In the second half of the 18th - first half of the 19th centuries. In Germany there were several outstanding thinkers who lived at different times and created grandiose philosophical doctrines. Their intellectual activity went down in history under the name German classical philosophy. Its founder was Immanuel Kant.

The starting point of his views is the assertion that before cognizing the world, we must find out whether we can cognize it in principle, and if so, then to what extent. It is necessary to establish the possibilities of our knowledge, its boundaries. The main cognitive tool is the mind, therefore, first of all, it is necessary to find out the abilities and capabilities of our mind. Kant called their comprehensive study criticism, and philosophy, in his opinion, should not be a comprehension of the external world, but a criticism of reason, that is, the study of its structure, specifics and laws. The German philosopher said that the teachings of David Hume pushed him to this conclusion. Let us recall the latter’s assertion that the world is inevitably hidden from us and therefore knowledge is possible not about it, but about our own states (sensations, feelings, thoughts, etc.) or that the subject of philosophy can be a subjective (internal, mental, spiritual) reality, but in no case objective (external). Kant believed the same thing: how do we know what the world is like if we are dealing not with it itself, but with its reflection in our consciousness, due to which the latter can and should be the main object of philosophical attention.

That which exists in itself, he called noumenon or the “thing in itself” which is unknowable; what we see, how what really exists appears to us, he designated by the term phenomenon, or "thing for us". The main question is to what extent the former corresponds to the latter, or to what extent phenomena can provide us with information about noumena. Following Hume, Kant argued: these two areas are strictly demarcated; what we see is not at all the same as what really exists. Our mind contains certain innate or a priori(pre-experimental) forms of consciousness, into which we seem to fit the world around us, squeeze it into them, and it exists in our imagination not at all in the form that it really is, but in the form that it can only be in these a priori forms.

Let us recall the teaching of Sextus Empiricus: every living being is structured in a certain way, and therefore it perceives reality not as it is in itself, but always sees only what it can and should see due to this structure. In humans, Kant says, the senses and mind are also structured in a special way, and we perceive the world around us exactly as it should be according to our ideas, that is, it is not consciousness that conforms to real things, cognizing them, but, on the contrary, things - with forms of consciousness. In other words, we endow the world with our original, innate, pre-experimental knowledge and truly comprehend what we ourselves put into it.

For example, we believe that time really exists. But let's think about this concept, it exists only in the human mind, being a specific term that no other living creature has. And if there were no man on earth at all, then who would talk about time, because in this case this concept could never exist anywhere. What then is “time”: reality or our invention, which we are trying to endow with reality? But the same can be said about everything else. Let’s mentally remove the person from the world, imagine reality without him. What will the world be like then? Is it really the same as it is now? But who then will call one object a tree, another an animal, and a third a river, who then will say that a mountain is higher than a plant, that spring foliage is bright green, that birds fly, and the like? After all, there is no being who could pronounce all these concepts and see reality through their prism. We are simply too accustomed to our idea of ​​the world and consider it the world itself, our subjective perception of reality is so firmly glued to it that we have not noticed for a long time that this reality is not at all what we imagine it to be.

Let us remember an operation that is well known to everyone from childhood: some simple word (for example, “saucepan”) must be repeated 30–50 times, while constantly thinking about its meaning. After a few dozen repetitions, this word will lose its meaning for us, turn into an absurd set of sounds, and we will ask ourselves in surprise: why is this thing called exactly such a “strange” term, and not another? We are accustomed to the fact that one object is called “cat”, another – “planet”, and the third – “flower”, and we do not think at all about the connection of the name with the object itself, we never ask ourselves why a tree is a “tree”. In the same way, we do not think about the connection between our ideas about the world and the world itself (although in fact there is no connection) and we do not ask ourselves whether reality is actually such as we see it (without even suspecting that it is completely other).

