Saturday, June 4, 2022

Appendix J: Is Kant’s concept of the noumena coherent and necessary for knowledge?

 Is Kant’s concept of the noumena coherent and necessary for knowledge?


“Finitude is essential for reason, as it is for everything that participates in being…the only point at which the prison of finitude is open is the realm of moral experience….”
—Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol.1, p. 82 (pdf.). 

 

The subject of Kant’s concept of the noumenon runs throughout Braver’s book, “A Thing of This World,” in his comparative study of antirealists philosophers that include Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Foucault; all who reject the Kantian notion of the noumenon, or thing-in-itself, as an incoherent holdover of the realist belief  in an independent reality (R1) still present in the Kantian paradigm as “noumenon-envy”  (ATTW, p. 503).” For Heidegger, the thing-in-itself is an unproductive, incoherent, and even nihilistic concept while arguing that “appearances are the things themselves,” (Ibid., pp.183-184 for Heidegger citations) which Braver names as Heidegger’s “Phenomenological Ontology” thesis (For complete references to ‘noumenon’ in Braver’s book see, pp. 152, 181-186, 253, 257-258, 336, 340-341, 503).

However, what I read from the rejection of the noumenal concept by each of these philosophers is they immediately faced the emergence of nihilism with its alienating companion of, “The meaninglessness in which the metaphysical articulation of modernity is consummated…Truth is certitude becomes the monotony that is injected into beings as a whole when they are served up for man’ securing of permanence…When certitude becomes the one and only, beings alone remained essential; never again beingness itself, to say nothing of its clearing…When Being lacks the clearing, beings as a whole lack meaning (Heidegger on, Nietzsche, vol. 3:179-80 found in ATTW, p. 336).”

I want to argue that meaninglessness (…don’t forget the monotony) is a result of jettisoning the concept of the noumenon from the Kantian paradigm that then requires, for the sake of coherence and completeness, each of these antirealist thinkers provide some kind of theoretical corrective (i.e., noumenal) against nihilism, alienation, and neurosis (…from the monotony). An epistemology of limitation is possible and even coherent: ergo, if the Kantian paradigm isn’t broke, don’t fix it!

“…to that which is inaccessible and not to be gotten around, which is constantly passed over.”
—Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (pdf.)

Hegel expressed skepticism of the Kantian notion of noumenality (also referred to by Kant as the “thing-in-itself,”) as a useless concept if it cannot become an object of knowledge. Hegel wrote…

It is a natural idea that before engaging in philosophical inquiry one should first examine the instrument or medium of such knowledge (Locke, Kant). Perhaps it is a good or a bad instrument, perhaps no good at all for knowledge of what absolutely is, since it modifies or distorts its object. It is quite vain, however, to try to eliminate the refracting and transforming powers of the instrument and so arrive at the intrinsic notion of the thing. For if what absolutely is cannot be reached by our faculty of knowledge, with all its refracting and transforming power, there is no sense in supposing that it can be reached by dispensing with or discounting the work of this faculty and the course it has to take. Remove the way truth affects us and nothing at all remains (Phenomenology of Spirit, “§73; bold added).”

In contrast to Heidegger, Kant accepts the classic distinction between appearance and reality; a phenomenal world of appearances known by sense experience (intuition) and the symbolic realm of reason (number-theory, geometry, natural science) known by intelligence as necessary a priori  (transcendental) categories of the understanding which are universally the same for all consciousness (transcendental idealism)--even for the angels. For Kant, genuine knowledge is limited to the realm of appearances, of the senses, but reason has an internal compulsion to speculate beyond experience for it recognizes no boundaries with any definite closure. As Wittgenstein wrote, “An indefinite boundary is not really a boundary at all (Philosophical Investigations, I, §99)(pdf.).

Kant means the “a priori categories” in the Aristotelian sense (κατηγορίαkatēgoria) as ‘that which can be said, predicated, or publicly declared and asserted, about something.’ A category is an attribute, property, quality, or characteristic that can be predicated of a thing (Wiki: Kantian Category)."  When reading Kant, wherever the term “categories” is used; think also of imagination. Examples of the categories of the understanding are the concepts of unity, plurality and totality applied in time.

Criticisms of Kant

There are vast libraries of articles interpreting Kant’s concept of the noumenal, but criticism generally centers on the 1.) Etymology of the term noumenon, 2.) Alleged incoherent meaning of the noumenal concept itself, 3.) Kant’s use of the terms noumenon and things-in-themselves. 

Kant clarifies his position by defining the concept of the noumenal as a limiting concept (Grenzbegriff); a negation of incompleteness that does not require specific determinations:

“Where extended things are concerned, boundaries always presuppose a space existing outside a certain definite place, and enclosing it; limits don’t require anything like that, but are mere negations, indicating of some quantity that it isn’t absolutely complete. But our reason sees around itself a space for knowledge of things in themselves, so to speak, though it can never have definite concepts of them and is limited to appearances only. As long as the knowledge of reason is all of one kind—for example, reasoning within number-theory, within geometry, within natural science, or the like—definite boundaries to it are inconceivable. (Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, §57) (pdf.).”

The Etymology of “noumenon.” 

The etymology of the term “noumenon,” and Kant’s uses of the term are problematic, and even contradictory. “φαινόμενονphenomenon is translated as bring to light, make to appear, to show. Anything that shows, or shines is a phenomenon. On the other hand, “noumena, or νοούμενα is derived from νοεῖν noeîn ‘to think, to mean,’ which in turn originates from the word νοῦς noûs, an Attic contracted form of νόος nóos[a] ‘perception, understanding, mind.’[3][4] A rough equivalent in English would be ‘something that is thought’, or ‘the object of an act of thought’ (italics added, Wiki: noumenon).” Kant’s use of these terms make clear that the noumenon cannot be an object of sense experience (intuition) and cannot be known determinately: all intuition is sense experience.

“But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.”—Kant, “Critique of Pure Reason,” p.27 (pdf.) 

By Kant’s definition phenomenon is what appears to the perceiving consciousness while noumenon is the object of thought, the thing as it is in itself cannot be experienced without the unifying categories of the understanding. Kant is criticized for arguing that appearances are “caused” by the noumenal thing-in-itself, which according to him, are beyond the unifying categories of experience so we should not be able to infer the noumenon from any phenomenon. To make matters worse, Kant’s entire project is a polemic against metaphysical speculation which claims itself to be knowledge that goes beyond human experience (i.e., religious dogmatism): this interpretation is a clear contradiction in reasoning, and to the overall purpose for writing “Critique of Pure Reason (publ. in 1781, 1st edition; & 2nd ed. in 1787).”

