Abstract
This article extends Aron Gurwitsch’s (1964) central insight about the field of consciousness—that it is always organized in a theme, thematic field, margin pattern—to the human capacity for reverence. It offers an original phenomenology of reverent awe, inspired by Gurwitsch’s work, as an articulation of reverential index and reverential attitude. According to Paul Woodruff (2014) in Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, reverence names those times when we become aware of something larger than human and simultaneously our human limitations. By bridging the concepts of reverence from Woodruff and relevancy from Gurwitsch, this study shows that in reverent awe the emphasis in consciousness shifts to the edge of relevancy, the zones farthest removed from the theme, as the “indefinite continuation of context,” “order of existence,” or what Gurwitsch also calls an “inarticulate mass”. Reverent awe is clarified phenomenologically as an emphasis in consciousness between the theme and the order of existence as indefinite continuation of thematic context, maintaining a specific relevancy-principle (a Gestalt-connection) between the theme and the order of existence. In a reverential attitude with a reverential index we become aware more immediately of an order of existence and we become aware of our place in the order of existence.
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Notes
Some scholars have discussed awe in the work of these two phenomenological-existentialists: for example, using Heidegger’s ideas of transcendence of the world (Rubenstein, 2010); comparing Heidegger’s and Sartre’s notions of contingency (Anderson, 1977); and articulating Sartre’s idea of being-in-itself (Arvidson 2019).
“Object, here meant in an all-inclusive sense, comprises not only material things perceived, as well as remembered or imagined, but also mathematical relations, musical compositions, and theoretical implications” (Gurwitsch, 1964: 4).
As should be clear, I do not understand Gurwitsch’s use of “inarticulate mass” as constrained only to some physical mass or resistant massiveness, in the way that Sartre often seems to mean Being-in-itself (l’être-en-soi), as an immense Cartesian plenum out of which consciousness creates meaning through negation.
I am using “transcendent” in a slightly different way than Woodruff who says “By ‘transcendent’ I mean completely independent of the world as we experience it, otherworldly” (Woodruff, 2014: 276n). He has in mind the case of someone experiencing reverent awe for a physical object, such as a majestic tree. For Woodruff, the tree is not transcendent while what the tree might represent (e.g., God or majestic Nature) is transcendent or “otherworldly”. In Gurwitsch’s ontology, if the inarticulate mass or indefinite continuation of context can become an object of reverent awe, it is not completely independent of the world as we experience it. In encountering an inarticulate mass or indefinite continuation of context in reverent awe, we discover it cannot be taken as a whole but not necessarily that it points beyond itself to some divine being or to a rational explanation yet unknown.
Kant is mentioned only in passing by Woodruff (2014: 56) in the context of contrasting virtue ethics (that reverence belongs to) and modern rule-oriented morals or duty ethics.
On Gurwitsch’s ontology and these three realities as orders of existence (stream of consciousness, body, perceptual world) see Embree (1985: xxvii-xxxvi).
Hegel (1969: 127) writes, “Limit is the mediation through which something and other each as well is, as is not. . . It is in accordance with this difference of something from its limit that the line appears as line only outside its limit, the point; the plane as plane outside the line; the solid as solid only outside its limiting surface”.
The transformation of attention Gurwitsch (1966: 243–248) calls “synthesis” might apply to awe. But I would reserve that modification for more ecstatic or mystical experiences than I understand reverent awe to be (cf. Keltner & Haidt, 2003). See Day and Schmetkamp (2022) for an application of Gurwitsch’s attentional transformations to psychedelic experience.
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I thank two anonymous referees of this journal for their helpful comments on an earlier version.
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Arvidson, P.S. Reverent Awe and the Field of Consciousness. Hum Stud 45, 397–416 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-022-09642-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-022-09642-6