I believe that within the empirical world, the world of material objects in space and time, the principles of scientific explanation apply. They do not explain everything, but at the level of their applicability there are no limits other than those of the world itself to what they can help us to understand, and we should make active use of them to take us as far as they possibly can. However, the empirical world is the world of actual and possible experience, and as such is subject-dependent. Reality as it is in itself, unconnected with us, cannot possibly be of the character of experience, and therefore, since the only ways we can gain any apprehension of it are dependent on the forms of experience, we cannot apprehend or understand it. So independent reality is hidden. This in turn means that the empirical world cannot be all there is. We know this to be a fact for another reason, unconnected with this, namely that we have direct and unmistakable experience of initiating movements of our bodies at will, and this means that we know for certain that some of the movements of some of the material objects in the world do not have their complete explanations in terms of the laws of physics, although we remain at a loss to know how they are to be explained. Personally, I think that our immediate experience leaves no room for doubt that these things are so, but I am forced to take account of the fact that there are people who argue that the conviction we have of possessing free choice is a delusion, and because there are such people it becomes necessary to point out that we have confirmation of the existence of free will independently of our direct experience of it, since if we attribute any significance at all to moral terms, or to evaluative terms in so far as they refer to human behavior (and I believe that in practice it is impossible for a human being not to), then that fact by itself commits us to asserting the existence of free will. So our knowledge that the empirical world is not the whole of reality is over-determined. For this reason, and especially because I have direct and perpetual experience of it as a fact throughout my waking life, I am unable seriously to regard it as being in doubt.

The Kantian account up to this point is a clearly recognizable description of reality as I find it to be in my direct experience of living. Included in this direct experience is the fact that we ourselves as human beings are partly in the empirical world and partly not. Our bodies as material objects inhabit the empirical world. However, there is a part of our selves which can initiate movements of our bodies at will, independently of the laws of physics (though not, of course, contrary to the laws of physics) and which must therefore be outside the empirical world. How it does it--what the relationship is between the willing me and the physical me--is a mystery that has baffled understanding since the beginning of human enquiry. But although I do not know what I am, I know that I cannot be only my body. I know myself to be a being that somehow combines the empirical and the non-empirical. Somewhere within the totality of whatever it is that I am, these two interact, and initiatives pass, or co-relationships exist, between one and the other. Questions about the nature of this connection--and, following on from those, questions about the nature of the non-empirical--are the most urgent and compelling of the questions we are left facing by the end of our study of Kant's philosophy. They are questions that Schopenhauer took up and tried to answer. That he did so, and the degree of originality and success with which he carried out the task, made him Kant's lawful heir.

--Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philoosopher, pp. 160-161

There is a non-religious sense in which when I read the Critique of Pure Reason for the second time I was in search of salvation. Almost overwhelmed by terror at the prospect of inevitable death, I was looking for some shred of hope that I might not be totally and forever annihilated, and that the world and my existence in it might not be meaningless and pointless. Kant's doctrine of the ideality of time and space, were I to believe it, offered me this. For it taught that the forms of time and space were inextricable from experience and its possibility and could have no purchase where they did not obtain. From this it follows that things as they are in themselves, independently of experience, are not in time or space. Without experience there can be no empirical world. If all human beings were to die, and also all other creatures with forms of experience like ours, there would be no question of our world continuing without us in it, for it would cease to exist as well. Kant is explicit about this. "What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things which we intuit are not in themselves as they appear to us, and that if the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish. As appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them--a mode which is peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared in by every being, though, certainly, by every human being. With this alone have we any concern." [Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith, p. 82; not in block quotation in text]

One thing that has always struck me forcefully about this doctrine of Kant's is that it legitimates important components of a belief which he had held since long before he began to philosophize, namely Christian belief. It is a standard part of the traditional Christian faith that time and space and material objects are local characteristics of this human world of ours, but only of this world: they do not characterize reality as such. "Outside" the human world, so to speak (obviously "outside" is a spatial term, and therefore cannot apply literally where there is no space: it is being used here metaphorically), there is a timeless reality where God is, and the immortal souls of people in the human world. God and these immortal souls are not in time and space, nor are they constituted of matter, nor do they live in a world of material objects; but they are all that there eternally is; and since in the human world nothing is eternal--everything perishes--it is they that constitute what one might call "real" reality as against the evanescent world of time and space within which nothing lasts. If one ignores the religious references in the last three sentences they contain a plain statement of Kantian doctrines of space, time, and material objects.

--Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, pp. 248-249

The . . . possibility is that we are not wholly our bodies. These bodies of ours, like all other material bodies, are possible objects of observation and experience, and therefore of empirical knowledge, inhabit the realm of space and time, and are subjected to all the causal processes that are the concern of physics, chemistry, biology and the other sciences, from which there is no escape for them. But it is possible that in addition to bodies we are, or have, selves that are not material entities, are outside space and time, are not impinged on by the causality that governs the empirical world, and for all these reasons are not possible objects of empirical knowledge. The fact that our material bodies are subject to the regularities of Nature, in other words to scientific laws, would be incompatible with what we ordinarily think of as free will if it should turn out to be the case that our choices and decisions are enacted entirely by our bodies--are, for example, nothing but the redistribution of microphysical properties over space within our brains and central nervous systems. But if it should turn out that our choices and decisions are functions of an immaterial self then there would be no incompatibility between their being free ("free" meaning not subject to the regularities of Nature, not subject to scientific laws) and the movements of our bodies consequent on those decisions being subject to scientific laws. In those circumstances the supreme constraint on our freedom of decision would be the impossibility of any consequent movements of our bodies breaking scientific laws: we would not be able to effect any decision that carried with it that requirement. But we would, apparently, be free to choose or decide anything that did not have that consequence. Because physical movements consequent on my decisions would be subject to scientific laws those movements would, in the ordinary way, be predictable, and responsibility for predictable consequences would normally lie at the point of their inauguration. Thus we have here a logically possible explanation both for freedom of action and for the ascription of moral responsibility: an immaterial self outside space and time inaugurates (some of the) movements of a material body in space and time, and is morally responsible for such of the consequences of those movements as are predictable.

Now the striking thing is that some such model as this appears, on the face of it, compatible with a very great deal of our experience, and can therefore be made to appear plausible if presented in a sympathetic way. But it gives rise to fundamental difficulties. How can an immaterial self move a material object? What is the ontological status of this immaterial self? Is its existence dependent on that of a material object, our body? If so, how does it come into being? If not, what is the nature of its apparently specific relationship to a particular body? Can it have only one such relationship, or can it have more than one? When the body dies, what happens to the immaterial self that is uniquely detached to it? Is this self in some way the, or at any rate a, connection between the empirical world and what lies outside the empirical world? Questions such as these would be the fundamental questions of philosophy if the logical possibility of a self's existence outside space and time were realized.

--Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, pp. 445-446

It does seem to me that I have a form of direct control of some of my bodily movements that involves free choice on my part. I still do not know how I do it, any more than I knew when I was a child, but that I do it is something I think I know. And I know this as directly and unmediately as I know anything--as directly and unmediately as I know that I see red when a red object is in front of me. To express it the other way round, if I do not know this then I do not know anything, and do not know what knowing is. I am familiar with the arguments of determinists, which can be very sophisticated, to the effect that all my movements are determined and none of them the outcome of free decision-making, but these arguments seem to me to be contradicted by immediate experience. For I experience directly not only the making of decisions but also the apprehension of fields of possibility, of what it is open to me to do, and I often weigh up first of all whether certain options are open to me or not, and then, separately from that, the pros and cons of alternative courses of action, and then I consciously choose from among them--and then sometimes change by mind. Again, I am familiar with the arguments that each one of these processes is determined; but that is rather like saying to me that all my visual experiences are optical illusions, and I am not really seeing anything at all: there is an obvious sense in which it might be true, but it is a denial of the very possibility of the experience I am having, and in the present case that is the experience of agency. The fact of my own agency is something of which I have a knowledge so direct that it survives the most careful consideration of all the arguments to the effect that I do not have it, much as, if you gave a man with ten fingers an apparently cast-iron proof that he had eleven, he would doubt your proof rather than doubt he had ten fingers.

There is another and totally different reason why I confidently reject determinism. If it is true, then none of us can ever refrain from anything we do. In that case any notions of good or bad, right or wrong, have no application with regard to human behavior. It is false ever to attribute praise or blame to anyone, guilt or responsibility. "Ought" never applies, nor do such concepts as "duty," "justice," "fair." Conscience is an illusion. Every determinist, if he is sincere, must eliminate all such conceptions from his view of human beings, and also from his view of all human activities, arrangements and institutions. I have never known anyone who came anywhere near doing this. Certainly none of the people I have met who told me they were determinists did it. And the truth is, or so I believe, that it cannot be done.

--Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, pp. 448-449

It is a striking, indeed compelling fact that I find it impossible to regard others as consisting of their bodies alone. Try as I might, even if only as a thought-experiment, I cannot encompass the idea than another person is a physical object in the same way as a sofa or a rock, one that happens to have powers of automation and conscious reflection. The notion is so contrary to what presents itself as being the case that I cannot get my mind round it: there is some sort of abyss between it and the possibility of its being true. In all my dealings with others I find myself compelled to treat them as if they are not only things, as if there is something essential to their nature that is not their bodies. And I observe that this is how they treat one another, and also how they treat me. A person who treats others as if they were things, physical objects, just so much matter, is a psychopath: and it is widely felt to be the most evil and horrific form of existence; and I sympathize with that view.

. . . [I]t is abnormal, and for most of us impossible, to regard a human being as solely a physical object. If we enter a large, dimly lit room full of furniture, a room in which we take ourselves to be alone, we have a certain feeling about our relationship to our surroundings; but if suddenly we realize that a dark shape in one of the corners is a human being asleep in an armchair then that whole feeling is transmuted into something quite different. It is not as if there were one more piece of furniture in the room. It is as if the metaphysics of the space had been transformed. We ourselves now, as it were, have one foot in some other space as well: that room is no longer the only place we are, no longer the only context within which we are interrelating with something that is not ourselves. This has nothing to do with being observed or responded to: the person is fast asleep. We have suddenly realized that we are not alone, and with that realization we find ourselves, as I have just put it, in a different metaphysical space.

--Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, pp. 450-451