Phenomena / Noumena

I got a train into Manchester today. Seconds after sitting down I heard someone drumming on their chair table. I ignored it and read my book. About a minute after that there was a sung guitar solo that came in with it. Someone was really enjoying listening to early 80s heavy metal. Awkward. He started really going for it with the guitar solos. 

I found myself laughing silently for a second, not at this guy, more because I got it. I’ve done that, not the singing, but the delight. Being in your own headspace, cocooned with Master of Puppets or Ride the Lightning. It’s been a while but there’s such a joy in metal. I laughed because of my own thirteen year old self, I think.

I made out an odd word. ‘Transylvania!’ more drumming ‘Memories! Memories!’ Then it occurred to me. This was a great metaphor for something I’ve been thinking about lately and which maybe forms the heart of a new art project I’m trying to get my head around. Phenomena/Noumena. 

In Kantian terms, a phenomenon is something as experienced. It’s mitigated by your senses and likely also by your assumptions. 

A noumenon is something as it really is, outside of the senses. It’s impossible to experience but there it is, pure reality, unbesmirched and unreachable by grubby human fingers, because the only tools we have to experience anything, our senses, would render it as phenomena.

I’m not sure what I see the noumena as being here. The music? The evident joy this guy had in the music? Clearly the phenomena was the entire carriage hearing him singing. Whatever. It’s kind of beautiful that it pointed abstractly to my own joy. 

I’m digging more into this gap between perception and reality and some of the weirdness that can sit in those gaps. I don’t know where I’m going with it yet. Sometimes you just get a smell in your nostrils, huh? I know I'm not even really making sense yet. Hopefully writing things down will help get me there.