Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Husserl’s
Coal-Fired Phenomenology
Energy and
Environment in an Age of Whole-House
Heating and Air-Conditioning
Dennis E. Skocz
Skocz received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Duquesne University. He uses phenomenology to pursue thematic interests in media, environment, and, most recently, economics. He has published chapters in Heidegger and the Earth, L. McWhorter & G. Stenstad, eds. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2009); and Symbolic Landscapes, G. Backhuas & J. Murungi, eds. (NY: Springer-Verlay, 2008). His articles appear in Analecta Husserliana and other philosophical journals. Skocz was President of the Society for Phenomenology and Media from 2006–2009 and is a member of the Husserl and Heidegger Circles. A retired career diplomat, he now works as a consultant in strategic planning and professional development. skocz@verizon.net. © 2010 Dennis E. Skocz.
It is easy to imagine phenomenology founder Edmund Husserl sitting at his desk in his study on a winter’s day, toasty warm and comfortable from the heat of a porcelain stove in a corner of the room, a stove fired by coal. Husserl makes it possible for readers to imagine him in this setting by what he writes in Ideas II. The imagery emerges from the text of Section 50: “The person as the center of a surrounding world” [1].
And what a vivid image of egoic-bodily centrality it is! This is not the ego-center from which rays of consciousness radiate to illuminate the immediate landscape of the self’s emplacement. Nor is it the zero-point of consciousness “holding sway” though its body over its environs, an ego that we meet in the Cartesian Meditations. This ego-body—just as central as the others—is absorbed in its thought, passive and comfortable, absorbing the warmth emitted by the coal in the stove. The warmth is a function of the heat released by coal that has been set on fire, a heat that radiates from the coal and suffuses the room.
In this reflective scenario, the coal enjoys its own centrality in the room and in relation to the warm and reflective ego [p. 197]. Between them, the coal and the ego, sender and receiver, the object and the subject serve to define the phenomenon addressed in the scenario; they describe the beginning and end of the event and experience that “fires” Husserl’s reflection and fuels the reflection ventured here.
This reflection alters the scenario in keeping with our contemporary life-situation in a post-industrial world. It endeavors to anticipate and ponder the consequences of changing the scenario even as the underlying phenomenological structures that govern our experience of near and distant worlds continue to hold sway.
The reflection ventured here draws implications from distinctions implicit or operative in Husserl’s account, namely between natural and built environments, causal and intentional linkages, and the relationship of Welt and Umwelt. Specifically, the reflection takes the following steps:
1. A reprise of Husserl’s account of the Umwelt via his analysis of “being-at-home” in a room heated with coal.
2. An imaginative variation of that Umwelt scenario in which key phenomenological structures illuminated in Husserl’s account are not in play. The variation will envision a surrounding world—a climate-controlled environment—not unlike that created by domestic technology in use throughout much of the developed world.
3. Phenomenological speculation about the implications for the broader natural environment of lives lived in a surrounding world made increasingly hermetic.
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Between the coal and the person it warms is a heated room, a room suffused with heat. One could begin to unfold the brief narrative of hot coal and warmed thinker with the coal. Ignited, it burns; burning, it emits heat throughout the room; with the spread of the heat, the thinker comes to feel warm. Herewith, an objective, cause-effect sequence, starting with the first cause and ending with its most remote effect.
Alternatively, one might begin at the end: I feel warm; I relate my warmth to the heat of the room; the heat is perceived to radiate from the coal in the stove. With the latter, a subjective sequence, starting with what one feels and regressing back to the perceived cause of that feeling.
From object to subject or from subject to object, the internal logic of the phenomenon, differently regarded, prevails. But the brief schematization given here oversimplifies. It misses the nuance and subtlety of the Husserlian account. I suggest that one might usefully begin with the heated room. It is after all the site of the phenomenon in question and the setting of the scenario. More importantly, in the context of Ideas II, it is an Umwelt, a surrounding world or environment, and that is the explicit object of investigation in Section 50.
The environment of the room lies between the coal and its warm occupant. It is “the between” that merits the most careful attention because this “between,” the surrounding world, the world that surrounds the ego is not just an adventitious concomitant of the ego. The ego is inseparably related to the surrounding world. The ego is as the subject of the surrounding world [p. 195, 6-7].
With this understanding of surrounding world, what may one say of the room, the environing world in question? Obviously, this environment is heated. As a surrounding world, its being heated is known in and through the experience of warmth, my warmth. The surrounding world is not a world in itself but rather a world as given for me in experience [p. 196, 3-9]. The analysis might end in the subjective experience of warmth, but warmth is not defined by some kind of subjective interiority. My warmth is a function of my position in the room [p. 197, 26-27]. It rises or falls in relation to my proximity to the coal, which I identify as the source of heat in the room, the heat that I experience as warmth.
