I do not deny the existence of a world-in-itself. Surely, trees, dogs, rivers, mountains, planets, solar systems and stars would exist regardless of whether humans were here to experience them.
What I deny is that such a world is philosophically relevant, because such a world, in principle, cannot be experienced. The world-in-itself exists, but it is not "like" anything. It just is. — Brian

But it is experienced. How can you even say those things exist if you don't experience them? You (and your experience of it) is all part of the "world-in-itself".

And everything we know about the world is the world-for-us, even when discussing cosmology or quantum mechanics. Such studies are meaningless in the face of a world wholly unrelated to our experience of it. — Brian

I wouldn't use the word, "world-for-us". There is simply the world and our experience of it. How would you explain how the two "worlds" interact? How is there a causal relationship between the world and our experience of it? Wouldn't all causal relations be part of the world as it is?

I take this view to be an essential tenet of traditional phenomenology. The goal of phenomenology is to describe the only world that can ever be experienced, the world-for-us. — Brian

You seem to be confusing terms. The world-for-us would be the experience. How can you even say an experience is happening if you aren't implying that it is an experience of something that isn't the experience? What you are arguing for is basically solipsism.

The world-in-itself, like the Kantian thing-in-itself exists - there would still be entities if there were nobody to experience them. But they wouldn't be like anything in particular, because because like something requires experience of those things. They would just be there, exist, as pure being. And there's nothing else to know about such a world physically, other than that it is coherent and exists. — Brian

Then how would you make distinctions between entities? How would there even be separate, or other entities if they didn't occupy separate points in space?

The goal of philosophy is not to see through appearance to get to the world in itself, but to immerse yourself in mastering the world-for-us, the only world we ever have any access to. — Brian

The only way to master the "world-for-us" is to establish correlations between our experience and the the "world-in-itself". Any other way makes no sense and causes confusion.

They certainly are ideals, but this draws back to the epistemic conditions of why we have them in the first place. "Cattiness" is real insofar as we presuppose its existence outside of our ideals. We cannot know that God exists, but the ideal enables us the noumenal experience of God and thus valid as a mind-independent reality, though inevitably doomed to the limitations of the contents of representations. Striving towards this ideal is a real experience.

It sounds like reverse fetishism to me, where Ideals forcefully compel a manner of living and knowing.

You sure about "Cattiness"? :)

How else can it be? This is the very epistemic limitation of our cognitive processes.

I don't accept any "infinite knower". So based on your thought, what I experience phenomenally forecloses on any reality behind the phenomenal as being the basis of my experience. I am in this sense alienated from any reality beyond the phenomenal, which I can only experience reality as mediated through thought.

Phenomenology becomes a kind of dogmatic idealism? — Cavacava

Perhaps it is different for different people, but what I "experience phenomenally" includes an inescapable sense of what is beyond that experience. I am led, then, to try to imagine the possibilities; it might just be a material or physical reality (materialism or physicalism) or it might be the ideas of a God or absolute spirit (idealism). I think the real difficult problem is with the coherency of the idea of it being a material reality that cannot be like anything beyond how it is experienced by sentient or sapient beings.

The idea of the material or physical seems to lose all coherency if it is not collapsed into the phenomenal; the experienced. Even the idea of things 'out there' which are currently not being experienced seems, on examination, to be unintelligible, because the idea of something being there and yet not being like anything seems absurd. What is purportedly there that is not currently there-as-experienced seems reduced to a kind of ghostly formal placeholder.

The big problem with subjective idealism as opposed to absolute idealism is that there is no explanation for how all the unconnected subject minds can constitute objects-in-common. This would seem to require a unifying (infinite) intelligence that constitutes the realm of experience for all the finite minds. Both Berkeley and Hegel had this idea, albeit in ostensibly different ways; and I always think it is somewhat ironic when Berkeley's idealism is referred to as 'subjective idealism' in contradistinction to Hegel's 'absolute idealism'.

The big problem with subjective idealism as opposed to absolute idealism is that there is no explanation for how all the unconnected subject minds can constitute objects-in-common. This would seem to require a unifying (infinite) intelligence that constitutes the realm of experience for all the finite minds.

How about language as the glue, since thought seems to be constituted by it. Is this why Wittgenstein made language the limit of our world

I don't see how language can explain the fact that people can invariably agree about minute details of any object which they are currently jointly viewing.

It can explain the fact that we can talk about those details, and agree that they are there, but it would equally explain the fact that we could talk about our disagreements if we failed to find the same details in objects.