Ethical Studies, Vol. 8, Iss. 1, 2023

THE FUNDAMENTAL TRUST THAT THERE IS GROUND BELOW OUR FEET
FROM TRUST TO THE ETHICS OF EMPATHY AND BACK /
ECO-ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON TRUST AND EMPATHY[1]

MARINA CHRISTODOULOU

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5721-833X

marinach@edu.aau.at  

marina.n.christodoulou@gmail.com

Abstract

Following propositions from other scholars, I propose a phenomenological analysis of psychosis as a disruption of trust (a fundamental trust that the “earth does not move”, to use a Husserlian phrase), and I extend it to some further formulations regarding neurosis and perversion and their own disruptions respectively, all of which, in turn, I link to addiction. These formulations of trust have ethical implications, especially for post-Covid times (conspirationism, etc.), war, economical crisis, and instances of health crisis, where there seems to be a radical multi-faceted disruption of trust starting from the ethical and political level but also infiltrating and corroding the ontological fundamental level of being. I also explain how fundamental trust is directly connected to empathy, which is a fundamental prerequisite of ethics, and then empathy leads back and is, to a subsequent and consequent level, a prerequisite of trust, too.

Key words: trust, empathy, (transcendental) ground, earth, reality, body, phenomenology, phenomenological psychopathology, Husserl, neurosis, psychosis, perversion, addiction

Background and Overview

In the course of my argumentation regarding life as (an) addiction within my doctoral thesis “Life as Addiction” (Christodoulou, 2022), I revisit the concepts of neurosis, psychosis, and perversion in relation to addiction, in order to clarify the concept of addiction. This argumentation towards the clarification of addiction starts from a concept that I borrow from Fazakas and Gozé (Fazakas and Gozé, 2018; Fazakas and Gozé, 2020). While there are many other analyses of trust in phenomenological psychopathology (Ratcliffe, 2017; Ratcliffe, 2021a; Ratcliffe, 2021b; Ratcliffe, 2022; Duschinsky, Collver and Carel, 2019) Fazakas and Gozé propose a phenomenological-psychiatric analysis of psychosis (focusing especially on schizophrenia) as a disruption of trust − of a fundamental trust, it could be schematically said, that the “earth does not move”, to use a Husserlian phrase− I extend the analysis to some further formulations regarding neurosis and perversion and their own disruptions respectively, all of which I link to addiction. Certainty (Doubt, Safety), Trust and Empathy are basic elements of and for the continuation (non-disruption) of the addiction to life, and thus of life itself or of the “going on being” (to use Winnicott’s term). I call these theoretical formulations cachexies of being, after I first explain what are the hexies of being, which is what the being is addicted to, namely the addictions of being which can all be summarized under the cluster of addiction to life (the stubbornness and irritability two-fold as I call it, which comprises what I conceptualize as the “addiction to life”: namely, we, as living beings, are addicted to living, to life itself, to whichever biochemical or other homeostatic or endostatic state we call life, as much as all beings are addicted to being, and this is how they manage to keep on be-ing, or “to go on being”.

In other words, psychosis, perversion, and neurosis, which construe the classical categorizations of the clinical pathologies in psychoanalytic, psychiatric and clinical-psychological nosography, are all cachexies (or pathologies) of being, because they are disruptors, “disorders”, or “revolters” of Certainty (Doubt, Safety), Trust and Empathy, that is, disruptors of the continuation of life, of the addiction to life, of the “going on being”.

These formulations on trust have ethical implications, especially in contemporary times and post-Covid times, for example, the rise of phenomena such as conspirationism (Ratcliffe, 2021a), war, economical crisis, health crisis, etc., where there seems to be a radical multi-faceted disruption of trust starting from the ethical and political level but also infiltrating and corroding the ontological fundamental level of being. However, as I will show, it is also the other way round: the disruption of trust starts from a fundamental-ontological and endogenic-psychoanalytical level, but when exo-genic factors such as personal and collective crises provoke it, it becomes activated. In this article I will further clarify what it is meant by fundamental of trust, or the faith and trust that there is ground below our feet and what this ground means, and I will also explain how fundamental trust is directly connected to empathy (which is the fundamental prerequisite of ethics), and then empathy leads back and is, to a subsequent level, a prerequisite of trust, too. This mostly transcendental (but also, as I will show, factual-empirical) ground or earth, or body, is lost along with the metaphysical and ontological fundamentality trust, especially in cases of major disruption, e.g. psychotic cases, but also to different degrees and more apospasmatically in so-considered “normal” cases of everyday collective madnesses like the ones observed during war, pandemics and other severe crises.

Here I am using mostly a phenomenological-psychopathological analysis so as to analyse the concept of trust (within psychosis) and then of empathy (within perversion), as well as what I call certainty, safety, and control (within the cluster of neurosis). The phenomenological perspective aims to provide such an analysis via discussion of the categories of neurosis, psychosis, perversion, and addiction, all through a phenomenological lens, as they could be theorized about and analysed based on the hypothesis that life is an addiction, and how this addiction to life, or this (addictive) condition of life, produces the aforementioned pathologies or cachexies. Thus, another proposal I made in my doctoral research demonstrated how the category of addiction or the addict is theoretically or phenomenologically (in his lived experience) connected to the psychotic, the neurotic, and the pervert (especially the latter two), and in effect how all these categories are interconnected in their phenomenological manifestations and their causations, which I propose to be located in the ontological and metaphysical principle of the addiction to life. In the addiction to life itself I locate the primary or originary addiction (can be conceptually parallelized to die Ursucht), which different authors located in different things, and I distinguish it from what I call secondary every-day addictions (addictions as we normally understand them), which are failed attempts to repeat or mimic the primary addiction, and they subsequently render the human subject addicted to various other substances, processes or experiences. However, here the concept of an “addiction to life” is not the focus, and thus I will use it as a satellite concept, only to permit further ponderings on trust, and finally on empathy, as well as their ethical repercussions and complications.

Cachexies of being [neurosis, psychosis, perversion as disruptions of Safety (certainty/non doubt; feeling in-control), Trust, and Empathy, respectively] fall under what I call disorders of irritability. Roughly said, while all living beings have a certain balance between their folds of stubbornness and irritability (composing their addiction to life), the human is over-irritable. The disorders of irritability (pathologies or cachexies of being) are categorized as the two polar opposites of the spectrum of being, or as Ethos and An-ethos, and Hexis (to be addicted) and An-hexis (not to be addicted). Being is performed in habits (ethos-ethē or ēthē [ἔθος or ἦθος (sing.), ἔθη or ἤθη (pl.)]), and habit is etymologically and conceptually intertwined with hexis, which is at the core of being [v.]. Therefore, the two pathologies of being are pathologies of ethos and hexis. The main proposition here, which extends the already existing proposition, by Tudi Gozé and István Fazakas, of psychosis as a disruption or a disorder of the fundamental Trust, is, as said, that neurosis is a disruption or a disorder of Certainty (Doubt, Safety), and perversion of Empathy.

Methodologically speaking, what I mean by the phenomenological analysis or lens is a recent way of approaching psychiatric experience that is informed by the phenomenological method as it has been developed in philosophy, starting with Edmund Husserl. Thomas Fuchs gives a general overview of this method as it is applied in psychiatry and psychopathology: “Since Jaspers’ Allgemeine Psychopathologie, phenomenology has served as the foundational science for psychopathology, providing a rich framework for the assessment and analysis of subjective experience and its disturbances in mental disorders. The last two decades in particular have seen an international rise and progress of phenomenology in psychiatry, which is also demonstrated by the recent publication of the Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology. Phenomenology is by no means restricted to the description of psycho-pathological phenomena, however. As an approach which investigates the patients’ subjective and intersubjective experience, indeed their life world in a comprehensive way, it can go one step further and provide the basis for an extended understanding of psychiatric and psycho-therapeutic practice.” (Fuchs, Messas and Stanghellini, 2019: 63)

I should note, in order to avoid misconceptions, that the concepts that I use here, which are taken from the fields of psychiatry, psychopathology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and neurology, and mainly consist of the classical concepts of neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, are to be understood as clusters of emotions, affective states, moods, thoughts, behaviors, and personality traits, and, in general, as philosophical “anthropologies”, rather than the very content-specific categorizations that other fields use. I am not attempting by any means to step into the expertise of other fields, I am writing here from the stance of a philosopher.

