Phenomenological Reviews

Title: Crisis and Lifeworld: New Phenomenological Perspectives
Series: Phänomenologie
Author: Hernán Gabriel Inverso, Alexander Schnell (Eds.)
Publisher: Karl Alber
Release Date: 2023
Format: Hardback
Pages: 230
Source: Reviewed by: Piero Carreras (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore\Bergische Universität Wuppertal)

The tripartite structure of Crisis and Lifeworld reflects that of  a conference which took place at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal in 2018: the first part, titled “Perspective on the Crisis” (essays by Carr, Schnell, Marsico and Walton) deals with methodological and historical questions of the relationship between lifeworld and crisis; the second part, “Echoes of the Crisis” deals more strictly with the reception of Husserl’s work (essays by Inverso, Lorelle, Garcia), with a special focus on the francophone developments; the third and last part, “The Lifeworld reconsidered”, is instead the exploration of contemporary interpretations of the lifeworld (essays by Held, Mossadeq, Rabanaque, Kim, Durt). As the editors remind us in the introduction, krinein means “to sift”, separating the flour from the bran. In phenomenological terms, this critical operation leads to a Rückfrage bringing forth the Urstiftung as the symbolic institution of meaning and transcendental consciousness, operating on the primary level of phenomena in their indeterminacy which is named lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Yet, there’s always a paradox in discussing the “crisis” in phenomenological terms, namely that, since Husserl denounced it for the first time, we are still ensnared within its net. For all the therapeutic intentions showed by the father of phenomenology, the crisis seems to have become permanent. Thus, contemporary phenomenologists are somewhat forced to go back again to this fundamental and problematic structuring of experience, in search for a new point of access to the underlying lifeworld, which is the most important step towards any possible solution.

This is how we could read the title of this collective work: we are faced with a couple of terms, “crisis” and “lifeworld”, and the contributions of this volume all seem to be situated in this in-between perspective. Being a collective work, this in-between space is at play again and again, as the perspective shifts necessarily due to the multiplicity of voices dealing with the topic from different understandings of phenomenology (and philosophy altogether). In the impossibility of finding a single line, the reader is somewhat forced to join the dialogue ex post. This premise is Necessary to understand how this book shall be dealt with in the following pages.

The opening essay by David Carr, “Phenomenology: Metaphysics or Method?” is possibly one of the most engaged ones. According to Carr, who has debated on the topic with, amongst others, Dan Zahavi, phenomenology is to be understood strictly as a method of critique of experience, cutting away from any kind of metaphysics. At the core of his essay, he proposes a “mutual hands-off agreement”:

I’m proposing is a mutual hands-off agreement: phenomenology should not be contaminated by prior metaphysical commitments; metaphysics should not look to phenomenology for support for its views. Thus I am not trying to de-legitimize metaphysics, much less empirical science. I am just trying to affirm the distinctness of their tasks from that of phenomenology. And what is that task? As we said, while metaphysics asks what exists, how it exists, and sometimes whether it exists, and while epistemology asks how we can know what exists, phenomenology asks, of anything that exists or may exist: how is it given, how is it experienced, and what is the nature of our experience of it. (p. 36)

The reader may be reminded of what already Dominique Janicaud (not mentioned here) had already denounced in French phenomenology at the beginning of the debate on the “theological turn”[1]. Although Carr’s position makes a strong claim, it could be counter-argued that a different reading of Husserl himself could even understand phenomenology as a “first step” towards metaphysics: the problem of this “hands-off agreement” is that it isn’t exactly clear who should benefit from it. The fact that phenomenology can be helpful for metaphysics and that metaphysics can grant phenomenology a further grounding is an object of controversy. It is true that Carr underscores the problem of metaphysical pre-assumptions rather than the possible metaphysical results which could span from phenomenology, but doesn’t cutting the line between the two doesn’t constitute a risk for philosophical development rather than an opportunity to do better phenomenology? I will leave the question open.

