Climate Change as Liminal Experience—The Psychosocial Relevance of a Phenomenological Approach

Abstract

Liminality is a sufficiently comprehensive concept to allow the description and interpretation of how we experience change as existing in a “betwixt and between time”. A situation of liminality implies an intrusion, always difficult to manage, of chaos, of the erratic, into the harmony of everyday life. The activation of ecological sensitivities can lead to spontaneous liminal experiences, triggered by the awareness that the world around us is a changing environment. We intend to show that notions from phenomenology, such as home-world and alien-world, allow the interpretation of climate change as a situation of liminality that we experience due to the de-familiarization of the environment. The way we understand and interpret the world we live in is based on its normality, understood as constantly experienced in our daily bodily behavior. The notion of the home-world expresses the inter-subjective way in which we experience the natural world, as a world that is already given to us. Because its environmental meanings are actively imprinted in our lived corporeality, the home-world becomes a foundational standard against which changes in the natural environment are always cognitively compared within intuitive, already-constituted terms. The same world may appear alien to us when we become aware of sufficiently significant changes in the normality of our everyday experience, associated with discontinuities or disturbances. Because it places the familiar and known in tension with the unfamiliar and unknown, a liminal experience is always, at a subjective level, epistemologically transformative. To the extent that the surrounding natural world loses its already-given character, we will perceive it as an alien-world, more or less different from the one in which we lived our daily lives.

1. Introduction

There is a growing concern to explore the relationship between communities and their environment in terms of attitudes, emotions and behaviors. Climate change challenges us to re-evaluate our relationship with the environment for reasons deeply related to our mental and emotional well-being [1]. What interests us is the direct experience of climate change in the surrounding world as a natural proximity that we encounter on a daily basis.

The psychosocial impact of the awareness of medium and long-term risks that climate change entails is beginning to be assessed in the classic terms of guilt, anxiety and loss [2,3,4]. Although for the time being it generates emotional responses rather than significant behavioral changes, climate change anxiety is recognized as a psychologically present, clinically quantifiable reality [5,6]. It is directly related to how we currently understand and evaluate our personal relationship with the natural environment to which we are forced to readjust cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally [7]. Today’s global ecological crisis can even be perceived as an existential threat, the effect of which is eco-anxiety, defined by Albrecht as “the generalized sense that the ecological foundations of existence are in the process of collapse” [8]. His concept of solastalgia captures a special kind of desolation: the feeling of losing the connection with the places we belong. It is a state of mind triggered by perceieved radical transformations in the familiar surrounding world. Although related to the concept of nostalgia, solastalgia is a different experience in the sense that it appears as a longing for home that we experience not evoked by the past but by the present time, while actually being at home [9].

The effects of global warming can be considered epistemologically disruptive, actively affecting our Weltanschauung, or worldview, as human beings living in post-industrial secularized communities. Arguing that systematic ecological thinking can be detected in the traditional religions of the western world, Rappaport notices that in order to provide a response to contemporary issues, ecological knowledge should overcome the limits of scientific mentality [10]. Perceived as sacred, nature as a whole was the subject of collective moral concern and responsibility. By contrast, our current desacralized relationship with nature has become culturally inadequate in relation to the magnitude of anticipated changes, changes that potentially threaten fundamental, non-negotiable values, such as the right to existence. Following this trail of thought, Eaton and Hornborg propose a reading of the ecological crisis in terms of the anthropology of the sacred, by remarking that the whole world can be described today as a liminal space. Contemplating the magnitude of some changes that can shake our very existence in the world can trigger awe, activating a sense of common responsibility towards the Earth. Hence, the situation of liminality in which we find ourselves calls for new arcane knowledge: we are all neophytes that enter the realm of ambiguity, forced to realize that our common future is uncertain [11].

An unchecked extension of uncertainty can lead to deep existential crises, crises generated by the lack of meaning. By analyzing those situations in which the shock of transformation may affect the structure or threaten the organization of the world of daily life as a whole, Szakolczai argues that liminality can become permanent, generating anxiety. In other words, extensive change can lead to a suspension of the sense of normality for a timeframe for which the end cannot be anticipated [12]. The concept of permanent liminality is a paradoxical construct because all liminal situations can only be temporary, for anthropological reasons. However, when the conditions producing appear unchanged, the feeling that we are obliged to live in an unreal and absurd world can overwhelm us. He illustrates the situation of permanent liminality by offering us a symbolic anthropological interpretation of the Odyssey: Ulysses’ road home seems to last forever, becoming an unpredictable and endless string of failures [13].

