Robert Tulip wrote:Your juxtaposition of 'openness to mystery' and 'return to innocence' is interesting in that many would argue they amount to the same thing.
Probably many do so argue, Robert, "Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven." To enter the cloud of unknowing -- a return to the aboriginal, uninterpreted raw data of experience -- the adult must struggle against fixed interpretation, the dead hand of convention. ("Convention is death," Thoreau somewhere said.) The difference between infant and adult is that the adult has developed a self that is a framework for reinterpretation.
Kant's argument was that the senses alone are not sufficient to provide knowledge, which also requires the ordering faculty of reason, also known as the transcendental imagination. Kant asks where we get our ideas of space and time, and observes that these are not the product of sense perception but of pure reason. He calls them the a priori categories of the understanding, because space and time are not objects that we can observe, but the formal framework into which observation is placed.
Kant is correct in that no recognition (not just space and time) is given by the senses but requires an activity of mind. And he is also correct that recognition requires "pure reason" but this is
reason as used in a peculiar sense by Transcendentalists to mean approximately
intentionality. Will intruded into experience because the interpreter contributes to interpretation. Recognition has inherent moral quality because it give expression to the inner self (genius) of the interpreter.
Recognition is always
recognition as. I find the maxim "Style is character" a more convenient expression of this state of affairs. The way we recognize and express discloses personality.
Kant's idea of space and time as a priori categories is, I think, a mistake. This idea does not accord with modern science, and it differs from Thoreau's in that Thoreau thought in terms of the uniqueness of place and moment:
"Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly"(2.1). Or, "This frame [the partially completed house], so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder" (2.9).
"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains" (2.33).
Are such statements possible for Kant?
Tom