The Epiphany of an “Old White Man”
(Photo by Allen Quiles, “Shooting while Driving (do not recommend)“)
Here is a piece that I want to share. The piece is not written by me, so I have to tell you the story of the person who wrote this piece.
The piece is written by someone who, in our contemporary culture, we would call an “old white man”. He lives his whole life in his town with relative safety and comfort considering the general material condition of humanity of his time. His privilege affords him to live to hale old age, and with that privilege of living a relatively peaceful life, he was able to spat out his ideas which later is considered a contribution to humanity.
He is an old white man, but he is a principle man. He lived his entire life in his town, and never indulged in any excessive material enjoyment. Of course, his way of life was not because of a sense of guilt about the privileged lifestyle he afforded over the majority of humanity of that time. It is simply out of principle that, for him, material enjoyments are irrelevant to the imperative of the mind, or in plain English, the more important stuffs in life.
On a regular day in his old age, he will spend a few hours at his home listening to the ideas of his students, associates, and friends. And then spend the afternoon looking out of the window, into the snowy view of his town, and put down his thoughts on paper. That's his way of connecting with the world.
If there is one material enjoyment in his life that he indulged, it is his daily walk across the town. On his walk, he always greeted whomever he crossed with decency and acknowledgment. And his walk always arrived at the clocktower of his town. It was the sight of the great clock, and the idea of a clock, that aroused a sentiment that he permitted himself to indulge. He finds great comfort in the fact that humanity is able to produce such precise machinery, and announces to the town a human order of time, analoging the cosmic order of astronomical bodies revolving around themselves without delay in a revolution cycle beyond men’s existence.
Not only did he indulge that sentiment of order, he likes to be a part of it. His walk always arrives at the clock tower exactly at 2pm everyday.
It is hard to say if his thought leans towards the gloomy side of things, or leans towards the more delightful side of things. If something could be said about his thoughts, they are his efforts to reach for some kind of epiphany, which for him, can only be reached by thought. Here are some of the big questions that apprehended his mind his entire life: How do we make of ourselves, when the terms of our being cannot be termed in the language of existence. If the being of our consciousness has this quality of randomness almost boarder-lining to that of a biblical miracle, why do we ought to act morally instead of living like the ancient Greek gods who see this world as the playground of their pleasure?
In his first two masterpieces, he reached an logically elegant reconciliation to those two questions, but in terms of the purity of epiphany, the epiphany only came late in his final masterpiece. His late epiphany guided him to his believe: the mind has a tendency to gravitate towards greatness, and what is great is validated by how it contradicts the terms of the mind. In the language of our contemporary culture, we might call this greatness love, justice, beauty, freedom, so on and so forth. But in his old age, he found this expression that is almost contradictory to his rigorous usual form of expression. It comes in an almost comical arrangement of words:
“Sublime is the name given to what is absolutely great. But to be great and to be a magnitude are entirely different concepts. In the same way to assert without qualification that something is great, is quite a different thing from saying that it is absolutely great. The latter is what is beyond all comparison great.”
The thinker in question is, or course, Immanuel Kant. Kant is the last classical canonical thinker who still grounded his philosophy in an proportional and stable structure of reason. In the Kantian system, pure reason and practical reason(moral) consist of an perfect unity by themselves independent to any empirical variables.
But in his late masterpiece, Critique of Judgement, Kant was starting to hint towards the idea that, maybe, reason and its “compelling power” over the mind, is not fully sufficient to compensate the unbiased “desires” of the will. It is a masterpiece where he talks about beauty, the “subjective purposefulness”, and, in a dangerous drift, the “sublimity” of a “fair war”, which had never existed in human history.
To precisely expound the human abyss hinted by Kant’s late idea about “the sublime”, it requires an independent writing which lies beyond the entertaining nature of this article, and quite frankly, beyond my ability. But what is suffice to say in the context of this writing is that, the contradiction of mind that justified Kant’s exposition on beauty and sublime, opens up a hole that is to become the philosophical foundation of the Romanticism movement.
It was on the ground of Kant’s discovery of the sublime that Johann Gottlieb Fichte would assert that, reason, in its essence, is not just a faculty for knowing, but an activity that does not justify its own purpose on its own term. And later on, Hagel would assert that consciousness itself is a strange mistake, or failing moments, that swings between its own contradictions in a dialectical motion to find its truth.
Whether if there is an abyss that is opened up by the human aspiration towards “absolute greatness”, is an philosophical question on which I have permit myself to write in an entertaining tone. But real human abyss do exist. The town Kant spent his entire life, for example, is in nowadays Kaliningrad, which was called Königsberg. How Königsberg became known as Kaliningrad is in itself its own story that is very sad. The name of the place evolved through several very real human abysses. But, about the story of the transformation from Königsberg to Kaliningrad, I will say no more with my entertaining tone.
May 7, 2023
Kado
Photo by Allen Quiles//@goinpeacecapturetheworld
The independent entry for Allen Quiles’ photo is coming up next week.