We are interested in exploring how the experience of climate change can be interpreted from the point of view of liminality as an experience triggered by a certain cognitive de-familiarization with the surrounding world. Stenner’s reading of the foundations of Schutz’s phenomenological sociology brings into attention the concept of common-sense experience. For Schutz, the life-world is a “world of work” [14], a common everyday world understood in terms of corporeality and intentionality in the sense that it is constituted by our projects as social beings. Guided by a natural attitude towards things, we are permanently engaged in transforming this world, through imagination, scientific knowledge, religious experience, etc., thus coming into contact with multiple alternative realities and interpreting them as different “provinces of meaning” [14]. These worlds appear to us as self-evident, due to the fact that they have their own cognitive integrity revolving around specific “cognitive styles”, defined as particular forms of habitualized interaction, as typified patterns of self-experience, etc. [14]. These provinces of meaning exist as coherent systems of attitudes towards reality, different from but still dependent upon the “everydayness” [14] of the world of work. Socially constructed within the cultural dynamics of group life, our different realities, understood as sets of similarly interpreted individual experiences, remain separated from an epistemological point of view. Although they appear to coexist, the fact that they can differ to the point of incompatibility can make shifting between them a shocking experience capable of producing transformations in our worldview.

For Stenner, the situation of liminality, understood as a wavering between these worlds, is always a possibility due to the fact that our very condition as social beings implies belonging to a multiplicity of socially constructed worlds. We experience religion, science, painting, dramaturgic arts, etc., in a radically different way than the world of our daily practice. In the process of transition between worlds, the cognitive expectations determined by our previous experience must be suspended. Both art and ritual are liminal affective technologies created to assist us in the interpretation of the hermeneutic shock produced by the experience of anticipated and desired or, on the contrary, fortuitous and spontaneous, transitions to these alternative worlds [15]. We propose an alternative phenomenological interpretation of the experience of climate change. We aim to demonstrate that a meeting between anthropological concepts describing the situation of liminality and the manner in which Husserlian phenomenology captures our encounter with the surrounding world can be remarkably fertile, leading to new theoretical perspectives in approaching the issue of climate change as a common-sense experience. Employing Stenner’s distinction between devised and spontaneous liminal experiences, we argue that liminality can be used to describe the anthropological aspects of climate change. We will then show that Husserlian concepts such as the notions of home-world and alien-world can be used to account for how we experience the striking or less perceptible changes that climate change brings.

2. Climate Change as Liminal Experience

2.1. The Anthropo-Logic of the Liminality Situation

Although initially linked to the interpretation of the symbolism of social practices [16], the anthropological concept of liminality has subsequently been applied with relative success not only in the field of human geography, but also in research in related fields such as the psycho-sociology of tourism [17] or the psychology of everyday life [18]. In order to argue that climate change is an experience that can be interpreted as liminal, a brief exploration of the conceptual roots of the anthropological meaning of liminality is necessary.

Experiencing liminality implies the sudden or gradual awareness of the existence of a spatial-temporal demarcation, a threshold between a familiar “nearness” and a more or less unfamiliar “beyond” [19]. Introduced into the social sciences by van Gennep and developed by Turner, liminality can be considered a sufficiently comprehensive anthropological category to allow, by observing the dynamics of symbolic behavior, for the description and interpretation of how we individually or collectively experience change as a psychosocial process of transition [20]. The two define the symbol as a cultural event that cannot be reified to the end and a latent phenomenon present in all social processes that is crucial in interpreting the meaning of social practices. Whether manifestly emerging in communication or inferred from observable behavior, symbols remain cognitively associated with individual and collective interests, goals and aspirations [21].

Van Gennep introduced a concept widely used in research on the anthropology of religious experience, that of a ‘rite of passage’. The notion includes the transformations triggered by seasonal changes, which occur, cyclically, in the cosmicized social life of the pre-industrial period. With regard to the relationship between community and nature, which is of particular interest to us, the dynamics of the situation of liminality can be described in ritual terms as separation, transition and, finally, reincorporation [19].

The period of separation, or pre-liminality, involves the construction of a symbolic boundary between the previous space and time, considered to be profane, and the one to which the transition is made, a place-time situated outside it, considered to be, par excellence, sacred. Analyzing the symbolical meanings of the rites of passage performed on New Year’s Eve, Eliade made the following observation: the routines of daily life are suspended and gradually replaced by new, expressive behavior that emphasizes collective detachment from the aging, ontologically degrading cosmos, in order to ritually renew it [22].

