Philosophy of Culture and Cultural Anthropology as Transcendental Phenomenology

Ernst Wolfgang Orth

The relationship of modern transcendental philosophies to anthropology—and the phenomenology grounded by Husserl takes itself to be a transcendental philosophy—is ambivalent. On the one hand, the recourse to subjectivity for the purpose of grounding the sciences, and especially for acquiring an adequate epistemology and methodology, entails a definite thematization of human beings. The human faculty of cognition, the human capacity for experience [Erfahrung und Erlebnis], its meaningful action, and human reason in general are thematized and interrogated in order to arrive at ultimate, logically binding structures and an adequate interpretation of the world. On the other hand, transcendental philosophy always strives to disconnect the consideration of concrete human beings in the name of the “purity” of its doctrine. That is true already of Descartes’s discovery and investigation of the cogito sum, but it is especially true of Kant’s critical philosophy as a philosophy of formal consciousness in general beneath which no real being—whether ontic or ontological—may be placed.¹ Husserl’s struggle against psychologism, and with it anthropologism, may be viewed as an ultimate tightening of this imperative for purity. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction, with its decisive disconnection of the world and of worldly humanity (and that means human beings in general), seems to underscore this emphatically and with an ultimate radicality. Even Martin Heidegger—who criticized Husserl’s transcendental-philosophical turn and who seems to have discovered and advanced an anthropological perspective with his fundamental ontology conceived as a hermeneutic of Dasein—protested against the misunderstanding (as he saw it) that his thought was anthropological. Indeed, in the end he even turned against humanism. It thus seems that his stance cannot be compared to transcendental philosophy’s usual verdict against anthropologism. Nonetheless, it remains evident—even for Heidegger—that a philosophy that grounds science and makes intelligible the possible binding character of an orientation cannot appeal to an accidental fact if it does not want to fall prey to relativism or the so-called naturalistic fallacy. An empirical, mundane reality of the anthropological type homo sapiens or animal rationale cannot be philosophy’s grounding basis—at least not if this human being is merely one empirical fact among others.

But is this empirical human being, then, just one fact amongst others, a fact like every other fact? It was not Heidegger—with his philosophical interrogation of the human being as existing and as Dasein that understands being—who first thematized the fact “human being” in a fundamental-ontological way (i.e., in the sense of prima philosophia). Traditional transcendental philosophy had already not entirely looked past the fact “human being.” Transcendental philosophy discovered the human being—as, for example, in Descartes’s thought—as the important orientation. Heidegger, relying on neo-Kantianism, against which he raised the discovery of “facticity,” built upon this, but he still employed neo-Kantianism’s formal motives when he sought to render this facticity intelligible.² However, transcendental philosophy seems only to thematize the human being as an important orientation in order then to isolate in the human being “pure” structures of orientation, “pure” categories, and then to treat them in isolation. What is left of the human being, which is precisely what constitutes the variety of human reality—the physiological, biological, social, historical, and cultural human being with its mythical and aesthetic attitudes—is then left to be whatever it may be. Alternatively, it is either handed over to the corresponding special sciences as a research theme or left to live in history, culture, and politics. At the same time, transcendental philosophy attempts—with reference to the transcendentality that has been read off of the human subject—to understand this merely anthropological human being as having a special dignity that is characterized as reason, freedom, responsibility, and creative power. Of course, with that, both anthropology—especially so-called philosophical anthropology—and transcendental philosophy appear dubious. Reason, freedom, responsibility, and creativity empirically seem to be something entirely different from what they are in transcendental theory. Even more, what is passed off as a transcendental determination of human beings could just be an accidental, historical, or otherwise empirical form. Or, conversely, what is presented as the concrete, empirical reality of human beings turns out to be merely a transcendental-theoretical construction.

Precisely here, in this disastrous choice between objectivism and idealism, the late Husserl would see the dilemma of philosophy, which is unavoidably directed toward human beings. Objectivism—itself a concrete cultural anthropology—is out of the question. But idealism, to which Husserl feels closer, must be modified and is in need of critique: “Idealism,” Husserl writes, “was always too quick with its theories and for the most part could not free itself from hidden objectivistic presuppositions; or else, as speculative idealism, it passed over the task of interrogating, concretely and analytically, actual subjectivity, i.e., subjectivity as having the actual phenomenal world in intuitive validity.”³ Here, Husserl chooses a fundamental anthropological fact as the point of departure for his basic philosophical consideration, namely, “actual subjectivity as having the actual phenomenal world in intuitive validity.” This is to be understood as an original, normal finding: “The man of everyday life is after all not without reason.”⁴ But at stake here is not a revision converting his transcendental philosophy, much less his transcendental-phenomenological reduction, but a modification and consistent deepening and refinement of these. For, “correctly understood,” the new statement of the task implies “nothing other than carrying out the phenomenological reduction and putting transcendental phenomenology into action.”⁵

It is my thesis that the early transcendental philosopher Husserl (the Husserl of Ideas I) begins, without providing an account of it, with anthropological motives, and that his theorems of intentionality and the reduction led him, in the course of his constitutive and genetic-constitutive analyses, to an explicit anthropology. This concept of anthropology that Husserl then attains in his later philosophy is admittedly an expanded one. To the same degree in which anthropology becomes important for transcendental philosophy, transcendental philosophy acquires increasing significance for anthropology. At stake here is thus not the external juxtaposition or addition of two disciplines but an attempt at integration.

Fundamentally, there are three conceivable disciplines or disciplinary forms:

Anthropology as (an) individual science(s), whether it (they) belong(s) to the natural or to the human sciences. No philosophy that wants to avoid relativism and objectivism can be based on this anthropology. However, with respect to its theoretical foundations, this anthropology can be grounded along with or critically determined by philosophy. Approaches and contributions to such an anthropology are to be found already in Husserl’s further development of Ideas I in Ideas II, where the term anthropology even occasionally occurs. These investigations belong in the domain of phenomenological research into constitution.

Anthropology as an isolated, more or less explicit, and more or less far-reaching relation of philosophy to significant anthropological circumstances or basic anthropological facts for the purpose of determining and founding philosophy itself. In individual cases, this form of anthropology can contain useful perspectives, though it is always exposed to the danger of taking on uncritical commitments. Husserl already seized upon individual anthropological motifs in the early elaboration of his transcendental phenomenology, although without designating these as anthropology.

A philosophical anthropology that is better called anthropological philosophy. It should secure a critically accountable integration of first philosophy and anthropology, and thereby at the same time better determine traditional anthropological research—and its results—as an individual science. In this last conception of anthropology, the human being is at once the base and the vanishing point of every possible orientation, and above all of every orientation concerning orientation—that is, of philosophy. Husserl’s late philosophy suggests such a conception.

The term anthropology, in the sense of philosophical anthropology, only became the explicit title of a problem for Husserl in 1931 in his Berlin lecture “Phenomenology and Anthropology.”⁶ However, with regard to the anthropological thematic, this contribution is rather vexing. Specifically, it seems to want to oppose the “growing turn to philosophical anthropology” “in the young philosophical generation of Germany.”⁷ Here, Husserl mentions only the influence of Wilhelm Dilthey by name. However, his target is surely the philosophical-anthropological interests of Scheler and Heidegger that arose out of his own school and that he saw as a threat to his transcendental phenomenology.⁸ He holds that “a principled decision between anthropologism and transcendentalism must be possible,” one that is “elevated above all historical formations of philosophy and anthropology or psychology.”⁹ Husserl once again plainly argues the case against anthropologism and for transcendental phenomenology and its main method, the transcendental-phenomenological reduction.

Throughout this lecture, one also finds formulations that, especially in light of later texts, bring to mind the conception of anthropological philosophy. Husserl poses the problem of transcendental-phenomenological-anthropological application, admittedly without solving it: “As a human being standing in the world I pose … all questions about my fate. Can I give all these up? But must I not do so, if the being of the world is and remains subjected to an epochē? This being the case, … I shall never again return to the world and to all those questions about life for the very sake of which I have philosophized and have striven for scientific knowledge as a rational and radical reflection upon the world and human existence.”¹⁰ Husserl had already in 1917 felt this tension between the scientism of his vocation (as the philosopher of philosophy in the sense of rigorous science) and the actual demands of human life.¹¹ But he wants to remain a scientist, even in philosophy. Thus he says, varying Bacon’s words, “one must put the thumbscrews not to nature, … in order to force her to betray her secrets, but to consciousness, or the transcendental Ego.”¹² He now—when he speaks of a “hermeneutic of the life of consciousness”—conveys his view in a language that admittedly veers in the direction of Dilthey and Heidegger. But the context in which this formulation stands reveals Husserl’s classic position: “Genuine analysis of consciousness is, so to say, the hermeneutic of conscious life, where the latter is taken as that which continuously intends entities (identities), and constitutes them within its own self in manifolds of consciousness that pertain to those entities in essential ways.”¹³ Here Husserl wants to fight back against a misunderstanding by means of which “the sense of the reduction is missed,” specifically by saying “I, this human being, am the one who is practicing the method of a transcendental alteration of attitude [i.e., the reduction],”¹⁴ as if the ego were nothing “other than just a mere abstract stratum of this concrete human being.”¹⁵ However, in the Crisis of 1935 and the following year, Husserl returns to precisely this point, partially to reject it and partially to agree with it once again. For now, in Crisis, he formulates positively “that each transcendental ‘I’ within intersubjectivity (as co-constituting the world in the way indicated) must necessarily be constituted in the world as a human being; in other words, that each human being ‘bears within himself a transcendental “I”.’ ”¹⁶ And he continues—as in his lecture from 1913!—“not as a real part or a stratum of his soul (which would be absurd) but rather insofar as he is the self-objectification, as exhibited through phenomenological self-reflection, of the corresponding transcendental ‘I.’ ”¹⁷

