WHITECROW BORDERLAND

Mayan Astronomy

Note 9: Kant, Transcendental Aesthetics, and the Maya Conceptualization of Space and Time. 4/25/99

Representation, as Kant uses the term in the Critique of Pure Reason, specifically in the context of his discussion of transcendental aesthetics, drives a wedge between the knowing subject and the object of the subject's apprehension that leads inevitably to a profound alienation between human subjectivity and the real world in which that subjectivity lives. A first necessary step in addressing this issue is to remove or reject the overdetermined abstraction that attaches itself to terminology that reduces human beings to the status of transcendental conceptualizations characterized, or objectified, as subjectivities. One of the primary problems with transcendental metaphysics is precisely that metaphysics deals with concepts that have nothing to do with the real and substantial realities available to human perception as empirical data. Kant, in his assessment of the concepts of space and time, for instance, insists that both are elements of the transcendental realm of aesthetics available to apprehension only through the exercise of pure reason. This assertion necessarily "elevates" both the world, as pure space, where human beings live, and the duration of their lives, as pure time, above and beyond the actual material reality where anything of concrete significance actually occurs or exists.

When Kant makes a distinction between objects and the ideas human beings have about them, when he says that the idea of an object is not the same thing as the object itself, that ideas are necessarily representations of objects, he is perfectly, even absolutely, correct in making that assertion. The argument is self-evident, as anyone knows who has attempted to sit on the idea of a chair instead of on the chair itself, so obvious, in fact, that anyone with half a brain has to wonder why Kant brought the concept to anyone's attention in the first place. Put another way: anyone who has ever entered a supermarket with the intention of making groceries knows better than to approach the checkout counter with a plan to tell the cashier that you intend to pay for your food, not with actual money, because you have none, but only with the idea of money, because you have more ideas about money than you know what to do with. The question this raises is: why would Kant seize on a concept so nearly self-evident, and known to everyone who lives in the real world, a concept furthermore that goes virtually without saying, and then worry it to death in a discourse about Pure Reason?

The issue here, of course, is transcendentalism, Kant's effort to differentiate between things in themselves and the non-material existence objects have, or seem to achieve, by virtue of becoming ideas in the minds of human beings. This impulse has strong ties, if unacknowledged and unspoken, to the otherworldly traditions of Christian ideology that provided a fundamental ground for all theoretical and philosophical discourse in the 1700 years leading up to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. In one very real sense, even as Kant was working to break away from old religious forms of thought, in the service of clarifying and creating a rational ground for scientific pursuits, all he actually managed to accomplish was to reinscribe these old ideas, especially the notions of otherworldliness, into a terminology that retained a basic connection to traditional religious ideology but appeared, by virtue of language alone, to be radically different from previous ways of articulating commonly accepted perceptions of reality. Kant's notion of the transcendental amounts to little more than shifting the locus of ideas from the all-knowing and perfect perception of them in the mind of God to a similar, if somewhat flawed, parallel universe he identified as Pure Reason, a world fashioned by God for the purpose of providing the potential perfectibility of (wo)man's mind and intellect.

An idea in the realm of Pure Reason, after all, is hardly more accessible to ordinary human beings than it was before when it had its natural home in the mind of God. In fact, one could even argue that Pure Reason, simply because it is perfectly pure and untainted by empirical perceptions of any kind, is the same as the mind of God but reduced in a linguistic sense from a theological to a purely secular expression. Rather than priests, of course, one now needed to rely on the philosopher for the ordinary tasks of interpreting and demonstrating the truth of a proposition. The purity of reason, and the purification of ideas, accomplished by moving them upward into a transcendental realm of pure, a priori, existence or being, accomplishes the same thing for them that is accomplished for human beings who desire to possess them through the ritual and sacrament of baptism: while the stain of original sin is removed from the thinker by baptism, the flaw in ideas caused by human fallibility is removed from them by situating them in a perfect, a priori, world where they can be reached only by the innate intuition Kant perceives as the true soul and highest faculty of human reason.