The liminal period is the period, always well demarcated by custom, in which the community effectively transcends the threshold and enters a space and time infused with ambiguity and therefore it is difficult to read or interpret symbolically. It is a period in which few recognizable attributes of the previous situation are preserved. The community, like its cosmos, is now in a state of manageable uncertainty and always temporary.

The symbolically manifest post-liminal period or incorporation stage involves perceptions and representations that mark the end of ambiguity by regulating the relationship between the human community and the cosmos. At the individual level, the completion of the transition from one age to the next is recognized and socially sanctioned only at the end of the initiation rites, which marks the actual reincorporation into the community. In the case of seasonal collective rituals, it is the period in which the cultural behavior specific to that season is quasi-definitively installed, always perceived as a return to normality.

Van Gennep’s anthropo-logic was developed by Turner [16,20,21], for whom the situation of liminality can be anthropologically defined as the existence in a “betwixt and between time” in which individuals and groups find themselves temporarily, as a result of the processes of social change. Liminality appears as a result of certain “breaks” in the continuity of socio-cultural processes, which can trigger structural crises, activating cultural solutions. Turner analyzes pilgrimages as ritual processes involving a symbolic universe built on the premise that the participants, who voluntarily abandon their ordinary, everyday lives, enter a “parallel zone” where social order is temporarily suspended [23]. To discover oneself in a transitional situation, to exist between a familiar here and now and an unknown there and then, is to be aware of liminality. Staged or not, such experiences are always intensely cognitively challenging and emotionally charged. Turner speaks of them as shared experiences or communitas and describes them in terms of communion because they involve experiencing a state of generalized empathy, interpreted as a communitarian identification with otherness. Liminal situations therefore create, intentionally or not, the conditions for an experiential confrontation with how each of us represents our own human condition [21,23].

Turner insists that all liminal phenomena involve collective perceptions and representations expressed in symbols whose meaning tends to be intellectually and emotionally the same for all members of a given group. Overwhelming events such as epidemics, natural cataclysms, etc., lead to the failure, without an immediate alternative, of the norms of social life. Liminality often arises in crisis situations, likely to prompt the emergence of new paradigms by reconsidering social experience and/or to lead to a re-evaluation of the human–nature relationship. More than mere cognitive reclassifications at the individual level, these paradigmatic creations closely reflect the history of the group, highlighting cultural continuity, but also changes that occur within shared experience [21,23].

In conclusion, regardless of whether communities self-adjust by responding to internal changes or adapt to unforeseen natural events, a liminal situation can be described as a prolonged reign of uncertainty, and interpreted as an intensely challenging intrusion of chaos into the harmony of the cosmos of everyday life. We will now argue that climate change can induce in the flow of daily life a sense of disturbance, affecting our connection with the surrounding world.

2.2. The Experience of Liminality and Climate Change

Following Schutz’s phenomenologically inspired account of shock experiences [14] that occur when moving between worlds, it can be argued that an awareness of the consequences of climate change induces a certain cognitive tension between the world of our daily practice and the world of scientific knowledge. The impression, so rooted in common sense, which springs from everyday experience, that the world around us continues to work as it should, can be shaken. We must insist on Stenner’s distinction between those devised liminal experiences that presuppose our prior consent and are, from the outset, symbolically removed from everyday practice, such as various initiation rituals or even the experience of the cinema, and spontaneous experiences, which we experience involuntarily or even against our will [20].

Taking into consideration that many experiences of climate change are devised liminal experiences largely mediated by media discourse, we will now argue that perceptual awareness of the fact that the world around us is a changing environment is sufficient to trigger spontaneous liminal experiences that can lead to de-familiarizing effects.

Stenner elaborates on the experiences triggered by what he calls liminal occasions: disruptive events that appear spontaneously or, on the contrary, are culturally built. Our psychosocial existence implies a constitutive instability, which Stenner calls ontological liminality [15]. When the discrepancy between our expectations and what happens to us becomes obvious, then we wake up immersed or willingly go into a reality located betwixt and between our former world and the world as it will be after these expectations have been adjusted. We are perfectly aware of the fact that the world, as we have known it, is no longer and that a new one has not yet appeared [15].

Through myths, rituals, plays, songs, etc., a different space and time which transcends the universe of daily practice is culturally created in order to make possible devised liminal experiences. On the other side, always inducing in the flow and structure of daily life a sense of disturbance, liminal experiences are spontaneous in nature when discontinuities in our life are not, and cannot, be anticipated. For example, catastrophic natural phenomena can highly disturb us because they lay, through their magnitude, far beyond our daily expectations causing intense, overwhelming experiences [15].

