SUMMITS OF PHILOSOPHY:AN INTERCULTURAL EXPLORATION OF KANT ON SELF AND COSMOS

[toyin adepoju]

Philosophy understood as a critical and empathic relationship to all cognitive possiblities


Commentary on and adaptation  of Kant on relationships between self and cosmos in his  Critique of Practical Reason in relation to conceptions from the cosmological and religious thought of Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, from Buddhist iconography  and the Adinkra symbolism created by artists from the Akan in Ghana and the Gyaman in Cote d'Ivoire.

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and  increasing admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily they are  reflected upon: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon. I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance.

The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also with all those visible worlds.

The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature,which, after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe).

The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world-at least as far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law,a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but reaches into the infinite."

Immanuel Kant,Critique of Practical Reason.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily they are reflected upon: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.


These lines, from the last chapter of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, are the first glorious strands of a great tapestry of ideas. I read, from time to time, the sequence that begins with these lines, in the spirit in which devotees read lines of scripture.

Is it possible to encapsulate more concisely and yet effectively the great polarities of human existence, the world outside the mind and the world inside the mind,as is done here by the philosopher from Konigsberg?

I don’t know. Perhaps it is possible in the pregnant conciseness of Japanese haiku poetry, that most elliptical and yet down to earth of poetic genres. Yet, while haiku requires an understanding of its distinctive aesthetic, at times a grasp of the informing philosophies of Buddhism which the ancient haiku poets took for granted, Kant’s declaration of the linked polarities of human existence do not require specific knowledge of any ideology or ideational scheme.

As Kant acknowledges in the lines that follow the opening, these realities he refers to are present to us all, adult or child, at any level of intelligence or knowledge:

I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon.

One thing I love about Kant’s writing is that, ostensibly, he is not talking about religion, but when one reflects in such resonant terms, evoking the depths and heights of human existence, one is in the region that religions share. The writer is participating in the ground of experience, reflection, emotion and expression that characterises religion, even though he approaches that originating ground from an individualistic, non-doctrinal perspective. This region is evoked by expressions like "veiled in darkness", "transcendent region beyond my horizon”. These suggest a sense of vastness, of infinite possibilities, of limitless spatial extension and knowledge.

He continues:

I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence.

These lines subtly invite the reader to reflect on their awareness of themselves through the expression of the writer’s own reflection on his individuality as a being conscious of himself.

The would outside the self would exist whether or not one is aware of it, but if one were not aware of it, it would not exist for the human being. Being aware of the other, one is more sharply aware that one is different from them. Through the other, one’s sense of self is heightened. A crucial question here, as the Indian philosopher Ramana Maharshi put it, is that of the source of the sense of self awareness, which is central to any awareness of what is different from the self.
Kant situates the relative points of awareness of inner and outer universes:

The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance.

This is great. Kant takes us at last into fellowship in the immensity of space and the vast scope of time as demonstrated by the range, distribution and revolutions of the celestial bodies, leaving the numinous sense of non-human immensities to take over. The human presence remains an undercurrent, in the voice of the contemplative evoking cosmic wonders. This facilitates the possibility of following him into those realms of thought, recognising them as demonstrating a sensitivity that was always present but remained hidden in the conventional human appreciation of the night sky, of the beauty and freshness of any particular day, in one’s satisfaction in being alive.

Among other sources that evoke immensities of time and space in relation to sensitising human consciousness, although in a very different ideational context, are Buddhist texts, such as the Lotus Sutra, the Bodhicharyāvatāra of Śāntideva, and the Avataṃsaka Sutra. These texts, however, operate largely through a network of Buddhist beliefs which make it necessary to understand specific Buddhist conceptions in order to appreciate their evocations of immense possibilities expressed in terms of vast spans of time and space, an appreciation which they are also very valuable in facilitating. The sublimity of the concept of the Boddhisatva as a teacher of the underlying meaning of being, an awakener to Enlightenment, emerges in the Boddhistava vow in the Bodhicharyāvatāra, “As long as space abides, as long as the world abides, so long will I abide, destroying the sufferings of the world”. The concept of Budhha nature, of the capacity for Enlightenment as inherent in all beings is dramatised in the combination of cosmic scope and infinite compression in the Avataṃsaka Sutra, in which every particle of dust in the universe contains a text which embodies the totality of existence; with a small pestle the teacher, the Tathaghata,who is awake to this knowledge, cracks open each particle to enable the realisation of this hidden cosmic reality by all sentient beings. The cosmic anthropormorphism, the spatial and temporal hyperbolies of the Lotus Sutra, are described as meant to redirect the mind into a sensitivity to the transcendence of convetional modes of cognition,as this transcendence is represented by the concept of Sunyata, the Void that underlies being.

