Noumenon and The Thing in Itself

[peter]

As far as I can tell (from Wikipedia) both of the above terms refer to objects or indeed events stripped back from their appearance to us via our five senses, but rather in their 'true' state as they really exist (ie rather than in their apparent state as they appear to us through the filter of our senses).
There appears to be an additional level of meaning that we should know such objects or events intuitively - or is it that noumena or things in themselves should only be known intuitively, and not perceived by the senses at all, in which case, say, the book case in front of me can never be described as such but the infinite nature of the Universe might be.

Over and above nailing down the actual meaning of the words themselves lies the problem of whether they are synonymous terms or not. It is claimed by some that they refer to the same idea, but viewed from a different perspective. This is beyond me. The idea I've outlined above (or the two alternative versions at least) are about as far as my understanding will at present take me. I can't expect to digest all of Kant in one five minute wikisearch, but if anyone would like to critique or add to what I've said above I'd be grateful.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

I'm certainly no authority on Kant, but I've always thought of the two as identical.

It's possible that any discrepancy is either a residue of Kan't terminological WIP or that he was simply trying too hard to square-the-circle.

I read the Wiki page to get some idea of what you're talking about:

A crucial difference between the noumenon and the thing-in-itself is that to call something a noumenon is to claim a kind of knowledge, whereas Kant insisted that the thing-in-itself is unknowable. Interpreters have debated whether the latter claim makes sense: it seems to imply that we know at least one thing about the thing-in-itself (i.e., that it is unknowable). But Stephen Palmquist explains that this is part of Kant's definition of the term, to the extent that anyone who claims to have found a way of making the thing-in-itself knowable must be adopting a non-Kantian position.

As I said, I'm no expert, but it seems that Palmquist's is a pretty reasonable reading.

[Avatar]

Sounds a bit like the Platonic forms really. And I don't trust the idea of being able to "know" something without knowing anything about it.

--A

[peter]

I guess we can know something about every thing all of the time, everything about some things all of the time, but we can't know everything about every thing all of the time.

[peter]

I guess we can know something about every thing all of the time, everything about some things all of the time, but we can't know everything about every thing all of the time.

[Avatar]

Even though we act as though we can.

--A

[deer of the dawn]

Both Science and Spirituality probe beyond what we can know with our senses. But what things in this universe really are, not as we experience them filtered through our senses and brains, we cannot know.

But science (and if you will, spirituality) allows us to know more and more stuff about what was before unknowable. How does that change the conversation?

[peter]

Well, we have to for starters accept that science is a discipline that will provide knowledge within a very circumscribed set of parameters. It can never go beyond those limits by virtue of its very methodology and thus any knowledge (assuming any such exists) that lies beyond those boarders will be forever closed to it. Intuitive knowledge (is this the same as spiritual knowledge) however has to be a different thing........

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Kant loves this s^&t, he even adds in two OTHER apparently co-referring terms when he goes on about "transcendental objects" and "the transcendental subject." What gives?

There is a section of the first Critique where Kant explains his use of the word "noumenon"/"noumenon." He says the word has both a limiting function and a transcendent one. Calling X "a noumenon" means either referring to X using only noumenal/abstract-thought terms, or referring to an X that exists only in those terms. According to Kant, we can intelligibly use the concept of a noumenon only in the first way, and then only as a restriction: empirical objects have superempirical aspects, but those aspects which are purely superempirical, that have no intuitive relation with experience, are pure noumenon and it is illicit to try to refer to them as such.

I guess "noumenal" is like a second-order adjective describing objects, while "thing in itself" is a first-order "name" for purely noumenal objects.

[peter]

Is it possible to put any of that into the form of examples - it might help me to get it (I was going to put better as the last word there, but that would be bullshit; I never got any of it at all! ).

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

An object that does not exist in spacetime = a noumenon in the extreme sense--therefore also "the thing in itself";

An object, considered apart from its spatiotemporal existence = a noumenon in the limiting sense. So we think of a planet, and then focus only on the fact that all objects for us fall under the categories, so we sort of disregard the planet's mass in space and think only of its abstract absorption into the order of causality...

... or something like that.

[peter]

So God could be described as a thing in itself (having no spatiotemporal existence) and our planet (which has), stripped of it's physical aspects and considered in the form of its 'Platonic ideal' as a noumenon?

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Well "noumena" literally means "object of thought." We have no intuition (Kant tends to suppose) of the divine nature itself, which can therefore only be described using the categories of thought. So God is a pure noumenon. A physical object is noumenal impurely, to the extent that is that it can be thought of without being visualized or otherwise perceptually approached.

[peter]

Thanks Mighara. I'll take these posts back to Wiki (and my encyclopaedia of philosophy) and see if I can pull it together.............

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

So God could be described as a thing in itself (having no spatiotemporal existence) and our planet (which has), stripped of it's physical aspects and considered in the form of its 'Platonic ideal' as a noumenon?

