Voicing Relationality — Phenomenological Directions

Abstract

Prefacing the 2007 reprint of Der Leib, der Raum und die Gefühle (1998), Hermann Schmitz, founder of the Neue Phänomenologie movement, contends that the rationalism of the early Enlightenment, its belief in objective truth and in measurable, empty space, is rooted in a much earlier event: The Enlightenment of the fourth/fifth centuries B.C. in Greece which marked a decisive shift away from a view of a dynamic, filled and thus relational cosmos. Whereas here, humans and natural phenomena are still interconnected, corporeal and dynamically involved with each other, the new paradigm is defined by intellectualism and an inward turn, with consciousness emerging as the culturally-sanctioned intellectual forerunner of solipsism and its cultural footprint: radical disconnection. In this paper, I argue that while cultural paradigms cannot easily be undone, with the help of phenomenological thinking, we have access to a different narrative, an important first step in re-thinking both interconnection and human responsibility in a world in which we have done so much damage. Outlining the contributions of Husserl (intersubjectivity) and Merleau-Ponty (embodiment and perception) as well as Schmitz (atmosphere), I hope to show that the phenomenological focus shifts from an initial Cartesianism (Husserl) towards relationality and an ethical re-focussing. By articulating a model of perception in which every moment of our understanding is shaped by relationality, phenomenological voices contribute alongside other forms of cultural expression to give hope for a different way of doing things, a hope badly needed in times of war and environmental disaster.

Keywords:

• Phenomenology
• Intersubjectivity
• Embodiment
• Lebenswelt, Vacuum alterity
• Atmosphere
• Environmental catstrophe
• Environmental ethics

Introduction

The choice of ‘Voicing Relationality’ as the title for this contribution alludes to both the expressive and the embodied nature of relationality.¹ In the following, I will primarily focus on ways in which phenomenology gives expression to relationality. Bearing in mind that philosophical discourse in a wider sense can offer only some of the many possible ways of contemplating relationality, the following contribution cannot claim to be exhaustive or even broadly representative of relationality within philosophy. Perhaps, however, this very selectivity may be helpful for thinking in terms of ‘voicings’. What are these, after all, if not specific iterations from a broader range of possibilities of expression for something that might be an abstract sense of our connected humanity on the one hand, or a concrete awareness of this humanity as something located, known and knowable on the other? This latter sense of relationality might be as physical as the former could be abstract and ideational. In approaching relationality, and, in particular, in dwelling on philosophical voicings of this, it is important to point to the over-arching dimension: our human lives are linked to the lives of other animals, and we co-exist in a way that is solely possible when the ecological conditions of life itself are given.

That these conditions can no longer be taken for granted is now a reality. Averting climate catastrophe will need very strong political, scientific and cultural forms of intervention. Humanities discourses, the arts and the social sciences will all have an important role to play. In focusing on philosophical discourse in the following, my aim is not to suggest a more important role for philosophy, but simply that each form of discourse that makes a case for relationality is significant if we are to overcome what Hans Blumenberg in 1948 described as ‘die ontologische Distanz’.² The Cartesian Age had increasingly heralded an objectivity in the form of exact science, he argues, which effectively makes subjectivity subordinate to the scientific experiment, and the rift between nature and subject wider. ‘Bloße Tatsachenwissenschaften machen bloße Tatsachenmenschen’, Husserl comments in the posthumously published Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften.³ At the same time as being marginalised on one level, subjectivity — with the primacy of the self, however, disconnected from the world — is established as a bastion of interiority, offering shelter and protection from the vulnerability of a world in which humans are embodied, vulnerable and creaturely. I hope to show that in the phenomenological philosophy of the twentieth century, relationality emerges as an alternative to this view.

While climate catastrophe and the need to act on all levels cannot be the main focus of the following contribution, I will, in the concluding section, address philosophical relationality and the question of environmental ethics with reference to Hans Jonas’ call for ethical responsibility in Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Beginning with an outline of interconnectedness in Husserl's phenomenology, I next turn briefly to Heidegger and then to Merleau-Ponty. My deliberations will then venture in a more recent direction — Hermann Schmitz's ‘New Phenomenology’ (Neue Phänomenologie) and its emphasis on the atmospheric — before concluding, as mentioned, with the ethics of relationality in focus.

Phenomenology as Relationality

One factor gives impetus to the directions of thought that shaped phenomenology more than any other. This is that the early phenomenologists were concerned by the extent to which the empirical mode of knowledge that characterised the natural sciences had displaced other forms of reasoning.⁴ With the acceleration in the pace of discovery in the natural sciences and, alongside this, the increasingly dominant idea of causation in social theory and in history, the scientific method was very much to the forefront. It seemed that the place for philosophy, and, along with it, the humanities, was chiefly to record individual sensations —an introspective type of project — not one likely to be a shaping force in political reality. These individual sensations within positivism as the dominant knowledge paradigm around 1900 are no longer strongly processed by a unifying consciousness of previous rationalist traditions. This leaves individual thought — not unlike the situation today — as very vulnerable to the 1900 equivalent of ‘big data’. The individual experiences whatever it experiences — but this is private and does not register in the main modus operandi of privileged knowledge systems. Edmund Husserl's work therefore partly revives an earlier Cartesian rationalism, one which carries over in part to Kantian epistemology, by claiming that there has to be an internal activity that allows us to know things, rather than our simply passively receiving ‘data’. Moreover, this internal activity allows us to both be relationally involved with the ‘objects’ of our knowledge and intersubjectively connected to other perceiving selves. It is in this concern to simultaneously emphasise the objects that Husserl differs to some extent from the Kantian model. The challenge, for Husserl, is to re-define the internal acts of cognition in such a way that they are not dualistically separated from our immanent and sensory contact with the world around us.⁵

The internal activity that Husserl proposes as Intentionality is described in many places in his writings, not least in Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie (see note 4 above) and it is, in its emphasis on interiority, to some extent within the Cartesian tradition. At the same time, Husserl is at pains to provide a corrective for the problem of the ego as one-dimensional arbiter of knowledge — likewise a hallmark of the Cartesian tradition. This effort to reconcile the two is tangible throughout his writings, but it is in one of the later works, the Cartesianische Meditationen, that his notion of intersubjectivity is fully developed.

