Mauro Senatore - The Dark Horizon: Post-traumatic Anxiety in Husserl’s Freiburg Ethics

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History. This episode features a presentation from Mauro Senatore Abstract: In his Freiburg lectures on passive syntheses (Hua XI), Husserl evokes a catastrophic scenario concerning consciousness and the world as a limit-case of standard perceptual experience. He supposes that, although problematic uncertainty (doubt) and disappointment (unfulfilled expectations) are admitted, a certain unity of sense (namely, a minimal certainty in the fulfilment of expectations) must be maintained, in order for the constancy of a single consciousness and the endurance of this one world to be safeguarded (§§6 and 23). According to the suggestive reading offered by the philosopher of psychiatry Matthew Ratcliffe, this scenario accounts for a structural alteration of the global style of anticipation that is inherent in perception and a shift to pervasive anxiety, which is characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorders (2017). Interweaving these references together, in my talk, I will interpret the dark horizon (der dunkle Horizont) of anxious possibilities that Husserl describes in his Freiburg reflections on ethics (Hua XLII, text n.24), as an adventurous exploration of the scenario evoked in his contemporary lectures on passive synthesis. My reading hypothesis is that the general uncertainty of life that motivates that horizon should not be measured against the thesis of the world (de Warren 2022), but against the thesis of the minimal certainty of fulfilment and the related understanding of the lived body as a kind of performance machine, which Husserl subscribes to in his late phenomenology of perception. To test this hypothesis, I will focus on Husserl’s analyses of how the dark horizon, specifically, the anticipation of a corporeal and mental sickness, disrupts the habitual confident style of anticipation. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/