landgrebe, l - the world as phenomenological problem

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The World as a Phenomenological ProblemAuthor(s): Ludwig LandgrebeReviewed work(s):Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Sep., 1940), pp. 38-58Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2103195 .Accessed: 22/02/2012 17:03

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THE WORLD AS A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PROBLEM'

"World" seems to be one of our most familiar and readily understood concepts. The term is used continually, in ordinary conversa- tion and in a great variety of sciences, without any apparent need of stating its exact meaning. The "world" of this or that animal species, "the world of primitive man," the "worlds" peculiar to various periods in history-all these "worlds" have been precisely analyzed. But the scientific description of that which is "the world" for a particular species, or for a particular group of human beings, is not equivalent to a philosophical clarification of the concept "world." Indeed, such description already presupposes a certain acquaintance with the concept.

The problem of clarifying the concept "world" was once so central to philosophy that it determined the name of a special metaphysical discipline. However, in the process of positivistic dissolution under- gone by the traditional organization of philosophy during the nine- teenth century, this fundamental problem-and many another-was as good as forgotten. It reappeared in a central systematic connection only with the emergence of Husserl's philosophy, where, especially in the inquiries of Husserl's last period, it occurs repeatedly and in various forms.

The phenomenological investigations to which this problem has given rise are significant in two ways. On the one hand, they help to clarify and deepen the concepts of "world" that occur in the special sciences; on the other hand, they help to reawaken an understanding for the old philosophical problems concerning the world and aid us in giving those problems a new interpretation. In the future, anyone who proposes to clarify the concept "world" should first become acquainted with Husserl's results, see their presuppositions and their limits, and come to terms with them. The relevant investigations belong, for the most part, among Husserl's yet unpublished-and by no means completely examined-literary remains. Thus it is still impossible to present an exhaustive or definitive account of them. One can only bring out a few of their fundamental traits, so far as the latter now seem to have been well established.

Already, in the period extending from the publication of the Logische Untersuchungen (1900/01) to the publication of the Ideen (1913), Husserl was led to undertake investigations that move, so to speak, in the realm of the "world"-problem-investigations along lines indicated by structures pertaining to the world-though the concept

1. Translated from the German by Dorion Cairns.

THE WORLD AS A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PROBLEM 39

"world" had not, at the time, become a theme in its own right. He approached these inquiries in two different ways: first,'in the course of detailed investigations undertaken to clarify the nature of perception; second, in connection with the problem of the phenomenological reduction. In the latter context one also finds the motives that, in the period beginning about 1920, led Husserl to probe ever more deeply and minutely into the problem of the world.

Let us, for the present, confine our attention to the approach first mentioned-which was also the earliest to bring to light certain world-structures.

While elaborating his Logische Untersuchungen, Husserl had already prepared to continue them by seeking, in the sphere of intuition, for the "fullness" that, as the substrate of judgments, gives-them their sense and is a presupposition for their "evidence." Thus perception, with its modifications (remembering and other "re-productive" acts), became his theme. Analysis of the perception of a particular thing- analysis of the syntheses in which the perception of a thing comes about-shows that one cannot confine oneself to the thing-perception as an isolated phenomenon, if one intends to discover its concrete sense. The perceptual thing is always a thing in front of its objective background, a background of objects consciously and more or less explicitly meant along with it. The concrete nature of that as which the thing stands before our eyes always involves such co-meanings: the table is "'a table in the room," "in front of the window," "in my house"; the house "on the street," "in this town"; etc. Thus, every particular datum involves references to perceptions that might take place from there on-references to them as potentialities of experience: "I can go on from here and, if I do, I shall see this and that." These references need not always become conscious as explicit themes; however, they can at any time become "actualized." Every particular percept brings its horizon of possible further perceptions, not only those perceptions in which it would itself become more precisely known with respect to its constituents but also those relating to the surroundings in which it stands, the surroundings that we are always conscious of as belonging to the thing. In other words, the thing has its horizon: first of all as a spatial horizon, which, taken in its full con- cretion, is our surrounding world. On every hand this world we live in offers open possibilities of further exerience so that, as we apprehend it, it is a part of "the" world-that part, namely, which is directly accessible to us. And, though it is a part, it is not rigidly limited. On all sides it admits of enlargement, by which, as we say, new aspects of "the" world become accessible to us. But the horizon of the per-

40 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

ceived thing, is also a temporally extended horizon. The table that I now see over there is, for me, the table that was already there on a previous occasion, the table at which I intend to seat myself later. With its stock of concrete determinations, the percept refers to the past and the future. Thus Husserl's early analyses of the perception of an individual thing disclosed-or, at least, began to disclose-a structure that he eventually saw as a determination of "the world": the world as the horizon of particular acts and, first of all, as the horizon of acts of perception.

This insight became important when Husserl began to develop his doctrine of the phenomenological reduction, a development that, in turn, brought out a further determination of the world. The fact that, even as a single act, each perceiving has its horizons, makes it necessary to exclude more than the doxic positing that takes place in, and transcends, the single act of perceiving. Otherwise we do not really isolate the latter's "meant object, as meant." That is to say, a reduction performed on the single act itself is not enough to isolate the act's intentional object, purely as intentional. Such a reduction overlooks the horizon co-posited in every single act. The reduction was first introduced as a general resolution not to cooperate in any positing that oversteps the meant qua meant but, on the contrary, to inhibit every such positing. Such a resolution cannot be consistently carried out merely by inhibiting, one by one, the doxic theses of separate acts, separate believings. Their basis must also be affected by the epoche; indeed, the epoche must relate primarily to their basis.

