I Kan(t) See For Miles & Miles

This blog began on the banks of the Esquimalt Lagoon on which Royal Roads University sits in Colwood, B.C. back in 2018. It’s a lovely view looking out to the causeway beyond the lagoon and the ships that dot the Juan de Fuca Strait. It was started one early August morning, and I was out for a walk before a class on paradigms in social research, which was going to require not just being fully awake, but a fair amount of caffeine.

A man with a dog approached and stopped to chat. Looking out across the lagoon, he said, “This is my reality”.

It’s a curious thing, this need for tangible “reality”. More than just being “real”, I often hear people talk about being “authentic”, including when they are looking for help in communicating their messages to media and other groups. It’s curious that today, where so much of mass media, popular culture, digital media, and rampant consumerism is anything but “authentic” – that is, “real” or “natural” – human beings have this apparent need for the “unfiltered life”.

That encounter with the man and his dog lasted about 90 seconds.  Yet, in that time, he staked out two astonishing claims: (1) there is a “real” world that he can see, feel, and touch, and, at the same time (2) his own “real” world is mostly in his mind (he called the view across the lagoon “his” even though – hello! – I was there, too).

As the man and his dog shuffled off, I though of Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, whose works rank among the greatest theoretical thoughts in Western philosophical thought. His mind-bending works on knowledge and metaphysics remain astounding centuries after the great man’s death in 1804.

Kantian philosophy is a cornerstone of Positivism (one of those paradigms which tortured my soul after the encounter with the man and his dog) and the quest to discover “reality”. Positivists believe that knowledge is derived from observable experience and empirical evidence. Kant himself insisted that all experience must conform to knowledge – what we can see and observe as “real”.

The positivist, empirical approach to research has led to the enduring emphasis on “proving” what’s in front of us as best as we can. Hard science demands that we prove and test everything. That is a good thing in many ways. It’s also a challenge when it comes to media and communications where “controlling the narrative” is premised on guiding a story to what it should be, not what it is. 

My positivist friends are thrilled with the quest for knowledge and good for them! But are there some mysteries one cannot “see” but are as real as anything we can test and examine? Are love and hate quantifiable? Is a man with a dog really seeing and owning a “reality” in front of him? That is the mystery I struggle with as a communicator: appreciating the brilliance of “knowing” the world but refusing to give up on the mystery all around us.

Spanish realist writer Benito Pérez Galdós once wrote in his great novel Tristana that people see themselves as “unique and complex” but that their “specialness” is, “the amalgamation…of the ideas floating around in the metaphysical atmosphere of the age, like…invisible bacteria.”

The positivist quest for “real” reality may be a bit of a stretch in the 21st century and its post-modern emphasis on superficiality, image saturation and hybrid amalgamations  hyperreality and simulacra and simulation (copies of the original). When you are communicating ideas, the “reality” of your message must balance what’s “real” and what you wish that “real” to be. 

Media relations, marketing and advertising, public policy development, and anything that depends on communicating the right message at the right time to the right audiences is increasingly complex (particularly in a digital and AI-driven environment). That’s a key driver for Tourniquet Communications: to help people and groups navigate today’s complex communications environment.

Want to cut through the noise and accomplish your communications goals? Contact us. We’re not always consumed by people and their dogs by a pleasant waterway!