The Veil of Appearance: Kant on the Limits of Human Knowledge
Why does Kant draw a distinction between two standpoints: the empirical and the transcendental? How does this distinction correspond to the distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves? Why does Kant claim that we can have no knowledge of things-in-themselves?
Kant distinguishes between the empirical and transcendental standpoints in order to clarify the scope and limits of human knowledge. From the empirical standpoint, Kant explains that we observe objects as they appear to us within space and time. This standpoint enables experience and ordinary scientific knowledge to be possible. However, when examining how an experience is possible at all, we adopt what Kant calls the transcendental standpoint. In this transcendental standpoint, we ascertain the necessary conditions of experience, including the forms of our sensibility. Kant argues that space and time are empirically real because they structure all of our experience, yet simultaneously are transcendentally ideal because they exist only as conditions of our mode of cognition.
This explanation corresponds directly to Kant's distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves. Kant defines appearances as objects represented through sensibility and therefore are necessarily spatial and temporal – the proper objects of empirical knowledge. By contrast, Kant explains that things-in-themselves are objects as they exist independently of our sensibility. Because space and time apply only to appearances, Kant concludes that things-in-themselves are not in space or time. Kant's transcendental idealism also explains how he resolves conflicts like the First Antinomy, as both the thesis and antithesis mistakenly assume that the world as it is in itself has temporal features.
Kant further explains that we can have no knowledge of things-in-themselves because knowledge requires both sensible intuition and concepts. While sensibility supplies the content of cognition, the understanding organizes this content through concepts. Since things-in-themselves cannot be given in sensible intuition, we lack the content needed for cognition of them. Kant explains that concepts alone are empty without an intuition to which they apply and, as a result, we can think the idea of things-in-themselves but we cannot know anything about them. Rather than being skeptical, Kant's restriction secures claims to knowledge by limiting them to appearances, the only domain in which experience and objectivity are possible.