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In moving toward and away from the hot coal, several distinctions and relationships come into play. Heat and warmth are correlative but not identical. If my experience of warmth were radically subjective and interior, it would not vary with my position in the room.
There is more. The heat (experienced as warmth) appears to emanate from the coal [p. 197, 22-24], and experience, aided by memory, confirms that the heat is an attribute of the burning coal [p. 197, 20-22], so that now the heat that manifests as warmth to a subject comes to be understood as a property of an object.
Husserl is quite clear here. The heat in the room is an objective property of the coal and it issues from the coal: Both that objective property (heat) and its propagation through the room are experienced phenomenon [p. 197, 22-24]. Thus, it is both an objective property of the coal and an experienced phenomenon that, when burning, coal is a cause of heat—and conversely, that heat is an effect of the burning coal. The causal connection between firing the coal and releasing its heat is also experienced [p. 197, 27-29] and founds the objective determination “combustible” [p. 197, 29-31] that, in the end and without reflection, gives itself immediately to experience as a property of the coal.
Combustibility, however, is both a founded and founding determination. By becoming linked to heat and warmth and, in turn, comfort, the combustible (coal) acquires value or utility to us, i.e., a source of heat that gives itself as good, pleasant, comfortable [p. 197, 29-35]. Value, like other determinations, is an attribute of the object (coal) but has its experiential basis in the subject’s value perception—“I apprehend it [the coal] from this point of view [i.e., that of value or utility]: I ‘can use it for that,’ it is useful to me for that” [p. 197, 35-36]. Well outside the immediate environment of the room, the value of the coal (as a utility to chilled thinkers seeking warmth) acquires commodity value in trade and commerce [p. 197, 35-198, 2]. Thus, the founded use-value of the coal serves to found the exchange-value it will have in the market for combustibles.
Within the short space of his coal-fired phenomenology, Husserl elides from founding to founded experiences and objects, and he rises from the base experience of warmth and comfort to the threshold of the greater social-world horizon of the market [p. 198, 3-8]. Back and forth, up and down, following the intentional references implicit in phenomena to trace the genesis of structures like c/ause and utility—with the worlds of science and commerce in the offing—Husserl’s reflection moves. All the while and thereby, he roots the most distant and complex and expansive worlds in the nearest world, the immediately surrounding world that defines the self.
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Let me recount the results of this reflection as it bears on what is to come. The room-environment is warm, inviting, and comfortable. Its occupants might well enjoy their time in the room without a thought that goes beyond the comfort the heat affords. From time to time, however, they will get up from their seats to move closer and farther away from the hot coals in the stove [p. 198, 26-27].
As soon as they do, the play of founded and founding experiences begins. Occupants are reminded that their warmth is a function of the heat in the room that, in turn, is function of the coal burning in the stove. The heat in the room they had unthinkingly enjoyed as warmth, without further ado, is now understood as an effect of burning coal.
For its part, the coal is then imbued with efficacy and utility. Moreover, because the coal—as combustible and useful—is present in my immediate environment and is experienced in its combustibility and utility, occupants are left to infer that their immediate condition as warm and comfortable is not self-contained and hermetic. They see the cause of their happy state burning in a stove in a corner of the room. It is perceived as a necessary condition of their animal comfort [p. 197, 16-18].
It may even occur to them that if the fire goes out and the coal is used up or if they go so far from the burning coal as to leave the room, they will likely be left cold. The self-evidence of their predicament is entailed by the self-evident causality and utility of the coal. That the coal makes them warm is perceived as a property of the coal. That the coal is instrumental to their comfort is perceived within the ambit of the world around them, in the room.
The environment that Husserl describes is largely a built environment, yet it is one in which the natural world and its causal laws are “represented” by the coal and the effects of its burning. The coal, by virtue of its objective properties (combustibility), will produce heat in the room, an effect.
Herewith, we see a cause-effect relationship. All these physical properties—the combustibility of the coal, the heat of the room, and the cause-effect nexus itself—are all experienced. Finally, the surrounding world described by Husserl points to a bigger world outside, one in which the “use value” of the coal founds exchange value in a commodity market.
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The environment I next imagine is at once familiar and descriptive of the world that most of us for the most part inhabit, and it will be found to be quite opposite to the one described by Husserl. The room is again a study that is toasty warm and comfortable. But no coal burns in a stove in a corner of the room. The room is evenly heated. The diffusion of heat throughout the room is constant. It does not appear to emanate from one spot or several discrete openings or points of origin.
