A common theme in 20th century philosophy and psychology has been the study of "phenomenon", also known as the field of phenomenology.
Just from the etymology alone, we can see that the 'appearances' of the world possessed a numinous quality which most of us simply do not pick up on anymore. They have become objects or signs instead of symbols, exteriors without any interior, syntax without semantics. Owen Barfield wrote an entire book about the need for us to 'save the appearances', fittingly called, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry.Documented in the Late Latin phaenomĕnon, referring to the Greek phainomenon, for describing a thought by an individual that is reflected in reality as an experience that escapes the commonplace, even alluding to something that appears to be real, associated with the passive verb phainesthai, for ‘appeared’, from the verb phainein, for ‘to show’ or ‘to appear’, with roots in the Indo-European *bha, interpreted as ‘to shine’ or ‘ to illuminate’.
"The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.” (Barfield)
.Saving the Appearances is about the world as we see it and the world as it is; it is about God, human nature, and consciousness. The best known of numerous books by the British sage whom C.S. Lewis called the "wisest and best of my unofficial teachers," it draws on sources from mythology, philosophy, history, literature, theology, and science to chronicle the evolution of human thought from Moses and Aristotle to Galileo and Keats. Barfield urges his readers to do away with the assumption that the relationship between people and their environment is static. He dares us to end our exploitation of the natural world and to acknowledge, even revel in, our participation in the diurnal creative process
There are many other 20th century thinkers who chronicled a similar evolution of consciousness, including, but certainly not limited to, Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, William James, Rudolf Steiner, Martin Heidegger, Jean Gebser, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Sri Aurobindo. There is much more that could be said on this topic, but for our purposes here I want to focus on late Heidegger, who looked at the phenomenology of thinking and cognition with his students. Unlike the art, mythology, philosophy and technology of ancient civilizations, which we must approach indirectly, thinking and cognition is something we can undoubtedly call our own and experience first-hand.
While perceptions appear to us from without, thinking appears from within. The experience of perceiving appearances seems passive, while the experience of thinking about appearances seems active. The important thing to remember here is that we are not talking about what is metaphysically "true" about perceptions, thoughts and the appearances, but how the appearances of perceptions and thoughts reveal themselves to us in the present day. Thinking appears to be a 'latecomer' in the evolutionary process, which is why we are starting with it first. It is most readily and expansively accessible to us for that reason.
We can think of it like peeling off the layers of an onion or taking off clothes to look at the body. We start with what was put on most 'recently' and work from there. From here, we will survey some ideas from Heidegger's lectures on this topic in detail. I want any readers to understand that I am simply repeating in this 'essay' what I have learned from others, and nothing I am writing here is original. I will conclude this portion with a quote from Heidegger's lectures to his students, which were compiled into a book, What is Called Thinking.
.Heidegger, [i wrote:What is Called Thinking?[/i]]But must here give attention to another matter. The interpretation of Greek thinking that is guided by modern conceptual thinking not only remains inappropriate for Greek thinking; it also keeps us from hearing the appeal of the problematic of Greek thinking, and thus from being held to a constantly more urgent summons to go on questioning. We must not fail, of course, to reflect on why and in what way it was precisely the thinking of the Greeks that essentially prepared the development of thinking in the sense of forming conceptual ideas; indeed, Greek thinking was bound to suggest that development. But on the path which we are following here, the important thing for us is first to see that our modern way of representational ideas, as long as it stubbornly holds to its way, blocks its own access to the beginning and thus to the fundamental characteristic of Western thinking