On Noumena
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.
I found an elegant explanation of the concept of noumena on a mysterious blog. The website is nameless: the URL handle reads “tsvibt”, but the displayed title changes whenever I click on a “different blog title” button. My browser capitulates by showing a dot as the tab label. The author’s username is nowhere to be found.
Here’s the bit:
"Thing = inductive nexus of references" tries to characterize approximations to (or rings around, or emanations from, or pathways toward) Kantian noumena, things in themselves. Wikipedia's Kant says: Noumena can't be directly perceived and can't be known, they are completely eternally external to and separated from minds. We can understand the structure of phenomena, which are the appearances of noumena, but we can't access noumena. Noumena must exist because there has to be something that appears to us, an object of investigation, something that we think about.
A noumenon as a nexus of reference is an abstraction over the inductivity of its nexusness: to say "there's a noumenon behind these related phenomena" is to say "so far we've seen some phenomena (appearances) which point to a nexus of reference, but there will always be further (deeper, more, bigger, tighter) nexusness of reference to be found, no matter how many additional related phenomena might appear later on". Noumena say, "what you have is permanently incomplete".
It's maybe like infinity: to say "there are infinitely many natural numbers" is to say "there will always be more natural numbers that we haven't already seen, even if we see more natural numbers later on". Infinity abstracts over the inductivity of the succession of natural numbers. The fact that things-in-themselves / noumena live in a sort of "remote exterior" from our experience or mental grasp, comes from the use of the concept of "thing-in-itself". The concept of "thing-in-itself" is specifically about that which we haven't already grasped, maybe kind of like how infinity is greater than all natural numbers because "infinity" is used specifically to discuss what's beyond any natural numbers already considered.
The above passage rhymes with the namelessness of the blog—the website’s phenomena showcase the impossibility of grasping their noumenon.
Recall that “Jewish scholars do not write or pronounce the proper name [of God] in most circumstances, but use substitutes […]”. God, the unactualised actualiser, the one noumenon behind all phenomena, must not be named.
The subtitle quotes the Tao Te Ching in Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English’s translation.