ABSTRACT
I defend Kant’s claim that his transcendental idealism is also a form of empirical realism. Transcendental idealism guarantees the relation of things as appearances to the ego, which in turn is given as an appearance to inner sense. The feature of “synthesis” completely permeates the capabilities of the human mind. Hence, Kant’s ultimate justification of transcendental idealism neither depends on the intuition of the outer senses nor on the intuition of the intellect. Rather, it is synthesized by the awareness of transcendental apperception—i.e., by the actual “Erleben” of first-person experience. As such inward “experiences” can be articulated only after a person has them, I ask why Western philosophy tends to classify the mystical evidence of Dasein as “ineffable”, whereas nothingness/emptiness in Asian philosophy tends to be seen as giving people access to phenomenal consciousness. Associating Kant’s Critique with Asian philosophy has several consequences: the universality of forms can now be read as ubiquity instead of merely as generality; the spatiotemporal world appears to be in a steady, mind-dependent transformation (here and now); it no longer has to be regarded merely as a sequence of variations of a substance (soul, world, or God), but instead constitutes full-fledged empirical cognition.
