9/12/2023 0 Comments Kant noumena and phenomenaTo put it to you, then: what remains, what is always already right here, in the absence of the operation of the physical senses and mental sense? Or to put it in Dogen’s famous phraseology: “Mind and body fallen away.” That is, of course, one vivid expression of awakening. “Beyond good and evil, what is your original face?” (Huineng’s koan posed to a monk).“What remains?” (I.e., what ultimately remains?).Zen koans exemplify the above with great pith: Once, therefore, we deactivate the physical senses and the mental sense, we need simply to see what’s here. Therefore, the noumenon, if we wish to call it that, is self-revelatory. This is described sometimes in philosophy as “knowledge by acquaintance.” That is, True Reality knows Itself (always unfathomably intimately and immediately) simply by virtue of being Itself. Knowing is being. Rather, True Reality requires no faculty to know itself. It assumes that there is a separate self that will need to use some faculty to bridge the divide between itself and Reality. It’s null and void because it begs the question. Zen in particular teaches us that this type of question (namely, “How could I ever intuit True Reality? What kind of ‘faculty of intuition’ is required on my part?”) is null and void. And it’s dead mistaken.įor, since Kant, we’ve gotten used to asking the epistemic question par excellence, “How can I know X?” But that is to ask the wrong question in the case of mysticism. Sometimes those on the path of awakening ask, “How could I ever intuit True Reality? What kind of ‘faculty of intuition’ is required on my part?” You can see that this is a post-Kantian style of epistemic questioning. True Reality: No Need for a Faculty to Apprehend It Kant is right about the first claim and wrong about the second one. IMMANUEL KANT, CONCEPT NOUMENA AND PHENOMENA WebThe defense begins by applying the dual-aspect. Because we can only ever has cognitive access to whatever can fall witin our conceptual net, Kant concludes that we can never have cognitive access to the noumenon, or “the thing in itself” ( ding an sich). The theory of phenomena and noumena Ask a Philosopher. For instance, we bring the categories of space and time to phenomenal experience in order for the latter to show up in the first place to us. For us, events occur in time and appear in space. Those phenomena, in order to appear to us just as they do, require the exercise of the specific cognitive equipment that we happen to have. We, as cognizing subjects, only ever to access phenomena.You can also come to the same realization, albeit not an intuitive one, via Kant’s argument in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781). During our philosophical conversation, you suggested that you intuitively got that there is a “disconnection” between what the physical senses can deliver and what True Reality is.
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