Phenomenon

Last night as I was falling asleep, I saw in my mental vision a woman passing through an open, archway passage, moving away from me. I was, as it were, in the garden to the left of the structure. She was visible, the disappeared, the reappeared as she passed the arches. The whole brief episode— like many other such in states between full awareness and sleep—had a most realistic quality. It might as well have been a film. It was much more real than any memory but somewhat dimmed—as if I were seeing this scene through a kind of intangible but light-absorbing veil.

Now the question I would pose here is the following. Was this a phenomenon? The word comes from the Greek for “to appear.” My Webster’s first definition would include my vision because it states that phenomenon is “an observable fact or event.” I observed it and there it was. A fact for me. The second definition is more ambiguous: “an object or aspect known through the senses rather than by thought or intuition.” What I saw was certainly a vision. It had a pictorial quality—but with my eyes closed it’s difficult to speak of this snippet as a phenomenon produced by light impinging on my eyes. This was no thought or intuition, either—but it vanished instantly as well.

This shows the problems with any philosophy labeled as phenomenology. It may be meaningful (broad, all-encompassing) or narrow and restrictive. A restrictive phenomenology is simply an assertion of materialism using a fancy Greek word. Broadly construed phenomenology means that knowledge comes from experience. Sensory or not, watching that woman in the passage was certainly an experience for me, nothing special but also quite objective, out there, independent of me, appearing to me without any summons on my part.

Difficulties arise when we attempt to determine what is real. Our commonsensical, everyday rule is that seeing is not enough. The real should be capable of examination by touch and hammer too. Here my vision fails the test. I cannot lead you to that archway and I can’t summon that woman to testify on my behalf. I don’t have her number, as it were. Indeed, I did not even see her face. But while ordinary science is very interesting, what I would really like to know a whole lot more about is where, if anywhere, that archway is and how it spent its three or four seconds in my mind between waking and sleep.

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Photo Credit: Ben and Debs Bench: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benanddebsyearoff/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0