Kant : Immanuel (1724-1804), German metaphysician.
... The form which this argument received at the hands of Kant is peculiar, and it is not satisfactory. Kant says it is a demand Page 38 of the moral self that the highest Good be realised. But in the highest Good there are two elements, virtue and happiness: the consciousness of duty fulfilled and of desire satisfied. Now, for Kant, virtue and happiness belong to two different worlds, the... the line of proof which Leibniz endeavours to work out could not give, for its conclusion, a Necessary Being who is separate from the world in which possibilities are realised. At the hands of Kant the Ontological Proof was subjected to a penetrating criticism, and since Kant's day it has ceased to be put forward seriously in the old form. His criticism proceeds on the principle that existence... placing its object before me in thought, and saying that it is. The real contains no more than the possible. A hundred real dollars do not contain a cent more than a hundred possible dollars." 5 Kant has shown conclusively, that it in not possible from the analysis of a conception to deduce from it existence as a predicate. Even when we feel that existence does belong to an idea or combination of ...
... their discussion on Reason, Buddhi, Kant, Hegel, the Gita, etc. Ultimately Sri Aurobindo was referred to. In the evening Purani took up the topic. PURANI: Anilbaran asks if Buddhi can mean the same thing as Understanding. Professor Maitra says they are the same and so he places Buddhi lower than Reason just as Kant does with Understanding. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, Kant seems to place Understanding lower... Buddhi. Hence Buddhi is Intellect. Understanding only a part of Buddhi. PURANI: Kant says we are free while we follow Reason, not while we follow our senses. SRI AUROBINDO: Then Buddhi can't be the same as Kant's Understanding. If anything it should be Higher Reason. PURANI: Anilbaran asks another question. Kant says that one can arrive at the Truth by Reason. Maitra says the Gita also affirms... Shankara, I believe, doesn't say that Reason is useless. He admits that it prepares for what is beyond—even for going beyond Sattwa, etc. It is stepping-stone. PURANI: Anilbaran wants to know whether Kant and Hegel had a notion of a faculty beyond mind. SRI AUROBINDO: I don't think so. PURANI: They didn't believe in a suprarational consciousness? SRI AUROBINDO: No, they thought Reason can arrive ...
... classical elucidations of the ontological argument. They were subjected to criticism by Kant and other empiricist philosophers, and for long it has been believed that he had successfully completed the task of demolishing the purely intellectual proofs for the existence of God. 1. Kant (1724-1804 C.E.) Kant declared that all the elucidations of the ontological arguments consider 'existence'... Anselm's argument was criticised by some of his contemporaries, and most of the great modern philosophers like Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant have also put forward theistic arguments. Spinoza formulated the Ontological Argument within the system of his own metaphysics. After Kant had apparently refuted the ontological argument, Hegel (1770-1831 C. E.) reestablished it within the framework of his own metaphysical... I will happy to know what you think of this. Tutor (3): I have already acknowledged that Kant thinks the Cosmological Argument is dependent on the Ontological. Whether or not he is right depends on which version of the Cosmological Argument you have in mind. Moreover, Kant clearly doesn't think that his own axiological argument depends on the Ontological Argument, since he believes ...
... Philosophy, for Kant, was the study of the a priori forms of mental understanding as the only accessible grounds of human knowledge. Since these categories of knowing were supposed by Kant to be inherent to mentality, he used the term "transcendental" for them, and called his own Philosophy "Critical Transcendentalism." 14 Kantian subjectivism has important 14 Immanuel Kant, Critique of... his Critique of Pure Reason Kant saw and expressed more clearly than his predecessors that Metaphysics' attempt to objectify the realm of Divine Ideas, of God or pure infinite Spirit, was an incongruity beyond the reach of finite mind and that what resulted from the effort was the subjection of the Reason to a concept, and not a thing-in-itself According to Kant, neither sensible objects nor... problematic relationship between Spirit and Mind, shifting the needle even more emphatically towards the independence of the human Reason and giving rise to the Enlightenment of the IS* century. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), easily the best known of the philosophers of this period, did not fail to address the problem introduced by Metaphysics, identifying its crux and seeking a breakthrough which would free ...
... (iv) A culminating point on this line of development in ethical philosophy came to be formulated by Kant, who discovered the presence of the Categorical Imperative in the normative part of human nature, and he derived from the deliverances of that imperative the doctrine of duty for its own sake. Kant even went farther and attempted to give formulations of the Categorical Imperative in the light of... ends-in-themselves. Kant even declared that the individual himself should be looked upon not merely as a means but as an end-in-himself. A consequence of this acknowledgment was to affirm the validity of individualism; but this individualism could not be conceived in the terms of the affirmation of the egoistic limitations of the individual. It was clear that according to Kant, the individual in his ...
... likes it, not because it is true. That is the nature of the mind in general. ( After a pause ) In my own case so long as I was in the mind I couldn't understand philosophy at all. I tried to read Kant but couldn't read more than one page. Plato, of course, I read. But it was only when I went above the mind that I could understand philosophy and write philosophy. Ideas and thoughts began to flow in... It was not by any process of mental reasoning or argument that I wrote the Arya . NIRODBARAN: Then you didn't try by the mind to understand? SRI AUROBINDO: As I said, I read only one page of Kant and then gave it up, because it wouldn't go in: that is, it didn't become real to me. I was like Manilal grappling with The Life Divine . Plato I could read, as he was not merely metaphysical. Nietzsche... powerful ideas. In Indian philosophy I read the Upanishads and the Gita, etc. They are, of course, mainly results of spiritual experience. People think I must be immensely learned and know all about Hegel, Kant and the others. The fact is that I haven't even read them; and people don't know I have written everything from experience and spiritual perception. Modern philosophers wrap their ideas up in extraordinary ...
