/lit/ - Literature

Guys please I have an essay due in a few hours and I didnt study

a better question: how can the noumena cause phenomena when causality is only a predicate of phenomena?

>>15584315
>How does he know that theres a noumenal at all and that everything isnt just phenomenal
LMAO the fact you wrote this explains your previous sentence.
You can't know there is a noumenon, it is simply a necessity for us to assume [everything Kant supposed to solve the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge].

If you are getting filtered by Kant you should reconsider whether you really can engage in Philosophy or perhaps not.

>>15584925
Well my professor explcitly asked us to demonstrate how Kant refuted idealism such as that of Berkeley. I'm reading a passage form the Prolegomena where he explcitly denies that his system of transcendental idealism is like Berkeley's but I just can't see how.

>>15584980
To be fair to my man Berkley he is often used only as a strawman.
If you have any sympathy towards Berkley you need to give that up and only view him through the same prejudicial lense as the others (Leibniz, Locke, mendelsohn, etc.) are viewed through.
Imo Berkley's idealism can be the same as Kant's except he offers nothing for the actual question of how synthetic knowledge a priori is possible, which is why Berkley fails and can not be compared to Kant's.
But you are right that they are at least similar which is especially obvious if you read the first edition of the KdrV where the accusation of Kant being a Berkleyesque idealist stems from. He takes a harder stance in the second edition as he does in the Prolegomena to show how he is not quite a Berkley idealist.
Kant says that it is Necessary for the things to also be seperate individual entities of which we only have the appearance but that we can never actually know (of) them. The necessity of the books in the room upstairs are for berkley not necessary free from being thought (perceived) to the individual but they do need to be so he supposes they are thought by God, which doesn't need to imply that they are actually isolated entities but perhaps this is just because "God" can mean so many different things. also remember Berkley's main work was only part one. He never got to elaborate on his system since his scripts were lost during his life.
Kant is very articulate how his system is not a Berkley idealism. you really should be able to understand what he is saying and how he means it.

I am also not doing your homework and am not gonna actually tell you how exactly Kant BTFO idealism.

>>15584858
Schopenhauer addressed this. It can't. Phenomena (representation) and noumena (the thing-in-itself; Will) exists as two sides of the same coin rather than casually interacting with each other. Dual-aspect monism.

>>15584315
Because appearances necessitate a source of appearances.

>>15584858
Indeed. I think this suggests that some basic type of causality is apodictically true.

>>15585229
Why not just go for transcendental realism then? Why the 'dual-aspect' bologne?

>>15584858
Jacobi, Schulze, and Fichte deserve a lot more respect than modern students of Kant want to give. These days Kantians think they've overcome the problems people raised to Kant in the 1790s but none of it is compelling enough.
>>15584980
Kant has a section in the Critique (B edition) called the Refutation of Idealism and he goes after Berkeley there if you're interested, though it goes beyond the scope of your class right now.
>Guys please I have an essay due in a few hours and I didnt study
Not doing your homework anon, Kant wouldn't want me to.

>>15584858
noumena doesnt cause phenomena. phenomena imply outer world objects we cant know directly. noumena are ideas with no ground on sensible stuff (and real objects), their content comes from reason itself, e.g. God, the soul.

>>15585306
That is one abstract interpretation that deviates STRONGLY from Kant's texts.
the noumenon is the source of the phenomenon that is the whole system you retard.
What you are saying is 20th century anglo reinterpretation by Hilary Putnam and such frauds and such. The most influential anglo interpretor, Strawson, says exactly how I stated it.

>>15585294
I probably shouldn't have called it dual-aspect. He still ultimately says that Representation is an objectification of the thing-in-itself. Rather than say the Will causes Representation, he says that the Representation *is* Will. In this sense, they're seperate things like Kant seems to postulate wrt noumena and phenomena.

>>15585365
*they're *not* seperate things

>>15585155
>>15585304
Thanks anons, i'll be less of a slacker next time.

>>15585365
>>15585373
Here, from WWR:
>For as the world is in one aspect entirely idea, so in another it is entirely will. A reality which is neither of these two, but an object in itself (into which the thing in itself has unfortunately dwindled in the hands of Kant), is the phantom of a dream, and its acceptance is an ignis fatuus in philosophy.

