It has become unfashionable to use religious language to describe any human experience. I believe the disrepute religion has fallen into over time is not entirely due to prejudice or blind disdain. It was widely felt that the understanding once afforded by the frameworks of faith was subordinate to that of reason. I have found myself in the crossroads of both these sides, unable to give up one for the other. However I am still far more sympathetic to the pursuit of truth and prefer its uncertainty to the comfort of staunch belief. Yet despite such sympathies, I have also found that I take recourse to mystical notions when I try to grapple with problems of deep significance. Words belonging to the religious fold such as “curse” and “sin” seemed to me animated despite my recognition of its dubious metaphysical foundations. It seemed natural to ask what was so special about these words that they often impressed themselves upon me. And to ask whenever I pursued a line of thought deep enough why did I often reach a point where language and rationality ceased to be the luminaries they once were. At the deepest of my reflections, I was invariably surrounded by a blackness where no differentiation existed. Where no categories could be drawn. Where no thought could arise in solid footing. I sought refuge in these arcane words because they were the closest forms of expression I could find in communicating something so real and yet so nebulous. I could not see or touch this blackness but it certainly underpinned all of what I thought or felt.

As far as my understanding of knowledge was concerned, the source of this experience seemed atleast partially comprehensible. Observations that we make of the world and of ourselves are fundamentally tentative. A philosopher of great renown named David Hume, coined this as the problem of induction. He demonstrated, through reasoning, that our observation of event B followed by event A does not necessarily indicate a causal relationship between them. Despite observing both of these events follow one an other, there still exists possibilities of observation that might entirely contradict all previous knowledge of those events. Therefore any statement that posits causality is by nature an assumption. An assumption that holds water in our daily lives but an assumption nonetheless. Accepting this proposition entailed a defeat in the quest to achieve knowledge that was certain. If statements based on observations, despite being validated for millenia, could still be open to contradiction, then is there anything that is certain at all?

This question had plagued the minds of many great thinkers until a philosopher of equal brilliance reformulated it, much to the dismay of those who wanted to solve Hume’s predicament. After several decades of wrestling with problems of perception and observation, Immanuel Kant published his “Critique of Pure Reason” where he completely redefined our notions of the world and the limitations of reason. Until Kant, it was customary to assume that the world “in and of itself” was quite similar to the way we perceived it. This assumption conformed with much of daily experience because an object simply doesn’t cease to exist just because we don’t observe it. When you return home from a long day’s work, your home is still there and all the places you had just travelled through to arrive at your home will be there as well. So the realization that our perception of the world at a given moment is limited and that the world which lies outside the bounds of what we can see and hear is similar to the world we perceive seems plausible.

However Kant’s reflection on the problem of causality led to a radically different conclusion. Despite the fact that Kant agreed with Hume’s remark on causality not being logically necessitated by the observation of two subsequent events, causal principles still hold. And they have enabled us to make strides in our understanding of the material world. Therefore what is the origin of causal relationships and by extension of even space and time? Kant’s investigation into the nature of these concepts forced him to conclude that the form the world takes for us, a world of objects localized in space and time causing one and another was largely determined by the nature of our sensory apparatus. In his terms, the phenomenal world, the world we perceive and can perceive and which comprised the totality of all possible human knowledge borrowed its fundamental characteristics of space, time and causality from our perceptual apparatus. He completely rejected the notion that the world would remain quite similar to the way we perceived it in the absence of an independent observer. According to Kant, the coherence of the world was something that we had ourselves fashioned, indicative far more of our inability to comprehend without elucidation than the nature of reality itself.