“I therefore had to annul [aufheben] knowledge in order to make room for faith. And the true source of all the lack of faith which conflicts with morality-and is always highly dogmatic-is dogmatism in metaphysics, i.e., the prejudice according to which we can make progress in metaphysics without a [prior] critique of pure reason (CPR, trans. W.S. Pluhar, 1996; p. 31; pdf. p. 91; first bracket mine)." 

Logicians can derive endless contradictions from postulating a sensible non-sensible object. I agree with the historian of philosophy, Frederick Copleston, that a purely etymological analysis of Kant’s term noumenon is a dead end, and we should examine how Kant actually used these terms and his later conceptual clarifications (for further analysis see “Modern Philosophy; Kant,” vol. 6, part, One, p. 267; pdf. p.139; First Image Books ed. of Volume VI of The History of Philosophy published 1964).

Kant’s Counter-Arguments

In a summary statement Kant argues: "The object to which I refer appearance as such is the transcendental object,U i.e., the wholly indeterminate concept of something as such. This object cannot be called the noumenon. For I do not know concerning it what it is in itself, and have no concept of it except merely the concept of the object of a sensible intuition as such-an object which, therefore, is the same for all appearances. I cannot think it through any categories; for a category holds only for empirical intuition in order to bring it under a concept of an object as such. Although a pure use of a category is logically,V possible, i.e., is without contradiction, it has no objective validity whatever, because the category does not then apply to any intuition that would thereby acquire the unity of an object. For a category is, after all, a mere function of thought; through it I am not given any object, but only think what may be given in intuition (Critique of Pure Reason, p. 315; pdf. p. 375).”

The Correlative Argument

Kant’s response to his critics is to make a number of conceptual and terminological distinctions to isolate his further developed view of noumenality. In order to experience--to see the noumenon as an object--I must possess some ability, or intellectual intuition for the object to appear. The very concept of appearance in representational epistemology assumes something that does not appear, that is, the thing as it is in itself independent of the perceiving subject much like a one side of a coin is visible while there is a correlative unseen backside of the coin. For something to be “re-presented” logically implies an originary presentation; “distortion” (Latin: twist apart) implies a pristine whole state. One could counter-argue that the idea of the correlative relationship of two sides of the same coin is relying on a spatial category through which the noumenon could not possibly be an object of perception according to Kant. However, he argues this correlative abstraction is completely indeterminate just as the “transcendental object” is completely indeterminate and does not appear; therefore, the concept of the transcendental object, Kant maintains, is not a blatant contradiction. Only if we had some special intellectual intuition would the noumenal become an object. Kant denies consciousness possesses such an intuition.

The thing-in-itself is problematical, not assertive 

Following Kant’s reasoning, the noumenon, or the thing-in-itself (ein Ding an sich) is not a contradictory concept, nor does it assert any existing entity, but functions instead as a limiting concept since we can only know what we can experience through the categories of the understanding (the Kantian block). The "Ding an sich" is not even a “thing!”  The noumenal is not a bone, a skull, nor an “is.” Hegel wrote in criticism of phrenology, a pseudo-science of his era, that it is based on the belief the essence (Spirit) of a person could be understood from interpreting the shape of their skull—that is, an abstract externality represents the internal Spirit of a being passed off as a thing: “For this reason, observation finally goes back again from this inconstant language to the fixed being.... When in other respects it is said of Spirit that it is, that it has being, is a Thing, a single, separate reality, this is not intended to mean that it is something we can see or take in our hands or touch, and so on, but that is what is said; and what really is said is expressed by saying that the being of Spirit is a bone (Phenomenology of Spirit; para. §343; original italics).”

“I regard a bone as your reality.”
--Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §339

For Kant, the noumenon is problematical (how categories set the limits of experience, and reason), and not assertive (claiming the objective existence of noumenality as an object) (see CPR, p. 319; pdf. p. 379; B 311). British philosopher, William H. Walsh, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, comments “If the world we confronted were one of the things-in-themselves, a priori knowledge of it, even of the very restricted sort for Kant argues, would be quite impossible. The fact that we have such knowledge…is taken by Kant as proof that the objects of our knowledge are phenomena or appearances (Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Collier Macmillan (1972) vol. 4, Kant, p. 315; “Encycl.” here on).” Copleston also adds that we cannot say that appearances exhaust reality either. The noumenal is interpreted here as an unknown “X.” Copleston wrote:

“Hence the division of objects into phenomena and noumena is not to be admitted. At the same time the concept of the noumenon is indispensable as a limiting concept; and we can call things-in-themselves, that is, things considered in so far as they do not appear, noumena. But our concept is then problematical. We do not assert that there are noumena, which could be intuited if we possessed a faculty of intellectual intuition. At the same time we have no right to assert that appearances exhaust reality; and the idea of the limits of sensibility carries with it as a correlative concept the indeterminate, negative concept of the noumenon (Copleston, vol. 6, p. 268; pdf. p. 140).” 

Positive and Negative Senses of noumenon

Generally, Kant is very careful with his terminology, but in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason he clarified his arguments by defining two senses of the “noumenal.” First, is the negative sense of the word noumenon that has two theses: “1.) We mean noumenon as a thing ‘in so far as it is not the object of our sensuous intuition,’ and 2.) We make no assumptions of the possibility of another kind of objectifying intellectual intuition of the noumenal (see, CPR, p. 318; pdf. p. 378; B 309).

Secondly, the positive sense of noumenon is 1.) We mean the noumenon as an object of a non-sensuous intuition, 2.) We assume another kind of intuition, which we do not have, but would make the noumenon an intelligible object by another kind of intellectual intuition. Kant rejects this positive sense of the noumenal (Copleston, vol. 6, p. 268; pdf. p. 140; and, CPR, p. 317; pdf. p. 377; B 307).

Wittgenstein’s worldview would be consistent with Kant’s on this issue by accepting the noumenon in the negative sense. Professor Walsh again noted that Kant, “does not need to assert that there actually are things of a different kind; he needs only the idea of such things. To talk about things as they might be in themselves is no more objectionable than to speak of an intellectus archetypus [understanding](Encycl., vol. 4, Kant, p. 315; brackets added).” In fact, one of Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism sums up Kant’s entire transcendental philosophy: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922; italics added).”  Kantians and Wittgenstein eschew making assertions about the noumenon in the object-sphere of scientific knowledge--that is the meaning of “whereof.” In a 1959 lecture by Theodor Adorno on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he coined the term, “Kantian block” that means, “…the confinement of knowledge to the world of experience, and the restriction of the operation of the forms of the understanding within this world (Adorno: The Recovery of Experience by Roger Foster, 2008; p. 82; “RE,” here on).” 

