Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun In the philosophy of Kant, an object as it is in itself independent of the mind, as opposed to a phenomenon.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In the Kantian philosophy:
- noun That which can be the object only of a purely intellectual intuition.
- noun Inexactly, a thing as it is apart from all thought; what remains of the object of thought after space, time, and all the categories of the understanding are abstracted from it; a thing in itself.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Metaph.) The of itself unknown and unknowable rational object, or thing in itself, which is distinguished from the
phenomenon through which it is apprehended by the senses, and by which it is interpreted and understood; -- so used in the philosophy of Kant and his followers.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun philosophy In the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and those whom he
influenced , a thing as it isindependent of anyconceptualization orperception by thehuman mind ; athing-in-itself ,postulated by practicalreason but existing in a condition which isin principle unknowable andunexperienceable .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the intellectual conception of a thing as it is in itself, not as it is known through perception
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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If, by the term noumenon, we understand a thing so far as it is not an object of our sensuous intuition, thus making abstraction of our mode of intuiting it, this is a noumenon in the negative sense of the word.
The Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant 1764
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What, therefore, we call noumenon must be understood by us as such in a negative sense.
The Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant 1764
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The noumenon is a bit difficult to locate; it can be apprehended only be a process of reasoning -- which is a phenomenon.
INTERNET WIRETAP: The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce (1993 Edition) 1911
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Behind the phenomena of human history, the noumenon is the Human
The Crest-Wave of Evolution A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-19 Kenneth Morris 1908
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And we cannot call a noumenon an object of pure thought; for the representation thereof is but the problematical conception of an object for a perfectly different intuition and a perfectly different understanding from ours, both of which are consequently themselves problematical.
The Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant 1764
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Some hold that the universal nature of things of any kind is an Idea existing (apart from the things) in the intelligible world, invisible to mortal eye and only accessible to thought; whence the Idea is called a noumenon: that only the Idea is truly real, and that the things (say, trees, bedsteads and cities) which appear to us in sense-perception, and which therefore are called phenomena, only exist by participating in, or imitating, the Idea of each kind of them.
Logic Deductive and Inductive Carveth Read 1889
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Pure action, that is, the will, is a 'noumenon', and irreferable to time.
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Henry Nelson Coleridge 1820
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The substrate or 'causa invisibilis' may be the 'noumenon' or actuality,
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Henry Nelson Coleridge 1820
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Surely not the visible, tangible, accidental body, that is, a cycle of images and sensations in the imagination of the beholders; but his supersensual body, the 'noumenon' of his human nature which was united to his divine nature.
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Henry Nelson Coleridge 1820
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Now the 'phænomenon' is in time, and an effect: but the 'noumenon' is not in time any more than it is in space.
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Henry Nelson Coleridge 1820
skipvia commented on the word noumenon
From Dictionary.com: "The object, itself inaccessible to experience, to which a phenomenon is referred for the basis or cause of its sense content."
I love it when the definition leaves you even more confused than you were.
October 24, 2007
reesetee commented on the word noumenon
Whaa...?
October 24, 2007
skipvia commented on the word noumenon
See, this is why I gave all that up. To quote Elwood P. Dowd, with his permission: "In this world...you must be oh, so smart or oh, so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. And you may quote me."
Listen to the voice of binky...
October 24, 2007
reesetee commented on the word noumenon
At least Binky doesn't speak in circles. ;-)
October 24, 2007
vanishedone commented on the word noumenon
Ah, the joys of Kant.
If the phenomenon is how we experience a thing (e.g. having spatial dimensions, persisting in time and bashing into things), the noumenon is how it is 'in itself' (???, ??? and ???). We can't actually strip away the aspects our minds apply (e.g. geometry, causality) in making sense of the world, but we can recognise them as scaffolding our minds use in putting experiences together. According to Kant.
If it bothers you that causality is supposed to be purely 'phenomenal' and the noumenon is said to cause the phenomenon, yes, that's a known difficulty.
October 25, 2007
yarb commented on the word noumenon
I think I understand, VanishedOne. Thanks.
So if a thing can only be experienced through phenomena, how do we know there is a noumenon? Why can't things be purely phenomenal? What makes Kant so sure there is something behind the scaffolding?
October 25, 2007
skipvia commented on the word noumenon
"Socrates scores, got a beautiful cross from Archimedes. The Germans are disputing it. Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside."
October 25, 2007
reesetee commented on the word noumenon
Actually, VanishedOne, I'm not at all sure I wanted to understand this. But thanks anyway. ;-)
October 25, 2007
vanishedone commented on the word noumenon
It's a while since I studied this, but as I recall my reading of Kant (i.e. not that of a recognised authority but the one I don't have to look up) was that we do experience things - i.e. the phenomenon isn't another class of thing, isn't itself an object of experience - but the way we experience them is phenomenal: for example, we experience objects as spatial, and we can't step outside geometry. So if there were no 'things in themselves', there would be no things and we wouldn't experience them in any way.
Of course that doesn't address the question of hallucinations, etc. but that one isn't specific to Kant. He does think we need a sensory component to experiences, but when it comes to arguing the point... I recall http://http-server.carleton.ca/~abrook/AMPHIBOL.htm has some comments on that:
'As he says, "without sensibility no objects would be given to us, ... thoughts without content are empty"... The trouble is, he never gets around to arguing the point--not till he gets to the Appendix on the Amphiboly. He mounts an argument that we need concepts, indeed very specific concepts, and he mounts an argument that we need the forms of intuition, space and time. But he never mounts an argument that we need sensations, empirical intuitions, what he calls the matter of knowledge...'
Unfortunately I'm not very familiar with the Amphiboly - it was never part of the lecture/discussion material when I was studying this - and I haven't time to wrestle with it at the moment.
October 25, 2007
chained_bear commented on the word noumenon
Skipvia, I love you. :) That's hiLARious.
October 25, 2007
stuartmathergibson commented on the word noumenon
noumenon
noun Inexactly, a thing as it is apart from all thought; what remains of the object of thought after space, time, and all the categories of the understanding are abstracted from it; a thing in itself.
April 6, 2022