Originating the Western World: A Cultural Phenomenology of Historical Consciousness

Abstract

The paper investigates Husserl’s account of Greek Antiquity as the origin of Western civilization in order to explicate his notions of the “spiritual surrounding world” (geistige Umwelt) and the “spiritual objects” (geistige Objekten) that are the elements of this world. The spiritual objects are proposed to be interpreted as cultural forms that play a crucial role in meaning-formation processes. Whereas Husserl sees the spiritual objects as intentional objects of a special type, the paper proposes to pay attention to their functioning, as what Husserl calls “grasping sense” (Auffassungssinn), by means of which an intentional object is constituted. This leads to re-examining the notion of noema and reading it as a “spiritual sense” that is shared by the members of a common “spiritual surrounding world”, i.e., to reading noema as a socially shared cultural form that makes an object to be identified as an object of a certain type within a particular community. Thus noema is not the object as it is intended, as suggested by the East-coast interpreters, but a socially shared sense which belongs to the symbolic structures of a culture, and which makes the object to be intended as something meaningful in a given social context. In the end of the paper these findings will be applied to Husserl’s own attempt to make sense of such a spiritual object as the unique character of European culture.