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Immanuel Kant

Kant, Ouspensky, Gurdjieff

A Kantian Connection?

Mr. Gurdjieff talked with P.D. Ouspensky towards the end of 1916 regarding the cosmoses, Mr. Ouspensky writes of the conversation in his book In Search of the Miraculous (hereafter called Search): “This is connected with Kant’s ideas of phenomena and noumena,” I (Ouspensky) said. “But after all this is the whole point—The earth as a three-dimensional body is the ‘phenomenon,’ as a six dimensional body, the ‘noumenon.’”

“Perfectly true,” said G., “only add here also the idea of scale. If Kant had introduced the idea of scale into his arguments many things he wrote would be quite valuable. This was the only thing he lacked.”

The praise, such as it was, Gurdjeiff gave to Kant was unusual in that typically he didn’t have much respect for contemporary or as in Kant’s case relatively contemporary thinkers or “learned beings”, Mesmer being another exception. Gurdjieff’s assessment appears to strike Ouspensky as a bit haughty and he writes: “I thought while listening to G. that Kant would have been very surprised at this pronouncement.”

Did Gurdjieff read and study Kant as he implies? Though in the written record he never explicitly says so, we do know that in his early life he was an avid reader. He notes several times in the second series, and that he was “…reading at that time a large number of books on the most varied subjects….I was interested in many questions…” As we will see, Kant wrote on a variety of subjects, can it be assumed Gurdjieff was referring to his best known philosophical works? We also know that Gurdjieff had read Ouspensky’s book Tertium Organum. In an early meeting with Ouspensky, Gurdjieff says, “A great deal can be found by reading. For instance, take yourself: you might already know a great deal if you knew how to read. I mean that, if you understood everything you have read in your life, you would already know what you are looking for now. If you understood everything you have written in your own book…I should bow down to you and beg you to teach me.” This statement opens up many questions but it is clear that Gurdjieff read Tertium Organum and was aware of Ouspensky’s respect for Kant. As notedOuspensky’s relationship to Kant’s ideas is much clearer. Ouspensky begins writing of “Kant’s System” early in Tertium Organum and periodically continues the use of Kantian ideas and some terminology though the book. Taking the quote in Search that gives his reaction to Gurdjieff’s assertions of the value of Kant’s arguments save the lack of scale and adding it to what was written in Tertium Organum it is certain that Ouspensky had a high opinion of Kantian thought. Gurdjieff appears to affirm a basic value in “much” of what Kant had come to while acknowledging its limitations. Why did he do this? Are we to take Gurdjieff’s assessment in its apparent meaning or was something else going on? Are the ideas similar? First a brief look at Kant the man.

Immanuel Kant born 1724 in the city of Königsberg in what was then Prussia and is now a part of Russia; he died 1804. In a general sense, the conventional view of Kant, the man, is as a bit of an odd duck, regimented in his ways, unemotional and cold. A man who never married, likely never experienced love in a physical or emotional sense; a man who never traveled more than 10 miles from his home city. A man so precise in his habits that his neighbors could set their clocks by his daily walks about town. This “dry-as-dust” impression, of course, is reinforced by his very difficult writing style and the detailed precision given to his arguments, particularly in the his three critiques: The Critique of Judgment (1790), The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and what is considered by many to be his Magnum Opus, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781). But was there perhaps was more to Kant then this conventional summation of the man implies?

Born into a family of Pietists, an evangelical off shoot of the Lutheran Church that believed in prayer, bible study, moral dealing and at least some degree of separation from worldly interests, his early academic interests were initially directed toward the natural sciences in which he obtained a substantial degree of success. Kant became a relatively popular writer on diverse topics, including earthquakes, astronomy, anthropology and education. Indeed, he was offered and refused a professorship in poetics at the University of Berlin. For many years he preferred to stay in his home city and make his living as a magister at the University of Königsberg. In 1770 Kant was offered and accepted a professorship in Logic and Metaphysics. His life and interests can to some degree be divided into pre-Critique and post-Critique periods with a so-called silent period between 1770 and 1781 when he was developing the philosophical theory of and writing The Critique of Pure Reason.

In 1764, during his pre-Critique period, Kant published a small volume titled Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Kant appears to have been influenced by Rousseau and the ideas and writing in Observations are far from the analytical style he used in the Critiques. Observations is inductive in style and comes to its conclusions, as the title suggests, through observation of human life and interactions with and within the sensible world. Kant wrote by hand in his personal printed copy of Observations a revealing comment: “Everything goes past like a river and the changing taste and the various shapes of men make the whole game uncertain and delusive. Where do I find fixed points in nature, which cannot be moved by man, and where I can indicate the markers by the shore to which he ought to adhere?” The word that is felt and may best describe the Kant who wrote this comment is seeker, a man looking for a solid structure within which to live his life. Kant appears to have seen the limitations of ordinary reason, a reason that grows from the empirical. That he primarily used empirical reason to write the volume in which his comment is written denotes a dissatisfaction with his methodology and a seeking that may well have lead him to his exploration of a different type of reason, what Kant terms pure reason.

