Kant

This is what KANT with his rationalistic ingenuousness did not foresee. According to him, every cognition which is not rational in the narrowest sense, is mere pretentiousness and fanciful enthusiasm (Schwärmerei); now, if there is anything pretentious it is this very opinion. Fantasy, arbitrariness and irrationality are not features of the Scholastics, but they certainly are of the rationalists who persist in violently contesting, with ridiculous and often pathetic arguments, everything which eludes their grasp. With Voltaire, Rousseau and KANT, bourgeois (or vaishya as the Hindus would say) unintelligence is put forward as a “doctrine” and definitively installed in European “thought,” giving birth, by way of the French Revolution, to scientism, industry and to quantitative “culture.” Mental hypertrophy in the “cultured” man henceforth compensates the absence of intellectual penetration; the sense of the absolute and the principial is drowned in a mediocre empiricism, coupled with a pseudo-mysticism posing as “positive” or “human.” Some people may reproach us with a lack of due consideration, but we would ask what due consideration is shown by philosophers who shamelessly slash down the wisdom of countless centuries. sophiaperennis: Use and limit of Logic

It should be possible to restore to the word “philosophy” its original meaning: philosophy – the “love of wisdom” – is the science of all the fundamental principles; this science operates with intuition, which “perceives,” and not with reason alone, which “concludes.” Subjectively speaking, the essence of philosophy is certitude; for the moderns, on the contrary, the essence of philosophy is doubt: philosophy is supposed to reason without any premise (voraussetzungsloses Denken), as if this condition were not itself a preconceived idea; this is the classical contradiction of all relativism. Everything is doubted except for doubt. (NA: For KANT, intellectual intuition – of which he does not understand the first word – is a fraudulent manipulation (Erschleichung), which throws a moral discredit onto all authentic intellectuality.) sophiaperennis: Original meaning of the word Philosophy

In Plotinus the essence of Platonism reveals itself without any reserves. Here one passes from the passion-centered body to the virtuous soul and from the soul to the cognizant Spirit, then from and through the Spirit to the suprarational and unitive vision of the ineffable One, which is the source of all that exists; in the One the thinking subject and the object of thought coincide. The One projects the Spirit as the sun projects light and heat: that is to say, the Spirit, Nous, emanates eternally from the One and contemplates It. By this contemplation the Spirit actualizes in itself the world of the archetypes or ideas – the sum of essential or fundamental possibilities – and thereafter produces the animic world; the latter in its turn engenders the material world – this dead end where the reflections of the possibilities coagulate and combine. The human soul, brought forth by the One from the world of the archetypes, recognizes these in their earthly reflections, and it tends by its own nature toward its celestial origin. With Aristotle, we are much closer to the earth, though not yet so close as to find ourselves cut off from heaven. If by rationalism is meant the reduction of the intelligence to logic alone and hence the negation of intellectual intuition (which in reality has no need of mental supports even though they may have to be used for communicating perceptions of a supramental order), then it will be seen that Aristotelianism is a rationalism in principle but not absolutely so in fact, since its theism and hylomorphism depend on Intellection and not on reasoning alone. (NA: Hylomorphism is a plausible thesis, but what is much less plausible is the philosopher’s opposition of this thesis to the Platonic Ideas, of which it is really only a prolongation, one that tends to exteriorize things to a dangerous degree just because of the absence of those Ideas.) And this is true of every philosophy that conveys metaphysical truths since an unmitigated rationalism is possible only where these truths or intellections are absent. (NA: KANTian theism does not benefit from this positive reservation; for KANT, God is only a “postulate of practical reason,” which takes us infinitely far away from the real and transcendent God of Aristotle.) sophiaperennis: Plato

The Augustinian and Platonic doctrine of knowledge is still in perfect accord with gnosis, while Thomist and Aristotelian sensationalism, without being false on its own level and within its own limits, accords with the exigencies of the way of love, in the specifi c sense of the term bhakti. But this reservation is far from applying to the whole of Thomism, which identifies itself, in many respects, with truth unqualified – It is necessary to reject the opinion of those who believe that Thomism, or any other ancient wisdom, has an effective value only when we ‘recreate it in ourselves’ – we, ‘men of today!’ – and that if St. Thomas had read Descartes, KANT and the philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he would have expressed himsel f differently; in reality, he would then only have had to refute a thousand errors the more. If an ancient saying is right, there is nothing to do but accept it; if itis false, there is no reason to take notice of it; but to want to ‘rethink’ it through a veil of new errors or impressions quite clearly has no interest, and any such attempt merely shows the degree to which the sense of intrinsic and timeless truth has been lost. sophiaperennis: Platonism and Christianity