Fundamental Trust that the reality of the ground is staying still

The aforementioned pathologies or disorders of irritability, as said, constitute pathologies, or cachexies of being. These pathologies and cachexies can be manifested or classified, in order that they be better understood and analyzed within the three traditional psychopathological classifications of neurosis, psychosis, and perversion. I proposed in my doctoral thesis that neurosis is a disrupter/disruption of control, a disorder of certainty, that is of doubt regarding oneself and one’s surroundings, and a feeling of (being in) lack of control. Psychosis is accordingly a disrupter/disruption of trust, and perversion is disrupter/disruption of empathy.

At first I will explain what I mean by fundamental trust, and then I will extend this notion to explain what it is to have faith or trust that the reality of the ground stays still or that there is ground below our feet.

I trust that I am somebody, which means, I have certain habits of perceiving, thinking, imaging the surrounding world. I trust even that I am and that I will continue to be for the next seconds, moments, hours, days, years, and that I already was, for a certain amount of time before, thus I have a certain consistency of a habitual self, which constitutes an “I”, “myself”, the “ego”, my habits.

The individual or collective with psychotic traits does not trust. Psychosis is a disrupter/disruption of the habit/habituation-formation and the narrative-formation, and thus of the self-formation-assisting-mechanism of trust; although “earth does not move” (a Husserlian fragment that I will explain later), the psychotic trusts not that it doesn’t. Both psychosis and perversion are springing, to use Freud’s concepts, from an atrophic super-ego, in contrast with neurosis that springs from a hyper-trophic super-ego.

When I wake up from deep sleep, I am barely a “minimal self” − as it is called in philosophy, cognitive science, and psychology (Zahavi, 2010; Zahavi, 2017; Metzinger, 2020) – a thing which in some ways resembles, or, rather, is a step further from, Husserl’s (phenomenological) Vor-Ich, although this “I” is still “maximal” or big enough to be (a) psychotic. Psychosis, I propose, is a deeper structure, a more archaic and primal structure of the self, of the “I”. More archaic animals, namely, animals in older stages of evolution, or simply of the story of the Earth, are structured in terms of self-individuation, in a structure closer to the psychotic motif. When I wake up from deep sleep, these primal psychotic structures are in prevalence. The oldest minimally aware living form had to be psychotic, because the stakes of elimination of the living mode of being itself were lurking in extremis: the living mode of being was fresh and sensitive, without many variants or many representatives, in other words, without many living beings. Psychosis is a deeper, more primal, more efficient, certain, valid, trustable, even, mechanism of self-sustainment and self-preservation; neurosis is a softer one. Later, in the story of Earth, living beings like mammals are mostly employing neurotic structures of self-sustainment and preservation, although we all have remains of psychotic structures that we exhibit in cases of violently unexpected urgency, during which they come to our rescue. Waking from deep sleep, a phase of high vulnerability and insufficiency of the upper brain faculties (that are unavailable to older representatives of living modes of being), puts at work the psychotic mechanisms. The upper structures of the brain are more recent, therefore they are the ones that need the deep sleep in order to be refreshed, while the primal serpent-like brain is a lighter sleeper; it is already old enough to have become enteleches (entelecheia), without much need of improvement and rebooting via sleep. So when I wake from deep sleep, my primal brain is the one already awake to be me; my more recent upper brain, as I (a human) am a more recent addition to the story of earth, becomes me slightly later, after awakening. At that moment, I initially do not trust (ontological psychosis: psychotic mechanism and feeling of being mostly not trusting of ontological values such as the being, the living form, the I, that I am being, that I live, that I have an individuated monadic self and I am not fused into the holon or into something or somebody else), and then slowly (in a matter of seconds, but still a long duration), as my upper brain awakes, I do not control. I neurotically feel out of control and I seek ontological control. Having already had gone past the psychotic phase, I do trust that I somehow am (being and self), but I need more control of these premises, that is, to be more aware, or conscious, to control.

Immediately after I wake up from deep sleep, I have no habits, I trust of none, even of the I or the am; I gradually remember them (the habits) and this is the neurotic stage of seeking control through the retrieval of rituals and habits.

To exist is the most fundamental trust one can and should have in order to “go on being”, which is equivalent to maintaining the addiction to be; I exist apodeictically (the self-giveness) − that is, there is “apodictic evidence of the ‘I am’” (Husserl, 1931/1960/1987: 103) − the “’apodeictic‘ self-evidence” of phenomenology, which means it is impossible not to exist, that I exist with certainty, as the necessary subject or agent of reflection, a phenomenological reformulation of the Cartesian “cogito, ergo sum”. Tudi Gozé, Till Grohmann, Jean Naudin, and Michel Cermolacce, in their article “New Insight into Affectivity in Schizophrenia: from the Phenomenology of Marc Richir,” referring to the Phenomenology of Marc Richir, explain further what is meant by the core concept of the fundamental trust which is disrupted in psychotics: “Trying to lay bare the genesis of the inner/outer, subject/object polarization, Richir describes affectivity as the experiential layer in which the inseparable and synchronic constitution of self and world is possible. It accounts not only for an inseparable unity of both terms, but also for the fundamental fact that we usually experience a reliable world, consistent, stable, and ultimately trustworthy. Affectivity constitutes a proof of acquaintance: we encounter the world with the subjective quality of trust. Here, trust is not to be understood as a psychological or a moral quality but as faith in the coherence and continuity of our experience. In the same respect, Maurice Merleau-Ponty mentioned the “perceptual faith”, which is supported by the constant and dynamic integration of our body schematic processes.” (Gozé, et al., 2017: 404) [The phrase “perceptual faith” is in reference to Merleau-Ponty, 1964 and Dastur, 1994].

The Ground below our Feet as an Ethical Ground

The phrase from Husserl I keep referring to is called the Umsturz Fragment, and it is the following: “Die Ur-Arche Erde bewegt sich nicht.” (“The originary ark, earth, does not move.”) It is part of Husserl’s description on the envelope that included his fragment titled “Foundational Investigations of the phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth, Does Not Move (May 7^th to May 9^th 1934).” In a revised form, the phrase goes thus: “The earth does not move; perhaps I may even say it is at rest.” (Lawlor, 2022a: xli) [2]

When I say that there is ground below our feet, I mean this as Husserl’s Ur-Arche, as Chōra, as ground, both as transcendental ground, but also as empirical-factual tacit ground; metaphorically I mean it as non-desperation, hope, faith, etc., but also I mean the ground as a transcendental earth, the world, the cosmos, earth as an environment and atmosphere [3]; both as a metaphysical, phenomenological and physical concept, as soil. “Sol transcendantal” or “Terre transcendantale” are the transcriptions given to Husserl’s Ur-Arche by Marc Richir, which is then conceptualized as chōra (Richir, 2006: 268); ground could also be Heimat / the Home and the Planet. I also mean the ground as an objective body (Körper), but also a lived body (Leib), that is, as carnality, materiality, reality, perceptiveness and trust towards this perceptiveness; or trust and touch within the Freudian reality-principle (Realitätsprinzip), as a sort of meaning (that something makes sense), as familiarity and homeliness (instead of uncanniness), inner subjectivity and coherence, etc.: “Being at home means being somewhere. To be precisely somewhere and not anywhere means to dwell in an “absolute here”, that is, not to be nowhere at all (as can be seen in some cases of schizophrenia), and this “absolute here” is an ultimate point of reference from which it is only possible to speak of movement and rest, of proximity and distance, of familiarity and strangeness. In this sense, being able to be at home reveals what Husserl has described as the originary foundation (Ur–Arche), which is the “transcendental Earth” or “the transcendental ground”. According to the infamous affirmation of Husserl, the “Earth does not move”. The analysis presented in the manuscripts published in English under the title Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature directly concerns our subject. Husserl affirms, not without provocation, that if the Earth is indeed a body (Körper) among the bodies in the cosmos, it is first and foremost for me a land that gives itself immediately as the immutable ground from which bodies are individualizable. It is the zero-point of any movement of individual bodies. The earth does not move because the empirical soil under my feet is at the same time a transcendental ground. Marc Richir interprets the Husserlian Earth as an archaic “amorphous and limitless ‘support’ (apeiron)” (Richir, 2006: 269), preceding the awakening of the individual consciousness, that holds us and has always held us even before the constitution of our “absolute here” and of which we strangely retain a transcendental reminiscence.” (Fazakas and Gozé, 2020: 175) [4]

