BCDU (2014) – Erscheinung

(BCDU  )

Nonetheless, for Husserl   as for Kant  , Phänomen and Erscheinung are not clearly distinguished. Heidegger, by contrast, insists on precisely this distinction when he attempts to clarify the sense of the word phenomenology on the basis of its two components, phainomenon and logos [λόγος], first in his lectures of 1925, devoted to the “Prolegomena to the history of the concept of time,” then later in the introduction to his 1927 treatise, Being and Time   ( Sein und Zeit   ). Returning to the primitive meaning of the Greek work phainomenon, Heidegger defines Phänomen as “that which shows itself in itself,” “the manifest” ( das Offenbare ), and sees in appearance ( Schein ) a privative modification of Phänomen by which a thing shows itself precisely as it is not:

Only when the meaning of something is such that it makes a pretension of showing itself—that is, of being a phenomenon ( Phänomen )—can it show itself as something which it is not; only then can it “merely look like so-and-so” ( nur so aussehen wie ). ( Heidegger, Being and Time  , § 7, 51 )

Heidegger insists on the fact that the term Phänomen, like Schein, has nothing to do with that of Erscheinung, which he claims in his lectures from 1925 has caused more ravages and confusion than any other ( Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, 112 ). Erscheinen has, in effect, as Kant   himself had emphasized, the sense of an indication by one thing of another, which latter precisely does not appear. Erscheinen ( to appear ) is thus paradoxically a “not-showing-itself,” which implies that “phenomena ( Phänomene ) are never appearances ( Erscheinungen ),” and that one therefore cannot explain the first term by means of the second, since on the contrary Erscheinung, insofar as it is an indication of something that is not shown by means of something that is shown, presupposes the notion of Phänomen ( Sein und Zeit  , 52 ).

It is thus of the utmost importance for Heidegger not to place Schein and Erscheinung on the same level: the former, as a privative modification of Phänomen, includes the dimension of the manifest, while the latter, like all indications, representations, symptoms, and symbols, already presupposes in itself the dimension of the self-display of something, that is, the Phänomen: “In spite of the fact that ‘appearing’ ( Erscheinen ) is never a showing-itself ( Sichzeigen ) in the sense of ‘phenomenon’ ( Phänomen ), appearing is possible only by reason of a showing-itself of something” ( Sein und Zeit  , 53 ).

Sometimes, however, without regard for the difference in meaning of the two terms, Phänomen is defined as the Erscheinung of something that does not reveal itself, which leads on the one hand to an opposition between the realm of appearance and that of being in itself, and on the other, insofar as we tend to give ontological priority to the “thing in itself,” to devalue Erscheinung as “blosse Erscheinung”—mere appearance—which is itself identified with Schein, illusion. As Heidegger emphasizes in his Lectures of 1925, “Confusion is then carried to extremes. But traditional epistemology and metaphysics live off this confusion” ( Prolegomena, 114; History of the Concept of Time, 83 ).