The Factors in the New Alliance Between Man and the World

Abstract

Phenomenology and poet’s thought meet once again on the subject of the world. One of the great teachings of phenomenology is that the world in which we passively live is a hardened, petrified world. In our natural abandon, we do not understand that the natural milieu is only a series of sedimentations of our past experiences, of ideas accepted by chance, of secondary attitudes. In order to apperceive it, the distance that the phenomenological attitude gives is first necessary; we can thus rediscover beings and objects, their relationships and their developments, stripped of their vital force. Constitutive phenomenology was then needed to penetrate to the roots that these elements formerly had in our consciousness, and which at present are atrophied, in such a way that the world is no longer anything, even in fact, but a dead world which persists as an immutable shell. The same procedure is followed by the creator: to the pure mind, the world shows itself to be empty of vital savor and beings and objects appear not as existing but as possible. Pure consciousness “does not know that it was born or that it will perish,” it exalts in the lucidity of its presence to itself, believes itself “quite easily... exempt from loss or change.”⁵⁵