Thus, transcendentality can now be grasped in the concrete, worldly human being—in the anthropological type “human being.” It is not grasped, however, as a special organ or essential layer that one could for its part posit absolutely and in isolation but as self-reflection [Selbstbesinnung]—as the implementation of an attitude that makes the human being precisely into a human being. This is no mere recourse to conceptions of the human that are, so to speak, approved and familiar—to conceptions of the human being as an entity [Wesen] that is capable precisely of self-reflection. Rather, what is achieved and made evident—over a lengthy course of transcendental-phenomenological analyses and arguments—is that the human being as a concrete, worldly entity is compatible with that entity’s transcendental function. Already in November 1932, a year after his Berlin lecture, Husserl had formulated the thesis “that universal anthropological cognition encompasses all cognition of the world in general as well as all human relations to the world in general, the universality of human strivings, valuings, actions in which humans shape their world and thereby put a ‘human face’ on it.” “Thus universal science is also the science of the human being.”¹⁸ This includes natural science, which indeed presupposes the corresponding accomplishments of the human being.¹⁹ In this sense, what Husserl here calls “universal human science as anthropology” appears precisely in the function of a prima philosophia and a new theory of science. As early as 1917, Husserl even prioritizes human science over natural science: “It is not the sciences of nature but the human sciences that lead into the ‘philosophical’ depths; for the philosophical depths are the depths of ultimate being.”²⁰ Of course, here one should allow that the concept “human science” must be differentiated. One must distinguish between the plural human sciences as cultural sciences of experience and the singular human science as the science of philosophical reflection. It is clear, precisely with regard to the conception of a philosophical anthropology, that the two cannot be radically separated. But how they interrelate—precisely that is the decisive problem for a theory of science and philosophy.²¹

To return to the question concerning the emergence of the anthropological motif in Husserl’s incipient transcendental philosophy: Initially, the thematization of so-called consciousness, a thematization decisive for Husserl’s philosophy, is nothing other than the reference to a fundamental anthropological fact, namely, the human capacity for fiction, the capacity to let something “hover” before oneself [sich etwas vorschweben lassen]. In Ideas I, Husserl writes:

The inventive consciousness is not itself invented and there belongs to its essence, as to any other mental process, the possibility of a perceiving reflection which seizes upon absolute factual being. No countersense is implicit in the possibility that every other consciousness, which I posit in empathic experience, is nonexistent.²² But my empathizing, my consciousness of whatever sort, is originally and absolutely given not only with respect to its essence but also with respect to its existence. Only for an Ego, or a stream of mental processes, in relation to itself, does this distinctive state of affairs exist.²³

This so-called “distinctive state of affairs” is the anthropological datum. But it is a sui generis datum, one in which existence and essence are linked and interwoven. The ratio essendi and ratio cognoscendi of consciousness seem to coincide here (precisely that constitutes the peculiarity and essentiality of its facticity). As part of his theoretical interests, Husserl would first investigate the side of essence (i.e., of possibility), and thus he seems initially to head for a traditional idealistic transcendental philosophy. But the anthropological, indeed existential, motif remains active even in the later transcendental-phenomenological teachings. Here one finds first of all the famous transcendental-phenomenological reduction. As an attempt to doubt, the epochē, which underlies the reduction, “belongs” (as we succinctly read) “to the realm of our perfect freedom.”²⁴ This is not a freedom that has been fetched or found somewhere along the way; it is the freedom that human beings always already have as human beings. The possibility of the epochē-attitude, as an expression of human freedom, is presupposed for the operative epochē and for the method of reductions. Even what Husserl calls the “phenomenological sphere” and the phenomenological concept of phenomenon is initially only the description of an elementary anthropological state of affairs, namely, the fact that human beings can thematize something and in this thematization they can at the same time put [that something] into question.²⁵ The thematization does not function without a minimum of distance, and the putting-into-question would not even get off the ground without a minimum of thematization. Husserl speaks of the ability—and this is an ability of human beings—to hold judgment in abeyance or even to withhold it. But every withholding of judgment also establishes or fixes a judgment. Every orientation is as it were a play between distance and identification, without which, incidentally, human orientation would be impossible. Thus, even our linguistic understanding, which is always bound to signs, always runs between the poles of a living, engaged attitude and “objectification.”²⁶

Husserl’s fundamental theorem is ultimately the theorem of intentionality, which provides a general formulation for the above-mentioned findings. This formulation is the determination of consciousness as consciousness of. With this general designation (which was, incidentally, already obtained by means of a reduction), Husserl certainly did not want to endorse or establish an anthropology. Instead, it primarily serves purely transcendental-phenomenological interests. But the more precise analysis of the fundamental intentional context led him to an increasingly complex point of view. Specifically, consciousness does not simply have intentionality in order then to relate to something (objects); it itself is intentionality. It itself is the play of distance (difference) and identity. It is worldhood [Weltlichkeit] and being-in-the-world. In the interconnection of hyletic components within the noetic domain and the intertwining of one consciousness with another (perhaps across determined, so-called objective differentiations among noemata), Husserl comes to a subject that is necessarily organized in a worldly way: to human beings and their culture.

The difficulties of research into the reduction, on the one hand, and the findings of research into constitution, on the other, led Husserl to this result. Husserl increasingly recognized that it is false to suppose that the so-called transcendental-phenomenological reduction, as a sort of methodological panacea, could lead to the ultimate transcendental structure. The reduction is much more a pluralistic procedure, and one must speak of reductions.²⁷ Of course, every reduction has an orienting value when it is executed and interpreted correctly, but it always leads only to elaborated and primed ultimates. On the other hand, the research into method, which runs parallel to the reductive method, shows that the subject, so important for the reduction and seemingly definable once and for all, can present itself in thoroughly distinct constitutive manipulations. Precisely in accordance with the fundamental theorem of intentionality, the subject can never be something purely subjective as opposed to something purely objective.

The alliance of reductive and constitutive research leads to three important results for anthropology and cultural anthropology.

1. The so-called transcendental subject must necessarily be localized and sensuously organized, that is, it must become manifest as corporeality.²⁸

2. The factually functioning subject always and unavoidably finds itself in potential or actual intersubjective contexts, and it implies, indeed internalizes, the alter ego. Corporeality, thematized as in (1), is in turn important for this intersubjective integration.²⁹

3. In addition to noetic intentionality, one must pay heed to noematic intentionality. This means that not only the noeses formalized in the analysis of consciousness constitute and lead to objects, but constituted objects, too, already refer in their sense to other objects. What has been culturally produced can itself serve functionally. The model for this is language, which, of course, is not made intelligible simply by explaining it as an expression of linguistic noeses. The signs and symbols that are operative in language have for their part certainly already been actively developed and as such they are noematic. They in turn play a role in the further work of worldly orientation. This work is called “noematic intentionality,” into which the human being (also as an intersubjective entity) has always already been placed.³⁰

It is crucial here to understand what question Husserl wants to address with the problem of intersubjectivity. It is not a question of how I, this concrete human being (who has been, as it were, entered into the civil registry) enter into an interpretive community, as if we are self-contained and complete strangers to one another. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl says “if the two original spheres have already been distinguished … the experience of someone else has done its work,”³¹ that is, when two concrete subjects confront one another. That means that human beings are entities that as such are already determined by intersubjective implications that they have internalized. Now we can understand why Husserl, in Cartesian Meditations, formulates two theses that appear to contradict one another: (a) “The other man is constitutionally the intrinsically first <Objective> man,”³² and (b) “I myself am the primal norm constitutionally for all other men.”³³ Husserl has thereby made a twofold discovery. First, he presented a fundamental determination of the anthropological type “human being,” namely, that the human being can only be understood from a constitutive genesis as an entity both localized in the ego and intersubjective. Second, he changes the research conditions of first philosophy to the extent that it has now been established that transcendental-philosophical research always relies on the achievements of concrete human beings, and that at the same time it can and must equally remain a transcendental phenomenology. In Crisis, Husserl asserts the necessary integration of the transcendental ego and the concrete human ego as the unmistakable discovery and unavoidable starting point of every radical investigation. With that, a peculiar problem of application presents itself.

At this point, of course, it must be conceded that there is no obvious solution to this problem of application, for as an intentional entity, the human being is an entity that is in principle unfulfilled. That is, intentional achievements must be performed; they cannot be simulated. For the play between distance and proximity (to oneself and the world), between difference and identity (with oneself and the world), there is no fixed calculus that can be anticipated in advance. It is a fundamental problem of all culture that, on the one hand, in generating culture human beings always rise above culture, and yet again, on the other hand—precisely in such distancings, for example, critical distancing—they remain suspended in its constructs. Culture is the great instance of application, the medium that devours everything—including distancings from it.

