ABSTRACT

Quasi-transcendental as in a certain sense or seemingly transcendental. Quasi-transcendental knowledge is transcendental to the degree that it seems so, but it is not so absolutely. Representation is quasi-transcendental because all knowledge begins with experience and experience is always mediated, hence we either never know or never know that we know the in-itself. We only know the for-itself. But this does not mean that we know nothing. This does not mean that the phenomenal world is a pale copy of the noumenal realm, that knowledge is all illusory. Rather, this means that there is a substratum to our knowledge, or else we could not know phenomena, and so something which is not a thing, something other is always under erasure while being at the same time the condition of possibility for reflection and reflexivity: there is always the tain to a mirror without which the mirror cannot mirror, because of which the mirror only mirrors.