I don’t completely understand the concept. Mabey someone can set me straight. According to Kant there is the world of the phenomena and the world of the noumena. The world of the phenomena is basically things as we know them, from the senses. Our knowledge of the world is comprised of the phenomena. The noumena begins at the limit of what we can know. We are incapable of understanding the world of the noumena.
Is this right? If so, if we can’t know anything about the noumena then why do we even know of it? Did Hegel talk about this?
This seems to be a natural reaction of the mind after it has settled the matter of what it can know and sense but without finding closure. That is to say, you can posit a world of phenomena as exhausting all that we can sense and know, all that we can experience, but without having a complete understanding of what sustains that phenomenal world and how it came to exist, the mind tends to want to reach beyond it and posit more to existence. In the process, it consumes the noumena and makes it part of the phenomena, and thus the infinite regress begins. One way of working around this (although you might debate with me whether it works or not), is to restrict your talk about the phenomenal world to a specific point in time. You can say the noumenal world is beyond the phenomenal world before I starting considering the noumenal world - which would be true (or at least valid) - but any talk about the noumenal world being beyond the phenomenal world now just leads into contradiction.