The second essay is “Transcendental Phenomenology and the Lifeworld” by Alexander Schnell. We are presented here with a historical and theoretical reconstruction of the development of Husserl’s transcendental Idealism. “Transcendental” is here to be understood as a motivation that makes comprehensible what can be described phenomenologically (with what is given immanently), referring to an ultimate source, the phenomenologically attestable or analysable fungierende Leistungen of transcendental subjectivity. What Husserl aims at in his last work is proposing a new  is a new fundamental task of phenomenology, which is no longer the legitimation of knowledge of the 1920s, but rather the Verständlichmachung (Hua VI, §49): phenomenology produces intelligibility, as shown in the new focus on Sinnbildung as fundamental task. This also entails a critique to the “principle of all principles” of Ideen I (§24), as the difference between the sphere of intuitiveness and non-intuitive manners of being conscious now relate back to the Vermöglichkeiten: objective existence now rests on the various manners of presentification, including phantasia and imagination, which brings forth a questioning of the priority of doxic and objectifying thematization. Schnell goes on to reconstruct further methodological problems that Husserl inherited from himself (e.g.  the problems of adequacy of the phenomenological description, the paradox of the annihilation of consciousness, and the distinction of objective and transcendental knowledge), showing how they relate to the last incarnation of Husserl’s phenomenology. In the Krisis, practicing phenomenology becomes a making comprehensible in a transcendental way insofar as it is a question of the sense and validity of phenomena: not securing objectivity anymore, but understanding it (Hua VI, 193). Schnell wraps up his essay suggesting a new possible line of elaboration: according to him, Husserl missed the opportunity to pursue and deepen the perspective opened by Hume: 

But instead of pursuing and deepening the new perspective opened by Hume – that of the transcendental Sinnbildung, which consists in a non-descriptive, transcendental “making-intelligible”, in which it is a question of putting forward the non-intuitive and non-presenting effectuations of consciousness – which would make it possible to focus on the anonymous processes of Sinnbildung beneath any egoic pole, Husserl preferred to concentrate on the constitutive role of what he called “intersubjectivity in community”. This missed opportunity must be held responsible for the reproach of subjectivism and solipsism that he has always been accused of and that – unjustly – continues to be made to him. (p. 58)

This implies the possibility of further developments, recurring to one of the (admittedly few) authors that Husserl himself discussed at some length. The Crisis is thus the final crossroads of some of the problems that Husserl himself faced throughout the development of his own philosophy, but it also leaves open some perspectives on which it’s possible to work further and differently.

After this reconstruction and opening of a possible new path within phenomenology itself and one of the key figures for its development (Hume), Claudia Marsico’s essay, “Philosophical generativity. Turn to antiquity, institution of meaning and the Denkergemeinschaft in the Crisis” tries to go back to the origins of philosophy altogether. Following Husserl (Hua VI, Beilage XXIV), philosophy as a task requires an historical reflection (Besinnung), which can trace back the phenomenological Urstiftung as a Nachstiftung of the Greek. Yet, as already the Greek institution wasn’t without conflict and tensions, the crisis can be conceived as a fundamental fact of our tradition. The Rückfrage in Husserl’s Crisis illuminates the Urstiftung der Ziele: underneath the sedimentations, the past becomes an infinite repository for new possible reconstructions, and this implies that the original institution is not self-sustaining, nor has any warrant except through the task of reinstitution. The double nature of Urstiftung means that its enaction is the possibility of achieving results, constructing a certain future, whose material condition is history. Thus, the phenomenologist belongs to a “community of thinkers” whose function is, since Plato, to reactivate consciousness, in a dialogue which transforms “classical” philosophers connecting them with their successors, while keeping this perspective open to the future[2].

The essay by Roberto J. Walton, “Crisis as the lack of response to an interpellation”, continues in the same line of problems of Marsico’s essay, at the same time signalling a more directly ethical turn within the economy of the volume. Walton proposes a tripartite understanding of the analysis of history in Husserl, which permits his interpretation of the crisis, seen as a disruption of the actual history in a broader movement from primal to rational generativity, entailing a lack of response to an interpellation that emerges from the former and demands the realization of what is implicit in it. This is discussed referring to the different perspectives on the process of teleology, which reflects the tripartite understanding of the crisis process. In “primal history”, teleological processes are connected with instinctive strivings and tendencies, composing a previous possession of the world which is the ground for higher-order generativities. This implies a further split between two levels of historicity: one of establishment and sedimentation of meanings directed towards finite goals, outlining the “natural concept of reason” (Hua XXXIX: 386), while the second level produces a new type of traditionality through cultural formations. The process of crisis is the moving-away from the primal establishment of goals, falling into an inauthentic re-establishment, a “lack of response to the twofold interpellation that stems from both margins of actual history”. The overcoming of the crisis is a going back to rational teleology as a structure that should hold sway over history, bringing forth the restoration of the fundamental reality. Walton then shows how various phenomenologists have understood various levels of history, and how these relate to the aspect of interpellation (namely: Heidegger, Patočka, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Henry, Waldenfels, Held). The unfolding of the crisis can be thus conceived as the overlooking of the margins of actual history, implying the need for a new approach: the possibility of saying-no in overcoming which doesn’t limit the human condition to demand and want. From the perspective of primal generativity, a crisis occurs when the preservation of its uniqueness and significance is endangered (Hua XXXVII 332): the twofold character of primal generativity is the foundation for the necessity of maintaining its integrity excluding artificial alterations and its diversity including different trends in the style of spiritual life.