We highlight the following psychosocial characteristics of spontaneous liminal experiences relevant to our approach:

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They are experienced as unpredictable breaks or discontinuities in the daily routine, events that force us to face changes that are by nature unanticipated or even impossible to anticipate;

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Involve fortuitous changes in our everyday way of feeling, understanding and acting;

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Are emotionally demanding and cognitively challenging;

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Although they can trigger changes in our outlook on life, they are not culturally premeditated;

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They involve an awareness of the presence of abnormality, in the sense that the familiar tends to be replaced by the unfamiliar or even the uncanny;

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Although the everyday world appears to us in a striking or, on the contrary, in a subtle, different way, it remains cognitively familiar enough for us to recognize it: it is different and yet the same;

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Affects us consciously, but also in ways in which we are not fully aware;

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Are described by those who have experienced them in temporal terms of processuality, or flow [20].

Given the above, we can say that spontaneous liminal experiences can also be triggered by ecological sensibilities, and that they presuppose the existence of processes of re-consciousness of the surrounding world as a transformed place or as an environment in the process of transformation. Climate change has the potential to transform the way we represent our surrounding world as a world of co-created life. It is a world that we know is changing, but also a world that we perceive as changing over the decades. Climate change has scientifically measurable consequences for the environment, globally. We have considered, as illustrative benchmarks, those studies on “climate dice” that avoid questionable predictive computational models in their argument. Hansen, Sato and Ruedy [24], for example, refer to empirically descriptive analyses using real data, systematically collected over the last three decades, which highlight the following effects of global warming, following indicators such as the geographical distribution of temperature anomalies:

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Increased frequency of winter and summer temperature anomalies;

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The onset of warmer winters and an increase in the frequency of unusually hot summers;

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Increase in the annual frequency of extreme weather events: heavy rainfall or prolonged drought.

We believe that these kinds of perceptually obvious changes, as well as less perceptible ones, such as observable changes in seasonal range of insects, birds and animals [25], are enough to make the world around us an environment we are beginning to become unfamiliar with.

We wish, in the following, to show that conceptual tools from Husserlian phenomenology such as the notions of home-world and alien-world can be used to account for how we experience the striking or less perceptible changes that climate change brings.

3. A Phenomenological Approach of Liminality

3.1. Methodological Arguments

Phenomenologically informed liminality theories are somewhat unfamiliar to mainstream psychologists, mainly because they participate in the articulation of an anthropology in an all-encompassing, Kantian sense of the notion. Liminal situations create the conditions for an experiential confrontation with how each of us represents our own human condition. Therefore, we believe it is time to resuscitate such a general level of psychological inquiry because phenomenological approaches can contribute to the exploration of the subjective complexities of our common relationship with the environment.

From an epistemological point of view, as Bannon notes, phenomenology aims to resist the positivist temptation to conceptually reduce the experience of the natural world to the most elementary psychological terms in order not to quit the rigor of an empirical analysis [26]. Phenomenology relies on comprehension, seeking to capture the structure, dynamics and significance of this experience in its inherent intersubjectivity with concern both for its intentional orientation and the way phenomena appear to us [27].

Phenomenological approaches to experience are invariably based on the notion of the everyday life-world as both a natural environment and an inter-subjective reality from within which human experience, knowledge and action originate and return [28]. For Husserl, the life-world is the totality of things that can be known through direct experience or scientific theorizing [29].

Starting from the observation that the world of life remains the common epistemological horizon of all possible investigations, phenomenological methodologies attempt to overcome the inherent tension between nomothetic and idiographic knowledge of social reality. This is relevant because, in psychological research, the nomothetic approach has as its ultimate goal the formulation of laws with a high enough degree of generality and validity to make possible predictions on human behavior by identifying only those similarities that can be statistically quantified. As a consequence, potentially significant differences between individuals, which are the focus of an idiograph ical approach, tend to become unobservable, but in this common world, which each of us discovers as already there, all events always appear to us from the perspective of the first person. As a world of nature and culture alike, our life-world is psychologically the soil or ground of all our cognitive activity, whether it is the familiar everyday practice or a more abstract, scientific type of knowledge. Therefore, even if the consequences of climate change can possibly be scientifically argued to us, their meanings will only be understood and interpreted against the epistemological background of our own life-world. Assuming this position, we present below arguments in favor of a Husserlian-inspired phenomenological interpretation of the experience of climate change.