Other sources that create a similar evocation of immense time and space in relation to an understanding of these forms as expressions of a source that is much more profound than the conventional understanding of the material universe available to the sensuous apprehension of the world are Johannes Kepler’s (1571-1630) Harmonies of the World and the "General Scholium" at the end of Isaac Newton’s (1643-1727)The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, two of the foundational works in modern scientific cosmology. These works are stamped with the authors’ reverence for the human capacity for knowledge and the magnificent order of the cosmos which the human mind contemplates as expressions of the ultimate mind that is God. To Kepler, cosmic harmony and human mentation are correlative:

...the movements of the planets around the sun at their centre and the discourses of ratiocinations are... interwoven
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For as the sun rotating into itself moves all the planets by means of the form emitted from itself, so too...mind, by understanding itself and in itself all things, stirs up ratiocinations, and by dispersing and unrolling its simplicity into them, makes everything to be understood.

Kepler’s triumphant declaration in completing his book sums up his understanding of a relationship between the spatio-temporal magnificence of the cosmos, the human being who is able to comprehend the order underlying this proliferation, and the creator who makes possible both the cosmic structure and the human mind: “...I am writing the book-whether to be read by my contemporaries or by posterity matters not. Let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God Himself has been ready for His contemplator for six thousand years.”

Newton expresses his own spirit of philosophia in terms of a precise correlation of time, space and ultimate mind:

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

...lest the system of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other mutually, he hath placed these systems at immense distances one from another.
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He is not eternity or infinity, but is eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space; but he endures and is present.

He endures forever and is everywhere present, and by existing always and everywhere,he constitutes duration and space.

Kant’s words do not share Kepler’s faith in God, but they resonate with Kepler’s conception of mind as “ understanding itself and in itself all things”. Kant depicts the grandeur of the celestial world as impacting upon his mind in a manner that evokes both a sense of smallness in relation to this splendour but also a sense of power corresponding to the celestial magnificence he contemplates.

What precisely does Kepler mean by the mind understanding in “itself all things”? Difficult to say, since he does not clarify it in the section of the text where it occurs. Kant’s example indicates , however, that Kepler’s idea could be suggestive of an abstract generalisation which develops relationships between what the self perceives outside itself and the manner in which the self understands itself. Or is Kepler referring to an undifferentiated ground of being, in which both self and not-self are unified? The conception of mind suggested by this characterisation of Kepler’s is closer to Classical Asian conceptions of relationships between human mind and the cosmos, where, in a manner similar to mystical or quasi-mystical metaphysical conceptions from the West, the mind is understood as capable of perceiving the unifying ground of reality within itself. To adapt a characterisation of a cognitive form from another context, the mind is described as capable of perceiving within itself the “essence of the whole”.

Kepler is closer, therefore, to the Avataṃsaka Sutra’s conception of cosmos and consciousness than to Kant, since the Avataṃsaka Sutra is described as based on the idea that each element in the universe reflects every other element.

Kant’s meditations do not state the idea of belief in an ultimate agentive power, like Kepler and Newton do. Kant’s words, however, demonstrate his own sense of faith, in the sense of faith being a commitment to upholding something that is not evident but is dependent on a perspective adopted from a number of available, non-empirical choices.

The kind of faith Kant develops is centred in the human self but is expressed in terms of such a wealth of ideational evocation that it can serve as a platform for a range of responses inspired by but not adhering in detail to their source in Kant’s thinking.