It is probably a safe conclusion that Gurdjieff was referring to Kant’s work in his post- Critique period. He says of Kant, that save scale, “many things he wrote would be quite valuable.” Ouspensky is clearly interested in Kant’s post Critique period ideas particularly in terms of time, space and consciousness; matters in which the question of scale is very important in developing an understanding of, what is for Ouspensky even before his contact with Gurdjieff, a multidimensional universe. Gurdjieff acquired much of his knowledge, at least foundationally in a very different manner than Kant. Gurdjieff was the recipient of an ancient esoteric teaching that comes from a source believed to be beyond the consciousness of ordinary man. He put this received teaching into a form appropriate and applicable for people of the 20^th century. This was a huge undertaking even without adding “original” ideas. On the other hand Kant while being influenced by philosophers such as Wolff, Hume, Rousseau, Descartes and others tells us how he is to/has come to his understanding. “I mean only to treat of reason itself and its pure thinking, comprehensive knowledge of which I do not have to look very far to find, considering that it is to be found within myself.” While Kant doesn’t explain the precise methodology of his study, it would seem, in spite of Kant’s unique and remarkable abilities, there would be significant limitations to this type of exploration. Kant, however, believes “If the mind alone is responsible for the objective world, then its knowledge—if limited strictly to that realm—must be absolutely trustworthy. Only when it escapes its bounds and soars to lofty speculative regions does it run the risk of being merely associative, fantastically flawed, or delusory.” Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, begins by differentiating types of knowledge and therefore, the type consciousness or as he calls it reason that has acquired and has access to this knowledge. Looking at a few of Kant’s and Gurdjieff’s ideas we can see similarities, a few oppositions and get a taste of the immense scale of the ideas Gurdjieff presents.

Reason

Kant presents two basic types of knowledge using the terms; a priori (from the earlier) and a posterieri (from the latter). A priori knowledge is knowledge that is essentially universal and is not affected by experience and has not been acquired through experience or tainted by experience, it is a pure knowledge. Mathematical equations are a priori knowledge. A posteriori knowledge is a knowledge derived from experience or what is generally called empirical knowledge. Kant further differentiates these types of knowledge with the terms analytical and synthetic. “Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A as something which is (covertly) contained in the concept A; or B lies outside the concept A, though connected with it. In the former case I call the judgment analytic, in the latter synthetic.” Kant uses the example of “all bodiesare extended” as an example of an analytical judgment. He uses the example “all bodies are heavy” as an example of a synthetic judgment. Empirical/a posterieri knowledge is by its nature synthetic. We come to analytic a priori knowledge by pure reason. But rather than moving forth with the expected proposition that all a priori judgments are analytical Kant opens the possibility to synthetic a priori knowledge using examples that physics and much of mathematics contain synthetic a priori judgments. Within the mind there exists the inherent ability to organize the data provided by experiments thus this ability predates the experiment itself and forms the basis of synthetic a priori knowledge and the possibility of a pure science and pure mathematics.

Gurdjieff gives scale and flesh to Kant’s ideas: “This sacred determinator of ‘pure reason’ is nothing else than a kind of measure, i.e., a line divided into equal parts; one end of this line is marked as the total absence of any Reason, i.e., absolute ‘firm calm,’ and at the other end there is indicated absolute Reason, i.e., the Reason of our INCOMPARABLE CREATOR ENDLESSNESS.” Gurdjieff goes on to say every three-brained being can have three kinds of being-Reason. The highest kind of reason is “pure” or objective reason which is present only when a higher being-body is present or in the presence of the perfected higher being bodies themselves. And has become the “ ‘center-of-gravity-initiator-of-the-individual-functioning’ of the whole presence of being.” In his speaking to Ouspensky in Search, Gurdjieff calls this “objective consciousness.” Further, Gurdjieff writes of a second kind of being-reason he calls “Okiartaaitokhsa.” This type of reason is found in the presences of people who have perfected their second body, the Kesdjan (astral) body. Okiataaitokhsa reason would correspond to what Gurdjieff tells Ouspensky in Search is true self-consciousness or a consciousness of ones being. Gurdjieff describes a third type of being-Reason as “… the automatic functioning which proceeds in the common presences of all beings in general…thanks to repeated shocks coming from the outside, which evoke habitual reactions from data crystallized in them corresponding to previous accidentally received impressions.” This type of reason is that which Gurdjieff in Search calls waking state consciousness and corresponds to Kant’s reason that derives its knowledge primarily in a synthetic a posterieri manner. It is noted that Kant does not provide an example of the second kind of being-Reason, self-consciousness that is assumed to be, by Kant and other philosophers, a part of all human beings waking state of consciousness. Gurdjieff’s “pure” reason or objective reason both is and isn’t what Kant is referring to in his Critique Pure Reason. Gurdjieff is exploring both the lower and the higher mind and Kant just the lower, again scale.

