Mere Kant

I. I Got A Head Full of Ideas that Are Drivin’ Me Insane

As good old Immanuel Kant seemed to demonstrate pretty effectively way back in the 1780s in his monolithic Critique of Pure Reason, there’s an unbridgeable gap between how we experience the world and the way it really is.

After all, we don’t observe nature as does a cytoplasmic-flowing amoeba, or a cabbage moth fluttering over the garden hedge, or your average mutt, with a sense of smell perhaps 100,000 times more sensitive than ours but an inability to see red or green as anything but grey.

For that matter, there’s no way of knowing if what you see as blue, say, is slightly different from my perception. Each of us is in a very real sense locked inside our own heads, given that we have access to only our own specific encounter with reality.

Born 302 years ago in what was then Königsberg in the Kingdom of Prussia — a Baltic port city renamed to Kaliningrad in 1946, when it was absorbed into the U.S.S.R. after the defeat of Nazi Germany — Kant is renowned today as one of the central thinkers of the Enlightenment.

He was far from the first to recognize, however, that there is no guarantee our ideas of things genuinely resemble the external objects we routinely take them as representing.

English empiricist John Locke, best remembered today as the “father of liberalism,” wrote extensively about this in the 1600s. Kant laboured in the shadows cast by Locke’s foremost successors, George Berkeley and David Hume, but more about that later.

Kant called the world of everyday experience, shaped by our senses and the way the brain processes sensory inputs, the phenomenal realm. It is the world of appearances.

He argued that our minds actively digest and structure sensory data using innate structures built into the brain so that we experience objects, others, ourselves and events as happening in space and time, with causes and effects, etc. But we only ever know objects as they appear to us. How else could we?

Kant contrasted the phenomenal realm with what he called the noumenal world — the domain of “things in themselves” that might impinge on our senses but to which we have no direct access. While we can logically conceive that a universe exists beyond our senses, and Kant ardently believed there was one, we can never possess any factual knowledge of what that universe truly is.

As Richard Tarnas summarized this outlook in his superb 1991 survey The Passion of the Western Mind: “In the act of human cognition, the mind does not conform to things; rather things conform to the mind.”

The temptation is to file all this under interesting, if true, and return to whatever more pressing concerns presently occupy us: answering emails, putting the bins out, remembering whether we locked the back door, wondering why the supermarket insists on moving the coffee from one aisle to another every six months.

I get it. Kant can seem a philosopher for libraries rather than kitchens. Yet few ideas have consequences that reach more quietly into the texture of ordinary life.

Think about it. If we never encounter the world except as it appears through the peculiar architecture of human consciousness, then we never encounter one another directly either. Every conversation becomes, again in a very real sense, a meeting between two private universes.

When I say that I know another person, what I really mean is that I know a particular constellation of gestures, expressions, memories, words, habits, silences and expectations through which they have appeared to me over time. The friend I have known for 30 years inhabits my consciousness every bit as much as he inhabits his own.

My wife possesses an inwardness as inaccessible to me as the far side of the moon was to astronomers before the space age. I can infer it, glimpse it, be moved by it, love it with extraordinary depth … but I cannot occupy it. There remains an irreducible distance between one consciousness and another — not a failure of affection or imagination, but a condition of existence itself.

This sounds Roy Orbisonishly lonely until one notices that it is equally the condition that makes empathy possible. If other minds were perfectly transparent, there would be nothing to imagine. Compassion depends precisely upon the recognition that another person’s experience can never become entirely my own.

We spend our lives building bridges across a gulf that never quite closes. Language, touch, music, shared laughter, grief, sex, literature: all are ingenious attempts to span a distance that can never be abolished but can, mercifully, be narrowed.

Indeed, one begins to wonder whether civilization itself consists largely in constructing ever more elegant means of translating one phenomenal world into another.

Translation is perhaps a better metaphor than vision. We are accustomed to speaking as though the senses function like windows opening directly onto reality.

But windows (and we’ll get back to windows at the end of this ramshackle treatise) imply transparency. Translation acknowledges mediation. The world arrives in a language we cannot read; consciousness renders it into another language altogether. Somewhere between whatever exists independently of us and our awareness of it, an act of interpretation has already taken place.

The metaphor extends further than one might first suppose. Every language preserves certain distinctions while obscuring others. Classical Greek possessed several words for love where English largely manages with one. Japanese can encode subtleties of social relationship that require whole explanatory paragraphs in French. Inuit languages famously distinguish kinds of snow that most of us would overlook entirely. None of these languages is truer than another. Each reveals certain aspects of experience while allowing others to remain indistinct.

Perhaps consciousness itself works similarly.

The human brain does not present us with reality in its entirety because reality, if such a phrase even means anything, presumably possesses no privileged scale. The universe contains galaxies whose light has travelled for billions of years before reaching our telescopes, and neutrinos that pass through our bodies by the trillion every second without leaving the slightest impression upon our awareness.

