Previously I have developed the notion that our interactions with reality are all interactions via representation, rather than being 'direct' in some sense. The notion of a representation implies something that is represented, hence if we have a 'representational reality' then there would appear to be implied a 'reality-in-itself' that is represented, with the former being the description of the latter.

At this point I can intelligibly introduce an interpretation of Noumena and Phenomena. The interpretation takes phenomenal reality as equivalent to reality as represented and noumenal reality as equivalent to reality in itself. This would constitute declaring the Kantian concept of 'thing-in-itself' and the concept of noumenon to be the same concept.

Schopenhauer is an example of a philosopher who held this interpretation and criticised Kant for his move away from the etymological and historical uses of the terms: "But Kant who, in an unwarrantable manner, entirely neglected the thing for the expression of which those words phenomena and noumena had already been taken, now takes possession of the words, as if they were still unclaimed, in order to denote by them his things-in-themselves and his phenomena." (Schopenhauer, 1969:476-7)

A definition of the term Noumenon that can be understood to support this interpretation can also be found in the first English translation of the work by Heywood:

"Noumenon (Noumenon) - A thing in itself, which can be cognized through the understanding. In a positive sense, it would be the object of a non-sensible intuition, if there were another mode of intuition than through the senses, and the understanding were able to perceive by intuition instead of thinking which is its peculiar province. It is opposed to PHENOMENON"

The same glossary of terms gives the following meaning to 'the understanding': "This is the faculty which conjoins the diversity which is furnished us by the senses, and forms into a whole, the sensible representations which are given to us".

More simply stated, the 'thing-in-itself' (or noumenon) is 'cognized' (or understood) through our 'faculties of understanding' whereby it is transformed into a sensible representation, which is to say that it is transformed into phenomenon.

Regarding the glossary's mention of the 'positive sense of the term', this would appear be to be drawn from the following remark by Kant in which he denies the possibility, or even the mere comprehension, of any direct knowledge by noumena but by the route of phenomena: "But if we understand by it an object of a non-sensible intuition, we thereby presuppose a special mode of intuition, namely, the intellectual, which is not that which we possess, and of which we cannot comprehend even the possibility. This would be 'noumenon' in the positive sense of the term." (Kant, 2003:B307-p268). Kant appears to deny the possibility of noumena in 'the positive sense of the term'.

In contrast, the negative sense of the term is defined thusly: "If by 'noumenon' we mean a thing so far as it is not an object of our sensible intuition, and so abstract from our mode of intuiting it, this is a noumenon in the negative sense of the term". In this sense we have no intuition of noumena, except indirectly via phenomena, but as such is abstract from our common modes of knowing and sensing. Given Kant's rejection of the positive sense the negative sense must be the sense that Kant believes is correct for understanding noumena.

This sense I believe to mirror the interpretation I wish to address, as I hope to show via an extended application.

The concept of representation is also foundational to Thomas Kuhn's work in the Philosophy of Science found in his book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'. Kuhn's work on representation can be useful in illustrating some key issues relevant to my project

Kuhn describes science as being 'paradigm based', by which he does not mean merely that groups of scientists share similar methods, but also that they share a certain way of understanding science, and thus the world (Kuhn: 1996:10-22). Kuhn calls changes in paradigms amongst Scientists 'Scientific revolutions', wherein a change in paradigm can radically alter the way scientists understand the world: "What were ducks in the scientists' world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards." (Kuhn 1996:111). It is not true that Kuhn believes that the world has changed, but merely the way we understand and represent the world.

Kuhn also does not mean to be disparaging of science; there is no indication of disapproval of the aforementioned in his book, instead it appears that he finds this peculiar tendency of scientific paradigms to put itself under such pressure that scientific revolution becomes necessary, and thus leads to an evolution of paradigms through time, to be what makes scientific paradigms superior to irrefutable paradigms such as are often seen in mysticism or political philosophy.

Kuhn's focus is that these paradigms evolve to become more useful in the sense that they gain more explanatory and predictive power, and in this is their usefulness. Scientific paradigms are thus 'models of reality', where in we only expect a representation rather than some kind of 'direct knowledge' of reality itself, and failure to be able to produce the latter is no failing of the model.

