Phenomenon

In philosophy, the term “phenomenon” refers to what is sensible: the observable data of experience and what human beings can grasp with the five senses. It is counterbalanced by “noumenon,” variously interpreted as “concept” or “law,” in epistemology in the tradition of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Simply put, epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge: what is known, what can be known, and how people come to know what they know. Concepts, which have been described as the patterns underlying sensory data, are arrived at after making inferences from aggregations of data. The natural law of gravity would be an example of a noumenon, while a quarter falling to the ground after being dropped would be an example of a correlated phenomenon. Kant drew a distinction between the unknowable objects-in-themselves that make up the world and people’s perceptions of those objects. He argued that a person’s interactions with the world are inevitably mediated by the formation of mental concepts of the world. According to Kant, the gap between reality as such and the mental experience of it is unbridgeable, although humanity’s faculty of reason provides a grappling hook. The phenomenal world is at the center of many debates in epistemology.

Background

Kant gives the concept, or noumenon, privileged status in the sense that it comes before, is logically prior to, and has a causal or determining relationship with its material manifestation, or phenomenon. As such, he is an idealist philosopher, as opposed to a materialist philosopher, who would give priority to the phenomenon.

The phenomenal realm is the primary concern of empiricists such as Francis Bacon (1561–1626), George Berkeley (1685–1753), and David Hume (1711–76). For empiricists, knowledge is derived most importantly through the process of sensory apprehension of phenomenon. Kant argued that it is erroneous to equate things in reality exactly with people’s sense impressions and mental concepts of these things. After all, one can think of many examples of how a person’s senses can be fooled, from optical illusions and mirages to phantom limb syndrome. Despite his criticisms, Kant adopted the empiricist skepticism of resorting to an ultimate and singular cause (God) to explain and understand the world, which had long been a mainstay of philosophy. For Kant, knowledge could be gained only with reference to other knowledge, not through reference to unknowable transcendent causes or unknowable things-in-themselves. According to Kant, there is always a part of a phenomenon that is simply given from nonconceptual nature.

German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770–1831) was among the first to use the word “phenomenology,” in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). His use of the term had mainly the interest in consciousness, specifically self-consciousness, in common with that of later German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), who is credited with creating phenomenology as a philosophical approach. Hegel shared Kant’s critique of strong empiricism—that is, the belief that all perceptions are mental approximations of the world “out there” and not things-in-themselves as they are. However, whereas Kant placed the noumenal realm (the one of natural law) external to consciousness, for Hegel it was inside consciousness itself. The recognition of the noumenal inside is part of the process of coming to self-consciousness.

Overview

To get to the truth of phenomena, it is necessary to have one’s senses as well as the awareness of how they can be fooled. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), René Descartes (1596–1650), and John Locke (1632–1704) tried to anticipate Kant’s critique of strong empiricism. Strong empiricism, also known as scientific realism, takes the position that the combination of one’s senses with mathematics provides the best tool for creating new knowledge. Aware of the possibility of distorted sense impressions, these philosophers made a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, most notably outlined in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). A quality is an attribute of an object. A primary quality is one that the object has regardless of whether it is being observed. It has a size and shape; it occupies a certain amount of space in a certain way. Color and taste, however, are secondary qualities. Color depends on a third phenomenon—light—to make it appear just so to an observer’s eyes. The green of a tree’s leaves is different at twilight than it is at noon.

For Descartes, acts of perception in which one understands phenomena could be divided into two categories: pure onlooking—which gives the observer objectively accurate, if not immediate, access to phenomena—and distorted looking. The problem is that there is no way to know when one is or is not engaging in pure onlooking. To solve this problem, according to the scientific realists, one must resort to an ideal being that can separate the primary qualities of phenomena from their secondary qualities, then try to reconstruct the world as perceived by this ideal being. Locke thought that if people’s senses were tuned a little finer, they would see the world solely in primary qualities. However, Husserl asserted that no being whatsoever could perceive a world of physical objects with only primary qualities, not even God. He also suggested that it is impossible to even imagine objects with only primary qualities. To the extent that Husserl puts aside the question of an ideal being with perfect perception (or an ultimate cause of the entire world), he fits nicely into the critical paradigm set by Kant.

Husserl was the founder of the philosophical approach of phenomenology. However, British philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) pointed out that this is an unfortunate name, because Husserl, like Kant, tried to veer away from the unreachable truth of things-in-themselves, and it follows that he was only marginally interested in the world of phenomena—that is, the sensible world. Instead, he tried to focus philosophical attention on acts of consciousness. And while one’s consciousness is without a doubt continually affected by one’s sensory input, the objective world is too unknowable compared to humanity’s experience of it.

Husserl’s phenomenology used a method called “epoche,” or suspension of judgment, which tries to adopt an intentional naïveté toward phenomena as a person experiences them. Consciousness is always conscious of something, and people’s emotional states, rather than being merely passive hitchhikers on their journeys, affect how they perceive the world. Phenomenology attempts to take an objective approach to subjective experience, setting aside beliefs, opinions, and theories that shape people’s perception of the world. Knowledge of these perceptions as true comes through intersubjectivity, which is simply the verification of one’s perceptions as true by the agreement of others. A similar concept in the philosophy of science is repeatability: the results of a study or experiment become verified when similar results are achieved by different researchers. While scientific realism is the predominant outlook of most of the sciences, phenomenology has achieved a wide currency and use in many other fields, including communications, linguistics, and education.

Bibliography

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