The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World: Applications in Pandemic Times (Analecta Husserliana, 124) 3031077563, 9783031077562

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Analecta Husserliana The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research

Volume CXXIV The Development of EcoPhenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World Applications in Pandemic Times Edited by

Daniela Verducci Maija Kūle

Analecta Husserliana The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research Volume CXXIV Series Editors William S. Smith, Executive President of the World Phenomenology Institute Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA Jadwiga S. Smith, Co-President of the American Division, the World Phenomenology Institute Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA Daniela Verducci, Co-President of the European Division the World Phenomenology Institute, Macerata Italy Editorial Board Francesco Alfieri, Pontificia Universitas Lateranensis Rome, Italy Angela Ales Bello, Pontifical Lateran University ROMA, Roma, Italy Carla Canullo, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici University of Macerata MACERATA, Macerata, Italy Calley Hornbuckle, Columbia College - Missouri Columbia, USA Maija Kūle, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology University of Latvia Riga, Latvia Maria Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, University of Seville Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain Thomas Ryba, Purdue Research Foundation WEST LAFAYETTE, IN, USA Francesco Totaro, University of Macerata MILANO, Milano, Italy

Founder: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, World Phenomenology Institute, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA Series Editors: William S.  Smith, Executive President, World Phenomenology Institute, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA Jadwiga S.  Smith, Co-President, American Division, World Phenomenology Institute, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA Daniela Verducci, Co-President, European Division, World Phenomenology Institute, Macerata, Italy Founded in 1968 by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Reidel/Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Holland) Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research is meant to pick up again and continue Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung (Halle 1913 - 1930), hence its name "Yearbook" although as a book series it appears in several volumes a year. It collects the vast research work gathered at the seminars and international conferences being held by the World Phenomenology Institute and its four incorporated International Phenomenology Societies with world-wide scholars. Analecta Husserliana promotes the aim of an extensive philosophical and interdisciplinary work to elaborate Husserl’s initial idea of mathesis universalis , in a renovative unfolding of phenomenology. Around the axis of phenomenology of life and of the Human Creative Condition a variety of ingenious insights and ideas of phenomenologically inspired philosophies, sciences and humanities meet in an original interdisciplinary dialogue. Breaking conceptual barriers, they advance originally the great project of an universal science in a harvest of innovative ideas. Analecta Husserliana includes an Encyclopedia of Learning (vol.80) and enjoys a world-wide authority. All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance. William S.  Smith, Executive President of the World Phenomenology Institute, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA Jadwiga S. Smith, Co-President of the American Division, the World Phenomenology Institute, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA

Daniela Verducci • Maija Kūle Editors

The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World Applications in Pandemic Times

Editors Daniela Verducci Department of Humanistic Studies – Section of Philosophy University of Macerata Macerata, Italy

Maija Kūle Institute of Philosophy and Sociology University of Latvia Riga, Latvia

ISSN 0167-7276     ISSN 2542-8330 (electronic) Analecta Husserliana ISBN 978-3-031-07756-2    ISBN 978-3-031-07757-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a good testing ground for the eco-­ phenomenological paradigm of the ontopoiesis of life, theorized by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka in over 40 years of phenomenological studies and resumed, after her death in 2014, in volume 121 (2018) Eco-Phenomenology: Life, Human Life, Post-­ Human Life in the Harmony of the Cosmos (W.S. Smith, J.S. Smith, D. Verducci eds.) of Analecta Husserliana, the editorial series she founded. This new volume of “Analecta Husserliana”, The Development of EcoPhenomenology as an Interpretative Paradigm of the Living World - Applications in Pandemic Times, takes up the challenge that the COVID-19 pandemic has presented to all naive ecological visions. These visions imagined that harmony and synergy between natural and human ecosystems were the spontaneous fruit of shared living and coexistence among living beings in the environment, but this has not been the case. After all, Ernst Haeckel, the German zoologist inventor of the term “ecology”, was right when, in his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen [General Morphology of Organisms] of 1866, he warned: ecology is the study of all those complex interrelationships indicated by Darwin as conditions of the struggle for existence. In effect, what we are experiencing is a call to battle, in response to an attack by the environment directed against our own physical, social, and cultural life. But the human species’ capacity to fight for existence has weakened over time. Human beings have become increasingly reductive in identifying the good life/­ happiness [εὐδαιμονία] with material well-being. They have entrusted the protection of their happiness to scientific and technological knowledge and practice inspired by the will to power. They have neglected self-care (cura sui), which alone is capable of strengthening humanity, just when a strong and living humanity is what is most needed to face the current ecological and pandemic crisis. For this reason, the question of the position of the human beings in the cosmos has grown ever more pressing since the early twentieth century, and there has been growth of an environmental consciousness, which uses the term “ecology,” well beyond the narrow scientific confines of biology. It is now used with reference to a range of extrabiological  systems, from cultural, social, and economic to

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spiritual ones. Thus, the ecological approach of biological and life sciences has been joined by a phenomenological one, focused on the lived experiences of human beings. This approach is for now limited to offering us both an ecological phenomenology and a phenomenological ecology, in an attempt “to tilling the middle soil”, so to speak,  between phenomenology and naturalism, between intentionality and causality. Eco-phenomenology based on the ontopoiesis of life of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka delves even deeper and seems to draw from the place where eidos and factum originate, the place where the human creative condition grafts into the powers of constructivism of natural life, drawing from them the energy to inaugurate a more elevated style of the becoming of life. While this eco-phenomenology embraces the entire biosphere, it seems as capable as classic phenomenology of achieving and maintaining a theoretical gaze free from prejudice and conditioning thanks to  the methodical exercise of reduction through epochè. Eco-phenomenology  therefore keeps to the description of “that which manifests itself,” by modulating its own expansion of analyses and deeper explorations according to the  phenomena as they  are prensently occurring in the experience, rather than by yielding to environmental, ecological, or naturalist ideologies or speculations. Even the eco-phenomenology of the ontopoiesis of life draws from the practice of reduction its particular fecundity, because phenomenological epochè, unlike simply skeptical epochè, opens to the continual intuitive re-sowing of experience. Effectively, classical phenomenology, proceeding from reduction to reduction, progressively integrated the auto-immanence of consciousness and acquired awareness of the intersubjective relationship and of the belonging to the world-of-life, thereby overcoming bit by bit the evident disjunctions of sense that in Husserl prevented the passage from the generative level of empirics to that of the pure abstract forms of consciousness, so confining phenomenology within that “bifurcation of being” denounced by Alfred Whitehead as the fallacy of modern natural philosophy. The same eco-phenomenological intuitive  focus on  the ontopoiesis of life emerged through epochè. Following the reductions already operated by Husserl – eidetic, transcendental, of intersubjectivity, and of the world-of-life – Tymieniecka carried out a new reduction to the level of the phenomenology of life, grasping and manifesting in the vital root of the constituting consciousness both the foundational moment of phenomenology and the source of the entire cosmic dynamism. With the reduction of the phenomenology of life, Tymieniecka was able to focus her attention on the dynamics of transcendence of consciousness that take place in the phenomenon of Verleibung/embodiment. She, thus, succeeded in going beyond the Husserlian conception of Leib as a zero point of orientation and – taking a step of decisive importance – she highlighted how consciousness constantly penetrates into the totality of nature, contrary to what Husserl had believed. The experience of the “bodily consciousness” (das Leiblich-bewusste) reveals that the psychic processes, their succession and interweaving, their motivations are rooted in the “natural body” (das Leiblich-natürliche); at the same time, we discover that even the ultimate laws of consciousness and universal knowledge are based on the mediator

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role of our own-living-body. In this way, transcendental consciousness with its ­specific intentional functions found itself immersed in the context of the human condition within the unity-of-all-that-is-alive. At this primeval ontological level, the entire constituent apparatus of transcendental consciousness experiences a dependence on the “sentient” function. Indeed, it is through the function of “sentience”, not through the intellectual functions, that the human condition is grafted directly into the flow of spontaneous self-productivity of the wild being. It is the generative energy of the latter, which effectively feeds the same creative/intentional acts of human being! With this, a completely new phenomenic situation was delineated, that of the givenness of life, which is manifested not as static givenness, corresponding to the cognitive processes of the human mind, but as the inward givenness of the life progress common to all living beings as such. By opening the self-enclosed eidos to actual existence, by breaking through the transcendental horizon of Husserlian consciousness, Tymieniecka found the filum Ariadne for understanding the creative unfolding of the cosmos in self-individualizing becoming that is common to both, the constructivism of nature and the creative acts of human beings. The phenomenological description of the vital flow shows that all the modes of life’s forces, forms, energetic complexes, and synergetic virtualities reach, in a constant self-individualizing influx, the state of the human condition, and here, in the degree to which they pass through the intergenerative schemas of that processor that is the human person, at the heart of the meaningfulness of life at large, they are “ciphered” in terms of meaning of being, historically always renewing itself, and continue their development in the framework of new and richer meaningfulness. Thus, on the one hand, the human being as a source of classical phenomenology is “repositioned” within the broader ontological field of inquiry into life and therefore emerges from the tangle of vital networks as the “vortex of universal sense,” in which the various orders of those networks meet. On the other hand, the virtualities of nature that reach and run through the human level of life are processed in such a way that the composition of a higher style is imposed on the flow of advanced constructivity of life or auto-poiesis, as expressed by the Chilean neurophysiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. This higher style is onto-poietic, or in other words, it is in accordance with being as the primality of the existential process of creative formation, which only living human beings possess. Thus, it happens that man’s elementary condition appears to be one of blind nature’s element and yet at the same time, this element shows itself to have virtualities for individualization at the vital level and, what is more, for a specific human individualization. These latter virtualities we could label the ‘subliminal spontaneity’.1

Therefore, a continuity of self-individualizing poiesis occurs between the constructivism of natural life and the creative evolution proper to human life as it is a single logos that leads and marks the evolution of all life. Tymieniecka calls it the  A.-T. Tymieniecka. Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason. “Logos and Life” – Book 1. “Analecta Husserliana” XXIV (1988): 28. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1

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ontopoietic logos of life because it manifests itself as a logoic force that actually, not just ideally, generates and substantiates the whole becoming, at the rhythm of propulsive impetus and balanced settling that is proper of the self-individualizing process of life. Here, Tymieniecka holds that she found the self-foundation of phenomenology that Husserl had sought: the ontopoietic logos of life, which was led to manifestation through her phenomenological reduction to the level of the creativity of life, seems to have the traits of that absoluteness that Husserl, unduly, had attributed to the constituent transcendental consciousness. Effectively, it is the ontopoietic logos of life which rests in itself and does not need further reduction, revealing itself to be intrinsic and adequate reason for being of the whole becoming. In logos omnia! For this reason, in the interview with the Norwegian journalists Lars Petter Torjussen, Johannes Servan, and Simen Andersen Øyen, in Bergen, when she was there to receive an honorary doctorate in philosophy, Tymieniecka revealed that the phenomenology of life had matured into an eco-phenomenological Enlightenment: Actually, my account of ontopoiesis is an eco-phenomenology. Ontopoiesis reaches to the very germs of ecology: development and genesis […] the self-individualization of life, which is the basic instrument of ontopoiesis, draws upon the laws of the cosmos and the earth. This is the most fundamental ecology that can be done.2

It is in the eco phenomenological framework, outlined by the ontopoietic logos of life, discovered by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, that the present volume is placed. According to such not naiv ecological outlook, the numerous contributions, which make it up, address the unprecedented human problems that the covid-19 pandemic has placed before us in the last 2 years. Thus, Enchantment of Life, Nature, and Ontopoietic Ecosystem (Part I) is followed logically by the observation of Human Conditions in the Pandemic Environment: The Logos of Subliminal Passions, Spacing, Dwellings, Feelings” (Part II) and Pandemic Challenges: Being Together, Keeping Distance, and Ecological Solidarity” (Part III). The intent of the authors of the various chapters, written in the midst of the present pandemic and ecological crisis, is the same one that motivated the phenomenological operations of Tymieniecka: to promote the maturation of a vision of reason that breaks out from the narrow traditional frameworks and opens up creatively towards an appreciation of the host of new rationalities, in order to deal with the changeable currents of existence, and to generate criteria of validity, predictability, prospects, and measure, adequate for the challenges of the present. More particularly, in the current context of the collapse of consolidated convictions once held to be evident, accentuated by the pandemic, the authors desire to use the phenomenology of life as a universal praxeology of knowledge to promote the passage from an exercise of reason, science, and technology, still entrapped in the modern will to power, to a mentality that instead is open to acknowledge and cultivate seeds of newness carried by life at every level and, therefore, is capable of  L.P.Torjussen, J. Servan and S. Andersen Øyen. “An Interview with Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka”. Phenomenological Inquiry. A Review for Philosophical Ideas and Trends, 32 (2008): 27. 2

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expressing the resilience that transforms adversities into opportunities in a sustainable way. The ecophenomenological vision of the ontopoiesis of life represented here could truly contribute to rekindling in all of us that which Tymieniecka calls the “spark of life”! It “radiates from the coalescence of the propitious factors of life that favor dynamic consolidation in self-individualization” and it is “the point of vital confidence, that of existential certainty that the identification of one’s very beingness lies in this, that to be is to be alive!”3 Acquiring this confidence and vital certainty mean “to feel oneself in a primogenital mode as being expanded and integrated into the world by one’s own body performance, to be dimly aware of one’s vital bodily/psychic participation in the world’s performance, to be from the inside out oriented toward close integration with the world’s life’s progress. Therein, in the actio/passio context of being alive, my certitude lies.”4 This is the same wish with which I accompany the publication of this volume. Macerata, Italy

Daniela Verducci

 A.-T. Tymieniecka. 2007. The Great Metamorphosis of the Logos of Life. In A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.). Timing and Temporality in Islamic Philosophy and Phenomenology of Life. “Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology in Dialogue”. Vol. 3: 16. Dordrecht: Springer. 4  Ibid. 16–17. 3

Acknowledgments

This volume of the Analecta Husserliana series, dedicated to the development of eco-phenomenology in a pandemic situation, is based on a joint initiative of the World Phenomenology Institute (WPI)-European Division, in the person of the Co-President, Dr. Daniela Verducci, and the Director and Leading Researcher of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Latvia, Dr. Maija Kūle. The initiative was also supported by Dr. William S. Smith, Executive President of the WPI, and by Dr. Jadwiga S.  Smith, Co-President of the WPI  – American Division. With their contributions, the authors participating in this volume intend not only to formally honor the memory of A.-T. Tymieniecka, the founder of the Analecta Husserliana series, but also to emphasize that half a century ago she was one of the first world scholars to bring the concept of life and harmony with nature to the attention of global philosophy. Many of the authors in this volume – from the USA, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Hungary, Georgia, and South Africa – have been long-time collaborators with Dr. Tymieniecka, President of the World Phenomenology Institute. We thank the following people from the editorial board of the Analecta Husserliana, The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research series: Angela Ales Bello (Pontifical Lateran University), Gary Backhaus (Harford Community College), Carla Danani (University of Macerata), Thomas Ryba (Purdue University), Marie Antonios Sassine (Dominican University College), Miloš Ševčík (Charles University), and Francesco Totaro (University of Macerata) for their interest in this volume, their reading of articles submitted, their criticism and suggestions for improvement, and, more generally, their support for the continuation of this series and ongoing development of eco-phenomenology today. We also thank the professors who took part in consulting and discussing from many different countries and universities: Sergio Labate (University of Macerata), Jānis Tālivaldis Ozoliņš (Australian Catholic University), Jānis Vējš (Christian Academy, Riga), Sigma Ankrava (University of Latvia), and Zaiga Ikere (Daugavpils University). The English language editor was Vincent Hunt, journalism lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK and a long-time collaborator with the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia in preparing books xi

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for international publication. He is also the author of two oral history monographs on the history of Latvia: Blood in the Forest: The end of the Second World War in the Courland Pocket (Helion 2017) and a century-long analysis of Latvia’s relationship with the Soviet secret police: Latvia and the KGB (Helion 2019). With his experience as a former BBC journalist, he aptly captured the societal significance of eco-­ phenomenology and its turn towards life, nature, and the solving of existential problems created by the COVID-19 pandemic. The scientific, organizational, and editorial work of the volume was supported by the Latvian Science Council grant 2020–2-0085. We thank University of Latvia doctoral student Zane Ozola for her work on the Index for this volume and her colleagues Ginta Vēja and Giulio LoBello for organizing Researcher’s Night 2020 on eco-phenomenology and who are, in their promotional theses, ready to develop their ideas relating to this phenomenological approach. We of course are thankful to all our collaborators, supporters, and authors who remain faithful to the ideas of eco-phenomenology. Macerata, Italy Riga, Latvia

Daniela Verducci Maija Kūle

Contents

Part I Enchantment of Life, Nature and Ontopoietic Ecosystem The Importance of Eco-phenomenology in the Understanding of the Pandemic Crisis – New Turns and Concepts��������������������������������������    3 Maija Kūle The Harmony Between Human and Cosmos as a Problem of Sense (with a Warning Against Misinterpretations of Pandemic) ������������������������   25 Francesco Totaro People on E(e)arth: Eco-phenomenological Turns in the Understanding of Life and Human Life in the Contemporary Situation�����������������������������   43 Ella Buceniece Edmund Husserl on the Conscious and Unconscious Aspects of Immanent Life����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   63 Bence Peter Marosan Tymieniecka’s Philosophy of the Logos of Life: The Story of the Totality����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   83 Zaiga Ikere Eco-Phenomenology as a Philosophy of Creativity and the Problem of Unity of Consciousness��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 Mamuka Dolidze The Evolution and Development of Eco-­Phenomenology as an Interpretative Paradigm of the Living World of Ben Okri’s A Broken Song: ‘The Wailing of Our Skies’ – An Eco-Phenomenological Appreciation ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  111 Rosemary Gray

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Part II The Human Condition in the Pandemic Environment: The Logos of Subliminal Passions, Spacing, Dwellings, Feelings Psychic Involvements and Spiritual Reactions in the Time of the Pandemic: Between Philosophy and Psychopathology����������������������  125 Angela Ales Bello To Be ‘Alone Together’ – The Value of an Eco-Phenomenological Approach Towards Mental Health During the Pandemic����������������������������  137 Giulio Lo Bello Returning Home����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  145 Algis Mickunas  he Body as an Ontopoietic Ecosystem that Somatizes Otherness������������  159 T Roberto Marchesini Toward a Taxonomy of Uncanny Objects: A Phenomenological Approach����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  173 Thomas Ryba The Phenomenology of Forms of Dwellings: The Self, Others and the Uncanny����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  215 Igors Šuvajevs The Phenomenology of the Coronavirus and the Uncanny World of the Pandemic������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  229 Uldis Vēgners Eco-phenomenology of Ambient Urbanism, Earth and Sky (Along the Aesthetic Lane)������������������������������������������������������������������������������  243 Māra Rubene Part III Pandemic Challenges: Being Together, Keeping Distance and Ecological Solidarity  he Dialectics of Openness and Closedness During the Quarantine: T Heideggerian Meditations ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  263 Tomas Kačerauskas Eco-phenomenological Interpretation of Autonomous Being at the Time of Pandemic����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  273 Maija Kūle Keep Your Distance! – Personal Space in the Pandemic Viewed Through Husserl’s Monophony and Deleuze and Guattari’s Polyphony ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  291 Ineta Kivle

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Together and Apart: Variations on the Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation in the Coronavirus Pandemic������������������������������������������������������  303 Tomas Sodeika and Lina Vidauskytė  arieties of Distancing Experience����������������������������������������������������������������  315 V Velga Vēvere  he Human Condition of Terror: Radiation, Terrorism, Viruses ��������������  329 T Māris Kūlis Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  349

Part I

Enchantment of Life, Nature and Ontopoietic Ecosystem

The Importance of Eco-phenomenology in the Understanding of the Pandemic Crisis – New Turns and Concepts Maija Kūle

Abstract  The chapter opens with introductory remarks about what the new philosophical trend of Eco-phenomenology is. It describes the main sources of its development and its branches in the fields of contemporary philosophy. Also described is the evolution of the Phenomenology of Life in the 1970s up to 2022 with the main focus on eco-phenomenology as ontopoiesis. The challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic to the eco-phenomenological turn are analyzed from a number of perspectives: as symbolization of COVID-19, through social vulnerabilities, the passion of mathematization, changes in the spatial experience and in being alone-together. The analysis also explores enstrangement, anxiety and mental disturbances and explains why the metaphysical approach and system are important for the development of eco-phenomenology today. Finally, it demonstrates the importance of the concepts of logos and telos in the context of the linguistic turn in world philosophy. Keywords  Eco-phenomenology · Phenomenology of life · Tymieniecka · COVID-19 Pandemic · Life · Nature · Cosmos · Logos · Ontopoiesis · Telos · Metaphysics

M. Kūle (*) Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_1

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 he Turn to Eco-phenomenology in the Situation T of the COVID-19 Pandemic The pandemic has accentuated and brought together all the dimensions that philosophy has discussed over the past three decades  – education, world problems of inequality, poverty, self-awareness of philosophy and learning to be a responsible human being in a pandemic situation. There has been thought given how to nurture society with philosophical input through paideia, including trust in science-based medicine. The times of pandemic set before philosophers a task: how to establish the priority of life. It has to be acknowledged that this dangerous virus and its variations have not only attacked life in its biological sense but actually launched a much wider assault against the ‘civilised order’ and the familiar routine of everyday life. It has disrupted economic development and conventional means of communication, pushing many people into online virtual relationships. The changes the pandemic has made in people’s lives are of a global character for another profound reason: there isn’t one single stigmatised group of people who are ‘sick’  – anyone and everyone could potentially become COVID patients. This makes for a truly universal approach when it comes to dealing with problems caused by the pandemic, which can be philosophically anthropological, ethical, epistemological, metaphysical, social and aesthetical. During a pandemic any philosophical reflection has to be supplemented with practical action to reduce poverty and insecurity, to improve healthcare and provide vaccines to lower-income countries. When a pandemic hits, nobody can be sure about the future, and the limitations of life sciences are laid bare. Many countries suffered from having underfunded their medical field or not understanding the value of human life, prioritising instead the production of material benefits. It will still take some time to fully grasp the astounding difference that exists between the billions spent on, for example, entertainment for the digital consumer society and the comparatively tiny amounts funding life science and the development of rational thought in philosophy. The technologies of pleasure rode a high wave in the developed countries, and now those citizens find themselves in the doldrums, they are baffled. Commodity-oriented and pleasure-oriented societies start to rebel against epidemic bans and changes in living arrangements. What matters today is how philosophy considers itself. What are its trends and who are its leaders capable of crafting new philosophical systems and the new language generated to form a solid metaphysical foundation (some authors interpret it as meta-metaphysical) to be used to comprehend the situation and consequences caused by the pandemic? Philosophy is in need of a restart. One of the new trends best suited for the challenges the pandemic poses is Eco-­ phenomenology, the subject of this dedicated volume of Analecta Husserliana. Eco-phenomenology over the past decades and World Congresses has gained influence by attracting contributors from new cultural regions outside Europe and the US, including the Middle East, Asia and Russia, and from other branches of science, including biology, physics, astronomy and ecology, to name but a few.

The Importance of Eco-phenomenology in the Understanding of the Pandemic Crisis …

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The ecological shift in phenomenology is characterised by several important aspects. One is a shift from a description of consciousness to Life, including natural life and vital life: another is a move away from the classical theory of intentionality to explore creativity and common intentionality. There has been a shift to a wider acknowledgement of scientific conclusions (such as evolutional-biological research, neurological studies and so on) and the inclusion thereof in the Eco-phenomenology system. There is also another significant shift, from a primary interest in social, communication and linguistic issues, to the inclusion of a human being in the horizon of the Universe and the development of Logos in life. Eco-phenomenology is a new trend in philosophy that is based on the antique, medieval and contemporary legacy regarding the value of life, and on the classical stream developed by Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. It manages to go beyond this basis by focusing on Life, with natural life as the fundamental core around which a system of concepts and primary principles is formed. Eco-­ phenomenology is an initiative to create new knowledge, including concepts of telos, logos, entelechia, ecological ontopoiesis, with the aim of realizing a phenomenological description of the resultant disintegration of societies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which have influenced tremendous feelings in relationships between human beings, Nature and culture.

 ow Eco-phenomenology Is a Distinct New H Philosophical Trend The Phenomenology of Life, developed by the World Institute of phenomenology (President A.-T.  Tymieniecka, the European district’s Vice-president Daniela Verducci) is distinct from those of other phenomenologists in several aspects: 1. Consciousness presupposes Man’s self-interpretation-in-existence and sharing-­ in-­life; creative experience is pre-given to all other acts. 2. Creative experience suspends givenness not in the evidence of consciousness, but in the life progress common to all living beings as such. 3. In the centre is the self-individualizing constructive advance of life; movement in its ontopoietic design of self-individualizing progress, spontaneous autoproduction of life, where time is a function. Time and movement are inseparable and are both functions of the constructive progress of life. 4. The human being is the all-embracing functional complex and the highest intellectual and moral figure of the development of the logos of life. The main premises, concepts and system of Eco-phenomenology as a trend have already been analyzed by Daniela Verducci, Maija Kūle, Bence Peter Marosan, Francesco Totaro, Massimo Marasi and others, including in Volume 121 of the Analecta Husserliana (2018) which is dedicated to life, human life and post-human life in the harmony of the Cosmos. The Phenomenology of Life which creates the

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basis of Eco-phenomenology has been supported by many noted authors contributing to the Analecta Husserliana series. They include Paul Ricoeur, Emanuel Levinas and Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) and contemporary phenomenologists such as Angela Ales Bello, James M. Magrini, Francisco Varela, Renaud Barbaras, Roberto Marchesini and so on, in the published Analecta Husserliana volumes 1–122. As a result, this trend is particularly wide-ranging. When it comes to an analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic, phenomenology has a distinct advantage, thanks to its world view through the prism of meaning/sense; the very space where the ethical, spiritual, sacral and symbolic level resides. Phenomenology unifies the constitution of meaning as closely connected to and with ‘a human positioning’ in the Cosmos. Its examination of sense includes aspects outside human beings: the natural world, all living beings, the Universe, the unity-of-everything-that-is-alive  – that have not been considered as a main subject in transcendental phenomenology. In this context, a new type of phenomenology is offered to describe the pandemic-induced changes in the experience of time, space and place, feelings and sensations, self-­ identification and self-individualization, being together in community and Universe, through the prism of the ontopoietic ecosystem. The general idea of Eco-phenomenology is to move from the transcendental subject to the creative subject; from transcendental ego-consciousness to ‘we-­ consciousness’ and being-together-with-the-living-world, from the individual to collective experience and eco-ethics. The ‘lost sense’ of the natural sociality of living human beings comes to the forefront. Eco-phenomenology means an ecological turn in phenomenology in close relationship with the philosophy of Life. But it does not mean a new naturalism or some trend of the environmental sciences. This ecological turn urges philosophers to think about specific human-Nature relationships alongside everything else in the living world, including anthropogenic climate change, and to develop phenomenological concepts of the ‘unity-of-­ everything-­that-is-alive’, as well as – and in-between – the harmony of life, Earth, Nature, the ontopoiesis of life, concepts of logos (Tymieniecka 1990), empathy (Stein 1989), ‘other’ (Levinas, Ricoeur), and the “phenomenological we” (Zahavi 2014, Moran and Szanto 2016). Among the philosophers who have influenced Eco-phenomenology to some degrees are Aristotle, Leibniz, George-Wilhelm-Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eugen Fink, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, Henry Bergson and others. Wilhelm Dilthey interpreted metaphysics as a search for sense, while Max Scheler enlarged metaphysical research to the field of ‘values’ and ‘human place in the Cosmos’. By modernising metaphysics to the direction of life, life-force and sense, Scheler is, to some extent, the forefather of the Phenomenology of Life. Eco-phenomenologists have found predecessors also in Realistic Phenomenology such as Hedwig Conrad-Martius, who published works on social ontology and phenomenological reality as well as Roman Ingarden, Henryk Skolimowski in Poland and Nishida Kitaro in Japan. Tymieniecka recognized Latvian philosopher Teodors Celms as one of predecessors of the Phenomenology of Life.

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This volume opens up perspectives on such philosophers as Vladimir Bibikhin, Hanna Arendt, described by Buceniece in this volume, Edmund Husserl and Gilles Deleuze, as well as Félix Guattari on space, territory and distance, analyzed by Kivle in this book, Edith Stein, the Italian psychopathologist Bruno Callieri, investigated by Ales Bello in this volume and Jan Patočka on the natural world described in Šuvajevs’ chapter. Eco-phenomenology has a conviction that Life, the planet Earth, the Cosmos and human existence is worthy of admiration, and is not just a resource for material benefits for the human species. The Enchantment of Life, to which the first part of this volume is dedicated, means an ontopoietic view where the logoic approach – based on Logos  – is related to a widely-understood aesthetic and beauty. Eco-­ phenomenology urges Humanity to leave its position of the exploitation of natural resources and pursue a ‘commitment of care’ in our relationship with the non-­ human world and environment. This trend gives up naïve materialism, economic determinism and transcendentalism, and refuses to align with Marxism, dialectical materialism, Neo-Darwinism or social constructivism, and takes from the Phenomenology of Life what we see as the most important ideas. They are logos in life, concepts of vitality and telos [purpose]; a responsibility for all living beings on the Earth and in the Cosmos and the vital role of spirituality in the sense of development of logos that exists over everything. Angela Ales Bello proposes the term “transcendental realism” (Analecta Husserliana, vol. 118) for the activity of examining reality where the subject and object are in non-subordinated relationships. The hermeneutics perspective is present but is not dominating, because Eco-phenomenology assigns a greater value to intuition, imagination and ciphering. The role of hermeneutics is evident in the vocative structure of the divine. By separating ciphering from interpretation Tymieniecka emphasises that for her, interpretation is mostly linked with comprehending texts, i.e., with language, while ciphering acts on a wider scope – that is, in the entire development of logos. The linguistic turn of the twentieth Century did, in a way, affect all trends of philosophy, but many of them have encapsulated themselves in a linguistic perspective, abandoning the concept of reality and the perspective of Universe and life that is retained in Eco-phenomenology. Eco-phenomenology selected the third way, choosing not to “sink into language (and deconstruction)” – but to open and develop an understanding of the Logos-in-Life. The Phenomenology of Life is constructed – like Eco-phenomenology – with an emphasis on a wider ecological approach. To be more specific: it deals with the development of life in the Universe and with ontopoiesis and Logos in life, thus enabling a new understanding of what the place of Man in the cosmos is. Furthermore, it explores the meaning of evolution by reaching its highest level: a human being endowed with Reason and Moral Sense. It would be a misinterpretation to believe that this phenomenological shift came about because of the identification of Nature followed by some trawling through of Husserl’s texts in search of his opinions regarding the ‘natural’. Some authors contributing to this Analecta Husserliana volume, such as Roberto Marchesini, Ella Buceniece and others, interpret Husserl’s

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understanding of body and nature. However, their interpretations are in the context of a turn to Life, and not with the idea of returning to Husserl’s opinion as the definitive view. Marchesini recognizes: the body is life, and every relationship it establishes must not be evaluated only in constitutive terms, but also in productive ones. Eco-phenomenology analyses anxiety and stresses the need for ecological solidarity. The ecological situation of climate crisis threatening the Earth reinforces the imperative need for this view. It gives researchers the opportunity to develop a new phenomenological language when considering human relationships: encompassing individual consciousness and ‘we-consciousness’, subjective and shared cognition, ‘I-we-thou’, egotism and loss, and the return of empathy and altruism. ‘We-consciousness’ functions not only as common intentional acts, but as creative self-individualizing acts in the horizon of the ‘we-world’. The Eco-phenomenological trend often makes use of metaphorical language, analysis of works of literature and art and a more descriptive and emotional literary style in essays, in order to counter the plainly-abstract and emotionally-void style of philosophy since Imaginatio Creatrix was considered to be the highest form of creative expression (Analecta Husserliana, vol. 19; vol. 23, part 1, 2). Tymieniecka recognizes: “The word bursts forth from the infinitely-complex linkages of life’s constructive processes as the decisive factor in the luminous intelligibility of life” (Tymieniecka 1990, 84). This branch does not consider language as the ‘House of Being’ as Martin Heidegger did, but rather as the expression of the highest level of life: a human intelligence – a connection to people’s communal life. Language is viewed through its artistic expressions, with literature as the foremost one. Many volumes of Analecta Husserliana are devoted to phenomenological and cultural-­ philosophical analysis of literature.1 Moreover, an eco-phenomenological reading presents an opportunity to find sensations in literature that are connected with Nature: of desert, sea, fire, light, gardens, landscape and so on. While Heidegger believed poetry to be the deepest form of language that enabled Being to “have its say”, the works of Eco-phenomenology have also turned their attention to novels, dance and other forms of Art. Tymieniecka’s teachings on body, mind and soul relations are interesting, for they implement the thesis that ‘soul’ is extended in the body. This is best seen in art, and particularly in dance; for which she provided a phenomenological description in her monograph Logos and Life, Book 1 (Tymieniecka 1988, 107–112). She exclaimed: “Only art can teach us!” (Tymieniecka 1988, 108). Friedrich Nietzsche too, in his work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, considered dance a better tool for comprehension than rational thought. Therefore, Eco-phenomenology is open to a variety of viewpoints, including those from the world of Art and beauty. Māra Rubene in her chapter continues the idea of the aesthetical experience in the perspective of space, time and atmosphere to

 See for example: Tymieniecka, Tractatus Brevis, and Analecta Husserliana volumes 23, 41, 42, 69, 75, 96, 112. 1

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disclose an approach to the architectonics of urban life, Earth and sky, interpreting the problem of the geo-cosmological coordinates of human beingness. The process of ontopoiesis also occurs poetically. This volume, as well as other volumes of Analecta Husserliana, does also consider how exceptional poetry can express the values of life, nature and the subjectivity of the landscape. Rosemary Gray’s chapter on the Nigerian poet Ben Okri explores his poem A Broken Song, which provides a convergence of time, space, humankind and Cosmos, synthesizing all aspects in a mythic and poetical relationship. The use of literature to discover life is specific. It is not regular philosophy or a critique of literature, but the reading of ‘life phenomena’ in the works of the great artists, who have unmeasurable skill and dexterity in expressing their feelings, such as the Ogoni people have for the ecological destruction of the flora and fauna of the oil-producing land of their homeland. Another author in this volume, Zaiga Ikere, identifies the enchantment of life in the Latvian language expressed in ancient folk poetry, a form long seen as an example of pantheistic natural inclusion that exists in human sensations to this day. Mamuka Dolidze writes in a poetical style about the fresh sense-forming impulses which create a dazzling picture of the interplay of unconscious darkness with the light of the mind. He mentions ideas from quantum physics about uncertainty and describes problems of differentiation and unity between the Self and its Brain. Dolidze, being a Georgian writer, demonstrates feelings relating to the way a writer’s words appear in the ideal orchestration of spontaneous mental events. He puts forward the question of extending the quantum-phenomenological approach to the sphere of consciousness, and concludes that we can observe at least some analogy between the Self-Brain discrepancy and the wave-particle duality of atomic events, deriving from Heisenberg’s ‘inequity of uncertainty’. One feature of life-in-the-pandemic-times is that the idea of uncertainty has gained special significance. Science is being questioned. Many people are worried about the safety of vaccines: others struggle to assess their own health, as COVID-19 can manifest itself in so many uncertain and variable ways. Uncertainty started to characterize many domains of the Human Condition. Eco-phenomenology tries to find a poetically and metaphysically orientated narrative useful in the situation when fully-fledged rationality and the reign of Reason has been replaced by the uncertainty of life and the logos of subliminal passions, by rationality that is open to vital phenomena.

 ow Did Eco-phenomenology Start? The Beginning H of the Phenomenology of Life in the 1970s Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s role in the development of world philosophy was underappreciated when it was dominated by analytical philosophy or Neo-­ pragmatism. She managed to shake up the Anglophone environment especially during the 1970s and 1980s, which had “enslaved” philosophy to language studies

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without existential knowledge and respect for life. By taking a fresh and courageous look at life, Nature, the Cosmos and creativity, she was a pioneer of metaphysically oriented practical life philosophy. The perception of these topics through life by placing the system she initiated at the centre propels philosophy to the forefront when it comes to a consideration of solutions to problems of ecology and the overcoming of the COVID-19 pandemic. Scrupulous analysis of Tymieniecka’s system has been carried out by Daniela Verducci in her book La Fenomenologia della vita di Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Verducci 2012). She considers the link between the Phenomenology of Life and Edmund Husserl, Eugen Fink, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Ernst Cassirer, and later looks at the mains concepts of the system and the views on autopoiesis of the Chilean philosopher-biologists Umberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, thus discovering the connection between the Phenomenology of Life and contemporary science. The intentions of Eco-phenomenology have echoes in the public sphere. British naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough expresses the deepest ontopoietic sense through his visual documentaries and inspiring quotes. He writes: “It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living” (Attenborough 2021). Putting together the Universe, Nature, Earth, beauty, enchantment of life and intellectual interest the Eco-phenomenological turn stimulates the renewal of philosophy in the twenty-first Century leaving behind the narrowness of the philosophy of subjectivity, social constructivism, ethical relativism and political engagement in suspicious practical matters. Eco-phenomenology was formed on the basis of a phenomenological trend that started in the US in the 1970s. Initially, the name Tymieniecka gave the new system was the Phenomenology of Life, but that changed after an interview at the 2008 International Congress in Bergen, Norway, where she said: “Actually, my account of ontopoiesis is an eco-phenomenology” (Torjussen, Petter, Johannes, and Andersen 2008). At that moment the Phenomenology of Life itself received new stimulus, with an eco-­phenomenological impetus. We continue to use the titles Phenomenology of Life and the Eco-­phenomenology in the basic structures as identical. The first Analecta Husserliana volumes in the 1970s and 1980s featured such authors as Stefan Strasser, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Emanuel Levinas, Calvin Schrag and many others, whose novel points of view undeniably had an effect on how the phenomenology of Husserl was being transformed. Although they did not directly produce an eco-phenomenology platform, their input at the initial stage was substantial. Each of these thinkers of world renown has a connection to phenomenology, but it should be pointed out that the route Tymieniecka took to reach the Philosophy of Life was a different one – recognition of the priority of life creativity. Most of the authors contributing to this Analecta Husserliana volume have helped construct this route over several decades, using their interpretations in the spirit of the Phenomenology of Life thus becoming this new turn of Eco-phenomenology. Through the teaching of themes like metaphors, language, identity and interaction,

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Ricoeur’s influence is most evident in the sections where Eco-phenomenology discusses the human condition and self-interpretation. Derrida, who participated in the Phenomenology of Life project in the 1970s, had already gained recognition in Europe for his principle of deconstruction, the subjugation of meanings to constant change. He recognized that the meaning of a word is never fully “present”, because meanings are not the same as ideas; they are endlessly “deferred” in a long chain of transformations. Eco-phenomenology in contrast is not subject to the idea of meanings in non-stop flux, because it retains the classical position that meaning expresses an idea and is involved in the development of Logos, while deconstruction destroys rather than discovers it. Richard Cobb-­ Stevens – a long-time collaborative partner from Boston College, shows why the Phenomenology of Life, based on the teachings of Husserl, did not follow the path of Derrida (Cobb-Stevens 1985, 367–379). Eco-phenomenology maintains the idea of logocentrism, which can be found in Husserl’s teleology as well. Telos is one of the re-awakened notions of philosophy that serves in the development of Eco-phenomenology. The teleological context and the making of meanings are of importance to both Husserl and Heidegger. Cobb-­ Stevens writes: “[..] they make sense by reason of their transcendental status as conditions of the realm of meaning. According to Derrida, we must follow Nietzsche’s lead and try to think of a Heracleitean play that has no sense at all, i.e., that does not belong to a project which hopes to make sense out of the whole” (Cobb-Stevens 1985, 377). Derrida’s path is very radical, too disruptive and deconstructing, but Eco-phenomenology searches for the essences and larger narratives about life. Although Tymieniecka has acknowledged in her publications that she follows the so-called Heracleitean path of fluctuations, Francesco Totaro in this volume also mentions the significance of Parmenides’ view because both these positions  – Heracleitean and Parmedian – are in a dialectic relationship. Inspired by Heraclitus, Tymieniecka calls on us to: listen to the Logos! (Tymieniecka 2011, 4). This means that logos carries a message. Logos is the transmitter of nature, Man and the cosmos: it has to be heard, rather than be smothered by the noise of human communication – in various and many languages – in squabbles over practical goods and problems. The pandemic we are currently experiencing also has its own logos. The message here relates to the necessity for Man to harmonise the relationship between Mankind and Nature with Life as the central figure of thought in order to facilitate solutions for social, political and economic issues through a new channel of eco-thought. The Phenomenology of Life aspires towards universality and regularity, unlike many concepts of contemporary philosophy that reject the principles of metaphysical systems and universalism. Many philosophical trends of the twentieth Century are characterised by their resistance to metaphysics and system-building, with Hegel seen as ‘the last of the Mohicans’, who created a system and and gave into, as Popper said, “totalitarianism”. The harsh words Heidegger had for the metaphysical viewpoint, criticism by Derrida of the “metaphysics of presence”, assaults launched by Logical Positivism

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against the vacuousness of metaphysical concepts; the ridicule by post-Modernists of the metaphysical outlook on the world and so on … all of this set the tone for the philosophy of the previous century: following the idea of a system and using the term ‘metaphysics’ was seen as a bad example. But is that really the case? Dan Zahavi has studied Husserl’s thoughts on metaphysics and has acknowledged the metaphysical neutrality of phenomenology (Zahavi 2021, 340–347), Latvian phenomenologist Theodors Celms criticized Husserl for the solipsistic metaphysics (Celms 1993). Husserl remained committed to the idea that phenomenology is metaphysically neutral, since his focus was on meaning rather than being. Husserl usually spoke of it as a matter of ontology rather than metaphysics (Zahavi 2021, 340–341). If metaphysics denotes the acknowledgement of the first principles, then Eco-­ phenomenology does not present a contradiction.2 If metaphysics is a philosophical engagement with questions of reality, being, facticity, birth and death, then Eco-­ phenomenology corresponds to this interpretation. Philosophy is a new metaphysical vision of beingness. Tymieniecka’s philosophy is, in its nature, anti post-Modernist. Jan Szmyd writes: ‘Its anti post-Modernist approach is manifested in the fact that it shows the possibility of the creation of metaphysics and other branches of philosophy” (Szmyd 2013, 4). Eco-phenomenology is not a philosophy which afraid of first principles but, on the contrary, continues the way of classical, sustainable thinking, starting from the ancient Greek philosophers, Aristotle, Leibniz, to contemporary Catholic philosophical anthropology, phenomenology of action (Pope John Paul II), existentialism and phenomenology renewed. Ontopoiesis is a new metaphysics in Eco-phenomenology. In this volume Francesco Totaro gives a description of the main features of the Phenomenology of Life as meta-metaphysics: the recovery of the sense of sense, the driving logos in its potentiality of realization, the idea that truth becomes co-extensive to the whole process of the logos already beyond human being (and which is not simply an epistemological category), and the move from cognitive dimension to the vital, existential and sacral one. Totaro has already published papers on ontopoiesis as a metaphysics, recognizing that intentionality, truth and ‘transcendental’ become driving forces until the emergence of the divinity as the fullness of the logos of life (Totaro 2015, 1–7). Relationships between phenomenological philosophy and the natural sciences are always delicate. The Japanese philosopher Hiroshi Kojima, an author included in the Analecta Husserliana volumes, predicted: “We can foresee a new conflict between science trying to carry through the decomposition of life into “homogeneous elements” and unknown phenomena of life which by nature refuse this decomposition” (Kojima 1986, 381). Many natural sciences follow the methodology of decomposition in elements, but Eco-phenomenology does the opposite and tries to take an holistic approach of phenomenological description. Direct experiences, intuition, imagination, particularly “cosmological method”, i.e., the method  Analecta Husserliana vol. 115 is devoted to the theme: From sky and earth to metaphysics.

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of conjectural inference about the Cosmos, Universe and genesis of life, are used as the philosophical method in Eco-phenomenology, combined with skills for philosophical comprehension of specific natural and social sciences. Intimacy with problems of nature, life and science gives Eco-phenomenology the opportunity to reflect more deeply on the pandemic situation. This does not mean simply epidemiological, medical, social and economic trouble, but also anxiety about the phenomenon of ‘Life’ in general.

The Eco-phenomenological Turn to Life The ecological turn in phenomenology preludes a closer examination of the origin of Life and its various forms and also implies a shift in perspective, making Life the central notion and carrying within a conviction that to be is to be alive. Discussions regarding Life have a wider remit than examinations of it in respect to Planet Earth and the existence of Man: the notion of Life is universal. It is not life-building history as a biological science, but philosophical description of the phenomenon of Life in all its dimensions starting with material up to sacral. The necessity for philosophers to turn towards the concept of Life was highlighted in 1993 by Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla), who sent a letter to phenomenologists in Latvia, addressed to the co-editor of this volume, Professor Maija Kūle. “What is perhaps more important still, you concentrate on the Phenomenology of Life,” he wrote. “One truly cannot stress life too much in our century, which seems tragically bent on eliminating it in so many ways” (Mūžīgais 1995, 4). Following the positions of Astrobiology, it is interesting to read conclusions regarding the possibility of life in the Cosmos, the discovery of which has to be accepted as a possibility. This thus requires considerations of how the public would react in the social space and in the media in order to prevent shock, chaos and inadequate reactions. Eco-phenomenology has indicated that the action of finding extra-­ terrestrial lifeforms necessitates philosophical and ethical preparedness. For far too long many philosophical approaches and social and natural sciences have focused only on life on our planet. The esteemed journal Nature has called for the question of life beyond Earth to be treated with adequate seriousness and responsibility. “Our generation could realistically be the one to discover evidence of life beyond Earth. With this privileged potential comes responsibility” (Green, Hoehler, Neveu, Voytek, et al. 2021, 575–579). Eco-phenomenology is currently one of the few philosophical systems that includes Cosmos and extra-terrestrial life in its wider reflections regarding ethical responsibility, which is one of the topics in this volume. In his chapter Bence Peter Marosan analyzes Husserl’s understanding of life, vitality and non-human life and concludes that an ethical approach is the main dimension in Eco-phenomenology. Humans are members of a community of living beings on the Earth, and therefore humans as rational subjects have self-evident ethical duties and responsibility for the other living beings, even non-human and non-conscious beings. This promotes the principles of a common understanding of

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‘we’ as a collective, intersubjective whole. “We-consciousness” is one of the new concepts generated by contemporary phenomenological thought, which has an epistemological, social, moral and metaphysical sense. The COVID-19 virus is a natural aggressor, and the pandemic creates a cataclysm. To overcome this requires a common telos of all people in ethical and social coexistence. The COVID-19 pandemic has already claimed about six million lives (https:// covid19.who.int/) and has devastated the global economy. The close links we see today between life, politics and economy only exist during pandemic and wartime. The pandemic calls for a new definition of relationships between humans and Nature; of rationality and irrationality in the human condition, space and time and ‘home’. There must be new thought given to human autonomy and collective solidarity, reason, expressive phenomena, anger, anxiety and explanations of conscious and unconscious life. This new definition must not be limited to “humans among themselves or only reasonable life on the Earth” but needs to include the micro-­ world of viruses, microbes, bacteria, flora and fauna, and also rapidly developing new technologies. If we speak symbolically, the virus as a particle (without mind and living body) becomes the greatest ‘hero’ of today, not the Pure Reason it was in Kantian times. Science has not found an answer to whether viruses are alive or not; they seem to be as being at the edge of life. “Scientists are beginning to appreciate viruses as fundamental players in the history of life” (Villarreal 2008). Coronavirus lacks many hallmarks of living beings – a metabolism, it does not have cells etc., but is able to ‘act’ very intensively by transmitting between human beings. Its telos (if we can imagine the virus acting as ‘targeted’) is oriented to find a host, but human beings, metaphorically speaking, are targeted to be free from any host, to certify freedom! Not for the first time in world history, the microspatiality of viruses and the human world have challenged each other, but the inner essence of these ‘worlds’ is quite opposite. The ‘free human being’ strives to be self-individualized, while the target of the virus is inclusion; it exists as a kind of “borrowed life”. Eco-phenomenology recognises the fundamental principle of the ‘cosmic’ as well as the transcendental constitution of the lifeworld and interprets life as ‘the play of Nature’ or ‘the quintessence of Nature’. Eco-phenomenology does not engage directly with the Philosophy of Life and Existentialism (not a direct link with Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry Bergson, Ortega y Gasset and others) but it is developed within the context of the life-force idea where natural vitality grows or develops until it reaches a moral, intelligible human vitality. Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset’s (1883–1955) ratio-vitalism is close to Eco-phenomenology. In his work The Revolt of Masses3 he writes about the vitality that unifies the worlds of Nature and Man: “The reality of history lies in biological power, in pure vitality; in what there is in Man of cosmic energy – not identical with, but related to, the energy

 First published as a series of articles in 1929; as a book in 1930, in English in 1932.

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which agitates the sea, fecundates the beast, causes the tree to flower and the star to shine” (Ortega y Gasset 1957, 34). The Spanish philosopher Avelina Cecilia Lafuente has spent many years working on the Phenomenology of Life and notes many similarities with the philosophy of Life. Both Tymieniecka and Ortega y Gasset regard life as the fundamental reality; both consider human life as creative, and both try to make life compatible with Reason and with philosophical endeavour (Cecilia Lafuente 2000, 185). The Philosophy of Life is based on a new kind of rationality; a rationality that is open to vital phenomena and inspired by phenomenology, while avoiding the excesses of abstraction to which Husserl’s approach leads (Cecilia Lafuente 2000, 186). Ecophenomenologists consider that Reason cannot be recognized as the sole ground for understanding the pluri-dimensionality of human life. Eco-phenomenology can be called the philosophy of life energy as a process, for it turns its attention to the genesis of life, to the embodiment of the processes of logos in self-individualization. This branch of philosophy sees historicity as a part of the development of life within the human condition. The creative human condition appears at a certain stage of cosmic evolution as a result of the autopoietic constructivism of life. The pivotal force of the genesis is a central point of the conception of fluctuating life. Recognition of historicity as an approach affirms belief in changes and issues of flux versus stasis, as well as understanding the fleeting nature of everything. Eco-­ phenomenology has included the principle of historicity in its system and is explained in a dedicated Analecta Husserliana volume.4 The trend does not bypass the principle of historicity but encompasses it as a component part of the system of life. It is substantiated by expansion, development, the individualization of life. This substantiation carries much greater weight than that by individual finitude, death and the time mode – namely, in the past (Kūle 2006, 248). The first part of this volume The Enchantment of Life, Nature and the Ontopoietic Ecosystem includes a direct emphasis that life should be perceived in its unique, aesthetic, moral and sacral dimensions as a sort of wonder in the Universe. The idea of sharing in life dominates. The Earth becomes the reference point and the zero point of thinking. This idea has been developed in Ella Buceniece’s work and in other authors’ opinions in this volume. She deploys a number of significant phenomenologists, ranging from Husserl himself to Merleau-Ponty, Bibikhin, Tymieniecka and Arendt to build a picture of the variety of ways in which human beings can be understood to be embedded in the natural world and exist as sharing in life. The concept ‘being-in-the-world’ expresses a very ecocentric idea that we are protecting not only ourselves but also the natural world. Bibikhin offers the metaphor of the world-forest (the Woods) in which individuals constitute “trees” but together with all the other living beings constitute “the forest” as an eco-entity – a

 Analecta Husserliana Volume 40, Manifestations of Reason: Life, Historicity, Culture Reason, Life, Culture Part II: Phenomenology in the Adriatic Countries (Springer, 1993). 4

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mystery of living unity. Understanding of this eco-phenomenological turn may help to develop the principles of a new ethics of ecological responsibility, directed towards the preservation of life and natural diversity on the Earth.

 he COVID-19 Pandemic as a Symbol of Changes T in the Human Condition COVID-19 becomes a symbolic figure with the phenomenological characteristics of: (a) its invisibility; (b) being present everywhere; (c) being a stranger; (d) its potential sustainability; (e) its changeability (the speed of its mutations!); (f) its resistance to human endeavours to protect their lives with vaccination (g) serving as a bridge connecting the human and natural worlds (with genesis from the animal world), as a trespasser, and so on. From the distancing and emancipating process of symbolization the tragic mark of the entire cultural development in the pandemic times emerges, marked by the worldwide experience of anxiety and trouble. Hegel would say that the irrational spirit has awakened from the slumber it was lulled into by the rationality of Enlightenment. The virus acts in the microworld – inside human bodies, invisible to the naked eye – but leaves a mark on the macroworld by affecting human culture, social life and mentality. Trends of philosophy that followed the rationality of classical German philosophy by sticking with the rational, observable and logical now face a dilemma as to how to describe phenomena that exist between many layers, are hidden and have incomprehensible determinations. COVID-19 has acquired a symbolic role as the virus is used by the consumer and entertainment industry where it is aestheticized, depicted in works of art, advertisements, computer games, movies etc. The situation of the pandemic demonstrates a modern dualism: the apperceptive uncertain body is united with doubtful consciousness and imaginative will to understand the world of viruses via images. It is an age of technological creation and of virtual shows, when our body has been converted into a threat to ourselves. Life in the macroworld is understandable through the use of human sentient experience and of mind, therefore depictions of the invisible virus are illustrative, decorative and of an intellectually analytic nature, providing descriptions of the genome as required for medicine. The virus is treated with tools developed by human visual culture and an iconic sign system, with the language of symbols often attracting ideas of the possible “non-existence” of the virus – as referred to by opponents of vaccination. The development of rational reason does not help people rationalize their feelings when meeting the microscopiality. What is more concerning is the entire microworld from which the virus COVID-19 derives. The Korean philospher Sang-­ Hwan recognizes this: “The world of microscopiality is a black hole through which the culture of the twenty-first Century must penetrate. The hope, anxiety, progress

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and danger of the future all await us in that very hole. […] Today culture is not pursued or enjoyed in terms of transcendent ideologies or grand hierarchical systems. Rather, it is developed in the miscellaneous, the quotidian, the marginal and the unconscious. Indeed, microscopiality is the cultural New World discovered at the end of the twentieth Century (Sang-Hwan 2011, 208). The effect the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the world is comparable to that of terrorism. In this volume Māris Kūlis writes of being in horror: describing how radiation, terrorism and viruses employ similar mechanisms of action expressed by their visual invisibility and their similar effect of causing terror that is aimed at everyone rather than at a particular adversary. He writes that to experience a pandemic is to also take part in historically important events of change to the traditional way of life. In this way COVID-19 is not only an object of fear, but also a reference point for symbolic meaning. It is also interesting how deeply the virus has influenced the measure of time and human history – people started to use the beginning of the pandemic as a new era. The case of COVID-19 started to function as a measurement of the time flow: people do not use dates and years, but the expression – “in the pre-pandemic time” (now as familar as B.C: Before Christ). which is: “before the end of pandemic”. Time counting has become Covid-centric, the same with space parameters, distance, shop areas, house size, theatre seating distances and so on. Anxiety during COVID-19 spreads in the form of concern, worry, disquiet and the distrust of science; of doubting practical measures and rational experiments of science. As a result, human beings on the Earth share a common fate which is analysed in the second themed section of the volume “The Human Condition in the Pandemic Environment: the Logos of Subliminal Passions, Spacing, Dwellings, Feelings”.

 he Challenges of Being Alone Together T and Mental Disturbances The pandemic situation illuminates the extent to which the existence of every human being is dependent on social space, being together with others and the actions of others. The situation of pandemic raises the question of the meaning of life and death, as people (in all corners of the world) feel a real threat of death. Today’s feelings are different from the times of deep Christian faith: human beings do not want to hear about death, because it seems to be something akin to a stranger. Ales Bello turns to the teaching of the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein about the life-force and mental disturbances and describes mental illnesses in the situation of pandemic. Ales Bello chapter contains a high ethical mission, with a detailed explanation of entropathy: the lived experience that allows us to know the other, and to help them. Giulio Lo Bello in his chapter turns to the feeling of “to be alone together” and considers the striking increase in mental health in the pandemic period. He explains

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that the mental health crisis is closely related to an existential crisis: the profound disruption of communication creating a fracture that can spiral downward. People lack an organic view of their relational world in the situation when the individualistic paradigm does not stimulate the understanding of life as a process of ‘unity-of-everything-that-is-alive’. The pandemic illustrates an aggravation of an age-old philosophical matter: the relationship between the individual and the community. In this, every individual is in need of community to expand their field of existence and provide the conditions for life, but the human society has become dangerous, as all its members are at risk of falling sick and potentially dying. Algis Mickunas describes the pandemic as an example of an expressive phenomenon. Expressive phenomena are not located inside individual psyche but are found among populations as “immanent transcendence”, in other words as a “mood space” or “atmosphere”. They create our “aesthetic home” as joyful, sorrowful, angry, erotic etc. The philosopher analyzes the modern ontology, interpreting a modern subject as the total possessor of inner feelings and agitates for an extended poly-logical horizon, where people are not only dialogical partners, but also participants in a field which also “speaks”. Roberto Marchesini calls for understanding of the relational meaning of life. Somatic phenomenology must become an important basis for eco-philosophical insight. The body is interpreted as a multi-layered core of affectivity, which puts the body in relation with the world. Marchesini joins Tymieniecka’s idea of ontopoiesis and recognizes that what drives the human being is desire, not simple rationality. He clearly expresses the main idea of Eco-phenomenology: what we need is a change in the way we understand the place of the human being in the biosphere. The idea of relationism is developed in Māra Rubene’s chapter on ambient urbanism, Earth and sky. An underdeveloped area in Eco-phenomenology is aesthetics analyzed in the context of the “drama of Nature” (A.-T.  Tymieniecka), human affectivity and human feelings. Rubene interprets Eco-phenomenological aesthetics as embedded in the relationality of livability and sustains striving to shared responsibility for life on the Earth.

The Uncanny World Everybody knows that the COVID times have generated a lot of uncanny complex objects which participate in the deepening of human anxiety, therefore some chapters of this volume are rightly dedicated to the explanation and description of uncanny phenomena. Thomas Ryba’s paper in this volume reflects on the taxonomy of the different forms of uncanny. He writes that phenomenological investigation must include descriptions of the phenomenological features of the uncanny – not only as negative uncanny but also as positive and neutral cases. The taxonomy of uncanny objects has the potential to be a very useful methodological tool for future Eco-phenomenological research.

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Ryba pays attention to normal and abnormal cases as co-constituted. In other words (expressed by Steinbock), he applies normality and abnormality to global forms of life and defines them as the home-world and the alien-world. This delineation corresponds to the pandemic situation. Human beings are fighting to stay in their home-world, but the virus comes as ‘a being from the alien-world’ trying to ruin the home-world, not to improve it. Igors Šuvajevs in his chapter continues the characterization of uncanny. He argues that the presence of the uncanny in human existence can be identified by distinguishing between human ‘lived-in’ and ‘liveable’ space, which seems to be an unhomely and ‘destroyed’ space. He describes the problem of the phenomenology of space, which is related to dwelling as an ethical question about the care of meaningful space. Dwelling in one’s selfhood becomes a problem. The uncanny unhomeliness is linked with suppression, fear, doubling, compulsion and so on, as Angela Ales Bello and Giulio LoBello analyze in this volume describing mental disturbances. When the virus first enters a human body it, like so many pathogens, does so without any signs. It can only be detected after a while as it reproduces and causes the host body to become ill. That is why there is a certain mythology surrounding the virus. Phenomenology offers the chance to depict these phenomena under examination as invisible, or indirectly visible, in separated perceptions or recollections; as imagined, i.e., in various modes where the various structures of inner time and space are at play. This invisibility is analysed by Uldis Vēgners, who describes the pandemic times as the uncanny world. According to him, we can consider a threefold displacement of virus appearance. The virus infects our bodies, but its meaning infects the meaning of our embodied existence in the world and that “infects” our everyday practical life, which radically changes as a consequence. From the phenomenological point of view, the “alien” virus that is unknown to the immune system becomes a known entity that can be fought against. Phenomenology, which has long since considered the “alien” aspect in humans, cultures and social life5 has now arrived at a point where the phenomenology of the alien has to look at challenges posed by the natural world. This is especially salient today as explanations associated with COVID-19 deal not only with it in epidemiological terms, but also with the fact that it forms a part of human life (epidemics and pandemics as companions of civilisation). Societies are vulnerable, because the dominant ideologies in many of them are often under the yoke of weak social security and profiteering. Eco-phenomenology does not, however, join forces with alien phenomenology6 or an object-oriented ontology (that puts “things” at the centre of being) because in Eco-phenomenology the human being is the primary or highest element in a great chain of life. Eco-phenomenology describes the human as a quintessence of logos  See for example Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts by emeritus professor Bernhard Waldenfels, (Northwestern University Press, 2011), 6  See Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to be a Thing by the post-humanist professor of digital technology Ian Bogost, (University of Minnseota Press, 2012). 5

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development, in a wide context as transitions of sense: from the vital towards the existential, and social sharing-in-life. In other words, it is the thread from elemental stirrings to human fulfilment which is an orientation towards transcendence up to the search for Divine.

 andemic Challenges: Being Together, Keeping Distance P and Ecological Solidarity The third part of the volume “Pandemic Challenges: Being Together, Keeping Distance and Ecological Solidarity” is devoted to the we-consciousness, intersubjectivity, autonomous being, social life and telos, and the need for ecological solidarity. Now large masses of people are targeted by irrationalism, anger, fear and disregard for philosophy and science. The pandemic time has incessantly imposed the realisation that Man should be viewed as a creature of the natural world – of the genesis of life. Now it is time to return to the ancient concepts as logos, telos and entelechy in a new interpretation, because the natural world has a purposefulness of its own: the generative matrix. Eco-phenomenology stimulates a search for a self-orienting complex of constructive forces of all segments and layers of life. This gives people an opportunity to look at the enchantment and dangers of life and nature, and to reflect all eco-phenomenological concepts in the ontopoietic eco-system. Philosophy turns to analysis of a dialectic interaction between the microworld (virus) and the macroworld (human), where each has its own rules and opportunities, yet both exist together in nature, but the human beings are trying to use medical-­ technical means against the virus. Eco-phenomenology develops a change of human intentionality towards the non-human environment. That is to understand how life is led by people on the Earth and in the non-human environment; how to reach a position of harmony between the Human and the Cosmos as a problem of developing Logos. Eco-phenomenology sees Life-Earth-Humans-Logos-Nature-Cosmos as intertwined phenomena. The mission of Eco-phenomenology is to pass from an instrumental intentionality to a loving intentionality towards Earth and Cosmos. The fundamental question of philosophy in Eco-phenomenology shifts from relations between existence and inquiry, object and subject, reality and constituted phenomena and so on to the question of life and death. Nature, technique and culture are not opposed. We are together-with-everything-that-is-and-is-not-alive. This has at its centre the protection of life ascribed with ultimate value, to enable the priority of life to overcome the pragmatism and the dominance of socio-economic life in the twenty-first Century. Anna Magdalene Elsner and Vanessa Rampton are certain that the COVID crisis cannot be solved without the involvement of the Humanities. They write: “Humanities enable us to resist those who claim certainty using simplified biological or societal models. Instead, they point to ways out that involve cultivating the shared habits, beliefs and values that make social life

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possible. The pandemic has given new concreteness to society’s vulnerabilities” (Elsner and Rampton 2020, 2). Whether to hug or not to hug Grandma has become one painful life or death choice to be made every day as a result of the pandemic situation. New phenomena change our understanding of what constitutes social life, which has turned into a mixture of the material and non-material worlds. The social and cultural changes that have happened during the pandemic are described in this volume by Tomas Sodeika and Lina Vidauskyte on the basis of their analysis of Husserl’s ‘Fifth Meditation’. Intersubjectivity is understood in Eco-phenomenology as life together with others and the recognition of others within ourselves. The philosophical challenge of Eco-phenomenology is how to assume individual intentionality versus collective intentionality; of ‘we-consciousness’ versus an individual subject’s reason and inner-time consciousness; of the common lifeworld in the web of life versus the ontological and transcendental nature postulated in Husserlian phenomenology. Intersubjectivity encompasses Edith Stein’s phenomenological teaching on empathy, social ontology, modern expansions in Jürgen Habermas’ communication theory and social psychology. Otherness has been examined in great detail by Emmanuel Levinas, whose works provided the groundwork for the Analecta Husserliana series (Pensée et prédication, vol. 6; Transcendence and evil, vol. 14). Bence Marosan expands the understanding of the Other – namely, the Other need not necessarily be a human person, but also could be a non-human being, or even our natural environment. Angela Ales Bello accentuates another aspect: that we have to assume the life of the other within ourselves, and this can happen only on the human level. The pandemic situation has accentuated the question of being together. The chapter by Tomas Kačerauskas discusses communicative openness and closedness during the quarantine. Efforts to open the world, knowledge, markets and borders in an age of globalisation have done an about-face, and now focus on the necessity to close and restrict everything. Eco-phenomenology interprets the interactions between openness and closedness as a dialectic process and describe phenomena where openness and closedness meet: in our dwellings, real and virtual. Tomas Kačerauskas concludes that the open horizon of being with others is one of the most important phenomenological attitudes, but the pandemic situation prevents a ‘living communication’. He sees the way out in the development of rather different forms of new kinds of communication – the world also opens up when a human being is at home, where creativity could be developed. Ineta Kivle writes in this volume about the idea of ‘keeping a distance’ in the context of the philosophies of Husserl from the one hand, and Deleuze and Guattari, from the other hand. A practical conclusion from her philosophical analysis has been drawn: to maintain a healthy living space and ensure safety for all the community. Maija Kūle discusses the question of the possibility of autonomy and the role of advisers. The idea of human autonomy is at the heart of Western civilisation. Philosophers such as Kant, Kierkegaard and Sartre have given it much

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attention – Kant sees autonomy in Man’s good will, Kierkegaard in absolute faith and Sartre in existential choice. Advisers are not needed and are not tolerated in a philosophical sense; autonomy means maximum individual responsibility. However, different trends of contemporary philosophy soften the demands of autonomy by turning to heteronomy (E. Levinas), by recognising the cultural and linguistic conditionality of Man. Eco-phenomenology also does this, looking at the human situation as a process of self-individuation in life which is an ontopoietic process. Maija Kūle reminds us that the idea of autonomy should not be lost, since the recognition of the universality of the categorical imperative is essential in Kant‘s teaching, and this approach of the universal view is relevant in the pandemic situation in explaining global moral responsibility. Kierkegaard‘s teaching is maximalist, but it is worth looking at today because he shows that individual moral choices should not be reduced to the advisers and should be made in the deepest silence, without social noise all around, which is also true of the pandemic situation, about which the media have made a huge noise today. Sartre‘s lesson also shows that we should not rely on advisers, but that we must find the moral decision and values for ourselves, taking maximum responsibility. The doctrine of autonomy thus serves as a guide for how to deal with the moral problems posed by the pandemic at the personal level today. Bence Peter Marosan concludes that the personal life-story of human beings is part of the never-ending story of life in general; and the answer to the question “Who are we in reality?” is partly answered by our own deeds and conduct, and by the manner in which we treat other living beings. From a broader eco-phenomenological perspective, it is an ethical question that is all the more important during a pandemic. Angela Ales Bello, who has contributed several articles for Analecta Husserliana volumes on responsibility, writes: “[…] we have to assume the life of the Other within ourselves, and this can only happen on the human level. Mutual responsibility by means of which we live not only by the side of the Other and with the Other, but also in each other, both potentially and effectively and in solidarity with each other for good or ill” (Ales Bello 2000, 51). Eco-phenomenology describes the possibility of morality as a process, as Moral Sense exists throughout the genesis of life: initially as a seedling and then developing into an expanded Moral Sense in the human world. An explanation of logos and telos in life provides a basis for ethics and for a theory of Moral Sense as a process of valuation that includes two opposite processes. One is self-interest and the other is being for-the-sake-of-the-Other. When faith in God as the Absolute has been lost, the many types of modern ethics (situational ethics, pragmatic ethics and so on) are without an ultimate ground and under threat of relativism. Morality as cognitive, aesthetic, and religious virtualities appears at a specific stage of evolution of All-being: in ontopoiesis. In the context of Eco-phenomenology, the lifeworld, an important notion of phenomenology introduced by Husserl, stands for the world of the whole of life. It is another new notion in phenomenology that shows and reveals how the human world is interlinked with all-that-is-alive. Consequently, the most important questions in the philosophical narratives of today

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deal with the place of Man in the Cosmos, of universal ethics and the harmonisation of relations between Nature, technology and culture. *This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project No. lzp-2020/2-0085 “Development of Eco-phenomenology in the Situation of Pandemic”.

Works Cited Ales Bello, Angela. 2000. Life, Person, Responsibility. Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenologic Research. vol. LXVII, The Origins of Life, vol. II, The Origins of the Existential Sharing – In Life, 43–53. Dordrecht\Boston\London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Attenborough, David. 2021. https://www.wwf.org.au/news/blogs/10-­best-­nature-­quotes-­from-­sir-­ david-­attenborough. Viewed October 11, 2021. Cecilia Lafuente, Maria Avelina. 2000. Human Existence as a Creative Process. In Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, The Origins of Life, ed. A.T. Tymieniecka, vol. LXVII, part II, 183–194. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Celms, Theodor. 1993. Der phänomenologische Idealismus Husserls und andere Schriften 1928–1943. Herausgegeben von J. Rozenvalds und Hans Jörg Sandkühler. Frankfurt a.d.M.: Peter Lang, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften. Cobb-Stevens, Richard. 1985. Derrida and Husserl. On the Status of Retention. In Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenologic Research, Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: The Sea. From Elemental Stirrings to Symbolic Inspiration, Language, and Life-­ Significance in Literary Interpretation and Theory, ed. A.T. Tymieniecka, vol. XIX, 367–381. Dordrecht\Boston\Lancaster: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Elsner, Anna Magdalena and Vanessa Rampton. 2020. Opinion: Science Alone Can’t Solve Covid-19. The Humanities Must Help. https://undark.org/2020/06/04/covid-19-humanities/ Green, James, Tori Hoehler, Marc Neveu, Shawn Domagal-Goldman, and Mary Voytek. 2021. Call for a Framework for Reporting Evidence for Life Beyond Earth. In: Nature, 598, October 27, pp. 575–579. Kojima, Hiroshi. 1986. The Modern Age as a Transitional Period: An Essay on Metaphenomenology. In Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenologic Research, The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition. Part II. The Meeting Point Between Occidental and Oriental Philosophies, ed. A.T. Tymieniecka, vol. XXI, 369–385. D. Reidel Publishing Company. Kūle, Maija. 2006. Principle of Historicity in the Phenomenology of Life. In Analecta Husserliana, The Yearbook of Phenomenologic Research, Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of The Logos. Book Three. Logos of History  – Logos of Life. Historicity, Time, Nature, Communication, Consciousness, Alterity, Culture, ed. A.T. Tymieniecka, vol. XC, 237–249. Springer. Moran, Dermot and Thomas Szanto (Eds.) 2016. Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’. Routledge. Mūžīgais un laicīgais (Eternal and Timely). 1995. Ed. Maija Kūle. Lielvārde: Lielvārds, pp. 4–5. Ortega y Gasset, José. 1957 (1932). The Revolt of the Masses. New  York: W.W.  Norton & Company. I.N.C. Sang-Hwan, Kim. 2011. Eco-ethica as New Narative on Culture. In Eco-Ethica. No.1, pp. 203–209. https://doi.org/10.5840/ecoethica2011118. Stein, Edith. 1989. On the Problem of Empathy: The Collected Works of Edith Stein (3rd Volume). Washington: ICS Publications. Szmyd, Jan. 2013. Modern Eco-philosophy and Phenomenology of Life on Human Positioning in the Cosmos. A.-T.  Tymieniecka and Henryk Skolimowski in Comparison. In Analecta Husserliana, The Yearbook of Phenomenologic Research, Phenomenlogy and the Human

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Positioning in the Cosmos. The Life-world, Nature, Earth: Book 2, ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka, vol. CXIV, 3–20. Dordrecht\Heidelberg\New York\London: Springer. Torjussen, Lars Petter, Servan Johannes and Øyen Simen Andersen. 2008. An Interview with Anna-­ Teresa Tymieniecka, August 27, Bergen, Norway, http://www.phenomenology.org/images/ Interview-­A-­T-­Tymieniecka-­27-­August-­2008.pdf. Assessed May 01, 2021. Totaro, Francesco. 2015. Introduction: Some Remarks About Ontopoiesis as New Metaphysics. In Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research. From Sky and Earth to Metaphysics, ed. A. Tymieniecka, 1–7. Dordrecht: Springer. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. 1988. Logos and Life: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason. Book 1. In Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol. XXIV. Dordrecht\Boston\London\Tokyo: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1990. Logos and Life. The Passions of the Soul and the Elements in the Onto-Poiesis of Culture. Book 3. In The Life Significance of Literature. Tractatus Brevis. Dordrecht\Boston\ London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2011. Inspirations of Heraclitus from Ephesus Fulfilled in Our New Enlightenment. In Analecta Husserliana, The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka, vol. CX, Part 1, 3–15. Dordrecht\Heidelberg\London\New York: Springer. Verducci, Daniela. 2012. La fenomenologia della vita di Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Roma: Aracne. ———. 2016. The Consciousness of Being Alive. A Forgotten Transcendental Condition of Community and Togetherness. In Fenomenoloģija mūsdienu pasaulē. Phenomenology Worldwide, ed. M. Kūle, 179–197. Riga: FSI. Villarreal, Luis P. 2008. Are Viruses Alive? Scientific American, On August 8, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-viruses-alive-2004/ Zahavi, Dan. 2014. Self and Other: Exploring subjectivity, empathy, and shame. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2021. Phenomenology as Metaphysics. In The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics, ed. R. Bliss and J.T.M. Miller, 339–349. London: Routledge.

The Harmony Between Human and Cosmos as a Problem of Sense (with a Warning Against Misinterpretations of Pandemic) Francesco Totaro

Abstract  This chapter deals with the issue of harmony between human and cosmos as a problem of sense. It first dwells on an integration of the Phenomenology of Life, as a metaphysics of being’s process (the Heraclitean moment), and a metaphysics speaking about the relationship between unconditional and conditional being (the Parmenidean moment). Then, it considers a complication related to the idea of harmony, which has to take into account the dimension of conflict pertaining not only to the relationship between humans, hearth and cosmos, but also between and within each of the various items of the environment (the mineral domain, plants and non-human animals). Consequently, a ‘not-naïve’ idea of harmony can be affirmed as a necessary “concrete utopia” that gives sense to the being’s fullness; its realization requires our capacity, both theoretical and practical, to change our anthropological self-assessment and the unilateral model of producing-consuming. The last part of the chapter warns against misinterpretations of the present pandemic. Such misleading hermeneutics consist of an uncanny “zoodicea” that takes up the worst features of an outdated “theodicea” and in an unreasonable as well as extenuated  – though seemingly fascinating  – repetition of bio-political patterns, reducing politics and its institutions to a death exercise. Keywords  Eco-phenomenology · Metaphysics · Ontopoiesis · Unconditional being · Conditional being · Harmony · Conflict · Human · Environment · Cosmos · Pandemic and misinterpretations

F. Totaro (*) FCSFG (Fondazione Centro Studi Filosofici di Gallarate), Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_2

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The Itinerary of This Chapter This chapter starts by taking up the metaphysical character of the Phenomenology of Life elaborated by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka.1 Thanks to this original turning, phenomenology becomes a recognition of a process of realization of being, or ontopoiesis, that includes in an unitary way all the manifestations of life, up to the evidence of the divine, passing through the moment of recapitulation and relaunch constituted by the human. At the peak of phenomenology and ontopoiesis, or a being that makes itself, we have to face the issue of the definition of being as such. In my opinion, indeed, the Parmenidean principle of being that cannot but be joins the Heraclitean or processual aspect of being as beingness. That allows us to think in a rigorous way about the flow of becoming. For this reason, the second part of the chapter presents the idea of being that, on the basis of Parmenides and of the neo-Parmenidean hermeneutic, can be considered as unconditional. On the other hand, the idea of conditional being, which corresponds to that of our experience, also comes to light from it. The two dimensions of being, however, must not be separated, but must be coordinated with each other. Beings of experience let themselves be thought of according to a positivity that has not been fully achieved or reached. The manifestations of the conditioned being are therefore attracted by the fullness of the non-conditioned being, which has been fulfilled. Then, a space of dynamic tension of beings of experience [entia] unfolds towards the fullness of being [esse]. Such dynamics embrace all that belongs to our rays of knowledge in its incessant and progressive extension towards the fullness of being. In this space, in my opinion, a processual ontology can find place, according to a re-understanding and not-dispersive vision as that offered by the thesis of ontopoiesis. Unlike the philosophies of the deductive and organic type, and unlike the systematic ambitions of classical idealism too, phenomenology has the “speculative” merit to respect the autonomy of the spheres of knowledge without, however, giving up a bestowal – or at least an indication – of a gathering meaning that avoids what Friedrich Nietzsche called “horrid randomness”. This is the deepening of the path opened by Edmund Husserl with his 1936 book Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie [The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology]. Therefore, ontopoiesis as a manifestation of the being that, so to say, has yet to be, opens the very wide area of mediation between unconditional being and conditional being. There is also a lesson here in method. In fact, the awareness that the acquisition of ontopoietic knowledge is always partial can warn against the tendency of some scientific elaborations to pose as hegemonic or even all-encompassing knowledge. This is the case with cosmological knowledge, when it does not shy away from the temptation, more or less spontaneous, to settle on the throne of an improper metaphysics, attributing to itself the last word regarding theological questions, where the affirmation of the  There is a rich and deep discussion in Verducci (2012).

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existence or non-existence of God is bound to empirical arguments concerning the primordial event of the “Big Bang”.2 Later in the chapter, I will try to examine the issue of harmony between humans and cosmos. This subject, if it does not want to remain just a good and praiseworthy aspiration, must be treated first of all as a problematic question. Therefore, we must ask ourselves what the ingredients of the issue are, and how they can be combined.

A Retrospective About Metaphysics Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka loved Heraclitus and his dynamic metaphysics. From my side, I would also like to remember Parmenides and his statement about “being that cannot but be”. This statement is very important because it introduces meanings such “being and not-being” or “being and nothing” (if you prefer: positive and negative); and simultaneously says that being prevails against and over nothing. In other words, Parmenides declares the unconditioned positivity of being or the being as unconditional. I will develop a sentence like that in the next section of this chapter, pointing out its importance too for a correct interpretation of Heraclitus; that is, if we want to interpret the flux of becoming as the life of positivity itself, and not as the passing of positivity into nothing. Thus, Parmenides offers us the legacy of an unconditional principle. That is, a principle we can recognize as the primal condition of any conditional being, and not as a consequence or a production of what belongs to an experience within the conditions of Time and Space. Such a background allows us to appreciate the modern course of metaphysics as a metaphysics of the subject, which culminates in the elaboration of the categories of consciousness and, finally, to a statement of its intentionality. Other philosophies linked to life do not delete the idea of metaphysics, which rather assumes new and transformed forms. Friedrich Nietzsche affirms a metaphysics consisting in the identity of becoming and being, although he does not manage to avoid a big contradiction in setting such identities. Wilhelm Dilthey speaks about metaphysics as a search for the sense that ought to take the place of classical “naturalistic” metaphysics. Edmund Husserl proposes a pure eidetics with a metaphysical air, and Martin Heidegger, focusing on the thesis of ontological difference, re-interprets the relationship between Being and beings as a manifestation of events – Ereignisse – in which Being itself remains hidden. Within the phenomenological stream, it must be remembered that Max Scheler‘s thought expands metaphysical research to the field of values and emotions too. Actually, at a closer look, we are in the era of ‘post-metaphysical thought’ – an expression borrowed from the title of a well-known book by Jürgen Habermas (see Habermas 1988), who moves away from the “philosophy of conscience” but is aware of the relevance of the intentionality referring to the “entire” [das Ganze].

 The author considers these arguments are far too empirical.

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The relationship with the whole would not be satisfied by a sort of scientism and not even by specialized knowledge, so it needs a “general philosophy”. My view is that this need for human thought hints at a post-post-metaphysics; that is, a regenerated metaphysics which should not be detached or separated from the world-of-life.

 he Main Features of the Phenomenology of Life T as Metaphysics Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Phenomenology of Life is at the same time a meta-­ phenomenology and ‘a new metaphysics’, as it elevates discussion to a general thought of being. At the heart of this thought lies a renewed inquiry into sense. Such an inquiry gets into the field of crucial notions of immanence and transcendence, totality and finalism, and all that can be useful to identify and articulate the basic idea of ontopoiesis, taken in its dynamism and in its constructive perspective, oriented to the creative discovery of sense and, more profoundly, of the sense of sense. This metaphysical turn of phenomenology requires a revision and a completion of Husserl’s notion of intentionality. The remodelling of intentionality proposed by Tymieniecka starts from a radical question: “Is intentionality really the exclusive basic factor in constituting our world as it manifests itself?” (Tymieniecka 2009, 21). To the features of intellectualism reproached to Husserl’s intentionality, Tymieniecka opposes the view of the universal logos that manifests itself as a driving force, which is progressing towards its aims by an alternation of “impetus” and “equipoise”. In this way phenomenology radically turns itself into a vision of processual dynamism. Landing on “the creative function of constitutive consciousness”, the intentionality of the logos realizes the instance of ultimate self-foundation as ontopoiesis, and thus as the logos of life. The certainty and truth of the logos are to be found in its potentiality for realization, with no need for further justification. Consequentially, truth becomes co-extensive to the whole process of the logos, and thus goes beyond the specifically-human sphere. The constant search for truth sustains the entire dynamic/constructive spread of the logos of life in its various spheres, using all the varied modalities of each.3 That means that the notion of Truth overlaps with a universal generative power. At the same time, since Truth is always embedded in a plurality of spheres where none is prevailing, it develops itself through a variety of levels and, we could say, through a variety of prospective partialities referring either to a cognitive and pragmatic field. A “contestual/interrelational conception” like that, in which each area of being can play its specific role within the respective sphere of sense, excludes on one hand renouncing the truth in favor of relativism and, on the other, the presumption of a part to be valid as the whole.

 For further details, see Tymieniecka (2009, 122).

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A third feature that characterizes the ontopoietic radicalisation of phenomenology is the translation of “transcendentals” – already analyzed by Husserl – from a cognitive dimension to a more comprehensive existential and vital one. Tymieniecka says the “transcendental situation of the living being” consists of: the vital positional situation of the living agent as the center of a band of vital attention as it pursues functional concerns – with all of its functions stemming from and oriented outwards by a “center” – a center open to receiving reactions, nourishment, etc. (Tymieniecka 2009, 134)

Beyond the horizons of our cognitive performances, we have to look at horizons of “the whole of experience of living beingness” and consider all its vital functions. Furthermore, the movement of the logos of life completes itself in the social forms of living and finally goes beyond the narrow borders of the existential dimension too, throwing up spiritual and, finally, sacral horizons of experience (Tymieniecka 2009, 135). So a further turn is realized with an “overturning”, consisting of the supremacy of mind over life and in the extension of the transcendental from the world-of-life to the wider geo-cosmic framework. Life-transcendental enters the dynamic web of geo-cosmic architectonics (Tymieniecka 2009, 137). The final step in the process of ontopoiesis is the emergence of the evidence of divinity as the fullness of the logos of life. Such evidence shows the teleological orientation of a manifold process that is not left to randomness, which would mean the negation of sense. From a methodological point of view, it is important to underline that the end of sense of the whole process of ontopoiesis cannot be deductively demonstrated, but rests on a claim for self-evidence that is nevertheless able to feed itself with the results of cognitive disciplines, and can offer them, reciprocally, a frame of their full understanding. Into the unity of ontopoiesis any “positive” knowledge can find a place, which can be integrated into the flow of everything-that-is-­ alive and in the frame of its intelligence. In a vision of the interrelation of expressions of being, attention to the methods and contents of positive inquiries regarding communication is obligatory. Therefore Tymieniecka appreciates the evolutional-biological research on language  – from Maturana and Varela up to Tomasello – and in neurological studies, provided their deterministic inclinations are corrected.

Unconditional Being and Conditional Being From the framework sketched above, it is clear that ontopoiesis constitutes itself as a new metaphysics, because it aspires to be an active search for the ultimate sense of reality, both in its dynamic articulations and in the unity of its telos. So what conclusion should be drawn with regard to such an aspiration? In this frame, the research of sense, if it wants to describe itself as research into the sense of sense, that is, of the ultimate sense, it can – or better still, must – open itself to a renovated consideration of the unconditioned principle, which is the legacy of classical

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metaphysics. In taking this path ontopoiesis, recognised as a new metaphysics (or as a renewal of metaphysics), could affirm itself as a resumption and development of the metaphysics of the unconditional being. We have to declare that the unconditional being does not mean a static being, because it means a being that is alive and intrinsic to the life, leading all the process of life in truth, goodness and beauty, until the manifestation of the fullness of God and of the fullness of the life in God. I would now like to make a personal contribution to the deepening of the concept of unconditional being and its status of fullness, which has emerged from the consideration of ontopoiesis as metaphysics or, as I believe it should be known, a ‘new’ metaphysics. Unconditional being is being that overcomes the contradiction of the negative.4 When we say, with Parmenides, that “being is and cannot but be”, we exclude the negation of being, because the negation of being negates itself. Its meaning consists of the semantic function of letting us say the being-that-is-freedfrom-­contradiction. The negation dissolves in signifying the being from which it is excluded. The positivity of the negation of being consists in letting the absolute positivity of being show, while the negation of being does not have its own content; its meaning lies in letting us say the meaning that it brings out: that is the being. Being is thought in relationship to a not-being that is taken away; so not-being is considered as ‘taken away’. From the other side the unconditional being always gives itself to us within the limits of our condition, where the primal opening to unconditional or absolute being narrows in the contradiction of our experience and our existence. The contradiction affecting our experience is twofold, because it regards both ontology and gnoseology, the philosophy of knowledge and cognition. From an ontological point of view, we are not the whole or the entire in which absolute positivity consists. From a gnoseological point of view it is not evident – or is not apparent to us – how we are linked to the entire or, more precisely, how we are included within the entire and, therefore, what should appear to us. That is, what is not apparent is how we are included within the-being-that-is in an absolute way. The opening of the unconditional being narrows in the bounds of existence. Existential context is marked by the coming to light of a deficiency. The content of the being-absolutely-free-of-contradiction does not appear in the way it should appear, and thus it is not for us. So being’s scenery splits into two aspects: being for itself and being for us; absolute being and relative being. That means that existence – and any being within existence – has the dignity of being and so the right to be included within an unconditional positivity; nevertheless any existent in a conditioned situation does not know the ways of inclusion and, due of this lack of knowledge, suffers a distance from being that is relevant to it and also belongs to its feature. Being that is in us and for us is accompanied by contradiction. This contradiction is not absolute, but relative to us. The being’s event within the field of

 For a more extensive consideration, see Totaro (2020, 6–20) for a comparison with Emanuele Severino’s thought. 4

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experience is inadequate to the fullness of being and, since this fullness does not appear, we could say that being that happens is a ‘not-yet’ being. The truth of being consists properly in the full manifestation of being and, for this reason, it is a goal that for us has yet to come. The manifestation of truth is always given to us incomplete. Since every being within the conditions of existence is inadequate in comparison to its fullness and does not presume to own the identity with the entire, the latter could only be approximated through multiple perspectives which converge to the same point of attraction. That does not mean that perspectives necessarily coincide, because convergence can also be pursued through oppositions, provided they are not destructive  – even when they imply conflict and a lack of harmony.

About Humans and God For each being in a conditioned situation, the path of approach to the entire and to the resolution of contradictions assumes the character of a task that involves the totality of existence. Such a task not only involves the intentionality of knowledge; it also implies practical tension. Indeed, the deep meaning of praxis is to tend to a manifestation of being that does not yet appear to us: that is, it consists in making happen for us the-Being-that-is-for-itself. This kind of praxis or, we can say, of action is not just any practice, but can be qualified as an ontological one. If we consider action in its essential constitution and how it unfolds, we can highlight who acts. Here Humans enters the scene and the Human expresses itself according to its structure with its fundamental features. So, three dimensions stand out within human being; dimensions that we can find in the course of history and we can assume as almost transcendental; that is, as transcendental elements at an anthropological level. The Human is a place where the ability-to-be comes together with the ability-to-act-in-view-of-being and the ability of having things, which is not detachable from acting and being. The sense of human experience is indeed played out in the overall task of making-the-being happen for us. In the distance between the fullness of being and its condition marked by limit and contradiction, the figure of the-God-who-saves is offered as the bearer of meaning. In my view, the same figure of God who creates depends on the figure of God who saves, and cannot be spun off from it. Extrapolated from this concrete union with the promise of salvation, the principle of creation entered into symbiosis with the principle of cause. Yet causal explanation was gradually removed from its metaphysical value, and in the modern era it has become fruitful in the exploration of the cause-effect connections within the physical-mathematical sciences (although we know that, with the advent of quantum physics, the transition to the indeterminist principle and stochastic-probabilistic logic has been affirmed). “Creation” was then interpreted as a particular case of the principle of causality and the image of God was assimilated to the physical-mathematical scheme of the cause that produces effects according to a relationship of equivalence. For instance, if we consider

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Spinoza’s famous formula Deus sive natura [God or Nature] we cannot avoid noticing that it is based on the principle of a perfect equation of the cause with its effects. So that formula is spurious from a metaphysical point of view. On the contrary, we have to free the concept of God from the concept of the cause and from relationship cause-effects. If we free from the notion of cause or, so to say, de-causalize the notion of creation, we also put an end to the improper controversies – e.g. the emblematic controversy with evolutionistic theories – with the explanations of the hard sciences elaborated in modernity and their development since. What does remain after such a renouncement of the metaphysical use of the principle of causality? The central core of the idea of God as the foundation of what-­ cannot-­be-given-by-itself certainly remains valid. Nevertheless, we need a more convincing interpretation of that. We have to be precise in our meaning; that when we speak about a being [ens] that cannot give being to itself by itself, we mean a being that cannot reach the fullness of being by itself. We have indeed stated within the entire – or the whole – of being, a difference between an unconditional being and a conditional one. That means that conditioned beings are oriented to and attracted by unconditioned being to realize their ontological fullness. In this way, we can purge the idea of a foundation in God of a nihilistic version, because foundation now means referring to an unconditional being that, in the perfect realization and expansion of being itself, is able to call conditioned beings to a full realization, provided that they already have in themselves the dignity of being and the right to their own completion.

 ositivity of Being, Position of Human Within Earth P and Cosmos The Phenomenology of Life and ontopoiesis as a new metaphysics, and the thought of a relationship between the unconditional and conditional being share the idea of the positivity of being in every manifestation. The positivity of being deserves care regarding not only the human being, but also the environment in which humans are situated, in a relationship that is not static. Humans constantly change the environment and, reciprocally, the environment changes humans. Recent modelling of this relationship implies that the environment changes humans, who have previously changed the same environment. The result is a system of blows and backlashes that grow on themselves. This growth is not positive when it can be destructive for both humans and the environment, the latter being constituted by things, plants and animals in a manifold variety of species. A larger part of the environment is represented by the celestial bodies, which have been studied in a scientific way since the sixteenth Century. We know – until now – of the human threat to the life of animals and plants, as well as to things that are closer to humans; the so-called mineral kingdom: from which humans take resources useful first to build, produce and consume, and more recently to move and communicate in increasing ways. We can only imagine

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a future situation in which the threat might extend to things far from the present range of human exploitation. The increase in human needs and desires that are satisfied is a trend that risks being unlimited, thanks to the extension of economies and the enhancement of technologies. The protagonists of a process like that are certainly humans, but, at the same time, all the non-humans are provoked to unprecedented processes that are unforeseen by humans, in a measure incomparable with the characteristics of the past, so that we are used to describing them as “abnormal”. Really, what we attribute as a norm to non-human nature depends on our interpretation of it. From an epistemological point of view, indeed, we have to highlight that our theories about nature are not Nature itself. That is also valid for quantum physics, the most advanced frontier of Nature’s knowledge. Carlo Rovelli (2020) remembers the words of Niels Bohr: There is not a quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum description. Thinking that the task of physics is to describe what nature is in itself is wrong. Physics only deals with what we can say about Nature. (Rovelli 2020, 49)5

If we add a practical point of view, it must be said that what is now declared as abnormal in nature depends in a growing measure on our behavior towards it. All that brings us to ask in a new way what the position is today of the human within the Earth and Cosmos, which is the more comprehensive figure of the environment. The turning of the Phenomenology of Life into an Eco-phenomenology cannot repeat the old patterns of an assumed harmony that in the past was rather the result of cultural images that culminated in the movement of Arcadia and in some expressions of Romantic poetry. In fact, the manifold manifestations of life have been always characterized by competition and conflict too. Plants within the process of growth compete for a better position to the light and the sun; non-human animals struggle against other species in search of nourishment, and within the same species for sexual and generative supremacy. Human animals have always been engaged in destructive conflict as well as peaceful competition. For their part, the Earth and Cosmos are shaken by cataclysms that incessantly deny their stability and involve, to a greater or lesser extent, every manifestation of life. Furthermore, we cannot ignore the fact that humans, besides domesticating plants and animals and rendering them edible, have also had throughout history to guard against the harmful effects of plants and from the unpredictable behavior of animals. Humans are now “the winners” at the expense of plants and animals, which they also have to protect, but the story of the human fight against bacteria and viruses belongs to a much longer episode.

 Author’s translation.

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Harmony as an Issue and Tasks of Humans What we consider as harmony actually consists of a relative predictability of events. The novelty of the current pandemic situation is that events are evading our predictions and, for this reason, they are declared abnormal. The even more radical news is that human behavior is at the root of this unpredictability. This is the most relevant cause of dis-harmony or, to put it better, of the predictable dis-harmony that we are used to calling harmony. Paradoxically, we are responsible for an additional dis-­ harmony, but at the same time we are pushed more urgently by the idea of harmony. All that means we have to become ‘builders of harmony’, starting from the awareness that we are responsible for dis-harmony. The concrete intentionality preserving life and everything belonging to our environment has to express an energetic ethical intentionality, provided that a task like that requires a capacity for discernment. This will be discussed in more depth later. Indeed, within this scenario, Eco-phenomenology cannot be a simple superficial make-up of phenomenology and ontopoiesis itself. An Eco-phenomenology, if taken seriously, implies a further turning point regarding the real conditions of harmony between human beings and the Earth, and human beings and the Cosmos. Human beings are at present responsible for the construction of a new relationship; that is, of new attitudes, habits and styles of life in reference to the Earth and Cosmos. We need a definite change in human intentionality towards the non-human environment. More precisely, we have to pass from an instrumental intentionality towards the Earth and Cosmos to a loving intentionality. So this way of thinking (or re-thinking) about phenomenology and the ontopoiesis of life as an Eco-phenomenology means both a theoretical purification of reason and an ethical commitment. All of this requires drastic replacing with regard to “the human position within the cosmos”, to take the title of a well-known work by Max Scheler again. We have to leave our position of domination and exploitation and pursue a commitment of balance and care in our relationship with the environment and the non-human world. We must not deal with abstract proposals, but concrete matter. The unavoidable task is to review the idea and practice of production that is reducing the Earth and the Cosmos to a reserve of means for an unlimited accumulation of material goods. Staying like this, the result will be a degradation of human beings too, to an instrumental dimension. The human being would become ‘a tool of his tools’. To guard against and resist such a fate, phenomenological ­perspectives can again be invited to help us escape a narrow vision of reality and enlarge the intentionality of human logos, overcoming a cramped anthropocentrism. In the two directions of our mind and our will, we can find the right measure to re-define the relationship between human being, Earth and Cosmos. Establishing the right measure is also a crucial point in assessing post- and trans-humanism, without falling in a dystopian digitized humanity on one hand, and without absolutely refusing every advantage deriving from a fair integration with cyber- and IT devices on the other. Unfortunately, aiming at the so-called enhancement of the

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human being, biological sciences and applied technologies do not have always a clear awareness of the consequences depending on unlimited manipulation, while on the contrary, enhancing the human being should not contrast the sense of measure with care for the dignity of every being. So we could construct a new enlightenment, as Anna-Teresa hoped in her last book The Case of God in the new Enlightenment, where logos is unfolding in all the richness of its manifestation and God seals its highest fullness. A desirable and wishful destination as such is able to inspire a new project of human civilization in harmony with the Earth and the Cosmos.

Generation and Production in the Era of Technologies A passage like the one just described requires critical consideration of two crucial issues: the distinction between generation and production, and the role of technologies. We can examine the relationship between technologies and nature, to which technologies are traditionally applied on the basis of a human project. In this context the sense of technology becomes a tool available to humankind, which is able to indicate ends for the use of technology. For this reason, a technology absolutely detached from phýsis (from nature) – and especially from human nature – would become an absolute non-sense. The concept of nature, and particularly of human nature, does not remain constant over time: on the contrary, it is subject to variations. It is beyond any doubt that we cannot uphold the point of view of the fixedness of nature nowadays, however considered. Nature outside us is not fixed and is not rarely subject to sudden changes. The nature of non-human animals shows signs of learning from past experiences and is subject to processes of adaptation to the environment. Nature inside us is the result of a very long chain of mutations; furthermore, it is the result of a ceaseless relationship with animals and things too (and also things built by humans themselves), starting from the Stone Age until the era of sophisticated technologies. The human being, as we actually know it, is the output of manifold connections which have not waited for the advent of the Internet to be realized. As Roberto Marchesini stresses in his work, the human being is certainly an ontological hybridization.6 Supporters of “post-human” can rightly root their reasons in what the human itself has become, besides coming from a history of disclosure from non-­ human life. Nevertheless, despite this derivation, the human is the only being that has cultivated the category of permanence and has not only considered the process of becoming, but has also asked about persisting in his being and of his being. Speaking about human nature means referring to a permanence in what is changing. That is the reason which pushed classical philosophers to describe the field of

 Further reading is recommended, especially Marchesini (2002).

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human existence, and then also put the question about the “éidos” or the essence, without which existence remains incomprehensible and falls into a dispersion of sense, if we conceive sense both as a completion of being and as a direction towards such completion. This means that onto-logy regarding humans cannot be reduced to a description of an onto-genesis and to a report of a phylo-genetic succession.7 The human being does not accept that to be is only a quantitative effect, but always seeks persistence of a qualitative order. In my view, human intentionality focused on permanence would deserve to be stressed as an original outcome of the phylogenesis and could be linked with the “self-individualization” of which Tymieniecka spoke. On these grounds Aristotle named the essence to ti ēn éinai: a being referring to its previous genesis which has to continue and complete itself in a future generation: a being not already given fullness. So considered, the essence indicates both a movement in permanence and a permanence in movement.

Post-human Against Human? This interweaving of movement and permanence is very important in assessing technologies relating to the transition of the human to a so-called post-human, which we have already mentioned. If this transition means an effective enhancement of humanity and not its end or denial due to an uncontrolled use of technologies, then in setting our knowledge and translating it into good practices, we need a fair measure between the respect of natural endowment in both its basic feature and its further development, and the opportunities offered by technological devices, especially in the case of their steady applications to the human body. Of course, there is no problem in applying artificial devices to restore or reactivate human capabilities which are insufficient in comparison to the so-called normal functions or “functionings”. Problems arise when a total substitution of natural endowment with artificial devices can arrive at a radical crossing out of nature in favor of an artificial mechanism ruling itself and obliging to follow those rules in an unconditioned way, along a chain of production that would be the opposite of acts of generation. The latter consists of a single and un-repeatable action. The feature of serial production – instead of the generation of a particular being – could not be avoided with the attribution of intelligent operations to the tools. Why? Because this operation would be run computing only a chain of causes and corresponding effects, while computation is just a part of the human mind. Until now human intelligence, which is outside AI, has provided artificial intelligence with the ability to choose, based on varying algorithms. Until this moment algorithms don’t have their

 See Lorenz (1973), who recognizes both the characteristics and performances of Man as “unique” and also Tomasello (2014, 2016), who highlights the uniqueness of the human being in coordinating both action and thought within the context of phylogenesis, which supports the individual ontogenesis. 7

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beginning or origin inside themselves. But if we forecast a world where algorithms depend on other algorithms in an unlimited automatic series, who could interrupt or vary their sequence? Presumably, human choices will aggregate to the cart of an un-controlled sequence; otherwise, if the choices claimed their autonomy, they would become irrelevant and meaningless. Consequently, choices that were totally produced would prevail, which we would struggle to continue calling ‘human choices’. A human choice is indeed an action which has its origin in itself or, to put it more accurately, has its last point of reference in itself, though taking into account circumstances both internal and external. Therefore, our task is to maintain the priority of generation, embedding or placing the field of production in the service of generation, thus escaping the opposite effect. If the sphere of production maintains its ground on generation, it can enhance and not destroy it. Furthermore, making generation a priority does not prevent the need for and satisfaction of production; on the contrary it is a necessary drive for good production, while production dis-embedded from generation, and getting ‘self-ended’, can destroy itself, together with its generative ground. The major challenge – today and in the future – is to defeat the enhancement of unlimited production, which flows in response to unlimited consumption, and to search for a fair measure in the balance or “equipoise” with generative power, which is irreducible to the chain of producing. Philosophical anthropology (especially the work of Arnold Gehlen) has sharply observed within humankind the power of suspending Man’s application to production – broadly considered – and to consumption too. This power of ‘suspending’ can be interpreted as a power of freedom and so has to be applied in our contemporary experience. An ability like that could find its model in the human attitude of cultivating, where we can find the search for a fair balance between nature and artifice, in line with putting production, ultimately, to the service of generating. The correct vision in the harnessing of technologies is important, not only in a harmonious relationship with the close dimension of the environment represented by the Earth, but because it also regards our setting within a Cosmos in all its extensions. My vision is for a “Phenomenology of Life” that gives a direction to the manifestation of being, starting from the shell of an existing world and going towards a possible new world, in an effort aimed at discovering the sense as a telos that is able to improve the meaningfulness of existence. On this ground phenomenology and ontopoiesis focus on the power of revealing-­ building-­creating that Tymieniecka referred to the human Imaginatio Creatrix. In my view, thanks to this peculiar force of recapitulating a past process and projecting a future one, the being itself – or the transparence of the link between the unconditional and conditional being – is brought to happen for us inside the boundaries of our limited situation. Being as happening is both something already done and something which depends on us.

