Meditation on the Real World and the World as it Appears 

 

       What we know directly are contents of our consciousness, not reality as it is in itself: that is the main idea of Kant, which Schopenhauer thought was self-evident. The contents of our consciousness, the possible contents of any consciousness like our own, that we can investigate, understand to a certain degree, acquire knowledge about, interpret, etc. – that is, our ideas or re-presentations of the world as we experience it is everything we can even think out, the horizon of our thought which we cannot go beyond. We cannot get outside of our experience as structured by our brains, by our language (and in particular by our concepts of things), no more than a character in a video game can do something that goes against its programming.

 

I am looking at the two birch trees in the back of my apartment house.

   These two birch trees are not really there as far as I know. Light hits my eyes; the photons are translated into electrical energy; the electrical energy reaches my brain; my brain interprets the energy according to its program into ‘two birch trees. I cannot get out of my brain to compare the images it produced with some unperceived, unconceptualized thing-in-itself. For all I know, I might just be a brain in a vat, a brain being fed the right electrical information by some Mega-computer (Hilary Putnam). All I know is what my brain generates as “reality”; I cannot know anything else.

    For Kant, our brain’s programming generates a Newtonian “reality.” The phenomenal world in space and time is governed by the deterministic laws of physics – not because the laws of physics describe reality as it is in itself but because the laws are the way we have been programmed to experience the world. When we do physics, we are really describing or mapping the way our brains have been programmed to experience. And since Kant mistakenly believed Newton was the final word on nature, he thought this programming belonged to our hardware.

   And the programming, what we think of as physics, is completely deterministic. Nature – so the programming – is a closed system. Imagine all of what we can experience, the entire set of the content of what we can be aware of, subject to a program with this logic.

   Here is an example of a simple, closed, deterministic system using just two symbols: "+" and "-". We can represent this system as a sequence of these symbols. One such system is a binary alternating sequence, where each symbol alternates between "+" and "-": for example, the sequence: "+-+-+-+-".

  In this system, the pattern is deterministic and closed. Given any starting point in the sequence, you can predict the next symbol and all subsequent symbols with certainty. The system follows a deterministic rule where the symbol alternates between "+" and "-". Starting from any position in the sequence, you can predict the symbol at any future point or past point in the sequence. For instance, if you start at the first symbol "+", you know that the next symbol will be "-", then "+", and so on, following the alternating pattern. Similarly, if you start at any other position, you can predict the subsequent symbols based on the deterministic rule of alternation.

   All of nature – so our programming – follows the laws of physics (the rule of alternating between + and – in my simple illustration would be a physical law, like the law of gravity. We, nature, everything that we can experience, is part of the chain of cause-and-effect. My typing these words, in this system, would be entirely predictable if we had all the laws operating – i.e. the full programming were transparent to us. This system is closed because there are no external influences or interactions affecting the sequence. It's a simple example, but it effectively demonstrates the concept of a closed, deterministic system where all possible outcomes are completely predictable.

    So every thinker who imagined reality as a radical split between the world as we experience and represent it to ourselves (the phenomenal world, the world of appearances) and reality as it is in itself, unperceived, unconceptualized, unrepresented always leaves a backdoor. There is always a way out of the phenomenal world, the world that our brains have pulled down over our eyes. For Kant, it is the experience of freedom, namely, the freedom to follow (or not) the moral law, to do one’s duty. In the world as we experience and as can be described with physics, there is no freedom and thus no responsibility, no morality. Everything is caused. A person being murdered and a person being killed by a tornado – no difference within the phenomenal world, the world of objects obeying causal laws in space and time. We experience it as different – which, if the world is our representation and nothing more, must either be an illusory experience or an experience from another realm, the true reality behind the veil of appearances.

   Kant chose the latter alternative. When I see a beggar, and all my natural inclinations urge me to check my phone and walk by, but something else in my – my sense of duty, call it – calls on me to stop and give, and I stop and give, I have actually experienced a leak from another world, from the true world. The chain of cause and effect that runs the program with which we must experience anything we can experience is broken every time we do our duty (for Kant). Now you can’t prove it. Everything about giving to the beggar happens in the world of appearances and is thus subject to the same programming laws, the laws of physics. And of course I might have given to the beggar for numerous other reasons than out of a sense of duty. But if I acted from a sense of pure duty, I experienced something beyond space and time, beyond cause and effect, but plurality and all other conditions of our experience. I can’t say anything about it. I can’t give a reason for it. I experience it as an absolute command, something sui generis, something that can’t be compared to anything else we experience because it is not part of our program. It is like Super Mario (from the video game) stopping the program and doing something on his own because a voice from somewhere outside the virtual world he was a part of communicated a duty to him; as though rather than jumping on an enemy goombah felt compelled to show mercy even though mercy is not part of the program.

    Kant worked out an interpretation of the sublime to account for this getting out of the programmed reality.  I read a book by Thomas Weiskel that worked out Kant’s notion of the sublime in a way that made sense for me.

      The world of appearances is not a cage. Our understandings change all the time – at the margins (though the margins seem deep to us surface dwellers). And sometimes something amazingly new breaks into it. First, a contrast to everyday experience is presupposed – the experience of the virtual world generated by our brains' interpretations of sensory input.  

        A father, say, has a conventional relationship with his children: he is preoccupied with work, does his duty to the children – reads to them in the evening, etc. – but experiences all this as something normal, everyday, something typical for his culture. We might say this relationship is somewhat shallow without intending a moral judgment. And this shallow relationship is interwoven with the routines of family – carrying out the father program. And then, in the second phase, something happens to radically disrupt this conventional relationship: he loses a child in an auto accident or, less dramatically, is moved by some loving gesture of the child: “The habitual relation of mind and object suddenly breaks down. Surprise or astonishment is the effective correlative, and there is an immediate of a disconcerting disproportion between inner and outer. Either mind or object is suddenly in excess – and then both are, since their relation has become radically indeterminate (Thomas Weiskel, 22-23).” The habitual attitude breaks down. Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, he begins to see his previous life with his children in a new, critical light as being shallow, conventional – a view that was not available before. 

        In the third and final stage – assuming it comes at all – a fresh, new relationship is established. This new relationship, incorporating the excess Weiskel identified, has a different character: “…the mind recovers a fresh balance between outer and inner by constituting a fresh relation between itself and object such that the very indeterminacy that erupted in phase two is taking as symbolizing the mind’s relation to a transcendent order. This new relation has a “meta” character that distinguishes it from the homologous relation of habitual perception (23; emphasis mine).” The father – again, like Ivan Ilyich – has come to see his children in a radically different light; has come to change the attitude he has towards them. It is like the linguistic change between conventional uses of words like son, daughter, father, including the ways a sociologist might perhaps use the words in his work, to the super-charged uses of these words in religious poetry – language “used at full stretch” reflecting a deeper love for the children. And the conversion is not restricted to how the father experiences his children; in a sense, he now lives in a different world. (This is the only sense Nelson Goodman’s world-pluralism makes for me.)

       And then the sublime experience gets passed on in the grammar of our language, becomes part of an expanded common sense. Newborn babies are gifts, a person can haunt us in remorse, the world is filled with the grandeur of God. . .. Not everyone will be able to make these metaphors come alive in sublime experience; but it will be generally intelligible to everyone that some people can, and it should be intelligible to most that I might judge my life to be impoverished to the extent I cannot. Conceptual space for the seeing of newborn babies as gifts will have been created. Of course, this cultural space is a gift of culture, and cultures differ from one another to the extent they do not share such space. 

         Now through the sublime experience, reality leaks into and changes us and our world. But because nothing in our experience of the world allows us to understand it – we can only understand what we are programmed to experience – it’s not like we can prove it. If someone denies it, calls it an illusion on the grounds that nothing escapes the laws of physics, then Kant could not prove it to it. He could say that unless we acknowledge it, morality would be an illusion. But that is no argument that morality is not an illusion. He could say our form of life would be turned upside down. Again, that is not argument that our experience of morality is upside down. When we act from duty, according to Kant, we cannot really believe that the sublime experience corresponds to nothing or is just part of the brain’s program. But our subjective certainty again proves nothing. We are left with the sublime and the sense of subjective certainty. Believe it or not!

    To draw a limit to what can be thought – to remove metaphysical thinking as a human possibility – Kant and his followers distinguished between the world as we experience it and thus can think about, and the real world beyond our experience that we can never experience and thus never think about. Any way of conceiving the world that divides it up into a world of appearances that is equivalent to the world that we experience and talk about, and the real world that is conceptually beyond experience and all of our concepts has two and only two mutually exclusive alternatives: either skepticism: we can understand our programming better but can never know reality as it is in itself (unperceived, unconceptualized); or there is an escape from the virtual world through the sublime, but it cannot be conceptualized, spoken about except metaphorically (or analogically?), and thus cannot be known or proven – it is based on subjective certainty. Wittgenstein calls this “the mystical.”

   Both Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein offer different variants of this, and I will discuss them in a future entry. But if one denies the axiom that all experience is by definition or by nature cut off from reality, virtualizes reality as it were, then things look different. I will conclude with a quote from Wittgenstein on this topic:

…to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought. . . .

I agree that we have no reason to suppose that reality completely conforms to our ways of experiencing it; that there is no reason to believe in realities that transcend our experience and thought. I disagree – and find it makes no sense – to suppose that our experience is not of something real. Perhaps it's only the surface, but it is the surface of something real.  When I look at the birch trees, I am seeing something real, birch trees, though I don't know them, don't see them as God does.         

Afterthought

Kant did not exclude the possibility that time, space, causality, subjects and objects, existed in the real world; but he maintained we could not know it. He did think it necessary to imagine a real material world apart from our perception of it. Schopenhauer found this illogical. If all we can know is appearances, then nothing gives us the right to suppose there is any world in itself apart from the world we experience. We don't know the sun, only the eye that sees the sun, he wrote. Thus the whole world of experience is a "phantasmagoria" - an illusion.