Space and Time

Kant represents space and time not as things, but as a frame through which objects or the phenomenal world in general, are perceived. They do not pertain to objects themselves but to the form within which objects are experienced. Space being the frame of the outer world. “Space is therefore to be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, not as a determination dependant upon them. It is the a priori representation which necessarily underlies all outside appearances.” Time being the frame of the inner world. “Time is not an empirical concept that in some way has been derived from an experience, for neither simultaneity nor succession would enter our perception if the representation of time did not enter our perception a priori… We cannot remove time itself from appearances in general, though we can well take away appearances from time…Time has one dimension only; different times are not simultaneous but successive(just as different spaces are not successive but simultaneous).”

Of time Gurdjieff says: “Time in itself, does not exist; there is only the totality of the results ensuing from all the cosmic phenomena present in a given place. Time itself, no being can either understand by reason or sense by any outer or inner being-function. It cannot even be sensed by any graduation of instinct which arises…Only time alone has no sense of objectivity because it is not the result of the fractioning of any definite cosmic phenomena…it alone can be called and extolled as the ‘Ideally-Unique-Subjective-Phenomenon.’” What Gurdjieff writes is not in direct opposition to Kant regarding time but while Kant considers time and space to be the inner and outer representations of a similar frame of perception Gurdjieff looks at space very differently. While space may ordinarily appear to be empty, space for Gurdjieff is not empty, it is not merely a frame of perception as it appears to Kant. Rather space is an expanding universe of interpenetrating cosmoses existing in different dimensions and, “Etherokrilno is that prime-source substance with which the whole Universe is filled, and which is the basis for the arising and maintenance of everything existing…all cosmic phenomenon in general proceed during some transformation in this same fundamental cosmic substance…it is just because of this…that ‘everything without exception in the Universe is material.’”

Phenomena and Noumena

In the conversation between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Ouspensky says “…The earth as a three-dimensional body is the ‘phenomenon,’ as a six dimensional body, the ‘noumenon.’” The terms phenomena and noumena in the written record derive from the ancient Greeks though their modern usage was resurrected by Kant and the terms are now closely associated with Kant. Ouspensky writes in Tertium Organum “ Events or phenomena were admitted to represent only one side of the world, an apparent one, devoid of real existence and coming into being at the moment of our contact with the real world; a side infinitely small as compared with the other side. The other side, noumena, were regarded as really existing in themselves, but inaccessible to our perception.” Ouspensky goes on to say that dividing the world into phenomena and noumena, that is, into entities existing independently of each other and perceived as such is a huge mistake. In this Ouspensky agrees with Kant: “A division of objects into phenomena and Noumena, and of the world into a world of sense and a world of the understanding is therefore quite inadmissible in a positive sense.” Both agree that we cannot know by ordinary perception “a thing in itself”, that is, as something that exists independent of us, we can only know the appearance of things as phenomenon that we perceive though our senses. They both also believe things in themselves can only exist as noumena which do exist independently and are therefore unknowable with perception using our ordinary senses. It is at this point where Kant parts company with Ouspensky. While Kant sees noumena as real, he also sees noumena as unintelligible objects he writes”…if we ask how it [our understanding] could know its object, not discursively through categories, but intuitively in non-sensible intuition – of such an understanding we cannot represent to ourselves even the bare possibility.” However, Kant was not always settled on this question and in an earlier work writes “The life of man is dual…The animal and the spiritual. The first life is the life of man and, in order to live this life, man needs a body. The second life is the life of the spirit, man’s soul lives that life separately from the body and must live in it after its segregation from the body.” For both Kant and Ouspensky the real world is not the three-dimensional world of phenomena that we take to be real.

Kant while once seemingly open to the possibility of direct experience of noumena in his pre-Critique period, hardened his position against even the possibility of such experiencing. Ouspensky writing in Tertium Organum gradually builds the premise that noumena or “the thing itself” can be known through “direct experience.” This being a type of perception that brings one to knowledge without the use of the five senses of man, it is a type of knowledge acquired by an expansion of consciousness that allows a perception beyond the sensible world.

