I might need to go back and reread Critique of Pure Reason.

A great many of my core ideas came from this source, most of all my understanding of intuition. But strangely, I suspect that Kant underestimated the preconceptual, prelinguistic nature of intuition and its importance to our lives.

I also suspect — maybe recklessly — that Kant’s categories pertain most to what Husserl called the lifeworld. These categories are concepts necessarily universal to all humans beings. From these, all other concepts are derived.

But the conceptual derivations are motivated by myriad intuitions beyond our sensory perceptions.

And to complicate things, once we conceptualize our intuitions, we can intuit these second-order concepts and make second-order concepts of first-order concepts derived from the lifeworld. And these concepts and the symbols used to express them can also be intuitively connected, to make conceptual systems that can themselves be encapsulated as concepts. If I am not mistaken think this is the core of Peirce’s semiology.

Another possible divergence from Kant is my belief that human beings (or at least many of us) have a need to situate ourselves in something beyond ourselves (here, I believe, I’m still in agreement with him) that we are called not only to think about or acknowledge the impossibility of knowing — but somehow obligated to participate in this being. Closest to us are interpersonal and social realities.

I think many, but not all, human beings intuit these human relational realities in a direct way. (I know for a fact my wife intuits them very vividly and reliably.) Years ago I read an article by Jonathan Haidt where he suggested that Kant might have been on the autism spectrum. Autism appears to inhibit suprapersonal intuitions, and some have even essentialized autism as “mind-blindness” resulting in “absence of theory of mind”. This might account for why social categories were excluded from his table. But had he been more interpersonally intuitive he might never have produced his fantastically precise and elaborate philosophical system in the first place, so let us give thanks not only for Kant’s amazing abilities but also his blessed incapacities.

But I think these relational intuitions might register our situated relationship not only among other people but to being itself. The best metaphysics is not theoretical speculation, but rather articulations and conceptualizations of metaphysical intuitions. Metaphysical intuitions, of course bring us into spirituality and religious life and ideas. If we carry Kant’s conceptual moves with us into this domain of reality, we are now on Cassirer’s turf. I need to read more of him, too. Reading his great (maybe greater!) student Langer’s magnum opus Philosophy in a New Key completely changed my understanding of understanding (by showing me modes of understanding that are purely plastic or performative and beyond the grasp of explicit language) and prepared me for Latour. Another reason to feel grateful for Kant’s limitations: it left wonderful work for post-Kantians to do.

So many things to read! And I’m sitting here in this wonderful room with all these books around me, some of which I have read and loved and others electric with promise.