Was reading about Schopenhauer and how he was critical about Kant’s view of Transcendental Idealism. Every explanation I find online is rather confusing and explained in this way: “Man can only perceive appearances, which are dependent on the mind, and cannot access the mind-independent world of things in themselves.” What does this mean?
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You can know the reality as it appears to you. How does it appear to you? As it is given through experience. Experience gives us only finite objects and the relations among them. So we can know (have legitimate knowledge claims) concerning finite things. Hence, positive sciences.
However, we can not have legitimate knowledge claims concerning the condition of the possibility of finite things. In other words, that which brings the universe as the totality of finitude into existence (aka the unconditional, absolute, the infinite) is beyond our cognitive capabilities since this condition is not given to us in experience.
In a nutshell, we can have knowledge about the universe, but we can’t know why there is a universe. You can have faith, though (yet you can’t act as if yours is the true faith in contrast to all other infidels’).
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