The essay by Hernan Inverso, “Echoes of the Crisis in contemporary French phenomenology”, sets the mood for the second part, which is mostly concerned with the francophone reception of the Crisis problematic. Inverso discusses specifically Henry, Marion and Richir searching for “relevant materials for diagnosing the discomforts of our times, unveiling mechanisms of distortion, and defining new horizons that allow us to understand the world of life”. Again, we are faced with the ethical (and political) consequences of the perpetuating crisis, this time in relation to the role of the universities. According to Henry, the crisis is necessary, and even desirable in the perspective of a possible recovery through its radicalization^[3]. Yet, if according to him universities are criticised as “organs of techno-science”, this perspective is less stark in the interpretation proposed by Marion: while he shares Husserl’s critique of “objectivism” and Henry’s conception of the crisis as a task against techno-scientific barbarism, he gives less attention to fractures and decadence, preferring to read the Crisis as a mode of rationality unable to “encounter the event”. At the same time, the university assumed as “a space of experience of the truth that measures what is known and what is not with an ethics of knowledge” as shown in the fading of specialized education implies a new hope for a “universal model”. The last author discussed by Inverso is Marc Richir, who ties the idea of crisis to a process of “dispersion of meaning”: university, according to him, is at the same time what reproduces the mechanisms of technoscience, while still keeping open the door to the non-daily experience, which Richir conceives of in similar terms of in terms similar to melancholy. As Inverso wraps up,

Without a holistic perspective and a commitment to a radical search proper to philosophy, knowledge becomes abandoned, and there is no way to let the phenomenon show itself to decide about the future. This horizon implies a real challenge for the university. In Husserl, it is the Ministry of Humanity; in Henry, the last redoubt at risk; in Marion, it is the guarantee of universality; and in Richir, the paradoxical entity that reproduces the mechanisms of technoscience but keeps the door open to the non-daily experience. (p. 112)

 

Paula Lorelle’s “Is life sensible? Husserl and Henry: two paradoxes about the lifeworld” focuses more deeply on Henry’s interpretation of the crisis. Focussing on Henry’s perspective, the crisis is interpreted as an abstraction from the sensible dimension towards insensible laws, which cause the self-objectivation of Life. According to Lorelle:

the phenomenological attempt to sensibilize the world through life, against its scientific idealization, ends up idealizing the world again, from the bottom of its insensible life. If the return to an absolute life leads to the lifeworld’s objectification, the only way out of this paradox and the true phenomenological solution to the crisis appears as the recognition of life’s essential sensibility, of its indefectible intertwining with the world. And this solution can also be found in La Barbarie. (123-124)

Whereas Husserl proposes a re-sensibilization of the world, Henry argues instead for the return to the insensible principle, pushing life’s insensibility to the non-intentional point of radical and unaltered auto-affection, disclosing self-sufficiency as life’s most insensible manifestation. But this also means an ambiguity between life’s affective impregnation of the world and its ecstatic objectification as synthesis: the world becomes the identical pole of perception, losing its vitality in becoming an “objective world” – which is the same process that Henry calls barbarism. This has repercussions for on the paradox of life as being both self-sufficient and essentially cultural: the acosmicity of life is shattered by the thesis of its practical and corporeal auto-affection: life seems to lose relation with the world, which reappears underneath objectivity as “earth” interior to life’s practical development. Yet, life’s self-unfolding implies the earth which is already lively. The return to the sensible lifeworld is seen as a solution to the crisis: paradoxically, life becomes sensible but also transcendental and absolute, but this movement is reversed in La Barbarie, which discusses life’s sickness and tendency toward self-negation. Life could thus be said sensible in two senses: living-through the world originally, but also being intrinsically vulnerable. Life frees itself rom its sensibility through phenomenology, meaning that the lifeworld is a lived and fragile world.

Esteban A. Garcia’s “Topics in Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the Crisis” follows the francophone discussion. Reconstructing Merleau-Ponty’s approach to Husserl’s Crisis rather than an approach to the “crisis”, a double trend can be observed: the attempt to gain access to the other from the cogito and the rejection of that problem and orientation towards intersubjectivity. Merleau-Ponty’s procedure overcomes philosophy as a strenge Wissenschaft towards a “pure interrogation”. According to him, reduction reveals “the simultaneous contact with my own being and with the world’s being”, entailing an “inhering of my consciousness in its body and its world,” which is intertwined with intersubjectivity. In this same perspective, Merleau-Ponty also recovers the Gestalt within phenomenology: purged from their ontological assumptions, and blurring the distinction between eidetic and empirical phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty thinks in terms of intertwining and reciprocal inclusion of phenomenology and psychology.

