What is the evidence that supports that they (phenomena) are appearances? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Isn’t that utterly simple? Going back to the original post: the contention is, simply, that “the world” (object, thing) is not simply
given but is
constructed by the mind/brain. That’s what the brain does! In humans, the brain is an enormously complex organ which absorbs a very large proportion of the organism's metabolic energy. What’s it doing with all that power? Why, it’s creating a world! A very different world to that of cheetahs, otters, butterflies and divas, but a world nonetheless
This is Kant’s basic point - not that Kant has the last word on all the implications, not that Kant is correct in every detail. But his ‘Copernican revolution in philosophy’ is the factor which was a fundamental turning point in modern philosophy. It was arguably the origin of all such later developments as phenomenology and constructivism, and why Kant has been (rightly) designated the ‘
godfather of cognitive science’. Hence also the amount of content devoted to cognitive science in the original post and the implied convergence of Pinter's 'gestalts' with the 'ideas' of classical philosophy.
In respect of the in-itself, Emrys Westacott puts it like this:
Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble. — The Continuing Relevance of Immanuel Kant
Kant, by his own admission, knows absolutely nothing about other people in-themselves. Any appeal to shared biology or culture is an appeal to the phenomenal to explain a noumenal connection by which discrete phenomenal perspectives are the same. — Count Timothy von Icarus
But he knows how we appear! And we
appear to have uniform abilities and faculties across populations, although of course with outliers and exceptional cases and those with anomalous skills. This charge of solipsism is often levelled at the kind of phenomenological idealism I'm advocating - but the response is, we are members of the same species language, and culture. Cultural worlds are vastly different, its inhabitants see things in completely different ways to what we regard as 'normal'. Again this is because we as a species and a cultural type construe the world in characteristic ways.
(When I did a unit in cognitive science, there were many examples of culturally-determined behaviours in response to situations. One I recall was an individual from a forest tribe in Africa, who was taken to a mountain lookout by an anthropologist, from where there was a vista of sweeping plains dotted with herd animals. The forest-dweller seemed to be looking at the view, but after a short time, he squatted and started drawing his fingers through the dirt in front of him. The translator explained that he was trying to 'touch the insects' - the insects being the distant herd animals. As this individual had lived his whole life in a forest, his sensory horizon could not encompass the idea of a 'distant view'.)
There's an enormous range of analogous data from anthropology, ethnology etc. The inhabitants of other cultures live in very different worlds to our own. Of course, it's all the same planet, but a world is more than a planet. It’s the structured field of meaning and perception we share through our faculties, language and culture - and that’s exactly what Kant was intuiting. That, I contend, is also the source of the later phenomenological concepts of 'lebenswelt' and 'umwelt' (also mentioned in the original post.)
And don’t forget that Kant, typical of academics of his day, also lectured in geography, anthropology, pedagogy, logic, physics, and mathematics — as well as philosophy.
Pace Kant, this is not what past metaphysicians thought they had. The category is itself modern. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Which is the point I'm driving at in Idealism in Context. That is about the decline of the 'participatory ontology' that characterised scholastic realism via the absorption of Aristotle's hylomorphism.
Thomist critics like Maritain would say that Kant misses the “intuition of being” — a direct grasp of existence itself that grounds metaphysics. Without that, they argue, Kant seals us off from reality - something other critics also point out. There’s force in that critique. But even granting it, Kant’s basic insight remains: the world of experience is constituted through the mind’s forms and categories, not simply received as a mirror of things-in-themselves.
I've even seen Kant read as Shankara or Nagarjuna. But these seem like a stretch to me. Doctrines like emptiness would suggest that the things-in-themselves are simply a sort of error (but of course, readings of Kant do dispense with noumena, I just don't think he does). — Count Timothy von Icarus
I've mentioned before I first read Kant via T R V Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (c 1955). This book is nowadays criticized by more current Buddhologists as being overly Euro-centric and too influenced by European idealism, but his comparison of Kant and Nāgārjuna really connected a lot of dots for me. Apropos of which:
Descartes mistake is to treat the cogito as if it delivered a determinate object — a existent entity. But Kant’s point in B421 is that this is a category mistake. The “I think” is the
condition of experience of objects; it cannot itself be
grasped as an object under the categories. That’s why Kant says the 'I' is not an appearance, not a noumenon, and not a substance — it’s simply the formal unity of apperception, which we can never convert into a determinate object without confusion. But Kant is also justly circumspect about the real nature of the self.
As Nāgārjuna has been mentioned, there's a short verse in the early Buddhist texts in which the Buddha is asked whether the self exists by 'the wanderer Vachagotta' (this character representing the type of seeker who asks philosophical or metaphysical questions.) Asked 'does the self exist?' and 'does the self not exist?', the Buddha declines to answer both questions, instead maintaining a 'noble silence'. Asked later by his attendant, Ananda, why he didn't answer, he replies that both answers would be misleading - saying 'yes' would 'side with the eternalists', those ascetics who maintain there is a permanently existing self, and 'no' would only confuse the questioner, as he would wonder where his self had gone (
ref.) This is one of the origins of madhyamaka ('middle way') philosophy of later Buddhism, which designates the two views of 'existing' or 'not existing' as the errors of eternalism and nihilism, respectively. (Most commentators agree that contemporary culture tends towards the latter.)