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The noumenon icon is a posited object or event that is known (if at all) without the use of the senses.
The term is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to "phenomenon", which refers to anything that appears to, or is an object

Object (philosophy)

An object in philosophy is a technical term often used in contrast to the term subject. Consciousness is a state of cognition that includes the subject, which can never be doubted as only it can be the one who doubts, and some object or objects that may or may not have real existence without...

of, the senses. In Ancient philosophy

Ancient philosophy

This page lists some links to ancient philosophy. In Western philosophy, the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire marked the ending of Hellenistic philosophy and ushered in the beginnings of Medieval philosophy, whereas in Eastern philosophy, the spread of Islam through the Arab Empire...

, the noumenal
realm was equated with the world of ideas

Theory of Forms

Plato's theory of Forms or theory of Ideas asserts that non-material abstract forms , and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. When used in this sense, the word form is often capitalized...

known to the philosophical mind, in contrast to the phenomenal realm, which was equated with the world of sensory reality, known to the uneducated mind. Modern philosophy has generally denied the possibility of knowledge independent of the senses, and Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....

gave this point of view its classical version, saying that the noumenal world may exist, but it is completely unknowable to humans. In Kantian philosophy the unknowable noumenon is often linked to the unknowable "thing-in-itself" (Ding an sich), although how to characterize the nature of the relationship is a question yet open to some controversy.

Noumenon does not refer to "numinous

Numinous

Numinous is an English adjective describing the power or presence of a divinity. The word was popularised in the early twentieth century by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his influential book Das Heilige...

", a term coined by Rudolf Otto

Rudolf Otto

Rudolf Otto was an eminent German Lutheran theologian and scholar of comparative religion.-Life:Born in Peine near Hanover, Otto attended the Gymnasium Andreanum in Hildesheim and studied at the universities of Erlangen and Göttingen, where he wrote his dissertation on Martin Luther's...

who, though well versed in Kant, drew the term from the Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

word numen
Numen
Numen is a Latin term for a potential, guiding the course of events in a particular place or in the whole world, used in Roman philosophical and religious thought...

which means deity, divine will or divine presence.

Etymology

Noumenon (νοούμενoν) is a Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

word. It is the medium-passive present participle

Participle

In linguistics, a participle is a word that shares some characteristics of both verbs and adjectives. It can be used in compound verb tenses or voices , or as a modifier...

of νοεῖν (noein), "I think, I mean". Thus a rough equivalent in English would be "something that is thought", or "the object of an act of thought". The plural is noumena (νοούμενα). Noein in turn originates from the word "nous

Nous

Nous , also called intellect or intelligence, is a philosophical term for the faculty of the human mind which is described in classical philosophy as necessary for understanding what is true or real, very close in meaning to intuition...

" (roughly, "mind").

Usage in reference to pre-Kantian philosophy

Overview

Noumenon came into its modern usage through Immanuel Kant. Its etymology

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...

derives from the Greek

Greek language

nooúmenon (thought-of) and ultimately reflects nous (mind). Noumena is the plural form. Noumenon distinguished from phenomenon (Erscheinung), the latter being an observable event or physical manifestation capable of being observed by one or more of the human senses. The two words serve as interrelated technical terms in Kant's philosophy. As expressed in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
Critique of Pure Reason
The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, first published in 1781, second edition 1787, is considered one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. Also referred to as Kant's "first critique," it was followed by the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement...

, human understanding is structured by "concepts of the understanding", or innate categories

Category (Kant)

In Kant's philosophy, a category is a pure concept of the understanding. A Kantian category is a characteristic of the appearance of any object in general, before it has been experienced...

that the mind uses in order to make sense of raw unstructured experience.

By Kant's account, when we employ a concept to describe or categorize noumena (the objects of inquiry, investigation or analysis of the workings of the world), we are in fact employing a way of describing or categorizing phenomena (the observable manifestations of those objects of inquiry, investigation or analysis). Kant posited methods by which human beings make sense out of the interrelationships among phenomena: the concepts of the transcendental aesthetic, as well as that of the transcendental analytic, transcendental logic and transcendental deduction. Taken together, Kant's "categories of understanding" are descriptions of the sum of human reasoning that can be brought to bear in attempting to understand the world in which we exist

Exist

Exist may refer to:* eXist, an open source database management system built on XML* Existence* Energetic X-ray Survey Telescope, a proposed hard X-ray imaging all-sky deep survey mission...

