Plenary talk from the Exploratory Workshop “Experience and Non-Objects” of the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience hosted by the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University on October 28-30. 2024.
The core claim of this paper is that the ‘matter of concern (Sache)’ of Phenomenology is ‘world’ and hence all phenomenology is in the end a phenomenology of world. Objects are worldly in the sense that they are constituted horizontally. The appearing of an object refers to an infinity of horizons of that object and those horizons of appearance are always already in relation to the appearing of other entities in the world. What this means is that no consciousness (not even God’s) can correspond to the being of the object. All such correspondence is partial and incomplete. The correspondences that phenomenology articulates do not amount to complete descriptions, but rather are important precisely in that they fail. But this failure is characteristic of experience itself, as it indicates its constitutive openness, that is its directedness towards a non-object: world. In exploring the ever-retreating phenomenon of ‘horizon’, we recognize that it is never the object of intentional consciousness, not alone because it is indistinct, but because it is radically incommensurate with all determinability. Horizon is rather the openness that makes not alone the object of perception possible but also any perceiving of that object. This is the fundamental exposure of subjectivity with respect to world: to perceive is already to be constituted horizontally. To understand this situation correctly we need to recognize the being of the perceiving entity to be fundamentally a locative one and its relation to the world to be rooted in its instinctive life. Such instinctive life is both a primal fact of animal being and is constituted through the happening of world that transcends itself infi-nitely. The horizon as a pivotal hinge between finitude and infinitude is thus best understood in re-lation to desire.