... that philosophy dissipates its energies when it begins to isolate mind from world. Once the process begins, no one knows where to stop - Locke is followed by Berkeley, Berkeley by Hume, Hume by Kant and even Kant by Fichte." 10 Reality and the Integral Knowledge Thus we see that modern science is in a fix; it has lost its self-assurance and it has no reverence for the contemporary... traceable to several instances of misplaced emphasis on the subjective element - "prolongation of the transition which in the West begins with Descartes, becomes crucial in Locke, rises to climax in Kant and Fichte, and is continued in various ways by subsequent thinkers." 9 This subjective emphasis is obvious in pragmatism and in its recent version, operationalism, which carries the general ...
... after his death, triumphed over Voltaire, revived religion, transformed education, elevated the morals of France, inspired the Romantic movement and the French Revolution, influenced the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, the plays of Schiller, the novels of Goethe, the poems of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, the socialism of Marx, the ethics of Tolstoi, and, altogether, had more effect upon posterity... full authority over the rearing of a very malleable youth called Emile. It is quite incredible, but Rousseau managed to make these 450 pages the most interesting book ever written on education. When Kant picked up Emile he became so absorbed that he forgot to take his daily walk. If nature is to be the tutor s guide, he will give the child as much freedom as safety will allow. He will begin... actions, or those of others, to be good or evil; and it is this principle that we call conscience. Whereupon Rousseau breaks out into an apostrophe which we shall find almost literally echoed in Kant: Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide of a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free, infallible, judge of good and evil, making ...
... it is the ego that has become that. Even Blake who had some idea of identity with the Self appears to have made this mistake. PURANI (after a lull in the talk) : Anilbaran says that according to Kant if one follows Reason one is free but if one follows Sense one is bound. There is also the question: Is Buddhi or Intellect an instrument of Prakriti and can a man, so long as he follows Buddhi, be... is the same as the Gita's Buddhi-Yoga. SRI AUROBINDO: He is quite a controversialist. (Laughter) But in a controversy one has to see whatever truth there is in others' points of view. PURANI: Kant, it seems, changed his mind in later life and admitted the necessity of Faith, which he deals with in his Critique of Practical Reason . SRI AUROBINDO: I haven't read European philosophy carefully... AUROBINDO: The European idea is to arrive at the Truth. SATYENDRA: They also have some idea of applying the Truth. PURANI: Yes, a sort of idealism but not spirituality. In his Practical Reason Kant maintains that Pure Reason is an abstract faulty hardly to be found unmixed in men. SRI AUROBINDO: What is it for then? PURANI: It is just an ideal hardly attainable. So Practical Reason is necessary ...
... Church, also hailed as such; and even Kant I have found looked upon in the same light. In our own day it is common, I believe, to refer to Bergson or Bradley as mystical. Regarded, looked upon by whom? It was not so in my time at least in Europe. Plato was never called a mystic then; Hegel was regarded as a transcendentalist but no mystic; if you had called Kant or Spinoza mystics people would have... experience. Merely to have metaphysical notions about the Infinite and Godhead and underlying or overshadowing forces does not make a man a mystic. One would never think of applying such a term to Spinoza, Kant or Hegel: even Plato does not fit into the term though Pythagoras has a good claim to it. Hegel and other transcendental or idealistic philosophers were great intellects, not mystics. Shaw is a keen ...
... following reason and Gita's Buddhi yoga are the same. Sri Aurobindo : Well, in a controversy one has to see the truth in the other man's point of view. Disciple : A told me that Kant changed his mind later in life and admitted the necessity of faith with which he deals in his "Critique of practical reason." Sri Aurobindo : I have not read European philosophy carefully... philosophy. Sri Aurobindo : That was X's great complaint that people here want always something practical from philosophy. They don't want to think for the sake of thinking. Disciple : Kant seems to say that he who follows his reason is free, who follows the senses is bound. This is, in part, an Indian idea. Sri Aurobindo : They have no idea of freedom – mukti – in the Indian... at the Truth. Disciple : Yes, also some idea of applying the truth to life. Disciple : Yes, some sort of idealism. It is not spiritualism. In his "critique of practical reason", Kant maintains that "pure reason is an abstract faculty hardly to be found unmixed in man and so practical reason is necessary. Sri Aurobindo : What is then the 'pure reason' for? Disciple ...
... physics? First we must note the status which, among ideas, Einstein accords to free creations. Can they be put on a par with what Kant calls a priori ideas? The so-called a priori ideas are those that some other philosophers label as logical generalisations from experience: Kant considers them forms of thought inherent in the mind and imposed by it on the stuff of sensation. When Einstein declares the ...
... far as its consequences are concerned. In the West, in the philosophy of Conscience and Intuitionism, similar ideas were put forward, and they came to a culminating point in the ethical doctrine of Kant, which enjoined duty for its own sake and attempted to give a standard of action that had to be judged not by its consequences but by its own intrinsic value. At that new higher level, the primacy... to what was the real nature of the individual, and Kant's own answer was that the true individual was capable of liberating him self from the clamour of desires into a realm of ends in themselves. Kant even went one step farther and declared that the individual himself should be looked upon not merely as a means but as an end in himself. In other words, it was affirmed that while individualism is ...
... categories—the constants, as they are called. —and link up mind and intellect with that- reality. This is the Copernican revolution that Science brought about in the modern outlook. Philosophers like Kant or Berkeley may say Page 86 another thing and even science itself just nowadays may appear hesitant in its bearings. But that is another story which it is not our purpose to consider... The stage of self-consciousness to which scientific development has arrived seems to land in a cul-de-sac, a blind alley: Science also is faced, almost helplessly, with the antinomies of reason that Kant discovered long ago in the domain of speculative philosophy. The way out, for a further growth and development and evolution, lies in a supersession of the self-consciousness, an elevation into a s ...
