Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [56]
Kant famously claimed, “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”5 Some things can’t be known, but that doesn’t mean they are pointless or meaningless. There are certain concepts, certain ideas we are warranted in believing because a holistic, comprehensive, and coherent worldview demands and depends on them. According to Kant these ideas include things like free will and God.
Free will is the idea of an activity that is spontaneous, that has no cause, that isn’t guided by the laws of physics, chemistry, or biology, operating within you. If it were rule or law bound you’d be determined by those laws, the mere end result of a series of physical processes determined by the laws of nature. But for ethics we demand freedom; namely, that you can spontaneously do whatever you choose. When we think about ourselves we think about ourselves as law governed, as material beings made up of synapses and serotonin that operate according to the laws of nature. But we also think of ourselves as free; that is, as beyond any laws or determinism. So how can we make these views compatible? Does it make sense to think of ourselves as simultaneously determined material organisms and free? Let’s hope so, because without freedom there is no ethics—in fact, there would be no value in the world whatsoever.
Free will, as a concept, seems obvious to all of us. In fact, we may think we experience our free will whenever we choose. We believe that for any action we could’ve done otherwise. And we feel this quite strongly. But prove it. Prove you could have done otherwise in any circumstance. Prove you could’ve not read these words. You can claim you could’ve done otherwise, but there’s no way to prove it, and there’s no way to experience or verify free will since we only experience the effects but never the spontaneous cause. All we have is the hollow claim, “I could’ve done differently.” But it’s impossible to experience our freedom, and so it’s impossible for us to know we are free. But yet we believe it to be so, and for Kant this belief is warranted. Why? Welcome to the noumenal world, a world populated with things that not even Dr. Seuss could’ve imagined, literally.
Since our minds create our experiences by processing data according to its inherent schematic, that means there is a world behind our perceptions that is unknowable, the noumenal world. There is the world we see, that we know, the phenomenal world, and there is the world behind that one. A world we can’t see because our minds aren’t set up that way. Just as we can’t see things in the infrared spectrum even though things exist in it, so does noumenal reality exist even though we can’t experience it. This world is unlike anything you can imagine, since all of your imaginings are governed by the laws of your mind, laws like causality. But these laws are just mental constructs our mind places on perceptible reality to give it coherence; they don’t really exist. The noumenal world is unlike anything you can imagine or comprehend. Even Dr. Seuss’s world looks tame in comparison. All his creatures, kings, and lands, all his oddity and silliness is still law bound. If it weren’t it wouldn’t make any sense and no one would buy his books. Even beyond Zebra, the Spazzim, Itch-a-pods, and Yekko still exist in space and time, are bound by the laws of causality and possess determinate qualities. They have to. If we are going to have an experience of them, then these experiences will be structured according to the format of our brain. So we can know what the Yekko’s howl sounds like, or whether the Itch-a-pods are currently here or there. But noumenal reality is the term given to describe that which lies beyond possible experience, a reality that must exist but which we can’t know or even conceive. Whatever noumenal reality is—whatever really lies