In Kant’s meditation, the almost incantatory sequence continues:

The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also with all those visible worlds.

We return from the wonder of interstellar space to the world constituted by the self. Kant describes this world as also awe inspiring, and as demonstrating true infinity, an infinity already evoked by the immense spatial and temporal scope of the celestial bodies. What does Kant mean here by the world of the personality having true infinity? I have searched the rest of the Critique for an answer but I would need to do a more careful and more sequential reading of the book, and perhaps of Kant’s other works, particularly, of his other two Critiques, in order to gain a precise grasp of his meaning. A guide to the meaning of this idea, however, might emerge from the next paragraphs of his meditation.

I am moved by Kant’s correlation of the grandeur of interstellar space with what he suggests is the infinite scope of the human self. The reflection on the sense of self awareness as related to this inner world in terms of a "universal and necessary connection" evokes, for me, notions of a glorious sense of gravitas as well as an affirmation of the inescapable material conditions of human existence, conditions which lead the thinker to a creative affirmation of his being, in spite of the accompanying sense of being compelled into existence which emerges in his next paragraph.

He does not, like David Benatar,the author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence,declare such a negation in response to the unwilled experience of being, but glories in what, to adapt the Buddhist poet Milarerpa, could be called the exercise of the mind’s strength in the “play” of existence.
I suspect that infinity, as Kant evokes it here, might not suggest infinity in a substantive sense, as a state of no-time,or of an unending progression of time, but the capacity of the self to transcend its material limitations through thought, as Kant could be described as doing ,to a point, in this sublime meditation. It could also suggest the capacity of the self to ennoble itself through a dedication to justice, particularly a justice that resonates in the self’s dealings with itself. On this score, in earlier passages in the Critique, Kant elaborates on the creative value of conscience.

We then enter into an elaboration of the first movement in the effect of this cosmic splendour on the mind of the thinker:

The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature,which, after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe).

On reaching this point in the text, my soul begins to sing. By this I mean that the master from Konigsberg has taken me out of myself and back into myself in a manner that reinforces my sense of self. Kant is particularly good at the communication of this sense of cognitive paradox, doing it in a manner that suggests the mind achieving an expansion of its fundamental structure, reaching a limit beyond which it cannot go on account of its inherent limitations and achieving, thereby, a reinforcing of strength through this cycle of expansion and contraction. His most powerful expression of this conception known to me is his description and analysis of the aesthetic category of the Sublime in the Critique of Judgement. The other effort that evokes a similar conception and with a comparable power, is the later example of Rudolf Otto’s development of the concept of the numinous in The Idea of the Holy, aptly summed up in the Latin expression he uses “mysterium tremendum et fascinans” where mystery, awe, inscrutability, and the distance and fascination of otherness cohere.

In this passage Kant subtly conjoins two conceptions. These are the paradoxical conjunction of participation in a great drama as a citizen of the earth, itself one of the very spheres whose sweep in space and whose motions in time have entranced him, to the contextualisation of this grand participation in terms of a sensitivity to the actual smallness of the earth within the immensity of the interstellar distances and massive forms to which it belongs as only one element. This ironic correlation is sharply foregrounded through the evocation of the mysterious origin and ultimate fate of the quickening power of life which makes possible his participation in and perception of this comic drama.

In his eyes, his relative position in this cosmic drama means he is an animal creature, a conjunction of biological possibilities that must render to the planet its due in the reintegration of its constituent elements with the earth, evoking the powerfully resonant image of God creating the human being from the earth in the Biblical book of Genesis and evoked in the metaphors of Psalm 139,verse 15, thereby suggesting, perhaps, the deep influence of Kant’s Christian Pietist background, transmuted here in a secular sacralisation,a veneration of the relationship between the sensuous universe and the self that perceives it.

The second movement emerges in the response to the cosmic location of the human being:

The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world-at least as far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law,a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but reaches into the infinite.

