FENOMENO. — From the Greek φαίνομα, “to show, to bring to light” (root φα, “to shine,” “light”), it signifies appearance, presentation: everything that appears and presents itself to consciousness, and therefore all the data of external and internal, subjective and objective experience, according to the primitive meaning of the term, may be called f. In this sense f. is sometimes taken as a synonym for fact, although, more precisely, f. adds to the meaning of fact or event the actual or possible relation of manifestation to consciousness. Alongside the fundamental meaning indicated, which has also passed into scientific language (“f. of the corporeal world,” “physical, chemical f.”), the term has assumed in philosophy further, more technical and determinate meanings.
In Aristotle φαινόμενον is that which appears to the senses, in opposition to being, τὸ ὄν, the object of intellectual perception. This opposition between f. and being, which in Aristotle is purely epistemological, had instead in Parmenides (v. ELEATISMO) a strongly ontological significance, insofar as sensible appearances were denied any consistency as objective reality, which was attributed solely to immobile and unitary being. The reduction of f. to the value of purely subjective experience is taken up again, with various orientations, in modern philosophy: partially BERGER, ELIE (v.), for whom every sensible presentation is nothing other than an idea or representation of the spirit, and fully in the phenomenalism (v.) of Hume, for whom the spiritual reality of the subject itself is posited only as conscious f. In Kant, f. (Erscheinung) is “the object of possible experience in time and space,” that is, what presents itself in experience as a synthesis of sensory impressions and the a priori intuitions of time and space. As such, f. is formally a construction of the subject or consciousness, and is opposed both to the pure matter of knowledge and to the no less thing-in-itself, inaccessible to experience and thought. Kantian terminology decisively influenced the current philosophical meaning of the term: f. is today generally understood as that which presents itself to the subject in knowledge, as distinct from the thing-in-itself and, therefore, is not, as such, the immediate expression of an absolute reality transcending knowledge itself.
As is easy to understand, this conception of f. raises (and had already raised in Kant) the question of the objectivity of experience and of knowledge in general. Once the split between the phenomenal appearances of reality and reality itself has been introduced, the objectivity of knowledge is no longer an immediate given and must be grounded otherwise, through metaphysical-critical derivation. This is what post-Kantian critical philosophy attempted in various directions, but for the most part with negative results. In traditional philosophy, on the other hand, that split between reality and f. is denied. F. is precisely the disclosure, albeit partial and fragmentary, of reality in its contingent and dynamic values. Certainly, as reality encounters consciousness, it is subjectively determined with regard to its mode of being in knowledge; but this does not annul the radical objectivity of phenomenal content, through which it remains possible for thought to reach the more interior and ontological values of the real.