The above should not seem unreasonable; we do not normally expect a model to 'resemble' what it represents, but rather to accurately explain and/or predict what it represents. For instance, operating systems are designed to create a representation of the contents of a computer so that we might interact with such contents, but the representation is not intended to resemble the insides of a computer (the operating system Windows is an attempt at such a useful but non-resembling representation).

Hence, there is a parallel between Kantian metaphysics and Kuhnian Philosophy of Science. With operating systems we interact with representations as if they were the ultimate reality of a computer (for instance; the entire folder structure of a hard disk is merely virtual and not mirrored in the placement of data on the hard disc yet we commonly count such things among our objects of knowledge about a computer). Worse; for science it is impossible even to look beyond his or her paradigm and peek within the casing of reality, and we must necessarily limit ourselves purely to the representation. This mirrors the necessary limitation to our phenomenal representation of the world and our inability to see beyond into noumenal 'things-in-themselves'.

Talk of ever possessing such knowledge, as Kant suggested previously, is beyond our comprehension, leading many philosophers to disregard the possible possession (and intelligibility) of such knowledge all together. Nietzsche takes this position in his epistemology of 'Perspectivism', which constitutes a denial of 'knowledge without interest', or the proposition that "The very notion of truth is dependent upon the notion of cognitive interests" and "the impossibility of a view from nowhere, or a view from no particular point of view" (Ridley, 1998:107). He would also in turn reject things-in-themselves entirely, but for the moment it suffices for my purposes to explore this point in isolation.

In Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche condemns the character of the 'The Scientist' for following an ideal that he equates with his notion of an 'ascetic ideal' due to its aspirations to the transcendent, although of course he does not criticise all scientific knowledge but only that breed of scientist that believes in "truth as complete, final, and transcendent" (Ridley, 1998:102), which is to say not the Kuhnian kind. The scientist Nietzsche criticises does not seek merely a representation of reality, but wants to attain knowledge of 'reality-in-itself', which amounts to desiring a form of transcendent noumenal knowledge regarding reality.

In understanding why it is a mistake for Science to try to seek out such knowledge, the 'one true and absolute truth', one needs only to look at the method by which such scientists claim to achieve such a feat.

The method is quite banal and well known. In investigation of the absolute truth of an object scientists will approach the object and use repeatable measurements, multiple observers, et cetera. After examination from multiple angles, careful measuring with appropriate measuring apparatus, and having a second person confirm his results, the scientist can stand back and declare the discovery of the absolute truth of the object's dimensions, a truth that stands regardless of what perspective one approach the object from, and hence in some way 'transcends' perspective.

Such scientists might claim to have provided us with an unchallengeable 'God's Eye View' of reality that is only accessible via the scientific method. However, the flaw is that this method does not transcend perspective, despite having created a very agreeable and often very useful shared perspective of how to approach the object, we none the less are still approaching the object from a perspective, albeit from the perspective of the shared 'geometric eye'. In terms of representation a way of representing the object that can be easily shared with others and that serves certain human interests has been constructed, but by no means have we broken our way into the realm of noumena or otherwise transcended phenomena.

A key difference in Nietzsche's treatment and Kant's however is Nietzsche acknowledges that reality can be approached from more than one perspective, whilst Kant is focused on a scientific perspective, which I hold to be to Kant's detriment.

For instance, instead of surveying an object from a scientific and materialistic perspective, we can instead adopt an artist's perspective and come to an entirely different set of knowledge about the object. Supposing that the object is a painting, then rather than collecting facts about the dimensions and possibly the chemical components of the object, we can instead investigate its use of form, or what the piece represents, or perhaps what it 'expresses' (these three different methods of approaching the artwork may indicate further divisions in our modes of understanding the object). The scientist however may not display any interest at all in such traits.

Hence we are presented with two radically different means of understanding and possessing knowledge about one single object depending on the perspective we use. A person who desires to seek one complete transcendent truth about the object would have to find some way to unify both sets of knowledge into one single system, and in the case of the scientist this would no doubt be some attempt to reduce artistic truths to certain facts about the effect of various images on human psychology, however, this in turn requires the scientist to reconcile truths about human psychology in general with his materialistic approach to truth, which is in turn very problematic.