The first argument concerns the meaning attributed to the notion of experience. The motto of the epistemological project, initiated by Edmund Husserl, remains the return to things themselves, to that world of our everyday life as we experience it bodily, in the most immediate way possible [30]. The notion of experience is thus given an extremely comprehensive meaning, encompassing everything from sensory perception as such to intuition, thought, imagination or emotion. Phenomenology insists that this world of life in which we are immersed is first felt and only then conceptualized, affirming the precedence of subjective experience in any attempt at knowledge, even in objective-scientific knowledge. Natural phenomena have appeared to us, appear to us and will continue to appear to us within the world of life which was, is and remains the onto-epistemological background of all new knowledge. The assumption of a phenomenological attitude, which implies the abandonment from the outset of any pre-judgments about the event under consideration, allows us to capture the phenomenon of climate change in its inter-subjective processuality, without losing sight of its lived character.

The second argument concerns one of the methodological desiderata of all qualitative research: the accuracy of descriptions. The phenomenological approach aims to achieve first-person descriptions of experienced phenomena that are as ideographically faithful as possible, to capture them in their naivety, as they were originally experienced. This distinct anamnestic perspective makes it appropriate when it comes to environmental changes perceptible over the decades.

The third argument also concerns the epistemological value attached to subjectivity. Events do not in fact remain at that objective distance from which the exact sciences treat them but always have an irreducible lived character. Accepting this psychological reality allows us to capture with maximum accuracy what is truly significant in lived experiences, always from the perspective of those who have actually lived them. The experience of the surrounding world is not expressed in specialized scientific terms but in everyday language. Because they remain intimately connected to the bodily relationship between person and environment, the meanings attributed by the subjects themselves to experiences provide the most legitimate framework for interpreting their perceptions [30] of changes in the natural environment as our lived place.

We will show that the notions of home-world and alien-world allow us to explore the situation of liminality in which we are placed today and which we experience as a de-familiarization from the environment.

3.2. Home-World versus Alien-World

Investigating the ways in which the world of life is already given to us we find that the concept of home-world, Heimwelt, or near-world, Nahwelt, in contrast to the concept of alien-world, Fremdewelt [30], most accurately describes the dynamics of how we conceive of the world we live in as we get to know it, always starting from our everyday intuitions. We will first show that these two notions make possible an analysis of our relation as subjects to the particular place in which we live, as the natural environment in which we exist and which, in turn, exists in us.

The notion of home-world was developed by Husserl from the observation that the sense of familiarity characterizes the most elementary, primal experiences of the surrounding world, as the near-world or Nahwelt [30,31]. The term home-world, Heimwelt, is largely synonymous with the term near-world, Nahwelt, because it expresses an elementary psychological fact: the world always appears or presents itself to us in a cognitively familiar context. Home-world is our well-known universe, continuously shaped by daily needs and purposes; it is the world of language and traditions passed on, actively interpreted and reinterpreted, generation after generation. Cognitively, it is constituted inter-subjectively through permanent interactive exchanges between our own intuitive knowledge and the knowledge of others who are our spatial and temporal neighbors. However, this process of constitution is also diachronic in the sense that it always goes beyond our synchronic existence. It is a generative world in the sense that it is received and passed on. Our home-world is always geographically and culturally delimited from everything that, because it is not as comprehensible to us, may appear unfamiliar or even strange. This is because it remains a mentally constituted reality handed down through successive generations. Because our presuppositions are always historically situated, the home-world is already given to each of us in the sense that it to exists prior to our own individual subjectivity. Because it is the world of our familiar experiences, of those experiences sedimented in the course of our own lives, but also of those that have been transferred or handed down to us culturally, our subjective interpretations of it as the world that surrounds us will always be rooted into its givenness. Some of those experiences are directly related to the natural environment in which we grew up. Therefore, the notion of home-world has, as we have seen, an inter-subjective meaning, expressing the way in which the same natural world is experienced together with those who are spatially in our proximity and with whom we are contemporaries.

Interpreted from the perspective of the first person, the immediate world is presented to us not only as a totality of objective phenomena but also as full of meanings inevitably rooted in inherited traditions. The concepts, including scientific ones, with which we describe any new phenomenon, emerge continuously in the unity of the common history that confers cultural specificity to the communities to which we belong.

3.3. The Horizon of Everyday Experience

The notion of home-world reaches that sphere of perceptual and cognitive familiarity with a particular geographical territory and its unique particularities.