Kant’s doctrine of the noumenon defends transcendental idealism against the criticism of solipsism (i.e., that only one’s own experiences are real): the goal in the Critique of Pure Reason is to define the bounds of reason so as to make room for faith.

But remember, Wittgenstein has a loophole for saying the unsayable so we can argue consistently that Wittgenstein’s view could also align with positive noumenalism. Bertrand Russell describes in the preface to the Tractatus (although, Russell does not use these exact words) Wittgenstein’s possible escape from the truth-conditional semantics of instrumental rationality which is a form of reason that is itself irrational in that it is concerned only with the efficient deployment of means. Russell’s exact words are, “Mr. Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said, thus suggesting to the skeptical reader that possibly there may be some loophole through a hierarchy of languages, or by some other exit. The whole subject of ethics, for example, is placed by Mr. Wittgenstein in the mystical, inexpressible region (Tractatus, p. 18 )." Wittgenstein’s escape from the objectivating attitude of means-ends mechanistic reductionist scientific categories is through expressive-aesthetic language; the languages of art, philosophy, spiritual faith, poetry, ethics, myth, and even the meta-logical propositions of the Tractatus itself. As I have noted before, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) is viewed in the West as a work primarily on logic and theory of language, but Austria-Hungarian Viennese intellectual circles also interpret the Tractatus as a philosophical work on ethics (“Wittgenstein’s Vienna,” by Allan Janik & Stephen Toulmin, 1973; p.24, 193).

Escape Through the Kantian Block: Saying What Cannot Be Said

Interestingly, in Kant’s effort to be complete and clear with his definitions of the noumenal, he identified a second group of philosophers I do not want to ignore. They embrace the noumenal concept in a modified positive sense--that one can say what cannot be said in the object-realm of science.  For Adorno, this is the utopian dream of philosophy, “…to counter Wittgenstein by uttering the unutterable (Negative Dialectics, Theodor W. Adorno, 1966; p. 9; ND, here on)(pdf.).” Under the heading titled “The Concern of Philosophy,” Adorno writes about the telos of philosophy and I want to quote it at length since I have spent, in one way or another, studying this one passage for over ten years. I’ll never finish the book:

“Though doubtful as ever, a confidence that philosophy can make it after all—that the concept can transcend the concept, the preparatory and concluding element, and can thus reach the nonconceptual—is one of philosophy’s inalienable features and part of the naïveté that ails it. Otherwise it must capitulate, and the human mind with it. We could not conceive the simplest operation; there would be no truth; emphatically, everything would be just nothing. But whatever truth the concepts cover beyond their abstract range can have no other stage than what the concepts suppress, disparage, and discard. The cognitive utopia would be to use concepts to unseal the nonconceptual with concepts, without making it their equal (Ibid., p. 9-10; italics added).”

Constellations of Truth

The nonconceptual is the remainder, the residuum, of what any concept does not cover, define, categorize, or captures. Adorno used the word “nonconceptuality” thirty two times in Negative Dialectics. The young Adorno was an assistant to the Christian theologian and professor at the University of Frankfurt, Paul Tillich, who sponsored and accepted his dissertation on Kierkegaard’s aesthetics in 1929. Tillich repeatedly used in a similar way the term “unconditional” in the noumenal sense—i.e., beyond what the concept does not capture---one hundred and two times in his three-volume magnum opus, “Systematic Theology” (1951-1964)(ST, here on)(pdf.).

Adorno contributed to philosophy not only by saving Tillich’s life in warning him to leave Nazi Germany quickly, but by borrowing and developing from philosopher Walter Benjamin the idea of “constellation” as a particular kind of writing style that would enable philosophy to say the unsayable by showing “…the truth as ideas formed by an arrangement of concepts that are not contained in those concept…The constellation shows the truth, it does not assert it in propositional form…. The constellation, in other words, is a form of writing that brings to self-awareness [Selbstbesinnung] the block on experience that curtails what concepts are able to say (RE, p. 82-83).” I imagine this kind of writing would create a series of philosophical essays that express concepts indirectly through a constellation of meanings that go beyond those concepts by showing truth. Adorno and Benjamin believed in truth, and represent another variation of the positive sense of noumenality in an attempt to escape the Kantian block.

Heidegger rejected the Kantian concept of the noumenal, but is still able to identify and describe a form of nihilism that is a driving force in modern technological societies. There is no awe, wonder, gratitude, autonomy, mystery, infinitude, nor of the unconditional—these human attributes have no place within the means-ends nexus of instrumentalist rational thought (utopia: u: οὐ, "not" and τόπος [topos, or topic] "place" or “region” means “no place”). Ultimately, the loss of the nonconceptual is dangerous according to Heidegger and explains why in great detail.  

Heidegger’s Move Away from the Kantian Paradigm

This section is important, and not a diversion from the topics we examined so far in this essay; otherwise, I can go no further coherently. Heidegger’s relation to the Kantian paradigm and his later move away from Kant must be clarified since I argue that even though Heidegger rejects the doctrine of the noumenon, his fundamental ontology still express noumenal ideas although in sublimated forms such as the a priori conditions for Being, Time, Dasein, Nothingness, and Care. Maybe some paradigms would benefit from an injection of Kantianism as a corrective by emphasizing the limiting concept of the noumenal, or the unknown X.

You may think it is odd trying to revive that other old dead dog (discredited doctrine) of noumenality; but after reviewing that vast library of distributed cognition, I discovered it has been done before with other systems of thought. The Marxist economist Lucio Colletti (1924-2001) defended Kant’s thing-in-itself in Marxist analysis of capitalism (Really!) since in his opinion the Hegelian branch of Marxism was lacking insightful effective analysis of modern capitalism. Colletti thought of the Hegelian-Marxist tradition as a religion (Hegel was a Christian theologian), not a true science, so he wanted to represent a new dynamic Kantian-Marxist tradition of criticism (However, one could respond to Colletti by noting that Kant--like Hegel--was a Christian theologian also).

