Template Thinking: The ever narrowing border of human reason

'Enlightnement is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere Aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!' - that is the motto of the enlightenment. - Immanuel Kant in 'What is the enlightenment'

 Kant, who Rudolf  Steiner described as 'the guardian of the threshold', is not one among the philosophers of ancient thought, and reducing him to the same is a grievous error. While we might analyse a number of philosophers up to Descartes, and perhaps even Leibniz as corollaries for ancient wisdom, for a Nyaya-type or a Madhyamika-type philosopher, Kant, and all of Kant, and not just the COPR, are in my reading of modern times the last stand against the darkness of human thought. 

But we have forgotten Kant in much the same way that we have repressed Freud and have stuffed all of the metaphysical excess of the world into a very simple set of 'templates'. Irrespective of political side, template thinking has dominated my experience of the world for some time now, at least ever since it became necessary for me to distinguish between a metaphysical and material reality, since, as such, there was little cause to do this for very long. But the childhood of the human soul seems done and there is nothing left to re-invigorate us with anything that goes beyond a few simple templates. 

Nowhere is the descent into template thinking more relevant than in the social sciences. Most of the Social Sciences have been organised historically through a series of more and less powerful academic departments, usually organised in opposition to each other: Take the Chicago School of History-Sociology versus the Delhi School of Economics brand of Sociology. These departments, if I am to indulge in a little gossip-mongering, are usually divided between 2 or 3 larger-than-life personalities that determine the mode of thought. 

In fact, I would suggest that even this schizoid form of the production of knowledge is perhaps better than what we find ourselves in now: a kind of universal clericalism of thought, where the old master, with all his tyrannies, perversities, and intellectual vanities, has been replaced by the template.

 The master, at least, was a person. He could be hated, surpassed, betrayed, misread, parodied. His doctrine could be taken up in fragments, transformed into its opposite, returned to him as accusation. But the template is not a person. It is an impersonal machine of acceptability. It has no doctrine, only structure; no wager, only recognizability; no metaphysics, only format. The old academic patriarch or matriarch may have demanded submission, but the template demands something worse: pre-submission. It demands that thought should already know the shape in which it must appear before it has even begun to think.

This is why the problem of the template is not merely stylistic. It is not merely that academic writing has become boring, bureaucratic, or sterile, though all this is true. The deeper problem is that the template represents the contraction of reason itself. 

Reason, which in Kant still stood at the abyss of its own powers and limits, asking not simply what can be known but how knowledge is possible, has now been reduced to the pre-approved itinerary of claims, evidence, method, findings, implications. The living movement of thought is replaced by a checklist of intelligibility. One no longer asks: what is the object, and what kind of consciousness does this object demand? One asks instead: into which existing template can this object be inserted so that it may pass as research?

Even the so-called ethical turn in anthropology or the ontological turn before it (honestly barf) or the reflexive turn before that rarely engaged with the deeper questions that concern thought as such and not just the representations of thought. Although, to be absolutely candid, the reflexive turn to me personally was one of the few examples of a sort of elevated anthropological thinking. The 1980s werea great period of Western Anthropology. Meanwhile, most of Indian Sociology, as Meera Nanda has described so effectively, was caught in all kinds of ontological exoticisms. In fact, Indian Sociology was never truly wooed by the power of the reflexive turn in Sociological thought, which is hardly surprising given that most of it was dedicated to a kind of reductionistic idea of 'Indian thought' as distinct from Western thought. In many ways, most people, and I mean people, I have met have eventually receded into varieties of this so-called 'effort towards developing knowledge'.

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Has the time not come to ask if we want to be materialists and argue that idealism is somehow 'Western' then what do we define as materiality? A survey? Done by some interlocutor in the field for us? So that we simply produce some descriptive statistics, 'Poverty affects people more in 2025 than 2024 and more in 2023 than in 2022', and so on, without anything to say about the general construction of human knowledge as such.

Which os the sciences has kowtowed so snivellingly to this kind of base empiricism? None! And yet the social scientist increasingly is just a fashionably dressed surveyor, and the difference between Public Policy and the Humanities is also dwindling, since the token 'theory stuff',  is also added to every policy report. 

What it is, is clerical professionalism in the place of actual thought, and it is no surprise that the politics of the academic, which is a corollary to academic thought, reflects exactly such attitudes. 

The irony is that so much contemporary anti-idealism is itself the crudest idealism, for it believes in the survey as pure presence, the statistic as immediate reality, the field-note as sacrament, the category as innocent. But the category has already acted. The questionnaire has already been philosophised. The table has already performed its metaphysics. The supposedly hard material fact comes to us already chewed by administration, already digested by funding logic, already dressed in the borrowed clothes of policy relevance. In this way, the academic who denounces idealism often becomes the priest of a more degraded idealism: the idealism of the form, the schedule, the measurable indicator, the impact statement, the deliverable. Against this, thought must insist that the real is not what appears when thinking stops. The real is what forces thinking to begin again.

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The best example of this I have found is the early experience of undergraduate life. In my time for reasons that are still inexplicable to me and even more so then, the show 'Friends' was all the rage amongst those who had come into college. I remember a perpetual struggle to be named behaviourally akin to your ideal character from the show. This is the literal floatsam of western materialism, Americanism divorced from William James, Poe, Kerouac and Melville: literal sludge. And increasingly today, what we are seeing in the average Bourgeois consciousness is a process like this: are you a sports person or a thinker? Are you a academic or do you watch international football or basketball? Because, naturally, if you're anti-capitalist, you would live your life like a sage?! 

My Insta feed is flooded with do-good academic 'thinkers' who produce the most base and mundane summaries of thought and reduce the enlightenment to some sort of Colonial 'Code of behaviour'. The codes generate their own sub-codes and then infiltrate language and make of the effort to reach freedom in thought some kind of 'teen coming of age' fantasy. 

Honestly, such thinking recreates some of the fundamentals of oppressive hierarchical systems, the kinds that perhaps even Dumont wouldn't be too proud of. There is a new impure substance and every group defines some set of unsayables that are beneath that particular hierarchical in-group order. 

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On a more light hearted note, perhaps the narrowing of our templates of reason, our ability to see the world as something other than a reflection of our selves has a benifit. The template itself being so small, we are so given to regular 'breakdown' that the conditions of life become more and more apparent to us. But at this moment it is crucial that we don't take the phenonmenological path to 'breakdown' as some kind of secular revelation, but instead pursue it in its full force as a Schellingian path to the absolute, to the full force of the mysticism of what we call nature, and that is nothing more than a play between the darkness of a ground that is perpetually lost to shimmering allure of metaphysical revelation:

'Whenever the light of that revelation faded and humans knew things not from the All, but from other things, not from their unity but from their separation, and in the same fashion wanted to concieve of themselves in isolation and segregation from the ALl, you see science desolated amid broad spaces....You see at the same time the beauty of life disappear, and the diffusion of a wild war of opinions about the primary and most important things, as everything falls into isolated details'- Schelling, Werke.