Kant and the Problem of Interpretation
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Mikhail at Perverse Egalitarianism once again manages to articulate what I have wanted to say:
The issue of thing-in-itself is the most confusing one when it comes to explaining Kant and therefore it seems the most confusing one for those who subsequently attempt to get away with formulating Kant’s position in a couple of sentences. Now, I do enjoy a sort of a swift philosophical generalization that mentions names and implies that they stand for well-established and uncontroversial positions: Kant said that apples are bitter, yet Hegel developed this idea to talk about grapes, while Heidegger flips it upside down and talked about chairs - you know what I mean. I think it’s important to have a perspective like that, to have an ability to survey the history of philosophy and to make conclusions, but my problem has always been the kind of a nagging question: how can you say “Kant” and somehow signify the great complexity of Kant’s work and post-Kantian discussions?
There is, to be sure, plenty to criticize in Kant’s thought, but it seems entirely unproductive to uncritically accept the doxa regarding interpretations of his work and use that as a basis of opposition. What this doesn’t mean, again, is that it would somehow be impossible to criticize Kant because his thought is “so complex” that we could never truly comprehend it and any reading would therefore be a kind of reductionism and miss the mark.
But it does require a reader to perhaps dig a little deeper into the text by negotiating with the contradictions and other aspects that do not cleanly fit into the established common-places and “undergraduate”-level readings. Mikhail gives the example of the unclear status of the noumena, which obviously should not be confused with the Thing-in-itself, as any reader of Kant knows, and I would also like to add to that the similarly unclear status of transcendental objects, just as an additional example.