Methodical precedence of intertwining

an introduction to a transitive-topological phenomenology

Martin Nitsche

The book is a research publication in phenomenology for a wider interdisciplinary (philosophy, psychology, environmental studies, political science, geography, aesthetics) interested audience. It offers a fresh conception of phenomenological philosophy by interconnecting topological approaches of late Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty with transitive thinking that can be found in Husserlian, Jamesian, Schützean, and Gurwitschian notion of the stream of consciousness. To clarify the linkage between a stream and an environment, the book also employs methods used in theoretical geography (Edward Soja’s trialectics). Main philosophical problems solved by the book are related to the “intertwining”. By this notion phenomenology understands relations between human subject and her environment, including not only other people, animals, plants, things, but also the environment itself. These relations are non-causal and non-direct, usually expressed in a feeling that I am connected not only to with what I immediately interact, but also to a broader situation. In this way humans e.g. feel responsible for people on the other side of the world whom they have never seen. The intertwining is hardly to be captured philosophically, because such attempts may easily lead to a superficiality. A key methodological task of this book is therefore to distinguish a vulgar feeling that “everything is interconnected” from a methodically serious phenomenological description.