(that is, to understand, or attempt to understand, "things in themselves"). In each instance the word "transcendental" refers to the process that the human mind uses to increasingly understand or grasp the form of, and order among, phenomena. Kant asserts that to "transcend" a direct observation or experience is to use reason and classifications to strive to correlate with the phenomena that are observed. By Kant's view, humans can make sense out of phenomena in these various ways, but can never directly know the noumena, the "things-in-themselves", the actual objects and dynamics of the natural world. In other words, by Kant's Critique, our minds may attempt to correlate in useful ways, perhaps even closely accurate ways, with the structure and order of the various aspects of the universe, but cannot know these "things-in-themselves" (noumena) directly. Rather, we must infer the extent to which thoughts correspond with things-in-themselves by our observations of the manifestations of those things that can be sensed, that is, of phenomena.

According to Kant, objects of which we are sensibly cognizant are merely representations of unknown somethings—what Kant refers to as the transcendental object—as interpreted through the a priori
A priori and a posteriori (philosophy)
The terms a priori and a posteriori are used in philosophy to distinguish two types of knowledge, justifications or arguments...

or categories of the understanding
Categories of the understanding
The categories of the understanding are used in Immanuel Kant's philosophy.Categories are a priori features of our mind that permit our sensible apprehension and ordering of representations of objects...

. These unknown somethings are manifested within the noumenon—although we can never know how or why as our perceptions of these unknown somethings are bound by the limitations of the categories of the understanding and we are therefore never able to fully know the "thing-in-itself".

Noumenon and the thing-in-itself

Many accounts of Kant's philosophy treat "noumenon" and "thing-in-itself" as synonymous, and there is textual evidence for this relationship. However, Stephen Palmquist holds that "noumenon" and "thing-in-itself" are only loosely synonymous in as much as they represent the same thing but viewed from two different perspectives, and other scholars also argue that they are not identical. Schopenhauer criticised Kant

Schopenhauer's criticism of the Kantian philosophy

Schopenhauer appended a criticism to the first volume of his The World as Will and Representation. He wanted to show Kant's errors so that Kant's merits would be appreciated and his achievements furthered....

for changing the meaning of "noumenon". Opinion is of course far from unanimous. Kant's writings show points of difference between noumena and things-in-themselves. For instance, he regards things-in-themselves as existing:

"...though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears."

..but is much more doubtful about noumena:

"But in that case a noumenon is not for our understanding a special [kind of] object, namely, an intelligible object; the [sort of] understanding to which it might belong is itself a problem. For we cannot in the least represent to ourselves the possibility of an understanding which should know its object, not discursively through categories, but intuitively in a non-sensible intuition".

A crucial difference between the noumenon and the thing in itself is that to call something a noumenon is to claim a kind of knowledge, whereas Kant insisted that the thing in itself is unknowable. Interpreters have debated whether the latter claim makes sense: it seems to imply that we know at least one thing about the thing in itself (i.e., that it is unknowable). But Stephen Palmquist explains that this is part of Kant's definition of the term, to the extent that anyone who claims to have found a way of making the thing in itself knowable must be adopting a non-Kantian position.

Positive and negative noumena

Kant also makes a distinction between positive and negative noumena

"If by 'noumenon' we mean a thing so far as it is not an
object of our sensible intuition, and so abstract from our mode
of intuiting it, this is a noumenon in the negative sense of the term".

"But if we understand by it an object of a non-sensible
intuition, we thereby presuppose a special mode of intuition,
namely, the intellectual, which is not that which we possess,
and of which we cannot comprehend even the possibility.
This would be 'noumenon' in the positive sense of the term."

The positive noumena, if they existed, would roughly correspond with Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

's Forms or Idea — immaterial entities which can only be apprehended by a special, non-sensory, faculty: "intellectual intuition".

Kant doubts that we have such a faculty, because for him intellectual intuition would mean that thinking of an entity, and its being represented, would be the same. He argues that humans have no way to apprehend the meaning of positive noumena:

Since, however, such a type of intuition, intellectual intuition, forms no part whatsoever of our faculty of knowledge, it follows that the employment of the categories can never extend further than to the objects of experience. Doubtless, indeed, there are intelligible entities corresponding to the sensible entities; there may also be intelligible entities to which our sensible faculty of intuition has no relation whatsoever; but our concepts of understanding, being mere forms of thought for our sensible intuition, could not in the least apply to them. That, therefore, which we entitle 'noumenon' must be understood as being such only in a negative sense.

