Beyond Whose Head?
Geoffrey Read
?The World is my idea ? To have brought this proposition to clear consciousness, and in it the problem of the ideal and the real, i.e. of the world in the head to the world outside the head ? is the distinctive feature of modern philosophy.? Thus Arthur Schopenhauer, a real philosopher, in 1818. On the one hand, then, the world-as-perceived (the phenomenal world); on the other, the-world-in-itself (the noumenal world). Two distinct sets of events: the phenomenal within the head, and the noumenal beyond it. And we can no more understand the noumenal by naively applying to it the categories of the phenomenal than we could find our way around Paris with a London A to Z.