With this question one runs into ultimate difficulties within Husserlian phenomenology. It is a matter of what one might call the optimizing of human existence. On the one hand, this optimizing could—misguidedly—be seen in a hypostasized life-world as substratum, in, as it were, fixed forms of simple, happy, or successful existence. This attempt at optimizing would be a regression. The other form of optimizing can be sought in a thinking and striving that goes beyond human beings. Such discoveries, however, should not be misunderstood as simple contributions to a factual anthropology in the sense of simple anthropological description—they are orienting parameters based in reductive considerations. But they are not the human itself. In Ideas II, in §§19–29, Husserl analyzes the identity of the ego with respect to the question of the demonstrability of the ego pole. It is shown that it is no longer possible to conceive an ontological magnitude of any kind. If one were to take Husserl’s analyses seriously as a factually descriptive, anthropological finding, then they would necessarily lead to existential despair, for a factual conception of the ego comes undone here. Husserl speaks of the ego as “engaged practically as setting the scene [der praktisch Inszenierende].”³⁴ But the pure ego is not a “real [reelles] moment” in a temporal flow in which it “steps forth” and again “recedes,”³⁵ although this temporalization is nonetheless the pure ego’s most original production: “Thus, instead of generatio and corruptio, to the pure Ego there pertains only the essential property that it has its stepping forth and its receding, that it begins to function and hold sway actively and that it ceases to do so. The phrases ‘it steps forth’ and ‘acts in the specific sense of the cogito become an event in the stream of consciousness’ mean the same, since the essence of such acts consists precisely in their being intentional lived experiences ‘carried out’ by the pure Ego.”³⁶ The “essential property” named here is obviously just a function between a “stage” and an actor, both of which are as such nothing. It is a question here only of transcendental-philosophically reductive considerations that discuss the possibility of grounding human cognition and anthropological research, but that must refuse the concrete human being a factual foothold. The human being must gain this foothold in culture. Of course, the being of the human being is itself determined by its ability to perform reductions. At the same time, however, the human being is confronted with the task of not absolutizing the individual reductions but of applying them to its concrete being-human [Menschsein], a being-human that in any event is nothing other than application. Every other alternative—the recourse to something substantial that is in itself concrete and dormant, such as, for example, nature—would be “dull” “Egolessness.”³⁷ The human being can only be grasped as a cultural entity, just as the world can only be understood as the world of human beings. The analyses Husserl here draws upon (from Ideas II) attempt only to elucidate reflexively the background of this thesis. After reading them, one can no longer allege that Husserl in ontologizing about the person posits a pure ego, assuredly to be understood solipsistically, at the origin of all things [Dinge], or that he offers the life-world as a truly substantial basis of an unambiguous human reality. In the sciences, even in those of the life-world, it is always a matter of possibilities that, when hypostasized or posited absolutely, can also be impossibilities. It is a matter of “invention” and “reinvention.” Admittedly, Husserl asks himself, “Can I do otherwise than [begin] from my human, present being?” He answers, “With respect to myself and the world, actuality precedes every possibility.”³⁸

Being human in the present day—the present reality—is, however, a cultural reality that has come to be and whose reality is not to be grasped according to the old metaphysical models as an ontological substance. Rather, it manifests itself temporally as human functioning. Such temporality, however, leads to a “critical idealism” that leaves all simple ontologizing behind it, in accordance with which the concept crisis is also thought in the concept critical. That is why “human life itself” is, for Husserl, “a limit idea lying at a perpetual distance, an idea that itself in turn contains an infinitude of limit-figures.”³⁹ The essence of the human being is no longer a substantial essence in the sense of the tradition but temporalization; its “essence” lies in the future, that is, in the capacity for a representing, envisioning anticipation [repräsentierenden, vergegenwärtigenden Antizipation]. The consciousness of temporality constitutes the cultural significance of the human being. And culture is nothing other than the shaping of time [Zeitgestaltung]. In this context, it must be conceded that we have to depart from what has accumulated culturally, what has become present as a cultural reality and, as such, maintains relations to past and future. In this concession, of course, philosophy makes a fundamental turn toward philosophy of culture, which is no longer merely one philosophical discipline among others.⁴⁰

The cultural world is the world of human beings. It is not the world of mere nature. Thus, it seems obvious that the world is better grasped by phenomenology than it can be by the social sciences, which are oriented toward the ideals of natural science. Of course, such a conception presupposes that there is unanimity concerning the meaning of phenomenology. But as is well known, the word phenomenology awakens very different ideas. For that reason, I would like to state once again that I am concerned with the phenomenology developed by Husserl.

Even with the theme limited in this way, the determination of a phenomenological philosophy of culture and cultural anthropology remains difficult enough. Specifically, even with Husserl, we seem to be dealing with at least two phenomenologies.

First, there is phenomenology as the description of phenomena in their original givenness, unfalsified by constructed opinions and functions. This phenomenology grasps the given vividly in pure intuition—in essential intuition, to invoke the ominous phrase—just as it gives itself in original experience. The “thing itself” is presented in its own essential structures and in accordance with its ontological status. According to this phenomenology, culture is described appropriately when it is placed in the framework of a regional ontology, and cultural phenomena are appreciated in the meaning or meaningfulness specific to them. This occurs in accessing a so-called proper and original experience, which is to be distinguished from a merely symbolic experience.⁴¹ Precisely when it comes to grasping cultural phenomena adequately, this Husserlian-phenomenological way of proceeding has been appreciated even by researchers who stand at a distance from phenomenology.⁴²

Second, however, there is phenomenology as epistemology, as transcendental philosophy. This phenomenology seeks to investigate the possibilities of consciousness, especially the possibilities of cognition and cognitive commitments. In doing so, it also pursues goals pertaining to the theory of science that are to serve all sciences and their rational coherence. Of course, this phenomenology also begins with an intuition, specifically the intuition that all experience and theory with which the sciences operate is accomplished and processed by a factual consciousness. At the same time, however, this consciousness is distinct in its structure from the empirical (mundane) human being that brings it about. It is transcendental. However, the validity of what is meant by consciousness—beyond itself and the things meant—cannot be compelled by a mere, quasi-passive, intuitive grasp. For consciousness—human experiencing and theorizing—is fluid; it has temporal and thematic horizons by virtue of which presentiation [Vergegenwärtigung] in one intuition loses its self-evidence. Presence, instead of being directly graspable, threatens to become a mere limit concept, something merely contrived. And with that, presentiation through intuition seems to become questionable as well. For that reason, Husserl here complements intuition with the method of reduction and reductions. Reduction and the reductions, however, have an operative characteristic that first and foremost arranges the theme of research in question. They are reflexive and critical, not merely intuitively accepted.⁴³

For the tenability of the Husserlian doctrine, a great deal depends on whether the coexistence of intuitions and reductions is systematically possible, or whether this is merely a matter of bringing together heterogeneous elements. Even in his later philosophy, Husserl emphasized that “along with phenomenological reduction, eidetic intuition is the fundamental form of all particular transcendental methods (that both of them determine, through and through, the legitimate sense of a transcendental phenomenology).”⁴⁴ It follows from this evidence that Husserl excludes the external juxtaposition of a merely phenomenological (descriptive) phenomenology as intuitive with a transcendental phenomenology as employing the reduction. Indeed, intuition too is explicitly identified as a transcendental method. With that, even the “principle of all principles”—“that everything originarily (so to speak, in its ‘personal’ actuality) offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being”⁴⁵—proves to be very much in need of interpretation. And Husserl himself adds an interpretation when he continues, the given is to be accepted—“but also only within the limits in which it is presented.”⁴⁶ Understanding these constraints is a concern of the methods of reduction as transcendental-phenomenological reflection.

Thus, one best does justice to the Husserlian conception of transcendental phenomenology if one recognizes in it the connection of intuitions and reductions in an integrative methodology. Of course, two emphases still remain: a more intuitive one and a more reductive one.

If, according to Husserl, eidetic intuition and the phenomenological reduction jointly constitute the sense of transcendental phenomenology,⁴⁷ then this raises a question: what unifies the accomplishment of intuition and that of the reduction? Both are intentional accomplishments of a living consciousness. Intuition means nothing other than the thematization of something given as such, with the equiprimordial effect that one can identify it and recognize it in repeated thematizations. Intuition is “insight” and “evidence.”⁴⁸ It is characteristic of such intentional thematization that consciousness is ever more fully immersed and engaged in the thing thematized. Specifically, this implies “accepting that which is originarily offered in its ‘personal actuality,’ so to speak.” But consciousness cannot fully and completely identify itself with what is grasped and identified in intuition. Without a certain distance from what is grasped in intuition, it would not know that it was grasping, and thus it would not grasp (anything) at all. This distance is a fundamental peculiarity of intentionality.⁴⁹ It is presupposed for an intuition that is “normal,” in accordance with which the given in each case is “faithfully” described. But it remains incidental and unthematic. Now, it is characteristic of the reduction that it explicitly thematizes precisely this distance and the circumstances of its appearing—and thereby also the circumstances of the given. That is the sense of the original designation of the reduction as epochē, as withholding of judgment.⁵⁰ In a replicating intuition, the reduction makes one conscious of what occurs in intuition. It attempts to thematize and measure the distance that belongs to every intuition. That is why Husserl also names the epochē a “withholding of judgment.” Withholding is here the opposite of engagement and immersion in the thing.⁵¹ At the same time, the reduction still remains intuitive and is even meant to lead to further intuition. But it thematizes the distances that necessarily accompany intuiting, precisely in order to investigate the “boundaries of the given.” One can now understand why the reduction must proceed in several steps:⁵² A whole system of possible distances must be investigated. Since this takes place within an intentional horizon, an investigation of this kind can succeed in quite distinct respects.⁵³

Thus, intuition and reduction must be related to one another. This relation also makes it possible for Husserl to define the phenomenological concept of phenomena (as opposed to that of all other sciences and the natural conception of the world)⁵⁴ while at the same time allowing him to draw the usual concept of phenomena into phenomenology by means of a “change of attitude.”⁵⁵ That means that every intuition contains reductive or epochal moments, and that every reduction also produces intuitions. Of course, the reduction more and more precludes a hypostatization of the given and thereby relativizes the claim of ultimate, intuitive insights.

