Phenomenology Kitten—Kantian Turns (2)

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On this day in Round and Square History
21 October 2012—Rural Religion in China (23)
21 October 2011—Styling Culture: Messy Terms and Phrases

1

[a] Appearing to consciousness RF

Our attaintment of enlightenment is something like the reflection of the

moon in water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water cleft apart...

The whole moon and the whole sky find room enough in a single dewdrop...

                             —Dōgen, Conversations

We continue today with one of the best explanations I have ever read of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It is embedded in Brian Magee's superb autobiography Confessions of a Philosopher. As we head toward the Husserlian Swirl, let's continue to unpack the Kantian underpinnings of phenomenology.

[b] Perspective RF

And, as before, we'll consider it our Prolegomena to Any Future Phenomenology.

If we look on the Kantian analysis as telling us primarily something about the world and not something about propositions, its crucial points are that we human beings are embodied and that our bodies are equipped with certain mental and sensory apparatus, such that all experience must come to us through it. Therefore only what it can mediate is possible experience for us. Therefore untranscendable limits to the world of possible experience are set by the nature of the apparatus we have, and would have been so set whatever apparatus we might have possessed. Although the apparatus we have is contingent, the fact that it sets limits to our possible experience is not contingent but necessary. What it cannot mediate cannot be experience.

This, to repeat, is not at all the same as saying that nothing can exist that it cannot mediate—to suppose this is the commonest error made by commonsense and scientific thinking, and also by empiricist and realist philosophers. 

[c] Appears RF

There are no grounds whatever for supposing such a thing. The simple truth is that as far as we can ever know there is no limit to what can exist outside the possibility of our knowledge...[Kant] believed as confidently as anyone can every believe anything that there is an independent reality outside the world of all possible experience. He called this the world of the noumenal, the world of things as they are in themselves, and of reality as it is in itself. He called the world as it appears to us—the directly known world of actual experience with its penumbra, the postulated world of possible experience—the world of phenomena. 

And it is of paramount importance for those brought up in an Anglo-Saxon tradition never to forget that when Kant and his successors talk of the world of phenomena they are talking of the world as we ordinarily think of it, the actual world, the world of material objects in space and time, the world of common sense and of science: what we are used to calling the empirical world.[1]

That world that seems natural, even "given" to us? That's the phenomenal one.

Ponder that. We'll pick it up tomorrow.

Notes
[1] Brian Magee, The Confessions of a Philosopher (New York: Random House, 1997), 145-146.

Bibliography
Magee, Brian. The Confessions of a Philosopher. New York: Random House, 1997. 

[d] To Mercury RF

[Originally posted on September 9, 2014]