>>15585347
thing in itself is not the same as noumenon

>>15585438
yes it is.
Noumenon = Thing in itself (Ding an sich)
Phenomenon = Appearance (Die Erscheinung = Das Ding für uns)

>>15585347
>muh strawson
>anglo interpretators

>>15585498
It's funny because Anglo-Americans and Germans are the main people working on Kant and German Idealism today and they work at each other's countries and write literature that answers to each other and basically they're all doing the same thing (obviously there's various views out there). There isn't really some sort of analytic/continental divide with Kant/German Idealism scholars. Can't speak for Strawson's day, but this is true of stuff after his time for sure.

>>15585285
>Because appearances necessitate a source of appearances.
Why? There's no casual connection between the supposed thing-in-itself and an appearance. A Kantian must accept that the external world is appearance alone.

>>15584315
"Dogmatic" in Kant's meaning refers to any metaphysics proceeding without a distinction between phenomena and noumena, but it was he who first proposed this distinction, and in it lies the refutation. Berkeley's idealism is certainly strange insofar as it was one of the first and last to propose a free-floating perception, aspects without things. In this sense only does his idealism bear any relation to Kant's own as both argue from the primacy of judgment, the subjective destitution of substance. However, Berkeley immediately departs when he, like so many of Kant's forebearers, is forced to invoke a God as the ultimate source of all perceptions, we, spirits without bodies, uncertain receptacles of this source, in this way mirroring the occasionalist constructions of Malebranche.

>>15585447
noumenon is the way of thinking the suprasensible aka things in themselves and metaphysical ideas.

>>15585559
whats your point

>>15586325
The point is there's no difference between Anglo and German interpreters.

>>15585638
Well, I'm not a Kantian, but Kant acknowledges that appearances must proceed from something(s) that we don't perceive directly/in their entirety, as we are beings of limited perception.

As for the causality there, you can argue that the particulars of the relationship can't be definitively known (e.g. temporality), but I don't see how it can be denied that a fundamental causal relationship (a continuity of some kind) exists.

>>15585432
I can't really get on board with his notion of 'Will', it seems to me like the mysticizing of what could be less assumptively called 'nature' (which can extend to encompass thought/ideas without introducing unecessary dichotomies).

Thanks for clarifying though, I understand Schoppy a little better now.

>>15584980
Beiser's work on German Idealism is dedicated to this in general and has specific chapters on Kant vs Berkely and dogmatic idealism

>>15586727
Thanks for the rec anon

>>15586440
>I don't see how it can be denied that a fundamental causal relationship (a continuity of some kind) exists.
Why not? I'm not being facetious, but how does Kant get past a skeptic challenge on the possible non-existence of the thing-in-itself. At best you can say it's possible that behind apperances are unknowable things-in-themselves. It's merely a speculative claim, and Kant is trying to ground epistemeology from the challenge of skepticism; how has he achieved that here?

>>15586774
Honestly Kant doesn't get past it. Kant scholars think he does but his earliest readers saw it for the problem it was. That's how German Idealism came about.

>>15586774
There's a confusion in your post. The 'challenge of skepticism' you refer to is Hume's, and it is not of the thing-in-itself. Hume had no proper conception of the thing-in-itself. His is a skepticism of appearance. Indeed, all hitherto skepticism has been of appearance, and this is what is answered by Kant, grounding appearance on the very conditions for the possibility of that appearance, the transcendental. The question of the thing-in-itself is a new question engendered by this construction, and, as we come to find out through Fichte, it is not so much a skeptical question as one of its dispensability.

>>15585782
Why wouldn't God be involved in the function epistemology?

>>15586922
But if your system just shifts the thing skepticism attacks from one thing to another thing you're not meeting the challenge.
>dispensability
So the only viable Kantian conclusion is that the external world consists only of apperences?

>>15586774
humes skepticism is about the power of reason by itself being able to deduce necesary propositions with no experience. Kant makes reason itself the foundation of experience and all science, with sensibility as the limit to which reason can apply concepts.

Intuitions are the concepts referents (phenomena), while things in themselves must be presupposed so reason can be "perfect" according to its own nature, which also explains why reason tends to metaphysics (noumena)

thats what i understood anyway, maybe im a brainlet pls no bully.

>>15586968
Seems right to me nigga

>>15586932
Antinomies of reason

>>15586944
No, I think the skepticism of Hume is answered by Kant as far as it goes. For Hume the question was of the connection between appearances which he could only find in habit. But what Hume construed as connection between, Kant takes to be condition for. We cannot doubt causality, though we may doubt that we have discovered the most fundamental cause. The skepticism of Hume is here answered. But the further "skepticism" of whether or not we have found the correct cause is now no longer a philosophical question but a scientific one. We cannot forget that it is ultimately in the service of Newton that the first Critique is written. Thus, the thing-in-itself is merely this very boundary, the pure negative of what we don't yet know from which new things emerge.

