Kant’s distinction between phenomena (things as they appear) and noumena (things in themselves) is the most contested legacy of the Critique.
- The objection (F. H. Jacobi): “without that presupposition I could not enter into the system, and with it I could not stay within it.” If causality applies only to phenomena, how can things-in-themselves cause our sensations?
- Idealist solution — Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: abolish it.
- Schopenhauer’s solution — Arthur Schopenhauer: we know it from inside, as The Will.
- Nietzsche: the “true world” became a fable.
Compare Māyā: in Advaita, the world as it appears is a veil over Brahman — but there, unlike in Kant, the veil can be lifted by realization.
Sententiae
phrases in the originalDas Ding an sich
Origin. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason — reality as it is independent of how it appears to us. — Immanuel Kant
For what lies beyond appearances and models.
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related by shared connectionsMāyā
The power of appearance — in Advaita, the cosmic illusion by which the one Brahman appears as a world of many things.
Kaṇāda
The founder of Vaiśeṣika and traditional author of the Vaiśeṣika Sūtras — the sage remembered as India’s first atomist, who taught that everything perceptible is built from eternal, indivisible particles.
Pratītyasamutpāda (Dependent Origination)
The Buddha’s central insight — “when this exists, that comes to be; when this ceases, that ceases.” Nothing exists independently; everything arises from conditions. Applied to suffering, it becomes the twelve-linked chain from ignorance to death.
Śūnyatā (Emptiness)
Emptiness — the Mahāyāna teaching that all things lack intrinsic, independent existence (svabhāva), because they arise in dependence on causes, parts and concepts. Not nothingness, but the openness that makes change and freedom possible.
Gārgī Vācaknavī
The woman philosopher who challenged Yājñavalkya at King Janaka’s court with questions about what the universe is “woven on” — pressing him until he warned that her head would fall off, then returning with two questions “like arrows”. One of the earliest named women philosophers in history.
Anekāntavāda
The Jain doctrine that reality is many-sided — that every thing has infinite aspects and every statement captures only one, so that truth requires holding many viewpoints together. Expressed in the parable of the blind men and the elephant and formalised in the sevenfold logic of syādvāda.