Phenomenon

PHENOMENON. - From the Greek φαίνομαι, "to show, to bring to light" (root φα, "to shine," "light"), it means appearance, presentation: everything that appears and shows itself to consciousness, hence all the data of external and internal, subjective and objective experience, according to the primitive meaning of the term, can be called a phenomenon. In this sense the phenomenon is sometimes taken as a synonym of fact, although, more precisely, phenomenon adds to the meaning of fact or occurrence the actual or possible relation of manifestation to consciousness. Alongside the fundamental sense indicated, which has also passed into scientific language ("phenomena of the corporeal world," "physical, chemical phenomena"), 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 phenomenon and being, which in Aristotle is purely gnoseological, had instead had in Parmenides (v. ELEATISMO) a strong ontological significance, inasmuch as all consistency of objective reality was denied to sensible appearances, being attributed solely to the immobile and one being. The reduction of the phenomenon to the value of pure subjective experience is taken up again, with a variety of orientations, in modern philosophy, partially in the empirical nominalism of Berkeley (v.), for whom every sensible presentation is nothing other than an idea or representation of the spirit, and fully in the phenomenism (v.) of Hume, for whom the spiritual reality of the subject itself is posited only as a conscious phenomenon. In Kant the phenomenon (Erscheinung) is "the object of possible experience in time and in space," that is, that which presents itself in experience, as a synthesis of sensible impressions and of the a priori intuitions of time and space. As such the phenomenon is formally a construction of the subject or consciousness, and is opposed both to the pure matter of knowledge and to the no less real thing in itself, unreachable by experience and thought. Kantian terminology decisively influenced the current philosophical meaning of the term: by phenomenon is generally meant today 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 intuit, this conception of the phenomenon poses (and already posed 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 is introduced, the objectivity of knowledge is no longer an immediate position and must be founded otherwise, by way of a metaphysical-critical derivation. And 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 phenomenon is denied. The phenomenon is precisely the revealing, albeit partial and fragmentary, of reality in its contingent and dynamic values. Certainly, reality, in encountering consciousness, determines itself subjectively as regards its mode of being in knowledge, but this does not annul the radical objectivity of the phenomenal content, through which it remains possible for thought to reach the more interior and ontological values of the real.

Ugo Viglino