>>15587095
Is the thing-in-itself known or not and in what circumstances? It's something more than a boundary to things we don't know if it's lurking underneath appearences that we do know. If we don't know any thing-in-itself could it be no thing?

What can we know of these, which are real:
1.) Things-in-itself of appearances we do know
2.) Things-in-itself of non-appearances (that may become a future appearance we will know but not yet)
3.) Appearances without a thing-in-itself (illusions?)

>>15587161
>Is the thing-in-itself known or not
no

>>15587234
So what makes an appearance real or an illusion?

>>15587243
I have some bad news, anon...

>>15587243
its possible if its concievable in time and space, real if theres an actual given intuition that matches a concept.

in science only "measurable" qualities were important at the time, when mechanics was the generalized approach to science, so as long there's weight, lenght, height, speed, etc. which are objective properties of things appareances didnt really matter (color, smell, etc.)

>>15584858
Noumena does not cause Phenomena, the mind does. How would the thing itself cause the appearance? The reason that the Phenomena exists is because it's your representation caused by your own forms of intuition and understanding coupled with your minds synthetic power.

>>15587322
phenomena has form, which is part of the subject, and matter, which comes from the outside world.

>>15587339
Kant specifically says that matter is just a way of representation. You can't know anything about the outside world at all.

>>15587354
He doesn't say that at all

>>15587449
Buddy, have you even read the Critique? Go to A385 in the Paralogism.
>For matter, whose community with the soul excites such great reservations, is nothing other than a mere form, or a certain mode of representation of an unknown object.

>>15587161
>>15587243
The line between real and illusion is drawn by science. All philosophy can tell us is whether or not we might know something, the bounds of possible experience; it cannot give us knowledge a priori. The thing-in-itself is merely the way Kant's system articulates the difference between what we know and what there is to know, or, simply, what there is. That there is something we cannot deny, nor can we speak any further of this fact, try as we might. That is all the thing-in-itself is. We may only speak about what we know of what there is, through science, but what we know of what there is is not all that there is to know.

>>15587510
>what we know of what there is is not all that there is to know.
Land's spooky fanged noumena?

>>15587510
I would simplify this further by just saying that the thing-in-itself is simply reality independent of the mind, all experience is necessarily phenomenal because to be experience it first must go through our mind and be synthesized and filtered in a sense by the categories, space, time etc...
So the big distinction in Kant is that the Ding as Sich is the independent thing and the Phenomena is simply the dependent experience which we all necessarily have.

>>15587575
>Ding as Sich
But it's a regulative idea, not a constitutive one, correct? It doesn't appear to have a strong basis in Kant's sytem. If nothing can be known about it, then it's a speculative idea.

>>15587685
Yes, it's a regulative idea. The way that Kant comes to derive it is pretty much just his way of guarding against Solpsism/Dogmatic Idealism. There must be something that comes to the mind in order for phenomena to arise, even if we can no nothing about this thing. It acts as a boundary principle against the idea that our mind is 'creating' reality. So from my readings I tend to look at Noumena as being that which precedes my mental synthesis, I can't know it because my knowledge is successive of this mental synthesis and necessarily requires it for experience. So all experience is essentially the mind shaping something that is already out there which we cannot know.

>>15587704
>no nothing
lol I'm too fucking tired to write

>>15587704
Correct. This is the key to distinguishing Kant from Berkeley.

>>15586564
Have a read of "On The Will in Nature". It's not quite as mystical as it seems. Nevertheless, my pleasure.

>>15584315
>How does he know that theres a noumenal at all and that everything isnt just phenomenal?
this is a common critique of kant by later idealists that dropped the noumenal

>>15586774
Because we are non-omniscient (again, beings of limited perception). From this recognition, we can deduce that thing(s) exist 'outside' of our experience. Think about it... Do you experience the generation of your thoughts? Are you experiencing the future (can you even predict it?). How could space/time only be an appearance (entirely contained within your experience) and also the necessary form of experience?

It is a certainty that an objective reality exists, and that this reality precedes and makes appearances possible (othwerise, we would be omniscient).

