ABSTRACT
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason demonstrates that it is impossible to have knowledge of the thing in itself by means of either concepts or intuitions. The Japanese philosopher, Keiji Nishitani, does not seem to dispute Kant’s claim that the thing in itself cannot be known by means of reason or indeed by any act of consciousness whatever. But the Critique of Pure Reason does not demonstrate that it is impossible to know the thing in itself through purely non-subjective, non-representational, and non-conceptual means. In this chapter I reconstruct Nishitani’s formulation of the paradox of representation and show how his method of resolving the paradox illuminates the non-conceptual means by which the thing in itself may be known. For Nishitani, although we cannot know the thing in itself by means of reason or subjectivity in general, the thing in itself can still be known by transcending reason and subjectivity altogether. Insofar as philosophy itself performs its rational work from the standpoint of subjectivity (whether implicitly or explicitly), the thing in itself can only be known by transcending the standpoint of philosophy. In Nishitani’s terms, the only way to know the thing in itself is by “breaking through self-consciousness”.
