the.com/thing in itself
Reality minus your perception of it — the guest that never actually shows up to the party.
means The object or reality as it truly is, independent of how anyone perceives, experiences, or conceptualizes it — as opposed to how it appears to an observer.
from A direct translation of the German philosophical term 'Ding an sich,' coined by Immanuel Kant in his 1781 'Critique of Pure Reason.' Kant used it to mark the limit of human knowledge: we only ever know things as they appear to us, filtered through our senses and mental categories (the 'phenomenon'), never the raw, unfiltered reality behind the appearance (the 'noumenon,' or thing-in-itself). The phrase entered English as a loan-translation and became a staple of philosophical vocabulary, often invoked whenever someone wants to gesture at the gap between perception and whatever — if anything — lies beyond it.
- coined by
- Kant, to mark the limit of knowledge
- german term
- Ding an sich
- key point
- you only ever get the appearance, not it
- later rejected
- Hegel called the concept incoherent