The noumenon as a limiting concept

Even if noumena are unknowable, they are still needed as a limiting concept, Kant tells us. Without them, there would be only phenomena, and since we have complete knowledge of our phenomena, we would in a sense know everything. In his own words:

"Further, the concept of a noumenon is necessary, to prevent sensible intuition from being extended to things in themselves, and thus to limit the objective validity of sensible knowledge".

"What our understanding acquires through this concept of a noumenon, is a negative extension; that is to say, understanding is not limited through sensibility; on the contrary, it itself limits sensibility by applying the term noumena to things in themselves (things not regarded as appearances). But in so doing it at the same time sets limits to itself, recognising that it cannot know these noumena through any of the categories, and that it must therefore think them only under the title of an unknown something".

Furthermore, for Kant, the existence of a noumenal world limits reason to what he perceives to be its proper bounds, making many questions of traditional metaphysics, such as the existence of God, the soul, and free will unanswerable by reason. Kant derives this from his definition of knowledge as "the determination of given representations to an object." As there are no appearances of these entities in the phenomenal, Kant is able to make the claim that they cannot be known to a mind that works upon "such knowledge that has to do only with appearances." These questions are ultimately the "proper object of faith, but not of reason."

The dual-object and dual-aspect interpretations

Kantian scholars have long debated two contrasting interpretations of the thing-in-itself. One is the dual-object view, according to which the thing-in-itself is a distinct entity from the phenomena it gives rise to.
The other is the dual-aspect view, according to which the thing-in-itself and the thing-as-it-appears to us are two 'sides' of the same thing. This view is supported by the textual fact that "Most occurrences of the phrase "things in themselves" are shorthand for the phrase, 'things considered in themselves' (Dinge an sich selbest betrachten)."
Although we cannot see things apart from the way we do in fact see them, we can think them apart from our mode of sensibility (perception); thus making the thing-in-itself a kind of noumenon or object of thought.

Pre Kantian critique

Though the term Noumenon did not come into common usage until Kant, the idea that undergirds it, that matter has an absolute existence which causes it to emanate certain phenomena, had historically been subjected to criticism. George Berkeley

George Berkeley

George Berkeley , also known as Bishop Berkeley , was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism"...

, who pre-dated Kant, asserted that matter, independent of an observant mind, was metaphysically impossible. Qualities associated with matter, such as shape, color, smell, texture, weight, temperature, and sound were all dependent on minds, which allowed only for relative perception, not absolute perception. The complete absence of such minds (and more importantly an omnipotent mind

Omnipotence

Omnipotence is unlimited power. Monotheistic religions generally attribute omnipotence to only the deity of whichever faith is being addressed...

) would render those same qualities unobservable and even unimaginable. Berkeley called this philosophy immaterialism. Essentially there could be no such thing as matter without a mind.

Schopenhauer's critique

Schopenhauer claimed that Kant

KANT

KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...

used the word incorrectly. He explained in "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy", which first appeared as an appendix to The World as Will and Representation
The World as Will and Representation
The World as Will and Representation is the central work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The first edition was published in December 1818, and the second expanded edition in 1844. In 1948, an abridged version was edited by Thomas Mann....

:

"But it was just this difference between abstract knowledge and knowledge of perception, entirely overlooked by Kant, which the ancient philosophers denoted by noumena
Noumena
Noumena is a melodic death metal band from Finland. The band's name comes from the word noumenon, a philosophical term used by Immanuel Kant. The band consists of five members: vocalist Antti Haapanen, guitarists Tuukka Tuomela and Ville Lamminaho, bass guitarist Hannu Savolainen and drummer Ilkka...

and phenomena. (See Sextus Empiricus
Sextus Empiricus
Sextus Empiricus , was a physician and philosopher, and has been variously reported to have lived in Alexandria, Rome, or Athens. His philosophical work is the most complete surviving account of ancient Greek and Roman skepticism....

, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book I, Chapter 13, ' What is thought (noumena) is opposed to what appears or is perceived (phenomena).' ) This contrast and utter disproportion greatly occupied these philosophers in the philosophemes of the Eleatics
Eleatics
The Eleatics were a school of pre-Socratic philosophers at Elea , a Greek colony in Campania, Italy. The group was founded in the early fifth century BCE by Parmenides. Other members of the school included Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos...

