But where do our ideas and our thoughts even come from? To borrow from Hume, ideas – along with “impressions” – make up the two kinds of “perceptions of the mind.” There are sensations, emotions, and passions on one hand, and there are thoughts, reasoning, and ideas on the other hand. To borrow from Hume: “All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call impressions and ideas.”
And of course, impressions and ideas “correspond” to one another and “resemble” one another. For every idea, there is a corresponding impression, and vice versa. Thought is “preceded” by perception, and in large part, perception amounts to the “impressions” on the mind which Hume highlighted. Moreover, and as Spinoza argued, the soul itself “is an idea arising from an object which exists in Nature.” Which means that the soul itself is an idea. Everything arises from an idea, given that the soul itself is an idea, and everything arises from the soul, particularly the perceptions of the mind which we have just highlighted.
In turn, the soul is about its essence. And as Spinoza argued, the essence of the soul is in its thinking attribute. Moreover, nothing can exist without the essence, and as a result, thought and reasoning and knowledge are then intertwined with the essence. And there are essentially two schools of thought regarding the nature and existence of the soul, in the sense that the perennial or traditional school sees the soul and the essence as being separate and distinct from the body, whereas the empirical and materialist school sees the soul and the body are being intertwined and interconnected and attached with one another.
It follows that the idea and the thought stems from the soul, and the soul is about its essence, and the essence is about the thinking attribute or thought itself as an a priori concept. Thought is then part of a broader and more comprehensive intellect. Reality in the perennial sense is therefore far different than the reality which has been etched out by the parameters and limitations of the modern worldview. To borrow from Arendt:
“If…present-day science in its perplexity points to technical achievements to ‘prove’ that we deal with an ‘authentic order’ given in nature, it seems it has fallen into a vicious circle, which can be formulated as follows: scientists formulate their hypotheses to arrange their experiments and then use these experiments to verify their hypotheses; during this whole enterprise, they obviously deal with a hypothetical nature. In other words, the world of the experiment seems always capable of becoming a man-made reality, and this, while it may increase man’s power of making and acting, even of creating a world, far beyond what any previous age dared to imagine in dream and phantasy, unfortunately puts man back once more – and now even more forcefully – into the prison of his own mind, into the limitations of patterns he himself created.”
We are incapable of “transcending the material world in concept and thought” as a result of the modern worldview and modern thought. And the ultimate result or outcome of this “containment” and these limitations on thought itself is that “Cartesian doubt” has seeped even into the modern worldview and even into conventional modern thought, hence the confusion and disorder and tumult of our time.
Adam A. Azim 