What was the long-durée trajectory implied in the phenomenological movement's original goals, and how might it speak to the work of phenomenologists today?1 This article will approach these questions by looking at Hans-Georg Gadamer's reading of the German phenomenological tradition and its goals of enlivening life, restoring our connection to powerful, guiding value-experiences, and exploring the unfolding of consciousness into ever-new global cultural expressions. Many have taken Phenomenology primarily as an epistemological project, an attempt ‘to elucidate… connections between veritable being and knowing’2 thereby solving problems introduced by scepticism. From this perspective, phenomenological analysis of experience serves as a methodological tool intended to ‘tackle philosophical problems by grounding our discussions in an appropriate type of encounter with ‘things themselves’, as they are given’.3 It thus treats psychological attitudes as a tool of analysis. But in this popular picture of Phenomenology, other wider concerns of the tradition are often occluded—including Phenomenology's attempt to reground experiences of value, to empower the creative nature of consciousness, and to reveal the nature of both individual and global flourishing. … just as the girl who presents the plucked fruit is more than Nature that presented it in the first place with all of its conditions and elements—trees, air, light, and so on—insofar as she combines all these in a higher way in the light of self-consciousness in her eyes and in her gestures, so also the spirit of destiny which gives us these works of art… is the spirit of tragic fate that gathers all these individual gods and attributes of substance within one Pantheon, into spirit conscious of itself as spirit.4 … it was Hegel who saw himself faced with the philosophical task of gathering together the new ‘sciences’ and everything else that did not merge with science, such as metaphysics and religion, and thereby to raise them up into the unitary whole of an encompassing concept.5 Hegel thus captures Being as a multilayered and dynamic process of development. But he also hints at the creative power of our own nature: we do not just exist. We are existence-converters, doing ontological work through the vast collective thought-forms we call philosophies and religions to make more things, and more kinds of things come to be. In the following pages we look at Gadamer's idea that global culture's continuous collaborative unfolding into new expressions is the proper destiny of humanity… and analysis of those global ideas in such a way that it amplifies and refines them, is the proper destiny of Phenomenology. The context in which Gadamer worked was quite different from that of Husserl or Heidegger; he came from a largely secular upbringing with his chemist father in cosmopolitan Breslau, writing in post-war (and even post-reunification) Germany. In his work he addressed issues such as cultural conflict, environmental care, and nuclear armament. Even among the phenomenologists of the 1980s and 1990s, his perspective was often more expansive and liberal—he was the only speaker at a conference on Religion and the Religions with Derrida, Vattimo, and others in 1994 (when he himself was 94) to remind the group that they should be looking to ‘other religious worlds and other cultural worlds’ beyond Abrahamic monotheism.6 He wrote in a festschrift that our ‘conception of the world must no longer be Eurocentric’ and that we must fight the ‘global transformation’ of world cultures toward ‘a unitary cultural model’ by attending to ‘the equally deep insights into the destiny of humanity that have come to expression, for example, in a dialogue of a Chinese master with his disciple, or in other kinds of testimony from religiously founded cultures that are equally strange to us’.7 His development of hermeneutics was both an extension of Heidegger's late focus on language, and an attempt to reflect the post-war situation of cultural dialogue while using a methodology that would help it to address the criticism of constructivists and cultural relativists. But he was not merely ‘firefighting’ the difficulties of the day; in his later essays, Gadamer hints that he saw the study of global culture as the next level in charting the structures of consciousness. In the first section we will argue that the goal of early twentieth century phenomenologists was to re-establish the legitimacy not only of truth, but also of value. This was sometimes obscured beneath the epistemological and ontological focus of much German thought, but it was influential on the development of religious Phenomenology from Scheler to Otto, Eliade, and Corbin. In the second section we consider the way that Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics sought to advance an implicitly ‘vitalistic’ element in phenomenology; this element has been explicated both as a ‘renovated organicism’ trying to revise romantic thought8 and a revival of the Greek religiosity of ‘the living whole’ that foreshadowed Heidegger's ‘whole effort …to think God as pure movement’.9 But it has rarely been seen as part of a wider phenomenological theme of