Noumenon

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The noumenon or thing in itself (German: Ding an sich) is a basic reality underlying observable phenomena.

Kant's usage

The word came into its modern usage through Immanuel Kant. The etymology of the word ultimately reflects the Greek nous (mind). Noumena is the plural form. Noumenon ("Ding an sich") is distinguished from phenomenon ("Erscheinung"), an observable event or physical manifestation, and the two words serve as interrelated technical terms in Kant's philosophy.

Expatiating the relationship between the noumenal and the phenomenal forms is one of the most difficult problems for Kant's philosophy. On Kant's view, as expressed in his Critique of Pure Reason, reality is structured by "concepts of the understanding", or innate categories that the mind engages in order to make sense of raw unstructured experience. Since these categories include causality and number, it is problematic to say that many noumena exist or that individually cause us to have perceptions of phenomena. But if the noumenal does not cause the phenomenal, then what is the relationship? The suggested answer is that the noumenal and phenomenal coexist simultaneously; we cannot say that either causes the other.

It can be said that for Kant, the noumenal realm is radically unknowable—for when we employ a concept of some type to describe or categorize noumena, we are in fact merely employing a way of describing or categorizing phenomena. Kant posited a number of methods by which human beings make sense out of the interrelationships among phenomena: the concepts of the transcendental aesthetic, as well as that of the transcendental analytic, transcendental logic and transcendental deduction. Taken together, they are Kant's desciption of the sum of human reasoning and use of language to describe the world in which we exist. In each instance the word "transcendental" refers to the process that the human mind uses to increasingly understand or grasp the form of, and order among, phenomena. Kant, here, is using a metaphor that is the opposite of "understand" ("to stand under"), saying instead that to "transcend" a direct observation or experience is to use reason and classifications (the forms of thought we engage in, including organizing and manipulating words and/or other symbolic representations) which strive to correlate with the phenomena we observe. By Kant's view, we can make sense out of phenomena in these various ways, but can never directly know the noumena, the "things-in-themselves," the actual objects and dynamics of the natural world. In other words, by Kant's Critique, our minds may attempt to correlate in useful ways, perhaps even closely accurate ways, with the structure and order of the universe, but cannot know these "things" directly. Rather, we must infer the extent to which thoughts correspond with things by our further observations of the manifestations of those things that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, tasted, and/or measured in some way by instrumentation, that is, of phenomena.

The relationship between noumenon and phenomenon is further complicated by the way in which our minds have been constructed. According to Kant, objects of which we are sensibly cognizant are merely representations of unknown somethings—what Kant refers to as the transcendental object—as interpreted through the a priori or categories of the understanding. These unknown somethings are manifested within the noumenon—although we can never know how or why as our perceptions of these unknown somethings are bound by the limitations of the categories of the understanding and we are therefore never able to apprehend the noumenon as it is actally manifest. It can be said that Kant is arguing that the categories of the understanding are required for our sensible apprehension of representations, and the noumenon is a prerequisite for the function of these categories. The direct link, however, between the noumenon and phenomena is assumed to be naturally existing by Kant, but he has much difficulty explaining exactly why or how they are naturally linked—that is to say, how it is that our minds are naturally capable of interpreting the world. In short, his methodology categorizes the various modes of understanding without demonstrating the processes of understanding and how they are correlated with each other.

Schopenhauer's critique of Kant

Schopenhauer claimed that Kant used the word incorrectly. He explained in "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy", which first appeared as an appendix to The World as Will and Representation:

"But it was just this difference between abstract knowledge and knowledge of perception, entirely overlooked by Kant, which the ancient philosophers denoted by noumena and phenomena. (See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book I, Chapter 13, 'What is thought (noumena) is opposed to what appears or is perceived (phenomena).' ) This contrast and utter disproportion greatly occupied these philosophers in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of the Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later the scholastics in the dispute between nominalism and realism, whose seed, so late in developing, was already contained in the opposite mental tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant who, in an unwarrantable manner, entirely neglected the thing for the expression of which those words phenomena and noumena had already been taken, now takes possession of the words, as if they were still unclaimed, in order to denote by them his things-in-themselves and his phenomena." (vol. 1, Dover edition 1966, ISBN 0486217612 p. 476)

Etymology

"Noumenon" is the neuter form of the present passive participle of "noein", which in turn originates from "nous" (roughly, "mind"). Noumenon is linguistically unrelated to "numinous," a term coined by Rudolf Otto and based on the Latin numen (deity).

External links

• The Reality Construction Kit, in which constructing a new phenomenal reality aids recovery from mental illness.

See also

• Unobservables
• An sich
• Hypokeimenon

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