30 | SUMMARY SO FAR: Part I of III
Phenomena & Noumena
In the previous post I highlighted the distinction between Analytic and Continental philosophy. Now, I’d like to put a new spin on this old idea.
We briefly met Immanuel Kant in the post regarding postmodernism (28 | Is This Just Postmodernism?). While Kant has much to say, I’d like to focus exclusively on his distinction between Phenomenon and Noumenon, and tie it back to the Analytic and Continental divide.
In the postmodernism post, I quoted Professor Hicks as saying:
“Postmodernism is the first ruthlessly consistent statement of the consequences of rejecting reason, those consequences being necessary given the history of epistemology since Kant.” (Page 81)
The Enlightenment was chiefly about using rationality and reason to discover things about the “Objective World”. Kant, being the critical philosopher that he was, attempted to reconcile the differences between Rationalism and Empiricism. And as I said in a previous post, Kant was the forerunner of postmodernism with his Transcendental Idealism. It is my contention that Immanuel Kant was not wrong per se, it is simply that Transcendental Idealism has been left incomplete as a philosophical idea.
I also said that I think postmodernism is largely correct about the role of Reason. The justification for thinking it is correct is based in Kant’s distinction between Phenomena and Noumena, or Phenomenon and Noumenon. It is the most accurate, and most useful, distinction in all of Philosophy. Let me explain.
Phenomenon is the easy term to define. It encompasses every thought, every experience, and every sensation you can conceive of. It is thought itself. It is, by definition, Empiricism. The mistake that is often made is to assume that Rationalism is separate, distinct, and in competition with Empiricism (Rationalism vs Empiricism).We have discussed this before in the post, 6 | Esse est percipi.
Noumenon, on the other hand, is the difficult term to define. The thinking goes like this: If an individual has a phenomena, then there must be some Thing giving rise to, or causing, that phenomena. The Noumena is the Thing that causes phenomena. Kant called it the thing-in-itself, or Ding an sich.
You could just as well call the Thing: Stuff, or Matter, or Material, or Will [Schopenhauer’s word for it], or Quantum Particles, or Quantum Fields, … and the list for candidates of what Noumena is goes on. Many people have tried to claim that they know what the Noumena is, and many people have failed. The problem is that Noumena is ineffable. Whatever the Thing - is, it resides as the source of the Strange Loop and precedes conscious thought.
The perennial issue then is: What is the Thing? What is Noumena?
Kant called it a ‘Transcendental Object’ - hence Transcendental Idealism. The Idealists, along with some strains of Hindu and Buddhist religions, call it a version of Pure Consciousness. It could be a Platonic Realm. It could be God. It could be anything to anyone. That is the problem, and that is where Postmodernism fits back into the picture. Postmodernists say there is no Truth, no Certainty, no Logic, and no Reason to the Noumena because you have to have a Phenomena to even know that is there. And because the experience of the noumena is merely phenomenal, it cannot be put into universally acceptable words. So, let’s not make the their same mistake and try to assert what the Noumena is.
As Ludwig Wittgenstein warned in the, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
Now, if you have read most of the posts prior to this, you might be thinking, “This is just the same concept stated over and over again, in different ways,” well, that’s because it is. It’s the unresolved issue between Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Ontology.
Indeed, THIS IS THE PROBLEM OF ALL HUMAN EXISTENCE. And it is what this Substack has been building up to. There are three roads you can take to move on from the Noumena.
Where you begin will determine where you end up.
IF, you begin with the assumption that Consciousness (Phenomena) precedes Being (Noumena), then you will end up in a place where Idealism reigns supreme and you will be on the Continental side of Philosophy. You are free to essentially make things up the way you see fit with little concern for facts, data, statistics, or probability. In essence, Consciousness (Phenomenon) takes primacy over Being (Noumenon).
“Any and all theories that attempt to explain any form of Consciousness as preceding, or as separate from a Body, are simply mistaken. This includes any Idealist position such as those proposed by Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hegel. Furthermore, modern day theorists such as Deepak Chopra, Donald Hoffman, Philip Goff, and Bernardo Kastrup are also mistaken. Positions like Dualism, Panpsychism (Cosmic Consciousness), and Epiphenomenalism are not even wrong.” [From the previous post, 22 | What is Real? How Would You Know: Part 3]
IF, however, you begin with the assumption that Being (Noumena) creates Consciousness (Phenomena) then you will end up in an entirely different place. Historically, if you rejected Idealism then by default that made you a Physicalist. You would have to assume reliance on the belief that the laws, theories, and models that are derived from Science describe what is “really real” - this is the view from Scientism and it is an erroneous perspective as well. As we saw with the books and lectures by George Lakoff, Adam Becker, Philip Ball, and Erica Thompson the purely Analytic Philosopher will be just as mistaken as the Continental Philosopher.
IF, neither of these two traditional avenues seems to make sense to you, then I will say that there is a third way, which I have been describing all along using the tools of Pragmatism, Embodied Cognition, the Strange Loop, and Status Function Declarations. This is the way of the Philosophy of Evolution. It’s not a new single idea, it’s a comprehensive collection of ideas. These ideas are Complementary to one another and collected together into a new Coherent meta-philosophy.
The Philosophy of Evolution is built upon the idea that Being (Noumena) precedes Consciousness (Phenomena). Pragmatism, with it’s nine guiding principles, tells us what should count as Justified Trusted Knowledge. Embodied Realism says that the very way we construct, and perceive, the Noumena is invariably fixed by the way our bodies and brains are formed, by our sensory inputs, and by the ways in which we move about the Noumena. The Strange Loop describes the path in which our thoughts move from the Noumena to Phenomena and back again in a “paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.” Lastly, Status Function Declarations show us that the word “reality” doesn’t adequately capture the distinctions between Primary Reality and the emergent realities that define social conventions.
There is much more to say about the Philosophy of Evolution. For starters, I haven’t even defined what Evolution is given this new philosophical treatment.
The new spin that I referred to at the beginning of this post, is in the expansion on the concepts of Analytic and Continental philosophy. Going forward, when I use the term Reductive Rationalism, I will be referring to Analytic Philosophy, the Scientific Method, Reason, a priori knowledge, and more. When I use the term Holistic Empiricism, I will be referring to Continental Philosophy, Psychology, Affect, a posteriori knowledge, and more.
In the next post I will continue distinguishing Reductive Rationalism from Holistic Empiricism, as well as make a claim about the origin of both perspectives (Teleonomy).