(Analecta Husserliana 35) Husserlian Phenomenology in A New Key - Intersubjectivity, Ethos, The Societal Sphere, Huma

H U S S E R L I A N P H E N O M E N O L O G Y IN A N E W K E Y
A N A L E C T A HUSSERLIAN A
THE Y E A R B O O K OF P H E N O M E N O L O G I C A L
VOLUME
RESEARCH
XXXV
Editor-in-Chief:
ANNA-TERESA
TYMIENIECKA
The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning

Belmont, Massachusetts
P H E N O M E N O L O G Y IN T H E W O R L D
FIFTY YEARS A F T E R T H E D E A T H OF E D M U N D
HUSSERL
Book 1
T H E T U R N I N G POINTS O F T H E N E W P H E N O M E N O L O G I C A L E R A
Husserl Research Drawing upon the Full Extent of His Development
Book 2
HUSSERLIAN P H E N O M E N O L O G Y IN A N E W K E Y
Intersubjectivity, Ethos, the Societal Sphere, Human Encounter, Pathos
Book 3
HUSSERL'S L E G A C Y I N P H E N O M E N O L O G I C A L PHILOSOPHIES
New Approaches to Reason, Language, Hermeneutics, the Human Condition
Book 4
N E W QUERIES IN AESTHETICS A N D METAPHYSICS

Time, Historicity, Art, Culture, Metaphysics, the Transnatural
The Editor acknowledges the assistance of Robert Wise in the technical preparation of
these volumes.
HUSSERLIAN P H E N O M E N O L O G Y
IN A NEW K E Y
Intersubjectivity, Ethos, the Societal Sphere,

Human Encounter, Pathos
BOOK 2
Phenomenology in the World

Fifty Years after the Death of Edmund
Husserl
Edited by
A N N A - T E R E S A
T Y M I E N I E C K A
The World Phenomenology Institute
Published under the auspices of

The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning
A-T. Tymieniecka, President
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD
IX
World-Wide Phenomenology Fulfilling Husserl's Project: An Introduction
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA /
xi
PART ONE
THE FOUNDATION OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY
JULIA VALENTINA IRIBARNE /
Intersubjectivity As the
Starting Point
Les Sources de la Vie morale
The Logical Space of Morality: A
Possible Theory for the Foundation of Moral Values
MARIANNINA FAILLA / Phenomenology and the Beginnings
of the Moral Problem (Dilthey - Brentano - Husserl)
JOHN E. JALBERT / Phenomenology As the Reawakening of
the Platonic Philosophical Ethos
PILAR BELDA PLANS / La Nocion de Valor en la Escuela
fenomenol6gica
ALEXIUS J. BUCHER / Phanomene einer Ethik
GRACIANO GONZALEZ R. ARNAIZ / Responsibility As
the Principle of Individuality: An Alternative to Husserl's
Theory of Intuition
BRUNON HOL YST / The Topicality of Husserl's Ethical Antirelativism
MARIO SAN CIPRIANO /
YUKIKO OKAMOTO /
3
13
43
53
67
79
93
107
123
PART TWO
FOUNDATIONS OF MORALITY AND
THE SOCIETAL WORLD
Vom Sozialen Verantwortungsapriori im
Sozialphiinomenologischen Denken Edmund Husserls
RUDOLF BOEHM / Le Phenomenal et Ie Politique
F. W. VEAUTHIER /
141
159
VI
TABLE OF CONTENTS
JES BJARUP / Phenomenology, the Moral Sense, and the

Meaning of Life: Some Comments of the Philosophy of
Edmund Husserl and A-T. Tymieniecka
FERNANDO RODRIGUEZ BORNAETXEA / La Actitud
Natural y las Realidades Alternas
OLA MOSTAFA ANWAR / Husserl's Influence on Sociology:
A Study of Schutz's Phenomenology
JACOB ROGOZINSKI/La Chair de la Communaute
HELENA GOURKO / The Historic Horizons of Meaning in the
Japanese Social World
169
193
203
215
233
PART THREE
THE HUMAN ENCOUNTER, THE SPHERE OF
ONE'S OWN, EMPATHY
HUBERTUS TELLENBACH / Analysis of the Nature of
Human Encounter in a Healthy and in a Psychotic State
ARMANDO RIGOBELLO / A Variation on "Reduction Within
Reduction": "Interior Extraneity"
CARMEN BALZER / The Empathy Problem in Edith Stein
MARIA CARLA ANDRIANOPOLI / The Influence of Husserl
in the Pedagogical Debate
247
259
271
279
PART FOUR
BEYOND DICHOTOMIES IN PHENOMENOLOGICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY: BODY, LIFE-WORLD,
NEW APPROACHES
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA / The Human Condition
Within the Unity-of-Everything-There-is-Alive - A Challenge to Philosophical Anthropologies
RICARDO PINILLA BURGOS / Toward an Open Anthropology: Developing Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology
CHRISTER BJURVILL / The Philosophy of the Body
LUIS FLORES / Corporalidad
ANTONIO PIERETTI / The "Lebenswelt" and the Meaning of
Philosophy
289
305
317
335
343
TABLE OF CONTENTS
vii
PEDRO LUIS BLASCO / Science and Dialectics in a Phenomenological Anthropology

LOURDES GORDILLO ALVAREZ-VALDES / Towards a
Phenomenological Methodology for Anthropology
VICTOR MOLCHANOV / Strict Science and Lebenswelt in
Husserl's Phenomenology
A. ZVIE BAR-ON / A Problem in the Phenomenology of
Action: Are There Unintentional Actions
355
363
369
377
PART FIVE
THE HUMAN BEING: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL,
PSYCHIATRIC, ANALYTIC, AND THERAPEUTIC
BREAKTHROUGHS OF PHENOMENOLOGY
MAURIZIO DE NEGRI/Phenomenological Perspectives in
Developmental Psychiatry
RADMILO JOVANOVIC / Phenomenology in General Psychopathology and Psychiatry
ADRIANA DENTONE / On the Possible Relationship Between
Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis
EVA SYRIstovA/ A Ballad on Laughter
MANUEL VILLEGAS / Phenomenological Hermeneutics of
the Therapeutic Discourse
ODED BALABAN / A Phenomenological Approach to the
Unconscious
MIGUEL C. JARQUIN MARIN / La Responsabilidad del
Orientador en el Desarrolo de la Autoestima
MARIA LUCRECIA ROVALETTI / Existence and Guilt: A
Discourse on Origins in Phenomenology
485
INDEX OF NAMES
497
393
411
425
435
445
455
469
FOREWORD
Fifty years after the death of Edmund Husserl, the main founder of the
phenomenological current of thought, we present to the public a four
book collection showing in an unprecedented way how Husserl's
aspiration to inspire the entire universe of knowledge and scholarship
has now been realized. These volumes display for the first time the
astounding expansion of phenomenological philosophy throughout the
world and the enormous wealth and variety of ideas, insights, and
approaches it has inspired. The basic commitment to phenomenological
concerns found in all this variety makes this collection a most significant historical document.
This second volume of the collection bears witness to a deliberate
shift of attention from the earlier to the later phase of Husserl's
reflections. We see how his issues - intersubjectivity, ethics, human
encounter, the societal world, empathy, the sphere of the self, and the
surpassing of dichotomies (bodylpsyche, etc.) - are now at the center of
attention in the human sciences. Among the authors are H. Tellenbach,
A. Rigobello, C. Balzer, C. Bjurvill, V. Molchanov, E. Syristova, O.
Balaban, R. Boehm, M. Sancipriano, O. M. Anwar, Y. Okamoto, B.
Holyst, T. Sodeika, and M. De Negri.
The studies were gathered at the programs held by The World
Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning in the
commemorative year 1988/1989, chiefly at the First World Congress
of Phenomenology at Santiago de Compos tela, Spain, with the aim of
assessing the current state of phenomenology.
A-T. T.
IX
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA
WORLD-WIDE PHENOMENOLOGY FULFILLING

HUSSERL'S PROJECT
An Introduction
What is the status of Husserl's phenomenology today? Does it play any
significant role or is it relegated to strictly historical research? Has the
phenomenology initiated by Husserl come to an end? There is hardly
any orthodox Husserlian today. But what is or could be an orthodox
Husserlian?
These questions come to mind when, even after fifty years of
discussions among scholars since the death of this great master of
phenomenology, we do not have a unified interpretation of his thought.
Moreover, such a unifying interpretation is altogether impossible in
view of Husserl's unfolding of his ever-expanding doctrine down to the
very end of his life, and of his reaching ever-new perspectives. The
possibility of a consensus about his thought recedes further and further
as rival or competing interpretations have stimulated new phenomenologists and younger representatives to move in their own directions,
often stimulated by non-Husserlian factors and nourished by new ideas.
Lastly, the now vast field of research claiming allegiance to phenomenology is diversified into numerous sectors inspired by the developing
thought of other classic phenomenologists and their followers.
As a matter of fact, it is often pointed out that phenomenology as a
philosophical trend is not due to one single thinker but was somehow
"in the air" at the beginning of this century. We trace its direct origins
to Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl who, as the disciple interpreting the master's intuitions in his own fashion, had elaborated the
starting point and foundations of phenomenology as a philosophia
prima. Yet, we acknowledge that the vigor, decisiveness, convincing
force, dissemination, as well as its launching as a new philosophical
approach by Husserl was supported, invigorated and carried out by
colleagues and friends who gathered around Husserl, such as Moritz
Geiger, Fritz Kaufmann, Adolph Reinach, A. Pfaender, Oscar Becker
and Max Scheler. They joined Husserl in his convictions while he
inspired and formed a group of students around him. Their work not
only contributed initially to launching the main porte parole of this new
xi
A - T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol.
1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
xxxv, xi-xx.
XlI
way of thinking, the lahrbuch fUr Philosophie, but their own original
phenomenological research has inspired in the past and is now inspiring
phenomenological investigations in various regions of philosophical
questions that they respectively undertook to investigate.
In short, it is obvious that the powerful current of thought into which
phenomenology gathered its momentum was the result of the meeting
of several minds, meeting in a strong conviction and prompted by their
personal inventive and talented efforts. It was truly a significant
moment in the history of Occidental culture that gave rise to this trend
as it is certainly also a significant situation of contemporary culture at
large that phenomenology, after having formed a school of thought, did
not fold its wings after one or two generations as did NeoKantianism
but rather is being acutely heard within the world, not only Occidental
or Oriental, but within the world wherever the present culture calls for
genuine philosophical inspiration.
In view of this vast expanse of thought and research which go on in
the present day in lines of innumerable diversifications, we naturally
must ask whether there is still a trend of shared features that could fall
under the common label of "phenomenology." I answer this question
emphatically in the affirmative. It is precisely in pointing to some basic
ideas of Husserl that they converge.
Don't we find, in fact, a pervading thread of the idea of intentionality, although extended to new areas? Is not the expansion of
phenomenological inquiry due to the discovery of the work of constitution in previously unsuspected areas? In mentioning here just these two
main tenets of classic phenomenology expanded into present-day
thought, we cannot overlook the fulguration of thought provoked by
inquiries into the later Husserl's intuitions and the subsequent discoveries of historical, cultural and life elements entering into and
affecting present experience.
Recognizing, on the one hand, the essential contributions to the
classic phenomenological foundation-laying phase of phenomenology
by Husserl's associates, then and now a valid source of our investigation, and, on the other hand, the innovative philosophical work by the
following generation, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Rombach and others not
forgetting such mavericks as Heidegger and Ortega y Gasset which
improved upon the pioneering ideas of the Husserl of his earlier and
middle period, we cannot fail to acknowledge the central role which the
work of Husserl plays within the entire phenomenologically oriented
INTRODUCTION
Xlll
orbit and far beyond it. Indeed, the immense, painstaking, indefatigable
and ever-improving effort of Husserl to find ever-deeper and more
reliable foundations for the philosophical enterprise (as well as his
constant critical re-thinking and perfecting of the approach and socalled "method" in order to perform this task and thus cover in this
source-excavation an ever more far-reaching groundwork) stands out
and maintains itself as an inepuisable reservoir for philosophical reflection in which all the above-mentioned work has either its core or its
source. In fact, in his undertaking to re-think the entire philosophical
enterprise as such and to recreate philosophy upon what he sought to
be at least a satisfactorily legitimated basis, Husserl, through his already
systematised and "authorized" work, and his courses, and later on in his
spontaneous reflection (which did not find its way into a definitive
corpus but was nevertheless sufficiently coherent with his previously
established body of thought to be considered a continuation of it),
uncovers perspectives upon the universe of man and projects their new
philosophical thematisation that brings together all the attempts by
philosophers (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, who drew upon this material and
found there his own inspiration) who succeeded him with foundational
intentions; it also gives a core of philosophical ideas and insights for the
younger generation of philosophers today.
It is also true that the present-day culture - not only this or that
specific culture but what we might call the cultural spirit of the world shows a receptivity, a thirst for the ideas which only phenomenology
appears able to offer. It is also true that the cultural climate of the last
two decades fostered a new dynamism in those who are phenomenologically inspired, one even more vigorous than before. As its result,
phenomenology today is completing an entire phase of its self-critical
course, the third phase which I announced two decades ago (Analecta
Husserliana, Vol. II, 1971).
As a matter of fact, because of the fundamentally self-critical character of phenomenological principles (cf. A-T. Tymieniecka "Phenomenology Reflects Upon Itself," I and II in Analecta Husserliana, Vols. II
and III), there is today an enormous proliferation of thought in new and
very diverse directions which, however, remain attached to the basic
tenets of phenomenology. And this crucial significance of the selfcritical principles of phenomenology applies in the strongest sense to
Husserl himself who, as pointed out above, has not only sought to
perfect his approaches and formulations but also in this self-critical
xiv
effort expanded his range of positive, constructive insights in various

circuits of reflection. In fact, since the Second World War, Husserl
research and the influence of his thought have followed the progressive
advance of Husserl himself as the various posthumous publications
secured by Husserl disciples and directed by the enthusiastic Fr. H. L.
Van Breda and released from the Husserl Archives at Leuven to the
expectant philosophical world. With each major volume the perspectives upon Husserl's thought have changed and expanded. Now, as we
read in the latest publications of his inedita (e.g. Intersubjektivitiit,
Ethische Vorlesungen, ...), Husserl's thought seems to have encompassed an entire cycle of philosophical reflection upon the human being
within his life-world and even beyond it leading toward the divinity. It is
from this complete cycle that the present-day generation of phenomenological scholars draws inspiration and enlightenment. For this and
other major reasons which we will briefly treat below, the present fourvolume collection not only gives us the essential panorama of what
phenomenology is at the present moment (we could say a truly culminating moment of its fruitful progress) - a vigorous thought inspiring
inventive minds around the world in all cultures, languages, nations,
political orientations, and economic conditions - but further makes a
point of getting a fix on this newly self-completing phase of the
phenomenological development as such. We could say that the "third
phase" of phenomenology, into which two decades ago phenomenology
was entering, leaving the classic and post-classic phases, has reached its
full growth and precisely this in still one more quite major turn in the
(then) unforeseeable enrichment of all lines of Husserlian thought and
within innumerable ramifications of these lines.
This collection is composed mainly from the papers submitted for
the First World Congress of Phenomenology organized by The World
Phenomenology Institute in September of the year 1988 in Santiago de
Compostela, Spain, commemorating the fiftieth annivarsary of Husserl's
death, as well as from selected work presented at other programs of the
Institute which took place the same year and with the same intent in the
US and England (cf. the report: "Phenomenology in the World Fifty
Years after the Death of Edmund Husserl," Bk 1, p. xxi). These
programs carried out on two continents, at two world congresses (the
other being the XVIIth World Congress of Philosophy in Brighton,
England, 1988) have been an exceptional occasion to bring together
our collaborators dispersed in the world with many other phenomeno-
INTRODUCTION
xv
logically inspired scholars attracted by these rare opportunities to come

together and air their views, interests, concerns. This accounts for the
truly world-wide sounding of what phenomenology is today; it allows
the surprisingly extensive and colorful fulguration of interests, problems
and formulations of ideas to appear.
It is not possible, in fact, to put the spectrum of philosophical issues
in their original varied colorful richness which we have here into fixed
philosophical categories; they are too full of ingenious new twists,
aspects, insights, views, indications, hints. ... Consequently, in their
arrangement we will follow a rather standard differentiation by disciplines and themes.
Nevertheless, while declining to prematurely attempt a systematic,
interpretative differentiation of this wealth of ideas which has emerged
so profusely, we must indicate, first, their allegiance to phenomenology
and to legitimizing it; second, we must trace the origin of this unexpected fecundity which phenomenology, now a century old, displays
as on the first day.
The first reason for this new wave of renewal of the entire field lies
in the first place in the above-cited availability of the entire cycle of
Husserl's thought, renewing all in itself already or having germinal
thought toward it. But it can be traced also to four other factors. We
will endeavor to trace them while we present the main sectors of our
anthology.
1. The present collection of essays marks in a striking way the
special new phase in strictly Husserlian research. Although inroads into
phenomenology drawn from the integral Husserl corpus have already
been initiated in recent years, as witnessed in the latest volumes of
Analecta Husserliana and elsewhere, it is in the present collection that
we see it in a vast spread of ideas, themes and insights; this collection
does, in this sense, inaugurate the new integral phase in Husserl
research proper.
2. Yet we gain not only new vistas and new precisions about the
thought of Husserl on the one hand, but also a deeper view into the
great puzzles of phenomenology, by confronting Husserl's thought with
other great phenomenological (and other) thinkers. Our second book
groups these studies. It covers a great range of issues, bringing them
into a new light. Also, in the strictly thematic essays, viewed literally or
obliquely, the great classic issues remain openly and intrinsically the
focus of concentration. Throughout these studies and reflections by the
XVI
new generation of scholars we find not only the work of Husserl and
the classic phenomenologists but also the ruminated and digested
presence of the classic interpretations of Husserl (e.g., of E. Fink, R.
Ingarden, L. Landgrebe and his school). The later thought of M.
Merleau-Ponty, H. G. Gadamer, E. Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur, phenomenlogically inspired albeit divergent in other aspects, are either
directly treated or implicitly alluded to. We might say that in this
vibrantly new fragrance of thought we feel the new generation of
scholars breathing the air of their forerunners.
What makes this vaste expanse of thought phenomenological, or,
what makes its allegiance to phenomenology, is, in the first place, the
predominance of the direct concern with the great classic issues of
Husserlianism: intentionality, evidence, consciousness, sUbject-object,
intuition, constitution, reason, empathy, certainty, method, relation,
transcendentalism, foundationalism, originality, time, horizon, historicity, intersubjectivity, life-world, etc. In the enormous variety of approaches, queries, insights, versatility of points of view, these dominant
issues undergo an infinite adumbration in nuancement and refinement.
3. This richness and its spread is also due to the immersion of
scholars in the debates going on in the philosophical streamlets of today
- debates in which they participate and solidarize themselves vicariously - because it can be said that the entire span of the philosophical
arena of today, whether positive or negative, constructive or decadent,
is indebted to the vigorous Husserlian proclaiming of phenomenology
and its unfolding. We distinguish Husserlian phenomenological concerns
in all the streamlets of present-day philosophical thought. Whether it be
structuralism, semiotics, dialogism, communicative action, existentialism
in its various shades, deconstruction, etc., in spite of their emphatic
disclaiming of any allegiance to phenomenology, each displays basic
controversies or issues which can easily be shown to be related to or
issuing from Husserl's inspiration. We may detect a Husserlian influence at the very heart. First of all we might say that Husserl's vigorous
struggle against relativism and his quest for a neutral framework for the
formulation and resolution of philosophical questions are visible in
Habermas' efforts and those ... of Foucault where we see a startling
example of the old drive for a unitary framework; the drive also
underlies the most recent phenomenology of life (Tymieniecka). The
old Realism/Idealism issue is still vigorously debated having taken on
new forms, e.g., moving from transcendental idealism to the metaphysical "onto-"realism.
INTRODUCTION
xvii
As already mentioned, the trends of structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, etc., can all be related to Husserl's main
emphasis upon pure forms, absolute certainty, evidence of eidoi, etc.
Had not, in the final account, his critique of reason in the hands of his
followers and others in contemporary philosophy led to disastrous
aporias? But it also stimulated the determined countering of the
tendencies which lead to the total decadence of our culture, by seeking
a major way out of them in a new attempt at rethinking the starting
point and the context of phenomenology precisely in the phenomenology of life which takes all these aporias in its stride.
Phenomenology appears to have laid bare the bone of contention to
be taken up by the main debates in the decadent philosophies of the
present historical moment; it has brought forth the subjacent arteries of
issues denouncing the mystification or twist or biased approaches and
subsequent formulations. (They are led astray into dead-end streets or
float upon spurious waves at the thinnest surfaces of this human
universe of discourse). The decisive issues thus brought forth by
phenomenology such as objectivity/subjectivity, individualism/intersubjectivity, cognition of reality/transcendental constitution, idealism/realism, horizon, analysis and passive synthesis, life/reason, structure/
content, intellect/passions, cognition/action, individual/community, etc.,
constitute the centers of these streamlets and are reformulated according to the different starting points which the thinkers take, giving
dynamism to the new debates in which these streamlets play.
Consequently, immersed in a much vaster network of philosophical
discussions than the strictly phenomenologically encircled one, the
present-day scholar in phenomenology is in his very own insights and
formulations of questions influenced by the philosophies of today
through those of their aspects congenial to phenomenology and yet
different due to their own biases. Hence we witness even in strictly
Husserlian research and everywhere beyond it a wealth of new ingenious twists and new intuitions with which the great issues of the core
of the phenomenological patrimony are adumbrated and enriched. The
almost infinite proliferation of perspectives upon the great classic
themes is overwhelming and eludes any hasty categorization.
When we propose the picture of the phenomenological spirit within
the entire world in which it is alive today, we cannot overlook the fact
that when classic phenomenological ideas fall upon a ground quite
different culturally from the one in which they emerged, these ideas
xviii
undergo specific variations and nuancements. Since it is the human

being within this life-world that is the center of the phenomenological
concern, different types and modalities of the life and societal world
also play their role in giving a special "flavor" to the work of the spirit,
special enrichment.
This should not be understood, nevertheless, as indicating the
dispersal of phenomenology today. Besides being differentiated into
fields of study, some new vigorous self-critical attempts, instructed by
the criticism of classic and post-classic phenomenological inquiry, bring
forth a new interpretation of the phenomenological project in the
reformulation of the philosophical enterprise as such in toto (unlike the
attempts of those of the post-Husserlian period who took up some
major innovative task but did not bring it to a conclusion that alone
could allow a judgement as to the validity of the total effect, e.g.,
Ingarden, Merleau-Ponty, etc.). We find this reformulation within the
present collection as a low but vigorous profile of this vast spread of
thought, making its way through it and taking on substance.
Yet the most remarkable thing which I have been emphasizing over
and over again is that scholars from the West and East, from the North
and South, from all the continents, social milieux, and political tendencies meet at conferences of The World Phenomenology Institute and
find in our core themes, the phenomenology of human life and of the
human condition a unique ground for intimate communication through
and beyond all the divergencies which they otherwise bear.
In fact, after we see the wheel of critical reflection upon the various
phases of phenomenology turn its full cycle, we find at the pole
opposite to Husserlian intentionality as the sovereign function of the
human being, the passions; intentionality's constitutive/cognitive mode
of operation is dethroned from its primordial position by the creative
act of man and his creative function; the intentional network of functioning is challenged by the creative orchestration; and the life-world
with the absolutism of transcendental consciousness at its center is, in
its position of pole of reference, dismissed to a secondary command,
receding to the subjacent life with its pre-human, pre-subject/object
division, to the unity-of-everything-there-is-alive (Tymieniecka and the
work of The World Phenomenology Institute expounded in the forum
of the Analecta Husserliana series).
4. But, as we all know, Husserl's intent that phenomenology should
INTRODUCTION
xix
function as a philosophia prima with respect to all fields of scholarship,

all fields of knowledge, has been fully realized. Indeed, from its
incipient stage, phenomenology not only encompassed all the philosophical disciplines such as philosophy of mind, logic, aesthetics, ethics,
ontology, anthropology, etc., but already was applied to jurisprudence
(Reinach), social science and economics (Scheler), sociology (Schutz),
religion (Otto), art (Geiger), biology (Conrad-Martius), etc. The early
phenomenological schools of psychology and psychiatry have burgeoned (Binswanger, Bujtendinck, Boss, Straus, Minkowski), and their
works are classics by now. But this first wave of the influx of phenomenology into the sciences of man has intensified and spread in the
period after the Second World War and now, toward the end of the
century in its tenth decade, it can be said without exaggeration that
there is hardly any human science or art theory which does not bear
directly or by proxy a mark of phenomenological inspiration in its
incredibly varied and rich spectrum of ideas, insights, bents, illuminations, etc.
Seeking to systematise the fruitful exchange between phenomenology
and the sphere of knowledge, the sciences and the arts, our continuing
research program carried out under the heading of "The Interdisciplinary Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition" coordinated in the systematic progression the world-wide research into what
is called "phenomenological praxeology" by The World Phenomenology Institute for the past two decades. (cf. Analecta Husserliana, Vols.
1-32 and Phenomenological Inquiry, Vols. 3-14). Phenomenology
has proven itself to be enlightening beyond the strict humanities,
extending to biology, all branches of sociology, technical studies and
architecture, and the phenomenology of life has much to contribute to
ecology and environmental studies.
In summary, phenomenology in all its variants is present beyond the
scholarly sphere in all realms of educated life, on every continent,
wherever the local culture seeks some serious and innovative philosophical inspiration.
We conclude this survey by stating that, after a long period of
reception, criticism, dissemination of germinal ideas, and progressive
discovery of deeply seated intuitions, phenomenology in the world of
scholarship, science, art, thought and culture has come of age. What
xx
would be the most appropriate historical moment to bring it into the

open? This is the conclusion that the reader, aware of the philosophicoscientific and cultural sphere of the present-day wide, wide world, will
come to make after study of our four volumes.
A group of participants after the opening reception on the Campus Universitario.
A-T. Tymieniecka speaking at the official inauguration of the Congress.
Annie Kuipers (Kluwer Acad. Pub!') and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka.
PART ONE
THE FOUNDATION OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY
JULIA VALENTINA IRIBARNE
INTERSUBJECTIVITY AS THE STARTING POINT
A thorough consideration of Husserl's thought can be accomplished by

a way different from the way in which it is done in traditional discussion. With the purpose of stressing the systematic character that the
philosopher sought for his philosophy, we take as our starting point
absolute intersubjectivity, i.e., a consideration of his phenomenology as
a monadology.l
This Husserlian conception has belonged to the public domain since
the publication of the Cartesian Mediations. The succint nature of the
Fifth Meditation, however, resulted in its true value for the understanding of his philosophy as a whole going unrecognized. The most widespread treatment at times reduced that discussion to the presentation of
a method, the phenomenological method, or explained it as the presentation of an egology which, at a later stage could be easily disqualified
as solipsistic; insofar as it is so understood, the philosopher's thought is
radically betrayed.
If we have asserted that Husserl's phenomenology is a monadology,
we shall now try to show that, unlike Leibniz's monads, these monads
have windows; therefore, an important part of our discussion deals with
the exposition of these monad's windows.
To develop our position, we will start by giving a first description of
intersubjectivity's eidos. Secondly - and so as to follow in our discussion an ascending order of stratification - we will attempt to demonstrate the existence of "orientation pole" of movements with and
towards the Other even in the life-world's pre-reflective ambit. Thirdly,
we will go on to consider the different strata of the ego's constitution
of the Other. Lastly, we want to stress the systematic nature of this
philosophy, which in the unfolding of its problems reaches the ultimate
questions on the Good and on the meaning of human history.
1. INTERSUBJECTIVITY'S EIDOS
"Intersubjectivity" designates in Husserl the concrete interweaving of

living human beings, whose lives in turn are intertwined with those of
3
A -T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol.
xxxv, 3-12.
predecessors in links that survive as tradition. The future dimension is

reached by the unraveling of the telos which acts not inevitably, but
with the strength of an idea in the Kantian way, and which points to the
people of the future's coexisting in harmony, as a result of the exercise
of being persons in authenticity. This intersubjective intertwining has
the form of the living flowing present of the we, through which the
personal temporalizations pass, insofar as the singular, isolated subjectivity can be reduced from the originally interrelated sUbjectivity.
The features of this interrelationship become evident when we do the
phenomenology of the different strata of constitution.
II. INTERSUBJECTIVITY IN THE PRE-REFLECTIVE STRATUM
In a text of September, 1933,2 Husserl asserts that primordiality is a

system of impulses having a transcendental character. The concept of
"primordiality" designates the continuous original flow, a part of which
is any impulse pretending to enter other currents from the lived body as a functioning center oriented to the life-world by movements that,
though disorganized at their beginning, become configured with meaning during their course, the motor of this configuration being indeed the
impulse; the very fact that a configuration is reached reveals the te/os
by which these impulses are organized.
The philosopher cares in particular to show two examples of that
anonymous impulsive functioning that reaches its goal. The first one is
the child's relationship to its mother, and the second, the sexual relationship.
The first case concerns the infant who is still at the pre-ego level of
functioning. Its own temporalization arises at an implicit temporalization horizon. It has a non-actualized world to which it is not "awake,"
but is affected by, and so receives hyle, and this is its first participation
in the world of awake ego subjects who are already in living connection.
The proto-child's instinctive habituality is exemplified in the fact that
since its life in the maternal womb it has been able to move and so was
born with that acquired experience; it has already lived with another in
the original intersubjectivity, in its being incorporated in the viscera of a
mother, who is not yet for it "the Other." The new-born child, "in the
normal 'way of seeing things,' cries for its mother, for the satisfaction of
its original needs, cries involuntary; often that 'works.' ... This first
mother is a premise and source for desire satisfaction - when she
arrives and is there, satisfaction is had."3
In the case of the sexual impulse, this reference towards the Other as
Other and towards its correlative impulse is shown. Here are not two
satisfactions to be considered separately. Husserl takes into account in
this case particularly the mere protomodal satisfaction, the most
elemental reference form; here is not two satisfactions isolated in one
and another primordiality, "but a unity of both primordialities established by means of the satisfaction of each one in the other."4 On the
basis of these examples we may say that in the life-world's original
ambit, the monadic window is created by the functioning of the impulse
towards the Other. In the former case, an impulse of the lived body not
yet identified as one's lived body; in the latter, insofar as the tending
toward the Other is experienced as an impulse of one's lived body and
not as proceeding from the I-subject with its higher affections and
cultural valuations; within that ambit is expressed the original lack of
fulfillment and reference to the Other, a reference, the reciprocal
character of which shall become more and more evident in an examination of the higher degrees of constitution.
III. INTERSUBJECTIVITY IN THE REFLECTIVE STRATUM
1. The Static Approach to the Constitution of the

Transcendental Other One
In this Fifth Meditation, Husserl expresses his intention to follow a

static approach as regards the transcendental Other's legitimation. To
that end he reaches, by way of methodological abstraction, the sphere
of primordiality, understood as an ambit in which are excluded all
references to the Other and to the world alluding to him, and in which
are retained only, together with one's own lived body and own world, all
the experiences (Erlebnisse) of one's mental processes, among them the
experience of the Other. The experience of the Other to me - to speak
from the ego of the meditating phenomenologist -, my empathy, shall
then be the starting point for a retrospective inquiry into the operations
that have produced it. A peculiar type of effectuation then reveals itself
presentiation, a becoming explicit that follows on a repetition of the
reductive operation, what Husserl calls a "double reduction."5 Husserl
treats empathy in a discussion paralleling it with another effectuation of
an analogous structure: memory.
In this latter case, there is offered to the first phenomenological
reduction a present consciousness which recalls, for instance, having
been in Paris in autumn; to a second reduction there appears a second

consciousness, the consciousness which is the mental experience of
being in Paris, as past. That is to say that, in the presentiation that is
memory, two consciousnesses are simultaneously sustained: the present
consciousness that remembers and the remembered consciousness. In
the case of empathy, presentification reveals an analogous structure.
Once the first reduction is practiced, the present consciousness which is
a present positing of the alter ego is revealed; in a second reduction it
appears that implicit in the first one there is a second consciousness,
that of the alter ego, which appears as such, i.e., as the zero point of
orientation in a world in which I am in turn pres entia ted by it as its
alter. This static analysis takes up the philosopher's technical problem
of the operation that legitimizes my positing of the transcendental
Other from the eidos ego; through it it is shown that the Other's mental
processes are for me not "present" but "presentiated," it also reveals the
structure of repetition (Wiederholungsstruktur) characteristic of the
empathic presentiation and its character as a window in the monads is
shown.
2. The Genetic Approach to the Constitution of the Other

2.1. The Constitution of the Mundane Other
To reach the operation that constitutes the mundane Other, Husserl
begins with an abstractive operation, one different from that practiced
in the static approach. Even if he does not say it explicitly, in the Fifth
Meditation we can infer this difference from its results: the primordial
sphere to be considered does not have at its disposition mental
processes concerned with the Other: these are necessarily reduced,
since we are going to witness the Other's genesis. To a scope of
consciousness restricted in that way, something is presented which is
first received as an empty apprehension which shall gradually be
fulfilled. That body moving through space avoids being apprehended as
a mere body. On the contrary, its conformation and behavior generate
the operation of "pairing"6 in which I assert that it is a lived body.
Such a pairing takes place in relationship to my lived body; in this
relationship neither member has preeminence since they make up a
living reciprocal evocation of a pair. Husserl defines it as "a primal
form of that passive synthesis which we designate as association in
contrast to passive synthesis of identification."? That lived body there is

apprehended from my lived body here as being psychic lived body,
governed like my own by an I which as a zero point of orientation
configures its world. s Along with the alien lived body an ego is simultaneously presentified to us, one whose appresented primordial sphere
is not fulfillable by me; the mental processes being appresented to me
are not mine, since in that case that ego would be I. That ego is alien,
analogous to me, not identical, and apprehended by me "as if I was
there." The analogizing modification apprehends it as concrete ego:
"another monad is established appresentatively in my monad."9 The
ego coexists with the alter and given their respective worlds they
configure a world, a world in common. Thus does the exegesis of
empathy in this stratum reveal in it the corresponding window of the
monads.
2.2. The Constitution of the Person in the Social World
As long as our approach stays at the level of reduction to the sphere of

primordiality, we shall exclude all references to the world as a cultural
world and therefore all references to the Other's being "human." The
realization of this occurs only when, shifting the context of our
reduction, we approach the configured world as a social one whose
subject of constitution is "man," in particular, the "person."
When we are then situated in the ambit of the phenomenology of
social action, it then becomes clear that for each one "the Other is the
first man, not 1."10 I know myself as a man only in the performance of
the reciprocal reference which allows me to establish that, just as I
constitute the Other as a man, polarizing from his place there the world
of objects that we have in common, so he, because he is such, in turn
takes me to be a "man polarizing the world" in return.
Husserl has called this approach to the social world, where spiritual
subjects relate through "acts of personalistic communication." These
acts imply the will to not only communicate but also to implement all
possible means in order to be paid attention to and get an answer. The
means for such communication, besides the privileged acts of speech,
range from gestures to the use of objects, such as the branches put by
gypsies along the road to inform their comrades which turn they have
taken or the apple laid by the philosopher's own wife on his hat so that
he would not forget to eat something before leaving. Pondering this
stratum of reciprocal communication as a linking window between socii
allows us to see an essential feature of the monadic interweaving: each

personal subject is not determined but is motivated, i.e., that which
provokes the Other functions in oneself as an inspiration. Another
feature of no less importance is that this interweaving is sustained by a
common will; and this is the same will that sustains the effective reality
of "higher order personalities," such as institutions or the State. If
deprived of that common tendency to sustain them these become no
more than words. In the revelation of the forms that the exercise of this
common will take, love appears to the philosopher to be a privileged
form: in this interweaving of wills wherein each one assumes the Other's
will, each one tries harder in the same way that the Other tries harder,
to the degree that each one's action, performed outside the knowledge
of or even against the Other's consent are known to be confirmed just
because they are his. "If I ever live in a community of aspiration with an
Other, then I live as I in him and he in me."ll This reciprocity and
community of will offers the framework for the formulation of the
valuation issue in this field. Does this way of interrelating have a per se
legitimation or may we conceive of it in a higher form? Asking this
question leads us to the next step in our discussion.
IV. THE ISSUE OF ETHICS AND THE
MEANING OF HUMAN HISTORY
Husserl considers a higher, privileged form of love, the Christie love.

Compared to this possibility, all other forms of interrelation appear to
be partial. Christ's figure offers support which emphasizes that here the
ethical reference is configured by the universal dimension of the love
evoked by Christ. The Christ who loves his enemy, loves the "germinal
soul," which is present in him as in all men; here is the ethical becoming
being of every man as his ideal I, his endless task. "Christic love is first
necessarily simple love. But it is linked to the aspiration (necessarily
motivated by love) to enter a love community, into an ambit as big as
possible, and, therefore, to the aspiration to enter into a relationship
with all men, to open up to them and incorporate them into oneself, all
in accord with practical possibility, the limits of which are set ethically
and, so, consequently, through ethicallove"12
In this way, following the itinerary of the ascending strata of
constitution of the life-world, from the intersubjectivity experienced by
the protoinfant in its mother's womb, to the highest strata of constitu-
tion where the meaning of the Good and of man's life is posed, we
reach the ambit, says the philosopher, of the "ethical-religious" issue.
This is not the occasion to renew the debate, still open, on whether the
philosopher in this discussion values the figure of Christ as a symbol or
as the Redeemer. Weare instead interested at this time in setting
another accompanying issue on the level of the dimension of love: we
want to offer for consideration what, in our opinion, can be found in
Husserl as a criterion for the moral valuation of actions, a critical
guideline for the orientation of the development of human history.
On our view this criterion of moral truth, which is not formulated as
such by the philosopher, but one quite in line with the meaning of his
thought as a whole, is the universality of the intersubjective experience
grasped as givenness, where the exercise of its endless perfecting lies as
a potential horizon. The unfolding of the implications offered to reflection reveals in all the strata of constitution, from the pre-reflective level
to that of mundane and social constitution, a reciprocal intertwining of
the ego with the alter. Once that character of reciprocity is stressed, we
find ourselves in front of the Jactum of my acknowledgement - and
with mine, because of the very meaning of the experience, that of
everyone - of the equi-valence of the One and the Other, of the
equality that is not identity but analogy within differentiation. From the
moment when the empathic presentiation implies the positing of the
Other as a subject having a world wherein I appear to him as the
subject of my world which is not essentially different from his and in
which it becomes clear that this reciprocity can de jure repeat itself
endlessly, until it embraces all existing men, past and future, this equivalence becomes radically and definitely explicit.
The operation of the ego who knows he is a man because that other
whom he constitutes as man, a subject of social acts, in turn constitutes
him as such, the operation which configures the "us," assumes all the
differences in identity, be it of persons or of peoples or nations, to
articulate them in a possible whole, that of "we human beings," what
Husserl calls "the entirety of monads."
What is unavoidable given the ego as starting point of the phenomenological analysis and given the presence of the Others in a
relationship of reciprocal acknowledgement of what is most radical in
their primordiality, is the revelation of this essential monadic equality.
The phenomenologist's responsibility arises out of the fact that through
his retrospective inquiry there is revealed the radical intertwining and
10
the radical equality of the reciprocal alteri and the tetos which lives in
them in the form of a will to. ever more perfectly fulfill the individual
and communal being of man, for the specific realization of the idea of
the "entirety of monads," of the universal harmonious coexistence of all
men. This is the meaning which begins to show itself in human history:
that all men may reach coexistence in a higher form of humanization,
which shall be such precisely because it shall be harmonious.
If the ethical question is not What I must do but Why must I, Husserl
would answer: I must because the universally experienced equi-valence
of persons says that all my rights are basis for all others' having all the
same rights.
V. ON THE "SYSTEMATIC" CHARACTER OF
PHENOMENOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY
If our discussion has up to this point presented the monadologic
character of phenomenology, it is necessary now to consider its

systematic configuration. In what sense can we speak of a "system" in
Husserl's thought? This question has been unavoidable ever since
Hegel's philosophy gave us the paradigm of systematic thought.
Husserl's philosophy can not be categorized in any of the three
classical "systems" based on the the possible ways of relating thought
and reality: "(1) The conceptual system derives from the real one; (2)
The real system is a product of an order imposed by the conceptual
one, and (3) The real system and the conceptual system are parallel
and, for some reason, coincidental."13 Although for a long time phenomenology was identified with idealism, i.e., with the second of these
systems, there is no doubt that the extended elucidation of the lifeworld and the position which the lived body has in the transcendental
genesis as a whole make it difficult to assign it clearly such a character.
We can not at this time give a thorough answer exhausting the
reasons for which it is possible to consider the philosopher's thought to
be "systematic." That would exceed the limits of what we are attempting
here. We shall only say this: Husserl's philosophy is essentially open
and is offered as a basis for future research; it is the philosophy of the
beginning philosopher. But he already revealed this philosophy's
method and the features of its problems, all giving it the character of
strict science and that in the highest and most radical sense. He
discovered, moreover, the incapacity of the world-constituting transcendental function that operates in intersubjectivity to acknowledge
11
itself as such in the "natural attitude." The importance of this revelation

and the fact that most texts published during the philosopher's life were
related to the unfolding of the issues of constitution may have led to the
conviction that the scope of his thought was exclusively gnoseological.
Today, on the contrary, we have the necessary indications to acknowledge that, staying within the transcendental ambit, with the ascending
unfolding of the different strata of intersubjective constitution, we do
reach the level of the questions of ethics and of the meaning of
historical human existence. Husserl himself says so in a letter to E.
Pearl Wekh. 14 In the intimacy of the transcendental ego, the radical
intertwining of the "entirety monads" is revealed making explicit the
original one-with-the-other and one-in-the other of concrete human
beings and, at the same time, the human telos, which, as a potential
horizon, attracts us to the perfection of personal and communal
existence, in a universal sense.
This last assertion could lead to the conviction that Husserl's
philosophy is animated by a metaphysical optimism which would close
the system, as if the advent of universal harmony and of authentic
humanity were unavoidable. None of this appears in his works. First,
the archon-like status of the philosopher encourages self-responsibility,
for, as far as philosophy is concerned, no teleological need predetermines events. Secondly, there are texts in Husserl which show clearly
that he guessed the possibility that our destiny could be a dehumanization of our world. Apropos this, we shall quote a question that should
be read as an assertion: "Is it not a collapse of the human community a
limit situation possible in which could be involved, not only myself, but
all of us: in which we can trust nothing not in any man, not even for
myself in myself, in which all the surrounding world, as our communal
life-world, loses for us the character of a world wherein things can be
forseen, wherein goals can be set and human life can be lived . .. ?" 15
The world's being is only apparently stable and is just the stability of a
normal configuration. Following Husserl's line of thought, the question
of the highest level of problems which can be philosophically addressed,
i.e., the question of the world as a whole, the question which includes
all horizons, arises just when such instability is made evident. It is our
responsibility for progress towards the human telos that given its
hierarchical character, is the only thing that can give plenitude to the
system of his philosophical reflection.
University of Buenos Aires
12
JULIA VALENTIN A IRIBARNE

NOTES
E. Husser!, Erste Philosophie, II (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1956), p. 190.

E. Husser!, Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit, Part III (The Hague: Nijhoff,
1973),p.594.
3 Ibid., p. 605.
4 Ibid., p. 594.
5 Husser!, Erste Philosophie, II, op. cit., pp. 82 and ff. and 132, 157 ff.
6 On this point, see Ichiro Yamaguchi, Passive Synthesis und Intersubjektivitiit bei
Edmund Husser! (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982), wherein this subject is discussed in detail.
7 E. Husser!, Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), p. 142.
8 We treat here, from our own point of view, a polemicized subject which has been
given different interpretations. The justifications. The justification of our position can
be found in full in La intersubjetividad en Husserl, Bosquejo de una teoria, Vols. I and
II (Buenos Aires: Ed. C. LoWe, 1987 and 1988).
9 Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., p. 144.
10 Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit, Part II, Annex XL VIII, p. 418.
11 Ibid., p.I72.
12 Ibid.,pp.174-175.
13 Jose Ferrater Mora, Diccionario de Filosofia (Buenos Aires: Ed. Sudamericana,
1956), p. 1245.
14 Letter written between June 17 and 21, 1933, quoted in Husser!, Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit, op.cit., Part III, p. LVIII.
15 Ibid., p. 213.
1
MARIO SANCIPRIANO
LES SOURCES DE LA VIE MORALE
I. LES IDEES MORALES
1. Le probteme du paraltelisme entre la logique et !'ethique

L'interet de Husserl pour la vie morale marche de pair avec Ie
developpement de sa pensee logique. Ainsi Ethos et Logos se donnent
la main et s'aident l'un l'autre, avec une sorte de "parallelisme" dans
leurs procedes specifiques. Malgre l'independance du Cogito, par rapport a la morale, on peut dire que l' attention et la bonne volonte,
constituant des noyaux de concentration, donnent a la pensee un
soutien qui lui est necessaire.' A son tour, la pensee offre a la volonte et
a l' action morale son soutien raisonnable, bien que cela ne s'avere pas
par une simple duplication des procedes logiques. En effet dans la
morale on realise un nouveau type d'intentionalite qui se base sur les
motivations et sur les directives du sujet moral, ainsi que sur ses
connaissances.
C'est pourquoi la connection de la logique avec !'ethique est toujours
presente dans l'oeuvre husserlienne. Elle est la consequence non
seulement de la constitution rationnelle de l'ethique, mais aussi, en
particulier, des analogies qui surgissent entre l'evidence intellectuelle et
l'evidence morale, dans les differentes spheres de "verite" qui leur sont
propres. Husserl a toujours soin de distinguer les deux spheres: celle de
la logique, avec l'apophantique, et celle des disciplines "paralleles", ou
se situe l' hhique, qui sont l' axiologie et la pratique, avec leurs propres
directives. Dans les Ideen I (1913), il precise: "on aboutit necessairement aux problemes qui concernent l'elucidation de la logique formelle,
au niveau de la raison theorique, et celle des disciplines paralleles
(paraUele Disziplinen), que j'ai appelees axiologie formelle et [tMorie
de laJ pratique (formale Axiologie und Praktik)".2 Dans la VIe des
Logische Untersuchungen (sa deuxieme edition a parue en 1921), a
propos des syntheses de la sensibilite avec l'entendement, Husserl
annonce d'avoir ouvert la voie a une "elucidation phenomenologique de
l'evidence logique (et par la aussi eo ipso parallelement de l'evidence
13
A -T Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXv, 13-42.
14
MARIO SAN CIPRIANO
dans la sphere axiologique et pratique"V Dans son livre consacre a la

Formale und transzendentale Logik (1929), il se propose Ie programme
de distinguer les differentes classes de significations et d'actes donateurs
de signification. Selon ces classes se groupent les expressions concretes
et enfin pleines de sens (Sinn) et aussi de sens moral. L'ensemble des
oeuvres de Husser!, nous presente - dans un systeme - les expressions du jugement et celles de 1'affectivite et de la pratique, comme Ie
sont les souhaits, les actes de la volonte et les ordres. Ce systeme se
termine par une phenomenologie de la raison, dans Ie domaine transcendantal, qui embrasse "la raison dans 1'ordre du jugement (entre
autre la raison specifiquement thiorique), la raison dans 1'ordre de la
valeur et la raison dans l'ordre pratique".4
Bien que les disciplines de la pratique s'eloignent parfois de la base
rationnelle, en preferant alors les suggestions de la vie sentimentale,
neanmoins elles se conforment toujours a la morphologie systematique,
par exemple dans Ie rapport "moyens-fins", qui regit tant la theorie que
la pratique, y compris la morale. Husser! reconnait ce parallelisme, en
precis ant encore que l' evidence axiologique et pratique s'appuie a
1'evidence doxique (croyance, certitude, position) et ala logique de la
verite, dont nous nous occuperons plus loin. On entrevoit desormais ce
que nous constaterons mieux dans nos analyses ethiques, c'est-a-dire la
distinction des deux spheres et, en meme temps, 1'unite originaire du
rapport de la pensee avec la vie, notamment avec la vie affective et
morale.
A propos de ce parallele, je voudrais en tirer une confirmation par
une voie opposee. En effet Hans Reichenbach, qui erige une "scient~fic
philosophy" inspiree du neopositivisme, refuse l' "ethico-cognitive
parallelism" transmis par la tradition classique et distingue les predicats
d'assertion (statements) et les locutions de l'ethique, qui enoncent des
directives (directives) et ne peuvent pas etre - il dit - classifiees
comme vraies ou fausses. Ainsi Reichenbach etablit les significations
des imperatifs moraux, en les separant des significations cognitives et en
les jugeant comme de moyens instrumentaux. II n'exclut pas pourtant
qu'il y ait une connaissance correspondant a chaque imperatif: "Every
imperative possesses a cognitive correlate, given by the correlate statement", ou l'action sociale joue un role tres important. Alors emerge de
nouveau une certaine connexion entre la morale et la connaissance: la
querelle du parallelisme entre l'evidence logique et 1'evidence axiologique et pratique - notamment morale - se retrouve actuelle, voire
15
dans une aptitude neo-positiviste. 5 De son cote, Husserl reconnait une

"difference essentielle" entre les domaines: (1) de la verite theoretique
et (2) de l' axiologie, qui se conforme a des situations motivees dans la
condition humaine, aboutissant a une comparaison et a un choix parfois
categorique. 6 La publication de plusieurs manuscrits inedits - en
particulier des Cours universitaires d'Ethique (Ethische Vorlesungen)
qui s'etendent, dans l'ensemble, de 1889 a 1924: en 1928 Husserl, mis
a la retraite, laisse la chaire de Fribourg - nous confirme la persistance
de l'accord logique-moral dans la formation de la pensee husserlienne. 7
Pour Ie moment, il suffit de preciser que les propositions de la logique
formelle reglent les actes de la volonte et aboutissent a la formation de
l'evidence morale, dans Ie contexte pratique. Neanmoins la raison pure,
bien que necessaire, ne suffit pas a constituer les sources de la vie
morale, qui ressent, comme telle, des essors originels proven ant du
monde de la vie (Lebenswelt).
En effet Husserl reconnait, par sa Gefiihlslogik, la necessite du
sentiment, pour constituer la vie morale. C'est par la "neutralisation" de
l'attitude naturaliste, que l'on peut accueillir la sensibilite dans une
conception ethique. 8 C'est ainsi que l'on atteint les profondeurs de
l'ame (Gemiitssphiire).9 L'etique phenomenologique s'annonce done
comme une doctrine soutenue par un support rationnel-raisonnable
(verniinftig): et Husserl, pour souligner l'aspect "raisonnable" emploie
Ie terme "einsichtig"; mais telle ethique s'inspire aussi des elans affectifs
du monde de la vie. En tous les cas elle s'organise selon un type
d'idealite qui vise aux valeurs objectives, au dela des enonces empiriques. L'ethique ne s'en tient pas exclusivement a la condition humaine
realisee, mais elle vise aussi Ie realisable. La verite morale ne se retrecit
pas dans les Ii mites des enonces positifs du "vrai" et du "faux", car elle
se developpe aussi par l'imagination libre, selon la norme des valeurs et
la preference du "mieux", pour atteindre la plenitude du sens, dans la
bonne conduite. Plus loin, nous irons a la recherche de cette verite qui
se recherche, dans les circonstances de la vie. III La "pratique formelle"
nous dirige vers la droiture du vouloir, vers l'accord des volitions avec
les valeurs et vers Ie "devoir-etre" et la realisation du realisable. l ! Cette
envergure aboutit a l'imperatif: "Cherche, avec prudence, Ie mieux,
parmi les choses realisables".12 Husserl developpe aussi une "pratique
materielle" concernant les normes de l'action dans une communaute
sociale (soziale Gemeinschaft von Personen), la matiere des valorisations et l'etre realise (Realisierung)P
16
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L'analyse cognitive de Husserl conclut a sa Formale und transzendentale Logik (1929), ou l'on trouve, en ce qui concerne la logique
formelle, la distinction bien connue entre: (1) la morphologie pure des
jugements; (2) la logique de la consequence (non-contradiction); (3) la
logique de la verite (correspondance avec les choses). Et respectivement: (1) les jugements encore vides de signification; (2) les jugements
distincts (dans la consequence); (3) les jugements clairs (dans la logique
de la verite).14 En parallele, notre analyse, menee a travers les oeuvres
principales et les manuscrits de Husserl, est valable pour la verite
morale, ou se forme enfin - de fac;on critique - un jugement "vrai"
(adequat a l'etat de choses) et une decision "vraie" (adherente a la
realite) qui s'oriente a l'action, voire a la conduite morale et sociale. En
effet tout ce qui concerne l' evidence, la coherence et la verite se pose
aussi bien comme une base pour Ie jugement moral, dans la region des
valeurs objectives.
Mais, a propos du "parallelisme", il faut faire des reserves. J'ai deja
fait allusion a ce que les fonctions logiques (empiriques, perceptives et
conceptuelles) ne se doublent pas telles quelles dans Ie domaine moral.
En effet ces fonctions ne restent accessibles, par l'examen reducteur,
qu'a la raison pure et ne debordent point de la, meme en reglant la
volante, l'action et la vie sentimentale; tandis que, dans la vie morale,
Ie jugement ne peut que ressentir les situations du monde du la vie
quotidienne et les motivations relatives, meme en adherant a des
principes rationnels et a des formes pures. 15 II faut souligner que
l'ethique de Husserl n'est pas affectee par Ie logicisme, ni meme sa
logique n'est affectee par l'absolutisme que Theodor W. Adorno (Zur
Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, 1956, nouvelle edit. Frankfurt a.M.
1972) lui reproche. Husserl nous presente une critique de la raison, qui
ne refuse pas l'apport du sujet (et meme du sujet psychique) a la facuIte
de connaitre. II reconnait les limites du "remplissement" des intuitions,
car les intentions significatives "ont besoin de plenitude" dans les
differents degres de la connaissance (Log. Unters. cit. VI, 21, p. 76
sq.). Pas d'absolutisme, donc: ni dans la logique, ni dans la morale! 16
2. Principes theoretiques de la vie morale

A fin de s'approcher des sources de la verite morale, on peut lire
d'abord les notes d' Adolf Grimme au Cours universitaire d'Ethique
(Ethische Vorlesungen) donne par Husserl en 1914 et consacre a
17
"Ethik und Wertlehre": cours presque contemporain a la premiere

edition des Ideen 1(1913).17 L'ethique formelle y est presentee comme
une doctrine qui conduit l'action morale par des normes rationnelles "a
priori", c'est-a-dire depassant la contingence empirique. Ainsi Husser!
fonde son "Apriori Ethik" sur des propositions theoriques, ou meme
theoretiques etablies par une evidence apodictique, dans la forme de
l'unite. L'Ethique n'est pas seulement une technique (Kunstlehre)
enracinee dans la psychologie des fonctions du temperament (GemiitesFunktionen), car elle se base de far,;on plus etendue et essentielle sur
des propositions theoretiques a priori (theoretische Apriori-Satzen).
L'Idee du Bien ne peut pas etre tiree des faits, d'ou l'on ne peut tirer
aucune idee, ni de la psychologie, ou il manque Ie concept de donner
des normes pour Ie "vrai" bien (Normierung). Ainsi, chez Husserl,
l'Idee du Bien est une hyper-realite (Uberrealitiit), qui surpasse les
choses.1 8 Sa contrepartie est Ie mal, en particulier Ie vice (dissolution
des moeurs)
Avec Ie tournant de la phenomenologie transcendantale, l' a priori se
caracterise davantage comme door:;, essence morphologique, et comme
la structure constitutive des experiences possibles, dans la conscience et
dans Ie monde. 19 En particulier l'a priori de l'ethique n'est pas simplement une forme pure de la connaissance, car il informe plutot les
situations de la vie humaine, afin d'y obtenir, comme nous Ie verrons
plus loin, la realisation morale et rationnelle de ce qui est "bien" pour
tout Ie monde, dans une situation determinee. Husser! decele aussi un a
priori materiel, qui opere comme intermediaire entre la forme pure et
la matiere, tant dans la logique que dans la pratique, et qui caracterise
les principes moraux. En general l' a priori materiel de Husser!
s'approche des "schemes transcendantaux" de Kant et englobe Ie
contenu de notions generales, telle que celle de classe, (logique). On Ie
peut reconnaitre aussi dans des modeles de la vie morale, par exemple
la sympathie et Ie desir (ethique). Dans ses Ethische Vorlesungen,
Husser! presente: (1) un a priori axiologique, en parallele avec l' a priori
theoretique (logique et ontologie); (2) un a priori normatif (noetique,
ethique, etc.) et (3) un a priori phenomenologique, concernant "l'essence
des contenus primaires, du flux temporel, de l'instance (Frage) , du
desir, etc.".20
Or, dans Ie courant du neopositivisme, Moritz Schlick, organisateur
du "Wiener Kreis", s'oppose explicitement aux "recherches logiques" de
Husser! et aux "series des valeurs" de Scheler. II reconnait les proposi-
18
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tions analytiques comme celles qui sont vraies grace a leur forme
tautologique: "Qui a compris Ie sens d'une tautologie, connait en meme
temps leur verite: c'est pourquoi elles sont a priori". A l'oppose, il
precise que dans les propositions synthetiques on doit d'abord comprendre la signification empirique (Sinn); ensuite l'on etablira si elles
sont vraies ou fausses: c'est pourquoi, elle sont a posteriori?] Dans
cette opposition tranchante, l' a priori materiel ne trouve point de place,
car il se reduit a une structure tautologique: "Unsere 'materialen'
apriorischen Siitze sind in Wahrheit rein begrifflicher Natur, ihre Geltung ist eine logische, sie haben tautologischen, formalen Charakter".22
Tout qu'il fasse une elaboration "a these", tendant a transferer au
domaine de la logique et de la linguistique tous les concepts ontologiques prop res a l' essence ideale, Schlick ressent une inspiration
morale enthousiaste, qui atteint Ie sens de la vie: selon lui, "1'ecole de
Vienne se comporte a 1'egard des questions de valeur et de morale, de
la meme fa90n que la philosophie de Socrate: pour elle 1'ethique est une
tache philosophique et elle sait que 1'eclaircissement des concepts
moraux est infiniment plus important pour 1'homme que tous les
problemes tMoriques".23
Mais la morale, dans sa purete formelle, ne depend pas des faits
empiriques de l'existence, car elle s'enonce par les propositions categoriques (normes) du devoir-etre, imposees par 1'ordre rationnelraisonnable et par la forme essentielle du Bien, voire de la plenitude de
la valeur (Pratique formelle). Enfin la morale se realise par l'action,
dans la Lebenswelt et par 1'amelioration de la vie humaine (Pratique
materielle). Et c'est la recherche d'une vie pleine et complete (vollkommenes Leben), qu'exige, dans sa racine, la metaphysique (Metaphysik fordert).24 Husserl meme l'avoue dans ses Cours d'Ethique, ou il
suit un penchant secret qui dure dans sa pensee et qui se termine par
l'idee de ["'absolutes Sein", persistant de l'epoque des Ideen I (1913) a
celle de la Krisis der europiiischen Wissenschaften (1936). On peut
preciser qu' a son tour la vie est disposee, des ses origines organiques, a
ses propres formations rationnelles (V. plus loin, II, 3).
Les facteurs psycho-physiologiques s'interposent entre Ie moi pur et
Ie monde, bien qu'ils soient contingentes et ne puis sent pas avoiren
eux-memes la necessite du code moral. En 1902, Husserl nous parle
d'une Gefiihlslogik et, en 1920, d'une ethique de la sensibilite (Gefiihl):
il nous laisse entendre que c'est la vie - la vie vraie et durable - qui
nous donne, tout au debut, la sensibilite de ce qui est mieux pour nous,
19
a partir de la genese passive du pnSsage. 25 L'attention d la vie (Bergson)

nous impose, aux origines de nos actes de conscience, les elans
genereux de la vie sentimentale, lorsque la forme idea Ie (et aussi bien la
forme de la sensibilite, reduite d son essence proprement humaine)
conduit la vie meme a ses buts raisonnables, qui tirent de leurs propres
raisons necessaires une force normative (parfois imperative). C'est la la
vie authentique, qui dure et qui nous fait vivre encore. Ainsi la vie
constitue l'etan, la moralite en donne la mesure. 26
La mesure est donnee dans l'ordre des va leurs, qui ne sont pas
entierement une production de l'esprit. En effet il faut reconnaitre ce
qui de la veritable valeur nous est deja donne dans un etat de choses.
La valeur n'est pas une chose, mais elle est bien une "propriete des
choses". Il est vrai que Husserl separe l'objet de la valeur et Ie monde;
mais c'est la une operation faite pour atteindre, dans sa purete,
l'intelligible de la valeur, qui enfin recouvre et valorise Ie monde. Ce
retour de la conscience au monde, apres la neutralisation (bwxn), est
donc indispensable, afin d'y reconnaitre l"'etat des choses" (Sachverhalt) auquel se rapporte l'etat de valeur" (Wertverhalt).27
Bien loin de reduire la valeur a ce qu'y en introduit Ie sujet
psychique (individuel ou social), ou a ce que l'histoire (Geschichte, pas
encore Historie ou s'avere la "genese de l'humanite") nous transmet, ou
a n'importe quelle autre expression du sujet empirique, Husserl distingue un double ordre d' objectite 28 ayant aussi une envergure morale:
(1) celle de la chose qui vaut et qui a un caractere de valeur, une qualite
de valeur (Wertheit); (2) celle de la valeur concrete elle-meme, c'est a
dire l'objectite-valeur (Wertobjektitiit).29 La qualite de valeur s'impose
comme une tension en avant, vers sa realisation parfaite. Dans ce
contexte, Husserl emploie Ie mot "Objektitiit" avec insistence. Dans les
Ideen I, on trouve en effet une predisposition a la pratique formelle, qui
n'implique pas l'affirmation de l'objet existant; tandis que les Ethische
Vorlesungen no us donnent la pleine objectivite (Objektivitiit) de la
realisation morale, dans la pratique materiel/e, comme nous Ie verrons
mieux plus loin. 3D
A ce point, Husserl precise que les distinctions qu'il vient de faire
peuvent etre transposees dans la sphere volitive, ou Ie "se decider" (sich
entschliessen) comporte un grand nombre d'elements noetico-noematiques. D'un cote nous trouvons des positions de valeur et des positions
de choses; de l'autre nous avons la decision (Entschluss), en tant
qu'espece propre appartenant au domaine volontaire (decider une
20
MARIO SAN CIPRIANO
chose et se decider). Notre auteur reconnait ici, a l'interieur de l'acte

volontaire, Ie "voulu comme tel", c'est-a-dire Ie noeme propre au
vouloir, et l'''intention volitive" (Willensmeinung), avec son penchant
intentionnel noetique a proceder "dorenavant", vers les choses, par un
commencement absolu dans l'interiorite libre (Ideen I, 95, p. 239). En
effet la volonte s'exerce par l'auto-decision et par l'action. Elle vise la
realisation (Realisierung) et ne peut pas se contenter de l'idealite: elle
cherche a se realiser dans l'avenir, c'est la son domaine (E. Husserl,
Ethik und Wertlehre, Ms. Grimme cite, pp 19 sqq.). Du point de vue de
la morale, on va de l' ethique formelle a l' ethique materielle, car
l'intention volontaire du "mieux" ethique nos conduit a l' action, qui se
termine par des relations qui realisent aussi Ie bien des autres.
De meme dans la vie sentimentale parait Ie fond veridique de la
croyance et de l'opinion (06~a), que chacun peut se former par ses
vues individuelles et par les representations sous-jacentes, dans Ie
domaine moral. Alors on forme des "syntaxes doxiques", par l'emploi
du "et" (jugement conjonctif) et du "ou" (jugement disjonctif). Husserl
en donne un exemple tres delicat: "La mere qui regarde avec amour son
groupe d'enfants embrasse en un seul acte d'amour chaque enfant
separement et tous ensemble".3! II parait encore ici Ie parallele logicoethique; mais encore ici il faut dire que l'instance ethique deborde Ie
cadre rigide de la representation dans Ie rapport "sujet-objet" et
aboutit aux operations tres singulieres et f1exibles de l'amour et de la
vie. Ainsi Emmanuel Levinas, contre la rigidite d'une representation
"totalisante et totalitaire", propose une "Sinngebung ethique", c'est-adire essentiellement respectueuse de l'Autre. 32
Enfin Husserl reconnait bien une extension non-egologique du
"monde de la vie" et notamment des instincts innes, qui s'eveillent dans
une genese passive: "die wach werdenden Instinkte im Stromen der
'passiven', der 'Ich-losen', der Urboden konstituierenden Zeitigung".33
Husserl precede, en quelque maniere, l'instance - soulevee par Aron
Gurwitsch - de considerer un champ de conscience non appartenant a
l'ego; mais il confine ce champ dans la sphere instinctive, qui se termine
enfin par 1"'Ich-Pol" des Affektionen. 34 Cependant Husserl con90it une
sorte de "realite psycho-physique" des autres (Psychophysisches als
"Reales": Ms. A V 6,1932), avant de former avec eux une union
personnelle, voire une "coIncidence" (Deckung), en particulier avec
ceux qui lui sont les plus familiers. Mais notre auteur n'ecarte jamais Ie
rapport pour ainsi dire inter-polaire (parmi les "Moi-Poles") qui est
21
enfin un rapport intersubjectif dans la forme et interpersonnel dans la

substance. Enfin comment est-il possible d'operer une "deconstruction"
sans faire, avec Ie Cogito ("Ie pense"), une analyse intellectuelle? Alars
toujours s'impose une synthese a nouveau: encore une fois l'on echappe
au declin de la conscience de sops
3. Les origines de la verite morale et religieuse

Edmund Husserl, l'auteur des Cartesianische Meditationen, ne se
contente pas de la certitude: ilIa depasse dans la recherche de la verite
(logique, morale et sociale). De toutes les deux il etablit d'abord les
modalites d'operation, avec leur necessite rationnelle, leurs types
d'evidence et leurs degres de clarification, jusqu'a ce que "l'essence se
donne purement elle-meme a la conscience" (Ideen I, 67,p. 156). Dans
Ie domaine de la praxis, l'hhique se balance entre: (1) l'evidence de la
connaissance apodictique de la verite morale s'appelant au noyau d'etre
absolu - dans nous-memes et dans Ie monde - dont nous sommes
conscients; (2) l'evidence de la certitude morale, suffisante pour regler
nos moeurs, selon une inspiration personnelle, bien que cette certitude
ne se fonde pas toujours sur une determination irrefutable, car elle
depend aussi des opinions courantes et de la foi que nos interlocuteurs
meritent par leur conduite.
Ainsi, dans les progres de ses Ideen I, Husserl procMe de la problematique concernant les structures originelles noetico-noematiques a la
phenomenologie de la raison, qui comprend Ies entrelacements entre
les divers types de verite: theorique, axiologique et pratique (notamment morale).36 On y apprend que, pour la recherche de la verite dans
ses differents types, l'on ne s'appuie pas toujours sur l'evidence absolue
ni sur une croyance inebranlable, avec la plenitude du sens. Aussi bien
dans la morale, il se peut que l'on doive se contenter d'une verite
relative (ou probable), qui jaillit de la vie individuelle par un fort
penchant, lorsque "quelque chose parle" en faveur d'une proposition.
Sans etre elle-meme du tout rationnelle, cette proposition peut neanmoins avoir part a la raison. 37 Bien sur la verite absolue (absolute
Wahrheit) on la recherche dans la "philo sophie premiere" (erste Philosophie) et on l'atteint originairement dans la "perception immanente",
qui est vraiment adequate a son objet, plutot que dans la "perception
transcendante", dirigee sur Ie monde. Celle-ci remonte bien a l'''etre
originaire des choses" (E. Husserl), mais elle est soumise a leurs
22
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apparitions fuyantes. Je voudrais interpreter Ie principe transcendantal

de la philosophie premiere de Husserl ("L'unique etre absolu est l'etre
du Sujet comme etre constitue pour soi des l'origine") en ce sens que
l'on puise mieux la verite absolue dans les sources de sa propre vie
interieure que dans les rapports avec Ie monde. 38 Dans Ie domaine
moral, il est plus correct de repondre d /'appel de I'absolu a l'interieur
de nous-memes, que d'y jaire appel, d'une fa~on intransigeante, dans
nos relations avec les autres.
II se peut qu'il manque I'evidence d'une verite absolue (parfaite) et
que ron s'en tienne a une conjecture vraisemblable. Alors quelque
chose "parle" en faveur du jugement "S est p", quelque chose amene a
croire que la liaison predicative "S p" est vraie. Ainsi la verite (Y. plus
haut, I, 1) s'ebauche par un jugement vague, qui a deja une structure
predicative (vide), mais pas encore un contenu determine et bien
enchaine dans son contexte (rempli). Pareillement dans Ie domaine
ethique, lorsque nous n'arrivons pas a une verite complhe, peut-etre
quelque chose nous dit (spricht) que notre conduite est de meme
conforme a une verite morale et que telle conduite est vraie dans son
fond ou vraisemblable (ou probable) et non vaguement bien intentionnee, car les jugements qui I'inspirent sont vrais ou vraisemblables
(ou probables). En plus, la certitude morale qui adhere aux faits et aux
personnes et qui n'est pas - c'est bien sur -la certitude mathematique,
repose elle-meme sur des jugements positifs et sur une certaine
evidence prioritaire (urdoxische Evidenz). En effet, aux experiences
sentimentales et morales, il faut que precede spontanement, dans la
sphere doxique, une attention intellectuelle, dirigee vers les croyances
et enfin vers les actes de preference et de choix. Enfin Husserl nous
amene a reconnaitre une verite par l' evidence axiologique et pratique,
qui constitue, d'une certaine fa~on, Ie pendant d'une verite par
l' evidence doxologique et theorique. A propos des spheres affectives et
volitives, il precise les contenus de verite propres a ces spheres.
Alors les buts vraiment humains sont juges comme des vrais buts, ou
des buts reels pour I'homme, et les moyens correspondants sont
qualifies vrais ou reels moyens moraux. 39 Husserl, qui taxe de scepticisme la morale empiriste,40 admet neanmoins que la raison pratique
procede souvent par des conjectures. Parce que la verite morale
s'adapte a la mobilite de la vie, elle applique la logique de la verite (Y.
plus haut, I, 1) aux situations reelles, avec une adaequatio qui est bien
23
ouverte aux possibilities du meliorisme. En meme temps, notre auteur

fait une certaine place a la logique de la sensibilite et du sentiment
(Gefiihlslogik), en faisant entrer en ligne de compte une verite morale
qui se nourrit d'inspirations spontanees peut-etre faibles du point de
vue rationnel, mais de meme irrefutables pour la vie sentimentaleraisonnable.
En m'approchant de la conclusion de cette premiere partie, je
voudrais preciser qU'une action conforme aux fins humaines peut etre
jugee comme une action "veritable" et qu'une action dijforme, destructive de l'homme, peut etre consideree "fausse", ou meme irreelle. C'est
la un critere general pour l'ethique, c'est-a-dire que l'action veritable
peut continuer dans la duree reelle de la vie (H. Bergson) et n'arrive
jamais d se contredire et d se supprimer elle-meme. II faut encore
souligner que, dans les Ideen et les manuscrits moraux de Husserl, la
methode phenomenologique montre son efficacite propre a une analyse
qui s'etend a la profondeur de l'ame (Gemiit). Bien que l'action morale
ait toujours un rappel a la necessite rationnelle-raisonnable (verniinjtig),
il se peut que dans Ie jugement moral quelque chose "parle" vaguement
en faveur d'un propos de generosite et d'amour veritable, sans que l'on
puisse assumer tout cela dans une proposition apodictique. Alors il est
possible qu'il vaille mieux obeir a la faiblesse (et a la douceur) d'une
telle suggestion genereuse, plutot que se soumettre a l'evidence (et
parfois a la brutalite) d'une ratiocination naturaliste. Enfin l'on pourra
verifier spontanement en soi-meme Ia bonte du choix, par la complaisance intime que cette faible suggestion procure. Avec autant de
spontaneite la conscience inspire les remords, apres une action mauvaise: Ie chatiment peut succeder d'ailleurs au crime; mais personne ne
peut contraindre autrui d'avoir des remords et de se repentir d'une
faute. 41
Enfin a l' evidence morale s'unit une evidence religieuse en vertu d'
un pres sentiment (Ahnung) instinctif de la conscience individuelle, qui
se depasse infiniment vers un but n'ayant pas d'avance une structure
cognitive complete. II y a la l'experience te!eologique de Ia foi.42 Husserl
ne construit pas un systeme de theologie rationnelle, bien que plusieurs
endroits de ses manuscrits nous donnent des indications utiles a en
dessiner les premieres lignes. En effet, il ne se remet pas au jideisme,
car il s'adonne aux symboles de la foi avec une sorte de parallelisme
logico-religieux. Ainsi, ses considerations theologiques s'appellent a
24
MARIO SANCIPRIANO
l' evidence, a la liberte, aux teleologies. 43 II envisage Ie rapport de

l'homme avec Dieu comme une attitude de priere et une recherche du
salut, par un processus oriente a un telos infiniment lointain. Dans Ie
manuscrit F I 14, que j'ai deja cite et qui obeit a une inspiration morale,
on trouve Ie debut d'une solution du probleme theologique, unissant
ensemble la comprehension de la teleologie originaire qui appartient a
la conscience absolue et l'''idee de la conscience la plus parfaite", qui
nous conduit a l'idee de la Divinite. 44 Dans ce contexte, 1'idee de Dieu
se renverse dans la proposition "Dieu comme Idee" (Gott als Idee),
Idee non pas entendue comme une abstraction, mais comme la presence infinie de 1'Esprit qui vit dans l'Idee. 45 Mais je voudrais preciser
que, puisque cette Idee - cette Vie de Dieu - est infinie, elIe nous
transcend, car nous sommes finis: Ie "lieu" de cette transcendance est
eminemment Ie rapport avec les autres, dans la subjectivite universelle,
ou Dieu demeure. 46 Husserl ne refuse pas une certaine inspiration de
l'argument "ontologique" (Saint Anselme), soutenant la necessite intrinseque de l'etre, a laquelle il arrive a travers l'idee de la conscience la
plus parfaite et du monde Ie meilleur possible, bien que dans Ie meme
manuscrit (p.59), il affirme une selection (Sonderung) necessaire entre
l'idee et l'existence.47 Je voudrais ajouter que l'Idee de Dieu ne vient
pas simplement a combler Ie vide de la conscience, angoissee par Ie
sens tragique de l'existence, car cette Idee provient plutot du Principe
de toutes les plenitudes (perfections), qui s'annonce a 1'homme et aussi
bien Ie depasse. 48
Bien que la foi, par l"'evidence" religieuse, ne dissipe pas tout Ie
mystere, Ie manuscrit de 1911, apres ses enonces theoretiques a propos
de la personnalite, se dirige a la recherche de la plenitude de la vie
(vollkommenes Leben) et parvient donc a la theologie, par une sorte
d'argumentation ontologique, Au contraire, dans les Ideen I, conc;ues a
peu pres dans la meme periode, la theologie est consideree par ses
apories, dans la problematique du Principe absolu, qui n'a pas une
transcendance, au sens ou Ie monde en a une, ni une immanence, au
sens ou il est immanent l'etre comme vecu dans la conscience. 49 Dans Ie
manuscrit susdit, qui oMit a une inspiration morale, on trouve ainsi Ie
debut d'une solution positive du probleme de Dieu, tandis que, dans les
Ideen I, par la problematique que l'on y debat, au sujet du principe et
du telos, Dieu est considere comme Ie concept-limite (Grenzbegriff)
necessaire, que 1'athee non plus ne peut renier. 50
25
II. L'ETHIQUE PURE
1. Intersubjectivite et "realisation" ethique
Avec son passage de la chaire de Gottingen a celle de Freiburg i.B

(1916), Husserl developpe encore sa pMnomenologie transcendantale.
Ensuite on trouve, dans Ie manuscrit de Freiburger Vorlesungen (le90ns
faites en 1920 et repetees en 1924), l'approfondissement de I'ethique
pure, qui s'assortit bien a la philosophie tMoretique de la derniere
periode. En effet on y apprend la construction d'une ethique de l' a
priori et d'une axiologie, qui se referent a I'essence des actes immanents
dans la conscience et a leurs operations originelles. 51
La construction d'une ethique sincere (echte Ethik), qui ne se lie pas
aux principes de I'edonisme ni a ceux de l'utilitarisme, se base encore
sur d'autres manuscrits, que I'on trouve pUblies dans les trois grands
volumes, deja cites, Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit. C'est
ainsi que l' ethique individuelle, qui privilegie les actes intentionnels de
la conscience solitaire, neanmoins orientee aux valeurs objectives,
trouve son integration dans Ie systeme de I'intersubjectivite transcendantale, aboutissant a une nouvelle tMorie critique de la societe. 52 On
ne peut qU'admirer l'effort que Husserl y a fait pour etablir la fonction
de l'intropathie (Einfiihlung), en eclairant, dans la me sure du possible,
tout ce qui appartient au monde d'autrui. Ce monde se montre a
chacun de nous comme etranger, mais il offre a tous, dans leur milieu,
une sphere d'appartenance commune. En allant a la recherche de
l'objectivite immanente dans l'intersubjectivite, Husserl procede de la
perception du "corps propre" (eigenes Leib) a la perception du corps
des autres 53 et a l'explication (Deutung) de la presence de l' alter ego, a
travers une "apperception analogique".54 Ainsi la connaissance d'autrui
est elle-meme directe; mais I'auto-connaissance est du premier ordre
("Primordinales 'ego''') et vraiment immediate. 55
Notre auteur n'ignore pas les difficultes que I'on rencontre a communiquer avec la psychologie de la "monade" etrangere; mais il enrichit
son analyse par plusieurs elements d' Appriisentation des autres, qui
nous eclairent, par les aspects qui se presentent (Priisentation), les
aspects qui se cachent. En depit des expressions les plus connues de
l"'idealisme transcendantal" de Husserl, sa doctrine morale montre
avec insistance un fort penchant pour une sorte de "realisme" ethique
et pour Ie depassement de n'importe quel solipsisme, car I'action
26
MARIO SAN CIPRIANO
morale nous engage a vouer nos efforts aux autres personnes, telles
qu'elles sont en chair et en os, avec leur "identite" personnelle, leurs
jouissances, leurs douleurs, leurs besoins reels. Ainsi la methode phenomen%gique, orientee a l' ontologie, nous conduit a reconnaitre
intentionnellement, dans son integralite, la personnalite des autres et a
exiger d'etre, a notre fois, reconnus par eux. Moins encore sur Ie terrain
moral, Ie contenu de cette relation, qui devient interpersonnelle, se
borne a un echange de sollicitations externes: on trouve beaucoup a
expliquer - par un "recit" sur la "realite" et sur la "condition humaine"
de no us memes et des autres - avant que une ligne imperative
s'impose. Dans ce recit, Ie rappel a l'ontologie (et aussi bien a la
mdaphysique) du noeud interpersonnel est un motif, enfin exemplaire,
qui revient, de fa<;on critique, dans la recherche moderne des sources
de la vie morale. 56
C'est ainsi que, dans un manuscrit (1920-1930), qui appartient a sa
pleine maturite 57 et qui s'insere dans l'elaboration du texte des Conferences parisiennes (1929), aboutissant a l'edition fran<;aise des Meditations cartesiennes (1931), Husserl s'efforce de depasser l'experience
subjective de l'ego par l'experience que l'ego meme peut avoir de l'alter
ego. II se propose de decouvrir Ie monde des sujets, dans son etre en
soi, Ie monde qui se pose devant n'importe quel sujet capable d'avoir de
l'experience. Dans cette intention il declare aborder {'experience de
l'intropathie (Einfiihlungseifahrung), c'est-a-dire l'experience que l'on a
de l'existence et de la presence (Dasein) des autres sujets dans Ie
monde.
Urn die Erfahrung Anderer zu mittelbar eigener Erfahrung zu machen und urn
iiberhaupt die Welt in ihrem An-sich-sein gegeiiuber beliebig sie erfahrenden Subjekten
und als fur jedermann daseiend verstehend aufzuklaren, muss ich naturlich zunachst die
Einfuhlungserfahrung, meine Erfahrung vom Dasein anderer Ichsubjekte verstancUich
machen. 58
Malgre la mefiance que Husserl eprouve a l'egard du "realisme", il faut

souligner cette, conception "existentielle".59 Par son rappel a l'existencepresence (Dasein) de l'autre, cette conception nous introduit a l'emploi
"realiste" de l'intropathie dans la vie morale, qui ne s'arrete pas aux
intentions vaguement sympathisantes, car elle vise a reus sir en substance a ameliorer Ie monde, notamment Ie monde reel qui nous
environne (Umwelt): "In dieser Umwelt sind konstituiert Andere als
meine unmittelbar und im eigenstlichsten Sinn 'Niichsten "'.60
27
Ainsi, par ses allusions a la region ontologique de la "Priisentation"

d'Autrui, Husserl repond d'avance, dans une certaine mesure, aux
objections soulevees par Sartre et par Schutz a la phenomenologie
transcendantale. Selon Jean-Paul Sartre, je ne suis pas plus certain de
mon moi que du moi des autres hommes: la certitude de mon propre
moi est seulement plus intime. 61 Dans Ie "Colloque de Royaumont
(1957)", Alfred Schutz conteste a Husserlla possibilite de passer - par
la conscience transcendantale - de la presence de l'autre a la sphere
d'appartenance propre a lui-meme et s'en tient aux echanges quotidiens
des operations intentionnelles qui agissent entre les personnes.62 Dans
Ie meme Colloque, Eugen Fink repond aux objections de Schutz, en
s'appelant au "jugement d'experience" (I. Kant), qui nous fait considerer
"originaire" la presence de l'autre, comme la notre, dans Ie rapport
intersubjectif. On sait que Husserl n'a pas donne, a ce propos, la
solution de toutes les apories qui surgissent de la phenomenologie
transcendantale, avec la deuxieme bWX1], mais qu'il a plusieurs fois
precise de facto les directives de sa recherche, par la description d'une
"presence" individuelle dans l'horizon commun de l'appartenance au
monde. II me suffit d'en avoir propose quelques confirmations, concernant les structures fondamentales, a partir des origines de la vie
morale. 63
2. L'hhique comme mesure de la vie

Sans oublier les apen;us d'ethique tels qu'ils paraissent dans les oeuvres
de Husserl publiees par lui-meme, nous avons aborde jusqu'ici des
questions morales que l'on peut tirer de l'expose systematique des
manuscrits de ses Cours universitaires (Ethische Vorlesungen). Maintenant je m'attarderai sur des questions speciales que j'ai deja esquissees
a propos des manuscrits.
C'est donc ainsi que, grace a des recherches d'archives, l'on peut lire
aujourd'hui l'ouvrage, edite et preface de fa~on remarquable par Ullrich
Melle, que j'ai deja cite (V.I, 1, note 6) et qui nous donne, pour la
premiere fois, dans un volume de la "Husserliana" (1988), une connaissance vaste et systematique des Ethische Vorlesungen (de la
periode 1908-1914), dont je vais exposer quelques passages. C'est un
evenement qui ne peut que rejouir les specialistes du mouvement
phenomenologique. On peut en attendre Ie statut "theoretique" de la
morale, donne par Husserl, notamment a propos des Grundprobleme
28
MARIO SAN CIPRIANO
der Ethik (1908-1909), des Grundprobleme der Ethik und Wertlehre

(1911) et d'autres sujets d'axiologie et de critique de la raison pratique
(1914).
II faut declarer tout d'abord qu'il y a la deux raisons qui nous
convainquent davantage de l'importance des nouvelles connaissances
ethiques dans l'oeuvre, editee ou bien inedite, du chef de file du mouvement phenomenologique: (1) parce que Ie developpement moral de la
pensee husserlienne, a travers ses structures internes et ses periodes
successives dans Ie temps, marche de pair avec le developpement
theoretique: ainsi l'eidetique pure (des Jdeen) et la phenomenologie
transcendantale (de la Krisis) se terminent par la pratique pure de la
moralite, qui se realise dans la genese de la vie de l'humanite;64 (2)
parce que les idees morales, avec leur projet de la plenitude ou perfection de la vie (vollkommenes Leben), no us aident a comprendre
l'objectivite intrinseque des jugements d'experience et la mesure des
decisions volitives, dans les rapports humains intersubjectifs: enfin
ceux-ci se confirment a travers leurs structures intentionnelles, pour la
realisation graduelle de l'ideal de plenitude de la valeur. 6s Ainsi
l'ethique nous donne la mesure de la vie humaine, c'est-a-dire de la vie
authentique, qui ne se detruit pas elle-meme, mais qui peut durer, etre
encore vie humaine. 66
Mais il faut remonter aux sources de la vie, a fin d'y decouvrir les
directions intentionnelles qui se terminent par sa plenitude. L' hhique
aura-t-elle, comme la physique, la tache de remonter a la source pure
d'ou proviennent ses inspirations nalves, qui precedent toute construction artificielle? Aura-t-elle retrouve, au dela (ou a la base) des
systemes moraux, l'elan tend ant vers la perfection de la vie? Eh bien, je
pense que l'on peut soumettre l'hhique au meme pro cede "reductif",
que Husserl a utilise a propos de la physique de Galileo pour deceler la
structure pre-donnie (vorgegebene) du monde de la vie (Lebenswelt),
qui precede n'importe quelle Mathematisierung de la nature et n'importe quel artifice. Ainsi, dans la Krisis (1936), il precise:
In der anschaulichen Umwelt erfahren wir in der abstraktiven Blickrichtung auf die
blossen raumzeitlichen Gestalten 'Korper' Ie nicht geometrisch-idea Korper, sondern
eben die Korper, die wir wirklich erfahren, und mit dem Inhalt, der wirklich Erfahrungsinhalt iSt. 67
De meme je pense que, dans Ie domaine esthetique, la representation

de l' espace emerge de la faculte intuitive de l'artiste, a partir des
29
ongmes de son experience de la vie. L'espace y est per<,;u par une

intuition primordiale, qui precede les constructions de la geometrie
d'Euclide, de Lobacevskij ou d'autres (Qu'on se souvienne du
cubisme). Pareillement l'artiste vit l'experience originaire du voir, par
une "metaphysique" de la lumiere, qui ne depend pas toujours strictement des lois optiques (Qu'on songe au tourbillon de lumiere, qui
l'emporte sur les coordonnees de l' espace, dans "L'ultima cena" de
Tintoretto [1594], Venise, San Giorgio Maggiore).68
Enfin il est possible de revenir au point de depart de l' action morale
(ou immorale), en ce qui l'inspire radicalement, voire en ce qui mesure
d'avance la direction vers la plentitude (ou la dejaillance) de la vie
humaine et en pese les consequences. A ce point l'on pourra bien
reconnaitre ensemble les sentiments de la pitie et de l'amour, avec
l'idee de la justice, a l'oppose de la terreur et de la violence. Alors
l'histoire de l'humanite (Historie) cesse d\~tre la source d'une "morale
provisoire" (Descartes) et se fait "constitutive", elle aussi, de la genese
de l'humanite, en formant, comme "science", une structure fondamentale (certes non pas l'unique) de l'experience de la vie. 69 Les
systemes moraux et sociaux pourront se mettre d'accord, en reconnaissant tous la meme origine legitime, a partir de la vie quotidienne reduite
a son expression la plus coherente et la plus sincere (Fink: "Echtheit des
Weltlebens)?O Ainsi les modeles logico-ethiques de la raison pure,
s'appliquant a la primeur de la vie authentique, se pretent a favoriser, a
la racine, la sensibilite, la comprehension et la communication parmi les
hommes.
En conclusion Husserl, dans sa pensee la plus mure, c'est-a-dire dans
la Krisis (1936), faisant rappel a la raison qui se cherche eUe-meme et
qui se realise (non pas de fa<,;on naturaliste, mais dans ses "taches
infinies") sous-entend une conclusion morale, qui se termine par la
conscience d'une "autoresponsabilite universeUe".71 Ainsi Ie monde de
la vie, "reduit" a ses origines authentiques et "retrouv6" dans ses fins
raisonnables, presente sa structure sociale qui commence par la recipro cite des perspectives individuelles dans la Paarung et qui s'elargit,
dans Ie domaine ethique, par les intentions reciproques.72 A ce propos,
Michel Theunissen a oppose a la philosophie transcendantale une
philosophie du dialogue, qui vise, dans son contexte ontologique, la
relation "Moi-Tu" comme immediate et susceptible d'un devouement
complet entre ces deux termes, qui n'est pas imaginable dans Ia relation
"Moi-choses" (M. Buber).73 n faut dire que I'approfondissement de
30
MARIO SANCIPRIANO
l'ethique, a travers les cours universitaires et d'autres manuscrits de

Husserl, a "objective", dans l'intersubjectivite monadologique, la rea lite
socia Ie la plus sincere, en abregeant les distances entre la phenomenologie et la philosophie du dialogue. 74
3. Tout commence d nouveau
Lorsque la volonte de l'homme n'est influencee par rien d'une maniere
determinante, elIe est libre: alors la volition sort du rien, elle est
creatrice. Si je dis, par exemple, "Dorenavant tout commence a
nouveau" et si je Ie veux et Ie fais, je suis libre, bien que par une liberte
finie, qui agit parmi de choix limites. Maintenant je vais chercher
encore la source de la vie morale, dans les replis les plus secrets d'ou
elIe nait. Husserl adhere, avec des nuances de langage, a la philosophia
perennis lorsqu'il emploie Ie mot Schopfer (createur) et ses derives,
comme schopferisch, qu' il renforce par Ie rappel au vraiment originaire, en s'attardant sur les urschopferische Akte, dont je m'occuperai
plus loin .
. . . Es ist so etwas wie das fiat, wie der Einsatzpunkt des Wollens und Handelns. Doch
darf man Allgemeines und Besonderes nicht verwechseln. Das spontane Sich-entschliessen, das willentliche, ausfiihrende Tun is ein Akt neben anderen Akten; seine
Synthesen sind besondere Synthesen unter anderen. Aber jeder Akt, welcher Art
immer, kann in diesem Spontaneitiitsmodus des sozusagen schopferischen Anfang
anheben, in dem das reine Ich seinen Auftritt als Subjekt der Spontaneitat hat. 75
Cet apen;:u des Ideen s'etend de la position cognitive a l'activite

volontaire, qui se fait par un "fiat", c'est-a-dire par un point d'insertion
(Einsatzpunkt) du vouloir, a nouveau et createur, dans Ie flux des actes.
Cette interpretation se retrouve confirmee dans l'influente hermeneutique de Paul Ricoeur, telle qu'eUe parait par une note apposee a sa
traduction des Ideen: "Le fiat de la conscience englobe Ie Cogito
tMorique et Ie Cogito pratique (vouloir, executer); il est Ie moment
createur de tout 'acte', de toute 'vi see' de conscience",16 II faut dire que
Husserl, dans les Ideen publiees par lui-meme, envisage avec moderation Ie fiat de la conscience, juge pour ainsi dire (sozusagen) un
commencement createur (schopferischer Anfang). Il fait donc une
reserve a l'emploi, Ie plus charge de sens, du mot "creation", qui peutetre Ie genait par la hauteur de ce concept classique dans la religion
jud6o-chretienne. 77
31
Mais ala meme epoque de l'elaboration des Ideen I (1913) et dans

des textes "moraux" destines aux etudiants, notre Auteur abandonne Ie
"pour ainsi dire" et s'engage a fond a deceler les sources Ies plus
immediates de la vie spirituelle. En particulier dans Ie manuscrit F I 14
(cite), au sujet des "Philosophische Disziplinen" (1911), il parle de la
creation sans reserve, a fin d'obtenir "a nouveau" (immer wieder) ce qui
est mieux dans Ie monde. Ainsi les formes de la volonte creatrice
(schopferische Willensgestaltungen), qui s'averent dans la constitution
de la subjectivite transcendantale, y realisent la "phase creatrice"
appartenant a la constitution meme. 78 En effet les actes volontaires (par
exemple l'attention volontaire, en comparaison avec l'attention passive)
sont des expressions privilegiees du sujet moral, par leur pouvoir
inchoatif, bien qu'ils soient toujours prealablement soutenus par l'evidence des actes "thetiques" (positionnels) de la connaissance. 79 Dans
son Ms. sur les "Grundprobleme (Formale Ethik)", Husserl s'attarde
sur Ie fiat du pouvoir createur, de par la volonte, qui s'avance vers Ie
futur et 1'ameliore. Tout commence d nouveau: c'est la l'espoir initial du
meIiorisme. Notre auteur precise que la volante creatrice s'etend a
1'avenir par une tension qui vise aux buts de 1'action morale. Cette
operation est Ie resultat d'un processus qui embrasse la phase de
l'actualite du vouloir et la phase creatrice du constituer, par les actes de
volante ulterieurs, dans l' horizon unitaire de la conscience. Dans la
volonte, ce qui se constitue garde toujours Ie caractere de la continuite
creatrice. 80 Que 1'on observe, dans ce contexte, que la creation ne se
separe pas du constituer, dans l'horizon de la conscience. Chaque
volition n'est pas dirigee vers une autre volition, mais elle vise librement
aux choses qui sont a realiser. Tout cela est possible car la conscience
interieure du temps n'est pas rigidement predeterminee dans son flUX. 81
Dans les dernieres annees de sa vie, Husserl se montre de plus en
plus engage a decouvrir Ie sens vraiment originaire des actes protocreateurs (urschopferische Akte). lei Ie prefixe "ur" devient indispensable, car il faut se debrouiller parmi les variations du mot qui evoque
la creation (humaine et divine), a ses divers degres. Je voudrais encore
preciser (c'est Ie prefixe "ur" qui l'inspire) qu'il n'est pas interdit
l'emploi du mot "creation" pur des oeuvres proprement "d'invention",
qui neanmoins ne supposent pas une production permanente et tout a
fait de nihilo: telles qU'elles sont, par exemple, les "creations" de la
"haute couture". Mais il faut encore s'eIever aux "creations" proprement
dites, ou proto-creations, qui surgissent plus radicaIement du rien, a
32
MARIO SAN CIPRIANO
l'origine de la vie - notamment de la vie absolue de l'esprit - et qui ne

sont jamais susceptibles de paraitre demodees. En 1935, a l'epoque de
la Krisis, un texte husserlien du groupe E (Intersubjektive Konstitution)
des "Archives-Husserl" de Louvain s'annonce par les mots "Urschopferische Akte" et remonte a l'aube de la vie pre-Iogique, qui s'eveille
dans la premiere enfance. Ce texte s'occupe aussi de la premiere
intropathie et de la recherche d'une objectivite commune parmi les
personnes ("/Ch-Du Konnex"), dans la vie pratique et communautaire. 82
Enfin, dans Ie mouvement phenomenologique, Ie theme de la creation a ete developpe par les recherches de Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka,
qui n'envisage pas l'activite creatrice exactement a la fa<;:on de Husserl,
comme une "phase du constituer", mais qui oppose les operations de la
"conscience creatrice" a celles de la "conscience constitutive".83 Ce ne
sont que les premieres qui peuvent briser les barrieres du monde
constitue, pour y realiser les possibilites ouvertes a la liberte, dans la
vie humaine. Tandis que chez Husserl tout est constitue, chez Mme
Tymieniecka la creation est vraiment telle, sans reserve, bien que situee
dans I'horizon unitaire d'une seule conscience. La phenomenologue
americaine, dans sa theorie generale, a con<;:u a fond la "creative
orchestration", en insistant sur l'intime connexion de l'experience vitale
("source-experience") avec la vie rationnelle ("Life'S Rationalities"),
dans la condition humaine. C'est par cette unite radicale que 1'0n peut
comprendre, dans sa propriete semantique, la doctrine origin ale du sens
moral qu'elle professe, aboutissant a une expression objective de
sensibilite et de bonte, telle qu'elle est la bienveillance, avec la "selfinterpretation" de l'homme dans la rea lite de la vie sociale. 84
III. CONCLUSION
Dans une conclusion "ouverte" au metiorisme, on peut dire que

l' ethique husserlienne, par sa recherche d'une plenitude du sens (Sinn)
dans la vie humaine, "exige la Metaphysique" (V. plus haut, I, 2), tout
que celle-ci n'accomplisse pas sa tache morale par une abstraction,
ou bien par une simple deduction d'en haut, et qu'elle montre plutot,
par une voie inductive, la rea lite spirituelle, avec les manifestations
qui en decelent, de l'interieur, Ie noyau d'etre absolu. Ce noyau, qui
s'offre avec souplesse, loin de se faire le soutien de n'importe quelle
intransigeance, forme Ie centre rayonnant de notre liberte et de nos
revelations interieures. Ainsi j'ai deja dit que, dans Ie domaine moral,
33
il est plus correct de repondre a l'appel de l'absolu en nous-memes,

que d'y faire appel, avec nos pretentions, dans les rapports avec les
autres.
A ce point l'ethique nous donne la mesure de la vie authentique, afin
que celle-ci puisse "durer" et atteindre sa perfection. Nous avons
reconnu les sources les plus pures de la vie morale: (1) dans les enonces
thCoretiques (principes et jugements), qui contiennent, dans leur necessite apodictique, les normes primordiales (de bienveillance, justice et
amour) des actions humaines, en les dirigeant vers leur buts de valeur,
avec 1'aide des motivations vitales de la sphere affective; (2) dans les
verites concernant les preludes, riches en sens ontologique, au devoir, a
la vertu, au merite, afin de definir Ie recit d'une "vraie" action morale,
par sa coherence avec les teleologies poursuivies et par son adhesion a
un etat de chose realisable (Realisierung); (3) dans les actes de la
conscience creatrice, qui se terminent par 1'accomplissement rationnelraisonnable, avec la liberte, de 1'humanite authentique; (4) dans l'essor
du monde de la vie et de l'experience, qui erige les structures ouvertes a
la societe, dans l'histoire.
Les apen;us moraux et religieux, que nous avons reconnus dans les
ouvrages tMoretiques publiCs par Husser! sont trop sporadiques pour
pouvoir conclure 1'ensemble. II est vrai, mais les manuscrits moraux,
qui accompagnent, pas a pas, les textes tMoretiques, aboutissent a la
construction d'un systeme, qui se base sur Ie rapport telelogiquetheologique, ou la theorie et la pratique vont bien de conserve. En effet
ces manuscrits nous donnent la clef pour une sorte d'interpretation
realiste de la vie morale, qui s'etend a confirmer 1'objectivite tMoretique du rapport intersubjectif et a depasser n'importe quel type de
solipsisme (Y. plus haut, I, 2; II, 1). Ainsi l' action morale, par son
intentionalite concrete, exige que nous ne nous dirigions pas aux autres
comme a des projections intellectuelles de nous-memes, mais que nous
les comprenions comme des sujets existants, pour leur etre reellement
dans Ie monde.
Alors on tachera de combler n'importe quelle situation vide de
dialogue, car l'ethique, avec la recherche d'une plenitude du sens, en
tant qu'il est possible dans la condition humaine, realise des perspectives interpersonnelles, auxquelles nous commen~ons deja a etre engages par notre activite cognitive et par nos relations sociales, dans
1'experience de la vie, a partir de la vie quotidienne. C'est dans la
comprehension de 1'action morale consacree par nous a la vie des
34
MARIO SAN CIPRIANO
autres, que nous reconnaissons aussi l'action consacree it notre vie par
les autres. Par Ie pouvoir de realisation de soi-meme et des choses, tel
qu'il se manifeste dans la conduite morale, en resulte aussi mieux
verifiee la presence n~elle de I' alter ego, com me celle d'un tu, originel et
vivant "pur soi", qui se realise dans Ie rapport entre les personnes:
University of Siena
NOTES
1 A propos des noyaux d'attention et des operations relatives, par exemple dans un
choix, d. E. Husser!, Ideen zu einer reinen Phiinomenologie und phiinomenologischen
Philosophie (livre Ier, 1913), edite par Walter Biemel. Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke,
Vol. III. (Den Haag: Nijhoff; 1950) 92, p. 230 sq. Dorenavant on designera cet
ouvrage par la locution "Ideen I" suivie par Ie numero du paragraphe et de la page. Cfr.
aussi E. Husser!, Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik
(1939, posthume) edite par L. Landgrebe (Hamburg: Claassen Ver!ag, 1954), 23, a:
"Das noch-im-Griff-Behalten als Passivitiit in der Aktivitiit des Erfassens", p. 116 sq.
2 Ideen I, 147, p. 359.
3 E. Husser!, Logische Untersuchungen (1901): 6. Unters., zweite Auflage (Halle:
Niemeyer, 1921), p. IV et 40 sqq. Cette sixieme Recherche (Ire edition 1901) n'a pas
ete comprise dans la 2e edition des 5 premieres Recherches en 1913. Elle a ete
reeditee separement, avec quelques remaniements, en 1921. - Dans la 3e edition de
1922, les 5 premieres Recherches resteront inchangees, de meme que dans la 4e edit.
de 1928. - J'utilise ici l'edition fran~aise: E. Husser!, Recherches Logiques, ed. par H.
Elie, A. L. Kelkel et R. Scherer (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959-1963) 4
volumes, avec appareil critique.
4 E. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen
Vernunft (1929), dans Ie "lahrbuch fur Philo sophie und phiinomenologische Forschung", edite par E. Husser!: tirage a part (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1929) 5 et 101 sqq.
5 Cf. H. Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, Ille edit. 1954), p. 50 sq. et 282.
6 Ullrich Melle precise: "Wertungen sind in ihrer Giiltigkeit relativ auf eine Motivationslage, und positive und negative Wertpriidikate schliessen sich nur bei gleicher
Motivationslage aus". Melle est l'editeur d'un livre qui vient de paraitre: E. Husser!,
Vorlesungen iiber Ethik und Wertlehre, 1908-1914, Husserliana, Vol. XXVIII, 1988.
Melle remonte aux sources de l'ethique husserlienne, avec une rigueur philologique et
critique, et y presente Ie "paralleIisme" logique-ethique, la morale affective ("Ies
sentiments [Gefiihle] ne peuvent pas etre 'principes', car les principes sont des jugements, des connaissances"), la critique de la raison axiologique et pratique, la querelle
du psychologisme, par rapport au scepticisme moral; et enfin il aboutit a l'ethique du
renouvellement individuel et communautaire.
7 Les Ethische Vorlesungen (1889-1924) se joignent a une grande partie de la
production scientifique husserlienne.
35
Cf. A. Roth, Edmund Husserls ethische Untersuchungen (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1960)
chap. II, 3 : "GefUhlsmoral und phanomenologische Ethik", p. 52 sqq. - Dates de
1920, on conserve des feuilles concernant la vertu, la Gefiihlsmoral et Ie "moral sense"
(K. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik. Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls (Den Haag:
Nijhoff, 1977) p. 239). En dehors des Cours, on trouve, parmi les textes de la "Intersubjektive Konstitution", Ie Ms. cons acre a Instinkt, Wert, Gut, Tele%gie, Normstruktur der Persona/itiit (1931 [1933]) (Archives-Husser!, Louvain, cote E III 9), qui
nous presente les tendances pre-subjectives et passives de I'instinct, emergeant de leur
terrain originaire (Cf. aussi Ichiro Yamaguchi, Passive Synthesis und Intersubjektivitiit
bei Edmund Husser! (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982) p. 56.
9 Cf. Ie manuscrit (original) de Adolf Grimme, qui rapporte Ie Cours de Husser!
consacre, en 1914, a Ethik und Wertlehre ("Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Miinchen",
Ana 385, C, I, 1, p. 14), a propos des "kausale Motivationen in intell. 'Gemiitssphare'''.
- ] e voudrais noter que deja dans la sensibilite naturelle ("natiirliche"), lorsque celle-ci
s'avere par la suspension de l'attitude naturaliste ("naturalistische"), I'on trouve une
source tant de la morale que de la religion. En etfet, par les sons, les couleurs et la
lumiere, il est possible s'emouvoir jusqu'a I'extase, comme dans la vision, spatiale et
sublime, de la "candida rosa" du Paradis dantesque: "In forma dun que di candida rosa/
mi si mostrava la milizia santa/ che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa" (Par. XXXI,
1-3). II est vrai que "Ia nuit des sens" opere la neutralisation et predispose au mysticisme; mais il est vrai aussi qu'un nouveau sens de la nature purifiee se repand par des
etfets "sensibles" dans Ie langage mystique. A ce propos, I'on peut lire des preliminaires:
M. Sancipriano, La transfiguration du corps dans la phenomenologie de la religion,
"Analecta Husser!iana", Vol. XVI (Dordrecht, Hollande, 1983) p. 295 sqq. Mais, a
propos du sellS specifique de l'experience rcligieuse ct du "desire to see God" la ou "no
one appears", ef. Clyde Pax, Truth in Religious Experience, "Analecta Husscrliana," vol.
XXII: "Morality within the Life- and Social World", ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
(Dordrecht, 1987) p. 455.
10 Cf. A-T. Tymieniecka, "Imaginatio Creatrix. The 'Creative' versus the 'Constitutive'
Function of Man and the 'Possible Worlds''', "Analecta Husserliana," Vol. III, 1974, p.
3-41.
11 Ms. F 124, p. 336: ct. A. Roth, Oeuvre citee, p. 129.
12 Ms. F I 21, p. 20: cf. A. Roth, Oeuvre citee, p. 138: "Wolle einsichtig das Beste unter
dem Erreichbaren". Husserl y elargit une formule de Brentano, jusqu'a comprendre la
relation entre la plus haute valeur et la volonte raisonnable (einsichtig) (A. Roth,
ibidem).
13 Ms. F I 21, p.4: ct. A. Roth, Oeuvre citee, p. 141. Encore dans ce contexte Husserl
base la volonte morale sur Ie "sujet" rationnel (das verniinftige Subjekt). Les Mss. F 121
et F I 24 contiennent la matiere de plusieurs Cours d'Ethique de la Periode 19081924, qui sont donc presque contemporains aux Ideen I et II.
14 E. Husserl, Form. und Transz. Logik, citee, 12. Cf. aussi E. Raggiunti, Husser!'
Dalla logica alla fenomenologia (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1967) "De la logique a la
phenomenologie": cela veut dire (pour ce qui concerne notre theme) que I'on arrive a la
discussion des realites (Realitiiten) que "l'evidenza antepredicativa" nous offre, ou Ie
mot Realitiit doit etre entendu "nel senso pili largo possibile" (Ibidem, p. 210). Cela
signifie aussi la recherche d'une solution du probleme du solipsisme dans I'intersubjec8
36
MARIO SAN CIPRIANO
tivite transcendantable (Ibidem, p. 218 sqq.). - A peu pres dans la periode qui precede
la Form. und transz. Logik (qui a ete redigee dans I'hiver 1928-1929 et publiee en
1929, dans Ie "Jahrbuch" edite par Husser! meme), notre auteur tint ses Freiburger
Vorlesungen zur Einleitung in die Ethik (Cours de I'ete 1920, repete dans I'ete 1924:
"Archives Husserl", Louvain, F I 28). Ici il se refere a I'ethique de Kant, enonce une
theorie de I'ethique pure et des valeurs, en rapport avec la verite, et s'occupe d'une
"mathesis formelle de la socialite" (p. 81).
15 Pour un certain depassement de I'adaequatio husserlienne, dans une ethique de
I'''ouverture'', efr. A. De Waelhens, Phenomenologie et verite. Essai sur l'evolution de
l'idee de verite chez Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1953) p. 43, 84 sqq. Cf. aussi H. Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la
religion, "Oeuvres" (Paris: P.U.F., 1959) p. 1024, a propos de la morale de I'''ame
ouverte". Mais, dans Ie depassement, s'avere de meme la partie "verifiee" de I'adae-
quatio.
Cf. la critique de James M. Edie, "Husserl Studies" (Dordrecht, Hollande), vol. I. 3,
1984, pp. 315-320. Contre la these de Adorno il renvoie notamment a la VIe des
Logische Untersuchungen. - A propos de I'Ecole de Francfort, d. D. Rasmussen,
Issues in Phenomenology and Critical Theory, dans Ie volume: "Crosscurrents in
Phenomenology" edit. par R. Bruzina et B. Wilshire (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978). David
Rasmussen pose la question s'il y a, dans la phenomenologie, une "apodictic foundation
for socio-historical phenomena" (ibidem, p. 21). En puisant aux manuscrits moraux du
Nachlass husserlien, j'ai tache de donner une reponse positive a cette question dans
mon livre: Edmund Husser!' L'etica sociale, Collection du "Consiglio Nazionale delle
Ricerche" (Roma), (Genova: Tilgher, 1988).
17 E. Husserl, Ethik und Wertlehre, Ms. Grimme, cite, p. 3.
18 E. Husserl, Idee der "philosophischen Disziplinen" (1911), "Archives-Husserl",
Louvain, Ms. F I 14, p. 59. A cette epoque-Ia, Dietrich von Hildebrand, studieux
influent in Giittingen, reconnaissait (Die [dee der Sittlichen Handlung, dans Ie "Jahrbuch" edite par Husserl, III, 1916) Ie bien comme Ie contenu du monde des valeurs
morales. Selon I'hermeneutique de Hans-Georg Gadamer (Die Idee des Guten zwischen
Plato und Aristoteles [Heidelberg: 1978]), l'Idee platonicienne du Bien denote un objet
(Ia realite premiere), mais aussi, par son etymologie visive, une perspective ideale.
19 Log. Untersuch., cit. VI, 8 et 64, Ire edit. 1901; Form. und transz. Logik, cit.,
1929, p. 219 sq. Cf. aussi J. N. Mohanty, '''Life-World' and 'A priori' in Husserl's later
Thought", "Analecta Husserliana" (Dordrecht, Hollande) Vol. III, 1974, p. 49.
20 E. Husserl, Beilagen zu den Grundproblemen der Ethik, insbesondere der formalen
Ethik (1908-1911), "Archives-Husserl", Louvain, Manuscrit F 121, p. 118, A cette
epoque-Ia, Max Scheler etait collaborateur de Husserl et publiait Zur Phanomenologie
und Theorie der Sympathiegefiihle (1913) et Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die
materiale Wertethik (1913-1916).
21 Cf. M. Schlick, Gibt es ein materiales Apriori? [1930-31], en Gesammelte Aufsatze
1926-1936 (Hildesheim: G. Olms Verlag, 1969), p. 22 (II s'agit d'une nouvelle edition
du recueil deja paru (Wien: Gerold, 1938).
22 Ibidem, p. 28.
23 M. Schlick, L 'Ecole de Vienne et la Philosophie traditionnelle, en Gesammelte
Aufsatze, cite, p. 397. - De nos jours, Werner Marx, ancien professeur a la chaire
16
37
"Husserl-Heidegger" de Freiburg i. Br. pose la question generale: "Est-ce qu'il y a une

mesure dans Ie monde?". En ethique il res out cette question par de considerations
rationnelles et existentielles, se basant: (1) sur Ie "materiales Apriori der 'Sozialitiit"',
qui constitue Ie "nous" parmi les personnes, et (2) sur la "vertu" de la pitie (souffrir
avec les autres) et de I'amour du prochain (W. Marx, Ethos und Lebenswelt. Mitleidenkonnen als Mass [Hamburg: F. Meiner Verlag, 1986], p. 41).
24 E. Husser!, Idee der "philosophischen Disziplinen" (1911), "Archives-Husserl",
Louvain, Ms. F I 14, p. 7 sqq. A cette epoque-Ia, Husser! entendait par "Metaphysique"
la "radikale Seinswissenschaft" Cf. K. Schuhmann, Husserls Idee der Philosoph ie,
"Husser! Studies" (Dordrecht, Hollande), 1988, III, p. 24l.
25 Cf. A. Roth, Oeuvre citee, p. XII et 17, a propos d'une logique du sentiment
"purifie" qui contribue a fonder une ethique pure. En ce qui concerne vaguement une
propension passive ou un pres sentiment instinctif (instinktive Ahnung), cf. Ichiro
Yamaguchi, Oeuvre citee, p. 56.
26 V. plus loin, II, 2. "Der Mensch lebt in der Norm"; au sujet du "Normaler
Lebensstil als Stil des Gemeinschaftslebens", ct. E. Husserl, "Zur Phiinomenologie der
Intersubjektivitiit. Texte aus dem Nachlaas" (1905-1935), ed par Iso Kern, Husserliana, Vol. XV: IIIe partie (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1973) p. 143. Cf. aussi W. Marx, Oeuvre
Gitee, p. 71 sqq.
27 Ideen I, 95, p. 238.
28 Objectite = allem. Objektitiit, mot employe par Schopenhauer. La traduction en
"objectite" est tres rare en franais. L' "objectite" se retere ici a l'object qui est pense ou
represente, en tant qu'on Ie distingue de l'acte par lequel il est pense. Le mot, en ce cas,
n'implique aucune existence actuelle de I'objet en soi (A. Lalande, Vocab. techno et
crit. de la Philosophie [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, VIe edit. 1951]) S.V.
"Objectit6".
29 E. Husserl, Beilagen zu den Grundproblemen der Ethik (1908-1911) Ms. F. 121
cit. p. 55 sq.
30 Objectivite = aHem. Objektivitiit: caractere de ce qui est objectif. C'est-a-dire voir les
choses telles qU'elles sont, les voir reelles, dans l'existence, etc. (A. Lalande, Vocab. cit.,
S.V. "objectivite"). A propos des "actes objectivants" (objektivierende), dans Ideen I,
117, p. 290, faudra-t-il relire ce texte a la lumiere des manuscrits moraux, pour etablir
les "regions d'etre" (Seinsregionen) et leurs propres ontologies? - Au sujet d'un
rapport de travail entre Andre Lalande et notre auteur en 1906-1909, ct. K. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik, cit., p. 97 et 123; A. Lalande, Vocab. cit., S.V. "1. Intention".
31 Ideen I, 121, p. 298.
32 E. Levinas, La ruine de la representation, en "Edmund Husser! (1859-1959)", (La
Haye: Nijhoff, 1959) p. 85.
33 E. Husser!, Ms. E III 9 (1933), p. 4: Ichiro Yamaguchi, Oeuvre citee, p. 56. Hllsserl
a envisage les conditions passives de l'experience (negation, doute, remplissement
partiel des intentions, tendances, etc.) dans les Cours et recherches: E. Husserl,
"Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten
1918-1926", ed. par M. Fleischer, "Husserliana", Vol. XI (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1966).
A' propos du "Phiinomen der Affektion", qui se produit a l'origine dans Ie present de la
vie, par une stimulation de l'ego, ct. ibidem, pp. 148 sqq.
34 Ichiro Yamaguchi, Oeuvre cit., p. 57.
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MARIO SANCIPRIANO
A ce sujet, ct. B. Waldenfels, Das umstrittene Ich. Ichloses und ichhaftes Bewusstsein
bei A. Gurwitsch und A. Schutz, dans Ie volume R. Grathoff und B. Waldenfels,
Sozialitiit und Intersubjektivitiit (Miinchen: W. Fink Ver!ag, 1983), ou l'on trouve des
arguments pro et contra un champ de conscience non-egologique (pp. 17-23). Mais la
phenomenologie ne peut pas nier l'Ego-Pol de la conscience. II est plus facile de
declarer la mort de Dieu et du correlatif "sujet-homme", que de se passer d'eux-memes
(Cf. M. Casalis, "Hermeneutics", "Death of God" and "Dissolution of the Subject": A
Phenomenological Appraisal, dans "Crosscurrents in Phenomenology", cite, pp. 262275). Quant a la deconstruction, cf. Ie cahier de "Nuova Corrente" (Genova: 1984), n.
93-94 consacre a "Decostruzione tra filosofia e letteratura". Ibidem: J. Derrida, Pacific
Deconstruction, pp. 35-118, a propos de I' oui dire de Joyce; M. Ferraris. Promemoria
sulla "svolta testuale", pp. 315-326; P. de Man, The Resistance to Theory (traduct. S.
Rosso), pp. 7-33. Mais Husser!, ici mentionne (p. 13), avait deja oppose sa resistance
a certaines premisses des theories (Krisis, 1936, 9). Au sujet du Ms A 5 6, d. R.
Toulemont, L'essence de la societe selon Husserl (Paris: P.U.F. 1962), p. 101.
36 Ideen I, 139, p. 341
37 Ibidem, p. 342 sq.
38 E. Husser!, "Erste Philosophie (1923-24)", edite par R. Boehm, Husserliana, Vol.
VIII (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1959), p. 190. Cf. du meme auteur: Die Krisis der europiiischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phiinomenologie (1936), ed. W.
Biemel (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1954), 55, p. 190 sqq.: "Die prinzipielle Korrektur unseres
ersten Ansatzes der 'Epoche' durch Reduktion derselben auf das absolut einzige
letztlich fungierende ego" (deuxieme i7roXfJ). Cette correction n'empeche pas Husser!
d'embrasser, dans I'etre absolu, I' Universum des sujets transcendantaux, par leur esprit
communautaire (Erste Philosophie, ibidem).
39 Ideen I, 147, p. 360.
40 E. Husser!, Ethik und Wertlehre, Ms. Grimme cite, p. 4.
41 On ne peut pas negliger les facteurs sociaux du repentir et notamment I'influx des
parents, avec Ie "Super-ego" de la psychanalyse. Mais, dans tous les cas, I'on remonte a
une egologie et il ne s'agit pas d'une imposition des remords, faite a I'instant, actuelle.
42 Que I'on songe a la philosophia perennis et a I'''instinctus interior Dei invitantis" de
St. Thomas d'Aquin (Sum. Theol., II-IIae, q. 2, a. 9 ad 3). Louis Dupre, en SJ1!ivant Ie
"religieux" Husser! des Manuscrits, estime qu'il separe la foi d'avec la raison. Je suis
d'accord, mais je crois qu'ici se pose la question methodologique du "paralleJe" entre
les deux, dont je suis sur Ie point de m'occuper. Cf. L. Dupre', Husser/'s Thought on
God and Faith, "Philosophy and Phenomeno\.ogical Research" (Buffalo), Vol. XXIX,
1968, n. 2, p. 207, 213 sq.
43 Louis Dupre souligne, dans la pen see religieuse de Husser!, la "reflection of man on
his destiny", la "religious evidence of saving God" et la "true freedom" (Ms. E III 4, p.
56) et en remarque I'influence sur la phenomenologie de la religion, chez les disciples
Scheler et Van der Leeuw, entre aut res (L. Dupre, Article cit., p. 213).
44 E. Husserl, Idee der "philosophischen Disziplinen" (1911) Ms. F 114 cit., p. 47. Ce
cours s'annonce par une introduction a la philosophie, en tant que science concernant
une vie absolument valable de fa,<on personnelle. Dans la partie moyenne, Husserl
presente une teleologie constructive a priori; d'inspiration leibnizienne c'est Ie noeud
des deux idees: la perfection des mondes possibles et la perfection de la personnalite.
La derniere partie se termine par une elucidation du sens (Sinneserkliirung) de l'etre et
35
39
de l'axiologie dans Ie cadre de la philosophie premiere. On peut reconnaitre, dans ce

manuscrit, les premieres lignes "phenomenologiques" du systeme de I'ethique pure.
45 Ms F 114 cit. p. 43.
46 A propos de la Divinite infinie, c'est-a-dire de "Dieu-venant-a-l'Idee, comme vie de
Dieu", cf. E. Levinas, De Dieu qui vient Ii l'Idee (Paris: Vrin, 2me ed. 1986), p. 13. Cf.
aussi A. Ales Bello, Husser!' Sui problema di Dio (Roma: Studium, 1985). Au sujet
de la "Alisubjektivitiit" ou Dieu demeure, cf. Iso Kern, Husserl und Kant (Den Haag:
Nijhoff, 1964), p. 300, note. - Chez Levinas, Ie langage ethique - "en remontant a
partir de ce qui est pense, vers la plenitude de la pensee elle-meme" - peut offrir des
possibilites nouvelles pour dire notre relation a I'Infini (E. Levinas, Oeuvre citee, p.
140).
47 En 1914, Husser!, interroge par Hans Driesch, n'exclut pas un passage de I'essence
conceptuelle de Dieu a son existence (Cf. K. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik. Denk- und
Lebensweg Edmund Husserls [Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1977], p. 186). Parmi les phenomenologues, Mary-Rose Barral (Anselm and Contemporary Man) s'est occupee de
I'argument ontologique, pour deceler I'idee de Dieu comme "present in a dynamic way
in us" (Akten der Anselm - Tagung, Bad Wimpfen, 1970, p. 260).
48 Dans un autre contexte, ou I'idealiti et la realite se synthetisent dans la mora lite
unissant en concret I'ideal et Ie reel, Antonio Rosmini demontre que I'idee de l'etre (ou
"etre ideal"), en tant qu'elle est infinie, ne trouve pas, dans I'esprit de I'homme, Ie sujet
adequat a elle-meme; au contraire elle Ie trouve dans I'Infini, ou ce Sujet est Dieu
meme: "L'essere ideale non puo stare senza un'intelligenza assoluta, ne senza un Essere
real mente reale, di cui e il riflesso e I"appartenenza'. Nel suo nucleo di assolutezza,
I'essere e Dio" (A. Rosmini, Teosofia, Vol. V, p. 369 sqq.). Cf. aussi M. Sancipriano, Ii
"Dio dei filosofi" nel pensiero di A. Rosmini, dans Ie volume "Dio" (Bologna: Patron,
1978) p. 172; A. L. Townsley, Rosmini and Post-Husserlian Philosophy: A Prospectus,
"RivistaRosminiana", 1976,pp. 101-111.
49 Ideen I, 51, p. 121: "Anmerkung"; Ideen I, 58, p. 138 sqq.
50 Ideen I, 79, p. 191, note 1. A propos du probleme de Dieu, cf. aussi Ideen I 43, p.
98; Krisis, etc. 3, p. 5 (Dieu com me "oberstes Prinzip"); 12, p. 67; 17, p. 76 sqq.;
53, p. 184.
51 Cf. A. Roth, Oeuvre cite, p. XIV. Je me fonde encore sur plusieurs manuscrits
reperes par Alois Roth (1960); mais j'ouvre rna recherche a une plus vaste consideration des sources de I'intersubjectivite, apres la publication des 3 volumes de E. Husser!,
Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1905-]935), ed.
par Iso Kern, Husserliana, Volumes XIII, XIV, XV (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1973). On
peut voir M. Sancipriano, Edmund Husser!' L'etica sociale, Collection du "Consiglio
Nazionale delle Ricerche - Roma" (Genova: Tilgher, 1988), Bibliographie pp. 169175.
52 A propos de la communaute humaine (Menschengemeinschaft), cf. E. Husserl, "Die
Krisis der europiiischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phiinomenologie"
(1936) ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana, Vol. VI (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1954), 47, p. 166.
53 E. Husser!, Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit, cit. Husserliana, Vol. XIII, p.
42,46.
54 E. Husser!, Cartesianische Meditationen (1931), ed. S. Strasser, Husserliana, Vol. I
(Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1950), 50, p. 138 sqq.
55 E. Husser!, Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit, cit., Vol. XV, <6>, p. 11 sqq.
40
MARIO SAN CIPRIANO
A propos du "recit" ethique chez Paul Ricoeur (Temps et reeit, Vol. I-III, Paris,
1985) cf. la conference au "Centro Italiano di Ricerche Fenomenologiche" (Roma),
donnee par Peter Kemp et publiee sous Ie titre "Ethique et narrativite", Aquinas (Roma
1986),pp.211-232.
57 Quant it la "pleine maturite" de notre auteur, cf. sa lettre it Dorion Cairns, datee Ie
21 mars 1930, ou il annonce "die deutsche Ausarbeitung [des Cartesianische Meditationenl, erweitert zu einem Buch - meinem Haupt - und Lebenswerk" Lettre de
E. Husser! publiee en Edmund Husserl1859-1959 (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1959), p. 285.
58 E. Husser!, Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit, cit., Vol. XV: IIIe partie
(1929-1935), p. 26. La doctrine husserlienne de I'intropathie a des precedents (par
rapport it T. Lipps) avant 1909. Cf. E. Husserl, Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit cit., Vol. XIII, n. 2, p. 21.
59 Dans sa lettre it Dorion Cairns, citee naguere, Husserl montre de la mefiance it
I'egard de "Realisme et Anthropologisme" (ibidem, p. 285). Mais il analyse ailleurs les
couches de l'etre, dans les relations "corps-arne", vers une ontologie de la substantielle
Realitiit (E. Husserl, "Ideen zu einen reinen Phanomenologie" etc., livre 2me (19121925), ed. par Marly Biemel, Husserliana, Vol. IV, 1952, 31, p. 125 sq.).
60 E. Husserl, Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit cit., IIIe partie, p. 428.
61 Cf. J.-P. Sartre "La transcendance de I'ego. Esquisse d'une description phenomenologique", en Recherches Philosophiques, 1936-1937, pp. 85-123. Sartre developpe
sa theorie du rapport interpersonnel, de fa<;:on positive, lorsqu'il en once la "dialectique"
de la comprehension sociale et depasse la "violence de l'Autre" en abordant les
rapports moraux. Cf. J.-P. Sartre, Cahiers pour une morale (1947-48), ouvrage
posthume, Gallimard, Paris, 1983, ou Ie philosophe existentialiste presente Ie "Plan
d'une morale ontologique" (p. 484 sqq.) et montre une sorte d"'idealisme", avec son
attention aux sources de la vie religieuse, it la generosite, it "Ia liberte dans Ie rapport du
saint it Dieu", etc. (p. 486). Cf. aussi W. McBride, "The Evolution of Sartre's Conception of Morals", "Phenomenological Inquiry" (USA: Belmont Mass., Vol. 11, 1987), p.
24 sqq.
62 Cf. A. Schlitz, Le probleme de l'intersubjectivite transcendantale, "IIIe Colloque
Philosophique de Royaumont" (1957), Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1959, p. 337. Du
meme auteur: "Common-sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action", en
Collected Papers, Vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. M. Natanson (The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1962), pp. 3-47.
63 Cf. K. Held, Das Problem der Intersubjektivitiit und die Idee einer phiinomenologischen Transzendentalphilosophie, dans Ie vol. "Perspektiven transzendental-phanomenologischer Forschung", edit. u. Claesges und K. Held (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1972).
Notamment III, 2: "Das origin are Bewusstsein vom Mitsubjekt", p. 45 sqq. Mais il faut
aussi admettre, dans Ie domaine ethico-religieux, les perspectives qui s'ouvrent it
I'interiorite objective, "in libertranszendental-subjektiven Sinn" (Ms E III 4 [193019341 cite par Iso Kern, Husserl und Kant (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1964), p. 300). Une
telle interiorite n'est pas une categorie psychologique car elle se termine par l' etre ideal,
intelligible en nous-memes (M. F. Sciacca).
64 E. Husserl, Ms. K III 9 (1934-1935), cite.
65 A propos d'une vie parfaite (vollkommenses Leben) en vue de I'ideal d'une
"plenitude absolue de la valeur", cf. Ie manuscrit sur I'Idee der "philosophischen
Disziplinen", cit., p. 11.
56
41
Au sujet de la "possibilite transcendantale" de "pouvoir encore" par I'action libre cf.

N. Abbagnano, "Contemporary Science and Freedom", The Rev. of Metaph, V, 3, 1952
(V. aussi plus haut, I, 3).
67 E. Husser!, Krisis, cit., 9 a, p. 22.
68 J'ai propose aussi I'application d'une mathesis esthetique a I'interpretation de
l'oeuvre d'art: M. Sancipriano, L'objet esthetique et {'art, dans Ie volume "Phenomenologie et litterature: L'origine de I'oeuvre d'art", Actes, ed. Mar!ies E. Kronegger
(Sherbrooke (Quebec, Canada): Editions Naaman, 1987), pp. 76-96.
69 E. Husser!, Mss. KIll 6, p. 332 et KIll 9, p. 13, cites par H. Hohl, Lebenswelt und
Geschichte. Grundziige der Spiitphilosophie E. Husserls (Freiburg-Miinchen: Ver!ag K.
Alber, 1962). Parfois Husserl distingue la Geschichte (evenements du temps de la vie)
et I'Historie (Science): ibidem, p. 62 sqq. II envisage, dans "I'a priori de l'histoire",
les conditions de la possibilite du recit d'une telle science. Cf. L. Landgrebe, Die
Phrinomenologische Forschungen (Miinchen), Cahier consacre a "Phanomenologie und
Praxis", N. 3, 1976, p. 21. Dans Ie meme Cahier: S. Strasser, Der Begrijf der Welt in der
phiinomenologischen Philosoph ie, pp. 151-179: a propos de I' humanite, p. 177 (Y.
plus loin, II, 3)
70 Cf. Ie Plan (1930) de Eugen Fink, Disposition zu "System der phiinomenologischen
Philosophie" von Edmund Husserl, 4. Abschnitt: "Grundziige der phanomenologischen
Metaphysik". Texte publie en E. Husser!, Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit,
Vol. XV, p. XXXVI sqq.
71 E. Husser!, Krisis, cit. <73, Schlusswort> tire, par I'editeur, du Ms K III 6. Cf.
Husserliana, Vol. VI, p. 269 sqq.
72 Cf. A. Schiitz und T. Luckmann, "Strukturen der Lebenswelt" (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1984), 2me Volume, V, E: Gesellschaftliches Handeln, p. 95 sqq.
73 Cf. M. Theunissen, Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart (1965),
W. de Gruyter, Ber!in 2me edit. 1977. Edition anglaise: The Other. Studies in Social
Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Buber, traduct. par C. Macann, 1ntroduct.
par F. R. Dallmayr (Cambridge, Mass. and London: "The Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Press", 1984), p. 4, 257 sqq., 274.
74 En 1920, Husser! arrive a admettre que "die Monaden haben Fenster" (Zur
Phanom. der 1ntersubjekt., Husserliana, Vol. XIII, p. 473): ce sont les fenetres de la
communicabilite. Luhmann s'appelle a un consentement social au sujet des valeurs,
dans un shared symbolic system, sans exclure un "a priori materiel" place com me
valable (N. Luhmann, "I fondamenti sociali della morale", Fenomenologia e Societd
[Milano], 1984, n. 1, p. 11).
75 Ideen I, 122, p. 300.
76 E. Husser!, Idees directrices etc. (Gallimard, 9me ed. 1950). Note de P. Ricoeur,
p.414.
77 In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram (Genesis, 1.1).
78 A ce point Husser! envisage Ie domaine des valeurs reelles ou possibles, comme
"formes de la volonte creatrice" (Ms F I 14, cit. p. 7). Ce manuscrit est a peu pres
contemporain de I'elaboration des Ideen I (1913).
79 Actes thetiques (trad. Ricoeur) = Seins-"setzende" Akte, thetische (Ideen I, 103,
p. 256). A propos de I'''originiir gebendes 'Sehen''', cf. Ideen I, 136, p. 333 sqq.
80 E. Husserl, Beilagen zu den Grundproblemen der Ethik, insbesondere der formalen
Ethik (1908-1911), Ms. F I 21, p. 142 sq. (Louvain: Archives-Husserl).
66
42
MARIO SAN CIPRIANO
81 E. Husserl, "Zur Phiinomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins" (1893-1917), ed.

