For something new and different, we present a joint perspective essay. In a radical departure from past trends, we didn’t end up with a debate or a silly argument clinic full of profundity, pomposity and posturing. Instead, it’s an armchair discussion questioning the meaning of life, the universe and quite literally everything. Of such is a friendship made.

(NB: Introducing a new long post feature: Clickable page numbers. At the bottom of the section of post, below the “tweet this” button…I will be giving wp.com some feedback about that positioning. Let me know if you hate this too too much.)

This is not a pipe. And it’s not. As Rene Magritte was rumored to have said, “Try to put tobacco in it.” It’s not a pipe; it’s a representation of a pipe.

There’s not much better than the intersection of art and philosophy. Magritte’s surrealism arises out of continental philosophy dating back to Hume and Kant. It’s impossible to know the “thing in itself.” All our perception of phenomena is characterized, conformed, and clouded by our humanness. For instance, try to conceive the edge of the universe, and what’s beyond. Weird, huh, being caught within time and space?

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Inconceivable, as a vertically-challenged villain was once known to say. Yet we bring all our perception of phenomena to bear on such far-flung fields as paleocosmology, and dare to state that our perceptions are authoritative, insofar as they confirm the representational cloud of smoke in which we prefer to subsist. (Would you quit blowing that in my direction.)

At the same time, we miss the “thing in itself” all around us, every day. For instance, we look at a loved one, but do we see that person or the representation we’ve built of them through years of knowing?