Reality and Fiction

Two hundred years ago, when Immanuel Kant expounded on his revolutionary concept of human understanding of the world, it seemed as though a steadfast path had been found to differentiate between reality and fiction. ¹ In his system, Kant had clearly separated the realm of reality from the world of our imagination and conceptualized both areas. Reality, the "thing as such," exists outside of our world of ideas. The reality with which we operate is that of our imagination and comprehension in which the actual reality is inevitably formed through the means of categories of understanding that we have created for this purpose. How a "thing" actually looks we do not know and cannot experience because we approach all "reality" with our categories of understanding. But it is not ultimately important for us to recognize the "thing as such" because, according to Kant's comforting message, our thought categories are innate and are the same for all humans. Thus, although reality itself does not appear in our minds, the same image of it appears in the minds of all people. Human relations in the world do not require absolute reality. It is sufficient that all humans have the same deduced, secondary experiences of reality on the basis of the homogeneity of our categories of understanding.