Appearances and things in themselves

In the 1960s, Kant's doctrine of transcendental idealism was only an embarrassment to those who were returning to the critical philosophy for refreshment as the springs of ordinary language and Wittgensteinian philosophy seemed to run dry. “Descriptive metaphysics” might be rehabilitated, but it hardly needed to be burdened by the “picture of the receiving and ordering apparatus of the mind producing Nature as we know it out of the unknowable reality of things as they are in themselves.” But philosophy is no less subject to the whims of fashion than other human activities, and since the late 1970s transcendental idealism has come to seem to some not merely a harmless but indeed a salubrious recommendation of epistemological modesty. In characteristic words, for instance, Graham Bird has written that “to assert the existence of … objects beyond our capacities is to underline the modesty with which we should view our own frameworks of belief”; transcendental idealism, he asserts, “indicates a kind of subjectivity which is not … that of an individual's private sensory experience but is rather that of a certain relativism associated with a system of belief.” However, Kant's transcendental idealism is not any heir to ancient skepticism's healthy reminder, against all forms of dogmatism, that our views and theories may be only one way of looking at reality.