>>24650622
The noumenal is not some sort of "thing" that exists alongside or behind the phenomenal, it is just what the name implies - something we think of rather than something that appears to us. Kant addresses this at the end of the Analytic but so many people get filtered by this section because it contradicts their natural dogmatism. The upshot of Kant's view on free will could be expressed like this - a dogmatist thinks there's a world outside of us of which we can form representations; it follows natural laws that we observe; we are part of this world as embodied animals, and in that sense it's not even outside of us, rather we are inside of it; therefore we too follow laws; therefore there's no free will. But the idealist knows that nature does not actually dominate us in that way, that nature makes no sense apart from consciousness and vice versa (the dogmatist can't even explain how we have representations in the first place, he can't explain self-reflexivity). In this way nature is "appearance". But if nature is not ultimate, if it is something that "appears" to consciousness, then we have liberty to believe in the "thought-thing" (noumenon) of freedom - and you're compelled to believe in this noumenon if you're a moral person at all, or if you even care about morality. He's not saying "oh bro maybe there's this magic Noumenon thing that that makes us free", that's a literalist, filtered reading of the CPR, and it's obviously dogmatic. Reading Kant means paying attention to the (apparent) contradictions and resolving them. He even warns you in the Architectonic that he can't spoon-feed you his philosophy, you have to think it through for yourself, and 'apprentices' get tripped up by literalist reading which blows through and ignores the tensions in the work. If you read it as a book of spoon-feeding... well, you will get filtered. Many such cases, even in academia.
>>24650658
Yup, rank, reeking dogmatism.