R. Boehm, Husserliana, Vol. X (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1966), 20, p. 47; Erfahrung und
Urteil, cite (1939, posthume), 48, p. 236. - Stephan Strasser s'oppose au transzendentalismus qui opere dans I'idee d'une "constitution creatrice", mise en evidence par la
reduction phenomenologique. II admet justement une "reduction" qui ne nous derobe ni
I'humanite ni I'ethos et qui agit com me Ie rapatriement (RiickfUhrung) dans la Lebenswelt et comme I'entree dans la pensee originelle du monde (Cf. S. Strasser, Artic. cit., p.
176 sqq.). V. aussi plus haut, II, 1; II, 2.
82 Ms. "Urschopferische Akte" (premiers mots du texte), "Archives-Husserl", Louvain,
cote K III 11, p. 9. Publications partielles du Ms.: dans "Aut Aut" (Milano), 1965 (edit.
M. Sancipriano) et dans Ie volume Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit, cite, Vol.
XV (edit. Iso Kern), p. 604-608. Cf. aussi K. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik. Denkund Lebensweg Edmund Husserls (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1977), p. 465, ou Ie manuscrit
est ainsi mentionne: "Urschopferische Akte fUr die Urzeitigung der Einheiten".
83 A-T. Tymieniecka, Eros et Logos. Esquisse de phenomenologie de l'interiorite
creatrice (Louvain-Paris: Nauwelaerts, 1972), p. 9 sqq.; Morality and the Life- World
or the "Moral Sense" within the World of Life, "Analecta Husserliana" (Dordrecht,
Hollande: Reidel, Vol. XXII, 1987), p. IX sqq.
84 A-T. Tymieniecka, First Principles of the Metaphysics of Life Charting the Human
Condition: Man's Creative Act and the Origin of Rationalities, "Analecta Husserliana,"
Vol. XXI, 1986, p. 8, 29, 68. - Quant a la semantique, Ie langage de la phenomenologie se rapproche bien plus de Descartes que de Hume. Chez Ie premier (Discours de fa
methode, I, 1) les mots "sens" et "raison" sont tous les deux orientes a I'homme et Ie
"bon sens" est synonyme de la "raison", car il n'y a au fond qu'une seule et meme
faculte, qui se distingue dans son exercice. Dans la Dioptrique, malgre son dualisme,
Descartes arrive a donner au "sentir" une signification spirituelle, en declarant que
"c'est I'ame qui sent", comme I'on voit dans I'extase et la contemplation, lorsque Ie
corps reste insensible devant les objets qui I'entourent, car I'ame est ravie (Dioptr., IV,
edit. Fayard, 1986, p. 98).
* Je remercie vivement Mile Ie professeur Maddalena Delforno des suggestions precieuses, qu'elle m'a donnees a I'egard Iinguistique.
YUKIKO OKAMOTO
THE LOGICAL SPACE OF MORALITY:

A POSSIBLE THEORY FOR THE
FOUNDATION OF MORAL VALUES
INTRODUCTION*
What drives us to expand our world appears to be practical demands

which are almost always guided by our practical interests.** But, I think
that interests and demands are not the whole story. The necessity for a
fusion of the various different cultural worlds is often raised by our
deeper demand for building up a human world. Both this fusion and the
recognition of this deeper demand presuppose the recognition of others
as human beings, and of other cultures as human cultures. Furthermore,
we need to indicate the condition which not only makes this recognition
possible, but also draws out of this recognition the motivation to build
up a human world.
In this paper I would like to thematize 1 this deeper dimension
underlying all the actual cultural worlds, and show the way in which we
can carry out investigations of this deeper dimension, as well as state
what is the necessary condition for the fusion of different cultural
worlds and for moral values. This study will be actualized as a study of
the logical space of morality. This is because only universal morality
may be capable of making a human world out of different societies with
different moral systems. And it is also because one might mistakenly
suppose we can accomplish the building up of just one world out of
various societies with different moral systems only if every language-use
and fact is thoroughly explained within a scientific frame-work.
Not all facts are bare facts, and most human conduct may fall in the
realm of institutional facts.2 Thus, any research concerning human
culture no matter how we produce it must have something to do with
moral values. Insofar as the fusion of cultural worlds must indicate the
construction of a human world, the main theme of this paper should be
the condition of universal morality and its theory.
Before discussing the theme, I shall give a short account of "thematization" in contrast to linguistic analysis and of the reason why I take the
phenomenological approach. Along with thematization, I shall highlight
43
A -T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXV, 43-52.
1991 K luwer Academic Publishers.
44
YUKIKO OKAMOTO
the role of human reason, and then I will explain what I mean by
"logical space."
It is a matter of fact that almost every socially, historically formed
culture has its own established moral system and customs. Moreover,
needless to say, none of these cultural moral systems can be absolute.
Each culture will have its advantages as well as its shortcomings.
However, to investigate particular cultural moral values is a matter of
small concern here. This is because working on the historical phenomena involves a scientific inquiry which uses an infinite number of
examples of available data collected and chosen in accordance with that
scientific inquiry itself. Historical phenomena and events continue to
occur in our spatia-temporal universe as long as we exist within it and
weave the texture of our history out of it. Thus, if we adopt the
scientific way of investigating historical phenomena, we would restrict
our inquiry to phenomena only and therefore disregard the essential
questions about moral values.
Nowadays (after the linguistic turn in philosophy), there seems to be
two typical paths taken in the study of these essential questions:
linguistic analysis, on the one hand, and phenomenological or transcendental inquiry on the other. Among examples of the former, I can
mention Wittgenstein's method with its effective model of "languagegames" which directs us to concentrate our analysis on our ordinary
language use. Recently, Barry Curtis employed this method in his
analysis of linguistic activities that concern moral values. His analysis
shows us not only that we characterize some activities as moralistic and
others not, but also that there are "universal imperatives" and that these
imperatives are the moral imperatives which belong to natural human
behavior. 3 I agree with him on this point.
However, Wittgenstein himself denies any possibility of an ethical
theory because "ethics is supernatural" and all our statements "will only
express facts." He means, perhaps, that we cannot express anything
supernatural (i.e., transcendental) in our language. I can agree with
Wittgenstein when he says that "there is only relative value and relative
good, right," etc. 4 He puts this point in this way in his Tractatus:
6.421 "It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is
transcendental."
THE LOGICAL SPACE OF MORALITY
45
6.43 "If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it
can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts - not what can be
expressed by means of language."
In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein says: "'Anything - and nothing
- is right.' - And this is the position you are in if you look for definitions corresponding to our concepts in aesthetics or ethics. In such a
difficulty always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this
word ('good,' for instance)? From what sort of examples? In what
language-games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word
must have a family of meanings."s But, he declines to go further in
order to explain this family resemblance of meanings. Here, I think, we
can get a clue to the elucidation of the deeper dimension which he
rejects.
Wittgenstein's rejection of any theory of ethics implies the impossibility of our thinking on this pre-linguistic dimension. Findlay phrases
this position clearly: "Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind is built
throughout on a denial of pre-linguistic meanings."6
Even following Wittgenstein's position though, we can raise a question about what binds the different meanings of various language-uses
and brings them into a family-resemblance. In other words, what makes
it possible that we characterize certain activities as moralistic? We
observe such activities that we call moralistic in every human society,
no matter which language is spoken in it.
Curtis states that those language-uses are "ruled by our language,
outside which we cannot speak."7 What Curtis reveals in his thesis on
ethics by using the language-game model in an attempt to overcome the
limitation of Wittgenstein's method seems to be unsatisfactory. This is
so, in the first place, because he did not intend to develop Wittgenstein's language-game model as a communication theory, which is what
is in my view both possible and necessary in order to discuss "universal
morality." Secondly, this is so because his notion of "universality" did
not seem to be fully developed. Then the questions, "What is the
universal morality?" and "In what sense is it universal?" are still open.
Therefore, we need a theoretical substantiation of "the universal
morality" from a point of view other than Wittgenstein's.
It can be said that expanding our world without sympathy for others
might shake our own world because of the ensuing endless quarrels and
the overwhelming hostility that would come against us in return. What
underlies the cultures of different societies reveals itself to be something
46
YUKIKO OKAMOTO
common to all the cultural worlds, as Curtis argued. But this common
dimension which is deeper than the surfact relative cultural worlds may
be pre-linguistic. We have then to penetrate this deeper dimension by
means other than linguistic analysis. To examine not only the natural
tendency of the human mind called the moral sense but also others'
demand for sympathy as well will give us a clue with which to apprehend this deeper dimension.
In the first place, we have to thematize the pre-linguistic dimension,
against Wittgenstein's postulates. Thus, we should move on to the next
line of investigation in order to start our study and answer the question
raised.
II
I think we should thematize what is the necessary condition for

humanity to expand its world and preserve its flexibility as well as its
creativity, i.e., what can be the foundation of the moral values.
First, I will inquire into what moral values presuppose. Then the
investigation will proceed to the phenomenological field of the primordial and passive strata of the human mind. Finally, I would like to
propose a possible theory that is logically constructed as well as
founded on phenomenological reality.
Without doubt, any moral system presupposes a communicative
society. The necessary antecedent of communication is the linguistic
communicative competence that characterizes human existence. As
long as there is a human society, there will be communication. It seems
to me that linguistic competence produces a logical condition for
communications and that the co-existence of human beings gives it a
realistic foundation. Therefore, we can say that the reality of the coexistence of human beings is an ultimate, i.e., "equi-primordial" (in
Heidegger's definitionS) condition along with the logical condition of
linguistic competence, i.e., language-use. This is the primordial fact, i.e.,
the "facticity."9 Since investigations of the moral conditions of human
society shall not be possible within the framework of scientific researchprograms according to both Wittgenstein's and the phenomenological
definition of the philosophical task, I apply this definition (to my
philosophical thinking, too). But the phenomenological research will
thematize the question about the deeper dimension concerning the
foundation of ethics while Wittgenstein would not go beyond analyzing
how we use languages with regard to moral values.
47
Wittgenstein's idea of the world picture 10 does undoubtedly imply

the existence of the deeper dimension of our language-use as well as the
necessary condition for our language-games in general. However, it is
said that, in his later philosophy, he discarded his early theory of the
logical investigation of the world as a whole and the project of
phenomenological inquiry of his middle period as well. Wittgenstein's
phenomenology might well have treated the deeper dimension of the
general condition for language-use. In any case, presumably, his
restricted notion of "description" would not allow him to penetrate the
deeper undescribable dimension.
Once we thematize the actual co-existence of individuals in a society
as a reality, this reality manifests itself as a necessary condition for any
communication, hence, as the general primordial "facticity." When we
proceed to the general background of our communicative society, that
is to say, when we are conscious of our own culture, then the difference
between our culture and other cultures is revealed. After finishing
thematizing this difference as well as the reality of the co-existence of
individuals in a society, we must proceed to the question of the
necessary condition for the co-existence of different cultures. I shall
explain in what follows why I say "we must."
The sense of difference can produce the feeling of unfamiliarity
which can also fill a human individual with fear or disgust and
sometimes the feeling of hostility. Even though a human individual has
natural spontaneity and sympathy for living things, she or he may be
overwhelmed by those negative sensations. Therefore, I think we must
neutralize this feeling of unfamiliarity by developing a sense of distance.
Then, being freed by consciousness from the unconscious restrictions of
our background, we will be able to refine sympathy and the moral sense
as our principal attitude toward both others and other cultures. Thus
I think that what makes this neutralization possible is the power of
human reason. By virtue of human reason's power to reflect, we can
thematize this difference as sheer distance. Then we are conscious of
our relativity, the relativity of our existence as human persons as well as
the relativity of our own culture against the background of which we
evaluate things and conduct. This neutralization does not extinguish the
differences among cultures and societies, but while it retains them, it
makes those differences relative.
Thus, we are able to study this distance as logical space. What this
logical space means and what kind of logical space it should be will be
our next questions. Since what makes us respect others as human
48
YUKIKO OKAMOTO
beings and other cultures as human cultures may belong to questions

that are not those of scientific, artificial formal logic but, rather, those
of phenomenological transcendental logic, we shall proceed to the
dimension of essence and the sphere of logos.
III
Any study of essence does not belong to the empirical investigations

that scientific research produces. The concept of logical space which I
take from Wittgenstein's terminology may not exactly overlap with what
Wittgenstein proposes in his Tractatus. But this idea will give us a
useful model of the possibility of the theory of ethics.
First of all, there can be no challenging the view that any claim which
must serve as a theory has to be logical. Secondly, the theory should
make evident the criterion for the jUdgments it makes. A third point I
would like to propose here is that the logical space on which the theory
of ethics can be formulated has not two dimensions, nor any definite
number of dimensions, but is multi-dimensional in accordance with the
variety of cultural factors.
The first point requires no detailed explanation because it is implied
by the concept of "logical space." The third point will be understood as
requiring openness to historical facts and continuous investigations. I
think it suffices here to discuss the second point in order to think
through the conditions for a possible theory of ethics.
Thus, I have to explain the idea of "logical space" a little at first, and
then elaborate the second point. The notion as it is expressed in the
Tractatus is based on the correspondence theory of truth. According to
this theory, when a statement corresponds to reality it is true and when
it fails to correspond it is false - but that the opposite is not the case
because propositions never determine the reality. This proposition gives
the whole of logical space. 11 If I apply this concept, I should reproduce
the definition of itP The agreement of proposition with reality may be
reinterpreted as that of language-use with something else. Language-use
may here mean any conduct which is equivalent to a constitutional
language-use, that is, to a constitutional fact. Every language-use shall
be reinterpreted in the logical tribunal of human dignity, insofar as it
concerns humanity. Language-use with regard to this human dignity
defines the whole of the logical space of morality.
What is, then, human dignity? This simply means morality, and it is
49
expressed in values and moral systems in general. This logical space is

multi-dimensional as mentioned above. Despite its plurality of dimensions, this logical space has one criterion which may decide what is true
and what is false. The fundamental rule for fusing various cultural
worlds in a way in accordance with the human natural inclination, the
demand for constructing the world as a human world, should be the
moral sense that Hume defined.13 This is the criterion I would like to
propose for the elaboration of the second point. The logical force of the
moral sense reaches through the whole of this logical space. Although it
has its basis in human nature, we need to recognize it, and to thematize
and refine it through human reason because it is necessary to make
it real judgment. I think if we attain consciousness of the distance
mentioned above, any requirement for a strict definition of what human
dignity is will turn out to be redundant. This is because this distance
makes our position relative to and equal with others. It is also because
consciousness of the distance may generate the space that human
reason needs to control our negative feelings by reminding us of "the
universal imperatives." Any occasional sympathy with other creatures
may soon fade away when fear of disgust grips us. That which can
strengthen and make the moral sense dominant in human nature is
human reason alone.
When distance is interpreted as a necessary condition for communication, this shall be reinterpreted as "between-ness," seen not as the
actual "between-domain"14 where the mutual language-use in a society
is possible, but as a neutral between-ness which is thoroughly entangled
with relative historical moral values. This concept of sheer "betweenness" is attained through phenomenological reflection. As is well known
and has repeatedly been discussed, phenomenological absolute reflection is impossible. Nevertheless, since this "between-ness" has its
foundation in the primordial reality of co-existence (the reality that is
ultimate), it has nothing to do with the aporia of Husserlian transcendental subjectivity. IS
Therefore, the possible theory of morality is proposed as the study
of the logical space of this "between-ness."
CONCLUSION
Some objections against the criterion I offer here can be anticipated.

One objection will be that the moral sense cannot be defined con-
50
YUKIKO OKAMOTO
cretely. It will also be asked where the actual starting point shall be.
Can we really realize the human world by means of such a project as I
have proposed?
To the first criticism, I will reply "no," simply because here concrete
definition is a grammatical contradiction. This is because the moral
sense will protect human dignity only when there is a challenge to it in
some way. No matter how it be expressed or actualized, these expressions or actual forms will be temporal. They represent, in accordance
with their grammatical meanings, the general limitation of the human
condition. 16 But even though they have many forms, we will be able to
pick up from them some primitive universal condition of human
dignity, which may be a true condition but not the whole story. This,
consequently, is the necessary logical condition for human behavior in
constructing a human world.
To the second objection, that which asks where our starting point is,
I can say that to respect others as equals to oneself and other cultures
as being equal to one's own is the most general expression of the moral
sense. The real starting point may be to respect oneself as one human
being among other human beings. Only in interrelationships among
human beings can we live meaningfully. To be aware of this reality may
be another answer to this second objection.
The best way to achieve a human world is to recognize this reality
and then to keep employing our reasoning. We should keep at the
constructing of a human world in which every person respects others
and employs her or his reason in accord with this recognition. I should
say we are constructing it or we are undermining it.
The demand for the fusion of cultures and the expansion of our world
does not of itself mean the opening-up of our cultural insularity, for our
culture can remain closed. That is to say, cultural solipsism may possibly
continue to exist when one culture imposes its styles and views upon
other cultures. But the reality of co-existence will gainsay this imposition's falsity and show the impossibility of the scheme in the long run.
Recognizing that cultural insularity is actually impossible, we have
sought the most appropriate way of thinking on and expanding our
world from the point of view of an absolutely correct logical condition.
Absolutely correct it will be because there can be no other logical
possibility that we will think of; in the final analysis this condition is the
limit that is dignity, which is the tautological condition of it. 17
Jiyu-bakuen College, Japan
51
NOTES
* This paper is based on my presentation at the poster session on the 12th board and
the discussion on that occasion during the XVIII World Congress of Philosophy in
August 1988 at Brighton, UK. I thank all the participants in my session for their
cooperation in the fruitful enjoyable discussion.
** Concerning the concept of the Moral Sense in this paper, lowe a great deal to the
following papers: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, "The Moral Sense," Analecta Husserliana
Vol. XV (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), pp. 3-78; "The Moral Sense and the Human
Person within the Fabric of Communal Life," Analecta Husser/iana Vol. XX (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986), pp. 3-100.
1 I use this term with almost the same meaning as in Husserl's usage, as, for example,
in his phrase, "a shift of thematizing interest." See Formal and Transcendental Logic,
trans. D. Cairns (Martinus Nijhoff, 1969/78), p. 121, etc.
2 This pair of concepts is taken from Searle's terminology. Ref. J. Searle, Speech Acts
(Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 50-52. See also G. E. M. Anscombe, "On Brute
Facts," Analysis 18: 3 (1958).
3 " . . . there is such a thing as a 'universal imperative,' which any speaker may, under
certain circumstances, issue to any hearer and which any hearer must, under certain
circumstances, obey. Such universal imperatives, ... are characteristically the moral
imperatives," and "such imperatives are profound expressions of our humanity, including our natural responses to our own suffering and the suffering and distress of others."
Barry Curtis, "The Language-Game of Morality," Philosophical Investigations 10: 1
(January 1987), p. 32.
4 L. Wittgenstein, "A Lecture on Ethics," Philosophical Review 74 (1965), pp. 3-12.
5 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Basil Blackwell, 1968), 77.
6 J. N. Findlay, Kant and the Transcendental Object (Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 375.
7 Curtis, op. cit., pp. 52-3.
8 M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Max Niemeyer, 1975), p. 230, etc.
9 "Facticity is not the factuality of the factum brutum of something present-at-hand, but
a characteristic of Dasein's Being .... " Ibid., p. 135.
10 Ref. L. Wittgenstein, Zettel (Basil Blackwell, 1967), sections 93-97, 146-7, 209,
233, 238, 262. Compared with Heidegger's idea of "das Weltbild," Wittgenstein's is
more primitive and general. According to him the Greeks, who have no "Weltbild" in
Heidegger's conception, can have their own world picture. Ref. M. Heidegger, "Die Zeit
des Weltbildes," in Holzwege (Vittorio Klostermann, 1980), pp. 86, 89-90.
J 1 "A picture agrees with reality or fails to agree; it is correct or incorrect, true or
false." L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1969),2.21.
12 Cf. Ibid., 4.463,3.42.
J 3 D. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (Pelican, 1969), Book III, sections 1 and 2.
Refer also to J. Farr's elaboration of Hume's idea of sympathy in his "Hume, Hermeneutics, and History," History and Theory 17 (1978), pp. 285-310.
14 Cf. B. Waldenfels, Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs Phaenomenologica 41 (Martinus
Nijhoff, 1971).
15 Husserl's concept of "das reine Korrelat" is proposed with the idea of "das reine
lch." This point may show a difference between the concept of between-ness and that of
52
YUKIKO OKAMOTO
"Zwischenreich." Ref. Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit, Dritter Teil, Husserliana, Bol. XV (Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 572.
16 Ref. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ed., The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human
Condition, Analecta Husserliana Vol. XN (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1977178).
17 As a condition of communicativity, this concept of logical space will demand much
more examination of the other texts, for example, Michael Theunissen's and Jiirgen
Habermas' and so on. It also requires a more elaborate explanation on what this
"tautology" means. However, those further issues will be addressed in future investigations.
MARIANNINA FAILLA
PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE BEGINNINGS

OF THE MORAL PROBLEM
(DILTHEY - BRENT ANO - HUSSERL)
1. THE TWOFOLD MEANING OF THE MORAL PROBLEM

IN DILTHEY
It is the purpose of this note to examine some of the background
motives of the pre-phenomenological, psychological theories of Dilthey

and Brentano and, in the light thereof, to pose the following question:
Could these motives have represented the point of departure for some
aspects of the phenomenological formulation of the ethical problem?
To this end one must necessarily assess the part played by the moral
problem in Dilthey's philosophy, a task for which a great deal of significant material is provided by his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften.!
The Einleitung is permeated by the demand that the theoreticocognitive and methodological foundation of the human sciences should
be related to the ethical dimension of the historical world.
The first tendency of Dilthey's ethical interest is to be found in his
intention of considering the foundation of the sciences as the cognitive
basis of a reflection about the political, juridical, and economic norms
that underlie and govern historical action. Not only does the basic
method yield the conditions for the recognizability of the historical
world which include, among others, the methodological interconnectedness of the empirical sciences and a distinctive psycho-physiological
theory of consciousness, but Dilthey's foundation of the human sciences
seeks also to promote reflection on the rules that affect subjective
action. 2 The ultimate aim is that of arriving at a conceptual - though
always life-immanent - reflection on the principles of theoretical and
practical action. 3
If the first significance of these endeavors in ethics is that they are
part of the determination of the essential conditions for the carrying out
of historically meditated action, yet a second way of considering the
ethical is closely connected with the real sense of Dilthey's gnoseology.
In this connection it becomes very helpful to throw the limelight on
Dilthey's analysis of the essential components of morality. Moral action,
53
xxxv,s 3-6 5.
54
MARIANNIN A FAILLA
so he would have it, is based on an "inner motivation" which is

connected with the "concept of worthiness" (" Wiirdigkeitsbegriff") and
which molds the insight of the "person" that one finds in Kant's
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. 4 But moral action also needs an
exterior compulsion which is expressed in the approval or disapproval
of the "collective moral conscience." On this basis, therefore, Dilthey
sets out on an attempt to reconcile Kant's ethical a priori and the
British common sense theories. The idea of a relationship between
transcendental ethical theories and British sensationalism had already
made itself felt on the occasion of Dilthey's habilitation thesis. In his
Versuch einer Analyse des moralischen Bewusstseins, Dilthey clarified
his attitude vis-a-vis Kant's formalism. s Although he accepted the
unconditional character of the Kantian moral imperative in this connection, he yet rejected the separation of the moral form from content,
thereby refusing to consider the principle of ethics as an a priori form
separate from the actual involvements of consciousness. The first
prejudice of Kant's ethical understanding that had to be overcome, so
he held, was precisely the contraposition of the rational element and
the sensory-perceptive element. Ethics had to find a point where these
two components coincide. This point can be derived from the activesynthetic principle, which Dilthey describes as the "fashioning purpose"
(gestaltender Zweck).6 Thanks to this principle, the sensory sphere is no
longer conceived of as an obstacle to the realization of morality.
Rather, the sensory dimension is perceived in a positive manner as the
place where the purposiveness of the Will (wollende Zweckmiissigkeit)
is fulfilled and becomes realized. When Dilthey calls into doubt the
separation of form and content, of moral reason and the sensory
sphere, some contributing part seems to be played by Trendelenburg's
reactions against Kant's formalism. Trendelenburg's concept of purposiveness seems to become important in this connection? It is
precisely this concept, or the concept of the soul understood as a
purposeful unity, as entelechy, that was to enable Dilthey to move away
from Kant's manner of considering the form-content relationship. The
idea of purposiveness that Dilthey had in mind was of Aristotelian
origin.
But this concept is not interpreted as a metaphysical-ontological
principle of matter. First and foremost, purposiveness is referred to a
psycho-physiological unity and highlights the latter's uniform structure.
Starting from this view of purposiveness as the "uniform" and typical
PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE MORAL PROBLEM
55
structure of human nature, one can understand the manner in which

Dilthey justifies the generality of the structure of consciousness. Weare
here concerned with an empirical generality that has been obtained by
inductive means. Purposiveness becomes the factual givenness of consciousness, and the empirical importance of the foundations of ethics
derives precisely from this factual nature. Even in Dilthey's later and
more mature Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, the ethical conception, which always calls for the overcoming of the contraposing of
rationalism and empiricism, is given a clearly psycho-anthropological
foundation. But the principal part in this connection is no longer played
by the concept of the purposiveness of the psychic structure, because
the accent is now placed rather more on the concept of the psychic fact.
The two fundamental components of moral action, namely, inner
motivation and ethical compulsion deriving from social approval are
described as unchanging, uniform elements of human nature conceived
only as facts of consciousness. The concept of psychic fact links a
tendency towards a positivist interpretation of the Kantian "appearance" as a factS - a view that was shared also by Brentano - to an
interest in the particular concept of the reality of consciousness that
had gained ground among the Neo-Aristotelians and was then used
against Kant. According to Dilthey, the psychic fact constitutes the
possibility of sustaining that consciousness is in conformity with experience in a manner that is appropriate for freeing the sphere of consciousness from references to the non-temporal noumenon.
But Dilthey's interpretation of the psychic fact also delimits him with
respect to the particular hypotheses of physiological causality that
derive from the psychophysiological naturalism of Wundt and von
Helmholtz. As a gnoseological foundation for ethical motivation, the
psychic fact becomes the sign of the empirical foundation of ethical
science but confers upon ethics a merely psycho-anthropological justification.
2. THE THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ASPECT OF
THE GOOD IN BRENT ANO
The effort to find an alternative to the Kantian conception of ethics is

characteristic of all pre-phenomenological psychology and, consequently,
also became the central point of Brentano's reflections on ethics. Just
like Dilthey, Brentano seems to turn his attention to the ethical sphere
56
MARIANNINA FAILLA
in order to concentrate it directly on the relationship between apriorism

and empiricism. In his Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis,9 as also in
Grundlegung und Aufbau der Ethik,1O Brentano not only undertakes
the analysis of the good, but also develops a theory of ethical action.
His theoretical considerations of the good aim at subtracting the
good from the domain of habit (Hume) , from blind and compulsive
instinct, and seek to disqualify the relationship of analogy to external
perception sustained and defended by the sensationalists. In contrast
with empiricism and sensationalism, Brentano sets out to stress the
criteria of true good or, rather, to deduce them through analogy to the
truth. Only judgment leads into the domain of truth. Representation,
which is the first modality of the psychic relationship to immanent
objects, has nothing to do with the true or the false. 11 The true only
makes its appearance when we are concerned with the recognition of an
act that is performed by inner perception. The recognition of inner
perception is the immediately obvious affirmation of the effective
presence (existence) of an act or of an activity of the mind (Gemutstiitigkeit). But the concept of the true does not imply only immediately
evident affirmation of the existence of these acts, for truth concerns
also the logical possibility of these acts. To this extent, therefore, the
true does stand in a relationship with apodictic judgments. These are
universal insights, which - as far as quality is concerned - are "disqualifying" (verweifend) or negative and exclude logical contradictions
among the acts. As analytical judgments, they represent the only a
priori cognitions that Brentano is prepared to accept. Brentano thus
writes:
Ausgenommen die Urteile der inneren Wahrnehmung, das sind die Anerkennungen
unserer eigenen psychischen Betatigung, unserer eigenen Bewusstseinsakte, gib es kein
positives Urteil von unmittelbarer Evidenz.
Nur unter den verneinenden Urteilen finden sich noch solche, die uns unmittelbar
einleuchten. So leuchtet uns ein, dass dasselbe Ding nicht zugleich sein und nicht sein
kann, genauer, dass ich etwas nicht zur gleichen Zeit anerkennen und verwerfen kann.
Diese Einsichten haben vor denen der inneren Wahrnehmung die Apodiktizitat voraus.
Was wir so verwerfen, verwerfen wir als unmoglich. Hingegen bieten sie uns keine
positive Erkenntnis, sie lassen uns kein Ding als existierend erkennen, sie zeigen uns
nicht, was ist, sondern nur, was unmoglich ist.
Mit dies en beiden unmittelbaren Erkenntnissen, den assertorischen der Selbstwahrnehmung und den apodiktischen negativen, sind die Quellen erschopft, aus denen unser
Begriff des Wahren gewonnen ist. 12
On the basis of these modalities of assertive and apodictic judgment,
57
then, our philosopher sets out to create a link between the laws of
formal logic and the dimension of inner perception. 13 In accordance
with the rule of analogy, the two aspects of evidence, i.e., the assertive,
factual aspect in conformity with consciousness and the logico-analytical aspect, are transposed into the domain of the good in order to
clarify the concept of the good per se.
What, then, is the reason that determines an act that, per se, is good?
With a view to answering this question, which goes beyond Hume,
Brentano analyzes the assertive recognition of loving acts. A loving act
is good, so he holds, inasmuch as it is recognized as good by inner
perception. As a result of perception, one has an immediately obvious
cognition of the existence of the loving acts. But they also stand in need
of a local recognition. Thus, the act recognized as right should also
possess a relationship to general classes and to universal concepts. The
mental operations that are co-contained in the single psychic content of
the good act are related to universal objects. The latter form part of the
apodictic sphere of the true good and, more precisely, form part of its
logical necessity. Their function in the ethical field is similar to that
which is performed by logical concepts in the case of mathematics.
The ultimate sources of the immediately obvious cognition of the good
become exhausted with the assertive inner self-perceptions of the loving
acts and with the relationship that these acts bear to classes of general
concepts. The factual and analytical a priori components that prove
essential for the inner rightness of the good are always intermingled.
Inasmuch as they are immediately co-existent, they can only be given in
inner perceptive experience, which is immediately evident and forms
the part of this whole which has to be attributed to the psychic subject.
Having analyzed the theoretical aspect of the good, we can now deal
with the domain of ethical action. This domain rests on the concept of
preference and choice. The question of rightness is posed also in this
context. The answer to this question is once again to be found in the
analogy with truth.14 Accordingly, a given preference is right only if it
becomes "sanctioned,"15 that is to say, when it obtains an assertive and
apodictic justification. As far as the logical sphere is concerned, preference given to the better includes a peculiarity that must not be overlooked: it presupposes the comparability of values, something that according to Brentano - does not exist in the case of truthS.16 The
concept of preference leads to value relationships that are regulated by
the law of summation. The rule of summation explains the proportional
58
MARIANNINA FAILLA
qualitative and quantitative relationships of the good or bad components of which values are made up. Furthermore, the law of summation opposes the attempts of the sensationalists to measure the intensity
of desire or non-desire (Bentham) and excludes blindly compulsive
desire from the sphere of preference. This law also seems to work in
the direction of finding a point of coincidence between the objective
mathematical rules of the calculus of probability and ethical action.
But Brentano aims not only at gaining entry into the inner structure
of preference for the better, but also at making a thorough analysis of
the greatest practical good. In this connection there seems to be here a
unique interweaving of the imperative to get beyond sensationalism and
the peculiarly utilitarian understanding of ethical action.
The greatest practical good is connected with the possibility of
applying the law of summation 17 to ethical actions and thus realizing the
greatest happiness within the sphere that is subject to the influence of
reason. By this sphere Brentano understands
... nicht allein das Eigene selbst, die Familie, (den) Staat, sondern die ganze lebenswartige Lebewelt, ja Zeiten ferner Zukunft. ... Das Gute in diesem wei ten Kreise nach
Miiglichkeit zu fiirdern, das ist offenbar der richtige Lebenszweck, zu dem jede
Handlung geordnet sein soli. Das ist das eine und hiichste, durch den Verstand
erkennbare Gebot, von dem aile anderen abhangen. 18
The good that can be realized in the intersubjective sphere is the

"greatest possible measure" of spiritual goods; and since "... man
einen, der diese Guter in hohem Masse besitzt, einen Glucklichen
nennt, so kann man das hochste praktische Gut auch als das hochstmogliche Gluck des weitesten, unserer Einwirkung zuganglichen
Kreises von Lebewesen definieren."19 Brentano thus formulates a
"supreme moral law" that is not orientated either by altruism or by the
theories of egoism. It is ultimately a principle that is understood as a
utility principle and therefore equated with utilitarianism.2 But Brentano approves a utilitarianism that only attains the greatest possible
good by virtue of the fact that the acting person prefers values that do
not depend on blind compulsion and performs their assertive and
apodictic recognition. In the field of ethical action, indeed, the references to utilitarianism (and the accompanying demand that the good
should be derived from the higher sphere of consciousness that has
been detached from passive habit) once again bring to the fore something that could already be seen in the theoretical analysis of the good,
59
namely the two springs of Brentano's considerations regarding ethics:

he does not want to overlook any part of the empiricist problematic of
the ethics of feelings (GefUhlsmoral), but at the same time he wants to
warrant an evident cognition of the feelings. Our philosopher thus
places himself midway between empiricism and apriorism. But in the
case of Brentano the spurning of empiricism coexists with the psychological background of his problematic of evidence. It is true that the
immediate evidence of the assertive and analytico-aprioristic elements
of the good leads Brentano to make a sharp distinction between ethics
and empiricism, but the fact that apodictic cognition of the real good is
rooted in the recognizing act of inner perception couples the evidence
of the acts to the psychological dimension of the subject.
3. CONCLUSION
A retrospective look at pre-phenomenological psychology permits one

to recognize a certain continuity: the critique of the formalism of Kant's
a priori that one finds in Dilthey's empiricism of consciousness and in
his psycho-physical theory of consciousness seems likely to have
triggered a change in approach. Those who took it separated ethics
from the formal self-determination of the moral law, and this led to a
situation where it became possible to thematize the relationship
between the subject and the entire sphere of feelings. But it was only in
Brentano's theory that this new approach to the formulation of the
ethical problem made itself very clearly felt: the contribution of prephenomenological psychology to Husserl's ethical reflections have
ultimately to be seen as emerging from this new approach.
What becomes visible in Brentano's philosophy is the demand that
the way should be paved to both break with ethical sensationalism and,
and at the same time, describe feelings as a sphere of attitudes that
stands in need of a cognition based on insight. "So scheint im Streite die
richtige Lasung gefunden. Die Prinzipien der Ethik mussen, wie bei
allen Wissenschaften Erkenntnisse sein, Gefuhle kannen es nicht sein.
Wenn Gefiihle debei beteiligt sind, so nur als Gegenstande der
Erkenntnis. M.a.W. Gefuhle sind die Vorbedingungen der ethischen
Prinzipien,"21 and as preconditions they should then become the objects
of a cognition that is not blind. This is the very demand that one finds
in Husserl's Vorlesungen iiber Ethik und Wertlehre (1908-1914). In
this connection, indeed, Ulrich Melle has already noted the influence
60
MARIANNINA FAILLA
that Brentano exerted on Husserl, though he limits it to his early

lectures. 22
But Brentano's starting point seems to have also affected Husserl's
later lectures, for in them one finds the intention of arriving at insightful
volition (einsichtiges Wollen):
Sprechen wir ethische Forderungen aus, so muten wir dem handelnden Subjekt
W ollungen zu, die es vollziehen soli, und richtige W ollungen sollen es sein. Also wir
stellen es dabei als jemanden vor, der wollend sein Willensleben regiert, dieses selbst
zum Feld der Praxis, zum Willensbereich macht, und nun richtiges Wollen anstrebt. Das
erfordert natiirlich Einsicht in die Richtigkeit und somit nicht blindes, sondern
cinsichtiges Wollen. 23
Brentano's concept of insight (Einsichtigkeit) has, without a doubt, a

psychological stamp, because the existence of insightful judgment
coincides with inner perception. 24 In Husserl, on the other hand, insight
seems ultimately to be traced back to the "systematische Herausstellung
des gesamten materialen Apriori"; the value and the ethical import of
this "Herausstellung" were extensively and emphatically stressed by
Alois Roth in his comments appended to Husserl's manuscripts. 25
Notwithstanding the divergence of the solutions, one can nevertheless assume that in the psychological tradition there do exist elements
that could have contributed to shaping Husserl's lectures on ethics. In
this sense, therefore, Husserl undoubtedly represents the continuation
of Brentano's demand that we proceed beyond sensationalistic empiricism, and remove feelings from the blind sphere of habit and confer
upon them an insightful and rational foundation.
Another essential aspect of Husserl's Vorlesungen is to be seen in his
intention of investigating the analogy between the ethical sphere and
formal logic.
Geht man nun den Parallelen von Logik und Ethik nach bzw. der Parallele der Aktund Vernunftarten, auf welche diese Disziplinen zuriickbezogen sind, der urteilenden
Vernunft auf der einen Seite, der praktischen Vernunft auf der anderen, so drangt sich
der Gedanke auf, dass nun auch der Logik in dem bestimmt und begrenzten Sinn einer
formalen Logik als Parallele entsprechen muss eine im analogen Sinn formale und
ebenfalls apriorische Praktik. 26
The formal logic that Husserl refers to is therefore the one that derives
from his Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. It is a Logic that does not
postulate its own principles - the principle of non-contradiction for
61
example - on the level of the succession and coexistence of real

psychic facts 27 and that further, rejects the claim that would affirm to be
a "natural law" and, at one and the same time, to be a "normal law" of
thought. 28 Husserl uses these arguments to combat all forms of psychologism. In his Vorlesungen, he therefore describes logic as a "in den
formalen Bedeutungskategorien griindende apriorische Disziplin, ...
die in sich ganz und gar nichts Psychologisches enthalt."29
In connection with this idea of logic as a formal system of meanings,
Husserl deems Brentano's philosophy to be incapable of liberating logic
from psychology: "Brentano steht freilich auf psychologischem Boden
und hat, ebensowenig wie in der logischen Sphare die Moglichkeit und
Notwendigkeit einer formalen Bedeutungslogik, so hier nicht diejenige
einer idealen und formalen Ethik und Axiologie erkannt. Aber das
hindert nicht, dass bei Brentano die fruchtbaren Keime liegen, die zu
Weiterbildungen berufen sind."30
But such "fruchtbare Keime" could indeed be contained in Brentano's concept of the analogy between the good and the true. The
importance of this approach is demonstrated by the fact that only the
concept of the analogy justifies the demand for an insightful cognition
of moral feeling; without this concept the problematic of evidence could
not have entered into the domain of the good. Furthermore, Brentano's
rule of analogy embraces also reference to statements of formal logic
(laws). The true and the rightly good should both display an apodictic
evidence that derives from the principle of non-contradiction and could
thus have provided a stimulus for the idea of formal axiology. But the
preeminent function that Brentano ascribes to inner perception in
assertive and apodictic cognition must have led Husserl to further
develop and formulate the "germs" of Brentano's philosophy in an
autonomous manner.
This rapprochement with Brentano's problematic is also based on
Husserl's direct application of the law of summation to the domain of
formal axiology. In this way Husserl completely accepts Brentano's
intention of preserving the peculiarity of the ethical sphere; the latter
therefore comprises a comparative relationship of values that do not
belong to the category of truths. Here is what Husserl says in the
Vorlesungen:
Wir gehen nun zu einer Reihe weiterer formaler Gesetze tiber, die in der engeren
apophantisch-logischen Sphiire kein Analogon haben (eher schon in der Sphiire der
formalen Logik der Wahrscheinlichkeiten). Ich meine die Gesetze, die sich auf Rang-
62
MARIANNINA FAILLA
verhaltnisse von Werten beziehen. Hier konnen wir an Brentano's geniale Schrift Vom
Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (1889) anknupfen, der zuerst solche Gesetze formuliert
hat, wie denn diese Schrift den Anstoss fur aile meine Versuche einer formalen
Axiologie gegeben hat. 31
The law of summation determines the ranked relationships among

values and guides the choice of the better. By analyzing this law,
Husserl proposes to oppose an axiological law to the logical principle
of the excluded third term and to move Brentano's theory of the
comparative relationships of values into the center of formal axiology.
The above considerations aim at provoking a critical study investigating the historical and theoretical part played by pre-phenomenological psychology in Husserl's theory of ethics.
If Dilthey historically triggered a shift away from Kant's ethical
formalism, Brentano theoretically mediated Husserl's critical struggle
against ethical sensationalism and Hume's theories of ethics. On the
basis of this mediation, Husserl then formulated the logic of moral
feeling in an autonomous manner; such a logic, understood as a formal
axiology and a practice, has its analogue in formal logic, i.e., in the
formal theory of meaning and in the phenomenology of the theoretical
acts of faith and their modification.
University La Sapienza
Rome
NOTES
Paper translated by Herbert Garrett.

See W. Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I
(Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1923).
2 Ibid., pp. 3 et seq.
3 Ever since the seventies, Dilthey's philosophy of life has been interpreted prim.arily
with a view to practical philosophy. This new critical representation of Dilthey's
philosophical quests for knowledge and understanding of the historical world seeks to
bring out the underlying formulation of the the theory of cognition and to relate it to
the practical dimension of life. In this connection efr. P. Krauser, Kritik der endlichen
Vernunft, W. Diltheys Revolution der allgemeinen Wissenschaft und Handlungstheorie
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968); H. Johach, Handelnder Mensch und objektiver
Geist. Zur Theorie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften bei W. Dilthey (Miesenheim
am Glan: Hain, 1974); H. Inheichen, Erkenntnistheorie und geschichtlich-gesellschaftliche Welt. Diltheys Logik der Geisteswissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1975); and M. Riedel, Verstehen oder Erkliiren? Zur Theorie und Geschichte der
hermeneutischen Wissenschaften (Stuttgart: Klett/Cotta, 1978). The endeavor to recon1
63
struct the basic theory of cognitive motives in Dilthey's philosophy comes particularly
strongly into play in H. U. Lessing. In this connection see H. U. Lessing, Die Idee einer
Kritik der historischen Vernunft. W Diltheys erkenntnistheoretisch-logisch-methodologische Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften (Freiburg/Munich: K. Alber, 1984).
4 See I. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Kant's Gesammelte Schriften,
Vol. IV, Berlin, G. Reimer, p. 429 et seq.
5 See W. Dilthey, Versuch einer Analyse des moralischen Bewusstseins, Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. VI (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1924), pp. 5-21.
6 Ibid., p. 20.
7 Cfr. H. Inheichen, op. cit., pp. 172-182. The author examines Trendelenburg's
concept of teleology with a view to highlighting Dilthey's "ethical naturalism." In his
own words: "Der Riickgang auf die genetisch-psychologische Fragestellung hatte den
Sinn, das anthropologische Fundament der Ethik freizulegen. Es liegt in diesem sich
entwickelnden Beziehungsganzen von Gefiihl, Wille und Vorstellungen: in der psychischen Struktur, im Charakter der Zweckmiissigkeit. Wie schon bei Trendelenburg,
ist das teleologische Prinzip das Merkmal, welches den Unterschied zwischen der
mechanischen Naturordnung und der geistigen Welt bedingt" (p. 180). The relationship
between Dilthey and Trendelenburg has also been thematized by H. U. Lessing; see H.
U. Lessing, op. cit., pp. 40-41 and 68-71. J. Wach analyzed the TrendelenburgDilthey relationship from the point of view of the history of thought; see J. Wahl, Die
Typenlehre Trendelenburgs und ihr Einfluss auf Dilthey (Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr
[Po Siebeck], 1926).
8 See F. Brentano, Die vier Phasen der Philosophie und ihr augenblicklicher Stand, A.
Comte und die positive Philosoph ie, edited by O. Kraus (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1926),
pp. 113-114. E. W. Orth discusses the sense of Brentano's reaction against Kant's
understanding of the phenomenon; see E. W. Orth, W Dilthey und F. Brentano zur
Wissenschaftsforschung, Dilthey und der Wandel des Philosophiebegrijfs seit dem 19.
lahrhundert, edited by E. W. Orth (Freiburg/Miinchen: K. Alber, 1984), pp. 27-28. O.
Kraus, in his commentary on Brentano's discussion regarding the concept and task of
the science of the psyche, shows that in this work Brentano does not yet distinguish the
psychic phenomenon from the physical one and traces this back to Comte's interpretation of the fact; see O. Kraus, "Einleitung" in: F. Brentano, Psychologie vom
empirischen Standpunkt, edited by O. Kraus, Vol. IIII (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1955/
1959), pp.lxxvii-lxxviii.
9 See F. Brentano, Yom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1934).
10 See F. Brentano, Grundlegung und Aufbau der Ethik (Nach den Vorlesungen iiber
praktische Philosophie aus dem Nachlass), edited by F. Mayer-Hillebrand (Bern: A.
Francke AG., 1952).
11 As regards the analysis of the basic imagination and judgment types of the psychic
phenomenon, see Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, op. cit., Vol. I,
pp. 195-293, and Vol. II, pp. 33-34 and 39-82.
12 See Brentano, Grundlegung und Aufbau der Ethik, op. cit., p. 141.
13 In this connection Brentano does not have in mind a psychologization of the laws of
logic. This is made very clear in the passages where Brentano criticizes Sigwart's
interpretation of obviousness. Sigwart, so Brentano would have it, had abolished the
difference between assertive and apodictic judgments because, basing himself on psychology, he interpreted obviousness as the feeling of necessity: "Sigwart stellt den
64
MARIAN NINA FAILLA
Unterschied von assertorischen und apodiktischen Urteilen in Abrede, weil jedem

Urteil das Gefiihl der Notwendigkeit der Funktion wessentlich sei. Sonach hangt diese
Behauptung ebenfalls mit seiner irrigen Grundanschauung vom Urteil zusammen; er
identifiziert, scheint's, das Gefiihl, das er manchmal das Gefiihl der Evidenz nennt, mit
dem Charakter des Apodiktischen. Es ware aber sehr zu missbilligen, wenn man die
modale Besonderheit mancher Urteile, wie z. B. dem Selbstbewusstsein, dass ich bin,
iibersahe; beim ersten handelt es sich urn notwendig wahr oder falsch, beim anderen
nur urn tatsachlich wahr oder falsch, obwohl beide im gleichen Sinn des Wortes evident
sind und sich in Ansehung ihrer Sicherheit nicht unterscheiden. Nur aus Urteilen wie
die ersteren, nicht aber aus solchen wie die letzteren, schopfen wir die Begriffe der
Unmoglichkeit und Notwendigkeit." See Brentano, Yom Ursprung sittficher Erkenntnis
op. cit., pp. 70-71. In spite of this moving away from the psychological interpretation
of obviousness, Brentano confers a preeminent function upon inner perception in the
recognition of truth.
14 Here is what Brentano has to say about the analogy between the acts of preference
and the problematic of obviousness: "Die einfache Erkenntnis als guyt und schlecht
vorausgesetzt, scheinen wir - die Analogie legt es nahe - diese Einsicht aus gewissen
Akten des Vorziehens, die als richtig charakterisiert sind, zu schopfen. Denn wie die
einfache Betatigung des Gefallens, ist auch das Vorziehen teils niederer Art, d. g.
triebartig, teils hoherer Art und, analog dem evidenten Urteil, als richtig ausgezeichnet."
See Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis op. cit., p. 26.
15 By means of the concept of sanction Brentano introduces the requirement of a
"gewisse innere Richtigkeit" for ethical acts, which then provides a link with the
problematic of obviousness. See Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, op. cit.,
pp.9-14.
16 Ibid., pp. 25-26.
17 The law of summation must here be touched upon because the choice of the better
depends on a value comparison: "Aus dieser Wertvergleichung muss sich dann ergeben,
was im Bereich unserer Macht das Beste, d. h. was im gegebenen Fall das hochste
praktische Gut ist. Dieses zu wahlen, und nur diese Wahl ist die richtige." See Brentano,
Grundlegung und Aufbau der Ethik, op. cit., p. 221.
18 Ibid., p. 222.
19 Idem.
20 Ibid., p. 222-223.
21 Ibid., p. 56.
22 See U. Melle, "Einleitung des Herausgebers," in E. Husser!, Vorlesungen uber Ethik
und Wertlehre (1908-1914), Husserliana, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. XXVIII, edited by
U. Melle (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), p. xvi:
"Aufgrund des im Nachlass erhaltenen Manuskriptmaterials von Husser!s friihen
ethischen Vorlesungen kann man vermuten, dass Husser! sich in seinen Vor!esungen
was Aufbau, Problemsteliung und Inhalt betrifft an F. Brentanos Vodesungen iiber
praktische Philo sophie orientierte."
23 Ibid., p. 143.
24 It is essential to point out here that the psychological traits of Brentano's theory of
judgment make their appearance because he derives the concept of being from the act
of judging. The concept of being is obtained through reflection on the act of jUdging.
65
See A. Bausola, Conoscenza e moralita (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1968), pp. 75 et seq.
This aspect of Brentano's theory of judgment was then further developed by A. Marty.
See A. Marty, "Dber subjektivlose Satze und das Verhaltnis der Grammatik zur Logik
und Psychologie," Vierteljahrschrift [iir wissenschaftliche Philosoph ie, 1894, pp. 171172, and 1895, pp. 32-34. M. Heidegger likewise analyzed the psychological sense of
Brentano's theory of judgment and related it to the further developments due to A.
Marty. See M. Heidegger, Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus, Frfihe Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1972), pp. 63-66.
25 See A. Roth, E. Bussert's ethische Untersuchungen (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960). In
opposition to Kantian formalism, the author stresses the importance of Husserl's
"material a priori." This also brings out his intention to establish a close link between
Husserl's value theory and the "material ethics" of Scheler.
26 See Husser!, Vorlesungen fiber Ethik und Wertlehre, op. cit., pp. 3-4.
27 See E. Husser!, Logische Untersuchungen, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, Husserliana, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. XVIII (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 88-93.
28 Ibid.,pp. 101-105 and 118-158.
29 See Husser!, Vorlesungen fiber Ethik und Wertlehre, op. cit, p. 8.
3U Ibid., p. 90.
31 Idem.
JOHN E. JALBERT
PHENOMENOLOGY AS THE REAWAKENING OF

THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHICAL ETHOS
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once noted that European

philosophy could be accurately characterized as a succession of footnotes to Plato. Even if we do not fully agree with Whitehead's claim, we
can nonetheless appreciate the great extent to which Plato has determined the course of Western philosophy and, therefore, the extent to
which it has proven fruitful to interpret subsequent philosophies in
terms of their relationship to Plato's thought. The phenomenological
philosophy of Edmund Husserl, which is the focus of the present paper,
is no exception. There are, in fact, several reasons why Husserl's brand
of phenomenology invites just such a comparison. The first and perhaps
most obvious reason is the central position to which Husserl assigns the
doctrine of essences and, in particular, his early elaboration of this
doctrine. A second reason, which some commentators have already
elaborated, is the extent to which the phenomenological concept of the
natural attitude lends itself to clarification by borrowing from the
famous Platonic Allegory of the Cave. There is also a third reason
which is, interestingly, rarely, if ever, mentioned by commentators and
critics who have examined the relationship between Plato's philosophy
and Husserlian phenomenology, and this is Husserl's own efforts in
Erste Philosophie (1923124), Erster Teil, to exhibit via an historical
reflection that the motive which is the life blood of phenomenology has
its origin in the Platonic struggle against skepticism.
The present essay will be concerned with the questions, "In what
sense can Husserl properly be called a Platonist?" and, more importantly, "What revelations about the project of transcendental phenomenology are disclosed by Husserl's Platonism?" Such questions are still
worth raising "fifty years after Husserl" not necessarily because of their
historical relevance - although they have that too - but because the
times in which we live call out for the philosophical spirit that was the
driving force of his life's work. Ironically, though, it is Husserl's
insistence on scientific rigor, as well as the apparently dispassionate and
67
A - T. Tymienieeka (ed.), Analeeta Husseriiana, Vol. XXXV, 67-78.
68
JOHN E. JALBERT
abstruse literary style in which his work is cast, that to a certain extent
gives it the appearance of having nothing to say to us - a charge which,
in the Crisis, Husserl himself would level against sciences corrupted by
the errors of naturalism and objectivism. Indeed, one critic, Marvin
Farber, suggests that the conception of philosophical reflection advanced
by Husser! "could be construed as a renunciation of the obligations one
has toward society as well as himself."] Farber furthermore argues that
even if phenomenology is not, strictly speaking, guilty of such a "renunciation," the subjective procedures advocated by Husser! nonetheless
render it "completely nugatory" when it comes to addressing "practical
social problems."
To be certain, Husserl's aim and mission as a philosopher was not to
be a leader of humanity, as he himself was quick to admit in a 1919
letter to Arnold Metzger. 2 Nonetheless, insofar as phenomenology
embodies the idea of genuine science, its interests and the insights
deriving therefrom are recognized as conditions for the possibility of
genuine practical life. Accordingly, what Husser! expresses in the
opening remarks of Philosophy As Rigorous Science is not merely a
fact about the history of philosophy but the sense attaching itself to the
idea of philosophy in its primal establishment. "From its beginnings," he
writes, "philosophy has claimed to be rigorous science." But this is only
part of the story, albeit a crucial part, for Husserl goes on to state:
What is more, it has claimed to be the science that satisfies the loftiest theoretical needs
and renders possible from an ethico-religious point of view a life regulated by pure
rational norms. 3
In the end, therefore, the meaning of a genuine science and, hence, of

phenomenological philosophy, necessarily includes the idea of serving
life by making possible its renewal. It is precisely this relationship
between the theoretical and the practical, between science and life, that
a reading of Husserl against the background of Plato's work can help to
draw out.
II
What sort of Platonist, then, is Husserl? Inquiries into and/or allegations of Platonism in connection with Husserlian phenomenology are
by no means novel. Indeed, as early as 1913 in Ideas I, Section 22,
Husserl makes an attempt to defend the doctrine of essences that he
69
had elaborated in the Logical Investigations against charges of Platonism.

For our present purpose, it will suffice to recall Husserl's position on
this matter: if there is a failure to distinguish between object and
something real, then the phenomenological conception of ideas or
essences as objects would be guilty of a "perverse 'Platonic hypostatization,'''4 but this is surely not the case. Essences are what they always
are for Husserl, viz., ideal beings rather than real entities. Thus, in an
essay to which Husserl lent his complete approval, Eugen Fink correctly suggests that even though the first book of the Logical Investigations may be marked by:
... an occasional over-emphasis on the ontological independence of the "ideal." ... If
the entire position of the Logical Investigations with respect to this question is taken
into account, all "realism with respect to the ideal disappears."5
But even if Husserl is not a Platonic realist, can another form of

Platonism perhaps be ascribed to him? For instance, his philosophy has
been described by Andre de Murault as a "subjectivized Platonism"6
and by Emmanuel Levinas as "Platonic idealism."7 Although such
designations are probably not incorrect given the proper qualifications,
as heuristic devices to assist in the illumination of the crucial but hidden
dimension of Husserl's philosophy which is of present interest, they
represent a relatively sterile line of discussion. The problem with discussions of this sort is that they focus too narrowly on the phenomenological doctrine of essences and do not delve into the deeper aspects of
the question regarding the Platonic strain of Husserl's philosophy.
What Husserl shares with Plato is not a theory of essences but, rather,
an unwavering conviction that rigorous scientific philosophy is necessary to sustain the quest for a truly ethical and rational existence on the
part of the individual and the community.
A clue that an approach to understanding Husserl's philosophical
program from a Platonic orientation might prove fruitful can be found
in Husserl's working notes to his London lectures of June, 1922, where
he cryptically remarks:
Historical connexion with Plato, the creator of the idea of philosophy as an universal
system of absolutely justifiable knowledge. ... Descartes' revival of the Platonic
intentions. What was lost of the Platonic Ethos: philosophy as fulfillment of an ethical
demand ... 8
Thus, even though Husserl sometimes speaks of Descartes as our
70
JOHN E. JALBERT
"philosophical father" and as the "urstiftenden Genius" of modern

philosophy,9 it is evident that, for him, Descartes' turn to subjectivity
constitutes a reestablishment or Nachstiftung of the Platonic philosophical intention to overcome all naivete and unclarity. But if Plato
was hampered by an objectivistic cosmology, Descartes was plagued by
a misinterpretation of his own discovery - the ego cogito - as a thing
in the world. From Descartes follow two seemingly conflicting lines of
philosophical orientation - one culminating in Kant's transcendental
philosophy, the other culminating in Hume's empiricism and skepticism. Even though Husserl viewed Hume's skeptical posture and challenge of objectivism in all of its guises as the more radical position,
Husserl's general criticism of the empiricists is highly significant for the
theme which presently interests us. To put it briefly, Hume's weakness
lies in the fact that his philosophical rigor and radicalness are not
accompanied by an equally "great philosophical ethos." Consequently,
as Husserl reads him, Hume deliberately attempts to disguise and
interpret the results of his philosophy in such a way as to give them the
appearance of being relatively harmless.lO However, if all categories of
objectivity are turned into "fictions" as in Hume, then, concludes
Husserl, "To be consistent, we must say: reason, knowledge, including
that of true values, of pure ideals of every sort, including the ethical all this is fiction."!! The latter, of course, is precisely what Husserl does
not want to say. Skepticism and relativism are never just academic,
epistemological positions for they inevitably have far-reaching consequences in the socio-political world.
So it remained the task of transcendental phenomenology to bring
the Platonic intention to fulfillment. But the question remains: what is
the final intention of Plato's philosophical enterprise? In searching for
an answer to this question, we must look away from Husserl's discussion of Descartes' thought even as a revival of Plato's philosophical
Ethos and consider instead his understanding and interpretation of
Plato's Ethos in such a way that its socio-ethical concerns can come to
light. The relevant material for our immediate concern can be found in
the opening lectures of the first volume of Erste Philosophie (1923/23)
where several observations deserving of emphasis can be found. We
learn at the outset that the idea of philosophy as rigorous science is
born out of a confrontation with the skepticism nurtured by the
Sophists. The first encounter occurred in the practical sphere with
Socrates answering the call to defend the possibility of an ethical life as
71
a life of reason and self-reflection. Insofar as life necessitates that we

act, judge, and take a stand, Socrates sought to demonstrate through
concrete successes (that is, not only in Logos but also in Ergon) that
there is indeed an alternative to vague, undarified, and relativized
opinions from which a life can draw in order to meet the demands of
radical justification and self-responsibility. Essential ethical insight is
Socrates' answer to the corruption of the practical sphere by the
Sophists. While accepting Socrates' position, Plato also recognized the
need to extend Socrates' efforts into the realm of science or philosophy
in order to not only halt the Sophistical erosion of philosophy as a
purely theoretical activity but to also secure a foundation for Socrates'
ethical insights.
There is no need in the present context to expound on the details of
Husserl's reading of Plato, but several passages do nonetheless deserve
to be underscored. First of all, according to Husserl:
... it is not until Plato that the pure ideas of genuine knowledge, genuine theory and
science and - emcompassing all of them - genuine philosophy, entered into mankind's
consciousness; likewise, he is also the first to have recognized and treated them as the
philosophically most important, because fundamental, (prinzipiellstenj themes for researchY
Secondly, we are nevertheless reminded that Plato "by no means

wanted to be merely the reformer of science." On the contrary:
In his final aim, he always remained even in his scientific and theoretical efforts, a
Socratic philosopher and, therefore, in the most universal sense an ethical practitioner.
Thus his theoretical investigation had an even deeper significance.!3
Thirdly, Husserl highlights his apparent approval of Plato's emphasis on

the community rather than the individual and notes that Plato thereby:
... becomes the founder of the doctrine of social reason, of a truly rational human
community in general ... in short, the founder of social ethics as the full and true
ethics.!4
To summarize, then, the aspects of Platonic philosophy which, for

Husserl, are worthy of special attention include 1) its focus on theoretical issues while 2) keeping the socio-ethical consequences of what
seem to be purely theoretical investigations foremost in mind.
For us, however, what is important about the passages just cited is
not so much what they tell us about Plato but what they tell us about
72
JOHN E. JALBERT
Husserl, for more than being mere expressions of his understanding of

Plato's conception of philosophy, they express Husserl's understanding
of himself as a self-declared "scientific philosopher" and his understanding of the task of phenomenological philosophy as rigorous
science. Husserl too labors in the theoretical domain because he finds it
philosophically "most important," but there are often hints that the
deeper significance of scientific philosophy lies elsewhere, such as
when, in the previously mentioned letter to Arnold Metzger, he
explicitly denies considering "truth and science the highest values."
Instead, he clarifies for Metzger that, '''Intellect is the servant of the
will,' and so also I am the servant of those who shape our practical life,
of the leaders of humanity."ls What is more, Husserl's Crisis and
numerous manuscripts from roughly the same time testify to his keen
awareness that the radical self-responsibility demanded of the philosopher extends in the end to the human community.
III
The features of Plato's philosophy which Husserl emphasizes are brilliantly brought to the fore in Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave, and
this same allegory has been repeatedly used to help explicate Husserlian phenomenology. Attention, then, must now be directed to Husserl's
conception of philosophy as it relates to Plato's Cave Allegory.
The allegory is, of course, well known and familiar enough so all that
is required of us in this context is a minimal sketch of some of the
details pertaining to it. Plato asks us to imagine prisoners in a cave,
tethered there from birth in such a manner that they can only see the
shadows on the cave wall in front of them. The remainder of the
allegory describes the experiences of a prisoner who is freed, forced to
stand up, to look at the artifacts and the fire which together at least
partially explain the shadows which were previously seen, and finally
dragged out of the cave and into the sunlight. The emphasis throughout
is on the pain suffered at each stage of the journey out of the cave until
finally the greatest suffering of all must be endured, namely, that which
comes from having to go back down into the cave with the task of
enlightening those prisoners who remain chained in its dim light.
It should be recalled that the Cave Allegory is not Plato's first
attempt in the Republic at presenting his theory of knowledge. Preceding it are the Sun Analogy and Divided Line Analogy, but the dim en-
73
sion added by the Cave account, which the previous attempts leave out,
is the socio-political context out of which philosophical insight arises
arid which it is its destiny to serve. The bifurcated world-view conjured
up by the Sun Analogy is largely overcome by the Cave Allegory.
Although the shadowy world of opinion will never again be confused
with genuine knowledge, the philosopher nonetheless returns to the
cave because, in a certain sense, it was never left behind (Socrates, after
all, with all of his philosophical acumen, did not prevail against the
ignorance of the Athenian court) and because philosophical wisdom
carries with it an obligation to serve the socio-political world, that is, to
serve life.
But, you might ask, how does all of this serve to shed light upon the
project of phenomenological philosophy? There are, of course, the
obvious parallels between the attitude of the cave dwellers and the
natural or mundane attitude described by Husserl as well as the clear
similarity between the attitude gained through the performance of the
phenomenological epoche and reduction and the mental state of the
freed prisoner who has just exited from the cave. This much, however,
has already been observed by other commentators. Most notably,
Eugen Fink and, more recently, Philip Bossert, have successfully
employed the Cave Allegory to clarify the phenomenological philosophy of Husser!. There are, however, several problems associated with
these analyses which deserve closer consideration.
There is first of all a problem relating to the release of the prisoner.
As regards the Cave Allegory, the gnawing question of the Republic is
"who is the liberator?" Who cuts the prisoner's chains and motivates
the arduous journey out of the cave? Fink completely circumvents the
issue and talks instead of the prisoner having "dragged himself forcibly
to the entrance of the cave," and of "tearing oneself free from the
power of one's naive submission to the world."!6 In a certain sense,
Fink is correct inasmuch as a hallmark of Plato's philosophy is that
genuine knowledge cannot be taught but involves instead "seeing" for
oneself. But a residual problem nonetheless persists which prevents us
from putting the matter to rest so simply. Indeed, Fink himself is hardly
oblivious to the problem at hand for, elsewhere, he discusses the
"strange paradox of the beginning of philosophical reflection" as it
relates to the requisite suspension of the "natural attitude."! 7 The
paradox stems from the fact that the natural attitude, like the Platonic
Cave, can only be recognized for what it is after one's release from it.
74
JOHN E. JALBERT
As long as one remains imprisoned in the natural attitude there does

not appear to be anything that could motivate the struggle to escape
from it. Bossert, on the other hand, alludes to the question of "who is
the liberator?" He tells us that Plato claimed to have been made aware
of the naivete of the natural attitude (cave) by Socrates, Socrates by the
Delphic Oracle, and Husser! from his search for the "foundations of the
apodicticity of logic."18 Unfortunately, Bossert drops the matter almost
as abruptly as he introduces it even though the issue is far from
insignificant and therefore deserving of further consideration.
Perhaps the question is not so much who, but what, can stimulate us
to engage in philosophical reflection, and here Husser! provides a few
clues. For example, in his essay "Phenomenology and Anthropology,"
Husser! mentions the "problems of life" leading us into "philosophy in
quest of science as the rational and radical reflection on the wor!d and
human existence."19 In his "Renewal" essay, he makes reference to
problems associated with inauthentic and degenerate modes of human
existence and culture which can also provide an impetus to philosophical reflection. 20 Finally, as regards the quest for philosophical
foundations for apodicticity in logic, we would do well to recall how, in
Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husser! introduces the sense investigation of logic against the backgound of a crisis in science which
ostensibly mirrors a related crisis in human life - a theme which was
destined to figure largely in the Crisis, Husser!'s last attempt at introducing the necessity of transcendental phenomenology. In other words,
it would seem that philosophy has its origin in perplexity, in the
problems and confusion associated with the natural attitude and the
mundane wor!d.
Consider once more how the problematic at hand is confronted in
the Platonic text. Not only is there a question surrounding how the
prisoner first gains freedom from the shadows and ignorance of the
Cave but the same issue surfaces in slightly different form in Plato's
account of the Divided Line. What is initiated here is a clarification of
the transition from the wor!d of opinion to the intelligible order. It is
important to note in the latter case that the doxa which is allegedly so
despised by Plato is actually assigned a positive role in provoking
philosophical reflection. What calls the intellect into action and leads to
reflection on "what is," for instance, is a sensation which goes "over to
its opposite,"21 such as occurs when one looks at one's little finger,
index finger, and middle finger and, by focusing on the index finger,
75
"sees" a finger which is at once both big and small. It takes little
imagination to realize, of course, that the realm of doxa offers other,
more crucial, examples of our perceptions "going over to their opposite" such as when in the realm of human affairs, an event or person,
with only a subtle and often forgotten shift of focus, appears to vacillate
between being just and unjust, fair and unfair, moral and immoral. In
fact, it is precisely this conundrum which motivates the reflections
found in Plato's Republic.
But we come now to a still more serious difficulty. Bossert's study in
particular presents the world of the natural attitude or the world of the
everyday attitude as though it were somehow shaped exclusively by
benign, even if unclarified and therefore vague, opinions. 22 Furthermore, he suggests that what separates Plato's allegory from Husserl's
phenomenology is that the former harbors a negative attitude towards
everyday life that is missing from the latter. The problem here is not so
much with what is explicitly stated as it is with what is implied. In the
first place, the views associated with the mundane attitude are not all
benign; some are, after all, responsible for the exploitation of persons,
and some, the wanton destruction of the physical environment. For
these, as well as for other similar reasons, the opinions of the cave will
often prove themselves to be repugnant to thoughtful persons. Second,
if this were not the case, then it would again be difficult to determine
what would ever motivate the turn from the natural attitude to a philosophical one. The task of philosophy as rigorous science is, at bottom,
to serve life, and in terms of Husserl's life work, this means providing
the means whereby a responsibile and rational critique of life is made
possible.
IV
In conclusion, we can concur with our previous commentators to the

extent that 1) the performance of the phenomenological reduction and
epoche is not a '''merely' theoretical act"23 and 2) the Allegory of the
Cave serves to clarify why Husserl's Platonism does not amount to an
escape into a separate domain of essences "'outside' of or different
from the world of eveyday life."24 After all, Husserl himself, despite all
talk of the reduction placing the philosopher "above" all worldly and
human existence, nevertheless insists that this in no way means that I
". .. turn my back on the world to retreat into an unworldly and,
76
JOHN E. JALBERT
therefore, uninteresting special field of theoretical study."25 The aim of

phenomenology, he adds, is to "interrogate just that world which is, at
all times, the real world for us. . .." What the present paper has
suggested and sought to underscore is that this interrogation must
eventually move beyond mere description and comprehension and
include a critical moment. One might even be tempted to say, with
Marx, that it is not enough to interpret the world; the problem is to
change it, although, for Husserl, the latter is not strictly speaking a
philosophical function.
The transformation of the socio-cultural world must begin with a
trenchant but responsible critique of:
... all life and all life-goals, all cultural products and systems that have arisen out of the
life of man; and thus it also becomes a critique of mankind itself and of the values
which guide it. ... 26
It should be noted, of course, that philosophies are themselves cultural

products, so every de Jacto philosophy is, in a certain sense, destined to
collapse under the weight of the same philosophical ethos which gave it
birth - an ethos which demands absolute intellectual integrity and
responsibility. Hence, armed with the idea of philosophy which he
claims to have inherited from the Greeks and from Plato in particular,
Husserl eventually has to ask himself: "What autonomous thinker has
ever been satisfied with this, his 'knowledge'?"27 The rationality of the
philosopher or of a philosophical culture does not hinge so much on
the attainment of a specific body of absolute truths as it does on a
resolve to remain engaged in "an infinity of living and striving toward
reason ..."28 The danger is to grow weary from such a life and to,
therefore, recoil from reason and seek solace either in a comfortable
but vacuous skepticism or in some type of equally egregious dogmatism.
In the end, the conviction that emanates from and sustains Husserl's
phenomenological philosophy is the same conviction expressed by
Socrates when he responds to Meno's invocation of the famous sophistical paradox of inquiry which, at first glance, seemed to place philosophy itself at risk. The conviction is forcefully laid down by Socrates
after he openly admits to a certain reticence to accept all the details of
his own well-known Myth of Recollection but then quickly adds that
what he is prepared to fight for is that "we shall be better, braver, and
more active men if we believe it right to look for what we don't know
77
than if we believe there is no point in looking...."29 It is perhaps this

Socratic/Platonic view more than anything else that is exemplified by
the spirit of Husserlian phenomenology. While the present reading of
Husserl's phenomenology is admittedly in a certain sense a modest one,
there may still be those who would want to object, along with Farber
and other similar critics, that Husserl himself was too detached, too
aloof from the problems of his day to fulfill its demand. Such accusations, notwithstanding, what seems at any rate clear is that transcendental phenomenology requires that the phenomenological philosopher
remain, as did Plato, "a Socratic philosopher and, therefore, in the most
universal sense, an ethical practitioner."
Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut
NOTES
1 Marvin Farber, Naturalism and Subjectivism (Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 1968), p. 294; see also pp. 111, 159-161.
2 Edmund Husser!, "Letter to Arnold Metzger," trans. by Erazim Kohak in Husserl:
Shorter Works, ed. by Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 361.
3 Emund Husser!, Philosophy As Rigorous Science, trans. by Quentin Lauer in Husserl:
Shorter Works, op. cit., p. 166.
4 Edmund Husser!, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, Collected Works, Vol. II, trans. by F. Kersten (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 41.
5 Eugen Fink, "The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husser! and Contemporary Criticism" in The Phenomenology of Husser!, ed. and trans. by R. O. Elveton
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, Inc., 1970), p. 84.
6 See Andre de Murauit, The Ideal of Phenomenology: Husserlian Exemplarism, trans.
by Gary L. Breckon (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 35-43.
7 Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husser!"s Phenomenology, trans. by
Andre Orianne (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 103. As regards
the question of "Platonism" in the Logical Investigations; see also Theodore deBoer,
The Development of Husser!"s Thought, trans. by Theodore Plantinga in Phaenomenologica, Vol. 76 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 260-269.
~ Edmund Husser!, "Syllabus of a Course of Four Lectures on 'Phenomenological
Method and Phenomenological Philosophy,'" trans. by G. Dawes Hicks in Husserl:
Shorter Works, op. cit., p. 69.
9 For example, see Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der Europaeischen Wissenschaften und
die Transzendentale Phaenomenologie, Husserliana VI (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1976), pp. 392 and 75 respectively.
10 Edmund Husser!, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenol-
78
JOHN E. JALBERT
ogy: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern

University Press, 1970), p. 88.
11 Ibid., p. 87. Emphases mine.
12 Edmund Husser!, Erste Philosophies (1923/24): Erster Tei!, Husserliana VII, ed. by
Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), pp. 12-13.
13 Ibid., p. 14.
14 Ibid., p. 16.
15 Husser!, "Letter to Arnold Metzger," p. 361. See also Edmund Husser!, Erster
Philosophie (1923/24): Zweiter Tei!, Husser!iana VIII, ed. by Rudolf Boehm (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), p. 201.
16 Eugen Fink, "What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Husser! Want to Accomplish? (The Phenomenological Idea of Laying-a-Ground)," trans. by Arthur Grugan in
Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 11,1972, pp. 8, 9.
17 See Fink, "Contemporary Criticism," op. cit., p. 115.
18 Philip J. Bossert, '''Plato's Cave,' Flatland and Phenomenology" in Phenomenology
in Practice and Theory, ed. by W. S. Hamrick (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), pp.
54-55.
19 Edmund Husser!, "Phenomenology and Anthropology," trans. by Richard G.
Schmitt in Husserl: Shorter Works, op. cit., p. 320.
20 Edmund Husser!, "Renewal: Its Problems and Method," trans. by Jeffner Allen in
Husserl: Shorter Works op. cit., p. 326.
21 Plato, The Republic, trans. by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1968), p.
523 ff.
22 See Bossert, op. cit., p. 63.
23 Fink, "What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Husser! Want to Accomplish?"
op. cit., p. 9.
24 Bossert, op. cit., p. 63.
25 Husser\, "Phenomenology and Anthropology," op. cit., p. 322.
26 Husser!, The Crisis, op. cit., p. 283
27 Ibid., p. 394.
28 Ibid., p. 341.
29 Plato, Meno., trans. by W. K. C. Guthrie in Plato: The Collected Works, The
Bollingen Series 71, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969),86 b/c.
PILAR BELDA PLANS
LA NOCION DE VALOR
EN LA ESCUELA FENOMENOL6GICA
I. INTRODUCCION
De todos es conocida la profunda influencia de la filosofia husserliana

en la historia del pensamiento occidental contemponineo, hasta tal
punto, que es imposible hacer filosofia en nuestros dias soslayando el
metoda y la doctrina fenomeno16gicos.
Tratare en este trabajo de una filosofi que nace al amparo de este
gran maestro - HusserI -, pues todos sus componentes 0 bien han
sido discipulos directos del fi16sofo de Friburg, 0 10 han sido de sus
discipulos mas inmediatos. Esta es la axiologfa 0 filosofia de los
valores. 1
Antes de adentrarme en el tema del valor, que por otra parte ha sido
tratado por multitud de prestigiosos auto res, me ha parecido necesario
examinar curues han sido los albores de la axiologfa efectuando un
breve recorrido hist6rico.
El termino ''valor'' ha sido utilizado desde siempre en la economia,
aunque ya este concepto estuvo presente en la filosofia antigua a partir
de Plat6n bajo los nombres de "Bonum, "Perfectio", "Arquetipo".
Kant fue uno de los primeros fil6sofos que traslada este termino a la
filosofia, si bien no se preocup6 de precisar su significado, tal vez por
estimar que era bien conocido por todos,2 y por ello no delimit6 el
concepto correspondiente a este termino. Habla, pues, del valor de
modo ocasional y no ofrece en modo alguno una investigaci6n sobre
dicho termino. No obstante, la consideraci6n anterior puede resultar
parad6jica si se piensa que la filosoffa kantiana es una filosofia que
centra su investigaci6n en el estudio de tres valores fundamentales: la
Verdad (Crftica de la Razon Pura), el Bien (Crftica de la Razon
Pnictica) y la Belleza (Critica del JuicioV Ello se debe a que la
filosofia de E. Kant es, en primer lugar, una filosofia de 10 formal,4 es
decir: al contexto sistematico de esta restricci6n a la valiosidad del
valor sin tomar en cuenta su especificaci6n es 10 que define al
formalismo kantiano. En efecto, Kant ignora todo el contenido con que
el valor se hace presente ante nosotros; para el, la etica ha de basarse
79
xxxv, 79-91.
80
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en el puro deber, el cual, a su vez, debe estar despojado de toda

materia, reduciendose a la forma simple de la validez 0 de 10 valioso.
Un segundo aspecto que hay que destacar en la filosofla kantiana es
su racionalismo. Para este, la subjetividad produce las leyes de la
naturaleza en el plano teorico y en el plano practico se da a sf misma la
ley.5 No se olvide que Kant tiene como precedentes a Hume y Hobbes,
quienes consideran al hombre como un haz de ideas e impulsos
respectivamente. Es, pues, necesario introducir un factor de ordenacion
en el mismo: la razon.
Un tercer aspecto de esta filosoffa es la ya conocida desconfianza
de kant en la metaffsica como cienia y como conocimiento capaz de
probar la existencia de Dios y del alma y sus propiedades. Para Kant, la
metaflsica tiene el valor de una disposicion natural de la razon (Naturanlage)
No obstante, nuestro filosofo entiende haber encontrado la fiabilidad
necesaria en el descubrimiento del deber-ser. Y cuanto mas formal sea
este tanto mas digno de credito. 6
Estos tres aspectos - formalismo, racionalismo y negacion de la
metaflsica realista - influiran de modo decisivo en toda la filosofia
aleman a del s. XIX. No obstante, a finales de este siglo, surge una
reaccion contra el formalismo kantiano y sus seguidores - Lotze y la
escuele de Baden - que deriva segun una doble vertiente: de una parte el
subjetivismo, cuyos maximos exponentes son Meinong, Ehrenfels y
Miiller-Freienfels, y de otra el objetivismo, cuyos principales representantes son Brentano, Husserl y Max Scheler. Para el subjetivismo, los
valores son algo material, con contenido, pero no un contenido objetivo
e inmutable, sino establecido por el hombre y relativo a las circunstancias de lugar y tiempo. Para el objetivismo, que admite la existencia
de los val ores dotados de un contenido concreto, no son estos valiosos
porque el hombre asi 10 estime, sino que 10 son en sf: los valores son
realidades objetivas e inmutables que tienen un caracter absoluto.
Ya puede hablarse de la filosofia del valor (Wertphilosophie) y no de
la filosofla de la validez (Geltungphilosophie), al contrario de 10 que se
hiciera en el formalismo. A partir de ahora el formalismo etico quedara
relegado a un segundo termino para dar paso ados concepciones
distintas del cosmos: de un lado, el positivismo, que entiende el mundo
como la exterioridad en general, la cual abarca y absorbe al hombre en
toda su realidad. De otro, el espiritualismo, que parte de la base de que
la naturaleza externa tiene su explicacion y finalidad en hacer po sible la
vida de reflexion interior; admite la espiritualidad del hombre y los
LA NOCION DE VALOR
81
valores que la integran, asi como una concepcion teleologica del

cosmos.
Dentro de este contexto, aparece la figura de Rudolph Henry Lotze
(1817-81). Aunque su doctrina esta imbuida de formalismo kantiano,
no obstante, apunta ya de modo implicito a la apertura intencional de
Brentano. El objetivo de su filosofia consiste en justificar la valiosidad
del universo, y 10 hace a partir de la finalidad que entreve tras la
causalidad del mundo? Entiende este autor que para apreciar los fines
de las cosas no basta la experiencia cientifica: la clave del universo nos
la da el mundo de los valores, pues todas las leyes de la naturaleza no
son mas que medios para que se manifieste en ell as el valor del bien y
mas concretamente, todo acontecer es una condicion preliminar para
que el bien se realice. 8
Si bien este autor da un paso adelante respecto del formalismo puro
sin embargo, no escapa al subjetivismo, al unir estrechamente el valor
al sentimiento, 10 cual adrnite Lotze al estimar que pertenece a los
valores el que estos sean vividos de modo placentero y al fundamentar
la metafisica en la eticaY Como ya se ha vis to, hay en Lotze un
progresivo abandono de la filosofia kantiana, que abre la puerta a la
intuicion material de 10 valioso, 10 que Ie constituye en un precedente
de la axiologia, pues para el es distinto ser de valer y los val ores no son
sino que valen; aunque la naturaleza es ajena al valor, es este la clave
para la explicacion del mundo material.
Sin perjuicio de que la aportacion de Lotze suponga un gran avance
respecto del kantismo, a finales del pas ado siglo vuelve a resurgir esta
doctrina, siendo su representante principal la Escuela de Baden, y
dentro de ella Wilhem Windelband, Heinrick Rickert y Hugo Miirstenberg. Estos autores, ademas de utilizar el formalismo kantiano, discrepa
de Lotze en el modo de concebir los valores, pues entienden que el
origen de estos se halla en el mundo material. Parten del principio
kantiano de que la medida de la verdad no es la realidad extrinseca,
sino la regIa intrinseca del conocimiento mismo. Por ello, la tarea de la
filosofia critic a es la de cuestionarse si hay un pensamiento que tenga el
valor absoluto y necesario de la Verdad, si hay una voluntad y una
operatividad que tengan el valor absoluto y necesario del Bien y si hay
un arte que tenga el valor absoluto y necesario de la Belleza. Asi pues,
de ningun modo la filosofia tiene por objeto propio la realidad
extrinseca, sino las normas segun las cuales el pensar, querer y sentir
han de ser conformados para ser validos.
Windelband busco la validez sobre los juicios dicos y esteticos
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kantianos, a los que aiiadio el estudio de los juicios logicos. Estos, al

igual que los dos anteriores, gozan para este filosofo de una necesidad
ideal - sollen -, de un deber ser que contrapone a necesidad natural
- miissen -, tener que ser asi. lO Se cuestiona asimismo Windelband
acerca del valor de 10 santo, pero no 10 considera como una clase de
valor distinta a 10 verdadero, bueno 0 bello, sino "como estos mismos
valores en la medida en que se relacionan con una realidad suprasensible".l1 Sin embargo, una vez planteado el problema de la conciliacion
entre valor y realidad, este autor no sabe resolverlo: pi ens a que ha
llegado al misterio y 10 considera como algo insoluble. 12
Rickert no fue exactamente el continuador de la obra de Windelband. Aunque desarrollo la idea de la interpretacion de la historia a la
luz de los valores, no obstante, en su doctrina se advierte cierta
confusion entre axiologia, positivismo historicista y subjetivismo 13 que
Ie lleva a ser un tanto paradojico, pues si de una parte admite la validez
de la conciencia kantiana, que de suyo tiende al absoluto, de otra tiende
a admitir que la validez de los valores es relativa y cambiante,
dependiendo de las necesidades historicas.
A la Escuela de Baden Ie sucedio la escuela psicologista de Viena.
Dicha escuela denota la influencia de Kant y Hume, que Ie acercan al
relativismo. Para estos autores - Meinong, v. Ehrenfels y MiillerFreienfels, el valor no es en modo alguno una propiedad de las cosas
que responda a una tendencia 0 interes por parte del sujeto, sino que
son mi tendencia 0 interes los que me permiten hablar del valor de un
objeto.
AIexius Meinong, discipulo de Brentano, mantuvo en un principio
una postura radicalmente psicologista y subjetivista, pero mas tarde
evoluciono. Para este, el valor no es sino la relacion de un objeto con
un sujeto que experimenta un sentimiento de valor ante ese objeto. 14
En una primera etapa de su filosoffa, piensa que cuando examinamos
un hecho psfquico que venga provocado por un objeto 0 por un estado
de cosas, sostenemos que pertenece a uno u otro campo de la vida
emotiva: que es un sentimiento (Wertgefiihl), y este, aunque no es un
juicio de valor expHcito (Bewerten), ni siquiera una actitud de valuacion
(Werthaltung), sin embargo es su fuente, pues da lugar a la valoracion
de los objetos y al juicio sobre estos. No obstante, el valor no se puede
atribuir a la cosa de modo absoluto, ni tampoco es el estado psicologico de placer 0 dolor que en nosotros despierta. El valor es una
relacion: la relacion personal con la cosa. AI final de su obra, Meinong
LA NOCION DE VALOR
83
sigue manteniendo el canicter relativo del valor,15 pero evoluciona

abandonando de hecho la teorfa psicologista. El sentimiento de valor
no sera sino el aspecto "fenomenico" de este: el unico accesible a la
experiencia,16 pero mas alla de los val ores personales - val ores para
alguien - admite Meinong los valores impersonales - Wiirde -,
Verdad, Belleza y Bondad. Son valores para no importa que sujeto:
mantienen su legitimidad en tanto que son universales.
Von Ehrenfels, profesando un psicologismo mas exagerado que el
del primer Meinong, piensa que 10 que confiere valor a un objeto es el
deseo. Atribuimos valor a las cosas porque las deseamos y no al
contrario. Se puede hablar de valor cuando hay una relacion entre el
sujeto y el objeto y la representacion de este determina en nosotros,
dentro de la escala de nuestros sentimientos de placer y dolor, un
estado emotivo mas intenso que aquel que condicionaria la idea de su
ausencia.17 El valor de un objeto depend era del grado de deseabilidad,
y la prueba de que algo es deseable es que una cosa es, fue 0 sera
deseada de hecho. Pero entiendase bien que no es 10 digno de ser
deseado, sino 10 que de hecho puede ser deseado, asi como un sonido
se dice que es audible cuando puede ser oido. Para Ehrenfels, cuanto
mas fuertemente se desee algo, mas elevado sera su valor. Como es
evidente, este autor afirma la subjetividad y relatividad de los valores,
corriendo el riesgo de hacerlos depender de la arbitrariedad del sujeto,
pues podria darse el caso de que 10 valioso para mi, al depender de mi
deseo, fuese pernicioso para otros, 0 que se desease en un momento
dado y se rechazase mas tarde.
Este relativismo fue ganando aceptacion con Kraus en Austria y
Muller Freienfels en Alemania. Este ultimo impulso notablemente la
tesis humeanas.
La axiologia tuvo una especial aceptacion en Norteamerica y en
todo 18 el mundo anglosajon. Merece una mencion especial Ralph Perry,
quien pretende superar las tesis de Meinong y Ehrenfels. Para Perry, es
el interes 10 que subyace a los deseos, tendencias y emociones del
sujeto; este esta a favor de ciertos acontecimientos y en contra de otros.
Y dicho interes se manifiesta en multiples matices: deseo, aversion,
busqueda, huida, agrado, desagrado. Es esta actitud motriz - el interes
- 10 que importa. Lo que es objeto de interes es valor. Y el interes
implica una cierta cognicion del objeto que 10 despierta, pero 10 que Ie
confiere el valor no es el acto de juzgar, sino la misma actividad
interesada. 19 Perry aplica su teorfa a los valores economicos. Y da al
84
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valor el canicter de medio para conseguir algo. En sfntesis, puede

decirse que estos autores hacen del hombre el origen y la medida de los
valores. Acaban de algun modo justificando la violencia para imponer
en la sociedad la ley del mas fuerte.
II. LA NOCION DE VALOR EN BRENT ANO Y SCHELER
Como ya se ha visto, el comienzo de la teorfa de los valores marco una

fuerte impronta en la filosoffa contemporanea. A continuacion y de
forma muy breve, pas are a analizar el concepto de valor en las dos
grandes figuras de la axiologfa: Franz Brentano y Max Scheler.
Brentano habla por vez primera del valor en su opusculo: EI origen
del conocimiento moral, que constituye al decir de Ortega "la base
donde se asienta la etica modern a de los valores".2o Aquf plantea
Brentano la diferencia entre "juicio ciego" y "juicio evidente".21 Lo que
se afirma sin razon suficiente puede ser verdadero 0 falso. 22 Sin
embargo, se nos dan juicios que son 10 suficientemente claros para que
estemos ciertos de ellos. Pues bien, la diferencia entre una y otra clase
de juicios se da en los juicios mismos, no en la representacion subjetiva
de ellos. 23 La evidencia se da en el acto de juzgar, de tal modo que
juzgar 10 contrario sea imposible de sostener. Esta distincion la
extiende Brentano a otro tipo de representaciones, tales como las
aversiones y propensiones. Al igual que en los juicios, las hay evidentes
y ciegas. Estas son las puramente instintivas, y aquellas, las que se dan
ante la comprension clara 0 la ignorancia. Ante la primera, se produce
la propension 0 agrado y ante la segunda, la aversion. Asimismo, para
Brentano este agrado es "un amor superior calificado como justo".24
Algo es digno de amor 0 de odio. Nos hallamos, pues, ante el umbral
del valor. Mas la dificultad que se plantea es la siguiente: l Como se
puede distinguir el objeto del acto intencional? El acto de amar 0 de
odiar no se puede separar del objeto mismo. La correccion 0 adecuacion tiene lugar en la conciencia y gracias a ella se da el caracter de
bueno 0 malo del objeto. 25 Asf, para Brentano el grado de certeza
depended de modo absoluto de la percepcion interna. Cuando el
hombre se percibe a sf mismo como libre, eso merece mas cr6dito que
cualquier otra percepcion 0 experiencia externa. En resumen, Brentano
pretende y esto es 10 mas original de su doctrina "avenir una teorfa no
racionalista del conocimiento moral con el mas riguroso objetivismo".26
A partir de ahora examinare 10 que significa el valor para Max
LA NOCION DE VALOR
85
Scheler. Aunque el tema es amplisimo, esbozare unas reflexiones sobre

el mismo que permitan esclarecer la no cion scheleriana de valor. Dicha
nocion es para Scheler univoca e irreductible. 27 En ello se basa la
existencia de una jerarquia entre los val ores que va desde los inferiores
hasta los superiores, pero a la vez, cada valor tiene una serie de
diferencias cualitativas respecto de los demas que impide que unos
valores queden subsumidos en los otros. El valor es para Scheler el
correlato del sentir intencional, es asimismo a-priori, es decir, independiente tanto de la constitucion psiquica de los sujetos humanos, como
del factum de que existan objetos determinados en los cuales se realice.
EI sentir intencional (Fiihlen) es aquel que por su propia naturaleza va
dirigido a un valor y se diferencia de los meros estados emocionales
(Gefiihl) en que estos no tienen un termino objetivo inmediato. Es a
traves de este sentir intencional como se nos abre el mundo de las
realidades valiosas. Estos, sin embargo, tienen para Scheler una existencia mas alia de la intencionalidad del sujeto. 28 No hay tampoco una
relacion existencial entre los val ores y sus depositarios; no hay una
relacion intrinseca entre la cos a valiosa y el valor mismo. No obstante,
el valor se hace presente mediante algun soporte y ya en el caso
particular del valor moral, su so porte se identifica con los actos de
realizacion. Tambien la disposicion de animo es depositaria de val ores
morales. Y la disposicion optima es para Scheler "Ia autonomia del
querer"29 que se opone a la heteronomia del querer forzado, aunque
vaya unido a un conocimiento afectivo.
Scheler polemiza con la doctrina del deber-ser kantiano, pues este
"nunc a es originariamente el ser de 10 bueno, sino tan solo el no-ser de
10 malo".30 Ante esto, cabe cuestionarse acerca de la nocion de deber
en Scheler. lOue es? lEn que consiste? lEs un bien normativo? lEs 10
que debo hacer? Para Scheler el bien es la cos a que tiene valor y la
normatividad se da cuando la conciencia choca con una resistencia que
impide realizar el valor. He de contrarrestar esa resistencia y en eso
consiste 10 debido: es el no ser de aquello que se resiste para la
realizacion del bien. Las expresiones normativas solo tienen sentido en
tanto en cuanto los valores positivos no existen.
Asi pues, Scheler considera que el deber-ser normativo (a diferencia
del deber-ser ideal) es "la fuente del caracter negativo de la
experiencia moral".3! Por eso aspira a suprimirlo de esta experiencia,
para que el sujeto pueda experimentar solo 10 positivo, es decir, solo
los valores. No obstante, en el fondo de la mencionada polemica, hay
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un punto en comun, a saber: "la admision de un querer que seria bueno

en su esencia, orientado para Scheler siempre por 10 que el conocimiento ha preferido; en consecuencia, 10 que haria pasar de uno a otro
querer habria de ser que los objetos dados al percibir sentimental son
diferentes".32 Asimismo, para este filosofo, la voluntad en modo alguno
se determina en relacion con cada bien, 10 que equivale a decir que no
existe en aqwSlla una orientacion natural hacia el bien que Ie haga posible
la libre eleccion en cada caso particular. Es esta una de las diferencias
mas notables entre la concepcion no sustancialista de la persona, segun
Scheler, y la postura clasica que ad mite un dinamismo natural en la
voluntad, previo a la elecion. Para aquel la persona es dada en la coactuacion de sus actos. Mas no se entienda un actualismo al modo de
Hume, para quien la persona es dada en sus actos; para Scheler, la persona es la unidad que recoge la diversidad de los actos pero no es
anterior a ellos. Ha de observarse una perspectiva fenomenologica sin
base ontologica alguna.
III. OTRAS POSTURAS SOBRE LA NOCION DE VALOR
Se han visto las nociones de valor en Brentano y Scheler, examinando como el primero fundamenta la etica en la experiencia fenomenologica,33
mientras que el segundo pretende elaborar una etica absoluta a partir del
sentir intencional. Mas no son estas las unicas posturas ante el valor.
Una posicion altamente representativa es la de Dietrich von Hildebrand discipulo tambien de Husserl, quien ofrece una interpretacion de
gran interes sobre la doctrina del valor. 34 La primera aproximacion al
valor la hace en su obra Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung (La idea de
la accion moral, 1916). Posteriormente aparece su exposicion mas
madura en la Etica (1963). En la primera obra, Hildebrand hace una
distincion entre la aprehension cognoscitiva (Kenntnisnahme) y toma de
posicion (Stellungnahme). En la aprehension cognoscitiva el sujeto no
pone nada anta el objeto: vive pasivamente su referencia intencional,
como si todo proviniese del objeto. En la toma de posicion, que supone
un conocimiento previo del objeto, parece como si el sujeto, de algun
modo, se impregnase de algo del objeto conocido y su referencia intencional va del sujeto hacia el objeto. 35 Posteriormente, Hildebrand en su
Etica ha sustitufdo las anteriores nociones lIamando "actos cognoscitivos" a las primeras vivencias y "respuestas" a las segundas. 36 De estas,
las que respond en a situaciones de valor, son las denominadas respues-
LA NOCION DE VALOR
87
tas de valor (Wertantworten) que, junto con las acciones y virtudes son
tam bien portadoras de val ores eticos. Dichas respuestas suponen
siempre una aprehensi6n cognoscitiva previa y comportan una respuesta
por parte del sujeto. Para este autor, la captaci6n de los valares
constituye un autentico acto cognoscitivo y mas concretamente, una
percepci6n que nada tiene que ver con el sentimiento de valor del que
habla Scheler, que para Hildebrand resulta muy confuso. 37 Con todo,
aunque la aprehensi6n del valor sea un verdadero acto de conocimiento, esta muy relacionada con las actitudes volitivas y afectivas del
sujeto.
Hildebrand ha analizado con gran profundidad la relaci6n existente
entre el conocimiento y la actitud etica, pues para la aprehensi6n de los
valores se precisan una serie de requisitos eticos que no son necesarios
para otro conocimiento, tales como "la reverencia y la apertura de
nuestro espiritu ante la voz del ser, un mayor grado de "conspiraci6n"
con el objeto ( ... ) y tambien una disponibilidad de nuestra voluntad a
plegarnos a la exigencia de los valores, cualesquiera que estos sean",38
10 cual quiere decir que una correcta disposici6n de nuestra voluntad es
esencial a la hora de captar los valores, pues de 10 contrario, cuando la
voluntad se aferra a su propia conducta, pretendiendo justificarla con
criterios ajenos a la verdad, se produce la llamada "ceguera axio16gica",39 de la que el hombre es siempre responsable, pues si bien el
valor se capta par un acto de conocimiento, no hay que olvidar que la
actitud ante este es indispensable para su conocimiento.40
Otro de los maximos exponentes de la actual axiologia 10 constituye
Hans Reiner,41 fue discipulo de Husserl en Friburg y el objetivo
fundamental de su obra consisti6 en sentar las bases de la etica. Para
ello utiliza la noci6n de valor y el metodo fenomenol6gico, asi como un
anaIisis de la historia, pero encuentra dos fuertes obstaculos: de un
lado, la etica formal kantiana y de otro, la etica material de los valores.
Marca en este autor una fuerte impronta el genio filos6fico de Hildebrand.
Reiner se cues tiona ace rca de la esencia de 10 bueno y de 10 malo y
la diferencia entre ambos la une a la conciencia del deber. 42 Lo bueno
se nos presenta a la conciencia como aquello que debemos hacer y 10
malo como aquello que no debemos realizar. Toda realidad se presenta
al hombre con caracter de grata 0 ingrata. Y aunque esta gratitud 0
ingratitud parece ser cuesti6n de sentimiento, sin embargo, en los
objetos existe una propiedad objetiva que despierta en nosotros esa
88
PILAR BELDA PLANS
gratitud. Es el concepto de valor el que expresa el canicter grato de 10

grato. "Un valor es eso que en un ser hace que este se nos presente
como digno, y, por tanto como grato".43 Distingue, asimismo, Reiner dos
tipos de valores: los relativos son aquellos que se constituyen como
tales en la medida en que "vienen bien a alguien" y que pueden ser
relativos a S1 mismos 0 a olros. El primero es el ambito de 10
subjetivamente importante y el segundo el de 10 objetivamente importante. Tambien existen valores absolutos, cuyo ser consiste en ser
gratos en S1 mismos. Estos valores nos remiten al ambito de 10
metafisico, porque nos hac en barruntar una razein de ser latente en el
fondo de ellos que nos es inaprehensible, pero que nos inspira un
peculiar respeto y veneracion por los portadores de esos valores. Tales
son, por ejemplo, el valor de la vida 0 del derecho preestatal.
Para este filosofo, 10 moralmente buena consiste en secundar la
exigencia 0 exhortacion con la que nos requieren los valores objetivamente importantes,44 10 cual requerira en ocasiones, renunciar a valores
subjetivos. Obrar el mal consiste para Reiner en no corresponder a la
exigencia de los valores objetivamente importantes, por no estar
dispuestos a renunciar a los valores subjetivos. Mas, en ocasiones se
trata de discernir no entre 10 bueno y 10 malo, sino entre dos valores
objetivamente buenos. ;, Cual es el mejor? En este caso hay que aplicar
una serie de principios que tienen todas las caracter1sticas del discurso
racional y que nos dan la pauta de 10 moralmente verdadero y de 10
moralmente falso. Se hace 10 primero cuando entre dos valores objetivamente importantes se elige el que responde a una serie de principios,
tales como: la mayor cantidad de valores a realizar, la mayor urgencia,
la mayor efectividad. Se hace 10 contrario cuando en dicha eleccion se
inmiscuye, de un lado, un valor subjetivamente importante y se obra
por est a razon. No obstante, este autor - cuyo analisis del valor es
profundo y original - ensaya una via intermedia entre el sentimiento y
el conocimiento racional: los actos en los que aparecen los valores
serian algo semejante a "sentimientos radonales."
IV. CONCLUSIONES
Como ya se ha visto, fue Kant el que utilizo por vez primera la no cion
de valor en filosofia, pero sin entrar en una investigacion seria sobre
este concepto. Sus sucesores caen de un modo u otro en un relativismo
mayor que el kantiano y que esclarece min menos el significado del
LA NOCION DE VALOR
89
valor. Sera Brentano quien Ie de una sistematicidad, aunque al hacer

depender el valor de la percepcion interna caiga en el psicologismo.
Max Scheler considera el valor como una realidad independiente del
sujeto y del objeto, intentando fundamentarlo en la Persona infinita,
como valor de valores. No obstante, cae en la ambigiiedad, pues no se
sabe a ciencia cierta si para d, el valor es una "cualidad irreal" como 10
interpreta Ortega45 0 da sentido a toda la realidad.
Para Hildebrand, el valor se conoce a traves de la percepcion
racional y es una realidad objetiva - propiedad del ser - que tiene
mucho que ver con la actitud etica del hombre, siendo asf que si no hay
una apertura por parte de este ante el valor, se produce la ceguera
axiologica.
Para Reiner, hay valores que tienen entidad en sf mismos, independientemente de que sean captados 0 no por el sujeto, pues todo valor
requiere su realizacion. Al igual que para Hildebrand, aquel tambien
concede una gran importancia a la actitud del sujeto a la hora de
realizar los val ores pues obrar bien consiste en optar por los objetivamente importantes. No obstante, Reiner se queda a mitad de camino
entre el sentirniento y el conocimiento racional del valor.
Como se ha visto, el tema del valor es una cuestion, a mi parecer, de
gran envergadura, que parte de la filosoffa husserliana. Cuestion sobre
la que se ha escrito mucho, pero que queda actualmente abierta, por 10
profunda y sugerente en toda la praxis humana, a ulteriores investigaciones.
Universidad de Murcia
NOTAS
1 Aunque no tratare directamente de Husser!, puede no obstante entreverse su
profundo influjo a 10 largo de todo este trabajo. Las contribuciones de este autor sobre
el tema del valor estan recogidas en la obra de Roth, A. Edmund Husserls Ethische
Untersuchungen (La Haya: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960). Si aqui no me ocupo de elias es
par tratarse de una cuesti6n mas monogrrifica que, en 10 que conozco, no ha sido min
suficientemente estudiada.
2 Seglin Mendez: "Kant se limita a emplear el termino "valor" como un adjetivo de
gran expresividad y de facil comprensi6n, gracias a su constante uso en la vida
cotidiana". Mendez, J. Valores ericos (Madrid: Estudios de axiologia, 1978), p. 279.
3 "La filosofia de Kant es, en eI fondo, c1aramente una filosofia del valor. Sus tres
Criticas podrian titularse: de 10 Verdadero, de 10 Bueno, de 10 Bello, Pero esta filosofia
esta todavia implicita". Ruyer, R. Filosofia del valor (Mexico: F.C.E. 1969), p. 7.
90
PILAR BELDA PLANS
Cfr. Ortega y Gasset, 1. "lQU(~ son los valores?" en Obras completas, VI (Madrid:
1964), p. 316.
5 "Para Kant, el conocimiento etico se organiza tambien como una sintesis a-priori del
contenido empirico - la maxima - y del elemento puramente formal de la inteligencia
- la ley - que 10 universaliza. La etica kantiana se estructura, pues, como un puro
formalismo a-priori, como un autonomismo moral subjetivo que brota de la razon
pratica". Derisi, O. L. Los fundamenlOs metaflsicos del orden moral, Ed. EI Derecho
(B. Aires: 1980), p. 337. V. t. Stegmiiller, W. Hauptstromungen der Gegenwartphilosophie (Stuttgart: 1960), t. esp (B. Aires: 1967), p. 160 Y ss.
6 As! 10 expresa Kant en toda la Critica de la R. Practica.
7 Cfr. Lotze, R. H. Mikrokosmus. Ideen zur Naturgeschichte der Menschheit (Leipzig:
1896-1909), III, v.
8 Ibid., III, p. 404.
9 Vease al respecto: Ruyer, o.c. p. 146.
10 Cfr. Windelband, W. Priiludien (Tiibingen: 1911), p. 59.
11 Windelband, W. Enleitung in die Philosophie (Tiibingen: 1914), p. 390.
12 Ibid., p. 393.
13 Para Rickert la validez de los valores es relativa y cambiante: es una necesidad que
cada pueblo 0 epoca se impone a s! mismo. Cfr. Rickert, P. Naturwissenschaften und
Kulturwissenschaften (Heidelberg: 1859).
14 Ruyer, o.c. p. 147
15 Cfr. Meinong, A. Psychologische Ethische Untersuchungen zur Werttheorie II, v.
(Graz: 1894).
16 Cfr. Meinong, A. Zur Grundlegung der algemeinen Werttheorie (1923).
17 Cfr. Ehrenfels, v. System der Werttheorie, I (Leipzig: 1897), p. 52 Y ss.
18 Cfr. Miiller Freienfels, R. Griindzuge, einer neuen Wertlehre (Leipzig: 1919).
19 Perry, R. B. General Theory of Value (Cambridge: Harvard, V.P. 2 a ed. 1950), p.
115 Y ss.
20 Ortega y Gasset, 1. Prologo a la ed. castellana de Brentano, F. El origen (del
conocimiento moral), Rev. de Occid. (Madrid: 1927). V. ten. 1. M. Palacios "EI
conocimiento de los valores en la etica fenomenologica" en Pensamiento 36 (1980),
pp.287-302.
21 Brentano, F. o.c. p. 40.
22 Ibid., p. 41.
23 Vease la nota 28 de este opusculo, donde Brentano distingue entre juicios ciegos y
juicios evidentes.
24 Ibid., pp. 43-44.
25 Respecto a la nocion de valor en Brentano efr. Chisholm, R. M. Brentano and
Intrinsic Value (Cambridge: V.P. 1986): McAlister, Linda, The Development of Franz
Brentano's Ethics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982).
26 Palacios, 1. M. o.c.
27 Esto quiere decir que el valor tiene un correlato y es conocido de un modo afectivo
mediante la intuicion emocional. EI valor no es para Scheler un estado de animo. As! 10
expresa a 10 largo de toda su Etica.
28 Cfr. Scheler, M. Etica, II, Rev. de Occidente (Madrid: 1941), pp. 27-29). Los
val ores para Scheler no guardian relacion existencial con el sujeto: el valor es dado con
independencia del estado de animo. P. ej: una cosa es 10 que yo siento y otra el valo,r
que suscita ese agrado.
4
LA NOCION DE VALOR
91
Ibid., p. 270.
Ibid.
31 Wojtyla, K. Max Scheler y la hica cristiana (Madrid: Bac, 1982), p. 140.
32 Ferrer, U. "Valor moral y persona a partir de la fenomenologfa" en Etica y teologia
ante la crisis contemporanea, I Simp. internac. de teologfa.
33 Brentano, F. o.c. pp. 23-24.
34 Cfr. Hildebrand, v. D. Etica (Madrid: ed. Encuentro, 1963).
35 Hildebrand, D. v. "Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung," lahrbuch fUr Philosophie und
phiinomenologische Forschung III (1916) I. K. p. 133 Yss.
36 Ibid., pp. 194-96; 197-98.
37 Ibid., pp. 126-29.
38 Ibid., pp. 114.
39 Hildebrand trata de modo especffico el tema de la "ceguera axiologica" en su obra
"Sittlichkeit und Ethische Werterkenntnis Eine untersuchung tiber Ethische Strukturprobleme," lahrbuch fUr Philosophie und phiinomenologische Forschung V (1922) pp.
463-602.
40 Hildebrand, D. v. Etica., p. 411. Para el, en realidad el valor es una propiedad del
ser.
41 La concepcion axiologica de Reiner se ex pone en "Vieja y nueva etica," R. de
Occidente. Madrid, 1964; Bueno y malo (Encuentro: 1985); "Der Ursprung der
Sittlichkeit dargestell auf Grund der Phanomenologischen methode," Z. fUr Philosophische Forschung XIII (1959) pp. 263-287.
42 Cfr. Reiner, H. Bueno y malo, p. 17.
43 Ibid., p. 19.
44 Ibid., pp. 32-33.
29
30
ALEXIUS J. BUCHER
PHANOMENE EINER ETHIK
1. METHODEN DER PHANOMENERSCHLIEBUNG
Wissenschaft beginnt mit PhanomenerschlieBung. Welche lebensweltlichen Fakten, in ihrer Vielfalt und Eigenart des Erscheinungsbildes,
konnen aufgezeigt und als mogliches Erkenntnismaterial in systematischer Absicht von der Vernunft erfaBt werden, so daB Zusammenhangen der Wirklichkeit im Ganzen sowie ihrer Teilphanomene
nachgegangen werden kann und Prinzipien aufgefunden oder entwickelt
werden konnen, urn Orientierungen fur ein verantwortliches Handeln in
der Welt anzubieten? Die philosophische Erorterung ethischen, verantwortlichen Weltverhaltens geschieht im Hinblick darauf, Sachverhalte
freizulegen, urn auf diese Weise zu einem moglichst zureichenden
Verstandnis der Sache zu gelangen.
Ein philosophischer Umgang mit Phanomenen der Lebenswelt fordert nicht nur Phiinomenbeschreibung sondern einen fortlaufenden
ProzeB von Kritik und Deutung auch dieser Beschreibung selbst. Eine
philosophische Vorgehensweise ist nicht als alternativ zu rein empirischanalytischer Methode zu verstehen, sondern als die PhanomenweIt
transzendierende Beschaftigung mit Bedeutungs- und Sinnzusammenhangen. Wenn ethische Entscheidungen Ausdruck von Bedeutungszumessungen und Sinnerkenntnis sind, dann ist ethisch verantwortliches
VerhaIten in der Welt das phanomenale Material einer philosophischen
Ethik. Das, was ethisch der Fall ist, das heiBt die konkreten ethischen
Phanomene in der Lebenswelt des Menschen, wird im Hinblick auf
die Bildung einer zu entwickelnden und zu begrundenden Theorie vor
Begriff, Urteil und SchluBvermogen der Vernunft des Menschen gestellt,
der sich als ethisches Wesen erfahrt.
Das phanomenale Ausgangsmaterial der Ethik liegt im Bereich
menschlicher Erfahrung und fordert, weil es der erfassenden Vernunft
vorliegt, sachgemaBe Berucksichtigung.
Erfahrung und Sachlichkeit sind konstitutive Momente fur den
systematischen, erkenntnisgerichteten Umgang der Vernunft mit den
Phiinomenen ethischen WeItverhaltens.
93
94
ALEXIUS 1. BUCHER
2. ZUM BEGRIFF DER ERFAHRUNG
2.1. A bgrenzung gegen MifJdeutungen
Die Bedeutung der Erfahrung fur eine philosophische Ethik muB sich
gegen zwei MiBverstandnisse wehren.
Oft ordnet man der konkreten Erfahrung das bloB begriffliche,
abstrakte Erfassen zu. 1m Bereich der Ethik vor aHem wird das
erfahrbar Konkrete gegen das gedacht Abstrakte wertend ausgespielt.
Dem auf Erfahrung sich berufenden Wissen wird der Vorrang eingeraumt, wenn es urns praktische Tun, urns ethische Handeln gehen
soH. Die Bedeutung anschaulich verursachter Betroffenheit in einer
konkreten lebensweltlichen Entscheidungssituation fur die Zielrichtung
der Entscheidung ist nicht zu leugnen. Kommt aber nicht jedes Urteil,
auch das sittliche Urteil, nur aufgrund eines Abstraktionsvermogens des
urteilenden Menschen zustande? Etwas aus eigener Anschauung kennen und/oder eine lebhafte eindrucksvoHe Vorstellung der Situation
vermittelt zu bekommen ist jedoch keine Garantie fur sachgerechte,
richtige Situationserfassung. Wenn es in den meisten ethischen Handlungsentscheidungen urn Entscheidungen zwischen Wertkonflikten geht,
hilft eine reale Erfassung der konkurrierenden Wertanspruche aus
existentiellem Wissen wirklich dabei, zu wissen, wie sich die Wertentscheidung tatsachlich auswirkt.
Von der Bedeutung der konkreten, erfahrbaren Situation, in der eine
ethische Entscheidung zu treffen ist, fur die ethische Entscheidung
selbst, die nur aufgrund umfassender Einsicht in die situative Besonderheit getroffen werden kann, braucht hier nicht gesprochen zu werden. 1
Welche Bedeutung fur die Grundlegung einer Ethik hat aber dann
die Erfahrung?2
2.2. Extreme Erweiterung des Eifahrungsbegriffes
Der ursprungliche Sinn von Efl7rClQ(a beziehungsweise experientia ist

durch den Erfolg der exakten Erfahrungswissenschaften auf die Methode
empirischer Kontrolle und ihrer Erkenntnis festgelegt worden. Ursprunglich wiesen noch der griechische und lateinische Sprachgebrauch
sowohl auf den Erfahrungsvorgang wie auch auf die Erfahrenheit als
Resultat einer Vielzahl einzelner Erfahrungsvorgange hin.
Den wissenschaftsgeschichtlich eingeengten Erfahrungsbegriff in
95
Frage zu stellen, veranlaBt von kritischer Kontrolle dessen, was tatsiichlich dem Begriff 'Erfahrung' in den exakten Einzelwissenschaften
unreflex zuerkannt wird, setzt den Ethikwissenschaftler rasch dem
Verdacht unausgewiesener Metaphysik oder des Intuitionalismus aus.
Nicht selten ist der Verdacht begriindet. Wenn zum Beispiel R. Egenter
die Bedeutung von Erfahrung fur das sittliche Leben des Menschen
untersucht, weitet er den Begriff der Erfahrung derart, daB selbst der
Gegenbegriff zu sinnlicher Erfahrung eingeschlossen wird. Glaubenserfahrung, Erfahrung der Gnade, Sinnerfahrung bis zur Urerfahrung und
Wesenserfahrung werden unter den Oberbegriff Erfahrung zusammengefaBt und damit die erkenntniskritische Bedeutung des Erfahrungsbegriffes der Neuzeit ihrer polemischen Schiirfe beraubt beziehungsweise das Erfahrungspostulat einer nachmetaphysischen Wissenschaft formal erfullt, ohne die Bedingungen der Moglichkeit
wissenschaftsrelevanter Erfahrung fur den eigenen Erfahrungsbegriff
aufgewiesen zu haben. Denn eine Erfahrung, die von intuitivem Erfassen
oder originiirer Intuition nicht mehr zu unterscheiden ist, mag moglicherweise als Basis einer wissenschaftlichen Systembildung niitzlich
sein, jedoch erfullt diese Erfahrung nicht die Bedingungen, unter denen
die nachmetaphysische Wissenschaft moglich sein kann. 3
2.3. Extreme Einschrankung des Erfahrungsbegriffes
Das Phiinomen einer Sinnerfahrung oder des intuitiven Erfassens von
Werten wird von nonkognitivistischen Theorien beziiglich der Begriindbarkeit moralischer Siitze geleugnet. Wenn sittliche Werturteile nicht
Sache der Erkenntnis sind, sondern Ausdruck von rational nicht
kritisierbaren Emotionen oder Dezisionen, spielt deren Ubereinstimmung mit empirischer Wirklichkeit fiir ihre Richtigkeit oder Falschheit
keine Rolle. Nur Siitze, die Aussagen iiber den Bereich sinnlicher
Erfahrung machen, konnen wahr oder falsch sein und sind Leistungen
des Vernunftvermogens. Affekt-WillensiiuBerungen und - Handlungen
sind weder - so schon Hume - Aussagen iiber die Beziehung von
"Ideas" noch Aussagen iiber den Bereich der Erfahrung. Bei Willensentscheidungen und -handlungen ist die Frage nach der Ubereinstimmung mit der Wirklichkeit sinnlos. Die Erfahrungswirklichkeit ist keine
Phiinomenbasis fiir ein ethisches Wert system oder fur eine systematische Herleitung normativer Aussagen.4
Auch A. J. Ayer kennt nur zwei Klassen sinnvoller wissenschaft-
96
ALEXIUS J. BUCHER
licher Aussagen von Wahrheitsbedeutung. Ayer nennt "analytische

Propositionen" jene Aussagen, die sich auf Begriffsrelationen beziehen,
und "empirische Propositionen" jene Aussagen, die Tatsachen betreffen. Insofern Ethik wertende oder normative Satze benutzt, also
ethische Aussagen trifft, kommen ihre Klassen von Urteilen in Ayers
Urteilsschema nicht vor. Wertende und vorschreibende Urteile konnen
nicht auf beschreibende Urteile zuriickgefuhrt werden, das heiBt Erfahrungsphanomene sind fur die Wahrheitsfrage irrelevant.
GemaB der kognitiven Theorie des Intuitionismus enthalten Urteile
der Ethik Aussagen, fur die ein Wahrheitsanspruch erhoben wird. Die
einfachste Moglichkeit, den Wahrheitsanspruch einzulosen, ware die
Begriindung der Aussage durch empirischen Tatsachenbeweis. George
Edward Moore verweist zumindest jede Letztbegriindung auf intuitive
Propositionen. Nicht zu Unrecht bemerkt Max Scheler, daB Moore,
ahnlich wie er selbst, Wertaussagen nicht auf beschreibende Aussagen
zuriickfuhren kann. "W0 wir einen Wert mit Recht aussagen, da geniigt
es nicht, ihn aus Merkmalen und Eigenschaften, die nicht seIber der
Sphare der Werterscheinungen angehoren, erst erschlieBen zu wollen".5
Der Wahrheitsanspruch einer kognitiven Ethiktheorie wird traditionell begriindet durch einen Erfahrungshinweis, der jedoch nicht auf
sinnliche Empirie eingeschrankt wird, sondern originare Intuition,
Werterfahrung mitbegreift.
Will man einerseits der berechtigten Kritik an nonkognitiven Theorien zur Ethik entsprechen - allein schon deswegen, weil wertende
Urteile nicht mit Gefiihlsausdriicken identifiziert werden konnen,
sondern jeder Gefuhlsausdruck selbst wieder gewertet werden kann,
und jedes Werturteil einen Gefuhlsausdruck provozieren konnte 6 andererseits aber als die Erfahrungsbasis ethischer Urteile nicht intelligible Wesenheiten und intuitiv mit dem dritten Auge des Phanomenologen erfaBte (Hinter-) Sinnstrukturen unkritisch voraussetzen, wird die
Zuordnung von Erfahrung und Vernunft neu zu bestimmen sein.
Die Begriindung des Wahrheitsanspruchs ethischer Urteile kann
weder durch die Riickfuhrung auf eine Erfahrungsbasis gewahrleistet
werden, wie breit auch immer die gegebenen Bedingungen fiir Erfahrung, von sinnlicher bis intuitiver Moglichkeit, ausgelegt werden, noch
kann eine rein formal-Iogische Methode den Begriindungsaufweis fur
wertende und vorschreibende sittliche Urteile liefern. Weder erschlieBt
sich uns die Wirklichkeit ausschlieBlich dank der Erfahrung, noch
garantiert eine rationale Methode fur sich die Wahrheit abgeleiteter
97
Erkenntnisse. Zunachst gilt es den Erfahrungsbegriff auf die Grenzen

seiner M6glichkeit zu verweisen, insofern er die Methode der weiteren
Uberlegungen mitbestimmt.
2.4. Naivitiit des naturwissenschaftlichen Umgangs

mit dem Eifahrungsbegriff
Die modernen empirischen Wissenschaften verhalten sich im Umgang
mit ihrem Erfahrungsbegriff differenzierter als sie es ihrer Definition
nach durften. DaB Erfahrung nur Messen und Zahlen sein kann, ist als
These selbst eine Erfahrungstatsache, aber keine zwingende Begrundung fur die Einschrankung von Erfahrung auf empirische Gegebenheiten der sinnlichen Welt. Auch die Empirie im engeren Sinn, eingeschrankt auf sinnliche Gegebenheiten, stutzt sich auf Erfahrung als
erlebte und gelebte Erfahrung. Neben der theoretisch empirischen
Erfahrungsdefinition ergibt sich auch eine pragmatisch vollzogene
Erfahrung im Vollzug lebensweltlich verantwortlichen Verhaltens.
AuBerdem gibt es die Erfahrung, gestaltete und gedeutete Sinnzusammenhange zu konstatieren, das heiBt die Erfahrung von sinnvollen,
brauchbaren, nutzlichen und genutzten Erfahrungen praktischer und
theoretischer Erfahrungen. Erfahrung ist nicht nur das, was in MaB und
Zahl angegeben werden kann, Erfahrung ist auch der praktizierte, als
sinnhaft oder sinnlos diagnostizierte Umgang mit Wirklichkeit. Erfahrung bedeutet immer auch gedeutete, gestaltete, aufgefaBte und interpretierte Erfahrung. Interpretierte, gestaltete Erfahrung ist selbst erfahrbarer Umgang mit Weltwirklichkeit. Ich erfahre nieht nur Raum-Zeitliches, sondern ich erfahre auch, daB ich Raum-Zeitliches erfahren
kann, und erfahre, daB die so praktisch genutzte Erfahrung Bedeutungsstrukturen und Sinnabsichten aufweist.
In einer refiexiven, wissenschaftlich systematischen Ethik ist diese
gestaltete und gedeutete Erfahrung materiales Phanomen der Untersuchung.
Nicht durch intellektive Schau oder Sinnintuition wird dieses Erfahrungsmaterial erschlossen. Es geht nicht urn Erweiterung von Tatsachenerfahrung durch Wesenserfahrung. 7
Der fur die Ethik fundamentale Erfahrungsbestand ist Teil intersUbjektiv aufweisbarer Alltagserfahrung. Es geh6rt zur alltaglichen
Lebenswelt des Menschen, daB ihm nicht nur meB- und zahlbare RaumZeitlichkeit begegnet, sondern daB er auf Sinnstrukturen und Wertge-
98
ALEXIUS J. BUCHER
fiige stoBt, sowie er mit Menschen zusammentrifft. Begegnung mit

Menschen in lebensweltlicher FaktiziHit ist ohne die Erfahrungstatsche
von Bedeutungs- und Sinnverweisen weder denkbar noch moglich. Das
muB nicht bedeuten, daB unmittelbare Sinn- oder Werterfahrungen und
absolute Verpflichtungserfahrung sich aufdrangen oder gar moglich
sind, aber es bedeutet, daB die intersubjektive Erfahrung aufgewiesen
werden kann: Es gibt die Erfahrungstatsache intentional und rational
verantworteter Phiinomene. Den Menschen auf meBbare Raum-Zeitlichkeit seines Weltverhaltens festzuschreiben, hieBe ihn seiner Geschichtlichkeit zu berauben. Sowenig wie Sprache auf Lautlichkeit verkiirzt
in ihrem Phiinomenbestand begriffen ist, sowenig konnen nonverbale
lebensweltliche Ausdrucksformen, das heiBt Erscheinungsformen
menschlich verantworteten Weltverhaltens auf rein meB- und zahlbare
Phanomene hin begriffen werden.
3. ZUM BEGRIFF DER SACHLICHKEIT
3.1. Sachlichkeit als Subjektleistung

3.1.1. Ausgrenzung der subjektivistischen Subjektivitiit
Der wissenschaftliche Erfolg einer rein auf MeBbarkeit ausgerichteten

Erfahrungsdefinition lag in deren hohem Objektivitatsanspruch und,
verbunden damit, dem Ausschalten nicht zu verallgemeinernder subjektivistischer Sachverhaltsinterpretationen.
Wenn beim Erfassen der Phanomene, die fiir eine Ethik von grundlegender Bedeutung sind, der Erfahrungsbegriff gegeniiber empiristischer Engfiihrung erweitert erscheint, dann muB der Vorwurf subjektivistischer Verengung des Erfahrungsbegriffes erwartet werden.
Wenn im Erfahrungsmaterial Sinnstrukturen, Wertbestimmungen
aufgewiesen werden sollen, ist die intellektuelle Verstehens- und Deutungskapazitat des die Erfahrung aufnehmenden Subjekts entscheidend
dafiir, daB das Phanomen in all seinen Erfahrungsgegebenheiten entdeckt werden kann. Das Phanomen selbst ist intersubjektiv erfahrbar.
Aber ob des sen Raum-Zeitlichkeit der einzig gemeinsame Nenner von
Erfahrung bei unterschiedlichsten Erfahrungssubjekten ist, oder ob und
welche Erfahrungsgegebenheiten des gleichen Objekts zusatzlich yom
erfassenden Subjekt ergriffen werden, hangt zweifellos auch von der
voluntativen und rational en Disponiertheit des Erfahrungsrezipienten
99
abo Doeh dabei gilt es zu unterscheiden zwischen den hochst privaten,

individuellen Rezipierungsvoraussetzungen und den prinzipiell allgemein moglichen Erfahrungsvoraussetzungen. Diejenigen Voraussetzungen zur Rezeption von Erfahrungsgegebenheiten, die nieht prinzipiell mensehliches Weltverhalten qualifizieren, muss en als subjektivistische, individual-private Erfahrungsvoraussetzungen ausgeklammert
werden, wenn allgemeine Subjektvoraussetzungen fur Erfahrungsrezeption die Methode wissensehaftlieher Phanomenbestimmung charakterisieren sollen. So wie der Mensch nicht nur Sprachlaute hart,
sondern im Gehorten Bedeutungszusammenhange, Verweise erfahrt und sieh keineswegs willkiirlich, subjektivistiseh 'seinen Reim' auf das
verlautete Erfahrungsmaterial macht, sondern AuBerungen in ihrer
Bedeutung gesagt bekommt - genauso erfahrt er gesehiehtliche, yom
Menschen verantwortete, intersubjektiv erfahrbare AuBerungsformen
nieht nur als raumzeitliehe Gebilde, sondern mit ihnen deren dokumentierte WillensauBerung und verbalen oder nonverbalen Erkenntnisausdruek. Der intersubjektiv erfahrbare Willens- und Erkenntnisausdruck
ist selbst nur von Erfahrungssubjekten mit voluntativer und rationaler
Kapazitat zu erfassen und begreifend zu erfahren. Aber dies gesehieht
selbst wieder empiriseh naehprufbar nieht in subjektivistiseher Willkur
oder individueller Intellektualitat, sondern unter der gleichen vorausgesetzten Erfahrungstatsaehe, wie sie bei jedem Empiriker naturwissensehaftlieher Provenienz akzeptiert wird. Es besteht zwischen den untersehiedlichen Erfahrungssubjekten prinzipielle - nieht geschiehtlich
individuelle - Gleichheit bezuglieh ihres empirieh-sinnlichen, aber
aueh vernunftigen Vermogens sich zur Welt zu verhalten.
3.1.2. Sachlichkeit als objektive Subjektivitat

Mit dem Begriff der Saehliehkeit konnte die Haltung des Erfahrungsrezipienten beschrieben werden, urn dem Verdaeht unsachlieh-unwissenschaftlieher Vereinnahmung des Erfahrungsphanomens entgegenzuwirken. Der Begriff Sachlichkeit als Arbeitshaltung wurde von G.
Kersehensteiner als Konsequenz ethisehen Weltverhaltens gefordert. 8
Das Ideal der Arbeitshaltung wurde darin gesehen, im Verhalten
zum Gegenstand aIle Subjektbetonung auszusehalten. Der von der
Kunst zeitweise geforderte Trend zu 'neuer Saehliehkeit' deutet bereits
an, wie bedeutsam gerade das SUbjekt mitwirken muB, urn Subjekteinflusse zu vermeiden. Objektive Erfassung eines Erfahrungsgegenstandes
100
ALEXIUS 1. BUCHER
scheint vor aHem yom Subjekt allein zu leistende, hochst 'subjektive'

Fahigkeiten zu fordern.
Max Scheler hat die Sachlichkeit als Spezifikum menschlichen Weltverhaltens im Unterschied zu Tieren hervorgehoben. Weil der Mensch
sich von Triebstrukturen distanzieren kann, ist er ein zur Sachlichkeit
fahiges Wesen. Sachlichkeit ist jenes geistbedingte Verhalten, das "die
Umwandlung der affekt- und triebumgrenzten 'Widenstandszentren' zu
'Gegenstanden' zu vollziehen vermag".9
Sachlichkeit konstitutiert Gegenstandlichkeit. Ohne Sachlichkeit zeigt
sich das Erfahrungsmaterial nicht als Gegenstand fur den mit rezipierender Vernunft seine Erfahrung konstituierenden Menschen.
3.2. Kritik des 'naiven'Sachlichkeitsbegriffes

