Kant said the right thing. But about a wrong thing.
The world is indeed created in the image of our thought, but not where the outstanding bore of Königsberg claimed. Maybe he was right and time and space - plus a few others - are the phylacteries that we never take off, but would this have to mean that without them the world, as we know it, would cease to be? Would Torah stop holding if Jews took off its reminders that they carry on their foreheads?
Even if we have some metaphysical spectacles on all the time, it's probably just in case - normally we can follow St Thomas Aquinas and safely go across an open transcendental bridge between us and the universe to find out about what's out there first-hand, which will confirm what we perceived in the first place.
The thing is, the bridge, or our perception - whichever you believe, leads us just to a toehold on the other side from which to explore other people and other things. What we reach are bare metaphysical necessities, so to speak: a few basic categories that we can easily work out if we have enough time and space.
So what's the big deal about Kant? The answer is that the other German Copernicus placed the action on a higher plane, in our mind. However, he was too timid, too unimaginative to fly beyond the posts that the Philosopher shoved in the ground ages before. And it is only beyond the frontier set by Aristotle that the real action begins.
Because there are categories that only we can add to the things we see and, slightly more excitingly, to the people we meet. There are spheres of the universe that only our mind has the power to create. There are dimensions whose existence totally depends on the way we look at the world. To build those new, unchartered realms is our Manifest Destiny.*
So I keep on building and maybe one day I'll make a long overdue mental breakthrough and expand our universe**, when beside the old familiar fellow human that stands hand-in-hand with me in existential awe under a starry sky and is in constant metaphysical wonder at the moral law in us; beside that sensitive sibling of mine that first and foremost seeks another person and not cheap thrills; beside the potential partner in the quest for love, peace and understanding (what's so funny??) and the prospective fellow-knight in the crusade against reductionism and the destructive madness of the present tax-code - when bedside all these, I finally manage somehow to notice the sexy chick you are, too***.
*Jews, Americans, civil-engineering – I'm losing my way with metaphors. By the look of it, Freemasons are coming next.
**being part of it, I expand the universe if I expand my corner.
***or is it the other way round? You confuse me, baby.