In the fifth Meditation, Husserl sets about countering the charge of solipsism. If it is the subject who must make sense of the world while at the same time being part of it, the question arises as to how to avoid being purely self-referential. For Descartes, making a distinction between mind and body as two substances had meant that it appeared less pressing to conceive of a holistic experience of a world to which one was connected. Only the body had to be considered part of the material world, as one object among many, but the mind would always have the capacity to abstract from this and to transcend it. Indeed, in the second Meditation (1641), Descartes puts forward different possibilities (sensory impression, mind, body, imagination) for testing the veracity of knowledge. He then gives examples that are intended to show the limitations of each before coming to the conclusion that it is the durability of the mind that can best be relied upon. This, for Descartes, is evidenced in the mind's capacity to observe phenomena and secure a continuity in knowledge despite various changes of state in the objects observed, all of which suggests, in turn, that we should place the mind above the senses or the imagination:

I see that without any effort I have now finally got back to where I wanted. I now know that even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone, and this perception derives not from their being touched or seen but from their being understood; and in view of this I know plainly that I can achieve an easier and more evident perception of my own mind than of anything else.⁶

Here, we see that an interiorised consciousness, as far as Descartes is concerned, holds the key to coming to an understanding of our place in the world. It is not our relatedness to this world, but our recourse, potentially, to a transcendent knowledge that is defining. Effectively, the self is cut loose from the world, is unfettered from the senses and can conceive of itself as first and foremost a thinking, reasoning being.

While Husserl, like Descartes, is also concerned with conceptualising knowledge, and, also like Descartes, refers to a continuity underpinning the ego's experience, he is at pains to simultaneously point to an inflection of otherness within the self's experiential awareness. The terminology used in Cartesianische Meditationen is not always very accessible, and the style is undoubtedly convoluted. While this has posed challenges for readers over the decades, it seems fair to say that for those for whom Husserl is an important thinker, his importance often lies in the ethical concern within the text to move beyond the solipsistic consciousness of the Cartesian tradition even though the internal activity of the ego indeed resembles Cartesianism. Husserl is at pains to counter the naturalism of the nineteenth and twentieth-century positivist paradigm in which the necessity for an internal, theoretical knowledge is displaced. In positivism, as mentioned earlier, the data are presented as objective evidence and an interpreting subjectivity is effectively dispensed with.

Husserl describes the self as, on the one hand, able to reliably form judgements about things external to itself while, on the other, being very much part of this world and implicated in its historical, social and cultural processes.⁷ At issue is how to avoid being entirely bound within self-referential awareness, and this very dilemma is one of relationality. If at risk of being solipsistic in the Cartesian tradition, Husserl's thinking addresses this risk and tries to counter it with an emphasis on the possibility of being able to know something of the world of the other, since this is known in partly the same way as the self knows its own consciousness while looking outward in the Lebenswelt. There, it encounters other selves that are also characterised by an encounter with what we can, following from Husserl, begin to call alterity.⁸

Husserl's self is not an ego which reflects on the world from a vantage point of presumed superiority or even safety. Self and Other are together in a world that is experienced as relational. They are not the same, but their co-habitation need not be antagonistic. On the contrary, for all the difficulty of the expression, and the undoubted rationalism, a belief in a form of empathy, that something of the world of the other can be known, emerges as a source of hope. In Husserl, we are far removed from a Hobbesian vision of nature as capable of reverting at any moment into self-seeking chaos and violence, ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’. It is important to emphasise, however, that empathy in Husserl's context does not refer to specifics of emotional affinity; it is more abstract, and is, perhaps, at the risk of simplifying it, a more intellectual rendering of empathy than we may find outside the phenomenological context.⁹ As Timothy Mooney has pointed out, moreover, the way of knowing the Other in Husserl is one in which others in any indicative sense are strikingly absent.¹⁰

Remaining with the fifth Meditation, Husserl talks about an objective world, one which exists independently of the ego, but in which the ego can think of other egos as counterparts, similar selves, others, neither the same nor entirely separate, since both can only arrive at any knowledge in a world that is shared.¹¹ Later, in the Krisis, this is elaborated on. Husserl uses the term ‘Konnex’ to denote a mode of relationality. If this points in the direction of a community, it is nevertheless not something local, but a more open sense of a lived and perceived world as always shared and potentially understood as equally the world of the other, not just the consciousness of self:

Jeder als Subjekt möglicher Erfahrungen hat seine Erfahrungen, seine Aspekte, seine Wahrnehmungszusammenhänge, seinen Geltungswandel, seine Korrekturen usw. und jede besondere Verkehrsgruppe wieder ihre Gemeinschaftsaspekte usw. Dabei hat jeder wiederum, genau gesprochen, seine Erfahrungsdinge, nämlich, wenn wir darunter das jeweils ihm Geltende verstehen, das von ihm Gesehene und im Sehen als schlechthin daseiend und soseiend Erfahrene. Aber jeder ‘weiß’ sich lebend im Horizont seiner Mitmenschen, mit denen er bald in aktuellen, bald in potenziellen Konnex treten kann, so wie sie es (wie er ebenfalls weiß) im aktuellen und potenziellen Miteinander tun können.¹²

