On Kant’s Conception of “Things in Themselves"

“I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,” Kant thus stated his mainspring of the composition of the Critique of Pure Reason. This thesis will take it as the guiding light to dissolve the problems resulting from the long-perplexing notion of things in themselves, such as that sensibility is affected by things in themselves in order that their appearances are given to us and the nonspatiotemporality of things in themselves. Now there are two competitive positions on these problems: the two-object view construes things in themselves and appearances as two distinct objects, a view which usually generates these problems; the two-conception view construes them as two different considerations of the same object, a view which is generally able to give a coherent account. I will explicate that, through criticizing the proposal of Henry E. Allison, who is one of the prominent scholars of the two-conception view, both views misunderstand how Kant talks of things in themselves. The two-object view regards these talks as genuine cognition, which cannot be consistent with Kant’s critical doctrine, and the two-conception view misleads the very answer to these problems into the identity between appearances and things in themselves.
The very answer lies in Kant’s insight that human cognition is discursive, that is, our cognition is the result of the cooperation of two heterogeneous, receptive and spontaneous, faculties. The spontaneity makes possible and the receptivity makes necessary the notion of things in themselves. Our talks of things in themselves, however, are merely conceptions but not cognition. One of Kant’s conceptions of things in themselves, their nonspatiotemporality, is actually how Kant denies knowledge to save room for faith.