Phenomenology Kitten—Kantian Turns (7)

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On this day in Round and Square History
2 November 2012—Rural Religion in China (33)
2 November 2011—Seinfeld Ethnography: Jerry's Haircut

[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] Thinks in themselves RF

And, as before, we'll consider it our Prolegomena to Any Future Phenomenology. We are nearing the heart of the heart of the country.

Although, says Kant, we know the objects in themselves to exist, they are outside the possibility of our apprehension. Central to the Kantian philosophy is the doctrine that precisely because this reality exists independently of all possible experience it remains permanently hidden.

No one who understands the central doctrines of any of the world's leading religions ought to have any difficulty understanding this idea, although such a person may disagree with it; that is another matter. The chief reason why so many empiricists misunderstand Kant is that the identification of independently existing objects (and therefore reality) with the objects of experience is so foundational a tenet of philosophy as they themselves conceive and practise it that they are not able to liberate themselves from the assumption, and so they import it into their understanding of Kant's philosophy, from which it is—equally foundationally—absent...

[c] Experience RF

Empiricists may want to say something like: "But surely it is absurd to assert that the whole of our direct experience, and therefore all that we actually know, is not really real, while what is really is something we can never know. Is that not standing everything on its head? 

My answer to this is: "No, it is not, for the simple reason that all we can ever encounter in direct experience is experience, and experience as such is subject-dependent. Inherent in its logic is that fact that it is not objective. We know for the marvelously insightful reasons supplied to us by Kant that it is impossible that it should ever be independent reality. Indeed, precisely because it is experience it cannot be independent reality. Experience can never be independent reality. The error at the heart of the entire empiricist tradition is what you might call the reification of experience, the mis-taking of experience for reality, the mist-taking of epistemology for ontology."


Ponder that. We'll pick it up tomorrow...with our first toddler steps into Husserl.

Notes
[1] Brian Magee, The Confessions of a Philosopher (New York: Random House, 1997),149-150.

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

[d] Halo Kitty RF

[Originally posted on September 14, 2014]