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Responsibility of Care and Quality of Being At this stage of our thinking about the conditions of harmony within the relationship of the manifold stages of beings, which appeals to our responsibility of care, we have to face a thorny issue: is every manifestation of being worthy of care? To answer a question such as this, we have to come back to the recognition of the dimension of conflict among beings. Let us return to that issue. We have to stress that conflicts regard either history or the natural world. In the field of history even the search for peace frequently means fighting for peace; against injustice, unfairness and inequality. In the world of nature there is a struggle that sets animal species against each other and also within the same species. Plants fight for their own life and development against other plants, and to protect themselves against animals. Events like earthquakes show a lack of balance within the mineral kingdom and this imbalance can damage both humans and human buildings. How could we consider all that as positive and in a relationship of harmony? At the top of this sequence there are inter-human struggles and psychological or interior conflicts within every person, and not only due to pathological reasons. To face conflicts and struggles and to be able to have an orientation concerning such a complication, we have to assume the logic of understanding and wisdom that allows us to consider the quality of being we are involved in. Thus, what is being that deserves to be cared for and improved, and what is being that does not deserve it? Moreover, which being must we contrast and leave out? Of course, expressing a judgment or discernment about that does not mean discrimination and exclusion. The opposite is true. There is no doubt that we have to include every being in a ‘full positivity’. But how? The answer to this, in my view, is that in the first instance we must hold each being in high regard and set great store by its present features; furthermore, we must welcome the virtual or potential improvement of each being, beyond the constraining limits of the present. This is the reason why we can aim at increasing or enhancing the value of every being, starting from its own traits. We cannot confuse the search for harmony with an already-complete condition, it should be pointed out. For instance, our aim of realizing the harmony of every being, and especially within the unity-of-everything-there-is-alive, does not allow us, as humans, to abstain from fighting bacteria and viruses that are a threat to our health. We know that the followers of Jainism, in observance of the tenet of non-­ violence and of the love towards all living beings, usually cover their mouth not to inadvertently kill microbes spread in the air. Practices like that are a good anticipation of the ideal situation where harmony will prevail over splits and contradictions, in the era where, as Isaiah said: The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together, and a little child will lead them. (Isaiah 11, 6)

We have to spare no efforts towards this final target, but we cannot abstain from acting in the conflictual condition where we stayed before. Actually, we suffer a distance from that fullness, which is nevertheless pushing us not to stop the march,

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even when our experience is signed by tragic contradictions. So, full harmony is a utopian target – that is, the goal of a good and concrete utopia – to pursue in the present condition of relative dis-harmony. Nothing more? Not at all! From our side, we have to control our injuries to the ‘not-human’ expressions of life and to the environment, as well as to the Earth and Cosmos. Such injuries damage not only nature, but also negatively affect humans. What could be a good strategy to respect and love all that is ‘not human’ and cannot be considered only as “a value of exchange” and not even – if we want to be radical – as “a value of use” for humans? In my view we have to recognize above all the otherness of nature towards us. It does not mean that nature is something alien to us. On the contrary: nature is certainly our mother and we have to appreciate its parenthood. We are children of nature, but a mature relationship between children and parents needs a fair recognition of difference and detachment too. To put it in a few words: we cannot identify ourselves with the ‘extra-human’ nature and we cannot flatten nature upon us. Nature, as well as the environment around us, is not a mere prosthesis of men. Looking at ‘non-human nature’ as a distinguished reality in comparison to our identity is the first step in renouncing an appropriative attitude, which is an attitude towards non-human life of ‘exploiting and spoiling’. We must pursue, on the contrary, behavior to preserve and safeguard it. In this direction we can also be interpreters of the “rights” of nature, considering the goods of nature – from animals to plants, forests, rivers, lakes and mountains – as both individual and collective quasi-persons who speak to us through our own language of their needs, which are irreducible to needs that are strictly human. However, such needs can be protected only through the intelligence and responsibility that humans can assume towards them. Marisol de la Cadena (2015) talks about the relationship between the human and the “other-than-humans” within the public sphere. The extension of rights8 to the natural goods also implies that they are always considered – we could say with reference to Kant – as “subjects“endowed with intrinsic dignity (quasi-persons) and never just as simple “objects” reducible to tools useful for our needs. All that certainly requires the overcoming of self-­ referential anthropocentrism, but, moreover, it also passes through a capacity of distancing from the logic of the assimilation of non-human nature. Responsibility for nature, in the various forms of its manifestations, and solidarity with its beyond-­ human expressions go hand in hand with the renunciation to make all of nature a simple stool for the human. It is not so much a matter of extending the characteristics of the anthropos to the environment, but of recognizing the proper characteristics of the environment; of overcoming engulfing attitudes towards it. To this aim an anthropological turn is required, to go beyond the present one-­ sidedness of a human who, as Hannah Arendt outlined in The Human Condition (1958), represents himself only as a worker, and, we could add, as a worker-­ producer-­consumer. For an anthropological turn it is important to integrate the ability to work with the ability to act and to contemplate. Referring nature to a larger

 See Cuturi (2020)

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sphere of ‘human acting’, and not simply to narrow this to the needs of work and production, can give origin to good actions to preserve and safeguard nature and environment, beyond demanding their reduction to an exploitable matter. Furthermore, good actions towards nature and the environment are possible if we contemplate them as a gift that is given to us, before any claim to use them for producing and consuming. The harmony of humans with the Earth and the Cosmos urgently needs such a transformation. In conclusion, we can say that an anthropological harmony – the right balance of human abilities  – is a necessary premise of a more general harmony, investing a good relationship between human and Cosmos. Giving sense to human being means giving sense to the cosmos for which we are responsible.

Warning Against Misinterpretations of Pandemic I would like to conclude this chapter by warning against misinterpretations of the traumatic events of this world pandemic and from them distinguish the role of the Phenomenology of Life as Eco-phenomenology. I have to premise that, also before the irruption of the unexpected COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease-19, more precisely: SARS-CoV2: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome – Corona Virus 2), the idea of harmony between human being and cosmos had already been torn apart by human abuses of the natural environment. The refinement of phenomenology in Eco-phenomenology also arises from the need to face the destructive character of the imbalance between the human sphere and the non-human environment. What were the causes of the imbalance? We have to say that the excess in producing and consuming should be put in the dock. This excess is closely linked to the primacy of the economic dimension in its capitalist form, which does not seriously accept amendment from its predatory tendencies towards natural resources, and has been weakly modified by still-embryonic ethical purposes, and also in its mimetic or decidedly competitive version represented by the hybrid communism of the Chinese brand. In this unbalanced situation the outbreak of the pandemic virus has exploded. Driven by a blind will to live in the Schopenhauerian mould, the virus has become the historic protagonist able to subdue expressions of human activity to an impersonal domination and a heavy prostration. The virus has spread without hindrance as an absolute subject of negative meaning. The bad interpretations of the phenomenon surely add evil to evil. The domination of the virus has had a reaction not only in terms of the justified attributions of guilt to the charge of humans, but also in paroxysmal attitudes of self-­flagellation. Among these can be counted the elaboration of a sort of uncanny “zoodicea” that seems to take the place of the “theodicea” inherited from Gottfried W. Leibniz and dating back to Augustine of Hippo. The deriving picture is full of imitative figures of the conceptual plexus of guilt, punishment and atonement. The holder of the punitive mechanism is no longer a vengeful god; the virus itself becomes the holder of a terrifying vengeance. In viro veritas then! Someone has

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gone so far as to invoke the “brother virus“, in an ecstasy of anti-speciesism. The virus has thus become the vehicle of a divine providence delegated to the animal kingdom and to its power of nemesis. In an undoubted conceptual upgrade, we have passed from the Spinozian Deus sive natura to Deus sive animal, where the latter has the trait of the executioner god who redeems the abuses suffered by the animal domain.9 The sacrosanct statements of overcoming self-referential anthropocentrism in favor of the “conversion” to the “integral ecology”, which before the pandemic was the great message proposed in Pope Francis’s 2015 Encyclical Laudato si’, have been bent uncannily to this rather tragicomic zoodicy.10 Only if we free ourselves from this unsustainable rhetoric that strings together regressive theology and animalistic emphasis, can we seriously assume our human responsibilities in causing the pandemic. The crucial point regards a radical revision of the coordinates directing human practices, where the sense of being, and precisely the being’s dignity of every person, should prevail over the imperatives of producing and consuming. Correcting the hypertrophic expansion of producing and consuming requires good anthropological reflection, which certainly cannot be delegated to the irruption on the scene of animal providence. It must be added that the pandemic has also given a boost to the more convoluted versions of the bio-political philosophy. An Italian epigon  – but of international notoriety – of Michel Foucault has indulged himself in the conspiratorial reading of the phenomenon of the pandemic, framing it in an authoritarian world domination strategy based on informatics supervision of everyone’s life, which would be subjected to strict control in space and time (see Agamben 2020).11 The conceptual consistency of such an interpretation would be negligible (see Totaro 2014, 18) if its herald did not lend themselves to ennoble the so-called “no-vax” movements and the instances of freedom proclaimed by them in spurious consonance with reactionary ideologies. Here, too, there is a comedy of misunderstandings: supporters of authoritarian political regimes stand up as defenders of threatened freedoms. The rights of democracy are being defended by its detractors. Since every ideological position contains some piece of truth in an overall envelope of falsehood or falsification, it is certainly not possible to abandon to the pastiche of such positions the critical cues they also contain. The task would undoubtedly be to monitor the likely exploitation of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic to the advantage of economic profit and illiberal political regimes. Any delay in the capacity of its more credible supporters to denounce and monitor the failings of democracy, with a view therefore of correcting the deficiencies to which the good  The book published under the name of ‘Filelfo’ (2020) is a brilliant and instructive story of an imaginary protest by the animal kingdom against the mistreatments suffered by humans, which became the reference for a questionable ideological position. 10  Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato si’ urges everyone on the planet to care for our common home. It can be viewed at https://cafod.org.uk/Pray/Laudato-si’-encyclical 11  Agamben does not miss the opportunity to confirm his idea about politics as a thanatological exercise, reducing politics and its institutions to a right to kill “naked life”; a notion as fascinating as well as fictitious, since life is always qualified, even in its lowest expressions. 9

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governance of democracy is continually exposed, is in fact likely to result in the success of those who intend to demolish democracy itself. In this theoretical-practical tangle that I have tried to illustrate above, the Phenomenology of Life, as ontopoiesis in its metaphysical landing, can play a valuable role of conceptual clarification and as a guide to action.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2020. A che punto siamo? L’epidemia come politica [Where are we at? Pandemic as politics]. Macerata: Quodlibet. Cuturi, Flavia G., ed. 2020. La natura come soggetto di diritti [Nature as Subject of Rights]. Firenze: Editpress. de la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Filelfo. 2020. L’assemblea degli animali [The Assembly of Animals]. Torino: Einaudi. Habermas, Jürgen. 1988. Nachmetaphysisches Denken. Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lorenz, Konrad. 1973. Die Rückseite des Spiegels: Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens. München: Piper Verlag. Marchesini, Roberto. 2002. Post-human: Verso nuovi modelli di esistenza [Post-human: towards new Models of Existence]. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. 2009. The Fulness of the Logos in the Key of Life. Book I. The Case of God in the new Enlightenment. Analecta Husserliana. Vol. C. Dordrecht: Springer. Rovelli, Carlo. 2020. Helgoland. Milano: Adelphi. Tomasello, Michael. 2014. A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2016. A Natural History of Human Morality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Totaro, Francesco. 2014. L’etica pubblica questione cruciale della democrazia [Public Ethics as Crucial Issue of Democracy], in Etica pubblica e democrazia, edited by Carla Danani. Archivio di filosofia, LXXXI (2013), 3: 17–32. Pisa – Roma 2014. ———. 2020. The Truth of Being between Unconditional and Conditional. Eternity and Contradiction Journal of Fundamental Ontology 3: 6–20. Verducci, Daniela. 2012. La fenomenologia della vita di Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka [The Phenomenology of Life of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka]. Roma: Aracne.

People on E(e)arth: Eco-phenomenological Turns in the Understanding of Life and Human Life in the Contemporary Situation Ella Buceniece

Abstract In his work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy Edmund Husserl stated that in our philosophizing, we are the functionaries of mankind. Mankind must engage in the resolution of the problems posed by the global ecological situation and the global COVID-19 pandemic, which are both interrelated. The solutions need to have a common goal – to safeguard and preserve human life and the life of everything that is alive on the Earth. Contemporary phenomenology is undergoing a paradigmatic change in thinking and transition from topics such as consciousness, constitution, transcendence, mind, subjectivity and ego, and intentionality to notions of nature, matter, and body, as well as notions of human life, life and the world. Immanence, affectivity, reality; the Earth – even outer space – are all determined by the internal revolution in phenomenology and the situation with contemporary human beings and ecology. This development of philosophical thought can be categorised as an ecological turn in phenomenology we describe as ‘eco-­ phenomenology’. This chapter considers the vast scope of phenomenological themes that all mark this ecological turn. Life, nature, body and the world, matter, natality, generativity and ecological intersubjectivity are among those themes, though they are not always clearly marked as signs of this eco-phenomenological trend. The study explores main concepts developed by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bibikhin and Arendt for the extension of the understanding of Eco-Phenomenology and its interpretations in the context of Tymieniecka’s philosophical system of logos and life.

E. Buceniece (*) Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_3

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Keywords  Husserl · Merleau-Ponty · Bibikhin · Tymieniecka · Arendt · Phenomenology · Life · World · Nature · Living nature · Reality · Matter · Body · Natural subject · Natality · Generativity

Introduction “What do you advise me to visit?” he asked. “Planet Earth,” replied the geographer. “She has a good reputation.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The Little Prince

The observation of human activity and processes on Earth today raises pertinent question as to whether Planet Earth still has her “good reputation” as has been recognized metaphorically by Antoine de Saint-Exupery? It has become clear now that the reckless behaviour of human civilization has led to a fractured ecological balance on Earth and the “reputation” for good life on Earth has been threatened. There are three factors that determine the features of the beginning of the twenty-­ first Century: the rapid development of new technologies; the ecologically-critical situation on the planet; and a change in the position of Man in relation to everything that is alive on the Earth  – all of which are interdependent in the life cycles. Phenomenology now has a mission to explain the present situation of the human-­ nature disbalance, seeking to ensure the sustainable existence on the Earth of all humans and all living beings. To take practical decisions, Philosophy must ‘come down to earth’, which means a transformation in previously-accepted metaphysical and ethical assumptions where human beings were at the top as the most valuable creatures, ignoring all life cycles where logos and telos take an important place in human self-individualization. The re-evaluation of human life and of life (it demonstrates the ‘phenomenology of plurality’) give a new awareness of the ecological situation on Earth and dangers of ecological crisis. This new approach must form the basis for studying the planet’s ecological unity as a new philosophical concept, seeking to impart meaning not only for the mind but also the human body and the manifestations of the self-efficacy of life. The prevalence of mind in Phenomenology goes on the second plan but concepts of life, logos, telos, embodiment, everything-­ that-­ is-alive, entelechy and so on become a priority in contemporary Eco-­ Phenomenological discussions. Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld [Lebenswelt] remains a stepping stone for all further transformations of Phenomenology and the creation of the basis of Eco-­ Phenomenology. Husserl recognised in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy that: “In our philosophizing, we are the functionaries of Mankind” (Husserl 1982, 17). He argued that Mankind must get involved in the resolution of the problems endangering it – which, in a modern context, are presented both by the global ecological situation and the COVID-19 pandemic. The intention in both cases is the same: to safeguard and preserve human life and all life and find a balance for

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all-that-is-alive on Earth. The Russian semiotician and phenomenologist Vladimir Bibikhin wrote: “The analysis of geological, biological and philosophical knowledge  – relevant to the history and current situation of life on the planet gives a clearer understanding of the prospects for human theory and practice to contribute positively to the process of life” (Bibikhin 2021, 5). It means that Eco-phenomenology turns to the natural sciences more than classical phenomenology did before. Eco-­ phenomenology respects the result of investigations in astronomy, biology, physics etc. unlike Husserl, who saw ‘over-mathematisation’ in the natural sciences and faith in natural attitude [Einstellung]. What are the main concepts that characterize this eco-phenomenological turn? Approaches to topics which have been the central concepts of classical phenomenology until now, such as the mind, subjectivity and the ego; consciousness, constitution and transcendence, intersubjectivity and intentionality, have changed due to the interest in notions of nature, life, human life and the world, including the question of the human being on the Earth. Immanence, affectivity, reality, the Earth and Outer Space are also included in this change in philosophical thinking, which can be categorised as an ecological turn in phenomenology (Buceniece 2018). Related themes include the new position of Man in the situation of Humanism and Posthumanism and the forms of human behaviour across the globe and their importance for the preservation of ecological diversity. The phenomenological turn towards ecology is marked by the fact that the Earth has become the reference point and the zero point of thinking. For Husserl the zero point was the living body, determining its spatial orientation, while for Arendt, for example, the referential framework of the Earth became a point of reference conjoined with the human-made object being sent into the cosmic space first in the year 1957. Arendt’s Human Condition begins with this event, which in her view is second in importance in human history to the splitting of the atom. This fact makes us understand that the Earth and living nature is a unique precondition for human existence, enabling us to live, breathe, think and engage in various activities. The human being is an Earth-bound creature related through life to other living organisms. The eco-phenomenological approach advanced in this chapter attempts an orderly thematization of the understanding of the nature of nature, matter, bodily life, natality and social life, and the significance of these items within the lives of every individual, both in a global and cosmic perspective. The understanding of these phenomena may help to organize life in accordance with the principles of the new ethics of responsibility directed towards the preservation of life and the natural plurality of the Earth. The eco-phenomenological approach upholds a referential connection with the model of world perception of Antiquity, which encompassed the world within a unified vision of a living entity. This aspect has been displayed in this chapter by way of analyses of the works of Bibikhin and Arendt.

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Husserl: Nature and ‘Theoretical Eros’ Nature is one of the most important concepts for Eco-phenomenology. It is mentioned in Husserl’s teaching but is not at the centre when phenomenology concentrates on the Transcendental Ego. Awareness of nature is linked to the concept of reality and this, in turn, is important in the face of the twenty-first Century pandemic, because in the spread of the COVID-19 virus, − humanity confronts the natural world in the most extreme way: the spread of the disease and the inability of contemporary medicine to stop it, even after 2 years, threatens the development of human civilisation. The idea of looking at Husserl’s understanding of “natural” and nature enables Eco-phenomenological thinkers – to see more clearly the possibility of linking the view to reality and nature with the possibility of staying on the phenomenological ground. This ‘turn’ in Eco-phenomenology focuses on the legacy of ‘early’ phenomenology, or the Munich-Göttingen School of the early twentieth Century which rejected Husserl’s transcendental turn toward the Ego. Instead, the School focused on reality, the world and nature, regarding its giveness [Gegebensein] in a different phenomenologically-­ontological way to ensure that it did not become relative to consciousness. This turn found its continuation in a debate on New Realism, represented distinctly  – by Umberto Eco and as noted by John Wild, integrated by Emmanuel Levinas in his thinking: “From this point of view, only the neutral and impersonal Being, for example, is important. “What is it?” is the most basic question that requires an answer in terms of a context, a system. The ‘real’ is something that can be brought before the senses and the mind as an object” (Wild 1979, 17). A preoccupation with reality and the world at an early stage of the phenomenological movement evolved into a dialogue between Idealism and Realism, and the representatives of the Munich-Göttingen School took a critical stand against Husserl’s idealism, demonstrated vividly by the Latvian phenomenologist and student of Husserl’s, Teodors Celms (1893–1989), in his work The Phenomenological Idealism of Husserl (Celms (1928, 1993). However, as pointed out by the German phenomenologist Hans R. Sepp, the distinction between the two trends was not that great, since, for instance, Edith Stein embraced Husserl’s concept of constitution, and Max Scheler also recognised not only eidetic but also transcendental reduction. Contradictions also arose due to the actual definition of what ‘idealism’ was. The Munich-Göttingen School’s definition meant the old nineteenth Century idealism, while Husserl’s ‘idealism’ related to his transcendental phenomenology (Sepp 2020, 13). That said, it should be recognised that Husserl was not immune to the giveness of nature and reality: he determined the relationship between nature and spirit in a new way, searching for their mutual determination to prevent nature being juxtaposed to spirit as a principle of freedom. Husserl addresses the understanding of nature in both his 1913 work Ideen II, (which was not published until 1952, after his death), and in other two works: in lectures he gave in 1919 and 1927 at the University of Freiburg which were published in the volumes IV and XX of the

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Husserliana, titled Nature and Mind/Spirit [Natur und Geist], edited by Michael Weiler. In the introduction to his lectures of 1919, Husserl examines Nature and Spirit as two regions so as to show them as mutually interconnected and to separate them radically later in terms of ‘spirit’ or transcendental, real, radical reflection. Husserl understands ‘nature’ from the phenomenological standpoint, as ‘the objective correlate of a very specific theoretical attitude’, referred to by Husserl as a ‘naturalistic attitude’; that is, as a very specific construct (Moran and Cohen 2012, 282). For Husserl, ‘naturalistic’ means a scientific attitude towards nature and the world. He differentiates it from a ‘natural’ attitude that reifies and absolutises the world that was compared by Eugen Fink to ‘shadows in Plato’s cave’. Fink recognises that we are ‘captives of natural attitude’ (Moran and Cohen 2012, 279). As early as his work Natur und Geist: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919, Husserl outlines scientific, theoretical culture as the spiritual field of European culture, its proto-foundation [Urstiftung] and horizon of thought. In the description he uses sensual language untypical of him  – “the image of theoretical eros” [das Gebilde des theoretischen Eros] – in which is contained the horizon of description, its scope covering both naivete growing out of passive sensuality and passive passion – or ‘urge’ [in German: Triebe], and reflexivity leading to an ever-increasing clarity (Husserl 2002, 3). A true [eigentliche] scienticism, he claims, evolves only through radical, philosophical reflection. Consequently, phenomenology, in its course towards the purity and clarity of consciousness, could be called a kind of ‘ecology of consciousness’ in general (Buceniece 1999). However, pre-scientific consciousness, the world of experience [anschauliche Welt], which is a life-world [Lebenswelt], also enters that movement of the mind towards the highest clarity. Husserl is usually associated with the subject of life-­ world, and it is in this early work that he characterises life-world in a manifestly sensual manner and with semiotic accuracy as the ‘extra-essential layer’ in the workings of the mind, in the layers of understanding [außerwesentliche Oberschicht] of the mind and of the world. Husserl writes: “Indeed, it is about the world in which we live, think, work, create which, in the alternation of these activities, always has a core of vivid prerequisite which, thanks to these subjective activities, is soon clad with apperceptive layers, including special ones like layers of thought” (Husserl 2002, 18). Although the mind becomes clear, it is not bare, being bedecked in and enveloped by the apperceptive layers of thinking. Husserl considers the grounds for distinction between Nature and Spirit as a series of distinctions between objects and reflecting subjects, while addressing the matter noematically instead of ontologically so as to avoid “methodological naturalism, since the entire science is said to confirm [bestätigt] the individual through the general”. (Husserl 2001, 231). However, it is only the constitution of the world through transcendental subjectivity, not scientific subjectivity, that enables us to confirm the individual in its generality. Both chapters of the 1919 Natur und Geist are devoted to a description of transcendental procedures, which also includes the transcendental theory of nature. The final conclusion in the introduction to this work

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is more important in the context of the contemporary ecological situation, COVID-19 pandemic and a global constellation in thinking: “As philosophers, we want to keep our gaze on the ultimate unity, which basically links nature and spirit, and on the world position [Weltstellung] that theoretically and practically foreshadowed us.” (Husserl 2002, 14). In the descriptions, inferences and outlines of the 1927 lectures of Natur und Geist dealing for the most part with the classification of sciences – both natural sciences and those dealing with spirit and culture – Annex XV is significant, advancing the problem of the “real” and the embodiment of ideal essences, or methexis. It is this problem that has been thematized in the later development of phenomenology. For instance, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, the architect of the phenomenology of Life, explains her radical turn toward ‘life’ by the fact that both Husserl and Ingarden “never spoke on methexis, i.e., on how these ideal essences participate in concrete things” (Tymieniecka 2004, XVIII).

 aurice Merleau-Ponty: The Body Cogito, Living Nature M and Natural Subject The real is distinguishable from our fictions because in reality the significance encircles and permeates matter. Thought is the life of human relationships As it understands and interprets itself. M. Merleau-Ponty

One of these concrete things is the theme of ‘body’, which has also been raised by Husserl in relation to rationale and a distinction between flesh [Leib] and body [Kōrper] and concerning the thematisation of space in the context of transcendental subjectivity. The understanding of body and a radical widening of the meaning – the cogito of the body – is elaborated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the basis of the reality of the natural and human world, instead of the transcendental subjectivity. The world is an inhabited territory, and such a turn to the world through an understanding of body can be termed as “ecological intentionality”, according to the formulation offered by Svetlana Sabeva (Sabeva 2021, 52). Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in The Phenomenology of Perception: “Consciousness is removed from being and from its own being, and at the same time united with them, by the thickness of the world. The true cogito is not the intimate communing of thought with the thought of that thought: they meet only on passing through the world” (Merleau–Ponty 1996, 297–98). Husserl involves Nature in the structure of the world and subjectivity, but Nature remains the opposite pole, a correlate, and finally an idea for transcendental self-­ consciousness. But does the idea of nature enable nature to manifest itself? Is consciousness, no matter how pure it may be, the only tool for understanding nature and the world, since consciousness is also undeniably linked to the body, the natural foundation of human existence. But how can Nature, the natural, also present itself

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as a “natural subject”? What are the conditions for its existence and relationship with consciousness, transcendental subjectivity, and the world? These and other questions are brought up and dealt with by Merleau-Ponty. The central element (if we use Richard Avenarius’ notion) and key word in Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenology of perception” is double  – the world and the body, or “body in-and-of-theworld”. Merleau-Ponty directs his efforts at imparting a philosophical status to the world – and the body is the phenomenological medium that makes it possible to understand the world. Moreover, it is not just any body that exists as an object but “our own body”. Merleau-Ponty wrote: “Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive; it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system” (Merleau-Ponty 1996, 203). It exists and manifests itself in the world through the lived corporeal experience because Merleau – Ponty understands corporeal, natural as living nature. According to Merleau-Ponty, the word “to exist” always has two meanings: to exist as ‘a thing’ or to exist as ‘consciousness’, while the experience of one’s own body reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existence (Merleau–Ponty 1996, 198). In my opinion, Merleau-Ponty handles two original notions that enable him to link and substantiate the unity of consciousness as corporeal reflexivity and the world – they are ‘ambiguity’ and ‘chiasm’ (the first was used in French Existentialism; for instance, in texts by Simone de Beauvoir dealing with the ethics of ambiguity, or on the ambiguity between freedom and determinism in Sartre’s work). Meanwhile Merleau-Ponty characterises the whole lived experience and human phenomena as ambiguous but identifies chiasm (or intertwining) as what characterises our existence as being-in-the-world. Our body, not the act of conscience or will, positions our existence in the world, which is a pre-objective view, since even our reflexes are never blind processes but “adjust themselves to a ‘direction’ of the situation, and express our orientation towards a ‘behavioural setting’ just much as the action of the ‘geographical setting’ upon us” (Merleau-Ponty 1996, 79). Accordingly, the body itself becomes a subject – a natural subject – because “thus experience of one’s own body runs counter to the reflective procedure which detaches subject and object from each other, and which gives us only the thought about the body, or the body as an idea, and not the experience of the body or the body in reality” (Merleau-Ponty 1996, 198–199). Merleau -Ponty seeks to find internal relations between us and nature, since Nature is the living nature and the place of intertwining of all that is ‘horizontal’ and all that is ‘vertical’ in Being. The human body is a medium which can allow this intertwining to take place, and is also, paradoxically, one which perceives nature, inhabits nature and is a genuine intertwining itself. It is corporeal experience that imparts visibility to nature and the human world, enabling it to remain non-reduceable and becoming the homeland of our thinking, while the “perceiving subject ceases to be an ‘acosmic’ thinking subject, and action, feeling and will remain to be explored as original ways of positing an object” (Merleau-Ponty 1996, 24). For us, our body is the mirror of our being because it is a natural self; [my italics  – E.B.] a current of given existence (Merleau-Ponty 1996, 171).

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Nevertheless, the givenness of that existence is not a necessity and is not static, since, according to Merleau-Ponty, human existence will force us to revise our usual notion of necessity and contingency, because it is the transformation of contingency into necessity by the act of taking in hand, thus becoming transcendence as a movement, whereby existence assumes and transforms the actual situation. (Merleau-­ Ponty 1996, 169). The movement of the body is not a movement in an “empty” space, it is a specific way of our attitude towards objects. It is always a bodily space where we are located, and it is determined to a great extent by the motility of our body, recognised by Merleau-Ponty as basic intentionality (Merleau-Ponty 1996, 137) because it is the movement itself, not the idea of movement; characterised by Merleau-Ponty as operative intentionality. Thus Merleau-Ponty resolves the distinction, rooted in philosophy – including phenomenology – between realism and idealism, or empiricism and intellectualism. Being in the world, our body inhabits space and time and manifests the world through itself. To be in the world as a body: it is transcendence, it is a verb, not the placing of objects in the world. The world is not a repository for objects, things, bodies; it is not a logistics centre, since the body inhabits space and time. This means we need to perceive the world as something alive; to protect it and always keep it alive, to embed space into existence. Existence as being-in-the-world is a very ecocentric idea: it reminds us that we are protecting not only ourselves, but also the world. The relationship of the body with the world is a kind of ecological intentionality. David Kleinberg-Levin has also referred to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as ecology, because it enables things themselves to speak: in many voices, such as the voices of the waves and the forests (Kleinberg-Levin 2008, 155). In his later works, especially in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty substantiates ontology, and it, albeit indefinite and absent, is also corpo-real or bodily ontology, so when he speaks of ‘flesh’ or ‘chair’, or of a world that as yet has no name in any philosophy, that is given voice in the absent ontology (Landes 2013, XIV). Although Merleau-Ponty recognises that this absent ontology has no name yet, its logos is visible and invisible chiasm: “The visible being that occupies the present does so then not with a plenary positivity, but with pregnancy and latency, caught up in a system of equivalences, a Logos of lines, lights, colors, reliefs, masses; a conceptless presentation of universal Being” (Lingis 1968, XIV). Return-to-the-world is an ongoing situation in the quest for separate phenomena and things, and for unity and overall substantiation. The chorus of global concern about the present-day ecological crisis urges us to further our efforts in this search. One of the new but basic solutions is pursuit of the phenomeno-realities of human life and Life in all forms that will be discussed in the following subsections.

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 co-phenomenological Variations of Life and Human Life E Understanding: Bibikhin, Tymieniecka, Arendt Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 3.

Although the right to life is addressed in Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, until now they have earned less attention from Philosophers - than the other two human rights – liberty - and security, with the latter – personal security  – having come to the fore only in nowadays. Although all three aspects of human rights are inextricably linked, they been mentioned together for good reason. While questioning the nature of freedom, Merleau-Ponty relates it both to human life and to birth and concludes that: “to be born is both to be born of the world and into the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1996, 453). However, both the value of human life and the phenomenon of life have changed radically in the present situation of COVID-19. The understanding of modern human life is explored by the humanitarian, social and exact sciences, especially biology, neuroscience and technological sciences. One of the fundamental questions that connects all sciences is the issue stemming from Antiquity concerning the roots of the matter, of life and vital life. It is also the question of the unity of Being, because to protect life and human life on our planet we should relate it to individual experience and be aware of Life as an absolute, planetary value for us, the people on Earth. Merleau-Ponty argues that that cannot be constituted, because: “Underlying myself as a thinking subject, who is able to take my place at will on Sirius or on the Earth’s surface, there is therefore, as it were, a natural self [emphasis – E.B.] which does not budge from its terrestrial situation, and which constantly adumbrates absolute valuation. What is more, if I elect to see things from the point of view of Sirius, it is still to my terrestrial experience that I must have recourse in order to do so” (Merleau-Ponty 1996, 440). The idea of describing human experience as terrestrial in the context of life-­ together-­with-others, gives an important basis for eco-phenomenological thinking in the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. It presupposes not only a full manifestation of one’s own individuality, − the problems of potential sickness and also a certain anonymity of individuality, which is a characteristic of the pandemic time. Terrestrial experience is a condition for togetherness – or intersubjectivity – and that again is a confirmation of the ambiguity of existence. Recognising that thinking is interpersonal life in the way it is understood and interpreted by life itself, Merleau-­ Ponty brings up themes he only obliquely alludes to; the question of the genesis of life, the understanding of matter and its relation to the forms of life, or the founding designated in phenomenological terminology as Fundierung: a basis (Merleau-­ Ponty 1996, 127). He demonstrates ways to develop eco-phenomenological interpretations of body, lived nature, matter, life and vital life.

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Bibikhin on the Unity of Life The next important concept in Eco-phenomenology is ‘matter’ and its relationship with nature and life. The question of matter is examined – profoundly and in a novel manner – by the Russian thinker Vladimir Bibikhin in his book The Woods (Hyle). The modern German philosopher Peter Trawny wrote in his cover note for the most recent edition of Bibikhin’s work: “At a time when we are urgently in need of a new holistic philosophy of life in order to understand our current situation on this fragile planet, this lecture course by one of Russia’s most eminent philosophers provides us with some profound and valuable ideas” (Bibikhin 2021, jacket note). Thinking of the cosmic unity of life and Man’s location on the scale of living beings, Bibikhin recognises that the morphological, physiological and ethical aspects of the characteristics of life should be respected, especially in comparison to, and differently from, their solutions through technologies: “The inclusive, attractive power of unity cannot be encapsulated by enumerating its components. The universe is a heap, and no matter how many components you throw on to it, there will still be room for more. And this is true of virtually any unity. Why it is a unity is a separate matter, and it is as difficult to find an answer to that as it is impossible to create a unity, a wholeness: it has to be found, intuited […] The issue of the elusiveness of wholeness in nature is different from the issue of wholeness in technology, where, for example, there is no difficulty in enumerating how many parts a wheel consists of” (Bibikhin 2021, 60–61). According to Bibikhin, it becomes possible to apprehend the specific nature of the unity of life by revisiting the understanding of matter through the thoughts of Antiquity, in the teachings of Aristotle and Plato in particular. The idea of returning to ancient philosophy for ways of explaining nature today is valuable for Eco-­ phenomenology, particularly the interpretation of matter through the symbolism of the forest. The forest can be associated with phenomena already analysed in the phenomenology of life as elements in the human condition: air, water, fire, snow; desert, sea, wind, etc., which are extensively described by many authors in the Analecta Husserliana volumes (for example, vol. 23, 1988). The author of Analecta Husserliana vol. 83 – E. Shannon Driscoll – analysed the phenomenon of the forest from the phenomenological and literary perspective of the tales of the woods. He points out their magic: “[..] the best and the worst of certainties is that there is no one way, no camino real. Every path can be a Via Santa for one and a Via Diabolica for another. The mystery of the forest is presented to one and all. And there is rather an unlimited, a boundless, an immeasurable number of ways in which to proceed. This is the dynamic of the forest” (Driscoll 2004, 290). Phenomenology understands Nature not just as a set of physical and organic beings but also as a dynamic force in countless interrelationships. Bibikhin argued that the origins of the ancient understanding of ‘matter’ lay in the semantics of the term ‘matter’. This is determined by an awareness of wood as a versatile substance which can be consumed by flame to produce different forms of energy. This ensured, he wrote: “that the term hyle (wood, timber, forest) should be

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adopted to designate matter (Bibikhin 2021, 1). Moreover, speaking of the use of the word ‘forest’ to define matter, Bibikhin said: “The state of the forest – the terrestrial forest – and of matter – the global forest, the birthplace of humanity – is extreme but indefinable. This unexpectedly brings us back to an old paradox in the history of philosophy: for Aristotle, and effectively also for Plato, matter plainly exists but no less plainly is very elusive; it is important because it occupies the opposite end of the spectrum from something as important as form [eidos] but that is precisely why it is indefinable” (Bibikhin 2021, 44–45). The forest, he argues, is a non-metric space, like a biological cell similar to tropical rainforest. The forest, with its symbolic meaning in myth, poetry, religion and contemporary forms of recreation, as well as surrogates such as tobacco, narcotic drugs and wine, circumfuse people to a greater extent than they have imagined, while the present-day nostalgia for woods evidences the willingness of people to withdraw to an elite forest-enclosed village. For Aristotle, matter is something that evolves. It grows like a tree from a seed, striving to achieve perfection. It is not juxtaposed with eidos, nor is it the chaos before the eidos. Consequently, matter as the forest (and not just that) provides life energy, while also incorporating the diversity of forms: of eidoses (matter is not raw material). Bibikhin substantiates this by claiming that “the fact that Aristotle introduced the concept of the forest is associated with his return to phenomenology (that is not a slip of the tongue)” (Bibikhin 2021, 67). Plato, the philosopher of eidoses, has not been able to avoid matter either: “We find complex interweaving of eidos and matter already being considered in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, where the place we now expect to find occupied by matter is occupied by khora, which is also eidos; only a darker, more complicated and elusive eidos because it is wide enough to accommodate many different concepts of eidos” (Bibikhin 2021, 45). Bibikhin also relates Plato’s understanding of matter to his postulation of number and pure geometry. That is what forms his understanding of matter as the forest: “… the Cross unexpectedly points in the same direction as Plato with his tetrahedron in place of the first element of matter, fire [...] The Cross is wood, it is the World Tree, and it is geometric” (Bibikhin 2021, 59). As he explores not only the understanding of matter but also the related evolution of life forms underpinned by the Darwinist and Neo-Darwinist concepts of fitness and survival, Bibikhin suggests that for a more accurate comprehension they should be supplemented with the term of ‘goodness’ (in Russian, godnost: to be good for something). “For a life form to be good for something does not necessarily mean only that it is successfully adapted to a purpose: it may indicate that it is a celebration, a glory” (Bibikhin 2021, 3). This, he says, also makes it possible to perceive life as a celebration. This position is supported and confirmed by many Indo-European languages, including Latvian, where goodness means ‘to hit the target’; ‘to gain’ (Bibikhin 2021, 3). Life as a celebration belongs to the corpus of Eco-phenomenological concepts. Life can be also described as enchantment; as existence in the dynamic ‘world-forest’. This is distinct from the individual tree, because it opens up possibilities relating to the idea of ‘where to move’ (pertaining to freedom of choice). Woods can be

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enlightened with a green half-light – the alternation of clearing and the possibility of ‘can-be-dark’ when the trees represent the realm of the unconscious. Conceptually, Matter as a symbolic ‘forest’ opens up a phenomenologically-­ sensitive ecological language and demonstrates a way to avoid rough mechanical determinism, which prevails in contemporary economic pragmatism.

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka on Fullness of Life For her part, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, who developed the phenomenology of life, examines life forms in their full orchestration in her concept of the ontopoiesis of life. Tymieniecka’s phenomenology is comprehensively reflected in her four-­volume work Logos and Life and in innumerable articles in 121 volumes of the Analecta Husserliana publication series and in many separate monographs.1 The author has accentuated the novelty of her approach as ‘the evolution of life phenomena’, which overturns, as will be shown later, the sequence and ascription of the present-day situation. Tymieniecka characterizes life as “a polyphonic game of life”. The “fullness of life” is “discrete, disharmonious, seemingly inconsequential, and nevertheless, is an ever-expanding creative coherence that surpasses itself at every instant” (Tymieniecka 1988, 15). Indeed, the notion of a “full life” encompasses the meaning of “a life filled to the full”. The meaning of life is self-development, and it is discontinuity that produces meaning as Logos. It is from here that Tymieniecka concludes that creativity is the principle of genesis, of ontopoiesis. Life’s entelechia, the body and spirit of life, are to be looked for from within, as they cannot be introduced as constructions of reason. In the same way Logos is involved in the process of life’s ontopoiesis; of the self-individuation of life. It is the Logos of ‘things themselves’ and not some pre-­ given or constituted ideality that corresponds to any concrete thing. Life may not be separated from Logos: there is a bond of solidarity between the two, as noted by Verducci (2007, 23). For, after all, life is a kind of self-origination and creativeness, and at the same time a “giveness”. Tymieniecka wrote: “With life comes everything. But the point at which I struck the key to the Pandora’s Box of Life was the point at which I realized there is no life without self-individualization. The dynamic process of life is not topsy-turvy. The elements of life do not coalesce and intergenerate at random, whimsically, as Bergson would have. It does not unfold without any direction, constraint, or element of proportion. On the contrary, here is a self-individualizing process in which life forms itself in accordance with an entelechial code” (Raynova 2015, 90). Tymieniecka does not deny the importance of Reason for the self-individuation of life but connects the foundation of life’s creativity with criticism of Reason, because Reason is but one of the manifold manifestations of life. However, Tymieniecka argues that over time Western philosophy has reduced all experiential forms to just experience: of rational reflection. This, she argues, is why  A bibliography of Tymieniecka is to be found in Verducci (2012, 149–152). See Works Cited.

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apprehension of phenomenological life should envisage a multiplicity of voices, or plurivocality: On the contrary, it is precisely the authentic vocation of phenomenology to make philosophical inquiry attentive to all the “voices of sense” other than intellect; to be open to all the avenues of life’s constructive meandering; courageous enough to oppose all the traditional prejudices, codes, established patterns of argumentation, rhetorics, etc. – all the paraphernalia of the rational limitations of our mind – and to use all the means at our disposal in order to elucidate this gigantic game of human creation (Raynova 2015, 90).

Creativity is life’s Logos. It is not external to life but is the process of self-­ individuation and self-apprehension, immanently belonging to life. Reality as a living reality and the world Tymieniecka understands both as the initially-material constative “giveness” and as its incarnation in the form of mind (the ‘Husserlian approach’) and as human-made objects, e.g. – works of art that are “living” within actual human existence (the approach of R. Ingarden who was Tymieniecka’s mentor and the author of material ontology. She writes: “...the world is indeed the groundwork of living reality. But conversely each living reality is an essential factor of the world. We cannot consider a living being completely outside of the world. Could we consider a planet without life, e.g., Mars or Venus, to be a world? Life is a factor of the world just much as the world at every stage [...] is the groundwork for each living beingness, with its network of dynamic conditions” (Tymieniecka 1988, XXIII). Thereby Tymieniecka problematises a seemingly obvious question: What is the world? She argues that a definition of ‘life’ such as she proposes requires evidence. The system of the phenomenology of life proposed by Tymieniecka forms a new critique of Reason and the acknowledgement of the logos of life as a universal principle. Another ultimate principle is recognition of the human dimension of life as a ceaseless “creative self-interpretation-in-existence”, which serves as the Archimedean point of her philosophy. She writes that there – in human existence – “all the cords of significant arteries and articulations of life are tied together; there it is that we will find the source of the multiple rationalities wherefrom we may proceed further (Tymieniecka 1988, 16). The ‘human condition’ is of a bi-polar character, encompassing both the specific human ‘meaning of life’ and the constructive aspect of the progress of life, formed by a set of primogenital elemental virtualities involving the propositions of specialized sciences. If the creative imagination [Imaginatio Creatrix] is of crucial significance for the human condition, the constructivistic side of the progress is fed from three sources, as Tymieniecka specifies: “We will, in fact, distinguish three factors of sense within the Human Condition as operative within the creative orchestration: moral, poetic, and intellectual sense” (Tymieniecka 1988, 16). This is a very significant and essential arrangement of the meaning of meanings in Tymieniecka’s thought, in my opinion. It is also a kind of radical change in the Western philosophical tradition, including the Kantian tripartite system, which assigned the central role to the ‘constructive force’ of Reason. For Tymieniecka the human aspect of life is determined first and foremost by the moral meaning then the poetical, creative aspect, including the complex of vitality followed by the

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intellectual meaning, wherein Reason arranges life-world and sociality. In addition, these three meaning-manifestations are not separable in time; they are coexistent in the ontopoetic events of life. It is noteworthy that Tymieniecka observes the presence of the tripartite structure in all the modalities, including those of the individual being, the moral being and the being as personal entity. The Italian philosopher Daniela Verducci considers Tymieniecka’s concept of the human condition in the light of the autopoiesis/ontopoiesis juxtaposition, seeing here the highest level of the individuation of life: “Life therefore incessantly produces ever-more individualized forms in virtue of a poiesis that is in conformity with being” (Verducci 2007, 9). It is difficult for this author to disagree with that.

Hannah Arendt on “the Phenomenology of Plurality” The original premise of Arendt’s philosophy is the idea that the Earth is inhabited by people, numerous people instead of Man of the highest order, with supreme human abilities, which, according to Arendt, have been the focus of current philosophical tradition that she is criticising. Arendt acknowledges that the birth of people (natality) and the plurality of people on Earth are in themselves a real apriori condition of life (generative phenomenology describes it as a new historicality). This has enabled Sophie Loidolt, an expert on Arendt’s philosophical thought, to designate this position as the phenomenology of plurality (Loidolt 2018). Arendt discussed the problematics of ‘condition’ in modern thought, and her approach is in agreement with aspects of Tymieniecka’s on the ‘human condition’. Arendt relates the central issue of understanding ‘condition’ to the origin of sociality, and on this point Tymniecka expert Daniela Verducci noted: “There is an evident consonance of these “creative virtualities” precisely of the human condition and directed to produce the new, with the motive of “initiating” central to the anthropology of Hannah Arendt.” (Verducci 2004, 7). For Arendt, the motive of “initiating” is the question of the origin of the world and of natality, which she upholds both in her concept of vita activa in her 1958 book The Human Condition and in her study of Augustine three decades prior to that.2 But what is the unifying aspect in this? Where is the common factor which allows us to comprehend the immense community of people in terms of their individual differences and the uniqueness of each (as, for instance, trees in a wood) and at the same time, in their totality as part of ‘the wood’? To Arendt, the idea of human immortality does not seem reasonable, as a human life has a beginning and an end. Therefore, she offers another rationale: “That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with beginning and end is the prepolitical

 Love and St. Augustine [Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustine. Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation von Hannah Arendt], published by University of Chicago Press, 1929. 2

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and prehistorical condition of history; the great story without beginning and end” (Arendt 1998, 184). That a human is a ‘conditioned being’ is the only thing that can be said about human ‘nature’, but human actions are intransient, albeit constantly-­ changing conditions of human ‘being’ – thus, vita activa. Tymieniecka argues that this ‘conditioned being’ explains self-individualisation in the process of the development of life in the creative acts – thus, imaginatio creatrix. But Arendt accepts the active mode of a human being in her concept of vita activa, which encompasses three basic kinds of human activity – labor, work and action – which comply with any of the conditions that are given to the life of humankind on the Earth.3 The first kind of human activity corresponds to the biological processes of a human body and its needs. In the second, humans confirm their belonging-to-the-world, while the third is activity that transpires between humans without the mediation of matter or things; purely as ‘the interaction of people’. The main condition for this to happen is human plurality. In Arendt’s opinion, the most important activity within the parameters of human plurality is the realm of the political. She confers human and worldly meaning to any type of labor as ‘an activity in the sense of working’, even if only to meet the basic necessities of life. She includes this is in her concept of the world, on the grounds that individuals belong-to-the-world: The birth and death of human beings are not simple natural occurrences but are related to a world into which single individuals, unique, unexchangable, and unrepeatable entities, appear and from which they depart (Arendt 1998, 96–97).

Arendt gives an example of how to extend the concept of ‘world’, including in it all existential lifestories of individual human beings and their labour which “presupposes the world”. Arendt’s terms  – labour, work and action  – are considered by many philosophers, including social sciences specialists Lewis and Sandra Hinchman as: “..conditions for human life and relevant to Being: they are understood as existential, instead of general categories” (Hinchman and Hinchman 1984, 197). In her work The Origins of Life Tymieniecka (2000) takes a different view of labour. For her a new form of life has priority: societal sharing-in-life not ‘labour’ and ‘work’ – but the idea of activity as a moving force is very close. She writes: “Specifically, although the system of transaction involving capital and labour is the skeleton of societal sharing-in-life; [author’s emphasis] it has no radically new origin or autonomous status. It proceeds from the operative schema of societal interaction as an amplifying expansion into the concrete” (Tymieniecka 2000, 11). Tymieniecka can be characterized as a philosopher of becoming. The English political theorist Margaret Canovan, an expert researcher into Arendt’s philosophy, concluded that Arendt was a theorist of beginning. People are multiple and mortal, and this human situation pervades politics with both a

 Arendt does not examine thinking in The Human Condition, with the pure theory being substantiated later in her final and partly-complete 1977 work The Life of the Mind. (From https://www. google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Life_of_the_Mind/98_1qCvDoAQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec= frontcover). 3

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wonderful openness and a desperate, deranged randomness, as Canovan recognised: “In sharp contrast to Heidegger’s stress on our mortality, Arendt argues that faith and hope in human affairs come from the fact that new people are continually coming into the world, each of them unique, each capable of new initiatives that may interrupt or divert the chains of events set in motion by previous actions” (Canovan 1998, XVII). Arendt’s 1929 work Love and St Augustine traced out the essentials of Arendtian thinking: love of the world [amor mundi] and the idea of Man as a born, active, working being – which are the grounds for her phenomenon of politics. However, Arendt’s greatest contribution lies in her accentuation of the importance and phenomenon of every life and human life, most notably through her phenomenology of plurality. This opposes a tradition dominated by the ontology of death and its hermeneutics, which is – for the most part – Heidegger’s ontology. Thus, another bedrock of eco-phenomenology can be seen in Arendt’s philosophy of plurality and new beginning, which also embraces the idea of movement and perhaps evolution, so we as human beings evolve to tackle each fresh challenge ‘life’ throws up.

Problematics of Generative Phenomenology Arendt opens up new horizons to phenomenology, as well as enabling continuation in several directions. One of these such turns is that of generative phenomenology. The origins of all new turns in phenomenology can also be found in Husserl’s classical phenomenology, wich may surprise some. In Husserl’s phenomenology the origins of a generative approach can be related to the perspectives of his genetic method and passive synthesis. Christian Lotz (2007) says that according to Husserl, genesis can be addressed on three levels. These are: a purely passive level, where structures are formed without any participation on the part of the I; a passive-active level, in which egoic participation runs up against passive “primal constitution”; and purely-active; (explicit judging, willing and deciding) (Lotz 2007, 38). Recognising that the genetic and static methods cannot be separated in Husserl’s phenomenology, and that they are two perspectives of one and the same thing, Lotz concludes that: “genetic phenomenology itself is not once again “genetic”; rather, genetic description is itself static” (Lotz 2007, 38). In my opinion statistic description of genesis in Husserl’s phenomenology does not give a perspective to genetic trend but namely a generative phenomenology creates new perspective. If Husserl’s genetic phenomenology and genesis as internal history, where consciousness evolves and enriches itself, has been explored in relation to both the awareness of time and intersubjectivity and lifeworld, thematisations of generative phenomenology in Husserl’s works and manuscripts have also been recently discovered. For instance, Dan Zahavi traces the intersubjective transformation of transcendental philosophy, and reveals a number of important aspects of generative problematics in phenomenology. These are in relation to the grounds for

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intersubjectivity, which include topics such as homewordly normality, objectivity, reality and definitions of what a normal person or a normal life is, while underlining the importance of norm in the infinite developments of the historical and socialisation process, and in the fusion of horizons. In relation to our topic of life and human life, Zahavi’s conclusion that resonates to a certain extent with Arendt’s concept of natality as a human condition is of special importance: “Exactly this concept of generative intersubjectivity indicates that Husserl did no longer regard the birth and death of the subject as mere contingent facts, but as a transcendental condition of possibility for the constitution of the world.” (Zahavi 2003, 245). For his part, Anthony J. Steinbock explores the problematics of generative phenomenology through bringing forward and thematising “limit-phenomena”, such as the unconscious, sleep, birth and death, temporality, the other person, other worlds, animal and plant life, the Earth, God, and others (Steinbock 2003, 290). From his perspective, limit-phenomena are not the ones on the limit but those that awaken the sedimentation of sense. Steinbock presents a solid rationale for generative phenomenology with a special focus on generative structures such as normality and abnormality, and homeworld/alienworld. Steinbock does not acknowledge the latter, homeworld/alienworld, as a “lifeworld”, which is too abstract according to him. In his oponion, homeworld/alienworld are sooner normatively significant, geo-­ historical life-worlds, formed by various modes of generative constitution. He writes: For example, the home is not one place among others, but a normatively special geo-­ historical place that is constituted with a certain asymmetrical privilege; the home gets this assimetrical privilege through modes of appropriation and disappropriation of sense and it can range from the smollest generative unit, “mother or parents and child” to a virtual cultural world (Steinbock 2003, 296).

The home is an intersubjective structure co-constituted by the alien and the abnormal, the author concludes. As we see, Steinbock’s solutions in generative phenomenology are an essential justification of new meanings of life in the broad context of the developing field of contemporary Eco-phenomenology.

Conclusion The themes and solutions examined in this chapter lead to a conclusion that a turn towards Eco-phenomenology has transpired involving a vast array of phenomenology-­ related topics and approaches. Specific areas of focus for a new researcher might include Husserl’s understanding of Nature, Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on body, natural self and terrestrial experience, and Tymieniecka’s concept of sharing-in-life, as well as Bibikhin’s world-forest and Arendt’s vita active and natality. Generative phenomenology in its study of home-wordly, normality, intersubjectivity and so on, adds another new layer to Eco-phenomenology.

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This chapter’s contribution to this new turn is to demonstrate how Eco-­ phenomenology, a developing field of phenomenology, can provide a theoretical basis for new thinking on the interconnectedness-of-human-life-with-the-eco-­ sphere. All these authors, all these concepts, extend the vocabulary of Eco-­ phenomenology as it develops. While not all the topics considered would be directly marked as eco-related – such as the Earth, Matter; affectivity and passivity, life and reality  – it is clear that phenomenology is undergoing a sea change under the present-­day circumstances from research in monadic transcendental subjectivity to the quest for the unity of Life and the world and on to intersubjective togetherness or object-oriented thinking, to use a Renaud Barbaras expression. The role of science and technology appears undisputable today in solutions for an ecological situation. Here, Husserl expert Donn Welton notes: “…in every scientific discussion the world is silent” (Welton 2003, 224). When the world has been designed mainly in urban and technological terms, Eco-phenomenology becomes important, as it gives a voice to the things-in-the-­ world-themselves and their diversity; the world being both reality and the meaningful horizon. Eco-phenomenological solutions to understanding of life-and-the-world may help considerably in our Planet Earth retaining its good reputation. This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project No. lzp-2020/2-0085 “Development of Eco-phenomenology in the Situation of Pandemic”

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1929. Love and St Augustine [Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustine. Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation]. Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer. ———. 1998. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Bibikhin, Vladimir. 2021. The Woods (Hyle). Trans. Arch Tait. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buceniece, Ella. 1999. Phenomenology is the Ecology of Consciousness. In Saprāts nav ilūzija [Reason Is Not an Illusion  – Western Philosophy in the Situation of Modernism], ed. Ella Buceniece. Rīga: Pētergailis. (in Latvian). ———. 2018. Phenomenology as Ecology: Movement from Ego- to Geo- and Eco- thinking. In Eco-phenomenology: Life, Human Life, Post-human Life in the Harmony of the Cosmos, Analecta Husserliana, ed. D. Verducci, J. Smith, and W. Smith, vol. CXXI, 225–234. Cham: Springer Verlag. Canovan, Margaret. 1998. Introduction. In The Human Condition, ed. H. Arendt, 2nd ed., xvii. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Celms, Teodor. 1928. [The Phenomenological Idealismus of Husserl], Der phänomenologische Idealismus Husserls. Latvijas Universitātes Raksti. Celms, Theodor. 1993. In Der phänomenologische Idealismus Husserls und andere Schriften 1928–1944, ed. Juris Rozenvalds, vol. 19. Frankfurt/M./Berlin/Bern/New York/Paris/Wien: Peter Lange. Driscoll, Shannon E. 2004. The Tales of the Woods. In Imaginatio Creatrix. The Pivotal Force of the Genesis/Ontopoiesis of Human Life and Reality, Analecta Husserliana, ed. ­Anna-­Teresa

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Tymieniecka, vol. LXXXIII, 289–318. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer academic publishers. Hinchman, Lewis P., and Sandra K. Hinchman. 1984. In Heidegger’s Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s Phenomenological Humanism. The Review of Politics 46 (2): 183–211. Husserl, Edmund. 1982. [The Crisis of the European Science and the Transcendental Phenomenology]. Die Krisis der europāischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. ———. 2001. Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1927. (Nature and Spirit. Lectures Semester 1927). In Husserliana, Bd. XXXII, Herausgeben von Michael Weiler. Springer Science + Business Media, B.V. ———. 2002. [Nature and Spirit. Lectures Semester 1919]. Natur und Geist. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919. In Husserliana, Bd. IV, Herausgeben von Michael Weiler. Dordrecht/ Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kleinberg-Levin, David Michael. 2008. Before the Voice of Reason (Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty’s Ecology and Levinas’s Ethics). State University of New York Press: Albany. Landes, Donald A. 2013. The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary, xiv. London/New Delhi/New York/ Sydney: Bloomsbury. Loidolt, Sophie. 2018. Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. New York/London: Routledge. Lotz, Christian. 2007. From Affectivity to Subjectivity: Husserl’s Phenomenology Revisited. London: Palgrave. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes, Klaude Lefort, ed. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Northwestern University Press: Evanston. ———. 1996. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. From the French by Colin Smith. London/ New York: Routledge. Moran, Dermot, and Joseph Cohen. 2012. The Husserl Dictionary. Bloomsbury: Continuum. Raynova, Yvanka. 2015. At the Sources of the Phenomenology of Life: An Interview with Anna-­ Teresa Tymieniecka (Hanover, NH). Labyrinth, An International Journal for Philosophy, Value Theory and Sociocultural Hermeneutics 17 (2): 84–96. Winter. Sabeva, Svetlana. 2021. Life with Virus. A Phenomenology of Infectious Sociality. Phainomena 30: The Journal of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, Ljubljana 30 (116/117): 41–60. Sepp, Hans Reiner. 2020. [Nature-Cosmos Speculation. For the Introduction]. Natur  – Kosmos Sepp, Hans Reiner. Spekulation. Zur Einfūhrung, In [Nature and Cosmos. Early Phenomenology Drafts]. Natur und Kosmos: Entwürfe der frühen Phänomenologie. Nordhausen: Hans Rainer Sepp (Hrsg.). Steinbock, Anthony. 2003. Generativity and Scope of Generative Phenomenology. In New Husserl: A Critical Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. 1988. Logos and Life. Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason, Book 1. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2000. The Origins of Life. In The Origins of Life. Volume II: The Origins of Existential Sharing-in-Life, Analecta Husserliana, vol. LXVII, 3–12. Kluwer Academic publishers, as above. ———. 2004. Inaugural Lecture: Ontopoietic Ciphering and the Existential Vision of Reality. In Analecta Husserliana, vol. LXXIX, xviii. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Verducci, Daniela. 2004. The Human Creative Condition Between Autopoiesis and Ontopoiesis. In The Thought of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Analecta Husserliana, vol. LXXIX. Dordrecht/ Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2007. The Ontopoiesis of Life  – A Theory of Solidarity Between Logos and Life. Phenomenological Inquiry 31: 23. ———. 2012. [Anna – Teresa Tymieniecka’s Phenomenology of Life], La fenomenologia della vita di Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. ARACNE editrice S.r.l.

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Welton, Donn. 2003. World as Horizon. In New Husserl: A Critical Reader, ed. Donn Welton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wild, John. 1979. Introduction. In Totality and Infinite – An Essay on Exteriority, ed. Emmanuel Levinas. The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Zahavi, Dan. 2003. Intersubjective Transformation of Transcendental Philosophy. In New Husserl: A Critical Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Edmund Husserl on the Conscious and Unconscious Aspects of Immanent Life Bence Peter Marosan

Abstract  This chapter aims to present Husserl’s mature philosophy as a philosophy of life [Lebensphilosophie]. Husserl understood life first and foremost to be the immanent mental life of a subject, which has both conscious and unconscious aspects. Given the particular relevance of the notion of the unconscious for understanding the phenomenon of life, the first section of the chapter is focused on Husserl’s conception of the unconscious while the second presents important details concerning Husserl’s notion of life in general. It is the main conclusion of the second section that life, according to Husserl, is necessarily embodied. This insight leads to the third section exploring Husserl’s Notion of Animality which considers the fundamental features of organic nature in his philosophy. One of the most important results of this overall study is the sense that, from a Husserlian perspective, we are members of a universal community of living beings. This chapter concludes that we humans  – as self-conscious rational subjects  – are capable of acquiring apodictically self-evident ethical insights: absolutely certain, provable and necessarily true. These ethical insights inform us that if we want to live an ethically-­authentic and responsible life then we have certain inevitable duties and obligations to fulfil with respect to other living beings – even towards non-human and non-conscious beings. Keywords  Edmund Husserl · Philosophy of life · Unconscious · Embodiment · Phenomenology of nature · Phenomenology of animality · Eco-ethics

B. P. Marosan (*) Budapest Business School, Budapest, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_4

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Introduction In his 1927 lectures on Nature and Spirit, Husserl declared that “the fundamental character of phenomenology is the scientific philosophy of life” (Husserl 2001a, 241). Indeed, from the Logical Investigations (1900–01) onwards, Husserl showed a strong affinity towards the notion of life – at least in his notion of ‘lived experience’ [Erlebnis]. However, prior to the ‘discovery’ of his genetic phenomenology around 1916–1917, he simultaneously attempted to distance his philosophy from the notion of life in general, and philosophies of life in particular. At this early stage, he harbored concerns about the naturalistic and biological connotations of the term ‘life’, which he wanted to keep apart from his ‘pure’ phenomenology. This changed when he started to develop his genetic phenomenology (which aimed at the transcendental and a priori conception of experiential genesis), at which point he also began to articulate a phenomenological notion of life – the pure immanent life of subjectivity or consciousness. In his 1917–18 work The Bernau Manuscripts, this notion of life already played a crucial role (Husserl 2001b), but this concept became especially central in Husserl’s research manuscripts from the 1930s, such as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy (Husserl 1976) and the C-Manuscripts (Husserl 2006). Husserl began to attribute increasing importance to this concept within his entire phenomenological framework. Among other key concepts, the phenomenological notion of life connects the conscious and unconscious moments and aspects of subjectivity as conscious and unconscious life. It appears to be no accident that Husserl devoted detailed analyses to the problem of the unconscious for the first time in his Bernau (or L-) Manuscripts and then later on in his lectures on Transcendental Logic, which were partly published under the title Analyses of Passive Synthesis (Husserl 1918–1926; Husserl 1966). The problem of the unconscious as such1 struck Husserl, especially in the 1920s, as a central issue to be addressed by any proper understanding of the nature of subjectivity or consciousness (see Smith 2010). The elaboration of his genetic phenomenology enabled Husserl to systematically relate the conscious and unconscious domains of subjective life.2 Together with the concepts of life and the unconscious, there is a third decisive notion within the context of this present study; namely embodiment, as the essentially incarnate nature of subjectivity. According to Husserl, subjectivity is necessarily expressed in certain physical aspects of the subject – in its functional, bodily, anatomic structure on the one hand, and in its behaviour on the other. Moreover, in Husserl’s view, similarities between the bodies of two subjects can

 A wider notion of the unconscious was already present in Husserl’s work earlier than this. See also Bernet 2002. 2  The 42nd volume of Husserliana (Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie) dedicated a complete section to Husserl’s manuscripts on unconscious, mostly within the context of time-consciousness and passive synthesis (“Phänomenologie des Unbewusstseins und die Grenzprobleme von Geburt, Schlaf und Tod”; Husserl, 2014: 1–136). 1

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motivate a special kind of intentionality, understood as empathy. Through empathy, it is possible to constitute the physical body [Körper] of another subject as an animate, living, sensing body [Leib], thus constituting the internal, mental and spiritual aspects of the other person in an indirect way. The notion of empathy also makes it possible to constitute our very selves as members of a universal (universally open) community of transcendental subjects which is, in Husserl’s view, a community of life and of living beings. The significance of the unconscious within the context of Husserl’s philosophy of life derives in part from his attribution of the term ‘subject’ in a wide sense. A transcendental subject in the strict sense would be a subject with the capacity to have phenomenally-conscious lived experiences [Erlebnisse]. A wider sense of subjectivity would include someone who is not a transcendental subject in the strict sense of the word, but whose rudimentary animate existence nevertheless indicates conscious life (which, in Husserl’s view, equates to life in the strict sense). It is in this manner that Husserl discusses the possibility of a “soul without a subject” [eine subjektlose Seele], referring to the lower levels of animality and organic nature such as plants (Husserl 1971, 116; see also Vergani 2021). In Husserl, we thus alight upon the idea that very low-level subjects (‘proto-subjects’) are part of the universal system of life alongside humans (as feeling, sensing, conscious subjects in the strict sense). In accepting that subjects – both in the strict sense and the wider sense – are part of this universal system of life (as transcendental intersubjectivity), we are confronted with certain ethical obligations and implications concerning other subjects. According to Husserl, life as such has an intrinsic value, so we cannot treat other subjects instrumentally as mere means of our own particular ends (see also Husserl 2014, 297–333). In this way, Husserl’s ideas about the universal community of living beings (as transcendental subjects and proto-subjects), and about the ethical obligations of rational subjects towards life in the entire richness of its forms, hold certain key ecological and eco-ethical implications (see also Vergani 2021). It can be argued that Husserl’s ideas in this way could play a pivotal role in laying down the foundations of a phenomenologically-articulated eco-ethics (see also Kohák 2003). This present study is divided into three major sections: I. Husserl’s Notion of the Unconscious II. Husserl’s Notion of Life III. Husserl’s Notion of Animality Within this structure, this chapter will offer and develop the following key theses concerning Husserl’s phenomenological notion of life: 1. Husserl’s mature philosophy, at least after the development of his so-called genetic method, is a philosophy of life [Lebensphilosophie]. 2. Husserl understood life to mean the immanent, subjective mental life of a subject. 3. Life has both conscious and unconscious aspects, and these are not separate from each other but instead shape and communicate vitally with one another.

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4. There are ‘lower level’ living beings (such as plants, fungi, and unicellular organisms) which lack consciousness in the strict sense, but still show certain fundamental features of life, and can thus be considered as members of the universal community of living beings. 5. We have certain obligations concerning other living beings, according to the ethical reflections offered by Husserl, since he held that life as such has intrinsic value – which thus entails certain duties and obligations for ethically-responsible subjects.

I.  Husserl’s Notion of the Unconscious There is a growing literature concerning Husserl’s notion of the unconscious, which also confronts his position with respect to Freud’s views (e.g. Bernet 2002; Welsh 2002; Tengelyi 2007, 114–131; Smith 2010; Gyemant 2021). However, mainstream interpretations of Husserl’s concept of the unconscious still do not typically compare the ideas of Husserl and Freud on the topic. This chapter will demonstrate the importance of the connection between Husserl’s notion of the unconscious and his conception of life, while also showing that Husserl’s and Freud’s respective notions of the unconscious bear some striking similarities. The chapter argues that Husserl’s later conception of the unconscious region of life was necessarily born out of the development of his earlier work and that it was no accident that the notions of ‘the unconscious’ and ‘life’ came to the fore at the same time, following the exploration of the genetic method around 1916–17. This methodological innovation opened up a way for Husserl to refine a more dynamic notion of the unconscious: one that is closer to Freud’s notion of a dynamic unconscious. The notion of life that appeared in Husserl’s research manuscripts in the 1920s (and later) is an incredibly dynamic conception that brings together two strongly-related regions of subjective life – the conscious and the unconscious  – which perpetually communicate and affect each other. When Husserl’s conception of the unconscious has been thematized in more recent literature, it has often been emphasized that this conception resembles Freud’s notion of preconsciousness [Vorbewusste] – a form of unconscious contents which is neither immediately conscious nor totally repressed. These authors claim that there is no adequately analogous notion in Husserl’s work for Freud’s concept of a dynamic unconscious, which refers to dynamically and explicitly repressed and censored contents (see also Welsh 2002). Nicolas Smith, however, has highlighted the limits of such an interpretation, pointing out that Husserl’s notion of passive synthesis does, in fact, offer a phenomenological equivalent to the Freudian notion of a dynamic unconscious and for phenomena of repression and censorship in particular (Smith 2010). Indeed, Husserl’s account of the unconscious can be understood to have developed in at least four different stages. His earliest conception is admittedly close to Freud’s notion of preconsciousness, but Husserl’s later reflections became more and more sophisticated. As Smith claims, Husserl eventually

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really did get close to the Freudian model of a dynamic unconscious. The first stage of Husserl’s investigations into the unconscious is worked through static phenomenology (until around 1916); the second is related to his investigations on time-­ consciousness in the Bernau Manuscripts (1917–18), the third is connected to genetic phenomenology from the same period of time (concerning affections, impulses, instincts and so on), and the fourth is linked to his later research on generativity and history in the 1930s. Husserl’s Static Notion of the Unconscious In Husserl’s static phenomenology, which explores crystallized static formations of experience and sense, the problem of the unconscious (as preconsciousness) appears in at least three different forms: 1 . Foreground and background (thematic and unthematic), 2. Implicit consciousness of absent contents and 3. Passive motivations (in Ideas II). With regard to foreground and background, Husserl considered how consciousness always has an attentional focus that could be understood as the unconsciousness in a wide sense – with consciousness surrounding this focus remaining only implicit (Husserl 2004, 260–276). The contents of the experiential background are present, but we are not thematically and explicitly aware of them. In a certain sense, unthematic contents of experience could be also called unconscious contents. As for the second static sense of the unconscious, there are contents of experience which are not present at all but absent (see also Bernet 2002). The field of actuality, in Husserl’s view, is always accompanied by a horizon of non-actuality [Inaktualität] – a web of absent and not explicitly-conscious contents. In this sense, we only implicitly mean or refer to these contents in our life of actuality, given concretely in experience, and these contents are implicitly ‘co-intended’ [mitgemeint]. For example, we are implicitly aware of the unseen sides and aspects of a visual object, such as a cube [Würfel]. Husserl elaborates on this perspective among others in Logical Investigations (1984). Last but not least, Husserl also discussed a “hierarchy of motivations” in the second book of Ideas (written in 1912).3 Here he says that we partly act on the basis of purely rational motivations [Vernunftmotivationen], but that these motivations are built upon less rational, duller and more vague motivations, in turn determined by instincts and non-rational or less reasonable interests. Finally, at the bottom of our hierarchy of motivations, there is a dark underground or sedimentation [Untergrund, Niederschlag] of entirely passive unthematic motivations which might even be called ‘the unconscious’ in a wide sense.

 Husserl 1952, 222–227, 248, 267–269, 275–279, 354–355, 366, 381. Husserl here briefly also mentions psychoanalysis: op. cit. 222. 3

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Temporal Aspects of the Unconscious in Husserl It is widely understood by contemporary philosophers, particularly researchers of Husserlian phenomenology, that Husserl, in his lifelong investigations into time-­ consciousness, broke with the Cartesian idea of a punctual now. Instead, he introduced the notion of a temporally-extended now which consisted of three components which necessarily and a priori belong together: original impression, retention (primary memory), and protention (primary anticipation or expectation). What is perhaps less well-known is that, after his earliest work on his philosophy of time (On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 1893–1917), Husserl started to develop a more sophisticated concept of the unconscious in his Bernau Manuscripts from 1917 to 18, where attempts and achievements from his second phase of work on the philosophy of time are collected. In the Bernau Manuscripts, Husserl makes a few hesitant attempts to base the constitution of time-consciousness in an ultimately-unconscious consciousness. However, he eventually manoeuvres away from this notion of unconscious consciousness, as is often reported in commentary on the Bernau Manuscripts (see e.g. Kortooms 2002; Römer 2010). In these passages, Husserl begins to understand the unconscious to be an inaccessible underground region of consciousness, reflection on which he eventually concludes to be a phenomenological impossibility. There is, however, a completely different sense of the unconscious that is also present in the Bernau Manuscripts. Indeed, Husserl discussed unconscious modal components of time-consciousness: unconscious retentions, protentions, and primal impressions (or hyletic data). Regarding retentions (the contents of primary memory) in the Bernau Manuscripts and afterwards, Husserl did not think that retentions of primal impressions completely fade away or that they eventually become entirely forgotten. Instead, he understood them to be preserved beneath the surface of wakeful consciousness as sleeping retentions, which could later be reawakened. The unconscious, as Husserl emphasizes later in Analyses of Passive Synthesis, is not a dead domain, but the “realm of forgetfulness” (Husserl 1966, 163) or a “subsoil of memory” (Husserl 1966, 194, 205). Sleeping retentions and memories as sedimented formations of sense ‘get in touch’ with each other, under the surface of consciousness, and also affect wakeful consciousness from below. Moreover, Husserl also makes a distinction between ‘near’ and ‘far’ retentions [Nahretentionen, Fernretentionen] in Analyses of Passive Synthesis (Husserl 1966, 288–290, 384–385, 407–408, 426–427). Near retentions refer to retentions in the strict sense (the contents of primary memory), while far retentions refer to sedimented typifications which are still able to influence present experience from deeper layers of consciousness (see also Rodemeyer 2006, 86–104). As for protentions, Husserl is of the opinion in the Bernau Manuscripts and later, that below the surface of our awareness there is a swarm of unfulfilled protentions, and that they ‘compete for fulfillment’ so to speak – but only one or a few of them can ever actually be fulfilled (as verified primary expectations or anticipations) by a new hyletic datum or original impression. These unfulfilled protentions also affect

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our waking conscious life. We might consider how unconscious protentions can even feed into quite defined expectations; for example, psychological ‘priming’ can influence subjective judgement and lead to phenomena such as confirmation bias. Finally, Husserl also thought that there are hyletic primal-impressional data which do not reach the level of full awareness, somehow ‘stuck under the surface’, which nevertheless affect conscious life. He therefore also has the notion of unconscious or non-conscious hyle. From the perspective of understanding the unconscious through time-­ consciousness and genetic phenomenology, the notion of retroactivity especially features in Husserl’s work. This means that there are certain non-conscious mental contents (such as sleeping retentions, unfulfilled protentions or subconscious hyle) which are later reawakened and shape reinterpretations of earlier events of experience. Husserl’s example is that of a cold room: “Suddenly I became aware that my leg is getting cold, but with this experience I also realize that I have been feeling cold for a while since” (Husserl Die ‘Bernauer Manuskripte’ 2001b, 285; also Lee 1993, 116). Husserl’s Genetic Notion of the Unconscious In his lectures on Transcendental Logic and in the accompanying manuscripts which were published under the title Analyses of Passive Synthesis, Husserl deepened the notion of the unconscious that had already appeared in the Bernau Manuscripts. As Nicolas Smith explicitly and systematically points out, Husserl offered there a more dynamic conception of the unconscious, much closer to the Freudian notion of a dynamic unconscious and censorship. The unconscious in Analyses of Passive Synthesis appeared explicitly as a pool or reservoir of sedimented contents which was not simply a passive or slumbering realm, but rather a domain which constantly and – in the wide sense of the word – actively affected the conscious region of subjectivity. The fundamental components of Husserlian passive synthesis are affection, allure or stimulus [Reiz] and association. Something alien to the ego [ichfremde] allures or provokes [reizt] the attention of the ego such that the ego turns towards this content through a passive and instinctive movement. The objective features of the world, which are alien to the ego, are expressed through hyletic data. The hyletic data are structured and articulated, connected and differentiated, due to passive association, as part of the functioning of the ego. On a basic level, the two principal types of association in Analyses of Passive Synthesis are associations of homogeneity (when hyletic content is connected to a group or figure) and associations of heterogeneity, which happen when two hyletic formations or groups are dissociated from each other (Husserl 1966, 129). In Husserl’s view, it is not just hyletic sensual data but also perceptual unities, structures, thoughts and memories that can be articulated and connected to each other through association. In Analyses of Passive Synthesis, the unconscious has several different meanings. There is first of all a ‘pool’ or ‘reservoir’ of sedimented hyletic data, perceptual

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formations, learnt bodily capacities (such as how to ride a bike), thoughts and memories. This pool or reservoir is, on the one hand, a dynamic region of consciousness in which the sedimented contents mutually affect and influence each other. On the other hand, this whole region affects the present, fully-awakened consciousness. We can refer to this realm of sedimentation as the past dimension of the unconscious. There is, however, a present aspect or dimension to the unconscious: affections which, according to Husserl, are competing with each other for the attention of the ego, and which are nevertheless unable to reach the level of consciousness. These affections have a less attractive force and intensity than those which attain a conscious level. Additionally, we can also consider a future dimension of the unconscious from a genetic point of view – that is, the domain of unconscious protentions, mentioned earlier. In this context, Husserl uses the notions of inhibition [Hemmung] and repression [Verdrängung] to explain how stronger affective tendencies could inhibit or repress weaker ones. But these mechanisms are also applicable between more complex formations of affections, perceptions, memories and thoughts. We can identify resistant tendencies and mechanisms within the whole mental sphere – the entirety of consciousness as such – against certain contents or complexities of contents (see also Smith 2010).4 This inhibiting and repressive force – against affective tendencies, unities, complexes, memories and thoughts – could arise from already-formed and crystallized complexes of habitualities and sedimentations. As we will see in the next subsection, the phenomenon of self-constitution and its different levels play a special role in the phenomenological explanation of the unconscious. However, here, in the context of genetic phenomenology, we should also mention the phenomenological notion of instincts (see also Lee 1993). From the autumn of 1921, when Husserl wrote the St. Märgen Manuscripts, and afterwards, Husserl devoted much attention and effort to developing a non-biological, purely phenomenological conception of instincts, according to which instinct is understood as a purely passive teleological directedness of subjectivity. Instinct, in this way, opens up scope for more or less conscious activities while also articulating its horizons. In Husserl, there are at least four fundamental types of phenomenological instinct: hyletic (striving to give form to the hyletic field in one way or another); perceptual (striving to grasp perceptual unities and complexes); intersubjective (openness to the other subjects and connectedness with them) and rational (striving towards rational activities and achievements). According to Husserl, instinctive tendencies and drives might often be unconscious, functioning under the surface of wakeful consciousness, and they can also conflict with one another  – just like affective tendencies.

 Nicolas Smith in this regard attaches special importance to the Husserlian notion of “sedimented concrete complexes” which can be found in manuscript D 14. Smith 2010, 228–241. 4

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Husserl’s Generative Notion of the Unconscious According to Husserl, every layer of subjectivity in human consciousness is part of a coherent, singular, organic system, such that all levels affect and influence one another. In this way, instincts do, in fact, affect the higher and highest levels of attentive and active consciousness. Instincts, however, do not only affect individual (inter)subjective life, since they also affect historical being and historicity. An important upshot from Husserl’s investigations on subjectivity is his demonstration that subjectivity has a necessarily embodied, intersubjective and historical character. The problem of history especially came to the fore in Husserl’s writings in the 1930s. In this context, the Husserlian notion of “generativity” ultimately refers to the level of historical and cultural genesis, partly referring to the historical and communicative connection between generations, and partly referring to experiential “genesis” in general (see also Steinbock 1995). Concerning this fourth and, in a certain regard, most sophisticated form of the unconscious – understood as a generative unconscious – Husserl’s notion of self-­ constitution is of particular importance. Self-constitution is the transcendental process through which the subject  – the transcendental ego  – conceives itself in different, more concrete and more complex forms. For example, the subject might come to understand herself as a bodily human being, as a member of a certain social and historical community, as someone who has her own personal history and as someone belonging to a collective history (e.g. Husserl 1973a, 100–103, 109–110, 133–134, 164–165). In Husserl’s view, self-constitution (as a necessary transcendental process) has different levels. The ego constitutes itself at different levels – inevitably, as a member of some community or other, and accidentally, as a member of several different communities. For example, I could be an English person, a member of a golf club, an activist for a political party, someone who happens to have a religious background in my family or someone who is an active follower of a religion and so on. In this regard, Husserl’s theory of a peculiar type of instincts is of special importance  – namely, the instinct of self-preservation [Selbsterhaltung] (e.g. Husserl 2014, 93–106; Lee 1993). The ego constitutes itself at different levels, and each level has a particular system of phenomenologically-conceived instincts and drives. The ego instinctively strives to protect and sustain the different forms and levels of its self-constitution and objectification, such as its biological being (identity as a biological creature) and cultural being (existence as a member of certain historical and cultural communities). These different levels can easily conflict with each other, and this conflict can be also a source of repression against certain instincts and drives, as well as representations [Vorstellungen] that stem from those instincts and drives. In this manner, we have a notion of the unconscious which bears strong resemblance to the Freudian concept. Here we could also refer to the Husserlian idea that different levels of self-­ constitution correspond to different degrees of rationality, noting that those different grades could also conflict with each other. In this context, we might consider, for example, the apparently irrational fears about vaccination in the current COVID-19

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pandemic situation. These fears may correspond to a certain rationality at lower levels of self-constitution, where fear of the unknown could very well be considered rational, because the unknown and the unfamiliar may represent a deadly threat. However, at a higher level of self-constitution, where judgements should be based upon critical and self-critical rationality, and decisions should be based upon reliable information from responsibly-verified sources, fears like this can also be regarded as irrational. Indeed, instinctual repression might also be understood phenomenologically at the level of collective historicity, which is the true horizon of generativity and concrete history as such. Experiential contents that are intersubjectively formed and communicated are also sedimented into the pool of collective remembering and forgetting of a community; the collective intersubjective domain of such contents could also be conceived as a form of a collective unconscious, almost in the Jungian sense of the term. Collective and intersubjective instincts influence and govern the processes of collective sedimentation, as well as inhibiting and repressing tendencies and mechanisms that might reawaken certain collective experiences, contents and traumas. These instinctive mechanisms of repression and inhibition concerning a collective unconscious, in my interpretation, could be understood as instincts of collective self-preservation [Selbsterhaltung]. That is to say, a community could instinctively repress certain memories which they instinctively and unconsciously feel might threaten their proper and optimal collective self-preservation. However, even on the collective level of the unconscious, from a Husserlian point of view there are no rigid separations within the flow of collective, historical, intersubjective life, and the conscious and unconscious regions of life are in constant communication with each other.

II.  Husserl’s Notion of Life The previous section focused on the aspect of the unconscious in Husserl’s notion of life. The Husserlian conception of life as such is central to this present section. As already mentioned in the Introduction, the concept of life was already present in Husserl’s early phenomenology, even if in a rudimentary form as ‘lived experience’ [Erlebnis]. However, in the Bernau Manuscripts, the term ‘life’ (as a noun and also in different adjectival forms) came to the fore, where it served as a guideline [Leitfaden] for phenomenological investigations.5 It was a crucial concept in genetic phenomenology in the 1920s, as well as in Husserl’s later analyses concerning the philosophy of history in the 1930s (as collective and historical life).  In this context we should also mention, with regard to the static phenomenology, that Husserl’s Studies on the Structure of Consciousness [Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins], a huge work only recently published, was written right after the Logical Investigations, partly as a systematic continuation for that ‘breakthrough’, mostly between 1900 and 1914, and in it Husserl discusses vital tendencies, forces and processes within the consciousness at length (Husserl 2020). 5

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In the Bernau Manuscripts (at the latest) and thereafter, Husserl characterized subjectivity “through and through” [durch und durch] as life. In other words, he emphasized the flexible, dynamic and active character of mental events and processes. The word ‘active’ should be taken here in a wide sense, because Husserl also attributed animation, vividity, dynamism and flexibility to passivity. According to the basic principle of genetic phenomenology, every activity rests upon passivity of some sort (Husserl 1973a, 111–114), but passivity for Husserl did not merely mean mechanistic process or state of mind. Passivity had a sort of dynamism of its own. It is not by accident that, in Experience and Judgment, Husserl claims that passivity is only a weaker form of activity (Husserl 1939, 61–62, 119); many parts of Experience and Judgment were taken from the Bernau Manuscripts (see also Lohmar 1996). In Husserl’s interpretation, the essence of subjectivity is never something straightforwardly automatic and thus ‘dead’; it is always and in every regard alive and active. The lower levels of subjectivity that we would characterize as passive are only active in the broad sense, while activity in the strict sense involves fully-conscious, rational, deliberate achievements. The higher and highest layers of subjective and intersubjective life, which are bound to rational self-consciousness and which are manifested in various cultural or spiritual achievements, are based upon lower levels of conscious life which lack clear and rational self-consciousness. According to Husserl, volition in its optimal case is also accompanied by morally responsible self-consciousness as rational decision-making, striving, and acting (see also Husserl 1959, 201).6 Below this level, below rationality and clear self-consciousness (and even volition is not always clear, as it is often accompanied by vague consciousness), the lower levels which constitute these vital rational motifs in subjectivity still lack clear and transparent consciousness. These lower levels include acts, motifs and tendencies of emotion, feeling, instinct, non-rational axiological (evaluative) acts, mood and sensation (hyletic data), the latter of which refers either to states and processes of the body or to the environment. In Husserl’s view, all these lower-level subjective processes have certain active qualities of their own. Life fundamentally has two aspects: a subjective (egological and intersubjective) aspect and an objective aspect. The subjective aspect relates to the ego-pole or to the community of subjects, and the objective aspect relates to events and states of affairs in the world. The world, the objective aspect of being, is manifested or expressed for the ego at the lowest level of life in the form of a purely hyletic field or stream. Husserl, in his later period of work, in the C-Manuscripts (among others) describes the fundamental level and form of experience as an interplay of the primal or primordial ego [Ur-Ich] and hyle or primordial hyle [Urhyle] (Husserl 2006) see also Held 1966; Kortooms 2002; Rodemeyer 2006; Römer 2010). It must be emphasized that, in Husserl’s interpretation, both aspects of life – the subjective (egological) and the objective – have an active character of their own. The hyletic field or stream  Ibid.“Cognitive reason is a function of practical reason; the intellect is the servant of the will”[“Erkenntnisvernunft ist Funktion der praktischen Vernunft, der Intellekt ist Diener des Willens”]. 6

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articulates itself in a highly dynamic and flexible way; it never mirrors or reflects the mind-transcendent world ‘outside’ in a mechanistic or automatic way. Habitual and kinesthetic7 structures that we acquire earlier in life also influence the formation of the hyletic field and primal impressions in the present. A professional painter, for example, experiences colors differently to people with other professions. The hyle is part of the universal nexus of immanent life, and it is never something dead or inanimate; it is alive as much as the ego itself.8 A further important structural component of life, according to Husserl, is mood [Stimmung] and related acts and achievements of consciousness, such as feelings, emotions and axiological (evaluative) representations. The notions of ‘feeling-­ sensations’ and ‘feeling-acts’ [Gefühlempfindungen, Gefühlsakten] are present in the Logical Investigations as explicit intentional acts (feeling-acts), which are founded by the consciousness or representation of an object or ‘state of affairs’ (such as an event that makes us happy), and these also have a non-intentional, purely sensational component (feeling-sensation) (Husserl 1984, 406–409). However, it is the Studies on the Structure of Consciousness (1900–1914) that offers more detailed analyses on the microstructure and fundamental characteristics of mood. In this text, mood is a kind of horizon-consciousness which connects feeling-sensations to feeling-acts. Husserl writes about mood here in an almost Heideggerian manner.9 Mood, Husserl claims, discloses, interprets and explains objects, events, facts and

 Kinesthesis in Husserl refers to consciousness of potentiality and potential bodily movements, such as consciousness of bodily capabilities to movement and also the actual experience of the realization of such capabilities. (Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge [1973a], Ding und Raum [1973b]; Ideas II [1952]). 8  In the first book of Ideas, as well as practically in the Logical Investigations, Husserl was of the opinion that the hyle (earlier, in the Logical Investigations, the ‘sensation’ [Empfindung]) is dead matter which is animated by the morphé (earlier, ‘conception’ or ‘interpretation’ [Auffassung]). (See also Husserl 1976, 192–196). Later, in his genetic phenomenology, in the Bernau Manuscripts and thereafter, Husserl’s concept of hyle became much more dynamic than it had been previously; it had a certain life of its own. Here I would like to express my respectful disagreement with Toine Kortooms who, in his otherwise excellent and exceptional monograph on Husserl’s philosophy of time-consciousness, claimed that Husserl, in his late genetic phenomenology, returned to a rather more passive conception of hyle (particularly in the C-Manuscripts). Kortooms holds that, in the late Husserl, active egoic (or egological) temporalization is juxtaposed with automatic, mechanistic and somewhat passive material (or hyletic) temporalization (Kortooms 2002, 231–232, 245–246, 263; see also: op. cit. 213, 218). I believe, on the contrary, that the production and manifestation of hyle and the hyletic field (as well as the temporalization of this field) was never really a mechanistic or ‘dead’ process in Husserl’s genetic phenomenology. At least, I think that most passages in the texts concerning his mature genetic phenomenology indicate this much. The articulation, synthesis and formation of the hyletic field – apart from and independent of egoic or egological processes and acts – is a highly dynamic, animate and vivid process. 9  In this regard, the Korean philosopher Nam-In Lee assumes that Husserl might have even influenced the formation of Heidegger’s notion of mood or disposition [Befindlichkeit]. (See also Lee 1998, especially 117–118. Op. cit. 117). Lee writes: “I believe that Husserl’s phenomenology of mood suggests that Husserl’s influence on Heidegger goes beyond what Heidegger states in his own lectures, and goes beyond what philosophers usually believe.” 7

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states of affairs in our environment and even the world in general. It helps us to understand better what is happening within and around us. In Husserl’s view, it is mood that enables us to set clear goals and to clearly evaluate things and events that surround us and happen to us. The next essential feature of life, according to Husserl, is intersubjectivity. Life, in its concrete form, is always life within a community. Every single form of life, every living being, is bound to other living beings, to the same community of living individuals, and also to other communities of other living creatures, including other species. A closer examination of life demonstrates that every single moment, event and act of life – whether conscious or unconscious – is embedded into an intersubjective horizon, without which those moments, events and acts are always abstract and never concrete. In fact, a single living being is an abstraction without a larger community of which she or he is a member. A single subject can only be considered concretely as a member of an intersubjective community to which she or he belongs. We feel and experience the bounds within ourselves that connect us to the wider community of our fellow subjects (e.g. to our particular nation and finally to the entirety of humankind), and ultimately to the infinitely-open horizon of universal life. Finally, life has a necessarily and indispensably embodied character. Lower and higher-level moments and events in life equally correspond to the bodily existence of a living being, and to particular bodily structures and capabilities, as well as to certain concrete and actual bodily processes. The subject, in Husserl’s view, is an embodied being “through and through” (see also Zahavi 1994; Moran 2013), and he emphasizes that no subject could be conceived concretely without actual physical bodily existence (Husserl 2012, 380).10 According to Husserl, the subject’s body has two fundamental aspects: a subjective aspect [Leib] and an objective aspect [Körper] that belong together out of structural a priori necessity. The transcendental subject constitutes itself necessarily as an embodied worldly being; it cannot conceive itself otherwise (Husserl 2008, 251–258). In Husserl’s view, one’s bodily being  – the embodiment of the transcendental ego – is a transcendental and a priori necessity. The higher acts and achievements of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, such as abstract and theoretical thought, are also related to structures and processes of embodiment, and – importantly – they are founded by the latter. Furthermore, the inevitably-embodied character of life and subjectivity is also reflected in intersubjectivity. According to Husserl, a certain “intercorporeality” can be attributed to our intersubjective being. As he says: “The ‘We’ has its collective corporeality” [“Das ‘Wir’ hat seine kollektive Leiblichkeit”] (Husserl 2008, 181).

 Ibid. “A person cannot be concrete without having a subjective body as an objective body” [“Eine Person kann konkret nicht sein, ohne einen Körper als Leib zu haben”]. 10

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III. Husserl’s Notion of Animality The close phenomenological examination of life teaches us that we are living in a world that we share with a potentially (and perhaps actually) infinite number of fellow living beings. Moreover, one universal transcendental life is manifested and incarnated in the infinite community of living beings as universal transcendental intersubjectivity. We are each a member of this community and, as the earlier phenomenological reflections show, we depend in several ways on this community; we could not be conceived as a concrete subject outside and apart from it. This universal life has its immanent and transcendent aspects; creatures, as embodied beings, have actual physical bodies with immanent subjective aspects [Leib], and their entire existence – even their higher mental capacities – is strongly influenced and affected by their necessary embodiment. However, the question remains of how we are to ascertain that there are other living beings beyond ourselves? And how are we capable of conceiving ourselves as dependent members, as abstract moments, of a wider intersubjective community? Husserl’s answer is brief; he attributes this to empathy. Empathy, as mentioned in the Introduction, is an indirect sort of intentionality. Thanks to empathy we are able to constitute other subjects. Bodies which are similar to our own are constituted as the bodies of other subjects, and ultimately we are thus able to constitute our very selves as intersubjective (see also Husserl 1973a, 123–124, 134–135, 148–156, 162, 173, 192; also Moran 2000, 176). Empathy is indirect, because we do not – and cannot – have direct access to the inner mental spheres of other subjects. If that were the case, says Husserl, then the other subject and I would not be two different persons, but we would share one and the same mental sphere, and therefore the other would simply be a modification of my own mental sphere – or I would simply be a modification of the other subject (Husserl 1973a, 138–139). In Husserl’s view it is the partial similarity of my body and that of the other which motivates empathy, and on the basis of this similarity I am able to constitute the other person’s body as a lived body [Leib] of another living, sensing, feeling and experiencing subject. Empathy also enables us to constitute so-­ called ‘lower level’ and ‘anomalous’ subjects – subjects who transgress the notion of a fully-matured human subject, e.g. children and animals.11 ‘Lower level’ here refers to the fact that higher layers of subjectivity – such as fully mature, abstract, conceptual and rational thought – are not present, and the bodies of these subjects are also somewhat less developed than subjects who are constituted as ‘normal’ from the perspective of a phenomenologist. The question is therefore: to what extent is it possible for phenomenologically-motivated empathy to grasp the body of a truly alien subject [Fremdsubjekt] as the body of another subject? Put another way: to what extent is it possible for phenomenologically-motivated empathy to constitute another subject at the lower levels of animality and biological complexity?  For Husserl, ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’ or ‘anomaly’ refer to typical and atypical, usual and unusual, phenomena at different levels of experience. (See: Steinbock 1995, 125–169). 11

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In the concrete constitution of the other subject, especially in ‘lower level’ or ‘anomalous’ subjects, the familiarity of behavior and functional apparatus plays a key role. More precisely, we should emphasize Husserl’s notion of organs in this context.12 Here, Husserl attempts to provide a phenomenological interpretation of bodily organs. According to him, the entire body appears as an organized system of organs, and the body as a whole presents as a tool or means for the ego to realize its goals and aims in the world (Husserl 1952, 151–152). The particular organs, from a phenomenological perspective, are functionally relevant; they help the ego to realize different ways of functioning and actions in the world, as well as different modes and moments of being-in-the-world. Hands are organic means of grasping, manipulating or otherwise handling things in the world; feet are the means to walk, teeth to grind food, the stomach to digest it and sensory organs to perceive the world (with eyes to see, ears and the auditory nervous subsystem to hear) and so on. According to Husserl, it is essential to the body that it consists of organs and that it is an organic system of those bodily organs. Moreover, it belongs to the essence of organic nature that it is inhabited by living beings which are composed of organs. In Husserl’s view, animality – and thus organic life – refers essentially to embodied subjects and living beings rendered capable of living through different organs which connect them to the world and realize their lives in different ways, achieving certain aims which are fundamental to living. Husserl held that organs, and the organic nature of bodily existence, are essential structural features of animality (see also Husserl 1952, 143–211). The next important question concerns whether Husserl would attribute consciousness in the strict sense (i.e. the fundamental capacity to have phenomenal and conscious lived experiences) and thus a transcendental ego to all living things. It is unambiguous and clearly apparent from his work that he would attribute this much to animals with a nervous system. Husserl conceives the nervous system as an organ which realizes the partial psychophysical dependency of soul on the body, and which connects the soul and body to each other (Husserl 1952, 294–297; see also Yoshimi 2010). In this manner, Husserl held that all creatures with a nervous system have a certain consciousness, no matter how rudimentary; even simple creatures like jellyfish with their decentralized nervous systems (see also Husserl 1973c, 112–119; 2003, 136; 2020, 52–53). Further questions remain, however. What about the levels below animals? What about, for example, plants, fungi and unicellular beings? Husserl is somewhat more hesitant in these cases. In some places, Husserl discusses ‘plant monads’ (Husserl 1973d, 595–596; 2006, 171; see also Lee 1993, 225–230), and there are textual passages in which he even entertains the possibility of ‘unicellular monads’ (Husserl 2006, 169,

 Husserl perhaps addressed the phenomenon and problem of organs in most detail in Thing and Space (1907) [Husserl Ding und Raum, 1973b] and in the second book of Ideas (Husserl 1952). Certain sections of his partly-still unpublished D-Manuscripts [Späte Texte zur Raumkonstitution] are also illuminating in this respect. (See also Claesges 1965). 12

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174–175).13 But these references are quite rare in Husserl’s work, and he writes about these cases as hypotheticals. In other places, he says that it is highly problematic to attribute consciousness in the strict sense to a plant (Husserl 1971, 10).14 The lower-level organic creatures such as plants, fungi and unicellular beings are similar to higher-level biological beings such as animals in several regards. They can all be conceived as living beings which bear at least some fundamental external signs of life, and we can therefore grasp them as transcendental subjects in the wide sense – that is to say, as transcendental proto-subjects. In other words, we cannot conceive them as transcendental subjects (transcendental egos or monads) in the strict sense, because plants, fungi and unicellular beings do not plausibly have a consciousness in the strict sense. However, they are evidently living beings, and they show many preliminary signs of conscious activity (including certain forms of functioning that resemble memory, sensation and anticipation), so it is phenomenologically legitimate to regard them as transcendental proto-subjects. Phenomenological reflection reveals the universe as the home of a universal community of transcendental subjects and proto-subjects which, in the wide sense of the term, share one and the same universal life. This life unifies every subject and proto-subject in the universe, particularly those on Planet Earth, in a universal communion. In this context, those subjects which possess the capacity of theoretical and practical rationality, and which can control their behaviour according to moral and ethical norms, are responsible for themselves and for other living beings too – both ‘rational’ and ‘non-rational’ subjects.

Conclusion Rationality and self-consciousness, in Husserl’s view, imply the consciousness of ethical norms, which in turn implies the existence of ethical obligations. According to him, rationality does not just concern theoretical matters but also the practical and the axiological. He held that phenomenology enables us to gain absolutely certain

 The Leibnizian term ‘monad’ refers in Husserl to “the full concretion of transcendental ego”. (See also Husserl 1973a, 102–103. 14  In Phenomenological Psychology (1925), Husserl is also very hesitant. There he writes: “Within this pervasive structure which belongs to the form of this world and of any world at all, a great distinction confronts us at once. Real things break down into living things, in the everyday sense of the word, into animately, psychically living and acting things, and on the other side into things lacking psychic life. Of course human beings and animals present an example of the first. We do call plants also living beings. But only if they would seriously be experienced as psychically living things, as sensing, perceiving, feeling, striving, in the manner of psychic subjects, psychically affected or psychically active, only then might we class them among psychic beings, among those things which are subjects and live as subjects. Otherwise we class them with things that are not subjects, things that lack psychic life, like stones, mountains, houses, architectures, works of art of every sort, machines, books, etc.” (Husserl 1977, 78). 13

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apodictic insights – insights that are absolutely certain or necessarily true – concerning ethics in general, and ethical values and obligations in particular. Apodictic insights into values prescribe clear apodictic directions – i.e. ones that are incontestable due to certainty – or offer clues to guide decision-making. In his lectures on ethics, Husserl claims that there is a hierarchy of values, at the top of which there are values relating to ‘personhood’ [Persönlichkeit] and freedom (Husserl 1988). However, he also attributes a certain value to life as such, as biological life. In his view, apodictic insights concerning values and ethical obligations should govern our practical behaviour and ethically-pertinent decision-making. Such insights from Husserl also have certain key eco-ethical consequences (see also Kohák 2003). If life in general, and every particular living being, has ethical value, then this implies that we have certain obligations towards these living beings. More than this, Husserl tends to conceive of animals as persons in the wide sense (see also Vergani 2021). We should remember that values of personhood belong to the highest level of the hierarchy of values from Husserl’s perspective. This would mean that it is ethically wrong – and apodictically wrong –to treat animals merely as instruments. We should also take them into consideration as ‘ends in themselves’ – and treat them accordingly. Concerning other living beings and the natural environment, we should set certain limits to individual and collective human actions in order to prevent their abuse. In Husserl’s view, ethical values and their application in concrete situations may give rise to conflict; however, it is always possible to discern how to maximize the realization of axiological potentialities in the world. Our contemporary mainstream human activities involve the wide scale instrumentalization of animals, the extreme exploitation of natural resources and the radical destruction of the natural environment. These activities certainly do not harmonize with Husserlian prescriptions, or at least implications, about respecting nature and life in general. In closing, we might consider these Husserlian prescriptions when noting that there are direct connections between the increasing destruction of the natural environment, the drastic loss of biodiversity and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Humans are increasingly dominating and domesticating wilderness and nature. This involves more frequent and intensive contact between humans and wild animals, which in turn increases the threat of ‘zoonotic diseases’ like COVID-19. In this way, the utmost disrespect towards nature and its extreme exploitation – as well as being ethically indefensible in itself  – threatens the very existence of human beings too. • This study was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Project: BO/00421/18/2) and by the No. 138745 project of the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund. I would like to express my gratitude to Maija Kūle, Jessie Stanier and Vincent Hunt for their help in the elaboration of this paper.

