Sociocultural Renaissance: Movement as the Art of Rethinking Everyday Life in Fractured Forms

Abstract

The quotidian is no longer a site of tranquil reiteration but a field of ontological fissure wherein sedimented collective structures undergo dissolution. This paper reconceives “sociocultural renaissance” not as a teleological ideal but as a phenomenological-existential process emergent from lifeworldly rupture. Engaging Husserl’s Lebenswelt, Heidegger’s Dasein-analytic, Merleau-Ponty’s carnal embodiment, and a radical phenomenology of collective praxis, it demonstrates fracture as structurally constitutive of sociohistorical being. Through a critique of “ultimate referentiality” and “articulated experiences,” the paper argues that fracture constitutes the transcendental condition for signification and collective transformation. Renaissance is thus redefined not as nostalgic restitution but as a mode of dwelling within fissure itself—a reorientation toward meaning-constitution when its ground reveals itself as abyssal and precarious. This demands acceptance of vulnerability and provisionality, ensuring that emergent forms remain perpetually open to reconfiguration. Ultimately, sociocultural renaissance consists of the arduous art of indwelling within ever-generative fractures. Freedom is actualized neither through escape from nor sublimation of the everyday, but through the immanent praxis of its transformation, a fragile intersubjective praxis that inaugurates the horizon of a genuinely common world.

1. Introduction

Everyday life in the modern world unfolds in habitual, cyclical rhythms that remain largely tacit, as humans work, commute, and navigate the ordinary circuits of existence. Yet beneath this seemingly stable surface, something has shifted in our age. The forms of life that reportedly once furnished meaning and normative density to daily existence have ceased to function as coherent wholes. Traditions persist but increasingly appear as hollowed gestures, while authoritative discourses retain public force, yet their capacity to structure lived experience grows fragile. Promises of progress circulate, but their legitimacy falters when structurally unfulfilled. Human action generally unfolded according to the beacons of norms, traditions, and grand narratives. What confronts us today may be announced as a society in transition toward a postmodern condition in which grand narratives have largely lost their authority over knowledge [1] (p. xxiv), leaving social agents to make knowledge claims from out of their particularity. This condition is clear not only in conflicted and diverging knowledge claims, but also in identity politics and diverse and accentuated lifestyles. We may, however, probe this condition in terms of the phenomenological concept of lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Drawing selectively on two key concepts from the phenomenological founders, this paper argues that lifeworld has lost its presumably former internal integrity, and consequently, the collective lived world in which the frames of meaning that were once interlocked now stand in tension, indifference, or contradiction.

This paper launches a phenomenological inquiry into this phenomenon by focusing on certain moments in which three key phenomenologists of the twentieth century, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, acknowledged, each in his own way and within his particular approach, the issue of what we call, in a Husserlian fashion, “fractured lifeworld,” linking it to Heidegger’s “inauthentic solicitude” and Merleau-Ponty’s fragmented perception. Implicitly, they measured this condition against an “ideal type”. Bringing these concepts into alignment, we then turn to Schürmann to show that such conditions can actually mobilize knowledge and point to new possibilities.

Bringing Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty into alignment means identifying a common problematic without collapsing their respective approaches into one another. The result is neither a synthetic unity nor a leveled equivalence, but a constellation in which each perspective brings into relief a dimension the others leave in shadow. This method is phenomenological in spirit. It attends to the things themselves as they appear across different descriptions, rather than subordinating them to a single system.

The issue on which these perspectives bear is not merely cultural decline or moral decay, as populist politics across the globe claims. It points to a structural transformation: the frameworks that once rendered the world intelligible have lost their self-evidence. What we witness is not the replacement of one set of meanings by another, but a condition in which meaning itself has become problematic, no longer given in advance, but something to be constantly negotiated and reconstructed amidst fragmentation. It must be stated at the outset, however, what this inquiry is not. The present paper does not aim to establish such facts. Its claim is not that “fracture”, broadly speaking, is new, but that its scope, pace, and structural location have shifted: the loss of self-evidence now affects the ultimate referents themselves, not merely particular beliefs or institutions. Earlier epochs experienced ruptures against a background of shared ultimacy; today the background itself has become unstable. The question is therefore not primarily historical: “when did fracture begin?” Rather, the question is now transcendental and phenomenological. How is the structure of experience itself transformed when the ultimate referents that once rendered the world coherently intelligible lose their self-evidence? The historian describes the content of what was lost, the phenomenologist inquires about the form of experience that remains; but these are not two separate inquiries: the form is disclosed only through the content, and the content is intelligible only in light of the form. What concerns us here is the manner in which consciousness, solicitude, and perception are reorganized when the horizon of meaning no longer holds together, a question that cannot be answered by historical narration alone, and that requires the resources of phenomenological description.

A clarification is needed here. The distinction between the transcendental and the historical is not a distinction between two separate domains, but between two ways of posing the same question. The fracture is historical in its occurrence and transcendental in its structure, just as Nietzsche’s “death of God” names both a historical event and a transformation in the conditions of experience. The present inquiry does not claim that “fracture” or “renaissance” escapes the logic of ultimate referentiality that Schürmann describes. It claims only that these concepts are diagnostic rather than foundational: they describe a condition without claiming to ground it. Whether they themselves will harden into a new fantasm is a question that can only be answered retrospectively, by the epoch that follows.

As the point of departure of this paper, the general observations above register an age characterized by the loss of normative sway and legitimacy of traditions, fragmentation of lived experiences, and divergence on otherwise common meanings. The paper suggests that these characteristics reveal themselves through diverse and diverging identity-oriented social movements of our age. This paper treats social movements not as a sociological concept but as a philosophical problem probed through a phenomenological lens and a specific trajectory within phenomenology, namely, lifeworld, inauthentic solicitude, and articulation of experiences that enable a new way of conceptualizing life in our age, a “renaissance” as we argue.

The concept of “lifeworld,” as theorized by Husserl [2], designates the pre-reflective horizon of everyday experience in which meaning appears as self-evident. It is the ground upon which all practical activity rests, yet this ground is never as stable as it appears. When taken-for-granted structures are shattered, human subjects experience a “fractured” lifeworld, not merely a psychological condition but an ontological one: it concerns the very structure of experience itself, the horizon within which things appear and actions acquire significance.