It is important that Husserl, precisely in the context of the epochē and reduction, brings the concept of human freedom positively into play as a presupposition of the reduction.⁵⁶ This concept of freedom can be seen as closely connected to the concept of “attitude.” It is only because the human being has an attitude that it can have a relation to the world and to itself. It is not just a passive, functioning piece of the world but an agency functioning in the manner of experience. “Attitude” means the manifestation of a relation and is at the same time the possibility of interpreting this relation in turn, that is, of having a relation to one’s relation. Reductions and attitudes belong together. It must be established that there is no really fundamental, objective analog of this relation called “attitude”; to that extent, it is always already presupposed as a living functioning. Although attitudes are always documented in manifest systems (just as meanings always make themselves known in something expressed), attitudes as such are not intuitively determinable in the conventional sense. So meanings, for example, are always codified in systems of expression. However, the fact that expressions have meaning cannot be codified; it is a matter of attitude.

Husserl also makes use of this attitudinal characteristic, as an original possibility of human beings, with regard to the determination of the phenomenological concept of phenomenon. Here he speaks of “a wholly different attitude”⁵⁷ and calls for a “style of attitude” that is “entirely altered in contrast to the natural attitude in experiencing and the natural attitude in thinking.”⁵⁸ It is the attitude that makes the fundamental “attitude” aware of itself. This means that, just as the reductive and epochal motifs already lie in a “normal” intuition, so too must every new attitude grow out of a preceding attitude. The relationship of one attitude to another is accordingly an implicative-explicative one. One finds good reasons for Husserl’s sharp distinction between “natural” and “phenomenological” (or “transcendental-phenomenological”) attitudes in the summons to a keen awareness of method as a necessary “transformation of sense.” But this cannot be a radical divide between two entirely “distinct worlds” because the one “world” qua constituted is supposed in the first place to be made intelligible through the other qua constituting, and both are interwoven with one another. It is precisely this interweaving that is to be understood; it is more a “transformation in the given sense” than a “transformation of sense.”⁵⁹

Attitudes also imply “always already having an attitude” and at the same time the possibility of having an attitude toward this having an attitude. Such attitudes are always linked with the formation of sense. Sense-formation is the original meaning of constitutive achievement. Even the “natural” [natürliche] and the “naturalistic” [naturale] attitude form sense, and this is not simply a mere occurrence, a mere functioning, but intentional functioning.⁶⁰ Husserl explicitly developed the idea that the phenomenological reduction (which actually must be performed in the pluralism of a multitude of reductions⁶¹) is not just a unique attitude but an attitude toward attitudes: “What is educational [!] in the phenomenological reduction, however, is also this: it henceforth makes us in general sensitive toward grasping other attitudes.”⁶² The designation of the reduction as “operative,”⁶³ as “advance priming” [Herauspräparierung] of transcendental structures,⁶⁴ as “artificial attitude”⁶⁵ underscores once again its methodological character, which is of course based in our average (“natural” [natürlichen]) attitude comportment, which is not artificial: “we constantly slip, quite effortlessly, from one attitude into another, from the naturalistic [naturalistischen] into the personalistic, and as to the respective sciences, from the natural sciences [naturwissenschaftlichen] into the human sciences.”⁶⁶

The obvious thing to do now might be to ascribe directly a cultural-philosophical meaning to the transcendental-phenomenological considerations outlined above. At any rate, an important thesis concerning human beings is implied here: the human being is a free, sense-forming entity that bestows sense upon itself and its world in the corresponding attitudes. Its flexibility and plasticity make themselves known in the manifold possibility of attitudinal transformation. Its freedom manifests itself in its competency for bestowing sense. And sense-bestowal is only possible under the presupposition of a minimum of free activity.⁶⁷ That means that the human being is a cultural entity. Indeed, it is nothing less than the origin of every culture. For the difference between the cultural world and the merely natural world is grounded for the first time with the uniquely human characteristic of having attitudes, a characteristic that has no naturalistic, objectivistic analog. The cultural world is the world of living and manifest sense-bestowal. Of course, the manifestation of sense as a cultural world seems to restrict human freedom. For the cultural world, too, as a quasi-objective world, stands now in opposition to the individual human being. It can certainly understand this world as its own, as a human world. But it also shows it a forceful, objective power, even to the point of “alienating” it.

This results precisely from the fact that this sense-bestowal is also intersubjective, social, and historical. Yet before the problem of transcendental genesis and transcendental intersubjectivity is worked out (or, at the least, separated from these Husserlian doctrines), the human being is understood as a historical, intersubjective, cultural entity whose relations to others of its kind are essentially not merely natural but cultural (should we say “attitudinally conditioned”?). This human being is with unexceptional normalcy already a cultural entity: “The man of everyday life is after all not without reason; he is a thinking being, he has the καθόλον [universal], unlike the animal, hence he has language, description, he makes inferences, he asks questions of truth, he verifies, argues, and decides in a rational way.”⁶⁸ However, this minimal characterization of the human being is inflated by Husserl with a certain pathos. With a view toward his remarks in First Philosophy and Crisis, one can add that the human cultural world is centered on a highest value, called “rationality” and “responsibility,” whose realization (precisely as culture) is absolutely mandated.⁶⁹ The human is to “make itself true.”⁷⁰

Weighty objections can be raised against Husserl’s conception and against the interpretation of Husserl based upon it, objections that add up to the charge of subreptions and a (or even many) μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος [change into another genus]. Has Husserl not simply run together the transcendental and the cultural, the latter of which is, of course, worldly (and thus in radical opposition to the transcendental) in order to furnish culture with the trappings of transcendentality and recommend his transcendental philosophy as a timely cultural endeavor or accomplishment? Of course, that would itself be a well-known cultural-historical phenomenon. For in a similar way, the philosophy of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel made transcendental philosophy into a formidable cultural program and impregnated the real culture with transcendental philosophy. The Neo-Kantianism of the twentieth century followed German Idealism in this pursuit.⁷¹ [According to this objection,] Husserl has thereby both endangered the precise sense of his transcendental method, whose meaning concerns only epistemology and theory of science, and also neglected important individual features of cultural reality.

Of course, we should not overlook the fact that there are a number of felicitous Husserlian texts in which the cultural world—including the historical and social worlds—is described and analyzed in its essential peculiarities with circumspection and acumen. But here the development of a transcendental phenomenology does not at all appear to have preceded as the condition of the possibility of such a cultural phenomenology. In these descriptions and analyses, neither a transcendental egology nor a transcendental genesis and intersubjectivity is always presupposed as developed doctrine. It seems that here the other, the merely phenomenological, solely descriptive phenomenology once again becomes operative.

We find in Husserl descriptions and expositions of the cultural world that occasionally are even presented entirely divorced from transcendental-philosophical considerations, or that at least seem to require no such transcendental deliberations for the reader’s understanding. These can be found especially in Ideas II,⁷² Ideas III,⁷³ and in the volumes on intersubjectivity,⁷⁴ but also in the particularly “transcendentally” oriented Cartesian Meditations.⁷⁵ The cultural world is described and made intelligible in part by integrating natural factors in this world (e.g., biological, evolutionary, physiological, and psychological moments). Such descriptions often recall portrayals familiar from Dilthey. Sometimes they even have a certain repetitive characteristic, and they create the impression (especially the texts from the estate) of something like an author attempting to attune himself to particular cultural situations.

When we consider such descriptions in Husserl’s so-called working papers (one could also speak of practice papers), a suspicion forces itself upon us, one that threatens transcendental phenomenology: Husserl’s concept of constitution is apparently nothing other than the transfer of the concept of sense-formation from the domain of cultural experience. The actuality of the cultural world forms itself and is experienced on the basis of the tendency of historical and social human beings to bestow sense. The cultural world owes itself to a human activity of apprehension that consists in the fact that humans, who in acting understand and in understanding act, give sense to a material (perhaps “mere nature”) that cannot per se be further determined. These activities occur in interactive processes that are themselves instances of acting-understanding. The processes are characterized by a complex interweaving of performances and ever significant, but also ambiguous, actualities in which the subjective potentially appears objective and the objective potentially appears subjective. In this way, humans first create a world and understand themselves in a world that is in each case socially and historically pregiven. And this world is by definition always already a cultural world. To the same extent that humans create, they understand; and insofar as they understand, they create. Constitution becomes the bestowal of meaning, in which the difference between passivity and activity remains strangely in limbo.⁷⁶

Thus, cultural experience (and equiprimordially with it, cultural activity—and there is, in fact, no activity other than cultural activity) seems to be the paradigm of every experience. This even means that the cultural supplies the unthought and always already concretely lived basis for the “original” concept of constitution that was first conceived strictly epistemologically and methodologically. Culture would then be an operative concept in Eugen Fink’s sense.⁷⁷ An accusation not seldom directed at Husserl—that his phenomenology is still beset with unnoticed naturalisms—must now be inverted: Husserl’s (supposedly transcendental) phenomenology is a culturalism.

