“Ecocollapse: An (Im)possible Experience? On Nature in the Life-World
“Ecocollapse: An (Im)possible Experience? On Nature in the Life-World

Summary/Abstract: In the genre of experimental thinking, this article poses the question of what is the field of primary self-evidences from which those critiques of the present that have as a stake Gaia (Bruno Latour) and the living earth (Deyan Deyanov) could draw their justification. Can we assume as true – and, if so, in what sense – the self-evidence by which Latour qualifies the universality of the experience that “the ground is giving way” as well as Deyanov’s thesis that the living earth today “may be warning us, blaming us, taking revenge on us, and demanding atonement from us” in the face of “ecocollapse”? Within the framework of an ecological phenomenology inspired by the later Husserl’s analytics of the life-world, the article outlines an understanding of primordial nature which places in epoché the Galilean nature of “bare things” that exists as an “absolutely persisting” reality in itself and “speaks in the language of mathematics”. At stake in this phenomenological archeology is the manifestation of a “primal generative” core (Husserl) in the light of which the object constitution of the natural world unfolds eo ipso as a constitution of a world of goods; while the alien (in their cultural-historical formation) surrounding worlds open up to the possibility of connection-in-separation in “the one life-world of Gaia”. This phenomenological archeology can be viewed as a correlate of the practical archeology of the “forgotten” nature which, upon every techno-natural disaster, rejects its status of formless material and manifests itself as a phenomenon of befalling.

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