But if we don’t know anything about the world, then how to navigate it and live in general. Here Kant, like Hume, says that there is nothing terrible in our ignorance of reality, in theoretical ignorance; it is enough that we can live in an incomprehensible world and navigate it quite well. We only need to find out whether there is (or can be) something common and unconditional for all people, some idea, or belief, or knowledge that no one could doubt at all. This principle is the innate idea of ​​goodness, which is invariably represented in the consciousness of any normal (not mentally ill) person. Each of us knows perfectly well what is good and what is bad, what can and cannot be done, and considers good, like evil, to be something that really exists, and not just a human invention. Suppose that you were offered to kill a person, guaranteeing the absence of any legal punishment, and also presented convincing arguments in favor of the fact that good and evil are nonsense and just a fiction of the mind, that in reality they do not exist and therefore everyone is free to do absolutely anything. They have proven to you that it is possible to kill, will you kill? Of course not. Something is holding you back from this, you, despite any arguments, see that this cannot be done, that this is evil and a crime. You don’t need any proof, since you know it for sure, or rather, you don’t know it, but you believe in it completely and unconditionally.

Such faith is an innate idea of ​​goodness, which is firmly built into our consciousness, its integral part and keeps us from inappropriate actions. After all, if we sincerely considered goodness to be an arbitrary invention, we would create everything. This means that we definitely believe that goodness exists in itself as a kind of reality. Where does this idea come from in our mind? From there, where the sun is in the sky, the heart is in the chest, the wings of the bird. What follows from it? After all, if good, as we believe, really exists, then there must be some eternal source of it or some unshakable guarantor, which can only be God. In other words, if we inevitably believe in the existence of good in reality, then as a consequence we also necessarily believe in God as the indispensable cause of this good. This reasoning is Kant's famous proof of the existence of God, which is most often called a moral argument. It will be the sixth in a row after the five we discussed in the chapter on medieval philosophy.

Kant says that it is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God in any logical way. Therefore, his thought can only conditionally be called an argument, because in it God is derived from morality. Do we want, the German philosopher asks, to live in a world that is structured according to the laws of evil, where villains triumph and innocents suffer, where only lies and meanness, violence and cruelty flourish, where crime is revered as a virtue and only injustice is possible, where the most terrible and terrible things happen? unthinkable things? Of course you won't want to. We involuntarily believe that the world in which we live is not like that, that there is truth, justice, goodness, and order in it. And since we are so firmly convinced of this, we must necessarily recognize the existence of God as a guarantee of the reality and inviolability of all of the above. Such an assumption is necessary, since without it our existence is unthinkable. Thus, even if God did not exist, we still could not help but believe in him, which means that he should have been created, or - if God does not exist, then he still exists. This is how paradoxical, but at the same time quite convincing, Kant’s argument sounds.

The idea of ​​goodness, inevitable for our consciousness, can and should become a universal principle of relationships between people. How much better and happier human life will become if everyone follows one simple rule: do unto others the same way as you would like to be done unto you. How many troubles and misfortunes could be avoided if we were all always guided by this moral requirement and considered it unconditional, undoubted and obligatory!

check yourself

1. What needs to be clarified before understanding the world, from Kant’s point of view?

2. Why is Kantian philosophy called critical or criticism of reason?

3. What are noumena and phenomena in Kant’s teaching?

4. What did Kant call a priori forms of consciousness? What new idea of ​​cognition was proposed by him?

5. What does Kant’s moral proof of the existence of God sound like?

In connection with the epistemological problem of the objectivity of human knowledge: is it capable of providing knowledge about the “true” being, or is it forced to limit itself to subjective knowledge about the “manifestations” of being? The terms “in itself” and “for us” were first used by A.G. Baumgarten. The concept "V. in the village." became one of the main ones in the philosophy of I. Kant. According to Kant, it is limited to certain phenomena, and “V. in the village." there is that basis of these phenomena that a person is not able to touch either with feelings or with reason. Criticism of Kant’s “V. in the village." went in several directions: the objective “V. in c"; their existence was recognized, but their unknowability was criticized; it was argued that there was no difference between the phenomenon and “V. in the village." no, but there is only a difference between what is already known and what is not yet known.

Philosophy: Encyclopedic Dictionary. - M.: Gardariki. Edited by A.A. Ivina. 2004 .

THE THING IN ITSELF

according to Kant, existing for itself, independently of the knowing subject, “true” being,“manifestations” of which are empirical things and to which precisely these “manifestations” point. see also Cipher; Reality.

Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary. 2010 .