To speak of a “fractured” lifeworld is therefore not to invoke a metaphor, but to name a concrete ontological condition: the lived experience of a world that no longer holds together as a coherent horizon of meaning. The concept of “fractured lifeworld” arises from “fractured worldliness” developed extensively in a work. This is distinct from mere uncertainty, which presupposes a stable background. Here, the background itself has become unstable.

The question that emerges is both simple and profoundly difficult. What does it mean to live within such a situation? How do subjects orient themselves when the conditions that once structured their activities have become fragmented and unreliable? This is not a question about institutional dysfunction but about a fundamental transformation in the mode of existence of subjects who inhabit a world that no longer offers stable coordinates for thought, perception or action. This ontological uncertainty is not evenly distributed. For some, it manifests as pervasive anxiety; for others, as a paralyzing excess of possibilities; and for still others, particularly those marked by displacement or historical trauma, as a continuation of existential precarity rather than a rupture. The phenomenology of fracture must attend to these differential ways of living and responding to brokenness.

If we take this transformation seriously, we must ask whether this fracture is simply a condition of loss or whether it contains seeds of something else, a new awareness, a renewed capacity for perception or alternative ways of being-together. This question is hermeneutical. It asks us to interpret fracture not as pure negativity, the signifier of a loss, but as a site of potential transformation. The hermeneutic task of our age, we argue, is not to repair the fractured lifeworld by restoring the purportedly lost coherence, a project both naive and impossible, but to understand how subjects dwell within and experience the fracture, how they navigate the absence of stable coordinates, and how in the very act of navigating they might generate new forms of meaning, solidarity, and orientation. It is at this juncture that the concept of “renaissance” enters. From a phenomenological standpoint, renaissance (literally, rebirth) cannot be understood as a nostalgic return to lost orders, nor as a project of historical renewal grounded in some imagined origin. Rather, it signifies a fundamental reorientation toward the very ground of meaning-making itself, an awakening to the constitutive contingency of meaning, the realization that the structures of everyday life are historically and practically produced, and that their fragmentation opens a space for creative reconfiguration. This “renaissance” is neither an event nor a program, but a horizon of possibility that opens within the experience of fracture. It names the capacity of subjects to reorient themselves toward the ground of meaning-making when that ground has become unstable. It is not a solution to fracture, for fracture is irresolvable, but a mode of dwelling within it.

This understanding carries significant methodological implications. This study is not sociological or historical but purely philosophical. It cannot proceed by measuring the present against an idealized past, nor by projecting a predetermined, utopian future. Instead, it demands attentiveness to the emergent, to the ways subjects amidst fragmentation are already engaged in tentative practices of re-articulation. The task of the philosopher is not to prescribe a new order but to interpret these emergent forms of meaning-making, discerning within the fractures the seeds of new possibilities. Thus, this inquiry follows a constellation of questions forced upon us by the experience of a fractured lifeworld itself: how do subjects in fragmented contexts experience a lifeworld whose (reportedly) once-coherent forms are eroding? How do their practices and relations constitute modes of rethinking that might amount to nascent renaissance? To question philosophically is to hold the question above any tentative answer, and to recognize that the meaning of our condition is to be discovered through the very act of questioning the conditions of our existence.

The following sections pursue this constellation through three traditions, each offering a distinctive vocabulary for understanding the “fracture”. First, we turn to Husserl’s concept of lifeworld as the universal structure of self-evidences, which allows us to propose the concept of fractured lifeworlds. Second, we turn to Heidegger’s authentic and inauthentic Dasein, discussing Dasein’s worldliness in mass society as “disorientation”. Third, we turn to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh (la chair) and his account of intercorporeality, where fracture is grasped neither as a rupture within a horizon of self-evidences nor as a falling away from authentic disclosedness, but as the inherent reversibility and dehiscence of being itself, not a defect to be overcome but the ontological condition of relation. We then introduce the concept of “ultimate referentiality” as a framework for understanding fracture as the condition of possibility for social transformation. Finally, we return to the concept of renaissance itself, asking whether these traditions can articulate how a fractured lifeworld, a disoriented Dasein, and a dehiscing flesh might nonetheless give rise to new forms of sense, solidarity, and renewal, that is, whether fracture can be thought not only as loss but as the opening in which renaissance becomes thinkable.

2. Lifeworld and Dasein

The expositions that follow are not intended as introductions to Husserl, Heidegger, or Merleau-Ponty. Each thinker has been read, re-read, and contested by generations of interpreters, and no summary could do justice to that literature. What is offered instead is a selective and critical reconstruction: each concept is retrieved not for its own sake but for what it discloses about the structure of fracture, and each is measured against the interpretations that have sought to domesticate or dismiss it. Thus, Husserl’s lifeworld is read against the readings of Carr [3], Welton [4], and Zahavi [5], who have variously emphasized its transcendental, historical, and intersubjective dimensions; Heidegger’s fallenness is read against the debates between Dreyfus [6], Haugeland [7], and Thomson [8] over the status of das Man; and Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual field is read against the interpretations of Dreyfus [6], Kelly [9], and Hass [10], who have pressed the question of its normative and social constitution. The aim is not to survey these debates but to draw from them the resources needed for the argument and to mark, where necessary, the points at which the received interpretations obscure what is at stake.

To pinpoint the experience of a fractured lifeworld, we proceed by taking a certain interpretive trajectory that brings in line Husserl’s concept of lifeworld into line with Heidegger’s Dasein and inauthentic solicitude. The idea is to establish, conceptually, that what we suggest as the fractured lifeworld has its theoretical roots in the works of phenomenology’s founders, and consequently, the proposed idea of renaissance here aims to be a phenomenological contribution as well.

2.1. Fractured Lifeworld

It is known that Husserl developed the concept of “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) in Part III of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology in the 1930s, although the term had a brief appearance earlier in Cartesian Meditations (1929 lectures, published in 1931) [11] (p. 19). The context was his critique of the instrumental worldview (Weltanschauung) that dominated modern, Western science and pushed it further away from the original conception of universal knowledge. Put succinctly, Husserl argued that with the European Renaissance, the Galilean approach, and the idealization of the world through its mathematization, science, aided by technology, was compartmentalized into specific fields that sent into oblivion the collective presuppositions of the scientific community. In the last phase of his philosophy, therefore, Husserl sought to “reactivate” the lost unity of philosophy as rigorous science free of presupposition through transcendental phenomenology [2].