In his study of Husserl and Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas describes Husserl's phenomenology as a philosophy of freedom, but one which is firmly rooted in consciousness.¹³ He sees this as in stark contrast to Heidegger. I will now turn briefly to Heidegger, since the notion of Mitsein in Sein und Zeit (1927) is a further significant step in the conceptualising of relationality. In §26 ‘Das Mitdasein der Anderen und das alltägliche Mitsein’, Heidegger elaborates on the notion of being in-the-world (In-der-Welt sein). Being is not to be thought of as something that can be considered independently of others and of temporality. At the same time, the task is to make sense of individual existence. The presence of the Other is less abstract than is the case for Husserl, where it is, arguably, ideational. Community, the ‘thereness’ of things, the ways of other people, a historical context — all of these will heavily influence any individual life. Heidegger uses the analogy of the craftsman, a recurrent symbolic figure in his thinking.¹⁴ In the instruments or equipment used, the ‘Zeug’, something that has been crafted and provided by others carries over into the work that will be done: there is a shared context, since the craftsman will not pursue an individualistic creative direction — in the nature of his work, this is not required. ‘Die “Beschreibung” der nächsten Umwelt, zum Beispiel der Werkwelt des Handwerkers, ergab, daß mit dem in Arbeit befindlichen Zeug die anderen “mitbegegnen”, für die das “Werk” bestimmt ist.’¹⁵ The individual may seek to orientate themselves, and they should — but there is a sense in which Heidegger regards our lives as determined by our relation to cultural reality — to the things and ideas that are prevalent and therefore binding. Indeed, Heidegger's fondness for such analogies of craftsmen and implements places an emphasis on a rustic ‘doing’ that is intrinsically anti-modern and seems to run counter to individual agency. Further, it holds connotations of life moulded by tradition, the type of life that Kant, in Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung (1783) criticised as one in which the individual colluded in its own subjugation, its ‘Unmündigkeit’.¹⁶

And yet, despite this deeply ambivalent form of relationality, and despite our knowing that Heidegger freely joined the NSDAP and implemented its educational policy as rector of the University of Freiburg, he also argues for an existential subjectivity that is emboldened to regard and to question its very relatedness to the Mitwelt. This is the paradox, and it can be seen in the following quote which illustrates that this subject need not automatically passively and conservatively accept the terms of the social world that surrounds it:

Die Klärung des In-der-Welt-seins zeigte, daß nicht zunächst >>ist<< und nie gegeben ist ein bloßes Subjekt ohne Welt. Und so ist am Ende ebensowenig zunächst ein isoliertes Ich gegeben ohne die Anderen. Wenn aber >>die Anderen<< je schon im In-der-Welt-sein mit da sind, dann darf auch diese phänomenale Feststellung nicht dazu verleiten, die ontologische Struktur des so >>Gegebenen<< für selbstverständlich und einer Untersuchung unbedürftig zu halten.¹⁷

Heidegger's ontological method in Sein und Zeit is a description of knowing existence as relating to this existence. Overall, though, the relationality in Sein und Zeit, unlike that of Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, is one that can authorise the self to be bound by its particular slice of historical circumstance, an expedient proposition for Heidegger who saw his own star rise within NS authoritarianism while Husserl lost his teaching accreditation, his right to publish and his home. It is with considerable justification that Levinas concludes that Heidegger, while still a phenomenologist, moves away from the Husserlian life of abstract, pure idea to an emphasis of the individual as dominated, indeed, overwhelmed by history.¹⁸ On the one hand, as can be seen in the quote above, the Heideggerian self can arrive at a critical awareness of its environment and is therefore capable of independence. Heidegger's phenomenological legacy is, in this sense, one of a relationality that emphasises language, interpretation and critique as part of an existential journey. Relationality in this instance would mean that the self achieves a sense of understanding of its own existence as part of a connection to others and to the circumstances of time and place, but is ultimately independent. On the other hand, however, the form which relationality takes can be interpreted differently. It can be seen as an embattled subjectivity that is likely to be determined by those things that pre-exist and potentially overwhelm the subject. The Heideggerian individual self is, in this latter instance, ‘thrown’ into a pre-existing set of circumstances, and it is this problematic Geworfenheit (thrownness) that leaves the individual helpless in the face of greater historical forces.¹⁹

Embodiment and Atmosphere — Merleau-Ponty and Schmitz

Unlike Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty picks up on the openness to the other and adapts Husserl's concept of intersubjectivity to make this less formal, less technical, more impressionistic, and very amenable to aesthetic experience. Early in his magnum opus, Phenomenology of Perception, first published in 1945 in the ruins of the Second World War as Phénomènologie de la perception, Merleau-Ponty sounds a hopeful note, a note of an engaged philosophical project. What the empiricists overlook, he shows (echoing Husserl), is that a world simply described as a set of facts can provide a glut of information, and while we might need that information and use it for further investigation and think about it as we want to, all of this is not enough, since

empiricism excludes from perception the anger or the pain which I nevertheless read in a face, the religion whose essence I seize in some hesitation or reticence, the city whose temper I recognize in the attitude of a policeman or the style of a public building.²⁰

We can, instead of following the empiricist path, listen further to a phenomenological voice and hold that these cultural spaces are infused with our living, both the objects such as buildings and cultural artefacts, and our expressive lives or ‘attitude’. This is what Merleau-Ponty is suggesting here.

Suddenly, while the ethical intention of Husserl's very formal and technical vocabulary is a guiding impetus, what I will describe as ‘reasoning affect’ is added by Merleau-Ponty. He does not shy away from our sentient nature as human beings. And no longer are the contents of thought construed in the purely formal terms of Husserl: they are allowed to be — precisely — contents. The self is affected by its environment. It senses how the state interacts with its citizens in the demeanour of the police and is not impervious to how architecture, e.g. a public building, communicates an attitude, a form of identity, to those who go in and out. Merleau-Ponty's embodied subject grasps not just the formal possibility of knowledge of the other, but the pain in the other's face, or, presumably, the happiness. It does not retreat from the modernity, since, as with Benjamin's Passagenwerk, the city and its sounds and sights and atmosphere are no less real than the life of the mind. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological self is not simply a passive imprint of its surrounding environment: it is embodied and responsive.

