The notion of world and the description of human being as openness-to-the-world have a pivotal role in the phenomenological tradition. Albeit from different perspectives, phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, Fink, Patočka etc. have focused on the structure of the world-totality and the way we experience it, by showing that the description of phenomena cannot fail to consider the whole horizon of pre-givenness in which they manifest themselves.
Yet, such a phenomenological focus poses new challenges nowadays, inasmuch as the actual environmental crisis evidently shows that our relation to the world and its balance got strained, thus requesting new reflections on the origin of this relation and its axiological implications. In particular, the question about the inherent value that we recognise to the natural world requires special attention, as the failure to consider this kind of value is one of the main conditions of the ecological crisis and our difficulty overcoming it. In this regard, phenomenology comes to intersect the environmental ethics debate and its attempt to justify the possibility of a non-anthropocentric and non-instrumental way of valuing the natural world.
Based on these premises, my paper aims at showing that the attention to the whole world’s value already emerges from the phenomenological analyses of Eugen Fink and—first of all—Max Scheler, whose Sympathiebuch (in particular the second edition published in 1923) presents notions such as “cosmic unipathy” and “vital value”. The phenomenological tradition, while describing our axiological experience of the world, is thus confirmed to be a fruitful point of reference for both environmental ethics and any contemporary reflection on how to rethink our relation to the non-human environment.