Before we go on, we must mention that to Morton, for example, the phenomenological interpretation of the relationship between the concepts of corporality and the environment leads to far too radical conclusions. Dwelling appears to us as an experience of intimate familiarity with the natural world, an experience in which the irreducible alterity of the latter is completely forgotten. He states on the contrary that, starting with our own body, we meet reality as otherness, as a series of beings and things that, although we get to know them closely, they retain a certain uncanny character [32]. The more intimate we get with them, the more familiarly strange they appear to us. This is valid even with for what Morton calls hyper-objects, realities that affect us perceptibly, but which are far too large from a space and temporal point of view to be rationally understood. The process of global warming tends to become more familiar to us precisely because it disturbs us cognitively, because it frightens us, because it upsets us [33]. Saari notices that global warming highlights the tragic limits of scientific knowledge causing, through its pervasive strangeness, the distinctions between human culture and non-human nature. The whole ecological discourse becomes the manifestation of an Oedipal logic in which we are, at the same time, guilty and detectives in an anticipated drama, triggered by future events that threaten our worldly existence [34].

From a phenomenological point of view, our familiarity with the environment is based on its comprehensibility in terms of everyday practice. Because we constitute it, we are and remain interpreters of our world, never from outside it, but always from within it, and therefore the meaning of all that appears familiar to us is based on its closeness. To highlight this, Husserl uses the notion of the lived horizon, Welthorizont.

We have chosen the following brief explanation: things appear to us as belonging to the home-world, understood as that reality, both natural and inter-subjective, which represents the horizon of our ever-expanding knowledge, constituting the epistemological background on which our experiences are continually projected [30,31].

Because, however elaborate, the terms in which we think remain rooted in the concreteness of experience, no phenomenon, object or event encountered in everyday life or known scientifically can be truly isolated by abstraction. They will always appear to us as part of that world which is already given to us; they will tend to enter from the outset into the constitution of our experience. The world that is already there remains the horizon of all possible future knowledge [31]. In this latter sense, capturing the dynamics of the gradual extension of our home-world, the notion of horizon describes the way in which we and new things are continually revealed to us. Our life-world exists for us as a lived horizon from which all things appear to us and to which we continually refer, while the horizon itself always remains hidden from us.

This lived horizon enables us to distinguish not only between our own values and traditions and those of others, strangers, but also, and this is of direct interest to us, between those features of the natural environment which are familiar to us and those which appear alien to us. Husserl defines it by analogy with the visual horizon whose line is that absolute limit beyond which we cannot look and which therefore circumscribes all that we can see. Its implicit existence particularizes our perspective in the sense that it makes possible our own view of the surrounding world, a world that we will understand in the epistemologically complementary terms of proximity and distance. The alien-world, Fremdewelt, is that world or worlds which, beyond this limit, can only appear to us as unfamiliar [31]. The opposition between the familiar and the unfamiliar structures every world of individual life. The boundaries of our home-worlds may have some degree of permanence or may be more fluid. Miettinen observes, with remarkable subtlety, that this structure of our individual worlds is based not so much on the conditions of the geographical environment as such, as it is on that level of cognitive familiarity at which we arrive with our surroundings in a place in which we live long enough [35]. These two ways of understanding circumscribe the concept of the home-world as the historicized territory of our bodily existence, a territory that tends to be a bounded one, but an extensible one at the same time [36].

3.4. The Terrain of Everyday Experience

The notion of home-world does not have an abstract meaning, but always refers to those places intimately connected to us, inseparable from our memory. The inter-subjective field of everyday practice, the home-world is given to us as the ground of our existence, as what Hussserl calls Erdboden [30]. This notion also refers to that natural domain in which we remain cognitively and affectively rooted, more specifically, to our geographical area. In the broadest possible sense, our home-world is this changing planet, understood not scientifically through the eyes of the astronomer, geographer or climatologist but, as Steinbock observes, as the historical territory of our existence [36].

Because the world of life is already given to us as the earthly ground of our existence, although we experience it inter-subjectively, it remains prior to any individual subjectivity. The home-world is the immediate world, the world of our familiar experiences, of those experiences sedimented in the course of our own lives, but also of those that have been transferred or handed down to us culturally. Many of these experiences are directly related to the geography of the environment in which we grew up. In this sense, because our own environment, the Umwelt, is our home-world, a different natural environment will be interpreted as a foreign world. Any other place will be a more or less alien-world for us, depending on the extent to which it epistemologically coincides with our own world. In this sense, Donohoe observes that our individual belonging to a particular home-world can be captured by noting the existence of a unity in the way we attribute meanings to things and events, a unity manifested in that pre-giving of them that becomes the benchmark or norm by which we understand or judge other worlds [37].

