Globalization: The Phenomenological Consequences

Lennart Heerwagen


According to Husserl, we can understand the distinction between home and alien as a distinction concerning accessibility: Normally we live in our homeworld, or better, in a surrounding world, which truly is a familiar world to us (although not familiar in all particularities), which is to be truly realized for us through intuition. In the mediate horizon there are alienlike humanities and cultures. They belong to this horizon as alien and alienlike, but alieness means accessibility in the genuine inaccessibility, in the mode of incomprehensibility. (1)
    Thus, on the one hand we have our homeworld, a world of familiarity, an accessible world. Following Husserl, we can examine the acquisition of this homeworld. As far as we can remember, Husserl explains, we have been rooted in this world of well-known sense. In our childhood it did perhaps not possess the same sense for us as it does now, but nonetheless it had, and maintained to have, a unity as the one and familiar world. (2) As we grow older we become more and more aware of the richness of our world. It takes on new layers of sense in a development that can be described as “ring-shaped”. (3) At first we have a relatively confined, familiar world, perhaps restricted to our local area, our local people, family etc., but later on we gain an insight in an even more embracing world which we come to consider as familiar. This familiarity could overall be said to concern our world as a cultural world, which occupies its own cultural space as a “territory” [Territorium]. (4) A constitutional feature of our cultural and familiar world is our language. (5) Through our language we can communicate with the people we share our world with, our “homefellows” [Heimgenossen], and make it a world common for us all, for our special intersubjectivity. Our language points to yet another constitutional basis. Our past, our traditions and history become known to us through narratives, and we can see that our world has been formed through a far-reaching chain of generations. Our present world, with its familiar customs, its well-known objects and so forth, is in other words the result of generativity, of the shaping and continuation of sense by precedent generations. And we, ourselves, become a part of this generative process when we as “co-bearers” [Mitträgern] of our world, that is, as subjects constituting exactly our familiar world, are able to pass it by. In this manner, a world is given to us as ours, as a world in which sense is accessible for me and you in our “homefellowship” [Heimgenossenschaft]. 
    On the other hand, we also encounter worlds that are different from ours, alienworlds, which are neither familiar nor accessible to us. Surely, we have previously experienced matters in our world that seemed unusual or surprising, and in this way diverted from what was familiar. But there is a difference between these anomalies and the encountered alieness. The anomalies, the apparent “unfamiliarities”, in my familiar world, refer to what is normal. When we meet people who act surprisingly, who speak our language in a funny way, who wear strange clothing, this all connects with what is normal behavior, language, clothing and so on, in our world. In this manner the anomalies of our own world are only “modifications” of the familiar normality. (6) When we encounter the alien, however, we experience that the “anomaly” of the alien does not refer to the normality of my world. The alien, for example the concrete alien subject, behaves in a way that seems strange to us, speaks a language we do not understand and wears odd clothing, but this cannot be reduced to mere modifications of the normality we are familiar with. The alien claims a normality of its own; a normality that is not dependent on our normality. In other words: the alien refers to its own familiar cultural world. (7) The alien world has its own language, its own traditions, its own histories and myths that take on a familiar sense for the alien subject. We can thereby speak of the constitution of the alienworld, but also of the constitution of our own homeworld as such. Before we encountered the alienworld, before it became thematic for us, we could not know that our world was homeworld. Only in the confrontation with the alien we become conscious that our world is not the only one, but nevertheless privileged in the sense of home. (8) The alienworld is to be sure a homeworld as well, but in the sense of an “alien homeworld”. In contrast to the accessibility of our homeworld, the alienworld is given to us as inaccessible. This is not merely because of the appearing differences in language and customs, but because of the generativity of the alienworld to which these appearances refer. As a homeworld the alien homeworld exhibits “a different historical totality” (9) that we cannot grasp. Being such a totality, we are not able to encompass the appearance of the alien into our own understandable normality, and so it becomes incomprehensible to us.
