Document Type : Research Paper
Author
Assistant Prof. University of Tehran, Iran. Tehran.
Abstract
By taking a phenomenological approach in examining the Covid crisis, this paper investigates aspects of the Corona phenomenon that remain hidden and allows them to self-reveal. I begin by situating the Coronavirus in the context of pandemic crises to examine its various dimensions. Following this introduction, I argue that the current crisis has made humanity cognizant of disasters caused by human action, compelling humans to confront, and reflect on them. As a result, the individual’s relationship with self, national culture, nature, other, God, and science has been greatly challenged. These challenges could best be explained using philosophical conceptions of “boundary situation”,” recognition”, “Gestell”, “other”, “the name of God”, and the “crisis of science”, respectively. For methodical reasons however, I only attend to the relationship with self and the concept of “boundary situation”, coined by Karl Jaspers. The main characteristics of “boundary situations”, antinomy and foundering, as well as four specific boundary situations, namely suffering, struggle, guilt and death are discussed to demonstrate that the Coronavirus crisis has caused general situations to switch places with boundary situations. Under normal circumstances, boundary situations would be at the periphery of general situations. In the current Covid state, the general situation founded on awareness is at the periphery of the existential crisis in boundary situations. It is therefore necessary that the encounter with this crisis shifts from the existentiell to the existential level and from stemming from human existence to general situations facing Dasein.
Highlights
Introduction
In the current situation it is helpful to revisit early Habermas’s account of three fundamental interests of humanity, and the mode of knowledge to which each interest gives rise. The first is the subject’s interest to exercise control over its environment and surroundings, which requires the knowledge essential for identifying natural phenomenon and their interrelations. This interest drives humans towards the empirical, natural and technical knowledge. The second interest is connecting and establishing relationships with other human beings, guiding the subject to the historical-hermeneutical realm. Habermas claims that this encapsulates humanity’s practical interest and deems language as its primary locus. He argues that interaction among human beings takes place through “communicative action”, and that this process itself yields to hermeneutical knowledge. The third interest is emancipation from restrictive repressive belief-systems, which gives rise to humanity’s interest to establish the social sciences.
According to Habermas, human interaction through communicative action is at times subject to misunderstanding and even organized manipulation. For this reason, the second human interest, that is the practical interest, also gives rise to the third, the emancipatory interest: emancipation from any form of domination, which Habermas designates as power. In such manner, the human interest to be emancipated from repression and domination yields to the knowledge pertaining to emancipation and critique. In Habermas’ view, technical interests (which are sought through instrumental action and ultimately yield to technical knowledge) and practical interests (which are sought through communication in language and ultimately yield to historical-hermeneutical knowledge) explain the persistence of human kind and the course of their developments throughout history. But in addition to these two fundamental interests, the two foundational epistemologies (analytical-empirical sciences and historical-hermeneutical knowledge) and the systems of rationality they produce, the emancipatory interest has continuously manifested itself throughout the history of humanity. Emancipatory interest is concerned with power and relations of domination and the knowledge to which this interest gives rise has been named critical theory. In Knowledge and Human Interests (1978), Habermas claims that the emancipatory interest is borne from the possibility of the interaction between the interests of technical control and human intersubjectivity.
With this formulation in mind, it is plausible to claim that a crisis in each of these three distinct spheres of human interest would merit the response of its corresponding mode of knowledge. The coronavirus crisis, for example, is a pandemic crisis and the natural sciences are to be regarded as the primary sphere in which we search for countermeasures and solutions. Yet crises do not occur in isolation from one another, and the manifestation of one rekindles previous ones, thereby giving rise to an interwoven, multidimensional network of crises.
