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The thing as it may be in itself

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The thing as it may be in itself

Paul
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Posted 10/24/02 - 11:36 PM:	#1
We know the perceptual process is complex. We can guess that things outside our heads are not likely to be quite the same texture which they appear to us as. Or do we really know that there's something beyond the appearances... does perception justify speculation about things causing perception? (Berkeley would say no.) Kant says there's a thing in itself beyond appearances. He also says it's unknowable. He believes we can know things about it, as interpreted from our perspective... we can have transcendental knowledge. What we can't have is transcendent knowledge -- we can't know what the thing really is in itself independent of our concepts. Patanjali (author of the Yoga-Sutra) also says there's a thing in itself beyond appearances, and he says that in normal situations it's unknowable. He, however, argues that it can be known through meditation with proper practice. The appearances which we're normally stuck with are a result of the subject/object distinction -- we only understand objects through the subject, the mind. Through meditating on an object we can remove the subject by quieting all thought. Once the thoughts are gone there's no subject, and the object as it is in itself becomes manifest in experience. In one way Kant faces a worse dilemma than Patanjali: Kant must assert the existence of something unknowable, making him at least on the surface seem vulnerable to Occam's razor. But I think he'd appeal to personal existence to get out of that, the self-in-the-self being known (a move that Patanjali would challenge, or at least challenge Kant's conception of). Can you know something in itself by removing the subject? Is knowing without mind a sensible notion? (Myself, I'm with Kant.)

Interlocutor
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Posted 10/25/02 - 12:50 PM:	#2
Can you know something in itself by removing the subject? Is knowing without mind a sensible notion? Any modern epistemologist, to be taken seriously, must solve Kant's puzzle, or fall into line with him. I've never seen any satisfactory falsification of Kant's position (if anyone has, please let us all know where we can find it), except, perhaps, in Hegel. Yet to my mind, Hegel's logic of being elucidates only the effects of Kant's unknown world. I think perhaps you've misunderstood Kant. Or if not, Kant flubbed his logic. I never thought Kant to believe that things, however unknowable, necessarily existed at all. Rather, it seems to me that he thought there was only a sort of imperceptible aether beyond our modes of sensibility and a priori cognition - that if there are in fact things in themselves beyond those modes which our senses draw upon, they are so unknowable as to be undefined, and therefore undefined as any thing or things in particular. As for how I see things...Knowing without a mind is wholly impossible. There is the perceptor (the knowing subject), and the perceptions (the objects of perception - the world "outside" the self). We cannot know anything in and of itself. Nor can we logically prove that we are not the only perceiving subject in existence. However, since knowing something in the manner we are wired to is all we have, for all practical purposes, our knowledge is of the thing itself. Since our perceptions faithfully follow laws, and we can faithfully interact with the perceptions, and to the best of the knowledge of the perceiving subject at the core of our beings, change and manipulate the world around us, our world is true insofar as truth exists for humans and any specific human. It therefore seems that discussion of whether or not it matters that we can know things in and of themselves is irrelevant, for though we do not, we cannot conceive of a circumstance in which it could matter to us. Even further, it cannot matter to us, for we cannot perceive of the world in any other way. Interlocutor

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Posted 10/25/02 - 01:35 PM:	#3
I think you guys both agree. I agree as well, but here are my two cents: Knowledge/awareness is a concept which is directly dependant upon perception. The nature of knowledge is inherently flawed because perception is flawed. But, to say that the true nature of the object is unknowable, I would say that that statement is false. Unknowable implies there is a knowledge to be obtained, yet we as humans simply do not have the means to obtain it. But, since I believe knowledge/awareness does not exist, cannot exist, and is not even relevant without perception, then knowledge of the true nature of an object without perception does not exist, and therefore is not unknowable. I still believe the object exists independant of our perception of it, but I do not believe knowledge of said object exists independant of our perception. Even further, it cannot matter to us, for we cannot perceive of the world in any other way. A different way of saying what Interlocutor said is that the true nature of objects is irrelevant to humans, except in our strive to make it as close as possible to our perceived nature of objects.
My game sites: http://www.entropicorder.net, http://www.plushquest.com My giant stuffed animal store: http://www.mybigplush.com "But the wise man neither rejects life nor fears death. For living does not offend him, nor does he believe not living to be any evil." - Epicurus