THE THING IN ITSELF

THING IN ITSELF (German selbst) - philosophical, the content of which is the entire totality of objects of the external world, independent of the consciousness and will of people. The concept of a thing in itself is organically connected with the development of materialism. According to J. Locke, there is “knowledge of the principles, properties and actions of things, what they are in themselves” (Thoughts on education. - Soch., vol. 3. M., 1982, p. 586). J. Berkeley contrasted this materialistic principle with “objects in themselves or outside the mind” (Treatise on the principles of human knowledge. - Soch. M., 1978, p. 182). In contrast to Berkeley, D. Hume believed that there is “some unknown, necessary as the cause of our perceptions” (An Inquiry into Human Cognition. - Soch., vol. 2. M., 1965, pp. 158-159).

I. Kant, whose development was not without the influence of Hume’s skepticism, combines recognition of the objective reality of things in themselves (one of the foundations of his teaching) with a categorical denial of their knowability: “We are given things as objects of our senses located outside of us, but about what they are in ourselves, we know nothing, but we know only their phenomena, that is, the ideas that they produce in us, influencing our feelings” (Prolegomena to any future metaphysics that may appear as .-Oc. in 6 vols. , vol. 4, part 1. M., 1965, p. 105). Things in themselves, in Kant's understanding of them, are not things at all, since they are interpreted as non-spatial (and therefore non-extended), timeless, something whose existence, Kant claims, is beyond doubt, since phenomena presuppose what appears; that is all that things in themselves can be. It remains, however, unexplained why things in themselves, once they appear, remain absolutely unknowable: the gap between the fundamentally unknowable objective reality of things in themselves and the completely knowable subjective reality of the world of phenomena is the main feature of Kant’s theory of knowledge.

However, Kant refers to the concept of a thing-in-itself not only as a transcendental something that evokes sensory sensations.

acceptance. After all, if a person, as a cognizer, creates (albeit through the means of things in themselves independent of him) phenomena, then he cannot be only a phenomenon, that is, just a representation. Therefore, according to Kant, a person is not only a thing, but also a thing in itself. This applies in particular to the human will, which is not free as empirical, but free as a thing in itself. Kant also distinguishes between empirically determined reason, which is not free from sensory impulses, and pure reason, which “is not a phenomenon and is not subject to any conditions of sensibility,” that is, it is also a thing in itself (Critique of Pure Reason. - Works in 6 vols., vol. 3. M., 1964, p. 491). Fichte, Schelling and Hegel rejected the concept of the thing in itself as an unacceptable concession to materialism. The neo-Kantians did the same, for whom the thing-in-itself is nothing more than the concept of the limit of knowledge. Meanwhile, Kant’s “thing in itself” has a meaning: a fundamental denial of what goes beyond the boundaries of possible experience and, therefore, a denial of the transcendental as an object of knowledge.

T. I. Oizerman

New Philosophical Encyclopedia: In 4 vols. M.: Thought. Edited by V. S. Stepin. 2001 .

See what “THING IN ITSELF” is in other dictionaries:

thing in itself- THE THING IN ITSELF (German: Ding an sich, Ding an sich selbst, sometimes Gegenstand an sich) is one of the central concepts of I. Kant’s critical philosophy, known, however, in one form or another in the previous philosophical tradition. In German... ... Encyclopedia of Epistemology and Philosophy of Science

- “THING IN ITSELF” (German: Ding an sich, Ding an sich selbst), a philosophical concept that is most important in Kantian philosophy. This term was quite widely used before Kant (see KANT Immanuel), in particular, in the Wolff school (see WOLF Christian). IN… … encyclopedic Dictionary

- (Ding an sich; thing in itself; chose en soi; cosa in se) – philosopher. a term meaning things as they exist in themselves (or in themselves), as opposed to how they appear to us - in our knowledge. This difference was considered back in... Philosophical Encyclopedia

Thing In Itself- Thing In Itself ♦ Chose En Soi A thing considered as such, regardless of our perception or our knowledge of it. In particular, in Kant - regardless of the a priori forms of sensory perception (space and time) and reason... ... Sponville's Philosophical Dictionary

- (Ding an sich; things in itself; chose en soi; cosa in se), philosopher. a term meaning things as they exist in themselves (or “in themselves”), as opposed to how they appear “to us” in our cognition. This difference has been considered... Philosophical Encyclopedia

- (“Thing in itself”) is a philosophical term meaning things as they exist by themselves (or “in themselves”), as opposed to how they are “for us” in our knowledge. This difference was considered in ancient times, but of particular significance... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