In fact, there is an interpretation of Husserl (or, better, a cannibalizing of Husserlian phenomenology) that amounts to such a culturalism. It is, admittedly, for the most part a culturalism that would like to free itself of certain endeavors that are invariably linked with culture. In place of the ethos that is required for every culture, “naturalness” is introduced. At issue is the long sought-after, proper foundation of every world, and the human therapeutic as such—the life-world.

However, it is precisely the concept of the life-world that shows that Husserl’s attempt to work out simple structures for the purposes of clarification is anything but a simple, hasty fallback to things taken for granted. As is well known, Husserl’s concept of the life-world is the result of an explicit reduction; that is, it is in limine a transcendental concept.⁷⁸ The topic was not a late discovery of Husserl’s; it was merely its elaboration under the title “life-world” that ensued only after a lengthy development of thought. The topic itself was—even if schematically, nonetheless with a decisive importance—the object of transcendental research under the title “general thesis of the natural attitude” as early as the time of Ideas I.⁷⁹ It belongs to the “considerations fundamental to phenomenology,” according to the title of the second part of Ideas I, whose first chapter takes up the “(general) thesis of the natural attitude,”⁸⁰ while the third and fifth chapters are dedicated to the phenomenological reduction.

What the “natural attitude” (as the attitude of the “ego with its natural environment”) and the “life-world” have in common is that they are both names for average, simple experience. They are, as it were, the least common multiples of a factually occurring orientation. They are names, acquired through transcendental phenomenology, for attitudes of human orientation that have not yet been transcendentally understood. Both the natural attitude and the life-world can also be designated as cultural actualities. But they are cultural worlds of an absolutely minimal sort; they are “natural” in the cultural sense of the word. Our usual culture, which Husserl also describes, tends to go beyond such simple relationships. It is a disadvantage of Husserl’s analyses that he does not always clearly set the more developed cultural systems (which he describes as mundane) apart from the description of the attitude of the natural world and, above all, from the so-called life-world. Of course, the natural attitude, the life-world, and more developed cultural systems are all mundane, but not everything mundane is life-world or natural attitude.

Husserl thematized the general thesis of the natural attitude in order to study the field of things taken for granted (which are experienced and putative but also unavoidable) and to assess the validity claims that turn up there so that no incorrect use could be made of them. To that extent, then, the general thesis was “disconnected” so that it could be made intelligible as the correlate of transcendental consciousness. Thus, the natural attitude was no sooner thematized than it was once again left behind in order to investigate the structure of transcendental subjectivity itself. The cultural meaning of the natural attitude, too, thereby remained almost unnoticed at first. More and more, the suspicion arose for Husserl that this natural attitude and its world as such were not adequately in view: “actual subjectivity” was “overlooked.”⁸¹ That means that the natural attitude and its world had to become the object of a more precise, descriptive phenomenology, a phenomenology, however, that had to carry out its work within the framework of a transcendental phenomenology.

For that reason, in the further development of this problematic, Husserl distinguished the concept of the life-world from that of the general thesis of the natural attitude by seeking to consider more broadly the content of the natural attitude. Thus, Husserl can consistently call the explicit attitude of the research work in this field the “reduction to the life-world.”⁸² As early as Ideas I, Husserl had identified intersubjective moments in the natural attitude. However, that was done only very abstractly. Later, above all in Crisis, the whole breadth of the concept of intersubjectivity, including its historical implications, was taken into consideration. For the history of the structure of the ordinary orientation, the life-world is now genetically the first; it is the name for the genetically first, already operative experience. At the same time, aside from this genetic feature, it is in static considerations the name for the level of unquestioned experience or orientation within every more developed culture. It is, as it were, the character of the self-evidence [Selbstverständlichkeitscharakter] of every (cultural) form of life. It must be noted that even complicated, reflected accomplishments of a culture that go far beyond the natural attitude receive, in precisely this culture (through a sort of melting down into the “everyday” and as “everyday”), a certain character of self-evidence.⁸³ Husserl obviously sought to conceive of this, too, as [an aspect of the] life-world.

Invariants of this life-world structure include the intuitive character of experience; the manageable relation of concrete subjects (common circles of communication); and the lived, subject-relative, natural world-actuality, which is not experienced theoretically but practically. This character of the life-world lets all the moments of an elementary cultural actuality be recognized. To that extent, the phenomenology of the life-world is in fact also the phenomenology of culture and cultural anthropology. Admittedly, it is a question only of forms—indeed, forms of concreta. The structure of the life-world, which remains the same, is variously realized and manifested in various cultures.⁸⁴

As it turns out, however, with the attempt to develop an ontology of this life-world, these invariant life-world structures threaten to explode conceptually as soon as their content is to be more fully described phenomenologically.⁸⁵ On the one hand, Husserl must keep the structuredness of the life-world free from all scientific determination (in the common sense) so as to present it in its “genuineness,” obviousness, and anonymity;⁸⁶ on the other, he must distinguish between a “naïve and natural straightforward attitude” and a “consistently reflective attitude toward the ‘how’ of the subjective manner of the givenness of life-world,”⁸⁷ and thus to make the case for the latter, that is, for a science of the life-world. Husserl accepts as trivial that the ordinary sciences “build upon the life-world as taken for granted in that they make use of whatever in it happens to be necessary for their particular ends. But to use the life-world in this way is not to know it scientifically in its own manner of being.”⁸⁸ And finally, Husserl explicitly adds that the reduction “to the life-world which is valid for us prescientifically by no means suffices.”⁸⁹ It is only a way station on the path to the “genuine transcendental epochē.”⁹⁰

It is Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological discovery, which announced itself to him paradigmatically in the topic of the life-world, that the ability to perform the transcendental reduction and the goal of the reduction can only be made intelligible through the mediation of the factual functioning of conscious life. The idea of the most elementary, concrete, thinkable, and living reality of action is, however, the life-world. As reality, this life-world manifests itself as a cultural actuality; but no such “elementary” cultural actuality is in all its appearances sure to be identical to the mere structure of the life-world. Of course, in any given case this structure of the life-world can manifest itself only one way or another in cultural worlds that are relatively simple but nonetheless different, that is, precisely in the so-called life-worlds. Husserl’s concept of horizonal intentionality would already forbid an absolute self-sufficiency and stability of a pure life-world. Thus, the life-world is really just an idea, a form of a concretion.

This becomes clear in Husserl’s Crisis, which discusses not only the portentous life-world but also, for example, European culture and its history. For this European culture is certainly no mere life-world. Here Husserl makes it evident that the “transcendental ego” (of Ideas I) “must necessarily be constituted in the world as a human being.”⁹¹ This human being is a concrete, cultural human being of a complex culture and not the human being merely of a restricted life-world.

In regards to the history of philosophy (e.g., with a view toward the culture of European science), Husserl declares that “idealism,” which recognized the significance of human subjectivity, “was always too quick with its theories” and for just that reason “could not free itself from hidden objectivistic presuppositions”; for “as speculative idealism, it passed over the task of interrogating, concretely and analytically, actual subjectivity as having the actual phenomenal world in intuitive validity.”⁹² This actual subjectivity with its actual world cannot be the life-world; the life-world is merely a convenient, relatively elementary preparatory investigation for this “actuality,” or, cultural reality [Kulturwirklichkeit]. “The difference between empirical and transcendental subjectivity” is admittedly methodologically “unavoidable”; but “also unavoidable [is] their identity,” which until now, however, has also remained “incomprehensible.”⁹³

Transcendental-phenomenological analysis now shows that “each human being ‘bears within himself a transcendental “I”’—not as a real part or a stratum of his soul (which would be absurd) but rather insofar [!] as he is the self-objectification, as exhibited through phenomenological self-reflection, of the corresponding transcendental ‘I.’ ”⁹⁴ The mundane culturality of human beings and their explicitly transcendental, methodological activity are here brought together under the concept of reflection (or self-reflection). Transcendentality and mundanity should not be hypostatically isolated in opposition to one another. They are, of course, necessarily distinguished on the path to the clarification of the truth of the world and of the human being. Still, ultimately the mundane can only be made intelligible by the transcendental; but with equal necessity “the” transcendental is manifested also as world, that is, mundanely—and specifically as the world of human beings.

“Only by starting from the ego and the system of its transcendental functions and accomplishments can we methodically exhibit transcendental intersubjectivity.”⁹⁵ Where method is concerned, transcendental philosophy applies. However, what it seeks to make intelligible has always already manifested itself as a concrete, historical-social, human being and its world. In this sense, it is possible to speak even of an a priori of manifestation in Husserl.⁹⁶ And thus it is possible, beginning with the transcendental-phenomenologically illuminated knowledge of this situation, to gain “an ultimate comprehension of the fact that each transcendental ‘I’ within intersubjectivity (as co-constituting the world in the way indicated [namely, that of transcendental intersubjectivity]) must necessarily [!] be constituted in the world as a human being.”⁹⁷ Thus, if she is to lay bare the so-called transcendental structures, a scientist who seeks to clarify the ultimate sense of possible science and to do this as a transcendental philosopher must take into account the fact that, as a researcher, she is this concrete human being belonging to a culture. For that reason, in the passage from Crisis leading up to the last quotation, Husserl spoke of the ego attained in the epochē as an ego by “equivocation,” “although it is an essential equivocation.”⁹⁸ The familiar and, as it were, prominent reductions of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology serve to make this unavoidable equivocation intelligible.⁹⁹ It cannot be set aside, for occasional meanings (and essential equivocations are recorded in such meanings) remain what they are even when one has seen through them. They are not objectively codifiable attitudes. The culture, as human world, is the transcendental occasion plain and simple.¹⁰⁰ Reflection is always reflection on an occasion and is thus determined situationally.

Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, then, cannot now be viewed as a covert or naive culturalism. Nor may his life-world and cultural-phenomenological considerations be regarded as a conversion to a modern variant of the philosophy of life [Lebensphilosophie] that moves away from transcendentalism—as well as every culture—toward primitiveness [Ursprünglichkeit] and naturalness. The interwovenness of mundanity and transcendentality in a factual, human understanding of self and world is to be recognized phenomenologically as a necessity. The motif of transcendentality is given and can be grasped in that minimum of reflection, of the attitudinal activity, without which there would be no culture.¹⁰¹

In this respect, Husserl’s doctrine flows into a peculiar anthropology. In its wake there is no denial of transcendental phenomenology, nor does it render transcendental phenomenology superfluous.¹⁰² Husserl has not parted with transcendentalism; instead he concretized and refined it. However, he also has not “idealistically” forgotten the concrete world (the mundane); he attempted, as much as possible, to render it intelligible.

For this reason, the phenomenology of culture also cannot be one regional ontology alongside many others. For initially, culture surely has only one opposite: nature. There would thus remain only two “ontological” domains, culture and nature. But even this distinction can still be relativized. For nature, when spoken of in its full meaning, belongs itself in the domain of a culture. Even the invention of the mere term nature as a cultural μή όν [nonbeing], as mere material free of determination, is already a cultural-historical performance, a first cultural determination, just like the mere name of chaos is a first cultural performance. However, the notion of an independent and meaningful nature grasps the concept of nature more as an “other” culture. In this respect, many a naturalism is merely an inverted culturalism. Seen in this way, regional ontologies can only be ontologies within the domain of the large theme of culture.

One can only speak of a distinction between nature and culture when there is already a culture in place to produce this distinction. If there were only culture or only nature, then, fundamentally, there would be neither. There would be sheer indifference. This consideration is anything but a mere frivolity; it shows instead the kind of horizon of possibilities and tasks that opens up before us once the thing we call culture has become thematic in even the most elementary form. If, however, the conventional distinction between culture and nature lies within culture, then this must modify our conventional understanding of the concepts “nature” and “culture.”

Nature is the magnitude in which the moment of one’s own attitudinal activity has, as it were, fallen to the zero point. It is only passively oriented, without the least self-activating orientation. Culture is, by contrast, activity, attitude, orientation. At the same time, however, it becomes clear that any attitude such as cultural actuality requires “materiality” and manifestation. That is, such an attitude requires objective stabilization in which cultural activities, if they do not quite fall to zero, nonetheless come to rest, as it were. They become “second nature.”¹⁰³ Nature has the characteristic of the “in itself”;¹⁰⁴ however, what it is in itself (i.e., beyond every culture, even beyond, e.g., the activity [Tun] of the natural sciences, with their ends and goals) remains intrinsically open. A radical distinction between nature and culture is thus still entailed even when one regards nature merely as that with which the egoical or the cultural rubs shoulders. Husserl seems occasionally to see it in this way when he considers “objective,” “physical nature” (including “the soul as experientially connected with the body”) and then understands nature “as the realm of inductive experiential properties”;¹⁰⁵ or when he, on the other hand, sees “cultural predicates” as “specifically irreal predicates.”¹⁰⁶ However, even the cultural “in itself” (which would then, admittedly, be more of a “for itself”) is already as such inconceivable without contingent contents. Human acting, which is essential for cultural actuality, shows the same peculiarity: it is in equal measure mental impulse and physical occurrence.¹⁰⁷ Cultural actuality is not the sum of something called “culture” and something in itself natural; it is in any given case a characteristic and integral interference of moments of activity, on the one hand, and moments of manifestation, on the other.

On the level of his specifically transcendental-phenomenological considerations (and thus long before the lines of thought of Crisis), Husserl arrived at the thesis that transcendental subjectivity must manifest itself necessarily and from the beginning. This is a compelling consequence of his concept of intentionality. Since transcendental consciousness has “in itself” hyletic data,¹⁰⁸ the “pure ego” has “sensations” necessarily localizing it in a surrounding world.¹⁰⁹

Husserl takes up a cultural-phenomenological mode of expression when he writes in 1925: “The universal form of humanity [Menschentum] is, precisely regarded, equivalent with the ‘natural concept of the world [natürlichen Weltbegriff]’ as the general concept of any world that is and can be encountered as the world for all conceivable ‘human beings.’ Freely imagined [frei fingierte] human beings are necessarily imagined as human beings of a world that is, for them, an environing world [Umwelt], but one in which they themselves must be counted.”¹¹⁰ The natural concept of the world includes within it “naturally [!] the essential concept of the individual human being, the essential concept of a humankind [Menschheit] within which the individual is an individual.”¹¹¹ It includes “the essential concept of a culture (to be understood in the broadest possible sense), of a physical and organic nature. Thus, even the distinction between nature (pure nature) and culture belongs herein.”¹¹² The distinction between the concepts of culture and nature is a distinction within and on the basis of the natural concept of the world. And the significance of this natural concept of the world is to be an elementary and unavoidable cultural actuality.

If culture and nature are distinctions made on the basis of a “natural” [!] cultural actuality, then it is in itself an interesting question what determinate cultures in each case consider to be culture in a unique, emphatic sense, and what they oppose to culture as nature. The prospects of a phenomenological science of culture emerge here, a science that must also always keep the history of cultural activity in view and that, at the same time, can serve the possibilities of other sciences.

Here, the manifold ambiguity not only of the concept of culture but also of culture itself comes into view:

1. Culture always stands opposed to a nature that it views in one way or another, and it simultaneously works on it.

2. Culture also stands opposed to other cultures in spatial juxtaposition and temporal-historical succession. To that extent, cultures have relations, and the question poses itself whether or not the epitome [Inbegriff] of all relations is in turn a culture, or even culture per se. Here the problem of the plurality and unity of cultures announces itself.

3. Finally, cultures are, on the one hand, living profiles of human acting that have come to be within the determinate boundaries of traditions and circumstances; on the other hand, they are an awakening of new possibilities and ideals, indeed ultimate ideals and forms of life. Here we see repeated the question concerning the alternative between the plurality of cultures and the universality of the one culture of humanity. A “conservative” and a “progressive,” a “realistic” and a “utopian” moment can be distinguished. A manifest, profiling confinement to tradition and an enlightenment that expands boundaries confront one another, as do the vita contemplativa and the vita activa.

Both of these moments are to be found in Husserl. The progressive moment manifests itself in a moralizing speculation on a rational future for human beings as a “limit idea.”¹¹³ In a social-historical light, the conclusion of Crisis,¹¹⁴ in particular, apparently seeks to realize a culture of absolute human responsibility. In the same work, however, one also finds much evidence for the theorem of the finitude of the human being; and, as is well known, the life-world itself is occasionally interpreted as an overdeveloped human being’s therapeutically understood option to pull back.

The specifically cultural-phenomenological lines of inquiry that turn up here depend in their precise formulation on a more exact grasp of Husserl’s more developed concept of intentionality. Just as—already at the time of Ideas I—the noesis as well as the hyletic and noematic moments belong to intentionality, in the same way, the introduction of functional, technical, and otherwise manifest factors belongs to a fully developed intentionality of cultural phenomenology. This is not a plea for naturalism or objectification. On the contrary, there resides here the possibility of finding an attitude for the contingent and functional moments of our existence. It is quite possible to appraise the factual and contingent from the standpoint of intentionality; it is impossible, by contrast, to do the opposite. On the basis of these considerations, one can also grasp more precisely and with greater nuance the concept of cultural relations, the qualified determination of relationships of distance and proximity within and between cultures.

In his late work, anyway, Husserl found a formula with which he brought to expression the characteristic human task of balancing the conservative and progressive, the realistic and utopian, the traditional and the enlightening [Aufklärerische]: “To be human is to be finite in a way that is constantly aware of the infinite.”¹¹⁵

Admittedly, a modification of Husserlian phenomenology resides in our considerations. World is here understood as a cultural world. Thus, whoever seeks a formula for the world seeks a cultural formula. At any rate, that seems to follow from a decisive further development of the Husserlian theorem of intentionality. With that, we do not take our leave of transcendental philosophy; rather, we emphasize its methodological sense, which only ever opens up conditioned scientific possibilities. Precisely here lies the rationality of such a transcendental philosophy.

