1. ARE THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES MERELY VESTIGIAL DOGMATISM?

Kant's distinction between “appearances” and “things-in-themselves” is construed by various commentators along the lines of the traditional philosophical contrast between appearance and reality. There are, on the one hand, the phenomena of the “realm of appearance” (whose status is mind correlative and whose being lies in their being present to a mind) and, on the other hand, the realm of extramental reality, the domain of “what really exists as it really exists,” wholly and entirely apart from the sphere of human thought and knowledge. Now if this be so, then the conception of things-in-themselves encounters grave difficulties because of the obvious problem of “getting there from here,” where “here” represents the fundamental commitment of Kant's critical philosophy. Thus A. C. Ewing flatly asserts: “Kant gives no grounds for believing in things-in-themselves, but merely asserts their existence dogmatically.” And if things-in-themselves indeed constitute a domain of altogether mind-external reality, it is hard to see how the matter could be otherwise on Kantian principles. Accordingly, it is often held that Kant's thing-in-itself is the (highly questionable) concession to a dogmatically rooted extra-mental reality of a philosophy whose “Copernican Revolution” everywhere else rejects metaphysical dogmatism and puts the creative activity of the human mind at center stage.

This discussion will endeavor to show that the preceding perspective is very much mistaken. It will argue that it is quite incorrect to think of Kant's conception of a thing-in-itself as an inappropriate concession to a metaphysical stance that is totally at odds with the fundamental thrust of Kant's philosophy.

2. NOUMENAL REALITY AS AN INSTRUMENTALITY OF THOUGHT

For Kant, human thought proceeds at three (closely interrelated and interconnected) levels, corresponding to the three major faculties of the human mind:

Their interrelation is crucial in Kant's theory of the thing-in-itself.

As Kant sees it, the conception of a thing-in-itself arises through abstraction, through removing in thought and by hypothesis certain conditions which are there in fact - namely, the particular limiting conditions of operation of our human sensibility (CPuR, B307).