The concept of “lifeworld” emerged in this process, when Husserl registered that this approach to science had overshadowed the scientists’ lifeworld. He discovered that scientists presupposed an objective world that could be probed through their methodologies and experiments. This was the discovery of the tacit, scientific “natural attitude,” in which humans share the world as pregiven. To expose this pregiven world, the phenomenological attitude suspends, or rather “reduces,” through withholding or epoché, the natural attitude, in order to discover its intersubjective structure of meaning and knowledge. Entities thereby appear as phenomena, leading the phenomenologist to the formative moment, or Urstiftung, of the knowledge in question.

Phenomenologically, a human is inconceivable outside of a world (or multiple worlds). The English “world” does not quite do justice to the German “welt” which captures a set of human relations in their concrete totality. Alfred Schutz (1967) described it as the “meaningful construction of the social world” and Martin Heidegger as “what is, in its entirety” [12] (p. 129). In short, “insofar as I experience the world, I am within a world and can never be outside a world. As a structure of the being of humans, the world in which I live and perceive things is always mine but never mine alone. Although this world changes constantly, I am always aware, however implicitly, of its contours” [13] (p. 51). For Husserl, lifeworld refers to the “world of immediate experience,” and the “pretheoretical attitude of naïve world-life, and the lifeworld which is its horizon, are thus found to be prior to all theory, and not merely in the historical sense. In fact, they can be said to be necessarily prior historically because they are essentially prior at all times” [3] (p. xl; original emphasis). Lifeworld enables immediate access to things. Important for our study here is that lifeworld operationalizes a certain experience. As Schutz [14] (p. 73) puts it, the world is always co-experienced through an intimate circle (family and community) as well as those with whom I share space (coworkers) and the anonymous contemporaries. Driven by practical interests and not theoretical concerns, the natural attitude allows the world to be experienced as mine but also intersubjective. Therefore, the objective world is constructed through tacit, self-evident intersubjective concord of a world-sharing community (scientific or not). In other words, the pregivenness of the world affirms its objectivity, rendering the world immediately experienced. Thus, lifeworld refers to the realm of immediate self-evidences that are (physically) present and normally accessible within the pragmatic context of ongoing activity [2] (p. 127), [15] (p. 418). Lebenswelt comes with its own validity, and validity through operational presuppositions. Insofar as my world “works” for me, it remains valid in the natural attitude. Lifeworld is a structure but not a “purposeful structure,” although purposeful activities take place within it. In fact, as the universal structure of human understanding and (self-) knowledge, lifeworld precedes all-purpose activity [2] (p. 382). This means that humans invariably dwell in lifeworld, they occupy their own lifeworlds driven by practical interests.

For the sake of this paper, we focus on consciousness and intentionality among the many complex aspects of Husserl’s theory of lifeworld. For him, the discovery of lifeworld led to theorizing consciousness in terms of the correlation between the intended object of consciousness (noema) and the act of consciousness (noesis) that allows the entities to appear in a certain way to the experiencing or perceiving ego. A gift of transcendental reduction, the noema-noesis pair registers the unity of object and intuition. In the native, natural attitude, the pair solidly holds, and the surrounding world always remains interpreted in a meaningful way, even at times of dramatic change.

It is here that a critical tension in Husserl’s account becomes relevant. If the noema is the object as intended, and if the lifeworld is the horizon of self-evidences within which intentionality occurs, then the coherence of experience depends on a certain fit between noematic content and intuitive givenness; Husserl himself acknowledged that this fit can fail, most famously in the wax museum example, but also in his analyses of disappointment and perceptual conflict. Yet he tended to treat such failures as exceptional, corrigible, and ultimately reintegrated into a deeper harmony. Critics from Fink [16] to Derrida [17] to Zahavi have questioned this tendency. Derrida, in particular, argued that the possibility of non-fulfillment is not an accident of experience but its condition, since every intention carries within it the trace of what it excludes. If this is right, then fracture is not a deviation from the lifeworld’s normal functioning but a possibility inscribed in its very structure.

We noted that the lifeworld is not itself purposive, though purposes arise within it. Likewise, an object of consciousness is always an intended object: we experience things not in isolation but through intentional acts—judging, perceiving, remembering, wishing. Intentionality thus captures the diversity of experiences of a given object, and there is no consciousness without an object. As the founder of modern phenomenology, Husserl revealed the lifeworld as the universal structure of human experience and knowledge, though his phenomenology is far more complex than can be presented here. We offer a critical extension of Husserl in light of the conflicts of interpretation we experience today. The problem we pose is whether the lifeworld always retains its integrity and cohesion. What if the lifeworld is experienced in a fractured way, as the subject finds the unity of noema-noesis broken and intentional acts of knowing produce confusion and anxiety instead of reliable, actable knowledge? Our rapidly changing, digitized worldliness suggests this direction, just as many social movements register this fractured lifeworld as the world “falls apart” in the eyes of human subjects. Phenomenologically, the thematization of fractured lifeworld pushes the subject toward diverging, even contradictory, worldviews and a split horizon of futurity, with horizons that are difficult, at times impossible, to reconcile. The thematic lifeworld loses its coherence.

A concrete example may clarify what is meant. Consider a person in a modernizing society who falls ill. The traditional lifeworld interprets the illness through the horizon of witchcraft or ancestral displeasure; the biomedical lifeworld interprets it through the horizon of microbial infection. Both interpretations are internally coherent and practically actionable, yet they rest on incompatible noematic structures. The same bodily event is intended as both a social-spiritual transgression and a biological dysfunction. The subject cannot simply choose one without the other continuing to exert its claim, nor can the two be synthesized into a single horizon. The result is not uncertainty within a shared world but the experience of inhabiting two worlds whose noemata do not converge.

