Dynamics of Oikeiosis. Familiarity and trust as basic elements of an intersubjective anthropology and their significance for psychopathology.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Fuchs
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 513696000

Familiarity and trust form an indispensable basis of human coexistence. Familiarity manifests itself in our habitualized, affective-atmospheric relationship to the environment, trust in our communicative and affective interactions. Only on this basis can the intersubjectively mediated appropriation of the world succeed in a way that enables the unfolding of potentials and relationships typical of human beings, and that can also be called Oikeiosis (“housing” or “indwelling”). This basis of the social life tends to become precarious in our increasingly fragmented and complex lifeworld. Therefore, the goal of the research project “Dynamics of Oikeiosis” is to elucidate the phenomenology and interrelation of familiarity and trust. The hypothesis of the project is that familiarity and trust form a mutually influencing dynamic that is constitutive for processes of participatory sense-making. In these processes, the social world and the environment are formed and acquire their culture- and milieu-specific significance for the interaction partners. Familiarity and trust necessarily entail vulnerability. Therefore, a successful dynamic of familiarity and trust can be distinguished from a failing one. The project describes the successful dynamic as Oikeiosis. The failing dynamic appears in phenomena of alienation (e.g., conspiracy myths) and paranoid delusions, which are analyzed in contrasting juxtaposition. The dynamics of familiarity and trust and their conditions of success involve cognitive and affective characteristics that will be investigated in two closely cooperating subprojects: (1) The first subproject investigates the constitutive role of familiarity and trust based on the understanding of language and shared reference to the world. For this purpose, it starts from the problem of radical interpretation and analyzes the enabling role of familiarity and trust for understanding in communicative processes of participatory sense-making. As a contrasting phenomenon, the project investigates the loss of familiarity and trust in schizophrenic delusions. (2) The second subproject explores the phenomenon of affective attunement to social environments. It will be shown that familiarity and trust in their qualitative dimension are a necessary condition for collective affective attitudes. The project substantiates the concept of an “affective niche construction” with phenomenological and enactivist methods. Contrastingly, the second subproject examines forms of collective affective alienation and loss of trust, in which a deficit of relational autonomy becomes apparent. The research project combines four methodological approaches: (A) phenomenological analyses of intentionality, (B) enactivist frameworks, (C) conceptual analyses of social epistemology and philosophy of mind, and (D) phenomenological psychopathology.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants