Realist Idealism

Many a philosophical idealist has held to the notion that we cannot know anything not connected to our consciousness. As we are unable to experience mind without body or body without mind they are things beyond our knowledge. I would go along with this theory, adding only that we cannot fully understand ourselves if we don't speculate on the existence of both mind and body independently.

For me there are two parts to thinking and they are able to transcend each other, for they are not directly connected. The first is the physical part, or the judgement faculty, this is all the data we collect through our senses. The experience we gather from our senses is physical in nature, we are aware of our physical brain and body collecting information about our environment. The judgement side, comes when we wish to act on our environment, we choose our actions through our ability to judge what is needed from the outside world. The second part of the mind is the mental part, or the understanding faculty, this is the conceptual theorizing, the ability to make our judgements universal. We are able to say, that some actions are good while other actions are evil. But the conceptual side goes further than just categorizing our judgements, we are able to create a reality of universal principles, it is in the understanding that we create mind without body and body without mind.

We can see that the understanding has two roles, to contain our judgements, or to judge our judgements, but also to speculate about the real nature of the outside world. Where the two meet is in contemplation, I always imagine this part to be where we play around with sense data and create images or noises in our own mind. Maybe we should call this area, of the mind, the imagination and it's goal is to extend beyond the moment. All our physical data is from the moment, our senses are fixed to the ever moving flow of our environment, but the reality is that we extent out from the moment, using memory, imagination and contemplation. The most important movement of the mind is forwards, into the future, the past cannot be changed but if we are able to judge the best, or near the best, then we can improve more than our own lives. It is my fascination with the work of Kant that has built this theory, some extensions of the mind are a priori, that is to say they are REAL ideas, ideas that are eternally true despite our ability to prove them empirically. In other words we can know something about the mental that is not connected to sense data, or, we can know something about God.