... by oneself and not by others. But then what about the laws of morality? They are made by others. And if one is supposed to act according to oneself and thus be free, one may disobey them. PURANI: Kant speaks also of heteronomy and gives the maxim that one must follow only that rule which one can make a universal law. SRI AUROBINDO: His idea of freedom is like the Sanskrit sloka: "Everything under... members of the Cabinet. (Laughter) SATYENDRA: God is very difficult to get. NIRODBARAN: He is also very clever in argument! EVENING Purani had given Sri Aurobindo Sisir Maitra's article on Kant and the Gita. Later he asked Sri Aurobindo how he found it. SRI AUROBINDO: He has overstressed the ethical part and left out the spiritual and explained the spiritual idea from the ethical standpoint ...
... feel very flattered by the unconscious compliment you have paid me. I can't agree that even for a student of philosophy the philosophic works of Sri Aurobindo are too difficult. Compared to Kant, for instance, he is smooth sailing. It is his comprehensiveness and integrality that challenge the reader accustomed to the intense but one-sided philosophical treatment that our own thinkers have... moment. I understand Advent is going to publish it. Perhaps you might also like to do it; if you do, substitute any good quotations from Sri Aurobindo rather than from yourself. If Kant is difficult, Sri Aurobindo may be difficult too. I take the normal philosophical student as one who is able to understand John Stuart Mill or Radhakrishnan easily, but 'The Life Divine' is rather difficult ...
... the contemporary mind. Subsequently, Western philosophy passed through various forms of rationalism enriched by contributions made by great philosophers like Spinoza (1632-1677), Leibnitz (1646-1716), Kant (1728-1804) and Hegel (1770-1831). In the meantime, an opposition against rationalism arose with the empiricism 1 of John Locke (1632- 1704). Locke attacked the theory of innate ideas and maintained... sense-experience cannot provide a basis for belief in substance, either physical or spiritual, and hence nothing can be known with certainty. Hume s empiricism ended in scepticism. It is true that Kant, who was awakened from his dogmatic slumber by Hume, attempted to provide a new foundation for certainty in his famous work, Critique of Pure Reason. But despite its originality and brilliance, Kant's ...
... my saying so. PURANI: No. I don't mind. I know. DR. MANILAL: I understood Purani's original writings better than his translations. SRI AUROBINDO: Have you read Kant? (Laughter) DR. MANILAL: No, Sir! PURANI: After Kant you would realise how easy The Life Divine is. NIRODBARAN: Don't worry, Dr. Manilal, I am in the same boat as you. PURANI: Many doctors will be in it. . CHAMPAKLAL: ...
... be barbarians. PURANI: Kant also did not have much sympathy with Prussia. He was a professor in Prussia, at Konigsberg, I think, but he was not allowed to publish his books there. He had them sent to Weimar and published from there. The authorities were wild at him. SRI AUROBINDO: The Duke of Weimar was a liberal. PURANI: The Christians tried to make out that Kant disproved the existence of ...
... possibility, existence, necessity. In other words, the realm of pure reason does not provide the ground for freedom, which is exhibited in the ethical urge towards normative action. According to Kant, it is in the field of Practical Reason that the genuine freedom is experienced, since it is in that experience that one finds an ultimate unanalysable idea of "ought or duty". Indeed, Kant's doctrine... differences of swabhava, the innate tendency of nature determined by the status of the evolution of the given individual in his upward growth. This flexibility is not to be found in the doctrine of Kant. Thirdly, the idea that dharma should be followed simply because it is dharma is only one side of the argument, Page 151 but it is not the overarching and ultimate idea of dharma. It is implicit ...
... categories – the constants, as they are called – and link up mind and intellect with that reality. This is the Copernican revolution that Science brought about in the modern outlook. Philosophers like Kant or Berkeley may say Page 137 another thing and even science itself just nowadays may appear hesitant in its bearings. But that is another story which it is not our purpose to consider... The stage of self-consciousness to which scientific development has arrived seems to land in a cul-de-sac, a blind alley: Science also is faced, almost helplessly, with the antinomies of reason that Kant discovered long ago in the domain of speculative philosophy. The way out, for a further growth and development and evolution, lies in a supersession of the self-consciousness, an elevation into a s ...
... far as its consequences are concerned. In the West, in the philosophy of Conscience and Intuitionism, similar ideas were put forward, and they came to a culminating point in the ethical doctrine of Kant, which enjoined duty for its own sake and attempted to give a standard of action that had to be judged not by its consequences but by its own intrinsic value. At that new higher level, the primacy... as to what was the real nature of the individual, and Kant's own answer was that the true individual was capable of liberating himself from the clamour of desires into a realm of ends in themselves. Kant even went one step farther and declared that the individual himself should be looked upon not merely as a means but as an end in himself. In other words, it was affirmed that while individualism is ...
... possess the quality of existence. That is the reason why that great German metaphysician, Immanuel Kant, could demolish that argument by pointing out that existence is not a quality through his famous statement that hundred dollars in actual existence are no more than hundred dollars in imagination. And Kant was quite right. A quality can be separated from substance, but existence cannot be separated ...
... own categories—the constants, as they are called—and link up mind and intellect with that reality. This is the Copernican revolution that Science brought about in the modern outlook. Philosophers like Kant or Berkeley may say another thing and even Page 26 science itself just nowadays may appear hesitant in its bearings. But that is another story which it is not our purpose to consider... Page 29 consciousness to which scientific development has arrived seems to land in a cul de sac, a blind alley: Science also is faced, almost helplessly, with the antinomies of reason that Kant discovered long ago in the domain of speculative philosophy. The way out, for a further growth and development and evolution, lies in a supersession of the self-consciousness, an elevation into a s ...