In psychology we find two distinct methods of representation; one paradigm is material and involves neurological descriptions, and is thus the material scientist's preferred mode of explanation. The other is through sets of immaterial processes within an immaterial mind, and is the more intuitive method of explanation. The problem of unifying these two theories will be familiar to most philosophers as the problem of mind/body duality. In practice, a person seeking 'the one true and absolute truth' is forced to either adopt a materialist paradigm and, contrary to all experience, deny the existence of the immaterial, or otherwise throw oneself into a Berkeleyan madness where one denies the existence of 'substance' in the abstract material sense (Berkeley, 1998: §4,p54)

The simpler alternative is to hold neither to be incorrect methods of representing reality, but just to be two separate irresolvable methods of representing one thing. In Kantian terms we might hold that envisaging human psychology as either material or immaterial are two ways of transforming one noumenal entity (thing-in-itself) into phenomenal entities.

We might be tempted to believe that representational models, such as Kuhn describes, are dramatically different to that of Kant's. Scientific paradigms are constructed based on evidence from the world of experience whilst Kant's phenomena is the world of experience. However, a significant portion of this difference is found in that the construction of the world of experience is innate and unconscious, whilst scientific paradigm is non-innate and conscious. This difference has limited impact however; despite one being hard-wired it is often the consciously constructed scientific models that are fallaciously taken as 'more true', whilst by my conception neither should be necessarily taken as such.

Nietzsche's solution does not make use of the concept of noumena and actually denies the existence of any 'thing-in-itself' entirely, whereas my solution above relies on the concept in order to relate and bring together the two methods of representation. There are multiple reasons for such a position, which shall be discussed later, for now I shall turn my attention to Nietzsche's concern regarding turning reality into an illusion. (Nietzsche §3:12,p85)

The risk with the line of thought I have advanced is to reduce Kant to the same absurd situation that Berkeley suffers from. Whilst I think some similarity to Berkeley is inevitable and not necessarily any bad thing, what I wish to avoid is what Langton describes as "the worst of all veil of appearance philosophies: Berkeley plus unknowable things in themselves" (Langton, 1998:142)

The problem arises from the suggestion that the (phenomenal) reality that we experience is actually just a mental construction our minds create in order to understand and interact with the world. Such a move requires us to believe that all that we think of as worldly objects are merely mental ideas that we have created rather than existing 'out there in the world' (by which I mean the noumenal world). This is reflected in Kant's own writings where he, akin to Berkeley, removes the status of primary qualities as belonging to things in themselves: "I for weighty reasons also count as mere appearances, in addition to these, the remaining qualities of bodies which are called primariae, extension, palace, and space in general with all that depends on it" (Prolegomena, ak. Iv. 288-98, Lucas 45 from Langton 1998:140-1)

An important difference is that Berkeley treats abstract conceptions that aren't rooted in sense impression with abhorrence (Berkeley, 1998: §4,p54) but Kant instead takes them seriously. In Kant's conception we can take such things as being a natural part of our representation of reality we thus needn't deny their existence (although they only exist within phenomena).

This difference allows Kant a less absurd approach to the issue than Berkeley can; whilst Berkeley, being of an Empiricist approach to epistemology, was concerned only with the immediately sensible, "Kant cares less for the manifest image than for the scientific image … Kant endorses a strong scientific realism, and he believes that a primary/secondary quality distinction holds within the phenomenological world" (Langton, 1998:142-3).

Berkeley's approach identifies sense impressions as the fundament of knowledge and the sole subject of knowledge, and thus the above is impossible for Berkeley, but Kant's more sophisticated understanding produces a viable way of understanding the world in a conventional manner.

Whilst there are many occasions where it is entirely sensible to refer to an object as having a certain colour or smell, as per our more immediate and 'everyday' representation of the world, such representation easily gives way to a more rigorous representation of the world that requires only primary qualities and denies that secondary qualities belong to objects. In neither case are we discussing noumenal reality however, but rather two ways of representing noumena via phenomena with the latter being perhaps more accurate and of greater use to the sciences.

Hence we can retain a very non-absurd and common-sensical understanding of the world. We can have the same list of qualities, and the same divisions in those qualities, it is just the case that these are representations of noumena (phenomena) rather than noumena itself. Further, by this conception we needn't deny the truth of a book being of a certain colour, or of a flower possessing a certain flower, despite under some representations such a thing being seemingly untrue. Whilst such scientific representations that reduce smell and colour to being entities of the mind are much more useful in many situations than our everyday representations, they are still both representations none the less.