- 'THING IN ITSELF' is one of the central concepts of epistemology, and then of Kant’s ethics. This concept, denoting things as they exist outside of us, by themselves (in themselves), in contrast to how they are ‘for us’, existed in philosophy even before... ... History of Philosophy: Encyclopedia

One of the central concepts of epistemology, and then of Kant’s ethics. This concept, denoting things as they exist outside of us, in themselves (in themselves), in contrast to how they are “for us,” existed in philosophy before Kant and was... ... The latest philosophical dictionary

- (German Ding an sich), a philosophical concept meaning things as they exist in themselves (in themselves), in contrast to how they appear to us in knowledge; one of the central concepts of I. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason... Modern encyclopedia

Kant first asks the question about the limits of human knowledge. In his opinion, all objects and phenomena (“things”) are divided into two classes. He calls the first class “things in themselves.” Things in themselves are objects and phenomena that exist independently of our consciousness and cause our sensations. We cannot say anything definite about what is beyond our consciousness. Therefore, Kant believes, it would be more correct to refrain from judging this at all. Kant calls the second class of objects “things for us.” This is a product of the activity of a priori forms of our consciousness. An example of this opposition can be the antinomy of the concepts of “gravity” and “mass”. The first cannot be understood and measured, but can only be experienced. The second is completely understandable and researchable.

Space and time, according to Kant, are not objective forms of the existence of matter, but only forms of human consciousness, a priori forms of sensory contemplation. Kant raised the question of the nature of basic concepts, categories with the help of which people understand nature, but he also solved this question from the position of apriorism. Thus, he considered causality not an objective connection, a law of nature, but an a priori form of human reason. All categories of reason, as noted above, Kant declared a priori forms of consciousness of philosophical thought

A thing in itself, a thing for us

“Thing in itself” and “Thing for us” are philosophical terms that mean: first, things as they exist: by themselves, independently of us and our knowledge; the second is things as they are revealed by a person in the process of cognition. These terms acquired special meaning in the 18th century. in connection with the denial of the possibility of knowing “things in themselves”. Expressed by Locke, this position was substantiated in detail by Kant, who argued that we are dealing only with a phenomenon completely divorced from the “thing in itself.” For Kant, “thing in itself” also means supernatural, unknowable, inaccessible to experience essences: God, freedom, etc. Dialectical materialism, based on the possibility of exhaustive knowledge of things, considers knowledge as the process of transforming “things in themselves” into “things for us” » based on practice (Cognition, Theory and Practice).

32. Kant's ethics

Let us first dwell on the speculative foundations of Kantian ethics. Kant adhered to the premise that dominated the minds of the overwhelming majority of scientists and philosophers of modern times, the essence of which was that everything in nature is strictly determined. In the “Critique of Pure Reason” we can read: “The law of nature states that everything that happens has a cause, that the causality of this cause, that is, the action, precedes in time and in relation to the result that arose in time, itself could not always exist, but must to be an event that has occurred, and therefore it also has its cause among the phenomena by which it is determined, and therefore all events are empirically determined in some natural order; this law, only thanks to which phenomena constitute a certain nature and become objects of experience, is a rational law, under no circumstances allowing deviations and exceptions for any phenomenon...” The position that strict causality reigns in nature investigative necessity can only be a prerequisite, Phenomenon and noumenon The general picture of a completely determined world included and the basis of such a possibility is the doctrine that made its author famous that space and time do not exist objectively, in themselves, and do not represent properties or objective definitions things in themselves, and are nothing more than subjective conditions and purely human forms of sensory intuitions. With the help of the senses, we do not perceive the things themselves, but only their appearance to us. As such, they can only be perceived with the help of the mind, but the human speculative mind is structured in such a way that, functioning as reason, it is only able to organize sensory data, and does not have direct access to things in itself. Thus, everything that we know categorically, that is, that and only that which exists in time and space, represents the world of phenomena, the world of phenomena. Consequently, all nature with its strict causality is purely phenomenal; it is not the world of things in themselves, or noumena. According to Kant, the world of noumena is meaningfully unknowable for the human theoretical mind: trying to cognize it, it becomes entangled in paralogisms and antinomies. Regarding the world of things in themselves, we know only that it exists, but what it is, we are not given to know. It is not given to us directly, it is only Of course, Kant never tires of emphasizing that noumena cannot be thought assertorically. “The concept of noumenon, that is, a thing that should be thought not as an object of sense, but as a thing in itself (exclusively through pure reason),” he classifies as problematic, i.e. that is, such, each of which “does not contain any contradiction and is in connection with other knowledge as a limitation of these concepts, but the objective reality of which cannot in any way be cognized.” This means that the mind “cannot know things in themselves through categories, and therefore can only think of them as an unknown something.” Nevertheless, this “something” is not so unknown: by studying Kant’s texts, one can gain a lot of information about it. First of all, this is important negative data about the world of noumena. Kant, speaking about our lack of knowledge about noumena, meant only positive knowledge and prohibited those assertoric judgments about noumena that were made in a positive sense. He allowed negative judgments about them: “...we should understand what we called noumena exclusively in a negative sense.” So we can probably perceive such significant negative information about the world of noumena as the fact that there is no time, no space, no natural causality in it quite assertorically. And Freedom and Will Now we can better understand what freedom is, according to Kant. In the “Critique of Practical Reason” he writes: “Since the pure form of law can only be represented by reason, therefore, is not an object of sense and, therefore, does not belong to the number of phenomena, the idea of ​​it as the determining basis of the will differs from all determining foundations of events in nature according to the law of causality, since in this case the determining foundations themselves must be phenomena. But if no other determining basis of the will can serve as a law for it, except for the universal legislative form, then such a will must be thought of as completely independent of the natural law of phenomena in their interrelations, namely the law of causality. Such independence is called freedom in the strictest, i.e., transcendental sense.”

