Kant argued that we can never perceive reality directly or know what things are “in themselves.” All we can perceive is things as they appear to us, through our eyes, ears and other senses—but those appearances, he asserted, are shaped and distorted by the nature of our senses. He posited that there are basic abstract “categories” built into our minds that impose themselves on our perception, that make things appear to us in a certain way, regardless of what things really are, independent of us. All our perceptions are shaped by “a priori concepts,” concepts formed not from observation and experience but implanted in our very nature, “to which all objects of experience must therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree.”
The advantage of this theory is that it allows us to confidently assert that our perceptions will always match our abstract assumptions, because they cannot do otherwise. The price, however, is that this theory cuts us off from reality, trapping us inside a delusion of our own making. There is no absolute truth, only our “perception” of the truth as shaped by who we are.
It’s a winding road from here to wokeness, but I think you can begin to see where it starts: with the idea that perception is more powerful than reality and that it all depends on your own identity.
In the 20th century, Ayn Rand summed up the contradiction in Kant’s philosophy: the idea that “man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.”