The Cathedral and the Compass
On high philosophy and what the academy has quietly abandoned
I shall dare venture into the treacherous waters of the words philosophy, philosopher, and my relationship to them. For it is a topic I think about a lot. It is related to my thoughts on the nature of narcissism.
I call myself a philosopher. I have no philosophy degree from a prestigious college of the academy. Some have bristled at the audacity of this move to self-identify this way. I have mostly ignored the bristling. And now I will do more than bristle back. I shall make some directed critiques toward the philosophy departments of the Western academic tradition.
Some will find this arrogant. That reaction is expected, and I have no interest in dissuading anyone of it. But I will go further than that. If I am narrating in this direction out of ego, then the test of that must surely be the coherence of my words. If that coherence can be undermined — if someone can show that my framework decoheres against a larger, more coherent epistemic structure — then upon discovering that condition, I should give ground. I consider myself prepared to do this. There is, in other words, a falsification condition for my own position. I am naming it in advance. The suspicion that my ego is at play is not a refutation. It is an invitation to attempt the refutation. I welcome the attempt.
This, as it happens, is precisely the move I am about to argue the Kantian tradition cannot make.
We are all performers. Performance is a communicative act — the instrumentalization of communicative technology. The question is not whether I am performing here. I am. The question is whether I perform to reveal or to conceal. Whether I leave room for you and your sense of identity, or whether I try to overwrite your identity with my own. I believe that love begins where projection ends. And so I regard the charge that I write without credentials from a place of inflated ego as a curious one. If my arguments lack coherence, if they are out of place with the register in which I write, then demonstrating me to be a charlatan should be straightforward. I invite the demonstration.
It is, of course, dangerous territory rhetorically — to stomp my feet and say, without the credibility that comes from institutional blessings, that I am a philosopher and that I am no narcissist. But I am forced to enter this territory. Not to defend myself. To make a moral and political point about intellectual standing. Does it derive from power? From the institutional blessing, the credentialed appointment, the peer-reviewed imprimatur? Or does it derive from the coherence of argument? I say the latter. And I think the difference between those two answers is not a minor disagreement about academic procedure. It is one of the central political questions of our moment.
Analytical philosophy conducted inside the Kantian method is not high philosophy. It is a sophisticated intellectual practice. It is often rigorous, often technically impressive, sometimes genuinely illuminating. But it is not high philosophy, because it is not subject to its own scrutiny. And a method of inquiry that exempts itself from its own method of inquiry has, at the foundational level, made the same error as every institution that has ever protected a prior from the data that might falsify it.
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Kant’s central move — the one that made him the organizing figure of modern Western philosophy — was to save the categories of experience from Humean skepticism by making them constitutive of experience itself. Hume had shown, with uncomfortable rigor, that the mind cannot justify its own most basic assumptions about causality, substance, and the continuity of the self. The categories we use to organize experience cannot be derived from experience. They are brought to it. They are, in Hume’s terms, habits of association — useful fictions we cannot do without and cannot prove.
Kant accepted Hume’s challenge and answered it by promoting the categories. If they cannot be derived from experience, he argued, it is because they are prior to experience — they are what makes experience possible. The synthetic a priori. The structures of mind that organize the raw data of sensation into the coherent world we navigate. You cannot question them from within experience because they are what makes experience possible in the first place.
It is an elegant rescue. It is also a cathedral.
Kant’s project is reflexive in intention; my charge is that it is protective in structure — because the categories are relocated to a level where experience cannot meaningfully revise them.
By placing the foundational categories outside the reach of empirical scrutiny — by making them the preconditions of scrutiny rather than its objects — Kant created a framework that is structurally protected from falsification. The framework cannot generate a result that questions the framework. The hard core is safe. Every anomaly becomes a puzzle to be solved within the system rather than a signal that the system’s foundations need examination.
Analytical philosophy in the Kantian tradition inherited this structure. It decides in advance what counts as a valid question, what counts as rigor, what counts as a legitimate move — and then operates entirely within those terms. The meta-level is always protected from the object-level scrutiny it applies to everything else. The method is not subject to the method.
