Kant and the Wonder of Existence : Multicultural and Multidisciplinary Resonances : A Very Brief Note
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Kant and the Wonder of Existence
Multicultural and Multidisciplinary Resonances
A Very Brief Note
Rhythms of Centrifugal and Centripetal Motion
Movement Away from and Towards a Centre
in the
Akan/Gyaman Ghanaian Adinkra Symbol Adinkrahene
incidentally evoking similar rhythms in German philosopher Immanuel Kant's meditations
on
self and cosmos, time and infinity
in
A Critique of Practical Reason
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
“Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”
One of the greatest things ever composed in words is German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s meditation on the significance of his life as a human being in the conclusion of his book A Critique of Practical Reason (1788, first publication, in German).
Some Kant scholars, such as Paul Guyer ( Kant, 2006 ) rightly recognize those lines as a matrix around which Kant’s comprehensive philosophical project revolves. Those words reach deep into Kant’s ultimate motivations and approaches in exploring the human quest for ultimate meaning in terms of what can be known, how one knows, how to live and the significance of beauty and imagination, central themes of his most impactful works.
Beyond the strategic significance of those expressions for Kant’s work is the resonance of those Kantian lines across cultures. Like sound travelling across a vast space to rebound to its origin, like an echo in a great hall, that passage dramatizes the themes of some of the greatest spiritual and philosophical expressions, in words and images, across space and time.
The sublime depictions of relationships between the human being and eternity in the Indian Upanishads, particularly in the dialogue between Nachiketas and Death in the Katha Upanishad.
The exchange about which deity can follow their devotee on a distant journey without turning back, an imaginative exploration of the idea of ori, the immortal essence of self, embodiment of the self's ultimate potential, in Yoruba thought, “essence, attribute, and quintessence… the uniqueness of persons, animals, and things, their inner eye and ear, their sharpest point and their most alert guide as they navigate through this world and the one beyond,’’ as Olabiyi Yai describes this concept dramatized in the Ifa poem “The Importance of Ori.’’
Ghanaian-German artist and philosopher Owusu-Ankomah’s human figures contemplating abstract shapes evoking convergences between the human mind and cosmic multiplicity and unity.
The visualization, in Japanese gardening, of balance between cosmic dynamism and stability through relationships between sand raked to suggest flowing water and rocks immobile within this evocation of aquatic motion.
The picturing of the dynamic radiance of the flame of human personality through the permutations of the human face across time as imaged by the sequence of self-portraits of Dutch artist Rembrandt.
The echoes of this dynamism of life across the reworkings of biology by time in Dutch-French artist and philosopher Vincent van Gogh’s last self-portrait, reflecting, in its spatial dynamism, his depictions of human embedding within cosmic volatility and sweep in his paintings Starry Night and Road with Men Walking, Carriage, Cypress, Star, and Crescent Moon.
All these, among other examples from humanity’s varied cultural expressions, vibrate in harmony with the exquisite perceptions of the thinker of Konigsberg, who hardly left his native town but mentally roamed the cosmos.
Let us journey with Kant. The following is Kant’s original formatting without paragraph breaks, highlighting the cumulative force of his expressions:
Two things fill the mind with ever newer and ever greater 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 do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence. The first begins at the place which I occupy in the external world of the senses, and broadens the connection in which I stand into the unsurveyable magnitude of worlds upon worlds and systems upon systems, as well as into the limitless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and continuation. The second begins at my invisible self, my personality, and displays to me a world which has true infinity, but which can be discovered only through the understanding, and with which I recognize that my connection with that world (and thereby with all those visible worlds as well) is not merely contingent, as in the first case, but universal and necessary. The first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter of which it was formed, after it has been provided for a short time (we know not how) with vital power. The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth, as an intelligence, through my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the entire world of the senses, at least as far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination which is not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life, but reaches into the infinite.
The same text with paragraph breaks made by me to ease reading, clarifying the sequential progression of the image and idea network Kant constructs:
Two things fill the mind with ever newer and ever greater 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 do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence.
The first begins at the place which I occupy in the external world of the senses, and broadens the connection in which I stand into the unsurveyable magnitude of worlds upon worlds and systems upon systems, as well as into the limitless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and continuation.
The second begins at my invisible self, my personality, and displays to me a world which has true infinity, but which can be discovered only through the understanding, and with which I recognize that my connection with that world (and thereby with all those visible worlds as well) is not merely contingent, as in the first case, but universal and necessary.
The first view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter of which it was formed, after it has been provided for a short time (we know not how) with vital power.
The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth, as an intelligence, through my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the entire world of the senses, at least as far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination which is not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life, but reaches into the infinite.
(Compiled from the translation that opens A.W. Moore’s The Infinite (2018, xxiv), in addition to the two different translations with which Paul Guyer opens his Kant, 2006, 1-3 and his edited The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, 2006, 1 and Thomas Kingsmill Abbot’s translation of Critique of Practical Reason, 2004, 170.)
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