Why Kant made me believe in magic
[002] In which I relate my journey from atheist materialism to belief in the supernatural.
The Bible tells of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. I reckon that’s as good a metaphor as any.
This is hard for me to write. I’m not talking about trauma or emotional triggers or my need to be vulnerable or any of that millennial whining crap that gets clickbait traction. It’s about the hardest thing for a human to admit: That I was wrong.
From my teens and through my twenties, I self-identified as the hardest-core of “rational skeptics”, a devoted materialist and atheist whose disbelief rose to a fervor on par with the fanatical Christians I claimed to disdain.
By my early 30s, a little over ten years ago, my intense faith in disbelief was already crumbling under my own doubts. Then a chance encounter with Immanuel Kant ended it forever.
Kant’s hardly a household name these days, but the impact of his work on philosophy, science, and even — indirectly — on the geopolitics of the 20th century can’t be overstated.
The key idea of Kant’s philosophy, set out in the Critique of Pure Reason, is simple to write out:
There is no knowledge free from the contributions of the mind.
What that means, how Kant got there and defended himself, that’s not so simple. There’s a dash of rationalism and empiricism, a complete and total revolution in the relationship between the mind and the world, and some of the densest philosophical prose ever set to paper. We don’t need to get into the details.
Here’s quick breakdown.
Look at any ordinary object in front of you.
An apple, a cup of coffee, a pencil. It seems to be “just there”, doesn’t it? Nothing unusual in this.
But if you spend too much time in philosophy class, you’ll start to ask strange questions. Is the cup really there? What about that striking shade of blue? Pick it up and you feel the weight of it, the leftover warmth of the cooling coffee.
The question of which of these qualities are “in the thing”, and which are brought to it by the human mind, is a deep puzzle. The general thrust of modern philosophy has been to filter two different kinds of qualities. One sort can be known to anyone, anywhere, without concern for perspective. Call these objective. The other sort depends on the point of view of the observer. Call these subjective.
There’s been some controversy about this but for the most part, if we can measure it with a ruler or a scale and assign it a numerical value, we classify it with the objective kind.
Everything else belongs to the subjective category, meaning that we bring it to the party. This includes the majority of what we experience through the five senses (minus what can be quantified), along with emotions, feelings, intuitions, and objects of imagination.
Kant’s thinking broke philosophy when he pointed out that both the “objective” and “subjective” side of this division presuppose some kind of organizing principle at work in the background.
What could that be?
The principle agenda of 18th century European philosophers concerned what we can know and how we know it.
The debate formed battle-lines between rationalists, who held that the mind comes equipped with innate ideas, and empiricists, who denied innate ideas, arguing that all knowledge comes through experience.
Kant found himself troubled by the skeptical consequences of David Hume’s radical empiricism. If Hume was right, science itself had no rational, universal foundations; we couldn’t have secure knowledge of anything, from the Newtonian science to our most cherished moral ideals.
Kant responded by flipping the table, asking a different question:
How is experience possible?
Simple enough. But in asking it Kant knocked European thought right off its square.
Instead of asking about the objects and qualities existing “out there”, which is the way of metaphysics dating back to Socrates, what we’re interested in is how the mind must operate if we’re to have knowledge of anything. That includes objects in the external world as well as the thoughts and experiences in our own mind.
This is known as Kant’s “Copernican turn”. Instead of viewing reality as “revolving around” the human mind, with the goal of giving a rational story about the universe, what if it’s our own minds that “revolve around” reality?
What if our goal is not to explain existence, but to give a critical accounting of our mental function, such as it makes possible all our thoughts and experiences?
Since we do have experiences and (we hope) knowledge of the world, what must be true for that to be the case?
Kant’s answer is that some of the mind’s activities are necessary conditions on any thought or sensation.
The operations of reason in the mind works like an empty bowl. Any liquid you pour into the bowl takes the shape of the bowl. The sensations we receive from the outer world are the “liquid” filling the “bowl” of the mind’s shape.