dynamic growth, creativity, and relationality. In practice, this meant that Gadamer encouraged the dynamic, creative, collaborative development of global culture. While religion is not necessary to either of these aims, two key aspects of the study of religions are: tracing lines of value in human experience, and placing cultures in dialogue. Gadamer reflected on the German tradition of Phenomenology at length—both in his explicitly phenomenological works (Truth and Method and the essays he wrote around the time of its publication, such as Man and World [1960], The Nature of Things and the Language of Things [1960], The Philosophical Foundations of the Twentieth Century [1962], and The Phenomenological Movement [1963]), and also in his collections on Parmenides, Plato, and Hegel (including his first book on Plato's Philebus) which set out the early history of phenomenological philosophy as he saw it. In his accounts, he discusses a number of goals that he saw unfolding in the early years of the twentieth century in German universities. In their attempt to understand reality, phenomenologists wanted to aid the ‘movement of the inmost personal self of a finite being toward participation in the essential reality of all possibles’.10 But there was a critical element to this project insofar as Being needed to be rediscovered not as particular things, nor as the sum of present entities, but as the preconditional ‘ground in which metaphysics as the root of the tree of philosophy is supported’.11 Further, some attempted to expand the traditional project of clarifying reality by opening the ‘empirical’ beyond sensory data to affective, aesthetic, and evaluative data. This would enable us to reground the realm of value as a distinctive reality-in-itself.12 For Gadamer, Phenomenology was meant to move beyond the ‘pointless’ Cartesian question of ‘how the subject, filled with his own representations, knows the external world’, to a new model of the subject as ‘already with objects’ as given by intuition.13 Humans were being reconnected with the world in all its richness. In essays such as The Phenomenological Movement (1960), he told a historical narrative of Phenomenology as a ‘missionary consciousness’ providing a new way of assessing reality that ‘carried all the way into the doctrine of God’.14 The turn to language in Heidegger acted as a touchstone for Gadamer's thinking, and he traced a similar development in Wittgenstein's thought.15 Study of meanings and concepts themselves seemed to offer a way beyond the intractable quest for a ‘thing in itself’ beyond subjectivism. In Heidegger's phenomenological conception, language was no longer ‘the “ice of words” that covered over the living stream’ as it had been for Bergson. Instead, Heidegger had realised ‘the compelling fact that linguistic formation is a schematization of the experience of the world’ in all its ever-emerging, imprecise, revealing-concealing, dynamically changing, innately relational, boundless character. Language analysis was meant as a method for treating experience wholly in its own terms. Thus as a post-war professor in the 1950s, seeking a starting point for Truth and Method, Gadamer began with language but added to it the study of art, and of cultural history; together these foregrounded consciousness in the forms that were most direct (language and hermeneutics in Truth and Method, Part III), elusive and evocative (art in Truth and Method, Part I), and collaboratively large-scale (cultural history and the human sciences in Truth and Method, Part II). The section on ‘ontological explanation’ in Truth and Method offered a core analogy for Being as a dynamic inter-relational structure that evolves around themes.16 It was ‘the fundamentals of philosophical ontology [were] the main provenance of Gadamer's enquiry’, opening up a new non-Cartesian model of truth that ended the alienation of nature, body, consciousness, and culture.17 For the present purposes, it is helpful to keep in mind certain phenomenological insights of hermeneutics; these were the features that he saw as adding necessary insight to the existing phenomenological tradition. Firstly, following the first Cartesian impulses of the tradition, hermeneutic philosophy shifts epistemology away from investigation into our empirical access to an external reality, towards analysis of the immanent fundamental structures of experience—yielding a ‘transcendental’ rather than a ‘metaphysical’ idealism.18 This is achieved by ‘bracketing all positing of being and investigating the subjective modes of givenness… to make intelligible all objectivity, all being-sense’.19 The ‘nature of things’ is thus redefined, and the distinction between inner and outer, subjective and objective, real and ideal realities is reconfigured. Gadamer repeatedly asserts that Phenomenology goes beyond the metaphysics of either realism or idealism, but establishes a new paradigm. Secondly, Gadamer's ‘transcendental’ analysis reveals that it is a universal feature of meaning that it is always: i. relational within an interdependent web of ideas; ii. dynamic since it involves a constant reinterpretative hermeneutic ‘spiral’; and iii. value-bearing, since