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

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terms of getting empirical observations of the world. The split continues on from the objective world into the subjective world of consciousness. This is not the same as the splits identified by psychology we’ve looked at briefly above such as ego, super ego and id or consciousness, sub-consciousness and collective consciousness. To see the world split into noumenon and phenomena is to claim that all of these divisions of the mind have their hidden aspects. Kant also distinguished between ‘empirical ego’ (normal self-consciousness) and a ‘pure ego’ (that is, presumably, the noumenal part of the ego), which, for Kant, could not be known. Just as there is a ‘thing in itself’ — what something is like in the noumenal world — so there is a ‘person in themselves’. Some of the psychological issues will be considered below, as these have a bearing on the development of the discussion within this work. But the phenomenon-noumenon split within the mind is treated as a further and distinct issue from the psychological concerns. As was observed in the previous chapter, modern philosophy — from the post-Kantian philosopher Schopenhauer onwards — has regarded subjects as having ‘first person privilege’, and with Schopenhauer at least, this is seen as some kind of inner knowledge of the workings of the noumenon. Effectively, my will or volition is not really my own, it is the noumenon working through me.

The difficulty with Schopenhauer’s first person privilege is that it might suggest that any and every thought and desire arising within me is actually the noumenon. Indeed, later philosophers, while dropping reference to the noumenon, have nonetheless taken up the idea

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