Noumena

Noumena refers to beings of the intellect or intelligible things. Noumena are untainted by the intuitions of sensibility, which are space and time, and are *things-in-themselves*; this latter phrasing of it is how noumena is typically referenced. In other words, the noumenal realm is behind this phenomenal (relating to phenomena, AKA the stuff we experience and feel) world. The use of the term ‘noumena’ found its popularity in the works of Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. Part of the ‘critique’ of reason that is provided there is that our reason cannot know these noumena. In order to understand or cognize such noumena, we need it to be brought to us by intuition or by its presence in experience. However, the only way that we can - under Kant’s view - intuit things certainly and in experience is through the aforementioned intuitions of space and time. Further, our mind imposes, in a sense, various concepts of the understanding of the natural world to allow us to make sense of it. But we add these intuitions and concepts to the noumena, then we aren’t really cognizing it in-of-themselves away from interference. It is an impossible task to fully comprehend these noumena, as it would require us to have them presented to our intuition without the intuition. However, there is something we can know about the noumena: they [or it] exists. The stuff that we experience in the world is only possible through the forms of intuitions, but for there to even be phenomena there must be something underlying them. For example, an analogy that is sometimes used (though it does have some pitfalls in its similarity) is that of red-colored glasses. Imagine if you put on these tinted eyeglasses and look around the world, all you will see are various objects which are red. However, to even see red-colored things there must be some noumenal object underlying them (perhaps there is a green chair that presents itself as red), which would presumably still be present if we removed the glasses. Unfortunately, the forms of intuition are not able to be removed, thus we can never know the true ‘color’ of the world around us - but we can definitively say that they exist. Note: This explanation was of how Kant used the term noumena, later thinkers and earlier thinkers touched on the same thing but with a different term - so it wouldn’t make sense to include it here.