We do lots of things together in a shared manner. From the phenomenological point of view, does joint or shared agency need a conscious _sense_ of shared agency? Yet there are many processes where we seem to just go along with the group without conscious intent. Building on the classic phenomenological accounts of Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Martin Heidegger (and the synthetic account of Berger & Luckmann), I want to emphasize the thick horizon of the life-world as a fundamental condition (...) for intentional shared agency. Joint agency has divergent forms with their own peculiar intentionality, attentivity, anticipations and expectations, and embeddedness in a pre-predicative tacit knowledge in the overall live-world. Phenomenology recognizes that even ego-centered activities that appear to be fully ‘agential’ can be carried out in an anonymous un-owned manner, in the manner which Heidegger calls ‘_das Man_’, or ‘the one’. This suggests that tacit belonging to the collective ‘we’ undergirds individual agency. Husserl, Heidegger, and Schutz all have accounts of this ‘anonymous’, pre-predicative kind of group participation. Phenomenology has rich accounts of anonymous, voluntary, shared, social participation that demand a new concept of agency, one neglected in the current literature in philosophy of action. (shrink)

This article extends Aron Gurwitsch’s ( 1964 ) central insight about the field of consciousness—that it is always organized in a theme, thematic field, margin pattern—to the human capacity for reverence. It offers an original phenomenology of reverent awe, inspired by Gurwitsch’s work, as an articulation of reverential index and reverential attitude. According to Paul Woodruff ( 2014 ) in Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, reverence names those times when we become aware of something larger than human and simultaneously our (...) human limitations. By bridging the concepts of reverence from Woodruff and relevancy from Gurwitsch, this study shows that in reverent awe the emphasis in consciousness shifts to the edge of relevancy, the zones farthest removed from the theme, as the “indefinite continuation of context,” “order of existence,” or what Gurwitsch also calls an “inarticulate mass”. Reverent awe is clarified phenomenologically as an emphasis in consciousness between the theme and the order of existence as indefinite continuation of thematic context, maintaining a specific relevancy-principle (a Gestalt-connection) between the theme and the order of existence. In a reverential attitude with a reverential index we become aware more immediately of an order of existence and we become aware of our place in the order of existence. (shrink)

This paper considers the technologically-mediated constitution of auditory experience based on the analogy of a healthy natural soundscape as a well-balanced orchestra in which living creatures use the full range of acoustic frequencies to communicate and survive. Using the idea of (inner) horizonality proposed by Edmund Husserl, I argue that key technological inventions enabling the transmission and recording of sound made possible a new form of experience characterized by split horizonality. This new form of technologically-mediated auditory experience brought with it (...) potential for both creative expression and manipulation. A broader historical trend driven by technology towards individualization that culminated with our present-day experience of constantly connected mobile phones deeply embedded in our everyday lives calls into question the soundness of thinking of our technologically-mediated auditory worlds in terms of the analogy of a healthy natural soundscape as a well-balanced orchestra. (shrink)