Phenomenology Kitten—Kantian Turns (3)

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On this day in Round and Square History
22 October 2012—Rural Religion in China (24)
22 October 2011—Styling Culture: Overly Colloquial Language

[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] "Sunset" RF

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

[Kant] remained always insistent that total reality consists of two worlds, one (pace Berkeley) the world of things as they are in themselves and the other the world of things as they appear to us. The latter is the world of objects of experience, manifesting themselves in three dimensions of space and one of time...[T]he entities which relate to one another are such as cannot exist independently of experience...They are what Kant calls forms of our sensibility, what we have been thinking of as nets; or one might call them frameworks within which we gather the as yet unprocessed raw material of experience together into the ordered, coherent world that is what we actually experience. Independently of that process they have no being...

[c] Continental Brontosaurus RF

And whereas objects as they appear to us are constituted entirely in these subject-dependent terms, any independent existence they might have would have to be entirely not in these terms, and that is something of which, in the nature of things, we are permanently unable to form any conception. Whenever a philosopher is heard to demand challengingly why objects as they are in themselves should not exist in forms that correspond to our apprehension of them he can be taken not to have understood this. Kant's demonstration of it is a contribution to philosophy of the utmost profundity. It underlies what he himself describes as his Copernican revolution in philosophy.

And you know what? It doesn't get much bigger than Copernican revolutions. You would think that these ideas would have transformed every discipline in academia.

Alas. That is not how it has played out. It is as though most academic disciplines have just tuned out this message for 233 years.

Ponder that. We'll pick it up tomorrow.

Notes
[1] Brian Magee, The Confessions of a Philosopher (New York: Random House, 1997), 146-147.

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

[d] Turkey tail, er, fungus RF

[Originally posted on September 10, 2014]