Yet even if allowance be made for such a lack of understanding, it seems that any honest man ought to be sensitive, if only indirectly, to the human level of these “dogmatists” – what is evidence in metaphysics becomes “dogma” for those who do not understand it – and here is an extrinsic argument the extent of which cannot be neglected. Whereas the metaphysician intends to come back to the “first word” – the word of primordial Intellection – the modern philosopher on the contrary wishes to have the “last word”; thus Comte imagines that after two inferior stages – namely “theology” and “metaphysics” – finally comes the “positive” or “scientific” stage which gloriously reduces itself to the most outward and coarse experiences; it is the stage of the rise of industry which, in the eyes of the philosopher, marks the summit of progress and of civilization. Like the “criticism” of KANT, the “positivism” of Comte starts from a sentimental instinct which wants to destroy everything in order to renew everything in the sense of a desacralized and totally “humanist” and profane world. sophiaperennis: KANTianism

In order to discredit faith and seduce believers, KANT does not hesitate to appeal to pride or vanity: whoever does not rely on reason alone is a “minor” who refuses to “grow up”; if men allow themselves to be led by “authorities” instead of “thinking for themselves,” it is solely through laziness and cowardice, neither more nor less. A thinker who needs to make use of such means – which on the whole are demagogic – must indeed be short of serious arguments. sophiaperennis: KANTianism

Avant-garde philosophy is properly an acephalous logic: it labels what is intellectually evident as “prejudice”; seeking to free itself from the servitudes of the mind, it falls into infra-logic; closing itself, above, to the light of the intellect, it opens itself, below, to the darkness of the subconscious. (NA: This is what KANT with his rationalistic ingenuousness did not foresee. According to him, every cognition which is not rational in the narrowest sense, is mere pretentiousness and fanciful enthusiasm (Schwärmerei); now, if there is anything pretentious it is this very opinion. Fantasy, arbitrariness and irrationality are not features of the Scholastics, but they certainly are of the rationalists who persist in violently contesting, with ridiculous and often pathetic arguments, everything which eludes their grasp. With Voltaire, Rousseau and KANT, bourgeois (or vaishya as the Hindus would say) unintelligence is put forward as a “doctrine” and definitively installed in European “thought,” giving birth, by way of the French Revolution, to scientism, industry and to quantitative “culture.” Mental hypertrophy in the “cultured” man henceforth compensates the absence of intellectual penetration; the sense of the absolute and the principial is drowned in a mediocre empiricism, coupled with a pseudo-mysticism posing as “positive” or “human.” Some people may reproach us with a lack of due consideration, but we would ask what due consideration is shown by philosophers who shamelessly slash down the wisdom of countless centuries.) sophiaperennis: KANTianism

For KANT, intellectual intuition – of which he does not understand the first word – is a fraudulent manipulation (Erschleichung), which throws a moral discredit onto all authentic intellectuality. sophiaperennis: KANTianism

2. KANT calls “transcendent al subreption” (Erschleichung) the trans formation” of the purely ” regulative” idea of God into an objective reality; which once more proves that he is unable to conceive certitude outside a reasoning founded on sense experience and operating beneath the reality which he pretends to judge and deny. In short, KANTian ” criticism’ consists in calling liar” whoever does not bend to its discipline; agnostics do practically the same, by decreeing that no one can know anything, since they themselves know nothing, or desire to know nothing. sophiaperennis: KANTianism

Certain arguments against eternal life are thoroughly typical of the “concretist” perversion of the intelligence and the imagination: to exist, they say, is to measure oneself against limits; it is to conquer resistances and to produce something. They have evidently no conception of the possibility of an existence that is incorporated in active Immutability, or in immutable Activity and that lives by it; the touchstone of the real for the materialists is always gross experience coupled with the “hylic’s” lack of imagination; on this level of thought there is nothing but “boredom” to be seen in eternal life, which brings us to the monologue attributed metaphorically by KANT to the Divine Person who, in taking note of his eternity, would, so it is supposed, logically be obliged to raise the question of his own origin. sophiaperennis: KANTianism

Reason, then, to the extent that it is artificially divorced from the Intellect, engenders individualism and arbitrariness. This is exactly what happens in the case of someone like KANT, who is a rationalist even while rejecting “dogmatic rationalism”; while the latter is doubtless rationalism, the KANTian critical philosophy is even more deserving of the name, indeed it is the very acme of rationalism. sophiaperennis: KANTianism

Thus, it is upon an intellectual infirmity that these thinkers build their systems, without their appearing to be in the least impressed by the fact that countless men as intelligent as themselves (to put it mildly) have thought otherwise than they do. How, for example, did a man like KANT explain to himself the fact that his thesis, so immensely important for humankind, if it were true, was unknown to all the peoples of the world and had not been discovered by a single sage, and how did he account for the fact that men of the highest abilities labored under lifelong illusions (in his eyes) which were totally incompatible with those abilities – even founding religions, producing sanctity, and creating civilizations? Surely the least one might ask of a “great thinker” is a little imagination. sophiaperennis: KANTianism