A fair reader will push back here. Quine dissolved the analytic-synthetic distinction. Sellars attacked the myth of the given. Brandom’s inferentialism subjects the norms of reasoning to social and historical revision. These are not small moves — they are precisely the kind of self-critical framework-questioning I am calling for. I do not dismiss them. I would go further: they are the best the tradition has produced, and they are the figures the mainstream of the tradition has proven least able to absorb. Quine is cited in every graduate program and followed almost nowhere in practice. Sellars’ attack on foundationalism has been acknowledged for decades without displacing the foundationalist habits of the field. The exception proves the rule not by being marginal but by being celebrated and then quietly set aside. What the tradition does with its own most radical voices is itself the datum.
This argument runs on two tracks that are logically distinct, and I will not pretend otherwise. The first is philosophical: is Kantian architecture structurally protected from falsification by the way it positions its categories? That stands or falls on philosophical grounds alone. The second is sociological: do philosophy departments treat these categories as unfalsifiable in practice? Kuhn, Lakatos, and the sociology of knowledge all support something like it — but that is corroborating evidence, not the argument itself. The philosophical claim is the load-bearing one. The two tracks reinforce each other. They do not substitute for each other.
This tradition shaped me before I could question it. I was formed inside Cartesian rationalism — the world of the scientific establishment, of empirical method, of what cannot be measured cannot be trusted. I spent years inside a framework that felt, from the inside, like rigor. Like the honest, disenchanted, view-from-nowhere that serious thought requires. I built software systems on it. I ran companies on it. It is a powerful framework. It is also a cathedral, and I lived inside it long enough to know exactly where the walls are.
What I eventually discovered — through Hume, through the contemplative practice that dissolved enough of the residue to let me see clearly, through the mythologist’s toolkit I built in its place — is that the Cartesian framework was not the view from nowhere. It was a view from a very specific somewhere, with very specific blind spots, that had mistaken its own limitations for the shape of reality. The framework could not question the framework. The observer could not see the observer. The cathedral had no windows facing inward.
What contemplative practice discloses — and this is the territory I want to name directly, because it is the ground from which everything else in this piece grows — is the existential and phenomenological fact of thrownness. Heidegger’s word: we are always already inside a situation before we can reflect on it. We do not first exist as disembodied subjects and then encounter a world. We find ourselves already here, already oriented, already caught in a web of meaning we did not choose and cannot fully see. Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perception makes the same observation from a different angle: the body is not a vehicle the mind pilots. It is the condition of all experience. The Cartesian tradition wants to examine experience from outside experience. Phenomenology says: you cannot get outside. You are inside it. That is not a limitation to be overcome. It is the situation to be honestly inhabited.
Contemplative practice is not a retreat from this condition. It is the most rigorous method available for examining it. To sit with the structure of experience, to watch the categories form and dissolve, to observe the prior operating before the thought completes — this is phenomenological investigation conducted from the inside. It does not deliver certainty. It delivers honesty. And through years of this practice, I have come to believe that the inside is the most honest place anyone can stand. Not because it gives you more than the Cartesian tradition promises. But because it does not pretend to be somewhere it is not.
I am aware that this claim — that contemplative practice constitutes rigorous phenomenological investigation — is asserted here rather than demonstrated. The essay tells you what practice delivers without showing a specific prior being revised through it in a way that could not have been achieved through ordinary philosophical reflection. That demonstration belongs to a subsequent piece. I flag the gap here rather than paper over it, because the itinerant posture is the same whether I am moving through theological traditions or through my own epistemological claims. I have not yet fully arrived at this argument. I am walking toward it.
This is not a credential problem. The people inside the philosophy departments know this tradition far more technically than I do. The problem is structural. When the framework is your livelihood, your identity, your community, your prestige hierarchy — when it is the water you swim in — you do not question the framework. You solve puzzles within it. And you call that philosophy.
I call it something else.
I was talking yesterday with a good friend about cosmology — and I will write about that conversation separately. For now, the relevant example is the Copernican principle — the foundational assumption of modern cosmology that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic at sufficient scale, that no location or direction is privileged, that the view from nowhere is available and we are approximating it.
