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

For this reason, we must know abilities in a different way. I argue that we know abilities in the
sense that we actualize them. But what does this mean? In the case of actualization knowledge
and what is known are not two different things. In other words, in the case of actualization
abilities are not know from the point of view of something other than themselves. Actualization
just means the development of abilities into activities. In this sense, knowledge as actualization is
nothing other than the use of abilities. For example, when I use the ability to sense as the activity
of intuiting that intuiting just is the knowledge of that ability. When I use the ability to
understand as the activity of conceptualizing that conceptualizing just is the knowledge of that
ability. And so on. In this essay, I have tried to explain in what sense we can know the thing in
itself understood not so much as der Gegenstand or the transcendental objects, but rather as the
ability, that is, as the transcendental subject. I hope that now the answer to this question is clear.
We know the thing in itself in the sense that we use it. Van Cleve recognizes this point. In the
first instance, he argues that we cannot know abilities “since in that case there would be either an
absurd infinite regress to ever higher acts or else an impossible feat of existential bootstrapping,
some items pulling themselves into existence by virtue of their own self-apprehension” (van
Cleve 136). However, van Cleve reconsiders the latter option: “even if literal self-apprehension
were deemed possible (as in some Indian philosophies), we would have to accord to ‘both’ terms
of the relation the status of existence an sich, for a mere content cannot do any apprehending. I
must confess that this way of proving the existence of things in themselves does not show that
there are things distinct from our own selves or other conscious beings” (van Cleve 136-7). Self-
apprehension is possible to the extent that it names the process of coming into being of the
apprehended self. That apprehended self, in other words, that actualized ability, in other words,
that activity just is the thing in itself. Perhaps we can call it the self in itself. This is why
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