Reading Notes | The thing in itself

Someone mentioned the debate between Chinese scholars on the existence of the thing-in-itself. At that time, it was thought that the two sides may be talking about two existences, one is essentia and the other is esse. The former is the meaning of the existence of chance, and the latter is because it cannot give any attribute definition to the thing-in-itself, so it cannot esse, so it cannot be summed.

Today I am reading Horkheim and Adorno's Dialectics of Enlightenment, and I see their understanding of Kant. They believe that Criticism constrains the scope of nature, that Kant does not recognize new things, and that science can only touch all existence. It makes me think that the former is a category delineated by transcendence, and the latter is to complain about Kant's belief in the agnosticism of science. Not so obvious, but it feels like a cognition that arises from the understanding of the thing-in-itself.

Kant's concept of being of the thing-in-itself only retains the part of essentia in accidentibus, but not the part of in substantiis, so it is more like something generalized by ens per se. It is not promoted by essentia. The reason I say that Kant's thing-in-itself is a thing and not a concept is because Kant never defines any definite properties of the thing-in-itself. And this ens is also different from the meaning of its ancient Greek origin, but in the probability proposition of existence and non-existence that the probability of existence in infinite unknowable is also infinitely close to 1. For example, we are born in a non-Euclidean geometric space continuous universe, then when we are limited by the three-dimensional senses, people will never be able to know whether there is another universe or even a speck of dust outside our universe. Of course, Kant's age is limited by tools, then we join modern science to promote the concept of things in themselves, we still can't confirm whether we have unknowable things, such as a completely static dust outside the universe in high dimensions, Since there are no "signs", people have no chance to judge it, let alone observe it. Kant's concept is to attribute these unknowable concepts to things-in-itself without discussing them. rather than defining the properties of the thing-in-itself.

Therefore, in my opinion, Kant's thing-in-itself is not that some of its intrinsic properties cannot be determined by the methods of Schopenhauer and Hegel's negation, but it is unnecessary. This thing is like a trash can in Criticism Likewise, just throw the unknowable in.