3.2.1. Erweiterung des 'naiven' Sachlichkeitsbegriffes (durch H. E.
Hengstenberg)
Hans Eduard Hengstenberg kritisiert in seiner 'Grundlegung der Ethik'
an Scheler, daB dessen Sachlichkeitsbegriff in 'naiver Sachlichkeit'
stecken bliebe und die "Schau des Soseins sich in der Vergegenstandlichung kristallisiert".l0
Auch wenn Scheler etwa in seiner Definition der Liebe das naive
Subjekt-Objekt-Verhaltnis weit transzendiert und das Ich in einer
Gemutsbewegung die Du-Person schopferisch entwerfen laBt, indem es
nicht nur jene Werte sieht, die am Du de facto realisiert sind, sondern
prospektiv verwirklicht werden konnen und sollen, so begreift Scheler
Liebe nicht als "hochste Form der Sachlichkeit".ll
Hengstenberg erweitert den Begriff der Sachlichkeit durch ein intellektives, volitives und emotionales Moment, die in einer sachlichen
Haltung "unlosbar ineinanderklingen".12
Sachlichkeit als Grundhaltung wendet sich nach Hengstenberg dem
Seienden urn des Seienden selbst willen zu und zwar derart, daB der
sachlich eingestellte Beobachter mit dem inneren Seins- und Sinnentwurf dieses Seienden 'konspiriert'.
"Konspirieren bedeutet 'Mitatmen', seinen Atem gleichsam mit dem
der Dinge vereinigen; und das ist ein Symbol fur die Teihabe des
sachlich eingestellten Menschen am Sein des begegnenden Seienden.
Konspirierende Sachlichkeit wendet sich dem Seienden in einer Hingabe zu, die vollig davon absieht, ob es demjenigen, der mit ihm
konspiriert, oder einer anderen Person irgendeinen Zugewinn bringt.
101
Dieses selbstlose 'Mogen' der Dinge, das grundsatzlich keinem einzelner 'Vermogen' zuzuordnen ist, sondern vielmehr intellektives,
volitives und emotionales Moment - wenigstens in seinem ersten
Anheben - noch unentzweit ineinanderklingen laBt, ist ein menschliches Urphanomen".u
3.2.2. Ablehnung des 'Urphiinomens' als Begriindungsinstanz
Ein den Menschen kennzeichnendes WeItverhaIten als Urphanomen
herauszustellen fordert zur Frage nach der intersubjektiven kognitiven
Ausgewiesenheit dieses Urphanomens. Setzt es sich selbst als ausweisendes Vermogen, und damit als konspiratives Ubervermogen gegeniiber allen ausgewiesenen intellektiven, volitiven oder emotionalen
Momenten, voraus, dann ware als Begriindungsinstanz unmittelbare
Evidenz gefordert. Wird diese Evidenz nicht als intersubjektiv verbindliche Grundlage einer allgemein ausgewiesenen Begriindung akzeptiert,
etwa mit dem Hinweis auf einen ZirkelschluB im Argumentationsgang
zur Begriindung des konspirativen Urphanomens, dann konnte nur
jenes humane Vermogen den Versuch einer Begriindungsargumentation
liefern, dem Begreifen, Urteilen und SchlieBen intersubjektiv verbindlich
zuerkannt wird, die Vernunft. Weil aber die Vernunft bereits einen sich
nicht selbst in seiner Allgemeinheit und Verbindlichkeit ausweisenden
Wahrheitsanspruch via Evidenz zuriickgewiesen hat, wird sie auch nicht
mit den Moglichkeiten der Vernunft, die Existenz eines iiberverniinftigen Urphanomens zu erklaren, dem nicht nur neben intellektiven auch
volitive und emotionale Vermogen, sondern die Qualitat einer iibergeordneten konspirativen Einheit zuerkannt werden, rechnen konnen.
Diese konspirative Einheit bezieht sich nicht nur auf das Vermogen
dieses Urphanomens, intellektive, volitive und emotionale Momente
'iiberintellektuell', 'iibervolitiv' und 'iiberemotional' aufeinander zu
beziehen, sondern kraft dieser Einheit des Urphanomens auch den
Erfahrungsgegenstand zu vereinnahmen. Wie anders ware sonst die
"konspirative HaItung, die das Subjekt-Objekt-Verhaltnis transzendiert,
bei Hengstenberg zu erklaren"?14
3.3. Neuformulierung des Sachlichkeitsbegriffes
3.3.1. Charakteristika des neuen Sachlichkeitsbegriffes
Die Sachlichkeitsdefinition von Max Scheler muB erweitert werden, will
102
ALEXIUS J. BUCHER
man dem humanen Weltverhalten, das nie nur ein sinnlich empirisches
ist, gerecht entsprechen. Doch der Gefahr intuitiven Emotionismus
entgeht man nicht durch derartige Erweiterung des Begriffes "Sachlichkeit" , daB die 'Sache: Verhalten des Menschen zur Welt' selbst nicht
mehr rational erfaBt werden kann. Menschen werden sich immer auch
nichtrational zur Welt verhalten. Rationalitat ist nicht das einzige
Vermogen des Menschen, sich zur Welt zu verhalten. Aber wenn dieses
Verhalten zum Gegenstand oder zur Moglichkeitsbedingung intersubjektiv verrnittelter, wissenschaftlich systematisierter Urteil mit Wahrheitsanspruch - praskriptiver oder deskriptiver Weise - gewahlt wird,
bleibt das Phanomen 'rationales Weltverhalten' die allein aufweisende
und ausweisende Instanz.
Da aber empirisch-sinnliches Weltverhalten des Menschen selbst
dort, wo es sich nur auf Messen und Zahlen beschrankt, immer auch
schon das Erkenntnisvermogen des Verstandes, die begreifende, urteilende, schlieBende ratio mit einbezieht, und da die ausdruckliche
Beschrankung auf 'sinnliche Erfahrung' nie bedeutet, daB nur das sinnliche Vermogen des Menschen sein Weltverhalten bestimmt, ist die
Erfahrung des Sinnlichen alles andere als nur erfahrene Sinnlichkeit.
Dabei ist zunachst nicht an die bei jeder kleinsten Erfahrung durch die
Sinne immer auch emotional en oder volitiven Momente gedacht, die
sich dem Erfahrungsrezipienten erschlieBen. Die Faktizitat dieser
emotionalen und volitiven Miterfahrung ist vermutlich allgemein, ihre
materiale Inhaltlichkeit jedoch laBt sich kaum in der Weise verallgemeinern, daB sie zum Gegenstand verbindlicher Aussagen praskriptiver oder deskriptiver Urteile gewahlt werden konnte. Gedacht ist an
die rationalen Momente humanen Weltverhaltens, die immer schon
aktiviert sind, auch wenn 'nur Sinnliches', raum-zeitlich MeBbares als
Erfahrungsgegenstand zur Kenntnis kommt. Es ist nie nur das sinnliche
Vermogen menschlichen Weltverhaltens im Vollzug, wenn rein Empirisches zu Erfahrungsgegebenheit gelangt. Die Erfahrung von rein
Sinnlichem ist immer auch schon die Erfahrung von Erfahrung des
Sinnlichen, das heiBt von Vernunftvermogen begreifender, urteilender
und schlieBender Art.
Zur Sache eines vernunftgeleiteten Umgangs mit der erfahrbaren
Wirklichkeit gehort alles, was sich vor dieser Vernunft ausweist. Das,
was sich ausweist, kann nie nur das raum-zeitlich Sachliche sein, weil
bereits in dessen Ausweis sich mehr als Raumlichkeit und Zeitlichkeit
ausweist.
103
Zur Sache eines vernunftgeleiteten Umgangs mit der erfahrbaren

Wirklichkeit gehort fundamental auch die ausweisende Instanz, die
Vernunft in all ihren moglichen Ausweisungsformen. (Damit ist noch
nicht entschieden, ob die Sache Vernunft je in der Weise Sache ihres
Weltverhaltens werden kann).
Sachlich mit den Erfahrungsgegebenheiten im wissenschaftlichen
Sinn umzugehen bedeutet daher vor aHem, sie einerseits nicht unkritisch auf ihre MeB- und Zahlbarkeit einzuschranken, andererseits das
wissenschaftliche Weltverhalten des Erfahrungsrezipienten nicht auf
volitives und emotionales Verhalten auszuweiten. Dies bedeutet nicht,
daB Emotionales oder Voluntives nicht zur Sache der ratio (= begreifender, urteilender, schlieBender regulativer Vernunft) gewahlt werden
konnte, aber nicht zur Sache von emotio oder voluntas, wenn wissenschaftsrelevante Erkenntnis erreicht werden solI.
Wenn im uneingeschrankten Sinn sachlich mit den Erfahrungsgegebenheiten im wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisstreben umgegangen wird,
dann wird weder deren Geschichtlichkeit noch deren ergreifbare
Bedeutungs und Sinnverwiesenheit, ihre verbale oder nonverbale Sinnausdriicklichkeit, ausgeklammert.
Noch einmal sei vor dem MiBverstandnis gewarnt: Zu dies em Erfahrungsbegriff und dem dazu komplementaren Begriff der Sachlichkeit
braucht es weder ein konspiratives Urphanomen auf seiten des Erfahrungsrezipienten, noch eine inteHektive Bedeutungs- oder Sinnerfassung.
Es ist nichts anderes am Werk als das Vermogen des mit Vernunft
qualifizierten Menschen, aus Lauten der Sprache Sinneinheiten zu
erfassen beziehungsweise zu konstituieren, das heiBt mit seinen Sinnen
sinnvoH umzugehen und aus nicht willkiirlich geformter Sinnlichkeit
den formenden Sinn zu erfassen. Dies leistet bereits jeder, der messend
und zahlend an sinnlich Vermitteltes herangeht. U nter den erlauterten
Bedingungen von Erfahrung und Sachlichkeit sollen sinnliche Erfahrungsgegebenheiten durch die Fahigkeiten einer auf Erkenntnis gerichteten Vernunft begriffen, beurteilt und in ihren Bedeutungsverweisen
erschlossen werden. Dadurch entsteht ein System aufeinander bezogener, kritisierbarer Erkenntnisurteile. Wenn die Bedingungen ihrer
Kritik formal identisch sind mit den Bedingungen ihrer Behauptung,
dann haben die Erkenntnisurteile zurecht Wahrheitsanspruch - wenn
auch materiale Identitat aufgewiesen werden kann.
104
ALEXIUS 1. BUCHER
3.3.2. Folgen des neuen Sachlichkeitsbegriffes (fUr eine Ethikbegriindung)

Die Methode, erkenntnisintentional mit Erfahrungsgegebenheiten umzugehen, muB sich an der sich zeigenden Sache bewahren, als Methode
aber ist sie immer der Erkenntnisweg des SUbjekts. Erkenntnis im
Umgang mit Erfahrungsgegebenheiten in methodisch systematischer
Absicht zu gewinnen, ist gebunden an den Willen des auf Erfahrungsgegebenheit gerichteten Rezipienten von Erfahrung. Sein Auf-Erfahrungaus-Sein ist erkenntnisintentional, sowie sein Rezipieren von Erfahrung
mit dem rationalen Vernunftvermogen geschieht.
Unter diesen ~l1ethodischen Voraussetzungen ist Ethik verniinftig
kommunikabel moglich. Wenn das, was der Mensch sittlich soIl und
will, als Sache wissenschaftlicher Betatigung gewahlt werden soIl, dann
ist Verstiindigung nur moglich, wenn empirische Praxis sich als sittlich
formiert erweist. Zwischenmenschlich zugangige Praxis, sei sie im
Material der Geschichte auf Zeit oder im Material lebensweltlicher
Begegnung auf den Raum bezogen, bietet dem erfahrungsrezipienten
Menschen einen Fundus von Phiinomenen, die sich als Ausdruck
ethischer Handlungen verstehen lassen. Diese Phanomene werden sittliche Phanomene genannt.
Katholische Universitiit
Eichstiitt
ANMERKUNGEN
s. Schuller, Bruno, Die Begriindung sittlicher Urteile. Typen ethischer Argumentation
in der Moraltheologie (Dusseldorf: 21980),1973, S. 308.
2 Zum Folgenden vgl. Griindel, Johannes, Die Erfahrung als konstitutives Element der
Begrundung sittlicher Normen, in: Sauer, J. (Hg.), Normen im Konflikt. Grundfragen
einer erneuerten Ethik (Freiburg: 1977), SS. 55-82; Laing, R. D., Phiinomenologie der
Erfahrung (Frankfurt: 41971).
3 Vgl. Egenter, Richard, Erfahrung ist Leben (Munchen: 1974), zum Begriff religioser
Erfahrung s. Rahner, Karl, Schriften zur Theologie, Bd 3 (Einsiedeln: 31964), SS. 105109; zum Begriff der Urerfahrung s. Hilderbrand, Dietrich v., Christliche Ethik
(Dusseldorf: 1959), SS. 11-34; zum Begriff der Wesenserfahrung s. Reiner, Hans, Die
Philosophische Ethik (Heidelberg: 1964), SS. 26-27.
4 Vgl. Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, hg. v. Selby-Bigge, Lewis A.
(Oxford: 1888) (Nachdruck 1978, Bd II, 3.3).
5 Scheler, Max, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materia Ie Wertethik, Vorwort
1
105
zur 2. Auflage, Bern 1921, S. 13; vgl. a. Moore, George E., Ethics (London: 1912) (dt.:
Grundprobleme der Ethik (Munchen: 1966).
6 Vgl. Williams, Bernard, Morality and Emotions, in: Casey, John (ed.), Morality and
Moral Reasoning (London: 1971); Tugendhat, Ernst, Vorlesungen zur Einfiihrung in
sprachanalytische Philosophie (Frankfurt: 1976); Rieken, Friedo, Allgemeine Ethik
(Stuttgart: 1983), bes. S. 41.
7 s. Reiner, Hans, Die philosophische Ethik (Heidelberg: 1964), S. 26.
8 Vgl. Kerschensteiner, Georg, Begrijf der Arbeitsschule (Miinchen: 12 1957, 11912), S.
29.
9 Scheler, Max, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Bern: 61962, 1928), S. 41.
10 Hengstenberg, Hans-Eduard, Grundlegung der Ethik (Stuttgart: 1969), S. 38.
11 ibidem S. 39; vgl. a. Scheler, Max, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (Bonn:
21923), p. 187; zum iihnlich objektivistischen Begriff der Sachlichkeit s. a. Pieper, Josef,
Die Wirklichkeit und das Gute (Miinchen: 71963), S. 83; Litt, Theodor, Technisches
Denken und menschliche Bildung (Heidelberg: 1957), SS. 17-23: Der Mensch als
Sach-Walter und als Person, S. 36. Wiihrend Piepers Subjekt-Objekt-Relation thomasischer Philo sophie verpflichtet ist, entwickelt Theodor Ballauff seine Interpretation von
Sachlichkeit vor dem Hintergrund von Heideggers Seinlassen des Seienden, das beim
Menschen zur Offenbarkeit kommt: vgl. Ballauff, Theodor, Systematische Pddagogik
(Heidelberg: 1962), SS. 169-170; Heidegger, Martin, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit
(Frankfurt: 51967,21949), bes S. 15; Bucher, Alexius J., Martin Heidegger - Metaphysikkritik als Begrijfsproblematik (Bonn: 1972), SS. 138-139 u. SS. 169-170.
12 Hengstenberg, Hans-Eduard, Grundlegung der Ethik, S. 38.
IJ ibidem S. 33; dazu a. ders., Philosophische Anthropologie (Stuttgart: 31966, 1957).
14 ders., Grundlegung der Ethik, S. 38.
GRACIANO GONZALEZ R. ARNAIZ
RESPONSIBILITY AS THE PRINCIPLE OF

INDIVIDUALITY: AN ALTERNATIVE TO
HUSSERL'S THEORY OF INTUITION
Although the concept of morality has been especially relevant within all
philosophical currents, Emmanuel Levinas now proposes a new way of
expressing the moral experience. "Morality," as a world of interrelations
and in its strict generic sense, is the core of his philosophy. He is
convinced that in this world of interrelation, sense or non-sense act
toward a certain human fulfillment.
Levinas understands the concretion of the world of interrelation as a
means of meeting "I," the identifying element of oneself, and "the
Other," understood as the external or foreign reference point to that
"I." A forceful subjectivity emerges from the tension created by these
two elements which, at first, is declared untouchable or unreachable,
and therefore requires a new way of "saying."
Despite the system and "appetites" of "I," the basis for this subjectivity, my own and that of the Other, lies in morality, which presides
over this encounter. Following this understanding, the moral is no
longer another branch of philosophy, but is primary in philosophy,
inasmuch as it "colors" significantly all other approaches.
How can we express this reality? In what way does subjectivity
begin? Or to phrase it another way, why is morality - the moral
experience - a never-ending philosophical quest? Do we circumscribe
ethical understand to lucid moments - intuitions - of thought? We
will attempt to discover the answers to these questions, glimpsing at the
work of Levinas, in an attempt to open up new horizons, and to
establish otherwise, - the human sense.
With respect to this, we think it important to point out that Levinas'
philosophical search is inscribed within a phenomenological context,
and that his outlook is personal and mature. Phenomenology is used as
a method! and not as a system as such. A new interpretation of
philosophical subjects arises from this method.
The innovation in utilizing phenomenology as a system was that it
questioned the traditional notion of objectivity, 2 which pre-supposed a
subject-object gnoseological space, and which was based on the mis107
A - T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXV, 107 -12l.
108
understanding that a homogenization of existence existed. This concept

has supposed a permanent oscillation between idealism and realism.
A key method in philosophy is the presupposition that intentional
consciousness and intuition are intermediaries which uncovers a key
method in philosophy: Back to the things themselves. Nevertheless, this
intuition, which refers to representation as an assertive reality, emphasizes an intellectual trait, inasmuch as "intentionality" remains prey to
representation. Following this, the only step that remains is to define
the "independence" of consciousness as an absolute reality, the reality
ordering the reaP
On the other hand, the recovery of consciousness' intentional space,
as an appropriate place for "the objective" permits a doubt to arise in
all types of construction. At the same time, when intuition is used, there
is immediate contact with reality. On this same line of thought, the
recovery of consciousness' intentional space would reveal the intellectual character of Husserl's theory. Husserl affirms that representation
serves as the basis for all conscious life, it being the same as "the form
of the intentional that assures the basis for the rest."4 In his philosophy,
knowledge and representation sustain the primacy of the theoretical
consciousness which blocks the exclusivity of "the" reality supported by
intuition. Levinas concludes that Husserl is, therefore, faithful to
Western idealism,s that he maintains an optic interpretation of Being, in
which the subject is led away from reality and later is proposed as origin
and freedom.
Heidegger proposes the insertion of man into his existence, which
supposes a decisive step here, and allows the appearance of the
concrete "I" (yo concreto) as a philosophical space.
Following all modern philosophy beginning with Descartes, Husserl
has located his philosophical contribution within the gnoseological
discussion, one leading into an ontological discussion of the subjectobject relation. Intentionality should lead to the same search for the
meaning of being in man and, therefore, should leave aside the reductive intellectualism of knowledge, in short, of consciousness as the location of "the truth of Being." In this way, philosophy, from Heidegger
onwards, "ceases to be an abstract task and is converted into a concrete
possibility of existence, of 'Dasein.' "6
Levinas takes into account the new perspective developed by
Heidegger. Supported by this statement of things, he denounces the
search for the concrete found in Husserl as a well-disguised Western
RESPONSIBILITY AS THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY
109
idealistic redoubt that, in the last instance, reduces the meaning of

existence to knowledge. But at the same time, phenomenology, utilized
as a method, permits him to go beyond all types of annihilating
reductions, for the sake of the concrete, in a synthesis that is well-tried
and unquestionable. There is a risk in the ontological dissolution of the
concrete Being to Being-in-general, i.e., into neutrality, which in his
thinking allows progress.
It was a time of "captivity" and of reincorporation into French postwar thought caught between existentialism and its controversy with
Marxism. In this context, Levinas, who has used Heidegger to overcome
the "defects" in Husserl's thought, becomes anti-Heideggerian? A
decisive step towards the construction of Levinas' thought is the
proclaimed danger of drowning Being in Being-in-general, which
Heidegger perceived. s
For Levinas, ontology is no longer a study of Essence but of beings
that constitute as subjects in the fight to not get lost in the anonymous
indetermination, which he defines as an impersonal THERE IS. He
differs from Heidegger, "who situates the drama of existence within the
dialectic of being and nothing, and conceives of authentic existence as
an ex-tasis oriented towards the End. Levinas attempts to speak of the
confrontation in terms of anonymous existence . . . and the personal
way of being, when man saves himself from the unsheltered being
opening the way to a world which he cultivates and works for, his
material existence. 9 The drama of existence consists in the struggle of
being to maintain its individuality in the face of THERE IS,1O which it
does with the HERE (lei) and the NOW (Instant).
Being acquires its separation and its manner of being in the NOW,11
the NOW being the original present in which being separates the past
from the future. This does not lead to a tragic end, but rather to the
achievement of subjectivity by means of work. Thanks to work, being is
capable of "attaching" itself to things that appear as a given world, and
through the consciousness of this "attachment," being recognizes this
world as coinciding with itself.
This coincidence of the existent with its existence - a hypothesis through exteriority, is not only found in conscious consciousness, but
also in a sleeping consciousness, i.e., unconsciousness.'2 This supposes,
not simply an opposition, but an original way of being. Both conscious
consciousness and unconsciousness have their characteristic space, they
are the HERE from which existence functions as such. This space is not
110
abstract, 13but manifests itself materially, as "at home", forming thus a

redoubt of interiority enabling one to oppose the anonymous THERE
IS.
In the NOW,14 there can arise the possibility of an encounter with
existence that inaugurates the substantiality of the subject in its becoming, therefore establishing its time. ls The possibility of this constitution
of the subject, who is thereby converted into such a subject, not in
relation to nothing, but through a relation with "the-other-than-him"16
is maintained by Plato's idea of the Good, which goes beyond Being,
and which acts as a resort in the struggle to not perish in the anonymity
of Being.17 Thus, it seems, all Western philosophy of oneness or of
totality, is questioned, in the primacy of individual-being, incapable of
being reduced to Being as the first category of reality.ls
If the only possibility of establishing "the-Other-from-me" passes
through the possibility of constituting the singularity of the individual,
several questions must be answered.
a) The first is the subject of isolation. Above we have tried to explain
the constitution of subjectivity, based on the two moments, HERE and
NOW. But if this is so, how can we overcome the solipsism of this
subjectivity, which allows us to pass on to a transcendence which,
according to Levinas, should be beyond Being? This is the question
that Levinas attempts to answer in Le Temps et L 'Autre, in a way
similar to existentialist thought. To Levinas, it is clear that "there is
solitude because there are existents,"19 inasmuch as each existent is
intransferable, ontologically speaking, and is therefore, unique. Solitude
is, in this way, a positive reality, separated from THERE IS, but also
the burden and responsibility of a material existent,20 which draws that
situation on towards the End.
Only the death experience as an encounter with the Other marks the
end of hypothetical subjectivity, i.e., the end of the coinciding of the
existent with its existence. This creates a contradictory situation Levinas calls it dialectic 21 when "I" encounters the mystery of the Other
(Death), "I" disappears as a subject, making any kind of I-Other
relationship impossible. On the other hand, Levinas believes that the
Other does not become diluted in "I" but, rather, tends toward a
"mysterious zone," behind and beyond the tension to "retard" the Other
(Death) through work or possessions. Using memory, "I" can regress
until it falls into the radical alterity of the annonymous, which is now an
111
other as opposed to the other (death), unforseeable and capable of

facing "I." At least one experience exists that confirms this possibility:
the Other, which is not "I," can appear in the son, who keeps "re-living"
my subjectivity. Later, Levinas will resume this position approaching it
from the idea of infinity.
What is interesting to underline here is that the concrete situation to
which Levinas makes reference, is a situation in which the event
confronts a subject who is helpless, although he deals with the event in
a certain way. This event is the relationship with the Other, a face to
face encounter which, at the same time, gives and takes from the Other.
Levinas tries to resituate this event within alterity, as a mystery and a
game of Eros, under the ontological notion of fertility, as the present
exteriorization in the Other, capable of transcending death in the son
through fatherhood. 22
As opposed to the possibility of the impossible that death supposes
in Heidegger, Levinas proposes the possibility of the son, in that after
my death the son will continue to "expound" the subjective in opposition to Being, manifesting in this way, transcendence.
b) However, if the transcendental - the face of the Other - exists in an
erotic relationship and in fertility, would this mean again the dissolution
of the sUbjective in pledge of a mythical existent, the residue of the
Semitic tradition of at chosen people? This is the second question we
would like to develop.
The overcoming of solipsism with knowledge or understanding, as
mediators of the neutral concept, leads the concrete being to alienation.
Therefore, it is essential to find another type of transcendence to which
concrete Being can unfold without being alienated in this opening. It is
this requirement that will repair the displacement of the meaning of
transcendence, return it from the erotic relation to the ethical relation,
from the neutral to the absolute of the ethical imperative, which is the
basis of all rationality?3
Because of this, ontology, in spite of its anthropological "engagement," needs to be surpassed for there to be possible a metaphysical
ethic that studies Being as Being without yielding to the neutral concept
or the totalization of understanding. "We oppose to the understanding
and the signification taken from splitting the horizon [Heidegger] the
significance of the face,"24 writes Levinas, of the one who is here and
talks to me in person. Therefore, understanding a person is talking to
112
him. Establishing the existence of the Other, letting him be, is already
accepting this existence, taking into account expressions that do not
refer to understanding or letting be.
In the word, an original relationship is sketched out indicating the
function of language, not as being subordinated to the awareness gained
from the presence of the other or from his nearness, or from communing with him, but as a condition of that "conscious awakening. 25
Language "visualizes," in this way, the ethical relationship, and converts
it into an "obligated" context for individual fulfillment. Therefore, ethics
precedes ontology.
However, this ethical ambit of alterity is such that it does not extend
to the alienation of individual freedom, freedom commanded from the
height of the Other.26 In this commandment, apparently heteronomous,
subjectivity finds its autonomy, its non-violent fulfillment, in the
presence of the Other, "committing us to socialize with him."27 In this
way, concrete Being is more than a laborious seeking to satisfy selfish
needs broken by the desire of-the-other. It is precisely the desire, as an
outlet itself, with no possible return that opens up another dimension
and manifests itself in a face-to-face encounter. On the other hand, the
tension created between desire and the desired, which is impossible to
reduce to a system, makes possible the appearance of the idea of the
infinite which is transformed into the true ethical guarantee of the
Other's appearance. Only through this "infinitization" of the Other, can
the "I" recognize the Other as a person, and have no option but to
speak. Pronouncing that first word, which proceeds from the absolute
I-Other difference and thus breaks the continuity of Being and of
history, making me responsible and removing forever the risks of
alienation or the dissolution of subjectity.
Following this, the moral "obedience" to the Other, which does not
commit us to a totality or a system,28 is "a true noumenal phenomena
one fulfilled in the expression,29 and which is beyond every totality or
system. "In a word, the noumenon should turnout to objectively
overcome a reason which tries to monopolize objectivity in the field of
phenomena. And this is where the originality of Levinas' thought lies:
the noumenon is the Other, which appears in a non-violent relationship, and is essentially language and non-power: "therefore metaphysics
is possible."30 Ethics is metaphysical, and at the same time first
philosophy, because it is possible to create a phenomenology of
113
noumenon from language, which already presupposes metaphysics in

someway.
II
The overcoming of solipsism and alienation in the ethical relation

leaves the way clear for a metaphysical deepening of Levinas' subject,
the relation with the Others. This brings us to the threshold of his work
in Totality and Infinity.
Thus, "I" is understood as a totality fighting for subsistence in the
exterior ambit, by means of the approval of objects (Others). But this
"I" which, at the same time, discovers this "material" exterior, also
perceives that there are different freedoms 3! that cannot be reduced.
So then, the relationships established on this "first" level are already
ethical. However, it can happen that the "I," because of its will and
its labor, is alienated. "This is the first injustice."32 This is a truly
ontological alienation, because it discovers "I" living in an economic
totality, distorting and invalidating the world of the Other by labour
and, consequently, trying to reduce and take possession of him.
In this context, the ethical qualification is given by the presence of
the Other, as manifested in a face-to-face relation, breaking all types of
systems 33 in order to affirm "I" as a subject. "The face-to-face relation is
a negation of the negation,"34 and inspires a respect in me so that the
Other "commands me." "I" and the Other, constituted on the fringe
of totality, can be put to work for that totality, fighting for justice 35
following an economically liberating commitment.
Thus, is maintained the co-existence of the materialistic statement
with the ethical perspective and the consciousness of violence which
totality implies. These points will be re-established and surpassed in his
book Totality and Infinity, and more significantly in Autrement qu'etre
ou au-dela de l'essence. 36
The question to be analyzed here is, can the "I" and the Other,
constituted at the margin of totality, still be such without reducing one
to the other. For this, Levinas proposed the step from the erotic to the
ethical, insisting on the primacy of the said ethical ambit of alterity, as
a guarantee for the maintenance of both (the "I" and the Other) in
tension thereby preventing their disappearance in the anonymity of
THERE IS. However, there was a risk in this new philosophical
approach - that the understanding of the "I" as a "joyful and econom-
114
ical" existent would finally reduce the Other by work or necessity if

a new concept of transcendence be not put forward, i.e., if a new
comprehension of exteriority is not undertaken in a decisive way.
The choice in Levinas' philosophy to "overcome" this impasse at this
point in Heidegger's philosophy in order to maintain the transcendence
of the Other is the boosting of this transcendence, which Levinas sees
threatened in the Heideggerian ontology that reduces "the relation with
the Other to a relation with the neutral that is Being."37 This choice
leads him to refer to the idea of Good in Plato as the restoration of
another philosophical angle, which is reaffirmed in the "Cartesian
analysis of the idea of Infinity,"38 and which refers ultimately to that
which is beyond of Being.
Only thus, does exteriority remain open to the irreducible ethical
experience, and is it by this experience converted into the primitive and
true "place" in the "I" -Other relation. The "ethical texture" of the
exteriority in which the meeting between the I and the Other takes
place, guarantees the impossibility of the reduction of the Other to the
"I," and at the same time, underlines the "height" from which the Other
"commands me." Facing the Other, the "I" is responsible for pronouncing one word.
In Levinas, this ethical experience is not based on knowledge or on
contemplation. Its radicality as experience does not allow it to quality
as a superstructure, but as an insatiable desire beyond all need. True
desire, according to Levinas, "is that which the desired does not fulfill
but only deepen."39
Thus we have the elements with which Levinas will construct his
philosophical vision of the Other. The ontological individualization in
THERE IS is replaced by a metaphysical approach in which the "I"
(Moi) constitutes itself as the totality, whose interiority will be called
the Same (Meme). This interiority lived in ENJOYMENT, understood
as the joy of living "within myself," constitutes the psychic reality and
manifests itself as a "healthy egoism" which emphasizes its separation
from totality. Enjoyment is characterized, in an approach to the Other
in the Same, by the "feedback" paradigm as the exposure of a need
requiring covering.4o The appearance of DESIRE, of the touch of the
idea of infinity, produces a breach in the Same, in which the selfsufficiency of the Same gives way to Desire for the Other.
In this new situation, the "I" that lives in the world, does not live
unsheltered, but undertakes its being-in-the-world from a dwelling in
115
which acceptance, symbolized by the feminine aspect, gives exteriority

an opportunity to seep in, i.e., transcendence, which has not been
molded as an absolute and rash alterity that judges me.
If through labor, the "I" appropriates objects (the Others), assimilating them; from the dwelling, the "I" is capable of establishing a
distance between the "I" and the objects originating from the elements.
From the side of the dwelling, which keeps its doors and windows
open 41 to the hospitality of the Other, the possibility of offering oneself
to the Other arises. In other words, in the "warmth of the home" one
best perceives the necessity of pronouncing the word that decisively
breaks the self-sufficiency of the "I." To start talking, in this situation, is
to establish the primal significance, in which the spoken word acquires
depth of meaning, i.e., apart from rhetoric, ethical weight. Speech is now
possible.
The appearance of the Other as FACE that is directed towards me
and that talks, puts an end to any type of power relationship and
invalidates "my possesion of power"42 establishing a critical activity by
which the "I" feels blame for the weakness of the Other.
Following this, the DESIRE for the Other is born and the face-toface encounter is derived, both being the object of metaphysics. The
purity of the relationship, as it appears in the face-to-face encounter, is
such because of speech, which, in this way, converts itself into the
primary relationship possible between the Same and the Other, thus
establishing the significance of Being. In this significance the terms are
absolved from blame in the relationship in which they stand, remaining
absolute within the relationship. The spoken word "under these circumstances," does not rise from the interior of consciousness, but from the
Other who puts a question to that consciousness, by having to say a
word.
Thus one can understand that: "the overcoming of ontology is a
condition of morality. The description of the subject looking only for its
happiness unites, with the ethical based on alterity which requires for its
constitution an independent and happy subject, who is challenged by
the hunger of the Other, a subject who is capable of feeling ashamed of
the arbitrariness of his freedom."43
III
We see thus, that the dialectic of Levinas' philosophical exposition,
116
which began with a criticism of Husser! based on Heidegger, continues

with a criticism of Heidegger himself from the viewpoint of Kant's practical reason modified by the face-to-face relation, which is postulated as
foundational.
After a review of the risks involved in a morality based on the
Kantian prototype,44 which is labeled subjective and incapable of taking
in the determination of works beyond the subjective determination, the
establishment of the appearance of the face outside of the totality and
material interests, as an absolute foundation for morality. The ambiguity which this choice between the experience of the face-to-face
encounter and the objectivation of this experience in language,45 which
is brought out in Totality and Infinity, will be the key to his approach to
matters in Autrement qu'etre au au dela de l'essence.
In that work, Levinas discusses the possibility of speaking of that
which is beyond Being from the amphibology of Saying and the Said,
which establishes the appearance of a third in the nearness of a
closeness, understood as responsibility for the other. 46 The notion of
proximity supposes, from here onwards, the surpassing and suppression
"of the distance of consciousness from ... ,"47 which is overcome by the
possibility of immediate contact without intermediaries. Here is where
the significance of sensitivity resides, before it is transformed into
sensation.
The moral experience, outlined thus, within sensitivity felt as closeness, remains an original and an-archic experience. This experience
shows us in itself the tension or contradiction of having to say one word
situated beyong being, at the point of disappearing into the fog of the
mystery but, however, pulled back by responsibility.
Behavior, and whether we like it or not, ethics refers to behavior,
implies being responsible for maintaining exteriority, in other words,
transcendence, i.e., SUbjectivity. Therefore, morality is neither the
seeking of solid principles, the creation of certain original conditions, or
the formal enactments of an assembly .... 48 To begin with, morality is
a question ofjustice.
To let subjectivity reveal itself, does not signify "to make a place" so
that the "I" can appear transformed into a consciousness that intuits the
"Other" subject. The Other is presented to me in person, without
schemas, pronouncing a living word, which is at the same time, a
novelty and a transgressor.
Before the Other as SUbjectivity, the neutrality of coherent thinking
117
system - no longer persuades, if it be understood as a common

search for categories in which to establish a dialogue - the social. The
subjectivity which appears in front of me is somebody to whom I talk.
Thus, the ultimate calling of speech is not description or knowledge,
but the instauration of a moral relation of urgency and judiciousness
that maintains the elements of its composition in their originality.
This relation, in the "warmth" of closeness, is morally significant, not
because of a metaphysical formalization of ethics, derived from the
purity of a face-to-face relationship,49 but because it derives from the
actual closeness which has, already and in itself, the significance of
responsibility. To be SUbjective is to be responsible for ... ,50 to feel
obligation to .... 51
To express this experience in words is the never-ending task of
moral philosophy, as is the challenge of keeping morality from being
lost in references to metaphysical worlds beyond, in its worst sense, or
in relation to subsistent entities, shrill ideologies, superstructures, ....
A Saying of responsibility within closeness exists, which would
account for "the Said" and Being without invalidating the significance
reached. To talk to the Other without submitting to a system, points to
a knowing which "would signify an enigma" 52 within the intrigue of the
closeness, permitting the "latest birth of the question ... without the
other, the neighbor, being absorbed into the theme which he reveals
himself.53
In the "Saying," there is an original word that justifies the Said itself,
which more than expressing a truth in itself, reveals a thought by means
of a combination of signs which should be deciphered from the
Other. 54 To decipher the message adequately, one should not make
increasingly more subtle reductions of consciousness, but should show
forth the Other in person, in closeness. Under the category of the
closeness, the ultimate meaning of "saying" is not knowledge, but the
instauration of an ethical language of the right to be, of the Other, one
spoken in terms of JUSTICE. In other words, speech develops out of
recognition of the Other, before whom the "I" commits itself with a
word of justice. A word which is impossible to manufacture one which
sustains the Other in his alterity and gives itself in the intrigue of the
ethical meaning (not the representative), expressed in never-ending
desire for-the-other.
Levinas' humanism of the "other," in this way, instaurates a concept
of SUbjectivity which establishes itself as such, already responding to the
118
Other. A subjectivity created from "collisions," and not by intuitions or

lucid moments of consciousness, but by "moments" of commitment in
sustaining the Other and the exteriority of transcendence. Only this
makes it possible to say that transcendence is the ambit of ethics, or,
even more, that the person verbalizes the in-finity of original testimony
- saying - the first real word, which no other expression has preceded.
To pronounce a word in this context, is not to refer to the interior of
a consciousness as a bearer of sense, but is to put in question this same
consciousness by means of the responsibility of having to say a word
before the Other. In short, it is a question of proposing responsibility as
the principle of individuation. Levinas, in answering the question of
whether man is individualized by matter or by form, says, "I uphold
individualization through responsibility for the Other." 55
In consequence, responsibility points to a subject that is constituted
as such in a relationship, that can and should be said, and in which he
feels already responsibility for something. This relation thus converts
itself into the supreme moral experience, in which, for the moment, a
concrete morality is not distinguished. 56
Only thus, will subjectivity and the possibility of "saying" the subjectivity of the Other, remain safeguarded. But for this, the moral experience would be inexpressable, i.e., ineffable.
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
NOTES
1 Cf., E. Levinas, Totalite et Infini. Essai sur L'Exteriorite (The Hague: 1974), 4th, xvi;
hereafter, TI.
2 Cf., E. Guillot, "Emmanuel Levinas, evoluci6n de su pensamiento" in Enfoques
Latinoarnericanos 3 (1975), p. 55.
3 From the start, Levinas is sensitive to this criticism which he finds in the followers of
Husser!; cf., E. Levinas, Theorie de l'intuition dans la Phenornenologie de Husserl
(Paris: 1970), 3rd, pp. 184-215, and also in the conclusion, pp. 216-223; hereafter,
TIPH.
4 Levinas, TIPH, p. 86.
5 On Husser!ian idealism see P. Ricoeur, Le Conflit des interpretations. Essais de
herrnenetique (Paris: 1969), p. 253, and also by the same author, El discurso de la
Accion (Madrid: 1981), p. 144; A. Muralt, "La Solution Husser!ienne de debat entre Ie
realisme et l'idealisme," Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Entranger 149
(1959), p. 545. What Levinas reproaches in Husser! is briefly: the objective character of
119
the intentional, the immanentism of consciousness, the claim to absolutism of the

subject, the phenomenological idealism and monism that conceive of the cogito as
arche: ct. Levinas, TIPH, pp. 88-89, 99, 101, 174, 203, 222. All this can be seen also
in: E. Levinas, En Decouvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: 1974), pp. 3,
12, 26; Hereafter, EDHH. Also consult the article by C. A. Kelbley: "An Introduction
to Emmanuel Levinas," Thought. A Review o/Culture and Idea 49 (1974) p. 85.
6 Guillot, op. cit., p. 63; ct. E. Levinas, EDHH, pp. 53-76, mostly p. 63.
7 Cf. E. Levinas, De l'Existence a l'Existant (paris: 1978) pp. 19, 169-171, hereafter
cited as: EE. Also EDHH, p. 171: And Humanisme de l'autre homme (Montpellier:
1978), pp. 88-90, hereafter cited as HAH; TI, pp. 16-17. Historically convinced that
"all philosophy which accepts the being, tragic despair of being and justified crimes, is
barbarian." E. Levinas, "De I'evasion," in Recherches Philosophique V (1935-36) p.
391. Afterwards his criticism of Heidegger is not as harsh; ct., E. Levinas, Ethique et
Infini. Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo (Paris, 1982), pp. 31-41. This change of attitude
is also reflected in the work of S. MaIka, Lire Levinas (Paris: 1984), pp. 19-20.
8 The appearance of EE marks the beginning of his own thought.
9 Guillot, op. cit., p. 69.
10 Levinas, EE, p. 95.
11 Ibid., p. 55.
12 Ibid., p. 110.
13 Ibid., p. 122.
14 Ibid., p. 170.
15 Ibid., p. 130.
16 Ibid., pp. 61,162,163.
17 Heidegger, according to Levinas, does not free himself from a "shameful materialism
that erects the landscape or 'nature mort' into the origin of the human." See Levinas, TI,
p. 275. Cf., L. Boukaert, "Ontology and Ethics: Reflections on Levinas' Critique of
Heidegger," International Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1970), pp. 405-407.
18 The first question is that "in Being there are beings." Levinas, EE, p. 174.
19 E. Levinas, "Le Temps et L'Autre," in J. Wahl and H. de Waelhens and 1. Hersch, E.
Levinas, Le Chiox-Le Monde-L'Existence (Grenoble-Paris: 1947), p. 132.
20 Ct., ibid., p. 147.
21 Ibid., p. 175.
22 Cf., ibid. (ed. 1979), pp. 77-89.
23 Cf.: E. Levinas, "L'Ontologie est-elle fondamentale?" Revue de Mlitaphysique et de
Morale 56 (1951), p. 95.
24 Ibid., p. 98.
25 Ibid., p. 93.
26 Cf. E. Levinas, "Liberte et Commandement," Revue de Mlitaphysique et de Morale
58 (1953), p. 270.
27 Ibid.
28 Even though this obedience be a blind submission to myths or a "reasonable"
obedience to the state. The last is critical, it being a constant in Levinas' work. Ethics
can never be reduced to politics.
29 E. Levinas, "Liberte et Commandement," op. cit., p. 270.
30 D. E. Guillot, "Introducci6n," in E. Levinas, Totalidad e Infinito (Sp. trans.), op. cit.,
p.21.
120
31 Cf. E. Levinas, "Le Moi et la TotaIite," Revue de Meraphysique et de Morale 4

(1954), p. 356.
32 Ibid., p. 365.
33 Ct., ibid., p. 370.
34 Ibid., p. 37l.
35 Cf., ibid.,pp. 371-372.
36 We refer to Totalite et Infini, op. cit., and to perhaps his most important work: E.
Levinas, Autrement qu'etre on au-dela de l'essence (The Hague: 1974); hereafter AE.
37 Levinas, EDHH (1976), p. 170.
38 Ibid., p. 171.
39 Ibid., p. 175.
40 Cf., Levinas, TI, p. 87.
41 One can here appreciate a clear critical allusion to Leibniz's thought.
42 Levinas, TI, p. 172.
43 Guillot, "Introducci6n," op. cit., p. 27.
44 The Kantian influence in Levinas, especially in his mature work, always remains in
the shadow. Thus, for example, in TI he only quotes Kant on 8 occasions pags. 36, 51,
74,92, 109, 162, 163, 170, and not precisely his practical philosophy but the constitution of the object i.e. the understanding of sensibility. A wider study of this subject can
be followed in: J. De Greef, "Ethique, reflexion et histoire chez Levinas," Revue
Philosophique de Louvain 67 (1969), pp. 431-460.
45 This is the criticism of Levinas by C. V. Van Buijtenen, "Emmanuel Levinas: Tusen
Politiek en Eschatologie," Bijdragen 28 (1967), p. 204 when he says: "if transcendental
ethics is only accessible to a non-reflective consciousness, are we just victims of
morality?"
46 We cannot agree with Gaviria because although it is true that "the act of creation"
supposes a first movement towards the other, we cannot remain there. Cf. O. Gaviria
Alvarez, "L'idee de creation chez Levinas: une archeologie du sens," Revue Philosophique de Louvain 72 (1974), pp. 509-538.
There is an essential second movement which is, that of responsibility for the other,
"responsibility for the other - for his misery and his freedom - which does not go
back to any commitment, project, or previous anxiety, and which the subject fecI'S
within himself before feeling being-in-debt." E. Levinas, "Dieu et la philosophie," Le
Nouveau Commerce, pp. 30-31 (1975) p. 123, emphasis by the author.
47 Levinas,AE,p.113.
48 The ethical search has been dedicated to solving these questions from Aristotle to
Kant, with the intention of finding a rational principle or a moral consideration that
explains the problems established by morality. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford:
1971); C. Perelmans and L. Olbrechtstyteca, Traiti! de L 'argumentation. La nouvelle
rhetorique (Brussels, 1976, 3rd ed), express their concern to find, either the original
conditions on which to base justice, or the rhetorical possibilities for discussing the
moral principle. Habermas would base the attainment of the intersubjective consensus
on the ground of an ideal situation of dialogue which facilitates advance towards an
ideal community of communication. Here, the premises of truth, justice, and freedom
articulate the linguistic-experimental world of consenting people, even as the mentioned
ideal community of communication entails a sense of moral fulfillment, i.e., it grants a
121
significant meaning to human fulfillment. J. Habermas, Moralbewubtsein und Kommunikatives Handeln (Frankfurt, 1983).
49 Reference here is made to the metaphysical formalization of ethics elaborated in TI.
Cf., p. 45.
50 Cf. Levinas, EDH, p. 225.
51 Levinas, AE, p. 102.
52 Ibid., p. 200. The meaning of this enigma is in the following, quote: "Desire, or the
response to the Enigma or morality, is a three-way intrigue: the "I" (Moi) approaches
infinity going toward the You .... "I" (Ie) approaches infinity in the measure that I
forget myself in favor of my neighbour who looks at me; ... "I" (Ie) approach infinity
sacrificing myself. Sacrifice is the rule and the criterion of rapproachment." Levinas,
EDHH,215.
53 Ibid. The insistence that one can, and should say this experience is overwhelming.
Or what amounts to the same thing, Desire has recourse to the Said and to Being so
that this experience has meaning. Cf. Levinas, AE, pp. 7, 9, (note), 19-20, 24, 37
(note), 48, 59, 78, 89-90, 104, 116 (note), 165, 188.
54 Cf. F. Guerrera Brezzi, "Pensari altrimenti la differenza: Levinas e Heidegger,"
Aquinas 26 (1983), p. 474.
55 E. Levinas, "Philosophie, Justice et Amour. Entretien avec Emmanuel Levinas,"
Esprit (1983), p. 12.
56 Cf., Levinas, EDHH, 225. Note that:
a) Closeness with regard to experience is not a "new experience," it is not even an
ethical experience. Thus, ethics, according the Levinas, does not emerge from a
specific moral experience;
b) Morality is established if the significance of closeness can orient the moral requirement, i.e., if one can and should say it and how to do it ... : this is the crux of the
amphibology; and
c) "Experience as the ultimate source of meaning" is questioned in Levinas, HAH, p.
14. The primacy of representation is thereby invalidated.
BRUNON HOLYST
THE TOPICALITY OF HUSSERL'S

ETHICAL ANTIRELATIVISM
"Philosophia prima et ultima." While an opinion or synthetic proposition like this would be accepted with difficulty by empiricists, phenomenologists accept such viewpoints as fundamentals of a specific
epistemological conception. Human striving for knowing the surrounding world has motivated people to admit various methodological bases,
in accordance with the epoch, culture, and mentality, which constitute
starting points for, or prisms of consequent images of the world.
An immemorial question, that of what is the truth, and what is not,
has also had an impact on the framing of basic criteria for philosophical
conceptions. The representatives of the subsequent doctrines have had
of necessity at least the conviction that the basic assumptions which
served as their research tools for their exploration of the surrounding
world, for their "science," constitutes an appropriate, ultimately valid
and reliable "apparatus." But the fact of the existence of many philosophical perspectives and methods of knowing the world has resulted
in relativism in the image of the world. Some kind of escape from
this epistemological chaos is observed in the .taking up again of the
questions that are simplest and most obvious for everybody. It seems
that their existence is undoubted. Husserl has admitted, as a basis for
his assumptions, that there are truths which do not demand the creation
of mental constructions, and whose essence does not need to be
extracted by inductive thinking; they are so obvious that we admit them
a priori.
When speaking of experience, empiricists mean a sensual experience
comprising things and physical phenomena, or introspection comprising
physical phenomena. The physical and psychical world, then, together
make up the world of real creatures existing within time. However,
besides the real world, there is, according to Husserl, the world of ideal
creatures existing beyond time.
Husserl proved that the psychological consequence of this is a heavy
charge against logical theory, for it makes theory completely impossible.
It makes it impossible subjectively since it takes away the bases for
distinguishing truths from errors; it also makes it impossible objectively,
123
A-T Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXV, 123-137.
124
BRUNON HOLYST
since, while negating logical truth it takes the sense away from such
expressions as the truth, theory, or object. It also results in relativism
for if logical truths depend on psychological facts, on physical organization, then a proposition which is true for one species can be false for
another.
Human beings and their judgements are changeable, but truths are
"eternal," eternal in this sense - that they are ideal norms for all judgements, irrespective of time and circumstances. In admitting the principle of the eidetic approach to such universals as right, justice, respect
for human dignity, wrong, etc., the phenomenological conception of
cognition maintains an antirelativistic position. According to the "principle of principles," the first and irreplaceable source of cognition is our
grasping through intuition that which is shown us by the world and the
relationships of human existence. If we assume this, then there are the
"truths" which regardless of times, circumstances, or pragmatic contexts
maintain their reasons and significance. Their antirelativism then, will
be narrowed to the scopes of their definitions.
The topicality of Husserl's ethical antirelativism will consist then of
inner constistency and a semantic univocal character. It would be
difficult to accept that there are two or more notions of, for example,
the right. What is good for one man, may be wrong, tragic, or burdensome for another. But, in these contexts, one more often than not
forgets that such involvements and relativism occur when the notion of
the right is narrowed down to strictly utilitarian, egocentric, and
situational viewpoints. The antirelativism of the intuitional grasping of
general truths will always maintain its topicality, since it is or should be
common to the human species. As the square is for everyone a figure
consisting of four equal sides, so justice, wrong, or right should be
understood or felt univocally. This is also a thought which seems to be
obvious. There is no place for creating complicated mental constructions or inductive analyses - these are notions which are "perceived"
almost intuitively. Husserl grasped that what escaped the attention of
others, what is simultaneously very obvious and glaring, what, so to
speak, guarantees human existence, is that which people ought to be
aware of. It is not difficult to distinguish life from death, joy from
sadness, freedom from slavery, and general and obvious rights which, to
put it simply, define our life in terms worthy of man. At the same time,
it is also true, that owing to the independent being which is charac-
HUSSERL'S ETHICAL ANTIRELA TIVISM
125
tenstIc of them, these general truths have an ideal significance, and,

therefore, it is difficult to approach them and equally easy to forget
them.
In Husserl's times both the theoretical and actual acceptance of his
conceptions encountered less opposition than in our civilization of
utilitarianism and technology. Nowadays, the basic "truths" called the
humanitarian principles, the sense of right and justice, the ability to
distinguish unethical activities from what defines humanity come more
difficultly to people. Even if the mature can, in moments of reflection,
rediscover in a rational way their human identity, there is still doubt
concerning the young. A consuming, utilitarian style of life is predominant in a glaring way, one that does not allow absolute basic values to
determine social life in terms of dignity, respect for man, right, and
justice. But rather than hurl ourselves into excessive pessimism, which
could be a proper response to the difference between Husserl's times
and ours, the conviction of the existence of absolute principles that
define human ways of life seems to be unshakeable. The right, sensibility, justice, respect for man, lose nothing of their essence, regardless
of the times and the culture, provided that humanity will use the
products and insights of times and places for progress and development, for enhancing the quality of life.
The existence of mankind towards the end of the twentieth century
actualizes Husserl's thesis. The world has passed into a phase with new
threats, but simultaneously it is still combating the problems of old.
That is why the eternal "truths" should enable today's man, full of
contemporary stresses, frustrations, and aggressions, to rediscover
Husserl's values.
Observing the changes going on in the world, the social and political
upheavals, the economic woes, we can clearly see that the changes
occurring are simply a reflection of disorder in the balance which until
recently existed between man and his environment. Scientists with a
catastrophist attitude claim that today's social and political unrest are
proof of our civilization's reaching its end. Whether the same will mean
the rise of a new civilization depends mainly on the reasoning of man,
upon his reflections on the meaning of his existence, upon the level of
his social existence, and upon whether or not his spiritual energy and
reason lapses into entropy. This is all the more important when we
consider that the margin of Nature's tolerance is clearly shrinking.
126
BRUNON HOLYST
I think that one of the greatest misunderstandings of our times is the

conviction that by taking small steps, solving single problems, and
liquidating local threats we can ward off adverse, impending events.
When he talks of overcoming Nature, man considers himself not as a
part of Nature itself but as an external force, destined to conquer
Nature, to dominate and master it. Man's domination of his natural
environment becomes thus the downfall of humanity. Hence, the
greatest threat is not civilization or technology, but rather both of these
spheres being in the hands of human beings, whose intellect cannot
grasp what humanity has created for its own usage.
Human thought has lost contact with reality and displays a specific
capacity for noticing and perceiving only those values which it has itself
created. The greatest enemy of man then, has become that which is
specific to human nature, especially when our ability to predict fails.
With the tremendous increase of knowledge, the enormous changes
in the environment, human nature is subjected to relatively small alterations. At the same time, the development of a technical civilization
causes more and more people to avail themselves of the achievements
of civilization in an uncontrolled manner. In societies called civilized or
modern, the number of people increases and along with this, there is a
rise in exorbitant, excessive "needs." Among the many values which are
important to man in the last decades of the twentieth century, the need
to consume dominates.
In the highly industrialized countries, the distinct increase in the
standard of living, and the further welfare aspirations of a broad strata
of the population surpass all sensible limits. More and more new
gadgets, often superfluous, keep appearing on the market, and we go
on, exchanging them for new, more modern ones. Unfortunately, the
societies of the developing countries are also taking the Western
hierarchy of values as their own, leading to an increased demand for
capital development and consumer goods.
The idea of attaining personal wealth exerts an enormous pull. The
act of accumulating wealth becomes a direct value, a value in itself.
Obsessive rapacity is accompanied by a pathological envy that others
have it better, or have more, or have something different.
Greed and envy are strong emotions; they are handicapping human
emotions, which give rise to stress and frustrations, provoking pathological forms of behavior. People motivated by greed and envy lose the
ability to view things in their proper perspective. Hence, they commit
127
mistakes which in the end lead to failure where there could have been
success. Irrationality in human activity appears at every level of the
social hierarchy.
According to Karen Horney, greed, the desire to accumulate goods
and the treadmill of consumption are at the same time a source of
stress and psychic injury and constitute a neurotic reaction to the fears
which haunt us today. However, she adds, "The influence which
internal requirements exert on the personality of an individual and on
his/her life, depends, to a certain extent, on the way in which he
responds to these requirements and experiences them."l
There exist, however, some permanent and inevitable consequences,
the intensity of which depends only on individual differences. According to a World Health Organization definition, mental health is understood as "a condition of full physical, mental, and social well-being, and
not only as an absence of disease or disability." If well-being is to
become a universal reality, then it must be understood that the first
condition of well-being is human wisdom based on an equilibrium
between man and his environment, on solicitude for the world's further
harmonious development. Hence, reflection on the hierarchy of values
has become one of the most pressing subjects of our time, one characterized by the possibility of almost unlimited creation and the simultaneous possibility of total annihilation. It does not take long in
societies whose operational methods are based on consumer values for
absurdities and injustices to appear. Both of these phenomena constitute a menace to the existence of the human species, threatening us with
either degeneration or cataclysm.
The development of technology and the effort of production leaves
but little space for the creative aspirations of man. The obtaining of
riches at any price robs mental life of the values necessary for harmonious development, the condition of a healthy personality.
The growing consumer needs are accompanied by a demographic
explosion. Over a period of 6,000 years the human population has
grown to five billion. In 1650, 500 million people inhabited the earth;
by 1950 the population had risen to 2,517,000,000. An extraordinary
increase is still expected, especially in the populations of Africa and
Asia. A continuation of this growth will create a feeling of overcrowdedness and, in consequence, a decline in the valuing of human
life.
The fears of demographers are shared by physicians and psycholo-
128
BRUNON HOL YST
gists, who witness rising esteem for physical force, cunning, agility,
aggression, violence, etc. Teenagers have a high opinion of these
qualities.
Violence now exists for the sake of violence. Aggression gives a
feeling of satisfaction. Wisdom seldom plays a leading role in the
hierarchy of values.
Whether materialistic or intellectual or social, the manifest hierarchy
of values varies from person to person and depends to a high degree
upon education and upbringing, on the cultural environment. However,
we can make a characteristic distinction using the criteria of religion
and philosophy.
In Eastern philosophy, man is one of Nature's elements, is part of
the whole. The principles of Taoism call for respect of life regardless of
its form; one of its chief values is reverence for any sign or form of life.
Western Christian religion in predicating the absolute superiority of
human beings suggests a different hierarchy of values, one that treats
Nature as an instrumental value which serves humanity's attainment of
immaterial values.
During recent years, certain reevaluations of the existing hierarchy of
the aims and motives of action have been noteworthy. Once again, "a
return to Nature," harmony and tranquil living in symbiosis with Nature
is now promoted among human values. At the same time, the twentieth
century, a era of activism and neo-positivism has seen the promotion
of such values as activity and competence. Work, which should help
man develop, often becomes destructive and counterproductive. Career
competition destroys the mental balance of those, who entering on the
rat race, are caught up in a spiral of continuously new, unfulfilled
aspirations. Our appetite grows. As values connected with the need to
dominate others grow in importance, intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic
values decline. The values, which people hold dear are more and more
those which say "have it at any price," even at the cost of one's own
health. In the embodiment of these values, understood as a process,
action aimed at maintaining the existing desired status becomes an aim
in itself and takes on the form of impulses which traumatize the human
personality.
The relationship between the hierarchy of values and the state of
mental health is bilateral. On one side, the values accepted by a human
being, their structure and mutual arrangement influence frame of mind,
promoting either internal order and peace, or strain, frustration, and
stress. The criteria of chosen values point out the direction of human
129
activity. The person, for whom the consumption of goods constitutes

the highest value constantly seeks new, more expensive, and, in his
opinion, better goods. If such things are valued instrumentally, i.e., are
seen as a means for improving life's comfort, thus enabling the achievement of other aims, then mental equilibrium may not be disturbed or
may at the most be subjected to situational imbalance. This is not the
case when a human being aims at having for the pure purpose of
"having." This causes a permanent increase in demands, constant stress,
and a feeling of low self-esteem. After all, there will always be someone,
who has more. The race for possessions becomes an agony, the basis
for constant frustration, which has a negative influence upon the mental
health of a person. However, it is not only consumer values which may
have a negative influence upon the mental equilibrium of a human
being. History notes many cases of people who led by the will to
dominate, the need for power, suffered internal conflict and lost contact
with reality, were caught in a vortex of disintegration. Hence, the
general conviction that the content of values has an influence on the
mental health of human beings is justified.
Actual conformity to a system of values socially recognized to be
negative means the disruption of society and the disturbance of the
balance between man and his environment, and personal mental imbalance.
The influence of the level of intensity of the evaluational process
needs to be recognized. A too intense process of motivation impairs the
effectiveness of human activity, often steering it into disadvantagenous
endeavors. A human being possessed by a "passion" to realize one
value develops unequally, is oriented by lowered standards and even
acts to his own disadvantage as a consequence of altered processes of
perception and thinking. This has certain influence over mental health.
From the other side, the state of mental health has influence upon the
choice and shape of the hierarchy of values.
The mentally disturbed often choose socially harmful, destructive
values which further disintegrate their personality. The limit values in
such disturbances in mental values are at base overvaluations.
If one were to define mental health as the multilevel development of
all of man's capabilities, then the selection of and fixation with one
value or complex of similar values must cause a state of disintegration
which cripples development. Conversely, a sound system of values can
be a positive force mental health, enhancing development.
A man choosing ultimate, universal, pro-social values encourages
130
BRUNON HOLYST
development, engages in activities on a level of higher cognizance, is

effective in giving and getting individual and social recognition. The
more the selected values constitute the universal good, are direct and
universal, the more even temporary frustrations, stresses, and fears,
which disintegrate the personality allow for the achievement of the next
step of development, the integration of human properties into new,
more positive structures.
Among such values we find love, truth, justice, and what is more
important - peace. Without peace and harmony social development is
impossible; and individual mental health is infeasible. These values
cannot be treated instrumentally, because life's meaning depends upon
their hierarchy. The basic values are independent, autonomous. They
are the ones that allow a human being to live authentically and with
dignity.
At the same time, ethical norms must include values that enable
societies and nations to exist. This is even more significant when we
consider that the increasing density of population and the ecological
and economic crises are attended by new sociological phenomena and
grave mental consequences. The rise in aggresion and violence is a
pathological reaction to the loss of balance at various levels.
European culture is only a segment of the whole world's culture.
Like every civilization, it has its virtues and enormous potential in the
form of human thought gathered over centuries. These are the fundamental resources from which we should draw conclusions and adopt
new solutions. A great many of these have appeared during the last few
years, even months.
Reflections on the level of political relations are the first among
these solutions. The struggle for peace and disarmament has started to
take on new, more constructive forms. Unconventional (until recently)
methods of thinking and acting are entering into a phase of realization.
Peace, as the chief value, becomes a catalyst enabling one to rid oneself
of one's fears and frustrations and, thus, is the factual condition for
mental health prophylaxis.
Agreement on this is accompanied by the undertaking of action to
preserve the environment, which, as the late Prof. Julian Aleksandrowicz irrefutably proved, is a necessary condition for maintaining mental
balance. Aleksandrowicz writes: "The survival of mankind is threatened
especially by the fact that we lack knowledge of how to protect our
brains from the impairment of their structure and functioning. . .."2
131
Impairment of the brain, as Aleksandrowicz proves, is caused first of all

by a lack of some micromolecules, most of all, magnesium, lithium,
zinc, and calcium.
Recent years have seen bold attempts at formulating new philosophies of man, a return to ethical values, and the framing of new
systemic methods of thinking. The development of science which up
until now has not only not prevented wars but has even contributed to
their course and effects must be directed towards working for peace
and for the benefit of man. This is possible only under the condition of
scientists' abiding by certain general rules. The guidelines are these: an
appropriate hierarchy of values must be served, and the mental balance
of man which rests upon the harmonious development of all of his
potential must be promoted.
Are societies at their present stage capable of taking on the tasks
demanded by such guidelines?
I think it plausible, and I perceive possibilities for such in the bond
that exists between science and social policy. Science and its achievements should be the source of all decisions after an exchange of
arguments, after an objective dialogue. Scientists should, on the one
hand, engage in creating a new shape for reality, and, on the other, they
must not become only a decorative element, lending the state prestige
in a way similar to works of art. Science should provide us with the
initial data for long-term political activities. With such a view on the
role of science in the social system, one must keep in mind that we
must not undertake any new course of action which might escape
control, which is incompatible with human nature, or which disintegrates personalities without allowing for reintegration.
The Man of Tomorrow must reach beyond the system of material
values, must subdue his unquenched need to consume, must turn
towards ultimate values. Only this can guarantee his mental health. This
is why the humanities are so esteemed a science. If the development of
technology is not accompanied by the development of our knowledge
of humanity, the harmonious development of man will be impeded;
otherwise the processes of destruction shall prevail over those of
creation. However, to understand this we need time and experience in
the field of social and humanistic education.
A man, who goes through the trouble to enhance his level of mental
health must take into account the dimensions of culture and civilization.
He also should embody intellectual qualities and a system of social and
132
BRUNON HOLYST
moral values which render possible the synthesizing of technological

developments and humanistic values in one reality. In such a synthesis
only is it possible for these values and mental needs, which lay at the
basis of man's harmonious development to flourish. The deepening of
values accompanying development, is conditioned by the surroundings
and by the hierarchy of human needs. It is general knowledge that this
hierarchy takes on the form of a pyramid, and for two reasons:
1) each person has a biologically and socially determined structure
of needs, from the basic, fundamental needs also called our material or
biological needs, which must be met to preserve life both autogenetically and phylogenetic ally (the necessities of hunger, thirst, sleep, sex,
and security), to social needs of a so-called higher order;
2) each member of a society has biological needs, but the arrangement of the others, so-called "higher order necessities" varies from
person to person. Some people's need resemble the flattened pyramid
with simple physical needs occupying the most space; others can satisfy
their physical needs with "simple things" so as to be able to satisfy more
their intellectual, creative passions. The more sublime the need, the
fewer the number of people who develop them to the fullest capacity.
Hence, the population of a society can be pictured as a pyramid, the
top of which constitutes a rather small group with a heightened
hierarchy of necessities.
The cultural development of mankind is undergoing such drastic
changes that a person must appeal to others to be able to keep up;
otherwise, frustrations, discouragement, mental imbalance, and stress
reactions would set in.
Less sensitive persons limit their development to an increasingly
complex system of necessities of a lower order. In consequence, they
feel most secure in a world of concrete and material goods. The
formation of values is strictly linked with the hierarchy of needs. In a
technocratic world order, the process of value development has become
equivalent to the creation of new values and is not the expansion and
upgrading of existing values.
A new problem emerges from the above situation when it comes to
question of the relation between the system of values and mental health,
as is easy to gather. It often is the case that contemporary man forgets
that achieving certain values is not a necessity, but rather, a possibility.
The scientific development of a given person may serve as an
example. Along with the undue institutionalization of knowledge, the
133
phenomenon of means becoming aims and aims becoming means

appears.
Scientific writing was once a way of realizing one's intellectual needs
and creating such universal values as wisdom; it was the basis for
achievements, which after social appraisal gave rise to constructive
authority. Today the gathering of knowledge and wisdom is but a byproduct of a scientific career. Hence, the divergence between the value
structures of today's and yesterday's scientists. It is believed that
nowadays young scientists view publication (the amount and place of
publication especially) as being of the highest value, and not, for
example, the value of formulating a "new school of thought."
The value of a man's work presents a similar problem. Work has
been slowly debased being seen as an indirect instrumental element in
the scheme of man's needs. Disregarding the psychological costs of
work, people toil to increase their profits which in turn enables them to
realize other instrumental needs. They can then purchase commodities
which allow them to project a higher social status. Hence, the desire to
obtain material goods becomes a compulsion. This pressure demeans
life, deranges personal harmony with one's surroundings. But people do
not tolerate such a cognitive conflict. New mental states - cognitive
dissonance and frustration - emerge.
Each person strives to recover and maintain a balance in the system
of his convictions, opinions, values. People try to do away with cognitive conflict by checking the precision and degree of justification of
their beliefs; they seek additional arguments. Unable to find any, they
lose their mental balance and start behaving in a pathological manner.
When the messages received from the outside world and their own
behavior collide, they are interpreted in such a manner as to alter
nothing in their subjective image of their existence in the given
surroundings. They bestow varying importance on these messages,
either discarding those which are at that particular moment in time
uncomfortable, or running away from reality into a world of false
conceptions and illusions. When brought back to the real state of
things, they experience new conflicts, even more perturbing. They are
governed by irrationally perceived values and are to be treated as
persons requiring therapeutic assistance. The restoration of a proper
process of self-realization is the prime condition for their regaining
mental health. Heightened consciousness in the formulation of one's
own opinions, outlook on life, and place in society enables a person to
134
BRUNON HOLYST
define his attitude towards life by choosing certain values, which he

then tries to put into effect.
Any block to information collection, any bar to adapting to our
surroundings negates the authenticity of a human being and limits this
liberty. They check his development and hinder his reaching a state of
mental health; they flatten the value structure by emphasizing the
satisfaction of material needs. Because of time restrictions, this short
review can only speak of some of the relations between the system of
values of a human being, a society, and the prevailing state of mental
health. But even those covered tell us enough for us to come to the
conclusion that there are certain tasks facing us in the sphere of
regulation and legislation individually, in groups, and on a societal and
even international scale. One of the most important jobs at hand is that
of finding a new shape for the moral and intellectual education of
future generations, one congruent with the harmonizing of the socioeconomic order with man's natural tendencies, and the harmonizing of
man's intellect with his personality.
It is not enough to build new educational and cultural institutions,
nor is it enough to increase the number of television channels. What is
really necessary are new methods of thinking and acting which would
assist a human being in finding his individual way, in attaining a state of
emotional balance, in developing harmoniously, and in choosing the
most appropriate forms of co-operation with the environment.
The potential for adapting to the changes in the environment along
with an aptitude for converting it, these are the features to be socially
cultivated thanks to a given deeper and better understanding of
ourselves. The mental hygiene movement can perform a positive role
on different levels of social life in inspiring and bringing to realization
the tasks here outlined.
As a result of threats on several fronts, modern man lives under the
pressure of constant stress. This stress, depending on the mental
structure of a given individual and the relations shaping his general
level of development, has basically two effects, either the growth and
complication of his receptors, the remaking of his mentality followed
by an intensification of and sensitivation to various realities, or, the
opposite, i.e., psychopathology, mental excitability, a lessening in sensitivity and increasingly primitive approaches to life. This second form of
reaction to stress promotes neither mental, nor physical health. Hence,
HUSSERL'S ETHICAL ANTIRELATIVISM
135
stress nowadays meets with reaction, sometimes taking the form of

open revolt, for example, the activities of rebellious youth.
Alvin Toffler has declared the era of industrialism dead, and he
heralds the birth of a new civilization. He also emphasizes the necessity
of being optimistic in regard to the future, although he believes the next
years will be rather stormy and crisis-laden. Toffler writes "These
violent changes can be considered as isolated characteristics of decline,
defeat and lack of stability. However, looking at the problem from a
broader point of view one can perceive some matters which, overlooked hitherto, now become obvious .... The third wave reveals these
possibilities and convinces that in all the decline and fall, one can, quite
unexpectedly, find signs of birth and life." 3
Konrad Lorenz called our attention to the fact that processes going
on within man himself will be the most crucial factor determining the
future of mankind. Will we become a community of truly humanitarian
beings or will our society become a rigid organization of incapacitated
inhuman creatures? This depends mainly on whether we allow ourselves to be governed by irrational perceptions of values. Lorenz writes:
"Nobody is able to foresee what will happen to mankind in the future.
This will depend entirely on processes taking place in human beings
themselves. All external factors leading to constructive genetic and
cultural evolution have lose their power."4 For this scientist, the
universal a priori perceptions of values are the foundation of his
philosophy of optimism.
Today, mental hygiene, as an instrument of mutual relations between
people is called to a particular role. The right attitude towards reality
should help solve the developmental problems of the individual and
enable him to establish within himself an attitude of empathy and
co-operation.
According to Kazimierz D~browski's theory of positive disintegration we can "alter," perfect, the group in which we live only when we
are willing to engage in our own development.
The stimulation of our "self-development," creative inspiration, and
the safeguarding of the sensitive and talented are important fields of
activity for mental hygiene. The outstanding are the one who will create
progress and determine the shape of our future. As I have elsewhere
remarked: "No nation will be able to reach the heights of development
when it will opt for the cult of mediocrity, so-so work, and incapacity.
136
BRUNON HOL YST
That is why it has to protect the best, the talented, those with initiative.
For the same reason an important concern is to make proper use of
man's intellectual potential in all areas of human endeavor. In each
situation the human mind should be working 'full time.' Our life would
then be easier and more humane." 5
Intelligence is man's natural treasure, and making use of its resources
demands constant training as well as upholding a high level of intellectual activity. Does man only want to get to know the world, or does he
also crave to change it?
Obtaining knowledge of the world is one of the indispensable
elements of human existence, but social development also demands
purposeful action altering the reality around us. To realize this it is
necessary for us to keep ourselves in constant intellectual preparedness
throughout our life, into old age.
People who are mentally active for a longer time live a full life. That
is why in modern times so much attention is paid to propagating the
model of the permanently active and creative person.
The most favorable of educations involves the cultivation of originality and of elasticity in thinking through and solving new issues.
For the stimulation of man's activity, the demands made on us must
always exceed our actual capabilities.
Knowledge about man's psychological defense mechanisms is enormously valuable. It is conducive to a better understanding of the
disturbances in man's contact with the world and facilitates finding new
ways of behaving in situations which are particularly difficult.
A kindly attitude towards others creates a cheerful atmosphere, one
of security, which is so necessary for contemporary man and his wellbeing.
If we keep strictly to rational rules of behavior, then mankind is
capable of keeping pace with the demands of the last decade of the
twentieth century.
An honorable life is the right and privilege of every person, and at
each moment of life a man should be allowed to live honorably. It is the
duty of society to enable him to do so. However, each one of us should
learn how to cope with this not easy task on his own.
The role of the mental hygiene movement in the last analysis is that
of preparing man for contact with his surroundings and for creating the
right kind of relations between people. The movement should also help
bring about a lessening of the intensity of existing threats so as to foster
137
the conditions for peace, progress, liberty, and an excellent quality of

life.
Polish Society for Mental Health, Warsaw
University of L6di
NOTES
1 K. Horney, Neurosis and the Evolution of the Individual (Warsaw: PIW, 1978), p.
109.
2 1. Aleksandrowicz, "Cerbrology: The Science of the Influence of the Environment on
Somatopsychic Health," in Mental Health (Warsaw: PWN, 1979), p. 188.
3 A. Toffler, The Third Wave (Warsaw: 1985), pp. 24-26.
4 K. Lorenz, The Regress of Humanity (Warsaw: 1986), p. 59.
5 B. Ho-Iyst, "Man in the Face of Contemporary Threats" in Mental Health in a
Changing World (Warsaw: 1990).
PART TWO
FOUNDA TIONS OF MORALITY AND

THE SOCIETAL WORLD
F. W. VEAUTHIER
YOM SOZIALEN VERANTWORTUNGSAPRIORI 1M

SOZIALPHANOMENOLOGISCHEN DENKEN
EDMUND HUSSERLS
Die Intention des Vortrages liegt im Nachweis eines yom phiinomenologischen Denken zwar nicht iibersehenen, die Ansatze einer transzendental-solipsistischen BewuBtseinskonzeption freilich iiberwindenden
"Verantwortungsapriori", das die sittliche Verantwortung Einzelner auf
der Vorgiingigkeit der Gemeinschaftserfahrung innerhalb einer Gemeinschaftspersonalitiit begriindet.
Wiihrend Max Scheler als "sittliches Apriori" das Solidaritiitsprinzip
identifiziert, also das Prinzip der solidarischen Verantwortungsgemeinschaft, gelangt Husser! in seinem Bemiihen urn Verantwortungsbegriindung zu der weitreichenden Feststellung des vorgiingigen Konstituiertseins verantwortlich handelnder Einzelpersonen in der "Gemeinschaftspersonalitiit", einer "Personalitiit haherer Ordnung". Dem spaten Husser! gelang damit nicht nur eine kiihne Erweiterung des individualistischen Personbegriffs, ihm ist dariiber hinaus ein signifikanter Beitrag
zur Lasung des Problems einer kommunikativen, gemeinschaftsbezogenen Vernunftauffassung (auf der die Verantwortungsgemeinschaft
basiert) gelungen.
1. Einleitung: Die Begriindung eines "sozialen Apriori"
Die Entdeckung der sozialen Dimension der Akte des Sichverantwortens (vor mir, vor einzelnen Anderen, vor der Gemeinschaft) ist im
phiinomenologischen Sinne erst einsichtig zu machen, wenn die Subjektivitiit des handelnden BewuBtseins als "soziale Subjektivitiit"J und die
Geltungssphiire der Intersubjektivitiit als eine solche der "sozialen
Intersubjektivitiit" nachzuweisen ist. DaB es solche Nachweise im
phiinomenologischen Denken gibt, ja, daB die phiinomenologische
Reflexion der Verantwortungs-Gemeinschaft auf einem entsprechenden,
allen faktischen sozialen Beziigen vorausliegenden sozialen Apriori
beruht, in dessen Vorgegebensein die Tatsiichlichkeit von Verantwortung (d.h. die Anerkennung, Zuerkennung, Ubernahme usw. von
141
A - T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Ana/eeta Husseriiana, Vol. XXXv, 141-158.
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F. W. VEAUTHIER
Verantwortung) erst ihre Begrundung findet, dies ist die im folgenden

darzustelIende These.
Die Ieitende Frage, die den nachfolgenden Oberlegungen zugrunde
liegt, fragt nach derjenigen apriorischen Voraussetzung, die gegeben
sein muB, urn konkrete Verantwortungshandlungen verstandlich werden zu lassen und urn sie zureichend begrunden zu konnen. Als die
entscheidendste Voraussetzung alIer faktischen Verantwortungsubernahme solI hier auf das "soziale Verantwortungs-Apriori" aufmerksam
gemacht werden. Das Attribut "sozial" verweist in dies em Zusammenhang auf die Notwendigkeit, die einzelnen Verantwortungsakte als
solche zu identifizieren, die erst im Horizont einer Verantwortungsgemeinschaft Sinn erhalten. Was den apriorischen Charakter der Voraussetzung betrifft, ohne die Verantwortung nicht gegeben ware, so stimmt
er nicht uberein mit dem Verstandnis, das Kant den "Erkenntnissen a
priori" gegeben hat. Das "soziale Verantwortungs-Apriori", das den
Erfahrungen verantworteter Gemeinschaft zugrunde liegt, ist keine
"Form", die zum Erfahrungsmaterial erst hinzutreten muBte. Vielmehr
ist das Apriori: materialer Gehalt und seinerseits erfahrbar! Mit diesem
Verstandnis von Apriori steht im Einklang, daB es nicht Form des
Denkens ist, sondern fUr das Denken, weil es diesem (d.h. dem
urteilshaften Denken) die Welt erst "gibt". "L'a priori est un fait donne
a priori, essentiel et non formeI; car Ie fait, ici, ou Ie phenomene, c'est
I'essence ... parce qu'il fait I'objet 'd'une experience pure et immediate',
alors que l' a posteriori fait l'objet d'une experience mediatisee ...".2
Dies eben unterscheidet phanomenologisches Denken von einer
bloBen Reflexions-philosophie, die fur das Gegebene alIein die Weise
seines Gedachtseins ausbildet. "Die Reflexionsphilosophie ersetzt die
'Welt' durch ihr 'Gedacht-Sein"'.3 Die Phanomenologie dagegen wendet
aIle ihre methodischen Anstrengungen fur die Erbringung des Nachweises auf, daB, wie Voraussetzungen gegeben sein mussen fur die
Moglichkeit der Erfahrung der Naturwelt, so auch die Voraussetzung
der Gemeinschafts-Welt "gegeben" sein muB, und zwar im Sinne einer
die Strukturen des sozialen und kommunikativen BewuBtseins bestimmenden "Vorgegebenheit".
Verantwortungsgemeinschaft setzt Vergemeinschaftung uberhaupt
voraus. SolI die Rede von der "Vergemeinschaftung" von EinzeIsuhjekten innerhalb eines interpersonalen Miteinanders von Menschen einen Sinn haben, so genugt es nicht, die Handlungsintentionen der
einzelnen Subjekte als grundsatzlich synthetisierbar, und die konsen-
VERANTWORTUNGSAPRIORI 1M DENKEN HUSSERLS
143
suelle Ubereinstimmung zwischen den Subjekten als Ergebnis einer

bloBen Assoziation anzusehen. Eine "kommunikative Umwelt"4 ware
dann nicht zu konstituieren, wenn das Zusammenwirken Einzelner der
Grundlage der "Sozial-Konstitution" der interpersonal en, geschichtlichen Menschenwelt entbehrte! Denn das soziale Sein des Menschen
kann nicht lediglich als "multiples", d.h. vervielfachtes Sein verstanden
werden, dessen Wirkraum eine bloB "kollektive Welt" assoziativer
Verb in dung en sein muBte. Eine "kommunikative" Geltungsgrundlage
fur die Einlosung von Geltungsanspruchen so1cher Aussagen, die sich
auf interpersonale Zusammenhange beziehen, ist auf dieser Basis nicht
gegeben. Hierrur ist die Fundierung des Miteinanderlebens und
-handelns in einer "Wir-Welt" bzw. in einer Gemeinschaftswelt erforderlich.
Husser! sagt es so: "Fur mich seiende Welt war immer schon, solange
ich Welt hatte (oder soweit ich mich zuruckverfolgen kann als waches
Menschen-Ich), Gemeinwelt, 'unser aller' Welt, und nicht etwa bloB
kollektive Welt eines jeden von uns fur sich ...".5 Allein die Vorgegebenheit einer "Gemeinwelt", deren Erfahrung tiber die egologisch oder
solipsistische reduzierte Originalerfahrung hinausgeht, macht jenes
Apriori aus, das Husserl "weltliches Apriori" nennt. 1m Vorgriff auf die
Erorterung der das bloB kollektive Zusammensein uberschreitenden
"Personalitat hoherer Ordnung" (Personenverband), in der Husser! die
"Totalitat" vergemeinschafteter Verantwortung erkennt, soll auf die
geradezu revolutionierenden Gedanken aufmerksam gemacht werden,
die von Husserl hinsichtlich der Konstitution einer hoherstufigen
"sozialen Einheit" vorgetragen worden sind (in der die "Einigung" und
die faktische Kommunikation von Menschen ihren Grund haben).
"Miteinander konstituieren wir die Welt, doch in jedem von uns
konstituiert sich zuvor das Miteinander selbst. Hierbei ist das Erleben
des Einzelnen nicht mehr fundierend in der Gemeinschaft, sondern
schlechthin fundierend flir sie; ...", so heiBt es bei Bernhard Waldenfels. 6 Bis hierhin also scheint zwischen Husser! selbst und der Rezeptionsgeschichte kein Dissens zu bestehen: Der Begriff einer erweiterten
Fassung der so genannten "originalen Erfahrung", die den anderen
Menschen mitumspannt - wie es bei Husser! heiBt,7 ist nicht mehr
verzichtbar. Die von Husser! "original" genannten Erfahrungsweisen
sowohl der Selbsterfahrung wie der Fremderfahrung werden nicht als
"disjungierende", sondern als "akzentuierende Momente einer Gesamterfahrung" verstanden, ohne damit den Ver!ust von wirklicher Erfah-
144
F. W. VEAUTHIER
rungsqualitiit hinnehmen zu wollen. Die Struktur des sozialen Apriori

als der unhintergehbaren Voraussetzung der Gesamterfahrung tritt
deutlich in Erscheinung. "Als natiirliche Generations- und Geschlechtsweseri und als Glieder einer Kulturgemeinschaft sind wir bereits auf die
Anderen bezogen und von ihnen mitgepriigt, wenn wir uns ihnen
zuwenden; die Anderen sprechen schon aus mir, wenn ich mit ihnen
spreche".8 Oder, urn es mit Worten von M. Merleau-Ponty wiederzugeben: "Das Soziale ist je schon da, ehe wir es erkennen oder dariiber
reden".9 Aus diesem "le-schon-dasein" des Sozialen schopft die Rede
von der moralischen Verantwortung des Menschen ihr Recht, aber
auch ihre Rechtfertigung. Fiir die Bildung des vollen Begriffes von
Verantwortlichkeit innerhalb einer Verantwortungsgemeinschaft ist die
Feststellung von der Vorgegebenheit und Vorgiingigkeit des nicht erst
durch Setzungsakte zustandegebrachten, sondern gleichurspriinglichen
und responsorischen "Aufeinanderbezogenseins" unverzichtbar. Auch
in diesem Zusammenhang gilt es, das "apriorische Perfekt" zu entdecken, das in der Aussage enthalten ist, wonach eine Zuwendung des
Anderen zu mir bereits erfolgt ist, wenn ich mich an ihn adressiere.
Eben darin liegt die Verantwortungsvorgabe. Nicht, daB man dies von
einzelnen Personen dann und wann zu erfahren immer neu Gelegenheit
hat, ist damit gemeint, sondern daB diese Gelegenheiten als Bekundungtm des "Gemeingeistes" einer weiterreichenden Sozialeinheit zu
begreifen sind, soll hier ausgesagt werden. Nicht urn die Feststellung
reziproker Imputabilitiit zwischen verantwortungsbewuBten einzelnen
Subjekten ist es hier zu tun, sondern urn die Entdeckung der "je schon
erschlossenen Sozialitiit", in der wie die Fremderfahrung so auch die
Selbsterfahrung begriindet ist.
Wie immer - von dem Gesagten ausgehend - eine schiirfere Erfassung der Begriffe "Verantwortlichkeit" und "Mitverantwortlichkeit"
ausfallen wird, man wird nicht umhin konnen, ein allen Zuschreibungen
von Verantwortung vorausliegendes urspriingliches "Erschlossensein"
ansetzen zu miisse, und zwar ein gleichurspriingliches Erschlossensein
meiner und des Anderen. Auf solchem Erschlossensein beruht die
"vergemeinschaftete Verantwortung, wobei die Selbstverantwortungen
selbst vergemeinschaftete sind in den Gemeinschaftlichkeiten."10
Es liegt nahe, die phiinomenologische Thematisierung des Charakters des gleichurspriinglichen "Erschlossenseins" meiner und der
anderen einer Begrifflichkeit anzuvertrauen, die sich auf Heideggers
phiinomenologisches Denken stiitzt, niiherhin auf seine Explikation des
VERANTWORTUNGSAPRIOR1 1M DENKEN HUSSERLS
145
Existentials der "Befindlichkeit". In der Tat hatte eine sozialphanomenologische Rekonstruktion des ersten Kapitels des ersten Abschnittes
von "Sein und Zeit" I I vor dem Hintergrund der sozial-phanomenologischen Untersuchungen im AnschluB an Husserl, Schiitz, MerleauPonty, Sartre, Levinas, Waldenfels und anderen, die Chance, das
Apriori des sozialen Seins scharfer sehen zu lassen und mit mehr
Berechtigung erweisen zu konnen, als es moglich ist, wenn auf die
Befindlichkeits-Struktur verzichtet werden muB. Die Forschungen Husserls machen es moglich, ja legen es nahe, zur "gleichurspriinglichen
Erschlossenheit von Welt, Mitdasein und Existenz"12 nicht nur das
Verstehen", sondern auch die "Verantwortung" bzw. die "Verantwortlichkeit" hinzuzuziehen, wenn anders nicht die Frage der Lebenspraxis
aus der Fundamentalanalyse ausgeschlossen bleiben soll. Eine so1che
dringliche Nacharbeit kann hier nicht naher beschrieben und begriindet
werden. Es geniigt in diesem Zusammenhang, auf die formalen Strukturkomponenten der Befindlichkeit hinzuweisen, aus denen ihr apriorischer Charakter deutlich werden soli: Wie "Befindlichkeit" keinen
seelischen Zustand anzeigt, kein reflexives Um- und Riickwenden des
BewuBtseins meint, keinen Akt von Erkenntnis und Wollen bedeutet, 13
so gelten auch von der Befindlichkeit der je schon erschlossenen
Verantwortungsgemeinschaft deren Vorreflexivitat und Vorintentionalitat.
DaB Verantwortung als "Zuschreibungsbegriff' verstanden werden
kann, eben dies setzt ein der konkreten Zuschreibung vorhergehendes
soziales "Betroffen-werden-konnen" voraus. Auch insofern konnte eine
sozial-phanomenologisch orientierte Rekonstruktion der Befindlichkeit
Heideggers Nutzen bringen (wie allein schon aus des sen Teilaussage
hervorgeht" ... so konnen wir jetzt von der Befindlichkeit her scharfer
sehen-, den Charakter des Betroffenwerdens".14
In durchaus unterschiedlichen philosophischen Ansatzen wird das
Entspringen von Verantwortung aus dem Betroffenwerden (zuweilen:
Getroffenwerden) als ethische Grundlegungsreflexion vollzogen. "Verantwortlichkeit entspringt nicht mir selbst, sondern im Getroffenwerden
durch den Anderen. Die Verantwortung ist so1che durch den Anderen",15 heiBt es im Blick auf Emmanuel Levinas. DaB das soziale
Sein, aus dem die Verantwortung erwachst, auf den weiteren Umkreis
des Lebendigen iiberhaupt, und zwar wegen dessen "Bediirftigkeit und
Bedrohtheit" ausgedehnt worden ist, wissenwir von Hans Jonas.
Obzwar es in "Das Prinzip Verantwortung" heiBt: "Das Urbild aller
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F. W. VEAUTHIER
Verantwortung ist die von Menschen fUr Menschen", 16 so wird der

Gegenstandsbereich der Verantwortung auf "alles Lebendige" hin geoffnet und vermerkt, dieser Bereich kanne, musse aber nicht Gegenstand
von Verantwortung sein. Fur andere seinesgleichen aber miisse der
Mensch Verantwortung haben, denn: "die Fahigkeit dazu ist die zureichende Bedingung ihrer Tatsachlichkeit".17 DaB Menschen fureinander
de facto Verantwortung haben, gehort nicht minder zum Sein des
Menschen, "wie daB er der Verantwortung generell fahig ist", woraus
folge, daB dieser Tatbestand (nicht anders als derjenige, daB er ein
sprechendes Wesen ist) "in seine Definition aufzunehmen" sei. DaB der
Mensch ein moralisches Wesen ist, das bedeutet nach lonas, daB er
moralisch order unmoralisch sein kann. Dies liegt im Sein des existierend en Menschen, welches das Sollen enthalt. Insofern hat die
lonas'sche Verantwortungs-Ethik auf eine fundamentalontologische
Fundierung nicht verzichtet.
2. Die vergemeinschaftete transzendentale Subjektivitiit
als Voraussetzung der Verantwortung
In seinem 1930 geschriebenen Nachwort zu den "Ideen" hat Husserl
die Phanomenologie als "apriorische Wissenschaft" identifiziert und
ihre Besonderheit darin gesehen, daB sie die "unzerbrechliche Wesensstruktur der transzendentalen Subjektivitat herausstellt als ihr 'Apriori"'.18 Es hat einer langen "Inkubationszeit" bedurft, urn zu erkennen,
daB die phanomenologische Thematisierung der transzendentalen Subjektivitat auBerhalb einer "transzendentalen Theorie der Gemeinschaft"
nicht moglich ist, so daB eine scharfere Fassung des Problems der
"Intersubjektivitat" geradezu zum Prufstein des rechtmaBigen Denkens
der Phanomenologie hat werden konnen. Mit einer Vielzahl von
Ausdrucken suchte Husser! in sprachlicher Hinsicht das groBe Thema
der "transzendentalen Subjektivitat als Gemeinschaft von Personalitaten"19 zu erortern, ein Thema, zu dessen vollem Verstandnis er erst
aufgrund immer neuer - und keineswegs einheitlicher - Ansatze
gelangt ist: Monadengemeinschaft, All-gemeinschaft, Personverband,
Personalitat hoherer Ordnung, die Anderen, solche und ahnlich klingende Ausdrucke stehen fUr hohere personale Einheiten als Verantwortungsgemeinschaften.
DaB es sich hier urn ein im eigentlichen Sinne phanomenologisches
Problem handelt, diese schlichte Feststellung ist freilich an eine wichtige
147
und unverzichtbare Voraussetzung geknupft, niimlich an die "phiinomenologische Reduktion" als dem wesentlichen Methodenschritt philosophisch-phiinomenologischen Denkens uberhaupt. Erst aufgrund des
Interessenwandels, den dieser Methodenschritt erbringt, niimlich yom
Faktisch-Zufiilligen zum Wesentlichen einer zur Erorterung stehenden
und gegebenen "Sache", wird zum philosophischen Thema, was man die
"vergemeinschaftete transzendentale Subjektivitiit" nennen kann. "Tritt
sie (die phiinomenologische Reduktion, F.W.V.) in Aktion, so macht sie
uns sehend fur die reinen Einzelsubjekte und fur die aus reinen
Einzelsubjekten vermoge der sozialen lch-Du-Beziehungen gebildeten
Subjektganzen, Subjektivitiiten hoherer Ordnung, komplexen Subjektivitiiten, die aus reinen Einzelsubjekten zusammengesetzt sind".20 Die
Ausarbeitung einer "Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitat" und die
Uberwindung des "transzendentalen Solpsismus", deren Konturen
Husserl bereits in den lahren 1910 und 1911 entwarf, hatten jahrzehntelanger Forschungen bedurft. 21
Auf die Erkundung der Wesenszusammenhiinge eines die einzelnen
konkreten Ich uberschreitenden "Ich-aIls" ist Husserls Aufmerksamkeit
nunmehr gerichtet, auf das "commercium der Monaden", woraus sich
die jeweiligen Einzel-Monaden, die Einzelsubjekte, erst als in einem
einheitlichen und umspannenden BewujJtsein konstituiert, verstehen
konnen. Hier gilt es nun eine interessante, vorab den Leser der "fruhen"
Husserl-Werkebetreffende, ihn womoglich auch irritierende Feststellung zu treffen: Die neue, zur Erorterung des Problems der Intersubjektivitiit von Husserl verwendete Terminologie tilgt keineswegs den
Sprachgebrauch, der zur Kennzeichnung von Positionen der transzendental-solipsistischen BewuBtseinsphiinomenologie verwendet worden
war. Husserl vermochte weder die Terminologie noch die Untersuchungsart vollends auBer Kraft zu setzen, die bereits entwickelt worden
waren, urn das residuale, reine BewuBtsein und dessen egologische
Interpretation zu explizieren.
Liingst verwendete Termini werden vielmehr beibehalten und nunmehr auf die Ausweitung des Einzelsubjekts in Richtung auf das
Gesamtsubjekt bezogen: Noch immer ist yom Ich die Rede, aber in der
Bedeutung des "IchaIls", noch immer handelt es sich urn die Strukturen
und die Konstitution der Subjektivitiit, inzwischen aber urn diejenige
der "sozialen Subjektivitat", noch immer richtet sich die phanomenoiogische Untersuchungsintention auf das Wesen von Person und Personalitiit, freilich jetzt auf die "Personalitiit hoherer Ordnung". Diese ist
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F. W. VEAUTHIER
kein bloBes Analogon zum individuellen Sein (obzwar Husser! die

Analogie-Struktur bemuht), sondern - als verbundene Personenvielheit
- "kommunikative Einheit", in der sich die (nicht aufhebbare)
Willensvielheit der Einzelperson zu einem "identisch konstituierten
Willen" transformiert, als dessen einziges Substrat daher die "kommunikative Personenvielheit" gel ten muB. Als solche ist sie eine "Einheit des
BewuBtseins".22
DaB es sich bei den Personalitaten hoherer Ordnung lediglich urn ein
bloBes "Bild" handele, dies schlieBt Husser! apodiktisch aus. Es liegt
wirklich ein "BewuBtseinszusammenhang" der einander verbundenen
Personen vor, das eigene und das fremde BewuBtsein konstituieren sich
neu zu einer "Gemeinschaftsperson", womit ein "Wesens-Oberbegriff"
gewonnen ist, in dem die Einzelperson und die Gemeinschaftsperson
miteinander verbunden sind. Fur die Kennzeichnung dieser neuen
Struktur benutzte Husserl gerne den Ausdruck "Gemeingeist".23 Die
Wirkungsgeschichte, die von E. Durkheims Begriff des "kollektiven
BewuBtseins" auf die sozialphanomenologischen Positionen Husserls
(und Schelers) ausging, ist nicht zu leugnen, auch wenn hieruber
ver!aBlich informierende Studien noch ausstehen. Schon Durkheim
hatte "BewuBtsein" und "Personalitat" fur gleichbedeutend erachtet,
schon bei ihm findet sich der Gedanke der "Gesamtpersonlichkeit", die
als "Realitat" begriffen wird und in der sich eine Gesamtheit von Ideen,
Uberzeugungen, Gefuhlen ausdruckt, also geistiges Leben, fur dessen
begriffliche Wiedergabe die Vokabel "BewuBtsein" weder eine Ver!egenheit noch eine illegitime (oder gar - wie vorwurfsvoll geauBert
worden ist - mysteriose) Assoziation darstellte. Obzwar das "kollektive
BewuBtsein" nur in den Individuen verwirklicht sei, so ist es doch
"etwas ganz anderes als das Gewissen eines jeden einzelnen". Es besitzt
spezifische Charakterzuge, die ihm eine eigene, deutlich unterscheidbare Wirklichkeit" attestieren, Formulierungen, deren Affinitat zu jenen
"der phanomenologischen Denker ins Auge fallt. 24
Husserl geht es hinsichtlich seiner Reflexionen urn den BewuBtseinszusammenhang von Einzelperson und Gemeinschaftsperson keineswegs
allein urn eine Erneuerung der theoretischen Fundamentalbetrachtung,
sondern urn die auf philosophischem Wege uberhaupt eruierbare und
rechtfertigbare Lebenspraxis, mit Vokabeln der philosophischen Tradition gesprochen: urn Seligkeit, phanomenologisch formuliert: urn die
Erfullung und "volle Konkretion" des personalen Lebens. "Die Ent-
149
wicklung geht notwendig auf Entwicklung von Personalitaten in personalen Gemeinschaften, die nach Seligkeit streben ...".25
Nicht die Eudaimonie der Einzelseele gilt es zu begrunden, sondern
die Verantwortung von Menschen, die ein "vergemeinschaftetes Leben"
miteinander fuhren. "Verb in dung" bzw. "Verbundensein" (der einzelnen
Person en miteinander) und "Einheit" sind die Signalworte, die Husser!
fur die Etablierung einer personalistisch-phanomenologischen Sozialtheorie ins Spiel bringt. Die Akttheorie, die einsichtigerweise mit Bezug
auf die Einzelperson bereits entworfen war, gilt nunmehr auch fur die
"Gesamtperson". "Aber die Personen sind nicht vereinzelt, sofern sie
verbunden sind ... Die Verbindung stellt Einheit her zwischen Akt-Ich
und anderem Akt-Ich und so fur eine Mehrheit von Akt-Ich (und
schliel3lich evtl. eine offene Vielheit, die in mittelbaren sozialen Akten
aufeinander bezogen und verbunden sind). So konstituiert sich eine
Personalitat hoherer Ordnung als ein fortdauernd Seiendes".26 Der
"Einheit" einer aktiven, "sozusagen vielkopfigen" Subjektivitat und
einem inter-personal verbundenen Aktleben gehort das vordringliche
Interesse Husser!s zur Zeit der Abfassung jener Manuskripte, die dem
schwer losbaren Problem der Intersubjektivitat gewidmet waren. Nur
unter Voraussetzung des Konstituiertsein der Einzelperson in der
"Gemeinschaftspersonalitat" bzw. in der "Allpersonalitat" kann von
Verantwortung sinnvoll gesprochen werden. Bereits in der "Ersten
Philosophie" (1923/24) hatte Husser! von einer "interpersonalen Intentionalitat" gesprochen, die jeden bloBen Selbstbezug des sich verantwortenden Menschen (gewissermaBen jede Art von existentialer "Jemeinigkeit") hinter sich gelassen hatte und die wichtige Elemente zur
Idee einer "Verantwortungsgemeinschaft" bereits enthielt. "Meine
Selbstverantwortung erstreckt sich in aIle Anderen (und ev. in ihre
Selbstverantwortungen) hinein, mit denen ich zusammenwirke oder auf
die ich wirke oder wirken will, und umgekehrt. Jeder ist fur jeden und
fur jedes Anderen Sich-entscheiden und Handeln, obschon in wechselndem MaBe, mit verantwortlich".27 Bevor auf die Phanomene von
Verantwortung und Verantwortlichkeit naher eingegangen werden soli,
ist erst zu klaren, welcher Zusammenhang zwischen der "Personengemeinschaft" (der Personalitat hoherer Ordnung) und der "Verantwortungsgemeinschaft" besteht. n
Das Ethos der Verantwortung hatte bereits in den Vorlesungen, die
Husser! 1923/24 uber "Erste Philosophie" hielt (HUA VII und VIII),
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F. W. VEAUTHIER
die Bedeutung der ursprunglichsten und unverzichtbaren Einstellung

des Philosophen erlangt. Gegenuber allen von Husser! wahrend eines
langen Denker!ebens rezipierten Philosophien, von denen "keine ... fur
eine echte Voraussetzungslosigkeit gesorgt hatte und keine aus dem
Radikalismus der autonomen Selbstverantwortung entsprungen war",29
setzt er an den Anfang die Forderung nach der "hochsten und letzten
... Selbstverantwortung des Erkennenden fur seine Erkenntnisleistungen", eine Formulierung, mit der Husser! die Idee einer "sich absolut
rechtfertigenden Wissenschaft"30 zum Ausdruck bringen wollte.
DaB Philo sophie keine theoretische "Liebhaberei der Menschheit"
sein kann, dies folgt aus der Bestimmung des philosophischen Lebens
als eines Lebens "aus absoluter Selbstverantwortung".31 Die Anerkennung dieser hochsten Norm gilt freilich nicht allein fur den zum
philosophischen Leben bereits Entschlossenen, sie gilt vielmehr universell. Diese Uberzeugung notigt Husser! zu dem Imperativ, "daB ich
jeden dazu zu bestimmen versuchen muB und ihn dafur verantwortlich
machen, daB er sich fur ein solches Leben entscheide und entsprechend
lebe".32 Beides, die Wahrnehmung der Selbstverantwortung und die
Aufforderung an andere, verantwortlich zu leben, bezeugen die Miindigkeit des Vernunftwesens "Mensch", eine Einsicht, die in naturalistischer Erkenntnis-Einstellung nicht zu gewinnen ist.
In seiner Auseinandersetzung mit dem physikalistischen Objektivismus hat Husser! in pointierter Weise Kritik an jener Interpretation der
leib-seelischen Einheit des Menschen geubt, welche das seelische Sein
unter den Bedingungen der Kausalitiit der raum-zeitlichen Welt betrachtete. Urn einer solchen "Naturalisierung" seinerseits zu entgehen,
trennte Husser! fortan die "naturwissenschaftliche Seelenlehre" von
einer geisteswissenschaftlichen "Personlichkeitslehre"; fur beide wissenschaftliche Behandlungsarten diagnostizierte er zwei deutlich von
einander unterschiedene "Einstellungen", niimlich die naturalistisch"theoretische" und die natur!ich-"personalistische" Einstellung. Wiihrend
wir in der naturalistischen Einstellung auf die objektive physische
Gesamtnatur (einschlieBlich der beseelten Leiber der Menschen und
Tiere) gerichtet sind, verhiilt es sich mit der personalistischen ganz
anders. "Ganz anders ist die personalistische Einstellung, in der wir
allzeit sind, wenn wir miteinander leben, zueinander sprechen, einander
im GruBe die Hiinde reichen, in Liebe und Abneigung, in Gesinnung
und Tat, in Rede und Gegenrede aufeinander bezogen sind ...".33 1m
Gegensatz zur naturalistischen Einstellung, in welcher der Forscher zum
151
naturwissenschaftlich giiltigen Prinzip der "AuBenkausalitat" gelangt, gilt

fiir die personalistische Einstellung die "intentionale Kausalitat": Die
Person als geistiges Ich wirkt (iiber den Leib) auf die andere Person, auf
die Umwelt ein. Husserl nennt den, der iiberall nur Natur sieht ("Natur
im Sinne und gleichsam mit den Augen der Naturwissenschaft" gesehen)
"blind fiir die Geistessphare, die eigentiimliche Domane der Geisteswissenschaften".34 Yom menschlich-personalen Leben sagt Husserl, daB es
in Stufen der Selbstbesinnung (das Selbstverhaltnis der Person zu sich
selbst betreffend) und der Selbstverantwortung verlaufe, eine Entwicklung, die erst abgeschlossen ist im erreichten Zustand einer "wahrhaft
miindige(n) Menschheit, die als solehe danach strebt, in allzeit wacher
Selbstverantwortlichkeit zu leben".35 Die Idee einer miindigen, d.h.
vernunftgeleiteten Menschheit in "wacher Selbstverantwortlichkeit"
konnte Husserl nur unter Riickgriff auf den Personbegriff konzipieren,
denn die Person war es, die er als Subjekt der Vernunftakte identifiziert
hatte. Mit der Offnung der Einzelperson in eine Personalitat hoherer
Ordnung gelang Husserl endlich auch der Durchbruch zu einer kommunikativen, gemeinschaftsbezogenen Vernunftauffassung, womit gewissermaBen der feste Boden der Verantwortungsgemeinschaft gelegt
war.
Offen bar hatte Husserl diese neue Idee unter Riickgriff auf Platon
konzipiert, auf des sen Interpretation des Gemeinwesens als eines
"Menschen im groBen" er in der "Ersten Philosophie" zu sprechen
kommt. Man gewinnt beim Lesen dieses Textes den Eindruck, daB
Husserl Plat on nicht eigentlich beerben will, sondern daB er ihn
vielmehr zum Kronzeugen seiner eigenen Sozialphanomenologie zu
machen sucht. So behauptet er beispielsweise, Platon sei "offen bar" von
der das praktisch-politische Leben bestimmenden Apperzeption geleitet gewesen, "welehe die Gemeinden, Stadte, Staaten analog wie Einzelmenschen als denkend, fiihlend, sich praktisch entschlieBend, handelnd
- als so etwas wie Personalitaten ansieht".36 Ferner heiBt es dort,
Platon sei zum Begriinder der Lehre von der "sozialen V ernunft"
geworden.
Wichtig und fur das Verstandnis Husserls interessant ist an der
getroffenen Feststellung, Sozietaten "als so etwas wie Personalitaten"
anzusehen, der kurze Hinweis auf die Methode bzw. auf die Rechtfertigung der behaupteten Analogie: Es ist die "Apperzeption", die dies
leisten soil! Dieser in Husserls Phanomenologie neubesetzte Begriff, der
auf Naturdinge anders als auf den fremden Menschen anzuwenden ist,
152
F. W. VEAUTHIER
bezeichnet ein solehes intentionales Erlebnis, das nicht allein das

Perzipierte selbst in sich enthalt (beispielsweise die Vorderansicht eines
gesehenen Schrankes), sondern auch das gewissermaBen Hinzuerganzte.
Das Apperzipierte-obzwar an den Perzeptionsakt gebunden - ist dem
Betrachter selbst jedoch nicht "gegeben". Wahrend also - in phanomenologischer Terminologie gesprochen - "Perzeption" als "Selbstgebung" bestimmt ist, in der ein vermeinter Gegenstand wirklich als er
selbst prasent ist, hat "Apperzeption" den Sinn des Zwar-nicht-selbstGegebenseins, aber des "Mitfungierens" und "Mitgemeintseins" mit dem
jeweils Gegebenen.
In Bezug auf die Apperzeption von physischen Dingen, die nicht von
allen Seiten und hinsichtlich aller ihrer Erscheinungsweisen gleichzeitig
perzipiert werden konnen, verhalt es sich anders als gegenuber dem
"anderen Menschen", dem alter ego. Nur dessen Leib ist mir durch
physische Prasentation gegeben (wie die korperhaften Natur-dinge
auch); sein Psychisches jedoch muB apprasentiert werden. Beides
geschieht in der Einheit der sogenannten Fremderfahrung, Die (allzu
knappe) Berucksichtigung dieser fundamentalen Unterscheidung in
Husserls Phanomenologie ist deshalb an dies em Ort von Bedeutung,
weil sich spatestens hier die Frage stellt, ob das Personale, die personalen Akte der anderen Menschen grundsatzlich anders als durch
"Apperzeption" mir selbst gegeben sein konnen. Wenn dies aber
zutrifft, ist dann nicht eher von einer interpersonalen ApperzeptionsPramisse als von einem sozialen Verstandigungs- bzw. Verantwortungsapriori zu sprechen? Anders formuliert: Wenn es zutrifft, daB nur dem
Ich eine (husserlisch gesprochen) unbezweifelbare "Originalsphare"
oder "Eigenheitssphare" zukommt, wie soli dann das Fremd-Personale
"gegeben" sein? Ferner: wie sollen dann andere Personen, ja gar die
schon erwahnte "Gemeinschaftspersonalitat" als solehe konstituiert
werden, mit denen ich hinsichtlich des "Gemeingeistes" ubereinkomme?
Das Problem der Apperzeption der anderen Menschen, von Husserl
haufig mit dem Ausdruck "Apprasentation" wiedergegeben, steht nicht
zu unrecht im Mittelpunkt seiner spaten Auseinandersetzungen mit der
These von der "sozialen Intersubjektivitat" und hat eine nicht unbetrachtliche Begrundungslast beim Versuch der Uberwindung des transzendentalen Solipsismus zu tragen.37 DaB die anderen Menschen im
transzendentalen Sinne von mir erst konstituiert sein mussen, bevor sie
zu Partnern und Genossen werden konnen, eben dies betrachtet eine
Reihe von Forschern als Hinderungsgrund, der schuld daran gewesen
VERANTWORTUNGSAPR10R1 1M DENKEN HUSSERLS
153
sei, daB Husser! die transzendentale Struktur der Egoitiit nieht habe
verlassen konnen. Die Aussage Husserls von dem mir apodiktiseh
einzig gegebenen eigenen Ego verleitete manehen Interpreten dazu, das
eigene Ego geradezu monotheistiseh zu paraphrasieren und dem
anderen Mensehen gegenuber zu distanzieren. Das eigene Ieh ubernimmt die Rolle des alleinherrsehenden Gottes, der "andere Mensch"
vermag dann nur noeh "Gesehapf' zu sein; sein Gott-werden ist ausgesehlossen. B. Waldenfels sprieht es offen aus: "Bildlieh gesproehen ist
es so, als wollte ein Gott Gatter sehaffen; sind sie Gotter, so sind sie
nieht seine Gesehopfe; sind sie seine Gesehapfe, so sind sie keine
Gotter".38 Dieses Bild kann leieht in die falsehe Riehtung fuhren. In
einem seiner Alterswerke, in den "Cartesianisehen Meditationen" hat
Husserl mit wiinsehenswerter Klarheit expliziert, daB die Appriisentation, die Ver-gegenwiirtigung des anderen Mensehen, stets verfloehten
sei mit der Gegenwiirtigung, d.h. mit der eigentliehen Selbstgebung, und
daB die Zusammengeharigkeit von Priisentation und Appriisentation
einer "intersubjektiven", d.h. eben nieht einer apodiktiseh-egologisehen
"Eigenheitssphiire" zu verdanken ist. Naturlieh ist dabei vorausgesetzt,
daB ein Ego mit anderen Mensehen wirklieh in einer "Vergemeinsehaftung" lebt, und nieht etwa eine Robinson-Existenz gewiihlt hat. Fur
diesen Fall trifft Husserls weitreiehende Feststellung zu: "Die transzendentale Intersubjektivitiit hat dureh diese Vergemeinsehaftung eine
intersubjektive Eigenheitssphiire, in der sie die objektive Welt intersubjektiv konstituiert und so als das transzendentale Wir Subjektivitiit fur
diese Welt ist und aueh fur die Mensehenwelt, in welcher Form sie sieh
selbst objektiv verwirklieht hat".39
Hermann Zeltner hat als einer der wenigen, die hier riehtig gesehen
haben, erkannt, "daB schon die transzendentale Struktur der Egoitiit
nieht voll zu begreifen ist, wenn man nieht ihre Leistungen fur die
Konstitution des alter ego, ja einer Allgemeinsehaft miteinbezieht".40
Dieser Autor maeht aueh deutlieh, daB die Phiinomene der Gemeinsehaft als "Objektivationen" zu begreifen sind, "die aus der transzendentalen Funktion des auf den anderen Mensehen bezogenen Ego bzw.
der in dieser sieh konstituierenden transzendentalen Intersubjektivitiit
entspringen".41 Dabei ist zu sagen, "daB den konkreten Gemeinsehaften
dieser ihr Ursprung aus der transzendentalen Intersubjektivitiit nieht
bewuBt ist und wesensmiiBig nieht bewuBt werden kann",42 weil dieses
grundsiitzlieh nur dem maglieh ist, der die transzendentale Reduktion,
also den Bruch mit der Naivitiit des In-die-Welt-Lebens vollzieht, die
154
F. W. VEAUTHIER
einzige Methode, urn die transzendentale Struktur sowohl des Ego wie
der Gemeinschaft uberhaupt zur Kenntnis zu erhalten.
Die Uberwindung der apodiktischen Egoitat kommt - akttheoretisch gesehen - in der von Husserl gegebenen Bestimmung der
sozialen, kommunikativen Akte zum Ausdruck, die eine zweifache
Wirkung haben: erstens stellen sie zwischen den Personen eine hohere
BewuBtseinseinheit her, zweitens beziehen sie die umgebende Dingwelt
als gemeinsame Umwelt in diese hohere BewuBtseinseinheit ein. Wortlich heiBt es bei Husser!: "und auch die physische Welt in dieser
apperzeptiven Einbezogenheit hat sozialen Charakter, sie ist Welt, die
geistige Bedeutung hat".43 Hier liegt ein wei teres wichtiges Argument
fur das Bestehen eines sozialen Apriori, namlich der wesensmaBig
soziale Charakter der personalen Umwelt, der sich ausdrucklich nicht
nur auf die "egoistische" Umwelt eines einzelnen Subjektes (die es ja
durchaus gibt) bezieht, sondern insbesondere auf die hiervon zu unterscheidende Umwelt der Subjektverbande.
Wie sehr Husserl mit diesem Gedanken zur kommunikativen Umwelt iiber die singularisierten Einzelbeziehungen hinausgeht, das wird
deutlich durch den ein wenig versteckt liegenden Hinweis, jede Person
habe innerhalb ihrer kommunikativen Umwelt ihre egoistische Umwelt
und es bediirfe besonderer abstrahierender Prozesse, urn sich die
egoistische Umwelt als abgesondert von der kommunikativen Umwelt
vorstellen zu konnen! Das Verstandnis von "untrennbarer Korrelation
fur Einzelpersonen und Gemeinschaften" ergab sich fur Husserl zwingend aus der Notwendigkeit, "die einzelpersonale Vernunft nur als
gemeinschaftspersonale, wie umgekehrt," zu begreifen und sie "zu
immer vollkommenerer Verwirklichung kommen zu lassen".44 Husserls
Traum von der "Entwicklung zu einer personalen und zu einer allumspannenden menschlichen Autonomie"45 zielte auf die ErfiilIung einer
"interpersonale(n) Komprehension oder Kommunikation",46 in der
Menschen einander nicht nur verstehen, sondern in der sie sich zu einer
"praktischen WilIensgemeinschaft" zusammenschlieBen. Yom Willen
der Einzelnen mussen die Normen gebilligt werden, unter denen ihr
und der Anderen Leben solI lebenswert gefiihrt werden konnen. Zu
solcher Normeinsicht und Normakzeptanz wird "normalerweise" der
Mensch schon erzogen, und zwar sowohl in Selbstverantwortung wie in
der Verantwortung vor Anderen. "Demnach ist der Mensch immer
schon, und als Mensch, in Selbstverantwortlichkeit. Sein als Mensch ist
Sein in einer Habitualitat von selbst-normierenden WolIungen, freilich
VERANTWORTUNGSAPRlORI 1M DEN KEN HUSSERLS
155
mannigfaltigen sozialen, im besonderen rechtlichen, Schicklichkeitsnormen, ethischen Normen".47 Diese Normen gehoren "konstitutiv" zu den
Personen, zu den Einzelnen wie zu den Gesamtpersonen, ja auch zur
"Allpersonalitat", durch die erst konkret Person gegeben ist. In immer
weitere Horizonte, bis zuletzt in jenen der "Menschheit" sieht Husserl
die Selbstverantwortung voranschreiten, die er - in einem Manuskript
des lahres 1931 - mit der Selbsterhaltung des Menschen zusammen
sieht. "... und zur Selbsterhaltung gehort Selbstverantwortung und
Selbstnormierung, zur Vergemeinschaftung jeder Form und Stufe vergemeinschaftete Verantwortung, wobei die Selbstverantwortungen
selbst vergemeinschaftete sind in den Gemeinschaftlichkeiten. Das
erfordert noch sorgsame Auslegungen, es gibt da Verwicklungen".48
Auf dem Hohepunkt seiner Reflexionen zur Verantwortunsgemeinschaft formulierte Husserl die "Voraussetzung" aller Verantwortung mit
dem lapidaren Satz: "Der Andere ist der erste Mensch, nicht ich".49
Damit hat das soziale Verantwortungsapriori seine pragnanteste Formel
erhalten: Den im Singularis fungierenden Anderen als "ersten Menschen" zu begreifen, heiBt, sein Vorgegebensein absolut zu setzen und
damit die Absolutheit des Selbst zu relativieren. Bei Emmanuel Levinas
heiBt dies: "Vor dem Anderen ist das leh unendlich verantwortlich".50
University of Saarbriicken
ANMERKUNGEN
1 E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phiinornenologie und phiinornenologischen Philosophie II, Husserliana IV (im folgenden abgekiirzt: Hua), s. 199.
2 M. Dufrenne, La notion ria priori (Paris: 1959), s. 88.
3 M. Merleau-Ponty, Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare, deutsch 1986, s. 66.
4 E. Husser!, Ideen II, Hua IV, s. 193.
E. Husserl, Zur Phiinornenologie der Intersubjektivitiit, Hua XV, s. 463.
fi B. Waldenfels, Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs (Den Haag: 1971), s. 162.
7 E. Husser!, Hua XIV, s. 385.
K B. Waldenfels, Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs, s. 164.
9 M. Mer!eau-Ponty, Phiinornenologie der Wahrnehrnung (Berlin: deutsch 1966), s.
414.
10 E. Husserl, Hua XV, s. 421.
11 M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, s. 41ff.
12 Ebd., s. 137.
1.1 Ebd., s. 136.
14 Ebd., s. 137.
156
F. W. VEAUTHIER
15 So A. Halder, Ontologie - Ethik - Dialogik. Zum Problem der Mitmenschliehkeit

im Ausgang von Emmanuel Uvinas, in: Philosophisches lahrbuch, 91 1g. (1984), s.
117.
10 H. lonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Versuch einer Ethik flir die technologische
Zivilisation, 1984, s. 184.
17 Ebd., s. 185.
IX E. Husserl, Jdeen zu einer rein en Phiinomenologie und phiinomenologischen Philosophie, Drittes Buch, 1952, Hua V., s. 142.
19 Hua XV, s. 421.
20 Hua XIV, s. 404. Die hier vorgenommene Interpretation wiihlt zugegebenermaBen
aus einer Fiillc von Ansiitzcn (besonders aus dem Denken des spiiten Husserls) diejenigen aus, die fiir die Erhiirtung der verfoehtcnen These von Bedeutung sind. Es wird
nieht behauptet, daB andere Ansatze sozialphiinomenologischen Denkens Husserls (z.B.
seine hier aus Umfangsgriinden nicht erwiihnten Reflexionen zur "Einfiihlung" oder das
Verstiindnis der Apperzeption fremder Subjekte als "analogisierende Interpretation")
nicht zu anderen Interpretationsthesen fiihren konnen. Gleiehwohl ist die Stringenz
niehl zu leugnen, die dem Aprioritiitseharakter der vergemeinsehafteten transzendentalen Subjektivitiit, zumal fiir eine Analyse der Verantwortungsgemeinsehaft, zukommt.
21 Zu Lebzeiten Husserls hatten diese Forsehungen ihren Niedersehlag vor allem in
den - in franzosiseher Spraehe ersehienenen - Cartesianischen Meditationen gefunden, wiihrend die Veroffentliehung umfangreieher Forsehungs-manuskripte zu diesem
Thema (die Biinde Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit, Hua XIII, XIV und IV),
1973, erst 35 lahre nach Husserls Tod erfolgte.
22 Vgl. hierzu Hua XIV, s. 200f.
23 Unter diesem Titel sind in dem zweiten Band Zur Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit (Texte aus dem Naehlal3, 1921-1928), Hua XIV, von dem Herausgeber, Iso
Kern, zwei Manuskripte Husserls aufgenommen worden, deren Titel lauten: Gemeingeist I - Person, Personales Ganze, Personale Wirkungsgemeinsehaften. Gemeinsehaft
- Gesellschaft; Gemeingeist II - Personale Einheiten hoherer Ordnungen und ihre
Wirkungskorrelate. Fiir eine griindliehe sozialphiinomenologisehe Untersuchung der von
Husser! eingenommenen Positionen sind diese Forschungsmanuskriptc von besonderer
Bedeutung.
24 Vgl. hierzu besonders Emile Durkheim, Ube,. die Teilung de,. sozialen Arbeit, dt.,
Ffm 1977, s. 120f.; ferner 170ff. (zu den beiden Grundtypen der gesellsehaftliehen
Solidaritiit); Vgl. Note 28.
25 Hua XIV, s. 272.
26 Hua XV, s. 479.
27 Hua VIII (Erste Philosophie. Zweiter Teil), s. 198.
2.' Von der Kritik sind gegen Husserls Konzept der transzendental vergemeinsehafteten
Subjektivitiit Einwiinde erhoben und Bedenken geltend gemaeht worden. die insbesondere den Status und das BewuBtsein der "Personalitiit hoherer Ordnung" betreffen.
Diese Einwiinde beziehen sich vor all em auf die methodische Diskontinuitiit im Denken
Husserls und stell en zur Frage, wie die "radikale Vereinzelung", die der phiinomenologisehe BewuBtseinsregreB leistet, mit dem spiiteren Konzept der transzendentalen
Subjektivitiit als Gemeinsehaft von Personalitiiten in Einklang zu bringen ist. Aueh
Alfred Schiitz hat Husserl in dieser Hinsicht seine Gefolgschaft verweigert und ein
VERANTWORTUNGSAPRIORI 1M DENKEN HUSSERLS
157
"transzendentales Wir" bestritten. Es kann gefragt werden, ob Schutz auch dann fur die
transzendentale Undeklinierbarkeit des UrIchs pladiert hatte, ware er im Besitz und in
der Kenntnis der Forschungsmanuskripts Husser!s "Zur Phanomenologie der Intersubjektivitat" gewesen. Was die fur unsere These Yom sozialen Apriori der Vergemeinschaftung so bedeutsame Aussage uber die "Personalitaten" hiiherer Ordnung betrifft,
so scheint Schutz einem strikt individualistischen Personverstandnis verhaftet gewesen
zu sein, das er aus der 'Tradition" ubernahm und fur das er sich auf "Autoritaten" aus
den verschiedensten Lagern berufen konnte: "Es ist wohl kaum niitig, die viillig haltlose
Theorie, daB soziale Gemeinschaften Personalitaten hiiherer Ordnung entsprechen, im
Detail zu wider!egen. Es ist klar, daB kein einziger Zug, der sich bei Analyse der
individuellen Personen ergibt, in den sogenannten Personalitaten hiiherer Ordnung
angetroffen werden kann" (A. Schutz, Gesammelle Au/salze, (Den Haag: 1971), s.
114f.).
Von einem anderen Kritikansatz gelangt Nicolai Hartmann zu einem ahnlichen
Ergebnis, das freilich nicht die gleiche Apodiktizitat beanspruchte: Wenn man selbst
einraumte, daB Einzelpersonen ihre Verwurzelung in einer persiinlichen Einheit
hiiherer Ordnung find en, so berechtigte diese Annahme jedoch keineswegs zu dem von
Husser! gezogenen SchluB, wonach hiihere Sozialeinheiten mit personal em Charakter
ausgestattet werden durfen. "Die Bedingtheit der Einzelperson und ihrer Akte durch
eine engere oder weitere Gesamtheit involviert namlich keineswegs den Personalcharakter der letzteren .... Es ist wahr, daB jene sozialen Einheiten in gewissem Sinne
auch Aktvollzieher sind und daB ihnen in gewissen Grenzen auch die Werttragerschaft
ethischer Aktvollzieher zukommt. Aber das gerade ist die Frage, ob dieses allein
genugt, urn ihnen schon die Personalitat in vollem, und nun gar in gesteigertem Sinn
zuzusprechen" (Nicolai Hartmann, Ethik, 1962", s. 242f.).
Wie bereits erwahnt scheint ein starkerer EinfluB von E. Durkheim auf die
phanomenologischen Denker Scheler und Husserl hinsichtlich des Charakters der
"Gesamtpersiinlichkeit" ausgegangen zu sein als dies bislang angenommen wurde.
Zur Affinitat der Positionen Durkheims und Husserls hat Hermann Coenen
Erhellendes beigesteuert. 1m ganzen gesehen hat er freilich seine Ablehnung des
Wirklichkeitscharakters der sozialen Subjektivitat allzu stark bekundet und dem Modell
der Interaktion, die durch zweiseitige egologische Intentionalitaten zustande komme,
den Vorzug gegeben. "Die soziale Subjektivitat ist deshalb immer nur (!) eine Subjektivitat 'hiiherer Ordnung'. Sie erhalt ihre Wirklichkeit erst durch die individuellen
Subjekte in einer Interaktion, die immer auf die letzteren zuruckbezogen bleibt" (H.
Coenen, Diesseits von subjektivem Sinn und kollektivem Zwang, Schutz - Durkheim Merleau-Ponty; Phanomenologische Soziologie im Feld des zwischenleiblichen Verhallens, 1985, s. 115).
29 E. Husser!, Hua V (ldeen III, Nachwort, 1930), s. 162.
31' Hua VIII (Erste Philosophie, Zweiter Teil), s. 3.
31 Ebd., s. 197.
32
Ebd., S. 199.
" Hua IV (Ideen II), s. 183.

