Matter, Fields, Dark Matter and Dark Energy in a New Phenomenal Ontology

Contemporary physics distinguishes between physical bodies, fields, dark matter, and dark energy as fundamentally different constituents of physical reality. While this classification has proven empirically successful, it has also generated persistent ontological tensions—especially in cosmology—where increasingly exotic entities are invoked to account for observed gravitational phenomena.This paper proposes an alternative interpretive framework in which these distinctions are understood not as differences in ontological kind, but as differences in phenomenal accessibility—that is, accessibility relative to a specific mode of perception, namely the human mode, extended by instruments, mathematical formalisms, and experimental practices.Within a phenomenal ontology of physical reality, we argue that physical bodies correspond to regimes of maximal phenomenal accessibility, characterized by localization, persistence, and stability; fields represent distributed but still phenomenally accessible structures; dark matter reflects non phenomenal constraints acting on spacetime geometry without themselves becoming phenomenally articulated; and dark energy signals a global evolution of the conditions under which phenomenal reality remains coherent at cosmological scales.Rather than postulating new physical substances or modifying established dynamical laws, the proposed framework reinterprets dark components as indicators of the limits and internal stratification of phenomenal manifestation. This approach preserves the empirical and formal successes of contemporary physics while reducing ontological inflation and clarifying the scope of physical explanation. The resulting picture replaces a fragmented ontology of entities with a unified, scale-dependent structure of phenomenal accessibility, offering a new perspective on fundamentality, cosmology, and the meaning of physical reality.