Both Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter and Immanuel Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds provide profound frameworks for understanding Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter challenges the traditional dichotomy between human and non-human realms, suggesting that all entities – animate and inanimate – possess vitality and agency. Kant’s division between the phenomenal world (what we perceive) and the noumenal world (what exists independently of perception) reveals the inherent limits of human understanding. Together, these ideas illuminate Shepherd’s exploration of the Cairngorms, particularly her depiction of the intricate relationship between human perception and the natural world.

If the whole truth of them is to be told as I have found it, I too am involved. I have been the instrument of my own discovering.

In Shepherd’s account, the Cairngorms are not a static backdrop but a dynamic force, actively shaping and being shaped by human experience. Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter offers a lens to view this reciprocity – the mountain is not merely observed but participates in a mutual relationship with those who engage with it. For both Shepherd and Bennett, materiality is neither inert nor lifeless: it possesses vitality and agency, weaving humans and the natural world into an interconnected web of existence.

How could we imagine flavour, or perfume, without the senses of taste and smell? They are completely unimaginable. There must be many exciting properties of matter that we cannot know because we have no way to know them.

Shepherd’s reflections resonate with Kant’s assertion that the noumenal world – the realm of ‘things in themselves’ – is ultimately unknowable, as human understanding is bound by our
sensory and cognitive faculties. While Shepherd acknowledges the profound effects of the mountains on human perception, she also accepts that their true essence remains elusive. The mountain’s inherent nature resists complete intellectual grasp, revealing the limitations of human knowledge.

Knowing another is endless. And I have discovered that man’s experience of them enlarges rock, flower and bird. The thing to be known grows with the knowing.

Rather than resisting these limitations, Shepherd embraces them, recognising the gap between knowledge and experience as integral to her engagement with the natural world. This perspective reflects her journey of discovery, shifting from a self-centred view of the mountain’s impact on her to a reverence for the mountain’s intrinsic being.

at first I was seeking only sensuous gratification … I was not interested in the mountain for itself, but for its effect upon me … But as I grew older, and less self-sufficient, I began to discover the mountain in itself

This evolution shows a shift in Shepherd’s perspective – from perceiving the mountain as a source of sensory stimulation to appreciating its intrinsic value. Her narrative moves beyond the pursuit of perceptual mastery toward a mode of comprehension rooted in an embodied engagement.

when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a profound harmony… I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain.

Shepherd suggests that overcome the dichotomy between knowledge and experience requires an epistemological shift: one rooted not in intellectual abstraction but in physical, embodied engagement. Through motion, rhythm and breath, she reveals a journey into Being itself, where understanding is mediated by the body’s attunement to the vitality of the landscape. This synchronisation between body and environment becomes a pathway to transcendent knowing, uniting self and mountain in a shared existence.

[All quotes are from The Living Mountain]