EXPERIENCE AS AN EVENT:

Edmund Husserl, Bernhard Waldenfels and Jean-Luc Marion in perspective

Abstract

This article explores the phenomenological approaches of Edmund Husserl, Bernhard Waldenfels and Jean-Luc Marion in relation to the concepts of experience and event. Phenomenology seeks to describe experience as a "self-given" phenomenon. Husserl proposes a radical investigation of experience, emphasizing the return to intentional experience as the basis for absolute knowledge. He highlights the irreducibility of experience to its causes and parts, especially with the description of the stranger's experience. Waldenfels focuses on the uniqueness of events and the strangeness inherent in experience, challenging conventional conceptions of normality and order. His phenomenology of the foreign explores how normality can obscure the uniqueness of events, leading to the tendency to equate the non-equal with the same. Finally, Marion approaches the event as a given phenomenon that reveals itself without a prior cause, giving itself to itself and exceeding our constitutive capacities. He emphasizes the singularity and unpredictability of the event, concluding that it has no defined reason and is excessively painful, deeply impacting our experience. Thus, the investigation of convergences and divergences between these thinkers highlights the dynamic and multifaceted nature of phenomenology, offering conceptual horizons that transcend its conventional borders. Waldenfels and Marion, in particular, broaden our understanding of experience and event by considering their uniqueness and unpredictability, which often escape our usual categories of analysis. By recognizing subjectivity as a field of constant constitution and transformation, these phenomenological perspectives offer a radical view of experience and its relationship with the surrounding world.