In terms of the validity or truth of ideas in Kant's system, of course, one can argue that, even as God's authority was undermined by the rise of scientific discourse, the ideas in Kant's conception of Pure Reason could be cited as having the same force and coercive power as the old religiously motivated monological commands did before them. This is true precisely because the terms of the existence and being of ideas in a state of pure, innate, a priori, Reason conferred on them the same element and degree of truth that the religious appeals made for the validity of ideas that were harbored in the mind of God. All anyone needed to do was convince the audience that the ideas being expressed had their origin in the realm of Pure Reason and it would follow from that argument that the ideas were indeed as valid as anything previously uttered by someone in touch with the mind of God.

So then, if ideas are transcendental, where does that leave the objects about which those ideas claim to speak? It leaves them where they have always been--in the world, subjected to the taint of the flesh and under the control and domination of the devil. In other words, all Kant has accomplished has been to change the terminology of the discourse from its preoccupation with sin and damnation in the Christian version of a teleological rush toward the Apocalypse and refocus (wo)man's attention on the possibility that scientific analysis provides a better, but not a different, way of looking at reality. Kant's view is better because it removes any possible taint associated with the exploitation of the natural world which is still objectified as being inferior to the idea anyone has of it. Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, put it this way: "In thought, men distance themselves from nature in order thus imaginatively to present it to themselves--but only in order to determine how it is to be dominated" (39).

In Kant's own words, we find these concepts expressed in this way with regard to space and time specifically:

"The transcendental concept of appearances in space . . . is a critical reminder that nothing intuited in space is a thing in itself, that space is not a form inhering in things in themselves as their intrinsic property, that objects in themselves are quite unknown to us, and that what we call outer objects are nothing but mere representations of our sensibility, the form of which is space. The true correlate of sensibility, the thing in itself, is not known, and cannot be known, through these representations; and in experience no question is ever asked in regard to it." (73-74)

To argue that space is a transcendental concept that does not belong inherently to any object which occupies it is a notion not particularly objectionable in itself. One can almost live with that idea. When Kant goes on to say, however, that objects themselves cannot be known at all because they cannot be separated from our perception of them as "representations of our sensibility," that objects have no knowable material reality of their own, as it were, but exist only as sensible representations, one must ask what value objects have if their existence is limited to what we intuit them to be. The point here is not that one cannot attach value to an object in Kant's perception of them because that is always possible but rather that if objects have no existence in themselves that can be ascertained by human perception in the real world of experience but only in the transcendental world of Pure Reason, then they have no intrinsic value at all and can be wasted just as easily as they can be preserved. Put differently: even if an object in its material reality, a forest say, ceases to exist at all because it has been clear-cut to satisfy Eurocentric greed, nothing can be said to have been lost because the idea of the forest in our sensible intuitive a priori perception of it as a member of the class of things residing in Pure Reason was, and will always already be, a better, purer version of the forest than the actual forest could ever have managed to be. Kant goes on to make this point even more clearly emphatic when he notes that

"What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things which we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being, nor their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us, and that if the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish. As appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us." (82)

The essential point of this statement, of course, and made perfectly obvious in plain enough language is that space and time, as Kant perceives them, as representations of human sensibility, have, possess, contain, exhibit no presence at all, and surely "would vanish" completely and altogether if the "subjective constitution of the senses" ceased suddenly or slowly to exist. Placing all objective reality into the mind of (wo)man and denying that it can exist apart from her/his perception or intuition of it subjugates reality to (wo)man's desire in an absolute sense that justifies any form of destruction that can be brought to bear against it. The problem with that idea, from a native American point of view, is that nature and all its objects become nothing more than a subjugated reality which wholly depends upon human agency for its and their existence in every way conceivable. This statement not only justifies the notion that (wo)man can, and even should, behave as if she/he has every right and duty to dominate the other but it also makes it inescapable that she/he do so. Reducing space and the natural world it encompasses to a mere hapless vassal to and victim of Eurocentric greed and exploitation, as Adorno and Horkheimer point out, is precisely Kant's intention in defining space and time in the way he does. Kant makes this explicit when he notes that

"If our subjective constitution be removed, the represented object, with the qualities which sensible intuition bestows upon it, is nowhere to be found, and cannot possibly be found. For it is this subjective constitution which determines its form as appearance." (84)

If Kant is right here, then it seems possible to intuit a forest where only a barren, strip-cut wasteland stands today. Reclamation of wasted capital, in Siberia say, where Soviet communism virtually destroyed every square inch of its ecosystem, ought to be the simplest task imaginable, since imagining, according to Kant, is all you have to do to bring it back to its pre-Soviet splendor. Just think it and it will be so!

