Gabriel Mehmel

The everyday language term “disorientation” can be applied to a vast range of different phenomena. As evidenced by everyday discourse, talk of disorientation cuts across both positive, negative, as well as more ambivalent experiences of emotional upheaval in which one appears to lose one’s bearings in and with the social world. For example, one may report a sense of disorientation in response to falling in love, losing a loved one, or misfitting the social norms. In such cases, the term “disorientation” is not evoked in the literal sense of disorientation, namely the malfunctioning of orientation processes in navigating physical space. Rather, it is used in the metaphorical sense, namely the experience of feeling at a loss as to how to go on with one’s own life. This thesis is about the phenomenon of disorientation in its metaphorical sense. Drawing on resources in phenomenology, social philosophy, philosophy of emotions, and philosophy of agency, I examine in detail what it is like first-personally to experience metaphorical disorientation in navigating social space. Despite the heterogeneous nature of metaphorical disorientation, I argue that there is a unifying phenomenological structure underlying paradigmatic cases of metaphorical disorientation. I call this phenomenological structure “social disorientation” and demonstrate that it consists in a constitutive relationship between feeling not at home and perceived lack of agency over one’s personal future. In developing and defending the phenomenological category of social disorientation, I aim to contribute not only to the small but growing scholarship on metaphorical disorientation experiences in particular, but also to philosophical scholarship concerning social life in general.

This paper seeks to develop a phenomenological account of the disorientation of grief, specifically the relationship between disorientation and the breakdown in practical self-understanding at the heart of grief. I argue that this breakdown cannot be sufficiently understood as a breakdown of formerly shared practices and habitual patterns of navigating lived-in space that leaves the bereaved individual at a loss as to how to go on. Examining the experience of losing a loved person and a loved person-to-be, I instead propose that this breakdown should be understood primarily in relation to a distinctive kind of futurity operative in disorientation, irrespective of the extent to which there is a breakdown of formerly shared practices and habitual patterns of navigating lived-in space. Drawing on the resources afforded by Heidegger’s phenomenology, I argue that it is a core characteristic of the experience of disorientation in grief that the grieving person can no longer meaningfully press ahead into a specific futural self. This view comes with certain advantages over existing accounts of the temporality of grief for making sense of the disorientated relationship to futurity, which the appeal to Heideggerian resources makes possible.

In this paper, I aim to defend Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics against what I call the radical hermeneutic critique, specifically the critique developed in Robert Bernasconi’s article “’You Don’t Know What I’m Talking About’: Alterity and the Hermeneutic Ideal” (1995). Key to this critique is the claim that Gadamer’s account does not rise to the ethical task of embracing the alterity of the Other, but instead reduces it to a projection of one’s self. The implication is therefore that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has to be rejected on ethical grounds, as it does not appreciate but assimilates the alterity of the Other. In contrast to this radical hermeneutic critique, I argue that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics can accommodate an Other that is not assimilated but appreciated, on the condition that the unique status of a dialogue with the Other as a person is no longer neglected, as Gadamer does, but instead truly distinguished from a dialogue with the Other as a text.