Author: Matthew Sanderson
Category: Phenomenology and Existentialism, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, Philosophy of Religion
Word Count: 999
Imagine seeing new beauty and meaning in your favorite painting every time you view it. Or feeling taken aback—surprised even—by how attractive your romantic partner is, not just physically, but as a person. Or having what you believe was an experience of a spiritual reality that completely caught you off guard and left you struggling to describe what you seemed to encounter.
These are examples of what French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) calls “saturated phenomena”: things people seem to experience (e.g., artworks, romantic partners, spiritual realities, etc.) that “blow your mind,” i.e. that exceed a person’s ability to make sense of them.
This essay introduces Marion’s concept of saturated phenomena, an important idea in the school of philosophy known as “phenomenology.”[1]
1. The Phenomenology of Givenness
Marion is a phenomenologist. As the name implies, phenomenology is the study of phenomena, i.e., things as they seem to appear to our minds in experience: other people; moods and emotions; sensations such as sights and sounds; perhaps even spiritual, non-sensory realities such as God.[2]
Phenomenology seeks to describe phenomena as we seem to subjectively experience them. For instance, to study romantic love, phenomenologists try to describe what the experience of falling in love seems to be like in “lived experience,” i.e., experience from a first-person perspective.[3]
Phenomenologists believe that accurate descriptions of lived experiences capture the essence or defining characteristics of how phenomena appear to us.
According to Marion, saturated phenomena are a unique and important type of phenomena we experience. Marion aims to describe the “givenness” of such phenomena: how they give or present themselves, on their own terms, to our minds.[4] This is because he thinks our minds only receive saturated phenomena rather than causing them somehow.[5]
2. The Active Mind
Marion agrees with previous phenomenologists (e.g., Husserl and Heidegger) that our minds typically shape experiences.[6] Our minds do this by anticipating, filtering, categorizing, and imposing meaning onto many of the phenomena we experience. This mental activity enables us to understand and maintain a sense of control over what we experience. As a result, our experiences partially consist of what our minds contribute to them.
For instance, your mind uses the concept of “essay” to identify what you’re currently experiencing. Expectations in your mind help you prepare for what might happen in the future, such as anticipating an example after reading “such as.” Mental pictures allow you to imagine possibilities and also “fill in” what’s missing from an experience, such as the backside of objects when looking at their front.
Marion believes that experiences of saturated phenomena overwhelm the mind’s ability to help structure and construct experiences in these ways.[7] To see why, it helps to contrast saturated phenomena with what Marion calls poor phenomena.[8]
3. Poor Phenomena
Some phenomena perfectly “match” what’s in our minds.[9] For instance, your smartphone is probably exactly what you have in mind—what you expect and visualize—each time you reach for it.
However, poor phenomena are those where our mental concepts and expectations are much greater, fuller, or richer than the given phenomenon.
For example, a musician might feel like she can never get her instrument to sound as good as what she “hears” in her head. Another example is any circular object you experience in the world compared to your idea of a perfect circle.
In these examples, the phenomena experienced (i.e., the music and circular objects) are “poor” compared to the richness of ideas the mind actively contributes to the experiences.
4. Saturated Phenomena
Saturated phenomena, on the other hand, are things given or presented to our minds which are more than we can “take in,” overflowing (i.e., saturating) our comprehension ability.[10] Whereas poor phenomena give too little in comparison to our mental ideas, saturated phenomena give too much, overwhelming our capacity to grasp or make sense of them. In short, poor phenomena fail to meet our expectations, while saturated phenomena far exceed them.[11]
Marion thinks we often experience saturated phenomena.[12] For instance, historical events (e.g., 9/11) can saturate our minds with their complexity and abundance of information; artworks can saturate us with everything they make visible and all their possible meanings; our bodies can saturate us with their inescapable closeness; other people can saturate us with their uniqueness and mysteriousness.[13]
For Marion, if God exists, God would be the ultimate example of a saturated phenomenon because he is considered eternal, infinite, all-powerful, etc.: you can’t envision or wrap your mind around God.[14] As a result, if God were to appear before you, he would explode the framed boundaries of your mind, like a blinding light does to vision.[15]
Thus, saturated phenomena flood (i.e., saturate) your mind with size, depth, and intensity, overpowering its ability to impose meaning and order onto reality. Your mind witnesses saturated phenomena, but it can’t adequately process or anticipate them.[16]
For this reason, unlike experiences of poor phenomena that are directed by our minds, experiences of saturated phenomena seem out of your control—like they happen entirely to you rather than you making them happen.[17] Thus, saturated phenomena interrupt the mind’s usual attempts to manage reality, rendering it a passive recipient.[18]
5. Conclusion
Marion is sometimes criticized for suggesting that saturated phenomena overwhelm our minds to the point where active mental operations like interpretation can play no role in our experience of them.[19] Critics say interpretation is necessary even just to identify a phenomenon as saturated. Marion might respond that such identification comes only after the experience is over, but during the experience our minds can only passively receive the phenomenon.[20]
Nevertheless, Marion’s concept of saturated phenomena gives us an interesting way to think about some of life’s most meaningful experiences, e.g., experiences of beauty, love, the divine, etc.[21] Furthermore, according to Marion, these awe-inspiring experiences challenge our sense of power and control as individuals. Thus, saturated phenomena teach us to be humble and receptive, allowing ourselves to be “blown away” and transformed by what escapes understanding.
