Is your Covid pandemic the same as my Covid pandemic?

Ever striving to bring Irish Times readers to the frontier of philosophical inquiry, the Unthinkable column has taken to the road – virtually speaking – to catch up with the latest findings from phenomenology.

Founded as a “new science” a little over a century ago by German thinker Edmund Husserl, it explores how consciousness is experienced from the first-person point of view. Eschewing systematic analysis for a more descriptive or even poetic methodology, it is the closest thing philosophy has to jazz.

Interrogating the nature of experience through “bracketing” – or suspending judgment on matters of fact – phenomenological studies can appear to the uninitiated like flights of fancy bordering on the comical. Think Tommy Tiernan doing one of his observational routines, only the cultural references are more Vienna Circle than the Centra in Navan.

When we become familiar with tools, like a blind person with their cane, or a musician with their instrument, those things are no longer experienced as thought-about objects but feel more like part of our subjectivity, and extensions of the body

Phenomenology’s devotion to the subjective – the unprocessed product of sight, touch and other senses – would seem to make it particularly relevant during the Covid-19 pandemic. Underscoring this view, Canadian philosopher Cressida Heyes presented her paper, Fast Death, Slow Death: The Biopolitics of Pandemic Temporality (a study previously crafted as A Political Phenomenology of Pandemic Time), at an online seminar last week at University College Dublin.

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Borrowing a line from postmodern guru Michel Foucault that beyond any pandemic is an “endemic” – a societal malaise that drains the human will – Heyes detects a “transition” of Covid to the endemic state “and part of the ordinary lived experience”. The crisis has normalised “slow death”, what she describes as “a quiet background condition of late capitalism”.

With a counter-Einsteinian flourish, she adds: “The unexpected upending of the shared world and the radically new and uncertain future ruptured ordinary time.”

Are you keeping up?

If not, you’re in good company. The first flurry of somewhat random questions to Heyes’ presentation prompts her to reply, with a smile, that either her paper is “a fecund piece of work, or it’s not very clear what I’m trying to say”.

The latter is an occupational hazard with phenomenology, UCC philosophy lecturer Adam Loughnane suggests.

“Phenomenology is a methodology that aims to uncover the structures of everyday or what we call ‘pre-reflective’ or ‘lived’ experiences,” he says. “For example, phenomenologists have shown that when we become familiar with tools, like a hammer, a blind person with their cane, or a musician with their instrument, those things are no longer experienced as thought-about objects but actually feel more like part of our subjectivity, and extensions of the body.”

We're now very conscious of the space between each other, of our propensity to touch surfaces and objects, the exposure of our hands, etc. These are aspects of experience that were more or less invisible to us before Covid struck

So understood, phenomenology is particularly relevant to the Covid era. “One of the things that has happened with all the restrictions is that we’ve become aware of aspects of our experience we didn’t need to think about before.

“We’re now very conscious of the space between each other, of our propensity to touch surfaces and objects, the exposure of our hands, etc. These are aspects of experience that were more or less invisible to us before Covid struck. We didn’t need to think about them. Our customary ways of being together as humans were part of the background of experience, or what phenomenologists call our ‘lifeworld’. We generally don’t need to think about lifeworld conventions but passively commit to them simply by living together. But lifeworlds are constantly changing,” says Loughnane, who is associate editor of the Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology.

“You can think about our western lifeworld and how visible people would have been if they wore masks in public two years ago. This might not be true in Japan for instance, where mask wearing goes unnoticed. Now, it’s more or less normal for us too. If it were to go on for many more years, it would go almost fully into the background of our lifeworld.

“And, the fascinating thing is that our consciousness will continue to evolve in tandem with the lifeworld. That teaches us that we’re not only ‘subjects’ but we’re actually ‘inter-subjective’. This means that we co-create our reality together, and we do it by bringing things into visibility or invisibility, by foregrounding or backgrounding meanings in a shared lifeworld. We’ll do the same, hopefully soon, when we shift into a post-Covid lifeworld.”

All fine words. But what does phenomenology have to offer the average person?

“Quite a lot, actually. Western philosophy has tended to focus on moments of deep thought, when we’re seeking to gain precise knowledge, define reality, solve ethical dilemmas, analyse the logic of propositions, etc. But, the average person actually spends very little time in this mode of thought. The vast majority of our experience is very ‘everyday’, where we’re seamlessly enmeshed in various situations, environments, and interactions without ever needing to think about them.

Philosophy hasn't paid much attention to our moments of everyday 'lived experience' but for phenomenology these are an extremely rich source of insight

“Philosophy hasn’t paid much attention to these moments of everyday ‘lived experience’ but for phenomenology these are an extremely rich source of insight.”

Demonstrating just how, Prof Heyes – whose other work includes writing “the first feminist philosophy of sleep” – tries to make her audience see the pandemic in a new light. “The event cannot be immediately apprehended, but only understood after the fact and third-personally, as something that happened to me rather than something that I did,” she says.

Pressed on what exactly constitutes an “event” in her phenomenological framework, she replies that giving birth could be seen as an event but – she throws out the question – what about giving birth for the tenth time? Is that less of an event?

To reach the threshold of a phenomenological event there must be “a floundering in time and the loss of subjectivity that comes with that . . . but to say when an event is not an event is a difficult thing”. She identifies possible criteria – it must be “radical and dramatic” – but before getting too precise she stops and sheepishly grins. “Sorry, I reverted to being an analytic philosopher for a moment there.”

As with those who think jazz is just noise, some will fail to see the point of phenomenology. But there’s a knowing quality to the performance, as Heyes herself acknowledges. So much already has been said about Covid, the challenge for those in the phenomenological tradition is to show, as she puts it, that “elaborate philosophical language... adds anything more than regular political language”.

Just don’t ask for a neat conclusion. Questioned on how best to define phenomenology, Loughnane replies that it could be called “a philosophy of the undefinable”.

Ask a sage

Is there just one Covid pandemic taking place?
Edmund Husserl replies: "Reality, that of the thing taken singly as also that of the whole world, essentially lacks independence . . . Reality is not in itself something absolute, binding itself to another only in a secondary way; it is, absolutely speaking, nothing at all; it has no "absolute essence" whatsoever; it has the essentiality of something which in principle is only intuited, only known, ie consciously presented in appearance."