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7:37

(In »Intensities and phenomena in a relationalist universe«)

Kant still speaks of a kind of clearly delimited thing, what he calls a noumenon. The phenomenon is, according to Kant, merely a bad approximation of the – for the Platonist Kant – even more real noumenon. The fact that this noumenon is unattainable is not grounded in the limitations of the senses however, as Kant imagines, but in the fact that all things are in constant motion and change, both intra-actively and interactively, and thereby by definition are not possible to fixate. Kant is the instructive example par excellence of an isolated observer within physics who does not understand that his own entanglement with the thing, which he imagines himself to be observing from the outside, also influences the thing itself. He cannot imagine that his external and neutral observer position is a physical impossibility, and that it is this and nothing else that makes the thing in itself something that is unattainable. Kant is quite simply the Newtonian-Einsteinian mystic who does not quite understand the quantum physical revolution. He does not realise that the observing subject also is world. For what else could it be? If it exists, it is world.