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Immanuel
Kant is one of the most famous philosophers of the Enlightenment. He
and David
Hume represent the two great minds of the eighteenth century. He is
well known
for his ideal transcendentalism, a phenomenological philosophy that was
considered by many to be a safe haven for
religion
from the fatal
logical
arrows of David Hume. According to this philosophy this world is not
'the
deepest reality out there' yet it is not mere illusion either, it is a
phenomenon of the innermost reality, the world of the nominal, the
thing in
itself.
Here
we can feel a mystical tone, but was Kant really a mystic? Is this
thing in
itself just another name for the mystical ultimate reality?
Unfortunately, I
don’t think so, and I’ll try to explain and support my view here.
In
order to illustrate the differences between Kant and a genuine mystical
philosophy, I’ll compare and contrast Kant and a philosopher no one can
doubt
being a mystic, Shankara. I’ll suppose here the reader has a minimum
knowledge
regarding the philosophies of those two.
The
advaita vedanta, or the non-dual interpretation of the Indian
Upanishads, is
Shankara’s philosophy. It considers this world as illusion, Maya. Only
Brahman
is real. Time, place and multiplicity are mere nothingness. Only
Brahman
exists.
Kant
would provide similar teachings, the phenomenal world is not real, the
twelve
axioms are not real, and among them we find time, place and
multiplicity. Kant intellectually
concluded this, from
what he thought to be paradoxical in this
world.
His arguments about the paradoxical nature of time and place are well
known and
found elsewhere on the internet, so I will not explain them here to
focus on
our main concern. Meanwhile, Shankara didn’t conclude that time is
illusionary,
he felt that. He simply felt a strange
state of being, a
wired
type of consciousness where time is totally transcended. And thus
naively
concluded that time is illusionary, he didn’t even realize that he
concluded
anything, his experience was so intense that the illusionary nature
of time
was self evident. The same can be said for both philosophers regarding
place
and multiplicity, one concluded, the other felt.
It
was just a coincidence that both philosophers reached such identical
positions
from totally different starting points and different paths. Yet, their
positions was not as close at might seem to the first instance, there
are such
critical differences that would solidly prove their different grounds
of
reasoning, I’ll explain here some.
Mahayana
Buddhism is maybe the only genuine mystical system where the feeling of
sacredness is dramatically suppressed, but if we put this exception
apart, we
can say that any mystic would feel sacredness towards the ultimate
reality.
Kant, as far as I know, never talked about the nominal world with this
sanctifying attitude. To him, the thing in itself was merely a solid
philosophical subject.
Mystics
believe that one can experience the ultimate reality, via the mystical
experience, some call it nirvana, moksha, being one with the Tao, the
inner
birth of the Christ, the Christ consciousness, the Buddha nature, the
spiritual
wedding, etc. Although they all stress that the ultimate reality can
never be
expressed by words, they believe it can be known, or better say it can
be felt.
The reasons for this alleged ineffability are worth investigation, but
that’s
not our subject now. Kant however denies any possibility of “knowing”
(and not feeling since the nominal world is just an intellectual
subject) the
nominal world. According to him, our minds were just crafted to see the
world
this way, the mind has been made to be governed by time, place, etc and
it
cannot transcend itself to know the thing in itself, it can, however, intellectually
conclude the presence
of such a thing because it can know that
what it
knows (time, place, etc) is paradoxical and not real. And thus Kant
would
strangely agree (and once again for different reasons) that you
couldn’t say
what the nominal world is, yet you can say what it is not. Just like
the lovely
Indian “neti neti”.
Here
is another difference, less complicated but no less important. Almost
all
mystics (again Mahayana 
excepted) would affirm that the
ultimate reality
is one.
Oneness is perhaps the only positive affirmation a mystic attributes
(and
strongly attributes) to the ultimate reality. Kant yet doesn’t. Since
Kant thought
that Oneness is also an axiom, thus the thing in itself is neither one
nor
many. While mystics find this reality to be “pure oneness”
Kant thinks the
nominal world transcends even oneness. Finally Kant explicitly deviates
from
one of the most, if not the most, important tenet of genuine mysticism.
And
after all said, let’s forget about the theoretical part. Let’s look to
Kant the
man, he was definitely a man of ethics, and as far as I can
see he
didn’t build
his philosophy to protect religion, but to protect the ethics of
religion. He
was too wise to be fooled by religion's fairy tales and omnipotent
gods.
He was
sad to see ethics collapse with religion. And his “Religion in limits
of mere
reason” clearly shows his non-interested position in religion. But
although
being a man of ethics, he was not a man of mysticism. He never let a
tear of
love fall on his cheeks, he never let peace dwell in his soul, and he
never let
his emotions take him to the dessert of Eckhart’s essential nothingness.
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