I hope to have made a sound case for why a person would be motivated to accept such a philosophy, and further how it would not render the way we think about reality absurd, nor require us to alter any of our beliefs or knowledge about the world (but rather to be an explanatory account of how we come to such knowledge, and the limits of such knowledge)

There still seems to be one main area of enquiry left. At this point I shall hope that my conception of phenomena is clear enough, however, it is 'things-in-itself' that needs elaboration, and to some difficulty due to its unknowable nature. Still, having used the term I am intellectually bound to present some account of it.

In illustration of the relationship between a representation and the thing-in-itself that is represented I used two examples, the first being a painting represented by either an artistic or a scientific paradigm, and the latter being that of human psychology via either a material or an immaterial representation of it. By doing this I create the rather questionable implication that 'human psychology' and 'an artwork' are appropriate examples of 'things-in-themselves'.

One understanding of 'thing-in-itself' suggested by the above would be an entity that requires description through representation, that is, any entity we seek to process through the understanding. However, taken the example of an operating system and the contents of a computer we can investigate the contents of the computer by lifting the computer case, but the conception of noumena I have presented holds nourmena to be unknowable.

This suggests that the operating system is at least a second-order representation or another representation, and when we investigate the innards of a computer first hand we are doing so through another representation, and it is what lies behind this representation we are most interested in, and which defies further description.

Hence what we are looking for is both fundamental and indescribable (except through representation). Affixing a term to such a thing is only allowable so far that we find ourselves unable to voice anything about it except by representation, for instance, we cannot say anything about a particular artwork without talking about in either of the two means I previously mentioned, and thus, like a noumenal entity, it defies description via representation.

The case of human psychology is more complex, as the representation itself contains numerous entities within itself. Such entities themselves may defy any description without a means of representation, but yet rather than being a thing-in-themselves, they would seem to be merely components within a representation of a thing-in-itself.

Some help can be found with the realisation that the concept of 'thing-in-itself' can and is regularly applied to items that are phenomenological in nature, rather than noumenal, which is thankfully acknowledged by Kant: 'The rainbow in a sunny shower may be called mere appearance, and the rain the thing in itself' (Kant: 2003:A45,p84)'

What Kant describes in the above is the relationship between an appearance and the thing that it is an appearance of, which in turn may be mere appearance also; in the case of the raindrop, whilst it would seem to be treatable as a thing-in-itself that gives rise to an appearance, it itself is an object of our knowledge and thus must presumably be a mere appearance also.

Langton's elaborates on the issue: "The rainbow is … a 'phenomenon' that is substratum for other phenomena': … for although one treats the rainbow as the subject of certain predicates … it is in turn adjectival on something else, the drops of rain, and so is in turn phenomenon. Raindrops in their turn serve as substratum' for the 'phenomenon' of the rainbow," (Langton 1998:55-6)

Langton's treatment implies a search for a fundamental substance that lies underneath our appearances, the ultimate substratum. Such a search is also incumbent upon me despite my differing use of language; whilst a representation may represent another representation, there must be some ultimate reality being represented rather than an infinite regress, thus leaving us with the true 'thing-in-itself'.

One method of understanding the concept of 'substance' is thus: "The philosophical term 'substance' corresponds to the Greek Οὑσια (ousia), which means 'being', transmitted via the Latin substantia, which means 'something that stands under or grounds things'. According to the generic sense, therefore, the substances in a given philosophical system are those things which, according to that system, are the foundational or fundamental entities of reality." (Robinson, 2004)

Kant's description of substance is as thus: "Substance, … when the sensible determination of permanence is omitted, would mean simply something which can be thought only as a subject, never as a predicate of something else"(Kant, 1993:B186, p187), and thus in Kant we see a similar allusion in the nature of substance as being the fundament/basis of reality.

A common suggestion for such a fundamental substance would be 'matter', but such a suggestion is rejected by Kant: "while this may be true of a thing in itself, as thought through a pure concept of the understanding, it does not hold of that which we entitle substance in the [field of[ appearance. For this latter is not an absolute subject" (Kant: 1993:B553, p460). Matter, in the sense used by the physical sciences, is merely something we give the title of substance, but not substance as according to the earlier definition.

