Indirect Realism as Resistance

Even subjects as agents or epistemological recognizing instances can themselves only be understood as a certain kind of interpretative construct. Also the recog­nizing subject is an epistemological construct and already a result of interpretation procedures on different mostly higher levels.

Nevertheless, we as persons and organisms may also run with our head against the wall: There is a certain experience of resistance, an impenetrability of real “objects” in the true sense (“throwing against”: “obicere”). Such experiences of confrontation and opposition show that what we call “reality” does play an influential role in impregnating our interpretations of experiences of, e.g., resis­tance. Thus, the constructs are not only of our making, but mediated by a certain kind of interplay between “world factors” and our patterns of interpretations and schematizations. These latter need in application to the so-called “reality in itself” (to such experiences of external reality or resistance experiences) the “something” which is being interpreted as the “opposing entity or event” (although this need not only be constituted in a permanent object form). The “opposing other part” (“das Andere”/the other “thing”/referent) of interpretation has to be pre-conceived, identified, somehow (though interpretationally) “distanced” or already “consti­tuted” in schematic form in order that interpretation may get “a grip” on that “something”. In this sense, as in referencing, an “objectifying interpretation” as a kind of “impregnation” presupposes something which it can “grasp” in a rather active sense. (Scheme-)Interpretation therefore is not just ideal production (a la Fichte and a comprehensive action-oriented or even subjective idealism)—at least not with regard to the object world, to be experienced and represented.

Here, this reality in itself may indeed be identified with Rod’s “residuum of experiential analysis” (1991, 171, 174f, 178ff). This “elementary” residuum of reality has to be presupposed and may be somehow, if not identified, but intrigu- ingly connected with reality in itself. Reality in itself and object reality are so to speak complementary modes of apprehending “things” (Rod 1995). I would not like just naively to talk of “things” here, but I would agree insofar as the per- spectivistic choices and restrictions do shape our modes of apprehensions and recognitions if we attend to reality in itself or as such or to more specifically individual “things in the realm of appearance” a la Kant. It is even compatible with a quasi Kantian interpretation that the “residuum of experiential analysis”, the fundamentum reale, so to speak, “the Other of the interpretation in a certain sense may be conceived as something, which again—from another or slightly modified perspective—may be interpreted” (e.g., epistemologically speaking) “as reality in itself”.

The “Other” of interpretation could according to Rod also be identified with Kant’s “thing in itself’.^[88] However, in Kant the foundation runs in the other direction: “The thing in itself” or presupposing “the world in itself” is considered as being a necessary condition for continuity, for the unity of the self and of the subject in the first place: The I, the self or transcendental subject—thus Kant’s “rejection of idealism” (CpR B 275)—can only be constituted by presupposing something permanent (“Beharrendes”), being distanced or separated from itself: The “thing in itself” would then in a certain sense be considered as interpretation-free, as only being hypothetically existent. This is for Kant necessary. But understanding all this from a higher level of interpretation certainly also the concept of “the thing in itself” or “the world in itself” can epistemologically speaking only be conceived of and “grasped” as and by an interpretative construct, if on a higher level, that is to say, from an epistemological point of view or perspective.

If we approach as a hypothetical realism of sorts, his theory is certainly com­patible with this epistemological modeling of his concepts of “thing in itself” etc. from a higher level—and even this modeling from an ever-higher perspective or meta-level (e.g. IS6) in my hierarchy of interpretative (meta-)schemes again. “The thing in itself” is so to speak—conceived on a higher or the highest meta-level (cumulatively understood)—itself to be interpreted as interpretation-dependent. (The separation and segmentation of “the thing in itself” from a totally entangled point of departure prior to epistemological specializing and concretizing may be understood in terms of complementarities not only between perspectives on the same level, but also between meta-levels.)

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