United States or Ukraine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Messages in the form of sense-impressions come flowing in from that 'outside world, and these we analyze, classify, store up, and reason about. But of the nature of 'things-in-themselves, of what may exist at the other end of our system of telephone wires, we know nothing at all. "But the reader, perhaps, remarks, 'I not only see an object, but I can touch it.
My plan of culture was very simple: it was to seek out the innermost unity connecting the most diverse and widely-separated phenomena, whether subjective or objective, and whether theoretical or practical, to learn to see the spiritual side of their activity, to apprehend their mutual relations as facts and forms of Nature, or to express them mathematically; and, on the other hand, to contemplate the natural and mathematical laws as founded in the innermost depths of my own life as well as in the highest unity of the great whole, that is indeed to regard them in their unconditioned, uncaused necessity, as "absolute things-in-themselves."
In any case it was a work of great merit to have transferred the existence of objects beyond our ideas, of things-in-themselves, out of the region of the self-evident into the region of the problematical. We never get beyond the circle of our ideas, and if we posit a thing-in-itself as the ground and object of the idea, this also is simply a thought, an idea.
What things-in-themselves are like we have no means of knowing; we know only things as they appear to us.
This outside world is constructed by him from the contents of the inside sounds, which differ as widely from things-in-themselves as language, the symbol, must always differ from the thing it symbolizes.
For example, in "The Grammar of Science," we find our author discussing, under the title "The Facts of Science," such problems as the following: the Reality of Things; Sense-impressions and Consciousness; the Nature of Thought; the External Universe; Sensations as the Ultimate Source of the Materials of Knowledge; and the Futility of "Things-in-themselves."
The gist of the idealistic argument always is that the world itself is nothing apart from thought; that thought-relationships rule in and through all things; that there are no things-in-themselves; that there can be no hard-and-fast stuff standing apart from God. Things must come within the range of thought or go out of existence. There is no alternative.
Kant is not so much concerned to prove the nonexistence of noumena, things-in-themselves, as he is to prove that the very conception is an empty one.
It would still remain possible for other methods of approach than this transcendental pragmatism, for instinct, perhaps, or for revelation, to bring us into contact with things-in-themselves.
In that state man abstracts himself: in that state man withdraws himself from all outside objects; in that subjective mood he is immersed in the ocean of spiritual life and can unfold the secrets of things-in-themselves. To illustrate this, think of man as endowed with two kinds of sight; when the power of insight is being used the outward power of vision does not see.
Word Of The Day