Notes
[1] For an introduction to phenomenology, see Phenomenology: Describing Experiences From a First-Person Perspective by Matthew Sanderson.
Marion discusses saturated phenomena across much of his work, but in most detail in his books Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (2002) and In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena (2001), as well as in the essays “The Saturated Phenomenon” and “The Banality of Saturation” collected in his book The Visible and the Revealed (2008). For helpful discussions of Marion’s concept of saturated phenomena, see Gschwandtner (2014), Gschwandtner (2007), Horner (2005), Mackinlay (2009), and Hart (2007).
[2] Things that seem to be the case in experience are what philosophers call “seemings.” For an introduction to this concept, see Seemings: Justifying Beliefs Based on How Things Seem by Kaj André Zeller. Note, however, that “seemings” is not an explicit topic of discussion in phenomenology specifically.
[3] Marion discusses romantic love in his book The Erotic Phenomenon (2006).
[4] See Marion (2002) for his discussion of “givenness.” Marion (2001: p. 25) writes that a saturated phenomenon “. . . gives itself starting from itself alone (and not from a foreseeing and constituting subject) . . .”
[5] Marion (2001: pp. 24-25) writes that a saturated phenomenon is one to which “I must respond precisely because I have neither chosen it nor foreseen it nor straightaway constituted it. Now, this datum [i.e., the saturated phenomenon] gives itself to me, because it imposes itself on me, calls me, and determines me—in short, because I am not the author of it. The datum . . happens to me, and in which it is distinguished from all foreseen, synthesized, and constituted objects, since it happens to me as an event. This unforeseen happening marks it as given and attests in it to givenness.” It’s important to note that receiving—e.g., witnessing—saturated phenomena is still something your mind does, for Marion. It’s just that your mind isn’t actively helping to construct or “co-constitute” an experience of saturated phenomena.
[6] For an introduction to phenomenology, including Husserl and Heidegger, see Smith (2013) and Smith (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; no date provided). See Marion (1998 and 2002) for his most extensive discussions of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s philosophy. For more about Heidegger’s philosophy, see Martin Heidegger on Being: Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing? and Martin Heidegger on Technology, both by Matthew Sanderson.
[7] Marion often argues that phenomenologists such as Husserl and Heidegger believed that our minds always help actively construct experiences by imposing meaning and order onto phenomena. Marion is thus critical of such phenomenologists for overlooking how experiences of saturated phenomena are, in Marion’s view, an exception to that rule. For his discussion of this criticism, see Marion (1998 and 2002).
[8] See Marion (2002 and 2008) for discussions of poor phenomena.
[9] Marion (2001: p. 112) sometimes calls phenomena that match our mental concepts and expectations “common phenomena.”
[10] Thus, experiences of saturated phenomena can sound quite close to experiences of what philosophers call “the sublime” where you encounter something that seems infinite in size or power. For an introduction to the sublime, see Kant’s Theory of the Sublime by Matthew Sanderson.
[11] Marion (2001 and 2002) distinguishes between intention, which is what our minds bring and contribute to experiences (e.g., concepts), and intuition, which is the phenomena given or presented to our minds. In experiences of poor phenomena, intention is much greater than intuition, whereas in experiences of saturated phenomena intuition is significantly greater than intention.
Marion (2002: p. 225) writes that with saturated phenomena “intuition sets forth a surplus that the concept cannot organize, therefore that the intention cannot foresee. As a result, intuition is not bound to and by the intention…Far from coming after the concept and therefore following the thread of the intention (aim, foresight, repetition), intuition subverts, therefore precedes, every intention, which it exceeds and decenters.” Marion (2001: p. 112) writes that he is “proposing…to consider phenomena where the duality between intention (signification) and intuition (fulfillment) certainly remains…but where, to the contrary of poor and common phenomena, intuition gives (itself) in exceeding what the concept (signification, intentionality, aim, and so on) can foresee of it and show.”
