Rosemary Lerner

This contribution attempts to shed a light from a phenomenological point of view on the ecological crises that have affected our planet and our surrounding lifeworld in the twentieth century, and particularly on the devastating 2020 global pandemic. I first address some historical-critical aspects that precede the 2020 pandemic that are related to the modern mechanistic view in sciences and culture. I then deal, within the natural attitude, with this current eco-crisis as a “guiding thread” for a retrospective questioning toward the experiential roots of every human sense and validity from the first-person perspective, contrasting it as well with aspects of a new, unified, systems view of life. In what follows, retrieving the paradox of the subject-in-the world and the subject-for-the world, I examine the lifeworld’s structure as the way (path) to the transcendental field of experience—that of the correlation between human life (embodied, intersubjective, and historical-temporal) and the world, namely, the noetic-noematic structure, in order to show how it is not reducible to a mere passive self-affection, but is the original source of a spiritual virtue and transformational capacity: that of responsibility.

Este trabajo intenta iluminar desde un punto de vista fenomenológico las crisis ecológicas que han afectado a nuestro planeta y al mundo circundante de la vida en el siglo veintiuno, y en particular, la devastadora pandemia global que se desató el año 2020. Primero abordo ciertos aspectos histórico-críticos que preceden a la pandemia del 2020, y que se relacionan a la visión mecanicista moderna en las ciencias y la cultura. Luego, situada en la actitud natural, parto de esta ecocrisis actual como un “hilo conductor” para la interrogación retrospectiva que conduce a las raíces experienciales de todo sentido y validez objetiva, asumiendo la perspectiva de la primera persona y contratastándola con aspectos de una nueva y unificada visión sistémica de la vida. A continuación, destacando la paradoja del sujeto-en-el-mundo y el sujeto-para-el-mundo, examino la estructura del mundo de la vida como un camino o vía hacia el campo de la experiencia trascendental—aquel de la correlación entre la vida humana (encarnada, intersubjetiva e histórico-temoral) y el mundo, es decir, la estructura noético-noemática, con el objeto de mostrar cómo no es reductible a una auto-afección pasiva, sino que es la fuente originaria de una virtud espiritual y capacidad transformativa: la de la responsabilidad.

Husserl envisages transcendental phenomenology as a radically founding science that lays bare the higher-order experiences whereby logic and a theory of science become constituted. On the other hand, according to a usual presentation of Hegel’s philosophy, phenomenology is “logic’s precondition,” and science presents itself as its “result.” This alleged precedence of Hegel’s phenomenology (with its experiential and historical horizons) regarding logic may be a motif behind the current affinities recently traced between Hegelian and Husserlian notions of phenomenology that highlight their views on experience, history, and the lifeworld. This paper offers instead a reconsideration of aspects of their philosophies mostly challenged or dismissed since the rise of positivism: a reappraisal of their views on the relationship between phenomenology, logic, and philosophy as an “absolute” system of sciences. The argument is made that the irreconcilable difference between their projects ultimately stands on the radical contrast between Hegel’s speculative-conceptual method and system of sciences and Husserl’s foundational science and method as experiential-phenomenological all the way through. Despite this methodological abyss, this paper vindicates their affinities in their refusal to segregate science from life, and their attempts to overcome modernity’s inherited fragmentation of culture by providing an all-unifying approach to philosophy.

This contribution addresses some of the issues that have haunted James Mensch’s rich and extensive intellectual career. From the perspective of the “systems view of life” and of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, it specifically refers to the problem of embodiment in relation to the recent Covid 19 pandemic, stressing the role of human responsibility. The text is organized in four sections that gradually transition from a third-person, objective viewpoint to a first-person, subjective one. The first section discusses our lifeworld’s ecological challenge within the “natural attitude.” The second section refers to the concepts of cognition and autopoiesis introduced by the biologists Maturana and Varela along with von Uexküll’s account of the subjective perspective in the animal kingdom. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is introduced in the third section, where the lifeworld’s structure is used to lead as a “guiding thread” to its transcendental experiential groundings—as its ultimate source of responsibility. Finally, the fourth section connects human responsibility back to the recent global sanitary crisis. It concludes with a call for humanity to take responsibility for this type of crisis—at an ethical, cognitive, and normative level—and to promote values of solidarity and compassion toward the “ideal-limit” of a global community of love.

This paper was mostly motivated by Peru’s intense social and economic problems that exploded in an internal armed conflict of exceeding violence, from 1980 to 2000. The A. uses the experience within her country as an exemplification of more global cultural and ideological antagonisms among countries, regions or hemispheres, and to ask whether an encounter beyond cultural differences and reconciliation beyond ideologically motivated antagonisms is at all possible, and upon which bases. Husserl left descriptions that indicate how “plurality” and difference dwell within the most intimate core of one’s “oneness” and “identity”, offering clues as to how we are able to conceive and build “common worlds”, “common truths” and even “objective truth”. The A. finally confronts these transcendental-phenome nological accounts with some elements of certain Amazonian ethnic groups’ worldview, which may seem totally “incompossible” with the Western view that finally nourishes some of Husserl’s basic notions.