Kant and Hermeneutics

The idea that there is a Neumenal World and a Phenomenal World is attributed to the Philospher, Emmanuel Kant. Kant wrote that the phenomenal world is the world of sense experience, while the neumenal world is the world of ideas. Kant tells us that we can only really know the neumenal world of ideas, because, starting very early in childhood, human beings only really have sense experience which is interprested and constructed in light of ideas, or, meaning categories. Thus, Kant says that we never really know the phenomenal world of sense experience, as such. Philosopher, Bernard Lonergan says the same thing when he asserts that at Level 2 Consciousness, we only know the World Mediated by Meaning. Do we have any connection at all, then, with the material world of sense experience, which the empiricists claim that exists. Well, the Philosopher, Han Georg Gadamer tells us that us that there are "forestructures on knowing" which are in the human mind, prior to cogntition. Gadamer's position is a type of Neo-platonism, where he asserts that there are essentially, "Interpretive Forms" front loaded into the mind, just as Neo-platonists assert that there are "Immutable Platonic Forms" which are front loaded into the human mind, prior to cognition. However, there is yet another approach which asserts that we can know the real of the "world out there," which is Lonergan, stating that we know the world, or the real, through the cognitive process, of, experience, understanding, and then, judgment and reflection. Now, it is apparent that the cognitive level and operation of judgement and reflection involves a cognitive, intuitive function, not just ideal, analytic understanding. This is consistent with cogntive and epistemological, phenomenological reasearch which states the intuition involves high speed, preconscious or unconscious analogical thought processes in the mind, which can go quantum, and thus non-local at a distance, so that the person can have an immediate intuitive sympathy (Bergson) with an object or an idea which is out there is the physical world, and or, the historical world of the past.