Any perception of objects, any thought in our own minds, is a product of the mind’s form meeting the content received from the world. The human point of view is impossible to escape. Every human being experiences the world from a human point of view, limited by the form and activity of the human mind.
There is no “God’s-Eye View” of reality free of a human perspective.
After Kant, the aim of philosophy is no longer to explain the world by speculating from the armchair. The proper purpose of philosophy is to discover the transcendental limits of thought and experience — to understand the mind’s own limits from within itself.
Once you understand the significance of this idea, it’s impossible to be a blind believer in doctrines like “materialism” and “atheism”.
You can no longer “follow the science”, as if science has a special purchase on the world independent of human understanding and experience.
Kant doesn’t argue that science is a lie or “relative” to human subjectivity, by the by. Quite the opposite. He takes the Galilean and Newtonian revolutions at face value. What physical science tells us is true. It’s just that the truths of physics only get us to the parts of reality knowable through the senses.
The operations of the mind transcend empirical reality and theoretical understanding, which means empirical science has nothing to tell us about them. You would just as soon expect your unaided eye to turn around and show itself to you.
The critical philosophy opened the way to question the skeptic’s argument that natural science is suited explain everything about the mind and the world. Science’s methods already depend on human forms of knowing and experiencing as their necessary background.
It’s worth paying attention here. This is the step that trips up newbs to the Critique.
Kant’s insight is about the necessary limitations of human cognition. The target of the attack isn’t experimental science or scientific truth, but rather at the conclusions we can draw from them. Science is well and good. What is not so good is drawing extravagant metaphysical conclusions from its truth.
Various doctrines called “mechanism” and “materialism” and “atheism” seem to follow from the truths of science. Kant shows us that this is a mistake. We aren’t in any position to draw these wide-ranging conclusions about the true nature of What Is behind the appearances.
The price of scientific knowledge is that the Ding an sich, the Thing In Itself, is a necessary limit of knowledge, forever and always beyond our access. We only know reality as we can know it, as it shows up for us.
None of our knowledge extends to generalizations about How Reality Is Without Us.
Does this strike you as odd? It shouldn’t.
Our best physical theories today, right now, have a persistent problem with observer effects that nobody is quite sure how to resolve. The oddities of wave-particle behavior in quantum physics bring the observing subject into the behavior that the theory is supposed to explain without any subjective contributions. It turns out that quantum physics isn’t the only place that these anomalies turn up.
Indeed, one of my key assumptions, which I’ll explore in future issues, is that mind and subjective qualities are as real as any physical or material objects.
The belief that matter is primary and mind a sort of illusion is an unreasonable dogma of our modern tech-obsessed age.
We believe that reality is primarily material and mechanical, and the experience of our own minds is at best a second-rate illusion, because we’ve been taught to believe it. But like so many popular beliefs, the evidence is sketchy, the reasoning flimsy, the motivations dubious, and in any case, hardly anyone has spent the necessary time thinking about it. It’s not even clear what matter is or how we have a concept of it independent of a human viewpoint.
I haven’t mentioned anything about magic yet, and nor should I. Kant was the arch-rationalist and defender of the enlightenment. Though he defended the existence of God and moral freedom (and I have no space to get into how), he had no time for such things as occultism or mystical thinking.
Even so, when I first came to see the possibilities opened up by Kant’s critical turn, it was much like being struck blind by a vision of an invisible world I’d never noticed before.
Everything I thought that I knew, and the certainty of how I knew it — through The Science — was shaken to the foundation by a 9.5 shock on the Richter scale.
After that nothing was quite the same.
There is a vast world of ideas and thoughts all around us that we are taught to ignore and demean.
If there is magic, that’s where we’ll find it.
-Matt
P.S. I started this Substack to meet interesting people that would never otherwise find me. I’m using this as my experimental scratch-pad to write about what’s on my mind that doesn’t “fit” anywhere else. That’s going to involve obscure philosophers, occultists, religious cultists, and more.
If this kind of thing bores the crap out of you, expect more of it.
If you enjoy anything I write, I’d appreciate it if you’d give it a share.
Beautiful