appearance and freedom

Just read Joshua Corey's take on Ron Silliman's assertion that theory replaced mysticism/wisdom traditions in American Poetry. Among many other interesting points, Joshua states:

The content of such [wisdom] traditions, like that of theory, is simply a means of comprehending the world that does not take phenomena at face value. If we could live by appearances it might not be such a bad thing, and perhaps that's what the calculated naivety of the Imagists (back to the things themselves!) and Objectivists (the poem's a thing, too!) was aimed at.

Flashback to a suggestion by Zizek (I don't recall which book) that direct access to the Kantian Thing-in-Itself would turn us into automatons. If we knew God's will with absolute certainty, it would be impossible to speak of such a thing as a moral decision -- such a notion would amount to a contradiction in terms.

Inasmuch as not having access to the Thing-in-Itself amounts to another way of saying that we can't take phenomena at face value, then I wonder whether we could read the "difficult, convoluted linguistic tradition in which verification often mattered less than authority and prestige" (Silliman's words) shared by both wisdom traditions and theory as an attempt to secure our existential/moral freedom by insulating us from the possiblity of direct access to the Thing-in-Itself. Of course, according to Kant, we needn't worry about having such access. The impossibility of direct access is built right into the very structure of consciousness. But that doesn't mean we aren't prone to believing that we have such access -- a delusion only slightly less dangerous than its impossible actuality.