The terms noumena and phenomena are not used by Gurdjieff but it seems he accepted their essential meanings and would agree with Ouspensky that the way to know a “thing in itself”, the real world, is through the expansion of consciousness. Gurdjieff in Search says that while in the objective state of consciousness “a man can see things as they are.” Gurdjieff gives us, through his elaborate cosmology, directly and indirectly, what in actuality the noumenal is and what can and can’t be known directly. At deep level our real world arises with what Gurdjieff, in All and Everything calls the Omnipresent Okidanokh. Okidanokh is the “Unique-Active Element” arising in space outside the Sun Absolute and through various processes governed by laws which Gurdjieff names and elaborates, is the creative “Element” of the universe. However “…no results of any kind normally obtained from the processes occurring through this Omnipresent World –substance can ever be perceived by beings or sensed by them; certain being functions however can perceive only those results of said processes which proceed for some reason abnormally, on account of causes coming from without and issuing either from conscious sources or from accidental mechanical results.” This statement is to be pondered, but would seem to put the direct perception of the creative process, excepting unusual circumstance, and only then perceived as an abnormal process, beyond the limits of human perception – even an expanded perception from a higher state of consciousness. This is not to say that many parts of the noumenal cannot be directly experienced, but that Gurdjieff is stating there are limits to man’s possibilities, limits imposed by the nature of his being.

Gurdjieff the Teacher

As we have seen there are similarities to Fourth Way Teaching and Kant’s ideas. So what was Gurdjieff up to when he said: “If Kant had introduced the idea of scale into his arguments many things he wrote would be quite valuable. This was the only thing he lacked.” Though scale is not a trifle, Gurdjieff’s statement is on its face accurate. Is there more to the statement than its apparent meaning? Upon reading Tertium Organum it is clear that Kantian thought provides many of the underpinnings of Ouspensky’s suppositions. As was previously written, Ouspensky had a very high opinion of Kant and obviously had studied his writings in great detail. Was Gurdjieff, in making this statement, now attempting, a severing of Ouspensky from Kant—his long dead teacher? As Gurdjieff given shocks go it was pretty gentle, but the statement made an impression to the degree that the conversation and Ouspensky’s reaction to it were included in Search. Gurdjieff had read Tertium Organium and was obviously aware of Ouspesnky’s feelings regarding Kant’s work. Gurdjieff was offering to build upon Kant and expand beyond what Ouspensky had come to through his searching. Perhaps Gurdjieff was, in effect saying Kant was right as far as he went, but with me you will come to understand what Kant didn’t and what you wish to understand by direct experience, the noumenal. As one reads Tertium Organum as well as Ouspensky’s experiences with Gurdjieff that were written about in Search there is a quite often a concurrence of Ouspensky’s questions and subjects of interest being answered, expanded upon and added to. Did Gurdjieff use Ouspensky’s book as a base upon which to determine some of the subjects of the lectures he gave to the Russian groups, and his personal talks with Ouspensky? Gurdjieff was aware of many of Ouspensky’s influences, he knew what Ouspensky was seeking, what Ouspensky knew, and what he didn’t know or knew wrongly. One can observe many times in reading the two books the intersection of a subject with the answers Gurdjieff gives to the questions Ouspensky raised regarding many of the topics he wrote about before meeting Gurdjieff. One of the more striking of these intersecting events involves Ouspensky writing in Tertium Organum about the limitations of the scientific method. “By means of it we can establish the chemical composition of the distant stars; photograph the human skeleton invisible to the eye, invent floating mines which can be controlled at a distance by electric waves and destroy hundreds and thousands of lives. But by this method we cannot say what a man sitting next to us is thinking about. (emphasis added).” So what happened between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky in Finland?

—Richard Myers— http://www.growingchoongary.com

Notes

This is connected. P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 304–305.
Reading at that time. G. I. Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men, 59.
A great deal. Ouspensky, 20
Everything goes past. Immanuel Kant, Translated by John T. Goldthwait, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (London: University of California Press, 2003), 8.
I mean only to. Immanuel Kant, Translated by Marcus Weigelt, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Penguin Classics, 2007),8.
If the mind. David Appelbaum, The Vision of Kant (London: Vega, 2001),11.
Either the Predicate. Kant, 43.
This sacred determinator. G.I. Gurdjieff, All and Everything, 769–770.
Space is therefore. Kant, 62.
Time is not. Kant, 67.
Time in itself. Gurdjieff, 123–124.
Etherokrilno is that. Gurdjieff, 137–138.
Events or phenomena. P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, 118.
A division of objects. Kant, 261.
The life of Man. Ouspensky, 161.
A man can. Ouspensky, Search 141.
No results of any kind. Gurdjieff, 153.
By means of it. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum 198.