Romano's Advenant and Steinbock's Self and the Myself

 So far, I've attempted to forge an alliance between Anthony Steinbock’s version of givenness (the self and the Myself) and Hedwig Conrad-Martius’s Realontologie. This integration redresses a possible liability of mainstream French phenomenology—namely, the tendency of Jean-Luc Marion’s "saturated phenomenon" to inflict a jolt so severe upon the subject that attempts to describe it necessitates a methodological shift into theology (from aletheia to apokalypsis). By anchoring the human receiver within an ontologically prior, unified architecture, I have suggested that human finitude is already real and structurally proportioned to experience excess without undergoing total annihilation.

Yet, as phenomenology is made to answer to realism, a methodological friction emerges. The co-primordial pairing of the self (the localized, chronological, and intentional witness) and the Myself (the unique field of the call) might take on the appearance of a rigid, bifurcated mechanics. If the self and the Myself are framed too strictly as adamantine, architectural coordinates, the framework risks mimicking the very Husserlian formalities it seeks to soften. If the very real structures of reception become too porcelain, they might lose the capacity to navigate in real time the fluid, unexpected, and potentially shattering nature of life as it is actually lived. To achieve a more phenomenologically economical account of finite reception, I now ask this question: What if Claude Romano’s concept of the advenant encompasses Steinbock’s structures of the self and Myself?

Claude Romano’s evential hermeneutics (herméneutique événementiale) offers philosophy a remarkably supple baseline for subjectivity by replacing Heidegger’s projecting Dasein with the advenant—the one to whom events happen, the one who arrives by virtue of what befalls them. By allowing the advenant to absorb and express the self/Myself dynamic, we do not abandon Steinbock’s structural insights; rather, we compress them into a highly economical and fluid operational baseline. For Romano, the advenant is "the very humanity of human being," and the ability and willingness to "undergo the unsubstitutable experiences of what happens to him or her" (There Is, 219).

The advenant represents the native resilience, openness and willingness to receive reality. It is human finitude understood not as a brittle, defensive perimeter or a static container, but as an inherently plastic clearing. When the advenant embraces the self and the Myself, these two terms cease to look like separate rooms within a psychological sanctuary. Instead, the "Self" becomes the advenant’s ongoing, chronological engagement with the world—the necessary maintenance of a worldly horizon, the situated stance that records the ticking of the clock and handles the daily traffic of objects.The "Myself" becomes the advenant’s permanent, exposed vulnerability to the vertical breakthrough—the unique, non-interchangeable locus where the impact of an event resonates, even long after its chronological window has closed.

By synthesizing these frameworks under the banner of the advenant, we achieve a refreshing phenomenological elasticity: all rich phenomena are eventive. Reality does not arrive as a collection of flat, passive sense-contents waiting for an intentional gaze to permit their existence; reality arrives under its own momentum as an event. The advenant is the precise name for a finite subject that is plastic enough and supple enough to be pressured, shaped, and continuously re-authored by any reality that manifests. This evential embrace secures an absolute balance of ontological gravity on both sides of givenness. 

When the advenant is grounded in a realist framework, subjectivity is granted an independent density that matches the independent density of the world. On the side of the phenomenon, we retain Conrad-Martius’s Selbsträgerschaft (self-carriage) and Leibhaftigkeit (bodily presence). A real entity stands and grounds itself independently, drawing from an autonomous, trans-temporal depth of being. On the side of the subject, the advenant is not a blank void or a helpless victim of excess; it is an equally real, finite entity whose structural openness is inherently wired for reception.

When a rich, eventive phenomenon manifests—whether it is the raw, unmitigated weight of a dying patient at the medical bedside, the optical eclipse of liturgical proskynesis at the surface of a venerated icon, or the vertical calling of a profound moral emotion—the encounter is registered not as an external, destructive trauma, but as an ontological transmission of weight and duration. The event does not destroy the subject; it leans into it. Because the advenant is supple and plastic, it holds the capacity to bend, stretch, and expand its own horizons to host the dense, unmanifest reserve of the thing itself. In other words, the advenant is already really real, and willing to receive other really real phenomena.

A potent explanatory value of this evential embrace lies in its capacity to resolve the problem of empathy without slipping into psychological fusion, assimilation, or what might be called "subjective theft." In classical models of empathy, philosophy often stumbles into a catastrophic collapse of boundaries: if I feel your grief, how does your grief remain yours without simply becoming my psychological reality? In our earlier formulations drawing from Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy, we preserved alterity by maintaining a strict, non-transferable architectural barrier between the primordial self and the non-primordial content of the other.

By filtering this problem through the advenant, the preservation of the other's distinct alterity becomes significantly more fluid yet remains structurally absolute. Because the advenant is characterized by a radical, non-dual ownership of experience, its perspective remains indivisibly, safely, and primordially its own. When the expressive reality of the other person phenomenalizes against us, it lands as an absolute, vertical event.

Because the advenant is supple and plastic, empathy does not require a clumsy, horizontal transference of consciousness or a psychological commingling. Instead, empathy becomes a supple, trans-temporal resonance. The advenant allows its own structural boundaries to bend under the objective, real-time pressure of the other’s non-primordial grief. The other person’s presence acts as a vibrant, enduring imprint that presses into the permanent clearing of the Myself. We do not swallow the other person, nor do we steal their sorrow; rather, the vertical impact of their presence profoundly awakens, deepens, and reshapes our own advenant identity from within our own inviolable sanctuary.

If Claude Romano’s advenant truly encompasses Steinbock’s self and Myself, then we have, in a sense, delivered phenomenology back to its earliest mandate: to stand before a world that genuinely gives itself from itself. It proves that we are under no necessary requirement to abandon the immanent terrain of aletheia for a theological apokalypsis when encountering the infinite, the vertical, or the overwhelming.

Finitude is not a cognitive lack or a flaw in our wiring; it is our permanent, open exposure to a self-carrying reality that we did not construct but are fully structured to host. By streamlining the self and the Myself into the plastic, eventive architecture of the advenant, we discover a subject that is profoundly relational, completely realistic, and endlessly supple—a subject fully capable of bearing the inexhaustible weight of the really real.