Noumenon and Phenomenon

I agree with Schopenhauer. "Things" require "thingers". Esse est percipi

Kant's division needs to be interpreted within the dualistic paradigm of Descartes et al prevalent at the time. This paradigm suffered significantly at the hand of Heidegger's existentialism and post-modern developments of pragmatism. The aspirations of philosophers to embrace/mimic "science" now involve them in the apparent paradoxes generated by quantum theory with respect to the role of the observer.

Immanuel Kant: Idealism consists in the assertion, that there are none but thinking beings, all other things, which we think are perceived in intuition, being nothing but representations in the thinking beings, to which no object external to them corresponds in fact. Whereas I say, that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i. e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses. Consequently I grant by all means that there are bodies without us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, we yet know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies, a term signifying merely the appearance of the thing which is unknown to us, but not therefore less actual. Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary. --from Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics

Getting rid of a "reality-in-itself" produces the post-Kantian idealisms, the phenomenalism of the later positivists, etc; it may also be an arguable retrograde to Berkeley's immaterialism (see Lenin's quote below, in addition to Kant's own above). What's controversial about Kant's version of things-in-themselves is his assertion that they unknowable as experiences, since they wouldn't exist as such outside of his internalization of the categories and space/time in the mind. What Schopenhauer actually criticized was Kant going too far in assuming the plural: Things-in-themselves. He then submitted his own thing-in-itself: Will.

V. I. Lenin: Denying the "absolute" existence of objects, that is, the existence of things outside human knowledge, Berkeley bluntly defines the viewpoint of his opponents as being that they recognise the "thing-in-itself." Berkeley writes . . . . that the opinion which he is refuting recognises "the absolute existence of sensible objects in themselves, or without the mind". The two fundamental lines of philosophical outlook are here depicted with the straightforwardness, clarity and precision that distinguish the classical philosophers from the inventors of "new" systems in our day. Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves," or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies or images of those objects. The opposite doctrine (idealism) claims that objects do not exist "without the mind"; objects are "combinations of sensations." This was written in 1710, fourteen years before the birth of Immanuel Kant, yet our Machians, supposedly on the basis of "recent" philosophy, have made the discovery that the recognition of "things-in-themselves" is a result of the infection or distortion of materialism by Kantianism! The "new" discoveries of the Machians are the product of an astounding ignorance of the history of the basic philosophical trends. --from Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

Lenin, from the same book: That Ernst Mach is the most popular representative of empirio-criticism today is universally acknowledged in philosophical literature . . . . The materialists, we are told, recognise something unthinkable and unknowable -- "things-in-themselves" -- matter "outside of experience" and outside of our knowledge. They lapse into genuine mysticism by admitting the existence of something beyond, something transcending the bounds of "experience" and knowledge. When they say that matter, by acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensations, the materialists take as their basis the "unknown," nothingness; for do they not themselves declare our sensations to be the only source of knowledge? The materialists lapse into "Kantianism" (Plekhanov, by recognising the existence of "things-in-themselves," i.e., things outside of our consciousness); they "double" the world and preach "dualism," for the materialists hold that beyond the appearance there is the thing-in-itself; beyond the immediate sense data there is something else, some fetish, an "idol," an absolute, a source of "metaphysics," a double of religion ("holy matter," as Bazarov says). Such are the arguments levelled by the Machians against materialism, as repeated and retold in varying keys by the afore-mentioned writers.

Thanks fresco. Can you explain and elaborate on it? Examples? The reasons why you say it? And how do you know it?

Thank you G H for your excellent answer. I was wrong in saying that Schopenhauer rejected Kant's thing-in-itself, he rejected only the plural ( things-in-themselves), as you say.
you have used the term, "reality-in-itself" in your answer. Can you please explain what do you mean by this term? And how do you know that there is any such thing?

I could...but I've done so many times on this forum ! Please follow up my posting history, in particular .....

http://able2know.org/topic/1119-1
http://able2know.org/topic/109523-1

Regards fresco.

It's just another way of referring to the "noumenal world", or things-in-themselves (noumena) as a collective whole. Or even an accomodating of Schop's wariness about Kant's plural assumption.



That there are external-to-the-mind thing(s) or influence(s) that correspond to the representations we experience is a postulate of Kant's practical reason -- -- wherein the very nature of the mind's "innate" conditions and functionings demands the necessity of believing there is a mind-independent realm (even he couldn't concoct a killer disproving of solipsism). Although Kant's critical philosophy is not a metaphysical doctrine like materialism, it's apparent that he was trying to salvage "bodies" in some manner, minus their characteristics which time and space and the categories made possible in human experience.

There's a possible evidence for "things-in-themselves" that Kant didn't explore, concerning that minds are such -- we each have an internal "what it's like" to be a mind, which is different from a brain's outer (represented) appearance or a description of its processes. In recent times, Michael Lockwood delved into this in a non-Kantian, physicalist manner:

Michael Lockwood: Do we therefore have no genuine knowledge of the intrinsic character of the physical world? So it might seem. But, according to the line of thought I am now pursuing, we do, in a very limited way, have access to content in the material world as opposed merely to abstract casual structure, since there is a corner of the physical world that we know, not merely by inference from the deliverances of our five senses, but because we are that corner. It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection. In being aware, for example, of the qualia that seemed so troublesome for the materialist, we glimpse the intrinsic nature of what, concretely, realizes the formal structure that a correct physics would attribute to the matter of our brains. In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity. from 1998, p.88, “The Enigma of Sentience”, in Hameroff, S.R. et al, 1998, 83–95

But the question of what it would be like to be other things-in-themselves that are not minds still lingers; we can't imagine rocks or atoms manifesting to themselves as anything at all, and so Kant's empty placeholder for noumena being unknowable (as experience) is still applicable. Lockwood explores this again without a context in Kant's philosophy:

Michael Lockwood: Granted that we have no reason to believe in a radical qualitative discontinuity between the mental and the physical, how are we to conceive those regions of the physical universe from which we assume awareness to be absent? Does it make sense, even, to speak of intrinsic qualities that, though in some sense continuous with the phenomenal, nevertheless do not literally figure as features of a “point of view,” in Nagel's sense—there being, presumably, no “what is it like to be a chair”? --from What Was Russell's Neutral Monism?, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, VI (The Foundations of Analytic Philosophy)

Could you please tell me where exactly the above paragraph is in Prolegomena? I find the above very significant.

You can find it at 289, under Remark II, here: http://www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20306/kant_materials/prolegomena4.htm

Or a half-paragraph beneath 43 of this version
http://infomotions.com/etexts/archive/ia311516.us.archive.org/3/items/kantsprolegomena00kantuoft/kantsprolegomena00kantuoft_djvu.htm

In Ernst Mach's The Analysis of Sensations, Mach writes of the Prolegomena's early influence upon him (below), but then he later switches to a phenomenalism stance probably inspired by David Hume's bundle theory, thus dropping Kant's "noumenal world" as superfluous. This view of later positivists like Mach, but some of who at the same time had one foot in Marxist metaphysics, is what Lenin was attacking in his book as a bogus brand of materialism that was akin to Berkeley's immaterialism. Actually there are differences between phenomenalism and idealism, but that's another detour....

Ernst Mach: I have always felt it as a stroke of special good fortune, that early in life, at about the age of fifteen, I lighted, in the library of my father, on a copy of Kant's 'Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics'. The book made at the time a powerful and ineffaceable impression upon me, the like of which I never afterwards experienced in any of my philosophical reading. Some two or three years later the superfluity of the role played by "the thing in itself" abruptly dawned upon me. On a bright summer day in the open air, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations, only more strongly coherent in the ego.... http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm

Thanks G H for providing the links.

You wrote that "things" require "thingers" . Do you include electrons, protons and neutrons etc. in these "things"?

