When Alphonso “Al” Lingis traveled outside the U.S. to other countries, he made it a point to visit both the beautiful and the ugly.

He saw people dancing, dressing up, laughing. He was both thrilled and unsurprised to see such happiness, because Lingis believed that “all life is essentially joyous,” he said in a 2020 interview. Later, though, he’d pass people sleeping on the streets, pleading for help and for food.

This was the human experience, in all of its glory and shame. As a phenomenologist, a philosopher who studies how we perceive the world, Lingis sought to understand exactly that.

“When I went to places that were full of poverty and suffering, and I saw the dark side of humanity and this world, I wanted to have my eyes open to see reality,” Lingis said.

He visited all seven continents, using his travels to reflect on humanity and its vastness. He was fascinated by the strange and the different, and by the ways people use their bodies, chronicling his thoughts in more than a dozen books. When it was time for him to retreat back to himself, to have his own reality and human experience, he came home to Lutherville.

Lingis, a longtime Pennsylvania State University professor who blended philosophy with travel logs, art and photography, died May 8 of meningitis and a brain abscess, complicated by two forms of cancer. He was 91.

He was born Nov. 24, 1933, in Illinois, the middle child between two sisters. His parents were both Lithuanian immigrants, and his father started working in factories before transitioning to a farm. Eventually, he earned enough money to buy his own property, where Lingis spent his childhood inspecting plants and animals. Whenever a cow birthed a calf, he would pick it up every day, trying to grow stronger.

Lingis had different dreams for himself, said Kenneth Saltman, one of Lingis’ closest friends. He drove taxis to put himself through college, earning a degree in philosophy from Loyola University in Chicago before pursuing a doctorate from KU Leuven, a university in Belgium. Abroad, he mostly took classes in French.

Phenomenology was a natural fit, perfectly aligning with his interests and existing beliefs.

“He really believed that people could have authentic experiences of the world and the natural world and animals and other cultures and people who are radically different from them,” Saltman said.

Lingis initially began teaching at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh before receiving an offer from Penn State. He taught there for decades before retiring in the early 2000s, developing a reputation as a thoughtful and sometimes theatrical professor.

He always scheduled his classes for the fall and summer semesters, so he could take springs off to travel and write. He amassed a loyal group of philosophy students and mentees who turned, over time, into friends.

“He was so present,” said Brian Schroeder, a friend and colleague. “If there’s any figure in continental philosophy that could be called legendary, it would probably be him.”

Lingis lived a true philosopher’s life, broad and introspective, and mostly solitary. He never married nor had children, and he lived alone. In State College, he owned a cabin decorated with velvet and walls full of books. The house had giant aquariums with all kinds of fish and an electric eel. He also had a trap door in his living room that led to a shark tank he never actually filled with water — nor sharks.

He also built an aviary around the home, as well as one in the mountains. An electrical accident one year brought down the mountain aviary in a fire, killing many of the birds, which was an “existential blow” to him, Schroeder said.

Lingis was looking to move when he retired, and became enamored with the Baltimore area, friends said. He frequented the Visionary Art Museum and the Charles Theater, and enjoyed the proximity to D.C. He loved Maryland’s extensive green space and saw an opportunity to build another nature sanctuary.

He bought a house in Lutherville, where he infused the best parts of his Pennsylvania home with a new esthetic, Saltman said. He put cave paintings and burnt feathers on the walls and rebuilt his aquariums. Lingis collected and displayed art from across the world, much of which will soon become part of a permanent exhibit at the Lithuanian National Museum of Art.

He also created a fish pond and built three aviaries that wrapped around his home. He planted a sequoia tree in his yard, savoring the idea of what it could look like in 100 years, said Karim Benammar, another former student and friend who traveled across the world with Lingis, including to Japan and Brazil.

Like other mentees, Benammar credits Lingis’s unique approach to philosophy as a major influence in his own work. Lingis linked phenomenology and humanity with art, biology and performance.

In his books, Lingis explored topics like desire, abuse, trust, and “violence and splendor.” He wrote of body transformations and physical sensations. He took his own photographs for each publication.

“He would be very happy if people told him … that he was valued perhaps even more in fields like anthropology and art than in philosophy, or equally,” Benammar said.

Although he explored almost every human experience, Lingis tended to stay away from darker topics, like grief and death. He acknowledged their significance but usually fell silent when they came up in his own life, Benammar said. (He often told friends that he wanted to “forget about bummers.”)

When he did speak of the grim, Lingis remained optimistic. In the 2020 interview, Lingis postulated that we are only afraid of death when we think ahead. Perhaps, when actually facing death, “we are more courageous than we realize.”

Lingis accepted that he was going to die, but mostly, because he lived a solo life and had no surviving close relatives, he wanted to make sure he would not die alone.

In “The Community of Those Who Have Nothing In Common,” Lingis wrote of the “necessity, among the living, to accompany those who are dying.” A society that left its dying to die alone would be inhuman, he said.

That’s why Saltman made sure to sit by Lingis’s side as he took his last breath, to give him the final human experience he could have.

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