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Posted 10/25/02 - 08:01 PM:	#4
"I do not believe knowledge of said object exists independent of our perception." Entropic Order I gather by this you mean our knowledge, not the knowledge that the object may possess itself independent of our participation. Spaces

Paul
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Posted 10/25/02 - 10:23 PM:	#5
Originally posted by Interlocutor I think perhaps you've misunderstood Kant. Or if not, Kant flubbed his logic. I never thought Kant to believe that things, however unknowable, necessarily existed at all. Rather, it seems to me that he thought there was only a sort of imperceptible aether beyond our modes of sensibility and a priori cognition - that if there are in fact things in themselves beyond those modes which our senses draw upon, they are so unknowable as to be undefined, and therefore undefined as any thing or things in particular. Objects are empirical. A thing in itself is what the empirical representation (which we call an object) is representing. There are without doubt things in themselves for Kant. He says these things are not in space-time (for space and time are just our forms of intuition) and there's no way to know what the things in themselves are like -- meaning we can't have transcendent (experiential) knowledge of them -- but we can have a sense of relational knowledge about them based on what this end of the relation looks like... meaning, we can have transcendental knowledge. What we know is what happens when our minds receive so-called data of the things... we know the appearance which is in essence a relation of the thing in itself into our modes of thinking. Imperceptible aether would be a really bad idea to Kant, and to me as well, and I see no justification for such an aether. If something is imperceptible, what business have you suggesting that it exists? Things in themselves are very much perceptible, Kant's entire project is to show perception (mind processes) creates the representation of the thing in itself (which takes the form of empirical objects). We don't perceive the empirical world, don't make that mistake, the empirical world is itself the perception of an unknowable transcendental reality. Things in themselves are reasoned to exist (through transcendental arguments) based on the nature of perception itself. It's the fact that we perceive things which proves there's something out there, and since we know from investigation that perceptual processes are interpretive and create representations which need not have anything more than relations in common with what we say they're representations of, we must therefore conclude that there is an unknowable thing in itself which causes (cause is a bad word to use actually, it's really more a relational fact of being since I don't mean to imply any causal chain) our empirical object. Now, if you mean to say that there's no objective reason to chop off a bit of reality to call it a chair-in-itself, that's may be true from a strictly objective point of view since the thing is neither spatial nor temporal. Excepting perhaps the case of conscious things, there's no objective critera to demarcate one object from another, and Kant surely knows this. Kant doesn't think there are trancendental objects. But Kant is fully justified in speaking of a chair in itself because he's describing relationally, from the perspective of the mind, looking/thinking behind the empirical appearance... we don't encounter transcendent reality, we encounter the empirical representations of it, and since these representations are called "things" we have to talk about the transcendental reality of things. When Kant speaks of "the thing as it may be in itself", he means the empirical object's transcendental nature.

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Posted 10/25/02 - 11:43 PM:	#6
Paul...we may be saying much of the same thing. It's been several years since I've read the Critique, so I may have to go back and check it out again, but I'll do my best. Here's what I don't get. When we speak of a thing, we imply that it is separate from other things. Each thing is separate, individual. What I question is to what extent Kant can claim that things exist even to the extent that they are relational to our senses. As you say, " we don't encounter transcendent reality, we encounter the empirical representations of it..." How can there be any transcendent nature of anything if there is not a transcendent reality? I may not be understanding your meaning, but you seem to suggest that a transcendental reality does exist, and also that things in themselves have a transcendental nature, yet transcendental objects do not exist. What then, is a thing? An empirical object...but if the thing in and of itself cannot be known, cannot be described in any way except by its effects in our perceptual modality, how can you say that there are not transcendental objects? Are not transcendental objecst things in and of themselves?

