Our Construction of Reality: Kant and the Power of the Mind

A rationalist in his thinking, concerned purely with reason—the intellectual processes of the mind—and dismissive of physical experience, Plato posited that the physical world is unreal, and that truth and reality lie beyond it in an immaterial world existing outside of space and time.  Immanuel Kant proposed a different strategy for understanding reality.  Kant's strategy shared Plato's framework of dual existences, but demystified the framework and validated earthly existence by claiming that, although there is a world of objective truth beyond human experience, it exists not in some ethereal plane beyond space and time, but rather alongside the subjective world of human experience, which, to Kant, is itself real, valid, and true.  Kant then solved the problems of rationalism and empiricism by proposing a radical method of understanding the division between the objective world and the subjective one.

Escape from Illusion: Plato's Allegory of the Cave and the Matrix

Nearly four hundred years before the birth of Christ, Greek philosopher Plato formulated a startling theory about reality.  The physical realm, Plato taught, is neither real nor the source of any genuine wisdom or enlightenment.  The things in this earthly world are merely illusory, impermanent reproductions of the perfect, unchanging, true essences of objects and ideas.  To achieve wisdom, Plato argued, a philosopher must first awaken to the unreality of the visible world, and then undertake the arduous process of learning to contemplate the reality beyond.  To illustrate this theory, Plato created the Allegory of the Cave, his tale of one man's liberation from a cave of shadow and illusion into the real world beyond.  More than two thousand years later, filmmakers Larry and Andy Wachowski proved the continued relevance of the Allegory of the Cave by repackaging it as The Matrix, a blockbuster science fiction movie about sentient artificial intelligence, computer-generated virtual reality, and one man's liberation from his virtual-reality bondage.

Socrates and Nietzsche

"An unexamined life is not worth living."
-Socrates

Over two thousand years after Socrates made his famous pronouncement, despair is everywhere.  Gifted with health and luxuries once unimaginable, we modern humans go to therapy and take medications to cope with our despair.  Our despair is not the desperation of poverty or enslavement, but a despair of the soul, which causes us, in the midst of our material comforts, to ask, "Is this life worth living?"  And speaking to us from the distant past, Socrates answers, "An unexamined life is not worth living."