Remembering and Understanding: Introducing an Autobiographical, Multi-Cultural and Interdisciplinary Journey with Immanuel Kant and Kantian Scholarship
Where: My study in Ikeja, Lagos.
What: I just realized today, the 21st of September, is my birthday, from noting the significance of the date on my computer.
I also realised earlier that I am writing a book on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
It's possible to forget that one's birthday is approaching.
But how can one write a book without knowing that one is doing so?
That correlation between unawareness and the obvious is at the core of the work on Kant I'm engaged in.
I'm exploring my recurrent encounters with Kant's work over 30 plus years as a point of entry into his creativity as it intersects with the development of my own life, helping me understand what his work contributes to understanding the meaning of my life in relation to progress in the quest that unifies my cognitive biography and that of Kant, the unfolding of the quest for knowledge of fundamental and ultimate realities correlating Kant's life and mine.
Having reached an above 20,000 word count without strain as the essay continues to grow, inspired by my reading of scholarship on Kant as well as studying Kant's works, explorations promising to expand in the context of the seemingly infinite access to these materials and complementary texts enabled by my own library and, at no cost, except to my conscience, by the controversial, but in my case, indispensable shadow libraries Zlibrary, PDFDrive, Libgenesis and Sci-Hub, a wealth of access I am observing myself using with some senstivity to the place of the insights they provide in the already clear structure of the growing work, it's become clear that the work is growing towards a book length text which will make some original contribution to Kant scholarship.
I aspire to present the relationship of Kant's work to the intimate, daily dimensions of human experience, as these point to the efforts to understand the ultimate significance of these immediate realities, developing this understanding at the intersection of autobiography and multi-cultural thought and art.
Without our ability to see, hear, touch and smell, how would we make sense of the world and move around in it?
What is the relationship between our awareness of ourselves and our awareness of the world?
What can we know as different from what we cannot know but can only believe, if we wish to believe?
How should we live in the midst of these perplexities, as we wonder if God exists, if the universe had a beginning or whether it will end, as we study the structure and dynamism of the cosmos and are inspired by the grandeur of existence in the midst of our mortality?
I understand the questions above as summing up the essence of what I have learnt so far in these opening stages of explorations of Kant's philosophical quest, exploring Kant's continous journey recurrently rethought from his 20s to its termination by his transition in his 80s, if I recall his age at that time clearly enough, a quest combining both ambition to totality of knowledge and a growing awareness of the impossibility of such totality, that tension being central to his contribution to human thought.
What has drawn me to Kant?
A revelatory experience on reading him for the first time in a selection from an English translation of his work on aesthetics, the study of beauty and of art, Critique of the Power of Judgement.
The effect was so powerful I entered into trance, losing consciousness of myself and the library where I was.
Similar though not as intense encounters with Kant have occurred for me in other libraries, from Benin to London and in my own library in Lagos.
What is this man really saying, I am now provoked to ask after these years of fascination and occasional engagement.
Let's relate closely with his work and with people's views on it and see what these tells us.
Steadily, Kant opens up for me in his effort at trying to make sense of the miracle of existence and explore how much we can know about it and how and why.
I am contributing to humanizing Kant's thought, making it more readily appreciated as speaking to everyone, everywhere, not only to those ready to engage the sophistication of his thought and expression, a sophistication I am contributing to demonstrating as open to being made accessible in terms of it's beauty and power without diluting it's force.
Do I expect to provide any new interpretations of the general direction or specifics of Kant's work?
I am developing an understanding of Kant that contrbutes to appreciation of how it can inspire individual quests for fundamental and ultimate meaning.
I am also developing close reading of strategic Kantian passages that might not have been discussed before in terms of such line by line analysis.
Whatever might have been achieved before along those lines, I expect what I'm offering to represent a new slant on the effort.
Why this struggle to argue for doing something new in relation to Kant's work, granted Kant scholarship has been growing for more than three centuries?
Why not simply engage Kant for one's own benefit, one's effort to understand something that strikes one deeply, using writing about one's explorations as a means of clarifying one's growing understanding?
Does one's enjoyment of a novel, a poem or a film, and one's notes on that enjoyment as it relates to the views of others need to be justified in terms of others' views on that work of art, such delightful engagement being how I see much of my relationship with Kant's work?
Such an approach to Kant seems unusual in the first place in the general understanding, an unusualness suggesting that such a perspective could contribute to making Kant's work better appreciated even if it does not aspire to developing new interpretations of Kant but only seeks to explore and re-present Kant from a particular perspective, not as the distantly brilliant mandarin of knowledge, akin to the exalted classical Chinese officials of high learning but distant from common experience, as this class is perceived in their title becoming metaphorical in English, but as a fellow traveller who walks the goat's Earth, as with his hands he touches God's sky, as an African poem puts it of the earthly foundations of human experience and it's celestial orientations, a tension and harmony at the heart of Kant's work.
But perhaps, new perspectives may emerge as I dialogue with my friend from Konigsberg, Kant's home town, where he spent most of his life.
Speaking with him and others who do so, one could be led into insights into issues perhaps yet undiscussed in Kantian scholarship, such as moving from the correlation between his ideas on the Sublime, on grandeur in the Earth and the cosmos and Rudolph Otto on the numinous, " an invisible but majestic presence that inspires both dread and fascination and constitutes the non-rational core of vital religion", as Webster's dictionary defines it, these ideas couid illuminate my encounters with sacred spaces, as in Benin-City's Ogba forest in Nigeria, correlations extending to the Yoruba concept of "ase", cosmic force both concentrated in sacred spaces and facilitating individual creativity, ideas also correlative with the German term "Geist", a concept strategic for German thought in meaning both "mind" and "spirit, leading also to the related Asian terms, the Indian 'shakti" and the Chinese "chi", correlations pursued as I illuminate correlations between Kant's work and Asian and African art, universes of possibility likely to be new to the field in spite of years of discussing Kant in relation to Asian thought and by Africans, perhaps in relation to African contexts.
Is there anything more beautiful than the exercise of natural powers?
Thinking, walking, sex, emotion, touching, all these and more testify to the awareness that one exists, one is alive and one is aware of these realities.
"Dare to trust your own intelligence", the man of Konisgberg summed up the core of the Enlightenment, the European philosophical movement that inspired him and to which he contributed.
The dash of the leopard across the savannah, the gliding of the fish in the sea, the potent thread of the elephant, the sinous twisting of the snake in it's motions across points are as the creative power of the mind exalting in it's own capacity to explore itself and the cosmos, explorations from within the potencies of thought that Kant pursued in a lifetime of unending quest.