[12] Marion (2001) discusses four major types of saturated phenomena and argues that each type exceeds (i.e., saturates) one of Immanuel Kant’s four mental categories of understanding (i.e., the categories in our minds that structure and organize experience): “the event” (e.g., historical events like 9/11, personal events like falling in love, etc.) saturates (i.e., surpasses) the category of “relation”; “the flesh” (i.e., one’s subjective experience of embodiment) saturates the category of “modality”; “the icon” (e.g., other people, religious symbols, etc.) saturates the category of “quality”; and “the idol” (e.g., works of art) saturates the category of “quantity.” Marion sometimes discusses a fifth type of saturated phenomena – “the Revelation” (i.e., God) – which he says is the ultimate saturated phenomenon because it saturates all four of Kant’s categories. This essay gives examples of each of these types.
[13] See Marion (2001) for his discussion of these and other examples of saturated phenomena. Regarding works of art, for instance, Marion (2001: p. 70) writes, “…we cannot see a painting once and for all…[T]he painting cannot be seen in a single instance, it must be reseen in order to appear, because it appears according to the phenomenality of the saturated phenomenon.” In Marion’s essay “The Banality of Saturation” (2006) he stresses that many experiences of saturated phenomena are ordinary (i.e., “banal”), everyday occurrences.
[14] In general, Marion thinks it’s the nature of saturated phenomena that you can’t envision them or picture them in your mind (which also means you can’t adequately expect or anticipate them), at least not as a whole, the way you can easily form a mental picture of your entire smartphone, for instance. Marion (2001: p. 113) writes, “I cannot have vision of these phenomena [i.e., saturated phenomena], because I cannot constitute them [i.e., conceptualize them] starting from a univocal meaning, and even less produce them as objects. What I see of them, if I see anything of them that is, does not result from the constitution I would assign to them in the visible, but from the effect they produce on me. And, in fact, this happens in reverse so that my look is submerged, in a counter-intentional manner. Then I am no longer the transcendental I [i.e., a mind actively constructing reality] but rather the witness, constituted by what happens to him or her.”
[15] See Marion (2001 and 2002) for his discussions of God as the ultimate saturated phenomenon. For a helpful introduction to Marion’s thinking about God, see Horner (2001 and 2005). For an introduction to the attributes or characteristics of God (e.g., all-powerful, etc.), see The Concept of God: Divine Attributes by Bailie Peterson. For more about the philosophy of religious experience (including mystical experience, often considered a type of religious experience), see Richard Swinburne on Religious Experience, Rudolf Otto on ‘Numinous’ Religious Experience, Philosophy of Mysticism: Do Mystical Experiences Justify Religious Beliefs?, and William James on Mystical Experience, all by Matthew Sanderson.
[16] Marion (2001: p. 113) uses the word “witness” to describe how our minds experience saturated phenomena.
[17] Marion (2001: p. 113) writes that saturated phenomena “happen to us.” See Marion (2002) for a discussion of how saturated phenomena challenge the self’s mastery of reality. The idea that saturated phenomena happen to us and overwhelm our mental power to control our experiences might suggest that such phenomena hinder our agency and free will. For an introduction to free will, see Free Will and Free Choice by Jonah Nagashima and Free Will and Moral Responsibility by Chelsea Haramia.
[18] However, it’s important to remember that while your mind can only passively receive saturated phenomena, that doesn’t mean it does nothing during the experience. It still witnesses saturated phenomena, for instance. But it passively receives such phenomena in the sense that it doesn’t and can’t help actively construct or “constitute” the experience.
[19] See Gschwandtner (2014) and Mackinlay (2009) for examples of this criticism.
[20] Gschwandtner (2014) argues that this appears to be Marion’s response to the criticism, but she finds it problematic for implying that there can be a “pure” experience free from interpretation. Remember that your mind passively receiving saturated phenomena is still something your mind does—e.g., witnessing the phenomena—but it’s just that your mind isn’t constructing any part of the experience.
[21] For an introduction to the philosophy of what makes life meaningful, see Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful? and The Meaning of Life: What’s the Point?, both by Matthew Pianalto.
References
Horner, Robyn. (2005). Jean-Luc Marion: A Theo-logical Introduction. Ashgate Publishing Company.
Marion, Jean-Luc. (2006). The Erotic Phenomenon. University of Chicago Press.
Marion, Jean-Luc. (2001). In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Fordham University Press.
Marion, Jean-Luc. (2008). The Visible and the Revealed. Fordham University Press.
Smith, David Woodruff. (2013). Phenomenology. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Last accessed on June 20, 2025.
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About the Author
Matthew Sanderson is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at West Shore Community College in Scottville, Michigan. He specializes in philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and 19th and 20th-century continental philosophy. philpeople.org/profiles/matthew-sanderson
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