Immaneul Kant's Transcendental Idealism and Kapila Muni's Sankhya Philosophy.
This intellectual and philosophical crusade in the European history is famously known as the Age of Enlightenment. It was the time when literally every European dinner table witnessed flaming hot discussions related to metaphysics, ethics, reality, morality, social fabric and the role of democracy, so on. It was such a climate created back then that the kids in the streets argued over whether Plato was correct or Aristotle, Socrates or Aurelius!
This Enlightenment Age included a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.
One of the protagonists of our today's blog, Immaneul Kant, was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy.
Kant was born in the East Prussian city of Königsberg, and lived there all his life. He worked as a private tutor for years before finally, in middle age, gaining tenure as a lecturer at the university. He didn’t even start publishing his best stuff until he was 57, and after that the works just poured out of him.
Immaneul Kant tried to reconcile rationalism and religious belief, individual freedom and political authority, as well as map out a view of the public sphere through private and public reason. Kant's work continued to shape German thought and indeed all of European philosophy, well into the 20th century.
Kant's books on his philosophy, and one of the best works of metaphysics is Kant's boom Critique of Pure Reason, which is often referred to as Kant's "First Critique" as this book was followed by Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgement. His critiques are in short his analysis on some of the greatest conflicts of a thinking being.
Today's blog will be my best try to get you all a glimpse of bunch of his groundbreaking ideas.
Transcendental Idealism
Suppose on a saturday night, you and your friends are chilling at the nearby garden, full of lush, dew-covered grass and serene cool breezes, adding flavour to that exciting idea which is running in your mind, "Ah, tomorrow is a holiday!"
Talking to your friends, all of a sudden you felt like you stepped on a snake, and you jumped a metre far away in absolute fright. Alas, it was a pipe for watering the plants! Foolishly you misunderstood the pipe for a snake.
What you might not know is how much this event is loaded with Kantian philosophy. Terrified by the idea of stepping on a snake, your misunderstanding is a perfect illustration of Kant's "Transcendental Idealism". For example, your wrong notion of thinking the pipe as a snake, you got a filtered interpretation of reality, created by your own mind. In other words, was it actually a snake, or a pipe which appeared to you as a snake, which bewildered the hell out of you?
In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant was challenged with a similar question: ‘Is appearance a reasonable reflection of reality?’ He asked this on the way to answering the further question, ‘Can we know what things are like beyond their appearance to us, that is, in and of themselves?’ Kant is famous for concluding ‘No’ – that despite what we might think, there’s very little we can know about what reality is like in and of itself, either from its appearance to us, or from any other source.
But what does this mean, ‘reality in and of itself?’
The word Kant uses for a thing in and of itself, is ‘thing-in-itself’ (‘ding-an-sich’); and the collective word for reality as it is in itself is ‘noumenon’, taken from the Greek word ‘nous’ roughly meaning ‘intellect’ or ‘pure thought’ or ‘pure reason’ (because Kant thinks what little we can know about it we can only know in terms of pure reason). This noumenal world is reality as it really is, divorced from or independent of our sense perceptions of it. Our sense perceptions of the world – feeling of the soothing green grass under your feet, rejoicing at the thought of holiday, strolling freely in the park, and suddenly being stupefied by a pipe - are referred to by Kant as ‘phenomena’.
This way of dividing the world is both very
interesting and very troubling. Take your talking with your friends, and at the same time thinking about the holiday, feeling grass under your feet as well as the pipe, then you experience phenomena, or sense experiences. While claiming that sensing the pipe just as it is or 'thing-in-itself' (ding-an-sich) is would be false.
These phenomena we experience are not the ultimate cause of the experience. For example, if I look up at the sky I can’t change it from blue to pink just by thinking about it, which might be thought possible if all that existed were the experiences themselves. Instead, Kant was convinced that there was something beyond our immediate sensations causing these phenomena. There’s something out there, insisted Kant, the source of these sense perceptions: something behind or beyond them called the noumenal world.