For all intents and purposes, my warmth and the heat of the room are indistinguishable. There is no perceptible source of warmth and comfort; for their part, warmth and comfort are not perceived as the effect of anything. They simply are experienced phenomena without a history or an anchor in anything outside themselves.
Obviously, my warmth does depend on the heat in the room, and the heat comes from a source (outside the room) and through conduits (all around the room). The point, however, is that neither the source of the heat nor its propagation through the room is a distinct perceived phenomenon. My situation in the room—my being-in-the-room—is holistically experienced but not objectified. It is not experienced as a discrete phenomenon or object that might itself stand in relations of causality and utility to other phenomena or objects.
So long as I experientially remain with the immediacy of my situation in the room—a room that does not itself contain the material conditions of existence as perceived phenomena—I am oblivious to the empirical or factical underpinnings of my well-being.
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This scenario is not a figment of pure fantasy. It is approximately descriptive of living conditions in dwellings throughout the developed world. Whole-house heating and air-conditioning names the domestic infrastructure that underlies the scenario. My point in turning phenomenological reflection upon the experience of warmth in the immediate environment created by whole-house systems is not to evoke nostalgia for less sophisticated systems or to make a pitch for “worry-free” life with central heating. Rather, the intent is to examine how the material conditions of domestic living and well being shape our perception of energy, the larger natural environment, and, with recursive irony, our relationship to the material conditions of our existence themselves.
A comparison of the two scenarios discloses implications for broader energy and environment issues. The occupant of Husserl’s study is recurrently, if not constantly, educated in energy-dependency. She is reminded with sensory-motor evidence that her animal well being is bound up with the consumption of energy sources. Regulating heating conditions in Husserl’s study requires deliberate first-hand intervention by the occupant.
By way of contrast, the homeostatic regulation of room climate minimizes the occupant’s involvement with ensuring her well being. In the second scenario, one may, without contradiction from any lived experience in one’s lifeworld, ignore one’s link and dependency on the natural world.
In the coal-heated room, however, one is experientially reminded of the natural and material underpinnings of our lifeworld. It is possible but arguably more difficult to ignore that life in a comfortable but coal-heated room is tied to nature and the earth. The coal is a product of the earth, a veritable piece of the earth. Its burning is a natural cause-effect process evident to us in our occupation of the room.
To be sure, the lifeworld “education” in energy and environment described here may not lead to green convictions. Coal-burning makes heat that affords warmth and gives comfort. Such a chain of reasoning and concatenation of causes and effects—experientially evident—could invest coal with a positive value that predisposes social-policy judgment in its favor, notwithstanding the environmental harms from mining, digging, and burning coal.
On the other hand, the firsthand use of coal also makes evident its downsides—smoke, soot, odor, grime, and not-so-remote damage to property and health. The occupant of a room with central heating, a controlled environment, is isolated—as a matter of lifeworld knowledge—not only from an awareness of dependency on energy but also from any firsthand experience of the harms of her energy consumption.
To be sure, firsthand experience or lifeworld awareness of nature does not necessarily translate into a green agenda or knowledge useful to environmental protection. I have argued elsewhere, with Husserlian phenomenology enlisted in support, that long-term environmental change and the operation of causes with delayed effects escape the temporal horizon of immediate experience arising in the surrounding world [2]. Global climate change, scientist and environmental thinker Jared Diamond points out, eludes close-to-the-earth local knowledge [3].
The suggestion made here is that firsthand, surrounding-world experience of the kind that Husserl’s scenario describes in experiential terms and on a microcosmic level parallels our mediated relationship to nature at a macro-cosmic level. It bears notice that Husserl’s room is not a natural environment. It is a surrounding environment in which the experience of nature is mediated through the burning of coal, through a relatively primitive technological process.
It is not likely the developed world will revert to an earlier lifestyle. Husserl’s coal-fired phenomenology points to a nexus of relationships that breaks down or gets forgotten in a post-industrial world that makes the material conditions of everyday existence remote from that very experience. If it does not describe the immediate living conditions of the developed world in the present, it nonetheless points to relationships between the domains of subjective experience, natural processes, and social structures that remain determinative for human dwelling on the earth.
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The two scenarios present two very different surrounding worlds, but both describe a relation—or perhaps in the case of the second—a non-relation to the greater world outside and beyond the room. The first suggests in microcosm the structure of our relationship to the world at large. The second covers over those structures. Energy dependence is a lived experience in the first. In the second, one could read about it in comfort but it would not present itself experientially.