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Posted 10/26/02 - 12:57 PM:	#7
Objects are empirical. A thing in itself is what the empirical representation (which we call an object) is representing. There are without doubt things in themselves for Kant. He says these things are not in space-time (for space and time are just our forms of intuition) and there's no way to know what the things in themselves are like -- meaning we can't have transcendent (experiential) knowledge of them -- but we can have a sense of relational knowledge about them based on what this end of the relation looks like... meaning, we can have transcendental knowledge. What we know is what happens when our minds receive so-called data of the things... we know the appearance which is in essence a relation of the thing in itself into our modes of thinking. Well, as I've already tried to point out in another thread, I still think this leads to monolithic sense of one world 'out there', impossible to reach except through mere appearance. Doesn't that sound just a wee bit disappointing? Okay, I can live with that disappointment, but what it also does is place this outside world infinitely away from our purposes as if those purposes as well were not in the world. It's still a way of separating the human mind from the world out there. Once we bring back the human mind, once we put it back into the world, what happens? All of a sudden, understanding the universe is precisely what we've always done, our descriptions of the world, of snow, hammers, bats, lions, and tigers are all things-in-themselves because they are also part of this world. Ah, but those are mere representations of the real things out there, aren't they? I don't think so. I think they are conceptual formulations created by dealing with the real world out there, not representations of the real world and therefore flawed, but causal ways of helping us to survive. Hey, does anybody remember a Borges story where a man decided to make a map that was an exact representation of the country? It was the country or something like that (Help me out here, it's been a while.). Imperceptible aether would be a really bad idea to Kant, and to me as well, and I see no justification for such an aether. If something is imperceptible, what business have you suggesting that it exists? Things in themselves are very much perceptible, Kant's entire project is to show perception (mind processes) creates the representation of the thing in itself (which takes the form of empirical objects). We don't perceive the empirical world, don't make that mistake, the empirical world is itself the perception of an unknowable transcendental reality. Things in themselves are reasoned to exist (through transcendental arguments) based on the nature of perception itself. It's the fact that we perceive things which proves there's something out there, and since we know from investigation that perceptual processes are interpretive and create representations which need not have anything more than relations in common with what we say they're representations of, we must therefore conclude that there is an unknowable thing in itself which causes (cause is a bad word to use actually, it's really more a relational fact of being since I don't mean to imply any causal chain) our empirical object. Obviously, I have no problems with causal. My problem here is that invisible wall between, "We don't perceive the emprical world, don't make that mistake, the empirical world is itself the perception of an unknowable transcendental reality." Doesn't this downgrade our perceptions, our interpretations or our perceptions, to the point where other perceptions, other interpretations of our perceptions, are somehow better than ours? It's that transcendental knowlege that is put on a superior footing when compared with "our" way of looking at things. But a transendental perspective, the view from nowhere, would have to include our perspective as one of it's many facets. It would be quantitative, not qualitative, in scope. Otherwise, those things-in-themselves, which includes us-in-ourselves -- unless you wish to keep that wall I spoke of -- would be incomplete. The God-like perspective would have to include both the separation of different perspectives with the connections as well. In other words, invisible aether is no more a sound description of what's really out there than what we see. How do we differentiate? We differentiate based on the purposes those desciptions serve. A God-like perspective would have to include them as well. Now, if you mean to say that there's no objective reason to chop off a bit of reality to call it a chair-in-itself, that's may be true from a strictly objective point of view since the thing is neither spatial nor temporal. Again, I think both you, Paul, and Interlocutor are attempting an hierarchy between demarcation of a chair-in-itself and its interaction with the environment. Furthermore, it seems to me that a strictly objective point of view would have to include both a holistitic, non-spatial, non-temporal point of view and "our" spatial/temporal view. It would include all possible interpretations, not an interpretation-less essence. It would have to include among other things, our sense data and all the other sense data of all other beings, as well as the chemical and quantum levels, as well as the cosmological relationship of that chair to the Andromeda galaxy as well as to quasars and all possible interpretations (Come to think of it, all impossible interpretations as well.) . Excepting perhaps the case of conscious things, there's no objective critera to demarcate one object from another, and Kant surely knows this. You mean, except those demarcations we choose to place on objects. Here, I agree with you. I don't think we should downgrade those demarcations however. Honestly, I don't know whether either of you are actually doing this, I may be misreading what you intend, but my points here, I think, do gibe with Kant's points because of his relationship to God. I do not think we can so easily dismiss that relationship anymore than I think we can dismiss it with Descartes. That's another whole thread of course. Kant doesn't think there are trancendental objects. But Kant is fully justified in speaking of a chair in itself because he's describing relationally, from the perspective of the mind, looking/thinking behind the empirical appearance... we don't encounter transcendent reality, we encounter the empirical representations of it, and since these representations are called "things" we have to talk about the transcendental reality of things. When Kant speaks of "the thing as it may be in itself", he means the empirical object's transcendental nature. In a nutshell, I think we need to talk about an infinite descriptiveness of objects (including conscious beings) rather than their transcendental natures.

