The Noumenal World
The Noumena, as Kant explains them, are the “things in themselves.” Every experience a human being has must, according to Kant, consist of the self, the thing which is experiencing, and the Noumenon, the thing which is being experienced. This Noumena is then structured through the lens of the self, meaning that it is structured in accordance with space, time, and the twelve categories by the human being which is experiencing it. This structured Noumenon is what Kant refers to as Phenomenon and the changing and varied Phenomena which human beings experience, Kant believes, are the result of changing a varied Noumena. According to Kant, the Phenomenon is not necessarily related to the Noumenon in form or appearance, though it is true that the human will always structure the same Noumena in the same manner. Rather, the Phenomenon is the result of the structure that is imposed upon the Noumena by the human mind. We have no way of knowing that there is any direct link between Noumena and Phenomena because we are unable to experience the Noumena. Anything that is experienced by a human being, Kant states, must invariably have been structured in space and time, and has been judged according to the twelve categories and is therefor a Phenomenon. This is because, according to Kant, we can do no other than structure experiences through the forms and categories because there is no type of judgment that can be made by a human being that exists outside of the forms and categories. For something to exist outside of the forms and categories, it must invariably exist outside of the realm of human experience which is confined to these forms and categories. According to Kant, despite the fact that we are unable to truly know the Noumena, we are still able to glean certain and invariably knowledge about the world around us through this necessity of structuring.
Because human beings invariably structure Phenomena through the same two Forms and twelve Categories every time they have an experience of something, Kant is able to make the statement that human beings will experience the same Phenomenon every time those same Noumena which produced that Phenomena are encountered. This means, being that a human will always structure the same Noumena in the same manner, it is possible for a human being to make a judgment according to the belief that the future will resemble the past because said human being will always structure the world in such a way that the future resembles the past. According to this thought, Kant is now able to conclude that Hume’s skepticism toward the continuity of the future and the past is ungrounded. Likewise, because human beings invariably structure the world in such a way that causal relationships between occurrences exist, Kant is able to state that Hume was wrong in believing that a human being cannot trust causality. Instead, it is through the structuring of The Twelve Categories, that human beings bring causality to the world and are therefor able to trust that their will always be causal relationships in their experiences because they will always structure their experiences in terms of causality. This ability to trust in the continuity of events over time and also the ability to trust that event “A” will always cause event “B” under identical circumstances also allows us to trust in the validity of the sciences and posit certain and invariable laws of science and nature.
Kant on the incorporeal and Pure Concepts
Lastly, where Hume stated that there is no value in that which cannot be explained in terms of sense data, Kant feels that he has left room for a belief in these incorporeal “things.”
Kant states that we obviously cannot have certain knowledge of those Pure Concepts such as the soul, fate, god or freedom because these concepts exist outside of space, time and the twelve categories and are therefore not within the realm of human understanding. Using our Analytic Judgment faculty, we are able to define such concepts, but if we try to form a Phenomenon of them, we fail utterly. Despite this, Kant does not believe we should throw them out. Rather than eliminate them, Kant believes that these unexplainable concepts (he states it is human nature to attempt to explain these concepts through the Forms and Categories despite the impossibility of doing so), should be something which each human being must make a judgment on despite the lack of evidence for any judgment that can be made about them. Thus, he has left room for a human being to have a belief or faith in these Pure Concepts which Hume chose to consign to the fires.
Does Kant overcome skepticism?
Kant makes a valiant effort to escape from the skepticism which we are left with in the writings of Hume, and in many ways he is successful, but in the end, I believe Kant is only able to push the epistemological gap back one degree. He has been able to show that human beings are able to trust to the continuity and causal relationships of our Phenomenon, but he is still unable to prove the existence of his Noumenal world, and he is certainly unable to state that the Noumenal world, if it exists, in any way resembles the material world. Therefore the gap no longer falls between the self and the external world. We are able to trust in the existence of the world as we sense it, because we bring the structure of that world with us. We place objects outside of ourselves in space and time, so we are able to trust that, according to Kant, said Phenomena exist outside of us. The gap now falls between the world of Phenomena and the world of Noumena, and that gap appears just as impenetrable as did Hume’s epistemological gap. Therefore, I must conclude that Kant was only partially successful in escaping the skepticism of Hume. Kant has, in his theory proven the sciences trustworthy, he has proven that we may trust the future to resemble the past, and he has proven that the relationships of causality that we perceive are more than mere convention or habit. Despite this, he is still unable to tell us of the underlying nature of the Noumenal world, nor is he able to fully explore the Pure Concepts. Even fully accepting Kant’s framework, Hume’s skepticism has been pushed back just a bit farther, but not yet eliminated.