Summation

We are here today your honor to suggest to the court that, previous to now, the main question has been asked incorrectly. This foundational mistake has a profound impact on my client.

How is it that we know absolutely, if at all?

We have thought for centuries that it is a systematic argument (critical method … what I call hyper-critical). How do we look down on this when "being critical" is mandatory? When looking deeper is always the mission?

We don't even know what intuition is, do we? What about sudden insight? Some form of immediate aphorism that serves more than an artistic function.

When I know that I am awake, I know it. Do I question it? Wait … that is not the right word? Perhaps I am so used to feeling awake that I confuse the habituation with truth. But what then is truth but I think I cannot deny. Reid suggests that all people do it, they all must do it, our survival depends on it, and when we are not armchair philosophizing it feels so absolute that we make our most important decisions on it. On what? Immediate awareness of commonsense truth? I am sitting here. I do have a mind and body and so do others. I am the same an hour from now than I am now. I live in a world that is more or less what I see and feel and smell and hear ….

But can that all rightly be a naturalistic fallacy? And the point is "yes," it can be made into a fallacy.

Your honor, I'd like to submit the notion that most of the expectations we have for absolute truth comes from religious or scientific growth and history. These are both powerful tools for people, though for me the latter is the only one with a truly beneficial outcome.

What truly is philosophy then if it came before them both? Is it forgotten? Is there a spirit, your honor, and this is my point today, that is and was separate from the warm vague-ness of religion and the cold, hardness of science? Is this spirit truly fundamental in the sense that if we ignore it or pervert it or diminish it that religion and science run amok? They seem to be running amok.

It must be there in that fundamental choice, those fundamental expectations, that we see that our existence, our real existence, our real life, relies on certain choices that manifest as immediate conscious absolutes. Our mind makes these mandatory choices without us in order to keep us alive. They are sometimes more physical and sometimes more inferential and "mental." When I see something happen enough times in identical fashion my mind "does" something, regardless of my ideology or my intellectual politics, it chooses. My mind does. My mind is. It lands on a certain bit of solid ground and I can identify this place and I can call it truth.

As Reid suggests, we can explain it no further. Though there are some that always want further explanation, ad infinitum, ad nausea; there are some that look past the stopping point. But some things are too simple to explain. Immediate awareness of fundamental concepts is one of those things. Doubt is the thing that springs from this mastery, it is the thing that looks beyond. But doubt is not a positive energy, it is a groping in the dark. Have we mixed them up?

Your honor, I suggest we've been doing it wrong all along. It has landed, instead of on solid ground, it has landed on a fulcrum, a see-saw, a joint where imagination precedes existence. And no animal can survive that.