3. Phenomena and the Noumenon
‘That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.’
Ludwig Wittgenstein — Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The ‘…very being of anything, whereby it is what it is. And thus, the real internal, but generally unknown constitution of things, wherein their discoverable qualities depend, may be called their essence.’
John Locke
The noumenon was originally noumena — plural — contrasting with phenomena. Phenomena are just things that can be experienced and measured, whilst noumena are either hidden things or the hidden aspect of a phenomenon. This is all from Kant. Noumena were perhaps not therefore originally meant to be that mysterious. It is just that as humans we are limited to three dimensions of space and one of time and so are inevitably limited in what we can actually either directly experience or measure. Because things can be conceived without apparently any prior knowledge or perception on which the conception can be based, there must, Kant argued be an underlying reality to allow this conception to occur. Since Kant’s time of course we have discovered that there may be extra dimensions of space that we are unable to experience but can model with mathematics. It is not clear whether such spatial dimensions would still be noumena to Kant or have now become phenomena. Indeed, we might question whether space and time are quite as ‘given’ as Kant and science have assumed.
A more modern take is from physicist David Bohm. His Wholeness and the Implicate Order suggests a universe where physical things — and perhaps also consciousness — are rolled up, as it were and are ‘implicate’ in reality until they are experienced, or thought. Then they are ‘explicated’. There is then an ‘unfolding’ which makes things and ideas ‘explicate’.
It was the post-Kantian philosophers, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer, who took the idea of noumena and phenomena forward from Kant’s original version, and Schopenhauer in particular who made it noumenon, singular, and related it to the ‘nondual’ belief of Eastern religion. His main work, the title of which is usually translated from the German as The World as Will and Representation, is one of the key works of philosophy. The ‘will’ in the title is the noumenon and the ‘representation’ is the world of phenomena. Schopenhauer also introduced the idea of ‘first person privilege’ in that we can know our own thoughts in a way that no-one else can. He thought that the will was the hidden motivator behind our actions, primarily as the will to live.
Schopenhauer’s ideas spawned a whole lot of post-modern thought including Nietzsche’s will to power and Freud’s will to pleasure. To Hegel, self-consciousness is desire.
Given what was said above about the noumenon perhaps originally not being intended to be ‘mysterious’ and also the possibility that what constitutes the noumenon may be eroded by new knowledge, I want to distinguish it in this work from what I will refer to as mystery. The noumenon may simply be what cannot be directly measured, and there is mystery beyond this — in fact an infinite regress of mystery such that we will never reach total understanding. For consistency with writers quoted later in this work, we could say that the essence of an individual emanates from mystery. To an extent similar to Schopenhauer’s view that will emanates from the noumenon. Mystery is also the source of value. Robert Pirsig, in his book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ would have ultimate reality as ‘dynamic quality’ and then split up the phenomenal world in terms of static ‘quality’. Value is therefore built into the universe by definition — in fact value defines the universe. Pirsig’s account is very useful in illuminating just what we do and what we assume when we split the world into subject and object rather than aspects of value. Pirsig draws attention to the essential place of desire in all of life and shows how choosing and preferring are actually more fundamental to the way life is lived than rationality and intellect. These statements are provisional of course and as explained in the Introduction I do not intend such definitions to be taken literally. They are just convenient ways of viewing reality to see how our views of things may change if a different system is adopted. How different the world might look for instance if we believed that our essential nature, our essence or soul stands somehow outside of our everyday selves. Compare this with the idea that we are just the product of genetic information provided by our parents, perhaps with some random differences that cannot be accounted for. Both views are an act of faith really, and it is only our culture’s bias towards a scientific world view that might make us favour the materialist version over the more mystical one.
We saw in an earlier chapter how regarding ‘God’ as an ‘object’ (that is, a fully transcendent ideal) brings difficulties. But to regard God as a subject also leads to problems. It leads to the very difficult questions that so-called ‘unbelievers’ often pose of religion. For instance, why does a good God allow evil to exist? In trying to make God into a person or at least somehow knowable, religion has actually made a belief that is as fallible as human reasoning. Could we equate God with the noumenon? That seems a troublesome possibility. (The ‘will’ for Schopenhauer, is something of a blind force.) It would be better to say that God is simply mystery and leave it at that. Perhaps Buddhism comes closest to this position. The Buddhist koans are designed to frustrate the normal linear human thinking in approaching ideas about ultimate reality. The most famous koan of course is: ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’
Traditionally science has regarded everything to be knowable and understandable, at least in theory, so it does not generally does not acknowledge the phenomenon/noumenon split. If any kind of unknown is acknowledged, it is simply as a result of lack of information. It is there, waiting for an explanation.
Science does not really believe in subjects — they are always regarded as derivatives of objects. Thus consciousness is merely a by-product of activities within the brain, which in turn are derived from objects. This has led to subjectivity being derided in our culture generally and thereby relegating questions of value and morality to ones of personal preference.
The phenomenon-noumenon split, like all our dualities, is something of a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it might suggest that attempts to comprehend the world will inevitably be thwarted. The noumenon, being fundamentally mysterious, will throw a spanner in the works as it were and make the operations of nature always incomprehensible. On the other hand, if the phenomenal world is the world as it appears through human understanding and via the constraints of the human senses then perhaps a complete and logically-consistent explanation of phenomena is achievable without interference from the mysterious noumenon. The noumenon is always there, but just as a ghost. On this view, for the purposes of human knowledge and understanding, it need not trouble us.
So, we have mystery, and indeed physicist John Wheeler has said that as the island of knowledge grows bigger, the shoreline onto the sea of mystery increases exponentially. Perhaps we are better to start by embracing the mystery rather than trying to deny it. That means to act from the assumption of ignorance rather than the assumption of knowledge. We might say that this is the response mystery calls from us concerning questions of truth or knowledge. Beauty and goodness — the other broad categories of value — also emanate from mystery. Bertrand Russell for instance — in The Problems of Philosophy — derides the phenomenon-noumenon split but he regards morals and aesthetics as coming ultimately from an unknown source. Wittgenstein, whose famous quote opens this chapter, is one of the few relatively modern philosophers who seems to have accepted that there is a hidden aspect to life for which we have no words.
Our true selves, the essence of who we are, also derives ultimately from mystery. The soul is the manifestation of that essence within an embodied person. The soul is the adventure of essence in the world. However, the adventure of essence can be frustrated by ego and personality and their tendency towards compulsion of all kinds. We will be exploring this in more detail as the work progresses.
