Oct 27, 2026 05:51 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 27, 2026 06:34 PM by Magical Realist.)
The mistaken assumption at the heart of empiricism--that there is a direct and untainted flow of information from physical reality to the knowing mind. That visual perception occurs without interpretation. That hearing speech requires no translation. And that information is transmitted raw without needing to be encoded and decoded. The myth of the sentient presentation of reality free of mental representation. The senses only reveal appearance, freeze-framed and unrelated to anything else. Only by the patterning of such frames by reason does knowledge occur. Reality is made present thru perception but only made intelligible thru conception.
In addition to this, perception is always perspectival and only possible thru being relatable inside the private Umwelt of the creature perceiving:
“...it would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences - and therefore the realities - of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkull, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things.”
― Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture
In addition to this, perception is always perspectival and only possible thru being relatable inside the private Umwelt of the creature perceiving:
“...it would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences - and therefore the realities - of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkull, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things.”
― Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture
