| Title | "The Horror of Darkness" |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Toward an Unhuman Phenomenology |
| Contributor | Dylan Trigg (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0032.1.18 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/speculations-4-speculative-realism/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ |
| Copyright | Trigg, Dylan |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2013-06-05 |
| Long abstract | “Life,” so Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space on a note of steadfast optimism, “begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.”1 To the critic, Bachelard’s remarks might be seen as emblematic of a kind of failure in phenomenology to think outside an anthropomor-phised cosmos, in which the endless void of dark space is nothing less than the warm enclosure of the primal breast. To this end, the critic would have a point. After all, it is hard not to agree that much of phenomenology has indeed failed to move beyond the human realm and instead has emphasized the validity of lived experience as the guarantor of truth. We see this tendency of aligning “being” and “world” time and again in phenomenology. Indeed, the focus on the inescapability of the human rela-tion to the world is evident in the very formulation that phenomenology advances as its groundwork: being-in-the-world. With this innocuous phrase, inherited in large from Heidegger by way of Bren-tano, phenomenology commits itself to a view of the subject as being constituted by the world and the world being constituted by the subject. Neither idealism nor realism, phenomenology merges the two via the concept of perceptual intentionality, where we—living subjects—are at all times in a relationship with the world. |
| Page range | pp. 113–121 |
| Print length | 9 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |