Zeno and the Tortoise by Nicholas Fearn

Author:Nicholas Fearn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2001-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

15 Kant’s Spectacles

Putting man at the centre of the universe

Hi-fi buffs can detect differences in the clarity of musical recordings that a non-enthusiast would never notice. They devote large amounts of time and money to acquiring amplifiers and speaker systems that produce a sound as faithful as possible to the original performance. But even the most advanced hi-fi system falls short of perfection. At some point in the process from the recording to the playback, impurities creep in that keep the next generation of electronics firms in business. There may come a time, however, when audio technology is so sophisticated that the only limitations an enthusiast will have to suffer are not those of his stereo system, but of the human ear itself. At this point, philosophers will have something to say about hi-fis. Whatever the ear adds or subtracts from a crystal-clear recording will not be a difference in quality, but in kind. We hear sounds the way we do because of the particular structure our ears have. A creature with a different kind of ear – a bat, for example – might hear things quite differently because its auditory system works on a different range of frequencies to our own. Ear canals with different structures affect how things sound to their possessors – just as different kinds of cameras take different kinds of photographs. When we describe a tune we have heard, we are describing not only the sound itself, but also something about the way human ears work. We cannot help doing this, as we have no way of listening other than the one we have. Since the same goes for all our senses, the way we understand the world is partly tied to the faculties we use to arrive at that understanding.

Our perceptions are not purely passive – we do not simply sit and drink them in. Whenever we taste a flavour or hear a sound we are also actively doing something. It is just that our brains are so used to ordering and processing the world that we do not notice them doing it. To perceive the world is to change it. This was the central insight of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. The seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke famously declared that the human mind was born tabula rasa – a blank slate upon which the world leaves its imprints as we learn and grow older. This thought led to the sceptical philosophy of Hume’s Fork, under which the knowledge that we possess innately is trivial and self-referential while significant knowledge can be discovered only through experience and observation. The search for substantial knowledge that could be attained purely through thought was not yet over. Kant was the first philosopher to suspect that there might be some residual innate knowledge hidden from even Hume’s gaze.

Kant was born in Königsberg in East Prussia in 1724. His father was a saddler from what Kant claimed was Scottish immigrant stock, while his mother was an uneducated but highly intelligent German woman.

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