system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Kant not an idealist?

I've read that in fact, Kant never said he was an idealist. What I've understood is that there is sensory input, but that he doesn't care (drops the question) where this sensory input comes from. However, in order for an input to be there, he carefully concludes that there is an external reality that causes this input.

Is this correct? Can someone elaborate?
gpt
for Kant, there is a real non-ideal world called the *thing-in-itself*, it is completely outside the realm of experience. Experience does require perception as we traditionally conceive it, but perception by itself cannot constitute experience, it also requires what he calls *Anschauung* (usually 'Intuitions' in English) – *a priori* ~~categories~~ forms of sensibility that order experience and make such a thing possible, not elements *of* experience. The best-known are space and time, ie. all experience is spatio-temporally ordered (or sometimes just temporally).

So because these ~~categories~~ intuitions are essential to experience, it's not as though you could subtract them and be left with "raw" experience of the thing-in-itself, and it's not as though our perceptions are being 'filtered' through these categories and deceiving us. But there still is real perception going on in experience, just, because experience has this innate structure, it will never be perception of the thing-in-itself, it will always conform to these ideal, not-in-themselves ~~categories~~ intuitions.