Kant noumena and phenomena7/30/2023 ![]() ![]() Through language we live mostly as 'we' and always with 'them' in the background. That there 'really is' something 'behind' all of this endless processing is probably most grounded on our inherently social nature. Nietzsche's philosophy is one more piece of the endless processing or mediation. Part of the complexity comes from thinking the distinction between the world and our image of it is itself 'within' the image of the world, threatening the very distinction of world versus image-of-world. If we are engaged in making sense of the world by imposing our a priori structure on it (''falsifying'' the world, as Nietzsche puts it), it seems to follow that the world as we experience it and the world as it is cannot be one and the same thing. I'm struggling with this disagreement between Kant and Hegel regarding things-in-themselves and would really appreciate some help. I don't accept Locke's concept of a tabula rasa because, like Kant, I believe that our minds are imposing structures on the world in order to make experience possible at all. But how can the world as we experience it be real given our a priori structure? If we are engaged in making sense of the world by imposing our a priori structure on it (''falsifying'' the world, as Nietzsche puts it), it seems to follow that the world as we experience it and the world as it is cannot be one and the same thing. The only way I can understand Hegel here is if he asserts that the world as we experience it really is the ''real'' world. How, then, did Hegel account for experience at all? If things-in-themselves are removed then it seems that our experience has no source. Hegel rejected Kant's concept of things-in-themselves. Although we cannot say anything about things-in-themselves, it seems to Kant that they must exist since there must be something to which we apply our a priori structure to (As an aside, I do not think that Kant was right in asserting the existence of things-in-themselves given that they are, by definition, that which is independent of experience at best, I think one can only assume the existence of things-in-themselves.) As such, things-in-themselves are unknowable we can say of them that they exist but we cannot say anything about them, since we cannot conceive of anything outside of our a priori structure. ![]() In other words, things-in-themselves are the world independent of (our) experience. Things-in-themselves are the source of our experience they are what things are like before we apply our a priori structure to them. According to Kant, knowledge does not conform to objects but objects conform to knowledge, to our a priori structure. Kant distinguished between the world as we experience it ( phenomena) and the world as thing-in-itself ( noumena).
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