Phenomena and Noumena

Kant's view of the world is truly a "footnote to Plato," as A. N. Whitehead wrote. The idea of phenomena (the word meaning what we can sense) and noumena (the 'spirit' or ideal world) reflects greatly Plato's world Ideas and our world which attempts to replicate these Ideas. This is what it looks like to me:

Us (subjective) ||||||||| The world (objective) ||||||||| The world of Ideas

Now traditionally, philosophers (existentialists excepted, and we shall get to them in a minute) have been trying to empirically or rationally see the world as it really is. This is how philosophy got broken up into the Sciences (experimental, psychiatry, psychology, etc.). Is it possible to attain the world of ideas by plowing through the world as it is objectively?

The other possibility is as the existentialists believed, that there is no world of Ideas. There is no Ideal way of doing things, no big capitalised Ideas like Beauty, Justice and Truth. We should do things not because it follows some divine precept (as the world of the Ideas is surely divine if not traditionally so), but just because we want to do the right thing. While this does lead to freedom of will, it still begs the question of what those right things are and how we can know they are right. Maybe we don't know and that's the point, that we do things we believe to be right even though we will never know for sure. I for one believe that if you are constantly questioning your actions, you are in the right, no matter what decision you have made. The world's greatest atrocities have been committed by people who believed unquestioningly in their cause.

Quite possibly (and this is what I've been hinting at -loudly- since the beginning of my blog), my view is something that cannot be communicated in this 2 dimensional space. Perhaps the way into the world of Ideas is not through the world as we know it objectively, but backwards, away from our senses. It could be, instead of a straight line from us to the world to the Ideas, a circle from Ideas to us to the world.

"Human beings go around admiring the mountain heights, the mighty tides of the sea, the broad streams of the river, the circle of ocean, and the orbits of the stars, but do not care to look more deeply into themselves." -Petrarch [Mt. Ventoux]