What does it mean to be a "we"?
We say the word casually — we believe, we decided, we suffered — yet behind it lies one of the deepest puzzles of human existence. When two or more individuals constitute a we, something new comes into being. But what, exactly? And what does belonging to a we do to the self?
In this conversation, Poorvam International Journal of Creative Arts and Cultural Expressions speaks with Prof. Dan Zahavi — Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen — on his landmark work Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Drawing on the early phenomenological tradition — Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Max Scheler, Gerda Walther, Aron Gurwitsch, Alfred Schutz — Zahavi constructs a bold new account of collective life: the complex, irreducible interrelation between I, you, and we, and the ways each transforms the others.
The conversation covers:
The phenomenological tradition and its resources for social ontology
How we-experience transforms selfhood, perception, and world-orientation
The relationship between individual subjectivity and collective life
What Husserl, Stein, and Scheler saw that contemporary philosophy is still catching up to
The dialogue between phenomenology and the social sciences
The ethics and fragility of we: how a we forms, endures, and falls apart
About the speaker:
Dan Zahavi is one of the foremost phenomenologists working today. His books include Self and Other (2014), Husserl's Legacy (2017), Phenomenology: The Basics (2019/2025), and Subjectivity and Selfhood (2005). His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
About PIJCACE:
Poorvam International Journal of Creative Arts and Cultural Expressions is a peer-reviewed journal committed to rigorous, cross-disciplinary inquiry at the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics, and the arts.
📩 editor@poorvam.com
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Part of the PIJCACE Authors in Conversation series.