, in Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

's doctrine of the Ideas, in the dialectic
Dialectic
Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues...

of the Megarics, and later the scholastics in the dispute between nominalism
Nominalism
Nominalism is a metaphysical view in philosophy according to which general or abstract terms and predicates exist, while universals or abstract objects, which are sometimes thought to correspond to these terms, do not exist. Thus, there are at least two main versions of nominalism...

and realism
Philosophical realism
Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief that our reality, or some aspect of it, is ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc....

, whose seed, so late in developing, was already contained in the opposite mental tendencies of Plato and Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

. But Kant who, in an unwarrantable manner, entirely neglected the thing for the expression of which those words phenomena and noumena had already been taken, now takes possession of the words, as if they were still unclaimed, in order to denote by them his things-in-themselves and his phenomena."

The Noumenon's original meaning of "that which is thought" is not compatible with the "thing–in–itself", which signifies things as they exist apart from being images in the mind of an observer.

Nietzsche's critique

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...

, having been profoundly influenced by Schopenhauer's work, went on to criticise Kant's noumenon on slightly different grounds. He later similarly criticised Schopenhauer's work. Nietzsche found fault in the noumenon's lack of definite properties and its complete inability to interact

Interaction

Interaction is a kind of action that occurs as two or more objects have an effect upon one another. The idea of a two-way effect is essential in the concept of interaction, as opposed to a one-way causal effect...

with other things. He argued that a thing in itself would necessarily be outside of any causal chain

Causal chain

In philosophy, a causal chain is an ordered sequence of events in which any one event in the chain causes the next. Some philosophers believe causation relates facts, not events, in which case the meaning is adjusted accordingly.-See also:*Causality*Event...

since it cannot interact with any other things without demonstrating other properties than being the "ground of being". Nietzsche and later philosophers argued that the noumenon is of an utterly indeterminate

Indeterminacy (Philosophy)

Indeterminacy, in philosophy, can refer both to common scientific and mathematical concepts of uncertainty and their implications and to another kind of indeterminacy deriving from the nature of definition or meaning...

nature and that any discussion that does not treat it as such cannot, in fact, be a discussion of the noumenon. In demonstrating any definite properties, the noumenon would cease to be so.
Nietzsche's criticism of the noumenon can be found, for example, in his Beyond Good and Evil
Beyond Good and Evil
Beyond Good and Evil is a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, first published in 1886.It takes up and expands on the ideas of his previous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but approached from a more critical, polemical direction....

.

Nietzsche provided increasingly sophisticated accounts of the noumenon throughout the body of his work by explaining its numerous influences and connections with other ideas. An example of such comment can be found in his criticisms of materialistic atomism and what he called "soul-atomism", which follows Nietzsche's belief that synthetic judgments a priori are impossible. From the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil:

"[I]t is high time to replace the Kantian question, 'How are synthetic judgments a PRIORI possible?' by another question, 'Why is belief in such judgments necessary?'--in effect, it is high time that we should understand that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they still might naturally be false judgments! Or, more plainly spoken, [...] synthetic judgments a priori should not "be possible" at all [...]"

Nietzsche then asserts that "the atomism of the soul" is connected with a belief in the existence of the thing in itself. He then attempts precisely to define that particular type of atomism:

"Let it be permitted to designate by [the atomism of the soul] the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science!".

In arguing that the concept of the noumenon negatively influenced other ideas in specific ways, Nietzsche specifically characterized it in those ways.

Though Nietzsche was critical of theories concerning what could not be observed, he believed that theories ought to be capable of being falsified: while arguing against what he held to be the negative influence of the Kantian noumenon in the philosophy and science of his day, Nietzsche roughly approximated the scientific philosopher Karl Popper

Karl Popper

Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...

's assertion that falsifiability

Falsifiability

Falsifiability or refutability of an assertion, hypothesis or theory is the logical possibility that it can be contradicted by an observation or the outcome of a physical experiment...

was the basis of scientific knowledge:

"One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability."

Nietzsche wrote in the eighteenth section of the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil that

"It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds."

External links

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Kant's metaphysics.
Glossary of Kant's technical terms by Stephen Palmquist
Article from undergraduate journal Noesis
Lecture notes by G.J Mattey
Kant's System of Perspectives (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993) by Stephen Palmquist

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