Kant noumena and phenomena8/6/2023 ![]() ![]() He is agnostic about them, claiming that science cannot learn anything about essences so we might as well abandon any pursuit of them. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t believe in essences or in substances. In fact, we can’t even know that there is an essence that underlies these perceptions. ![]() And so, we can’t know what that essence is. All that we can perceive are the external manifestations of these things. You never have a sensation of essence or of being. But Kant is saying you never have a perception of substance. But whether you are a Platonist or an Aristotelian, you still had some concept of substance-some ontology-some sense of being. For Aristotle, they inhere in objects themselves. For Plato, those essences were the ideas that are the eternal ideas. Everybody assumes that there is some kind of substratum of reality that exists beyond what we can perceive. And we remember Aquinas and his distinction-or Aristotle and his distinction between substance and accidents. And then, Berkeley challenged that saying that all the qualities were secondary. Remember when we looked at Locke, and Locke made a distinction between primary and secondary qualities. What he’s speaking about as essences are those metaphysical realities that all of the previous philosophers have been struggling with with their concepts of substance or the substratum. They are God, the self, and what he calls the “der wesentliche” or what we would call the essences. And for Kant, there are three things that he puts in the noumenal world-that is, three notions or categories. Now, the noumenal realm is the realm of metaphysics. The scientist is exploring and measuring and experimenting with things that he can perceive. And the phenomenal world is basically the arena of investigation for the scientist. So, we might call it the “sensational realm.” It’s sensational not in the sense of “fantastic” or “exciting,” but sensational in a more literal sense-in the sense that it is the realm in which we have sensations or perceptions of physical things, the external world to us. It is the concrete material realm where the scientist is engaged in his exploration and in his inquiry. One is called the “noumenal realm,” and the other is called the “phenomenal realm.” Now, the phenomenal realm is the realm of sensations. That is, he distinguishes between two realms. In this schema, Immanuel Kant made a distinction that has perhaps been more famous than anything else that he’s done and perhaps more significant than anything else that he’s done. Today, watch the entire message for free. Sproul shows how Immanuel Kant’s response to this question has influenced the thinking of many agnostics today. Is it possible to prove whether God exists, or is that question left unanswerable because we are bound to the physical world? In this brief clip, R.C. ![]()
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