PMC

The third stage of ontological nihilism corresponds to the severance of the self-world structure. Consequently, all possible perspectives of self-consciousness, that is, the FPP, SPP, and TPP, are altogether impaired. Any possible healthy point of view is therefore impaired; hence, the schizophrenic individual experiences himself as dead or decayed. Simultaneously, experience concerning the world contains its doom or that the world has vanished. FPP, first-person-perspective; SPP, second-person-perspective; TPP, third-person-perspective.

The relationship between established phenomenological concepts, for example, by phenomenological psychopathology, and their applicability to the annihilation of self-consciousness in the final existential-ontological stage is roughly inverse. Phenomenology and phenomenological psychopathology especially offer descriptive and interpretative power regarding stages 1 and 2. The final third stage, however, requires both to include yet to go beyond the contemporary conceptual horizon of phenomenology to account for existential nihilism.

The conceptual distinction between 2 layers of self-consciousness and its annihilation in a third layer allows. The possibility for narrative and thus reflective explanations regarding the individual's self (the narrative self) relies on the healthy and underlying pre-reflective experiential self of the immediate stream of consciousness. Within the stage of ontological nihilism, however, even the experiential self is annihilated. The only remain is a pre-intentional “blind-consciousness” that lacks a coherent, vital, and meaningful subjectivity and including one's relatedness and belonging to the world.

The intentional arc can no longer fully span across both the self and the world. This entails the breakdown of the intentional structure of consciousness, so that the unification of the self and the world dissolves. Conceived from another perspective, the intentional arc cannot “hold” or “carry” self-consciousness across a significant extent of space and time anymore; ultimately, the individual “falls” out of Heidegger's [] notion of being-in-the-world into the existential void of nihilism, where one's “Dasein” (being-there/here) is no longer provided.