990117 1623 -Things as they appear and as they are in themselves

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Von: Evan Wm. Cameron <ewc@yorku.ca>
An: Multiple recipients of list <kant-l@bucknell.edu>
Betreff: RE: Things: as they appear and as they are in themselves
Datum: Sonntag, 17. Januar 1999 16:31

A reminder:

Kant did NOT say that we could never 'know' things as they are in
themselves; the verb he used was 'erkennen' which, then and now, is the
German verb for 'to recognise - and, given Kant's concern with judgment
(REfining the identity of something through predication already identified
in a preliminary way by the subject), the verb is more exactly apropos
than even Kant may have gathered.

Careful translators have tried to avoid the confusion by using the verb
'to cognize' rather than 'to know', but 'to cognize' is hardly a verb
commonly used in English, whereas 'erkennen' was and is commonly used in
German to precisely Kant's point - as is the verb 'to recognise' in
English.

Kant's never suggested that we were prohibited from thinking of things as
they are in themselves (and indeed think testably, though he would have
been as surprised as anyone at the extent to which we have been able to do
it; see Godel's work on Einstein for a good and attributed example), nor
indeed that we could know nothing about things as they are in themselves.
Kant's work, after all, is replete with judgments about things as they are
in themselves (the goodness of God, etc.) that we are supposed to take as
true of them. Rather, he held (to use an example close to his heart) that
although both we and God encounter the SAME THINGS, we must encounter them
AS THEY APPEAR whereas God encounters them AS THEY ARE IN THEMSELVES - and
we need only think of how we are constrained when thinking of the former to
think of how a being unlike us might be unconstrained when encountering
and recognising them otherwise.

As serious Kant scholars have insisted for years, the phrases capitalized
above were ADVERBIAL; Kant used no hyphens (for there were for him no
things-as-they-appear to be distinguished substantively from
things-as-they-are-in-themselves). He held rather that whereas we must
encounter things spatially and temporally, and hence recognise them as
being causally related, etc., we could THINK of other modes of encounter
and recognition, God, in particular, being under no such constraints.
(God's encounters, for Kant, were somehow creative and intellectual,
unlike our own - which, incidentally, short-circuits any attempt to render
his sense of encounter, much less recognition, in contemporary
psychological terms. Using Kant to readjust contemporary psychological
discussions may be as useful as using him for any other purpose; to
reverse the procedure, however, claiming to understand Kant better through
the common understandings of contemporary psychological research is
puzzling - to put it kindly.)

Dr. Evan Wm. Cameron Telephone: (416) 736-5149
CFT 216 (Film): York University Fax: (416) 736-5149
4700 Keele Street E-mail: ewc@yorku.ca
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M3J 1P3