Phenomenon and noumenon

The general picture of a completely determined world included and the basis of such a possibility is the doctrine that made its author glorified that space and time do not exist objectively, in themselves, and do not represent properties or objective definitions of things in themselves, but are nothing more than subjective conditions and purely human forms of sensory intuition. With the help of the senses, we do not perceive the things themselves, but only their appearance to us. As such, they can only be perceived with the help of the mind, but the human speculative mind is structured in such a way that, functioning as reason, it is only able to organize sensory data, and does not have direct access to things in itself. Thus, everything that we know categorically, that is, that and only that which exists in time and space, represents the world of phenomena, the world of phenomena. Consequently, all nature with its strict causality is purely phenomenal; it is not the world of things in themselves, or noumena. According to Kant, the world of noumena is meaningfully unknowable for the human theoretical mind: trying to cognize it, it becomes entangled in paralogisms and antinomies. Regarding the world of things in themselves, we know only that it exists, but what it is, we are not given to know. It is not given to us directly, it is only Of course, Kant never tires of emphasizing that noumena cannot be thought assertorically. “The concept of noumenon, i.e., a thing that should be thought not as an object of sense, but as a thing in itself (exclusively through pure reason),” he classifies as problematic, that is, such, each of which “does not contain there is no contradiction in itself and is in connection with other knowledge as a limitation of these concepts, but the objective reality of which can in no way be cognized.” This means that the mind “cannot know things in themselves through categories, and therefore can only think of them as an unknown something.” Nevertheless, this “something” is not so unknown: by studying Kant’s texts, one can gain a lot of information about it. First of all, this is important negative data about the world of noumena. Kant, speaking about our lack of knowledge about noumena, meant only positive knowledge and prohibited those assertoric judgments about noumena that were made in a positive sense. He allowed negative judgments about them: “...we should understand what we called noumena exclusively in a negative sense.” So we can probably perceive such significant negative information about the world of noumena as the fact that there is no time, no space, no natural causality in it quite assertorically.

Freedom and freedom

Now we can better understand what freedom is, according to Kant. In the “Critique of Practical Reason” he writes: “Since the pure form of law can only be represented by reason, therefore, is not an object of sense and, therefore, does not belong to the number of phenomena, the idea of ​​it as the determining basis of the will differs from all determining foundations of events in nature according to the law of causality, since in this case the determining foundations themselves must be phenomena. But if no other determining basis of the will can serve as a law for it, except for the universal legislative form, then such a will must be thought of as completely independent of the natural law of phenomena in their interrelations, namely the law of causality. Such independence is called freedom in the strictest, i.e., transcendental sense.”

