ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by framing encounter as communicative and as the starting point of all human relationships. Drawing from the sociological phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, the chapter assumes that humans live in an intersubjective world and encounters with others are a part of our everyday existence. After discussing Tischner’s work, encounter is established as the paradigmatic relation of two persons relating to each other in the world. Several points about encounter are made over the course of the chapter. Encounter is communicative, essential for friendship, foundational for all human relationships, an everyday event, inherently relational, an event, not reciprocal in the sense of awareness but in the sense of contextual dependence on the nature of intersubjectivity, and revelatory. These components lead to the conclusion that from a communicative framework, encounter could be understood as the communicative phenomenon in which persons enter into a communicative common environment.