The data is pushing back against this prior, hard, from multiple directions simultaneously. In parts of the literature, the cosmic dipole anomaly is reported at significance levels exceeding 5-sigma, with measurements of the matter dipole consistently showing amplitudes two to three times larger than predicted by the CMB kinematic dipole — the CMB, our best window into early-universe structure. The Hubble tension — a persistent discrepancy between local and early-universe measurements of the expansion rate — is often characterized as roughly 4 to 6-sigma, depending on datasets and systematics, significant enough that some cosmologists now call it a Hubble crisis. And JWST, our deepest infrared eye on the universe, keeps returning images of massive, mature galaxies at distances where the standard model of cosmology, Lambda-CDM, says they have no business being. Lambda-CDM is the reigning theoretical framework — a baseline model dominated by dark energy and cold dark matter, components we infer from their gravitational and expansion signatures, not from laboratory isolation. I will have considerably more to say about the state of cosmology in a forthcoming piece. For now, the structural point is sufficient.
And the establishment response is not to question the Copernican principle. It is to invoke hidden variables and scale horizons — to say the isotropy is there, we just cannot see it yet, it is beyond the empirical horizon, the data is incomplete. The principle is necessarily true. Find the missing pieces that recover it.
A fair accounting: many cosmologists are actively exploring alternative models. The heterodox work is being done. But it is being done at the edges, against institutional gravity, by people willing to absorb the professional cost of questioning the prior. The center of the field is still managing the anomalies rather than hearing them. That is the structural point. Not that no one is asking the question. But that asking it carries a cost that asking questions within the framework does not.
This is goal-seeking behavior dressed as inquiry. We have the conclusion. Now keep sciencing until we have enough data to satisfy it.
The structure is identical to the Kantian move. The Copernican principle is not a finding of the scientific method. It was never proven. It was adopted as a productive prior — a necessary working assumption that allowed modern cosmology to get off the ground. But somewhere in the passage from productive prior to foundational assumption to sacred constant, it acquired the status of synthetic a priori. It became constitutive of the framework rather than testable within it. And now a significant violation of the principle is not evidence against it. It is evidence of our limited vantage point. The principle is what makes the data interpretable. Therefore the data cannot question the principle.
Popper’s warning lights start flashing here: once a principle is defended primarily by pushing its vindication beyond any possible observation, it has drifted from empirical hypothesis toward metaphysical commitment.
A careful reader will note that Kant’s categories and the Copernican principle are different kinds of claims operating at different levels — one purports to describe the structure of cognition itself, the other functions as a simplifying assumption in physics. That distinction is real and I do not collapse it. My claim is structural, not analogical: both have acquired, through their position in their respective frameworks, a practical immunity from revision that their own stated methods do not warrant. The Copernican principle is in principle revisable — the question is whether the institutional and theoretical apparatus surrounding it permits revision to be seriously entertained when the data calls for it. The answer, at this moment, appears to be: not easily.
The cathedral, again. Different vocabulary. Same structure.
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And then there is the Church.
I have been writing this week about the Gospels — about reading them with fresh eyes, without institutional instructions for how to proceed, and finding a figure whose entire ministry was oriented against exactly this structure. Against the protected prior. Against the framework that cannot question itself. Against the institution that converts a direction into a doctrine and then defends the doctrine against the living data of the world.
The Pharisees were not irreligious. They were the most methodologically serious people in the room. Their problem was not insufficient devotion to the tradition. Their problem was that the tradition had become the object of protection rather than the instrument of inquiry. The categories were prior. The data — the leper, the tax collector, the Samaritan, the woman at the well — had to be interpreted within the categories rather than allowed to question them.
Jesus kept doing one thing in response to this. He kept treating the data as information. He kept letting the anomalies speak. He kept refusing to invoke the scale horizon — to say the kingdom is fine, the isotropy will be recovered at sufficient scale, the missing pieces will eventually vindicate the prior.
He said: the kingdom is here. In this person you have decided not to see. The prior is wrong. Look at what is actually in front of you.
That is not a theological observation. It is an epistemological one. And it is the same observation across every domain where a framework has been elevated to the status of a sacred constant — cosmology, institutional religion, analytical philosophy. The move is always the same. The prior protects itself. The anomaly gets absorbed. The data is managed rather than heard.
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High philosophy, in the tradition I am actually working in, is the philosophy that does not make this move. And I want to name this tradition directly, because the academy claims it as its own while systematically abandoning its orientation.