it is always inflected with values that shape our world-experience.20 The dynamism arises because individual consciousness is a self-reflexive function of reality that constantly reflects itself, and channels its own content into new phenomena. With these features as basic characteristics of reality, ‘Hermeneutics makes a universality claim’ leading to a ‘strong, somewhat metaphysical’ conclusion.21 These are not novel to hermeneutics, as the method of Truth and Method aims to show with its constant critique and recuperation of past thinkers. For Gadamer, at least, this vision is the culmination of diverse traditions using phenomenological reflection of one kind or another. Indeed, the relational dynamic structure revealed in transcendental analysis pervades concepts, self, language, community, and global history itself, providing a vision of the world as an ever-expanding web of meanings and cultures—an idea to which we will return in the second section. But one of the aspects of this picture that had been most thoroughly obscured in Husserl's thought was the emphasis on the present integral reality of values. One of the distinctive goals of Phenomenology that was gradually obscured by its epistemological aspirations vis à vis ‘real objects’, was its ethical aim to re-establish value as a legitimate phenomenon. For some phenomenologists, value—in the form of emotions, beauty, experience, or the sacred—was a content of experience and thus of the world, in its own right. It was largely for this reason that Gadamer saw Max Scheler and his focus on emotions and love22 as an essential complement to the work of Husserl. Scheler was hugely influential in his time; he saw emotions as empirical data equal to sensory perceptions or a priori cognitions, and held that they revealed real ‘value-entities’ (Wertsein) present in Being. Scheler was eager to engage with religion, and referred to Rudolf Otto in his work (although he himself seems to have shifted toward pantheistic inclinations over time).23 He argued against the mindset of capitalism, technological attitudes to nature, and warned about the dangers of dictatorship; his work would eventually be suppressed by the National Socialists. All of this made him a hero to many young philosophers. But as Husserl ascended, and Scheler after his death at 53 became largely forgotten, Phenomenology came to see itself more as a science of consciousness and being than of emotion and value. It was partly to recoup this lost attention to value and reassert its ontological and epistemological legitimacy that Gadamer paid such attention to aesthetics at the outset of Truth and Method. Art provided an insight into the purely speculative participatory phenomena, but emotional genres like tragedy also let us see how values flow through those phenomena. In tragedy we see not subjective states but real forces, ‘events that overwhelm man and sweep him away’ and bring him into a state of ‘ekstasis’ that has real ontological force.24 Thus, when Gadamer referred to himself as a phenomenologist aiming ‘above all to get at the Sache selbst [thing itself] and to get back to the lifeworld’,25 he was trying to make contact with the perceived world in all its dimensions, taking into account affects as well as percepts. The move beyond an ontological separation of subject and object, idealism and realism,26 thus produced an ‘eidetic ontology’ that Roman Ingarden also hinted at in his emphasis on the purely intentional realm of literary objects.27 Rather than a reduction, Gadamer saw the method as an enrichment that enabled its practitioners to ‘disclose the whole wealth of the self-given phenomena’.28 This accorded with the needs of the time. As Gadamer later remembered it, young scholars in that period wanted from Phenomenology ‘a worldview’ and a ‘means of salvation… for the sickness and crisis of the time’.29 Husserl ‘misjudged the original intentions of his follower of that time’,30 whereas Scheler's philosophical anthropology was passionately concerned with ‘problems of the individual, society, the state, and religion’31 and aligned more closely with Kierkegaard's insight into the urgent, immediate particularity of life-as-experienced, Barth's emphasis on our ever-vulnerable relation to others (via experiences of the ‘Thou’), and Jasper's focus on ‘boundary situations’ in which we must make extreme choices without any ‘certain knowledge provided by science’ to form commitments with ‘the seriousness of existentially binding truth’.32 Heidegger incorporated all of this in Being and Time using a style deceptively similar to Husserl, but an approach that—for Gadamer—descended from ‘the great moralists in the style of Montaigne, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche’.33 It sustained hints of what Sikka34 has called a kind of ‘moral realism’: in this form of Phenomenology, fact and value were united as features embedded in reality as it presents itself to us. This project of mapping value's presentation within the eidetic reality of experience was demonstrably influential on some of the fathers of modern phenomenology of religion. Henri Corbin, who had been an early translator of