Human beings only ever understand themselves and their world from within determinate situations in which they explore relations that they must initially focus upon themselves. If one places these relations under the norm of intentionality—as Husserl surely did—then the concept of intentionality must be expanded. It circumscribes not only the fully transparent activity of an ego that has absolute command of itself (this is only a limiting value) but also factual, functional determinations of the most various kinds—and of the most distinct degrees—of activity and passivity (up to and including the limiting value of sheer, self-less nature). The inescapable human attitude of relating everything to the human being leads ever again, in the course of a sort of self-optimizing tendency, to the illusion of the total intentional self-mastery of the human being. The interweavings of noematic and intersubjective intentionality, however, teach us that human beings need orientation, that they are always already pre-oriented through “something else” and thereby find themselves in constellations and configurations. Thus, they must find a judicious equilibrium (though, admittedly, by definition it can never be struck once and for all) between the two extreme values. The forms of such attempts at equilibrium are called culture. They can—indeed, must—be more or less conscious, up to the limiting values of mere occurrence. Precisely in the example of very concrete cultural relations, one can study the diversity of intentional relations. The sense of such relations extends from direct, sympathetic, and spiritual exchange between human beings all the way to technical and ultimately unconscious, quasi-natural influences in space and time. If total, egological and intentional transparency is an illusion, then, of course, to an equal degree, the recognition of the sheer force of the factual and its selfless functions is the loss of culture and world. But such a “recognition,” as a conscious farewell to all egoicity, would be a contradiction in itself.

Translated by Hayden Kee

NOTES

1. H. Plessner, too, judged Descartes’s and Kant’s meaning in this way. But he saw Kant as the most important predecessor of philosophical anthropology. Cf. H. U. Asemissen, “Helmuth Plessner: Die exzentrische Position des Menschen” [“Helmuth Plessner: The Eccentric Position of the Human Being”], in Grundprobleme der großen Philosophen: Philosophie der Gegenwart, Band 2, ed. Josef Speck (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1973), 146–180, esp. 151–153.

2. In “Dasein” and the “existentials” of Being and Time, one can still see translations of the neo-Kantian “consciousness in general” and the “categories,” specifically in the medium of facticity. Cf. the Davos Disputation of 1929 between Heidegger and Cassirer in Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1973), 243–268 [translated by Richard Taft as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 193–208], as well as Cassirer’s review of Heidegger’s Kantbuch in Kant-Studien 36 (1931): 1–26.

3. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 272 [translated by David Carr as The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 337].

4. Husserl, 270 [336].

5. Husserl, 272 [337].

6. The essay first appeared in the American journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (1941): 1–14. Cf. Edmund Husserl, “Phänomenologie und Anthropologie,” in Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 164–181 [translated and edited by Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer as “Phenomenology and Anthropology,” in Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 485–500].

7. Husserl, “Phänomenologie und Anthropologie,” 164 [485].

8. In 1931, Husserl spoke of “my antipodes, Scheler and Heidegger,” and he set “Dilthey and Heidegger” in relation with one another. Cf. Karl Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik: Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 379, 381.

9. Husserl, “Phänomenologie und Anthropologie,” 165 [486].

10. Husserl, 173 [493].

11. In a letter from August 2, 1917, Husserl wrote to Gustav Albrecht “life is generally hard, and I yearn for the peace that the natural conclusion of this earthly being must provide. Admittedly, I do not yet feel myself sufficiently religiously prepared and the end of my philosophical life yearns for the ultimate religious-philosophical conclusion. Unfortunately, duty requires that I bring my many years of work to completion and press, especially as these works provide the scientific fundaments for a reconciliation between the naturalistic worldview, which dominated the past epoch, and [the] teleological worldview. In the end, the teleological is the true worldview. I struggle constantly against unfavorable circumstances, in part those which lie in myself, in my weak powers.” Cf. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik, 212–213.

12. Husserl, “Phänomenologie und Anthropologie,” 177 [497].

13. Husserl, 177 [497].

14. Husserl, 172 [493].

15. Husserl, 173 [493].

16. Husserl, Krisis, 189–190 [186].

17. Husserl, 189–190 [186].

18. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, Dritter Teil, 1929–35, ed. Iso Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 480.

19. Husserl, 3:481.

20. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 366 [translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 376]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen II.

21. Whereas Husserl still sought to ground the scientificity of the sciences in a rigorous, scientific philosophy, Heidegger separates the thinking that is philosophizing from the mere sciences, which, according to him, do not think in the proper sense. Dilthey remained undecided on this question. Cf. E. W. Orth, “Dilthey und die Gegenwart der Philosophie,” in Wilhelm Dilthey und die Philosophie der Gegenwart (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1985), 7–27.

22. Husserl’s later doctrine of intersubjectivity would restrict such a claim. However, the view could well persist that I must begin from my Ego in order to clarify any possible intentional interconnections.

23. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 97 [translated by F. Kersten as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenolog (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 101]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen I.

24. Husserl, Ideen I, 62 [58].

25. Husserl, 3 [xvii].

26. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Erster Teil, Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), 100.

27. Husserl, Ideen I, 73 [72–73]; Ideen II, 174, 180 [183, 180–181].

28. See Husserl, Ideen II; cf. also Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Drittes Buch, Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971) [translated by Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book, Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980)]. That is the motif of Plessner’s Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch of 1928 (3rd ed., Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975), which was already prepared in 1923 with Die Einheit der Sinne [cf. Anthropologie der Sinne: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003)].

29. Cf. E. W. Orth, “Anthropologie und Intersubjektivität. Zur Frage von Transzendentalität oder Phänomenalität der Kommunikation,” Phänomenologische Forschung 4 (1977): 103–129.

30. Cf. Husserl, Ideen I, 235–236., 237, 295–313 [245–247, 247–248, 307–325]. Cassirer’s Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923/1925/1929) can, among other things, also be understood as a (noematic) philosophy of culture of this kind. See Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 3 vols. (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1956) [translated by Ralph Manheim as The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955–1957)].

31. Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser (The Hagues: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 150 [translated by Dorion Caims as Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 121].

32. Husserl, 153 [125].

33. Husserl, 154 [126].

34. Husserl, Ideen II, 98 [104; trans. modified].

35. Husserl, 103 [110].

36. Husserl, 103–104 [110].

37. Husserl, 107 [114].

38. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, 3:519 (from 1933).

39. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, Theorie der Phänomenologischen Reduktion, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 162.

40. According to Cassirer, the “critique of reason thereby becomes the critique of culture” (Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 1:11 [80]). He demands, in opposition to anthropomorphism, a “critical-transcendental anthropomorphism.” See Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1920), 116.

41. Husserl initially developed this distinction following Franz Brentano in the context of his Philosophie der Arithmetik, ed. Lothar Eley (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 190–194, esp. 193–194 [translated by Dallas Willard as Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 200–207, esp. 205–207]. Scheler writes in his essay “Phänomenologie und Erkenntnistheorie” (1914) that, in view of self-givenness, “phenomenological philosophy is a continual desymbolization of the world.” Gesammelte Werke X: Schriften aus dem Nachlass, Band 1, Zur Ethik und Erkenntnislehre, ed. Maria Scheler (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1957), 384 [translated by David R. Lachterman as “Phenomenology and Theory of Cognition,” in Selected Philosophical Essays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 143]. Admittedly, “self-given is not the same as ‘indubitable’ or ‘irrefutable’ ” (ibid., 382 [140]). How one is supposed to understand a culture without any symbolization may appear difficult. One must understand the term symbolic in opposition to proper, intuitive, that is, without additive constructed moments. On intuition in Husserl and the concept of essence, cf. Husserl, Ideen I, 13–20, 176–178 [8–15, 187–190]. On ideation and intuition, cf. E. W. Orth, “Ideation, ideierende Abstraktion,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, eds. Joachim Ritter and Karlfriend Gründer (Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe Verlag, 1976), 4:52–54.

42. Cf., for example, Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 2:16n1 [12].

43. Cf. E. W. Orth, “Phänomenologische Reduktion und intentional-analytische Orientierung. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Sprachphilosophie,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 7 (1980): 319–344, esp. 330–332, 341. Husserl distinguishes (in B II, 6/1–2) a “naive-direct phenomenology and the phenomenology of the phenomenologizing ego—phenomenology of phenomenology” (cf. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik, 372).

44. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 106 [72].

45. Husserl, Ideen I, 51 [44].

46. Husserl, 51 [44].

47. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 106 [72].

48. Husserl, Ideen I, 176 [188]. On the concept of evidence, see Elisabeth Ströker, “Husserls Evidenzprinzip. Sinn und Grenzen einer methodischen Norm der Phänomenologie als Wissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 32 (1978): 3–30.

49. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty also emphasize this fact of distance. The problem is the appropriate qualification of this distance.

50. Husserl, Ideen I, 64 [59].

51. To that extent, the human being is, according to Scheler, the “one who can say no” in opposition to the animal, “who always says ‘yes’ to reality.” Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, in Späte Schriften, ed. Manfred S. Frings (Bern/München: Francke Verlag, 1976), 44; English translation: The Human’s Place in the Cosmos, trans. Manfred S. Frings (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 39; trans. modified. Scheler sets Husserl’s concept of reduction in connection with the fundamental human attitude [Grundhaltung] of “launch[ing] a strong ‘No’ against this kind of reality” (42 [37]). Of course, the distance here in question lies not only in the “no,” but also in every human “yes.”

52. Husserl, Ideen I, 69/66.

53. Husserl spoke of the “horizonal structure of all intentionality” (Cartesianische Meditationen, 86 [48]); [according to his own testimony] he still lacked the “doctrine of horizonal intentionality” in the Logical Investigations and first developed it in Ideas I. Edmund Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 207 [translated by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logik (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 199]. Even comparatively simple intentional systems have their “horizons,” which point beyond what is actually evident (Cartesianische Meditationen, 18–20, [translated by P. Koestenbaum as The Paris Lectures (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 17–19] as “meaning more” (Cartesianische Meditationen, 20 [Paris Lectures, 19], cf. 86 [Cartesian Meditations, 48]).

54. Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester; 1925, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 188 [translated by John Scanlon as Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester; 1925 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 144].

55. Husserl, Ideen I, 1–9 [xvii–xxiii].

56. Husserl, 62–63 [57–59].

57. Husserl, 3 [xvii].

58. Husserl, 5 [xix].

59. Cf. also Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970), 200.

60. Cf. Husserl, Ideen II, 178–185 [188–194].

61. Cf. Husserl, Ideen I, 68 [65–66]; Ideen II, 179 [189].

62. Husserl, Ideen II, 179 [189]; cf. 179–185 [189–194].

63. Cf. Husserl, Ideen I, 68–69 [66].

64. Husserl, 182 [193].

65. Husserl, Ideen II, 180 [189].

66. Husserl, 180 [189–190]. Alongside the general distinction between “natural” and “phenomenological” attitudes (which also turns up as the distinction between “natural” and “philosophical mental attitudes,” or “natural” and “philosophical thinking” [Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie: Fünf Vorlesungen, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 3, 17 [translated by Lee Hardy as The Idea of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 61, 15], Husserl also worked out more specialized attitudes. Within the “natural” [natürliche] attitude, he groups the “natural” [naturale] (related to nature) attitude and the “personal” or “cultural” (related to human beings and the human world) attitude. Finally, upon these attitudes, further attitudes can be built up that are characteristic of whole types of sciences, for example, the “natural-scientific” and the “human-scientific” attitudes. Cf. Husserl, Ideen II, 332–372, esp. 359–372 [344–382, esp. 369–382], 372–377 [382–386]; Phänomenologische Psychologie, 381. There can be as many possible reductions as there are possible attitudes.

67. Leibniz and Lotze, for example, held activity to be determinable in principle only as mind [Geist], where for Lotze the passivity of suffering also belongs to mental activities.

68. Husserl, Krisis, 270 [336].

69. Cf. Husserl, Erste Philosophie, 1:203–207: “The Idea of a Philosophical Culture”; Erste Philosophie, 2:203–228; Krisis, 9–12, 273–276 [11–14, 338–341].

70. Husserl, Krisis, 11 [13]; trans. modified. Cf. Gerhard Funke, “Kritik der Vernunft und ethisches Phänomen,” in Neuere Entwicklungen des Phänomenbegriffs, ed. E. W. Orth (Freiburg: Alber, 1980), 33–89. Funke has worked out the role of the ethical in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology especially clearly.

71. On German Idealism’s culture of reason and its aftereffects in Husserlian phenomenology, cf. Werner Marx, Vernunft und Welt: Zwischen Tradition und anderem Anfang (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), especially the first three essays.

72. Husserl, Ideen II, 200 [210–211].

73. Husserl, Ideen III, 59–70 [51–60].

74. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, ed. Iso Kern, 3 vols., (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).

75. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 159–163 [131–136].

76. This indecisiveness does not seem to be untypical of the use of the “hermeneutic” method or of the theory of the linguistic world picture. Husserl was himself aware of the complexity of the concept of constitution. For example, he explicitly distinguishes between “original constitution” and “the understanding-experience within constitution and within what is already constituted, the understanding of which is all the more complete the more the constitution is revealed” (Husserl, Ideen II, 360 [370], cf. 366 [376].

77. Eugen Fink, “Operative Begriff in Husserls Phänomenologie,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 11 (1957): 321–337.

78. Husserl, Krisis, 105–193 [103–189].

79. Husserl Ideen I, 3, 56–58 [xvii, 51–53].

80. Aside from Ideas, the topic of the general thesis can also be found in Phänomenologische Psychologie, 465–470 (from 1925). Cf. E. W. Orth, “Generalthesis,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter (Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe Verlag, 1974), 3:270–272.

81. Cf. Husserl, Krisis, 272 [337–338].

82. Husserl, 138–145, 150 [135–141, 147].

83. As is well known, the concept of intuition was expanded by Husserl into the concept of “categorial intuition.” This must in turn be distinguished from the supposed intuitiveness that consists in the intimate or routinized familiarity with complicated issues such as, for example, those of a vocational world in which we feel ourselves at home. A pseudo-intuitive obviousness of this kind belongs to every culture, no matter how complicated and complex it may be. Even the nonintuitive is lived or experienced in a pseudo-intuitive way.

84. Husserl, Krisis, 141–142 [138–139].

85. Werner Marx has investigated the problematic of the relationship between life-world, life-worlds, and special worlds. Werner Marx, Vernunft und Welt, especially the essays “Vernunft und Lebenswelt” (45–62) and “Lebenswelt und Lebenswelten” (63–77). Cf. also Elisabeth Ströker, ed., Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979).

86. Husserl, Krisis, 114, 140–144 [111–112, 137–141].

87. Husserl, 146–148 [143–145].

88. Husserl, 128 [125].

89. Husserl, 150 [147].

90. Husserl, 154 [151]; cf. 158–159, 155–156 [155–157, 152–153].

91. Husserl, 190 [186].

92. Husserl, 272 [337].

93. Husserl, 205 [202].

94. Husserl, 190 [186].

95. Husserl, 189 [185–186].

96. Cf. E. W. Orth, “Husserls Begriff der cogitativen Typen und seine methodologische Reichweite,” Phänomenologische Forschungen 1 (1975): 138–167, esp. 157.

97. Husserl, Krisis, 189–190 [186].

98. Husserl, 188 [184]. Husserl here draws on the linguistic doctrine of essentially grounded equivocations [Äquivokationen aus Wesensgründen] in the context of the so-called occasional meanings as he had developed it in Logical Investigations. In Formale und transzendentale Logik, Husserl calls such equivocations “internal shiftings of intentionality and its products [Leistungen], shiftings that are tied together, and demanded, by essential interconnexions” (Formale und transzendental Logik, 158 [177]; cf. “Horizonal Structure of All Intentionality,” Cartesianische Meditationen, 86 [48–49]; cf. Formale und transzendental Logik, 207 [199]). Thus, Husserl shows also in Krisis “The ‘I’ that I attain in the epochē … is actually called ‘I’ only by equivocation—though it is an essential equivocation since, when I name it in reflection, I can say nothing other than: it is I who practice the epochē.” “The primal ‘I,’ the ego of my epochē, … can never lose its uniqueness and personal indeclinability” and to that extent is insurmountable; however, it can “through a particular constitutive accomplishment of its own [make] itself declinable, for itself, transcendentally” (Husserl, Krisis, 188 [184–185]; cf. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, 3:586, 388–393).

99. Reductions of this kind, which can lead to a priori benchmarks and mutually correct themselves, are (1) the structure schema ego-cogito-cogitatum, (2) transcendental factical temporality, (3) the concrete monad-ego with its habitualities, and (4) concrete transcendental intersubjectivity as the name for the collective nexus of all possible intentionalities. Cf. Orth, “Husserls Begriff der cogitativen Typen,” 158–163.

100. On the transcendental-phenomenological role of occasionality, see Orth, “Husserls Begriff der cogitativen Typen,” 166; Orth, “Phänomenologische Reduktion,” 335–338, 341–343. Cf. also Klaus Held, “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität und die Idee einer phänomenologische Transzendentalphilosophie,” Perspektiven transzendentalphänomenologischer Forschung, ed. U. Claesges und K. Held (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 3–60, esp. 5–6, 13, 25. Held does not draw on Krisis, 188–189 [184–185].

101. Analogously, “Reflection” [Besinnung] plays a role for Dilthey. For this reason, his philosophy of life is precisely not to be interpreted irrationally. Life is, for Dilthey, cultural life, in which reflection grows and which cannot then be placed on this or that side of life.

102. Cf. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, 3:480–487.

103. Husserl, Ideen II, 364 [374].

104. Husserl, 364 [374].

105. Husserl, 362 [373].

106. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, 502.

107. On the concept of acting, see E. W. Orth, “Phänomenologie und Praxis,” Phänomenologische Forschungen 3 (1976): 11–13.

108. Husserl, Ideen I, 194, 198–199, 227–228 [205, 209–210, 238–239].

109. Husserl, Ideen II, 153 [160–161]. On the biological, physiological, and locational aprioris, cf. Husserl, Ideen, 3:109, 114 [94, 100]; Krisis, 482; Phänomenologische Psychologie, 108, 197–199, 326 [81–82, 150–151]; Formale und Transzendentale Logis, 211–212 [203–204].

110. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, 492–493.

111. Husserl, 493.

112. Husserl, 493.

113. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 160, 172–173 [132–133, 145–147]; Husserl, Erste Philosophie, 2:162.

114. Husserl, Krisis, 272–276 [337–341]. [What Orth here refers to as the “conclusion of the Crisis” was published as the concluding §73 in the German Husserliana edition (269–276), while it appears as Appendix 4, “Philosophy as Mankind’s Self-Reflection; the Self-Realization of Reason” in the English translation (335–342).—HK]

115. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, 3:389. [“Das menschliche Sein ist Sein in der Endlichkeit derart, daß es beständiges Sein im Bewußtsein der Unendlichkeit ist.”—HK]