Definition of "thing-in-itself" []

• Philosophy See noumenon. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "And it's worth it, when you're at the cash register, to throw a thing-in-itself down on the conveyor belt behind a bleached blonde with a cartful of “natural” foods."
• "I got the feeling it was one of those This Is A Metaphor books, when I really wanted sort of less metaphor and more thing-in-itself -- I thought that idea was really well-done in the Secret Country books, where you got flashes of the original game obliquely and at the same time that kind of terrifying exhilarating game-as-reality feeling."
• "Now what in the world could it possibly mean to say that it is "impossible" to interpret a literary work as autonomous, a "thing-in-itself"?"