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Posted 10/27/02 - 02:32 AM:	#8
What can you be sure of that exists? Your consciousness. How do you know that the world around you is "real." Is the world in your dreams real? What about the people in your dreams? Maybe youre the only consciousness in existence (solipsism). Your subconscious mind is generating this universe and then your conscious mind perceives it. What it really comes down to is this: does matter create consciousness or does consciousness create matter? The atheists believe in that matter creates consciousness and the believer in a God/s believe that consciousness creates matter.

Brad
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Posted 10/27/02 - 03:26 AM:	#9
Why should we believe consciousness is real? Ever read Tolstoy?

Paul
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Posted 10/27/02 - 03:58 AM:	#10
Originally posted by Interlocutor As you say, " we don't encounter transcendent reality, we encounter the empirical representations of it..." How can there be any transcendent nature of anything if there is not a transcendent reality? You don't have to encounter something to know that it exists -- that's the point of Kant's project of transcendental arguments and transcendental knowledge. We don't encounter transcendent reality but there is certainly a transcendent reality there, which we can derive the existence of indirectly (and what we learn about it in this relational way is called transcendental knowledge). I may not be understanding your meaning, but you seem to suggest that a transcendental reality does exist, and also that things in themselves have a transcendental nature, yet transcendental objects do not exist. There is a transcendent reality, Kant seems very clear about this. There are transcendental objects as well, they just aren't of the same nature as the empirical and so they're not known. Things can exist which are unknowable. The existence can be derived through what is knowable -- this knowledge related to things in themselves is what Kant calls transcendental knowledge, and Kant does think we can have transcendental knowledge. It's only transcendent knowledge he denies -- essentially, we cannot know what it's like to be the thing (putting it in terms Nagel might like). This is where Patanjali does have it easier, because Patanjali has basically the same theory as Kant but says transcendental objects can be known directly through meditation which eliminates the mind and leaves the object directly in consciousness. Kant would, of course, dismiss Patanjali as being mistaken. Also, Kant may have a way out for himself like Patanjali's -- I haven't yet had the chance to study Kant's theory of mind in detail, but in some spots he implies that he's considering the mind to be a thing in itself, and so we can know one little bit of transcendent reality -- the mind -- from which we can get some vague sense of what the transcendent is like. (Particulary, Kant explicitly draws the inference from a lack of a sense of space in the mind that there necessarily isn't space in transcendent reality of things in themselves... so you can see that he does allow himself a way to a general sort of knowledge of the background nature of the trancendent as like the background nature of the mind, which also opens up the chance for knowledge of non-self things by analogy.) What then, is a thing? An empirical object...but if the thing in and of itself cannot be known, cannot be described in any way except by its effects in our perceptual modality, how can you say that there are not transcendental objects? Are not transcendental objecst things in and of themselves? It all depends on how you want to use the word "objects". If you require it to be a space-time object, then there are no real objects because you're defining objects as being the subjective interpretation of reality which makes up the empirical world. Kant keeps things metaphysically simple, there's only one realm of things, and the appearance reality distinction is due to the position and nature of the mind as a piece of the universe with its own ingrained structures which interpret. If all perceivers died tomorrow, there'd only be things in themselves left. Now, if you want to call them objects or not is up to you... if you think of objects as being something truly external to yourself then you'll have to call the things in themselves objects and just make drastic revisions to what you think objects are like. (Kant is clear about space and time not being features of things in themselves, and he seems to imply that even causality isn't a feature of things in themselves... that's all part of the relation the mind brings to things.) So anyhow, whatever I try to imply about if objects exists or not has to be based on complete guesswork as to what you mean by the term "objects". I may be agreeing with you but just not understanding how you mean to use the terms. Originally posted by Brad I still think this leads to monolithic sense of one world 'out there', impossible to reach except through mere appearance. Doesn't that sound just a wee bit disappointing? It provides a huge boost in explaining why things appear as they do. If you're disappointed, then that's your problem. But note what I explained above, there's a lot more to it thn mere appearance even though appearance is the most direct method and is required first in order to set about other sorts of understandings. If you construct a robot which can only take in data which is, say, a certain small sound frequency range, then should the robot be dissapointed that any speculations it makes about the nature of what the sound-data might represent outside of itself must neccesarily begin from the basis of that sound-data? I don't see why. We can know about what's out there by analogy with the self, as well