Trust is understood as “perceptual faith […] that it is founded in the functioning of a transcendental ground.” Further, “[…]trust has a transcendental dimension in that it functions as a condition of possibility of the basic ego-world relation. Tacit for the most part in ordinary experience, it comes forth in its problematicity in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. People experiencing psychic disturbances lose trust in the continuity and the mineness of lived experience and conceive the world as uninhabitable.” (Fazakas and Gozé 2020: 169 [Abstract])

This husserlian Vor-Ich, mentioned before, is equivalent to the foetus in the womb, and – in an analogous sense to a pre-ontology – equivalent to a pre-on (pre-Being) in the third platonic genre: the chōra. Chōra is equivalent to Husserl’s Ur-Arche, which is equivalent to the transcendental earth [the originary ark, which is the earth, or the original archē (ἀρχή)] or transcendental mother. Maurice Merleau-Ponty speaks, too, of the Ur-Arche, which is mostly, for him, the soil, and Marc Richir explicitly makes the two concepts meet and separates chōra from topos: “In this respect, Husserl’s lesson is remarkable. The primordial Leib, he conceives, is not a body (Körper), it is indivisible in bodies, it contains no body, does not move and is not at rest. It is in this sense the transcendental ground (die Ur–Arche) or the transcendental Earth, the formless receptacle or the nurse of becoming, the mother as transcendental matrix [giron transcendental], as an absolute transcendental “reference” that never leaves itself and that, therefore, never has to regain itself, which makes the primordial Leib non-portrayable [infigurable] in perception or imagination – just like the chôra, it cannot be object of doxa.” (Richir, 2006: 268) [5]

The ground, and thus the earth in the Husserlian phrase, for Merleau-Ponty is the soil, a rather empirical or factual archē, or, it could be said, a ground or an earth belonging to the Platonic genus of the sensibles (mimēmata, the within-the-world, the perceivable with the senses), whereas for Husserl it is a more transcendental archē, and thus an Ur-archē, rather, at first, resembling the Platonic genus of Ideas (eidē, the supra-sensual), or, I would say, it is rather equivalent to the Platonic obscure third genre of things, which is Chōra. More details are available in Leonard Lawlor’s “Foreword” to Merleau-Ponty’s Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology: “For Husserl, in “The Earth Does Not Move,” the earth is the preobjective and pre-Copernican earth; and since it is preobjective, it is relative, for Husserl, to subjectivity, to, as Merleau-Ponty says, “the idealist Sinngebung” (BN 47) of the absolute constituting ego. And yet, what Merleau-Ponty sees in “The Earth Does Not Move” is that Husserl’s analysis “concerns the whole ontology: everywhere a new type of being is unconcealed” (BN 46). The Husserlian earth is equivalent to what Heidegger calls Being, and the earth understood as Being brings about, for Merleau-Ponty, a clarification of the notion of the “possible” (BN 44). From the famous preface to the Phenomenology of Perception on, Merleau-Ponty has always tried to root all abstract concepts in factuality.” (Lawlor, 2002b: xvii) [6]

It should be parenthetically noted that, on the other hand, people overtly optimistic and satisfied with their everydayness have lost touch with reality and have been absorbed by their imposed habitus; such over-confidence and trust that one is living an unquestionably good life has a psychotic overtone.

Belief and faith are disturbed or disrupted in neurosis, too, but not to such a fundamental level, and while their strategic and methodological suspension is important for philosophical inquiry and critical thought (for example in scepticism), their overabundance is problematic for the same purpose of philosophical inquiry, as it leads to dogmatism and even to fascist tendencies on a political level; their overabundance is also encountered in personality disorders of over-confidence, over-faith and over-trust, especially towards oneself and also towards the reality of one’s perception (a hyperbolic perceptual faith).

However, it always depends which reality one chooses as a reference point, since an over-trust towards the inverted reality, towards a certain perceptual “inversion of the eyes” [7], is paramount to the paranoiac, as well as an over-trust towards their beliefs or convictions, even thought detached from their perceptions. Paradoxically, exactly this inverted or reverted over-trust −of the personality disorder, and of the paranoid or other psychotic, as well as the neurotic, the over-trust or over-belief in the lack of certainty, safety, and control, of the latter− stems from a fundamental disruption of trust. Thus trust, as an affect, is not what “suffers” it, but it, somewhat, in one way or another, resurfaces in parallel embedded realities, but what “suffers” or becomes disrupted or disordered is the very fundamental constitutional trust of being of oneself and the world, the trust of being: the trust concerning one’s and the world’s being or reality, namely, that one and/or the word is/exists. − How am I rather than not, how can I be among nothingness, or is nothingness the same as being? − The addiction to being, and then to life, suffers subsequently from these disruptions, disorders, or questionings of being/reality, along with other disruptions, disorders, or questionings mostly attributed to the neurotic and the pervert. Fazakas and Gozé explain further the connection between inner and outer reality and trust’s contribution to both, as well as the origins of trust, which are not to be conceived of as ex nihilo. (See, Fazakas and Gozé, 2020: 186, with reference to Winnicott, 1953/1971/2005: 19).

Friedrich Nietzsche grasped and fathomed a similar fundamentality or reality of the ground or the E/earth, or simply the real world, through the persona of Zarathustra who, against the Western locus of the constant, almost neurotic abjection and denial of the E/earth or, at the same time, the over-sublimation, which is again a form of radical euphemistic denial of the E/earth, exclaims: “bleibt der Erde treu” / “remain faithful to the earth”. (Nietzsche, 1896/1980/1988: 15) [8] This is again a realistic assertion towards the primacy and the fundamentality of the E/earth or the ground as an untrembling constancy of the existence of a real world in which we all live; it is, at the same time, an affirmation and a rehabilitation (perceptual, cognitive, and factual or sensual) of the world, the cosmos, and of lived experience and its revaluation and appreciation. This affirmation, revaluation and appreciation is at the core of ancient Greek thought, especially that of the pre-Socratics, but also the Stoics and other philosophical schools where there exists the adamant interconnectedness of all things in the world, the cosmos, or physis; there is also a strong admission and belief/trust in the existence of the reality-principle of the physis as an inclusive reality and materiality, in opposition to the later transcription of physis as a natura or nature which becomes disembodied, exclusive, exoteric or exogenous, merely surrounding and thus ready to be abjected, objectified, denied, rendered inhabitable, uncanny, monstrous, indifferent, and thus suppressed as much as oppressed, enslaved, violated, and possessed as a slave and as an enemy of the so-called human civilization (hence the opposition nature-culture).

Moreover, my concept of the “addiction to life” is a sort of a ground, a primordial and fundamental ground-reality; it is what grounds the being, and especially the living organism, to reality, and even, it could be said, to its own Autopoiesis (Varela and Maturana, 1972/1980), its own perceptiveness, self-organization, intercommunication and inter-dependence with the environment, and thus cognition, which make up its Autopoiesis, for which the addiction to being/life is a prerequisite or essence. The “addiction to life” is an ontological and vital counterweight that keeps us to the ground.

