![]() It is not possible for consciousness, he thought, to find a grounding in a supposed real outside world represented by the noumenon. For Fichte, that solution amounted to an illusion. Kant had maintained that notion to avoid falling into Berkleyan subjective idealism, the denial that there is a reality outside of our perception. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was the first to part ways with his mentor on that point.įichte came to the conclusion that Kant’s retention of the thing in itself, unknowable and yet affirmed, was a left-over of dogmatism. The notion of the thing in itself or noumenon was promptly rejected as unsatisfactory by Kant’s immediate successors, the German Idealists. Still, the dichotomy between the two realms makes it impossible for Kant to arrive at a fully satisfactory solution.Ĭritique of the notion in post-Kantian philosophy In sum, Kant’s notion of the noumenon and its relationship to the phenomenal world are not as inconsistent as they have often been depicted to be. This moral certainty, for Kant, takes the place of the theoretical knowledge we cannot achieve. Additionally, our moral or practical reason requests us to assume the existence of a world beyond our senses, the eternity of the soul, and God. In his view, although such an assumption could not be proved, it contained no contradiction. He merely asserted that we must assume that, somehow, a noumenal world exists behind or beyond the world of phenomena, in a non-specified way. Kant was aware of the problem, however, and he never directly stated that the noumena are the cause of knowable phenomena. In other words, anything that is said about the function of the noumenon automatically denies its unknowable nature and unwittingly relegates it into the world of phenomena. Further, Kant often refers to noumena (the plural form), though the very notion of individuating items in "the noumenal world" seems problematic, because the notions of number and individuality also belong to the categories of our understanding. Kant’s contemporary, Jacobi, was the first to notice an apparent contradiction in Kant’s position that the noumenon, in some way, serves as the cause of the phenomenal world, since cause, and even existence, are considered by Kant as mere modes of our thought- they express the way we understand reality, not the way it is-which is unknowable. This, nevertheless, did not amount to theoretical knowledge for him. The closest Kant came to absolute certainty about the transcendent reality was through moral considerations, or faith. Kant did not recognize a spiritual intuition that would allow us to directly perceive a non-material reality (though he had been fascinated by that possibility, as suggested by Swedenborg, in his earlier years). For Kant, however, since our knowledge is only possible through our sense perceptions being processed by the categories of our mind, we can neither know the reality behind things in general, nor can we know anything about non-sensible entities postulated by our reason, such as God or the immortal soul. Hence, the word “noumenon,” which means intellectual object. According to Kant, if we had the gift of intellectual intuition, we could perceive the reality of things in themselves as they are, without using the lenses of our sense perceptions, much the same way Plato conceives our knowledge of eternal ideas. Kant’s use of the concept of noumenon is closely related to his concept of intellectual intuition. Kant, however, defends its use as a limiting concept (Grenzbegriff) a notion to set clear limits to the ambitions of our mind and remind us that there is something unknowable behind the phenomena. In fact, Kant himself calls the noumenon a problematic notion, in the sense that it cannot lead to true knowledge. On the other hand, by denying that we have the capacity to know anything about it, he puts himself in the position of speaking about what cannot be known, which involves a paradox, if not a flat-out contradiction. On the one hand, the existence of "something" behind the phenomenal world is a necessity for him. It has often been called the crux of his entire system. It is immediately apparent that Kant’s notion of the noumenon is problematic. ![]()
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