I am an artist, teacher, and lifelong psychology student.  I believe in our inherent potential for growth, self-actualization, and healing. Connect with the community on social media platforms, subscribe to keep up with this growing community, and to participate in upcoming group art sessions. We focus on the whole person, in a safe, empathetic, and non-judgmental space to explore our authentic selves, fostering personal meaning and emotional well-being through genuine connection. ~Doria R. G. 

“When people see truth visualized, it bypasses the carnal noise of mental chatter and speaks directly to the nervous system. The image becomes a mirror for the psyche — helping people feel what the intellect alone could never quite articulate.”
~Cup of Peace

Bridges and Blossoms: A Reflection on Truth

At the core of early modern epistemology, both John Locke and George Berkeley identified a troubling “gap” between what we perceive and what is real, but they addressed it in opposite ways. Truth functions relationally because reality itself is relational. It exists in the spaces between observation and meaning, between person and world, between self and other. Truth is a living current flowing through our dialogue with one another, allowing us to know when and how to trust each other so we can solve big problems together.

Truth as Bridge, Truth as Bloom

Truth once seemed like a solid bridge—stable, logical, and spanning the distance between the mind and the external world. Early modern thinkers believed that reason and method could reliably help us cross from perception to reality. Objectivity was the foundation: measurable, universal, and dependable.

John Locke firmly stood on this bridge. He argued that, although we never perceive the world directly, our ideas serve as enough of a representation to establish knowledge. The bridge remained intact, even if the crossing was indirect. Reality stayed on the far shore, steady and independent, while the mind carefully charted its shape.

Even Then, A Small Doubt Began To Grow

George Berkeley looked at the same bridge and asked a quieter, yet more radical question: If all we ever experience are perceptions, why assume there is a world beyond them? For Berkeley, the bridge dissolved—not into chaos, but into intimacy. Perception was no longer a way to access truth; it was truth itself. Reality was not behind experience but within it, held through relationships and awareness.
This change allowed the subjective to blossom. Perception, intuition, and meaning were no longer barriers to knowledge but its foundation. The knower could no longer be separated from what is known. Every observation carried a hint of human presence.

Truth is not something we cross alone; it is something we cultivate together. Knowledge isn’t just stored in minds—it lives in relationships.

Gradually, The Bridge No Longer Led To Just One Shore

Modern and postmodern thought further advanced this idea, giving rise to what we now call epistemic relativism—the understanding that knowledge always develops within frameworks: cultural, linguistic, historical, and relational. From Protagoras’s ancient claim that “man is the measure,” to Thomas Kuhn’s notion that even science operates within paradigms, truth appeared as contextual rather than absolute.
The world was no longer a fixed landscape to be crossed once and for all, but a living garden to be entered repeatedly.
Truth, from this perspective, resembles a chrysanthemum—layered, relational, responsive to its environment. Each petal opens through dialogue, culture, and shared meaning. No single vantage point captures the entire bloom, but each contributes something real.
Objective truth roots us in what endures.


Subjective truth influences our perception and experience.


Intersubjective truth emerges between us—through language, trust, and mutual recognition.


We no longer stand apart, measuring the world from a distance. Instead, we participate in its unfolding.
The bridge still exists—but now it breathes. It hums with reciprocity, memory, and care. Truth is no longer solely a destination to reach but a shared act of nurturing. We are not just travelers crossing for meaning but gardeners cultivating it together—each petal revealing not certainty but connection.

Modern and postmodern philosophy, systems theory, and relational psychology all agree that actual knowledge is a process that develops through connections between mind and world, between people and perspectives, and between inner intention and outer consequence. Actual knowledge today is a network rooted in evidence, woven with logic, tested through action, and maintained through relationships. It endures because we keep rebuilding it together.

Epistemic Realism (e.g., Locke)

At the core of early modern realism is the belief that a mind-independent reality exists—a world with structure and properties that do not rely on our perceptions or beliefs. From this, the claim arises that humans can achieve objective knowledge of this reality through a careful combination of reason and experience. John Locke expressed this view by describing the mind as a tabula rasa, or blank slate, gradually filled through sensory experience. According to Locke, our ideas roughly correspond to features of the external world. He distinguished primary qualities—such as shape, motion, and number, which exist objectively in objects—from secondary qualities like color, taste, and sound, which are produced in the observer through sensory interaction. The main goal of this framework was to explain how the human mind could represent or mirror an external order, maintaining the possibility of shared, objective truth while recognizing the mediating role of perception.

Epistemic Relativism

A contrasting insight arises once we recognize that, even if a mind-independent reality exists, it may never be fully accessible to us as it truly is. From this perspective follows a different claim about knowledge: all understanding is mediated—shaped by language, culture, historical context, and the conceptual frameworks through which experience is interpreted. Truth and objectivity, then, are not fixed features waiting to be discovered in the world but achievements relative to human systems of meaning. Immanuel Kant articulated this boundary by distinguishing between phenomena, the world as it appears to us through the mind’s organizing structures, and noumena, the unknowable reality beyond those structures. Later epistemic relativists extend Kant’s insight by arguing that all truths depend on frameworks—there is no “view from nowhere,” only situated perspectives through which reality becomes understandable.

