Saturday, June 20, 2009

Is Death Noumenal?

Sometimes, metaphysics isn't so complicated as many of the blogs I have written about here, such as the "tree falling in the forest" question that answer to which lies in the "primacy of existence." Sometimes metaphysics is just simply simple. Kant is not considered to be "simple" philosophy, but when you break it down, it can be shown to be simpler than Kant would wish you to think his ideas were.

In this blog, someone asked the simple question of whether or not "death" was an example of Kant's "Noumenon" theory.

Death is phenomenon. "Noumena", according to Kant, is anything our animal senses cannot detect about what is empirical, and which our logic cannot reach.

Death is empirical, observable, and logically explainable. What lies on the other side of physical death, if it exists, would not be a Noumenon either, because a Noumenon regards only that which is undetecable about a phenomenon.

In other words, we see a baseball, but that is the empirical phenomenon. What we cannot detect about the baseball is Kant's "real reality" precisely because our animalism (which he abhored and which therefore prevented him from being objective about it,) prevents us from seeing it.

But the baseball and the state of physical death are still empirical. There is nothing about the afterlife that is empirical--it is supernatural; therefore it cannot be noumenal.

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