In a new twist given to phenomenology, phenomenological reflection involves a gaze, contemplation, an encounter. Merleau-Ponty dwells more on the expressive character of such encounter, and comes up with a conclusion:

Through phenomenological reflection I discover vision, not as a ‘thinking about seeing’, to use Descartes’ expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze; that expressive instrument called a face can carry an existence, as my own existence is carried by my body […].²¹

Here, we see an interrelatedness of self and other; alterity is experienced, dwelt on, not fled from, necessarily. That we are embodied is not only part of how we think, it is part of this very interaction between Self and Other in a way that shows that the body contributes to what we might call the conceptual. Earlier in the text, Merleau-Ponty elaborates on the use of instruments as an example of such embodiment. When using a typewriter, the typist does not simply form the intention of typing a particular sequence of letters. The understanding forms, as she learns to type, of how to type by what Merleau-Ponty understands as the keyboard (the translator uses the term ‘key-bank space’) being incorporated into the ‘bodily space’ of the typist. She does not simply intend to type a word, but forms a habit of knowing where to place the fingers in order to type words, and this means that there is a relation between the body and the object and the act that is carried out.²²

In the same passage, Merleau-Ponty moves from the example of the typewriter to an example of musicianship. Two very different things, but also forms of embodied responsiveness at the same time which exemplify a more intellectually framed ‘knowing how’ to do something. He gives the example of an organist arriving at a venue to play an organ with which she is not familiar. Despite not having been at this venue previously or having played this particular instrument, everything about her habitus encompasses both a sense in which the pedals and the stops and the manuals of an organ have become part of the musician's bodily awareness. It is not simply a question of having memorised, intellectually, the sequence in which to do things. The musician will sit in a certain way, lean in a certain way, perform acts that may not count as conscious thoughts, but are no less intentional. Merleau-Ponty's point is that these acts should also not be thought of in the mechanistic sense of simple reflexes. It is not the case that the musician does not have any intention of what to do in the playing of the instrument, but she does not have to rely on a learned process that is separate from bodily response:

During the rehearsal, as during the performance, the stops, pedals and manuals are given to him as nothing more than possibilities of achieving certain emotional or musical values, and their positions are simply the places through which this value appears in the world. Between the musical essence of the piece as it is shown in the score and the notes which actually sound round the organ, so direct a relation is established that the organist's body and his instrument are merely the medium of this relationship.²³

The body contributes to both artistic performance and interpretation — they are connected. If hermeneutic interpretation involves the text and hermeneutic analysis tends to structure ideas of meaning as a reading process, the form of interpretation suggested here by Merleau-Ponty is that the body is connected to the mind, that the body itself has an agency in learning how to play an instrument, and to do so in a way that understands the composition. He adds later that the body enables us to develop our ‘stable dispositional tendencies’.²⁴ These are not simply habits; they are how we are, how we interact with the world. They are not determined at birth — it is not the case that we cannot form who we are, or become who we are, but that ‘the body is our general medium for having a world’.²⁵ We could extrapolate from this that how we are in this world can create an atmosphere, but we can also respond to an atmosphere.²⁶ It would seem safe to say, upon reading Merleau-Ponty, that there has never, after all, been an absolute split between mind and body, subject and object, human beings and the natural world. However, it would be too easy to forget that disconnection, rather than relationality, has been the greater hallmark of cultural and philosophical history. I would like to turn now to Hermann Schmitz, whose Neue Phänomenologie takes certain aspects of Merleau-Ponty's perspectives on embodiment a step further.

In Atmosphären (2010), Schmitz comments that a radical shift took place in the fifth century B.C. in ancient Greece that would profoundly influence not only philosophy, but would also have far-reaching cultural implications.²⁷ Where human beings had seen themselves as related to the world around them and as constituted by the same substances (fire, earth, water, air), this changes with the advent of metaphysics. From this point onwards, they begin to perceive themselves as first and foremost intellectually defined and only, in a secondary sense, tenuously linked to the rest of the universe via the senses.²⁸ ‘Die Welt wird gespalten, indem jeder Bewußthaber einen Ausschnitt aus ihr als seine private Innenwelt bekommt, in der sein gesamtes Erleben enthalten und nach außen abgeschlossen ist.’²⁹ Schmitz observes, in addition to this, that whereas Heraclitus already mentions the soul, this is not yet conceived of as hermetically sealed off. Sophocles, however, subsequently refers to its ‘closed door’, and, although the historical interlude is not very great, Schmitz adds: ‘Zwischen beiden Zeugnissen liegt die Weltspaltung.’³⁰ His comment on this rupture is striking: it points to Heraclitus bearing witness to a continuity of nature and of human beings who interact with it and within it. These are connected to it by their senses and their processes of interpretation. By the end of the fifth century B.C., the Greek Enlightenment was underway and metaphysical thinking had instituted a split that would be constitutive for the modern world. From this point onwards, the concept of the soul encases the hermetically sealed off interiority of the rational subject. The advent of the soul puts an end to the relationality that had characterised the ancient world. But philosophy, whether it liked to think of itself in this way or not, was always also part of cultural history and played its part in the shaping of our specific narratives and our political realities. Schmitz is right to point to this ‘Weltspaltung’, since its legacy has played such an influential part in Western culture.

Indeed, from the onset of metaphysics in the fourth/fifth century B.C., the story that is told is one of human beings having to strive for maximum disconnection from the ‘lower’ regions of existence, to escape from embodiment, from connection to nature, to escape from each other. In the place of connection, the notion of the immaterial soul emerges as the pinnacle of human intelligence and as the means by which humans apprehend truth. The emergence of the soul in philosophy led to a privileging of the mind and of the notion that the highest achievement of the human world is to reach beyond matter to eternal essence. From Plato onwards, the body would be distrusted, and this brought with it a cultural and theological disposition that thought in terms of transcendence instead of any sense of relationality based on embodiment.³¹

The very existence of literature and the arts at the very latest from the Renaissance onwards to some extent refutes this metaphysical legacy and opens a much wider cultural space for different forms of storytelling and for far more rich narratives of human beings’ place in the universe. And still, our discourses of knowledge have been deeply inflected with a metaphysical legacy that is fundamentally opposed to relationality. It is not least this tradition that is felt in many ways that inspired Hermann Schmitz to try to take the phenomenological project that began with Brentano and Husserl around 1900 to a slightly new, less Cartesian, direction, and one closer, perhaps, to Merleau-Ponty's.