Heidegger, interpreted Sufi ecstasies not as subjective affects but as phenomena that were real from a phenomenological perspective.35 He wrote that such experiences of radical value ‘have the quality of piercing even the granite of doubt, of paralyzing the “agnostic reflex”, in the sense that they break the reciprocal isolation of the consciousness and its object, of thought and being; phenomenology is now an ontology.’36 So too, Mircea Eliade spoke of treating religious experiences ‘on their own plane of reference’, and developed this into a study of the specifically religious form of value in The Sacred and the Profane. For Eliade (drawing on Raffaele Pettazoni for support) this would be a central step on the way to a hermeneutic phenomenology of religion in which ‘religious meanings must always be regarded as forming part of the history of the human spirit.’ Indeed, he continued, ‘more than any other humanistic discipline (i.e. psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc.), history of religions can open the way to a philosophical anthropology. For the sacred is a universal dimension’.37 We can see here the idea that a phenomenologist's special ability to identify and explore experiences of value in the plenitude of their own being is central to his or her unique insight. …the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole. …the actual realisation of this abstract whole is only found when those previous shapes and forms, which are now reduced to ideal moments of the whole, are developed anew again, but developed and shaped within this new medium, and with the meaning they have thereby acquired. The presence of God consists precisely in life itself, in this ‘communal sense’ that distinguishes all living things from dead—it is no accident that he [Oetinger] mentions the polyp and the starfish which, though cut into small pieces, regenerate themselves and form new individuals. In man the same divine power operates in the form of the instinct and inner stimulation to discover the traces of God and to recognise what has the greatest connection with human happiness and life.43 What is alive preserves itself by drawing into itself everything that is outside it. Everything that is alive nourishes itself on what is alien to it. The fundamental fact of being alive is assimilation… the consciousness of something alien, still, as ‘the feeling of life,’ […] is the first truth of self-consciousness.46 In this idea, Gadamer felt Yorck's view to be ‘superior’ to Dilthey and Husserl.47 It was premised on Phenomenology's core insight that ontology should not counterpose itself to consciousness, but rather overcome the false dichotomy of subjective and objective, eidetic and concrete, or material and emergent realities. But it took one beyond an assurance of knowledge as static truth securely possessed, to a revelation of knowledge as dynamic life in creative development. We are no longer alone in our small, fragmented, rich, and multifarious portion of the earth. We become involved in an event and are threatened by an event, which is not limited to our narrow homeland… For the first time an arsenal of weapons has been created, whose use does not guarantee victory, but would rather result only in the collective suicide of human civilisation. And perhaps even more serious—for as far as I know, no one knows how to master this crisis—the ecological crisis, the exhaustion, destruction, and desolation of the natural basis of our home, the earth… we are slowly approaching, in the West and the East, the border zone of life and survival.48 Here, modernity is characterised by global-scale threats that unite all people into a collective awareness. Like Heidegger and others before him, Gadamer tended to see these problems as a product of the wrong kind of over-objectifying, world-alienating thinking. In writing about ‘the task of hermeneutics as philosophy’, he declared ‘there cannot be uncertainty anymore that our science-based civilization, with its unbelievable capacity to alter nature for our own use, life, and survival, has also caused a huge worldwide problem’.49 Worse, it seemed that the problematic heritage of western thinking was becoming standardised globally. By 1960 the world had been freed from many structures of explicit colonialism (in India, South-East Asia and the Middle East, for instance). But Gadamer understood that the cultural globalisation happening through media and the standardisation of educational and political systems was in danger of perpetuating the asymmetry of colonial rule rather than allowing for equal engagement between cultures.50 He felt it was philosophy's job to lead the way by encouraging balanced dialogue in pursuit of a pluralist ‘globalism’ rather than asymmetrical ‘globalisation’. …there is a fact worth considering: whole blocks of humanity that are quite different from each other in terms of cult, religion, and honoring their ancestors—in short, that have different collective ways of living together in conformity with their social rules—these diverse cultures are now being confronted by the resplendent methodological mastery represented by science. Indeed, we can measure our fate by how, either