 This methodology is already employed in the Metaphysics of Cognition. A phenomenological description that extracts the “essential features” from the phenomenon of cognition would note that: cognizers face off against something to-be-cognized; they attempt to “grasp” that something; they form an “image” (broadly speaking) of that something; the image is somehow “determined” by the something; that something is entirely untouched by the cognizer’s attempt to grasp it; they may or may not be in error about it (truth criterion); cognizers may become conscious of problems surrounding the something; and they may succeed or fail in making cognitive progress regarding them (ME5a-i). From among these factors, take the central feature of “grasping.” The phenomenon of grasping generates an aporia: how does the mind go “out of itself” to grasp a transcendent object? The sense of being faced with something that one did not anticipate or create and that one must now “grasp” is often simply backgrounded by antirealists who claim that the mind unconsciously creates its objects, or is imprisoned in a circle of its own “positings” (ME6a). This is a “skeptical-subjectivistic” resolution to the aporia of grasping that simply ignores rather than does justice to the phenomenon. It fails to distinguish between image and thing; what is currently “objectified” in it; the object and the “transobjective” (currently unknown but knowable); and what may even be “transintelligible” (nonrational) in the thing. Only by retaining the Kantian distinction between object (appearance) and “thing-in-itself” can we account for this central phenomenon of grasping. Far from being irrelevant, Hartmann believes that the thing-in-itself is the “fundamental and eminently critical concept” (ME30a). It is needed to explain the phenomenon of transcendence in the total phenomenon of cognition. Problem consciousness, which entails “knowing that you don’t know,” implicitly recognizes what is transobjective, and possibly transintelligible, in the thing. It implies a relation between the subject as existing knower and something existing independently of it. The phenomenon of cognition overflows the domain of epistemology into ontology.