Buddhist Romanticism

Some typical answers were these:
• The world is just as we perceive it, and it can be understood by working down
to first principles—about what things are in their essence, both in the world and in
the mind—and then deriving our experience from those principles.
• The world exists only in the mind, which is the only essential substance there
is.
• There is no way that we can know the essences of things, for all we know are
representations derived through the senses. We can’t even know if causality is
really at work behind our sense data, because causality can never be seen in action.
Even our self is unknowable. It’s simply an assumption that lies outside the range
of our senses.
Kant gained his reputation as a major philosopher because of the novel
and provocative way he addressed these questions. Instead of focusing on a
quest to confirm or deny essences outside or inside, he looked at the way
consciousness interacted with the input of the senses, showing that the
basic raw material of knowledge is composed not of sense data, but of
judgments about sense data. In other words, what we perceive directly is
not things-in-themselves in the world outside or the self inside, but the
workings of reason in shaping experience in the middle ground. We make
our experience, and—as Kant often said—we know best, not what is, but
what we make.
However, this fact does not prevent us from coming to objective
conclusions about our place in the world, for if we examine, through
introspection, the workings of reason in action, we can penetrate beyond
the subjective content of our experiences to their objective structure or form,
which has to be the same for all conscious, rational beings. In other words,
we learn objective facts about the world of experience by observing the
ways our reason has to shape it. Kant called this approach critical, in that it
took a critical view of the powers and limitations of reason, and
transcendental, in that it sought to discover necessary, objective forms of
conscious activity that transcended the purely subjective level; i.e., all
subjective experience had to presuppose and follow these forms. (Kant’s
meaning of the term transcendental here differs from the meanings that other
thinkers will be using throughout this book, so take note of how these
meanings change.)
One of the consequences of this critical, transcendental approach is that
Kant developed a novel criterion for truth. Because things-in-themselves
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