At this point, the full ideational and structural power of Kant’s meditation declares itself. He has introduced his two major ideas in the first sentence, developed a number of perspectives on them, taking one after the other, evoking the paradoxes they embody, and in this concluding paragraph, he indicates his own conception of transcendence in terms of the power of what he names the moral law. Kant refers here to his own conception of ethics, to which the Critique of Practical Reason is dedicated.

I find it difficult to suggest the power of these last lines for me. It is one of those examples, frequent in poetry, where one does not fully grasp what is being suggested, and yet, the effect is all the more powerful, releasing echoes in the open and hidden chambers of the mind, reverberating even more strongly every time the lines are encountered.

What does Kant mean by the moral law impelling the self into the infinite? What kind of infinity would this be, one of time, of space or simply infinity understood in terms of scope of qualitative evaluation?

Kant asserts that this law enables the self to transcend the conditions and limits of this life, conditions and limits that must include the earlier mentioned return of the body’s matter to the planet from where it came, after the departure of life which has left to a mysterious end as it arrived mysteriously.

Is Kant referring to immortality of the self after physical death, in which the identity of the self exists as a distinctive form? I don’t think so. From his first Critique, The Critique of Pure Reason, which began the major works represented by the three Critiques, he has stated that he is committed only to what he can reason out.As far as I know, committing himself to a proposition, such as life after death, that he cannot justify rationally, even in terms of the powerfully imaginative rationality of this meditation, is not a move I would expect Kant to make.

It seems that the idea of entering into the infinite, even as the body decays to the earth, suggests an imaginative conception, a style of evaluating the results and possibilities of human choice and action, rather than a substantive state of being.


It could be useful to explore Kant’s ideas with the aid of a visual form. Such a form would constitute a symbol since it would involve attributing ideational value to visual forms, which, by themselves, would not necessarily imply those ideas. Such a visual symbol could suggest these ideas in terms of an immediacy that is not possible to the linear development of the discursive mode Kant uses.

In order to concretise the significance of Kant’s meditation for me, I try to correlate it with the mandala and the yantra forms of visual symbolism developed in Hinduism and Buddhism. I then express the aesthetic and ideational constants in the use of mandalas and yantras in terms of an individualistic interpretation of a symbol known as Adinkrahene from the Adinkra corpus of visual symbolism developed by the Akan of Ghana and the Gyaman of Cote d’Ivoire. Using this symbol facilitates my adapting mandala and yantra theory and practice while transposing them in a manner that enables me avoid the ideational and artistic specificities of their Hindu and Buddhist roots.

Mandalas and yantras express cosmographic ideas in terms of geometric forms. These forms are used to guide the mind in contemplating itself in relation to the cosmos and the cosmos in relation to itself, progressions of thought similar to those demonstrated by the meditations of Kant and suggested in the ideas of Kepler.

The Adinkrahene symbol is a simple geometric symbol that in the Adinkra corpus symbolises ideas of kingship and supremacy.Its powerfully evocative form,however, lends itself to adaptation to a broad range of ideational functions. Adinkrahene is designed in terms of concentric circles, the circle being a form that on its own carries no ideational weight but which is one of the world’s most ubiquitous symbols, being used to express a broad range of ideas.

My adaptation of the symbol has no direct relationship with the meaning conventionally associated with it. My interest is in the suggestive value of its arrangement of concentric circles, circles which share the same centre. This is inspired by the fact that Kant’s reflections, and, to a greater degree, those of Kepler, suggest the possibility of a contemplative oscillation between the human mind and the cosmos it contemplates. The contemplator, therefore, could be understood as centring their reflection in one point or another in the movement of their thought, either in the cosmos outside the self, as Kant does at the beginning of his meditation, or in the human self, as he does at the conclusion of his meditation. The possibility of a centre at either point is evoked by the revolution of the circles round a particular centre, which could be construed as the human self or the cosmos. At the same time, however, the visual symbolism of this progression of thought highlights the fact that the centre of any reflective exercise is ultimately the agent engaged in reflection, since their consciousness is localised within a particular identity, their identity, as it reaches out to what is different from itself but is part of its field of awareness. This realisation further provokes questions about the details of human cognition in relation to what it perceives, questions central to the thrust of the full body of Kant’s philosophical investigations, as well as to the philosophical conceptions emerging in the thought of Kepler and those that underlie the cognitive imperatives of mandala and yantra theory.

