The Aesthetics of How We Know

I don't reject the empirical way of knowledge or reject epistemology, but I give intellectual intuition, as seen in aesthetics and in religion, a central role. The human empirical restrictions or disciplines can come later to affirm what intellectual intuition finds.

I say “human” ways of thought because humans do seem confined to the limitations of their own minds, but I don't believe we are trapped there, as Kant thought, unable to find real truth or find the thing-in-itself. Like the latest “speculative realists” I don't see “epistemology having primacy over ontology,” as Steven Shaviro put it.

Epistemology can trap us in the human process, whereas the cosmos has more than the human process working. There are things in the world outside of the human perception of them. But we can think or intuit that all living things share an activating Spirit-Will-To-Godhood residing materially or supermaterially within life, which humans can grasp intuitively, and which other things or objects in the world may or may not grasp. There is, or was, even such a thing as intuitionist mathematics which relies on intuitive more than discursive reasoning.

We can grasp reality in nature because we are part of nature even if we are not the whole of nature. We are evolving along with nature toward Godhood. And this is not defined as philosophical idealism or spiritualism, the Spirit-Will-To-Godhood is a material or supermaterial activation and dependent on evolution.

This also does not reject traditional religion, it transforms the Inward God, or the Father Within, from only the inward symbolic experience of Godhood, to the Outward Path of material evolution to real Godhood within the cosmos. The beauty of real conservatism, or deep conservatism as I call it, is that it finely modifies past tradition but does not reject it. For example, we can arrive at the orthodox view of beauty, which is not merely in the eye of the beholder, and truth is not beyond the grounded values and morality of our material and supermaterial evolution toward Godhood.

We can intellectually intuit the activating forces within the life we are living, and we do that the way the artist uses intuition as the medium of knowledge, or the way the religious seer uses intellectual intuition as the criterion for awareness of reality, goodness, truth and beauty. This is the way the activating Spirit-Will is seen or understood. After this aesthetic and religious intuitive medium we can apply the more humanly restricted forms of empirical knowledge.

The post-moderns have trapped themselves in Kant's blockade of human knowledge, which has caused them to embrace nihilism as truth. The intellectual intuition affirmed here, and in theological materialism, allows us to break out of the Great Spiritual Blockade so that we may continue, consciously this time, evolving materially and supermaterially toward Godhood. This leads to the foundational values and morals of our lives... This helps explain the aesthetics of how we know.