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Tymieniecka’s Philosophy of the Logos of Life: The Story of the Totality Zaiga Ikere

Abstract  Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s conviction was that co-operation between scientific inquiry and philosophy would provide links among the fragmentary discoveries of science. This dialogue will open fresh perspectives for a philosophical paradigm represented by the Phenomenology of Life. In this branch of phenomenology, life itself is the key point of reference, and being is represented as ‘beingness-­ in-­becoming’. The evolutionary process of beingness ends in a specifically human phase, that of the human condition. It is creativity that plays a paramount role in all forms of human activity, and the human creative condition is present in all aspects of reality. In Tymieniecka’s philosophy the bond between nature, the human world and cosmic forces finds its representation in the principle of the ‘unity-of-everything-­ there-is-alive’. This viewpoint can be found intuitively expressed in the folk traditions and cultures of different nations across the world. One vivid example is the folk-poetry found in Latvian culture. Keywords  Phenomenology of life · Beingness · Becoming · ‘The-unity-of-­ everything-there-is-alive’ · Folk tradition · Culture

 he Dialogue Between Scientific Inquiry T and the Phenomenology of Life Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka occupies an innovative and independent position in modern trends of phenomenology. She devoted her life to advancing phenomenological inquiry along new avenues to provide guidance for scientific investigations and the conduct of life. Tymieniecka admitted that philosophy and other sciences so far “have followed distinct but parallel paths” (Tymieniecka 2004, 7). Different Z. Ikere (*) University of Daugavpils, Daugavpils, Latvia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_5

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scientific branches have concentrated on solving specific questions in each section of scientific inquiry. This specificity and endeavour to solve practical tasks did not allow us to delve into the final reasons of things or contemplate the first original principles and causes of human life. Tymieniecka sets out the situation since Modernity as follows: With the unfolding of Modernity there ensued the tendency to so-called ‘empiricism’, which abandoned the quest for first principles and reasons, holding them to be dispensable in the understanding of Reality and Nature. This, along with the rejection of speculation that occurred at the end of the 19th Century, and which shaped 20th Century thinking, meant that the metaphysical system dealing with the great issues of ultimate Reason, the Aristotelian ideal of philosophy […] has altogether been abandoned (Tymieniecka 2004, 8).

She stresses that it is the task of philosophy to provide links among the fragmentary discoveries and findings of the numerous diversified compartments and workings of various branches of science. She argues that the significance of a fragmentary discovery can be grasped only through reference to the guiding ideas of philosophy and, in particular, as it is represented by phenomenology in any of its branches (Tymieniecka 2004, 9). Tymieniecka proposed continuing the dialogue between philosophy and science. She believed this approach opened new perspectives for a fresh philosophical paradigm, which she characterized as ‘the ontopoiesis of life situated within the Philosophy of Life’ (Tymieniecka 1998a, 15). As a result, Tymieniecka developed a new approach in phenomenological inquiry, which was analysed by the Polish philosopher Jan Szmyd, who wrote: Its main element is original metaphysics, ontology of existence and life, integrally linked to other elements of this system with characteristic epistemology, philosophical anthropology, axiology, ethics and aesthetics, the philosophy of education and religion and a philosophical interpretation of individual and collective existence (Szmyd 2011, 37).

Tymieniecka argued that her branch of ‘Phenomenology of Life’ was the starting point of philosophy, since it opens the complete field of ‘being and becoming’ in its entire expanse and progress. She put forward several reasons to defend her claim. First, a phenomenology of ‘life’ embraces the concept of life in all its significant aspects, beginning with the mineral, vegetal, animal and human sphere, including the works of the human spirit, with reference to society, culture, art and so on. Second, a philosophy of life considers cosmos, bios [Tymieniecka’s wording] and culture within ‘a common interplay of life’. Seeking to bring to light the specificity of each segment of reality, at the same time it analyses these in close relation to others, drawing upon the results of the natural sciences, art and social and cultural studies. Third, by laying down the proto-metaphysical groundwork, the ontopoiesis of life pursues the ontic progress in the becoming of beingness. Fourth, the self-­ individualization of life – as the vehicle of ontopoiesis – handles all the conditions for forming the course of the living beingness-in-progress (Tymieniecka 1998b, 60–63). Tymieniecka created a new intellectual paradigm “providing a co-ordinated vision of compartmentalized scientific findings” (Backhaus 2003, 23). Her Phenomenology of Life was realized in her philosophical system in the 122

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volumes of the Analecta Husserliana book series she directed, through the work of the World Phenomenology Institute she founded and the 64 international conferences that brought together philosophers from around the world to discuss her ideas at the highest level. The World Phenomenology Institute, for instance, has the stature and significance of a highly-influential philosophical body. The Latvian philosopher Maija Kūle wrote: Tymieniecka’s overwhelming system of Logos and Life with its ontopoietic vision is one of the best-elaborated frameworks for proceeding that we have at the beginning of the 21st Century, because it fully covers the theoretical basis for ecologically-oriented philosophy. She has worked out a system of concepts at the highest theoretical level, returned to the ancient view of the logos active in the Universe, and demonstrated the natural and ontopoietic development of the human mind and spirit (Kūle 2018, 51).

Life as a Key Point of Reference for Philosophical Inquiry Assuming that there is no great difference between nature and the cosmos or nature and human life, Tymieniecka tries to find a universal principle; a point of reference for the formulation of issues and answers for her analysis. She asserts that in the same way there is a proportionality in the forces and principles maintaining the cosmos and earth in their place, and that a proportionality exists in the relations between and among other things, measured against each other and the whole (Tymieniecka 2005, xxi). Tymieniecka was searching for a universal principle: some point of reference on which to base her investigation. Among the questions she considered was whether “Man is the measure of all things” as it was for the 5th Century Greek relativistic philosopher and sophist Protagoras (485–415  BCE) who considered the human being a universal point of reference (Tymieniecka 2005, xxi). For Tymieniecka, such an anthropocentric approach does not seem to be justified. She assumes that her philosophy – dealing with the human situation within the network of existence, taking into consideration all the meaningful circuits of bios, and gathering insights from all fields of knowledge – necessarily points to life as ‘the crucial concern’ of philosophy. She considers that “against the background of natural being-in-­ becoming within the crucial play of forces”, the decisive issue that emerges is the issue of measure. For Tymieniecka however, the key factor is not the human being as it was for Protagoras, but life (Tymieniecka 2004, 14). Tymieniecka’s reason for revising the Protagorian maxim is a search for the answer to the question: “What is the basis for the unity-of-all-beingness?” The phenomenologist Gary Backhaus stresses that Tymieniecka assumed that life is a self-individualizing entity in progression, in ceaseless cyclic developments: Life is self-individualization-in-existence, which follows a dynamic constructive progression. The individual articulates its own line of development, which emerges within it as an entelechial design. Entelechial design is a dynamically-unfolding patterning of relevancies and operations that regulates the inward and outward passage of energies. Its spacing orien-

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Z. Ikere tation differentiates sameness/otherness relevancies so that a metabolic exchange allows for a spiral of cyclic development. Tymieniecka calls the telos-oriented schema the ontopoiesis of life. ‘Onto’ means ‘firstness’ in the scale of existential formation, and ‘poiesis’ characterizes the ceaseless qualification in the process of becoming (Backhaus 2001, 32–33).

Since vegetation, animals and all the species share the same living conditions with Man within the unity-of-all-beingness, Tymieniecka declares life to be “the measure of all things”. It is life, she says, that maintains the entire beingness (Tymieniecka 2005, xxii).

The Ontopoietic Process of Life The principle of the-unity-of-everything-there-is-alive is both the beginning and end of Tymieniecka’s approach to philosophical analysis: her alpha and omega in deciphering the first principles of the web of Life. Her conviction is that we all, starting even from “viruses, bacteria, plants and the smallest animals” are “creatures of the earth”, and as such share the conditions for life on Planet Earth. Human beings are “existentially symbiotic” with all other living forms (Tymieniecka 2005, xxxii). Tymieniecka asserts her belief that each living being is in a way the reflection of the entire universe: an embodiment of the universe. Her position in this respect is similar to the Leibnizean conception of the monad. In Leibniz’s concept the monad is animated and alive, and reflects the entire universe according to its own expansion and perspective. For Leibniz, there are infinite gradations in the complexity and modes of nature, each reflecting the universe-in-making (Tymieniecka 1998a, 33). The emphasis of Tymieniecka’s analysis shifted from the notion of what-there-is to conception of the ways and modes of becoming. It is this perspective exactly which allows us to consider the poiesis of life as a constructive progress (Tymieniecka 1990, 9–10). Tymieniecka developed her theory on the nature of the logos itself, as guided by the universal law of impetus and equipoise.1 She believed the logos of life was at the very nucleus of the life process as the conduit of becoming. Philosopher Lawrence Kimmel wrote in this respect that the emergence of things was not a matter of destiny. Rather, he said, at its core was a self-organized, self-governing Logos toward the construction of life and the world (Kimmel 2003, 29). Tymieniecka considered the logos of life as a process of ontopoietic interplay. The task of her philosophical inquiry has been the step-by-step pursuit of the diversified route taken by the logos to establish the reality of Life and Existence in its manifestation of living beingness; ultimately in its human expression” (Tymieniecka 2005, xxxiii). According to Tymieniecka, all things are united in a web of gigantic interplay, interacting with each other and influencing one another. It is the very sense of the beingness of beings crystallized within the gigantic web of ontopoietic interplay (Tymieniecka 1998b, 65). It is in the concept of the logos that the essence of being-­ in-­becoming is seen most clearly.

 For further detail see: Tymieniecka (2000).

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The Human Creative Condition Influenced by the teaching of Heraclitus on flux and stasis, Tymieniecka adopted a view of the ‘fluid nature’ of existential reality. Tymieniecka’s philosophy is process philosophy, reflecting beingness-in-becoming, where one of the phases of Nature’s evolutionary progression ends with the specifically-human phase of the human condition. Tymieniecka envisages the human being in the network of its sharing-in-life with other types of living beings. Their development through self-individualization proceeds in a series of instances of metamorphic becoming. Beginning with the incipient life forms, the ontopoietic impetus moves ahead until it promotes the body-flesh-psyche-life complexes. The progress follows from the living agent vital constitutive system to the human mind and the emergence of creative imagination. Tymieniecka states that at this juncture the human being is empowered by the creative logos to invent and forge, which transforms the human being itself. The logos of life is differentiated in its specifically-human constructive expressions and devices (Tymieniecka 2005, xxxi–xxxii). Within the “unity-of-­ everything-there-is-alive” the human being has a key knot position,2 and so acquires the human signification of life. Tymieniecka has named this situation ‘the human condition’. Gary Backhaus pointed out that Tymieniecka considered the human condition to be a specific station of the inward/outward energy vectors of life, characterized by a specific beingness of life. He emphasized that for Tymieniecka the notion of beingness replaced being because she rejected substantive ontology and subscribed to her own version of process philosophy, focusing on self-individuating ‘real’ entities both in becoming and their ontopoiesis (Backhaus 2001, 18). Tymieniecka uses the term ‘the human condition’ for the creative principle which emerges in this phase of life. Backhaus writes that it is the creative principle that “provides the Archimedean starting point of Tymieniecka’s Phenomenology of Life because it provides access for uncovering the inner workings of all of Nature in its evolutionary progression, i.e., ontopoiesis” (Backhaus 2001, 18). The human creative condition ensures that it participates in all spheres of reality and all types of human activity. Again, Tymieniecka stresses that the realm of the human creative condition is not to be identified just with human activity. Since it is fundamentally connected to the evolution of the universe, it participates in various ways in all circles of reality and in all ways of existing. The creativity of the human plays a paramount role in all types of human activity and lays down a network of correspondences between and among all the realms of human constitutive and cognitive involvement (Tymieniecka 1998a, 56). Exploring the dialogue between the natural sciences and philosophy, Tymieniecka concluded that there have been notable developments in the natural sciences from the era of Brentano and Husserl to today. In this respect the Italian philosopher Daniela Verducci admits that taking the Husserlian inheritance into consideration,

 Tymieniecka’s wording.

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the radical question facing Tymieniecka is “whether one can proceed beyond the absoluteness of the constituent transcendental consciousness” (Verducci 2004, 4). The philosopher Maija Kūle argues that consciousness relates to a special form of experience, and is realized in an empirical situation. Explaining the nature of consciousness, she writes that consciousness is a form of peculiar world understanding and an experience that turns all of objective reality into an aggregate of ‘sense formations’. However, she notes that it is a special form of experience realized only in the context of definite human relations, in a concrete situation (Kūle 2008, 427). In Tymieniecka’s philosophy, consciousness is not a pure consciousness. She considers consciousness as an existential bond with the genetic web of the logos of life. Tymieniecka’s critique of knowledge refutes the notion of pure consciousness as the ultimate foundation of true knowledge. Instead, she stresses that ‘knowing’ and ‘being’ are inseparable in constitutive consciousness. Highlighting Tymieniecka’s considerations of the relationships between knowledge and human cognition – the latter being one of the possible modes of access to information – the American philosopher Jadwiga Smith wrote: Tymieniecka believes that subjectivity is fundamental to all human knowledge and creative acts. She points out, though, that knowledge and creativity exist analogically across the living universe. Life in all its richness and variety stores information through which human cognition is one of many possible modes of access. Knowledge, latent in nature, has no meaning unless it is approached by consciousness (Smith 2011, 20).

Tymieniecka’s concept of the human creative condition carries an important message. There are two maxims that seem to be of paramount importance: 1. ‘Self-individualization-in-existence’: a person’s unique individuality and the importance of their continuous development throughout their lifetime. 2. The role of creativity is of paramount significance in the human condition and in the entire universal flux of ‘life-in-the-world’.

 onderment, Enchantment of Life, Philosophical Reflection W and the Unfolding of the Human Spirit Tymieniecka wrote that the ancients considered philosophy to be born from wonderment. She claimed wonderment to be the essential stance of the human being, the state pertaining not only to philosophical reflection. She stated that wonderment about things which do not seem to fall into the simple causal concatenation has its experiential counterpart in another human primogenital state, that of marvelling. Wonderment and marvelling complete each other. Tymieniecka asserted that in this respect we could speak of ‘marvelling-wonderment coupling’ as the primogenital condition of the launching of the human spirit. The stance of the marvelling-­ wonderment experience bears a triad of intellectual bents of the human mind, each of them playing a definite part in this experience. The intellectual powers involved

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in this primogenital human stance are natural curiosity, pure inquisitiveness and personal conjecture (Tymieniecka 1990, 36–37). Human beings are confronted with the enigmatic maze of the world as beingness-­ in-­becoming. When we are confronted with life’s naked facts, we start to ponder upon them. Tymieniecka claims that without reflection and imagination they remain meaningless for us. We endow the brute facts of life with signification only as our mind moves from marvelling to wonderment. Tymieniecka has attempted to explain the nature of these two notions of ‘marvelling’ and ‘wonderment’. She says that when we become “enchanted”  – such as, entranced before the beauty of a flower, plant or tree  – this is marvelling. “Wonderment” occurs, Tymieniecka says, when this beauty or complexity of forms “makes us wonder about the prodigy of nature of bringing about forms, and about this very bringing about.” (Tymieniecka 1990, 36). Analysing the creative human condition, Tymieniecka speaks of the aesthetic/ poetic sense Man possesses and the individual powers of wonderment and marvelling about the world of nature that each human being has been given. The sense of unity with nature and cosmic forces and the Leibnizian interpretation of the monad as the mirror of the Universe can be found in intuitive interpretations of the world. The enchantment of nature is intuitively grasped and expressed by poets of different epochs and nations. For instance, in one of her poems the Latvian poet Aspazija (1865–1943) compared the solar system with a daisy blossom in the meadow: both being the subject of ‘the flow of eternity’. The poetess considers the tiny meadow flower as a reflection and counterpart of the vastness of the universe. She stresses the movement and transformation to which everything in the unceasing interplay of eternity is subjected, where everything disappears and vanishes, and where too our Sun will die. This figurative comparison – a tiny wildflower and the vast world – matches the vision of the English poet William Blake (1757–1827). In his poem Auguries of Innocence he urges us to imagine the whole of heaven contained in a small wild flower and for us to grasp the greatness of the whole world in a small grain of sand, thereby holding eternity in the palm of one’s hand. The Phenomenology of Life represented by Tymieniecka stresses the transcending perspectives of everyday cultural experiences present in individual life, as well as forming the cultural tradition of nations. She writes: The subliminal propensities of the Human Condition have been at work so that the mouth-­ to-­mouth tradition of folklore has unfolded into formalized art and literature […] The subliminal propensities corroborate, enrich, amplify and weed through a culture's tradition, imbuing society with a particular vision. The various cultural styles which thus unfold in the history of nations stem from basic ideals formulated in prehistoric times and which persist through the punctuations of cataclysm, war, defeat and victory, revolution, plague and even cultural epochs (Tymieniecka 1990, 39–40). Culture is transmitted from generation to generation as an organized unity of sense-­ formulation. Separate elements of culture are full of meaning. The world vision of the unity of bios, man and cosmos is deeply-rooted in the folklore of Latvian culture. One thing that brings Tymieniecka’s concept of ontopoiesis of life so close to traditional Latvian culture and pantheism is her conception of nature, universe and human beings within ‘the-unity-with-everything-that-is-alive.’

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Z. Ikere A considerable part of the heritage of Latvian folklore comes through folk songs [dainas]. Latvian folk songs began to be collected in the mid-1800s and published at the turn of the 19th Century (1894–1915). The significance and high artistic value of Latvian folk poetry was appreciated by such world-famous German scholars of that time as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788). Thematically, Latvian folk songs embrace the flow of the entire human lifespan marking the basic stages of life from the birth of a child to its old age and death. The songs also depict the cyclic flow of time in the natural world. Astronomical events are observed, especially the summer solstice [Jāņi] or that of winter solstice3 (Bula 2012, 16–18). The form of the classical Latvian folk song is a quatrain consisting of two couplets of verse. The content most often offers a comparison of the human life events with the corresponding phenomena of nature. It should be noted that these phenomena of nature are presented as animated beings. The vivid parallels with nature and its phenomena in an animated form emphasize the feeling of the interconnectedness of Man with the surrounding world and cosmos making him or her to be an integral segment of the web of life ‘within-the-unity-of-everything-there-is-alive’. Wonderment about the world and an appreciation of its beauty in an intuitive apperceptive sense is also presented in many folk songs. For instance, in the Latvian world picture, even grass in a meadow may have silver flowers. The folk song runs: O, land of fathers, The beauty of you! Meadow grasses bloom With silver flowers.4

Living beings are placed deep in the midst of everything-there-is-alive both in the Latvian folk song tradition and in Tymieniecka’s phenomenology. There, an “all-­ underlying unity of life, Man and the cosmos” (Tymieniecka 2011, 4) is presented. When considering Man and the bios, Tymieniecka stressed the necessity of the bond between Man and Nature and the feelings of wonderment and marvelling that can be gained and experienced from this interconnection and interaction. According to Tymieniecka, among the diverse networks within the web of life the human being has a decisive position acquiring the specifically-human ‘significance of life’. Consequently, Man being an integral part of the whole entire giveness bears a grave responsibility for the whole beingness in the universal flux of life within the world. In short, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka has investigated the diversified route taken by the logos “to establish the reality of life and existence in its manifestations of living beingness; and ultimately in its human expression” (Tymieniecka 2005, XXVIII). Tymieniecka’s ontopiesis of life, which grounds the human condition within the totality of life’s spread, is a philosophy serving to truly inspire the human creative spirit.

 These are the two occasions in the year when the sun is directly above the furthest points north or south of the equator that it ever reaches, with the longest hours of day or night. 4  The original poem can be found by searching Daina#3679-Daina:Dainu Skapis.Latvju Dainas. 3

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Works Cited Backhaus, Gary. 2001. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka: The Trajectory of Her Thought from Eidetic Phenomenology to the Phenomenology of Life. In Phenomenological Inquiry, vol. XXV, 17–53. Belmont: World Phenomenology Institute. ———. 2003. Impetus and Equipoise in the Life-Strategies of Reason as the Culmination of A.-T.  Tymieniecka’s Open System of her Phenomenology of Life. In Phenomenological Inquiry, vol. XXVII, 5–13. Belmont: World Phenomenology Institute. Bula, Dace. 2012. Priekšvārds. Krišjānis Barons. Latvju dainas, 16–18. Rīga: Latvijas Universitātes Literatūras, folkloras un mākslas institūts. Kimmel, Lawrence. 2003. Logos: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Celebration of Life in Search of Wisdom. In Phenomenological Inquiry, vol. XXVII, 20–33. Belmont: World Phenomenology Institute. Kūle, Maija. 2008. Humanities in Transcending the Perspective of Experience. In Analecta Husserliana, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, vol. XCV, 423–432. Dordrecht: Springer International Publishing AG. ———. 2018. Eco-Phenomenology: Philosophical Sources and Main Concepts. In Analecta Husserliana, ed. W.S.  Smith et  al., vol. CXXI, 43–58. Hanover: Springer International Publishing AG. Szmyd. Jan. 2011. The Role of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Philosophy in the “Post-Modern World”  – Cognitive Optimism, Innovativeness and Creativity. In Phenomenological Inquiry, vol. XXXV, 25–48. Hanover, New Hampshire: The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning. Smith, Jadwiga. 2011. The Cosmo-Transcendental Positioning of the Living Being in the Universe of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s New Enlightenment. In Phenomenological Inquiry, vol. XXXV, 17–24. Hanover, New Hampshire: The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. 1990. In Logos and Life. The Passions of the Soul and the Elements in the Onto-Poiesis of Culture, Analecta Husserliana, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1998a. The Ontopoiesis of Life as a New Philosophical Paradigm. In Phenomenological Inquiry, vol. XXII, 12–59. Belmont: World Phenomenology Institute. ———. 1998b. Phenomenology of life (Integral and “Scientific”) as the Starting Point of Philosophy. In Phenomenological Inquiry, vol. XXII, 60–65. Belmont: World Phenomenology Institute. ———. 2000. Impetus and Equipoise in the Life-Strategies of Reason – Logos and Life Book 4 at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bfm%3A978-­94-­010-­0946-­1%2F1.pdf ———. 2004. The Pragmatic Test of the Ontopoiesis of Life. In Phenomenological Inquiry, vol. XXVIII, 5–34. Belmont: World Phenomenology Institute. ———. 2005. The Pragmatic test of the Ontopoesis of Life. In Analecta Husserliana, ed. Anna-­ Teresa Tymieniecka, vol. LXXXIV, xiii–xxxvii. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2011. Inspiration of Heraclitus from Ephesus Fulfilled in our New Enlightenment. In Analecta Husserliana, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, vol. CX, 3–14. Heidelberg/London/New York: Springer. Verducci, Daniela. 2004. The Human Creative Condition between Autopoiesis and Ontopoiesis in the Thought of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. In Analecta Husserliana, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, vol. XXVII, 3–20. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Eco-Phenomenology as a Philosophy of Creativity and the Problem of Unity of Consciousness Mamuka Dolidze

Abstract  The aim of this chapter is the interpretation of the Eco-Phenomenology of Life in the style of a creative philosophy. The paper integrates all the parts of the living experience of the mind, especially focusing on the process of the idealization of consciousness through recollections and religious meditation. These lyrical digressions highlight the important role of imagination in the human condition of life. The phenomenological inquiry reveals the creative freedom in the internal work of the Subjective Self, leading to the independence of written texts from the will of the author. The main problem faceted in this chapter is to contemplate the living unity of the mind, which envelops all the layers of mental life: memory, dreams, religious oblivion, psycho-emotional experiences, phenomenological approaches, logical thinking and philosophical ideas. However, to get a more complete picture of human consciousness, these creative aspects need to be supplemented with a scientific point of view. For this reason, an in-deterministic quantum-physical approach to the problems of modern neuroscience is used. The final section of the research is dedicated to a quantum-mechanical interpretation of the differentiation and unity of the Self and its Brain, in the light of the Phenomenology of Consciousness. Investigation of the activity of quantum waves in the brain sphere leads to new insights into the problem of correlation between the ideal and real, the subject and object, the Self and its brain. Keywords  Phenomenology · Life · Memory · Dream · Imagination · Creativity · Spiritual experience · Metaphysics · Quantum approach.

M. Dolidze (*) Tbilisi Javakhishvili State University, Tblisi, Georgia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_6

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Introduction The Phenomenology of Life goes beyond the borders of rigorous science that were established by Edmund Husserl. New investigations by the Latvian philosopher Maija Kule, director of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology in Riga, show that the phenomenon of rhythm turns individual existence into a general essence and provides life with a creative act of sense-formation. In her book Phenomenology and Culture she emphasizes that the Logos of Life cannot be reached through the usual way of scholarly investigation, semantic analysis or hermeneutical interpretation. It can only be grasped using creative ciphering (Kule 2002, 48). Professor Daniela Verducci, Co-President of the World Phenomenology Institute, articulates the communicative virtues of the ontopoiesis of life, which opens up postmodern philosophy to a new enlightenment (Verducci 2014, 3–17). The Spanish philosopher, linguist and writer Antonio Domínguez Rey, Professor Thomas Ryba and other contemporary philosophers also make clear that the phenomenological conception by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka reveals one of the impressive forms of creative philosophy, which goes beyond logical investigations (Domínguez Rey 2021, 212–275; Ryba 2002, 430–460). We cannot treat the method of phenomenological reduction, which brings to light the subjective essence of the intentional object, as a scientific way of understanding consciousness oriented to the being. The path of modern neuroscience (Pearson 2019, 624–634) evokes great interest among contemporary philosophers with regard to this creative thinking. The problem with the correlation of the Self and its brain consists of the fact that the scientific viewpoint cannot comprehend the countless ways of revealing the mind. Consciousness includes the correlation of the brain and the subjective content of the Self, which embraces the different faces of psychological phenomena. Why does perception of the color red correlate with the configuration of neurons at the center of the brain? Although the brain and Self are connected through mental activity there is no direct link between the physiological state of the brain and the subjectivity of the Self. On the other hand, this correlation is not accidental: it is an inevitable fact.

Being and Not-Being, Perception and Imagination To investigate the problem of the unity of consciousness it is worth referring to the work of the prominent American philosopher Robert Sokolowski. In his book Phenomenology of the Human Person he searches for the points of absence in the imaginary objects of a painting (Sokolowski 2008, 136–157). In a chapter titled Knowing Things in their Absence Sokolowski considers the problem of the coexistence of being and not-being in the artistic and imaginary phenomena of human consciousness. He asserts that the great merit of Edmund Husserl consists of revealing the points of absence as participants in constructing the phenomenological form

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of the presented thing. Inter-phenomenon as the absence of a phenomenon is an inseparable part of an intentional object. That intentional object has the ability to be unveiled as a perceptible thing. The example of a painting makes the creative role of nothingness more profound in acts of phenomenological reduction. The distinction that the author makes between the art of painting and the act of imagination should be articulated. In a picture I can see a painted tree, whereas in the case of imagination I see the seeing of the same tree. Imagination can be oriented to the process of perception, whereas during that perception I deal with the object, no matter whether it exists or is a fantasy of the painter. The imagination has a wider context than perception, since the first relates to the intentional process of seeing the object, whereas the latter refers directly to the object. The famous American philosopher and theologian Father George McLean highlights the important role of imagination in the history of philosophy, especially in aesthetics (McLean 2014, 12–38). Thanks to inventive thinking, the free syntheses of the actual parts of Being can produce a fantastic entity of phenomena that does not actually exist, but confines real parts of existence. The non-existence of the imaginary object has a significant meaning. Why does the fantasy turn the synthesis of existing parts into a non-existent whole? It seems that the imagination refers to perception in the same way as the Not-­ Being refers to the Being. The imagination participates in the phenomenological process of constructing the thing as an inter-phenomenon, as a point of absence of the same thing. Therefore the intentional act of constructing the object, which involves human imagination, plays the role of Nothingness toward the resulting Being of the same perceptible object. Professor Sokolowski considers the absence of Being in the spheres of painting, imagination and verbal creativity. In this chapter his position will be analyzed, with the conclusion that in all forms of Being (which is in Becoming), Nothingness has a significant part to play. Through Nothingness we can find the special meaning of absence for each phenomenon which presents in a state of ‘becoming’. The alliance of being and not-being accompanies the phenomenological process of becoming the state of existence. The final point of this process, which we treat as an intentional object (a perceptible thing) lacks a complete being, since it is open to the process of self-creation. This deficiency engenders the incomplete object. We cannot express the emptiness within a thing through the language that describes the matter of that same thing. This is a sphere of special nothingness participating in the forming of ‘definite being’. So we see many faces of not-being with special functions and meanings, taking part in the becoming of beings. Our mind is unable to grasp these non-existent points and, at the same time, to deal with phenomenological cognition of ‘that thing’. A philosopher should find a point of balance where he is in touch with the intentional object, keeping some awareness at the same time towards the creative act, which anticipates the appearance of the same object. This balance refers to the mutuallyexclusive ‘conditions of mind’. They seem to be the ‘mental states,’ always slipping away from the phenomenological reduction of mind.

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When we scrutinize the middle, uncertain ground of our reasoning between elusive germs of unknown creative forces and resultant being, we hardly ever keep our verbal identity on this split ground. Our language turns the incomplete, dynamic forces of existential becoming into the perfect linguistic forms. Thus it distorts the very first and fresh sense-forming impulse, which is responsible for engendering the intentional being. In her article The Virtues and the Passions of the Soul Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka discovers a similar contradiction between the human condition – which is in charge of forming the human consciousness – and the vital forces of nature. This contradiction gives birth to the spontaneous impulse of sense-forming acts, generating the preconscious play of subjective forces, leading to the appearance of Self (Tymieniecka 1991, 291–332). Professor Tymieniecka describes the passage between living matter and the human soul in detail so we can face the dazzling picture of the interplay of unconscious darkness with the light of the mind. Tymieniecka treats the resulting, impressionistic obscurity of this picture as ‘a twilight of consciousness’. We believe that here she deals with some ‘middle ground’ between nature’s vital significance and the human condition. As a matter of fact, this shimmering stage of preliminary germs and uncertain forces striving for the role of a human self presents the performance of Nothingness. It is an essential Nothingness dwelling within the individualization of self-consciousness. It seems to be difficult to create a dramatic story to express the elusive entertainment of this playful picture, in order to narrate the final result of this creative action in clear concepts. Tymieniecka’s descriptive style of expressing the Phenomenology of Life has more in common with the artistic creativity of Impressionism in painting, rather than with a rigorous-scientific way of finding a solution to the problems. Neither the organic form of the life-world nor the anthropological center of human existence are acceptable to her. Tymieniecka investigates life and self-consciousness in the wide, cosmologic context of becoming the being. She highlights the intentional current of the self-creative and sense-giving streams which saturate the whole universe. Anthropology examines the human being as an already-established entity, whereas Tymieniecka’s interest is in contemplating life in its ‘dynamic state of origin’, which is an integral part of a wider process of the development of Being. The formation of existential sense accompanies this cosmologic evolution. The sense-­ formation process deals with the presence – as well as the absence – of consciousness within the chaos of self-creativity. Such an approach appeals to the twilight of the dreamy mind, to the middle ground of uncertainty, where the Not-being dominates the being of physical matter. Now to answer the question raised at the beginning of this chapter: “Why does the perception of red (or any other) color correlate with specific neuronal firing patterns? How can we explain a non-deterministic link between the subjective matter of Self and an objective state of Brain?” The brain excitement presents as the physiological animation of mental being. Turning into an intentional phenomenon, the system of neurons develops an ability to be perceived in a definite (red) color. This ability does not belong to the network

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of neurons. It plays a role of Nothingness toward this neural network, and takes up this position just as the Not-being complements the Being.

The Theological Point of View With respect to the theological extension of our viewpoint it’s worth noting that the significant Nothingness can be transformed and spread across a vast kingdom of the human soul. We can compare religious meditations, the experience of spiritual life and the rituals of prayer with the preconscious exercise of the soul, considered by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka as a ‘Twilight of the mind’ (Tymieniecka 1991, 291–332). Although she focused mostly on the problems of phenomenological philosophy, her intention was to bring to light the preliminary germs which gave birth to the life of Consciousness. She aimed to search for the spiritual points of living matter, which lead to the kingdom of the Almighty. Her intuition of the ontopoiesis of Life inspired us to present our viewpoint in a theological manner (Tymieniecka 2009, 30–40). The world in which we live represents an incomplete reality. Non-perfect forms of the objective being need to be filled by an intangible substance. This ineffable essence participates in the individualization of Being as a subjective phenomenon. Professor Daniela Verducci considered these theological problems of the Phenomenology of Life in the article The Sacred River Toward God: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Phenomenology of Religious Experience (Verducci 2018, 630–639). I do not intend to follow the trivial way of interpreting a spiritual mystery in the common concepts of theology. My everyday exercises in prayer and Church rituals now need to be arranged according to the new demands of this chapter. As a believer in God, I desire to turn away from the logical way of thoughts leading my faith to a dead-end. Spiritual experience seems to be the treasury in which I keep all the things I have received in my lucky and fortunate meetings with supreme forces. This is also the sacral place of feelings I bear from my childhood. Here I can find the source of my memories. I am even ready to fall in the nonsense, since the nonsense provides me with the power to fight against the exaggeration of sense. What is ‘the sense’? Speaking in style of Heidegger, the ‘sense’ represents the fetters by which our language is surrendered to the Object (Heidegger 1989, 238–239). I would like to take the opportunity that phenomenology offers me and put the external object in brackets. This means devaluing the sense of objective being. The rational mind retires and gives way to the emotion of glory. The unconscious state of soul keeps me on the tightrope between being and not-being. I fall in the spontaneous stream of prayer, which flows by itself without my will and thought. The strong exaltation prompts me to leave the impoverished country of the physical, physiological, psychological being. I am dazzled by the light of an immortal life, in which the perception of color coexists with the excitement of the brain. The sense of happiness inspires me to continue my search for the Truth.

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What is the Truth? Does it exist or not? The truth seems to be the reward for having the courage to reject the meanings of the words and write my essay without an intention or aim. The pleasure of getting lost in the play of words leads me from nowhere to nowhere. I lift my body off the ground and lose myself in the melodies and expressions running in the spontaneous stream of nonsense, where my pen anticipates my thoughts. I cannot express the glory and pleasure lifting me from the ground. The words discharge me from any responsibility for their sense and usher me into a wonderful land of daydream. The immense building of the heavenly church attracts me to the light of the life-­ giving word. A saying of Socrates responds to my oblivion. “I know that I know nothing”. The less I know the more I steep in the darkness of the dazzling light. My ignorance helps me out of the world, where the words seem unable to express the objects which are alien, and so fatal for the spiritual origin of those words. By praying, I can throw away the burden of knowledge, which my soul is sentenced to pull like a camel. The aroma of myrrh and the twilight of candles surrounds me. The feeling of self-evidence is simply the Truth I have been searching for all my life in the complicated ways of philosophical logic. I would like to reject the logic and conclude … yet I cannot conclude! The state in which I find myself excludes the definite terms to express an indefinite passion. The feeling of joy runs through my veins and beats in the rhythm of my heart. I am snatched away by the avalanche of living forces. I am unable to tear myself away from the wonderful music of inspiring words, playing with my dream and keeping me in a heavenly state of happiness. What consequences can I deduce from this chaos? It looks like the creative disorder of becoming the being. What conclusion can I reach in this unconscious happiness, which exceeds any kind of philosophical Wisdom? I want to be in this happiness eternally. The warm, unconscious, pleasant wholeness of being and not-being shows me that I am in the Truth.

In Search of Things Past The description of these passions echoes with Tymieniecka’s way of considering life within and outside organic matter (Tymieniecka 2009, 30–40). While reciting my prayer I see the passage between the mental conditions of the brain and the continual being of self-consciousness. I see the way to resolve the problem of the integrity of ideal and real. This problem leads to the simple entity of mind and body. On the other hand, it is a puzzle, deriving from the dualism of spirit and matter. It seems incredible to comprehend countless points and links reducing a real thing to its ideal essence. The rational mind cannot calculate the passage between the physiology of the brain and the continual substance of the Self. The mind is unable to confine the plurality of the preconscious factors of life. The vast amount of animating impulses floods across the border of a numerable quantity, and changes into the consistent, continuous

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quality of innumerable matter. This substance fills up the frames of Self, where the discontinuity of neurons turns into the continuity of self-existence. I can identify myself with all the situations and conditions of my being. This identification is possible because of a continual feeling of self-awareness. Even when I dream, thanks to my subjective continuity I can avoid the danger of becoming lost in an abyss of sleep. I have the ability to make up for the discontinuity of the brain through the continuity of the Self. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s great contribution in describing this passage between brain and self-consciousness represents the integrity of life in the universal process of world creation. This immense picture of the formation of Being is essentially in tune with the Christian viewpoint. Christianity represents a religion of Life. God’s living word was responsible for the genesis of the world. Life deriving from the immortality of soul has a wide context, exceeding the borders of organic matter (Lossky 1991, 222–249). This Christian viewpoint echoes with Tymieniecka’s approach, where she considers life in a worldwide scale of “creation of being” (Tymieniecka 2009, 30–4). I cannot make a clear separation between my prayer and the cognitive state when I scrutinize the preconscious germs of the Phenomenology of Life. Deriving from the ‘nonsense’ of religious mystery and seemingly similar to the ‘Logos of Life’, the individual sense drives the intentional stream of living consciousness. Professor Tymieniecka notes that the human condition stands out from the organic restrictions of nature. Imagination provides the human being with the creative freedom of possible worlds, breaking through the vital constraints (Tymieniecka 2009, 30–40). The creative imagination is a great thing! It covers all the faces of Nothingness, which are so important in a life of consciousness. Recently I drove through a forsaken part of a little town – the town where I grew up. I was unable to find the words to describe the melancholic mood emitting from the small village houses and the huge neo-Realistic buildings. It seemed that a bygone time had visited my soul and, breaking the borders of reality, involved me in a pleasant sensation of glorious sadness. Glenn Miller’s music from the film Sun Valley Serenade played on the radio. This heartfelt melody enhanced the charm of my lovely place: the place where sweet memories met with my daydreams. The recollection revealed the treasury in which I had kept all the unforgettable songs forming the musical stream of my life. It was not an exaltation of joy but a triumph of melancholy. I hardly ever recognized what was happening to me; why I wanted to end my journey and forever settle back in this small old mezzanine, which looked at me like a loyal host, but with yearning. Suddenly I encountered a theatre of toy houses and a puppet show by dolls, which involved me in a playful sphere of spiritual oblivion, where the sunny present married the moonlit past, giving birth to a child of eternal light. Any words were rude, foul; inadequate to embrace this spiritual festival. Yet I saw no other way to say what I wanted, to describe this wonderful state of agreement between ideal and real, being and Not-being. My journey in this magically-­ wistful place opened up a new horizon of life, which seemed to be endless … and at the same time so close and intimate. I was a living witness of the transformation of

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a dispassionate environment into a wonderful country of passions and dreams. The actual landscape – the buildings, roads, valleys, mountains – turned into an ideal picture of Impressionistic painting. Phenomenology as a philosophy of creativity includes the living experience of a soul, yet it cannot be crystallized into the logical terms of a rigorous science. The free and easy sailing in the space of Time revealed my way to the beginnings of life. The sweet melodies by Glenn Miller accompanied this inspiring journey, changing the common landscape into a cosmic space of immense musical sounds. The colorful interplay of musical chords and the heartfelt voice of the singer was telling me the fairytale of my childhood. This musical carnival acquired the grey sadness of a bygone age and time flew by as a musical stream, led by silvery shimmering saxophones and rhythmic guitars. As it died away, the song turned into tears of confession for missing happiness. My sorrow for the lost time took a new form of special beauty through the Not-being of the world. It was the Not-being of the vanishing snow, when the rain of Spring saw the sunny winter off with a longing sensation of remorse. I found the charm of Nothingness in the disappearing mist of a snow-blue hill, bidding me farewell in this ineffable beauty of the shadow-lit past.

The Phenomenology of Life and Metaphysics This impression of a bygone time presents an alternative view of the intentionality of consciousness described by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka in The Virtues and the Passions of the soul (Tymieniecka 1991, 291–332). It shows the innermost link between phenomenology and metaphysics. I used to travel the same roads through my beloved places many times and always met unknown, subjective forces of soul, which were responsible for the charm of the journey. My travelling was touched by something hidden and strange. The very openness of memory to the space of time had the source covered by an eternal darkness. I felt the weakness of imagination, drawing the fairy tale of wonderful feelings through the Not-being of things past. The meaningful silence of the forest told me that I was at the door of the metaphysical sphere but I wasn’t supposed to enter there. My past experience had many faces. Every time running through the memories, I used to come to different sensations of longing excitement. Yet I would like to step over the diversity of psychology and fix the one and the same passion beyond many feelings. This intangible passion revealed the innermost truth of phenomenology: The more a phenomenon opens itself up as an intentional object, the more it hides itself as a metaphysical thing.

Metaphysics seemed to be the goal Tymieniecka was striving for as she considered the discrepancy between the self-realization of living forces and the absurdity of human death. We can formulate her ideas in the following question: “Why do we face such difficult, even insurmountable tasks in our earthly life, which urges us to

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work so hard for the perfection of being, if the final point is ‘Not-being?” (Tymieniecka 1991, 312). In the same way I can pose a question: “Why do I put so many emotions into my memories, if they just turn into Nothingness?” The answer would be this: The living forces of the mind, which we use to intensify our being as well as the excitement of the soul, have a strong metaphysical basis, providing the human self with sublime emotions. These spiritual passions have nothing to do with miserable and absurd bodily death. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka focused on a specific human condition where the Imaginatio Creatrix or creative imagination generates three forms of sense as the goals of self-realization: the intelligible, aesthetic and moral senses. The Moral Sense occupies a pivotal role in the creative vortex of life. It is a very important step toward the intelligible sense of ‘becoming existence’. Without moral orchestration the cognitive phenomena of the mind descend into chaos, severing the link between a continual state of Self and the discontinuous system of the brain. However, searching for the deepest source of the full liberation of consciousness in the immense field of metaphysical forces, we prefer to focus on the preconscious creative process of sense-formation – on the “twilight of the mind”, as Tymieniecka called it. The tremendous building of objective knowledge would be destroyed by our strong intention to get the subjective Self free. It means keeping the Self of a creative mind on a wave of lyrical digressions between existence and non-existence. My memories, dreams, sensations … my will, my ideas, my words, my ‘experience’ and my predictions: my confessions, perceptions and imaginations... all these phenomena of mental life interplay with the blowing stream of Not-being: and at the same moment keeping the awareness of Being here and now, then and before, afterwards and later. I feel myself in a wonderful state of unity of awareness and oblivion. It is a state of waiting-for-the-sense, which will be borne by its own power against the will of the mind and in favor of the dreams of the heart. The liberation of the mind is not completely achievable, yet it generates hope for a new development of the human condition in an everlasting stream of life. It appears to be a strange and wonderful state of waiting for an unknown phenomenon, which should be engendered in the flow of words, running rapidly through the memory. A state of spiritual effort co-exists with an easy play of expressions under the influence of sublime forces. I witness how words lose their meanings, changing into particles of Nothingness, raising expectations for a new Logos of Life, which would anticipate the arrival of ideas in the final stage of the sense-creation process.

My Pencil is Cleverer Than I The integrity of emotions and thoughts, unfolded in complex detail through the Phenomenology of Life, inspires me to embrace all the phenomena of the creative mind: poetry, recollections, sensations, emotions; the tribulations, afflictions,

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excitement – the confessions and fantasies … I can hardly count the ways in which these spiritual events are displayed. The living experience of my mind merges with the immense, amorphous body of postmodern philosophy, where the border is lost between poetry and logical investigations, between scientific theory and artistic essay. I find myself at the threshold of a new kind of wisdom that exists beyond the human mind at the very center of the formation of the being. It appears to be the building of subjective knowledge. It’s like a skyscraper which has grown by its own from a spontaneous stream of human creativity. I am one and the same in the whole disposition of sense and nonsense, memory and imagination; of dreams and confessions, absurdity and wisdom … and of Being and Not-being. The main purpose of my philosophical exercises is to free myself. Freedom is possible if I push the train of words along the railway track of self-expression. Let the words express themselves. The effect of the spontaneity of the text reveals subjective impulses, making the life-story of Consciousness. I try to grasp the elusive sense of prescientific germs. They are responsible for either forming philosophical ideas or flowing into the passions of the soul, which eventually appear to envelop all the creative experience of conscious and pre-conscious life. To emphasize this creative freedom of self-consciousness I would like to highlight Albert Einstein’s famous expression as it was quoted by Karl Popper: “My pencil is cleverer than I” (Popper and Eccles 1977, 208). This catchphrase of the genius thinker obviously emphasizes the autonomous nature of creative text, which displays itself in the immense field of unconscious forces. The inventive thinking overflows the borders of physical reality and enters the wonderful country of metaphysics, accompanied by the generation of new ideas or appearance of artistic images in the dizzy chaotic dance of self-existing phenomena, where the pen anticipates the thoughts. It looks like an avalanche falling from the top of the mind and running like a blood flow through the vessels of the heart with pulsations of scientific or artistic sense. Einstein discovered the self-directed nature of discovery as an achievement of the stream of consciousness, which seems to be independent from the will of the author and has the sky as its limit.

 Quantum-Phenomenological Interpretation A of the Differentiation and Unity of Self and Its Brain The Wider Cultural and Scientific Context of Quantum Theory The ingenious words from the previous chapter –  ‘My pencil is cleverer than I’ – appeared to be the revelation of the self-contained existence of the creative act. Einstein’s witty idea dazzled and shocked scientists like an explosion in the sphere of atomic physics. His original approach highlighted the spontaneity and uniqueness of scientific discovery, which responded to the great event of 20th Century

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science  – the birth of quantum theory. Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Lous de Broglie, Max Planck, Enrico Fermi, Erwin Schrodinger are just a few of the outstanding physicists of the 20th Century who made immeasurable contributions to the development of this new-born theory. Werner Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty presented one of the essential points of Quantum Mechanics. The inequality between the continuity and discontinuity of quantum phenomena, leading to a wave-particle duality of atomic events, was crowned by the discovery of the probabilistic existence of the micro-world. This new approach engendered many puzzles of the atomic situation (Popper 1982, 98–119, 144–159). The quantum particle displayed itself like Leibniz’s spiritual-­ physical Monad – with its miraculous mystery of non-prognostic behavior. Let’s consider this innovation in the wide context of 20th Century thinking, when the classical ideal of rationality was crushed in all spheres of philosophy, science, literature and art. The essential shift of mental life was revealed in the area of micro-­ phenomena. A non-classical rationality found its way through Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Thanks to in-deterministic interpretation of quantum theory, the achievements of physicists made significant contributions to the entire development of 20th Century science. The Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili maintained that non-classical rationality revealed the integrity of physical phenomena and at the same time emphasized the dualism in understanding them (understood as the ‘physical’ and ‘conscious’ objects). This dualism contradicted the classical viewpoint of Rationality. The classical-physical events were coordinated and constructed in a field of infinite intellect that was both integral and universally understood (Mamardashvili 1984, 26–30). In his book Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge Niels Bohr introduced the principle of complementarity, which was based on Heisenberg’s ideas and the probability of micro-events (Bohr 1961, 43–44, 139–148). The result of this interpretation exceeded all the expectations of scientists. The quantum complementarity built a bridge between physics and many mental fields of human activity such as linguistics (Domínguez Rey 2014, 69–170, 137, 167; 2007, 35–112, 173–175); psychology (Zohar and Marshall 1994b, 58–75); sociology and politics (Zohar and Marshall 1994a, 3–89), art and literature (Dolidze 2002, 613–617) and the Phenomenology of Life (Dolidze 2021, 61–75). Bohr truly discovered the depth of the cultural and scientific context of quantum theory. His interpretation of atomic physics reminds me of the phenomenological exercises to be seen in the masterpieces of 20th Century art. Claude Monet, the famous French painter and founder of Impressionism emphasized the effects of light and shadow in nature. He famously depicted the San Giorgio Maggiore temple in Venice at various periods during daylight: in the morning, afternoon and evening. The painter expressed his subjective visions of the temple thanks to his specific impressionistic style. The miraculous effect of this creativity consisted in fact that instead of one primordial object, the pictures gave the impression of three different churches. The perception of these masterpieces excluded the imagining of one and

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the same building beyond the various impressions. It seems that Monet intuitively used a phenomenological approach in his creative works. Phenomenology as a creative philosophy of the individualization of being rejects the statement that there is one and the same general essence behind different, individual forms of existence. It’s important to highlight that thanks to his brilliant intuition, the French painter Monet used a phenomenological method of description in drawing three different temples instead of one original object. Like Monet’s presentation of different temples, Niels Bohr and his followers worked out an interpretation of wave and particle pictures of atomic events. With respect to his phenomenological approach Bohr rejected the existence of one and the same atomic object beyond individual wave and particle pictures of the same object. This approach was realized through ‘Bohr’s principle’. According to this principle an atomic phenomenon, which is different to the ‘object’ of classical physics, did not exist beyond its experimental state. The language of quantum phenomena did not suggest some general substantial being, regardless of the experimental data. Based on Bohr’s ideas, we suppose that the measurement instrument plays the role of consciousness in a quantum situation. The instrument not only measures the properties of a micro-particle but also makes its quantum-physical sense. The measurement represents the mental act, providing the micro-object with existential meaning. This interpretation of atomic events had a shocking effect on the scientists. Like in classical physics they believed that the quantum-physical reality existed independently from the measurement experiment (Popper 1982, 98–119, 144–159). Quantum theory upset the entire world of science, and its waves reached many different shores of that science. Now let me express the subjective relation to the problems of quantum physics. My living experience consisted in fact of a moment when the misty uncertainty of quantum phenomena generated a joyful stream of consciousness in the area of micro-physical reality and nurtured in me an unshakeable belief, held ever since, in the omnipotence of creative thinking. I found myself in an exalted state of soul, which, like a quantum probability, prepares me for meeting unobtainable and unknown subject-object integrity, which I cannot consider according to either a physical or even metaphysical manner. I felt responsibility for the playful behavior of the quantum particles, as if they had entered the sphere of a doubtful mind and kidnapped my soul in a twilight field of subconscious forces – in the lucky place where the subject meets its object. It dawned on me that the subject’s invasion of the quantum area cannot be treated separately from the individual mind and from spiritual exercise. While inquiring into the philosophical problems of quantum physics, I have reached the conclusion that the phenomenological individualization of Being was responsible for the appearance of the quantum situation in the atomic world (Dolidze 2021, 61–75; 2013, 219–227; 2006, 329–339). This conclusion derived from the individual free will of micro-particles which provided the atomic events with ontological probability. Having developed this idea of the partial autonomy of quantum phenomena (which reminds me of the freedom of self-consciousness) I now conclude that the quantum state of things should also encompass my own Self – along with its creative feelings.

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This does not mean however, that the quantum world is the fruit of my imagination and that micro-phenomena signify the psychological events of mental life. Thanks to the integrity of the Self and the quantum object, my private experience goes beyond psychology and discovers a wonderful reality of subjective being, which embraces the Self and micro-objects simultaneously. Werner Heisenberg maintained that his inequity of uncertainty expressed the integrity of the subject and object in the quantum area. Niels Bohr and his followers were witness to the subject’s invasion of the atomic sphere. We extend their position and consider the private development of Self-consciousness as an essential part of quantum-phenomenological reality. The Self does not represent the center of the psychological sphere. It is the highest point of phenomenological singularity. Such an attitude makes clear the border between the psychological Ego and the intentional Self, since the Self is the subject, responsible for the unity of the individualization of Being, taking place in the field of quantum physics. That is the reason why the things in my memory have a metaphysical mystery. Recollection tries to surmount the ephemeral temporality of the past and generates an ideal picture of unforgettable events. Religious experience also plays a significant role in this idealization. Thanks to my quantum-physical approach I feel myself as a micro-cosmos, echoing and resonating with the atomic micro-world. Digging into the innermost depths of my mind I expect to find something that looks like quantum phenomena.

Quantum Theory and Neuroscience Neuroscience experiments in the sphere of the mind have the great perspective of offering further investigations. Nevertheless brain science has a principal deficiency: the physiology of mental life cannot show how the network of neurons produces the colorful objects of perception and evokes the fairytale of the creative imagination. All these secrets of the human mind are centered in – and yet hidden in – the complicated mechanisms of the brain. It seems that a quantum-mechanical approach offers a solution to the problem of the unity of the Self and its brain. In this context we can compare the indeterminism of quantum particles with the ‘Self-­decision’ behavior of neurons. Heisenberg’s inequity of uncertainty manifests the correlation between singularity and continuity within the measurement quantum situation (Uffink and Hilgevoord 1985, 925–944). So: where:

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Q is the parameter of the quantum particle (singularity) P is the impulse deriving from the frequency of the quantum wave (continuity) Δ is the interval of fluctuation. The figure h/2πi –represents constant value. In simple terms, Heisenberg found the balance between two mutually-exclusive values, Q and P. Due to the inaccuracy of their meanings – ΔQ and ΔP – Heisenberg put together these two incompatible values. Thanks to the loss of exact knowledge, he discovered a creative state of uncertainty, a state of generation of physical sense, and managed to unite the continual P with discontinuous Q in the wholeness of subject and object. The extension of Heisenberg’s principle to neuroscience turns the dualism of Self and its brain into a correlation between them. The correlation is possible thanks to the imprecision of the network of neurons and the uncertainty of self-­ consciousness. This uncertainty has a positive sense, since it explains the duality between consciousness and brain mechanisms. This derives from the controversial unity of subject and object on the misty stage of creative thinking, which Anna-­ Teresa Tymieniecka considered as a ‘twilight of the mind’. The profound philosophical meaning of quantum physics allows us to extend the relation of uncertainty from the atomic sphere to the hemispheres of the brain. Phenomenological investigation of quantum physics has reached the conclusion that an atomic object exists as a discontinuous particle (or system of particles) but receives the essence (the physical sense) while spreading as a continual wave (Dolidze 2002, 608–617). Accordingly, in the case of the brain, the existing network of neurons behaves as a wave and, thanks to this continual stream of consciousness, develops a definite sense. This turns either into the ideal objects of imagination or into the ideas of thought. The quantum wave does not belong to the particle picture of atomic facts. Similarly, the wave of consciousness flows out of the brain, out of its hemispheres. This sense-formation stream belongs to the spiritual self of the mind and plays a role of Nothingness toward the biophysical Being of the brain. In quantum physics we speak about the free will of micro-particles. Thanks to this freedom, through the measurement process, quantum particles participate in the generation of the physical sense of the atomic object. Likewise, we can explain the decision-making freedom of neurons. Thanks to the free will of neurons, the brain generates an existential sense through the wave of intentional consciousness, which goes beyond the brain and beyond any mechanisms of interaction of the neurons. This analogy allows us to find new insight into the problem of correlation between the ideal and real, the subject and object, the Self and its brain. With respect to this viewpoint, it’s worth considering a valuable review by Professor Joel Pearson about the neural mechanisms of visual imagery (Pearson 2019, 624–634). The author comes to the conclusion that imagery can be depictive while still involving semantic information. Pearson wrote that the studies on this

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topic are not without controversy. Currently what still remains unknown is the involvement of the higher level non-sensory areas in the act of imagination. It is logical, however, that this higher level does not play a part in the generation of imagery. It seems that the involvement of non-sensory areas – and at the same time their indifference – leads to the dualism between the Self and its brain. Such a point of view apparently rooted in the dualistic conception of neuroscience is considered by Karl Popper and John Eccles (Popper and Eccles 1977, 358–365). Eccles showed that the self-conscious mind was in charge of the unity of countless neuro-machinery systems. This integrating action took place in the liaison area of the dominant cerebral hemisphere. It is supposed that this highest level of brain activity is open towards the intentional stream of self-consciousness, which cannot be described in terms of neurophysiology. We do not intend to investigate the physiological functions of the brain, since we are not sufficiently competent in this sphere. Yet looking through the very complicated passages and transformations within cerebral activity, we cannot find either the source of the self-decisive behavior of neurons or the ideal orchestration of these spontaneous mental events, which would enable us to discover the very act of engendering the meanings of mental actions. Even though scientists can accomplish the Herculean task of unfolding the full potential of the human brain, they are still not able to identify the genesis of the meaning of ideal, which complements the real state of neurons. The sense-formation process is elusive and incongruent to the physiological facts, taking place in the hemispheres of the mind. The emergence of sense seems to be the spiritual event, which belongs to the superstructure of the mind. By extending the quantum-phenomenological approach to the sphere of Consciousness, we can observe at least some analogy between the Self-brain discrepancy and wave-particle duality of atomic events, deriving from the inequity of uncertainty. In the article Phenomenology in Science and Literature (Dolidze 2002, 610–613), I highlighted the wholeness of the atomic experiment, implying the integrity of Subject (measurement instrument) and Object (atomic particle). If we use the quantum approach in neuroscience, we can also speak about the integrity of Subject (the Self) and Object (the brain). Eventually, on the basis of this analogy the free will of quantum particles correlates to the freedom of neurons within the intentional stream of the mind. To grasp the problems of quantum neuroscience more deeply, in the light of the Phenomenology of Life, it would be helpful to include the personal emotions – of dreams, recollections, confessions and artistic images  – in the creative stream of living consciousness and to present the flow of these inspiring feelings in the wider context of the individualization of Being. Two important thinkers helped find the words to convey this phenomenon philosophically: Edmund Husserl, the founder of 20th Century phenomenology, considered this intentional stream as a ‘sense-formation’ process (Dolidze 2002, 608–617; Kakabadze 2012, 10–229). Niels Bohr emphasized the important cultural value of in-deterministic quantum theory. He foresaw the fruitful perspective of the quantum viewpoint in various

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fields of human mental activity, which has led to the principles of quantum mechanics being extended to different spheres of creativity, such as phenomenology, art and modern literature as well as psychology, linguistics, sociology, neurosciences and much more. Scrutinizing the similarity between quantum physics and neuroscience, we observe the great performance of Nature on the dazzling stage of the interplay of real quantum objects with the ideal phenomena of the mind. Mental information seems to be the reward given by the living forces of the cosmos to tiny singularities of atomic existence. Imitating the play of micro-particles, the neurons turn themselves into self-excited centers, as if they left the machinery of the object’s perception in the boring reality of physical things. Changing into subjective phenomena, they obtained the free will to spread the wings of fantasy in the imaginative space of creativity. By entering the wonderful world of quantum miracles we can discover the same preconscious process of becoming the sense of Being.

Conclusion The quantum phenomenon seems to be the main character in the flamboyant world spectacle. It has a twofold nature (wave plus particle) and displays many faces for playful interaction with so many subjects of art, literature and science. The other metamorphosis of quantum events is discussed in detail in the article Phenomenology in Science and Literature by the same author (Dolidze 2002, 608–617). The work illustrated the phenomenological conception of quantum physics and established the analogy between atomic knowledge and modern stream-of-­ consciousness literature. This strange similarity showed that in both areas of physical and artistic reality the same phenomenological method of an object’s construction was used, be it an atomic object or an artistic image. Consideration in detail of these ideas goes beyond the remit of this chapter but it should be noted that in my own creative life I had a living experience of this very same analogy. It explains the strange influence of atomic effects on my literary writings. It’s an amazing fact – but not an incredible one – that my meditations in quantum physics used to inspire me for my artistic creativity, such as when writing stories, poems and novels. The duality of human consciousness often implies the discrepancy of cause and effect in the subconscious sphere of creative thinking. Albert Einstein in his interviews and memoirs said about the key points of the Theory of Relativity: “I thought of it while riding my bicycle”. These famous words show the unconscious, irrational origin of creativity and respond to the spontaneous character of scientific discovery. Finally, to summarize, it’s worth mentioning that quantum physics was not only a schism in physical science. It revealed a creative split in the human mind, since there is not a direct link between the motives of creativity and the resulting process of creation. This moment highlights the special significance and manifold flexibility

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of quantum theory, and determines its wide philosophical, cultural and scientific context. This investigation does not pretend to resolve entirely the problem of the miraculous unity of the human mind. The quantum interpretation is offered as a new step for integrating the ideal and the real, or for taking the Self–brain duality in a positive sense. This may be as a source of the spontaneous and super-conscious creativity of everlasting life in the great mystery of differentiation and unity of spirit and matter.

References Bohr, N. 1961. Atomnaia Fisika i Chelovecheskoe Poznanie [Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge.]. Moscow: Publ. “Inostrannaia Literatura” (in Russian). Dolidze, M. 2002. Phenomenology in Science and Literature. In Phenomenology World-Wide. Foundation, Expanding Dynamics, Life-Engagements, A Guide for Research and Study. Analecta Husserliana, ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka, vol. LXXX, 608–617. ———. 2006. The Phenomenology of Life of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Some Issues of Contemporary Georgian Philosophy. Analecta Husserliana XC: 329–339. ———. 2013. Human Development Between Imaginative Freedom and Vital Constraints on the Light of Quantum Phenomenology. Analecta Husserliana CXIV: 219–227. ———. 2021. The Analogy Between Phenomenology of Life and Phenomenology of Quantum Physics. Serta: Revista iberorromanica de poesía y pensamiento poético 12: 61–75. Domínguez Rey, A. 2007. Ciencia, Conocimiento y Lenguaje [Science, Consciousness and Language]. Madrid: Spiralia Ensayo Editorial/UNED. ———.2014. El Gramma Poetico. Germen precientífico del lenguaje [The Poetic Gramma. Prescientific Germ of Language]. Barcelona: Antropos Editorial. ———. 2021. Poiesis del Pensamiento [Poetry of Thought]. Serta: Revista iberorromanica de poesía y pensamiento poético 12: 212–232. (in Spanish). Heidegger, M. 1989. Qofiereba da Dro [Being and Time]. Tbilisi: The Georgian National Academy of Sciences (in Georgian). English: Being and Time. Translators. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962. Kakabadze, Z. 2012. Rcheuli Filosofiuri Shromebi [Selected Philosophical Works]. Batumi, Georgia: Rustaveli State University Press (in Georgian). Kule, M. 2002. Phenomenology and Culture. Riga: Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia Press. Lossky, V. 1991. Ocherk Misticheskogo Bogoslovia Vostochnoi Tserkvi. [Essay on Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church.]. Moscow: Centre “SEI” (in Russian). Mamardashvili, M. 1984. Klassicheskyi i Neklassicheskyi Idealy Ratsional’nosti [Classical and Non-classical Ideals of Rationality]. Tbilisi: “Metsniereba” Publ. (in Russian). McLean, G. 2014. The Role of Imagination. In Culture and Philosophy. A Journal for Phenomenological Inquiry, 12–38. Washington D.C: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. Pearson, J. 2019. The Human Imagination: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Visual Mental Imagery. Nature Neuroscience 20: 624–634. Popper, K. 1982. Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics. England, UK: Routledge Publ. Popper, K., and J. Eccles. 1977. The Self and its Brain. An Argument for Interactionism. London UK: Routledge Publ. Ryba, T. 2002. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Phenomenology of Life. In Phenomenology WorldWide, Foundation  – Expanding-Dynamics  – Life-engagements. A Guide for Research and Study, Analecta Husserliana, ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka, vol. LXXX, 430–460.

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Sokolowski, R. 2008. Phenomenology of the Human Person. Cambridge MASS: Cambridge University Press. Publ. Tymieniecka, A.-T. 1991. The Virtues and the Passions of the Soul. “Dialogo di Filosofia” 8, 291–332. Rome, Italy: Herder Università Lateranense. ———. 2009. Human Development Between Imaginative Freedom and Vital Constraints. Culture and Philosophy cit: 30–40. Verducci, D. 2014. Communicative Virtues of A-T Tymieniecka’s Phenomenology of Life. Analecta Husserliana CXVII: 3–17. ———. 2018. The Sacred River Toward God: Anna -Teresa Tymieniecka’s Phenomenology of Religious Experience. Open Theology. 4: 630–639. Uffink, J.B.M., and J.  Hilgevoord. 1985. Uncertainty Principle and Uncertainty Relations. Foundation of Physics 15 (9): 925–944. Zohar, D., and Marshall. 1994a. The Quantum Self. Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics. London UK: Flamingo Publ. Zohar, D., and I. Marshall. 1994b. The Quantum Society. Mind, Physics and a New Social Vision. London UK: Flamingo Publ.

The Evolution and Development of Eco-­Phenomenology as an Interpretative Paradigm of the Living World of Ben Okri’s A Broken Song: ‘The Wailing of Our Skies’ – An Eco-Phenomenological Appreciation Rosemary Gray

Abstract  The argument in this chapter is that Ben Okri’s tribute in A Broken Song to Ken Saro-Wiwa is embedded in an eco-phenomenological frame of reference, foregrounding as it does the environmental ruin of Ogoniland. The poem highlights the destruction of the area’s natural environment by Shell’s quest for capitalist enrichment. Okri’s petro-protest poem mirrors a double disaster: the ecological destruction of the flora and fauna of the oil-producing land of the Ogoni people and the tragic death of its feisty Ogoni writer, Sara-Wiwa, leader of the Movement for the Salvation of the Ogoni people (MOSOP), hanged for his love of the land. Aligning his eco-phenomenological standpoint with that of the late Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s metaphysical perspective, Okri advocates a raising of consciousness or ontopoeisis to address the dichotomous slippage between the natural and the unnatural, leading to ‘the wailing of our skies’. The mood of this petro-protest poem is predicated on Wole Soyinka’s graphic symbol of his homeland as a suppurating sore. I conclude that A Broken Song constitutes creative confrontation of the chaotic state of Nigeria precipitated by its capitalist military regime. Keywords  Ben Okri · Soyinka · Eco-phenomenology · Ontopoietic awareness · Tymieniecka In his tellingly-entitled The Federal Republic of Nigerian Army: The Siege of a Nation Chris Alli (2001, 208) enlightens us to the fact that the military ‘ruled Nigeria from 1966–1979 and from 1983–1999; a period of about thirty years’. ‘The experience,’ says Oyèniyi Okunoye (2011, 64), ‘left the nation in ruins, frustrated R. Gray (*) Department of English, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_7

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her democratic desires and brought the Nigerian military into disrepute.’ Even after almost a quarter of a century, there remains considerable scholarly interest in the impact of these military dictatorships on the psyche of the Nigerian intelligentsia and the resultant literary outpourings, particularly in the form of socially-committed poetry that expressed resistance against the dictatorship of Sani Abacha. Okunoye (2011, 76) usefully explains that the chaotic state of affairs ‘led to the flowering of three major trends in anti-authoritarian poetry in Nigeria.’ These can be characterized as prison memoirs and diaries, the most famous of which is arguably Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died (1994); a form of exile writing, characterized by a ‘deep attachment to the homeland’ (Okunoye 2011, 77); and thirdly, ‘a trans-ethnic tradition of resistance poetry’ by the third generation of Nigerian poets (Okunoye 2011, 79). This third major category is predicated on the killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa to whom Ben Okri dedicates the poem under discussion in this chapter. Taken from his ‘savagely political’ A Fire in my Head (2021), Ben Okri addresses his elegiac protest poem A Broken Song to the memory of a fellow compatriot, who was publicly hanged ‘for loving his homeland’ (Okri 2021, 58, l. 4). The life of poet, environmentalist and human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was brutally cut short by the tyrannical military dictator, the late Sani Abacha. On 10 November 1995, following months of torture and detention without trial, Saro-Wiwa was executed by hanging ‘leaving the whole of Nigeria and the world in total shock’ (Jefiyo 2013, n.p.). In the preface to the reprint of his prison diary The Man Died (1994, xiii), Wole Soyinka points to the crux of the problem of so-called preventative detention, noting: “When power is placed in the service of vicious reaction, a language must be called into being which does its best to appropriate such obscenity of power and fling its excesses back in its face.” Okri devises just such a language in his rhymeless prosaic poem, freeing it from the usual poetic constraints and opting for ‘punch-in-the-face’ staccato rhythms in the plainest of English, bolstered by a deep ecology1 as will be illustrated in this chapter and as exemplified in his opening lines to powerful effect: that he was jailed and tortured and killed for loving his homeland the earth and crying out at its defilement is monstrously unfitting. (Stanza 1, ll. 1-8)

What then was Saro-Wiwa’s ‘crime’? He was thrown into a maximum-security prison in Nigeria, tortured and hanged for instigating non-violent campaigns for the survival of his Ogoni people against the government and the multinational

 The concept of deep ecology was coined by philosopher and environmentalist Arne Naas (2019: 12), and compels us to consider an integrated approach to living. 1

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petroleum conglomerate Shell, that together decimated the oil-rich river state of Ogoniland in the Niger Delta region (Wiwa, Mail & Guardian 2000, 28–9). Not coincidentally, Saro-Wiwa’s activism and Okri’s ‘broken song’ are underpinned by a complex dynamic: a multi-layered phenomenology of life on Planet Earth. ‘Sometimes,’ says Okri (2018, 77) in Rise Like Lions, ‘poetry, roused by something intolerable in society, awoken by some injustice, rises to the condition of protest.’ He elucidates: ‘Sometimes the poet is so choked by the foulness of the world, or some unacceptable condition of society, that they abandon briefly the woods and the flowers and love ditties to sound a powerful note.’ (ibid.) As I argued in an earlier chapter in The Tough Alchemy of Ben Okri (Gray 2021, 101), this Nigerian-born Londoner asserts that ‘the poet is the widener of consciousness’ (A Way of Being Free 1997, 3). Implicitly invoking an eco-phenomenological standpoint, he suggests how this raising of consciousness, or the process of ontopoiesis, occurs poetically: ‘[Poets] speak to us. Creation speaks to them. They listen. They re-make the world in words, from dreams’ (ibid.). He muses about this mystical dialectic in terms that resonate with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the visible and the invisible (Low 2011, 49–90): ‘Intuitions which could only come from the secret mouths of gods whisper to [poets] through all of life, of [N]ature, of visible and invisible agencies’ (Okri 1997, 3). Underlining the relation of eco-phenomenology with the fluid nature of reality in the same text, Okri mystifies the alchemy further: ‘The poet turns the earth into mother, the sky becomes a shelter, the sun the inscrutable god’ (Okri 1997, 2). The poets’ role and the source of their poetic inspiration that Okri expounds also accords with the late Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s concept of eco-phenomenology articulated in her introduction to her Passion for Place (1997) – of eco-phenomenology being the philosophy of ‘our relationship to the earth’ (Tymieniecka 1997, 2). In explication of her unique brand of phenomenology and philosophy of life, Tymieniecka explains not only its theoretical underpinning but also its application. Drawing an analogy to climate change and the current global warming ecological crisis, she argued in The Passions of the Earth that people generally see these as physical problems, resolvable through technological innovation. By contrast, eco-­ phenomenologists, she said, ‘approach these problems from a metaphysical perspective’, thus requiring ‘a fundamental re-conceptualization of human values and our relationship to [N]ature’ (2008, 2). In this chapter, I argue that Ben Okri’s tribute to Ken Saro-Wiwa in A Broken Song fits into an eco-phenomenological frame of reference. Some additional socio-­ historical background in support of my appreciation of Okri’s poem is perhaps called for. In his Introduction to The Open Sore of a Continent –in a chapter revealingly subtitled ‘The Last Despot and the End of Nigerian History?’  – Soyinka (1996, 3-4) explains the reasons for Saro-Wiwa’s agitation against the plight of his homeland and his Ogoni ethnic group that led to his execution: There was once a thriving habitation of some half a million people in southeastern [sic] Nigeria, the land of the Ogoni. It is an oil-producing area that has suffered much ecological damage. That damage has received world publicity largely due to the efforts of a feisty and passionate writer named Ken Saro-Wiwa, himself an Ogoni. A leader of the Movement for

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Probably the most prominent Nigerian writer, the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, was later to capture this historical scenario poetically in a bitter biblical satire entitled ‘Calling Joseph Brodsky for Ken Saro-Wiwa’ (In Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known, 2003, 27): The Party of the Niger Delta rules by the barrel – Oil and gun – a marriage made in heaven Market forces write the law, rigs and derricks Scorch the landscape, livelihood and lives. Marionettes In itchy uniforms salute and settle strife On orders from above – the only tongue they learn – For oil must flow through land and sea Though both be silted from contempt and greed.

According to Okunoye (2011, 64), ‘While the military adventure lasted, a virile press, civil society organisations and writers mounted pressure on successive military rulers to checkmate their attempts at self-perpetuation and resist violations of human rights’. However, in solidarity with Soyinka’s view that although Nigeria lacks ‘a climate of enquiry’– due, he implies, to fear of the immediate harsh consequences and rampant falsifications which may temporarily ensure ‘that such unresolved anomalies remain ‘on hold’– ultimately, ‘the armoury of public wrongs […] will reinforce the channels to eventual change (1994, xi). Okri writes: It is only after protest, after saying no, that we can say yes. The ultimate purpose of protest is change. But this change can be a change in the temperament of a society. It can represent an altered tone, a bringing to the fore of concerns previously unheard. It is in a way a ‘making visible’, a ‘making real’ […] Sometimes a poem breathes forth that change in images of the future. Not any particular future but the always hoped for future (Okri 2018, 12).

As if in anticipation of a more harmonious future, A Broken Song can be read as a protest elegy that gives voice to an opportunity to change the paradigmatic status quo  – to reverse the accepted unnatural ‘natural’ in society. This is a poem that advocates the phenomenological obligation to intervene expressed in its closing lines that give voice to its injunction to make our world: Natural again With our singing And our intelligent rage’ (stanza 5, ll. 54-56).

Here, Okri displays a transcendental consciousness, an ontopoietic heightened awareness. Perhaps unwittingly he aligns his eco-phenomenological poetic frame of reference with that of the late Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s (2012, 4) view that ‘[o]ntopoiesis brings about the logos’ possibilities incarnating them in its self-becoming’.

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She elaborates on ‘the possibility of the entire apparatus sending out the spark of life’ which, she asserts ‘derives from the logos’ response to circumambient existential/constructive conditions. She concludes that ‘[i]t is on the ground of a constructive congeniality that the ontopoietic course lays its track on the earth’. The poet’s heightened consciousness manifests, for example, in the inferred oxymorons both in the poem’s title – A Broken Song – and in the lines I have used in this chapter’s title: ‘the wailing/ of our skies’ (ll. 33–34). These oxymorons point to the key theme of the dichotomy between the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural’ in both real and eco-phenomenological terms. It can be argued that both oxymorons, and contradictions in terms, are indicative of the abject. In her seminal study of the Abject, Powers of Horror (1982), Julia Kristeva maintains that the abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between subject and object or between self and other. Because Kristeva cites the corpse, which traumatically reminds us of our own materiality, as the prime example of the abject, I have taken the liberty of proposing that Saro-Wiwa’s death by hanging, an action which reduces him to a corpse – the invisible pivotal emblem in A Broken Song – epitomizes the abject. Furthermore, I extend its signification to the inversion or distortion, and so to the collapse of the symbolic order of the meaning of what is deemed ‘natural’ as opposed to what is conceived of as ‘unnatural’. Capturing the perversion of values, the poetic persona in Okri’s poem asserts that it is the ‘unnatural’ that erupts into and dominates our lives so that, paradoxically: […] unnatural times then become natural by tradition and by silence. (stanza 2, ll.13-16)

In the chilling words of Biodun Jefiyo, foregrounding the de-personalized mayhem of power politics and introducing the reader to Ken Saro-Wiwa’s archived letters and writings (2013: Introduction, edited by Corley, Fallon and Cox) as Silence Would Be Treason: Last Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa: One military dictator, Ibrahim Badamasi Bobangido, defined the true Nigerian this way: Every Nigerian had a price and all you had to do was to find the right price; if, however you found a Nigerian who had no price and who therefore could not be bought, he or she was not a true Nigerian and had to be carefully watched.

As one catches one’s breath at the essentialization and what Kristeva calls the Powers of Horror (1982), Jefiyo invokes the unspeakable horror of the subsequent military dictator who executed Saro-Wiwa: ‘[…] Sani Abacha had a far more sinister take on the matter: Every Nigerian had a price; any woman or man that had no price and could not be bought was not a Nigerian and had to be jailed or killed or both.’ (Jefiyo 2013, n.p.) Little wonder then that Okri captures this soulless commodification of one’s fellow human being and its cynical view of his fellow Nigerians in the fourth stanza of A Broken Song, incorporating our contemporary dilemmas on Planet Earth:

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Not only are ‘the strange new diseases’ all too evident in the current coronavirus pandemic, but an intense eco-phenomenological quality also completes the stanza: and of that dying earth bleeding, wounded, and breeding grim deserts where once there were proud trees of africa cleaning their rich green hair in the bright winds of heaven (stanza 4, ll.31-42)

Here, the progressive shift from the unnatural in humanity to the natural in Nature accords agency to the ‘proud trees of Africa’ and ‘the bright winds of heaven’, and, as such, poses an animist conception of Nature. In his article on the last writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Alexander Fife (2017, 83) provides insight into the African mindset regarding the environment: ‘It is not merely a case of human suffering that occurs on the land: rather, human suffering is intimately related to, and indeed inseparable from, the land’s subjectivity.’ In contradistinction to the Romantic view of the sublimity of Nature, Fife reminds us that African animism conceives of Nature ‘as possessing its own subjectivity and agency’ (2017, 81) as the lines above from A Broken Song illustrate. Moreover, while we are aware that, in spatio-­temporal poiesis, time and space are inextricably linked as Michela Borzaga (2015, 65) notes, socio-political phenomena and the natural world tend to be treated as separate entities. In contrast, Okri’s poem, as seen in the stanza above, provides a convergence of time, space, humankind and cosmos, synthesizing all aspects in a mythic conjunction as does Tymieniecka (2012, 2) in her feature study Possibility, Life’s Ontopoiesis and the Vindication of the Cosmos where, in a classic conception of transcendental consciousness, she proposes a dismantling of simpler models: If we would compare the humanity maturing in individual people with the growth of a tree, which grows springing up from its root – hence stem and leaf and then trunk and branches – and consider all that traverses from roots to branches, we reach, on the one side, the common stream that carries the generative resources of existence and we know on the other side the outgrowth from the individual’s circumambient conditions as they come to be expressed in a singularizing unfolding and maturation.

Such a phenomenological worldview is central to my appreciation of Okri’s poem, becoming, as it does, a powerful tool for affecting public consciousness. The third stanza in particular indicates that the poem belongs to the animist mode, opening as it does with ‘the earth deserves our love’ and revealing its ontopoietic, eco-­ phenomenological undertow in: only the unnatural ones can live at ease while they poison the lands

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rape her for gain bleed her for oil and not even attempt to heal her wounds (stanza 3, ll. 24-30).

Although the land is gendered, as in our Motherland/Gaia, the lens is animist rather than anthropomorphic. Appropriately in a poem dedicated to the memory of his countryman, Okri’s A Broken Song complements Saro-Wiwa’s short poem entitled The Call, that instructs the reader to Hear the call of the ravaged land The raucous cry of famished earth The dull dirge of the poisoned air (2013, 158).

In both poems, the poetic narrative voice is evocative, yet subtle and restrained, which constrains Okri’s parallel call for ‘intelligent rage’ (l. 56) at the poisoning of land and air. Both poets use highly evocative cacophonous vocalisers: Okri’s ‘wailing/ of our skies’ (ll. 33–34), and an appeal for our ‘own wailing’ (l.12) are in chorus with the earth’s ‘raucous cry’ in Sawo-Wiwa’s The Call. Jefiyo attests to the ‘great eloquence’, sadness and even humour with which Saro-Wiwa – and, by extension, Okri – confronted the ‘darkness’ of Abacha and his henchmen, and Shell’s wholesale destruction of the land and their people’s livelihood, masking their very real anger and suffering. In Jefiyo’s words, introducing the last writings: ‘The unspeakable plunder of resources and despoliation of the environment that they [the international oil conglomerates] perpetuate are given a searing indictment . . . taking this testament far beyond Ogoniland and Nigeria to the four corners of our planet’ (2013, n.p.). Fyfe alerts us to the synchronicity in Saro-­ Wiwa’s writings – his poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction – as demonstrating ‘a constant preoccupation with the land as a political, material and philosophical problem – one in which traditional animist conceptions of land play a key role’ (2017, 81). It is evident that a comparable synchronicity permeates the poem under discussion. The true originality of A Broken Song however, lies in the poem’s implication that the brutal death of Ken Saro-Wiwa terminated the as-yet not fully developed human power of an eco-conscious patriot, an act that was ‘monstrously unfitting’. Stanza 5 commences with that he was jailed for loving his homeland and tortured and killed for protecting his own people and crying out like the ancient town criers did at the defilement of the earth is monstrously unfitting. (Stanza 5, ll. 43-51)

The poem juxtaposes the idea of the defilement of Nature with the reality of nation states that ‘today ring out/ with injustice/ with lies/ with prejudice/ made natural’ (stanza 2, ll. 18–22; emphasis added), the anaphora conjoining the negatives effectively.

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But, says Okri (2018, 181), reinforcing the ‘silence’ that has allowed the ‘unnatural’ to become the new normal: ‘Ultimately poetry transcends, it speaks beyond. It speaks at, … It gathers all our inner states, the core of our being, and it takes us beyond. That beyond is not somewhere far off, it is not a visionary land, it is here. It takes us to the core of here, to the truth of now.’ Without diminishing the feloniousness of an assassination prior to that of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the celebrated fellow poet Wole Soyinka focuses on ‘the criminal complicity’ of the victim’s own peers, ‘through silence, and the failure of the self-asserted progressive voice of the nation’s intelligentsia to ask questions’ (1994, ix). He elaborates, inferring just how the ‘unnatural’ comes to displace and replace the ‘natural’, indicting ‘the failure to understand that such events are habit-forming in the psychology of power, and that the boundaries of the geography of victims eventually extends to embrace those who think they are protected by silence’. As if in dialogue with Soyinka, Okri (2018, 77) explains: ‘the greater the sensitivities of the poet to the plight of his or her fellow human beings the more it becomes impossible to be silent about that which is crushing them.’ This is perhaps why Okunoye (2011, 82) perceptively claims that ‘[t]he most significant formal impact of the experience on Nigerian poetry consists in the radical sense in which the voice of the persona came to be identified with that of the poet’. The poet, Okri, counterbalances the abject with the poem’s anthroposophical mode, a term coined by Rudolf Steiner (2008, first published in 1963) to signify ‘the wisdom of the human being’ that, in turn, reinforces the importance of the subtitle to Okri’s collected poems in A Fire in My Head, that is: ‘Poems for the Dawn’. The allusion, at once literal and figurative, is to the dawning or awakening of the transformative as in Okri’s novel The Freedom Artist (2019) with its rhetorical subtitle ‘Who’s the Prisoner?’ with which it appears to be in conversation. Both are a tacit indictment of silence in the face of defiling tyranny. Cast in lower case throughout, these five stanzas, largely unpunctuated, free verse poem, indicative of the unstoppable flow of ‘our intelligent rage’ (l. 56), underline the import of the ninth line in the opening stanza that articulates its core message: ‘we live in unnatural times’. By freeing the poem from the tyranny of rhyme, the verse transmits as starkly as its subject, indicative of the starkness of the truth expressed. The reiteration in the closing stanza ‘we live in an unnatural age’ (l. 52) serves to heighten the emotional affect of the abject, culminating in the ‘monstrously unfitting’ ‘defilement of the earth’ (ll. 50, 51), referred to earlier. That the poem is dominated by a cascade of negative – often abstract – nouns and epithets that percolate throughout its 56 lines (torture, killing, defilement, injustice, lies, prejudice, poison, diseases, rape), concepts that are ‘made natural’ (l. 22), coalesces with the poet’s bitterly satirical mode and foregrounding his democratic sympathy for his fellow countryman. The poem juxtaposes the defilement of Nature with despotic nation states that systematically invert the ethical norms – perverting ethical values – so that the abnormal proliferates as a substitute for the normal. Soyinka (1996, 152-3) records the state of panic at the 1995 summit of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting [CHOGM] in Auckland exacerbated by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s belief that Saro-Wiwa ‘was not

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killed on the date announced by Sani Abacha’s regime, but in June 1993, the day the nation’s democratic elections were annulled’. This uncertainty about factual evidence, occasioned by what Soyinka graphically calls Abacha’s ‘dance of death’, signified ‘a blatant, unrepentant defiance of civilized norms’. Soyinka laments that ‘[a]n atavistic psyche is what has characterised this regime from the beginning’ and berates the fact that despite warnings and pleadings, Nigerians ‘are paying another heavy price for the comatose nature of global conscience’ (Soyinka 1996, 153). Okri captures this psychic confusion unequivocally in the closing lines of his final stanza with: we live in an unnatural age and we must make it natural again with our singing our intelligence rage’ (stanza 5, ll.52-56).

By way of contextualizing the singing, it is perhaps pertinent to note, for instance, that South Africa’s liberation struggle against the equitably unjust and unconscionable Apartheid dispensation was perpetuated and enhanced through communal song. The title to Soyinka’s The Open Sore of a Continent (1996, 153) highlights the current African dilemma and the closing words in his ‘Epilogue’ therefore have continental applicability: ‘What sort of a nation is this?’ he asks rhetorically, adding: ‘We grasp only too painfully what the nation can be, what it deserves to be.’ Then, homing in on the specific, he surmises distressingly prophetically that: ‘If Ken Sara-Wiwa’s death-cry does prove, in the end, to have sounded the death-knell of that nation, it would be an act of divine justice richly deserved’. Okri insists that truth [coincidentally Soyinka’s kind of unpalatable truth about the import of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s murder] ‘speaks to the condition before injustice was perceived and it speaks to the condition after we have taken up the arms of our spirit and our voices against that injustice’ (2018, 181). ‘Poetry that embodies this truth,’ he states, ‘reminds us of core things, of those eternal verities that transcend left or right, this or that, your side and my side’ (ibid,). In Okrian eco-phenomenological aesthetics, poetry is unifying; it acknowledges our common humanity and stretches beyond party politics. ‘You may think of it,’ he suggests, ‘as something beyond any one side, truer than either, true as the sea, true as the wind in our faces, true as the peace on the face of a sleeping child, true as the rose, the storm, or the heron in flight.’ (ibid.) Okunoye (2011, 80; emphasis added) endorses Okri’s sentiments when he observes that ‘[t]he fact that the poets went beyond envisioning an end to the chaotic state of affairs to imagining a new dawn for their land indicates that they saw the vision of change as the only viable alternative to despairing’. And, pre-figuring Okri’s eco-phenomenological poetical aesthetic orientation, he adds, ‘[t]hey therefore invest images of renewal, rebirth and fulfilment in a future that holds prospects of recovery and the fruition of the dreams for Nigeria’ (ibid.). As if anticipating the tenor of Okri’s A Broken Song and ratifying the agency of our ‘common humanity’ of which Okri writes, fellow Nigerian poet Christopher

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Okigbo wrote Lament of the Silent Sisters in response to the Western Nigerian crisis of 1962 and the death of Patrice Lumumba. I quote Part III in full for its import and for the way in which it resonates with A Broken Song: Chorus: Dumbbells outside the gates In hollow seascapes without memory, we carry Each of us an urn of native Earth, a double handful anciently gathered. And by salt mouths by yellow Sand banks sprinkled with memories, we spread To the nightairs our silences, Suffused in this fragrance of divers[e] melodies: Crier: This is our swan song     This is our senses’ stillness: Chorus: We carry in our worlds that flourish     Our worlds that have failed . . . Crier:This is our swan song     This is the sigh of our spirits: Chorus: Unseen shadows like long-fingered winds     Pluck from our strings     This shriek, the music of the firmament . . .

In Eco-phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself (2003), Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine ponder that should philosophy have a role to play in contemporary decision making, it would surely begin with the classification of our ethical and metaphysical assumptions about ourselves and the world around us. They surmise that such assumptions that determine individual and cultural behaviors would concern themselves with the relation between the individual and society, as well as that between the individual and Nature, and would extend to ‘the nature of nature’, and ‘the nature of the Good’. Would that it was so! About power politics and its abusive tyranny, Okri laments – to reiterate  – that ‘only unnaturals/ rule our nations today’ (Stanza 4, ll. 31–32). Thus, in contrast to Saro-Wiwa’s alignment with the Greenpeace movement and his highly developed social consciousness, those in power are ‘so deaf to the wailing/ of our skies …’ (Stanza 4, ll. 33–34), Okri proclaims. Once again, the unnatural is pitted against the natural, a contrast that makes it difficult not to experience moral indignation over humankind’s decimation of nature, our profligate treatment of Mother Earth. Brown and Toadvine advocate that philosophy should play a role in re-orientating our relation with the natural world (2003) and, more pertinently, they foreground the role phenomenology can play in developing this newer relation with Nature, given that it is regarded as a highly abstract theoretical inquiry into ‘consciousness’ or ‘being’. This view prefigures Tymieniecka’s cautionary clarification when she admits first that: ‘It is, indeed, the ontopoietic constructive stream of being/becoming that establishes and carries the current of life’ but, in modification, adds that ‘[i]ts order and the course that it projects might be essential, but this order does not inhere in it. Neither does the stream regulate its course from within’ (Tymieniecka 2012, 4).

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What Okri infers in this eco-phenomenological poem, with its injunction to sing out ‘our intelligent rage’ in unison with ‘the wailing/ of our skies’, is the building of a counter public discourse to that of the late Sani Abacha. The significance of the poet’s intervention can only be fully appreciated ‘if we consider the enormous role that ideologies play’, to appropriate the words of Zine Magubane (Magubane 2007, 387), although in a different context. Nigerian poetry in general and Okri’s A Broken Song thus constitute ‘the literary expression of resistance to the chaotic state of affairs the Nigerian experience of military rule precipitated’ (Okunoye 2011, 83). I conclude that A Broken Song depicts a creative confrontation of Nigerian chaos precipitated by its capitalist military regime.

References Alli, M.  Chris. 2001. The Federal Republic of Nigerian Army: The Siege of a Nation. Lagos: Malthouse Press. Borzaga, Michela. 2015. The Present in Pain: ‘Temporal Poiesis’ in Mpgani Wally Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood (1981). Journal for Literary Studies 3 (1): 64–81. Brown, Charles, and Toadvine Ted, eds. 2003. Eco-phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself. New York: University of New York Press. Fyfe, Alexander. 2017. The Textual Politics of the Land in the Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa. Research in African Literatures 48 (4): 78–93. Gray, Rosemary Alice. 2021. The Tough Alchemy of Ben Okri. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishers. Jefiyo, Biodun. 2013. Biodun Jefiyo Introduces Us to the Writer and to Two Extracts From These Last Writings. In Silence Would Be Treason: Last writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa, ed. Ide Corley, Helen Fallon, and Laurence Cox. Dakar/ Bangalore: Daraja: Codesria. https://www.opendemocracy.net. Accessed 12 April 2021. Low, D. 2011. Merleau-Ponty’s Enchanted Nature. Phenomenological Inquiry 35: 49–90. Magubane, Zine. 2007. Oprah in South Africa: The Politics of Coevalness and the Creation of a Black Public Sphere. Safundi 8 (4): 374–393. Naas, Arne. 2019. Deep Ecology. Yearbook. Malmo Art Academy, University of Lund, Sweden. Okigbo, Christopher. [1971] 1979. Labyrinths. London and Ibadan: Heinemann. Okri, Ben. [1989] 1997. A Way of Being Free. London: Phoenix. ———. 2018. Rise Like Lions. London: Hodder & Stoughton. ———. 2019. The Freedom Artist. London: Head of Zeus. ———. 2021. A Fire in My Head. London: Head of Zeus. Okunoye, Oyèniyi. 2011. Writing Resistance: Dissidence and Visions of Healing in Nigerian Poetry of the Military Era. Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 48 (1): 64–85. Saro-Wiwa, Ken. 2013. Silence Would Be Treason: Last Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa. Ide Coley, Helen Fallon, and Laurence Cox eds. CODESRIA Conseil pour le Developpement de la Recherche Economique et Sociale en Afrique. Soyinka, Wole. [1972] 1995. The Man Died. London: Vintage. ———. 1996. The Open Sore of a Continent. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003. Samarkand and Other Markets I have known. London: Methuen. Steiner, Rudolf. [1965] 2008. Christ and the Spiritual World and the Search for the Holy Grail. Trans. by C. Davy and D. Osmund. Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Press.

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Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. 1997. The Theme/the Esoteric Passion for Place. In A.T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Passion for Place, Book II. Analecta Husserliana LI, ix–xiv. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic. ———. 2008. The Passions of the Earth. In Human Existence, Creativity, and Literature, Analecta Husserliana, vol. LXXI, 6. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic. ———. 2012. Possibility, Life’s Ontopoiesis, and the Vindication of the Cosmos. Phenomenological Inquiry 36: 1–8. Wiwa, Ken. 2000. A Difficult Martyr. Mail & Guardian: 28–29.

Part II

The Human Condition in the Pandemic Environment: The Logos of Subliminal Passions, Spacing, Dwellings, Feelings

Psychic Involvements and Spiritual Reactions in the Time of the Pandemic: Between Philosophy and Psychopathology Angela Ales Bello

Abstract  My aim in this chapter is to examine the pandemic from a philosophical, psychological and psychopathological perspective. This event, in fact, reminds the human being that he must die and for this reason provokes psychic reactions, the first of which is: fear. A philosophical-phenomenological analysis of the human being lets us understand the relationship between his/her psychic dimension and his/her spiritual one; that is, one’s capacity to evaluate and decide. Fear, in fact, can be controlled by human beings through their spiritual force, but not all of them are able to do it. Everybody’s task ought to be to help and support the others acting with ‘responsibility’, because we can live better if we are able to organize a community. Unfortunately there are also some people who suffer from mental diseases and need special help, particularly in a time of pandemic, and every psychologist and psychotherapist has a specific and very difficult professional and ethical task. Keywords  pandemic · fear · psyche · spirit · philosophical-phenomenological anthropology · responsibility · community · psychic disturbances · psychopathology.

Introduction It is really true that reality often surpasses fantasy! The  imagination expresses human creativity through its formation of images, but it always needs to borrow from reality the materials on which it exercises its capacity for original composition. Reality therefore is the place where we live. We can move away from it, try to alter it, but it always remains a necessary point of reference. Who would have ever thought that we could live the experience of the current pandemic and apply the results of phenomenological analysis to understand this phenomenon? And we A. A. Bello (*) The Italian Centre for Phenomenological Research, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_8

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encountered this phenomenon in the midst of our living life; our concrete, real life. The phenomenon requires understanding and challenges us to understand it. What precisely is important about the pandemic and what about it draws our attention? In an immediate and direct way, it raises the question of the meaning of life, for we are confronted by the real threat of death. Human beings do not want to hear about death; life characterizes the individual, and death, after all, is something akin to a stranger. It is true that during this pandemic not everyone will die; some even know that death is not to be expected, especially young people, but everyone is exposed to the disease to some extent and it could be understood in a certain sense as the ‘antechamber of death’ – that is, it is always a threat to life. Moreover, many have died during the pandemic because, in some cases, they cannot be cured. This has not happened to just a few people in a particular country; rather, the phenomenon is all the more shocking because people have died all around the world. Death is a fact that affects all human beings, of course, but usually there is a multiplicity of causes and factors that determine it. In  this case a single cause affects many people living far from one another, who also simultaneously share the same fate.

The Theme of Death That human beings do not find it easy to accept death is admirably described by Shakespeare in the famous monologue of the Danish Prince Hamlet. Reflecting on this theme, his words come to mind: To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. (Shakespeare, Hamlet.)

Even if death were just sleep, we would not have the courage to accept it because it involves an awakening. Here we face the problem of where we would wake up: what is the new place we would find ourselves in? And since we are not aware of this place – that is, we do not know it – we are afraid of dying. As the bard says, we are ‘cowards’.

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The comparison between death and sleep is also found in some important texts by Edmund Husserl in the volume Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie [Liminal Problems of Phenomenology] (Husserl 2013) which I commented upon at the conclusion of my Italian translation of the manuscript Das Kind,  found in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. (Ales Bello 2019). Husserl speculates that, if it is true that death is like sleep, then we could conceivably wake up in a dimension of which we are not now aware, but this means that, in reality, our life continues in a different form. Husserl does not seem to be afraid, unlike Hamlet. It is clear that in order not to be afraid we need a religious vision of life, and we will return to this claim later in the chapter. Normally and spontaneously, we are afraid of death, for we feel it as a threat. But what is fear or cowardice, to borrow from Shakespeare’s refined words? To understand it, we must deploy the phenomenological analysis of the human being. In fact, fear is a lived experience that arises in us in and through the perception of danger, both external and internal. The ‘inner feeling’ is typical of the psychic dimension; that is, of that set of drives and reactions that always accompany us.

Psychic Reactions in the Face of Death and Illness The reaction of fear in the face of a threat to life – in particular, a threat to the body that falls ill – affects everyone, but in the case of the pandemic we are witnessing, as we have already mentioned, a reaction emerges that is different in young and old, because we know that older people are more easily affected and so may succumb more easily to the virus. This difference arouses fear: young people know that they are less vulnerable in this situation and, therefore, their actions are not always marked by caution and care. The fact that in Europe the virus was widespread was due mainly to the behavior of individuals who carried the disease without symptoms – a group described as ‘asymptomatic’– who unknowingly infected other family members and their friends. In the first phase of contagion in 2020, particularly in Italy, there was a long period in which no-one could leave their homes. The English word ‘lockdown’ was used to describe the situation; it could be translated as a ‘total closure.’ In 2021 lockdowns occurred around the world with restrictions imposed as well as further,  albeit less severe, closures.  If closures lessened the fear of death, they  also provoked other psychic reactions, mostly of a depressive or anxiogenic type, but here we must distinguish the ‘strong’ from the ‘fragile’ psyche. To understand this difference, let us take up Edith Stein’s notion of lifeforce (Stein 2000b). Psycho-physical life is regulated by a certain amount of lifeforce that moves in varying intensities. In states of wellness, vital force increases, whereas it decreases in states of malaise. Therefore, well-being causes an increase in lifeforce and the opposite occurs in malaise. However, this is neither predictable nor determinable, for it also depends on individual characteristics and individual reactions to the surrounding world. In a strong psyche, the lifeforce manifests itself with continuity and constancy despite

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the alternation of states,  whereas in the more fragile one there are events which cause great discomfort that can continue for a long time, such as the disturbances linked with lockdown which are still present in many people, particularly in young people and the elderly. We can clarify the first distinction by turning to the writing of the phenomenologically-informed psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger.  In his work  Melancholy and Mania (Binswanger 2001 (1960) we find him inspired  by  an  observation of  Husserl.  The philosopher  had noted that  the real world exists and we assume that the experience of the existence of the world constantly continues  in the  “same constitutive style.” This allows humans to have a shared way to obtain knowledge about themselves as well as things, and therefore to understand one another in order to work together. It is clear that no-one is ‘the same’ as the other, but possibilities of mutual understanding exist as the structure of the lives of human beings are universal and shared. This is the meaning of the term ‘transcendental,’ which indicates conditions that structure and constitute our universe. Binswanger agrees  with Husserl (Ibid.,  Einleitung)  even if,  from time to time, particular and personal lived experiences are lived by one individual and not others. One can still collectively recognise the sense of these individual experiences: my joy, in its intensity and particularity, is not the joy of the other, but it is nonetheless joy, and we all know immediately what joy means and how it is distinguished from sadness. It can happen though that this style of experience, which helps constitute the sense of the common world, is not shared by some. Indeed, one may note a certain unfamiliarity with – or incapacity to grasp – the sense of a lived experience, which may cause some to feel ‘disorder’ or a ‘disturbance’ that causes suffering. Here, we encounter the idea of ‘mental disturbances,’ and we use the term ‘mental’ in a very general sense. In order to grasp what we intend by the term; it is necessary to turn to the writings of Husserl and Stein on psyche and spirit.

Psyche and Spirit It has been noted that during the COVID-19 pandemic those with fragile psyches suffered greater damage. However it  is also interesting to observe that,  in some cases, especially in paranoic disorders, the disorder itself seems to manifest in those who live with others. The reason is that these states are characterized by mania or delusions of persecution, but if others also suffer persecution, such as that caused by the threat  of the virus, paranoid individuals feel that they are ‘in similar company’ and not isolated or alone. One should note, however, that the paranoid who lives through the pandemic alone is worse off, because the reasons for persecution remain focused on the individuals themselves. Here, intersubjective or interpersonal relationships are at stake, and they demonstrate the importance of what phenomenologists call entropathy, the lived experience that allows us to know the other – and therefore relate to others.