I agree with Colletti: Marxism is a Christian heresy, not a non-Christian heresy. This explains why the Neo-Marxist Frankfurt School of philosophers and even some atheistic existentialists not only engage in socio-economic analysis, but also struggle with deeply religious questions and themes like noumenality; yet very few people would believe it. Adorno, a member of the Neo-Kantian anti-humanist branch of Marxism, argues that there is no full totality, only a partial totality in a nod to the Kantian thing-in-itself (ND, p. 5). Professor Michael Pelias noted in a seminar lecture that Kant’s Copernican Revolution takes into account the time of capitalism, which is Newtonian time. Colletti believed the creative Kantian paradigm would generate insights into capitalism particularly of fictitious capital ("money that is thrown into circulation as capital without any material basis in commodities or productive activity"—David Harvey) that characterizes modern occult interest bearing financial instruments sold by Wall Street such as derivatives (see further details; Seminar 9: Marx, Marxism and Philosophy Today” with Professor Michael Pelias; 34-38 minutes; 1hr.50 min.—2hrs. 6 min.).

“The recovery of experience is coterminous with the disclosure of its own limitation, or its own absence”
--Roger Foster, Recovery of Experience

An analogous case can be made for Heidegger in relation to Kant if we examine the Davos, Switzerland debates between Heidegger and Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer of the Marburg Kantian School who studied under Professor Hermann Cohen just as the Nazi Fascists were coming to power in Germany. Unfortunately, the debates were heavily propagandized and characterized by some as a debate between the wise German peasant woodsman against the money grubbing Jew. However, after the debates, Heidegger clarified his position by writing, “What is Metaphysics?” “On the Essence of Ground,” and “Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (pdf.)” and revealed his views had ”…moved from neo-Kantianism and phenomenology of consciousness to his own phenomenological ontology (IEPby Dr. W. J. Korab-Karpowicz on Heidegger).” In fact, Heidegger targeted Cassirer’s Neo-Kantian mentor, Cohen, by presenting a “…radical new conception of an ‘existential analytic of Dasein’ in the guise of a parallel interpretation of the philosophy of Kant. Cassirer, for his part, defended his own new understanding of Kant in the philosophy of symbolic forms – against Heidegger’s insistence on the ineluctability of human finitude (SEPby Dr. Michael Friedman on Cassirer).”Surprisingly (I would have expected the opposite), Heidegger is emphasizing the finitude of Dasein, and it is Cassirer who attempts to counter Dasein’s “radical finitism” by appealing to the transcendentalism of “…genuinely objectively valid, necessary and eternal truths arising in both moral experience and mathematical natural science (Ibid., Friedman).” The term “radical finitism” refers to Heidegger’s emphasis in Being and Time (1926)(pdf.) of the “throwness” [Geworfenheit] and “falleness” [Verfallenheit] of Dasein into the alienating world of objects as distorted “das Man.”  After the Davos debates, Cassirer admitted that the Critique of Pure Reason was written with human finitude as its key theme and assumption, but appealed to the ethical theories of the Critique of Practical Reason as an escape from the prison of finitude. So Heidegger argued the finitude of Dasein while Cassirer offered an escape from the Kantian block. I believe, the debate shows that Heidegger’s new fundamental ontology which emphasized Dasein’s radical finitude still had embedded within it the Kantian negative sense of noumena even though Heidegger rejects Kant’s doctrine of the noumenal thing-in-itself arguing instead that appearance is reality.

Ernest Cassirer’s Neo-Kantian Philosophy of Symbolic Form

Cassirer was not defeated by Heidegger, but attempted to find a Kantian middle way between Hegel’s divine reason and Dasein’s radical finitude. Stanford Professor Michael Friedman wrote of Cassirer, “By building the Marburg conception of knowledge, in his new philosophy of culture, on top of the more primitive forms of mythical thought …and ordinary language Cassirer takes himself to have done justice to the insights of both Hegel and Heidegger while avoiding both the infinite divine reason of the former and the radical human finitude of the latter. Yet he has now conceded to Heidegger that Kant’s theory of human cognition involves only the notion of potential rather than actual infinity. In particular, Kant’s treatment of the regulative use of the ideas of reason from a merely theoretical point of view leaves their actual content quite indeterminate (SEP: Cassirer; Italics added).” Adorno would also agree that there is no actual infinity in human cognition, only potential infinity. Regarding the question of noumenality; Heidegger is right to emphasis the finitude of Dasein, but Cassirer also has much to offer with this theory of symbolic forms which demands another essay exploring the creation and power of symbolic meaning within language, myth, and science.

“…the inexhaustibleness of That which is worthy of questioning.”--
Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (pdf.).

And again, Heidegger’s phenomenology of time also has embedded in it the concept of the limits of human cognition. Professor Friedman writes of Heidegger’s fundamental category of time: “Heidegger seems to embrace this very option, arguing that nature is within time only when it is encountered in Dasein's world, and concluding that nature as it is in itself is entirely atemporal. It is worth noting the somewhat Kantian implication of this conclusion: if all understanding is grounded in temporality, then the atemporality of nature as it is in itself would mean that, for Heidegger, we cannot understand natural things as they really are in themselves (cf. Dostal, R. J., 1993, “Time and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger”, in C. Guignon (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 141–169).”

Heidegger on the Gestalt (shape) of the Great Gestell (enframing)

Heidegger’s philosophical language is deceptively simple using terms such as  “Enframing,” “unconcealment,” “destining,” “presencing,” and “oblivion” that are tightly interconnected with those of technology, and Enframing so I will focus on what is relevant to the Kantian theme of epistemological limitation without overlooking too much detail. Occasionally, words like “destining” [Geschick]  that means “fate,” Heidegger will instead emphasis closely associated etymological meanings of the same term such as in this case “self-adapting” and “aptitude,” as in a turning around in direction (see, QT, p. 37 ff.).  Also, I want to gain insight by speculating on how other philosophers might stand regarding noumenality including Adorno, Wittgenstein, Tillich, and a few more contemporary Heideggerian scholars.

Heidegger’s philosophy is vast and complex so this short essay cannot be a comprehensive review of his thoughts on technology; rather, I want to show how his critique of modern science, and technology (techne) relies on the concept of noumenality in the Kantian negative sense of the limitation of cognition. Heidegger does not reject noumenality, only the language of noumenality. He never used the term “noumenon” in his lectures collected in the book “The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (pdf.)(1954), forming five short essays; “The Question Concerning Technology,” “The Turning,” “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’” “The Age of the World Picture,” and “Science and Reflection.” Heidegger does use mystical language; “Language is the house of Being (“Letter on Humanism,” 1947).” The first essay concerning technology is the paradigm of profound philosophical writing. Heidegger warns in these essays of a specific modern technological paradigm much like Kant warned against dogmatic doctrines (metaphysics) of his day by appealing to the limiting concept of noumenality.

