Our Minds Secretly Build the World (We Just Don’t Know It)
From Talmud School to Berlin’s Salons
In 1780 a young man with wild dark hair and a threadbare coat walked through the gates of Berlin. He had hardly any money and spoke German in broken, heavily accented phrases. But inside his head he carried a storm of questions about God, the universe, and how a human mind can ever know anything at all. His name was Salomon ben Joshua. The world would come to know him as Salomon Maimon.
Maimon was born in 1753 in a tiny village in Lithuania. His family had once been wealthy, but by the time he was a child they had fallen into poverty. After his mother died, he was forced into an arranged marriage at age 11, and by 14 he was already a father. From a young age he threw himself into the study of the Talmud, the vast collection of Jewish law and debate. But his restless mind soon discovered Maimonides (1138–1204), a medieval Jewish thinker whose book The Guide of the Perplexed tried to reconcile faith with the philosophy of Aristotle. Maimon was so deeply inspired that he later changed his own surname to Maimon, as an act of reverence.
As a teenager he also dove into Kabbalah, Jewish mystical writings, and even visited the court of a charismatic leader of the new Hassidic movement. But his real passion was the dream of studying philosophy and the sciences in the great university city of Berlin. So in his twenties he left his family behind and set out. His first attempt ended in disaster: the Jewish community in Berlin, suspicious of his radical ideas, told him to leave immediately. For six months Maimon wandered the roads as a beggar. Eventually his brilliance was recognized by a rabbi in the town of Posen, who gave him a job as a tutor. But Maimon’s hunger for knowledge pulled him back to Berlin in 1780.
This time he connected with Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), a leading figure of the Jewish Enlightenment. To the polished society of Berlin, Maimon looked like a crude Eastern European peasant — wild gestures, terrible grammar — but they could not ignore his brain. He could read a difficult book of mathematics once and then explain it, in his rough way, an hour later. Mendelssohn saw the genius beneath the rough surface. Through these circles, Maimon heard about a new philosophy that was shaking the German-speaking world: the work of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).
Kant’s Big Idea and Maimon’s Doubt
Maimon got hold of Kant’s massive book, the Critique of Pure Reason, and studied it obsessively. Kant claimed that human experience is a team effort between two distinct mental faculties. On one side you have sensibility — your ability to be passively affected by the world, receiving raw colors, sounds, and touches. On the other side you have the understanding — an active power that organizes this raw stuff using built‑in rules called categories, like “cause and effect.” For Kant, concepts without intuitions are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind. Real knowledge needs both.
Maimon was deeply impressed, but he spotted a crack at the heart of the system. He called it cognitive dualism: the idea that sensibility and understanding are two completely different sources that somehow have to work together. Maimon asked a simple, devastating question: how? Imagine pouring oil and water into a glass — they can sit next to each other but they never truly mix. In the same way, Maimon argued, Kant had no real explanation for how the understanding’s categories ever get a grip on the raw data of the senses. They just happen to be in the same mind, but their connection is a mystery.
Kant began his book with two Latin questions: the quid facti (the question of the fact that we actually use categories in experience) and the quid juris (the question of the right to use them, their legitimacy). Maimon thought Kant simply assumed the fact without justification. We never experience bare intuitions or pure concepts by themselves; we only ever find them already blended in an experience. So Kant’s whole argument, Maimon said, was a “castle in the air” — it might be logically valid, but it never touches the solid ground of what we actually live through.
The trouble gets even sharper with a concrete example: causality. Kant argued that we know one event causes another because we see a necessary order — the effect always follows the cause in time. But Maimon pointed out that any sequence of perceptions can be described as following a rule. If you see a flash of light and then hear a clap of thunder, you think it’s a causal chain. But if you see a flash and then your friend sneezes, you think it’s just coincidence. The order of perceptions alone can’t tell you which one is really a cause and which is mere association. Kant’s own rules forbid appealing to the content of the sensations to decide, so, Maimon concluded, the application of the category of causality is arbitrary.
The Secret Painter: How the Mind Might Build Everything
If Kant’s dualism fails, where does the rich stuff of experience — colors, tastes, shapes — actually come from? Maimon’s answer is startling: it comes from us. But secretly.
He argued that the difference between a finite human mind and an infinite divine mind is not a difference in kind, only in degree. An infinite intellect, like God’s, would actively produce all its thoughts; nothing would ever be passively “given” to it. Human minds, being finite, do not consciously create everything. But, Maimon suggested, the so‑called given in experience is really something our own mind has produced unconsciously. What we call “raw sensation” is just a representation whose origin we don’t notice. He wrote that the word “given” means only “a representation whose manner of origin in us is unknown to us.”
