Now, here are two ways to approach this issue. One is to be open to the possibility that we can see things as they really are, that with the right efforts it is possible to dissolve the illusions of our conditioned existence and see things as they really are. The other is (as Kant has suggested) that it is not possible to see things as they really are, that we cannot escape the prisons of our own minds, nor of the hard-wired processes of that mind, nor of our (and this, initially, seems impossible to get past) inherently limited angle of vision (i.e., perspective) at any given moment. We simply cannot see something from every perspective at once—it is not possible. Either way, it is this problem of illusion vs. reality, this problem of us all living in our own custom worlds of illusion, that causes so much, if not all, of our human conflicts.
It is our perceptions and concepts and opinions of things that make them good or bad, right or wrong, sensible or nonsensical. These are concepts we impose upon nature; or perhaps they are a part of nature. The implication of Kantian metaphysics, though, is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much effort we put into it, we can never know the truth of it, as we can never not be in our own minds, we can never not be, well, us.
One answer to this stifling implication is that there is no difference between “us” and the “outside” world; that we are not separate things; that we are mistaking the way we analyze the world for the way the world is; for, in many ways, how and why we separate “this” from “that” is arbitrary. Just think of the human “body,” and how we separate it into parts, but it works together as a whole. We think of it as both parts and a whole. Which is it? Parts or a whole? Do we really understand “parts” and “whole?” I mean, they each seem to need each other for their respective existences, and so how can they really be different, separate things?
Do we really understand the way we separate things and why we do it?
We are questioning basic assumptions here. What we find is that things might not be separate, but rather we separate them in our minds in order to understand them in a context, a context that our own minds provide. As such, how do we really know that we are separate from the world, from nature, from that which we assume to be “other” than us? As much as we might want to insist that it is just obvious that there is a you that is separate from that which is not-you, when you think hard about it, you see that it is really a fairly arbitrary judgment based on “rational” assumptions, the grammar of our language, certainties and beliefs that are not understood so much as stood on.
If this is the case, then it suddenly seems possible not only that we might be able to connect with each other and the world, when we previously thought it impossible, but also that we may, in fact, be able to get out of the prisons of our selves, our minds. In fact, I think we can also find the potential for this idea in Kant, in that he said that we impose our a priori ideas and concepts (per our hard-wiring) onto nature. So, from this idea, we can say that one of those concepts is this idea of duality (Kant didn’t say this about duality, as far as I know; I am using it, making an analogy between a priori concepts and assumption). We see the possibility that there is not only not necessarily such things as space and time and extension in the world itself, but that there is also no real such thing as a difference between me and you, this and that, at least as we know them. (This is a possible connection and harmony between Kantian and Spinozian metaphysics, though it might just be with a bridge I put there.)
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From my personal notes, 11/15/99.
