Reader struggles to grasp the meaning of Kant's Transcendental Idealism

A READER WRITES: "Dear BB, I've been reading Kant's critique -- on a friends
recommendation. That is, whenever my feeble arms will allow me to lift the heavy
tome - such is the weight of knowledge. I've just come to his infamous
copernican turn. It seems that he favoured inquiry into the world of
appearances. Would I be as well of to spare my bi-ceps and restrict my future
readings to Look magazine, best, Your admirer"

BB SAYS: It is true that Kant did not believe it was possible to say or know anything about what he called "things in themselves" or "noumena" i.e. things as they exist independently of our perception of them, or things that transcend the empirical or phenomenal world i.e. the world of appearances. So Kant did, indeed, favour inquiry into the world of appearances.

However, he was not a straightforward empiricist or phenomenologist. His Transcendental Idealism permitted him to believe in the existence of synthetic a priori knowledge – what he took to be the pre-condition for the existence of appearances or phenomena e.g. the reality of time, space, causality and so forth. Because of this, Kant is often held to have synthesized the British Empirical philosophy of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, with the Continental Rationalist Philosophy of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Kant's thought, is, in many repsects, the culmination of Enlightenment philosophy.

Your post’s emphasis on appearances suggests that you may not have sufficiently considered Kant’s Transcendental Idealism or his theory of synthetic a priori truths. For this reason, I recommend that you continue your reading of the Critique of Pure Reason. If you find it hard-going at times, take a break and read Look for a while. But do not become deterred - Kant's Critique is one of philosophy's most notoriously difficult texts.