“…where Enframing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense.”
—Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

I have discussed pattern-seeking Kuhnian “paradigms” in another essay that describes all of the same characteristics as what Heidegger calls “Enframing” [Gestell] which is a categorical ordering of the world in a specific way. The German word “Gestell,” is related to the term “Gestalt” meaning “shape,” “form,” and is often interpreted as the “pattern of the whole.” Heidegger discusses the form and patterns of modern technology, its limitation, and dangers telling us, “…until Plato the word techne [τέχνηtékhnē] is linked with the word episteme. Both words are names for knowing in the widest sense (QT, p. 13).” Heidegger uses techne in the modern sense of “technology,” as distinct from “modern science” in the sense of the Greek word ἐπιστήμη,[ epistēmē], meaning 'science' or 'knowledge' referring also in this context to European modern science. 

Kantian absolute a priori categories and Neo-Kantian relative a priori categories

To make an analogy between Enframing and paradigms I must add a further distinction between “absolute a priori categories” and “relative a priori categories.” (An analogy is a useful rhetorical device for clarification, but is an inferior substitute for sound deductive argument). The Kantian school of thought understands categories as “absolute,” or the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience (transcendental). On the other hand, the Neo-Kantians, like Ernest Cassirer, believe these necessary “absolute” a priori concepts for experience are functionally indistinguishable from a priori  "relative" categories. Relative categories are unnecessary for experience, but they also can change the way perception is organized. The “a priori forms of sensibility” is the Kantian term for the absolute categories of space and time since any object must necessarily be presented to understanding within these two perceptual schemas: place and duration. Traditionally, Western philosophy has four main categories: space, time, causality, and substance. Relative a priori categories could describe the beliefs that time is cyclical, or linear occurring within a closed or open universe—or in a teleological or non-teleological cosmos. These are only contingent cultural beliefs not necessary for the possibility of sense-experience. From my point of view, Heidegger argues as if Enframing is a relative category, or paradigm not necessary for experience, and should be eschewed for its damaging effects on human being. Braver’s Impersonal Conceptual Schemes (ICS) could also be interpreted coherently as relative categories. Relative a priori scientific empirical paradigms are constructed upon transcendental absolute categories of experience or, the forms of sensibility such as space and time.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Paradigms 

Heidegger considers the philosophical systems of Kant, Leibnitz, Fichte, Hegel, and Shelling as great philosophical systems: “The greatness of the systematic in these thinkers lies in the fact that it unfolds not as in Descartes out of the subject as ego and substantia finita [finite substance], but either as in Leibnitz out of the monad, or as in Kant out of the transcendental essence of finite understanding rooted in the imagination, or as in Fichte out of the infinite I, or as in Hegel out of Spirit as absolute knowledge, or as in Schelling out of freedom….(QT, p. 141; brackets added).”

bad system (Heidegger uses the term “degraded system”) are those research projects that blindly gathers data to merely register facts wherein “Ongoing activity becomes mere busyness (Ibid., p. 138; 141).” Philosopher Georg Lukács describes scientific paradigms in this degraded state: 

"...that the more intricate a modern science becomes and the better it understands itself methodologically, the more resolutely it will turn its back on the ontological problems of its own sphere of influence and eliminate them from the realm, where it has achieved some insight. The more highly developed it becomes and the more scientific, the more it will become a formally closed system of partial laws. It will then find that the world lying beyond its confines, and in particular the material base which it is its task to understand, its own concrete underlying reality lies, methodologically and in principle, beyond its grasp (“History & Class Consciousness,” 1919-23; p. 116)(pdf.)."

Enframing would be what Heidegger considers the ugly relative a priori paradigm of the modern scientific age. He describes it as a “gathering together,“ or an “ordering” attitude toward nature: “Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve (Ibid., p. 20).” As a side note, “λόγος,“(Reason) is related to the verb λέγω meaning “to gather, pick up”, as in the phrase “αἱμασιὰς λέγων” picking out stones for building walls. To preserve this active sense of framing that is an ordering of nature, Heidegger spells the term distinctly as “En-framing,”(Ibid., p. 19n17).

Heidegger is careful defining the terms he uses to describe modern technology and science, and often repeats them in slightly different contexts to add other desired shades of connotative meanings to avoid the metaphysical incoherencies of exaggerated subjectivism, or objectivism. We should also remember that Nazi censors were present when Heidegger lectured, and also reviewed his written work, but the reader will find a tremendous depth of meanings emerging from below the surface. For example, Heidegger asks rhetorically, “What is a standing-reserve?” His answer: “It is the undifferentiated reserve of the available that is ready for use (Ibid., p. 84, 19ff).” The paradigm of Enframing is specifically aimed at building a standing-reserve, and has profound consequences for how human beings relate to nature, to others, and how the real is defined so that everything everywhere appears as an object for technology (see, Ibid., p. 100). Heidegger mentions energy sources such as coal, and mined ores (like uranium for example) specifically as part of the standing-reserve, “…which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such…(Ibid., p. 14).”

The Great Reduction of Being to beings

Spelled with a capital letter “Being,” means for Heidegger to “to-be-in-being” or [Sein] in contrast to “that-which-is-in-being” or [das Seiende] (entities, or existent) spelled as “being.” Heidegger derives this distinction from the etymology of "being" (ὄν,) Greek for 'being' as opposed to (ὄντα) that means "things that are." (see translator’s notes on this distinction by Fried and Polt in “An Introduction to Metaphysics,” M. Heidegger, 2000; p. xi)(pdf.). Some translators might not use this English spelling convention instead letting context determine which sense to use.

