What is a Noumenon?

I will not bore you with the dictionary definition of “noumenon,” although I’m not even sure it exists in too many dictionaries. That is to say, it probably is not in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. It may be in their Unabridged Dictionary. However, that is beside the point.

The point is that I’d like to discuss what a noumenon is and what it isn’t. I guess it’s a tricky thing to talk about because noumenon literally means that which we cannot know. It’s sort of like the opposite of the word “phenomenon.” Other than the fact that the etymology of “phenomeonon” is Greek, I don’t know much about the word’s history. I know that Immanuel Kant used it in his famous Critique of Pure Reason.

I also know that Jean-Paul Sartre used a similar, but not exactly the same, concept in his Being and Nothingness.

Noumenon, then, is something that we have no knowledge of, yet it is still going on out there in the world, but it is unknowable. I thought it’s kind of a cool concept to speak of, yet it’s almost as if we cannot even begin to describe it, because we don’t know what it is. It’s out of our league, if you know what I mean, phenomenologically.

Is a guitar a noumenon then? No, because we know what a guitar is and what it does.

I think what Kant and other authors were talking about when they described concepts or other things as noumena, was that those things were unknowable or unconceivable by human minds. So, things like pure reason itself, by Kant’s account, were noumena.

And so on and so forth.

Yet the reason I wanted to talk about noumena again is because I think in translation a similar process is going on in the “black box” explanation of translators’ minds.

Because we don’t quite know the cognitive processes going on in translators’ minds while they translate, we can say the cognitive process of translation is a sort of “noumenon.”

I have written on this subject before, and what Friedrich Schleiermacher alluded to as a “tertium comparationis” is sort of what goes on in translation, in that there’s a third element going on in between two languages in translation.

So can we say that the tertium comparationis is essentially a noumenon? Potentially. And because the tertium comparationis is a sort of “meta-language,” I’d say it is apt to describe it as a noumenon because we cannot really know what is going on in a translator’s mind in this case. Obviously the translator has a certain cognitive process occurring. However, we cannot generalize about this process in all translators. Otherwise, we might run the risk of calling translation a science, which it seems not to be, at least in my opinion (perhaps I’ll write another post on that line of thinking).

So, there is some more credibility for the “black box” explanation of translation in translators’ minds as a cognitive process. I don’t think it’s necessarily true – i.e. the “black box explanation” – yet what it reveals is interesting because it posits that what is inside the translator’s mind while he/she translates is unknowable. This, I think, is false. Yet, my point is that we cannot generalize about any of these things, and doing so would run the risk of trying to generalize among all translators, which I think a quite hefty (and quite impossible), task, indeed.