Global climate awareness is also at issue between the two scenarios. In the climate-controlled environment, the micro-climate is never an issue or concern so long as the auto-regulation of room temperature and humidity functions without a hitch. The technologically mediated surrounding world not only works to alienate occupants from the climate outside the room but also suggests that climate is a human artifact, manageable and conformable to our “settings.”
To be sure, I am not imprisoned for life in arti-factual climate-controlled environments. I venture forth to experience the vagaries of weather outside. Yet, for the time that I am inside, in climate-controlled environments, I am “taught” that climate is not an issue and is controllable. The language of conditions teaching us something alluded to here is not at all remote from Husserlian notions. He might speak of expectations as meaning intentions being continuously fulfilled so as to fuse in a judgment that says “thus it is.” Stated conversely, so long as my expectations of continuous warmth (or coolness) are not disappointed, I take it for granted that the micro-climate of the room—and by extension the macro-climate of the world as such—is adjustable to my liking.
There is an element of falsification to the experience of climate generally that derives from the experience of the artificial micro-climate of the climate-controlled room. To the degree that climate manifests itself in lived experience, it is lived in the experience of weather as encompassing. Often it goes unnoticed but then can unexpectedly become intrusive, problematic, and variable.
Weather is not an object within my surrounding world but the pervasive element within which I live, move, and feel. I can only accommodate to the vagaries of weather. Because it lays siege on me and my fellow humans—attacks from all sides and does not present an object that I can grasp and dominate—it has something of the quality of destiny or fate.
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I have, in the preceding, used “weather” and “climate” interchangeably. One may object that weather is not climate. The point is well taken. The experiential or phenomenological manifestations of weather, nonetheless, do apply to climate. However remote and abstract the concept of climate and climate change is, that concept has its experiential basis in our sufferings of and dealings with weather.
Like weather, climate is encompassing, even more so. The future climate conditions that only scientific investigation and causal method can predict are conditions that will be experienced as weather. With appropriate adjustments in temporal and spatial scale, weather experience fills in with sensible content the “big picture” effects of climate change. So when the climate-controlled micro-environment alienates us from weather conditions, it diminishes our awareness of climate.
The micro-climate can falsify our experience of climate because it presents itself ambiguously. Inside the room, the controlled climate is the element within which I move. It has the property of climate or weather—when its weather/climate “is well-behaved”—as the encompassing and unnoticed. If some small variation in room conditions arises to call some attention to it, then through the mediation of thermostatic regulation, I can adjust it (room climate) to me and my specifications.
Thus, the micro-climate manifests both as the encompassing element within which I move, act, and feel and the “encompassed” and controlled object of my actions. As “the element,” it is largely unnoticed and unobtrusive, unproblematic. Its manipulation via the thermostat cancels that feature of the encompassing weather or climate that presents itself as beyond control. The climate-controlled habitat then supports and reinforces a habitus of desensitization to climate and climate change and a sense that climate is easily within the control of technology.
Revisiting Husserl’s room might help to make points about climate awareness. In the Husserl scenario or the micro-environment he describes, the room-climate is an encompassing element but one that is by no means uniform in our experience. Adjusting it to our needs is an elusive goal, and strategies for dealing with the vagaries and variations of the micro-climate include moving about and adjusting my behavior and location to conditions in the room rather than trusting to a pre-existing technology to ensure that every position in the room is equally suitable for my comfort.
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The speculations ventured here are not predictions of what might happen regarding energy availability or climate change. The speculations are phenomenologically inspired and guided. This is to say that they deal with awareness and the lack of awareness of what lies in our surrounding world and the greater world beyond.
Awareness, of course, can lead to needed action and lack of awareness to unhappy surprises. The reflections ventured here suggest that the built-configuration of the immediate lifeworld can bode ill for an awareness of emergent difficulties, reinforcing habits of mind that foster an unawareness of problems or a false sense of control over the material conditions of our existence.
A reflection that exposes the structures of lived-experience that foster indifference and false security is—need one say it?—the first step to addressing issues that are “there” but “below the radar.” Perhaps in the style of the analysis undertaken here, one can see a role for phenomenology in environmental consciousness-raising. Or perhaps, the outcome is more modest: an explanation of how we come by our unawareness and indifference.
Endnotes
1. Husserl, E., Ideals Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to
a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, R. Rojcewicz & A.
Schuwer, trans. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 194-99. References in the
text are to page numbers of this edition, followed by the line
numbers over which the text runs.
2. Skocz, D., “Husserlian Variations of Nature, Environment, and Earth: Toward a ‘Green’ Phenomenology,” Phenomenology 2005, Selected Essay from North America, Part 2, L. Embree & T. Nenon, eds., Zeta Books, 2007
3. Diamond, J., Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (NY: Norton, 1999).