'" Hua IV (ldeen II), s. 191.
35 Hua VII, s. 204.
3tl
Ebd., s. 16.
158
F. W. VEAUTHIER
,7 "Von einer posltIven Widerlegung des transzcndcntalen Solipsism us" (8. Waldenfels, Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs, s. 32) zu red en, fallt insbesondere jenen Interpreten Husserls schwer, die - trotz aller Beteuerungen Husserls, aueh das Ieh des
anderen Mensehen sei in meinem Ego konstituiert, - das Festhalten Husserls an der so
genannten "primordialen Eigenheitssphare" nieht in Frage gestellt sehen; vgl. ebd., s. 33.
38 Ebd., s. 29.
39 E. Husserl, Hua I (Cartesianische Meditationen), s. 137.
40 H. Zeltner, Das Ieh und die Anderen, in: Zeitschrift /iir philosophische Forschung,
Bd. XIII, s. 308.
41 Ebd., s, 309.
42 Ebd.
43 E. Husserl, Hua IV, s. 194.
44 Hua VI (Krisis), s. 273f.
45 Ebd., s. 273.
40 Hua XIV, s. 370.
47 Hua XV, s. 422f.
48 Hua XV, s. 421.
49 HuaXIV, s. 418.
50 E. Levinas, Die Spur des Anderen, dt. 1983, s. 225. Dort wird das Ieh als Verantwortungswesen gewissermaBen anthropologiseh radikalisiert: "Das Ieh wird sieh
nieht nur der Notwendigkeit zu antworten bewuBt, so als handele es sieh urn eine
Sehuldigkeit oder eine Verpfliehtung, tiber die es zu entseheiden hatte. In seiner
Stellung selbst ist es dureh und dureh Verantwortliehkeit ... ", ebd. s. 224.
RUDOLF BOEHM
LE PHENOMENAL ET LE POLITIQUE
II nous faut, dans les circonstances actuelles, comme toujours, nous

limiter. II nous faut donc nous efforcer de dire, dans ces limites,
quelque chose. Je me bornerai a tenter de vous faire sentir que la
phenomenologie, telle qU'elle a ete fondee par Husser!, peut et doit
nous enseigner, entre autres choses, a penser davantage et a nous
comporter plus decidement, meme comme philosophes, en hommes
politiques. Bien entendu, dans l'expression 'la phenomenologie telle
qu'elle a ete fondee par Husserl', il faut alors faire porter l'accent non
seulement sur Ie nom de Husser! mais surtout sur l'indice 'fond'. Car
selon Husser! lui-meme, notre recherche doit etre motivee 'par les
choses et par les problemes, et non par les philosophies', c1assees par
les noms d'auteurs CPhilosophie als strenge Wissenschaji').
L'acces au domaine de la phenomenologie est menagee par l'epoche, la

suspension de toute foi dans un monde d'etres et de choses existant en
soi. Comme terme technique, ce mot d'epoche a ete forge dans l'antique
tradition sceptique; sans aucun doute, c'est a celle-ci que Husserl l'a
emprunte. Et il dira que 'Ie sens Ie plus profond de la philo sophie
moderne' - c'est-a-dire Ie sens Ie plus profond d'une philosophie
phenomenologique a laquelle elle doit, selon lui, aboutir - consiste a
'rendre sa verite, en un sens superieur, au subjectivisme radical de la
tradition sceptique. En d'autres termes, cette evolution a pour fin de
surmonter Ie sUbjectivisme paradoxal, joueur, frivole qui nie toute
possibilite d'une connaissance et science objectives, par un subjectivisme nouveau et serieux et qui peut se justifier absolument et
consciencieusement sous la forme d'une theorie radicale, bref un
subjectivisme transcendantal' CErste Philosophie' 1923/24, 9me lec;on).
La philo sophie phenomenologique, c'est la verite du scepticisme. C'esta-dire que la pensee du scepticisme antique est vraie, mais qu'il a ignore
la verite qui lui revient en se concevant et en se presentant lui-meme
comme un 'negativisme'. Ce scepticisme dit, selon Husser!: 'Tout ce qui
159
160
RUDOLF BOEHM
est objectif n'existe pour celui qui Ie connait que par Ie fait qu'il en fait
I'experience. Mais qu'il en fait I'experience, cela veut dire qu'il lui
apparait, subjectivement, en tels et tels modes d'apparition. Une fois,
une chose lui apparait telle, une autre fois, autre, et un chacun la voit
telle qu'elle lui apparait selon son experience du moment. Ce sur quoi
un chacun peut se prononcer indubitablement, n'est que ce qui, en ce
moment, est reellement donne, ce qui apparait tel en tant qu'il apparai't
tel. L'etant en lui-meme (ou retant lui-meme), separe de toute apparition, etant en soi, absolument identique a lui-meme, n'entre pas dans
notre experience en ne peut y entrer' (ib.). Tout ce que Ie scepticisme
ne met pas en doute, c'est les choses telles qu'elles apparaissent (a
quelqu'un), les 'phenomenes' (encore un mot qui a ete forge en terme
technique et oppose aux 'hypokeimenes' ou 'noumenes' par Ie scepticisme). Mais en meme temps, ce scepticisme a meprise la valeur de
verite des phenomenes parce qu'il a persiste a la mesurer a leur
contribution a une connaissance des 'hypokeimenes', de ce qui 'est', en
soi, a la base des apparitions de notre experience. Et comme, selon lui,
cette contribution est nulle, Ie scepticisme se presenta comme un
'negativisme'. C'est, selon Husserl, que Ie scepticisme antique a omis
d'operer une epoche vraiment radicale, celie qui consiste a suspendre
toute foi dans un monde d'etres et de choses existant en soi. Husserl,
lui, s'est attache a demontrer, moyennant la 'reduction phenomenologique', que meme ce monde d'etres et de choses existant 'en soi' ne
constitue qu'un certain mode d'apparition subjectif de ces etres et de
ces choses, correspondant, il est vrai, a une subjectivite tres particuliere,
dite 'transcendantale' (se rapportant, a son tour, a des objets 'transcendants'). Des ce moment-la, il n'y a plus lieu, ni de mepriser la valeur de
verite des phenomenes sous pretexte qu'ils ne contribuent rien a la
connaissance d'un pretendu monde objectif existant en soi, ni meme de
'nier toute possibilite d'une connaissance et science objectives' parce
qu'il s'avere qu'elles encore ne rei event que d'une 'realisation' de la
'subjecivite' (d'une 'subjectivite transcendantale').
II en resulte, dans la pensee husserlienne, une nouvelle conception
du monde, de la realite et de la verite. Le monde ou la realite ne se
congoivent plus comme la collection ni meme comme l'ensemble des
etres et des choses existant en soi et produisant des effets les uns sur les
autres qu'il faut distinguer de leur realite en soi, effets parmi lesquels
leurs apparitions dans la conscience des etres que nous sommes nousmemes, selon notre receptivite sensible. Le vrai monde reel, c'est Ie
161
monde phenomenal: un monde qui englobe les apparitions 'subjectives'

des etres et des choses, l'effet ou l' 'impression' qu'ils nous font, l'air
qu'ils ont, apparitions sans lesquelles ils ne sauraient meme pas acceder
a leur realite. (L'effet produit, par exemple, par une chose sur une
autre, en dehors de nous, devant etre con~u de la meme maniere.) La
maniere dont quelque chose ou quelqu'etre m'apparait, l'effet ou
l'impression qu'il me fait, est avant tout une realite, avant meme que ne
se pose une question relative a la verite de cette apparition, de cet effet
ou de cette impression, c'est-a-dire a leur conformite d'avec ce que
cette chose ou cet etre sont 'en soi' (ou, pretendument, 'en realit6').
Mais a la verite, cette question peut-elle meme se poser jamais, en toute
rigueur? Sans doute, en un sens, on peut souvent cons tater avec raison
qU'une chose m'apparait autrement qU'elle n'est 'en realit6'. Mais en fait,
cela peut-il vouloir dire autre chose qU'a une autre occasion, la chose
peut m'apparaitre autrement qu'en ce moment-ci et que cette autre
apparition me fera une impression plus profonde parce que, pour l'une
ou l'autre raison, j'y attacherai plus d'importance qu'a la precedente?
Car il faut se resigner a l'evidence qu'un etre ou une chose ne sauraient
jamais apparaitre tels qu'ils sont en soi, pour la simple raison qu'etre, en
soi, n'est precisement pas apparaitre, pour un autre etre (ou se
manifester en quelque chose d'autre). (C'est meme cela la plus grande
le~on ontologique que nous n'avons pas fini a apprendre des considerations fondamentales qui sont a la base de la science moderne, celles qui
ont donne lieu a la distinction des 'qualites primaires', 'secondaires' et
'tertiaires' des choses.)
Le monde reel ainsi con~u - 'Ie seul monde reel, Ie monde reellement donne a la perception, Ie seul a faire objet de notre experience
effective et possible' ('Die Krisis .. .', 9, h) -, Husserll'a appele, des
l'epoque des le~ons sur la 'Philosophie premiere' de 1923/24, Ie monde
de la vie ou monde vecu. Caracteristiquement, dans 'La Crise .. .', il
ouvre l'introduction systematique du concept du 'monde de la vie' par
la simple remarque: 'Manifestement et de maniere evidente, il se
distingue Ie changement d'un objet per~u dans son contenu, comme une
alteration ou un mouvement per~u en lui-meme, d'un changement des
manieres d'apparaitre (comme par exemple des perspectives, des
apparitions de pres ou de loin) dans les quelles l'objectif en question se
presente comme present lui-meme' ('La crise .. .', 28). Le monde de
la vie, ce seul monde reel, est celui qui est constitue par ce 'changement
des manieres d'apparaitre' des etres et des choses, alors qu'aucun
162
RUDOLF BOEHM
changement de ceux-ci 'en eux-memes' ne peut se manifester, c'est-a-dire

avoir lieu, qu'a travers un tel 'changement des manieres d'apparaitre'.
J'ai pris l'habitude d'en trouver une illustration 6lementaire dans la
structure d'un roman policier. Un tel roman contient toujours deux
recits differents: Ie recit des faits qui ont conduit au meurtre, et celui de
la decouverte progressive (dans un autre ordre) de ces faits par Ie
detective; seul Ie dernier etant raconte, Ie premier ne se revel ant qU'a
travers 1'autre. On admettra que la popularite de ce genre de romans
n'est certainement pas due au fait que nous tous aurions reve d'etre des
deteotives, mais bien plutot au fait que nous tous Ie sommes, detectives.
Tout comme Ie detective, nous arrivons toujours trop tard sur la scene:
au moment ou nous sommes nes, toute sorte de choses, irrevocables et
irreparables (comme Ie meurte dans Ie roman policier), ont deja eu lieu
ou sont en train de s'accomplir independamment de nous, et nous
pas sons une bonne part de notre vie a leur courir apres et ales
decouvrir, et c'est par cela seulement qu'ils acquierent une realite
effective pour notre vie consciente.
Le monde de la vie, Ie seul monde reel, n'est, si ron veut, qu'un
monde apparent, un monde d'apparences. Il est un monde romanesque
ou romantique, ou ce que nous 'imaginons' est plus reel qU'aucune
realite objective. Il est Ie monde historique ou ce que representent les
traditions est plus reel qu'aucun fait historique objectivement etabli. au
encore, il est Ie monde ploitique OU, selon l'enseignement de Machiavel
que la phenomenologie, pour la premiere fois, nous a fait comprendre,
l'effet qU'une action, voire un simple discours, fait sur les hommes est
plus important que cette action elle-meme ou Ie contenu objectif, voire
l'intention 'vraie' du discours tenu.
Nous vivons tous, philosophes ou non, sur Ie sol de ce monde de la
vie. N ous ne pouvons nous comporter que comme des etres romantiques,
des etres historiques et surtout, sur Ie plan de nos actions conscientes
(rut-il souvent, la encore, sans en etre conscients, parce qu'il y a d'infinis
degres de conscience et non seulement une opposition du conscient et
de l'inconscient), comme des etres (des 'animaux') politiques.
II
Mais vaut-illa peine d'aller plus loin? Husserl ne nous a-t-il pas invite,
dans son dernier ecrit, a nous imposer une epoche meme a regard du
monde de la vie et a nous 'sur61ever au des sus du sol du monde de la
163
vie' ('La crise ...', 41)? Mais pourquoi donc? Apparemment, afin de
ne pas sombrer dans Ie relativisme d'une 'vie des inten~ts' qu'est la 'vie
naturelle au monde', et parce que ce relativisme lui-meme ne peut etre
mis en lumiere que par l'exercice d'une epoche qui nous engage a un
survol de ce monde de la vie. En effet, ce qU'est pour nous Ie monde de
la vie aussi longtemps que nous demeurons sur son sol, est de part en
part constitue par un echange constant (parfois vif, parfois lent et a
peine perceptible) entre ce qui, a chaque moment et pour chacun de
nous, est thematique et non-thematique, echange correspond ant a la
fluctuation de nos interets et de nos desinteressements (comme Husserl
l'a si bien decrit dans Ie 28, deja cite, de 'La crise ...').
Mais ce relativisme caracteristique du monde de la vie, repetons-le,
n'est mis en lumiere, selon Husserl lui-meme, que par un survol de ce
monde menage par une epoche qui nous fait decoller de son sol. Ne
serait-il donc point lui-meme une apparence qui n'apparait que lorsqu'on se detache, moyennant une epoche telle que Husserl la reclame,
des interets constitutifs de notre vie au monde? Aussi longtemps que
nous ne nous detachons pas de cette vie, ces interets n'offrent point Ie
spectacle d'un va et vient confus et depourvu de raisons saisissables,
mais sont enracines solidement dans Ie sol meme sur lequel nous
vivons, celui du monde de la vie. Notre interet a acquerir un savoir (et
donc, d'abord, notre interet philosophique, et ensuite, notre interet
scientifique) est motive par (et, en ce sens, fonde en) nos interets
techniques, economiques, politiques et moraux. A leur tour, ces interets
ont pour racine nos besoins vitaux, effectivement sentis par chacun de
nous. Ces besoins ou sentiments ont quelque chose d'absolu; il y en a
qui, comme la faim et la soif, doivent absolument etre satisfaits, sous
peine de mort. S'il y a relativisme, c'est seulement que nos interets ne
representent que des choses dont nous pensons, a tort ou a raison,
dependre pour satisfaire nos besoins sentis, et qu'ils sont donc entierement relatifs aces derniers qui, eux, ne sont pas d'un ordre raisonnable
et discutables mais de l'ordre sensible. Les sentiments que nous
appelons nos besoins sont eux-memes de deux types differents, voire
opposes. II y a, d'une part, les besoins des vivants qu'on a coutume, non
sans raison, d'appeler materiels. Ce sont nos besoins de survie que nous
ressentons comme des etres mortels. En eux est fonde, en premier lieu,
notre interet technique, c'est-a-dire notre interet a savoir produire ce
qu'il nous faut pour assurer notre survie. II est clair que cet interet
entraine un interet economique, etant donne qu'il nous faut constam-
164
RUDOLF BOEHM
ment choisir entre la production de 'moyens de consomption' et de

'moyens de production', ou entre la jouissance et l'epargne. Mais il est
aussi fonde dans nos besoins materiels notre interet politique, et cela
non seulement, quoique egalement, en fonction de notre interet economique. En effet, au lieu de s'assurer de la satisfaction de ces besoins
par Ie moyen de produire soi-meme ce qu'il y faut, on peut aussi faire
appel, a cette fin, a autrui; et nous Ie faisons to us constamment, des
notre naissance. C'est meme parce que cela est largement indispensable,
aussi dans Ie domaine de la technique et de l'economie, que I'homme a
pu etre appele I'animal politique. (Ceux que nous appelons des
'hommes politiques' constituent un cas particulier; ce sont des hommes
qui comme porte-paroles de tiers en appellent a d'autres pour pourvoir
aux besoins materiels de ceux au nom desquels ils parlent et agissent.)
Mais il y a aussi, d'autre part, des besoins vitaux des hommes qui ne
sont pas d'un ordre materiel et qu'on a coutume d'appeler 'emotionnels'
ou 'spirituels'. II importe de ne pas les confondre, comme on fait trop
souvent, avec des purs interets qui ne sont enracines que dans nos
besoins materiels, par exemple l'interet philosophique ou scientifique;
quoique la philosophie ou la science, et meme la technique et I'economie, pour ne rien dire de la politique, puis sent etre mises au service,
et Ie sont trop souvent, de la satisfaction de cet autre type de besoin. Ce
dont il s'agit, c'est Ie besoin que nous sentons comme etres natifs (et
nails) d'un sens de notre vie qui ne s'epuise pas a sauver notre survie
elle-meme. Sur ce besoin, se fonde surtout notre interet moral. Car
pour satisfaire a ce besoin, il nous faut acquerir Ie sentiment que notre
vie et survie est en quelque sorte necessaire au du mains utile, et elle ne
peut l'etre que pour d'autres hommes qui font appel a nous pour leur
aider a satisfaire leurs propres besoins materiels, fUt-il en leur apprenant une technique ou Ie savoir requis pour leur permettre d'y pourvoir
eux-memes. (On voit par la que notre interet moral, enracine dans
notre besoin d'un sens de notre vie, implique a nouveau un interet
technique, economique et politique et, par la, l'interet a acquerir Ie
savoir qui y est indispensable.)
II est remarquable que notre interet politique, d'abord enracine dans
nos prop res besoins materiels, correspond aussi, exactement, au besoin
senti par autrui d'un sens de sa vie et a son interet moral, issu de ce
besoin. Autrui (et il va de soi que, pour autrui, nous sommes aussi
nous-meme cet autrui) a besoin qu'il soit fait appel a lui, politiquement,
pour qu'il intervienne en faveur des besoins materiels ressentis par
165
nous; et il peut Ie comprendre s'il entend bien son propre inten~t moral.
Inversement, si nous voulons repondre, non seulement aux besoins
materiels d'autrui, mais aussi a son besoin de sentir que sa vie a un
sens, il nous faut nous comporter, vis-a-vis de lui, politiquement.
L'interet politique se trouve ainsi au coeur de la 'vie des interets'
constitutive du monde de la vie, Ie seul monde reel.
C'est peut-etre sous l'effet d'une terreur de la politi que avec laquelle
il fut brutalement confronte a son vieux age et qui risquait s'approcher
rapidement d'une question de vie et de mort, que Husser! a cherche
refuge dans I'idee d'une epoche exercee meme a l'egard du monde de la
vie. Car phenomenologiquement, cette 'nouvelle' epoche est inadmissible. La 'premiere' epoche, celie qui consista a suspendre toute foi dans
un monde d'etres et de choses existant en soi, etait imposee par Ie
'principe de tous les principes' enonce par Husser! en ces paroles:
'toute intuition qui no us offre (un phenomene) originairement est une
source legitime de connaissance, et tout ce qui s'offre a no us originairement dans l'intuition (dans sa realite, pour ainsi dire en chair et en os)
doit etre admis simplement tel qu'il se presente, mais aussi seulement
dans les limites dans lesquelles il s'offre ainsi' ('Idees pour une
phenomenologie pure', I, 24). Mais Ie meme Husser! dit du monde de
la vie qu'il est 'Ie seul monde reel, Ie monde reellement donne a la
perception, Ie seul a faire objet de notre experience effective et
possible' (voir plus haut). Comment donc ce monde de la vie peut-il
faire l'objet d'une epoche conforme au 'principe des principes' d'une
phenomenologie?
Une telle 'seconde epoche' au nom de laquelle on se refuserait a
faire foi dans la realite du monde de la vie, comme monde phenomenal,
risque me me de faire retomber la phenomenologie sur la position du
scepticisme, celie d'un 'subjectivisme paradoxal, joueur, frivole qui nie
to ute possibilite d'une connaissance et science objectives', au lieu de Ie
'surmonter' en lui 'rendant sa verite'; car cette 'seconde epoche' revient
a renier la 'premiere' dont l'omission fut precisement la cause pour
laquelle l'antique scepticisme n'a pu s'approprier sa propre verite.
On admettra facilement que nos interets, derives eux-memes de nos
besoins, nous obligent souvent, et meme constamment, a ajourner, a
remettre a plus tard, a differer la satisfaction de nos besoins. (Toute
consomption, par exemple, suppose une production, et celle-ci une
technique, et celle-ci un savoir, et celui-ci une philo sophie.) Cela aussi
peut etre appele une epoche, et c'est meme la, probablement, la
166
RUDOLF BOEHM
signification la plus primitive et naturelle du mot. Mais eriger une telle

'differance' (Jacques Derrida) en ideal d'une attitude habituelle et
permanente ou renouvelee constamment et sans fin, ce serait Ie debacle
de la phenomenologie, quoiqu'on ne puisse nier que Husserl lui-meme
ne l'ait risque a la fin tragique de sa vie. Selon la 'Chronique' de Karl
Schuhmann, Husserl parla la derniere fois de sa vie philosophie Ie 10
mars 1938, Ie jour de l'invasion de son pays, l'ancienne Autriche, par
les troupes hitleriennes.
III
Les besoins sentis par chacun de nous impliquent ou entrainent aussi,

lorsque pour les satisfaire nous nous adressons a autrui, notre interet a
pouvoir exprimer de fa<;on comprehensible pour autrui ce que no us
sen tons comme besoin, parce qu'un autre ne peut sentir ce que nous
sentons, et ne peut que Ie comprendre. Cet interet a pouvoir s'exprimer
se lie particulierement a notre interet politique, celui a pouvoir faire
appel a autrui pour intervenir - faveur de la satisfaction de nos besoins
materiels. Ce pouvoir d'exprimer ses sentiments est un art si difficile
qu'on a pu Ie confondre avec l"art' en general, au sens des 'beaux
arts'. (Ce qui imp Ii que que d'une maniere generale, no us ne pouvons
qu'emprunter ce pouvoir qu'a l'art expressif des artistes, ou qu'il
incombe aux musiciens, aux poetes, aux peintres, sculpteurs et architectes a trouver une expression pour ce que nous tous sen tons camme
notre besoin.) Notre interet moral, a son tour, qui est de nous rendre
utiles, voire necessaires, au service d'autrui et de la satisfaction de ses
besoins materiels (car repondre a l'autre type de besoins des hommes
est une question de politique, et non de morale), implique ou entraine
un interet de comprehension ou un interet a pouvoir interpreter
l'expression que trouve son besoin, afin de pouvoir savoir ce qu'il lui
faut. L'ensemble des sciences hermeneutiques ou humaines doit etre
issu de cet interet, et ce n'est pas en vain qu'on les appelait jadis les
'sciences morales'.
L'homme politique ou politicien (qui a ete mentionne plus haut en
parenthese et qu'on appelle ainsi pour Ie distinguer de l'animal politi que
qU'est tout homme) partage aussi bien l'interet d'expression que l'interet
de comprehension. II agit en politique lorsqu'il fait appel a d'autres
hommes pour venir en aide aux besoins materiels de tiers dont il se fait
Ie porte-parole. II lui importe alors de pouvoir donner une expression
167
adequate a ce que sont les besoins sentis par ces derniers. II Ie lui
importe egalement pour etre reconnu par ceux-ci comme leur porteparoles, du fait qu'il trouvent adequatement traduit en paroles, par lui,
ce qu'ils eprouvent. Mais afin d'en etre capable, il doit avant tout
pouvoir comprendre et interpreter correctement les sentiments de ceux
qu'il entend representer sur la base de l'expression que ces sentiments
trouvent chez ces derniers eux-memes. Cela fait partie de I'engagement
moral de l'homme politique.
La philosophie, elle, n'a pas, a proprement parler, un domaine
propre (j'ai donc parle d'une maniere impropre lorsque j'ai evoque
I'acces au 'domaine' de la phenomenologie), elle ne repond pas a un
interet bien determine des hommes comme I'interet scientifique, l'interet
technique, l'interet politique, l'interet moral et aussi l'interet artistique
et l'interet hermeneutique. Dans tous ces domaines, l'interet philosophi que ne porte que sur les questions de principe, et il porte sur les
questions de principes dans tous ces domaines. Pourtant, la situation du
philosophe est en quelque maniere comparable a celle de l'homme
politique (comme aussi a celle de l'artiste). Le philosophe ne fait appel
a personne, (mais) il a pour (seule) tache de donner expression aux
questions de principe qui se posent pour tous les hommes, dans tous les
domaines (enumeres plus haut). Ou plutot, il nc..fait appel a tous les
hommes qu'a se rendre compte du fait que telles sont les questions de
principe. Mais pour qu'ils puis sent s'en rendre compte, il faut y trouver
une expression dans laquelle les hommes sont capables de reconnaitre
ce qu'ils sentent, ou leurs propres interets qui sont enracines dans leurs
sentiments; les hommes - et non seulement d'autres philosophes a qui
trop souvent, a notre epoque, les ecrits des philosophes semblent
resignes a s'adresser. Et pour pouvoir trouver une telle expression il
faut d'abord aux philosophes pouvoir comprendre les sentiments de
besoin sentis par tous les hommes, tels qu'ils s'expriment, confusement
et difficilement, chez ceux-ci. Le philosophe si non seulement il veut
mais s'il doit redevenir, selon I'expression de Husserl, 'fonctionnaire de
l'humanite', doit aussi redevenir, disons pour une bonne part, homme
politique. Amon sens, c'est la un des plus grands enseignements de la
phenomenologie, fUt-il imprevu par Ie grand penseur qui en fut Ie
fondateur, Edmund Husser!'
Universite de Ghent
JES BJARUP
PHENOMENOLOGY, THE MORAL SENSE, AND

THE MEANING OF LIFE: SOME COMMENTS
ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDMUND HUSSERL
ANDA-T. TYMIENIECKA
1. INTRODUCTION*
In this paper, I wish to do two things. First I shall present my view of

Edmund Husserl's philosophy and his claim that the phenomenological
method is the only way to arrive at truth. I shall offer some comments
on Professor Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's papers "The Moral Sense. A
Discourse on the Phenomenological Foundation of the Social World
and Ethics"! and "The Moral Sense and the Human Person within the
Fabric of Communal Life."2 This approach to moral issues within
human life is based upon Tymieniecka's phenomenology of the Human
Condition, in which the Moral Sense supplies the foundation for the
meaning of life and human rights.
2. EDMUND HUSSERL'S PHILOSOPHY
2.1. Husserl's Philosophy

I have to confess that I am not an expert on Husserl's philosophy,
consequently I do not pretend to be familiar with the development of
Husserl's phenomenological method, nor for that matter with the later
developments within phenomenology. What I do know is that Husserl
shares the Cartesian assumption that knowledge must be based upon a
secure foundation.
Rene Descartes lived in a rapidly changing world, a world marked by
war between the Catholics and the Protestants, war in which Descartes
took part as a soldier. It was also a world marked by controversy
between competing views concerning knowledge of the nature of the
world and man's place in the world. This issue was faced by Descartes,
who described his own existence as being "half-way between being and
nothingness."3 In such a state it mattered enormously to find a proper
foothold. Hence Descartes' quest for establishing a secure foundation of
169
A-T Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol.
xxxv, 169-191.
170
JES BJARUP
knowledge by means of a systematic method of doubt which requires

the suspension of all that present itself to one's consciousness in order
to arrive at clear and distinct ideas as the only way of attaining
knowledge of everything within the world.
Husserl also wrote in a time of war. There was also a crisis within
science between the natural sciences and the human sciences. The
natural sciences have proved to be successful since by means of
knowledge of the laws of nature, man is capable of great technological
advances, thus fulfilling Descartes' prophecy that man would be the
master and owner of nature. 4 By contrast, the human sciences are in a
much more precarious position. This, in turn, calls for alarm, since the
human sciences may attempt to apply the same procedures used in the
natural sciences in order to be considered to be genuine science. If
this is the case, then what is at stake is human values and human life,
since man becomes mechanized and treated as an object rather than
a subject, that is to say a human person striving for a meaningful
existence.
The natural sciences are committed to fact-finding, but then Husserl
objects, "Blosse Tatsachenwissenschaften machen blosse Tatsachenmenschen."5 The objection is, as I understand it, that this scientific way
of thinking leads to a world-view which may be technologically useful
but is a humanly impoverished world-view since it excludes the most
important questions, that is, "die Fragen nach Sinn oder Sinnlosigkeit
dieses ganzen menschlichen Daseins."6
This is the background for the crisis within European science, which
Husserl tries to solve by his phenomenological method. Philosophy
must be a rigorous science dedicated to the investigation of the things
themselves, to use Husserl's well-known watchwords.? Philosophy, thus
conceived, is the ultimate foundation for scientific thinking; in its
offering a critical examination of scientific thinking and assumptions,
philosophy provides the proper methodology for scientific research of
nature an man's place in nature.
The starting point for Husserl is the experience of a single individual,
the Cartesian cogito. In this respect Husserl follows Descartes. Husserl
shares Descartes' objective of maximizing true ideas by looking for a
method which should be error-proof. The procedure to be followed is
examine what is directly present to consciousness. This examination
involves critical reflection not just on the content of one's ideas, but
also on one's methods of acquiring ideas. The philosophical question,
SOME COMMENTS ON HUSSERL AND TYMIENIECKA
171
then, is not only the ontological question: "What is the case?", but also
the epistemological question: "How can I know what is the case?" This
epistemological question, unlike the ontological question, mentions the
knowing subject, and requires reflection, not just on the world, but on
one's experience of the world. This reflection must be a critical reflection on one's consciousness without any presuppositions. And this
reflection reveals the intentional structure of consciousness. Thus the
world or reality is only accessible as a correlate of conscious acts, and
what matters is to pay close attention to what occurs in these acts and
the objective entities that get constituted in them in order to discover
the essential structures of the acts and the objective entities that
correspond to them. A means of discovering the essence of various acts
of consciousness is the intuition (Wesensschau) which is completed by
the transcendental reduction's achievement of insight into how meaning
comes about.
2.2. Criticism of Husser/'s Philosophy

This phenomenological method is put forward by Husserl as an attempt
to reach the ultimate sources of meaning and knowledge by an analysis
of various acts of consciousness. Husserl is committed to the view that
the phenomenological method must be a perfect method, that is to say,
the objective is that the method, if correctly applied, will lead infallibly
to meaning and truth. The method, rightly used, is the only rational way
which will guarantee that meaningfulness and truthfulness prevail over
meaninglessness and falsity. This is the reason for Husserl's lifelong
struggle and endless endeavor to clarify and describe the phenomenological method. But to offer a description of a method does not
necessarily, at least within philosophy, enable other persons to apply it.
For Husser! everything depends ultimately on the quality of the original
insight in which things reveal themselves for the transcendental ego.
This insight provides the Archimedean point from which the meaning
and truth of judgements may be discerned. The crucial question is,
however, how this insight can be communicated to other people. The
answer to this question reveals a clash between the basic watchwords of
Husserl's phenomenology, "Zu den Sachen selbst" and "Philo sophie als
strenge Wissenschaft." To say that an inquiry into the nature of things
themselves is a rigorous or scientific inquiry implies that the results
obtained by the investigation can be communicated to other people for
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scrutiny in order that they may decide whether to assent, dissent, or

suspend judgement as to whether the results are true or false. A great
principle of reason (reason in the sense of ideal habits of thinking well)
is the love of truth, philalethy. The good man is philalethic, as Plato
said in the Republic. Certainly, Husserl was a good man in the sense of
being a true lover of truth for its own sake, one "born to strive towards
reality who cannot linger among that multiplicity of things which men
believe to be real, but holds on his way with a passion that will not faint
or fail until he has laid hold upon the essential nature of each thing with
that part of his soul which can apprehend reality because of its affinity
therewith" to use Plato's characterization. 8 Husserl's intellectual integrity is to be admired and followed. It is also this disposition for truth
which explains Husserl's endeavors to find and describe the method
which will reveal something of that reality which endures for ever.
Another great principle of reason is respect for reasons, that is, to
believe, disbelieve, or suspend judgement about each proposition that
comes to one's notice, in accordance with the balance of reasons for
and against it available to one. Husserl also adhered to this principle. It
follows that the meaning obtained by the original insight into the nature
of reality must be communicable in sentences, so that whoever understands the sentences reaches the same understanding. In my opinion,
this is the flaw in Husserl's phenomenology. For Husserl, meaning is in
the act of insight, and not in discourse. The concern of phenomenology
is not primarily the meaning of what people say, that is, the information
conveyed by sentences, but rather in whether they mean to say it, that is
in their intention or insight. The task of the phenomenologist is to try to
describe this insight but the description cannot replace the insight; at
best the description can make it easier for another person to achieve a
similar insight. This, I take it, is not "strenge Philo sophie" since the only
reason cited for the claim is a person's insight, and another person may
claim that, despite the description, his insight differs. It is a well-known
fact that persons may have conflicting insights, and if insight is the only
way to settle the disagreement, then whose insight is to count?
The answer to this question is, undoubtedly, the philosopher's
insight. Why is this so? Because the philosopher's insight does not
depend upon any preconceived ideas, as is the case with ordinary men.
The philosopher's insight cannot be mistaken because he has searched
and found incorrigible cognitive acts. I doubt that this is a tenable
173
position. It seems to me that it rests upon the preconceived idea that it

is possible to investigate any subject matter without preconceived ideas,
which is self-contradictory. Besides, the search for incorrigible cognitive
acts as the foundation of knowledge is based upon the fallacy of
thinking that we can be right only when we in principle cannot be
wrong. It seems to me that this approach to knowledge dispenses with
its relationship to learning. If we follow Husserl's recommendation we
must turn our back on all our beliefs and established theories in order
to gain access to a pure and primordial insight into the things themselves. This is tantamount to disregard for the relationship between
knowing and learning. There is a distinction, also stressed by Husserl,
between cognitive acts of knowing on the one hand and what is known
on the other. What is important, however, is not acts of knowing but
what is known. The phrase "I know" is not used to announce the
occurrence of acts of knowledge or the experience of insight. To use the
phrase "I know" is to claim a certain status, that is to say that I am in a
position to justify the truth of what I assert I know by giving reasons for
my claim. This leads to a stress on the relationship between knowledge
and learning, rather than to adherence to the traditional position in the
history of philosophy which assimilates knowledge to seeing. To be
sure, seeing is a means of getting knowledge, but then there is a
distinction between the means of getting knowledge, and what is known.
To know is not something which we do, it is not an act which we
perform at a particular time. To know is rather something we get at by
applying various methods. In this respect Husserl confiates, it seems to
me, the distinction between the methods of arriving at knowledge and
knowledge itself. Husserl is committed to finding the proper method of
arriving at knowledge, but his phenomenological method is neither the
only method nor is it the proper method to apply in order to get
knowledge. This is so because it ignores the way of learning truths by
application of the rules of scientific evidence. It also ignores the
historical backgrounds for the development of theories, which is, after
all, of no small importance within the sciences. In this respect I find it
interesting that Husserl remarks that "since we not only have a culturalspiritual heritage, but are also nothing other than what we have become
through our spiritual-culture history, we have a task which is truly our
own. We can approach it properly only through a critical understanding
of the totality of history - our history."9
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2.3. The Critical Understanding Achieved through

Historical Investigations
This task of critical understanding cannot be achieved, I submit, by
concentrating on an examination of one's own consciousness, bracketing the historical background and development of concepts, and presenting this examination as the foundation of knowledge of nature, and
man's place in nature. As an example, I shall just mention the concept
of the laws of nature which plays a vital role in scientific explanation.
The concept of law of nature was introduced by Descartes to signify
God's commands, and later, when God is put between brackets, it
comes to signify any true universal empirical proposition that describes
the way nature works. A critical understanding of the growth of natural
science in Europe is only possible, I submit, by a historical investigation
into the vocabulary used by philosophers and scientists after Descartes. tO
Rational science has a religious background and began to flourish in
Europe in the seventeenth century when philosophers and scientists begin to think in terms of laws of nature as God's commands imposed upon
nature, which is His creation; "By measure, and number, and weight"
God orders everything, says the Wisdom of Solomon. Thus we have the
distinction between the primary qualities of an object, the qualities of
size, shape, weight intrinsic to objects that can be measured and dealt
with in science, and the secondary qualities of an object, such as color,
smell, and tactile quality, which fall outside the domain of science.
According to Descartes, God also creates man, and, besides acting
as a sovereign legislator establishing laws in nature; God also implants
ideas of these laws in men's minds, such that on sufficient reflection on
their own innate ideas, they cannot doubt that these laws are exactly
observed by all objects and events in the world. Thus, it is the Christian
ideas of a creative and omnipotent God which is the foundation of the
important concept of the laws of nature. It is this idea which Descartes
made respectable and which accounts for the success we have had in
gaining knowledge of the way the world is. It is because scientists think
in terms of laws of nature, implanted in their minds by their creator,
God, that scientists have the capacity to discover them, and not the
other way round, that is, because scientists discover regularities which
can be interpreted as laws of nature. This is the reason why Descartes is
committed to an investigation of his own consciousness and his own
innate ideas. God creates man in His own image to subdue nature. Man
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is lord of nature in virtue of his rationality which enables him to know

and use its resources without any moral scruples. It is the Cartesian
philosophy which is the background for the growth of the natural
sciences, with its conception of the world as a machine in contrast to
the Aristotelian conception of the world as an intelligent organism.
Natural processes become mechanized to be explained in terms of
efficient causes rather than in terms of natural kinds distinguished by
essential qualitative differences.
It is also the Cartesian philosophy which is the background for the
codification of laws decreed by sovereigns as commands to be obeyed
by their sUbjects. For Descartes, speaking of human affairs, the great
prosperity of a country is due, not to the goodness of each of its laws in
particular, but to their having been devised by a single man, and thus
tending to a single end.!! This, of course, is to raise important questions
on how to organize society. It also raises important questions on how to
exercise political power by means of law. What sorts of conduct may
the state rightly regulate by means of legislation, and are there any
moral principles to guide the legislator in this respect?
3. TYMIENIECKA'S APPROACH
3.1. Perspectives on Moral Issues

This brings me to consideration of Professor Tymienieck's papers since
they are concerned with the theme of "moral concern, moral attitude,
or moral right which the human individual exercises or is expected
to exercise in social interactions as well as in intimately private
experiences." (MSHP, p. vii)
I agree with Professor Tymieniecka that this concern is of crucial
importance for human life in society. I also agree that philosophy can
make a contribution by providing an analysis of moral thinking in terms
of an analysis of moral language. In this respect, we may, however, disagree since Professor Tymieniecka proposes an analysis from another
perspective, that is, from that of the nature of human life, which will
remedy the persistent discrepancy between theory and practice and
bring them together. As Tymeiniecka writes, "we are, indeed, proposing
a new approach to their treatment such that the gap between ethical
theory, concrete human behavior, and self-experience may be overcome." (MSHP, p. viii) I wonder what this "new approach" implies. Is it
a new approach for analyzing moral language? This is, I take it, an
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analytical or conceptual moral question which involves an analysis of

moral language in order to clear the ground and pave the way to the
knowledge of what is right and what is good, and of the conduct suited
to them, thus uniting theory and practice. Or is it the case that
Professor Tymieniecka's new approach rather involves a change in
human values and our idea of moral conduct? This is a substantive
moral question which is quite distinct from the analytical question. It is
quite possible to give an affirmative answer to the analytical question,
that is, propose a new way of treating moral questions without necessarily giving an affirmative answer to the substantive moral question,
that is, to propose a new set of values replacing old values. It seems to
me that Tymieniecka thinks that the analytical and the substantive
moral questions are interrelated, so that a new method of analyzing
moral language will also lead to new values. This is so, since the new
approach "may open new roads toward the fundamental revision of the
status, formulation, and significance of moral and ethical issues that are
vital for our time." (MSHP, p. ix)
With respect, I disagree. It seems to me that we do not need any
revision of our moral principles resulting in new moral principles of
what is right and what is good. What we need is rather a new mode of
conduct conforming to traditional values and moral principles. I shall
revert to this in section 3.6.
3.2. Questions Concerning Meaning

If I understand Tymieniecka correctly, she subscribes to a conception
of philosophy which is capable of answering questions about the

significance of human life, human rights, and human virtues. Indeed,
her theme is the human condition, that is, the source of the meaning of
life in general, and of human beings in particular, as well as the meaning
of moral language. This source of meaning is found in the moral sense
as "the factor of moral evaluation, sensibility, inclination and judgement
instilled into foundational human functioning." (MSHP, p. ix)
In her papers Tymieniecka addresses large questions. Tymieniecka
makes a distinction between" 'the objective' cognitive meaning-bestowing function" and "the 'moral' meaning-bestowing function." (MS, pp. 8f)
I shall concentrate my comments on the "'moral' meaning-bestowing
function," since the concept of moral sense has a very comprehensive
and crucial role to play in Tymieniecka's argument.
177
It seems to me that Tymieniecka addresses three questions concerning meaning. The first question is the meaning of human life in general,
which I shall dub the cosmic question. The next question is the meaning
of life for a particular individual which I shall dub the personal
question. The third question is the meaning of moral concepts used in
moral language which I shall call the conceptual question. The answer
offered by Professor Tymieniecka to these questions is that the source
of meaning is to be found in the moral sense. My thesis, which I shall
try to substantiate in what follows, is that this is not the case. I shall
start with the cosmic question of the meaning of life in general.
3.3. The Cosmic Question

This question is often regarded as the most urgent of all questions
within philosophy. Before trying to give an answer, it is worthwhile to
ask a prior question, that is, that of whether the cosmic question is an
intelligible question at all. To understand a question is to have some
idea of what would count as an answer to it, and some idea of the way
by which it could be established for any given answer whether the
answer is relevant or irrelevant, and further whether the relevant
answer be true or false. Is the cosmic question an intelligible question in
this sense? The answer may be affirmative, understanding the question
to be whether there is meaning, in the sense of purpose, in man's life in
general. If you adopt a theistic approach, as Descartes did, referring to
God, there is indeed a purpose in man's life in general, namely, the
purpose of mastering nature by means of science. If you, by contrast,
adopt a non-theistic approach, the answer may be much more difficult.
In this case there is no suprahuman intelligence like God creating
human beings, along with other objects in the world to serve some
purpose. Consequently, without the existence of God, life has no
purpose; it is as Macbeth exclaims, "Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury, signifying nothing."12 Shakespeare's character's point
is not, I take it, that life has been created by an idiot, but rather that life
is not part of any design at all. This position, that life has no meaning, is
often understood to imply that the cosmic question is not an intelligible
question. Or, if an intelligible question, then that there is only a negative
answer. Life is absurd, and we better recognize this fact. The position,
that life is absurd, is then likewise often understood to imply an answer
to the personal question, that is, to say that the life of any human
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individual IS absurd. This is the case for the individual who finds
himself in a situation where nothing matters. Since nothing matters, he
does not matter either. This experience is, I take it, what Tymieniecka
refers to "when the individual feels 'lost.'" (MSHP, p. 56) This may
indicate that the human person has need for psychiatric care. (Cf.
MSHP, pp. 69 ff)
There is, however, cure besides psychiatric care, namely, a philosophical analysis. This cure consists in making the person understand
that it is false to move from the position that life in general has no
purpose to the position that his life has no purpose. Because people do
not serve God's purpose, it does not follow that people have no
purposes in their lives. In other words, if the answer to the cosmic
question is negative, it does not follow that the answer to the personal
question of the meaning of one's life is also negative.
3.4. The Personal Question

The cosmic question and the personal question are distinct questions,
so neither a negative nor an affirmative answer to the former entails any
answer to the latter. It seems to me that Tymieniecka thinks otherwise,
claiming that there is a need for an affirmative answer to the cosmic
question in order to affirmatively answer the personal question. Modern science cannot answer, it is often said, the cosmic question. It does
not follow that it cannot answer the personal question. But, the argument runs, modern natural science cannot answer the personal question
either. Science is descriptive and tells us how things are, according to
causal laws, but it is silent as to why things are and happen. Hence
man's predicament and the importance of the personal question. Since
no answer is forthcoming within natural science, it is within the
province of philosophy to provide an answer, which in turn may be
important for the human sciences. This is Tymieniecka's thesis.
Philosophy and the human sciences, she claims, have a common
province which is the human being as a social being within his life and
social world. Within this world the human being is motivated by
individual life-interests, thereby trying to promote significance of his
own devices for his own self-interpretation in existence. But the crucial
factor is that the individual is also motivated to expand his "own
individual meaningfulness into transactions with other individuals."
(MS,p.17)
179
The human being is a social being motivated by the moral sense

which is "the decisive factor" in making man aware of his situation and
role within the existential "unity of everything-there-is-alive." (MSHP p.
8) The moral sense is important for the conception of the human being
as a human person, and also for the conception of the human person as
a moral agent. A human person "is a moral agent only insofar as its lifeenactment is, throughout all the 'vocal' circuits of its functioning,
informed by the moral sense." (MSHP, p. 27) Thus, there is an affirmative answer to the personal question of the significance or meaning of
his life. The answer is the moral sense as "the key factor in founding the
individual's social significance of life." (MSHP, p. 37)
I am not sure whether Tymieniecka is putting forward an empirical
or conceptual claim concerning the moral sense and its importance for
living a meaningful life. Human beings are certainly motivated by
purposes, hence it makes sense to ask for explanations in terms of
reasons (in contrast to causes) for their activities and conduct. By
contrast, things are not motivated by purposes. This fact makes human
beings distinct from things. Of course, things may be made to serve a
purpose, e.g., an airplane is made to serve a purpose, the purpose of the
persons who build it to serve as a means of fast transportation.
But this does not make the purpose of the plane identical with the
purpose(s) of the persons who made it. Man is not created with a
purpose, but it does not follow that man's life therefore is without any
meaning, purpose or significance.
Although there may be no purpose of life, it does not follow that
there is no purpose in life in the sense that men cannot themselves
adopt and achieve purposes in their lives, and hence live a significant
and meaningful life. It seems to me that this is also the case if the moral
sense is put forward as an empirical claim. Although the individual may
lack a moral sense, it does not follow that his life is without sense or is
meaningless. Tymieniecka perhaps advances the moral sense as a
conceptual necessity if a human being is to be a human person and
moral agent. If so, it follows that a human being lacking the moral sense
is not, strictly speaking, a human person and a moral agent. The human
being is a thing or an object. This, of course, is of no small consequence
for the treatment of such persons in mental hospitals. It is also important to notice that the question is no longer the personal question of
the meaning of life for a human person. It is the quite different
conceptual question of what is meant by the concept of a human
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person? You may adopt Tymieniecka's thesis that this concept includes
the moral sense as a necessary characteristic. But it does not follow that
a human person, thus defined, as a matter of fact lives a significant
life.
The concept of human person is contested, and I shall not enter into
a discussion of it now, but rather move to a discussion of the conceptual question, that is the question of the meaning of moral concepts.
3.5. The Conceptual Question

Tymieniecka also proposes that the moral sense provides the key to the
meaning of moral concepts. In this respect her analysis is close to
the British Moral Sense doctrine advanced by Shaftesbury, Francis
Hutcheson, as she herself notes (see MS, p. 11). If this is the case, then
Tymieniecka's analysis is not as novel as she claims. Further, her
analysis is vulnerable to the same objections to the significance of the
moral sense put forward by other British Moralists such as Samuel
Clarke, John Balguy, and Richard PriceY
The Moral Sense, as advanced by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, was
subjected to the criticism that the moral sense is an extra human organ
which no one had noticed until Shaftesbury and Hutcheson discovered
it. This criticism was countered by treating the moral sense, not as an
organ but as a faculty which can be accounted for in the same way as
other faculties, for example, perception and memory. Tymieniecka's
account is that the moral sense has "a specific sense-giving and promoting function which is responsible for the meaningfulness of 'moral
life,' 'moral conduct' and 'moral language.' " (MSHP, p. 36; MS, p. 23)
But she contests "the identification of the moral sense with any
psychic faculty or with any faculty for that 'matter.''' (MSHP, p. 36;
MS, p. 23, emphasis added). This statement, however, does not square
with her statement "that we have to seek the origin of man's selfinterpretation in existence in the autonomous faculty of the Moral
Sense!" (MSHP, p. 13, emphasis added) As far as I can see Tymieniecka
contradicts herself, claiming that the moral sense is, and is not, a
faculty. In any case, if the moral sense is not to be seen as a faculty, she
makes a departure from Hutcheson who advances the moral sense as a
faculty. So it is false to say, as Tymieniecka says, that her view is "in
agreement substantially with those of the British Moralists of the 17th
181
century." (MSHP, p. 98) And I doubt that there is any clarification in

her claim that "the moral sense using all the conscious faculties is a
unique type of spontaneous function, which is virtually present in the
Human Condition, in which the psychic faculties in their mature form
also crystallize." (MSHP, p. 36) If the moral sense is "a unique type of
spontaneous function" then this presupposes the activity of some organ
or faculty. Tymieniecka claims that this is to be found in "the moral
conscience." (MS, p. 32) This is to locate the moral sense, not as a
faculty, but as the moral organ, "the moral voice," as the meaningbestowing factor using "the psychic faculties (sensing, feeling, emotive
experience, imagination, and cognition) ... (in) its meaning-bestowing
exercise." (MS, p. 34) Moral conscience exercising the moral sense is
not an instinct, since "the moral sense does not manifest itself through
and in the 'animal nature' of the human being." (MSHP, p. 37) By this
claim Tymieniecka answers the objection put forward by John Balguy
that Hutcheson is forced to admit that animals not only are capable of
being treated as objects of virtue and vice, but that they, like human
beings, are "subjects of virtue."14
Professor Tymieniecka claims that the moral sense belongs to human
being "as a specific quality of his commerce with other human subjects."
(MSHP, p. 37) Thus moral consciousness is not innate, but rather it
develops and manifests itself in interaction with other human beings.
Unlike Husserl, Tymieniecka takes into consideration "the genetic
progress of the forms of live-development of the living individual at
various cultural stages during which his sense-information - and object
constitution - unfolded." (MS, pp. 8f) This, I take it, is an empirical
question concerning the origin of the moral sense which reminds me of
Charles Darwin's claim, "the following proposition seems to me in a
high degree probable - namely, that any animal whatever, endowed
with well-marked social instincts, ... would inevitably acquire a moral
sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as
well, or nearly as well, developed as in man."15 If this explanation is
true, then it seems to be the case that there is no need to postulate in
man a special capacity for moral thinking. Moral thinking arises in a
natural way from a person's exercise of his other capacities in social
relationships with other human persons.
This raises the question why do we need a moral consciousness exercising moral sense? Tymieniecka's answer is that we do not need it in
order to observe the world and men's conduct. This objective is within
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the province of cognition and its language of the objective meaningbestowing function. But we need the moral sense as a moral meaningbestowing factor introducing through a valuative process values or
moral language as a directive power in social life, in order to attach
moral approval or disapproval to human persons and their conduct
"from the standpoint of benevolence." (MS, p. 23) Everyone ought to
valuate and act "benevolently" as the key to human happiness which is
considered the fulfillment of life of the human being. (MS, pp. 23, 32)
This raises a very interesting issue. If the moral sense is needed as an
unique factor to attach approval of the human person to his action
already observed to be benevolent, then there are two interpretations of
this moral approval. The first interpretation considers moral approval
as a way of sensing primary qualities. This I shall call the objective
interpretation. The second interpretation considers moral approval as a
way of sensing secondary qualities. This I shall call the subjective
interpretation. According to the objective interpretation, in our preception of primary qualities like shape or size, our sensations give us
reliable information about something which is inherent in the object. I
see the oven as round, and it is round, just as I see it. The moral sense
functions in a similar way, I see the benevolent action with the further
inherent quality of its demanding approbation. Merely by perceiving the
action we are necessarily committed to the approbation of the human
person and his conduct.
It is quite otherwise if the subjective interpretation is adopted. In this
case I may have a sensation of pain when I touch the hot oven. My
sensation of pain is an immediate natural, non-willed, and non-referential response to something objective, but the pain that I feel does not
inform me about anything like pain-as-I-feel-it in the object, the hot
oven. If we follow this interpretation concerning the moral sense, the
logical status of being morally good is like being painful. What is
morally good is what provokes a certain subjective response in the
person perceiving human conduct, and this response is an entirely
contingent matter. What is good depends upon the human nature of the
perceiver. Hence his moral judgement expresses either his own feelings
- autobiographical or intra-subjective definition of moral concepts or it expresses the feelings of most men, the transsubjective or sociological definition of moral concepts. 16
By contrast, the objective interpretation of the moral sense presents
moral judgements as expressing what is good in the nature of actions
183
and offers an objective definition of moral concepts as being independent of feelings, sentiments or facts about ourselves.
Tymieniecka refers to the British Moralists, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and these moralists clearly adopt the subjective interpretation. I am
not sure whether Tymieniecka endorses this interpretation or whether
she rather adopts the objective interpretation. This interpretation is also
put forward by other British Moralists such as Clarke and Butler. But I
am quite sure that these interpretations are important for the answer to
the "paradoxical question" raised by Tymieniecka, that is, "How can we
explain that, in a cultural period like our own, which distinguishes itself
from previous periods of Western culture by a highly refined conception of moral values and by sophisticated institutional (legal, etc.)
methods to implement them in current interpretations of human transactions, we yet witness in social practice their violation, abuse, neglect,
ignorance, or outright contempt?" (MS, p. 37)
This question is related to the question of how to explain that error
comes about, which worried Descartes. Since the human mind is supposed to be the rational faculty of judgement, which, when correctly
applied, will lead to truth, how is error at all possible? The answer is
that error arises from the relations between the will and the understanding.
A similar explanation may be offered in regard to moral conduct.
The failure to act properly and morally arises from the relations
between the will and understanding. For the good that I would, I do
not, but the evil which I would not, that I do. Another explanation may
be that if it is the case that the origin of the moral sense is to be found
in a social process, then there will be a difference in the way this
process is regarded according to whether one adopts a subjectivist
interpretation or an objectivist interpretation. If one adapts the subjectivist interpretation or morals, then this process is regarded as a process
whereby some men (and especially the weak) deceive the community
into believing that moral considerations possess an importance which
really they lack. Hence they are treated with contempt or neglected in
education. By contrast if you adopt the objectivist interpretation of
morals, then the process is regarded as a process whereby some men
(people with wisdom) discover and reveal to the rest of the community
moral truths, which, like mathematical truths, have been waiting to be
discovered. Hence their importance, and the cause of their not being
followed in social practice is due to lack of education.
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JES BJARUP
3.6. The Analysis of Moral Concepts

I do not know whether this is the appropriate answer to Tymieniecka's
"paradoxical question." But it seems to me that in order to answer this
question, one has to settle a prior question concerning the analysis of
moral concepts used in moral thinking. This question is whether
motivation is, or is not, part of the analysis of moral concepts. The
affirmative answer is the internalist position, which holds that motivation is part of the meaning of moral concepts and that moral judgements cannot be analyzed without reference to the feelings or volitions
of the human person as a moral agent. In contrast, is the negative
answer, or the externalist position, which denies that motivation is part
of the meaning of moral concepts and holds that moral judgements can
be analyzed without any reference to the feelings or volitions of the
human person as a moral agent. I 7
What is common to the internalist and externalist position is that in
both morality is concerned with human conduct. It is practical in the
sense that moral values are to be conceived as governing and guiding
human persons in their conduct. They differ, however, concerning the
question of the motivation to act morally. Hence, Tymieniecka's
"paradoxical question." In the externalist position it is logically possible
for a human person to have an obligation, even if he has no motivation
at all to do the action in question. In the internalist position this is a
paradox, since it is not logically possible to separate obligation and
motivation. Motivation is important because it is built into judgements
of having obligations. The neglect of obligations which we witness in
social practice, lamented by Tymieniecka, is a sign of the decline of
traditional moral values, which must be replaced by new values or new
virtues. ls For the externalist, motivation is an important problem, not
because it is involved in the analysis of moral concepts, but rather
because it is necessary to convince human persons to act in accordance
with their freely undertaken obligations. The neglect of obligations is
not a sign of the decline of traditional values. We do not need a new
morality. What we do need is rather better moral education, stressing
the importance of moral reasons for human conduct. It seems to me
that we should follow Hutcheson and make a distinction between two
kinds of reasons for human conduct, exciting reasons as motives for
doing actions, and justifying reasons as the ground or justification for
actions.
Tymieniecka also borrows Hutcheson's concepts of "exciting rea-
185
sons" and "justifying reasons" but in her analysis, as she admits, these
concepts are used with altogether different meaning (see MS, p. 72).
Her analysis collapses the distinction between motivation and justification, which I wish to uphold. Tymieniecka then adopts an internalist
position, claiming that the principal motivation for human action is that
"everyone ought to valuate and act 'benevolently.''' (MS, p. 23) She also
thinks that benevolence reveals the universal principle of justification of
moral conduct, the exercise of which will lead to the "moral significance
of our act." (MS, p. 31) This benevolent acting will in turn lead to a
communal mode of life among human persons and to human happiness
which "is considered the fulfillment of life." (MS, p. 32)
The deliverances of the moral consciousness, applying the moral
sense as a meaning-bestowing factor, are then put forward as the
foundation for a determinative, systematic morality for human conduct
in the human condition. But to say, with Tymieniecka, that "happiness
is the fulfillment of life," is not to say very much until the concept of
happiness itself is clarified. As far as I can judge from Tymieniecka's
papers, she believes she can do that by ascertaining the functions of
human beings, which are not to be found in the human instinct of selfinterest, but, on the contrary, in "the surrender of self-interest to the
common interests of other beings." (MS, p. 25) The function of human
beings is to become human persons as moral agents. To be happy, and
to live a meaningful life, is for a human person to perform benevolent
actions. "The moral subject, in benevolent acting finds his own reward.
In evil-doing, his own punishment." (MS, p. 31)
Concerning self-interest and benevolence, I think it is important to
notice that individualism is not necessarily equivalent to egoism or selfinterest, as Tymieniecka perhaps implies (see MS, pp. 7f). The term
individualism can be used in two, quite different, ways. Individualism
may be used in opposition to collectivism on the one hand, and in
opposition to altruism on the other hand. Since there is no word to
express the opposition to collectivism, but several synonyms do express
the opposition to altruism, for example egoism or self-interest, there is a
risk of identifying individualism with egoism and altruism with collectivism. This is not necessarily the case as can be seen by the following
pair of opposites: (a) individualism as opposed to collectivism; and (b)
egoism as opposed to altruism.
As these two oppositions show, there are not just two, but four
possibilities concerning the conduct of human persons towards other
human persons. An individualist is an anticollectivist, but not neces-
186
JES BJARUP
sarily an egoist, since he may very well be prepared to make sacrifices

or perform benevolent actions in order to assist other human persons,
that is to say, it is possible for an individualist to be an altruistic human
person. To identify altruism with collectivism, and individualism with
egoism is, I submit, a mistake. It is a mistake to suggest that if you do
not surrender your interests for the sake of society, then you are selfish,
only pursuing your own happiness.
Happiness for Tymieniecka is an activity of the moral sense, an
exercise of the distinctive human capacity to use the interpretative
sense of benevolence to act for "the good in general." (MS, p. 26)
According to Tymieniecka, "the Good [is] the ultimate directedness of
the moral sense." (MS, p. 27) Tymieniecka then follows Hutcheson,
who claims that "that action is best, which procures the greatest
happiness for the greatest numbers, and that worst, which, in like
manner, occasions misery."19 Now this claim is also the foundation for
Jeremy Bentham's moral theory of utilitarianism. It may be the case that
Tymieniecka's reliance upon the moral sense and the Good as the
"Archimedean point" (MS, p. 58) commits her to a version of utilitarianism. But I shall not enter into a discussion of the merits or
demerits of utilitarianism, but only note that it cannot be considered to
be the only tenable moral theory.
3.7. The Concept of Rights

Besides, utilitarianism, at least in Bentham's version is very hostile to
the concept of natural rights, as opposed to the concept of civic or legal
rights. According to Bentham, the language of natural rights is nonsense. "Natural rights is simply nonsense, natural and inprescriptible
rights, rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts."20 But this nonsense
can be dangerous. When applied to social affairs and the task of
government it is "terrorist language" as opposed to the language of
reason. For Bentham, then, the language of natural rights cannot be
essential to moral language. What is essential to moral language is
rather utility and regard for happiness. In her paper, Tymieniecka also
addresses the issue of rights from the phenomenological perspective of
the Moral Sense. I shall conclude this paper by some comments on this
approach.
There is a substantial amount of discussion among lawyers concerning the proper analysis of the concept of right, and some of its results
187
are valuable outside of legal contests and relevant to the discussion of

the concept of human rights or natural rights. I shall only draw attention to Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld's breaking the proposition "P has a
right to" down into P's claims, liberties, powers, and immunities.21 I
believe this analysis is relevant to Tymieniecka's claim that "by 'human
rights' we understand, in the current life, first a mixed bag of claims ...
[and next] certain inalienable 'privileges' pertaining to the status of
humanness among all other types of beings (and things) within the lifeworld." (MS, pp. 46-47)
I shall not pursue this analysis which concerns the relationship
between persons concerning the substance of their rights. Tymieniecka
thinks that rights and obligations are correlative concepts (MS, p. 61),
but it is arguable that this existential correlation does not hold for all
rights. Still, I shall not enter into a discussion of this issue. Rather I wish
to focus on the basis or foundation for rights. In this case there is a
distinction between legal rights and the human rights, also called
natural rights, mentioned by Tymieniecka. (MS, pp. 62f) Legal rights
('civic rights' in Tymieniecka's terminology) depend for their existence
on social convention or recognition. They owe their existence to a
particular legal system and its special social conditions. By contrast,
natural or human rights are rights we are all said to have, by those who
believe we have them, independent of particular circumstances, and
they do not depend on any special conditions. Consequently a human
right does not depend upon social recognition, as is shown by the fact
that it is appealed to even when it is not recognized by law. Now,
Tymieniecka claims that "in a sense all rights are 'human.' " (MS, p. 60)
I take this in the sense that all rights, legal as well as natural rights,
belong only to human beings as members of human society. Thus
Tymieniecka may be interpreted as claiming that it does not make sense
to say that animals can have rights or that even trees and plants and
even rocks and landscapes can have rights. This is a moot question, and
some suggest an affirmative answer, claiming that animals, plants,
landscapes have a "right to exist." In my opinion, this claim creates only
confusion. It is one thing to say that it is wrong to treat animals cruelly,
or to say that it is wrong to exploit nature, it is quite another thing to
say that animals, plants, or landscapes have rights. The concept of right
is simply not applicable to what is non-human, but is only applicable to
what is human.
The next question concerns the claim that in order to say what we
188
JES BJARUP
mean by human rights, we must draw the distinction just mentioned

between human rights as legal rights, and human rights as natural
rights. The former are "related strictly to the concrete and sociopolitical
frameworks in which they are expressed," as Tymieniecka quite rightly
notes. (MS, p. 66) Human legal rights depend for their existence upon
recognition by the legal system. By contrast, human or natural rights are
quite independent of any such framework or recognition by other
human beings. Hence it seems to me to be false to suggest, with
Tymieniecka, that human rights in the sense of human natural rights
owe their existence to their being recognized by other human beings. I
take it that this is what she means when she writes: "I cannot exercise
my rights unless they have been recognized by other subjects in my life
dynamics complex as their obligation to make provisions within their
own life, which we peripherally share, for my exercising them." (MS, p.
61)
Human natural rights, however, are not granted by society, since
they exist prior to society, and this is precisely why they should be
recognized and respected by governments and implemented by the
enactment of legal rights. The question is what is the foundation of
human natural rights? Tymieniecka claims that "a human right is a
postulate of the individual's 'human state.'" (MS, p. 58) 1 am not sure
whether Tymieniecka claims that human beings have human rights
simply because they are human beings, or whether human beings have
rights only insofar as they also are human persons.
If the former formulation is Tymieniecka's claim, that is, that human
being qua human beings have certain rights, e.g., the right to life, then
another consideration becomes critical. This is that the set of criteria
defining "humanness" must be identified. This again turns out to be a
difficult question which brings the issue of abortion into focus. The
question of whether fetuses have rights, e.g., the right to life, may be
answered in the negative by insisting that it is human beings qua
persons rather than qua human beings who have rights. Having human
rights implies being a person, that is, an autonomous rational agent.
It seems to me that Tymieniecka's claim that "the 'human being' is to
have specific, and unique, rights in virtue of 'being human' " (MS, p. 55)
is based upon the conception that human beings are persons or moral
agents. This in turn is based upon the moral sense (MSHP, p. 27). Thus,
the foundation of human rights is "the function of the Moral Sense" in
189
virtue of which "the individual may engage in a full-fledged social selfinterpretation in existence as a fully human being." (MS, p. 68) This
raises the issue, referred to above, in section 3.4, concerning the
concept of the human person. For Tymieniecka, the important fact is
the presense of the moral sense. To me, the concept of a human person
rather implies agency, that is to say, a human being is a human person
insofar as he has the capacity for autonomous intentional action involving freedom and the power to engage in relationships with other human
persons respecting their autonomy. This implies respecting their equal
rights, so that no human person may "harm another in his life, health,
liberty or possessions" as John Locke puts it. 22
Tymieniecka stresses the importance of transactions for "man's
fashioning his social life-world." (MS, p. 44; ct. pp. 51ft) I agree, but
wish to draw attention to the fact that to engage in transactions presupposes that you are a human person who owns something, that as a
free agent you own your actions for which you are responsible. Hence,
the importance of natural rights as the foundation for legal rights.
Hence, also, the importance of individualism, that is to say, of human
persons having the capacity for autonomous intentional actions respecting other persons' autonomy. Individualism united with natural rights
provides a stronghold in the defenses of the moral integrity and freedom of human persons in relation to government. Individualism united
with altruism provides the foundation for social relations with other
human persons within society.
4. CONCLUSION
Whether or not the foundation of natural or human rights is to be

found in the moral sense, I agree with Professor Tymieniecka's conclusion that the importance of rights "lies with its virtual conditions conditions such that man's meaningfulness of existence may be actualized." (MS, p. 71) I would add, however, that to lay stress on the
human natural rights of persons is precisely to allow controversy about
the ultimate meaning of life. It is the peaceful conflict of values, rather
than their harmony, that keeps our culture alive. This makes it vital for
human persons to think for themselves. It is important at all times for
human persons to examine their presuppositions and question their
beliefs. This is the legacy of Husserl's philosophy which it is important
190
JES BJARUP
to keep alive in times of change. This shows the relevance of philosophy to human development.
Aarhus University
NOTES
* EDITORS NOTE: While Professor Tymieniecka does not necessarily agree with some
of Dr. Bjarup's extrapolations concerning her work, she does want to emphasize that
these are Dr. Bjarup's own interpretations.
I In A- T. Tymieniecka and C. O. Scrag, cds., Foundations of Morality, Human Rights,
and the Human Sciences, Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XV (Dordrecht: 1983) pp. 3-78.
Henceforth referred to as MS in the text in order to reduce the numbers of footnotes.
2 In A- T. Tymieniecka, ed., The Moral Sense in the Communal Significance of Life,
Analecta Husserliana, Vol. xx (Dordrecht: 1986) pp. 3-100. Henceforth referred to
as MSHP in the text.
3 Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1642), IV Meditation, translated in
E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge:
1934) Vol. 1, p. 172.
4 See Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method (1637), Part Six.
5 Edmund Husser!, Die Krisis der europiiischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phiinomenologie, Husserliana, Bd. VI (ed. Walter Biemel) (The Hague: 1954)
p.4.
6 Idem., p. 4.
7 See Edmund Husserl, "Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft," in Logos, Bd. 1,
1910-1911, pp. 289-340.
H Plato, The Republic (transl. F. M. Cornford) (Oxford: 1941), Book VI 490 (p. 193).
9 Husserl, Die Krisis, op. cit. note 5, p. 72; cf. Husserl, "Philosophie als strenge
Wissenschaften," op. cit. note 7, pp. 340f.
I() See Francis Oakley, "Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The Rise of
the Concept of the Laws of Nature," Church History, Vol. 30, 1961, pp. 433-457.
II See Descartes, Discourse on Method, op. cit. note 4, Part Two. The idea of law as
command is also put forward by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651).
12 William Shakespeare, "Macbeth," Act V, Scene V, 16. See my paper "Interpretation,
Reasoning and the Law," in The Structure of Law (ed. Ake Frandberg & Mark van
Hoecke) (Skrifter fran Juridiska Fakulteten i Uppsala), Bd. 14 (Uppsala: 1987) pp.
161-178.
13 See D. D. Raphael (ed.), British Moralists 1650-1800, (Oxford: 1969) and for an
overview J. L. Mackie, Hume's Moral Theory (London: 1980).
14 John Balguy, "The Foundations of Moral Goodness," in Raphael, British Moralists,
op. cit. Vol. 1, p. 391.
15 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd ed. (London: 1875), p. 98, quoted from
Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: 1986) p. 224.
16 See the analysis of moral-sense theories in ethics by C. D. Broad, in Broad's Critical
Essays in Moral Philosophy (ed. David Cheney) (London: 1971).
191
17 See William K. Frankena, "Obligation and Motivation in Recent Moral Philosophy,"

in Essays in Moral Philosophy (ed. A. 1. Melden) (London: 1958) pp. 40-81.
I, I admit that there may be a clash between traditional principles since these
principles can be conceived either in terms of rights or in terms of virtues. I cannot,
however, enter into a discussion of this theme.
19 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, in Raphael, British
Moralists, op. cit. note 13, Vol. 1, p. 284.
20 Jeremy Bentham, "A Critical Examination of the Declaration of Rights," in Bentham's Political Thought (ed. B. Parekh) (London: 1973) p. 269.
21 Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions (ed. W. W. Cook)
(London: 1919).
22 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (ed. Peter Laslett) (Cambridge: 1963)
Second Treatise, Ch. II, 6.
FERNANDO RODRIGUEZ BORNAETXEA
LA ACTITUD NATURAL Y
LAS REALIDADES ALTERNAS
1. INTRODUCCION
El papel de esta comunicaci6n es el de subrayar la concordancia y la

influencia de la obra de Husserl para con los modernos desarrollos de
las ciencias sociales. Evidentemente, son muchos los textos husserlianos
y muchas las interpretaciones de estos que nos permiten subrayar esta
influencia, por razones de espacio me limito a seguir la pista de una de
las meditaciones de Husserl que considero mas han desarrollado las
Ciencias Sociales y mas futuro tiene alin dentro de ellas y en especial
de la Psicologia. En la Introducci6n general a la Fenomenologia pura,
concretamente en la Tesis de la actitud natural y la desconexi6n de la
misma, Husserl estaba proponiendo una ruptura epistemol6gica definitiva en cuanto abria un dominio de investigaci6n nuevo y desconocido
para el ego cogito cartesiano, fundamento de la Filosofia y Ciencia
modernas:
En el natural dejarse vivir, vivo constantemente en esta forma fundamental de toda vida
'actual', enuncie 0 no el cogito, dirfjame 0 no 'reflexivamente' al yo y al cogitare. Si 10
hago, entra en la vida un nuevo cogito, que por su parte no es reflejado, 0 sea, no es
para mf un objeto .... Mientras me dejo vivir naturalmente, estoy 'en actitud natural'; es
mas ambas cosas quieren decir exactamente la misma. (Husser!: 1913)
En la actitud natural, el mundo de la vida cotidiana nos envuelve y

al estudiar sus partes mantenemos la dualidad sujeto-objeto y desde ella
edificamos nuestro saber, pero si nos referimos reflexivamente al
contenido de la conciencia y, par ende, al yo pens ante (inseparables
por la "intencionalidad"), no podemos considerar el mundo como algo
independiente 0 exterior, como existente, sino como 10 que es para
nuestra conciencia. En consecuencia, la ciencia y el conocimiento en
general, se presentan como referidos a la actitud natural y como tales
tienen un valor innegable, pero, para Husserl, su defecto esta en que
obvian la circunstancia de su caracter de constructo consensuado y
como tal dependiente de la conciencia que los construye. Como
veremos mas adelante, los aiios sesenta van a ser testigos, de la
193
A - T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXV, 193-202.
194
asuncion de este desdoblamiento del flujo de la conciencia por el

sentido comun, de la relativizacion del saber cientifico (como ponen de
manifiesto la aparicion de concepciones como la episteme de Foucault,
el paradigma de Kuhn) y de una nueva busqueda de la trascendentalidad de la conciencia, que des carta la seguridad apodfptica en el
progreso del hombre que confla en la razon kantiana.
Husserl caracteriza la actitud natural como la creencia en un mundo
objetivado espacio-temporal e intersubjetivo pero renuncia a su descripccion sistematica completa, su interes esta en intentar discernir
como se constituye la conciencia trascendental, mediante la suspension
de 1a creencia en 1a realidad del mundo exterior (epoje fenomenologica).
Si bien 1a Gestalt ya habia propuesto una tearia de la percepcion
basada en la influencia del sujeto sobre el objeto percibido, fue A.
Schutz quien desestimara la percepcion como cuestion decisiva para e1
quehacer filosofico desplazando el interes a la acci6n.
2. LA EPOJ; DE LA ACTITUD NATURAL
La Fenomenologia Social de Schutz, no viene directamente de la

Fenomenologia de Husserl. La originalidad de Schutz radica en su
farmacion en Ciencias Sociales y mas especialmente en Derecho y
Economia que curso en la Universidad de Viena y que practico toda su
vida. Schutz, busco en Weber una teorla de las ciencias sociales y de
alli se remonto a Husserl (1932). En Viena, no habia grupo de
fenomenologos por 10 que Schutz no pudo deducir su Fenomemologia
Social a partir de Husser!, sino que llego tanto a el como a Bergson,
como recurso para construir su propia obra, contrariamente par
ejemplo a Merleau-Ponty, quien intento tambien tambien deducir un
pensamiento social de la Fenomenologia.
La presencia activa de Schutz en Estados Unidos a partir de 1939
ha ejercido una influencia progresiva sobre algunos de los nuevos
desarrollos de la Psicologia Social. La Fenomenologia es un descubrimiento reciente de los cientificos sociales de habla inglesa (A. Giddens:
1976) y Schutz fue uno de sus divulgadores. La mayoria de sus escritos
americanos son exposiciones didacticas de la Fenomenologia y de la
sintesis que el realizo a partir de las intuiciones de Husserl. Schutz,
vivio veinte anos en los EEUU (1939-59) pero su importancia creciente
se hace evidente sobre todo despues de su muerte, al comienzo de los
LA ACTITUD NATURAL Y LAS REALIDADES ALTERNAS
195
anos 60, cuando los etnometodologos comenzaron a publicar sus

primeros trabajos.
Como dice Maurice Natanson en la Introduccion al n 1 de los
Collected Papers, toda la obra de Schutz es un intento de "concretar
una filosofia de la realidad mundana 0 - dicho en lenguaje mas formal
- una fenomenologia de la actitud natural". Su interpretacion de la
"actitud natural" es en realidad una inversion de la epoje husser!iana al
proponer que la actitud natural es en sf una adquisicion basada en una
suspension previa de la duda sobre la existencia del mundo. La
paradoja revel ada por Schutz es que los amilisis de Husser! fracasan al
fundar una intersubjetividad trascendental mientras que son legftimos al
nivel del sujeto intra-mundano. Schutz considera las ciencias y la
actividad cientffica como modificaciones de la actitud natural. Desde su
punto de vista, es la metodologfa la que constituye el tipo de modificacion especifica de cada ciencia y, por ende, de cada "realidad":
Puede aventurarse la sugerencia de que el hombre en actitud natural utiliza tambien
una epoje especffica, por supuesto, muy distinta de la que emplea el fenomen6logo. No
suspende la creencia en el mundo externo y sus objetos; por el contrario, suspende la
duda en su existencia. Lo que coloca entre parentesis es la dud a de que el mundo y sus
objetos puedan ser diferentes de 10 que se Ie aparecen. Proponemos denominar a esta
epoje, la epoje de la actitud natural. (A. Schutz: 1962)
No es solo esta epoje especifica 10 que caracteriza para Schutz la

"actitud natural", la "atencion a la vida" (Bergson), una perspectiva
temporal especifica que podemos denominar "tiempo estandard", una
forma prevalente de espontaneidad (Ia ejecucion), una forma especifica
de experiencia de uno mismo y una forma singular de comunicacion y
de accion social, son algunas de las caracteristicas de la conciencia
ordinaria de la vida cotidiana que se convierte en tema de estudio para
sus seguidores. El cambio de cualquiera de estos facto res es la condicion de emergencia de otro "ambito finito de significado" y por tanto,
de otra "realidad". Para Schutz, las "realidades multiples" se constituyen
por el significado que atribuimos a nuestras experiencias. (A. Schutz:
1962).
La intuicion de los "ambitos finitos de sentido" de Schutz (1945), es
deudora pero diferente de los "subuniversos" de James: "Hablamos de
ambitos de sentido, y no de subuniversos, porque la realidad esta constituida por el sentido de nuestras experiencias y no por la estructura
ontol6gica de los objetos" (Schutz: 1962). Los "ambitos" implican un
196
"choque" 0 "saito" (Kierkegaard) que permita el cambio de "realidad".

En cada uno de ellas la epaje de la actitud natural es reemplazada por
otras epajes que "suspenden la creencia en capas cada vez mayores de
la realidad de la vida cotidiana". Schutz menciona los sueiios, la
fantasia, los juegos de los niiios, la experiencia religiosa y mitologica, el
mundo de la ciencia, como ya hemos dicho, y el de la locura. A cada
uno de estos "ambitos" Ie corresponde un estilo cognoscitivo que solo
puede estudiarse a partir del arquetipo de la "actitud natural". Sin
embargo, en esta relacion no hay referencia a una multitud de "estados
de realidad no ordinaria" (Castaneda: 1971) inducidos, como la
hipnosis, las drogas 0 algunos estados meditativos que fueron, de
alguna manera, la "revelacion" de los aiios sesenta. La obra de
Castaneda es pionera en el estudio fenomenologico de estos "ambitos
finitos de significado" y ha motivado un inusitado interes en el estudio
de los "estados de conciencia" impulsando abundantes estudios que
vienen agrupandose bajo el epigrafe de "Psicologia Transpersonal".
3. LA EPO]; ETNOMETODOL6GICA
Se puede considerar que existen al menos tres tendencias herederas de

la obra de Schutz: La fenomenologia social del conocimiento de Berger
y Luckmann, quienes se presentan como sus continuadores mas fieles,
aunque combinando esta influencia con las teorias del conocimiento de
Marx a Manheim (Gonzalez Garcia: 1979); La etnometodologia de
Garfinkel constituida en la interseccion entre Schutz y Parsons (Heritage: 1984); Y la Sociologia Cognoscitiva de Ciourel que se situara entre
Schutz y la teoria linguistica de Chomsky (Leiter: 1980).
Consideramos que estas corrientes de investigaci6n aprovechan en
10 fundamentalla puerta que abre Husser!:
Pero tampoco nos proponemos ahara la tarea de proseguir la pura descripci6n hasta
elevarla a una caracterizaci6n sistematicamente completa 0 que agote las anchuras y las
honduras de 10 que se encuentra en la actitud natural (ni mucho menos en todas las
actitudes que cabe entretejer armoniosamente con esta). Semejante tare a puede y debe
- como cientffica que es - fijarse como meta, y es una tare a extraardinariamcllite
importante, bien que hasta aquf apenas vislumbrada. (Hu~serl: 1913)
Berger y Luckmann consideran que la conciencia es capaz de moverse

en diferentes "esferas de realidad". En el paso de una a otra se experi-
197
menta un impacto que se toma como causado par el desplazamiento de

la atencion. Entre las realidades posibles esta la realidad de la vida
cotidiana que se considera la realidad suprema. Esta se aprehende
como realidad ordenada e independiente de nuestra aprehension por
medio del lenguaje y se organiza alrededor del "aquf y ahora" en un
mundo intersubjetivo. La realidad de la vida cotidiana es la que mayor
tension de la conciencia exige. Esta "plena vigilia" es para Berger y
Luckmann la actitud natural. Para elIos, el interes de una Sociologfa del
conocimiento esta en "los procesos por los que cualquier cuerpo de
'conocimiento' llega a quedar establecido socialmente como 'realidad'."
(Berger y Luckmann: 1967)
Garfinkel y los etnometodologos analizan el mundo social como
construyendose continuamente, emergiendo como realidad objetiva,
ordenada e inteligible (Parsons) en las actividades practicas de la vida
cotidiana. Esta actividades se realizan en la interaccion ateniendose a
los presupuestos y a las formas de conocimiento propias de la "actitud
natural" que adopta el miembro de una colectividad en su vida cotidiana.
Cicourel y la Sociologfa Cognoscitiva se proponen estudiar los
problemas sociologicos inherentes a los procesos de construccion del
conocimiento humano, la actividad de "darse cuenta" de 10 que sucede
y su actuacion consecuente:
La estructura social no sera mas que una ilusi6n narrativa (accountable illusion) salida
del conocimiento de sentido comun del soci6logo en tanto que no se pueda restablecer
la relaci6n entre los procesos cognitivos que contribuyen a evidenciar las actividades
contextuales y los esquemas normativos de la narraci6n que utilizan tanto el profano
como el profesional, con el fin de expresar los conocimientos. (A. Cicourel: 1972)
Todas estas corrientes de pensamiento comparten con Schutz la asuncion de que la vida cotidiana es la "realidad suprema" y, por 10 tanto las
otras "realidades" se constituyen a partir de modificaciones en algunos
de los supuestos de la actitud natural pero volviendo siempre a la
realidad de la vida cotidiana. EI propio Husser! pensaba que el
movimiento de la conciencia en actitudes diferentes a la natural (como
la cientffica) mantiene la creencia en la existencia del mundo como
fondo, aunque no como horizonte en el que se inserte un mundo
diferente.
De entre las corrientes mencionadas, solo la Etnometodologfa toma
el recurso de la reduccion (Zimmerman & PolIner: 1970) 0 de
198
reducci6n etnometodol6gica (G. Psathas: 1977; 1979) admitiendo y

describiendo su metoda de investigaci6n como una forma modificada
de la "actitud natural" consistente en estudiar el mundo en tanto que
correlato de las descripciones de los actores sociales. Para los etnometod610gos, hay una convergencia fundamental entre la investigaci6n
sociol6gica profana y profesional en el sentido tradicional, en el sentido
de que ambas suscriben las mismas concepciones de los hechos
sociales. Por ejemplo, en virtud de la asunci6n de la factualidad del
mundo social, las descripciones de sentido comun se tratan como
recurso de las investigaciones profesionales. La etnometodolog{a propone que las estructuras objectivas de las actividades sociales sean
consideradas como las realizaciones pnicticas y situadas del trabajo por
medio del que dichas estructuras se exhiben y se detectan.
Castaneda expresa en una dedicatoria de su tesis doctoral (1968) la
deuda para con Garfinkel. Garfinkel form6 parte del jurado y sigui6 de
cerca su elaboraci6n:
No tengo necesidad de explicaciones. Presentame los hechos brutos tal como se producen.
La riqueza de detalles, eso es 10 esencial (D.C. Noel: 1981).
Castaneda dice:
he adoptado el metodo fenomenol6gico y luchado por encarar la brujeria exclusivamente
como fen6menos que me fueron presentados. Yo, como perceptor, registre 10 que percibi,
yen el momento de registrarlo me propuse suspender todo juicio (Castaneda: 1971).
La aparici6n y asentamiento de la psicosociolog{a con ralces fenomeno16gicas ocurre en un momento hist6rico de descontento general de la
juventud respecto de las interpretaciones cient{fico-positivas del mundo
y de la sociedad (anos 60), "Si la teorla social de Goffman fue una
sociologfa sofisticada concordante con la dec ada polfticamente pasiva
de 1950, la de Garfinkel se adapta mejor al activismo de la decada
siguiente, y en particular a las universidades polfticamente mas rebeldes
del perfodo actual." (A. Gouldner: 1970) La Etnometodologia es un
producto cultural de las universidades califomianas, las cuales se
caracterizaron por ser las mas comprometidas en aquella revoluci6n.
Lapassade (1985) se ha referido a ella como "etnometodologfa psicodelica" y A. Gouldner (1970) como "La sociologfa como 'happening' ", no
obstante, la etnometodologfa es reconocida como una forma fructffera
de producci6n de conocimiento que participa siquel la propuesta
schutziana de que la percepci6n no es el punto de partida paradigmatico
199
para una metodologia de la ciencia, sino que la "acci6n" debe ser el

tema predominante de estudio.
4. EST ADOS AL TERADOS DE CONCIENCIA
Al tradicional T. Group que marc6 una epoca de la psicosociologia

americana se unieron en los alios sesenta todo un conglomerado de
tecnicas terapeuticas, artisticas y orientales que configuraron 10 que se
di6 en llamar "movimiento del potencial humano". Una caracteristica
principal de este movimiento fue la superaci6n de la palabra, la
focalizaci6n en el "aqui y ahora" y el interes en el cuerpo. La no
directividad y la implicaci6n del animador en contraposici6n a la
"neutralidad" analltica marcaban la diferencia entre el objetivismo
reinante y el abordaje fenomeno16gico que comenzaba a practicarse.
Entre las tecnicas que configuraban el movimiento, la psicoterapia
gestaltica de F. Perls es la que mas se aproxima al desarrollo te6rico
que estamos describiendo. Perls lleg6 a Estados Unidos, concretamente
a la New School for Social Research donde enseliaba Schutz, en 1946.
La "toma de conciencia" continua, la insistencia en expresarse en
primera persona, los ejercicios para distinguir la realidad exterior de los
fantasm as y la regIa del "aqui y ahora" que Perls practicaba en sus
seminarios recuerdan a las ya mencionadas caracteristicas basicas de la
actitud natural de Schutz.
El termino "psicologia trans personal" se suele atribuir a Maslow
(Maslow: 1968). Los "Studies in Ethnomethodology" de Garfinkel son
de 1967. Castaneda es uno de los representantes mas conocidos de este
final de los 60 que presenci6 la divulgaci6n de experiencias psicodelicas, divers as formas de meditaci6n, gurus, sistemas de creencias
elaborados como religiones, y otras sintesis mas 0 menos afortunadas
de una revoluci6n cultural, que tambien se not6 en Europa (1968). Una
de las caracteristicas de esa revoluci6n era el interes en la posibilidad
de expansi6n de la conciencia mas alla de 10 que el limitado metodo
cientifico proponia como realidad unica e incluso como unico futuro.
Buscar "mas alia de fa condicion humana, de fa identidad, de fa
autorrealizacion y cosas semejantes" (Maslow: 1968), es decir, mas alla
de la actitud natural, en busca de realidades distintas, "ambitos finitos
de sentido" diferentes. Siguiendo la recomendaci6n de Schutz; "Seria
una tare a interesante elaborar un agrupamiento sistematico de estos
ambitos finitos de sentido segun su principio constitutivo" (Schutz:
200
1962), Lapassade ha elaborado una sintesis de los mismos, incluyendo

las "realidades aIternas" inducidas, en "Les etats modifies de conscience" (1987).
Los "estados de conciencia aIterada" ("Altered state(s) of consciousness", Charles. T. Tart, 1975.) se han convertido en tema de investigacion empirica. A nadie se nos oculta el desinteres de muchos
jovenes por la ciencia y la tecnologia. A pesar de que los fenomenos
que se denominan "paranormales" no son exclusivos de nuestra epoca,
son cada vez mas las personas que experimentan voluntariamente con
"estados alterados de conciencia." En sus declaraciones aparece como
un conflicto el hecho de que estas experiencias y las filosofias que de
elIas se derivan sean catalogadas por nuestra ciencia de subjetivas y
patologicas. El conocimiento es sobre todo vivencial pero la ciencia
ortodoxa pasa por alto 0 con sid era indignas de una investigacion seria
importantes experiencias humanas. Pero atencion, solo el que vive la
experiencia tiene capacidad para hablar sobre ella (unique adequacy,
Gaifinkel, 1967). La perspectiva garfinkeliana recoge la idea de Husser!
y de la juventud de los aiios sesenta de que no se puede comprender
nada desde el exterior, se pone en duda la "neutralidad" cientifica. Una
de las razones de la importancia de las obras de Castaneda reside en
que el autor comparte con el lector la lucha personal que Ie supuso
desprenderse de su actitud natural occidental, de su estatus de observador exterior y convertirse en un practicante de un "estado de
conciencia alterada": "al decir practicante me refiero a un participante
que posee un conocimiento adecuado de todas, 0 casi todas, las
unidades de significado implicadas en su sistema particular de interpretacion sensible. (Castaneda: ]97]). De la misma manera que Castaneda estudia "una forma yaqui de conocimiento", se van reconociendo divers as tradiciones que representan tecnologias diseiiadas para
la induccion de "estados superiores de conciencia." Algunos criticos
(Herpin: 1973) han catalogado el trabajo de Interaccionistas y Etnometodologos como "tecnologias sociales". Para los psicologos transpersonales, sin embargo, es importante distinguir entre ciencias
especificas de estado y tecnologias especificas de estado: "para una
ciencia 10 importante es comprender y buscar continua mente una
comprension mayor, mientras que el objetivo primario de una tecnologia es cumplir metas ya reconocidas, siendo la mayor comprension
que eventualmente se obtiene de importancia secundaria 0, a veces,
nula". (Ch. T. Tart: 1975)
201
5. CONCLUSIONES
Los psicologos transpersonales propugnan la necesidad de ciencias

espedficas de estado y denuncian la limitacion de la ciencia racional. El
propio Husserl habia ya detectado esta limitacion de las "ciencias de la
actitud natural": "resolver todos los problemas del eonocimiento cientifico que se presentan sobre su suelo, tal es la meta de las ciencias de la
actitud natural" (Husserl: 1913), dejando asi abierta la posibilidad de
"ciencias de estado". La propuesta no resulta evidente, como dice
Castaneda: "Para el indio americano, aeaso durante miles de alios, el
vago fen6meno que llamamos brujeria ha sido una practiea seria y
autentiea, comparable a la de nuestra eieneia. Nuestra difieultad para
eomprenderla surge, sin duda, de las unidades de significado extraiias
con las cuales trata." La narraci6n de 10 vivido dentro del estado
alterado, puede no tener significado para el lector exterior. No disponemos de un cuerpo de observaciones convalidadas por consenso ni
de instrumentos que nos permitan medir algo que, en principio, no
parece poder reducirse a terminos fisicos. No obstante, existe la
posibilidad, desde nuestro punto de vista, de hacer estudios fenomenologicos y mas precisamente etnometodologicos de las practicas de
personas en estados como la autohipnosis, los estados meditativos, la
embriaguez de la marihuana 0 del acido lisergico, los estados inducidos
por biorretroalimentacion y otros en los que se mantiene cierta
capacidad de observacion de uno mismo, del exterior 0 de ambos y se
actua "intencionalmente" hacia ellos. La profundizacion en las caracteri'sticas que constituyen un estilo cognoscitivo espedfico y las descripciones de los "etnometodos" de los "miembros" de estados alterados de
conciencia, pueden ser de gran utilidad en esta labor. El "estado
alterado de conciencia" motivado por la "reduccion etnometodologica"
que permitio a Castaneda describir los "estados alterados" producidos
por la ingestion de las plantas que utili zan los indios Yaquis en sus
practicas de brujeria puede propiciar, a traves de la comprension de
la "actitud natural" y de su deconstruccion, el "salto" a reaeidades
diferentes de la de sentido comun.
Consideramos, en definitivo, que la Fenomenologia y espedficamente el pensamiento de Husserl, habia llegado a principios de siglo a
ciertas problematic as que se han ido construyendo, independientemente de el, en el transcurrir del tiempo. Asimismo, la Fenomenologia
se nos antoja como el unico recur so teorico y metodologico capaz de
202
afrontar los nuevos desaffos en el estudio de la conciencia y en la

comprensi6n de muchas experiencias y dudas existenciales que el
modelo objetivista cientffico occidental ha sido incapaz, por ahora, de
explicar.
Universidad del Pais Vasco

REFERENCIAS
Berger, P. L. & Luckmann, T. 1967. La construcci6n social de la realidad (Ed.
Amorrortu, 1968), p. 15.
Castaneda, C. 1971. Una realidad aparte (Ed. F.c.E., 1974), p. 17,23.
Cicourel, A. V. 1972. La Sociologie cognitive (Ed. P.u.F., 1973), p. 8.
Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology (Ed. Polity Press, 1984).
Giddens, A. 1976. Las nuevas reglas del metodo sociol6gico (Ed. Amorrortu, 1987),
p.26.
Gonzalez, Garcia, J. M. 1979. La sociologia del conocimiento hoy (Ed. Espejo).
Gouldner, A. 1970 La crisis de la sociologia occidental (Ed. Amorrortu, 1979), p. 363.
Heritage, J. 1984. Gaifinkel and Ethnomethodology (Ed. Polity Press, 1984).
Herpin, N. 1973. Les sociologues americains et Ie siecle (Ed. P.U.F., 1973).
Husser!, E. 1913. Ideas (Ed. F.C.E., 1940), pp. 64-74.
Lapassade, G. 1985. "Chamans et sorciers" en Pratiques de formation, n 11-12, p.
115.
Lapassade, G. 1987. Les etats modifies de conscience (Ed P.u.F., 1987).
Leiter, K. 1980. A Primer on Ethnomethodology (Ed. Oxford Univ. Press, 1980).
Maslow, A. 1968. Toward a Psychology of Being (Ed. Van Nostrand Reinhold).
NOel, D. C. 1981. Castaneda, ombres et lumieres (Ed. Albin Michel).
Psathas, G. 1977. "Ethnomethodology as a Phenomenological Approach in the Social
Sciences" en Ihde/Zahner, 1977, p. 73.
- - 1979. Everyday Language. Studies in Ethnomethodology (Ed. Irvington Publishers, 1979), p. 180.
Schutz, A. 1962. "Sobre las realidades multiples", 1945, en El problema de la reaUdad
social (Ed. Amorrortu, 1974), p. 216.
Tart, Ch. T. 1975. Psicologias transpersonales (Ed. Paidos, 1979), p. 45.
Zimmerman, D. H. & Pollner, M. 1970. "The Everyday Wor!d as Phenomenon", en
Douglas (Ed. Aldine Pub!., 1970).
OLA MOSTAFA ANWAR
HUSSERL'S INFLUENCE ON SOCIOLOGY:

A STUDY OF SCHUTZ'S PHENOMENOLOGY
Why has there been, in the last few years, a renewed interest in
questions of social meaning, fundamental principles, and qualitative
relationships, indicating a return to the ideas of such great thinkers as
Husserl, Weber, Schutz, and others? This paper is an attempt to answer
these questions.
Since Husserl's great achievement had wide impact in the various
fields of the human sciences, we have chosen to deal with a specific
human science, sociology, and a specific philosopher and sociologist,
Alfred Schutz.
Schutz looked at the subject matter of the human sciences as being
uniquely different in various ways from that of the natural sciences. To
find the adequate solution to the methodological problems of the
sciences of man, he applied Husserl's phenomenology to the problems
of social life. He focused on the life-world, the relationships between
the actors in social life, their stock of knowledge, and their typifications
of the social world. He accepted the phenomenological assumptions
concerning intentionality, reduction, and essences. In all that he was
very much attached to the last phase of Husserl's development as set
forth in Cartesian Meditations and in The Crisis of the European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.
From the start, we will limit ourselves to Schutz's phenomenological
reasoning concerning society, and try to show to what extent he was
inspired and guided by Husserl and how he reached a genuine stance
after adding his own contribution, one not far removed from Husser!.
From his first work Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (The
Phenomenology of the Social World), published in 1932, Schutz took
an interest in the life-world (the Lebenswelt, as Husserl called it), the
world of common-sense, the world of daily life, the mundane word,
hence, the paramount reality. This interest developed and flourished in
the works published together after his death in three volumes, the
203
A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analeeta Husserliana, Vol. XXXV, 203-213.
204
OLA MOSTAFA ANWAR
Collected Papers, and especially in Volume III entitled Studies in

Phenomenological Philosophy. In this work Schlitz implemented a
theory of intersubjectivity, of the typification of understanding that
gives the life-world its structure and meaning.
Schlitz found in Husserl's phenomenological psychology the starting
point for the application of phenomenological considerations to matters
social: the general thesis of the "natlirliche Einstellung," "the natural
attitude" as most translators have called it, or the "natural stance," to
use a rendering more adequate for sociological purposes. This thesis
refers to the inclination of everyone in his daily experiences and affairs
"to accept as unquestionable the world of facts which surround us as
existent out there."l
The introduction by Husserl of the concept of "Leben swelt" as a
starting point for his phenomenological investigations marked his
superseding positivism. It also creates a new task for philosophy, and
that is: beginning with the lived experience of everyday life.
When Husserl in his last works came to denote the "world of the
natural attitude" as the life-world (Lebenswelt), he did so in order to
contrast explicitly this world as it is given to our immediate experience,
independent of and previous to scientific knowledge, with the universe
as it is constructed and elaborated by science. Obviously the social
scientist, the philosopher of the social sciences and of social life, takes
as his point of departure not the idealized and mathematized constructs
of the physical sciences, but rather the world of common sense as the
scene of all social relationships and actions. 2
Schlitz agrees that this world should be taken for granted, in both its
natural and socio-cultural aspects, as he expresses clearly, when talking
about some structures of the life-world. He writes:
The following considerations concern the structure of what Husserl calls the life-world
(Lebenswelt) in which, in the natural attitude, we, as, human beings among fellowbeings, experience culture and society, take a stand, with regard to their objects, are
influenced by them and upon them. In this attitude the existence of the life-world and
the typicality of its contents are accepted as unquestionably given until further notice .
. . . Therefore we can speak of fundamental assumptions characteristic of the natural
attitude in the life-world, which themselves are accepted as unquestionably given;
namely the structure of the world, of the constancy of the validity of our experience of
the world, and of the constancy of our ability (vermoglich-keit) to act upon the world
and within the world. 3
For Husserl, the concept of the natural stance served as a starting point
HUSSERL'S INFLUENCE ON SOCIOLOGY
205
for the analysis of individual consciousness. For Schutz, the "naive

natural stance" was primarily a social stance.
Husserl developed the concept of "the life-world" in the Krisis after
finding that his attempt to solve the problem of transcendental intersubjectivity did not succeed. In his first work, Schutz had accepted this
concept; in his last work, Collected Papers, he integrated the concept
into his thinking and, even more, developed it beyond Husserl's intention. Schutz declared phenomenology to be "a philosophy of the lifeworld," and that its theme was "the demonstration and explanations of
the activities of consciousness ... of the transcendental subjectivity
within which this life-world is constituted."4
We can say then that Schutz, in later works, added other aspects to
the life-world that he saw as being as crucial as the natural attitude.
These are the social, cultural, and historical aspects. He declared in an
article entitled: "The Social World As Taken for Granted and Its Structurization":
We start from an examination of the social world in its various articulations and forms
of organizations which constitute the social reality for men living within it. Man is born
into a world that existed before his birth, and this world is from the outset not merely a
physical but also a sociocultural one. The latter is a preconstituted and preorganized
world whose particular structure is the result of a historical process and is therefore
different from each culture and society.5
Schutz denoted features common to all social worlds, as they are

rooted in the human condition. First, there are the needs that man
possesses and which motivate his actions, including biological needs,
needs for common protection, and psychological needs. Then there are
the social relationships, the systems of signs and symbols with their
particular meaning structure, the institutionalized forms of social
organization, etc.
The meaning of the elements of the social world are taken for
granted by those living within it.
They are taken for granted because they have stood the test so far, and being socially
approved, are held as requiring neither an explanation nor a justification. These
folkways constitute the social heritage which is handed down to children born into and
growing up within the group ... , To take the world for granted beyond questions
implies the deeprooted assumption that until further notice the world will go on
substantially in the same manner as it has so far."
But Schutz is not conclusive about what is taken for granted, because
206
OLA MOSTAFA ANWAR
he does not close the door in the face of questions which constitute the
core of philosophy and the social sciences. When such questions arise,
things that are taken for granted become problematical. Such is the case
when traditional patterns of behavior or interpretation are unable to
cope with certain events or situations that happen on the individual or
social level. Schutz calls such a situation "a crisis - a partial one if it
makes only some elements of the wor!d taken for granted questionable,
a total one if it invalidates the whole system of reference, the scheme of
interpretation itself." In this case, we need "to investigate more fully the
structure of commonsense knowledge that man has of its folkways, and
the manner in which he acquires such knowledge. This commonsense
knowledge is by no means identical with that of the social scientist."7
II
A major focus of sociology, and closely related to it, is the relations that
exist between the members of a society. Schutz attempted to capture
these with a very important concept: "Intersubjectivity."
Schutz discussed the significance for Husser! of intersubjectivity, a
matter which Husser! sounded throughout his entire work. In his first
volume of Ideen Husser! just introduced the concept on the occasion of
his analysis of the natural attitude, without pursuing further investigation of it. In the second volume of Ideen, published after his death, he
supplied more analysis; then the theme became the central motif of his
Formale und Transzendentale Logik. More development is found in
Cartesianische Meditationen and in the Krisis.
Schutz discussed intersubjectivity as a genuine phenomenon that
could lay the ground for commonsense reality and found the social
sciences. He proceeded from Husser!'s conception of intersubjectivity
which he summarized as follows:
We do not, each one of us, experience the life-world as a private world; on the
contrary, we take it for a public world, common to all of us, that is for an intersubjective world. Not only do we encounter our fellow-men within the life-world as this world
is given to us, but we also take it for granted that they are confronted with the same
world and the same mundane existence as we are. Everyone of us perceives the world
and the things within the world from the particular point of view at which he happens
to be placed at the moment, and hence under aspects and from perspectives that vary in
dependence on, and in accordance with, the point of view .... We take it for granted
207
that our fellow-men take the world for granted in substantially the same way we do.
Because of this thorough-going reciprocity we can act and work with our fellow-men in
the multiple forms that such cooperation can assume. We orient our actions with regard
to what we anticipate theirs to be, and we expect them to do the same. 8
In his discussion of Husserl on attitude, Schutz had a critical view that

diverged from Husserl's. He did not agree that intersubjectivity is to be
placed on the transcendental level and preferred to place it in the social
realm or in the life-world. He declared in an article entitled "The
Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl":
... Husserl's attempt to account for the constitution of transcendental intersubjectivity
in terms of operations of the consciousness of the transcendental ego has not
succeeded. It is to be surmised that intersubjectivity is not a problem of constitution
which can be solved within the transcendental sphere, but is rather a datum (Gegebenheit) of the life-world. It is the fundamental ontological category of human existence in
the world and therefore of all philosophical anthropology. As long as man is born of
woman, intersubjectivity and the we-relationship will be the foundation for all categories of human existence. 9
For Schutz the problem of intersubjectivity is primarily "intermundane."

It is one that lies at the root of all the social sciences and at the heart of
our existences that is, "the concrete understanding of the other whose
existence is taken for granted.") 0
Schutz looked to the social life as the "domain of direct social
experience and the subjects encountered in it as our fellow-men. In this
domain we share with our fellow-men a common span of time; moreover, a sector of the spatial world is within our common reach. Hence
the body of my fellowman is within my reach and vice versa.")) This
mutual relationship between any two or more associates, in space and
time, constitutes the foundations of all possible communication and
thus of intersubjectivity.
The world which we take for granted is lived by each of us in every
moment of our life. Whether with others or alone, our actions and
thoughts, our attitudes and concerns, intend an intersubjective reality.
There are two aspects of the intersubjective to be considered: first, the
world intended is a social reality, and second, the intending itself has a
social inflection. Thus, in naively accepting the world as intersubjectively valid, my acceptance is a prime and subtle example of intersubjectivity. As Professor Natanson rightly says:
It is as if I were looking at the world through social lenses: I see an intersubjective
208
OLA MOSTAFA ANWAR
It is as if I were looking at the world through social lenses: I see an intersubjective

reality and I see it intersubjectively. The analyses that Schiitz offers help to elucidate
both poles of the intersubjective and demonstrate the way in which phenomenology
displays and transcends the rootedness of man in daily life. The clue to these analyses
lies in Schiitz's conception of typification. 12
III
Schutz's investigation into the structure of the social world constitutes a

part of the problem of intersubjectivity, and this led him into his
discussion of typification and knowledge. Here too the social plays a
major role, he writes:
... the common-sense constructs used for the typification of the other and of myself
are to a considerable extent socially derived and socially approved. Within the in-group
the bulk of personal types and course-of-action types is taken for granted as a set of
rules and recipes which have stood the test so far and are expected to stand it in the
future. Even more, the pattern of typical constructs is frequently institutionalized as a
standard of behavior, warranted by traditional and habitual mores and sometimes by
specific means of so-called social control, such as the legal ordeL I ]
From his first work, Schutz had accepted the concept of ideal types as
presented by Max Weber; also he had access to Husserl's theory of
typification. But, Husserl, though he considered the formation of types
as an achievement of the individual, did not apply what he said on their
use to the social world of daily life. We can say that Schutz expanded
Husserl's investigations into psychology and sociology, and made a
considerable contribution to the theory of typification.
Schutz had what we can call an interdisciplinary approach toward
society, one embracing various elements, anthropological, historical,
sociological, and cultural. His conception of typification made him quite
independent fom empirical schools, especially positivism, and even
independent from Husserl himself. He sees that:
it will be useful to remember that what the sociologist calls 'system', 'role', 'status', 'role
expection', 'situation', and 'institutionalization', is experienced by the individual actor on
the social scene in entirely different terms. To him all the factors denoted by these
concepts are elements of a network of typifications - typifications of human individuals, of their course of action patterns, of their motives and goals, or of the sociocultural products which originated in their actions. These types were formed in the
main by others, his predecessors or contemporaries, as appropriate tools for coming to
terms with things and men, accepted as such by the group into which he was born. But
there are also self-typifications: man typifies to a certain extent his own situation within
209
the social world and the various relations he has to his fellow-men and cultural
objects. 14
The knowledge incorporated in these typifications is closely related and

constitutes an element of the sociocultural heritage passed on to the
child by his parents and his teachers; it is socially derived. The sum of
these typifications forms, according to Schutz, "a frame of reference in
terms of which not only the sociocultural, but also the physical world
has to be interpreted, a frame of reference that, in spite of its inconsistencies and its inherent opaqueness, is nonetheless sufficiently integrated and transparent to be used for solving most of the practical
problems at hand."
All the acquisitions of men, language, the rules for handling and
manipulating things, the modes of conduct, behavior, and action in
typical situations constitute together what Schutz calls: "the stock of
knowledge at hand." It is socially derived and enlarges with experience.
Schutz distinguishes between typifications on the common sense
level and typifications made by scientists, and especially the social
scientist, in that the former emerge in the everyday experience of the
world as taken for granted without any formulation of judgments or of
neat propositions with logical subjects and predicates. They belong to
prepredicative thinking. And, if Husserl showed that the prepredicative
experience of the life-world is fundamentally articulated according to
types, he did not explain, in his published writings, that this typification
takes place according to particular structures of relevancy. 15
The social world, as we have seen, is to be typified as that of
common-sense men going about the course of their daily lives. That is
the paramount stratum of social reality. Thus, a typifying consciousness
is not, in the first instance, a product of the analysis, interpretation, or
attitude of the philosopher, phenomenologist, methodologist, or social
scientist, but is rather the taken for granted creation of ordinary men
going about their business in the ordinary world. The task of the
philosopher and of the scientist is to make explicit the structure of
mundane life. 16
In addition to all he had to say on the social origin of knowledge
Schutz spoke of the "reciprocity of perspectives" or the structural
socialization of knowledge. It is taken for granted that fellowmen exist,
so they are faced with the same objects that face me, but also they
attribute a different meaning to them. This is due to the Here and
210
OLA MOSTAFA ANWAR
There relation, where the other sees things under a different perspective and with a different system of relevancy.
This situation is solved by two idealizations: the interchangeability of
standpoints and the congruency of the systems of relevancy. Given the
"interchangeability of standpoints" it is taken for granted that I can
change places with my fellowman and transforming my here into his
here, and his here into mine. I can see things from his point of view and
he can see them from mine. In this way I would have typically the same
experiences of the common world. According to the principle of the
"congruency of the systems of relevancy," I take it for granted and I
assume my fellowman does the same, that differences in perspectives
are irrelevant for our puposes at hand and that different systems of
relevancy can be made conformable. In this way we reach a common
world containing identical objects, one which allows mutual cooperation.
In a third thesis concerning knowledge, Schutz raised the matter of
the social distribution of knowledge. Our actual stocks of knowledge at
hand differ: some fields I know only by "acquaintance," others I really
"know about." William James made the fundamental distinction between the two. "Knowing about" refers to that comparatively very small
field in which each of us has thorough, clear, distinct, and consistent
knowledge, not only of what and how, but with that an understanding
too of why, a field in which one is "a competent expert." "Knowing by
acquaintance" is merely a knowledge of the what that leaves the how
unanswered. Schutz believes that
the zones of our 'knowledge about' and 'knowledge of acquaintance' are surrounded by
dimensions of mere belief which in turn are graded in multiple ways as to well-foundedness, plausibility, likelihood, reliance upon authority, blind acceptance, down to complete ignorance. Among all these spheres of knowledge it is only the "knowledge about"
that stands under the postulate of clarity, determinateness and consistency. All other
spheres belong to the realm of what is not questioned (unbefragt), and therefore,
unquestionably accepted, briefly to the realm of what "is taken for granted."17
All social interaction is thus founded on the general thesis of the alter
ego's existence, and is concretely "worked out," so to speak, by means
of the three theses of socialization, the idealization involved therein,
and the typifications constructed by actors on the social scene. IS
With his notion of the "stock of knowledge at hand," his theory of
the social origin of that knowledge, and his "general thesis of the
reciprocity of perspectives," Schutz makes a most important contribu-
211
tion to the analysis of the phenomenon of intersubjectivity. To see this,

one has to consider these conceptions in conjunction. The world of our
common-sense experience and daily life is an interpreted world, having
sense and meaning for us; and as thus interpreted it is taken for
granted. 19
IV
It has been said that Weber's interpretive sociology provides the

theoretical bridge between Husserlian philosophical phenomenology
and Schlitzian phenomenological sociology. The Weberian concepts of
most importance for discussion of this bridge are social action, Verstehen or understanding, and ideal types. 20
Schlitz agrees with Weber that to understand action one must
discover meaning. This led him to discuss understanding and motives.
For Schlitz, the world, knowledge, action, meaning, and understanding
are logically interrelated. He writes:
This world is given to me from the first as an organized one. I was. so to speak, born
into this organized social world and I grew in it. Through learning and education,
through experiences and experiments of all kinds, I acquire a certain ill-defined knowledge of this world and its institutions. Above all I am interested in the object of this
world in so far as they determine my own orientation, as they further or hinder the
realization of my own plans, as they constitute an element of my situation, which I have
to accept or to modify, as they are the source of my happiness or uneasiness in a word,
in so far as they mean anything to me. This meaning to me implies that I am not
satisfied with the pure knowledge of the existence of such objects; I have to understand
them, and this means I have to be able to interpret them as possible relevant elements
possible acts or reactions I might perform within the scope of my life plans. 21
In reflecting on the world, our experience of it, and intersubjective

relations, Schlitz interprets this world as the possible field of action for
all of us. Moreover he discerns, in this world, two types of things:
natural and social. The former are given to me as realities independent
of me, the latter as products of human activity. To understand both is
important, but what concerns us is the understanding of social things.
This happens with reference to other things: "I cannot understand a
social thing without reducing it to human activity which has created it
and, beyond it, without referring this human activity to the motives out
of which it springs.'>22
Schlitz then distinguishes two types of motives: "because motives"
212
OLA MOSTAFA ANWAR
and "in-order-to motives." The first have their roots in my past which
determines my present. They are generated by my past experience and
cannot be discerned except in terms of the life history of the person
involved. But as I live my action and am involved in it, how could I
detect those motives? Schutz sees that we can, through a condensation
of the past experiences which take the form of principles, maxims,
habits, tastes ... all that constitutes the, so-called, social personality.
The "in-order-to motives" are simpler, because they are given to me,
in my acting. They involve a kind of planning, refer to the future, and
constitute the purpose of my acting. As I endeavor to reach the aim of
my act, I am always aware of my "in-order-to motives" which are at the
center of my conduct.
To understand other people's acts I need to know the in-order-to
and because motives of their acts. But is this possible? It is through
typification as Schutz explains:
I must not (even more, I cannot) grasp the full ramifications of other people's motives,
with their horizons of individual life plans, their background of individual experiences,
their references to the unique situation by which they are determined. Such an ideal
understanding would presuppose the full identity of my stream of thought with that of
the alter ego, and that would mean an identity of both our selves. It suffices, therefore,
that I can reduce the other's act to its typical motives including their reference to typical
situations, typical ends, typical means, etc. 23
"Understanding" holds an important position in Schutz's phenomenology, for understanding fellowmen in daily life is essential, othewise no
interaction or reciprocity is possible. He considered the world of everyday life to be a
social cultural world in which I am interrelated in manifold ways of interaction with
fellowmen known to me in varying degrees of intimacy and anonymity. To a certain
extent, sufficient for many practical purposes, I understand their behavior, if I understand their motives, goals, choices and plans originating in their biographically determined circumstances. Yet only in particular situations, and then only fragmentarily, can
I experience the other's motives, goals, etc .... briefly, the subjective meaning they
bestow upon their actions, in their uniqueness. I can, however, experience them in their
typicality. In order to do so I construct typical patterns of the actors' motives and ends
even of their attitudes and personalities, of which their actual conduct is just an instance
or example. These typified patterns of the other's behavior become in turn motives of
my own actions, and this leads to the phenomenon of self-typification well known to
social scientists under various names. 24
To sum up we can say that only Schutz was able to apply phenomeno-
213
logical insights to the crucial problems of the social sciences in general

and sociology in particular, forging thereby a strong bond between the
life-world and sociology.
National Center for Social and Criminological Research,
Cairo
NOTES
I Helmut R. Wagner, Alfred Schutz. An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 287.
2 Aron Gurwitsch, "Introduction" to A. Schutz. Collected Papers, Vol. III: Studies in
Phenomenological Philosophy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), pp. xi-xxxi, p. xii.
3 Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. III, op. cit., p. 116.
4 Alfred Schutz, "Phenomenology of the Social Sciences," in Philosophical Essays in
Memory of Edmund Husser!, Marvin Farber, ed. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940), pp. 164-86.
5 A. Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. and introduced by
Arvid Brodersen, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 229.
6 Ibid., p. 230.
7 Loc. cit.
K Gurwitsch,op. cit., p. xiii.
9 A. Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. III, p. 82.
10 Richard M. Zaner, "Theory of Intersubjectivity: Alfred Schutz" Social Research 28
(Spring 1961), pp. 71-93.
II A. Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. III, op. cit., p. 119.
12 Maurice Natanson, "Phenomenology and Typification: A Study in the Philosophy of
Alfred Schutz," Social Research 37 (Spring 1970), pp. 1-22.
13 A. Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 19.
14 Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. II op. cit., pp. 232-33.
15 Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. III, op. cit., p. 125.
16 Natanson,op. cit., p. 12.
17 Schutz. Collected Papers, Vol. III, op. cit., pp. 120-21.
IX Zaner, op. cit., p. 87.
19 Gurwitsch, op. cit., p. xxii.
20 Monica B. Morris, An Excursion into Creative Sociology (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1977), p. 14.
21 A. Schutz, "The Social World and the Theory of Social Action," in D. Braybrook
(ed.), Philosophical Problems of the Social Sciences (New York: The Macmillan Co.,
1965), pp. 53-67.
22 Ibid., p. 60.
23 Ibid., p. 61.
24 A. Schutz, "Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences," in M. Natanson
(ed.) Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 231249.
JACOB ROGOZINSKI
LA CHAIR DE LA COMMUNAUTE*
"La communaute se desagregerait s'il n'y avait quelqu'un pour prendre

soin d'elle. De meme Ie corps de l'homme se decomposerait s'il n'y
avait dans ce corps une certaine force directrice veillant au bien
commun de tous ses membres (...). En toute multitude il faut donc un
principe de direction".! Ce texte de St. Thomas d' Aquin soul eve
plusieurs questions essentielles. Pourquoi Ie lien social et l'unite du
corps humain sont-ils si precaires qu'ils se disloqueraient sans Ie soutien
d'un principe directeur? Quel doit etre ce principe, et comment
parvient-il a unifier les membres disperses de la multitude? Ne pourrait-on concevoir que celle-ci parvienne a s'unifier par elle-meme, sans
recourir a un principe transcendant? Comment rendre compte enfin de
ce rapport d'analogie que ce texte, a la suite d'une longue tradition,
etablit entre Ie corps individuel et la communaute politique? Selon
Aristote, "c'est en premier lieu dans l'etre vivant", et plus precisement
dans Ie rapport de l'ame au corps, qu'il est possible de saisir l' arkhe,
Ie principe ou l'origine de l'autorite politique. 2 Faut-il admettre, en
d'autres termes, que la constitution du corps propre precede, en un
sens transcend antal, et pre-determine la constitution de la communaute? Et que les divisions et les crises de la communaute
s'enracinent dans l'enigme d'une instabilite premiere, dans la precarite
ontologique d'un corps menace a chaque instant de se desagreger?
Toutes ces questions doivent etre accessibles a une description pure.
Le sens d'etre un corps, d'etre autrui, d'etre en communaute se
constitue a travers une genese, dont les intrigues, les impasses et les
drames peuvent etre mis en lumiere. Certes, Ie sens d'etre de ces
phenomenes ne nous est pas donne d'emblee: il est recouvert et occulte
par les prejuges de la tradition. L'evidence naIve s'installe dans Ie
constitue: elle presuppose toujours qu'it y a de l'autre, que je sais deja
qui est cet autre et comment nous pouvons, lui et moi, entrer en
rapport. Si nous voulons atteindre ce qui est en question, cette naIvete
dogmatique doit etre ecartee. Pour decrire comment, a travers quelle
genese, se constitue pour moi Ie phenomene "autrui", il importe de
neutraliser les significations deja constituees d'autrui, de faire abstrac215
A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXV, 215-232.
216
JACOB ROGOZINSKI
tion de toutes les fonctions intentionnelles qui vi sent autrui ou Ie

presupposent, de toute communaute et de toute objectivite commune,
du desir comme desir de l'Autre, du langage comme mode de communication, bref de to utes les structures du Mitsein. Le chemin que
nous empruntons ici, celui d'une reduction radicale qui nous reconduit
au champ d'experience transcendantal de l'Ego, ce chemin a deja ete
explore par Husser!, notamment dans la yo Meditation cartesienne et
nous pouvons, au mains au depart, Ie prendre pour guide. 3
A I'extreme limite de la reduction, l'Ego se saisit lui-meme, dans la
solitude de l'absolu, au coeur d'une "nature primordiale" que Husser!
designe comme sa "sphere d'appartenance". Au sein de cette sphere
purement immanente, Ie monde transcend ant subsiste cependant, mais
depouille de toute objectivite, reduit a des esquisses fluentes offertes a
rna perception. Dans ce flux incessant, des silhouettes surgissent, qui
gesticulent quelques instants, puis s'evanouissent. Ce sont les corps des
autres tels qu'ils m'apparaissent dans mon champ d'appartenance,
depossedes du sens d'etre autrui, prives de chair et d'ipseite, comme
autant de choses parmi les choses du monde, qui gravitent a la
peripherie de rna sphere primordiale. Car Ie centre de cette sphere, son
nay au ultime, n'est pas chose mais chair. Autour du point-zero central,
de l'Ici absolu, rayonne une zone indecise qui se constitue "sans
esquisses", par une auto-donation immediate, comme un reseau mouvant d'impressions sensibles que je ressens moi-meme, qui m'appartiennent en propre. Et ceci est rna chair, la chair vive que moi, l'Ego,
j'habite, ou plutot que je suis. "Parmi les corps de cette Nature, je
trouve, par une distinction unique en son genre, rna chair: c'est en effet
l'unique corps (Korper) qui n'est pas seulement corps, mais precisement
chair (Leib)".4 Au terme de La reduction, Ie monde primordial eclate,
partage par la difference de la chair et du corps. C'est cette division
originaire, la difference charnelle, qui me permet de distinguer entre ce
qui est mien et ce qui m'est etranger, entre moi et les autres: "Si je
reduis a l'appartenance les autres hommes, j'obtiens des corps materiels
reduits; mais si je me reduis moi-meme ... j'accede a rna chair".
De rna chair au corps des autres, un abi'me s'est creuse. En effet, la
difference charnelle ne deIimite pas seulement deux regions de l'etant.
Source ultime de toute perception et de toute evidence, rna chair ne fait
qu'un avec man ouverture au monde. Elle n'est pas un corps dans Ie
monde, mais Ie Nullkorper ou Ie Nullobjekt, Ie corps-zero que est la
condition de toute experience d'un objet au d'un corps. La demarcation
LA CHAIR DE LA COMMUNAUTE
217
de la chair et du corps est donc une difference transcendantale ou, si

