Kant’s Revolution & The Perception's Limits

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from the 1700s. His contributions to metaphysics (questions relating to the nature of reality) and epistemology (questions relating to knowledge) profoundly shaped all philosophers who came after him. This is all because he went about philosophy in a unique way.

(A quick precursor: it’s worth mentioning that until the 1700s, philosophy was basically the same thing as science. Until scientific tools like microscopes and telescopes came about, the best way to understand more about our empirical world was to just think about it. So, for most of human history, philosophers were the same as scientists. It’s worth keeping that in mind as you read on!)

Before Kant, philosophers had tried to answer questions such as: what is the soul? Is all matter made of the same substance? What can we have knowledge of? And does God exist?

Kant, instead, began by asking a more fundamental question: how do we attain knowledge of the world? What conditions must be satisfied in order to have any knowledge at all?

Kant claimed that we could only enquire about the nature of our world when this was answered satisfactorily. Kant’s answer to this question, and the consequences of his answer, form what’s known as his ‘critical philosophy.’

Buckle up for this.

Kant’s main idea is this: instead of humans passively receiving information from the world around us, via the sensory data collected by our sense organs, the human mind instead actively plays a part in shaping the world that we experience. This means that everything which we experience does not come to us already shaped. Instead, we play a part in shaping how our experiences are structured.

As he writes:

The direction of explanation changes: instead of the limits of what we experience being the limits of our cognition, it is the limits of our cognition itself that become the limits of what we can experience. The world which we have an experience of is thus only a world of appearances and not any underlying objective reality.

This idea is not that controversial: current research in neuroscience and psychology agrees with this broad idea. Anil Seth, a cognitive neuroscientist and the co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, even describes perception as your brain ‘hallucinating’ the conscious reality you experience.

It also fits with our understanding of how animals perceive the world. Consider dogs: all dogs are red-green colour-blind, so cannot perceive the same range of visible light that humans can.

A consequence of this is that all we ever experience is a world of appearances. We never directly experience any kind of objective reality, which Kant refers to as “the world as it is in itself,” or “Ding an sich” for the Germans reading. It’s beyond our limits of perception.

Kant’s new framework for how we experience the world was revolutionary; he’s often compared to Copernicus, who first posited that our Earth orbits the Sun, rather than vice versa.

When Kant was alive, philosophers were unable to explain how one event caused another (look up Hume’s problem of causality, if you’re interested); meanwhile, Newton and others were making leaps and bounds in the fields of mathematics and early physics. Kant’s project was thus incredibly important. He provided a metaphysical system that was able to ground the objectivity required by the scientists.

But what does this mean for us magicians?

Broadly speaking, in most magic tricks, a magician creates an illusion by manipulating a spectator’s perception and/or expectations of how the natural world functions. The entire point of a magic trick is to create an impossible experience, i.e., an experience that seemingly violates the laws of nature.

This is why, as a magician, I find Kant’s philosophy so interesting. Kant argues that those laws of nature literally come from us. Concepts such as causality don’t exist independently of human minds. Instead, it’s something we are born with: being a human being means seeing things in terms of cause and effect. Causality is only real by virtue of human beings perceiving two things as causally related. We can never truly know the world as it is in itself because our perception and understanding are always limited by the categories and concepts of our mind.

So, what are the takeaways here for a magician?

There are a few options here.

One is a presentational approach: you could explain to your audience the dry technical terms of the Kantian project, emphasising the importance his academic theories have in the history of philosophy, and then move on to showing some magic tricks, explaining how, in the action of making a coin disappear you’re tricking the categorisation schemes their mind places on the world and disrupting their cognitive processes.

But I think the better option is just to keep this in mind for you as you perform. I love philosophy like this because, if we subscribe to Kant’s theory, it reminds us that we really are so small and the world is something much bigger. The True world, the world as it is in itself, is literally unknowable in every single sense. I find that awe-inspiring and powerful.

And magic is a way to make someone experience that feeling.

Sure, as the magician, I know that I’m doing double lifts and false transfers, but someone who witnesses my magic and believes it gets a different experience. They get a peek behind the curtain; a glimpse at a piece of knowledge that hints that the world is maybe, just maybe, bigger than just what we perceive. Maybe there is some form of existence just beyond the limits of our perception.