In the same trajectory, I think, work, or shall work, both the ecological, environmental, planetary humanities and the conscience of contemporary times – at first one shall “ground” and trust or have faith in the reality of the ground, the planet, the soil, the ecologies and nature, the world or the cosmos in general; on a more metaphysical (metaphysical realism) and ontological level, the contemporary movements of speculative realism, new realism, critical realism, object-oriented-ontology, and other contemporary realisms and materialisms are geared towards a re-turn to object(s), towards anti-correlationism, and towards a re-do of the Kantian tradition of philosophy of perception. Perception is the main contested faculty here, and, together with it, its main corollaries of trust and faith in the intentionality (to use a phenomenological term) of (perceptual) experience; thus, in the case of the disruption or disorder of trust in psychosis, or in psychotic-traits, we could be talking, at first, about a perceptual madness and a perceptual absence or a belief in the private world (which is, surprisingly, how the Ancient Greeks would define idiocy, which for them included mental illness both in the sense of “madness” and “folly”), and a simultaneous disbelief or distrust in things or reality (as well as in the ground, the soil, the E/earth, etc.), or a disbelief or distrust towards our experience, which is usurped by our opinions, or by an opinion-delirium or opinion-madness. Experience, as Merleau-Ponty notes, is older than any opinion − “our experience, prior to every opinion, of inhabiting the world by our body, of inhabiting the truth by our whole selves” [9]. Such madness then extends to a body-negating madness and a self-negating madness − I create these terms/concepts so as to juxtapose Merleau-Ponty’s “perceptual faith” (“la foi perceptive”) (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 28; Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 47), as well as in juxtaposition to Merleau-Ponty’s “perceptual presence”, and what to “believe in the things” is in counter-relation with “to believe only in the private world”.

Such perceptual disturbances, at first, affect and disrupt what Varela and Maturana called the Autopoiesis of the organism as two-fold self-organization (ability of the organism of producing and maintaining itself) and cognition (which is an embodied cognition and inter-communication with the environment), and from then on Autopoietic Enactivism, as well as what I call the “addiction to life”. There is thus an interruption, or a scission of coherence of the ego-world relation (a chorismos), and a disruption of that continuity of coherence which then disrupts security, homeliness, familiarity, faith and trust both in one’s perception (“perceptual faith”) and in the ground. [10] From then on to a further conscious level, these perceptual disturbances stemming from such perceptual madness, perceptual disbelief or perceptual distrust, disrupt our ethico-political perceptions and hence our judgments concerning our own habits of living, thinking and acting, where empathy is another such corollary disruption, casualty, or collateral damage, following that of trust.

From Trust to Empathy

I propose here, as I did in my doctoral thesis, that perverts are un-empaths. For example, sovereigns, that is, people in control of our habits/rituals, and more specifically in control of what I refer to as anti-life habits or habits that render life a taboo (techniques, tactics or habits that we follow, which axiomatically consider life itself as a taboo), or simply people in power, are mostly perverts, because they oppose, mainly, sex-sexuality, for the following reasons. Firstly, they have experienced the “jouissance” and they want nobody else to have the “privilege” of experiencing it, and, secondly, sex is an empathetic endeavor (as well as an endeavor based on and presupposing certainty and trust). Sex equalizes the other to oneself, and if this empathy towards the other is enhanced through sex, it will make its way into all other relations, thereby seeping into the ethics (habits) of social communication and into society itself. This would have a devastating effect on the perverted idiot, who is diverting their desire to the other as an (empty of subjectivity and agency) object. Sex is taboo for the aforementioned two reasons that are stemming from the diverted desire of the perverts, because in case sex is exhorted, the sovereign perverts would be rendered castrated asexuals, and they are not willing at the slightest to let go of their privileged over-felt “jouissance”, of their “encore”. “I experienced that ultra-experience, and I want it all for myself− you shall not have it! −because if you are unapologetically un-taboo-ed (without taboo) do so, the zombified objects of my diverted-desire will turn into real others, and this will be an act of conviction of my own sexual desire.”

In neuroses, urges and impulses are repressed; that is, the object of desire or pleasure is repressed. In perversion it is reversed or detoured in favor of the pervert. The pervert has no actual desire but mere (catastrophic) needs. He has developed his character without being identified with it –the character− (αὐτό) and thus with himself [(ἑ)αυτὸν]; there is distance, dissociation, divergence, a void between himself and his character, something that consequently makes him detached from his emotions, desires, thoughts, actions, and simultaneously from the emotions, desires, thoughts, and actions of others – a disorder of empathy. Something else that plays a part in the making of the pervert is the prolonged infantile omnipotence/tyranny (systematic protection even though the child has committed an injustice; if, on the other hand, someone is constantly punished without having done any injustice, he is led to neurosis), due to the lack of the superego’s taming power. This is why the pervert is characteristically multiplied in the present era. Our irritability with the present society is intensified (speeds/vitesses, etc.) and transformed from an addiction-(“Sucht”/Trieb)-to-life, to a perversion-to-life.

Maybe it is the case that everybody becomes perverted immediately after ablactation and before being tamed by the Superego or the Symbolic (omnipotence, infantile tyranny, non-tolerance of authority), but some of them remain perverts. Or rather, we are born psychotic (lack of trust), we “progress” to perverts (lack of empathy), and if we surpass those two phases, we redound to becoming neurotics (lack of control, certainty and safety). Some tarry in the first, some in the second, some surpass more or less even the third, and live happily ever after becoming/being addicted to life, without the trauma of coming to life which accompanies some people till the end and manifests as psychosis, perversion, neurosis, or as the evolutionary succession of the three of them.

Furthermore, according to some of Fernand Deligny’s (1913–1996) observations as an experimenter in the field of special education (Deligny, 2007; Deligny, 2013; Wiame, 2016), who conducted what he referred to as “attempts” (tentatives) in residential collective programs, psychotic and autistic children lack language. This absence of language was presented, by Deligny, as equivalent to the absence of Gravity. Therefore, following from the Fazakas-Gozé article, I conclude that trust is like a gravitational force (“remain true/faithful/trustful to the earth”, to borrow the phrase from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in another context). Lack of language means lack of trust, and vice versa: lack of trust leads to lack or disturbance of language, and thus language and trust are based on one another. If trust constitutes the realm of the “Symbolic”, as expressed in psychoanalysis, then, in psychotics, the “Symbolic” evokes untrust. Autism and psychosis are not illnesses for Deligny, but other modes of being. So, according to this latter proposition, neurosis, psychosis and mental illnesses in general are not illnesses except to contemporary society, as it is structured by its particular rituals and habits of civilization, just like physical/mobility disabilities only become excruciating disabilities due to careless urban planning and inaccessible architecture of living spaces. I would say that they are, indeed, other modes of being, and in a way, as I also proposed in my doctoral work, apart from being disorders or cachexies of being (cachexies and disruptions of the addiction to being), they are sometimes also “revolters” of being, new revolutionary (and evolutionary) ways of being, or revolutionary hexies of being. At the same time, however, they clash with reality and the consequent ethico-political bios, even if this bios is at the same time anti-zoē, anti-addiction-to-life and anti-life.

Parallel to Deligny’s observations, Husserl in “The Origin of Geometry” speaks of how the ideal object (including geometrical objects) is instituted [institution: Stiftung] through language. This institution of ideal objects presupposes a unity of world and language, and the objectivity or the objective being of the world presupposes humanity, which is meant as the community of beings or subjects capable of expressing themselves (thus capable of language). Husserl thus speaks of “the horizon of humanity (HUA 369)” [11], while, in German, Horizont has a sense of the limit.

What is relevant here is that this horizon, about which Merleau-Ponty also writes, based on Husserl, “is prior to the thesis of any humans or human communities, prior to any specific Einfühlung; it is the typic or style of being human that makes Einfühlung possible (BN 22).” (Lawlor, 2002b: xix) Thus, based on the aforementioned observations by Deligny, it could be said that language is placed in-between trust and empathy; after trust and before empathy. Lack of language means lack of trust, and severe lack of trust simultaneously means lack of language; at the same time, lack of language means inability to start with empathy. Therefore, trust and empathy are not far away from each other and are interconnected, so when one speaks of E/ethics, where empathy is core, one has to face the issue of trust, or rather, of fundamental trust as described. In other words, I would like to accentuate here, in relation to E/ethics, that we cannot do away with trust if we are to have a discourse on E/ethics.