I'on veut, ontologique. Et il va s'agir de montrer comment, par queUe
synthese transcendantale, une chair et un corps peuvent se recouvrir,
s'identifier par-dela la difference charnelle: comment la chair se donne
un corps, comment un corps en vient a s'incarner. Sans cette enigmatique operation, cette synthese charnelle, la constitution d'autrui serait
tout a fait impossible. Pour que cette silhouette mobile qui penetre dans
mon champ perceptif devienne Ie corps d'autrui, un corps de chair
vivant qu'habite et anime un autre Ego, il lui faut predre chair. Or,
dans Ie monde de la reduction primordiale, il n'est d'autre chair que
la mienne. II faut donc, conclut Husser!, "que Ie corps la-bas, qui
est pourtant saisi lui aussi comme chair, tire ce sens d'un transfert
aperceptif a partir de rna chair (...). Des lors, il est clair que seule une
res semblance hant dans rna sphere primordiale ce corps la-bas au mien
peut fournir Ie fondement et Ie motif de saisir "par analogie" ce corps
la-bas comme une autre chair".5 Ce qui me permet de transferer Ie sens
de chair a un autre corps, c'est donc la "saisie analogique" d'un
"res semblance" entre ce corps et Ie mien.
Mais une difficulte majeure surgit aussitot. Ce transfert suppose en
effet que j'aie moi aussi un corps, comparable a l'autre corps la-bas. Car
rna chair primordiale ne ressemble par elle-meme a aucun corps : rien
au monde ne ressemble a rna chair. Le devenir-chair du corps d'autrui
presuppose ainsi Ie devenir-corps de rna propre chair, son incorporation. Ceci devra rester acquis: la constitution "solipsiste" du corps
propre est une condition prealable a la constitution d'autrui et de la
communaute. Ne doit-on pas admettre, cependant, que I'incorporation
de rna chair presuppose a son tour l'intersubjectivite, et notamment comme Ie suggere parfois Husser! - que la perception du corps
d'autrui m'est requise pour que j'accede a une saisie globale de mon
corps?6 Ma corporeite presuppose ceUe d'autrui, mais la saisie d'autrui
presuppose celIe de mon corps ... Nous serons condamnes a tourner
dans ce cercle tant que nous n'aurons pas eIucide la constitution de la
synthese charneUe: tant que no us ne saurons pas dans queUe mesure
une auto-incorporation solipsiste de la chair est possible, et par queUe
merveille la chair devient-eUe corps sans cesser d'etre chair. Si no us
parvenons a repondre a cette question, il nous faudra alors revenir au
probleme du transfert analogi que de rna chair au corps d'autrui.
Chercher a comprendre comment cette chair qui est "originairement
mienne", parvient a s'alterer ou a s'aliener, a s'arracher a rna sphere
218
JACOB ROGOZINSKI
d'appartenance pour se laisser capter par la gravitation d'autrui: comment une chair issue de rna propre chair peut-elle se constituer comme
une autre chair, comme la chair de l'autre, sans cesser aussit6t d'etre
chair des qu'elle cesse d'etre mienne. Toute communaute, tout etreavec-autrui repose sur l'enigme de cette coexistence charnelle. Mais il
ne s'agit la que d'une synthese derivee: rna coexistence avec la chair
d'autrui se fonde sur une coexistence premiere de rna chair avec ellememe au sein d'un seul corps. Et celle-ci suppose a son tour que rna
chair ait pris corps a travers la synthese charnelle. C'est cette synthese
originaire qu'il s'agit d'abord d'eIucider.
En fait, il semble que, pour Husser!, celle-ci ne pose aucun probIerne. C'est d'un geste unique, a travers une experience privilegiee, que
"la chair se constitue originairement sur un mode double", qu'elle
"apparait en meme temps comme chair et comme chose materielle". II
s'agit, on Ie sait, de l'experience du chiasme tactile? Lorsque rna main
droite touche rna main gauche, elle peut l'eprouver d'abord comme une
chose physique. Mais cette surface lisse et inerte que je palpe n'est
justement pas une simple chose: elle-meme se sent touchee par l'autre
main, elle ressent aussit6t des impressions tactiles que j'identifie comme
miennes: "elle devient chair". Au moment meme ou rna main gauche
touchee comme une chose s'eprouve comme chair, la main droite lui
"apparait a son tour aussi comme une chose". Simuitanement, en un
seul geste indivisible, chacune des deux mains entrelacees se donne a la
fois comme chair et comme chose. II devient alors possible de comprendre comment rna chair parvient a se constituer comme lme "chose
corporelle", puis a decouvrir sa res semblance avec Ie corps d'autrui, et
a lui conferer son sens de chair.
Ce serait du moins possible si la chair arrivait effectivement a se
constituer sur un double mode dans Ie chiasme tactile. Husser! nous
previent cependant que la chair est "une chose incompletement constituee".8 Autant dire qu'elle ne reussira jamais a achever son incorporation, que les syntheses du corps propre, d'autrui et de la communaute
resteront marquees de cette incompletude, et toujours menacees de
detaillir. Loin d'etre simplement contingent, il nous semble que
l'inachevement de la synthese charnelle trouve son origine dans la
structure meme du chiasme: dans ce qui, au croisement des deux mains,
resiste a la synthese et la met peut-etre en echec. Tout se passe en effet
comme si Husser! se donnait par avance ce qu'il s'agit precisement de
constituer: l'homologie de la chair et du corps, l'organisation spatiale du
219
corps propre, la simultaneite temporelle du contact. II lui parait acquis

que la meme main peut sans difficulte se reconnaitre a la fois comme
chair et comme corps, comme si cette reconnaissance allait de soi, et
que sa carnation et sa corporeite lui appartenaient comme deux
attributs empiriques d'une unique substance. Nous savons pourtant que
la difference charnelle est une difference transcendantale, qu'elle fait Ie
partage entre un phenomene dans Ie monde et la condition ontologique
du monde des phenomenes. Comme l'avait bien vu Merleau-Ponty, des
la Phenomenofogie de fa perception, "la main droite objet n'est pas la
main droite touchante: la premiere est un entrelacement d'os, de
muscles et de chair ecrase en un point de l'espace, la seconde traverse
l'espace comme une fusee pour aller reveler I'objet exterieur".9
A vrai dire, au niveau atteint par la reduction, il faudrait meme
s'abstenir de parler d'une "main droite" et d'une "main gauche". La
"difference des regions dans I'espace", du proche et du lointain, du
dedans et du dehors, du cote gauche et du cote droit - se fonde dans
l'espace ordonne d'un corps propre deja constitue. II en va de meme de
la differenciation organique de la main, de l'oeil, de la bouche, de la
peau. La chair primordiale n'a pas de mains: elle n'est rien d'autre
qu'un flux d'impressions sensibles qui surgissent a chaque fois a un
certain pole, rayonnent et se diffractent a partir de ce pole, puis
s'estompent. Chaque pole de chair demeure enferme dans son rayon de
monde, incapable de rejoindre d'autres poles de chair et de s'articuler a
eux dans une unite organique. Et encore moins capable de se reconnaitre dans un "corps," ou plutot dans I'un de ces points-sources
d'impressions sensibles, ou Ie pole de chair ne se sent pas sentir et qui
procedent donc du domaine opaque de la non-chair, de I'etranger a rna
chair. Pre-corporelIe, pre-organique, dispersee en une infinite de poles
monadiques, la chair primordiale se retranche de la non-chair et reste
prisonniere de sa carnation. Pour que, de ce chaos, de cette chara,
emerge la stature stable d'un corps, il faut que la chair surmonte sa
dispersion, son retranchement. II faut que chaque pole de chair se sente
coexister, simultanement, avec d'autres poles de chair, et surtout que la
chair se ressente elle-meme a la fois comme chair et non-chair.
La synthese charnelle exige donc une co-saisie simultanee ou, au
coeur du chiasme, chaque main - ou plutot chaque pole de chair - se
perc;oive soi-meme et perc;oive l'autre en meme temps comme chair et
comme corps. Mais rien n'est plus difficile a constituer que la simultaneite temporelle, la co-presence en un seul main tenant-present, de
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JACOB ROGOZINSKI
plusieurs apprehensions successives, de plusieurs "main tenant" qui

s'excluent. De cette difficulte de principe, qui traverse toute l'histoire de
la metaphysique, Aristote temoigne dans un texte celebre de sa Physique. 10 Elle concerne directement la question de l'unite du sensible: en
effet, selon Ie De sensu, "il n'est pas possible de sentir deux choses
simultanement (hama) par une seule sensation" et il est "encore moins
possible de sentir simultanement deux sensations tombant sous deux
sens differents, par exemple Ie blanc et Ie doux".ll Et encore moins,
ajouterions-nous, de sentir ensemble une sensation corporelle et Ie sesentir charnel, dont la difference n'est pas empirique, mais transcendantale. II Ie faut cependant, et Aristote Ie soulignera dans Ie De anima:
"II doit encore y avoir une unite pour dire qu'ils sont differents. Le
doux, en effet, est different du blanc, et c'est quelque chose d'unique
qui Ie dit" - et, precise Aristote, "ille dit en meme temps (hama /egei) ,
en un temps indivisible".12 Ce n'est pas Ie lieu d'analyser la solution
qu'Aristote propose a cette aporie, c'est-a-dire sa doctrine du "sens
commun" (koinon aistheterion) , qui n'est pas un "sixieme sens" distinct
des autres, mais un recoupement ou un recroisement en chiasme de
chaque sens sur lui-meme et sur les autres. Retenons-en simplement
que la synthese charnelle risque fort d'etre impossible a constituer
temporellement. Comme Ie remarque encore Merleau-Ponty, "jamais
les deux mains ne sont en meme temps l'une a l'egard de l'autre
touchees et touchantes" - corporelles et charnelles. De sorte que leur
coincidence, "toujours imminente et jamais realisee en fait", "s'eclipse
au moment de se produire".13 La synthese doit pourtant s'accomplir,
sinon rna chair ne saurait s'incorporer, je n'aurais pas de corps, il
n'y aurait pas d'autrui, pas de communaute, ni de monde objectif.
Comment penser ce non-sens du sens commun, cette possibilite de
l'impossible?
Si la chair differe du corps, d'une difference transcendantale, il doit y
avoir, pour reprendre les termes d'Aristote, "quelque chose d'unique"
- une unite transcendantale - qui puisse saisir leur difference, "en un
seul temps indivisible". II doit y avoir un element commun a chaque
pole perceptif, qui puisse sentir simultanement en chacun des poles et
operer ainsi leur impossible recouvrement. Ce sens commun charnel,
quel peut-il etre, s'il est vrai que la saisie d'une autre chair, d'un autre
site d'incarnation, echappe par principe a rna chair? Chaque pole de
chair est comme une monade "sans porte ni fenetre", prisonniere de
221
son angle de visee: a travers chaque pole, je ne pen;ois jamais qU'un

seul rayon de monde, une unique mouvance de l'etre. Mais precisement
c'est moi, l'Ego, qui pen;ois depuis chaque pole de chair. Car la chair
est "originairement mienne": au terme de la reduction, je me suis
decouvert comme un "Ego concretement incarne ou une chair corporelle egoisee. 14 Et je ne loge pas dans rna chair comme Ie pilote dans
son navire ou la forme dans sa matiere, et encore moins comme une
substance pensante unie exterieurement a une substance etendue. Je
suis rna chair. Accompagnant chaque impression sensible tout au long
de sa diffraction, l'Ego delivre la chair de l'anonyme neutralite de I'etre.
Sans "pensee" et sans visage, l'Ego primordial est l'auto-affection du
se-sentir charnel, sa refraction immanente, comme une concretion, un
noeud dans la trame, ou la chair revient sur soi et s'enlace a soi. Autant
dire qu'il habite chaque pole de chair, qu'il est chacun des deux poles
du chiasme. Et certes, chaque pole est d'abord apprehende comme une
chose par I'autre pole, mais l'Ego inc arne les pen;oit ensemble I'un et
l'autre, il perc,:oit chaque pole en lui-meme-comme chair - et depuis
l'autre - comme corps. Dans cette unique perception a double foyer, il
se vit lui-meme a la fois comme chair et non-chair. II est Ie "sens
commun", l'unite synthetique originaire de la chair et du corps, la
matrice de l'incorporation. Et il s'agit pas d'un tertium quid, un element
transcendant qui surplomberait du dehors la division. L'Ego primordial
est la chair elle-meme, effleurant la chair, se reconnaissant en chacun
de ses poles, se delivrant de sa cloture monadique pour s'ouvrir a
l'etrangete immense de la non-chair.
Mais notre description reste encore trap statique. II nous faut
reinserer la double perception de l'Ego-chair dans Ie flux de la
temporalite immanente. Essayer de decrire la genese de la simultaneite
temporelle dans l'experience du chiasme. Nous savons qU'une double
apprehension simultanee est impossible a priori. Dans une premiere
phase, l'Ego est donc condamne a osciller entre les deux poles, en
epousant tour a tour la perspective singuliere de chacun d'eux. En
passant d'un pole a l'autre, sa perspective se modifie a chaque fois, une
nouvelle visee perceptive chasse la precedente et la rejette dans Ie
passe. Toutefois, celle-ci n'est pas annulee, elle est gardee-en-prise dans
une saisie retentionnelle et reactivee toute les fois que son oscillation
ramene l'Ego au premier pole. Passant a l'autre pole, l'Ego s'efforce de
retenir activement la perception du premier, de sorte que l'impression
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JACOB ROGOZINSKI
nouvelle et la retention gardee-en-prise se recoupent, se chevauchent et

tendent a se confondre. "L'Ego se dirige donc sur les deux ensemble:
avec Ie nouveau et a travers lui sur l'ancien. Tous les deux ensemble
sont activement assumes par l'Ego" - jusqu'au moment ou un "glissement" se produit: "La successivite des rayons de l'attention et de la
saisie s'est changee en un seul rayon dedoubl6".15 L'Ego per~oit alors
simultanement a travers les deux poles et la synthese charnelle peut
enfin s'accomplir.
Nous comprenons desormais pour quelle raison cette synthese
demeure inachevee et precaire: c'est qu'elle implique une violence
transcendantale, une tension violente de l'Ego qui s'acharne a garder en
prise ses retentions et ales ajointer aux impressions venues de l'autre
pole. Il travaille ainsi a contre-temps, s'epuisant a unifier ce que la
poussee du flux temporel ne cesse de disjoindre. Accoles un bref
instant, les deux lfwres ou les deux bords du chiasme s'ecartent aussitot.
C'est pourquoi "rna chair est une chose incompletement constituee":
parce que la synthese violente qui lui donne corps se voit sans cesse
defaite et deconstituee par l'eclatement extatique de la temporalite.
Quand la synthese defaille, les structures corporelles deja constituees
subsistent neanmoins, comme autant de strates retentionnelles sedimentees, que l'Ego s'efforce constamment de reactiver et sur lesquelles
il prend appui pour elaborer de nouvelles syntheses, toujours aussi
instables et menacees. C'est ce double mouvement de constitutiondeconstitution que nous avons main tenant a decrire, a travers ses
phases successives d'incorporation ou s'etablissent des strates toujours
plus complexes et differenciees - du corps de chair primaire au corps
total et aux diverses figurations du corps social.
Lorsque l'Ego parvient a operer, ne serait-ce qu'un instant, une
premiere synthese du corps et de la chair, la dispersion anarchique de
la chara primordiale commence a etre surmontee. Peu a peu, a travers
une longue serie de syntheses, I'ebauche indecise d'un "corps de chair"
(Leibkorper) emerge du chaos. Cette incorporation primaire s'effectue
dans deux directions divergentes, seIon une double intentionalite,
"transversale" et "horizontale". Au coeur du chiasme, chaque pole de
chair se per~oit soudain comme une chose corporelle touchee par
l'autre pole. II dec ouvre qu'iI est "Ie meme" comme chair et comme
corps, et done que la chair peut rester chair tout en devenant corps.
C'est cette synthese transversale qui permet a la chair de s'inserer dans
l'espace objectif des corps, d'y trouver un site et des contours. C'est elle
223
qui decoupe l'espace en "regions" differenciees et qui confere a la chair

la permanence objective d'un corps.
Cette spatialisation de la chair suppose toutefois que l'incorporation
progresse en profondeur et en etendue, qU'une surface transcendantale
se deploie, qui circonscrive l'espace propre du corps en tral;{ant la
frontiere d'un dedans et d'un dehors. 16 Ce qui implique que chaque
pole de chair ne reste pas enferme dans sa perspective monadique, qu'il
etende sa mouvance, entre en contact avec d'autres poles, que leurs
visees perspectives se croisent, se recoupent, instaurant peu a peu un
"sens commun" des monades. C'est, la encore, l'experience du chiasme
qui delivre les poles de chair de leur reclusion originelle. Quand les
deux poles se touchent, chacun d'eux decouvre que l'autre pole n'est
pas seulement chose, mais aussi chair, comme lui-meme. Que ce corps
etranger qui l'affectait du dehors etait en verite la chair de sa chair. II se
reconnait dans l'etrangete de la non-chair. Ou plutot, il transfere son
sens de chair sur la chose etrangere et cette premiere donation annonce
deja Ie transfert analogique qui constituera Ie corps d'autrui. L'alterite
premiere n'est pas celle d'autrui, mais de l'autre pole de chair. Celui-ci
apparait a la fois semblable - issu d'une meme chair - et pourtant
different, puisqu'il rayonne d'ailleurs, d'un autre site d'incarnation,
depuis un ecart, une distance irreductible que la contact furtif du
chiasme ne saurait abolir. La structure intentionnelle qui rend possible
cette coexistence des monades est la matrice de toute communaute.
Nous pouvons la designer comme une synthese "horizontale", puisque
c'est elle qui ouvre l'horizon charnel du monde. Desormais, par la vertu
magique du transfert, l'Ego se sent environne de toutes parts par de la
chair. II decele des traces d'incarnation disseminees partout dans
l'opacite de la non-chair, aussi loin que s'etend sa perception, et
jusqu'aux ultimes replis de l'etre.
Autant dire qu'a ce niveau l'incorporation est encore loin d'etre
achevee. Les frontieres du corps primaire sont floues. La surface qui
l'enveloppe reste poreuse. De transfert en transfert, il s'epanche sans
cesse au-dehors et tend a se confondre avec ce qu'il entoure. Toute la
difficulte va consister alors a ajointer l'enigmatique charniere du meme
et de l'autre, a articuler la difference spatiale des monades et leur
identite charnelle. Tant que Ie rapport qui unit les poles perceptifs
demeure indetermine, it sera impossible de progresser dans l'incorporation et Ie corps naissant, a peine ebauche, risquera toujours de
retomber dans le chaos informe de la chair primordiale. Ce risque
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JACOB ROGOZINSKI
s'aggrave encore a chaque defaillance des syntheses constituantes,

lorsque Ie chiasme se disloque sous la poussee du temps. Le double
faisceau intentionnel qui soutenait Ie corps primaire dans son espace et
sa duree s'effondre alors. Ce qui s'etait eprouve simultanement comme
chair et comme chose a I'instant du chiasme se dissocie a nouveau, et
l'Ego recommence a osciller entre les poles disjoints, dont chacun
redevient successivement chair et chose. Toutefois, la deconstitution ou
la desincorporation du corps n'est jamais integrale. Nous avons vu que
I'Ego maintient en prise les traces retentionnelles de son travail de
constitution. C'est cette memoire de son corps a venir qui Ie garde de
sombrer dans Ie chaos de sa chair.
On n'assiste donc pas a une simple rechute dans I'indifferencie,
ou plutot cette retombee est toujours pef{;ue a travers les remanences
des structures deja constituees. Ce qui fait apparaitre de nouvelles
configurations, des resonances d'apres-coup, ou les intentionalites
primaires se voient profondement modifiees. Ainsi, lorsque l'intentionalite horizontale se decompose, cesse aussitot la possibilite de
transferer Ie sens de chair d'un pole a l'autre. On retrouve apparement
la situation initiale ou chaque pole de chair etait per<;:u par l'autre
comme une chose. Mais, entre-temps, les poles s'etaient reconnus dans
Ie chiasme comme etant d'une meme chair, et chacun garde en memoire
la trace de leur coexistence charnelle. Cette retention persistante
interfere avec la nouvelle perception ou l'autre pole se presente comme
depouille de sa chair, desincarne ou decharne. Cela meme que j'avais
reconnu comme la chair de rna chair, cela m'apparait soudain comme
un corps etranger, qui me semble surgir du plus intime de rna chair. Le
premier objet est Ie "mauvais objet" - I' abject: ce qu'il me faut rejeter
au dehors, inlassablement, et qui revient toujours me hanter. Dcsormais, l'etranger sera apprehende comme une menace: la chair s'angoisse
de se sentir menacee par la non-chair qui la cerne et la penetre de
to utes parts. Par leur coexistence charnelle, les monades autrefois
dispersees entraient en connexion, s'entrela<;:aient sur toute l'etendue de
la surface corporelle. Lorsque Ie transfert s'interrompt, chaque pole
exclut et repousse tous les autres, leur tissu conjonctif se dechire, et Ie
corps se demembre, se fragmente a I'infini. La encore, on n'en revient
pas simplement a la situation d'origine, a la dispersion absolue des
monades refermees sur elles-memes. C'est a partir d'une synthese
possible, depuis l'unite naissante d'un corps, que la retombee dans
la chair peut etre vecue comme une deliaison, une desagregation.
225
L'apparition du corps etranger au sein de rna chair peut etre alors

represente comme la "cause" de cette dissociation panique, comme un
agresseur qui penetre dans mon corps pour Ie disloquer. Ainsi,
I'angoisse du corps morcele et la haine de l'etranger se renforcent
mutuellement.
Decette catastrophe ontologique, de cette alternance incessante
d'incorporation et de desincorporation, d'incarnation et de decharnement, un des plus anciens textes de l'Occident porte peut-etre temoignage. Certains fragments du Peri phuseos d'Empedocle decrivent ce
cycle d'une double genese ou "Ies elements assembles creent et detruisent tour a tour la mort et la vie, quand tout se desunit, tour a tour
apparait et perit (...) soit que I'Amour amene tout a I'unite, soit que la
Haine disloque et dissocie ce que l' Amour a reuni" - "Prives de corps,
les membres, sous l'empire de la haine, erraient 9a et la, disjoints,
desireux de s'unir" - "Mais des qu'un dieu se fut uni a l'autre plus
etroitement, on vit les membres s'ajuster, au hasard des rencontres, et
d'autres en grand nombre sans cesse continuerent la chaine"P
Si la haine - Ie neikos empedocleen, comme puissance d'exclusion,
de fragmentation trouve sa source dans la crise de la synthese d'horizan, il se pourrait que la detaillance de la synthese transversale soit a
l'origine de la mort. En revelant a la chair qu'elle est a la fols chair et
corps, cette synthese lui permettait de s'incorporer tout en restant chair.
Lorsque Ie chiasme se detait, cette saisie simultanee s'interrompt, Ie
rayon de l'Ego se remet a osciller d'un pole a l'autre et chaque pole est
per9u tour a tour comme chair et non-chair. Mais la chair primordiale
etait incapable de se sentir passer dans la non-chair. Enfermee dans
l'instant de sa perception, elle dure aussi longtemps que ses impressions
sensibles et leur sillage de retentions. Des que celles-ci s'effacent, elle
s'evanouit, pour resurgir du neant a chaque impression nouvelle. Elle se
perd et se reprend sans jamais se donner Ie temps de vivre et de
mourir. Pour la monade "qui ne nait ni ne perit," ce que no us appelons
naissances et morts, disait deja Leibniz, ne sont que des deploiements
et des repliements, des reveils, des somnoences. En parvenant a s'incorporer, la chair surmonte son intermittence primitive. Elle accede alors a
la permanence des corps. Elle s'installe dans sa duree, se constitue
continument dans l'unite d'une histoire. Cette saisie de sa duree persiste
apres l'effondrement de la syntMse, dans la desincarnation, Ie
decharnement des poles de chair. Au moment de glisser dans la nonchair, rna chair decharnee garde la memoire de son incarnation. La
226
JACOB ROGOZINSKI
retention de son passe charnel lui interdit de sombrer d'un seul coup
dans Ie neant: elle se vit sur Ie point de cesser de vivre, elle se sent
mourir. Et certes, elle ne mourra pas vraiment, puis que la gravitation de
l'Ego reincarne toujours a nouveau Ie pole decharne. Mais elle s'est
sentie mourir, et ce souvenir nourrit l'attente de sa mort prochaine. La
chair s'angoisse d'une mort imminente et toujours differee. Ma chair
restera en agonie tout au long de sa duree. Et cette agonie des origines
est sans doute la source ultime de la crainte de mourir. Ce n'est pas en
se pro-jetant vers son avenir que Ie Dasein se constitue comme etrepour-la-mort: c'est depuis son plus lointain passe, dans l'interminable
attente d'un impossible qui a deja eu lieu. L'activite constituante de
l'Ego a arrache la chair a son innocence native. Mais la brisure du
temps ruine son oeuvre, et l'Ego s'angoisse pour sa chair, il tente de
reparer l'ouvrage qui se detait. Et c'est ainsi que la haine et la mort sont
entrees dans Ie monde de rna chair.
Au niveau du corps primaire, l'incorporation semble avoir partiellement echoue. Elle se fonde sur une syntMse "imparfaitement constituee", qui ne parvient pas a assurer l'articulation des differents poles.
L'incorporation primaire bute sur une aporie qu'il lui faut lever:
comment plusieurs poles issus d'une meme chair peuvent-ils coexister
au sein d'un meme corps sans se confondre, sans devenir "Ie meme"?
Un nouveau mode de connexion doit s'etablir, qui preserve leur identite
charnelle sans effacer leur difference spatiale. La coexistence du
multiple dans l'un et du different dans l'identique va etre apprehendee
comme co-presence des parties au sein du tout. Des lors, les poles de
chair se percevront comme les parties d'un corps total, comme ses
organes ou ses membres. Et cette synthese de totalisation bouleverse
les structures corporelles deja constituees: elle les fait acceder a un
stade superieur d'incorporation. La diversite des monades n'etait
qu'une simple divergence de perspectives, une distribution "topique" de
poles indifferencies: elle va se transformer en une difference interne,
une differenciation organique. Des regroupements d'organes s'operent,
des axes de symetrie et des "incongruences" se precisent. L'oeil se
distingue de la bouche, et la main droite de la main gauche. A la surface
du corps, se forme Ie tissue consistant d'une peau, qui tranche entre Ie
visible et l'invisible, le dehors et Ie dedans. A l'effusion charnelle du
corps primaire, toujours en fuite hors de lui-meme et pret a se fondre
dans la chair immense du monde, succede la cloture du corps total. Au
dedans comme au dehors, en differenciant ses organes et en se retran-
227
chant du monde, il s'efforce de se delimiter, d'imposer une forme stable

au chaos de sa chair.
Aristote detinit Ie tout (holon) comme "ce a quoi ne manque aucune
de ses parties".J8 Mais la synthese de totalisation n'est qU'une formation
seconde, qui presuppose les syntheses primaires du chiasme: la nouvelle
stature du corps s'edifie sur Ie soubassement instable d'une chair
incompletement constituee. Aussi reste-t-elle precaire, promise a la
ruine. Le corps s'angoisse de son passe de chair. Menace a chaque
instant de retomber dans l'informe, il lui faut aussi resister aux effets
de remanence apparus lors de la crise des syntheses charnelles. Et
notamment a la representation pregnante d'un corps morcele, envahi
par des fragments de corps etrangers qui Ie penetrent et Ie font eclater.
La totalisation du corps propre a precisement pour fonction de
conjurer une telle menace, d'integrer les representations remanentes en
neutralisant leur charge de destruction. Cette visee s'inscrit dans la
structure meme du rapport entre Ie tout et ses parties, tel qu'il se
constitue a ce niveau d'incorporation, et il est possible d'en reperer des
traces dans l'histoire de la philosophie occidentale. De la Metaphysique
d'Aristote a la Critique du jugement ou a la troisieme Recherche
logique, s'affirme avec insistance la fonction unifiante du tout. II
apparait que chaque partie n'est possible que par sa relation au tout, et
que Ie tout suppose la co-presence et l'interaction de ses parties. Un
corps morcele ne serait plus un corps. Comprendre I'unite corporelle
comme une totalite organique, c'est deja la preserver de sa decomposition. C'est aussi se delivrer de la hantise du corps etranger. Dans cette
figure d'abjection, je m'angoissais de reconnaitre un lambeau decharne
de rna propre chair, un fragment de mon corps devenu etranger a luimeme. L'incorporation totalisante interdit de telles representations, elle
les prive de sens. L'unite close du corps total exclut I'autarcie des
monades. Entre mes organes vivants et Ie fragment decharne qui s'en
detache, il n'y a plus aucune communaute d'essence, rien qu'une simple
identite nominale, une homonymie: "les parties du corps ne peuvent
exister separees (... ) ainsi Ie doigt mort n'est un doigt que par
homonymie".19 Un doigt mort, un oeil aveugle, une main de pierre. IIs
traver sent furtivement Ie corpus aristotelicien. On les retrouvera au
debut des Parties des animaux, dans Ie De anima 20 et encore au livre I
de la Politique, au moment decisif ou il s'agit de fonder la primaute
ontologique de la cite sur l'individu: "Car Ie tout est necessairement
anterieur a la partie: si Ie tout (du corps) est detruit, il n'y aura plus ni
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JACOB ROGOZINSKI
pied, ni main, sinon par homonymie, au sens ou I'on parle d'une main
de pierre: une main de ce genre sera une main morte (...) Ainsi donc il
est evident que la cite existe par nature et qu'elle est anterieurea
l'individu".21
La synthese du corps organique conduit ainsi a une hypostase de fa
totaliu~. Le tout se pose desormais comme anterieur et superieur a ses
parties, comme Ie principe souverain qui les engendre, les unifie, les
soutient dans leur coexistence. L'unite synthetique immanente du corps
tend a etre representee comme une entite transcend ante qui lui
imp rime sa forme du dehors. C'est a ce niveau seulement que Ie corps
de chair se divise en arkhon et en arkhomenon, en une partie qui
"commande" et une autre qui "obeit." L'unite originaire de I'Ego-chair
se brise. La chair est rejetee dans une corporeite inerte, celie d'une
matiere amorphe qui "aspire a la forme comme la femelle desire Ie male
et la laideur, la beaute". Tandis que I'Ego charnel se desincarne, qu'il
s'extrait de la matiere corporelle, se sublime ou se subtilise, qu'il est
represente comme un principe etranger tombe pour son malheur dans
la prison du corps, ou comme la plenitude de I' ente!ekheia chargee
d'ordonner I'informe. Vne ame sans chair regne sur un corps sans ame,
qu'elle domine, dit encore Aristote, comme Ie tout commande a la
partie et Ie maitre a l'esclave. L'hypostase du corps total a rendu
possible cette dechirure de l'ame et du corps, de la forme et de la
matiere, du tout et des parties, qui est la mutilation de ma chair.
On n'a pas assez remarque que, en Metaphysique V, la definition du
"tout" est immediatement suivie de celie de la "mutilation" (to kolobon),
de cette sorte de sten?sis qui affecte exterieurement une totalite sans
porter atteinte a sa substance - car "une coupe tronquee (kolobos) est
encore une coupe".22 Ce qui signifie que Ie tout peut survivre a la
destruction de ses parties, ou de certaines d'entre elles, alors qU'aucune
partie ne saurait subsister en dehors du tout. En deniant toute consistance a la partie separee, I'hypostase de la totalite permet au corps
total de se maintenir, de se reforcer meme, a travers sa mutilation.
L'ablation d'un membre gangrene est necessaire a la survie de l'organisme: de Platon a Robespierre et au-dela, ce principe a servi a justifier
Ie sacrifice infini de l'individualite. Depuis les Grecs jusqu'a nos jours,
les maitres de la Cite se sont presentes comme les medecins du corps
politique, prets a Ie "purger" ou a I'amputer pour son plus grand bien. 23
Et la Cite en crise s'est elle-meme representee comme un corps malade,
comme un corps morcele, toujours menace de "retomber dans la
229
multitude", ou comme un corps monstrueux ou la disproportion des

parties compromet l'harmonie du toUt. 24 Les representations rem anentes qui affectaient l'incorporation de la chair reapparaissent ainsi au
niveau du corps politique, comme si l'instauration de la communaute
ne faisait que repeter la constitution originaire du corps propre; qU'elle
en reproduisait a une autre echelle les syntheses intentionneUes, et la
detaillance de ces syntheses.
Au terme de notre parcours, nous rencontrons a nouveau l'enigme
de la constitution d'autrui. A vrai dire, nous ne l'avions jamais quittee:
car "Ie premier non-moi, Ie premier etranger au moi", ce n'est pas
l'autre moi, comme Ie croyait Husserl, c'est l'etranger en moi, c'est ce
corps adverse que rna chair effleure et reconnait soudain comme un
autre pole d'une meme chair. L'enigme du transfert de mon sens de
chair au corps d'autrui s'eclaire alors:il recommence Ie transfert originel
de rna chair a rna chair. Ce qui compose dans Ie chiasme l'unite
precaire de mon corps, c'est cela meme qui m'enlace au corps des
autres et donne chair a notre communaute. La encore, Merleau-Ponty
l'avait compris: "Si rna main gauche peut toucher rna main droite
pendant qu'eUe palpe las tangibles, retourner sur elle sa palpation (.. .)
pourquoi, touchant la main d'un autre, ne toucherais-je pas en eUe Ie
meme pouvoir d'epouser les choses que j'ai touche dans la mienne?"25
II faut prendre garde cependant a ceci que, s'agissant de la main d'un
autre, la reversibilite ne saurait etre integrale. EUe s'esquisse deja a
grand-peine, et pour un bref instant, lorsqu'il s'agit de man autre main.
Et pourtant, a travers Ie deux poles de rna chair, je ressens chacun
d'eux sentir l'autre qui les touche; les deux foyers de rna double
perception se rapprochent dans Ie chiasme, ils deviennent quasisimuItanes et, par ce double transfert reciproque du sens de chair,
l'incorporation parvient enfin a s'amorcer. Dans Ie cas du corps
d'autrui, cette double experience me fera toujours detaut. Les deux
chairs etrangeres se frolent et s'etreignent sans jamais se croiser, sans
jamais sentir poindre dans la chair adverse cette meme perception
incarnee qui s'eveille dans la mienne. C'est en vain que, dans la caresse,
Ie regard ou l'ecoute, les monades s'epient et se traquent. Elles
demeurent "sans portes ni fenetres", sans qu'un grand Ordonnateur ait
depuis toujours preetabli leur harmonie dans Ie meilleur des mondes
possibles. Autrui ne me sera jamais "donne en personne", "dans sa
chair". II y faut Ie detour d'une transposition analogique, d'un transfert
dissymetrique, non-reciproque, ou de la representation - de "l'appre-
230
JACOB ROGOZINSKI
sentation" dit Husser! - vient toujours compromettre la plenitude de la

presentation. Depourvue d'evidence originaire - privee d' Urpriisenz-Ia
donation d'autrui restera indigente, au point de mimer l'auto-constitution solipsiste du corps propre. Nee d'un chiasme mutile, la quasi-chair
de la communaute rejoue, en l'aggravant encore, Ie drame d'ou emerge
rna chair.
Les syntheses fragiles du corps primaire en appellent, afin d'achever
leur ouvrage, a des modes superieurs d'incorporation, a la synthese
d'un corps total. Et nous comprenons mieux desormais pourquoi la
communaute se represente a son tour sous la forme d'un corps immense,
dont mon corps et celui des aut res ne seraient que des membres. A ce
niveau aussi, un premier transfert s'opere, ou chaque chair tente
d'incarner Ie corps des autres. De transfert en transfert, d'innombrables
corps de chair s'entrelacent pour tisser une trame unique, une communaute infinie de monades nees d'une meme chair. C'est sur Ie
soubassement de cette communaute charnelle - qui n'est, nous Ie
savons maintenant, qU'une quasi-communaute - que s'edifient les
diverses figures du corps politique, reiterant a l'echelle d'une cite ou
d'une nation l'hypostase du corps total, son unite indivise, sa cloture
autarcique, la hierarchie de ses organes. Ils reproduisent aussi, en les
amplifiant a l'extreme, la detaillance des syntheses et la desincorporation des corps. Si la chair reste a jamais "une chose incompletement
constituee", son incompletude affecte plus durement l'armature hautement instable du corps social. Lorsque celle-ci vacille dans la crise,
resurgissent les remanences primitives de son passe de chair: la peur de
retomber dans Ie chaos, l'angoisse du corps morcele, la haine de
l'etranger.
L'experience de notre siecle nous l'enseigne: il arrive que des peuples
cedent a la panique, qu'ils s'efforcent de ressouder d'un lien de mort
l'unite precaire d'un corps qui se defait. Ce risque demeure, tant que
subsiste l'hypostase du corps total, tant qu'elle continue d'ecraser son
soubassement secret, la coexistence charnelle des monades qui la soustend et l'anime. Car l'effondrement du corps total n'implique pas
necessairement une rechute dans la multitude, dans la dispersion
anarchique et Ie chaos. La desincorporation du corps n'implique pas Ie
decharnement de sa chair. Peut-etre la ruine des corps collectifs et des
totalites transcend antes parviendra-t-elle enfin a delivrer la chair vive
de la communaute. Peut-etre, a travers la detresse de l'epoque, porte-t-
elle la promesse de ce temps qu'annance un hymne de Navalis,

jour tout sera chair, une seule chair".
231
au "un
College International de Philosophie

Paris
NOTES
* Ce texte a ete presente au colloque sur Le non-sens commun organise a Urbino en

juillet 1987 par Ie College international de philo sophie et Ie Centro internazionale di
semiotica.
1 Saint Thomas d'Aquin, De regimine principum 1-1. cite par J. Schlanger, Les
metaphores de l'organisme (Vrin, 1971), p. 193.
2 Cf. Ie texte essentiel de Politique 1-5, 1254b: "C'est en premier lieu (proton) dans
l'etre vivant qu'il est possible d'observer I'autorite (arkhen) du maitre et celie du chef
politique: en effet, l'ime commande (arkhei) au corps avec I'autorite (arkhen) d'un
maitre, et l'intellect commande au desir avec I'autorite d'un chef politique et d'un roi".
3 Dans Ie cadre limite de ce texte, il nous est impossible d'aborder les problemes que
soul eve une telle demarche, en particulier la decision de "neutraliser" Ie champ du
langage et celui du desir. Ce qui pose d'ailleurs la question difficile des rapports de la .
phenomenologie avec la psychanalyse et les "philm,nphies du langage" contemporaines.
4 Husserl, Meditations cartesiennes, 44, trad. fr. Levinas, Vrin, p. 80. II nous a ete
impossible de conserver la traduction inappropriee de Leib par "corps propre" ou
"corps organique". Sur la "distinction essentielle" de la chair et du corps, cf. aussi Ie 28
de la Krisis, trad. fr. Granel, Gallimard, p. 122, etc.
5 Meditations cartesiennes 50, p. 93. Sur I'ensemble de ces questions, cf. I'etude de D.
Franck, Chair et corps, Minuit, 1981. De ce travail remarquable, qui nous a ouvert un
nouvel acces a I'oeuvre de Husser!, nous reprenons ici les concepts de difference
charnelle, d'incarnation et d'incorporation - et la visee meme d'une "analytique de la
chair".
6 Sur ce "cercle husser!ien", cf. les belles analyses de P. Ricoeur, A l'ecole de la
phenomenologie, Vrin, 1986, pp. 122-123, 163-164, etc.
7 Cf.les Ideen II 36, trad. fr. PUF, pp. 206-208.
g Id. 41, p. 224, II nous sembie possible de compredre cette "incompletude" dans un
sens ontologique, comme I'indice de notre finitude charnelle - bien que Ie texte cite
de Husserl ne I'interprete que dans un sens empirique (comme limitation de I'autoperception du corps).
9 Phenomenologie de la perception, Gallimard, pp. 108-109. De tous les "successeurs" de Husser!, Mer!eau-Ponty est Ie seul a avoir saisi l'importance decisive du motif
du chiasme tactile. En effet, la reference a la Leiblichkeit husser!ienne reste tres limitee
chez Heidegger, et quasiment inexistante chez Sartre, Levinas ou Derrida.
10 Physique 218a. Commentant ce texte dans Ousia et gramme, Derrida remarque que
"l'impossibilite de la coexistence ne peut etre posee comme telle qu'a partir d'une
certaine coexistence, d'une certaine simultaneite du non-simuItane (...). Le temps est Ie
232
JACOB ROGOZINSKI
nom de cette impossible possibilite". Elle se joue dans la duplicite du "petit mot hama",
qui "dit la complicite, I'origine commune du temps et de I'espace, Ie com-paraitre
comme condition de tout apparaitre de l'etre.", cf. Marges, Minuit, 1972, pp. 63-65. II
nous semble que cette "impossible possibilite" soutient toute la problematique de la
synthese charnelle et de I'incorporation.
11 Aristote, Parva naturalia I, De la sensation 7, 447b.
12 De l'ame JII-2, 426b.
13 Phenomenologie de la perception, p. 109 et Le visible et {'invisible, Gallimard, p.
194. Merleau-Ponty nous parait ainsi avoir surmonte la "naivete" qui caracterisait la
conception husser!ienne du chiasme. Toutefois, son analyse ne distingue pas aussi
rigoureusement que Husser! la strate originaire du tactile et Ie niveau "secondaire" du
visible. Sur "l'ecart invisible" du voyant et du visible, cf. les remarques de C. Lefort, Sur
une colonne absente, Gallimard, 1978, pp. 134-135.
14 Husserliana t. XV, p. 287 (cite par D. Franck, op. cit. p. 105). On sait que Husserl a
longtemps he site a reconnaitre Ie caractere "inc arne" de l'Ego transcendantal.
15 Experience et jugement 24, trad. fr. PUF, p. 135.
16 Sur ce concept de sUrface transcendantale, cf. la Logique du sens de G. Deleuze,
Minuit, 1969. En analysant cette constitution egologique de la surface charnelle, nous
parviendrons peut-etre a compredre l'enigmatique sentence de Freud: "Le moi est avant
tout une entite corporelle, non seulement une entite to ute en surface, mais une entite
correspond ant a la projection d'une surface." Le moi et Ie <;a in Essais de psychanalyse,
Payot, p. 194.
17 Diels, trag. 17, 58, 19. trad. ff. Battistini, Trois presocratiques, Gallimard.
18 Metaphysique V-26, 1023b.
19 Mhaphysique VII-IO, 1035b.
20 Des parties des animaux I-I, 640b-641a, ainsi que De {'ame II-I, 412b.
21 Politique 1-2, 1253a.
22 Mhaphysique V-27, 1024a.
23 ct. Ie Politique de Platon, 293b, 298a, etc.
24 Cf. par exemple Aristote, Politique V-3, 1302b. Sur la portee de cette representation du "corps monstrueux", on se referera aux travaux de C. Lefort, cf. notamment
L'image du corps et Ie totalitarisme, in L'invention democratique (Fayard, 1981), pp.
165-175.
25 Le visible et l'invisible, p. 185.
HELENA GOURKO
THE HISTORIC HORIZONS OF MEANING IN

THE JAPANESE SOCIAL WORLD
The idea of the horizon of meaning was among the key concepts of
phenomenological inquiry as early as in Husserl's Logical Investigations. In a certain sense the whole of intentional analysis can be
understood as interpretation of the horizon of meaning of thematic
objects. The horizon of meaning's field is created by consistent intentional effects and ensures the continuation of the constituting activity of
cogitation.
Meaning complexes, being ceaselessly synthesized by cogitation,
cannot be regarded as mechanical conglomerations of abstract ideas;
there is a dialectical, moving system of horizons of meaning. In a global
sense the horizon of meaning system can be called the meaning field of
culture. Intentional analysis has to dissect the possible implications
which help to create the horizons of meaning (or fields) of cogitation,
i.e., the successiveness of the life-world. Basically every non-contradictory system of intentional effects consists of some interdependent
totality of horizons of meaning.
The structure of a meaning field in any significant segment of culture
may be regarded as a harmonized entity of horizons, with its inner form
and order. It is obvious that a fracture in the meaning field of a culture
can damage the horizons and complicate the activity of cogitation. Such
warnings emerge in horizons of meaning rather often; the main reason
is the difficulties of the non-contradictory joining of the two basic
components of meaning-positing activity which Husserl designated as
meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment. What he had in mind is the
difficulty (sometimes even impossible to overcome) of transforming
meaning-intention into meaning-fulfillment in an adequate translation.
"An ideally perfect fulfillment would be an experience, in which the
transcendental object is given, intuited exactly as it was meant in the
signitive or symbolic meaning-intention, but this situation is rather a
unique one due to the relationship of meaning-intention and meaningfulfillment" .1
Following Husserl's distinction between meaning-intention and
meaning-fulfillment, it may be possible to explain fractures in horizons
233
234
HELENA GOURKO
of meaning first of all by pointing up the difficulties of the positing of

sense in language. Human thinking, cogitation, has to be put into words
- this is the only way of expressing its content and activity. That is why
the analysis of the meaning-positing process cannot be initiated without
a scrutinizing of the sense-carring constructs of discourse (language).
According to this analysis, language is a universal mediator in the
meaning system of a culture, providing interpretation of meanings, i.e.,
transferring form intention to fulfillment. But it happens, and not
seldom, that situations come about in which this mediator appears to be
unsatisfactory, because it is mistaken about the proper translation/
transition of meanings.
Constraints on the main meaning-system's mediator can provide the
impulse for culture to find some substitute, some compensatory means
for the universal process of communication. The consequence of such a
shift may be a fracture in the totality of the semiotic fields of culture.
One of the forms of such a fracture, according to Jacques Derrida, is
the semiotic shock waves which arise due to the basic linguistic difference between speech and writing. 2
Practically any writing-based culture has at least once fallen into this
semiotic disorder - when it constructed its system of writing. Some
cultures are really unlucky in this matter. These are cultures with
adopted or changed systems of writing. The consequences of a culture's
adopting another or a new writing system may be even catastrophic for
its meaning-system and self-identification. The form these consequences
take depends on the differences between the native oral language and
the adopted writing system. If writing is closely bound to the phonetics,
phonology, and syntax of the native language, the culture does not have
to change its horizon of meaning system in any principal (cardinal) way,
and it can even enjoy some benefit in saving time and effort. Such was,
for example, the case with the adoption of Latin script in German,
French, English, and other languages. But it is quite easy to find cases
of different sort, cases of the adoption of non-related writing systems,
which are only with difficulty, if it is possible at all, fitted to the native
colloquial speech. In such situations definite shock waves of semiotic
dissonance are felt as the adapted writing system expands through the
horizons of meaning of a culture.
A special case of the fracturing of horizons of meaning is that of
situations where the adopted script is hieroglyphic or iconographic in
character. This is exactly what had happened in Japan in the process of
MEANING IN THE JAPANESE SOCIAL WORLD
235
borrowing the Chinese characters. From the purposes of the meaningpositing activity of culture the peculiarity of any iconographic/character
writing system consists in its seamless placing of determined meanings
into the fabric of written language and culture. This can create a
deceptive impression of their being a universal essence in a given writing
system. The fraudulent universality of characters is created by the
special meaning determined for every character, which can speed up its
deciphering by eliminating of the phase of translating the written sign
(character) into its sound referent. The definition, which is some
schematic representation of objects, clarifies the meaning of a character
without any extra-translation; this connects in some direct way with the
horizons of meaning of thematic objects in different cultures, i.e., the
native culture of a script and the culture which has borrowed a writing
system.
From the theoretical point of view it seems quite reasonable to
predict some complications due to this borrowing, possibly complications created by this direct connection. By definition the determinations
of meanings in various cultures have to be more or less different;
otherwise it would be impossible to distinguish cultures at all. A certain
similarity of some meaning determinations can be noticed in any
surface comparison. But there are a lot of levels of reference in the
horizons of meaning for thematic objects in various cultures; the surface
of naming covers a complex structure. Some dissonance in those
meaning complexes, rooted in the differences between the creator
culture and adapting culture, is unavoidable, and the acuteness of it
depends on the degree of their distinctiveness.
This dissonance may be readily grasped when the adopting culture is
advanced and their horizon of meaning complexes has already been
developed and all or most of the levels of their structure have been
clarified. But if one of the compared cultures has no complex structure
of horizons of meaning, then this semiotic dissonance may not be
understood, at least not in the beginning. This creates some sort of
temptation for a less advanced culture - to enrich its content by the
direct borrowing of horizons of meaning from another culture. This
borrowing, which involves adapting the entire system of meaning-determinations, then seems to be entirely reasonable. This was the case with
the system of character writing adopted in Japan.
This situation developed at the very first stage of Japan's adaptation
of Chinese writing. The original Japanese stock of words in the eighth
236
HELENA GOURKO
century AD. (at the initial stage of borrowing written Chinese) was
much less numerous than that of Chinese, and the horizons of meaning
of every Japanese word were wider and more vague. So Japanese
culture immediately benefitted from an expanded dictionary and from
obtaining meaning, previously inaccessible in it. For example this
procedure solved partly the problem of abstract words, which were
created mainly by the combination of Chinese morpheme-characters
(kango). Old Japanese - yamato Kotoba - saw rapid and essential
changes from the very beginning of its borrowing of Chinese characters.
These changes accomplished an extensive expansion of horizons of
meaning but were also accompanied by some radical transformation in
the entire semiotic field of Japanese culture. Japan was extremely
unfortunate in its choosing to borrow from a language like written
Chinese, because this language was totally unsuitable in every possible
linguistic way - in phonology, morphology, syntax, and so on. It is this
system and meaning-positing elements of its characters which should be
held responsible for the deep and significant fracturing of the horizons
of meaning in the whole of Japanese culture.
This fracture was inevitable due to a basic difference, even contradiction, between the meaning-constituting processes of old Japanese
and Chinese culture. David Pollack has offered a good comparison to
describe the situation:
in Chinese ... we might see an instance of language as a "black hole", a dense core,
creating a gravity so powerful that meaning collapses inward upon itself centripetally,
with the result that little escapes outward ... meaning in Chinese is located primarily in
the creation of formal structures. Japanese seems by contrast to represent language as
"supernova", a central core radiating meaning outward with such energy that it can
scarcely be contained. 3
Having intuitively grasped this opposition, Japanese culture tried to

borrow characters in the only possible way, that is by preserving the
original Chinese system of meaning. This was done by doubling the
sound line in written Japanese by giving each character Japanese
reading of words, or kun-reading. The so-called on-readings, or pure
Chinese soundings of words, were preserved. Kun can be translated as
explanation, but one is able to understand, i.e., to explain, first of all the
words of one's own language (native tongue), so kun is the Japanese
reading (and meaning) of the character and on - by contrast - is its
Chinese sound. Every character written in Japanese has this double
237
sound line and can be read in a different way. This situation is quite
obvious to any foreigner who studies the Japanese language: he cannot
understand (without the aid of translation to his native language) either
kun or on. For him there are exactly two sounds for each character,
one for the Japanese-Chinese character (on) and one for its Japanese
meaning-translation (kun).
As a rule all written language has only one sound line, except for
some borrowed foreign words which retain their pronunciation. From
this standpoint Japanese is a rather unique language having a double
system of sound and meaning. This is quite understandable due to the
history of the formation of written Japanese, due to the application of
Chinese characters to the original meaning/sounding system. The initial
stage of borrowing saw the greatest divergency in the Japanese and
Chinese meaning/sounding systems. There is the possibility of the
successful convergence of meaning components in these systems. In
such instances, it will not be necessary to control the meaning of a
character by translating it into its original Chinese and the second sound
line (the on-sounding) can easily by eliminated. But a total convergence
of the meaning system of cultures so different is impossible by definition. This was the reason for the preservation of the Chinese sound line,
which is strictly necessary for the understanding of meanings in written
Japanese (now mostly for understanding kango-Japanese words, created
by combinations of Chinese morpheme-characters). This situation can
be interpreted as a double hermeneutic circle: everybody, even the
Japanese himself, has to translate written Japanese words twice, considering this double sounding/meaning system.
This does not mean, of course, that the double meaning/sounding
line in written Japanese is now exactly the same as it was when the
borrowing of characters began. The process of the so-called meaningconvergence between Japanese and Chinese languages was under way
all along in the adopting of characters. This meaning-convergence can
take shape in three different processes: 1) the substitution of meanings,
2) the identification of meanings, 3) the rapprochement of meanings.
The first process is initiated when there is no suitable Japanese word by
which to name something, and so its name is taken from the Chinese
vocabulary (this, for example, is the case with some adjectives in
Japanese). It may also be possible to introduce entirely new meanings
into Japanese culture using Chinese words. It is a well-known fact that
there were no Japanese terms for filial piety, benevolence, justice, etc.
238
HELENA GOURKO
before the adopting of Chinese characters. Now these Japanese words

are written and read in the Chinese fashion and so Japanese meaning/
sounding is identified with the Chinese. A special case appears to be
those common, plain Japanese words which constitute the vocabulary
of yamato kotoba. For these words the process of meaning-convergence
appears to be some never-ending kind of rapprochement, in which is
correlated the horizons of meaning of the different cultures.
Thus, the meaning-convergence process has slowly changed the
entire system of the horizons of meaning in Japanese culture. Although
it was initiated by borrowing a written system for Japanese language,
this convergence can be seen not only in the field of language, but also
in religion, philosophy, literature, even in customs, habits, and entertainment. From the point of view of meaning-endowing processes this
synthesis can be interpreted as a dialectic involving three inter-connected processes:
1) the transmission of Chinese cultural patterns,
2) the preservation of Old Japanese cultural traditions,
3) the so-called dialectic of wakan (Japanese content and Chinese
form).
The transmission of Chinese cultural patterns into Japan, initiated in
the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., has covered practically every important field of culture. The extremely versed experts in Chinese
culture were the Buddhist monks, mostly Japanese, who had to carry
on the whole divine service in Chinese only. The Buddhist sacred books
were not translated into the Japanese vocabulary of yamato kotoba in
this period because its vocabulary was not fitted for that due to its
poverty of necessary abstract terms. But rather surprisingly, no such
translation has ever been made at all; to the present the Buddhist
monks in Japan can read the sacred books of their religion only in
Chinese. This is really a strange situation; where Buddhism has been a
very important inspiration for Chinese cultural patterns for more than a
thousand years, it is still not completely assimilated into Japanese
culture.
But even given this pattern of unfinished transmission, Buddhism
appears to be one of the most important religious systems in Japan, in
stark contrast to Christianity, which has not been very important for
Japanese culture until recently and even now has no influence comparable to Buddhist influence. According to the Japanese-Portuguese
239
dictionary, compiled by Christian missionaries in the sixteenth century,

there were a lot of assimilated Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, etc. words in
colloquial Japanese. But because of their origin, mostly stemming from
the Catholic stock of words, practically all of these words disappeared
from the Japanese vocabulary with the prohibition of Christianity in
Japan at the beginning of the seventeenth century. There were a few
exceptions not related to the Christian terminology, such as pan bread, karute - cards, tabaco - tobacco, and so on.4 Christianity
turned out to be of no importance for Japanese culture, because this
religious system could not be subsumed within its its horizons of
meaning and so was thrown out.
It is a rather amazing situation that Christianity and Buddhism are
equally extraneous to the native religion/philosophy of Japan - Shinto.
How can it be explained that Christianity vanished from Japanese
culture in less than a century, and that the progress Buddhism has been
retarded for more than a thousand years, still not being entirely assimilated in Japanese culture? The explanation of this strange situation can
be found by taking a look at some peculiarities of Japanese culture and
its horizon of meaning system.
Early Japanese culture (i.e., neolithic culture) was highly developed,
but was a backward culture compared with the world cultures of that
time (fifth to third centuries B.C.). There was then, a rather long and
dangerous time-lag between Japanese culture and that of its neighbors,
a lag also to be found in its horizon of meaning system. In order to
preserve this highly developed but already out-of-date culture as an
independent entity it proved to be necessary to surmount this cultural
lag as soon as possible, i.e., to fill in certain gaps in the meaning-system.
This necessity was so urgent that the filling of these gaps was realized
by means of borrowing from the not at all fitted but highly developed
culture of Han China, which became the cultural model for Japan.
Christianity came to the historical scene much later when the gaps in
the meaning system of its early culture had already been occupied; so
Japan refused to shift the direction of its cultural synthesis.
Naturally Buddhism was not the only avenue to the adaptation of the
fundamental meaning fields of Chinese culture. In practically every
sphere, legal philosophy and ethics, moral codes, and genres of literature and art, Chinese traditional culture was introduced and assimilated
in Japan. This assimilation as such is very interesting from the point of
view of the horizon of meaning system of Japanese culture. This has
240
HELENA GOURKO
been a twofold process of preserving the traditional Chinese patterns in

their purest possible form, on the one hand, and inserting it into fabric
of Japanese culture, on the other.
For example, there is the case of the Chinese poetic tradition in
Japan. The collection "Kaifuso" composed in 751, began the practice of
compiling Japanese poetry in Chinese, which was very popular in Japan
until the beginning of the twentieth century. This phenomenon can be
regarded as one of the ways in which the precise meanings of Chinese
culture were transmitted. Quite naturally a lot of Chinese words and
meanings travelled out of these poems and into the Japanese vocabulary. The tradition of these compilations lasted longer, for a couple of
centuries, in Japan than in China.
Drawing upon to the original Japanese system of meaning, one can
easily notice similar situations in the tradition of vabun poetry which
was composed in the old Japanese oral language, yamato kotoba.
Written down in Chinese characters this language is called manyogana
- after the title of the first written collection of Japanese poetry,
"Manyosu". Manyogana was quite appropriate in "Manyosu," was quite
appropriate in "Manyosu," in which some folk poems and tales,
composed before the adoption of writing (i.e., in oral, colloquial
Japanese), were put to paper using Chinese characters phonetically.
The transcription of these poems was done by rather good experts in
Chinese, without introducing any corrections into the original sounds.
This careful attitude is quite understandable in the light of the ancient
texts. This care, however, appears to have vanished in instances of the
later transcription, when the vocabulary of yamato kotoba had disappeared from colloquial Japanese. This phenomenon raises some
important questions: Why did manyogana as a literary style persist for
so long time after "Manyosu"? Why was it used even by authors wellversed in written Chinese? And last, but not least, why is it the case that
there are no Chinese words and meanings in manyogana, not even
those words which were widely used in colloquial Japanese from the
ninth and tenth centuries AD. on? Before attempting to give an answer
to these questions, it is useful to keep in mind the peculiarities of this
initial stage of borrowing characters. It was a very complicated period:
the main words of yamato kotoba were written down in Chinese kandji,
but new words and meanings (of Chinese origin) had to be avoided as
provoking too much stress. This explanation cannot, however, account
for the phenomenon of kaiku and tanka and the attempt of the
241
ideologists of kokugaku (i.e., Japanese national studies) to establish

yamato kotoba as the official Japanese language in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. This attempt at restoring old Japanese did not
succeed because by that time yamato kotoba had totally disappeared
from colloquial Japanese. With regard to haiku and tanka poetry it still
flourishes in Japan and has enormous success. This widespread fashion
may be considered to be a rather curious fact. But again, it seems very
plausible since it is related to the fact that some regularity rules the
horizon of the meaning system of a culture. The strict preservation of
manyogana (i.e., the written form of yamato kotoba) can be regarded as
adherence to some original (initial) meaning-matrixes of Japanese
culture, created before the adoption of characters. In a sense it involves
an aspiration to oppose the processes washing out the meaning-identification system of early Japan in order to save it as the core of a separate
cultural entity.
The mythopoetical structure of early Japan as a whole turned out to
be that "solid remnant" which is the mirror of the original culture and
also the very valuable "starter dough" in the mixing of Japanese culture
first with old Chinese culture and then with Western culture (in the
sixteenth century and now). The whole business of creating Japanese
culture it seems would have been impossible without this "solid
remnant" of pure Japanese cultural patterns; at least it was absolutely
necessary for the self-identification of this culture. This makes it also
quite understandable that these original pattern-meanings have not
changed during a long history. What we have here is a novel manner of
cultural synthesis, which became the one and only way of creating and
developing the meaning-complexes of Japanese culture.
Another illustrative example is the phenomenon of Shinto, the
religious and philosophical system which can be regarded as a very old
and rather out-of-date manifestation of Japanese traditional culture. In
modern times, the preservation of Shinto as national religion is really a
very peculiar phenomenon. It is as if Greeks, for example, should still
believe in their ancient myths and legends and understand them in a
religious way. This is of course nonsense, but in Japan this phenomenon
has an entirely rational foundation. One can assume that the most
important thing for Japanese culture is not the content of the Shinto
myths of "Kojiki" and "Nihonshoki," but rather their spirit, i.e., the
structure and the totality of meaning involved. It might be a transparent
pivot of the horizon of meaning system in Japanese culture, one which
242
HELENA GOURKO
permits it to keep its roots and identity intact even in a most dangerous
and troublesome period of cultural synthesis.
This parallel coexistence of Japanese and Chinese lines of modeling
over a millenium of cultural synthesis seems to be an essential condition
for developing new horizons of meaning in Japanese culture, which
proceeds mainly through the so-called dialectics of wakan (Japanese
spirit vs. Chinese form). The constituting of meanings in Japanese
culture, according to D. Pollack, was carried out by maintaining a series
of dichotomies: "heart/word" (in the early Heian era), "void/color" (in
the middle ages), and "emotion/restriction" (in Tokugawa Japan of the
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries).
Having analyzed the dialectic of wakan, Pollack is quite right in
tracing this polarity back to the initial stages of cultural synthesis. But it
seems to me to be an exaggeration to stress only the polarity of these
extremes without paying enough attention to the processes of their
synthesis. Otherwise Japanese culture could only be regarded as a
basically fractured, split entity, one doomed to draw its own content
from Chinese writing.
As it is, the synthesis of cultural meanings through the dialectic of
waken seems to be of no less importance than the opposition of
Japanese spirit and Chinese form. In view of this point, it is instructive
to analyze the process of the creation of the Japanese kana syllables.
From the very beginning hiragana was a very precise reflection of colloquial Japanese. This raises the question: Why is it that this phonetic
writing cannot replace the cumbersome and unsuitable Chinese characters, but only supplements them? The answer is probably that by the
tenth and eleventh centuries A.D., when hiragana was created, Chinese
writing was already deeply rooted in Japanese horizons of meaning. In
comparing kana and manyogana, it can be seen that kana served to
reflect the expanded horizons of meaning, while manyogana was
responsible for preserving native meanings.
Thus, the synthesis of cultural meanings through the dialectics of
wakan is a process which seems to be very important for the totality of
the horizon of the meaning system in Japanese culture. Slowly at the
beginning, then faster and irreversibly, this synthesis became a special
mode of existing, a way of processing Japanese culture. It has not even
been so important what the sources of the meanings brought into this
process are - Chinese, Christian, or modern Western - since the
meaning-system's synthesis has been very similar in all these cases.
243
Another question is how a shift away from the meaning-borrowing

that has dominated Japanese culture might be contrived. For a millenium it was traditional Chinese culture which prevailed in this synthesis, then the component of Christian culture was joined to it, now the
entire body of the Western meaning system is being assimilated and
synthesized in the crucible of the Japanese meaning system. This raises
the issue of whether it is possible for Japanese culture to develop a
horizon of meaning system on a foundation of its own. This issue may
be very important and raising it, perhaps, even painful. After having
assimilated the main achievements of traditional China and the modern
West, Japanese culture finds itself faced with the challenge of adapting
its central mode of existence, its horizon of meaning system, to new
conditions in the social world.
University of Minsk
NOTES
J. N. Mohanty, Edmund Husserl's Theory of Meaning (The Hague: 1964), p. 49.

Cf. Jacques Derrida "The Violence of Metaphysics" in Writing and Difference
(Chicago: 1978), p. 148.
3 David Pollack, The Fracture of Meaning (Princeton: 1986), p. 19.
4 B. Habein, The History of Written Japanese Language (Tokyo: 1984).
1
PART THREE
THE HUMAN ENCOUNTER, THE SPHERE

OF ONE'S OWN, EMPATHY
HUBERTUSTELLENBACH
ANALYSIS OF THE NATURE OF HUMAN

ENCOUNTER IN A HEAL THY AND IN A
PSYCHOTIC STATE
The time when philosophy reached upwards to the regions of the

transcendental in order to seek on that high plane the primal conditions
of the law of thought and perception ended in the second half of the
last century with that counter stroke by which Nietzsche assigned
thinking to the sphere of life and then contrasted the great reason of
the body to the lesser reason of our minds. It is with Heidegger's thesis
on the end of metaphysics that the antipodes of idealistic philosophy
has seemed to have been reached; for the ontological examinations of
Being and Time turn to the immanence of the everyday, to that which
we come across "first and most" in our lives. This has shown, to our
surprise, that just that which we come across in everyday life, that
which seems so completely natural, is really the most obscure and least
understood of all. Therefore it is no wonder that in Heidegger's Being
and Time, the work which has influenced philosophical thinking most
since Hegel and Nietzsche, questions arise about things which we
assume we know quite as a matter of course, questions which are
concerned with our understanding of the nature of things like our
health, understanding, chatter, curiosity, ambiguity, worry, conscience,
and so on. Admittedly, such examinations of ordinary phenomena
began with the phenomenology of Husser!; and there is no doubt that
it is above all those disciplines which deal with the psyche - such
as psychology and psychiatry - which have gained the most from
phenomenological definitions of the nature of, for instance, perception,
volition, behavior, memory, and so on, because there the opportunity
was seen to get away from the previous almost exclusively emphasized
mechanistic and functional attempts to explain such psychological
actions, and so achieve an understanding which is more appropriate to
the psychological reality.
"Encounter" also belongs to those phenomena which we speak of
every day with a prescient and vague understanding of their meaning.
We utter the word and at the same time understand its meaning. The
meaningful content of life is always interpreted somehow or other in
247
A- T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXV, 247-257.
248
HUBERTUSTELLENBACH
language. These meanings, imparted to us directly by language, will

nearly always satisfy us. We do not feel the need to examine all the
manifold phenomena of our human state for their essential message,
because they have an unequal importance and varied positions in our
lives. There are ephemeral and transient phenomena, but there are also
some in which the human quality is quite central. Encounter seems to
occupy a special position among these basic phenomena. It was
certainly not just by chance that philosophers such as Martin Buber and
Karl Lowith, theologians such as Romano Guardini and scientists such
as Buytendijk, Ludwig Binswanger and von Baeyer have devoted special
attention to it. But that psychiatry is also very interested in discovering
what encounter really is, in the fullness of its meaning, really is due
above all to the fact that in the analysis of the natural characteristics of
"encounter" one achieves something like a "parameter," which makes it
possible to comprehend in a more uniform way the confusing variety of
pathological indications, such as those we find above all in schizophrenic psychoses. Indeed in clinical psychiatry we orient ourselves
almost entirely by the so-called symptoms which we fit together into
units of sickness. Thus we speak, in the case of schizophrenics, for
example, of disorders in perception, that is, of illusions and hallucinations - for example, the schizophrenic hearing of voices. We speak of
volitional disorders, that is, of the so-called catatonic symptoms of
stupor, agitation, and catalepsy; and of disorders in the thinking
process, whereby we even distinguish between formal disorders such as
distraction and substantive disorders such as delusions. We speak also
of so-called ego disorders where, for example, the subject hears his own
thoughts aloud, is helplessly influenced by the thoughts of others, or
feels he is being hypnotized and directed, and that his thoughts are
being read by others. Finally we speak of contactual disorders, of
autistic withdrawal from one's fellows. In view of this division of the
most varied individual symptoms, which we regard as deficient variations of normal functioning, we feel an understandable desire to ask
whether one could achieve a unity of meaning which would run through
all these particulars. Here a procedure suggests itself in which first of all
the attempt is made to determine the nature of encounter between
human beings in a healthy state - and then further observation made
to see whether the characteristics here ascertained undergo a definable
change in a psycotic state.
A phenomenological examination of "encounter" begins with our
ANALYSIS OF THE NATURE OF HUMAN ENCOUNTER
249
remembering some encounters or other, picturing them to ourselves,

imagining them, in order to detach them more and more from the
merely accidental data of external and internal perception. In this way
we gradually arrive at the idea of an encounter which has been purified
from empirical accessories. In other words, we arrive at the phenomenon "encounter." And now we ask what there is about this phenomenon
which always remains the same, and which continually recurring
characteristics we can find.
Perhaps no general characteristic of the phenomenon encounter can
be discovered except the element of being connected with something in
a special way. Encounter is a particularly prominent form of connection.
From the many-sided phenomenon "encounter" we are referred to the
more primal phenomenon "connection." There are two basic types of
connection: a functionally founded one and a functionally unfounded,
accidental one such as we find, for example, when a piece of string and
a piece of wood are tied together. It is different when we are confronted
with a piece of string wound round a piece of wood: here they are both
connected to each other, reciprocally dependent: a reciprocal connection exists from the very nature of the relation. Admittedly, this
connection is very far removed from encounter. The strictly two-sided
relation, which we call correlation, such as the correlation between key
and castle, comes closer. This connection certainly has the element of
reciprocity, but not in the same way as it exists in a relationship
between human beings, such as between father and son; for the relation
of something to something else, for all the reciprocity of being related,
is not essentially a "relationship." We only find a relationship when one
person stands in relation to another person. Relationship is always a
relating-of-oneself-to-another. The one and the other are always essentially persons. The nature of encounter is also delineated in this view of
relationship. Encounter is an essential, that is, real fulfillment of the
relationship of one person to another. A thing, that is, an object, in its
materiality, cannot "encounter," it resists, it withstands. Only when one
person meets the other person do they "meet each other" in the sense
of each-otherness and this reciprocal "each other" answers to first and
foremost the original meaning of an "encounter" together with its
element of "accident" (Lowith). Because everyone can conduct himself
everyone can prevent the encounter, can hold himself aloof from it.
Encounter is always reciprocal and is always accidental, in contrast to a
planned appointment. It always occurs in a state of each-otherness, in a
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"between" (Buber). Encounter is not the result of the sum of the

partner's individual moments. Encounter is always something new,
something unique.
We must animate these abstract definitions with a few examples.
Certainly we would not speak of encounter when, for example, two
billiard balls knock against each other. This process of blow and
counter-blow manifests a connection which can only be understood
physically. We come closer to our intended phenomenon if we think of
a grain of corn falling to the earth. Here, from the biological connections and reactions of two realities a third develops - corn. But even
then, when instinct draws two animals together to fight or to mate, even
then there is not an encounter, although one living initiative meets
another. But animal behavior research has shown how involuntary such
occurrences are, how much their fulfillment is bound by recognisable
biological rules. We need only think of Buytendijk's description of the
struggle between the mongoose and the cobra. In none of these
examples can we recognize an original relating-of-oneself-to-another
and therefore there is no encounter, because this is always confined to
the personal. What is the case then when a psychiatrist examines a
patient and enters into a "reciprocal process" with him? Even that is
not necessarily a genuine togetherness nor is it an encounter as long as
the doctor is only acting in his "functional capacity" - no more than I
"encounter" a bus conductor, a shop-assistant or an official in the
execution of their duties. But an encounter can develop from all these
forms of functional association if I appeal to the other's personality, if I
begin a relate myself to him, and enter into his ideas and if he opens
himself to me.
Admittedly this can only happen in a medium of genuine freedom.
Things and animals are bound in their nature and behavior by immanent laws. Human connections can also be characterized exclusively by
factually and purposively determined behavior. Encounter does not
begin until a human being starts to relate himself to his fellow human
beings. And it only happens when he has at his disposal the freedom to
let it begin or to prevent it. This freedom is not only a basic prerequisite, but is also a decisive characteristic of encounter. It decides
whether I want merely to "come across" the other person (P. Christian)
or whether I want to "take him at something" (Binswanger), (for
example, at his duty, for which he "is there") - or whether I pay
attention to him, am affected by him, open myself to him and dare to
251
make the move towards a genuine human connection. Encounter

always involves daring; for I cannot know what that third, new element
is, which has its beginnings in the encounter: Is it rejection and hostility
or is it trust and the for-each-other-ness of friendship? However the die
is cast: that which begins in and with the encounter is fate. That is also
a decisive feature of the nature of encounter. We can add two further
ones. It is inherent in the "accidentalness" of encounter that it does not
develop from something previous, but always happens instantaneously.
It is unexpectedly there and in this occurrence I leave time, so to speak,
behind me. And finally, all this happens from an opposite position.
Encounters are always vis-a-vis, eye to eye. A genuine exchange always
follows. The-relating-of-oneself-to-another is always frontal. The primal
direction of meaning in which an encounter occurs always remains that
of the opposite one. Only from this can I discover what it means to turn
away or, for example, to "stand by" someone else.
If we now summarize the result of this examination of the phenomenon of human encounter, of which the first approach has now been
completed, we can ascertain the following characteristics: in encounter
we find that the reciprocal structure of relating-oneself-to-another can
be distinguished by the factors of accident, freedom, fatefulness,
instantaneousness, and oppositeness. If we are to be prepared for
assessing the altered forms of encounter in the sphere of the psychoses,
we now need to consider the possibilities of an encounter of "somebody" with "something." We have said that an object is not capable of
encountering and that even a human being does not "encounter" a
thing, which he claims in its availability, which he treats like a utensil.
Yet it can happen that he comes up against a material reality which
claims him, because he, going beyond average functional references, is
affected by something peculiar and begins to relate himself to this. We
can explain this with the example of fruit. An apple can be taken as a
means of appeasing hunger, but it can also be seen in such a way that
the apple still-life of Cezanne is the result. Then encounter has occurred. Things, animals and landscapes disclose not only their purposes
to the eye; they can also appear in their sense, in their essence. Then the
place of the familiar, the obvious, is taken by the new, the perhaps
unheard-of, the "significant radiation of its essential form" (Guardini),
which I encounter as it affects me. This is true above all of the forms
and formations of the human mind, and sometimes over the centuries,
of works of art, of the creations of thought, and of the religious, which
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HUBERTUSTELLENBACH
disclose to me - often by accident and beyond the associations of my

knowledge - the sphere of their meaning. Here, too, is encounter, and
in it we find all the above-mentioned characteristics of encounter.
Perhaps no one has expressed this more clearly than the poet Rilke
before the "archaic torso of Apollo," when he says at the end: "for here
(on this torso) there is no place which does not see you, you must
change your life."
If we now compare the kinds of encounter found in a psychosis, let
us say, in paranoid schizophrenia, with that which the phenomenological analysis of encounter has shown us, we must first of all register the
fact that the psychotic person is for most part not absolutely incapable
of encountering. He can, in various forms and degrees, enter into a
relationship with healthy people. Frequently, however, if we speak
clinically of the symptom of "contactual disorder," we find his encountering altered in many ways. If we imagine the possible course of a real
encounter in a schizophrenic, it is evident above all that the reciprocity
of the each-otherness has changed. Often there is a "pure perplexity"
(von Baeyer), a feeling of being stared at yet unable to protect oneself
against it, the feeling of being closed in upon in an unwelcome and
intimately intrusive manner, of being approached, of being influenced
to the extent that one's own response is completely paralyzed; there are
the symptoms of the "fabricated," that is, for example, fabricated
feelings or thoughts. There is no reciprocation, no exchange, it all
merely happens. But it is not just the intrusive proximity of the other
person which prevents reciprocity; to the paranoiac the other person is
at the same time quite out of reach, as is shown particularly crassly in
the experience of sexual influence. This is not the oppositeness of "you
there - I here" (Guardini). Here from the first there is only a passively
endured, one-sided contact instead of the lived reciprocity of witheach-otherness. A further destructive element of paranoid encountering
is the tendency to pluralize, treat anonymously, and collectivize,
whereby it is clear that in this encounter the substantiality of the
personal is missing. "This disappearance of the partner reaches its
climax in the well-known indication of the subject's thoughts becoming
loud: his hearing, tuned by its very nature to its surroundings, no longer
transmits a partner to the sick man, but instead only more of himself."
(von Baeyer)
Now, however, the loss of accidentalness in the paranoid world of
encounter also becomes obvious. Encounters impress the sick man as
being planned, premeditated, contrived, and arranged to bring about his
253
downfall. This is a world without chance, in which everything has a

hallucinatory meaning - even if often only in retrospect - and
therefore it is a world which often only knows the catastrophic temporality of the sudden but not the creative developing of the moment. It
hardly need be mentioned that in this world of encounter the element
of freedom is missing. The sick person sees himself being actually
forced into encounters from whose entanglement he wishes in vain to
push his way out of to freedom. This appears above all in the experiences of the fabricated or directed whose intrusion means that even
what little freedom remains must be suffocated. Such a denatured world
of encounter produces no fate in the sense of the third, new element
which is the result of reciprocity. Everything extends into the indefinite,
undecided, merely suggested. Fate is always made up of freedom and
necessity, of the accidental and unforeseeable, which "had to happen
thus," without being therefore anticipated. In all this genuine encounter
is a present, psychotic encounter, a pressure.
Finally, we must note that even encounters with realities outside the
world of one's fellow human beings such as the cosmic and environmental experiences of the schizophrenic, are deformed in a significant
way. Here, above all, we find a "new kind of encouter world" (von
Baeyer) which is alien to the average, "healthy" world. There things
frequently appear preponderantly in their peculiarities which causes a
one-sided perplexity - not just in a hostile sense but also in an exalting
and distinguishing one. Thus, we are faced with a fundamentally
disordered, denatured, destroyed encounter - and indeed in such a
way that we find this phenomenon in all the empirically related
symptoms which clinical psychopathology has assembled in its formation of a paranoid syndrome. We can now see one significant advantage
of the phenomenological approach. With a certain ease we can find in
all the symptoms - contact disorders, illusions, ego disorders, persecution mania, and even in so-called psychomotor behavior - a structure
which shows these varied symptoms in their inner uniformity. In all
these forms of pathologically altered encounter there is a perceptible
unity of meaning between the individual symptoms (von Baeyer). This
unity of meaning enables us to go beyond the empirical classification of
the natural science clinician and give a reason, arrived at through the
methods of phenomenology, why this complex of symptoms belongs
together. And thus we can call phenomenological psychopathology a
"science which concerns itself with meaning."
If we would attempt to bring a phenomenon like encounter into the
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HUBERTUSTELLENBACH
focus of intentional research this is only possible if we leave the

network of connections which put encounter in the shade. We must,
however, throw some light on that element which is the indispensable
condition for an encounter. Heidegger discovered this fundamental
condition in Being and Time. If the fact of being-in-the-world is the
most common characteristic of existence, then just this being-in-theworld is originally characterized by the being-with-us (Mitsein) and the
being-there-with-us (Mitdasein) of others. An isolated "I" is never given
first without others. The others are "there with me." The world has
always been a world which I share with others. And others encounter
me from the world. This being-there-with-us is the condition for every
encounter being possible. Within this great ontological framework we
must now ask what is necessary so that being-with-us will release us for
an encounter. The factor of being-with-us is also a condition in which
people do not know each other or walk by each other "impersonally,"
because they are indifferent to each other or because they only fulfill
certain functions or have definite purpose in mind during their association. But what must be present so that two people begin to relate
themselves to each other in the sense of a personal encounter? It seems
that something in them begins to take effect, something in which both
can share, a medium which seizes and sways them both, in which both
are suspended, something invisible, impalpable, and yet of final,
decisive reality. We can call this medium the "atmospheric." It is like
air which both breathe, producing an atmospheric harmony. It is a
"heaven" which sweeps over both. It is that which the Japanese call Ki.
Buber speaks of it as the "between." It is this force - as is evident
above all in a loving encounter - which establishes the encounter
"between" you and me. What we can love does not cling to the one or
to the other - and it does not just consist of an emotion which the one
or the other senses in himself. Love is first and foremost a stream of the
activating, helping, healing, saving, forming, educating elements which
are active between you and me.
The fundamental contactual disturbance, as it exists between the sick
man and his surroundings, has its true origin in this between. It is the
atmospheric harmony which is no longer effective; and it is this
atmospheric dissonance which the experienced psychiatrist senses
immediately and establishes in an exercise of atmospheric diagnostics
when he meets a schizophrenic for the first time, even if the symptoms
of the disorder have not yet appeared. He senses the atmospheric
255
disintegration. He senses that the "between," the very source from

which an encounter arises, has changed, that the "mutual heaven" is
missing - the participation in the mutual Ki. These facts are interpreted quite directly in the Japanese language. The nature of melancholy is described here as a heavy, depressed, decaying, confined,
stationary Ki. The nature of mania, on the other hand, is a light, swift,
buoyant Ki. The derangement of schizophrenia is described as Ki chi
gai - as deranged Ki. "When Man is sick it always means that the
'between' is sick, the between in which the existence of the individual
and those of others have their mutual foundation." (Kimura) This
sphere, the foundation of human togetherness, is already expressed in
the Japanese word for human being, which is Nin-gen. Nin-gen literally
means "human being-between," whereby "nin" defines the form and
"gen" the essence of the human being. The decisive role of this between
may at first seem a little strange to us; but we must visualize for a
moment a part of the procedure of encounter, such as a hand shake,
and must think of the surprising simultaneity of the beginning and the
end. It happens as if by agreement. And if the handshake lasts longer
and still remains quite firm, as in moments of distress or intense
agitation - although we look into each other's eyes and not at our
hands, we do not know who gave the initiative, nor who determined the
duration, or who ended it. It is a force between the partners, which has
both, so to speak, in its grasp.
At the end let us cast at least a short glance at the encounter which
takes place everywhere where the recollection of that mythical beginning has not yet faded from human memory: "where they still received/
heavenly teaching in earthly speech" - as Goethe says in that great
poem of his old age, "Der West-Ostliche Divan." We mean the encounter with the numinous. Here it will be immediately obvious that in
our phenomenological definition of the characteristics of encounter we
have neglected to refer to the physical form in which it occurs. We
mean what Buytendijk has formulated thus: "Tradition demands a style
of behaviour in every encounter and with that outlines the mutuality of
the expressive content of one's own and the stranger's body in a definite
basic form." Those encountering each other play a role, as it were,
perform a ritual which is regulated by convention. In the encounter with
the numinous this assumes quite special forms. They are special
because here Man appears in an "unnatural" way in his body - and this
is intentional. He turns away and disregards all the utterances, physical
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HUBERTUSTELLENBACH
attitudes, miming, gestures, and was of speaking which he is accustomed

to finding natural. Where Man, in awe, encounters the sacramental,
exalted, and holy he completes the hiatus which is occasioned by the
immense power which excludes all possibility of reciprocity. Here he
must resort to forms which are above the personal, which he cannot
take from his individual sphere of experience but which flow to him
from a solidary knowledge of the exceptional in the situation and which
are stamped by tradition. He now surrenders the individual stamp of his
physical behavior to the ritual which has been cultivated in the historical development of his community. His encounter shows the seriousness of the tension between his visible being and that concealed being.
All physical utterances join together in a unity of style. Silence, too,
now assumes great importance. In the attitudes of the body the principle of symmetry prevails. The encounter with the numinous is always
frontal. Here there is no turning away, no reservation, no ambiguity.
The attitudes of prayer are always symmetrical - as are the priest's at
the altar, whereas his attitude during the sermon is quite different. The
divine being is also depicted frontally in nearly all cultures - unless it is
shown participating in human existence.
Here, too, the crucial event occurs in the "between" - and more
explicitly than in any other form of encounter. This between, however,
is not only the center of the individual's religious experience, nor only
the center of the religious experience of the community. This between is
the origin of all culture. "Every great culture which embraces a group of
natures rests upon a primal encountering, on an answer to the You
which occurred at its very source, on an essential act of the mind ....
Only if and as long as he (Man) is capable of performing and suffering
this act in his very being, as long as he himself enters into the relationship: only then and to that extent is he free and thus creative." (Buber)
But this living center, this immense between appears in the psychotic in
atavistic forms of religious encounter, in the guilt complex of the
melancholic and in the manic identifications with figures of salvation of
the schizophrenic; the destruction demonstrates in a grotesque way just
how alienated the sick person is from life. Thus in encounter is acted
out Man's state of existence, and in it he reveals himself in times of
health and of sickness.
University of Heidelberg
257
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Werkbund,1956).
Heidegger, M. Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1953) pp. 29-38.
Husserl, E. Ideen zu einer reinen Phiinomenologie und phiinomenologischen Philosophie. Husserliana, Bd. III/V (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950, 1952).
Kimura, B. "Der Sinn der schizophrenen Symptome." Tetsugaku-Kenkyu, 497, 225,
1965 (In Japanese with a summary in German by the author).
Lowith, K. "Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen." Siimtliche Schriften Bd. I
(Stuttgart: I. H. Metzler, 1981).
Tellenbach, H. Geschmack und Atmosphiire. Medien menschlichen Elementarkontaktes
(Salzburg: O. Muller, 1968).
Tellenbach, H. Melancholie. 4th ed. (Berlin-Heidelberg-New York-Tokyo: Springer,
1983).
Tellenbach, H. "Die Dekomposition religioser Grundakte im Wahn und in der
Melancholie" (1966). Psychiatrie als geistige Medizin (Munich: Verlag fur angewandte Wissenschaften, 1987).
ARMANDO RIGOBELLO
A V ARIA TION ON "REDUCTION WITHIN

REDUCTION": "INTERIOR EXTRANEITY"
1. THE SPHERE OF "ONE'S OWN" AND
"INTERIOR EXTRANEITY"
Let us begin with the well-known paragraphs 42, 43, and 44 of

Husserl's Cartesian Meditations (V). Husserl there operates a "reduction within reduction" in order to derive a sphere which belongs
rigourously and exclusively to the self, until he reaches the primitive
experience of the possibility of operating at the level of an elementary
sense of the animated body. The world of values, of culture, and of
history belongs, on the other hand (and in consequence), to an area of
the self which is revealed in relations with other people in a context of
extraneity. Husserl, therefore, has conceived of a sphere of "one's own,"
as something which is primordial and exclusive.
Though one may understand the need to attempt this reduction in
order to isolate solipsism in its most extreme form, it is necessary to
point out that Husserl's sense of "one's own" is restricted in too simple
a way to the primordial sphere. The present investigation aims to define
a realm of the self which is yet contained within that realm of extraneity
that constitutes the superior world of human experience. Is it possible,
in such a sphere, to define the conditions of appearance and action
pertaining to that which belongs to the subject? This question presupposes a conception of "one's own" which cannot be resolved into the
meaning which Husserl gives this expression in paragraph 44. How can
such a conception be reached?
This paper proposes a "reduction with reduction," not towards the
primordial, but towards the superior complexity of the self. It will be
necessary to set aside all cultural constructs, all intentional noematics of
the world of values and of culture, and to point the radicalization of the
reduction towards a center, an origin of activity (of possibility as a
precondition for activity) from which the whole universe of values
develops intentionally.
A reduction which is carried through to this radical level takes us,
not to the private, primordial sphere of the self characterized by the
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ARMANDO RIGOBELLO
"appertaining nature," but to the elementary yet original emergence of

the relation between self and other, or, to be more precise, to the
elementary and original dualistic structure of the self (primordial
belonging and transcendental extraneity), to the paradox with which
paragraph 44 seems to close. This paradox, however, is not derived
from reflection on the data of reduction, but is something which
emerges, a piece of data discovered in the very process of reduction. It
might appear to be a secondary variation of a single method, whereas in
fact we are dealing with a fundamentally different approach, with
important consequences. It is necessary to seize on the self-other
relation, belonging and extraneity, in the nascent state, so to speak, as
the original fact which is at the basis of the most complicated elaborations of human spirituality. The self has direct experience of this
original fact, which leads it, in special conditions of radical reduction, to
the most elementary source of its reflected life (which is not the same
thing as the elementariness of the perception of one's own body). In
other words, if the reduction which is expounded in paragraph 44 gives
us the "genetic process" of the first appearance and formation of the life
of the self, the reduction that is proposed here gives us an "atemporal
genesis" which is constitutive, the form of the very life of the self.]
The consequences that follow from all this are of considerable
importance for the relation between "one's own" and "not one's own,"
and for their thematic contraposition. The elementary, primordial "self,"
which finds its typical form in "one's own body" is opposed to extraneity; but there is a "self" at a superior level of consciousness at which
extraneity is not an extrinsic element but a constituting, fundamental
pole. It follows that extraneity is no longer the radkal negation of the
self, but a constituting element in the selfs consciousness of itself. More
rigourously, one might say that the opposition between the self and the
extraneous is dissolved, for the self is enlarged beyond its elementary
expressions to take on a depth in which, in its presence to itself, it
absorbs another presence, a "secret guest," which is at the basis of its
interiority: an "interior extraneity" which is "more one's own" than
"one's own appertaining nature." One might say, paraphrasing Augustine, that at the basis of each of us, and accessible phenomenologically,
is "a self which is more ourself" to us than we ourselves are, which
appears as an "interior extraneity," an other which provides the basis
for our sense of the infinite, and our related sense of our own finitude.
The other of whom Husser! speaks is placed in extraneity even when
A VARIATION ON "REDUCTION WITHIN REDUCTION"
261
this extraneity is maieutic of spiritual enrichment, self-knowledge of the

self. Here, on the other hand, we are dealing with the other revealed as
the otherness in the recesses of the self. The entire preceding argument
of Husserl's on ownness, on one's own body, on extraneity as sources
of an axiologically subsequent cultural formation maintains its genetic
validity. The results of the present "reduction within reduction" towards
the interior depths derive from a phenomenology which is already
interpretative, from an open (or better, a listening) method of analysis. I
will try to make clear what I am saying by exemplifying the central
reductive process of the "reduction within reduction" that I have
suggested.
2. THE HORIZONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND COMMUNICATION
In order to carry out a phenomenological analysis of our experience of

consciousness at a higher and more elaborate level, we might isolate, by
means of the reduction which is necessary to reveal them, certain states
of consciousness and the consequent horizons of experience.
There exists a state or horizon or level of consciousness which can
be defined as "solipsism." It consists of perceiving oneself as "solus
ipse," which makes us aware of the insignificance of cultural constructions and values, of idealistic tensions, of the intentionality of hope;
which consists of a solitude which we are unable to find sufficient
reason to interrupt, in which the phenomena of moral, cultural, and, in
general, spiritual life appear as disguises, ideologies, deceptions - so
that one feels the recognition of insignificance to be an act of absolute
sincerity towards oneself.
Another horizon of consciousness is that in which the breakout from
solipsism and the exercise of communication generate an equilibrium of
axiological formations and of practical commitments. This might be
called the level of "pragmatic communication." Phenomenological
reduction, by placing its contents, or rather, the forms in which it is
made concrete, within brackets, highlights the functional character of
communication with the other. Pragmatic communication indicates the
sphere of functional alienation: a sphere which is certainly useful in
daily living, but which is irrelevant to the fundamental problems which
underlie rigorous enquiry. Sometimes, it is not only irrelevant but may
even be detrimental to an interest in fundamental problems.
Another horizon is that of "communication in authenticity." Here the
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ARMANDO RIGOBELLO
"reduction within reduction" touches its central focus. The reduction

which led us to define the horizon of a solipsistic sincerity, or that
which points to the sphere of pragmatic intersubjective communication
must be made more radical still. In the first reduction we separate
sincerity from solipsism; in the second we distinguish communication
from questions of pragmatics. We can reach a still more reduced level,
far from the psychological colorings of the first reduction, and from the
practical ends of the second, a level where sincerity and communication
are bound together in constitutive form. In this way, we arrive at a level
of consciousness, of communication in authenticity, at which authenticity means the expression of that which is most "one's own," communication in the shared, essential, constitutive element, in authenticity.
While mere sincerity is a moral value without guarantee at the level of
speculation, authenticity is the correspondent of sincerity at a theoretical level; it is the expression of that which is "one's own," of whatever is
radically constitutive.
One might refer to an experience of normal reflective life which
concerns the world of moral, spiritual, and cultural values. We sometimes have the impression of being more truly ourselves (at the level of
what is "more one's own," the level of "authenticity") when in an
unrelated solitude (in an absolute immanence of ourself with ourself)
we see values, ideals and moral intentions as things without significances, and we find ourself either in a state of sincere desperation, or in
that arid condition which we usually refer to as "realistic" or "unprejudiced" (a precondition for a utilitarian and egocentric pragmatism).
At other times, we have a clear awareness that we achieve authenticity
by breaking through solipsism, when the other enters by right the
sphere of our experience - not as a stranger confronting us, nor as an
instrument of our own self-affirmation, but as an "alter ego," as the
interlocutor of a disinterested communication ("disinterestedness," in
this sense, being the moral equivalent of rigor on a theoretical level).
Disinterested communication purifies us so radically that it reduces us
to that which is most our own; it makes us authentic. If we analyze
these two contexts of experience with the methods of phenomenology,
it is the second that will reveal the rigor of radicalized reduction,
precisely because this second experience represents a process of
deepening and overcoming the relation between I and the other, one's
own and more one's own, sincerity, functionality and authenticity.
The contradiction can be resolved dialectically: in the immanence of
263
the self can be traced the evidence of the transcendance of the other,
immanent evidence of a transcendent Other. The dialectical, Platonic
interpretation carries us thus into the metaphysics of Transcendance.
The "interior extraneity" which breaks down my solipsistic closures and
my egocentric calculations, which forces itself into my solitude in order
to open itself through communication, while at the same time leaving
me dissatisfied with a purely pragmatic communication, opening me to
communication as interpersonal communion, is the presence of God in
us, the "secret guest" which Socrates heard as a "voice" and which was
given a personal face by the faith of Augustine. One's relation with
other people is the "uncompleted image" of this Other, towards whom
this relation is intentionally directed. His presence breaks through
solipsism, while at the same time constituting a principle of progressive
unification between a purely pragmatic and functional communication,
and the communion between persons. This communication as communion, however, is not consummated in absolute unity, which is an
impossibility for our human condition (if it were proposed, it would be
an alienating ideology), but remains an uncompleted image of it. This
incompleteness yearning for completeness describes the space of one's
personal life in its inalienable singularity and in its constitutive openness towards the community, in its vocation for a transcendent destiny
(which must not, however, become a pretext for evasion) and in its
faithfulness to a common commitment from which it cannot subtract
itself (yet which must not become a pretext for an ideological mythology or for an exhaustive activism).
3. RESPONSIBILITY AS "SIGNIFICANT COMMUNICATION"
In a climate in which the subject is being deconstructed, what sense can

there be today in speaking of "responsibility"? There are two paths that
can be followed to reach an answer. The first is that of ethical solitude,
along the lines of Camus: an idea of responsibility which in the end
flows into the very sense of one's own identity; responsibility as a
decision to give oneself dignity and meaning. The other path is that of
communication. The emergence of a relation with an other or with
others, under whatever form it may appear, poses a problem of
responsibility, a technical problem which is raised by the simple fact of
co-presence, which becomes a moral problem when one becomes
aware that questions of value are present in the fact, whether these
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ARMANDO RIGOBELLO
questions take the form of a convergence of aims or of a solidarity

which may take on the tones of compassion. And once again, it is
natural to refer to Camus.
From the perspective that I have outlined, the identity of the subject,
or more precisely, his identity-authenticity, brings about the otherness,
the sense of finding in ourself the origin of our being composed of two
levels of consciousness: ourselves, and the immanent presence which is
more than us. Can the relation between me and him whom I feel to be
originally in me provide the basis for responsibility in any of the senses
mentioned above? The most appropriate model for the condition
illustrated is that of communication which is originally involved with
value, with a meaning which gives value. Clearly, by saying this we do
no more than outline some conditions of possibility. To give a personal
face to the intimate stranger within us, to establish the possibility of
conversation with him, is the result of a decision in favor of something
which is plausible but not demonstrable. To give an interpersonal
relation to the double face of our own interiority is a choice which in
some ways resembles an act of faith. The allusive, anticipatory thought
which accompanies that choice finds in the authenticity of interpersonal
communication a maieutics which is in relation to its own contents and
a discipline of its own intentionality, but its premise is gratuitous.
Can the argument here presented be justified, at least as a possible
discourse, by the rigorous standards of a philosophy which has passed
through contemporary reflection? How can one think of God after his
"death"; how can one "repeat," today, the problem of God, and at the
same time the problem of justifying his action in the world: the problem
of theodicy? In the preceding pages I have tried to answer these
questions by understanding this "how to think" in a descriptive, rather
than a fundamental sense. I have tried, that is, to express a conception
of God (the God in us) and the justification of his involvement in our
affairs, siting the discourse within thematic openings and linguistic
expressions which are current in contemporary philosophical speculation. But a common thematic horizon, or a common language, are not
enough to justify this argument at a level of strict philosophical rigor.
An argument which appears persuasive, a protreptic or even apologetic
intention must be followed by a justification of another kind; a discourse on the method which justifies a possibility, on the strength of
which one feels entitled to break silence. This is what I will now
attempt.
265
4. THE "REPETITION" OF THE PROBLEM OF GOD
In the attempt to reach a more vigorous foundation let us take a step

back (Schrittzuruck), away from the classical, traditional arguments
about God, towards the source of the problem from which these
arguments spring. We intend, that is to "repeat the problem," in the
famous sense which Heidegger gives the expression: "By repetition of a
fundamental problem we mean the making explicit of those of its
original possibilities which are still hidden. By putting these possibilities
to work the problem is transformed, but this is also the only way to
safeguard its problematic content. To safeguard a problem means,
moreover, keeping free and alive those internal forces that make it
possible as a problem, in its most fundamental essence."2 We must,
therefore, retrace the argument to its moment of genesis in which it
arises as a problem under the pressure of urgent requests for sense. But
what does this mean in the case of the classical metaphysical discourse
about God? It means returning to that moment of speculation in which
the theoretical dominion of the problem is still constitutively incomplete, as if, in order to complete it, it were necessary to overcome the
phenomenon. Insuperable incompleteness and the necessity to transcend
bring about a dialectical leap, a radical change of method. To be aware
of all this is to place oneself in a problematic tension between a global
and absolute demand for sense and awareness of the limits of the
phenomenon. This is the result of the first phase of the "repetition of
the problem," the phase, that is, that forces us to retreat from doctrine
to the problem itself. The second phase is that in which one sees the
problem in new terms, and becomes aware of new ways of replying to
the question which has been reopened. In our case, when one applies,
that is, the "repetition of the problem" to the discourse presented in the
first part of this essay on the presence within us of a divine extraneity,
we might say that the focal point of the repetition lies in the clearing up
of the "methodological breakdown" that one passes through, by means
of an interior testimony, from the phenomenological discussion of
consciousness to the affirmation of a reality which is "more intimate
with us than we ourselves are."
We have referred to a "methodological breakdown": an expression
used by Paul Ricoeur to indicate the abandoning of the transcendental
for the hermeneutic method, a speculative operation which is necessary
if we are to realize the "affective fragility," to realize how much of the
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ARMANDO RIGOBELLO
interior world escapes the "cognitive" and "practical synthesis" which

he describes in Finitude et culpabilite. 3 In the construction of the
classical metaphysical doctrines of God, something happens which may
resemble the "methodological breakdown" which occurs when one
passes from the discursive use of reason to analyze the phenomenon to
the affirmation of a meta-phenomenic reality by means of a noetic act
of the intellect. The passage from a discursive to an intuitive use of the
intellect is a leap, a dialectic leap which brings about the breakdown of
methodological continuity. In the context of classical speculation the
dialectic leap is not an anomaly of research, but the truest life of
thought. In the anxious and radically troubled context of contemporary
philosophy, on the other hand, it is a change of direction which is in
some ways traumatic, which requires an existential justification, involving questions of sense and of fundamental choices. Bearing in mind the
considerations of the first part of this paper, one must clarify how, by
what authority, on the basis of which justifications, one can abandon
the level of pure phenomenology; how one can pass from the description of appearances to the affirmation of what is. The problem of
passing from appearance to being, which in itself is already extremely
arduous, becomes more complex still, still further from "philosophy as
a rigorous science" (in the Husserlian sense of the words), when this
being is the very being of God.
In the outlook sketched in the first part of this paper, methodological
breakdown appears as the abandoning of the phenomenological level in
favor of a method of argument that, by operating on the evidence,
brings out meanings, makes inferences, and proposes sense links. The
evidence is that which is obtained by means of the reversal of directions
involved in the "reduction within reduction." If we wish to have a more
rigorous awareness of what has been done, we may point out that the
"reduction within reduction" can also be sited within the boundaries of
phenomenological description. Our inferences on the data of this
description, too, derive from attitudes which can become the object of
phenomenological description. A situation emerges here which reminds
one of the Platonic argument of the "third man." When the phenomenological method is taken to an extreme of awareness, one realizes that
one has turned into a cul-de-sac: every operation that one performs can
be reduced to description; every result achieved is a neutral piece of
evidence; each change of perspective falls back into phenomenological
presentialism, and can be translated into an untranscendable eidetic
267
context. Any metaphysical statement is reduced to the phenomenology

of the human, conscious act of making metaphysical statements.
Is it possible, despite all this, to break out of this closed horizon, to
perform a transgressive act? The way out can be found at the point at
which methodological breakdown occurs; to be more exact, at the
instant in which the act of breakdown is performed. This act can be
described phenomenologically, but this description comes to a halt
before an experience which is not eidetic but existential, lived, in which
one becomes aware of the necessity of breakdown. Such an experience,
which can be introduced in phenomenological terms, gives place to a
representation. The focal point of this representation is the representation of the moment in which the decision for transcendence takes place.
Phenomenology as a rigorous science has always come up against the
limit posed by lived experience, and when, overcoming this limit, it
absorbs lived experience, it takes on an ambiguous coloring. The
operation of transcendance that I am proposing can be sited on this
side of phenomenology in existential living, and beyond it since not
only does it describe, but it constructs, that is, represents. In our case,
the object of representation in lived experience is singular, and of
extreme delicacy. It is not an elementary, auroral experience, but a
complex existential one: the decision to transcend, and more exactly the
moment in which this decision is taken. Freedom, temporality, and
transcendance are bound together in an operation which lies on the
borderlines of representability. Moreover, we are at the extreme limit of
human discourse. But precisely because of this, its positive use could
bring us to the "repetition of the problem of God."
5. METHODOLOGICAL "BREAKDOWN": BEYOND
PHENOMENOLOGY
The global demand for sense which is not satisfied by the network of
meanings which emerge from the phenomenological vision of reality is,
as we have seen, the motive that leads to "methodological breakdown."
We do not dispose, however, of speCUlative arguments designed to convince those who believe this demand to be unnecessary. The insistence
and the refusal to carry it out are both situated outside the borders of
demonstrative rigor. To me, it seems that faithfulness to that which is
most our own as human beings makes necessary this fundamental
question, which is also the demand for salvation. To be saved means to
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ARMANDO RIGOBELLO
interpret positively every aspect of our human adventure; it means

reaching a full justification, and, in the last analysis, it means seeing
oneself within the context of theodicy. Salvation, in fact, presumes that
the action of God in the wor!d is wholly justified. I hardly know how to
answer those who nevertheless believe that the demand for a meaning
which can save us is something to be eluded, or that hides a pseudoproblem. One might recall Kant's words about those who are insensible
to moral feeling: there are no arguments that can force the reason to
affirm it, yet there are "strong foundations deriving from analogy." In a
footnote on the same page he observes, at a level of persuasion rather
than of pure reason: "the human spirit (as I believe must necessarily be
the case for all rational beings) is naturally interested in morals, though
this interest may not be exclusive or decisive in practice."4 A similar
argument could be used in connection with this "natural interest" and
"total meaning."
One final point must be made clear. One may look for the answer to
so radical a question in a vertical dimension, at transcendance of a
metaphysical nature; but it can also be found in an ever open, infinite
seeking: that is, in a horizontal dimension. The infinite task of reason,
which Husser! stresses in the last part of his work, is concerned with
this open horizon, this transcendance in time. This second solution,
however, seems to me inadequate to express the qualitative leap
required by the demand for absolute meaning. If the answer were to
reach absoluteness, it would already be situated on a different level; it
would have left behind the curve of days in which, by definition, it
should be contained.
Without denying that there is a gratuitous element in the radical
demand for meaning, and without ignoring the lively charm of a
commitment to seek meaning through an ever open, horizontal search, I
will try to describe the final outcome of the argument that has been
presented so far. Having suspended the operation of the phenomenological method, one arrives, by means of the instruments of discursive
thought, at a result which one might term the hypostatization of the
constitutive form of the object of the demand itself. The total sense,
which is the object of the demand, can be defined by means of the form
which constitutes it: one might even say that it is the "meaning of
meaning," which gives the word "meaning" the value of total sense, of
that which "saves." The demand for total, exhaustive meaning sets in
motion a series of reactions which does not stop at a conceptual image,
269
but tends to the realization of the image in a hypostatization of the

same total meaning. The reality of a being endowed with absoluteness is
not, however, enough for that meaning; the radical, rigorous development of the meaning of meaning, as a consequence of an overriding
need for salvation, transforms hypostatization into personification: the
hypothesis of an absolute meaning has a personal face, and we find
ourselves confronted by the notion of God.
University of Rome
NOTES
I The comparison that is made here with the Husserlian position, and in particular with
the implications of paragraph 44, deserves closer attention; for the sake of brevity I
have simplified and stressed the differences instead of dwelling on the internal complexity of this part of Husserl's analysis, Paragraph 44 finishes, for example, with an
expression that underlines the organic links that join ownness and extraneity within the
"manself" (that is, within the totality of the person). What is certain is that the
explanatory direction of the self is always, for Husserl, self-explanation, and that the
direction of this self-explanation is always from ownness towards extraneity, from the
primordial internal to the external, which points towards a superior specification.
2 M. Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Bonn: 1929), p. 195.
, Cf. P. Ricoeur, Finitude et culpabilite (Paris: 1960), Vol. II, p. 323.
4 1. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 830, B 858. Similar considerations could be
made in connection with the need for a total meaning and for salvation.
CARMEN BALZER
THE EMPATHY PROBLEM IN EDITH STEIN
INTRODUCTION
We shall discuss here the exciting question of empathy or the comprehensive knowledge of the other, as taken up in the doctoral dissertation
of Edith Stein, Edmund Husserl's favorite disciple and his assistant at
the University of Freiburg in Breisgau: "Das Einfiihlungsproblem in
seiner historischen Entwicklung und in phanomenologischer Betrachtung" ('The Empathy Problem in its Historical Development and
Phenomenologically Considered") (Halle: 1917). It is to be noted that
soon after being awarded her doctorate, Edith Stein, like many other
phenomenologists of the day, embraced the Catholic faith.
The text we have at hand is a translation from the original German
into English done by Waltraut Stein, a grandniece of the author (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964).
This work represents a deep study of "empathy" - "Einfuhlung" and is essential for getting a clear idea of the subject, as well as of the
closely related question of "intersubjectivity" as developed by Husserl
in Ideen II, Cartesian Meditations, and the manuscripts published in
1973, at the Hague, as Volumes XIII, XVI, and XV of the Husserliana
series. Moreover, this conceptual definition of "empathy" is essential for
the explanation of aesthetic feeling within the field of Aesthetics and of
the religious experience studied by the Phenomenology of Religion.
As Edith Stein herself acknowledges in this volume, her discussion
stays within the general framework of Husserl's phenomenology. He
was her teacher and the director of this dissertation. Stein's characterization of empathy parallels in its general features all that is set forth
in Volume I of Husserl's Ideen. Her approach to empathy is even closer
to that which appeared in Ideen II, a work of Husserl's published only
after his death, in Husserliana IV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952).
But Edith Stein was wholly acquainted with her teacher's work: it was
her task to "decode" his shorthand and transcribe it into regular script.
In this way she read the manuscript of Ideen II, which explains the
similarity of her approach to empathy and that of Husserl in that
book.
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CARMEN BALZER
No less striking is the relationship between Stein's work and the

Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who also had
access to the same unpublished manuscript of Ideen II. His most
significant and interesting assertions show a surprising similarity to
those of Edith Stein. This is made evident above all in both authors'
sharing the concept of the lived or living body (Leib). Phenomenology
makes a suggestive distinction between the living body (Leib) as center
of orientation of the spatial world and the material body (Korper),
understood as a physical thing.
Many years after Edith Stein completed her work on empathy,
Husserl published his Cartesian Meditations (1931) in French. There
he offers an approach to the problem wholly different from that of his
disciple's. In fact, Husserl is now interested in the "possibility of
perceiving the other," while Stein confines herself to the phenomenological description of empathy. But both authors make use of the
phenomenological reduction to pure consciousness. But within the
framework of these coincidences, Edith Stein makes original contributions to the description of empathy.
THE NATURE OF EMPATHY
According to Edith Stein, the basis for any discussion of this problem
can not be anything other than the description of empathy in the field
of consciousness, after the question of its real existence has been
suspended. Stein's description, then, applies to the pure transcendental
phenomenon. From this approach, as interesting as the psychological
description of the genesis of empathy in a real psycho-physical individual can be, such a description is valid only when the psychologist
returns to the transcendental phenomenon. That is why phenomenology
is the basis of psychology. The key to Edith Stein's work lies in her
description of the pscho-physical individual and of the mental person.
Such descriptions are necessary, since they will eventually show the full
implications and applications of the doctrine of empathy.
Edith Stein proceeds from the datum of foreign subjects and their
experiences, and since phenomenology appears as a science of sciences
and cannot be based on previous scientific results or verifications, it
must use its own means to get to the justification of all possible objects,
this being the reason that all sciences have their ultimate basis in it. This
is an idea that constantly reappears in this work on empathy. From
273
such a perspective, all the surrounding world, the physical world as well
as the psychophysical world, bodies as well as souls of men and animals
(including the psycho-physical person of the researcher herself) are
subject to exclusion or reduction. What remains when the question of
the existence of the whole world and even of the subject experiencing it
is suspended? An infinite road of research opens up, since we have
excluded the positing of existence, which may be questioned. But what
can in no way be questioned is "my experience" of the thing (of
perception, memory, or other types of grasping), together with their
correlate: the full phenomenon of the thing, i.e., the object given as it is
present to the consciousness.
In Chapter 2 of her dissertation, Stein explains the meaning of the
assertion that empathy is the givenness of foreign subjects and their
experiences. This is asserted as a function of the pure "I," the subject of
experience living in the experience. Finally, she establishes that this
empathy is not a perception, representation, or neutral assertion, but is
"sui generis." In this respect, we read:
So now to empathy itself. Here, too, we are dealing with an act which is primordial as
present experience though non-primodial in content. And this content is an experience
which, again, can be had in different ways such as in memory, expectation, or in fancy.
When it arises before me all at once, it faces me as an object (such as the sadness I
"read in another's face"). But when I inquire into its implied tendencies (try to bring
another's mood to clear givenness to myself), the content, having pulled me into it, is
no longer really an object. I am now no longer turned to the content but to the object
of it, I am at the subject of the content in the original subject's place. And only
after successfully executed clarification, does the content again face me as an object."
(p.l0)
Three levels of accomplishment are comprehended by this description

of empathy: 1) the emergence of the experience, 2) the accomplishment
of explicitation, and 3) the comprehensive objectification of the explicitated experience. The first and third levels reveal something nonprimordial parallel to the original perception, and the second level
reveals something non-primordial parallel to the fact of having the
experience. Be that as it may, the subject of the empathized experience
is not the empathizing subject but another subject. And this is what is
fundamentally new as regards memory, expectation, or the fancy of our
own experience. These two subjects - Stein goes on to say in Chapter
2 - are separate and are not to be joined together, as they have been
before by a consciOUSnei:i: of analogy Or of the continuity of experience.
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CARMEN BALZER
While I am living in the other's joy, I do not feel primordial joy. It does not issue lively
from my "I." Neither does it have the character of once having lived like remembered
joy. But stilI much less is it merely fancied without actual life. This other subject is
primordial although I do not experience its primordiality; his joy is primordial although
I do not experience it as primordial. In my non-primordial experience I feel, as it were,
led by a primordial one not experienced by me but still there, manifesting itself in my
non-primordial experience. (p.ll)
On this basis can be accomplished the bodily expression of what is of

the soul and also the will of mobilizing the body's members and of the
soul's intentions. But it is on the level of senses that we have the
elements by which we can establish a link with the foreign individual. It
is here where, according to Waltraut Stein, the author's most original
contribution is to be found. To start with, she emphasizes sensations as
one of the constituting elements of consciousness. For that very reason
they cannot be sup res sed or suspended, just as neither can the "cogito"
itself. Such sensations would then seem to take on the role of a mediating bridge between the pure "I" and the living body. They have a
footing in the domain of pure consciousness and, on the other hand,
they are always identified with places somewhere in the living body,
e.g., in the head for visual data or on the body surface for tactile data.
Now, this paradoxical nature of sensations, which seem to float between
what is non-spatial in the "I" and what is spatial in living physical
corporeality, somehow explains what we might call the localization of
the "I," as it results from the text we are discussing. Edith Stein wants to
compensate for this apparent absuridity of having related the spatiality
of sensations to the non-spatiality of the pure "I," which nevertheless
she finally "localizes," saying that its so-called place is the "zero point of
orientation" of the living body, a point which has no distance from it,
while any specific sensation is obtained at a certain distance from the
"I." As to the external perception of the living body, it again acts as the
zero point of orientation. A later analysis by Stein clarifies still further
the paradox of the localization of the "I." To that end she takes into
consideration the double constitution of the living body: as the living
body (Leib) felt and bodily perceived and as the physical body
(Korper), externally perceived in the external world.
Also the sensations of objects are given to the same living body, in
this case seen as "feeling," as the subject of sensations, and for that very
reason they are closely linked to bodily perception, though they are
simultaneously external perceptions or sensations of objects. Such a
275
double way of expriencing objects is called by Stein a "phenomenon

of fusion": I see the hand and also what it feels and touches and I
simultaneously perceive bodily that hand touching that object. Such a
double perception becomes particularly evident with tactile sensations;
in them there is a fusion between the I feeling "tactilely affected" and
what is touched of sensorily perceived, which then puts us before the
objective aspect or the tactile experience, while the other perception
refers us to the subjective aspect of that same experience.
In no other sensation does something equivalent happen, since
normally I never see myself there and am not manifest to myself in my
non-primordial experience.
For all this, empathy appears as a kind of perceptive act (eine Art
eifahrender Akt) sui generis.
THE TWO LEVELS OF EMPATHY
Empathy, knowledge or experience of the other, the "giving of the

other," takes place fundamentally on two levels: that of the psycho-physical individual, transcendentally constituted, and that of the mental
person.
Let us start at the level of the psycho-physical individual. His
giveness appears in the perception of the other as a living body. In
this way, the psycho-physical individual's corporeality becomes an
objective datum in my consciousness, just as happens with touch, in
which sensation I simultaneously feel effectively affected while I
perceive what is touched. In contrast, in visual sensation, I only see a
visualized object.
Still further, the psycho-physical individual only gets a consciousness
of his living body as a physical body analogous to those of others when
he empathically understands that his zero point of orientation is just
one of many spatial points. In this way the human body's being given to
itself is in the full sense a repeated experience of empathy.
The individual's primary and original experiences of the phenomenon of fusion is then extrapolated to the experience of the other as
other, even though experienced by me as being analogous to what I am
myself. We are now getting into the second level of the empathic
experience: that of the apprehension of mind and of cultural goods. A
new objective domain is then constituted on the basis of emotional
graspings. But this new level has been strikingly anticipated by what
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CARMEN BALZER
Stein, in the third part of her dissertation, calls "The Constitution of the
Psycho-Physical Individual," since there the issue of the "foreign body"
as conveyer of phenomena of expression is also discussed.
We have become acquainted with the foreign living body as the conveyer of a psychic
life that we "look at" in a certain way. Now there is still a group of phenomena that
disclose a further domain of the psyche to us in a peculiarly characterized way. When I
"see" shame "in" blushing, irritation in the furrowed brow, anger in the clenched fist,
this is a still different phenomenon than when I look at the foreign living body's level of
sensation or perceive the other individual's sensations and feelings of life with him. In
the latter case I grasp the one with the other. In the former case I see the one through
the other. In the new phenomenon what is psychic is not only co-perceived with what is
bodily but expressed through it. (p. 70)
Further on in the same chapter we can read that a person's external

modality, his gait and his posture, may tell us something about his
personality. In the same way, in a furrowed brow I grasp not only
disapproval but also its intention, and this grasped intention is what
gives the whole phenomenon a new character. In this way, the person
behind the acts and gestures is already perceived, as well as the person
behind the creation of cultural goods, which are also expressive of an
inner mentality. But the other's subjectivity - as asserted by Husserl in
Ideen II is shown only indirectly by the foreign body. Here then is not
Urpriisenz - original presence - but an Appriisenz - ad-presentation.
Now, this ad-presence is constituted on the basis of a similarity or an
analogy existing between the bodies considered in their thingness. This
is the "ad-presentation," somehow coincidental with Edith Stein's
"fusion," which in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation is called Paarung pairing. Such similarity or analogy between bodies in turn allows for the
"localization," direct (in sensations) or indirect (in the I), of what is
psychical in the body to be tranferred from my own living body and my
embodied soul to all analogous bodies. To this we are gradually
introduced in the discussion of the mental level by Stein in the fourth
part of her book. In this new domain, empathy no longer implies the
grasping of the natural causality to which the soul is subject as well as
the relationship between what is psychic and what is physical, but the
grasping of "motivation." The example of the new sphere is the mind,
which implies indeed being set apart from the natural world and which
is characterized by having a significant context based in motivation. It is
motivation which gives meaning to human actions which are embodiments of the mind and also to everything that man thinks, feels, wants,
277
or wishes. In the end what we grasp as giver of sense is always a value

emotionally intuited.
Only by starting from motivation can we accomplish understanding
of the other, whose gestures, ideas, wishes, and feelings act as vehicles
for values. Thanks to understanding we penetrate his interiority and
grasp the significant structure of his mental activities which are governed by a scale of values.
Motivation is described by Edith Stein as symbolic antecedence,
experienced, from an experience arising from another, without passing
through the detour of the objective sphere. She then develops the
concept of mental person in terms of feelings, since they make up the
basis of will and give a valuation foundation.
In turn, the description of feelings gradually reveals an "I" with
several depths or levels. With the additional consideration of attributes
such as intensity and extension: it is then possible to establish a hierarchy of valuating feelings and a doctrine of the types of persons.
Indeed, the author shows how it is possible, in the empathic experience,
to be guided by human types into the classification of different individuals or mental subjects. Thus, for example there is the class "homo
religiosus," which Stein is able to grasp comprehensively in the other
"person," even in the absence of corresponding religious values in her
own self, for she declares herself openly skeptical about this domain.
Nevertheless, this does not prevent her from understanding the other as
religious. She explicitly declares that this fact involves something that
she can not accomplish, since she would then get into conflict with her
own experimental structure. This is, however, given to her in the mode
of a void presentation. She understands, consequently, that the other
may sacrifice all his earthly goods for his faith. She says: "I see him
behave in this way and empathize a value experienced as the motive
for his conduct. The correlate of this is not accessible to me, causing me
to ascribe to him a personal level I do not myself possess .... " (p. 104)
It is then possible to conclude that just because there are different types
of persons, different from ourselves, we may perceive that there are
levels of value closed to our own mental modality.
This fourth chapter, which discusses the subject of the empathy
between mental persons, starts with an emphasis on human consciousness being the correlate of the objective world, and this is, as we have
already pointed out, what turns it into something mental. Only here,
then, is there a level of understanding of personalities foreign to our
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CARMEN BALZER
own. It is also true that the mind of the other had already somehow
started to reveal itself in the sphere of the constitution of the psychophysical individual (see Part III of the book). At that time we had
already accepted the "I" of the foreign living body as a mental subject
- from the moment his body was interpreted as a center of orientation
in the spatial world. So, too, could we attribute to that foreign living
body an objectively constituting consciousness, while we considered all
the foreign world as its correlate. In the final analysis all foreign perception is then anchored to mental acts and for that very reason, in each
empathic act, i.e., in the grasping of the emotional act, we are already
introduced into the domain of the spirit. In this way, there is opposed
to physical nature a world of values, grasped in emotional acts.
Undoubtedly the last word in this difficult problem is related to the
experience of "fusion," which closely links what is subjectively manifest
and what is objectively psycho-spiritual and mental, what is given as a
thing and is manifested in the exteriority of our own feeling and
thinking corporeality. In turn, this unity implies that other unity, thanks
to which it is itself merged to the fused unity of the other, which has
analogously presented itself to our intentional field.
Catholic University of Buenos Aires
University of Belgrano
MARIA CARLA ANDRIANOPOLI
THE INFLUENCE OF HUSSERL IN THE

PEDAGOGICAL DEBATE
To exalt the philosophy of Edmund Husser! cannot mean other for us than to clarify its
spirit, to enlarge and to deepen sense of the exigency of it, and to work out its
methodology and results since phenomenology was innate in the thought of its author,
and is still today before us not a concluded and definite system in its structure and in its
meanings, but the systematic beginning of a theoretical purification and of a renewing
integration of learning in which the speculative tradition of the past is concentrated and
illuminated in order to gain a sounder certainty of itself, and a warranty of faster
process in the present moment.!
The phenomenological analysis that makes clear the relationship in which we live as
researchers and as men, and in which we exist insofar as we are in the world, meditation. This analysis is not an additional dimension in the relationship, but is innate in the
relationship: to meditate is the same as to establish oneself in a connection.
The relational function is the ground of meditation, as it is commonly understood,
and, also when it is admitted that it is an act unrelated to a relationship, which sets itself
outside of a relationship, in order to meditate on it. 2
In the extensive field of the philosophical problems that Edmund

Husserl weighed over the fifty years of his teaching activity, the
pedagogical themes he examines are strictly connected with the philosophical ones: the interaction between phenomenology and pedagogy is
here seen within a broader treatment of the studies attended to by
Husserl. The message that Husserl can give to the present, what is of
topical interest is the invitation to a "will fully conscious," to establish a
new dimension of research, and to found a "new theoretical attitude."
"Husserl, on his own account, attempted to put these principles into
practice in his life as well as in his philosophy. His method has been
and is a rich schooling in intellectual discipline, temperance, and
humility."3
Pedagogical reasoning goes together with phenomenological inquiry
for it constitutes a matter of particular relevance for it, it avails itself
of the strict relationship that exists between phenomenology and psychology.4
The fundamental processes within the bounds of psychic life are referable to the
research into the "motive" which is basically different from the cause typical of natural
events, or at least brought out by the natural sciences. 5
279
280
MARIACARLA ANDRIANOPOLI
Husserl's pedagogy enjoys a preferential relationship with philosophy in

that "... it accepts," as Enzo writes, "logical requirements, but, moreover, it accepts the most profound calling, that concerned with the
nature, the essence - I mean - and the destiny of man. Philosophy
itself, then, has a cathartic and formative function, in a word, an
educational one."6
If Pedagogy is a philosophical science, if, at least, in the broadest
sense, it is applied philosophy, if it requires assumptions and philosophical connections insofar as it is science of education, it undertakes
the task of checking the soundness of the same principles, arriving at a
settled philosophical conception, and the rules suggested by or inferred
from it in the field of education." And since it concerns man in his
essence and in his reality, in his activities, from the gnoseological to the
aesthetic, the moral, and the religious, and man's relationship with
society and history, since it involves a comprehensive contemplation of
reality, education concerns itself with the whole of philosophical
science. Thus, reconsidering its theoretical and scientific fundamental
principles, education can become a real laboratory for testing the
rightness or the incorrectness of a conception and of a philosophic
system. 7
What matters to us now, is the analysis of Husserl's work. Since
phenomenology involves being expounded on and critically evaluated,
scholars have to be experienced and attentive in writing a criticism of
Husser!' It is necessary to be well acquainted with his work and with the
complexity of phenomenology.
"Even before understanding what phenomenology is, whether it is
welcomed or rejected, the sciences, letters, the arts, and politics
rediscover it in themselves as an attainment of awareness. Little by little
this process of apprehending consciousness deeply changes whatever
field it arises in. From the branch of learning in which it blossomed
earlier, it comes to pervade all the others, to go through every field of
culture, and to assert itself as its foundation and its 'telos.' Phenomenology, in fact, aims, at a new encyclopedic learning that might be defined
the phenomenological encyclopedia."g
Husserl always meant to give philosophy a moral duty: "far from
being a methodology of learning only, or a standardizing synthesis of
scientific data, or a metaphysical explanation, intellectual, philosophical
learning was for him what gives meaning and relevance to the whole of
human life."9 To understand phenomenology will not so much mean
HUSSERL AND THE PEDAGOGICAL DEBATE
281
to expect a reply to the question "What is the phenomenological

doctrine?", as to start "an open dialogue, to promote its solicitations
and its deepest pressing need in view of recognizing all the copious
fertility of its internal motives, and of achieving a common speech that
- in the spirit of truthful understanding - does not in itself belong any
longer to either the speaker or the hearer or the fellow who puts
questions.,,10
It is possible to understand how, within the bounds of phenomenology, there may be performed the description of some conceptual components connected to the structure of man: the phenomenological
meditation is useful in outlining these components.
"To think phenomenologically on the status of the self, (above all
under the ethical, metaphysical, and religious aspect), signifies to
acquire awareness of the constituents which, in fact, make it up,
constituents that would aim at enduring in themselves, giving way to a
sequence of situations which happen again and again insistently, as if
they revealed the presence of an exclusive, exacting, and persevering
deliberateness in a definite direction. Now, to the extent in which, once
such a direction has been individualized, is accepted or, better still, is
given as strictly individual, its "status" no longer exhibits the precariousness of a transient situation, but rather the consistency of an enduring
one."l!
Let us appropriate the words of Schiavone when he writes that "the
reference of Husserl is the determination of a fixed path towards a
genuinely critical realism. The process of phenomenological reduction,
in fact, provides the opportunity to found - in the light of the rational
evidence - intentionally as a presence, namely, the binding unity of
'noesis' and of 'noema' in the transcendency of consciousness."!2
"The predominant tendency of the different human sciences,"
Suchodolski remarks, "is the perception, possibly attained through
empirical processes, of the existing condition of things. The premise
seems to be unquestionable, and yet it gives rise to doubts. In fact
reality is never steady or unchangeable; it is a process in the course
of which some things go on rising and others die out. In the meantime
in the fields of the empirical studies there is seldom met research into
something that is still unknown, or not yet intelligible, or even
refractory."! 3
Husser! challenges conceptions based on an absolute reality which
is, in perspective, no more well-grounded than is the thought of a
282
"quadrangular circumference." "Reality" and "world" are simply considered by Husserl to be the titles of determined units of sense, which
refer for their own essence to fixed significative relationships of pure
consciousness, which properly confer this sense and testify to the
soundness of it.
Husserl is concerned with perception/category relations, the insight/
material structure, which effect the presence/categorical outcome of the
activity of presence in every spatial and temporal procedure.
The categories cannot remain isolated in themselves: they must be founded. And since
foundation is tied to insight, there must exist an intuition of the categories. However
this is not a conclusion: it is rather the framework of ample problems. Intuition is not
sharply detachable from the categories; in order to get to the categories there must be
something precategorial, and there must be a mediating operation leading to the
categorial status. On the other hand, categories are also unthinkable if considered as
objects and abstractions without a genesis. 14
Husserl's work represents a fundamental chapter in the history of

contemporary logic in the extent to which he insists on a foundation of
logic that is not, in its turn, a formalization, but instead is thought of as
being transcendent. Without doubt, Husserl's commitment aims at going
beyond the division between materiality and formality, between experience and judgment, between original conditions and logical structure.
Genuine evidence is that fullness of the meaning offered by experience: the leading thread is the generation of judgment from experience.
A crisis, according to Husserl, involves all the sciences. They have lost
their function and their scope: all the sciences are founded in a "world"
that is not vitalist or naturalistic but which reveals itself only if prejudgment ceases. Time makes it clearer and clearer that we operate on a
planetary level where a number of powerful tendencies come into
conflict.
Husser! proposes to himself to evidence the crisis to make possible
the dissolution of the blocks which bring our life and our history to a
highly dangerous limit. Husser! aims at demonstrating that the crisis
may be resolved, can even be transformed within a new framework.
And this framework takes on the aspect of a practical and theoretical
encyclopedia where the sciences acquire a historical function enabling
man to defeat the negativity of the present time, surpassing the crisis
not only verbally, but with new acts, with new conduct for life.
The theme of the new phenomenology is that of action governed by
the idea of a society in which everybody has grown up in the right way:
283
this conception, in its absolute perfection, remains infinite; however, it

is the leading motive of life.
Practice achieves this in a "new" society, one that always refuses to
acknowledge the negative, given this new sense of dialectical reasoning,
conceived dynamically; as a matter of fact the negative of the present
can be denied, and it is possible to arrive at the paradox of an unreal
truth that is also inside us, the life and the meaning of the truth. Only in
this way we will be able to free ourselves from the growing danger and
obtain a general victory. In this manner we can, on one side, fulfill
Husserl's words and, on the other side, mend them by mending ourselves. It is the typical task of the expert in pedagogy to work out
patterns to be offered to the educator as a concrete way of working,
projecting that activity towards a society that is hypothesized to be
optimal, proceeding towards its perfection in a more and more critically
founded way.
Though pedagogy is a system of knowledge, its formality consists in
relating itself to an active system. It is in this context that the problem
of the concrete use of pedagogical theory arises in connection with the
educational event: the subject and the object of pedagogy are both
naturally dynamic. Even as the educational process is governed by a
never ending historical increase in knowledge, so the conceptual tools
aiming at the interpretation of the educational reality develop in turn.
It is the same pedagogy that presents itself, in theory and in practice,
as a subject ever developing and ripening with the purpose of surpassing the mere analysis of the dynamics of objects and subjects.
Pedagogy is to be considered as an abridgement of theories methodically worked out in touch with and dependent on experience. Nothing
hinders, as in any other discipline, making use of conceptual materials
that have been produced in the course of other research.
This happens, for example, with the findings produced by psychology
that the science of education adopts within its own range of investigation in order to achieve its purposes. "In case pedagogy thinks of doing
without the connection with scientific progress, it runs the risk of
engaging itself in a useless effort because this is to turn to solving
problems that can either no longer be the same or, at least, exist with
different characteristics." 15
It seems to us at this point that this author's concept of the true
cause of today's crisis in trust and in the possibility of giving a meaning
to human nature, above all, points out the need for constancy, for not
284
giving up fighting for the individual's meaning and that of the whole of
mankind.
"Let man meet himself again, find again the original way of living.
But let him not betray himself in aspiring to be like an isle of a submerged continent, a rapture of the infinite temporality, or like the
presence of shrewd deliberateness which acts behind, and folds itself
into the ego. Perhaps man does not hold such a high place. But
Descartes, on discovering the formula of the 'cogito,' the soul, with
millenarian ingenuousness pointed to a sound foundation which had
given origin to the 'ego,' making it greater than an ecstasy of the infinite
fleeting intentionality." I 6
If today we can forecast the shaping of an empirical science of education, we owe it to a great extent to the reason that "the deepening of
the studies of what is commonly recognized as the 'curriculum,' and what
substantially is the whole schooling process as an outstanding manifestation of willful education, opens the way to improvements that are
feasible positive developments only in a multidisciplinary perspective." I 7
Education being a subjective dynamic process on the basis of which
everybody refines his standards, personality influences the self's cultural development. And since this personal process requires external contributions, every educator reacts to the young pupil in his individuality.
Our speech consequently assumes the form of self and other in education. The main theme therefore brings us back "to the emergency in the
upbringing of the apprentice 'fellow'; either it is granted that education
concerns people, or education is denied." I H
Man makes many wagers on his own future but none of them is so
essential as the one made on the next generation. We cannot at all lose
the "bet" on our children since at stake is not only our future, but above all - theirs. For this purpose we shall never have enough
resources and will never have meditated seriously enough: for this
reason we make the "safe move of pedagogy."
"The scholar, although he draws inspiration from the absolute, is
always invited to partake of the original manifestations of life, living out
continuously its principles in different applications, in such a way that
new potentialities ripen in individuals, programs, and educational
methods change." I 9
The problem of human incomprehensibility, propounded as the
problem of the unity of consciousnesses and which cannot be restricted
to mere psychological and naturalistic interpretations asserts itself in
285
the role of a necessary and rationally justified reminder of the problem

of transcendence, and, therefore, of the connections between transcendence and history.
"Our" pedagogy then refers to the reunification of human history on
the basis of a final justification in the name of a telos that exists beyond
those of the individual adventures of the existence and the destiny of
peoples, and to attain that everybody has to work together, to the end
of all conceivable good.
"Education consists in working with sincere love for the other, for
the person who calls for help, just for his being, precisely with his way
of being in order that he may grow, may be better than we are, and selfgoverning to such a degree that he can part and go forth his own way,
as is his right, this being the fulfillment of human growth."2o
NOTES
I A. Banfi, "La Fenomenologia e il Compito del Pensiero Contemporaneo," in
Omaggio a Husserl (ed. E. Paci) (Milan: II Saggiatore, 1960), p. 31.
2 E. Paci, Tempo e Verita nella Jenomenologia di Husserl (Bari: La Terza, 1961), p.
187.
3 E. Baccarini, La Fenomenologia. FilosoJia come Vocazione (Rome: Nuova Universale Studium, 1981), p. 2.
4 Cfr. A. Ales Bello, Husser! e Ie Scienze (Rome: La GoliardicaEditrice, 1980).
, A. Ales Bello, "Psicologia e Fenomenologia," in Metafisica e Scienze dell' uomo, Atti
del VII Congresso Internationale, Bergamo (Rome: ed. Borla), Vol. I, p. 465.
" D. Enzo, Ricerca e Operativita educativa fra Filosofia e Scienza, "Scuola e Citta,"
Feb. 1988, XXIII.
7 A. Agazzi, II Discorso Pedagogico (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1975), p. 141.
H E. Husserl, La Crisi delle Scienze Europee la Fenomenologia transcedentale, trans. E.
Fillippini, Pref. E. Paci (Milan: "II Saggitore", 1961), p. 12.
" N. Cassanello, Introduzione alla Fenomenologia (Genoa: Tilgher, 1976), p. 155.
10 R.
Pucci, "II Compito della Fenomenologia," in SignificalO e Compilo della
Fenomenologia (Padua: Cedam, 1957), p. 95.
II R. Lazzarini, "Fenomenologia, Intenzionalita e Problematic a degli status," in SigniF
icato e Compito della Fenomenologia, op.cit., p. 45.
12 M. Schiavone, Psichiatria, Psicoanalisi, Sociologia. Riflessioni Epistemologiche sulle
Scienze Umane (Bologna: Patron ed., 1988), p. 43.
13 B. Suchodolski, Pedagogia quale scienza sull'uomo, "Rassegna di Pedagogia" XLIV,
nos. 2-3, Apr.-Sept. 1986.
14 E. Paci, Idee per una encliclopedia Jenomenologica (Milan: V. Bompiani, 1973), p.
171.
15 L. Pedrazzi, Sociologia ed Educazione, in FilosoJia e Sociologia, Conv.Sez.Bologna
Soc. Filos. Ital., 23-25 Apr. 1954 (Bologna: IL' Mulino) p. 187.
286
MARIA CARLA ANDRIANOPOLI
16 C. Bonci, "Soggettivitae Intersoggettivita nella "cr;si" di Husserl," In Metafisica e

scienze dell'uomo, op. cit. , p. 552.
17 R. Laporta, "I Fini Educativi," in Filosofia e pedagogia oggi (Padua: Libreria
Gregoriana Editrice, 1985), p. 477.
I H G. Cattanei, Scacco della filosofia dell' educare?
I" G. Cattanei, "Persona, Societa e socialita," in Pedagogia tra tradizione e innovazione
(Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1979), p. 39.
2(1 G. Cattanei, "Linee di politica nazionale e internazionale per la promozione umana
del fanciullo," in Fanciullo e Societd (Vicenza: Edizioni del Rezzara, 1980), p. 68.
PART FOUR
BEYOND DICHOTOMIES IN
PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY:
BODY, LIFE-WORLD, NEW APPROACHES
THE HUMAN CONDITION WITHIN THE

UNITY -OF-EVERYTHING-THERE-IS-ALIVE A CHALLENGE TO PHILOSOPHICAL
ANTHROPOLOGIES
INTRODUCTION: SOME FOUNDATIONAL NOTIONS OF

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE
The philosophy of life waited for two thousand years, as Julian Marias
pointed out, to get off the ground. Already hinted at by Dilthey, it
surged with the philosophies of Miguel de Unamuno and Ortega y
Gasset. Both of these Spanish thinkers brought forth profound intuitions and insights in their own original fashions. Unamuno believed that
lyrical meditation and a poetic, literary, and not an intellectual discursive, form of colloquy is the best way to frame and communicate the
profound experience of life. Ortega also took the free literary, evocative
stance although in places he attempted to articulate certain areas of his
thought in a scholarly fashion. Nevertheless, in order to preserve the
original freshness of his intuitions he shunned exfoliating in a traditional
philosophical discourse. Both thinkers are certainly justified in this
refusal to identify philosophy with a pseudo-scientific and strictly
rational approach and mode of expression. And yet in spite of the many
perils of giving a formal articulation to the profound inspirations which
plunging into the depths of the question concerning life stirs - especially the danger of falsely framing the original life-pulsating insights
into traditional and, in their understanding, stultified forms - there is
incontestable merit in trying to discover discrete articulations among
the elements of the process of becoming as well as those of the fleeting
givenness that an inquiry into the immense complexity of life may offer.
There is also some intellectual gratification in using the analytic,
synthesizing, and inferential powers of the human mind - using them
with great care and discretion - to disentangle the various complexes
of that givenness, to seek their interrelations and causes, to translate
them into the form of questions about their reasons and foundations,
and finally to engage the labyrinth of issues, with the purpose of
introducing there some order, following a filum Ariadne of lived
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xxxv, 289-303.
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intuition. No doubt, to philosophize means to seek the origins of order

or disorder, explanations, interrelations, reasons, etc. and to seek unity
in what appears to be dispersed as well as in harmony, in what appears
dissipated. Maybe the ultimate reality could be directly and adequately
communicable only in an evocative, lyrical modality of soundings,
feelings, allusions, evocations, etc. Yet, on the other side, it is a challenge to the analytic/synthetic/conjecturing mind to seek to dissociate
reality and recompose it by means of rational articulations, symmetries/
asymetries, harmonies, principles, and reasons. The types of traditional
philosophical disciplines which we distinguish as epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, metaphysics, antropology, cosmology, etc. are just types
of questions, approaches, and responses to the questioning that the
philosophical mind launches into reality. No doubt this same mind
abuses this reality by introducing into it its own rules, regulations,
formal arrangements, cleavages, dissociations, and other paraphernalia.
It is the commitment of the philosopher who identifies himself with the
phenomenological approach to see this situation with lucidity and to try
to avoid the traps of the mind, and, while communicating his insights
into reality in a discursive way, to at least seek such a style of discourse
which corresponds to the particular experiences in which he receives
these insights, that is, a style that is as close as possible to the lyrical,
poetic way in which he experiences the profoundity of life.
The fact that it is from the human mind with its very own apparatus
that various forms of ordering take their clear, intelligible form does
not, however, preclude/rob them of all validity. When we look at this
situation with a mind enlightened by history's great debates about
"truth," "reality," the nature of experience and that of the human mind
and at the enormous progress in these debates, we will arrive at the
conclusion, which I have attempted to substantiate in my own writings,
that, first, as far as the "truth" of the cognition of reality is concerned
there can no longer be any question of adopting one privileged,
supposedly "absolute" type of cognition or approach that would yield
us access to "truth" or reveal it. After we have become aware of the
artifacts of human reason, we discover the intrinsic weakness of all the
arguments which were or which may be advanced to purport the unique
validity of one way. Second, we come to the central discovery which is
of decisive significance, the discovery of the inventive molding of
experiences which takes place within the creative act of the human
being, within his source-experience, and which underlies all his specifically human functioning, which discovery demonstrates that reality
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reveals itself through all the innumerable channels and perspectives

through which we as living beings take a constructive part in it. Thus
only the multiplicity of these modes of experience considered each in
its own right and then together can yield up a full experience of reality
for our philosophical scrutiny. It is within this spectrum of infinitely
differentiated pulsations, impulses, functional organic processes, feelings, emotions, thoughts, actuations of our life-enactments, willings, etc.,
each ready to speak in its "own voice," which are brought together
precisely through the individualizing/self-interpretive course of our
existence, that we delineate within the great reservoir of life's forces and
the enormously rich network of vital and societal circumambiant
situations our own natural as well as specifically human course: that we
actuate our life. The human mind participating in life allows us to
distinguish strands of ordering to satisfy our innermost need for
charting our own course and pondering our destiny. These questions
are framed by the mind and call upon the mind for their disposition,
that is, mind expanded to comprise the fullness of experience, the
reason/intellect included.
With all this in mind, I have undertaken to elaborate a philosophicaldiscursive, that is, scholarly, account of the philosophy of life, one in
which the work of the human intellect - all too lightly discredited in
contemporary thinking - is trusted to help in framing the answers to
the great philosophical issues which receive a new formualtion as, on
the basis of my phenomenology of life, several of the voices of experience together come to the fore. In the following exposition, three of the
main themes of my phenomenology of life, 1) the self-individualization
of life circumscribing the context of phenomenological investigation, 2)
the creative act of the human being which brings us into the center from
which the human mind draws all the rays of order, and 3) the human
condition which grounds the creative act as man's foothold within the
unchartable schema of life, will be discussed.!
Although in setting out upon our query we indulge in beginning with
the well-established ontological, metaphysical, and epistemological
questions, we are yet attentive to the poetic fullness of our experience
of life and cautious to not introduce unwarrantedly the speculative
artifacts of the mind so that we might come up with answers that lead
to the reformulation of the questions at large. The novelty of the
answers may, indeed, bring us to a new conception of the questions we
began with.
These three new themes, new with respect to philosophical tradition,
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in the exfoliating of which my phenomenology of life consists, are also

three essential points which distinguish it from the thought of both of
the great Spanish thinkers Unamuno and Ortega. I came into contact
with their thought long after the main tenets of my phenomenology of
life were already elaborated and brought into the public domain. As
gratified as I was to discover that I coming from a rational, discursive
- scientific - way of philosophizing shared in many of their intuitions,
I found that phenomenological rigor, the demand that the scholar
substantiate his insights by rational means as well as poetic, allows us to
advance down the pathway of discovery. In my phenomenology of life, I
advance, in fact, some basic insights that are new with respect to these
two great thinkers. These ideas in turn yield new approaches to some of
the main points of our common philosophical concern.
Although both of these thinkers emphasize in many ways that it is the
human being who creates either his own circumstancia and/or his own
legend - that is, the meaning of his existence - an emphasis which
puts man's inventiveness to the fore, they did not bring forth the
essentially creative nature of the human being. The crucial difference
between my phenomenology of life and the thoughts of both of these
great thinkers lies in my exfoliating in its full extent the creative/
inventive essence of the human being and recognizing it consequently
as the Archimedean point for the phenomenology of life. With this full
exfoliation and philosophical thematization of the creative nature of the
human being, I am in a position to enlarge the inquiries into several
points of the common philosophical quest that we share.
The crucial question raised by Ortega - of how to reach the fact of
life - a question to which he left no answer, has received an answer
within our framework of inquiry. (See A- T. Tymieniecka, "The First
Principles of the Metaphysics of Life; Charting the Human Condition,"
Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXI, 1988.) Man's creative act not only
reveals itself to be decisive for specifically human existence, but it
participates as well, in all of the life-transactions which carryon the lifeenacting course of our self-individualization. Thus, in the creative act
we have a royal access to all the experiences and processes which carry
on human existence, first within nature, and then within our societal
framework. Lastly, the creative act of the human being brings us to
man's foundational basis within the universal life-process of nature, the
human condition.
These three conceptions: the creative act of man as the Archimedean
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point of all philosophy, man's self-interpretation-in-existence, and, the

