It’s as if Kant doesn’t want to be a full-blown idealist and therefore argues that there must be things-in-themselves that are unknowable, the product of our senses and cognitive apparatus. — Tom Storm

I'd say the producer, not the product, of our senses and cognitive apparatus seems more apt.

I screwed up the sentence. I meant that phenomena are the product or our sense and cognitive apparatus. I fixed my syntax.

:up:

It’s as if Kant doesn’t want to be a full-blown idealist…. — Tom Storm

Correct, he does not want to be thought of as a full-blown idealist. He does, on the other hand, state for the record (A370), of all the idealist doctrines he lists, he is of the transcendental variety. It is this variety alone which argues as you say.

He argues against all full-blown idealists, such as Descartes and Berkeley, and even the quasi-transcendental idealists, here and there, but those mostly because they don’t realize that’s what they really are, or are oh-so-close to really being if they’d just gone one or two steps further, such as Mendelssohn, Libneitz, Wolff, Baumgartner, et al.

As for noumena directed/indirect compromise…maybe, maybe not. I don’t have any interest in it, and Kant didn’t even know about the direct/indirect dichotomy. Or perhaps what it represents he would have called it something else.

But at any rate, noumena in the Kantian sense is not a compromise of any kind, but rather an example of understanding coloring outside its own rule-bound lines.

But at any rate, noumena in the Kantian sense is not a compromise of any kind, but rather an example of understanding coloring outside its own rule-bound lines. — Mww

That's a nice way of framing it.