While discussing Nietzsche’s aphorism “God is dead,” in part II, Heidegger describes Enframing as a natural-scientific reductionist paradigm that wipes out all transcendence [possibilities]. Even nature experienced through Enframing becomes one-dimensional while all other ontological possibilities are “blocked” (Ibid., p. 26); but yet, it still cannot capture nature in its complete unity and totality: “Scientific representation is never able to encompass the coming to presence of nature; for the objectness of nature is, antecedently, only one way in which nature exhibits itself (Ibid., p. 174).” Being is the opposite of objectness (beings). Regarding Nietzsche, Heidegger writes:

"The killing [of God] means the act of doing away with the suprasensory world that is in itself—an act accomplished through man…. But above all, in this event man also becomes different. He becomes the one who does away with that which is, in the sense of that which is in itself. The uprising of man into subjectivity transforms that which is into object. But that which is objective is that which is brought to a stand through representing. The doing away with that which is in itself, i.e., the killing of God, is accomplished in the making secure of the constant reserve by means of which man makes secure for himself material, bodily, psychic, and spiritual resources, and this for the sake of his own security, which wills dominion over whatever is—as the potentially objective—in order to correspond to the Being of whatever is, to the will to power (Ibid., p. 107; italics and brackets added)."

The real means “that which works…’to work’ means ‘to do’ (Ibid., p. 159).” Human beings are fever seized by the paradigm of Enframing, “Man enters into insurrection. The world changes into object (Ibid., p. 100, 21).” Enframing dominates human life by representing nature only as an object to be collected for the “standing-reserve,” driven by a will to control (will to power), and by modern scientific methodologies that recognize no limits which Kant described as characteristic of pure reason: ”Today science goes its way more securely than even before (Ibid., p. 178 ).” Technology “entraps nature” as a “calculable coherence of forces (Ibid., p. 21).” However, Heidegger makes a distinction between Enframing and technology: “…the essence of modern technology lies in Enframing…. It is nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine. It is the way in which the real reveals itself as standing-reserve (Ibid., p.23).”  “Essence” means what something is. Heidegger is not a anti-modernist Luddite, but instead tells us there is “no demonry of technology,” nor is it a curse from “the work of the devil (Ibid., p. 26; 28 ).”

“… the utilization of machinery and the manufacture of machines is not yet technology itself—it is only an instrument concordant with technology, whereby the nature of technology is established in the objective character of its raw materials. Even this, that man becomes the subject and the world the object, is a consequence of technology's nature establishing itself, and not the other way around.”
—Heidegger in “What Are Poets For?”

The problem of Enframing is not technological, but ideological: “…where everything that presences exhibits itself in the light of a cause-effect coherence, even God can for representational thinking, lose all that is exalted and holy, the mysteriousness of his distance. In the light of causality, God can sink to the level of a cause, of causa, efficiens…(Ibid., p. 26).” In another comment he writes: ”Even god is represented in theology—not in faith—as causa prima, as first cause (Ibid., p. 161).” The “Weltbild,” (view of life) is that everything is a thing; even God is an object within the Enframing of the standing-reserve, which can be interpreted as the business mindedness of a modern industrial commodity market system of capitalism. Philosophers have encountered this problematic issue of total reification in other disciplines of study such as theology (Tillich), logic (Wittgenstein), and economics (Lukács). Reification is a kind of amnesia that misunderstands the symbol as more real than the symbolized.

The Oblivion of Reified Experience

An important theme of The Frankfurt School philosophers such as Marcuse, Horkheimer, and Adorno is the atrophy of experience resulting from an emphasis on identity-thinking that characterizes the categorizing-driven model of subject-object epistemology, and the obsession with calculative instrumentalist rationality. Scientization of life is ultimately nihilistic by reducing the world to things so that experience becomes, to use their metaphors; “withered,” “reified,” “restricted,” “mutilated,” “diminished,” “narrowed,” “damaged,” and “lost.” Reified experience of natural-scientific reductionism is reduced experience. Categorical thinking subsumes all objects under a classificatory concept so that the object is identical to the cover concept; otherwise, it is non-identical. Adorno also refers to what cannot be covered by the concept as the “nonconceptual.” However, Professor Brian O’Connor comments that for Adorno, “The nonidentity is a product of meaning itself, not a mystical alternative to predication (Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality, 2005, Brian O'Connor, p. 67).” Adorno’s major thesis in Negative Dialectics is, “Reified philosophy--reified intellectual life, for that matter--deprives us of the capacity to articulate the complex dynamics of experience (Ibid., p. 55).” Reification means all processes of life are conceptualized as “thing-like,” or “as if” they were a thing, or object. Adorno believed all reification is a form of forgetting; that is, failing to remember the true historical origin of the thingified concept. For example, certain metals are used as money and believed by some to be value itself (bullionism), but these things (metals) within this social context, are actually reifications of the processes of human labor. Adorno thinks that self-reflection and awareness of the nonconceptual will retrieve remembrance, and thereby recover nonreified experience.

Correspondingly, Enframing dominates by reducing Being to beings (thingification) while human life slides into meaningless ‘not-being,’ or oblivion. Stanford professor M. Wheeler writes of oblivion: ”The notion of a not-being (oblivion) signals two things: (i) technological revealing drives out any sense of awe and wonder in the presence of beings, obliterating the secularized sense of what is sacred that is exemplified by the poetic habitation of the natural environment of the Rhine; (ii) we are essentially indifferent to the loss (SEP: Heidegger).” Heidegger wrote that oblivion is a forgetting such that “in the midst of all that is correct the true will withdraw…(QT, p. 26).” Because scientific technology is doing what is real, what works, science does not think (Ibid., p.109); that is, science cannot think outside of itself—of its own framing.  The danger of Enframing is its intrinsic drive to dominate, or entrap nature, human beings, and all knowledge to “…be consumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealedness [discovery, truth] of standing-reserve (Ibid., p. 33; brackets added).” The term “oblivion” [Vergessenheit] can be interpreted to mean, “forgetting” (λήθηlethe, Homer used this word to mean “a place of oblivion” in the lower world…of Hades.)(Ibid., p. 46), but Heidegger also uses this term in other ways related to truth ἀλήθεια (see, Ibid,. p. 36).

Heidegger defines three ontological modes of being: 1.) Daseinbeing-there of human existence, 2.) Vorhandenseinpresent-at-hand is the being of things in existence, and 3.) Zuhandenseinready-to-hand are things intended as tools for some purpose. One danger of Enframing is Dasein itself becomes part of the standing-reserve as Vorhandensein. Heidegger warns:

“This danger attests itself to use in two ways.  As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so rather exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth… This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself…In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself (Ibid., p. 26; Bold text added).”