Animistic people, like the ones Stalin annihilated before he was able to begin the whole(sale) destruction of Siberia, on the other hand, have a slightly different view of the relationship between human intellect and the natural world which both contains and limits its activities. While it may not actually be possible to explain or describe precisely how the pre-Columbian Mayas perceived space, it is possible to express some sense of their conceptualization of it from the remains of the ceremonial architecture that has survived in the jungles of Central America to this day. The pyramid and temple structures that are signatures of their culture over long periods of habitation and in virtually every area of their homeland probably "represented" the world mountain. As noted elsewhere, the concept of the world river, tree, and mountain is a notion common to all shamanistic people. When a person dies, his/her spirit begins its long journey back to the source of its origin in the head-waters of the river, at the top of the tree, or at the summit of the mountain from with it sprang in the first place. The temples, in Maya ceremonial architecture, since they were always constructed on the top of a mound or a pyramid, would, in this context, represent the "nest" where the reborn spirit is nurtured until it is ready to rejoin a human host to begin the process of life over once again. Getting to the temple, however, requires that the spirit climb the mountain first. The long reach of steps that front every Maya pyramid, sometimes from all four directions when the base of the structure is square or rectangular, symbolizes, or represents, the struggle every spirit encounters on its ritualistic return to the place of its origin and rebirth. Maya rituals, which were performed in the ceremonial centers, places where no one actually lived, were probably meant to represent and facilitate the journey of various clan spirits, of actual ancestors or not, back to the source of their origin in the space represented by the temple at the top of the pyramid.

Most European observers, when they look at Maya ceremonial architecture, see little or no plan or design in the relationships that stand among the pyramids and temples of any given site. At Palenque, for instance, one is discouraged from finding a rational plan in the structures, any (wo)man-made design, because most of the pyramids there were created by reshaping the natural ground form of the hills and ridges, cutting them down to size as it were, and then covering their exposed faces with dressed blocks of limestone to fashion the exterior system of risers and platforms that make up the pyramid itself. In other words, Palenque's pyramids are actually hills that have been transformed architecturally into sacred spaces. Finding relationships that reflect geometrical design imperatives among naturally occurring hills and ridges, of course, from a Eurocentric point of view, goes without looking for them, as it were, because nature does not have nor does it contain any sensible structures or forms that shape it to its face. When Europeans look at nature they see chaos, they see threat to rational forms of thought, they see the unknown and unknowable face of the other, they see Satan and every other visage of the devil anyone has ever imagined. When native Americans look at nature, they see its ordered harmony.

This difference is the result of attempts made by frail and frightened children to control and dominate that which they do not understand, because they do not live within the limits nature imposes on them, and a more mature and sensible tribe of human beings who have always found a way to take a reasonable stand among all the various creatures that occupy a single, shared and mutual, living space that is sanctified, not by God nor any other (super)natural being, but instead by a profound and abiding respect for the natural order of the river, the tree, and the mountain that is the only home any human being can ever expect to have. If you destroy that, because you believe with Kant that reality is nothing more nor less than your pitifully inadequate idea of it, which you cannot even see clearly now because you do not know yet how to look beyond your own childish demands for gratification, then you truly do deserve the fate that awaits you. Native America will do everything in its (spirit)power to bring it home to you.

To reach [Note 1]; [Note 2]; [Note 3]; [Note 4]; [Note 5]; [Note 6]; [Note 7]; [Note 8]; [Note 9a]; [Note 10]; [Note 11]; [Note 12]; [Note 13]; [Note 14]; [Note 15]; [Note 16]; [Note 17]; [Note 18] in this series of thoughts.

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