Editing Noumenon (section)

=== Overview ===
As expressed in Kant's ''[[Critique of Pure Reason]],'' [[Understanding|human understanding]] is structured by "concepts of the understanding" or pure [[categories of understanding]], found prior to experience in the [[mind]] and which make outer experiences possible as counterpart to the [[rational]] faculties of the mind.<ref>Hanna, Robert (2009). [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-judgment/supplement2.html Completing the Picture of Kant's Metaphysics of Judgment]. ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy''.</ref><ref>[http://www.science.uva.nl/~seop/entries/kant-metaphysics/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Kant's metaphysics].</ref>

By Kant's account, when one employs a concept to describe or categorize ''noumena'' (the objects of inquiry, investigation or analysis of the workings of the world), one is also employing a way of describing or categorizing ''phenomena'' (the observable manifestations of those objects of inquiry, investigation or analysis). Kant posited methods by which human understanding makes sense of and thus intuits phenomena that appear to the mind: the concepts of the ''[[transcendental aesthetic]]'', as well as that of the ''transcendental analytic'', ''[[transcendental logic]]'' and ''transcendental deduction''.<ref name="EOP, K2">''The Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (Macmillan, 1967, 1996) Volume 4, "Kant, Immanuel", section on "Critique of Pure Reason: Theme and Preliminaries", p. 308 ''ff''.</ref><ref name="EOP, K3">''The Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (Macmillan, 1967, 1996) Volume 4, "Kant, Immanuel", section on "Transcendental Aesthetic", p. 310 ''ff''.</ref><ref name="EOP, K4">''The Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (Macmillan, 1967, 1996) Volume 4, "Kant, Immanuel", section on "Pure Concepts of the Understanding", p. 311 ''ff''.</ref>  Taken together, Kant's "categories of understanding" are the principles of the human mind which necessarily are brought to bear in attempting to understand the world in which we [[Existence|exist]] (that is, to understand, or attempt to understand, "things in themselves").  In each instance the word "transcendental" refers to the process that the human mind must exercise to understand or grasp the form of, and order among, phenomena. Kant asserts that to "transcend" a direct observation or experience is to use reason and classifications to strive to correlate with the phenomena that are observed.{{Citation needed|date = February 2016}} Humans can make sense out of phenomena in these various ways, but in doing so can never know the "things-in-themselves", the actual objects and dynamics of the natural world in their noumenal dimension - this being the negative, correlate to phenomena and that which escapes the limits of human understanding. By Kant's Critique, our minds may attempt to correlate in useful ways, perhaps even closely accurate ways, with the structure and order of the various aspects of the universe, but cannot know these "things-in-themselves" (noumena) directly. Rather, we must infer the extent to which the human rational faculties can reach the object of "things-in-themselves" by our observations of the manifestations of those things that can be perceived via the physical senses, that is, of phenomena, and by ordering these perceptions in the mind help infer the validity of our perceptions to the rational categories used to understand them in a rational system. This rational system (''transcendental analytic''), being the categories of the understanding as free from empirical contingency.<ref>See, e.g., ''The Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (Macmillan, 1967, 1996) Volume 4, "Kant, Immanuel", section on "Critique of Pure Reason: Theme and Preliminaries", p. 308 ''ff''.</ref><ref>See also, e.g., ''The Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (Macmillan, 1967, 1996) Volume 4, "Kant, Immanuel", section on "Pure Concepts of the Understanding", p. 311 ''ff''.</ref>

According to Kant, objects of which we are cognizant via the physical senses are merely representations of ''unknown somethings''—what Kant refers to as the ''transcendental object''—as interpreted through the ''[[A priori and a posteriori|a priori]]'' or ''categories of the understanding''. These ''unknown somethings'' are manifested within the noumenon—although we can never know how or why as our perceptions of these ''unknown somethings'' via our physical senses are bound by the limitations of the ''categories of the understanding'' and we are therefore never able to fully know the "thing-in-itself".{{sfn|Kant|1999|loc=A256/B312|p=27}}