A Phenomenological Encounter with the Covid 19 Crisis Focused on Boundary Situations

By taking a phenomenological approach in examining the Covid crisis, this paper investigates aspects of the Corona phenomenon that remain hidden and allows them to self-reveal. I begin by situating the Coronavirus in the context of pandemic crises to examine its various dimensions. Following this introduction, I argue that the current crisis has made humanity cognizant of disasters caused by human action, compelling humans to confront, and reflect on them. As a result, the individual’s relationship with self, national culture, nature, other, God, and science has been greatly challenged. These challenges could best be explained using philosophical conceptions of “boundary situation”,” recognition”, “Gestell”, “other”, “the name of God”, and the “crisis of science”, respectively. For methodical reasons however, I only attend to the relationship with self and the concept of “boundary situation”, coined by Karl Jaspers. The main characteristics of “boundary situations”, antinomy and foundering, as well as four specific boundary situations, namely suffering, struggle, guilt and death are discussed to demonstrate that the Coronavirus crisis has caused general situations to switch places with boundary situations. Under normal circumstances, boundary situations would be at the periphery of general situations. In the current Covid state, the general situation founded on awareness is at the periphery of the existential crisis in boundary situations. It is therefore necessary that the encounter with this crisis shifts from the existentiell to the existential level and from stemming from human existence to general situations facing Dasein.