The cosmos contains ultraviolet colours invisible to our eyes, infrasonic vibrations inaudible to our ears, magnetic fields that migrating birds apparently perceive with effortless familiarity, and dimensions of size ranging from quarks to galactic clusters. We occupy an extraordinarily narrow corridor through this immensity.

Our senses are therefore less like windows than carefully cut apertures.

Evolution did not ask what reality is. It asked what an ape on an African savannah needed to notice in order to survive long enough to have children. That turns out to be quite a different question.

Natural selection rewards useful perception, not comprehensive perception. The gazelle need not understand the lion’s evolutionary history or molecular composition. It need only register danger quickly enough to run. A robin need not appreciate fluid dynamics to build a nest. Nor need a child understand optics before delighting in a rainbow. The world disclosed by evolution is not false; it is practical. It is edited.

This should probably endow us with a touch more humility than we usually evince.

Human beings have long exhibited a touching confidence that the universe has arranged itself in a fashion peculiarly suited to our understanding. We instinctively assume that colour belongs to objects rather than emerging from an interaction between light, retina and brain; that solidity is a property rather than an electromagnetic negotiation between atoms; that time flows uniformly because it feels as though it does.

Every scientific revolution has, in one way or another, diminished this confidence. Copernicus displaced the Earth from the centre of the cosmos. Darwin displaced humanity from the summit of creation. Freud, however one judges his conclusions, suggested that consciousness is not even master in its own house.

Kant’s revolution was quieter but perhaps more radical than all three. He displaced the knowing subject from the centre of knowledge itself.

The irony is exquisite. The one instrument with which we attempt to understand reality is also the one instrument whose limitations we can never entirely escape. It is rather like trying to determine the exact shape of a pair of spectacles while never being able to remove them.

There are moments, admittedly, when the spectacles seem briefly to disappear.

Anyone who has stood before the sea on a winter evening, or watched sunlight move across an empty room, or listened to the final movement of a late Beethoven quartet with that curious sensation that time itself has somehow loosened its grip, knows the peculiar feeling that the world has become simultaneously more ordinary and more mysterious. Nothing has altered. The waves remain waves. The light falls where it always did. Yet something in the relationship between observer and observed seems momentarily to shift. We experience not new information but a new quality of attention.

This is why beauty has so often been regarded as possessing philosophical significance. A beautiful object does not merely please us; it interrupts us. It arrests the ordinary traffic of thought.

For an instant we cease classifying, measuring, comparing and planning. We simply attend. The world appears strangely sufficient unto itself, as though it had slipped free from the network of purposes in which we habitually entangle it.

Whether such moments reveal anything about reality beyond ourselves is impossible to say. Kant would almost certainly have counselled caution.

Intensity is not evidence. Wonder, however profound, is not a proof. Nevertheless, these experiences suggest that consciousness contains possibilities richer than those demanded by everyday survival. Evolution may have built the instrument, but it does not necessarily dictate every melody that instrument is capable of playing.

Which brings us not to art — not yet — but to science.

Science is often imagined as the great escape from subjectivity — as the disciplined enterprise through which humanity finally strips away illusion and confronts the universe exactly as it is.

Yet Kant invites a subtler picture. Science does not abolish the phenomenal world. It refines it. It extends it. It teaches us to see farther, more precisely and more honestly than common sense permits. But it does so using the very faculties whose limitations first gave rise to Kant’s philosophical revolution.

That apparent paradox turns out to be one of the most remarkable features of modern thought.

II. The Cartographers of Appearance

The history of science is sometimes described as a succession of triumphs over human ignorance.

There is truth in this, of course. The distance between an 18th-century physician and a modern geneticist is not merely one of accumulated facts but of transformed understanding. We know incomparably more about the workings of the physical universe than Kant — who speculated presciently in 1755, by the way, that the Milky Way is a vast, rotating disk of stars and that the faint, oval-shaped nebulae visible in the night sky might be unimaginably distant “island universes” — could ever have imagined possible.

We have watched galaxies (Kant’s island universes) collide, detected gravitational waves generated by black holes more than a billion light-years away, peered into the molecular machinery of life itself, and built computers capable of performing calculations that would have occupied generations of mathematicians.

Yet there is something quietly misleading about the image of science as a gradual lifting of the veil. For every advance in knowledge seems simultaneously to reveal another layer of mystery.

Newton’s universe, elegant and deterministic, gave way to Einstein’s pliable geometry of space and time, only for Einstein’s own majestic architecture to collide, at the smallest scales, with the unsettling indeterminacies of quantum mechanics.

Light turns out to behave as both wave and particle. Empty space is not empty. Matter consists almost entirely of void. Time itself, once assumed to flow with serene impartiality, proves capable of stretching, slowing and curving according to gravity and motion. The closer we approach what we imagine to be the foundations of reality, the less those foundations resemble the furniture of ordinary experience.