... subjective force which has been so much disfigured in its objective action, was not in Germany's statesmen and soldiers—for the most part poor enough types of men—but came from her great philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, from her great thinker and poet Goethe, from her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, and from all in the German soul and temperament which they represented. A nation whose ...
... It has analysed the elements; it has weighed the suns and measured the orbits of the stars; it has written the dramas of Shakespeare, the epics of Valmekie and Homer and Vyasa, the philosophies of Kant and Shankara; it has harnessed the forces of Nature to do its bidding; it has understood existence and grasped the conception of infinity. There is something fascinatingly romantic and interesting in ...
... strange word? In the Middle Ages there was the famous Ontological Argument that the very idea of God the Perfect Being entailed His existence since one could not be perfect if one did not exist. Kant is said to have refuted Anselm's logic but I don't think he could touch the question: "What makes us conceive of anything like God at all?" Imagination can conjure up Gorgons and hydras and chimeras ...
... experience. Merely to have metaphysical notions about the Infinite and Godhead and underlying or overshadowing forces does not make a man a mystic. One would never think of applying such a term to Spinoza, Kant or Hegel: even Plato does not fit into the term, though Pythagoras has a good claim to it. Hegel and other transcendental or idealistic philosophers were great intellects, not mystics."! Yes, Pythagoras ...
... him in his Contrat Social to his Utopian reveries - the inspirer of German transcendentalism in which his insistence on the inner subjective determinant and judge played so decisive a role that Kant, who demonstrated the innate thought-categories and the conscious self as the unifiers of experience into a totality and who argued a God-given moral imperative within each heart, used to hang on ...
... when philosophy and notion got split. They used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristorte, Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So, the novel went sloppy and Philosophy went abstract – dry. The two should come together again - in the novel. ( Phoenix, p. 520) III Many of these concerns and injunctions ...
... 72 I have been quiet a long while 247 I have come to the secret hour 553 I have loved thee though thy beauty stands 401 I have mastered the antinomies of Kant 367 "I have not trod on thorns: do I deserve 499 I have seen the inmost truth behind mam's form 303 I have viewed many miracled whitenesses— 484 I heard ...
... are self- answering and spiritual faith is self-justifying. But in what sense does faith justify itself? Obviously not by providing any measure of intellectual guarantee or assurance. Kant attempted to destroy knowledge to make room for faith. Faith, however, is not a rival to knowledge and the latter needs not to be destroyed but understood. Once we remove the underpinning of logic ...
... to be interfered with in its rights and liberties so long as it does not interfere with the rights and liberties of other nations.” In these formulations of Sri Aurobindo one hears a direct echo of Kant and the ideals of the Enlightenment. As we have seen repeatedly, Fascism as a whole and Nazism in particular were a revolt against everything the Enlightenment stood for, especially the idea of ...
... Created half to rise, and half to fall, Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of Truth, in endless error hurl’d; The glory, jest and riddle of the world. If, as Immanuel Kant also thought, “human nature occupies as it were the middle rung of the Scale of Being,” the scale must consist not only of matter, life-force and mind, but also of spiritual gradations above the mind ...
... the human mind. Spiritual insight is based on direct knowledge; mental activity remains inexorably restricted by the human constitution, as has been recognized by philosophers like Plato, Berkeley and Kant. Another example of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s “foreknowledge” is the very special nature and purpose of the Earth, as commented upon in the talk “2012 and 1956: Doomsday?” It must suffice here ...
... specified limits, an inherent indefiniteness in nature. The probability law must be accepted as primary: it cannot be superseded by a more fundamental law of a deterministic kind. To quote Whittaker again: "Kant said, quite justly, that regularity in occurrence is a necessary presumption of the science of physics. He supposed (erroneously) that these regularities must always be of the kind that we meet with ...
... itself, considering that human beings are always conditioned by the cultural backgrounds in which they are born and brought up. It will be seen that Hick's suggestion is basically Kantian. According to Kant, human beings are so conditioned in their epistemological apparatus that they can never experience the noumenal truth behind the phenomenal reality, and that they can experience only the phenomena which ...
... selfishness, egoism and subjectivity, and the more is one led to the discovery of the Categorical Imperative, the criterion of which is translatable in some kind of objectivity and universality, as Kant showed—although not entirely satisfactorily, and as shown by the Bhagavadgita in its concept of Loka sangraha. What we call good actions can be relative, and our judgement about them can be subjective; ...
... beginning presuppose something beyond the end or beginning. In the first place, infinity is conceived in terms of Time and Space, an eternal duration, interminable extension. In the philosophy oflmmanuel Kant, 14 for instance, Time and Space are conceived as conditions of consciousness under which we arrange our perceptions of phenomena. But existence — in itself has to be conceived as something beyond ...
... Thought, Page 131 (2 Vols.), George Alien & Unwin Ltd., 1939, London; Joad, C. E. M., Guide to Philosophy, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1953, London. 14 Vide., Wolf, R.P. (Ed)s Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays, Garden City: Double day Anchor, 1967. 15 Vide, Manser, A., Stock, G. (Eds.), The Philosophy ofF. H. Bradley, Clarendon Press, 1984. 16 Vide., Moser, P ...
... " in the Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. VII, McMillan, New York, 1987. Kalyani Mallik, Siddha- siddhanta paddhati and other works of Nathayogis, Poona Oriental Book House, Poona, 1954. Kant, Immanuel, Ethical Philosophy, translated by Ellington, James W., Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana, 1983. Karl H. Potter, (ed.), Advaita Veddnta, up to Shankara and his ...
... Arguments in the context of their own systems of philosophy. Along with the Ontological Argument, the Cosmological Argument and Teleological Argument have flourished both in the East and the West. Immanuel Kant criticised the Ontological Argument but supplied a new argument, the Moral Argument. However, after Kant's refutation of the Ontological Argument, and particularly under the influence of the empiricist ...