In the course of Husserl's analyses of perception, this basis too had become visible in certain structures, namely, wherever perception does not flow in unbroken harmony, wherever conflict and subsequent negation occur in perception. In this way the thesis, already stated in the Logische Untersuchungen, that conflict also produces a kind of union, received its concrete confirmation. Every conflict, as a special form of synthesis occurring even in sensuous perception, and every "not," founded on such a conflict, presupposes a basis. While one is looking at an otherwise uniformly colored thing, a "green" may appear somewhere in place of the expected "red." Then the conflict (between expected "red" and actually seen "green") and the negation (ccnot red") arising from it take place on the basis of the continuously certain positing of the thing as somehow colored.2 The same is true universally. Every conflict, every negation, presupposes a basis of abiding doxic certainty. If, perchance, the whole thing is cancelled,

2. On this matter, see the most recent exposition: Edmund Husaerl, Erfshrung And Urtil. edited by Ludwig Landgrebe, Prag, 1939, p. 94.


if we look and do not find the thing where we expected it, then we find something else there; every "not" is a "not so but otherwise." The process of conflict and negation may go on thus without limit, but even if we ultimately see ourselves compelled to cancel whole sections of our supposedly perceptual life-to regard them as illusory with respect to their supposed validity-still everything else in our surrounding world remains as it was before. No matter how large the segments that prove erroneous, there always remains a basis: ultimately and underlying everything else, the basis which is our world. On that basis not only every confirmed experience but also every negation, indeed, every considering of anything as probable or possible, takes place.

As a whole, our world, the world in which we find ourselves consciously living, remains certain, no matter how many details become doubtful or invalid. Only particular parts of it ever undergo the correction, "not so but otherwise." This means that every particular positing or negating presupposes a universal basis: belief in the world, certainty of the world. Every positing is a positing and every cancelling is a cancelling on this basis, which we can never disturb in the natural attitude. Therefore, if the bracketing is to be really universal and not limited to particular acts and their meant objects qua meant, it must embrace this basis of all particular positings: "the general thesis essential to the natural attitude" must be "put out of action."3

In this way, while developing the doctrine of the phenomenological reduction, Husserl acquired an initial definition of the concept of the world, a clarification owing to his insight into the horizon-structure of every experience. The world is the all-embracing doxic basis, the total horizon that includes every particular positing. If, in these analyses, Husserl was primarily concerned with acts of believing (acts of doxic positing as existence-positing) and acts of perceiving (as doxic, existence-positing acts of a lower level), the reason is that, according to his conviction, existence-positing acts and especially acts of perceiving (in the sense of immediate aisthesis) are fundamental to acts of every other kind. If anything is to be the object of a valuing or of a practical action (a striving, goal-setting act of willing), it must be-first and fundamentally-something perceived. Acts of believing, acts in which being is posited with doxic certainty, found all other acts.4 It follows that, in being the basis of every doxic positing, the world is, at the same time, the basis for all our attitudes and acts of valuing or willing, which are built on our beliefs in being, the acts in which being is posited. In brief, the world is the

3. Cf. Iden. ? 32. p. 56. 4. Cf. Erfahrung und Urtell, pp. 66ff.


horizosi of our total attitude-the latter being understood as our intentional directedness in all our diverse acts. Our belief in being is a belief in the world and, in our natural discourse about being, it goes quite without saying that our theme is "worldly" being.

Thus the "general thesis," the universally fundamental doxic positing of the world, is not a definite act, explicitly performed at some time or other, but rather the foundation for every definite act. It is nothing other than the elemental fact that, from the first and quite as a matter of course, the ego "lives in a world"-is intention- ally directed towards the existent, which is always tacitly understood as "mundanely" existent. Consequently, the universally fundamental doxic thesis must not be interpreted as a blind "prejudice," an innate or acquired habit. On the contrary, all the habits born in a man, or acquired in the course of his life, belong to him as a man who already stands on his belief in the world and, on that basis, is aware of himself as one existing object among others.

Husserl had already reached these fundamental insights in the years preceding the appearance of the Ideen. In that work, the doctrine of the "general thesis of the natural attitude"-and that means the doctrine of the world as the doxic basis underlying every particular experience-was presented for the first time. Now, when it is said that the whole world is "bracketed," the universality thus claimed for the method of phenomenological reduction yields consequences that necessitate a further clarification of the concept "world." It is not the purpose of the reductive method to be merely an improvement on the method of analyzing consciousness: a suspending of judgment concerning the being of what is meant in consciousness, merely to ascertain that being and consciousness are always correlative. The exclusion of all actual, potential, or habitual positings in which the existent is given as truly thus and so, as having this or that value, etc. -this exclusion is a preparation for showing that all these positings are accomplishments on the part of transcendental subjectivity, accomplishments by virtue of which the world with all that belongs to it, as we intend it and believe it, is there for us. But if we are to show that all being is thus built up as a product of consciousness, we cannot begin at an arbitrary point; rather, the existent, as it is given and accessible to us, and in its experientially given order of founding, must be taken as a clue. The correct initiation and performance of constitutional analyses (analyses that trace being of every kind to its origin as a posited product of transcendental consciousness) accordingly require a preliminary explication of the world in its immediacy as given us in experience: the formulation of a "natural world-con-

TH.E WORLD AS A PHENOMENOLOCICAL PROBLEM 43

cept," as Husserl, adopting a phrase from German positivism, occa- sionally expressed it.5 This explication has the character of a preliminary survey of the world-structures which, taken all together, are to undergo "bracketing": first of all, the universal structures, those that must be present in every form of human surrounding world; then, on the basis of such universal structures, the essentially possible special types of surrounding worlds.

