Kant, the Buddha and the limits of reason.

Kant held that all philosophy before him had been dogmatic, and he even admitted that he himself, up to a certain point, had been a dogmatic philosopher; and he admitted it in terms which have become famous - he said that it was a reading of Hume's essay that woke him from his dogmatic slumbers. What he meant really was quite simple, he meant that hitherto philosophers had employed the human reason, especially on such subjects as God, the soul, and immortality, without asking themselves, seriously, whether the human reason was fitted to deal with those topics. In other words they'd used the human reason to deal with those topics without any sense of its limitations. So according to Kant, a 'dogmatic' philosopher was one who used reason to enquire into certain subjects without first investigating whether reason was so constituted as to be able to enquire into those subjects, at all. A 'critical' philosopher was one who, to begin with, examined his instruments -examined especially human reason- and tried to see whether it was really competent to deal with the subjects with which it was proposed to deal. So when we read that the Buddha had a critical awareness of the impossibility of giving full and final expression to the nature of reality in fixed conceptual terms, it was because he had looked at reason, looked at those conceptual terms, in that critical sort of way.

You can read Sangharakshita’s thoughts and reflections on:
Nietzsche, Milton, Handel and artistic inspiration.
Nietzsche, Goethe and the enemy.
Nietzsche, Zen and Sudden Enlightenment.
Kant, the Buddha and the limits of reason.
The limits of space and time.
Baudelaire and awareness of others.
Spiritual friends.
Giving style to one’s character.
Anarchism.
Schopenhauer and the will to live.
Schopenhauer and aesthetic appreciation.
Mozart and pauses.
Mozart and the unpredictable.
Mozart and the concentrated mind.

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Dernière mise à jour:
04 avril, 2007.