... supreme endeavour of her greatest spirits, are not sane, not virile. This, one may be allowed to say, is a very Occidental and up-to-date idea of spirituality. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Spinoza, Kant, Charlemagne, Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mussolini, these, shall we suggest, are to figure henceforth not only as great poets and artists or heroes of thought and action, but as our typical heroes and ...
... selfishness, egoism and subjectivity, and the more is one led to the discovery of the Categorical Imperative, the criterion of which is translatable in some kind of objectivity and universality, as Kant showed although not entirely satisfactorily, and as shown by the Bhagavadgita in its concept of Loka sangraha. What we call good actions can be relative, and our judgment about them can be subjective; ...
... this dictum in substance the entire teaching o the Gita. But when we read the Gita in all its complexity one finds that the great gospel of Karma yoga that we fine in the Gita goes much farther than Kant. One has also to remember that Sri Krishna accepts the truth that lies bah in the Sankhyan gospel of renunciation according to which all works have to be renounced, even though Sri Krishna's fine ' ...
... opening of vision got the eye to see and the mind of understanding about colour, line and design? How was it that I who was unable to understand and follow a metaphysical argument and whom a page of Kant or Hegel or Hume or even Berkeley left either dazed and uncomprehending and fatigued or totally uninterested because I could not fathom or follow, suddenly began writing pages of the stuff as soon as ...
... Quarles, Crashaw and a number of others who wrote poetry of a religious and spiritual character—metaphysical here means that (truth beyond the physical) and has nothing to do with the "metaphysics" of Kant or Hegel or Bradley. November 4, 1938 Please throw a glance over the names of the metaphysical poets—I couldn't make out one name which I have underlined. You seem to have got the names ...
... his whole Page 247 philosophy is only a rationalisation of an inner prejudgment, almost a window-dressing of a perception that came to him direct and in other secret ways. That was what Kant meant when he made the famous distinction between the Pure and the Practical Reason and their categories. Only the direct perceptions, the spiritual realisations are so much imbedded behind, covered ...
... reality b ing consciousness. The subject is the consciousness turned on itself and the object is consciousness turned outside or going abroad. This is pre-eminently the Upanishadic position. In Europe, Kant holds a key position in this line: and on the whole, idealists from Plato to Bradley and Bosanquet can be said more or less to belong to this category. The second intermediate position views the subject ...
... his whole Page 344 philosophy is only a rationalisation of an inner prejudgment, almost a window-dressing of a perception that came to him direct and in other secret ways. That was what Kant meant when he made the famous distinction between the Pure and the Practical Reason and their categories. Only the direct perceptions, the spiritual realisations are so much imbedded behind, covered ...
... to be going down to another level of stupidity. It is not Jadabhava, because here only the mind is Jada and the rest is very active. SRI AUROBINDO: Then perhaps it is due to the effort of reading Kant and trying to understand him. (Laughter) NIRODBARAN (after some time) : What does Blake mean by self annihilation? SRI AUROBINDO: I don't know, perhaps annihilation of the ego. NIRODBARAN: ...
... men, not only of our age, but of all ages. His all-embracing, crystal clear and profound philosophy is assuredly a contribution to human thought, vision and progress which ranks with that of Plato, Kant, Bergson or Goethe... the findings of Sri Aurobindo which we have no means of verifying at our level of experience actually supply all the consistency which strikes us in the explanation given by Sri ...
... 13 Joyce, James, 535 Julius Caesar, 140 Kabir, 9, 497 Kalidasa. 10,50, 69ff, 90H, 337, 695 Kama, 169, 172 Kanungo, Hemachandra, 216, 326 Kant, Immanuel, 416 Kara-Kahini, 307fn, 308ff, 314H, 318, 320 Karmayogin, The, 201,250, 335,336ff, 345, 346ff, 359ff, 362H, 370, 375, 376, 390, 399, 449, 514, 531 Kathasaritsagara ...
... a different complexion and run on different lines. This is a common enough experience, illustrated in the lives of many great men, such as St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, Luther, and Kant (among the Westerners); and Valmiki, Tulsidas, Vivekananda, to name only a few, among the Indians. This proves that there is nothing permanent and sacrosanct about our mental structures, which are but ...
... discovery of a nation's or of a sub-nation's soul. Sri Aurobindo rightly points out that it was not her soldiers and empire-builders like Bismark and Moltke and Kaiser Wilhelm II but her thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Nietzsche and her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, who represented Germany's great subjective force that has ushered in the modem renaissance. And yet it is the soldier and ...
... opening of vision got the eye to see and the mind of understanding about colour, line and design? How was it that I who was unable to understand and follow a metaphysical argument and whom a page of Kant or Hegel or Hume or even Berkeley left either dazed and uncomprehending and fatigued or totally uninterested because I could not Page 192 fathom or follow, suddenly began writing pages ...
... all that will be is OM. With this pregnant confession of faith Hinduism begins its interpretation of the Universe. Metaphysical systems arise and metaphysical systems fall; Hegel disappears and Kant arrives; Pantheism, Theism, Atheism pursue their interminable round, and there is no finality. Then Science comes and declares the whole vanity, for all is physical and there is nothing metaphysical ...
... mind they were not only real and familiar, but valid processes; our Indian ancients held them to be the supreme means of arriving at truth, and, if any Vedic Rishi had composed, after the manner of Kant, a Critique of Veda, he would have made the ideas underlying the ancient words drishti, sruti, smriti, ketu, the principal substance of his critique; indeed, unless these ideas are appreciated, it is ...
... supreme endeavour of her greatest spirits, are not sane, not virile. This, one may be allowed to say, is a very occidental and up to date idea of spirituality. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Spinoza, Kant, Charlemagne, Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mussolini, these, shall we suggest, are to figure henceforth not only as great poets and artists or heroes of thought and action, but as our typical heroes and ...
