What is Enlightenment? (Kant) | Hacker News Reader

What is Enlightenment? (Kant)

english.upenn.edu

17 pointspsawaya13 comments

> "Have courage to use your own understanding!"--that is the motto of enlightenment.

But what if our understanding is a result of conditioning.

I think it was Descartes who once said "I think therefore I am" which is flawed in several ways. He was stuck in thought. Someone else later figured out that the person thinking is apart from the thought. But he too was stuck in thought/mind.

Enlightenment is seeing that you are not the mind or the mental story or concept of yourself. And being totally free of that. Enlightenment is when the misidentification with the mental self is broken. The mental self acts out of fear and insecurity and a constant wanting of something else. This is a sure recipe for being unhappy and causing unhappiness in others.

I don't know which kind of enlightenment you wish to discuss, but I would rather you read Eckhart Tolle instead of Kant.

I will heartily second reading Eckhart Tolle instead of a whole lot of different spiritual books - he gets to the heart of it all without the needless digressions. Next to it J Krishnamurthy is good if you want to go deeper. But yeah after you've read Eckhart's Power of Now you should not feel like adding more knowledge to your self :)

To me PoN was a fundamental shift - in the way I think, the reasons that prompt me to think, the decisions I make, everything. I found the concept of utilitarian thinking very helpful in terms of actually being able to stop useless thinking - if you keep a bit of consciousness always in the background and ask - what is this thought giving me, is it changing my circumstance - that to me is a huge balancing force.

I actually came to PON after finding the silence and I-am ness through a process of questioning beliefs. I was glad to find someone who could explain simply what was happening.

Tolle was great for me because he asks us to stay in this I-am'ness or Nowness and not just dispel it. And that has led to a huge "fundamental shift" as you say.

Just because some of these things have been known for thousands of years and have been talked of by Christians, Buddhists, Hindus etc, does not mean they are a set of beliefs (as some are suggesting).

Beliefs have traditionally come with blind acceptance - either due to very complex disposition or due to its origins in fear (sins/hell etc). To that extent, I agree that what Tolle is doing falls outside of beliefs - it is a paradigm change in that the path he charted to get to enlightenment is much more scientific in nature - verifiable, logical and something that can be easily experimented with. And most of all it doesn't have its origins in fear or authority.

We sure have different perspectives.

Having read Eckhart as well as Kant, I strongly prefer Kant's take on enlightenment. I feel Kant's perspective actually shines some light on the topic in a way which can benefit the reader's life- not in terms of moving further down a prescribed spiritual path, but instead urging people to further adapt to and interact with the world.

I really feel like we might see things in completely opposite directions. Kant's thought here, and the whole western tradition of enlightenment, urges people to follow their own reason rather than the reasoning of a church or religion, be it Buddhist or Christian.

Am I confused about two applications of the term Enlightenment or do you think we actually disagree?

The alternative to following one's reason is not following someone else's doctrine or religion. We can, for example, investigate our conditioning and concepts through questioning. We may find that our reasoning is itself based on concepts that are relative, or believed due to social conditioning. Questioning brings about a silence, that silence in time reveals that even things such as the "I" or person was a concept. Now that's a huge discovery and is not specific to some church or belief.

Perhaps you make an interesting point regardless, but your analysis of Descartes' famous assertion is flawed.

"Cogito ergo sum" was formulated to provide a foundational axiom in skeptical philosophy - the act of doubting one's own existence proves that one must exist in some capacity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum

The "I" that doubts one's own existence itself is a product of thought. As is said, it was flawed at several levels.

I'm not sure I understand your object to Descartes, "I think therefore I am" is about how much one can be ultimately be deceived - senses can betray you, memory can betray you, but no matter what if someone is a thinking thing - then by the very nature that their thought exists, they must in some way exist.

> But what if our understanding is a result of conditioning.

Indeed, it is fascinating just how different eastern and western understanding of enlightenment is. Or, perhaps, how differently they express themselves. One of my favorite Taoist quotes is:

The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.

-- Lao Tzu

Well, one problem is that these two different concepts of enlightenment have the same name in English. This is not always the case in other languages.

I'd like to see Socrates' take on this.

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