system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Kant's transcendental idealism

Thanks for all the great responses.
gpt
There are things as they are in themselves, which are things as noumenon, and things as we experience them, things as phenomenon. We cannot experience things as noumenon. The structure of our experience is necessarily spatio-temporal, so for us, reality and the things in it are spatio-temporal, but we cannot know whether things are ultimately spatio-temporal or whether these properties are just a consequence of how we perceive the world. This approach solves problems that idealists (who think there is nothing *but* what we perceive) have and problems that realists (who think we perceive things as they fundamentally are) have.

There is a divide between people who think Kant believes noumena and phenomena are ontologically distinct (two worlds view) and peopel who think Kant believes noumena and phenomena are two ways of seeing the same thing (two aspects view).