Hence, for Kant, matter is only substance in the phenomenal sense of the term; we treat it as such because it forms a permanent fundament for our representations of noumena, and thus has practical use, but it is not, however, the fundament of reality proper because it is phenomenal in nature.

This of course should not be surprising, aside from anything else, Kant portrays both time and space as 'modes of representation', and hence phenomenal in nature. (Kant 2002:31-32) Given this, substance in the sense described before would have to be both timeless and spaceless, and thus alien to any concept of 'substance' we are familiar with (which is not a remarkable fact given the unknowability of any such 'noumenal substance')

Thus it is impossible to give a direct account of such a substance, convincingly or otherwise, due to its indescribability. This should not be taken as any such bad thing however, I have already expressed earlier how seeking to describe things-in-themselves is misguided in my comparison with Kuhn's philosophy of science. In the same way, appearances/representations are a perfectly adequate way to know noumenal entities.

The above may content us with not knowing anything about the ultimate substratum, but yet wishing to still be able to give some example. Whether we discuss representations or appearances we might feel we should be able to trace back the line until we get to some level of existence where, despite not being able to describe it, we could at least claim to have 'located' it. Such a conception is broadly 'reductionist' in that we seek to dig far enough to eventually get to the basic 'stuff' of reality.

This I believe to be in error. Part of the reason may be seen in comparing a segment of text from Langton to my own treatment of the issue.

"Someone might say of a battle, that it lasted for three days, and that two brothers were killed in the same battle. One might think of the battle as if t were a comparatively self-subsistent individual thing. But battles are adjectival on the existence and actions of soldiers, and if we reify them they are merely phenomenal" (Langton 1998:54)

In the above we are can see the example of how one thing, an appearance, can be broken down into further appearances, and perhaps we might think that if we can break down the appearance of a battle, into the subjects of the people fighting it, perhaps then this could further be broken down into smaller and smaller entities, until we are left with a particularly scientific and materialist view of reality, and there, underneath that, lies the ultimate substratum.

This is in opposition to my example which possesses a reversed pattern. The immaterial processes or material reactions that explain human psychology are mere representations of a greater whole, and in this sense the greater whole seems to be part of the substratum, and not the individual processes and reactions that form the representation.

There is reason to believe that Kant may be sympathetic to my claim given that one of the most convincing attempts to reach a fundamental substance within phenomenal representation ends with 'matter' and he rejects this as true substance, however, if it were that he was not sympathetic, I should have to simply hold that he is in error.

It is not true that we would normally think we get to closer to the truth or to 'things-in-themselves' via reductionism, as illustrated by Wittgenstein: "When I say: "My broom is in the corner", -is this really a statement about the broomstick and the brush? … Then does someone who says that the broom is in the corner really mean: the broomstick is there, and so is the brush, and the broomstick is fixed in the brush?" (Wittgenstein 1972:§60,p19). Here Wittgenstein is talking about understanding language through breaking it down into ever small component parts, as he attempted in his early career, and attempting to show that we do not better understand words by breaking them down into smaller components.

In a certain way my point is similar. It is false that we get closer to the noumenal truth by considering a broom as being composed of a broomstick and a brush, such an attempt to trace out way back to the ultimate substratum is misguided, for considering it just as a broom is as good (accurate) a representation of the noumenal truth as considering as a broomstick and a brush.

As we are forever trapped in the task of representing noumena through representation, then whatever representation we give of the broom is as good as another, provided it is just as accurate, and in actuality it is indeed as accurate to call a broom a broom, as it is to call it a broomstick and a brush.

Understanding reality through matter on the microscopic level may in some instances give us a better representation of 'the truth' (as in, 'noumena') than a more intuitive method of representing reality, on some occasions, but on others it may be an inferior representation, such as when one is interested in social or political truths.

Hence any 'basic substratum' we can conceive of in phenomenological reality will never be akin to the noumenal substratum that we seek, and hence we should cease to seek the latter, or to try to 'locate' it in any sense. Noumenal reality should not be conceived as 'beneath' phenomenal reality, as such a belief only tempts us to dig downwards into deeper and more reductionist representations of reality, whilst all the time noumena lies behimd phenomena rather than beneath it.

Another problem is not in what we consider noumenal reality to be, but rather how it is supposed to relate to phenomenal reality. The relationship between a thing and its appearance, or a thing and its representation, is normally clear enough, but that type of relationship is usually inside phenomenology.

