Taking my lead from Kant, my thinking here inquires into the nature and possibility of knowing itself, which is always an epistemological subjective state. Is the perceptual cognition of physical objective reality the only way this happens? Are there other kinds of knowing that occur without sensory transference of objective information from objective things to subjective minds?
Well, what about self-knowledge? Wouldn't that just be a kind of solipsism trapped inside of itself like a hallucination? On the contrary, that it is even possible suggests there a kind of knowing just by being in a state, not by being a supposed blank slate on which external information is impressed. Not as if we are observers of ourselves in some pre-objectified outer sense, but rather thru a tacit and intuitive self-awareness of being in a state thru expression and intention.
What about how we know when we wake up? How does the subjective state of waking up possibly reveal itself apodictally, not thru our perception of some pre-existent only objective reality, but thru the enactment and experience of awakening itself. Thru the inherent knowing that happens from being unconscious to suddenly being conscious.
Other forms of a priori knowing suggest themselves. The subjective sense of selfness or ontic identity, as being the unvarying subject of knowing itself. The phenomenal knowing of new events/experiences happening to us in time, as well as the concurrent phenomenal knowing of events/experiences fading away into the past. Memory, which is how I know something happened to me, even a dream. Practical knowing, which is the tacit acquisition of knowing how by performing an action, like riding a bike. There is spatial knowing, which is the awareness of existing timelessly at once in the same instantanious state as what exists outside of us. There's how we reliably know other people's state of minds/feelings, not possibly perceivable by the senses themselves but rather thru the empathy made possible thru being in the same subjective state. The knowing that happens thru logic. The knowing that comes from math and geometry. There's even the possibility of knowing what we don't know or perceive, which is a subjective state that seems inseparable from the event of suddenly being phenomenally aware of something without any semantical interpretation. Like seeing an unknown thing or experiencing an unknown state.
I feel like this more general sense of knowledge entails that it isn't restricted to the empirical reception of data from a pre-existent physical world thru our senses. Nor is it the mere generation of phenomenal states in a self-contained mind. It is grounded in the possibility of ontic participation in realness thru being exposed to the shared futural possibility of being aware itself with what it is being aware of. How is it that there is this consensual common sense understanding of seeing as a mere passive subject in an objective world? I think it goes something like this. This is something I wrote a few weeks ago:
"Our experience of seeing physical things only happens in a world pre-conceived as already perceived and pre-perceived as already conceived. Thus even before sight happens, there is the assumed co-presence of the object being itself without being conceived and the mind being itself without being perceived. But in fact it is only ever due to the mutual happening in the activity of seeing of the conceived and perceived that they seem to have already happened, eternally separated from each other as two mutually exclusive states. It is only in the motor enactment/sentient experience of seeing itself that all possibility of understanding sight arises. The constantly dialectical interplay between and instantiation of visibility and invisibility."
Heidegger understood the nature of man or Dasien lying in the futural essence of his being. As always projecting itself forward as the resolved-towards possibility of both knowing and becoming.
"The Structure of Temporality: Heidegger defines authentic temporality as an "equiprimordial" (simultaneous and fundamental) unity of the future, having-been (the past), and the present. The future comes first in our existential projection: we understand our present situation based on the possibilities we project into the future."
Quote:But what makes dream awareness distinct from non-sleeping awareness is the highly regulated nature of the latter multi-mode waking manifestation. Its refusal to obey personal will (features nothing comparable to lucid dreaming), the fact of other people sharing access to that phenomenal environment, a strong fear of death that is lax in dreams, and the inescapable moral imperative of valuing other humans and creatures residing in that manifestation (ascribing the same capacity for mind or a split phantasm of private/public experiences to them, too). That very social community insists that it has independent existence and dispenses various forms of punishment if not accepting that.
All of which are fundamentally felt states of being a subject. Even the sense of something happening independently of our phenomenal experience of it would be unknowable without being an immediate state of being aware of it. Real not because it is objective and outside us but because it happens that way consistently to us. Much as pain does or color or the incipient random future or other mindedness does. We can't mentally change those either. And yet they are entirely subjective states we are in. Invariant phenomenally but not objectively. Our reality is real because of our subjective mutuality, not because of some entirely objective, non-phenomenal state of "things":
"Mitsein (Being-with): In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that human existence (Dasein) is never an isolated, purely private subject (I), but is fundamentally and constitutively Being-with-others (Mitsein). We do not first find ourselves alone and then stumble upon other people; rather, the world is always already shared."
In summary, I say this: The truth of perception is that it enables us to successfully navigate the world and detect prey and predators and potential mates and find food and shelter, not that it accurately represents reality. Just as it does with all different moving species. More like a radar screen than a TV screen.
Oct 27, 2026 10:20 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 27, 2026 10:32 PM by Magical Realist.)
