Pandemic crisis: husserlian phenomenology and the call to responsibility

Abstract

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.