Immanuel Kant And The Phenomenal And Noumena

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Are we free? This is the question that has plagued us since the beginning of mankind. While many different answers have arisen, many more problems have cropped up. Immanuel Kant, famous German philosopher, is known for his outside the box thinking on the subject. Kant theorized that the world is separated into two realms: the phenomenal and noumenal. The phenomenal realm, according to Kant, includes all our experiences and appearances of the world as we know it, whereas the noumenal realm consists of noumena. The noumena, or Kant’s controversial ‘thing-in-itself’, are unknowable entities that exist outside of our experience and are not under the laws of determinism or time. The one specific noumena I will find interest in for the duration of this paper is the noumenal self.
Kant is often criticized for his indecisive view on the location of the noumena, such as Grabau mentions: “…the texts which refer to things in themselves as a separate world of objects are always in the A or first edition. The texts where this interpretation of the thing in itself is denied and where it is made a characteristic of our phenomenal experience are in either the B edition or in a text which is common to them both, indicating incidentally that Kant had this idea even in the first edition but badly stated it” (772). From this back and forth view of the noumena, Kant has divided his followers into two camps of people.
Noumenalists, as I will refer to them for the duration of the paper, understand the noumena and noumenal self to exist within the noumenal realm. Additionally, they hold the view that the noumenal self must exist outside of the phenomenal realm in order for us to obtain free-will. I am in the other camp and believe the noumena can exist...

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... deliberation/access to the noumenal self was determined. Brandon could not choose to not have noumenal deliberation at that present time. It was, simply put, determined that Brandon have a noumenal deliberation. I think this is hardly the sort of association Noumenalists want in the noumenal realm. Any sense of determination, even so small as this, seems to be a problem for the Noumenalists.
Another issue Noumenalists need to consider is consciousness. If the noumenal self is a timeless entity, how do we come to have consciousness of it after birth, and where does that consciousness of it go after we die? Of course, the noumenal self being a noumena, we can’t exactly have any practical knowledge about it, but our intuition would seem to supply some sort of problem for the Noumenalists. A Noumenalist might say that we only experience our noumenal self while alive

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