These matters occupied Husserl more and more in the nineteen- twenties and 'thirties, when he was seeking a deeper insight into the problem of the phenomenological reduction. During that period, the concept of the world, which was at first defined very generally as the all-embracing horizon of any experience, the doxic basis persisting throughout all experiences, received a more concrete and fully differentiated content. The merely preliminary character of these anlyses (as analyses belonging to "mundane" phenomenology, i. e., a phenomenology that does not yet operate on the basis of the phenomenological reduction) makes it clear that, for Husserl, the problem of the world can find only its inception, not its solution, in them. For Husserl, a real understanding of the world can mean only an understanding of it in its origination as a product of conscious processes, and such an understanding can be attained only after the reduction has been performed, only as the result of detailed constitutional analyses. Not until we have examined Husserl's constitutional analyses shall we be in a position to judge the scope of his conception of the world and of his problem of the world.

Let us first picture to ourselves a few leading traits of the "mundane"-phenomenological analyses that Husserl devoted to the structures making up the world especially during the last decade of his life, when he was repeatedly finding new approaches to them. The purpose of such analyses is to discover and explicate the structures that make up the essence of the world, as the world that we experience, i. e., our world as present to us now and always. To acquire knowledge of essences, Husserl had developed the method of starting with an already given example and varying it freely.6 If our goal is knowledge of the essence of the experienced world, the initial example must not be taken at random; it must be that phenomenal exemplification of the essence "world" which is immediately accessible to us. We must begin, accordingly, with our world as it is there for us. This "our" means "belonging to the men of our time"; it is with their "world" that the analysis must begir. As a result of having this

6. Cf. Ludwig Landgrebe, "Husserls Phdnomenologie und die Motive zu ihrer Umbildung," Revue international de Philosophie. I. 2), (Bruxelles, 1939), pp. 303f.

6. Cf. Erfahrung und Urteil, ? 87, pp. 410ff.


ttworld," we already have a certain-usually quite inexplicit-understanding of the essence "world," and this understanding provides the horizon within which alone we can gain access to "worlds" structurally different from ours, namely, by apprehending them as variants, each having a set of invariant essential determinations that belong to any "world" as such.

This understanding of "world" in general, this our "world-picture" (which is also, for Husserl, the obvious and determinative starting-point for such inquiry), is especially influenced by two facts:

1. Our way of apprehending the world is determined by the fact of science, by the fact that mathematical natural science has explicated the world in categories that-although they undergo continuous development and correction-claim to define the world objectively, as a set of given objects and relationships, existing in themselves and capable of being grasped by exact methods. Our concept of the world therefore involves, quite as a matter of course, the belief that this is an objective, exactly determined and determinable world.

2. However, to this conviction, which has indeed become a downright matter of course to "modern men," the broadening of our historical, ethnological, and sociological knowledge has added the awareness that the world-picture determined by exact science cannot be regarded as the only one. Today, as in earlier times, we find human communities whose understanding of the world has in no way been affected by science. It is true that "exact" science, and the men whose way of thinking is determined by it, always claim that their world-picture is the only true one, the one that is valid objectively and in itself, so that extra-scientific or pre-scientific world-pictures are, at best, preliminaries to theirs or, in most cases, "subjective" falsifications of the real world by the prejudices of tradition, super- stition, or the like. This claim is opposed, however, by a conviction that is likewise familiar to us all, the conviction of those who think historically, the conviction of "Historismnus": This scientific world- picture is itself only one among many and, like all the others, it has been produced by a certain society under definite conditions. Thanks to their position and capabilities, modern men have created this tool called "objective natural science," as a means of intervening in the world technically and controlling it. To this historical way of thinking, the claim that the world-picture formed by natural science is absolute must appear naive. The consequence of such thinking is rather a belief in the plurality and historical relativity of world-pictures and a conviction that none of them may claim for itself a greater truth-to say nothing of the whole truth-about the world.


How did these views, which determine the modern world-picture, affect Husserl's point of departure when he undertook to define the essence "world"?

First of all, with regard to the claim that the methods of exact (mathematical) natural science give us access to a true, objective reality behind the sensuously apparent world, Husserl had pointed out earlier, in connection with certain epistemological deliberations, the contradictions and pseudo-problems that result from interpreting the methods of natural science in this way. Already in the Ideen, the "impossibility of a world behind the world" is quite clearly stated: It is always one and the same world that we are trying to grasp and determine. Sometimes we can be satisfied with what is accessible in sensuous experience; at other times, if the goals of knowledge and the practices leading to them so require, we choose the path of Imathematization." This is a special method, but its results always lead back at last to the sensuously intuited world and find in it their ultimate confirmation.