The efforts of science and technology to reveal the truth of objective interrelations in existence by empirical experiment is overshadowed by the urgency of the standing-reserve itself so that Dasein only orders and bureaucratically manages resources forgetting the questions of human existence and of Being—even forgetting the question of Being is forgotten (see, Ibid., p. 43, 46). The sole telos of human beings and society is now to “entrap” nature as “objects in order” (Ibid., p. 179) for the standing-reserve resulting in their own entrapment.

Within the object-sphere of Enframing only what can be measured is recognized and validated as real: nature, Dasein*, history, and language still cannot be captured in totality while it “sucks up” everything, including other possibilities of living while shutting out the “…inexhaustibleness of That which is worthy of questioning (Ibid., p. 174; italics added).” Here is Heidegger’s negative theory of noumenality, or limitation:

“Even if physics as an object-area is unitary and self-contained, this objectness can never embrace the fullness of the coming to presence of nature. Scientific representation is never able to encompass the coming to presence of nature; for the objectness of nature is, antecedently, only one way in which nature exhibits itself. Nature thus remains for the science of physics that which cannot be gotten around (Ibid., p. 174; italics added).”

Heidegger’s critique of Enframing (not of technology per se) can easily be updated to describe today’s merger of military and Internet monopolies to create unregulated markets for a privatized surveillance and penal state in an age of after-market home made “ghost drones” all while ignoring the emergency of anthrogenetic climate change. Human beings themselves have become objects of the standing-reserve.

*Heidegger repeats the masculine pronoun, “Man,” 183 times in QT instead of “human,” or “humanity” so I am using Dasein instead even though after his philosophical ‘turn’ (die Kehre) he no longer methodologically focuses primarily on Dasein’s experience (transcendental hermeneutic phenomenology) in investigating the question of Being. After publishing Being and Time (1927) he wrote, “everything is reversed,” meaning his earlier writing centered too much on the subjectivity of Dasein in his view. 

Paul Tillich on Existential Finitude and Reason 

“The denial of reason in the classical sense is antihuman because it is antidivine.”
--Paul Tillich in "Systematic Theology."

Tillich’s major work Systematic Theology refers to Heidegger by name thirteen times in his three-volume work with each division titled after the ontological categories of reason, existence, and spirit which parallels fundamental ontology of Being and Time emphasizing the Dasein analytic: existence is self-contradictory, being is finite, and life is ambiguous (see ST, vol. 1, p. 81). Tillich deliberately wrote his systematic theology to demythologize Christian categories (to remove literalistic distortions of symbols and myths) by translation into an existential hermeneutic phenomenology motivated by his belief that “...existentialism is a natural ally of Christianity. Immanuel Kant once said that mathematics is the good luck of human reason. In the same way, one could say that existentialism is the good luck of Christian Theology (Ibid., vol. 1, p. 27).” Take for example, Tillich’s rejection of biblical literalism that defends the cosmological argument’s conclusion that God is the Creator, and First Cause because rationalistic theism is based on the category of causality: "...the category of causality cannot 'fill the bill’...In order to disengage the divine cause from the series of causes and effects, it is called the first cause, the absolute beginning. What this means is that the category of causality is being denied while it is being used. In other words, causality is being used not as a category but as a symbol (Ibid., vol. I, p. 238; italics added).” Tillich’s polemic in opposition to biblical literalism is based on his notion of the unconditional: “…the gods are not objects within the context of the universe…Ultimacy stands against everything which can be derived from mere subjectivity, nor can the unconditional be found within the entire catalogue of finite objects which are conditioned by each other (Ibid., vol. 1, p. 214).”

“Anything that claims to be sacred and that does not recognize the demand of the Unconditional is demonic.”
—Paul Tillich in “Political Expectation,” (1971)(pdf. ) p.31.

Tillich draws the distinction between ontological and technical concepts of reason. The conceptions of ontological reason are represented by philosophers from Promenades to Hegel including Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas. Classical Reason is that of the logos of being, which includes cognitive, aesthetic, practical, and technical functions of the human mind. The technical concept of reason is the capacity of reason reduced to the capacity to calculate. (Tillich’s distinction parallels Heidegger’s calculative vs. meditative thinking). The “depth of reason” is not another field of reason, but rather is the structure preceding (metaphorically speaking) all rational thought which is manifested in the creative logos of being (see, ST, vol. I, p. 79). Logos determines the ends, while technical reason determines the means. Tillich warns if these two capacities of reasoning become separated and technical calculative reason overshadows the logos as it has since the middle of the nineteenth century, ”The consequence is that the ends are provided by nonrational forces, either by positive tradition or by arbitrary decision serving the will to power (ST, vol. I, p. 72-3).” Logical positivism is given particular criticism of its refusal to recognize as relevant anything that is not empirically verifiable (irrelevant subjectivity) in the object-realm of technical reason. Tillich directs the reader to Max Horkheimer’s famous book, “The Eclipse of Reason (1947)(pdf.).” The topic of Enframing, and the same suspects are here again: Tillich, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Heidegger.

“Wherever technical reason dominate, religion is superstition and is either foolishly supported by reason or rightly removed by it.”—Paul Tillich

Tillich has already updated Heidegger’s critique of Enframing for us. Tillich specifically warns of the objectification of Dasein as dangerous to self-identity and human existence. Another existential hazard is falling into a mode of alienated being having lost a sense of noumenality, the unconditional, or the infinite—in short, the loss of existential meaning:

"The basic structure of being and all its elements and the conditions of existence lose their meaning and their truth if they are seen as objects among objects. If the self is considered to be a thing among things, its existence is questionable; if freedom is thought to be a thing among things, its existence is questionable; if freedom is thought to be a quality of will, it loses out to necessity; if finitude is understood in terms of measurement, it has no relation to the infinite. The truth of all ontological concepts is their power of expressing that which makes the subject-object structure possible. They constitute this structure; they are not controlled by it (ST, vol. I, p. 168; italics added)." Tillich believed Hegel “deified reason” which later opened the way for the domination of cognitive-technical-instrumentalist reason of the modern era forgetting Kant’s greater sense of ontological reason that “…grasps the cognitive, aesthetic, practical, and technical functions of the human mind (Ibid., vol. I, p. 72).”

“The secret of Kant’s philosophy is the unthinkability of despair.”
—Adorno in Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashston, p. 383 (pdf.)

