Seeing the emergence of the thing by enacting it is the basis of the pleasure of knowing. We are wired to understand through analysis-synthesis, and wired to feel pleasure at successful mapping. We know, when our predictions are verified, that we have digested some bit of the logos of nature and, in so, become one with it.

If the identity of subject and object ever shows up in experience, it does so in understanding. If ever there is knowledge, it is knowledge of some part of the mind of God (or, the laws of being). And complete knowledge really would be knowing the mind of God. We should not accuse Hegel of exaggerating, since he did know God’s mind under this definition. And Kant did to—he knew the mind of Deus sive Natura insofar as this determines the phenomenal. (But knowledge of the phenomenal is knowledge of some aspect of the noumenal. The noumenon must correspond to our a priori knowledge of the phenomenal in some way. The real in sensation is the effect of the noumenal, which means that it at least conforms to its general features. Its ontological support moves along with the phenomenal. If the phenomenal is regular in such-and-such a way, then its underlying noumenal stimulus is also regular, at least at the point of contact.)

Knowledge is makes the subject identical to the object.