Beschrijving
Crisis and disruption can induce feelings of self-loss, instability and fragmentation, but they can also be a catalyzer for connecting to the core of who you are and what is really essential. As Hegel says, living from crisis to crisis, feeling an ongoing urgency to ‘respond’, is not the result of disruptions outside but a lack of resilience within. It is in this search for resilience that I put forward the question: is it possible to find a comprehensive and foundational philosophy of communication?For good reasons, many philosophers consider communication – or at least some forms of communication – to be a defining characteristic of what is means to be human. However, these approaches place communication in the context of specific questions – What is the nature of consciousness? Why do we have language? How can political power be reconciled with freedom? – rather than placing communication in the center of the question itself. The concept of communication has great explanatory power, but the question remains: what is communication? I argue that to answer this question, we have to look at communication as a professional reflective practice.
It is not easy to find an approach to professional communication that lends itself to something ontological, or perhaps even metaphysical. There is a lot of knowledge and skills involved in professional communication, but there is not one core activity; in that sense, it is not a craft. Communication theory tends to be an aggregate of different outlooks and borrowed methodologies, anchored in other disciplines, like psychology, sociology and anthropology. Also, the development of professional communication is mainly driven by external societal and technological developments like (mass) mediatization, market globalization and political emancipation, rather than a search for the true nature of communication.
However, there is one competency often attributed to the communication professional that lends itself for deep philosophical analysis: sensitivity to the environment – be it organizations, society or other stakeholders. Environmental sensitivity is a fundamental competency, but it is not knowledge or skill. It is not an instrument but rather something that the communication professional has to be – as a mode of existence. And what is more, environmental sensitivity plays a key role in metaphysics since the late 18th Century, especially in continental philosophy. Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty all stress, in distinct ways, the importance of ‘transcendental openness’ to what is present to us but appears to come from outside of us – whether you call it Ding-an-sich, Epoche, or simply Otherness.
In this paper, I use this philosophical tradition to make explicit how professional communication not only instrumentalizes communication in terms of knowledge and skills, but also appeals to this fundamental mode of existence. I argue that this does justice to communication as a reflective practice and provides a philosophical grounding for communication theory that appeals to a metaphysical understanding of what communication in itself is: openness as an existential mode. In that sense, environmental sensitivity is what makes professional communication a resilient reflective practice.
| Periode | 27 sep 2024 |
|---|---|
| Evenementstitel | 10th European Communication Conference |
| Evenementstype | Congres |
| Locatie | Ljubjana, SloveniëToon op kaart |
| Mate van erkenning | Internationaal |