Spinoza turns the lens on the lens. The Ethics is not only a system of propositions about God and nature and human freedom. It is an inquiry into what it means to inquire — into the conditions under which the mind can know anything at all, including itself. The method is subject to the method. The framework builds its own limitations into its foundation. The contemporary academy treats Spinoza as a historical curiosity, a pantheist who got some things interestingly wrong. What it cannot absorb is his example: a man who worked outside the institutions, who was excommunicated from his community for thinking clearly, and who refused to let the framework protect itself from its own scrutiny.
Hume does the same thing with more destructive intent. He follows the empiricist method to its logical conclusion and discovers that the empiricist method cannot justify itself. Causality, substance, the self — the foundational categories of experience cannot be derived from experience. This is not a failure of Hume’s philosophy. It is its achievement. He turned the light on the light and reported honestly what he found. His orientation, in the deepest sense, was toward imagination — forward-facing into the dissolution, willing to follow the evidence past the point where the ground disappears.
Kant was existentially alarmed by what Hume reported. And here, within the shared Cartesian premise both men inherited, their intuitions diverge. Hume moves toward imagination. Kant turns back toward memory. The synthetic a priori is an act of preservation: this is what we need the world to be in order to function, so we will install it as prior to experience, shelter it from the weather of empirical revision, build a cathedral on it. His response was, in its deepest structure, the move that physics would later make famous under a different name: shut up and calculate. Do not dwell on the metaphysical foundations. Here are the structures that make experience possible. Now proceed.
The academy lionizes both and does not dwell on what they share: a Cartesian inheritance neither fully escaped. Hume dissolves the self from a stance that still presupposes a detached observer doing the dissolving. Kant saves the categories by relocating them beyond experience — but the subject/object split that Descartes installed remains intact in both. Together, from opposite directions, they produce the same false intuition: that there is a subject here and a world out there, and that rigorous method can deliver an unmediated account of the latter. The view from nowhere is not a finding of the empiricist or the transcendentalist tradition. It is their shared, unexamined premise.
I should say plainly that this reading of the Hume-Kant divergence as imagination versus memory is my own interpretation, not a settled scholarly claim. Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics addresses adjacent territory — Heidegger reads Kant’s treatment of time and the transcendental imagination as the suppressed center of the first Critique, the place where Kant himself briefly glimpsed the abyss and retreated. Whether my memory-orientation reading aligns with, extends, or departs from Heidegger’s argument I hold provisionally. That is a conversation the next piece may need to have. I name the gap here because the itinerant posture demands it: I will not claim to have arrived somewhere I have only glimpsed.
William James carries this forward. Pragmatism is not a doctrine. It is a practice of holding all doctrines provisionally — of treating every framework as a tool for navigating experience rather than a map of the territory as it actually is. James wrote for general audiences. He wrote in plain English. The academy has never quite forgiven him for it.
Dewey makes it civic. The philosophical practice that turns the light on itself is not just an intellectual virtue. It is a democratic one. A community that cannot question its own foundational assumptions cannot govern itself. The republic of inquiry and the political republic are the same project. Dewey understood that philosophy conducted inside the academy, for the academy, evaluated by the academy’s own standards, was not doing what philosophy was supposed to do. He was right. The academy has spent the decades since proving him right while largely ignoring the proof.
What unites this tradition is not a set of conclusions. It is an orientation. A refusal of the exemption. A willingness to let the method question the method, to let the data speak against the prior, to treat the foundational categories as navigational tools rather than eternal structures of reason. The academy contains this tradition. But its incentive structures reward puzzle-solving inside frameworks more reliably than framework-risking inquiry.
When one lays the sight of one’s attention upon the metaphysical objects I describe, I do not intend them to see a cathedral, but a compass.
A cathedral is built to last. It is built to shelter the sacred from the weather. It accumulates doctrine the way stone accumulates weight — each layer resting on the ones below, the whole structure depending on the integrity of the foundation, which cannot be questioned because the cathedral is standing on it.