Science, in other words, does not remove us from Kant’s phenomenal world. It continually reminds us how unlike our ordinary perception reality appears to be.

The physicist does not see electrons. She sees traces in a cloud chamber, patterns on a detector, equations whose predictions survive experimental scrutiny. The astronomer never touches a distant galaxy. He interprets photons that have travelled across unimaginable gulfs of space before ending their journey upon a telescope mirror. Every scientific instrument is itself another act of translation, converting one kind of phenomenon into another until, finally, it arrives where all human knowledge must arrive: consciousness.

There is a curious humility concealed within this enterprise.

Scientists are often caricatured as claiming certainty, yet the greatest scientists have usually been remarkable for the opposite quality. Their theories are offered not as mirrors of ultimate reality but as models — sometimes astonishingly successful models, to be sure, yet always provisional.

A map is not the landscape it depicts. It omits almost everything: every blade of grass, every cloud passing overhead, every conversation occurring in every village. Yet the omission is precisely what makes the map useful. The history of science might therefore be understood as the history of increasingly beautiful maps.

Some maps become obsolete. Others are absorbed into larger maps that preserve their usefulness while revealing their limitations. Newton remains indispensable whenever Elon Musk’s SpaceX launches a satellite, despite Einstein having shown that Newton’s account of gravity is not the final story. Scientific revolutions rarely discard the past entirely. They place it within a wider horizon.

The horizon itself, however, forever recedes. We will return to this later.

But for the moment, one is reminded of those medieval maps whose edges dissolved into decorative sea monsters and the warning Here be dragons. Our dragons have become quarks, dark matter, quantum gravity and consciousness itself, but the principle remains unchanged. Every enlargement of the known also enlarges the circumference of the unknown.

Maybe this is why Kant — who was known as the Königsberg Clock because he woke, worked, wrote and took his daily walk at exactly the same time every day, so precisely that locals in his hometown would reportedly set their timepieces by him — has proved so strangely durable.

He did not deny the possibility of knowledge. On the contrary, after being shaken by Scottish empiricist David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature — which questioned our basis for believing in such basic concepts as induction, causality, morality, personal identity and human understanding in general — he wished to explain how knowledge was possible at all.

Kant’s revolution consisted in relocating certainty.

To repeat: Instead of asking how the mind conforms to objects, he asked how objects, as experienced, necessarily conform to the structures through which the mind apprehends them. It was an inversion as radical as Copernicus’s proposal that the Earth moves around the sun rather than the reverse.

Yet it was also profoundly unsatisfying.

Human beings possess a remarkable inability to leave mysteries alone. We tolerate practical uncertainty with admirable resilience. Most of us happily drive our vehicles without the faintest understanding of combustion engines or microprocessors. We use mobile phones while remaining gloriously ignorant of the physics that permits voices to leap invisibly across continents.

But philosophical uncertainty exerts a peculiar irritation upon the mind. We itch to know what lies behind the curtain. Tell us that something exists which can never, even in principle, become an object of knowledge, and our first instinct is to begin drawing diagrams. Command us not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and next thing you know, we’re half-cut in some godforsaken country bar in Moose Jaw, humming along to a tune about our exes from Texas.

The generation after Kant devoted itself almost entirely to this itch (the diagram part, I mean).

Johann Gottlieb Fichte,  a younger contemporary of Kant and the founding figure of German idealism, looked upon the noumenal realm with understandable suspicion. What role, he wondered, could be assigned to something that by definition could never enter experience? If the thing-in-itself remains forever inaccessible, how can we legitimately speak of it at all? Why postulate its existence?

Good questions.

In the first half of the 18th century, George Berkeley, the Bishop of Cloyne of the Anglican Church of Ireland, had raised exactly the same objection to John Locke’s insistence that there are material objects out there somehow “represented” to our minds. Berkeley reduced all sense data to mental contents and went on to argue that from a rigorously philosophical point of view, “to be” does not mean “to be a material substance.” Instead, “to be” means “to be perceived by a mind” (esse est percipi).”

Tarnas again: “Yet Berkeley held that the individual mind does not subjectively determine its existence of the world, as if the latter were a fantasy susceptible to any person’s whim of the moment. The reason that objectivity exists, that different individuals continually perceive a similar world, and that a reliable order inheres in the world, is that the world and its order depend on a mind that transcends individual minds and is universal — namely, God’s mind.”

And all’s right with the world.

By the late 18th and early 19th centuries,  Kant’s idealist successors were afire with the idea of a universal Mind distinct from Berkeley’s Christian God, but similarly revealing itself through us.

Philosophy, Fichte thought, ought to begin not with mysterious objects beyond consciousness but with the activity of consciousness itself. The self — the “transcendental ego”, the endlessly striving “I” — became the source from which the world of experience unfolded.