... The Secret Splendour I have mastered the antinomies of Kant And the four-dimensional continuum And the daedal scheme of Joyce-wrought Ulysses— Of Dali's weird signs I am a hierophant, And how through Narcist quiverings they come I have learned by subtle psychoanalysis. Now, Lord, I pray make me most ignorant, Drown ...
... being rational consists. The 19th century materialism, fresh with the triumphs of science made all rationality synonymous with scientific rationality. But even as early as the 18th century, Kant in his preface to the work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), had declared, "Our age is the age of criticism to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion and the authority ...
... university days. Dr. Jung was in India on a personal research project and he encouraged my father to go to Germany for doctoral studies. He did so and studied Hegel and Jung, lived near the birthplace of Kant and taught Sanskrit and Indian philosophy at the University of Koenigsburg. After receiving his doctoral degree he returned to India to continue teaching and lecturing. He presented many famous papers ...
... under the surface of the waters." 2 SRI AUROBINDO As a metaphysical concept, the unconscious had been spoken of by several European thinkers, including the eminent philosophers Leibnitz and Kant. The first elaborate metaphysical theory of the unconscious was developed by Eduard Von Hartmann in Philosophic des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious) published in 1869, according to which ...
... 23,29,38,53, 57,67, 111 on ego 19,111 and Freud 6,27-29 and Sri Aurobindo 7,9, 19, 41-42 and the unconscious 6,7, 26-27,28-29,41-42,43-44, 45, 50-51 Kant, Immanuel 23 Karma 134,137 Leibnitz, Gottfried 23 Libido 6,7,29 Life-force see Vital, the Mania 111 mantra 126-27 Maslow, Abraham 14, 15 Page 163 ...
... opening of vision got the eye to see and the mind of understanding about colour, line and design? How was it that I who had been unable to understand and follow a metaphysical argument and whom a page of Kant or Hume or even Berkeley used to leave either dazed and uncomprehending and fatigued or totally uninterested, suddenly began to write pages of the staff as soon as I started the Arya and am now reputed ...
... self-vision … The real source of this great subjective force which has been so much disfigured in its objective action, was not in Germany’s statesman and soldiers … but came from her great philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, from her great poet and thinker Goethe, from her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, and from all in the German soul and temperament which they represented. A nation whose ...
... positively loaded with references to the Vedas, the Upanishads, Taoism (Bohr made the yin-yang symbol part of his family crest), Buddhism, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant, virtually the entire pantheon of perennial philosophers.” 35 Consequently Wilber divides the 20th century physicists into two batches: the open-minded “mystics” including all those named above ...
... novelists, poets, philosophers and musicians: the literary men Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Heine, Hölderlin; the philosophers Fichte, Schlegel, Hegel, all of them having to define themselves against Kant, paragon of the Aufklärung; and musicians of the stature of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann, who even today delight so many hearts with an art incomparably refined, profound and sublime. ...
... not only in matters of politics but also in matters sociological, ideological and religious. The times were out of joint, not only in Germany, but all the same very much so in the land of Goethe and Kant. Hitler, driven by the power of his “obsessions”, was an intriguing figure of the kind which fascinated the masses. And the more his fame spread, the more he was attacked by the enemy on the left, in ...
... Page 215 got the eye to see and the mind of understanding about colour, line and design? How was it that I who was unable to under stand and follow a metaphysical argument and whom a page of Kant or Hegel or Hume or even Berkeley left either dazed and uncomprehending and fatigued or totally uninterested because I could not fathom or follow, suddenly began writing pages of the stuff as soon as ...
... the manuscript page. Its place of insertion was not marked: One would sometimes almost think that this upheaval of thought anticipated at once Plato & Empedocles, Luther, Erasmus and Melanchthon, Kant, Hegel & Berkeley, Hume, Haeckel & Huxley—that we have at one fell blast Graeco-Roman philosophy, Protestant Reformation & modern rationalistic tendency anticipated by the single movement from Janaka ...
... instead of tending as in Europe to ignore or combat religion, has always been itself deeply religious. In Europe Buddha and Shankara would have become the heads of metaphysical schools & ranked with Kant or Hegel or Nietzsche 1 as strong intellectual influences; in India they became, inevitably, the founders of great religious sects, immense moral & spiritual forces;—inevitably because Europe has ...
... been born of them, which, as Europeans have noted with an admiring or patronising wonder and Indians with a sort of obsequious pride, are on a level or almost on a level with the metaphysical ideas of Kant and Hegel! Apart, even, from these baser concessions of the subjugated Indian mind, it has been with a feeling of sincere relief and consolation that truly spiritual Indians, distressed by the clamorous ...
... the Greeks seemed to me a mass of abstractions with nothing concrete or real that could be firmly grasped and written in a metaphysical jargon to which I had not the key. I tried once a translation of Kant but dropped it after the first two pages and never tried again. In India at Baroda I read a "Tractate" of Schopenhauer on the six centres and that seemed to me more interesting. In sum, my interest ...
... well be insuperable. All difficulties in that realm can be insuperable: if this were not so, there would be a universal consensus of philosophers instead of Aristotle at loggerheads with Plato, Kant going hammer-and-tongs at the Schoolmen as well as the Empiricists, Bertrand Russell spitting fire at Bergson. The spectacle, though extremely fascinating, is a trifle ludicrous too. Seeing that ...
... and Charles V had gout, arteriosclerosis, and dropsy. Many eminent men had syphilis (Henry VIII, Benvenuto Cellini, Baudelaire), and sufferers from tuberculosis can be listed with out end — Voltaire, Kant, Keats, Dostoevsky, Moliere, Schiller, Descartes, Cardinal Manning, Spinoza, Cicero, St. Francis. But in the realm of physical deformity names are not so numerous. Several celebrated writers were eunuches ...
