Maximilian Gregor Hepach

The question if climate is real is occasioned by a discrepancy between the increased certainty that climate change is being experienced and the impossibility of experiencing climate (change) according to the very framework which provides the basis for this certainty: climate science. I trace this discrepancy back to a question of realism: What sort of realism is necessary in order to make sense of experiences of climate and its changes? In this thesis, I develop a phenomenological realism as a response, which dispels the false dichotomy between ‘objective’ scientific knowledge and ‘subjective’ experience. I do so along three main lines of argument: (i) I turn to the first use of ‘phenomenology’ in Anglo-American geography, namely in Sauer’s Morphology of landscape. By reflecting on what occasioned Sauer to turn to phenomenology, I identify a precedent for my question “Is climate real?” in the history of geography. Informed by the theory Sauer draws on, I develop a Sauerian phenomenology beyond what Sauer himself wrote; an incipient phenomenological realism in geography. (ii) I go on to turn to the origin of the very concept of climate itself, namely the Ancient Greek term klima [κλίμα]. After highlighting the latent, abstract nature of klima, the traces of which extend into our present-day scientific under-standing of climate, I undertake a counterfactual etymology. I (re-)construct a concept of climate that might have emerged based on a different Ancient Greek term: hora [ὥρα]. Through a geographical reading of Plato’s dialogues, I develop a first phenomenological account of climate and its changes. Turning to Aristotle’s work on Metaphysics, I go on to give further shape to a phenomenological realism by reflecting on what sort of ‘thing’ or ‘being’ climate is. Finally, (iii) I situate my own phenomenological approach in the history of phenomenology in geography. I argue that the introduction of phenomenological theory into human geography as a reaction to positivism has led to a subjectivistic or anti-realist understanding of phenomenology. Hence, my doctoral project is both to account for the experiential reality of climate and its changes and, by example, to detail an alternative geographical approach to phenomenology. I conclude with a re-reading of Husserl’s later work, informed by the phenomenological challenges climate presents one with. In summary, the question if climate is real is not merely philosophical. What one takes to be real inevitably shapes how one makes sense of experience and what is deemed to be possible in the future. Much public discourse around climate change in-formed by climate science is increasingly concerned with the narrowing down of reality in order to instil a sense of urgency. Here, a phenomenological approach promises to open up new ways of making sense of living in a changing climate.

Historical and cultural approaches to climate generally consider climate to be a stabilising concept between weather and culture. Different historical and cultural concepts of climate signify different ways of learning to live with the weather. However, anthropogenic climate change evidences the limit of this approach: instead of stabilising, climates ephemeralise together with the ways we have come to adapt to them. Changing climates require a concept of climate that captures how climates are experienced both as stable and ephemeral. To create such a concept, I engage in an exercise of counterfactual etymology, reconstructing the concept of climate that might have emerged from the Ancient Greek term hora as opposed to klima. Central to my re-creation of phenomenological climate are Plato's myths, through which I highlight the methodological kinship between myth and phenomenology. Drawing on a later dialogue, Philebus, I provide an ontological account of climates as both stable and ephemeral. I conclude by situating my approach to climate and its changes in recent work on the relationship between weather and climate, arguing for the necessity of phenomenological climate in order to make sense of what changes with climate change. My turn to Ancient Greek philosophy and its application to the phenomenology of climate and its changes sounds out a novel approach to research in historical geography.

This article calls into question recent attempts to move beyond, to ‘post’ phenomenology by highlighting the continued relevance of key phenomenological concepts (intentionality and correlationism) for human geography. I show how these concepts are pivotal to addressing problems raised by post-phenomenologists themselves concerning affects and objects. Drawing on recent phenomenological theory, I develop a spatial account of how subject and object cohere in experience. I argue that the very relation between/entanglement of the human and more-than-/non-human can best be accounted for phenomenologically. Such a phenomenological approach promises new ways of understanding various phenomena such as landscape, weather or climate.

In Being and Time Heidegger analyses the structure of Dasein, making transparent how and what we are in the world. Yet Heidegger’s writing becomes increasingly vague the closer he comes to describing what Dasein actually is. It seems the possibility of authentic Being grounds in the state-of-mind of anxiety, confronting us with a meaningless world and making Dasein transparent to itself. In three grammatically ambiguous sentences, Heidegger explains that we experience nothingness, yet not ‘total’ nothingness, in moments of anxiety. This short passage seems of utmost importance to me. I argue that only in experiencing nothingness are we able to lead an authentic and self-owned life, independent of interpretations of others. From this insight I turn to Bernhard Waldenfels’ work Phenomenology of the Alien, my idea being that experiencing nothingness is an alien experience par excellence. Waldenfels analyses how we answer to alien experiences​, and what type of answers we can give. My thesis is that the possibility of authentic Being lies in an answer from nothingness, which does not just repeat what has already been said but must give new answers.

The following article aims to answer the question: “How do we experience weather and qi?” Answering this question addresses two problems: Both the phenomena of weather and qi elude classic phenomenological paradigms such as thing-perception and Dasein, brought forth by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, respectively. If phenomenology is concerned with giving an account of experience starting with the “things themselves,” weather and qi necessitate a different phenomenological paradigm, which comprehensively accounts for the experience of both. This article demonstrates that inconspicuousness, as it has been recently phenomenologically accounted for by Günter Figal, is such a new paradigm. Philosophy done across different languages and cultures is often faced with the problem of untranslatability. This article further demonstrates, following Hisayama Yuho’s work, how phenomenology can present a ground for such philosophy: Instead of discussing qi through its mistranslations into English, I approach the phenomenon by discussing the similarity of phenomenological accounts of qi from Japanese philosophy with my own account of the phenomenology of weather. Both phenomenological accounts mutually elucidate each other. A phenomenological analysis of weather and qi thus both illustrates a largely unthematized facet of human experience in phenomenology, namely, the immersion in media of perception and experience, and demonstrates the philosophical productivity of intercultural philosophy.