I was writing a paper for a class during the past academic quarter, and while researching for said paper, I came across an idea originally posited by Kant called transcendental idealism. Here is Kant’s definition of transcendental idealism, from the Critique of Pure Reason:
I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves…consequently, we can only cognize objects in space and time, appearances. We cannot cognize things in themselves.
I interpret this rather confusingly-worded paragraph as essentially consisting of the recognition that, since we can only perceive the universe through the medium of our senses (e.g., we can’t feel the universe directly), everything that to us forms reality can only be said to exist in our brains. While this may seem like an insight that could even be described as trivial, I believe it is widely applicable to a pretty wide range of important phenomena, perhaps precisely because it constitutes a way of looking at reality that is inherently (and understandably) foreign to us.
For instance, this notion can go a long way towards explaining the sometimes seemingly bizarre qualities that mass interpersonal interactions can take on. Transcendental idealism would hold that the people in our lives only are made real to us as representations in our brains, meaning that we have a natural inclination to fail to cognize the inherent humanity of strangers and those with whom we have spent little time.
As an example of why this matters, consider the now-ubiquitous interpersonal interactions on social media. A Twitter user spouting views you (perhaps rightly) perceive to be ignorant is just that, for all you know — a Twitter user, not a person. As a result, one is inclined to treat such Twitter users very differently than we would treat a close friend who espoused similarly ignorant views. Most people would simply explain this discrepancy by pointing to the fact that you’re “closer” to your close friend, and thus more tolerant of their views. In reality, I think, there’s more to it than that: there’s a fundamental difference in the way that you view their existence.
Transcendental idealism can thus explain a lot of why mass politics can be so rabid and/or unintellectual. It’s easy to berate those awful Wall Street investment bankers when they’re just despicable, selfish people with no concern for others. Likewise, it’s easy to trim the welfare budget when its recipients are just lazy people mooching off the government. The thing is, that those bankers do care about strangers just about as much as you do, and that welfare recipients are really just as self-serving as you (in aggregate, at least.) In other words, this blog post might as well be an advertisement for the school of classical economics that views all humans as rational, profit-maximizing actors. What’s actually really counterintuitive about this economic approach is that it treats other people in a vastly different way than we are accustomed to in real life. This is part of why I think that the viewing of life through an “economic” lens, as useful (and ultimately humanitarian) as it is, is really quite rare.
A slight tangent to back up my thesis about economics being humanitarian: it took until the 1970s or so for crime to be viewed in economic circles as nothing more than the rational actions of self-interested actors (usually those of lesser means.) Until then, policymakers (who by definition were not the ones committing crime) tended to view crime as an example of moral failure, which is understandable, since they couldn’t really cognize the fundamental humanity of criminals. Gary Becker’s famous paper which popularized this economic view of crime was thus incredibly counterintuitive, revolutionary, and humanitarian (and ultimately exemplary of the liberal worldview.) My guess is that the United States’ failure to treat crime in such an economic manner accounts for 90% of the problems inherent in its criminal-justice system.
Unfortunately, this also sheds light on just why the economic view is generally un-pervasive: the illiberal view (that is, the viewing of humans as anything other than such) is supported by almost every interaction we have! It’s particularly bad in online interactions, but it’s also the case in most in-person interactions in Industrialized society. You have no communication whatsoever with 99% of the people with whom you interact on a day-to-day basis beyond looks/stereotypes, etc. Therefore, it’s understandably difficult to think about an entire group of people with whom you have little interaction as fully human. As usual, it’s helpful to remember that humans were evolutionarily designed to live in tight-knit groups of ~100 people, and that the way we currently interact with each other bears almost no resemblance to this.
Is there a solution in sight to this massive systemic problem with every interaction we have? I’d like to think that the advent of brain-computer interfaces will facilitate the development of some technology analogous to the Vulcan mind-meld from Star Trek, and that that technology will finally force us to cognize the humanity of every other human. Knowing humans, though, we’ll probably find some way to create an even bigger problem out of this potential solution. A lot of people thought the internet would perform some function analogous to this, and while they may have been right in some ways, they were very wrong in others.
A few final things: it could be pretty easy to take some aspects of this post out of context, and cite this as an example of my extreme moral depravity. Even if you don’t do this, you might have a hard time stomaching my assertion, for example, that both bankers and welfare recipients are (in aggregate) rational, profit-maximizing, fundamentally human, humans. Either way, you’ve missed the entire point of this post, and you should read it again.
Also, sorry if this post read somewhat like a slightly more intellectual version of “can’t we all just get along?” I maintain a high level of derision for people who legitimately believe this, and fail to undertake any sort of a rigorous analysis of just exactly why people never do seem to get along. Be aware that this post was simply an attempt to explain in analytic terms an aspect of the world that I’ve been thinking about lately, not any sort of a normative statement.
Also, sorry for the long hiatus prior to this post. I haven’t stopped maintaining this blog, and hope to deliver more posts shortly.