Tillich describes the Kantian categories as the “forms in which the mind grasps and shapes reality (Ibid., vol. 1, p. 192),” or the categories of finitude, which means Dasein faces existence with uncertainty, insecurity, doubt, risk and anxiety without an object (unlike phobias that have a definite object such as insects, horses, or snakes, etc.). Tillich gives a detailed analysis of Heidegger’s term “Dasein” twice (Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 62, 168 ) describing human existence as thrown and requiring the courage to be: “In this dimension there is an ultimate security, or certainty which does not cancel out the preliminary insecurities and uncertainties of finitude (including the anxiety of their awareness). Rather it takes them into itself with the courage to accept one’s finitude (ST, vol. 2, p. 73)." Realism accepts the “realm of essences” (symbols), but only as tools without the “power of being” so that scientific realism devolves into undialectical pragmatic positivism (see, ST, vol. 1, p. 234).

"Karl Marx called every theory which is not based on the will to transform reality an ‘ideology,’ that is, an attempt to preserve existing evils by a theoretical construction which justifies them.”--Paul Tillich, ST, vol. I, p. 76

Paul Tillich publicly identified himself as a socialist in his famous essay, “The Socialist Decision,”(1933)(pdf.) which was immediately censored by the National Socialist (Nazis) who had infiltrated the German University system; he was particularly critical of some German churches for cooperating with the pagan Nazi regime. Tillich was fired from the University of Freiburg in 1933 for his loud and disruptive protests against the display of the Nazi swastikas with the Christian cross. Tillich is known as the first non-Jewish professor dismissed from the university system by the new Nazi regime. Just before immigrating to the United States, Tillich was nearly arrested while traveling to say goodbye to a friend, Mrs. Ida Bienart, at her home in Dresden as she was being interviewed by the Nazis about a comment Tillich made concerning Nazi official Herman Goering being a drug addict—both of which were true. A next-door neighbor warned Tillich before his arrival and hid until dark at another friend’s home, then left Dresden on a train. After WWII ended it became known that Tillich secretly wrote one hundred sermon like radio broadcasts for Voice of America to persuade the German people to “battle to break the Nazi spirit” saying they are “thieves of millions who are adorned with medals,” and even worse than this they “deliberately set the earth aflame (Against The Third Reich: Paul Tillich’s Wartime Addresses to Nazi Germany 1942 to D-Day 1944, pp. 20, 264) (pdf.).” He warned all Christians that an otherworldly attitude that only celebrates internal spiritual peace hands “this world over to satanic powers” and replaces freedom of life with freedom to dream (see my essay, “Paul Tillich’s Wartime Addresses”). As a Christian socialist, Tillich wanted something more than just a better dogcatcher.

“Others, perhaps the majority, were blinded and didn't see to whom the German people had surrendered themselves. They didn't see that they had made a pact with evil. Others finally did suspect what was occurring, but because they shared in the gifts that were first distributed, they accepted bribes and silenced the warning voice. Now they have all awoken and seen what has happened: that the power of evil has become visible in its ultimate depth and is demanding its victims, the German people!”—Tillich, War Addresses, p. 215

Conclusion

I reviewed a few of my favorite philosophers about the question of noumenality, and attempted to speculate on what positions they might take to arrive at some coherent conclusions. Kant made the distinction between the negative sense of noumenality which is Apophatic (ἀπόφασις; meaning ‘denial,’ or ‘negation’) and the positive meaning that speculates on the possibility of an intellectual intuition that would make transcendental “objects” intelligible in some way, or Cataphatic (κατάφασις: meaning ‘affirmative proposition’). Surprisingly, Wittgenstein could be placed with those who favor the positive meaning of noumenality since he has a loophole through the Kantian block (according to Bertrand Russell). We can include Heidegger with Wittgenstein on this point since both also viewed poetry as a loophole through which one can think the mystery of Being. Even Kant himself has a loophole to the noumenal realm by commitment to pure practical reason (or the Second Critique of the necessary conditions for the possibility of ethics). Maybe we can identify those in the positive cataphatic camp such as Wittgenstein as “quasi-negative noumenalists,” or “quasi-positive noumenalists” depending on the philosopher’s viewpoint. Adorno, and Benjamin explored the notion of authoring constellations of meanings as a way to say the unsayable. Tillich and Adorno refer to the unconditional and the nonconceptual respectively in their writings describing the loss of experience and a possible recovery of experience.

"...I am indebted to Kantian criticism, which showed me that the question of the possibility of scientific knowledge cannot be answered by pointing to the realm of things."--Paul Tillich, Interpretations of History, p. 60 (pdf.)

Heidegger rejects the Kantian doctrine of noumenality, but in my opinion he retains a negative sense of ontological finitude, or “limitation” within his critique of the Enframing paradigm as a totalizing causal-mechanistic materialist science commanding (or swaying) autonomous authority that monopolizes the ability to define what is real experience. Enframing cannot think itself for the same reason that there is nothing outside the text (Derrida): what is not covered by the concept is nonidentical and the nonconceptual. Without the notion of noumenality (as limitation), much of the later Heidegger makes little sense: the same is true of Kantian Transcendental Idealism. Abstract paradigmatic totalities are powerful tools of cognition, but they are only parts of the whole. Even the non-mystic Marxist scholar Lucio Colletti sought to introduce the Kantian notion of noumenality (thing-in-itself) into economic analysis in the hope of stimulating new insightful critiques of capitalism. 

“Poetically, Man dwells.”—Heidegger (1951)

Theologian Paul Tillich never used the term “noumenon” in his three volumes of Systematic Theology, but instead favored “unconditional” as an ontological negative noumenal concept that represents the ethical realm of the categorical imperative—the ethical form of the imperative is absolute (dutydeon-tology), but its moral contents are relative (empirically contingent). Kant’s notion of noumenality understood in the negative sense—of the limitation of cognition--is not inherently self-contradictory. Tillich has stated he is not a Neo-Kantian because of its “pan-logical tendencies”(see, “The Interpretation of History,” 1969, pp. 36, 59) (pdf.). Ouch!

To repeat Professor W.H. Walsh’s argument why noumenality is necessary for knowledge: “If the world we confronted were one of the things-in-themselves, a priori knowledge of it, even of the very restricted sort for Kant argues, would be quite impossible...The fact we have such knowledge…is taken by Kant as proof the objects of our knowledge are phenomena or appearances.” Reason demands both totality and limitation. If we do not acknowledge our finitude, we are not unlike Kant’s foolish dove flying confidently through a resistant wind:

“When the light dove parts the air in free flight and feels the air's resistance, it might come to think that it would do much better still in space devoid of air.”
--(Critique of Pure Reason, p.50, A5).


End

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