> How could it be otherwise? Have you ever seen
> something that you didn't understand as a something?
This doesn't answer the question.
As I pointed out, if it can't be otherwise, there is, as a logical matter, no escaping "solipsism" of the present moment".
In Kleinian psychoanalysis, the capability for what Husserl calls the "epoche" is a matter of ego strength and integration, the counterpart there to Husserl's idea of the "transcendental ego". This underpins what the Kleinian Wilfred Bion, following Keats, calls "negative capability". Keats invoked this concept to explain Shakespeare's capacity for perceiving truly. The following is from an 1817 letter Keats wrote to his brothers:
"I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason"
Kleinian psychoanalysis makes "fear of annihilation" - "fear of death" - provoked by the functioning of what Freud called the "death instinct" the "primal anxiety" from which all other forms of anxiety derive. To the degree that the ego is weak and unintegrated, it will be dominated by what Klein called "psychotic" defences against this anxiety. This produces delusional features in experience that prevent it from being direct experience of reality. It also produces an ego given to violence, destructiveness, sadism and paranoia since these are the products of early "psychotic" defences against fear of annihilation. A somewhat stronger ego holds these in check through obsessional defences (this will explain the misidentification of "reason" with deductive reasoning from fixed axioms i.e. it will explain what Keynes calls the "remorseless logician" able by "starting from a mistake" to "end up in Bedlam".)
Such defences also explain the inability to understand the ontological idea of "internal relations". Where they remain significant reality will appear "fragmented" into lifeless externally related bits. The anxiety against which this is defending makes the alternative ontological idea of internal relations incomprehensible. (Wordsworth's line in "The Tables Turned" - "we murder to dissect" - is consistent with this psychoanalytic explanation of the psychopathology involved, though he there makes it part of a criticism of the "intellect" per se as opposed to a particular kind of psychopathological intellect.)
As I've pointed out before <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo- talk/Week-of-Mon-20051219/028005.html>, Keynes, in his biographical essay on Newton, makes use an explanatory framework of this kind to explain the irrational features of "modern science" as psychopathology. He associates the "horrors of modern science" with this psychopathology and with a premodern mystical hermeneutics.
"As many hundreds of pages of unpublished manuscript survive to testify, Newton was seeking the philosopher's stone, the Elixir of Life and the transmutation of base metals into gold. He was, indeed, a magician who believed that by intense concentration of mind on traditional hermetics and revealed books he could discover the secrets of nature and the course of future events, just as by the pure play of mind on a few facts of observation he had unveiled the secrets of the heavens. Whilst his work looked forward, and led the way, to all the horrors of modern science, his own spirit looked back beyond the middle ages to the traditional mysteries of the most ancient East." (Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. X p. 377)
Ted