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It is true that every human being has his own personal characteristics, but the relationship with otherness is important from childhood, when the process of education and development of the personality begins, as Husserl highlights in his text on the child, Das Kind. Of course, personal potentialities are given: there exists a wealth of possibilities in every single human being and this, to use the language of psychology, can be called ‘temperament.’ For the development of character, however, contact with others is essential. Since establishing relationships is also linked to the ability to grasp what the other is experiencing, here too there is a difference between ‘those who share a style of common experience’ and those who do not share it. For example, paranoid delusions indicate an alteration in the ability of one to relate to others, because those who suffer from it do not really grasp what they are experiencing; rather, they project their own psychic experiences by attributing to others what, in reality, they are not living in their psyches. Following the double sense of experience that is individual and shared, we note here that empathy or entropathy is particularly relevant, as it is a tool for knowing the other. For those who share a style of experience, even if such sharing certainly has its limits, it is possible to understand the difficulties of the other and possibly help him or her to overcome them. This is something that every human being should do, and this also characterizes the work of the psychologist or  psychotherapist. Hence, this is why we ‘should’ always try to carry out an epoché of our prejudices on ourselves in order to open ourselves up to an authentic understanding of the other.

The Moral Question as Spiritual Question So what is the meaning of ‘should’? It means to be attentive, to listen, to try to eliminate prejudices: these acts are not operations of the psyche but of the spirit; that is, the human ability to assess reality and act consciously, which is the foundation of a moral life. Here, we find ourselves in the realm of behavior and therefore what we do every day or rather, in every moment of our life, takes on a moral note. And here an important question arises: what is  the  relationship between the psyche and the spirit? Let us analyze the concrete case of the pandemic fear of a person who shares a style of common experience. Examining the situation, we observe that they can feel fear, but then they transform it into  'worry’ –  that  is,  they assume prudent attitudes and live with responsibility toward themselves and others. Those who do not share this experience or share it only minimally are faced with a situation they cannot manage on a spiritual level; indeed, they often subordinate the spiritual to the psyche. Hence, being afraid, they try to eliminate fear by rationalizing the situation by saying it is not serious, that there is no danger and finally that the pandemic is all a hoax or a conspiracy, ultimately placing blame for the present situation on a hypothetical human enemy and not on the virus. We have to admit however, that the mutation of the virus is due to human disrespect for nature, for we pollute it. Hence,

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as the virus passes from animals to humans, producing deadly mutations, it causes great harm to us. At this point however, there may still be a double cause to this fearful turn away to psyche from spirit, whether it be motivated by denial or conspiracy. It may be the case that one’s psyche is weak and unable to face the difficulty of overcoming the fear. Hence, one simply denies the evidence. It may also be true that one knows how to evaluate the situation, but in order to gain power over others, one deploys strategies of mass psychology to convince people that there is no real danger. Stein’s analysis of the relationship between the mass and its leader is useful for understanding this possibility (Stein 2000a, Second Treatise, II, §4b). In her discussion of the mass from a psychic point of view, even those who share a common experience can remain a prisoner of their fear. In this case, the psyche controls spiritual activity, which is subject to psychic activity. Therefore, there exists a lack and a fault: it is convenient not to evaluate morally and commit oneself. Here, a sort of psychic contagion occurs, which today can be observed in the dissemination of false news and ‘fake news’ through various social media platforms. Thus, the mass is formed and false news can be spread by someone who understands the situation, but nevertheless chooses, for his or her own interest, to exploit the masses. We come face-to-face here with knowingly immoral behaviour. The mass renounces the use of its spiritual capacities of evaluation so that the individual people who belong to it are not able to choose what is better for them or for the benefit of all. In this way a leader can use the masses to do evil. The decision to do good or evil depends on the exercise of spiritual activity. In the case of the mass there is a lack of responsibility. This is why Stein insists on her call for a community. The community is the fruit of an acceptance of mutual responsibility; therefore it implies the exercise of the spiritual activity that wants to achieve what is good after evaluating a situation and elaborating the criteria to achieve it. And what are these criteria? Why do we need to take responsibility? Because the other is a human being like us and their life must be respected, as we wish ours to be respected. This means that we will her ‘good’ and not only ‘my’ good; that is, I love the other as a similar human being to me. Love is a spiritual feeling on which community is founded. The leader who uses the masses loves only himself and despises others. Stein and Husserl tell us that the aforementioned ‘criteria’ are of an ethical-­ religious sort. In the case of Husserl, we can refer to ethical love: “We could say: those who love each other do not live side-by-side or with each other, but in each other, potentially and actually.  They therefore also share all the responsibilities: they are solidly bound, even in sin and guilt.” He continues: “We are naturally thinking infinitely of the love of Christ for all men and of human love in general, which Christians must arouse in themselves and without which they cannot be a true Christian.” (Husserl 1973, I., 9, § 5, 174). Husserl maintains that it is a 'duty’ to love others, if we are to follow the example of Jesus Christ. Edith Stein writes that a true Christian keeps the commandments, but the greatest commandment is to love, and the love of God is engendered in and through the love of one’s neighbor, understood as brotherly love for all God‘s

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children as well as the right or just behavior toward oneself and others (Stein 2001, 78). If it is true that with our reason we understand through an honest assessment of the situation that it is better to do good than evil, we come to grasp that the values​​ we recognize are further grounded in a religious dimension, which is present – even if not always cultivated – in the human being. The reference to the divine unites all and,  therefore, should overcome  hatred and  conflicts. In this sense, the  Christian religion invites all human beings to become like brothers, as they are all children of God. Interreligious dialogue, which is based on mutual love, helps us find a higher justification for the values ​​for which it is most worth living.

Psyche and Spirit in Mental Disorders One wonders whether spiritual activity is always possible in cases of mental disorders.  One may note that  the possibility  decreases as  the disorder  becomes more severe. In fact, the psyche, which we have defined as ‘fragile’ because it is prey to pathology, paradoxically demonstrates its strength precisely on account of its weakness. It can itself become the element that leads life and characterizes it, preventing the spirit from acting on its own. In addition, we know that there are some cases in which the subjection of spiritual activity to the psyche is such that though the capacities for evaluation may persist, they are still subordinate to a mental disorder. A person hounded by a persecution complex who wishes to assert his or her rights – legitimate and recognized as they may be  – may perform rash acts that lead to delirium, for example. The  criterion of justice exists but is subordinated to a persecutory mania. Therefore, the freedom of the spirit’s power of evaluation is lacking. In all human beings, one finds psychic and spiritual activity, and one must periodically ascertain what role these two activities play within the individual person. When the spirit is capable of acting autonomously, of directing the individual, then a common style of experience is shared. We have seen that the spirit can also act by doing evil, and in this case there is full responsibility. If, however, the psyche is characterized by attitudes that prevent the exercise of spiritual activity, it is difficult to speak of responsibility. As mentioned earlier, young people sometimes behave less prudently than adults. Certainly, this is a generalization and, as such, only partially valid. Indeed, many of them have suffered and are suffering from the pandemic. Here, we need to distinguish between different age groups. Child psychiatrists tell us that children up to the age of twelve suffered less harm from the lockdown if their family was welcoming and helpful. These children still need parents and siblings for their growth and development, and so being at home was less traumatic. There were different results in the case of adolescents, whose development unfolds with and through contact with their peers and with adults outside the family circle – adult strangers. Young people between 12 and 18 years of

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age, it was found, need to leave the family unit. The family must always remain an important point of reference, but young people need to leave to allow entry into the larger community. This larger community consists of personal relationships at school and/or after-school friendships. In this group, episodes of insomnia and self-­ harming were observed, as well as an increase in suicides. Psychic impulses characterized by the desire for movement and new experiences are repressed because of the pandemic and the control activity that we have defined as spiritual  – that is, intellectual and will-centered – is still in the process of formation or stabilization at the age of adolescence. Often, those who are psychically weaker succumb to the distress.

On Entropathy Entropathy is central to the understanding of mental disorders. It is clear that relationships between human beings are always quite complicated, even for those who share a style of common experience. For example, one notices difficulties in differing descriptions of typologies of behaviors.  Four types of behaviors are usually identified: 1. Excited 2. Lazy and/or passive 3. Irritable 4. Cyclothymic, passing from enthusiasm to frustration. Certainly, it is not easy to live among these types of behavior in interpersonal relationships, but in shared conditions the formation of character due to the intervention of the spirit can orient a human being in a different way and make them capable of living with others. Pedagogical actions, for example, should aim to elicit the capacity of each subject to control oneself in view of a socially-ordered life. Pedagogical actions, for example, should aim to elicit the capacity of each subject to control themselves with respect to a socially-ordered life. This is possible thanks to entropathy, in that this lived experience allows us to understand what the other is experiencing and, therefore, to mutually adjust to a non-conflictual mode of encounter. I would like to show how the failure to exercise entropathy appears in psychic disturbances. We examine, in particular, personality disorders. Some given classifications of the disorders are always only indicative.  For example, the first group includes paranoid, schizoid and schizotypic disorders, which are characterized by suspicion of ‘the other’. The second group, consisting of narcissism, histrionic disorder, borderline and antisocial behavior, is characterized by a closure in on oneself. The third group is constituted by the obsessive-compulsive, the avoidant and the dependent, and is characterized by anxiety and fear. All are disorders that lack balanced intersubjective relationships and therefore experience a deficit of entropathy

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in the sense that one cannot grasp what the other or others are experiencing. This generates great suffering in most cases. With regard to young people, to elaborate on observations discussed above, the capacity for the living of entropathy is consolidated in adolescence, during which one increasingly tries to understand 'what the other is experiencing.’ Here the personal, intersubjective dimension is being constructed. The absence or lack of contact is particularly serious and can lead to the formation of permanent damage in the development of the personality.

The Therapist’s Work So far I have focused on those suffering from pathologies. But let us turn to therapists. It is truly fortunate that there are people willing to help those suffering mental disorders in a specialized way. This has always aroused great admiration in me. The therapeutic commitment is fundamental in trying to help the recovery of those who have difficulty establishing human relationships  ‘in the shared world.’  How can effective therapy be achieved? What are the necessary conditions? I would like to reflect briefly on the specific training of therapists, because each of us can, to a certain extent, help others in difficulty, but not always with success, especially in the cases we have indicated. What characterizes the therapist? What should their preparation be like? Must it have – or not make – theoretical and in particular philosophical assumptions about the anthropological dimension of the human? We discussed earlier the phenomenological aspects of psyche and spirit, but how do these dimensions come to condition our understanding of mental disorders? To speak however of ‘conditions’ may connote the sense of an underlying ‘prejudice’ or a ‘presupposition’, but we know that from a phenomenological point of view we have to execute the epoché, that is, to put aside every prejudice and every presupposition. So, how can we say that we need to be mindful of important conditions? I believe that the knowledge we have or should have, in every context that touches on the human being,  must answer the question: What is the human being? How is it constituted? This idea framed Edith Stein’s own work Beiträge zur Begründung philosophischen der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften [Contributions toward the Philosophical Grounding of Psychology and the Sciences of the Spirit]. As we know, this is the original title of the work, which in the English translation has been abbreviated to Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. Stein sought to provide a solid philosophical foundation or ground for psychology and psychopathology as well as for what we now call ‘the human sciences’. The philosophical and phenomenological analysis of Stein’s work serves as a background to grasp the meaning of the shared world and the one marked by ‘private’ characteristics, often pathological, which is difficult to grasp. It is clear that each of us has a ‘private’ world, because each person is a singularity, but this does not prevent us from being able to communicate as we share the same human structure.  When you manifest  more or less severe changes that impede

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communication,  to understand them you need to analyze our lived experiences [Erlebnisse]; we need to know how they function to grasp the ‘different styles of experience’,’ as Binswanger remarks. According to this psychiatrist phenomenologist, there is a need for anthropological training in the philosophical sense. Again, our experience has a style that we share, but in cases where this does not happen, an ‘other’ world is established, and it is the therapist’s task to interpret it in order to have a dialogue with those who often experience it in a painful way. Binswanger also highlighted the importance of a particularly effective approach to care, that is; attention to the other and their world, ultimately welcoming participation in it,  which he saw as essential  for the success of treatment. Binswanger’s teaching has generated a school of thought which has become known in the west. In particular among his followers I would like to mention the Italian psychopathologist Bruno Callieri. Following in Binswanger‘s theoretical-practical footsteps,  Callieri discusses the  psychopathology of reciprocity  that is realized through the  dialogical dimension of the doctor-patient encounter and urges us to examine the world of the other while trying to understand it in terms of its own characteristics. (Callieri 2008). He defines this attitude as ethical-anthropological:  anthropological because the preliminary work of research and analysis of the human is necessary. It requires a theoretical investigation  of the  structure of the human and a careful study of the specific characteristics of a given disorder. Furthermore, for the therapist’s commitment to be effective, the preservation of the human dimension of the encounter is fundamental, for the therapist can never give a perfect nosography; rather, it is orientational. What is primary then is the modality of the encounter between  two human singularities, between the patient and the therapist, who engages the former from an ethical point of view. We can observe that for Callieri the moral question was also a spiritual question, understood in the religious sense, as Husserl and Stein pointed out.

Conclusion The reflection on the pandemic has brought us  closer to considering ethical and psychic questions, urging us to understand them within a framework of philosophical and phenomenological anthropology. From an ethical point of view I pinpointed the importance of ‘responsibility’ in order to build a well-organized human community; something which must be at the basis of a society and its political life always. We discovered that it is necessary at the time of pandemic. Moreover, I touched on  psychopathological issues because  we often  focus  on the physical aspects of the virus which, given the risk of death, certainly are very important. But we often forget the psychic resonances that flow from it, or we do not consider those who have suffered previous psychological disorders and now find themselves in further difficulties or distress.

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References Binswanger, L. 2001 (1960). Melanconia e mania. Studi fenomenologici (Melancholia and Mania. Phenomenological Studies, tr. it. by M. Marzotto (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001). (Melancholie und Manie: Phänomenologische Studien. Pfullingen: Günther Neske. Callieri, B. 2008. Note per una psicopatologia della reciprocità (Notes for a Psychopathology of Reciprocity). In IO E TU: Fenomenologia dell’incontro (ME AND YOU: Phenomenology of the Encounter)., eds. G. Di Petta, ed. A. Ales Bello, A. Ballerini, E. Borgna, and L. Calvi. Rome: Roman University Editions. Husserl, E. 1973. Die Liebe in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjectivität, Husserliana vol. XIV, ed. Iso Kern, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 2013. Geburt und Tod als Vorkommnisse in der konstituierten Welt, Text nr. 4, in Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik, ed. R.  Sowa and T.  Vongher, in Husserliana XLII.  Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2019 (1935). Das Kind. Die erste Einfühlung, 1935, in  Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität  II; Il bambino. La genesi del sentire e conoscere l’altro (The Child: The Genesis of Feeling and Knowing the Other), translation, preface, textual analysis, and commentary by Angela Ales Bello, in Le forme del filosofare (Forms of Philosophizing series). Rome: Fattore Umano Edizioni. Shakespeare, W. Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1. At: https://poets.org/poem/hamlet-­act-­iii-­scene-­i-­be-­or-­ not-­be. Accessed 27 May 2021. Stein, E. 2000a. Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanitiestrs. Mary Catherine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki. Washington DC: ICS Publications. ———. 2000b. Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. First Treatise, II, § 1: Consciousness and Sentience. In Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities: The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 7. Trans. Mary Catharine Baseheart. Washington DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies (ICS) Publications. ———. 2001. Jugendbildung im Licht des katholischen Glaubens in Bildung und Entfaltung der Individualität. In Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16. Einleitung by Beate Beckmann-Zöller, ed. Maria Amata Meyer und Beate Beckmann-Zöller. Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Herder.

To Be ‘Alone Together’ – The Value of an Eco-Phenomenological Approach Towards Mental Health During the Pandemic Giulio Lo Bello

Abstract  The pandemic has once again brought to light the inherent fragility of the human condition in the world. Notwithstanding the practical concerns for the worldwide medicalization of our societies, many have experienced for the first time a range of mental health problems such as isolation, depression, lack of social ties and relationships. What were once considered the issues of a minority are now a rising international concern that requires a multidisciplinary response that lies outside the reach of medicine alone. The aim of his chapter is to outline what can be learned about the role of philosophy and especially of the phenomenology of life in addressing those existential concerns about the meaning of ‘being together in the world’ during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the renewed interest towards philosophy sparked by the tumultuous and uncertain situation we are currently living in, the philosophy of A.T. Tymienicka may support the development of a different approach towards the concept of mental health within our society. Keywords  Phenomenology of life · A.T. Tymieniecka · Mental health · Medical humanities · Pandemic

A World Enveloped in a Crisis The pandemic has crept into our daily life with a speed and pervasiveness that has risen exponentially, overwhelming country after country and the regularity of our social, political and economic world. Although the comparison with war events is neither accurate nor strictly comparable in its destructive effects, the language often used in the media while covering the pandemic phenomenon has reduced, in the common imagination, the distance between us and the generations who endured the deprivations of armed conflicts. The measures deployed to contain the pandemic by G. L. Bello (*) Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_9

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many countries worldwide have affected millions of people, evoking an inescapable leviathan, the pervasiveness of which has altered our daily life and penetrated the depth of the social fabric that for decades had been perceived as a constant and immovable reality. The situation accelerated exponentially from being remote news to the first response of unreasonable panic towards an increasingly serious and pervasive scenario where terms like lockdown or curfew gained a steady presence even in common communications. Resignation and acceptance were finally welcomed as proof of order with the tacit promise – perhaps the clearest proof of the naivety of our society – of going back to our previous life, as if it were possible to put in brackets the effects of a similar event. The pandemic should indeed have marked a moment of reflection on our societal model and its shortcomings, from the direction taken in the economic development of the last century to our way of perceiving our relationship with the natural world. The pandemic has unveiled the inherent fragility of the human being. The suspension of our everyday life has forced – in ways otherwise unthinkable – a confrontation with feelings of loss, isolation; a profound break with social reality. Despite the deployment of the impressive technology that kept the Western world afloat we nevertheless found ourselves alone, a witness to our vulnerability and impotence. ‘To be alone together’ refers indeed to this unique condition we have recently experienced; the common state of isolation where we are all facing the threat of illness but each person has to deal with it on their own terms, in a pervasive fracture of our common living. The analysis of all the implications connected to the pandemic is a task that goes beyond the ambitions of this chapter, both for the scope of the knowledge required and the complex stratification of the areas involved. The choice of focusing on the state of mental health is due to several factors that make it an emblematic crossroads of a wider crisis looming over the tenets of Western society, as Maija Kūle has observed in her writings about phenomenology and culture: The spirit of our times has a bitter tone. It can find expression both in reactionary views and in utopian positions, but not in an orientation which may open up new prospects (Kūle 2002).

Philosophy, she adds, may help in dealing with those issues concerning our community life and I argue that this crisis could contain the germs for a pause for reflection and a more careful reconstruction of our ‘being together in the world’.

Mental Health, a Crisis That Started Long Before COVID-19 In March 2020 the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. It occurred while the world was already grappling with a widespread mental health crisis that has become one of the first causes of disability in the Western world and is, as yet, without a counter-strategy available. The stressors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have only heightened this crisis, especially for all the

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categories of the population already at risk. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported that in 2020 mental health deteriorated worldwide (Colombo 2021) while surveys in the United States and United Kingdom saw a worrisome rise in the percentage of people affected amid the pandemic (Abbott 2021). Traumatic experiences can exert a toll on mental health long after a crisis is solved, outlining the existence of a problem that will continue growing in the near future. A study from Oxford University published in The Lancet (Taquet et al. 2021) investigated the occurrence of a large number of neuropsychiatric outcomes in the early stages following a COVID-19 diagnosis while appearing as a real-time experiment into how different policies affect people’s mental health; namely, how the population reacts to the safety protocols of curfews and quarantines. The current situation is the result of multiple factors, many of them rising from one conceptual framework of reference. This is the Cartesian division of mind and body, the dualism between a quantifiable res extensa and an independent res cogitans, a schism that persists in the way biological medicine tends to explain the illness. It is seen as the effect of an alteration located on the organic biological level. The disease event is thus introduced into an empirically-verifiable causal plot by the physician. The patient, on the other hand, is considered a stranger to the disease. (Casalone 1999).

The long-lasting attempt to reduce the mind to its biological nature (Allen 1994) has neglected the concomitant efforts of other disciplines to obtain a more inclusive understanding of our being, affecting the long-lasting relationship between philosophy and medicine, especially in the field of psychiatry (Andreasen 2007). Nevertheless, it seems that the beginning of the 21st Century has brought a renewed interest in the value of philosophical insight, both supporting new models of services, to bridge the connection between mind and brain in research and – equally important – to support a ‘patient-centered’ approach (Fulford et al. 2004). The centrality of the mental health issue may perhaps become emblematic of the limits of our understanding of reality in purely materialistic or biological terms, in which the connections with the world are dictated by purely socio-economic dimensions and by a radical individualism (Santos et al. 2017). The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben was sceptical about the real magnitude of the pandemic during its first appearance in Italy but aside from his criticism of how the government reacted, bringing him to draw parallels to Foucault’s descriptions of ‘plagued cities’, Agamben offered a singular consideration on the Italian condition that could be extended to any other country, a vision of the disintegration and impoverishment of what our common life used to be, a dystopian image of selfish survival: Fear is a bad counselor, but it makes us see many things we pretended not to see. The first thing the wave of panic that’s paralyzed the country has clearly shown is that our society no longer believes in anything but naked life. It is evident that Italians are prepared to sacrifice practically everything – normal living conditions, social relations, work; even friendships and religious or political beliefs – to avoid the danger of falling ill. The naked life, and the fear of losing it, is not something that brings men and women together, but something that blinds and separates them. […] What will human relations become in a country that will be

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accustomed to living in this way for who knows how long? And what is a society with no value other than survival? (Agamben 2020).1

It appears the pandemic has heightened an already-existing crisis in the relationship between the human being, the others and the outside world. The causes of mental health issues are indeed heterogeneous, including biological, psychological and environmental aspects i.e., trauma, abuse, isolation, social disadvantage, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, stress, genes factors and brain injuries.2 It seems misleading to resort to medicine alone when most of the causes appear to have a deep social root; an example of attempting to reduce the symptoms without dealing with the real issue. The nature of the solution resides essentially in political actions aimed at creating effective policies. Even though the author of this chapter strongly believes in our social life being intrinsically political, the aim is to tackle the question from a subtly-different point. Nowadays the individual seems to be the center of our society, the angular stone on which to build society itself, but our living models appear to be ‘off-balance’ (Michael 2015), This stops us from achieving a possible harmony between fellow humans and the surrounding environment, and suggests that we may have to reconsider two things: our concept of ‘human being’ and, with regard to mental issues, the dynamic relationship between humans and their health, their sickness and their surrounding environment.

Eco-Phenomenology, the Moral Sense and the Human Person The phenomenological investigation of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka is incredibly wide and contains a lifetime of philosophical works. This chapter refers mainly to her writing concerning the person and the human significance of life (Tymieniecka 1986) and the concept of the human condition (Tymieniecka 1990). The author considers them a starting point for the conceptual reconstruction of the human person and the evolution that leads from a simple individuality aimed at the satisfaction of one’s own vital needs to a complete development towards the transactional nature of social exchanges and the development of a Moral Sense, which are fundamental elements for achieving the full realization of the human being. This research assumes that a fracture in this process could be the catalyst for our inability to reach that authenticity so necessary to understand our being with others and the ‘unity of everything that is alive’.  The European Journal of Psychoanalysis has put together a special section Coronavirus and philosophers with the translation of Agamben’s intervention referred to this chapter: http://www. journal-­psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-­and-­philosophers/. Agamben also wrote a response to the criticisms addressed to his original intervention. The English translation can be found at: https:// itself.blog/2020/03/17/giorgio-agamben-clarifications/ 2  This list is from an American medical information website: https://www.webmd.com/mentalhealth/mental-health-causes-mental-illness. 1

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Tymieniecka points out that no single definition has been universally accepted of what a ‘person’ is, since almost all the conceptualizations built around this idea draw on culturally-influenced values. The theories deriving from this approach are innumerable and sometimes irreducible to each other. Despite the variety of descriptions it seems possible to identify a few common characteristics; namely, its singularity and the cognitive dominance bestowed upon the rationality of human intellectual abilities. This individualization, predominant in Western culture, had considered the human being isolated from both their historical and natural context, visualized without existential features; a neutral concept far from the lived world in which humans are naturally immersed. As Tymieniecka argues, the ‘person’ belongs to a wider cosmos of social relations that are both biologically relevant and related to its existence, subsistence and development: The unique specificum of life is that it unfolds from within, from its very own core, which progressively in its struggle against circumambient factors unfolds its virtualities and grows toward a maximal development which is uniquely its own. (Tymieniecka 1990).

The meaning of the human person is divided into three main functions. The first aspect, concerning the system of activities aimed at satisfying vital needs, assumes, in Tymieniecka’s description, a fundamental value for psychiatry as the person’s activity expands in spatial and temporal dimensions, starting the unfolding of a network of meanings that go beyond the simple satisfaction of basic needs, opening the way to the existential recognition of the others. Although this interpretation might be valid for the onset of severe forms of mental issues the author would argue that while anxiety and depression are the most common problems of mental health3 they are more tightly-related to another aspect described by Tymieniecka; the one that sees the person as: an agent from whom the initiatives and their realization within the social world stem […] the person is assumed to be a concrete, fully developed and self-conscious being where self-consciousness provides the “means to endow one’s vital course with specific meaningfulness of existence […] the capacity to rise above the concrete acts, of achieving one’s vital development toward the principles, evaluation and planning of those acts, and to invent new means and ways to advance that development (Tymieniecka 1990).

The individual is supposed to pursue goals beyond the simple satisfaction of basic needs, creating an existential path where a self-conscious being acts within the social world: the transactional world. Bringing forth the task of guiding one’s own development and self-realization, the human being enters this network thanks to the unfolding of the Moral Sense, the linking element between the vital meaning of existence and a specifically-human, culturally-oriented meaning. Tymieniecka illustrates that the Moral Sense emerges and manifests itself in the role of the founding character of the transactional balance necessary for the social life of a person and their relationship with the Other, and

 Numbers of cases and distribution can be found at the John Hopkins University webpage: https:// www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-­and-­prevention/mental-health-disorder-statistics 3

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that “the identity of the human person may be accomplished only within and with reference to a communal network” (Tymieniecka 1986). The foundation of the Moral Sense also takes into consideration the importance of the body and the process of self-identification, but in our analysis we maintain a specific focus on the relational aspects; that is, the human being is influenced by the surrounding environment and at the same time actively intervening and modifying it: Every living organism has a history that individualizes it. What happens to it is undoubtedly in conformity with the regularities that characterize the living phenomenon. But what it is at a given moment is the result of all the interactions it has undergone with its environment and of all the internal vicissitudes that have occurred in its becoming. In the case of the human being, this historicity proper to the living being is assumed and transformed into the properly-existential historicity, which is that of a subjectivity open to a horizon of meaning (Casalone 1999).

The human being is fundamentally a moral agent and the genesis of the Moral Sense is of fundamental importance in the theoretical architecture of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. The distinctive characteristic of the person does not lie in a series of skills but in the conferral of significant networks that the human being extends over the world of which they are a part: This philosophical conception of the human being as human existence or Dasein centers in the structural conundrum of the network of interrelations between the living existence of the individual and other living beings within the life-world (Tymieniecka 1986).

The path described above goes forward to a deeper analysis of the Moral Sense, intersubjectivity and human creativity. But within those lines lies another element that Tymieniecka describes as a ‘breaking point’, a situation at the limits of human existence; a condition ‘on the brink of existence’ and a state of crisis where the human being falls outside the network. The author considers this insight as a valuable narrative of the situation illustrated in the first part of my research: the mental health crisis is related to an existential crisis; the ‘brink’ is any condition that disrupts the communication within the communal life-world, creating a fracture that can spiral downward. Tymieniecka indeed lists in this situation the ‘social misfits’, the homeless, and other groups. But this fall is not anymore relegated to groups of outcasts, neglected by society or with the more severe cases locked away in institutions. The extension of the social crisis created by the pandemic points toward a further inquiry into how to correct our ‘being together’ according to the kind of human being that has emerged from Tymieniecka’s analysis. That means thinking more about how to strive towards a social structure that can truly allow a human being to fulfill their self-realization, remembering that can only be done through mutual recognition. The scope of such change might seem impossible to reach, but either we are going to build a momentum powerful enough to bring our social and natural world away from the current condition, or this state of crisis will become a reality we have to live with.

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Conclusions The chronicity reached in the field of mental health should inspire us to consider other fields of knowledge that have offered different philosophical, anthropological and social perspectives capable of contributing to a different conception of the nature of the disorders, their origins and their care. Ultimately it seems like the main causes of the dramatic rise that the pandemic has greatly contributed to aggravate and reside within the functioning of our society itself. The recent turn of events would suggest taking into consideration other philosophers and models that might help in evaluating the power dimension at play. Similarly, we should turn our focus to other ideas, such as the meaning of health and sickness in life nowadays, and what death has come to represent, not simply during the COVID-19 pandemic but in general terms as well. Nevertheless, this author still considers the insight Eco-phenomenology offers into the realm of medicine as an example of the ability of philosophy to shed light on different paths. We lack an organic view of our relational world: the individualistic paradigm cannot be sustained, as all the parts composing our world have grown even more interlaced, and the life achievements illustrated by Tymieniecka can only be obtained with policies able to consider the ‘unity of everything that is alive’ – and act consequently. The role of philosophy in these perilous times has been properly described in the words of UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay: If the health crisis calls into question several of the foundations of our societies, then philosophy helps us to move forward, by stimulating critical reflection on problems that are already present, but which the pandemic is pushing to the limit. At a time when the radicality and speed of the world's major upheavals may disorient us, philosophy allows us to both step back and see further ahead (Azoulay 2020).

The Polish-American philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka strived towards a philosophy that could enlighten our world and engage in the troubled reality of life. This chapter has attempted to draft the eventual application of several of her original concepts that might benefit relationships within our society – and so foster a better development of it. This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project No. lzp-2020/2-0085 “Development of Eco-phenomenology in the Situation of Pandemic”

References Abbott, Alison. 2021. COVID’s Mental Health Toll: Scientists Track Surge in Depression. Nature 590: 194–195. Agamben, Giorgio. 2020. Article on publisher’s website clarifying epidemic position at Quod Libet. (signed by Agamben 17 March 2020) online at: www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-­agamben-­ chiarimenti (accessed 1.12.2021). Allen, Frances in Sadler J.Z. 1994. Philosophical Perspectives on Psychiatric Diagnostic Classification. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Andreasen, C. Nancy. 2007. DSM and the Death of Phenomenology in America: An Example of Unintended Consequences. Schizophrenia Bulletin 33 (1): 108–112. Azoulay, Audrey. 2020. UNESCO news website at https://en.unesco.org/news/ importance-­philosophy-­times-­crisis-­theme-­world-­philosophy-­day-­2020 Casalone, Carlo. 1999. Medicina, macchine e uomini. [Medicine, machines and men], 8. Brescia: Morcelliana. Colombo, Francesca. 2021. Addressing the hidden pandemic: The impact of the COVID-19 crisis on mental health. Article dated 7 May 2021 online at: www.oecd-­forum.org/posts/addressing-­ the-­hidden-­pandemic-­the-­impact-­of-­the-­covid-­19-­crisis-­on-­mental-­health-­f02d8e3e-­6252-­4f 4e-­91f5-­476ad2c9a027 (Accessed 21.11.2021). Fulford, Kenneth, Giovanni Stanghellini, and Matthew Broome. 2004. What Can Philosophy Do for Psychiatry? World Psychiatry (official journal of the World Psychiatric Association, WPA) 3: 130–5. (Accessed 21.11.2021). Kūle, Maija. 2002. Phenomenology and Culture. Riga: FSI. Michael, Marmot. 2015. What Kind of Society do We Want: Getting the Balance Right. The Lancet 385. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-­6736(15)60784-­X. Santos, H.C., M.E.W.  Varnum, and I.  Grossmann. 2017. Global Increases in Individualism. Psychological Science 28 (9): 1228–1239. Taquet, M., J.R. Geddes, M. Husain, S. Luciano, and P.J. Harrison. 2021. 6-Month Neurological and Psychiatric Outcomes in 236, 379 Survivors of COVID-19: A Retrospective Cohort Study Using Electronic Health Records. The Lancet Psychiatry 8 (5): 416–427. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. 1986. The Moral Sense and the Human Person. Analecta Husserliana XX. Dordrecht: ANHU. ———. 1990. The Human Condition Within The Unity-Of-Everything-That-Is-Alive. Analecta Husserliana XXXI. Dordrecht: ANHU.

Returning Home Algis Mickunas

Abstract  The paper interprets the unique dimensions of awareness without which humans could not engage in any venture. Such dimensions will be called ‘expressive phenomena’, ‘mood space’ or atmosphere’. Poly-centric poly-logue defies the traditional notions of sequential history; poly-logue constitutes a field of temporal depth wherein the ‘past’ partners are not passive, but participate equally in articulating, challenging, and interrogating a specific issue, topic or subject matter. Awareness of others is present not only as poly-logical ‘partners’ in a common venture of meaningful engagement, but above all as expressive; they are present as joyful, sorrowful, indifferent, angry and above all erotic. Thus, our sensibilities are pervaded by expressive phenomena. ‘Immanent transcendence’ means the presence of expressive phenomena which are not identical with the characteristics of things, although things, including humans, are given with these phenomena. The paper explains how the expressive phenomena encompassing human life was abandoned by Western modern metaphysics and ontology. All meanings and expressivity stem from the inner human predisposition to project the conceptions, feelings, thoughts, desires and hopes onto the indifferent, ‘externally-perceived’ world. Our home  – this planet – is a place of expressive phenomena which cannot be located inside some individual psyche but is found among and through populations and even things. Keywords  Phenomenology · Expressive phenomena · Communicative community · Polycentrism · Immanent transcendence · Metaphysics · Ontology · Pandemic

A. Mickunas (*) Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_10

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Introduction The modern Western lifeworld has become a magnet and an enemy, both oppression and salvation. It claims scientific universality and political liberation. It offers explanations of all that occurs in the cosmos, human dominance of the planet and colonization of neighboring planets. After all, man is ready to conquer space and escape to the Moon, where moondust can be made into water and lighter propellants for easier flights to colonize Mars. It has globalized by a specific ontology and metaphysics, both as reality and method, which are accepted by all nations as a sure path to progress and salvation from natural calamities, disease and even aging. Laboratories are sprouting around the globe to conduct research in all areas – from physics through chemistry, biology, sociology, genetics and even AI with an endless creation of algorithms, capable of producing ‘clean’ biological systems which surpass anything that ‘inadequate’ nature can produce. But it is a laboratory which produced a pandemic, the Covid-19 little ‘bug’, capable of ‘speaking’ in a cynical way: “Not so fast people, you are overstepping your limits.” There is nothing that concentrates the mind like a little bug which spreads global terror. Of course, the same laboratories have produced an anti-terror antidote which is regarded as progress. This essay will explore the modern ontological and metaphysical phenomena as the ground for the global spread of ‘progress’ and with it the spread of its own products by the means it itself constantly creates. Yet it is equally important to disclose the unique dimensions of awareness without which humans could not engage in any venture, from philosophy through modern progress. Such dimensions will be called ‘expressive phenomena’ or as others might have suggested ‘mood space’ or ‘atmosphere’ which are all-pervasive, encompassing and inescapable. They comprise a most fundamental environment whose rejection reduces the world and humans to a ‘corpse’. Without these phenomena, constituting our ‘aesthetic home’, there would be no need to worry about a minor chemical or biological interaction between some mechanism – such as a bio-­ chemical body and some other, although much smaller, viral entity. Here we must be very strict with any claim that purports to provide an explanation of events. Any explanation must be limited by its own principles without introducing features which such principles do not contain. If a scientist claims that we are present to direct empirical data and, as empirical beings, our organism reacts to whatever empirical environment is given, then there is no room for deviations. To claim that someone’s reaction was mistaken, because his physiological conditions were different from the statistical norm does not solve anything. After all this specific physiological condition reacted precisely as it had to; it was simply different from other physiological conditions which reacted precisely as they had to. To say that a corn, containing a black kernel, has some blight is nonsense; the chemical interaction of elements producing this kernel could not be anything else; the kernel is not a mistake; indeed, if it had not followed the precise chemical composition, then scientists would be shocked. Covid-19 is a different form of purely biological and chemical interaction and by itself is neither good nor bad, neither health nor disease.

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Empirically it does what it has to do. To introduce a simple term like ‘disease’ is to disclose a phenomenon which transgresses the pure bio-chemical interaction. We “spread the disease”, we say the “plague is coming”. We ask: “Have you seen the way that scientists are working to stop the spread of the pandemic?” The ‘pandemic’ is an expressive phenomenon which spreads before we or even the scientists know its mechanics. The public is warned to take precautions to contain its spread; thus, when one stands two meters away, one is ‘safe’ and life is protected. It would be nonsense to ask why someone wants to avoid the empirical fact of two chemical events from interacting, because their answer is ‘phenomenal’: for example, “I love my life, my family, my friends, my job. I love vacations, love to visit the wonders of the pyramids, the magnificent erotic statues and carvings of Khajuraho temples in central India, or the awesome challenge of the majestic Himalayas.” Before entering the basic philosophical discussion concerning the modern explanation of these expressive phenomena, it is advisable to explicate their unavoidable presence in various domains. Such explication will set a stage for daily understanding of the way that the pandemic, infecting the social environment, is both possible and communicated. It is also the case that our natural environment has been stripped of its expressive presence. While there is no lack of communication theories, what is missing is a fundamental explication of the levels of communicative phenomena themselves.

Communicative Community There is ample evidence that our age is one of communication and to such an extent that every child has the latest means, such as smartphones or laptop computers, to be ‘in touch’ with friends, global game partners and anonymous others. In many cases common discussions of events overlook the media and simply mention the content – for example: “Did you see the tornado in Oklahoma yesterday? Awesome”. No matter where or when, the images on media are seen as the thing itself. Yet any communication has to be understood in principle before one can understand the way it spreads its messages. At the outset, all communication is dialogical, although it is also extended by any media to be poly-logical. Most minimal dialogical process requires a three-fold orientation: relationship to a situation, a field or some theme in the field; one’s relationship to another person and relationship to oneself. This composition is prior to any question concerning whether the social should take priority over the individual or vice versa. In dialogue both commonality and individuality emerge. A person experiences his or her understanding and limitations only by relating to the other person’s interrogations and challenges in their mutual relationship to a context, a field and a theme, an issue or question in a field. It could be said that a person is decentered from ego-centricity by the presence of the other person, and in such a way that they recognize both their common engagement either in a topic, issue or a task, and their distinct personal

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contributions through mutual differentiation and limitation. ‘Society’ and ‘individual’ constitute themselves in a communicating, dialogical activity. Specific modes such as address and reply, trust and understanding are mutual. While turning to the other person, one also turns to a topic, object or problem in a field, inviting the other to consider the theme. The event is addressed through the dialogue. Essentially speaking, in dialogue the other person is not an object of someone’s intentionality but a co-operating partner in an undertaking; the other person enters one’s every act of intentionality. As co-operative and co-present, the other is given prior to an explicit experience of the other as a subject. A person’s relationship is solicited and shaped by an ‘addressing intentionality’, which has at the outset the world and the other taken for granted. (Waldenfels 1971). While the specific understanding might belong to the person’s experiences of the world, the person in dialogue is sharing in the experiences of the other person. The person comes to recognize his or her explicit understanding in the dialogical reflexivity. Here we have a ‘prime-mutuality’ simultaneously implicating two persons and, as we shall see shortly, various others. Yet we are not beginning with some anonymous ‘they’ nor do we take a mysterious leap into the ‘interiority’ of the other person; rather we approach both in dialogue. The dialogical motivation must be distinguished from an object motivation. The object motivates a person by its object characteristics which, nonetheless, are not neutral. They are significant points of interest in a field and thus have a meaning in their relationships to a field. The dialogical persons regard it not only as an object but as something that means something. In this sense, we are not only dialogical partners but also participants in a field which also ‘speaks’. For dialogical process, it is insufficient that something is ‘there’ in the world; that something must become a theme and a focus, a unitary attentional core. The theme, as an attentional core appearing through different phases of the dialogue, lends stability to the fluidity of the dialogue. Language is regarded as the basic medium in communication; language is poly-­ logical  – the latter is an extension of dialogue. To speak is to speak to someone about something – some topic, issue, value, religion or scientific theory, and thus, at the outset, to be a dialogical partner. But we also perceive with the perceptions of Others who limit and extend our awareness into poly-logical horizons. Without mentioning an author, I can say that gravity is now considered one among other forces in physics, but it also means that my dialogue is already poly-logical and includes Newton, Planck and others as a co-present. We might even have our favorite poly-logical partners across a vast temporal horizon. With any question I confront, I always consult the gigantic dialogues between Plato, Aristotle and the Arabic ‘doctors’ – and mix in the barefooted Socrates. After all, he defended philosophy to the death and became an example of what it is to be dialogical and poly-logical. To emphasize, the dialogical partner is not merely the currently co-present other, but the others whose orientations toward the world, their perceptions of the topic and the subject matter, are equally co-present. The books I read, the conversations I had with others – which may be long forgotten – comprise an extension of my perceptions and constitute a poly-centric and poly-logical field. I perceive with the perceptions of others; perceptions that contest, extend and modify my own regard of a

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given subject matter. The same is true of my current dialogical partner. She too is founding of and founded by a poly-centric field, and in our dialogue, we mutually involve our poly-centric awareness and extend our poly-logical participation. Poly-centric poly-logue defies the traditional notions of sequential history; poly-­ logue constitutes a field of temporal depth wherein the ‘past’ partners are not passive, but participate equally in articulating, challenging and interrogating a specific issue, topic or subject matter. At the poly-logical level we are constantly decentered from our limitations even when we would reject the others’ perceptions of a given subject matter. Indeed, the very preoccupation with rejection, the efforts to demonstrate the inadequacy, mistaken understanding and downright error, shows the extraordinary credence and co-presence of the other. This is the transparency principle: I know myself to the extent that I reflect from the other, from the way she articulates a specific theme. I see myself through the different perceptions offered by the other that connect us by way of a common theme, task or subject matter and allows us our recognition of our own positions. The current events, such as Covid-19, become a theme with its own memories, leading media to compare this event with Medieval Constantinople’s pandemic, with ‘demonic’ beings responsible for its spread. This was one way of scaring people into staying indoors, diminishing contacts and limiting infections. Many other ‘memories’ are paraded poly-logically, which opens the co-presence of variants of the same theme. One important aspect of the communalized meaning is that it comprises the individual’s and the community‘s direction and ‘sensibilities’. The latter, emerging from dialogical partial covering, appear as facets of the communalized meanings which become the community‘s sensibilities. No doubt, each person has their own sensibilities, perceptions and unified points of significant references in the lived context, yet the dialogical community in a certain way has its own sensibilities. One hears, perceives and tastes not only with one’s own sensibilities but also with those of the others, and they with ours. This is not merely an objective statement but a fact of consciousness of the human condition. Each person’s experience is oriented by her present sensibilities and by our sensibilities. This is significant for the understanding of the cohesion and the antagonisms of groups and ethnicities, of racism and even the ‘historical’ settling of accounts.

Immanent Transcendence Such sensibilities are also propagated by another, encompassing phenomena. In broad human terms, awareness of others is present not only as poly-logical partners in a common venture of meaningful engagement, but above all as expressive; they are present as joyful, sorrowful, indifferent, angry and above all erotic. Thus, our sensibilities are pervaded by expressive phenomena. In human encounters there are no pure data – the so-called external body – and hence no need for analogization or projection. It has long been noted that even an infant of seven or eight months

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answers with comfort and pleasure to a smile and with fear to a terrifying expression. Moreover, the infant can respond to a terrifying or pleasant voice, even if the direct physiological characteristics of the producer of the voice are not present, i.e., if the speaker is in another room. Erwin Straus goes so far as to suggest that the reading of direct expression goes across racial and species barriers. (Straus 1966). In this sense immanent transcendence means the presence of expressive phenomena which are not identical with the characteristics of things, although things, including humans, are given with these phenomena. The particular expressions pass, but in passing they create a form for continuation, for repetition, by others. (Merleau-Ponty 1962). While inhering in individual gesture, expression captures others in its mood. This being captured is well-depicted in such phenomena as desire and eroticism, where one is transfigured, elevated, ennobled or degraded. One way the power of expression is depicted in enlarged images can be gleaned from myths. While all humans engage in rituals that appeal to unseen powers, the latter are ineffective if they would be merely ideological constructs. Rather, they are intensive concentration of expressive characteristics: they love, they hate, threaten with horrible punishments, demand our passionate commitments and our bodily gestures of self-effacement and subjection. Mythological figures are depictions of expressive awareness that goes beyond the location of such figures. While the latter are regarded as transcendent beings, in awareness they are a concentration of immanent transcendence – the manifestation of the expressivity of the world and its moods, depths, attractions and terrors. Expressivity in myths pervades the universe. There is no dry, geometric space or digital time in concrete life. When one is confronted by the expressive characterizations describing for example Aphrodite, one finds a description of worldly moods across all events and things. It is the tenderness of everything calling to the enchantment, to the embrace and to the sweet and breath-taking flow of all into all. It is an expression manifest across all things as attractive and harmonious. The fields of flowers shimmer with the radiance of the dawn, and all come to life. And she is contrasted to Artemis, the feminine. This goddess is the soul; the expression of wildness with its heights and depths, with her animals and tormenting beauty, with her rejecting look and maternal care and her blood-lusting hunt - lust, playfulness, tenderness, bright glory, inaccessibility and horror  – these are expressive dimensions. And Hermes, the solitary and lonely night, offering solace and comfort to the traveler, is not some projection of psychological emotions. (Walter 1974). As will be seen shortly, such ‘projections’ are inventions of modern ontology and metaphysics. Van Gogh went ‘insane’ while trying to capture the expressive phenomena on canvas. When asked why he was painting wheatfields, his answer was: “I am painting the golden tone of the day”. The mythical figures are depicted as transcending the characterization of things in their empirical appearances and anatomical properties; yet as manifestations of expressivity, the figures are inner-worldly. Expressivity can appear everywhere: in the faces of statues, where the great utopian dreams of days to come are inscribed in the uplifted postures of the ‘revolutionary’ classes; the victories shine from the canvasses, tensed with fierce steeds and proud warriors, while the defeats are spread

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across the canvas in prostrate bodies – and all directly present across the writings, paintings, stories and edicts of civilizations and their cultures. It is an expressive power which manifests the Greek movement toward theo-centrism, an expressive power of bodily movements. For example, happiness and enthusiasm are demonstrated with arms spread and open toward the sky while, when the things go wrong the bodily movements are of slavish submission in kneeling and prostration. It is a spontaneous expression of being moved, of being gripped by a presence where what does the gripping and the being gripped are one: a singular and common sensibility. In Western thinking, the most pervasive phenomenon of the quest for truth is eros. After all, philosophy is an erotic quest for wisdom and what it seeks as its telos must also want to be sought. The ‘erotic logic’ of philosophy can be used for the understanding of all cosmic phenomena of expressivity. Erotic passion desires all things not as material entities or among humans as physiological beings, but as desired by others. In brief, it desires to be desired. The Greek expression of eros culminates in Platonic thought where eros is defined as a great spirit, a daimon. Like all spirits, he is an intermediate between the divine and the mortals; he spans the chasm and pervades both as their mutual unity. The aim for which eros yearns is perfection itself, the limitless idea which no mundane thing can approximate. In Platonism the most exalted ideas, the ultimate realities, are attained through stages. Each one is reached by the propulsion of eros which is dissatisfied by any attained term; it seeks to transgress every limitation and aims at the universal, the limitless, the infinite. The ideal constitutes its ultimate telos. (Krueger 1978). Eros in Plato encompasses with its own life the ultimate; the perfect being. This erotic ultimate becomes the telos of eros, but a telos which finds eros facing itself, which finds its own desire in the erotic ultimate. The ultimate is an expression of the erotic search for itself. In this way eros aims at itself; eros is driven by eros. This is the secret reason why the idea of the ultimate good had to be pervaded by the idea of the beautiful, the attractive, the desirable. When the good, as the motive force of Aristotelian prime mover, was translated into a Christian God, it became an object of worship, a ‘loving father’ – loving and wanting to be loved; angry, benevolent but never indifferent. While eros is a good example of the worldly phenomena, such phenomena are multiple and can be found in other civilizations. Despite colonial impositions and interpretations, the tradition of India maintains the expressive phenomena not just as transcending the features of things and humans, but as cosmic dimensions. No doubt, this tradition contains various ‘ultimate’ and transcendent figures, such as Brahma, Krishna and Shiva, but their very being depends on the cosmic dimensions of maya, shakti, lila, kama, kali, (meaning veil, energy, play, passion, time). What is significant is that these dimensions are pracritic, maternal. They overdetermine all events, things and the ultimate figures. The cosmic energies – shakti – are always at play. Lila, forming and transforming all things and forming appearances; maya, which are passionate and erotic; kama, forever appearing and disappearing and kali, time. Without these dimensions the world would be a sum of things. Thus even such

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a divinity as Shiva would be sava, a corpse; he exists as a cosmic dancer only through the play of cosmic, expressive phenomena. To show the inescapable presence of these expressive phenomena as independent from all things and yet their creative force one must consult the eminent text, Mahabharata. The story recounts that while the king is expecting a birth of a son, a female, Draupadi, is born in full blossom from her own fire (agni), and thus is self-­ birthing, and gives no deference to any of the patriarchal figures. She is the irresistible kama (erotic passion) for whose hand numerous warriors strive; she mocks them and plays with their passions, and thus she is lila; she has power over their desires and thus she is shakti; she promises and withholds, and thus she is maya. Just as Aphrodite or Artemis, Draupadi is a concentrated image of expressive phenomena which do not belong to the features of things but are cosmic. They pervade and lend all things their appearance of excitement, fire, playfulness, passion – without escape. All things in the universe are not affects of her being a cause of their actions, but their very actions are manifestations of the passionate, playful, energetic cosmic phenomena. (Zimmer 1951). The expressive dimensions are taken for granted in the civilization of Japan. They can be manifest in extremes, yan-qi – yo-ki, cheerful atmosphere, or yin-qi, in-ki, gloomy mood. It can be present in various images, such as ‘hazy day,’ ‘shiny night’, ‘splendid heavens’, or, according to Mencius and his Taoist background, hao-jan chih ch’I (kozen-no-ki) is the strong moving spiritual power. The qi/ki is greater and larger, wider and stronger and fills the world between heaven and earth and to the very ends of the world. For humans, the practice of balanced and thus righteous life establishes a proper qi/ki, and such an establishment reveals the empty and formless way of Tao. The latter is what must be ‘experienced’ in order to understand even the images of qi/ki, since they are merely a help to get beyond images. Such images were expressed in many ways, including poetry. Thus a follower of Mencius, Wen T’ien-Hsiang, composed a poem Cheng-ch’i-ko, or ‘The song of the right qi/ki.’ A famous Japanese poet, Toko Fujita, wrote a poem as a response to Wen T’ien-Hsiang, where the images of qi/ki were totally Japanized to include Japanese dignity and spirit, a Japanese sea, cherry blossoms, Mt. Fuji and a Samurai sword. (Mickunas 2018).

Metaphysics and Ontology The global spread of Covid-19 was carried round the world by the daily news, but no news is available concerning the means or the highways which carried the expressive phenomena with the news. To come to terms with these issues, it is advisable to turn to the reasons how the above explicated world phenomena encompassing human life was abandoned by Western modern metaphysics and ontology. Although frequently confused, those terms cover different domains. Metaphysics is concerned with the formal, invisible, meaningful and repeatable, while ontology focuses upon the nature of things of ‘this’ world. No doubt, at times the latter is

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interpreted equally as invisible, and is presumed to be metaphysical in character. This character depends on the ways that metaphysics assumes pre-eminence over ontology, and thus is placed in a position of defining what reality is. There is a protracted Western poly-logue concerning the relationship between them, expressed in various dualisms: formal and material, mental and physical, subjective and objective. To grasp this relationship for our purposes requires a brief disclosure of the birth of modern metaphysics and ontology. (Mickunas 2012). The birth was prefigured by a fundamental question brought to light by Greek thought concerning the nature of a substantial entity. Such an entity can be either an aggregate of parts, like barley and wheat in a barrel, or it can form a unity. If a substance is an aggregate, then it cannot possess characteristics apart from those of the parts. If it is a unity, then the substance as a whole must possess attributes belonging to the whole. The attributes of the latter must be more than the sum of the attributes of the parts. For example, water as a substance possesses a qualitative attribute of being wet. Hydrogen and oxygen, the parts of which water is composed, are not wet. They possess their own attributes. The aggregation of the parts should then be equal to the whole, and the latter should be equal to the sum of the parts and their attributes. Since these elements do not possess the attribute of wetness, then their aggregation, to form water, should not possess wetness. In this case the whole is equal to the sum of its parts and their attributes. This means that the basic ontological component of the universe would be the part and all things would be equal to the sum of the parts. But in this sense, the attribute of wetness of water is an ontological mistake. Wetness would have to be attributed to ‘the mistake of the senses’. This immediately casts doubt on all our qualitative awareness of things, including colors and sounds, seeing a thing as human, or a cat, tree or fish. Perceptual experience tells us that the parts are unified into a whole and that we see the characteristics of the whole thing. But the theory of the primacy of parts allows that the whole is a sum of discrete parts and their attributes. Here we face a dilemma: if we perceive the whole with its attributes, and if the whole is a sum of parts and their attributes, then our perceptions cannot be trusted. It is at this juncture that modern Western thinkers opted for the ontological position that all things in the world are composed of parts – atoms, or in current terms the ‘building blocks’ of the universe – with their primary characteristic of magnitude: res extensa. Of course, such atoms are not accessible to perceptual awareness; we see colors, hear sounds, greet the morning star, feel the breeze, taste the wine, but none of these ‘sensations’ give us access to the ontological reality. In principle, what is perceived directly must have a ‘place’, and this place was designated to be a subject containing the secondary qualities, while the real objective world was composed of primary particles having quantifiable magnitudes in the form of atoms. The subject does not exist in the ontological world and is designated as metaphysical, one expression of which is ‘mind’ – the mental subject: the result is mind/body dualism. In contrast to the ontological reality, the subject does not exist; its only presence is metaphysical, specifically when it ‘discovers’ in its interiority mathematics  – the very foundations of modern sciences. Moreover, all concepts, such as values and expressions of joy or hate such as religious, cultural or aesthetic, are subjective. The worldly expressive

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phenomena are reduced to subjective psychology, disconnected from others and the world. (Mickunas 2018). While the resolution of the part-whole controversy led to atomism and the subjectivation of perceptual experience, the question that has to be answered is concerned with the access to the ‘imperceptible’ reality of the atomic parts. There is no other avenue except through the subject who has to posit a method which must exclude perceptual-qualitative imprecisions. This method is quantitative, i.e. metaphysical in the form of mathematics and, in accordance with modern ontology, must be mental and subjective. Despite its objective non-existence, the subjective mind is the transcendent site of mathematical metaphysics as a source of all explanations such that the subject can pronounce: “Let us look at the world mathematically.” The choice of a mathematical metaphysics as a method is done on the basis of a will to control, to master the environment. It is quite clear that if we know how to define something mathematically, we also know how to make it. Metaphysics in the mathematical form as a method is, in principle, technical. It contains rules of construction and as a result these rules can be applied to anything in a way so that application results in the construction of everything in terms of mathematical formulations: instrumental reason. For modernity, mathematical formulations are not only methodological but founding for all theoretical thought (Husserl 1970). In this sense we can construct mathematical systems and produce objectivity in terms of such systems – the social construction of reality including ‘scientific socialism’ and algorithmically-­ constructed AI as a ‘new species’. The subjective metaphysics as method of the modern sciences cannot be derived from the perceptual world or from the homogeneous material world. (Stroeker 1986). Since mathematical procedures are at base ‘technical’, then, when applied to a quantitatively-conceived reality, the same procedures are productive of reality. This means that mathematical definitions are both productive and causal. By calculating and arranging material processes, the human is in a position to calculate and predict the results of such processes. This ontology and metaphysics is a condition which renamed human masses as homo laborans – Man as maker. By the 18th Century, reality was no longer defined by its being but in accordance with ‘the conditions for the possibility of being’. It is no accident that Kant did not discuss ontological questions, but the “transcendental conditions for knowledge.” He was concerned with metaphysical conditions, not knowledge as we live it in direct evidence of things. Reality is a calculative possibility of material conditions and predictable results. In turn if we project specific results and calculate their material aggregation, we can calculate and set up the material conditions and achieve the calculated results. The basic conception is simple: everything can be made into everything. We can produce materials out of liquids, liquids out of rocks, computers which produce algorithms for the production of novel biological beings, all of which processes become the means for more projects and their fulfillment. Yet what leads the process is the possibility of the increased formalization of propositions, resulting in the concept of formal systems which can be differentiated into formal sub‑systems and of splitting up of systems into distinct scientific disciplines. Each constructed mathematical

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domain can be applied and form a specific discipline. Thus, we have physics, macro and micro physics and physical chemistry; biology, evolutionary biology, chemical biology and genetic biology; psychology, psycho-genetics, social genetics, psycho-­ chemistry, behavioral chemistry and so on. Each is in a position to define its mathematical domain and to make events happen by producing the required conditions and results. The increased submission of events under human control to yield increasing power for increasing control is the source of what comprises the modern notion of progress. We project and calculate the desired results and thus design the material conditions to yield such results. But the more results we project and the more material conditions we establish to yield the results, the more power we gain to establish more conditions to achieve more desired results. In this sense it is the progress of material power over nature in a technological form. Progress does not mean an acquisition of greater knowledge but a constant incrementation of technological-­ material means to yield projected material results; the latter can also become the technological means to yield further results, and so on. The shaping of matter into new technologies opens in turn a demand for other technologies and discoveries. If a technological means makes material discoveries possible, the new discoveries will bring technological implementation to suit our needs ad  infinitum. No achieved technical stage is adequate; every stage calls for new and improved technologies to yield new intrusions into the material domain to yield new results. Progress must be without regression, without death, and all formal systems and transformations of the lived world into a technically re-made environment are maintenances of this permanent structure. Progress has no ‘subject’ that would progress. Its aim and its subject are itself and thus it is self‑referential. Progress is its own destiny. It constitutes its own increasing formal refinements, efficiencies and ‘improvements’ without attaining final purpose. It is a sui generis process – an independent subject – and humans are its objects. It also created a global network of ‘highways’ both in communication and transportation. Materials and goods crisscross the globe just as travelers, tourists on crowded ships, planes, buses, trains and cars enjoy the ‘sights’ everywhere. All these means and all these people also spread everything, including viruses – for example Covid-19. The appeal of progress is simple: one can have anything, be anyone, go anywhere, relate to ‘others’. There is the entire modern globalization of magical metaphysical productivity. While everyone has equal rights, the latter are, in a practical domain, the right to obtain a profession through training, the right to engage in private enterprise and the right to move to any region to sell one’s expertise – to become nomadic. One becomes detached from one’s specific region and its symbolic designs of identity and joins the emergent nomadic civilization of detached experts whose only real commitments are to the technological or entrepreneurial global progress and the technical communities speaking one metaphysical language. Such a nomadic civilization is most attractive since it introduces continuous novelties in every area of social life: of conveniences, medicines, communications, mass means of rapid transportation by air and luxury ships. These become global ‘roads’ available to

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those who have expertise or a service capability: they too become global nomads. There are tourists everywhere, photographing and recording everything including themselves, but perhaps never really experiencing anything meaningful for their own lives. It is a nomadic, mechanical ritual without deep cultural awareness. To speak principally, they have not ‘understood’ anything – they are simply capturing images on their cameras. The metaphysical magical discourses are of algorithms embedded in vast technical systems which promise and produce perceptual and sensuous ‘beauty’ technologies, offering everyone the means to achieve all sorts of advertised ‘ideals’ in any corner drugstore, beauty parlor, grocery outlet and exercise place. There is a skin-­ deep global equalization in numerous domains lending the appearance of increasing material equality. Everyone can have similar foods, spices or clothing  – despite differences in quality. Everyone enjoys an apparent equality in terms of the socially-­ proliferated ideals and looks. The saturation of all domains with the images, tastes, sounds and conceptualities of ‘the good life’ lends technology a magical power. Images of an ideal female, an ideal male, the ideal body from toenails to hair, are proliferated for the ‘needs of consumers’. Of course, ‘needs’ are just as invented as their fulfillment is in a unique consumer imperative: the consumer not only wants the latest thing; he must want to consume. Ideology is no longer a matter of consciousness reflecting the material-economic or technical conditions but an inscription in the body in the images, passions and desires appearing in magazines and on the body. Advertisements, videos, television programmes and movies are replete with expressive phenomena in order to keep the consumer consuming.

The Returning and Back Home Given that all expressive phenomena for modern thinking are subjective, one major effort to keep the bleak, material world attractive and livable is an invented thesis of expression as ‘objectivation’. The indifferent empirical experience, the impressions of things and the bodies of others, produced by light-waves, is invested with expressive characteristics by the objectivations of the experiencer’s inner psychological states. All the cosmic expressivity, the magnificent sunset, the exploding energies of stars, the morning glory reaching for the sunrise, are now the property of the internal states of the modern subject. The internal states are projected and attached to the indifferent external sense data, lending these data an expressive character. This chapter’s claim is that the experienced expressions of another human are actually a multiplication of the inner states of the experiencer. Apart from being solipsistic, all that is given in the world as erotic, sad, terrifying or exciting are the inner contents of the experiencer projected on an indifferent mechanical universe, including the mechanical movements of one’s own body and the bodies of others. This notion of objectivation, or projection, is regarded by anthropology as the origin of sacrificial practices, totemism, fetishism, ancestral worship, symbolism and myth. The

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primitives adorned the indifferent world with the objectivations of their own emotional content – their psychodrama – in order to give it a human face. In addition, this thesis employs various magical terms to characterize this experience: anthropomorphism, personification and besoulment. It is assumed that all meaning and expressivity stem from an inner human predisposition to project the conceptions, feelings, thoughts, desires and hopes onto the indifferent, externally-perceived world. Yet precisely this relegation precludes any kind of justifiable understanding of the prevalent consensus that we constantly encounter expressive bodies in our experience of and interaction with others, and the inevitable immersion in worldly phenomena of ‘furious storms’ or ‘gentle breezes’, which make things and others present. The brief explication of the ontology and metaphysics which resulted in a modern subject as the total possessor of inner feelings as expressive characteristics of the world, also precludes the understanding of the global and local media and their spreading of the ‘news’, plus the promotion of social communication, the exchange of virtual images and transmission of short expressions of the states of the minds and bodies of the transmitters. The latter – through different kinds of media such as social media platforms, the newest technical tools of communication and the virtual world in general – is the ‘bearer’ of expressive moods, excitements and messages which capture entire populations; which make differences in expressive phenomena between ages, genders, minorities, races and ethnoses, creating pluralistic attitudes toward others and the entire world. While scientists, psychologists and economists are searching for causes of behavior in individual feelings, thoughts, desperations and anger, many fail to note that our home – this planet – is a place of expressive phenomena which cannot be located inside individual psyches, but is found among and through populations and even things. Around the world the situation of Covid-19 became a social, cultural, economic and even racial ‘football’, crowded by expressive phenomena. This is well-testified to by the notion that if an individual says that a particular action is not appropriate, the statement remains his or her subjective, private opinion. One has a right to speak, with or without any technical media from print to television and social media paying attention, unless the image appears on such media as attractive and beneficial, is spread globally and acquires ‘followers’. Social media creates, step-by-step, an image culture, starting with Facebook, then Instagram, then Tik-Tok, then leading onwards to new platforms as they are devised. This does not imply that the ‘followers’ will listen to the message; the ‘look’ is the crucial primary factor. In other words, expressive phenomena do their job and influence ‘followers’ – as long as the followers like the mood, forms and images of the message, which capture, captivate and constitute a psychological attitude and not a rational position to be defended, contested or debated. In this way one dominating ‘opinion’ can be seen across numerous media globally, thus appearing as many voices or images. Everyone exposed to this media has seen and heard this ‘globally important person’ and their looks – carried by their ‘opinion’. But the real issue is more basic. Other ‘subjective opinions’ using the same social media will also appear and will be seen globally as exciting and fascinating, completely obfuscating the

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‘opinion’. The winner will be the one whose rhetoric is for a brief moment more attractive, outlandish and even more irrational – as long as it begins to dominate the various media. The pandemic phenomenon has demonstrated that modern Western ontological attempts to reduce the worldly phenomena to some invented psychological interiority of a subject is just as dramatic a failure as the dramatic presence across civilizations and our daily social environments of expressivity, including virtual phenomena. The failure to accept its presence leads to its proliferation through media as an individual’s right to express their ‘private’opinions and to be accepted or rejected by others for their private opinions and emotions. Thus, the governments of open societies and their media are playing a game between the pervasive presence of expressive phenomena which are spread and promoted by everyone. They then pretend they are not responsible for the negative effects of that influence because such phenomena are a subjective and private matter of each individual’s state of emotion. Here modern ontology is at the base; it created the modern subject and reduced the expressive phenomena to subjective emotions, inaccessible to anyone but the individual.

References Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. Carr, D. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Krueger, Gerhard. 1978. Eros und Mythos bei Plato. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception, tr. C Smith. New  York: The Humanities Press. Mickunas, Algis. 2012. The Divine Complex and Free Thinking. Chesterhill, N.J: Hampton Press. ———. 2018. From Zen to Phenomenology. New York: Nova Science Publications. Straus, Erwin. 1966. Phenomenological Psychology. English ed. New York: Basic Books. Stroker, Elizabeth. 1986. Philosophical Investigations of Space tr. Mickunas A.  Athens: Ohio University Press. Waldenfels, Bernhart. 1971. Zwischenreich des Dialogs. Den Haag: Martin Nijhoff. Walter, Otto. 1974. Die Gestalt und das Sein. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Zimmer, Heinrich. 1951. Philosophies of India. New York: Pantheon Books.

The Body as an Ontopoietic Ecosystem that Somatizes Otherness Roberto Marchesini

Abstract  The body is an interweaving of relations and references that refer to non-­ present others and rely on them to realize their predicates. The phenomenology of life, and in particular the areas of research pioneered by the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, helps us to understand this relational ontology that places the body at the center, not as a disjointed entity, closed in on itself, but as a threshold of hospitality. This ecological vision of existence therefore calls for a profound transformation of the way of conceiving of the human being in relation to the biosphere, in a new dimension with respect to anthropocentrism. Questioning the isolationist principle of humanism does not mean relegating humanity to the background but recognizing the relational and copulative meaning of humankind itself. The great ecological crisis that the entire planet is experiencing, putting at risk the future of the human race itself, as the pandemic is demonstrating, is due to a cultural paradigm based on the alleged separation of the human being from the biosphere. Today it is necessary to bridge this gap, starting from philosophical reflection. Keywords  Eco-ontology · Post-humanism · Phenomenology of life · Body · Technology · Heteronomy · Virus · Ecological crisis · Anthropocentrism

Premise We have an autarkic image of ontology, in terms of the existential dimension. This approach, combined with an essentialist conception of predicates – seen as the emanation of something inherent – prevents us from understanding the relational meaning of life. We are so caught up in ontological isolationism that we fail to comprehend R. Marchesini (*) Centre study for Post-human philosophy, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_11

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that the somatic image, which makes us appear as separate entities, is only one of the possible ways of understanding our presence. If we changed the perceptual register of the body, as suggested by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2000), we would realize that the subject-other dualism is only one of the many perspectives to view the emergence of the reality – a perspective that our sensory organs adopt to constitute an adaptive unity. The sharp disjunction we experience is not unreal but is only one of the possible interfaces that a body can construct. As an entity that, insofar as it is alive, continually transforms itself and introjects external elements, the body is the core of our Dasein. Yet, at the same time, the body is obscure, because, after all, we know little about what a body can do. Certainly, the epidermal disjunction, which we experience through the surface sensory organs, only provides a partial account of the ontopoietic process and of our actual existential dimension, which actually is made up of multiple relational levels. The inability to understand the body as a niche of relationships, as a welcoming place, as a landscape, as something that is neither passive nor autonomous, limits our propensity to view predicative events as relational outcomes. It forces us to seek in beings themselves a justification for the way they appear, as if they were monads. If, on the contrary, we observe the dynamics of the body, we will realize that every expression present on a certain level of reality is the result of a relational introjective process that takes place on an underlying level: a predicative event is never emanated, but always hybridized. In other words, we should approach the emergence of predicates through the lens of eco-ontology and focusing on the multiple layers of bodily phenomenology. This also means that it is not possible to preserve the body, but only to let it transit through relationships and be changed through them. It means moving away from the dualist conception as a disjunctive operator, in order to take on a connective view of ontopoiesis, where each relationship image is nothing more than the expression of a level of reality. By modifying the perceptual perspective, what previously appeared as external now becomes an integral part of the entity. The body is a multi-layered core of affectivity, with the latter term being understood in Spinozian terms, i.e. as openness or reference to a content, or ‘vagueness’, to use the words of Giacomo Leopardi (1827). However, affectivity is not only a reference to an idea, but primarily a copula that puts the body in relation with the world. Twentieth Century quantum physics has shown us the corpuscular and undulatory nature of matter: every phenomenon can be situated on two levels of reality which, although different, are equivalent. The Apollonian form converts into the Dionysian flow and vice versa, in a dance that can never be broken up into a still image of its choreography. But this should not make us think that form is pure appearance, because every relational expression produces a form. What eco-­ ontology suggests is that every form, rather than the revelation of an underlying essence, is a self-presentation of the relations that the entity has established with other levels of reality – that is to say, it is a subsumption of previous welcomes. It is not easy to shift from an essentialist and therefore disjunctive vision to an eco-­ ontological or relational perspective, where the predicates of the phenomenon are seen as the result of interaction, emerging through interchange events. It is not easy because it is counter-intuitive and because it goes against a cultural framework that

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has severed the appearance of form from its generative roots. We seek the self-­ contained sphericity of entities, and we believe that authenticity is expressed in purity; that otherness means other-than-self. The solitude of human beings in the modern age is often attributed to a series of decentralizing processes, especially the loss of the centrality that was once assured by some aspects of medieval thought, such as Ptolemaic geocentrism. I believe, on the contrary, that this solitude is not the result of a decentralization, but rather the outcome of the anthropocentrism introduced by the humanistic revolution of the fifteenth century. Humanism has undoubtedly allowed important intellectual shifts, such as the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, the parable of this paradigm has already shown its contradictions in the twentieth century. Humanism holds the naive belief that human beings are impervious to the world, that they are autarkic in their ontopoiesis, and that they make up the very metric of the poem of the universe. In this view, humanity is destined to dominate the scene of reality from above, and to extract the objectivity of things through its universal lens. Like every illusion, humanism has misled us by turning presumptions into facts. The disjunctive claim has prevented us from understanding how much the inevitable ecological crisis would affect our existence, by modifying principles that were believed to be certain and independent of external conditions. For the same reason, we misunderstood the role of technology, ignoring how it would literally alter our perspective and not merely extend our reach or increase the power of our actions. Most aberrations of the twentieth century stem from our unawareness of the mutagenic significance of technology and of the binding character of the biosphere. The First World War can be viewed as a war between machines and human beings, between steel and flesh. Similarly, we cannot ignore the role of the post-war mass media in the emergence of totalitarianism and the grand collective narratives. The idea that only human labor has value has led us to consider natural resources as cheap goods, with the result that at the end of that century we found ourselves facing an ecological crisis reminiscent of the great mass extinctions of the geological eras. The awareness that the non-human universe is of fundamental importance to human life, not only from an environmental point of view but precisely because of the ontopoietic repercussions that it implies, has thus given rise to a profound philosophical revision that takes the name of Post-Humanism. This transformation should not be seen as a form of anti-humanism, because there are countless points of affinity between this perspective and the achievements of humanism. At the same time however, it cannot be considered a simple form of neo-humanism, because there are just as many differences between these two approaches. The tragedy of the pandemic has shown us how the human phenomenological experience cannot be separated from the network of relationships that characterize the biosphere. The body, reduced to an epidemiological matrix, has brought out new existential dimensions. Human actions do not only affect ‘cheap’ natural resources, but have serious repercussions on the social dimension of the human body itself.

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On Affectivity The body, by its very constitution, is an open and thermodynamically unstable system, which relies on constant external contributions to sustain itself and perform its functions. Most of its expressions do not derive from acquisitions made in the course of its specific history, but result from previous experiences that are lost in the mists of time; many of these are presented to us as resonances, as memories of experiences which were not lived individually. Every ‘being-there’ is always an expression of a ‘having-been-there-before’ in this world, a rediscovery of images that rest in the depths of our unconscious and that reflect experiences lived by our ancestors. The evolutionary approach has also shown us a picture of relational somatization from a diachronic perspective, because what our body expresses is the result of a set of hybridizing events that have occurred throughout phylogeny. What we call adaptation is actually an integration of forms, so that the shape of our palms and our opposable thumbs are due to hybridization with the conformation of branches, just as the growth of the crown of an oak tree reflects the light opportunities of its environment. This non-autonomy of the body and its constitutive openness to the outside, the relational nature of its presence on the stage of the here and now – all this makes the body a copula towards the world. The body is inclined to look for connections, to rely on encounters and hospitality and to be, therefore, heteronomous. Affectivity, then, is not the reference to an idea, but an opening to the outside, where the idea itself becomes functional to this process, acting as an instrument that enables the conformity of the copula. If love is openness towards a potential beloved, it is evident that the idea serves more as an orientational compass than as content for affectivity. Tying affectivity to an idea would lead back to the principle of autonomy of the entity, which results in the claim of a non-relational ontology. Affectivity, instead, is the insufficiency of the entity, but not in terms of lack. Rather, it is a form of exuberance, because the copulative process does not take place passively but through an effort-tension of the body. Affectivity is therefore a reference to something possible in the world, which is neither predetermined nor generic. It is what allows a full presence that is always also a singularity of state. The body presents itself as a single large territory, delimited on the map of space by a resistant and well-defined elastic film: that is, skin. Even if its shape changes in tension and its profile is articulated, we can imagine the body as a sphere that contains a pulsating entity, the nomadic self within the paths of its somatized reflection. The body changes over time, through growth and aging, while memory gives us the false impression of a self that goes undaunted through the world, in an evolutionary progression that never stops. Hence a feeling of disjunction from the other, which makes us feel abandoned in eternal solitude. The body is felt in the sense of pain and urgency, when the pain takes hold of you to the point of bending you over and making you scream when you want to escape that prison of suffering. Or else, the body is felt when it imposes its organic functions on you, making you feel small and precarious, and reminding you that your self is a captive. This is the problem of

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presence that turns into an infinite instant when, at the end of the day, you wonder where you are ... really. But the body is never in one place; it is not an object that occupies a given space. Its parts do not represent some kind of toolbox at the disposal of a master self. Likewise, the body is not an impermeable sphere that can be visited through internal wanderings. The body does not have an autarkic identity, it does not possess predicates that can be evaluated, if not in their multiple manifestations in a thousand relational streams. It always and only manifests itself in relationships and, like a wave, it pierces the corpuscular idea of time so that, as much as it may seem otherwise, the somatic dimension can never be frozen in a still image. The body is not thrown into the world, the victim of a hic et nunc to be doubted or transcended, projecting itself into death in search of a meaning. Its condition can never be fixed in a here-and-now. The body does not properly belong to a time or a space: it always escapes the question of being, because it constantly moves within space-time. In manifesting itself, the body expresses the occasional nature of the relationship established in the moment, the singularity of a shaping conjugative encounter; consequently, it is never equal to itself. Every somatic action is the conjugation of a hidden root that is impossible to extract, because the body is a relationship and in expressing itself it can only highlight a hybrid predicate. Every analysis of the body is therefore the observation of a trace imprinted by the body on external reality, a shadow blurred by multiple recalls; a sort of echo of what has already passed or a suspension on something that is about to happen. Even our thoughts are, in the final analysis, a refraction that escapes any spatio-temporal collocation. The body manifests itself in the relationship and brings out a transitory shape in it so that, even if we could alienate ourselves from the body and observe it from an external position, we would only witness its varied but already-surpassed shadow. However, it is a "connecting structure" (Bateson 1972) that inevitably reflects or refers to something non-inherent in morphopoiesis. Thus, we can witness two aspects of reality. (i) On the one hand, the epiphanic process of otherness, which is always something more than an external phenomenon, because it is the expression of our relational projection. (ii) On the other hand, the diachronic dictate which the body obeys at all times, where Being-there, feeling oneself in the here and now, cannot be separated from a Having-been-there-before. The body has always already undergone a previous conformation, causing the knower to bear the traces of the known imprinted in its epistemic apparatus, so as to translate them into a future condition that is already implicit in the relationship itself. From the very first phases of conception, the body opens its relational thresholds with the world and does so on the basis of a past that echoes in every part of its being. There is not a moment in the life of a body that does not depend on having already been in the world, that is not in some way ‘the memory of a previous Being-­ there’. However, should one seek to retrace this past, it would shatter like a hypnotic image, a reflection of a seemingly infinite regression. There is not an instant that

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cannot be linked to pre-experiential memories: the sense of Having-been-there-­ before brings out resonances that sweep through individual existence in waves. If we move away from the dichotomous reading of soul and body, with the consequent transmigrative interpretations, we can understand the true meaning of Having-been-­ there-before. This significance has nothing to do with a presumed reincarnating soul, but with a body that always brings back what preceded it, in the form of experience that is not individually acquired. Being in the world, then, means recognizing the link joining individual experience with the whole  – both in a spatial sense towards the whole of nature, and in a temporal sense, towards what came before us, towards the living forms that still dwell, incredibly alive, inside us. This resonance contains confused images of the world, an orientative toolbox that has translated the phylogenetic a posterioris into a prioris. Above all, it carries a copulative power that fills the body with hunger for the world on every interface level. Resonance is therefore yearning, the exact opposite of nostalgia: it is the joy of finding oneself immersed, conjugated and rooted in the world. A child who opens its eyes to the world rejoices in finding itself again: resonance is the pleasure of homecoming, the excitement of adherence, of finding full relational conformity between the self and all that surrounds it. Affectivity, as sensitivity of feeling and as a burst of the will to act, is anything but dimmed in a newborn. Indeed, it is more vivid than ever, fierce in its blossoming, more poignant than it will ever be in the course of the person's existence. In time, the memories of pre-experiential fragments will be dispersed in the world through the donation that existence entails, but in that moment of first blossoming they are urgencies that explode with vitality in the world. Every living thing coming into being is a ringing of celebratory bells, not a vacuum that sucks the world in. Willingness to be hospitable cannot be considered a lack, but a gift. The same goes for the body, which is bound to the world through the act of making space for it within itself and making itself available to it. Having-been-there-before makes it possible to mobilize the welcoming mechanisms of being-for-the-world. We could say then that the body has a home of its own, and can therefore host others, but its home is the multi-layered core of affectivity. Resonance simply gives the body copulative coordinates; that is to say, it puts it in relation with the world through precise welcoming dispositions. However, by defining languor (i.e., the copulative motive) and not the reference, every predicative result is, in fact, entrusted to occasionality and to the principle of eveniential singularity. Resonance does not hinder ontopoiesis but underlies it, so we could say that the body, if deprived of its Having-been-­ there-before, would be condemned to an eternal present. The conforming act, therefore, is not the development of a performative device, but the birth of a relational entity that must appeal to the world in order to find its own consistency. Thus, the act of being present never corresponds to being thrown into the moment, but rather means constructing the moment through the interaction between different times. Through copulative yearning, the body builds its rootedness and shows itself in an ever-changing form. The body is never a given, a res extensa that can be nailed down on space-time axes and mathematicized: even its here-and-now, as Merleau-Ponty (1962)

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suggests, is a pseudo-present. A dead body is not a crystal, because it falls into immediate degradation, and this too is a living process. The body rejects the identity principle; it is unfaithful by its founding character. It is for-others, it is in becoming, but this state of unfaithfulness does not mean that it is nothing: this, in my opinion, is the legacy that Merleau-Ponty (1962) left us as a starting point for future reflections. We must overcome the oppositional categories that, through the principle of non-contradiction, have made it impossible to fully develop a philosophy of nature. The condition of living does not pre-exist its constant making. As Bergson would say, the consequent cannot be explained by the antecedent. The reasons for this, in my opinion, lie in the three principles of having-been-there-before: namely singularity, mirroring and infidelity. The body is insofar as it always presupposes an external contribution: it is a ‘matrix of relations’ with the world and it is precisely from these relations that its predicates emerge, so that the latter can never be deduced through internal recognition. Without the corresponding reference to a copula that brought forth a predicate to a multi-layered intentionality, it is in fact incomprehensible. The body as a whole relates to the world through well-defined intentional structures: the perceived cannot be foreign to the perceiver. The body therefore cannot afford an overview, a ‘bird's eye’ perspective: somatic predication is more likely to be an epiphany. But, on closer inspection, epiphany is already a recourse to a time that escapes the here and now. Epiphany is both a resonance and a projection. Drawing a transversal line, we find in the body the Husserlian concept of institution/ donation [Stiftung] which is a register of diachronic implementation (Marini, 1974). The body is the place where time is inscribed or accumulated for the dialogues to come. Being-for-the-world means becoming aware of this relationship, breaking out of the solipsistic conception that, rooted in the Cartesian cogito, has paved the way for our hypnotic narcissism. The consequent consumerist individualism has transformed Being-there into an exaltation of the present and a denial or repression of death, in a sort of black hole that annihilates the world. Sure, being-for-death cannot give meaning to an existence that is too focused on the individual. However, today's opposite precept, which is not at all about being-for-life but rather a way of bringing death into life, shows the full weakness of seeking meaning for life through emphasis on immunity. As the body shows us, on the contrary, we are in and for the relationship, and only in this donation and dedication can we find meaning for our existence.

Somatizing Otherness The body is a resonance of the past and at the same time a projection into the future: it is ultimately a continuous non-Being-there, at least not entirely. This nomadic condition is not limited to the bodily system but belongs to every single portion of the body. Its parts not only interact with each other but relate to the world in a singular way, so that the multi-layered system maintains relations with the outside

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world in different dimensions. The body is therefore implicitly conjugable. The somatic dimension is an interweaving of relationships developed on different levels, to such an extent that it is difficult, and in many ways arbitrary, to identify where one ends and the outside world begins. Indeed, it is on the interface of the multi-­ layered relational core that predicates develop. In this sense, the functional constitution of an organ only appears to result from the assembly of the histologies that compose it: in reality, an organ is the outcome of the relationships established by its various tissues. The somatic dimension is therefore made up of reciprocal supporting entities, as if the body could not sustain itself without the innumerable contributions that unfold in the stratifications of its constitutions. Let us say then that the body does not end in the finite limits of its interior, but extends onto external contractors. In short, the predicates it manifests at a particular moment emerge from its various relations. We speak therefore of a predicative register, more reminiscent of conception than emanation. Indeed, we can see the relationship as a work that produces something, that gives form to something or makes something possible. I would like to emphasize this last aspect: we should not consider the body as a shapeless or lacking entity that can be made whole by some external contribution, but just the opposite. The body bears such a luxuriant complexity that it contemplates many possible manifestations, so that each predicative expression is but one of the many facets it can take on. At the same time, however, we must understand that any given variation is always a poietic, just like a statue “extracted” from the marble by its sculptor – in other words, it would not be possible without external contribution. The relationship is therefore predicative, in that it ‘actualizes’ certain connotations that are not given a priori except in their potentiality. The relationship brings out a form of the world, but at the same time it reflects on the body by assigning it a certain shape. Otherness, therefore, when it enters into a hybridizing relationship with the body, is no longer external, or at least not completely so. The body is an ontopoietic entity, in that it constantly somatizes otherness in order to produce its own predicates. The body is life, and every relationship it establishes, in this case between its own parts, must not be evaluated only in constitutive terms, but also in productive ones. For example, we can consider the relations of the nervous network as moments of work, so that their result cannot be equated with qualities deriving from the sum or systemization of the parts, but from the work that develops in the encounter between the parts. The predicates of a body can therefore be referred to a surplus that cannot be acquired by constitutive finding, because it results from the work of life that develops when the parts come into a relationship with each other. So, the body is not a house, evaluable in extensive or constitutive terms, but rather a factory, if we are to find a metaphor that exemplifies the relationship between the body's predicates and the body's production. In other words, the phenomenology of the body does not bring to the surface the constitutive predicates, but the relational work that takes place between the parts. Somatization resembles the creation of an ecosystem that is not given by the sum of the biotic and abiotic entities present, but by the relational work that is produced. Similarly, an adaptive process is never a simple

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adaptation of a species to the conditions offered by the environment. It is adaptation to the species' own niche construction, which thereby modifies the selective pressures it receives and thus its own phylogenetic trajectory. When I speak of a predicative relation, I mean a relation in which the body constructs its predicates through the other. In other words, we can say that the predicate, which makes the body recognizable, already implies the relation, as if the body foresaw it on the basis of a relational pre-constitution. The genealogy – or better, the diachronic-relational ontology – of the body makes it incomprehensible through the isochronous lens of the res extensa. The body is only apparently an autonomous entity, even though it needs energy, so it is misleading to infer existence through an internal morphopoiesis and an individual destiny. And it is not just that living beings need to receive energy from outside. Living beings have constituted their complexity by presupposing an external contribution; that is to say, by relying on a substratum that is taken for granted and that is indispensable for their ontopoiesis. Even the smallest parts of the body – cells, but even the cytoplasmic organelles – appeal to something external to give rise to the predicates that make them recognisable. Everything responds to a heteronomy principle. By ‘heteronomy’ I mean being intrinsically constituted in the copulative sense. Heteronomy is therefore not just the banal observation of the physiological, ecological and social needs of a body, but the acceptance of the fact that the very constitution of the body is based on a principle of relational normation with the outside world. The founding principle of living beings is therefore the presupposition of an external contribution, and this must be considered the poietic archetype of life itself. Assuming an external normative contribution, a support point or an operator to extend one's predicates paves the way, in fact, for serial operations of externalization, based on bringing the complexity of the predicates themselves into the external matrix of relations. Externalization thus provokes a distancing of the body from its self-sufficient equilibrium, triggering a process of redundancy in the system. The body can afford redundancy because it rests, like a creeper, on an external matrix. The heteronomous contribution, moreover, is implied in the very constitution of the somatic structure. For this reason, the body cannot be thought of outside of the relationship, nor can it be explained starting from internal recognition on the basis of predicative inherences. Every expression of the body can only be a result of the relationship, not an expression of simple internal qualities. The body is constitutively projected outwards and qualified by relations already given in its poiesis. So it is interesting to note that the body, in taking shape, brings forth the imprint of the relationship that genealogically preceded it. The expression of the body is ultimately a projection and a copulation, not because it is lacking but because it is endowed with redundancy, by having previously introjected a relational contribution that has allowed it to undertake the path of constitutive non-equilibrium. It is precisely redundancy that allows the body to introject new relationships: the copulative process is therefore autocatalytic, an event that once triggered is self-sustaining, with a gravitational and dissipative effect that is increasingly broader and more involving. What appears as a vertical movement of emancipation and disjunction is actually a horizontal spreading of arms towards otherness.

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This awareness should significantly change the way we conceive of our relations with the biosphere. There is no such thing as a lifeboat for the human being alone, because our ontology is relational: it would be like eradicating a tree from its root ball and thinking that it would still survive. Our body is physiologically loaded with bacterial xenobiotics, which produce serotonin and influence our mood; also, our genetic heritage establishes complex relationships with the virosphere, so it is not enough to tackle epidemiological problems with immunity measures. Our culture is dripping with animal borrowings, which had a co-factorial significance in our conception; most innate characteristics of our species evolved in non-human progenitors, so they are not properly human, and there are no Umwelten, (environments) as isolated monads, but only vast areas of overlap between species. Likewise, tèchne is in no way an external tool that simply enhances our predicates and amplifies our reach but is always infiltrative and modifies our predicates at their core.

The Body as a Welcoming Threshold The body represents the hospitable dimension, its being-for-the-world, in its twofold expression. (i) On the one hand it takes shape through external contribution or by achieving a structural surplus through the introjection of a supporting substratum. (ii) On the other, it experiences the epiphanic revelation of otherness, or the supervenience of being-with, which not only unveils but transfigures a being from other-from-self to other-within-self. [Does this work?] The body is ontologically a gift to the world, however much it may appear to be, and in some ways is a flywheel of dissipation. Life itself stands on the principle of donation; of being-with and making room for otherness, as Edith Stein (1989) suggested. The shift from considering existence as a projection into death to viewing it as a donation implies a profound metamorphosis in the ontological vision of being, which, from a principle of individuation, becomes a principle of relation. Individuation emphasizes the transience, the black hole opacity of the stellar journey of existence. On the contrary, relation shows that it is precisely in the course of life that existence is fragmented into a thousand streams of resonances in the world. If individuation must necessarily seek an escape from the body, the only means of salvation from the apparent end, the relational principle shows the non-­ individualized eternity of the body spreading in the echoes of time and space. We can view the somatic condition as a casing that contains something, and the skin as the paper that adorns and encloses the package, but this disjunctive claim, which believes it can affirm a presence in complete dubitative solipsia, is a major

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misunderstanding. The cogitating subject addresses itself in a relational act, not in a reflexive autarchic gesture, and it does so for the simple reason that it is itself a fractal receptacle of relations: it cannot exist outside the relation. Being a body therefore means being-for-the-world, predicatively emerging in the relationship and not outside of it, adhering to an eco-ontological dimension. The founding principle of life is love, understood as the constitutive selfgiving of all beings, which can only exist in a condition of perpetual self-giving to the world. This donation can take different forms, including projection, which transfigures otherness in an epiphanic sense, or possession, which introjects the relationship itself. What I would like to point out is that donation is not a deprivation of something, but an expression of the very meaning of existence, because being a body implies being referred to something external, referring to a noninherent predicative principle. Existence is therefore being-for-life, a dimension of being that does not end with the death of the individual. All the people we have met on our journey, even if they are no longer with us, continue to live within us, and it is up to us to perpetuate this gift. This also means changing the very concept of desire from one based on appropriation to one based on dedication and giving. I believe that the acquisitive emphasis given to desire today, by viewing it as a deficiency or nostalgia to be filled, results from a misunderstanding and a cultural framework. Desire is first and foremost openness, copulatory drive and passion, in the sense of full participation in active life, engaging in an activity as being devoted to something that transcends us. When desire is understood this way, it fills a person's existence while, on the contrary, when it is thought of through the focal point of appropriation, it always generates frustration. Therefore, I believe that more than anything else our age needs a new sentimental education. And philosophy has a very specific task in this revolution, which cannot simply be given over to science by maintaining the same anthropocentric paradigm that has led us to this dramatic situation. The phenomenological school laid the foundations for this reinterpretation of ontopoiesis. I am referring in particular to the legacy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1969), Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (2007) and Verducci (2012). The body manifests itself in donation because it is born out of a relational ontological principle, so that every somatic expression can only appeal to ontopoietic interlocutions, references and subtexts. The body therefore is not just a disjunctive shell that manifests – or rather makes manifest – the distinction between being and otherness: it is a place that, on different levels, realizes the predicative relationship with everything that surrounds it, whereby even otherness is only apparent. The body is the hybrid dimension of time, the place where time can emerge from. It is the inexorable beauty of time which, in predicating itself through the body, scatters the seeds for the future on which it relies. Life is always a gamble, but we bear within us – indeed we are made of – the sense of a time to come. We are nothing more than a gift to the world. But this requires us to reflect on the principle of this hospitality and the consequences that follow from it.

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The body is hooked up to the world through peculiar referentialities, i.e. specific features of the somatic condition that we could define as ‘welcoming thresholds’; free ports of hospitality. This is where one can see the magic of donation, which is both ontological and epistemological, lighting up some predicates and overshadowing others. The body is therefore a multi-layered conjugation with beings and, at the same time, an intentionality referred to them. In authors such as Bergson (1913) and Merleau-Ponty (1962), the body is presented as the "chiasmatic center" of a becoming that mixes, in the same glass, time and space, structure and function, identity and otherness, past and future. The body is thus presented as a plurality of co-­ existing conditions, the "how of manifestation" of mirroring events introjected at different times, which come onto the stage of consciousness as actors who subsume their masters, their script and their human dimension through the singularity of the here and now. Taking up Brentano’s work but extending its applicability to all somatic dimensions, we can speak of an intentional plurality of the body, which does not only concern the multiple layers of somatic geography, but also the diachronic dimension. The body is a ‘time machine’ that is constantly opening space-time portals, bringing back into the present entities that belong to other chronological dimensions. The body therefore refers to something, whereby one is always ‘somatoreferred’ and not simply somatized. The body is always in becoming – and here I am obviously taking up Tymieniecka's work (2012)  – because its copulative engine creates, in a continuous flow, new thresholds of reception: its being in the moment. It is then evident that Dasein does not reveal itself in self-­distancing but in creating contexts of hospitality, points of docking, internalization of references. In being a welcoming threshold, in providing a conjugation, the body always refers to something: affectivity is therefore its constitution. The body is insofar as it welcomes and makes space for everything that surrounds it; it "is for the world", because it is ontologically eco-logical. Somatic phenomenology is the modal expression of the body in its plural making-reference to the world, in its implicit nature of radical reciprocation. Here we find some of the intuitions expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) and, in a certain sense, the enactive conception expressed by Francisco Varela (1999). Being a body, a shift from the traditional view of having a body, therefore means manifesting a plurality of relational levels and admitting the introjection of an order envisaged in the world. The body, in the final instance, cannot deny itself to the relationship because it is intimately constituted according to the ontological coordinates of reception.

Conclusion Our understanding of predicative processes still suffers, in the words of Gaston Bachelard (2002), from certain epistemological obstacles. In particular, we are still inclined to think of phenomena in terms of essentialism and substantivalism. These intuitive distortions prevent us from understanding that the qualities expressed by an

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entity do not depend exclusively on the entity's intrinsic characteristics, but rather on its established copulative framework. There is no such thing as a phenomenon expressed in non-relational terms, since every entity is manifested through its encounter with otherness. The simplest form of copulation is apparently the perceptive one, but in reality this is already much more implicative than what we might be led to think by adopting the false image of sensory exposure, as Merleau-Ponty has rightly pointed out. On the other hand, relational predication does not only occur in the contemplation of otherness, but in every expression of the interacting subject. As one cannot exist outside of some relationship, we deduce that every predicative process always has a relational configuration and can never be said to be emanative. This leads to a profound redefinition of what we define as human, which is no longer ‘what is specific to’ humans as biological entities, but rather what emerges from the copulative capacities of human beings. In order to understand this however, it is necessary to delve into the concept of predicative relations starting from the principle of hybridity. This term goes beyond the usual interpretations of the interaction between entities, which often remain constrained in terms of the summation of qualities. We see this, for example, in how we view the use of technology, generally believed to either compensate for the presumed incompleteness of the human being or to extend our field of action as well as enhance our abilities. When I speak of a hybridizing relationship, I mean a process that modifies the relational entities and brings out new predicates that can no longer be attributed to any particular being. Moreover, a hybridization is never an objective event, but a copulative layer that is characterized on the basis of precise directions of encounter-dialogue. Human beings have always been hybrid entities, from the very first moment they built a close relationship with choppers and with fire. As in all co-evolutionary processes, what is external is somatized, shapes the body, and transforms it. Every technology infiltrate and morphs the body, like a virus that bends the metabolism of the infected cells. Culture, and specifically techne, this is a different spelling to previously [tèchne] do not compensate for the body's deficiencies, as claimed by some philosophical anthropologists, but create dependencies. It is clothing that makes us feel naked, not the other way around. The sense of incompleteness that we feel when we discover the fragility of the body is a consequence of technopoiesis, not the cause of it. The awareness that we live in a hybrid dimension and that every technology is somatized shows the groundlessness of the principle of purity and of the human claim to be disjointed from the world. The dystopian image of these last few decades is no longer science fiction but a perspective that we must deal with head-on, observing the reality of the environmental disaster and the day-to-day consequences of the pandemic (Marchesini 2021). We are wrong, however, when we myopically regard this as the spectacle of the past falling apart. The disastrous effects that we are now witnessing are the result of the culture that we sometimes insist on defending, in a hopeless and useless entrenchment. What we need is a change in the way we understand the place of the human being in the biosphere, not a sterile nostalgia fit for laudatores temporis acti: someone looking back on a ‘golden age’. Spelling it out in English makes your meaning more exact and emphasises it, to me,

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In order to fully understand the challenges, we are facing, it is necessary to start again from Spinoza's concept of affectivity (Pardi 2013), but reading it through the copulative lens: what drives the human being is desire, not simple rationality. And the desiring being can be expressed in two ways: in appropriation, as done by humanist narcissism, or in dedication; that is, in giving oneself to something that goes beyond oneself and focuses on the relationship. This is what leads me to believe that the future of humanity is closely linked to a new – and I would say revolutionary – sentimental education, capable of reconnecting what anthropocentrism sought to disjoin. This is a paradigmatic metamorphosis that undoubtedly affects ontology but that also has very clear repercussions in aesthetics, ethics and epistemology. Humans are realizing that they are grafted within a complex network of relationships above which they cannot rise, contrary to the humanist claims of verticalization. The course of humankind has never been ascending and disjunctive, but horizontal and copulative. Of all living beings, we are the most bound in our relationships with otherness. A central point in this paradigmatic shift lies in the search for a meaning to one's existence and one's worldly itinerary, which is to be found not in the self but in relationships. One cannot seek meaning in life by desperately looking for it in oneself: this is a tautology.

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. 2002. The Formation of the Scientific Mind. Bolton-Manchester: Clinamen Press. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. San Francisco: Chandler publishing Company. Bergson, Henri. 1913. Time and free will. An essay on the immediate data of consciousness. London: Allen & Unwin. Leopardi, Giacomo. (1827) 2020. Operette morali. Milano: Feltrinelli. Marchesini, Roberto. 2021. The Virus Paradigm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marini, Alfredo (Ed.). 1974. La fenomenologia trascendentale. Firenze: La Nuova Italia. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press. ———. 1969. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston Illinois: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2000. De la Nature à l’Ontologie/From Nature to Ontology/Dalla Natura all’Ontologia. Chiasmi International 2. Milan: Mimesis. Pardi, Aldo. 2013. Cosa può un corpo? Lezioni su Spinoza. Verona: Ombre corte. Stein, Edith. 1989. On the Problem of Empathy. “The Collected Works of Edith Stein” Vol. 3. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa, ed. 2007. Phenomenology of Life  – From the Animal Soul to the Human Mind, Book II. Analecta Husserliana. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2012. Christo-Logos: Metaphysical Rapsodies of Faith. In The Fullness of the Logos in the Key of Life. Book II. Analecta Husserliana. Dordrecht: Springer. Varela, Francisco. 1999. Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Verducci, Daniela. 2012. La fenomenologia della vita di Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Roma: Aracne Editrice.