... be applied. SATYENDRA: Tagore can make a last attempt. NIRODBARAN: I think I too will again make an honest attempt to understand it. SRI AUROBINDO: But it is, I think, easier than books by Kant or other philosophers. EVENING We learnt that N.R. Sarkar had resigned. So the talk centered on that, it being the most important news of the day. Purani suggested that he may now join the Hindu ...
... self acts—without knowledge. Sri Aurobindo started taking his short walk in the room. When the walk was finished, Purani took up the thread of a past conversation. PURANI:: Between Hegel and Kant, poor Nirodbaran's question was lost. SRI AUROBINDO: What was it? PURANI: Nirodbaran says that, just like reasonings, experiences differ and come to different conclusions. How then can experience ...
... latter are an Anglo-Saxon mixture. NIRODBARAN: Germany is racially purer. SRI AUROBINDO: That's humbug. The Germans are as much mixture of Slavs, Nordic Alpines and Celts. Nietzsche was a Slav. Kant was born in Pomerania and was a Slav. SATYENDRA: Goebbels says that the Allies attacked the Ruhr. So the Germans had to protect the Netherlands' neutrality. SRI AUROBINDO: Does he think anybody ...
... 212 Junkerism, 88, 89 Juno, 220 KABALA, 151, 214 Kahler, Erich, 358-9 -Man the Measure, 358 Kali, 327 Kalidasa, 8, 55, 136, 197 Kant, 326, 345 Kanwa, 247 Keats, 120, 194 Kepler, 301, 308 Khilafat, 51 Kierkegaard, 362, 375-6 Koran, the, 70 Korea, 209 Kosala,91 ...
... of the greatest philosophical thinkers, notably Pythagoras, Descartes, Pascal and Leibnitz, were great mathematicians as well. Some others like Thales, Democritus, Plato, Saint Augustine, Condorcet, Kant, Auguste Comte and Husserl were not professional mathematicians, but their acquaintance with 'the Queen of the Sciences' was certainly not negligible. One remembers in this connection a pregnant remark ...
... this dictum in substance the entire teaching of the Gita. But when we read the Gita in all its complexity, one finds that the great gospel of Karma Yoga that we find in the Gita goes much farther than Kant. One has also to remember that Sri Krishna accepts the truth that lies behind the Samkhyan gospel of renunciation according to which all works have to be renounced, even though Sri Krishna's final answer ...
... will have the result. Well?' In his characteristic way, he parried my question with one of his own: 'How was it that I who was unable to understand and follow a metaphysical argument and whom a page of Kant or Hegel or Hume or even Berkeley left either dazed and uncomprehending and fatigued or totally uninterested because I could not fathom or follow, suddenly began writing pages of the stuff as soon as ...
... itself the whole warp and woof of the cobweb. There is no truth, that is to say, no conclusion which it cannot demonstrate and all with equal cogency. That was indeed the great discovery of the great Kant who described it as the antinomies of Reason. Reason finds it infinitely exhilarating to pirouette ad infinitum, i.e., beating about the bush without caring to look for the fact or reality hidden ...
... reality being consciousness. The subject is the consciousness turned on itself and the object is consciousness turned outside or going abroad. This is pre-eminently the Upanishadic position. In Europe, Kant holds a key position in this line: and on the whole, idealists from Plato to Bradley and Bosanquet can be said more or less to belong to this category. The second intermediate position views the subject ...
... Jeanne d'Arc, 192 Jerusalem, 115, 122-3 Joyce, 88 Jouve,216-17 Judas, 120 Jung, III Juno, 182 Jupiter, 108, 180 KALI, 24n., 218 Kalidasa, 39, 85, 98, 176, 181 -Shakuntala, 162 Kant, 246 Kanwa, 162 lOIn., 162, 170, Kasyapa, 133 Keats, 68, 78n., 98 -"Ode on the Poets", 78n Ken, 68n -"A Morning Hymn", 68n Krishna, 180, 218 Kronos, 159 Kushika ...
... Isaie, 394 JACOB, 397 Jagai-Madhai, 65, 73 Janaka,21 Japan, 421 Jeanne d'Arc, 116, 118, 198 Jehovah, 46, 98 Jung, 134-5, 139, 147 Jupiter, 25 KALI, 383 Kalidasa,210 Kant, 137, 139, 389 Kanwa, Rishi, 151 Kinnara, 47 Krishna, 9, 58, 76, 82, 93, 101, 105, 112, 116, 161,317 Kurukshetra, 66, 109, 116 LAo- TSE, 134 Laplace, 370 Lazarus, 200 Lenin ...
... self-consistency means the contrary of these things-the two terms used by philosophy are only the logical formulation of an essentially aesthetic value. Take, for example, the philosophical system of Kant or of Hegel or of our own Shankara. What a beautiful edifice of thought each one has reared! How cogent and compact, organised and poised and finely modelled! Shankara's reminds me of a tower, strong ...
... itself the whole warp and woof of the cobweb. There is no truth, that is to say, no conclusion which it cannot demonstrate and all with equal cogency. That was indeed the great discovery of the great Kant who described it as the antinomies of Reason. Reason finds it infinitely exhilarating to pirouette ad infinitum, i.e., beating about the bush without caring to look for the fact or reality hidden ...
... itself, considering that human beings are always conditioned by the cultural backgrounds in which they are bom and brought up. It will be seen that Hick's suggestion is basically Kantian. According to Kant, human beings are so conditioned in their epistemological apparatus that they can never experience the noumenal truth behind the phenomenal reality, and that they can experience only the phenomena which ...
