Are you a reductionalist? What Kant said is similar Malebranche, Rosmini, and many others. The world is yet is not. It's contingent. But the nous in our minds is in the structure of matter and how it interacts with itself. The source of reason is experienced in our knowledge of the world we live in. The world becomes necessary by our interactions with it. If I jump or fall from the Eiffel Tower, it's at that moment necessary that I fall and die if there is nothing to caught me. Yet it's contingent because the tower could have never been made and myself not there to die by it. Contingency and necessity are dualities that stand as thesis/antithesis. Experience is their sum. The universe is Nature and we are in its unity — Gregory

But you can't really take something like Kant's pure reason as a basis for understanding what our existence is about. Reason doesn't give one knowledge as it is the mere form of knowing, and in itself has no value at all. Nor does sensory intuition, as Kant calls it. The intuition of the color red or a tone in middle C played by a clarinet does not as such carry one to understand the our world. Because these do not, conceived as such, have any meaning. Kant failed to understand the basis for meaning in the world. It is not definitional meaning, but affective meaning that is first philosophy.

As to contingency and necessity, Kant's apriority had only to do with logic's pure form. Consider what this is: a complete abstraction, devoid of the palpable content of experience, the ooo's and ahhh's and ughs and yuks, you know, the blisses and miseries we experience. Herein lies the theme for analysis that can reveal the essence of what is meaningful. Other matters are important only to the extent that they are useful to this end.

Kant's pure reason is attached to its practical reason, being the servant of it. So you can learn from Kant about life. His -Critique of Judgment- has us playing purpose into the world of experience. This is proto-existentialism. The thing in itself is him doing the Buddhist thing where you empty everything of mental constructions and try for a moment to see things as they are to themselves. But he places essence back into quanity, which for him has substance. The moon has substance for Kant. There is just something deeper going on

This is proto-existentialism. The thing in itself is him doing the Buddhist thing where you empty everything of mental constructions and try for a moment to see things as they are to themselves — Gregory

What an interesting thing to say. Where does he say this?

Compare the Critique of Pure Reason with his Critique of Judgment. The first takes objective reality of immediate perception to be false. It's not the thing in itself. This I see as his Buddhist method. With faith in God and total admiration for the teleological argument he retain his Christian side but realizes he left the world *empty*. This is why inn paragraph 57 of COJ he mentons the "indeterminate concept of the supersensible substrate of the appearances" and of "purposiveness without purpose". And also the picture Kant paints in The Critique of Practical Reason is that of spontaneity of applying moral action to ourselves. Is his philosophy too man centered for you? The perennial philosophy of man has always been that thought and will are prior to matter, instead of the other way around (matter being the substrate of consciousness). Was Hermes an existentialist?

Compare the Critique of Pure Reason with his Critique of Judgment. The first takes objective reality of immediate perception to be false. It's not the thing in itself. This I see as his Buddhist method. With faith in God and total admiration for the teleological argument he retain his Christian side but realizes he left the world *empty*. This is why inn paragraph 57 of COJ he mentons the "indeterminate concept of the supersensible substrate of the appearances" and of "purposiveness without purpose". And also the picture Kant paints in The Critique of Practical Reason is that of spontaneity of applying moral action to ourselves. Is his philosophy too man centered for you? The perennial philosophy of man has always been that thought and will are prior to matter, instead of the other way around (matter being the substrate of consciousness). Was Hermes an existentialist? — Gregory

I would pull back form invoking Buddhism, a method, really, that leads to enlightenment and liberation that has little to do with an analysis of the structure of rational judgments. But then, the Buddhists do claim, along with Kant, that desire for things in this world stand outside of ethics and higher meaning. Finally though, Kant's "method" of reducing the pursuit philosophical truth is a turning toward an anaysis reason as such and applying this across the board, while the Buddhist terminates all processes of engagement. This make their endeavor more like phenomenology's reduction, that is, the Husserlian reduction BUT as this is played out in post Husserliam thinking (Husserl himself being too much like Kant's detailed analyses. See Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation where he explicitly brings the Copernican Revolution up as the beginning for further investigation.

I wil have to look into COJ.

Hermes? There is a book by John Caputo that places Hermes, the messenger of the gods, as the cord of connectivity between our philosophical endeavors and the revelatory possibilities in the world. And he invokes Derrida, first Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Husserl, but Derrida as the radical interpretation that is at the end of where hermeneutics can actually go, which is to the "radical" confrontation with the world's "presence". A long story in this, continued by Michel Henry and others. But Hermes: Derrida wrote a paper on Levinas on the Metaphysics of Violence, and he explores, here and evlsewhere, this impossible interface with the world where "totalities" (Heidegger's term lifted from Husserl) are mitigated to yield, what Heidegger called in his Discourse on Thinking gelassenheit, a familiar term among the Amish, meaning a kind of yielding, a withdrawing of interpretative imposition to allow the world to "speak" if you will.
What does Hermes deliver from the gods? a true encounter? But Heidegger's position is one of a radical finitude, so Hermes is more like a single shaft of light issuing from a source that is beyond reach. But note, we have left Kant's rationalism altogether, have we not? Kant seems like he does well understand what Wittgenstein said about logic and value, that these are only shown to us, but one can never speak of their nature and logic, value and world to understand what they are would require a perspective beyond them, which makes talk like this impossible and nonsensical. But the reduction! Where does this actually take us? To the things themselves, says Husserl. This si a movement that suggests a mysticism, something of the order of Meister Eckhart, who Heidegger briefly allows into the conversation in Discourse.