stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

above mentioned, namely, that the categories are neither self-thought first principles a priori of
our knowledge nor derived from experience, but subjective dispositions of our thought,
implanted in us from the first moment of our existence, and so ordered by our Creator that their
employment is in complete harmony with the laws of nature in accordance with which
experience proceeds—a kind of preformation-system of pure reason” (CPR B167). In other
words, if knowledge corresponded to objects such knowledge would not be necessary. “There is
this decisive objection against the suggested middle course, that the necessity of the categories,
which belong to their very conception, would then have to be sacrificed” (CPR B168). Thus
representational knowledge exists on the basis of the insurmountable opposition between itself
and the object. “For if we were speaking of a thing in itself, we could indeed say that it exists in
itself apart from relation to our senses and possible experience” (CPR B522/A494). For this
reason, Kant argues, “we have no insight whatsoever into the inner [nature] of things” (CPR
A277/B333). Lucy Allais acknowledges this point in “Kant’s One World: Interpreting
Transcendental Idealism:” “we cannot know the intrinsic nature of things, even though the
appearances of things are the way things, or the intrinsic natures of things, appear” (Allais
678).Nevertheless, representational knowledge does attempt to surmount this insurmountable
opposition. In “The Thing in Itself in Kantian Philosophy,” George A. Schrader argues that “only
if the thing in itself is also the thing which appears, is Kant’s position consistent and defensible”
(Schrader 30).
That we cannot know the thing itself does not mean that we cannot think it. “But our
further contention must also be duly borne in mind, namely, that though we cannot know these
objects [of experience] as things in themselves, we must yet be in a position at least to think them
as things in themselves” (CPR Bxxvi). In this sense, the thing in itself is in fact some kind of
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