“If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”
This idea is at the heart of Kant’s philosophy, and he called this position transcendental idealism. That is to say, the mind has structures which impose structure on the data our senses receive from the world, and so actually create our worlds in certain ways. These mental structures organize all our diverse sense data into experiential context for us, turning the physical data our senses receive from the world into our experienced sense perceptions of the world. This means we’re not perceiving or experiencing a pre-existing world. Rather, the structures of the mind are bringing forth phenomena, created as much by the workings of the mind as by (noumenal) reality, and thus the world as we experience it is dependent for its form upon the way the mind works.
The more you think about it, the more intuitive the idea of mind structuring the world we experience seems. For example, you get up to go to the bathroom, and on your way you see a painting of dogs playing poker. What are you really seeing? Paintings give the illusion of having ‘organised meaning’ – but in fact any painting, even da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or van Gogh’s The Starry Night, is just dots and streaks of color smeared on canvas. Our minds apprehend these colored blotches and make sense of them as images. And that’s just the start of how our minds influence our experience. More radically, Kant thought that even time and space are aspects of our experience created by the mind, independent of reality in and of itself. Looking around the bar as you walk on, it’s hard to see how this might be the case; but, then, how could we possibly organize our experience without the experiences being organized in space and time?
I would like to compare Kant's philosophy with India's greatest philosopher Kapila Muni, who is known as the father of Sankhya philosophy.
Vivekananda once talked about Kapila's Sankhya which shows striking resemblence with Kant's idea of reality,
"The greatest psychologist the world has ever known, Bhagavan Kapila, demonstrated ages ago that human consciousness is one of the elements in the make-up of all the objects of our perception and conception, internal as well as external"
"The other conclusion of Kapila is that there is no God as the Creator of the universe. Nature is quite sufficient by itself to account for everything. God is not necessary, says the Sankhya.
The father of our psychology, Kapila, denies the existence of God. His idea is that a Personal God is quite unnecessary; nature itself is sufficient to work out the whole of creation. What is called the Design Theory, he knocked on the head, and said that a more childish theory was never advanced. But he admits a peculiar kind of God. He says we are all struggling to get free; and when we become free, we can, as it were, melt away into nature, only to come out at the beginning of the next cycle and be its ruler. We come out omniscient and omnipotent beings. In that sense we can be called Gods; you and I and the humblest beings can be Gods in different cycles. He says such a God will be temporal; but an eternal God, eternally omnipotent and ruler of the universe cannot be. If there was such a God, there would be this difficulty: He must be either a bound spirit or a free one. A God who is perfectly free would not create: there is no necessity for it. If He were bound, He would not create, because He could not: He would be powerless. In either case, there cannot be any omniscient or omnipotent eternal ruler. In our scriptures, wherever the word God is mentioned, he says, it means those human beings who have become free. "
"The Sankhya philosophy of Kapila was the first rational system that the world ever saw. Every metaphysician in the world must pay homage to him."
"According to Kapila, from undifferentiated nature to thought or intellect, not one of them is what he calls the “Enjoyer” or “Enlightener”. Just as is a lump of clay, so is a lump of mind. By itself the mind has no light; but ate see it reasons. Therefore there must be some one behind it, whose light is percolating through Mahat and consciousness, and subsequent modifications, and this is what Kapila calls the Purusha, the Self of the Vedantin. According to Kapila, the Purusha is a simple entity, not a compound; he is immaterial, the only one who is immaterial, and all these various manifestations are material"
Isn't this crazy guys?
Kant and Kapila breed very similar ideas of existence. All in all, this was my attempt to introduce to you all the works of Kant - one of the greatest Western Philosophers.
"Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it."
"How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else."
-Immaneul Kant
In many ways, Immanuel Kant was a man for our times. The bewigged eighteenth century thinker sat at home for years, reading and writing, taking a walk once a day, barely ever travelling more than a few miles from his home town, yet he tried to set down some universal truths about what we can know, what people are, and how we should all live. Kant dug deep – deeper than a mole in a coalmine – trying to tunnel under the barriers that the universe has erected to hide itself from our understanding. An indication of his success is that his ideas seem to become more, not less, relevant as the centuries go by.
Thanks,
Daksh Parekh.
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