Between materialism and idealism

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A LTHOUGH outwardly he lived a simple and colourless life, Immanuel Kant is the most fascinating of all the German philosophers. The poet Heine said, “The history of the life of Kant is hard to write … he had neither a life nor history, for he lived a mechanically ordered and abstract old bachelor’s life in a quiet retired street in Koenigsberg.” Koenigsberg, an old town, lies on the north eastern border of Eastern Prussia. About Kant, Heine further says, “I do not believe that the clock of the cathedral there did its daily work more dispassionately and regularly than the compatriot Immanuel Kant. And when he in his grey coat, cane in hand appeared at the door of his house, and strolled towards the small avenue of linden trees, which is now called The Philosopher’s Walk, the neighbours knew it was exactly half past three.” Yet this unassuming thinker created tremors in the history of western thought by writing three critiques — The Critique of Pure Reason (the book under review) published in 1781 and substantially revised in 1787 offers a new foundation for human knowledge, demolishing virtually all of traditional metaphysics; The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) inextricably links human freedom to the moral law while attempting to reconstruct the most cherished ideas of traditional metaphysical belief on practical rather than theoretical foundation and The Critique of Judgment (1796), which ostensibly brings the seemingly disparate topics of aesthetic and teleological judgment into Kant’s system. The Critique of Pure Reason mainly discusses this epistemological foundation and demolition of traditional metaphysics. While developing his epistemology, theory of knowledge, Kant tried to synthesise between a priori and a posteriori sources of knowledge. His premise is that the human understanding can no longer be conceived as a passive mirror which reflects intuitively the pattern, the logos of things-in-themselves. What we call the mind must be regarded as an active agency which itself composes the raw material of sense experience into a word of conceptualised phenomenon. As Henry Aiken correctly says, “Kant, however, an idealist does not hold that the mind itself is its own reality, nor that the mind creates its world. The data of sense experience is given some thought. For example, we find things to be there when we open our eyes and ears. Kant does not doubt that in some sense these are things in their own right themselves outside the mind and are independently real.This assumption is in fact the central thesis of his whole philosophy. But things-inthemselves are not, according to Kant, objects of knowledge and about which the understanding has properly nothing whatever to say. In Kant’s own words, “All our knowledge begins with experience. There can be no doubt. But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.” Frederick Coplestone is of the view that Kant agrees with the empiricists to the extent of saying that all our knowledge begins with experience. According to him our knowledge must begin with experience because the cognitive faculty, as he puts it, requires to be brought into exercise by our senses being affected by objects. Given the raw material of experience, the mind can set to work. Bertrand Russell elaborates Kant’s theory in simpler language. He says, “According to Kant the outer world causes only the matter of sensation. But our own mental apparatus orders this matter in space and time and supplies the concepts by means of which we understand experience. Things-in-themselves which are the cause of our sensations are unknowable. They are not in space and time.” Kant names his innovations as the Copernican revolution in philosophy. In this he suggests that we can not know things, that they can not be objects of knowledge for us, except in so far as they are subjected to a certain a priori condition of knowledge on the part of a subject, as Coplestone understands it. While demolishing the citadel of traditional metaphysics, Kant develops his theory further while discussing things-in-themselves which are not and can not be phe nomenon and there is no faculty of intellectual intuition which could supply object for meta-phenomenon and application of the categories. Hence metaphysics of the classical traditional is exclu ded when it is considered as a possible source of knowledge. Actually Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason is faced with a great dilemma towards which Lenin has also indicated. According to him the principal feature of Kant’s philosophy is the reconciliation of materialism with idealism and a compromise between the two — the combination within one system of het erogeneous and contrary philosophical trends. When Kant assumes that something outside as a thing-in-itself corresponds to our ideas, he is a materialist and when he declares this thing itself to be unknowable, he is an idealist. Translating a book like The Critique of Pure Reason could not have been an easy job. Forget about translating it into Urdu, even understanding it needs extra doses of intelligence with an added grasp on the history of philosophy. Moreover, there is no standard usage of philosophical terminology which is adapted by all the translators. In addition to this, Urdu language is still in its initial stages to be able to accommodate so many philosophical terms. Most of the terms that have been used have been borrowed from Arabic and are mostly confined to the Greek period. Dr Abid Hussain has translated this second edition of the book which was also preferred by Kant. But he says in the preface that he has only translated two thirds of the book and the rest of it is not relevant to the subject as it discusses theological questions. The translator has used certain Urdu terms which are not understandable. For example Abid Hussian translates a priori as “badihi” while generally it is translated as “Qabal az Tajarbi”. A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms, published by the University of Karachi, also confirms my apprehension about the translation of certain terms. Professor Abid Ali Abid, Qazi Qaisar ul Islam and Kazi Javed also follow the same translation. As confirmed by Professor M. Saeed Sheikh in A Dictionary of Muslim Philosophy, “badihi” means that to which we give our assent without any question or investigation. It is opposed to “nazari”. The attempt made by Dr Abid Hussian, though remarkable for grappling a giant like Kant, requires extra effort and a lot of understanding about Kant and his teaching. Several decades ago, the book was also translated by someone from the Darul Tarjama of Usmania University, Hyderabad Deccan. It is hoped that in future someone with more understanding of the subject would attempt to translate this book