What is important about the noumena and phenomena?

Question

So if we know that the phenomena is our perception and the noumena is the reality, then how is is important? In what situation do we use this knowledge?

Answer 1

Do not be fooled. Noumena is NOT the "reality."

Plato said essences are unknowable because they are in heaven.

Aristotle said essences are in the things themselves.

The Stoics, Wm. of Occam, Ayn Rand and others said essences were concepts.

Kant took Aristotle's metaphysics "in the things themselves" and applied Plato's epistemology of "unknowablity" to them.

Noumena do not exist.

"The man who . . . closed the door of philosophy to reason, was Immanuel Kant . . . .

"Kant’s expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was reason.

"Even apart from the fact that Kant’s theory of the “categories” as the source of man’s concepts was a preposterous invention, his argument amounted to a negation, not only of man’s consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such.

"No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting as anyone could ever do.

"If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies—such as pragmatism, logical positivism, and all the rest of the neo-mystics who announce happily that you cannot prove that you exist—you will find that they all grew out of Kant." Ayn Rand

NOTHING is unknowable to the mind of Man, if he has enough time to discover it. The Atomists knew of atoms 2500 years before they were proved. The essence of things is conceptual and can be described in words.

But the rules of epistemology must be learned and followed. Kant ignorned them all, for the sake of the abnegation of reason and to preserve self-sacrifice in the image of the church.

"Even if God does not exist," he said,"we must act as if He did."