My previous post was about a nice little tidbit from Salomon Maimon where I found him describing a way of reading Immanual Kant that was analogous to a way I study math (while protecting an internal intuitive coherence which I feel certain would become fragmented if I read other writers more immersively [as I used to]).
I continued reading the encyclopedia article, and find Maimon's description of the difference between finite intellect and infinite intellect to mirror Bernardo Kastrup's recently published insights on the way everything-is-consciousness and consciousness has, in the case of human intellect, separated into smaller dissociated alters which have lost memory of the separation. Here is another quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Replace "finite intellect" with Kastrup's concept of alters, and see for yourself:
In this respect Maimon revives the Leibnizian notion that there is not a difference in kind, but only in degree, between a finite and an infinite intellect. Maimon argues that for an infinite intellect, all of the content of thought is consciously produced through the mind's own activity — by virtue of its infinity, nothing needs to be given to such an intellect. By the same token, Maimon holds that we can think of finite cognizers in the same terms, but with the crucial difference that finite minds are not aware of the productive capacities that create the matter of experience. The supposedly given content provided by sensibility, in other words, can in fact be explained in terms of the 'subconscious' productive capacities of the active mind. In this respect, Maimon argues that our minds are limited reflections of the divine or infinite mind; our active powers are conscious, he claims, in mathematics, where we display a 'god-like' ability to create content according to rules of thought. Mathematical objects, that is, are constructed according to the complete determinations of our concepts, rather than merely encountered in our sensible interactions with the world. In the case of empirical content, however, the creative process remains uncognized, since the 'manner of origination' of empirical objects or the complete conceptual determination that guides construction remains unknown to us.These 'subconscious' products become conscious to the finite mind, Maimon claims, by being represented in space and time. The contrast with Kant is again important, for while Kant claims that space and time are forms of human intuition, Maimon maintains that space and time are in fact the ways in which humans represent conceptual differences between thoughts. Space and time, that is, "are both concepts and intuitions, and the latter presupposes the former." (GW II, 18 | VT 18) Space and time are concepts as representations of the differences of things in general, but they are intuitions when they represent a particular sensible object in relation to other sensible objects. As finite cognizers, we represent in space and time what we have not completely conceptualized. The fact that we represent content spatially and temporally indicates only that there is some incompleteness in our conception of the world, and not that this content is provided by a realm of wholly independent objects.
Maybe there is something to this observation near the beginning of this article: "The eminent German scholar, Manfred Frank recently suggested that Maimon is the 'last great philosopher' about to be discovered." I'm good with that. From what I can tell so far, Maimon's way of thinking reminds me of the way I approach things. I like how he foreshadowed Kastrup here by well over two centuries, as Kastrup is one of my favorite contemporary writers, whose ideas are right at the cutting edge of a new, and I believe substantially correct, way of seeing the nature of the universe.