Toward a Taxonomy of Uncanny Objects: A Phenomenological Approach Thomas Ryba

Abstract  This chapter proposes a Husserlian phenomenological approach to the uncanny, to make some first steps toward a taxonomy of uncanny objects. Making use of the insights of Husserl, Steinbock and Tymieniecka, it proceeds according to the principle that description ought to precede theory. Thus, against a premature theoretical explanation of uncanniness, it concentrates on some objective characteristics of objects that contribute to the experience of the uncanny, arguing that the notions of home-world, alien-world, internal and external noematic horizons of objects are useful in explicating what makes an uncanny object “uncanny”. Broader in scope than some other treatments, this chapter includes discussion not only of phenomena that may be classified as negatively uncanny but also phenomena that are positively and neutrally uncanny. The result is a nine-part taxonomy which is applied in the interpretation of representative (but variegated) examples of complex uncanny objects. Keywords  The uncanny · The creepy · Mysterium tremendum et fascinans · Husserlian phenomenology · Home-world · Alien-world · Typification · Taxonomy · Steinbock · Tymieniecka

Introduction Perhaps it is the strangeness of our age, a time in which nothing seems to be predictable, that explains the current revival of interest in the uncanny. It is a time in which personal identity, norms and technology are fluid; a time where the horizon of the future is frightfully wide open and without any certainty, a time of war, plagues and social upheavals – a time when the media revels in fascination with the macabre,

T. Ryba (*) Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_12

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grotesque and violent. Perhaps we are fascinated by the uncanny because we live in uncanny times. As with much human practice, the experience and poiēsis of the uncanny long preceded the ability to theorize it. Though the human encounter with and control of the uncanny is ancient, it is in only about the last hundred years that scholars have tried to identify its common features and to understand its tell-tale experiences and causes. This attempt begins with the psychologist Anton Jentsch (1906) and the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1919). Subsequently, in a torrent of books, monographs, and articles, academics have attempted to explain the uncanny from perspectives that range across psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, literary criticism, aesthetics and robotics (Jentsch 1996 [1906]; Freud 1971 [1919]; Mori 2012 [1970]; Royle 2003; Trigg 2012, 2014; Eveleth 2013; McAndrew and Koehnke 2016). Though all of these attempts have their usefulness, some of them too quickly theorize an explanation before they have appreciated the varieties and features of objects that are responsible for uncanny experience. Rather than advancing an overarching theory about what the uncanny is, without a sufficient appreciation of the varieties of objects that can induce it, it is my purpose in this chapter to approach the topic of the uncanny principally from the side of the variety of uncanny things and to approach their uncanniness as a consequence of their properties. Compared to some of the highly-theoretical treatments of the uncanny, my project is more modest: to present some first steps – five in total – toward a phenomenological taxonomy of uncanny objects. First, I will provide a brief summary of the phenomenological and semantic characteristics of the uncanny [in German, unheimlich] to establish some generalizations about its nature. Second, I will briefly describe Anthony Steinbock’s retrieval of Husserl’s observations about the distinction between the normal and abnormal to show how they can be employed to make sense of some experiences of the uncanny. Third, I will outline some of the categories and features of the uncanny, describing their various modalities. Fourth, I will take some specific examples of uncanny objects and analyze them according to their distinctive features. Fifth, I will conclude by suggesting future directions for the study of the uncanny.

 he Attempts of Jentsch and Freud to Describe and Explain T the Uncanny At the origin of recent discussions of the uncanny – and often cited in them – are the essays of Jentsch and Freud. Though there is some overlap between the approach of each, according to what each author describes as uncanny and the sources he employs in illustrating the uncanny, each comes to different conclusions about how to explain the experience of the uncanny. Jentsch favored an explanation that made the awareness of anomaly as the basis of the uncanny experience, whereas Freud

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favored subconscious association as its basis. Both were cognitivists with respect to the ability to explain the psychological processes at work: Jentsch saw these processes as directly accessible to conscious reflection, Freud specified a recondite technique to gain access to subconscious processes. Each were reductive in their own way. Jentsch reduced explanation to the manifest qualities of uncanny thing, their effects, and their conscious interpretation; Freud reduced explanation to the unmanifest associations engendered in the subconscious by manifest things. My position is that explanations of the uncanny may operate on both the manifest and unmanifest levels of consciousness, though I will concentrate on the manifest level.

Anton Jentsch’s Psychological Inventory of the Uncanny The 1906 essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny by Anton Jentsch, a medical doctor, psychologist and psychological pathologist, was the first twentieth century attempt to treat the uncanny [unheimlich] according to the intersection between language and observation (Jentsch 1996 [1906]). Jentsch dismissed the attempt to define the idea essentially, which is a definitional task I will partially embrace in this chapter. Instead he focused on the experience – how it is excited – in order to provide a working definition (Jentsch 1996 [1906], 8). Thorough though he was, Jentsch produced a hodge-podge of 11 features definitive of the experience of the uncanny. 1. It is a characteristic uneasiness in confrontation with what is foreign; 2. It possesses a variability across subjects (with more sensitive and intelligent subjects experiencing it more acutely); 3. It possesses unpredictable repeatability for the same subject; 4. It is connected with the lack of knowledge about the thing or incident; 5. It can be mixed with delight or admiration to the extent that the experience of the thing or incident is grounded in an understanding of that thing or incident’s positive purpose; 6. It can be produced when the fantasies of imagination are thought to be really present; 7. It can be produced by alterations in color and light, size and sound; 8. It, as a feeling, can remain even after a rational explanation is forthcoming; 9. Its intensity is increased by altered states of consciousness (illness, psychological pathology, lack of sleep etc.), and/or; 10. A smaller scope of familiarity with the world, and/or; 11. Whether there is uncertainty about whether the thing is really animate (Jentsch 1996 [1906], 8–14). Most if not all of these features are possible concomitants, thus making the uncanny a complex product of characteristics and conditions. Jentsch argued that the key to explain how the uncanny operated was in understanding the resolution of the anxiety that accompanied it. He thought that anxiety

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was relieved when the uncanny became familiarized (or rationally explicable or classifiable); that is, when it could be fitted into a taxonomy of explicable things. But he also recognized that there were after-effects not dispelled by knowledge; after-effects that were purely aesthetic (Jentsch 1996 [1906], 12–13). As an exhaustive description of characteristic features of the uncanny from the side of subject and object (expressed in a brief text), Jentsch’s description of the uncanny is unrivalled. Its weaknesses lie in his concentrating on only the rational resolution of the experiential effect and the brevity with which he describes the kinds of objects that produce the psychological effect.

Sigmund Freud’s Semantics of the Uncanny Taking Jentsch’s essay as its foil, Freud’s famous 1919 monograph On the Uncanny is a more expansive treatment which proffers a psychoanalytic explanation of uncanniness that makes it not a matter of cognitive dissonance but of subliminal causes. Relying closely on Daniel Sanders’s Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Sanders 1876, 1:729b – 1:729c) (and lexicons of other languages), Freud approaches his subject semantically, by establishing an intersection set of the various meanings of the German root word heimlich (homely, not strange, familiar – connected with a space of intimacy, “comfortable”, not disquieting, and so on.). Applied to animals, this word suggests domesticatability, tameness, and friendliness (Freud 1971 [1919], 23). Applied to ambiance, or personal relations, it suggests hominess, comfort, quiet security, calm, or intimacy (Freud 1971 [1919], 23–24), but can also suggest opposing meanings, such as “whatever is concealed”, secretive, private, unmanifested, occult, and figurative as well as “the intimate as what is not to be disclosed”, deceitfulness and “what is hidden and dangerous” (Freud 1971 [1919], 27–30). The meanings connected to the unmanifested and secretive, Freud points out, oddly overlap with the meanings of the word unheimlich; with heimlich developing “toward an ambivalence until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich” (Freud 1971 [1919], 30). In comparison to heimlich, Freud says much less about the common meanings of unheimlich, though he provides many examples of unheimlich objects. Affectively, this word most commonly signifies what makes one uneasy, what is bloodcurdling or eerie, and (following Schelling) “whatever is manifest but should have remained hidden”. It is generally associated as heimlich’s opposite, except, on occasion, when the meanings seem to overlap. Among what Freud counts as unheimlich are “things, persons, impressions, events and situations” such as dolls, waxwork figures, automata, spirits, demons, ghosts, dead bodies, individuals with supernatural powers, doppelgangers, the evil eye, inexplicable repetitions, coincidences, secrets, good fortune, the envy of the gods, epilepsy, madness, dismembered limbs, enucleated faces, etc. (Freud 1971 [1919], 30–53). All of these objects or states, in one way or another, disrupt the settledness of what is homely and comfortable.

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The English Words “Canny”/“Uncanny” In contrast to the semantic field of heimlich/unheimlich, the semantic field associated with the corresponding English pair “canny/uncanny” circumscribes a set of connotations that overlaps with heimlich/unheimlich, but contains differences as well. “Canny” had its origins in Scottish, Irish and the northern regional English dialects of the sixteenth century. In Scottish “canny” originally meant “wise, judicious, prudent, shrewd, frugal, wise in the ways of the world, wily, cunning, clever, dexterous or what was in accord with the natural, safe, or right; steady, careful or cautious.” Not unlike the German, it could also mean “comfortable, cozy, snug, easy, pleasant, calm.” In the northern English dialect, “canny” meant “neat, agreeable, satisfactory, attractive, worthy or considerable.” More broadly, it also had the connotation of someone or something humorously artful, subtle, or reserved (“Canny” 1975). “Uncanny,” not quite the antonym of “canny,” has the older connotations of something or someone mischievous or malicious (Scottish and northern English dialect) or careless, incautious, or unreliable. More recently, its English meaning has become (of persons) unsafe to trust or involved with the occult or supernatural powers or the black arts or – more broadly – whatever is supernatural, weird, mysterious, uncomfortably strange, unfamiliar, dangerous, unsafe or even severe or hard (Uncanny 1975). Comparing the German complements “heimlich/unheimlich” and English complements “canny/uncanny”, we see that the German word puts a slight accent on emotional ambiance, the Gestalt signifying domestic comfort and safety versus the disquieting disturbance of that experience, an emphasis on a constellation of things that elicit a positive emotion of irenic settledness against those alien things that would threaten it or erupt into it and shatter it.1 In short, the emphasis is on the emotional impact of the experience, the mood or effect in the subject, though objects that effect the uncanny experience are also identified. The emphasis of the English words in contrast is not so much on the emotions connected to a complex scene or ambiance, but squints between it and the objective properties causing them, with the emphasis on characteristics of persons, actions and things. Though different from the German connotations, the connotations of the English words provide a supplement that helps capture the richness of the experience involving subject and object that lies behind the meanings. Taken as complements, the emphasis of the German semantics (á la Freud) and the English semantics approximate approaching uncanny objects according to the Husserlian notions of noetic and noematic horizons. The significance of this similarity will be seen shortly. Freud’s list of uncanny things is a hodgepodge. Except for a couple of examples, he sets aside case-by-case examinations of the reasons uncanny objects are disquieting and moves directly to psychoanalytical explanations that often neglect other  Gaston Bachelard has provided a thorough exploration of homeliness in his classic work The Poetics of Space (Bachelard 1994 [1958]). 1

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objects and characteristics. He jumps from a subset of characteristics to his totalizing psychoanalytic theory, without apparent interest in the possibility that the uncanny may have a wider set of objective features than those explicable as neuroses connected with repetition compulsions or as reactions to things or situations that evoke repressed fears of punishment for forbidden desires. Freud’s interpretation of the intersection of the semantic fields of the heimlich and unheimlich is also narrow and does not fully explain the ambiguity that he correctly recognizes. What I should like to take up anew here is the expansion of the field of uncanny phenomena to focus not upon seeking the hidden causes of the uncanny but instead to focus on the manifest, disquieting qualities of uncanny objects and to answer how (according to an appropriately-modified Husserlian analysis) they are disquieting. What does “the uncanny” characterize and how do we encounter it? Preliminarily, we can stipulate that the uncanny characterizes the encounter with alien events, places, artifacts and persons, and the feeling of anxiety, fear or disquiet when confronted by the strangeness found in these things. The affective aspect of this experience of the uncanny is more easily described from the side of the things that induce it than in terms of the emotions or feelings themselves. Emotions and feelings – like tastes – are terribly difficult to describe or distinguish. Also, because the spectra of emotions and feelings, like the sense of taste, are limited, any one emotion or feeling can be a response to multiple experiences or objects. For this reason, we should not find it odd that some of the emotions or feelings induced by uncanny things are also induced by other things or experiences  – sublime things or experiences, for example. Most simply, what is canny or uncanny would thus seem to have two aspects. One is the affect associated with a specific kind of object, a feeling which may or may not be reducible to known qualities of the experienced object or experience, and which is always unpleasantly disquieting to some degree. In contrast, the uncanniness of an object or experience may refer to qualities of the uncanny thing itself; qualities which are subject to positive, negative, or neutral evaluations. These aspects (according to circumstance) may be amplified or attenuated, and sometimes one may have dominance or subordination over the other  – feeling-dominant or object-dominant – or they may be in relative balance; but both are always present to some degree. This corresponds to the Husserlian observation that the noema appears in the noesis and the noesis would not exist were it not for the noema, though one may thematize one to the relative bracketing of the other.

Uncanny Alien Worlds In Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After Husserl Anthony Steinbock provides philosophical tools for the phenomenological explication of the uncanny (Steinbock 1995). Mining Husserl’s unpublished and untranslated manuscripts with the intention of generating fruitful extensions of the Husserlian phenomenology, Steinbock brings Husserl’s writings on the distinction between the normal and

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abnormal into tension with Husserl’s better-known writings on the Lifeworld. Though everything that Steinbock asserts is not necessarily admissible, features of his discussion can be used to illuminate the phenomenon of the uncanny. A prerequisite, however, is a rehearsal of some fundamental Husserlian ideas that ground Steinbock’s argument. Chief among them are: 1. The distinction of morphē and hulē; 2. The distinction between noema and noesis and; 3. The notion of the horizontality of experience.

Morphē and Hulē According to Husserl, in the stream of consciousness two components can be discriminated; one which consists of the “primary contents” and the other which consists of intentional mental processes. The former are concrete sensory data of the five senses present in consciousness prior to categorization; this sensuous stratum is “in itself nothing pertaining to intentionality” (Husserl 1983 [1913], 203/172). The former exist sub-intentionally as hyletic data, or hulē: sensuous stuff which is shaped and given form by intentional consciousness. The other component consists of intentions that structure and categorize these sensations into objectivities and bestow sense on them. This latter, formal component of consciousness, Husserl terms the “morphē” (form or structure) by which the raw data of sensation is categorized and given meaning. It is only by reflection on intentions (acts that partially constitute an object) that we can grasp the hyletic data, though occasionally, by virtue of its stratification, it is accessible reflectively (with minimal conscious contributions) as a raw material that undergirds experience. Thus the “stream of phenomenological being has a stuff-stratum and a noetic stratum” (Husserl 1983 [1913], 207/175). Husserl says very little about the possible operations of this hyletic data outside of intentional constitution. Perhaps this is because he thinks it is only through objectification that it can it be considered. And yet, he posits it as pre-intentional stuff. This raises the question as to how he can know it is pre-intentional; that is, if it is intentionality that brings it to awareness? He does not, in the main, address the possibility – a possibility examined at length by Michel Henry – that this stratum may structure the intentional acts or trigger the emotions of the subject directly, without the involvement of intentionality (Henry 2008 [1990]). This Husserlian blind spot points us to an important similarity between Husserlian phenomenology and Aristotelian ontology. Just as Aristotle’s philosophy made prime matter [prima materia] a limit concept for understanding the organization of beings – whether it has existence separate from substantial formality or not – so Husserl made the hyletic component of experience a limit concept for the understanding of the constitution of the noema. Relevant here is the recognition that some uncanny experiences seem to be examples of the signs that C. S. Peirce described as

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possessing “firstness”: they act to elicit the emotion of the uncanny by apparently unmediated aesthetic effect on the subject (Peirce 1932, 1:152:412; 1:191:513). Such signs work on the experiencing subject in a way subliminally. It is by highlighting this subliminality that Freud has recourse to the subconscious as the organizing agency, and this, in part, might explain the effect. But we might further ask: 1. whether it is not also possible that there are things that produce an aesthetic effect directly without the mediation of either imagination or reflection but also – and further; 2. whether the morphic (or objective) component of the experience may, on occasion, become the background to the aesthetic force of the hyletic component of the experience? Such effects would mean a cause that, in its first moment, produces an effect in experience without intentionality.

Noema and Noesis Every act of consciousness has an object pole (a noema) and a conscious act that is an intentional modalization of the experience of the object (a noesis), such as noticing, recognizing, comparing, valuing, judging, examining, fearing, etc. Noetic acts are also constitutive of the noematic object, a structuring of the hyletic data into stuff and strata. Noematic description must preserve the formality of “noema in general” while attending to noematic diversity, to the variable elements of noemata and to their constant structures (Muralt 1958 [1974], 267). Each noema has a noetic sense – its meaning  – which is intended as a transcendental object. As such it is stable and necessary, though it is the matrix for the peripheral or accidental determinations which are the variable features of the noema (Muralt 1958 [1974], 268). Accordingly, individual uncanny objects (noemata) are distinguished by their variable features, while the necessary features shared by all point to a noema, an essence which is the anticipation of all of the necessary features of the object (Husserl 1980 [1971], 73–77/85–89).

The Horizon of Experience Noemata (objects) have a regular structure, consisting of accidental and necessary features. These features can be further distinguished according to whether they belong to the object, in se, or whether they belong to the possible set of things that the object can be in relation to. The possible set of accidental and necessary features belonging to the noema (or object) is the internal noematic horizon of the object. The external noematic horizon for an object, in contrast, is the set of all possible

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relations and things that can environ the object. The internal and external noematic horizon of a thing are also temporalized: there are antecedent internal and external noematic horizons (the object’s past); there are consequent internal and external noematic horizons (the object’s future possibilities), and there are present internal or external noematic horizons (the object in the present). Without reference to the noetic horizons of an object – which may be parsed in similar fashion, though they are not of direct significance to our purpose here – the internal and external horizons taken together are simply its noematic horizon: the complete set of possibilities that define the object. This distinction between the internal noematic horizon and external noematic horizon roughly corresponds to Aristotle’s distinction in The Categories between substance and quality, on one hand (here characterizing an object’s internal noematic horizon of an object) and time, place and relationality on the other (characterizing an object’s external noematic horizon of an object). Also important to the noema and its internal horizon is its composition as morphē (form) and hulē (matter), the form being the abstractable structure of the object and the matter being its sensorial filling. On this basis, the typification of the world can be explained with reference to conscious acts and their objects. The inventory of possible objects and their possible qualities and relations, and the possible conscious acts that take them as objects, establishes the horizon of the Lifeworld.2

Lifeworlds and Alien-Worlds In the received understanding, the Lifeworld can be regarded itself as a noema which is an unlimited composite comprised of “an infinity of noemata … ordered and organized unitarily in an infinite (teleological) unity” (Muralt 1958 [1974], 267). The Lifeworld’s future horizon is pitched toward a telos (at infinite distance),  Husserl’s notion of horizon was anticipated by Kant in his Logic in his distinctions between rational and historical horizons (in reference to objects) and the absolute and private horizons (in reference to subjects) (Kant 1974 [1800], 4:45–46). “Horizon” is both a metaphor and technical term that takes its meaning from the homology between a structure of human consciousness and a tangent drawn from a line segment orthogonal to a sphere to the sphere’s surface. If the tangent is the observer’s line of sight, then spinning the tangent around the segment (as an axis) defines a circle on the surface of a sphere expressing a limit beyond which it is impossible to see at the highest point on the segment. (This can be made concrete with reference to the horizon of the earth. Think of a pirate ship sailing toward the horizon of the ocean. Because of the curvature of the earth, first the pirate flag is visible, then the rest of the mast, and finally the ship becomes visible.) Just as tangents from that segment to the surface of the sphere describe the limit of what can be seen, for Husserl and Kant before him, past and present experience and future anticipations analogously determine the horizon of experience for an individual subject or an intersubjective community. The height above the surface is an analogue to the subject’s (or community’s) capacity to understand the connectedness of past, present and future noemata and noeses, so that a greater height is the physical analogue to the capacity for greater understanding (and hence an expansive vision). 2

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a telos that is tantamount to the fusion of all Lifeworlds and whose end is the European scientific ideal – the scientific understanding of all things. In the received understanding of Husserl’s notion of the Lifeworld [Lebenswelt], the present Lifeworld is the “normal” world, a world in which intersubjective typification is familiar relative to those who inhabit it experientially. The Lifeworlds of others are the worlds that possess familiarity for them, but which are, in some respects, relatively unfamiliar to us. Because the horizons of these other Lifeworlds overlap with our own, they pose no special challenge because we have the capacity to enter them in an empathetic act of understanding and grasp their style of typification. This is how the unfamiliar eventually becomes familiar. Husserl recognizes that familiarity is scalable, recognizing degrees of familiarity and different degrees of being acquainted with other worlds. Complicating this understanding, Steinbock opposes the Husserlian texts that are not conformable to the hope for an ultimate fusion of horizons. Rather, Steinbock asserts that the underappreciated Husserlian notions of the “normal” and “abnormal” are co-constituted. Applied to global forms of life they define what Steinbock calls the home-world and the alien-world. Steinbock 1995, 179). Steinbock challenges Husserl’s tendency to ground the abnormal in the normal, making it an intentional modification of the latter, arguing instead that both the home-world and alien-world are co-constituted by the experience of their mutual liminality (Ibid.). Two very different worlds are each alien to one another. One does not have priority over the other, except relative to the inhabitants of each home-world. This experience of liminality occurs through two modes; the appropriative experience of the homely and the transgressive experience of the alien (Ibid.) Because this co-constitution of reality has neither first nor final moment, it is always constitutive of the Lifeworld, but no Lifeworld will ever be a total world encompassing all worlds (Steinbock 1995, 180). This effectively puts an end to either the actual or possible achievement of the telos of the Lifeworld either as the fusion of horizons or the realization of the scientific ideal. An intersubjective community relative to a home-world takes up and makes its own history and traditions. It actively constitutes that world in the process of reconstitution through repetition, rituals, communications, narratives, exhortations, extensions, reasonings and so on. This active constitution is the community’s appropriation of itself. But in this process the community sets boundaries as to what is not of this community so that the alien-world is actively – though perhaps not always consciously – constituted at the same time. What is normal is what occurs within the home-world. What is abnormal is what occurs outside it, in the alien-world. But this delimiting of the home-world and alien-world does not only occur from the inside of a home-world based on its self-appropriation. It cannot ultimately be the solipsistic creation of the other. Rather, contributing to any world’s construction is the confrontation with other, already-existing worlds. This is the home-world’s encounter with the alien-world. In the abnormality of the alien-world one is made aware of the limits to the home-world. Inasmuch as the alien world invades a home-­ world that incursion is experienced as a liminal transgression, one in which the home-world may become less homely because the transgression calls into question

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the assumptions about the home-world’s constitution and limits. The possible responses to such transgressions are multiple. Disruptions of the home-world by an incursion of the alien can be gauged according to their intensity and their cognitive disruption. Husserl himself distinguishes the intensity of two kinds of cognitive breaks with the experience of the home-­ world. Despite the surprise it brings, a slight anomaly or break (little more than a bump in the road, as it were), is incorporated into the experiential consistency of the home-world easily enough. Then there is a great anomaly or break, which is so transgressive that it utterly undermines the structure of our home-world to the point that I become alienated and am unable any longer to appropriate what was once homely (Steinbock 1995, 240–241). Husserl ignores the intensity of possible affective responses which are not cognitive. Among breaks that cognitively disrupt, we can include alien but mildly disruptive ideas, objects, experiences or practices with which we are simply unfamiliar. Once placed in (or made consistent with) our home-world’s system of typification – that is, in the place they hold in the natural or cultural order – they are understood and even familiarized. The deeply-disruptive alien, on the other hand, is resistant in its difference. It is inaccessible because it has a genetic origin not shared by anything in our home-world. Because it consists of such an overwhelming network of meaning and significance relative to the alien-world from which it issues, the only way for it to become familiar is for one to grow up within its connected home-world (Steinbock 1995, 242–243). Husserl never precludes some accessibility to the deeply-disruptive alien, however, for the same reason that Rudolf Otto’s “wholly other” cannot be utterly alien and yet the object of experience. Were the alien utterly alien (or the wholly other really “wholly other”), we could not know them at all. The complete inaccessibility of the totally alien would make it unknowable and, as such, incapable of being a co-constituent of the home-world. Husserl, therefore, provides a recondite description of the admissible accessibility of the deeply alien other: it is accessible in its inaccessibility (Steinbock 1995, 244). No mere play on words, this is to say that when encountered, the subject is impotent to make its heterogeneity conform to the typification of the subject’s home-world, even though one has a jarring experience of that heterogeneity and knows it. There is another aspect of this inaccessibility that Steinbock misses. This notion of inaccessibility may well apply to confrontation with things that come from alien-­ worlds, but it is also at the very core of experience relative to the home-world in the hyletic composition of noemata. Even granting that all possible horizons of all possible worlds can be joined rationally, the hyletic will remain as incomprehensible. Our own experience of the hyletic is liminal. Moreover, we are not certain that our experience of the “stuffs” of experience exhausts all its varieties. This means that the uncanny may operate as the alien in its eidetic constitution, but it might also present itself hyletically, below the level of intentionality. Initially, the utterly alien is experienced as incomprehensible; this incomprehensibility is what Steinbock calls a “break” or “rupture” in “our concordant and

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typically familiar experience” (Steinbock 1995, 240). It is too mild to say that the expectations that accompany the future horizon of our home-world are not met; rather, they are utterly disrupted, and then that horizon must either be expanded, abandoned or left in a state of shambles, or the horizon of the alien-world may itself be adopted. Only the first alternative preserves at least part of the home-world intact. As Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) and later Samuel Huntington (1927–2008) have argued, historical records of the transgression of home-worlds by alien-worlds  – especially when the irruption is sudden, expansive and hegemonic – indicate that this does not usually end well for the weaker, invaded, and disrupted home-world. It is of little consequence to my ultimate purpose to affirm or deny the rectitude of Steinbock’s argument in its entirety. What is of use to my purpose is the way he characterizes the notions of appropriation and transgression, as well as those of home-world and alien-world. In attempting to sustain an argument for the co-­ constitution of the familiar and the alien, normal and abnormal – something which Husserl apparently entertained but then marginalized – Steinbock has in my view accurately identified one of Husserl’s abnegations: his attempted resolution of the issue of the radically uncanny by presuming it could be made explicable within a rational worldview. But because Steinbock operates mainly on the level of the intersubjective in addressing the co-constitution of the homely and the alien, he misses Husserl’s second abnegation: his failure to identify the radically alien at the heart of intentionality  – the otherness and inexplicability of the hyletic component of experience. The first abnegation has relevance to the way the uncanny operates within an intersubjective community; the second abnegation has relevance to possible hyletic causes of the experience of the uncanny.

The Unhomely, the Alien and the Uncanny Although neither Steinbock nor Husserl directly associated the alien-world’s irruption into the home-world as an experience of the uncanny, the affinity between home-world and alien-world and the homely and unhomely allows us to describe the latter in terms of the former, especially when explaining the uncanny experience of alien social practices and ideas. But just because an object or practice belongs to an alien world does not make it uncanny. It must possess additional characteristics for this emotion to be felt. It must be disquieting, disturbing, distressing or threatening.

The Unhomely and the Uncanny Though the uncanny may be manifest within the relative settledness of the home-­ world –– in strange natural objects or defamiliarized novel creations – it may also be manifest in the penetration of an alien thing or social world into the home-world.

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Put simply, the distinction between the heimlich and the unheimlich is a distinction between whether one experiences a phenomenon in conformity with the horizon of one’s known world, or whether that phenomenon is known imperfectly – as only imperfectly manifest – as disrupting that conformity. The disruption of the homely in uncanny experience can occur in one of two ways; either as a disruption within the horizon of our world or as a disruption that results from another world’s penetration of our own from the outside. In other words, heimlich is everything that we associate with our home-world, an experiential world that has a horizon of expectations about things and acts that is comfortable because it is established, regular, predictable and/or reliable, whereas the uncanny is anything we associate with something alien, an event in our world or the world of another about which we are befuddled, because our regular expectations have been violated. Here, everything seems exotic, unpredictable, strange, incompletely-­ explained, oddly-situated, and, to some degree, threatening or disquieting. The uncanniness of the alien is derivative from its discontinuity with and immediate inaccessibility from one’s home world. Because the phenomena of alien worlds are present to us only sporadically and intermittently; because they “leak” or penetrate our world unpredictably or in piecemeal fashion, they are heimlich to the occupants of that alien world, but they are unheimlich to us. The reverse goes for the alien in relation to me; our “homely” is the uncanny alien world for others. Against Freud’s unnecessarily reductive analysis, I would therefore argue that heimlich is not a species of the unheimlich (as he maintains), but that this shared meaning can be a matter of positionality; namely the comfort of a subject’s position in some place, act or experience vis-á-vis what is alien to it. Individuals inhabiting diverse social worlds experience their respective worlds as settled and comfortable in a like way. However, when the homeliness of one world penetrates the homeliness of another; when worlds partially open alien horizons to one another, the respective inhabitants of each will identify the other’s homeliness as unhomely. We may be comfortable with our own domestic secrets, with our own rituals, with the ideas within our own social bubble, but when we become partially (but unempathetically) aware that the alien has similar but different not-entirely-manifest secrets, rituals and ideas that exclude us, those things become disquieting. The reciprocity of alien worlds lies in the fact that each is heimlich to its inhabitants and unheimlich to those outside it. A characteristic of the uncanny is the unfamiliarity that accompanies the incomplete understanding of another realm, whether social or ontological. Sometimes the prevention of social understanding is intentional (as in the occult or secret, as noted by Freud); sometimes the barrier to understanding is a mere difficulty in communication. But sometimes, as A.-T. Tymieniecka noted in her magnum opus Logos and Life, radical otherness can be a concomitant of originality in poesis and/or it can be a contrived effect intended by the maker of an aesthetic object, whose purpose is to induce an experience of the uncanny for artistic, religious or social purposes within the home world.

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This defamiliarization can operate within the horizon of what is homely and settled (as in the case with intended forms of radically-new works of art), or it can be an effect of either natural or created things coming from an alien world.

I ntentional Defamiliarization and the Creation of the Uncanny à la A.-T. Tymieniecka Though she rejected Husserl’s understanding of the Lifeworld and its constituting consciousness as inadequate, A.-T. Tymieniecka’s discussion of defamiliarization has special significance here, especially as it describes those uncanny objects created by humans within the horizon of the home-world. According to Tymieniecka, because the Husserlian understanding of the constitution of the world is rational and operates within the boundaries of how things are, it is limited (Tymieniecka 1988, 98). Creative consciousness on the other hand operates within the realm of sufficiently-­different worlds that are not so different as to be alien in an utterly-­ unanticipatable way; they are not inaccessible to our world (Tymieniecka 1988, 99). Rather, they fall within a newly-recognized horizon broader than the Husserlian notion that includes imaginative works; a horizon that includes “abysses … of horror, or love, or quietude” (Tymieniecka 1988, 97). That they are precisely abyssal, however, means that they are unplumbable. They thus reinforce Steinbock’s assertion that the resolution of the alien in an ultimate fusion of horizons is impossible. Constitution of our world is thus expanded as a possibility in a way not addressed by Husserl. This expansion ultimately is transformative of the world of culture, and productive of ideas and tropes which set new projects for the sciences. Much of this creative constitution operates below the level of consciousness, so it is not subject to immediate observation (and here Tymieniecka is in partial agreement with Freud); the processes of its workings can only be conjectured after the creative act is accomplished (Tymieniecka 1988, 117). Based on her conjectures (abductions) of its operations, Tymieniecka concludes that this process begins in chaos (at conscious and subliminal levels) with partial de-structuring of the sedimented field of experience (Tymieniecka 1988, 125). Creative consciousness explodes the typified network of “ideas, images and sensation” in a dialectical process that moves backward and forward between deconstruction and synthesis until the ideas, images and sensations are reassembled into a series of adumbrations tending toward and ending in a completed “creative product” (Tymieniecka 1988, 125). The result of these processes is that the originality of the emergent new artifact is alien to established typologies. To dwell any longer on the mechanics of the process  – which Tymieniecka describes in detail – would be to be diverted from the significance of her discovery to the business at hand.3 The importance of her formulations for the study of the  For an elaboration of the moments in this process see Tymieniecka (1988, 113–378) and Ryba (2002, 448b–452b). 3

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uncanny is twofold. First, she recognizes that defamiliarization  – the making of something alien – is at the heart of the creation of original works. Second, she establishes (by implication) that uncanny artifacts, like other created objects with different aesthetic effects, can intentionally be made to be uncanny, but this creation engages all mental operations so that the product’s disquieting strangeness will not be purely cognitive. Only the fusion of the horizons of the alien and home-world, or the familiarization of the defamilarized artifact, removes their uncanniness, but there are limits to familiarization. It may be that what lies below the cognizable uncanny is something that is irreducibly weird (inexplicable and utterly unfamiliar), in which case the fusion of worlds is defeated: an aspect of the alien world or thing will remain irresolvably other. Freud’s explanation of the uncanny in terms of subconscious causes makes one kind of fusion of horizons possible through the explication of the unconscious to the conscious mind, but this excludes the possibility of uncanny qualities that are sui generis (unique). What is experienced as uncanny may not be completely reducible to a product of the unconscious imagination, however. The uncanny also applies to other experiences as well as to cultures and things. Thus, we may say that the manifestation of the uncanny is underdetermined.

The Uncanny as a Natural Appearance in the Home-World The uncanny is not, however, merely about the unpredictable interpenetration of alien social worlds. Another world is not required to experience the natural uncanny. The uncanny (as the mood that accompanies the experience of the alien) can also be experienced as native to our home-world in the experience of anomalous objects and events; things which are inexplicable because they are in relation to a different realm of meaning, experience or cultural frame, but which appear strange against the horizon of meaning with which we are well familiar. Here the shift is from the horizon of the home-world to the internal and external noematic horizons of things and actions. Things can be experienced as uncanny because they violate our expectations about how they ought to behave or be, according to “laws” of our world. This is a violation of our expectations about those things’ internal noematic horizons. But things can also be uncanny when found in temporal or spatial contexts where they do not belong. This is a violation of our expectations about those things’ external noematic horizons, but this violation may have both formal (eidetic) and material (hyletic) aspects. Thus, things can manifest themselves as uncanny within our world by either structural composition or dislocation. From this correspondence, it is possible to express the uncanniness of an object (in near-Aristotelian categorical terms) by reference on one hand to its substance and qualities (which are a function of its structural composition and sensorial filling), and, on the other, as a function of its time, place and relationality. Based on everything said above, it is possible to take these observations about the disruptions

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of expectations about the categorical characterization of objects and expand them into a rough taxonomy of the uncanny.

Toward a Phenomenological Taxonomy of the Manifest Uncanny Jentsch correctly observed – as Kant before him said about the beautiful – that sensitivity of the subject is a factor in the perception of the uncanny (Kant 1952 [1790], 2:42:160/301). Like the aesthetic sense of beauty, there is great variability in the abilities of different subjects to perceive it; the intensity with which they perceive it, and their ability to distinguish its varieties. Even so, based on the accounts of others (and on my own experience of the uncanny, which is quite acute), I offer the following (not entirely comprehensive) characteristics of uncanny objects: characteristics which in their definitive nature are relatively independent of the sensitivity of the subject.

A Brief (Inexhaustive) Taxonomy of the Uncanny What follows is an attempt to specify and classify the manifest features of uncanny things. Necessarily, these descriptions unavoidably include noetic features as well, insofar as an object is always experienced by a subject. Consciousness of something is always an experience of someone. The purpose here is to build up a set of characteristics which are useful in the analysis of concrete examples.  he Uncanny Can Be Scaled on a Spectrum Ranging From the Negative, T Through the Neutral to the Positive Although much of the literature about the uncanny treats it as though the experience and objects of it are only negative, this is not the case. The negative uncanny has been emphasized simply because it is the most commonly registered by frequency and intensity. Its intensity is due to the existential threat that accompanies it which makes it fearful. A kind of uncanniness which is negative, and which is sometimes taken as – mistakenly – – indistinguishable from the uncanny, is the creepy uncanny. Creepiness is a kind of uncanniness, but it differs from the powerfully uncanny in that it is attended by a suggestion of (sometimes subliminal) oddness or repulsiveness – but not usually full-blown threatening alienness – that characterizes it. Its intensity is notably less than the kinds of uncanniness that involve an overt existential threat. Mildly-discomfiting is the creepiness of the stranger whose affect is not quite normal, such as the “office colleague” who constantly violates your body space; the

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person on the bus who constantly licks her lips, someone whose hobby is collecting scabs, the android whose features are too regular, the acquaintance who asks questions that are a little too personal, and so on. But creepiness can extend to environments and things as well. A hotel where most furnishings are made from animal horns is also creepy. Here, the existential threat is usually minimal, but the appearances do not match expectations of normality and lead to suspicions that something is not quite right about the person, place or thing. Something need not be an existential threat to be fearful, however. This recognition allows uncanniness to be recognized as characteristic of a wider variety of objects than simply the existentially-threatening. As an illustration of this point, Rudolf Otto has described the experience of the Holy as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans; an experience that is uncanny, disquieting and anxiety-inducing (a tremendum) to be sure, but also one whose positivity in its attraction to an object, in the midst of a disquieting carrier experience, makes it something to be sought and embraced (Otto 1952 [1917], 31–40). For this reason, it makes sense to distinguish the negative uncanny from the positive uncanny, and to allow a middle position of neutrality as well. After the discovery of, for example, a new species of animal we may view its form as neutrally uncanny because we are neither threatened nor positively transported by its appearance. Note that the carrier experience – the noetic component and the feeling – may be in the main similar, but the object thus delivered may not be. This is to say that the experience that carries the effect of the uncanny is not isomorphic to a particular object: it may not even allow explication in terms of the known features of the object. This feature of some uncanny objects corresponds to Otto’s mysterium (Otto 1952 [1917], 23–30). Two examples come to mind from the artistic attempts to represent the ethereal uncanny. Both are paintings that treat the event of the Annunciation of Mary as an uncanny event. One is by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1849–1850), the other is by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1898). In both, the effect of the uncanniness of the event is registered in the emotions on Mary’s face – an anxious wonderment – which is easily-read and sympathetically-­ experienced by the viewer. The sympathetic sharing of the mood invites deeper empathetic reflection on what the impact of such an announcement on a young maiden might be. In Tanner’s painting, the mood (and hence the uncanniness of the effect) is heightened by the unconventional representation of the angel as a meniscus of light; the effect being to signal that the experience should be framed by the realm of the preternatural – as coming from an alien world. The Uncanny Can Be Experienced as Natural, Artificial or Preternatural The experience of the uncanny can take place when its object is continuous with the natural world, when other realms of being irrupt into the natural world, or as the effect of human artifice, either social or artistic. As an experience in the natural world, the uncanny usually manifests itself as either discontinuous with the internal

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or external noematic horizon of the type of object. When this happens, a type of known object is experienced with features alien to the expected ones. This usually constitutes only a mild realignment of expectations; one that can be harmonized with the horizon of expectations about the type. When the uncanny is an artifact or a human creation, that effect on the subject is, as it were, doubly removed. First, it is an intended effect by the creator of the artistic work with the expectation that the observer will experience it through the work qua – “by virtue of being [a]” – work of art. Second, the artistic uncanny achieves its effect not through a real uncanny object in the world of quotidian experience but representationally, through the artist’s production of an object that requires the imaginative entry of the observer into the work; an entry that is always accompanied by a kind of suspension of doubt. The same might be said of a ritual relative to the culture from which it issues. The ingression of rituals from an alien-world achieve their uncanny effect not because one imaginatively suspends doubt in the way that is expected in its original cultural framing, but because of the strangeness of actions, words and vestments relative to the home-world which is transgressed by them. The purveyors of religion are often expert at arranging the aesthetics of ritual to produce uncanny effects in those familiar with a shared cultural code. This is part and parcel of the intentional process of defamiliarization. Though not its only effect, among the intended effects of defamiliarization is the production of the experience of the uncanny. This defamiliarization is a controlled effect in many sectors of culture, and in some cases defamiliarized artifacts and acts are intentionally made into artifices. If these artifacts are experienced as uncanny by someone from an alien social world, that experience is neither the same nor induced in the same way as it is for someone in the home-world from which it issued. Thus, the defamiliarization necessary for the uncanny to be experienced may have effect in two different ways for the same made object – for example, a ritual. The preternaturally uncanny, on the other hand, defies expectations for this or any conceivable social world. It is the irruption of another order of being into this one; its eidetic and hyletic effects are incomprehensible.  he Uncanny Can Be Experienced as a Spatial, Temporal or T Ontic Displacement The uncanny can be modalized under the general category of displacement. Uncanny displacement of objects can occur topologically, temporally, or ontically. (i) The uncanny as involving spatial displacement: Spatial displacement is one of the ways the uncanny manifests itself. When an object is found mysteriously present in a location where it should not be, this can be experienced as uncanny. Here, the experience is topological and reliant on the spatial framing – in other words, what strikes one as uncanny is when

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something is strangely misplaced. Here the experience of the uncanniness of the object is not the object per se but where the object is found. Here, we may say that it is the expected external noematic horizon of the object that is vitiated. In other words, it comes spatially into relation with other things in a way that could not be anticipated. This qualification of the uncanny approximately corresponds to the Aristotelian accident of location. It is one thing to understand the possible set of spatial relations any object can have with any other object in the universe; it is quite another to have expectations about the horizon of an object’s likely spatial relation. The topological uncanny disrupts those expectations. The raining of frogs (or fish) also represents an example of spatial dislocation and displacement (Teenmar News/V6 News 2016; Vassigh 2021). (ii) The uncanny as involving temporal displacement: Temporal displacement is another way the uncanny manifests itself. An anachronism such as an object present in a time where it does not belong has the potentiality for being experienced as uncanny. Again, the frame determines the uncanniness of the experience. Especially uncanny are objects that seem to be future anachronisms in ancient surroundings. In this case, the experience of the uncanniness is not a result of the object per se but where the object is found in time. Again, it is the anticipation of the possible external noematic horizon of the thing that is disrupted because the object is not in the time it ought to be. Slightly uncanny would be to discover a nineteenth century Native American war club while digging in a Mid-Western garden in the USA; uncannier would be the discovery of a mastodon skeleton there. Exceptionally uncanny would be the discovery of a hieroglyphic depiction of a rocket ship on the wall of an Ancient Egyptian temple. Here, the measure of the intensity of the experience of the uncanny has little to do with our familiarity with the object; it is almost completely a function of the temporal framing of the object. (iii) The uncanny as involving temporal repetition (or temporal loops) Although not strictly a displacement, unexpected repetitions of the presence of an object or person – or the repetition of coincidences – also count as one of the forms of the experience of the uncanny. The intensity of the associated uncanniness is connected to the negativity or positivity of the thing repeated. If the repeated object is a threat to the experiencing subject – if I meet my evil twin, for example  – the intensity of the uncanniness of the repetition will be increased, and subsequent repetitions will be dreaded with increasing accompanying anxiety. On the other hand, if the repetition is a matter of chance meetings with my best friend, unexpected repetitions will come to be hoped for, with the diminishment of accompanying strangeness. This is explored at some length in Freud’s monograph and more recently by Rene Girard in his discussions of the strangeness of twins and doppelgangers. Other temporal alterations of experience, such as time dilation, lost time, or the almost-instantaneous passage of time, can also produce the feeling of uncanniness. This is especially likely when inexplicable according to the usual causes of the alteration of temporal perception (among them pain, pleasure, inebriation, fatigue, etc.)

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(iv) The uncanny as involving ontic displacement (preternatural or supernatural): A fourth kind of highly uncanny displacement is the experience of an object which is perceived to be from another order of being. This is a transgression of the maximally alien. The uncanniness of such experiences is a function both of what the thing is in itself and the possible unnatural sensory effects it might have on the experiencing subject. Both are especially uncanny because they have never been experienced before. This possibility represents one of the peak experiences of the uncanny because of its consummately alien nature. There is no analogy of experience that could adequately express the object or its effects. Here belong those things that appear as supernatural experiences, experiences of the paranormal, mystical unions or celestial flights, and so on. Whether the ontically-displaced object is experienced as a threat, a benignity or a consolation may depend on the object itself, but it also can be a function of the carrier experience apart from the object’s mode of presentation, as is the case with the notion of a consolation without a cause as it appears in The Spiritual Exercises (Loyola 1914 [1548], 134–135).4 In other words, something may be perceived in the experience that is not apparent when the object of the experience is bracketed. The Anthropomorphically-Similar Can Be Experienced as Uncanny In a passage from the late fourth century BCE that harmonizes with the present approach, Aristotle describes nature as straying greatly from expectations associated with an established generic type and producing an aberration as a monstrosity [teras] (Aristotle 1943). For Aristotle, children that do not resemble their parents are monstrosities to some degree because they deviate from type (Ibid., 8). The inverse of this example – and by the expansion of the meaning of uncanny to include what is wondrously disturbing – is that of children that seem to be, in looks and actions, clones of their parents. As will be shown below, the monstrous is a variety of the uncanny, but it is too rash to name the uncanniness of minor deviations from nature, or minor deviations about expectations about type, as monstrous, for reasons that

 In two sections of his exercises (Loyola 1914 [1548], 88–89), Ignatius mentions this mysterious phenomenon. In the section titled Rules For The Same Effect With Greater Discernment of Spirits, as the second rule, he says: “[I]t is the property of the Creator to enter, go out and cause movements in the soul, bringing it all into the love of His Divine Majesty. I say without cause: without any previous sense or knowledge of any object through which such consolation comes, through one’s acts of understanding and will.” Further on, in the eighth rule, he adds, “our Lord alone, as was said; still the spiritual person to whom God gives such consolation, ought, with much vigilance and attention, to look at and distinguish the time itself of such actual consolation from the following, in which the soul remains warm and favored with the favor and remnants of the consolation past; for often in this second time, through one’s own course of habits and the consequences of the concepts and judgments, or through the good spirit or through the bad, he forms various resolutions and opinions which are not given immediately by God our Lord, and therefore they have need to be very well-examined before entire credit is given them, or they are put into effect.” 4

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will become apparent. Nevertheless, the deviation that Aristotle describes – a deviation from expectations of the “homely”  – does designate the uncanny, as we have seen. Outside of nature, the uncanniness caused by the anthropomorphically-similar is often an aesthetic effect produced with various degrees of effectiveness in Gothic, Romantic or horror literature and cinema. Both Jentsch and Freud mention it, especially in reference to the stories of Hoffmann (Jentsch 1996 [1906], 12) (Freud 1971 [1919], 31). Jentsch relates its especial uncanniness to uncertainty about whether the anthropomorphic artifact is possibly animate or not; marionettes being a cause of the experience of uncanniness (Jentsch’s trait # 11, above). Contemporary pieces that address the eeriness of robotic automata (the rough equivalent of the marionettes of Hoffmann’s day) refer to these original observations and the 1970 milestone study by the Japanese futurist Masahiro Mori, which represents the first attempt to quantify the reaction of subjects to anthropomorphic simulacra (Mori 2012 [1970]).5 The “uncanny valley” that Mori proposed describes the data curve which plots “affinity” – the Japanese word shinwakan means “affinity, likeability, relatability, familiarity, level of comfort, ability to empathize with” – against human likeness (Mori 2012 [1970], 1–2). Though Mori’s conclusions have been contested, and though they possess limited application to a wide range of uncanny objects, his study establishes the point that the difference between the canny and the uncanny is a continuum (Eveleth 2013). Mori finds that the ability of a human simulacrum to move increases the intensity of its uncanniness. Uncanniness is most acutely experienced in the space between the completely familiar (human) and the completely different (industrial robot). Here difference plays a role in defining the strangely unfamiliar, but it is in the middle register between the same and different that the experience of the uncanny is most likely to be acute. As likeness increases, affinity increases to a point – and then Mori’s curve falls precipitously. Not terribly uncanny are industrial robots; they in no way resemble humans in visage, nor are their movements anything but mechanical. There is greater affinity for automata that look very much like human beings and move like human beings. The place near the bottom of the curve (great similarity but little affinity) is occupied by the Yaze-Otoko (gaunt-man-suffering-in-hell) mask of the Japanese Noh Play, while the curve’s nadir is occupied by the zombie (the living dead). Further discussion of masks as uncanny follows below. As the curve begins to trend upward one finds Bunraku marionettes (which bear a great likeness to humans in motion and visage), then sick humans, and finally healthy humans at the highest point on the curve (maximal likeness and affinity) (Mori 2012 [1970], 1–4). Scholars have proposed explanations that emphasize the evolutionary value of uneasiness felt in the presence of human approximations  – suggesting that it is genetically “hard-wired” into our psychology  – but here, the importance of the anthropomorphic uncanny is an example of how simulacra are apprehended as a violating type, and this in itself is a cause of the uneasiness felt in their presence.

 Thanks to my nephew Jack Wills for calling my attention to this essay some time ago.

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The Monstrous Is Experienced as Uncanny The monstrous uncanny is the variety that has perhaps received the widest treatment because it is most emblematic of the mood set by the experience of alien objects, persons or things. Its ubiquitous fascination is also a function of its mode of appearance, especially as a controlled and artificially-induced theme and effect in literature, film and the plastic arts, though this mode of the uncanny is found in nature and the preternatural as well. Different social frames establish different experiences of the monstrous. The monstrous uncanny is experienced very differently when one is confronted by an actual monster compared to when one encounters a cinematographic monster. In the former case, one’s life is actually threatened whereas in the latter, the suspension of disbelief provides the moviegoer with a perspective much akin to Kant’s subject, who experiences the dynamic sublime: that is, delight in the fear because of the awareness of the security of the Self and the indomitability of its will (Kant 1952, 2:1:B:28:111/261–262). Derrida’s treatment of the monstrous uncanny (though brief and too narrow) reinforces some of the points made about the susceptibility of the uncanny to phenomenological analysis along four modalities: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Disclosure Temporalization Composition and Familiarization.

These modalities are in harmony with my observation that the uncanny as alien is only partially-disclosed, that it is something whose noematic horizons are known, at best, fragmentarily, and that it, as noema, is a displacement in our world. Derrida (playing off the statement of Husserl) says that the monster is precisely that which “shows itself” [elle se montre] “in not being fully shown”; it “therefore looks like a hallucination, it strikes the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to identify this figure,” and yet it is alive (Derrida 1995 [1992], 386). This striking parallel to Husserl’s description of the alien (mentioned by Steinbock, above) recommends it as an example of the monstrous uncanny. In keeping with the temporalization of the uncanny also mentioned, Derrida describes the historical future as monstrous because it is not “predictable, calculable, programmable” (Derrida 1995 [1992], 387). The monstrous and uncanny is anything that erupts into our present as “having no past” (Ibid.). Unlike the Husserlian future horizon of the world, which is pitched towards a scientific or rational telos, Derrida’s future is fearsome with the threat of the utterly alien. But the idea that the future is either utterly unpredictable or utterly predictable are exaggerations. The historical future is as much composed of continuities as discontinuities; it is as much about the predictable and humdrum as it is about what is flabbergasting and new. Nevertheless, unpredictability and inability to place something in history are marks of the uncanny.

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According to Derrida, a monster is no mere hybridization; it is a first, an original, sui generis; it is something for which we do not even have a name (Derrida 1995 [1992], 386). The uncanniness in the experience of the monster, a perception that is tantamount to a traumatism, has a practical dimension: it threatens the established order and norms (Derrida 1995 [1992], 385). For the circumspect, it can become an occasion to reflect on the history of norms or normality. But norms are always the rule of the home-world. Finally, Derrida speaks about the familiarization of the monstrous, a process of understanding that takes place almost as quickly as the recognition of the monstrous. “[A]s soon as one perceives a monster… [qua monster], one begins to domesticate it, one begins … to compare it to the norms, to analyze it, [and] consequently to master whatever could be terrifying in this figure …that is, [one begins] to accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign and strange, but one must also add, to try to domesticate it; that is, to make it a part of the household” (Derrida 1995 [1992], 386). Things that were denounced as “anomalies or monstrosities” may now be “appropriated, assimilated, acculturated”, Derrida says, arguing that the result will “transform the nature of the field of reception [and] transform the nature of social and cultural experience, historical experience” (Derrida 1995 [1992], 387). In its moment of emergence, a “monstrous monstrosity” (as Derrida describes it) is unanticipated and completely unknown; it is in its alienness that it has its shattering effect; it only becomes a “normal monstrosity” by being made intelligible within an established order of thinking, but this makes it “mis-known” (méconnue); a residue of alienness in it always remains irreducible (Derrida 1990, 79–81). What Derrida says about monstrous ideas is compatible with other uncanny objects, but his blanket statement is naive regarding whether the monstrous may be domesticated and to what extent. Though the domestication of the monstrous may occur as the fusion of the monster’s noematic and noetic horizons with the horizon of our home-world, sometimes the alienness or the existential threat of a monster overcomes all possibilities of domestication. In their respective ways Jentsch, Freud, Derrida and Girard all privilege the cognitive in describing the monstrous or the uncanny, inasmuch as they emphasize the intelligible morphē of the monstrous or the uncanny as something that can be mastered and assimilated intellectually, imagining that the noema of either can be reconciled by an expansion of the world’s intelligibility; its horizon. But this cognitivist approach is an abnegation of other features. For instance, the noema of the uncanny is not purely formal but also material; an effect of color and light, size and shape, and perhaps even unknown transcendental causes. In the experience of the uncanny, it is the hyletic component (and its aesthetic effect) that may resist the kind of domestication or familiarization possible for the morphic component. And this is because the perceptual filling of an experience is irreducible to its structural features.

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The Uncanniness of the Monstrous Dead The frozen face of a dead elder, mouth opened in a grimace expressing pain or the release of the soul, conveys the uncanny in a way that the peaceful repose of a corpse does not. Animate the dead corpse, and, as Masahiro Mori has argued, one produces an experience of the anthropomorphic uncanny unrivalled by any static uncanny anthropomorphic artifices such as dolls or statues. Disfigure the animated corpse (as is the case with zombies), and one increases the intensity of the uncanniness of the monster even further. The dead are supposed to stay dead. Animated, they violate the type and appear threatening. The Disfigured, Chimeric and Metamorphic Uncanny René Girard has noted the constitutional effect that disfigurement, composition and metamorphosis have on the identification of the monstrous, but like Freud, he is more interested in explaining the monstrous according to his theory of mimesis and scapegoating, instead of grounding it as a sui generis phenomenon. For Girard the disfigured, the chimeric and the metamorphic – and the disquiet they induce – are all cultural maskings of what lies behind the experience of the uncanny monstrous. His principal interest is in what they hide, not in any possible aesthetic effects of these qualities in themselves. The monstrous for Girard is both a differentiating reason for – and a mythic residue of – the scapegoat mechanism; the act of scapegoating singles out the alien and justifies the violence done to it on the basis of difference. When a society, on the verge of internecine violence, because of suffocating de-differentiation, seeks a scapegoat as an outlet to relieve tension, severe deformity becomes its excuse (Girard 1989 [1972], 143–168). But aside from noting the difference of the deformed or disfigured, Girard says little about the aesthetic impact of those characteristics. The abnormality of the disfigured or physically or mentally disabled can elicit a nearly-automatic recoil, and the feeling of uneasiness that the “normal” members of society sometimes experience in their presence can become unjust grounds for discrimination and persecution (Girard 1986 [1982], 18). If the enormity or improbability of the abnormality is great, this uneasiness places these unfortunates on the scale of the monstrous. But as a violation of type, especially as far as humans are concerned, the violation is merely a matter of typical appearance or function: it is not uncanniness induced by the experience of something essentially different. Thus, though the aesthetic uncanniness of monstrous deformity may be hard to overcome, the intensity of its uncanniness is not as great as if type were violated. From a Husserlian perspective, the uncanniness that results from the disfigured, chimeric and metamorphic monstrous has some common features. All three varieties violate expectations about ontic type, though in different ways. However, in Husserlian terms, the violation of our expectations about what the human form should look like  – the negative aesthetics of the deformity  – is coupled with the empathetic realization about the cause of the deformity (congenital or mechanical), responsibility for it and/or the possibility that the able-bodied subject might be directly or (by relations) subject to it. If scapegoating of the deformed occurs, it is propelled (but not legitimated) by these noetic responses as much as the noematic characteristics of the deformity.

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An extreme example of the deformed human monstrous uncanny are teratomas (literally “monster tumors”). Split open, these tumors show evidence of the development of human body parts (bone, teeth, muscles, neurons, hair, partially-developed eyes and/or organ tissue) all jumbled together, distorted and disturbing. These tumors not only violate expectations about type – the intact human body – but they also are an example of an uncanny object that is a violation of place: they are found in the human body, in unexpected places, and thus cause disquiet typical of a parasitic infection. In addition, their internal composition is such that “alien” body parts occur in grotesque combinations. Such tumors bridge the difference between the monstrous uncanny and the chimeric uncanny. The uncanniness of the chimeric monstrous is an uncanniness that can be gauged as greater than the monstrously deformed. Squinting between types, as a pastiche of two kinds of beings, the chimeric violates our expectations about type relative to our home-world and makes classification according to one specific type or another impossible. At the time of its discovery, the uncanniness of the duck-billed platypus qualified it as an example of the chimeric monstrous. Once the platypus became classifiable (as a mammal with homologous duck-like bill, flippers and venomous back spurs), some of its uncanniness was dissolved because it could be explained within the theory of animal evolution (as understood as relative to the home-world), though its appearance nevertheless remained strange. The monstrously chimeric differs from the monstrously deformed because its fusion of features, especially in myth or literature, belongs to an inexplicable order; one that is beyond the world’s anticipatable horizon. In the role that chimeras play in imaginative literature, this unclassifiability often signals a danger that threatens not only the preconceptions of the characters but their lives (Girard 2004 [1991], 52–53, 70–71, 344–347). The uncanniness of the metamorphic monstrous combines aspects of both of the above – and is more disturbing than either – because its kinetic movement intensifies the effect of its unclassifiability. The shifting of differences “back and forth”, their blending together or their transmutation into something that cannot be anticipated, is an extreme defiance of the anticipation of type (Girard 1989 [1972], 22, 67). When the mutable chimeric is an existential threat, its fearsomeness is an effect of our inability to predict how to respond to it to preserve our lives. An Invisible (or Secreted) Presence Can Be Experienced as Uncanny Uncanniness characterizes the experience of a presence that cannot be seen. Here, the perception of the object may be subliminal (below or outside conscious perception and yet an awareness of it), liminal (at the very edge of conscious perception), or a conscious perception by any one or more of the senses, except sight. Ghosts, Peeping Toms and apex predators [sharks, tigers and serial killers] are among the kinds of secreted things that fall into this category. The threat of the unseen increases the tenor of the experience, but threat need not accompany the invisible thing for the uncanniness to be felt. Raised hair at the back of the neck when one perceives a secreted observer need not involve a threat.

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Crackling leaves and twigs and a musky smell in a forest, indicating that one is being tracked by an unseen bear, greatly increases the tenor of anxiety and the intensity of the experience of the uncanniness.  xperience and Things May Be “Transparent” Carriers (or Icons) E of the Uncanny The determinants of the experience of the uncanny usually include: 1. The qualities and structure of the object (the noema) and 2. The intentionality accompanying it (the noesis). In the conscious experience of the uncanny, the object may become dominant so that reflection on anything except the object may be (for all practical purposes) thwarted, or the experiencing of the object may become dominant. In this way, the feeling takes the foreground and the object becomes insignificant, a mere occasion for the feeling. In these cases, the experience is a mere carrier of the force of the uncanny with no significant object. Here, the object becomes the mere occasion for the experience. The experience of the uncanny may not simply be the sum of its parts, a composite quality of the noema and the noetic contribution of the subject, but may be something super-added and presented through the experience of the noema. In some cases, the aesthetic and aesthetic effect remains when the noetic and noematic aspects are subtracted (bracketed); yet still the feeling of the uncanny remains. This persistence of the feeling of the presence of something more, without physical evidence, possibly signals there is more than can be accounted for on the basis of the formal and material components of an experience. Here the experience of the uncanny would be caused by something that transcends our ability to identify it. Freud certainly thought so, and Girard apparently believed this to be the case as well, but both of them attempted to explain away the uncanny with reference to psychological states or a mythic masking of violence. Barring psychological causes – which are real but should not be taken as totalizing – what remains are the occasions where the uncanny is experienced as “transmitted through the experience”, but not reducible to it. Via a purely descriptive phenomenology of the uncanny, it may be possible to discover examples where the causative features of the uncanny are not in the experience of any particular object, but the object is merely the carrier of the feeling. Where would it be possible to locate the “window” of transmissibility of this effect? Might the transparency of the carrier be the hyletic component of the noema in the experience, the pure stuff of the sensation, operating subliminally, and acting on the subject to produce the emotion, especially if the known noematic and noetic components of the experience cannot account for it? The possibility that I am proposing is that the force of some experiences of the uncanny or monstrous may be effected by an irreducible, direct sensation, other than those with which we are familiar (Henry 2008 [1990], 13–20, 88–99; Henry 2015 [2000], 47–64).

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The attempt to understand the uncanny, qua uncanny, is already a secondary reflex cognition. If this is so, then the uncanny might impact the subject without the experience of it being constituted intentionally, at least in the first moment. This means that the understanding of the monstrous or the uncanny – an understanding which is tantamount to its intellectual domestication – will never be able to grasp the hyletic component in such a way as to dull its effect. In other words, there may be something aesthetically irreducible about some uncanny things. Following Jentsch’s observation, some experiences of the uncanny will possess sensorial aesthetic effects that will always remain effective but unexplained, even as the uncanny thing has become intelligible. The Framing of the Uncanny Modalizes Its Experience The context of the subject’s experience of the uncanny – the conditions under which it is experienced – modalizes the experience. Context determines the experience’s intensity and mode of reception (threatening, enjoyable, etc.). It makes a significant difference whether the uncanny is experienced in the real world  – where it may confront one as unavoidable – or in an artistic work, where distance can be placed between the appreciator and the artifact. (I can close a book; I can leave the theater, and so on.) It is especially in works of art that the experience of the sublime and the experience of the uncanny resemble one another. The uncanny resembles the sublime when the frame for the uncanny puts the subject in a position of safety such as in a movie theater, and especially when the cinematographic narrative allows the characters to triumph over the monstrous uncanny. Then the monstrous uncanny can be experienced as thrilling because there is no existential threat. Here, the awareness of the will standing against the monstrous is an analogy of experience to the will standing against the dynamic sublime (Kant 1952, 2:1:B:28:111/261–262). The Uncanny Is a Complex Product From everything said above, it is possible to posit the uncanny as a complex product. To explain the effect of the uncanny, all the following aspects would seem to be involved: 1. The confrontation of the home-world by an alien-world; 2. The disruption of the noematic horizons of an object within its home-world or from an alien-world; 3. The perceived qualities of the uncanny object itself (liminal or subliminal); 4. The frame of interpretation for the object (natural, cultural or preternatural); 5. The feeling of uncanniness itself; 6. The composite experience of the uncanny consisting of its noematic and noetic aspects (1 through 5), and finally:

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7. The carrier, or what is responsible for inducing the emotion of the uncanniness in the subject, which is the totality of the experiential aspects as a composite, or possibly something beyond the totality that supervenes on the components of the experience. Having laid out some (no doubt incomplete) features of a phenomenological taxonomy of the uncanny, I would now like to turn to some examples to show how these features are operative in each. I do not claim that everyone reading this piece will register the same reaction to the examples  – this is hardly an empirically-­ established dataset – but the effect of most of these examples, as indicated in the media and my own experience, suggest generally predictable similar responses, though perhaps of variable intensities. What follows is a limited set of uncanny objects which provide occasions for the application of the above taxonomy. For want of space, these examples do not realize all of the possible taxonomic categories which can be identified. Also, many of them are complex examples having overlapping features.

Some Illustrative Examples of the Uncanny  xample 1: The London Hammer (the Uncanny as Temporal E and Spatial Displacement) Without its proper framing, the photo of the London Hammer (Picture 1) requires contextualization before its uncanniness can be appreciated (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/10/London_Hammer.jpg). When historically framed however, it becomes an occasion for uncanny wonder. Found in 1936 in London, Texas, the London Hammer is a purported anomalous artifact. It is a hammerhead (160 mm by 25 mm) and part of a hammer shaft (140 mm) of the style used in late nineteenth century America. However, it is supposedly embedded in rock, dating from the Lower Cretaceous Period (around 145 million to 100 million years ago). Whether or not physical processes may be at play enabling geologists to explain the juxtapositioning of the two anachronistic elements (a nineteenth century hammer embedded in prehistoric rock), the artifact and context of its discovery induce a mild feeling of uncanniness because it is an apparently-inexplicable example of a temporal and spatial displacement (Fitzpatrick-Matthews 2007). In Husserlian terms, this anomalous object violates expectations about the external noematic horizon of the object – a hammer – with respect to its spatial relations and licit time coordinates (any period after the nineteenth century in North America). As an uncanny object however, it is hardly profoundly disturbing because there are plausible explanations continuous with scientific assumptions about our home-­world (it might be that it fell into a petrifying well and became the nucleus of an aggregation of limestone fossils). This is an object which causes only a mild disruption of our assumptions about the temporal and spatial placement of the

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Picture 1  Photograph of the London Hammer or “London Artifact”, found in Texas, 1936. (Image from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/10/London_Hammer.jpg, according to legal use guidelines)

thing  – a hammer  – but especially because of the incongruity of its geological context, it is nevertheless evocative of uncanniness. In its valuation, the London Artifact is an example of the neutrally uncanny.

 xample 2: Purdue Pete (the Uncanny E as Anthropomorphic Distortion) In 2021, when Quality Logo Products asked 1266 people to rank the “best, worst, sexiest, unsexist, creepiest and most offensive” NCAA Division 1 mascot, “Purdue Pete” came in first place as the creepiest and in second place as the worst. Pete is the sledgehammer-wielding, hardhat-wearing engineer (Picture 2) that is both the emblem and talisman of Purdue University (https://upload.wikimedia.org/ wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Purdue_Pete_modern.jpg). Its uncanny creepiness has been known to frighten children and fans, so much so that it was retired at the beginning of the American football season in the autumn of 2010 in favor of a new design. But that design was booed off the football field by Pete’s devotees, and Purdue Pete was brought back by popular demand in April 2011. The features that contribute to Pete’s uncanny creepiness can be approximated on Masahiro Mori’s uncanny valley curve (Graph 1) in a position evocative of

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creepiness-in-motion somewhere between a myoelectric hand and an okina mask on an actor (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mori_Uncanny_Valley.svg). Purdue Pete’s strange anthropomorphic form and motion (masking a student, who is hidden within), his disproportionately large head, aggressively-chiselled jaw, expressionless stare, dilated pupils, with sledgehammer in hand, all suggest a psychotic feral threat. This is perhaps exactly the desired effect needed to intimidate opponents in a football game (WTHR.com 2021; Nelson 2018; Watson 2021). Again, this mascot is an object that evokes mild anxiety typical of the experience of the uncanny. Because the materials of its composition are combined as an accidental composite  – a human body pretty obviously masked over by a fiberglass head – it has less impact than the experience of the organically chimeric. Also, its social context (antics at a football game) contributes to its benignity. Its creepiness can be heightened, however, by its decontextualization (bracketing) from its ritual frame and by attending to its features. This is why fans of other teams consider it creepier than do Purdue fans. They do not share its frame; it is an alien mascot and as such and in form it is mildly threatening. Its uncanniness is an instance of the masked monstrous that Rene Girard includes in the category of the chimeric. It mixes “man and beast, god and inanimate object” both to conceal its wearer’s visage while at the same time exaggerating the expressiveness of the human face (Girard 1986 [1982], 167). This monstrousness has a cultic function, which is not entirely absent in the performance of a football mascot.

Picture 2  Purdue Pete, the “best, worst, sexiest, unsexist, creepiest and most offensive” NCAA Division 1 mascot, according to a 2021 survey of 1226 people by Logo Products. (Image from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Purdue_Pete_modern.jpg, according to legal use guidelines)

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Graph 1  Masahiro Mori’s Graph of Uncanny Valley. (Image found at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mori_Uncanny_Valley.svg; Smurrayinchester, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-­sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons, used according to legal use guidelines) Masks juxtapose beings and objects separated by differences. They are beyond differences; they do not merely defy differences or efface them, but they incorporate and rearrange them in original fashion. […] Masks stand at that equivocal frontier between the human and “divine”, between a differentiated order in the process of disintegration and its final undifferentiated state  – the point at which all differences, all monstrosities, are concentrated (Ibid., 167–168).

Masks occupy a position that Steinbock calls “liminal.” They are on the differentiating edge between the homely and the alien. But masks are this by intention; they are artifacts deployed to achieve controlled effects in social performances, signifying roles in any rituals where “sacred” powers are evoked. They are adscititious additions to the human form – that is, “added to” or “supplemental” – to effect an imaginary transformation, and as such, they always require some suspension of disbelief. Purdue Pete’s uncanniness is in part a function of the composition of the mask, but his significance as a talisman for victory should not be discounted. He is larger than life and an unnerving expression and concentration of the university’s will to triumph over its opponents. In Husserlian terms, the familiarity of this mascot is increased by the ritual frame in which it is found. It is only mildly cognitively affective (or “creepy”) because it is quickly recognized as a costume though by its exaggerated features it violates expectations about what the human visage should be. Following Derrida, we can say that its monstrousness is domesticated by the fans’ affection for him. His uncanniness is more acute for the uninitiated, however.

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Unlike the Sheepshead Fish (below), Purdue Pete is not a “true” chimera, but merely a simulation of one – so he does not defy expectations about type (that is, a football mascot). Because he is an assemblage, his disruption of expectations is not connected to the essential, but to the aesthetic impact of the mask’s features, in combination with the human hidden underneath it. The aesthetic effect of the mask persists even after the suspension of disbelief connected with the ritual activities (the football game) ends, though its aesthetic impact varies with familiarity and domestication. In its evaluation, Purdue Pete is an example of the positive uncanny for Purdue University football fans in West Lafayette, Indiana – aka “The Boilermakers” – and the negative uncanny for their opponents.

 xample 3: The Sheepshead Fish [Archosargus E probatocephalus] (the Uncanny as the Chimeric) Another mildly uncanny object is the visage of the Sheepshead Fish (Picture 3), a member of the Sparidae family, unusual because of the homology between its mouth and the human mouth, which has been found off the Atlantic coast of North Carolina, USA, most recently in August 2021 (Gamillo 2021). (Gamillo’s on-line piece contains a photograph which much more unnerving.) Something of a nightmare to see, the disquiet induced in the observer has to do with its chimeric monstrousness: an unexpected, incongruous combination of features which defy type and expectations about what a fish should be or look like (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fishmarket_01.jpg). Like other uncanny-inducing examples of the chimeric which are more intense, the Sheepshead Fish is an example of a violation of our expectations about the internal noematic horizon of an object or fish – and what its mouth should look like. It seems a violation of an established ichthyological type (Crew 2013; Etienne 2021). Whereas the mere appearance of the London Hammer conveys uncanniness only to the palaeontologist, who immediately establishes the puzzling nature of its frame (decontextualized, it may seem mundane to the layperson), the Sheepshead Fish induces the feeling of the uncanny by its appearance alone, even for the ichthyologist, who understands that its mouth is an adaptation for the omnivorous consumption of sea life not unlike the adaptation of human dentation. Here, the cognitive placement of the Sheepshead Fish in its natural family and according to its evolutionary history – all things continuous with the essence of “fish” and the horizon of the known natural world – does not erase its perceived uncanniness. Though rationally explicable – the Sheepshead Fish uses its molars to crush the shells of various mollusks and crustaceans – its uncanniness is inextricably related to its chimeric structure. One might think it is monstrous but its threat is slight, so that its evaluation is scalable between the neutral and negative. Here, the feeling of the uncanny is

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Picture 3  The Sheepshead Fish. (Image from https:// commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Fishmarket_01. jpg. Taken at the Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico fishmarket. Picture by Tomas Castelazo, reproduced according to legal use guidelines)

more intense when compared to the uncanniness of the London Hammer because the Sheepshead Fish appears to violate natural type.

 xample 4: The Cypriot Xoanon (the Contrived Uncanny E Ritual Object) A good example of a ritually-purposed uncanny artifact is the above chalk figure (Picture 4) dated 1900–1800 BCE, curated in the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens (Museum of Cycladic Art 2021). Measuring 810 mm in height, 240 mm wide and 82 mm thick, it is a unique fetish whose formal characteristics as well as its ritual frame contribute to its creepy uncanniness. This fetish is a xoanon (plural: xoana);6 its etymology indicating the mechanics of its construction (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plank_figure.jpg). Among the Cretans, Greeks, Cycladians and Etruscans, xoana were important cultic artifacts whose ritual framing had eight distinctive features, according to J.P. Vernant: 1. They have an unknown past or origin; 2. They are crudely or roughly shaped; 3. They are atopas (without a place of origin) and/or xenos (strange, foreign, alien);  From the Greek xeo- or xeein: a thing or being that is scored, scraped or abraded.

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Picture 4  The chalk figure known as the Cypriot Xoanon in the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens. (Photo from: https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Plank_figure.jpg, according to legal use guidelines)

4. They make the divine present; 5. They are, therefore, treated as divine; 6. They may be made of specific substances (wood especially); 7. To see them, without cultic initiation, is to go mad; and 8. To possess them is to possess supernatural power (Vernant 1991, 153–156) The doxastic assumption that xoana are without place, time or origin puts them among uncanny objects that are temporally or topologically strange. The belief in their ability to make present the numinous (that is, the divine, mysterious or awe-­ inspiring, or that which is capable of arousing spiritual or religious emotions), makes them – by Otto’s estimation – mysterious objects, and the sense of the invisible presence that was expected to accompany one’s experience of them contributes to their uncanniness. Their tremendous power is ambiguous and therefore dangerous. They evoke fear, because on one hand they kill the uninitiated, but on the other their possession is coveted for the power they embody that can be harnessed. In addition to these culturally-determined noetic features, the Cypriot xoanon achieves some of its negative uncanny effect by its form alone. In this sense, it has a timeless uncanniness about it. Its flattened, rectangular and plank-like shape, flippered arms, absence of key anthropomorphic features (eyes, nose, mouth, fingers, toes etc.), though possessing the rough shape of a human figure suggests a creepiness that places it under the categories of the anthropomorphic and the monstrously deformed uncanny. The unfamiliarity based upon its form alone is nightmarish. Coupled with its social frame – and empathetic entry thereinto – it is an example of the power of contrived artifacts to induce an intense sense of the uncanny.

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 xample 5: The Assimilated Spider-Head in John Carpenter’s E the Thing (the Chimeric, Metamorphic, Monstrous Uncanny) Perhaps one of the most effective films ever made for inducing a sense of uncanniness is John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing. A remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing from Another World (which in turn was based on the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell), the director inverts expectations vis-á-vis the original cinematographic treatment. In the 1951 film, threatening uncanniness is achieved by the hiddenness of the monster and the claustrophobic rooms, sealed against a blizzard in the Arctic. The monster is not seen until the final scene, and there is only illuminated against the arc of a high-voltage cable. In Carpenter’s treatment, the claustrophobic sets and blizzard are similar, but the setting is the Antarctic, and the monster is seen in bright illumination throughout. Carpenter does not rely upon the imagination of the viewer to supply the features of the metamorphosing monster, but brings them to life through animatronics and other special effects. The result is equally (if not more) unnerving. An artist’s conception of one of the mutations of the Thing can be found at https://monsterlegacy. files.wordpress.com/2017/07/thingnorrisspider headconcep.jpg (accessed 29 January 2022). Uncanny on its own terms, this sketch’s creepiness does not capture that of the cinematographic monster that tears the body of its victim apart from the inside, only to fuse with the victim’s head, sprout legs, and then go skittling across the floor. A film clip7 conveys some sense of the uncanny that this film conveys, but even this does not do justice to the emotional impact that builds to this point in the film. An example of intentional defamiliarization (in the Tymienieckan sense), the unfamiliarity of the titular alien lifeform is established by its literal origin in another world. Nothing about it is known except that it is parasitic, assimilative and super-­ intelligent enough to build starships capable of transporting itself from world to world. The claustrophobic fear – of (a) being enclosed with a monster and incapable of escaping its intent to assimilate all forms of life, and (b) the form of the monster itself, which is polymorphous and violently aggressive  – produce a heightened sense of the uncanny, especially if the movie-goer is able to suspend disbelief and enter emotionally into the narrative. The form  – or rather formlessness  – of the monster is that of a constantly-changing chimera, containing all of the previous life forms it has assimilated. Because it comes from an alien world, where the known biological laws work differently, and because it fails to resemble any single biological type but is a pastiche of them all, its unfamiliarity is so great that it falls within the noematic horizon of no known lifeform. And its utter ruthlessness makes it especially threatening.

 A clip from Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing can be found at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0mELdCU1GSw (accessed 30 November 2021). 7

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One can only “enjoy” a feature like Carpenter’s film adaptation because the imaginative suspension of disbelief is mitigated by the framing of the experience as that of “watching a horror movie”. In this state, the uncanniness is put at bay, as it were, and the position of the viewer is like the person who experiences the dynamic sublime.8

 xample 6: Black Rock Promontory, Otterbein, Indiana E (Unusual Natural Object with Dark Brooding Aesthetic Effects Coupled with Irreducible Uncanny Threat) Lending its name to the nature preserve in which it is found, Black Rock (Picture 5) is “a sandstone promontory” that soars to a height of 100 feet above the Wabash River. Considered a geological anomaly for the area, Black Rock is bounded by “steep-sided shale ravines, sandstone cliffs and seep springs” (Reuter n.d.) Its historical significance lies in the fact that the Shawnee Native American chief Tecumseh’s warriors were stationed on its peak to watch for the arrival of the American General (and later US President) William Henry Harrison’s troops just before the battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Later, in 1838, 859 members of the Potawatomi nation camped near this site on their 1000 km forced march to Kansas, known as “The Trail of Death” (Reuter n.d.). The aesthetic features of this location, though looming, dark and brooding, do not explain the feeling of uneasiness, dread and evil which I have registered every time I have visited it. I experienced these feelings, on site, even before I knew nothing geologically or historically about it. Every time I visit it, they return. Having been there with others, they, however, have not recognized the same feeling. In fact, most simply find the geological formation and setting interesting. I include it here, because in my experience, it is one of the most powerful examples of a negative invisible presence not accounted for by the aesthetics of a place. I have hiked throughout the southwest USA through similar formations, and I have never experienced anything but beauty or sublimity encountering unusual topography or geological formations. Here, I propose it as an example of the iconic – an environment as the carrier of the feeling of the uncanny from an undisclosed source not reducible to the aesthetic features of the scene. At Black Rock, the frightful uncanniness would seem to be concomitant with – but not caused by – the place. It either issues from beyond the scene or from within the subject. Either way, it is not reducible to the aesthetic effect or its social framing, simpliciter. Here, an alien  A different kind of phenomenological approach to this movie and to the negative uncanny more broadly can be found in two books by Dylan Trigg: The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny (Trigg 2012) and The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror (Trigg 2014). The former approaches the experience of the uncanny in terms of embodiment, following the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. The latter is an extensive interpretation of the horror film, The Thing, along similar lines. 8

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Picture 5  Black Rock Promontory, Otterbein, Indiana: an example of an unusual natural object with dark brooding aesthetic effects coupled with an irreducible uncanny threat. (Picture used with permission from the private collection of Dr. Xiang Hui Liao, North Chengdu Medical University, China)

threat is experienced as purely hyletic (in the Husserlian sense), or as transcending the narrowly-material hyletic, and is seemingly unrelated to the aesthetic or morphological characteristics of the place. The site, for me, functions as the occasion for a manifestation not caused by its physical features. It is an example of alien evil being manifested through a place.

 xample 7: Our Lady of Schoenstatt Shrine, Waukesha, E Wisconsin (Bright Airy Human Artifact Coupled with an Irreducible Peacefulness) The Schoenstatt shrine (Picture 6), located in Waukesha, Wisconsin, is one of 193 shrines in 31 countries of the International Schoenstatt Movement, a Catholic Movement founded by Father Joseph Kentenich in 1920. Each is believed to be a place of grace by members of the movement and has a unique aesthetic, while reproducing some of the same elements (an altar, a tabernacle with the inscription Nobis datus, nobis natus ex intacta Virgine [which means in English: Given to us,

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Picture 6  Peaceful  – our lady of Schoenstatt shrine, Waukesha, Wisconsin. (Photo used with permission from the private collection of Sister M. Emily Kenkel, Provincial Superior of the North American Province of the Schoenstatt Sisters)

born to us, of an untouched virgin]). There is a Ver Sanctum Lamp, and the Antepedium to the altar is inscribed with a typical saying, ringing the image of the Virgin: Servus Mariae nunquam peribit: in English, A servant of Mary will never perish. There is also the image of the Virgin and Child, or Mother Thrice Admirable – thrice being a superlative, signifying Mary’s motherhood of God, of the Redeemer (Jesus Christ), and of the redeemed, and other things (Schoenstatt.org n.d.). The aesthetic of the shrine in Waukesha is light and airy in comparison to the other five or six I have visited in Germany and the United States. But in none of the others did I have an experience of the uncanny as I did in October 1992, when attending the International Schoenstatt Conference in Waukesha. Here, I think it is important to note that though a fellow traveler of the movement, I have never been a member, nor am I constitutionally predisposed toward Marian devotion. However, when I walked into the shrine on that morning in October, I was unprepared for the emotional impact it was to have on me. Shortly after sitting down, I was overcome by an uncanny sense of peace: deep peace, unlike anything I had experienced before.

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Usually sceptical of such things and aware of the way the aesthetics of a space can induce feelings, I was curious as to how the elements of the shrine produced this effect. After circumambulating the shrine and scrutinizing its elements and lighting, I concluded that its effect was inexplicable by anything of which I was consciously aware. Uncanniness seemed to supervene on the space but without any particular object as to its origin. Of course, given the environment in which it occurred, one might well conclude that it was an effect of the holy person honored there. But what was puzzling is that I have felt no similarly-intense effect in any other sacred space, no matter the centrality of saint, personage or deity. I finish with this experience of the uncanny, because though similar in intensity, it was the inverse of my experiences at Black Rock. In the Schoenstatt experience there was no threat, nor anything negative; yet the experience was deep, perplexing, transcendent, mysterious, utterly unanticipated and positive. It seemed to be effected in some way from outside of and irreducible to the aesthetic elements in place in the chapel, either taken individually or in the composite. In Husserlian terms, the presence of the ontically-alien seems to have penetrated my home-world in this sacred space. I offer this as an example as the counterpoint to the Black Rock experience, as an example of an irenic experience of a positive ethereal uncanny object that supervened upon the aesthetics of a physical space. Qua uncanny, it was a violation first of my expectations about the internal horizon of the noemata in Schoenstatt shrines or other Roman Catholic chapels and secondly, a violation of my expectations about the noema of the type “Schoenstatt Shrine”. Again, whether my experience had a subliminal origin inside of me, or whether it was the effect of a supernatural object that transcended the physical place, using it only presentationally, as a carrier or icon, I cannot say. I simply report it as something someone might report a positive experience of something supernaturally uncanny.

Conclusion This chapter is an attempt to describe some of the features of the uncanny from the side of the objects that engender it. The assumption of this chapter is that careful description of uncanny objects with minimal theoretical importation is to be preferred (in the initial stages of the development of a Phenomenology of the Uncanny) in contrast to elaborate theoretical frames which, like the bed of Procrustes, cut off any instances of the uncanny that do not correspond to their framework. Here, the definition of the uncanny was not focused exclusively on monstrous or existentially-­ threatening objects – the usual subject matter of studies – but included a range of positive, neutral and negative objects and described them according to common features. That frame for this description was found in the Husserlian notions of Life-­ world, home-world, alien-world and nine propositions definitive of uncanniness. This approach has been shown, in application, to be useful for the analysis of artificially-­constructed as well as naturally-occurring uncanny objects.

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Because the above approach is broader than other alternatives, especially in presenting the common features of (and a common approach to) a wider set of phenomena, it has greater descriptive power, especially when uncanny objects are thematized. As a phenomenology however, it concentrates on the manifest properties of uncanny objects but does not necessarily preclude other approaches. It is neither as complete nor as comprehensive as possible in its treatment of cases, nor is it the final word in descriptive precision. It is a merely a few tentative steps toward the identification of the uncanny. Finally, not as an afterthought but to bring this essay full circle with the musing with which it began, I would like to conclude by suggesting that the uncanny has been present to us constantly, for the last 2 years, in the form of a plague. In fact, this plague is an object lesson in what the experience of the uncanny is like. COVID is an embodiment of many features of the uncanny discussed above. Invisible and ubiquitous, it seems to lurk in waiting (God know where). It takes its victims without warning; when it does, it is deadly, or it maims. It is alien, apparently coming from nowhere, violating our expectations about what is possible in this world. It cannot be contained, and its mutagenic nature means that it transforms in ways that cannot be predicted, even by the pundits. Captive with it, within this world-horizon, we are unable to escape, and the claustrophobia of our containment with it is suffocating. The fearsomeness of its threat has created anxiety and (at worst) mob hysteria, madly dividing uninfected against infected. It is perhaps most uncanny in that it alters the perception of time itself. Under its thraldom, everyone seems to be sleepwalking in the nightmare of a malaise. Under its threat, days are dilated; they seem to stretch on interminably, while the longer measures of time – the weeks, the months, the years – seem contracted and fly by. This describes the manifest uncanniness of the plague years. The taxonomy that I have proposed above offers no antidote to our present situation, but that taxonomy takes some first steps toward a symptomology of the uncanniness of which our situation is but one manifestation.

Works Cited Aristotle. 1943 [Late 4th BCE]. Generation of Animals. Translated by A.L. Peck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bachelard, Gaston. 1994 [1958]. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. “Canny”. 1975. Vols. 1: A-P.  In Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 329a. London: Oxford University Press. Crew, Becky. 2013. The Sheepshead Fish has Human Teeth, But It’s Okay Because It Won’t Give You a Psychedelic Crisis. Scientific American/Running Ponies. Scientific American, March 21. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-­ponies/the-­sheepshead-­fish-­has-­human-­teeth-­ but-­its-­okay-­because-­it-­wont-­give-­you-­a-­psychedelic-­crisis/. Derrida, Jacques. 1990. Some Statements and Truisms About Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms. In The States of “Theory”: History, Art, and Critical Disclosure, edited by David Carroll, translated by Anne Tomiche, 61–94. New York: Columbia University Press.

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———. 1995 [1992]. Passages--from Traumatism to Promise. In Points … Interviews, 1974–1994, edited by Elizabeth Weber, translated by Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Etienne, Vanessa. 2021. North Carolina Man Catches Fish With Human-Like Teeth. People/Pets. People.com, August 6. https://people.com/pets/north-­carolina-­man-­catches-­fish-­with-­human-­ like-­teeth/. Accessed 21 Sept 2021. Eveleth, Rose. 2013. Robots: Is the Uncanny Valley Real? BBC Future. BBC. London, September 1. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130901-­is-­the-­uncanny-­valley-­real. Fitzpatrick-Matthews, Keith. 2007. The London Artifact (Texas). Bad Archeology, May 9. http:// www.badarchaeology.com/out-­of-­place-­artefacts/very-­ancient-­artefacts/the-­london-­artifact/. Freud, Sigmund. 1971 [1919]. The Uncanny. In Studies in Parapsychology, edited by Sigmund Freud, translated by Alix Strachey, 19–60. New York: Collier Books. Gamillo, Elizabeth. 2021. Sheepshead Fish With Human-Like Teeth Plucked From North Carolina Coast: The Atlantic coast swimmer uses its molars to crush the shells of various mollusks and crustaceans. Smithsonian On-Line. August 9. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/sheepshead-fish-human-teeth-plucked-north-carolina-coast-180978396/. Accessed 20 Sept 2021. Girard, Rene. 1986 [1982]. The Scapegoat. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1989 [1972]. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2004 [1991]. A Theater of Envy. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press. Henry, Michel. 2008 [1990]. Material Phenomenology. Translated by Scott Davidson. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2015 [2000]. Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh. Translated by Karl Hefty. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1980 [1971]. Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences. Third Book. The Hague: Matinus Nijhoff Publishers. ———. 1983 [1913]. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Translated by F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Jentsch, Ernst. 1996 [1906]. On the Psychology of the Uncanny (First English Translation). Translated by Roy Sellars. Angelaki: A New Journal in Philosophy, Literature and the Social Sciences 2 (1): 7–16. Kant, Immanuel. 1952 [1790]. The Critique of Judgment. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1974 [1800]. Logic. Translated by Robert Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company. Loyola, Ignatius. 1914 [1548]. The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. Translated by Elder Mullen. New York: P.J. Kennedy & Sons Publishers. McAndrew, Francis T., and Sara S. Koehnke. 2016. On the Nature of Creepiness. New Ideas in Psychology 43: 10–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2016.03.003. Mori, Masahiro. 2012 [1970]. The Uncanny Valley: The Original Essay by Masahiro Mori. In IEEE Spectrum/IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine. Translated by Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki. June 12. Online at: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/the-­uncanny-­valley. Accessed 11 Jan 2021. Muralt, Andre de. 1958 [1974]. The Idea of Phenomenology: Husserlian Exemplarism. Translated by Garry L. Breckon. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Museum of Cycladic Art. 2021. Article titled: Cypriot Art. https://cycladic.gr/en/page/kipriakos-­ politismos. Accessed 25 Oct 2021. Nelson, Hilary M. 2018. A History of Purdue Pete. ECN. West Lafayette: School of Engineering, September 18. Online at: https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECN/Support/KB/Docs/ PurduePeteHistory. Accessed 21 Sept 2021.

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Otto, Rudolf. 1952 [1917]. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. 2nd ed. Translated by John W.  Harvey. London: Oxford University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1932. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reuter, Andrew. n.d. Black Rock Nature Preserve. Black Rock. West Lafayette: Niches Land Trust. Article online at: https://nicheslandtrust.org/properties/warren-­county/black-­rock. Accessed 25 Oct 2021. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. 1849–1850. The Annunciation (Ecce Ancille Domini!). The Tate, London. Online at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rossetti-ecce-ancilla-dominithe-annunciation-n01210. Royle, Nicholas. 2003. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ryba, Thomas. 2002. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Phenomenology of Life. In Phenomenology World-Wide: Foundations-Expanding Dynamics-Life-Engagements A Guide for Research and Study, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Sanders, Daniel. 1876. Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Leipzig: O. Wigand. Schoenstatt.org. n.d. International Schoenstatt Movement. https://www.schoenstatt.org/en/services/about-­schoenstatt/the-­shrine/. Accessed 15 Oct 2021. Steinbock, Anthony J. 1995. Generative Phenomenology After Husserl. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Tanner, Henry Ossawa. 1898. The Annunciation. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art. https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/104384. Teenmar News/V6 News. 2016. Frog Rains Down From Skies at Nandigama Village in AP. Teenmaar News, V6 News. Andhra Pradesh: VIL Media Pvt Ltd., June 9. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=_Dg9SJntMxI. Accessed 11 Jan 2021. Trigg, Dylan. 2012. The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens: Ohio Unversity Press. ———. 2014. The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror. Winchester: Zero Books. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. 1988. Logos and Life: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason. Book 1. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press. Uncanny. 1975. Vols. 2: P-Z.  In Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 3475b–3475c. London: Oxford University Press. Vassigh, Alidad. 2021. It’s Raining Fish, Hallelujah! Mysterious Lluvia de Peces Lands Again in Honduras. July 12. Online at: https://worldcrunch.com/what-­the-­world/it39s-­raining-­fish-­ hallelujah-­mysterious-­lluvia-­de-­peces-­lands-­again-­in-­honduras. Accessed 1 Nov 2021. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. 1991. Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, edited by Froma I. Zeitlin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Watson, Deanna. 2021. Does Purdue Pete Scare Your Children? He’s Voted Creepiest and Second Worst Mascot in NCAA. Journal and Courier, August 25. Online at: https://www.jconline. com/story/news/2021/08/24/purdue-­university-­mascots-­purdue-­pete-­ncaa-­voted-­creepiest-­ second-­worst-­mascot/5571792001/. Accessed 1 Nov 2021. WTHR.com staff. 2021. “Purdue Pete” Named Creepiest College Mascot in America. 13 WTHR. Lafayette, August 24. Accessed 20 Sept 2021.

The Phenomenology of Forms of Dwellings: The Self, Others and the Uncanny Igors Šuvajevs Abstract  The ‘self’ is a substantiated reverse pronoun which implies not an identity, but an ontological project to be realised when one’s self is free. ‘Dwelling’ is an ethical question expounded in political, historical, ‘economic’ etc., dimensions entailing reciprocity. ‘Self-care’ demands getting oneself in order, to dwell in oneself. There are different life forms for dwelling: the carnal self, home as family, city, country, etc. In the framework of dwelling, the meaning of landscape and mental mapping is emphasised, pointing out the role of unconsciousness and carnal selfhood as the embodiment of ‘one’s own’ and the ‘other’ (even alien). The presence of the uncanny in human existence can be identified by distinguishing between lived-in space and liveable space when the order of the world is unhomely and destroyed space. Keywords  Self · Carnal selfhood · House as family · Dwelling · City · Country · Self-care · Reciprocity Taking into account the outlines of eco-phenomenology and what Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka called the ‘gigantic polyphonic game of life’, one can try to approach the seemingly simple concept of ‘eco’ and avoid several problematic instances characterised by the word ‘dwelling’. This caution can be justified with reference to Wittgenstein’s insight in Philosophical Investigations: “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (Wittgenstein 2009: 19). Moreover “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (Wittgenstein 2009: 23). Activity or Tätigkeit is a form of life which manifests itself linguistically in various ways, which is the first problematic instance in relation to ‘dwelling’. Émile Benveniste notes that “the word for ‘house’ (...) is one of the best-known elements of the Indo-European vocabulary. Moreover, it is connected with a verbal root in a manner which seems immediately comprehensible and satisfying” (Benveniste 2016: 241). Benveniste points out the precise distinction in the Ancient Greek language, namely dómos, which describes a specific form of life and domē which refers I. Šuvajevs (*) Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_13

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to a house or a building which can be inhabited. This distinction also exists, for example, in Latvian: mājas (dómos; house) and the verb connected to it, mājošana (Benveniste 2016: 239–260) which may be termed as ‘dwelling’ in English. In this chapter, ‘dwelling’ will be used to refer to dómos as a life form, using the subjunctive verb. However, this does not reduce the number of problematical instances, because the practice of language may be and has been historically transformed. For that reason one can point out the second problematic case (which is also detectable in the Latvian word mājošana): which is that dwelling entails being, and is not something which can be ‘had’ or ‘owned’. One can own or have a house or a building (domē), one can buy it or rent it etc. However, ‘home’ (dómos) is associated with being and describes a specific form of life – that is, dwelling. These two problematic instances may be explained with Husserl’s reflection that factual sciences and knowledge produces factual human beings [Blosse Tatsachenwissenschaften machen blosse Tatsachenmenschen] (Husserl 1976: 4). However, in the case of dwelling, one speaks not of facts, but rather f-acts,1 and the words used only need to illustrate the form of life which consists of specific acts and is actualised through ongoing discoveries. These words only sketch out the ideal-­ typical features. By identifying differences between a human being and an animal (or more broadly  – any living being) Max Scheler writes about the surrounding environment (Umwelt) and the dimension of being (Welt) (Scheler 2005: 43). The surrounding environment or Umwelt would be characterised by the genetically pre-­ determined as well as the collectively-acquired structures. However, a human being is characterised by Welt which introduces the dimension of being, though one should not be too eager with the special position (Sonderstellung) of a human being because it may not exist – the kosmos that once was no longer exists and this kind of ‘order’ may be deteriorating or perhaps already has deteriorated. This position or Stellung would more readily be shaped by working out one’s ethical stance – which is what the German word calls for. Moreover, Umwelt is being privatised and subordinated to consumerism more strikingly is that contemporary tendencies point toward the replacement of Welt with Umwelt. The subtle differentiation between ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ is significant, especially in this case, because the modern obsession with possession (Latin: possessivus, possidere) can destroy any universe or order. The obsession with possessiveness (Besitzen literally means ‘to sit down on the already existing’) rips up Sitz – the possibility of dwelling. In this way it also becomes possible to avoid what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called the ‘scholasticism of existence’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 99). ‘Dwelling’ does not derive or emanate from some kind of Ego, whatever or whoever it might be. Dómos (and thus also dwelling) is to be conceptualised as ‘house as family’ not ‘house as construction’. Dwelling refers to dómos which already entails others (family, clan, tribe, country; génos, phrētre, phúlon; etc.) Dwelling is originally political. It refers to people you call your own; ‘one’s own’ (oîkos), entailing reciprocity. It is political because it is included in the polis (pólis) of city or country. Moreover, in this way it

 Something which is born out of acts and then is perceived as factual.

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is possible to avoid the resilient misunderstanding that the multiplication of houses produces a polis, a city or a country. Much in the same way one avoids the opposite misunderstanding, that a polis or a city determines the existence of houses. All of that is given at the same time and there are multiple and different communities (koinónía) existing simultaneously, not just one, and it is their reciprocity and mutual accommodation which matters. That, however, means that within the parameters of the ‘eco’ (derived from oikos) it is important not to reduce the dimension of being (Welt) with the life-world (Lebenswelt) to the surrounding environment (Umwelt), ignoring their reciprocity as well as the political and the economic dimensions. The recidivism of the ‘scholasticism of existence’ can also be prevented with the help of Jan Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology (Kohák 1989; Šuvajevs 2019: 204–227). Welt is primarily a life-world, Lebenswelt. In Patočka’s habilitation work The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem (Přirozený svět jako filosofický problém), this natural world is brought into being – angeboren – existing outside and beyond the sciences and defining the life-world. Patočka does not repeat the insights of Husserl but revises them, thus becoming one of the most significant second generation phenomenologists. In Patočkas’s perspective, a human being meets injustice and the thunder of individuation in the world and it is precisely this which “renders the world into that warm and hospitable ward, which means the maintenance of the fire of life” (Patočka 2002: 43). The life-world is illuminated in dwelling and Patočka offers a kind of existential housekeeping (technē oikonomikē) – a practical philosophy instead of limiting oneself with theorisations and contemplative musings. Patočka emphasises that “for a human being, her own being is given for responsibility not observation” (Patočka 2002: 57). In this way, Patočka stands for living in the truth, which is not a substantiation but a necessity and a capability, a skill to ‘live in the truth’ – he uses the Czech term žít v pravdé – resisting the attraction and deception of losing one’s way. In the background to Patočka’s reflections there is always Husserl and Heidegger. Husserl seems too Cartesian for Patočka, but Heidegger clearly omits carnality, and this re-thinking makes Patočka closer with the later Merleau-Ponty. Already Günther Anders2 has pointed out Heidegger’s unjustified treatment of the concept of being-there (Dasein), by arguing that his Dasein is not starving: “it resembles a snake which lives off itself and eats itself from the tail” (Anders 2001, 132). For Patočka, what matters is an understanding of existence, Dasein that is liberated from subjectivism. For that reason he perceives existence as motion. (Patočka 1991). In the ensemble of motion, one can distinguish between three basic movements. The first movement is usually called receiving – the acceptance of the world, its acquisition and incorporation. The acceptance of the world is simultaneously the acceptance of others, of being with others. This movement entails rooting oneself in the world. The second basic movement is reproduction – self-inclusion in the world, (re)producing oneself in this same world. The third basic movement

 An Austrian philosopher. Student of Heidegger and the husband of Hannah Arendt.

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however is usually called transcendence or self-obtainment – the obtainment of self, opening and expanding. This is all traversed by ‘care for the soul’ – Sorge für die Seele. As emphasised by Patočka, care for the soul has “basically created Europe and history” (Patočka 1988: 194). In his treatment of the basic issues, Patočka emphasises the significance of care as well as the learning of the self and the test of life. Learning of the self enables the re-acquisition of the historically oriented European perspective to empower ‘living in the truth’. At the same time, it allows for the avoidance of Euro-centrism and surveying the genealogical ‘becoming of the present’. Patočka points toward the acquisition of the world in an imperial, external way. In this way, the world has been europeanised, but a post-imperialistic, post-­ imperial world has also emerged which is new and non-European. However, there still remains “the downgrading of the meaning of small countries and nations” (Patočka 1988: 215) even if it is precisely these that can – and do – offer a new and different existential experience. Patočka’s solution is prefigured in two arguments. In the first, he points out the entwinement of the individual and the collective (political): “Care for the soul is at the same time care for one’s own soul and thus care for the soul of the collective: both are not mutually distinguishable” (Patočka 1988: 260). The second argument points out the unmediated difference between ‘the soul’ and ‘the reflecting soul’ (Patočka 1988: 264–265). However, it is even more important that the soul is self-­ moving (Patočka 1988: 300) and it is precisely through care that the soul is revealed (Patočka 1988: 263). In other words, without care the soul does not exist. In this way, it becomes possible to form some simple but far-reaching conclusions. Care for the soul is ‘self-care’ – one’s own care for oneself. It also allows a distinction between care for oneself and self-care because caring about oneself may not necessarily be self-care; namely it is ‘caring about what one has’. The ‘biography’ of the conceptual meaning of self-care has been sketched out by Wilhelm Schmid (Schmid 1995: 98–129) at the same time emphasising the disallowance of I-centredness and selfishness in such care (Schmid 2016: 164). Historically, self-care has segmented into different exercises (such as intellectual, spiritual, physical, etc.) and techniques of existence (Hadot 2002), allowing an outline of the way dwelling becomes possible in self-care. In other words, it entails the maintenance of order and co-living. The word ‘Self’ entailed in ‘self-care’ is a substantiated reverse pronoun. Self is not some kind of frozen identity but an ontological project which is realised in a regime of freedom. Self-care is ethical  – “the term ethos is only the pronominal reflexive root e followed by the suffix –thos and thus means simply and literally ‘selfhood,’ namely, the mode in which each one enters contact with oneself” (Agamben 2016: 247). Dwelling is an ethical issue which expands into political, historical, ‘economic’ etc. dimensions and is not reducible to construction or architectural and aesthetic aspects. Self-care means putting oneself in order and maintaining this order, namely dwelling in oneself. However, selfhood is not something purely spiritual or naturally self-existing – it is carnal selfhood, or leibliches Selbst. If misunderstanding was not an option, one could say that selfhood needs to become carnal; however, this opens up a mistaken path toward dualism which may result in Manicheism.