as having transcendental knowledge (about things which are transcendent) but not transcendent knowledge. (Semi off topic note, "knowledge" is the translation usually used but many people suggest "cognition" might be a translation less apt to cause misinterpretations. You can't cognize the thing in itself because for something to be cognized means it's a relation in the mind to something external, but necessarily in mind-form. Everything you cognize is a part of your mind, even though much of it represents external [transcendent] things.) I have knowledge of a chair in itself insofar as I know how the empirical chair relates to other things. I know that the chair in itself really does have a certain relation with a scale in itself that I get a sense of by looking at a numeral and abstracting. More importantly I have knowledge of what a chair in itself is not... I know it's not spatio-temporal, it's not a certain color or anything like that... and this is crucial knowledge gained that allows me to understand why people are not wrong if they disagree with me on these sorts of things. It's also a step towards being able to better understand what it's like to be And the end result of all this is that the empirical world is quite useful. In fact, Kant's entire transcendental project is to explain how the empirical world arises in context and justify our beliefs in things like causation and physics and geometry in the empirical world -- which is where things matter. The exploration of the trancendental is for the purpose of gaining a better understanding of the empirical. You understand yourself better if you take a look at the context you're in. Once we bring back the human mind, once we put it back into the world, what happens? What happens is you have a particular thing in itself (the mind) which has perceptual representations of other things in themselves. You seem to be accusing Kant of separating the mind from the world, which is a very strange accusation considering he's seen as a founder of phenominalism. He examines how closely entwined the mind and the world are... he's just wise enough to remain aware that this is the empirical world, the representation in the mind, so that he doesn't fall into a solipsist or Berklean trap of thinking that the mind is stretching across the external universe. I think they are conceptual formulations created by dealing with the real world out there, not representations of the real world and therefore flawed, but causal ways of helping us to survive. First, where do you see a difference between "conceptual formulations" and "representations"? Kant would say that the process of conceptual formulations in the mind is part of the process of representation. To illustrate the general process (with all but the first step being mind-related): Things in themselves -----> presentation to senses ----> undifferentiated manifold of experiences ----> forms of intuition (templates through which we translate objects - space and time) ----> understanding (categories and empirical conepts) ----> judegement (faculty of subsuming intuitions under concepts) ----> reason (faculty of drawing inferences) It's not entirely clear to me where Kant would place your perception of a chair, I guess it depends on exactly how you think about the chair, but it has to at least be post-forms. Second, "flawed" is not a word I ever recall seeing Kant use to describe the empirical world. If you can show where he used an emotively negative term like that, please let me know. The empirical world is our world, he makes that quite clear, and his project is to explain and reinforce our world without declaring it less important than something else... he recognizes the transcendent world as more basic, but also observes that the transcendent world is totally useless to us as is because it's just an "undifferentiated manifold" which could never be anything but noise to us -- basically, the Kantian mind is a device that takes the messy static noise of nature and turns it into something useful and meaningful. (Of couse, this noise is itself only reprentational since distant things don't directly contact the senses and the retina and optic nerve and other such translations have already taken place before the mind gets a hold of the noise.) If one thing is to be declared better than the other, Kant would certainly favor the empirical world, which is why he concentrates on showing that the nature of the mind allows us to know certain things (causality, space-time, etc) about the empirical world. He's simply observing how the empirical world is accounted for by a relation of the nature of the mind (a nature which he tries to break down in extraordinary detail into differnt functions -- Kant is basically a functionalist) to the nature of the things in themselves... nowhere does he suggest that this relation is inferior to something. Third, causality has no place in the objective, and by not committing himself to it I think Kant has a major advantage over you by not assuming metaphysical complexity the way you have. (I suppose you're a proponent of the causal theory of mind?) Kant's system is highly elegant in how it can do away with both dualism and a lot of bulky metaphysics at once, without ending up in anything like an idealist (Berklean) or naive realist situation. He can account for the appearance/reality distinction without needing to throw out either end of the distinction, without needing anything dualistic, and without needing to suppose that the universe comes prepackaged with any complex metaphysics like space, time, causality, etc. outside of the human mind. Anyhow, the nature of how the real universe is, is such that minds contain relational representations of things... it's a fact that can be analyzed causally but which should not be taken as in itself causal. (Again, causality is part of what