with his philosophical revolution, Kant made a breakthrough the radicality of which he was himself unaware; so, in a second move, he withdraws from this radicality and desperately tries to navigate into the safe waters of a more traditional ontology. Consequently, in order to pass \u201cfrom Kant to Hegel,\u201d we have to move not \u201cforward\u201d but backward: back from the deceptive envelope to identify the true radicality of Kant\u2019s breakthrough\u2015in this sense, Hegel was literally \u201cmore Kantian than Kant himself.\u201d\u00a0 208-281<\/p>\n
… the limit between phenomena and noumena is not the limit between two positive spheres of objects, since there are only phenomena and their (self-)limitation, their negativity<\/em>.\u00a0 The moment we get this, the moment we take Kant\u2019s thesis on the negative employment of \u201cnoumena\u201d more literally than he did himself, we pass from Kant to Hegel, to Hegelian negativity.<\/span> 282<\/p>\n This is how one should read the key statement that understanding \u201climits sensibility by applying the term noumena<\/span> to things in themselves (things not regarded as appearances). But in so doing it at the same time sets limits to itself, recognizing that it cannot know these noumena<\/span> through any of the categories.\u201d Our understanding first posits noumena<\/span> as the external limit of \u201csensibility\u201d (that is, of the phenomenal world, objects of possible experience): it posits another domain of objects, inaccessible to us.<\/p>\n But in doing so, it \u201climits itself\u201d: it admits that, since noumena<\/span> are transcendent, never to be an object of possible experience, it cannot legitimately treat them as positive objects. That is to say, in order to distinguish noumena<\/span> and phenomena as two positive domains, our understanding would have to adopt the position of a meta-language, exempt from the limitation of phenomena, dwelling somewhere above the division.<\/p>\n Since, however, the subject dwells within phenomena, how can it perceive their limitation (as Wittgenstein also noted, we cannot see the limits of our world from within our world)? The only solution is that the limitation of phenomena is not external but internal<\/em>, in other words that the field of phenomena is in itself<\/em> never \u201call,\u201d complete, a consistent Whole; this self-limitation of phenomena assumes in Kant the form of the antinomies of pure reason.<\/span><\/p>\n There is no need for any positive transcendent domain of noumenal<\/span> entities which limit phenomena from outside \u2015 phenomena with their inconsistencies, their self-limitations, are \u201call there is.\u201d<\/p>\n The key conclusion<\/span> to be drawn from this self-limitation of phenomena is that it is strictly correlative to subjectivity: there is a (transcendental) subject only as correlative to the inconsistency<\/span>, self-limitation, or, more radically, \u201contological incompleteness,\u201d<\/span> of phenomenal reality.<\/p>\n The moment we conceive the inconsistency and self-limitation of phenomenal reality as secondary, as the effect of the subject\u2019s inability to experience the transcendent In-itself the way it \u201creally is,\u201d the subject (as autonomous-spontaneous) becomes a mere epi-phenomenon, its freedom becomes a \u201cmere appearance\u201d conditioned by the fact that noumena<\/span> are inaccessible to it (to put it in a somewhat simplified way: I experience myself as free insofar as the causality which effectively determines me is inaccessible to me).<\/p>\n In other words, the subject\u2019s freedom can be ontologically grounded only in the ontological incompleteness of reality itself.<\/span> 283<\/p>\n Noumena<\/span> designate the In-itself as it appears to us, embedded in phenomenal reality<\/em>; if we designate our unknowns as \u201c noumena<\/span>,\u201d we thereby introduce a gap which is not warranted by their mere unknowability: there is no mysterious gap separating us from the unknown<\/strong>, the unknown is simply unknown, indifferent to being-known. In other words, we should never forget that what we know (as phenomena) is not separated from things-in-themselves by a dividing line, but is constitutive <\/em>of them: phenomena do not form a special ontological domain, they are simply part of reality. 283<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" with his philosophical revolution, Kant made a breakthrough the radicality of which he was himself unaware; so, in a second move, he withdraws from this radicality and desperately tries to navigate into the safe waters of a more traditional ontology. Consequently, in order to pass \u201cfrom Kant to Hegel,\u201d we have to move not \u201cforward\u201d … Continue reading “critique of noumena”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,15,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hegel","category-subjectivity","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9484"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9487,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9484\/revisions\/9487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}