thing-in-itself

[ thing-in-it-self ]

noun

, Kantianism.

, plural things-in-them·selves [thingz-in-, th, uh, m-, selvz].

1. reality as it is apart from experience; what remains to be postulated after space, time, and all the categories of the understanding are assigned to consciousness. Compare noumenon ( def 3 ).

thing-in-itself

noun

1. (in the philosophy of Kant) an element of the noumenal rather than the phenomenal world, of which the senses give no knowledge but whose bare existence can be inferred from the nature of experience

thing-in-itself

1. A notion in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant . A thing-in-itself is an object as it would appear to us if we did not have to approach it under the conditions of space and time.

Word History and Origins

Origin of thing-in-itself¹

1650–60; translation of German Ding an sich

Example Sentences

At every level of yet deeper engagement, the thing-in-itself, the musical unknown, remains, taunting us with a sense of unachieved enlightenment.

From Washington Post

In the eighteenth century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that we can never have access to the Ding an sich, the unfiltered “thing-in-itself ” of objective reality.

From Salon

Most often we end up smothering the plain eloquence of the thing-in-itself under a pile of metaphors.

From Scientific American

He makes the reason a thing-in-itself outside time, although it is an activity, a process of consciousness in time.

From Project Gutenberg

Fichte kept to the same point of view: his non-ego is only something set over against the ego, only defined as in consciousness: it is made no more than an infinite “shock,” i.e. a thing-in-itself.

From Project Gutenberg