In the 1927-28 semester, Heidegger delivered a course on Kant’s CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. In section 6b, entitled “Appearance as Object of Empirical Intuition Distinguished from the Thing Itself,” Heidegger warns against the “grossest misunderstanding,” to wit, that the phenomenal world is an illusion. Or as Rand puts it, committing the “grossest misunderstanding” “The “phenomenal” world, said Kant, is not real: reality, as perceived by man’s mind, is a distortion.” (FNI 30) Continuing with Heidegger, “we must say that appearances are not mere illusions, . . .Rather, appearances are objects themselves or things. Furthermore, appearances are also not other things next to or prior to the things themselves. Rather, appearances are just those things themselves that we encounter and discover as extant with the world. However, what remains closed off to us is the thing itself insofar as it is thought as object of absolute [God’s] knowledge.”
For Kant, there aren’t two worlds; the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. There are phenomena and noumena, but they differ due to their RELATION to a type of knower. As Kant puts it, “The thing in itself (ens per se) is NOT another object, but another RELATION of representation to the same object.”
Rand worries someplace about not knowing Frank as he is in himself. Now we can see her concerns were misplaced. She knew Frank as a finite knower would know Frank, and not as an infinite knower would know him. No problem, since she was in fact a finite knower. She was not God, ARI to the contrary notwithstanding.
Fred