In this picture, space and time are not external containers that Kant imagined, but fictions that our mind uses to represent its own incomplete understanding. They arise from the imagination. Think of a painter who mixes colors on a palette without paying attention to the exact recipe. The finished picture looks like something received from outside, but it is all homemade. According to Maimon, when you see a red tomato on a green plate, your mind has unconsciously sorted out conceptual differences — red vs. green, round vs. flat — and presents those differences in space and time. If the whole field were a perfectly uniform red, you wouldn’t perceive any space at all; spatial experience appears only because there is some diversity.
Maimon even tried to explain the tiniest bits of sensation, which he called infinitesimals of perception. Just as a mathematician can think of a line as made of infinitely many points with infinitely small differences, Maimon proposed that consciousness is built from perceptual differentials that the imagination “integrates” into a full, stable experience. The details are extremely difficult, and Maimon himself largely abandoned the theory later, but the core intuition stayed with him: your mind is constantly active, even in what feels like passive looking and listening.
A Law for Real Thinking: The Principle of Determinability
If the mind secretly builds experience, how can we ever tell the difference between a real connection among ideas and a merely accidental one? Maimon’s answer is his Law of Determinability.
Imagine you form the judgment “a straight line.” Can you think of a line without thinking of straightness? Yes — you can picture a wavy line or a curved line. But can you think of straightness without thinking of a line? No; straightness only makes sense as a property of a line. That means “straight” is a real determination of “line.” Now consider “a red line.” You can think of a line without redness, and you can also think of redness without a line — red applies to apples, shirts, and sunsets equally well. So “red” is only an arbitrary predicate for “line”; it tells you nothing special about what a line is.
According to Maimon, a genuine synthetic judgment — one that actually builds new knowledge — must obey the Law of Determinability: the predicate can only be thought through the subject, not independently. Mathematics is full of such connections. A triangle’s acuteness is a real determination of triangle, because you can’t grasp “acute” without already having the idea of an angle and a figure in mind. But when you say “the cup is green,” the connection is just a habit that your mind has stumbled onto, not a necessary construction. You can imagine a blue cup just as easily.
This principle serves two roles. First, it helps uncover the basic shape of our most fundamental concepts by testing which ones depend on which. Second, it acts as a sharp knife to separate real thought from the tangled mess of empirical experience. That cut leads straight back to Maimon’s skepticism: most of what we believe about the world — that this bread will nourish me, that the sun will rise tomorrow — does not pass the test. Only in pure mathematics do we reach the kind of knowledge where the mind truly constructs its objects. Everywhere else we are just guessing.
Why It Still Matters: The Castle in the Air
Maimon called himself a “rational dogmatist and an empirical skeptic.” He accepted the rationalist dream that reason sets the standards for real knowledge — standards that we can glimpse in mathematics — but he agreed with the skeptic David Hume (1711–1776) that those standards are never met in the messy world of tastes, textures, and colors. We can see the Promised Land from afar, but we never get to enter it.
That image came from Maimon’s own pen. Quoting the biblical story of Moses, he wrote that a voice calls to the philosopher: “You should see the promised land from afar, but you may not enter it!” We know what it would take for our concepts to perfectly match reality, yet our finite minds cannot pull off the trick. We can only inch closer, endlessly revising our ideas, never reaching the finish line.
This skeptical turn influenced the next generation of German philosophers — especially Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) — who tried to build a whole system that would finally escape Kant’s dualism and Maimon’s doubt. Fichte admired Maimon’s talent and admitted that he had overturned the way everyone understood Kant. But while Fichte and later thinkers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) were optimists who believed they could construct ultimate knowledge, Maimon remained a restless wanderer. He thought that any system claiming to wrap up the universe in a neat package was fooling itself.
So why should a kid today care about a poverty‑stricken, half‑forgotten thinker from the 1700s? Because Maimon’s core question is still very much alive. When you see a blue sky, is that blueness really “out there,” or is it something your nervous system actively assembles? Cognitive scientists today debate whether perception is a kind of controlled hallucination, built by the brain out of predictions rather than passively received. Maimon had no access to brain scans, but he saw the deep philosophical problem: you can never step outside your own experience to compare it with reality as it is “in itself.” Every time you try, you are still using your mind as the instrument, and you can never check whether your instrument is distorting the world.
Maimon’s answer was not to give up thinking but to keep striving, even with the full knowledge that the goal is infinitely far away. He spent his whole life moving from book to book, question to question, never quite at home. That hunger — the refusal to pretend we have arrived — might be his most honest gift to philosophy.
Think about it
- If you could never prove that your best friend sees the same color red as you do, would that change how much you trust your own senses?
- If a supercomputer knew every atom of your brain, could it predict every choice you will ever make? Would that mean your choices aren’t really free?
- If we can never be certain that our ideas perfectly match the world, why do airplanes still fly and medicine still works? Is “good enough” actually good enough?