Accordingly, in Husserl's last period, when he attacked the problem of the world, it was obvious to him from the outset that the meaning-determinations borne by the world thanks to the accomplishments of natural science-the explications to which the world has been submitted by natural science-must not be regarded forthwith as essential structures belonging necessarily to a world as such. On the contrary, we must turn from the world as it is always already there for us, with its sense as explicated by natural science, and go back to the world as it is Prior to science, the immediate "life- world" with its original givenness, which is the underlying basis for scientific determination. Correlatively, we must go back to pre- scientific experience, in order to comprehend the nature of the path leading from the immediate cognitions and practical plans of pre- scientific life to such a thing as a plan to determine the world "exactly." Husserl's systematic and historical investigations concerning the origin of the methods of exact natural science, and the sense of the "idealization" involved in that method, belong in this context.7

The original givenness of the world-our "life-world"-depends on the fact that, as men living in the world, having our experience and carrying on our practical activities in it, we are unities of body and mind, such that all our experience of the world is ultimately mediated by our senses and the functioning of our sense-organs. For each of us, his body with its organs is the absolute zero-point, the orientational

7. Cf. Edmund Husserl, "Die Krisia der europaischen Wissenschaf ten und die transzendentolc Phdnomenologie," Philosophia, I (Beograd, 1936), especially pp. 97ff.


center for every experience, the absolute "'here" corresponding to every "there." Thus the first step in describing our immediate way of having a world is the distinction between near and far, between near- world and far-world, though these concepts at once involve more than merely spatial relations. The fact that all experience of the world involves the body and its organs divides the immediately accessible part of our world from the part that can be experienced only medi- ately, e. g., by way of inferences from the immediately given or by way of communications from other persons. The absolute "here," first distinguished as the locus of one's life, is further determined by the fact that, with our bodies, we move on the earth or, at least, with reference to it. "Here" is "here on the earth." The earth is the primary basis for our experience. It is not merely one among the other objects of our experience; rather it is that, relative to which all other objects are determined with respect to their loci and, more particularly, are determined as at rest or in motion. Accordingly, for our immediate experience, the earth is immobile. Our cognizance of its move- ment does not derive from immediate experience; it is mediated by scientific knowledge. Thus, in explicating immediate experience, the experience of our world as a "life-world," Husserl effects a reversal of the "Copernican Revolution," by the insight that every experience necessarily presupposes an ultimate unmoved basis, which is not itself objectivated. For "us men," this basis is "our earth"-as an actual exemplification of an essential necessity.

These most general essential structures are without possible ex' ception; without them, an immediate experiencing of a "life-world" by men, as psychophysical beings, is inconceivable. But more than this is universally and essentially necessary to the "life-world." The life- world is not only a world for me, the single individual; it is a common world, a world for a particular human community. And it is not only the world as given without our intervention, purely as Nature with its natural determinations; it is a world fashioned and cultivated by the men who live in it. This fact leads to a differentiation of surrounding worlds, on the basis of the world as Nature, which, at least in certain of its fundamental structures, remains the same throughout-a differentiation determined by the peculiar way in which its surrounding world is shaped by a particular human community. The differences among surrounding worlds are determined not only by differences in the given natural situation-the geographical configur- ation, for example-but also by differences in aptitude, in develop- mental level, and in the resultant customs and usages of particular communities.


The task of describing the human "life-world" therefore includes a higher level. Having brought to light the all-pervading "aes- thetic" structures of the world and world-experience the structures pertaining to Nature as the basis of every surrounding world-we must look for the possible types of world, as the surrounding worlds of particular human communities. This may be conceived as an empirical enterprise, namely, as the task of reducing to types the environing worlds and the world-pictures that have in fact been produced by past or present communities of various levels, and investigating their development and the evolutionary levels to which these worlds belong. But the empirical task is, ini itself, secondary to the task of elaborating the essential possibilities and fundamental structures, the essentially possible types, of surrounding worlds. Until this primary task has been accomplished, we lack the concepts for an empirical grasp of the kinds of worlds that have actually occurred. It goes without saying that Husserl confined his efforts to the primary task and that all his descriptions of possible types of human environment claim the character of essential descriptions, though naturally their underlying intuitional material must derive from our historical awareness of different or "more primitive" forms of human life and experienced environment.

This whole line of inquiry not only signifies a break, on Husserl's part, with one of the tendencies present in our modern understanding of the world-namely, the tendency to absolutize the world-picture determined by exact science-but also involves a close consideration of the opposed insight into the plurality of possible world-pictures. The often-expressed opinion that Husserl was blind to the problems raised by Historismus are therefore unjustified. Indeed, Husserl's own problem can be understood only as having arisen on the basis of His- torismus. It need hardly be emphasized, on the other hand, that Hus- serl could never regard historical relativism as an ultimate and tenable point of view.

The difference between near and far, with its ultimate reference to the body and the functioning of bodily organs, is also important for the elaboration of the fundamental types of life-worlds, as worlds surrounding typical human communities. It is this difference that originally delimits the circle of other people from whose communications and instructions each of us derives his knowledge of the world, so far as the latter is not immediately accessible to him in his own experience. First of all, in the most immediate sense, this circle is made up of others as fellow-members of the community in which one was born and grew up. These "others" are marked off from the "strangers," the members of a strange or alien community. Now


"foreignness" or "strangeness" is a matter of degree: To the little child, still living in the family circle, those who stand outside the latter are "strange"; to those who belong to a certain clan or people, other peoples are "strange," "foreign"; and to the inhabitants of a certain part of the earth, provided they are aware of being united by a consciousness of belonging together, the inhabitants of "foreign" parts are "foreign." Thus, the all-pervading difference between near and far, a difference relative to the absolute "here" of our bodily existence, functions as the basis for a difference between near and far in a transferred sense, namely as a difference relative to our community and its particular surrounding world, which is marked off from the world surrounding any other community. This difference is the ground for a differentiation of the concept "world" according to the essential distinction between home-world and alien or foreign world.