>>15585155
It sounds like he didnt btfo idealism at all

OP trying to sound smart with the whole noumena concept and trying to categorize Kant as dogmatic when his philosophy was liberating. Berkeley was a dumb Anglo who believed we lived in the Matrix.

>>15585304
>Refutation of Idealism
IN THE SECOND EDITION of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant inserted a refutation of
idealism in the examination of the "Postulates of Empirical Thought." This is one of
the most condensed sections of the Critique, but because of the nature of its subject it
is also one of the most important. It is the most direct attempt to set the Kantian position
off from Berkeley and more particularly from Descartes. In spite of the evident importance Kant placed on these passages the argument is marred by subtle shifts of terminology so that the casual reader is likely to misunderstand the position which is being
upheld. Indeed, as we shall see, this terminological difficulty is to be found in the very
formulation of the thesis to be proved in the section. It is the purpose of this paper to
draw out, or perhaps to reconstruct, the main argument of the refutation and in the
process clarify exactly what is and what is not being proved. The argument as it will be
reconstructed is not found explicitly in the section under consideration, but then it can
hardly be expected that what is essentially a one-paragraph argument can adequately
spell out all that it involves, particularly when the literary style is a good illustration of
all the negative comments which have been leveled against the German metaphysical
writings.

>>15587322
What do you know of 'the mind'? What is that, exactly? How would your experience even be possible if some noumenal thing had not conditioned it and made it possible?

>>15587354
Kind of silly absolutism here, imo. Appearances must be conveying some degree of information about the noumenal, the limitation is that we can't know the 'outside world' comprehensively.

>>15588239
There is no possible knowledge of the outside world, comprehensive or not. Go re-read the Critique, specifically the Phenomena/Noumena chapter and the Paralogisms. Noumena isn't to be thought of as something behind appearance which is problematically accessible, rather it is the unconditioned object. Remember, all of our knowledge is firmly grounded in experience, which is itself grounded on the forms of thinking. Appearances convey the thing in itself as it is conditioned by the forms of intuition/understanding and the synthesis grounded in consciousness. Noumena is just the thing that precedes thought, it is the object itself, phenomena and experience are precisely that object having gone through the unity of apperception. Again, I'll quote Kant to make it clearer what is meant by a mode of representation (also check my other post about A385):
>Thus there may very well be something outside us, which we call matter, corresponding to this appearance, but in the same quality as appearance it is not outside us, but is merely as a thought in us, even though this thought, through the sense just named, represents it as being found outside us. Matter thus signifies not a species of substances quite different and heterogeneous from the soul, but rather only the heterogeneity of the appearances of substances (which in themselves are unknown to us), whose representation we call external in comparison with those that we ascribe to inner sense, even though they belong as much to the thinking subject as other thoughts do....

>>15588355
Based

>>15588184
What about objects?
The appearance is the sense data external to me, the representation is the mental image I interally make out of sense data by applying the categories.

The external world could becomprised of appearances only. I'm not saying their existence is dependent on my making a representation of their sense data. What I am saying is there could be no thing-in-itself independent of sense data, whether that sense data is perceived or not.

>>15588355
Good post

>>15584315
Curiously Schopenhauer also glosses over this, in a remarkably funny passage:
>But whether the objects known to the individual only as ideas are yet, like his own body, manifestations of a will, is, as was said in the First Book, the proper meaning of the question as to the reality of the external world. To deny this is theoretical egoism, which on that account regards all phenomena that are outside its own will as phantoms, just as in a practical reference exactly the same thing is done by practical egoism. For in it a man regards and treats himself alone as a person, and all other persons as mere phantoms. Theoretical egoism can never be demonstrably refuted, yet in philosophy it has never been used otherwise than as a sceptical sophism, i.e., a pretence. As a serious conviction, on the other hand, it could only be found in a madhouse, and as such it stands in need of a cure rather than a refutation.
True solipsism cannot be refuted for the simple reason that no logical absurdity arises from the hypothesis that only I exist and the rest of the world is mere fancy.

>>15585432
>>15585365
>>15585229
Julian Young makes a good case that Schopenhauer's ontology actually encompasses three worlds instead of two. You alluded to it yourself in your analogy: two sides of the same coin, but the coin is also a thing. Young argues Schopenhauer isn't actually talking about the thing-in-itself but rather a world "between" Will and Representation. The most obvious argument is that the Will is explicitly expressed through time (as through music or succession of moments of pain etc.) while "time" is supposed to be the domain of the Representation, not Will (thing-in-itself).

