PHILOSOPHY : Criticosynthesis : Waymarks for a ... - SOFIATOPIA

essential theo-ontology, the direct experience "Face-to-Face" of God with God.
"By God, I mean the absolutely infinite Being - that is, a substance consisting in infinite
attributes, of which each expresses for itself an eternal and infinite essentiality."
Spinoza : Ethics, Part I, definition VI.
"That thing is called 'free', which exists solely by the necessity of its own nature, and of
which the action is determined by itself alone. That thing is inevitable, compelled,
necessary, or rather constrained, which is determined by something external to itself to a
fixed and definite method of existence or action."
Spinoza : Ethics, Part I, definition VII.
At the end of the 18th century, a variety of ontological systems had been proposed and
substantialism had come under attack by empirism. Can a variety of contradictory answers
be true ? What if only direct experience is valid ?
Kant deemed the situation scandalous. Philosophy was in need of its own "Copernican
Revolution".
Criticism
In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant unmasks the false substantialism (or ontological
illusion) brought into the field of epistemology by both rationalism (innate ideas) and
empirism (sense-data). The possibility of knowledge cannot be grounded in an outside,
substantial reality, but only in the ideality of a formal set of cognitive conditions enabling
one to know and produce scientific knowledge, i.e. empirico-formal propositions. This
"transcendental" ideality is necessary to formal thought and by critically reflecting on it,
spatiotemporality, a categorial system and regulating ideas are discovered (cf. Clearings,
2006).
Because of this change of perspective, more systematically clarified by neo-Kantianism and
the philosophies of science, language & mind, phenomena may or may not appear as they
are. Perception is not sensation, for sensation (the actual conscious experience by a
conscious subject) is always simultaneous with conceptual, discursive interpretation,
involving identification & labeling (cf. Chapter 4).
S(ensation) = P(erception) . C(onceptual)I(nterpretation).
Is CI = 1 possible, as nonduality suggests ?
Critical philosophy lay bare the limitations of conceptual, discursive thought. Sensations are
perceptions orchestrated to contain the inherent duality or concordia discors of conceptual
thought. Conceptual thought is unable to avoid the factum rationis of reason itself : no
designation without a designator, no cogitation without a cogito, no transcendental subject
without a transcendental object.
But in conceptual thought, things-for-us do continue to eventuate simultaneous with an
appearance of objectivity, which is the manifestation of their concrete, conventional reality,
composed of "working parts" and seemingly determined reactions. Critical philosophy tries
to cut through this ontological illusion.
Although we must think as if these relative facts indeed, in some way simultaneous with