A compass does not tell you where you are. It tells you which way is north. It is useful precisely because it does not pretend to be a map. It is subject to interference — you have to hold it level, away from metal, and read it carefully. And north, as any serious navigator knows, is magnetic north, not true north. The compass is an approximation. A productive prior. A tool that works well enough to get you where you are going, held with the awareness that it is a tool. The observer is always inside the system being observed. The prior cannot be dissolved — only named, held provisionally, and kept subject to revision. This is what postmodern naturalism, as I practice it, attempts: to use the mythologist’s toolkit — the comparative method, the structural analysis, the attention to what wisdom traditions keep returning to across centuries and cultures — as a navigation technology rather than a metaphysical claim. To build the limitation into the foundation.
The honest objection here is that a compass still needs a north. If all priors are provisional and all frameworks are tools, what guides revision? What makes one provisional framework better than another? This is the question the pragmatist tradition has always faced and not fully resolved. Peirce insisted that truth must be tied to verification processes and warned that appeals to accumulated wisdom without specifying the process of inquiry carried the seeds of circularity. Dewey’s solution — truth as warranted assertibility, the settled outcome of controlled inquiry — specifies a process rather than a static criterion. My answer attempts to honor that insistence. The criterion is coherence with the living data of human experience across traditions and time — but the criterion is only as strong as the process used to test it. The process I rely on is threefold: the contemplative practice of sitting with the structure of experience directly, without the mediation of inherited categories; the mythologist’s comparative method of tracking structural isomorphisms across traditions while remaining alert to the historian of religion’s transmission test; and the willingness to narrow the domain of genuine convergence wherever shared cultural pathways explain the similarities better than independent discovery does. This is controlled inquiry in the relevant sense. It does not deliver certainty. It delivers warranted assertibility — which is, Dewey was right, the most honest thing inquiry can deliver. The wisdom traditions that survive this scrutiny, that appear independently across cultures with no contact, that keep pointing in the same direction from genuinely different starting points — these are the accumulated signal I navigate by. That is not a perfect criterion. It is not a view from nowhere. But it is not nothing. It is the best north available to a navigator who has given up the fantasy of true north and decided to find the way home regardless.
A careful reader will notice that this criterion is itself a prior, and will ask what would falsify it. The question is fair and I will answer it directly. The falsification condition for cross-cultural experiential coherence as a criterion is this: if a pattern of apparent convergence across traditions turns out, on rigorous examination, to be the product of shared cultural transmission rather than independent discovery — if the silk roads of ideas explain the similarities rather than the independent operation of consciousness on the world — then the signal weakens. Historians of religion have done exactly this work, and it has done exactly this: it has narrowed the domain of genuine independent convergence considerably. I do not claim more than what survives that scrutiny. The domain that survives is smaller than the Perennial Philosophy tradition wants it to be, and larger than the materialist reductionist tradition wants it to be. That zone of honest uncertainty is where I work. It is not a cathedral. The foundation can be questioned. I am questioning it here, in public, in the same essay where I am standing on it. That is the only posture I know how to hold with a clean conscience. And if someone shows me the north criterion requires revision by way of demonstrating greater coherence, then I shall give ground. How could I not?
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If you want to call me a chauvinist for my civic American republicanism and liberal ethic, fine. I give ground. The itinerant posture I described in my most recent piece — the willingness to move through traditions without settling, to find what is true without being captured by the institution — is not a softening of the polemic. It is downstream of it. It emerges from these normative antecedents. I believe in the American republic as a place that should be properly welcoming of all pilgrims sailing in the night toward home. I believe we should move closer together, without leaving anybody behind. These are not conclusions I arrived at through detached analysis. They are the prior I am willing to name. And naming it, I think, is the only honest thing to do.