In the place of metaphysics, of idealism and of a rationalism that is inclined to transfer the empty space of the modern scientific paradigm, namely the vacuum, onto its conceptions of human thought and a human world, Schmitz ventures a re-thinking of space.³² His new phenomenology reconstrues space as atmosphere, but the atmospheric, in turn, as neither spiritualised nor mechanistic. It carries, instead, the aesthetic and aisthetic properties of the living we do, and the traces, emanations, emotions, and sensibilities are things he describes as perceptible. Not only that, but they are a central part of our engagement with the world, be it how we encounter a city for the first time, or the sense we might have of a place, not just how we view it, because this relies too easily on the visual sense. Schmitz wants to contradict the idea that our sentient and emotional life is immaterial and therefore part of a private world, or interiority. He sets about doing so by saying that ‘Gefühle’ are, indeed, atmospheres. While literary scholars, and those of us who teach literary texts in university will rightly caution against naïve equation of aesthetic discourse with ‘feelings’, and to hear Schmitz referring to these as something close to a material phenomenon may initially appear problematic, Schmitz's idea deserves further attention. His rehabilitation of a connection between emotionality and atmosphere runs counter to the idea of an ‘empty space’. The vacuum — that phenomenon of the modern world view — had had negative political consequences in facilitating the reduction of the human to the rational, and the natural to what Horkheimer and Adorno famously describe in Dialektik der Aufklärung as a resource that was waiting to be instrumentalised. In regarding emotions, along with Schmitz, as phenomena, it is possible to consider them as atmospheres:

Gefühle sind räumlich ergossene Atmosphären und leiblich ergreifende Mächte. Was hier “Atmosphäre”, “räumlich” und “leiblich” heißen soll, muss zunächst präzisiert werden. Als Atmosphäre bezeichne ich die Besetzung eines flächenlosen Raumes oder Gebietes im Bereich erlebter Anwesenheit.³³

Schmitz's point is that affect and emotion are not private. They should not be seen as compartmentalised within the individual subjectivity of a private ‘you’ or an interior ‘I’. The conceptual language of philosophy has mostly failed to grasp this and, in the process, has consigned affect to the margins of thought. He goes on to elaborate and explain why he talks about surfaceless space (‘flächenloser Raum’): it is to avoid the geometrical description of space and the post-Cartesian subcategorising of space into coordinates, in other words, into mappable, charted and recognisable units. What if space is occupied or ‘besetzt’ by the lived experience of one or more people? This need not be visual extension only. In one example, Schmitz describes how 'Schall’, or sound, can have volume without three-dimensional expansion, but it can also incorporate silence, as sound gradually weakens and recedes. As much as the sound itself may ebb and flow, increase or decrease, it can also designate when something else should happen.³⁴ Schmitz points to sound or rhythm as signalling when other forms of movement should take place, e.g. in dance — the dancers knowing when to dance or to stop — or in the marching of troops; both the dancers and the marching troops are responding to sound. They are responding not just to the sound itself, though, but also to its rhythms and the way in which it punctuates the silence. We could extrapolate from this that sound is a form of extension in space that is a good example of why it is wrong to think of space as empty, just because we cannot see anything there. If we see space as empty, we are likely to hold to the theory of the vacuum that makes human beings on the one hand anthropologically prone to overestimating themselves and, on the other hand, likely to be afraid of their solitude in an empty universe: horror vacui. Both of these, either together or in isolation, make the likelihood of our destruction of nature on a local scale and of the environment wholesale more likely.

Staying with the idea of sound for a moment, and how it can fill a space, and affect us. We know that human beings react to music and to sound; different types of music affect different people. We may dance, we may sing, we may even change the mood we’re in, but we also may react against the music. One way or another, music is a powerful form of cultural and symbolic expression, and when human beings gather for a musical event, this may be in public or private or cultural or countercultural places. During the Covid 19 pandemic, these places were sorely missed by many people during lockdowns and periods of imposed staying at home or close to home. But what if the atmospheres of music and other cultural venues contributed during this confinement either to a sense of home or to a certain identity or shared identity? This would surely be an example of relationality — an atmosphere that can be part of who we feel we are or what we want to do. In music or dance, we can express this, we can define ourselves and relate to each other in terms of our cultural affinities — the music that speaks to us, the dance that stirs something in us, the music we don't like, as well as the music we like. As Schmitz observes, ‘Die Musik legt sich nicht fest wie die Dichtung, bringt aber desto offener und vielseitiger dem Menschen sein Schicksal nahe, in Raum und Zeit ausgesetzt zu sein und betroffen werden zu können.’³⁵ While the reference to fate is not clear, and the pronouncement on poetry altogether too glib, there is merit in emphasising how it is in our nature to be affected, to be responsive and not to be solely thought of in an intellectual capacity without embodiment or affectivity.

