War! Phenomenon Worth Studying

Abstract

The paper argues for reconsidering war from a phenomenological perspective as a transformative phenomenon of lived experience. Drawing on Heidegger, it examines war as a historically produced mode of being-in-the-world that reorganises Dasein’s relation to (1) mortality by making death appear as an unpredictable and close possibility; (2) time and space, by suspending stable temporal horizons and rendering familiar spaces uncanny; (3) embodiment, by being both enacted by human bodies and suffered through them, and also capable of reshaping the bodily “I can”; (4) Others and the World itself, by producing a crisis of Dasein through the confrontation between fear and anxiety that may have a generative effect, such as a leap to authentic life and re-evaluation of one's values. A phenomenological approach, therefore, reveals war not merely as the World’s destruction or political misstep or tactic, but as a condition under which these radical transformations become possible.