Mistrust in the World: From Perceptual Faith to Familiarity

Recent phenomenological research on limit-experiences has witnessed an increasing interest in the idea of “basic trust,” commonly interpreted in light of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “perceptual faith”. However, I argue that basic trust is not reducible to perceptual faith, insofar as losing one’s perceptual grip on the world completely obstructs one’s access to the world. Instead, I propose an interpretation of basic trust in accordance with Heidegger’s hermeneutical notion of familiarity (Vertrautheit), which accommodates two fundamental traits of basic trust that, when couched in perceptual terms, become irreconcilable. First, basic trust must be understood as a world-disclosive experience that lays the ground for being-in-the-world. Second, due to its inherent vulnerability, basic trust must be liable to loss. Following Blankenburg, I argue that this is the case with schizophrenia, which I interpret as a dynamic process of defamiliarization followed by the inextricable attempt at refamiliarization with an alien world.