Because we constitute it, we are and remain interpreters of our world never from outside, but always from within it. As a constituted world, in which all experiences become comprehensible to us, the ways in which it is given to us always provide us with a pre-understanding of it. This pre-understanding we lack in an alien natural world. It will appear to us as such precisely because it is relatively incomprehensible to us but, importantly for our argument, not in scientific terms but in terms of our everyday practice. Even if we recognize a natural world as alien to us, we will understand and describe it in the only terms that make sense to us, i.e., in terms born out of the experience of our own world.

3.5. Normality

We return to the relationship between the home-world and alien-world because it is necessary, before the final argument, to introduce the concept of normality. This concept most accurately describes how we encounter new and novel perceived objects, phenomena or events. Normality is the manner in which the world is given to us within a horizon of familiarity, in the sense that our perception and understanding depend on typical patterns of understanding and action previously established in the course of experience and which are self-stabilizing as norms. The notion of normality is therefore equivalent to that of normativity. That normality of the world to which we historically belong, a normality that results from its generativity, implies a certain order, primarily temporal, in which we expect to experience new and novel objects in accordance with the previously given world. The natural environment has a normative effect on the way we constitute our own home-world through perception and cognition, always starting from everyday experiences. Everything that is presented to our consciousness will be characterized as normal or, if there is a significant discontinuity or even a break with our expectations, it will be characterized as abnormal. In terms of this anticipated concordance, any natural realm of difference or otherness appears to us as an alien-world, a world of which we become aware only because the home-world is already given to us.

We have adopted this interpretation, given by Steinbock to the Husserlian concept of normality, because no alien-world can be conceived of absolutely beyond our world but only within that change in the normality of our experience which it brings about, a change which appears to us as a discontinuity, as a disturbance. He remarks that there are two kinds of such ruptures [36]. In the first case, a particular event does not fit in with our previous experience. This surprises us cognitively, but that disruption is immediately reordered within that horizon or system of experience that tends to remain, on the whole, unchanged. Much more interesting for our discussion is the possibility of major ruptures, ruptures brought about even by events in the natural world, which intensely challenge our power to appropriate the new, and cognitive disrupt us. Climate change has become such an event.

The normality of our home-world is the nuanced result of historicized processes of appropriation and misappropriation of meanings that continually emerge in a tradition. In this way, as Donohue [38] notes, the home-world becomes a foundational standard against which changes in the natural environment are always cognitively compared in terms already constituted at the bodily level. The environmental meanings of the home-world are imprinted in our corporeality, subjectively experienced always in a particular place. Moreover, Steinbock [37] notes that our home-world is normatively meaningful because it involves an inter-subjective territory in which we are, epistemologically, at home. Our home-world thus plays a primary role in conferring identity in the sense that it helps us to understand ourselves as ourselves in the midst of others with whom we share the same territory [37]. The historical territory of our existence is the only world in which we are anchored both through our daily practices and through perpetual spatial-temporal cohabitation. We will always carry the structure of our home-world in our lived corporeality, i.e., in our understanding, behavior and practices [37].

The home-world and the alien-world are co-constitutive and co-determining in the sense that they cognitively highlight each other. The fact that the home-world is normal, ordinary and familiar makes the foreign world appear to us as abnormal and unfamiliar. This is because the way we understand and interpret the world in which we live is underpinned by the phenomenological sense of normality, understood as lived constancy in our everyday bodily behavior.

The previous observation is important because it introduces a new notion, equally important in the interpretation of situations of liminality, that of typicality. The notion is based on the observation that we orient ourselves in everyday life according to certain generalizations, called types by Husserl, which are constituted through factual experience on the basis of similarities that constantly come to our attention. Cognitively, therefore, the world of everyday life is for us an already typified world. Types arise through our activity of conceptualization; they arise through the activity of memory and imagination, starting, however, from the simple primary awareness of the existence in our perceptual proximity of objects and phenomena. The novelty of some changes is captured as such by continuous reference to these already constituted types [37].

