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

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made a belief that is as fallible as human reasoning. Could we equate God with the noumenon? That seems a troublesome possibility. (The Will, for Schopenhauer, is something of a blind force.) It would be better to say that God is simply mystery and leave it at that. Perhaps Buddhism comes closest to this position. The Buddhist koans are designed to frustrate the normal linear human thinking in approaching ideas about ultimate reality. The most famous koan of course is: ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’

Traditionally science has regarded everything to be knowable and understandable, at least in theory, so it generally does not acknowledge the phenomenon/noumenon split. If any kind of unknown is acknowledged, it is simply as a result of lack of information. It is there, waiting for an explanation.

Science does not really believe in subjects — they are always regarded as derivatives of objects. Thus consciousness is merely a by-product of activities within the brain, which in turn are derived from objects. This has led to subjectivity being generally derided in our culture and thereby relegating questions of value and morality to ones of personal preference.

The phenomenon-noumenon split, like all our dualities, is something of a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it might suggest that attempts to comprehend the world will inevitably be thwarted. The noumenon, being fundamentally mysterious, will throw a spanner in the works, as it were, and make the operations of nature

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