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However, one cannot fail to point out that the inability to incarnate causes all kinds of psychic, psychosomatic complications (especially in the modern world). One could say that selfhood is characterised by carnal being, or Leibsein. Moreover, it is an objective (Böhme 2003), even though it is already given. In other words, one can dwell in flesh, but it may be unhomely, allowing just the capacity to dwell. The distinction between flesh and body is important. In the past couple of decades there has been a flourish of publications that purport to rediscover the body again. In hindsight one can see that in the twentieth Century the issue of the body is worked out in several disciplines and philosophical currents. This issue is dealt with in marked intensity in phenomenology – Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Waldenfels and others in feminism (Butler J., Federici S. and others). Fresh impulses are provided by psychoanalysis and psychosomatic research (Freud, Binswanger and others). Techniques of the body are analysed (Mauss and others), as well as the history of the body (Kantorowicz, Le Goff, Sennett, Laqueur and others). Significantly, these quests are harnessed with ethics and entail a distinction between the body and the flesh. A human being lives with a body that is constituted by and reflects certain representations, procedures, technologies and strategies that entail fear, wishes, desires, yearnings etc. Thus, a body is not something self-existing but a transfiguration of certain discursive practices. Not only does an individual body (or bodies) exist, but collective ones too (social, political, economic, medical, etc.) A human being has no choice but to live with these bodies, to live in them or with them. However, the use of an individual body is characterised by certain bodily techniques that are not simply the uses of a body, but this use depends on developed representations that entail even archaic and archetypical features – largely unconsciously. A body is not only not self-existing, it is also not self-functioning – one needs to mobilise it, to direct it etc. This distinction may be considered as the first difference between flesh and body. However, in the awareness of the flesh, its carnality is directed not toward comprehension or theorisation, but practice. Gernoth Böhme writes that “the ethics of the carnal existence demand that I am carnally familiar with myself, that I live inside myself or – as is said – that I identify with my body” (Böhme 2003: 115). But identification with the body is not the same as the carnal self: moreover, as is evidenced by this quote, within linguistic practices it is occasionally difficult to distinguish flesh from the body. Thus, the second distinction may be suggested only with caution. A body is revealed to the external gaze, but flesh is revealed to the internal eye. In another formulation: a body is characterised by a different, alien experience, but flesh is characterised by one’s own experience. The body is a result of instrumentalisation. However, this instrumentalisation is not solely determined by the experiences of others or the external gaze; instrumentalisation includes one as him or herself. However, this instrumentalisation leads to an unfamiliarity with flesh; in other words, the repression (Verdrängung) of the issue of the flesh away from one’s attention. In a way, the cult of the body fosters it (Böhme 2003: 120). Flesh, however, is not to be identified with selfhood. Flesh is simultaneously one’s own and something else with which it is possible to be on friendly terms (Schmid 2004: 173) and it entails reciprocity. Carnal selfhood is not a natural given, but sense-giving or

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Sinngebung. Carnal existence is the basis of self-being, but a fleshless selfhood may probably be just an intellectual exercise. Flesh is a person’s home, but it may turn into a habitat or a disturbing possession. The re-discovery of the flesh suggests that “flesh is the viewpoint of all viewpoints” and “a phenomenon that always participates in the constitution of other phenomena” (Waldenfels 2000: 9). One can dwell in flesh, which allows dwelling in the entire world. A body is mute, but flesh has a voice worth listening to. It not only has a voice, but a memory, too. Severe pain, for example, can inscribe itself in the body, leaving an n-gram – meaning, a unit imprinted in a physical substance. This pain, moreover, can derive not only from one’s own experience, but also from pain caused by the distress of others. This ‘record’ can surface many years later causing physical pain – even though there appears to be no reason for it. The unconscious ‘memory of pain’ tends to be more powerful than the consciously-articulated stance toward pain. This memory may cause a perception whereby one’s own flesh is experienced as something external. It ensures dissociation or ‘de-fleshing’; namely, distancing oneself away from oneself. De-fleshing can be a defence against pain, or Abwehr, which is linked to bodily self-harm or going on a quest toward new dangers or unconscious pain while trying to overcome tension and anxiety (Angst). This kind of de-fleshing can cause eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, binge-eating disorder (BED), etc. An important part of the re-discovery of the flesh is its naturalisation; namely, flesh is viewed as nature or as included in nature. However, nature is given differently, and moreover flesh as nature is experienced in at least two ways: as something that is one’s own or, on the contrary, as something alien. Whatever the historical presentation of this perception and experience, flesh denotes a dependence which becomes an objective, if there is effort to lead oneself and one’s life reflectively. Flesh reminds one of finiteness and compels toward an action here and now. Flesh, in contradistinction to the ever-young, fresh, alert and modern body, reminds one of the ageing that is countered using differently-modelled bodies. In this way, a person tries to inhabit a beautified and constantly renewing body instead of dwelling in his or her flesh. A linear direction is thus formed: birth-maturity-ageing concluded with distant dying and death. Thus, an organism becomes something almost or never changing. But in terms of the flesh a person is born and is dying all the time; namely, a constant interaction between birth and death is going on. Carnally, a person is the embodiment of constant natality and mortality. The preceding presentation permits the marking of two points: one, a short recap, and the other necessarily schematic. There are several justifications for putting forward the carnal existence and carnal selfhood in ethics. In flesh one can dwell in or simply inhabit it. Dwelling entails an ecology which would be expanded into an existential dwelling on planet Earth. Dwelling in one’s own flesh allows dwelling in the world. The concept of oikeiosis is historically linked with oîkos (traditionally translated as ‘appropriation of’, ‘affiliation with’, ‘endearment to’, ‘familiarization with’ and others) where the basic meaning is ‘to be at home in the world’, entailing reciprocity. By taking into account this conceptualisation, one can look at several strings of dwelling. However, the initial point would be flesh, the carnal self. At the

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same time, flesh (as given or provided for by nature) is not something solely one’s own: namely, it entails reciprocity because it contains others. Flesh, not being something self-independent, prefigures others, gives access to the experience of others. A person cannot remain only at ‘home’ – then it is an eternal home and ‘himself” or ‘herself’ an inhabitant, of what is, in essence, a corpse. Flesh allows departures from it. ‘Being’ in certain places and in spatial constructions, means that having a diet is important for flesh. It is by no means a machine that can be ‘tanked up’ with energy-giving chemicals necessary for functioning. However important food ethics are nowadays, one should not forget the ethics of eating or gastrosophy (Lemke 2007). Flesh, carnal selfhood ‘naturally’ provides a justification for virtue ethics. Moreover, “flesh is a synergetic system” (Waldenfels 2000: 92), which entails the cooperation and co-habitation of the different, and is itself immersed in nature. For purposes of simplicity, the second point can be summed up as the construction of a new body (Sarasin 2001). A representation of the body as a mechanical machine (and its respective discursive practice) is replaced by a body as a stimulated machine. A body is understood as a machine of reactions and stimulations that is to be protected from over-stimulation. Alongside, the sexualisation of the body, which entails the sexualisation and over-stimulation of its specific organs, is also taking place (Laqueur 1990). A mobilisable and perfumable body is constructed while the natural scent of flesh comes to denote dirtiness and invites emancipation from the carnality (Muchembled 2017). The production of the stimulated and over-­ stimulated body invites behaviour where one deals with a gender-neutral, clean, sterile and unchanging object that is strictly de-limited from anything external. Flesh, however, is a synergetic formation where different kinds of life forms co-­ habit, existing in synergetic relations with the surrounding world. The concept of Homo hygienicus – the hygienic human – emerges in relation to the stimulated body (either individual or collective), emphasising the meaning of cleanliness and sterility. This body is de-limited from the outside world, excluded from the game played by the living and de-limited from flesh (carnal selfhood) and the carnal experience. Human flesh is home to thousands of living beings that sustain the existence of the human being as ‘himself’ or ‘herself’. Moreover, it is deceptive to argue that flesh is initially one’s own even though Husserl asserts the opposite: “The original gift of the body can only be the original gift of mine and no other body. The aperception of "my body" is the first and foremost, and it is the only complete original” (Husserl 1973: 7). [in the original German: “Die ursprüngliche Gegebenheit eines Leibes kann nur die ursprüngliche Gegebenheit meines und keines anderen Leibes sein. Die Apperzetion „mein Leib” ist urwesentlich die erste un sie ist die einzig völlig originable”] Flesh is already an alignment of oneself and others: in any case, the originality of one’s flesh is not persuasively evident. The clean, hygienised and sterile body (an organ or a collection of organs) is, first of all, the visible. In this way, it delays or even renders impossible the experience and history of others. This includes not only the history of scent and smelling, other senses should not be abandoned, and there is no reason to limit oneself to the traditional five senses. Sensory perception and life are culturally and historically distinct and reflected in language games which leads toward a different perception and

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understanding of the world. The configurations of grasping sense are historically variable – sight does not always dominate, but contemporary extrapolations prevent the grasping of not only the significant, but also the present tendencies (demonstrable evidence of this can be found in the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated loss of smell). Sensory history and linguistic mapping would allow one to be more sensible toward the present as well. The self-proclaimed ‘historian of the sensibilities’ or historien du sensible – the French micro-historian Alain Corbin, with his history of miasma (Corbin 1982) – has called for the development of this kind of history. The archaeology of the life of senses and forms of language would allow for existence and history to become colourfully diverse, juicy, aromatic or smelly and maybe even tasty: not just sterile and deodorized. The recent bacteriological and virological discursive practice that enfolds within colonialism (Sarasin 2007: 38) allows us to sketch out certain plot expansions. It is about a general guerrilisation3 because an invisible enemy threatens (namely, the ‘other’ as an enemy), whom it remains possible to identify. Thus, a person finds oneself in constant entrapment leading to uninterrupted neurotisation and mobilization. Guerrilisation a priori  – vindicates the fallen soldiers, victims of war and justifies the most diverse protective measures, ripping up the entwinement between the immune and the commune (Esposito 2002). Importantly, this entwinement also exists in the sphere one may call ‘the natural’, in the interaction between different life forms as they play out in nature. In Aristotle’s exploration of ‘the use of the body’, or he tou somatos chresis (Arist. Polit. 1254b 18) a question about the use of flesh becomes relevant. The concept of chresis and the verb chresthai has multiple meanings (Agamben 2016: 24–30) even though soma entails the meaning of both ‘flesh’ and ‘body’. For the purposes of simplicity, one can use the words ‘to utilize’ and ‘to use’. However, the importance of the question is emphasised by the contextual relation with the slave. Utilization denotes an instrumentalized attitude and practice, while ‘use’ implies a hint of inheritance, such as inheriting and passing on an inheritance. The utilization of a slave relates to what belongs to you and what is one’s own. A slave is technically another self which is not the self after all – he or she is only an organ to be utilized (oikeia organa). This discourse and its respective practice principally entails the scholasticism of existence, while ‘the other’ and ‘the different’ is eliminated. In the course of time, these ‘others that are one’s own’ whose selfhood is ripped up and not acknowledged are privatised and used as juridically reinforced tools. This is further reinforced by a process whereby the concept of life-bios as well as life-zoè4 becomes technicalized, juridicalized and medicinalised (Agamben 2016: 195–196). The result is the destruction of the world as immediately or directly experienced in the subjectivity of everyday life (Lebenswelt) and the division of life, subordinating human life as well as life generally to a legal and medical experience which is thus

 From the Latin ‘bellum’, relating to war.  These terms derive from the vocabulary employed by Agamben – bios relating to life as lived and zoe referring to life in its biological form. 3 4

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‘constructed’ and is dispositive and dominated by privatisation and the use of its instruments. These considerations allow us to sketch out an important dimension to the phenomenon of dwelling in terms of ‘house as family’. A vivid testimony is offered by the ethnopsychoanalytic experience (and a reflection of it) with the Dogon people in West Africa. It concerns a long stroll where the character Dommo walks around the settlement and occasionally notes that “this here is his home” (Parin, Morgenthaler, Parin-Matthey 2006: 48–50). Dommo does not point at physical constructions where he lives temporarily; it is about a form of dwelling which manifests itself in a specific spatial arrangement (which is different in relation to the customary European experience). Dwelling is spatial, it is not realised in an a priori given and objective space whose meaning is singular for everyone. Space is produced (Lefebvre 2000), and its mapping and the saturation of its sense is also different. ‘Dwelling’ entails the production of a specific space whereby it becomes possible to live reciprocally. It introduces an important distinction: the house as ‘a lived-in space’ and the house as ‘a liveable space’. In principle, dwelling relates to a liveable space. In the best case scenario the lived-in space affords the possibility of forming or imitating dwelling, even though the spatial structures do not allow it. It is precisely this kind of existential dwelling that is pointed out by Hölderlin when he writes about dwelling in the distance: “When the people go living into the distance” [“Wenn in die Ferne geht der Menschen wohnend”] (Hölderlin 1953: 314) and variously playing out this theme: “I want to live with you, to dwell with you on a loving night, with my loved ones living close by” [in the original German “Will ich wohnen mit euch; zu wohnen in liebender Nacht; die Liebsten nahe wohnen”, etc]. It is about an inhabiting life which may be misunderstood in English because it concerns that which is not primarily a property. ‘A habitat’ is reciprocally maintained and inherited; namely, one finds it before oneself, even though it is not always habitabilis, that is; ready for living. ‘A habitat’ is a structural formation emerging historically and naturally characterized by certain techniques of existence and unconsciousness (individual, collective, national, cultural and so on). ‘A habitat’ is also a disposition, but one of the meanings of habitus is ‘appearance’ which enables a reductionist perspective, reducing the visible to its exterior or bodily quality. Dwelling entails several important distinctions: one’s own or ‘others’; private or public and so on. ‘Home’ does not presuppose locking oneself in: it functions as a restrictive and de-limiting mechanism. But it is precisely the ‘care for home’ which sustains caring for everything else. Moreover, to be outside home entails the possibility of returning home, otherwise a person becomes a stranger to him or herself. To be ‘home’ means to be oneself, to ‘be in order’ while maintaining this order and caring for what is shared (city, birthplace, country, etc.) Home de-limits; namely, it means that one’s own order is not transferred to the outside world. Home restricts; namely, it means that the ‘external order’ does not overwhelm or rip apart ‘one’s own order’. Two important aspects emerge from this consideration that are often ignored – the vernacular and the ethnic.

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The vernacular points toward the local, ‘the aboriginal’ or as in the contemporary meaning: the national. Originally this concept was referred to as ‘vernacular architecture’, but its meaning is broader and highlights an essential characteristic of dwelling, namely the alignment in surroundings and landscape. The vernacular is what emerges, and is inherited from generation to generation and upgraded in one’s household as the ‘economy’. One may call it the traditional life-world, but the vernacular is not reducible to the rural and the rustic and does not entail a nostalgic longing for a return to or escape into the past. Importantly, “dwelling and living in the vernacular world is one and the same” (Illich 1995: 77). In the vernacular world, traditionally one works at home or near to it; if one goes to work elsewhere, then the absence from home tends to be longer, but normally work happens ‘at home’. However, the modern industrial world is a gender-neutral economy with a unisexual evolution where ‘home’ is just a habitat or a co-habitat, dominated by domicilium and the exploitation of labour-power. The vernacular world is harnessed with enrooting and the rhizomatic enlargement of rooting. It confirms the autonomous which includes the commons (Allmende, communaux, gli usi civici). It encompasses not only dwelling and living, but also working. In the modern world, however, there is a tendency to transform home into a workspace – technologically this is manifested in distant working (the Covid-19 pandemic has only reinforced this) whereby as a result one becomes distant only from oneself, one’s home and others, encapsulating oneself as a fabricating instrument in a house that has become a pure construction. The vernacular can also characterise modern urban life if one takes into account ‘the local’ and ‘the autonomous’ that does not exist without the commons. Nowadays, the ethnic is often reduced to the national, albeit in various conceptual forms. It tends to be though the product of the nationalisation of the presently-­ existing (similar to racialization). The situation is complicated by constant references to democracy, forgetting that “dēmos is a territorial and political concept” (Benveniste 2016: 378). The ethnos is characterized by spatiality and the political. The conception of ethnogenesis proposed by Lev Gumilyov can provide grounds for interesting reflections and research. His theory is mainly viewed as an imperial ideology within the framework of Eurasianism (Laruelle 2012), but what is important in the context is the alignment and coalescence of the ethnos in the landscape. In Gumilyov’s view, cities are particular landscapes of the region. Moreover, these landscapes are not just natural but also aural and sensory – soundscapes, smellscapes and so on. However, the entire history after the Neolithic revolution can be seen as the history of urbanisation leading to an awareness of the forms of dwelling that can be characterised as vernacularism. Two questions are especially relevant. Is ethnos characterised by a certain collection of landscapes (not just the natural), and do ethnoses have a homeland with their own specific forms of dwelling? The second question relates to a new awareness of the ethnos itself because in the past the word ethnos was characterised by the totality of humans and animals (Benveniste 2016: 378). Perhaps the concept of animals can be expanded to denote all living beings. That means, however, that the ethnos entails the meaning of the unity-of-everything-­ that-is-alive. But the emphasis of landscapes reminds us that dwelling entails

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co-living not only with everything that is alive, but also dead (for example, viruses). The ripping up of landscapes renders dwelling impossible. Dwelling (which includes also landscapes) is embedded in self-care care for the self. The urban forms of dwelling are linked with unconscious representations (and unconscious mapping). Lévis-Strauss has demonstrated this by analysing the representations of ‘habitat’ (Wohngebiet) in a particular village as the arrangement of a concentric and diametrical structure (Lévis-Strauss 1963: 132–163). It allows us to look at the city as a populated place and a liveable space. The city as a liveable space is a certain kind of ‘organ’ or technos which organises the collective life of people, determines their behaviour, the pace of life and the horizons of comprehension. This kind of city is a synthesis of flesh and stone and is characterised by certain techniques of urban existence. The existing cities can be classified as, for example, ‘the city of the centre’ and ‘the city of the margins’. ‘The city of the centre’ (it can be at the centre only in people’s representations, and not ‘actually’) normally embodies and represents the entire respective land and surroundings. These kinds of cities are normally characterised by imperialism. However, ‘the city of the margins’ can serve as a support for expansion or means toward the transformation of the respective country. Urban life may be considered as the only genuine one (the cultural life, the correct one, etc.), or the exact opposite: as ‘inauthentic’ and ‘impure’. A city can be a home or just a house; a habitat which is called ‘a city’ for reasons of conjuncture. But both cities are characterised by a certain psychogramme of life, through linguistic mapping as well as architectural. Sennett (2018) argues that life in the city is characterised by ville and cité. However, the corresponding English term  – ‘built environment’ (Umwelt), or ‘the surrounding environment’ does not correspond to cité – an urban form of self-understanding and life. Urban forms of dwelling have their own dynamic and pace which is segmented into care for the city as home. A city is not just a sum of several homes, oîkoi, much in the same way as ‘city’ does not mean just ‘house as construction’. A state, however, is not just a city or its derivation. Moreover ‘home’ can be stationary or mobile (traditionally this kind of embodiment is the ‘ship’). In the ancient world, a state was conceptualised as a kind of ‘moving house’ or ship because it was characterised by a certain course in the sustainability of existing and co-habiting. In the case of all these ‘strings of houses’, their landscape-ism and space is important, not simply as being populated, but as something that is liveable and can be experienced. The insight by Husserl that a person lives – and comprehends in sense (see Kūle 1989: 39–57) does not permit either individual or ‘global linear thinking’ (Schmitt 1974, 55) because the liveable space is a landscape (physically and mentally); a symphony of folds and curves. With this kind of linear thinking and behaviour, this space is ripped up, it becomes uncanny. One has to choose and make one’s homeland (Schmid 2021) which is the basis of ethnos and the existence of people in a world overwhelmed with suspense and the uncanny. But homeland is conceptualised as ‘a space where everyone feels at home’ (Stavenhagen 1939: 18)  – to quote from the German: “Raum, in dem jemand zu Hause ist.”

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In the comprehension of ‘the uncanny world’ at least one significant feature has been identified by Sigmund Freud. In 1919 he published an article discussing this which had the title in English The Uncanny [in German: Das Unheimliche] (Freud 1919: 297–324). In the German text the subtle distinction between unheimlich and heimlich is identified. Heimlich is ‘homely’, namely that which is in order, and maintained. The opposite of homeliness is unhomeliness, namely the uncanny  – unheimlich. The uncanny-unhomeliness is linked with repression, suppression, defence, doubling, repetition, compulsion and so on. Freud offers a similar solution in relation to techniques of existence and living in his work Das Unbehagen in der Kultur which in English has acquired the ambiguous title Civilization and its Discontents. The antonym of das Behagen, that is das Unbehagen, also includes the meaning of ‘homeliness’. In a way, the word ‘discontents’ used in the English title entails the uncanny and points toward a forced life in an insane society, ‘a discontented’ world. It is a world where different formations, Sinngebungen, cannot be aligned, provoking dissonance and preventing dwelling. It makes us recursively turn toward self-care. Self-care is care for oneself, letting one to dwell in one’s selfhood. This selfhood is not something spiritual. It is, primarily, a carnal selfhood. The next ‘element’ of this chain is home. All the elements entail a difference and the other, simultaneously pointing out that it is not about property, but about (self)-relations. The city can be identified as the subsequent element in this chain where one can dwell but which may turn into a population space characterised by the uncanny, das Unbehagen. The final element is the ‘state’ which, according to Freud, may also lead to the uncanny and das Unbehagen if the current form of dwelling is not sustained. Self-care entails all these different forms of care. But what is important is that all these ‘elements’ of the chain (they can be further developed) are elements of different spheres and care in them is not identical. In other words, if ‘care for the city’ is the same as ‘care for one’s household’, it is not actually ‘care’ because it is egotistically focused one oneself and rather leads to the emergence of the uncanny and the unhomely. Care ensures homeliness and order whereas the uncanny entails disorder. To put this more clearly, each ‘element’ can be compared to a lifeworld. Reciprocity, the horizons of the world and their interaction is crucial for a living life. However, encapsulating oneself in a specific ‘element’ would mean finding oneself in a fold of life without horizons, opportunities for interaction and reciprocity. This kind of lifeworld becomes unhomely, enabling only wild grazing – but this lifeworld may be made civilized and even comfortable. This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project No. lzp-2020/2-0085 “Development of Eco-phenomenology in the Situation of Pandemic”

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The Phenomenology of the Coronavirus and the Uncanny World of the Pandemic Uldis Vēgners

Abstract  The COVID-19 pandemic is not just a physical, biological or medical event, it is also an event that has radically changed our experience of and embodied existence in the world. Phenomenologists already have contributed to the understanding of the radical change of our lived world brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic that has come with a disruption and breakdown of our life as we previously knew it. However, little attention has been paid to how the experience of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) itself, that is, the meaning it has for us and its appearance to us in our daily life, have contributed to the radical change. Without denying the variability of the pandemic experience and the importance of a broader context that shapes our experience of the pandemic, I want to argue that the invisibility of the virus, and what I will call the threefold displacement of its appearance, lets it become indirectly visible everywhere and every time we carry out our daily habitual actions and interactions. The virus does not just infect our bodies, its meaning infects the meaning of our embodied existence in the world, radically changing our everyday practical life. Keywords  COVID-19 · Pandemic · Coronavirus · Phenomenology · Edmund Husserl · Experience · Meaning · Embodiment · Invisibility

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic is not just a physical, biological or medical event, it is an event that has radically changed our experience of and embodied existence in the world. Since the outbreak it has radically changed the way we live. Now, more than U. Vēgners (*) Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_14

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a year has passed and, despite the best global efforts to fight it, the SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus from now on) is still and promises to be for an unforeseeable future a huge part of our daily life. There is a lot of literature about how the COVID-19 has changed the world starting from individual experiences to global politics, but in this chapter I want to look at the coronavirus and the pandemic it has created from a phenomenological perspective focusing on how we perceive, make sense of and act in the world of the pandemic. Phenomenologists already have reflected and written about the radical change of our lived world brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic that has come with a disruption and breakdown of our life as we previously knew it (Aho 2020; Carel 2020; Carel et al. 2020; Dahiya 2020; Dolezal 2020; van Grunsven 2020; Božič 2021; Gara 2021; Molchanov 2021; Pierosara 2021; Sobota 2021; Sabeva 2021). Havi Carel describes the pandemic as “a new global regime of abnormality” (Carel 2020, 13) and as a condition of global uncertainty (Carel 2020, 16). It is not the same world we knew and in which we have habitually lived and acted, that is, the familiar world of our daily life: “The embodied dimension of many things we have previously taken for granted – how we move around in the world, hug loved ones, socialise freely, travel – is now clearly visible” (Carel 2020, 13). The familiar world, as Janna van Grunsven notes, has been disrupted and lost (van Grunsven 2020). The world of the pandemic is a new, strange, unfamiliar or uncanny world (Aho 2020; van Grunsven 2020; Gara 2021), stricken with loss, distrust, fear, uncertainty and prohibition. In this context it is striking that little attention has been paid to the coronavirus itself and its contribution to the radically changed world of the pandemic. May aim in this chapter is to argue that much of the radical change in our life of the pandemic is due to how we experience the coronavirus itself, that is, the meaning it has for us and its appearance to us in our daily life. I do not deny the importance of a broader scientific, cultural, political, economic, social, health and personal context that shapes our experience of the pandemic, but I want to argue the way we understand viruses in general and the coronavirus in particular, and the way it appears to us in our experience of the world provide fertile soil for us to experience it everywhere. The term “invisible” in this chapter means everything that is not given to my senses, not just vision. The virus as a phenomenon of our experience is invisible, but it is exactly because of its invisibility, and what I will call the threefold displacement of its appearance, that it has the potentiality of injecting itself into the meaning of our everyday things and, as of consequence, becomes indirectly visible everywhere and every time we carry out our daily habitual actions and interactions. Because of that the virus does not just infect our bodies, its meaning infects the meaning of our embodied existence in the world, radically changing our everyday practical life.

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The World of Meaning Our embodied life is a life of meaning. The world, in which we live as embodied beings, is shaped by the sense or meaning the world and our surrounding environment have for us. Our world, the world of embodied experience is the world of meaning. What does it mean that the world is the world of meaning? First, it means that it is the world that appears to us in our experience. Second, it means that as living, experiencing beings we make sense of the world, we understand it somehow. The world itself and everything in it that we experience have a meaning. What is meaning, what it means to have a meaning and make sense out of things? In order to answer the question, I will use the ideas and terminology developed in the later philosophy of Husserl. According to Husserl, our experience consists of a multitude of individual experiences, for example, experience of pain, thinking, hearing or fear. These experiences come and go, but that is not the whole story about our experience. While these experiences come and go there is a multilevel intentional synthesis at work that based on these experiences establishes intentional unities or identities (Husserl 1982, 41–42). Intentionality is what makes it possible in our experience to have oneness out of a multitude, it unites all the different experiences in the experience of one and the same object. Because of intentionality all the different experiences are experienced as appearances of one and the same experiential unity. To illustrate it Husserl gives an example of a die (Husserl 1982, 39). If I take and through the die, it is given to me in a constantly changing multiplicity. By revolting in the air and then bouncing on a table it is given to me from a multitude of different perspectives or profiles. The shape, colour and size change, but despite these differences in our experience, we are still able to intend or grasp it as one and the same die. Despite the multitude of experiences intentional synthesis is capable of constituting the same intentional object, the identity of this particular die. And the intentional synthesis of the die is neither limited to its current appearance or the type of experience in which it appears. The same die “can be intended in highly diverse modes of consciousness – simultaneously, or else successively in separated modes of consciousness – for example: in separate perceptions, recollections, expectations, valuations, and so forth” (Husserl 1982, 42). The fact that we experience identities that outlive and endure individual, particular experiences means that there is an intentional process that makes it possible. Intentional synthesis, thus, makes it possible for us to intend one and the same object in a multiplicity of experiences. However, it does more. It connects together not only the actual experience of one and the same object, but also the actual experience with the potential experiences of that object. To make it clearer, we can again return to Husserl’s example of the die. The actual experience is what we are going through right now, actually. If I through the die and see how it flies, bounces and finally stops, this is my actual experience of the die, meaning, my actual experience of the die is of it being cast. But the experience of the die is not limited to what is happening to it right now, the experience of what actually happens now with the die

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comes together or implies what potentially can happen to the die or dice in general. That is, when I intend an object in my actual experience, a whole set of potential experiences can be co-intended (Husserl 1982, 44). It should be emphasised that the potentialities Husserl is speaking here are not empty potentialities, they are based on our previous experience (Husserl 1982, 44), including general, linguistic knowledge as well. Potentiality is not any possibility a thing can have, but rather our previous experience which we now project on the thing. As potentialities are dependent on our previous experiences different people might have different potentialities for the seemingly same object. What we co-intend or apperceive depends on our past experiences. For example, if I perceive some external thing from one side, I at the same time instantly co-intend or, in other words, apperceive (Husserl 1982, 111) or appresent (Husserl 1982, 109) also the sides that I do not perceive now but could perceive, if that object would move or I would move. But these potentialities go beyond just the other, currently unperceived side of physical objects. When I experience casting the die, at the same time I implicitly co-intend, for example, that it is my die, that it is a representative of a group of things that can be viewed from different sides, that it can come in all the colours, that it can be hard or soft, big or small, and that it can be put into a box and taken out again. The list is not exhausted and could go on and on as we try to explicate the potentialities of the die. And because the co-intended potentialities depend of previous experience, the set of potentialities for an object is not closed and is open for change with every new experience. For example, if I have never seen dice before, I might not know that I can also play games with them. Once I learn about them or play a game with dice myself the potentialities for dice expand, now including the potentiality to play games with them. Another thing to stress is that, although the source of potentialities are our past experiences, they are projected into the future. When I experience a thing, I do not just experience the past experience as the past, but rather as what could be experienced. Potentiality is about what kind of experience I can possibly have. It lets me anticipate and thus engage with a thing in way that I want or that is convenient to me. I can actively engage with the thing based on the potentialities the thing has for me. If I know that an apple is edible because I have eaten apples before, I can take it and take a bite out of it. Husserl calls the totality of these experiential potentialities that we apperceive in an intentional object “an intentional horizon of references to potentialities of consciousness” (Husserl 1982, 44). And this horizon according to him is what constitutes the sense (Husserl 1982, 45, 46) or, what is the same in the context of this chapter, the meaning of an intentional object. Every object that we experience in the world is a pole of identity, some x, with a meaning horizon, consisting of potentialities to be actualised. As was already stated, the world in which we live, is the world of experience and meaning. But it should be emphasised that the world of experience and meaning is not just perceptual or theoretical, it is also, and mostly, practical. Our practical engagement, our actions and interactions with the world are inevitably embodied. The body is not only the site in which our world is experientially revealed but also

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a centre of actual and possible practical action and relation to the world. Our embodiment means that we, our body, and the world are inextricably linked. The meaning the world has, therefore, is not only perceptual or theoretical, but also practical. The range of potential interactions between me and a thing in the world forms a part of the meaning of both that thing and my body. The meaning of a thing is at the same time a part of the meaning of my body. When I reveal something new about a thing, I reveal something new about my body as well (Husserl 1982, 97). For example, one of the potentialities of a glass of water that I perceive is that I can raise the glass to my lips and safely drink from it to quench my thirst. But, if I am paralysed from the waist down stairs do not present themselves to me as something to be walked up and down, they are rather obstacles and imply my bodily limitations. Thus, the meaning of a thing is as much about the thing itself, as it is about me and my body, what I do and what I can do (Husserl 1982, 97; 1989, 159), but also what I cannot or should not do. In other words, the perceptual world is a world of affordances. The term affordances, coined by ecological psychologist J.J. Gibson, refers to the practical possibilities for action that an environment presents or affords, which depends on being’s needs, skills and habits (Gibson 1979; van Grunsven 2020). The world of affordances forms the familiar setting of our life in which we feel like at home (van Grunsven 2020). Because the world has a meaning for me, it is a familiar place, place in which I pre-reflectively, without thinking much, realise my goals knowing how to act and what to do.

The Meaning of Virus Everything we encounter as a part of the world has a meaning horizon with its experiential potentialities. Viruses are no exception in this regard. They are a part of our world, and as such they are experiential identities with a meaning horizon. As meaning depends on our previous experience, there is no one meaning of virus for every experiencing subject. The meaning of virus will differ among people and depend whether one is a virologist, a medical professional, a lay person, and so many other factors. For example, for scientists viruses are nucleic acids coated with a protein (Li 2020; Villarreal 2008). It is estimated that there are 10 nonillion individual viruses on our planet, and they are everywhere: “Viruses infiltrate every aspect of our natural world, seething in seawater, drifting through the atmosphere, and lurking in miniscule motes of soil (Wu 2020)”. It is known that viruses are not just in our environment, but also, and importantly, within us. Most of us now know that they need a living organism to reproduce and that they can be spread by the infected living organism, making the host contagious. It is estimated that there are about 380 trillion viruses in us at any given moment, which is 10 times more than bacteria (Pride 2020), and most of them are “lurking quietly in the human body, hidden away in cells in the lungs, blood and nerves and inside the multitudes of microbes that colonize our gut” (Pride 2020). Viruses have also become a part of our DNA: “Our

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DNA contains roughly 100,000 pieces of viral DNA. Altogether, they make up about 8% of the human genome (Zimmer 2017)”. Different viruses have different relationship with humans and therefore they have different meaning for them. Although viruses generally have a bad reputation, mostly because of the diseases they cause, actually not all viruses are harmful to us, some can be actually beneficial (Marder 2021). The coronavirus is among the “bad” ones, because it can cause respiratory tract infection in humans, which can lead to death. For general public, journalists, politicians and economists viruses are often framed using military metaphors as invisible enemies, as is also the case with the coronavirus (Moses 2020). Viruses are anthropomorphised not only by assigning them such characteristics as will, agency and collective planning, but also evaluating them according to moral standards (Porubanova and Guthrie 2020). For a lot of people viruses, including the coronavirus, mean loneliness and loss of social life (Hwang et al. 2020). And yet for others pandemics and viruses are God’s punishment (Wyatt 2020; Staff 2020) or a hoax and a global large scale conspiracy to control people and take away their freedom (Imhoff and Lamberty 2020). And if we go back into the history, many people have lived and died without knowing anything about viruses. The history of discovery of microorganisms, including viruses, is a complex and spans centuries (Labadie et  al. 2020), but it was only at the end of nineteenth century that the germ theory, “the theory that certain diseases are caused by the invasion of the body by microorganisms, organisms too small to be seen except through a microscope” (Britannica and The Editors of Encyclopaedia 2020), gained its prominence in medicine. Thus, the meaning of virus is very rich and diverse, going beyond just scientific understanding, which makes it impossible to fully explicate it. However, despite the vast differences in how we understand viruses and the coronavirus in particular, for most of us the meaning of virus would at least imply that it is a physical entity, which is so small that it cannot be directly perceived with our own senses, and the only way to perceive it is to use advanced technologies like electron microscopes.

The Daily Invisibility of the Coronavirus Besides the relatively high rate of contagion, morbidity and mortality, and the fact that it is a new virus what characterizes the virus is that it is so small that it cannot be seen, nor sensed in any other way by us. In our everyday life we never perceptually encounter viruses directly. In Husserlian terms, one of the basic potentialities that constitute the meaning horizon of virus in general is the potentiality of impossibility to perceive it directly without using specialized technological means. When it comes to our daily life, viruses mean tiny entities that cannot be perceived or presented, they can be only apperceived or appresented. Viruses are everywhere, outside and inside us, affecting our lives for better or worse, yet in our daily lives we cannot perceive them. Yes, we can use technologies and make them visible, but the

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visibility of the virus is limited to laboratories which are equipped with the required technology. And even virologists, who research viruses, can see only a very tiny portion of the vast number of viruses that are all around. We might be presented with pictures of different viruses, informative videos that depict how viruses work and what they do to our bodies, but not with viruses themselves. Although we cannot detect viruses, we presume, that is, apperceive or appresent them in our environment or in us, for example, when someone else or I become ill. However, in our everyday life viruses themselves remain invisible, and form the invisible part of our environment. As such the coronavirus together with so many other viruses differ from other physical things that we experience in our life. For example, if I experience an ant, there is always one side that is presented in my perception. I can feel it as it crawls up my thigh, I can see it as it continues its way upwards, I can pick it up and take it closer to my eyes and inspect it. During all of these experiences there is an apperception taking place, appresenting everything about the ant what is not present and directly perceived by me. But there is always a profile, a side which is presented to me, perceived by me. The coronavirus, on the other hand, is never perceived by me in my daily life, there are no profiles or sides that are perceptually presented to me. I cannot see it, taste it, smell it or otherwise sense it. If other physical things in my everyday life are given to me by partially presenting themselves, the coronavirus is never presented, only appresented. If I am to experience the virus not just theoretically and generally thinking about it or imaginatively playing with the idea, but concretely as a particular, real entity that I have encountered, I can experience it only through other things in my experience that present themselves, for example, my own body. The virus, being appresented indirectly in the things that present themselves, in our daily lives is only given as a meaning, a meaning horizon within a meaning horizon of a thing that can be presented. In other words, the virus is experienced as a potentiality within a set of potentialities of a phenomenon that is actually experienced.

The Displaced Appearance of the Coronavirus The virus is never directly experienced in our daily life, its appearance is in form of appresentation. And this appresentation takes a form of a threefold displacement. I have discerned 3 interconnected displacements that form the basis of the appresentive appearance of the coronavirus: spatial, presentive and temporal displacement. All these displacements come together to form the specific way the coronavirus and other disease-causing microorganisms appear to us in our experience. Spatial displacement is about where the coronavirus appears, presentive displacement is about as what it appears, and temporal displacement is about when it appears. Now, let us dive deeper in each of them. The coronavirus is a contagious virus to which we can be exposed and by which we can be infected from our environment. As the current evidence suggests and

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most of us know now the coronavirus “can spread from an infected person’s mouth or nose in small liquid particles when they cough, sneeze, speak, sing or breathe” (WHO 2021). Although it spreads mainly between people who are in close contact, it can also be transmitted via poorly ventilated or crowded indoor settings, as well as by touching one’s eyes, nose and mouth after touching infected surfaces (WHO 2021). Therefore, when we move about in our daily life, we cannot tell if we are exposed to coronavirus or not, or at least we cannot be sure that we have. I cannot see if the product I take from the shelf in a supermarket is covered with the virus or not, I cannot see the virus on a toilet seat at my work place, I cannot see the virus gusting out of my friend’s mouth as she is talking to me, I cannot see if my own fingers with which I rub my nose are covered in the virus. There can be nothing in the environment that could suggest my exposure to the virus. The environment I am exposed to might be full with the virus and still I might be not any the wiser. But it also goes the other way round, I might suspect that the environment is infectious while actually it is not. And the fact that for so many people the infection occurs asymptomatically or that people could be infectious before symptoms appear makes the things even more complicated, because the lack of symptoms does not mean the virus cannot be transmitted to others (WHO 2020, 2021). I might be infected and unwillingly spread the virus to my family, friends, colleagues and even strangers. Or other people could be infected and contagious without any symptoms and transmit the virus to me. Although the virus in the environment is invisible and hidden from us, it has a potential of becoming visible and revealed in our bodies. In our everyday lives it is primarily our bodies that reveal the hidden virus in the environment. It is the body that makes what is invisible outside of us visible inside of us, or, in other words, it is in the body that the invisible becomes in-visible. So, the spatial displacement of appearance of the virus means that what is outside appears not outside, but rather inside, when it has entered my body. Our body, thus, reveals itself as a site where the coronavirus can become visible. I can tell that I have been exposed to the viral environment, because of what is happening to my body. Thus, the inapparent virus in the environment becomes apparent when I have been exposed to it and the virus has entered my body. However, its appearance in my body is still not a direct one. The virus does not present itself as itself in my body. I do not experience the microorganisms in my body. Rather they appear to me via a set of symptoms and/or as positive results from diagnostic tests. So, the presentive displacement is that the virus manifests in our body not as itself, but rather as disease symptoms and, with more certainty, as positive test results. The virus in my body is appresented in the presentation of my illness experience or test results. The two displacements described above are accompanied by yet another displacement. When the virus enters our body, it does not produce the symptoms right away. The virus has an incubation period, which is the period from the infection to the onset of symptoms. In other words, it is a time period between the exposure to the virus in the environment and when one becomes ill. On average the COVID-19 symptoms, if they appear at all, appear after 5–6 days after infection (WHO 2020). When we are infected, the virus is already present in our body but does not yet

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appear, there is a temporal displacement or the delay between when the virus is already in our body and when it shows itself in form of the disease symptoms. At the moment of exposure and infection, the virus does not appear to me, it appears to me only later, and then also, as noted, not as itself. We know that we have been in an environment that contained the virus, because now we experience the symptoms. If I develop the COVID-19 symptoms, it is already too late, I have been already exposed to the viral environment days ago. The exposure to the virus in the environment that infects my body is the past to its future appearance in me, and, vice versa, the appearance of the virus in my body is the future to its past entering my body. For example, I go to meet a friend I have longed to see for many months, and nothing tells me that the meeting exposes me to the virus. It is only days later when I develop the COVID-19 symptoms and do a test that I find that my friend was infected and contagious. Therefore, when it comes to the appearance of the coronavirus in our embodied experience, it is always delayed and lags behind the invisible entrance and presence of the virus in our body. In other words, the presence of the viral environment is experientially absent or inapparent, and becomes apparent only after the fact. When the presence of the virus becomes apparent, the viral environment might very well be absent. In the temporal displacement of the coronavirus the moment of infection is appresented later once the symptoms start to appear days later. To summarise, first, the coronavirus appears only when it is in my body. Although I first meet it when it is outside and when I am exposed to it in my environment, it does not appear there, it appears only when it is in me. Second, it appears only when I develop disease symptoms or receive test results for a more or less conclusive answer. Although it is in my body and it affects my body by rapidly multiplying, it appears only as disease symptoms and test results. And, third, it appears only with a temporal delay. Although it is already in my body, due to the incubation period its appearance in form of disease symptoms is delayed.

The World Is Not the Same Anymore What the displaced appearance of the coronavirus suggests is that although the virus itself is inapparent in our daily life, it does not mean that we do not experience it. Although the virus is inapparent, it becomes indirectly apparent in our environment via the threefold displacement. If the virus would be directly apparent in my environment, its appearance would be localised and limited to certain things in my environment. I would know where it is and where it is not at any given time. However, as the virus is invisible and its appearance displaced, every object, every environment in my practical world becomes a potential source of infection. Because the virus does not appear outside in the environment where I can be infected with it but shows itself in my body (spatial displacement) only days later (temporal displacement) as disease symptoms (presentative displacement), it opens up a room for uncertainty and speculation. Any object, any person that I interact in my practical world becomes a potential source of infection. The uncertainty about the existence

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of the virus around us, coupled with its contagious and deadly nature, provides fertile soil for us to experience it everywhere. To use biomedical metaphors, the meaning and the specific way the virus appears to us can contaminate or infect the meaning of other things we interact with on daily basis, pressing its meaning and appearance onto their meaning and appearance. The virus not only hijacks cells to multiply on the organic level, it also hijacks the meaning of other everyday things to multiply on the level of meaning. If I talk with another person, if I touch a doorknob, how do I know they do not spread the virus? As far as we can perceive it, it is the same world as it has been before, but now we know that there is a contagious and deadly virus raging around. And it could be possibly anywhere. It changes the meaning of the things with which I interact in my daily life. Each and every thing that I come across in my daily life now can entail as a part of its meaning the potentiality of being infected with the virus and being its transmitter. And this is what we have seen with the COVID-19 pandemic in abundance. The experience of the virus has become viral. We “see” the virus everywhere, especially in public spaces. The coronavirus has spoiled the meaning of our practical world and thus altered our embodied relation to it. This apperception makes the perceptual world to appear as a new, strange uncanny, potentially dangerous, and uncertain terrain (Aho 2020, 2), because the coronavirus and the pandemic caused by it have changed the meaning of the things in the world for us and, thus, also our potentialities to practically engage with them, making our embodied experience challenging (Dahiya 2020). It is undeniable that for a lot of people all over the world the life is not the same. The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the everyday life of so many. To some extent we could say that the presence of the pandemic and the virus is almost ubiquitous in our experience and even central to our daily life. Whatever we do or plan doing, we have to think, for example, whether it is safe or allowed. We have subjected our lives to it, and it is practically impossible to live a life that is not guided by our concern regarding the virus and the pandemic. The pandemic has shown that the world can be not only a world of practical possibilities, but also a world of suspicion, danger, uncertainty and internal and external prohibitions. A new cluster of “the ‘to-be-avoided,’ the ‘to-be-suspected’, the ‘to-­ be-­treated-with-caution’” (van Grunsven 2020, 3) affordances have proliferated. The perceptual world is and at the same time is not the same (van Grunsven 2020). As van Grunsven writes: “The key thing to notice, though, is that the current situation invites us to simultaneously see these objects and persons as affording to be feared, avoided, treated with caution, where this new affordance is in direct conflict with the old affordances we still perceive as well (van Grunsven 2020)”. The loss and radical change in our embodied potentialities are most substantial with regard to our intersubjective, social life. Every interaction and every place that another person has attended can be perceived as a potential situation of infection. If I go outside and interact with people, I do not know if I am not exposed to the virus. My neighbour or friend are not just what they seem, they are also possible carriers and transmitters of the virus. A doorknob is not just a handle to open doors, part of its meaning, now, is that touching might lead to infection, illness and even death. So, the doorknob is not anymore what affords and calls us to touch and press it (at least

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without precautionary measures), now it is dangerous, affording me rather not to touch it. The same goes for many other things in my habitual environment and many practical possibilities that they afford. The world of affordances we enjoyed and took for granted pre-pandemic (Carel 2020, 13), is to a great extent disrupted and broken. Even our own body can appear to us as a possible threat to ourselves: “With the new coronavirus pandemic, the sense of touch has come under attack. Medical authorities insistently advise us: do not touch your face, do not touch doorknobs with your hands, and definitely do not touch others (no kisses on the cheek, handshakes, or other bodily greetings) (Marder 2020)”. Thus, the virus appears in our bodies not only when it causes our body to become ill, it is inscribed in our bodies in the way we live in the pandemic, how we behave, interact and organise our daily life. Distancing, mask wearing, constant hand-washing, self-isolation, lockdowns, travel bans etc. are all responses to the radical change of the meaning of our everyday world and the deep uncertainty that stems from it. Even for people, who do not believe in the existence of the virus or who do not think that the COVID-19 is a serious threat to their lives or lives of any other, still the coronavirus is a central part of their lives. Their mobility and freedoms are still restricted, their everyday life decisions and actions are limited, and their beliefs constantly challenged.

Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way so many people live today, radically changing our embodied world and making it uncertain and uncanny. Without denying the importance of a broader scientific, cultural, economic, social and personal context of the experience of the pandemic, I argued that that much of the radical change in our life in the pandemic is due to how we experience the coronavirus itself. The direct invisibility of the virus and its appearance via threefold displacement, coupled with the fact that it is a new and highly contagious virus that can make people seriously ill and even cause them to die, provide fertile soil for the virus to copy its meaning on the meaning of things we engage in our everyday practical life, radically changing the experience of the world and our embodied potentialities to interact with it. The invisibility and displaced appearance of the virus, together with its contagious and deadly nature, play a key role in why the pandemic has changed the experience of the world and reshaped our practical possibilities so radically. However, it should be emphasised that it does not mean that these experiential characteristics of the virus can explain every experience of it and the pandemic it has caused, because the virus and the pandemic are experienced (or not) in a broader – scientific, cultural, economic, political, media, health, personal etc – context. For example, without science we would not be able to tell that there are viruses and would not know that this is a new virus, as well as how contagious it is, how it spreads etc. Without health-care organisations, governments and media we would not be able to tell the scope of the pandemic and we would not know the measures

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to take to stay safe or avoid death from the illness that the virus causes. The pandemic experience will also differ, for example, between people who have fallen ill and who have not, who have fallen ill at the beginning of the pandemic and who have done it later, people with severe symptoms and people with mild symptoms. Also, personal dispositions, previous experiences, community involvement and social media play an important role. And the last thing to mention is that, although this chapter specifically targeted the experience of the coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic, the line of though expressed here does not exclusively apply to the coronavirus and the current pandemic but could be generally applicable to many other viruses that are new, spread relatively rapidly, cause serious illness, or have a relatively high risk of death. This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project No. lzp-2020/2-0085 “Development of Eco-phenomenology in the Situation of Pandemic”.

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Eco-phenomenology of Ambient Urbanism, Earth and Sky (Along the Aesthetic Lane) Māra Rubene

Abstract  Eco-phenomenology is a common denominator for various research initiatives, striving to respond philosophically to the emergency of a situation (notably climate change, pollution, deforestation) in its different layouts. It dates back to Husserl's response to the crisis of the lifeworld [Lebenswelt] when the task of phenomenology is formulated to serve humanity by returning and examining philosophical premises. In lectures on the consciousness of internal time, the cognitions on primal impression and elsewhere on space and thing resulted in the development of a rich dictionary of ‘lived spatiality’ and ‘living present’. The quality of ‘lived’ is a secret key to the phenomenological re-elaboration of the Kantian transcendental aesthetic of sensibility. Husserl thus draws up new horizons to explore human presence in his relations with the circumscribing world [Umwelt]. An eco-­phenomenological orientation sustains discussion on ambient urbanism via a turn to terrestrial life with its temporal and spatial exposures as a research laboratory for a renewed ethos (when the place is taken as principal for subjectivity) poetic-­aesthetics as well. Cities in the throes of environmental crisis, COVID-19 outbreak, binds of pandemic times opens a chance to revaluate a load-bearing capacity of the aesthetics in the framework of eco-phenomenology. An effort in conjoining aesthetic aspects of ‘living present’ with reflection on elements – air, water, fire, earth and sky in urban space – is realised by questioning the different aesthetic life settings in its emphasis on ‘the life of the natural sphere’ or ‘the drama of Nature’ (A. Tymieniecka), describing the sky and earth relations as relations of freedom (K. Held) and as a Husserlian way through the ‘spatial nature’ seeking for the aesthetic foundation (G. Neri). The ‘aesthetics of emotional spaces’ (T. Griffero) and the account of such quasi-phenomenon as ambiance (B. Bégout) are part of drawing distinctions between eco-phenomenological aesthetics and ecological phenomenology as well as phenomenological ecology. Eco-phenomenological aesthetics is embedded in the relationality of livability and sustains striving to awaken shared responsibility for life on the Earth by looking closer at the spectacle of nature in the framework of ambient urbanism. M. Rubene (*) Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_15

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Keywords  Eco-phenomenology · Aesthetics · Urbanism · Urban space · Living present · Earth · Sky

Urbanism and the Susceptible Borders of ‘Living Present’. …And so, the pain; above all, the hard work of living; the long experience of love – those purely unspeakable things. But later, under stars, what then? That's better left unsaid. For the wanderer doesn't bring a handful of that unutterable earth from the mountainside down to the valley, but only some word he's earned, a pure word, the yellow and blue gentian. Maybe we're here only to say, house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window – at most, pillar, tower… (Rilke 1977, 63)

By Husserl's redefinition of the relationship of consciousness with time and space, the question of the special status of life on Earth is gaining visibility in various attempts of phenomenological endeavours, among them efforts to analyse closer results of human settlement (including aesthetics of nature), architecture or buildings as lifeworlds (environmental aesthetics), city life and lived embodiment (including everyday aesthetics, especially aesthetics of secondary senses and urban experience), and last but not least there is an interest to develop phenomenologically-­ oriented aesthetics of urbanism. Urbanism as the leading thread in the perspective of space and time taken together with research of atmosphere and ambience is designed to disclose aesthetic edges and apertures of architectonics of urban life, mainly including the problem of the geo-cosmological coordinates of human being-ness. This vision promotes a better understanding of humankind's responsibility for the niche of everything-that-is alive, which is the focus of eco-phenomenological research. What it means to-be-­ together in schools, hospitals, in workplaces, airports, streets, and in places of residence, at home, in all these urban spaces we learn to find ourselves at the benevolence of our nearest, of other humans; we learn to live together in a lockdown regime and of our possible obligation to wear masks. Philosophy more than ever now faces questions rooted in the dynamics and increasing complexity of the urban environment, translated as relations between ‘the built environment’ and human creativity. In aiming to identify eco-phenomenological nuances in various efforts to rethink urbanism in an aesthetic key, that is as an ‘art’ (such as architecture, landscape architecture or performance); as sensitivity to the ‘livingness’ of life and its extreme vulnerability and fragility; as affectivity and its resonance of being ‘here and now’. In a variety of atmospheres, situations in climate pervasiveness, attention will be paid to ‘liveability’ through its aspects of ‘lived space’ and ‘living present’ and to the imagination awakened by the presence of elements (fire, air, water, earth, and sky). Some questions need to be posed in order to pursue the thread of aesthetic research which sustains discussions leading to eco-phenomenology. One is: how can the ongoing processes of urbanisation be described in this key, and how do they look from the perspective of already-invested aesthetic development?

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Eco-­phenomenology does available research which emerges on the margins of the 'known-as-affective' places in the full bloom of vitality such as 'lived spaces' and 'the living present' presented to us in our cities beyond or complementing the calculable, physical and geometric space of settlements. Sensuous, affective, primordial areas were questioned, and environmental, landscape, urban space as spaces of moods toward which research efforts were systematically accounted in forming more or less independent aesthetic theories. Maybe the opportunity to think about urbanism in the continuum of nature has already been lost. Still, nobody has freed us from our responsibility to find a place for nature in an emerging continuum of urbanism. Changing the perspective from the “spectacle of nature” to the “drama of nature”, opens other layers of passivity and activity, domination and respect, involvement and imaginative creation. Closely following the Husserlian path, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka answers Heidegger's reading of Kant's theme of imagination, his interpretation of poetry and pre-Socratic heritage with her formula: "The creative process becomes a locus of scrutiny and elucidation of innumerable elements from all realms of the living present" (Tymieniecka 1988, 279). Thinking about space, spacing, urban space, or urban interstices is part of broadening the limits of aesthetics in an eco-phenomenological key. The temporalising and spatialising of a particular and contingent emplacement, the interstices that are regarded as "the outcome of composition of interactions" that "coexist within a given spatial situation" (Brighenti 2013, xviii) seem to form a necessary i.e., more abstract background to draw us closer to the problems urbanism poses to Planet Earth (in terms of relations, pointing towards "liveability"). In most general lines, those problems are the problem of the aesthetics of nature in the context of the cities (including the scientific approach) and the issue of human interaction or that of creativity (including that of appropriate language). Thus, we return to the discussions Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka had with contemporaries such as Paul Ricoeur, Mikel Dufrenne and Gaston Bachelard but first with Edmund Husserl and Immanuel Kant. Here her conception of logos of life is essential. Maija Kūle beholds the advantage of eco-philosophy in its orientation to ethical responsibility and its avoidance of the naturalization of human life. Referencing Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's geo-cosmical order Kūle writes: "Eco-phenomenology appears not as a new philosophia naturalis focused only on nature, but as a wish to apply the richness of the phenomenological approach, part of its conceptual apparatus, in order to elaborate the relationship holding among the Universe-logos-nature-­ life-human being-ethics. The human being in relation to communication, the biosphere and eco-systems should be an ethical human being" (Kūle 2018, 46). Aesthetics in the Eco-phenomenological approach can be regarded as helpful in a search for equipoise and ethos and is critical in laying bare the power that upholds or hinders particular life forms, certainly in the lived space and the specific living present. The Heraclitean nerve of the Husserlian re-elaboration of "transcendental aesthetics" in the perspective of so-called "cosmic architectonics" is disclosed by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka as "cosmic positioning with its dynamic architecture"

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that "is assuming the transcendental role formerly accorded to consciousness" (Tymieniecka 2011, 10) Like Heraclitus, for whom the basic logos of cosmos is transformation and change, Tymieniecka subscribes to earth-cosmic interdependencies. She emphasises, on one hand, that "laws that determine earth's position" such as "gravity, relativity and other physical laws" and from the other, life and those of "visceral earthly forces." Tymieniecka writes: "Life has its celestial complement in the cosmic conditions, its earthly complement in the resources of the earth. Its very foundations are in the forces and laws of the cosmos, which in life become sustaining and transformatory (light and motion, atmospheric and climatic forces, etc.)" (Tymieniecka 2011, 7). These last aspects are crucial in moving closer to an Eco-­ phenomenological study of urbanism. Increasingly, we are urged to take as a datum point aesthetics linked with theories of lived space, habitats and atmosphere as a precondition for free breathing space for all those alive under the skies. Urban spaces have always been an experimental field where something like the future of humankind evolves and occurs, where another ethos and other aesthetics can be found. Therefore, we take them as spaces where livability is combined with other determinative aspects such as time measurement, time and the intimacy of presence. Aesthetics via research about cities is looking forward to a new form of beauty, which follows landscape aesthetics (Kühne 2018). Various strains come together in phenomenologically-informed studies of space, place and lifeworld (Seamon 2018) and built space. The framework of environmental aesthetics supports the production of the "aesthetics of urbanism" (Berleant 2010, 115–135). Significant developments lead toward the eco-phenomenology of ambiances (Bégout 2020) via the "aesthetics of ambiances", emotional spaces or pathic aesthetics (Griffero 2020). Whirlwind aesthetic theories accrue from the phenomenological aspiration toward balanced ethos, moving from judgmental attitude to perceptual experience to sensation, building on imagination, performance or immersion. Thus, the interest is more on those who help us discover the area of prereflective passivity, where human and non-biological intelligence collide. We are considering the outlook supported by the contemporary development of so-called Earth Sciences, and foremost in this are those results acquired in the framework of phenomenological philosophy and its discussions of the Eco-­ phenomenological approach. "With roots deep in the earth, we extend our vision to the encircling skies," wrote Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Tymieniecka 2011, xvi) stressing the geo-cosmic dimension of life. "Ugly spaces are punishing," noted Elaine Scarry in her argument for close relations between aesthetics and ethics in their maintenance of life in her formula of Beauty and the pact of aliveness (Scarry 2019, 34). She is sure that human beings are sensitive to the asymmetry between beauty and justice, and her analysis of beauty reassures us that the experience of beauty teaches us to be more limited in our ego-centricity; to become more welcoming. Relations between human beings and life and human beings and nature are complicated and possibly too sensitive, if we look closer at Husserl's discussions with Neo-Kantians on the connections between natural and human sciences, with

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philosophers of life and, last but not least, the so-called ‘anti-humanism’ approach. Anti-humanism discussions cast a shadow on M.  Duffrenne's analysis of human being and nature. The French aesthetician Maryonne Saison in La Nature artiste. Mikel Dufrenne de l’esthetique au politique poses a question: how to understand the resistance of the philosopher who excludes every form of naturalism and posits human beings [l'homme] as a principal player responsible for the balance between him and nature (Saison 2018, 7). In striving to "defeat the inhuman" to “achieve a man" [faire l'homme], eco-philosophy can be seen as a development of the Stoic nerve of the phenomenological approach already present in Husserlian elaborations of phenomenological reduction (epochē). Ecological urbanism, in its turn, is a common denominator for proposals to reposition nature and intentions to reconstruct urbanism and thus to reduce the contrast which falls into the perspective between a life-friendly environment and that of hostility to life. Oscar Wilde's saying from The Decay of Lying (1889) is often quoted: "If nature had been comfortable, Mankind would never have invented architecture" (Wilde 2018, 2). Architecture better adapted to the vicissitudes of nature; a city favourable to life in urban spaces and more capable of finding the best answer to all kinds of vulnerabilities, to secure humanity and civilization: these inventions have always been bordered with dreams of unlimited life. Whether urbanism, ecology or nature – not one of them alone serves as a simple theoretical approach, quite the opposite. Involved in century-old discussions, they urge us to re-evaluate some of the primary premises of occidental philosophical tradition. Everybody dreams of well-being, responsibility and harmony. Still, we can discern a flavour of Husserlian dynamics in the presence of the phenomenological approach in discussing elements in the imagery of poetic constructions, the display of the atmospheric qualities of urban space and its resonating presence. In our situation of omnipresent urbanism, the task of philosophers is to give attention to the issue of maintaining life in the whole continuum on Earth. Husserlian analysis of distentio (Augustinus), i.e., the living present and primary impressions, reminds us of the essentiality of temporal relations and presence as such; what we have not only in the measure of time but also in the ethical resonance of language itself. Nodes of a living present and spatiality, the complicated syntax of space and time in the context of growing automation processes in our urban way of life, in which we actively immerse ourselves, urges us to look for the dynamic of the aesthetic happening of beauty. In answer to the question of human vocation, a kind of an aesthetics of presence, conjoining the ethos of language with the possible eventuality of beauty, can be broadly involved. Using "ambient" for qualifying urbanism, the purpose of this essay is to draw attention to the specific contemporary perception of the quality of life, the burning necessity on a grassroots level of changing attitudes to the everyday lifeworld, of subsequent careful rethinking of resources, and of reconsidering previous solutions rooted in age-old certainties. In other words, it is an attempt to show the vitality of phenomenology via the exploration of a link to sensitive life applying the perspective of aesthetics. On a basic level it can be characterised by acknowledging that the 'here and 'now' of my life (selfness, consciousness, I/me) has somehow lost the

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familiar ways of escape via knowledge or praxis and now is involved in the discussions via the problems of image, body and dwelling, leading to better understanding of sensibility, activity of passivity, creativity and involvement as well as commonality. "I choose the word ambience in part to make strange the idea of environment, which is often associated with a particular view of nature" (Morton 2007, 34). "Ambient" has a rather encompassing amplitude of meanings, reaching back to the ancient Greek periechon and the French term milieu, building relations "both ways," resonating with chora or aura, as has been pointed already by Leo Spitzer (Spitzer 1963). The richness of the phenomenological approach should be displayed together with a "richer understanding of embodied practices in place," thus leading us to reconsider not only the dynamic of elements which are observable in urban spaces – earth, sky, air, fire, water  – but also all kinds of endeavours to use technological prosthetics to improve our aesthetics of habitation. The surface of Planet Earth should be regarded as an essential part of lived experience in building up the ethical space of human life.

Urban Spaces and Life on the Earth And philosophers tell us, Callicles, that communion and friendship and orderliness and temperance and justice bind together heavens and earth and gods and men, and that this universe is therefore called Cosmos or order, not disorder or misrule, my friend. (Plato, Gorgias, 507–508)

Urban spaces are witnessing the best of human strivings and the worst of human failures. The concept of urban spaces seems to have a functional role in studying the built environment, so it is operational in landscape architecture, but especially in adopting an aspect of virtuality. Thus, it can be taken as a core concept of all kinds of urbanism. Space and time, in their openness to the various relations of human life, as they give expression to the proximity, intimacy, integrity, plurality, alienation, and distance, are the most critical indicators of flourishing or degrading life on the Earth. As a notion, as a metaphor for urban human life – urban spaces – is excellent to show the enlarging role of technique in acceleration, pluralization and the fragmentation of human lived space and time. That is trivial, but sky and earth will not be the same for the city dweller and the astronomer, geographer or poet. Ultimately, their architectonics is in the process of change, and Husserl thinks about the Earth and sky relations and Man's geo-cosmological condition, not like the Kantian "seafarer." Husserl writes: "But if the earth is constituted with carnality and corporeality, then the "sky" is also necessary as the field of what at the extreme can be spatially experienced for me and for by all of us – and that happens on the basis of earth-­ ground" (Husserl 2002, 126). Husserl thus underlines the importance of the "surrounding space of bodies," which is necessary to be oriented at first to "earthly bodies" and to the "earthly space". Only afterwards does the human being learn

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more about his "ontic ground" and then understands that "we were only sailors on the larger earth" (Husserl 2002, 126). Guido Neri comments: "Originally what is given is only the ground of the earth," and he notes that Husserl "reacts to naturalistic reductionism by developing a new, extraordinary kind of transcendental aesthetics in which the lived body assumes a primary role" (Neri 1992,78). Guided by Husserl's formula "There is only one humanity and only one earth," Neri uncovers a link between "embodiment and sensorial structure in relation to which a language or communicating logos could and should be developed" as that which is necessary to communicate with possible extra-terrestrials, who see earth not as ‘ground’ but as a body. Though as Neri writes in The Spatiality of Nature it is clear that possibility of conceiving earth as a celestial body among others must never obliterate its mode of being according to which the earth is always "on our side"; not a "mere thing" in the sense of physics, but a "pre-object" generating an original temporality and spatiality" (Neri 1992, 82) Urban spaces, looked closer in the framework of earth and sky, urge us to think not only of ‘weather’ – air and wind, rain or snow – but also about aeroplanes and even photographs from the Apollo space missions. The celestial perspective instead of the Platonic cosmic order leads us back to reflect on the experience of a plane landing and touching the ground. Thus, we turn to the phenomenological auscultation of human presence on the Earth, described by some – somewhat confusingly – as "dreams of technological utopia" that have turned overnight into "a nightmare." What is going on, and what can be our part of responsibility in "clearing" paths to sustain future life? Klaus Held wrote: "[...] we live directed towards the sky – the region "above" us – and see how earthly things appear in a bright open space and stand out there in their outline. [...] Our experience of sky and Earth takes its point of reference from the place of the earthly area in which we live our lives and is conditioned by our experiences in this middle zone. On account of this the phenomenological analysis of sky and Earth must take as its starting point the way in which sky and Earth appear within this living space." (Held 1998, 24). What can be named a phenomenological investment is possibly also so-called ‘living urban aesthetics’? Which of these endeavours should be taken up as helpful to understand better the relations between environment, nature and ecology – and subsequently humanity and civilisation – as supportive of life? How will it put up the aesthetic reconfiguration? Of course, it is designed to help to show other possible paths besides those of positivism and abstract formalism with their relatively shallow attitude to measure and economy. In "logos of life," Tymieniecka revokes more Husserlian resounding of the Heraclitean "fire" dimension and maintains that there is no other alternative for the human being than the earth-life, nor Reason. Commenting on the Heideggerian approach, Werner Marx quotes Friedrich Hölderlin: "Is God unknown? Is he manifest as the sky? This rather I believe. It is the measure of Man. Full of acquirements, but poetically, Man dwells on this earth. But the darkness of night with all stars is not purer, if I could put it like that, than Man, who is called ‘the image of God’. Is there a measure on earth? There is none" (Marx 1987). Tymieniecka responds to the Heideggerian Hölderlinian position "there is no measure" by opposing the logos of

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life as a measure of itself. That runs parallel to Tymieniecka's programmatic elaboration of "the aesthetics of nature" in the "Human Condition" and striving for the restoration of the lost equilibrium. Urban spaces give place to both lines, either the line of logos, logoical, rational, rule-governed, or the line of desire, fleeting, ambiguous, open to lawless, rootless, without measure, to the yet-unknown. The growing digital virtual presence in urban spaces supports the increase of mobility and underpins orientation. Like an interface, it is "omnipresent," "embedded in everyday objects" and "invisible," but at the same time functional in changing common meanings of everyday life. So mediated, the hyperconnected, smart city leads to the various broad use of urban spaces, but what can it reveal in the aspect of the necessities of aesthetic reflection to give a key to maintenance and balance of the living present and to establish susceptible criteria disrupted by changes of urgency introduced in schools, hospitals and in all those places encompassed by the invisible borders of a pandemic.

Cities – A Phenomenological View The city in fact invents itself suspended between heaven and Earth. It does not tend towards sky like a pyramid or a cathedral, it does not cling to the soil as castle often does to its rock – even if, once again, the city can mix these features and vectors of forces with what gives her its own face and energy. (Nancy 2011, 106)

The modern city is open to those who come to build and cultivate, who come "to settle," and those for whom it is just the space of their travel business or vacation plan, with random connections, intersections and variable and fluid points of contact. So even more than stasis – a place to repose (or lounge) the city is seen as dynamic: a space of opportunities and additional erotic qualities in urban life is introduced by com-presence, co-emplacement, as well as by the actualisation of the virtual realities of the city, heightening our awareness of the city's past, of its possible future, as well as that of its presence, either physically or virtually. Arnold Berleant, who followed a phenomenological approach and path in elaborating the aesthetics of urbanism in the context of environmental aesthetics underlined the emerging tendency of philosophers of the environment to begin to question the dichotomous thought that separated 'city' from 'environment,' recognising that cities also include non-human species, plants, water and multiple types of terrain and soil. The other point Berleant draws attention to is "the meaning of environment," which according to him "has changed dramatically" and now has to be thought of not as "surroundings" but as "a kind of four-dimensional global fluid medium" (Berleant 2010, 117) Ambient intelligence, sentient computing and the intensity and density of our urban spatio-temporal locations provide unprecedented interconnections and collaborational possibilities to enable challenges and thus lead to human creativity. The ‘real-time’, ‘data-driven’, ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘sentient’ cities we are building create the possibility of a remarkable continuity of freedom and free choices, which urges

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us to realise the responsibility we bear for the human presence on Earth, for other living creatures and those not-yet-born. The city not only has its unique place under the sky, but it also keeps coming back, as a town’s name brings back memories from childhood, and the passions kindled then. The city is a fascinating combination of the known and unknown, presenting to us the aesthetic qualities of its lifeworld, displayed in its architecture, its nexus of soundscapes, smellscapes and tastescapes, and also by our awareness of the presence of natural elements; hopefully in their empirically-acceptable form as clean air, pure water, unpolluted soil in the city’s park, not too hot, not too extreme in summer or winter: restrained. The space, place, name, description and image are brought together in Nancy's La ville au loin: "The city hardly has to say "I am," but rather "I am there" (Nancy 2011). Jean Luc Nancy, who is sometimes called a representative of post-­phenomenology or so-called 'deconstructive phenomenology,' draws attention to "the distant city." One of his ways of keeping alive Husserl's perspective of humanity is by posing a question of urban space or city as the concourse [la Rencontre]. Thus he sees that "a city is a place where what takes place is something other than the place": […] The hills or rivers [...] have never been adequate to define the city [...] Something else is necessary for the town; what is needed is an ethos other than a place and locality. (Nancy 2011, 45)

Françoise Choay, in her turn, as a complicating issue of the contemporary city, names "a bastard and diachronic urban space." There, in her view, we are surrounded virtually by 'connection space' [l'espace de connexion]. It makes an impact on previous forms as well, that is, 'the space of contact' [l'espace de contact], 'performance space' [l'espace de spectacle], 'the space of traffic' or transportation [l'espace de circulation] (Choay 2011). The urban salience in our living space is discernible in the presence of a wide range of digital devices and technologies, and partly thanks to iCloud. When cities have been built, people have always sought to establish the beauty of heaven on earth, but the preconditions of a lifetime have not been at the center of their philosophical research. Oriented by sub-specie aeternitatis – what is ‘universally and eternally true’ – or what was later called "the metaphysics of presence," aesthetics supported relatively rigid taste criteria. But that was supposed to change, partly thanks to Husserl's efforts in his lectures of inner time consciousness, which fortified a more sensible relational way to temporal interpretation of sensibility. Paul Souriau speaks about "conventional aestheticians, who never fail to condemn the present in the name of the past and refuse to see art where there is industry" (Souriau 1983, 100). Souriau is the first to draw attention to technique or, what he calls "results of efforts," as a legitimate source of aesthetic emotion. Heidegger was impressive in disclosing vital aspects covered up and unnoticed by tradition by providing a unique formula of links between 'building', 'dwelling' and 'thinking.' However, he was somewhat critical of aesthetics. He emphasized: "The spaces through which we go daily are provided for by locations; their nature is grounded in things of the type of buildings. If we pay heed to these relations between

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locations and spaces, between spaces and space, we get due to help us think of the relation of man and space. When we speak of Man and space, it sounds as though Man stood on one side and space on the other. However, space is not something that faces the man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience "(Heidegger 1993, 359). Heidegger reminded us of the remoteness of the skies, the proximity of Earth, and poetry. In The Origin of the Work of Art (Heidegger 1993, 174), Heidegger describes strife between the Earth and the world, but later, he speaks of the conflict between Heaven and Earth. Thus, time and space are disclosed as parameters of nearness or remoteness and as part of the openness of being itself. Urbanism displays itself as having a phoenix-like sustainability. Fire's uncontrollable power over cities and vast areas of suburban spaces has produced fears and has been well-known from time immemorial. However, taken as an element, it incites our imagination as the poetic image ready to rise again. Fire, the line of fire, the edge of fire, "a gift from Prometheus", a thunderbird born from the sun  – those mythic images from almost-forgotten stories are returning to enrich our self-understanding informing other reference resources, to overcome our instrumental attitude. Instrumentality and functionalism often met in architecture are lately counterbalanced by recapturing its links with language and stories. Paul Ricoeur sees the city as a possibility of a "temporal connection of diversity," in his view, notions from narrative can complement those of architecture. Thus Ricoeur elaborates three types of them: pre-figuration, which he understands as an act of dwelling [l'act d'habiter]; configuration as an act of constructing and re-figuration – an act of mediation between the others two (Ricoeur 1998, pp. 46-48). Names and naming, creativity, imagination, invention, engagement are those threads that are explored and tested to lead towards human well-being in the framework of city life. The same could be said about 'urbanism.' First, urbanism has various qualifications, from ecological urbanism to the biophilic theory of 'serene urbanism' and 'posthuman urbanism,' "transversal urbanism" and many other forms are oriented to enabling some sustainability. In such a form, we can see that architects and various urban theorists themselves are either changing their approach from a purely instrumental, functional and technical view to the broader context of life, poetic dwelling or by complementing the exact computation with the rich vocabulary of memories and looking for openness to future.

Ambient Urbanism, Planet Earth and Elements A man’s ethos is his destiny [Ethos anthropoi daimon]. (Heraclitus)

The emblematic notion of "Life-world" that entered philosophical parlance via Husserl's Krisis lecture is a concept that happens to be read as a theoretical analog for everyday life, or even posited as a synonym of "living present” has inspired aesthetics life-oriented research. The life-world as a spatial-temporal continuum has worked as a springboard for urban aesthetics (Maskitt 2016, 84, 86–88).

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However, general meta-developmental lines of philosophy evaded either life-­ oriented aesthetics or built-in environment poetics; in any case, they were supposed to be on different and challenging to reach shelves. Instead, Husserl elaborated phenomenology striving to discover the sedimented origin of beginnings of consciousness, to lay bare those by-passed layers, where life meanings are rooted, opening access to scientific representations and present motives, emotions, feelings, intentions. Though his legacy is obscured by some of his students' and followers' more popular vocabularies, he still turns out to have something to say to those who ask for aesthetic landmarks. If Heidegger tried to apply for a "saving power" of poetry and mythological residues in language as an antidote to the technological part in human lives, he also reminded us about the deep relations between Heaven and Earth and their role to stabilise the human dwelling. In the perspective of phenomenological reflection, Heidegger is joined by Paul Ricoeur. The latter also highlights the spatial exponents of the human situation. In striving to find a counterweight to the disappearance of distance, Heidegger put the topographical approach against that of spatial division, preparing a path for the problem of the "enactment of space" and its emotionally-­ coloured environmental impact. To escape from the purely categorically "determinate presence" [Anwesenheit], Heidegger invites us to ponder upon "aroundness" [das Umherum], "environment" [Umwelt], "closeness" [die Nähe]. Husserl has given an impetus of change to the philosophical architectonic of space and time, which resulted in perspectives for further exploration, more adapted and conforming to the needs of the Space Age, or according to another formula — Ecological Age. Timothy Morton, nevertheless, insisted on the fact that despite the prevailing lifestyle of urbanism, we still live in an "agricultural age" which is dominated by "reifying of Earth," "unformatted space waiting to be filled" that is largely responsibly, according to him, for global warming. According to him, "ecological age" can be understood only as a "post-agricultural age," when reason learns "anxiety," that is, at first, like Oedipus-King, accepts the bitter truth "he is the criminal he has been looking for," and second, starts to glimpse "humans coexist with a host of non-humans" (Morton 2016, 237). We can only ask if elaboration of the concept of "foodscapes" in the framework of "urban paradox" with an intention "to reduce the physical and mental distance between urban and rural communities" (Baines 2017, 52) has this Oidipean quality. But possibly there are only gradual steps towards more appropriate measures toward better consensus and more freedom. Urbanist Paul Virilio, sympathizing with the phenomenological approach of Husserl, offers the idea of "grey ecology" as an answer to technological overexposure. He invites us to turn our attention to "the unperceived pollution of distances that organises our relationships with others and the world of sense experience." Virilio focuses on "urban ecology" that, according to him, requires "another" intelligence' of the artificial and not merely another policy on nature." He writes, "An ecology of those 'archipelagos of cities', intelligent and interconnected" "that would be concerned not only with air and noise pollution of the big cities but, first and foremost, the sudden eruption of the world-city, totally dependent on

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telecommunications" (Virilio 1997, 59). If Virilio is urging to rethink "the area of relativity" because we are losing a sense of proximity, distance and duration. There are also other initiatives that, taking as a guidance phenomenology, are eager to develop the discipline of thinking green, thinking of lived qualities, that became popular among architects, designers, and researchers of space and place studies (Seamon 2018). The phenomenological imperative to serve humanity (Mankind) started its fruitful presence in different "folds" of building rationality and in searching for beauty and introducing components of aesthetic importance developed cultivated "logos of life." Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's revision of phenomenology promoted it as inviting us to look more closely at these "concrete influences of astral spaces on life" because "living in our usual modes of being, we are usually unaware of how we have visceral bonds with the forces of the cosmos." (Tymieniecka 2011, XVI). This emphasis is significant for building an eco-phenomenological understanding of humanity and looking for an account of community, communal life, or life on Earth. Everybody and everyone is involuted (through consumption, vaccination, digital security or entertainment), notwithstanding the area of Planet Earth where patterns of complex interaction are located; a new spatial regime of global interdependence manifests itself. Behind the city's boundaries, urban spaces with their problems of the definition and complexity of the built environment. Therefore, we want to look closer at the natural and artificial (technical or prosthetic) determinations of liveability via the recent endeavours of aesthetic research at the level of space and time. There have been different attempts to find the aesthetic key to the logic of dense city life (from transcendental, ecological and natural standpoints). Ambient urbanism is emerging as one of the compound designations for the global aim of forming "a better world for humans," where things around us will "know what we like, what we want, what we need." We are entering an age of ambience, one in which boundaries between subject and object, human and non-human, and information and matter lose their sharpness, distinctiveness. The architecture of the internet of things, which covers "the various aspects related to the extension of the network and the Internet into the physical world, through the deployment of the wide range of devices that are distributed spatially and typically integrate sensing, processing and acting" (Hmida, Braun 2017, 183) complements other types of architecture (buildings, landscape). The city becomes like an analogy of an airfield for centripetal/centrifugal node of dynamics of movements and their various rhythms even more than ever. There is no singular city. The schedule of airplane routes dazzles, calling one by one the place from where we return to where we are going; like urban lights, in a dark hour our flight ascending or descending from the sky, one name brings another in attention. Between dark Earth and light atmosphere, we can take a glimpse one after another of those fascinating city names. Livability (Wiryomartono 2020, x) on the level of Planet Earth was, and still is, severely contested by the COVID-19 virus. As a result, our awareness of the complicity and complexity of the current situation is enormously heightened. Several new practices were highly intensified during last year  – public hygiene, testing,

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vaccination and others – and disciplines (virology, immunology, and others) became a part of ordinary everyday conversation. The new and heightened importance of science, practical expertise and the emerging 'bubble' communities reopened the urgency for a renewed debate on the premises of understanding our existence on the Earth and the vivacity of our time on the planet. The sporadic unfolding of various research directions based on the auscultation of 'eco' testifies to the same need to find a better key for orientation in this non-stop augmentation of complex double-­ binding questions for societies and states. Global urban network and these scintillating flares in it, or our formed lists of urbanonyms more often than not, makes us think about disproportionate consumption, usually followed by awkward recalling for a necessary and urgent ecological action. Relations emerge together or simultaneous with envelopment, entanglement, awakening or resistance. More often than not, we speak of fabric, network, convergence to take into account involvement, our "wakefulness" in the face of cosmic, natural, and all those artifacts, thanks to which our "built-in" environs are vitalised. Mikel Dufrenne reminds of Leibnizian sense of expression as "presence of the other" and of "to express oneself "that points toward pre-established harmony, "mutual understanding," but what is most important remains "earthbound." Dufrenne, in this, underlines the moment of language. In the case of a work of art, it needs to remain "pure language" to be trustful to its "vocation" of art. But as for language and Nature, as explained, Edward S. Casey, Dufrenne's translator, speaks to man ("who is regarded as a "witness" of Nature, its correlate and yet also integral part of it") with the help of "a certain kind of image." With that in mind, "pre-images" as the sky, the sea, the mountain Nature appeals to "the poetic" nerve in human beings. Imagination and such its a priori as "the elementary," "the power," "the depth," "the purity" enters in play and "allows Nature to express herself" (Dufrenne 1992, 425). Tymieniecka summarises the situation of "human life" as that of "the dynamic of nature." She draws attention to "vital spontaneity." The paraphrase of a poetic line of Paul Valéry can complement the description: "The wind is rising / we should live on." Husserl's phenomenological impetus is still recognisable and present in various modes of studies, which are made possible partly thanks to his search for keys to problems of the living present, nature and space. Husserl speaks of the "harmonic unity of perspectivity." Notions of time and space crucial for exactness in geography, sociology and urban studies; showed needing to be elaborated beyond their representations in physics or mathematics, and disclosed in their correlational, relational positioned dimensionality, proximity and distance are a rich resource for approaching life, consciousness, power and politics, imaginative creativity. Unearthed time-space complexity and the collaboration of their perspectival, positional and contextual features leading to other horizons encouraged and demanded internal transformations of the phenomenological approach to get closer to spot, uncovering of and appreciating dynamics elemental layers of urban life. Those porous areas where stillness is alive, those resonating, vibrating "reciprocity" layers, where the lines between transformative and transformed are not easy to discern, are the repository of not-yet-explored desires and the possible starting point of

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what depends or not of "me," beginnings of shared responsibilities. Nature as an environment, as a kind of screen against which, according to Tymieniecka and Dufrenne, philosophy finds and sees a human being as speaking and free. Tymieniecka turning to the "world in the creative effort" correlates with Paul Valéry and Edmund Husserl, "once again, poet and phenomenologist take the same road." Suppose Husserl from static phenomenology passes to genetic phenomenology and phenomenology of Life-world. In that case, Tymieniecka speaks about geo-­ cosmic principles of human beings and of the human being as that assuming a role of "constitutive factor with respect to the entire realm of Nature" and to pass to "impact upon the circumambient forces of Nature" and to become "a centre in which these forces of the hitherto anonymous Nature converge." She wants to avoid the "inhuman" "human life as a nightmare." Building new poetic aesthetics encompassing the theory of creativity, nature and created environment, Tymieniecka engages herself in discussions with Kant and Husserl. The problems introduced and built up by the Kantian transcendental aesthetic drawing oppositions between subjectivity and objectivity, activity and passivity, which are inscribed in the architectonics of pure reason, are addressed by Husserl and by Tymieniecka. Husserlian Heraclitean's answer emphasizes "streaming life" [lebendige Strom] in its fixed shores  — blue sky, immobile Earth. Like Heraclitus, Husserl emphasizes not so much change as the musicality of melody, harmony, rhythm, and street-life example is analysed in this framework. In her reading of Husserlian phenomenology, Tymieniecka develops her approach to living present in steep correlation with her theory of creative imagination, living humanity. She emphasises spontaneity, elemental spontaneity, creativity as a core of imagination and poetry, alluding to the cosmos as a prospective creation area. The question animating research on ambience and urbanism in the context of a phenomenological project is rooted in the need to find an outcome for the confusing situation of the burning duplicity of still-forceful dualisms sustaining the disciplinary approach and exacerbating the opaque flow of thus-unresolved problems of urban life, "sustainable living" and a livable planet Earth. Therefore, the phenomenological turn to 'eco' can be regarded as one more time its re-establishing and mobilization of efforts of philosophical radicality, its return to the "beginnings." In this, it seems, Husserlian elaboration of the vocabularies of space and time themselves are a source of later inspiration. Heidegger, in his turn, reminds us that man should learn that it is his relation to language that needs to be changed from instrumental to honourable. That means taking care of the nearest, staying in a place, and exploring it. He illustrates this by reminding, "The proper meaning of the verb bane, namely, to dwell, has been lost to us. But a covert trace of it has been preserved in the German word Nachbar, neighbour. The Nachbar is the Nachgebur, the Nachegebauer, the near-dweller, he who dwells nearby (Heidegger 1993, 348–349) The aesthetics of ambience, with their focus on the research of the theme of the architectural and urban atmosphere together with all those who are trying to gain access to urban memory scapes, to that spatiality and temporality within the nexus of lived relations, are looking back to phenomenological elaborations to avoid formalism and naturalism. Kantian architectonics, which could be regarded as a

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supporting part of philosophical reflections on traditionally-inherent dualisms and questions of the future of philosophy itself, is thus again involved in intense discussions of the "metaphysics of presence." Even while aesthetics either in its orientation to the vital aspects, or more spiritual elements of urban living is turned to the presence of partes extra partes still language as the naming of spatial, temporal, introducing as well wording of elemental (reawakening some mythological motives, reminding of tragic eros) is playing an essential role in our ability to be present, to be fascinated, to be involved and involve themselves. Urbanity adds to a labyrinthine human way of life with more intensive fullness and dynamic, but in terms of actual COVID-19 pandemic, it urges to take care of a neighbour. Contemporary urban spaces and urban life teach us a new sensibility for our everyday comportment.

Conclusion Husserl's analysis of passivity as a kind of activity, his interest in spatially and temporally embedded sensibility and "nature," which displays a new, rich vocabulary to add almost imperceptible differences to our senses, as well as a better understanding of the structure of our involvement in everyday aesthetic processes have been. It seems still is a source of discussion. Phenomenology has inspired various lines of "eco" research regarding life in cities and urbanity. Eco-phenomenological research, drawing attention to urbanism, reveals the complexity of the environmental problem. When reading this as a problem of the "living present," both the general connection and the vulnerability must be taken into account, whether we are talking about artificial intelligence, the elements of nature in the city or our self-awareness. As climate change transforms our lifestyles and our interactions, nowhere is this influence more present than in urban areas. Urban spaces make wider choices available and expose us to climate risks and unprecedented biological threats. Eco-phenomenology supports changes in aesthetic reorientation in drawing its attention to the complexity of urban human life, a life of everyday, in a built or human-made environment which is not usually or generally a focus of our awareness. On the contrary, the aesthetics of resonating presence and ambience continue to re-orient us towards the poise and singular situational harmony between scientific research, art and technology in sustaining the urban artificial and natural components for a flourishing life. "Living present" is a beginning and end of the creative effort that gives birth to an act on behalf of the common good and establishes language of justice once upon played by Cosmos or crowns with the work of art. Therefore, not ignoring absences in the presence of living present but turning to them, to answer, what exactly depends on me, on my action to be a reasonable part of nearest and furthermost natural

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environs, with which we are intertwined – air, water, earth, fire, sky – and to which give my voice, joining and confirm a vocation of humanity. This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project No. lzp-2020/2-0085 “Development of Eco-phenomenology in the Situation of Pandemic”

Works Cited Baines, R. 2017. Food, Waste and Water. In The Urban Paradox. Smart Urban Regeneration, Visions, Institutions and Mechanisms for Real Estate, ed. S. Huston. London: Routledge. Bégout, B. 2020. Le concept d'ambiance. Essai d'éco-phénoménologie. Paris, Éditions du Seuil. Berleant, A. 2010. Sense and Sensibility. Imprint-academic: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World. Brighenti, A.M., ed. 2013. Urban Interstices, The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-Between. Ashgate. Choay, F. 2011. La terre qui meurt. Paris: Fayard. Dufrenne, M. 1992. Phénoménologie de l'expérience esthétique. Vol. 2. Paris: PUF. Griffero, T. 2020. Places, Affordances, Atmospheres. A Pathic Aesthetics. Routledge. Heidegger, M. 1993. Building, Dwelling. Thinking. In Basic Writings. Revised and Expanded Edition., ed. D.F. Krell. HarperSanFrancisco, A Divison of HarperColinsPublishers. Held, K. 1998. Sky and Earth as Invariants of the Natural Life-World. In Phenomenology of Interculturality and Life-World, ed. W.  Orth and C.-F.  Cheung. Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Albert. Hmida, H.B., and A. Braun. 2017. Enabling and Internet of Things for Ambient Assisted Living. In Ambient Assisted Living. 9. AAL_Kongress, Frankfurt/M, Germany, April 20–21, 2016,, ed. R. Wichert and B. Mand. Cham: Springer. Husserl, E. 2002. The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World that is Outside the Flesh. In Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Including Texts by Edmund Husserl. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ed. L.  Lawlor and B.  Bergo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kūle, M. 2018. Eco-Phenomenology, Philosophical Sources and Main Concepts. Eco-­ Phenomenology, Life, Human Life, Post-Human in the Harmony of Cosmos. In Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, ed. W.S.  Smith, J.S.  Smith, and D. Verducci, vol. CXXI. Cham: Springer. Marx, W. 1987. Is there a Measure on Earth? Foundations for a Nonmetaphysical Ethics. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Maskitt, J. 2016. Editor's Introduction. Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 3 (2). Morton, T. 2007. Ecology without Nature, Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA\ London, UK: Harward University Press. ———. 2016. This is not my beautiful biosphere. In A Cultural History of Climate Change, ed. T. Bristow and T.H. Ford. London/New York: Routledge. Nancy, J.-L. 2011. La ville au loin. Paris: La Phocide. Neri G. N. 1992. Earth and Sky, An Analysis of Husserl's 1934 Manuscript on "The Spatiality of Nature" Telos June 20. Ricoeur P. 1998. Architecture et narrativité. Urbanisme, 303, novembre-décembre 1998. Rilke R.  M. 1977. The Ninth Elegy. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. Translated by A. Poulin, Jr. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company. Scarry, E. 2019. Building and Breath, Beauty and the Pact of Aliveness. In Aesthetics Equals Politics, New Discourse Across Art, Architecture, and Philosophy, ed. M.F. Gage. Cambridge, MA\London, UK: The MIT Press.

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Saison, M. 2018. La Nature artiste. Mikel Dufrenne de l’esthétique au politique. Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne. Seamon, D. 2018. Life Takes Place, Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making. Routledge. Souriau, P. 1983. The Aesthetics of Abstract. Movement. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. Spitzer, L. 1963. Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony. Prolegomena to Interpretation of the Word "Stimmung.". Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Thibaud, J.-P. 2015. En quête d'ambiances , éprouver la ville en passant. Genève: Métis Presses. Tymieniecka, A.-T. 1988. Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason. “Logos and Life”Book 1. Analecta Husserliana XXIV. Dordrecht/Boston/London/Tokyo: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Tymieniecka, A.-T. 2011. The Passions of the Skies. In: A.-T. Tymieniecka and A. Grandpierre (Eds.). Astronomy and Civilisation in the New Enlightenment. Passions of the Skies: xi-xvi. Analecta Husserliana CVII. Dordrecht: Springer. Virilio, P. 1997. Open Sky. London/New York: Verso. Wilde, O. 2018. Intentions. Frankfurt am Main: Outlook Verlag GmbH. Wiryomartono, B. 2020. Livability and Sustainability of Urbanism. An Interdisciplinary Study on History and Theory of Urban Settlement. Singapore, Palgrave MacMillan.

Part III

Pandemic Challenges: Being Together, Keeping Distance and Ecological Solidarity

The Dialectics of Openness and Closedness During the Quarantine: Heideggerian Meditations Tomas Kačerauskas Abstract  By appealing to Heidegger, I examine the dialectic of openness and closedness under quarantine conditions. The theses are developed as follows. (1) The cost of an open invasion of consumption is covered by other layers, including disinterested seeing (aesthetic), gratuitous help and empathy (ethical). (2) Openness and a policy of openness have their limits in a democratic environment that is inevitably influenced by the mass media. (3) On the one hand, public opinion is always influenced by the attitudes expressed in the media, including social networks, in which the so-called influencers have a particularly strong voice. On the other hand, more and more decisions are made in a narrow circle of specialists, which is becoming more and more closed. (4) Extreme openness borders on extreme captivity, when we are no longer the masters of our bodies, being closed between the walls of entertainment. (5) When we are closed at home and privacy outweighs publicity, quarantine is a test of democracy. (6) During the exit periods, new stories and works were born, when the world opened surprisingly, before it was bracketed, i.e. after escaping from it. (7) The virus and declared quarantine remind us about the time of other organisms, about the “shortened” time of progress, and about the ecstatic time of a home event when we meet the world alone. Keywords  Phenomenology · Openness · Closeness · Quarantine · World · Home

Introduction Openness and closedness are two different principles of being in the world. How open are we to the world and how open is it to us? Should political formations be open – (closed) – and to what extent? What are the limits of cognition? How much do we need to be open to each other? What is the relationship between publicity and privacy? These and other questions pre-suppose the dialectic of openness and T. Kačerauskas (*) Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Vilnius, Lithuania e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_16

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closedness discussed in political science (Galindo-Silva 2021), epistemology (Sharon and Spectre 2017), sociology (Popper 1971), economics (Ashraf et  al. 2021), management (Gomezel and Rangus 2019), psychology (Azhari et al. 2020), communication (Kwak et al. 2021) and, of course, philosophy. Already in ancient philosophy (Plato 2016; Aristotle 2013), questions have arisen to what extent society should be open. In phenomenology (Husserl 1952, 1976, 1987; Heidegger 1996), an orientation towards the open world is one of the most important attitudes. However, the rapid spread of the virus has forced the closure of borders and various institutions, as well restrictions on the movement of people. How has this changed the attitude of openness? Is the phenomenological attitude of openness still relevant? What is the dialectic of openness and closedness in the light of new realities? Here I will examine the dialectic of openness and closedness, largely based on Martin Heidegger’s and Edmund Husserl’s philosophy. I will first analyze attitudes of openness by showing their limits then the clauses of closedness, which are inseparable from the tendencies of openness.

Trends of Openness The attitude of openness can be defined by phenomenological approach. Heidegger, appealing to the Greek concept, defines phenomena as “what lies in the light of day or can be brought to light” (Heidegger 1996, 25 (28)). Hence the notion of beings [Seiende], which covers the aspects of opened being and appearance. Heidegger associates the opening of the phenomenon with the existential project of temporal beings, understanding it as a factor of our worldly being towards death. The phenomenon is directing the beings [Seiende]. Such an opening of the phenomenon is associated with the truth, the Greek origins of which point to alētheia, or unconcealment. Related to this is the openness of the world [Weltoffenheit], while Dasein manifests within it. The world is open by allowing us to be within it with others, herewith to manifest within it responsibly. This is an aspect of our openness to the world. As the main existential, Heidegger points the existential openness of Dasein to the world. Openness to the world is also expressed in the attitude of a return to things [Sachen]. On the one hand, we see things (including artistic manifestations, images and expectations) in the light of our existential project in the world with others. On the other hand, return means that things open up our worldly project. The idea of an open world and a directed or intentional consciousness that is to be bracketed at the same time came from the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. According to Husserl, the world is my environment: not a physical, but a “thematic world of my intentional life” (Husserl 1952, 218). The environment is the “common field of real and potential experience” (Husserl 1952, 197), the “open horizon” in which we meet other participants of it when returning to things. The environmental horizon is always open: on the one hand, it offers ever new experiences while new phenomena emerge; on the other hand, we find in it wholeness of our experiences as an “I can” system (ibid, 253). The aspect of openness is also the ability to

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imagine and fantasize, which in its way expands the horizon of the world. Husserl speaks of the “indefinite open horizon of the world experience” (Husserl 1987, 62). “In the open infinite horizon” (Husserl 1976, 167), we experience and cognize the co-­worlds  – both people and things  – that emerge as the relevant connections [Konnex] of our experience and cognition. This open horizon of the world paradoxically demands that we bracket (i.e. close) our attitudes and views that hinder the re-­opening of the world with things that serve as agents of opening up. And what about bracketing of the attitude towards opening up to the world? Popper (1971), who is further away from phenomenology, coined the concept of open society, as opposed to a closed totalitarian society. The totalitarian society restricts the ability of its citizens to travel, communicate and see the democratic world, but also projects an ideological, narrow view of the world beyond the Iron Curtain. This presupposes a shrouded, captive, paramilitary society, the alternative to which is a fully open society. Aspects of this political openness are mobility and communicability. Popper supplemented these views of political philosophy with cognitive attitudes about logic dictating that there were “logically, infinitely many possible worlds” (Popper 1989, 13) and about the fact that every statement of science is transient [vorläufig]. Closed reasoning illustrates a vicious circle in which “the laws of nature created conventionally are not falsified by observations which are determined by the laws” (Popper 1989, 48). Popper associates scientific progress not with ever-increasing knowledge while cognizing the world and not with the validation of the most correct theories, but with their “opening the possibility of falsification” (Popper 1989, 51). In other words, science develops while the new theories deny or falsificate the old ones. If we have no such process, we face other knowledge fields (religion, magic, beliefs) but not science. Any validation that speaks of epistemological violence, ideological intrusion and extensive knowledge does not focus on an “existential project” (in Heidegger’s words) while we find ourselves in the world, but that leads to us losing ourselves in it. Popper’s proposal is not to open the world through avalanches of knowledge that do not walk alone without theories but seeks to to bring it closer by constantly opening up the possibilities of falsifying theories. This has to do with the Husserl bracketing procedure, which is not just a cognitive technique but an approach to open up the world. Openness is inseparable from globalization. Concerning the latter, we have in mind first of all economic openness, which has resulted in the spread of invasive species of global brands into the local economic landscape. Not only that but also the rise of buying and consuming in our life-world, has meant all other activities are subordinated to ensure the consumption chain. Consumption will need to be unrestricted or open in both scope and scale. The scope is provided by financial institutions such as banks, which, by opening up the horizon of consumption, at the same time subjugate their customers by forcing them to serve “until retirement”. The scale of consumption transcends the economic layers of the life-world: consumption attitudes are imposed on human relationships by changing life partners (Bauman 2003). Thus, the cost of an open invasion of consumption is overshadowed by other layers, including disinterested viewing (aesthetic), gratuitous help and empathy

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(ethical). The establishment of the economic layer also means a creative desert, when the creation of an existential project is simulated either by economic innovations or the breakthroughs of popular culture. Another area of unlimited openness is social networks. On the one hand, we are completely “open” on social networks to any “friends” and their friends around the world. On the other hand, this openness is a dubious hallmark, or inauthentic (uneigentlich, in Heidegger terms): we choose what we reveal of our private environment. Moreover, this threatens to blur the line between our public and private lives, i.e. between what is to be brought into daylight – “an den Tag bringen” – and what is not. In the latter case, we face the boundary between openness and closedness that determines each other. This case shows that openness is only possible up to a certain limit, and closedness plays the role of limitation. The same can be said about closedness, which is limited by openness. Throughout the whole text, I will develop this dialectic of openness and closedness that we have faced in our our public life as displayed through social networks. Similarly, openness and a policy of openness have limits in a democratic environment that are inevitably influenced by the mass media, i.e. is mediated. On the one hand, public opinion has always been influenced by the attitudes expressed in the media, including social networks, where so-called influencers have a particularly strong voice. On the other hand, more and more decisions are made by a narrow circle of specialists, which is becoming more and more closed. The need for these specialists to ensure progress also dictates the priorities of education, as specialization becomes more prevalent. A specialist trained as an expert in a narrow field does not know and cannot know about the wider horizon of societal needs, in which ethical issues also arise. Later, such a specialist “behind closed doors” shapes the development of society, including in the field of education, and ensures the “progress” of society. This policy of closed circles forces us to talk about the limits of openness or even its deficit in today’s democracy, which can be called post-democracy. The limits of openness are demonstrated by the phenomenon of pornography. Nudity and the demonstration of “natural copulation” are extreme cases of openness. The etymology of the Greek word “pornography” refers to a slave sold for sexual exploitation. In ancient Greek and Roman culture, the tunic of every slave “hid” this record [graphein]. According to Arvydas Šliogeris, who grew out of the phenomenological tradition, “amusement around the clock” is the most brutal form of slavery (Šliogeris 2016, 86). On the one hand, the contemporary culture of pornography shows that with the help of the media, everything is open and everything is “natural” (we will talk about the boundaries of nature and culture). On the other hand, we are like slaves being sold to the lord of entertainment who constantly humiliates and rapes us. So extreme openness borders on extreme captivity: we are no longer the masters of our bodies when we are imprisoned between the walls of entertainment. When we talk about the clothes we cover our body with – or not – we mean a culture that is opposed to nature and limited by it. The unlimited openness of culture implies two things. First, its globality mixes with various forms of culture (both

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geographically and genre-wise). Second, it is aggressive towards nature. In the first case, we should be talking about national cultural backwaters which mature into globally attractive forms and enter into cultural development. In the second case, the abolition of the limit between nature and culture threatens to introduce rationality into the natural region, ultimately leading to the revenge of nature. Is the case of a virus  – that either crossed nature’s species boundary or spread from the enclosed spaces of specialists – not such revenge? Aspects of the cultural invasion are both audible and visual noise, which forces us to shrink, retreat and increasingly close down in our “nature”. On the other hand, the mania for nature protection takes forms such as the “nurturing” of threatened flora and fauna in reservations and zoos. The implication of these relatively new institutions is to control nature by tearing it out of the region of nature. Land, air and sea routes are what divide a vast, shapeless and unpredictable natural world into sections. At the same time, travel unites cities and cultural nodes into a single fortress; a refuge from natural disasters. On the one hand, roads open up ever-new cultural regions. On the other, they serve as a means of nature retreating – or “closing in” – to its reservations between these monitoring corridors, ipso facto “digging trenches” around its excesses. The phenomenon of homelessness and nomadism embodies the dialectic of openness and closedness in its way. First of all, it should be noted that this is not a new phenomenon – let us remember Diogenes the Cynic and other ancient cynics who, wandering from one pole to another, called for the over-estimation of values​​ and cultural attitudes. The city of today, wherever it is, is unimaginable without the homeless, the beggars and the vagrant underclass – a sector of society which diversifies the urban landscape. Homelessness also means extreme openness, giving up or losing the last closed space of privacy: the home. On the other hand, the homeless, beggars and vagrants form a closed caste of the marginalized – the “untouchables”: the stink of whom avoids the “cultural” majority. The fact that such disadvantaged and marginalised people are present in every city marks the globality of this phenomenon. The appearance (or image) of the homeless is similar everywhere, and they are very often accompanied by dogs who, referring to the etymology of the cynics’ name, testify to nostalgia for nature in a cultural citadel of the city. It should also be noted that as children of nature, where they spend day and night, they are its biggest litter louts, digging through all the dustbins. Garbage sorting and collection is also cynically evaluated by them as a cultural prejudice. The phenomenon of globality is characterised for the most part as global brands, the uniform architecture of modernism: the same fashions, an obsession with consumption and – at the other end of the scale – by the homeless in the city streets. Does the similarity of cities show their openness to each other? Or, conversely, does it testify to one ideology (for example, consumerism) that pushes an individual into a closed circle in any city around the world of “earn-consume-die”? In this scenario, isn’t globalism a vaccine against otherness, creativity and happiness in general? Is

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the aspect of globalism also a historical precedent, when humanity was fighting infections while cities and people were closed to and isolated from each other?

