A Fresh Look at the Position of the Thing-in-Itself According to Kant and Hegel Based on the Metaphysical Foundations of David Bohm’s Quantum Physics

Kant addressed the distinction between the two domains of phenomena and the thing-in-itself by considering time and space as two conditions of cognition. The result of such a distinction, which is the basis of his transcendental idealism school, was limiting cognition to the domain of phenomena and the impossibility of cognition of reality and the thing-in-itself. As the greatest philosopher of the modern period, and by adopting such an approach, Kant left unanswered the acute duality which he had inherited from his predecessors and left his successors to encounter this problem; the most important of these successors was Hegel. Hegel, who considered duality to be the source of the need for philosophy and his school to be comprehensive of the previous philosophies, holds the establishment of such a comprehensive philosophy to requisite prevalence over dichotomies where the central point of such shortcomings was that very duality that was present within them. By establishing the school of absolute idealism and through the belief in the essential foundation in which the mind and external reality are unified, he saw both the underlying duality in Aristotelian and Platonic thought to be an obstacle for the actualization of his absolute ideal, as well as Kant’s thing-in-itself. Therefore, he denied the thing-in-itself by acknowledging its contradictoriness; however, he was then faced with the challenges that arose from omitting it. These challenges include deducing nature from logic as well as the issue of the existing probabilities in nature; in the first instance, we are faced with the problem of how particular nature can be deduced from general absolute thought and in the second with the problem that Hegel does not provide a rational solution for the existing probabilities in nature. These very challenges move us towards a fresh look at the thing-in-itself according to David Bohm as one of the greatest physicists of Quantum Physics. He studies the thing-in-itself by distinguishing between the two views of ontology and epistemology, the result of which was the distinction between the whole (as reality) and things (as phenomena). Through this distinction, in the ontological approach, he considers the essence of the whole (foundational reality) to transcend the mind and matter and thus, unknowable (the transcendental idealism stance) and denies the possibility actualization of Hegel’s absolute idealism; the result of this is acceptance of Kant’s thing-in-itself. In the epistemological approach too, despite being aligned with Hegel, he considers holomovement to consist of a dynamic movement. However, he departs from Hegel’s view (supposing a human being to be a carrier of the geist and the possibility of the actualization of absolute knowledge) and chooses Kant’s by distinguishing between two types of dynamics (1. The dynamics present in normal incidents and things and 2. The dynamics present in the holomovement). The results of such a study include the following: a) the possibility of addressing some metaphysical issues in the new age and evaluating them through scientific-philosophical criteria; b) strengthening Kant’s stance regarding the thing-in-itself; 3) the overlap of the relationship between physics and philosophy in the study of existence and reality as a common matter that is discussable in both domains and d) the limitation of human thought in the cognition of the true foundation of the universe.