    The structure “home- and alienworld” describes how the world is pregiven to us as a cultural world, and how this world receives its proper meaning in relation to other cultural worlds. It shows each of us the meaning of our being as “subject of a cultural world” [Subjekt einer Kulturwelt]; that is, as a subject living in a intersubjective world with familiar traditions and conventions that is inherited, kept, shaped and passed on, with a common language, and a common cultural space. However, my question would be: how important is this? This is not a question which concerns the truthfulness of the constitution of home- and alienworld as Husserl identified it. Rather, it is a question of relevance, and relevance is determined by the particular situation of the questioner; following Alfred Schutz we could say her “biographically determined situation”. (10) If we fashion this biographical determination in a more intersubjective manner we could perhaps say: How important is this for our time, how can this help us understand the world we live in?
    Since this question depends on the definition of “our time” and “our world”, let me provide a possible leading clue. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has recently discussed the somewhat blurred social phenomena of “globalization”. Not so much what it actually means as its consequences. According to Baumans line of thought, a major consequence of globalization is a social stratification focused on the concept of mobility. In the top of this stratification we have a social segment that lives “in time”. Of course they must in every moment be situated in a particular location, but this location has only little significance to them. They are not bound to any special geography, and travel as they please either in reality or virtuality for the sake of entertainment, work or other reasons.  In the bottom of the stratification we have a social segment that lives “in space”. Not because they necessarily wish to do so, but because they do not have any other alternative. They are bound to a specific location, and are forced to bear any change that may happen to this place. They too live in time, but they have no use of it. “Nothing ever happens”, where they live, and time looses its significance. In this way we have, according to Bauman, two sorts of worlds: “the world of the globally mobile” and “the world of the locally tied”. (11)
    As Bauman also emphasizes, we do not choose the society we are born into. (12) We have a familiar world, a cultural homeworld with its generative sense, pregiven to us. However, the process of globalization, as Bauman states, “divides as it unities”, (13) and, we may add, does so across cultural homeworlds. There is the world of the global elite of businessmen, leaders and academics with its privileges, wealth, resources, power and freedom and the world of a restgroup with its deprivation, poverty, impotence, powerlessness and constraint. (14) We could say that the process of globalization creates two fundamental types of practical horizons where the generative density, the original language and familiar normality of the cultural homeworld seems less significant. Perhaps we could even say that globalization makes familiar “homeworlds” in a new sense of which some are accessible to us and others are not. If so, there seems to be a challenge in explaining not how, for example, generativity matters for the constitution of an accessible homeworld or an inaccessible alienworld , but how it does not matter.
     A development like “globalization”, could obviously be of no concern to Husserl, but it should be of concern to us if transcendental phenomenology is to explain social aspects of our age. And this concern should raise new relevant questions for transcendental phenomenology in regard to the constitution of accessible and inaccessible worlds.

Notes

(1) "Wir leben normalerweise in unserer Heimwelt, oder besser, in einer Umwelt, die für uns wirklich vertraute (obschon nicht in allen individuellen Realitäten vertraute) Welt ist, die für uns wirklich durch Anschauung zu verwirklichen ist. Im mittelbaren Horizont sind die fremdartigen Menschheiten und Kulturen; die gehören dazu als fremde und fremdartige, aber Fremdheit besagt Zugänglichkeit ind der eigentlichen Unzugänglichkeit, im Modus der Unverständlichkeit." (Edmund Husserl: Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität III, Husserliana Band XV. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973, p.631.)
(2) Ibid., p.138.
(3) Ibid., p.429.
(4) Ibid., p.206.
(5) Ibid., pp.224-225.
(6) Ibid., p.154.
(7) Ibid., p.214.
(8) Ibid., p.214.
(9) Ibid., p.139.
(10) E.g., Alfred Schutz: Collected Papers I. The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973, p. 9.
(11) Zygmunt Bauman: Globalization – The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, p.88.
(12) Ibid., p.85.
(13) Ibid., p.2.
(14) Ibid., p.70. Text