As we have seen, the line between the home-world and the alien world is not rigidly fixed; their relationship is fluid and constantly changing. For the child who has never left the neighborhood where he was born, for the inhabitants of a lonesome and inaccessible moun- tain valley, the limits of the home-world are naturally not the same as for him who has become acquainted with all parts of his "native land" (an expression, incidentally, for a home-world on a higher level) and feels at home in them all. Despite this relativity of the difference between home-world and alien world, the corresponding concepts point to an absolute and essential difference: The members of any community, whatever its nature or extent, necessarily have their home-world as their original basis and point of departure for acquir- ing a broader experience, for appropriating and learning to understand -more or less intimately-that which is strange, for making the acquaintance of "alien worlds." To be sure, under certain circum- stances an individual or an entire community may stand, with respect to this home-world, in the relationship of one who has lost something. But this constitutes no exception, since losing is essentially a deficient mode of having, and "having lost the home-world" can be understood only as a modification of the essentially necessary structure of "having the home-world."

None of these categories ever refers to objectively present situations or relationships-purely geographical relationships, for example. They all signify forms of our self-understanding, ways in which we consciously find and know ourselves in the world. The home-world comprises everything that is immediately familiar by acquaintance: the familiar surroundings, the scene and one's fellows with their familiar manners, customs, and ideas, the home state with its familiar


laws and regulations. A home-world is never the home-world of only a single person; it always belongs to a community-a tribe, a people, or the like dwelling in their "territory," where they have their history, their past that, in the form of tradition, has its influence in the present. Within the home-world, everything has its structure of acquaintedness. The attitudes and conduct of the individual are gov- erned by the repeatedly fulfilled expectations accompanying this acquaintedness of things: "One" behaves thus and so in such and such situations; this is the custom and it is also to be expected from others with whom we have dealings. In these typical forms human dwellings are arranged and the land has been fashioned into a scene of culture. Outside this sphere lie "foreign parts" and nothing is predelineated in this way. Men may conduct themselves according to other rules, rules unknown to us; the houses are differently arranged; our expectations are repeatedly disappointed. The fixed pattern of the home-world is missing and its place is taken by a pattern far less definite. But our understanding could not penetrate such an alien world if it did not bring with it a set of familiarities from the home-world, familiarities that now, to be sure, become altered, yet in such a way that certain of their most general structures and predelineations remain: These are men of some kind, with needs the most general nature of which is familiar to us, with ways of satisfying such needs; they act and react somehow, in ways that we do not yet know but that we can learn to understand if we penetrate further into their world.

From this beginning, Husserl tried to develop, as limiting concepts, the idea of a closed home-world and, correlatively, the idea of a "closed society" as the genetically original types: a community that remains inside a home-world completely shut off from every foreign world. A closed home-world is indeed a limiting concept-a device for making the structure of a home-world particularly distinct-since, as a matter of fact, that would be a type nowhere to be found, cer- tainly not in connection with any group now in existence. Every- where the foreign projects into the home-world; the worlds surrounding different social groups are tied together by countless threads. And this means, for each individual, at least an incipient extension of his experiential horizon beyond the limits of his home-world; it means an antecedent awareness, however vague, of other worlds and world- pictures, and consequently a richer pattern of definite expectations than would be at the disposal of a person locked in his home-world.

This is the very situation that determines our modern understanding-including our pre-philosophical and pre-conceptual understanding-of the world. Though each person and each community has,

so PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

first of all, a home-world as the sphere of most intimate familiarity, there is always at least a vague awareness of the presence of alien worlds, no matter how little they may be understood in their details. Regardless of the fact that our actual ability to understand is limited by the more or less narrow home-world from which we start, we are always aware that our home-world is not the "whole" world but only one among various "segments" of the world. That is to say, our "natural" world-concept, the one we have unquestioningly, as a matter of course, includes an awareness of the multiplicity of surrounding worlds, such that all the latter are understood as belonging to one and the same world as the total horizon of possible experiences-our own actual and possible experiences, which can be had directly by us, and the experiences of others who stand, or may be conceived as standing, in connection with us. To speak of alien "worlds," worlds not directly accessible to us but possibly accessible to somebody or other, is significant only if we assume at least the essential possibility of a course of experience leading from our world to those alien worlds and the men who experience them. Alien worlds must be conceived as standing in a nexus of possible continuous (direct or indirect) experience with our own, in such a manner that all such "worlds" com- bine to make up the unity of the all-embracing world. Accordingly, the world cannot have for us the sense of being a self-contained world (like, perhaps, the rigidly limited disk of antiquity); we must take it to be a world unlimitedly open on all sides. In this openness it provides free space for all the different home-worlds of the most diverse human communities. It becomes the infinitely open universe as the whole of existence, the completely open horizon in which, ideally at least, our experiences can always be extended ad infinitum. To be sure, the predelineation of these possible experiences is, for us, extremely vague; it is restricted to a very general pattern of what still might be encountered there, beyond the limits of any world already known to us. Finally it becomes merely the expectation that "somehow or other, things must always keep on this way": there must come along some scene or other, some human beings; some planet or other, perhaps like the earth, with some living things upon it; etc. The concept of infinity that is involved here has nothing yet to do with the mathematical conception, which arises from "idealization"; it is, however, the presupposition for the latter.