Relationality may have been consigned to the margins of philosophy for centuries, but if ever there were an urgency in exploring its many possible forms, it does not seem exaggerated to say that we are now at a point of such historical urgency. Contributing to a volume highlighting relationality in German aesthetic and political landscapes at a juncture in the twenty-first century when it has become very clear that we are part of an interdependent Europe and, indeed, an interdependent planet, the ethical dimensions of relationality cannot be overstated. The atmosphere, part of our perception, part of our construal of ourselves, is threatened in so many ways, and maybe the thinking of atmosphere by Schmitz, who died in 2021, is prescient. For the first time since World War II, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the Spring of 2022 has meant that war returned to European lands. And as this volume goes to press in early 2024, the scale of destruction in the Middle East is already immense with extremely high losses of Israeli and Palestinian lives. Israel's war against Hamas was sparked by acts of terror and butchery by Hamas that are difficult to comprehend. That there would be a strong military retaliation by Israel can be assumed to have been factored in by Hamas in targeting, as they did, not just an area of land or a contested border. It was not a case of rockets launched or of single acts of hostility, however reprehensible, but of the mass-scale systematic targeting of Israeli civilians, of the murder of young people gathered in their thousands as they prepared to go home on the morning after a rave. It was the slaughter of kibbutzims, the taking of hostages, the gendered violence in the form of the rape and murder of young and elderly women alike — all of these things make it possible to speak of atrocity — something which is relational in the sense that atrocities are, as historian Alan Kramer has noted, culturally constructed.³⁶ It is not just the action that will be felt, but that its perpetrators calculate the way in which it is capable of altering a sense of community, identity, belonging and future safety.

In response to the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel's military might has crushed the houses, the hospitals, the bodies, and the lives of people who have had nowhere to flee. It is not within the remit of this contribution on relationality to suggest which comparisons of suffering or which acts of war, even war crimes, are most shocking, or which people are most worthy of our care or our approval or our condemnation. However, what we can say — with Schmitz, perhaps — is that in the rubble, in the destroyed spaces of Ukraine, or of Palestine, or wherever bombs fall and communities disappear, there will be atmospheres, lingering effusions of what has been done and what has been felt. Environmentally, we know, if we choose to, that we are interdependent. And this is something that Schmitz was aware of. Hermann Schmitz was born in 1928 and, in a 2017 interview, described what had, in part, led him to his phenomenology of atmosphere. Ill for a long time during his adolescence, he describes having been physically removed and consequently detached in a more far-reaching sense from the contagious public emotionality of NS-Germany.³⁷

Again, today, we can observe the proliferation of far-right movements that has brought such parties to power in both Italy and the Netherlands, and to taking a very large electoral share in Germany for the AfD, Alternative für Deutschland. What we can take from Schmitz is the recognition that there is more to emotion than a private, fleeting state, something of little consequence to shared life and to intellectual and political discourse. In the same 2017 interview, Schmitz explains that it was mistaken to have, in the history of philosophy, thought of emotions as harmless psychical states of individuals. To dismiss emotions in this way can blind us to the fact that there are what he calls ‘Ausbrüche kollektiver Ergriffenheit’ (outbursts of being collectively seized or affected or moved by something), and that these can be a dominant cultural force in a particular time:

Emotionen wurden immer als harmlose Seelenzustände der Einzelnen verstanden. Verdeckt blieb dadurch, dass es tatsächlich Ausbrüche kollektiver Ergriffenheit gab. Diese kollektiven Gefühle wollen aber gar nicht zu unserer klassischen Auffassung von einer in sich abgeschlossenen Seele passen, in der sich irgendwelche Erregungen und Gefühle abspielen. Gefühle sind keine Privatsache, sondern sie können Menschen wirklich überschwemmen. Hier sehen wir also, wie eine verharmlosende Fehldeutung in der Realität üble Folgen haben kann. Diese Lektion hat meine philosophische Arbeit von Anfang an geleitet.³⁸

It would be inaccurate, of course, to only mention such instances of emotions and of emotional contagion without acknowledging that a range of other factors should be taken into consideration. Nothing can take the place of critical historical, political and socio-cultural analysis of the individual context in which emotions such as hate and rage spill over into instances of far-right violence, as well as fuelling recent extreme-right voting patterns. At the same time, Schmitz's contention that such emotions are far from simply private matters is a valid point, and touches on a very unnerving form of relationality.

Conclusion: Biosphere and Relational Life

If we are to contemplate relationality from a contemporary perspective, both for the German-speaking world and in a wider sense, a number of primary areas of concern appear at the time of writing, not all of which can be discussed in full here. Those that must at least be mentioned in brief are the increasingly heightened threat posed by climate change leading to the very real possibility that irreversible tipping points will be reached, and the ongoing war in Ukraine that has followed the Russian invasion in early 2022. The humanitarian disaster of Israel versus Hamas is unfolding, as I write, and can only be noted, although with horror. My intention is not to be flippant in dismissing it; it deserves more specialised analysis than can be offered at the close of an article on the phenomenological background to theories of relationality.

The war in Ukraine and climate catastrophe are linked in that during this war, acts of extreme destruction, no small number of which could be categorised as war crimes, have been committed against both the Ukrainian people and against the environment, against animals, wildlife, habitat, and against sentience in and of itself, unless one regards such destruction as localised.³⁹ The role of Ukraine as one of the world's major producers of grain underscores the practical reality of global interdependence: the very real possibility that grain may not be able to be exported safely and in sufficient quantity via secure corridors in the Black Sea is one that threatens global food security. Other regions, notably the poorest and those ravaged by other wars or lingering conflicts, can be expected to be the first to suffer the most severe effects of crop failures or food shortages caused by lack of grain exports. In the sense that humans and other animals are interdependent rather than sovereign and autonomous subjects, giving voice to relationality is, surely, an important part of our overall self-expression, and of our survival on a very fundamental material level.