THE THING IN ITSELF(German: Ding an sich selbst) is a philosophical concept, the content of which is the entire totality of objects in the external world, independent of the consciousness and will of people. The concept of a thing in itself is organically connected with the development of materialism. According to J. Locke, the philosophy of nature is “the knowledge of the principles, properties and actions of things, what they are in themselves” (Thoughts on education. - Soch., vol. 3. M., 1982, p. 586). J. Berkeley contrasted this materialistic principle with the denial of “objects in themselves or outside the mind” (Treatise on the principles of human knowledge. – Soch. M., 1978, p. 182). Unlike Berkeley, D. Hume believed that there is “some unknown, necessary something as the cause of our perceptions” (A Study on Human Cognition. - Soch., vol. 2. M., 1965, pp. 158–159) .

I. Kant, whose philosophy was formed not without the influence of Hume’s skepticism, combines recognition of the objective reality of things in themselves (one of the foundations of his teaching) with a categorical denial of their cognizability: “We are given things as objects of our senses located outside of us, but about what they are they are in themselves, we don’t know anything, but we only know their phenomena, i.e. the ideas that they produce in us, influencing our feelings" (Prolegomena to any future metaphysics that may appear as a science. - Works in 6 volumes, vol. 4, part 1. M., 1965, p. 105) . Things in themselves, in Kant's understanding of them, are not things at all, since they are interpreted as an extra-spatial (and therefore non-extended), timeless, transcendental something, the existence of which, Kant claims, is beyond doubt, since phenomena presuppose what appears; that is all that things in themselves can be. It remains, however, unexplained why things in themselves, once they appear, remain absolutely unknowable: the gap between the fundamentally unknowable objective reality of things in themselves and the completely knowable subjective reality of the world of phenomena is the main feature of Kant’s theory of knowledge.

However, Kant refers to the concept of a thing-in-itself not only as a transcendental something that causes sensory perceptions. After all, if man, as a cognizing subject, creates (albeit through the means of things in himself independent of him) a world of phenomena, then he himself cannot be only a phenomenon, i.e. with just one performance. Therefore, according to Kant, man is not only a phenomenon, but also a thing in itself. This applies in particular to the human will, which is not free as an empirical will, but free as a thing in itself. Kant also distinguishes between empirically determined reason, which is not free from sensory impulses, and pure reason, which “is not a phenomenon and is not subject to any conditions of sensibility,” i.e. there is also a thing in itself (Critique of Pure Reason. - Works in 6 vols., vol. 3. M., 1964, p. 491). Fichte, Schelling and Hegel rejected the concept of the thing in itself as an unacceptable concession to materialism. The neo-Kantians did the same, for whom the thing-in-itself is nothing more than a subjective concept of the limit of knowledge. Meanwhile, the Kantian concept of the “thing in itself” has a rational meaning: the fundamental denial of what goes beyond the boundaries of possible experience and, therefore, the denial of the transcendental as an object of knowledge.

Introduction

In 1724, on April 22, Immanuel was born in Prussian Konigsberg. Subsequently, this boy became the largest German scientist and philosopher. His works had a great influence on the development of philosophy in the 18th century.

The two topics that most interested him were physics and metaphysics. He was especially admired by the rigor and validity of physics, which separated from metaphysics into an independent discipline. Hesitations and doubts around the metaphysical foundations, which did not allow metaphysics to become a science, led Kant to a period of criticism in his works.

The Thing in Itself by Immanuel Kant

The main works of Immanuel Kant are called Critiques: “Critique of Pure Reason”, “Critique of Practical Reason”, “Critique of Judgment”. However, these works cannot, in my opinion, be characterized as criticism. Rather, they represent an analysis, a scientific study of the boundaries of knowledge and human cognitive capabilities.

The basis of all the Critiques is the doctrine of “phenomena” and “things in themselves,” that is, of things that exist in themselves. A thing in itself causes sensations, affecting our senses, but it cannot be known. People do not know things in themselves, but rather the form in which they appear to us. Accordingly, we recognize them only as a phenomenon.

Let me quote from Immanuel Kant’s work “Critique of Pure Reason”: « ...if we destroy our subjective properties, then it turns out that the represented object with the qualities attributed to it in a sensory visual representation is not found anywhere, and cannot be found anywhere, since it is our subjective properties that determine its form as a phenomenon.”

