I recently finished to read a new published book, The Phenomenology of Living: The Foresight of the Coming, and found its arguments quit interesting but also a bit unclear. If there are someone who also read it, it would be nice to discuss.

I was especially interested in this book due to its name, because, I think, there are many book about the phenomenology, but the phenomenology of living, seems somehow new.

Anyway, the book has actually so many provocative opinions (it says, "every paradox is paradoxical" for instance), but particularly its main theme concerning the question "what is life". The author says, the question "what is life" cannot answered as long as the question is asked in this way, because it assumes a reciprocal relation that as if there are entirely separated subject as Ego and object as life. For him, the only way to overcome of this problem is to combine subject and object by using a temporal intermediary, and to ask the question from this temporal connection. In this respect, he claims that "we can understand life only if or when what we live for is what life is."

Regarding that the author defines two kind of answer concerning this question: "the answers that given" and "the answers that lived." The answers that given are in the sphere of proof and truth, and they are subject of endless speculation that never reaches an absolute answer. The answer that lived, on the other hand, are utterly indifferent to proof and truth, and they get their validity and trueness from the fact that the presence at the present time of the person who asked the question is the result of them. And only way to live the answers without knowing them is what authors called "seeing the coming." He writes: "Seeing the coming does not necessarily mean knowing what will happen in the future, but rather it is to live in a present time which the future will open itself." But book says, this concept does not indicate any commitment, although one can see the coming, he can still live entirely tragic and painful meanings, because for author "seeing the coming means life unfolds itself to us and life is already beyond good and bad". But for him, this concept makes possible the concept of "foresight of the coming."

If I understood right, the foresight of the coming is a way to use the understanding of seeing the coming, and it makes possible that life serves itself for you. This serving condition, however, does not mean a domination between human and life. The foresight of the coming promises that life unfolds itself for us, by doing so it serves for us for its own sake. In other word, this becomes a kind of relationships of love, in the foresight of the coming human and life are two beloved, and they devote themselves for each other.

At the end, the author ends his book with this sentence: "When we foresee the coming, we don't become God, but Tyche, the god of fortune whom even God serves..." Vouv :) But yeah, it sounds still a bit weird.