I''ve always thought that for Kant, Noumena is the "thing in itself" and phenomena are the apparences it generatess by means of perceivers.

...If "thinging" something simply means to describe its rightfull operational status from where we stand then I don't give much a damn with what one might call it/them...human "imagination" is no excuse to go beyond that...a simple truth that some tend to forget...which resumes to say that whatever is being described, at each moment by each observer, that, is functionally right!

...each of us is in fact a first hand witness of that...funtions are "REAL" seams sufficient to rest my case...

...Or could someone point whatever else should be real then?...

All "things" (rocks, protons, gods, selves, the USA....) are mental constructs triggered by socially acquired linguistic markers called "words". Such words trigger one side (expectancy) of the conceptualized relationship between "observer" and "observed". I say "one side" because all interactiions are two-way...."existence" is a mutual state existing between thinger and thinged.

If you are interested in understanding this non-dualist position you need to familiarize yourself with the following.
1. Piaget's genetic epistemology which describes mutually dshifting states of observer-observed.
2. The Santiago Theory of Cognition, in which all life is cognate, and "observation" is an epiphenomenon of languaging.
3. Heidegger's "at-handedness" in which "objects" are only conceptualized when the flow of "being" is interrupted or contemplated (the latter =Existenz)
4. The status of "the observer" in as an integral part of the observation event in quantum physics.
5. The status of "the word" as a pragmatic marker in a language game (Wittgenstein) whose meaning is a function of the overall social context ( historical paradigm) in which interlocuters operate (Khun).

"Reality" is the consensual agreement between observers. Local consensuses (e.g.religion) can conflict with non-local consensuses (e.g.science). Such conflict is generated by differing levels of systemic functionality.

I insist in exhaustively speaking about functions only because I have the very strong impression most don´t have a clue on them and what they signify for this matter...Functions are something very objective, no "Mexican soup" in there !

If you think functional operativeness changing from individual to individual proves you´re right I am sorry to say you don´t have a clue either...on functions in a system, the more of them the more objective the picture gets...the number improves resolution and not the opposite !
...now, the worst in it all, is that you have the intellectual capacity, what necessarily implies sloppiness on your part on this regard...or simply not wanting to see !

You´re right when you say we assemble information according to our needs, our capacity, or our overall level of operativeness in relation to everything else...but that does n´t change a thing ! Functions imply a real objective link between what is given and what is taken from it ! What is "given", actually, has two ways, once we also give and ad to it...so functions are complex not linear, but that does n´t make them fictional, nor reality in itself has a whole less real ! (you completely misread the thing)

Wrong ! It changes every thing.
"Reality" only becomes an issue when a particular version of it is disputed. But you will not move from an "absolutist" stance akin to Newton's "fixed frame of reference" eclipsed by Einstein's relativity. Why not take a trip like he did (thought experiment) on the back of a light wave but imagine what we sub-warp speed travellers call "the physiology of the perceptual system" might make of such an experience. Consider then the issue of "persistence" ....an undoubted lay attribute of "things"....and consider Einstein's statement...
""Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
....that's where I am coming from.

Possibly, but complicated by perceivers and the noumenal world adhering to two different nomological orders, despite noumena and their phenomenal appearances (generated by minds) being aspects of the same reality. Kant: "Things in themselves would necessarily, apart from any understanding that knows them, conform to laws of their own."

Kelley L. Ross: David Hume had challenged philosophers to show why it is that we believe in principles such as the one that every event must have a cause. Kant's answer, then, was that the mind itself constructs a phenomenal reality according to just such a rule. http://www.friesian.com/kant.htm

Kant: Thus the order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce.
http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/cpr/ancon.html

Kelley L. Ross: Things-in-themselves, in turn, are the way that reality exists apart from our experience, our consciousness, our minds, and all the conditions that our minds might impose on phenomenal objects. The question occurs, then, whether concepts like substance and cause and effect apply to things-in-themselves the same way that they do to phenomena. Kant did not think that we could know. http://www.friesian.com/kant.htm