One further thinker who has contributed very influentially to an environmental phenomenology is Hans Jonas whose two major works require at the very least some brief mention. Jonas's definition of life at the outset of Das Prinzip Leben points to an intrinsic connectedness to an outer something. It is not a case of interior versus exterior, and between them, disconnection. On the contrary, thinking about substance in the sense of our organic nature and the metabolism that characterises life, Jonas reminds us that thinking of life at all means being cognisant of the equally likely scenario that this life would not be: ‘So konstitutiv für das Leben ist die Möglichkeit des Nichtseins, daß sein Sein als solches wesentlich ein Schweben über diesem Abgrund ist, ein Schweben entlang seines Randes.’⁴⁰ In thinking about relationality, we are being attentive towards that which is, but with an awareness of this within the temporal, where things come and go. Perhaps it has been the mistake of metaphysics to dwell on the polarity of what is and what is not, since the latter can predispose us to thinking of the universe as a vacuum, and somehow denying its intrinsic value — value beyond our human designations. Both of these tendencies have had a regrettable impact in that ‘we’, the human, have been too self-satisfied with our role as ‘presence’ — and equally too given to looking towards comforting ideas of transcendence in the face of our own frailty. For Jonas, however, the notion of transcendence is put to a slightly different use; following the grim reminder of the fragility of existence, he points to life not as something that contrasts with nothingness, and also not as a solitary manifestation of ‘something’ within a vacuum. Instead, it is relationality: ‘Leben ist wesentlich Bezogenheit auf etwas; und Beziehung als solche impliziert “Transzendenz”, ein über-sich-Hinausweisen seitens dessen, das die Beziehung unterhält.’⁴¹ There is some common ground with what we have seen in Hermann Schmitz's Atmosphären. In the sense that the relationality we see here in Das Prinzip Leben may be thought of ontologically, our search for meaning is within a symbolic, cultural field of belongings that may be part of who we are, or the how of what we seek to distinguish ourselves from.

Jonas's late work, Das Prinzip Verantwortung (1979) has sparked renewed interest in recent years, and a new edition was reprinted in 2020 which included an essay at the end by the German Green politician, Robert Habeck. At the outset, Jonas decries the fact that the history of ethics from the ancient world onwards concerned itself only with the human. Outside the city, the polis, nature was cast simply as a resource.⁴² This history of ethics therefore not only excluded ecological responsibility and a duty towards other creatures, but it was built, disastrously, on the idea of human beings’ essential difference from everything around them. With the dawning awareness of the extent of this mistake, the ecological movement began to demand change, starting with the recognition of human responsibility for planetary destruction. Jonas formulates an ecological imperative as a result of this: where the Kantian categorical imperative was based on the idea that human beings would make moral choices to abide by laws based on knowing that what was good for society could be known on a consensual basis, the ecological imperative moves away from human self-interest towards a decision-making based on ‘die gesamte Biosphäre des Planeten’.⁴³ The change being called for by Jonas in 1979 was radical and, as we know, went unheeded. Re-thinking relationality, or thinking of it for the first time, he seems to be saying, would mean recognising that the natural sciences have not done justice in any form to nature, and that from the point of recognition onwards, life thought of as the biosphere itself and not just human life as a subsection of this, is issuing the imperative.⁴⁴

If this seems like a grim conclusion, given that we know how late we have left it to abide by such an ecological imperative, perhaps it is appropriate to finish by returning to Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception ends in a way that emphasises human openness to the world. As different as these thinkers are, I see a similarity in how both Jonas and Merleau-Ponty urge us to use our capacity to both be within the Lebenswelt but relationally directed outwards, too. Our activities need not all begin and end within an isolated or even a solipsistic consciousness, both tell us. The body is always part of a world, and we act within this world, Merleau-Ponty encourages us: ‘Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.’⁴⁵ This existentialist note at the close of Phenomenology of Perception emphasises our ability to act, not to be entrapped by this entanglement with the world, but, at the same time, not to deny that it is an entanglement either. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty presents us with a hopeful narrative of relationality, and I think we need to be able to hope now, no less than in 1945, that we will be able to begin again.

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Notes on contributors

Jeanne Riou

Jeanne Riou teaches German at University College Dublin. Her research interests include Continental Philosophy, especially German Thought, & Cultural Theory. Her second monograph was Anthropology of Connection. Perception and its Emotional Undertones in German Philosophical Discourse, (K&N, 2014); co-edited volumes include Re-Thinking Ressentiment. On the Limits of Criticism and the Limits of its Critics, (transcript, 2016), and she has published numerous articles.

Notes

1 Hermann Schmitz, Der Leib, der Raum und die Gefühle (Bielefeld: Edition Sirius, 2007), pp. 11–12.

2 Hans Blumenberg, Die ontologische Distanz. Eine Untersuchung zur Krisis der philosophischen Grundlagen der Neuzeit (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2022), p. 35.

3 Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Elisabeth Ströker, rev. edn based on Husserliana, VI (Hamburg, Meiner, 1992), VIII: Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, p. 4.

4 Phenomenology in Austrian and German thinking originates with Carl Stumpf, Theodor Lipps, Alexander Pfänder, Franz Brentano, Else Voigtländer, Edmund Husserl, Wilhelm Wundt and others. It incorporates impulses from empirical psychology, e.g. Theodor Lipps’ investigation of social mimicry in Grundlegung der Ästhetik (1903). For an account of early phenomenology and the differing conceptions of empathy, see: Jeanne Riou, Anthropology of Connection. Perception and its Emotional Undertones in German Philosophical Discourse from 1880–1930 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014), pp. 90–119. See also: Matthias Schloßberger, Die Erfahrung des Anderen. Gefühle im menschlichen Miteinander (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005), pp. 60–67.

5 See Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Elisabeth Ströker, rev. edn based on Husserliana, III/1 and V (Hamburg: Meiner, 1992), V: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologische Philosophie I, p. 75: ‘Ist ein intentionales Erlebnis aktuell, also in der Weise des cogito vollzogen, so “richtet” sich in ihm das Subjekt auf das intentionale Objekt. Zum cogito selbst gehört ein ihm immanenter “Blick-auf” das Objekt, der andererseits aus dem “Ich” hervorquillt, das also nie fehlen kann.’

6 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. With Selections from the Objections and Replies, ed. and trans. by John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 22.

7 See also Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2005), p. 204: ‘How can the ego be that which constitutes the world and also that which is concretized, mundanized and corporealized in the world? How can the transcendental ego, the source of all meaning and being, inquire into itself as a meaning-and being-constituting entity?’.

