For years, I’ve drawn a line between reality and actuality. In my own usage, actuality was meant to capture the whole of what happens — real or misperceived, fact or hallucination. If someone experienced it, it was actual. Meanwhile, reality was meant to describe what is really going on, the part of existence that isn’t fooled by human error or perception.
But recently, diving into Kant again, I realized something odd: I’ve been using these words almost opposite to how they were understood in his time — and even opposite to how he philosophically framed them.
Kant’s Categories — and Mine
Kant distinguished between:
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The phenomenal world — what we perceive, shaped by the structure of our minds (space, time, causality).
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The noumenal world — what truly is, beyond perception: the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich).
He used:
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Wirklichkeit (“actuality”) to refer to what exists within our structured experience — the phenomenal.
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Realität (“reality”) as a more specific term tied to sensation and degrees of presence.
By contrast, I had been treating actuality as something deeper than reality — as a way to refer to what truly is, inclusive of all experience, flawed or not.
But here's the revelation: what I really meant by “actuality” all along was something much closer to what Kant meant by the noumenal.
The Modern Switcheroo
In everyday usage today:
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Reality is the dominant term for “what’s real.”
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Actuality is relegated to meaning “what’s currently happening” or sometimes “what has been instantiated.”
This flips the older, more philosophically rigorous meanings.
Today, people casually use reality to mean both what they perceive and what they believe is truly out there. We say, “That’s my reality,” when we really mean, “That’s how things seem to me.”
And actuality? It’s almost disappeared from everyday conversation — except in newsrooms or technical discussions.
So here’s where I’ve landed:
A Clearer Triad: Noumenal, Actuality, Reality
To clarify things for myself — and possibly for others — I now see these terms this way:
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Noumenal: What truly is, independent of all perception, language, and cognition. The raw, unfiltered foundation of existence. Objective reality, if such a thing can be said to exist. This is what I had in mind when I said “actuality” — and it's what Buddhist thought might call ultimate reality or enlightenment, the emptiness (śūnyatā) behind appearances.
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Actuality: The totality of what is experienced — including misperceptions, illusions, dreams, delusions. If it happens in consciousness, it is actual, even if it doesn’t reflect reality. This includes both phenomenal experiences and reality itself.
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Reality: What we believe to be real based on perception, cognition, and consensus. Often confused with the noumenal, but really just the structured, filtered version of the world we navigate every day. What Kant would call the phenomenal world.
The Illusion of Objectivity
This naturally brings us to the slipperiness of the phrase “objective reality.”
We like to believe we can step outside ourselves and see things “objectively.” But we can’t — not entirely. Even science, as rigorous as it is, depends on human observers, instruments built by humans, interpreted by humans. Every so-called “objective fact” is mediated through some system of meaning.
That’s why I’ve always liked the phrase:
“Objectivity is subjective, and subjectivity is objective.”
It may sound paradoxical, but it’s a reflection of the human condition. We want to believe in something solid and observer-independent — and maybe it’s out there (the noumenal!). But all we can ever experience is what passes through our lens of subjectivity.
And yet, the reporting of subjective experience — the acknowledgment of perception — is itself a kind of objective data. Especially in disciplines like psychology or phenomenology, subjectivity becomes the field of study.
This diagram visually expresses a layered view of reality based on Kantian and post-Kantian ideas:
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Phenomenal Reality (outer circle): What we perceive — the world as shaped by our senses, cognition, and shared interpretation. This is the world of appearances.
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Actuality (middle circle): All that is experienced, including perception, imagination, misperception, and illusion. It's the content of consciousness, regardless of its truth.
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Noumenal (beneath the circles, reached by the arrow): The objective reality that exists outside and independent of experience — what is, even if we cannot fully access or describe it. The arrow suggests we aim toward the noumenal, but never fully enter it.
The Deep Tie to Enlightenment
This is where Western philosophy brushes up against Eastern thought.
What Kant called the noumenal, Buddhist philosophy might call ultimate reality, or tathatā (“suchness”) — the true nature of things, which cannot be grasped by conceptual thinking, only realized. In that sense, the noumenal realm isn’t just unknowable — it’s beyond knowing, because it exists prior to the subject-object split.
In Zen, for example, the moment of enlightenment is seeing past the illusion of the phenomenal world and directly “touching” the noumenal — even if it’s not graspable in words.
So maybe that word I was reaching for all along, when I said actuality, was this:
Noumenal — not as a technical term, but as a placeholder for what is ultimately real. The ground of being. The is-ness beyond all filters.
Final Thought
We have these words — reality, actuality, objectivity — but they bend under pressure. They drift with time and culture. But what we’re reaching for hasn’t changed.
Kant saw the problem. So did the Buddha.
Maybe we’re all just pointing — like fingers at the moon — toward something we can’t quite grasp, but that we can, in rare moments of clarity, unmistakably feel.
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