But the multiplicity of actual and possible alien worlds is not all that this total horizon of the world, as the universe, encompasses. In our differentiated modern way of living, particular spheres of life have acquired a certain independence and even the familiar world

THE WORLD AS A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PROBLEM 5 1

surrounding us-as the total horizon of our subjective and objective experience-embraces many separate horizons, e. g., the horizon of vocational life alongside the horizon of one's experience as a citizen, as the head of a family, etc., all within the immediately superordi- nate total horizon of the home world, and the latter, in turn, within the total horizon of "the" world.

As has already been said, it is characteristic of this horizonal structure of the world that, as such, it is usually not thematic. To live in the world is to live within its present horizons, to orientate oneself and have one's experiences within them. Our thematic object, the object of our perceiving, the goal of our willing, whatever we are directed towards at the time, is usually some particular object within the horizon. The horizon itself becomes thematic only where the references composing it are disturbed-only where we encounter some limit to our understanding of things, e. g., an "alien world" that projects into ours. Only in such cases will "our world" itself become thematic, as the horizon that delimits and includes all that we can understand. Accordingly, that awareness of a world which we have even before any properly philosophical deliberation, is different in kind from the awareness of particular "worldly" existents. A world is lot one object among others; rather it is that which embraces all possible objects of our experience, and functions as the basis for every particular experience. For this reason it does not attain original givenness in the manner characteristic of particular objects. But we do indeed understand and use this expression "world" and therefore there must also be a manner in which the world too is given, a consciousness of a world that bestows sense on such language. That is to say, even before any philosophical deliberation or thematizing of the world, there must exist an experience of the world. Now, for our consciousness, distinguished as it is by an awareness of the plurality of possible surrounding worlds and the unity of the universe embracing them all, this experience of the world is precisely the above-mentioned consciousness of the possible r"and-so-forth" of our experience, our consciousness of its possible extension without limit-as an extension not into the utterly uncertain and indeterminate but into an infinity of possible data pervaded by a most general style of being (and a correlative style of experience) that is essentially necessary to a world as such. To form an idea of the world requires, therefore, a "systematic construction of the infinity of possible experiences."8

The "idea" of the world that is to be acquired in this way is, like all the above-indicated elaborations of structures belonging to "the"

8. Nachlassmanuskript A VII 1, 14f.


world (home-world, alien world, etc.), precisely an explication of what is tacitly and inexplicitly contained in our pre-philosophical awareness of the world. Accordingly, the results of these explications are, in the first place, useful in making clear what we "really mean" when we use the term "world" in any given context, whether in every- day speech or in scientific-but non-philosophical--discourse, when a "world" is somehow the theme. Let us suppose, e. g., that the his- torian speaks of the "medieval world." The concept includes the range of experience commonly enjoyed in the Middle Ages, and the medieval "world-view," i. e., the set of categories by means of which the existent was explicated. But it also includes the whole set of customs and rules of conduct, the standards of value, in accordance with which men acted and passed judgment, as well as the ways in which they gave the world external form-in short, everything that, as part of his life-horizon, was familiar and matter-of-course to anyone living in that era. The sense is quite the same as when, in ordinary conver- sation, we speak of the "world" in which a certain person lives, e. g., his "narrow world" with the prejudices peculiar to his station, etc., or the "broad horizon" that he possesses.

Let us remember, however, that since these clarifications of our pre-philosophical understanding of the world are attained in connection with the mundane-phenomenological explication undertaken prior to the reduction, they are, for Husserl, rather incidental. The chief purpose of that explication is, after all, to gain clues to follow in the transcendental-phenomenological, constitutional clarification of the world. Only in the course of the latter clarification can the strict- ly phenomenological concept of the world be acquired.

What can the analyses already made contribute to the initiation of this problem of clarification? To what extent may they become clues for constitutional investigations?

These mundane-phenomenological observations are limited by only being able to ascertain that, wherever men are found living together in a community, their life is already a life in a surrounding world of a certain, more or less limited, type. This world is always there already for the individual who reflects. He was born into it; then he grew up in it-was educated in its traditions and conceptions; and thus he has acquired his world-picture. By absorbing the experiences of earlier generations, elaborating them, having new experiences on their basis in community with his contemporaries, he contrib- utes to the continuation and development of this world-picture, either to its conservation within traditional limits or to a revolutionary disruption of the tradition, a disruption by which new tables of values