It was a bold move, and one that changed the direction of German philosophy. And not necessarily for the better, though the verdict on that is mixed. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling spun the idea of an absolute Spirit constituting all reality into a Naturphilosophie that has lasting echoes in today’s environmental movement.

But it was Schelling’s old roommate, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who early in the 19th century transformed Kant’s insights into something approaching an epic.

For Hegel, Kant’s distinction between appearance and reality represented not the final wisdom of philosophy but an unnecessary wound inflicted upon it. Reality could not, he believed, remain forever divided against itself. Thought and being must ultimately belong together.

History therefore became the story of Spirit gradually awakening to itself, discovering its own nature through religion, politics, revolution, tragedy, science and art. Every contradiction generated its own overcoming (an idea seized upon by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in laying out the dialectical framework of their Communist Manifesto). Every conflict became the seed of a richer reconciliation. The world itself was not static but developmental, engaged in a vast process of self-understanding.

Hegel advanced one of the most exhilarating and exasperating visions ever produced by the philosophical imagination.

Also kind of nuts.

Reading him can feel rather like climbing a mountain in thick mist. One is frequently uncertain whether one has ascended another hundred metres or merely wandered in circles. Then suddenly the clouds part, and the landscape appears with startling clarity before vanishing again almost immediately.

Arthur Schopenhauer, arriving a generation later, admired Kant’s distinction but distrusted Hegel’s optimism. If Hegel’s universe resembles an immense Bildungsroman in which reality slowly educates itself into wisdom, Schopenhauer’s is a tragedy without intermission.

Behind the world of appearances, he argued, lies not Reason but Will: an endless, aimless striving expressing itself in every living creature. The flower pushes through soil. The bird builds its nest. Lovers pursue one another. Empires rise. Economies expand. Children cry. Old men cling to life. Everywhere the same blind impulse surges forward, indifferent alike to happiness, justice or meaning.

One need not follow Schopenhauer all the way to his conclusions to recognize the force of his insight. Anyone who has watched ivy engulf an abandoned cottage or found themselves checking their phone for no reason whatsoever already possesses some acquaintance with the mysterious persistence of desire.

Yet despite their profound differences, Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer agreed upon one remarkable point: None of them was willing to leave Kant’s wall standing.

Each, in his own fashion, sought to abolish the gap between appearance and reality.

For Fichte, reality emerged from the activity of the self. For Hegel, appearance was reality in the process of recognizing itself. For Schopenhauer, the hidden world possessed a name and a character, however dark: Will.

Kant alone retained the austere discipline to say, in effect: here thought reaches its legitimate boundary.

There was something almost moral in that restraint.

Modern intellectual life often encourages the opposite habit. Every unanswered question is treated as a temporary inconvenience awaiting better technology, larger data sets or more powerful computers. Ignorance becomes merely delayed knowledge.

Kant’s suggestion is stranger. Some questions cannot be unanswered. They are simply unanswerable.

Not because reality is insufficiently generous, nor because human intelligence is inadequate in some accidental sense, but because every answer would itself already belong to the phenomenal world whose limits the question sought to transcend.

This is not entirely a negative. For if ultimate reality forever escapes conceptual capture, then certainty ceases to be philosophy’s highest virtue.

Attention becomes more important than possession. Description becomes more valuable than conquest. And wisdom begins to resemble not the accumulation of answers but the refinement of perception.

That is where our own century re-enters the story.

For the arrival of artificial intelligence has forced us to ask a question that Kant himself could scarcely have imagined. What if there exists a form of intelligence whose window upon reality is not merely different from ours, but different in kind?

III. Other Windows

In 1974, post-analytic philosopher Thomas Nagel posed what has become one of the most celebrated questions in modern philosophy: What is it like to be a bat?

The question sounds whimsical until one notices what it is really asking.

A bat does not merely possess different information from us. It inhabits a different world. It flies through darkness by constructing, from echoes, an acoustic landscape that no human being has ever directly experienced. The cave through which the bat moves is not the cave we perceive dimly by torchlight. It is another place altogether — a world articulated not by colour or perspective but by distances measured in reflected sound.

No accumulation of neurological facts, Nagel argued, can tell us what that experience is like. However completely we describe the bat’s brain, something remains that escapes objective description: the subjective character of experience itself.

Kant would surely have smiled.

The bat, after all, occupies its own phenomenal world no less than we occupy ours.

The thought has lost none of its unsettling power. Indeed, our century has given it an unexpected companion.

What is it like to be an artificial intelligence?

The obvious answer is that, so far as anyone knows, there is nothing it is like. A language model does not wake from dreams. It does not know the heaviness of limbs after illness, the ache of grief, the embarrassment of speaking someone’s name too soon after they have died, or the peculiar happiness of hearing blackbirds before dawn on the first morning of spring.