All of this begs the question, if it is our impositions that give continuity to the world of phenomena thereby demarcating a fabric of reality which can be perceived and comprehended, what is the nature of reality devoid of such impositions. This Kant termed as the “noumenon”, the world in and of itself which by its very nature was unknowable. Kant’s conceptualization of the noumenon was widely different from those who came before him. Despite the fact that the noumenon was fundamentally unknowable, he was able to infer its characteristics simply by contrasting it with the phenomenal world. The noumenon knew neither time nor space and in it objects could not cause one another because objects themselves did not exist. The noumenon remains unknowable because concepts of space, time and causality are not merely characteristics of the material world but rather constitute the very preconditions of knowledge itself. Therefore the noumenon did not consist of a plurality of objects abiding by laws of science and logic independent of our perceptions. It was instead a gaping void of sheer mystery that defied all understanding and whose boundaries were visible only in virtue of it being related to a world that we can see and understand.

The precise nature of the relationship between the noumenal and the phenomenal, between the world that can be known and its antithesis that will forever elude human knowledge is of profound significance. Kant was able to explain notions of free will and morality by situating individuals at the intersection of both these realms. The individual, he proposed, could initiate actions out of volition and felt compelled to do right by others because a part of his existence was rooted in the noumenon. And it reminded one that whatever difference he observed between mine and thine was only of this world behind which an absolute singularity was always peering through. There were many questions that assailed me when I first encountered these ideas but the most important of them all was why is the noumenon even important?

The blackness I had mentioned initially that confronted me at every juncture of thought and affect could be understood as this unknowable which pervaded all of life. If this blackness was something neither you nor I could escape, why must we even bother ourselves with it? Wouldn’t it be insanity to pursue insight into something which at the outset is recognized as an impregnable mystery? Or perhaps there were different ways of understanding that were unfettered by the limitations of thought. Whatever it may be, it seemed fruitless to speculate on the unknowable. Even more so to suggest that it could have any great relevance in the quest of furthering human understanding.

Despite such reservations, Kant was thoroughly convinced of the importance of the noumenon. Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher who greatly contributed and built upon the foundations of Kant’s ideas, even vehemently opposed those who entirely rejected its existence and proposed that all of reality can be known. I believe the fundamental conflict which Kant laid bare, atleast for me, is that we were essentially creatures given enough intelligence to know nothing is definitive yet put in a world where we must act definitively. To me the more interesting question was not how we can penetrate this mystery but what must we do in the face of it? Is it even reasonable to talk of “musts” and “shoulds” when the unknowable threatens to swallow us from all sides?

The sight of the noumenon and any experience of it should leave us paralysed. Paralysed to move, think or even say anything and yet it does not. Accepting Kant for me necessitated embracing the paradox that lied at the heart of the human condition. We can know nothing for certain. All human knowledge can be contradicted. Our judgments of right and wrong, true and false are all mere assumptions. However we are still forced to arrive at conclusions. Some of us appeal to reason while others to faith but regardless of where we go, the noumenon confronts us in all its ambiguity. The word “curse” appealed to me because at the core of our being there was a dichotomy. An either/or where through thought we can always determine nothing is certain yet must live as though something were. This curse, to me, did not seem like a misunderstanding or an inadequacy from which we could liberate ourseleves through enlightenment. It was rather life itself.

If I had somehow been right in formulating this paradox, all of human pursuits became equally elusive. I could recognize in some form or the other that all endeavours were essentially a call to the unknown. Art, most of all, reminded us of how ephemeral the distinctions that separated one from the other truly were. And even the distinction that separated one from the world. When enjoying art we feel ourselves to be one with something we seldom understand. And yet those moments are transient. As much as we seek to extinguish the separations between the phenomenal and the noumenal, to glimpse at the unknown even only for a fleeting moment, the “I” would cease to exist without such separation. Intellectual pursuits, morality and art always reminds us of the fundamental similarities between us but the will to live emphasized the difference. We might feel compassion for our fellow men but we still have to eat and fend for ourselves. It seemed to me that as much as we sought the demise of the “I” through all these different pursuits we also equally sought its solidification. And life did not consist of escaping this but rather emerged because of it. I know that we might eventually become one with the unknown but for the time, we remain separate from it, forever torn asunder between what we can know and what we should do. Yet despite such a dismal state of affairs, we cannot help but fight the conditions that bring forth life. And perhaps that is all we seek at the end of the day. A good fight.