Noumena Quotes

“Many who have learned
from Hesiod the countless names
of gods and monsters
never understand
that night and day are one”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“To claim that there, in addition, exists a behind-the-scenes world, a hidden world that transcends every type of givenness, every type of evidence, and that this is the really real reality, is rejected as an empty speculative claim by the phenomenologists. In fact, they would insist that the very proposal involves a category-mistake, a misapplication and abuse of the very concept of reality. Rather than defining objective reality in terms of an inaccessible and ungraspable beyond, phenomenologists would argue that the right place to locate objectivity is in, rather than beyond, the appearing world.”
― Dan Zahavi, Phenomenology: The Basics

“It is phenomenologically absurd to speak of the phenomenon as if it were something behind which there would be something else of which it would be a phenomenon in the sense of the appearance which represents and expresses [this something else]. A phenomenon is nothing behind which there would be something else. More accurately stated, one cannot ask for something behind the phenomenon at all, since what the phenomenon gives is precisely that something in itself.”
― Martin Heidegger

“Scientists think rationalists are mad because the rationalists are dancing to the Music of the Spheres, to which scientists are stone deaf. Scientists are like the blind describing the visible world to the sighted. The vast majority of reality is hidden from the human senses, yet scientists have chosen to consider the observable as the only reality, and everything else as unreal. In fact, the unobservable is true reality, and the observable is a sensory phenomenal, empirical delusion that actively masks non-sensory, noumenal, rational reality.”
― Thomas Stark, The Book of Mind: Seeking Gnosis

“Hegel was an advocate of panlogism: reason is literally everywhere. Existence is made of reason, hence existence is entirely knowable. Reality is constituted by the mind and is its construction. Given that mind can know everything it made, there is no unknowable, noumenal world. If mind creates everything, there is nothing outside mind, no noumenal objects existing independently of mind.”
― Mike Hockney, Magic, Matter and Qualia

“The greatest lie of all is that we live in a strictly empirical world. We actually live in an analytic, mathematical world of reason and logic, and its flip side is the empirical world of phenomena. Your reason isn’t empty and futile, dealing only with ideals and nothing real. Your reason, just like your senses, feelings and intuitions, directly encounters reality, but noumenally rather than phenomenally, rationally rather than irrationally.”
― Mike Hockney, Science's War On Reason