The COVID-19 Pandemic - a saturated phenomenon: When the horizon of meaning collapses

I find it fascinating to follow the manifold, often hectic attempts at understanding and categorizing the Covid-19 pandemic and, if not getting a hold on things, at least adapting quickly to this situation. I spent the last weekend taking a step back – and asking myself, from a philosophical perspective: “What is happening out there?”.

The phenomenological perspective

How do we perceive and understand the world? Phenomenology puts the individual in the center, with his/her perception of things and experiences in the real world – the way these “phenomena” appear to his/her consciousness. The sensual, unmediated, conscious perception of phenomena is called intuition, or what we call our “gut feeling”. We know, we understand something directly without analytic reasoning.  

Our consciousness is always directed towards something.

We are always aware about something but also about “something as something”.

This intentionality of our consciousness provides us with meaningful content about what we perceive, and also appropriate enabling conditions. We interpret the world based on our previous experiences which also determine their possible manifestations in the future. We act within this horizon of meaning. 

In our everyday life, this process happens without significant disruptions. We perceive things around us, we understand their meaning, and we have an idea as to what we can do with these objects. For example, we perceive a chair; we have an understanding of its size and material, and we know that we can sit down on it. We take care quite naturally, without a need of pondering on it, of our psychological and physical wellbeing; and we understand private and business situations and contexts without any challenges – just because we know what the world is like. 

The French philosopher Jean Luc Marion calls them ?poor phenomena”: these events, these phenomena are poor in intuition (unmediated sensual experience) and rich in intention (knowledge about things). Within our well-known horizon of meaning, we master and control these events.

Covid-19: when the horizon of meaning collapses

This horizon of meaning collapses in times like our present crisis. The experience of COVID-19 disrupts all categories of terminological and intellectual categories and reaches beyond our ability to comprehend. Marion calls phenomena which lead to such a flooding of the individual “saturated phenomena” – caused by an “uncontrollable excess of intuition over intention”. A saturated phenomenon eludes any past experience. With a saturated phenomenon we experience something that goes beyond our control and mastery.

The excess of affections disrupts the habitual horizon of meaning in the world as we know it.

An event such as the one we are experiencing for the first time exceeds our mechanisms of intentionality and functioning properly.

Saturated phenomena lead to a shift in the relationship between the world and the cogitating individual. It is no longer us who constitute the phenomenon or event through our consciousness and define its meaning; COVID-19 is happening to – or with – us, and we cannot take a decision for or against it; it befalls us with overwhelming unwelcome feelings and with the concomitant disruption of our abilities to perceive and act.

The potentialities of experiencing the world around us and engaging in it no longer present themselves to us – at least not in the way we know them, by transforming “I can” and “I do” into “I cannot” and “I don’t”. 

How we react to the loss of control

The loss of control unsettles us in an existential way – at a degree which varies by individual. This is how Jule Specht, Professor of Psychology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, responds to the question of how individuals will react to drastic changes in their lives: 

“Typically, people are happier in their lives who have the feeling that they have their lives under control – and that they are not at the mercy of luck or ill fate, coincidence, or powerful other individuals. In a study, we were able to show that in disruptive, negative situations beyond their control, this may turn around completely: here, those individuals will feel better who had been living with a low level of feeling of being in control before. In this pandemic, people who used to feel in control and not dependent on external circumstances will find it harder to cope”. 

Creating new horizons of meaning

We all try to understand, and develop coping strategies. This includes the requirement to develop quickly new routines. Our embracement of digital methods of communication is leapfrogging. GROW2GLOW coach Susan Bregenzer invites us to regard the Coronavirus not merely as a threat but also as an opportunity for a transformation of mankind. Some of us may hope to finally find acceptance for what has been a key concern to them for a while: “We need an unconditional basic income“. And some of us are being refocused to core questions of our lives, as my friend Zeynep-Eileen Cakmur lists in her article.

I marvel at how fast analysts are already now able to draw conclusions from the Corona virus crisis and to make projections for the time after the pandemic. Matthias Horx is a favorite source of future scenarios. I’ll confess: I am not yet in a position to cope with this onslaught of feelings. 

The Corona virus will change the lives of us all. We are all going through an experience of a loss of autonomy, of the disruption and the transformation of the habitual meaning patterns of our worlds and our “selves”.

I wish to all of us, first and foremost, that we survive the pandemic – and that we will be granted the opportunity to meet our transformed selves. 

“The line where the sky meets the sea, it calls me! And no one knows how far it goes! If the wind in my sail on the sea stays behind me, one day I'll know!” Moana, Princess of Motunui