PHENOMENA

[A249] Opposed by Kant to noumena, which beings unlike us (viz., with a radically different sensibility) could experience; all our possible experience, i.e., of appearances, is of phenomena. "Appearances, so far as they are thought as objects according to the unity of the categories, are called phenomena. But if I postulate things which are mere objects of understanding, and which, nevertheless, can be given as such to an intuition [pace our sensibility]...given therefore coram intuitu intellectuali--such things would be entitled noumena (intelligibilia)". Kant argues that the objective reality of noumena has already been established: "for if the senses represent to us something merely as it appears, this something must also in itself be a thing, and an object of a non-sensible intuition, that is, of the understanding. In other words, a [kind of] knowledge must be possible, in which there is no sensibility, and which alone has reality that is absolutely objective". (Kant, of course, denies that we can have such absolute knowledge; all our knowledge is limited by our sensibility to knowledge of transcendentally ideal appearances).