We have set aside two explanations as to how we can comprehend (at least in part) a world that so vastly outsizes us. The first (Kantian) explanation is that this is possible because the comprehended world is folded inside the comprehending mind. This, however, leaves the problem of accounting for the sense of a world outside of the mind of which we have incomplete knowledge. If extra-mental reality is a featureless noumenon, then we must find within ourselves the difference between what we feel we are and what we feel we know. The experiencable Other loses its opacity and, indeed, its otherness. It is difficult, moreover, to understand how the Kantian transcendental subject fails to be all-powerful, if it creates the context (the world) in which it both exerts its power and experiences its limitations. The opposite explanation that the mind is attuned to the world as a matter of biological necessity – the mind is wrapped in the natural world – proves equally flawed as an attempt to deflate the mystery of the comprehensibility of the world. There is nothing in biological processes that seems able either to generate mind or to account for its putative value as a condition of enhanced replicative power. Besides, if there is only nature, then the fact that mind is “about” nature remains unexplained. Organisms, as part of nature and subject to its laws, do not seem to have the wherewithal to generate the kind of distance explicit in intentionality. The determined attempts to eliminate intentionality by many philosophers committed to naturalism is striking testimony to this. Moreover, in both Kantian idealism and the various forms of naturalism, the gradual, laborious acquisition of explicitly incomplete knowledge is equally without explanation. The problem of the intelligibility of the world returns with an added force when we consider the nature of the being – the fallible human subject – that comprehends the world.

The cognitive progress of humanity is typically presented as being characterized by, and dependent upon, progressive escape from the subjectivity of the knowing subject. Minds, it seems, understand the world only by overcoming some fundamental aspects of themselves.