What is Naturalism? Part III: The Quest for a Pathway to the Noumenal

In the last post, we looked at Kant’s distinction between phenomena (objects as they appear to us) and noumena (things as they are in themselves), and we saw that Kant took the noumenal realm to be entirely inaccessible to human understanding. Whatever is knowable by human beings is knowable by virtue of being presented to us in experience—and anything that is presented to us in experience is a phenomenon. Furthermore, phenomena are not only presented in a form that says more about our mode of apprehension than it does about the things being apprehended (their spatio-temporal properties are an example of this), but any effort to understand them necessarily involves putting them into conceptual categories that, at the most basic level, say more about the nature of human cognition than than they do about the objects being conceptualized.
So, the object of experience is an appearance, not a thing-in-itself (which is beyond the reach of cognition). All our knowledge is thus knowledge of appearances. But the world of appearances has a givenness to it: it is a world we have to come to grips with, a world that operates according to rules that hold regardless of what we might wish. Put in simple terms, this world of appearances is the world in which we live our lives—and even though it is in part constructed by our distinctively human cognitive faculties, its features are beyond our conscious control or will. Space and time won’t go away just because we wish them to—they are an inextricable part of the world of experience.

For these reasons, Kant calls the world of appearances “empirical reality”—it is real in the sense that it’s a given, something we have to come to grips with. But even though space and time are therefore “empirically real,” they are not for Kant a feature of things as they are in themselves apart from our experience. They are, rather, the necessary form in which our faculties of perception present objects to us in experience. Kant captures this idea by saying that space and time, while empirically real, are transcendentally ideal. That is, they are a real part of the empirical world (the world of phenomena) but not of the noumena that lie behind or beyond the empirical world.

If all of this is correct, then “ultimate” reality is unknowable. And, as I pointed out in the last post, this implication of Kant’s thought was not one that others were prepared simply to accept. In the intellectual generation immediately following Kant, there were two towering figures in philosophy and theology who, each in his own way, sought a pathway beyond the wall of unknowability that Kant had erected around the noumenal.

I’m speaking, of course, of Schleiermacher and Hegel. Both thought that Kant had missed something important—namely, that the self which experiences the world is also a part of the world it is experiencing. Rather than there being this sharp divide between the experiencing subject and things-in-themselves, with phenomena emerging at the point of interface, the experiencing subject is a thing-in-itself. It is one of the noumena—or, put another way, the self that experiences the world is part of the ultimate reality that lies behind experience.

So: the self that has experiences is a noumenal reality. Both Schleiermacher and Hegel believed that this fact could be made use of, so that somehow the self could serve as a wedge to pry open a doorway through the wall of mystery, into an understanding of reality as it is in itself.

But this understanding couldn’t be achieved by simply turning our attention on ourselves. As soon as we do that we’ve made ourselves into an object of experience, and this object is just as likely to be the product of our own cognitive reconstructions as any other object. In other words, what we are presented with when we investigate ourselves introspectively is the phenomenal self, not the noumenal self. The self as it appears to itself may be radically unlike the self as it is in itself.

In briefest terms, Hegel’s solution to this conundrum was his dialectical method. If my understanding of myself is at odds with what I am in myself, Hegel thought this would become apparent as I attempt to be (in practice) what I take myself to be (in theory). There arises a clash between my self-concept and what the self really is, a clash that manifests itself as a “contradiction,” one that then forces a revision in my self-understanding. When I try on this new self-understanding and attempt to live it out, another contradiction emerges. And so on. The resulting “dialectic” (Hegel’s name for this evolutionary process) continues until (at the end of history, so to speak) I finally reach a self-understanding that generates no contradictions when lived out. At that point, the phenomenal self has collapsed into the noumenal self—and I come to see what I am in myself.

According to Hegel’s own developed philosophy, the vision I have of my noumenal self turns out to be not just a vision of one small piece of the noumenal realm, but rather a vision of the Absolute (Hegel’s term for the ultimate noumenal reality). And this makes sense, insofar as an understanding of the self cannot be divorced from an understanding of broader reality. A materialist understanding of the self is wedded to a materialist understanding of the universe, etc.

Let’s leave Hegel aside for a moment to consider how Schleiermacher dealt with the same conundrum--that is, with fact that even if I am a noumenal self, the self as I appear to myself may not be all that similar to what I am in myself. Schleiermacher dealt with this conundrum by privileging a distinct mode of self-consciousness, one in which all attempts to make the self into an object of consciousness—that is, all attempts to come to know the self—are set aside. When the self is made an object of study it becomes a phenomenon, and as such is divorced from the noumenal self. But it is possible to simply be—to become quiescent, if you will, and simply be what one is rather than attempt to know what one is.

And in this place of cognitive stillness, one discovers in a direct experiential way an ultimate reality that cannot be conceptualized or made into an object of study. This is the domain of mystical experience—and even though it is ineffable (that is, even if it cannot be made into an object of knowledge) it brings with it a kind of insight or enlightenment. One may not be able to adequately put this experience into propositional terms that can be affirmed as true, but that doesn’t mean one hasn’t in some sense encountered noumenal reality. One hasn’t encountered it as an object of experience (since that would turn it into a phenomenon). Rather, one encounters it in the way one experiences.

The challenge, then, is to attempt to articulate this encounter in a way that is meaningful to us--in other words, in a way that our cognitive minds can grasp and affirm. The encounter itself is what Schleiermacher calls “religion.” The effort to articulate this encounter is theology. My own view, for what it’s worth, is that theology risks turning this profound mystical experience into just another phenomenon unless something like Hegel’s methodology guides the theological discipline. And so, rather than treating the approaches of Schleiermacher and Hegel as alternatives, I treat them as complementary pieces of a broader strategy. In effect, as we spiral up through the Hegelian dialectic, one of the most important things to do is pay attention to what implications our self-understanding has for the interpretation of mystical experience. Contradictions that arise on this front are uniquely significant in driving the evolution of our self-understanding

But defending the merits of this approach will have to wait for another time, because my aim here is simply to describe one broad strategy for trying to get beyond the Kantian wall of mystery that hides noumenal reality from us. And my main reason for describing this broad strategy is to offer a point of contrast with the view that I take metaphysical naturalists to be espousing.

Make no mistake: like Hegel and Schleiermacher, metaphysical naturalists think there is a way to get beyond appearances to things-as-they-are-in-themselves. But for the metaphysical naturalist, the method isn’t Hegel’s philosophical one of pushing successive self-concepts to the point of rational untenability, nor is it Schleiermacher’s method of critically reflecting on alternative interpretations of mystical experience. Rather, the method is a scientific one of describing the phenomenal world, modeling it in essentially mechanistic or mathematical terms (that is, conceiving a general mechanism that might produce the range of phenomena we observe, or a coming up with a mathematical formula that these varied observations all fit into), and then testing and refining the models in the light of further phenomenal observations.

What the metaphysical naturalist claims is that this method gets us past appearances to things as they are in themselves—or at least it moves us ever closer to an understanding of reality as it is apart from our experience of it. The question is why one might think that, and why one might be skeptical. And while I had originally thought to take up that question in this post, my lead-up to it took more space than I had expected—so it will be the topic of the next.