Quora Answer: Is Transcendental Idealism equal to the thinking of “Law of Attraction”? Or am I misunderstanding Transcendental Idealism?
I think you are a little confused as to what Transcendental Idealism means. It basically means that mind comes first in our understanding of reality, and it is difficult to escape this truth because we only know what is real through our mind, so most philosophical traditions are idealist because it is difficult to imagine direct access to reality except through our minds. So as Bernstein says for Kant Transcendental Idealism is the royal road to Transcendental Realism. Actually there is no other road which is what Parmenides was trying to say at the beginning of our tradition. To Parmenides Non-Being and Appearances are not a road to reality. And Zeno tries to prove that with his paradoxes of motion. That more or less started things off in an idealist direction, and we have been going more or less in the same direction ever since, with a few notable exemptions. What is nice is that Borges makes fun of this idealism by taking it to extremes in his famous short stories. His work is a good introduction to the oddity of the idealist position. Basically all duals are traps. That is the point that Kant makes through the antimonies.