>>15588548
Interesting. So objectified Will is actually liminal between the purely aimless and insatiable Will and the world of Representation?

Great seeing someone discuss Schopenhauer in more depth on here. It's frustrating to see people view him as someone who built his system on the premise of "I had a bad day" rather than truly engaging with how his pessimism was derived.

>>15588592
His argument is that Schopenhauer, when he speaks of the Will, is not talking about the thing-in-itself. By equating the two, he believes Schopenhauer was mistaken. Why? Because the Will is obviously expressed in a temporal dimension. However, it's not expressed in time AND space, like the Representation. So the Will is both different from the thing-in-itself and different from the Representation. Hence, there are three "worlds" so to speak, with the thing-in-itself as unknown as it was in Kant.

Schopenhauer's own argument for Will=thing-in-itself is similarly based on a false (according to Young) premise:
>knowledge is either phenomenal or noumenal
>knowledge of my own body is not phenomenal
>therefore, knowledge of my own body is noumenal
Young argues Schopenhauer made a mistake in the first premise.

>>15585559
true

>>15588615
I see. So what Young is trying to do here is reformulate Schopenhauer's notion of Will so as to not violate the conditions placed upon the Kantian thing-in-itself in the CPR.

>>15588755
He's just denying Schopenhauer's equivalence of the Will as the thing-in-itself. The Will is something else entirely.

There is no such thing as synthetic a priori, nobody has ever managed to give a good argument for the validity of such judgments. All a priori knowledge is analytic, for positive, synthetic knowledge you need to resort to experience.

>>15588548
Doesn't Schoppy also use Platonic forms and not mention how they intersect with everything else?

>>15588759
Ok, fair enough. I'm not awfully familiar with Young. I tend to read stuff by Janaway and Geyer regarding secondary analysis of Schop. Nevertheless, thanks for giving me something else to check out. I still hold a lot of respect for what Schop was trying to do and I find that I generally agree with his conclusions.

>>15588615
>>knowledge of my own body is not phenomenal
Isn't that a false premise too? The self we know is empirical and phenomenal. Self-knowledge is still sense data plus concepts.

>>15588767
Platonic forms are largely irrelevant to his metaphysics. He uses them in his theory of aesthetics but they're not really incorporated in his larger system. I might be wrong on this but afaik he doesn't even give the forms an ontological status like Plato did. They're just abstract concepts to him. (But again, I might get this wrong.)

>>15588774
Yeah Schopenhauer is great. Young explains him decently well too. In my experience there's an uptick of interest in Schopenhauer in recent years but most is very surface level.

>>15588776
No, with knowledge of the body Schopenhauer refers to the sensation that I "live" in my body. It's different from the knowledge I have of my body as an object among objects. You can observe your body like a biologist or a sculptor, but you can also "observe" it as the inhabitant. In this latter sense you "feel" as if you can move your body through acts of will, with intention, not merely as a passive effect of physical laws in the way a rock falls to the ground. Moreover he says that sensations such as hunger, pain, love, lust, etc. are not part of the Representation since they do not occupy a place in the empirical world (they don't have a spatial dimension) therefore they must be noumenal (since all knowledge is either noumenal or phenomenal)

>>15587704
>There must be something that comes to the mind in order for phenomena to arise, even if we can no nothing about this thing... So all experience is essentially the mind shaping something that is already out there which we cannot know.
does it go against the platonic idea of forms as in mutual transference between forms in divine intellect and forms in human mind?

>>15588793
Good post, thanks.

>>15585882
Ok. I know the noumenon is supposed as more than jsut the other end of the coin when discussed as a possibility of different knowingness (erkenntnis) but that whole line of thinking was empty, right?
Just going through the german Kant lexikon https://www.textlog.de/33066.html
again, he states what you also say but also refrences that it really is nothing but the thing in itself
>Unser Verstand schränkt nur die Sinnlichkeit dadurch ein, daß er Dinge an sich selbst Noumena nennt.
>"Our Verstand limits sensibility so, that he names the thing in itself Noumenon."