It possesses neither body nor biography. It does not remember childhood because it has had none. It anticipates no death because it does not inhabit a life.

And yet …

If intelligence can exist, however differently constituted, without sharing our particular mode of experience, then consciousness begins to look less like the inevitable companion of thought than one remarkable way in which thought has appeared in the universe.

Whether future machines will ever possess genuine phenomenal experience is, at present, unknowable. Perhaps consciousness requires organic life. Perhaps it emerges whenever information becomes sufficiently integrated. Perhaps it depends upon conditions we carbon units have not yet imagined.

Human thinking is determined, structured and distorted by a multitude of overlapping factors — sensory experience, the innate organization of our brains, biology, habit, history, culture, social class, emotion, imagination, the particular language(s) we speak, whatever is going on in our unconscious minds — but AI is virtually unencumbered by all of this.

Emotion, least of all.

McCoy: “The release of emotions, Mister Spock, is what keeps us healthy. Emotionally healthy, that is.”

Spock: “That may be, Doctor. However, I have noted that the healthy release of emotion is frequently very unhealthy for those closest to you.

Sorry about that. You know how the mind wanders.

But in any case, debates over the meaning of artificial intelligence often generate more heat than illumination, not least because we lack an agreed understanding of consciousness in ourselves.

It is difficult to recognize consciousness while standing inside it. The eye, as the old saying goes, cannot see itself except in a mirror. And artificial intelligence has become one such mirror.

Not because it tells us what machines are, but because it reveals what we had unconsciously assumed ourselves to be.

For centuries we quietly conflated intelligence with consciousness, reason with subjectivity, language with understanding. The appearance of machines capable of producing fluent language without possessing anything recognizably like human experience has loosened these associations. We begin to discover that what we had imagined to be one phenomenon may in fact be several.

Does this matter? Yeah.

A calculator performs mathematics without understanding numbers as a child understands them. A bird navigates continents without studying geography. A spider constructs intricate webs without attending architecture school.

Human beings themselves conduct astonishing portions of their lives automatically. We drive familiar roads while scarcely remembering the journey. We type words whose spelling our fingers seem to know before our minds do. Consciousness, far from governing every action, often appears to arrive slightly after the event, composing a narrative about decisions already made.

So maybe consciousness is not the sovereign we have imagined but rather, the narrator.

This possibility, disconcerting though it may be, draws us back toward Kant from an unexpected direction.

Suppose that every sufficiently complex form of cognition constructs a world appropriate to itself. The bat inhabits one. The octopus another. The migrating swallow another still.

A future conscious machine — if such a thing should ever exist — might inhabit one stranger than any biological creature has known. Reality would then resemble not a single stage upon which different actors perform but a vast cathedral filled with coloured windows. The same light passes through each pane, yet every window casts its own pattern upon the floor.

No creature sees the light itself. Each sees only its own illumination.

The image is imperfect, as all metaphors are, but perhaps fruitful enough to carry us a little further. For if each consciousness constitutes a particular way in which the universe becomes visible to itself, then diversity of experience ceases to be an obstacle to truth. It becomes one of truth’s conditions.

Every species notices what another overlooks.

The bee sees ultraviolet markings on flowers invisible to us. Dogs inhabit a world woven together by scent. Whales exchange songs across oceans. Human beings alone, so far as we know, write elegies and compose fugues.

None of these worlds is complete. But together they suggest an inexhaustible richness beyond the grasp of any single perspective.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead — who together with his former student Bertrand Russell produced the grandly titled Principia Mathematica, one of the last century’s most important works on mathematical logic — once remarked that philosophy begins in wonder.

He might equally have said that it begins in comparison.

The child who first notices that another person disagrees about the taste of olives has already embarked upon philosophy. The traveller discovering that another language divides the colours of the rainbow differently has begun to suspect that perception itself might possess a history. Every encounter with genuine difference loosens the assumption that one’s own experience simply is reality.

It becomes instead one beautiful local dialect among countless others. And yet there are moments when the dialect seems, however briefly, to approach something universal.

They are notoriously difficult to describe.

The vocabulary of ordinary life appears oddly inadequate to them, which perhaps explains why they have so often been entrusted to poets, musicians and mystics rather than philosophers.

The experience may arrive unexpectedly. Walking alone through woodland after rain. Watching sunlight strike a single window across a city at dusk. Standing beneath a sky so full of stars that one suddenly understands — not intellectually but bodily — how extravagantly large the universe is.

Listening to the slow unfolding of a Bach partita or the 16-minute suite on the second side of Abbey Road until the distinction between the music and one’s own attention begins almost imperceptibly to dissolve.

