21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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perception on which the conception can be based, there must, Kant argued, be an underlying reality to allow this conception to occur. Since Kant’s time of course, it has been discovered that there may be extra dimensions of space that cannot be experienced but can be modelled with mathematics. It is not clear whether such spatial dimensions would still be noumena to Kant or have now become phenomena. Indeed, it might be questioned whether space and time are quite as ‘given’ as Kant and science have assumed.

A more modern take is from physicist David Bohm. His Wholeness and the Implicate Order suggests a universe where physical things — and perhaps also consciousness — are rolled up, as it were and are ‘implicate’ in reality until they are experienced, or thought. Then they are ‘explicated’. There is then an ‘unfolding’ which makes things and ideas ‘explicate’.

It was the post-Kantian philosophers, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer, who took the idea of noumena and phenomena forward from Kant’s original version, and Schopenhauer in particular who made noumena into the noumenon, singular, and related it to the ‘nondual’ belief of Eastern religion. His main work, the title of which is usually translated from the German as The World as Will and Representation, has the ‘will’ in the title as the noumenon whilst the ‘representation’ is the world of phenomena. Schopenhauer also introduced the idea of ‘first person privilege’ in that we can know our own thoughts in a way that no-one else can. He thought that the Will was the hidden motivator behind our actions, primarily as the will to live

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