FENOMENISM. — In its most rigorous expression, it is the philosophical system that denies the reality of being or of the thing phenomenon (v.), and consequently asserts the reduction of all reality to the facts and contents of psychic experience. This is pure f., which might also be called metaphysical, in opposition to epistemological f., which, without denying the thing in itself or, in any case, without pronouncing upon its existence (agnostic f.), nevertheless denies that it is knowable, reducing all our knowledge to the pure phenomenon understood as subjective representation.
Epistemological f. arises in the history of thought with Protagoras (v. SOFISTI). Indeed, the conception of sense perception as the heterogeneous result of the encounter between two movements, that of the object and that of the perceiving sense, led to the empirical relativism in which f. was already germinally present. Protagoras could therefore assert that “man is the measure of all things” (Diogenes Laertius, IX, 51; Plato, Theoret., 152 a), since he is not granted perception of reality as it is in itself, but only as it appears to him at the moment of perception, conditioned and determined by his present individual subjectivity.
F. in the stricter sense (agnostic f. and pure f.) is a position characteristic of modern philosophy, determined chiefly by the critique directed by G. Locke and D. Hume against the objectivity of the concept of substance. It is therefore on the basis of empiricism that modern f. arises and develops, in turn entering into the history of idealism through the gradual process of absorbing reality into the sphere of subjective experience.
Thus, whereas in the empirical immaterialism of G. Berkeley only material reality is reduced to the value of phenomenon, D. Hume, who would subsequently be followed in this by the representatives of the empirical-materialist school (I. Tsin, T. Huxley, and, in at least an agnostic sense, J. Stuart Mill), extends f. also to the field of spiritual experience, denying the substantiality of the self or knowing subject: “For my part, when I enter most deeply into what I call myself, I always encounter some particular perception of heat or cold, light or darkness, love or hatred, pain or pleasure, or something else. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception” (Treatise on Human Nature, I, 1, part 4, sect. VI, Italian translation by A. Carlini, Bari 1926, p. 305). Against the metaphysical scepticism implicit in Hume’s integral f., the Kantian critical reconstruction was of no avail, since it too arrived at an epistemological f. in which every theoretical knowledge of things in themselves is definitively closed off to human reason. And Kantian f. lives on in a large part of subsequent philosophical speculation, fixed upon the relativism of knowledge and therefore upon the denial of its objectivity, in the strongest and most traditional sense of the term: thus, whether pure f. with varying emphases and differing orientations, in G. F. Herbart, R. Lotze, W. Hamilton, A. Comte, H. Spencer, and chiefly in the author of French neo-criticism, C. Renouvier, who reduces the entire world of experience and theoretical knowledge to a system of relations among phenomena. In Italy, a new radical form of f. was advocated with tenacity and speculative vigour by C. GUASTELLA, COSMO (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 regards the world of our experience, into f. Indeed, the reduction of reality to the subjective development of transcendental consciousness (J. G. Fiche), or to the dialectical process of the idea (G. W. F. Hegel), or to the perennial self-positing of the act (G. Gentile), entails the denial of reality as an ontological position transcending the subject’s immanent experience, and therefore the denial of the thing in itself beyond the phenomenal world.
The extreme position of pure f. has no solid consistency from the logical-metaphysical point of view. Indeed, even setting aside all the negative consequences in the ethical sphere entailed by the denial of the substantial reality of the human spirit, the reduction of all reality to phenomenon or simple conscious representation is inconceivable once the absolute value of the logical-metaphysical principles of thought is acknowledged: the phenomenon, in fact, as a datum and fact of consciousness, presupposes that at least consciousness, insofar as it is the perceptive and unifying centre of phenomena, possesses the ontological consistency of being or substance.
As for epistemological-agnostic f., it can be defended only on the presupposition of the absolute subjectivity of the phenomenon. But this is a pure postulate of relativism, unjustified both on the basis of the nature of knowledge (which does indeed require the object to conform to the conditions of the knowing subject, but not the absolute heterogeneity of the datum of consciousness in relation to reality), and on the basis of the positive contents that reflection discovers in consciousness. In the inward and clear experience of our spiritual activity we in fact genuinely know something of our most intimate being, and through the appearance in sense experience of an external reality, even if under partial and relative aspects, the way remains open to thought for a positive and objective knowledge of the thing in itself (v. CONOSCENZA).