In sum, this difference can be interpreted epistemologically from the observation that the home-world and the foreign world are both historically co-generative concepts. This means that abnormality is characteristic of the foreign world and normality characteristic of the home-world, provided that they are in a continuous historical becoming in delimitation from each other. The notion of the stranger arises against the background of the delimitation of normality versus lived abnormality. The natural environment has, as we have seen, a normative effect on the way we constitute our own home-world through perception and knowledge, always starting from everyday experiences. This is why the world changed by global warming will not be primarily seen in an abstract scientific way, but continuously experienced at the level of our individual history. To the extent that it loses, to a certain extent, its already given character, we will encounter it again as a somewhat alien reality.

In conclusion, climate change can then be understood in terms of everyday life as an experience of liminal character, starting from the fact that, because of it, although the surrounding world begins to be increasingly unfamiliar to us in bodily terms, we still encounter it bearing the memory “written on the body” [38], of the home-world.

3.6. Liminality as Tension between the Familiar and the Unfamiliar

In a condition where climate change leads to a de-familiarization with the world around us, we ask the question: can a world that is becoming alien to us, be home again?

There is a Husserlian-inspired definition of the home-world coming from human geography, that of Seamon, as that sphere of lived experiences and situations whose existence cuts out or sets apart from the whole universe that world of our own in which each of us is born and comes of age [39]. It highlights once again that the conceptual dyad made up of the home-world and the alien-world forms the framework in permanent historical flux that allows us to capture how we continually cognitively demarcate the familiar from the alien [37].

Because of the inter-subjective character of the life-world, which is and remains a co-constituted reality, a liminal experience is always an epistemologically transformative one because, as Steinbock notes, it relates home and stranger in two ways: through appropriation and through transgression [40].

Appropriation leads to the co-constitution of the stranger as stranger precisely through the appropriative experience of the house, re-constituted as home. This means that, in situations of appropriation, we realize the appropriations of the home-world by recognizing particular qualities of the foreign world as obviously different from those of the home-world.

Transgression involves co-constituting home as home through the transgressive experience of the stranger. In other words, it is only by encountering the foreign world defectively, bodily, that we recognize and accept as present in our home-world certain different qualities of the foreign world intimately connected to our everyday practice. That is why any home-world is always constructed and reconstructed through appropriation in relation to multiple encountered foreign worlds [37].

The answer to the previous question is then a positive one. Even if the home-world is based on tradition, it is continually developing not only through that constant appropriation from which the typical is born, but also through criticism and renewal. It is indeed a concrete territory, but it appears to us within the generative density of a tradition that is temporally experienced as a historical development [37]. This territory appears to us, as Seamon remarks [41], as a sphere, constantly expanding, of the proper. He observes that our home-world appears to us in a relation of lived mutuality with any possible alien-world at its border, an alien-world understood as that world of difference and otherness of which we are aware, as we have seen, only because of the already given character of the home-world [41]. The surrounding world as home-world and the same world rediscovered as alien thus appear to us as phases in the anthropological dynamics of a liminal experience [20]. Although disruptive, the constant experience of something that blatantly contradicts our previous experience can gradually lead to the adjustment of our expectations. The relative strangeness induced by climate change in our daily lives can be cognitively appropriated.

4. Conclusions

Taking into consideration that many experiences of climate change are devised liminal experiences mediated by media discourse, we argued that perceptual awareness of the fact that the world around us is a changing environment is sufficient to trigger spontaneous liminal experiences that can lead to de-familiarizing effects.

Giving sufficient credit to subjectivity and not establishing a pre-conceived boundary between description and interpretation, the opposing concepts of home- versus alien-world allow for the exploration of the topic of de-familiarization with the surrounding world as an effect of climate change awareness. Because any new world will remain co-constituted with the primordial and normalizing experience of our home-world, generated in our bodily relationship to the surrounding world, a changed world will still be interpreted in the language of our own world or home-world. It is because we interpret the world around us in already constituted bodily terms that we are capable to perceive its transformation.

Each individual has their own home-world, always bordered by alien-worlds. The world around us is not, due to climate change, understood only in an abstract scientific way, but at the level of our individual history. To the extent that the surrounding world loses, to a certain extent, its already given character, we encounter it again as a somewhat alien-world.

The notions of home-world and alien-world allow us to explore the situation of liminality in which we are placed today as an experience of de-familiarization with the environment. When those loved places, intimately related to our identity, change to the extent to which they become difficult to recognize, we can feel abandoned, isolated and alienated right in the middle of the familiar world. Albrecht’s concept of solastalgia becomes increasingly relevant because it draws attention to the possibility that the experience of a world distancing itself from us can trigger profound emotional distress [42].