“All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing to almost everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.”
Is it the inadequacy of our capacity for wonder that diminishes our metaphysical will to think, or simply a powerful curiosity toward God? We seek to integrate, dialectically, our hatred for the sensory world—with all its decay and corruption—with our quest for a flawless realm. Kant’s greatest naïveté lies in believing that from the concept of a transcendental world one could ascend to God.
Though we know intellectually that the senses deceive—and that from birth we confront only “purely phenomenal” realities—we have still pursued truth within those limits. We have endlessly tried to unite our boundaries with our aspirations for the absolute. We searched for the “thing-in-itself” with our senses, yet we failed to extract identity from what we found.
Plato’s theory of Ideas aimed, above all, to resolve the problem of ontology—just as Aristotle’s metaphysical substances sought it. Thus we deified these two giants, adorning them with meanings they never possessed. We shaped the history of thought by a desire to discover a truth we could not fully grasp. We draped the rules of logic over perception, then pitted that ornate perception against our sense of transcendence.
The more refined and valued an object or a person became, the stronger grew our curiosity that thoughts might be still more precious. Yet no matter how far we advanced, we always returned to Plato. Whenever we tried to flee, we met him again at our point of departure. We perfected our systems, but always traced our origin back to a single act. We unified the totality of our beginnings and our fragments into one and the same singularity.
We sought elevation: summoning seven plus five to gain knowledge of space and time. We concocted the absurdity of “synthetic transcendence.” We ended up alone. We staked our all on being unloved—but persisted in systematizing. We became certain that one thing could never be another, yet ignored the act of cognition that binds the two. We criticized relentlessly, only to uncover empirical realities we could not comprehend.
We squandered our genius on the EPR path to ensure a deterministic universe. For the sake of not thinking metaphysically, we denied God’s fallibility—calling Him immutable, yet casting dice. Now we cloak the transcendent in our phenomena, and forget probabilities through induction. With each accumulation of knowledge, we continue to err.
However hard we strive, we cannot escape normalization. Infinity or zero; zero or one. We remain mere synthetic fools.
soli 