Burdens of Human Reason and Metaphysical Illusion: A Dialectical Essay on Immanuel Kant and Advaita Vedānta

Abstract

Kant once described reason as a wanderer that finds, in the end, no permanent resting place, only a vantage from which to survey its own limits. This essay begins from that unsettled image and follows it into a second tradition that reaches a strikingly similar impasse from the opposite direction. Reading Kant's account of transcendental illusion alongside Advaita Vedānta, and drawing on K. C. Bhattacharyya and A. C. Mukerji as careful Indian interlocutors of the first Critique, the essay argues that both traditions diagnose reason's demand for the unconditioned as self-defeating, whether directed at the self, the world, or the absolute. The two paths diverge, however, in what follows from this shared limit. Kant converts the impasse into a postulate of practical faith securing moral freedom, while Advaita Vedānta converts it into a soteriological opening toward mokṣa. In both cases, reason must finally stand on faith to climb beyond itself.