8 In Husserl's other late work, Krisis, he develops the concept of ‘Lebenswelt’ further. In this work, notably, he calls for a relational, rather than a purely positivist or solipsistic knowledge (critiquing the dominance of positivism and the natural sciences). See Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Elisabeth Ströker, rev. edn based on Husserliana, Vol 6 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1992), VIII, Cartesianische Meditationen. Krisis, p. 111.

9 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran explains that early realist phenomenology had described the emotions as acts of Intentionality, something which marks a departure from contemporary cognitivist positions. See Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, Die Emotionen. Gefühle in der realistischen Phänomenologie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008), cf 69. Arguably, this attentiveness towards emotions as intentional acts is reduced in Husserl.

10 Timothy Mooney, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: On the Body Informed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), p. 163. Mooney offers a valuable elucidation of embodiment in Husserl.

11 Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 109: ‘Also das an an-sich erste Fremde (das erste ‘Nicht-Ich’) ist das andere Ich. Und das ermöglicht konstitutiv einen neuen unendlichen Bereich von Fremden, eine objektive Natur und objektive Welt überhaupt, der die Anderen alle und ich selbst zugehören. Es liegt im Wesen dieser von den ‘puren’ Anderen […] aufsteigenden Konstitution, daß die für mich ‘Anderen’ nicht vereinzelt bleiben, daß sich vielmehr (in meiner Eigenheitssphäre natürlich) eine mich selbst einschließende Ich-Gemeinschaft als eine solche miteinander und füreinander seiender Ich konstitutiert, letzlich eine Monadengemeinschaft […].’

12 Husserl, Krisis, p. 167.

13 Emmanuel Levinas, En découvrant l‘existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, 4th revised edn (Paris: Vrin, 2010), p. 70.

14 Dan Ihde places this in the context of what he identifies as Heidegger's ‘good’ technology — the type of technology that is rooted in a traditional and ‘authentic’ context. ‘Bad’ technology for Heidegger is modern technology or modern architecture. See Dan Ihde, Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 104–08.

15 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), p. 117.

16 Immanuel Kant, Werkausgabe, ed. by Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), Vol. XI, Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik, 1, pp. 54–55.

17 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 116.

18 E. Levinas, En découvrant l‘existence, p. 69: ‘Pour Heidegger cette existence a certainement un sense; et en affirmant le sense de l’existence qui n’a pas pour lui l’opacité d’un fait brutal, Heidegger reste phénoménologue, mais ce sens n’a plus la structure d’un noème. Le sujet n’est libre ni absolu, il ne répond plus entièrement de lui-même. Il est dominé et debordé par l’histoire, par son origine sur laquelle il ne peut rien, puisque’il est jeté dans le monde et que cette déréliction marque tous ses projets, tous ses pouvoirs.’

19 This is also Levinas's conclusion — see quotation in previous footnote.

20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 24.

21 Ibid., p. 409.

22 Ibid., p. 167.

23 Ibid, p. 168.

24 Ibid., p. 169.

25 Ibid.

26 See Timothy Mooney, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, p. 173: ‘(T)he notion of behaviour has a rich and multi-faceted extension for Merleau-Ponty, well removed from the scientistic behaviourisms having little or no concern with sense and meaning. All behaviour is expressive of something, from the simplest of gestures and gesticulations down to the reflex movements that are responses to situations rather than reactions to stimuli.’

27 Hermann Schmitz, Atmosphären (Freiburg: Albers, 2020 [2014]), p. 13.

28 For a compelling account of the history of the elements, see Gernot and Hartmut Böhme, Feuer, Wasser, Erde, Luft. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Elemente (Munich: Beck, 2014 [1996]).

29 Hermann Schmitz, Atmosphären (Freiburg: Albers, 2020 [2014]), p. 13.

30 Ibid.

31 On this issue see Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, in Symposium and Phaedrus (unabridged), trans. by Benjamin Jowett (New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 1993). This translation was first published in The Works of Plato (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, n.d.).

32 The term used by Schmitz is ‘flächenloser Raum’, in Atmosphären, p. 30. This can be translated as ‘empty space’, since Schmitz's intention is to highlight the sense in which rationalism has conceived of space in geometric terms, devoid of any contents or characteristics or traces of sentient life. In effect, we can think of it as a vacuum.

33 Schmitz, Atmosphären, p. 30.

34 Ibid., p. 31.

35 Schmitz, Atmosphären, p. 91.

36 See Alan Kramer ‘Atrocities’, in International Encyclopedia of the First World War <https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/atrocities> [accessed on 17 December 2023].

37 See Hermann Schmitz in interview with Inna Barinberg and Simone Miller, ‘Gefühle sind keine Privatsache’, philosophie Magazin, 1 February 2017 <https://www.philomag.de/artikel/hermann-schmitz-gefuehle-sind-keine-privatsache> [accessed on 4 December 2023]. Schmitz recalls having observed, during this time, how a small minority succeeded in stirring up political sentiment that would spread contagiously.

38 Ibid. Gernot Böhme points out that correctly understanding Schmitz’ notion of atmosphere involves removing it altogether from any subject-object dichotomy. For this to make sense, the human being has to be considered as first and foremost a somatic being. See Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik, rev. edn (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013 [1995]), p. 31.

39 On this issue, see the ZDF documentary Umwelt unter Beschuss. Wie der Krieg die Ukraine zerstört, dir. by Bernd Reufels und Laura Hohmann (ZDF, 2023) <https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/planet-e/planet-e-umwelt-unter-beschuss-100.html> [accessed 20 August 2023].

40 Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Leben: Ansätze zu einer philosophischen Biologie, 2nd edn (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1977 [2011]), pp. 19–20.

41 Ibid.

42 Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation. Mit einem Nachwort von Robert Habeck (Berlin: Suhrkamp, rev. edn 2020), cf 22. The line of argument here is strongly reminiscent of Horkheimer's and Adorno's in Dialektik der Aufklärung.

43 Ibid., p. 29.

44 Ibid, p. 31 and p. 40.

45 Ibid., p. 530.