Right and Ought: Schopenhauer on Kant

 

In The Basis of Morality Schopenhauer undertakes a wholesale critique of Kant’s moral philosophy. He begins by attacking the very idea of a categorical imperative: morality should not be conceived as consisting of imperatives at all; the concept of the “moral law” is defective; moral rightness should not be analyzed in terms of duties, obligations, or ought-statements; and there are no unconditional obligations anyway. Kant, he thinks, has unknowingly modeled ethics on the Decalogue, which presupposes a “theological ethics”: commands from God, fear of punishment, desire for reward. He writes: “Kant, then, without more ado or any close examination, borrowed this imperative Form of Ethics from theological Morals. The hypotheses of the latter (in other words, Theology) really lie at the root of his system, and as these alone in point of fact lend it any meaning or sense, so they cannot be separated from, indeed are implicitly contained in, it.” (17) A consequence of this assimilation is that ethics emerges as a form of egoism (“Eudaemonism”), since it builds ethics on the (long-term) happiness of the individual. I think Schopenhauer is onto something here and I propose to articulate it in my own way. This has radical consequences for our understanding of the nature of moral value and the way we have to come to talk about morality. The concepts of command, duty, obligation, and ought are not properly speaking moral concepts and should be jettisoned from moral philosophy (!).

            The quickest way to see this is to focus on the imperative as the canonical form of an ethical pronouncement. An imperative utterance has an addressee and an agent, as well as some expectation of reward or punishment (which can take many forms, ranging from approval or disapproval to cash payments or imprisonment). This is part of the semantics of the imperative mood: someone gives the command and there are consequences for obedience or disobedience. Legal propositions are like this. In the case of theological ethics we have God as legislator and enforcer—hence the “divine command” theory. Thus it is in the interests of the addressee (us) to obey the commands, which makes morality a matter of enlightened self-interest. But in fact morality is not like this (true morality), since here we act irrespective of self-interest. So we can’t base morality on these concepts: morality does not issue from commands expressed in imperative form that we must obey or else pay the penalty. God could issue such commands, but without God the idea is pure anthropomorphism. There is no agent of such moral commands and no system of reward and punishment (unlike the law). In fact, as Schopenhauer says, morality has no intrinsic connection to this set of concepts: we have no moral duties or obligations, and there are no moral laws. These concepts belong to theological ethics (or human-based ethics), which is not true ethics. Of course, such duties or obligations can exist alongside ethics, but they don’t form its essence: for we may indeed be rewarded or punished for our response to imperatively expressed commands (by God or by other people). But these facts can’t constitute our moral reasons for acting as we do, on pain of reducing ethics to prudence. The rightness of an action (thought, desire, person) cannot be analyzed as compliance with a moral command. All commands have a conditional or relative structure, being predicated on the existence of a commander equipped with the power of sanction. I obey the command on condition that I want to avoid the consequences of non-compliance. But this has nothing to do with morality proper. Kant’s problem, inherited from the Christian tradition that shapes his moral outlook, and contrary to his intentions, is that he is tacitly assuming a theological conception of ethics, which works from a basis of self-interest. According to Schopenhauer, then, we should separate morality completely from these ideas; it is indeed contradictory to speak of categorical imperatives (imperatives can never logically be categorical) or moral laws or moral duties. That is to try to locate morality in a sphere alien to it—the sphere of commands, consequences, and retributive agents. There is a sharp conceptual separation between the right and good and the imperative form, with all that it implies. There may be a correspondence between the two, but there is no identity, no reduction. We have got used to talking this way because we have lived for so long with theological ethics, but it is the wrong way to talk (to think). It is impossible to base ethics on a foundation of commands.[1]

