I do not consider my views or my perspective to be narrow or myopic, nor my goals and opinions to be essentially self-interested or ungenerous. But of course they are, for I make the fundamental mistake of confusing what is my own personal view of the world with the nature of the world as it actually is. How could I not? It is the only thing I see with these eyes I have.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant’s central point was that our observation and experience of the world is never free of or uncompromised by the presuppositions and concepts that make our experience possible in the first place. This means that I can never fully comprehend or assess anything that is not-me as having any sort of brute fact reality. I have a comprehensive, fully realised image of the world. It is broad in structure and detailed in its minutia, but I fail to realise that it is still, for all that, a uniquely personal and therefore self-centred vision. It is my world that I am determined to see, not the world, but I honestly think that the world I see is the real one.