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Old 03-25-2004, 06:56 AM   #1
Specforces
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Default The thing as it may be in itself

A little more philosophy for you FFRers....

We know the perceptual process is complex. We can guess that things outside our heads are not likely to be quite the same texture which they appear to us as. Or do we really know that there's something beyond the appearances... does perception justify speculation about things causing perception? (Berkeley would say no.)

Kant says there's a thing in itself beyond appearances. He also says it's unknowable. He believes we can know things about it, as interpreted from our perspective... we can have transcendental knowledge. What we can't have is transcendent knowledge -- we can't know what the thing really is in itself independent of our concepts.

Patanjali (author of the Yoga-Sutra) also says there's a thing in itself beyond appearances, and he says that in normal situations it's unknowable. He, however, argues that it can be known through meditation with proper practice. The appearances which we're normally stuck with are a result of the subject/object distinction -- we only understand objects through the subject, the mind. Through meditating on an object we can remove the subject by quieting all thought. Once the thoughts are gone there's no subject, and the object as it is in itself becomes manifest in experience.

In one way Kant faces a worse dilemma than Patanjali: Kant must assert the existence of something unknowable, making him at least on the surface seem vulnerable to Occam's razor. But I think he'd appeal to personal existence to get out of that, the self-in-the-self being known (a move that Patanjali would challenge, or at least challenge Kant's conception of).

Can you know something in itself by removing the subject? Is knowing without mind a sensible notion? (Myself, I'm with Kant.)

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