            It might aid intuition to consider a strange possible world, namely one in which the ruling god is morally imperfect. Suppose the inhabitants of this world are morally superior to their god in respect of moral judgment, so that they find themselves disagreeing with his moral decrees. Suppose, for example, he holds that lying is always wrong, without exception, and will punish you if you infringe this rule. The people in this world realize that this is not morally correct, since there are clear exceptions to such a rule. They will then be confronted with a dilemma: either you obey the god’s rule and thus behave immorally, or you disobey his rule and get into trouble with said benighted god. The god is obliging you to follow his rule (his imperative), but you judge that this obligation is contrary to true morality. If the punishment isn’t so severe, you might disregard this imposed obligation and do what you know is right; if it is severe, you might say “This is morally wrong but I am obliged by my god to do it anyway”. In the same way the law may oblige you to do what you deem wrong—just as your job may require you to carry out certain duties that morally repulse you. This is often the case with what are called contractual duties: you have signed the contract so you are obliged to carry out its commands whether they are moral or not. But you can’t have moral duties or obligations in this sense because there is no enforcer and no contract: morality isn’t an agent with the power to force compliance via the mechanism of self-interest. To suppose otherwise is to commit a category mistake. But what other sense is there? Is it that “duty” and “obligation” are ambiguous, sometimes meaning compliance to an authority and sometimes not? No, we have just got used to thinking of morality in terms of theology, where God is conveniently deemed morally perfect. Then what God commands and what is right never come apart: but that doesn’t imply that we can analyze right and wrong in terms of the concepts of duty and obligation. God may issue infallible imperatives, but the nature of our moral reasons is not analyzable in terms of conformity with these imperatives. But there is no other notion of an imperative; morality itself cannot issue imperatives, save perhaps metaphorically. It may be as if morality commands you to do this and not do that, but it cannot literally do any such thing. So it is a category mistake to suggest that moral rightness is conformity with a categorical imperative (a contradictory concept if Schopenhauer is right). When I say of an action that it is right I am not saying that it is obedient to a categorical imperative (or a hypothetical imperative): that is to import into morality an alien conceptual structure. This is Schopenhauer’s opening criticism of Kant, and he would appear to have a solid point. But the point extends far beyond the details of Kant’s system; it applies to the entire apparatus of duty, obligation, requirement, prescription, law, edict, and directive. Action does indeed follow from morality, but not because morality somehow commands or demands it—morality is not the kind of thing that can do such things. Proper conduct might be entailed by the Good, to put it Plato’s way, but not because the Good (an impersonal being) issues imperatives. After all, imperatives are speech acts, and moral values don’t speak. Neither do they oblige in any ordinary sense (“I was obliged by my hosts to take my shoes off before entering”), so how can they impose obligations?[2]

            How does this point apply to “ought”? Schopenhauer says: “What ought to be done is therefore necessarily conditioned by punishment and reward; consequently, to use Kant’s language, it is essentially and inevitably hypothetical, and never, as he maintains, categorical. If we think away these conditions, the conception of obligation becomes devoid of sense; hence absolute obligation is most certainly a contradictio in adjecto.” (16) Here we may find ourselves losing sympathy for Schopenhauer’s position: surely we can say that we ought to do what is right! But is the connection between right and ought really that tight? In my imaginary possible world the inhabitants might find themselves ruefully reporting, “I know it’s wrong to tell the truth in this case, but I guess I ought to do it anyway or there will be hell to pay from you-know-who”.  And how can “right” mean “ought” in view of the following fact: you can explain why you ought to do something by saying that it is right but not by saying that you ought to do it? Why ought I to give money to charity? Because it is morally right to do so—but not because I ought to (that just repeats the explanandum). There may well be a correlation between right and ought, but we shouldn’t try to analyze the former by the latter. And there is certainly a use of “ought” that is purely egoistic, as in “I ought to take my umbrella with me today”. Then too there is the legal use of “ought”: “I ought not to drive above the speed limit” etc. So it is not clear that ought is the right concept to use in giving the basis of morality; maybe Schopenhauer is right that it belongs to the old theological conception of ethics. At best it has been extended into morality and thereby acquired a moral connotation, but the root notion is non-moral—like obligation, duty, etc. Our language of morals may (must?) reflect our metaphysics of morals, and that may be tainted (soaked) in theological conceptions of right and wrong. Perhaps we do better to stick with the unadorned “right” and “wrong”, “good” and “bad”, “virtuous” and “evil”.[3] The utilitarian may dispense with the notion of ought in the metaphysics of morals, saying simply that it is right to maximize happiness and wrong to cause needless suffering—what we ought to do is none of his concern. At any rate, a foundational use of “ought” needs to persuade us that we are not buying into thinly disguised theological ideas. Certainly we must reckon with forms of words like, “You ought to do such and such or else”.[4]