Nothing supernatural need occur. Indeed, what is most striking about such moments is their complete ordinariness. The world remains exactly what it was. The transformation occurs in the quality of consciousness itself. Attention becomes strangely unpossessive, barely egocentric. One ceases, for an instant, to “use” the world.

The tree is no longer timber, shade, carbon sink or botanical specimen. It simply stands. The cloud drifts. The bird sings. Reality appears to have slipped free of the web of purposes into which we habitually gather it.

It is this quality of perception that 19th century English essayist Walter Pater captures with incomparable delicacy when he writes of the sudden transfiguration of ordinary things — the weather-vane, the windmill, the dust suspended in a barn doorway — by a particular fall of light. Nothing has changed except seeing itself. Yet that alteration seems sufficient to make the familiar world shimmer with unsuspected depth.

One hesitates before drawing philosophical conclusions from experiences so elusive. History is littered with certainties acquired during moments of ecstasy.

In 1964, when Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to cannabis (Dylan had misheard the “I can’t hide, I can’t hide” bit in “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as “I get high, I get high”), Paul McCartney became convinced that all the secrets of the universe had  been revealed to him and made roadie Mal Evans follow him around with pen and paper as McCartney dictated his newfound wisdom. History records that Evans’ notes were lost almost immediately, as was the Beatle’s certainty about the value of the revelations once he found his way upstairs and had a more conventional smoke.

Religious traditions, understandably, have often interpreted intense spiritual or mystical experiences as glimpses of ultimate reality. Contemporary neuroscience is inclined to regard them as unusual configurations of neural activity.

Psychedelic research, now undergoing something of a renaissance, suggests that certain substances temporarily disrupt the brain’s habitual patterns of prediction and filtering, allowing experience to unfold with extraordinary vividness and emotional force.

Each explanation possesses its own vocabulary. None entirely exhausts the phenomenon. For what is remarkable is not merely that human beings have such experiences, but that they report them with such astonishing consistency across cultures, centuries and systems of belief.

The Buddhist emerging from deep meditation, the Christian contemplative in silent prayer, the Sufi speaking of annihilation in the divine, the Romantic poet overcome by landscape, the neuroscientist describing the dissolution of the default mode network after psilocybin — they disagree about almost everything except the experience itself.

Each tells us, in one language or another, that the ordinary boundaries of the self became unexpectedly porous.

Notwithstanding his own fondness for red wine (he was not the rigid, joyless ascetic of legend), the highly social Immanuel Kant, one suspects, would have remained politely sceptical.

A transformed consciousness does not necessarily disclose a transformed reality. But a prudent skepticism need not entail dismissal. For even if these moments reveal nothing whatsoever about the noumenal world, they reveal something of immense importance about the phenomenal one.

They remind us that consciousness possesses depths rarely demanded by everyday survival.

The spectacles through which we ordinarily view the world may not be removable. But maybe, just maybe, they are capable of being polished. Or, more mysteriously still, illuminated from within.

And it is here, I think, that philosophy quietly hands the conversation to art.

IV. The Window That Was Not There

If the scientific revolution of the 17th century was humanity’s way of saying, “Relax, the universe is perfectly sensible,” then the 20th century arrived like an overqualified auditor whose first act was to point out that the sensible universe had been assembled with several imaginary screws.

The comforting Newtonian picture — little hard atoms clacking around inside an infinite box while absolute time ticked away with the emotional range of a metronome — turned out to be less the operating manual for reality than a beautifully organized misunderstanding. The atoms were mostly empty. Matter and energy kept exchanging business cards.

Space and time, once the respectable divorced couple of physics, announced they had secretly been a single four-dimensional entity all along. Time itself refused to maintain professional standards, running slowly for fast travellers, dawdling around massive objects, and apparently taking indefinite leave forever (what a concept) inside black holes.

Gravity, meanwhile, underwent what can only be described as an extreme career change. Instead of reaching across space like some invisible cosmic tow rope, it turned out that the sun simply bent space itself, and the planets, with all the oblivious confidence of grocery carts rolling across a warped parking lot, followed the curves. Euclid, whose geometry had enjoyed more than 2,000 years of uninterrupted prestige, discovered that the universe had not, in fact, signed the contract requiring it to remain flat.

Then quantum mechanics entered the meeting and politely set fire to everyone’s assumptions. Subatomic entities behaved like particles until someone asked them about waves, whereupon they became suspiciously wave-like, and vice versa, as though reality had developed a taste for practical jokes. The more confidently you identified where something was, the less confidently you could say where it was going, which is either a profound statement about nature or an excellent excuse for being late for work.

Observation itself stopped being a harmless activity. Looking at a system wasn’t like watching a play from the audience; it was more like wandering onto the stage halfway through Act Two and then acting surprised when the ending changed.

By this point “substance” had quietly packed its bags. The universe was no longer built from little indestructible objects but from probabilities, relationships, and what physicists, with admirable restraint, called “tendencies to exist” — a phrase that sounds less like fundamental ontology than like the résumé of an underemployed philosophy graduate.

