More on Monsters

Since Kant, at least, we have been very worried about the thing as it is in itself. Kant said we could not know this thing because our experience is structured by a-priori categories of the understanding. We experience phenomena but not noumena; things as our consciousness shapes them not things as they exist in themselves. The noumena are behind and the phenomena are in front obstructing our view. This is not, of course, the only way of looking at the matter. Some, like French philosopher and social scientist Bruno Latour, put the noumena in front and the phenomena behind. The real things are constructed out of a phenomenal backdrop. I like to think of it this way: there is an immense cloud of phenomena; visual and other impressions that clamor for our attention, for admittance into the world of real objects. Of these we must accept some and reject others. One of the ways we do this is science. Some might assume that the function of science is to reflect experience but actually the function of science is to rigorously edit experience. There is too much experience, too much noise and noise must be filtered out into useful information. This is because science is founded on narrative. A lab report is a story about what happened in a lab and a story is lost in too much irrelevant detail. This is why a lab report does not contain a buzzing fly or the smell of coffee or a lab assistant’s smile. This is why science is not about experience and does not rest on experience. It rests rather on a thin and carefully curated pre-selected slice of experience. Science, like story, excludes most experience as noise because it is in search of useful patterns.

The objects in our world are the objects that have passed this editing process or others of a like nature. Dogs and cats along with knives and forks circulate in our social world being bought and sold, used and discarded, talked about, praised and blamed and so on. They have done so for centuries, millennia in some cases and have become objects of such weight and stability that we can’t imagine our lives without them. To that extent they are noumena as are the objects accredited by science, like germs, atoms or the planet Neptune. Religion also constructs noumena like God the Father, the Holy Ghost or angels. These are ‘up-front’ objects that circulate as signs through social and linguistic systems and gain their gravity, their ontological status by doing so. Other objects are not allowed to so circulate because they ruin the narrative. The pulsing, boiling cauldron of phenomena must be strained into a few noumena. According to a principle called Ockham’s razor these noumena should literally be as few as possible. If bears cover all the phenomena associated with bears AND all the phenomena associated with Bigfoot then all we need are bears. Further we must choose bears over Bigfoot because of a principle of parsimony and economy: bears fit easily into our current theories about life and Bigfoot does not. Bigfoot would create the baffling theoretical problem of how such an animal evolved and why it has been so difficult to detect and no one needs more problems. Bears create no such difficulties and that is why we use them, or other known animals, to cover Bigfoot phenomena that cannot be dismissed as outright forgeries.

Of course this would be true regardless of whether there actually was (or was not) a real Bigfoot out there (to revert to another sense of real different than the one we are employing here). Of course the sad part is that this straining process only tempts us to wonder about what is on the other side of the barrier. If  a Kantian tells us to forget about noumena the result is that we can’t stop thinking about them. If a scientist hectors us on confining ourselves to ‘real’ entities, the ones that circulate as signs in their communities, we torment ourselves all the more about the ‘un-real’ ones. This is no doubt because banishment to the status of a ‘para-entity’ gives something an aura. There are probably many layers to this aura but part of it is, in fact, that we know, deep down, that the phenomena are far, far richer than the small number of noumenal entities we have strained out of them.