Fja1 wrote: ↑Sun Jun 20, 2021 1:12 am
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri Jun 18, 2021 8:29 amI don't see that in Kant, "thinking is
always thinking about something."
That 'about something' is highly conditional and qualified because the masses of humans are conditioned by 'cause and effect'. [note Hume on the Problem of causality].
For Kant, we cannot be hasty in jumping to conclusion as to what that "something" really is - depending on their state of mind.
For Kant the real 'something' is confined to the empirical and possible experience which is immanent. As such what is real is not mere appearance but the whole shebang of the cognitive processes that include the self within an environment, where the self is not independent of the environment.
The realist on the other hand insists there is something that is independent of the self even though he does not have any direct relation to that something. This is chasing an illusion.
This is where Kant stated, the insistence on the transcendent is being deluded by an illusion.
Even the wisest of men cannot free himself from them [the illusions].
After long effort he perhaps succeeds in guarding himself against actual error; but he will never be able to free himself from the Illusion, which unceasingly mocks and torments him.
B397
I din't quite understand your first sentence, but here's what I've digested:
Represantion is never a 1:1 representation exclusively of one thing-in-itself, but representation is always manifold; representatation is a representation of one of many things-in-themselves, but we are limited in our ability to truly filter out a single thing-in-itself that projects the representation, as this is highly conditioned by our perspective and conditions of perception. (In lack of a better riff.) This is why this thing-in-itself is inaccessible, trancendental, no? We can only positively filter the experience/sensation as a conditional argument. (Which Hume revendicates to familiarity and pattern.)
To the naive realist, representation is a case of 1:1 with the thing-in-itself.
To the indirect realist, representation is NEVER the case of 1:1 with the thing-in-itself BUT nevertheless there still exist a thing-in-itself to be corresponded with.
For Kant, there is no thing-in-itself existing as real and independent awaiting to be corresponded with in the first place.
The thing-in-itself is
invented by humans as an inherent and natural activity of the human mind and pure reason, in this case by realists [philosophical].
Thus the realists
instinctively [naturally]
invent the thing-in-itself and then correspond the appearances/perception of the supposed thing-in-itself with itself.
This is why Kant insisted, the claim of the thing-in-itself [which is unconsciously self-created] as the real, objective and an independent thing is delusional.
Hope you get the point?
Other philosophers attempt a complete dissolution of the thing-in-itself. "Esse est percipi" of Berkeley (and apparently Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, although Nietzsche turns this around into some sort of realism, saying that appearances are the only real thing which exist).
To jump to the conclusion of "Esse est percipi" is too rough and crude. Btw, Berkeley was motivated by God as the most real and whatever he deemed anything else as not significant is not a worry to him as a theist.
As I mentioned above, to understand why 'what is real' is real is a complex issue and we need to cover the whole shebang of cognition, reality and the self/consciousness.
Why would I as a person not be reductible to representation, then? Why do I not, in making choices, transfer my will into representation by modifying external conditions? (Maybe thought is predicated, and the "I" is the predicate.) In self-affirmation or emancipation (e. g. Hegel's master/slave -dialectic), such self-consciousness is only reflective perception and thus represenation, but what about someone I seek valuation from? He may refuse to be made into an object, he may become self-conscious as a subject and thus incomplete as an object, "restarted" so-to-speak. Do we here finally touch upon some temporal horizon between a subject and an object? To be an object is to be objectified (constituent subjectivity) and to be a subject is the reverse (non-constituent subjectivity)?
Firstly, the appearance of other humans can be reduced to representations.
There is no permanent self-in-itself extending to a soul-in-itself that survives physical death.
There is only the empirical self of a person which is always changing till it disappear upon physical death.
Secondly, what we understand of other humans individually can be transposed onto oneself as another human being like all other human beings out there.
Thus there is no ''me-in-itself" and so no room for the "me" to hope for heaven or fear be in hell.
Ultimately it is about consequences and utilities [pros and cons] to the individual[s] and humanity relating to the adoption of whether to believe the independent thing-in-itself or me-in-itself exist as real or not.
In the past and at present, to believe in the instinctive and natural thing-in-itself had more pros than cons for the masses, BUT the reverse should be the case in the future from now onwards.