The Being of Phenomena

Modern Phenomenalism begins when Berkeley denies the existence of non-mental primary qualities, thereby distinguishing the doctrine in advance from the Kantian thesis of the existence of a thing-in-itself or a noumenon underlying an appearance or a phenomenon. Husserl is more cautious--he allows that things-in-themselves are the objects of ordinary experience, and that they are transformed, not obliterated, by the transition to the realm of phenomenal experience. In contrast, by dispensing with the Husserlian epoche, Heidegger and Sartre revert to Berkeleyan dogmatism regarding the existence of non-phenomenal objects, i. e. by denying them outright. However, both their subsequent Ontologies, Sartre's more explicitly, entail a further inference that even that dogmatism does not authorize. To assert that all existents are phenomena is to assert that they are objects for some subject, and that subject in all cases is a 'Me'. Hence, the Ontological status of any phenomenal object is always properly 'Being-for-me'. But, Sartre and Heidegger go further, and treat it as 'Being-in-itself', as Sartre puts it. However, Sartre's defense of the inference--that being perceived does not affect an object of perception, so it is perceived as it is in-itself--is not only question-begging, but likely refuted by contemporary Physics, leaving it illegitimate. Sartre's eventual abandonment of his Phenomenological Ontology, for Critical Dialectical Materialism, may be a tacit acknowledgment of that illegitimacy. In contrast, much of Heidegger's later work, e. g. his History of Metaphysics, aka the previously discussed History of the Forgetting of Being, is an extension of that logical subterfuge, and is all the more noxious because of its dogmatism.