As Mighara pointed out, this isn't quite true. That being said, I will hazard that there is a certain element of truth in your statement, inasmuch as Nature's God/Being is the securer/guarantor/sustainer of the Thing-In-Itself, even though you, yourself, will never intersect the Thing-In-Itself.

One thing to remember about Kant -- something which might make all of this a bit easier to digest -- is that he's all about Judgement (hence, "Critique"). He is all about holding a Tribunal in which sense phenomena is put in the dock, viz. Man's Reason has (inbuilt from God/Being) a full arsenal of Concepts, starting from the position of which, he travels through "sensuality" adjudging the phenomena inasmuch as they conform to his own a priori conceptual standards.

Perhaps, one might even say that the more closely that a phenomenon conforms to one's intuitive concept, the more "noumenal" is one's judgement (or grasp) of said phenomena.

Mig is welcome to correct any of this if need be, since he's obviously more of an authority on Kant than I.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I don't know why "intuition" is the word used to translate "Anschaung" or w/e it was in the German, since especially in the modern world where "I had an intuition" comes off as "I had a hunch," it gets us into trouble understanding like half or so of what Kant says haha. So unfortunately or not, Kantian intuition must be described by contrast with the Kantian notion of a conception (there's a pun in there). There's even a sort of genealogical tree of information forms somewhere in (at least Edition 2) of the first Critique. Not that I recall it off the top of my head but it ranks intuitions and conceptions both under cognitions. I suppose they are then to be regarded as propositional states, e.g. one is where sensation is "accompanied" by propositional form (I see rain and think that it is raining) vs. merely attending to such forms in themselves in thought.

However, this cannot be all of the matter, for sensation is not subsumed under intuition. So generally a thing is intuitive if it is given in particular, concrete information states, whereas discursion/conceptuality deals with abstraction and generality more. Since the mind has active and passive components, it therefore is conceivable that we could have an active intuition instead of the receptive one that we have (sans spacetime, on which we a priori act when tracing structures in the imagination).

But now Kant says an intuitive faculty of understanding would be transcendent. For him, the solution to the problem of how to merge all the core descriptions of God (power, knowledge, and glory) comes from this, that God's knowledge is "from" such a faculty (supposing God to exist). But then intuitions are the meanings of proper names and the like, and conceptions are the meanings of definite descriptions and the like--we are referring to the difference between reference and sense, that is.* An intuitive understanding will then refer in the act of trying to refer, and given the equation of reference with existence ("God exists" = "The word 'God' with its meaning refers to an actual entity"), this is to say that an intuitive intellection creates what it knows. But since we are not immutable, and since our thoughts do not directly alter physical reality in the act of reference (according to the schematic of the alternative faculty of reference), such intellection is transcendent in relation to us, i.e. we ourselves cannot intuit whether there is any being that has this faculty.

*"Kant lived in Germany," then, vs. "a human who wrote a book containing X number of words expressing the Critical theory's foundation lived in Germany."

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

And yes, since reason is emphasized as a discipline (in Kant's writings that is), then our knowledge of our knowledge of an object, so to speak, as it is crystallized relative to the noumenal limit on intuitive information, would be (negatively) noumenal. Eventually Kant goes on to try to explain art and the like on such lines, describing the feelings of beauty and sublimity as grounded in some finessed juxtaposition of reason's limiting force and imagination-and-perception pressing up that ladder, triggering a sort of "sense" of even physical objects as noumenally colored (I guess you could say).

[peter]

Yes Wos - that is a useful point, an anchor if you like, to hold on to. Did Kant start, Descartes like, from scratch in his deconstruction of reason into its elements (it seems to me he perforce would have to) or was his work a continuation of that which had gone before?

Mighara ....... that is a serious post: my deep apologies for not (at this stage) being able to do it justice - but gosh I'm going to try!

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

And yes, since reason is emphasized as a discipline (in Kant's writings that is), then our knowledge of our knowledge of an object, so to speak, as it is crystallized relative to the noumenal limit on intuitive information, would be (negatively) noumenal. Eventually Kant goes on to try to explain art and the like on such lines, describing the feelings of beauty and sublimity as grounded in some finessed juxtaposition of reason's limiting force and imagination-and-perception pressing up that ladder, triggering a sort of "sense" of even physical objects as noumenally colored (I guess you could say).

Sorry for my density, but is this in response to my comment that "the more closely that a phenomenon conforms to one's intuitive concept, the more 'noumenal' is one's judgement (or grasp) of said phenomena"? It seems to follow, but I just want to make sure.

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Yes Wos - that is a useful point, an anchor if you like, to hold on to. Did Kant start, Descartes like, from scratch in his deconstruction of reason into its elements (it seems to me he perforce would have to) or was his work a continuation of that which had gone before?

Since my first inclination is to say that no one starts from scratch -- that we all stand on the shoulders of giants --, maybe I'm not sussing your meaning. In what way are you suggesting that Descartes started from scratch?

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

@Wosbald, yes.