Human Condition, sustain the phenomenology of life which gives the
basic guidelines for all our philosophical and scientific research. We
will succinctly outline them below.
THE HUMAN CONDITION WITHIN THE
UNITY -OF-EVERY -THING- THERE-IS-ALIVE
I. Some Postulates for an Adequate Approach to Human Being
In the traditional and in the phenomenological anthropologies which

focus on the human being or on human nature, we have singled it out in
its specificity and have attempted to grasp it according to some or other
approach. We may approach human nature in the exercise of intelligence; we may seek the specific modalities by means of which the
human being enacts his existence; we may investigate the ways and
means by which he establishes his specific environment, life-world,
objectivity as such, or himself within the human sphere of life. We may
also seek the features which distinguish man from all other living
beings.
In all of these, and in other approaches which I have not mentioned,
the focus of philosophico-anthropological inquiry is definitively the
human being singled out from the rest of the universe, and, already, by
the process of singling him out and attempting to differentiate his
specific features or functions, the human mind of the inquirer is
operating a speculative, rational isolation of humanness - assumed to
be unique - from the concrete network of things and beings within
which the human being naturally dwells and within which he finds his
forces, promptings, and constraints.
Due to this anthropocentrism, only when the philosophical anthropologist is satisfied with the description of the specific exalted characteristics of man will he seek to find our natural relatedness to the rest of
creation. Because the specificity of man will always reach its peak, and
culminate in our intellectual, strictly rational powers and in the exercise
of our mind, we while exalting that, lose the "pure," "absolute" intelligence's relatedness to our empirical, changeable, fleeting substratum
- as it then appears - in the material nature in which it is embedded.
We then will, clumsily and without success, try to find links with and
bridges to the empirical dimension of the human being so defined by
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our isolating operations and to Nature in which it is embedded. Out of

this very procedure, by the same stroke, there emerges a conception of
"Nature" as a universal factor that is yet somewhat outside of rational
humanness - or "existential," spiritual humanness - and isolates it in
its assumed "naturalness" from human beings who just partake of it.
This understanding that isolates Nature then creates further difficulties for the complete grasp of the human being, as well as for the
understanding of that for which the isolated concept of "Nature" stands.
In short, all philosophical anthropologies which start by focusing on the
specificity of man as he is within himself and alone inevitably run into
anthropocentrism and into dichotomies of various kinds.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that the human being, the
knower, the one who asks questions and seeks to investigate things is
and always remains at the center of the inquiry. Yet it is questionable
whether his being at the center should prejudice the inquiry by focusing
on the human being at the very beginning. Maybe, instead, the knower
should bring knowledge to the center. In such a program: 1) The
investigator should suspend his privileged - and easily misleading position and begin by acknowledging the entire milieu, the entire sphere
within which he as a human being operates and within which the human
being whom he wants to investigate is existentially situated; 2) Instead
of focusing at the start on the specificity of the human being within this
sphere, the investigator should, instead of isolating him, immerse him
within this sphere of existence which carries his beingness; 3) And since
the inquirer as a human being is undertaking the inquiry insofar as he/
she is endowed with specifically human features and cannot be ousted
from the central position which he occupies precisely as a human being
- and because we do not want to isolate the object of our query from
his existential sphere - we should, must, find such a point of departure
that the investigator can approach the human being together with his
existential context.
II. The Context of the Phenomenology of Life

In order to establish an inquiry that changes so radically our orientation, we have to find its proper parameters. In the first place, we will
situate it within the foundational ground for all philosophy, that in which
every philosophy has its roots, and which I have called the phenomenology of life. Within the context of life, we find, indeed, the human
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being immersed within his existential network together with all other
living beings, partaking of the universal forces which carry life as such,
suffering the restrictions which the struggle for life within a full network
imposes and reaching his own stature and level of accomplishment.
Indeed, the leitmotif of our investigation is the proto-ontological
evidence that "life means individualization," that is, when we talk about
life, we understand already that it is not a vague, undefinable, and
ungraspable notion but that being as vast as it is - comprising everything - it offers us an absolutely evident clue: whatever lives, lives in a
process of becoming in which it differentiates itself from its living
network and acquires its very own, individual, life-course.
So the existence of the human being, whatever other factors of its
exercise may be, consists ultimately in man's self-individualization-inexistence. Indeed, the unique specificum of life is that it unfolds from
within, from its very own core, which progressively in its struggle
against circumambiant factors unfolds its virtualities and grows toward
a maximal development which is uniquely its own.
Now, the universal progress of life, which never stops, proceeds
precisely through individual unfoldings. When we consider the enormous variety of types of life and their individual struggles for survival
and the unfolding of their courses, we cannot fail but to recognize a
tightly articulated network of interconnections, links, and intertwinings
which play crucial roles in existential progress; we may say that
everything holds together in the great onward rush of life.
And what is the place and the role assigned to man in this gigantic
life schema?
FIRST, within this gradual advance in complexity from the simplest
to the most complex, the well-known fact appears upon analysis that it
is the human being who through his complexity and the development of
his life-extension, life-exercise, is the culmination of this advance of
life's self-individualization. This phase culminates in a self-devised
constructivism.
SECOND, when we envisage the inward functioning of the selfindividualization of life along the entire scale of its progressively
developed stages, we discover that there is a progress within the steps
of this functioning which accounts for the progress in complexity or
which is identical with it. We discover, in fact, the various operational
networks of growth and decay as well as the discrete transitional phases
from one type of a constructivism to another. We differentiate, most
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significantly, the various degrees of the advance in flexibilities, selectiveness, undertakings, and lastly the devising of projects and the aiming
at their accomplishment.
These characterize precisely the functioning of the human being and
his specific differentiation from the rest of living beings.
The most remarkable fact which we discover about the existential
progress in self-individualizating life is that this progress means a
differentiation of the Logos of Life into ever new rationalities: in the
performance of life's functions in various articulations, modes, and
types of constructivism, in building organisms and organs to undertake
the more complex functions, in establishing subtle means of bringing in
various significant devices for selectiveness and choice.
Each accomplished type of complexity in the constructivism of life
offers a new set of intrinsic virtualities pointing toward the next phase
in which a new type of beingness has its roots and point of departure.
Already Aristotle detected within the unfolding of the real individual a
direction from within, that is, an individualizing core which he called
"entelechy." This inward set of principles which directs the route of the
unfolding is acknowledged again by Leibniz in his conception of the
monad which contains its entire growth prefigured within itself and only
unfolds it; it is again affirmed by Hedwig Conrad-Martius in her
phenomenology of nature, and, needless to say, it is the crucial idea
underlying contemporary natural science, especially genetic theories.
However, my investigation is not focused strictly on the concrete
analysis of the growth of the individual but on the progressive phases in
which the complexity of this growth changes, advancing in an ascending
line with the progress of the entire chain or the onward rush of life, and
here the entelechial element within each individual living being is not
the answer. The question must now be formulated: first, how and in
virtue of what is there a change in the complexity of entelechies
between two different and successive phases of life's unfolding; and,
second, what does the entelechial principle consist of, or rather, what
are its foundations, roots, or basic elements such that it may carryon
the becoming of life acquiring the various shapes of individual entelechial types marking thereby the different constructive phases of its
advance.
I propose that following the pre-life stage in which no individualizing
process is yet present but merely an infinite reservoir of fulgurating
proficiencies ready to enter into an individualizing process, these
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proficiencies - millionfold and intergenerating ad infinitum - come

together into indivdualizing complexes of forces which form thereby
VIRTUALITIES for the generation of new entelechial principles as
well as for the surging of new phases of life's constructivism. In other
words, we may say that these complexes of virtualities which establish
new forms of life in their springing forth offer specific types of life
conditions. In this fashion each type of living beingness is an outcome
of, and is rooted in, its own life condition.
The notions of virtuality, entelechy, and life condition are the
elementary notions of the proto-ontology of life.
III. The Human Condition
With this framework established, we may now turn to the central point
of our concern. As a matter of fact when we pursue the discrete and yet
tightly articulated progress of the steps through which the Logos of Life
promotes the constructivism of the consecutive phases of individualizing functioning, we find that at a certain point of this progress there
emerges a phase of life's constructivism which is founded in a most
particular set of virtualities. It is not only that it contains the virtualities
of life that account for organic, vital, and gregarious-psychic rational
articulations, but these are joined by others which mark a revolution:
the inventive and creative virtualities of imagination which take off from
the hitherto predominant various degrees of flexibility in selectiveness
(which always remained prescribed by an interior code of self-individualizing agencies), but which offer the possibility of breaking with such
an inbuilt code and inventing and promoting by self-devised means new
avenues of life itself.
To state it at the outset of our inquiry into the human condition, it is
precisely the discovery within the human condition of the Archimedean
point for the philosophical orientation as such in the creative act!
tremor of life that enables us to enter into the game of life itself. That is,
we may clearly locate the place of the questioner, the philosopher. We
are not only in a position to discover the great line of the ordering of
life per se - which we have been exposing thus far - but to penetrate
into the center of the knot that the route taken by life in differentiating
the Logos places in the human being.
In fact, we arrived at the human condition by way of pursuing the
various phases of life's progress. Its virtualities are a deposit of the
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progress of life preceding it while making a discrete jump toward novel

types of proficiencies. The human condition characterizes itself as a
new phase in the unity-of-everything-there-is-alive through the emergence of the following virtualities: the inventive/creative proficiency, the
imaginatio creatrix, and the will. With the advent of the inventive
proficiency all the life synergies and forces flow into new molds which
the otherwise life-subservient proficiencies project in their intergenerative moves. Imaginatio creatrix gives this intergenerative turmoil a new
profusion of points of reference, patterns, images that lead its swings
beyond strictly life-subserviant functioning, that is, beyond the matured
entelechial code, even of the highest order, while yet pre-determining
the life-course that individualization will take. This new, and now
self-devised, life-course-orientation will emerge from a novel type of
generative forge: a new phenomenon within the progressively graduated
steps of life, which we call the "Source Experience." In experience is the
initiation of a phase in which the living individual as a self-directing
agent will project a new apparatus for the differentiation of the Logos
of Life, an apparatus that will allow him to differentiate not automatically, following an inbuilt order, the processes of life, but at will, and by
means of invention. Thus, not without reason, I have called this first
phase, this originary experience inaugurating the crystallization of the
human condition, the "source experience." From the source-experience,
just as a stream emerges from a spring to which droplets of water have
gathered, there emerges within the turmoil of the natural virtualities in
transformation, under the aegis of the inventive factor and the prompting of imaginatio creatrix, the main faculties by means of which the new
factor of man's self-individualization in life will proceed: Imagination,
Memory, Will, and Intellect. Under the aegis of imagination, they enter
into a CREATIVE ORCHESTRATION OF THE ENTIRE HUMAN
FUNCTIONING. As life's self-individualization is ultimately nothing
other than the differentiation of orders - a differentiation of the
rationality of life - so the work of the source-experience centers on the
surging of an entirely new phenomenon that occurs within the orbit of
the schema of life: AWARENESS. On the one hand, this is awareness
of functional ties, of functional processions, occurrences, elements and
factors. On the other hand, it is in this awareness, culminating in the
self-awareness of the individual's functioning, that the differentiation of
the Logos of Life, now occurring in an inventive way through the living
being himself, proceeds. Thus, the self-individualizing agent, the living
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being that is man, turns into a self-interpreting being: one who projects
himself the significance of his existence. Through the entirely novel
sphere of the circumambiant situation, which he calls "the world" and
which he himself projects within and above the bounds of Nature, he
himself as the courterpart of his life-world comes to embody the great
spontaneity of the Logos of Life.
IV. The Human Condition and the Three Factors of the Human
Significance of Life
The Human Condition establishes the human living being in a most

particular situation with respect to the total life expanse, the entire
existential schema of living beingness. Simultaneously it gives the
human being a central position - a knot position - with respect to the
spheres within which living being is suspended, and, lastly, it gives to
man a unique responsibility toward all.
FIRST, let us consider human existence with respect to the three
meaning-giving factors that the human condition introduces into the
life-schema through man. Each of them separately and all in cooperation give, in fact, some attributes essential for the establishment of a
uniquely human situation within the schema of life and a novel sphere
of life itself.
Beginning with the aesthetic/poetic sense we see the human experience prompted in psychic acts expanding into all directions that life's
functioning takes. Each psychic act in its fullness draws upon a selection
from all of the vital functions which life carries. It is "receptive" and
assimilates in a proportioned way all the movements of natural forces in
sensing, feeling, hearing, tasting, touching, feeling temperature, etc.,
movements which without this receptivity and assimilation would
remain mute, without the voice which experience endows them with.
Through this receptivity, assimilation, and endowment with a "voice,"
the human condition allows man to participate in the innermost movements of nature's life. Through the specific voice which man utters in
the assimilation of these forces, the movements of these forces, of the
innermost natural life, reverberate in the conscious sphere which
experience causes to emerge. This "conscious" sphere prolongs itself
into a typically human "aesthetic" sphere of life. In fact, the essential
function of the poetic/aesthetic sense is not only to draw all the life
movements into the orbit of psychic experience, but reaching in its elan
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far beyond the borderline of the natural reservoir of life and prompted
by the stirrings of imaginatio creatrix, to endow them with significance
that also goes beyond the threshold of the performance of life-preserving functions. In the movements of the wind man not only experiences
the life of the natural sphere and may see in it the presage of a tempest
or of a change of weather but also feels drawn, without his thinking of
it, into the aesthetic expanse of the movement of the celestial spheres,
which provides a pause in everyday sorrows in a dreamlike repose.
Thus, through the poetic sense the human condition makes the human
living being not only partake in a mute fashion in the process of
universal life, but makes man's participation in it full through a conscious receptivity and with a voice that reverberates throughout his
entire frame. Lastly, it prolongs this sphere of the natural life into
all of the spheres which man himself creates by bringing it in full,
and enlarged a thousand-fold, through the aesthetic expansion of
experience.
SECOND, there is the intelligible sense, of which the main instrument is the human intellect and which is particularly employed in the
construction of the, entirely new in the living universe, sphere of
objectivity. As already pointed out above, the intellect, as the architect
of this marvelous edifice, uses the intelligible sense in finding meaningful complexes in all of natural life's functions as a base for constructing
marvelous avenues of life and inventing projects for life's unlimited
expansion. And so it turns the primitive natural groundwork of the
otherwise blind, mute movements of nature into the stupendous
dwelling of an objective life-world - objective because it stands in front
of us and brings everything in front of us to behold, to test, to appreciate, to work upon, to enjoy, to transform to our wish in order that we
may fashion ourselves and be transformed, and, not least, to find
appropriate. We dwell and grow within the objective universe assuming
it to be our birthright instead of realizing its miraculous appearance
within the play of natural forces which instead of being expanded in
objectivity are rather consumed in the game of life.
But through the use of intellect which measures, observes, judges,
and establishes proportions, we human beings come also to have a
distance from the rest of living beings, from our surroundings, and from
others, as well as from ourselves. We may envisage all mirrored in our
experience, and through our knowledge thus obtained - knowledge
going beyond the receptivity of the sense that we objectively frame
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toward various levels of observation and the construction/constitution

of objectivities, higher objects, and ideas, etc. - realize the situations of
others living beings on earth, the trends of life, and the positive and
negative conditions for their growth. In short, due to the intellect with
the intelligible sense at work, we may bring everything that surrounds
us and relates to our human condition within the unity-of-everythingthere-is-alive (which keeps us at the center of all the life forces and
processes) into an intelligible form, and then, as from a gazebo, we may
view the entire expanse of life.
Indeed, through the intelligible sense the human condition brings us
into a double centrality with respect to the schema of life: it is not only
that we tie the knot of its processes, but we may from within, and as if
impartially, encompass in a glance the whole of life. We may in this
way, first, gain all the necessary insights for our further progress,
avoiding the obstacles and the dangers, and inventing means to use the
opportunities and the forces at our hand. But, second, this extraordinary position which the human condition offers us gives us also a
uniquely human role to assume. With this we pass to the function of the
moral sense.
THIRD, the moral sense is another unique factor which surges as a
virtuality of the human condition and is operative particularly in the
emergence and expansion of the specifically human sphere of existence.
While the intelligible sense installs the "objectifying" axis of this sphere,
the moral sense brings in the "subjectifying" axis of the specifically
human significance through which the human being expands within his
self-projected orbit.
Indeed, it is through the moral sense that there is introduced into the
otherwise "neutral" but self-centered (driven by egotistic survival
interests) individual line of behavior, which is purely "utilitarian" and
empirically pragmatic, the Sentiment of Benevolence toward other
living creatures, toward oneself, and toward life in general. The
benevolent sentiment introduced into the living arena a new and
unprecedented system of appreciation, that of moral valuation. With it
the objective neutrality of self-interest finds a balancing counterpart in
the acting agent's subjective attitude toward the other man, the other
living being, in which not only one's own but also his vital interest are
considered. Valuation under the promptings of the benevolent sentiment takes in an entirely new sphere of the objective universe: the
societal sphere in which the participants take into consideration each
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others' interests, inclinations, attitudes, and feelings about things. Now

objective neutrality is balanced by subjective concern for the Other.
Given this concern the benevolent sentiment will in principle be able to
calibrate the balance for the benefit of the other against one's own
interests so that he may receive his due according to his own merits.
Extending this valuation, subjective concern for the Other, the measuring of "what everyone is due," beyond strictly individual situations, we
reach to establish societal organizations and institutions of justice in the
name of the interests of the group as opposed to those of the individual,
and international laws which regulate the balance of interests among
nations, etc.
Simultaneously, it is also the moral sense - concern for our own
interests which has the capacity to see those of other living beings that allows man to estimate the life-situation within the living kingdom
as well as his own. Indeed, with the human condition being placed deep
in the midst of the unity-of-everything-there-is-alive, the unity which the
moral sense has contributed to the recognition of man is brought to
recognize the interdependencies in existential ties and conditions
among all living beingness: animals, birds, fish, plants, trees, etc. In
tandem with the estimating, proportioning, weighing, measuring, and
planning work of the intelligible sense which penetrates in this fashion
all of the spheres of life, the moral sense with its concern, its meaning
well, its recognizing of every living beingness' appropriate due and of its
right to live and exist estimates the status quo of life, its dangers and its
causes, and prompts us to action to redress wrongs and avoid perils. In
short, the moral sense makes the human being CUSTODIAN OF
EVERYTHING THERE IS ALIVE.
CONCLUSION
With the recognition of the central place of the human condition within
the unity-of-everything-there-alive (which allows us to enter into the
very workings of living natures) as well as of the unique prerogative of
the creative factor (which allows us to interfere inventively in those
workings), we may now see why, as a philosopher, Kant could have
asked the philosopher the questions: what am I, what can I do, and
what may I hope for.
The Phenomenology of Life gives to these questions an answer.
THE HUMAN CONDITION
303
NOTE
1 Cf. by the present author, "Tractatus Brevis The First Principles of the Metaphysics
of Life: Charting the Human Condition," Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXI. For a full
grounding of the human condition within the unity-of-everything-there-is-alive, see
A-T. Tymieniecka, Logos and Life Book I, The Creative Experience and the Critique of
Reason (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988).
RICARDO PINILLA BURGOS
TOWARD AN OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY: DEVELOPING

MERLEAU-PONTY'S PHENOMENOLOGY
A PRELIMINARY REMARK
This essay is offered as a contribution to the effort to make phenomenology not only a descriptive, but also a critical project. It follows the
conceptions of Husserl's spirit previously developed by B. Waldenfels
(Cf. Der Spielraum des Verhaltens, Frankfurt a.M., 1980, and In den
Netzen der Lebenswelt, Frankfurt a.M., 1985) and J. San Martin (Cf. "La
fenomenologia de Husserl como utopia de la razon." Anthropos, Madrid,
1987, pp. 134f). Merleau-Ponty can be a very important guide in this task.
1. A TOTALIZING TASK: TO EXIST
We confront a temporal discourse, one open at both ends. We confront

evidence that at one time appear dark: we will call it world. Certain
evidence will empathize profoundly with our situation; I will call it "the
other" (alter ego). A task globalized everything: we exist. I am existing.
We will call ourselves men. Is everything solved? Not really.
Who are we? Do I have anything to do with them? The temporal
discourse does not forgive, and the limit question arises, the drop that
overflows the glass: What are we doing here? (This is the damned quest
for meaning).
Up until now we have accepted all kinds of evidence. I am a man
that exists and that asks himself who and what he is. It seems as though
being whatever we are, we have the skill - or the flaw - to judge the
evidence of our existence from the moment in which it simulates - or
tends to simulate - the atemporal. It is this moment that we will call
reflection or thinking, and that way of going back over the evidence and
of critically relating to it to things - we will call "being conscious," to
be conscious of things. "How would you manage to find that whose
nature you absolutely ignore? Which among the things that you do not
know would you decide to search for?" (Meno, 80d)1
It had to be old Plato who brought our wondering to halt before it
dissipated into the emptiness of mere nominalism. What have we done
305
A -T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXv, 305-315.
306
up to now but to call that situation, totalizing, dark, dispersing and, at

the same time created as we call it - again words - "to exist"?
We set out with evidence which is itself indefinite. We start from
total infiniteness. Pretentious, then, seems the question which usually
imposes itself as the starting point for anthropology - or philosophizing about man - What is man? We find ourselves, inevitably, existing,
but can we control that existence? Can we submit it to divisions?
II. THE PROBLEMS OF ASKING ABOUT OURSELVES
In the previous section we tried to give a personal outline of what

Merleau-Ponty calls "Point Zero," the discovery of which he locates in
Kant?
Being faithful to our itinerary, we should, as of now, find unapproachable the question of man and his meaning. We will even see with
a certain fear how the same question applies to ourselves and to my I.
Let us see the implications of the anthropological question, and let us
find a point of departure which will make this question licit or illicit.
a) The question of man - implies integrating my I into a species,
into a concept.
Objection to a) Who am I? Without a previous meditation on my I
and its existence, it is dangerous to talk about "man."
b) The question of the I - implies a differentiation of the I and and
the not I.
Objection to b) Can we talk about a delimitation of the I? We finally
detect the implicit distinction that philosophy presupposes as being
evident and upon which it has constructed its man, its world, and its
reality: we are referring to the Subject-Object distinction.
How could we speak of subjective reality and exterior objective
reality if we accept the question of - and therefore ignorance of - our
being, of our identity?
We speak of the world as being something objective (this is the
philosophical ontology of Nature) but which world? The one which the
subject perceives and lives in. Having in mind the phenomenological
reduction, we will talk about the "life-world."
We speak of the subject (Anthropology). But every observation and
reflection about ourselves implies an observation, and auto-objectivation of the I subject as an I object upon which I subject reflects. Our
question complicates the whole sphere of the subjective since this
TOWARD AN OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY
307
question involves an observation. At the same time, it indirectly speaks

of the objective, of the world through negation, since, when I set limits
to my I, I indirectly set limits to my not-I. Merleau-Ponty complicates
even more this chaos when he discloses to us the body - my body - as
a reality that presents itself objectivated and external to consciousness,
and at the same time as not part of the world of the other (alter-ego). It
is my I, yet at the same time presents itself to myself as something
objective, something in between the in-itself and the for-itself. At this
point we pick up the thread of the concept of ambiguity which is
fundamental to the whole work of Merleau-Ponty and, in our opinion,
to real acceptance of the phenomenological reduction and its ultimate
consequences.
III. FROM INDEFINITENESS TO THE ACCEPTANCE OF
AMBIGUITY AS THE "STATE OF THINGS"; MERLEAU-PONTY
a) Preliminary Clarification
Before we go on to study Merleau-Ponty's answers to the problem
which occupies us here, we are impelled to clarify which "problem" it is
that we are worried about and how our winding itinerary has bumped
into the work of this French philosopher. We should make it clear from
the beginning that our contact with Merleau-Ponty's work, just as with
other authors that appear in this study, does not intend to be either
exhaustive or systematic. We will recognize in a certain way the possible
use of authors. Of course we will try to avoid erroneous interpretation, as
far as possible but, instead of just listening to them, we will, better, make
our authors converse with us within the discourse of our questions. In
this way, we can find points of intersection with the problems mentioned,
and at the same time, linger in parts of works that sometimes fall outside
of our itinerary. We therefore do not just study the works but establish a
dialogue with them.
b) Criticism of the Cartesian Subject-Object Distinction

After clarifying these questions of method, we will discover the point of
convergence between the questions we plan to pose and MerleauPonty's work (mainly The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of
Perception ).
308
First, we had to distrust the distinction between subject and object.

The Cartesian distinction, we think closes too early the problem of
being-in-the-world and forces us to isolate the study of ourselves as
something away from us and even opposed to the study of the world or
even to the study of others (e.g., society).
We also believe that the subject-object distinction can be criticized in
view of the results obtained in discussions that lead us to what we call
the "philosophy of compartments," of enclosures that establish themselves and then bump into each other. In this manner we find the much
encountered problems of man and society (determination and freedom), man and reality (solipsism, conventionalism ...), man and his
history (philosophy of history ...).
All of these polemics proceed from a strict separation behveen
subject and object and tend, for the same reason, to an argument
between two sides, a banal argument that is only an attempt to set out
an ontological hierarchy of three compartments:
EGO - the conscious,
WORLD - the objective,
ALTER-EGO - the social.
We propose, in our own itinerary, to take apart these frontiers, or at
least, to accept the indefiniteness of the us, the me, the others, and
the world. We accept from phenomenology that starting point that is
the "Pure I" 3 but without dogmatizing that the "Pure I" is a closed ready
to order compartment. We start out from something even prior to the
unknown, we set out from that zero point which we have already described as a totalizing task and which we relate to existing (of whom,
what for ... everything there is to find out).
Let us go back to Section I of this essay: there is lived evidence and the
evidence of a living subject, there is also external empathy (the others)
but at the same time, this evidence is obscure, its outlines are blurry: we
choose indefiniteness.
But how can we enclose the limits of the ego, the world, and the alter
ego starting within the limits of indefiniteness? We will not propose a
philosophy of separate entities that would lead us into split thinking in
which different branches compete to totalize my existence; psychology,
society, history, biology, etc. We will propose a philosophy of relations
in which the possible I, the subject other, and the perceived world will
serve as open foresights, ready at every moment for a Copernican turn.
309
Problems? Of course there are, because we are not planning a stable

structure but a flight over the unstable, over that which lives. But it is
our belief that such a flight will spare us the exhausting and vain arguments between compartments and will allow us to see a certain possibility to giving coherence and meaning to our existing.
c) Encounter with Merleau-Ponty

From this philosophy of relations we arrive at Merleau-Ponty's work.
Perhaps, he is one of those who most accepted the real consequences of
the method proposed by Husserl. This is not the place to demonstrate
loyalty to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology; but we want to state that
his philosophic attitude is something really exploratory and not an
attempt to implement the truth. His going back to things and to existing
without ready-made taxonomies, at the same time that he kept up a
critical dialogue - never superficial - with the facts proffered by the
other sciences of man (psychology, physiology, etc.) is, we think,
something to take into account when meditating about ourselves and
our being-in-the-world.
From our point of view we have already laid out a philosophy of
relations that would leave both the subject and the object open. Arias
Munoz 4 in his study of Merleau-Ponty summarized his investigation in
two questions which serve to open to Merleau-Ponty's book The
Structure of Behavior: Is it possible to establish a relationship between
consciousness and nature? How can this be done? Truly, Merleau-Ponty's work is more than simply significative in relation to the problem already set out. While carrying out a philosophical investigation which
has the consciousness-nature relationship at its center, the author develops an open position and a dynamic which reject the dogmatisms of
both materialism and intellectualism. It is from this point of view that
we understand the term "ambiguity" with which the philosophy of
Merleau-Ponty has been described.
It should be clarified that we understand this to be the ambiguity of
philosophy and of man's reality. It is not a philosophy of ambiguity which would mean using this ambiguity as a method. As Merleau-Ponty
points out in a dialogue from La connaissance de l'homme au XXe
siecle:
When I speak of ambiguity, I do not mean a shaky thought. ... I seek to discourse on a
310
thought which distinguishes different relationships among things, an interior movement

which makes them participate in contraries. 5
Based on this statement we propose the possibility of a phenomenological reflection which could avoid any thematization and prior taxonomy.
But this is not a methodological proposition in the Cartesian sense of
the word. We do not propose it as a hypothesis to work on and for
finding new roads, but as a confirmation of the radical evidence of our
existence as a being-in-the-world, and an existing living dialectic with this
obscure evidence. Thus, relationship with the world becomes intimate
and unavoidable; we should then avoid the unhappy separations we
make and try to understand each other from that relationship. Otherwise, we will only falsify or limit the definition of my I and of Man.
Perhaps Ortega y Gasset's concept of life could help us clarify our
itinerary.6
IV. THE OVERCOMING OF PSYCHOLOGISM. THE OBJECTIVE
FAIRNESS OF OUR EXPERIENCE AS EXISITING PERSONS
It seems as if our way of understanding the phenomenological reduc-
tion could lead us into a psychological solipsism which would constantly subjectivize and deform reality. Nothing is further from what is
intended. What is that which we call "reality" but lived reality? Also, it
is unnecessary to speak of subjectivization when the frontiers between
subject and object have lost their clarity and distinction.
It would be completely erroneous to speak of psychologism in the
work of Merleau-Ponty. It is precisely the psychological criticism of
behaviorism and its concept of reflex 7 and a critical dialogue with
Gestalt psychology8 that takes up most of his work, The Structure of
Behavior. He covers fields common to psychology, behavior and
perception, but does not consider the facts of them to be attitudes of
the subject. His job is more profound since he claims behavior, action,
perception, and even thinking, "perception consciousness"9 to be licit
forms of being-in-reality. They are already "licit" without being previously objectivized or "made into things."
Merleau-Ponty proposes, with the honesty of a real thinker, a pure
phenomenology of being-here as a necessary preliminary for any
philosophy of the I and the not-I. This is not a going back to the
Cartesian cogito in any of its meanings, or even a psychological
311
solipsism in which our existence is condemned to the distortion in

which an insignificant I is set over against an unknown reality which
also determines us without our control. This is not though a going back
to the cogito as a restorer of the thinking I as the absolute evidence, a
move which would take us almost to the identification of the I with the
God of Spinoza (a cogito which thinks out himself).
V. WHAT IS LEFT: A WHOLE REALITY TO GIVE MEANING
a) Merleau-Ponty Gets to Language: the Symbolic forms
The interaction between consciousness and nature reveals itself through

what Merleau-Ponty will call "FORMS" OR "STRUCTURES OF
BEHAVIOR."!O We have managed - we think - to explain more or
less clearly our initial worries about opening the frontiers of communication - therefore, clearing the way for ambiguity - between objective
and subjective perception.
What is left? If talking about ourselves brings us to talking about
everything that is real as long as we live it, are we not then seized by
"the stagnation of indefinition"?
Do we see the end of our discourse in a tragic way? Maybe it is
weird for us to see ourselves as something with limits, and at the same
time as being completely real. We will go back to the beginning: we
exist and we are real. Learning from the excellent Merleau-Pontyean
investigations, we suggest coming back to ourselves without the bias of
subjectivism, and without thinking that by doing so we can turn our
backs on reality. Merleau-Ponty overcomes the ontological dualism of
existentialism. We are not a for itself, but we live on an in itself (our
body). Overcoming even Husserl's "pure I," the French philosopher
presents the "I can"!! in the sense of a subject placed in reality; or even
more, a real subject who transcends on contact with the no-subject.
We have managed to obtain some unity. We are a spatio-temporal
situation erected as a subject. With this autonomy, in the midst of the
superior flow which is real being, we understand the emergence of
conscious being, the capacity to abjure from that "totalizing-task"
(remember Scheler's ascetic man)!2 and to have a mechanical as well as
insightful relationship to the temporal flow of our existence.
I started this essay by giving names to some of the situations which
constantly face us. We now claim that language is a licit and effective
312
way to give meaning to our situation. It is not mere illusion, it is not a

new invention of reality. In The Structure of Behavior we are already
told of symbolic forms as symbolic structures of behaviorP The
adventure of that possible subject (who, before thinking, is already in
contact with himself and with the world) proves to be as exciting as that
of the explorer who has a whole desert island to explore, to give a name
to, to conquer, and to recreate by his wording, to become oneself on it,
and finally to name it itself and give a name to its existence. Man makes
meaning, but he does not make it up; he does not autistically separate
from the real when he gives meaning to its dark evidence. We claim
that he does not reinvent, because he is part of the reality; he empathically understands the embracing flow of the dialogue's existence with
the temporal discourse. In this sense, we believe that the following
fragment from Merleau-Ponty is more than illustrative of what we are
trying to convey:
To go back to things themselves is to go back to that prior world, to the knowledge of
which knowledge always speaks and in respect to which every determination is abstract,
significative, and dependent, like the geography by which we first learned what a jungle,
a prairie, or river was. 14
b) Foucault's "Open Man. " The Critique of the Cogito
Slowly we are placing man in his world and the world in man. He is
neither foreign to reality (Sartre) nor at the summit of creation. He is
one who enjoys living within the flow established on reality: in this way
we connect with that open man of whom Foucault writes:
Man is a way of being so that on him, an always open dimension is founded, one never
limited once and for all. But man is indefinitely going over from one part of himself
which does not reflect in a cogito, to the act of going through, by which he recovers it
and ... he goes from this pure apprehension ... to the whole silent horizon of that
sandy extension of the never thought. 15
In fact, Foucault claims in many ways the critique of phenomenology
and from Merleau-Ponty 16 the critique of the Cartesian cogito. We

could say that Descartes' investigation recovers its interest in the
confluence of meditation and I, anthropology and epistemology, and
the world, the philosophy of nature. Yet, it was also in Descartes that
we found the origin of the SUbject-object duality which broke the
integrity of existing into epistemological categories. These, although
313
acceptable as moments of life's dynamic, are never acceptable as

different ontological realities.
We reinsert ourselves into the flow of the real, we leave ourselves
opened and localized in the relationship; our reflection tries to abandon
the idea of fixed compartments. Of course this view is uncomfortable.
Both indefiniteness and the obscure enter our existence, and from the
pretended honesty of our reflections we see that that obscurity is an
inherent part of that deluded subject which tried to see clarity and
distinctness. We have solicited re-integration into the world as part of
reality which also makes meaning for itself out of that reality in a valid
way. Man lives in his representation, and the sign - or the signs - with
which he reads the world, is his reciprocal projection of the He and the
Not-He (the world, society) and of the not-he on himself. But, in
exchange for that re-integration-in-reality, we have had to renounce our
stable and static structures, which placed us in a privileged situation,
which, however, conflicted with nature and with all of reality. Maybe it
is that we tried to be more than real. We tried to stop time and space
and to tell the world what it had to be and do. If we accept the
reintegration and the obscuring of the boundaries, we must accept, at
the same time indefiniteness, or even non-cognition, the obscurity of
our existence. 17
VI. PROPOSAL FOR AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE OPEN
MAN-WORLD RELATION
At the end of his book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 18

Heidegger explores the relationships between philosophical anthropology and metaphysics. From its ontological concept of "Dasein" he
arrives at a mediation on the essence of man and on his finitude. We
claim this connection but from a very different perspective.
Any attempt from anthropology - as it has been expounded up till
now - should avoid the isolation of man as a precious stone for study.
The search for the essense of man should not lead us to artificially close
his intimate relation with that which is not man. We also do not speak
of man in the sense of his being a fragment. The man-nature distinction
should be a distinction of the two extremes of the same living dialetic
and never of moments which mayor may not be related.
We propose a re-thinking of man (based principally on MerleauPonty and Foucault's structural contributions), one that forgets pre-
314
cisely that he is a man and concentrates more on how he acts, perceives, and thinks on the world, his I, and his others. Here we set forth
the term the "anthropology of the living man." It may seem obvious,
but, although this expression is very simple, it reclaims certain fundamental aspects of man's life, not of the life of knowledge or of consciousness, but of perceptive, sensitive life - and not necessarily of his
rational placement in the environment (symbolic relationships, aesthetic
experiences, affective feelings ...).
We are only referring to a wider view of man (the overcoming of the
old rational man). We are declaring it impossible to isolate man, the
subject, cognitively. The negative of man as mere consciousness and the
negation of this world and of his knowledge as something objective and
alien to the subject, ontologically separated from the concept of "man,"
are in this view transcended.
Going beyond anthropology, we propose a way of thinking about
ourselves that enters into the study of man's doors (the open man) and
not into his assumed genuine essense. In a certain way, we propose a
rethinking, a meditation on my I and on us from the precognitive
moment in which that subject is not concerned with looking for an
identity, or orientation, and not even with defining itself as a subject;
yet he lives still; he exists. 19
University of Comillas, Madrid
NOTES
I Quoted by Merleau-Ponty in Fenomenologia de la percepcion (Barcelona: 1975), p. 380.
(See Note 2.) Cf. Phenomenologie de la Perception (P.P.) (Paris: 1945), p. 425.
2 "What I reach is a same thing, since every thing on which one can think is a
significance of that thing, and is called precisely perception of the act in which that
significance is revealed to me. It is not Bergson but Kant who gave origin to the idea
that perception of being is the zero point. This follows immediately from this the notion
of consciousness as a universal life wherein every assurance of the object finds its
motives." From M. Merleau-Ponty, La estructura del comportamiento (Buenos Aires:
1957), p. 277. Cf. La structure du comportement (S.c.) 3rd ed. (Paris: 1953), p. 215.
3 "The I seems to be there even necessarily, and this constancy is not, of course, that of
a personal experience (Erlebnis) which stupidly persists .... It belongs to the whole
personal experience which comes and goes in the current .... E. Husserl, Ideen (1913),
57.
4 J. A. Arias Munoz, La antropologia de Merleau-P(mty (Madrid: 1975), p. 9.
5 Quoted in: Ibid., p. 197. (See also Noted 67, pp.197, 198.)
315
(, "Things are not I and I am not things: we are transcendental to each other, but we
both are immanent to the absolute coexistence which is life." - 1. Ortega y Gasset,
Unas lecciones de metafiscia (Madrid: 1974), p. 186.
7 M. Merleau-Ponty, La estructura del comportamiento. op. cit, pp. 27-30, 83ff. (S.C,
pp. 8-39, 55ff.)
H Ibid., pp. 75-80, 94ff., 185ff. (S.C, pp. 48-52, 64ff., 139ff.)
9 Ibid., p. 307ff. (S.C, pp. 240ff.)
10 M. Merleau-Ponty, Fenomenologia de fa perception, op. cit., p. 383ff. (P.P., pp. 428ff.)
II A. del Brio Mateos, "Ambiguedad y reduccion en Merleau-Ponty," in Anafes del
seminario de Metafiscia (Univeridad Complutense), XVIII, 1962 pp. 85-101, p. 88.
12 M. Scheler, El puesto del hombre en ef cosmos (d. Die Stelle des Menschen im Kosmos)
(Buenos Aires: 1982), p. 72. (Man is the being which knows how to say no, the ascetic of
life, the eternal protester against every mere reality.)
IJ M. Merleau-Ponty, La estructura del comportamiento, op. cit., p. 174ff.
14 M. Merleau-Ponty, La phenomenofogie de la perception (Paris: 1945), p. iii, quoted
in the Introduction to his La structure du comportement (Paris: 1942), by A. de
Whaelhens, "Une philosophie de I'ambiguite," XIV.
15 M. Foucault, Las pafabras y las cosas (Les mots et les choses) (Mexico City: 1978),
p.314.
1(, We believe to be a major importance in this regard: M. Merleau-Ponty Fenomenofogia de fa percepcion, op. cit, III, II. In a pure phenomenological essay, the author revises
the concept of subject, highlighting the subject-in-reality; p. 379ff. (P.P., pp. 423-468
("Le cogito").)
17 How can one make man think the way he does, inhabit that which escapes him in
the way of a mute occupation, give life, through a kind of frozen movement, to this
figure of himself which appears under the form of a stubborn exteriority?" - M. Foucault,
op. cit., p. 314.
IH M. Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, (Frankfurt a.M.: 1951), pp. 185ff.
19 "Well this significant life, this certain significance of Nature, and of the History which
is not me, does not block my access to communication with it." M. Merleau-Ponty,
Fenomenologia de la percepcion, op. cit., p. 462. (P.P., pp. 519-520.)
CHRISTER BJURVILL
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE BODY
THE BODY AS PHENOMENON
What is the human body? This is the first question to be asked. To

begin with, one might answer it like this. The human body is the whole
human being from top to toe in the way it appears to us in our immediate experience.
And so it was from the very beginning of time. At that time, the
body was nothing more or other than nakedness and nature. We may,
for example, think of "Ie bon sauvage," the good savage, in Jean Jaques
Rousseau's writings on the "state of nature." This was man before he
was tempted to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and was adapted
to civilization. After that, the image of the body was radically changed:
it was not naked any more.
And, if we take a big step forward in history to for instance ancient
Greece, the cradle of science, then the image of the body changes from
that of a natural phenomenon to that of a cultural phenomenon.
Perhaps, among the first philosophical questions asked by man was this
one: How does the body really look from the inside? How does it
work? In fact, this question was a turning-point in the philosophy of the
body, since in it was embedded a splitting of the human body into
various parts: the inside and the outside, the head and the rest of the
body. Since that time, science has appropriated one part of the body,
the inside, philosophy the mind, and medicine the organism. Since that
time too, art has appropriated the other part of the body, the outside,
and the various kinds of artists, painters, sculptors, poets, dancers,
actors, and so on, have been especially interested in the outside of the
head, that is, in the face and its expressions, and in the outside of the
body, that is, in the limbs and their movements.
Thus, the body has been divided from one whole into four different
"bodies." This has followed from these double dimensions of exteriority-interiority and body-mind. Thus we have got two internal bodies,
the brain and the biological mechanism, and two external bodies, the
perceptual apparatus and the motor apparatus. Specifically these four
317
318
CHRISTER BJURVILL
aspects of the body allows us to see the body as the ambiguous phenomenon that it is; this may be a simplified way of viewing it, but
nevertheless this will be my starting point. The first aspect is a highlighting of the exterior of the head, what strikes our senses and perceptions.
This part of the body has been studied by physiologists and by psychologists especially. The second aspect is a focusing on the inside of
the head, that is, on thought and intellect. This part of the body is
studied by philosophers in the first place and also by cognitive psychologists. Further aspect of this same aspect is the phenomenon of the
soul. Here we move further into the body. To the soul, this most
interior realm of interiority, and to the problem of the soul philosophers of all times have devoted the greatest interest. They have even
tried to localize it to a certain part of the brain, the "glandula pinealis."
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was widely thought
that the soul was situated just here. The third aspect is a view of the
outside of the body, that is, postures, the play of features, gestures, and
motor performances. This aspect interests artists as well as craftsmen
and atheletes, physiotherapists, and all those who we might call practical
people. This particular aspect is the one most neglected by scientists. At
the same time it is perhaps also the most crucial one, and I will come
back to this question later on. The fourth aspect is a focusing on the
inside of the body, that is, the anatomical construction and physiological functioning of the body. This special part of the body has been at
the center of interest for physicians.
There is more to say about this old splitting of the human being.
Nowadays we can see that man, in the era of modern science, has
become even more split and is reduced to either head or body. The
priority given the head in our days is very clear. We see it for instance
in our work places in the division of intellectual and practical work. We
see it in school in the division of theoretical and practical sUbjects.
Theory has much higher status than practice, both socially and economically. Our Western culture, that is, the mainstream Western
culture, values heads much higher than bodies. Look for example, at the
head-hunting industry. For a certainty, the human body is no longer a
totality but is split. The classical human ideal of "mens sana in corpore
sano" once formulated by the Roman poet luvenalis is now remote. In
contrast, the development in philosophy since Descartes has been a
kind of "beheading" of man. At the level of the neck is the demarcation
line that divides man into mind and body, into one upper part and one
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lower, these two parts being separated from each other. This is how I
would describe the image of the body emanating from science. In this
image the body is regarded as an object of research and treatment.
Against that image it should be possible to posit another kind of image,
that of the human body as a living and acting subject, that is, the body
as it appears in front of us and in direct contact with us and as it is
experienced by us without having to be split up. The next question to
answer, then, is this one: What does the natural body look like? How
does it look in its wholeness, that is, in its combination of inside and
outside, higher and lower, in short: the body which is "I"? How to
describe the body as a combination of subject and object, of consciousness and materia, of mind and machine? Philosophy since the
seventeenth century has typically neglected this combination and has
concentrated on the mind. It is not until now in the twentieth century
that we can find a real philosophical interest in the body, meaning, in its
concrete, practical, and existing modes of living. Typical too is the fact
that it is two phenomenologically oriented philosophers who have
contributed to a philosophy of the body. The one is Jean-Paul Sartre, in
his Being and Nothingness. The other is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his
Phenomenology of Perception. In both of these books we find special
chapters dealing with the body, and these two chapters will play an
important role in the following discourse.
My central point here is that it is impossible to grasp the living body
in its existing human being, as a phenomenon being-in-the-world, unless
one faces the complex nature of the combination of body and mind. In
making a claim for this synthesis, physiology alone is not sufficient as a
ground for description and explanation. This because of the fact that
the body is not simply a machine or an apparatus or a robot, and
certainly, most of the body is not anything like such at all. In my
opinion modern philosophy should challenge modern physiology and
try to unite it with modern psychology in a fruitful synthesis. This
attempt would be a challenge because it has to confront a field of
science that is full of taboo. It then confronts the traditional Cartesian
dualism of two incommensurable substances: idea and materia. It then
also confronts the traditional materialism which declares that man, in
body and soul, is just one big machine and that consciousness is just a
"ghost in the machine" as Arthur Koestler puts it in his criticism of
materialism. Mechanicalness, not consciousness, is the Alpha and
Omega of materialism. Instead of this dualism and materialism, one
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might, as a provisory arrangement of the synthesis called for above,

start with a description of the phenomenon of the body in terms of interiority-exteriority, impression-expression, and essence-existence. This
means that a synthesis of the body may be defined with the aid of,
among other things, these three dimensions and may be described as a
combination of these dimensions.
Speaking of the dimensions of exteriority-interiority, 1 cannot here
avoid reference to the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupery and his
book for children (!), The Little Prince. The phenomenon of the body is
articulated in a most pregnant way in the very first pages of this book.
Here Saint-Exupery tells how, as a small boy, he made a drawing of a
boa that had swallowed an elephant. He showed the drawing to the
grown-ups but they understood nothing, or better: they just saw a hat.
They just looked at the outside of the boa and could not even think of
anything inside it. The boy then made a second drawing and this time
he made it very clear that there was an elephant inside the boa. Now
the grown-up reaction to this was anger and they told the boy to stop
this useless game of drawing and to start doing more useful thinks like
geography and history, mathematics and grammar. The essence of the
story is this: It is only with the heart that one can see properly, the most
important things being invisible to the eyes. Children use their hearts,
grown-ups their eyes and that makes the difference of the interpretation
of the drawings. That also is part of the difference between a more
concrete, phenomenological philosophy of the body and a more
abstract, positivistic philosophy of the body.
THE BODY AS KNOWLEDGE
Perhaps the first thing we come to think of when we hear the words
"philosophy of the body" is the difference between the exteriority and
the interiority of the body and also the dominance of the interiority
over the exteriority. This way of thinking goes back to Descartes and
was accentuated by him. To him knowledge was equal to reflection. The
essence of the body was pure philosophical reflection. "Cogito ergo
sum," "I think, therefore I am," was his way of defining man and human
knowledge. For him the body did not matter whatsoever, it was materia,
a substance totally separated from the intellect, a machine without an
idea. The "Cogito" was like a free floating idea. A different definition of
human knowledge was offered by Berkeley. He coined the sentence
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"esse est percipi," that is, what I perceive with my senses I cannot
doubt. Therewith the essence of man was removed from the very
interior of the mind to the exterior of the body, but the "percipi" was
still something placed on top. The body beneath the neck was not
included in this philosophy either.
The image of the body patterned by these two philosophers was
assumed for the following centuries by the philosophers, physiologists,
and psychologists. Without doubt, much of mechanistic physiology and
experimental psychology has been nourished by Cartesian lines of
thought. The body, but not the intellect, was materia, a collection of
atoms functioning totally mechanically. There is no doubting either that
positivistic philosophy and the behavioristic psychology of our day
draws scientific support from here. The body - and why not the
intellect also - is a mechanism. Descartes had declared that the
animals were completely like machines, "une bete machine." He also
declared that most of the human body was like a machine, all of it
except the intellect. The only thing that separated man from animals, he
said, was language and thinking. Thus, it was not going far for somebody to define the rest of the body as materia too. In fact, this was what
happened in the middle of the eighteenth century when the French
physicist and philosopher Julien Offray de LaMettrie wrote a book
titled I'Homme machine and compared the human body, and all its
parts, to a machine. This book influenced many physicists, philosophers,
and authors of the days. LaMettrie's image of the body was that
of a clockwork, a "perpetuum mobile" working by itself by means of
various springs. The soul was here reduced to a central spring of the
clockwork. LaMettrie declared, in contemporary opposition to dualistic
philosophy, that there was just one substance in Universe and that this
substance was materia only. To him, the essence of man was "extension," that is, the action and functioning of the body, mechanicalness.
Man is no more and no less than an animal, a vertical crawling machine, he said.
If, for Descartes, the essence of man was pure intellect and the only
source of knowledge was philosophical reflection, and if, for Berkeley,
the essence of man was pure perception and the only source of knowledge was experience of the senses, for LaMettrie, the essence of man
was the central nervous system and the only source of knowledge was
stimuli of this nervous system from inside and outside, a kind of
continuous stimuli-response reaction. In brief, it can be said first that
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with Descartes and Berkeley, knowledge is concentrated in the human

mind solely and, second, that with LaMettrie, knowledge is concentrated in the body solely. As a physician LaMettrie was of course
primarily interested in how-the-body-works, and this is quite understandable against the background of the rapid development of the
science of medicine, for instance Harvey's finding of the circulation of
the blood and the discovery of the central nervous system. Descartes, in
constrast, had quite another focus on the body. He was primarily
interested in how-the-body-knows. And so we are confronted with two
quite incommensurable notions of the body as an instrument of
knowledge, two opposed epistemologies.
From that time the image of how-the-body-works has been separated
from the image of how-the-body-knows and there has been no question
of trying to combine these two kinds of knowledge. Not until recently
has philosophy attended to a type of knowledge which we may call
body-knowledge and tried to combine it with a type of knowledge we
may call mind-knowledge, that is, to some sort of combinatory epistemology. It was perhaps with the development of phenomenology at the
beginning of our century that philosophy first seriously took the body
as an instrument of knowledge "ad notam." Here I first of all think of
the phenomenological notion of "die Lebenswelt," in which the practical life-world is given a central place and the practical knowledge is
given equality with theoretical knowledge. I also think of Alfred Schutz
and what he designated as "the stock of knowledge at hand," that is, a
kind of practical knowledge which he held should precede theoretical
knowledge and abstract, scientific models of explanation. Finally, I
think of what we may call a "Korperwelt" within the life-world. Aron
Gurwitsch discusses the problems of the life-world from different
aspects and one of these aspects could surely be called a "Ki::irperwelt,"
"body-world."
Close to this kind of body-knowledge is that type of knowledge
Michael Polanyi calls tacit knowing in his book The Tacit Dimension.
Tacit knowing implies an accentuation of the body as a source of
knowledge, it also implies a combination of theoretical and practical
knowledge. He says: "Our body is the ultimate instrument of all our
external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical" (Polanyi, p. 15).
Two central concepts here are "incorporation" and "indwelling." According to Polanyi knowledge is a question of integrating one "proximal" kind of knowing with one "distal" kind of knowing and this
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proximal term is precisely body knowledge. The combination of these

two kinds of knowing makes up what is called tacit knowing. In this
knowing, he says, "we can know more than we can tell." It is easy here
to see a parallel with Saint-Exupery's saying that there is a difference
between knowing-with-the-heart and knowing-by-sight. Tacit knowing
is very close to knowing-with-the-heart. In both cases it is the interiority
of the body that is emphasized.
This kind of tacit knowing has also much to do with an emotional
state of affairs, with some sort of feeling. In our body we may feel that
something is right or wrong. We speak the of some kind of intuition,
some kind of feeling in contrast to knowing. The difference between
feeling and knowing is important here. When we talk about body
knowledge it is precisely the feeling we mean, this emotional experience
and learning: I do not only know that something is right or true, I also
feel it in my body. To Polanyi, "feeling" is the tacit (latent) dimension of
knowledge, that part which is implicit, that which we can know but
cannot tell. "Knowing" is the manifest dimension of knowledge, the
explicit part of it, that which we know and can also tell.
In his book The Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schon takes up lines
of thought close to Polanyi's. He designates knowledge as "know-how"
and so he also emphasizes the body as an instrument of knowledge.
Here the focus is two different types of knowing, one called" knowingin-action" the other "reflection-in action." Knowing-in-action is the
typical knowledge of everyday life, very close to a habit. This is the
external dimension of the body, the automatism. Over against this
knowing, or better, parallel to it, is reflection-in-action, that is, the
internal dimension of the body, consciousness. If we combine these two
types of knowing, we arrive at a kind of practical knowledge close to
the "learning by doing" conceptualized by John Dewey. Let me quote
Schon here: "Learning by doing suggests not only that we can think
about doing but that we can think about doing something while doing
it" (Schon, p. 54). We are given examples of this kind of combinatory
knowledge from practical life and from sports and music, and in all of
these examples Schon accentuates the feeling that is in the performances. For instance, he speaks of the need for a baseball player to find
the "groove," that is, the player must try to find the right combination of
thought and action in one and the same movement. Then, his performance will be marked, on the one side, by reflection-in-action, and, on
the other side, by a skillfullness in exercising the movement, that is, by
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knowing-in-action. The same thing happens when a jazz mUSICian

improvises. He must be ready all the time to adjust his own playing to
that of his fellows in the orchestra. He must feel in what direction the
music is going; he must listen to himself playing and at the same time
listen to the band playing, he must reflect-in-action and be-one-withthe-music in the same way that the baseball player must be-one-withthe-ball.
Both concepts, "learning by doing" and what could be called
"thinking in acting," have to do with the body as an instrument of
knowledge. Both cases concern practical knowledge. In the first case, a
type of knowing is incorporated into thinking. In the second case, a
type of knowing indwells in acting. In both cases it is a question of
combining the exteriority and the interiority of the body.
In contrast to LaMettrie and his concern with how-the-body-works,
the focus is now on how-the-body-knows. In between lies a big difference according to the phenomenon of the body. Both Polanyi and
Schon have made it very clear, I think, that knowledge cannot onesidedly be reduced to a matter of either mind or body but must be
regarded as a matter of both mind and body.
THE BODY AS LANGUAGE
We now pass over to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body. There

we are confronted with a totally new conception of the subject. It is no
longer Descartes' "Cogito" that is the focus of interest but "Ie corps
propre," that is, the living body itself, how-the-body-acts. I quote:
"Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of 'I think that' but of 'I
can'" (Merleau-Ponty, p. 137). This is a philosophy of emotion and
action and, perhaps most of all, a philosophy of the body as an instrument of expression. The need for a combination of mind and body is
here apostrophized in a way that it is hard to find in other places. We
are here far away from traditional physiological and psychological
images of the body as a machine directed by nerve-impulses and stimuli
from outside; positivism and behaviorism have got a very intense
opponent in Merleau-Ponty. To him, the human body is totally innerdirected, directed by the Ego itself, that is, by the subject himself.
The essence of man is here "motility," which means body intentionality, that is to say: the combination of intention and action and
those conscious movements which are a result of this combination. The
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body is a psycho-motor unity, he says. Close to motility is spatiality and

temporality as two horizons of the "Korperwelt." These double horizons
define the territory of motility. Thus, the human being always conceives
the self and the body itself as a relation to the surrounding world in
terms of time and space. This reflection may be described also in terms
of figure and ground. On the one side, you may perceive your own
body, the body in itself, from this perspective. For example, your right
arm may be a figure and the rest of your body a ground when you use
your right arm to do something. On the other side, you may also
perceive you own body as being located in the surrounding world and
then you may perceive the body in its wholeness as a figure and the
wider context around you as its ground. The question is then: What do I
perceive your own body as being located in the surrounding world and
background or do I see the whole just as a figure? What kind of
attention do I pay? Am I just a passive receptor of impressions or am I
an active seeker of impressions? Merleau-Ponty's answer here is very
clear. The human being, he says, is an acting being consciously looking
for impressions and attention is intentionally directed to certain areas
of the perceptual field, selectively excluding other areas. This selection
in figure-ground terms has to do with what is called the body image.
Some people have major problems with separating a figure from a
ground. For instance certain patients with brain injuries find it very
difficult to simultaneously close their eyes and point at a particular
part of their own body; while, in contrast, they find it much easier to
grasp it. The observed difference between pointing and grasping is due
to the difficulties had with separating a figure and a ground in the body
itself. To close one's eyes and, at the same time, point at one's nose, for
example, presupposes that one perceives the pointing hand as figure
and the rest of the body, including the nose, as a ground. The one who
cannot perceive this separation closes his eyes and grasps the nose
because he perceives his whole body as a figure without a background.
These patients lack motility and can therefore handle concrete movement only, such as grasping and keeping. They can not handle more
abstract movements such as pointing and marking. They lack an intact
body image of the body itself and they also lack a certain kind of
selective attention. This makes it hard for them to differentiate two
things from each other at the same time.
We are all sometimes confronted with situations wherein we have to
handle several things at the same time. One example is the "cocktail
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party problem." On a cocktail party you must be able to simultaneously

converse with somebody and attend to other persons passing. Another
example is the "car driver problem"; there you must at the same time
drive the car and talk with passengers. Our ability to perceive and
handle such dual tasks is a clear proof of the combination of body and
mind. Complex movements in complex situations demand, among other
things, that we can divide our attention. This is a very important part of
the body image. Body image involves here, firstly, perception of where
one's own body is situated-in-itself, and this means a designation of
spatial speed and position. But, secondly, the body is also situated-inthe-world, that is, in a further context of time and space, and then we
cannot speak of the body only as something located in certain positions.
Instead we must speak of various situations. Thus, the body image must
include also an interpretation of these situations and an attributing of
meaning to them by means of the body itself.
Merleau-Ponty makes the body image the proof of an existing
linkage of mind and body. He argues like this. If there is no such
connection between body and mind, then any injury in the non-motor
centers of the brain should not interfere with the motor functioning of
the body. And conversely, if there is an injury to the body, for instance,
to an amputated arm, then this should not interfere with the cognitive
functioning of the brain. After having stated these assumptions,
Merleau-Ponty shows with examples how brain-injured patients have
great problems in managing certain movements which they could
handle quite easily before they got injured (ct. the example given
above). And then, a person with an amputated arm may experience a
phantom arm, that is, he may really think that there is a real arm there:
the image of his own body is unchanged despite the fact that the real
body has changed. These examples, Merleau-Ponty says, point to a
psychosomatic connection.
I will now ask: Could we not use other examples from quite different
quarters to prove the same thing? I mean from healthy persons instead
of injured persons. I think here of those situations mentioned before
wherein one has to make use of one's conscious will in combination
with one's technical skill in order to adapt rightly to a complex situation, in the performance of dual tasks or of improvised actions. In these
situations there is very little known in advance and one must act on the
spot. Such complex problem-solving situations could also be proof of
an existing connection of mind and body, in this case a psycho-motor
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connection, presupposing that one actually solved the problem. (Compare this to the earlier mentioned notions of knowing-in-action and
reflection-in-action.)
I now pass over from body image to body language. Here we leave
the body as an instrument of impressions and attend instead to the
body as an instrument of expressions. "Die Korperwelt" is now defined
more in terms of social situations than of spatial positions. Body
language is to a great extent a social phenomenon, a matter of communication without words. Thus, the body attributes a meaning to a
situation with the help of a silent language; as mime is the language of
the face, postures, gestures, and mimicking movements are the language
of the rest of the body. All of these are aspects of how-the-body-acts.
The most striking example of body language are to be found in film,
ballet, theater, pantomime, masquerade, etc. Charlie Chaplin is probably the most well-known artist of silent language, its everlasting
champion. Or take a prima ballerina, she too must master a silent body
language in a perfect way. Generally speaking: In all situations where
people act without using words they use the language of their bodies.
This happens in everyday life, not least in social and sexual situations.
This type of language is very well known.
Beside this, body language is also used to express artistic meaning.
Merleau-Ponty says: "The body is to be compared not to a physical
object, but rather to a work of art" (Merleau-Ponty p. 150). Precisely as
spoken words express something more than just their literal meaning,
so the executed actions express something more than just their pure
physical meaning. A speaking person gives further meaning to his
speech by means of his face, his accent, his emphasis on certain words,
etc. A poem, for instance, is more than the sum of its words, and you
cannot understand it word by word but have to translate it into an
inherent meaning behind the separate words. The same counts for the
body in action. An acting person cannot be apprehended as the sum of
his movements. Quite aside from this, he has also a certain way of
moving, that is, of walking, of standing, of turning and so on, and this
gives a further meaning to the movement "per se." The artistic body,
Merleau-Ponty says, "is a nexus of living meanings, not the function of a
certain number of mutually variable terms" (p. 151).
So, what we have seen is that the body is in the first place not to be
grasped as just motion, or just transportation, or just distance covered
in time and space. For sure, its purpose may be this, the body being
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without doubt a physical phenomenon, but its purpose is most of the

time quite different in nature. As we have seen, we use our body to tell
something, and sometimes we also use our body to tell something in an
artistic way. But when we say so we must be aware of how we use the
words artistry and ability, and art and skill. This question puts the
finger on the body as an instrument of creative actions. I will take three
examples of body performance in order to make these distinctions
clearer. (1) Ballet has a choreography that without doubt has an artistic
meaning. Primarily, it has a story to tell with the aid of moving bodies.
The question here is not at all merely one of having the technical ability
to master the laws of gravity. On the contrary, it is a question of creating
steps and movements that express thoughts and feelings in combination.
If we rightly understand the body language in a ballet, then the dancer
speaks to us with the help of her body. Her body radiates artistry and
intentionality, and in that she expresses a meaning to us. (2) The
bullfight interests us as choreography too - the turns of the bull and the
bullfighter. But compared to ballet, a bullfight tells us a different story
and, above all, almost the same story every time. Still we may feel a
passion for it, like the Spanish "afficionados" or like Ernest Hemmingway
who has told us much of the mystery of the bullfight in his books The
Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon. For sure, the bullfight may
have great symbolic meaning, but I would still say that there is as much
ability as artistry in it. Perhaps also, there is more passion than meaning
in it. (3) My last example will be soccer. Here too we may see a
choreography in terms of the movements of the players and the movement of the ball. But is there a story to tell and, if so, what does it tell
us? Well, of course there is a story to tell and also a meaning that
transcends the pure physical facts. But perhaps it is the same with soccer
as with the bullfight, namely, that there is more passion in it than meaning. What fascinates us in soccer is the individual artistry, like that of
Maradona for instance, but also the teamwork, the collective movement
in an attack, the social phenomenon of a team working together like a
symphony orchestra, the triumph of teamwork. In this example we find
skillfulness in the handling of the ball, but do we find it to be artistic? Is
soccer an artistic phenomenon in the sense in which Merleau-Ponty
speaks of the body as a work of art? Can soccer be compared to poetry
in one way or another? Well, for Italian soccer fans, the so-called
"tifosi," soccer is some sort of poetry without doubt. Even more, to
them soccer is religion. Nota bene: I speak here of true soccer lovers, not
of hooligans as they are called in England or of the "teppisti" in Italy.
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THE BODY AS FREEDOM
Previously we have discussed the phenomenon of the body from the

perspectives of how-it-works, how-it-knows, and how-it-acts. Now I
intend to discuss how-it-exists, that is, the body as being-in-the-world.
This is the existential aspect of the phenomenon of the body, and in this
context it will be natural to refer to both Gabriel Marcel and lean-Paul
Sartre and look at their ideas of the body.
Being-in-the-world means here that you just not have a body but that
you are a body. Marcel has made this distinction clear in his book
Being and Having. He says that I am my body and it is impossible to
separate it into two halves, one being the Ego which I am and the other
being body which I have. I quote: "Can I, with real accuracy, say that
my body is something which I have? ... If I treat it as a thing, what is
this I which so treats it? We end up with the formula: My body is (an
object), I am - nothing" (Marcel p. 170). With this distinction of
having and being, the body is seen as both object and subject. And the
freedom of the body lies just here along the line between two opposite
poles: object-subject. If I make my body into an object, or if I let
someone else make my body into an object, then I have lost my
freedom. And vice versa: if I make my body into a subject, or if
someone else makes my body into a subject, then I have my freedom.
This difference between "make" and "let make" has to do with two
different body concepts: (1) one's own body, and (2) the Other's body. I
can myself make my body into a subject by means of the Other's body.
But I can also let the Other make my body into an object. This in its
turn has to do with my body as a social phenomenon, for thus my body
is always looked upon by other people. I expose my body, and in this
way I let other people know who I am. In this situation I may be
ashamed of my body for how it looks or for what it does. In the first
case I may experience my body as too fat or too thin, as too tall or
too short, or as too clumsy and too slow. In the second case I may
experience the action or the behavior that I execute as something which
is stupid or strange in the eyes of the Other.
Sartre strongly connects one's own body to what he calls the Other's
"look." By exposing my body I lend myself to the Other's look and am
seen by him. In this encounter between two subjects, myself and the
Other, one subject risks being transcended by becoming only an object
in front of the Other. Being-in-the-world means here that the subject
wants to control both its own body and the social situation it embodies.
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The subject also wants to control the Other's body and the social
situation of the Other. The subject wants both to control and transcend
by it. Thus, the body is a being of both transcendence and facticity. It
will at the same time be its own project and make the Other's body into
a project within its own project, into a transcended-transcendence. The
Other's body is then made into an instrument, into a thing, a "this," to
something in-itself. In Sartre's terminology these situations of the body
are desiginated (1) the body for-itself ("pour-soi"), (2) the body forothers (pour-autrui") and (3) the body in-itself ("en-soi"). These
concepts, furthermore, correspond to different ontological modi of
being, that is, being-for-itself, being-for-others, and being-in-itself. The
being-in-the-world of the body is marked by the relations of these three
modi of being. Therefore, I will say a little more about them.
The body in-itself is the body as object and machine and answers to
that image of the body held by LaMettrie. The body for-itself corresponds to Merleau-Ponty's concept of "Ie corps propre" and is the body
as subject and consciousness. Seen in-itself, the body has properties like
necessity, dependency, slavery, passivity, impossibility. Seen for-itself, it
has attributes like independence, freedom, activity, possibility. The
body in-itself can be defined as facticity, as a "this." In contrast, the
body for-itself can be defined as transcendence, as "nothingness" as
Sartre puts it or, as I prefer to put it, as a project.
Sartre, speaking about freedom, postulates that existence precedes
essence. Here existence implies transcendence, that is, the possibility of
emergence and "breaking through." That which is taken for granted has
to be set aside for that which is seen as possible. As regards to the body
this means that the freedom to move and act always is greater than is
presumed: there will always be room to move. It also means, that the
body always encounters a choice between activity and passivity,
between rest and action, and between fight and flight. In these situations
of choice, the body faces the problem of authenticity. The authentic
body is the body for-itself, the naked body, the true body. And the
inauthentic body is the body in-itself, the mechanical body, the machine, the robot, the mask, and the lie. It is a transcended-transcendence. Sartre says: "I am my body to the extent that I am; I am not my
body to the extent that I am not what I am. It is by my nihilation that I
escape it" (Sartre, p. 326). This means that my body exists as two
modes of being, both as being for-itself and being in-itself; furthermore
it means that the body for-itself always implies a negation of the body
331
in-itself. When Sartre separates being from nothingness, this means that
the body has the possibility of being what it is not yet but is also subject
to the necessity of being precisely what it is right now. Interpreted in
this way, "nothingness" means something definitely positive and "being"
means something definitely negative. Also implied is a choice between
two diametrically different modes of existence: to exist as a subject or
to exist as an object. I encounter the Other not as a pure body in the
first place but as incarnated freedom and this will result in a negation of
the Other, that is, a transformation of the Other from a subject into an
object. Making the Other into an object is to make him immanent, to
something in-itself. On the other hand, it is to make myself transcendent,
into a body for-itself. The objectification of the Other makes him into a
being-in-the-midst-of-the-world, his transcendence is transcended, is
out of play. Conversely, I have then made myself into a subject, into a
being-in-the-world, and not in-the-midst-of-the-world like the Other,
that is, not into a thing among many others but into a project of myself.
One may apprehend this existential dialectic, this possibility of transcendence, as a struggle for life and a fight for freedom both in the face
of oneself and in the face of the Other - in the face of oneself by
nihilating the existence of the own body as a "status quo" or something
past, and in the face of the Other by nihilating the existence of his body
as incarnated freedom, that is, of his possibilities for making my body
into a status quo.
These ways of facing freedom may be expressed by the two terms
"acting" and "posing" and may be described in the wider context of
authenticity. Thus, the authentic body acts, the inauthentic body poses.
The posing body negates freedom, the acting body affirms it. The
posing body exists by means of ambiguity, that is, of faking reality. The
body then, seems both present and absent at the same time. It is in fact
both physically present and mentally absent. The ambiguity consists in
its saying one thing and doing another, or in thinking one thing and
saying another. In so doing my body lies to the Other.
We meet the poser in both everday life and in professional life.
People working professionally with the body, for example, the two
extremes of the prostitute and the concert pianist (perhaps the most
striking example of professional posing is the mannequin), have to both
act and pose in their jobs. But, now the question is when and under
what conditions does a voluntary posing becomes an involuntary posing
and in what way does this transition mean a loss of freedom, if it
332
CHRISTER BJURVILL
necessarily means a loss of freedom at all. The problem seems to be

how to determine when someone does not want to pose but is nevertheless forced to do it. A person who is forced to pose instead of act,
let us sayan actor who is directed very forcefully, will probably
experience a loss of freedom. Or take another person who has chosen
on his own to pose more than to act. He might do so in order to get
more freedom. If his work, for example, is made totally mechanical he
then gets time to do quite other things, for instance, to think. Thirdly,
we may also think of a person for whom acting will imperceptibly and
eventually pass over into involuntary posing which sooner or later ends
in boring routine in which freedom is totally lost. I mean that it is just
this boring routine that is the keyword in the phenomenon of posing;
the fear of being trapped in routines concerns all of us in our everyday
life. Getting stuck, feeling the viscosity of daily life ("inertia"), this is the
resistance the body has to fight and overcome, to nihilate to use Sartre's
word. Many times it is just too easy to sell out one's own body for the
sake of convenience, or to bargain over the body for the sake of shortterm profit, or to, quite simply, not give a damn for the body itself and
to just see it as a "this" to be transported here and there. This kind of
giving up on the body, and thereby on existence itself, I will call
pessimistic posing, or, better, paralyzed acting.
Will any type of solution appear for this kind of dangerous pessimism
and loss of freedom? Well, I believe that one way of solving the
problem will be to restate the status of the body and to reshape the
creative force of the image of the body. We then, at least, may feel
some sort of power in the absurd optimism, that is, in an existential
belief which says that even if it looks like we have no chance, we
nevetheless have to take what chance there is, because the alternative is
so nauseating. Just our action in itself will have great value.
This absurd optimism I think may very well go hand in hand with the
concept of freedom formulated by Sartre and with the philosophy of
the body that he developed.
Lund University
REFERENCES
Gurwitsch, A. "Problems of the Life-world." In: Natanson, M. (ed.) Phenomenology and
Social Reality (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), pp. 35-61.
333
Marcel, G. Being and Having (London: Collins, 1949).

Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1962).
Polanyi, M. The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967).
de Saint-Exupery, A. Le petit prince (Paris: Gallimard, 1946).
Sartre, J.-P. Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1981).
Schon, D. The Reflective Practitioner (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
Vartanian, A. LaMettrie's {'Homme machine. A study in the origins of an idea (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1960).
LUIS FLORES
CORPORALIDAD
I. ENFOQUE FENOMENOLOGICO DEL CUERPO
Por "enfoque fenomenologico" entendemos nuestra interpretacion y

adaptacion personales del metodo fenomenologico, tal como ha sido
concebido y practicado por Husserl y los fenomenologos posteriores.
Una fenomenologia del cuerpo supone no considerar este como una
cosa entre las cosas 0 como un hecho, sino como un fenomeno.
"Fenomeno" significa aquf 10 que aparece a mi conciencia, es decir, el
modo como un objeto se me da.
La intencionalidad es fundamental para una fenomenologfa del
cuerpo: el cuerpo es cuerpo para una conciencia que 10 intenciona con
un sentido. La intencionalidad se despliega en dos direcciones: una,
respecto de este cuerpo estante aquf - el mas inmeadiato a mf -, y
otra, respecto de las relaciones entre este cuerpo y esos cuerpos
estantes ahf 0 aHa. En el primer caso, distingo, en este cuerpo, funciones que varian segun la intencionalidad respectiva. Toda funcion
corporal remite, pues, a una relatividad de la conciencia. "Funcion" no
significa aquf conjunto de propiedades naturales orientadas en un ser
vivo a un fin - v.gr. la funcion del hfgado -, sino el sentido intencional
con el cual es vivido este cuerpo. En el segundo caso, distinguimos
varias perspectivas que tienen como punto de referencia, ya ese cuerpo,
ya este cuerpo.
Desde un enfoque fenomenologico, hay que poner entre parentesis
toda doctrina filosofica acerca del cuerpo (salvo correspondencias
establecidas a posteriori): esto es la reduccion filosofica. La fenomenologfa ha de ser mas bien una practica, inspirada en la tradicion de los
fenomenologos, que una aplicacion de la doctrina de Husserl, la cual se
convierte, como diria Wittgenstein, en una escalera que hay que
abandonar. Debemos excluir a fortiori las teorfas cientfficas del cuerpo
y, por ende, las taxonomfas cientfficas de los cuerpos - v.gr. aqueHa
que los clasifica en minerales, vegetales, animales, humanos -. En
suma, no sabemos aun que es este cuerpo.
Finalmente, para que nuestra descripcion se ajuste a la esencia del
335
336
LUIS FLORES
fenomeno y no a aspectos casuales 0 arbitrarios - es decir, conforme a

la reduccion eidetica -, debemos recurrir al metoda de la variacion
imaginaria. Puedo describir una graduacion en la funcion 0 tambien
una hiper-o una hipofuncion, mas no puedo imaginar este cuerpo sin
las funciones mediante las cuales 10 constituyo, y, por eso, estas son
esenciales.
II. LA TETRAFUNCIONALIDAD DE
LA CORPORALIDAD
En primer lugar, intenciono este cuerpo como funcion fisica. Como tal
tiene extension, peso y color, yes, por ende, mensurable (antropometria). Seglin el nivel de organizacion, es el cuerpo-tumba, la "maquina
del cuerpo", 0 el mero monton de vfsceras y huesos (el cadaver).
En segundo lugar, intenciono este cuerpo como cuerpo vivo, como
organismo con funciones vitales: muevo esta mano, este corazon late,
este cuerpo respira, este cuerpo es sexuado. Pero min es extraiio a mi.
En tercer lugar, intenciono este cuerpo como cuerpo vivido, como
mi cuerpo, que yo muevo, sobre el cual ejerzo mi poder aquf y ahora.
Aparece mi corporalidad, esto es, mi cuerpo animado por mf 0 mi
psiquis corporificada por mt. No hay entonces un agregado de alma y
cuerpo, que hayan sido concebidos como substancias separadas, ni
mucho menos como una coleccion de "presas". Mi corporalidad no es
este cuerpo vivo que es ademas vivido, sino que este cuerpo vivo es mi
corporalidad desvivida. Es la sedimentacion silenciosa de mi historia, es
el unico diario de vida que no puede ser secreto. Vease la corporalidad
del ex-boxeador u, otrora, la del esclavo. Es perspectiva encarnada,
desde la cual vivo unitariamente el mundo.
Respondo a la pregunta "lcomo estas?" con la respuesta "jaquf
estoy!". Este "aqui" no es el lugar geometrico, ni el lugar fisico colleccion de puntos-masa -, los cuales son abstracciones de mi lugar
de corporalidad. Si digo que estoy alicaido 0 que me siento aplastado,
estos no son enunciados de propiedades mensurables en kilos; tampoco
son meros enunciados psicologicos; son, ante todo, enunciados respecto
de mi lugar de corporalidad. "No me hallo" y "No se donde estoy
parado" no son enunciados de incertidumbre geogrcifica. Y mi corporalidad es tempo, irreductible a cronometria. Mi corporalidad posee
limites a priori, que Ie dan una configuracion espacial unica y una
finitud temporal propia de corporalidad naciente, y de corporalidad
CORPORALIDAD
337
muriente. Pero no posee Ifmites empiricos determinados, pues mis

fronteras son modificables; por ejemplo, por cirugfa. Estoy, pues,
siempre confinado, pero sin saber hasta donde y hasta cmindo. La
identificacion personal por apodos radica en esta corporalidad, a
diferencia de los nombres de pila, los pasaportes y las cedulas de
identidad.
Hay un fenomeno original de pegajosidad 0 de impregnacion
intencionales entre corporalidad y mundo. Mi corporalidad no se acaba
en mi piel, pues se proyecta intencionalmente al mundo. Mi entorno se
hace as! disponible, a la mana: corporable, e incluso incorporable. El
asa de la taza convoca mi mano, incluso la llamo "oreja". El mundo, en
cuanto vivido desde mi corporalidad, se convierte en mi mundo. El
antropomorfismo es un fenomeno mas profundo y menos casual de 10
que se cree. Desde mi corporalidad, el mundo ya no es extraiio simple objeto de metria - y se hace entraiio: es el terruiio 0 la
querencia y no la mera tierra, es el hogar y no la mera casa, es el lecho
y no la mera cama, es el vino conversado y no la mera bebida, es el
barrio y no la mera comuna. La impregnacion alcanza las ropas y los
objetos circundantes: aparecen los "recuerdos" (souvenirs). En la
emigracion y el destierro (exilio), la nostalgia (que significa etimologicamente "dolor por regresar a la patria" y equivale al "mal du pays" de
los franceses) radica en una corporalidad desarraigada, decontextualizada.
En este estrato intencional de mi corporalidad, intenciono esta como
red de funciones especfficas. Este complejo funcional es mi estrategia
mas arcaica en el mundo. La alteracion de este estilo primordial nos
cambia de "mundo" y se expresa en patologias corporales.
Distinguimos las siguientes funciones de mi corporalidad: (a) la
funcion pragmatica, (b) la funcion cognoscitiva, (c) la funcion estetica,
(d) la funcion sintomatica. Cada corporalidad tiene su mapa de relevancias 0 de predominancias funcionales. Denominamos "corporema" a la
unidad minima distinguible en la corporalidad. Los corporemas son
unidades de sentido pragmatico, cognoscitivo, estetico 0 sintomatico. El
sentido global de la corporalidad es una combinacion, con predominancia, de estos corporemas.
En la funcion pragmatica, intenciono mi corporalidad como accion
(pragma) transformadora del mundo. Desde esta funcion, esquivo un
obstaculo, aro la tierra, estrujo un limon, hago una incision quinirgica,
apago la luz. Sin embargo, distingo entre arrojarme al rio para socorrer
338
LUIS FLORES
a alguien que se ahoga (praxis) y pintar (poiesis). Por 10 tanto, la

corporalidad como acci6n puede ser intencionada, ya como accion
normable (funcion deontica), ya como fabricacion (funcion poietica del
homo faber). En el primer caso, la nocion mas primitiva de etica surge
ligada al permiso 0 a la prohibicion corporales existentes en este
ambito: por ejemplo, el nHio que esta rayando una pared y cuya mana
es retirada por los padres. En el segundo caso, la no cion mas originaria
de tecnica surge ligada a los primeros quehaceres de nuestra corporalidad. En la fase reflexiva de la corporalidad como accion, la
corporalidad se vuelca sobre sf misma: activo mi pierna dormida con
mi mano, 0 bien modelo mi cuerpo con la gimnasia correctiva. Desde la
funcion pragmatica, aparece tambien la corporalidad como objeto de
relaciones de poder: la corporalidad vejada, humillada, prohibida. En
los casos lfmites de la tortura y del terrorismo, no es casual que se
impersonalice la corporalidad de la victima, que se Ie reduzca al cuerpo
de un animal (lenguaje zoologico) 0 a la entidad de una cosa; en suma,
que se la intencione como mero cuerpo ffsico 0 vivo. Finalmente, una
de las expresiones eminentes de la corporalidad pragmatica es el
trabajo, respecto del cual la dicotomfa cartesiana de trabajo mental y
manual es falsa.
En la funcion cognoscitiva, vivo mi corporalidad como conocimiento.
Es mi corporalidad como sensibilidad aprehensora, desplegandose
mediante los sentidos. Exploro el mundo visible, tangible, audible,
gustativo, olfativo. El mundo se me aparece "a flor de piel". Mi corporalidad se focaliza 0 se identifica con aquella sensibilidad concreta,
desde la cual aprehendo mi mundo: es el sentido implfcito de expresiones como "comerse con los ojos" a una persona, 0 "ser todo oidos"
respecto de alguien que nos habla, 0 "tener los pies bien puestos sobre
la tierra". En una fase poietica, construyo instrumentos para expandir
mi sensibilidad: ya sea aplicados a mi cuerpo (anteojos), 0 bien mas
externos a el (el telescopio, el microscopio; etc.). En la fase reflexiva, mi
cuerpo se hace sensible desde mi corporalidad: siento cenestesicamente
mi taquicardia, palpo mi frente caliente en un estado febril.
El tacto es la funcion cognoscitiva mas originaria. Por eso, es
necesario elaborar una fenomenologia del tacto, que supere una
tendencia de la filosofia occidental a interpretar el mundo segun el
paradigma visual: eidos, nous, noema, teona, teorema, intuicion, etc.
Preferimos decir "tactilidad" en vez de tacto, pues la tactilidad sup one
la corporalidad; en cambio, el tacto supone el cuerpo-maquina 0 el
CORPORALIDAD
339
cuerpo vivo, en cuanto se estudian con un modelo de localizacion

neuronal con input y output - consideracion, par 10 demas, legitima
y necesaria -. La tactilidad nos entrega el sentido mas b:isico de la
realidad. Si hacemos dudar de la existencia de una flor a un nino, acaba
por asirla. La tactilidad condiciona los diversos estratos que se superponen a ella en la sensibilidad de la corporalidad, como asimismo la
aprehension de la psiquis propia 0 ajena. Hablamos de una mirada fria
o dura. Describimos al otro como pelmazo, pegote 0 pesado. Nos
referimos a su conducta fria, dura, calida, seca, aspera, 0 tierna. Tener
relaciones humanas es contactarse. Tener tacto es tener prudencia.
EI objeto tangible aparece en "escorzo" (Abschattung), se presenta
como aspecto dentro de un horizonte. EI tangente 0 el tocante tiene
ante sf una region tangible, la cual es una trama de objetos tangibles
con horizonte. El mundo tangible es la totalidad de las regiones
tangibles reales y posibles. Los aspectos 0 fenomenos tactiles no son
propiedades del objeto tangible, sino momentos - partes dependientes,
husserlianamente hablando - del campo tactil, es decir, la totalidad de
10 que aparece en el flujo de las sensaciones tactiles. La diferencia
esencial entre la region tangible y el campo tactil es que la primera se
refiere a 10 que esta al lado 0 cerca de este cuerpo fisico y es definido
segun cierta mensura; en cambio, el segundo se refiere a 10 que esta
junto a mi, a 10 "a la mano" desde el punto de vista de mi corporalidad.
Una parte de la region tangible puede estar muy cercana con respecto a
este cuerpo fisico, pero como parte del campo tactil estar muy lejos con
respecto a rni corporalidad: por ejemplo, las manos que estrecho
mecamca y rutinariamente, 0 bien en general los objetos tangibles
irrelevantes para mi. Los momentos del campo tactil - podemos
denorninarlos "tactemas" - se entrecruzan polarmente: frio-caliente,
aspero-suave, seco-humedo, duro-blando, pesado-liviano (barestesia),
movil-inmovil (cinestesia), viscoso-fluido, rugoso-liso, compacto-poroso, las formas detectables en la estereognosia; etc. Por 10 tanto, no es
que haya los conjuntos disjuntos de los objetos duros y de los objetos
blandos, sino que a cad a objeto tangible corresponde una combinacion
unica de tactemas superpuestos.
En la funcion estetica, rni corporalidad es vivid a desde la intencionalidad de la belleza. Entonces afino y predispongo mi corporalidad
segun esta. Si accedemos a una intencionalidad poietica, rni corporalidad es corporalidad de escultor 0 de alfarero, que transforma la piedra
o el barro en obra bella. El mundo deviene paisaje en el horizonte. Si
340
LUIS FLORES
pasamos a la intencionalidad reflexiva, entonces mi corporalidad es

intencionada esteticamente: aparece la corporalidad ideal, la elegancia;
etc.. Desde una intencionalidad reflexiva y poietica, mi corporalidad
estlitica y dinanuca es obra estetica, el poema de una poiesis de correcciones y retoques esteticos. Mi corporalidad deviene adorno: aparece la
danza, el vestuario como adorno, la gimnasia y la cirugia esteticas.
Finalmente, en la funcion sintomatica 0 expresiva, mi corporalidad
es vivida como indicio 0 sintoma de la psiquis (afectos, voliciones,
pensamientos; etc.) 0 del habitat (rural 0 urbano; etc.). Es mi corporalidad como expresion. Lo expresado es potencialmente la totalidad
de 10 psiquico y, allimite, el mundo circundante. Se trata de la diferencia entre rostro (0 facies) y cara, entre mirada y ojos, entre facha y
cuerpo. En el caso del rostro, las unidades minimas expresivas son los
semblantes. El mudar de semblante es transito de expresividad. Otro
concepto expresivo es el de aire, cuando hablamos del aire triste de una
persona. Es interesante notar que en aleman, mudar de semblante se
puede decir "sich verfiirben", es decir, cambiar de color. Y este cambio
de color es intencionado como esencialmente diferente a la mudanza
cromatica de la cara que es ensuciada 0 pintada.
La funcion expresiva posibilita, pues, el universo fisiognomico. Para
el nino, su estancia en el mundo es fundamentalmente fisiognomica. El
rostro materno, paterno, fraterno 0, en general, familiar constituye un
foco decisivo de su intencionalidad. Vease al respecto el papel que
juega la sonrisa. En las primera audiciones, el lenguaje oral es aprehendido en la dimension expresiva del tono. Para el adulto, la funcion
expresiva constituye un basamento de la vida cotidiana: descubro el
rostro triste, el porte alicaido, el bostezo de aburrimiento, la mirada
perdida, en el otro 0 en mi. En ciertas profesiones, se sobredimensiona
esta funcion: el mirno, el actor, el medico en cuanto semiologo; etc. El
tic y el guino pueden corresponder ados niveles distintos de la funcion
sintomatica: un nivel del psicoanalisis del inconsciente y un nivel de
interpretacion cotidiana del guiiio como senal, por ejemplo, de complicidad.
Las cuatro funciones son primitivas, con 10 cual queda abierto el
estudio de las funciones derivadas, como, por ejemplo, la funcion
erotica de la corporalidad, la cual supone las funciones estetica y
expresiva en la dimension de la corporalidad imaginaria, fantaseada.
Veamos las cuatro funciones de mi corporalidad presentes en un
mismo momenta de esta: mi mano. Espero una manzana. Tamborileo
CORPORALIDAD
341
impacientemen con mis dedos de la mana (funcion sintomatica). AI

llegar la manzana, la cojo con elegancia (funcion estetica). Me doy
cuenta de la lisura de la cascara (funcion cognoscitiva). Y entonces la
mondo con el cuchillo (funcion pragmatica).
III. PERSPECTIVAS DE NUESTRA INTERCORPORALIDAD
Analizar este cuerpo sin esta intercorporeidad - es decir, las relaciones

entre esos cuerpos y este cuerpo - es una abstraccion. En el estrato de
mi corporalidad, esta es el caso limite de nuestra intercorporalidad. EI
horizonte inmediato de mi corporalidad es el campo de corporalidad, el
cual es finito y designa el espacio de convivencia, donde nos encontramos, donde nos observamos. EI sentido originario de "projimo"
(proximus) como superlativo de "cercano" (propinquus) y "mas cercano" (propiro) radica en este campo de corporlidad. La inmediatez del
projimo es una inmediatez de corporalidad, la cual no se reduce a la
contigiiidad de cuerpos fisicos (apiiiaminento en un Metro), ni a la
rutina de las relaciones de vecindad.
Descubro mi corporalidad en soledad. Mas esta soledad es soledad
de alguien. Este alguien es esa corporalidad ajena como fenomeno,
existente 0 no, respecto de la cual estoy vocado intencionalmente.
Distintas perspectivas intencionales van surgiendo: (a) Ese cuerpo fisico
para mi. (b) Ese cuerpo vivo para mi. (c) Su corporalidad para mi. (d)
Mi corporalidad para e1. (e) Su corporalidad para eI. Describamos,
entonces, estas perspectivas:
1) Es el bulto que pasa. Me desplazo entre marionetas. Ese cuerpo es
escalera para subir al arbol 0 es obstaculo fisico para cruzar la
puerta. Es ese cuerpo fisico para mf.
2) Es ese cuerpo vivo con el cual el entorno cobra densidad. Este se
altera a partir de aque1. Trato de alcanzar ese cuerpo, y me elude,
me esquiva. Es ese cuerpo vivo para mf.
3) Es ese cuerpo que el mueve y cuya mirada se dirige hacia mi y cuya
mana se dispone a saludarme. Es su corporalidad para mi.
4) Torno conciencia de mi corporalidad que es mirada, de mi mana
que sera estrechada. Es mi corporalidad para mf.
5) Supongamos que evito el encuentro porque aparentemente desconozo a ese que viene hacia mi. El otro parece captar mi rechazo en
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LUIS FLORES
mi mirada desviada, en mis brazos eafdos: es mi eorporalidad para

61.
6) Aprehendo esa eorporalidad turbada, indeeisa, que pareee tomar
eoncieneia de sf misma, pensar que se equivoeo de persona, y
eerrarse sobre sf misma: es su eorporalidad para sf.
7) Mas, Ie miro fijamente y reeonozeo a mi amigo. Entonees dispongo
mi eorporalidad para el saluda: es el eneuentro.
La intercorporalidad, la eual es mas que intercorporeidad, se constituye
en este juego de perspectivas. Mi eorporalidad es afeetada ineluetablemente por su insercion en esta totalidad. Es decir, las funeiones que son
esenciales a mi corporalidad son propiamente interfunciones. Ademas,
el reeonoeimiento del euerpo del otro como eorporalidad no es fruto
de un razonamiento por analogfa (la existente entre este cuerpo y ese
cuerpo), sino que es inmediato. Asf, el otro no se eseonde tras un
robot, pues su eorporalidad es egofanfa 0 psieofanfa inmediatas. Sin
embargo, la eorporalidad ajena no es aprehendida adeeuadamente; ella
se eomplaee en ocultarse; jamas puedo vivirla.
Pontificia Universidad Cat6lica de Chile
NOTAS
Esta reflexi6n encuentra su punto de partida en:

a) Flores, Luis; "Fenomenologfa del cuerpo" en Ojeda, Cesar (Comp.), La corporalidad y las perturbaciones psiquicas (Ediciones Universidad Cat6lica de Chile, 1983), pp.
17-31.
(b) Flores, Luis; "La corporalidad (estudio fenomenoI6gico)". Revista de Psiquiatria
Clinica, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Chile, XXII, No.1, 1985, pp. 33-41.
ANTONIO PIERETTI
THE "LEBENSWEL T" AND THE MEANING

OF PHILOSOPHY
Although foreshadowed in the recurring distinction he makes between

logic and experience, between predicative and pre-predicative experience, the expression "Lebenswelt" appears in Husserl only in manuscripts dating from the end of 1925 and the beginning of 1926.
Nevertheless, that was a marginal appearance, without a specific
theoretical relevance. Instead, the term becomes a constant and continuous presence only in manuscripts of the 1930s. Husserl clarified the
nature of the expression "Lebenswelt" and specified its meaning above
all in the years between 1935 and 1937, during which he wrote his last
work, Die Krisis der europiiischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phiinomenologie. 1
In this work he takes into consideration the "Lebenswelt" in relation
to the nature of the sciences; how they first came to have their character
and how profound changes occurred in it at the close of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth, be it under the conceptual
aspect or from a methodological point of view. Moreover, the "Lebenswelt" is examined in connection with the European cultural and historical reality, which was greatly influenced the upheaval which took place
in the world of science.
The result of this is a reflection on the "Lebenswelt," which, besides
enlightening its role with respect to the meaning and value of science,
proposes a critical contemplation of knowledge in general, in view of a
definite foundation. But, more than a retrospective historical reconstruction of the different forms attributed to knowledge, Husserl offers
a kind of genetic analysis of them, through which we are shown how
their conditions have arisen or rather what made them possible.
Therefore, starting from a reducing decomposition of the principal
modalities in which knowledge has been manifested from the beginning
of the modem age, he clarifies the sense in which certain processes
have developed and given rise to their constitution. Thus, the main
point, the teleological objective that is hidden in each and every one of
these forms, is fully illustrated.
By means of this genetic analysis, knowledge finds its nature as an
343
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ANTONIO PIERETTI
activity which justifies its own formation and real historical development restored. Thus, it is revealed as a constitutive rational activity.
On the other hand, philosophy, with its genetic analysis, inscribes
knowledge in an order of considerations of a transcendental mode;
thus, it becomes a science that assures knowledge an absolutely definite
foundation, even if it has to be forever renewed. As such, philosophy is
equivalent to self-knowledge which is the ultimate aspiration of knowledge. It incarnates "die ratio in der standigen Bewegung der Selbsterhellung."2 In philosophy one finds the expression of self-comprehension
through which man, being rational, realizes that he is called to "live in a
apodictic world."3
1. THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN SCIENCE AS THE CRISIS
OF REASON
In the last years of the past century, according to Husserl, a profound

upheaval came about in the world of science. This phenomenon is not a
matter of the capacity of knowledge nor of scientific methods, since
both of these factors can still guarantee the maximum certainty of the
results obtained and the maximum rigor of the procedures of scientific
discoveries for human existence and their importance today. Rather,
it is that science, transforming itself into factual science, will admit
as valid and real only what is objectively proven and empirically
ascertainable.
This criterion, which had been initially applied to the sciences of the
nature (NaturwissentschaJten), was progressively extended to the socalled sciences of the spirit (GeisteswissenschaJten). Therefore, the latter
too, although they deal with man's improvising his real needs and ideal
aspirations, require that the researcher avoid entirely valuation
of "aIle Fragen nach Vernunft and Unvernunft des thematischen
Menschentums und seiner Kulturgebilde."4
The so-called sciences of the spirit comporting themselves in a way
analogous to science, now stand in contrast to history. In conformity
with its new principles, the sciences of the spirit maintain in fact, that
history "nichts wei teres zu lehren hat, als daB aIle Gestalten der
geistigen Welt, aIle den Menschen jeweils haltgebenden Lebensbindungen, Ideale, Normen wie fliichtige Wellen sich bilden und wieder
auflosen, daB es so immer war und sein wird, daB immer wieder
Vernunft zum Unsinn, Wohltat zur Plage werden muB."5
"LEBENSWEL T" AND THE MEANING OF PHILOSOPHY
345
But if science is conceived of in this way, Husserl observes, the

principle problems of human existence concerning sense and non-sense
are excluded. Thus, they do not refer to mankind in general, which
must choose its own way of life and mold itself rationally within its
surrounding world. There are no considerations of man as a person,
that is, as a free subject, responsible for his own actions. Since only the
facts are dealt with, science makes an abstraction out of any kind of
personal identity and out of any subject.
Therefore, the upheaval that came about at the end of the last
century brought to light the limits of science and re-evaluated its
meaning for human existence. But the crisis of faith in science, according to Husserl, derives from more remote origins plunging to its roots
of the crisis, he implicates philosophy at the beginning of the modern
age.
"Ein bestimmtes Ideal einer universalen Philosophie und einer
dazugehorigen Methode macht den Anfang, sozusagen als Urstiftung
der philosophischen Neuzeit und aller ihrer Entwicklungsreihen."6 But
this ideal, instead of verifying itself, fell into dissolution. By considering
nature in mathematical terms, as did Galileo and Descartes, so began
"the superposition of idealized nature upon intuitive, pre-scientific
nature."
In this way science, which was previously a branch of philosophy,
became cut off from the trunk and thus attained autonomy. It had
been accepted "fiir wahres Sein was eine Methode ist - dazu da, urn
die innerhalb des lebensweltlich wirklich Erfahrenen und Erfahrbaren
urspriinglich allein moglichen rohen Voraussichten durch 'wissenschaftliche' im Progressus in infinitum zu verbessern: die Ideenverkleidung
macht es, daB der eigentliches Sinn der Methode, der Formeln, der
'Theorien' unverstandlich blieb und bei der naiven Entstehung der
Methode niemals verstanden wurde."7
The ideal of a universal philosophy and a suitable methodology was
not yet abandoned; it remained the internal propelling force of philosophy in the succeeding centuries. In fact, rationalism and empiricism
tried to achieve this goal through varied modalities that often contrasted with one another. With this aim in mind rationalism and
empiricism attached great importance to, respectively, the abstract
aspect of knowledge and its subjective-empirical aspect. Thus they,
without denying the ideal of a universal philosophy and of a true
methodology qualified to guarantee it a sense and an autonomous
346
ANTONIO PIERETTI
development, III reality, released themselves from the obligation to

realize it.
This ambiguity was clarified during the eighteenth century, when, as
Husserl illustrates, "der Glaube an das seit Anfang der N euzeit die
Bewegungen dirigierende Ideal der Philosophie und der Methode geriet
ins Wanken; nicht etwa bloB aus dem iiuBerlichen Motiv, daB der
Kontrast zwischen dem bestiindigen MiBlingen der Metaphysik und
dem ungebrochenen und immer gewaltigeren Anschwellen der theoretischen und praktischen Erfolge der positiven Wissenschaften ins
Ungeheure wuchs."8
In that time the need to understand the causes of the failure to
achieve the ideal began to stir among philosophers. The main consequence of the passionate wrestling that took up this problem, starting
with Hume, and continuing up to and including Kant, was that philosophy became a problem in its own right and, in addition, the possibility
of metaphysics was problematic. Initially, since this problem concerned
the possibility of rational activity in general, one was given the impression that this problem did not involve positive science. But, on closer
observation one realized that the problem of the possibility of metaphysics implied eo ipso the problem of the possibility of the empirical
sciences.
Meanwhile, with increasing doubts concerning metaphysics, faith in a
universal philosophy was remarkably weakened. This fact lead to the
progressive decline of faith in the reason as a universal and necessary
faculty. The phenomenon quickly assumed such dimensions as to
involve all the possible forms in which reason manifests itself. Therefore, faith "an den Sinn der Geschichte, den Sinn des Menschentums,
an seine Freiheit, niimlich als Vermoglichkeit des Menschen, seinem
individuellen und allgemeinen menschlichen Dasein verniinftigen Sinn
zu verschaffen,"9 collapsed too.
The crisis, which beset philosophy in general, was reflected also in its
various ramifications, that is, in the sciences which had transformed
themselves into sciences of fact and had excluded from their ambit all
reference to reason. The crisis taking place assumed peculiar characteristics; it shook the validity of the sciences because it shook their
foundation.
At the same time, it was a crisis involving European humanity: the
complex meaning of its cultural way of life and existence. Husserl wonders why the truth was allowed to succumb to "the sceptical downpour"
347
that now seems to be flooding all of Western civilization. And placing

the question on the level of existence, he continues: "K6nnen wir uns
damit beruhigen, k6nnen wir in dieser Welt leben, deren geschichtliches
Geschehen nichts anderes ist als eine unaufh6rliche Verkettung von
illusionaren Aufschwiingen und bitteren Enttauschungen?" 10
In order to avoid these dangers, Husserl maintains that there are no
other possibilities besides reflection on the crisis of Western civilization
itself ("from the inside of our misery") and reconsideration of the
history humanity has built up since the beginning of the modern age.
On the other hand, the only way in which the universal philosophy and
its suitable methodology can attain its own realization is represented by
the ability to bring latent reason up to the level of self-understanding, to
the discovery of its real potential. Only through this operation would it
be possible to decide whether the "telos," consisting of universal reason,
is an authentic "telos." When this is ascertained, then philosophy and
science will prove their real identity and will present themselves as "die
historische Bewegung der Offenbarung der universal en, dem Menschentum als solchen 'eingeborenen' Vernunft."11
But naturally, if reflection must be directed must be directed towards
the crisis of Western civilization, then faith in philosophy is necessary.
Husserl maintains that such a faith is not contrary to man's natural
behavior because his rational belief in the possibility of a universal
knowledge is ingrained in his being. Moreover, in man's awaiting this
endeavor which derives from just this predisposition, Husserl sees
revealed the opportunity to work as the servant of humanity, the
supreme incarnation of universal reason.
2. THE "LEBENSWELT" AS THE SCIENTIFICALLY TRUE
FOUNDA TION OF THE WORLD
The rationalization of nature, the idealization of the intuitive world,

from which derives the origin of modern science, satisfies the requirements not only of knowledge, but also of praxis. Husserl writes: "Mit
der fortwachsenden und immer vollkommeneren Erkenntnismacht iiber
des All erringt der Mensch auch eine immer vollkommenere Herrschaft
iiber seine praktische Umwelt, eine sich im unendlichen Progressus
erweiternde." Besides this, man obtains dominion over humanity and
over that which is included in the real surrounding world, over himself
and over other men and so "eine immer gr6Bere Macht iiber sein
348
ANTONIO PIERETTI
Schicksal, und so eine irnmer vollere - die fur den Menschen iiberhaupt rational denkbare - 'Gliickseligkeit."'12
As mentioned previously, the objective world of science is the result
of a progressive construction on the basis of an initial abstraction with
respect to life. This world was obtained by raising science to a level
of "pure theory" or rather, by disengaging it completely from any
connection with the variety of reality. Therefore, if we wish to rediscover the significance of science for mankind, it is necessary to take
into account both factual science and the "Lebenswelt."
Reflection on this theme, according to Husserl, is a pressing matter
not only to achieve a definite foundation of science, but also because
science derives all that can fulfill its aim gradually from the "Lebenswelt." Scientists, in fact, whether outside or inside their line of work,
constantly rely on experience, appealing to the world based on intuition. Moreover, in contrast to science which has not always existed, the
"Lebenswelt" has always been present.
However, in order to proceed to a new consideration of the "Lebenswelt," Husserl observes that, as a preliminary, it is necessary to operate
the "transcendental reduction of the sciences," that is, to put into action
an abstaining from any position with respect to their truth or falsity and
from any presumed objective knowledge of the world. In this way the
world of science will not disappear, instead it will continue to be that
which it has been from the beginning; but it is no longer at the center of
our interests, nor is it the reference point of our final aims and actions.
Attention has now been shifted to the "Welt als im Wandel der Gegebenheitsweisen uns standig vorgegebene,"13 that is, to the "Lebenswelt."
This world possesses, although in a completely different way, the
same structure as the world of science. However, the "Lebenswelt" has
a fundamental structure which is at the basis of everything that is
relative, though this structure is not relative in itself but constitutes "the
always valid and always identified a priori" of each one of our experiences.
Therefore, the structure of the "Lebenswelt" is the condition of our
sense formulation and also of the validity of science. Husserl affirms
that the "Lebenswelt" is "immer und notwendig als Universalfeld aller
wirklichen und moglichen Praxis, als Horizont vorgegeben." Also,
"Leben ist standig In-Weltgewissheit-Ieben."14 The "Lebenswelt" is the
common world of all people, that in which we move everyday. It is
already given to us in a very natural way, because, on the horizon of
349
humanity, we are people related together. It is a constant ground of

validity, an ever available and evident source with which we occupy
ourselves always. "Wenn Wissenschaft Fragen stellt und beantwortet,"
Husserl points out, "so sind es von Anfang an, und so notwendig weiter,
Fragen auf dem Boden dieser, an den Bestand dieser vorgegebenen
Welt, in der eben ihre wie aIle sonstige Lebenspraxis sich hiilt."15
In its most immediate form, the "Lebenswelt" is the world-environment, or rather, the world in which each one of us exists either as an
individual or as a member of the community. It is the near and the
familiar world that motivates us with greater force, that which conditions our choices, and our behavior. It is also the world that survives
the many social and historical changes which are inevitable, since it is
the world of which I speak, of which the Chinese, the Greeks of Solon's
time, and the inhabitants of Papua speak too. Finally, it is a world that
functions as a common horizon for everyone in which to find their
individual meaning of life in relation to each one's own interests and
aims.
In this immediate form which depends upon our observation, on our
behavior with others, the "Leben swelt" presents itself to us as a "surrounding world." In this case it appears as the world valid for everyone
and forever; a world of perception and experience. "Wir sind in ihr,"
affirms Husserl, "Objekte unter Objekten, lebensweltlich gesprochen;
niimlich als da und dort seiende, in schlichter Erfahrungsgewissheit, vor
allen wissenschaftlichen, sei es physiologischen, psychologischen, soziologischen usw. Feststellungen." But we are also wordly subjects,
niimlich als die sie erfahrenden, bedenkenden, bewertenden, zwecktiitig auf sie
bezogenen Ichsubjekte, fiir welche diese Umwelt nur den Seinssinn hat, den ihr unsere
Erfahrungen, unsere Gedanken, unsere Wertungen usw. jeweilig gegeben haben, und in
den Geltungsmodis (der SeinsgewiBheit, der Moglichkeit, ev. des Scheins usw.), die wir
als die Geltungssubjekte dabei aktuell vollziehen bzw. als habituelle Erwerbe von friiher
her besitzen und in uns tragen, als beliebig wieder aktualisierbare Geltungen des und
des Inhalts."16
The associations, groups, cultural formations, that surround us and

condition our personal behavior and our external theoretical reactions
make up our world or "surrounding world." Husserl states: "Wir im
Miteinanderleben haben Welt im Miteinander vorgegeben, als die fur
uns seiend-geltende, zu der wir im Miteinander auch, zur Welt als Welt
fur uns aIle, als der in dies em Seinssinn vorgegebenen, gehoren.'>17
Owing to its nature, the "Lebenswelt" presents a high level of
350
ANTONIO PIERETTI
relativity. It is for us a historical formation, as each of us is in his own

being. The "Leben swelt" takes form starting from the common, factual
world, and it reconstitutes itself again and again through its evolution.
In its identity as a world already given, as a world of which we are a
member, the "Lebenswelt" represents "the a priori of history." It is the
origin of and acts as the source of sense for history.
In contrast to the world-milieu that manifests itself according to the
various modalities, the "surrounding world" is unique. It constitutes the
"common world" in which mankind lives as a productive community.
The ''world-milieus,'' from the cultural point of view, cluster around
the European world. They become absorbed by this world that incarnates the norm of human existence in which civilized man is able to
express himself and live according to reason.
The European world coincides with the valid universal "Lebenswelt."
Like all worlds, the European world is a historical world; it consists of
a formation bound to time, and it modifies and renews itself in the
course of time.
3. THE TRANSCENDENTAL EPOCHE AS THE "LIBERATION"
OF SUBJECTIVENESS
In order to remain faithful to the nature of science, philosophy must go

beyond the "Lebenswelt," to "the realm in deep anonymity." Its genetic
analysis therefore must be radical in order to provoke "a complete
change of the natural attitude" in virtue of which "wirnicht mehr wie
bisher als Menschen des natiirlichen Daseins im stiindigen Geltungsvollzug der vorgegeben Welt leben," rather that abstaining ourselves
from this participation. I 8
To reach such aims it is not sufficient to only correct the direction of
our gaze or to turn our attention towards neglected, though accessible
spheres, because all of these spheres pertain to natural behavior;
instead, one should seriously question the origins of everything that has
previously been accepted without doubt, be it thought or deed.
One can object that the aim of achieving universal knowledge and a
suitable methodology, that is, of realizing philosophy as science, can
only be fulfilled during the course of time and is therefore temporary.
Husserl himself, on the other hand, observes that "die Idee der Endgiiltigkeit mitsamt der Philosophie, in der sie historisch entsprungen ist,
eben ein historischer Bestand der Menschheit ist und damit selbst zur
"LEBEN SWELT" AND THE MEANING OF PHILOSOPHY
351
Welt gehort."19 Yet, philosophy in its concrete and historical form

maintains unchanged its identity because its original plan is represented
and sustained by "an intention of new kind."
In order to achieve the auspicious, absolute change of natural
attitude there must be the transcendental epochC of the immediate
reality and life's interests. In Husserl's opinion, Descartes offers us an
example; his epochC in fact "umfaBt ausdriicklich nicht nur die Geltung
aller bisherigen Wissenschaften, selbst die apodiktische Evidenz beanspruchende Mathematik nicht ausgenommen, sondern sogar die Geltung der vor-und auBerwissenschaftlichen Lebenswelt, also die stets
in flagloser Selbstverstandlichkeit vorgegebene Welt der sinnlichen
Erfahrung, und alles von ihr genahrten Denklebens, des unwissenschaftlichen, schlieBlich auch des wissenschaftlichen."20
The transcendental epoche, notes Husserl, "ist eine Enthaltung von
der totalen Weltgeltung mit allen darin beschlossenen Geltungen,
erfahrenden, erkennenden, von allen Interessen, von allen auf Weltliches bezogenen und zu beziehenden Akten, die als solche selbst zur
geltenden Welt gehoren wiirden."21 Thus it takes shape as a "suspension," an "enclosure within brackets" of the whole natural attitude and
also of the very "Lebenswelt."
With the transcendental epochC the field of philosophy becomes
truly free of all obstacles, in particular, of those which derive from the
pre-given world. This liberation is equivalent to the discovery of the
universal correlation, which, being completely finished and absolutely
autonomous in itself, exists between the world and the consciousness of
the world, between the world and transcendental SUbjectivity.
The transcendental epoche opens to the philosopher "eine neue Art
des Erfahrens, des Denkens, des Theoretisierens ... , in der er, iiber
sein natiirliches Sein und iiber die natiirliche Welt gestellt, nichts von
ihrem Sein und ihren objektiven Wahrheiten verliert, wie iiberhaupt
nichts von den geistigen Erwerben seines Weltlebens und des ganzen
historischen Gemeinschaftslebens."22
The "Lebenswelt" is thus transformed into the "phenomenon" of a
common world accessible to everyone, which takes sense exclusively
from being in correlation to our intentional life. For this reason Husserl
affirms that "die radikale Weltbetrachtung ist systematische und reine
Innenbetrachtung der sich selbst im AuEen 'auBernden' Subjektivitat."23
The transcendental epochC however, by excluding on principle any
presupposition whatever, creates a complete upheaval for the ego itself
352
ANTONIO PIERETTI
also. It brackets the entire "Lebenswelt" together with the actions of the
subject and his life conducted on the world's terrain. For this reason,
rather than living on the basis of what has already been assumed, the
subject "den Willen, sich selbst in seinem ganzen bisherigen und von
da als kiinftig vorgezeichneten Sein (seiner ganzen Weise bisheriger
Willentlichkeit und Habe) kennenzulernen."24
Yet the ego still does not know itself as a human person, but as a
transcendental subjectivity, that is, in the light of the condition, which
light allows him to know himself as a subject who is in constitutive
correlation with the object or, better, with the world in its everyday
already given existence. Husserl observes that the ego obtained by the
transcendental epoche "is denominated 'I' only by a equivocation,
although it is the essential equivocation, because, when I try to define it
reflectively, I cannot say that I am this 'I'."25
4. PHILOSOPHY AS "STARTING OVER AGAIN"
Therefore transcendental subjectivity, which, as such, is "the basic

subconscious personality," is not only the center of the activity constitutive of sense and of the foundation of the "Lebenswelt" and the world
of science, but it is also the terrain which comprehends all possible
knowledge. Therefore it is the reason of being for all the concrete forms
that knowledge has assumed and continues to assume. History and
humanity are both a projection of transcendental subjectivity that, by
exteriorizing itself in wordly manifestations, struggles to "arrive at"
itself, at its own understanding. Transcendental subjectivity is thus the
ultimate form of the universality of philosophy which reached the
"definitive face" of apodictic science par excellence. It expresses the
reason that is revealed in itself, or that appropriates anew its own
identity and "already consciously guides the human becoming, by an
essential necessity."26
However, according to Husserl, the authentic and absolute selfconsciousness that the transcendental epoche incarnates is an endless
endeavor. On the one hand, it requires a decision which must be
continually renewed, and on the other, a choice which should always
be definitive. Given this it becomes clear that for philosophy to be a
science of foundations, it must always start over again in excluding all
presuppositions that have not undergone a genetic analysis. Philosophy
353
presents itself therefore rather as a requirement for absolute knowledge, and consequently as the desire and aspiration to reach it, rather
than possess it, yet with the certainty that such absolute knowledge
exists and, therefore, with the disposition to consider this faith in
absolute knowledge the criterion for searching and for evaluating the
results according to the measure they are achieved.
University of Perugia
NOTES
1 For a reconstruction of the presence of the "Lebenswelt" in Husserl's writings see
H. Hohl, Lebenswelt und Geschichte. Grundziige der Spiitphilosophie E. Husserl
(Freiburg - Munich: 1962).
2 E. Husser!, Die Krisis der europiiischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale
Phiinomenologie (The Hague: 1962), p. 273.
3 Ibid., p. 275. On this subject see E. Baccarini, La fenomenologia. Filosofia come
vocazione (Rome: 1981); P. Miccoli, Husser! e la fenomenologia. Il senso umana del
modo della vita (Rome: 1983).
4 E. Husser!, Die Krisis, op.cit., p. 4.
5 Ibid. For an accurate reconstruction of the entire subject see G. Forni, Commento
alla 'Crisis' di Husserl (Bologna: 1986).
6 E. Husser!, Die Krisis, op.cit, p. 10.
7 Ibid., p. 52.
8 Ibid., pp. 8-9.
9 Ibid., p. 11.
10 Ibid., pp. 4-5.
11 Ibid.,pp.13-14.
12 Ibid., p. 67.
13 Ibid., p. 157. On the nature of the "Lebenswelt" see S. Strasser, Phenomenologie et
sciences de l'homme (Louvain - Paris: 1967), pp. 77-8; A. Rigobello, Legge morale e
mondo della vita (Rome: 1968).
14 E. Husser!, Die Krisis op. cit, p. 145.
15 Ibid., p. 124.
16 Ibid., p. 107.
17 Ibid., p. 111.
18 Ibid., p. 151.
19 Ibid., p. 397.
20 Ibid., p. 77.
21 Ibid., p. 469.
22 Ibid., pp. 154-155.
23 Ibid., p. 116.
24 Ibid., p. 472.
25 Ibid., p. 188.
26 Ibid., p. 13.
PEDRO LUIS BLASCO
SCIENCE AND DIALECTICS IN

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
On taking a phenomenological point of view of anthropology two of its

dimensions immediately come to mind: the consideration of man as a
transcendental and phenomenal subject himself, and the consideration
of man within the phenomenological research of reality to situate him
as a reality different from other realities.
I would say the same in the following way. Knowing what man is is
knowing what is human about man, but less pretentiously than knowing,
wondering, at least, about man is at the same time wondering about the
human in man. This means two things. On the one hand, the "human"
in man is not identified or I do not understand it as what is "specifically" human, according to the concept coined in classical metaphysics.
This does not prevent the question of the "specifically" human from
being treated as a legitimate one, but just that I do not understand this
specificity as a peculiar part of man, one different and opposed, even in
this precise sense, to any other part or parts which are not specific but
generic and of some other kind. I understand man as an entitative and
ontological unit, not as a simple but as a complex unit, a differentiated
unit in which we can distinguish elements, qualities, potentialities, or
even different "parts"; but these parts or elements, insofar as they are
elements or parts of a single man do not have their specificity in
themselves but in the unit of the human whole which is the subject.
Considering them and speaking of them in themselves is an abstraction
since they are never found, being human, a parte hominis, outside of or
aside from the individual man, and in him they are found and found
reciprocally conditioning and influencing each other in an intrinsic
interaction resulting from the unit transcendental to them which is the
human subject. The very activity of any of these elements is impregnated with the whole, it is not a pure activity, but neither is there a
question, regarding this element, of a pure entity, in such a way that, for
example, in one of the extreme cases and in the theoretical complexity
of the mind and brain, body and spirit problem, etc., it can be stated
that there is no pure perception of pure consciousness. Therefore, each
element is and acts in man in a human way, and not only as this
355
A - T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXV, 355- 361.
356
PEDRO LUIS BLASCO
element; It IS now each element which is and acts in a specifically

human way from the moment when it is not only this element but it is
an element of a single subject of an individual, deep, and transcendental
unit, and of his phenomenalizations, understood only in intuition. Thus,
it is this unit which in a strict sense is the human "part" of man, and
according to this consideration, that which is specifically human.
On the other hand, wondering about the human in man means also
wondering about the human specificity of that peculiar living nature
which is man. Do not see in this expression an already elaborated
theory of human nature, but my contribution to a conception of this; in
spite of the complexity which this concept has historically acquired as
well as the criticism which it has received, I prefer to talk about human
nature even before talking about its metaphysical essence because, as a
starting point for anthropology, I prefer to see man as he is immediately
apprehended as a worldly reality, as a natural reality and, therefore, as
nature, that is, as human nature. With this understanding, and trying to
avoid all that is a priori essentialist, metaphysical, and from which one
can then go on to deductively achieve a characterization of man, of
what man is, it will be best to resort first to the experience which man
has of himself, for surely this was the Aristotelian procedure or method
in understanding man as a political animal which has logos - two
"definitions" whose mutual implication can only be captured and
understood from the evidence of the more immediate experience that
the Stagirite had of man, of Greek man above all.
It occurs, however, that our resources and, therefore, our demanding
a conception of man from experience greater than a definition, are
wider and more complex in the different fields which must necessarily
be taken into consideration, with each one to be experienced without
excluding the rest since all of them state something about man, something about what man and men are, and since in all of them man and
men are phenomenalized or, to say it in another way, become an
empirical phenomenon disclosing by means of reflection common
features both in what they would have that is specific within a specific
field of experience (an abstraction from his real everyday life) and what
they are when they are the outcome of the reciprocal influence of the
conditionings of the different fields of experience.
Thus, in a purely analytical way, we count on, as our starting point,
the historical experience of several thousand years, at least, from all the
ends of the earth within our universe, which includes a rich, and at
SCIENCE AND DIALECTICS IN ANTHROPOLOGY
357
times surprising, cultural experience with different social, political,

religious dimensions, etc. But we also count on our psychological,
personal, and outside experience, lived and analyzed, which provides a
knowledge of man derived from his content and the different interpretations of the same in the different orientations and schools. In
addition, we have as a starting point our biological experience of man,
sometimes rigorous, sometimes tentative, as an organic life, as a living
organ, based on elements, phenomena, and physical and chemical
processes. And, effectively, we draw on very important and fertile
speculative and philosophical experience because, being conscious of
himself, man has needed and tried to know his place in the cosmos and
in history, his level of reality, and the reality of his possibilities.
These experiences prevail on their own, they are inevitable and
constitute a starting point which is minutely unconditioned for anthropological research which tries to state and explain how, what, or who
man is, the human individual subject, and why he is like that. This is
research and theory which must be made use of, therefore, as the
method of an empirical phenomenology which offers us data about
how, what, or who is humanity, and as a transcendental methodology
which explains it to us from its conditions of possibility.
In this way it is made clear and with the pertinent limitations what,
for example, man is as an essence and/or existence, and whether that
nature must be thOUght of as nature and/or history or whether, on the
contrary, individual and collective life is only a tragic and/or comic
masquerade depending on the roles or characters which have to be
represented, but, in any case, a purely phenomenal reality without any
substantive noumenal base.
Since my philosophical interest in anthropology comes out of my
work on moral and political philosphy, I will start, unimpaired by what
I now want to set forth, with a consideration suitable for pointing out
some features of projected anthropology.
We necessarily attribute moral being to man's nature due to his
having not just any nature but being human. Here we understand that
man is rational, free, responsible, able to decide etc., and therefore we
have to ask ourselves what it is to be rational, free, responsible, able to
decide, etc. or better still, what it is like and how it is that man is
rational, responsible, etc. - in addition, only in this way will we know
what rationality, freedom, etc. is. Studying man's behavior, his activity,
his life and daily occupations through sociology, politics, religion,
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PEDRO LUIS BLASCO
psychology, biology, etc., we discover, effectively what he is like and

how it is that man is rational, free, etc. de jure at least, if not always de
facto; only in this way do we discover the human part in the real man,
and not in a previous concept of the essence of man, and only thus do
we discover in the whole nature of the universe that which is particularly human nature.
But there is another question: it is raised by the immediate evidence
that we humans are very complex living beings. This complexity comes
to us both from the way in which nature has made us, and from what
we have made of ourselves: objective nature and subjective nature,
"natural" nature and "social" nature. It is the evidence that we move,
act, and live in accordance with certain interests, desires, satisfactions,
commitments, pressures, etc. both natural and social, in accordance
with different criteria, values, and roles. We are just that, living beings,
and life, from the unicellular to the most complex, is not something
which is empty, without anything or anybody behind it, a mask only;
neither is our human nature, at least our natural nature if not always
our social nature: we are human living nature, we are a living organism,
a vital and relatively but sufficiently autonomous system (Umwelt,
ecosystem, etc.).
I think that it is both interesting and necessary to recover this
perspective and this reality of man as a being in the world and also a
world being. And it is this idea of man as a human living nature, still
vague with respect to the determination of the content of the expression
"human" but sufficiently precise and illustrative on the point, which
includes the constitution of man, and his belonging to and his participation in the natural reality of our world - because in order to understand what man is it is necessary to begin at the beginning, at what
would be the beginning according to the psycho-bio-physico-chemical
elements, etc. that make up man. That is, supposing some knowledge of
the most elementary reality of nature, the material part of the universe,
its constitutive elements and all of its physical, chemical, and other
properties, then to know that relevant part of that material reality that
is that of living beings, i.e., to know, definitively the nature of life, it will
be necessary to ask oneself and find out what type of nature is
constituted as living nature, precisely by those material elements with
all their properties and relations although perhaps not only by these
elements and properties and relations, perhaps by others still unknown.
Even more, regarding ourselves, to know that relevant part of living
reality that is that of human beings, i.e., to know, definitely, man's
359
nature, it will be necessary to ask oneself and find out what type of
living nature is that which is constituted living human nature, precisely,
by those material and biological elements with all their properties and
relations although perhaps not only by these elements and properties
and relations, and, perhaps, by others still unknown. In this way,
incidentally, the surprising unity, at least of the whole mundane reality,
from the simple elements with their atomic and nuclear structures to
man's human nature, is made obvious.
This matters because the human being, anyone of us, like any other
living being, upon receiving this being, immediately grows, develops, in
such a way that the radical task, to put it some way, the most individual
and original, most spontaneous and autonomous, or non-transferable
fact, the most unavoidable activity, is life itself, the fact of living, the
expansion and corporal, psychological development, etc. in time, of the
life that is summed up and condensed in his initial cells, the development of all his possibilities, the realization - the real doing - of all his
content and of all that he is and has as an individual human living
nature, moved, impelled prereflectively and prevoluntarily by his own
uncontainable internal vital dynamism, "from" himself and "for" himself
- self-realization - but unavoidably "with" the other than I, and above
all, "with" the other I - co-realization. The fact of living is self-realization and, at the same time, it is also the fact of living with: full human
self-realization is only possible as co-realization (although in the best of
cases the other is not counted on: living-with, co-realization, is the most
original and natural tendency and reality of any interrelationship and its
condition of possibility, even for a negative interrelation like hostility).
To be a man is to be an individual human living nature in a reciprocal, interpersonal self-realization process; is to be an I in community
with other 1's in the realization of all their individual and communal
possibilities, our nature being, at the same time, our potential and our
limit.
It occurs also that the individual 'by being and living in community'
creates a "social" nature which is also a condition - possibility and
limit - of his being himself, of his living, of his reciprocal self-realization, and this nature can - we know this by experience - turn against
his "natural" nature and become then unnatural, inhuman, and alienating.
I am interested now in pointing out that this is a dialectical selfrealization.
Self-realization's dialectical being means that it is our individual
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PEDRO LUIS BLASCO
human living nature which is dialectical. It is obvious, incidentally and

according to the development proposed here, that in the dialecticity of
human nature and of our self-realization, a moral dialecticity is also
found, morals being as it were only valid in and for the individual, by
and according to his human nature in his self-co-realization; this then
being their dialectical foundation and content, morals are themselves
dialectical morals.
Well then, it is no less obvious that just how morals are dialectical is
given by the question of how self-realization and individual human
nature are dialectical. A first indication and reply to this question is
founded the same co-realized or interpersonal self-realization, the
involvement of the I in the we and the we in the 1. But other equally
relevant features are also evident: a) the subjectivity and the objectivity
of human nature; b) man as a being and as a project; c) the immanence
and the transcendence of the I; d) the spirituality and the corporeality
of man; e) the irreducible and original character of the I in his personal
individuality, and his participation in a community, as a human being,
with other I's; f) each person's being the subject of feelings, tendencies,
etc. as opposed as love and hate, egotism and altruism, etc.; g) each
person's being an I that is the unique and radical subject of a plurality
of diverse and wide-ranging feelings and tendencies, acts, possibilities,
etc., such as those we experience daily, that is, the unity of the I in the
plurality of its, let us say, phenomenalizations; and h) our natural nature
and social nature.
All of this means that only abstractly is any of these opposing
characteristics a characteristic or element of human nature to the
elimination of the opposite characteristic; man is really only one of
them while also being the other. I mean that any of the conditions and
postures referred to above can be considered in themselves to be
logically incompatible with its opposite, but the fact that both have a
truly, natural, anthropological foundation, would show that in themselves neither of them is absolutely valid: they have to be dialectically
seized, in such a way that they maintain between themselves a
simultaneous relationship of antagonism and complementariness. The
logical, abstract, and formal contradiction between them would certainly be insurmountable; but it is not really a question of a logical
contradiction but of an opposition, of a reciprocal and complementary
negation, of a dialectical negation, in this case anthropological, and man
is, of course, not only possible but objectively real.
361
Thus it is that, going back to the initial considerations, we find man

to be the transcendental unit of his own phenomenal plurality, and we
see how a phenomenological analysis of human nature must of necessity
include in its philosophical anthropology the contributions of the
different natural and social sciences in order to adequately understand
man and the multiple dialecticity inherent to human nature.
University of Zaragoza
LOURDES GORDILLO AL V AREZ- VALDES
TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGICAL
METHODOLOGY FOR ANTHROPOLOGY
Currently, one of the main problems in the field of anthropology is that

of finding a methodology specific to its aims.
The viability of philosophical anthropology as a global knowing of
man becomes problematical when one tries to present it with a pretense
to objectivity.
This is because anthropology is, on the one hand, nourished by
everyday experience and, on the other, enriched by confrontation with
scientific objectivity.
.
Nevertheless, this openness to the results of the sciences presents a
risk to philosophical anthropology. The application of the scientific
method for the sake of maintaining the objectivity of anthropology
should not mean that philosophical anthropology loses its peculiar
epistemological status in order to be able to be related with the other
human and natural sciences.
It is precisely this opening to the sciences that deal with man that
makes it necessary to maintain the philosophical character of reflection,
precisely, in order to approach their pretension to objectivity.
In any case, one cannot take as a solution the rejection of philosophical anthropology and hope, thus, to achieve a higher degree of
objectivity.
For these reasons, the phenomenological methodology is that most
suited because it maintains the exactness necessary for objectivity, is
open to scientific contributions, and demands an ontological projection.
The aim here is not to analyze the phenomenological method and all
its implications and trajectory (tendencies). Of interest only is to show
its starting point and its ontological projection in its specific application
to anthropological problems.
THE STARTING POINT OF THE METHOD
The phenomenological method makes possible the penetration of the

nature of things; it is the ideal approach for their comprehension and
orientation, without loss of the sphere of original evidence.
363
364
LOURDES GORDILLO ALVAREZ-VALDES
To achieve this, one must begin anthropology by situating oneself on

an epistemological level, one prior to that of scientific and philosophical
conceptualization, and disregard any supposition or previous theory.
In this investigation, one's thought should be orientated exclusively
towards the object to the total exclusion of all sUbjectivity.!
It is evident that scientific objectivity is anchored in the primitive
objectivity of immediate experience, and this does not exclude movement at the very level of philosophical hermeneutics. 2
Thus, on the basis of a description of the original phenomena, one
aims to critically reflect on the data and to advance towards the
ontological level.
This is possible because man, as a concrete totality, bases his
plurality of knowledge on one structural unity which contributes to his
understanding.
Here, is revealed to us the starting point which is a prelininary preunderstanding to analytical work. It is a case of understanding the
information received, its real epistemological value, and its level of
objectivity.
All that proceeds from the subject should be excluded. One should
attend only to the object of investigation and, for this, one requires a
pure intuition which banishes all possible practical aims, because the
only thing of interest in the object is what the said object is like.
This phenomenological starting point is the assumption of consciousness of a world extended in space and time as the reality that I experience. This natural attitude leads us to the phenomenological attitude
which excludes completely all judgement on existences in space and
time. As Celms says, it leads from all that is objective right to the most
primitive depths of the spirit. It means, therefore, a radical interiorization and an "integral spiritualization" of all the ways of considering
things.3
This individual human being in space and in time, then, being
individual and contingent, has a corresponding essence. The phenomenological reduction should operate on facts; it disregards what is
contingent so as to arrive at the essence; it is a reduction of what is
factual to what is eidetic: the grasping of the essence.
Thus, the authentic phenomenological method requires that the supposition of the existence of the object is also eliminated, because its
existence does not come into consideration. The proper object of the
phenomenological investigation must be the essence.
TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHODOLOGY
365
However, we must ask ourselves: is it possible to admit the phenomenological method in its application to anthropology? Furthermore,
what must the essential factor of the method for a philosophical
anthropology be?
To make anthropology possible, the radical explanation of man as a
whole, and to arrive at the fundamental character of phenomenology is
to return to the facts, to return to reality. But this is a reality which
demands that all theories and hypotheses on the facts be excluded until
the phenomenological foundation is reached. For this reason, its
peculiar approach should be directed at a particular sphere of the facts:
the phenomenological, or pure facts, "those whose unities or whose
depths are completely independent of the sensory functions through
which they are given."4
In this way, it is understood that the phenomenological grasping of
pure fact is essential to the founding of a philosophical anthropology.
The pure fact has as its characteristic its being the one final foundation
of the sensory components which are independent of all the symbols
with which they can represent. In pure intuition it is a case of seeing the
object as it is.
Phenomenology depends on the fact that pure facts do exist and that
they are at the basis of all other facts. In order to acquire this intellectual vision of the object one must situate oneself in an intuition of
the given, and this requires separating from the object, that is, from all,
that is accessory, and analyzing only the essence of the thing. The
phenomenological method has to gain credit and make itself valid in the
field of facts.
ONTOLOGICAL PROJECTION
From this starting point the next step consists in seeing how pure facts
can be known. For the interpretation of man does not exhaust itself in
its opening; rather, it is precisely in this opening onto being or reality as
such that man receives his proper meaning in his relationship with
being.
In this sense it is not possible to separate phenomenology and
ontology, since the full understanding of the object appeals to a
superior intellect, because the understanding of the object demands this
ontological extension.
Thus, the strength of phenomenology is rooted in its realizing the
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LOURDES GORDILLO ALVAREZ-VALDES
meaning of cultural processes, in their capacity to demonstrate, to

describe, to indicate the various ways in which activities shape themselves. 5 For this reason, it is important at this point to indicate the
possibility of understanding the meaning of the world in which we are
immersed inasmuch as philosophical anthropology tries to grasp the
direction of all objectivized phenomena. It is necessary that all objectivated phenomena have a meaning or a direction to be discovered.
But, prior to any knowledge or understanding, explicit and determined, some concrete data exist which constitute a whole to which the
particular is pre-ordered. Thus, philosophical anthropology examines,
beginning with the immediate datum, the conditions which must be
fulfilled for the existence of an objective reality in general to be
possible.
Thus, this total vision which comprehends isolated content and
gathers it in a total meaning for their set supposes understanding the
human totality as a unity of meaning with real structures founding it.
Reflection on this entitative structure of the human being is the last
explicative fundamental of all human activity or behavior.
However, to offer pure knowledge that is free of supposititions and
absolute as regards things themselves, one needs a critical function 6 that
uncovers the permanent structures of a phenomenon and confronts the
results with those of the sciences which proceed from the phenomenon
and its conceptual apparatus. Because "this knowledge of essences
realizes two very different functions. In the first place, it provides all the
positive sciences with their supreme axioms, which indicate the direction of productive observation, induction and deduction, carried out by
the intellect and discursive thought."7
Nevertheless, this critical explanation of the essential structures of
behavior in the world is the key point in arriving at ontology, at being
and the world.
The method for essential knowledge is that of the phenomenological
reduction which makes pure facts appear as pure intuition.
In this way, one realizes that the simple collection of particular
scientific results, which does not manage to reach the primal unity and
totality, has to be integrated in that totality for it to be fertile with
respect to the general understanding of man.
Phenomenological reduction consists in suspending the moment of
reality and the actions that make it up. It is a process of thought and
not one of interior action.
TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHODOLOGY
367
From this perspective, one understands that the starting point for the
phenomenological method is not the evidence of the I, because phenomenology, as understood by Scheler, is that science which investigates the modes of being and the essential structure of all that is. That
which is of interest as a concrete object of investigation is part of
applied phenomenology, that part referring to acts and functions and
how one arrives phenomenologically at these concepts.
In consequence, on the basis of a description of the original phenomena, one aims to carry out a critical explanation of the scientific
data. But to achieve this one requires a bridge to the ontological level in
order to arrive at the fundamental structures of behavior.
In this manner, the phenomenological method remains open to
scientific contributions at the same time that it demands an ontological
projection, understood as one moment of the method, from which all
the perspectives of the analysis of the initial whole acquire meaning.
The phenomenological method aims to give anthropology an exact
method, freeing man's knowledge from objectivism, and to sort out the
fundamental themes of the positive sciences.
University of Murcia
NOTES
1. M. Bochenski, Los metodos actuales del pensamiento (ed. Rialp), pp. 45-6.
Cfr. S. Strasser, Phenomenologie et Sciences (Louvain: Publications Universitaires,
1967), passim.
3 T. Celms, "El idealismo Fenomenol6gico de Husserl," Rev. de Occidente 1945, p. 36.
4 M. Scheler, Esencia de la Filosofia y la condici6n moral del conocer filos6fico
(Buenos Aires: Ed. Nova, 1980).
5 Cfr. A. Ales Bello, "Para una lectura fenomenol6gica de nuestra civilizaci6n," Rev.
Fragua, Nos. 25-26 (1984), pp. 1-21.
6 This critical function is the discernment which attempts to introduce a factor of
rational objectivity among the constituting elements.
7 M. Scheler, El puesto del hombre en el cosmos (Buenos Aires: ed. Losada, 1938)
(1971,9" ed.), p. 9.
1
VICTOR MOLCHANOV
STRICT SCIENCE AND LEBENSWELTIN

HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGY
Logical Investigations was published about ninety years ago. This work
by Husserl is the point of departure for phenomenological philosophy.
Now, appraisal of the phenomenological movement depends to a large
extent on interpretation of Husserl's philosophical evolution. From my
point of view, it is a matter of importance to consider the genesis of
phenomenology for the clarification of its changes and invariance.
The problem of consciousness - the main phenomenological theme
- arises from the problem of specifying the ideal logical connections in
theory, and of distinguishing them from the associative, or psychological
connections of lived experience in cognition, and from the causal or
functional connections of things - objects in the broadest sense. The
problem is this: What are the structures of consciousness which
constitute meanings as ideal unities having neither psychological nor
material status.
Logical Investigations is devoted to the solution of the problem. This
work does not contain a closed system of philosophy; we find here the
outline of the main phenomenological ideas, the main phenomenological distinctions.
Unlike most of Husserl's followers and critics, Heidegger suggested
that the change of his teacher's positions and his drawing towards
Neo-Kantianism took place just after the publication of this work. But it
is well known that Husserl delivered his famous lectures on ''The
Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness" precisely in those
years. And it would be useless to seek in them some sort of
N eo-Kantianism.
By the same token, in following editions of Logical Investigations,
having introduced the term "pure Ego" in Ideas I, Husserl noted that
that concept had not been required for the type of investigations
carried out in the investigations. One may at least make a note here that
Husserl recognized that there is a realm of investigation in phenomenology which does not need the "pure Ego." At the same time it is
probably impossible to avoid this concept in discussing the problem of
intersubjectivity.
369
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VICTOR MOLCHANOV
In 1910 Husserl published his programmatic article "Philosophy as

Strict Science" wherein he first paid attention to the place of his
philosophy in European tradition. Husserl's new "upheaval" in philosophy is a turn to non-psychological subjectivity, the turn to the concept
of strictness contrasted to relativism and scepticism as the consequences of psychologism and naturalism.
One may suppose, following Heidegger, that this article opens the
new stage in Husserl's thought which culminates in Ideas I, i.e., in the
complete formulation of transcendental phenomenology.
Although Husserl himself does speak specifically of pure and
transcendental phenomenology (in the preface to English edition of
Ideas I), Heidegger's estimation should not be rejected. In fact, the
change did take place. But what is this change in philosophical position
as a matter of principle? And what is the reason for this change?
Husserl did not believe this position to be an altered one, just as Kant
did not see the essential difference between the first and the second
editions of the Critique of Pure Reason.
I think that these alterations (both in Husserl and in Kant) are the
consequences of striving to systematize a novel paradigm, in order to
make the breakthrough to a new way of philosophizing accessible to
others. And in Husserl's case perhaps it was due to an attempt to found
a new philosophical school.
Systematization is not a harmless procedure. Sometimes it may lead
to the deepest levels of thought seen in sketches or outlines being
buried in the system. In this respect Heidegger's investigation of the
differences between the two editions of Kant's main work is very
instructive, though one may criticize it as far as his understanding of
phenomenology and the problem of Time are concerned.
Every systematization brings into philosophical discourse some
elements of natural science, some elements of the scientific method. It
implies a fixation of definite meanings in corresponding systems of
terms or signs: thus scientific systematization involves the possibility of
a sign fetishism. The possibility of overcoming this fetishism which
Husserl saw at the heart of what he called the "crisis of European
sciences" involves a reverse operation: bringing philosophical reflection
into the activity of scientists. This work has partly been done by such
philosophers as Popper, Koyre, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and
others.
Certainly, in the history of thought systematization appeared earlier
STRICT SCIENCE AND LEBENSWELT
371
than theoretical natural science (Newton); it culminates in theology in

the "prescientific era." But in the seventeenth century systematization
came into philosophy from mathematics and physics (Decartes, Leibniz,
Spinoza).
I think that systematization is not only not identical with strictness
but is opposite to it. The foundation of strict science, or better, strict
doctrine on consciousness is not a theoretical thesis but a practical
demand: to direct reflection onto consciousness. But this directedness
has a peculiar character. Reflection is not observation of consciousness
from the outside; reflection animates consciousness, it transforms the
possibility of sense-bestowing, of the intentional stream of consciousness in actual multiplicities of contexts which become the "objects" of
intentional analysis. The phenomenological method aims at switching
off relationships to external objects in an investigation of the sense
connections of contexts.
Strictness is identical with contextuality and contextuality comes into
contact with systematization only because they coexist in language and
through language.
The foundation of phenomenology is not an explanation of its main
principles. Strictly speaking, one cannot explain the transition to the
phenomenological attitude. But that does not mean that we cannot
describe it. The guarantee of an adequate description is the unity of
intentionality and evidence. The latter is not a psychological act added
to some kind of judgment; it is in itself an act of absolute adequacy.
Due to this act it is possible to identify meanings or every complex of
sense in the flux of phenomena.
The difference between strictness and systematization must be
supplemented by the difference between strictness and closedness. In
Logical Investigations HtIsserl brought to light both the phenomenological, and the transcendental reductions without using these terms. The
confusion of terms and problems often leads to these concepts being
wrongly interpreted, to a misunderstanding of phenomenology as a
closed sphere of investigation without openness to real objects and
consequently to real problems. In other words, there is an alleged
contradiction: intentionality is the directedness of consciousness toward
objects, but phenomenological reduction is a return to consciousness
itself. And what about the slogan: "Back, to things themselves!"?
I think this is an imaginary contradiction. Strictness in the doctrine
on consciousness implies firstly the refusal to make judgments, the
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VICTOR MOLCHANOV
abstention from (epoche) any judgments in which we "simply," i.e.,

without reflection assert something about the existence of objects in
their spatio-temporal and causal connections; and secondly, abstention
from judgments concerning the causal or functional connections of
lived experiences. Neither objects nor psychological states vanish in the
shift to the phenomenological attitude wherein causality and functionalism are deprived of their supposed status of being the only method for
studying human consciousness.
According to Husserl's conception, epoche or the phenomenological
reduction pushes the sense or meaning relations of consciousness and
world into the foreground. Only within these relations should one look
at other various connections between man and world. In. the natural
attitude we always find a firm belief in the existence of objects, and this
is a necessary background for identification and purposeful orientation.
For a "naive man" the kind of connections found between objects blur
with the kind of connections found between consciousness and objects.
The phenomenological attitude suspends the causal and functional
relationship between objects: consciousness and objects are taken to be
causally and functionally independent of each other. Husserl's slogan
"Back to things themselves!" is a demand to focus attention on the
contexts wherein the objects intended reveal their meanings (senses)
without any reference to natural or manufactured connections with
other objects, i.e., with objects outside of the context apprehended. If
one may give a simple example: We must pay attention to a building as
carrying a definite cultural or social sense (meaning), and at the same
time we must bracket this building as a purpose or an obstacle to our
walking or as a result of construction.
The other direction of the phenomenological attitude - transcendental reduction - is the refusal to understand objectivistically the
psychic life. The emprical ego as a thing-like object is reduced to the
phenomenological content of lived experiences in the unity of their
stream. Connections of meanings are realized in the stream of phenomena where there is no difference made between appearance
(Erscheinung) and being (Sein). The appearance of the psychic is its
being. According to Husserl, the object (thing) appears, but meaning
(sense) does not appear, it is experienced.
In the case of both phenomenological and transcendental reduction
strictness has the same meaning: if we are concerned with the problem
of consciousness, then we must be at work with consciousness which is
373
the flux of lived experiences with their contents or meanings. The unit,
the elements of this flux would be contexts but not singular meanings;
the latter, strictly speaking, do not exist at all. To paraphrase a famous
Wittgestein aphorism: the world is an aggregate of contexts and not of
facts. The later Wittgenstein came to the same position expressed in
other terms.
In the twenties the concept of intersubjectivity became the focus of
Husserl's thought. In the Crisis this problem is discussed as a paradox
of human subjectivity which is a constituting subject before the world at
the same time that it is an object in the world. This paradox extends to
the paradox of the universal intersubjectivity which as mankind involves
the totality of all objectivities in its world while being at the same time a
part of the world.
According to Husserl, solving this paradox implies a strict, radical
epoche, and the concrete human ego is the starting point of the
phenomenological way of thinking.
The method now requires that the ego, beginning with its concrete world-phenomenon
systematically inquire back, and thereby become acquainted with itself, the transcendental ego, in its concreteness, in the system of its constitutive levels and its incredibly
intricate [patterns of] validity-founding .... In this systematic procedure one at first
attains the correlation between the world and transcendental subjectivity as objectified
in mankind. 1
Thus the precondition of intersubjectivity is the concrete world-phenomenon, the living world, the world of life. This is the world of the
subjective-relative world-horizon of all our purposes and strivings
which in some way realize themselves in objects - in things of everyday life and in cultural-historical realities. They belong to the living
world, not being the objects of scientific analysis. And the connections
between them are not ones determined in scientific investigation.
Between them are the connections called meanings. This does not mean
that there is no causality and functionalism in everyday life or in
the texts, building, etc. in which some forms of spiritual culture are
objectified. But such relations are outside of the living world, of the
Lebenswelt.
The life-world can be considered both within the natural and within
the phenomenological attitude. In the first case we are simply absorbed
in it; in the second, we are conscious of it as a pre-given world, a world
correlative to our sense-bestowing subjectivity. In the Crisis Husserl
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VICTOR MOLCHANOV
cntIcizes the short way to epoche (the "Cartesian way"): for radical,
strict epoche, multiform experience in the living world is required.
Thus, strictness does not oppose the concept of the living world.
And what is more, this concept makes the move toward strictness in
phenomenology much more strong. Strictness is neither systematization
nor closedness, it implies the multiplicity and pluralism of the contextual stream of consciousness.
In an era of rapid advance in the natural sciences Husserl raised the
question of the "crisis" of European science. He believed the origin of
the crisis to lie in the forgetting of the living world as the sense foundation of science - one could also say, in the forgetting of strictness, if
that could have been found before phenomenology. In the world of
science (its subjects, methods, experimental techniques), the scientist
overlooks his meaning-subjective correlations with objects and directs
his gaze on the relations between objects. Of course, and in the last
instance, his subjectivity is also a meaning-bestowing one. But the
foundation of every scientific analysis is some premise which itself is
not a sense-formation process.
Natural science does not deduce its assertions from the realm of
everyday experience, but it necessarily comes into contact with the
main way of orientation in the living world - with perception. According to Husserl, perception is the ground for abstract thought and the
final point for the verification or refutation of theories. The chief thing
is that it is precisely in the living world that the scientist's subjectivity
finds its experience of sense-correlation to any object. In reflection this
experience provides some chance of eliminating non-clarified premises,
i.e., ones which are not correlated with some of the meaning-bestowing
processes.
The admission of the self-dependence of natural science leads to
objectivism in the Geisteswissenschaften, the gap between them being
the result of forgetting that "true nature in the sense of natural science
is a product of the spirit that investigates nature and thus presupposes
the science of the spirit."2 According to Husserl, the ground of the true
science of the spirit is a disclosure of the inner historicity of consciousness, a revealing of the intentional structure of the "living present."
Objectivism is the main cause of the crisis of European culture in
general. It has obscured the true sense of rationalism, the meaning of
the "immanent spiritual history of Europe." In his Vienna Lecture,
Husserl made an attempt to present transcendental phenomenology as
375
the living source of universal philosophy, as the guardian of the spiritual

shape of a non-geographically interpreted Europe.
The phenomenological understanding of consciousness opposes both
experimental and introspective psychology. The latter implies that
various aspects of inner experience can be described as fixed observable objects. It is to be noted, first, that Brentano denied the possibility
of observing psychic phenomena, and, second, that Husserl believed
that the distinction between the inner and the outer is not the main
epistemological distinction to be made.
Phenomenology refuses to explain consciousness through objects
and processes which themselves are not conscious. Furthermore, this
refusal is specified in Husserl's thought in such a way as to avoid
traditional forms of idealistic philosophy: the "final elements" of
consciousness are interpreted as meaning-forming factors which express
the primordial "predestination" of consciousness to perceive, to conceive, to recollect, to imagine, etc. various kind of objects. Meaning, in
the phenomenological sense, is relation of consciousness to objects.
In Mach's subjective idealism, consciousness is interpreted as a
multiplicity of sensations, and external things; the human body and
emotions are reduced to them. But what does it mean here to say
"reduced"? Sensations themselves are not consciousness in the proper
sense of the word, exactly in the sense of meaning. Sensations do not
constitute any meaning of sensations and cannot lie at the ground of the
unity of consciousness.
In Hegel's objective idealism the essence of consciousness represents
itself in "a speculative construction," as the connection of the abstract
forms of thought. But the latter again have no constituting, sensebestowing character. This construction already carries a closed system
of meanings which can only "guess" the real content of the actual world.
The significance of Husserl's phenomenology consists in the attempt
to eliminate these alternatives: to "dismember" consciousness into a
totality of sensations or to include it in a system of abstract notions.
The former and the latter become the material for various conceptual
constructions, but they cannot be the subject-matter of phenomenological reflection. Phenomenology refrains from making constructions
which would make it impossible to work with consciousness itself.
Phenomenology has an imperative character. It demands to penetrate
through many conceptions and doctrines on consciousness to consciousness itself. There is an essential difference between concepts of
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VICTOR MOLCHANOV
duty, opinions on the nature of love, aesthetic theories, etc. and doing
one's duty, loving, and the experience of beauty.
Summing up, phenomenology does not become a set of empirical
descriptions. It maintains the difference between life and concepts of
life, and this "retention" implies that one must be constantly watchful
concerning three main phenomenological distinctions: (a) between
meaning and sign, (b) between meaning and object, and (c) between
meaning and psychic image.
In my opinion the first distinction is the one most important today.
The distinction between contextuality and systematization is a modification of the distinction between meaning and sign. Context is the living
space (i.e., time) of meaning; in system is the real existence of the sign.
Their intertwining is evident. But the aim of phenomenology is to
distinguish between them, and to not set them in such proximity that
the difference would be obscured. I think Derrida's reflections have just
this tendency.
Keeping these distinctions is the strictness of life, if one may say so.
And the strictness of life is keeping vigil and overcoming the European
fatigue which Husserl addressed a bit more than fifty year ago.
State University of Rostov-on-Don
NOTES
1 E. Husser!, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,
trans. D. Carr. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970) p. 187.
2 Ibid., p. 297.
A. ZVIE BAR-ON
A PROBLEM IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF

ACTION: ARE THERE UNINTENTIONAL ACTIONS?
John Searle, who may be regarded as the best phenomenologist among

the analytic philosophers, or even better, the most brilliant analytic
philosopher among the phenomenologists of our day, writes in his
Intentionality:
[I]ntending and intentions are just one form of Intentionality among others, they have
no special status. The obvious pun on "Intentionality" and "intention" suggests that
intentions in the ordinary sense have some special role in the theory of Intentionality;
but on my account intending to do something is just one form of Intentionality along
with belief, hope, fear, desire, and lots of others; and I do not mean to suggest that
because, for example, beliefs are Intentional they somehow contain the notion of
intention or they intend something or someone who has a belief must thereby intend to
do something about it. (p. 3)
Searle wants to separate entirely the colloquial, pre-analytic, or prephilosophical sense of the terms "intention" and "intentionality" from
the sense which is attached to them when a theory of intentionality is
being construed, like for example, Husserl's or Searle's theories.
Note, however, that this terminological remark of Searle's is a part of
a whole series of locutions similar in character, by means of which he
tries to bring out the special way in which he himself uses these terms,
"in so doing to dissociate from certain features of the tradition."
I showed elsewhere (see Bar-On, 1985), that these non-conformist
remarks of Searle's should not be taken too seriously, since when the
remark is correct, the deviation from the tradition is not very significant, while when the deviation seems of importance, the allegation is
not quite accurate.
The remark we quoted above seems to belong to the second
category. The distinction between the two senses of "intentionality" is
significant indeed. Singling it out, however, is quite in accord with the
tradition. Husserl was aware of it and used the terms accordingly. (On
this point, see Spiegelberg, 1976).
377
378
A. ZVIE BAR-ON
It is true that Husserl, as far as I can remember, did not bother to

express the distinction by a special terminological rule. But the danger
of conceptual confusion in the German language is much smaller than
in English,or some other Western languages, since there are different
words in German for "intention" in its colloquial sense (Absicht,
Vorsatz).
But what exactly, we may ask, is the content of that distinction
between the two senses? How should we apply it when, for instance, we
analyze the concept of an action? What precisely is the difference
between intentionality as the characteristic of both belief and action,
and as that which belongs only to an action?
It so happened that until now analytic philosophers paid attention
mainly, if not entirely, to the colloquial sense of the term, while the
phenomenologists focused largely on the other, technical, as it were,
sense. The relation between the two senses was neglected by both.
I feel that time is ripe for reconsidering the whole set: each of the
two senses as well as the relation between them. This is the broader
context of my present analysis. The more particular one will be a
reassessment of some interpretations, given recently to the colloquial
sense. I see it as one of the urgent problems of phenomenological
praxeology.
I shall deal with this problem somewhat indirectly by asking the
question of the title: are there unintentional actions?
If we followed ordinary language usage, we would have to answer
this question in the affirmative. Indeed, we use the locution "unintentional action" for a considerable range of happenings, such as: screaming when one sees a mouse; stepping onto the corns of one's neighbor
on a bus full of people; saying something which embarasses one's best
friend.
In cases like these the comment would normally be: one did not
mean it; one did it unintentionally.
However, would we stick to this idiom after phenomenological
reflection? Can such a complex experience as action of any kind be
altogether devoid of intentionality?
This and related questions will concern us in what follows.
I was prompted to take up this issue while studying some of
Aristotle's praxeological considerations, to be found in the first five
chapters of Book Three of his Nicomachean Ethics.
It seemed to me that I have detected an inconsistency in Aristotle's
A PROBLEM IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ACTION
379
argumentation, which propelled me into an even more thorough investigation of the relevant text. As it will become clear from my discussion,
this inconsistency may be said to have cast its shadow on praxeological
theories right down to recent times.
Aristotle starts his praxeological theorizing with the distinction
between voluntary ahd involuntary action. He writes:
Those things ... are thought involuntary, which take place under compulsion ... ; and
that is compulsory of which the moving principle is outside, being a principle in which
nothing is contributed by the person who is acting ... , e.g., if he were to be carried
somewhere by a wind, or by men who had him in their power. (1109b35-1110a3)
Thus, the general description which Aristotle gives to compulsory

action is that its agent is moved to act by an external factor to which he,
the agent himself, contributed nothing. The two examples bring out
beautifully this idea. The typical case of compulsion is that in which
the action is being imposed on the agent literally from outside, by a
superior physical force.
A parallel definition is given for a voluntary action:
the principle that moves the instrumental parts of the body in such actions is in him [in
the agent], and the things of which the moving principle is in man himself, are in his
power to do or not to do. Such actions, therefore, are voluntary .... (111 Oa15-19)
As to compulsion, Aristotle is undoubtedly aware of other varieties of

it, of cases where the notion of an involuntary action is applied in a
somewhat weaker sense. He indeed qualifies his initial statement by
saying:
But with regard to the things that are done from fear of greater evils ... (e.g., if a tyrant
were to order one to do something base, having one's parents and children in his
power, and if one did the action they were to be saved, but otherwise would be put to
death), it may be debated whether such actions are involuntary or voluntary .... Such
actions, then, are mixed, but more like voluntary actions; for they are worthy of choice
at the time when they are done. (1110a15-19; italics mine)
We have gained a concept of "mixed actions." These are partly compulsory and partly voluntary. They are compulsory - because if it were
not for the special circumstances (in Aristotle's example, the risk of
letting the agent's parents and children be killed) the agent would by no
means have performed the base action. And they are voluntary -
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A. ZVIE BAR-ON
because despite those special circumstances, the agent could still

abstain from performing the base action; he would not have been, by
assumption, compelled by a superior physical force to do it. He had, in
principle, the freedom of choice.
Granted, it was a very restricted freedom. In similar circumstances and they occur in our time no less then in Aristotle's - we are rather
inclined to say: if the life of the hostages is in such a grave danger, we
do not have the choice.
That "no choice" is nevertheless only relative. You can always say:
"One should never give in to the terrorists. . .. Giving in to blackmail
only invites more and graver blackmail," etc. Thus, in those "mixed
actions" there is an element of choice, albeit a very unpleasant, indeed,
a frightful one.
This idea also finds telling expression in Aristotle's text: "[S]ome acts,
perhaps we cannot be forced to do, but ought rather to face death after
the most fearful sufferings; for the things that "forced" Euripides's
Alkmeon to slay his mother seem absurd." (111 Oa27 -9)
Thus, the notions of voluntary, involuntary and so-called mixed
action came through, it seems, crystal clear in Aristotle's explication in
the first chapter of Book 3. A surprise awaits us, however, in the third
chapter of that book, where the concept of deliberation is discussed.
In this discussion Aristotle takes it for granted that "we deliberate
not about ends but about means," a proposition which undoubtedly can
be debated, but which seems not to be incompatible with Aristotle's
system.
The ends, we are told, are, basically, given; what we may deliberate
about are the means to their attainment, and as to these, the agent has
to consider, according to Aristotle, two things: (a) are they really the
means for the attainment of his end; and if so (b) is it something he
himself can do or obtain.
At this point of his argument, Aristotle urges: "It seems ... that man
is the moving principle of actions [while] deliberation is about the things
to be done by the agent himself." (1112b32-33)
We see that here Aristotle considers any action whatsoever, and not
only voluntary action, as something of which the moving principle
inheres in the agent himself and not outside of him. If such is the case,
it would follow that a compulsive action, the moving principle of which,
it was said, is outside of the agent and to which the agent contributed
nothing, is a contradictio in adiecto.
381
What was labeled up to now "an involuntary action of an agent" can

by no means be considered his action. He is not its moving principle.
At most it could be considered to be movements of his body, forced
upon him by some external power.
"There are no involuntary actions" - this should be the conclusion
of our analysis of Aristotle's text. In the context of our discussion it
seems to be an overstatement. We do not want to speak about the
relation between will and action, but between intention and action. Is
what we found in Aristotle applicable to the latter relation?
I think it is. As we understand the relationship between will and
intention, it is such, that we are entitled to infer from a proposition
taking the form "the agent S did the action A voluntarily" the proposition taking the form "S did A intentionally." You cannot perform an
action voluntarily and not intentionally. Hence, intention is even more
implied in an action than is volition. Consequently, if there are no
involuntary actions, then, a fortiori, neither are there unintentional
actions. Thus, we arrive at a negative answer to the question posed in
the title.
So much for the implication of some of Aristotle's praxeological
considerations. Can it be backed up by arguments taken from more
recent discussions of praxeological matters?
II
The theories of two contemporary thinkers appear to me particularly

relevant to this issue. I have in mind the already mentioned Berkeley
professor, John Searle, and the well-known Finnish philosopher, Georg
Henrik Von Wright.
Throughout his analysis of the relationship between intention and
action, Searle applies the rather extensive conceptual apparatus he had
constructed in the course of developing his theory of Intentionality. For
our purpose the most important of these are the concepts of intentional
content and of psychological mode, as well as the idea of conditions of
satisfaction of the intentional content. All these relate to what Searle
calls intentional states or events, which may be roughly seen as being
congruent with Brentano's psychic, or mental, phenomena and Husserl's experiences.
Now it has been shown (see Dreyfus, 1984, pp. 4ff; Bar-On, 1986)
that all the three main concepts mentioned above are to be found, some
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A. ZVIE BAR-ON
of them phrased slightly differently, in Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen. Husserl speaks there of the "intentional matter of experiences"
but he says explicitly that in this combination the word "matter" is
substituted for the word "content," to avoid the too many undesirable
connotations of the latter term (Husserl, 1922, Vol. II, p. 411).
Husserl's "intentional quality" seems to function the same way in his
theory as Searle's "psychological mode" does in his, while Husserl's
"intention/fulfillment" pair comes very close to Searle's "conditions of
satisfaction of an intentional content."
In a conversation with Searle in 1985 I brought this fact to his
attention. He did not seem to be very much surprised, but maintained
that whatever affinity one may find between Husserl's apparatus and
his, it is a sheer coincidence, because he is not at all familiar with the
details of Husserl's theory. I have no reason to doubt Searle's statement.
This alleged coincidence, however, this kind of overlap of the two
theories must have a historical significance, particularly as far as the
present and future relations between phenomenology and analytic
philosophy are concerned.
Still, it is not the historical aspect of the matter, which is our main
interest. What we want to know is, how does Searle define the relation
between intention and action and whether his way of looking at it can
help us to deal with our problem.
First let us have a short explanation of Searle's relevant terms.
If I believe that the Messiah will come soon, and I also desire it, then
Searle would say that I experience two intentional states with the same
intentional content ("The Messiah's eoming soon"). This content is
experienced by me in different psychological modes (the modes of
belief and desire).
If, further, I hope that Gorbachev succeeeds in implementing his
"perestroika" program, and I equally hope that the Iron Lady of Britain
will change her rigid monetary policy, then Searle would say that what I
experience are, again, two different intentional states, but this time they
are of the same psychological mode, though each of them has a
different intentional content.
Now in Searle's idiom, the Messiah's arriving soon, as much as the
success of Gorbachev's perestroika and the change in Mrs. Thatcher's
monetary policy, are the conditions of satisfaction of the intentional
content of my four intentional states.
These very same concepts apply to the intention as an intentional
383
state and to the relation between it and action. Searle writes accordingly:
Just as my belief is satisfied if the state of affairs represented by the content of the
belief actually obtains, and my desire is satisfied if the state of affairs represented by the
content of the desire comes to pass, so my intention is satisfied if the action represented
by the content of the intention is actually performed. (Searle, 1983, p. 79)
A closer look, however, at the concept of intention brings to the fore

some problems.
First of all, Searle implies, we have to distinguish between two kinds
of intentions: intentions which occur in the agent's mind prior to the
actions which are the condition of their satisfaction, (called "intentionsfor-action"), and intentions which are present in the mind during the
performance of those actions ("intentions-in-action").
Searle says that normally the intention-for-action causes the intention-in-action, which in its turn causes the performance. The question
of causation in action will be dealt with at a later stage of our discussion. At this point we must just notice that it would be a mistake to
think that every single action is connected with intentions of both kinds.
There are actions for which no intention is being formed prior to their
performance. These are the so-called spontaneous actions. In connection with these, only intentions-in-action can be spoken of.
Let us now consider the concept of the conditions of satisfaction, as
related to actions. First, as to simple actions. Suppose I raise my arm.
This simple action may belong to either of the two categories mentioned above. In any case we will have to distinguish two components in
it: (1) the experience of raising my arm, and (2) the physical movement
of the arm. In Searle's idiom (2) is the condition of satisfaction of (1). If
for some reason I have the experience of raising my arm, but the arm
does not rise, we have to say that I have an experience of an intentionality the content of which has not been satisfied.
In this example the relation between intention and action is quite
transparent. The situation is different with more complex actions.
Consider for instance Searle's example of the murder of the Archduke
Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, in 1914. It can be said
of the murderer that he (1) pulled the trigger; (2) fired the gun; (3) shot
the Archduke; (4) killed the Archduke; (5) struck a blow against
Austria; and (6) avenged Serbia.
It is clear that in this case there was an intention-for-action, and we
384
A. ZVIE BAR-ON
may asume that it was to avenge Serbia. But the conditions of satisfaction of the content of that intention encompassed the whole list of
"actions" written above. Gavrilo pulled the trigger with the intention to
fire the gun; he fired the gun with the intention to shoot the Archduke,
and so on to the sixth item on the list.
Such an analysis of a complex action is sometimes called the
Accordion Effect. (See Searle, 1983, pp. 98ff; Feinberg, 1970, p. 34;
Goldman, 1970, pp. 18ff.) Wherever we place a finger on this list we
will touch an intentional action, something done by Gavrilo on that
single occasion. Note, however, that this list can be, as Searle puts it,
extended in several directions. Upwards: Gavrilo, say, contracted
certain muscles in his arm. Sidewards: he displaced a lot of air
molecules. Downwards: he caused the First World War.
No one of these can possibly be considered Gavrilo's intentional
action. But can they be looked at as actions at all?
Another of Searle's examples may help us to sharpen this question:
Oedipus marrying his mother Jocasta. When Oedipus decided to marry
the woman by the name of Jocasta he did not know that she was his
mother. His intention was to marry a non-related woman, which he was
allowed to do by the law of his land. Actually, he married his mother.
How are we to define this event of Oedipus marrying his mother? On
the face of it, at least, not as an intentional action on his part. Perhaps
then, as his unintentional action? Or alternatively, not as one of his
actions at all?
Searle says that he is inclined to think of it as Oedipus' unintentional
action. But he points out certain other aspects of that complex event,
which might be indicated as Oedipus' unintentional actions, but which
he, Searle, would not classify this way. He writes: "When Oedipus
married his mother he moved a lot of molecules, caused some neurophysiological changes in his brain and altered his spatial relationship to
the North Pole." (Searle, 1983, p. 102).
Searle has no doubt that these should not be classified as Oedipus'
actions, not even as his unintentional actions. He thinks that there is an
important difference between these two kinds of events.
Fine, but what is the difference? Where is the yardstick by which we
should make out the distinction when we come to particular cases?
In connection with these questions Searle's theory has been repeatedly criticised. (See Dascal, 1981). Dr. Ora Gruengard's criticism in her
article "Unintended Actions and Unconscious Intentions" (Gruengard,
385
1985) seems most acute of all. It appears that the problem of the
criterion, alluded to above, makes the issue even more difficult to solve,
when we take into account two possibilities overlooked by Searle. First,
in principle, it is entirely possible for an agent to talk with the intention
of moving air-molecules. Secondly, from the point of view of Freud's
theory of the dynamics of mental occurences, it is fully possible that
part of Oedipus' intention in marrying Jocasta was his unconscious
striving to marry his mother. The Oedipus Complex hypothesis offers
quite an impressive explanation of such a situation.
We are bound to conclude that Searle's theory, although it illuminates to an extent the structure of action and contributes thereby
significantly to its phenomenology, does not provide any satisfactory
solution to our problem.
III
Time has come to consider Von Wright's conception. First let us say a
few words about Von Wright himself and the broad context of his
philosophy. He was one of the first analytic philosophers, who broke
the ice between phenomenology, or Continental Philosophy in general,
and the analytic philosophical camp. After having been deeply involved
in the analytic way of philosophizing, he attempted to combine the
analytic method with more traditional devices. This trend in his work
comes to the fore, more than anywhere else, in his analysis of action
and of the practical inference.
The crucial concepts in that analysis are: a distinction between
"internal" and "external" aspects of action: intention as one of the
essential parts of the internal aspect (along with deliberation, anticipation, decision, preference, etc.); "stages" in the external aspect; and
a variety of "descriptions" under which the same action can be subsumed.
Take for example the simple action of opening the window. This
event of the window becoming open is called, in Von Wright's idiom,
"the result" of the given action, which is to be considered one stage only
among others of the action's external aspect. If it was needed, in this
particular case, to press a button in order to open the window, then
pressing the button would be considered the "causal antecedent" of the
result, another stage of the external aspect of the action. Again, if the
opening of the window was followed by a drop in the indoor tempera-
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A. ZVIE BAR-ON
ture, then we should refer to the drop in temperature as the consequence of the external aspect of the action.
From among all these stages, Von Wright singles out the result as
that stage which is intrinsically, or conceptually connected with the
action itself. This assumption will prove to be of special significance.
But first, let us continue with the basic analysis.
If, for instance, the opening of the window did not occur, it would be
logically erroneous to speak of an action of opening the window. We
could then at most speak of an attempt to open the window, which
would naturally bring our attention to the internal aspect of the action,
the agent's intention.
Before we talk of this, let us recall that the external aspect of an
action has several stages, in our case, pressing the button; opening the
window; a drop in the indoor temperature. Now, notice that the
identification of the result can be switched from one stage to another.
By doing so we subsume the action under several descriptions. We may
say:
The agent pressed the button and, as a consequence, the window opened and the room
was cooled; or, the agent opened the window by pressing a button (causal antecedent)
and as a consequence the room was cooled; or, the agent cooled the room by opening
the window, which he did by (first) pressing a button (Von Wright, 1971, p. 88f. On the
description-idea see Anscombe, 1957; Davidson, 1980).
This part of Von Wright's analysis is particularly important to us, since

it brings out the problematic relation between the various stages of the
external aspect and the intention. The result, in its technical sense, is
the object of the agent's intention, i.e., what he intends.to do. Less clear
is the relation between the other stages of the external aspect and the
intention. If we say that the agent opened the window by pressing a
button, then the connection between pressing the button and the
intention is obvious. The agent pressed the button intentionally, in
order to open the window. But how should we figure out the connection, as far as the consequences are concerned? If a drop of the indoor
temperature followed, it does not mean that this too was part of the
agent's intention. He could have opened the window, say, in order to
speak to a friend who walked by. In such a case we cannot ascribe to
him the intention of cooling the room.
We come close again to the main issue of our discussion. At this
387
juncture Von Wright raises the question of the relation between the
internal and the external aspects of an action, the focus of the internal
one being the intention.
He points out the fact that in recent praxeological discussions two
trends opposed to each other came to the fore in search of an answer to
this question. Their champions are the causalists versus the intentionalists. The causalists' answer is, as their name suggests, that the
relation is a typically causal one: the internal aspect is the cause, the
external is the effect, while the bond between them is an empirical, i.e. a
non-logical one. The intentionalists, and Von Wright among them,
argue for the logical character of that bond. Von Wright sets out to
back his intentional thesis by a thorough reconsideration of the socalled Practical Inference (hereafter - PI).
In formulating his schema of PI, Von Wright uses - as is quite
fashionable these days - the Aristotelian model of the Practical Syllogism, but with a difference which I shall briefly explain.
Aristotle formulates the practical syllogism in ch. 3 Book VII of his
Nicomachean Ethics. Dealing with the proposition that practical wisdom, or phronesis, is incompatible with incontinence, he writes:
We may view the cause as follows with reference to the facts of human nature. The one
opinion is universal, the other is concerned with the particular facts, and here we come
to something within the sphere of perception; when a single opinion results from the
two, the soul must in one type of case [i.e., in scientific reasoning] affirm the conclusion,
while in the case of opinions concerned with production [here acting in general is most
probably meant] it must immediately act (i.e. if "everything sweet ought to be tasted,"
and "this is sweet," in the sense of being one of the particular sweet things, the man who
can act and is not prevented, must at the same time actually act accordingly).
(1147a25-32)
As we see, Aristotle points out the isomorphism, the structural similarity between the scientific or theoretical, and the practical syllogisms.
In both of them we have a major and a minor premise, and a conclusion which follows from the combination of the two premises. There is,
however, also a difference between these two syllogistic forms. The
major premise in the theoretical syllogism is assertive and factual, while
in the practical syllogism it is of a normative nature. Also, the conclusion in the theoretical variety is equally factual, whereas in the practical
one it is a directive to act.
In Von Wright's exposition PI gets the following form:
(1)
The agent S intends to bring about the state-of-affairs p;
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A. ZVIE BAR-ON
(2)
S considers that he cannot bring about p unless he does

action A.
(3)
Therefore S sets himself to do A.
The major premise gives expression to the agent's intention; it is the

intentional component of PI. The minor premise refers to the agent's
belief regarding the means necessary to achieve that goal; this is the
cognitive component of PI. The conclusion speaks of the performance
itself.
Now the question at issue is whether we are entitled to say that in PI
the conclusion follows logically from the conjunction of the two
premises. Von Wright's answer to this question is in the affirmative, and
he tries to substantiate his answer by the method of verification.
He starts with the conclusion. How do we know that S sets himself
to do A? Naturally, it would be easier to become convinced that S set
himself to do A, if he actually did A, than if something prevented him
from it. Suppose we see that S puts his finger on the button, which
opens the window, and we also see that at that moment the button is
sinking into its hole. We have a good reason to suppose that the
movement of S's finger actually caused the button's sinking into the
hole, and thereby also caused the opening of the window. A causal
connection between two events was established. But, asks Von Wright,
did we also verify, or at least confirm the proposition that S performed
A? To accomplish that we have still to show that what happened was
intended and not - and I quote Von Wright - "brought about only
accidentially, by mistake or even against his will."
Thus our task is to show that S actually has a certain intention, as
well as certain benefits connected with that intention. We are pushed
back in our endeavor of verification from the conclusion to the
premises of PI. And how can we establish from outside the presence of
an intention-cum-"practical" belief in an agent?
Certainly not by observing all those physical phenomena which,
according to our analysis, are included in the external aspect of the
action. On this point Von Wright makes the following important
statement:
Intentional behavior ... resembles the use of language. It is a gesture whereby I mean
something. Just as the use and the understanding of language presupposes a language
community, the understanding of action presupposes a community of institutions and
389
practices and technological equipment into which one has been introduced by learning
and training. One could perhaps call it a life community. We cannot understand
behaviour which is completely alien to us. (Von Wright, 1971, p. 114f.)
Von Wright concludes his analysis by saying:

To say that intentionality is in the behaviour is at once suggestive of something
important and easily misleading. The truth in that formulation is that intentionality is
not anything "behind" or "outside" the behaviour .... The misleading thing about the
formulation is that it suggests a "location" of the intention, a confinement of it to a
definite item of behavior, as though one could discover the intentionality from a study
of the movements. One could say ... that the behavior's intentionality is its place in a
story about the agent. Behavior gets its intentional character from being seen by the
agent himself or by an outside observer in a wider perspective, from being set in a
context of aims and cognitions. (Ibid., p. 115)
Thus, intentionality is in the action, it is an integral part of it. It would

therefore be preposterous to speak of an unintentional action at all,
although ordinary linguistic usage may suggest its reasonableness. In
this, as in many other cases, ordinary language is misleading, when the
question is that of conceptual precision.
IV
As far as I know, Von Wright does not deal explicitly with the prime
question of our discussion here. But, as I attempted to show, his
praxeological analysis leads clearly to a negative answer to it.
What such an answer requires, is a re-assessment of the praxeological distinction between two kinds of occurrences in one's system:
between things one does, and things which happen to him.
I open the window; write a letter; vote in the elections; solve a
problem, or get rid of it by showing that it is no problem at all - these
are things I do, and I certainly do them intentionally. But I also get
older; am sometimes emotionally agitated; one day I become a grandfather. These latter things happen to me; the question of intentionality
does not arise at all with respect to them.
Now, as a consequence of our analysis, it is necessary to broaden
this second category of occurences by subsuming under it those which
are ordinarily referred to as unintentional actions.
Suppose I work on the roof of my house, the hammer slips out of my
hand, falls down, hits a passerby on his head and kills him. Should we
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A. ZVIE BAR-ON
say that I killed the man, albeit unintentionally? Such may be a

convenient way of speech of, say, a prosecutor in the courtroom, who
wants to persuade the members of the jury that I am responsible for the
victim's death. But it does not hold water as far as precise thinking goes.
What I intended to do with the hammer in my hand was not to kill
somebody. My intention at the particular moment of the disaster was a
completely different one, but I did not succeed in implementing it.
Instead, something happened to my hand such that the grip on the
hammer loosened, causing a chain of events which led to the victim's
death. None of these events can be defined as an action. That is not to
say that there is no way of making me responsible for what happened. It
is just that the performance of an action is not a necessary condition of
making somebody responsible for an occurrence or a state-of-affairs.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

REFERENCES
Anscombe, G. E. M. 1957. Intention (Oxford: Blackwell).
Aristotle. 1941. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R. McKean (New York: Random House).
Bar-On, A. Z. 1985. "Who, Sear!e or Husser!," in Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of
Psychology, ed. R. M. Chisholm et al. (Vienna: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky).
Dascal, M. and O. Gruengard. 1981. "Unintentional Action and Non-action," Manuscrito, Vol. 4.
Davidson, D. 1980. Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Dreyfus, H. L. (ed.). 1984. Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science (Cambridge
Mass.: The MIT Press).
Feinberg J. 1970. Doing and Deserving (Princeton: Princeton u.P.).
Goldman, A. I. 1970. A Theory of Human Action (Princeton: Princeton U.P.).
Gruengard, O. 1985. "Unintended Actions and Unconscious Intentions" in Philosophy
of Mind, Philosophy of Psychology, ed. R. M. Chisholm et al. (Vienna: HolderPichler-Tempsky).
Husser!, E. 1922. Logische Untersuchungen (Halle: Max Niemeyer).
Searle, J. R. 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge:
Cambridge u.P.).
Spiegelberg, H. 1976. "'Intention' and 'Intentionality' in the Scholastics, Brentano and
Husser!" in The Philosophy of Brentano, ed. L. L. McAlister (London: Duckwort).
Von Wright, G. H. 1971. Explanation and Understanding (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul).
PART FIVE
THE HUMAN BEING: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL,

PSYCHIATRIC, ANALYTIC, AND THERAPEUTIC
BREAKTHROUGHS OF PHENOMENOLOGY
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PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES IN
DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHIATRY
INTRODUCTION
Phenomenological psychiatry has long been considered an important

part of general psychiatry, and yet its contributions to the literature
focusing directly on childhood and adolescence have been few, and
those few, though on occasion of considerable weight, have been
neither systematic nor have they made direct reference to the primary
sources of phenomenological research.
The aim of this paper is to provide a general outline of basic principles for a phenomenological approach to developmental psychiatry.
These basic principles are drawn mainly from the original phenomenological analyses of Husserl and Heidegger (as detailed in a previous
monograph) [De Negri, 1986]. Examples are also given of the type
of phenomenological approach applied in some of the main clinical
conditions.
1. THE ANALYTIC OF HUSSERL AND OF HEIDEGGER
Basic Principles
A. The analyses taken from Husserl (mainly from his posthumous
Eifahrung und Urteil deal with the structural and genetic phenomenol-
ogy of consciousness, and are of particular and specific relevance,

therefore, in a developmental and psychodynamic perspective (Husserl).
It is possible to recognize in these analyses some of the basic principles
underlying "psychic dynamics," using this term in a wider, less onesided sense than that of "psychodynamics" in the psychoanalytic
context. In the developmental context, the psychiatric interpretation
rests on the presupposition that whatever in Husserl's analyses
describes the "structured" layering of consciousness in psychiatric terms
becomes "developmental progression."
On this basis the parameters to be adopted are as follows:
- The mastery of logical-casual consequentiality, of apophatic and
393
xxxv, 393-409.
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objectivizing prediction, of spatial and temporal positioning and

their interrelation, and of objective corporeity is gradual, proceeding
from the most immature (infantile) stages to the more mature stages.
The more immature patterns of the dynamics of consciousness
persist and often predominate in adult consciousness in physiological and, more particularly, pathological conditions having their
origin in drives and affects.
The activity of consciousness (or Ego activity) both in its precategorial and categorial modes is constitutively "intentional," tending
constantly to "intend" interconnections of comparison and synthesis
and to formulate predications and objectifications in an effort to
arrive at the truth (erkennen: for the "Ego," it is a question of selfpreservation [ef. Husserl]. The degree of appropriateness (or adaequatio) and the ability to "make up one's mind" in formulating
judgements are, however, subordinate to the structural degree or
level at which this egological formulation is expressed.
Consciousness and egological activity should be seen in a dynamic
rather than a static perspective and not only latitudinally but also
longitudinally. There emerges in the "living-now" of consciousness
not only the perceived present but also what was perceived in the
past (which has become "submerged and latent" or "unconscious"),
with similar patterns of association and interconnection (by analogy,
temporal position, and "sense").
The present content of consciousness is also conditioned by its
"historicity": most precategorial and categorial judgements are
"given" and are subjected to the longitudinality of retention and
extension. The content is enriched and refined in its interconnections and "adaequatio," from the lower to the higher strata of
consciousness or, equally, from the immature to the more mature
stages.
A careful reading of Husserl's analyses helps to unfold and define
phenomenologically both the gradually progressive infantile patterns of
consciousness and the psychopathological modes typified by restrietive
patterns of defensive regression and distortion.
From this viewpoint, Husserl's analyses correlate with psychoanalytic
observation and, in a certain sense, also support it.
B. The analyses taken from Heidegger's Being and Time deal with the
fundamental existential horizons of the "human presence," omitting the
"whys" in order to penetrate the "hows," the "fors," the "sinces," and the
"references" which (expressed in practical terms) represent the primary
PERSPECTIVES IN DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHIATRY
395
tendencies which guide and condition the development of personality

and the adaptation process right from the very first and throughout the
entire sequence of development.
Heidegger developed the fundamental themes of "existential" phenomenology, which most nearly and incisively concern the drama of the
"human presence" (Dasein or Being-there "human existence"). It is, in
fact, well known that the principal applications of phenomenological
analysis in the field of psychiatry derive specifically from Heidegger's
phenomenology, and yet this phenomenology has never, at least until
now, been applied to developmental psychiatry.
In order to establish some points of reference to clinical practice we
can formulate a series of coordinates (see De Negri, 1986) which would
include these:
The ontic character and the various positive or defective ways of
"Being-with."
The law of adaptive contraposition or "distancing" (Abstandigkeit).
The constraints, ambiguities and hindrances of "averageness" and
the "they" ( das man).
The longitudinal historical approach to personal development.
The contradictions of identity (the advance from the "they-self"
derived from the world of the "they" to the attempt to fulfill oneself
in the authenticity of the "Being-self").
The "ontic" or "primordial existential" character of "concern" and
the "project" and the inhibiting of "depossibilizing" factors.
The existential patterns of corporeity and of time and space, which
follow the dynamics of their evolution from the "experienced" (with
cognitive, affective, and existential components) to the "known."
***
The premises suggested by the phenomenological analyses of Husserl
and Heidegger can be summarized as follows:
Given are the fundamental denotations of the functioning of consciousness, its constant "acting" and its various structural patterns;
in the determination of the clinical signs (symptoms, symbols, bending or evasion of ego processes) pertaining to immaturity as
opposed to regression and with respect to the specific stage of
development (in the realm of developmental psychology) and to
specific psychopathogenetic matrices (in the realm of dynamic
psychopathology).
Having accepted the fundamental principles of existentiality, in
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order to determine in a specific clinical case the "instrumental"

defects and/or coexistential inadequacies which inhibit, constrain, or
distort development.
Having accepted space-time and corporeity as fundamental existential coordinates, in order to examine their role and mode of expression and communication, both throughout the developmental
progression (from "experience" to the "known") and in cases of
pathological psychodynamic inhibitions.
The Complementarity of and Differentiation Between
Psychoanalytic and Phenomenological Principles
At this point it should be emphasized that although psychoanalytic and

phenomenological principles are complementary, on certain fundamental premises they differ in approach:
Phenomenological methodology's (deriving from Husser!) analyses
of the structure and dynamics of consciousness agree in many
respects with psychoanalytic precepts and also with Piaget's genetic
psychology, as shown in a previous paper (De Negri, 1968).
However, its premise lies not so much in a purely instinctual matrix
(Ego functions activated and governed by the libido) as in an allimportant egological context (in the "epistemological" calling of
consciousness, which itself moves, in its continuous "acting," to
attain ever more mature levels of knowing and to formulate
judgement objectifications).
The phenomenological analyses of the "experience" of space and
corporeity also anticipate and somehow run parallel to those
applied in contemporary psychoanalytic practice (which is probably
often influenced, though not explicitly, by phenomenological concepts). The "sense" of this experience does not, however, originate
simply in instinctual urges but in wider, more comprehensive
existential values.
The evasion of consciousness (in psychoanalytic theory "defense
mechanisms") does not proceed from the matrix of instinctual
conflict alone but also meets other needs inherent in the difficulties
of "projection of self," coexistential difficulties of frustrations,
obstacles to "possibility and provision," uneasiness at comparison,
with measuring up to the stereotypes of "das man."
397
The concept of "love" is not limited to its instinctual or erotic

component.
Anxiety and guilt not only arise from conflict but they are (according to Heidegger) "existential fundamentals," essential to the human
condition, representing the primordial "mover" driving one to
"project oneself" towards growth and towards authenticity. They
have, therefore, their own individual physiology and their own
pathology.
It is clear that the appraisal of deficiencies and distortions involving
these "existential fundamentals," aside from any symptomatological or
nosographic formalization, is fundamental clinically, particularly during
the developmental structuring of the personality; and this appraisal is
objectively possible and clinically valid in the "here and now" as well as
in the diachronic prospects of each individual history.
It should be stressed that the phenomenological perspective still
represents (at least as it is proposed here) as instrument for clinical
analysis and therapeutic intervention of the "objective" type. It is
proposed even before all that concerns the "empathetic," "transferance," "interpretation," and "identification." This presupposes the "existentially founding" character of certain attributes of human existence
which must be considered objectively constituent and indispensable to
its accomplishment - constituent, therefore, of a "being" considered
not as a "thing" (or, in Heidegger's terminology as a "presence-athand") but as "e-xistential," that is (and indispensably), in its acting and
"relating-to."
These "existential fundamentals" as defined in the analyses of
Husserl and Heidegger, require neither demonstration nor inference
but may be considered "self-evident."
Authenticity, Anxiety, and Guilt

Heidegger's phenomenology devotes special attention to the problems
of authenticity, anxiety, and guilt.
Authenticity can be adopted as a clinically relevant parameter
subdivided into different levels or classes of meaning.
The first level is that of the strictly Heideggerian meaning of
authenticity which is not only philosophical but also anthropological
and, therefore, clinical, if we accept the premise of an ontological origin
of anxiety deriving from a continuous and profound summons calling us
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away from the banality, vanity and the "inauthenticity" of the anonymous world of the "das man" (or the "they") to one's own more
authentic "potentiality-for-Being."
This involves:
The tension of striving to fulfill one's own "potentiality-for-Being,"
and to not draw back from the "possibilizing" attitude which constitutes the human presence.
The tension of transcending oneself, that is, of going beyond one's
present limits (in developmental terms we could say, "to develop
towards maturity"), freeing oneself from "depossibilizing" constraints, be they external (the world of the "they" with its referents,
prejudices, constrictions, idle chatter, and "ambiguities") or internal
(biologically or "psychodynamically" determined conflicts, stereotypes and conditioning).
.
The second level of authenticity, one more tangibly of clinical value
in terms of criteria of development concerns the sphere of the Mitwelt
or "communal world." This level also presents a number of different
aspects:
The extent to which one's identity, as derived from the reflection or
mediation of the relationship with "others" (the "they-self"), coincides with the authentic feeling of "one's-self."
The extent to which the mode of "Being-with" is expressed in its
positive forms, (with respect and solicitude for the independent
maturing of "others"), or alternatively, is expressed in its defective
forms, especially in those of aggression, more often than not masked
by a wide range of defensive or evasive behavior modes ("psychodynamic" in the traditional sense);
The extent to which the "situational sense of self" in "adaptive
contraposition" (Abstandigkeit) is expressed in behavioral modalities and intentions which mayor may not fit one's actual possibilities and adaptive needs, given the objective conditions of the
surrounding world, or in the more fluid but compulsory and prejudicial averageness of the "they."
Finally, the criterion of authenticity may also cover the extent to
which the cognitive process (in the Husserlian sense) responds to its
chief function of adaequatio, whether in the antepredicative or in the
predicative and categorial contexts, or alternatively, the extent to which
it is distorted by negative conditioning, especially of an emotional
nature (projection, distortion, inhibition, escape, symbolizing, etc.). (See
399
De Negri, 1986.) A more subtle connotation of inauthenticity can also

be inferred from the objectifications made in verbal judgements. This
may be reductive (reducing "Dasein" to "presence-at-hand") before the
understanding of "sense" equal to the mode of the cognitive-affective
projection that is concern and feeling "possibility and provision." Reductive conceptualization, objectified in verbal formulae ("statements")
can be adopted and passed on as static, impoverished and inauthentic
expressions of much wider, more profound, and more dynamic existential realities, as occurs, for instance, in descriptive or nosographic
psychiatry.
Closely linked with the concept and experience of authenticity is the
concept and experience of anxiety and guilt. A first fundamental
relationship between inauthenticity and anxiety lies in the fact that
inauthenticity is always experienced indistinctly and obscurely as
anxiety and often as guilt.
Different levels of anxiety can also be defined within the realm of
clinical praxis, a first fundamental and basic level being that intended in
the purely Heideggerian sense: anxiety as a summons calling us away
from ambiguous, anonymous, futile dissipation in the "they," world of
the "they," and back to the authenticity of "oneself."
Other levels at which anxiety finds expression (ultimately to be
ascribed, however, to fundamental existential anxiety, of which they are
specifically defined modes) are those described by clinical tradition as
specific conditions of existence; at these levels anxiety lends itself to
being confronted and averted by psychiatric means. There exist numerous existential conditions of this kind, often overlapping and interacting, as shown by the following examples:
Anxiety arises where Dasein is "depossibilized" in its essential
prerogatives such as intentionality and projection within the continual dynamics of "possibility and provision."
Anxiety arises where the "signs" guiding Dasein in its existential
adaptation are incomprehensible, ambiguous, or contradictory (consider, for example, the clinical analysis of metacommunication or,
more generically, of psychotogenetic interrelations).
Anxiety arises where the (ontically constituent) needs of "Beingwith" are frustrated or hindered or where defective modes of
"Being-with" prevail, or where the Dasein feels that it risks inadequacy or failure in coexistential situations and modes which evoke
"distancing" or "adaptive contraposition."
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Anxiety arises where the fulfillment of primordial existential needs

(including instinctual needs) is hindered by conflictualization with
the stereotyped or aggregating world of the "they" for which the
"superego" functions (as understood in psychoanalytic theory) as an
interiorized expression.
Clinically speaking, therefore, even though it may appear paradoxical, anxiety and guilt are not ailments to be eliminated. That would
mean depriving human existence of fundamental components. The need
is to lay bare, in each individual clinical situation, the different modes
of inauthenticity giving rise to anxiety and, in accordance with psychoanalytic insights, to pinpoint the defense mechanisms by which it hides
from itself in order to restore to it its primary function.
The Three "Worlds" or Modes of Existentiality
Heidegger's conception of living "within-the-world" incorporates, phenomenologically, three "worlds" or modes which, though separate are
also complementary and concurrent: the circumambient world (Umwelt),
the communal world (Mitwelt), and the personal world (Eigenwelt).
These three modes, though concurrent for the adult, are not yet so
for the child. The very young child, at the dawn of his existence, is
immersed in the "naturalness" and "creaturliness" of the circumambient
world, with all the connotations of biology and drives that this world
implies: feeding, sleeping, and waking, tension and repose. This is the
non-dualistic world of incorporative and receptive orality. Neuropsychiatric pathology in this context can only be due to privation: the
mode of "anaclitic depression." But this very concept of anaclitic
depression takes us already into the mode of the communal world.
In fact, the privation pathology of anaclitic depression is already
a void in interpersonal relations. Even in the first few months of
life, every being-in-the-world proves to be a "being-in-the-world-withothers": all being is communal being.
It is well known that the personalization process, even in this
primordial world, can be much conditioned by manner of coexistence.
In this setting lie the foundations for morbid personality development
(neurotic, depressive, or even psychotic) which are to be found mainly
in a discontinuous, ambiguous, ambivalent, frustrating, and incomplete
relationship between the two poles of the dyad that is the mother-child
relationship which is still symbiotic but already dialectic. The full ontic
401
character of the communal world is most apparent much later, during

the development of subjectivity and its interaction with others in intersubjectivity: at the beginning of awareness of self in coexistence.
Often, and especially starting from school age, psychiatric pathology
in the child becomes easier to penetrate pathogenetic ally and more
malleable therapeutically if reference is made within the context of the
communal world to given parameters such as the "situational stateof-mind" (or coexistential awareness of self), which emerges in the
confrontation with "averageness" (with the "they") in the dramatic
dynamics of the "distancing" or "adaptive contraposition." This is
particularly evident, for instance, in handicapped conditions deriving
from primary instrumental insufficiencies (intellectual, psychomotor,
psycho-perceptive, praxic) which engender precise clinical conditions
such as those encompassed by the broad but well-defined concept of
Minimal Cerebral Dysfunction, where the pathology is subjective and
relational rather than objective and biological.
Other more subtle and less easily classifiable clinical conditions arise
from distortion and constriction in intersubjective communication
leading to distortion and constriction in personal development and,
finally, to actual psychotic conditions. Modern currents of psychiatric
thought emphasize these pathogenic factors in the interpersonal theory
in psychiatry and more generally, in the pathology of metacommunication. Still other clinical conditions, characterized by somatic phenomena, derive the more dramatic core of their pathology not so much
from their physical severity (often very minor), but from the coexistential connotations by which these are overshadowed. A classic example
is offered by epilepsy which, with variable clinical significance, is
frequently found in childhood. The dissociation between the objective
entity on the strictly medico-biological level and its enveloping existential "sense" framed by the defining term and its existentially negative
connotations is clear, and this dissociation conditions the epileptic
person's coexistential awareness of self, his personal development, and
his life projection.
Other clinical conditions or rather symptoms, which are generally
transitory and reversible in childhood, and often linked to contingent
situations and, are up to a certain age, of little significance psychiatrically, will at a subsequent age find, in their negative coexistential
connotations and the consequent subjective and psychodynamic repercussions, the main reason for their needing psychiatric treatment.
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Examples of such symptoms are common enuresis, encopresis, compulsive behavior, and, what is more evident, transitory stuttering in the
very young child - which for this very reason has been defined as a
"morbid condition depending on symptom awareness" rather than as a
nosographic entity. Imperfections or difficulties in verbal functioning
are frequent and often transitory in children and, even though obvious,
have at least up to a certain aze, little emotional echo. They become
subjectively weighty, influencing possibilities for interrelational development, at a later age (around school age) parallel to the developing
awareness of self and of one's partaking of life with others when
precisely the verbal instrument which becomes the preferred means of
communication.
II. A BRIEF REFERENCE TO SPECIFIC CLINICAL CONDITIONS
A Phenomenological Note on "Depression"
In general phenomenological sense, depression means the loss of

"possibility" and of a "project": an experience of "depossibilization."
This condition has already been the focus of important phenomenological analyses within the realm of adult psychiatry. But it is perhaps
one of the psychiatric conditions of childhood least suited to analysis by
adult models.
There are a number of parameters derivable from phenomenological
analysis which can give an explanation of why this is so. The parameter
of temporality, for instance. In a morbid structure like that of depression, in which abnormal time experience is a component of primary
importance, this experience has different connotations for the child
than for the adult: the before and after dimensions of a child's time are
still uncertain and limited and not yet historicized; the location of
consciousness is commonly in the present; consciousness of the
moment prevails; emotional fluctuations are still mainly reactions to the
incidental and to the heteronymous.
Depression in childhood differs principally, however, because the
child subdivides his world-experience into regions which are different
from those divisions adopted by the adult: he does not yet "look out,"
he does not historicize, and he is not yet fully reflective in the personal
world. Depressive anxiety (which is, above all, guilt anxiety) cannot yet,
therefore, have the points of reference, the innermost echoes, the depth
403
and duration whlch become possible only later when a chlld's worldexperience opens and deepens further.
A Phenomenological Note on Psychoneurosis and The "As-if" Mode
As is well known, few chlld or adolescent "psychlatric" cases can be

classified according to nosographlc definitions; rather, they must be
studied according to their individual pattern and psychodynamic and
phenomenological structure.
One of the patterns met with most frequently, not only in chlldren
but also in their adult partners in the pathological and pathogenic
interrelational circle (such as the family context), is the "as-if" mode.
Though having no well-defined nosographic significance, this can be
described as a "neurotic" mode, as distinct from the depressive and
psychotic modes. In the "neurotic" "as-if" mode, as it is understood
here, ego functions are intact, including judgement's capacity for "adaequatio," the understanding of coexistential "signs" and their "sense"
connotations as well, the ability to depolarize one's "self" in emotional
existential situations, the ability to categorize, the ability to distinguish
between the "fictive" and "effective reality," etc. But, in part, these
egological concerns remain potential matters only, they being electively
and partially evaded by compensatory and defense tactics. The main
immature and inauthentic modes of existence are:
Insufficient overcoming of egocentricity leading to lack of recognition of the prerogatives and needs of other ego nuclei.
The choice of archaic mental operations for given sectors of greater
affective weight (projection, transduction, symbolizing, fabulation,
etc.), modes in whlch the lability and inauthenticity of a judgement
of reality are chosen because they are emotionally advantageous.
The tendency towards "adfirmation" and closure of the prediction
of judgement for longed-for magical moments or for the reassurance
implicit in such closure.
The excessive dependence of one's identity on referring to "them"
(here, identity remains ensnared in "they-self" modes).
Defective modes of "being-with" connected with an overriding
desire for "power" over others and with the constant fear of being
overcome in the process of "distancing" or in measuring oneself
against others - a fear whlch is acted out as contraposition and,
therefore, as open or (more often) masked aggression;
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The search for "cathartic" short cuts to resolve anxiety, a preference

for the "therapeutic" solution because it is guiltless.
Here the existential project is forced and distorted. Anxiety does not
here act as a driving and organizing force; it shuts itself off and feeds on
the uselessness of its own fictitious objects, searching for the outlet and
the reassurance offered by "symptoms." These inauthentic attitudes are
masked (for the most part "almost" unwittingly), by assuming "as-if"
modes: "as-if" the patterns of judgement were pertinent; "as-if" one's
identity were settled and stable; "as-if" the coexistential relationships
were adequate; "as-if" the symptoms presented were the real "illness."
In the subtly ambiguous control of the ego functions, cognitiveaffective understanding (the ''understanding'' rooted in the ontologically
co-real "state-of-mind" or Befindlichkeit) remains alive but is tenuously
divided between authentic and inauthentic choices, between reality and
escape - choices which allow adaptation to the rules and stereotypes
of the they and the continuation of narcissistic safety bound up with the
outward demands of the "they-self." An ambiguous and fictitious
communication system is induced or imposed by one or the other
partner in the intrinsic and extrinsic relationships within the group,
which is made to participate in the inauthenticity game. To reduce and
decode this system is one of the fundamental, even though sometimes
extremely difficult, requirements of the therapeutic "taking-in-charge."
A Phenomenological Note on Autism and Psychosis
A first step is to consider the "existential fundamentals" characteristic

of "coexistentialness" (Heidegger).
In psychodynamic terms, autism is clearly the epiphenomenon of a
co existential failure. It is the phenomenological response to the failure
of "mutuality" postulated by Betteiheim, bringing about emptiness and
the anxiety of depossibilization.
A second important element is the primitive existential character of
anxiety. In childhood psychosis, anxiety is emblematically non-conflictual. It is primordial ("existential") even though its more extreme forms
of expression may call for biological mediation.
The psychotic child does not have the means to contain, process,
and organize anxiety so that it may serve its primitive function of
propelling force and accelerant of "projection" and development. The
archaic "defense mechanisms" (Klein) correspond to the "archaic"
405
primitiveness of the mobilized and mobilizable cognitive processes in

the context of the layered and dynamic structure of consciousness in
which different levels are activated (from the elementary to the more
highly structured) both in relation to primary limitations and conditioning (an actual instrumental defect in the cognitive apparatus) and to
emotionally conditioned deviations or inhibitions. The phenomena
which Klein terms "splitting," "negation," "fragmentation," "projective
identification," etc. correspond to the primordial (and diachronic) levels
of the cognitive apparatus (the prelogical, precategorial, and preverbal
levels), (see Husserl's Erfahrung und Urteil). It should, however, be
specified that while, in psychoanalytic interpretation these phenomena
are almost exclusively seen as being reactive (expressly, as "defense"
mechanisms), they should also be considered from the point of view of
their primitive insufficiency. The "splitting" or "fragmentation" can be
reactive and defensive, but they can also reflect the inability to provide
a significant synthesis of the data deriving from perceptive experience;
the "projective identification" may be an investment in defensively
externalized drives, but it may also be the inevitable consequence of not
overcoming the primitive phase of cognitive non-differentiation. "Negation" may indicate aggression or defense, but it would not be possible if
there were not a defective inability to move away from the more
elementary levels of cognitive functioning towards more highly-developed levels: from naivete and the massified "ingenuous certitude of
belief" to the more differentiated modes of "possibility" and "doubt"
(Husserl). The inconsistencies in behavior and interrelating may be a
defense against and an escape from commitment to a frightening reality,
but they may also relate to a primary defectiveness of "insight" or
"sense" in the unfolding of the "Lebenswelt" or "world of life." A
similar defective inability may underlie the imperfect integration of
corporeity (enacted and experienced) in interrelations and in establishing identity.
Finally, the symbiotic non-differentiation can be secondary or reactive to a psychosis generating relationship with the mother, but it may
also be the expression of a handicapping inability to depolarize other
ego nuclei, of an inability to process the anxiety autonomously without
the fusional aid of an external Ego. It is clear that reactive and defective
factors can be complementary, with varying relative importance, and
that they must necessarily also involve other interrelating subjects,
mainly, the mother. It is also difficult to establish "a priori" which of the
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different factors involved is primary or secondary and to deduce some

kind of nosographic definition.
A Phenomenological Note on Adolescence

Adolescence is of great interest in the phenomenological approach to
human development. Two typical features of this age are "ambiguity"
and "rejection." Much has already been written about adolescent
ambiguity from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, including:
Ambiguity between the impositions of the "super-ego" and the need
for free choice.
Ambiguity arising between identification and aggression in regard to
adult models.
The ambiguity of instinctual-affective drives, between "libido" and
rejection of the materiality of the body, etc.
Phenomenological analysis can also clarify some other aspects of
adolescent ambiguity. A first topic could be that of anxiety and the
sense of guilt, Heidegger's interpretation of these two concepts having
already been mentioned.
Adolescence is the moment when existential anxiety and guilt appear
most explicitly and when the "voice of the conscience" starts to "call."
And according to Heidegger's analysis, it "calls back" from the ambiguous and elusive interpretation of the "they" in which the child is still
completely and artlessly immersed, imposing the distressing question:
"whence?" and "whither?", questions overshadowed by the possibility
that "nothingness" may be the response.
In adolescent perception there emerges, in a confused but emotionally loaded way, the non-gratification deriving from average construction and interpretation patterns and their restless rejection. The outlet
for this rejection is found in forward "escape," which assumes disordered and exasperated patterns and in the uncertainty of a projection
which at that point has at its disposal only unsuitable and immature
experience and cognitive and affective instruments.
Another explanatory aspect of adolescent ambiguity may be its
having a base (again in a developmental perspective) in the persistent
immaturity of cognitive structures. Cognitive development evolves
progressively from a one-sided or predominating mode which has the
outside world as its object, towards a mode which also has "one's self"
as an object. This attitude taken up by consciousness in which it
407
becomes the subject and object of itself emerges and is exacerbated at

adolescence; hence the well-known introvert and narcissistic stance
which typifies this age. But the advance in cognitive ability marks the
critical transition from childhood consciousness, still focused on
content taken in from the world for the most part (acting principally
according to significance of "sense" and using conceptual objectifications which are performed and transmitted by the outside world), to a
more adult consciousness, which understands autonomously and consciously and is able to form its own "intellectual objectifications." The
spirit's impregnation by intellectual objectifications already passively
received and established is still, however, in no way really, or at least
only insufficiently, perceived. Hence, the adolescent equivocation of a
presumed critical originality, exacerbated by the impelling need for ego
expansion and by emotional reaction to the insecurity of an unstable
"self" in rapid transformation. Certain attitudes which are typical of
adolescence, such as the adopting of a radically critical position and an
aggressive belief in one's own ideologies, are styled by the poverty of
"things known" which inhibits the modulation of pseudo-critical certainty, given the intuitive awareness that ideologies as stereotyped
"objectifications" are reductive and inadequate in comparison with the
complex mode of "knowing concern" and the multiformity of the
experienced world.
A third theme underlying adolescent ambiguity concerns the fracturing of temporality, understood as a process of personal historicizing.
Husserl's and Heidegger's phenomenological assumptions can be
expressed, without belying the complexity of their organic structure, by
the formula: "Dasein" is never a "present" (as a "presence-at-hand") but
is always a having-been-being, which is projected towards its becoming.
During childhood and adolescence, this historicizing unity does not
develop in a continuous flow; there are discordant, biologically determined bursts of which adolescence is the most dramatic. The "havingbeen-being" styling the "my-self" of the "here-now" has a traumatic
effect upon impact with fundamental issues such as the disquieting
metamorphosis of the body, instinctual-affective concerns, and the
disclosure of new horizons and new existential spaces. The "here-now"
does not recognize its "having-been-being" and does not live it as its
own (as its "myself-mineness"); and it rejects it, though aware obscurely
and conflictually of being, however, ensnared.
This fracture, or this conflict, in the personal historicizing process (in
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MAURIZIO DE NEGRI
the formation of self) can, therefore, explain some of the aspects of

adolescent ambiguity which on occasion evoke experiences of depersonalization. It leads the adolescent to an anxiety-stricken disorientation regarding his own identity, driving him to ephemeral and
contradictory identifications and to the rejection of the identification
patterns proposed to him, together with all related behavior and
standards.
A final consideration to be made on the theme of adolescent
ambiguity is one concerning the pattern of co existential interaction. The
adolescent is eager to break free from old dependent relationships and
to face "being-together" independently, no longer assisted by the
reassuring child-adult relationship. He inevitably tries defective ways of
being-with and finds a multiplicity of sources for his latent background
anxiety. Being-together is always dominated by "distancing" or the need
to distinguish oneself, to make comparisons with others, though this is
often done ambiguously and at the limit of awareness. Being-together
has the existential characteristic of adaptive contraposition. This produces what is sometimes a dramatic experience for the adolescent
passing through a phase of great uncertainty as regards his identity and
of exacerbated narcissism. Coming face to face with the defective
patterns of communal living (Mit-sein) with the need to measure
himself up against them with defensive-adaptive weapons which are still
inadequate leads the adolescent to activate "psychodynamic" defense
mechanisms including, among the more elementary and least elaborate,
aggression and rejection.
CONCLUSIONS
This has been but a brief summary of the phenomenological parameters

we use, together with a limited number of examples of their clinical
applications. It should be stressed that the phenomenological references, to which we have here afforded but a glance, cannot, unless for
purely descriptive purposes, be read out of context, except where a
particular situation or particular aims may dictate an emphasis on some
one of them rather than on others. It should also be added that for
existential understanding of an existent (as required in psychiatric
understanding) and for its phenomenological explication, no kind of
preliminary or fragmentary knowledge should be overlooked or rejected;
the same is true of correctly applied clinical method. This does not,
409
however, mean letting oneself be seduced by technical and nominalistic

facileness or by the short-cuts offered by biologism.
Phenomenological parameters afford an attitude of openness in the
therapeutic-preventative taking-in-charge. In the context of childhood
and adolescence in particular, this "taking-in-charge" cannot be limited
to the subject (to the "identified patient") in his individuality and
contingent symptomatology. It is clearly indispensable to decipher the
psychodynamic message conveyed by his symptoms, to clarify the
nature and meaning of his immaturity or regression and of his verbalized or enacted inauthenticity. It is equally indispensable to provide
chiefly psychotherapeutic support for his anxieties, which are mainly
depossibilization and abandonment anxieties and, later (during adolescence), anxieties related also to the profound yearning for a personal
one-to-one relationship. But everything that concerns the subject and
his circumstances takes on an actual therapeutic meaning if interrelated
with the latitudinal (or "co existential") and longitudinal (or projecting)
parameters discussed above.
It is clear that the child psychiatrists who adopt a phenomenological
perspective must still continue to be psychiatrists; they must still take
full advantage of their rich store of technical and methodological
knowledge, and their medico-biological background and psychometric
and psychodynamic diagnostic methods; but they must do so while
applying a more extensive, freer, and more comprehensive cognitive
and interrelational approach.
University of Genoa
Istituto G. Gaslini
REFERENCES
De Negri, Maurizio. "Esperienza e Giudizio: l'analisi husserliana rapportata al problema
genetica della conoscenza infantile." InfanZia Anomala, No.. 12 (Istituto di Neuropsichiatria Infantile dell'Universita' di Roma, 1968).
De Negri, Maurizio. "Activity and Passivity in the Genetics of the Cognitive Process in
Children's Development" in Analecta Husserliana VII, p. 43 (Dordrecht: Reidel
Pub!. Company, 1978).
De Negri, Maurizio. Fondamenti fenomenologici alia psichiatria maturazionale (Padua:
Piccin Nuova Libraria, 1986).
Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit (1927). Trans. Being and Time (Southampton:
Blackwell,1962).
Husserl, Edmund. Erfahrung und Urteil (1948) (Hamburg: Classen Verlag). Italian
translation Esperienza e Giudizio (Genoa: Silva, 1948).
RADMILO JOVANOVIC
PHENOMENOLOGY IN GENERAL
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY
Von Wissenschaft schlechthin ist aber nur da zu

sprechen, wo innerhalb des unzerstiickbaren Ganzen
der universalen Philosophie eine Verzweigung der
universalen Aufgabe eine in sich einheitliche Sonderwissenschaft erwachsen lasst.
Husserl
In strict philosophical terms, phenomenology can be "applied" in

psycho(patho)logy only in the sense of the undertaking of a "regional
ontology" (Husserl). Phenomenon is here understood to mean the
occurrence of the psychic Being in the psychic "symptom." Methodologically it is possible to deduce that Being when the psychic
"symptom" and the entire content of experience generally are "put in
parentheses" in the application of the so-called radical "epoche." This
Being (Dasein) is no substance, nor is it some anthropological "essence,"
but is a phenomenon which appears and also disappears, fades away;
consequently, it is something that "happens" in the psychopathological
"phenomenon" in general, or in the psychic "symptom" in particular.
From the formal standpoint, this Being is a total structure consisting of
mutually determined "elements" as well as of a totality which is at the
same time "indeterminate," that is, it is an open entity in relation to the
empilically unknown (but not only in that direction). The total content
- the hyle - of this formal structure is the experience, normal or
pathological, of the subjective as it exists in the world (DaseinserlebnisGefUhl).
There are (according to Martin Heidegger) three basic "priorities"
(Vorrang) of this fundamental ontology from the standpoints of which
the theme in the title can be discussed.
A. The Ontic-Existential priority, in which the existential aspect of the
experience of existing enters into a relationship with itself (its selfhood
- Selbst). Karl Jaspers made use of this standpoint for the research and
phenomenological investigation of individual occurrences of abnormal
psychic life within the framework of his general psychopathology (the
411
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RADMILO JOVANOVIC
so-called static phenomenology). The advantage of this aspect of the

"application" of phenomenology in relation to the simple clinical
description of "symptoms" lies in the fact that these phenomena (i.e.,
hallucinations, paranoia, affective disorders) are observed not only
separately but at the same time as they are interrelated. This latter is
made possible by the phenomenological fact of the Momentary Totality
of the state of consciousness which is determined by the sum total of
given and mutually conditioned phenomena. But that very totality
determines such individual occurrences. The momentary totality of the
state of consciousness is then the "regional Being." The limitation of
this ontic-existential "priority" of existing is in that, that its "Being" is a
psychophysical fact - consciousness; this is not, therefore, a question
of the structure of existing as such.
B. The Ontological Priority. At this level existential-ontological theo-
ries of individual psychic diseases can be formulated (e.g., Ludwig

Binswanger - Manie und Melancholie-Schizophrenie). In question here
are some specific qualities, that is, the "structures" of the experience of
total existing in the world by which it as existence relates to its being.
These, the so-called existentialia (Heidegger) in their total relationship
form the contents of such existing (Le., as existence), and in these terms
they can be apprehended by the method of psychological penetration
or mental understanding generally (Verstehen) only existentially, that
is, objectively-statically, and by no means existentially-subjectivelyontically.
This priority (Vorrang) in the phenomenological approach opens a
wider dimension of possibilities for research then the first owing to the
fact that through it a reorientation has occurred - attention is directed
away from the individual "symptoms" and their mutually determined
relationships and towards the TOTALITY of existing in the world.
Thus a wider and in an anthropological sense more concrete phenomenon of existing is encompassed. But there is a clear limitation here
also: the "existentialia" are structures that are too abstract and which
lack the internal tension of the existential-subjective drama of existing.
This shortcoming was noticed by Binswanger rather late, and, contrary
to his earlier attitude, he introduced to the structural fabric of the
structural-ontological analysis of existing the biographical analytical
woof as welL In this way the phenomenological ontology of a possible
Daseinsanalyse has spawned a kind of multi conditional analysis of
psychopathological phenomena.
PHENOMENOLOGY IN PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
413
C. The Ontic-Ontological Priority. This aspect of existing is significantly emphasized in Aristotle's formulation that the "soul" (of man) is,
in a way, that which "is in being" (Heidegger). In its ways the psyche
reveals its Aistheses and Noesis all of itself, in the sense of that which is
in being (das Seiende), namely, as it manifests the fact that it IS and that
it is SUCH, that is, is always within its being. What is the structure of
this Aisthesis? First of all, this Aisthesis is a perception which is
composed phenomenologically - it is constituted out of the "feelings"
of a pre-existential "reality" and out of the noetic act of intentional
consciousness in which the content of sensual experience or of some
significance or essence is experienced or brought to consciousness.
Within the framework of simple experience this noetic "actu ens"
cannot be seen for the simple reason that the unreflected perception is
reduced to the object (contents) of that which is perceived. The noetic
act occurs only within psychic existing as that which "is in being." It is
through existence and through that which is in being that existing, from
the feeling of its pre-existential reality to the noetic actu ens, is at
one and the same time what it is (from Dass-Sein to a So-Sein). This
noetic moment comprises all of the ontic-existential aspects of the
psycho(patho)logical hyle of the experience of existing in the world.
The psycho(patho)logical subject accepts of its own "free" will "its" preexistential reality in virtue of its existing in the world by way of the
noetic act. But in this "creative" reorientation the subject IS "reality"
only in the existential relationship of its existing in relation to its Being.
After this relationship of constitution has been established, the circle of
the "feeling" of the pre-existential reality of existing is closed: one finds
that meaning of Being of the existentially ("freely") created quality of
one's own existing in the world, the so-called So-Sein, and the Being of
existence's meaning in pre-existential existing.
For natural scientific consciousness the relationship between Aisthesis
and Noesis is methodologically determined by the type of "causality"
involved: first, the "objective" feeling of the pre-existential reality of
existing as a "cause" must exist so that in terms of "consequences" the
"subjective"-noetic creation of such "reality" could occur. In general
psychopathology, that is, psychiatry, this relationship between the
"objective" and the "subjective" would in the first place correspond to
the somatogenesis vs. psychogenesis scheme. Clearly, the total phenomenon of the psychopathological experience of existing and the
relationships of the various "elements" in it have in this case been, as
far as fingering the moment of genesis is concerned, reduced to
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RADMILO JOVANOVIC
causality of the so-called "linear" type taken over from physi<cs. That
totality can be reestablished, as we will see later, only in applying the
clinical-empirical notion of endogeny, and methodologically only on the
plane of phenomenology.
The notion of "endogeny" describes a clinical fact which shows the
factuality of the paradoxical psychopathological existing of the subject:
namely, the subject, exists at the same time objectively and subjectively
(Husserl). In positivistic reduction endogeny is only a "genetic structure" and is therefore absolutely objectified. In contrast, in approaches
focusing on the psychogenetic pole, in psychoanalysis, for example,
endogeny is absolutely of a subjective character. Clinically, the genetic
structure is a concretely biotypological constitution (E. Kretschmer)
and already contains the dimension of subjectivity. Tellenbach has
shown that the endogenic structure can imperceptibly "consume" the
situation, that is, the subjective aspect, in the factuality of existing as a
personality in the world. In its total (ontic-ontological) aspect, endogeny
contains, in the sense of this factuality of existing both the feeling of
pre-existential reality (Aisthesis) and the intentional "actu ens" (Noesis).
In the case of the former, endogeny involves perception connected with
somatogenesis, and with the unconscious as well, for there is no
perception without a sense organ nor the "pre-existential" without
something that is contrary to consciousness, that is, without the
unconscious. That very fact invites the question of the relationship
between the somatogenic and the unconscious, a relationship which can
only be considered from the standpoint of phenomenological anthropology.
Between the neuro-biological (which is extraconscious) and the
psychological unconscious there is no sharp borderline if the psycho(patho)logical existing of the subject in the world be described as that
which "is the being" (das Seiende) and "to which exactly that Being, is
in question in its Being." In contrast to Jaspers' methodological
parsimony, the attitude of Heidegger's Daseinsanalytik permits some
kind of "connecting seam" (Tellenbach) between the methodologically
heteronymous areas of the global phenomenon of the psycho(patho)logical existing of the subject in the world. Contact between the areas
of, say, "eidetic phenomenology" (which concerns itself with "essence")
and hermeneutic psychological phenomenology, which deals with that
which is given in consciousness is played out somewhat punctually. This
is by no means a question of the relationship of the layers of a "real
415
being" as in the real ontology of Nicolai Hartmann but one of a

relationship of that which "is in being" (that is, existing) to causally
determined events on the one hand and to Being on the other within
the framework of the ontically existentiel and ontological aspect of the
psycho(patho)logical phenomenon.
The first "connecting seam" accessible to immediate phenomenological analysis exists within the ontic existentiel "priority" (Vorrang).
That seam is situated between the individually unconscious and conscious aspects of experience, thus making Aisthesis - "perception" possible in case the experience of pre-existential reality, that is, of the
unconscious in relation to Noesis, i.e., the conscious, becomes prominent; then we can speak of the functioning of a CAUSE when we have
in mind the occurrence of psychic phenomena. Indeed, phenomenologically speaking, "conscious" perception is not only based on, but has its
"cause" too in the experience of pre-existential reality. But here, as
Lacan says, there remains something only partially said, there exists for
empirical consciousness a "Hiatus" of events. That becomes clear when
we keep in mind the fact that the occurrence of Aisthesis "bridges" the
two historical areas of the psycho(patho)logical phenomenon - the
unconscious and the conscious, between which lies the gap of the
"emptiness" of Being.
Some continuity must exist, however, because our experience of both
normal and pathological psychic life shows that both realms, after they
have appeared and during the time they last, unfold in a unified
manner. This "causal" relationship must be considered on some other
plane, one on which both of these heteronymous areas are comprehended and linked by some deeper phenomenon: "that which is in
being" (Seindes).
Thus, we can now understand in more concrete phenomenological
terms the so-called "cause-consequence" relationship between that
which "is in being" on the ontic-existentiel plane or, clinically-empirically speaking, on the psychic plane. In the unconscious as a "cause"
there lives that "which has not yet been born" in the conscious side of
experience or in some or other act. That "unborn" virtuality, says
Lacan, is neither unreal nor made unreal but is simply not realized. On
the ontological plane this relationship within that ''which is in being"
was observed by Hartmann who had almost the same understanding of
it as Lacan. Hartmann proceeded from Aristotle's categories. Namely,
for Aristotle, that which is in being as real, that is, that which is of a
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RADMILO JOVANOVIC
higher rank just because it is real, must also be active to be real in the
sense of everyday experience. This "real" is truly that which is in being
only through energeia-on - and thus becomes active. Energeia-on is
not something added to the moment of "real" (embryo of the yet unborn
- Lacan) as to the possible truly being, but it is itself already. Real
(although not yet truly being), only when dynamics is with energeia-on.
Dynamis as the passive "Anlage" is a physical-biochemical "process" of
existence, and is to be understood as the basis of psycho(patho)logical
experience within regional being. Dynamics should not be considered
in the sense of potentia, i.e., in a sense of "being able to be." Also, "dynamic" in its contemporary meaning as a kind of "driving force" which is
external towards the motioned system does not conform to Aristotle's
meaning of this word. According to Hartmann, namely, dynamics within
energeia-on, passively maintains the "disposal (Anlage) of something.
Thus, finally, the "germ of the unborn," or the ontologically "real" of
that possibly real which is in being and which is not real, because it is
not active, is determined more closely and ontically more concretely:
that is, it lies in dynamis - a passively maintained "organization" for
something. By this very fact this "organization" makes in a way for the
incompleteness of Being. That incompleteness lies in the indeterminacy
between Being and Non-Being and this Something. The Energeia-on
itself is the realization of this Something, and accordingly that is
"determinacy," says Hartmann.
On the psycho(patho)logical plane, psycho-"genesis," or in a wider
sense, "determinacy," in the sense just discussed when dynamis enters
into it, can be turned from a passive into an active "factor." That is
possible when, in the act of Noesis, the totality of the "feeling" of the
pre-existential existing of the subject in the world is broken. At that
moment that which "is in being," that is, the real existing, the subject in
the sense of noein discerns the "elements" of the broken pre-existential
totality as being present and leaves them standing before him as they
are. (See M. Heidegger, Was Heisst Denken). Among these "elements"
is also dynamis, which is thus separated from the subject of discernment and which now appears as the active-causal "factor" of psycho(patho )logical events in the framework of existing in the world - that
which "is in being."
For the scientific-methodological consciousness this dynamic factor
of the unconscious, or rather, of the pre-conscious (in psychoanalysis,
for example) is now a "cause" of the contents of some concrete
417
psycho (patho )logical experience or way of behaving which then becomes

its "consequence." Phenomenologically, the event that in the intentional
act stems from dynamis is a striving toward a certain sense (in Husserl's
term, Sinngebung). In other words, in the latter analysis, that "which is
in being," that is, existing in the content of that "intentional act," tends to
found its sense in some (regional) Being.
The first "external seam" which methodologically ought to "bridge"
the hiatus between the unconscious as "cause" and the conscious as
"consequence" is now reduced to the problem of the relationship
between (linear-mechanical) causality and psychological understanding
in the sense of "penetration," in keeping with the principle that "the
psychic comes from the psychic" (Verstehende Psycho/patho/logie). This
problem is for psychopathology solvable to a certain extent by "purely"
psychological means (in psychoanalysis, for example) only insofar as it
is solved with more or less clarity within a phenomenological consideration of the reestablished totality of existing in the world - that is,
of that "which is in being" and that insofar as it tends to establish its
sense (its Sinngebung) in "regional" Being. The Dynamic is the stream
of energeia which carries the "process" of objective events - those of
the somatogenetic priority, which conceals in itself the possible causal
character of the dynamic "factor" - the PASSIVE "organization"
which, as has already been said, is pointed towards a possible creation
of something. That objective possibility punctually touches the dynamic,
however, in the sense of a possible subjective motivation which bears in
itself - because it is already both existentially ontic and that which is in
being - a possible sense of Being ("regional" Being). The boundary
between this topical touching of heteronomous segments of existing (in
the world) is very moveable: at one time the possible method of
psycho(patho)logical understanding by way of penetration (Verstehende
Psychologie) disappears as the objectivity of somatogenetic causal
events comes to the fore (at the level of the highest cerebral integrative
processes); at some other time, those causal events, through the understanding of connections between subjective (psychological) motivations,
flow into the hermeneutics of "that which is in being" and end in the
sense of its Being - this time of its ontic-ontological being. Briefly,
unconscious motivation, that is, unconscious stimulation - the "pulsio"
in the form of a dynamic factor - is causal in character in the area of
aisthesis, i.e., of "pre-existential reality." In the area of Noesis it is the
intentional sense founded first of all existentiel-ontically in a regional
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RADMILO JOVANOVIC
psycho(patho)logical Being. Such Being, when we deal with a schizophrenic "entity" can be represented by Riimke's Praecox feeling (Praecoxgefiihl) for the simple reason that such a feeling is a psycho(patho )logical expression of the total existing of a schizophrenic patient
in the world. But existing in general psycho(patho)logy, and particularly
in psychiatry as a medical discipline, is not only a psychopathological,
i.e., psychic, substratum - the hyle - for within this somatogenetic and
psychogenetic framework it is based ontologically on "endogeny," when
that notion is no longer understood exclusively in clinical-empirical
terms but in phenomenological terms, that is, when endogeny - the
phenomenon which appears in the ontic-existential somatogeneticpsychogenetic - is grasped. Thus, the phenomenon of endogenous
existing in the world - in the sense of "synthesis" of somato- and
psychogenesis can be understood as its ontological subject, which will
phenomenologically make it possible for the "causal" and any determinacy of psycho(patho)logical occurrences generally to be viewed
from the ontic-existentiel and existential-ontological standpoint. In the
sense of being the "ontological subject" of existing, endogeny is the
"thing itself" (die Sache selbst) of the psycho(patho)logical phenomenon,
i.e., its "Being," but only after that "Being" has been freed of possible
metaphysical meaning. Only in that case can the "thing itself," although
still remaining in the horizon of "Being," fruitfully serve in phenomenological and clinical-psycho(patho)logical investigation of "endogeny"
understood as a "synthesis" of intrasomatic and intrapsychic events.
Another condition for this methodological position of "endogeny" is
again "negative" and consists of the fact that that notion should not be
reduced to the positivistic thesis of the so-called "genetic structure" of
the psycho(patho)logical phenomenon, because its totality of structure
would then be degraded to a sheer and one-sided aspect of the
chemical-physical "substratum."
The phenomenon of "endogeny" is not therefore a transcendental
Being in the sense of traditional metaphysics, nor is it a positivistic
"Being" which serves as a substratum. Instead of being in either of these
two senses, that "ontological subject" can be described in accord with
Heidegger: "Being, i.e., endogeny, exists" ("Es gibt Sein"). In that case,
Being, because it "is not," and because "it exists," only appears and
disappears. To put it still more definitely (and again in accord with
Heidegger), Being-endogeny (the "ontological subject") "happens""occurs" in what "is in being" (das Seiende), i.e., in the psycho-
419
(patho)logical phenomenon in general, that is, in the psychic "symptom"

and the psychiatric "nosological" entity in particular. By this fundamental
fact that it "occurs" ("Es schickt"), the ontological subject participates in
the fate of that "which is in being" (das Seinde) and thus escapes the
metaphysical beyond. Also, it does not identify postivistically with the
concrete determinism of that "which is being" that can be reached in an
operational way, but retains in itself a possibility of further "happening,"
i.e., that it can continue to be in the sense of a further "giving" of itself
in one of the next occurrences of "that which is in being."
This position of being (endon, i.e., "ontological subject") can be
thought to be some kind of its occurrence, when its double epoche takes
place (happens). The epoche is the basic feature of such occurrence
(Schicken), i.e., the self-restraining of the ontological subject for the sake
of receiving "the offering," being in respect of understanding that which
occurs. This is the first Aspect of the double Epoche. Thus we can now
understand that the ontological subject-endon (H. Tellenbach), after
having "given away" its "presence" - its "abode" - to a concrete "fact"
(to the psychic "symptom" of the psycho/patho/logical phenomenon,
for example) "restrains itself' so that the somatogenetic, or psychogenetic, determinism can come into play through intrasomatic and
intrapsychic events. By this second aspect of the epoche a field of the
given "regional" Being, i.e., the totality of that "which is in being" has
been opened and fruitful scientific-empirical research is made possible
until the ontological theories (the Daseinsanalyse of Binswanger, for
example) based on that ground become petrified (even though they
most frequently remain logically impeccable in the process) and completely closed not only before the possibility but also before the inevitability of a renewed "happening" of Being. At the critical moment
the "endon" - the "thing itself" - does not restrain itself but is, by
means of the epoche - (one proceeding in the opposite direction) "placed in parentheses," those of the former empirical area of phenomena in which the already exhausted regional Being shone forth, not
in order that a "transcendental essence" might appear (Husserl) but in
order that, through the inducement of some newly discovered fact or
even of an "old" fact, of something having the character of the "factual,"
Being may "happen" anew and throw light on a new ontological field in
the given empirical area. In this way a double trap has been avoided:
the classical-metaphysical trap and the positivistic trap as well, which is
only the inversion of the former perspective.
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RADMILO JOVANOVIC
THE REGIONAL BEING - THE "THING ITSELF"
- "ENDON"
The regional Being "happens" as the "thing itself" by its own coming
into its own in time or "temporalization" (Zeitigung) through the
ripening of the end on. That is the basis of the so-called positivity of the
psycho(patho)logical phenomenon in general and possibly of the "nosological entity" in psychiatry in particular. Outside this "temporalization"
- in some way, the "ripening," that is, the "self-definition" of the
"same" self in something concrete - i.e., development into the "thing
itself" of Being (regional), there "exists" as something "possible" that
which does not yet appear in that "which is in being." Finally, this
ripening or "temporalization" reaches the existential time in which
exists (Dasein) the "thing itself" and in which the total "objective," socalled "metric," time of the happening of that "which is in being" (i.e.
existing - Dasein) gains its full meaning, i.e., the character of a regional
Being. Therefore, only in this existential time of one's own existing does
the positivity of the Being of the psycho(patho)logical phenomenon
appear as its ontological basis.
The endon (see Hubertus Tellenbach) is a possible "mediator"
between the self-definition or "temporalization" of the regional Being
and its "happening" or "developing" (das Schicken) into the concrete
"thing itself" on the very basis of its temporal "structure." The endon
thus unites in itself, as a fundamental phenomenon of the existing of the
psycho(patho)logical Being, its existential time-"duration" with the
"metric" time of its concrete "happening" in the dimensions of biological, psychic, and social events of the psycho(patho)logical phenomenon. In the phenomenological sense, the endon is neither apersonal
as something that is only biological nor merely personal as existence
which inspires life into spiritual reality (H. Tellenbach) but is something
that can be most purposefully (in the sense of this paper) understood as
Aristotle's Physis, that is, as Goethe's "Gestalt." Furthermore, as
"Gestalt"-"shape," the end on is "something" which "exists" "before it
appears in the personal (existential) or the biological. But it is also
"after" in relation to these dimensions of the existing of the psycho(patho )logical phenomenon. In the former case it comes before because
in it as "shape" (Gestalt) the regional Being "already" happens develops into the "thing itself," making possible through it a concretion
of the personal and biological dimensions of existing (Dasein) of the
421
psycho(patho)logical phenomenon. In the latter case - when it is

"after" - the endon, as an earlier and only possible "happening" of
Being through causal inevitability, "comes into its own in time - ripens"
through personal (psychic existential) and biological happenings,
development into the reality of the so-called "thing itself."
As an at once "pre"-personal and "pre"-biological phenomenon, the
end on is a movement of the existing of the ontological subject towards
(regional) Being. The character of that movement is the Gestalt
formation (Bildung) of the totality of human existing not only as
individual existing but as general social-cultural-spiritual existing as
well. The endon, however, develops in the sense of the empirical fact as
an "after"-personal (i.e., psychic existential) and "after"-biological phenomenon, and, therefore, it is determined as well by all these "factors."
In other words, it is determined by "psychogenesis" also, and by
"somatogenesis," which are in their turn defined by their immanent laws
(the "mechanisms" of the unconscious and of physical-chemical events).
During the Gestalt formation of the totalities of existing, the endon is,
as can be seen, involved in the causal events of natural occurrences.
The Gestalt formation of the endon comprises the whole range of its
"structure," i.e., it permeates these "elements" from the "personal" to
the "biological" but leaves them at the same time a certain "autonomy,"
that is, it does not dissolve them into any "totality" which bears a
possibility of having the elements violate the harmony of the growth of
the endon towards a more comprehensible Being of existing in the
world. This just mentioned possibility becomes reality (Wirklichkeit)
only insofar as - and when - such a deviation of the relatively
autonomous "elements" finds resonance in an already existing affinity of
the endon for deviation from its "normal" development. Only in that
way does the "personal" (i.e., the psychic-existential) and the biological
(physical-chemical happening) work "causally" - as that has, for
example, been understood in the notion of "psychodynamics," in which
these two kinds of the "causality" of the psychopathological phenomenon are united.
Max Scheler differentiates the so-called "driving function" of the
organ from the Gestalt function of the organic - i.e., the organismic a distinction in which the former can be identified with Heidegger's
term: "just to live on." In the Gestalt formation (Bildung) of the endon
the borderlines between these two "functions" are as much movable as
they are relative so that the distance between them can be so small that
422
RADMILO JOVANOVIC
a pathologically structured endon - an example in clinical terms

being the so-called "deadly catatonia" (todliche Katatonie - K.
Stauder), a "primarily psychic" disorder - brings about such a collapse
of the "driving function" that it ends in death. Or going the other way,
clinically florid schizophrenia goes with the exceptionally good physical
health of the patient; in other words, the seriously disturbed Gestalt
"function" of the end on (in this case in its personal-existential aspect) is
correlated with the fully preserved "driving function" of the patient's
entire organism. Thereby this "function" has so correlatively deviated
from its former state - the so-called "premorbid" state - that it now
forms a "somatic basis" for the newly made structure of the existing
of the endon - the "ontological subject" in the world, that is, its
psycho(patho)logical-"regional" Being; an example of this in clinical
terms is so-called schizophrenic autism.
As long as the endon is in the aspect of the ontological existential
subject of existing, its Being remains "on the other side" and outside the
sphere of experience, i.e., it is a metaphysical category. Only in the
ontic-existentiel aspect, that is, in its "post"-personal, or "post"-biological moment, when the Gestalt "function" of the organismic is
inseparable from the really "causal" events of psychic phenomena
("psychodynamics"), that is, from the biochemical ("biological"), is the
endon not only a transsubjective (metapsychological) or transobjective
(metasomatological) phenomenon but also a clinical-general psycho(patho )logical occurrence and concretely individual-historical "thissideness" (Diesseitigkeit).
THE DOUBLE IMAGE OF THE ENDON IN THE
CLINICAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGICAL PHENOMENON
The endon itself in the sense of its Gestalt appearance-growth and

change is "pure," in an objective-cognitive aspect, an unobjectified
phenomenon. Only in the aspect of its concrete structuring and
individual-historical arising in the intraphysic and intrasomatic dimensions, does the endon become "objectified" so that it becomes accessible to natural scientific research. It is in this double perspective phenomenological and "objective" - that the endon, by way of the
regional Being of the psychopathological phenomenon generally,
appears in the "thing itself," i.e., in the "essence"of individual clinical
and psycho(patho)logical "entities."
423
It is true that in the so-called "thing itself" the regional Being of the
psychopathological phenomenon "happens" ( es schickt) and that
"event" is not diagnosed by the clinician as an objectivity but only as a
"presence." Such a "presence" of Being has the character of so-called
"atmosphericity," i.e., the "unity" of presence and sense of LIVED
reality which has not yet been defined thematically (F. J. J. Buytendik).
Furthermore, unlike the "harmony"-mood (Stimmung - Heidegger),
which is the unity of an ego and a feeling of the world, the "atmosphere
is an impersonal reality similar to the Physis of antiquity in which man
participates because he must breathe and taste" (F. J. J. Buytendik). It is
just in that fact that "one must breathe" that the factuality of the
existential existing (Dasein) of the so-called "ontological subject" lies; to
extend the image, tasting is a "metaphorical expression of the inevitability of the subject's FINDING itself ontically-existentially in the
world."
If the thing itself is understood as a possible "objectified" object
("objectivity") in which the regional Being of a certain psycho-pathological existing of the subject in the world appears in the form of an
"atmospheric," then it is clear that it (i.e., "atmosphericity") is inseparable from such an object. Of course it is not objectified in the sense of
its "this-sideness" but only coincides with the state of the object (H.
Tellenbach) in which it appears. When we have such an object, e.g., the
physiognomic-mimic occurrence of a person, the "atmospheric" as a
phenomenon stands in front of this correlational area of its own and
therefore it cannot be reduced, in the sense of Gestalt psychology, to
any of its elements, to "background" and "figure." Rudert has expressed
this in a picturesque way: "the atmosphere is characterized by the fact
that it surrounds a person-personality. The person-personality melts
away in it by way of its contours, filling up the space around itself, just
as the emanation of an odor fills up the space around a person."
An emanation of this kind, it is true, cannot be reduced to an objective objectivity but it can be qualified as a "level" of phenomenological
"definability" (Miiller-Suur). Thus understood, "atmosphericity is doubly
significant as a medium of intersubjectivity" in which the psychiatrist
and the psychotic person meet. Sometimes that medium is the scene of
the so-called diagnostic understanding (Verstehen) of the very Being of
psychosis which appears in the totality of the "thing itself," and sometimes it is the scene of therapeutic, or rather psychotherapeutic, activity.
University Psychiatric Clinic, Sarajevo
424
RADMILO JOVANOVIC
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Werke, Bd. IX (Berlin: Akademieverlag).

Binswanger, L "Ober die daseinsanalytische Forschungsrichting In der Psychiatrie."
Schweiz. Arch. Neurol. Psych. (1946); Grundformen und Erkenntniss menschlichen
Daseins (Munich and Basel: Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, 1973); Drei Formen
missgliickten Daseins (Tiibingen: 1956); Schizophrenie (Pfiillingen: 1957).
Buytendik, F. J. J., in: Geschmack und Atmosphiire (ed. H. Tellenbach).
Hartmann, N. Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1965).
Heidegger, M. Was heisst Denken (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1971); Sein und
Zeit (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967).
Husserl, E. Die Krisis der europiiischen Wissenschaften und die transzendetale Phiinomenologie. Husserliana, Bd VI (The Hague: 1954); Phiinomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Husserliana, Bd IV (The Hague: 1952).
Jaspers, K. Allgemeine Psychopathologie (Springer Verlag, 1953).
Lacan, J. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychonanalyse (Paris: Seuil).
Miiller-Suur, H. "Die schizophrenen Symptome und der Eindruck des Schizophrenen."
Forschritte d. Neural. Psych. (1958).
Rudert,1. "Die personliche Atmosphiire." Arch. f d. ges. P~ych. (1964).
Scheler, M. Die Formen des Wissens und der Bi/dung (Bonn: 1925).
Tellenbach, H. Melancholie (Springer Verlag, 1976); Geschmack und Atmosphdre
(Salzburg: Otto Miiller Verlag, 1968).
ADRIANA DENTONE
ON THE POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN

PHENOMENOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
In 1945 Merleau-Ponty made the following enquiry and reflection:
"What is Phenomenology? It may seem strange that such a question was

stilI asked half a century after the first researches of Husser!. It is,
however, far from being answered."! The question is certainly stilI
relevant above all for the openings that may well be inherent in
phenomenology itself as a doctrine and method, and for those cultural
openings to which it can give life in relation to other human research.
The enquiry is still relevant because phenomenology is not an identity
per se but, being a philosophy and attitude, it is a possibility, a way to
enter into other human investigations without prefiguring and predetermining prejudices. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the amount of suggestive, consolidated material written about phenomenology, which has
resulted in the creation of a "Phenomenological Psychiatry," and
notwithstanding the advances made in relating phenomenology and
psychoanalysis, one gets the impression, not just doxa, that phenomenology in general has an inner fear of placing itself side by side with
psychoanalysis. Husserl's contribution in relation to the conscious life is
rigorous. But one asks if consciousness itself in the area of the psychic
life does not encounter risks, and, indeed, what these risks might be;
and whether the scientific discoveries of Freud need to be put to the
side and not related to phenomenology because the unconscious is
considered the world of nature; or whether instead the latter also can
not be considered as such.
One hazards to ask whether it might be possible to coordinate
hermeneutics as interpretation of the unconscious and phenomenology
in order to give possible life to a "phenomenological psychoanalysis";
one which, however, does not deny its roots in the reflections of
Husserl and Freud.
In reality, it may seem a paradox to attempt to forge a relationship
between phenomenology and psychoanalysis for phenomenology, in its
premise - starting with Husserl - is an investigation in the world of
the conscious, the rediscovery of meanings and essences through
consciousness itself and its intentional process, while psychoanalysis is
425
426
ADRIANA DENTONE
the interpretation of the unconscious, of that which is beneath the

surface, the drives, symptoms, traumas, transferral processes, etc., a
world that is, besides, one of mechanisms and nature. But the paradox
is more open-ended and less closed in on itself than it might seem and
therefore, even within the complications and uncertainties, we will look
for a way to a possible solution.
The first difficulty seems to impose itself when one thinks of the
meaning of the cogito that Husserl speaks of along Cartesian lines,
although he is critical of Descartes: its meaning to the world in which
the subject finds itself, its "surrounding world," all the spontaneous
activities of consciousness, "investigating," "conceptualizing," "confronting," "distinguishing" etc. And what of the multiple states of feeling, the
movement of the will, "liking," "enjoying," "acting," etc. as well. "All
that, with the addition of the true stature of the 'I' around which the
world of the spontaneous turns, and the understanding of it as it is
understood immediately, is contained in the Cartesian expression
cogito."2 Nevertheless, Husserl criticizes Descartes, who from one point
of view claimed to reveal the world "by means of syllogistic inferences
rightly carried out on the basis of innate principles of the ego," and
from another point of view made the ego "the substantia cogitans, the
human and separate mens sive animus, a point of departure for the
reasoning of causality: that turning point, to be brief, for which he
became the father of that contradiction in terms, transcendental realism."3 Thus, if in one way Descartes emphasized innateness, in another
he reduced the ego to a particle of the world. But, indeed, it is from all
excess that Husserl wants to keep himself free: "We will keep ourselves
far from all that if we keep ourselves faithful to the real meaning of
radicalism and self-exploration [SelbstbesinnungJ and also to the principles of pure intuition or obviousness."4 Therefore the ego and the life
of the ego cannot constitute "a piece of the world and so 'I think,
therefore I am' means 'I, this man, am here.'''5 Husserl's concern is, in
this sense, not to reduce man to either a natural experience or the
interior of experience of himself which is purely psychological, because
to understand man in that way would be nothing other than positive
science - biology and anthropology, psychology too - so that the
"psychic life" would be cultivated as "psychic life in the world."6 The
ego, for Husserl, comes from the phenomenological epoche; it is the
ego transcendentally reduced, and the objective world is that which
derives its "value of being," its "full sense" from the transcendental ego,
ON PHENOMENOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
427
even if, as Husserl quickly adds: "The reduced ego is not a piece of the
world and, vice versa, the world itself and every object that belongs to
the world is not a piece of my ego."? It is the very structure of the
subject that knows how to build itself intuitively with the inherent
strength by which it is able to equilibrate its relationships with the
world and with others, eluding every kind of solipsism.
Husserlian philosophy is so oriented towards knowledge of consciousness in its completeness and all its intensity that it does not give
space to the real unconscious, and psychic life thus proceeds according
to a reflective power which reveals also its own unique and real area in
whose interior only the non-reflective world can find space; it is a world
of the non-actual which turns into actuality, of the "implicitly" conscious, which is only potential, and which can aim at or does aim at the
"explicitly" conscious, an experience which, if not attention and if not
clear, still leaves open room for a "growing clarity." It is that which is
not awake now, but which transforms itself into the" 'awake' ego" like
that which in the ambit of its stream of Erlebnisse constantly actuates
the conscious in the "specific form of the cogitO."8 The movement,
without being able to be actually dialectic always takes places between
the terms of the conscious itself, a modality of light and shadow, of
transparent and opaque representations, which are mutually transformable. For Husserl, then, there exists a "flowing chain of cogitationes"
surrounded by a medium of possible non-actual experiences with a
potential which indicates, in its turn, the tendency to move up to
actuality, which is to say that every halo can become an "Erlebnis of
consciousness" for the shadow is inclined to retranslate itself into transparency: the two terms of the same axis reveal reciprocal processes.
The extent to which the stream of consciousness cannot consist of
pure actuality, because of its perceiving, remembering, day-dreaming, is
more intensely expressed in Experience and Judgement in which there
is presented, together with the force of the conscious, the "subconscious," even if through the associative process a being stimulates the
past and "reaches an intuition and a submerged intuitive world."9
Exactly those ways of "association" and "stimulation" re-propose a full
re-presentation of the memory: there grows from the experience which is
born intuitively, perception or memory, a "gradual intentional tendency
in which the non-living submerged part seems to constantly pass into
a living submerged part, more and more alive."lo The time of the
resuscitation can be shorter or longer in relation to unforeseen forms,
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ADRIANA DENTONE
or else gradual; and the "'stimulation' which radiates from the present
and which directs itself towards making the past live again is possible
because between the equal and the similar a 'sensitive unity' was
previously constituted, a unity of the 'subconscious' [Unterbewusstsein 1
which connects the various positions of the effective and submerged
intuitions."!! For Husserl these stimulation and association events take
place in the "domain of passivity" without augmentative processes on
the part of the ego: "From that which is at this moment perceived there
radiates a stimulation, and the memories 're-emerge' whether we want
them to or not."!2 In this sense a movement is seen which is not the
explicit expression of the ego because stimulation carries in itself traits
in accord with passivity, and the associative process presents a double
function for positional consciousness. It is that double function which
subsequently explains how that which is submerged is not a sphere
which has its own world with its specific characteristics that also affect
the existence of the subject, and which does not present its own
scientific distinguishing sign which estranges the submerged content
from temporality, from the "before" and "after," transforming itself into
that which is not temporal or is, in Freudian terms, "atemporal." In one
way positional consciousness, "basing itself on the absolute position of
the course of the consciousness of time, establishes the effective
connection of all the perceptions of an ego present and past, in the
unity of a memory, and in another establishes the intuitive unity of that
which is remembered inasmuch as it brings together the stimulation
with the stimulated in the unity of an intuition."13 Basically, the halo of
passivity is not the resistance of a psychic sphere in itself qualifiable by
means of scientific rigor, a real dialectic term of the conscious life; it is
not an area that dethrones consciousness and deconstitutes its absoluteness. The risk of idealism is always near even if it is, indeed, Husserl
himself who leads the way through intentionality and towards "the
things themselves." It is that which invites a further step in order to
acknowledge another realistic source, with its objects, those ve.ry things
which constitute the unconscious in a Freudian way, and so come to be
scientifically understood; here is an unconscious which is also a
stimulus of the awareness of limit and of the reduction of the absoluteness of consciousness and of the fullness of self. In this sense, as
Ricoeur maintains, "Husserlian phenomenology cannot go right down
to the depths of the conscious; it remains in the circle of correlations
between noesis and noema."!4 It does not give room, in fact, to the
429
notion of the unconscious but to a subconscious which is, however, a

halo of the conscious. Against the certainty and the "narcissism" of the
conscious per se, the unconscious throws into crisis the conscious itself
and give it new dimensions. Therefore two paths have to be safeguarded in order to make a common itinerary: one is marked by
consciousness of the humbleness of the self per se, by awareness of its
limitation, which is also acceptance of the unconscious; and the other is
marked by the unconscious together with its repressions, in a relationship which is neither occasional nor episodic, an unconscious which, for
this reason, is not closed in on itself, but is linked to the conscious and
that can even be pathologically conditioned, though it can likewise be
stimulated by either normality or deviance. In this sense the limitation
of the conscious is only an apparent defeat and not a checkmate and so
the connection can change into an internal dynamism, into possible
outlets for realistic development, so as to clarify or render transparent
that which is analogical, or even opaque and obscure. Freud gives hope
and invites investigation: internal objects are less unknowable than
external objects and like external objects, they are not identical in their
appearance. Kant's warning against the mistake of disregarding the
conditioning of perception and of identifying the unknowable object
with perception is apropos here. "As occurs with physical reality,
psychic reality also is not necessarily just what it appears to be to us.
Nevertheless we will be happy to learn that the work of the rectifying of
internal perception manifests lesser difficulties than that of rectifying
external perception, that the internal object is less unkowable than the
external world."15 Freud invites us to proceed beyond the epistemology
of the physical object, in order to examine the pyschic world in its
unconscious region, not in order to consider it as a set of objects
identifiable with fact, a set of motionless data, but to grasp what exists
beyond appearance, to illuminate the representation of the drive, the
sense of symptom or symbol, the hidden significance of the epidermal.
There arise revelatory experiences, new realities which emerge from
the weight of naturalism, new eidetic content of the conscious, owing to
the strength of intentional consciousness itself, along with processes of
elaboration and investigation which never provide definitive results, but
have a commitment to achieve meanings which even though they place
them within brackets, do not neglect the world, nor the family, nor the
society in which the subject exists.
Freudian interpretation discloses two rigorous possibilities: the
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ADRIANA DENTONE
unconscious is not unknowable and the unconscious is not knowable as

fact, but as the sense of fact. This is what enables Freud to depart from
positivism, though still maintaining ties with it, thus permitting the
reading of a phenomenological experience of great and unequivocal
value.
The conscious and the unconscious constitute together a dynamic
structure, which would not be such if the conscious were per se made
absolute and the unconscious an element reduced to the subconscious,
the halo of the conscious, or to an unmovable, unknowable sphere; or if
the conscious had the capacity or indeed the presumption of containing
the unconscious and the latter, exceeding its power claimed to enclose
the conscious in itself: "the unconscious is the psychic made real in the
true meaning of the word." It is "the greater circle, which encloses in
itself, the lesser one of the conscious."16 "The 'Ego' is identical to the
rd, is only a singularly differentiated part of the rd, ... is in fact the
organized portion of the rd."17
Every form of excess at one and the same time, excludes, while
voraciously including; but the exclusion which takes life from one side
only renders impossible a priori every balanced and ordered expression
of psychic life, and as a consequence, dialectics itself. Therefore, every
form of internal dualism is likewise not conducive to dialectics, for
example, when the conscious is thought of as being on one side and the
unconscious as being on the other: in reality, if it is true that the
conscious is such because it is not the unconscious and the latter is such
because it is not the conscious, then it is likewise true that the terms are
strictly connected. Psychic life is dialectical because the alleged excesses
do not exist: we have the a priori non-superimposition of the two
regions, a non-division with radical furrows. Phenomenology and
psychoanalysis, in searching for internal balance and hidden meanings
in what appears to be, can follow the same road together. Psychoanalysis is an excavation that departs from mere "explanation," the
latter being only knowledge through causal processes, the convergence
of phenomenal objective connections, seen from the outside (erkliiren);
hermeneutic research of the unconscious is also an intentional process
which "speaks of lost objects to be re-found symbolically"18 beyond the
symbol itself which cannot be transparent because of its own analogical
constitution. Freud, in fact, breaks "the spell of the fact" and helps us to
recognize "the superiority of the sense."19 If the psychic life were totally
contained within the nets of causal concatenation, man would become
431
homo natura: in reality analysis of the objects of the unconscious

constructs a relationship with the past, but without schematizing it
according to rigid causal connections, so as to construct a "bridge" to
the future, in order to form a constructive development from the inside,
so as to give life to an interior world in which a new history of
experiences is searched for. The process of searching does not so
indulge in the past as to get enclosed within it; the life of consciousness
does not stop at causal concatenation, but via archaicism moves
forward to construct a rich teleology of experiences, a teleology not cut
off from archaeology, but revealed in continuity. If the adult does not
grow through creative processes as well, and not, indeed, by means of
rigid causal connections or in "wrenches," would he not still be a child
even though he were a man in his twilight years?
The process of the interpretative cognition of unconscious objects as
well as that of external physical objects cannot be fulfilled through the
intentionality that Husserl indicates as that which characterizes the
conscious in a full sense; amongst other things, a judgement "is judging
a relationship-of-'things,'" and an evaluation is "evaluating a relationship-of-values."2o And although intentionality expresses itself with
intense energy in the cognizing process and is revealed more when
pointed at rather than towards, it also cannot help but move within that
interpretation which within the unity of man delves into a sphere that
does not remain and must not remain for itself. This is the process of
the discovery of the representation of the hidden sense of what appears
to be, be it symptom, symbol, transferal process, mechanism, Id, drives,
the process of "the departure from the flesh,"21 to use an incisive
expression of Merleau-Ponty's, in order to grasp in depth the representation of a naturalistic world from which one can and indeed must
depart with the elimination of the naturalistic dross itself, in order to
grasp the sense or intrinsic meaning of the objects which constitute the
unconscious, in order to liberate the subject from the grips of "psychologism" and likewise of biologism and physiologism, etc., understood
per se. But this is the way marked out by Husserl as well as with the
epoche, the reduction which tends to eliminate the dross, the apparent,
so as to delve into the depths with intentionality and grasp the essential
in order to transform that which is flesh or Korper into Leib.
Phenomenology cannot ignore the psychic sphere in its totality, in
man as a unity both of spirit and flesh, and of the existent and its world
- the experience of st. Augustine and of Kierkegaard cannot but leave
432
ADRIANA DENTONE
its own indelible signs, and neither does that of Heidegger - since the
conscious itself is not consciousness per se, the psyche would be
halved, but it must be a prop for every investigation and therefore for
psychoanalysis with its declared intention of searching for the hidden
meanings of the unconscious. No fear of confrontation must infect
phenomenology, and the interpretation of the unconscious must have
the humility to not consider itself research per se, because, in this sense,
also, man would come out halved and he would not find his ego or the
unity in the world in which he exists. This is a step which cannot
qualitatively move even psychoanalysis, and it reduces man to homo
natura - and Freud, we must say, notwithstanding his aforementioned
merits and others besides, comprehensively reduces man to nature
because he does not know how to escape from positivism; this he does
in order to throw himself, in his complexity, into that research which
aims at grasping the essential which can cut and also does cut into the
life of the conscious and which can condition it, without pre-stabilizing
and prefixing it however. Here is a "phenomenological psychoanalysis"
or anthropology that reviews methodologically, like any scientific
research, the parts but does not stop at the parts or at an attempted
equilibrium of the parts themselves and wishes always to move on
because man in himself cannot be reduced to an object, an organism in
line with the explanatory line of the natural sciences, nor can he be
considered to be divided from or predetermined by the world which is
night-like, without itself being night, prefiguring and definitive. In this
sense psychoanalysis searches with inventiveness beyond the configuration of the naturalistic limits, and, as an unmasking or deciphering of
sense, it opens up new ways beyond the weight and consistency of the
unconscious, anthropological ways which present in addition profound
ethical implications by means of a language of order and balance with
oneself and with others in the discovery and re-appropriation of
authentic meanings.
Exactly in this way, psychoanalytical interpretation invokes phenomenology and, not closed in itself, humbly recalls that "understanding" which rescues further relationships in the internal world of man,
not in fragments but in unity, lest it run the risk of being transformed
into merely causal "explanation"; the interpretation of the unconscious
is res creata and not restranslata. Since Freud himself, starting from
1896, perceived the influence of the imagination upon neurosis, a
tendency to escape from a reality which does not satisfy toward an
433
imagined world which is more attractive, a symbolic world which also

in the interpretation of dreams is made particularly evident.
Reflective comprehension, which also contains the immediate comprehension, and to which Marcel gave so much prominence as "reflection to the second power" is the experience of openness and participation in man in his unity and does not exclude, because reflective, the
contribution of scientific and human research; thus, between interpretation and understanding, we can, in a way very different from Heidegger,
verify the "hermeneutic circle" which can never be a vicious circle.
Interpretation and reflective comprehension are not in conflict but
given a mutually open disposition, each can accept the other and be
likewise complementary: interpretation provides results from research,
comprehension humanizes them. If there came between the two forms a
dominating radical autonomy that even went so far as to divide, interpretation could suffer an inevitable fall and comprehension would lose
the contribution of scientific research - not the "mere science of facts
[which] creates mere men of fact"22 - and would remain deprived of
that help which completed the sense of a human relationship that is not
sterile, but full of creation and re-creation and, therefore, having
momentous consequences for the deeper understanding of the meaning
of man.
University of Genoa
NOTES
1 M. Mer!eau-Ponty, Fenomenoiogia della percezione, Italian translation by A. Bonomi
(Milan: n Saggiatore, 1980), p. 15.
2 E. Husser!, Idee per una fenomenologia pura e per una fiiosofia fenomenoiogica,
edited by E. Filippini (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), Book I, p. 59.
3 E. Husser!, Meditazioni cartesiane e i discorsi parigini, translated into Italian and
introduced by F. Costa (Milan: Bompiani, 1960), p. 68.
4 Ibid., pp. 68-69.
5 Ibid., p. 69.
6 Idem.
7 Ibid., p. 70.
M Husser!, Idee, op. cit., p. 76.
9 E. Husser!, Esperienza e guidizio, preface by E. Paci, translated into Italian by F.
Costa (Milan: Silva, 1960), p. 195.
10 Idem.
11 Ibid., p. 196.
434
ADRIANA DENTONE
Idem.
Ibid., p. 197.
14 P. Ricoeur, II conflitto delle interpretazioni, preface by A. Rigobello, translated into
Italian by R. Balzarotti, F. Botturi, G. Colombo (Milan: Jaca Book, 1977), p. 118.
15 S. Freud, L'inconscio [1915], in Metapsicologia, translated into Italian by R.
Colomi; in Opere, edited by C. L. Musatti (Turin: Boringbieri), Vol. VIII, 1976, p. 54.
16 S. Freud, L'interpretazione dei sogni [1899], translated into Italian by E. Fachinelli
and H. Trettl Fachinelli, in Opere op. cit., Vol. III (1977, 2nd Edition), p. 557.
17 S. Freud, Inibizione, sintomo e angoscia [1925], translated into Italian by M. Rossi,
in Opere, op. cit., Vol. X (1978) p. 247.
18 Ricoeur, op. cit., p. 33.
19 Ibid, p. 161.
12
13
20
Husseri, Idee, op. cit., p. 187.
M. Merleau-Ponty, II visibile e l'invisibile, ed. A. Bonomi (Milan: Bompiani, 1969),

p.304.
2Z E. Husserl, La ensi delle scienze europee e la fenomenologia transcendentale,
preface by E. Pad, translated into Italian by E. Filippini (Milan: n Saggiatore, 1975),
p.35.
21
EVA SYRIStOV A
A BALLAD ON LAUGHTER
To the inquiry of the attending doctor, "How goes it for you, Alexander," this claim was made in response:
"I am suffering from moronism, I became mentally deficient, but
totally, and I think, there is no help for me. You do know that the
human life is in the main determined by the environment into which
one is born and in which one must live even against one's will?"
Then he turned back to the doctor and like a timed automaton
marched a stylized German Parade goose-step towards the restroom on
the same floor where the round occurred. He left the door behind him
open, he stopped at the door marked with a gentleman figure, he put
his right hand on his heart, he made several bows as if practicing
some magic ritual and than with an earnest and motionless face almost
deprived of mimicking he stood upright and shouted with a solemn
voice that filled the spacious corridors and rooms of the psychiatric
clinic built two hundred years ago in the time of the Empress Maria
Theresa: "I shall praise you in odes, my unsurpassed, my sanctuary,
because you take into consideration my privacy. The time of my
dwelling in your area is limited, my dear, but even for that, for this
infinitesimal right which I am authorized to claim here, hundreds of
thanks!"
Then his face suddenly lost its light, he turned his heels and with the
same very stylized step marched back to the patients' room where the
round had not yet finished. In a showy ceremonial way he stopped
before the doctor and shouted with an expression of forced cheer: "I
am at your service, me, ens homo rid, me homo ridens, a homoridal
being, I am at your service."
"His behavior considerably breaks down the discipline of the other
patients, Doctor," said a nurse keeping his voice down, so that Sasha
(i.e., Alexander) should not hear. "Taking part yesterday in the group
therapy and a pantomime with the theme 'We are just small donkeys,'
he did not at all behave like a supple and submissive animal, but he
pranced like a runaway horse, he broke two pots with blooming cacti
on the window, he was almost crippling the others and the nurse
435
xxxv, 435-443.
436
EVA
SYRIStovA
leading the group therapy paid for his behavior with big bruises on her
hands and legs. We are conscious, naturally, that he is a patient, but in
his case it would be rather useful to take some measures in order to
keep the ward quiet and orderly."
... "Would you be able, Doctor, to accept the role of a donkey in a
group and at the same time preserve your normality?" Alexander
entered the crowd of patients around the doctor, because he heard,
what the nurse said, and he made a few very loud brays .
. . . "You are in fact, Sasha, that small silver donkey, you should need
only to have such a one as Juan Ramon Jimenez besides you - who
would take care of you," said the doctor with a small laugh. And
Alexander ceased to cut up and bray and cuddled up in a chair and
kept silent in the adjacent club room.
"I should like to know, who invented these absurb themes for the
group pantomime," the chief doctor of the ward asked his working
group in his office when he finished the round. "Because I would most
probably become a dangerous madman from them too," he noted
whispering. "Do you not really have anything more reasonable?"
Despite his known tolerance, it seemed that theme and the application
of group "treatment" filled him with indignation. "Next time I wish to be
informed in advance about the themes. Because it has the same
importance for treatment as psychopharmacy."
"Give me the file on Alexander," he went on, "I want to have
detailed and regular discussions with him, alone," he said deep in
thought. "Be so kind and invite him!"
In a short while, Alexander, a tall young man about twenty-three
years old, was face to face with the doctor in his office.
"Have a seat, please."
"Who, please?"
"You, Sasha."
"But I do not exist, Doctor. Nothing exists anymore, in fact."
"You do think and communicate to me how you perceive yourself
and how you feel the world around you. Thus you do exist."
"No. It cannot be verified. I have no evidence for it."
"You are speaking like Berkeley, who also used to say that there is
no existence, because it can not be proved. But I do not think that you
are taken up with arguments like those of Berkeley."
"I do know that gentleman. I am Nobody, isn't it so? The never
developed hour. No-man's-land. You do not know that, Doctor? I am a
437
snowdrift of laughs, if you will, a revolutionary, who kills the prostitute

of forms. Are you able to experience the situation of a snowflake
whirling in a blizzard? What you see, right in front of you, that is
forged, it is a substitution of my person, a plagiarism."
"The actuality, however, is something a little different. While you, in
fact, are not Nobody, you are somebody else, a man most probably
forged by his environment, a man forced into a role which is not his
own. However, this situation can look like one in which human
existence has ceased or at least a man can get such a feeling if he is not
seen by the others or accepted just as he is or as he can be or wants to
be. Man can exist only if he is seen, heard, accepted, discovered by the
others."
"Yes. It is exactly that. So, 1 do not exist. My life has no sense."
"From the viewpoint of global natural history it is evident that
human life has no sense, Sasha. But man is the only being in the whole
cosmos who has the exceptional possiblility of searching for it and
creating it. ... "
"And what about the possibility that he is placed at the mercy
of somebody who produces only forgeries? To tell it more exactly,
Doctor, 1 am rather in the state that was prior to the Creation of the
World. 1 am not yet born. 1 have not yet come into existence. 1 have not
yet begun to exist, probably out of fear that they would forge me. Now 1
am, as it were, driven by the wind, rotating in a spiral. 1 have no power
to control it; it drags me along. 1 am spellbound in a labyrinth of
funnels .... Every shape, even one only sensed, liquefies in a jiff, every
concept, every idea turns inside out immediately. 1 can not live in the
aqua regia of my own brain. 1 can not stop, 1 can not make a normal
move - an infernal propeller drives my thoughts, which rotate in all
directions, 1 hear words, they rattle like a big skeleton and go endlessly
through the deadly train station of the mouth. It is a condition which
can not be grasped or described: perhaps a total stupor and petrification, stiff immobility in maniacal raging."
"Don't you have a remedy for this terrible marathon? To switch this
dance off. To sleep! What a relief it would be!" Sasha's face reveals
despite its stiffness a gigantic inner tension. His body suddenly crouches
like the body of a beast intending to jump.
"I can not do anything now. 1 can not behave anyhow."
"Why?"
"I have the feeling that it could be dangerous."
438
EVA SYRIStOV A
"Dangerous?"
"I could even kill!"
"Why would you do that?"
"It is better to be a criminal than a beggar."
"You must have experienced true hell inside, Sasha if you say this.
Do you see yourself as a beggar who has lost all that he has, or as a
beggar, who has nothing?"
"As a child, as somebody, who begs in vain, who is of no use to
anybody...."
"Would you prefer to choose some role in your life or none?"
"I do not know. Murder or suicide looks like a liberation to me, in
comparison with this torture."
"All I would need is a real enemy."
"Do you think, that you would thereby succeed in regaining your
self-confidence ?"
"Yes. I would definitely feel that I am, that I exist, that I have some
importance. Meanwhile, I fall, down a terrible spiral of indifference,
into an abyss."
"Now, speaking with you, I get from time to time a feeling that the
actual words could come back to me again, but in fact I have no tongue.
My parents cut out my tongue already in my childhood. In my mouth as
well as in my heart I now have a big black pit and a tumor of envy has
grown in my brain."
Sasha starts to grimace, he opens his mouth fully and says: "It is
artificial, ar-ti-fi-ci-al," and shows his tongue. "It is grafted, it is foreign,
it is remote controlled like my heart and my brain."
"How did you feel yesterday during the therapy group?"
"Like at home. The same as phony. Like a prostitute. According to
the original meaning of the word. Do you understand? Prostitute means
somebody, who represents somebody else, somebody who stands for
somebody else, it means to be only a tool for something, it means to
accept the role of somebody else as one's actual one, to speak with
another tongue or not to speak at all. Simply, not to be oneself. The
nurse, who led the group therapy, dreamed most probably about an
absolute power, before which one must genuflect and which forces
everybody to give himself up."
"And the thriving patients, the hopeful ones, they capitulated and
accepted the role of donkeys for the pleasure of this punk pusher.
Joking aside. Everybody took this comedy seriously. I began to yearn
439
suddenly for a genuine carnival. For a geniune distraction. For a laugh,

which would blow this all up and wipe out ... "
The doctor looked, in the mean time, into the file and read the notes
of the medical registrar: "The patient is negativistic, grimaces, usually
does not answer questions, sometimes makes dumb jokes, he sometimes
laughs for no reason. Besides his hebephrenic symptoms, he suffers the
delusion that he does not exist, that his parents excised his tongue; the
beginning of paranoid and psychotic tendencies are clear: he claims that
ideas not his own are imputed to him, that he is remote-controlled by
alien forces, that his thinking is remote-controlled ... , that he is
interned here for the purpose of making him totally mentally deficient."
"You said, that you had in the group the same feeling as at home.
You felt there quite at home. What did you mean by that?"
"At home I was also all the time told: 'You have to adapt. Behave
spontaneously. Be a little active, you have to have a little confidence in
yourself." But at the same time they nailed me to the wall with their eyes
and pressed my face, my thoughts and feelings into strange forms and
masks not proper to me. I felt instinctively how I threaten their power
when my illness improves."
"At the beginning I defended myself, because I felt that I was being
pulled up from the roots, how I was losing myself, was being wasted.
But then I had no more strength to resist, and so I gave up. Perhaps
only seemingly. I became submissive before I could become myself.
There was no place to escape, I was walled in on all sides."
"Then I began to behave like a prosthesis, like somebody else, one
who maintains the power of others. That is to say like a Nobody
actually. In so doing I felt more and more how I was losing myself, how
someone else was acting instead of me, somebody else, some other
person, a total stranger to me, this zero point of an equilibrium always
kept artificially in balance; and in fact, I had to cease to exist on my
own in order to not menace their power. I petered out, I gave myself up
to their manipulative deceitful self-confident praise in order to confirm
their 'love' for me, that they have a reason for living and that they have
well deserved me, to confirm their power over me. I had to learn and to
speak an ambiguous and obscure language, their language, which
attempt always issued in nothing. A speaking without a language.
Whenever I tried to speak in order to understand them, they deprived
me of the language. Do you know that nice and playful rhyme by
Morgenstern ?:
440
EVA SYRISfOVA
Kroklokwafzi? Semememi!
Seiokrontro - prafriplo:
Bifzi, bafzi; hulalemi:
quati basti bo ...
Lalu, lalu, lalu, lalu, Iii!
Hontraruru miromente
zasku zes rii rii?
Ente, pente, leiolente
klekwapufzi Iii?
Simarar kos malzipempu
silzuzankunkrei (;)!
Marjomar dos: Quempu Lempu
Siri Suri Sei / / !
(Christian Morgenstern,
"Das grosse Lalulii"
from the collection
Aile Galgenlieder,
German original.)
"You see, how it is possible to speak and not to say anything. And so
now I am a prosthesis. A prostitute. It is sometimes more bearable than
this confusion, this anxiety, this existence reduced to zero and deprived
of form, this impossible liberty. So I do not exist now as me, as Sasha. I
exist as somebody else, only as a tool, as a means. I have become used
to this remote control, to these voices and emotions, to these commands, which control me like a puppet. One can adopt oneself so
thoroughly that one no longer recognizes one's own existence. Maybe
there is certain advantage in it. Perhaps, comforts too. With time I
became used to this role. When I began to exist, they sent me to the
insane asylum. And you can see it even here, when I refused to accept
the role of a donkey, when I refused another role alien to me, they
excluded me from the group and claimed that I am unadaptable. I do
not know whether the improvement of my condition depends on my
adapting to the donkey position. I see that here too, that I have to
become a madman, in order to be normal in the eyes of the doctors."
"At home it was essentially the same. My parents had no common
441
language. At least 1 never heard that they would speak a common

language. They evidently needed me as a crutch in their own relationship, in order to preserve it. 1 served as a zero point which assured the
equilibrium of totally antagonistic forces. You can imagine yourself the
fun: a man must transform himself into a prosthesis of other persons
just in order to exist - at the price of the abdication of his own self. 1
always had to take the role of someone else in order not to be excommunicated. Do you not understand, Doctor, that 1 have to be ill? If 1
would begin to be healthy, they sent me to the insane asylum. They
would say: he again can not adapt, he behaves in an aggressive and rude
way, he runs away from home, where all his needs are met, for no
reason, he does not do anything, he stares for whole hours at the wall
or at the books to no purpose. He is cold to his parents."
"They did not understand, that sometimes a man gets the most out of
staring at the wall, and that without it no invention or work of art can
become reality."
"I smashed the TV, 1 gladly admit that. For year after year it had
disturbed my staring at the wall in the evening. But 1 need this staring
for my life. 1 need to face a space not contaminated with this uninterrupted pressure to consume things increasing around me geometrically.
1 need to throw the TV-hallucinations out of my head. All these strange
ideas and images stuffed into my brain, 1 wanted to create something, to
discover, to play. 1 will not bear this endless, mechanical, day after day
merry-go-round, this always the same marathon, this dead repetition."
"I keep hearing, 'Adapt! Adapt!' But to what!"
"Once 1 heard in the clinic, that 1 suffer from mannerism. Before that
1 had heard something about mannerism in art and so 1 searched for the
meaning of this word in learned books, but 1 did not comprehend anything there. But suddenly everything became clear to me when by chance
1 switched on the TV. 1 saw the jerky motions and grimaces of the
disco-dancers, something about it repelled me. It is as though one has
an inner life only on the outside, for the external effect. But then this
disco-trance totally consumed me. 1 begun to suffer from discomania."
"I saw these people as being controlled by an alien will, what with
the spasmodic motion of their limbs, as they danced to a rhythm as
hard as the pounding of a pneumatic drill. They were no longer men
but automatons."
"I understood, that it is possible to deprive a man of everything:
thinking, questions, the future, everything. Looking at the TV, 1 began
442
EVA
SYRIStovA
to feel that I am like a puppet. Like a marionette, a plaster of Paris

puppet. But I also felt these motions overpowering me too."
"Another time I felt I was gradually becoming blind. I saw nothing
but these TV-hallucinations. I knew, that my folks wanted to exchange
my life for another one."
"I jumped up and dashed the TV on the floor. I could not allow
having such a thief in the house. I made off from the house to the fields
far away from the town, then they interned me in this madhouse."
Sasha looked attentively at the doctor, who listened to him intently.
"Look, Doctor. ..."
"What is on your mind, Sasha ...."
"I do not know how to say it ...."
"I look to the life-giving or eternal Thou, through which we come to
be ourselves. That Thou, which listens to me, which accepts and speaks
to me. But I know that time ripens and changes itself into a budding
Never. Around this heart-shaped crater, where man is born, loves, and
dies, a carnival whirls."
"Yes, Sasha, we two have found a common language ..."
"But that brothel, Doctor," Sasha said laughing almost imperceptibly,
"where before I came to know you, I had only a stand-in role, the role
of a prothesis, the role of a prostitute for those impotent ones with the
power, taught me the art of laughing and comedy. It was good for
something. When you leave, I shall be strong enough to use it."
"Do you know the liberating power of laughing?" added Sasha.
"Sometimes one goes on laughing so that time bursts. One has a feeling,
that one is not able to stop."
"One most probably cannot do anything in this case but laugh. Such
laughter, seems indeed to be the last chance," replied the Doctor.
"You are right. This laughing may seem to be quite impotent. In spite
of that, it has something omnipotent inside."
"Man has in it the power to lighten a little his sadness."
"Yes, through laughing man can become the master of the situation.
By means of the carnival we push back the world, its pain and evil,
troubles, real and imagined. In the play of laughter, in caricature, in
comedy, we make their burden lighter."
***
Then the doctor did not see Sasha for a long time, because he was
obliged to travel for studies. They promised, however, to write each
other a letter.
443
On his return, the doctor found that Sasha had meanwhile left the
hospital and begun a successful career as a circus clown. He plays the
role of Nobody and of Everybody. He is masterful in his stylized and
original mannerisms. He is unsurpassed in parodying grimaces and in
changing disguises. And his sarcastic typical black humor delivered
without expression is unbeatable. His laugh is a fascinating one. Here is
an acrobat who succeeded in jumping over the danger of imbecility.
But unfortunately while attempting one last somersault, he broke his
neck and died. His griefstruck admirer will never forget him.
Charles University
Prague
MANUEL VILLEGAS
PHENOMENOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS OF THE