This bears stating plainly: I consider myself fully and properly inside the classical liberal tradition. I have not ventured from it. By classical liberal I mean the dignity-of-conscience, rule-of-law lineage — not the late twentieth-century property-rights absolutism that borrowed the name. What I would suggest is that much of the wisdom I try to communicate has extensive prior art in the early tradition — prior art that has been de-emphasized, selectively interpreted away, buried under the institutional accretions of two centuries. Not unlike what has happened, I think, to the concept of ministry as the Gospels describe it when read without institutional presuppositions. The liberal tradition, like the Gospel tradition, has had its radical core managed by the institutions that inherited it. The suspicion of concentrated power. The insistence on the dignity of the individual against both the state and the market. The egalitarian premise that no person’s standing is prior to another’s by birth or credential. These are not departures from liberalism. They are its foundation. I am not reading liberalism through a new lens. I am attempting to read it fresh — the way I read the Gospels. Without being told in advance what I will find. And it is worth noting that the Deism of many of the Founders places them squarely in the territory I now explore. Jefferson, Franklin, Paine — and in a different register Madison — were shaped by Enlightenment deism and a deep suspicion of ecclesiastical authority, reading the same wisdom traditions with the same suspicion of institutional interpretation, arriving at a republic premised on the dignity of conscience precisely because they understood how institutions corrupt the texts they claim to protect.
The enemies of the republic are, at their foundation, people who have elevated a prior to the status of a sacred constant and are now managing the data to protect it. The market is necessarily self-correcting. The strong man is necessarily wise. The nation is necessarily chosen. The hierarchy is necessarily natural. These are not findings. They were never findings. They are priors that have been insulated from falsification by the apparatus of power, the apparatus of culture, and in some cases the apparatus of the Church.
The philosophical tradition I am defending — the one that turns the light on itself, that refuses the exemption, that treats every foundational category as provisional — is not just an intellectual preference. It is the epistemological foundation of democratic self-governance. A republic is a community that can question its own priors. That can look at the anomalous data — the leper, the Samaritan, the dipole anomaly — and ask what it is actually being told, rather than invoking the scale horizon that puts the answer safely beyond the empirical horizon.
When Kant built the cathedral, he was trying to save the Enlightenment from Hume’s skepticism. The impulse was not wrong. The method was. You do not save the Enlightenment by protecting its foundational categories from scrutiny. You save it by doing what the Enlightenment always claimed it was doing: following the evidence wherever it goes, including back to the foundations.
That is high philosophy.
Everything else is building inside the foundations of memory. From a place where imagination has been contained to a specific set of questions.
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What changes when you see this? Not the conclusions you hold — those may remain largely intact. What changes is the posture from which you hold them. You begin to notice when a framework is protecting itself rather than questioning itself. You begin to feel the difference between a prior being tested and a prior being managed. You begin to ask, of any tradition — philosophical, political, religious, scientific — not only what it claims but what it cannot afford to discover. That question, applied consistently, is the practice. It is uncomfortable. It is also, I think, the only honest intellectual posture available to someone who has looked carefully at the history of ideas and noticed what keeps happening to the anomalies.
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Walt Whitman is the philosopher the academy has never known what to do with. He had no credentials. He published himself. He revised his own work for decades without institutional permission or approval. He wrote in a form nobody had used before and called it American.
And he wrote the line that I think is the most epistemologically serious sentence in the American tradition:
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.
This is not an excuse for incoherence. It is an argument for dimensionality — for holding multiple, partially incompatible lenses without pretending they collapse into one tidy map. It is the opposite. It is the acknowledgment that a framework large enough to be honest will contain tensions that a smaller, tidier framework would resolve by exclusion. The cathedral resolves contradictions by declaring them heresies. The compass holds them, navigates by them, treats them as information about the territory rather than errors to be corrected.
I am a civic republican and a mythologist. I am a Humean skeptic who takes the Gospels seriously. I am a naturalist who meditates. I am a former Silicon Valley executive who writes political pamphlets in the tradition of Thomas Paine. I do not offer these categories as credentials. I seek no authority from them. I offer them as orientation — as a map of where to find me, so that you know which direction I am coming from when I speak. If the categories fit, it is because my arguments cohere with what those categories mean, not because I have claimed the titles. The coherence is the only authority I seek. And the coherence, as I said at the outset, is falsifiable. I contain multitudes. I do not experience this as a problem. I experience it as the condition of honest inquiry — the condition of a framework that has not yet protected itself from its own scrutiny.
If that makes me a philosopher without credentials, I can live with that.
Whitman lived with it too. His verse, contributed. Received.
Okay, I read the whole thing. Is it too much of a shortcut to move straight into contemplative prayer?
Seriously, wow.
"Institutional gravity," in the context of the cosmologists' tradition, cracked me up.