By the same token, in a Husserlian fashion, we might ask: what if the perception of an object does not accord with the intended object in one’s consciousness that one has habitually internalized in the natural attitude? And what if such discord constantly forces the subject to reevaluate the object but more importantly one’s own consciousness in an unsettled state? And what if the present perception clashes with the original intention? Are we not experiencing such disjointed worldliness every day? We submit that when the perception of an object does not accord with, or diverges from, the intended object in consciousness, the subject experiences a fractured lifeworld. We sense the fractured lifeworld in increasingly faltering human relations (even intimate relationships) in shrunken commodities, simulated food, failing products, divergence and conflict of societal values, and the broken promises (and lies) of our politicians.

Though having never developed these ideas in the direction of the present inquiry, early in his thinking, Husserl had already and brilliantly anticipated the lack of “fulfilment” of expectation and perception in his example of seeing a wax statue in a wax museum. The wax replica of a person can be sensed and perceived but does not satisfy the expectation of experiencing the original, real person [18] (pp. 219–245). Here, one finds one’s original intentional act betrayed. We initially dwell in such a state of disappointment when promises are not fulfilled. Our proposed “fractured lifeworld” arises from disappointing experiences like this. We intentionally choose the word “fracture” instead of somewhat equivalent words like “broken” or “torn” (they work too): like a fractured bone, a fractured lifeworld can “heal” and function again, although the experience and thus the memory of the fractured bone or lifeworld, healed or not, will always remain with the subject.

2.2. Dasein’s Inauthentic Existence

Is there a Heideggerian equivalent to fractured lifeworld? We argue that Heidegger’s concepts of Care and “inauthentic solicitude” lead in the same direction. To stay focused here, we must ignore the significant differences between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s philosophical approaches. To put it ultra-simply, Heidegger parted ways from Husserl by “suspending” the experiencing ego (which Husserl also abandoned in the 1930s but in the direction of an intersubjective lifeworld) and instead discovering existence as the structure of experience itself. Dasein’s facticity registers its “being-there” within a temporal horizon. To stay focused on our conceptual problem, we inevitably need to set aside several relevant concepts in Being and Time (1927).

Let us approach the problem through Care (Sorge) as the ontological structure of human existence, the way Heidegger approached Dasein. Heidegger’s Sorge reminds us of Husserl’s intentionality. For Heidegger, facticity captures the concrete conditions of one’s life. Thrownness (Geworfenheit), projection (Entwurf), and fallenness (Verfallenheit) constitute Dasein’s existential relationship to its world as a whole. Humans are thrown beings in that, by virtue of birth, they are riveted to a place and time that shapes up their actuals and potentials. Projection captures how Dasein conceives of its own possibilities and sees itself in the future, its “potentiality-for-being” and “being-ahead-of-itself” [19] (p. 179). Fallenness registers Dasein’s comportment toward other humans but also toward entities and objects.

Dasein is characterized by “mineness,” the being that I am, but concretely it is always codetermined by the world and by others and consociates [19] (p. 108). Practical and concrete, Dasein’s “being-in-the-world” simultaneously signifies being a human self and Mitsein, being-with or togetherness [19] (p. 107). Already determined universally but always already in a particular, historical, and concrete fashion, humans owe their inevitable, specific sociality to thrownness. Co-existence with other Daseins, being-there-with or Mitda-sein, “remains existentially constitutive for being-in-the-world” [19] (p. 114). This reveals the social character of Care as relational concern, which remains fundamental to Dasein. “The being to which Da-sein is related as being-with does not… have the kind of being of useful things at hand; it is itself Da-sein. This being is not taken care of, but is a matter of concern” [19] (p. 114). Being-with therefore registers a mutual relationship. Dasein cannot be alone. But Mitsein also exposes Dasein to the anonymous public. If Dasein’s thrownness (past) enables its projection (future) in a potentially open way, then Dasein’s genuine concern for its being will determine the extent and depth to which Dasein finds its ownmost potentials. However, every Dasein is also confronted with fallenness (present), an inescapable feature of mass society, one that mass society may aggravate but does not originate. The same averageness and idle talk can be found in the Gemeinschaft as in the Gesellschaft; what differs is their medium and scale, not their ontological character.

Heidegger speaks of the danger of Dasein’s “falling prey” to the masses, das Man or “the They” (or “Anyone”), characterized by averageness and “idle talk” that enfolds language, discourse, and communication in anonymous Gesellschaft. The “there” of being-there is caught in idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity that seize Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Idle talk registers “the mode of being of the understanding and interpretation of everyday Da-sein” [19] (p. 157), a certain “public interpretedness” [19] (p. 165) that leaves no or little room for Dasein’s genuine engagement. We confront this daily, especially in this age of digital social media, when people are loaded with directions in life through unqualified advice and propagate such knowledge by stating, “they or somebody said such and such. “This is a matter of public interpretedness, or better, a public being swayed to interpret and communicate in a certain direction. “The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its being public, but encourages it. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter” [19] (p. 158). Falling prey reveals an ontological aspect of Dasein. The anonymous “They,” with its gossip and idle talk, distracts Dasein from searching for its ownmost potentials. But it also creates a worldliness into which we fall and to which we belong, its ubiquity rendering it all the more difficult to resist and protect Dasein’s authenticity. There is no duality here. “Da-sein can fall prey only because it is concerned with understanding, attuned being-in-the-world” [19] (p. 167). Falling prey represents Dasein’s possibility for inauthentic existence—a possibility that blocks its potentials for authentic projection: a trap indeed (Verfallen as being “ensnared”) that occupies Dasein with pointless yet soothing busyness with tasks at hand. The “tranquillization in inauthentic being… does not seduce one into stagnation and inactivity, but drives one to uninhibited ‘busyness’” [19] (p. 166). In Heidegger’s words, “Existence is decided only by each Da-sein itself in the manner of seizing upon or neglecting such possibilities” [19] (p. 10). Note how Heidegger “individualizes” Dasein’s response.

Dasein’s concern for its surrounding environment (Umwelt) relates simultaneously to tasks, tools, and objects as well as Dasein’s relationship with other humans (Mitwelt), which Heidegger captured through the concept of “solicitude” (Fürsorge). For our purpose, we need to focus on the latter. Inauthentic Dasein lets itself be pushed into everydayness and the soothing presence of das Man, a worldliness with determinate outcomes and thus without original possibilities. In contrast, authentic (eigentlich; note: eigen, one’s “own”) Dasein’s response to the anxiety of existence is being-toward-death and exploring its own potentials. Authenticity is to be wrested away through inauthenticity, a road filled with anxiety (Angst). This requires intentional care and a turning away from the popular and sanctioned everyday busyness. This general structure of Sorge is reflected in human relations of Fürsorge.