THERAPEUTIC DISCOURSE
INTRODUCTION
One of the difficulties the different kinds of psychotherapy have had to

face up to is that of the hermeneutics of the therapeutic discourse. By
this we mean the set of utterances produced by the patient within the
context of the therapeutic setting.
The phenomenological conception of discourse assumes that the
keys to understanding it are inscribed in the very same discourse and
that they have to be used without any theoretical a priori. In contrast to
other forms of interpretation such as psychoanalysis, phenomenological
comprehension has to develop at the outset analytical instruments that
are immanent to the subject's verbal world and capable, at a later
stage, of transcending themselves in a structural comprehension of the
subject's world.
From the psychological point of view, we are interested in discourse
and in the subject that produces it, a subject that we can only
understand through his discourse.
As a matter of fact a great part of the behavior of the subject (and
almost the totality of his mental world) is present at the therapeutic session only through its verbal or discursive representation. The methods
that can help us to decipher in a systematic way the meaning of the
therapeutic discourse have to be considered powerful hermeneutic
instruments.
The idea that underlies our proposal is that the discourse uttered
within the therapeutic setting can be analyzed as a text. Now, the
question of the meaning of a text refers necessarily to the problem of
textual analysis. This is one of the most complex and important
questions for the therapeutic task.
According to Lindkvist's (1981) classification there are four different
approaches to textual analysis: content analysis, analytical semantics,
structuralism, and hermeneutics.
445
A - T. Tymienieeka (ed.), Analeela Husserliana, Vol. XXXV, 445-454.
446
MANUEL VILLEGAS
CONTENT ANALYSIS
The most basic level of textual understanding refers to its content. We

think that before any interpretation or inference is made there must be
the possibility of analyzing the content in a systematic way, without any
prejudical distortion.
Content analysis shaped after the tradition of Berelson (1952),
Holsti (1969), Krippendorff (1980), and other authors is mainly a
technique for the quantitative analysis of a text within the framework of
a communication model, though it admits various types of qualitative
approaches also. Content analysis establishes a direct relation between
the frequency of words and the interests of the author which are thus
revealed. The use of computer analysis (frequencies, indexes of
association, etc.) facilitates the task of the analyst by preempting the
interference of the researcher's belief system in the study of a text.
The problem that content analysis presents us with, apart from the
intrinsic difficulty of putting it into practice, is twofold: (a) can the data
themselves, without the help of reconstruction or interpretation, show
their significance?; (b) is interpretation outside of a theoretical framework possible?
ANALYTICAL SEMANTICS
Analytical semantics comes out of the tradition of analytical philosophy

and is oriented mainly to the anlaysis of argumentative and philosophical texts (Naess, 1953). It looks for the inner connections of
meaning. In terms of the communication model, it is especially interested in the process of decodification. It presupposes the autonomy of
the text beyond the author's intention.
Analytical semantics rejects the idea of a correct interpretation of a
text. What is possible, this approach maintains, are reasonable interpretations of a text. The reasonableness is dependent on certain contextual claims, which can be linguistic, logical, semantic, or empirical.
Semantics makes a model of the text which in a systematic way
realizes the internal textual connection of meaning. Semantics makes
the relations between different textual categories clearer and presents
them in a more systematic way than the text itself.
The problem of textual autonomy, nevertheless, presupposes the
genesis of a text outside of the sphere of communication or of language
PHENOMENOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS
447
use. A text at least in the context of a therapeutic dialogue has not an

ontological entity, but an existential one, and it has to be delimited and
interpreted only in the framework of this existence. The phenomenological understanding of the therapeutic discourse demands the disenchantment of language; as Wittgenstein said, it does not conceal
anything behind it. The meaning of language is, the infinite uses people
make of it.
STRUCTURALISM
Structuralists like Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida, and others

have analyzed highly different kinds of texts, as well as other forms of
communication (music, architecture, film, and art).
Kristeva (1969) defines the textual model as a "formal system, the
structure of which is isomorphic or analogous with the structure in
another system." The textual reading becomes as "une lecture verticale."
It begins with "the manifest level and goes downwards, revealing codes
on deeper levels." Thus we have three levels: manifest, transformative,
and generative. The text producer transfers certain ideological codes to
a manifest text which, through narrative codes at the transformation
level, receives its final "syntagmatic code." The different levels are said
to be overdetermined, so that the task of the interpreter is to unravel
this sequence and reveal the ideological or generative code.
HERMENEUTICS
In hermeneutics we can distinguish between an intentional approach

(Hirsch and others) and a textual, anti-intentional approach (Gadarner,
Ricoeur, and others). Hirsch defends intentional analysis and criticizes
what he calls the doctrine of semantic autonomy. According to Hirsch
(1969), "the only valid norm of an objective analysis is to establish the
intentions of the text producer. The correct interpretation of a text is
the same as the intentional interpretation of the author; the author has a
monopoly on interpretation."
The limits of this position are clear: it presupposes the existence of
a single intention unchangeable over time; it implies a constant and
univocal validation on the part of the author's message and it excludes
any type of unconscious communication.
According to Gadamer (1960) it is an illusion to believe that a
448
MANUEL VILLEGAS
reader can understand a text in the same way III which the author
understands the text. Every human being has a "horizon," certain
knowledge and preunderstanding historically determined. To understand a text "is to partake in a fusion of horizons. The interpreter must
have a genuine respect for the text. He does not create the meaning of
the text, but is a receiver of it and the tradition it mediates."
Ricoeur (1965) discusses the methodological problems of the text in
another way. He declares that we must
construct the meaning of the text for two reasons. First, the text is written, which means
an asymmetric relation between the text and the reader. Second, the text represents a
cumulative, holistic process. However, there are no distinct rules for this construction.
The construction relies on clues contained in the text and on a set of prohibitions and
permissions. A probable construction is a construction which has the greatest number
of facts provided in the text and offers a better qualitative convergence between the
traits which it takes into account.
For Ricoeur (1974) the world of a text is the ensemble of references

opened by the text. Ricoeur tries to liberate the meaning of the text
from the "tutelage of the mental intention" as well as from "the limits of
ostensive reference." To interpret is "to understand the world opened
up by the non ostensive reference of the text, that is, to understand the
world in its manifoldness." A text is to be seen "in the light of the
Weltanschauung of the producer of the text." "A text must not be
treated as an object, but as an expression of a certain preunderstanding,
which the hermeneutist tries to articulate." Thus, a text is subjectrelated in two ways: as created by a subject with an aim of communicating something and as interpreted by another subject with the aim of
understanding the textual meaning. The text is not autonomous; it is an
open relation between sender and receiver.
TOWARDS HERMENEUTICS OF THE THERAPEUTIC DISCOURSE
We can consider hermeneutics as a special case of general phenomenology, the aim of which is to unveil the structure of textual meaning. The
practice of psychoanalysis is often seen as hermeneutic, since it tries to
reveal hidden meanings. Nevertheless, its criteria of interpretation
reflect the therapist's Weltanschauung more than the patient's, inverting
the direction of the discourse.
The basic problem that hermeneutics introduces into therapy is that
of the reconstruction of the patient's world through his discourse.
449
Consistency with the phenomenological position demands, beyond the

unrealizability of the psychoanalytic interpretation, an understanding of
the subject's experiential world. The purpose of this reconstruction in
therapy is twofold: first of all the production of an immediate therapeutic result insofar as the experience of being understood as empathetically as possible produces a decrease in tension which facilitates
personal integration and, then, the establishment of the basis for the
change, insofar as the phenomenological structural description of the
subject's world makes possible a systematic hermeneutics of experience.
This approach is interested neither in causes nor in symptoms but in
the alternative re-construction of experience.
In order to be successful at attaining results of this kind, simple
empathy or an emotional-empathetic comprehension such as other
therapists - Rogers, for example - have tried is not enough. A
synthetic comprehension of the patient's world requires transcending
somehow manifest content, though it has to be based solely upon it.
The basic hypothesis that we start from can be summarized as follows:
manifest content involves the whole of sense; its explanation is a hermeneutical task. This task requires the accomplishment of the following
tasks:
(a) Discernment of the author's intentionality. We understand as
intentionality not only the immediate and conscious goals of discursive
communication, but the intentional position of the subject in his world
- which is implicit in the same manifest content. The explicitness of
any meaning implied in the communication with the patient will have to
be negotiated with the subject.
(b) Textual analysis. Textual analysis tries to establish the relations
of intratextual coherence through the analysis of micro- and macrostructures. The meaning of a text has also a necessary relation to its
context. This context can be either immediate - intratextual - (new/
given information) or mediate - extratextual - (implicit information
which has to be traced beyond the text).
(c) The elicitation of the pre-textual Weltanschauung. Any text is
produced within an ideological framework, which participates as a
generating matrix in the dialectical process of discourse production,
interacting with the present circumstances that stimulate it. This type of
pretextual comprehension will help to reveal in a synthetic way the
underlying structures. Because of the impossibility of separating the
discourse from its author, the text that gives form to discourse implies a
450
MANUEL VILLEGAS
necessary reference to his personal world. The explicitation of its

structure is the fundamental task of any hermeneutics of therapeutic
discourse.
For the satisfactory performance of these three tasks, we have
developed a methodological instrument for revealing the thematic
structure of the patient's world, one which we have named "categorical
analysis."
CATEGORICAL ANALYSIS
This type of analysis had already been suggested by Binswanger, who in

his psychopathological writings, pointed out that the patient's world is
thematized, that it is, in other words, structured around themes that are
axes of reference and meaning and that make coherent the psychopathological world of the subject.
In our research (Villegas, Feixas, Lopez, 1990) we have worked
particularly at designing a formal procedure for analyzing autodescriptive texts - because they are closer to therapeutic discourse. The
approximation of an autodescriptive text has necessarily to be exploratory, and, since it presents a lack of formal structure, its treatment needs
some type of thematic systematization. In order to accomplish this, we
take the following steps:
1. Identify the topics in a discourse. Considered as the topics of a
discourse are the different themes that are treated in it. One way of
identifying the topics of a discourse is that of compiling all the nouns or
other nominal forms therein. In order to avoid possible double meanings it is necessary to solve previously any ambiguity in the text by
reducing polisemy to univocity through special codes (bank 1 = commercial bank; bankz = bank of a river).
2. Categorical reduction. The grouping of such a dispersed universe
of topics needs some form of categorical reduction. Because in an
exploratory procedure there does not exist a standard categorical
classification, it is necessary to create one on purpose. In order to
obtain an adequate classification for a chosen text, we can proceed by
calculating the average frequency of the topics and its standard deviation; on the basis of these statistics we establish the number of categories into which the data are to be grouped.
3. Thematic classification. In order to give content and a name to
the categories thus established, we proceed by forming groups around
451
the most frequent semantic nuclei. In this way we can determine a

limited number of categories which the subject's discourse deals with.
The nominal labels which the categories established in this way carry
will be related at a higher level of abstraction to the semantic nucleus of
every word (e.g.: thought, idea ~ mental category). Once the categories
have been determined, the topics are coded in register sheets alongside
the phrases which form their context.
4. Thematic categorical follow-up. Once the themes have been
grouped in categories, their evolution through the text can be studied
only if all of them have previously been coded every time they
appeared. Thus, we consider the complete text, not by proceeding to an
intuitive reading, but to a systematic one through the categorical
classification of the themes.
This type of study can be carried on in a synchronic or a diachronic
way. Further, this method allows the partial development of topics,
analysis of concurrences, cluster analysis, etc., because it works on a
data base that can be processed in both a quantitative and a qualitative
way. It is a process similar to that obtained by the use of a computer
since it provides a list of frequencies, places them in their linguistic
context, makes the transformations necessary for avoiding ambiguity,
creates thematic-categorical groupings, follows the diachronic evolution
of the themes, studies their concurrences, and analyzes separately
different topics of the discourse. The problem lies in the fact that a
program for accomplishing the whole procedure has not been designed
yet.
A METHODOLOGICAL APPLICA TION
We shall now briefly apply and develop the methodological approaches

we have described in the case of Ellen West, an anorexic woman who
committed suicide at the age of thirty-three after trying different
psychological and psychiatric treatments (see Villegas, 1988). Three
fundamental stages can be distinguished in her life. The first covers the
first twenty years of her life. She was a very lively and ambitious girl,
though there was some ambiguity in her sexual identification: she
preferred to wear trousers and her games were boyish. The second
stage begins at twenty years of age when the crisis starts. The third
stage is that of the stabilization of the illness, and begins particularly
452
MANUEL VILLEGAS
when she is twenty-five and is admitted to a psychiatric sanatorium.

This third stage ends with her death.
Autobiographical texts which were transcribed by Binswanger
(1945) and that we have analyzed are the basis for the present study.
An exhaustive analysis of the content shows the existence of 74 different topics with very different frequencies, ranging from a maximum
of 52 to a minimum of 4 (the topics with fewer than 4 have been
discarded). The mean frequency of appearance among the items is 8.5
and the standard deviation 6.5. We consider that those words which
have a frequency of 15 occurences (the sum of 8.5 and 6.5) or more are
nuclei of semantic attraction among all the related words, which belong
together in the different thematic categories. Following this protocol we
have identified in Ellen West's discourse ten different themes, yielding
the following ten categories:
EXISTENTIAL (life, death, existence ...),
MENTAL (thought, mind, reason ...),
ORAL (hunger, food, ...),
IDEAL (goals, objectives, purposes ...),
EMOTIONAL (dread, fear, despair),
TEMPORAL (days, hours, minutes ...),
TRANSCENDENTAL (soul, God, spirit ...),
CORPORAL (body, hands, health ...),
ENVIRONMENTAL (world, earth, nature ...),
DYNAMICS (strength, will, ambition ...).
The systematic consideration of these themes makes it possible to get a
rather accurate representation of the experiential world of Ellen West.
A diachronic follow up of all of these thematic categories makes it
possible to, besides, fix the weight of their evolution and give positive
or negative evaluation of them. For example: analysis of the emotional
category allows us to realize that the feeling mentioned with the greatest
frequency is "dread" (out of total of 159 expressions about feelings
"dread" appears 16 times; 33 times in all, adding other synonyms). A
diachronic follow up of these mentions of "dread" shows a clear
concentration of instances during the last year of her life.
In the analysis of the existential topic "life," which is the word
appearing with the highest absolute frequency, we observe a clear inner
division which shows the opposed evaluation that Ellen makes of it. It
seems that life is so important to her because it constitutes the temporal
453
space wherein to project existence. Her existence is however frustrated

because the only way out for her is death. For Ellen life and death
complemented one another in her experiential construction: "Death is
the greatest happiness in life, if not the only one. Without hope of the
end, life would be unendurable. Only the certainty that sooner or later
the end must come consoles me a little. If he makes me wait much
longer, the great friend, death, then I shall set out and seek him."
This text was written at the age of twenty-one. If we bear in mind
that its author committed suicide at the age of thirty-three, it is clear
that during these years her life was a fight to live dying.
How Ellen West experienced "time" will be our last subject in this
thematic analysis. There can be observed a persistent raising of the
temporal theme during the last years of her life. But what is most
significant are the terms she uses to refer to time. Her references are
generally to more or less lengthy periods (years, months, weeks, days
...) in the first writings, and to very short periods (hours, minutes,
moments ...) towards the end of her life. This way of experiencing
time, which becomes increasingly shorter, might be a clear indicator a
posteriori of her increasing proneness/readiness to commit suicide.
CONCLUSION
The type of categorical analysis of themes proposed in this paper is

only one of manifold means of attaining textual comprehension. Its
advantage lies in the fact that it allows access to the thematized
subject's world without using any interpretative hypothesis alien to the
subject's consciousness.
It is an analytic method faithful to the rules of phenomenology, one
which we have developed with a psychotherapeutic purpose. The
possibility of applying an analysis like this to therapeutic sessions is
technically possible, though very arduous. A decision of this type
depends, as usual, on consideration of its cost. What seems demonstrable is that a systematic approach to a text improves its understanding and that the training of future psychotherapists in these analytical
techniques would be profitable with the generation of alternative designs
for the construction of meaning and change.
University of Barcelona
454
MANUEL VILLEGAS
REFERENCES
Berelson, B. 1952. Content Analysis in Communication Research (Glencoe: The Free

Press).
Binswanger, L. 1945. "Der Fall Ellen West. Studien zum SchizophrenieprobJem."
Schweizer Archiven flir Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 53, 54, 55.
Gadamer, H. G. 1960. Wahrheit und Methode (Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr).
Greimas, A. J. 1966. Semantique Structurale (Paris: Librairie Larrouse).
Hirsch, E. D. 1967. Validity and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Holsti, O. R. 1969. Content Analysis for the Social Sciences fmd the Humanities
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley).
Krippendorff, K. 1980. Content Analysis. An Introduction to its Methodology (London:
SAGE).
Kristeva, J. 1969. Semeiotike. Recherches pour une Semanalyse (Paris: Editions du
Seuil).
Lindkvist, K. 1981. "Approaches to Textual Analysis," in Advances in Content
Analysis, ed. K. E. Rosengren (London: SAGE).
Naess, A. 1953. Interpretation and Preciseness. Oslo: Skrifter utgitt av Det Norske
Videnskaps-akademi i Oslo, i kommisjon hos Jacob Dybwad.
Ricoeur, P. 1965. De l'Interpretation. Essai sur Freud (Paris: Editions du Seuil).
Ricoeur, P. 1974. "Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics." New Literary
History, VI, 1.
Villegas, M., Feixas, G., and Lopez, N. 1990. "Phenomenological Analysis of Autobiographical Texts. A Design Based on Personal Construct Psychology." Analecta
Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, XXIX 405-424 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers).
Villegas, M. 1988. "Ellen West: Amilisis de una existencia frustrada." Revista de
Psiquiatria y Psicologia Humanista, 25, 71-94.
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A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO
THE UNCONSCIOUS
This paper is an attempt to offer a phenomenological approach to

unconsciousness without trying to reduce it to conscious intentional
processes. I shall offer a phenomenological model of intentional acts
and shall try to show that unconsciousness (non-intentional content)
can be grasped in its specifity.
INTENTIONALITY
I shall now develop a model of the intentional field in order to understand the distinction between process and result, i.e., between the
content of intentionality and the intentional process. 1
Every act of consciousness is an intentional act. Every intentional act
has two aspects as illustrated in Figure 1.
The primary intention is directed towards the object (horizontal axis)
and towards the meaning (vertical axis). Therefore, meaning and object
are that to which the act is directed. They are the raison d'hre of the
act, its intentional content.
MEANING
SUBJECT
---------+---------
OBJECT
CARRIER OF
MEANING
Fig. 1.
455
A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol.
xxxv, 455-467.
456
ODED BALABAN
The subject/object intentional relation has different basic modii. An

object, in the intentional act, can be discovered (cognitive approach),
created (creative approach), and evaluated (evaluative approach) by the
subject.
Besides its sUbject/object relation, every intentional act includes also
the meaning/carrier of meaning relation. The meaning is that to which
the intention is directed. Thus, "to mean" is to conceive or refer to
something by means of something else. This may be illustrated by the
relation between a word and a concept: the word is not a concept but a
carrier of the meaning of a concept; and the concept is not identical
with the word but is the meaning carried by the word. Meaning is
conveyed by its carriers in different ways: by signaling, by showing or
expressing, or by symbolizing.2
Consciousness, as an intentional act, has two aspects: content and
form. The content of the intentional act is its "what," that to which the
intention is directed - its object and meaning. The form of the
intentional act is its "how," or, process. The form tells us how the
meaning is conveyed by its carrier (vertical axis), and how the subject
refers to the object (horizontal axis).
At this point, one can already reach partial conclusions concerning
unconsciousness. The intentional act, though an act of consciousness,
also has unconscious aspects. In the horizontal axis, the subject is
conscious of the object, which represents his intentional content.
Nevertheless, he is unconscious of his relationship as subject to the
object, i.e., the intentional consciousness of the subject is, as it were, no
longer conscious of itself; it is totally immersed in and trapped by its
object. This unconsciousness is inherent in intentionality; it cannot be
transparently present in consciousness.
On the other hand, in the vertical axis, the direction of the intentional act is towards meaning; but the intentional subject is not
conscious of the way meaning is conveyed by its carrier. And it is this
phenomenon that enabled Lacan to develop a whole psychology based
on the separateness of meaning and signifiers (signifiant).
To sum up, it can be said that consciousness, as constituted by the
intentional field, includes in itself unconscious aspects precisely because
of its intentional nature. This raises a terminological problem - the
need for a fresh set of terms that will include this unconscious
consciousness, my next topic of analysis.
AN APPROACH TO THE UNCONSCIOUS
457
REFLECTION
It has been seen that the intentional act includes both intentional
aspects (its content,) and non-intentional aspects (its form). The intentional act is directed towards its content (that is, its meaning and object)
by means of its form. But there is no consciousness of the form; there is
consciousness neither of the way meaning is conveyed by its carrier (or
carriers) nor of the way the subject relates to the object.
But besides these intentional acts, that may be called 'original' or
'primary,' there are other kinds of intentional acts which, following
Strauss, I shall call reflective intentional acts. What is the content of
these reflective intentional acts? Precisely what is not perceived in the
original act: the subject and his relation to the object, and the relation
between meaning and carrier of meaning. The subject, and the way
meaning is conveyed by its carriers - that is, the form of the original
act - will both be focused on, will both become the content of consciousness only in this reflective intentional act. The binary division
(vertical and horizontal) also pertains to form.
Therefore, in the reflective intentional act the intention is not
directed towards the same content as is the intention in the original act:
the original meaning and the original object are no longer focused on.
This does not imply that they are absent, for if this were the case, the
intentionality of the act could not be grasped. Their not being focused
on only implies that object and meaning are at the back of reflective
consciousness and not in the fore. The reflective intentional act has,
therefore, a new content which is revealed by means of this new
perspective. This reflective perspective, in the analytical situation, is a
combination of two opposite perspectives - that of the patient and that
of the analyst, which makes it very complex.
Since this new content emerges by way of reflection, if follows that
this content is not altogether new: it must have been, in some way
already included in nonreflective consciousness: In which case, the
rejection of Sartre's reductionism - total transparent consciousness does not imply the acceptance of a substantialist approach that assumes
the existence of a special domain in the soul reserved for unconscious
contents which are inaccessible to description. It only implies that the
intentional mode of activity includes unconsciousness as an inseparable
aspect of consciousness.
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The patient/analyst situation takes place wholly within the reflective

state. But there are different kinds of reflection:
1) Non-phenomenological reflection, which is reflection that is
unaware of being reflection. This is of two kinds: (a) anti-formalist
reflection, and (b) formalist reflection.
2) Phenomenological reflection, which is reflection that is aware of
being reflection.
Reflection is an intention directed towards another intentional act,
and is therefore posterior to the original act. It is knowledge of or
thought about the original intentional act; it is an act whose intentional
content is the form of the original intentional act.
The main feature of intentional reflection, characteristic both of
current psychological thinking and of everyday thinking, is its lack of a
descriptive-phenomenological qUality. It is a reflection that, instead of
describing the original intentional act as an event or as a phenomenon,
explains, evaluates, or interprets it.
How does non-phenomenological reflective consciousness interpret
the form of the original intentional act? There are, as stated above, two
basic types of reflective interpretation: (i) the anti-formalist, which is
the type generally adopted by patients and found in everyday thinking;
(ii) the formalist, which is the type generally adopted by psychoanalysts.
There are, besides, two types of formalist interpretation: the verticallyoriented, generally adopted by the followers of Jacques Lacan, and the
horizontally-oriented, generally adopted by the followers of the objectrelationship psychology of Melanie Klein. I shall now analyze these
different types of reflective interpretation, that is, non-phenomenological reflection.
a) Anti-Formalist Reflection
Anti-formalist reflection, like all reflection, takes into account the form
of the original intentional act, but does not regard it phenomenologically, i.e., it does not regard it as an intentional act but as an act
pertaining to an external object. It inverts the form: it sees that which
pertains to the subject and to its intentionality as pertaining to the
world of objects. According to this reflective consciousness, the cause
and reason of our feelings toward an object lie in the object itself. The
source of my love for or hatred of an object lies in the object itself and
459
does not derive from my intentionality as a subject. I, the subject, am

in fact unaware that I am in any way contributing to, that I am the cause
of, these feelings of love and hate. I am, as I believe, merely responding
to an external factor. I do not love the object, rather, it is lovable; I do
not hate it, rather it is hateful, etc. Since the subject has been
neutralized, the values that derive from his own subjectivity will appear
to him as knowledge of natural objective values. It cannot therefore be
said that the subject consciously chooses and adopts values but, rather,
that he knows them as inhering in the object itself. The subject is not
aware that his knowledge of the object is mediated by his subjective
needs and his own structure. His needs have been externalized and
grafted onto objects that exert an influence upon him.
This kind of reflection functions by the inversion of related terms i.e., the subject becomes the object, the internal becomes external. The
subject denies what we have called the form of consciousness and so
becomes unconscious. Denial of form is thus the manner of existence of
the unconscious, in reflective anti-formalist consciousness. In this way
the subject does not accept as his own something that is in fact his own.
This situation cannot be described by saying that the subject, motivated
by certain needs, is saying "I understand my role in what I am experiencing, but I do not want to understand it," since he is not even aware
of the role of his will - the will pertains to the form, which he denies.
Another kind of anti-formalist inversion is that of transferring blame
to others. In the appropriate context such behavior must be interpreted
as a defense against self-reproach. The simplest model is that of the tu
quoque arguments of children. Thus, for example, when someone tells a
child that he is lying, the child replies: "You are lying." This may be
taken as proof that he was caught lying. The difference between a child
and an adult is only in the degree of sophistication. In the case of an
adult, blame refers to real defects in the adversary. The paranoid unlike the normal adult but like the child - is especially sincere. He
approaches without changing the content and without any real basis in
reality; thus it is less difficult to discover his confession in his reproaches. 3
Hence, reproach is a kind of projection from elements, albeit unconscious, that nevertheless appear in consciousness, but reversing the
same content ("not me, but the others") whether disguised or not.
A subject in the anti-formalist mode of reflective consciousness
cannot want to change himself since he considers his state a natural
one, and to change it is even beyond his power. He can at most increase
..
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his knowledge. He cannot be educated but only informed, since there is

no subject to be educated only a world to be known.
Nevertheless, the anti-formalist subject does not always succeed in
externalizing the fOrIns of intentionality; he often fails to grasp them as
external objects separate from himself. This occurs when that which is
to be externalized in his own body or has qualities that lack a clearly
separable intentional object. In such cases, the subject regards these
forms as if they were an item of property that he owns. The antiformalist is not himself corporeal; his body is not him - rather he is the
owner of a body; he possesses skills, he is not himself skilled. I am the
owner of my body and soul in the same way that I can be the owner of
a house, etc. And thus, I, the owner of myself, become a vacant abstract
being facing a full concrete world.
The subjective relationship (i.e., forms) of the subject with other
subjects are constitutive factors of the subject. Yet they are not grasped
as such but are, rather, grasped as being outside, not only the subject
himself but also other subjects; human relations are placed in an intersubjective space and exist independently of the subjects. The subjects
can be trapped in this space; but just as they can be trapped in it, they
can also leave it. This means that the subject's social relations are not a
constituent part of him - they are not him. Rather, the subject, in his
anti-formalist consciousness, isolates these relations and makes them
distinct from himself. And the result, once again, is a vacant abstract
subject. This kind of subject is characteristic not only of everyday
consciousness, but also of such different philosophies as those of Sartre
and Wittgenstein, which despite their differences do share an antiformalist tendency.
b) Formalist Reflection
Jacques Lacan, speaking of Freud's Dora, observes that in the first
stage of analysis the facts are revealed as active subjects to the patient,
who himself functions as a mere fact. The patient is therefore a passive
"victim" - a sufferer (patiens).4 The patient first becomes an active
subject when he asks "What can I do in order to contend with the given
facts?" This is a kind of rebellion against factuality. Although the
subject still perceives himself to be given a fact, his awareness nevertheless takes him beyond conceiving of himself as merely a given fact. It is
at this stage that he begins to realize the fact of his having himself
461
contributed to the reality he suffers from and about which he complains. That is to say, the patient discovers that, apart from his passive
role as victim, he also collaborates in creating and maintaining the
reality that afflicts him: he becomes aware not only of his active role in
establishing that reality, but of his own special interest in preserving it.
We now know that he is drawn to what he had earlier kept himself
away from. This attraction contradicts his former repulsion, and he can
now reaffirm his loyalty to himself. The independent reality established
in the first stage, at which the process of analysis began, assumes at the
end of the process the status of the patient's intimate secret.
We see from the above that Lacan interprets the subject from a
formalist point of view. The formalist reflection, that can, in the above
context, also be called psychologistic, recognizes the form of intentionality, but not as such - not as modes of relationship of a subject to
an object - but, rather, as a subjective structure. For the formalist,
subjects have object-like structures that can be analyzed; the subject is
not considered as a relational process. The formalistic approach is,
therefore, a reflection that, through interpertation, changes the relational character of the subject by reducing it to an object-like structure.
It also, as we shall see, reduces the original content to a form.
Being on the horizontal axis, this approach interprets the objective as
being subjective: the object becomes immanent in consciousness; and
there is, strictly speaking, no object. The same occurs on the vertical
axis: the meaning of the original act is regarded simply as a symptom, as
a carrier of meaning.
This is the key to the understanding of the formalist approach: the
original content is reduced to form. To anticipate, we may say, by way
of contrast, that a phenomenological psychology does not regard the
original content as form but continues to regard it as content; otherwise, description becomes interpretation, whereas the role of reflection
is to give an account of intentionality as it actually is. The difference
between phenomenological reflection and the original non-reflective act
does not lie in changing the original content into a form but rather in
treating the original form, which was unconscious, as content. The
content remains as such, but is placed in the background and not in the
foreground of reflective intentionality.
What happens, then, in the patient/analyst relationship? It is a
relationship between an anti-formalist patient and a formalist analyst.
The analytical situation as a whole lies at the level of reflection of
462
ODED BALABAN
reflection. The analyst tries to create a change in the patient's mode of

reflection: the patient tends to regard the forms as content; the analyst
tends to regard those contents as forms, and tries to induce the patient
to do likewise.
Therefore, the formalist analyst, since he considers that the patient's
consciousness acts by inversion of related terms - i.e., inversion of
subject into object, of internal into external - assumes that the act of
understanding requires a reversal of the process. What is regarded by
the patient as content, is assumed by the analyst to be based on an
unconscious form. Unconsciousness is understood, by the analyst, as a
process that has been divorced from the conscious (the Ego); and since,
in the eyes of the analyst, the anti-formalist patient inverts form and
content, the more accurate way to arrive at the forms of consciousness,
which are unconscious, is by negating the patient's anti-formalist
inversion. Negation, Freud says, is a way in which the unconscious exits
in consciousness. s
According to the formalist, the content of anti-formalist reflective
consciousness may eventually become subjective with the assistance of
certain categories of reflection (interpretation), and is therefore not
conscious in anti-formalist consciousness. In anti-formalist reflective
consciousness the form has the status of an object; the formalist analyst
argues that the subject is immersed in the object of consciousness and
in the explicit meaning. Formalist reflection tries to shift the patient's
attention from these to the carrier of meaning and to the subject.
We can now understand the status of unconsciousness in Freud's
theory. (I do not refer here to the substantialist theory that Sartre
attributes to Freud). In Freud's theory, the unconscious is analyzed only
in the context of formalist reflection (or, interpretation) and, in this
context, the unconscious does not have the status of an abstract concept
which functions as a kind of storeroom. In Freud's theory, unconsciousness is the form of the original intentional act, not considered as a form
of intentionality but, rather, as the structure of the subject, and the
subject is not considered as being relational but rather as being thinglike, and knowable like every other thing.
Freud reserves a central role for the categories of negation and
inversion, since he needs to transform anti-formalism into formalism,
i.e., he needs to correct the anti-formalist's inversions by means of a
reinversion: that is to say, by re-internalizing what has been externalized, and re-converting the object into subject. This is also the way
463
of understanding the anti-formalist. Freud assumes that what has been

externalized, what the subject treats as external to himself - as, for
example, some other person - is in fact none other than the subject
himself: it is his alter-ego. And the meaning of the inversion of the terms
'subject' and 'object' consists in this: when the subject (the patient itself)
is the object of the analyst's reflection, the object of the patient's, antiformalist, reflection, is reversed to become the subject. In other words,
the analyst learns about the subject, his patient, through the subject's
relation to some other person. This "other person" is, in the eyes of the
analyst, an externalization of the subject (or patient) himself, which the
analyst must negate (or, reinternalize).
It is worth noting here that the content which is negated in reflection
is negated by anti-formalist aware-consciousness, and that the unconscious is, therefore, according to formalist intepretation, not a negation
but an affirmation that is grasped by the negation of anti-formalist
negation, i.e., by the psychoanalyst's negation of his patient's consciouslevel denial. Thus, the terms 'conscious' and 'unconscious' may be
misleading. Freud says that "in analysis we never discover a 'No' in the
unconscious ...".6 The unconscious is positive by nature: it is the form
of the original intentional act and is also the content taken as form. It is
anti-formalist aware-consciousness that is the source of negation.
Thus, negation of negation can assist in the formalistic understanding
of the patient's unconscious content. The psychoanalyst who listens
uninvolved to the patient's denial - uninvolved because he does not
share his patient's need to repress a specific content (or, rather, because
he retains a formalist point of view) - may immediately realize that the
patient's denial (or, negation) derives only from his conscious-awareness. The patient, however, is not yet conscious of this because he is
motivated by a need to repress (or because he retains an anti-formalist
point of view). Hence, according to Freud, negation has its source in
the negator (here, the patient) and not in the content, since negation
takes place at the patient's conscious-level only and is not the expression of his unconscious.
It should be pointed out that Freud's source in accounting for the
unconscious is anti-formalist consciousness. Consciousness and the
variety of somatic phenomena are the given facts for further interpretation. The consideration of Freud's account of the case of Dora is
illuminating at this juncture. In this instance, Freud makes special use of
the categories of inversion and negation as tools in his interpretative
464
ODED BALABAN
work. There is also the advantage that he places the reader on the same
level as the analyst - on the level of formalist reflection - and
describes the way in which he goes about understanding his patient's
personality.
Here Freud distinguishes, for example, between different degrees of
forgetfulness. The degree of forgetfulness relevant to my purposes is
that of 'true amnesia' (repression), which we come to know about from
the presence of its opposite, paramnesia (false recollection).? Paramnesia
is the formalist interpretation of the anti-formalist 'true-amnesia.'
But someone might ask, how do we know about a paramnesia if not
from a true amnesia? To answer the question, it is necessary to appeal
to context. According to the formalist approach, the patient does not
forget completely, but informs the analyst of a relevant traumatic event
that he has forgotten, replacing it with an imagined event. The patient,
as it were, says to himself that here is something he is not aware of, but
of which he should be aware. Freud therefore concludes with a general
rule - namely, that the quantity of paramnesias is equivalent to the
quantity of true amnesias.
Freud also discusses the phenomenon of the reversal of emotions.8 A
repressed emotion can be revealed in focusing on the extremist and
assertive character of conscious emotion. The conscious emotion is in
itself not the key to understanding the emotion that has been repressed.
Rather the repressed emotion is to be understood from the manner in
which it becomes manifest in consciousness - in other words, by the
overwhelming force and obsessive character of the conscious emotion.
That is to say, Freud tries to bring the patient to attend not to the
explicit intentional content but to its form, the way in which it takes
place.
Still another example of the practical uses of inversion in formalist
analytical treatment is the existence of an obsessive idea in the
consciousness which the patient dwells on unwillingly.9 A conscious
thought of this kind is grounded in an opposite and unconscious
thought that may reveal itself by the special intensity of the conscious
thought. This intensity is the key to understanding the power of the
repressed thought. The process of repression is here a result of the
antithesis of the repressed idea gathering strength and entrenching itself
in consciousness. This is a reactive reinforcement, and the concomitant
conscious thought is a reactive thought.
465
CONCLUSIONS AND PERSPECTIVES
Both everyday reflection and scientific reflection are unaware of being

reflections of the original intentional act. Therefore, although they both
consider the form of the intentional act, everyday reflection regards the
form of the intentional act as an external object (the anti-formalist
approach), while scientific reflection (the formalist approach) regards
the form as part of the subject (but subtracts from the form its
intentional character) and also considers the original content as form.
That is to say, both types of reflection interpret rather than describe the
intentional act.
The only appropriate attitude would be, not to transform the intentional act into something else, but to describe it reflectively. From the
phenomenological reflective point of view, the intentional act remains
unchanged and has to be understood as it actually is. The starting point
of phenomenological reflection is the original intentionality (or, consciousness) itself. Original consciousness is the primary datum of
phenomenological reflection and must therefore not be changed.
But this approach does not imply the rejection of unconscious
elements in the intentional act, as Sartre mistakenly believed. On the
contrary, there are unconscious elements that can be grasped more
clearly by phenomenological reflection than through Freud's and his
followers' formalistic approach. Phenomenological reflection enables us
to realize that unconscious residues are an inevitable consequence of
intentional acts that include both an unconscious process and conscious
results. The unconscious (or, intentional) process and its conscious
product (or, result) are not identical. Process, though prior to result,
can be consciously understood, if at all, only after and not together with
content (the conscious product, or, result). The Owl of Minerva spreads
its wings only after nightfall.
The phenomenological reflective approach may not be focused on
the content of the original intentional act, which (the content) nevertheless remains conscious. What is unconscious is, basically, the way in
which meaning is conveyed by its carriers, and the relation of subject to
object. Indeed, object and meaning (i.e., content) are only aspects of the
intentional act. Nevertheless, they include in themselves also formal
aspects, such as the very fact of the distinction between them.
These aspects, focused in reflection, are the objects of the phenomenological reflective approach. This approach attempts, moreover,
466
ODED BALABAN
to describe the previously unfocused on form of the original intentional

act.
As for the object of the original intentional act, it is not considered
by the subject to be part of his own structure but, rather, to be something transcendent, something non-subjective. Transcendency means
bestowing on an object the status of an entity independent of the
intentional act that is directed to it. The meaning of "object" is first of
all a relational one: the object is an object inasmuch as it relates to a
subject. But to maintain this relationship it must also have an existence
independent of the subject. The original consciousness supposes a
What (a Substance) that cannot be reduced to the immanent content of
sensation. 1 neither touch the color 1 am seeing nor see the immanent
content of what 1 am touching. And the same is true of all the other
senses. 1 do not see the taste and 1 do not taste the color. Therefore,
when 1 stated that "I see what 1 touch," the term "what" does not
express the immanent content of sensation but, rather, something that
lies beyond sensation. This ''what'' is that which must be grasped as the
intentional object.
This transcendency of the object is a prerequisite of the symbolic
function in general, and without it symbolization is not possible. If, for
example, 1 tried to symbolize, without transcendency, the sentence
"Peter goes to the Cinema," 1 would think that the concept "Peter" goes
to the concept "cinema." This is evaluation or interpretation, which
instead of analyzing the phenomenon, ignores it; that is, it ignores the
transcendency of the object, that occurs in the original intentional act.
As regards the meaning of the original act, it is that to which the
subject is directed. Therefore, in reflection, it must be taken as such,
without trying to reduce it to its carriers.
The above analysis gives only a general idea of the phenomenological approach. For its further elaboration, the cognitive achievements
of the formalistic psychoanalytical approach can be adopted (such as
Freud's account of the unconscious, Lacan's studies of signifiers
(signifiant), Melanie Klein's object-relationship theory, etc.,) but only
after this approach is properly translated and revised.
Moreover, the phenomenological approach can serve not only the
understanding of original intentional acts, but also the understanding of
different kinds of reflective intentional acts, like those of everyday
consciousness and of scientific consciousness. These two kinds of
reflective intentional acts, by rejecting the need for phenomenological
467
description, fail to give an adequate account of consciousness; they

either reduce object to subject (formalism), or subject to object (antiformalism); either object to meaning (Lac an) or meaning to object
(Klein). The phenomenological approach may be able, then, to give a
critical account of the flaws of the formalist and anti-formalist theories,
not in order to reject them, but to define their scope and their
limitations.
University of Haifa
NOTES
This model is borrowed from Michael Strauss in Empfindung, Intention und Zeichen,
Typologie des Sinntragens (FreiburgiMunich: Verlag Karl Alber GmbH, 1984).
2 If this distinction between the two aspects of the intentional act, the vertical and the
horizontal, is not grasped, a terminological confusion occurs: meaning is identified with
object. Then, there is a tendency to reduce the vertical axis to the horizontal (as in the
object-relationships psychological theory of Melanie Klein), or a tendency to reduce the
horizontal axis to the vertical (as in the structuralist psychological theory of Jacques
Lacan). I think that the distinction between the two axes avoids these confusions.
3 Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (n.p.: The Crowell-Collier
Publishing Co., 1963), p. 51.
4 See Jacques Lacan, "Intervention sur Ie transfert," in Ecrils (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1966),
pp.291-221.
5 See Sigmund Freud, "Negation," in Collected Papers, ed. J. Strachey (London: The
Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1950), V, p. 182.
6 Freud, "Negation", op. cit.,p.I85.
7 See Freud, Dora, op. cit., p. 31.
8 Ibid., p. 44.
9 Ibid., p. 72.
1
MIGUEL C. JARQUIN MARIN
LA RESPONSABILIDAD DEL ORIENT ADOR EN EL

DESARROLLO DE LA AUTOESTIMA
Coincidiendo con todos los - demas, encontraremos

el centro de nosotros mismos.
- P. Teilhard de Chardin.
INTRODUCCI6N
A varios alios de ejercicio profesional, vale la pena detenernos y preguntarnos si el rumbo de nuestro trabajo ha de continuar igual, si
requiere un viraje 0 tal vez, un nuevo sentido.
Yo yeo tres rumbos en el quehacer del orientador actual. El primero, iluminado por el objetivo general: "colaborar al desarrollo
integral del educando, favoreciendo la creacion de actitudes para lograr una vida plena, equilibrada y constructiva en el aIllbiente escolar,
familiar y social"l ideal maravilloso pero diffcil de cumplir. En segundo
lugar, capto la enorme dispersion que surge por tantas funciones que ha
de cubrir el orientador en la institucion educativa y algunas, muy fuera
de su formaci on, como la de colaborar en la organizacion de programas
de actividades escolares y extraescolares de proyeccion comunitaria
que favorece el desarrollo y otras. El orientador se vuelve, para
expresarlo con un dicho popular, "ajonjoH de todos los moles" y va
desde ser un "pasa calificaciones" 0 - "reune reportes y datos", hasta
ser promotor social 0 diseliador de festivales. La tercera brecha, se
fomentaba en las Norniales, haciendo creer al estudiante que seria el
defensor de los derechos de los alumnos. Era algo asi, como el Robin
Hood de la educacion media; era palio de lagrimas de los escolares, el
centro de las quejas y el lfder frente al nepotismo de la direccion y el
autoritarismo de los maestros en las aulas.
Era el paladin de la individualidad. EI hombre que se enfrentaba a
los fascismos escolares, luchando contra el sentimiento de insignificancia que alimentaban los maestros perfeccionistas y contra la expresarlo de impotencia que se vivia frente a la norma y el poder de la
autoridad.
Peleaba proque cada quien pudiera expresar sus propios sentimi469
A - T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXv, 469-483.
470
entos, par ser espontaneo. Se opoma al sentir social que desaprobaba la

exteriorizacion de las emociones y promovla, en cambio, 10 enfermizo y
desequilibrado de una vida neurotizante.
Gritaba para que el estudiante no se lIenara la cabeza con pensa
mientos hechos y que se Ie tomara en cuenta. Pero ellos no tenlan
poder y los seres sin el, se les trata con abierta desatencion y con una
sutil condescendencia.
Observaba que se les ensenaba a vivir en un mundo relativo, cargado
de escepticismo y cinismo en el que los valores eran monedas gastadas
y los slmbolos estaban vados de contenido y a nombre de la libertad,
se les daba una vision desordenada del universo, amen de confusa.
Se les educaba a tener una voluntad deteriorada, presa facil del consumismo. A no ser ellos mismos, sino simplemente a obtener "buenas
notas" y enrolarse en la carrera en busca de exito. Este hombre,
resultado de nuestra educacion, teme forjarse sus propios fines. El
cumple con 10 que el sistema quiere. El esta hecho para ser peon,
nunca senor de sl mismos.
Con una cita de Pirandello, ilustrare una de las cuestiones que deseo
abordar: "i,quien soy yo? - escribe - i,que pruebas tengo de mi propia
identidad, mas que la permanencia de mi you ffsico? ... yo soy como
tu me quieras".
Este hombre prefiere perder su yo que enfrentar la soledad como
encrucijada que puede conducirlo hacia su ser el mismo. Aparecen
nuevas cadenas e incertidumbres sin facil solucion. Erich Fromm, nos
describe esta situacion: "Sentirse completamente aislado y solitario
conduce a la desintegracion mental, de mismo modo que la inanicion
conduce a la muerte".2 Nada sencillo de resolver el dilema ya que el
hombre desea ser libre, sin estar solo; ser cntico, sin ser esceptico; ser
indepeniente, sin dejar de integrarse a la humanidad.
El orientador es en esencia, una persona que se esfuerza por desarrollar y fortificar una vision del hombre que se libera del miedo y la
sumision; sobre todo, del irrespeto a sl mismo.
AI abrirse las puertas del tercer milenio, i,que podemos decirle
nosotros mismos? ... i,de la labor del orientador y de su misma
persona? En un extremo, acaso i,Sera la herramienta del sistema
adarmecedar que pretende eliminar la carga del yo, apaciguando al
hombre, al confundir su vocacion, con una profesion cualquiera? 0 en
la otra punta i,el ser conciliador y no agresor; ser el hombre capaz de
integrar los esfuerzos de la humanidad hacia una vision mas integral del
hombre que gusta de sl mismo, porque es quien es?
LA RESPONSABILIDAD DEL ORIENTADOR
471
APPROXIMACI0N FENOMENOL0GICA
En la noche desierta, vacfa de ruidos y quiza de afanes, sonaron las

pezuiias de la alborada. Pronto el amanecer como petalo en la flor
dormida en la madrugada. Pasaban de las seis. La luz de mi lampara
patinaba entre las betas negras y cafe oscuro de mi escritorio. En 10
alto de los edificios de la Colonia Jardin Balbuelna, la luna bostezaba
con la boca seca, llena de sueiio y sorpresa. Harto de mohina y dolor
estaba yo. Profundo dolor con un espantajo de alientos en medio del
pecho que se corria como un estertor a 10 largo del cuerpo. Relet la
carta que enviaria al dia siguiente.
jHola Nacho!
Se que hace tiempo que no te escribo. Disculpa. Ahora 10 hago con
el temblor en mi mano. Aun no entiendo como paso. En fin, en este
Mexico nuestro, to do es po sible. El suceso que te narrare, solo tiene
unos dias de distancia y esta vivo, terriblemente vivo en mi.
Sabado, un poco despues del mediodia. Recibo un telefonema corto.
Contundente. Jorge: Juan, el estudiante de primer semestre de comunicacion. Acaba de morir. Te esperamos en su casa. Sabes la direccion,
l,verdad? No tardes. Adios.
El hilban raquitico que sostenia el adorno del carro, bailoteaba
incansable. Me acompaiiaba en la senda ardiente que cruzaba la ciudad cargada de yahoo El sol cruel, ahogaba las gargantas. Llegue a la
casa enclavada en la colonia Lindavista. Silencios. Ojos de pregunta.
Comentarios Atonitos. El grupo se fue reuniendo: compaiieros, maestros y familiares, por supuesto.
Uno de entre todos, alzola vos para pedir atencion.
Acabamos de encontrar una carta de Juan. La leere.
Ahora, yo te la reproduzco con todas las telaraiias de mi memoria:
CompaIieros:
Llevo mucho pensando. Siempre estoy solo. A mi nadie me busca para charlar; tal vez
soy aburrido. insfpido 0 no soy simpatico. A las mujeres no les he lIamado la atencion.
Me esquivan; sera que no soy bien parecido, les caigo mal 0 les sere repugnante. Los
maestros ... bueno ... yo creo que para ellos ni existo; soy un cuadro en la lista para
calificar. En la direccion y la administraci6n he de ser un mimero y una colegiatura
mas.
Estoy cansado de no significar nada para nadie. Estoy de sobra, oigan ... i,Alguien
de ustedes querrfa amarme? i,Que es tener y ser un amigo? i,Que se siente esperar el
tintineo del telefono, sabiendo que alguien necesita hablar contigo? i,Que es desear ir al
colegio, no a pasar Iista 0 a ser enjuiciado, sino a vivir la aventura de encontrarte con
otros hombres, a sentir que te palpita el corazon porque vas en busca de alguien que te
espera?
472
jMaldicion! que se aprende en la escuela: tanto conocimiento idiota 0 a querernos

como seres incanjeables, unicos; tanto que si yo faltara, mi pupitre quedara vacfo y
expresara mi ausencia y todos sintieran la necesidad de verme ... de volver a verme.
Saber que si yo no volviera, mi lugar quedaria vacante para siempre. Nadie podrfa
ocuparlo.
jOh demonios! pero el orgullo es mayor. i,Que falta habre cometido que no pueden
perdonarme, ni intergrarme al sentido del grupo. i,0 sere yo quien no me he perdonado
ami mismo? i,De que he de perdonarme? De no ser yo 0 de ser yo. De no quererme 10
suficiente. De no amarme. De no estar contento conmigo. De que, de que, de que ...
Hoy, un dia cualquiera. Sin valor: decidi no vivir mas. Suprimire una de tantas vidas
insignificantes. Ustedes no me quisieron en su grupo. Mi familia, ni hablar de ellos. Yo
tampoco me acepto, ni me quiero en este mundo. Es demasiado pesado vivir sin ser
nadie; ni amado ni requerido por alguien.
Adios.
Juan el proscrito.
La Ultima palabra quedo como la rafaga de un corto circuito en el silencio aterrante
de todos. Juan no habia muerto; se acababa de suicidar. La explosion reventaba en el
cielo fundido en sangre de tempestad.
Querido amigo i,que estamos haciendo en este mundo de mediocres? Vive, vive el
gozo del campo en aquel pueblo precioso de Queretaro. Recuerdame con un vasa de
vino en la mano, en medio de tu soledad que yo 10 hago desde la catedral de los
solitarios. No te unas al despertar mons truoso de la cuidades. Conserva tu habitacion.
Desde el rincon oscuro de un condominia perdido en el enjambre de la noche que
se escapa. Recibe mi aprecio y el deseo firme de no olvidarte.
Jorge.
AUTOEXPRESI6N Y AUTOESTIMA
l,Cuantos Juanes han existido en nuestros centros educativos? Apurados en registrar en las estadfsticas a cuantos tenemos y mientras, l,no
habremos perdido a muchos, que no sabemos ni donde quedaron?
La funcion del orientador nos lleva a una pregunta nueva: l,cual es el
fin de la escuela? Alguien ha dicho que es ir a aprender. Yo preguntaria: l,Aprender que 0 a aprender a que? Es un hecho que la educacion bancaria fracaso. Podemos entonces postular que a la escuela se va
a aprender a vivir y mejor dicho a convivir. Se va a aprender a ser
compaiieros, es decir, a construir junto "con-otros", un destino comun.
Para esto se requiere que el hombre aprenda a ser sensible a los
"otros". Esta impresionabilidad personal se caracteriza por su potencia
formadora y su capacidad de expresion que coinciden en un vertitce de
sosten: la vida interior. La plenitud, esta vivencia tan llevada y traida
entre los diversos enfoque de la psiocologia contemporanea y tan
LA RESPONSABILIDAD DEL ORIENT ADOR
473
exorcizada por las huestes filosoficas, solo es po sible, si existe una

profunda vida intima, de la que el fundador del Personalismo escribe:
" ... el sentimiento de intimidad ... Expresa la alegria de redescubrir las
fuentes interiores y refrescarse en elIas".3 Mientras tanto, la experiencia
de la plenitud no se alcanza por decreto, ni por mandato de la
autoridad.
La plenitud solo se alcanza cuando la capacidad de expresion ha
encontrado los canales propios para hacerse presente y esta a su vez, es
posible en el momenta en el que la potencia formadora ha enraizado en
el fondo vital y cargada de energia es capaz de imprimir una huella en
el canicter que se llama testimonio.
La potencia formadora es el poder que el hombre tiene en sf mismo
para transformarse en el ser que quiere ser. El poder es la herramienta
para convertirse en sf mismo; para conseguir desarrollar su vocacion de
hombre, como proceso de personalizacion. Es el uso de la energfa
cosmica que se capitaliza en mi poder-ser, como 10 dijera Teilhard de
Chardin: "... la energia fundamental en juego en el universo, no es otra
cosa que un flujo de personalizacion".4
La capacidad de expresion es el poder de salir de sf mismo, haciendose presente a los "otros" al traves de todos los tipos de lenguaje. Es ir
mas aHa de sf. Es autotrascenderse al traves del signo. Es el instrumento
por medio de cual, se vuelve el hombre palabra para el hombre.
Ser, poder y expresar son en la experiencia humana, tres realidades
ligadas entre sf. El ser puede expresarse. El poder enrafza en 10 que se
es para automanifestarse. La expresion es el poder de ser fuera de sf.
Realidades ambivalentes que al filo de la vivencia, se mueven entre la
abundancia y la escasez, la plentitud y el vacio, la fidelidad y la traicion,
la inocencia y la complejidad.
El cuerpo juega aquf un papel importantfsimo. El cuerpo es el calor
personal de la materia de la intuicion. Como percibo al mundo,
equivale a como es mi cuerpo ... y min mas, como soy en el mundo al
traves de mi cuerpo. Hemos de recordar que el mundo existe a la
evocacion de aque1. El cuerpo-sujeto es el mediador entre el mundo y
el sfmismo.
El dualismo dicotomico de la tradicion, empezando a ser superado
en un intento de ver al cuerpo como el propio sujeto, sin agotarse en e1.
En un texto de Klages, en 1910, podemos hallar nueva luz para este
tema: "... el cuerpo es la manifestacion del alma, y el alma es el sentido
de esa manifestacion corporal".5
474
De la autoexpresion, entrocamos ahora con la autoimagen. El

mundo es, en cierta forma 10 que yo soy. En un ejemplo brillante.
Merleau-Ponty ha descubierto esta relacion al hablar del pintor: "es
prestando su cuerpo al mundo que el pintor cambia al mundo en
pintura".6 El mundo surge de entre mis manos. Un cuerpo amado se
dibuja en la caricia y se vuelve incomparable en la frescura de la
sensacion.
Mi cuerpo es un entrelazado de union y movimiento. Mi movimiento
se despliega, es irradiacion de un sl mismo. El ve y se ve a sl mismo. Se
puede ver por medio de 10 que ve. Viendo es que se mira. Tocando se
toca. Mi cuerpo es, en el mundo que 10 rodea. El mundo es aparecer en
mi cuerpo. Para un cuerpo opaco, el mundo sent triste y oscuro. Para
un cuerpo iluminador, el mundo sera alegre y transparente. Nuevo
conflicto: el hombre es hUlda de la oscuridad hacia la luz; encuentro
con la luz y necesidad de regreso a la oscuridad. En la medida en la
que el hombre se ama en sur ser corporal aprende a amar al mundo. La
autoimagen esta ligada a la autoestima. Si mi autoimagen es apreciada
por ml mismo, me autoestimo. La autoestima la podemos definir como
el amor a SI mismo, en contra-posicion del egoismo.
Aunque sea de paso, penmtaseme expresar mi desacuerdo con
Lutero, Calvino, Kant y Freud en este asunto, ya que para ellos es 10
mismo el egolsmo y el amor a SI mismo. Por eso es calificado como una
"peste" en la obra de Calvino. 7 Siguiendo a Fromm, yo creo que el
egolsmo define a un ser codicioso, insaciable, insatisfecho, inquieto,
torturado por no tener bastante, temeroso a perder algo 0 a ser
despojado de algo; lleno de envidia porque los "otros" pueden tener
mas. No se ama. Se desprecia. Se tiene aversion y como compensacion
aparenta amarse a sl mismo en una carrera loca y obsesiva de acumulacion para engalanarse, pero que realmente, Ie lleva a destruirse. En
"el arte de amar" nos 10 dice claramente el autor: "Es verdad que las
personas egolstas son incapaces de amar a los demas, pero tampoco
amarse a sl mismas."8
La autoestima se manifesta en la estructura del caracter. No es un
comportamiento aislado, es un modo de ser. Tres cualidades estructurales 10 apuntalan: la excitabilidad personal de los sentimientos
llamada afectividad: la excitabilidad personal de la voluntad, conocida
por algunos como temperamento y la facultad personal de exteriorizacion.
Exteriorizacion y autoexpresion son equivalentes. En este tema, el
475
cifculo se ha cerrado. Estamos en el entendido de que a todo proceso

vital, corresponde un proceso corporal. A esto llamamos exteriorizacion 0 si se prefiere, expresion 0 apariencia. A veces los seres vivos
tienen interes en no mostrar ciertos procesos animicos: el enamorado
oculta su amor; el celoso, sus celos; el envidioso, su envidia ... quien
mas quien menos, aparenta la inclinacion opuesta. Hay una resistencia a
la exteriorizacion como en la formula de Klages: K = E/Rx que
podemos traducir asi: la fuerza personal de Rx exteriorizacion (K) para
surgir, depende del grado de excitabilidad (E) y la resis tecnica (Rx)
que se oponga a la exteriorizacion.9
El autodominio, resistencia, esta al servicio de la autodefensa. El
animal se hace muerto por temor. La tecnica del engafio y la educacion
en el hombre, superan la mentira de los otros seres vivos y llega a la
regIa moral. Nos volvemos esclavos de la reputacion. El buen hombre
esta contra la vida. La vivencia de los sentimientos se vuelve incongruente, como 10 dijera el Dr. Lowen. "Nos protegemos de las penas de
amor, no amanda y de la muerte, no viviendo."lo
Autoexpresion y autoestima se van a pique al declararse contra las
exigencias de la sociedad. Aparece entonces, el sentido del honor.
El mimetismo mata la autoexpresion; todo es disimulado, farsa. El
egoismo aniquila la autoestima; todo es avaricia, mezquinidad.
SER Y HACER
La autoestima que es el agrado de ser uno mismo. Y asi, exactamente

asi, ser con los demas y para los demas. Cuando esto no sucede, surge
un deterioro en la personalidad como 10 penso Klages: "La union de
una falta de facultad de exteriorizacion espontanea con una vehemente
necesidad de expresion, provocaria un conflicto a la larga insoportable
que aniquilaria especialmente la autoestima de la personalidad, si el
organismo perturbado no se creara - una compensacion en una
necesidad cada vez mas autonoma de exponer sus estados afectivos,
necesidad cuya secuela inevitable es que los sentimientos mismos se
consumen en beneficio del interes de manifestarlos y se atrofian mas y
maS. 11
Mi necesidad de amar, amarme y ser amado, se confunde con ser
agradable a los demas. El sentimiento del yo se vuelve sefial de - 10
que los demas piensan de mi. No puedo hacer nada porque me siento
incapaz e imitil. Valgo por mi popularidad. Mi ser se torna - egoista.
476
Este siente repudio por la exteriorizacion. Busca poses. Se ve demasiado a sl mismo y se vuelve artificial y cerrado en S1. Solo tiene ojos para
su dolor, sus sentimientos, su tristeza, su abandono ... solo existen
elios para ellos. En "EI misterio de ser", Marcel nos describe muy bien
a este hombre: "Porque no piensa mas que en sl, el egoista en el fonda
falla, ignora que se traiciona en la medida en que concentra en sf toda
su atencion"P
Aparecen formas inofensivas de la mentira como es la exageracion,
la exaltacion, la extravagancia; pero tambien hay modos ofensivos como
la histeria.
l.Como lograr ser tornado en cuenta? El hombre centra su atencion
en el hacer. La esposa cree ser ideal por ser buena ama de casa; el
marido por ser un excelente financiador del gasto familiar; el amante
por enjoyar al amado; los hijos por sacar buenas calificaciones y ser
obedientes; los padres por dar regalos y un buen-nivel de vida; el
maestro por proporcionar conocimientos titiles ... todo es actuar, no
ser. Convierte el trabajo en el mejor de los fines. Reemplaza la iniciativa y el coraje por la impotencia y la - desesperacion.
Fensterheim y Baer en un valioso enfoque del aprendizaje asertivo
postulan que "Los seres humanos desean una vida de dignidad y autorrealizacion."13 Esta meta se hace dificil porque los hombres no reconocen su propia fuerza. Considera cada quien que 10 que hace, influye y
define quien es y como se siente para consigo mismo. Su actuar
positivo 10 lleva autoafirmarse: a maniferstase libremente; a comunicarse con otros en forma abierta, directa, franca, adecuada; a encontrar
una orientacion activa sobre la vida e intenta hacer que las casas
sucedan; se juzga respetable y pone 10 mejor de sf en cada empresa.
Esta vision del quehacer humano es altamente tonificante ya que "ser es
obrar".
Cuando no es aSl, su hacer y la calidad de su hacer, Ie demuestra la
fuerza de su poder. En un momenta el ve el poder como "confianza en
sf mismo". Surgen dos versiones del poder: la forma estenica que
materializa al vigor y el modo astenico que enuncia al sentimiento debil
del propio poder.
El hombre fragil se inclina a la insatisfaccion al estilo de la tristeza 0
de la amargura. Denota un temple de angustia vital. Su reaccion ante las
contrariedades y peligros se orienta hacia el temor, el sobresalto, la
excitabilidad nerviosa. Estan en peligro constante de la depresion y la
perdida en la iniciativa. Estan frente a la perplejidad paralizante. No
acepta responsibilidades ni riesgos. Ve al futuro sin esperanza, con
477
inquietud y miedo. Es el mundo de los hombres vfctimas. En "El miedo

a la libertad" se nos hace un retrato de como usan su poder estas
personas: ... "el deseo de poder no se arraiga en la fuerza, sino en la
debilidad. Es la expresion de la incapacidad del yo individual de
mantenerse solo y subsistir. Constituye el intento desesperado de
conseguir un sustituto de la fuerza al faltar la fuerza genuina."14
El hombre estenico, tiene dos facetas de presentarse: uno reactivo y
otro activo. El reactivo es alegre y tranquilo. Las acechanzas las recibe
con calma y seguridad; no es espontaneo, pero sf equilibrado. El activo
es emprendedor. Tiene iniciativa propia; capacidad de decision; audacia. Corren el riesgo de confundirse con el afan de podeno. El destino
parece que esta a su favor; tal como escribiera Cesar: "Estas conduciendo al Cesar y a su buena fortuna". Hayen enos, temeridad y
arrojo que les lleva a creerse poseedores de una fuerza demoniaca y
querer conquistar el universo.
Estos peligros aparecen cuando el poder se vuelve fin y no el medio
para llegar a ser. Con gran claridad en la teona del "hombre constructor" se postula "El poder, en el sentido de dominacion, es la
perversion de la potencia."15
En cambio, enraizado en 10 que yo soy, el poder que nace del ser,
hace creer al hombre en sf mismo y a los demas eh 61, como 10 externara MefistOfeles en el "Fausto" de Goethe: "solamente si teneis confianza
en vos misma, confiaran en voz la almas ajenas".16 Son hombres que en
lugar de esquivar enfrentan. Actuan. Acercan el futuro a nosotros.
Paralelo al sentimiento del poder, esta el sentimento del valor que
adopta divers as manifestaciones. (1) Sentimiento del propio valor con
horizontes reducidos. Es falto de crftica. Su caricatura patologica es la
megalomania. (2) El sentimento demonfaco del propio valor que nace
de atribuirle a un fetiche su propia fuerza. Es un elegido. (3) El
sentimiento aristocratico del propio valor; se halla anclado a la nobleza.
Su valor radica en un pas ado glorioso. Se basa en una cualidad que 10
selecciona. Expresa su ansia de notoriedad. (4) El sentimiento narcisista del propio valor. Es el enamorado de sf, como si fuera "otro". Es el
ejemplo tfpico de la tautologfa: solo existe el. Sale de sf, para sf. Es un
vanidoso. (5) El sentimiento del propio valor mediato objectivo, es
aquel que se centra en una mision y en torno a ella, toda su vida. Este
es volcadura total. (6) El sentimiento del propio valor inautentico. que
se vive "como revestimiento compensador de un sentimiento de
inferioridad, siempre dispuesto a actualizarse" .17
Es altanero. Esta hastiado. Nadie Ie satisface.
478
El sentimiento del propio valor sera sana alligarse al sentimiento del

poder, como facilitadar de la persona que surge. Esta emergencia en el
proceso de personalizacion, nos lleva a crear una vision diferente del
mundo que se declara en favor de la vida y del hombre. Ahora ya no
soy par 10 que valgo, sino que valgo por 10 que soy. Ni siquiera por 10
que hago. Mi hacer es el surgir de mi ser. Aparece la necesidad
infatigable de elegirme a mi mismo, constantemente.
Elegirse a si mismo es "un afecto libre, en 10 concreto que existe
para nosotros solo temporalmente y como historia".18 Kierkegaard 10
expresa asi: "El individuo se hace consciente de si mismo, en cuanto
este determinado individuo con estas dotes, estas inclinaciones, estos
instintos, estas pasiones, bajo el in flujo de este ambiente determinado,
como este producto determinado de un determinado ambiente. Quien
de esta forma se hace consciente a si mismo, acepta to do esto junto
bajo su responsabilidad. No vacila en si debe tomar 10 particular 0 no;
pues sabe que se pierde algo superior, si no 10 hace. Se encuentra pues,
en el momenta de la eleccion, un aislamiento compIeto, pues el se
desprende de su alrededor; y sin embargo, en ese mismo momento esta
en absoluta continuidad, pues se elige a si mismo como producto, y
esta eleccion es una eleccion libre, de modo que puede decirse de el, en
tanto que se elige a si mismo como producto, que se produce a si
mismo".19
Llegamos aqui al meollo de esta investigacion: esta podria ser la
mision central del orientador: asumir la responsabilidad de cooperar a
construir hombres, cuyo ser es la emergencia del hombre que se elige a
si mismo y al procesarse, se vuelve capaz de autoestimarse.
EL ORlENTADOR, VANGUARDIA DE LA AUTOESTIMA
Despues de todas estas reflexiones, l,al orientador no Ie gustaria ser el

promotor de la autoestima en sus instituciones? l,A esforzarse para que
cada dia las personas que conviven con el, aprendieran a quererse y
sentirse a gusto consigo mismo porque descubren dia a dia que se estan
convirtiendo en el ser que han sonado ser?
Me imagino que su respuesta seria positiva. Sin embargo, la labor no
es facil, pues nuestro primer enemigo somos nosotros mismos. Nadie
puede ensenar a "otros" a amarse, si uno mismo se desprecia. El
segundo limite es la lapida de 10 cotidiano. De ese terrible todos los
dias. Empero, esto pasa a todas las profesiones como 10 dijera Rilke, en
su sexta carta a un joven poeta: "... considere si todas las profesiones
LA RESPONSABILIDAD DEL ORIENT AD OR
479
no son asi, si no estan llenas de hostilidad hacia el individuo, saturadas

del odio de aquellos que se han adaptado mudos y hoscos al deber
insipido".20
Alto amigos orientadores. Deteganse un momenta y levanten su voz.
No sean de los que se amoldan sin mas a ese sistema adormecedor que
nos mata poco a poco. Sean creadores y "Para los creadores no hay
pobreza, ni lugar pobre, indiferente"21 Desde su centro de trabajo,
conviertanse en la vanguardia del hombre que abre las ventanas al siglo
XXI, creyendo en nosotros y contando con 10 mejor de nosotros.
Traigamos las palabras de Juan, el estudiante de la carta que leimos.
Se sentia culpado, culpable y no sabia de que 0 por que. Considero que
vivimos en una civilizacion en la que la culpa forma parte de nosotros.
No es el momenta para profundizar en este tema pero valdria la pena
hacerlo en otra ocasion. La culpa la llevamos como esencia de nuestro
ser-cultural.
(,De que seremos culpables? Me voy a atrever a postular que el
manejo de la culpa es la guerra del hombre insatisfecho que al no ser el
mismo, no puede vivirse pleno de alegria y esperanza en eI y en su porvenir. No puede vislumbrar que en su condicion de todavia-no, se esta
fraguando su propio ser. Ante esta desesperacion, mas se guia por su
insignificancia que por su grandeza. Ese hombre nuevo que esta
surgiendo, es grande. Dyer, ha dedicado unas lineas preciosas para
esculpir esta imagen: "La esencia de la grandeza radica en la capacidad
de optar por la propia realizacion personal en circunstancias en que
otras personas optan por la 10cura."22
La carta que hoy leimos, se parece en mucho a la que Ivan, el
personaje de Tolstoi afirmara: "(, Y si toda mi vida ha sido una equivocacion que? Se Ie ocurrio que 10 que antes la habian parecido completamente imposible, especialmente el hecho de que no habia vivido
como deberia haberlo hecho podria despues de todo ser verdad. Se Ie
ocurrio que sus impulsos vitales, reprimidos brutalmente por si rnismos
apenas los habia experimentado, podrian haber sido 10 unico verdadero
y real de su vida y to do 10 demas falso. Trato de defenderse y justificarse ante si mismo y sintio de pronto cuan debil era 10 que estaba
defendiendo y justificando. No habia nada que justificar".
Una vez mas jalto!. Atrevete a ser responsable de ti mismo. Juan, en
su carta, nos dejo ver que el no habia sido sensible a los demas. (,No
valdra la pena educarnos a ser capaces de percibir el afecto de los
demas, a saber captar al hombre que los otros nos bridan, a poder
gozar con los otros sin tener que cobnirnoslo mas tarde?
480
Tenemos derecho a ser, a experienciar la alegria, a vivir la fiesta de

la existencia. Despierta, esclavo y vive la enorme satisfaccion y angustia
de ser tll mismo. Afortunadamente, tll eres mas de 10 que todos vemos
en tf. Esfuerzate por no ser desgraciado y vivete intensamente. Solo
vive, no te justifiques. El Demian de Herman Hesse, 10 dice muy
atinadamente: "Los que son demasiado perezosos 0 comodones para
pensar por' sf mismos y ser sus propios jueces, obedecen leyes. Otros
sienten sus propias leyes dentro de ellos mismos; estas les prohiben
cosas que cualquier hombre honesto haria cualquier dia del ario y les
permiten otras cosas que suelen considerarse despreciables. Cada
persona debe pararse sobre sus propios pies".
Parece ser que Oscar Wilde escribio: "Todos terminamos matando 10
que mas amamos". jCuidado! Lo que mas amamos es a nosotros
mismos. No posterguemos la decision para manana. Hoy, hoy mismo
decide creer en ti mismo y decidete a poner 10 mejor de ti para ti. La
persona con la que mejor cuentas para todo, es contigo mismo.
Es verdad que tll eres un pilar frente al problemas de desercion
escolar. Pero 10 eres mas, frente al de desercion en la vida. Por eso a tf
dedico esta.
ODA AL ORIENTADOR
Orientador
Herramienta dulce y homicida
vuelas con un resplandor
en torno a los que nacen
Rayo silbante
caido
alado
rugiente
Estas cerca de todas las edades
en el que empieza
en el que florece
en el que fructifica.
Acompanas como hogar en la aldea
al que sufre
al que 110ra
alquegime
No ceses en tu intento
relampago de fuego
abre la cicatriz
y despierta al gigante
No dejes que nadie se marchite
abOnalo
injertalo
cufdalo
Espada que muges
y grita
des trona a
la invalidez
la farsa
el buen nombre
quemalos en la hoguera
con racimos de paciencia
baranas de dulzura
palitos de afecto.
no te agotes
ejercftate desde tu procedencia
rompe la roca obstinada
y saca agua fresca
con tu cayado
tu testimonio
de vida alegre
amante
Rompe la malicia voraz
cierne la espiga de la caricia
vierte la jugosa burbuja de la sonrisa
mitiga la pena maligna.
Cincela los cardos
cava el barb echo
aguarda la grama
celebra el boton.
Hortelano que guardas
el huerto de la hermosura
como paloma que se posa
en el nido de tus manos.
Pastor que velas
481
482
el rebano de 10 admirable
como oveja que se acoge
en el regazo de tus senos
Caminante
con tus pies pones
micar en el propio carino
huella en la sal y la arena
a orillas
del mar pleno
en donde la brisa nos espera
libaci6n y hogar
para serenar nuestra vida inquieta.
Desahoga en mt
tu juego de luces
y prende la antorcha
del hombre que cree en sf mismo.
Silencio
humedad
vasto huracan
brama en medio de las muertes
que el diamente de la vida
aguarda en la gruta de tus posibilidades
y brilla hoy mas que nunca.
Para terminar me gustarfa citar un pasaje de una de las obras de
Tennessee Williams, en la que Blanche dice a su hermana: "No te que
des atras junto con las bestias", a 10 que anade: "nuevas luces han
alumbrado el mundo desde entonces." Ojala, tu, amigo orientador seas
uno de los portadores de esa nueva luz.
Universidad Jose Vasconcelos
Durango, Mexico
NOTAS
1
2
3
4
Manuales S.E.P. (Mexico: 1986).

Erich Fromm, "EI miedo ala libertad" p. 45.
Emmanuel Mounier, "EI personalismo". III. p. 27.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "Esbozo de un universo personal" V. p. 97.
483
Ludwig Klages, "Los fundamentos de la caracterologia". vn, p. 190.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "EI ojo y el espiritu" I. p. 15.
7 Cfr. Calvin, J., "Institutes of the Christian Religion". 7.4. p. 622.
H Erich Fromm, "El arte de amar" II 3 d. p. 65.
9 Ludwig Klages, op. cit. VI p. 162.
10 Alexander Lowen, "EI miedo a la vida" II p. 77.
11 Ludwig Klages, op. cit. vn p. 171.
12 Gabriel Marcel, "EI misterio del ser" II. VI. p. 224.
13 Fensterheim, H. y Baer, J., "No diga sf cuando quiera decir no". 1 p. 23.
14 Erich Fromm, op. cit. p. 198.
15 Erich Fromm, op. cit. p.199.
Ih Goethe, J. W. v., "Fausto" Ira. parte.
17 Phillip Lersche, "La estructura de la personalidad". p. 295.
IX Karl Jaspers, "Psicologia de las concepciones del mundo". p. 149.
19 Soren Kierkegaard, "W.W." II p. 215.
20 Rainer Ma. Rilke, "Cartas a un joven poeta". VI. p. 77.
5
21
Rainer Ma. Rilke, op. cit. p. 25.
22
Wayne W. Dyer, "Tus zonas erroneas".1. p. 17.

BIBLIOGRAFfA
Dyer Wayne W., "Tus zonas erroneas" (Mexico: E. Grijalbo, 1988).

Fensterheim, H. y Baer, J., "No diga sf, cuando quiera decir no" (Mexico: Ed. Grijalbo,
1983).
Fromm, E. Birch, "El miedo a la libertad" (Buenos Aires: Ed. Paidos, 1971). "El arte de
amar" (Mexico: Paidos Studio, 1987).
Goethe, J. W. v., "Fausto" (Mexico: Ed. Pornia, S.A., 1986).
Jaspers, Karl, "Psicologia de las concepciones del mundo" (Madrid: Ed. Gredos, 1967).
Klages, Ludwig, "Los fundamentos de la caracterologia" (Buenos Aires: Ed. Paid os, 1965).
Lersch, Phillip, "La estructura de la personalidad" (Barcelona: Ed. Scientia, 1971).
Lowen, Alexander, "EI miedo a la vida" (Mexixo: Ed. Lasser Press, 1985).
Marcel, Gabriel, "EI misterio del ser" (Buenos Aires: Ed. Sudamericana, 1964).
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, "EI ojo y el espfritu" (Barcelona: Pafdos Studio, 1985).
Mounier, Emmanuel, "EI personalismo" (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1968).
Rilke, Rainer Ma., "Cartas a un joven poeta" (Buenos Aires: Ed. Siglo Veinte, 1984).
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, "Esbozo de un universo personal" (Madrid: Narcea, S.A.
Ediciones, 1975).
MARIA LUCRECIA ROVALETTI
EXISTENCE AND GUILT:

A DISCOURSE ON ORIGINS IN PHENOMENOLOGY
What defines human existence is the way it is constituted of being: sistit

ex. If in Richard of Saint Victor the "ex" takes us to the origins, in
phenomenological existential thinking it rather concerns the ad-vent, be
it in the form of choice (Kierkegaard), project (Heidegger), decision
and freedom (Jaspers), or progressive appropriation of our effort of
being (Ricoeur).
For Kierkegaard, existing is something more than being born; existing is precisely that spiritual relation, an interior consciousness, free
and active, which keeps one in tune with decisions, passions and faith.
Man is born in a way as an individual I when he leaves the original
innocence of pure sensibility. As the spirit cannot escape from itself nor
fully realize itself - because it is dissonant unity of the finite and the
infinite - the possibility of choosing one of the terms manifests itself as
"anxiety" at the moment in which it resounds with divine prohibition.
Anxiety presents itself as the reality of liberty as regards possibility; it
belongs to the very condition of man and does not derive from his
performance. Upon choosing, man clings to something concrete, disdaining the infinity of the possible; and as every choice implicitly
carries the negation of the infinite, it installs guilt. Guilt does not
constitute, therefore, a moral category but an ontological one; it is an
attribute of liberty. The spirit cannot arrive at the full realization of its
destiny except through a guilty choice, going through the temptation
which comes precisely from God. Anxiety now abandons being for the
prohibited possibility of finite choosing, in the face of the abrupt
distancing of the infinite. To the anxiety of discovering himself through
the possibility of choosing, man adds the anxiety of negating infinity by
assuming the finitude of the thing chosen. Human nature, given limited
and finite liberty, makes sin possible. In a certain way, liberty coincides
with guilt. To be a subject is to relate oneself to sin. I cannot be "I" or
make myself "I" except by a willful splitting with respect to God, and
this is exactly the "fault." The "me" comes out . . . and assumes its
solitude against every other one, and therefore in the first place against
the Other which precedes its origin. To be oneself is to choose against
485
A- T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXv, 485-495.
486
God. In this way the fundamental parody is constituted: "man discovers

God discovering himself, but he cannot discover Him without defying
Him, without sinning." (De Waelhens, 1954,54-55)
"Evil, therefore, is a dialectic reality, which cannot be understood
without relating the exercise of liberty of every human being with the
anteriority of the evil-nature which contingency supposes." (Maceiras,
162).
For Jaspers, "resolution and being yourself are the same thing"; but it
is not about the realization of the isolated individual in front of God, as
with Kierkegaard, but rather that every consciousness supposes other
consciousness with whom to be realized. Man makes himself responsible for the given thing because he does not receive it resignedly;
rather, he adopts it as his very own. "At the same time, I am the origin
of my action and of my being." (Jaspers, 41-42) However, choosing
worries man and committing himself terrifies him. He becomes anxious
due to it and experiments as a non-being. Therefore he can opt to
continue "existing," or he can convert himself into the material of
someone else who will decide for him.
"Resolution ... is the liberty of he who has to act thus because of
being himself. ... Due to being free, I see myself as guilty (responsible).
Whilst I, due to being free, struggle to be guilty, I am already guilty
because of my freedom. But from this guilt I cannot exclude myself
without contracting the guilt of negating the liberty itself." (Jaspers, 41,
56-57)
In this way 1 assume the origin of my being from the one that I
wanted and had to choose, an origin which is prior to every
determined action. "Upon assuming responsibility, 1 conserve my
liberty by recognizing my guilt." (Ibid., 57) It is as if man had chosen
himself before, and then taken and recognized this choice in his guilty
conscience as his own product. There is a determined guilt, but also an
undefinable guilt, unredeemable, the foundation of every specific guilt,
because of freedom. "But 1 cannot exclude myself from this guilt
without contracting the guilt of denying my liberty itself." (Ibid.) Man
cannot dissolve this freedom, although optimistically he contemplates a
possible life without it, and only recognizes the singular guilt that he
can expiate. These false disguises cannot hide the fact that "I am myself
but guilty." Furthermore, by living actively man can snatch something
from someone else and damage him through rejection, by the excluding
realization that implies his possible existence. And as one cannot
EXISTENCE AND GUILT
487
maintain oneself in the universal possibility of non-action, since in

omission one would still be acting, acting or not acting, both manners of
conduct have a consequence: in any case one inevitably incurs guilt.
Nevertheless, man cannot discover the origin where his responsibility
begins, cannot define the blame. The motives for action and the feelings
born of impulses are so mistaken vis-a-vis the mUltiple possibilities of
the context that only in rare moments or due to a blind rational
abstraction is a clear decision possible.
For Heidegger, "Ek-sistence" expresses the specific form that the
reference to "go to your being" takes for man, i.e., the tacit or expressed
comprehension of the being which is being made. "Sistere ex" indicates
"being outside," and pertains to some one who has a being in front of
him like a job to do and not something that is fixed in which to repose.
Heidegger starts from un-authentic existence, from the fallen-ness
(Veifallen) of that modality which interprets itself starting from the
mere entity, without assuming its own "power-to-be" (Entwurj). But this
concealment is not total, because it can be modified by authentic
existence. As an expression of this possibility, there is anxiety, a
privileged form of finding oneself. This is why Dasein is interpolated by
the "voice of the conscience." The phenomenological analysis of the
conscience excludes from the beginning all refuge in potentialities
outside Dasein. There is no supreme instance before which Dasein
should justify itself. Neither the "Daimon" of Socrates nor the Biblical
God, neither the intelligible Kantian Ego nor the Freudian Super-Ego.
Heidegger examines the current explanations of conscience characterizing them as the comprehension of the Manselbst, but retaining from
them the character of "voice." He who voices is not something that can
be verified in the world, that 'who' only has the form of a "call." The caller
and the called are the same, although in a different way. The caller is the
Dasein who becomes anxious and who has not renounced absolutely
familiarity with his thrown-ness. The called is the Dasein called to his
own power-to-be. The called is not linked to a dearth or defect of
something (as in Vorhanden) but rather to the way of being constitutively affected by negativity which is expressed in the "thrown-ness."
Ek-sistence is essentially a not having placed oneself, a not being one's
own foundation, and at the same time one is thrown towards some
possibilities limited by the thrown-ness itself (Gewoifenheit). My
power-to-be is to choose one possibility and not another. Heidegger
radicalizes Jaspers' postulations, and shows that man is always in a limit
488
situation: every decision exacts a debt, because every time we decide in

favor of something we decide to drop something else. Finally, existence
points towards its most obvious destiny: death. If I am and have to be
the foundation of my own finitude, my existence will have to develop its
project under the constant sign of death, as a permanent, continuous,
and ultimate possibility-to-be. Very well, the voice of conscience is
nothing but "concern" (Sorge). Concern - the being of Dasein means according to this, a thrown-out project: to be the foundation of a
negativity. And this signifies that "the There-being as such is guilty."
(Heidegger, par. 58, 285)
In this talk about its finite condition, in this "willingness to be
called," Ek-sistence makes itself responsible for an irredeemable guilt.
And this dilemma implies at depth a decision between an authentic
existence and a un-authentic one. It is about a guilt which has neither
penitence nor expiation. What the voice of conscience voices is that
Dasein is authentically guilty. This is why Demoulin said: "L'authenticite n'est jamais donne mais toujours conquise sur une inauthenticite
prealable." (Demoulin, 65) There is a primordial guilt of the contemporary Dasein in its style: Dasein did not choose to exist, but it should
determine its Ek-sistence. By accepting being finite, Dasein makes itself
responsible (guilty). On a reading of the thinking of Kierkegaard, Jean
Wahl said that it is leization of Kierkegaard's thought; and Emmanuel
Levinas said that it is a discourse about the absence of God.
For Ricoeur, upon comparing this "brute made out of being" with
the demands of totality, existence makes itself known as something man
neither produces nor positions. The imagination which conceives of the
possibility of having been able to not exist, comes to reveal to us also
that lack of "being for itself": "here I am, but there was no necessity for
me to be here . . . and that necessity reveals the negative side which
encloses all sentiments of precariousness, dependence, lack of subsistence and, existential vertigo ... . I am the living unnecessity of
existing," "that pleasure of one's self in the sadness of the finite."
(Ricoeur, 1960, Vol I, 156 ff.) Man, that "mix of original affirmation
and existential negation," is the progressive manifestation of the failure,
which turns him into a mediator, a fragile one, for one with himself. This
difference between the I and the I, or to put it in an other way, between
the demands of the I and its own contingency inside a selfsame particular destiny, this "secret crevice" reveals to us a sense of conflict. The
limitation - disproportionate between finitude and infinitude - is
EXISTENCE AND GUILT
489
synonymous with "fallibility." And this fragility, this "fallibility" is the

point of least resistance through which evil penetrates. Nevertheless,
between the possibility of evil and committing it there is an abyss which
can only be negotiated by a leap: this is the enigma of guilt. Precisely,
when the infinitude of desire, that is to say, the desire of desire, takes control of consciousness, of action, of will, does the finitude become intolerable. Propensity to and the occasion of the fall do not depend so much on
the human libido but rather in the structure of our finite liberty: it is
freedom which makes evil possible (Ibid., Vol II, 239). But Ricouer
seems to leave to one side that jump that submerges us in guilt. Thus in
Finitude et Culpabilite (Vol. I, 123), he says that we have no other
access to originality apart from fallen being. This is why we ask
ourselves with Alphonse De Waelhens (1961) if it would not have been
more expedient to - as in Heidegger, and also in Kierkegaard and
Jaspers - directly connect finitude and fallibility. There is no historic
existence not of Adam nor of humanity that is prelapsarian. As in
dualist philosophy evil is to be identified with ontological potency.
It is true that Ricoeur distinguishes between the evil prior to human
decision, and the protoplasmic evil decision. And in the same way he
opposes the cosmogonic myths wherein man falls into guilt as he falls in
existence, and the anthropological myths wherein man is the author of
the evil. Nevertheless, this objection presents itself again within the
Adam myth itself, as demonstrated by the story of the temptation which
involves a lapse which calls into question God who prohibits, the object
of the temptation, and the woman who is seduced as well as the snake
who seduces. In this way the myth of the fall is the myth of the testing,
is a myth about an evil choice but also about temptation. Here the
serpent constitutes "the other face of evil" which the myths tried to tell:
it is the prior evil. For this reason, U. Bianchi postulates the distinction
between "antecedent guilt" and "original sin."
"Antecedent guilt" is the guilt which "founds and imposes conditions"
existence "up to the point of causing it." (Bianchi, 1976, 55); it is prehuman, and is pre-cosmic, belonging rather to the divine ambit or to the
first principles. In this way, "antecedent guilt" introduces us into a dualist
vision, not only of man and of the cosmos, but of all the very divine
thing. There could be recognized a certain amount of antecedent guilt
in the lapse which expands or "tempers" the event of the fall and the
decision involved in the sin, that is to say, which abides in the interval
between the end of creation and the completion of the sinful act. But
490
one thing is the prior evil of the serpent, and another is the evil of an
anti-God. The serpent is a fallen creature. The antecedent guilt which
abides within the act of Adam is only antecedent in its consequences
for all humanity throughout history. Adam is now fully constituted
before the intervention of the sin. The sin of Adam is not a fundamental cause of the simple existence of man as a corporeal being, but of
his conditions of mortality, suffering ... which form a part of actual
human nature. The serpent is not a co-principle which belongs to the
same homogenous chain of causality as Adam. The evil of the serpent is
a scene and a conditioning of the act of Adam, but it has the same type
of causality as the act of Adam. Instead, the anti-creator determines, by
his act previous to the constitution of man, an essential part of the
nature of this: two co-eternal principles found the nature of that which
exists. (Bianchi, in Castelli, 1980, 61)
In a parallel to Ricouer in his interpretation of the myth of Adam
(1965, 456), we can say that just as in Kierkegaard and as in Heidegger, and Jaspers, so in Ricouer himself certain elements of a tragic
anthropology and even, perhaps, of a tragic theology, tend to be reaffirmed: guilt damages the very roots of human constitution and its
essential realization. Due to his being finite, man did not choose to
exist, but, nonetheless, he should determine his existence with regards
to a project: he is therefore guilty because of his freedom. Upon objectively assuming guilt, man makes himself responsible. "Guilt and
responsibility constitute two states of the same demand." (Sarano, 47)
Responsibility reveals itself as a fruit of the "difference" proceeding
from guilt. Existence makes itself responsible for an irredeemable guilt.
If guilt is the foundation of the human condition, how can we understand "this narcisism of the fault," this guilt which translates as the "sin
of existing," to talk in the terms of Hesnard? As in melancholy, existence presents itself as a state of indebtedness (Schulden) which always
takes the form of guilt (Schuld).
Therefore, we could, like Hesnard, discover infantile rationalizations
and justifications of this guilt, which are completely unreal, in order to
therapeutically "dissolve" - and not absolve - the world of guilt and
sin, above all the Oedipal crime which is its fundamental point. In the
first years of life does not man accumulate so many motives for guilt
that he appears completely unconscious of any reproach? Original sin is
precisely a part of the collection of fundamental archetypes.
We could also, like Vattimo (Castelli, 1967, 428), say that the guilt
EXISTENCE AND GUILT
491
of Heidegger - and let us extend the remark to the other authors being
considered - is only expressive of the characteristic man of the "metaphysical epoch," in the same way that the Oedipus complex is to be
linked to the structure of a patriarchal society.
It could be objected that with these schemes we are adulterating
ontology with psychology or that we are looking for empirical answers
to a philosophical problem; that for us - as in certain pathologies fundamental guilt as a meaning does not indicate anything, it does not
give us anything to think about and is taken literally (De Waelhens, in
Castelli, 1967).
EXISTENCE AND TRANSGRESSION
Since the privileged language of guilt possesses a marked preference for

indirect and figurative expression, the mere description of it using the
phenomenological method - which we have been working on up to
here - is not enough. This demands an operation which is so much
more complex than interpretation. Let us analyze now the "truth of
guilt" as it enters into psychology, the "human dramatic" as it is designated by Vergote.
Existence, as soon as it is received, implies "debt," insofar as it
involves dependence, lack. Instead, ex-sistence insofar as it involves
choice demands a violent twist to a state of "immediacy with reality," to
speak in Kirkegaardian terms. Nevertheless, these two modalities are not
opposed, because it is the same dependency which sustains this movement toward autonomy through the rupture. When the debt of dependency comes to have an overbearing moral and religious character - as
we shall see shortly - it converts the transgression into fault and sin.
Besides the separation which involves pain, insecurity, there is added
the pain of suffering which takes on the sense of pain, of transgression,
pH.mishment.
Ricoeur (1965, 316), commenting on Freud, says that desire reveals
to us a strictly insatiable constitution and is not a tension that can be
released. Eros brings us back to an early state of psychological development, the narcissist phase of the dual union of the child and the mother
which leaves an archaic memory of affective plenitude in the person.
The mother, says Lacan ("La famille," Encic. Franc., Vol. VIII) is the
symbol of the primordial totality, of the universal harmony prior to
every rupture and conflict, of the life spring, of that happiness which
492
takes away all nostalgia. The Oedipus drama would not be possible if
the child did not want too much (to possess the mother, to have a child
with her).
Therefore, the rupture of his affective totality is needed in order to
oblige the subject to come out of his immanency, transform his original
desire, and open the access to the Other. As an instance which introduces reality in its depths, the father exercises this fantasy. When this
does not occur, the maternal fixation not only submerges the man in a
regressive mysticism, but it could draw him into pathological experience. Beyond the nostalgia for the mother, the fascination of death is
allowed to shine. In the Oedipus conflict, the parental figure is revealed
in its structural functioning because the father is, at the same time, the
author of the law which forbids, and the model with which the son can
identify himself and recognize himself as his equal in potency; he is also
the guarantee who promotes the happy future. "In the natural bond, as it
is diffused with the mother, the child is not, but on accepting the law and
identifying himself with the model, he must come to be what is still
promise and possibility. The future, therefore, is promised, permitted,
and guaranteed to him." (Vergote, 1975,234)
The phenomenon of authority opposes desire and desire converts
itself into desire for transgression. "We have to presuppose authority to
pass from pre-history, individual and collective, to the history of desire
and make it seem like a 'difference' of desire; the institution of the
Super-Ego will respond to such a demand" (Ricoeur, 1965, 210). But,
"sous cette culpabilite de remplacer Ie pere, si fausse qu'elle paraisse, se
cache une tout outre ordre, un sorte de peche originel inherent a tout
ce qui vit. Creer, c'est d'abord detruire." (Choisy, in Psyche, 394)
If the myth of the original sin, the myth of the Totem and the Taboo,
the myth of Oedipus inaugurate human history and correspond to
psychological laws, should we not perceive the effects of an essential
ambiguity belonging to anthropogenesis itself?
Man is desire to be, but the putting in motion of this desire installs
the fault. In the very beginnings of conscious life - negativism, envy,
the Oedipus conflict - man constitutes and affirms his identity thanks
to an act of transgression. "Tuer pour se creer. Ou la nervouse ou la
sacrifice." (Choisy, in Phyche, 395) To surpass the father is the sacrifice
necessary for growth, for being. Only when this false guilt is overcome
does the real drama present itself, "et sa genese philosophique doit etre
saisie. De fausse culpabilite en fausse culpabilite, nous nous surpren-
EXISTENCE AND GUILT
493
dons enfin a travers tous ses masques de carnaval son visage authentique." (Idem.)
The primary guilt is linked in this way to the metaphysical anxiety by
those eternal chains which liberty should break. As Jorge Sauri has
said, the destiny of Paternity, upon initiating the Son in Identity and
Liberty, is to transcend one's self; it constitutes a long and hard task in
which the Father will achieve, through his own imagined death, rebirth
in a category different from the previous one, though closely dependent
on it. "Paternity is the initiation of the Son and the Father as the result
of a work carried out in common."
From the psychological point of view, "il n'est pas gratuit que les
origines de l'humanite commencent par un geste qui est en meme temps
une acte de trangression et Ie debut de l'histoire aussi bien culturelle
que religieuse." (Vergote, in Castelli, 1967, 395) Precisely the episode
of paradise with which the Bible begins human history is the expression
of the history of donation, of rebellion, of guilt, and of reconcilation.
For this whatever is acquired at the price of punishment is a product
that man will not abandon ever (Scholem, in Castelli, 1967, 137). It is
about a road which goes from given innocence to acquired innocence.
The myths of paradise and the fall express just one story of the human
condition. The symbols of the fall "discover, in an almost irreplacable
language, a 'situation' or 'human condition' which could not be discovered without prejudice to the relatively finished apprehension of my
existence." (Ceriotto, 8-9) Because of its symbolic character, the myth
cannot be located in a chronological instant for every person. It constitutes a real past, "gewesen" Heidegger would say, not "gegangen."
And so it is necessary to restore to the myths their symbolic truths and
de-mystify the imaginary elaborations which accompany them. The
psychological analysis will have to illuminate the partial truths and
dialectical contradictions inherent in the human experience. Since
Hegel, this lack of knowledge has been called "alienation" by which
man finds himself different from himself. Therefore, "... analyse
(tMrapeutique) n'est peut etre une enterprise de des-alienation qu'en
assumant d'abord l'alienation (en Ie "repetant" au sens kirkegaardien
dans Ie transfert) pour Ie de-passer ensuite; il faut que j'assume ce
disc our de I'Autre qui m'accuse d'inceste et de parricide pour me
deprendre de ce Moi qui n'est construit que pour repondre aces
accusations." (Demoulin, 65).
Nietzsche (II, 20-22) has clearly demonstrated how this "man of bad
494
conscience has taken charge of the religious budget to take his own
automartyrdom to its most horrible hardness and acrimony." "A debt
with God, this thinking converts into an instrument of torture." And
every rebellion "against the Lord, the Father, the progenitor and the star
of the world is interpreted as a mistake, a debt with God." "Atheism and
a kind of second innocence (Unschuld) are found to be linked together."
Nevertheless, the atheism of Nietzche is not exhausted in the
negation or destruction of religion in the sense of an archaic, infantile
structure which should be overcome; it also opens for us a horizon for
a post-religious faith. It is therefore necessary to attend to a discourse
on the "ethic of desire or of the force to exist," before turning to a morality of obligation (Ricoeur, 1978, 83, 195). Desire, says Pietro Prini, is the
essential psychic category of the act of being; it is the existence which
opts for itself, it is the "I am" as an energetic act, always renovating itself
of our incarnated subjectivity where there are intrinsically articulated the
hedonistic vitality and the option of existing.
University of Buenos Aires - CONICET
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(Rome: Ed. dell Ateneio & Bizzarri, 1976).
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sur Ie mythe de la peine dans Ie judaisme" (G. Scholem); and "Mythe du chfttiment
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profondo" (U. Bianchi).
Ceriotto, C. L. "Aproximacion a Paul Ricoeur; Hermeneutica, Latencia, Reflexion."
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Ed. Nawelaerts, 1967).
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Goldberg, J. La culpabilite, axiome de la psychoanalyse (Paris: P. U. F., 1985).

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Hersch, N. Thulstrup).
Kierkegaard, S. El concepto de la angustia (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1965).
Maceiras, M. Schopenhauer y Kierkegaard (Madrid: Cincel, 1988).
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INDEX OF NAMES
-A-
Berkeley, G. 321, 322, 436

Bettelheim, B. 404
Bianchi, U. 489, 490, 494
Biemel, M. 40
.
Biemel, W. 34,38,39,190
Binswanger, L. xix, 248, 249, 257, 412,
Abbagnano, N. 41
Acevedo, J. 494
Adam 489, 490
Adorno, T. 16,36
Agazzi, A. 285
Aleksandrowicz, J. 130, 137
Ales Bello, A. 39, 285, 367
Allen, J. 78
Anscombe, G.E.M. 51, 386, 390
St. Anselm 24
Arias Munoz, J.A. 309, 314
Aristotle 55, 120, 175, 215, 220, 227,
419,424,450,452,454
Bloom, A. 77
Bochenski, LM. 367
Boehm, R. 38, 42, 78
Bollnow, O.F. 257
Bonci, C. 285
Bonomi, A. 434
Boss, M. xix
Bossert, P. 73, 74, 78
Botturi, F. 434
Bmikaert, L. 119
Braybrook, D. 213
Breckon, G.L. 77
Brentano, F. xi, 35, 55-65, 80-82, 84,
232, 296, 378-381, 387, 390, 415,

420,424
Arlt, M. 495
St. Augustine 260, 263, 431
Ayer, AJ. 95, 96
-B-
86,89-91,375,381
Broad, C.D. 190

Broderson, A. 213
Bruzina, R. 36
Buber,M. 29, 248, 250, 254, 256, 257
Bucher, A. 105
Butler, J. 183
Buytendijk, F.J.J. xix, 248, 250, 254,
Baccarini, E. 285, 353

Baer 476,483
Balguy, J. 180, 181, 190
Ballauff, T. 105
Balzarotti, R. 434
Banfi, A. 285
Bar-On, A.Z. 377, 381, 390
Barral, M.R. 39
Barthes, R. 447
Bausola, A. 65
Bayer, W.v. 248, 252, 253
Becker, O. xi
Bentham, J. 58, 186, 191
Beaufret, J. 495
Berelson, B. 446, 454
Berger,P. 196, 197,202
Bergson, H. 19,23,36,194,195
256,257,423,424
-CCairns, D. 40, 51
Cairns, H. 78
Calvin, J. 474, 483
Camus, A. 263, 264
Carr, D. 78
CasaJis, M. 38
Cassanello, N. 285
497
498
INDEX OF NAMES
Castaneda, C. 196,198,200,200-202
Castelli, E. 490, 491, 493, 494
Cattanei, C. 286
Celms, T. 364
Ceriotto, C.L. 493, 494
Cezanne,P.251
Chaplin, C. 327
Chisholm, R.M. 90
Choisy, M. 492, 495
Chomsky, N. 196
Christian, P. 250
Christoff, D. 314
Cicourel, A. 196, 197, 202
Claesges, U. 40
Clarke, S. 180, 183
Coenen, H. 157
Colombo, G. 434
Colorni, R. 434
Conrad-Martius, H. xix, 296
Cook, W.W. 191
Cornford, F.M. 190
Costa, F. 433
Cotta,S. 494
Curtis, B. 44-46, 51
-DDabrowski, K. 135
Dallmayr, F. R. 41
Darwin, C. 181, 190
Dascal, M. 390
Davidson, D. 386, 390
de Boer, T. 77
De Greef, J. 120
De Gruyter, W. 41
del Brio Mateos, A. 315
Deleuze, G. 232
de Man, P. 38
Demoulin, P. 488, 493, 494
de Muralt, A. 69, 77,118
De Negri, M. 393, 395, 396, 399, 409
Derisi, O.L. 90
Derrida,J.38,166,231,234,375,447
Descartes, R. 29,42, 69, 70, 108, 169,
170, 174, 175, 177, 183, 183, 190,
193, 284, 307, 310, 311, 318-322,
351,371,426
De Waelhens, A. 36, 119, 315, 486,
489,491,494,495
Dewey, J. 323
Dilthey, W. 53-56, 59, 62,63, 289
Dreyfus, H. 381, 390
Driesch, H. 39
Dufrenne, M. 155
Dupre, L. 38
Durkheim, E. 148, 157
Dyer, W. 479, 483
-EEdie, J. 36
Egenter, R. 95,104
Ehrenfels, C.v. 80, 82, 83, 90
Elie, H. 34
Elliston, F. 77
Elveton, R.O. 77
Empedocles 225
Enzo, D. 280, 285
Euclid 29
-FFarber, M. 68, 77,213

Farr, J. 51
Feinberg, J. 384, 390
Feixas, G. 450, 454
Fensterheim, H. 476, 483
Ferraris, M. 38
Ferrater Mora, J. 12
Ferrer, U. 91
Feyerabend, P. 370
Filippinni, E. 434
Findlay, J.N. 51
Fink, E. xvi, 27, 41, 69, 73, 77, 78
Fleischer, M. 37
Flores, L. 342
Forni, G. 353
Foucault, M. xvi, 193,312,313,315
Franck, D. 231, 232
Frlindberg, A. 190
Frankena, W.K. 191
Franz Ferdinand 383, 384
Freud, S. 232,425,427,429,430,432,
434,460,462-67,474,487,491
Fromm, E. 470, 474, 482, 483
499
INDEX OF NAMES
-G-
Helmholtz, H.L.F.v. 55
Hemingway, E. 328
Hengstenberg, H.E. 100, 105
Heritage, J. 202
Herpin, N. 200
Hersch, J. 119,495
Hesnard, A 490, 495
Hesse, H. 480
Hicks, G.D. 77
Hildebrand, D.v. 36, 86, 87, 89,91, 104
Hirsch, E.D. 447, 454
Hobbes, T. 80, 190
Hohfeld, W.N. 187, 191
Hohl, H. 353
Holsti, O.R. 446, 454
Holyst, B. 137
Horney, K. 127, 137
Hume, D. 42, 49, 51, 56, 57, 70, 80, 82,
86,95,104,346
Husser!, E. xi-xx, 3-12, 13-42, 51,
60-62, 64, 65, 67-78, 80, 86, 87,
89, 107-09, 116, 118, 123-125,
141-158, 159-167, 169-173, 181,
193, 196, 197, 200-202, 203-213,
216-18, 229-231, 233, 247, 257,
259-261, 268, 269, 271, 272, 276,
279-283, 285, 311, 314, 335,
343-353, 369-376, 377, 381, 382,
390, 393-98, 405, 407, 409, 411,
417,419,424,431,433,434
Hutcheson, F. 180, 181, 183, 184, 186,
191
Gadamer, H.-G. xvi, 36, 447, 454

Galileo 28
Garfinkel, H. 196-200, 202
Gaviria Alvarez, O. 120
Geiger, M. xi, xix
Giddens, A 193,202
Goethe, J.W.v. 255,477,483
Goffman, E. 198
Goldberg, J. 495
Goldman, A.I. 384, 390
Goldmann, L. 495
Gonzalez Garcia, J.M. 196,202
Gorbachev,M.382
Gouldner, A 198,202
Grathoff, R. 38
Greimas, AJ. 454
Grimme, A 16, 20
Gruengard, O. 384
Grugan, A 78
Grtindel, J. 104
Guardini, R. 248, 251, 252, 257
Guerrara Brezzi, F. 120
Guillot, D.E. 118, 119
Guitton, J. 495
Gurwitsch, A. 20, 213, 322, 332
Guthrie, W.K.C. 78
-HHabein, B. 243
Habermas, J. xvi, 120, 121
Haldene, E.S. 190
Halder, A. 156
Hamilton, E. 78
Hamrick, W.S. 78
Hanafi, H. 494
Hartmann, N. 157,415,416,424
Hegel, G.W.F. 247, 375, 493
Heidegger, M. xii, 46, 51, 105,
109, 111, 114, 116, 119, 145,
231, 247, 254, 257, 269, 312,
369, 370, 393-95, 397, 399,
404, 406, 407, 409, 411-414,
418, 421, 423, 424, 425-428,
433,485,487-491,493,495
Held, K. 40
-1-
Ingarden, R. xvi, xviii

Inheichen, H. 62
-J-
108,
155,
315,
400,
416,
432,
James, W. 195, 210

Jaspers, K. 411, 424, 483, 485-87, 489,
490,495
Jesus Christ 8, 9, 35
Johach, H. 146, 156
Jonas, H. 146, 156
Joyce,J.38
Juvenal318
500
INDEX OF NAMES
-KKant, I. xii, 4, 17, 27, 36, 54, 55, 59,

62,63,70,79-82,88-90, 116, 120,
142, 268, 269, 302, 306, 346, 369,
370,429,474,487
Kelbley, C.A. 119
Kelkel, A 34
Kemp, P. 40
Kerenyi, K. 494
Kern, I. 39, 40
Kerschensteiner, G. 99, 105
Kersten, F. 77
Kierkegaard, S. 196, 431, 478, 483,
485,486,488-491,495
Kimura, B. 255, 257
Klages,S.473,475,483
Klein, M. 404, 405, 458, 466, 467
Koestler, A. 319
Kohak, E. 77
Koyre, A. 370
Kraus, K. 83
Kraus, O. 63
Krauser, P. 62
Kretschmer, E. 414
Krippendorf~K.446,447,454
Kristeva, J. 447, 454

Kronegger, M. 41
Kuhn, T. 194,370
-LLacan,J. 415,416, 458, 460,461, 466,

467,491
Lakatos, I. 370
Laing, R.D. 104
Lalande, A 37
La Mettrie, J.O. de 321, 322, 324, 330
Landgrebe, L. xvi, 34, 41
Lapassade, G. 198,202
Laporta, R. 286
Laslett, P. 191
Lauer, Q. 77
Lazzarini, R. 285
Lefor, C. 232
Leibniz, G.W. 3, 120,371
Leiter, K. 196,202
Lersche, P. 483
Lessing, H.U. 63
Levinas, E. xvi, 20, 37, 39, 69, 77,
107-121,145,158,231
Levi-Strauss, C. 447
Lindkvist, K. 445, 454
Lipps, T. 40
Lobachevsky, N.I. 29
Locke, J. 189, 191
L6pez, N. 450, 454
Lorenz, K. 196, 202
Lotze, R.H. 80, 90
Lowen, A 475, 483
Lowith, K. 248, 249, 257
Luckmann, T.41, 196, 197
Luhmann, N. 41
Luther, M. 474
-MMcAlister, L. 90
Macann, C. 41
MacAvoy, P. 495
McBride, W. 40
McCormick, P. 77
Macerras,M.486,495
Mach, E. 375
Machiavelli, N. 162
Mackie, J.L. 190
Malantschuk, G. 495
Maika, S. 119
Mannheim, K. 196
Mannoni, O. 495
Maradona, D. 328
Marcel, G. 329, 333, 432, 476, 483,
495
Marias, J. 289
Maria Theresa 435
Marty, A 65
Marx, K. 76, 109, 196
Marx, W. 36, 37
Maslow, A 199,202
Mayer-Hillebrand, F. 63
Meinong, A 80, 82, 83, 90
Melden, AI. 191
Melle, U. 27, 34, 59, 64
Mendez, J. 89
Merleau-Ponty, M. xii, xiii, xvi, xviii,
144, 145, 155, 193, 219, 220, 229,
501
INDEX OF NAMES
231, 232, 272, 305-315, 319,

324-28, 330, 333, 425, 431, 433,
434,474,483
Metzger, A. 68, 72
Minkowski, E. xix
Mohanty, J.N. 36, 243
Moore, G.E. 96,105
Morris, M. 213
Mounier, E. 482, 483
Milller-Freienfels, R. 80, 82, 90
Milller-Suur, H. 423, 424
Milnsterburg, H. 81
-NNaess, A. 446, 454

Natanson, M. 195,207,213,332
Nemo, P. 119
Nietzsche, F. 247,493-95
Noel, D.C. 202
-0Oakley, F. 190
Olbrechtstyteca, L. 120
Orianne, A. 77
Ortega y Gasset, J. xii, 84, 89, 90, 289,
292,310,315
Otto, R. xix
-PPaci,E.285,433,434,495
Palacios, J.M. 90
Panikkar, R. 494
Parekh, B. 191
Parsons, T. 196, 197
Pax, C. 35
Pedrazzi, L. 285
Perelmans, C. 120
Peris,F.199,202
Perry, R. 83, 90
Piaget, J. 396
Pieper, J. 105
Pirandello, L. 470
Plantinga, T. 77
Plato 67-78, 79, 110, 114, 151, 172,
190,228,232,263,266,305
Polanyi, M. 322-24, 333

Pollack, D. 236, 242, 243
Pollner, M. 197,202
Popper, K. 370
Price, R. 180
Prini, P. 494, 495
Princip, G. 383, 384
Psathas, G. 197
-RRaggiunti, E. 35
Rahner, K. 104,494
Raphael, D.D. 190
Rasmussen, D. 36
Rawls, J. 120
Regina, U. 495
Reichenbach, H. 14,34
Reinach, A. xi, xix
Reiner, H. 87-89,91, 104, 105
Richard of St. Vietor 485
Rieken, F. 105
Rickert, H. 81, 82, 90
Ricoeur, P. xvi, 30, 40, 41, 118, 231,
265, 269, 428, 434, 447, 448,
454,485,488-492,494,495
Riedel, M. 62
Rigobello, A. 353, 434
Rilke, R.M. 252, 478, 483
Robespierre, M. de 228
Rogers, C. 449
Rombach, H. xii
Rosmini, A. 39
Ross, G.R.T. 190
Rossi, M. 434
Roth, A. 35, 37, 60, 65, 89
Rousseau, J.J. 317
Rucci, R. 285
Rudert, J. 423, 424
Rlimke, H.C. 418
Ruyer, R. 89,90
-SSaint Exupery, A. de 320, 323, 333

Sancipriano, M. 35, 39,42
San Martin, J. 305
Sarano, J. 490, 495
502
INDEX OF NAMES
Sartre, J.-P. xii, 27, 40, 145, 231, 319,

328,330-33,457,460,462,495
Sauer, J. 104
Sauri, J. 493, 495
Scheler, M. xi, xix, 17, 38, 80, 84-87,
89,90,96, 100, 101, 104, 105, 141,
157,311,315,367,421,424
Scherer, R. 34
Schiavone, M. 281, 285
Schlick,M. 17, 18,35
Schmitt, R.G. 78
Scholem, G. 493, 494
SchOn, D. 323, 324, 333
Schrag, C.O. 190
Schuhmann, K. 35, 37, 39,166
Schuller, B. 104
Schlitz, A. xix, 27, 40, 41, 145, 156,
157,193-202,203-213,322
Sciacca, M.F. 40
Searle, J. 51, 377, 381-85, 390
Selby-Bigge, L. 104
Lord Shaftsbury 180, 183
Shakespeare, W. 190
Sigwart, C. 63
Socrates 18, 70, 71, 73, 74, 77, 263,
487
Solon 349
Spiegelberg, H. 377, 390
Spinoza, B. 311, 371
Stauder, K. 421
Stein, E. 271-78
Stein, W. 271, 274
Strachey, J. 467
Strasser, S. 41,42,353,367
Straus, E. xix
Strauss, M. 467
Suchocolski, B. 281, 285
Suden, H. 494
Swinburne, R. 190
-TTart, C.T. 200, 202

Teilhard de Chardin, P. 469, 473
Tellenbach, H. 257,414,419, 42?, 423,
424,482
Thatcher, M. 382
Theunissen, M. 29, 41
St. Thomas Aquinas 38, 105,215,231

Thulstrup, N. 495
Tilliette, X. 494
Tisseau, P.H. 495
Toffler, A. 135, 137
Tolstoy, L. 479
Toulement, R. 38
Townsley, A.L. 39
Trendelenburg, F.A. 54, 63
Trettl Fachinelli, H. 434
Tugendhat, E. 105
Tymieniecka, A.-T. xiii, xviii, 32, 35,
42,51,52,169,175-190,292,303
-uUnamuno, M. de 289, 292
-VVan Breda, H.L. xiv

Van Buijtenen, C.V. 120
Van der Leeuw, G. 38
Van Hoeke, M. 190
Vartanian, A. 333
Vattimo, G. 490
Vergote, A. 491-95
Villegas, M. 450, 451
Von Wright, G.H. 381, 385-390
-WWach, J. 63
Wagner, H. 213
Wahl, J. 63, 119,488,495
Waldenfels, B. 38, 51, 145, 153, 155,
158,305
Weber,M.193,203,208,211
Welch, E.P. 11
West, E. 451-453
Whitehead, A.N. 67
Wilde, O. 480
Williams, B. 105
Williams, T. 482
Wilshire, B. 36
Windelband, W. 81, 82
Wittgenstein, L.v. 44-52, 335, 372,
447,460
503
INDEX OF NAMES
-Z-
Wojtyla, K. 91
Wundt, W. 55
-YYamaguchi, 1. 35, 37
Zaner, R. 213
Zeltner, H. 153, 158
Zimmerman, D.H. 197,202
Analecta Husserliana
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H U S S E R L I A N P H E N O M E N O L O G Y IN A N E W K E Y

The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning

N E W QUERIES IN AESTHETICS A N D METAPHYSICS

Intersubjectivity, Ethos, the Societal Sphere,

Phenomenology in the World

The World Phenomenology Institute

Published under the auspices of

SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

Librar y o f Congress Catalog1ng-1n-Pub1teat1o n Dat a

World-Wide Phenomenology Fulfilling Husserl's Project: An Introduction

JES BJARUP / Phenomenology, the Moral Sense, and the

PEDRO LUIS BLASCO / Science and Dialectics in a Phenomenological Anthropology

WORLD-WIDE PHENOMENOLOGY FULFILLING

effort expanded his range of positive, constructive insights in various

logically inspired scholars attracted by these rare opportunities to come

undergo specific variations and nuancements. Since it is the human

function as a philosophia prima with respect to all fields of scholarship,

would be the most appropriate historical moment to bring it into the

A group of participants after the opening reception on the Campus Universitario.

A-T. Tymieniecka speaking at the official inauguration of the Congress.

Annie Kuipers (Kluwer Acad. Pub!') and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka.

THE FOUNDATION OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY

JULIA VALENTINA IRIBARNE

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AS THE STARTING POINT

A thorough consideration of Husserl's thought can be accomplished by

"Intersubjectivity" designates in Husserl the concrete interweaving of

JULIA VALENTINA IRIBARNE

predecessors in links that survive as tradition. The future dimension is

In a text of September, 1933,2 Husserl asserts that primordiality is a

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AS THE STARTING POINT

1. The Static Approach to the Constitution of the

In this Fifth Meditation, Husserl expresses his intention to follow a

JULIA VALENTINA IRIBARNE

been in Paris in autumn; to a second reduction there appears a second

2. The Genetic Approach to the Constitution of the Other

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AS THE STARTING POINT

contrast to passive synthesis of identification."? That lived body there is

As long as our approach stays at the level of reduction to the sphere of

JULIA VALENTINA IRIBARNE

allows us to see an essential feature of the monadic interweaving: each

Husserl considers a higher, privileged form of love, the Christie love.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AS THE STARTING POINT

JULIA VALENTINA IRIBARNE

If our discussion has up to this point presented the monadologic

character of phenomenology, it is necessary now to consider its

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AS THE STARTING POINT

itself as such in the "natural attitude." The importance of this revelation

University of Buenos Aires

JULIA VALENTIN A IRIBARNE

E. Husser!, Erste Philosophie, II (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1956), p. 190.

LES SOURCES DE LA VIE MORALE

I. LES IDEES MORALES

1. Le probteme du paraltelisme entre la logique et !'ethique

MARIO SAN CIPRIANO

dans la sphere axiologique et pratique"V Dans son livre consacre a la

LES SOURCES DE LA VIE MORALE

dans une aptitude neo-positiviste. 5 De son cote, Husserl reconnait une

MARIO SAN CIPRIANO

2. Principes theoretiques de la vie morale

LES SOURCES DE LA VIE MORALE

"Ethik und Wertlehre": cours presque contemporain a la premiere

MARIO SAN CIPRIANO

LES SOURCES DE LA VIE MORALE