Further, earth, for Merleau-Ponty, and thus the ground, “presupposes language, the horizon” (Lawlor, 2002b: xviii) [12], and thus fundamental trust presupposes language.

Along with the earth, of the same matter or kind are carnal bodies, according to Merleau-Ponty, and due to this, there exists a sympathetic condition (as I would call it) of the kinship between the earth and the carnal felt or lived bodies − the felt bodies (Leib) in opposition to the objective ones (Körper), where carnal bodies are always the reference point and the centre of any movement of the earth; there is therefore a subsequential empathy between all other bodies (animate or not) on E/earth (as the material substratum, or as a physis and as a planet). This empathy is then protracted to an empathy towards other living beings and humans. In other words, I would put it thus: empathy derives from the sympathy between earthly bodies, and it is no coincidence that sympathy in its original Ancient Greek sense means what empathy came to mean today – a sense of compassion and kinship or philia due to perceived sameness or likeness. Such sameness, identity, or a-likeness between bodies is also discussed in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, when the latter speaks of “the universe of Körper”: “This Einfühlung anticipates the Einfühlung with other animate beings and humans (BN 45). Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty describes “the access to others” first in terms of an identity of “the universe of Körper” (BN 45). The identity of bodies happens because the others are both Körper and Leib (“flesh”). Since the others consist in Körper they have to do with the same bodies as I do; since they consist in Leib, the others transform me into a Körper just as I transform them into a Körper (BN 45). But Merleau-Ponty insists, while still following Husserl in “The Earth Does Not Move,” that “the identity goes farther” than the identity of Körper (BN 45). There is an identification among the “they,” as Merleau-Ponty says (les “ils”), because their Leib as well as their Körper is the same for each and for the others. In other words, as Merleau-Ponty says, there is an identity through “the same body-world structure” (BN 45). Merleau-Ponty concludes that this identity is to be taken “very generally: my corporeality is communicable— participatable, dimension—through my corporeality I can ‘verstehen’ other bodies and in this way I can put my experience into relation with theirs” (BN 45). Even though it is precisely the identity of having the same universe of bodies on the earth that allows for this Einfühlung, which in turn allows for communication and understanding among humans— in other words, even though having the same world allows for the very idea of humanity, that is, for the horizon of humanity—this same world actually presupposes the horizon of humanity. As Merleau-Ponty says, “the others are already implicated in my experience of the Earth: through them, my horizon is enlarged to the size of the earth” (BN 45).” [Lawlor, 2002b: xviiii–xix)

At last, some clarifications regarding how I define language and empathy. Concerning empathy, here I am mostly referring to quotations of the German use of Einfühlung, especially as it is used within Phenomenology. This term already existed in 19^th and early 20^th century German Aesthetics, and literally means “feeling into” another body or environment, animate or inanimate, real or imaginary; a “feeling into” and attunement to (another) “atmosphere”; I would describe it as the taking of another stance or perspective, or the emplacement in another affective or cognitive situatedness, and it has both aesthetic and inter-personal qualities (Ganczarek, Hünefeldt, and Olivetti Belardinelli, 2018). However, one might still wonder whether attributing such meanings to empathy excludes non-human animals from possessing it, since it is all the more observed and argued that they show evidence of a proto-sympathetic empathy. And then, is this empathy meant as compassion, as cognitive empathy, as emotionally driven empathy, or is it of any other sort? I think that, for the purposes of this paper, I shall limit myself to stating that empathy is to be conceptualized as an understanding that there is an inner-world in both oneself and the other being; that I do not solipsistically exist, and the other is not a “zombie” (in the philosophical sense). Even trees have some sort of proto-empathy, as well as a proto-language, in the sense that their roots communicate deep below the ground −a trusting under-ground− and in cases where one of them is struggling due to external (e.g. fire) or other reasons, then this is communicated to others through some type of root-signals or chemical signals. So, here I have in mind a proto-empathy, or rather a fundamental-empathy – fundamental (as in the case of fundamental-trust) in the sense of being at the core of being, and quintessential for the being and its structure, so that the being can “go-on-being”, or, in my terms, trust and empathy are quintessential habits (ethos-ethologies) or even addictions (hexis-hexies of being) of being and of living, part of what comprises their stubborn persistence (addiction to being/life). When and if this fundamental proto-empathy is disrupted, then the advanced form of empathy that we usually mention in reference to humans, and in E/ethics, is disrupted too, in the same way that when fundamental-trust and/or proto-trust is disrupted, the more advanced trust seen in humans and employed in E/ethics, follows as well.

Speaking of ethologies, here I shall add a further clarification: that my conception of E/ethics is roughly a thinking on ethological or habitual deontologies, rules of action, habits, morals/moralities − a deontology in the original sense of the word, as that which ought to be done (habits, actions, dispositions, etc.), and not Deontology as an ethical field/theory. In that sense, and in the sense I have already approached E/ethics in my previous work (Christodoulou, 2022), E/ethics deontically follows ethologies, that is, what way or form of life one shall follow derives or is indicated by their ethology (their habits, tactics, techniques, stratagems or general technology of life); however, I will not elaborate further on this here.

How do we subsequently mean language, is it in the common everyday use, consisting mainly of verbal articulation and expression through words, semantics, grammar, and syntax? Does the mediatory link between language, trust, and empathy then pass through verbal language, and what meaning does Deligny assign to language? (Cf., Krtolica and Sibertin-Blanc, 2019; Hilton, 2015; Deligny, 2007; and Deligny, 2013) The subject of language is one that has been a puzzle to philosophers, linguists, psychologists-psychoanalysts and others, and there is vast research and bibliography on it. Thus I will only limit myself to some primary considerations. I think language, at first for Deligny, is mostly meant as verbal (and also written) and phonetic language, that is, speech (parole), since he declared those children (and adults) as being “hors de parole”, and he also declared his antithesis to psychoanalysis (which he thought to be a “curious language”), especially Lacan’s given primacy and dominance of language and the symbolic order as a core form of relation. Also, considering that at the time that he conducted his experiments and clinical observations those children, conceived of as disabled, were not receiving enough care and attention (they were previously institutionalized in state asylums), and thus remained verbally inarticulate, I think, their state might be partly explained with their environmental surroundings and the lack of special education.

I further mean language as an inner coherent logic (not logic as rationality) or a structure of thoughts and emotions; it is only after and because of this inner logic or structure that language becomes an expression, communication, either in bodily or verbal form. Thus, language can be non-verbal, it can be bodily, and so I mean it mainly as a “proto-language”. In this I include the “language” of non-human beings, which also have, if not a conscious inner structure, then at least a type of cognitive (mostly in the sense of cognition within the theory of Autopoiesis) and affective structure, or, roughly said, a certain subjective (psychic, mental, somatic) logic or structure. This animalistic inner logic or structure can even possess some sort of automatized or mechanic quality; it can be construed by instincts or other tactics of each being as part of their self-organization (their correspondence with the environment, amidst Autopoiesis) and thus survival. There is a language, or information (an archive of information, or even a hysteresis, to use Maurizio Ferraris’s concept), or logic, even in every single sense, or in perception, in general, and in the tactics, habits-ethologies, “technics/techniques”, or “stratagems” of each being, organism, species, or other taxonomic ranks −and thus we can talk of “perceptual faith” in animals, too, where, however, perception is most probably automatically and mechanically trusted; it seems that in non-human animals the ground is unmovable, and this total perceptual trust is maybe part of their life-strategy or life-tactics, as dis-trust can be argued to be part of the human life-strategy or life-tactics, including some evolutionary considerations. These tactics, habits, techniques, this whole technology of being – in general or for each particular being – is a language; in other words, each being has its own “technology” of being or of life, and this “technology” is a sort of a language, which I have further explored in previous work (Christodoulou, 2022).

