Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 4:39 am In the most basic, what Kant implied with things-in-themselves is things do not exist by themselves if there are no humans around to interact and actualize things.
To Kant whatever things exists, they exists as things-by-human_selves NEVER by "themselves" pre-existingly.
Thus what Kant meant is whatever are things existing as real, we cannot extricate the human elements from their existence.
For example you exists only as an empirical self and physically but not as person-in-itself as in an independent non-empirical soul that survives physical death.
Point is;
1. At the ultimate level -U, nothing is separable from human existences [ not observation].
2. At the sub-level of U,- common and conventional perspectives, things are separable from human observations.
3. Since level-U overrides all, there is no thing existing as separable from human existence.
Note the analogy [dualism and monism] of the Pando Tree.
Pando (Latin for "I spread"), also known as the trembling giant,[1] is a clonal colony of an individual male quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) determined to be a single living organism by identical genetic markers[2] and assumed to have one massive underground root system.
The clonal colony encompasses 43.6 hectares (108 acres), weighs nearly 6,000 metric tons (6,600 short tons), and has over 40,000 stems (trunks), which die individually and are replaced by new stems growing from its roots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
Here one will obvious see 40,000+ individual trees but actually they are all tree trunks from one root system.
In this case there is no tree-in-itself but trees-by-same-root-system.
The above analogy is similar to reality and its varied things.
The dualism and monism of reality is not as obvious as the analogy of the pando tree but the principles are the same.
What is reality is held by human consciousness on the collective basis and there is no thing-in-itself that is independent of that collective human consciousness.
Btw, that collective human consciousness is not a consciousness-in-itself - like a God.
Like the collective consciousness of a symphony orchestra, where if no collection of humans organized as an orchestra, then there is no orchestra,
thus, if there are no humans there is no collective human consciousness in itself.
As such there are no independent external things-in-themselves, there are only things-by-the_collective-human-consciousness.
The above limit to one claiming there is a soul-in-itself that can survives physical death and a God-in-itself that exists by itself independent of humans and the universe.