Is Kant’s concept of the noumena coherent and necessary for knowledge?
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!
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 (κατηγορία, katēgoria) 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. “φαινόμενον, phenomenon 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).”
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.).
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 (IEP: by 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 (SEP: by 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.
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.
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 [τέχνη, tékhnē] 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).”
A 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 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” (λήθη: lethe, 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.) Dasein: being-there of human
existence, 2.) Vorhandensein: present-at-hand is
the being of things in existence, and 3.) Zuhandensein: ready-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
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).”
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).”
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
(duty, deon-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:
End