Conclusion

In this paper I have attempted to go through what is meant by the term trust, and especially fundamental trust – the transcendental ground, the trust that the ground or the E/earth does not move, that is, that there is ground below our feet, an unmovable reality, and a perceptual certainty, safety, control, as well as a trust in the existence of such a reality. From then on I went through some further considerations and remarks regarding the classical psychopathologies, all through a phenomenological lens, and I also proposed and argued how trust, empathy, and language are interconnected, while also commenting on the eco-ethical perspectives and repercussions of all of these propositions and proposals.

NOTES

[1] This article is prepared as part of my postdoctoral research project “Ontological Exhaustion: Being-Tired, and Tired-of-Being: a philosophy of fatigue, exhaustion, and burnout” at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, implemented with the financial support of the National Programme “Early-stage and Postdoctoral researchers” – 2, Stage 1, 2022–2024. 

[2] This volume (Merleau-Ponty, Lawlor and Bergo, 2022) includes Husserl’s revised aforementioned fragment, called the Umsturz Fragment (since Umsturz is the first word on the description written on the envelope, where the fragment was found) or “Foundational Investigations of the phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth, Does Not Move (May 7^th to May 9^th 1934).” The part of the fragment where this phrase is seen is the following: “The earth does not move; perhaps I may even say it is at rest.” (Husserl, 1934/2002: 122) The original in German is: “Die Erde bewegt sich nicht — ich sage vielleicht doch, sie ruht, […].” (Husserl, 1934/1940: 313) The description on the envelope is as follows: “Umsturz der kopernikanischen Lehre in der gewöhnlichen weltanschaulichen Interpretation. Die Ur-Arche Erde bewegt sich nicht. Grundlegende Untersuchungen zum phanomenologischen Ursprung der Köperlichkeit der Räumlichkeit der Natur im ersten naturwissenschaftlichen Sinne. Alles notwendiges Anfangsuntersuchungen.” (Husserl, 1934/1940: 307, n.1) Translation: “Overthrow of the Copernican theory in the usual interpretation of a world view. The originary ark, earth, does not move. Foundational investigations of the phenomenological origin of corporeality of the spatiality pertaining to Nature in the first sense of the natural sciences. Of necessity all are initial investigations.” (Lawlor, 2002a: xli) For the whole text of the fragment, in English, see, Edmund Husserl (1934/2002) and, in German, see, Edmund Husserl (1934/1940).

[3] For a phenomenological analysis of the atmosphere, see Sass and Ratcliffe, 2017.

[4] For the French, see Fazakas and Gozé, 2018: 89: “Je suis chez moi –, cela signifie que je suis quelque part. Être quelque part signifie habiter un « ici absolu », de ne pas être nulle part, et cet « ici absolu » est un point de référence ultime à partir duquel seulement il est possible de parler de mouvement et de repos, de proximité et de distance, de familiarité et d’étrangeté. En ce sens, il révèle ce que Husserl a décrit comme l’archi-fondement (Ur-Arche), et qui est la Terre transcendantale ou le sol transcendantal. Selon Husserl, la Terre ne se meut pas. Les analyses présentées dans le texte éponyme semblent concerner directement notre propos. Husserl affirme, non sans provocation, que si la Terre est bien un corps (Körper) parmi les corps dans le cosmos, elle est d’abord pour moi une terre qui se donne immédiatement comme le sol immuable depuis lequel des corps sont individualisables. C’est le point zéro du mouvement des corps. On peut pourtant la séparer en corps, morceaux de corps, elle est un tout de parties implicites en elle. C’est donc plus exactement son incommensurabilité et son inépuisabilité en corps qui fait d’elle la référence transcendantale de tout mouvement et de tout repos. La terre ne se meut pas parce que le sol sous mes pieds est le sol transcendantal. Richir parle d’un « ‘support’ amorphe et sans limites (apeiron) » qui nous « tient » et dont nous gardons une réminiscence transcendantale.” [Reference to Richir, 2006: 269.]

See, also Fazakas and Gozé, 2018: 91: “Si je peux faire confiance au monde, c’est qu’il y a une promesse qui peut être tenue. Tenue par quoi ? De quelle archè s’agit-il dans l’Ur-Arche de Husserl ? S’agit-il de l’architecture d’un ego transcendantal constituant le monde comme monde habitable, cohérent, continu et donc fiable ? Dans ce cas, la cohérence serait créée par l’ego transcendantal. Autre perspective : la prévisibilité du monde reposerait sur la structure causale d’un monde pré-donné qui dès lors soutiendrait par exemple la connexion entre le fonctionnement cognitif (les représentations) et les lois physico-mathématiques de la matière. Dans ce second cas, la cohérence de l’expérience est simplement trouvée à même la matière. Selon la première option, que nous nommerons idéaliste (cet idéalisme fût-il transcendantal), la cohérence serait le résultat d’une effectuation de l’ego transcendantal qui serait vécue avec le caractère de la confiance. Dans la deuxième option, réaliste, la cohérence des datas sensibles rendant pour moi un monde fiable serait un caractère de la matière (donc, pourquoi pas, du cerveau). C’est en naviguant entre ces deux écueils que Merleau-Ponty affirme, assez étrangement, que « c’est parce que je crois au monde et aux choses d’abord, que je crois à l’ordre et à la connexion de mes pensées » ”. [Reference to Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 75.]

Also, Fazakas and Gozé, 2018: 92: “Dans son ouvrage intitulé La perte de l’évidence naturelle, Blankenburg affirme que sa patiente Anne a perdu (elle l’avait donc déjà gagnée) l’assise transcendantale lui permettant d’aborder le monde comme évidence pré-donnée. Elle se doit donc de reconstruire explicitement sa possibilité d’habiter et s’y épuise dans un effort vain (asthénie transcendantale).” [Reference to Blankenburg, 1991.]

[5] I borrow this translation of Marc Richir’s text from Fazakas and Gozé, 2020: 176. The original is as follows: “À cet égard, la leçon de Husserl est remarquable. Le Leib primordial, conçoit-il, n’est pas un corps (Körper), est indivisible en corps, ne contient pas de corps, ne se meut pas et n’est pas en repos. C’est en ce sens le sol transcendantal (die Ur-Arche) ou la Terre transcendantale, le réceptacle sans forme ou la nourrice du devenir, la mère comme giron transcendantal, comme «référence» transcendantale absolue qui ne se quitte jamais elle-même et qui, par là, n’a jamais à se regagner elle-même, ce qui rend le Leib primordial infigurable en perception ou en imagination – tout comme la chôra, il ne peut être objet de doxa.” (Richir, 2006: 268)

[6] BN refers to the Bibliothèque Nationale’s “numbering of the 55 sheets of Merleau-Ponty’s Course Notes on ‘The Origin of Geometry’.” The course was offered at the Collège de France in 1959 and 1960. These 55 sheets are found in the Bibliothèque Nationale, box 7, envelope 5, under the title “Husserl aux limites de la phénoménologie. Cours de 1960”, as Leonard Lawlor informs in his “Editor’s Note” and “Abbreviations” (Lawlor, 2002a: xxxix and xliii). These “Course Notes” are also re-published in this same edited volume (Merleau-Ponty, 1960/2002: 11–89).

[7] I am basing this statement, regarding the “inversion of the eyes”, in the reading of the first lines of Rilke’s “Eighth Elegy” from Duino Elegies (Rilke, 1923/1977: 54–55), and on Renaud Barbaras’ reading and translation, in Barbaras, 2011, and in Barbaras, 2008/2021: 221–228. I quote part of this elegy, where the phrase is met: “Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur
/ Das Offene. Nur unsre Augen sind
/ Wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt
/ Als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang.” Translation: “AIl other creatures look into the Open
/ with their whole eyes. But our eyes,
/ turned inward, are set all around it like snares,
/ trapping its way out to freedom.”