Solicitude conceptualizes Dasein’s relationship with other Daseins. Both authentic and inauthentic solicitude constitute the existential dimension of Dasein and are rooted in its facticity, meaning they cannot be read as ethical concepts, though an ethical reading is possible at the expense of abandoning Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Authentic solicitude frees Dasein’s others, allowing them to stand in my world as my equals with related or converging horizons; it thus offers the principle of community and responds to anxiety in a productive, collective way. In contrast, inauthentic solicitude responds to anxiety by dominating others, imposing Dasein’s own weltanschauung upon them and reducing them to “objects” of its worldly concerns, evident in media manipulation of public opinion and politicians’ endless but consistently broken promises of a better society.

The success of inauthentic solicitude in swaying Dasein away from its potential for authentic existence resides with Husserlian “naïve world-life,” within which reside habitual worldviews and matter-of-factness of human collectives, feeding them with palpable and satiable, yet unreachable, horizons to overcome their anxiety. We suggest that inauthentic existence represents the fractured lifeworld that we previously proposed. Key differences between the two approaches notwithstanding, we suggest that just as the potential for lifeworld’s fracturedness resides in its concrete cohesiveness, so the possibility of inauthentic solicitude, as imposition and distraction, resides within Dasein’s search for its authenticity by being-toward-death. If following Heidegger, the genuine response to anxiety is authentic solicitude and being-toward-death, represented by Dasein’s horizon and intentionality, which is its projection, then inauthentic solicitude represents a type of intrusion, although always an ontological possibility, into Dasein’s own projection, degrading and exhausting Dasein’s potentials through an endless barrage of pejorative and mundane busyness of das Man in mass society. Inauthentic solicitude, therefore, represents the response of the fractured lifeworld, as it takes away Dasein’s ownmost way of dwelling in the lifeworld it shares with others. It may seem that das Man provides cohesion while authentic being-toward-death produces fracture. But the cohesion das Man provides is precisely what conceals the fracture, sustained as it is by the repression of the question of being. The distinction is therefore not between cohesion and fracture, but between a cohesion that conceals fracture and a fracture that opens the possibility of authentic cohesion.

2.3. Perceptual Disintegration and Fracturedness

Maurice Merleau-Ponty reframes what we call fractured lifeworld as a disruption within the perceptual field itself. For Merleau-Ponty, the lifeworld is the horizon of bodily engagement, a figure-background structure in which objects appear against a tacit, unthematized ground [20] (pp. 294–303). The “breaking” (or fracture) occurs when the habitual body’s “intentional arc” (arc intentionnel) is interrupted: when the familiar background becomes opaque, when the “I can” of bodily projects falters, and perception loses its seamless grip on the world. This is a phenomenological rupture, a crack in the sedimented harmony between body and world.

Such disruption can manifest through pathological conditions, wherein the body-subject—what Merleau-Ponty terms the corps proper—forfeits its synthetic capacity to organize sensory data into coherent perceptual gestalts [21] (pp. 94–95). In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates through analyses of phantom limb phenomena and anosognosia that the body schema operates not as a representational map but as a “field of structuralization or polarization,” a dynamic system of existential equilibrium that integrates sensory inputs into meaningful totalities [21] (pp. 84–85, 94). More generally, the lifeworld undergoes rupture when the intermodal integration that ordinarily binds our perceptions into a unified world fails—when the senses no longer collaborate in what Merleau-Ponty describes as the primordial “co-existence” of sensory fields, a synesthetic structure wherein each sense modality reverberates with the others [21] (pp. 229–230). This breakdown fundamentally destabilizes the “virtual” body—the intentional arc that, in Merleau-Ponty’s account, bridges the “here” of the perceiving subject to the “there” of the other, establishing the intersubjective space wherein the world appears as genuinely shared and coherent [21] (pp. 136–137, 353). When this intercorporeal bridge collapses, the very condition of possibility for the constitution of a common world is threatened, leaving the subject suspended between the fragments of a disintegrating perceptual field.

Merleau-Ponty’s later work, The Visible and the Invisible [22] and The Prose of the World [23], expands this account. The lifeworld becomes a field of virtual possibilities (virtualités), a “flesh” (chair) of the world pregnant with multiple adumbrations intended as open horizons. These indeterminate zones give perception its depth, temporal thickness, and intersubjective resonance. The breaking occurs when these virtualities are foreclosed—when the open horizon contracts into a closed system of fixed actualities. Fracture, here, is the ossification of the perceptual field: the reduction of the living, polymorphous world to a dead, univocal object.

The same logic applies here. Ossified perception may seem to provide stability, while lively perception appears destabilizing. But the stability of ossification is the stability of habit, a stability purchased at the cost of the living openness of the perceptual field. The “fracture” of lively perception is not a defect but the truth of the perceptual field’s constitutive openness. The distinction is not between stability and instability but between a stability that forecloses possibility and an instability that sustains it.

This is why literature acquires phenomenological significance: unlike philosophy, which analyzes and conceptualizes, literature has the capacity to show the lifeworld and its paradoxes indirectly. Through indirect language (langage indirect), poetic expression, and narrative ambiguity, literature evokes the pre-thematic, pre-predicative unity of the perceptual world, the “latent logos” that animates bodily engagement [23] (p. 125). Literature does not explain the lifeworld; it exhibits it, revealing the “chiasm” (entrelacs) of subject and object, visible and invisible. In this sense, the literary text becomes a site for remembering the fractured lifeworld, not by repairing its fractures, but by rendering them esthetically visible.

