PHENOMENISM. - In its most rigorous expression, it is the philosophical system that denies the reality of being or the thing in itself beyond the pure phenomenon (v.), and therefore affirms the reduction of all that is real to the facts and contents of psychic experience. This is pure phenomenism, which might also be called metaphysical, as opposed to epistemological phenomenism, which, without denying the thing in itself or, in any case, without pronouncing on its existence (agnostic phenomenism), nevertheless denies that it is knowable, reducing all our knowledge to the pure phenomenon understood as subjective representation.
Epistemological phenomenism arises in the history of thought with Protagoras (v. SOFISTI). Indeed, the conception of sense perception as the heterogeneous result of the encounter of two movements, that of the object and that of the perceiving sense, led to the empirical relativism in which phenomenism was germinating. Protagoras could therefore affirm that "man is the measure of all things" (Diogenes Laertius, IX, 51; Plato, Theaetetus, 152 a), insofar as he is not given to perceive reality as it is in itself, but only as it appears to him at the moment of perception, conditioned and determined by his actual and individual subjectivity.
Phenomenism in the more rigorous sense (agnostic phenomenism and pure phenomenism) is a position characteristic of modern philosophy, determined principally by the critique leveled by J. Locke and D. Hume against the objectivity of the concept of substance. It is therefore on the basis of empiricism that modern phenomenism is born and develops, in turn inserting itself into the history of idealism, through the gradual process of absorption of the real into the sphere of subjective experience.
Thus, while in the empirical immaterialism of G. Berkeley only material reality is reduced to the value of phenomenon, D. Hume, who in this will later be followed by the representatives of the empirico-materialist school (I. Taine, T. Huxley, and, at least in an agnostic sense, J. Stuart Mill), extends phenomenism also to the field of spiritual experience, denying the substantiality of the I or knowing subject: "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception" (A Treatise of Human Nature, I, 1, part 4, sect. VI, Ital. trans. by A. Carlini, Bari 1926, p. 305). Against the metaphysical skepticism that was implicit in Hume's integral phenomenism, the Kantian critical reconstruction was of no avail, since it too issued in a gnoseological phenomenism in which every knowledge of things in themselves is definitively precluded to theoretical human reason. And Kantian phenomenism lives again in a great part of the subsequent philosophical speculation, fixed in the relativism of knowledge, and therefore in the denial of its objectivity, in the strongest and most traditional sense of the term: thus, whether pure, with varying emphasis and different orientations, in G. F. Herbart, R. Lotze, W. Hamilton, A. Comte, H. Spencer, and principally in the author of French neo-criticism, C. Renouvier, who reduces the whole world of experience and of theoretical knowledge to a system of relations among phenomena. In Italy a new radical form of phenomenism was championed with tenacity and speculative vigor by C. Guastella (v.).
Idealism, born from the Kantian critique as a further development of its intrinsic postulates and an attempt at metaphysical reconstruction in the face of its agnosticism, likewise resolves itself, at least as far as the world of our experience is concerned, into phenomenism. Indeed, the reduction of reality to the subjective unfolding of transcendental consciousness (J. G. Fichte), or to the dialectical process of the idea (G. W. F. Hegel), or to the perpetual self-positing of the act (G. Gentile), entails the denial of reality as an ontological position transcending the immanent experience of the subject, and therefore the denial of the thing in itself beyond the phenomenal world.
The extreme position of pure phenomenism does not claim, from the logico-metaphysical point of view, any solid consistency. In fact, even setting aside all the negative consequences in the ethical field that the denial of the substantial reality of the human spirit brings with it, the reduction of all that is real to phenomenon or simple conscious representation is inconceivable once one recognizes the absolute value of the logico-metaphysical principles of thought: the phenomenon indeed, as a datum and fact of consciousness, presupposes that at least consciousness, as the perceptive center and unifier of phenomena, has the ontological consistency of being or substance.
As for gnoseological-agnostic phenomenism, it can defend itself only on the presupposition of the absolute subjectivity of the phenomenon. But this is a pure postulate of relativism, unjustified both on the part of the nature of knowledge (which indeed demands the conforming of the object to the conditions of the knowing subject, but not the absolute heterogeneity of the datum of consciousness with respect to reality), and on the part of the positive contents that reflection finds in consciousness. In the interior and clear experience of our spiritual activity we indeed really know something of our most intimate being, and through the appearing in sense experience of an external reality, albeit under partial and relative aspects, the way remains open to thought for a positive and objective knowledge of the thing in itself (v. CONOSCENZA).
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Ugo Viglino