art, though the third work also treats of themes in biology. For the moment, let’s focus on the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s central idea is his distinction between phenomena and noumena, also known as appearances and the thing-in-itself, though some scholars draw subtle distinctions between these pairs of terms. Kant sees his predecessors as having been devoted to “dogmatic” philosophy, which means the attempt to provide definitive answers about how reality is by means of rational argument. For example, this might involve attempts to prove that human freedom either exists or does not exist, that physical matter either is or is not made of indivisible particles, that time and space either have or do not have a beginning and an end, or that God must exist or need not exist. Kant covers these four themes under the heading of “antinomies,” and concludes that it is pointless to attempt philosophical proofs for any of them, since their solution one way or the other lies beyond the limits of direct human awareness.
Kant’s case against dogmatism hinges on his claim that human cognition is finite. All human access to the world seems to occur in three dimensions of space and one of irreversible time, and in a framework of twelve basic “categories” that define our human experience of reality: cause and effect rather than random events, the distinction between one and many, and other such rudimentary features of the world as we know it. But given that we are humans, and that we therefore encounter the world in a specific human manner, we have no way of knowing whether the conditions of our experience apply to the world as it is apart from our access to it. Perhaps God and angels experience a world without time and space or devoid of causal relations. Going beyond Kant’s own remarks, maybe the same holds for hyper-intelligent alien beings or even for various animal species. Our imprisonment in human finitude means that we must limit the claims of reason; philosophy can no longer be about reality apart from us, or the “transcendent.” Instead, philosophy must restrict itself to determining the basic conditions that hold for all human access to the world. Somewhat confusingly, Kant calls these conditions “transcendental,” a word so unfortunately close to “transcendent,” which we have seen means something entirely different. Whereas dogmatic philosophers claimed to address transcendent reality directly, Kant insists that we have access to the transcendental alone.
It is ironic that, although the career of virtually all major Western philosophers since the 1780s has been determined by their assimilation of Kant, his central idea of the thing-in-itself has been almost universally rejected. The unknowable noumenon has often been scorned as a residual form of Platonism or Christianity that slanders the world of bodies, pleasures, and life-affirming forces that we ought to celebrate instead, as in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Yet Kant’s more direct heirs, the so-called German Idealists running from J.G. Fichte through G.W.F. Hegel, make an important objection from within Kant’s own framework. Namely, if we claim to think a thing-in-itself outside thought, this is itself a thought; seen from this standpoint, Kant seems to commit what would later be called a “performative contradiction.”2 Since thinking a thing outside thought is itself a thought, the distinction between appearance and the thing-in-itself itself turns out to be contained wholly within the sphere of thought. This line of argument is what allows Hegel to claim a new sort of “infinity” for his philosophy, replacing Kantian finitude with an ultimate reconciliation between subject and object through a dialectical movement of positing and negation. German Idealism has influenced many contemporary philosophers, and is most visible today in continental thought in the line passing through Slavoj Žižek and Badiou up through the latter’s important disciple Meillassoux. None of these authors has any sympathy for the Kantian thing-in-itself: all of them claim, each in a different way, that the human subject is able to gain access to the absolute. We should note that OOO actively opposes this trend – which it designates as “neo-Modernism” or “epistemism” – and holds that reaffirmation of the thing-in-itself is the key to future progress in philosophy, though rather differently from how Kant imagined. Importantly for the present book, OOO also holds that the elimination of the thing-in-itself forecloses any effort to clarify the nature of artworks, since it robs us of the ability to disarm literalism.
A different way of rejecting the thing-in-itself and claiming direct access to the absolute is found in the phenomenology of Husserl. Born in Moravia in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Husserl’s turn from mathematics to philosophy occurred in Vienna under the tutelage of the charismatic ex-priest Franz Brentano, who was also the teacher of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Brentano’s most famous contribution to philosophy was to revive the medieval concept of intentionality, which does not refer to the “intent” of a human action, as the term often falsely suggests to beginners. Instead, Brentano’s concern was to ask how psychology differs from other sciences.3 What is most characteristic of the mental realm, he claimed, is that every mental act is directed at an object. If we perceive, judge, or love and hate, then we perceive something, judge something, love or hate something. Now, it will immediately be remarked that we sometimes perceive things that are not really there: we hallucinate, make confused misjudgments, or go ethically astray by loving and hating imaginary things. What, then, is the relation between the objects of my mental acts and any “real” objects that might exist beyond them? Brentano gives insufficient guidance on this question. Intentionality, he says, is aimed at immanent objects, meaning objects directly present to the mind, and not – as frequent misreadings hold – at objects that may lie beyond it. Despite Brentano’s Aristotelian heritage through his Catholic background, and his temperamental dislike for German Idealism, his philosophy shows a lingering idealist or at least agnostic attitude toward the outside world.
The numerous talented students of Brentano worked to clarify this cloudy point in his teaching.4 One of the finest efforts in this direction was made by his brilliant Polish disciple Kazimierz Twardowski, in a provocative 1894 thesis entitled On the Content and Object of Presentations.5 The most important claim of this work is that intentional acts are double, aimed both at an object outside the mind and a specific content inside the mind. Though Twardowski was seven years younger than Husserl, he was initially far more advanced than the latter, who had shifted from mathematics to philosophy relatively late in his student career. Indeed, much of Husserl’s early work can be read as a protracted struggle with Twardowski’s doubling of object and content. What worried Husserl is that under this model, there was no way to reconcile the two realms in such a way as to make actual knowledge possible: a variant of the issue that bothered the German Idealists when reading Kant. As Husserl put it at the time, how can there be two Berlins, one of them a content inside the mind and the other an object outside it? In that case, there would be no way for the two Berlins ever to come into contact, and knowledge of Berlin would not be possible.6
This question led Husserl to his philosophical breakthrough, which amounts to a radical idealism despite repeated denials by his followers even today. His solution, namely, was that Berlin itself is purely immanent: not because it exists merely in the mind, but because there is no important difference between what is in the mind and what is in reality. The thing-in-itself outside thought is for Husserl an absurd notion; there is no object that could not be, at least in principle, the object of an intentional act by some mind. To speak of Berlin is to speak of Berlin itself, not just of a mental Berlin inside my mind. To be the real Berlin is not to be a Berlin-in-itself beyond access for all thought, and to be the Berlin-for-consciousness is not to be a mere mental figment with no objective correlate. Instead, the real Berlin and the Berlin in my mind are one and the same, both occupying the same ontological space. In short, Husserl rejects Kant’s division between noumenal and phenomenal worlds. The major difference between Husserl and Hegel (another famous critic of the thing-in-itself) is that Husserl is far more interested in objects, which – despite being immanent in rational thought – nonetheless have shadowy contours and elusive profiles that must be carefully analyzed. This is why Husserl often feels like a realist adrift in a world of independent objects in a way that is never true of Hegel, even though Husserl rejects the noumena just as decisively as Hegel himself. Philosophy for Husserl must be phenomenology: not – as for Hegel – because we need to describe the various stages through which the thinking subject passes in becoming aware of the world more concretely, but because the phenomenal realm is filled with translucent