2.4. Discussion and Synthesis

From Husserl’s lifeworld to Heidegger’s analytic of solicitude (Fürsorge), this inquiry moves toward the ontological foundations of modernity’s existential disorientation. Heidegger does not merely supplement Husserl. He displaces the terrain on which the question of the lifeworld is posed, transforming it from a problematic of transcendental constitution into a question of existential-ontological disclosure (Erschlossenheit). The diagnostic question thus becomes: what manner of being does this lifeworld possess, prior to any thematization by constituting consciousness? Husserl’s response remains rigorously immanent: the lifeworld is the a priori horizon of constitutive subjectivity, recoverable through the self-explication (Selbstauslegung) of transcendental consciousness. Yet in remaining within this horizon, Husserl leaves the ontological status of the horizon itself unasked. The scientific idealizations he critiques as a “garb of ideas” (Ideenkleid) are, from a Heideggerian standpoint, not merely epistemological abstractions but a mode of ontological disclosure in which Dasein, having fallen into the publicness of das Man, interprets itself through the dominant interpretive horizon of the They. What Husserl describes as the concealment of the lifeworld beneath the “garb of ideas” finds its Heideggerian counterpart in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of being-in-the-world—a mode of existence in which Dasein, absorbed in everyday dealings, remains ontologically blind to its own existential possibilities.

The synthesis proposed here is not without precedent in the critical literature. Carr [3] has argued for the continuity of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s projects around the concept of the lifeworld, Zahavi [5] has insisted on the centrality of intersubjectivity across both, and Dreyfus [6] and Kelly [9] have brought Merleau-Ponty into dialog with Heidegger on the question of skillful coping, What distinguishes the present account is its focus on fracture as the unifying thread. Not the constitution of meaning, but its disintegration; not the achievement of coherence, but its loss. What emerges from the three expositions is not three separate phenomena but three layers of a single structure. Noematic slippage (Husserl) establishes the condition under which inauthentic solicitude (Heidegger) can divert Dasein from its ownmost projection, and this diversion in turn interrupts the intentional arc (Merleau-Ponty), breaking the perceptual field’s grip on the world. Conversely, perceptual disintegration can precipitate noematic conflict, which then exposes Dasein to the leveling sway of das Man. The three dimensions thus co-implicate one another: each is a moment of the “same” fractured lifeworld, and none can be adequately understood in isolation from the others. To attend to only one, say, the epistemic without the existential, or the perceptual without the noematic, is to mistake a partial description for the whole. Fracture, phenomenologically understood, is this interlaced structure; and it is precisely because the three moments reinforce one another that the condition is so resistant to any simple remedy. This synthesis will govern the analysis that follows.

So, we can interpretively state that while Dasein theoretically is always endowed and remains able to retain its authenticity in Heidegger, the overwhelming presence of distracting public sway wrests away that potential from Dasein, thereby forcing Dasein into a “fractured” existence in the sense that Dasein’s authentic self-fulfillment and projection are torn away from its potential when Dasein loses itself to inauthentic solicitude exercised by others that dominate Dasein.

Yet this synthesis leaves an unresolved tension. If literature can only render fracture visible, can it also heal it? Or does esthetic exhibition merely confirm the rupture without offering transformation? Moreover, Merleau-Ponty’s account remains tethered to the individual body and its perceptual field, offering little regarding the collective, historical, or cosmological dimensions of fracture. It is precisely these dimensions that direct us to Vahabzadeh [24,25], who reframes the question of the fractured lifeworld in terms of ultimate referentiality, arguing that fracture is not merely perceptual but epistemic and historical, the result of the collapse of the ultimate foundations that once unified the lifeworld into a coherent totality. The following section turns to this alternative framework. We submit that when the perception of an object does not accord with, or diverges from, the intended object in consciousness, the subject experiences a fractured lifeworld, a fundamental discordance between perceptual givenness and noematic intention that destabilizes the very ground of meaning-constitution.

3. Identity and Action in the Age of Fractures

At the heart of this approach is the question of human action in a world where traditional systems of meaning, traditions, norms, laws, and grand narratives, have lost their efficacy. This paper now explores how, conceptually, the fractured lifeworld, inauthentic solicitude, and perceptual disruption may actually produce a proper mode of action for this age. We should now proceed in two steps: first, we need to attend to the epistemology proper to this age of fragmentation, and then we proceed to offer the contours of this mode of action.

3.1. Ultimate Referents

The epistemic position proper to the fractured lifeworld appears in the post-Heideggerian philosophy of epochs advanced by Reiner Schürmann. He proposed the concept of “ultimate referents” to refer to exalted and supreme justifications of acting and thinking that govern an age [19] (p. 8148). Referring to the history of metaphysics in the West, from the classical Greeks to Romans to medieval Christianity to modernity, he defined epochs as successive periods in which modes of thinking and acting are anchored to a presumed ultimate referent—respectively, arché, natura, God, and rational animal—promoted by the philosopher. He speaks of these epochs as successive “broken hegemonies” [26], each rising on the ruins of the previous one.

Before turning to Schürmann, it is necessary to acknowledge a debt that has shaped the present argument. Vahabzadeh’s work on “ultimate referentiality” provides the conceptual bridge between the phenomenological analyses of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty and the epochal theory of Schürmann. Vahabzadeh argues that fracture is not merely perceptual or existential but epistemic and historical: it results from the collapse of the ultimate foundations that once unified the lifeworld into a coherent totality. His account of “experiential hegemonies”, the way a dominant knowledge structure organizes doxic experience according to its founding principles, is presupposed throughout the following analysis. The turn to Schürmann is therefore not a turn away from Vahabzadeh but a deepening of his insight into the epochal structure of referentiality.

Schürmann’s claim is not merely that epochs differ in their ruling ideas; it is that the structure of referentiality itself, the compulsion to ground thought and action in an ultimate justification, remains constant even as its contents change. What interests us phenomenologically is not the catalog of referents, but the epistemic practice of ultimate referentiality as such: the demand that meaning be secured by a final ground. This demand, we argue, is what fractures from within, and its fracturing is what the three phenomenologists registered avant la lettre. The point is thus not historical but structural: the very form of foundational justification contains the seed of its own dissolution.

According to Schürmann, these epochs arise from singular experiences that were then, thanks to the efforts of philosophers (and theologians), maximized into universal laws that impose norms that define the ambits of doable and actable in each period [25] (p. 26). The principle (principium) of knowledge comes in a package with authority (princeps) [19] (pp. 106–119). Ultimate referents change from an epoch to the next, but the essence of referential justifications for thinking, that is, mooring thinkable and doable in each period to an exalted ultimacy that is constructed by philosophy, remains constant. He calls these justifications for the ultimate referents “fantasms” [25] (p. 26).