Crises Originating from Human Conduct
While pandemic crises such as the coronavirus can be categorized as urgent crises necessitating immediate attention, crises from human action are more gradual, incremental and eventual. Typically, urgent crises do not warn of their arrival and for this reason evade the possibility of prior planning and preparation. By contrast, gradual crises manifest slowly, giving rise to the possibility of prior preventative or mitigatory measures. However, both types of crises can be continuous, spanning across years and decades, preoccupying all aspects of societal life. But of crucial consideration is the fact that while natural disasters—earthquakes, volcanoes, avalanches, tsunamis and floods are more or less unconcealed and thus palpable, crises arising from human action (such as pandemic crises with coronavirus and spanish flue as its examples)—from its manipulation of nature to its relation with itself and other human beings—are often veiled and thus remain to a large extent unseen. Under such considerations, the fundamental question is how a pandemic crisi such as the coronavirus which requires the insight of natural sciences to be eradicated—can shed light on the six-fold dimension of a crisis resulting from human conduct (that is a crisis arising from the human’s relationship with the self, with its national culture, nature, other, with God, and with the sciences? The mentioned crises have indeed been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Can the humanities and in this instance philosophy show us a way out?
As Jürgen Habermas reminds us in a recent interview, no one is in a position to explain the entirety of what is at stake amid the coronavirus pandemic; nor can we predict the probable outcomes. According to Habermas, the coronavirus has demonstrated once again the ignorance of humanity with regard to its present situation. Ultimately, this leads to a state of ambiguity,which Habermas calls existential insecurity, a boundary situation which cannot be adequately comprehended by scientific thinking. We cannot view the current dynamic as external events. We are not, in other words, detached observers of the world in which we live. Rather, we must reckon with the fact that the “world” which stands over and against our consciousness is in indeed an indistinguishable element of our own being. Experiencing the borderline situation is humanity’s existence.
If the first dimension of crisis is the relation between I and Me, the second dimension of crisis designates the relationship between I and We in the national and cultural realms. Indeed, a cultural crisis can deeply threaten a nation’s identity. In the postcolonial era, what is representative of a nationality is its culture. But culture itself does not designate a fixed horizon, a stable substructure, as it were, on the basis by which we can readily derive our national identity. Culture is rather malleable and subject to perpetual conflict. It requires a constant fleshing out of its meaning and significance through the course of its development and evolution. Most importantly, culture is essential to society’s collective consciousness, commonly referred to as solidarity. As Axel Honneth argues, solidarity designates concrete values, it pertains to the realm of the everyday and the convictions by which we orient ourselves towards others. It designates the fundamental cohesive force of society. For Honneth, a need to be recognized as valuable and significant within this horizon of solidarity, that is one’s societal culture, runs deep into our individual identities. A societal culture can thus be deemed ethical if it is able to build a horizon of solidarity in which the freedom of all of its members is recognized.
The third dimension of crisis pertains to the relationship of humanity with its environment. As Heidegger argues, this crisis comes to the fore through two processes. First, in contrast to older technologies where a discovery was done through Poiesis, new technology reveals the world to humanity through disrupting the being of the world, compelling the deformation of nature into “energy-reserve”. Second, it is the human being that propels this disruptive technological revealing. Yet, we must keep in mind that Heidegger does not exclusively attribute these processes to human action. In this vein, he speaks of enframing [Gestell], which despite the fact that it represents the most dangerous phenomenon of our time, must also contain the means for emancipation: “But where the danger is, also grows the saving power”, Heidegger quotes Höderlin.
The fourth dimension of crisis resulting from human action pertains to the relationship between I and Other: an ethical crisis. It is precisely in this light that Emmanuel Levinas, a prominent proponent of ethics as first philosophy, posits the primordial relationship between I and Other as the basis of his phenomenology. According to Levinas, this ethical relation has been overlooked in the works of both Heidegger and Husserl. For Levinas, rather, the relationship between I and Other precedes any metaphysics and philosophy. Yet we must keep in mind that Levinas’s ethics is completely unrelated to moral philosophy in Western traditions. As he argues, the latter neglects the dimension of “otherness”: despite their particular differences in content—whether we speak of the Kantian categorical imperative, Bentham’s utilitarianism, or even “meta”-ethics—Western philosophies remain entrapped within the framework of the self; they represent an “egoistic” ethics. For Levinas, the prominent force of phenomenology consists of the encounter with the face of the other, to which the “I” is released most primordially. In this vein, the most prominent question of philosophy is: how can I justify my existence to the other? Thus, in favor of a humanism that derives its fundamental starting point from the “other”, Levinas eschews the individualism and egoism that he associates with Western moral philosophy. Any social deliberation on his account must find justification on the gaze of the other.