... self-consistency means the contrary of these things—the two terms used by philosophy are only the logical formulation of an essentially aesthetic value. Take, for example, the philosophical system of Kant or of Hegel or of our own Shankara. What a beautiful edifice of thought each one has reared! How cogent and compact, organised and poised and finely modelled! Shankara's reminds me of a tower, strong ...
... metaphysician must not only master the uses of the Intellect, he should be able to beyond them too, "self-lost in the vasts of God". 6 The central problems of philosophy were formulated by Kant in the form of three questions; What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? These questions carry the content of the Indian concepts of tattva, hita and purusārtha. Perhaps the simplest ...
... Voltaire, Tseu-Tse, Confucius, Minamoto Sanetomo, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Epictetus, Lao-Tse, Leibnitz, Hermes, Schopenhauer, Sadi, Asvaghosha, Rumi, Spinoza, Bahaaullah, Omar Khayyam, Pythagoras, Kant, Firdausi, Ramakrishna, Vivek ananda , Pasteur, Giordano Bruno and Antoine the Healer. It is a fascinating mosaic of the choicest quotations meant to inform, instruct and inspire at once. All ...
... 118, 127, 132-3, 149ff, 203-5, 213, 241, 281 Ruud Lohman 803-4 Sahana Devi (Gupta) 255, 262ff. 281, 285, 287, 289, 296-7, 335, 349, 356, 359, 364, 371, 691 Salvador de Madariaga 534 Samir Kant Gupta 12 Sanat Banerji 241 Sanyal, Dr see Prabhat Sanyal Satprem 719, 753, 772-4, 777, 794, 808-9, 816 Satwalekar, Sripad Damodar 683 Satyakama Jabala 730 Satyendra Thakore 276-7, 400, 490 ...
... will be difficult to translate into any language. SRI AUROBINDO: Except German. German is the language for philosophy. SATYENDRA: How? SRI AUROBINDO: It is hard and abstract. NIRODBARAN: Kant's language! PURANI: The Future Poetry also may sell well in England and America. SRI AUROBINDO: Not in England. There the age of modernism is on, and my stand is quite different. PURANI: Amiya ...
... n; but it is not as a poet, stylist or novelist that Bengal does honour to him today. It is probable that the literary critic of the future will reckon "Kopal Kundala", "Bishabriksha" and "Krishna Kant's Will" as his artistic masterpieces, and speak with qualified praise of "Devi Chaudhurani", "Anandamath", "Krishna Charit" or "Dharmatattwa". Yet it is the Bankim of these latter works and not the Bankim ...
... of the towering personalities of Bengal who significantly contributed to its re-awakening in the nineteenth century. Page 211 A. A. Ghose found philosophy very dry. He tried to read Kant's Critique, "and after two pages I gave it up." Sri Aurobindo commented, "I made in fact no study of metaphysics in my school and College days. What little I knew about philosophy I picked up desultorily ...
... pose the fundamental questions: Where do I stand? What is my goal? How may I reach it? These roughly correspond to the traditional Hindu categories of tattva, hita and purus ā rtha, and, again, to Kant's celebrated questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? These primary questions have thus occurred to thinkers of the East as well as the West, and since Sri Aurobindo was in ...
... second and third methods, but they are fewer, and the chances of arriving at truth much greater. But it is only by the first method, the ¹This was also the starting point of the radical change Kant's mind underwent in regard to the unknowability of the Things- in-themselves. Page 354 method of identity, that the truth of a thing can be realised and its knowledge gained. In identity ...
... nature and history of the world contradict. But still there is a truth in this ancient superstition or imagination which the rational denial of it misses and the rational confirmations of it, whether Kant's categorical imperative or another, do not altogether restore. If man's conscience is a creation of his evolving nature, if his conceptions of ethical law are mutable and depend on his stage of evolution ...
... Rig Veda, Mandate I, Sukta 164, Hymn 46. 2. GKa,Vl,21. Page 26 prevented from experiencing the truly existent object — if, indeed, there is such a thing. We experience, to use Kant's terminology, quantity, quality, relation and modality, in addition to two forms of intuition, Space and Time. But we fail to experience the Object-in-itself, the Existence-in-itself. The question is ...
... wonder a certain un- canny dread, even in the most enlightened elite of humanity, of trying to rise beyond reason and seek for a better instrument of knowledge than this blinkered arbiter of our life. Kant's mind sought to reach after intuition, but could not cut its moorings in reason. The same dread is discernible in Jung, the leading psychologist, who, at times, appears to be almost touching the fringes ...
... are the intellect and reason, although both are considerably influenced by the desires of the vital and by sensory perceptions. Above the ordinary intellect and reason there is pure, abstract reason (Kant’s reine Vernunft ), and then the mental means of receptivity to the higher and illumined mind, the intuition and the overmental-spiritual planes above our mind from where it sometimes receives inspirations ...
... it criticise its instruments by vichara and creates the critical reason, bids it approach the truth directly by a wide passionless & luminous use of the pure judgment, and creates shuddha buddhi or Kant’s pure reason; bids it divine truth & learn to hold the true divination & reject the counterfeit, and creates the intuitive reason & its guardian, intuitive discrimination or viveka. But the intellect ...
... perception of some sort of unseemliness, of some defect that does not involve pain or injury. According to Henri Bergson the comic is something 'mechanical' encrusted upon the living. In Immanuel Kant's view the comic is "an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing." Each of the above ways of looking at humour contains an element of truth but not ...
... subjective apparatus imposes its own categories on the object of experience, and we are thus prevented from experiencing the truly existent object—if, indeed, there is such a thing. We experience, to use Kant's terminology, quantity, quality, relation and modality, in addition to two forms of intuition. Space and Time. But we fail to experience the Object-in-itself, the *Rig Veda. Mandela I, Sukta ...
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