“Ultimate referentiality” is not the realist expectation that referents validate our intentions, nor is it a general deconstructionist theme. It is a specific epistemic practice: the demand that thought and action be secured by a final, non-negotiable ground. Schürmann calls the content of such a ground a “fantasm” not because it is illusory, but because it functions as a foundation while itself lacking one. The paradox is structural. The referent supposed to ground all justification cannot itself be justified without circularity. As long as this paradox remains concealed, the regime of knowledge appears apodictic; when it becomes visible, the referent loses its self-evidence and the lifeworld fractures. Ultimate referentiality, in short, is the form of foundational justification, and fracture is the moment of its disclosure.

Generally speaking, these fantasms govern acting and thinking in a certain age. The dominant epistemology and the sanctioned source of knowledge in each epoch are anchored to the ultimate referent of that age, like God for the medieval epoch and rational sciences for the moderns. We can extend Schürmann’s concept of the ultimate referent in a nuanced way by suggesting “ultimate referentiality” as the epistemic practice of actively seeking an ultimate justification for our theories. And when no immediate “ground” for a theory can be found, the philosopher proposes one, while in fact that which had appeared to the philosopher’s view did not arise from the coveted ground [19].

Just as Schürmann argues about the rise and fall of ultimate referents as they constitute hegemonies that are broken from within, so we can submit that the epistemological appeals to finality and absolute authority inevitably develop fissures within themselves when confronted with living, fluid, and changing human experiences.

As such and in light of Schürmann’s theory of epochs, we are able to read Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty through the lens of ultimate referentiality. Does this not reveal that each thinker, in his own way, was describing a structure of experience that becomes visible when ultimate justifications lose their self-evidence? Once again, the claim is not historical but phenomenological. This is the direction of our interpretation. In a way, these three engagements “anticipated” Schürmann’s critique of ultimate referents, or, inversely, Schürmann’s theory represents a culmination of the inevitable epistemic directions of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. As ultimacies lose their hold on our experiences and knowledge, we inevitably witness the fracture. What is at stake here is not the general deconstructionist refusal of foundationalism, but a more specific claim that follows from Schürmann’s account: ultimate referentiality is Vahabzadeh’s expansion of Schürmann’s concept, taking it in the direction of critical epistemology. The structure of foundational justification is not something we can simply reject, but something that fractures from within. The task is not to refuse foundations, but to inhabit the moment of their disclosure, the moment when the referent that secures thought and action loses its self-evidence.

Now that we have established the epistemic break of our age, we turn to the contours of the mode of action proper to this epistemic reality.

3.2. Articulation of Experiences and Fragmented Identity-Formation

Lifeworld, Being-with, and perception position the subject vis-à-vis the facticity (Heidegger) of their world-life or Weltleben (Husserl) according, respectively, to horizons and intentionalities, Care and solicitude, and the intentional arc and intercorporeal synthesis (arc intentionnel and synthèse intercorporelle). Such structural positioning informs human identity and thereby the modes of action proper to that identity. But now we need to probe how identity and action are shaped by the experience of fracture, inauthentic solicitude, and fragmentation of perception when dominant ultimacies—that is, stable referential horizons and normative intentionalities—are no longer available to the subject.

A cohesive, intersubjective lifeworld and authentic existence in the community of authentic solicitude allow for the conditions in which the subject’s experience coheres with the collective horizon. The experience of such a life is already articulated through the availability of a stable referential point and its emanating horizons. Here, we use the term “articulation” in a specific way: first, in the rhetorical sense as in French les articulations which denotes the joints. This is when (possibly unrelated) phenomena are connected together by virtue of the speaker’s discourse. Secondly, following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, we take articulation as a mode of praxis that links identity to a certain horizon through the subject’s decision. Here, “articulation” is defined as “any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice. The structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice, we will call discourse” [21] (p. 105).

Now, if a fractured lifeworld and inauthentic solicitude have concretely crystallized in fragmented identities as the signature of our age of irreducible plurality of peoples as well as diverging and conflicting worldviews (and thus politics), then phenomenologically we realize that, far from being cohesive by virtue of adherence to normative principles or fixed essences, the mosaic horizons of identities can only come together in a composite way through articulation [24]. Therefore, the condition of possibility of the articulation of identities is indeed the fractured lifeworld and inauthentic solicitude of das Man that surround Dasein. Fracture here signifies the very possibility of re-articulation: every identity articulated within a specific historical context inevitably undergoes internal ruptures, creating the conditions for new forms of articulation to emerge. Following Laclau and Mouffe, such articulations totalize within discourse [21] (p. 105). Following Schurmann, we can assert that such discourses become possible through the possibilities of an epoch. According to this framework, each epoch is defined by its own characteristic forms of articulation and action, and the transition from one epoch to the next necessarily involves the fracture of prior forms of agency and identity. Fracture, in this sense, is the engine of historical transformation.

3.3. Urstiftung and the Unfracturable

Here we arrive at a more subtle concept in this approach: in Husserlian phenomenology, the “originary foundation” (Urstiftung) refers to those foundational moments in history when a primordial experience opens a new horizon of meaning and establishes new norms. These are opening moments when new possibilities emerge. Later Husserl [2] (p. 56) spoke of it with respect to the origins of mathematical natural science. Husserl also acknowledged that there is an endpoint, a final formation or Endstiftung to every Urstiftung [2] (p. 72). He did not see it, as did Schürmann, that Urstiftung might account for the conditions of decline of that which it founds. For Schürmann [26], the history of the Western metaphysics shows that hegemonic epistemic regimes that hinged on ultimate referents have a lifespan due to their original foundation. As Reiner Schürmann [26] (p. 53) states, “a domain of the possible and necessary is instituted, endures for a time, and then cedes under the effect of a mutation.” For our discussion here, what remains “unfracturable” is the very possibility of fracture itself—the inherent capacity of lifeworld to lose its cohesion, and Dasein’s ontological possibility to find its authentic existence lost to inauthentic solicitude.

For us, the key question for a philosophy of fracture should be: is the originary foundation itself destined for fracture? Philosophically, the question can only be answered in a metatheoretical, indeed metaphysical, fashion, because we have no access to the original foundation of that which surrounds us (and makes this question possible) from outside of the structural totality born out of that very Urstiftung. Our response inevitably resides with the way we started this article: the response can only arise from the facticity of today’s world-life and our lived experiences of it, or, stated differently, the only satisfactory response ends up being empirical and historical. This is not a concession to historicism, but a recognition of the transcendental-historical character of the inquiry, as clarified in the introduction.