The late Klaus Held’s “Phenomenology of the Crisis and digitalisation” is more concerned with Heidegger’s understanding (and refusal) of the metaphor of the diagnosis and crisis. Held is explicitly proposing an open essay, trying to ground a possible understanding of the restructuring of lived experience through the process of digitalisation, which in this essay is seen in three main varieties (virtually augmented reality, sharing-activity and artificial intelligence). Through Besinnung, Heidegger leads to the “tragic insight that we cannot escape enframing’s commands”, that is here understood as the process of digitalisation, whose development cannot be ascribed to anyone, has crept into current life as routinely “idealizing” operations[4]: The recursive process of digitalisation brings forth the production of a deeper forgetting of the lifeworld, which entails a new and manifold exacerbation of the crisis originally described by Husserl. The political demand to bring under control digitalization is destined to fail according to Heidegger’s understanding, as the non-attributability of digitalization belongs to the self-withdrawal of the withdrawal. Yet, phenomenology does not abandon entirely “those who urge human beings to take responsibility for the development of digitalization”: the analogue bodily experience of the world faces the “virtual” or “augmented” realities, against which Besinnung can lead to understanding that the fascination of the virtual plunges us into a virtuality frenzy. The difference is that Held, recovering Husserl against Heidegger, tries to think in terms of the possibility of exercising an influence.

In his “Lifeworld forgetfulness in the digital age. Reflexions following Husserl’s Crisis”, Ismail el Mossadeq develops further what has been proposed by Held, focusing on the analogue-digital contrast. This entails the concept of “density”, which is how the analogue given is registered as continuous, making an analysis of discrete units impossible, as opposed to digital objects, which are entirely calculated “abstract real things”. Phenomenology, in this perspective, has to uphold its task of critical reflection, relating the digital realm back to the horizons of the lifeworld, “lest the digital realm become an autonomous fiefdom” subject only to its own rules and dynamics, exacerbating the crisis of sense and orientation. From this perspective, Phenomenology is what has to trace downstream of every digital medium, “its subsequent analogue” dimension.

Luis Roman Rabanaque, “Crisis and the Unconscious: Another Look at the Lifeworld” begins with the double aspect of the crisis, as both a problem within the scientific method and of its meaning for the decisive questions of humanity. Considering the lifeworld as the original mode of access, Rabanaque develops his essay towards the problems of the unconscious, of seizing phenomena that reach beyond conscious activity – something that Husserl called a Grenzproblem (Hua XLII)[5]. He proposes two strategies: reflection begins by focusing on what falls within the reach of evidence, thus examining the conscious thresholds, or it can examine the recollection and indirect experiences. The unconscious is, in Husserl’s sense, a horizon of latency which is related to wakefulness and affection, and with sunkenness beyond what is or can be conscious. In both cases this is to be conceived of as a transcendental dimension, not merely an anthropological or psychological one, and, at the same time, a site of sedimentation, which may even provide a foundation for some theses of psychoanalysis.

Hye Young Kim’s “Intersubjective Subjectivity: Language, Diversity of Language” proposes an experiment. Taking into account how phenomenology has rarely discussed the “other” (which, more specifically, means other languages), he proposes a “paradigm change” of the perspective on selfhood. This is discussed considering how subjective self-consciousness and individual cognition is always intersubjective, considering a pre-subjective “we”. Kim’s strategy turns to a discussion of how the Korean (and Malagasy) language employs systematically a we-mode, that is taken to signify a deeper understanding of intersubjectivity than the one possible through the standard vision. This is developed in the sense of knot-set theory, which is explained through multiple examples and drawings. This experimental and unusual approach is rich with implications, which may also be read against the old view of German as the “official language” for philosophy. What remains unclear is how exactly this difference in understanding of intersubjectivity can (or cannot) give a deeper perspective than the traditional “Occidental” perspective, and how exactly the possible conversation between “Occidental” phenomenology and its “other” is to be understood[6].

