Noumen is a concept of philosophy, denoting a certain essence of a phenomenon that is not obvious. It is comprehended (if at all possible) in the study and in-depth study. Usually in philosophy this term is contrasted with such a term as a phenomenon. This concept means something lying on the surface. When we look at an object or phenomenon, they affect us, our senses. Very often we take this effect for essence. Phenomenon and noumenon are terms that are often confused, and are also taken one after another. Let us try in this short essay to understand what a hidden entity is and whether it is accessible to us at all, according to philosophers.
Meaning
If we turn to the Greek original, we will see that noumenon is a word that means “reason” in translation. Ancient philosophers often designated by this term not only a rational method of comprehension of truth, but also phenomena, actions and things, independent of our feelings. But this concept has another connection with the mind. If a phenomenon is an object that we can perceive through sensations, then in the case of essence the situation is more complicated. After all, we are not faced with an object in reality that you can touch, see or touch. It is given to us exclusively in the imagination, and is comprehensible only by reason.
History
For the first time we see this term in the "Dialogues" of Plato. For the great Greek philosopher, noumenon is an intelligible phenomenon. So he designated his famous ideas. These are transcendental concepts, first of all, such as truth, good, beauty. Moreover, for Plato, this world of ideas is the real reality. And the world of phenomena, things that we comprehend with feelings, is just an appearance.
Plato speaks about this in the dialogue "Parmenides", where he declares that it is the world of noumenons that has a true existence, which the objective universe is deprived of. These entities or ideas, in addition, are examples of things, their “authenticity”. He also calls them archetypes. And phenomena are extremely distorted images of ideas. Plato uses such an expression as "shadows on the wall."
Middle Ages
Noumen is a term that was widely used not only in ancient times. This tradition was preserved in the European Middle Ages. First of all, the perception of the totality of noumens as a different, intelligible world, which is accessible only to the mind, was extremely popular.
Scholastics often used this term to describe what is relevant to God. Not only orthodox theology, but also religious dissidents used the concept of "noumenon." For example, the theologians of such a heretical medieval movement, which modern scholars have called catarism, believed that our visible world does not have a true existence, because it was not created by God. Everything in it is subject to decay and death. But the world of noumenons is the phenomena really created by God. They are imperishable and immutable and represent the true Universe.
Noumen in Kant's philosophy
Unlike medieval tradition, the famous German classic philosopher gave this term a completely different meaning. For him, the noumenon has no connection with reality. This is an exclusively intelligible object, existing only thanks to our logical conclusions. He even called it "thing-in-itself."
Kant explained his understanding of noumenons as follows. Things and objects that we contemplate and feel, of course, are outside of us. But their essence is unknown to us. All forms and qualities that we see in them - or rather, we attribute to them - such as length, heat or cold, place or color, are rather subjective properties of our way of thinking and the method of cognition. And how all this really looks like, we do not know. Our experience tells us that something exists and what it is. But what is its essence, we are not given to understand. The difference between phenomena and noumenons, according to the philosopher, is a kind of demarcation line that indicates to us the shortcomings of our mind.