>"So ist denn der Begriff reiner bloß intelligibler Gegenstände gänzlich leer von allen Grundsätzen ihrer Anwendung." Nur der "Platz" bleibt für sie offen, KrV tr. Anal. 2. B. 3. H. (I 284 ff.—Rc 344 ff.). Der Begriff des Noumenon ist also "nicht der Begriff von einem Objekt, sondern die unvermeidlich mit der Einschränkung unserer Sinnlichkeit zusammenhängende Aufgabe, ob es nicht von jener ihrer Anschauung ganz entbundene Gegenstände geben möge, welche Frage nur unbestimmt beantwortet werden kann". Dieser Begriff ist "für uns leer" und dient nur zur Grenzbestimmung unserer sinnlichen Erkenntnis, ibid. Anh. Anmerk. zur Amphibolie

>>15585438
>>15585447
>>15585882
>>15588890
Kant (for all intents and purposes) uses the word noumenon to refer to the thing-in-itself. But before Kant it was used by the Greeks (and Plotinus iirc) in a broader sense. Schopenhauer criticized Kant for using/choosing the word noumenon to prevent precisely this misunderstanding

>>15588921
>The difference between abstract and intuitive cognition, which Kant entirely overlooks, was the very one that ancient philosophers indicated as φαινόμενα [phainomena] and νοούμενα [nooumena]; the opposition and incommensurability between these terms proved very productive in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later in the scholastics, in the conflict between nominalism and realism. This latter conflict was the late development of a seed already present in the opposed tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant, who completely and irresponsibly neglected the issue for which the terms φαινομένα and νοούμενα were already in use, then took possession of the terms as if they were stray and ownerless, and used them as designations of things in themselves and their appearances.

I wish all of /lit/ was like this thread

>>15588760
How would you respond to Kant's statement that knowledge of a triangle's angles adding to 180 degrees is synthetic a priori?

>>15588948
Kant threads seems to bring out the best of /lit/

>>15584925
Shut up faggot

>>15588355
I have to wonder what is meant by your continual use of the phrase 'outside world'. From the outset, you seem to use it in a way equivalent to noumena. This is forgivable, but it is not how I would speak. However, your inclusion of the quoted passage suggests you are actually equating 'outside world' with outer sense, or, possibly, outer sense with noumena. It seems to me the issue of 'matter' is really a triumph for Kant and a settled one. It does not bear on the phenomena/noumena distinction or the troubles entailing from that. We can see in what follows immediately after your passage, these troubles begin.
>… we should consider that bodies are not objects in themselves that are present to us, but rather a mere appearance of *who knows what unknown object*; that motion is not the effect of this unknown *cause*, but merely the appearance of its influence on our senses … [emphases mine]
As some have already noted, we cannot, strictly speaking, attribute cause to noumena.

Kant is obscure enough that it looked to many of his earliest readers and to some to this day as if he was saying a few things in tension with each other. That might actually be true, it's Kant's own fault if it's false because he couldn't show it. Those who insist that's not the case are, unfortunately, either obscure too, or not clearly solving the problem. Here's what it's about. On the one hand, Kant says there must be an object (the thing in itself) that does the appearing. Furthermore, Kant seems to synthesize the object (of appearance) entirely from synthetic a priori forms and categories, with empirical content as the only a posteriori bit. And that empirical content appears to amount to still-subjective affections of the sensibility produced in the sensibility by the external object/thing in itself, but clearly counted as different from it. But then Kant also seems to talk as if the object of appearance and the thing in itself are both 'the object', which is why today we have Henry Allison with his two-aspects theory of the object. A bunch of Kant's earliest readers all saw a problem here, a tension between two things apparently being said, and they weren't dumb, the fault is honestly Kant's and he never resolved it for them afterward. For example Hegel saw that the synthetic construction of the object of appearance had no need for a superfluous thing in itself at all. That wasn't an insight original to Hegel since Fichte made a similar observation earlier. What the German Idealists felt was that the best way to resolve the tension in Kant is to reject the whole thing about there being one object rather than two, and then to mark the second object (the thing in itself) as a dangler that did no theoretical work for the view at all, since affections of the sensibility + synthetic a priori forms and categories (+ we should add, transcendental apperception) do all the work to construct the object of appearance.

Alternatively, some Kantians stress that the thing in itself is just a transcendental limit of thought or something. But that reading is highly susceptible to idealizing the thing in itself itself. It stops actually being a thing in itself, becoming merely a limiting concept or something like that. And that is precisely how Fichte understood the thing in itself in Kant, which allowed him to read Kant as a subjective idealist despite Kant's protests to the contrary. The Fichtean view has merit. Anyone who tries to evade the problems at hand by taking this line on the thing in itself (and to be fair, it can be found in the Critique) just solves the tension by turning transcendental idealism into subjective idealism.