Kant, again: Things in themselves would necessarily, apart from any understanding that knows them, conform to laws of their own.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/reason/ch02.htm

Perceivers are surely grounded in the noumenal world, but since this realm of things-in-themselves was acausal, aspatial, atemporal, etc. -- it's not clear how it could be an origin for perceivers, since evolution would only be a time/causality based process of the phenomenal world that science researches. Correlation seems all that remains to replace origin with: The how/why of perceivers existing has an enigmatic relationship to the noumenal world, of which no more could be meaningfully said unless converted to circumstances in the phenomenal world (the experiences and reasonings of the mind, "things-for-me" or "us").

Fresco;

Your 2 posts are in conflict with each other and yet, at the same time they are in absolute agreement with each other.

Let me illustrate. You said:

I say that the individual 'observer' creates and has his own 'reality' and 'agreement' or 'non-agreement' with other observers doesn't create reality, it creates society.
Then you went on to say in your next post that;

Each “particular version” in the “dispute” has to exist prior to the “dispute” occurring otherwise the “dispute” could not exist.

Subjugating one's “reality” for the sake of “society” is a “slippery slope”. Eventually the individual loses the relationship with one's 'self' and becomes 'lost' in society. This 'lostness' produces all of society's woes (greed, murder, domestic violence, war, racial injustice, etc.) and is not in the best interest of the individual or society.

It is imperative for the sanity of 'society' and the world that each individual refuse to attempt to 'prove' (explain) their reality to each other. The only result that it produces is the domination or subjugation of your reality. Not a good idea. It is also imperative that those individuals refuse to participate with those who want to 'compare notes' with them.

Individuals create society by be-ing individuals, it doesn't happen the other way around. Society (whatever label it has) will never be accountable. Accountability is an individual choice. Individual accountability is the only thing that will reduce greed, murder, domestic violence, war, or racial injustice.

In a nutshell, it is in the best interest of all humans Be-ing on this planet that you 'stand your ground' and no longer allow the world and society to define who you are.

Based on the assumptions contained in the word “reality”, “consensual agreement”, “observers”, etc. this is just one of a few different directions this discussion could have gone.

However, the discussion (above) fails to introduce the possibility of 'you', Be-ing, so by introducing 'you', Be-ing, the conversation heads off in another direction.

Let's assume that you're sitting down while reading this. Notice that 'you' know your body is sitting in a chair looking at a computer monitor, 'you' know that you're reading words, and interpreting the words 'you' are reading.

Where does the 'you' take place? Does it take place in the body? Does it take place in the “sitting” or the “looking”? Does the 'you' take place in the “reading” and “interpreting”? Or, does the 'you' take place in all of it?

Don't 'you' occur in all of life? Aren't 'you' always there when you are buying books, raising children, paying bills, going to church, hunting, fishing, making love, and on and on. Doesn't the joy of all this happen when 'you' show up while buying books, raising children, etc. If 'you' don't show up isn't all of this just “going through the motions” and just marking time?

Earlier, I spoke of “subjugating one's reality for the sake of society”. What I'm really talking about is subjugating 'you' in favor of the world.

In the conversation about “reality”, “consensual agreement”, and “observers” the 'you' is assumed (and ignored) by all of us. Everybody is looking into the world for the evidence (explanation) that 'you' exist instead of being accountable for what you know.

'You' only show up in the realm of 'knowing' therefore 'you' can't be proved, because 'proving' isn't the same as 'knowing'. 'Knowing' requires that you get on with your life. 'Proving' allows you to keep your life 'on hold' and complain about the way it turned out. You can spend your entire lifetime looking for proof and never find it. The interesting thing to notice is that if you didn't already know, you couldn't be looking for proof.

Ultimately you spend your time on the planet 'proving' (explaining) so you don't have to be accountable for 'knowing'.

How frustrating: I just spent about twenty minutes forging my view on the nature of causality and determinism only to lose it for no reason at all (it just disappeared). If someone insists that there WAS a cause, please explain it to me.