            How does deontology look if we take Schopenhauer’s strictures to heart? It is commonly formulated using the notions of duty and obligation, but it need not be so formulated. We can say simply, “Lying is wrong, stealing is wrong, murder is wrong, generosity is good, justice is right, equality is desirable”—we need not resort to the imperative mode of moral expression. We need not speak of “prima facie duties” but of “prima facie rights and wrongs”. So deontological ethics would not perish with Kant’s Judeo-Christian imperatival picture of moral discourse (as in the Decalogue). As Schopenhauer observes, Kant just assumed this apparatus at the beginning without much in the way of motivation or questioning; but we are not compelled to follow him. Perhaps this is one of those cases in which ordinary speech is so saturated with questionable metaphysical theory that what it is natural for us to say is false to the underlying realities. We find it hard to get away from the commander-and-enforcer model of morality given (apparently) rigorous shape by Kant. Morality does not consist of super-imperatives but of indicative statements of rightness and wrongness, good and evil, etc. Plato didn’t have much use for this dictatorial apparatus and Eastern religions are not wedded to it either; it is very much a feature of Western Christianized morality founded in Judaic law. It goes along with personified pictures of the world, and with (idolatrous?) religious art, thus failing to do justice to the impersonal abstract nature of morality. Things are just good or bad; no one has to issue shrill imperatives exhorting us to do this or that or face the consequences (e.g. God’s displeasure). From this point of view, the categorical imperative is irrelevant and nonsensical, certainly not the basis of morality. Morality is inherently non-legislative.

[1] Notice how the phrases “morally permissible”, “morally forbidden”, and “morally compulsory” tacitly introduce the notion of an agent; but morality itself can’t permit or forbid or compel—only agents can do these things. An odd kind of animism pervades such moral language.

[2] We speak of being “morally obliged” and “legally obliged”, but these must be completely different senses of the term “obliged”: the latter implies legal sanction imposed by humanly created laws, but the former implies no such thing. Why do we speak in this misleading way? Perhaps we mean by “morally obliged” something like “will be criticized morally for not doing such and such”, or perhaps we are speaking metaphorically. It seems clear that we are borrowing the legal notion of obligation and applying it to the moral case—quite misleadingly. Morality has no obliging power, unlike the police force and law courts. 

[3] It would be strange (false) to say that God himself has moral duties or obligations or ought to do such and such, yet what he does is clearly right and good. So God doesn’t fit Kant’s theory of the right and good: God isn’t subject to any moral imperative, hypothetical or categorical. When then must we be? Kant’s theologically based theory of morality fails to apply to God!

[4] The prudential “ought” has nothing to do with morality and clearly means “ought given one’s long-term interests”. The same might be said of the putative moral “ought”, which therefore doesn’t really belong with morality. Or are we to say that “ought” is radically ambiguous?

 

Death, Disgust, and a Possum

 

The other day my attention was caught by a bad smell emanating from near the front gate of my yard. Upon closer inspection I discovered a dead animal, evidently a possum. It had clearly been there a few days in hot weather. Flies were buzzing all around it. A regiment of maggots was feeding on it. It smelt appalling. I had to remove it, holding my breath and averting my eyes. It was a paradigm disgust object. It set me wondering again about disgust as it relates to death (it’s dirty work but someone has to do it). This dead animal, we might say, was “alive with death”: it was proclaiming its death, making a spectacle of it, assaulting the senses with the fact of its death. The flies and maggots were literally alive, and they were the palpable proof of death. Often death looks like a mere absence: we speak of a “lifeless corpse” that could just as well be asleep and which might wake up at any moment. It doesn’t look dead—unlike my possum. We might know it is dead, but it might turn out not to be (life is still an epistemic possibility). We could say that the body is passively dead, whereas my dead possum was actively dead—aggressively and vehemently so. And disgust flowed from it. Death was rendered palpable, perceptible, a datum of sense. It was undeniable. Imagine if this was always so: as soon as an animal dies it undergoes a perceptible change, possibly a spectacular change—it suddenly disintegrates or changes color or becomes covered in warts or smells of sulfur. The death would be a perceptible quality not a hypothesis: it would appear real—a presence not an absence. The animal is not just no longer alive but presently dead, floridly so. Wouldn’t this change our attitude towards death? Wouldn’t death, being so out in the open, seem like a solid observable fact—indubitable and unavoidable. When I saw that possum I saw (and smelled) its death: its death flooded into my brain, my consciousness. I knew that death is real—including my own death. Don’t we habitually regard our own death as rather hypothetical, as not quite real, a rumor not a fact? We believe it will happen but we don’t viscerally sense it. But we could have a far more vivid sense of death’s reality—we could encounter it as an inescapable fact. The rotting corpse, alive with death, presents an impression of death. The possum could not just be “playing possum”; it was unambiguously dead. When you smell a rotting corpse you smell death—you don’t just conjecture it. The feeling of disgust brings with it these intimations, intuitions, and impressions. Death impresses itself on you as your senses recoil in disgust—not just as a thought would, but as a felt reality. It passes from the abstract world to the concrete world: the Form of Death (as Plato would say) becomes an empirical datum. We move from the Cave to the Grave, as it were: from a flimsy concept of death, a mere shadow of the real thing, we are suddenly confronted by a vivid display of it. Of course this is disturbing, because now we can’t keep death at arm’s length (I had to physically remove the body with broom and bucket). All our methods of death denial are circumvented and death hits us hard—its active malevolence becomes apparent. The disgust we feel at the rotting corpse is bound up with these psychic realities—our deep lifelong fear of dying, our horrified knowledge of our finiteness. We carry within us a psychological formation dedicated to death (the “death module”), which operates in us all the time (see Heidegger), occasionally emerging when death obtrudes itself; but it is especially active when death becomes part of the perceptible world—as in the spectacle of the rotting corpse (so sad, so revolting). No wonder disgust is such a powerful and disturbing emotion: it taps into our deepest anxieties, terrors, and disquiets. That poor possum reminds us of what we are as mortal biological beings—food for worms, walking death certificates, future nuisances for the living (the body has to be disposed of). I dropped it in the trashcan and went on with my life.[1]