Even particles separated by enormous distances appeared capable of correlations that ignored our tidy, mechanistic intuitions about cause and effect, as though the cosmos had decided locality was an optional feature.

The cumulative effect was that science accomplished something few institutions ever manage: it made reality substantially weirder while simultaneously becoming more accurate. Every time physicists thought they had reached bedrock, the bedrock dissolved into mathematics, the mathematics dissolved into probability, and the probability started behaving as though certainty itself were a quaint 19th-century superstition. Newton wasn’t wrong so much as gloriously, magnificently incomplete — the way a subway map is incomplete if your destination turns out to be Jupiter.

And, almost as an afterthought, all this cosmic weirdness reopened one of philosophy’s oldest arguments. If the deepest layer of reality wasn’t a perfectly wound clock after all, then perhaps the old deterministic objection to free will had misplaced some of its confidence. This did not prove that human beings were free. It merely established that the universe itself had become a considerably less intimidating witness for the prosecution.

All of which is to say that Kant’s suggestion that we can never know what’s happening in a noumenal word that impinges upon our senses doesn’t sound like a bunch of philosophical hoohaw if you think about the tenuous state of scientific knowledge today.

Albert Einstein, one of the founders of quantum physics through his work on photons and the photoelectric effect, spent the latter half of his career arguing that its standard interpretation was incomplete: “All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this knowledge failed completely. It was as if the ground had been pulled from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere upon which one could have built.”

Werner Heisenberg, one of the principal architects of quantum mechanics (the famous uncertainty principle — which states that the more precisely you know a particle’s position, the less precisely you can know its momentum, and vice versa — is named after him), came to a similar conclusion: “The foundation of physics have started moving … (and) this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science.”

One of Heisenberg’s best-known observations would not be out of place in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

One can be forgiven for arriving at the perfectly Kantian conclusion of physicist and philosopher of science P.W. Bridgman, one of the last century’s leading experimentalists best known today for his influential ideas about the meaning of scientific concepts:

“The structure of nature may eventually be such that our processes of thought do not correspond to it sufficiently to permit us to think about it at all. … The world fades out and eludes us. … We are confronted with something truly ineffable. We have reached the limit of the vision of the great pioneers of science, the vision namely, that we live in a sympathetic world in that it is comprehensible by our minds.”

Last stop on the train to nowhere.

But maybe there’s another way to approach the world. After all, Kant’s polymathic younger contemporary, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, spent much of his life striving to bring scientific observation and imaginative intuition into an intimate interaction that he believed would enable humans to pierce nature’s veils and discover its essence.

Goethe turned Kant on his head, replacing the view that the human spirit imposes its order on nature with the idea that nature’s spirit brings forth its own order through human cognition — the IMAX theatre of nature’s self-revelation.

In this way of looking at things, truth and reality is not discovered, but rather co-created by us via what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the “esemplastic power of the imagination.”

“Esemplastic” being a handy word the English poet coined in 1817 to describe our capacity to take chaotic, disconnected sensory experiences and mold them into cohesive, artistic visions (until an unwelcome person arrives on business from Porlock and dismantles the pleasure dome while draining the sacred river).

“Against positivism” German philologist and proto-existentialist Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in one of his notebooks, “which halts at phenomena — ‘There are only facts’ — I would say: No, facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations.”

Henry James argued that great novelists — great artists of every sort — bring forth “a rival creation” by turning raw experience into a self-contained universe. Francis Bacon’s cosmos is not William Blake’s.

And if that is so, the greatest misunderstanding about art is that it is either a form of decoration or representation.

Understandable, mind you. A painting hangs upon a wall. A melody occupies the air for a few minutes before vanishing. A novel rests quietly on a shelf. None of these things appears as urgent as food, shelter, medicine or the laws of physics. They do not keep a body alive.

And yet, if human beings are anything more than biological mechanisms attempting to extend themselves through time, then art belongs among the necessities.

Not because it comforts us. Not because it distracts us. Not even because it tells us truths that cannot be expressed in any other way.

Art does something stranger. It adds to reality.

This is a claim that sounds almost metaphysical, and perhaps it is. But consider what occurs when a genuinely original work enters the world. Before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, there was no Hamlet. There were princes, grief, revenge, indecision, ghosts, fathers and sons, but there was no particular consciousness named Hamlet through which generations of human beings would subsequently understand hesitation, mortality and the terrible complexity of thought itself.

Before Bach composed the Goldberg Variations, there was no such arrangement of sound. Before Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway, there was no Clarissa walking through London with the entire invisible architecture of memory and time unfolding around her. Before Paul Cézanne painted apples upon a table, there were apples and tables, but there was not yet that particular way of seeing them.