harmonizing or clashing, the fusing of cultures will take place, perhaps even shaping our own future.51 We do not require a naïve recognition in which our own world is merely reproduced for us in a timelessly valid form. On the contrary, we are self-consciously aware of both our own great historical tradition as a whole, and in their otherness, even the forms and traditions of quite different cultural worlds that have not fundamentally affected Western history. And we can thereby appropriate them for ourselves.52 … my own deepest hope, or perhaps should I say, dream: that from the shared inheritance which is gradually being built up for us from all the different human cultures across the globe we might eventually learn how to recognise our needs and address our difficulties through becoming explicitly conscious of them.53 The otherness of the neighbour is not only the otherness to be shyly avoided. It is also the inviting otherness which contributes to the encountering of one's own self. We are all others and we are all our own selves… the coexistence of different cultures and languages, religions and confessions supports us. We all, as humans and as peoples and as nations, break the laws of such co-existence infinitely often, and yet in actual life, with the goodwill of partners, something common is always rebuilt. In general this appears to me to be the same task everywhere. And it appears to me that here, the diversity of languages, this neighbourhood of the other in a narrow space, and the equality of the other in an even narrower space, are a true training ground.55 The optimism in this statement runs contrary to the ‘clash of civilisations’ model of global modernity that became popular a decade later; Walhof has called it a politics of solidarity.56 To recognize one's own in the alien, to become at home in it, is the basic movement of spirit, whose being consists only in returning to itself from what is other. Hence all theoretical Bildung, even acquiring foreign languages and conceptual worlds, is merely the continuation of a process of Bildung that begins much earlier.60 The continuity between this account of development and his ontology is clear; cultural encounter is a heightened form of the essential relational, dynamic, developmental nature of Being itself. Thus it is a form of eudaimonian flourishing that starts in education (see The German University and German Politics [1992], and The Idea of the University [1992]) and continues in travel, cultural exchange, and relocation. He described the rise of the seminar as a more egalitarian, interactive, and creative forum than the pedagogical hierarchy of lectures, and he offered this as a template for society more broadly: such communities represent ‘a living universe… [precursor] of the grand universe of humanity, of all human beings, who must learn to create with one another new solidarities’.61 The pre-war communities of his youth that surrounded the poet Stefan George were another model for the co-flourishing of spirit. A modernist poet and hero of German liberal youth for disdaining National Socialism, George championed a kind of collective optimism, writing that: ‘I and You, Here and There, Once and Now endure next to each other and become one and the same’.62 For Gadamer, this ‘evoke[s] in us the “you are that”’63—likely a reference to the Vedāntic idea of unity that had become popular in Germany not least through the influence of writers like Hermann Hesse. These aspects of Gadamer's thought have been described not only as an ‘ethics of solidarity’ but also an injection of humanism to the German phenomenological tradition (Grondin held that ‘Gadamer is humanist and Heidegger is not’). It is dynamic and relational in that it advocates ‘a transition from monological to dialogical self’64 based on a ‘participatory ontology’,65 and this in turn has led to Gadamer's thought being applied to areas such as comparative religion and philosophy.66 We can take three key lessons from this. The first is that value, including the special cases of ultimate value that we see in religions, can be treated by phenomenological method as a component of the real world. Far from being a merely ‘subjective’ phenomenon, or the somatic side-effect of the bodily mechanism, it is one of the legitimate entities of which the world consists. Ontology and ethics, fact and value, combine within Phenomenology's eidetic purview, and it is its job to study both. The second is that culture should be taken as an extension of consciousness, and incorporated into Phenomenology's remit as a proper object of study. The third is that this approach has implications beyond purely descriptive phenomenology as it leads to potentially transformative applications based on a eudaimonian ethics: widened understanding develops us and amplifies reality itself. If Phenomenology tells us about universal structures of experience, and the phenomenology of cultures tells us about emergent forms of communal consciousness, then comparative phenomenology does the same on a global scale. The study of global cultures and religions is thus not a distraction from the true tradition, but part of the natural destiny of Phenomenology.