are set up, new insights won, new standards of action established. But no matter how far we go-not only back into actual history and pre- history but also in that free varying of the conditions of human existence which affords us a survey of the possible forms of living with one another in a world-we still find communities living in a world. It is essentially impossible to find men in any "pre-worldly" state, because to be human, to be aware of oneself as a man and to exist as a human self, is precisely to live on the basis of a world-at first quite as a matter of course and without any cognizance of the fact; then, perhaps, reflectively, with an awareness of the limits of that world, an awareness of its horizontal character. The world has always been there already, as a presupposition for the possibility of particular experiences in it, a presupposition for anyone anywhere finding himself as a human being. And this having-already-been-there means, on the other hand, that men have already been at work fashioning such a world-horizon and have transmitted their awareness to those who followed after. Accordingly, this possession of a world points to previous subjective accomplishments. It does not mean simply that something ready-given was there; rather, what is already there is there precisely as what one has learned from others to apprehend. And this continues to be the case, no matter how far back we inquire. Such analyses are significant because they show, on the one hand, that any surrounding world, with its form at any particular time, is functimn- ally dependent on, and inseparable from, the community of men who shape it, and, on the other hand, that intentional analysis is also a method by which the historical development of surrounding worlds, and of the communities of men living in them, can be understood from the inside, as a subjectively produced result. Analysis of this sort is what Dilthey envisaged when he required that the human-historical world be comprehended as a tissue of effects (Wirkungszusammen- hang); it is what he himself initiated at several points. Its goal is to comprehend historical processes as completely human, and that means comprehending them as processes that can, as it were, be relived from the inside in other words, the goal is to acquire deeper knowledge of the kind striven for in any cultural science, by an intentional analysis of the essential structures of human world-shaping co6per- ation.

But this way of considering things-i. e., the "mundane" way, which, when carried over into the empirical sphere, is also the way characteristic of the cultural sciences-is limited in that it can bring to light only this correlation between a particular form of world and a particular community of men. In so doing, we always presuppose


the world. And this means, ultimately, that we presuppose that something is always there already, out of which men can fashion their surrounding world. Men live in their geographical environment and are dependent on the formation given it by Nature; ultimately, as the whole human race, they depend on the earth with what it provides by way of plants and animals, by way of "material" for them to fashion. We find these things, not as human creations but as pre- given "Nature," the lowest stratum underlying every human fashioning of the world; the Nature "in" which we have our place and which is effective in us as psychophysical beings with "nature-given" apti- tudes and inclinations; the Nature that not only surrounds us but also governs within us. In all human surrounding worlds, no matter how diversely fashioned, Nature, as the simple pre-given "material" for any historically formative living, has the same general traits. This fundamental "material" of every historical process interests the cultural sciences only so far as it is worked and fashioned by men, or has an influence on their way of living; thus, e. g., the geographical environment is of interest so far as it helps determine the development of a particular kind of social life, culture, etc. But the cultural sciences do not investigate the further significance of man's depend- ency on the Nature that is already there, this "minimum" world which is always presupposed wherever human life, as historical life, can begin. That means, however, that the world as a whole is always presupposed wherever human life is conceived as beginning, no matter how primitively.

On the other hand, if the world as a whole is "bracketed" by means of the phenomenological reduction, the first task is to understand precisely those subjective accomplishments by which this always-ready-given fact of the world as Nature, as the purely sensuously pre-given substrate for any human efficacy, is built up for us. And the result of the above-stated explication of immediate world- experience, and of the natural world-concept, is the insight that the proper clue to these subjective accomplishments is this pre-given world, not as it has been determined by natural science but as the world of immediate sensuous experience, with all the structures indicated above, i. e., the natural structures belonging to the world as a life-world.

However, if we examine the way in which Husserl actually performed this task of bringing to light, by constitutional analysis, the very origin of the world (not merely its further development on an already given basis), we encounter difficulties owing to the fact that he had already completed most of these constitutive analyses during


a period when he did not yet possess the clues eventually unravelled by his mundane-phenomenological analysis of the world. Thus his initial constitutional analyses were guided by an as yet unclarified awareness of world-structures, and this circumstance imposed limi- tations that were only gradually, and perhaps never completely, over- come. This meant that Husserl's early analyses were guided not by such elaborated clues but by what is most immediately given in experience. And a world as a whole, as the horizon of every possible particular experience-even though it be conceived as the above-mentioned "minimum" world of Nature, still in no way formed by men but ready-given as a basis for all their deeds-is precisely not the pre-given existent that lies most immediately at hand in experience. As has been shown, no "world" is an immediate object of experience; the eventual experiencing of a world is mediated and complicated in many different ways. In our experiencing we are directed first of all towards the particular existent, as given in perception. (As already said, all other attitudes or acts are built on "perception," in the sense of aisthesis.) Therefore, the particular object of perception and the togetherness of perceivable things became the immediately available clues for Husserl's constitutional analysis. They determined the path that he followed beyond what is at first given immediately in natural experience, as his inquiry penetrated gradually into the deeper layers of constitutive accomplishment. For this very reason, the question of the world in its above-formulated sense, as the total horizon of experience and as something of which the community is conscious- something that is pre-given as the basis for every communal accomplishment and yet is itself formed through communal accomplishments-this question could not arise at the outset. In the constitutional analyses that lie closest at hand, the world is encountered chiefly in the guise of the immediate horizon of perception, the perceptual situation, and Husserl did not go on immediately to raise the problem of the world as a whole. Therefore the question of this horizon as always already there, and the fact that these predelineations also are products of subjective accomplishments, could not enter his field of vision at the outset; subjectivity, as producing this horizon, could be in no way comprehended forthwith.

To understand this, let us consider how Husserl's reflective inquiry proceeded, starting with the thing given in perception, the per- ceptually Meant as such.

