Abstract

This contribution addresses some of the issues that have haunted James Mensch’s rich and extensive intellectual career. From the perspective of the “systems view of life” and of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, it specifically refers to the problem of embodiment in relation to the recent Covid 19 pandemic, stressing the role of human responsibility. The text is organized in four sections that gradually transition from a third-person, objective viewpoint to a first-person, subjective one. The first section discusses our lifeworld’s ecological challenge within the “natural attitude.” The second section refers to the concepts of cognition and autopoiesis introduced by the biologists Maturana and Varela along with von Uexküll’s account of the subjective perspective in the animal kingdom. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is introduced in the third section, where the lifeworld’s structure is used to lead as a “guiding thread” to its transcendental experiential groundings—as its ultimate source of responsibility. Finally, the fourth section connects human responsibility back to the recent global sanitary crisis. It concludes with a call for humanity to take responsibility for this type of crisis—at an ethical, cognitive, and normative level—and to promote values of solidarity and compassion toward the “ideal-limit” of a global community of love.