One of the interesting parts of our discussion below, on Hegel and love, is the question of whether you can in fact know your wife as anything more than an idea. Hegel's position is that you really can't; although that doesn't mean she isn't real. Hegel lets himself out of this trap by asserting that 'the real is rational, and the rational is real' -- and, therefore, that the more you improve the rationality of your ideas, the more it doesn't matter whether you have 'the rational idea' of your wife, or 'the real' wife. The two approach, and in the mind of God attain, identity.
The idea is that our minds (these days, internalists like to say, "our brains" or "our nervous systems") interpret reality, and therefore add a layer to it that it doesn't really have. For example, we interpret light waves in certain ranges as color.
Thus, we cannot know what the things are really like in themselves (as Kant says in his Critique of Pure Reason). We're sort of trapped in our minds.
Mr. Hines supports this idea in relation to his wife:
Even after 89 years of close marriage, we can never know the other person, we only will have learned a lot about that person. Since we cannot merge our selves, we can never completely know the other, and so we can never really know the other. And so we are left with "just" the idea of the other--our perception of who the other is.There are some good reasons to doubt this picture, even though it comes with a pedigree as exalted as Kant and Hegel. Hillary Putnam raised some of them in some thought experiments that will seem a little odd when you first encounter them, but which make the serious point that the meanings of words don't relate to our mental -- or even our brain -- states. You can explore that at your leisure, if you wish: For example, see his paper "Meaning and Reference." There are now many rational, detailed, analytic arguments against the internalist model.
I don't propose to make another one here, though I'll be glad to discuss Putnam's (or another) with you if you like. The idea of being 'trapped in the head' and never being epistemically certain of what is around you strikes me as a kind of nonsense. So too the concept that we know things only as ideas. There's a way of knowing what a horse is as an idea: you can read about horses, study their makeup and their structure, learn about the diseases that afflict them, read about their gaits, and so forth. That's an intellectual knowledge, an improving of your rational understanding of the idea of a horse.
You can also go out on a misty morning, with a rope in your hand, walk up to a black horse and set your hand on its nostrils. I did that this morning when the neighbor's beasts broke down their fence again, and had migrated down the road toward my place.
Once you put a rope on a horse, you can do many things with it. You can train it to the saddle. You can sit in the saddle, and feel it move beneath you. You can learn how it thinks, and experience the mind of a prey animal firsthand by how it moves and starts underneath you. You will realize -- not think, but know -- that other kind of mind.
You can know when it trusts you, and then you can see as a new world opens for the horse as well as for you: the two of you can do things that neither of you could have done alone. Just as you know its mind, it comes to know yours, and loses some of the fear that lies in its own nature.
You can then ride together, wherever you wish.
That's not my idea of the horse interacting with the horse's idea of me. It's me, and the horse, together. We know each other. The experience does not suggest atomic intelligences that can only know each other as ideas. It suggests living beings that have a certain capacity to merge, at the level of soul.
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