Diebert van Rhijn wrote:After all that preamble, I really have to object to your introduction of the term "thing-in-itself" since it seems that any "thingness" will always be derived from relations, by definition. What else would a "thing" be?
That's the intentional irony of the thing-in-itself. It's clearly metaphysical nonsense, so why would anyone use such a term? Yet the same nonsense is allowed to be used under countless other labels.
Diebert van Rhijn wrote:
Despite the ambiguity of language, it doesn't look like a good idea to speak of a "thing" in this case. It's not "nothing" either, so this is why many people continue to arrive at "all", "totality", "absolute" or even "emptiness". These are concepts and names but I think it's important to minimize the contradiction and maximize consistency, simply because that's what mind appears to do: a minimization of contradiction and maximizing of self-consistency, so we can have our experiences and evaluate them too.
Whatever you call it, it all has the same meaning (none). I prefer the term thing-in-itself for two reasons: A) it's not trampling all of these other words that have a meaningful context (and hence creating even more ambiguity) and, B) the meaninglessness of the concept is more obvious (not hidden behind the mask and appeal of other words). To maximize consistency and clarity we should stick to one dedicated term instead of cannibalizing an ever-growing list of others.
Better yet, we should stop using such concepts altogether because, as far as I can see, the only value they can have is a delusive one. They can lead us to higher confidence in our understanding, thinking well of ourselves that we are logically complete or consistent, without considering that our premises are not truthful, so their conclusions can't be assumed to be either. They can also enable us to slander the "apparent" world in favor of some beyond or "absolute" world which is postulated; when the two are not in agreement, the "beyond" has traditionally been favored over the "apparent", and it's even had things like morality attached to it! Instead, we should understand that everything in our head is merely a model of the the empirical world in front of our eyes, and that when the two diverge it's most likely our head that is wrong rather than our eyes.