View

Claim about reality

Claim about knowledge

Epistemic Realism

The world exists independently of our minds

We can know it (at least partially or approximately) through observation and reason

Epistemic Relativism

A world may exist independently

But we can never know it as it truly is, only as filtered through human perception, culture, and language

Kant: The Bridge Rebuilt from the Inside

Into this growing tension stepped Immanuel Kant, neither content to rest on Locke’s cautious realism nor willing to follow Berkeley into complete idealism. Kant agreed with realists that a world independent of our minds exists. Still, he also recognized the skeptic’s point: we can never truly know that world as it is in itself—the noumenal realm, forever beyond direct access.
Instead of abandoning the idea of truth, Kant rethought the connection itself.

His groundbreaking idea was this: objects conform to our knowledge, not the other way around. The mind doesn’t passively receive reality like an empty vessel catching impressions. Instead, it actively shapes experience, organizing perception through built-in structures—space, time, causality, and the categories of understanding.

The world we perceive, then, isn’t raw reality, untouched or just an illusion. It’s the phenomenal world: reality as it appears through human cognition. The bridge still spans something real—but its shape is determined by the architecture of the mind that walks it.
Here, objectivity is maintained but humbly limited. Truth isn’t arbitrary, but never absolute in the divine perspective. Knowledge isn’t fully universal nor just relative, but shared among beings who share the same cognitive framework.
Kant doesn’t end the journey. He stabilizes it—long enough for the garden to grow.

Kantian Concept

Meaning

Connection to Realism / Relativism

Noumenon

The “thing-in-itself,” reality as it exists independently of human perception

Realists believe this can be known; Kant says it exists but is unknowable

Phenomenon

The world as it appears to us, filtered through space, time, and the mind’s categories (causality, unity, etc.)

What we can actually know and study scientifically

Synthetic a priori knowledge

Universal truths (like mathematics, causality) that arise from the structure of the human mind, not from experience alone

Explains how objective knowledge within experience is possible

Transcendental conditions

The mental frameworks that make experience possible (space, time, causality)

Knowledge is “objective” for all humans sharing these same structures, even if it doesn’t reach the thing-in-itself

What we know is shaped not only by the world we encounter, but by how we encounter it together.

How Kant Bridges the Two

Taken together, realism, Kant’s transcendental idealism, and epistemic relativism do not cancel each other out; they describe different layers of our relationship to truth. Realism reminds us that something exists beyond us—a world that resists our wishes and anchors meaning in what endures. Immanuel Kant teaches humility, showing that while reality may exist independently, it only becomes knowable through the structures of the human mind. Relativism, at its best, completes the picture by acknowledging that knowledge always unfolds within cultural, linguistic, and relational frameworks. The bridge, then, is neither an illusion nor a final destination. It is a shared construction, shaped by cognitive limits and sustained through dialogue. Truth does not vanish when certainty softens; it deepens. Like a garden tended in common, it thrives not through domination or detachment, but through participation—where objectivity grounds us, perspective enriches us, and understanding blooms between us.

Problem

Realist View

Relativist View

Kant’s Solution

Is there a real world?

Yes, and we can know it

Maybe, but we can’t know it

Yes, but we only know its appearances (phenomena)

How do we know anything objectively?

The mind mirrors external reality

All truth is culturally or perceptually relative

Objectivity arises from shared cognitive structures (universal categories of understanding)

What is knowledge?

Correspondence between idea and object

Interpretation within perspective

Interaction between sensory data (empirical input) and mental form (a priori structure)

Knowledge is not the accumulation of facts, but the process by which consciousness encounters reality. True knowledge is not static or something we possess, but a collaborative process of aligning facts, logic, and actions. We uphold it through inquiry, shared evidence, ethical dialogue, and the humility to let it unfold like a flower in the sun. Each petal of knowledge depends on elements and atmosphere; truth is not discovered in isolation.

Hegel: From Kant’s Dualism to Dialectical Unity
Goal: Overcome Kant’s “unknowable noumenon.”
Hegel argued that reality and thought develop together — history itself is the unfolding of Spirit (Geist) coming to know itself. For him, reason and truth are not separate: every stage of human thought (art, religion, philosophy) shows a deeper synthesis of opposites (thesis–antithesis–synthesis). Knowledge, therefore, is dynamic and historical — truth is not static correspondence but the growth of self-aware understanding. Hegel transforms Kant’s “structure of mind” into a living process where mind and world evolve together.


Husserl: From Transcendental Structures to Conscious Experience
Goal: Return to the “things themselves.”
Husserl maintained Kant’s idea that the mind structures reality, but he aimed to study those structures directly through phenomenology. By bracketing (epoché), we suspend assumptions about external reality to focus on how things appear in consciousness. Reality then becomes a correlation between subject and object—a phenomenon that occurs in the intentional act of perception. Husserl brought Kant’s abstract categories to life by emphasizing intentionality (consciousness is always consciousness of something).


