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In philosophy, a noumenon (, ; from ; : noumena) is knowledge posited as an object that exists independently of human sense. The term noumenon is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to, the term phenomenon, which refers to any object of the senses. Immanuel Kant first developed the notion of the noumenon as part of his transcendental idealism, suggesting that while we know the noumenal world to exist because human sensibility is merely receptive, it is not itself sensible and must therefore remain otherwise Epistemology to us. In Kantianism, the noumenon is often associated with the unknowable "thing-in-itself" (). However, the nature of the relationship between the two is not made explicit in Kant's work, and remains a subject of debate among Kant scholars as a result.
Regarding the equivalent concepts in Plato, Ted Honderich writes: "Platonic form are noumena, and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses... This dichotomy is the most characteristic feature of Plato's dualism; that noumena and the noumenal world are objects of the highest knowledge, truths, and values is Plato's principal legacy to philosophy."
By Kant's account, when one employs a concept to describe or categorize noumena (the objects of inquiry, investigation or analysis of the workings of the world), one is also 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 understanding makes sense of and thus intuits phenomena that appear to the mind: the concepts of the transcendental aesthetic, as well as that of the transcendental analytic, transcendental logic and transcendental deduction. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Macmillan, 1967, 1996) Volume 4, "Kant, Immanuel", section on "Critique of Pure Reason: Theme and Preliminaries", p. 308 ff. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Macmillan, 1967, 1996) Volume 4, "Kant, Immanuel", section on "Transcendental Aesthetic", p. 310 ff. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Macmillan, 1967, 1996) Volume 4, "Kant, Immanuel", section on "Pure Concepts of the Understanding", p. 311 ff. Taken together, Kant's "categories of understanding" are the principles of the human mind which necessarily are brought to bear in attempting to understand the world in which we Existence (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 must exercise to 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. Humans can make sense out of phenomena in these various ways, but in doing so can never know the "things-in-themselves", the actual objects and dynamics of the natural world in their noumenal dimension - this being the negative, correlate to phenomena and that which escapes the limits of human understanding. 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 the human rational faculties can reach the object of "things-in-themselves" by our observations of the manifestations of those things that can be perceived via the physical senses, that is, of phenomena, and by ordering these perceptions in the mind help infer the validity of our perceptions to the rational categories used to understand them in a rational system. This rational system ( transcendental analytic), being the categories of the understanding as free from empirical contingency.See, e.g., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Macmillan, 1967, 1996) Volume 4, "Kant, Immanuel", section on "Critique of Pure Reason: Theme and Preliminaries", p. 308 ff.See also, e.g., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Macmillan, 1967, 1996) Volume 4, "Kant, Immanuel", section on "Pure Concepts of the Understanding", p. 311 ff.
According to Kant, objects of which we are cognizant via the physical senses are merely representations of unknown somethings—what Kant refers to as the transcendental object—as interpreted through the a priori or categories of the understanding. These unknown somethings are manifested within the noumenon—although we can never know how or why as our perceptions of these unknown somethings via our physical senses are bound by the limitations of the categories of the understanding and we are therefore never able to fully know the "thing-in-itself".
...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.
He is much more doubtful about noumena:
But in that case a noumenon is not for our understanding a special kind object, namely, an intelligible object; the sort 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."The Radical Unknowability of Kant's 'Thing in Itself'", Cogito 3:2 (March 1985), pp.101–115; revised and reprinted as Appendix V in Stephen Palmquist, Kant's System of Perspectives (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993).
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 be immaterial entities that can only be apprehended by a special, non-sensory faculty: "intellectual intuition" ( nicht sinnliche Anschauung). 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 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.
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".Rohmann, Chris. "Kant" A World of Ideas: A Dictionary of Important Theories, Concepts, Beliefs, and Thnkers. Ballantine Books, 1999.
The difference between abstract and intuitive cognition, which Kant entirely overlooks, was the very one that ancient philosophers indicated as φαινόμενα phainomena and νοούμενα nooumena; the opposition and incommensurability between these terms proved very productive in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later in the scholastics, in the conflict between nominalism and realism. This latter conflict was the late development of a seed already present in the opposed tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant, who completely and irresponsibly neglected the issue for which the terms φαινομένα and νοούμενα were already in use, then took possession of the terms as if they were stray and ownerless, and used them as designations of Thing-in-itself and their appearances.
The noumenon's original meaning of "that which is thought" is not compatible with the "thing-in-itself," the latter being Kant's term for things as they exist apart from their existence as images in the mind of an observer. In a footnote to this passage, Schopenhauer provides the following passage from the Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Bk. I, ch. 13) of Sextus Empiricus to demonstrate the original distinction between phenomenon and noumenon according to ancient philosophers: νοούμενα φαινομένοις ἀντετίθη Ἀναξαγόρας ('Anaxagoras opposed what is thought to what appears.')
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