WHERE "KANT" MEETS "CAN"
31 OCTOBER 2002

I just read a fascinating sentence in "Philosophy Through Film," by Mary Litch. It's one of those passages that knocks down a wall in the brain. Now I see why it's called "a passage."

"Kant's method of doing philosophy is to look beyond (to 'transcend') experience in order to understand the cognitive machinery creating it." To transcend experience. To look behind the curtain.

And it occurred to me that my way of doing the philosophy of belief is to transcend a world view, which amounts to personal experience, in order to understand the ideas and attitudes creating it, to see where it comes from.

And where it comes from is describable in one simple word: INTERACTION.

It does not all come from the outside-in as the realists and the objectivists would have us believe; it does not all come from the inside-out as some philosopher-psychologists would have us believe; it comes from the interaction of our human physiology, our unique but ever-developing personality, and the world we encounter — with our genetic heritage, our sense-perception machinery, our time and place of birth; with our parents, peers and siblings; with the stories we hear and what we accept as knowledge; and even with the language we speak.

Since we are hard-wired toward realism and acceptance (another one of Kant's major realizations) we find it almost impossible to keep this straight. As Bryan Magee writes in "The Tristan Chord," Kant showed us ...

"The human mind has a built-in tendency towards one particular illusion, namely the illusion of realism ... we can hardly stop ourselves from proceeding in our thoughts as if they constitute reality, and as if reality consists of them ... No other way of thinking is available to us." Unless we become philosophers, of course, and even then it's a constant battle.

But it's worth the fight.

Otherwise we continually confuse the things written into us by experience with those things that seem to be eternal truths written in stone, keeping us constantly out of step with the true nature of things, even if we can say exactly what that "true nature" consists of.

It's a common mistake. And if you want to remain common, keep repeating it.