This line from 30 Philosophers captures one of the simplest and most overlooked truths: we don’t experience reality directly. We experience impressions, the sights, sounds, memories, and expectations of experience, and we build our understanding from that raw material. Even if reality had some ultimate nature we can’t access, our impressions still give us enough to navigate, learn, and grow.
Here it is in context of chaper 22:
“…no matter how you slice it, we end up in an empirical world that is real because ‘it is real to us.’ Reality is self-creating by definition, whether it is what we think it is, a dream, or something else. No matter what, our impressions of it are what we use to build knowledge. All paths seem to lead to the existence of an empirical world.”
When I was writing about Descartes, I found myself returning to the newborn metaphor. A baby doesn’t need perfect knowledge to begin constructing a world. It starts with impressions, then builds structure and meaning one moment at a time. That’s what all of us do. It’s what science does. It’s what philosophy does. And it’s what the TST Framework tries to capture.
To me, this is an empowering idea. If knowledge grows from impressions rather than certainty, then we don’t have to wait for perfect clarity before acting or learning. We can build understanding step by step, refining it as we go. That’s my worldview: truth isn’t handed to us; it’s assembled. Carefully. Imperfectly. Humanly. And every impression we gather becomes another brick in the structure we call knowing.