Oh Those Noumenal Comic Books

The Joker and the World Outside the Mind

If you’re indoors, sit please in a quiet nook, one featuring a window looking out at Nature. Maybe you see a tree. What’s it like? It has a trunk, probably, covered in a dark, crunchy bark, crowned with a thick bouquet of green leaves. But is that really what the tree is like? Maybe the tree only appears to you clothed in crunchy bark crowned in green, but that’s just a relative fact, and “in itself” the tree is none of these things; “in itself” it is not even tree-shaped. Puzzled and confused, you will of course ask, if this is right, what the tree is like “in itself,” but maybe that question is impossible to answer, human language being able to describe only appearances, and such appearances being all the human mind is able grasp.

This I believe is a wild metaphysico-epistemic fantasy, but it has some authority behind it, as something in its neighborhood was defended by the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, over the course of what seems like 10,000 pages, in the Enlightenment’s greatest doorstop, The Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s funny word for the tree “in itself” was the “noumenal tree,” and noumena were unknowable. Kant felt driven to all this by problems about perception, the mind, and the world, that he thought could not be solved in any other way, but he was wrong; trees really are tree-shaped with brown bark and green leaves, “in themselves,” and we can know as much just by looking at, and then hugging them.

I mean, there are still Kantians out there, but if, like me, you long ago swore off italics, and toted your unmarked copy of the Critique to a used bookstore, and bought a lemonade with the $3.50 the clerk reluctantly surrendered after glancing gloomily at how many unsold copies sat on the shelves waiting to befriend the newest arrival, you expected not to have to think about it all that much. So I think it’s kinda awesome to see a philosopher say, not in so many words, that even if Kant’s views are wrong about reality, they might just be right about Batman comic books.