our perception rather than reality

Do we really know "reality"? We know our perception of reality, but not "reality." Imagine if our only sense was a pair of infrared eyes--assume we had no other senses. We would not know what music is, why sex is pleasurable, what a ice cube feels and tastes like. In fact, we wouldn't be able to see an ice cube because it emits no heat. Thus, our senses, our faculties determine what our perception of reality is, never "reality."

Consider a tape recorder. A tape recorder, being the kind of instrument it is, can capture only one mode or aspect of reality: sound. Tape recorders, in this sense, can "hear" but they cannot see or touch or smell. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond the reach of a tape recorder. The same, Kant says, is true of human beings. We can apprehend reality only through our five senses. If a tape recorder apprehends reality in a single mode, human beings can perceive reality in five different modes: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. There is no other way for us to experience: reality. We cannot, for example, perceive reality through sonar in the way that a bat does. Our senses place absolute limits on what reality is available to us.

Moreover, the reality we apprehend is not reality in itself. It is merely our experience or "take" on reality. Kant's point has been widely misunderstood. Many people think that Kant is making the pedestrian claim that our senses give us an imperfect facsimile or a rough approximation of reality. Philosophical novelist Ayn Rand once attacked Kant for saying that man has eyes but cannot see, and ears but cannot hear—in short, that man's senses are fundamentally deluded. But Kant's point is not that our senses are unreliable. True, our senses can fool us, as when we see a straight twig as bent because it is partly submerged in water. Human beings have found ways to correct these sensory distortions Kant is quite aware of this, and it is not what he is after.

Kant's argument is that we have no basis to assume that our perception of reality ever resembles reality itself. Our experience of things can never penetrate to things as they really are. That reality remains permanently hidden to us. To see the force of Kant's point, ask yourself this question: how can you know that your experience of reality is in any way "like" reality itself? Normally we answer this question by considering the two things separately. I can tell if my daughter's portrait of her teacher looks like her teacher by placing the portrait alongside the person and comparing the two. I establish verisimilitude by the degree to which the copy conforms to the original. Kant points out, however, that we can never compare our experience of reality to reality itself. All we have is the experience, and that's all we can ever have. We only have the copies, but we never have the originals. Moreover, the copies come to us through the medium of our senses, while the originals exist independently of our means of perceiving them. So we have no basis for inferring that the two are even comparable, and when we presume that our experience corresponds to reality, we are making an unjustified leap. We have absolutely no way to know this.

- Dinesh D'Souza