Intellect, Imagination and Faith Between Self and Cosmos in Western Thought
The Example of Immanuel Kant
A Few Words
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
A thread runs through some of the greatest thinkers in the Western tradition, from the ancient Greeks to perhaps the present in the dialogue between intellect and faith, philosophy and spirituality.
This is a synthesis the ancient Greeks seem to have achieved, which I have observed in my little reading of Aristotle, resonating with what I have read about Plato and Socrates, and which I have also observed in the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, another landmark in Western philosophy. It is also luminous in the work of the 17th century English thinker Isaac Newton, understood by one view as the greatest scientist of all time and variously evident in Western thinkers in diverse disciplines to the present.
This quality is a keen sensitivity to the wonder of existence as appreciated through a broad complex of faculties, from intellect to imagination and faith, in relation to a sense of the human being as part of a grand synthesis, at times depicted as intimating an ultimate intelligence integrating and perhaps extending beyond full human comprehension, a synthesis which compels the human being to seek to understand it as far as possible through the disciplined use of his faculties, unified through the judicious use of reason as the one faculty over which the human being may gain complete or near control over as a mediator between all human cognitive possibilities.
Kant is at times described as strategic in the destruction of Christian religious centraties that prevailed in Europe before his time, a role in the desacralization of Western thought emerging from his ''critical period'', when, over a ten year span in which he hardly published anything as a professor of philosophy, he rethought his previous philosophical orientations which had privileged conventional religious sensitivities, subjecting those orientations to sustained analysis, wondering about how intellectually valid they were, and in his opening text concluding that period, translated as Critique of Pure Reason, he argues that a significant number of those religious convictions, such as the belief in the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, were not intellectually sustainable, could not be upheld by logic.
But that is only a basic reading of that strand of Kant's synoptically rich, multi-faceted masterpiece. Even taking account of all themes in that book, and in Kant's work in general, Kant is beyond adequate paraphrase, like a fine poem cannot be adequately summed up by any expression other than an encounter with its own unique individuality. ''A great poetic image is more than the sum of its parts'' observes Dorothy Sayers in her introduction to her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Along similar lines, a great poem is more than the collection of its components or its ideas. A great philosophical work is also more than the summation of its enquiries and positions. Summaries of Kant's works are at best akin to efforts to present a skeleton in place of the vitality of the human form, that being perhaps the best that can be done in that situation.
Responding to the spirit as well as the letter of Kant's thought, I am not aware of a greater spiritual, as opposed to religious, thinker than the Kant of the ''critical'' period, in all my journeys across some of the greatest masterpieces of Hinduism, Buddhism, Western esotericism, Yoruba Orisha, Fulani Kaidara, Christianity and Islamic religions and spiritualities.
This interpretation of Kant is correlative with though not identical with that of Stephen Palmquist on Kant as in his Kant and Mysticism: Critique as the Experience of Baring All in Reason's Light, rich as that position and book and Palmquist's work on Kant generally is, although Kant's work can be adapted to mystical theory and practice in its oscillation between the human and the cosmic, the part perceiving itself as belonging to a sustaining but overwhelming whole pulling the part to itself, a whole beyond full understanding by the human being.
Kant's work could be seen as aligning with no particular religion but as dramatising the essence of the spiritual and religious quest, the effort to make meaning of existence in the light of its mysteries encapsulating and going beyond human cognitive capacities.
Kant's deconstruction of Christian thought in Pure Reason, for example, is a struggle with the Christian convictions central to the culture he lived in, convictions strategic to the formation of his own person, as emerging from both his family upbringing and his academic education, as I have understood his history, convictions perhaps permeating his pre-critical thought, convictions the affective potency, the emotional and imaginative force of which resonate powerfully through his efforts to dismantle them in Critique of Pure Reason, a lover coming to grips with the limitations of the loved one, even as the undercurrents of that love continue to sound as a powerful, underlying melody suffusing that effort, as suggested by the dramatic power of his efforts to dismantle intellectual proofs of the existence of God.
Also potent in Kant's writings of his "critical period'' is his critically venerational approach to the power of the human mind, as demonstrated, for example, in the remarkable "The Architectonic of Pure Reason", in the concluding sections of Pure Reason, which begins with ''By an architectonic, I understand the art of systems'', proceeding to outline an approach to the development of systems of knowledge, structures of understanding, through a sensitivity to relationships between the conscious, unconscious and subconscious minds, concepts which would be developed centuries after his time, a perspective he sums up in terms of the image of maggots emerging seemingly mysteriously from meat, akin to the gestation of ideas attaining synthesis over long periods of time through processes inadequately understood by the person in whose mind those ideas undergo transmutation.
In that image, the priest of reason, of logic, demonstrates the partnership of the control of thought with possibilities of thought that are not subject to control but only to stimulation and provision of nurturing ground where they can work undisturbed in the dark, unseen soil of the mind.
This coalescence of the intellectual, represented by the critical efforts of the mind, directed purely by the will of the thinker, and aspects of understanding beyond such control, reaches one of its peaks in his meditations on time and eternity, mortality and immortality, self and cosmos, concluding his Critique of Practical Reason, which, with Critique of Judgement, constitute the other major two books of his ''critical'' period.
Kant's description of the Sublime, of the encounter with something that elevates and yet humbles the mind in Critique of Judgement is a great dramatisation of the human being's engagement with a universe which dwarfs him and yet exhilarates him with the sense of elevation such immensity inspiries.
The marvellous ''Surah an Nur'', ''On Light'' chapter in the Koran, evoking Allah, the creator of the universe, in terms of light, described in terms of powerfully evocative images of a lamp hidden in a rock, a lamp lit by an olive tree neither of the east or of the west, the soaring evocations of God by the celebratory or anguished human soul in the Biblical book of Psalms, the sublime Orisha Ifa poem, ''Ayajo Asuwada'', about the descent of the principle of unity permeating the world through aggregations from hair on the human head, to trees composing forests to fish in the sea, the awesome opening sections of Abhinavagupta's Hindu Tantric texts such as the Tantraloka where his mother and father are depicted in terms of divine creativity and generation, W.M. Gray's poetic rendering of cosmic correlations in terms of the image of the cosmos as a tree in his Office of the Holy Tree of Life, are some the family of short but perennially luminous summations of the loftiest insights humanity has constructed I see those lines of Kant's on mortality and immortality, earth and cosmos, in Critique of Practical Reason as belonging to.
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