the mind brings to things.) Doesn't this downgrade our perceptions, our interpretations or our perceptions, to the point where other perceptions, other interpretations of our perceptions, are somehow better than ours? It's that transcendental knowlege that is put on a superior footing when compared with "our" way of looking at things. Trancendental knowledge is our knowledge, obviously. Whose do you think it is? Trancendent knowledge isn't ours, it's impossible except perhaps in the case of the self, and by analogy except using analogy puts it back over in the category of trancendental. Kant uses trancendental arguments to prove certain features of how the mind interprets things, so that he can say that all empirical experiences will have these aspects. (Space and time, causality, logic, etc.) Trancendental arguments are a way of proving things about the empirical world. They're absolutely irrecoverably tied to our way our looking at things, by design. There is nothing in the theory which says anything is better than anything else... Kant is very clear in simply using the transcendental to help explain and prove things about the empirical world, obviously he's very much grounded in the empirical or he would devote so much effort to trying to solve the philosphical problems of our experience. What this does do is it makes the point clear that self-perception of mind is to be taken as more basic than perception of objects (although, there's another thing Patanjali would debate). The mind as a thing in itself is more like the nature of objective reality than the appearance of a chair is like objective reality. If you care at all about objective reality is a completely different matter, and I can think of few reasons to care about the objective nature of a chair... but just because you prefer the empirical world and find it more pragmatic doesn't mean you can deny the underlying nature of it as a relation, a relation which exists in the only thing in itself you'll ever transcendently know and which neccesarily has something trancendent on the other end (at least if we're to stick with monism). Furthermore, it seems to me that a strictly objective point of view would have to include both a holistitic, non-spatial, non-temporal point of view and "our" spatial/temporal view. Our view would only exist in the mind-in-itself, quite obviously. Thinking about something doesn't involve jumping out and attaching perspectives to the external world. A strictly objective point of view does include all empirical spatio-temporal views, as part of the nature of what's within the tiny areas called minds, but not external to the minds... and of course the minds don't really have space-time in them, they have representations of a form called space-time within them. Naturally the representative aspect wouldn't be obvious from the objective point of view, but it'd be there just as a peculiar nature of how one "area" (misusing a spatial word) is itself affected in a certain textural pattern way by other areas wherever a certain thing called perception is at work. I may be misreading what you intend, but my points here, I think, do gibe with Kant's points because of his relationship to God. I do not think we can so easily dismiss that relationship anymore than I think we can dismiss it with Descartes. Kant uses God for his ethics, and just about nowhere else. He's very much unlike Descartes, he doesn't involve god to prove his main arguments. In fact he says we can't prove god and sets about refuting various proofs of god and claims to knowledge of god... plus Kant's god is so unlike other gods that it certainly has different implications. Considering his strange conception of god's mind, which he basically argues doesn't think, he's incredibly far away from Descartes. He was considered a bit of a heretic for his reinterpretation of religion... he tried to base religion in philosophy instead of the other way around. And more to the point, I see no way in which god is involved with the transcendental picture of things. This is a picture that was developed to destroy dualist ideas which people like Descartes though were needed for a god. I really don't see what you mean by Kant's "relationship to God"... it just doesn't apply to anything here. In a nutshell, I think we need to talk about an infinite descriptiveness of objects (including conscious beings) rather than their transcendental natures. The way the world would be described in something other than a human mind would be far different -- that's a Kantian point. Your point seems more postmodernist if I'm to take "infinite" literally. As Kant would say, the types of descriptions which can apply to objects is limited by the types of minds which are perceiving them. The relation between a clod of dirt and a rock does not add descriptions, because neither of them is structured in the form of a mind. And anyhow, your talk of infinite discriptivness will only be able to leave you dazed and confused about what's generating all these descriptions if you fail to realize that all the descriptions are actually relations following physical laws and physically observable perceptual processes (not to say we understand the brain processes) -- and relations require that the things on both ends actually exist, which requires things in themselves to exist on both ends of the relation. Talk of infinite descriptiveness of objects ignores the subject -- the object doesn't take on infinite descriptions itself, it's the altering of the relation with the observing subject(s) which generates the huge number of possible descriptions. If you realize that descriptions are all relative then you have to have things in themselves as the ends of the descriptive relations to account for the multitude of descripion-relations hanging between them.

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