After analyzing all the intentional accomplishments that provide an initial understanding of the character of a perceived thing as standing before us-its givenness in adumbrations (Abschattungen),


the cooperation of kinaesthesis and data belonging to the different sensuous fields, and the apprehendings built on what is sensuously given-all conceived as in the "primordial sphere," i. e., without tak- ing into account the fact that the thing, as objective, as veritably existent, is always, according to its own sense, intersubjectively constituted-we reach the insight that these accomplishments, taken all together, involve a first level of activity on the part of the ego, an active receiving of what is passively pre-given. First of all, this activity is adversion to something in the sensuous fields that "affects" the ego, and, when the result is apprehension of a concrete material thing with all its sensible qualities-not merely its optical but also its tactile and, perhaps, its acoustic qualities-the ego-activity is an adverting to what is passively pre-given in the cooperation of a plurality of sensuous fields. Any active grasping presupposes this passive pre-givenness, presupposes that something is already given there in the sensuous fields and stands out in them. To stand out is to stand out from a background of what does not stand out, does not stimulate to adversion and is not grasped, but nevertheless is also there, as a background. But, in addition, this advertent receptive grasping is always a grasping within a horizon of an acquainted type. Even the newly grasped is always something already in some way familiar; it can be grasped only if this horizon is there in advance, to indicate the direction that further experience will take.9 The constitutional investigations that Husserl carried out along this line were, in the first place, investigations relating to the constitution of what exists within this horizon, to make the given existent understandable in its being-for- us as a result of constitutive accomplishments, in the way it is built up as a product of the latter. Thus, if we use the term "world" to indicate the whole set of horizons in which experience of what exists takes place, and within which alone such experience is possible, we must say that Husserl was tracing the constitutive origin of the "worldly," i. e., of what exists "in" the world, rather than the origin of the world itself. To be sure, Husserl did not stop with the fact that what exists stands out, in its sensuous qualities, from a sensuous field and affects the ego. He also investigated the associative and affective structure of such a sensuous field itself-but precisely the structure within the field, the principles governing the outstanding- ness of single '"data" within it. He did not undertake the previous search for the constitutive accomplishments, thanks to which a sensuous field is already given in advance, whenever one grasps a particular datum.

9. On this whole analysis, see Erfahrung und Urteil. 1l 16, 17, 25, and 26.

THE WoRiLD AS A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PROBLEM 57

Only in one direction did Husseri overstep this limit and investigate what subjectivity accomplishes not only by way of constitution inside the predelineated horizon but also by way of constitutively forming the horizon itself. In this one direction, however, he did so very early, namely in his analyses of the consciousness of time. These went back to his establishment of the fact that even the simplest sensuous "data" are not mere data but always unities of duration which must first be constituted as unities in the temporal flow of consciousness. According to the clear wording of these investigations, the consciousness of time accomplishes not only the production of immanent unities of duration in inner time but also-in the structures of primitive impression, retention, and protention-the constitutive production of the possibility of enduring and passing away in general, the possibility of apprehending something as enduring, becoming, or remaining. The producing of the temporal horizon itself becomes the theme when these structures are considered; they involve more than the apprehending of a temporal content and temporal relationships. But the consciousness of time is precisely an accomplishment that produces a universal form; and this form is nothing, unless it has a content. In the beginning, and for a long time after, "content" meant for Husserl that which is passively pre-given-the sensuously given and its arrangement in a field-which then becomes the basis for every constitutive grasping of an object. If the world, in its entire horizonal structure-which, after all, is not only temporal- is to be understood as a constituted product of transcendental subjectivity, then this ultimate pre-givenness cannot be allowed to stand simply as such. Rather one must show how the distinction between activity and passive pre-givenness is only provisional, how that which at first we find as passivity has its constitutive origin in subjective accomplishments, a task which Husserl seems to have attacked many times during his last years.

On the other hand, the horizonal structure of the world implies that everything apprehended on the basis of something pre-given, no matter how the latter has come about, is itself pre-given in a certain manner as an acquainted object of some type or other, and that the apprehending of it can be orientated and deepened only according to the pre-given horizon. No matter how far back we go in tracing the genesis of the world, no matter how greatly we impoverish the predelineation of already acquainted types of existents, a ready-made horizon always remains, if anything at all can still be grasped. There must always be the horizonal anticipation that the object will be an existent of some kind, "something or other" of the type "object- in-


general," assuming that the latter should still be called a type rather than an a priori condition for the forming of any type. It is always presupposed that, as a matter of fact, the passively pre-given "data" are somehow united synthetically in a pole (which we subsequently call an object) and, accordingly, that for every apprehending even the first apprehending, guided by the poorest horizons-this at least is pre-delineated as a horizon: intentional pole, "unity of a manifold." This cannot itself be an acquired type; it is a necessary presupposition for every intentional acquisition. Only when this predelineation is also exhibited in its origin, as deriving from accomplishments on the part of the transcendental ego-only then has the task been completed. Only then can we say that the origin of the world as horizon has been clarified, and that our transcendental constitutional analysis has fully displayed the sense of the world as something fashioned in transcendental subjectivity.

The thoughts developed by Husserl in his last years must be surveyed before we can see how far he progressed with this task; until late in life he remained unaware of the problem. Only then shall we be able to judge how far his concept of the world, as an in- clusive a priori originating from subjectivity itself, is superior to traditional philosophical concepts, and whether the tradition, with its conception of the a priori, involves something to which Husserl, fol- lowing his own course, could not do justice.'0

LUDWIG LANDGREBE.

INSTITUT SUPERIEUR DE PHILOSOPHIE LOUVAIN, BELGIUM.

10. A second article will follow.

landgrebe, l - the world as phenomenological problem

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