For Schürmann [26], every originary foundation, over time, solidifies into a hegemony, an internalized dominant epistemology that appropriates the lived experience of humans by constraining, ordering, and thus governing the originary (pre-hegemonic) experience into an epistemic framework, in an anticipative attempt to prevent fracturing, but it paradoxically becomes susceptible to fracture and collapse precisely because the entire edifice of the knowledge subsequent to the original foundation was permeated by its own demise. In other words, as long as such a regime of knowledge is hegemonic, it remains apodictic. Following an earlier work, we call epistemically framed experiences under a regime of knowledge “experiential hegemonies” [24] (pp. 57–69). So, the dominant knowledge organizes the worldviews, lifeworlds, and life activity of the subjects according to its founding principles, “the ‘matching’ nexus between doxic experience and epistemic truth” [24] (p. 67, original emphasis).

It is certainly possible to romanticize (and mobilize) the (allegedly) cohesive identities and modes of practices of yesteryear. However, we move in the opposite direction. We propose that today’s fragmented identities actually reveal new possibilities. Given the fracture, identity and practice break free from dominant epistemologies, release subjects from experiential hegemonies, and open new horizons for identity and practice.

3.4. Collective Praxis and Radical Phenomenology

The question posed at the beginning of this section can now be addressed concretely. A social movement, philosophically defined, is not a sociological aggregate but a collective praxis emerging when the ultimate referents securing a lifeworld lose their self-evidence. Melucci offers a definition consonant with this claim: social movements are “a form of collective action that implies solidarity, […] that is immersed in a conflict, and therefore in opposition to an adversary” [27]. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of institution, developed in his 1954–1955 Collège de France lectures [28], this praxis can be specified as an embodied, temporal process, at once instituted (perpetuating historical resources) and instituting (directed toward a transformed future). Habermas locates it at the point where the system colonizes the lifeworld [29]; Touraine specifies its structure through the combination of a principle of identity, a principle of opposition, and a principle of totality [30]. What unites these accounts is the treatment of social movements as fragile, revocable practices of articulation that generate orientation without a foundation.

This account of collective praxis must be distinguished from two inadequate alternatives. The first is the liberal conception of social movements as aggregations of individual preferences, in which collective action is merely the sum of private decisions. Phenomenologically, this misses the constitutive role of Mitsein: the movement does not presuppose already-constituted subjects who then decide to cooperate; it is the very medium through which new forms of subjectivity are articulated. The second alternative is the foundationalist conception of movements as vehicles for a pre-given truth, whether natural law, historical necessity, or national destiny. This misses the constitutive contingency that fracture discloses: the movement’s orientation is not discovered but produced, and its authority resides not in its correspondence to a referent but in its capacity to sustain collective life.

The phenomenological structure of this praxis can be described in three moments. First, there is the moment of detachment: the identity that was experienced as natural, given, and self-evident is disclosed as contingent, constructed, and historically produced. This disclosure is not a theoretical insight but a lived rupture, the noematic slippage through which a previously secure meaning loses its self-evidence. Second, there is the moment of re-articulation: the fragments are brought into a new configuration through a collective decision that has no guarantee. This is the work of articulation in Laclau and Mouffe’s sense [31] (p. 105), a practice that establishes relations among elements such that their identity is modified in the process. Third, there is the moment of sedimentation: the new articulation, if it endures, becomes habitual, embodied, and self-evident, but never permanently so, since the contingency of its origin can always be re-disclosed. The movement thus lives in the tension between the fragility of its foundation and the durability of its effects.

The political significance of this account lies in its refusal of both nostalgia and utopia. Nostalgia seeks to restore the lost referent; utopia seeks to install a new one. Radical praxis does neither. It inhabits the fracture as the very condition of its possibility, and it demonstrates that collective life can be sustained without the guarantee that foundationalism promised. This is what the paper has called “renaissance,” not the restoration of a lost order, but the cultivation of re-orientation without foundation. And it is in the movements of our age, whatever their particular content, that this renaissance is most visibly at work.

4. Conclusions: The Convergence of Fracture and Creation

What fundamentally distinguishes this framework from passive nihilism or post-structuralist narratives of sheer dissolution is not the mere acknowledgment of ruptures, but the vital praxis of their dynamic inhabitation, a praxis that transfigures everyday existence into a site of perpetual re-signification within the very tissue of fissures. We may designate this as “poetic life” (a modern enactment of poiesis): a mode of being wherein human praxis, collectively enacted and often animating social movements, constitutes not a reactive submission to structural wounds [24], but a form of sociocultural renaissance, a renaissance in which every crack becomes not the locus of collapse but the generative ground for emergent meaning and the re-creation of quotidian action. At its most radical, the fractured lifeworld is not a pathology but a creative condition (conditio creativa), an opening wherein fracture ceases to be terminal and becomes the arduous art of rethinking entrenched systems of signification.

If an example is sought, one need not look only to the present. The Axial Age, the extraordinary proliferation of epistemically creative movements across China, India, Greece, and Persia between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, offers a historical instance of what we are calling “poetic life.” These movements did not restore a lost coherence; they generated new horizons of meaning from within the breakdown of older sacrificial and cosmological orders. What distinguishes them is not the content of their visions but their mode of production: they articulated new ways of being-together without appealing to an ultimate referent of the previous age that could secure them in advance.

A challenge might arise: if fracture reveals that no ultimate ground can be relied upon, does the subject not still need some epistemic support for meaningful comportment—and if so, has nothing been gained? The objection presupposes that orientation requires foundation. We deny the equivalence. What human beings require is not a ground but a direction: a horizon that renders action possible without claiming necessity or universality. A foundation answers “why this and not otherwise?” once and for all; a direction answers it provisionally, revocably, and in awareness of its contingency. Renaissance, then, is neither the restoration of a foundation nor the embrace of groundlessness, but the cultivation of orientation without foundation, the capacity to project fragile, revisable horizons within which collective life can be sustained. The paradox is not resolved but inhabited; and inhabiting it, rather than solving it, is what the age of fracture demands.