From experience to gift. Reflections on life as disclosed to consciousness. Part 1

Abstract

In the following meditation I investigate how life is disclosed to human consciousness. I use phenomenology to avoid reducing life to the natural sphere has to avoid the common mistake of objectifying it, that is, of taking life as something, as a property of being. A more justified phenomenological approach that remains open to the supernatural character of life would focus rather on how life is given to consciousness. The starting point for my analysis is the observation that before life is thematically given as such it is somehow always already disclosed in any conscious experience. Life gives itself in a tacit and discreet way. I offer an itinerary: from the point of a deepened understanding of the silent disclosure of life, towards a reflected recognition of life as divine gift. Before any philosophical investigation begins, the first impediment itself present in the drama of life that one must overcome is evil. The phenomenon of life is overshadowed by evil and its meaning is fragmented. Life remains unperceived in those experiences that are not thematically concerned with life as such. It is an explicitly phenomenological task to discover those formal aspects that reveal the nature of life in all conscious events prior to any ‘experience’ in the full sense. Investigating the process of transforming a ‘conscious flux’ as an immediate and yet unreflected experience to a reflected one with an already clarified specific meaning is indispensable to see how life that is originally given remains unnoticed until it is manifested in experiences through which it is thematically given. I shall also investigate the different modes of reduction of the originally given life to experience. In my conclusion I argue that despite the general fragmentation life presents itself to consciousness there is a profound unity of ‘vital­‑experiences’: they all refer to the same ultimate origin, i.e. the self­‑disclosure of life as such.