A person has the opportunity to expand and deepen his knowledge of the world, but all this happens only within the boundaries of phenomena. The things in themselves that underlie these phenomena remain transcendental, inaccessible to human knowledge and its diligent attempts. Human knowledge is limited by experience. Our attempts to get beyond the line of this experience are quite natural and irreversible because they meet the needs (spiritual) of a person. When a person finds himself beyond the horizon of experience, his spirit inevitably falls into error. Kant compares this situation with a pigeon that decided to fly above the atmosphere and forgot that air resistance is not an obstacle, but a condition for flight.

The thing in itself represents the essence of this thing, inaccessible to our knowledge. We have the opportunity to cognize only phenomena, since people are limited both by certain sense organs and a priori forms of knowledge. This is the most important concept in the works of Immanuel Kant. It is worth noting that these things in themselves, which are indivisible unities, have genuine existence. In contrast, in the continuous world of phenomena, everything happens in accordance with the laws established by physics.

According to Kant, “things in themselves” are the world taken “from within,” while phenomena represent the world perceived by man “from the outside.” A “thing in itself” is something indivisible, which means it cannot be seen, nor in any way perceive at the level of feelings, since it is accessible only to thought. People know nothing about them: the very categories of unity and plurality can only be applied to objects that can be contemplated, and therefore we cannot even attribute to things in themselves the line of indivisibility.

Nevertheless, a cause-and-effect relationship remains between the “thing in itself” and phenomena: in the sense that without a cause there can be no effect. Accordingly, without “things in themselves” there cannot be phenomena. I will cite Immanuel Kant’s thoughts on this issue: “... Considering, as it should, the objects of the senses as simple phenomena, we, however, at the same time recognize that they are based on the thing in itself, although we do not know it itself, but only its appearance, that is, the way in which this unknown something acts on our senses. Thus, the understanding, accepting phenomena, thereby recognizes the existence of things in themselves; so that we can say that the representation of such entities lying at the basis of phenomena, i.e. pure mental entities, is not only permissible, but also inevitable.”

But on the other hand, Kant argues that the concepts of cause and effect are (Kant I. Critique of Pure Reason. - M.: Mysl, 1994. - 591 p.) products of reason, and therefore can only be applied to objects of experience and, accordingly, to For “things in themselves” it is inappropriate to apply these categories.

In the chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, which is called “On the basis of the distinction of all objects in general into phaenomena and noumena,” Kant attempts to answer the question that arises: what is a “thing in itself”, and what reason do we have to talk about it at all? if it turns out to be unclear how it is connected with the world of phenomena.

According to Kant, beyond the boundaries of sensory phenomena there is an unknowable reality, about which in the theory of knowledge there is only an abstract idea.

Kant is firmly convinced that the world of things in themselves exists and argues that the “thing in itself” has several meanings. The first meaning: “things in themselves” indicate the presence of an external stimulus to our feelings and ideas. The second meaning of the “thing in itself” for Immanuel Kant is that it is any fundamentally unknowable object. The third meaning of “thing in itself” embraces everything that lies outside of experience and the sphere of the transcendental. The fourth meaning of “thing in itself” is as a kingdom of unattainable ideals. It is worth noting that these kingdoms as a whole turn out to be a cognitive ideal. “The thing in itself” in this case turns out to be an object of faith.

The author extends the idea of ​​the unknowability of “things in themselves” to the area that, according to Leibniz, served as the primary source for his concept of the monad. Or rather, on the human “I”, on self-awareness. Kant argues that even our “I,” as it is given to us in self-consciousness, is not a “thing in itself,” since it is known by people through inner feeling. Consequently, it is mediated by sensuality and is only a phenomenon.

Here is what the German philosopher specifically said about this: “Everything that is represented through feeling is in this sense always a phenomenon, and therefore either the presence of an internal feeling cannot be allowed at all, or the subject serving as its subject must be represented through it only as a phenomenon , and not in the way he would judge himself if his contemplation were only self-activity, that is, if it were intellectual." Kant philosopher scientist

As a result, the “I” of transcendental apperception is not a thing in itself. “The analysis of myself in thinking does not provide any knowledge at all about myself as an object. The logical interpretation of thinking in general is mistakenly taken for the metaphysical definition of an object.” The object of pure thought, not given to contemplation, i.e. “noumenon,” as Kant explains, is not a thing in itself, but an illusion of reason. The thing in itself turns out to be beyond the limits of theoretical knowledge because it cannot be an object of contemplation, but could only be an object of speculation.