 

[1] Other disgust objects such as disease and excrement partake of the same psychic formation: they elicit the same complex of death-directed attitudes, though less forcefully. We know we need food to live and that without it we would die, but also that all food is killed in the process, leading finally to the excremental corpse. The idea of eating is bound up with the idea of dying. In the case of disease the connection with death is even closer. The rotting corpse is the basic case, however, the shining exemplar. It radiates death, makes an art form of it almost. Notice that zombies occasion disgust in us, because they render death active and alive; by contrast, the recently deceased do not occasion the same reaction, because they are not so deep in death. It all depends on how salient death is, how apparent to the senses.

 

The Frog Crawl

 

The kick in swimming the crawl adds little to forward momentum, maybe ten or fifteen percent of the power. All the power comes from the arms. In the breaststroke the frog-like movement of the legs adds much more to propulsion, about forty percent I would estimate. The arms have less power than in the crawl (question: why?). Reflecting on these facts the other day it struck me that combining the arm movements of the crawl with the leg movements of the breaststroke would maximize power. Yet nobody ever does it, recreationally or competitively. I surmised that the reason is that this combination is physiologically impossible because of the disparate nature of the two sorts of movement. Theoretically the frog crawl would be the best stroke, but physiologically it isn’t feasible. I decided to put it to the test. It was certainly unnatural for the first few minutes, as one would expect, but it was by no means impossible. It was exhausting to be producing that much bodily movement, but it wasn’t something my body and brain couldn’t accomplish. Within ten minutes I was doing the frog crawl quite comfortably—and moving a lot more quickly. Practice confirmed theory. After half an hour trying out different variants of the new stroke it was second nature and it felt strange to go back the old kick. I had discovered a new way to swim! I venture to suggest that this is the natural way to swim “free-style” because your legs want to generate some power and not just trail behind you in a rather pointless shuffling action. You no longer feel that your arms are dragging you through the water with no real help from your legs; instead your legs are producing solid forward motion for your arms to modify and augment. I felt astonished alone there in the pool with no one to tell my discovery to. But why is this not generally known? Is it just the power of custom and habit (Hume)? Surely it has been thought of and rejected for some reason—but what? Later I tried to research the question via Google, but I found nothing to indicate that anyone recognized the existence of the frog crawl—and its superiority. So I am announcing it now, wondering if in fact the idea has already been mooted. It has certainly changed the way I swim from now on. I’m not going back to the old style.