Christoph Durt’s “Subjectivity and world: the roots of the crisis in Husserl” closes the circle of the whole volume. Drawing from Emiliano Trizio’s study of the mutual repercussion of the crisis of sciences and the crisis of philosophy and from George Heffernan’s multi-faceted and intertwined understanding of crisis, Durt raises the question concerning the actual efficacy of still using this concept. According to him, the crisis shows different ramifications of a common issue: “seen in this way, it does not really matter whether the loss of the meaningfulness of modern science to life is a consequence, or a part of, the crisis of the European sciences” (p. 212). Durt also explicitly faces the problem of the “perpetual crisis”: “the idea of crisis as a critical state that results either in recoalescence or death is furthermore inept in accounting for more-or-less outcomes” (p. 224). In a somewhat dramatic conclusion for the whole volume, Durt writes:

The concept of crisis is not apt to capture the complexity of the discussed issues and may lead to misunderstandings of their nature and possible solutions. Rather than becoming too entangled in “crisis” talk, philosophers need to come up with new metaphors that take heed of the complexity of the problems and possible solutions. (p. 225)[7]

What emerges from this volume as a whole is what we could interpret as a “double resurgence”: on one hand, the problematic resurgence of a crisis, which is never entirely overcome, and represents itself in even more acute forms. Against this resurgence, which is seemingly inescapable, largely negative and, if we may use a Marxist term, alienating, the resurgence of the lifeworld is considered, if not the most efficient available strategy, at the very least the common phenomenological strategy. We could also call this a dialectic between the resurgence and the reemergence: the problem is that the phenomenological lifeworld itself becomes apparent as a problem only because there has been a crisis. As Blumenberg – an author which is alas missing from this work – lucidly said, the problem of the lifeworld is that we can only discuss it when we are already outside of it[8]. To employ one of the recurrent metaphors of the work, the collected essays help come to a diagnosis of the problem, rather than properly discussing the therapeutics which are to be used. This volume helps in reconstructing the various strategies that have been employed at various points of the history of phenomenology to figure out what to do with this double resurgence, but it leaves the reader with much work to do, hinting at possible ways to develop further phenomenology (and philosophy). And, maybe, a revolution is truly what is needed to survive the crisis and to preserve the lifeworld as the infinitely rich cradle of meanings. The reader is accompanied through the topic but, following what seems to be a recurring question, the crisis is still present and operating, and the way to contrast it is not yet clear. We can even (provocatively) say that this volume implies the necessity of a crisis for the reader: both a crisis in the reader’s own understanding of “crisis”, which is also what leads the volume again and again to the roots of the lifeworld. Thus, this volume can also be read as an implicit call to action to act towards the safeguard against the crisis and its perpetuity. The absence of a strong final thesis, which is outside the scope of this work, opens up this questioning of the position of the reader himself, who is then sharing both the same Denkergemeinschaft of the authors, and has to face the same problems. While it’s out of the scope of this work g to be “definitive” on the topic, what actually it manages to be is both a good handbook and a useful tool for further research.

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[1] See the volume containing both Janicaud’s original essay and the conference-answers originally edited by J-F. Courtine: Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, New York, Fordham University Press, 2000.

[2] The reader familiar with Machiavelli can be reminded of what he nicely expressed in his letter to Francesco Vettori (10^th of December 1513).

[3] We may also add: in a typical French Catholic fashion. This dynamic of perpetuation and exacerbation of a crisis for therapeutical purposes was already present, for example, in the reactionary critiques of the French Revolution as Joseph de Maistre, or even Léon Bloy.

[4] Hans Blumenberg – who, like Held, also was a pupil of Ludwig Landgrebe as Held himself – did somewhat partially anticipate this kind of interpretation in his seminal “Lebenswelt und Technisierung unter Aspekte der Phänomenologie” (1961, republished H. Blumenberg, Theorie der Lebenswelt, Suhrkamp 2010).

[5] Small, missed opportunity here: the impossibility of direct access of the unconscious offers the same kind of problem of the access to metaphysics. This could have been a further development of what the main point of Carr’s essay was. In general, in all of those cases of impossibility of direct access, a theory of analogy could be the only viable option – but this is, admittedly, extremely complex to think of in strictly phenomenological terms.

[6] Similar problems, with a (sever mis-)use of phenomenology, are seen for example in the debates concerning the Ontological Turn in anthropology.

[7] The Italian reader is somewhat reminded of a similar conclusion by Enzo Melandri, arguably Italy’s greatest philosopher of the past century: “It is therefore always worthwhile to look for analogies in the hope that they will be revolutionary. But it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. There is no shortage of analogies. Should we be interested in the hay? No; verification is found in the needle. What is missing are not analogies, but rather revolutions. We opt for a philosophy of the needle and not the straw. And it stands or falls according to the alternate fortunes of revolution.” (E. Melandri, La linea e il circolo, S. Besoli, R. Brigati eds., Macerata, Quodlibet, 810).

[8] H. Blumenberg, Theorie der Lebenswelt, cit.