Today I’m looking at Immanuel Kant’s “thing-in-itself” and Hans Vaihinger’s ideas. In Kant’s philosophy, the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) refers to the reality that exists independently of human perception or experience. Kant argued that while we can know phenomena (i.e., the appearances of things as they present themselves to us), the thing-in-itself remains inaccessible to human cognition. Our knowledge is always mediated by the structures of our mind (such as space, time, and categories of understanding).

The Kantian dichotomy therefore is phenomena (i.e., things as they appear to us) and the noumena (the things-in-themselves). For Kant, the thing-in-itself is something that exists independently of human perception but is forever inaccessible to us. We can only know the world as it appears to us, not as it truly is in itself. This creates a separation between appearance and reality, and Kant suggests that this gap is unbridgeable for human beings.

I’m not a fan of dichotomies. Most often, dichotomies are created as linguistic tools to aid our thinking. But they form a life of their own and can also cause confusion in our thinking.

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