 

 

Seeming

 

Seeming is a pervasive feature of conscious life. We (and other animals) are constant subjects of seeming: things are forever seeming this way or that to us. It now seems to me that there is a red cup in front of me, that Sebastian is in a good mood today, and that seeming is a worthwhile topic for philosophical investigation. Consciousness could almost be defined by way of seeming: it is a center, a hub, of seeming. What it is like to be x is how things seem to x, and where there is seeming there must be consciousness. Sentience is seeming. Oddly, our vocabulary for it is quite limited: in addition to “seems” we have “appear” and how things “strike” us, but not much else. Synonyms are thin on the ground, despite the ubiquity of the phenomenon (is this a sign of poor comprehension?). What exactly is seeming? It might be thought to be a species of belief, perhaps the tentative kind: if it seems to you that p, then you (tentatively) believe that p. While there is certainly a correlation between seeming and believing, it would be wrong to define the former by the latter, since it is possible to disbelieve what seems to you to be the case (or to be neutral about it). If you have reason to believe you have been hallucinating recently, you may distrust your senses and reject the appearances they offer to your faculty of judgment. Seeming may be something like an invitation to belief, but you can decline the invitation. Nor is belief sufficient for seeming: I believe the Sun is 93 million miles away, but it doesn’t seem to me that way. Seeming looks like a sui generis state of mind, not to be assimilated to belief. It is also shared by different sense modalities and indeed by other modes of knowing: both sight and hearing (etc.) provide us with occasions of seeming, so the nature of seeming cannot be defined in terms of specific types of experience. What we can say is that all knowledge depends on episodes of seeming: we can’t know things without things seeming a certain way to us. Seeming plays a vital epistemological role. What we believe depends ultimately (sometimes directly) on how things seem to us. So it would be good to know what seeming is, how it is to be analyzed. When it seems to me that p what kind of mental state am I in?

            The answer might seem straightforward (note how frequently we use the word): I am in a subjective state that has representational content (intentionality, reference). In short, seeming is experience. But that can’t be right as stated, because mental images fit that specification: they are subjective states with representational content, but they are not states in which the world seems to be a certain way. Mental images are not hallucinations and do not present themselves as such. I am not tempted to believe what they represent; they don’t function as evidence for me. Here we might reach for the concept of the sense datum: a seeming is a sense datum, a constituent of perceptual consciousness. This suggestion encounters a problem with non-sensory seeming, unless we enlarge the concept of a sense; but there is a subtler problem, namely that the sense datum, as traditionally conceived, is too weak to add up to real seeming. The intuitive idea is that a sense datum is an intrinsic state of consciousness that transparently presents itself to the knowing subject—not very different from a pain or tickle (“My visual field is yellowish”). But why should that add up to a way the world seems? The sense datum is conceived as a floating element of consciousness—a quale in modern terminology—but where is the idea of how things seem in that conception?  Couldn’t such an entity be present in consciousness and not strike the subject as pointing to how things external to him actually are? The sense datum is too neutral, too isolated within itself, too uncommitted. It is too much like an image or idea or concept: it doesn’t carry within it the element of world-directed commitment. It just hangs there. You can see what I am driving at by consulting the dictionary: the OED gives an admirably concise and abstract definition of “seem”—“give the impression of being”. We could choose to build this into the notion of a sense datum, but the traditional notion is not so understood. There are two aspects to the definition: being and impression. Seeming is the appearance of being—existence, reality, externality. It isn’t a neutral quality of consciousness: it points outwards; it has (purported) objectivity. This is more than mere intentionality, since that is compatible with the fictional or subjective status of the intentional object. But in the case of seeming we have apparent reality. When visual experience makes it seem to you that there is red cup in front of you it makes that state of affairs seem real—objectively real, really there. The concept of seeming is connected to the concepts of fact and truth; indeed, it is up to its neck in the idea of an objective, shared, external reality. All seeming is existential seeming (unless explicitly about fictional entities). The senses make the external world real to consciousness (whether or not it really is). If it seems to you that p, then it seems to you that it is true that p (factual, part of being). Seeming is ontologically committed. It isn’t ontologically neutral like traditional sense data or physical stimuli impinging on the sense organs. You need not believe what it purports to reveal, but it certainly has strong opinions (as it were). Seeming is a realist: it affirms the transcendent. The second element is the concept of impression: in seeming you have the impression of reality; you are affected that way. The seeming makes a certain impact on you. Not necessarily a belief, but some sort of mental effect (the word “impress” can mean “make a mark or design on (an object) using a stamp or seal”: OED). You have, as we say, the distinct impression that things out there are thus and so—really thus and so. You may be cut to the quick by this impression, or elated by it, or sublimely indifferent to it. How things seem concerns the self: it is the self that is impressed by the (apparent) encounter with being. But this fact—the fact of having the impression that p—fits none of the standard mental categories, being neither belief nor sensation. It is sui generis and rather puzzling, despite its familiarity. Seeming is neither assent nor feeling, but somehow something in between. It concerns reality and is clear in its commitments, but it isn’t a type of belief—though it functions as an invitation to belief. We might say it belongs to its own mental faculty, alongside the faculties of belief formation, imagination, emotion, etc. It provides input to other faculties but isn’t a special case of them.[1] It demonstrates the variety of the mental (and the dangers of that overarching concept). The seeming faculty is in the business of providing impressions of being (though it can fail in its mission), which we must evaluate in order to arrive at beliefs. These impressions are useful and sometimes impressive (waterfalls, mountains, whales) and no doubt serve a biological purpose. But they are rather mysterious, being neither fish nor fowl. It is hard even to talk about them: we are left with the bare claim that the mind is capable of entertaining impressions of reality that don’t ascend to the level of belief (but do go beyond mere subjective items).

