Ever find that, in the middle of a perfectly polite conversation, you suddenly clash with your friend over "mere semantics"? Tony Hardy has an explanation for this. The problem with the modern world, if we can be simple-minded for a moment, is that we don't understand it. And what is most perplexing, paradoxically, is our own human nature. None of our front line reporters or big city editors diminish in the least the incomprehensibility of man's inhumanity to man or his inability, on average, to lead a truly fulfilling life.

That statement is not from Tony Hardy's new book, but it well might have been. It is from an introduction I wrote a quarter of a century ago to a book by Paul Rosenfels that I considered the foundation for a new understanding of human nature that would constitute more than just a footnote in the history of philosophy. Hardy's book starts out the same way: by asking, simply, why we don't seem to know very much about ourselves. Why have two millennia of philosophical argument not created a utopia? Why have two centuries of psychological science — including specialties like sociology and anthropology — accomplished almost nothing to improve the lives of the human beings crawling on this lonely planet?
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It is said that Descartes originated his novel point of view about the separation of mind and body by staying in bed for two weeks. Perhaps Tony Hardy did something similar that I always wanted to do but never had time for: to sit still for hours and hours trying to examine his thoughts objectively. This is truly not a job for everyone, but what Hardy learned is astonishing. (He also credits the influence of phenomenology in general, and Ernst Cassirer in particular.)

Descartes's program was ambitious: to doubt everything we think we know. The only thing we needn't doubt is that we exist, since if we didn't exist we couldn't doubt it. "I think, therefore I am" is a convenient talking point for cocktail party chatter, but like "E = MC2" doesn't seem to help us ordinary folk very much in solving our problems.

Phenomenologists went much further. They took apart our senses and asked whether there was any proof that there were any "real" objects generating them, indeed whether such objects could exist independently in and of themselves. Once you start going down this road, you will eventually wonder whether everything you experience is a dream, and whether (as seems likely if you are honest about this) you are in fact the only consciousness in the universe. Something like, "I imagine a universe, therefore I exist. But you don't."

No fear. The author insists that we have a right to believe in reality. But he agrees with Kant's claim that we can never be in direct contact with it, that we experience only phenomena (colors, sounds, and all the other "qualia" that can't be reduced to attributes of subatomic particles) rather than noumena (the things in themselves). The idea that we are truly captives of our senses can be quite a shock for some people. But, since it's always been that way, we needn't panic.

How the author leads us through a series of discoveries that will in fact teach us a whole new and superior way of looking at human existence is far too complex for me to summarize here. But I believe this book (and maybe those of Cassirer) will come to be seen as one of those great but rare breakthroughs in the history of ideas. For these are ideas not meant for professionals alone. They need to trickle down to us ordinary people who are still held captive by the image of ivory-tower cap-and-gown academics who hold sway over all possible human knowledge and who will enlighten us only if and when they so choose. (The truth belongs to everyone and it is time that we took it back from "authorities" that have betrayed the public trust.)

I once wrote to a young man, when he still seemed interested in understanding the world, that "Soon you'll realize some seemingly amazing things. For example, positing fairies and sprites, or gods and goddesses, that work in mysterious ways doesn't really explain anything. But that's okay because it never did. We've been getting along without gods all along only we didn't know it."

Hardy's book has given me a similar revelation, and made me feel lots better about being myself, and about not having to see the world anymore through intellectual contrivances like a reductionism that insists that kittens are no more than "atoms in flux". If there is anything like philosophical psychotherapy, then this is it.

I am human. This is where I belong. And my cat loves me. This book is available at .