The Symphony of Sentience, in Cosmos and Life:
In Memoriam A.-T.T.
In this tribute to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, I will examine whether phenomenology, as a cognitive enterprise of sentience, extends beyond the death of the physical body. In the First Movement, Allegro, I will set the stage by drawing distinctions between sentience as viewed in the Phenomenology of Life and intentionality of consciousness as viewed in cognitive phenomenology, which features a strong legacy of Husserl’s ideas. In the Second Movement, Moderato, I will follow the Tymienieckian thread of sentience in the labyrinth of life in order to show the ontopoietic patterns of complexity and emergence in animate and inanimate nature. I will establish a link between the Phenomenology of Life and complexity theory. As the dance of nonlinear complexity of the brain and the so called qualia of thought unfolds in the Third Movement, Minuet, the informational patterns of consciousness, cosmos and life are recognized as sentience. Whence, sentience is not a property of the human brain, but rather, is borrowed from the cosmos and appropriated as the self in the human condition; inter-subjectivity is a derivative of sentience, and subjectivity is an instance of inter-subjectivity. Since sentience brings with it intuition of life, intuition continues in dying and has no reason not to continue beyond. In the Fourth Movement, Finale Glorioso, I will describe patterns of sentience in the soul’s final ascent, and honor the intuitional gifts which proceed from the passage of a great soul.