In some way, noumenal reality has to be responsible for phenomenal reality. This is clearest in the language of appearance and thing, in which case it is standard to describe the thing as causing the appearance, however, this route is barred.

As mentioned before, Empiricism has led to the concept of 'necessary connection' being diluted, and the Copernican Revolution can be used to solve that problem. However, in doing so, it transforms causation, and similar concepts, into 'categories'; "forms according to which objects of experience are structured and ordered" (Caygill, 1999:102)

This gives us the required certainty in our belief in a world governed by necessary connection, but it also makes necessary connection phenomenal in nature (which given my earlier references to noumena being spaceless and timeless, should not surprise). If necessary connection belongs only within phenomenal representations of the world, we cannot describe phenomena as being caused by noumena.

The categories comprise of a number of fundamental concepts of the understanding, including those of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Modality (Kant, 2003:B106,p113). This means that we cannot apply such fundamental concepts of the understanding to noumena, which renders noumena the very alien type of realm that we should have expected it to be.

Perhaps the real mistake to describe the relation between noumena and phenomena as being one of appearance at all, but instead to adopt solely the language of representation. The relationship between a representation and the represented needs not be one of cause and effect at all. A representation is not caused by the represented, but constructed to represent the represented.

However, even when talking instead about noumena in terms of something represented, rather than some thing that has casual powers and thus creates and appearance, there is still obviously more to be discussed.

If phenomenal experiences are representations of noumena, then what we are left with is a very convenient picture were we simply deal in representations of ultimate reality, which could be entitled plainly 'The Truth'. We can indeed talk about 'The Truth' (noumena), just not in its own right; we must talk about it only via representation.

Hence all phenomenal experience, or talk of reality, is indirectly talk about noumena. That much must be correct if we are not to find ourselves detached from 'reality' completely (noumenal reality that is). However, a problem may be had in discussing what role the concept of 'noumena' itself plays.

To call our understanding of reality a representation is to say we have only a picture of reality that we interact with reality through, and within this is contained all our knowledge. Take now the statement 'There is such a thing as noumenal reality', and there becomes a problem worthy of serious notice.

The problem is that this statement is that it is supposedly a datum item of knowledge itself, in which case it must be part of the representation (as all knowledge is through representation). This means we have placed our concept of 'noumenal reality' within our representation, meaning within phenomena. However, clearly noumena are not phenomenal entities.

Further, if we consider reality of being composed of two parts, 'that which is created by our minds; phenomena' and 'that which is not created by our minds; noumena', we find that this is an understanding of reality, and thus must be a representation itself, and hence is a mental creation. Also, when we consider that such a mental creation must be internal to our minds, rather than external, we invoke an external/internal division that would also seem to be an internally created mental representation, and thus again internal to our minds. In both cases our explanations of these concepts as representations invokes themselves, which leads to an infinite regress.

On method to avoid such a problem might be to have some form of unrepresentational/noumenal awareness of reality. In order to suggest where we might possess such an awareness I will consider first what would not count.

We can dismiss our awareness of space and time as phenomenal, as well as the many relations involved in those concepts. This might be shown through the way we can acknowledge that it might be possible to represent such things differently. We know that even amongst humans that people's perceptions of time and space can vary amongst them, and even vary amongst ourselves depending on mood or mental state.

Lee Werth brings this to an ultimate conclusion in his discussion of our likely inability to communicate with, understand, or even identify extra-terrestrial life that may have evolved to use entirely different categories of understanding: "the categories we use to experience things and events are hopeless anthropocentric' biological selection pressures have determined the categories we use to construct and thereby experience objects and events: quantity; quality; causality; possibility; necessity; real; etc … it becomes depressingly obvious that such categories and relations are of utility to land creatures who live in the quasi-cyclical environment which Earth provides" (Werth, 1998:85)

Noumenal awareness must be something that cannot be said to be mere representation. Fortunately, such things have a history of being discussed in philosophy, and it is here we should look for a noumenal awareness.

With Sartre's philosophy with his phenomenological method he makes the following remark: "Nothing would be gained by debating whether this sheet of paper reduces to a collection of representations or whether it is and must be something more than that", further he goes on to say "What is certain is that I cannot spontaneously produce the white of which I take note" (Sartre: p2)

What is interesting here is that the certainty of which Sartre speaks is no logical certainty, nor even an ordinary empirical certainty. It's not a certainty borne of thinking through the issue, nor the sort of certainty of 'I know there is a table in front of me because I see it'. It is the certainty of 'having an image'

'I am having an image' is not even a judgement; there is no decision-making process involved. Whilst I might receive sense impressions, and come to a judgement about the world, that I am having sense impressions is not in itself a judgement of any kind.

This is the same kind of certainty seen in Descartes' Meditations: "And let him deceive me as much as he wishes, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think I am something" which thus leads to the cogito "I am, I exist" (Descartes, 1998:24)

'I am, I exist' is not meant as a logical inference. The profundity of the statement is that it doesn't require a logical inference for us to be aware of the truth of the statement.

Explaining this kind of 'knowledge' is tricky, but with the concepts developed in this dissertation I have the means to do so. That I am having a representation, need not actually be a representation, nor even phenomenal. It is precisely because it is not phenomenal that it has this special place in philosophy, as an unquestionable truth that seems to be independent of logic.

The phenomenal world is the representation, but the actual receiving of the representation is noumenal.

Of course, our awareness of our self is not entirely noumenal. We clearly have means of building various perceptions and representations of ourselves also, rather complex ones at that. What I refer to is the ineffable awareness of our selves. The moment we try to think too hard about our thoughts, and our mind, we engage in finding ways to understand it through representation, but we are surely also aware that, even when we are not directing our thoughts and concentration to the nature of experience, we are indeed having experiences, and it is to this that I call our 'noumenal awareness'

I think at this point it is fair to say that I have laid out an understanding of the concepts of Noumena and Phenomena and their place in metaphysics and epistemology. I hope further that I have successfully illustrated how this understanding lacks absurd consequences by showing how they do not invalidate our ordinary conceptions and interactions with reality, nor have any radical effect on how we should go about describing reality, nor with our current store of knowledge about reality (and indeed that such knowledge is still knowledge about reality, albeit via representation). Finally, I hope that my final pinpointing of an example of what noumena might be, through our ineffable 'experience of having experience' that I can inspire some kind of understanding of what sort of thing noumena can be thought to be.

The most significant criticism that can still be directed at my work is in regard to the degree to which it is an accurate interpretation of Kant's work. The interpretation of Kant I have attempted to elaborate and defend is certainly not an interpretation that all would agree is accurate. If this is true, then my work is merely inspired by Kant, rather any defence of the philosophy that Kant would recognise as his own.

I take some solace in the thought that the correct interpretation of Kant is debatable. I believe that part of this problem is that any attempt to translate such complex ideas about metaphysics into a written form will be intensely difficult, and requiring a person of Kant's brilliance to perform with any success at all. It may be thus that Kant's work is not entirely consistent, and lends itself to multiple interpretations. Hence if my writing here can be fairly supposed to differ significantly from Kant's writing in numerous points, then I at least hope that both myself and Kant are trying to translate a not dissimilar understanding of metaphysics to the written form. If this is also not true, then I can merely hope that despite my interpretation being born of misunderstanding that it has enough merit independent of Kant to be of philosophical interest.

Kant, I (2003) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith, UK, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Kant, I. (2002) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. F. Heywood, UK, London: Living Time Press

Langton, R (1998) Kantian Humility, Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Caygill, H (1999) A Kant Dictionary, UK, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc.

Kuhn, T (1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Third Edition), USA, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

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Markie, P, (2004) "Rationalism vs. Empiricism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2004 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, Available at the World Wide Web: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2004/entries/rationalism-empiricism

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Despite the above consisting of merely the work of a graduate, nor a post-graduate nor any professional academic, I felt it was important to provide proper referencing information for anyone who might possibly require it.

I do this partly because I used to find it annoying to read pages online and struggle to find the information I required in order to reference the article, and partly because plagiarism is a very serious issue in many educational establishments.

Hence for the sake of the possibility of someone needing it, here would be a typical format for referencing this article. You should check with your university department in order to get precise instructions of how to format your bibliography.

Hankins, J. (2007) Understanding 'Things-In-Themselves' through the concepts of Noumena and Phenomena Available from the World Wide Web: http://www.skeletalroses.co.uk/html/articles/metaphysics_noumena_and_phenomena.htm