More recently, materialist approaches have accused phenomenology of being a subject-centred approach that makes the existence and validity of reality dependent on a recognising subject. Furthermore, this primacy of the subject leads to power relations that do not recognise the plurality of reality and do not allow access to the non-human. As an alternative, realists propose new ontologies (Harmans, Meillassoux), while posthumanists develop systems or networks that emerge through the equal action of de-subjectivised subjects and subjectivised animals, plants and objects. Thus, humans become hybrids (Latour) and cyborgs (Haraway), animals and plants become subjects (Braidotti), and objects and networks become agents (Latour, Bennett).
In my talk I would like to show that phenomenology, based on the concept of the world, overcomes dualistic and subject-centred ways of thinking and thus opens up a plural perspective on the non-human and on the interaction between humans and the non-human. After Heidegger’s first phase of conceptualising the world as existential, phenomenology establishes the world as a given horizon of experience. The world is no longer conceived on the basis of human being, but human being on the basis of the world. This reversal of the relationship between human being and the world becomes very clear in the development of phenomenology: Heidegger’s later ‘worlding world’, Fink’s cosmological difference, Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology and, not least, Tengely’s metaphysics are different declinations of this primacy of the world over human beings. It is precisely this primacy of the world that makes it possible to analyse a complex reality consisting of the interweaving of artefacts, nature and human being. I will show the extent to which this is concretised by drawing on Heidegger’s late philosophy and Fink’s cosmological difference.