Kant’s Thing On Its Own or In Itself
I just happen to freeze for a moment on the plug of the computer. It was out, which was odd. Then I immediately realize that I had unplugged the other end.
That freeze was a synopsis of the senses. A picture, continuing for a second or two, of a unlit computer plug.
The freeze was surely prompted by the understanding, i.e., the sense becomes used to holding back and noticing a sequence. An unlit computer plug, how odd! That oddness stems, I suppose, from the expectations based on exposure, we are so used to something that we automatically notice a difference.
So in the first place I did not consider the specter of the unlit plug as a thing on its own. For in that case no question could ever arise but merely a passive wait and see (even if certain cusomary actions are taken—it usually acts is this way). Rather I considered it a specter in space and time and which was sugject to the rules of the understanding, and so where such rule were then sought out via trial and error. I.e., all things as specters are connected (the primitive assertion and presupposition), and so be on the look out for these connections, i.e., anticipate them so that the senses can be sensitive to patterns.
If I were to consider the plug light to be a thing on its own, then for all I could tell the next thing would be a battleship with plates of gold or nothing or . . . what can you tell about a thing on its own? You do not have an intuition or envisagement by your mind of a thing on its own in order to grasp that it was subject to laws. Rather you presuppose that and bring it to the table of experience with you. You are faced with a specter of our senses (which may be quite different from the views of other non-human beings. By recognizing things as specters and not as things on their own, we are able to arrange for ourselves out of the myriad representations or depictions of our minds such that there is an indepdently and uniformly existing world, in contrast to which our perceptions are merely occasionally glimpses into this independently and uniformly existing world, and then also reproductions via memory and imagination which we then can understand to be the perceptual world in general.
By means of this original take on things by the understanding, if you will, we are able to erect an external world such that all of our perceptions can be arrayed in time with that world such that some are images of existing things and some are the memory of things which did exist and some are the imagination of things which have never existed. For example, when I was doing cartwheels before the Emperor of China, I had gone to bed just before and gotten out of bed just afterwards, and I am able to connect all this by having the getting into and out of bed the objective world, i.e., perceptions of actual things existing in the world, and the cartwheels as the work of my imagination. Only by means of the factual existence of the external world can I represent to myself what is meant with the internal world, the subjective world of perception.
When I see a face in the cloud, I do not say that the face is in the cloud as a thing on its own, i.e., as though the face were physically there and could be recognized from different perspectives, rather I say that is my projection onto the cloud. Now I know that the imagination is at play, but this is distinguished from the look which is given on its own. The envisagement is a given and cannot (easily) be changed. I have to look hard at the cloud to remove the face and see something else there in its place, or nothing at all but a cloud. I can imagine other things there, but I can only see the face, and so the face is the result of my looking and not of my imagination, even if the former were prompted by the latter.
If I said that the face were really in the cloud, then I expect all people to admit to that. And there would be chaos. It would be an illusion to see the face as in the cloud itself as a thing on its own. The only way out of that problem is to see it as a specter of the human sensitivity, which is our own projection or Anschauung. And then, based upon that assumption, we can search out the laws which we know are there (presupposed) in and among the specters, to account for their appearances.
February 24, 2008