[8] This is, in the German original, the following phrase from Zarathustra’s Vorrede 3: “bleibt der Erde treu”. In French: « restez fidèles à la terre ». And in English: “Remain faithful to the earth”. Cf., on this phrase, Montebello, 2019. Cf., also, Husserl’s relevant book, in its French translation: Husserl, 1931/1934/1989 (especially the section/chapter corresponding to Husserl’s discussed Umsturz Fragment, entitled, in French, « L’arche-originaire Terre ne se meut pas. Recherches fondamentales sur l’origine phénoménologique de la spatialité de la nature » (1934), translated by Didier Franck).

[9] This term is based on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of perceptual faith (foi perceptive). See, Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 28: “The methods of proof and of cognition invented by a thought already established in the world, the concepts of object and subject it introduces, do not enable us to understand what the perceptual faith is, precisely because it is a faith, that is, an adherence that knows itself to be beyond proofs, not necessary, interwoven with incredulity, at each instant menaced by nonfaith.”

For the original, see Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 47: “Les méthodes de prevue et de connaissance, qu’invente une pensée déjà installée dans le monde, les concepts d’objet et de sujet qu’elle introduit, ne nous permettent pas de comprendre ce que c’est la foi perceptive, précisément parce qu’elle est une foi, c’est-à-dire une adhésion qui se sait au-delà des preuves, non nécessaire, tissée d’incrédulité, à chaque instant menacée pas la non-foi.” Regarding “perceptual faith”, see, also, Dastur, 1994.

Merleau-Ponty talks also of “perceptual presence”, and what to “believe in the things” is in juxtaposition with “to believe only in the private world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 28): “It is said that to cover one’s eyes so as to not see a danger is to not believe in the things [ne pas croire aux choses], to believe only in the private world [ne croire qu’au monde privé]; but this is rather to believe that what is for us is absolutely, that a world we have succeeded in seeing as without danger is without danger. It is therefore the greatest degree of belief that our vision goes to the things themselves. Perhaps this experience teaches us better than any other what the perceptual presence of the world [la présence perceptive du monde] is: not affirmation and negation of the same thing in the same respect, positive and negative judgment, or, as we said a moment ago, belief and incredulity—which would be impossible; beneath affirmation and negation, beneath judgment (those critical opinions, ulterior operations), it is our experience, prior to every opinion, of inhabiting the world by our body, of inhabiting the truth by our whole selves, [notre expérience, plus vieille que toute opinion, d’habiter le monde par notre corps, la vérité par tout nous-même] without there being need to choose nor even to distinguish between the assurance of seeing and the assurance of seeing the true, because in principle they are one and the same thing – faith, therefore, and not knowledge, since the world is here not separated from our hold on it, since, rather than affirmed, it is taken for granted, rather than disclosed, it is non-dissimulated, non-refuted.”

It is also worth mentioning Fazakas and Gozé’s comment on this (Fazakas an Gozé 2020: 175): “Faith is therefore an archaic (i.e. not yet subjective) experience of the inhabiting of the world as a familiarization of it, an experience intimately linked with the inter-subjective experience of a shared, common world. What makes this dwelling possible? According to Merleau-Ponty, it is because being in the world is an embodied condition that it does not need to be explicitly constituted in an act of consciousness. Therefore, its functioning has an apodictic dimension of which we now will elucidate the transcendental structure.”

See, also, Fazakas and Gozé, 2018: esp. 86–88, or Fazakas and Gozé, 2020: esp. 173–175. I quote a relevant passage in the English revised translation of their paper (Fazakas and Gozé, 2020: 173): “To achieve the phenomenological analysis of trust, we propose a hybrid method. In the first part, we will conduct a static analysis which will allow us to explore trust as (1a) perceptual faith [la confiance comme foi perceptive] (Merleau-Ponty), depending on the capacity of being somewhere made possible by the functioning (fungieren) of a (1b) transcendental soil (Husserl). We will then see that only a phenomenological genetic analysis can give access to the exploration of the a-subjective structure of trust and its (2a) transcendental history during early childhood and the first intersubjective experiences. We will propose a phenomenological analysis of (2b) child-care and of the parental environment (with Husserl, Richir and Winnicott).”

And, ibid., 175: “The transcendental soil. Perceptual faith manifests itself as a blinking between familiarity and strangeness on the basis of an original adherence, more fundamental than any conscious or unconscious act, more fundamental than the level of belief and disbelief. There is no major fracture in the feeling of certainty that a familiar world can be encountered. This familiarity of the world is founded at home, and the home bears the character of ground as reliability and sufficient familiarity for encountering the unexpected without too much surprise. Faith is linked to the experience of security one gains at home, the Heimat, which is the first familiar space of experience. Before turning to the analysis of the genesis of this very first space of familiarity, we must still specify the foundational function of this ground and we propose to do that by drawing on Husserl’s later phenomenology of spatiality.”

Further, see, ibid., 187: “As a first step, the architectural stratum of perceptual faith has driven us to recognize an affective adherence of the self to the world. We proposed to interpret perceptual faith as an affective phenomenon, beyond any doxa, be it even the Husserlian Urdoxa. Perceptual faith has thus led us to the conceptualization of an embodied trust, rooted purely in affectivity. We have also shown that the condition of possibility of such adherence is the possibility for the self to be somewhere. This possibility is grounded, in turn, on the transcendental ground that makes it possible to live in the world and to be at home in the world. Perceptual faith, as theorized by Merleau-Ponty, encloses a basic dimension of trust that is precisely trust in the world, and in the fact that it is and will go on to be inhabitable, neither falling to pieces nor opening up an abyss in which we would lose any possibility of a stance.”

[10] See, Fazakas and Gozé, 2018: 94. See, also, another passage in their English revised translation, in Fazakas and Gozé, 2020: 170: “In this paper, we will not directly address trust in the ethical-psychological sense. Instead, we will conduct an analysis of the transcendental dimension of trust as the basis of conscious embodied life. The transcendental, in the sense used here, cannot be dissociated from its functioning in an embodied experience, i.e. from corporeity (Leiblichkeit) in general. It could indeed be dangerous to understand the transcendental in a quasi-platonic way, as if it were a realm of disembodied “ideas” or even processes structuring the empirical field but being at the same time disconnected or separate (chorismos) from it. Historically the concept of the “transcendental” has undergone various modifications: in a Kantian conception of the term, the accent is put on the gnoseological dimension of knowledge a priori; in Husserl, it pertains to the idea of the correlation between a subject purified from its empirical contingencies and its object (the world); with Heidegger, we witness an ontologization of the transcendental through the concept of possibility and possibilization related to Dasein (Schnell 2010, 21–22.).”

[11] HUA refers to Edmund Husserl, “Der Ursprung der Geometrie als intentional-historisches Problem (1936),” edited by Eugen Fink, in Edmund Husserl, Husserliana VI, “Beilage III,” pp. 365–86. They are the original pages of Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry” which are also reproduced in Husserl (1936/2002).

[12] Moreover, on this lack of language in cases where there is also lack of trust (e.g. in the psychosis of schizophrenia), see Fazakas and Gozé, 2020: 180: “Regarding the loss of trust in schizophrenia spectrum disorders, for example, this is a very complex situation because here, too, people with schizophrenia have difficulty in translating this loss into words. However, some people do manage to say something about it. For example, in the case of Anna in Wolfgang Blankenburg’s Der Verlust der natürlichen Selbstverständlichkeit (2012), the patient complains that she has lost something tiny but indispensable—she calls it “natural evidence”, but it is legitimate to recognize this as what we call transcendental trust. More often than not, however, this loss is “covered” or “filled” by a delusional belief and construction. This has the merit of giving a structure (however fragile) to the experience and of protecting oneself from the anonymous anguish of breakdown.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barbaras, R. (2008/2021). Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life [Introduction a une phenomenologie de la vie, Paris Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2008], trans. Lawlor, L., Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press.

