Hippies Part 4 - Explorers of Reality

This essay blends two series together: Hippies of the 19th Century, and a forthcoming series called “Explorers of Reality”, which will be a deep dive on the metaphysical explorations that happened around the 17th to 19th centuries.

In this essay, we explore the connection between Kant’s view of a priori knowledge, categories and perception, with William James’ conceptions= of the mind, informed especially by his focus on visionary experience and altered states of consciousness…

In 1772, Immanuel Kant, a professor who had spent years thinking about how the mind works, wrote to his former student Marcus Herz. In the letter, he admitted that he was stuck on one enormous problem: how does the mind connect what is inside us—our thoughts and concepts—to what is outside us—the world of objects? That question became the engine of Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781 and revised in 1787.

Kant’s answer was strange and powerful. He said the mind does not simply sit there and receive reality like a camera. It helps shape experience before we are even aware of it. Some features of experience, he argued, are built into us in advance. This is what he meant by a priori: not something learned afterward from life, but something already there, helping make experience possible in the first place. Two of these built-in structures, he said, are space and time. We do not first discover them by looking around. We experience everything through them. They are like the basic frame through which anything can show up to us at all.

Then came what Kant called the categories. These were the mind’s most basic organizing habits—ideas like cause and effect, one and many, substance, possibility, necessity. In plain English: when things happen, the mind does not just watch chaos pass by. It automatically sorts events into patterns. It sees one thing as causing another. It treats objects as stable things. It groups, separates, compares, and orders. Kant thought that without these built-in mental habits, experience would not be a world at all. It would be a blur.

This was the brilliance of Kant’s system. But it also came with a severe limit. Kant said these mental structures only tell us about the world as it appears to us. He called that world the world of phenomena—the world as filtered through human perception and thought. Beyond that, he said, there may be reality as it is in itself, independent of our way of seeing it. But that reality—the thing in itself, or noumenon—cannot be known directly by us. So Kant’s philosophy was not just about what we can know. It was also about what we cannot know.

Nearly seventy years later, on 11 January 1842, William James was born into a family already unusually open to unseen worlds. His father, Henry James Sr., was fascinated by religion, mysticism, and the Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg. The James household was restless, intense, intellectual. William’s younger brother Henry would later become the novelist Henry James. In that family, questions about perception, consciousness, spirit, illness, and reality were not side issues. They were part of ordinary life.

As a young man, William James suffered periods of depression and fear. In April 1870, at the age of twenty-eight, he recorded what he later described as a turning point. He had been reading the French philosopher Charles Renouvier, who had begun with Kant but pushed in a more personal, less rigid direction. Renouvier argued for freedom, choice, and the active role of the self. After reading him, James wrote the line that became famous: “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

James did not come to philosophy as a detached system-builder. He came to it through nerves, crisis, choice, and private struggle. And over time he grew suspicious of any philosophy that treated human reason as a closed and final system.

Then came one of the strangest figures in the story: Benjamin Paul Blood. In 1874, Blood published a short work called The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy. He claimed that under anaesthetics, especially nitrous oxide, the world seemed to open up. Opposites that looked irreconcilable in ordinary thought suddenly seemed to fit together. Everything appeared to make sense all at once.

James reviewed the pamphlet that same year. Most readers could have dismissed it as nonsense. But James did not. He thought there might be something important in the fact that altered states of mind could produce such overwhelming convictions of insight. He did not simply ask, “Was the revelation true?” He also asked, “What does it mean that the mind can enter states in which reality seems organized differently?”

That question stayed with him. James later tried nitrous oxide himself. He found that it could produce a powerful sensation that hidden truths had been revealed—a sense that reality was larger, deeper, more unified than it appeared in ordinary waking life. But when sobriety returned, the insight often became hard to translate. The feeling of revelation remained vivid; the actual content often dissolved.

James did not think nitrous oxide had handed him a neat new philosophy. Nor did he think a gas had solved metaphysics. But, importantly, what it did do was shake his confidence in the idea that ordinary waking consciousness is the only serious way the mind can encounter reality.

By the time James published The Principles of Psychology in 1890, he was openly wrestling with Kant. He was highly skeptical of the idea of a fixed, controlling structure sitting above experience and ordering it from behind the scenes. Through his personal experience, and his study of visionary experience, he was more focused on the flow of actual consciousness as people lived it.

Later, in Pragmatism, he pushed further. He suggested that our ways of organizing the world might not be eternal, pre-installed truths in the Kantian sense. Instead, our a priori toolkit- our sense of space and time, our categories of cause and effect, substance, possibility…that these a priori, foundational capacities can grow, harden, and change over time. In other words: maybe the mind’s framework is not timeless machinery. Maybe it is partly shaped by life, use, need, and situation.

Then, in 1901 and 1902, James delivered the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, later published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. There he gathered cases of visions, ecstasies, conversions, mystical experiences, and religious crises. He argued that these states often have what he called a noetic quality. That means they do not just feel emotional. They feel like knowledge. They seem to the person undergoing them like glimpses of truth.

And this led James to one of his most important claims: our normal waking consciousness is only one special type of consciousness. Around it, he suggested, lie other possible forms of awareness.

Kant had argued that the human mind comes with built-in ways of shaping experience: space, time, cause, substance, and the rest. These make the world intelligible to us. But James’s experiments and his research into mystical experience raised a disturbing possibility: what if Kant had really described not the permanent structure of reality as such, but the structure of one particular mode of access to reality—the normal, sober, human, waking mind?

This does not make Kant trivial. Far from it. It means Kant may have mapped, with extraordinary precision, the structure of ordinary human experience. But James forces open a question Kant had tried to close: are those structures universal and final, or are they the habits of one finite kind of consciousness?

James did not claim that every trance or drug experience should be accepted as gospel. He was more careful than that. He thought these states could be epistemically serious—meaning they might reveal something real, or at least something important—but not automatically authoritative for everyone else.

To recapitulate, Kant says: this is how the human mind makes a world possible. James replies: perhaps—but perhaps that world is only one version of what reality can look like when filtered through one specific human arrangement of mind. And perhaps there are many, many others…