Hegel’s and Husserl’s Influence on Intersubjectivity
Later phenomenologists, such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, built on this idea. Heidegger viewed Being itself as relational: we exist as Dasein, or “being-in-the-world,” never separate from context. Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as a mediator — perception is embodied, not just a detached intellect. Sartre focused on freedom and responsibility, shaping the understanding that knowledge and existence are intertwined through choice and action. Knowledge arises from the encounter among the self, the other, and the world—an existential and relational field, not a detached mirror.

Knowledge is not discovered from a distance; it is formed through participation.

Participatory Ways of Knowing

Social and constructivist extensions of epistemology shift the focus from isolated knowers to shared worlds of meaning, emphasizing that knowledge is co-created through social, linguistic, and historical interaction. Karl Marx transformed Hegel’s idealism into a materialist account, arguing that consciousness is shaped by social and economic conditions, while thinkers such as Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget demonstrated how cognition develops through language, interaction, and participation in shared practices. In the twentieth century, philosophers of science and culture—including Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty—argued that even scientific knowledge advances through paradigms, discourses, and vocabularies shaped by human communities rather than through access to a neutral, framework-free reality.

From this perspective, reality does not disappear but becomes accessible only through shared symbols, narratives, and practices, combining a commitment to realism with a deeply relational understanding of meaning. Building on this foundation, relational and participatory epistemologies—developed by thinkers such as Martin Buber, Alfred North Whitehead, and Humberto Maturana, as well as contemporary constructivist and relational-cultural theorists—propose that knowledge arises between persons rather than solely within them. Truth, on this view, is not a static correspondence but a living process of mutual attunement, an ongoing loop of perception, interpretation, and interaction. Reality is neither simply “out there” nor merely “in here,” but emerges through relationship—grounded in a world that responds to our involvement, yet continually shaped by how we meet it together.

Thinker

Key Shift

Bridge Built Between

Kant

Mind actively structures experience

Objective world ↔ Subjective mind

Hegel

Thought and being co-evolve

Individual knowing ↔ Historical reason

Husserl

Intentional consciousness gives meaning

Objectivity ↔ Lived experience

Heidegger / Merleau-Ponty / Sartre

Being-in-the-world is relational

Self ↔ World through existence

Constructivists / RCT / RLT

Knowledge arises in connection and dialogue

Individual ↔ Society ↔ Reality

Reality does not live only ‘out there’ or ‘in here’—it emerges between us, through relationship.

Shared Worlds of Meaning

In the modern age, truth was conceived as a solid bridge linking the mind to an independent, orderly world. Philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant laid the foundations of this bridge on reason and observation, convinced that objective knowledge could bridge the gap between perception and reality. Modernity prized the objective—the idea that truth exists “out there,” stable and measurable, waiting to be discovered through rational inquiry. The scientist and the philosopher were its engineers, working to design methods that would remove illusion and reveal a universal, impersonal order.

Yet beneath this rational structure, a seed was already germinating. The subjective—the inner life of perception, emotion, and interpretation—began to push through the cracks of the bridge. Kant acknowledged that the mind shapes experience; Romantics such as Goethe and Schiller celebrated intuition and imagination; Nietzsche later warned that all “truths” are human interpretations, metaphors hardened by use. The chrysanthemum started to unfold, showing that knowledge is not a single span of logic but a layered bloom of experience, each petal colored by context and perspective.

By the twentieth century, the modern bridge no longer seemed to lead to a single, fixed shore. Science revealed relativity and uncertainty; philosophers of language showed that meaning shifts with use; culture itself appeared as a lattice of interpretations. The post-modern turn did not kill truth—it transformed it. Truth became intersubjective: something that arises between minds in dialogue rather than being imposed from above or isolated within. Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world,” Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perception, and Buber’s “I-Thou” relation all pointed toward a world where knowing is participatory. Reality reveals itself only through relationship—between self and world, between person and community, between word and silence.

In this view, the chrysanthemum’s bloom depends on light, soil, and season. Likewise, truth unfolds through shared conditions—language, empathy, and culture. The petals of objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity coexist:
Objective truth offers structure—the stem and roots grounding inquiry in evidence.


Subjective truth gives color—the lived experience that animates understanding.

Intersubjective truth is the bloom itself—the shared meaning that opens when minds meet.


The shift from modernity to post-modernity thus replaces the quest for certainty with a more organic humility. Knowledge becomes less about conquering reality and more about co-creating it responsibly. Like gardeners, we tend the soil of conversation, nurture perspective, and recognize that no petal exists apart from the whole flower.

In the end, the bridge and the chrysanthemum belong together. The bridge reminds us that connection is possible; the flower shows that it must be alive—rooted in both earth and air, shaped by the interplay of light and shadow. Truth, then, is not a monument but a living relationship: an ever-opening bloom nourished by the shared sunlight of our collective understanding.