Apart from the forms of sensory knowledge, KANT admits the categories, regarded by him as innate principles of cognition; these he divides into four groups inspired by Aristotle, (NA: Quantity, quality, relation, and modality; the latter no doubt replacing the Aristotelian ” position.”) while at the same time subjectivizing the Aristotelian notion of category. He develops in his own way the peripatetic categories that he accepts while discarding others, without realizing that, regardless of Aristotelianism, the highest and most important of the categories have eluded his grasp. (NA: Such as the principial and cosmic qualities which determine and classify phenomena, or the universal dimensions which join the world to the Supreme Essence and which include each in its own manner the qualities mentioned above. Aristotle for his part had the right not to speak of them in that he accepted God as being self-evident and his approach was in no way moralistic and empirical; since he accept ed God, he did not consider his categories to be exhaustive.) The categories are a priori independent of all experience since they are innate; KANT recognized this, yet he considered that they were capable of being “explored” by a process he called “transcendental investigation.” But how will one ever grasp the pure subject who explores and who investigates? sophiaperennis: KANTianism

The first reproach is based on the totally false hypothesis that a metaphysical doctrine is a logical attempt at an explanation; the second reproach, which stems from KANT, amounts to flagrant nonsense, for if there is nothing to prove our intelligence is capable of adequation – in that case, what is intelligence?- there is likewise nothing to prove that the intelligence expressing this doubt is competent to doubt, and so forth. If the optic nerve has to be examined in order to be sure that vision is real, it will likewise be necessary to examine that which examines the optic nerve, an absurdity which proves in its own indirect way that knowledge of suprasensible things is intuitive and cannot be other than intuitive. sophiaperennis: KANTianism

For KANT, God is only a “postulate of practical reason,” which takes us infinitely far away from the real and transcendent God of Aristotle. sophiaperennis: KANTianism

There remains the experimental or mystical proof of God. While admitting that logically and in the absence of a doctrine, it proves nothing to anyone who has not undergone the unitive experience, nonetheless there is no justification for concluding that because it is incommunicable it must be false; this was the error of KANT, who moreover gave the name of “theurgy” to this direct experience of the Divine Substance. sophiaperennis: KANTianism

This is what KANT with his rationalistic ingenuousness did not foresee. According to him, every cognition which is not rational in the narrowest sense, is mere pretentiousness and fanciful enthusiasm (Schwärmerei); now, if there is anything pretentious it is this very opinion. Fantasy, arbitrariness and irrationality are not features of the Scholastics, but they certainly are of the rationalists who persist in violently contesting, with ridiculous and often pathetic arguments, everything which eludes their grasp. With Voltaire, Rousseau and KANT, bourgeois (or vaishya as the Hindus would say) unintelligence is put forward as a “doctrine” and definitively installed in European “thought,” giving birth, by way of the French Revolution, to scientism, industry and to quantitative “culture.” Mental hypertrophy in the “cultured” man henceforth compensates the absence of intellectual penetration; the sense of the absolute and the principial is drowned in a mediocre empiricism, coupled with a pseudo-mysticism posing as “positive” or “human.” Some people may reproach us with a lack of due consideration, but we would ask what due consideration is shown by philosophers who shamelessly slash down the wisdom of countless centuries. sophiaperennis: Logic

Without wishing to be too systematic, it can be said that with most traditional artists, it is the element “object” that determines the work; with the majority of modern artists on the contrary, it is the element “subject,” in the sense that the moderns – individualistic as they are – intend to “create” the work and in creating it, wish to express their altogether profane little personality; whence ambition and the pursuit of originality. To be sure, the non-modern artist also, and by the nature of things, inevitably expresses his personality; but he does so through the object and by his quest of the object. Conversely, the modern artist – we mean “modernistic” – is necessarily preoccupied with the object, but within the framework and in the interest of his subjectivism; (NA : Let us note that originally, the word “subject” was a synonym for “predicate” and also for “substance”; it is only with KANT that the “subject” became the conscious, the knower and the thinker. But as this interpretation has become common in modern language, we follow its usage.) the apprentice artist no longer has to learn to draw, he has to learn to “create”; it is the world turned upside down. sophiaperennis: ART, ITS DUTIES AND ITS RIGHTS

… some modern Vedantists … claim that the two states in question (the waking and the dreaming egos) are quite unrelated, that the dreaming ego is not in any way the same as the waking one, that the two states are closed systems and that it is incorrect to take the waking ego as the point of reference for the dreaming consciousness; (NA: Like KANT, Siddheswarananda, for instance, seems to think that his own experiences limit those of others.) and that consequently, the latter is in no way inferior to the former nor less real (NA: Some have even gone as far as to claim that dreaming is superior to the waking state since it comprises possibilities which are excluded by the physical world, as though these possibilities were anything but purely passive and as though the objective and determinant reality of the waking state did not compensate infinitely for the dream possibility of rising into the air; or again, as if one could not just as well dream of being deprived of movement.). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism