Phenomenon - More Notes

That word, phenomenon, has come to be associated with the purely physical in the eighteenth century when Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) made a sharp distinction between phenomena and noumena, the appearances of things (die Erscheinungen) and things-in-themselves (die Dinge-an-Sich). We only have access to phenomena, Kant taught, and that by means of the five physical senses. Noumena are inaccessible to us, utterly unknowable. He thus split reality in two. Nothing is accessible to us except by the senses, but what the senses tell us has a kind of mysterious and hard reality behind it.

This illustrates the way philosophers can influence perception—especially those philosophers who are lifted into prominence, a social process actually. The word he used for thing-in-itself, noumenon, in the Greek once meant either “thing perceived” or “what is known.” The linkage implied between perception and knowledge in this word is not emphasized in that other Greek word, phenomenon, “that which appears.” But that which is perceived is certainly that which appears. Hence Kant’s exploitation of the word had an intention: he used the second sense of noumenon and restricted the word phenomenon to the first meaning of noumenon. In the Greek they are equivalent, but one carries more emphasis on knowledge.

But is there any legitimacy in thinking that phenomena hide something utterly inaccessible? And how then do we deal with perceptions in which vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are not genuinely present? Such is certainly the case in hypnagogic visions, for instance, of which I mentioned one the other day here and have discussed the subject at greater length here. Is vision with eyes closed some as yet undiscovered sixth sense?

This subject is important for a reason. Our current bias to narrow the meaning of the word phenomenon to the senses absolutely forces us to regard any other experience, however real it is, to the region of illusion. This served the spirit of the enlightenment and the succeeding era of materialism very well. A consequence of this has been that we’ve marked as Off Limits an extensive range of reality with possibly very serious consequences. I’ll expand on that as the New Year takes hold and starts to run.