The Veil of Perception
Hello, Five O'Clockers!
It’s been a couple of weeks—thanks for your patience. I imagine you’ve all missed me terribly. (Haha.) Life has thrown some weightier matters my way recently, including the passing of my mother. That kind of event rearranges your mental furniture, and I just ran into a chair.
But I haven’t been idle.
Over on Rodrigo Vanegas’s Substack, Two Hands, I’ve been engaging in a lively back-and-forth with him about one of philosophy’s deepest riddles: the nature of knowledge—subjective and objective. We’ve been chewing on the question of whether we can truly access reality “as it is,” or whether we’re always, inevitably, seeing through a glass darkly—through what’s often called the veil of perception.
You can read our dialogue here: Sight of an Apple
This is classic territory. Kant famously argued that we never encounter the world directly. Our senses, our minds—these are filters, not windows. What we know of the world is shaped by the structure of our own cognition. That’s why two people can walk into the same room and walk out with radically different versions of what happened.
Rodrigo, for his part, is trying to hold the line for objective realism. He offers the idea of seeing an apple.
“I consider the process of conceptualization itself passive. We do not choose to see the apple as an apple. So yes, we are active agents, but neither perception nor conceptualization is among the actions. . . We actively look then passively see; actively touch then passively feel; actively study then passively learn.”
And I... well, I push back. I try to defend the subject—not in opposition to reality, but as its inescapable medium. As I wrote in response:
“When you deny epistemic subjectivity, am I to understand that you would deny that two people—two subjects—might perceive and conceptualize the same apple differently? ... You grant agency, you grant subjectivity, yet you will not let the subject enter the domain of knowledge. Does this not risk reducing ourselves to sophisticated cameras?
When you offer the apple, let me partake.”
We may not get out of our heads to the “real” apple, but we can learn to navigate what’s in there more honestly, more rigorously. That’s its own kind of objectivity—one forged not by escaping subjectivity but by owning it.
So, my dear readers: Where do you stand in this debate?
Can we ever know the world as it is? Or are we always seeing shadows on the cave wall—our own included?
I’ll be back soon with more.
—Theral
I don’t see how anyone can argue that our perception is a window and not a filter. And I think the argument here is simple: there are many aspects of the physical world that we simply cannot sense. Pushing the edges of light and sound frequencies is one example — we can’t hear dog whistles, but dogs can. Our experience of reality is fundamentally constrained by the limits of our perception.
To me the interesting question is what sort of dynamism exists within those constraints. If both me and you were to focus our eyes on the Apple, it is a fact (assuming our vision works) that we will see an Apple. And there’s nothing we can do to change that. To me this is where the realm of “objective” reality sits. Something I like to call “shared perception”. We know for a fact that we all have a shared perception of the world. Language in some sense is the proof of this.
But while we have no choice but to see the apple upon looking at it, our own internal experience of our perceptions will no doubt drastically vary. If I come home after a 12 hour shift in a coal plant seeing an apple will no doubt remind me of my empty stomach. If you come after a 12 hour shift picking apples from an apple orchard all day you’d take it and toss it out the window.
We’ve seen the same Apple, but have we really seen the “same” apple?
We subjectively (actively) experience objective (passive) facts about the world.
I never formally studied philosophy, so I can’t quote the Greeks or anyone who came before or after. This I feel pretty clear on, though. From the time the sperm fertilized the egg, my being has collected exposures and experiences. Like a BB in a pinball machine, I have been bounced around my environment, with impressions of my world being formed by those impacts like silly putty (emphasis on ‘silly’). When I was finally able to hear, see and feel, I absorbed the ideas of others around me, and those ideas, too, helped shape me. Whether I agreed or disagreed, they moved me in some direction or other.
Bottom line, I fall out on the side of filtering. From the unique, life-long-acquired perspective of each individual, a concept of reality is formed. Thus, each of us lives in our own filter bubble. From within that bubble, we evaluate what we continue to hear, see and feel. The filter can sieve out what doesn’t line up with the worldview we have formed. It can distort and deflect incoming information. But, new information can also sometimes get through the filter and may reshape our worldview.
So, I think we experience the world through a filter, but that does not render invalid the conclusions we reach about the nature of what we have experienced.