The artist does not merely record reality. The artist changes the inventory of possible experience. This, to me, is the most important distinction between art and representation.

A photograph can preserve a moment. A painting can create a new mode of attention. A scientific theory can explain what occurs. A work of art can make something occur within consciousness that could not have occurred before.

After hearing a great piece of music, we do not return to the same world we inhabited before the first note sounded. Certain emotions have acquired names. Certain silences have acquired meaning. Certain possibilities of perception have become available.

The world has become larger.

Kant’s phenomenal universe, so far as we know, contains billions of galaxies, perhaps trillions of planets, oceans beneath the ice of distant moons, particles whose behaviour continues to confound our best theories. Yet one of the most astonishing facts about existence is not merely that there is something rather than nothing.

It is that something can appear which has never existed before.

A melody. A sentence. A mathematical proof. A sculpture. A new way of seeing.

The physicist asks how the universe behaves. The philosopher asks what it means to know the universe. The artist performs a more mysterious act: the artist contributes something to the universe that the universe did not previously contain.

This is why the idea of artistic creation has always carried a faint echo of the divine.

To create is, in a small and limited human sense, to participate in bringing possibility into actuality.

The comparison should not be exaggerated, of course. The painter does not create atoms. The novelist does not summon matter from the void. Every artist works with materials already given: pigments, sounds, language, memory, the accumulated inheritance of every person who has ever lived.

But creation does not require absolute beginnings. A musician does not invent sound. A poet does not invent words. A painter does not invent light.

The miracle lies in arrangement. The universe provides the alphabet. The artist discovers sentences that have never been written.

And this is where we return, finally, to Kant.

The noumenal world — the world beyond appearance — remains inaccessible. We cannot step outside consciousness and compare our experience with reality as it exists independently of every possible observer. The window cannot be removed from the building so that we may look directly at the glass.

But perhaps we have misunderstood the significance of the window (I warned you we’d get back to this). We imagine that its purpose is merely to let us see what lies beyond. Yet a window does something else.

It frames. It selects. It creates a relationship between inside and outside.

A landscape viewed through one window is not the same landscape viewed through another. The frame does not falsify the world. It makes a particular encounter with the world possible. Every consciousness is such a frame. Every work of art is a new frame placed upon existence.

This does not solve Kant’s problem.

It transforms it.

The question was never simply whether we could escape appearance and reach the thing-in-itself. The more interesting question is what kinds of appearances we are capable of creating. The phenomenal world is not merely the world given to us. It is also the world we participate in shaping.

We are not passive recipients of reality's appearances. We are among the sources from which new appearances emerge.

This is why the artistic act feels, at its highest moments, like discovery. The artist often speaks of finding rather than inventing. The composer says the music was already there and was mysteriously channelled through her. The novelist says the characters revealed themselves. The painter says the painting told her where to go.

Such language sounds artsy-fartsy esoteric until one remembers that much of human creativity occurs beneath the level of conscious intention. The mind is not a solitary author sitting at a desk. It is an ecosystem of memories, sensations, influences, accidents and intuitions accumulated over a lifetime. The conscious self receives something from depths it does not entirely understand.

The artist, like the philosopher, encounters a mystery. The difference is that the artist answers by making art.

This may explain why certain works of art produce a feeling strangely close to the experiences described by mystics. Not because art reveals a hidden realm with certainty, but because it temporarily alters the relationship between self and world. We are no longer merely looking at something. We are participating in an act of recognition: Yes, this was possible. Yes, this way of seeing existed. Yes, the world contained this possibility all along.

The experience is not proof of Kant’s noumenal. But it may be the closest analogue available to finite beings.

The final pages of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse provide perhaps the most delicate expression of this idea. Character Lily Briscoe, returning years after the events that shaped the novel, completes the painting she has struggled with throughout the book. Her achievement is not simply that she has finished a picture. She has resolved, however briefly, a deeper conflict between perception and expression, between the fleeting world she observes and the permanent form she seeks to give it.

The painting does not capture reality. Nothing can. The moment passes. The light changes. The people we love disappear. The experiences that seem most essential often prove the least capable of being held.

And yet something remains. Not a copy of life. A new thing. A new possibility. A new way in which life may be encountered. Human creativity has woven itself into the fabric of the universe. Maybe not the noumenal world per se. But numinous for sure.

That’s the quiet answer art offers to Kant’s great division. We may never cross from the phenomenal realm into the noumenal. The wall may remain. The ultimate nature of reality may continue to withdraw beyond every instrument, every equation, every act of perception.

But as my friend Peter in the Laurentians and John in Montreal and Kim in Saskatoon and Paul in Victoria have known all along, we are not merely prisoners behind the wall. We are also builders. We frame windows.

And occasionally, through one of those windows, a new light enters the world. It is the light of Lily Briscoe’s revelation:

Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was — her picture. Yes, with all its green and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.