Barbaras, R. (2011). La vie lacunaire, Paris, Vrin.

Blankenburg, W. (1991). La perte de l’évidence naturelle: une contribution à la psychopathologie des schizophrénies pauci-symptomatiques, Paris, PUF.

Blankenburg, W. (2012). Der Verlust der natürlichen Selbstverständlichkeit: Ein Beitrag zur Psychopathologie symptomarmer Schizophrenien, Berlin, Parodos Verlag.

Christodoulou, M. (2022). Life as Addiction, PhD diss., Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt & Université de Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès. Unpublished.

Dastur, F. (1994). Perceptual faith and the invisible. – In: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, (25.1), 44–52. DOI: 10.1080/00071773.1994.11007047.

Deligny, F. (2007). Œuvres, edited by Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, Paris, L’Arachnéen, 2007.

Deligny, F. (2013) The Arachnean and Other Texts, translated by Drew Burk and Catherine Porter, Univocal Publishing.

Duschinsky, R., Collver, J. and Carel, H. (2019), “Trust comes from a sense of feeling one’s self understood by another mind”: An interview with Peter Fonagy. – In: Psychoanalytic Psychology, (36.3), 224–227. DOI: 10.1037/pap0000244.

Fazakas, I. and Gozé, T. (2018). De la foi perceptive à la promesse du monde. Pour une histoire transcendantale de la confiance. – In: Annales de Phénoménologie – Nouvelle Série Annalen der Phänomenologie – Neue Reihe, (17), 83–116.

Fazakas, I. and Gozé, T. (2020). The Promise of the World: Towards a Transcendental History of Trust. – In: Husserl Studies, (36) (Online on 30 April 2020), 169–189. DOI: 10.1007/s10743–020–09264–9.

Fuchs, T., Messas, G. P. and Stanghellini, G. (2019). More than Just Description: Phenomenology and Psychotherapy. – In: Psychopathology, (52.2), 63–66 (Editorial). DOI: 10.1159/000502266.

Ganczarek J, Hünefeldt T, Olivetti Belardinelli M. (2018). From „Einfühlung“ to empathy: exploring the relationship between aesthetic and interpersonal experience. – In: Cogn Process, (19.2), 141–145. DOI: 10.1007/s10339-018-0861-x.

Gozé, T., Grohmann, T., Naudin, J. and Cermolacce, M. (2017). New Insight into Affectivity in Schizophrenia: from the Phenomenology of Marc Richir. – In: Psychopathology, (50.6), 401–407. DOI: 10.1159/000481516.

Hilton, L. (2015). Mapping the Wander Lines: The Quiet Revelations of Fernand Deligny. – In: Los Angeles Review of Books, July 2, 2015. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mapping-the-wander-lines-the-quiet-revelations-of-fernand-deligny/

Husserl, E. (1931/1960/1987). Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology [Cartes. Meditationen / Meditations Cartesiennes: Introduction à la phenomenology, 1931], trans. Cairns, D., The Hague/Boston/London, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Husserl, E. (1934/1940). Grundlegende Untersuchungen zum phānomenologischen Ursprung der räumlichkeit der Natur (1934). – In: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Farber, M., Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 307–325.

Husserl, E. (1934/2002). Foundational Investigations of the phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth, Does Not Move (May 7^th to Lawlor May 9^th 1934), trans. Kersten, F. and rev. Lawlor, L. – In: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology: Including text by Edmund Husserl, ed. & trans. Lawlor, L. with Bergo, B., Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 117–131.

Husserl, E. (1936/2002). The Origin of Geometry, trans. Carr, D. – In: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology: Including text by Edmund Husserl, ed. & trans. Lawlor, L. with Bergo, B., Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 93–116.

Husserl, E. (1931/1934/1989). La Terre ne se meut pas, ed. & trans. Franck, D., Pradelle, D., and Lavigne, J.-F., Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit.

Krtolica, I. and Sibertin-Blanc, G. (2019). The Children Estranged from Language: Fernand Deligny, in His Time, and against Lacan Psychoanalysis and History In: Psychoanalysis and History, (21.2), 211–227. DOI: 10.3366/pah.2019.0296.

Lawlor, L. (2002a). Editor’s Note. – In: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology: Including text by Edmund Husserl, ed. & trans. Lawlor, L. with Bergo, B., Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, xxxix–xlii.

Lawlor, L. (2002b). Verflechtung: The Triple Significance of Merleau-Ponty’s Course Notes on Husserl’s ‘The Origin of Geometry’ (Foreword). – In: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology: Including text by Edmund Husserl, ed. & trans. Lawlor, L. with Bergo, B., Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, ix–xxxvii.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1960/2002). Course Notes: Husserl and the Limits of Phenomenology, trans. Lawlor, L. – In: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology: Including text by Edmund Husserl, ed. & trans. Lawlor, L. with Bergo, B., Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 11–89.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Le Visible et l’invisible, Paris, Gallimard.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible, trans. Lingis, A., Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology: Including text by Edmund Husserl, ed. & trans. Lawlor, L. with Bergo, B., Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press.

Metzinger, T. (2020). Minimal Phenomenal Experience: Meditation, Tonic Alertness, and the Phenomenology of ‘pure’ Consciousness. – In: Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, (1.I), 1–44. DOI: 10.33735/phimisci.2020.I.46/

Montebello, P. (2019). Nietzsche. Fidélité à la terre, Paris, CNRS editions, Biblis Inédit.

Nietzsche, F. (1896/1980/1988). Also sprach Zarathustra [KSA 04 in Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (KSA), ed. Colli, G. and Montinari, M., De Gruyter.

Ratcliffe, M. (2017). Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Ratcliffe, M. (2021a). Disorientation, distrust and the Pandemic. – In: Global Discourse, (11.3), 463–466, DOI: 10.1332/204378921X16158114033083

Ratcliffe, M. J. (2021b). Trauma, Language, and Trust. – In: Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and the Social World: The Continued Relevance of Phenomenology, ed. Bortolan, A. and Magrì, E., Berlin, Boston, De Gruyter.

Ratcliffe, M. J. (2022). The Underlying Unity of Hope and Trust. – In: The Monist (16 Apr 2022, Unpublished).

Richir, M. (2006). Fragments phénoménologiques sur le temps et l’espace, Grenoble, Millon.

Rilke, R. M. (1923/1977). The Eight Elegy. – In: Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Poulin, A., Jr., Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 54–59.

Sass, L. and Ratcliffe, M. (2017). Atmosphere: On the phenomenology of “atmospheric” alterations in schizophrenia—Overall sense of reality, familiarity, vitality, meaning, or relevance. – In: Psychopathology, (50.1), 90–97.

Schnell, A. (2010). En deçà du sujet. Du temps dans la philosophie transcendantale allemande, Paris, PUF.

Varela, F. J., and Maturana, H. R. (1972/1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: the realization of the living [De Maquinas y Seres Vivos, Chile by Editorial Universitaria S.A (1972)], (Boston studies in the philosophy of science), Dordrecht, Holland; Boston; London, D. Reidel Pub. Co.

Wiame, A. (2016). Reading Deleuze and Guattari through Deligny’s theatres of subjectivity: Mapping, Thinking, Performing. – In: Subjectivity, (9.1), 38–58. DOI: 10.1057/sub.2015.18.

Winnicott, D. W. (1953/1971/2005). Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena. – In: Playing and reality, London and New York, Routledge, 1–34. First publication of the specific essay was in 1953 at the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, (34), Part 2.

Zahavi, D. (2010). Minimal self and narrative self: A distinction in need of refinement. – In: The Embodied Self: Dimensions, Coherence, and Disorders, ed. Fuchs, T., Sattel, H. and Heningnsen, P., Stuttgart, Schattauer Verlag, 3–11.

Zahavi, D. (2017). Thin, Thinner, Thinnest: Defining the Minimal Self. – In: Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World, ed. Durt, C., Fuchs, T. and Tewes, C., Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 193–199. DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035552.003.0010.