The fifth dimension of crisis pertains to humanity’s relationship with God, or as Levinas puts it, “otherwise than being”. God, on this account is absolute difference. For Levinas, the relationship between the subject and God is an encounter between a finite being and an infinite reality. This relation represents a transcendental event, which Levinas names the absolute other. If the other is infinite and absolutely different, it is because it transcends the epistemic framework of the thinking subject. And if love designates care for and an orientation towards the other, then love on Levinas’s account can never be fulfilled. This is due to the infinitude and the absolute otherness of the other. Love must also remain infinitely directed at the other on based on Levinasian ethics. Responsibility, therefore, does not merely designate accountability in the face of the other, but also a migration from one’s current situation, that is most fundamentally the world in which we are a “subject”: a move away from beinghood to a place that is “otherwise than being”.
The sixth dimension of crisis is perhaps best articulated by Husserl, as a crisis of the new sciences, which have increasingly become detached from the realities of everyday life. For Husserl, this gap can only be bridged by a critique of objectivism that has come to dominate the scientific realm. It is precisely for this reason that he starts his analysis from the life world; the lifeworld which despite providing material for the historical-systemic foundations of science, is ironically forgotten by science itself.
Conclusion
In this final section, I would like to shed light on two points, which I hold to be fundamental in formulating an adequate response, both theoretical and practical, to the phenomenon of interwoven crises. The first is to locate a middle ground between ideological and academic approaches. The second is to ignite the project of rediscovering the self in light of its situation in a world which is in crisis. Among various ways of thinking—that is between “technical” thought (which is neutral, disinterested, and academic) on the one hand, and engaged, “committed” thinking (that is ideological thinking) on the other hand—we must seek to identify a kind of thinking that 1) has the ability to shed light on the questions of our time and reignite a sense of collective concern towards such issues; 2) eschews and abstains from any form of dogmatism; 3) is self-critical and continuously concerned with reconceiving itself. The exact contours of this threefold approach to “thinking” and a systematic account of the various principles it represents can be a topic of further discussion and analysis.
In order to depart from crisis, we must reinvigorate selfhood. Self-alienation must give way to self-actualization: an existence reinvigorated and in control of its fate. Indeed, in the conditions borne out of the crises of the last four decades, this new commitment signifies the emancipatory potential of our time. At the same time, we must keep in mind that the starting point of the reinvigoration of the self must be sought in social life. In this vein what is required is a collective consciousness with regard to the marriage of traditional religion and market modernity. This, of course, is no easy matter; for reinvigoration does not in the first instance point to an Iranian issue, but rather a global issue. Apprehension and analysis in Iran are indeed part of apprehension and analysis at the global level. To reinvigorate the self, a critique of social life must provide the occasion for the advent of a novel situation: in other words, a critique that is at the same time a renewal. Such critique, whether on the individual or societal level, must start from the re-evaluation of what has been regarded as common, “natural”, and ordinary. Tradition, history, culture, and religion are all subject to this critique; their foundations are questioned and conceived anew. But this critique does not lead to nihilism. In the same manner that an individual who becomes alienated from himself/herself in the face of crisis would require a rediscovery of himself/herself, this dynamic can also be said to be present at the level of societies and nations. But this rediscovery is not a return; it does not signify a place that exists in advance of the rediscovery. Rather, it is a process of self-finding at the opening of a new existential situation. The reinvigoration of the self is a result of the conditions of crisis. Selfhood represents a backbone for the individual to emancipate itself from danger and to fulfil its responsibility for the emancipation of others. But this will not take place except under conditions in which the value and significance of selfhood could become manifest to society. Selfhood is a product of an impossible investigation in a time that the economic, cultural, and political crises have endangered both the individual and the collective. But the impossible is always born out of existing possibilities.
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