Closedness: Quarantine Restrictions Let us now examine the aspects of closedness, with the imposition of quarantine restrictions on states and cities because of the pandemic. First of all, let us ask – what kind of phenomenon is the virus? It has been mentioned that the phenomenon is what “lies in the light of day”; that is, what appears in public. However, we do not see the virus unless it is seen by scientists, equipped with their devices and explanatory theories. Nevertheless, we “see” those who are ill or dying, and most importantly, we face consequent restrictions on our public life because of the virus. The virus is like an invisible king who rules us from mysterious apartments somewhere between the natural and human worlds; it has prevailed after transcending the boundary between nature and culture. Public life seems to be essentially suspended or “bracketed”, in Husserl’s terms. Is the restriction of public life not fatal to the development of democracy? Still, public life – unlike in the example of the ancient Greek pole  – manifests not only in live gatherings and demonstrations which, at least temporarily, are not allowed. We can still make outrageous noises (or maintain a fearful silence) in media spaces, from radio and television to social networks. Nevertheless, quarantine is a test of democracy when we are enclosed at home and privacy outweighs publicity. Here, the figure of the specialist re-appears: the medical scientist insists on measures from hand disinfection to vaccinations. Is it possible to resist this dictatorship of a specialist? Is democracy guaranteed when the majority follows these instructions? What about the minority that opposes it? Does it threaten the stability and sustainable development of democracy or, conversely, does it guarantee it by appealing to a public space that is no longer public without debate? Is an obedience to the dictates of a specialist a condition for sustainable development? And what about the quarrels between the specialists, and the process of falsification of their theories and previous theories, which, according to Popper’s ideas on communicability, ensures scientificity? Suddenly, at the behest of the virus, wearing its triumphal crown, state borders, institutions, offices, halls and arenas, museums and galleries, schools and universities, cafes and restaurants are closed. Movement is restricted, planes no longer fly and tourists are no longer welcome. The population is ordered to keep the social distance, extending to even our nearest and dearest: friends and family, even children and grandchildren. The close proximity of a foreign body becomes undesirable and intimidating. True, many activities such as education, attending exhibitions, going to concerts and some work activities can take place remotely, and within certain limits (inside the borders of the state, if municipalities are not closed). We can become more mobile and free if we have mobile devices such as laptops and phones,

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which means we are not constrained by the demands of a compulsory physical presence at our place of work. We “remember” the Spanish flu of a hundred years ago and the outbreaks of the plague several hundred years ago. The word “quarantine” itself refers to the Italian quaranta giorni, the 40 days a ship had to spend in port because of fears of a possible plague. This in turn is a reference to the 40 days Jesus Christ spent in the desert, i.e. on the sidelines of the world. Incidentally, Jesus Christ was not the first to do this: let us remember the prophets of various times – both historical and fictional figures – from the Buddha to Jean-Baptist Grenouille (Süskind 2010). They all retreated to the sidelines of the world, where they tested the limits of their bodies to move the whole world later. During these retreats new stories and works were born. In this way the world surprisingly opens up whereas before it was bracketed, i.e. the process of escaping from the world liberates radically different thought. Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (2013), an idea born during one such retreat, has several aspects. First, it covers the different stories that are told and heard in the company of those who have retreated. In other words, those who have come together from disasters. Second, all ten stories are about bodily vitality, with stories trying to compensate for forced abstinence. Compared to the precedents of past quarantines, our quarantine has several new features. On the one hand, it seems more strict: ships and planes are no longer allowed into ports and airports and state borders are subjet to blanket closures. On the other hand, due to the development of media and communication technologies, we have more opportunities to communicate and even work from home. Does quarantine reveal a trend for us to communicate as little as possible while staying at home as much as possible? The next question is more profound. Are we not facing permanent quarantine as we desperately try to control nature, which – as in the case of the Covid pandemic – takes its revenge when the line between nature and culture is transcended? While we try to stop the “unnecessary” movement of human bodies with filters, barriers and gateways, additional control of the person emerges when all possible data is scanned. Although the closed home environment establishes an autonomy, that has to be abolished to overcome the barriers to movement, whose caretakers treat us as potential carriers of infection and destroyers of a “stabilized” situation. Barriers at state borders are replicated by fences in the cities and their courtyards, marking “safe” areas free of the viruses that may threaten strangers. Movement  – the implied sense and restriction of which is the process of our identification during the period of being-toward-death [das Sein zum Tode]  – is becoming a threat to society. Time, our guide towards death, stops altogether, and we count the days until the quarantine’s end, distracted by entertainment. On the other hand, by its transformation into statistics recorded and disseminated through the media, death ceases to be a factor of existence. Is time fenced in as well? Does the suspension of time, when we too freeze in our closed space, mark the end of the world and with it humanity – or at least what Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger might call “a scandal” over that end? After all, human existence is defined as “co-existence in the open world”, according to Heidegger. The city becomes a “global village” (McLuhan 1964), and the

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world becomes a home (Mažeikis 2020), as houses become worlds with entrenched envelopes of time and space. Another layer of quarantine relates to the conventions of everyday life. Did quarantine allow for the “average daily routine” [durchschnittliche Alltäglichkeit] analyzed by Heidegger (1996)? On one hand, he criticizes the Platonic tradition as oriented to the other side and as alienating us from our daily life. As a result, he applies destruction [Destruktion] toward this tradition. On the other hand, average everydayness, manifested in the environment of “the they” [das Man], in which the question of the meaning of being is immersed, is itself to be criticized as inauthentic [uneigentlich]. Finally, “everydayness” does not accept discussion of death, which is considered uncomfortable, obscene and scandalous. Does quarantine shut us down in our everydayness by forcibly soaking up us in the environment of “the they” without time and creativity? The answer is: yes and no. While at home, we are quicker to surrender to the media, which are now the only channels opening up the world. We listen to the news anxiously, meet with friends at remote events awkwardly, work on lectures and have fun watching movies, but at home – we do everything on computer screens. But in the same way, we can choose what matters most and distance ourselves from activities that distract us. What’s more, we can focus on our work more than ever without being interrupted by meetings. We meet the world, but through the media. However, we become responsible for the way we spend our time at home and, at the same time, for the time of the world during quarantine. Heidegger (1996) talks about “the ecstatic time”, i.e. the wholeness of our past experiences, present worries and future projects. No-one will “close” our time if we spend it by resolutely choosing our way. All this is inseparable from the understanding of our being, which unfolds at the moment [Augenblick] of everydayness, but points further ahead.1 It is everydayness that provides the “ecstatically and horizonally-founded transcendence of the world” (Heidegger 1996, 335; (366)). In other words, by leading our project, which is created by daily work, we are constantly being moved further – so the world is bridged. Quarantine does not interfere here but helps us by focusing on this existential creation. The fact that we are threatened by the media at hand at home does not hinder us but helps us to resist the illusion of timelessness (that is, of closed time) and worldlessness (the world as a prison). By concentrating on working at home, the temporal world is not actually closed but opened, as we create it together with others. Mažeikis (2020) talks about the creative layer of the world, which inevitably opens up when we work at home. In other words, “working at home” refers to a process of “creating the world”. First we need to pay attention to the thresholds of time in creating the world: one “day” water was created with its creatures and their time; on another day the earth came into being with its creatures and their time. On another day the sky came, with its birds and insects and their time, and then finally

 “The future has priority in the ecstatic unity of primordial and authentic temporality” (Heidegger 1996, 302 (329)). 1

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human beings arrived – with their time. The day of God does not coincide with our day, and we are unable to empathize with the timescales of other creatures. Similarly, we have different layers of time, although we are tempted to measure everything with the time of progress. The virus and the quarantine issued for it reminds us of the time of other organisms, the “shortened” time of progress, and the ecstatic time of a home event when we meet the world alone. On the one hand, the thresholds of time are references to the boundaries of our world which can no longer be transcended. On the other, they speak to our possible transcendence beyond the time imposed, i.e. through ecstatic states. Is the time given to us a remnant of the time of the creation of the world, which we are creating from nothing in our home environment? Didn’t quarantine throw us into a co-­ created world that as such emerges only in a more less-structured home environment? Aren’t the scandals and catastrophes caused by the collision of different times, while the time of the progress penetrates all other layers of time and imposes its divine dimension? What about creativity regions and their boundaries, while a human being wanders through natural barriers? Creativity ignores boundaries, or perhaps, on the contrary, nurtures them? Isn’t that what the homeliness of the world teaches when we return from wandering and are sitting at a comfortable table with bread? (Heidegger 1959). Is a boundary, a wall or a barrier not a necessary condition for the autonomy of an individual who is seeking shelter? Isn’t the process of covering up the body the very act that feeds erotic cravings, so unlike the openness of pornography? Should we not nurture a distinctive culture to draw the attention of the global world to what lies behind the curtains of national isolation? Isn’t the question one that opens by closing, instead of an open closure of a straightforward answer? And what about defaults, implications, references, hints and irony? Are these motions that foster openness or closure?

Instead of Conclusions: What’s Next? Under the global quarantine conditions, the enthusiasm for openness in the political, economic and social spheres has waned. Instead, we should talk about the dialectics of openness and closedness. While providing economic benefits, global openness comes at a cost, which we have to pay for by losing our identity or even, as the case of the virus has shown, risking our health and even our lives. The open horizon of being with others is one of the most important phenomenological attitudes. But in the same way, the world opens up when you are in a home where creativity can develop. The virus and the worldwide quarantine issued for it – which has affected every human being in the world in profound ways – remind us of the other layers of time, the limits of the rate, time and pace of progress, and of the ecstatic time in the homes where we meet the world.

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Works Cited Aristotle. 2013. Politics. Translated by C. Lord. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ashraf, B., Ningyu Qian, and Yinjie Shen. 2021. The impact of trade and financial openness on bank loan pricing: Evidence from emerging economies. Emerging Markets Review 47: 100793. Azhari, Atiqah, Paola Rigo, Pei Y.  Tan, Michelle Jin-Yee Neoh, and Gianluca Esposito. 2020. Viewing romantic and friendship interactions activate prefrontal regions in persons with high openness personality trait. Frontiers in Psychology 11: 490. Bauman, Z. 2003. Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Hoboken: Wiley. Boccaccio, G. 2013. The Decameron. Translated by W. A. Rebhorn. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Galindo-Silva, H. 2021. Political openness and armed conflict: Evidence from local councils in Colombia. European Journal of Political Economy 67: 101984. Gomezel, Alenka S., and Kaja Rangus. 2019. Open innovation: It starts with the leaders’s openness. Organization & Management 21 (4): 533–551. Heidegger, M. 1959. Unterwegs zur Sprache, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 12. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1996. Being and Time. Translated by J. Stambough. New York: State University of New York. Husserl, E. 1952. Ideen zu reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie II in M. Biemel (Hg.) Husserliana IV. Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1976. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1987. Cartesianische Meditationen. Hamburg: Felix Mainer Verlag. Kwak, Nojin, D. Lane, S. Lee, Fan Liang, and B. Weeks. 2021. From persuasion to deliberation: Do experiences of online political persuasion facilitate dialogic openness? Communication Research 48 (5): 642–664. Mažeikis, G. 2020. Sienų ir ribų sugrįžimas [Return of Borders and Limits]. https://www.vdu.lt/lt/ sienu-­ir-­ribu-­sugrizimas. Accessed 2021-06-03. McLuhan, M. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Plato. 2016. The Republic. Translated by B. Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Popper, K.R. 1971. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1989. Logik der Forschung. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Sharon, A., and L. Spectre. 2017. Evidence and the openness of knowledge. Philosophical Studies 174 (4): 1001–1037. Šliogeris, A. 2016. Kasdienybės metafizika [Metaphysics of Everydayness]. Vilnius: Apostrofa. Süskind, P. 2010. Parfume: The Story of a Murderer. London: Penguin.

Eco-phenomenological Interpretation of Autonomous Being at the Time of Pandemic Maija Kūle

Abstract  The chapter outlines the eco-phenomenological interpretation of shifting individual perceptions of autonomy, of the link between self-individualization and inclusiveness that could be described as being in the human world and nature. The fundamental concepts of Eco-phenomenology – logos and life – cause a shift in the perception of autonomy by distinguishing many heteronomous aspects. The chapter considers three different philosophical models of autonomy by Kant, Kierkegaard and Sartre, their critique, and their significance today which could be expressed in three aspects: (a) moral autonomy is closely connected with the global responsibility of every human being in the situation of pandemic; (b) Kirkegaard’s maximalism stimulates the understanding that too many unnecessary advisers have grown in the social space, preventing an autonomous decision from being reached. The third approach – Sartre’s story of a French boy torn between the wartime choices of staying with his mother or joining the Resistance movement – shows the significance of individual decisions based on personal values. An important lesson to be taken from Sartre during a pandemic is that the autonomous decisions we make create his or her (and our common) future and demands responsibility for the good future. Eco-phenomenology, as seen by A.T. Tymieniecka, has a different view of an autonomous subject, whereby Eco-phenomenology highlights the regulative telos of the real autonomous individual. The history of philosophy indicates that wherever the quest for autonomy proceeds without including the linkage between reason and good will it encounters the subject of anxiety: of concrete illnesses, fear of death and cosmic trouble. Keywords  Eco-phenomenology · Autonomy · Heteronomy · Kant · Kierkegaard · Sartre · Tymieniecka · Logos · Life · Real autonomous individual · Anxiety

M. Kūle (*) Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_17

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Autonomy or Heteronomy? The concepts of autonomy and heteronomy have so far existed as opposites in European philosophy, yet changes in philosophical perceptions caused by the pandemic instil the thought that the positions of autonomy and heteronomy should be brought closer together in order to provide a philosophical and ethical analysis of the state of pandemic that the entire world now exists in. The idea of individual autonomy has been recognized as a fundamental basis of Western civilization, and one closely related to freedom. Emmanuel Levinas called it “the backbone of European thought”, of which he offered his critique denying the Kantian type of autonomy. There is no need to lose the idea of autonomy today by replacing it with life in the subordinating, powerful public sphere. But the pandemic sees an increase in the amount of advice, recommendations, mandatory and hetero-normative requirements produced by experts, authorities, conspiration myth tellers and so on, and all of this strengthens the heteronomous influential environment, outwardness, that affects individual freedom and decisions. A human is a conditioned being. However, in life in democratic regimes during a pandemic every individual has the right of choice – in other words, autonomy for the sake of freedom – whether to take the vaccine or not, whether to take care of one’s health (or that of society in general) or to be ignorant thereof, with all that follows; thus bringing the attention of philosophers back to the old question: “Am I autonomous and free in my decisions or subjected, through heteronomy? Do I make a decision or is it made for me, or am I influenced so deeply from outside that I transform influence into my own feelings?” On one side, the pandemic stimulates the growth of autonomous inclinations while simultaneously threatening the ultimate values every human hold – their freedom and personal survival. However, the pandemic is a boon to the other side as well, as survival is dependent on collective action and the general ability to make responsible decisions not only at a state level but also globally. One popular explanation maintains that people are heteronomous if their will is under control from outside. What is ‘outside’ is a difficult philosophical question. If we follow a phenomenologically hermeneutical philosophy a conditional ‘outside’ turns into ‘inside’, into a transcendental immanence. The aim of this chapter is to outline the eco-phenomenological viewpoint on ongoing changes in personal perceptions of autonomy, reason-will-feelings-faith relations and of linkages between the power of will, individual self-dependence and compliance. Anti-vaccination campaigns are also a compliance but of a different kind, commonly based on myths, conspiracy theories and sometimes on political manipulation. They try to oppose the rational action proposed by medicine, science, and many governments to stop the pandemic. The lives of many people go on without them standing up for freedom or compliance: they are neither autonomous nor heteronomous, but rather incurious. Heidegger is right  – “das Man” exists and the pandemic time simply further confirms it!

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If we discuss the possibility of human autonomy there are different ways to consider impressionability (such as conditionality and free will restrictions). Influence could appear as an external actor through causal determination or an otherwise, i.e., ‘softer’ influence by pulling, beckoning, implying, addressing, inviting. A brute variant of determinism is the Marxist theory of relations between the base and the superstructure, the reduction of Man’s essence to the class struggle. The Marxist epistemological thesis ‘being determines consciousness’ offers the clear principle of reduction. Axiologies in Western philosophy are mostly built as teachings of motives (because values attract) rather than determinism. Even Nietzsche, whose Übermensch acted on the basis of will, depicts it as an inviting will; a will that re-­ examines values. Phenomenology, already in its classical form as presented by Husserl, is saturated with such teaching of motive. A notable example here is the role of teleology in Husserl’s teachings (Buceniece 1989, 627–641). The way Heidegger understood ecstatic temporality, Sartre’s philosophical concepts of project, Merleau-Ponty’s autonomy of body, Camus’ world of the absurd, where one survives not because of determination but in spite of it … all of these are examples where philosophers have addressed questions of freedom and various forms of conditionality separate from strict determinism. Kant and Rousseau acknowledged that autonomy represents the genuine fulfilment of freedom rather than its restriction and that it is linked to free will. In Kant’s teaching the concepts of will, pure forms and a priori come to the forefront as a complex. Autonomy as proposed by Kant speaks of reason and good, strong will while heteronomy is based more on desires, needs and interests. By comparison – where the idea of autonomy is based more on a decision (to be) made when a person has faced an individual choice (on Kant’s ethical and pure form expressed as a categorical imperative) – heteronomy has more to do with the influences, requirements and interpositions that have ‘enveloped’ the so-called autonomous choice-maker in a web of history, social norms, rules, traditions, laws, and different forms of social power. The COVID-19 pandemic stimulates the question of how we could speak about human autonomy and responsibility if the pandemic situation is uncertain; if political motivations are undeveloped, medical explanations changeable and heteronomous influence greater than before the pandemic. Life beyond arguments of science includes various COVID-19 anti-vaccination movements encompassing about half the population in some countries. This testifies to a major shift away from a rational world view and towards a new pandemic mythology. It cannot be denied that governments and their advisors in many countries are acting rationally and all the time on the best scientific and medical advice available. But there is also ample evidence that specialists are acting blindly and on the basis of guesswork. The practical implementation of measures to contain the virus is subject to human errors and incompetence, which is motivating the activities of anti-vaccination adherents. Should philosophy claim that an individual can break free from conditionality and reach a pure form of autonomous choice, or has the time come for a heteronomy that would contain the idea of autonomy as a conditional freedom? Is hetero-autonomy

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possible, when a person is convinced about autonomy but has integrated heterogeneous influences and requirements into their own identity many times without knowing about their genesis? What philosophical direction could advance this line of thought in Eco-phenomenology?

Re-thinking Autonomy ‘Autonomous being’ is the state of being self-governing without external influences and demands, it is self-identical. Some definitions, such as that of Google search most popular answer states that: “Autonomous individuals are those who follow their own courses of action relatively unimpeded by others”. It is the word ‘relatively’ that indicates how fragile this definition is since the relative aspect can have varying and serious degrees of impact on free choice. The idea of autonomy is truly paradoxical in philosophy. In fact, from the point of view of Eco-phenomenology there is no such thing as full-blown autonomy, as everything is interconnected in the Universe: the world of the living and the inanimate, of humans and living nature, culture and the physical world, spirit and matter, consciousness, and body. Even processes are interrelated and emerge from each other. Causes create effects and consequences; the motives of actions lead to results; the implementation of common desires brings about specific turning points in peoples’ lives. The ‘I-consciousness’ is closely connected with ‘we-consciousness’ and my horizon aligns with the horizons of culture and language. The human being is essentially unable to leave its ‘enveloped’ status, to abandon interpositions, to play the role of the ‘pure I’, which is just a philosophically methodological technique for verifying the universality and apriorism of pure forms; the leftovers after the reduction of natural attitude as a residuum after the exclusion of the empirical and psychological subjectivity included in it. The comprehension of factors that restrict ‘pure’ autonomy can have diverse perspectives considered in various directions of twentieth Century philosophy. These include among others: 1. On a metaphysical level as the existence of a human being created under conditions; for example, having Original Sin throughout their life as a determinant of the life course. 2. On a social level where a human being is affected by social structures, education, norms, law, ideologies, power and so on. 3. On a cultural level where individuals are affected by historical a priori, forms of culture, traditions, customs, affiliations (including engagement and ‘belonging to’). 4. On a communication level where people are affected by communities, structures of ‘we–consciousness’, communication groups or, as the media calls them today in the COVID times, ‘bubbles’. 5. On an unconscious level.

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6. On a linguistic level that features hermeneutic teachings on prejudgements (for example Vor-verstand: ‘before understanding’), the traditions and genesis of word meanings, history as language (explained in the work of H.-G. Gadamer), the conflations Verschmelzung or ‘merger’ of interpretations, paradigms, narratives, and speech as a conduit for teaching (explored by E. Levinas), and so on. If we look at this profound, embedded conditionality of the human being, it seems that the autonomous subject does not exist. But the Kantian model of autonomy has a strong argument. For Kant the idea of autonomy is based on a belief in pure forms and apriorism that persists despite the discrepancy between daily life and these pure ideal maxims. The potential for self-governing is being weighted in philosophy from Stoic ideas of fate as the guiding force in life to existential thinkers like Jean-­ Paul Sartre who justified the freedom of choice with the idea that it is possible to start everything from nothing, since freedom represents ultimate liberation. The middle ground between the two extremes is occupied by philosophical directions that distinguish a partial determination or, in other words, conditionality, especially because Man forms a part of the natural world – and experiences a partial liberation from it by moving into the spiritual world. That is one way to explain autonomy, or at least the Kantian model: there is no autonomy in the natural world, but possible freedom in the spiritual world. The Transcendence of the Ego (1937), an early work by Sartre, explores how phenomenology treats ego, consciousness, the Me and spontaneity. Sartre writes: A phenomenological description of spontaneity would indeed show that spontaneity renders impossible any distinction between action and passion, and any conception of an autonomy of the will. These notions only have a meaning on the level where all activity is given as emanating from a passivity that it transcends, in short, on a level where Man considers himself to be simultaneously both subject and object. But it is an essential necessity that we cannot distinguish between voluntary spontaneity and involuntary spontaneity. (Sartre 2004, 48)

Sartre shows that free will, which enables autonomy, should not be viewed as a capacity humans are born with. Rather it is itself created conditionally, linked with spontaneity and self-awareness. It should be noted that Tymieniecka, who was not a follower of Sartre – in fact, quite the opposite – uses the concept of spontaneity, which is associated with the creativity of life, as the starting point in her Phenomenology of Life. Aspirations of perfect autonomy are open to discussion. But to preserve one’s seemingly influence–free identity and freedom one needs a strong will that must prevail over other human abilities and powers. Yet the pandemic time and the emotional distress of the twenty-first Century demonstrate that reason and good will-­ based choices as stimulants of moral action are, sadly, in the minority. There is plenty of emotional spontaneity, sentiency, and lack of free will; it is exactly as Sartre writes: “Thus consciousness, realizing what might be called the fate of its spontaneity, suddenly becomes filled with anguish” (Sartre 2004, 48). Sartre is right – and we can also see evidence of this in the current pandemic time  – that freedom as spontaneity brings with it suffering, worries, horror and

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anxiety. Sartre did not experience a pandemic like the one in our times, but he did live through a time of a world at war, with its accompanying suffering, horror, and anxiety. During the time of a pandemic, as we have seen with COVID-19, responsibility is pushed to the fore – that of individuals, specialists, government members, opinion leaders, managers and so on – to make sure choices and decisions are based on reason, knowledge, and moral action rather than subjected to pre-reflective influences and political and economic interests.

 antian Philosophy on Individual Autonomy and its K Usefulness in the Situation of Pandemic In Kant’s philosophy the autonomy principle is the highest moral principle. An autonomous subject is seen as someone liberated from nature’s determination. According to Kant, moral justification must be independent of sentiency and external power. It must be linked with compliance to a universal a priori law, namely, a law imposed on will by itself. The source of such a law is within Man as an end in itself. Universal moral law has decisive authority over oneself. Only this combination of positions: will that turns to itself, and the human being as an end, more precisely, the humanity in human beings that must be treated as an end in itself – can provide a basis for understanding the Kantian version of autonomy. The universality of the maxim of the will is of greatest importance. Kant writes: “To do no action on any other maxim than one such that it would be consistent with it to be a universal law, and hence to act only so that the will could regard itself as at the same time giving universal law through its maxim” (Kant 1997, 69). Kant’s teachings on free will also include the viewpoint of motivation and categorical universal ‘inviting’ or call rather than determining, because Kant describes will as a power that only a being in possession of reason can have, as it represents the ability to act in accordance with the notions of the universal moral law. Creation of accordance and following a categorical imperative is not strong determinism but a call presented to a being endowed with reason and free will – to choose to directly follow the law, but not one’s sensations. Kant distinguishes between practical regulations and moral law. Plenty of regulations exist during a pandemic (including ones introduced and then constantly amended by governments because of uncertainty over how to act), but the power of universal moral law today turns out to be rather limited, or even non-existent. According to Kant, an action carries moral value only when it is performed due to a sense of duty. Duty is interpreted as the necessity to act out of respect for the law of good will. For many people however, the effect of free and good will as the justification of morality in the situation of pandemic has been lost. The reality of a pandemic time differs seriously from the pictures created by Kantian idealism; many people discuss their individual and egoistic rights more, not their duties. The significance of Kant’s teaching today could be expressed in the understanding of ‘moral duty’,

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which is closely connected with the global responsibility of every human being in the situation of pandemic as a global process. Morality requires first the independence of reason-based will and secondly, getting rid of the deep influence of sentiency (and, during the pandemic of today, the myths related to it). Yet the opposite happens as restrictions are established to limit the spread of a virus, but the demand for bodily delights keeps on growing, bringing along fresh troubles, and further undermining the significance of reason. This is evidenced by resistance to vaccination, the rejection of science, instigation of political conflicts and the continuation of the binge of the consumer societies. Of course – and Kant has acknowledged this – human sentiency is a source of pleasure and, more often than not, people surrender themselves to sentient inclinations [Neigungen]. Nowadays duty-orientated free will has no way of limiting such actions, despite the best efforts of classical culture adepts. Kant recognised hypothetical imperatives presented in the form of suggestions; the execution of which are associated with consequences the individual finds pleasant and desirable, i.e., of pragmatic value. If the outcome is not set as the objective, there is no need for action even under the hypothetical imperative. The categorical imperative however is more rigorous, in this case, akin to general law. The categorical imperative is underpinned by an objective presented by pure reason. According to Kant, moral laws [Regel] in their universality form [der Form der Allgemeinheit] are in need of practical, experience-based judgement, as they are not implemented haphazardly. Observations show however, that what society receives these days instead of judgement is a hefty dose of attitudes steeped in critical denial of science and medicine. Evidence of this can be found in almost every country around the world, generally regardless of the level of development. The time of the pandemic shows that it is very difficult for the world to agree on the general legality of action [allgemeine Gestzmäßigkeit], which alone can serve as the principle of will, i.e.; so that the maxim of my will would become a universal law, because otherwise autonomy has no meaning. But the universality (generality) of the principle of the will is hard to reach in practice. When we change a viewpoint from the individual subject to the ‘common opinion’ – even through such agencies of international co-operation as the United Nations and the World Health Organisation – we see organisations that should be pressing to find a universal principle not only to stop the pandemic but also to address that other global threat: climate change. The situation of pandemic turns understanding of individual duties to global responsibility for life on the Earth. Kant warns of excessive passions and lack of responsibility; of setting one’s own needs ahead of others. An excerpt from the chapter ‘From popular philosophy to metaphysics’ in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals – which Kant wrote in 1785 – reads like a lesson for today’s pandemic: Now, it is impossible for the most insightful and at the same time most powerful but still finite being to frame for himself a determinate concept of what he really wills here. If he wills riches, how much anxiety, envy and intrigue might he not bring upon himself in this way! [..] If he wills a long life, who will guarantee him that it would not be a long misery? If he at least wills health, how often has not bodily discomfort kept someone from excesses

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into which unlimited health would have let him fall, and so forth. In short, he is not capable of any principle by which to determine with complete certainty what would make him truly happy, because for this omniscience would be required. (Kant 1997, 28)

Many philosophers after Kant recognize that autonomy and freedom cannot be achieved by focusing on duty. Hegel’s teaching is full of ideas of indirect and direct influences: it is essentially a description of the spiritual development of subjective, objective and absolute spirit. The individual could not be a pure autonomous subject because they would be involved in dialectic relationships, where inwardness is submerged by outwardness. Hegel sees human autonomy in reciprocity; autonomy being the result of a struggle for recognition, when the human being leaves a period of “undifferentiated” interaction with Another and becomes self-determined, finding their self-identity. When compared with Kant’s position, Hegel’s viewpoint is more intersubjective, based on an understanding of process and relations between direct and indirect influences and conditionality, respecting changes. Whereas Kant considers the universal to appear through a universal, moral, ahistorical law, Hegel sees it in the long development process of the spirit. Although Kantianism has received its fair share of (somewhat justified) criticism over the past century, the twenty-first Century pandemic time has tempted a return to the notion of duty. What is required are close links between will and reason, the reduction of the huge impact of sentiency and, most importantly, the unity of humankind in a universal law of good will aimed at stopping the pandemic, to ensure the continuation of human civilization. It is a philosophical weakness that Kant’s teachings about the universality of ‘moral’ and ‘duty’ have not taken root in the consciousness of European societies, and that ‘freedom’ is regularly realized as democratic anarchy, an infinity of choice-situations, the fulfilment of one’s desires at the cost of others and plurality without reasonable borders.

 Critique of the Idea of Autonomy: Emanuel Levinas A on Heteronomy Emmanuel Levinas accuses those implementing the principle of autonomy of incorrect treatment of the Other, the Different. If the figure of the Other appears at the philosophical stage, it becomes understandable that the Individual is not alone with their good will, but the human being already exists in a Human Condition, together with Others. The idea of heteronomy is not about the necessity to ask advice of the Other, the divergent for counsel at the moment of moral choice, because Kant certainly calls for the observance of law set forth by good will. The accusation is that Kant’s free will subsumes the Other (as universal duty), ignoring its differing qualities. Although Kant’s teaching is not individualistic, Levinas faults it for being based on impersonal reason [raison impersonnelle] as such. He describes autonomy-based freedom as ‘unrestricted and egoistical’ but he is not right about egoism, because

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Kant turns the moral to the universal principle without any selfish, personal interest. While Kant indicates that the unspecified value of a human being is to be found in their rational nature, Levinas calls for the recognition of uniqueness so that the human being could be perceived face-to-face to the Other. The right steps are not taken through consultations with others or by accepting their views, but by respecting the uniqueness of the Other that represents ethics. Levinas’ specific understanding of heteronomy, putting the Other in first place, seems to be a subject for discussion, when it has been turned to the practical and ideological questions about millions of illegal migrants gathering at the borders of the EU, or illegally entering well-off and prosperous countries. For Levinas the quest for human autonomy becomes an impossibility: it is powerless when not supported by institutions. He writes: “Freedom could cut into the real only by virtue of the institutions” (Levinas 1979, 241). According to him, institutions can eventually turn tyrannical, and the universal law can become totalitarian. But the ideological priority of the Otherness is no less tyrannical when it is orientated to a crackdown on national identities and opposite human personalities. Levinas believes there should be an external, written law instead of the categorical imperative that is helpless against tyranny. He sees autonomy as threatened by the risks of subjugation and loss of independence, and his philosophical work clearly demonstrates his preference for the principle of heteronomy. Levinas writes: “The presence of Other, a privileged heteronomy, does not clash with freedom but invests it” (Levinas 1979, 88). Let us continue with the idea that privileges are also very risky, as has been demonstrated by the pandemic situation. People who were not interested in taking responsibility for the health of the general public have been trying to get privileged treatment so they do not have to be vaccinated, while others resort to illegal migration processes when they become convinced their Otherness has some privilege; despite the laws. Levinas does not believe that freedom as autonomy could form the basis of duty. In his view, experience is used to construct a totality with no externalities that could endanger the freedom of the I or invade this independence heteronomically. Still, such a critique of Kant is misplaced. It is not experience that grants strength to free will but rather will, as one of three fundamental human powers that create a priori law. It should be noted that Kant excludes the perception of the categorical imperative as a political, state-enacted law and certainly does not expect it to be an expression of ideologically tinted tyrannical power. In a situation where the pandemic has the entire world in its clutches would it not be sensible to try to look for unity rooted in reason-based free good will and mutual understanding, rather than succumb to the interests of geo-politics, business, the consumer society, and the messy viewpoints of daily life. Eco-phenomenology offers new concepts to strengthen understanding of communality as the ‘unity-of-everything-that-is-alive’ or ‘a living being’ in the universal ontopoietic eco-system. These ideas seem to be gaining traction during the current pandemic crisis with the orientation to ‘living-together’, not to be categorized as alone, Ego or the Other.

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 ho Should We Ask for Advice? Kierkegaard’s W Answer: “Nobody” The idea of autonomy demands that moral decisions should be completely independent. Questions like “Who should I ask for advice?” or “Who should I allow to influence me?” should be answered in the autonomous position by: “No-one, ever!” and “The only person who influences me is Me, Myself!” But this ultimate responsibility for autonomous decisions creates fear and desperation. The description of this feeling is to be found in Kierkegaard’s teaching about Abraham, when God told Abraham to travel to Mount Moriah with his favourite son Isaak to kill him there. Yet Abraham finds salvation in absolute faith. How could this tragic story, the archetype of an autonomous decision in the situation of paradox, be meaningful in today’s pandemic situation? Two scenes can be seen here: if autonomy is not based on free, good will and reason (Kant’s idea), it is related to fear. Autonomy means tragicism. The next aspect is that autonomy means silencing. Nothing – not an a priori ethical law, free will or hypothetical imperatives – is of any help here. Existential rates are higher, reaching up to the sky. The paradox – the demand for Abraham to kill his own son – can only be overcome with deep faith in God’s goodness, trusting that whatever God demands of him is good. Kierkegaard demonstrates an extraordinary circumstance of absolute autonomy and a way out of the paradox without any external advice. Kierkegaard’s model of autonomy is maximalist – beyond human understanding – and is not meant to be imitated: not in everyday life. He shows that Man is alone in his or her existentialistic decisions. Kirkegaard’s approach shows the uselessness of advisors, including Abraham’s closest relatives. The philosopher presents this problem (in his work ‘Preliminary Expectoration’ in Fear and Trembling it is named as a third problem) as a question: Was Abraham ethically defensible in keeping silent about his purpose in front of Sarah, Eleazar, Isaak? It is a question of whether it is necessary to ask for counsel, to tell another, to disclose a situation, to involve them in consideration of an issue or dilemma? Abraham is not allowed to speak and thus is unable to put into words what is happening. He cannot utter the words to explain a situation and moral tragedy. “So then, Abraham did not speak. He did not speak to Sarah, nor to Eleazar, nor to Isaak. He passed over three ethical authorities; for the ethical had for Abraham no higher expression than family life (Kierkegaard 1994, 58). He cannot speak; not because he had lost his ability to speak, but because he cannot come up with a description that others would understand. The relief of speech is that it translates Abraham into the universal. That is the highest level of autonomy: with no involvement of reason, will, language or communication with others. Absolute silence dominates. The search for autonomy is invaded by the subject without words. In a pandemic situation, this approach stimulates the understanding that too many unnecessary advisers have grown into the social space, preventing us from reaching an autonomous decision when it is needed.

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The next problem of tragedies in a pandemic time is that many people have forgotten that silence without words exists; namely, the inability to express into words what happens, what exists. The social regime of contemporary societies demands that everything needs to be expressed in a loud voice, put in the social networks and so consequently noise, trouble and relationships conducted at high volume in public spaces dominate. Fear has grown because many people have lost their religious faith, something which inevitably focuses on hope. In the pandemic people have fewer resources for psychological strength because many no longer have the comfort of religious faith to sustain them, and nothing replaces the need for autonomy based on deep faith. Kierkegaard declares that inwardness is essential – more important and necessary than outwardness – as the individual human being became higher than the universal. So inwardness is where the battle for autonomy is waged. A knight of faith cannot rely on someone else! In Kierkegaard’s teaching, the autonomy of decisions pre-supposes not a free will, but a maximal concentration of faith. The pandemic has placed humankind in a paradoxical situation of choice where the lives of many people are at stake. Yet the solution is still sought in talks, discussions, papers, statistics, numbers, and tables that transform the people mentioned in them into abstract units. Kierkegaard implies in his model of autonomy that the solution comes not from talking and counting, but from maintaining a tension in relation to the individual, concrete human being with the Absolute. In other words, in maximum effort and exertion of the powers of striving and concentrating to take individual responsibility. Kierkegaard recognizes that the story of Abraham therefore contains a teleological concentration of the ethical. He writes: “People imagine maybe that the individual can make himself intelligible to another individual in the same case. Such a notion would be unthinkable if in our time people did not in so many ways seek to creep slyly into greatness. The one knight of faith can render no aid to the other. Either the individual becomes a knight of faith by assuming the burden of the paradox, or he never becomes one. In these regions partnership is unthinkable (Kierkegaard 1994, 98). As an existential thinker Kierkegaard is right. Tragic situations are survived by every Man, every person, by themself. Death from COVID-19 (and of course, all kinds of death) is always individual, in spite of the official numbers of deaths in each country. In the time of pandemic existential situations are much more common than before, and they need to be explained in the philosophy of Existence. Kant’s moral teaching does not call for advice, but allows seeking it when the question deals with regulations, with hypothetical imperatives. But it is free will acting as a powerful core that endows law-based morality with meaning and universality. In Kant’s philosophy fear, anxiety and courage are not essential concepts when compared with the philosophies of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Tillich, Jaspers and Sartre. Fear does have a role however, through the anticipation of Man failing to fulfil his or her moral duty. By means of its positivity the will brushes aside emotional and existential trials. In Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals the notion of

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anxiety is mentioned only in passing. It does not dominate, but rather belongs to a field separate from the law of free will; one dealing with concern about how such anxiety will affect the outcome of action. Kant writes: To be truthful from duty, however, is something entirely different from being truthful from anxiety about detrimental results, since in the first case the concept of the action in itself already contains a law for me, while in the second I must first look about elsewhere to see what effects on me might be combined with it. For, if I deviate from the principle of duty, this is quite certainly evil; but if I am unfaithful to my maxim of prudence this can sometimes be very advantageous to me, although it is certainly safer to abide by it. (Kant 1997, 15)

The Latvian philosopher Mara Rubene compares Kant with Kierkegaard: “Kant does not read the story about Abraham as a story of meeting with the other of faith therein; he follows the more general and highest task. Kierkegaard, meanwhile, poses a question of what constitutes the highest, the moment that “elevates” above the flow, that dignifies (Rubene 2020, 176–177).

The Story of J.-P. Sartre on Autonomy Another example devoted to the idea of autonomy is J.-P. Sartre’s story in his 1946 work Existentialism is Humanism. To be autonomous, as we have established, is to rely on oneself in making all decisions and choices, even though the road to choose and the responsibility that comes with that can feature communication with others, education, asking for counsel and the search for life models. Sartre asks the same as Kierkegaard: “Is it permissible to accept advice by submitting to an external impression?” Consequently, Sartre looks at the choice of a free person where a decision has to be made by the protagonist. In Sartre’s philosophy the autonomous perspective is essentially phenomenological, in that choices are made through reflection and discussion of values before a ‘leap of choice’ occurs. This position is full of ambiguity between freedom and determinism, as has been recognized by Simone de Beauvoir when considering the ethics of ambiguity. Sartre writes that when faced with an important choice a person tends to receive counsel from friends, relatives, companions, priests; but to him they are of little relevance – the actual choice has to be made by the individual themselves. Sartre rejects Kant’s idea of autonomy by indicating that for him any individual is a specimen of the universal concept of ‘Man’; that the essence of Man exists before its existence and within the confines of moral theory that all humans are supposedly comparable. It lacks a view of the concrete, the individual; Kierkegaard too had similar objections towards Kant’s moral philosophy. The formation and development of Man is a process in which the protagonist chooses their path; the way they ‘become’ throughout life. As existence is before essence, there is no definite determination from the past, but an orientation towards the future. Hence Sartre’s theory of action is characterized by teleologism, not by determinism.

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In Existentialism is a Humanism Sartre looks at various variants of choosing to act on the trivial, political, and existential level. Choice is given a pivotal role: ‘in choosing Myself, I choose Man’. There is no determination, no pre-determinism; values tend to be changeable and obscure and the essence of ‘human being’ is abandoned. One typical example used by Sartre tells of a young French man who lives with his mother during the Second World War. His father is inching towards collaborationism while his mother is mourning the death of her oldest son. The young man must make a choice between going to England to join the Free French forces or staying with his mother and helping her stay alive. The mother is important, for if abandoned she will end up in despair, yet the Resistance movement is also important. Should external counsel be heeded here? Sartre describes a social situation where those who want to teach others how to live are all around us, including Christians with their doctrine of “love thy neighbor”  – but what constitutes a ‘neighbor’? Sartre’s philosophy defends personal autonomy: you make the choices and free choice drives your existence, from which the essence of Man is then derived. The Frenchman continues to reflect: “If I remain with my mother, I shall be regarding her as the end and not as a means: but by the same token I am in danger of treating as the means those who are fighting on my behalf, and the converse is also true: that if I go to the aid of the combatants I shall be treating them as the end at the risk of treating my mother as a means. If values are uncertain, if they are still too abstract to determine the particular concrete case under consideration, nothing remains but to trust in our instincts” (Sartre 1975). Sartre emphasises that there is no such thing as general morality. But he sticks with universality, although it is understood differently than in Kant’s philosophy. Sartre sees it as a creative process through understanding yourself and other people. “In this sense we may say that there is a human universality, but it is not something given; it is being perpetually made. I make this universality in choosing myself; I also make it by understanding the purpose of any other man, of whatever epoch” (Sartre 1975). It is interesting that Sartre re-interprets the Biblical story of Abraham. Sartre makes an amusing comment: “If it really was an angel who had appeared and said: “Thou, Abraham, shalt sacrifice thy son” (Sartre 1975). He does not immediately believe the order but wants to be convinced about who has spoken to him – a characteristic feature for the communication in the twentieth Century. Sartre dares to question this challenge posed by God: “But anyone in such a case would wonder first whether it was indeed an angel and secondly, whether I am really Abraham. Where is the proof?” (Sartre 1975). He is looking for the existential experience, for evidence instead of paradoxes of faith. What Kierkegaard tries to highlight is that the knowledge we have or could have has no bearing on the way we make choices or decisions. We need to capture a secret, non-rational paradox. It contains no imitation or understanding but rather a following. Kierkegaard’s teachings also feature the themes of motivation, invitation and following, which do not mean compliance with cause-effect relations.

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Comparision of the Three Models The three models of autonomy in philosophy we have looked at are each based on its own blueprint. For Kant autonomy is rooted in the strength of will that is linked with reason. Given this, it has no heteronomic determination and does not change along with history but exists as a pure a priori principle. Autonomy is based on the idea of Man as a goal and on the perception of universality. If we look at the current pandemic, Kant’s moral theory delivers the following lesson: that during a time when the entire human race is under threat from a common disease and the death that comes with it (as well as the consequent political and economic destruction in many countries) the understanding of ethics sees a return of the concept of universality. One part of Kant’s moral theory gets a boost as well; namely to consider every human threatened by the pandemic as a goal rather than to manipulate human choice in order to bring back the economy, tourism, consumer society and to boost profits. Kant’s moral theory is particularly relevant in the COVID-19 pandemic. Kierkegaard’s philosophy of autonomy takes us to a different type of reflection, as it describes a dimension where a human being meets God’s absurd demand. That is not an everyday situation but an imagined state of maximum paradox and concentration of despair and faith. Will, categorical imperative and universality provide no solutions here. On the contrary, everything is focused on the individual. The pandemic does indeed present both generally absurd and individually-tense situations of life and death. The stakes are even higher in Kierkegaard’s teachings than Kant’s as the solution lies not in ethics, but in communication with the Absolute; in faith, reliance and silent undertaking of the impossible. The pandemic has caused so much noise, commotion, irrational action, and mass media irresponsibility in developed countries that Kierkegaard’s ideas sound rather appropriate: there should be less giving out of worthless advice and more restraint and focus on the core of the matter. The micro-world of the virus and the task of addressing climate change have challenged humankind’s belief in itself as ‘superior to nature’. Now humankind must tackle this ‘paradox of feeling’ as the most significant force on Earth, and yet comply with Nature’s laws to construct a harmony with it. The comparison of the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Kant elucidates another conclusion. If autonomy is not based on a strong free will that enacts its own law, it gives rise to anxiety. Kant’s model of philosophy does not produce anxiety as it is based on pure reason, practical reason, freedom and will. As soon as this classical premise of freedom is lost, the primary role of reason and will is lost as well, leaving behind a world view dominated by fear and anxiety. Overall, the positions of Kierkegaard, Sartre and the Existentialists are saturated with these sensations of concern that now accompany the pandemic. Fear is one of the main concepts discussed by contemporary philosophy, psychology and medicine as experts in these fields analyse the human situation in the COVID-19 pandemic. The eco-anxiety that comes with autonomy has evolved into an anxiety of humankind generally; into a universal cosmic trouble that includes the pandemic but also concerns about climate change, the depletion of natural resources and the fear of humans losing control over the subsequent natural changes.

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Eco-phenomenology on the ‘Real’ Autonomous Human Being Eco-phenomenological positions do not represent models that assert the pure autonomy of the individual human. Rather, they balance autonomy with heteronomy, inwardness with outwardness. This model is different from the ones proposed by Kant, Kierkegaard and Sartre which argue in favour of individual autonomy. While during Sartre’s life Left-leaning cultural movements reinforced the need for philosophy that considered the freedom of the ‘autonomous I’, now – half a century later – there is a growing wish for a philosophy of communication, communitarianism and the verification of togetherness. In relation to the pandemic Eco-phenomenology develops new concepts: to be alone together, we-consciousness, ecological solidarity and so on. Philosophy and ethics propose a move from the idea of autonomy defended by classical philosophy to a new concept of ‘hetero-autonomy’ that expresses both my self-reliance and simultaneously the participation of Others in this self-reliance. My self-­ consciousness exists as we-consciousness (Hegel had already interpreted this paradox). Eco-phenomenology recommends viewing we-consciousness not as a unification of opposites – of autonomy and heteronomy – but rather as a synthesis when hetero or outwardness becomes integrated into auto(nomy) and phenomenology turns back to Nature itself. A comparison can be drawn with Heidegger’s teachings where he, after overcoming the seclusion of the transcendental Ego in Husserl’s phenomenology, created the concept of being-in-the-world [In-der-Welt-sein]. Now Eco-philosophy is taking the next step to being-in-the-Nature-world [in-der-Natur-Welt-sein]. The main concept here is that of the life-vehicle, which is unlike ‘consciousness’ in Husserl’s phenomenology or ‘existence’ as proposed by Sartre. The individualizing process of the life-vehicle works along with the growing autonomy of the living being, which unfolds an inner agency of telos. This understanding of autonomy differs from the philosophy of Kant, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas: it is a process of self-individualizing which unfolds in several successive phases as evolutive development. Tymieniecka writes: “In fact, in the attempt to follow the real individual being in its emergence from the primitive forces as he progressively stands out as an autonomous factor of the whole which then becomes the “world”, we gain the evidence of his beingness” (Tymieniecka 1988, 19). The selfhood of the human being is an outcome of life-strategies during the constructive unfolding of the individual life-course. Eco-phenomenology describes the emergence of the individual subject within the lifeworld in his or her existential-ontological autonomy. This understanding of autonomy does not pre-suppose controversy with heteronomy because the self-individualized human being is interpreted as an inclusive part of the natural, social and cultural life processes. Nature should not be separated from World, as both can be seen as equally phenomenological, and the core of this view of life phenomenology is formed not by intentionality but by logos, telos, entelechy. Self-­individualization

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occurs not as the construction of autonomy as resistance to influence by a heteronomous environment and outwardness, but as a process of blending in. The direction is inside/outside and dealing with outer elements strengthens a person’s very own, unique position. The moral search is linked up with Moral Sense, which in the development of nature has the potential of being like logos. Eco-phenomenology also differs from the model presented by Kierkegaard by not depicting paradoxes and anxiety when faced by the Universe and the Absolute, but rather by describing the human person as the all-embracing functional complex and the transmutation centre of the logos of life. This kind of phenomenology has advantages over other philosophical directions when it comes to providing a philosophical analysis of the current pandemic through an holistic world view of nature-­ life-­man that includes both telos and freedom. Eco-phenomenology widens our philosophical horizons and calls for an understanding of the human being as part of the Universe, nature and life-cycle; for the emergence of the individual subject within the life-world in his or her existential-ontological autonomy. The subject of eco-anxiety is a by-product of directions that have not found a balance between man-world-nature, autonomy, and heteronomy. The imbalance of the ecosystem in consumer society exerts an enormous influence on decisions made by individual humans, heightening their fears about health and life during the pandemic. We are living in a situation where it is impossible to predict the next decade. This increases the special kind of anxiety created by culture. The Korean philosopher Kim Sang-Hwan explains that the roots of the current cultural anxiety may lie hidden in the heart of cultures: “Crisis and anxiety come not from outside but from inside culture itself. Indeed barbarity grows precisely where culture blossoms, according to the same logical structure. One needs to look near as well as far: this era needs a microscopic perspective as much as a macroscopic one” (Kim Sang-­ Hwan 2011, 208). The pandemic situation functions as a litmus paper which demonstrates growing anxiety and the appearance of a kind of ‘new barbarism’ rooted in irrationality. Pointing out the contrast between autonomy and heteronomy is an indicator of cultural anxiety in the situation of pandemic. Specific individual fear and anxiety as to one’s existence is one of the deepest sensations contemporary humans feel during a pandemic. But therein exists a subject’s difficulty in accepting psychological autonomy. If, in their heart of hearts, a human being feels like they belong to a mighty social group or a mighty ethnos, this anxiety is reduced, because everyone is as mighty as the totality to which they belong. However, individuals living in big communities are more dependent on the ‘policies’ that the political and military leaders, medical experts and pseudo-experts that these communities follow in the interests of ‘scientific truth’ – or in the interests of their business. Fear grows because there is no protection against it in a life saturated with individualism, egoistic feelings, and the great wish for ‘autonomy’. The pandemic only aggravates the fear a person feels about their body, health, and life, thus compounding their anxiety about not only the place of Man in the universe but also about universal cosmic trouble.

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This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project No. lzp-2020/2-0085 “Development of Eco-phenomenology in the Situation of Pandemic”.

Works Cited Buceniece, Ella. 1989. The Teleological Structure of Historical Being (The Analysis of the Problem Made in Husserl's Work, The Crisis in European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology). In Analecta Husserliana, Man Within His Life–World. Contributions to Phenomenology by scholars from East–Central Europe, vol. 27, 627–641. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kant, Immanuel. 1997. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1994. Fear and Trembling (first published as Frygt og Bæven under the name Johannes de Silentio, 1843). Trans. Walter Lowrie. Everyman's Library. Random House. Kim, Sang-Hwan. 2011. Eco–ethica as a New Narrative on Culture. In Eco–ethica, vol. 1. Re-thinking Ethics Today, eds. P. Kemp and N. Hashimoto. Tokyo, Copenhagen: Tomonobu Imamichi Institute for Eco–ethica. Levinas, Emanuel. 1979. Totality and infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. A.  Lingis. The Hague\London\Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Rubene, Māra. Da capo. Filozofiski estētiskas studijas un portretu skices. 2020. Rīga: Al secco. (In Latvian). Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004. The Transcendence of the Ego. A Sketch for a Phenomenological Description. Trans. Andrew Brown. Routledge: London and New York. ———. 1975. Existentialism is a Humanism. In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. Trans. Walter Kaufman. E–resource at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/ exist/sartre.htm. Viewed October 25, 2021. Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. 1988. Logos and Life: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason. Book 1. In Analecta Husserliana, vol. XXIV.  Dordrecht\Boston\London\Tokyo: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Keep Your Distance! – Personal Space in the Pandemic Viewed Through Husserl’s Monophony and Deleuze and Guattari’s Polyphony Ineta Kivle

Abstract  In recent decades there has been a tendency for philosophy to develop in relation to the ‘real processes’ of the world and to find new experiences and new areas of investigation to explore. This chapter focuses on two distinct strands of contemporary philosophy – phenomenology and postmodern philosophy – to consider the question: “How in a time of pandemic do the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Deleuze and Guattari deepen our understanding of the human place and role in the world”? In Hussserl’s Cartesian ‘monophony’ the ‘I’ is the centre of the world, whereas Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s fluid polyphony regards a ‘human’ as a construction of mutual interactions by difference. The author’s dual-view approach makes it possible to look at the concepts the two contrasting perspectives bring both in terms of philosophical insights and in reference to the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. Keywords  Distance · Husserl · Deleuze · Guattari · Territory · Pandemic

Introduction The word ‘distance’ refers to the space between two or more points, including interactions between different elements, such as humans, animals, things and the environment around them. This distance is not only physically measurable but also imaginable, thinkable, existential and social. Face-to-face conversations have been replaced by distance communication, and much of life transferred to digital and virtual spaces, such as Zoom, MS Teams, Instagram, Facebook. The spread of the COVID-19 virus has had an influence in the broadest sense imaginable, as it has changed individual lives and transformed the role of humans in the world. In other I. Kivle (*) Academic Library of the University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_18

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words: a human is not so much the ‘I’ that constitutes the world, but more a construction of actual situations, surrounding environments and mutual interactions. The differences between these two positions of humans in the world – as occupied philosophically by Husserl and Deleuze – calls for new thinking about an individual’s ability to control both the world and their own lives. This chapter considers the profound changes in nature, society and sociality in recent years due to digitisation, mobile communications, social media and now COVID-19 and takes up the contrasting perspectives of the [‘I’-centric] monophony of Husserl’s Cartesian phenomenology and the polyphony of Deleuze and Guattari’s postmodernity. This chapter asks whether these contrasting philosophies can deepen our understanding of the human place and role in the world in the time of a pandemic crisis? What could be ‘a safe distance’ in the philosophies of Husserl and Deleuze? The phenomenological approach moves away from the natural world to the constitution of phenomenological structures and transcendental ego. However, it gives us an opportunity to analyse and develop a possible model for understanding the central role of Man in a crisis situation such as the 2020–2022 pandemic. Postmodernism, however, turns away from subjectivism and transcendental philosophy and relates to reality, where the human is viewed only as an element of the territory determined by others and not as a central object of investigation. Both Husserl’s phenomenology and Deleuze and Guattari’s postmodernism each have their own conceptual apparatus, a corpus of philosophical language in which their ideas are expressed. Husserl created phenomenology as a rigorous science and method for philosophy, where each concept has a definite, functional and conceptual horizon. Deleuze and Guattari take a different approach, where philosophy is ‘a creation of concepts’. In the introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s 1980 work Thousand Plateaus, translator Brian Massumi writes: “The concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through ‘a space’ at a given velocity in a given direction. The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, xiii). Deleuze characterizes his own philosophy as ‘constructivism’, ‘vitalism’ and a ‘construction’ of concepts. Such concepts in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari as: territory (de-territorialization, re-territorialization), becoming, becoming other, difference, organ, in-between, refrain, rhythm, rhizome, assemblage, milieu, chaos and others, characterize a radically different philosophical interpretation of people, nature and the world than in Husserl’s phenomenology. This extends to other areas of human activity, behaviour and interactivity such as ‘in-between’, ‘rhythm’, ‘refrain’ and ‘assemblage’ as well as specific elements in life and reproduction, such as ‘organ’ and ‘rhizome’. By contrast, in Husserl’s phenomenology the central concepts are intentionality, consciousness, direct experience, givenness, phenomenon, essences, phenomenological method, structures of formation of meanings, internal time consciousness, meaningful worlds, horizon, intersubjectivity, life world and others.

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This chapter assumes familiarity with the philosophical concepts of both Husserl and Deleuze and Guattari, and both are worthy of separate and extensive research. But as the main aim of this chapter is to discuss ‘distance’ in the ‘new reality’ of the COVID-19 pandemic. Postmodern philosophy is a useful approach in considering and explaining the ways in which an individual has experienced a loss of stability while also attempting to live and survive in a changing and fluid world.

Monophony or Polyphony? The concepts of monophony and polyphony have been used as allegories to emphasize the fundamental difference between the findings of Husserl and Deleuze. Husserl is a Cartesian thinker who placed great value on Descarte’s contribution to the development of a new philosophy of subjectivism. On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy distances itself from the Cartesian tradition and is more related to Nietzche’s impulsive vitalism. Therefore, the central concepts become as follows: Husserl’s worlds with a subjective centre (monophony) and Deleuze and Guattari’s forming of territories with moving stability points (polyphony). To make the distinction between Husserl and Deleuze and Guattari, I will cite two quotes related to the fundamental difference between both philosophers in their attitude towards the philosophy of subjectivity: one from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and the other one from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s 1991 work What is Philosophy? Husserl writes: “Descartes, in fact, inaugurates an entirely new kind of philosophy. Changing its total style, philosophy takes a radical turn: from naive Objectivism to transcendental subjectivism.” (Husserl 1999, 4). Husserl continues the Cartesian tradition and develops phenomenology as a special method for reaching transcendental subjectivity and the constitution of essences. On the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to philosophy departs from the Cartesian tradition. On the philosophy of subjectivity they write: “Beginning with Descartes, and then with Kant and Husserl, the cogito makes it possible to treat the plane of immanence as a field of consciousness. Immanence is supposed to be immanent to a pure consciousness, to a thinking subject.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 46). Postmodern explanations radically distance themselves from the philosophy of subjectivity and offer a new philosophical approach formed through the internal genesis of philosophical concepts. The different explorations and understanding of such fundamental philosophical concepts as transcendence and immanence show significant differences in the explanations of the human place in the world. To a certain extent, immanence shows the sphere of human existence that is a priori given, in which humans dwell and operate in certain conditions. Basically, Husserl’s cognitive subject lives in a monophonic relationship – ‘I’ and the perceived world – but a man viewed using Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical perspective finds ‘self’ in polyphonic differentiation from his fellow humans. Consequently, the spheres of immanence are also different.

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Immanence Immanence shows how different states of being are inherent within something, how these states dwell within a given domain and how, with immanence, everything is given. So, how does the concept of immanence relate to the current subject of the COVID-19 pandemic? There are some aspects that should be noted here: one is based on relations of monophony-polyphony while others raise questions about how distance can be identified philosophically. In Husserl’s Cartesian monophony the sphere of immanence is in subjectivity. Concepts in Husserl’s philosophy such as an intentional consciousness and the lived body, perception and the formation of different intersubjective worlds make it possible to discover different phenomenological aspects for a philosophical understanding of distance and the pandemic situation. A sphere of phenomenological immanence requires a special method (phenomenological reduction) of the constitution of transcendental subjectivity encompassing transcendental ego, essences of pure phenomena and intentional structures) and immanently given the feasibility of experience. The immanence of intentionality and the formation of meanings are constituted by moving within the depth of consciousness by bracketing and epoché. Husserl writes: “Only phenomenological reduction finally secures the sphere of absolute, immanent data – the result of foundational sceptical consideration – as the field of pure transcendental phenomenology.” (Husserl 1997, xix). Husserl’s approach to immanence is directed by the ‘I’ perspective moving from ‘changing’ to ‘the undoubtable’. In Deleuze’s view, the concept of immanence needs to be reconsidered. Immanence should not be sought as a result of transcendence. In the 2005 collection of his essays Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life Gilles Deleuze offers another definition of immanence and shows that immanence is ‘in itself’; that immanence is ‘a life’ and nothing else. He compares the field of immanence with the planes of consistency that take place through what he and Felix Guattari call ‘different assamblages – that is, ways of constructing a hierarchical, stratified territory using artistic, scientific, political elements all in relation to one another. This plane of consistency is constructed piece by piece. Each person’s lives, wishes and desires are a pure multiplicity of immanence, and people construct their own field of immanence. “There is a mutual immanence of the lines. And it is not easy to sort them out. No one of them is transcendent, each is at work within the others. Immanence is everywhere. Lines of flight are immanent to the social field.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 205). Immanence is not included in subjectivity, but takes the dimensions of plane and continuum where immanence changes together with the activities of humans. In the pandemic the virus becomes immanent to human life, and manifests itself in various assemblages of life.

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‘Distance’ in Phenomenological Attitude Phenomenological experience binds subjectivity (ie., consciousness, body and imagination) with other people and their lived experience, and with the physical space and presence of things and their surroundings in a specific way through phenomenological attitude. The phenomenological attitude does not protect the surrounding world affected by the virus directly, and no practical principles of social space organization can be offered, but the awareness that humans can – relatively, at least – choose their own location and protect themselves is important for the maintenance of health and a safe life. In a comparison of ‘natural’ attitudes of spirit with phenomenological ones Husserl looks at different human roles in the world. In the natural attitude humans contemplate the existing and surrounding world consisting of moving, changing things that affect each other, come together and then separate again. In Husserl’s Thing and Space (1907) he links distance to perception relating to the motion of the eye – known as the oculomotor function – where each oculomotor distance constantly changes in a way that is kinaesthetically motivated. (Husserl 1997, 210). The human is in the midst of this world: “We find ourselves to be centres of reference for the rest of the world; it is our environment. The environing objects, with their properties, changes and relations, are what they are for themselves, but they have a position relative to us; initially a spatio-temporal position and then also a ‘spiritual’ one. We immediately perceive a first environment round about us; it is together with us, contemporaneous with us, and appears to us in the relation of being seen, touched, heard, etc.” (Husserl 1997, 2). As perceived, environment becomes the meaningful spatio-temporal pheno­ menon permeated by emotions, intentions and personal attitudes where things and space are valued differently. The perceived world becomes ‘the world’ for us, whether agreeable or disagreeable, evil or good. In the pandemic situation the world, as we know it, becomes a force that works against the order of natural things and demands people adapt to the changed world of the virus. For the maintenance of a healthy living space the ability of Man to see himself in the structures of life and identify an adequate assessment of his own place and position is crucial. The phenomenological ‘distance’ goes from the perceived phenomena to the immanent consciousness and vice versa. In this case, the truth of perceived objects depends on perceptual conditions. Objects restricted to a one-sided viewpoint appear in the visual field as intentional images depending on the distance from the eye to the objects perceived.

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‘I’ and Intersubjectivity The transmitter of the virus is the human body and the ability to assess one’s own location and a ‘safe distance’ covers different areas of research: medical, psychological, biological, philosophical and so on. The lived body is the centre of the formation of different meaningful worlds, and it offers an answer to the question: “Why do some people respect a physical distance as a guarantee of safety during a pandemic, while others do not? The answer could be as follows: that people live with different meanings for the same thing, and they have – or don’t have – a common experience of the same object. It means that for phenomenology it is important to know how the ‘I’ is aware of distance. ‘Distance’ as a meaningful phenomenon is given as ‘here’ and ‘now’, but its meanings change. Shared meanings of the same object form common intersubjective worlds at the centre of which is a person who determines the formation of both personal and intersubjective worlds. If ‘I’ along with ‘others’ perceive, think about and understand the importance of physical distance in maintaining health, then we have a common intersubjective world [We-unity]. Conversely, with those people who believe that a ‘COVID distance’ should not be observed, a common intersubjective world of pandemic restriction cannot be established. In today’s society the respect given to the keeping of physical distance shows how the observance or non-observance of the pandemic restrictions divides sociality into parts or groups. In one grouping, the physical distance is respected, and so a community develops with people who feel the same way; others in other groupings live their lives according to their own convictions. They meet, gather and socialise and do not feel responsibility for common solutions. Subjectivity and one’s own intentional activity becomes the centre of ‘meaningful worlds’ that determines both human life and the world. In this setting a human is responsible not only for their ‘self’ but also for their surroundings. It is within a human’s power to manage and control one’s actions and the ongoing processes around that person. Distance relates both to a human’s internal constitution of mind-­ body and stream of consciousness as well as to the environments surrounding them. In the virtual world common bodily experiences are limited, and distance moves from ‘the real’ to ‘the virtual’ and to other forms of remote communication. Communication takes new forms, and distance is transformed from an area of direct natural perception to perceptions of digitally-transmitted audio and video signals. During remote communication people are pictured on a screen where rational, imaginal and emotional consensus takes on a greater importance than perceptions of the real bodily locations. The visual images of the participants are compressed into small boxes through which their opinions are expressed. “The distance between the images would again be modified unitarily throughout the series of pairs of images and again would help to constitute an objective distance, but one that was different than before, and the same would apply to every destination in the location of the images in the visual field.” (Husserl 1997, 181).

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In Thing and Space (1907) Husserl writes about distance in relation to the perception of objects that are not fully and properly-given objects but are given as an appearance through intentional perception. These objects are given by the intentional content belonging to them, and they have their corresponding locations of ‘here’ and ‘now’. The same intentional structure also works in the perception of virtual objects – we perceive them as they are given and as they appear in the subjective visual field marking the internal distances of images. In the same way the nature of intersubjectivity does not change in relation to distance communication and the virtual world. It ‘sketches’ the significance of sociality and everyday experience in remote communication and shows how humans share life together with others and operate in a common digital environment of many subjects. Intersubjective space is formed only between those who, whether critically or uncritically, communicate with each other in some way. The conceptual distances are formed as a result of agreements or disagreements about the phenomena under discussion. If different and contradictory meanings are given to the same thing, the common intersubjective space is partly disturbed. In the case of misunderstanding and lack of empathy the common intersubjective experience becomes fragile and problematic. Intersubjectivity is a complicated structure of various active elements in any case. Regardless of where and how intersubjectivity is formed, its intentional ontological structures and functions are similar: empathy, listening and mutual understanding play an important part in this process. This cannot always be achieved through verbal communication, but concerns  – in a broader and larger context – ontological questions about the meaningfulness of the places where ‘being’ and ‘belonging’ can occur and develop, and includes a world where an immediately-perceivable human presence is not necessarily required. Such an explanation moves away from the privileged role of the subject to the wider environment. The inverse relationship, in which surroundings and others determine one’s own life, is one of the most important dimensions in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy.

Becoming Deleuze and Guattari consider insights relating not just to philosophy but also contemporary problems of nature, people, geography, art, politics and so on. Their philosophy forms a plateau where one concept mirrors others, forming dynamic and self-organized systems that have no need of transcendental thinking. They attempt to explain de-regulated flows of energy and the fluid processes of the contemporary world. “Flows of intensity, their fluids, their fibers, their continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject. Becomings, becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, have replaced history, individual or general.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 162). ‘Becoming-other’ is compared to ‘becoming-quality’. This is a process by which a human adapts themself to their environment, and by ‘becoming-other’ acquires

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quality that is appropriated for fluid surroundings, which is also a crucial condition for safety in the pandemic situation. Safety is a fundamental element of any state, whether politically or in human life. The question then becomes: “How is it possible to live safely in a world where there are no absolute points of reference (for example, as in the ‘here’ and ‘now’ in Husserl’s phenomenology)?” ‘Becoming’ as process, transformation and movement correlates with intensity and desire. It is variable in itself and refers to different areas of life. “‘Becoming’ is certainly not imitating or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all of its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, “appearing”, “being”, “equalling”, or “producing.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 239). ‘Becoming’ pervades life, penetrating everywhere in equal measure, which  – when combined with the concept of ‘difference’  – makes the whole world fluid. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s fluid approach to the place and role of humans in the world fundamentally changes the relations of ‘self’ and ‘others’. ‘Self’ is not a self-­ sufficient being but is constituted out of difference. Deleuze suggests that ‘individuals’ are distinguished from the phenomenological and self-sufficient ‘I’. The individual is indeterminate, floating, fluid; communicative and open to ‘becoming-other’. The pandemic situation is characterised very precisely by reciprocal interactions. ‘Others’ play an equal role to the ‘Self’, while the Self is determined by others. The ‘Self’ is open to difference and ‘becoming-other’ while suffused by its surroundings.

Chaos and Belonging Territory In ‘safety’ situations “the forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 311). Safe territories are exposed not only to chaotic forces but also to the principle of ‘eternal return’ where the circular energetic forces of the world and the cosmos determine things and people’s lives. It’s important to note that ‘chaos’ and ‘eternal return’ are not two distinct things, but an affirmation of the world process. As Gilles Deleuze puts it in Difference and Repetition: “The world is neither finite nor infinite as representation would have it: it is completed and unlimited. Eternal return is unlimited of the finished itself, the univocal being which is said of difference.” (Deleuze 1994, 57). Chaos operates by its own repetition, therefore separates from itself by repetition and difference, and new ‘safety spaces’ are created. This thinking is important in relation to the pandemic situation: (a) Each repetition strengthens the existing order and maintains stability. The permanent observance of COVID-19 restrictions and the constant return to them

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[for example, through gradations of alarm and degrees of ‘lockdown] guarantees the social order. (b) ‘Becoming-other’ is compared with ‘becoming-quality’. People are forced to submit to the effects of the virus and thus ‘possess themselves’ in a new ‘quality’. By becoming-other they maintain their ‘territories’ as well as their own lives. (c) People control themselves with the difference by separation from chaos and through obtaining a new – but indefinable– quality. These processes show life as fragile, penetrable and fluid, fluxing in-between situations depending on the environment surrounding the person living that life. Chaos is not the opposite of territory. Territories and not fixed, and each contains the opportunity and possibility to return to a state of chaos, as well as to leave existing territories and establish new ones. This ‘eternal return’ could be characterised as ‘pulsations of territories’. Territories of different kinds, both physical and spiritual, form themselves by separation from chaos and through the establishment of borders, parameters and distances. Deleuze and Guattari define the concept of territory in terms relating to both human and animal instincts; of ‘keeping’ your distance; and also ‘marking’ your territory. “The territory is first of all the critical distance between two beings of the same species: Mark your distance. What is mine, is first of all my distance. I process only distances. Don’t anybody touch me; I growl if anyone enters my territory, I put up placards. Critical distance is a relation based on matters of expression. It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of chaos knocking at the door.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 319–320). Territory is open to ‘becoming-other’. It means the capability of ‘openness of boundaries’. As a directional space and a circle of belonging, territory has its own centre of intensity that is at once ‘within’ the territory and ‘outside’ it, and around which cosmic forces congregate and come together. The activities of such centres – these centres can be active too – are not subjectively directed. A ‘circle of belonging’ can move to other regions, not intentionally or deliberately, but through its own capacity to be open itself, by itself, over and over again. The opening of a circle of belonging in another region means not only a ‘displacing’, but also the movement made by its different elements. In other words, by the inclusion of different milieus various kinds of components of exterior, interior and other milieus are also included in movement and opening of new territories. (Kivle 2021, 81–94). The opening of a circle of belonging in another region means not only a ‘displacing’, but also the movement made by its different elements. In other words, by the inclusion of different milieus of various kinds – including components of ‘exterior’, ‘interior’ and other types – these also become factors in the movement and opening of new territories. (Kivle 2021, 81–94). This process of formation and re-formation of territories relates to circles of de-­ territorialization (in other words, the de-contextualization of an actual territory and

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the leaving of it), and re-territorialization (in other words, the beginning of a new territory). Territorial assemblages include directional elements, and ‘safe spaces’ can be created by the maintenance of repetition, refrain and rhythm. In the pandemic situation, when the spread of a virus has taken over the whole planet, we are in between chaos and order; not a ‘movement to new territories’ but a ‘compliance period’ involving the repetition of medical restrictions.

In Conclusion Deleuze and Guattari are process philosophers, looking for points of stability in self-organized fluid systems composed of different elements. Their philosophy considers a wide range of contemporary issues that can be useful when considered against the problems of the pandemic, of climate change and global warming, of instability, the virtual world and more. Unlike Husserl’s phenomenology, where each of the concepts are precisely defined, Deleuze and Guattari view philosophy as ‘the invention of concepts by the separation of chaos’. A comparison of the different philosophies of Husserl with Deleuze and Guattari shows how philosophy forms a wave-like complicated movement created by viewing the processes of society and the world, and its own task of arranging the world conceptually, thus separating the world and itself from chaotic thinking. This chapter by no means covers all aspects of distance exhaustively: there are many aspects that can and should be developed. One is, for example, Husserl’s early approach to space that can be taken up through his later constitutive phenomenology. Distance in the context of an open dynamic and self-organizing systems is explored not only in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, but also in a phenomenological approach to the theory of mind and neurophysiology. As this chapter shows, Husserl’s phenomenology focuses on the ‘self-givenness of subjectivity’ and an in-depth philosophical perspective extending above or below particular events and current processes. However, phenomenological views on the role of subjectivity in the processes of forming scientific knowledge are ‘actual’ in strengthening the theoretical ground for science and creating knowledge and theories. Scientific explanations of the spread and specificity of the virus use the sense and data of the immediate perception of human experiences of the life-world and intersubjectivity, dating back to the time before science attempted to offer explanations, the time of ‘pre-science’. In the pandemic situation, science has become the ‘explainer of the danger’, the ‘source of safe behaviour’ and the saviour of the modern world. Keeping a physical ‘distance’ between your life and the life of others has become a guarantee of remaining healthy and staying alive, justified by science. *This article is a part of the framework of a bilateral (Slovenia – Latvia) international interdisciplinary project “Listening and Polyphony: Echoes of Phenomenology, Ethics and Anthropology” (BI-LV/20-22-006).

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Works Cited Deleuze, G. 1994. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1994. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press. Husserl, E. 1999. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1997. Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. In Collected Works, vol. 7. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kivle, I. 2021. Search for Stability: Rhythm in the Philosophies of Husserl, Deleuze and Guattari. The Polish Journal of Aesthetics 61 (2/2021): 81–94. https://doi.org/10.19205/61.21.5.

Together and Apart: Variations on the Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation in the Coronavirus Pandemic Tomas Sodeika and Lina Vidauskytė

Abstract  We aim in this chapter to draw a parallel between the strict lockdowns announced during the COVID-19 pandemic, which involved many months with severe restrictions on movement and contacts with other people, and the phenomenon of loneliness as the metaphorical expression of solipsism. Edmund Husserl in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation explores the problem of transcendental subjectivity and the phenomenon of solipsism. The main focus of this chapter is Husserl’s phenomenological research on intersubjectivity: how the Other is given to me? This givenness is described phenomenologically through various terms used by Husserl, such as “reduction”, “empathy”, “pairing”, etc. At the end of the chapter the authors turn to the existential side of Husserl’s phenomenological project on the Other, and offer some advice for the existential-philosophical position during the pandemic. Keywords  Husserl · Solipsism · Loneliness · Pandemic · Inter-subjectivity · Phenomenological reduction

Introduction Despite the mass vaccination programmes worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic is still affecting our health and our everyday lives and habits. New virus mutations appear everywhere from time to time and become a source of worry, and it requires much effort from us to cope with changing situations. As is well known, lockdown was extremely hard in some countries with social life limited to monadic one-house T. Sodeika (*) Institute of Humanistic and Existential Psychotherapy, Vilnius, Lithuania L. Vidauskytė (*) General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania, Vilnius, Lithuania © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_19

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life (Kovacs et  al. 2021; Lagoy 2021; Peng and Roth 2021). The ‘monadic life’ according to the new pandemic rules generates a feeling that your own house suddenly becomes without doors and windows. It creates an atmosphere that generates insecurity, and feelings of togetherness are replaced with a feeling of ‘apartness’. Older people and children especially experienced many difficulties coping with loneliness, which was accompanied for example by difficulties in homeschooling, not seeing relatives and not being able to communicate with other members of the local communities. Even digital technologies and social networks did not help to minimize the feelings of apartness. That is a paradox – the social networks which are designed for intensive communication left us with a feeling of apartness and loneliness. All the restrictions and all the requirements to keep ‘socially distanced’ created a sense of mistrust and the suspension of real togetherness. The lockdown was an unpleasant and disturbing situation for many. It showed the importance of mental health and raised a sense of insecurity in the world. There is no doubt that the virus itself and the social measures to combat the pandemic (restrictions, isolation, ‘bubble life’, different ways of working, etc.) will have a serious psychological impact on many people: both those who have suffered the virus and those who escaped it, yet those groups must remain apart from one another. Can philosophy help in this situation in any way? Considering that, the problem of “togetherness” (how one experiences objects, events and actions as a public sharing, not in a private moment) during the lockdown has been heightened to its sharpest existential form, probably never experienced before this pandemic. To look at this problem existentially and phenomenologically, we shall look more closely at Husserl’s fifth Cartesian Meditation. The starting point here may be the fact that the situation which many of us have found ourselves in as a result of quarantine is in many ways similar to the solipsist position that critics attribute to Husserl’s phenomenology.

Husserl’s Solipsism As Dan Zahavi notes: “Husserl’s phenomenology has very frequently been accused of being solipsistic in nature. By solipsism, one normally understands a position that either claims that only one single consciousness exists, namely one’s own; or that argues that it is impossible to know whether there are in fact other subjects besides oneself.” (Zahavi 2003, 109). Zahavi sums up the question of intersubjectivity and writes: Husserl’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity seems to be confronted with two interrelated difficulties: 1. How should I ever be able to constitute the Other, since the Other qua Other must be more than a mere product of constitution? 2. How should it phenomenologically be possible to describe the givenness of the Other, since the Other qua foreign, subjectivity is characterized by its inaccessibility by always transcending its givenness for me? (Zahavi 2003, 110)

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Phenomenology acquires a solipsistic character because Husserl uses phenomenological (transcendental) reduction. It is a methodological tool that requires any derivative of meaning to be based on the experience of first-person evidence. Around 1905 Husserl became aware that the fundamental condition of phenomenological experience is a “phenomenological attitude,” which is opposed to “natural attitude” and which presupposes a transcendental reduction. It can be said that by revealing the importance of transcendental reduction for phenomenological research, Husserl turned “the solitary life” [einsames Seelenleben] (Husserl 2001, 190) into the main figure of transcendental phenomenology. Since then every phenomenologist is well aware that аny meaning must be reduced to its origins perceived from the first-person perspective. This perspective is realized by transcendental reduction and guarantees that perceived meaning has the character of Cartesian fundamentum inconcussum veritatis. In his lectures from 1923 to 1924 on the First Philosophy, Husserl emphasizes that the criticism of experience, which forms the basis of phenomenological philosophy, can only be “solipsist in a good sense” [im guten Sinne solipsistische], i.e. everything that we perceive as a significant thing should be perceived only as a phenomenon experienced from the position of the first person only. Experience in the primary sense is experienced from the point of view of the first person. This applies not only to ‘thing-like’ structures or meaning but also to other subjects. According to Husserl, universal criticism of experience, which is incumbent on me as a phenomenologist, can only be “solipsistic in the good sense”. This means that phenomenology allows the possibility only of exploring my experiences and everything that belongs to external reality should not be presupposed as being (Husserl 1965, 65–66). When Husserl says “solipsistic in the good sense” he means that transcendental phenomenology is a kind of transcendental idealism: “We have here a transcendental idealism that is nothing more than a consequentially executed self-explication in the form of a systematic egological science, an explication of my ego as the subject of every possible cognition, and indeed with respect to every sense of what exists, wherewith the latter might be able to have a sense for me, the ego” (Husserl 1999, 86). However, because of the solipsistic character of transcendental phenomenology, the objective relevance of the phenomenological experience becomes problematic. Does it mean that phenomenology is capable of correctly explaining only the meaning of “solipsist” subjectivity? Is the phenomenologist inevitably doomed to “loneliness”? Does the solipsistic character of transcendental phenomenology not contradict the fact that Husserl from the very beginning emphasized the need for “teamwork” in the implementation of a phenomenological project? As if trying to answer these questions, Husserl introduces the theme of intersubjectivity into his phenomenological research project.

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Enter Intersubjectivity The theme of intersubjectivity appears in Husserl’s works almost simultaneously with the theme of transcendental reduction and, accordingly, the theme of solipsism. Аlready in 1908, Husserl was engaged in the question of the possibility of cognition of an alien person’s ego-experience (Husserl 1973a, 3–4). In the preface to the 1931 English translation of Ideas Husserl noted that there is a fundamental linking between the objective certainty of the world and the Other, which is significant for me, and therefore “egological” phenomenology must be extended to intersubjectivity. He writes: Within this view of things there grows up, provided the consequences are fearlessly followed up (and this is not everybody’s business), a transcendental-phenomenological Idealism in opposition to every form of psychologistic Idealism. The account given in the chapter indicated suffers, as the author confesses, from lack of completeness. Although it is in all real essentials unassailable, it lacks what is certainly important to the foundation of this Idealism, the proper consideration of the problem of transcendental solipsism or transcendental intersubjectivity, of the essential relationship of the objective world, that is valid for me, to others which are valid for me and with me. (Husserl 1931, 18)

How much importance Husserl attached to the problem of intersubjectivity is evidenced by the fact that three volumes of Husserliana were devoted to this topic (Husserl 1973a, 1973b, 1973c).

The Fifth Cartesian Meditation The problem of intersubjectivity was most systematically approached in the Cartesian Meditations in 1929. The Fifth Meditation is entitled Uncovering of the Sphere of Transcendental Being as Monadological Intersubjectivity. In this text Husserl tries to overcome a kind of “solipsist phenomenological loneliness” caused by the transcendental reduction. However, he does this not by rejecting the primates of the first-person perspective, but by trying to discover in the most constitutive acts of this perspective the moments that constitute other entities. The phrase “monadological intersubjectivity” reflects the paradoxical character of the phenomenological project well. If we remember that the concept of “monad” expresses the subject’s apartness from other subjects, and the concept of “intersubjectivity” indicates the togetherness of the community of subjects, so it becomes clear that the required form of phenomenological experience should cover reciprocally-­exclusive moments. Husserl begins his Fifth Meditation with the words: As the point of departure for our new meditations, let us take what may seem to be a grave objection. The objection concerns nothing less than the claim of transcendental phenomenology to be itself transcendental philosophy and therefore its claim that, in the form of a constitutional problematic and theory moving within the limits of the transcendentally reduced ego, it can solve the transcendental problems about the Objective world. When I, the meditating I, reduce myself to my absolute transcendental ego by phenomenological

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epoche do I not become solus ipse; and do I not remain that, as long as I carry on a consistent self-explication under the name phenomenology? Should not a phenomenology that proposed to solve the problems of Objective being, and to present itself actually as philosophy, be branded therefore as transcendental solipsism? (Husserl 1999, 89)

The main problem that Husserl confronts here can be formulated as follows: in the stream of my transcendental consciousness, I must rediscover such intentionalities that constitute the subjectivity of another subject. As already mentioned, the problem is related to the procedure of transcendental reduction, which Husserl considers one of the main methodological procedures in phenomenology. According to Husserl: [t]ranscendental reduction restricts me to the stream of my pure conscious processes and the unities constituted by their actualities and potentialities. And indeed it seems obvious that such unities are inseparable from my ego and therefore belong to his concreteness itself. But what about other egos, who surely are not a mere intending and intended in me, merely synthetic unities of possible verification in me, but, according to their sense, precisely others? Have we not therefore done transcendental realism an injustice? The doctrine may lack a phenomenological foundation; but essentially it is right in the end since it looks for a path from the immanency of the ego to the transcendency of the Other. (Husserl 1999, 89)

In other words, at this stage of phenomenological research, it is necessary transcendentally (that is, first of all questioning the method of presentation) to consider those moments of the meaning of objectivity that are associated with an alter ego constitution. In the Fifth Meditation, asking how the meaning of the alter ego is constituted in his consciousness, Husserl tries to answer two closely related questions: 1. What are those moments of my phenomenological experience that distinguish a person from an object that appears in the field of my phenomena? 2. How can transcendental intersubjectivity function as a primitive constitutive community, i.e., as a condition for the possibility of adequate experience?

Primordial Reduction: Apartness in Togetherness Husserl notes that to answer these questions it is first necessary to understand, as clearly as possible, the scope of the original experience. For this, an additional “initial” reduction is used, which can be considered as a kind of “philosophical vaccination” like the vaccination programmes during the COVID-19 pandemic. He writes: As Ego in the transcendental attitude, I attempt first of all to delimit, within my horizon of transcendental experience, what is peculiarly my own. First I say that it is non-alien [Nicht-­ Fremdes]. I begin by freeing that horizon abstractively from everything that is at all alien. A property of the transcendental phenomenon “world” is that of being given in harmonious straightforward experience; accordingly, it is necessary to survey this world and pay attention to how something alien makes its appearance as jointly determining the sense of the world and, so far as it does so, to exclude it abstractively. Thus we abstract first of all from

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what gives men and brutes their specific sense as, so to speak, Ego-like living beings and consequently from all determinations of the phenomenal world that refer by their sense to “others” as Ego-subjects and, accordingly, presuppose these. For example, all cultural predicates. We can say also that we abstract from everything “other-spiritual” [Fremdgeistigen], as that which makes possible, in the “alien” or “other” that is in question here, its specific sense. (Husserl 1999, 95)

Thus, the phenomenologist’s attention is focused on what Husserl calls “the sphere of property” [Eigenheitssphäre] (Husserl 1999, 92). This sphere is my sphere of subjectivity with moments that belong only to me, such as my living body as the only body, my soul, and my Self – with all those experiences of me that are directed at the Other, but these experiences are without content. Such an exclusion is necessary for Husserl as a kind of vaccination: the removal of “everything ‘other-­ spiritual’” activates (and therefore makes more clearly perceived) specific phenomenological experiences in which the phenomenon of another subject, the alter ego, is manifested.

Empathy: Togetherness in Apartness The condition for the appearance of an Alter ego in the field of phenomena is a special mode of intentionality, which Husserl, following Theodor Lipps, calls “empathy” [Einfühlung] (Jahoda 2005). However, one should not lose sight of the fact that what Husserl means with this term has nothing in common with a vague experience or anything similar. To begin with, Husserl sees some similarity between empathy and remembrance: “Somewhat as my memorial past, as a modification of my living present, “transcends” my present, the appresented other being “transcends“my own being (in the pure and most fundamental sense: what is included in my primordial ownness).” (Husserl 1999, 115) Both in empathy and remembrance, I have to do with something that I can’t experience directly, but that is “co-present” with the “presentness” of me to myself. It is the specific form of intentionality, found in the stream of my intentional experiences, which provides the possibility to distinguish more clearly the difference between how I am given to myself and how I am given to the Other. First of all, this intentionality concerns the difference between the experience of my own body and the experience of another human body: my body is appearing to me as sensed and at the same time sensing, while the other body is given only as any sensed object. However, upon careful examination of the stream of my intentional experiences, I can observe that the intentionality that constitutes the bodily form of another person appearing in the field of my phenomena resembles the constitutive intentionality of my own bodily experience, although they do not coincide with this. To point out this similarity, Husserl complements the concept of “perception” with the concept of “co-perception” [Mitwahrnehmung]. By this concept, he denotes a kind of making present [Vergegenwärtigung] combined by associations with perception proper [eigentlichen Wahrnehmung] that is fused with the latter in the

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particular function of “co-perception”. In this way, Husserl writes: “the two are so fused that they stand within the functional community of one perception, which simultaneously presents and appresents, and yet furnishes for the total object a consciousness of its being itself there” (Husserl 1999, 122). The “making intended as co-present” Husserl designates by the term “appresentation” (Husserl 1999, 109). Аpplying this term to perception in general, it indicates that the perception of any object consists of two components – of the immediately-­ presented part and a part, which is co-presented (or appresented) and which Husserl calls “horizon”. The sides of a thing that are currently imperceptible can become perceptible because we change our location in space in such a way that it becomes possible to look at that thing from the other side. However, when a human being rather than a thing appears in our phenomenal field, we cannot change our location and so on in such a way that the conscious life of this person becomes perceptible to us. But this does not mean that we are not able to distinguish the perception of a thing from the perception of a person as a being with the same ability to perceive various objects in the world (including me). Husserl discovered that the consciousness of this distinction unfolds in steps, starting from a passive-associative synthesis based on the similarity between my physical body and the body of another human being appearing in my phenomenal field and leading to the empathic understanding of experiences at higher levels of the conscious life of another person as alter ego. In my awareness of the alter ego, the crucial moment is the basic connection between presentation and appresentation. The presentation in this case is the perception of an other’s body [Körper] appearing in my phenomenal field and proprioceptive and kinesthetic perception of my own lived body [Leib]. This is that necessary connection, the foundation on which the temporal and spatial coexistence of my and someone else’s ego is based. According to Husserl “[i]t is clear from the very beginning that only a similarity connecting, within my primordial sphere, that body over there with my body can serve as the motivational basis for the “analogizing” apprehension [analogisierende Auffassung] of that body as another animate organism.” (Husserl 1999, 111) So it is not surprising that appresentation “would lead over into the other original sphere” (Husserl 1999, 109). In this respect, one can say that appresentation is a specific way of understanding the otherness of the Other. I can apprehend the inner life of another person, as well as his characteristic manner of perceiving of the world, not through direct perception, but only by virtue of the appresentation of his movements, facial expressions and so on. Husserl characterizes the peculiarity of the nature of appresentation as follows: whereby a body within my primordial sphere, being similar to my own animate body, becomes apprehended as likewise an animate organism, we encounter first, the circumstance that here the primally institutive original is always livingly present, and the primal instituting itself is therefore always going on in a livingly effective manner; secondly, […] that what is appresented by virtue of the aforesaid analogizing can never attain actual presence, never become an object of perception proper. (Husserl 1999, 112)

It can be said that to the extent that the phenomenologist can recognize in the stream of his consciousness on himself this peculiar intentionality of the presentation, his apartness, he is no longer a monad in the Leibnizian sense: no longer a hermetic

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entity. Another possible association to avoid is the idea that presentation is based on inference. It is extremely important to emphasize that participation in intersubjectivity, which we enter into through the rediscovery of the moment of appresentation in the stream of our intentionality, has nothing to do with an inference or a kind of thinking act. Husserl emphasizes that “[e]very apperception in which we apprehend at a glance, and noticingly grasp, objects given beforehand [...] every apperception in which we understand their sense and its horizons forthwith, points back to a “primal instituting” [Urstiftung], in which an object with a similar sense became constituted for the first time.” (Husserl 1999, 111).

Pairing: Symmetry of Togetherness and Apartness Husserl begins the § 51 of Cartesian Meditations with the following crucial remark: If we attempt to indicate the peculiar nature of that analogizing apprehension whereby a body within my primordial sphere, being similar to my own animate body, becomes apprehended as likewise an animate organism, we encounter: first, the circumstance that here the primally institutive original is always livingly present, and the primal instituting itself is therefore always going on in a livingly effective manner; secondly, the peculiarity we already know to be necessary, namely that what is appresented by virtue of the aforesaid analogizing can never attain actual presence, never become an object of perception proper. Closely connected with the first peculiarity is the circumstance that ego and alter ego are always and necessarily given in an original ‘pairing’. (Husserl 1999, 112)

The word “pairing” seems to be a kind of keyword in Husserl’s concept of intersubjectivity. Explaining the meaning of this word Husserl writes: “Pairing is a primal form that passive synthesis which we designate as “association”, in contrast to passive synthesis of “identification”. In a pairing association, the characteristic feature is that [...] two data are given intuitionally, and with prominence, in the unity of consciousness and that, on this basis [...] as data appearing with mutual distinctness, they found phenomenologically a unity of similarity and thus are always constituted precisely as a pair.” (Husserl 1999, 112). The fact of appearance of the Other’s body in my primordial phenomenal field motivates the associative transfer of sense from my own body to the Other’s body. This transfer is possible because of similarities of both bodies, i.e. because they as a “pair” are together. But it is not the “togetherness” as simply opposition to the “apartness”. Both moments enter the state of fusion at the same time without losing their “apartness”. Husserl explains this paradoxical situation as follows: “Every overlapping-at-a-distance [Fernüberschiebung], which occurs by virtue of associative pairing [assoziative Paarung], is at the same time a fusion and therein, so far as incompatibilities do not interfere, an assimilation, an accommodation of the sense of the one member to that of the other” (Husserl 1999, 118). It is precisely because of this character of “fusion” that the ego of me and the alter ego of the other person now appear to each other as “together.” For each of us, our own body is “the zero body, the body in the absolute Here” [Nullkörper im

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absoluten Hier] (Husserl 1999, 123). On the contrary, the bodies of others always are Тhere and not Here. If we manage to experience this difference in a relevant phenomenological manner, it becomes clear that realizing this, we get evidence that the intentional givenness of my own body and intentional givenness of an alien body is different and given as apart. I can potentially take the place of another body in space thanks to my kinesthetic possibilities. Then I perceive the world from the position of the Other – as if I were where the body of the Other is now. Husserl writes: In this appresentation, therefore, the body in the mode There, which presents itself in my monadic sphere and is apperceived as another's live body (the animate organism of the alter ego) that body indicates ‘the same’ body in the mode Here, as the body experienced by the other ego in his monadic sphere. Moreover it indicates the ‘same’ body concretely, with all the constitutive intentionality pertaining to this mode of givenness in the other's experience. (Husserl 1999, 117)

Body movements are crucial here because the manner in which the other’s body manifests itself in the “There” mode does not pair directly with my body. Only through an interface of the possibilities of my own subjective movements associated with a potential change of place can the bodily movements of the other person be meaningful for me. As Husserl explains: Manifestly what has just now been brought to light points to the course of the association constituting the mode ‘Other’. The body that is a member of my primordial world (the body subsequently of the other ego) is for me a body in the mode There. Its manner of appearance does not become paired in a direct association with the manner of appearance actually belonging at the time to my animate organism (in the mode Here); rather it awakens reproductively another, an immediately similar appearance included in the system constitutive of my animate organism as a body in space. It brings to mind the way my body would look ‘if I were there’. (Husserl 1999, 117–118)

This means that although, as mentioned, there are some similarities between empathy and recollection, still this “awakening” does not lead to the observation of remembrance [Erinnerungs-Anschauung] but to a specific experience of pairing, in which another body appears as a unity of its manifestations. The primary step of the experience of the otherness creates a possibility of “assimilative apperception” [verähnlichende Apperzeption]. It is the apperception: “by which the external body over there receives analogically from mine the sense, animate organism, and consequently, the sense, organism belonging to another “world”, analogous to my primordial world” (Husserl 1999, 118). The other alive body is not a part of my primordial sphere. It has its specificity [Eigenheit], which I am given too through sensual perception. The alien body acquires a meaning of alter ego with the same transcendental and cognitive possibilities as mine. But the experience of “pairing” must be distinguished not only from the experience of memorizing but also from the experience of imagination or phantasy. So, trying to recognize in our stream of consciousness the intentionalities corresponding to the “pairing” we must remember that “[s]omething that exists is in intentional communion with something else that exists. It is an essentially unique connectedness, an actual community and precisely the one that makes transcendentally possible the being of a world, a world of men and things” (Husserl 1999, 129). So it can

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be said that the phenomenon of “pairing” is the experience sui generis, the essence of which is that the “apartness” and “togetherness” of subjects are experienced in their paradoxical unity.

How to Read Husserl in Pandemic Isolation? The situation in which we find ourselves due to the COVID-19 pandemic-induced lockdown resembles in many ways the situation in which the solipsistic subject of transcendental phenomenology lives. As we have seen, Husserl succeeded in discovering the moment of intersubjective “togetherness” in transcendental subjectivity itself. So the question arises: can Husserl’s analysis of intersubjectivity help to overcome the “solipsism” caused by coronavirus isolation? It seems that a lot here depends on how we will perceive the description of the path leading to “monadological intersubjectivity” presented in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. For many readers of Husserl’s texts it may look as if he is trying to explain how phenomenological subjectivity functions, how it generates structures of sense and so on. It may seem that the problem of overcoming solipsism only occupies Husserl as “puzzle-solving” (Thomas S. Kuhn), i.e. as a purely theoretical problem whose solution is motivated by the discrepancy discovered between some theoretical concepts. In other words, it might seem that the goal Husserl strives for is to give the theory he is developing a coherent, consistent form. Indeed, one might think that the problem of solipsism arises from the fact that, striving for distinctness and clarity, Husserl gives phenomenology the form of transcendental idealism; in other words he focuses all his attention on experiencing meaning from a first-person perspective and therefore overlooks those aspects of phenomenological experience that make it possible to adequately perceive other people. But is such a reading of Husserl’s text the only possible one? The authors of this chapter suggest reading Husserl’s work differently. Namely, not as a description of “the mechanism of consciousness” but rather as prescription, following which we must exercise in conscious experiencing our subtle intentions that constitute the Other. It can be said that the concept of “pairing” indicates a set of specific experiences in which the paradoxical unity of “apartness” and “togetherness” is realized. These experiences are quite difficult to detect precisely because observing the flow of our own experiences, we are under the influence of our habit of perceiving any content through the prism of binary oppositions. Therefore, it seems to us that “togetherness” and “apartness” are reciprocally-exclusive moments. However, Husserl’s idea of ​​primordial reduction should help us tune our attention in such a way that the paradoxical unity of “apartness” and “togetherness” becomes the content of evident experience. If we manage to carry out this reduction (and this is a rather difficult task), then in the stream of constituting moments of solipsistic subjectivity, the moments of the Other’s subjectivity begin to be highlighted. In other words, the initial “apartness” of the solipsistic ego reveals in itself the moments of “togetherness” with the Other and vice versa. And this is no longer a purely

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theoretical construction, but a concrete experience of living consciousness. It seems to be possible that such a reading of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation could be helpful by recognizing a deeper form of our togetherness inside our pandemic-induced apartness.

Conclusion With the introduction of phenomenological (transcendental) reduction, Husserl creates a “lonely subject”. Such “phenomenological loneliness” has a resemblance to the ‘forced apartness’ of the COVID-19 pandemic, when social life is limited and all of us must keep socially distanced. Considering that, the forced apartness in the COVID-19 pandemic appears (although it may sound strange) as a chance for each of us to become a phenomenologist. Husserl declares that real phenomenology starts with being single. But all this does not lead us to a confirmation that “everybody lives and dies alone or apart from each other”. The main aim of Husserl’s phenomenological project is to change our mind; our attunement to the world. Developing the idea of intersubjectivity Husserl proposes that we become more attentive to phenomena and to understand better – or more clearly – that despite being apart during the pandemic, we still can “feel” the Other as we “feel” ourselves. It means, that “being apart” always includes “being together” and vice versa. It seems that Husserl’s proposed modification of our attention can help us overcome the feelings of alienation caused by pandemic social isolation and revive our togetherness with others. But in order to verify this, it is necessary that each of us, apart from each other, tries to reproduce in our own consciousness the transformations described by Husserl in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation.

Works Cited Husserl, Edmund. 1931. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson. London: George Allen&Unwin LTD; New York: The Macmillan Company. ———. 1965. Erste Philosophie (1923–24). Zweiter Teil. Theorie der Phänomenologischen Reduktion. Hrsg. R.Boehm. Husserliana Bd.VIII.  Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1973a. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Erster Teil (1905–1920). Hrsg. I.Kern. Husserliana Bd.XIII. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———. 1973b. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Zweiter Teil (1921–1928). Hrsg. I.Kern. Husserliana Bd.XIV. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———. 1973c. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Zweiter Teil (1929–1935). Hrsg. I.Kern. Husserliana Bd.XV. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———. 1999. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. D.Cairns. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2001. Logical Investigations. Vol 1. Trans. J.  N. Findley. London and New  York: Routledgee.

