Kant's Phenomena

At one point in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant observes that he is not the first philosopher to think the problem of knowledge in terms of a distinction between phenomena and noumena: "Since the oldest days of philosophy, inquirers into pure reason have thought that, besides the things of sense, or appearances (phenomena), which make up the sensible world, there were certain beings of the understanding (noumena), which should constitute the intelligible world" (Prolegomena Section 32). The difference, however, between Kant's use and what we might see as analogous in Plato, amounts to a neat reversal: if for Plato the realm of phenomena is that of illusion and change which escapes conceptual determination, in Kant the phenomena are the locus of all possible knowledge, and any attempt to know beyond them must end in delusion or skepticism.

This metaphor of "beyond" is not the right one, though. It suggests an outside which, although necessarily inaccessible, is qualitatively similar to the inside-- as though our faculty of sensible intuition goes out toward the thing-in-itself but doesn't quite reach it for one reason or another. It suggests that our understanding of the phenomena might somehow distort the truth of the noumena, that the phenomena may not "resemble" the noumena. But the whole question of resemblance, similarity, getting the noumenon right or wrong in the phenomenon is misplaced. The phenomena are not illusions, mere appearances blocking us from the object; rather, they are things insofar as things appear.

What would it mean to know things, not as they appear, but as they are? It would mean to know them through thought rather than sensibility-- to have concepts, Kant says, whose designation could not be shown in any possible experience. But this is impossible on Kant's understanding of thought and sensibility: these faculties are handcuffed together, and neither can transcend the other. Sensibility is receptive and passive, allowing it some form of access to the objective world, but needs thought to transfigure its subjective sensations into an experience which might be called objective. Thought is active, but possesses no capacity to grasp objects of its own accord-- there is no "intellectual intuition," where "intuition" is that which allows our mind to grasp objects-- and so needs objects and cannot transcend them. Sensibility cannot grasp the noumena because it cannot think; thought cannot grasp the noumena because it can grasp only what the sensibility offers.

Contrast this with Plato: for Plato, contemplation is possible. One can see Ideas with the eye of the mind. For Kant, the mind always only thinks about and around what the eyes see. So: I'm dissatisfied with what Kant says, to be sure, but he helps me articulate why I find what Plato says to be genuinely unthinkable.

This is background reading for my post of tomorrow which will be more interesting because it will relate to Nietzsche.