Abstract
The primordial sphere, the givenness of the Other, and animalic understanding; a typology of understanding; the static analysis of social interactions in the lifeworld; the generative structures of socio-cultural developments in the lifeworld; and causal relations and facts in the lifeworld.
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Notes
- 1.
The German version of the Cartesian Mediations was not published before 1950, but the shift in Husserl’s position including the turn to the problem of intersubjectivity, the lifeworld, and the distinctions between the transcendental, the egological, and the primordial reduction has been discussed by the members of the Freiburg circle in exile at the New School in New York. The modifications and extensions of the following accounts, especially concerning hyletic contents, the Here and the There of inner space, and animalic understanding, are similar to the analyses of Cairns 2007, 313f and 317ff. and Embree 2012, ch. 3, 4, and 5. More on the constitution of the lifeworld is now available in Husserl’s manuscripts from 1916 to 1937 in Hua XXIX.
- 2.
For a detailed account see now Behnke 2009.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
The adjective “animalic” is mentioned in Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary. In this investigation it not only includes the understanding of animals by animals or humans, but also the understanding of animalic life expressions of other humans by humans. What is said in Cairns 2007, 314 and 321 on sense transfer and organism is similar to what is said above about animalic life expressions and animalic understanding.
- 6.
This does not mean that certain higher animals are not able to understand symbolic significations, but most animals can do without it and humans can do without it in primitive encounters with other animals including other humans. For Peirce’s distinction between index and symbol, see Peirce CP 2.205–2.207. On appresentation see Hua I, §§51, 52, 55.
- 7.
To call not-understanding a kind of understanding seems to be awkward, but the expression “I do not understand” presupposes the assumption that there is something that can be understood.
- 8.
The terms “elementary understanding” and “higher understanding” have been introduced by Dilthey GS 7, 207–213; SW 1, 228–234. See also Seebohm 2004, §12 and §14. Animalic understanding as genetic foundation of both is not mentioned by Dilthey.
- 9.
The term “natural environment” can be interpreted in the context of Hua XXXIX text 4, 6, and 30 as referring to the originally “surrounding world” (Umwelt) of the natural attitude. Cultural worlds have their deepest genetic foundation in the original pre-givenness of the world as “surrounding world.” “Natural environments” in this sense are the immediate foundation of theoretical systems of higher order understanding of nature in philosophical or scientific systems. On the natural attitude and its correlate in the surrounding world, in Ideas I and its significance for the development of Husserl’s concept lifeworld as historical world in Husserl’s later writings, cf. the interpretation in Moran 2013.
- 10.
The world of elementary understanding is approximately coextensive with Schutz’s practical world. See Embree on Schutz in Embree 1977 comparing Schutz and Gurwitsch. Cf. also Embree 1988b, esp. 121f, 127f. The practical environment is according to Hua XXXIX texts 31, 32 in the pre-given world genetically one-sidedly founded in the pre-given world as natural environment, cf. fn. 83.
- 11.
Peirce CP, 5.372–5.376.
- 12.
This type of environment can also be called natural environment last not least because it is just that what is left of the environment of elementary understanding in the methodological abstraction that is constitutive for the natural sciences; cf. Sect. 4.3.
- 13.
Almost nothing is said in Hua XXXIX about objects of higher understanding, cf. text 17, §2, 164f about religion and science.
- 14.
- 15.
Schutz 1932, §50, presupposed for his investigations the immediate givenness of the social lifeworld and assumed that the phenomenological question of the how of the givenness of the lifeworld is not relevant for his purposes. The later discussions of Schutz and Gurwitsch indicate that this assumption causes problems. See Sect. 4.5 below.
- 16.
See Schutz 1932, §§36–41.
- 17.
Schutz 1932, §50 presupposed for phenomenological descriptions the immediate givens of the lifeworld as a whole in the present in direct intention, but the presentation of the Other is not an immediate presentation of the Other and it is it is difficult, even impossible, to reduce the givens of the past in subjective reproductions and intersubjective reconstructions to a primordial immediate awareness.
- 18.
Subjective reproductions presuppose the material of memories. With regard to the structures of subjectively reproduced and intersubjectively reconstructed past series of events, see Sect. 2.2 above on the temporal structures underlying genetic and generative foundations.
- 19.
- 20.
This analysis of the underlying temporal structures of the interplay of interpretation and application is of basic significance for the epistemology of the historical human sciences. See below n. 98 on Gadamer 1965.
- 21.
According to Dilthey monuments as well as texts are fixed life expressions of past predecessors. Schutz’s term “sign” is too broad. There are many other types of signs.
- 22.
- 23.
The assumption that written discourse in a lifeworld without oral discourse can function as a substitute for oral discourse in communication in the present has to presuppose communication via immediate bodily life expressions as its own necessary substructure.
- 24.
Gadamer 1965, part II, section II, esp. 1.b and 2.a, 2.c. The problem of the relation of interpretation and application is one of the basic problems for philological hermeneutics and of basic significance for the epistemology of the human historical and systematic or social sciences. The separation of interpretation and application in the human sciences presupposes the possibility of an abstractive reduction that is able to separate interpretation and application. See below esp. Part II, Sects. 5.3–5.5, 7.1; and Part IV esp. Sects. 10.2 and 10.6.
- 25.
For a thorough account see Behnke 2009, §4 on protentionality and §5 on bodily protentionality.
- 26.
This aspect of the understanding of causation is “mechaniistc,” mechanē understood in the old Greek sense as using a tool as a means to realize a purpose.
- 27.
See, for example, Thomas of Aquinas 1882, I. II qu. 91, art. 1; qu. 93 art. 1–3 on the eternal law, i.e., the laws of nature (not the natural law!) and their origin in the reason of God.
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Seebohm, T.M. (2015). The Material Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology in the Structures of the Lifeworld. In: History as a Science and the System of the Sciences. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 77. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_3
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