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Jahoda, Gustav. 2005. Theodor Lipps and the Shift from ‘Sympaty‘ to ‘Empathy‘. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41 (2): 151–163. Kovacs, Balazs, Caplan Nicholas, Grob Samuel, and King Marisa. 2021. Social Networks and Loneliness During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 7: 1–16. Lagoy, Julian. 2021. COVID-19 Loneliness. Psychiatric Times, May 13, 2021. https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/covid-­19-­loneliness Peng, Siyun, and Adam R.  Roth. 2021. Social Isolation and Loneliness Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Longitudinal Study of U.S.  Adults Older Than 50. Journals of Gerontology. Series B XX (XX): 1–6. Zahavi, Dan. 2003. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Varieties of Distancing Experience Velga Vēvere

The world experienced comes at all times with our body as its center, center of vision, center of action, center of interest. —William James

Abstract  The pandemic of COVID-19 has actualized the problem of body self-­ perception during lockdowns, social distancing and working from home. The aim of this chapter is to describe the distancing experience through the concepts and techniques of proprioception and somatic introspection. We believe that we currently witness the shift of philosophy towards the ecological conception of ego (ecology to be understood in the broad sense as specific – natural, social, cultural, economic – placement of ego) and at the same time return to earlier, pre-Husserlian developments of phenomenology, like William James’s radical empiricism. The chapter consists of two main parts. The first section is devoted to the body positioning in the place and movement in relation to the surrounding objects (proprioception, according to M. Merleau-Ponty). How to approach my personal experience of distance? Is it unique or co-constituted? The second section concentrates upon the internal perception (body scan, according to W.  James). Although a concept of somatic or bodily experience does not lie at the heart of James’s psychological and philosophical investigations, we can still find in there explications relevant to the current theme, especially the ones related to his interpretation of the ‘pure experience’ and ‘stream of thought’. Keywords  Distancing · Distance teaching · Somatic introspection · Proprioception · William James · Maurice Merleau-Ponty

V. Vēvere (*) University of Latvia, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Riga, Latvia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_20

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The times of hardship, like in today’s global pandemic situation, illuminate questions of Man’s fragility, vulnerability, and mortality. These themes are anything but new in the history of Western philosophy. Let us mention here a few insights into the problem, like being-in-the-world, anxiety and care in Martin Heidegger, fear and anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, the gaze of the other in Jean-Paul Sartre, the decentering of subjectivity and passive exposure in Emmanuel Levinas, the vulnerability of the body in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, etc. It is not surprising though, that all philosophers mentioned are somewhat tied to the existential and tradition that presupposes particular; that is, an anxiety-permeated Man-centered view of the world. Thus, for both Heidegger and Kierkegaard, anxiety constitutes the fundamental condition of the birth of Man’s self-awareness (distinction from the world). Anxiety is the first experience of our freedom, as a freedom from things and other people; it is a freedom to begin to become oneself. To illustrate this let’s compare the following statements: “That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the world as such. What is the difference phenomenally between that in the face of which anxiety is anxious and that in the face of which fear is afraid? That in the face of which one has anxiety is not an entity within-the world” (Heidegger 1985, 230–231) and “Freedom’s possibility announces itself in anxiety” (Kierkegaard 1980, 74). Sartre, in his turn, talks about the ontological anxiety that arises from the objectifying gaze of the other (Sartre 2021, 135). Levinas’ concern, as he states in his “Otherwise than Being”, lies with the ethics of vulnerability stemming from the decentered subjectivity. He writes: The passivity of the exposure responds to an assignation that identifies me as the unique one, not by reducing me to myself, but by stripping me of every identical quiddity, and thus of all form, all investiture, which would still slip into the assignation. The saying signifies this passivity; (…) This being torn up from oneself in the core of one’s unity, this absolute non-coinciding, this diachrony of the instant, signifies in the form of one-penetrated-by the-­other (…) the subjectivity of a subject is vulnerability, exposure to affection, sensibility, a passivity more passive still than any passivity, an irrecuperable time, as an unassemamble diachrony of patience, an exposedness always to be exposed the more, an exposure to expressing, and thus to saying, thus to giving. (Levinas 1981, 50)

Merleau-Ponty in his 1945 masterpiece Phenomenology of Perception compares two interpretations of subjectivity in relation to vulnerability, one of them being an invulnerable subjectivity in the face of transcendental consciousness, while another can be defined as a sort of inner weakness or ‘thrownness into the world’: My freedom, that fundamental power I have of being the subject of all of my experiences, is not distinct from my insertion in the world. I am destined to be free, to be unable to reduce myself to any of my experiences, to maintain with regard to every factual situation a faculty of withdrawal, and this destiny was sealed the moment that my transcendental field was opened, the moment I was born as vision and as knowledge, the moment I was thrown into the world. (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 377)

All these philosophers are reflecting on the bareness of the fact of human existence, the fact that becomes obvious – even too obvious – during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the midst of which we are compelled to reside today. The paradox lies in the fact that this heightened sense of vulnerability, fragility and mortality calls for the

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highest individual responsibility. We believe that we currently witness the shift of philosophy towards the ecological conception of ego (ecology to be understood in the broad sense as the specific – natural, social, cultural, economic – placement of ego). This, in its turn, calls for revisiting works in descriptive psychology/phenomenology by William James, paying a special attention to the problem of internal experience or experiences. Yet other aspects to be taken into consideration are the ones of distancing (self-­ isolation), distance education, online interaction, touch and bodily contacts (or their lack thereof). What does it mean to teach philosophy online? Despite the variety of available (and actively used for more than a year during several lockdown periods) digital platforms, such as Zoom, Teams, Webex, Skype and their technical possibilities (breakout groups, presentations, seminars, shared screens, tests, webinars, background photos, etc.) there is a lack of personal interaction. Of course, it depends on the personality of a lecturer and the size of the group, but still there is or can be the sense of empty space behind the screen (on the part of lecturers) and difficulties to follow the stream of words and images (on the part of students), especially if the lectures get carried away and keep going on and on. Silence as a phenomenon of distancing, whether voluntary or involuntary, generates entirely new bodily experiences by all parties involved. The expression “to stay in touch” now can be read literally, not metaphorically as we have become used to do. The aim of the present chapter is to analyze the forementioned type of distancing experience on the basis of such concepts as proprioception (or body awareness, or kinesthesia) and somatic introspection (or somaesthetics). But prior to this let us dwell shortly on the concepts of distance and proximity in philosophy.

Distancing and Body Positioning How do we come to know one another? Would this be possible if there wasn’t some distance? What should we do if the distance, whether physical or temporal, is large? Are we still able to close the gap, assuming that there is any. How should I approach my personal experience of distance? Is it unique or co-constituted? Answers to these questions have been sought by a fair number of philosophers. It is not our aim to follow through the theme of proximity and distance meticulously, but rather to pinpoint some lines of interpretation significant for the current research. Distance plays a number of important roles in Kierkegaard’s communication conception. First, it is a biographical self-staging tool, which allows us to look at the author’s life as a work of art, forcing the reader to move from the oeuvre to the author, not vice versa, thus creating a gap between the author and the text. Second, it creates a situation of an existential shock of not understanding the authorial intention. Third, distance is a part and parcel of Kierkegaard’s existential communication, resulting in the birth of ‘the authentic self’. Distance serves as an alienating (but positive) factor, which, by causing confusion, leads to understanding. The process of moving away brings author and reader closer.

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V. Vēvere For example, it is indirect communication to place jest and earnestness together in such a way that the composite is a dialectical knot - and then to be a nobody oneself. Or, to bring attack and defense into a unity in such a way that no-one can directly say whether one is attacking or defending, so that the most zealous supporter of the cause and its most vicious foe can both seem in one an ally – and then to be nobody oneself; an absentee, an objective something, a nonperson. (Kierkegaard 1991, 133)

For Kierkegaard, the source of disharmony is the internal, therefore the act of communication is directed towards self-identity as its ideal goal. Since the goal is always unattainable (an ideal) and changing it the way man chooses that which counts for him. Besides that, we have to mention the asymmetry of the communication. Namely, the initiator of communication (the locutor) is the only one who knows the prospective case scenario, arranges the whole process in the direction of confusion as to what all this communication is about. Then it is a matter of the collocutor’s choice to follow the path towards the unknown that has been laid out by somebody, or to swerve away from that path altogether. Kierkegaard’s vision of dialogue presupposes a distance, an avoidance of identification with the Other. At first glance his position on distance and distancing seems almost similar to that of Emmanuel Levinas when he talks about transcendence of the Other. But is this so? For Levinas the radical distance is retained in the questioning gaze: The relationship of language implies transcendence, radical separation, the strangeness of interlocutors, and the revelation of the other to me. (Levinas 1991, 86)

In his view the relation of the Self with the Other does not form a simple correlation that could be reversed under circumstances. Rather, this radical break means that it is impossible to place oneself outside this correlation. If this wouldn’t be so then the Same and the Other could be included in one and the same gaze, and the absolute distance would be closed. This, in turn, would put into question the very sovereignty of the Other. Levinas writes: the Other remains innately transcendent, innately foreign: his face in which epiphany is produced and which appeals to me breaks with the world that can be common to us, whose virtualities are inscribed in our nature and developed by our existence. Speech proceeds from absolute difference. (Levinas 1991, 231)

Levinas, like Kierkegaard, speaks of a traumatism of astonishment related to the discourse as experience of something absolutely alien. But the difference between them lies in the fact that for Kierkegaard the source of disharmony is internal. It does not grow out of the transcendental dichotomy of the Self/the Other, but is the existential precondition necessary for the birth of an authentic individual. Whereas for Levinas, the gap between the Self and the Other though unbridgeable (as determined by the absolute transcendence of the Other) could be made meaningful by the initial welcoming of the Other and conversation. For Levinas, the gap between the Self and the Other is unbridgeable (as determined by the absolute transcendence of the Other) but could be made meaningful by the initial welcoming of the Other leading up to the dialogue.

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Merleau-Ponty speaks about the role of the distance (the “difference”, as he calls it) in human relations, or – more accurately – about the bare necessity of it, since to be able to recognize somebody or something as ‘Other/It/He/She’ should be somewhat removed. At the same time, the Other should be near enough to be recognizable. Though the process of recognition can go wrong in both ways, if the distance is non-existent, the Otherness disappears entirely and the act of knowing the Other turns into pure self-reflection. Merleau-Ponty admits in Phenomenology of Perception: If my consciousness constituted the world that it perceives at this moment, there would be no distance between it and that world, and between them no interval would be possible; my consciousness would penetrate the world all the way to its most secret articulations, intentionality would transport us to the heart of the object, and in the same stroke the perceived would not have the thickness of a present, and consciousness would become neither lost nor ensnared in the perceived. On the contrary, we are conscious of an inexhaustible object and we get bogged down in it because, between it and us, there is this latent knowledge that our gaze uses, of which we merely presume that rational development is possible, and that always remains prior to perception. (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 247)

On the other hand, according to Merleau-Ponty, enlargement of the distance makes the Other disappear in a different way – we do not know anything about it (we cannot think of something we do not know as ‘an object to be thought of’). The distance between me and the object is not a size that increases or decreases, but rather a tension that oscillates around a norm. The oblique orientation of the object in relation to me is not measured by the angle that it forms with the plane of my face, but rather experienced as a disequilibrium, as an unequal distribution of its influences upon me. (Ibid., 316)

The result of such distancing is a feeling of confusion; an alienation leading to the final indifference. Thus, to be recognizable one needs to be far enough to be perceived as something different from oneself, while at the same time, close enough to be seen. In both cases distance and distancing play a crucial role. This leads to the next question; of body positioning in space and the sense of movement – or its mere possibility. This phenomenon has been described as proprioception or kinaesthetics. The grounds for its analysis have been laid by Brian O’Shaugnessy. According to him, proprioception is a system of spatial ordering with the self (the body) at its center. Proprioceptive awareness is neither allocentric (including information about the location of one object in relation to other objects or their parts), nor egocentric (including information about the location of objects in relation to the perceiving subject or ego). Rather it is a kind of non-perspectival self-­ awareness; that is, self-awareness that only implicitly depends on other objects (or bodies) within a field of vision. In order to explain this, O’Shaugnessy employs an example of a touch. He states that “in absolutely every instance of tactile perception an awareness of one’s own body stands between one and awareness of the tactile object. And so the sense of touch must depend on proprioception, as not vice versa. Therefore whether or not proprioception is absolutely immediate, it must be immediate in ways not open to tactile perception” (O’Shaugnessy 1998, 176). In other words, our ability to perceive something or somebody using taste is possible if we

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have a proprioceptive sense beforehand of my fingers. Shaun Gallagher aligns with this train of thought. He points out: “Proprioceptive awareness does not organize the differential spatial order of the body around an origin. Whereas one can say that this book is closer to me than that book over there, one cannot say that my foot is closer to me than my hand” (Gallagher 2005, 352). Proprioceptive self-awareness can be characterized as pre-reflective, marginal and pre-conscious, not directed towards an object and hence non-intentional by its character (Gallagher 2006). Perhaps one of the most concise definitions of proprioception in phenomenology is given by Shaun Gallaher and Dan Zahavi as “a ‘pre-reflective sense of myself as embodied’” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, 155). Then the question is how this pre-reflective body awareness is given to itself as a subject, since the lived body is not only immersed in surrounding environment, but also structures the experience itself and assigns the meaning to it: “To be situated in the world means not simply to be located someplace in a physical environment, but to be in rapport with circumstances that are bodily meaningful” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, 156). Proprioceptive awareness provides immediate experiential access to the embodied self that is engaged in the spatially and socially contextualized actions or movements. Phenomenologists deem this the proprioceptive and kinaesthetic awareness of the body in action. In this way the body shapes the environment as much as the environment compels the body to make the necessary spatial adjustments: to move around objects, to hold a cup of coffee clasping your hands around it in a certain way so as not to spill the drink, etc. Do we calculate each and every phase of our leg and hand movements while moving? Perhaps to a certain point yes, but mostly these movements are automatic in their nature: our postural and positional senses are tacit, below the surface of consciousness. “The possibilities that my body enables, and that define the environment as a world of affordances, just as much as those activities that my body prevents or limits  – these are aspects of embodiment that I live with, and live through, and that define the environment as situations of meaning and circumstances for action” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, 156). But what happens if we are compelled to stay put for a certain amount of time due to ‘reasons’ such as, for example: incarceration, prolonged hospital stays, physical immobility or pandemic lockdown? In all cases this entails inevitable changes in the environment and its perception, as well as in body self-awareness and kinaesthetic perception. Everything becomes experientially different and gains an entirely new significance when situated at arm’s length, when ordinary objects play a life-­ structuring role – they become existential events. Our morning cup of coffee is not only the start of a productive (or non-productive) period at our computer but signifies the passing from one mental state to another: from resting mode to working. Our home clothes miraculously turn into a formal apparel, if, of course, our work does not involve face-to-face meetings. But what if our working day has to be spent in front of the camera, as if we are participants in some kind of reality TV show? What does it mean to be ‘here and now’? What is our body positioning when entering a virtual classroom? Are we still here or already there, here and there simultaneously? Is it me I am seeing talking on the screen or is this my other-me? Is that person my double; my avatar? Apart from

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the geometrical or physical distancing between me and objects, there exists “a lived distance”, a space filled with things of significance for me. I thrive or die within this space depending on my ability to make this meaningful  – or not. As the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty puts it like this: “At each moment, this distance measures the “scope” of my life” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 299). Thus a computer screen and a keyboard as artificial extensions of my body become measurements of my pandemic life. I am nothing without them: I am mute, blind and actually non-existent for others. This process of distancing can be described as a ‘situational spatiality’. As Merleau-Ponty said: “When the word “here” is applied to my body, it does not designate a determinate the spatiality of one’s own body and motricity position in relation to other positions or in relation to external coordinates. It designates the installation of the first coordinates, the anchoring of the active body in an object, and the situation of the body confronted with its tasks” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 102–103). Then what about a distance between the online presenter (speaker, moderator) and the virtual audience? Those taking part in the virtual conversation must decide whether to connect their microphones and switch on their cameras, or whether they prefer not to. When participants turn off their cameras, are they still there? Silence acts as a marker of distancing; as demarcation of the personal space facilitated by the actual physical isolation (of working from home) and by the possibility of not having to leave the zone of silence in work meetings (with some listening passively, some perhaps mocking actual presence silently). This phenomenon also points to the paradoxical nature of speech. In speech we use words with preconceived meanings, but in the process of speaking we both strengthen and destabilize these meanings at the same time. If when we speak we hear only our own voice, without knowing whether anyone is listening to us (though we might hope so), then the voice becomes an echo, and meaning shifts take place in the very process of speaking. The voice of the interlocutor makes us listen but can’t make us hear the things said. The voice can be muted or switched off altogether, so those at home can distance themselves and get on with personal things: not paying attention to the speaker whatsoever. The catch is that the speaker may not know that and continues, talking into the abyss of silence with no-one listening. The distance becomes almost eternal. The only sound you can hear is your own voice. This phenomenon has been described as autoecholalia by Bernhard Waldenfels. He writes: “The echo appears as an acoustic version of the looking-glass effect. We hear ourselves speaking although we are the ones who are speaking. Here we find the case of autoecholalia” (Waldenfels 2011, 50). Now the Other is being perceived as one’s double, so the distance is at the same time forever eliminated and forever unbridgeable, since the distinction between the Self and the Other has disappeared, at least in the situation in question (i.e., online teaching and learning in the pandemic). But how do we experience this distancing phenomenon? One way to answer this question from a phenomenologist’s point of view is to turn to William James’s archaeology of experience.

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Distancing and Somatic Introspection Although the concept of somatic or bodily experience does not lie at the heart of James’s psychological and philosophical investigations, we can still find in there explications relevant to the current theme, especially the ones related to his interpretation of ‘pure experience’ and the ‘stream of thought’. To state the arguments briefly: first, the pure experience in James overall can be characterized as something pre-conceptual, pre-reflexive and thus somatic by its nature; second, discussions on the stream of thought/the flux of consciousness and its fringes are inevitably intertwined with the problem of intentionality. Thus, conceptions of pure experience and the stream of thought can be used as methodological tools for analysis of the somatic experience (body consciousness, as James puts it) of distancing. One of the authors who has particularly turned toward the body philosophy of William James is Richard Schusterman (Shusterman 2005, 2008). In phenomenology, in general, the somatic experience has traditionally been described as the hyletic experience. Angela Ales Bello in her article The sense of things. A reflection starting from Husserl delineates the hyletic and noetic fields on the basis of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. She explains that: “[...] sensations are immediately located in the body. They permit human beings to immediately intuit their living bodies [Leib] as their own bodies, as subjective objectivities, which are distinguished from a purely material ‘body proper’ by means of a layer of localized sensations. This layer of localized sensation, which is “difficult to analyze and illustrate”, forms the material substrate of the life of desire and the will; they are the sensations of tension and the release of energy; sensations of internal inhibition, paralysis and liberation. Intentional functions then, are connected to this layer of sensation. Materiality takes on a spiritual function, as is the case for primary sensations that form part of the perceptions upon which perceptual judgements are formed” (Ales Bello 2015, 17). According to this insight, the hyletic moment brings along the noetic one, it already exhibits an intentional structure “that permits it to present itself in a configured or structural way” (Bello 2015, 21). One of the ways to disclose this intentional structure, temporary in its nature, is through somatic introspection. This problem has been tackled by William James. Though somatic experience is not the central theme of his works, the introspection without any doubt is. Let us mention an example here: “Introspective observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always. [...] That we have cogitations of some sort is the inconcussum in a world most of whose other facts have at same time tottered in the breadth of philosophical doubt” (James 1950, 185). The use of the Latin term inconcussum bears a certain significance since it designates something unshaken, firm. In James’s opinion, thus, the results of introspection can be distilled, measured and compared. At the same time it would be an overstatement to claim that James insists on the possibility of the total explication of deep structures. Instead he offers a set of introspective techniques, that could be seen as the Jamesian, quite idiosyncratic version of phenomenological description with a subsequent

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phenomenological reduction. Here though, we have to note that James does not use the concepts of description and reduction, but rather researchers are assigning those concepts to James by proxy. Is this approach justified? Maybe not, strictly speaking, but we still believe that James, especially in his late writing, exercises a phenomenological mode of reasoning. Nevertheless, it has to be noted that detectable differences exist between what can be called the ‘early James’ and the ‘later James’, or more precisely, between his analysis of experience in The Principles of Psychology (published in 1890) and in Essays in Radical Empiricism – a collection of essays written between the years 1904 and 1905 (posthumously published in 1912 by his colleague and biographer B. R. Perry). If in The Principles of Psychology his concern is experience viewed through the lens of the stream of consciousness, then in Essays in Radical Empiricism he turns towards thought’s objects and pure experience. The first perspective is inspired by an empirical psychology; the second by the philosophical investigations of intuitionists, paying great attention to aspects of temporality and intentionality of consciousness and the problem of pure experience. Despite the shift (though not a strict break in the chronological sense), both introspection and the thought’s object analyses are directed against intellectualism as well as the “mind-stuff” theory of classical empiricism. James first tries to proceed by the introspection of the mental acts in order to correlate them with their causes, but comes to the conclusion that in the end, all he gets is the object as it appears in experience and only there. What is immediately present is not the mind itself but rather its object. “In its pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-splitting of it into consciousness and what the consciousness is ‘of’” (James 1996, 23). In chap. IX of The Principles of Psychology James describes five characteristics of thought. The first characteristic refers to the relative isolation of the individual mind performing the act of thinking, and at the same time it refers to the possible plurality of different experiences and different actors. The second characteristic deals with the constant changes happening within the stream of thought and the object perception thereof. Thus, for example, our experience of distance and distancing varies according to our mental disposition and/or situatedness regarding particular objects to be perceived. In other words, the same object cannot be perceived exactly in the same way twice. “For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same fact” (James 1950, 233). The third description of the stream of thought touches upon the continuity and discontinuity of experience; that is, the division of it into meaningful temporal sequences, where each ‘after-consciousness’ moment belongs together with the respective ‘before-consciousness’ moment mediated by the somatic feelings of vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch, and by the sense of positioning of oneself in the space. The fourth characteristic of the stream of thought touches upon a problem of ‘sameness’ and ‘otherness’ in terms of thought and its object. The fifth and last description of the stream of thought regards the selective character of attention, both in the psychological (a span of attention) and philosophical (live and dead hypotheses) sense. All in all in The Principles of Psychology James concludes that

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upon introspection we find the temporal succession of consciousness being the continuous stream. When talking of the Jamesian vision of introspection it is also necessary to mention his conception of the constituents of Self. According to him, there are the following constituents: (a) the material Self; (b) the social Self; (c) the spiritual Self and (d) the pure Ego. In the context of the present discussion the most significant aspect is the one of the material Self. He writes: “The innermost part of the material Self in each of us; and certain parts of the body, seem more intimately ours than the rest” (Ibid., 292). This, in its turn, accounts for Self-feelings and Self-perception. But then the question arises if are there any specific techniques of introspection in James. It seems that the answer does not lie on the surface at all, since James himself admits the existence of introspective difficulties. From the viewpoint of sensualists (i.e., empiricists) the difficulty is due to the fact that they are unable to lay hands on the feeling of relation, and therefore deny them all. Intellectualists (rationalists like Descartes and Kant), on the other hand, have to admit that relations are impossible to grasp by the means of reason that inevitably encounters its limitations. Entirely different plane. In other words, neither sensualists nor intellectualists are able to grasp the conjunctive relations; that is, to perform the act of introspection. Still, despite these difficulties, there are some reflections in The Principles of Psychology that can be deemed introspective techniques, which, it seems, partly overlap with analysis of the stream of consciousness; but only partially. Here we can agree with Richard Shusterman who states: “Though James does not formulate them systematically, five distinct introspective strategies can be discerned in his discussions of attention, discrimination, and perception” (Schusterman 2005, 426). Let us dwell on the Jamesian techniques of somatic introspection briefly. First, in the beginning the person performing the introspection has to specify the questions to be asked or, rather ask them in the new key – digging deeper, that is., asking a series of questions, because, in James’s view, ‘novel’ questions (or a series of questions thereof) can change the view of the object itself; in fact, here we see the technique of phenomenological description. James illustrates this by a description of questions regarding breathing as a somatic phenomenon (for example: is the breathing shallow or deep, rapid or slow, etc.). Second, the technique of constant internal body scanning, typically with the eyes closed, moving from one bodily feeling to another. The third technique is the stimulation of certain senses, or concentrating upon them in order to analyze the process of self-perception afterwards. The fourth approach involves blunting the external sensual stimuli and the fifth and final strategy is of anticipation of perception or ‘pre-perception’. Here James gives an example of someone waiting for a distant clock to strike. This moment of waiting is so filled with its anticipatory images that the illusion of sound can arise. In other words, one can almost hear the bells ringing before they really do. “The image in the mind is the attention; the pre-perception [...] is half of the perception of the looked-for thing” (James 1950, 442). Here, it seems, James comes close to the concept of proprioception discussed earlier in the chapter because he relates this feeling of anticipation with a prior organic adjustment in that place.

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Thus, there is no denying the fact that the mind is filled with necessary relations which it finds between certain of its ideal conceptions, and which form a determinate system, independent of the order of frequency in which experience may have associated the conception’s originals in time and space. “The objective nucleus of every man’s experience, his own body, is, it is true, a continuous percept; and equally continuous as a percept (though we may be inattentive to it) is the material environment of that body, changing by gradual transition when the body moves” (James 1996, 65). But we need to look further into the division line (or field) between ‘the external’ and ‘the internal’ when talking of Man’s experience of the world and the self within this world. Another concept that can be key to understanding James’s philosophy of body is that of pure experience. It has to be admitted though that it is rather ambiguous by its nature, like the majority of Jamesian terms. It can bear a temporal significance as the instant field of actuality, as the presence is not divided into ‘thing’ and ‘thought’ as yet. At the same time the concept of pure experience designates the field of pre-­ reflective, pre-thematized experiences. Any feeling or sensation tends to fill itself with emphasis and becomes fixed in a verbal form; therefore, pure experience in this sense is what remains – the unverbalized sensations. And if we remember that the objective nucleus of Man’s experience is his own body, then these unverbalized, pre-thematized sensations are the somatic initial reactions to external occurrences. James writes: “The instant field of the present is at all times I call ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain unqualified actuality, or existence: a simple that” (Ibid., 23). This existence is permeated by bodily sensations, not reflected as yet. There is no doubt that life and work under the conditions of COVID-19 entail and prompt ever-new questions regarding body self-perception related to positioning in the place (often static and not changing throughout the whole day, i.e., in front of a computer screen), with a lack of bodily contact (touching, for instance), and a lack of oxygen due to spending all day inside; tiredness due to talking all day to virtual images of others with minimal or limited feedback (discussed above as ‘the problem of silence’). We can say this is nothing new, since those types of professions existed long before the pandemic (computer specialists among them), but still the situation is radically different now, (that is, since 2020) because of repeated lockdowns and the labour force working from home en masse. This makes it possible to compare body experiences among different interlocutors. What can the internal body scan reveal regarding the distancing experience? According to James, it should be performed with eyes closed in order to concentrate upon the internal experience. In this particular case, during lockdown this process could seemingly be easier to perform, since we are already on our own. At the same time, this forced process of ‘self-isolation while being together virtually’ can also make introspection quite problematic since the status of always being connected, always being in plain view, robs us of the sense of privacy. Of course, we can hide behind an avatar or a photograph at certain moments, but the teaching process itself requires our actual screen presence. This makes the internal body scan even more

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urgent since we have to access our state of mind; to concentrate on our current bodily feelings, gradually moving from one sense to another, reflecting on this experience afterwards and conceptualizing the result. The phenomenological description of our distancing experience calls first of all for the anticipatory awareness of body feelings (pre-perception), followed afterwards by mental images and thematization of the somatic experiences. It seems that the pandemic situation with the accompanying involuntary/voluntary isolation actualizes the problem of self-perception within the environment by means of the body. Is this situation something new, or rather a return to some past ways of thinking in phenomenology? Paradoxically enough, we can answer both questions positively and simultaneously. On one hand, we can agree with Ella Buceniece who has stated in her article Phenomenology as Ecology: Movement from Ego- to Geo- and Eco-Thinking (Buceniece 2018) that we are currently witnessing a paradigm shift in phenomenology away from the transcendental Ego and toward the world, reality and immanence and toward the Earth and Cosmos, i.e., eco-phenomenology. On the other hand though, prompted by the pandemic situation, there is growing interest in Franz Brentano’s empirical psychology and William James’s radical empiricism; and this signifies the return to the Self via recognition of the living and lived reality of space, place and embodiment. This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project No. lzp-­ 2020/2r0085 “Development of Eco-Phenomenology in the Situation of Pandemic”.

Works Cited Bello Ales, Angela. 2015. The Sense of Things. A Reflection Starting from Husserl. Archivio di Filosofia 83 (3): 15–26. Buceniece, Ella. 2018. Phenomenology as Ecology: Movement from Ego- to Geo- and Eco-­ Thinking. In Eco-Phenomenology: Life, Human Life, Post-Human Life in the Harmony of the Cosmos, ed. William S. Smith, Jadwiga S. Smith, Daniela Verducci, and Analecta Husserliana, vol. CXXI, 225–234. Chan: Springer. Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2012. The Phenomenological Mind. London\New York: Routledge. Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. The Intrinsic Spatial Frame of Reference. In A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Mark A. Wrathall, and M.A. Malden, 346–355. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Heidegger, Martin. 1985. Being and Time. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. James, William. 1950. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Dover Publications. ———. 1996. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Lincoln\London: University of Nebraska Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1980. The Concept of Anxiety. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1991. Practice in Christianity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levinas, Emanuel. 1981. Otherwise than Being or, Beyond Essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge. O'Shaugnessy, Brian. 1998. Proprioception and the Body Image. In The Body and the Self, ed. José Luis Bermúdez, Anthony Marcell, and Naomi Eilan, 175–205. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sartre, Jean Paul. 2021. Being and Nothingness. An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. New York: Washington Square Press. Schusterman, Richard. 2005. William James, Somatic Introspection, and Care of the Self. The Philosophical Forum. 36 (4): 419–440. ———. 2008. Body Consciousness. A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2011. Phenomenology of the Alien. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

The Human Condition of Terror: Radiation, Terrorism, Viruses Māris Kūlis

Abstract  The aim of this chapter is to outline the use of phenomenological and hermeneutic ideas in terrorism studies through the reinterpretation of ‘terrorism’ as ‘terror’. The chapter will first consider contemporary trends in the methodology of terrorism studies and the shortcomings to be found. Current mainstream terrorism studies can be divided into two major directions but there is a third option available for terrorism studies, one that would employ ideas of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Eco-phenomenology would look at narratives and meanings as they appear over the horizon of history and culture. The introduction of phenomenology and hermeneutics in terrorism studies would cause a conceptual shift that should return the focus to the fundamental element of terrorism — that of terror. The final part of the chapter will illustrate this approach using some instances of terror (the atomic bomb and radiation; military terrorism and a virus) by expanding and commenting on phenomenologically-observable shifts in meaning: with chemical and nuclear weapons ‘breath’ becomes a threat; with military terrorism and counter-terrorism ‘sky’ becomes a source of danger, while a virus lands threats on ‘surfaces’. The development of thought from terrorism studies to the pandemic is a reflection of an eco-phenomenological idea viewing the environment as imbued with meanings and ideas rather than a material totality. Keywords  Terror · Terrorism · Atomic bomb · Radiation · Virus · Methodology · Narratives

M. Kūlis (*) University of Latvia, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Riga, Latvia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9_21

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The Current Research into ‘Terrorism’ and Not ‘Terror’ When one looks back at the events of the twentieth and twenty-first Century reasonable concern might arise that sustaining a condition of horror is as natural a part of human life as joy and sorrow. At least three narratives that deal with emergent terror conditions – externally diverse yet similar in their essence – have moved to the forefront on a global and societal level: the first one is radiation and nuclear war, the second is military terrorism and the war against it, and the third one is viruses and biological threats. At the same time the field of terrorism studies, imbued with the ideas of modern political sciences, often defines terrorism as a militarised form of political violence aimed not so much at its direct victims as at some third party or witnesses of terrorism in order to intimidate them and thus achieve political changes (Walter 1969). It should be noted that notions of ‘terrorism’, ‘political violence’ and ‘terror’ in terrorism studies are vague, and this has been identified as one of the main problems by the field itself (Shanahan 2016; Whittaker 2003). This is a narrow approach that views terrorism only within the context of military or political concepts, ignoring relationships of human meaning, and yet it is the approach that mostly dictates the structure and subject of mainstream terrorism studies (see Zulaika and Douglass 1996). However, when viewed through the prism of phenomenology, military terrorism is not de-limited by the activities of individual Islamic radicals and instead involves a much wider range of events that forces a reinterpretation of various socially significant fundamental values. It is phenomenology together with ecology, i.e., a life-­ oriented viewpoint, that can illuminate terror as a human condition. Hence the purpose of this chapter is to examine how phenomenological and hermeneutic principles might be beneficial in terrorism research. Introducing phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics to terrorism studies would cause a conceptual shift away from ‘terrorism’ and towards ‘terror’ by analysing the origin of meaning and thus expanding the range of terrorism studies. ‘Terrorism’ seen as ‘terror’ would, first of all, be a feeling of horror that persists throughout daily life. This is exactly the reason why terrorism studies should not be limited to analysing and recording tangible violence or the systematisation and analysis of terror attacks, a task being carried out by plenty of national security services and academic institutions. The task of eco-phenomenology is to consider terror as a specific existential condition of being human. One can only agree with observations by the phenomenologist Massimo Marassi that the modern world is falling increasingly under the sway of technology, which is also gaining dominance over the spiritual life of people. It is the ideological structure of our time with the mathematisation principle as its foundation, a question discussed in-depth by Edmund Husserl. Yet this trend also affects the future, as it influences the framework of further studies, including descriptions of terrorism that consist overwhelmingly of data lists with minimal interpretation. Marassi turned to eco-phenomenology to search for answers by looking at “the great concepts” – the world in its entirety, nature, life (Marassi 2018). At the same time, the situation is

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such that politics keeps coming closer and closer to the humanely bodily dimension (this is discussed by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito). Massimo Mezzanzanica says that the bio-power, medicine and bio-technology of modern science tears down the borders between man, animal and machine, and that it is exactly the area where a new philosophical anthropology is needed; one that treats a human “as a human condition within the unity of everything there is alive” (Mezzanzanica 2018). The concept of ‘the human condition’ is a cornerstone in the phenomenology of life. Following the teachings of Martin Heidegger, we can speak of being thrown into the world; of fear (Angst) rooted in human existence in the shadow of death. Yet Anna Teresa Tymieniecka writes: “[..] it is obvious that primitive and brute forces – although their interference is undeniable – do not in their workings even approach the functional level from which the authentically human significance of life surges. The ‘human beast’  – except perhaps in some rare pathological cases  – does not represent humanness as such!” (Tymieniecka 1990: 69). The focus that terrorism studies has placed on objective data is one-sided, while the phenomenological approach emphasises terror – yet its intention is not to make the condition of being ‘in terror’ a universal principle, but rather to provide an opportunity to describe an essential aspect of human life. Attempts to fight military terrorism have brought to the fore a contradiction that has infused efforts to understand terrorism. While the primary objective of terrorism is to bring about ‘intangible’ or political changes through intimidation, the war against it is principally waged in the tangible dimension. This explains why conventional terrorism studies usually bear little fruit as they consider terrorism as a kind of guerrilla warfare and mostly fail to see the unique way terrorism is implemented, i.e., by creating and maintaining a condition of horror. The same can be said of ecology and environmental protection where the limelight is occupied by comprehension of the ‘tangible’ environment, namely flora and fauna, the climate or soil pollution, while the environment of meaning, attitudes towards nature, life within nature and its pollution is pushed into the background. Yet the world of sense and the horizons of meaning are elements of human life just as important as the physical environment. If there are discussions about environmental pollution, why not have discussions about the pollution of meaning and even the overheating of meaning? The public mood is sometimes described using the metaphors of climate conditions – and not without reason. If, in a physical, biological or – to borrow an expression from US military terminology – kinetic meaning, terrorism targets bodies and the environment inhabited by these bodies, then in a phenomenological and especially eco-phenomenological meaning, the phenomenon of terrorism has to be reinterpreted as terror. The current trends in terrorist research methodologies, as well as the flaws that could be rectified, should be outlined here. Contemporary terrorism studies had a watershed moment on 11 September 2001 when terrorists attacked New York, bringing about an unprecedented surge in research and turning this field into an ‘industry’. This situation was characterised by narrow methodology and thematic scope  – a non-defined system of research principles, objectives,

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aims, research approaches and even expected outcomes, which reproduced themselves (Silke 2004). Before the fall of the Soviet Union, when the global political situation was determined by Cold War sentiments and the confrontation between two superpowers, terrorism had a different meaning on both a semantic and political level. Terrorism was ‘outsourced’ and subjected to the whims of the superpowers, who skilfully manoeuvred relatively small extremist groups. The Soviet Union faced mujahideen ‘freedom fighters’ in Afghanistan, while Western Europe had to deal with the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy. Nowadays the effective and efficient terror attacks carried out by al-Qaeda have placed Islamic terrorism at the centre of attention of the public, security services and researchers, enabling this field to reinvent itself. It bears noting that the 11 September attacks were the most spectacular organised by al-Qaeda, but far from the first. In the 1990s, after having met more failure than success, al-Qaeda went for terrorism as its mode of operation. In 1993, attackers associated with al-Qaeda bombed one of the Twin Towers in New York; in 1998 it organised the bombing of two US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; then in October 2000, it bombed the US warship USS Cole. Current mainstream terrorism studies can be divided into two major directions. Since 2007, the appearance and development of the direction of critical studies has been propelled by both objections to the existing orthodoxy and the definition of new research interests. Critical studies are based on the Frankfurt School of critical theory and its conclusions, which in turn are based on ideas of Western Marxism (Gunning 2007). Its methodological framework includes conclusions of critical theory along with Foucault’s analysis of power discourse, as well as ideas from feminism, postcolonialism, ethnography and even visual analysis (Dixit and Stump 2015). Consequently, critical terrorism studies pay greater attention to socio-economic and cultural aspects, to Marxism-tinged concern for social justice, discussions on knowledge being dependent on power structures, efforts to cast off state control, emancipation, class conflict, inequality and other similar topics. This direction however is just a reformative avant-garde, and the vast majority of terrorism studies consist of political science and positivism orthodoxy (Jackson 2007). Currently, the global tone in terrorism studies is set by conclusions and assumptions made in the international relations branch of political science in the Anglophone part of the world, as well as by close connections to security and counter-insurgency actors. The orthodox direction and the positivism that comes with it essentially defines the study approach, which considers ‘bodily’ aspects. Terrorism is viewed as a military measure, and the terrorists themselves as military ‘objects’. As a result, the political and ideological convictions held and expressed by terrorists are seen not as alternative ideologies but as nonsensical deviations. This has serious consequences as attempts to improve our cognition of terrorism are dislodged by attempts to enhance our recognition of those engaged in terrorism so that we can eliminate them.

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Epistemological Crisis When engaging in terrorism studies one has to consider an epistemological crisis characterised by a conviction that previous knowledge has turned out not only to be insufficient or inaccurate but also structurally invalid. Richard Jackson mentions the various types of knowledge as given by US statesman and two-times Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: what we know or the known knowns, what we know that we don’t know or the known unknowns, and finally, what we don’t know that we don’t know or the unknown unknowns. By making the unknown unknowns the central motto of study discourse the entire study character undergoes a transformation. According to Jackson, this is expressed by at least four elements: 1. Rejection of previous knowledge and acceptance of total uncertainty and insecurity, or in other words, principled ignorance of future threats; 2. Extreme dogmatism and exaggerated caution in order to prevent and pre-­ emptively control the unknown; 3. Principled legitimisation and institutionalisation of imagination and fantasy, turning imagination into a fully-fledged tool for study and counter-terrorism activities; 4. The unknown unknowns as a fundamental formula of knowledge imposing the acceptance of a ‘standby mode’ as a constant and day-to-day standard (Jackson 2015). A direct echo of this epistemological orientation can be observed in specific actions during studies, in study organisation, and in the management of public life. Terrorism studies and counter-terrorism activities where ignorance serves as the basis of inquiry become anti-intellectual and de-contextualised, leaving no other recourse but blind action, which can certainly be successful but rarely provides comprehension. There is reason in the objection adopted in critical terrorism studies which states that orthodoxy suffers from an evident and widespread inability and unwillingness to engage directly with the inquiry of the phenomenon that is terrorism, which in turn illustrates that the topic of terrorism is still a taboo in modern Western society as it fears that direct contact with terrorists could cause ‘moral contamination’. It is characterised by worries that understanding what motivates terrorists would be akin to joining their cause or sympathising with them, and that explaining terrorist actions would grant them justification. All that is left then is a dry description of material facts (for example, the movement of arms and personnel, assessments of battlefield progress, radiation levels or biological pollution etc.), keeping the sphere of ideas isolated behind a high and massive wall. The epistemological crisis produces an absurd situation. By discarding old knowledge, which has nothing to say about the unknown, research has to start over, an impossible task since an unknown unknown is, by its very nature, unlearnable. As a result of this kind of thinking terrorists are transformed into mythical characters and ascribed with both transcendental evil and supernatural abilities, while other forms of terrorism – radiation, viruses as sources of terror – are pushed outside the circle of attention.

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Eco-Phenomenology or ‘Against the Crisis’ There is a third option available for terrorism studies, one that would employ ideas of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Eco-phenomenology would look at narratives and meanings as they appear over the horizon of history and culture. The introduction of phenomenology and hermeneutics in terrorism studies would cause a conceptual shift that should return to the fundamental element of terrorism – that of terror. To paraphrase Husserl’s original slogan, it would be a call to go “back to terror itself!”. The conclusion by philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, which states that the twentieth Century saw attacks shift from the enemy’s body to the enemy’s environment (Sloterdijk 2009: 14), can be expanded by understanding the environment as a phenomenological lifeworld. In other words, terrorism should be viewed as ‘terror’; as an existential condition that has taken root in public life and determines narratives of life and death, safety and fear.

Terror of the Body Environment The possible use of weapons of mass destruction is a typical example of a major terrorism threat. It has been established that al-Qaeda made serious attempts to acquire nuclear weapons or at least the so-called ‘dirty bomb’, but at the same time Osama bin Laden often talked of climate change, the al-Qaeda magazine Inspire published articles on climate change and how the “evil Western imperialists” were guilty of polluting the environment, and a Taliban leader urged Afghans to “plant one or several fruit or non-fruit trees for the beautification of Earth and the benefit of almighty Allah’s creations”, while Somalia’s al Shabaab banned single-use plastic bags (see Asaka 2021). Meanwhile the military fight against terrorism by conventional means has an incredibly destructive impact on the environment, as can currently be seen in, for example, Syria and Iraq where vast territories, including cities with millions of inhabitants, have been almost completely devastated. Rural areas have become toxic, infrastructure lies in ruins and the land itself is full of mines. Viewed from this perspective, waging war on terrorism becomes a comprehensive ethical issue with an aspect of environmental deterioration. For example, the use of white phosphorus or sarin gas is a threat not only to human life but also to the life environment. One historic example of this can be found in France after the First World War where some areas of the former front line had to be isolated, creating the so-called ‘Red Zone’. This was inaccessible to civilians as the environment was too contaminated: it was littered with unexploded shells containing high explosive and gas, and the soil was polluted by lead, arsenic, chlorine and mercury. Unlike wars in ancient times that left in their wake not so much metallic but, so to speak, organic waste, the conflicts of our age are especially nature-unfriendly.

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It was the First World War, the first truly modern conflict, that illuminated aspects of war that were inhuman in a very specific sense: war denied respect to humans as beings that are alive and have thoughts and feelings. Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has even identified a specific date: 22 April 1915, the Second Battle of Ypres. At Ypres a special unit of the German Army first used a weapon of mass destruction; poison gas. This was the start of a new age that Sloterdijk describes as the arrival of terrorism, product design ideas and environmental thought (Sloterdijk 2009: 9–12). It was an ideological shift from a war between human bodies to a war against the enemy’s environment. The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, himself a witness of the war, called it Materialschlachten (material battles). Consequently, the human remains rotting away in the trenches were no longer human but material expenditure. It was no longer a war between people, but between arms factories. The overwhelming use of military methods in the war on terror can be partly explained by the orthodoxy that exists in terrorism studies and interprets the opponents – the terrorists – as ‘non-humans’. Terrorists are considered outlaws, because they do not comply with the standards of humanity. They are homo sacer (sacred man; a person in Roman law who is banned and thus may be killed, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual – a term explored by philosopher Giorgio Agamben) and so not protected by law. This also applies to their environment – their inhabited space – which is seen as exotic, wild, uncivilised, beyond all that is humane and, as a result, not under the protection of laws of human environment. It is the principle of ‘us and them’ in action, where one side represents civilisation and culture but the other side is wild and dangerous nature. This way of thinking creates dangerous consequences. Namely, it enables the degradation of the natural environment and the minimisation of the opponent’s moral status, as well as – intellectually – creating a risk of restricted studies expressed as fear of moral contamination.

The Phenomenological Way Contrary to mainstream terrorism studies, which aim to describe the operational activities of terrorism, the eco-phenomenological approach focuses on human socialising aspects. Here the distinction between the ‘concept’ of terrorism and the ‘phenomenon’ of terror should be clarified. In the case of terrorism, while definitions may vary, it is more or less understood as a kind of political violence, as concrete acts of violence with particular political aims. However the very concept of ‘terror’ as a phenomenon incorporates the meaning of horror that is caused by a general fear of uncertainties in the world, e.g. the loss of financial security, dangerous animals, darkness, climate change, health issues or death, and a great many things that are not related to political violence or terrorism. That would be a valid addition to the analysis of terror – and that has been already done by philosophy, psychology and other social sciences. One could mention Kierkegaard’s conceptualization of the experience of dread or Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety and fear in

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the face of death. Moreover, the phenomenology of violence is a well-established subject in, for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s research on revolutionary terror, Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism and Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence, as well as in Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. However, in the context of terrorism as an identifiable political concept and research object, the phenomenon of terror as an existential condition and a sense-changing force has been mostly left out. To put it in parallel with the history of philosophy, the problem of philosophical hermeneutics becomes an issue – is it just a tool, a methodological device, in the hands of critical theory? Or is hermeneutics a fundamental structure of human existence; a mode of being more basic than scientific activity? The reinterpretation of ‘terrorism’ as a ‘terror’ hence leads to a simple-sounding question: what does it mean to experience terror inflicted by terrorism? Finally, the limits of the distinction between ‘terrorism’ and ‘terror’ here are set by pragmatic reasons, namely within the framework of the terrorism research discourse currently prevailing. So far there has been little research on the potential of phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics in terrorism studies (see Morris and Crank 2011; Zingale and Hummel 2008; Mitchell 2005). For example, neither Priya Dixit and Jacob Stump (2012, 2015) nor Andrew Silke (2004) or handbooks on the methodology of terrorism studies (Jackson 2016) even mention phenomenology, hermeneutics, Husserl or Gadamer. Meanwhile phenomenology, liberated from epoché and transcendental reduction (Zahavi 2019), is used in the studies of religion, music, art, environmental philosophy (eco-phenomenology), state administration, psychology and psychiatry, medicine and even business. The important part here is the relationship between phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics. Phenomenology claims that we exist in the world and that is why we have a language. Hermeneutics proposes the contrary  – we exist in the ‘world’ because we have a language. If phenomenology is a descriptive approach, we need to establish what exactly we want to describe. If our perception emerges from history, tradition and language then, even after accepting Husserl’s conviction that a sphere of strictly philosophical truths exists, it appears that the world needs fewer descriptions from a distance, and more interpretation. Accordingly, phenomenology advances along the path of interpretations. In other words, even though phenomenological description is applicable to inputs from experiences, these will always be somewhat determined by a specific viewpoint, and thus in need of review. In her analysis of Paul Ricoeur’s ideas María Avelina Cecilia Lafuente considers a potential development of eco-phenomenological hermeneutics as an analysis of symbols and myths, paying special attention to the myths that discuss the origin and end of evil. These myths demonstrate our pre-conscious belonging to the whole and, at the same time, our individual responsibility. Cecilia writes that Ricoeur’s philosophy would serve as the perfect basis for developing eco-phenomenological hermeneutics, as Ricoeur’s understanding of interpretation goes beyond rationality and causal knowledge by incorporating imagination and human creativity. Cecilia Lafuente indicates that Tymieniecka understands creativity as ‘awareness’ while Ricoeur considers creativity to be ‘unaware’ (Lafuente and Avelina 2018). These

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considerations need to be taken into account in order to interpret terror successfully. Terror — the fruit of terrorism — is a myth through and through, a creative story of good and evil that establishes order in the world and provides reference points, but is reproduced on a political level as a series of institutional practices and an accompanying set of political narratives (Jackson 2005a). This context enables a better understanding of why George W. Bush talked in 2002 of an ‘Axis of Evil’ – or why the world gets divided into the good and the bad. Eco-phenomenology as a perspective is wider than eco-philosophy as it poses questions about humans, nature, the universe, creativity, the creative imagination (imaginator creatrix), ontopoiesis and self-individualization. It inquires into environmental phenomena: wind, breath, tempests, snow and flame, fire and thunder, as well as rhythm, fragrance, words, touch, sound, colour, images, harmony and so on. Eco-phenomenology has a wide-ranging task as it attempts to view life in its diversity: to understand life and death, space and time. Therefore, eco-phenomenology is by no means a new kind of natural philosophy, but rather a specific mindset that strives to apply the abundant approach of phenomenology to the description of the diversity of life. Unlike classical Husserl phenomenology – which strived to study the structures of consciousness  – eco-phenomenology examines the process involved in the creation and genealogy of the human consciousness, and the subsequent processes in the development of consciousness. It deals with life processes: with life and death, with existential conditions. Maija Kule writes: “Life described in eco-phenomenology is not “pure” but vital, expressed in plural forms, connected with growth and dying, and included in the environment” (Kūle 2018: 49). Terror and horror is evidently an integral part of life with a significant impact on public life, both at an individual and political level. The diversity and richness eco-phenomenology brings to the topic of ‘life as a whole’ is perfectly suited for understanding the phenomenon of terror. The potential of the phenomenologically-hermeneutic approach in terrorism studies, where terrorism is reinterpreted as terror, is at least twofold. Firstly, unlike critical terrorism studies, which emphasise social factors and power relationships, philosophical hermeneutics searches for the meaning of language and tradition. Seeing where the roots of critical terrorism studies lie (Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School) it is not a surprise that this direction focuses on social, political and emancipatory aspects, as well as on cultural, social and political conditions. Meanwhile, philosophical hermeneutics as established by Gadamer underlines the ongoing interplay between truth and tradition and its inevitable dependency on prejudices. This difference was on clear display during an argument between Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas in the 1960s. Habermas intended to rework critical theory in order to revitalize the theory’s emancipatory goals as it has always been established as a guide to interpretation leading to the overcoming of false consciousness and recognition of the illegitimacy of existent cultural institutions. That is not the case in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics which emphasize ‘understanding’ (verstehen) as an ontological not epistemological concept or a prescriptive methodology, while at the same time both

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were aimed at demonstrating the limitations of the objectifying methods of natural science while supporting the legitimacy of other sorts of discourse. At the core of their dispute was a principal disagreement by Habermas, who rejected the hermeneutics’ claim to universality as a fundamental interpretative principle. He insisted instead that hermeneutic understanding should be mediated through critical theory because, in his view, communication theory is meant to have a practical impact ultimately. Meanwhile, Gadamer was concerned that critical theory could have authoritarian tendencies while it positions itself as ideologically neutral (Mendelson 1979). Unsurprisingly, the practical and emancipatory aspects of critical theory are to be found in critical terrorism studies. However, efforts to develop a phenomenologically-hermeneutic methodology for terrorism studies would aim to reinvigorate the perspective of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics in conjunction with phenomenological description. Secondly, the adaptation of phenomenological and hermeneutic ideas to terrorism studies could boost attempts to identify the weak spots of current terrorism studies. One can only agree here with what the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE) stated in its study into counter-radicalisation measures titled Countering Terrorist Narratives, namely that “there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of counter-narratives and many of its underlying assumptions have been called into question” (Countering Terrorist Narratives 2017). It is a relatively sound belief that phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches to terrorism would enable a reconsideration of various assumptions regarding terrorists, for example, their irrationality, pure wickedness, primitive attachment to ideologies and so on. Terrorism reinterpreted phenomenologically as ‘terror’ would allow a discussion of such topics as horror and fear, intimidation and death, as well as aspects of ‘the environment’ as an ‘environment of meaning’ – air as the foundation of life, space (the threat from the unknown), the dialectics of life and death (suicide bombers and the fear of them), viruses and radiation (invisible terror), and so on. When viewed this way a different side of terrorism is illuminated; one which reveals a research potential that could tell us more about not only terrorists but also the victims of terrorism. A long-standing feature of terrorism has been its comparatively low threat to life yet its enormous impact on the public mood. (e.g., see the case of ‘Jihadi John’) That is why this topic should be re-examined. Considering the viability and origin of narratives, Paul Ricoeur poses the very apt question as to whether imagined narratives can be true. He accurately indicates that the first and lowest level of inquiry, a propensity towards the objectivity characteristic to the natural sciences, can do this with facts alone. But we are interested in the “interest” itself and, as Ricoeur points out (by following the ideas of Habermas) it is the ‘wish’ to have communication. Reaching into history is not just a naive quest for facts, but an opening for communication (Ricoeur 1983). The very same thing occurs when ideologies meet. When we try to comprehend terror, facts alone will not suffice. Leaving the task of finding ‘objective truths’ to other branches of terrorism studies, the phenomenological-hermeneutic methodology in terrorism studies would strive to learn the ‘stories’, and meanings on the horizon of history and culture. In

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the next section of this chapter we will look at three terror narratives that appear different on a superficial level and are thus deemed irrelevant by orthodox terrorism studies. Yet in their fundamental meaning – that of creating terror – they are very much alike. The atomic bomb and the radiation it causes, viral and biological threats: these types of terror must be interpreted phenomenologically as part of the human condition of ‘being here and now’.

The Atomic Bomb and Radiation If the twenty-first Century is marked by a move towards military terrorism, the second part of the previous century was filled with the fear of total annihilation in a nuclear war (e.g.: Fox and Groarke 1985). People thought they had already experienced a total war, yet on 6 August 1945 the United States further escalated the ability of its military to deliver mass destruction and death by dropping an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing between 90,000 and 146,000 people over the next two to four months, half of whom died from the initial explosion. The next step after the Second Battle of Ypres, where chemical weapons were used, was the expansion of this idea into nuclear war and the threat of radiation. Unlike terror, which was deployed by, for example, totalitarian superpowers through their security forces, nuclear weapons and radiation emphasised several different threat meanings: invisibility, unidentifiability coupled with immediate presence, and absolute power. Even the most destructive conventional weapons could not measure up to an atomic bomb, which represented total annihilation. Radiation is omnicidal and became a metaphor for death. Chemical weapons to a lesser extent, and nuclear weapons to the fullest extent, are invisible phenomena or even ‘saturated phenomena’ (Jean-Luc Marion’s term  – an experience that goes beyond the bounds of intentional limitations), as is the radioactive pollution they cause. Just like death, that in Heidegger’s view served an ultimate purpose, radiation cannot be prevented or subdued. It is not only invisible and present in the air; it actually becomes the air – thus replacing ‘air as a provider of life’ with ‘air as an ether of death’. The same thing was achieved by chemical gas weapons. Later, in the twenty-first Century, terrorists attempted this, too. Terrorism is essentially rewriting meanings, creating new metaphors of death. Modern humanism, when viewed through Heidegger’s prism, has reached down into the very depths of matters and has approached the core itself. The atomic bomb imposes its rule over existence at a sub-atomic level. In this way the nuclear sciences – the ones that created the atomic bomb – are especially significant as they break into the core of material matters. After all, a nucleus – the core of an atom – is just like the essence of matter. To draw some comparisons, the nuclear sciences represent the journey modern science takes to reach the soul, yet the most insidious forces reside deep in our souls, including the power of death. The anticipation of destruction marks the atomic bomb age, where the expected end would see individual death dwarfed by collective death. The radiation that

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follows the explosion of an atomic bomb extinguishes the already-weak consolation that existence is not threatened by the death of an individual. No such consolation would be possible with an omnicidal weapon, as it brings total annihilation, killing friend and foe alike. Just like Judgement Day or an apocalypse, a total explosion of radiation would cause death that is collective and thus also absurd (Weinberger 1984). Even more than that, the quantum leap in destructive capacity that the atomic bomb represents is so great that it is in a new class of its own, one that is able to turn existence into non-existence. So, for example, if the modern ICBM ballistic missile RT-2PM2 Topol-M loaded with a nuclear warhead struck the Manhattan borough of New York City 1.7 million people would die instantly and more than three million more would be injured, but if the largest nuclear weapon that has ever been tested, the 1960s Soviet Tsar Bomba, were to be detonated in the same place the death toll would be approximately 7.6 million. Nowadays, in the early years of the twenty-­ first Century, the global stockpile of nuclear weapons consists of around 14,000 units of various power, but it is worth mentioning that at the end of the twentieth Century it was around 70,000 units. The vast increases in the explosive power delivered by nuclear weapons as they were developed were of such magnitude that it exceeded the boundaries of humane feelings. In contrast to conventional bombs, including even the American GBU-43/B MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast, also known as ‘the Mother of All Bombs’), which fit into a horizon of events, the blast wave of an atomic bomb sends the entire horizon reeling and also fully occupies the horizon of meaning. And through this action of occupying the entire horizon of humane meaning the atomic bomb is like an exploding sun as it embodies the promise of total non-existence. An atomic bomb does not just kill us, it vaporizes and obliterates us. Considering the suddenness and power of an atomic bomb explosion, as well as the invisibility of radiation, one can agree with an observation made by Peter Sloterdijk that an atomic bomb has something meditative about it. From a philosophical point of view, meditations about a bomb are the same as deep thought about humans themselves. The atomic bomb is the “purest reality and purest possibility.” The atomic bomb is “the epitome of cosmic energies and human participation in these, the highest achievement of human beings and their destroyer, the triumph of technical rationality and its sublation into the paragnostical” (Sloterdijk 1987: 103). The atomic bomb goes beyond the boundaries of a practical mind as it is more than merely a means to an end. It becomes an end itself, while radiation becomes the invisible unconditional background, the embodiment of terror that flows like air through every aspect of human life.

The Dangerous Air As the Cold War ended, the source of horror changed. The threat of nuclear war, while still a possibility, faded from view and for a brief moment the political world was overcome with optimism and talk of the end of history that would bring about

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the irreversible triumph of liberalism, democracy and free markets. This optimism came to an abrupt end on 11 September 2001, when al-Qaeda launched its attack on the US. This moment changed the meaning of ‘air’ as such. Before 11 September threats from ‘the air’ denoted radiation or poison gas. Now a new form of threat emerged, namely, the worrisome feeling that death could fall from above, which changed once more the perception of ‘air’ and ‘the skies’. Secret terrorists, supposedly inhabiting caves in Afghanistan, were able to penetrate the defences of the greatest military power in the world. This built a new mythology, one that appeared especially dangerous because it was incomprehensible and obscure. The US military response has, among other things, caused a similar reaction. In Afghanistan and other countries where drone strikes are a regular occurrence the aesthetic and ethical value of the sky has changed over the years. Contrary to the naive notion that the sky is an environment that belongs to nature or a god and carries known threats (storms, lightning, etc.) the sky is actually the new front line. In lands where drones  – unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs  – are widely used a good day is one where the sky is overcast rather than clear. This has a very simple explanation — ‘bad’ weather limits the capacities of UAVs, forcing them to stay on the ground and thus preventing a rain of missiles. Terrorism brought the threat of death to the skies over the US, but counter-terrorism has turned into counter-terror. The wrath of God that usually comes down from the sky is now joined by military aerial vehicles that terrorise the common understanding of climate. This is a change of symbolism on both aesthetic and ethical levels. In this sense terrorism and counter-­ terrorism transform into a problem of meteorology.

Information Bomb Within the context of terrorism another change is more important as it provides a clearer indication of how meanings have shifted. Shortly after the Second World War, Albert Einstein, inspired by Abbé Pierre’s prediction, warned of three explosions that will happen in the next age. The first one is the atomic bomb. The second one is the information bomb, and the third one is the demographic bomb. The atomic bomb explosion loomed over the second half of the twentieth Century. The information bomb is definitely a sign of the Information Age, and the initial flashes of the third explosion were probably visible during the refugee crisis of 2014. Right now, at the start of the twenty-first Century, it is still the information bomb that presents the greatest challenge. The ‘information bomb’ could be interpreted as a deliberate sabotage of information systems (e.g. crippling banking systems, electricity grids and the like) that could destroy or at least inflict serious damage on our civilization, but leave nature relatively unscathed  – a form of eco-friendly terrorism. Although discussions regarding information exchange usually deal with web technology, social networks

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and instant communication tools, terrorism does have a vital role here as it can perfectly demonstrate the inner logic of the Information Age, where the kinetic effect of military action is overshadowed by a narrative that instils a feeling of constantly being under threat. The purpose of terrorism is not to kill people: that is only the method of achieving other goals. The dark side of the Information Age is that terrorism and the media are mutually reinforcing each other. The terrorist organization alQaeda was well aware that in terms of conventional forces it was considerably weaker than the local secular authorities and the US. Fighting under asymmetrical conditions it picked terrorism as its weapon of choice, but not only because it did not have regular armed forces but mostly because terrorism is the most prominent expression of the communication and information age. What the media focuses on is not ‘truth as a reflection of how things are ordered’, but rather events, and terrorism is an event par excellence. The result is a symbiotic relationship between the media and terrorism. As the media hunts not only for great events but also for ever-bigger events, a hypertrophied reality is established which exists in an environment of hyper-­ communication where everything has to be huge. But terrorism also becomes ‘huge’. In conditions of hyper-communication importance is not attributed to a discussion in the form of a dialogue, but to a series of monologues, the significance of which is certified by the volume of the speaker. If news has to be ‘huge’ then terrorism is the perfect form of communication. In this way terrorism is completely modern as it lets the inner logic of the media play out to its full extent. Islamic terrorism, and especially the form practised by Islamic State (IS), highlighted the importance of spreading information. Both the September 11 attacks and, to an even greater extent, the media operation implemented by Islamic State were aimed at evoking a particular mood, which is where the terror of military terrorism truly shows itself. When seen as a military action, the attack carried out by al-Qaeda was an absolutely pointless move that caused incalculable damage to its authors. Yet the actual point of this attack was to create a mood of terror, which came to fruition when the US launched its War on Terror. One can only agree with the observation made by Richard Jackson that this war was not only “a set of actual practices – wars, covert operations, agencies and institutions” but also “an accompanying series of assumptions, beliefs, justifications and narratives” (Jackson 2005b: 8). The mood of terror was the second, successive explosion, the impact of which was even greater than the first material one. The French cultural theorist Paul Virilio was right when he thought that the explosion of the information bomb would be devastating for the entire modern society as it would, in Kellner’s words, destroy social memory, relations, traditions and community with an instantaneous overload of information (Kellner 2021; Virilio et al. 1999). Terrorism serves as the payload of this weapon by making terror the message.

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Terrorism and Virus The explosion of the information bomb illuminates a similarity between military terrorism and the COVID-19 pandemic as they are both primarily media events with the state of terror as a shared communality. Fear of radiation was replaced by fear of the sky, a transition from air to sky. The information bomb, however, also exists in the air, because ideas, when considered phenomenologically, exist in the ether of thought  – the realm of ideas  – which are removed from the physical, corporeal world. In other words, the radiation that ruins the flesh is replaced with madness that crushes the spirit. The topic of terror and terrorism can be discerned in the portrayal of the COVID-19 pandemic. The realisation that terrorism is not attacking the enemy’s body but the environment where that body could live includes an intersection between military terrorism and COVID-19. This has nothing to do with the use of chemical or biological weapons in terror attacks. In the direct input of experience, the virus itself becomes the ‘terrorist’. Modern military terrorism and the virus, as well as other threats such as radiation, have conjured up a dreadful image and have been very effective at creating an atmosphere of fear. Yet another shift in meaning can be discerned here – the threat from the air has left the sky and landed on surfaces. Islamic terrorists use aeroplanes with the grace of Allah, but COVID-19 is transmitted through cough droplets that settle on commonly-used surfaces yet remain invisible, just like terrorists or radiation. The ultimate expression of invisible horror is death, and one of the central themes Martin Heidegger proposed  – and not without reason  – was a comprehension of ‘being-towards-death’ as the final point of reference for the meaning of human life. It is probably the reason why Islamic terrorism has appeared to be so dangerous. When Osama bin Laden said “We love death more than you love life” it upended the entire life-death relationship. An apt reference here is from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who when describing the September 11 attacks, called terrorism ‘blatant cheating’ (Baudrillard 2002: 16). It breaks the basic rules of the game by challenging a system that strives for an existence where death is absent. In the market capitalism of liberal societies or, to put it bluntly, in consumerism culture, there is no death: it has, in fact, been banished, because the dead make poor shoppers. As a result, by turning death into their ultimate weapon, Islamic suicide bombers pretty much blew away the goalposts. How does one fight terrorists who do not dread their own mortality? From the viewpoint of consumerism culture, a suicide bomb attack is senseless because of its poor effectiveness (thinking in terms of price and return) but also senseless within the meaning of any value system or order of sense. In the context of coherence of truth, a suicide bomber is an anomaly that clearly casts doubt on the integrity of the coherent system. A virus operates in a strikingly similar fashion. When examined in detail the parallels between terrorism and viruses are very close indeed: a virus operates like a terrorist and a terrorist operates like a virus, as both of them are not specific

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opponents but rather a modus operandi, simultaneously a type and status of attack. Unlike conventional warfare with clearly-marked front lines, invisible terrorists target the public mood. In this sense COVID-19 acts just like a true terrorist — it has no shame, it doesn’t care for our values, it shows no mercy to civilians, it is suicidal, it makes us feel awful and at the same time it is completely hidden. The outbreak of the virus is so powerful not due to its direct impact, but its incomprehensibility. While deadlier than seasonal flu, COVID-19 is not a threat to humanity’s existence. The key to COVID-19 effectiveness can most likely be found in the two concepts of fear and horror. Unlike fear, which is understood here as something objective, direct and specific, horror emerges when facing death – the ravaging, corrosive and consuming panic that stems from imagining one’s own mortality not as an abstract probability but as something very concrete. Horror, however, is also imaginative and uncertain. The COVID-19 virus, just like radiation and military terrorism, is a metaphor of death; one that pulls the horror of dying into a space where it is distinct, evident, identifiable and understandable. While thinking about death is difficult, thinking about a virus is simple. Dread of dying becomes thinkable when expressed as fear of the virus. It is necessary to reiterate that the target of terrorism is not the enemy’s body but the environment it inhabits. Biological or chemical weapons attack through the proxy of environment. They turn a human’s source of life, their breath, into a weapon against them. A suicide bomber is just like COVID-19 — it wants to spread but sometimes overshoots and kills its host. Suicide bombers turn their own lives into weapons. When others are willing to die, life as an idea becomes dangerous. The same applies to a virus — it is impersonal and uninterested. It cannot be bargained with, bribed or convinced. This realisation reflects a simple truth: that death exists, is dreadfully destructive yet can be accepted – brought into one’s consciousness through the use of metaphors. The metaphor of military terrorism and, before that, the atomic bomb has been superseded by the most vivid symbol of death currently — COVID-19. The dread is too heavy and oppressive to be contained within. That is why we need fear, for it clarifies the obscure and provides words with which to speak of the unspeakable.

Conclusions and Predictions Considering the public reaction to the COVID-19 crisis, one might be inclined to agree with philosopher Paul Virilio, who identified two trends of the modern times: the administration of fear and constantly increasing speed. The feeling of constantly increasing speed means that the sense of space is shrinking. Modern transport, its speed, affordability and ubiquitousness make the world smaller, yet instead of openness and accessibility it leads to claustrophobia. Contrary to the widespread but hasty verdict that modern technology liberates and expands our life space, it actually has more to do with restrictions. Speed and full availability cause a radical change in the environment  – it loses its aura of inaccessibility and distant

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remoteness, becoming an ‘object’. However, the objectification of environment also creates a ‘burden’ that weighs down and encumbers. The isolation imposed by COVID-19 is a clear illustration of the inverse side-effect of globalisation: because the world is open, we cannot leave our homes. Another aspect is the manner in which the speed of the viral spread is described with constant measurable comparisons that sometimes resemble a race. Mass media websites track the spread, speed and dynamics in different countries like they would a sports competition. The fight with the virus is like an attempt to contain this speed. According to Virilio, the Industrial Revolution used the mass media in the nineteenth Century to achieve “standardization of opinions”, while the digital revolution of the twenty-first century is engaged in the “synchronization of emotions” (Virilio 2012). That is why the panic caused by the pandemic is global. At the same time the status of terror contains something peculiar; something of a perverse pleasure since radiation, terrorism and COVID-19 make life meaningful on several fronts. Firstly, for a society in which the spiritual life can be rather limited, the encounter with death is something surprising, novel and, to a certain extent, even exciting. Secondly, all types of terrorism and the terror they cause are total by nature due to their secretive threats. That is why the pandemic is a ‘global event’ and thus becomes a process of historic significance, and while the people who live through it might not shape history, they definitely participate in it. Seen rationally such a sense might appear absurd and harmful, yet it is often treated as a significant blessing. The hope that a subject participates in the formation of history grants it significance, recognition and even global value. To experience a pandemic is to also take part in historically important events. Besides, the concern is not only individual but also collective. In this way COVID-19 is not only an object of fear and a metaphor of dread, but also a reference point for meaning. The development of thought from terrorism studies to the pandemic and the status of fear and horror is a reflection of the eco-phenomenological approach of viewing the environment as imbued with ideas rather than as a material and biological totality. This view opens up to research a wide array of diverse meanings, which are in need of a more serious assessment to better understand modern topics such as the pandemic, climate change, terrorism and other environments as problems of spiritual and material environs. Modern military terrorism and the COVID-19 pandemic are very similar occurrences when examined from the eco-phenomenological viewpoint. They explain types of social behaviour, the interpretation of which impacts general ethical decisions on mutual interactions, trust and public political decisions on specific measures, ranging from airport security checks or vaccination procedures, to war strategies and peace treaties. This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project No. lzp-2020/2-0088 “Understanding Terror: Phenomenological-Hermeneutical Methodology for Terrorism Studies”.

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Index

A Abnormal, 19, 33, 34, 59, 118, 174, 179, 182, 184 Abnormalities, 19, 59, 76, 182, 196, 230 Aesthetics, 7, 15, 18, 22, 84, 89, 95, 101, 119, 146, 153, 172, 174, 176, 180, 185, 187, 188, 190, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 204, 208–211, 218, 244–258, 265, 341 Affectivity, 18, 45, 60, 160, 162–165, 170, 172, 244 Agamben, Giorgio, 41, 139, 140, 143, 218, 222, 331, 335 Aho, Kevin, 230, 238, 240 Ales Bello, Angela, 6, 7, 17, 19, 21, 22, 125–134 Alētheia, 264 Alienation, 248, 313, 319 Alien-world, 19, 182–187, 189, 190, 199, 207, 211 All-that-is-alive, 22, 45 Alone together, 17–18, 137–143, 287 Ambient urbanism, 18, 244–257 Ambiguity, 49, 51, 178, 284 Analecta Husserliana, v, viii, 4–10, 12, 15, 21, 22, 52, 54, 85 Anders, Günther, 217 Ankrava, Sigma, xi Anomalies, 114, 174, 183, 195, 208, 343 Anthropocentrism, 34, 39, 41, 161, 172 Anxiety, 8, 13, 14, 16–18, 132, 141, 175, 178, 191, 198, 202, 212, 220, 253, 278, 279, 283, 284, 286, 288, 316, 335 A posterioris, 164

A prioris, 64, 68, 75, 164, 166, 222, 223, 255, 275, 276, 278, 281, 282, 286, 293 Arendt, Hannah, 7, 15, 39, 45, 51, 56–59, 336 Aristotle, 6, 12, 36, 52, 53, 148, 179, 181, 192, 193, 222 Artificial intelligence, 36, 257 Aspazija, 89 Atomic bomb, 339–342, 344 Attenborough, David, 10 Augustine of Hippo, 40 Autonomous autonomy, 274, 275, 277, 278, 280, 282, 287 individuals, 167, 274, 275, 280, 284, 287 Auto-poiesis, vii Avenarius, Richard, 49 B Bachelard, Gaston, 170, 245 Backhaus, Gary, 85, 87 Barbaras, Renaud, 6, 60 Becomings, vi–viii, 10, 26, 27, 35, 49, 50, 57, 84, 86, 87, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 108, 116, 120, 142, 165, 170, 217, 218, 236, 266, 269, 292, 297–298, 345 Being autonomous being, 20, 274–288 being-absolutely-free-of-contradiction, 30 being-in-the-world, 50, 164, 263, 271 beingness, 26, 55, 87, 90, 287 being together, viii, 6, 17, 20–23, 142, 313, 325 being with others, 21, 140, 217, 271

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Verducci, M. Kūle (eds.), The Development of Eco-Phenomenology as An Interpretative Paradigm of The Living World, Analecta Husserliana 124, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07757-9

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350 Ben Okri, 9, 111–120 Benveniste, Émile, 215, 216, 224 Bergson, Henry, 6, 14, 54, 165, 170 Bernau Manuscripts, 64, 67–69, 72–74 Bernet, Rudolf, 64, 66, 67 Bibikhin, Vladimir, 7, 15, 45, 51–54, 59 Binswanger, Ludwig, 128, 134, 219 Black Rock, 208–209, 211 Blake, William, 89 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 269 Bodies, ix, 8, 16, 18, 19, 32, 45, 48–50, 54, 59, 64, 65, 73, 75–77, 85, 98, 127, 139, 146, 151, 153, 156, 157, 159–172, 176, 188, 197, 207, 219–222, 230, 232–237, 239, 248, 249, 266, 268, 269, 271, 275, 288, 294–296, 308–311, 316–322, 324–326, 331, 334–335, 343, 344 Bodily life, 45 Bohr, Niels, 33, 103–105, 107 Brentano, Franz, 87, 326 Brown, Charles, 120 Buceniece, Ella, 7, 15, 44–60, 275, 326 Buddha, 269 Butler, Judith, 219 C Callieri, Bruno, 7, 134 Camus, Albert, 275 Canny, 177–178, 193 Canovan, Margaret, 57, 58 Carel, Havi, 230 Carnal, 218–221 Carnal selfhood, 218–221, 226 Carpenter, John, 207–208 Categorical imperative, 22, 275, 278, 279, 281, 286 Celms, Teodor, 6, 12, 46 Censorship, 66, 69 Chiasm, 49, 50 Choay, Françoise, 251 Christ, Jesus, 17, 130, 210, 269 Ciphering, 7, 94 Closeness, 253 Cobb-Stevens, Richard, 11 Communications, 4, 5, 11, 18, 21, 29, 72, 134, 138, 142, 147, 148, 155, 157, 182, 185, 245, 264, 269, 276, 282, 284–287, 291, 292, 296, 297, 304, 317, 318, 338, 342 Communicative community, 147–149 Communities, 6, 13, 18, 21, 56, 65, 66, 71–73, 75, 76, 78, 130, 132, 134, 138, 149, 155, 182, 184, 217, 240, 253–255, 276, 288, 296, 303–313, 342

Index Conditional being, 26, 27, 29–32, 37 Conditions, viii, 11, 15, 18, 27, 30, 31, 34, 38, 39, 49, 55–57, 59, 84, 86, 87, 95, 98, 99, 113, 115, 116, 119, 128, 132, 133, 139, 142, 146, 154–156, 161, 163, 165, 167–170, 175, 199, 230, 246, 268, 271, 276, 293, 295, 305, 307, 308, 316, 325, 330–345 Conflicts, 12, 31, 33, 38, 70, 71, 79, 131, 137, 238, 252, 279, 332, 334, 335 Conrad-Martius, Hedwig, 6 Conscious life, 65, 69, 73, 309 Consciousness, v–viii, 5, 8, 9, 16, 21, 27, 28, 45–49, 58, 64, 66–68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 77, 78, 88, 94–109, 113–116, 120, 149, 156, 170, 175, 179, 180, 186, 188, 231, 232, 244, 246, 247, 251, 253, 255, 264, 275–277, 280, 287, 292–296, 304, 307, 309–313, 316, 319, 320, 322–324, 337, 344 Constitutions, 6, 14, 31, 45–47, 58, 59, 68, 77, 162, 166, 167, 170, 179, 182, 183, 186, 220, 292–294, 296, 304, 307 Contingency, 50 Contradictions, 12, 27, 30, 31, 38, 39, 46, 96, 115, 161, 331 Coronavirus, 14, 116, 143, 229–240, 303–313 Corporeal experience, 49 Cosmos, v, vii, viii, 5–7, 9–11, 13, 20, 23, 26–42, 84, 85, 89, 90, 108, 116, 141, 146, 246, 248, 254, 256, 257, 298, 326 COVID-19, 9, 14, 16, 17, 19, 40, 46, 51, 79, 138–140, 230, 236, 237, 239, 254, 275, 278, 283, 291, 292, 298, 312, 325, 343–345 COVID-19 pandemic, v, 4–6, 10, 14, 16, 17, 44, 48, 51, 71–72, 79, 128, 138, 143, 222, 224, 229, 230, 238–240, 257, 275, 286, 293, 294, 303, 307, 313, 316, 343, 345 Creations, 12, 16, 31, 32, 44, 55, 99, 108, 113, 146, 166, 182, 184, 186–187, 190, 245, 256, 266, 270, 271, 278, 292, 334, 337 Creative imagination, 55, 87, 99, 101, 105, 256, 337 Creative self-interpretation-in-existence, 55 Creativity, viii, 5, 10, 21, 54, 55, 87, 88, 94–109, 125, 142, 244, 245, 248, 250, 252, 255, 256, 267, 270, 271, 277, 336, 337 Creepy, the, 188, 203, 205 Cultures, 5, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 47, 48, 84, 89, 94, 138, 141, 151, 157, 168, 171, 186, 187, 190, 266–269, 271, 276, 279, 288, 334, 335, 338, 343 Cypriot xoanon, 205–206

Index D Danani, Carla, xi Dasein, 142, 160, 170, 217, 264 Deaths, v, 12, 15, 17, 20, 21, 46, 56–59, 90, 100, 101, 115, 117, 119, 120, 126–128, 134, 143, 148, 155, 163, 165, 168, 169, 208, 220, 234, 238, 240, 264, 269, 270, 283, 285, 286, 331, 334–341, 343–345 de la Cadena, Marisol, 39 Deleuze, Gilles, 7, 21, 172, 291–300 Democracy, 41, 42, 224, 266, 268, 341 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 11, 194, 195, 203 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 27 Dis-harmony, 34, 39 Distances, 7, 17, 21, 30, 31, 38, 64, 137, 181, 199, 223, 248, 253–255, 268, 270, 291–300, 317–319, 321, 323, 336 Distancing, 16, 39, 167, 220, 239, 316–326 DNA, 233, 234 Dolidze, Mamuka, 9, 94–109 Douglass, William, 330 Dreams, 98–102, 107, 113, 119, 126, 150, 247, 249 Dufrenne, Mikel, 245, 247, 255, 256 Dwellings, viii, 17, 19, 96, 215–218, 220, 223–226, 248, 251–253 E Earth, viii, 6–10, 12–18, 20, 32–35, 37, 39, 40, 44, 45, 51, 56, 57, 59, 60, 78, 85, 86, 112, 113, 115–118, 120, 152, 181, 220, 243–258, 270, 279, 286, 326, 334 Earth/planet earth, viii, 6–10, 13–18, 20, 32–35, 37, 39, 40, 44, 45, 51, 56, 57, 59, 60, 78, 85, 86, 112, 113, 115–118, 120, 152, 220, 244–257, 270, 279, 286, 326, 334 Eccles, John, 102, 107 Eco, Umberto, 46 Eco-ethics, 6, 65 Ecological intersubjectivity, 20, 306 Ecological situation, 8, 44, 48, 60 Ecological solidarity, viii, 8, 20–23, 287 Ecological turn, 6, 13, 45 Ecology of consciousness, 47 Eco-phenomenology, v, vi, viii, 4–23, 33, 34, 40, 44–46, 52, 58–60, 111–120, 140–143, 215, 226, 240, 244–258, 276, 281, 287–289, 326, 330, 334, 336, 337 Eco, Umberto, 46 Eidoses, vi, vii, 36, 53 Elsner, Anna Magdalene, 20

351 Embodiment, 15, 44, 48, 64, 75, 76, 86, 208, 212, 220, 225, 233, 244, 249, 320, 326, 340 Enhancement, 33, 34, 36, 37 Entelechy, 20, 44, 287 Eros, 47, 151, 257 Esposito, Roberto, 222, 331 Everything-that-is-alive, 29, 44, 140, 143, 225, 244 Evil, 21, 40, 130, 131, 176, 191, 208, 209, 284, 295, 333, 334, 336, 337 Evolution evolutional-biological research, 5, 29 Existence, v, vii, viii, 7, 13, 17–20, 27, 30, 31, 36, 37, 44, 45, 48–51, 53, 55, 65, 71, 75–79, 84–86, 90, 94–96, 101–104, 108, 114, 116, 128, 139, 141, 142, 161, 164, 165, 167–169, 172, 179, 216–223, 225, 226, 229, 230, 237, 239, 255, 269, 276, 283–285, 287, 288, 293, 316, 318, 324, 325, 331, 336, 339, 340, 343, 344 Existential, vii, ix, 10, 12, 18, 20, 22, 29, 30, 57, 86–88, 96, 104, 106, 115, 141, 142, 159–161, 188, 189, 195, 197, 199, 217, 218, 220, 223, 264–266, 270, 277, 282, 283, 285, 291, 304, 316–318, 320, 330, 334, 336, 337 Existentialism, 12, 14, 49, 284, 285 Experience distancing, 315–326 experience of the body, 49 wonderment, 88, 189 Expressions, 8, 17, 27, 29, 33, 39–41, 60, 86, 87, 90, 98, 101, 102, 121, 138, 150, 151, 153, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163, 166–171, 203, 248, 255, 281, 282, 299, 309, 317, 331, 342, 343 Expressive phenomena, 14, 18, 146, 147, 149–154, 156–158 F Fears, 17, 19, 20, 71, 72, 114, 127, 129, 130, 132, 139, 150, 178, 194, 206, 207, 219, 230, 231, 252, 269, 282, 283, 286, 288, 316, 331, 333–335, 338, 339, 343–345 Feelings, viii, 5, 6, 9, 16–18, 49, 65, 69, 73, 74, 76, 90, 97–100, 104, 107, 127, 130, 138, 157, 162–164, 175, 178, 189, 191, 196, 198–200, 204, 208, 211, 253, 274, 282, 286, 288, 304, 313, 319, 323–326, 330, 335, 340–342, 344 Fink, Eugen, 6, 10, 47

352 Flesh, 48, 50, 161, 219–222, 225, 343 Foucault, Michel, 41, 139, 331, 332 Francis, Pope, 41 Freud, Sigmund, 66, 174–178, 180, 185–187, 191, 193, 195, 196, 198, 219, 226 G Gasset, Ortega y, 14, 15 Gehlen, Arnold, 37 Generations, 13, 35–37, 71, 89, 102, 106, 107, 112, 137, 217, 224 Generativity, 67, 71, 72 Genesis of life, 13, 15, 20, 22, 51 Genetic method, 58, 65, 66 Genetics, 58, 64, 67, 69–70, 72, 73, 88, 146, 155, 168, 183, 256 Givenness of life, vii God/Deus, 22, 27, 30–32, 35, 41, 59, 97, 99, 130, 131, 151, 192, 210, 212, 234, 249, 271, 282, 285, 286, 341 Gnoseology gnoseological, 30 Gray, Rosemary, 9, 111–121 Grenouille, Jean-Baptist, 269 Guattari, Félix, 7, 21, 291–300 Gyemant, Maria, 66 H Habermas, Jürgen, 21, 27, 337, 338 Hadot, Pierre, 218 Haeckel, Ernst, v Hamann, Johann Georg, 90 Harmony, v, 5, 6, 20, 26–42, 140, 194, 247, 255–257, 286, 337 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 8, 11, 27, 58, 97, 217, 245, 251–253, 256, 264–266, 269, 274, 275, 283, 287, 316, 331, 335, 336, 339, 343 Heimlich, 176–178, 185, 226 Heisenberg, Werner, 9, 103, 105, 106 Held, Klaus, 73, 249 Heraclitus Heracleitean, 11 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 90 Hermeneutics, 7, 26, 58, 277, 330, 334, 336–338 Heteronomy, 22, 167, 274–276, 280–281, 287, 288 Hinchman, Lewis, 57 Hinchman, Sandra, 57 Historicity, 15, 71, 72, 142

Index Hölderlin, Friedrich, 223, 249 Home home-world, 185 Horizons, vii, 5, 8, 18, 21, 29, 47, 58–60, 67, 70, 72, 74, 75, 99, 142, 148, 173, 177, 180–187, 190, 191, 194, 195, 197, 199, 200, 204, 207, 211, 212, 225, 226, 232–235, 255, 264–266, 271, 276, 288, 292, 307, 309, 310, 331, 334, 338, 340 House as family, 216, 223 Human bodies, 8, 14, 18, 19, 36, 44, 48, 49, 51, 57, 76, 102, 142, 149, 156, 161, 168, 170, 171, 197, 202, 219, 221, 222, 249, 276, 296, 308, 309, 322 civilizations, 35, 44, 280 condition (human condition), vi, vii, 9, 11, 14–17, 39, 45, 51, 52, 55–57, 59, 87–90, 96, 99, 101, 133, 138, 140, 142, 149, 154, 170, 248, 250, 280, 298, 330, 331, 339 intentionalities, vi, 5, 12, 20, 27, 34, 36, 45, 48, 76, 170, 287, 308 self, 9, 49, 51, 222, 293, 296 Hunt, Vincent, 79 Huntington, Samuel, 184 Husserl, Edmund, 6, 7, 10, 17, 26, 27, 63–79, 94, 107, 127, 245, 256, 264, 330 Husserlian phenomenology hulē, 179–181 morphē, 179–181 I Ideologies, vi, 17, 19, 41, 121, 156, 224, 267, 276, 332, 338 Ikere, Zaiga, 9, 83–90 Illness, 17, 127–128, 138, 139, 175, 236, 238, 240 Imaginatio Creatrix, 8, 37, 55, 57, 101 Imaginations, 7, 12, 89, 95, 99–102, 105–107, 125, 137, 175, 180, 187, 207, 244–246, 252, 255, 256, 295, 311, 333, 336 Immanence, 28, 45, 274, 293, 294, 326 Immanent transcendence, 150, 294 Impressionism, 96, 103 Ingarden, Roman, 6, 48, 55 Intentionality basic, 28, 50 of the logos, 28 instrumental, 20, 34 operative, 50 Interdisciplinary, 300

Index Intersubjectivity, vi, 20, 21, 45, 51, 58, 59, 65, 75, 76, 142, 292, 296–297, 300, 304–307, 310, 312, 313 Invisibility, 16, 17, 19, 230, 234–235, 239, 339, 340 Isaiah, 38 Isolation, 138, 140, 271, 304, 312–313, 321, 323, 326, 345 J Jackson, Richard, 333, 342 James, William, 317, 321–326 Jaspers, Karl (Carl), 283 Jefiyo, Biodun, 112, 115, 117 Jentsch, Anton, 174–178, 188, 193, 195, 199 John Paul II, Pope, Karol Wojtyla, 6, 12, 13 K Kačerauskas, Tomas, 21, 263–271 Kant, Immanuel, 21, 22, 39, 154, 181, 188, 194, 245, 256, 269, 275, 277–287, 293, 324 Keeping distance, viii, 20–23 Khora, 53 Kierkegaard, Søren, 21, 22, 282–288, 316–318, 335 Kitaro, Nishida, 6 Kivle, Ineta, 7, 21, 291–300 Kleinberg-Levin, David, 50 Kojuma, Hiroshi, 12 Kristeva, Julia, 115 Kūle, Maija, 4–23, 79, 85, 88, 94, 138, 245, 274–288, 337 Kūlis, Māris, 17, 330–345 L Labate, Sergio, xi Lafuente, Maria Cecilia, 15, 336 Languages, 4, 7–11, 16, 29, 39, 47, 53, 54, 95–97, 104, 112, 129, 137, 148, 155, 175, 176, 215, 216, 221, 222, 245, 247, 249, 252, 253, 255–257, 276, 277, 282, 292, 318, 336, 337 Latvian folklore, 90 Lefebvre, Henri, 223 Leibniz, Gottfried W. monad, 86, 89, 103 Leibsein, 219 Levinas, Emanuel, 6, 10, 21, 22, 46, 274, 277, 280–281, 287, 316, 318

353 Lévis-Strauss, Claude, 225 Life as a celebration, 53 cosmic unity of life, 52 evolution of life phenomena, 54 immanent life, 64, 74 life as a celebration, 53 polyphonic game of life, 54, 215 unity of life, 52, 60 Lifeworld, 14, 21, 22, 44, 47, 56, 58, 59, 96, 142, 146, 179, 181, 182, 186, 211, 217, 224, 226, 246, 247, 251, 252, 256, 265, 287, 300, 334 Limit-situations, 37, 142 Lifeworlds, 244 Linguistics, 5, 7, 22, 96, 103, 108, 219, 222, 225, 232, 277 Liveable space, 223, 225 Lived corporeal experience, 49 Living entity beingness, 29, 55, 84, 86, 90 beingness-in-progress, 84 life, 126, 226 present, 244–248, 250, 252, 255–257, 308 world, 6, 111–121 Lo Bello, Giulio, 17, 137–143 Logos logos of subliminal passions, viii, 9, 17 Loidolt, Sophie, 56 London, 200–201, 204, 205 Loneliness lonely, 150 Lossky, Nikolay Onufriyevich, 99 Loving intentionality, 20, 34 Loyola, Ignatius, 192 M Magrini, James M., 6 Magubane, Zine, 121 Mamardashvili, Merab, 103 Mankind, 11, 44, 247, 254 Marassi, Massimo, 330 Marchesini, Roberto, 6–8, 18, 35, 159–172 Marosan, Bence Peter, 5, 13, 21, 22, 64–79 Mars, 55, 146 Matter interpretation of matter through the symbolism, 52 Maturana, Umberto, vii, 10, 29 McLuhan, Marshall, 269 Medicines, 4, 16, 46, 139, 140, 143, 155, 234, 274, 279, 286, 331, 336

354 Memories, 68–70, 72, 78, 97, 99–102, 105, 112, 117, 120, 149, 162–164, 220, 251, 252, 256, 342 Mendelson, Jack, 338 Mental health, 17, 137–143, 304 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 6, 15, 48–51, 59, 113, 150, 160, 164, 165, 169–171, 216, 217, 219, 275, 287, 316, 319, 321, 336 Meta-phenomenology, 28 Metaphysics meta-metaphysics, 12 Methexis, 48 Methodologies, 12, 331, 336–338, 345 Mickunas, Algis, 18, 146–158 Minds, vii, 8, 9, 14, 16, 29, 34, 36, 44–47, 55, 57, 73, 85, 87–89, 94–98, 101, 102, 104–109, 126, 139, 146, 153, 154, 157, 187, 189, 255, 265, 300, 311, 313, 323–326, 340 Monet, Claude, 103, 104 Monophony, 291–300 Monstrous, 192, 194–199, 202, 204, 207–208, 211 Morality, 22, 278, 279, 283, 285 Moral senses, 7, 22, 101, 140–142, 288 Munich-Göttingen School, 46 Mysterium tremendum et fascinans, 189 Mystery, 16, 52, 97, 99, 103, 105, 109 N Nancy, Jean Luc, 251 Natality, 45, 56, 59, 220 Natural self, 59 subjects, 6, 13, 39, 40, 48–51, 233, 277, 330 Nature, vii, viii, 5–16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 32, 33, 35–40, 45–52, 57, 59, 64, 65, 77, 79, 84–90, 96, 99, 102, 103, 108, 113, 116–120, 129, 139, 140, 143, 146, 152, 153, 155, 160, 162–165, 170, 174, 188, 192–195, 204, 208, 212, 220–222, 238, 239, 244–251, 253, 255–257, 265–269, 276, 278, 281, 286–288, 292, 297, 304, 309, 310, 318, 320–322, 325, 330, 331, 333, 335, 337, 341, 345 Nature and spirit, 46–48, 64 New critique of Reason, 55 New enlightenment, 35, 94 New realism, 46 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 11, 14, 26, 27, 275

Index Noema, 178–181, 194, 195, 198, 211 Noesis, 178–180, 198 Non-being non-being-there, 165 Non-human environment, 20, 34, 40 Non-human life, 13, 35, 39 Nothingness, 95–97, 99–101, 106 O Oikeiosis, 220 Oîkos, 216, 220 Ontology bodily, 50 materials, 153, 154 Ontopoiesis ontopoietic awareness, 114 ontopoiesis of life, v, vi, ix, 6, 34, 54, 84, 86, 89, 94, 97 ontopoietic logos of life, viii Ontopoietic ecosystem, viii, 6, 15 Openness, 21, 58, 70, 100, 160, 162, 169, 248, 252, 263–271, 299, 344 Otherness, 21 Others otherness, 39, 86, 129, 159–172, 184, 185, 267, 281, 309, 311, 319, 323 others within ourselves, 21 other-than-humans, 39 Otto, Rudolf, 183, 189, 206 Our Lady of Schoenstatt Shrine, 209–211 Outer space, 45 Øyen, Simen Andersen, viii Ozola, Zane, xii Ozoliņš, Jānis Tālivaldis, xi P Pandemic crisis, v, viii, 4–23, 138, 140, 142, 143, 281, 288, 292, 344 environment, 17 environments, viii, 40, 158, 274, 295, 297, 320, 326, 344, 345 situation of, 16, 17, 51, 278, 279, 282, 283, 321 Parmenides Parmedian, 11 Patočka, Jan, 7, 217, 218 Pearson, Joel, 94, 106 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 179 Phenomenological reduction, viii, 94, 95, 247, 294, 323

Index Phenomenology, vi–ix, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 26, 28, 29, 34, 37, 40, 44–48, 50, 52–56, 58–60, 64, 67–70, 72–74, 78, 83, 84, 90, 94, 97, 100, 104, 107, 108, 113, 120, 127, 138, 160, 166, 170, 178, 179, 198, 208, 211, 212, 215–226, 229–240, 247, 251, 253, 254, 256, 257, 264, 265, 275, 277, 287, 288, 292–294, 296, 298, 300, 303–313, 317, 320, 322, 326, 330, 334, 336, 337 of animality, 76 of experience, 67 of health, 295 of life, vi, viii, ix, 5–7, 9–13, 15, 26, 28–29, 32, 33, 40, 42, 48, 52, 54, 55, 83–85, 87, 89, 94, 96, 97, 99–101, 103, 107, 113, 277, 331 of nature, 46 of perception, 48, 49, 316, 319 of plurality, 44, 56–58 Philosophical anthropology, 12, 37, 84, 331 Philosophy of life, 6, 10, 14, 15, 52, 64, 65, 84, 113 Phýsis, 35 Planet’s ecological unity, 44 Plato, 47, 52, 53, 148, 151, 248 Pleasure, 4, 98, 150, 164, 191, 279, 345 Pleasure-oriented societies, 4 Plurivocality, 55 Poiesis self-individualizing, vii Polyphony, 291–300 Popper, Karl, 11, 102–104, 107, 265, 268 Pornography, 266, 271 Positivity of being, 27, 30, 32–33 Post-humanism post-human, v, 5, 35–37 Preconsciousness, 66, 67 Proprioception, 317, 319, 320, 324 Psyches, 18, 112, 119, 127–133, 157 Psychic disturbances, 132 Purdue Pete, 201–205 Q Quantum approach, 107 Quarantines, 21, 139, 263–271, 304 R Radiation, 17, 330–345 Rampton, Vanessa, 20

355 Real, 17, 21, 34, 46–48, 52, 56, 78, 87, 95, 98, 99, 106–109, 114, 115, 117, 126, 128, 130, 139, 140, 153, 155, 157, 160, 190, 198, 199, 235, 264, 281, 287–289, 296, 304, 306, 313 Realities, 6, 7, 12, 14, 15, 20, 22, 29, 34, 39, 45, 46, 48, 49, 55, 59, 60, 84, 86–88, 90, 97, 99, 102, 104, 105, 108, 113, 117, 125, 127, 129, 138, 139, 142, 143, 146, 151, 153, 154, 160, 161, 163, 166, 171, 182, 250, 264, 278, 292, 293, 305, 320, 326, 340, 342 Reciprocity, 134, 185, 216, 217, 219–221, 226, 255, 280 Responsibility responsibility for life, 18, 279 Ricoeur, Paul, 6, 10, 11, 245, 252, 253, 336, 338 Rubene, MĀra, 8, 18, 244–258, 284 Ryba, Thomas, 18, 19, 94, 173–212 S Sabeva, Svetlana, 48 Saint-Exupery, Antoine de, 44 Sang-Hwan, Kim, 16, 288 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 112–120 Sartre, Jean–Paul, 21, 22, 49, 219, 275, 277, 278, 283–287, 316 Sassine, Marie Antonios, xi Scheler, Max, 6, 27, 34, 46, 216 Schmid, Wilhelm, 218 Schmitt, Carl, 225 Schrag, Calvin, 10 Security personal, 51 Self self-care, 218 self-individualization, vii–ix, 5, 6, 8, 14, 15, 36, 44, 54, 57, 84, 85, 87, 88, 287, 337 self-referential anthropocentrism, 39, 41 Sennett, Richard, 219, 225 Senses, vi, 4, 6, 7, 10–12, 14, 20, 22, 26–42, 46, 55, 57, 59, 65–69, 72, 73, 77–79, 86, 88–90, 96–99, 101, 102, 104, 106–109, 118, 120, 126, 128, 129, 131, 133, 134, 148, 150, 153–156, 162, 164, 166, 167, 169–171, 174, 178–180, 188, 189, 197, 206, 207, 209, 210, 221–223, 225, 230–232, 234, 235, 239, 244, 249, 253–255, 257, 269, 278, 285, 291, 300, 304, 305, 307–312, 316, 317, 319, 320, 322–326, 331, 335, 341, 343–345

356 Sentience, vii Sepp, Hans R., 46 Servan, Johannes, viii Ševčík, Miloš, xi Sharing-in-life, 5, 15, 20, 57, 59, 87 Skolimowski, Henryk, 6 Sky, 9, 12, 18, 102, 113, 151, 244, 248–251, 254–256, 258, 270, 282, 341, 343 Šliogeris, Arvydas, 266 Sloterdijk, Peter, 334, 335, 340 Smith, Jadwiga S., v, 88 Smith, William S., v Sodeika, Tomas, 21, 303–313 Solidarity ecological solidarity, 8, 20–23, 287 Solipsism, 304–307, 312 Somatic introspection, 317, 322–326 Soyinka, Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde, 112–114, 118, 119 Space spacing, 17 Spinoza, Baruch, 32, 172 Spirit spiritual experience, 97 spiritual reactions, 125–134 Stein, Edith, 7, 17, 21, 46, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 168 Steinbock, Anthony J., 19, 59, 71, 76, 174, 178, 179, 182–184, 186, 194, 203 St. Märgen Manuscripts, 70 Strasser, Stefan, 10 Subliminal passions, viii, 9, 17 Summer solstice, 90 Šuvajevs, Igors, 7, 19, 215–226 Szmyd, Jan, 12, 84 T Taxonomy, 18, 173–212 Technology technological sciences, 51 technologies of pleasure, 4 Technos, 225 Telos, 5, 7, 11, 14, 20, 22, 29, 37, 44, 151, 181, 182, 194, 287, 288 Terrestrial, 51, 53, 59 Territories, 7, 48, 162, 292–294, 298–300, 334 Terror, 17, 146, 150, 330–345 Terrorism, 17, 330–345 Texas, 200, 201 Theoretical eros, 46–48 Tillich, Paul, 283

Index Time inner, 14, 19, 251, 252 Torjussen, Lars Petter, viii Totality, 28, 31, 56, 83–90, 200, 224, 232, 281, 288, 345 Totaro, Francesco, 5, 11, 12, 26–42 Transcendental elements, 31 Transcendental subjectivity, 47–49, 60, 293, 294, 312 Trans-humanism, 34 Truth, 12, 28, 30, 31, 41, 97, 98, 100, 118, 119, 151, 217, 218, 253, 264, 288, 295, 336–338, 342–344 Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa, v–viii, 5–12, 15, 18, 26–29, 36, 37, 48, 51, 54–57, 59, 83–90, 94, 96–101, 106, 113, 114, 116, 120, 140–143, 169, 170, 185–186, 215, 245, 246, 249, 254–256, 277, 287, 331, 336 Typification, 68, 181–183 U Unbehagen, 226 Uncanny objects, 18, 173–212 Unconditional being, 26, 29–32 Unconsciousness unconscious, 67 unconscious life, 14, 64 Unhomeliness, 19, 226 Unity-of-everything-there-is-alive, 38, 87, 331 Urban spaces, 244–251, 254, 257 Urbanism, 244–250, 252, 253, 256, 257 V Van Grunsven, Janna, 230, 238 Varela, Francisco, vii, 6, 10, 29, 170 Vēgners, Uldis, 19, 229–240 Vēja, Ginta, xii Vējš, Jānis, xi Venus, 55 Verducci, Daniela, v, 5, 10, 54, 56, 87, 94, 97 Vēvere, Velga, 316–326 Vidauskytė, Lina, 21, 303–313 Villarreal, Luis P., 14, 233 Virilio, Paul, 253, 254, 342, 344, 345 Virus, 4, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 40, 41, 46, 127–130, 134, 171, 230, 233–240, 254, 264, 267, 268, 271, 275, 279, 286, 291, 294–296, 299, 300, 303, 304, 343–345 Vita activa, 56, 57 Vortex of universal sense, vii

Index W Walter, Eugene, 336 We-consciousness, 6, 8, 14, 20, 21, 276, 287 Weiler, Michael, 47 Weinberger, David, 340 Werner, Marx, 249 Whitehead, Alfred, vi Wild, John, 46 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 215 Woods, forest, 15

357 World world-forest, 53 World Health Organization (WHO), 138 World Phenomenology institute, 85, 94 Z Zahavi, Dan, 12, 58, 59, 75, 320 Zingale, Nicholas, 336 Zulaika, Joseba, 330