Mainstream Western philosophy contains many examples of sections of texts and entire texts that could serve as powerful stimuli to contemplation, to thinking, to reflection of various kinds, and yet, it seems to me, this philosophical tradition is approached from a vital but limited perspective, one that focuses only on the effort to reason through the ideas of the thinker or to elucidate them. Why not do that as well use them as sources for meditation, meditation here referring to mental exercises that encompass a range of mental activities, and which may include the rationcinative but go beyond it.

Visual symbols, like mandalas and yantras, and the adaptation of their underlying conceptions presented here, are able to suggest a number of ideas simultaneously.


MANDALA




In common use, mandala has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective-Wikipedia

Image source:/www.buddhismus.cz

YANTRA




A yantra is a two- or three-dimensional geometric composition used in sadhanas, or meditative rituals.The term yantra is usually used to refer to primarily Hindu contexts and practices and mandala is usually used in reference to Buddhist contexts and practices. Yet, the terms are also used interchangeably, and occasionally mandala is used in Hindu contexts- "Mandala"-Wikipedia

Tantra has developed a system of thought which makes us see the universe as if it were within ourselves, and ourselves as if we were within the universe.

Further the forces governing the cosmos on the macro-level are believed to govern the individual in the micro-level. According to tantra, the individual being and universal being are one.

The [cultivation of this realisation] is the broad aim of Tantra art, achieved through visual symbols and metaphors. Encompassing its whole pictorial range, Tantric imagery can be broadly grouped under three heads:

Geometrical representation of deities as Yantras; Representation of the Human Body as a Symbol of the Universe; and Iconographic images.

From http://shaktiananda.webs.com/art.htm

Because of the relationship that exists in the Tantras between the outer world (the macrocosm) and man’s [sic] inner world (the microcosm), every symbol in a yantra is ambivalently resonant in inner-outer synthesis, and is associated with the subtle body and aspects of human consciousness-Khanna, Madhu, Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity. Thames and Hudson, 1979, p. 12.Quoted in "Mandala"-Wikipedia

The Sri Chakra or Shri Yantra is a yantra formed by nine interlocking triangles that surround and radiate out from the bindu point, the junction point between the physical universe and its unmanifest source. It represents Sri Lakshmi, the goddess of abundance on all levels, in abstract geometric form. It also represents Tripura Sundari, "the beauty of the three worlds." Four of the triangles points upwards, representing Shiva or the Masculine. Five of these triangles point downwards, representing Shakti or the Feminine. Thus the Sri Yantra also represents the union of Masculine and Feminine Divine - "Sri Chakra"-Wikipedia


ADINKRAHENE





The structure of Adinkrahene can be understood as symbolising both the cosmos and the human being who contemplates Adinkrahene as a representation of that cosmos. Within this scheme,Adinkrahene could embody the known and the knower, that which is known and the one who knows, thinker and thought, the cosmos and that within the cosmos which contemplates the cosmos through the symbolism of Adinkrahene.
The structure of Adinkrahene can be understood as three black circles or as six black and white circles.

If understood as three circles, the first, outermost circle of Adinkrahene can be seen as the celestial world, in the revolutions of its bodies through space and time. The circle after the outermost one could stand for the human person, who reflects on the cosmic world and on the relationships between the cosmos and themselves as an individual and as a representative of the earth.

The third circle becomes the conjunction of mind and cosmos represented by the recognition of and reflection on the fact of being. This reflection demonstrates the sensitivity to self and environment that defines the nature of consciousness as it emerges through the convergence of terrestrial and extraterrestrial matter in shaping that self that now looks out upon the cosmos.

Using such an evocative visual form,we can, like Immanuel Kant, travel inner and outer space, navigating the world within us and the cosmos without us without moving from one spot.

We could thereby emulate Kant,who never travelled far from Koningsberg, but united the universe within him and the universe outside him as he surveyed both far ranging worlds of thought and distant universes of vision.