1 July 2022

Abstract

What does it mean to be in public, to appear and to act? The existential significance of public spaces and encounters has become clear to us in the last two years of the pandemic, especially through withdrawal experiences. But even in the years before, classical concepts of the public sphere and privacy had been put to the test theoretically and practically, insofar as they rearrange and hybridize themselves through advancing technologization and economization. All these are contemporary experiences and moments of crisis of the public sphere – a crisis that requires a phenomenological reflection in the Husserl sense, on primordial foundation, processes of meaning and types of experience of the public.

In the Husserl Lecture, basic lines of a "phenomenology of the public" are developed in recourse to the rich phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition. It is conceived as a methodically reflected analysis of structures of experience, existence, and appearance, as well as the constitution of reality. In addition to the essential characteristics of the commonality and visibility of what appears in public space, anonymity and exposure, accessibility and exclusion, participation and distance, as well as modes of dispute and judgment as experiential and social types of the public are in question. In this way, beyond mere psychological state shots, it is possible to open up how worlds, public, private and above all hybrid worlds constitute, er- and are lived, how ambivalences with regard to the appearance of the world, self and others emerge and how successful and failing experiences of the public can come about as a result.

Link to the video on Youtube.