            We can now define “seems”, notwithstanding its puzzling status. It seems to an organism that p if and only if the organism has an experience in which it has the impression that p. More briefly, seeming is having an experience-based impression of being. Here we leave “impression” as undefined (the dictionary is no help); it must be taken as primitive. All we can say is that it is not a case of belief (or disposition to belief). Such states, however, are the basis of all knowledge. Hamlet’s famous line “Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not ‘seems’” encapsulates a good deal about seeming: its relation to being and its puzzling status. The traditional philosopher would put “is” after “I know not” (skepticism etc.), assuming that how things seem can be known; but Hamlet seems (!) to be saying that he doesn’t know anything about seeming. What is this strange seeming, this curious hybrid, this committed agnostic? I understand “To be or not to be”, but what are we to make of “To seem or not to seem”? I know not that, Horatio. Poor Hamlet, he doesn’t even know how things seem, let alone what really happened to his father or the nature of the afterlife! Our ordinary language also seems to be in some doubt on the matter: there are verb and adjective forms of “seem” (“seems” and “seeming”), but there is no noun form, as if English is reluctant to engage in the ontology of seeming. I have spoken in noun form of “a seeming” and “seemings”, as if there are such things, but that is not regular English. English, like Hamlet, knows not “seemings” or “a seeming”. Yet seeming seems real (I have the strong impression that seeming has being)—there are seemings of seemings. But they are puzzling conceptually; perhaps this is why they are seldom discussed, or assimilated to something else. We need a philosophy of seeming (not of physical sensory inputs or amorphous “sense data”); in particular, we need a better understanding of the notion of “impression”. Perhaps seemings are supervenient on other mental phenomena such as experiences of one kind or another, but we should be wary of any attempt to reduce them to such a basis. Do experiences cause seemings? Is it because of experiences that things seem a certain way, even though seemings strictly transcend experiences as such? Or are the things we call “experiences” really compounds of seeming and some more primitive sensory material? And how do experiences make an impression on the subject, whatever that effect is exactly? Hume spoke of impressions and ideas, recognizing that the senses do more than just parade ideas before our minds, but he said nothing to explain what an impression is, i.e. what it is an impression of and what it is an impression to. We are constantly having impressions of this or that, but what this operation amounts to remains obscure. Metaphorically, it is something like an imprinting (a type of denting), but that tells us little of any theoretical use. All knowledge therefore rests on something we don’t understand.[2]

 

[1] Someone might try saying that seemings are the beliefs of the perceptual modules, potentially in competition with the beliefs of the central system, as in cases of visual illusion (see Jerry Fodor’s The Modularity of Mind). But that is an anthropomorphic picture of the perceptual systems: nothing in you believes that the lines of the Muller-Lyer illusion are unequal (assuming you know the illusion). The seemings of the senses are completely non-doxastic. It is merely as if your visual system believes what it delivers. Belief is really the icing on the cake not fundamental epistemological reality.

[2] If we say all knowledge rests on observation, we tacitly bring in the idea of seeming: an observation is a mental act in which something seems to be the case. That is, observations are precisely conscious states that embed an impression of being: the observer is affected by reality in a certain way and he seems to himself to be so affected. We can’t avoid admitting seeming into the epistemological picture in favor of something (seemingly) less obscure. Seeming is inescapable.