Immediate Perceptual Grasping of Truth

Each small social mammal perceives, opens their eyes, and sees the truth just as humans do. This initial act of 'seeing' directly into the nature of truth immediately and completely occurs when the tree appears or the bird whistles and the branches bend----this act of seeing is the greatest and most stupendous act of the mind whether human or not. To see---what an exalted gift!

To denigrate the act of seeing, to reduce this act to a "neurological act" is simply bad prose. The actual event is instantaneous grasping of the "thing" in its truth of being---be it frog, or stream or tree---direct immediate grasping of the truth of the thing. I don't see where the academic debate concerning the phenomenon versus the 'ding an sich' arises, to be honest with you. I simply do not see the need for bifurcation. Kant's project was a sort of over the top paranoid virtuosity to defend the truth against Hume's acid bath of skepticism. Paranoid because it is much simpler and elegant (recall Ockham) to allow the thing to be what it is! A rose by any other name is yet a rose! Is this not a bunny pictured above? Indeed it is---what is to be gained by dividing the phenomenal and noumenal?

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason paves the way for cybernetic science and "artificial intelligence". The thematic of apperception. the a priori, schematization, to announce the first evidence. But after all this is another "paranoid" fiction. The first was Descartes 'malin genie'--- that evil genius who convinces Descartes that what he sees may not be really real. But at the end of the day, its is still hypothetical----as he begins his First Philosophy he opens with a subjunctive hypothetical---i.e. imagine that a deceiver (malin genie) convinced you that the report of your senses was errant and might ever be so. Well this is fine and good but in all actuality there is no doubt concerning my perception unless I am severely inebriated, hallucinatory, or dreaming. As a matter of fact when I see the tree in front of me I have not the slightest doubt that it is a tree, as I said, unless I am very paranoid or under the influence of some very good mushrooms.

No, I do not buy this! The effect is purely literary---granted both Descartes and Kant were intellectual virtuosos and culture rightly erects fitting tribute to their genius. But as philosophers, personally I think they fell short. To my mind, realism is the great intellectual achievement---to account for the being of this phenomenon qua this phenomenon! To reduce qua phenomenon to other said phenomena is rather a disappointment akin to the dissection of a frog---well you have something in the corpse but it is no longer the frog. Life itself is the elixir we seek---the summum bonum, the telos and value of human existence. Yet it is a transparent medium and like quicksilver cannot be handled.