Abstract
What types of unity and disunity belong to a group of people sharing a culture? Husserl illuminates these communities by helping us trace their origin to two types of interpersonal act—cooperation and influence—though cultural communities are distinguished from both cooperative groups and mere communities of related influences. This analysis has consequences for contemporary concerns about multi- or mono-culturalism and the relationship between culture and politics. It also leads us to critique Husserl’s desire for a new humanity, one that is rational, cooperatively united, and animated by a universal philosophical culture. Reflecting on culture, a spiritually shaped and shared domain of the world, draws us to reflect also on ourselves as social and rational animals, and to ask, what should we reasonably hope for—and aim for—in a human culture that expresses and supports our shared lives of reason? Aristotle is used for occasional comparisons and contrasts.
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Notes
“Motivation” is a technical term Husserl applies to the relation between objects as thought (that is, as perceived, valued, willed, and so forth) in which some noema arouses or “motivates” others; it is distinguished from “causation,” a relation that obtains among realities in their spatio-temporal dependencies. For example, while the red of the shirt causes my optic nerve to transfer certain electrical impulses to my brain, the red of the shirt motivates me to try it on, as I think I look rather good in red.
Communication is the basic type of cooperative act and the ground for all more complex cooperation, but it is not practical cooperation in the fuller sense: “So far we have dealt with the mere communication of facts; a certain community of willing and a certain agreement are already present here. There is, however, still another kind of agreement, one that is practical in the fullest sense, a practical community of willing” (Hua XIV, p. 168).
“Here, however, there is an important difference: (1) I operate through a foreign will in the sense that the goal of my willing lies in that of another, that I want to achieve my goal through his willing and activity (personal connections in the unity of a community-willing). (2) I operate through the foreign willing in the sense that the product, e.g., a technical work, which is executed according to my idea, becomes the starting point for the spiritual work of others… (personal effect-communities [Wirkungsgemeinschaften] without the unity of an encompassing communal willing and acting)” (Hua XIV, pp. 194–195).
Regarding the analogy of a community to a person, in “Gemeingeist II” Husserl explains it and denies that it is mere metaphor because the community is capable of intentional acts, though they are always founded in the members’ intentional acts: “The common, the connected personality, as ‘subject’ of the common achievement, is, on the one hand, an analogue of an individual subject; on the other hand, however, it is not a mere analogue, it is a connected multiplicity of persons, which has in its connection a unity of consciousness (a communicative unity). Within the multiplicity of the will that is distributed among the individual persons, it has for all of them one identically constituted will, which has no other place, no other substrate than the communicative multiplicity of persons” (Hua XIV, pp. 200–201).
These two types of community do not correspond neatly to Tönnies celebrated distinction between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft.
Words, especially written words and also words attributed to some important figure, provide more stability to a subjective accomplishment, allowing them to be more durable when passed around.
It should also be remembered, however, that spiritual accomplishments can retain identically the same sense for various persons. As Husserl comments in Phenomenological Psychology, “diverse cultural formations in spite of really separated individual matter can very well have identically the same sense. Thus, a mathematical proposition which is objectively embodied in the German language and is thus a German cultural formation, can become embedded in other languages with fully identical mathematical sense; and everyone can also grasp this identity” (Hua IX, p. 117/88–89).
Of course, and very importantly, some paths also repulse us. This is less passive, however. Because being repulsed by what someone has done requires first grasping it as possibly something to do, repulsion requires an assertion of oneself against the draw of the used path. The repulsion is partly based on being compelled, by passive empathic understanding, to think of the world as valued and actionable in that way.
We might also add that in addition to being influenced by particular others in particular actions, and to being influenced by the indeterminate “they” (what “one” does), we can also be influenced by particular others because what he or she does is exceptional from within the typical or conventional. Fashion develops this way: we are drawn to models that both fit with, and are exceptional within, the general style of what one does. Similarly but at a higher level, influence can also operate by way of—and so also produce—norms in the more serious sense of standards by which we recognize something as a good or bad instance of its type.
As Drummond points out regarding Husserl’s use of Gemeinschaft: “Persons achieve a common understanding through communicative acts, and a personal association, i.e. an association of persons or a society, is thereby formed. But such associations are communities only in a weak, imprecise sense. While Husserl often uses the term ‘community’ and its cognates when discussing such experiences and such associations, at other times he reserves the word ‘community’ and its cognates for a more intimately united intersubjectivity” (1996, p. 245).
H. Peter Steeves describes this well: “Part of the problem here is in thinking of the ‘new’ community member as an ‘addition.’ This description is misleading. What I would like to submit is that such members are ‘actualizations’ rather than ‘additions’” (1998, p. 98). Though Steeves is describing cooperative communities here, his description fits the indeterminate cultural community better.
It is important to note that the communicative community is not cooperatively structured; it is not a community of united purpose and will, even though communication is a cooperative activity and those involved in any given communicative act are united cooperatively (see note 4, above). “The subjects in communication with one another constitute personal unities of a higher level,” Husserl points out, but it is “the sum total” of these, “extending as far as actual and possible personal ties do,” that “makes up the world of social subjectivities. To be distinguished from this world of social subjectivities is the world correlative to it and inseparable from it, the world for these subjectivities, the world of social Objectivities, as one might say” (Hua IV, p. 195/205). This “world of social Objectivites” is our topic of culture. Gerhart Husserl also emphasizes that a cultural community is not a willing-community: “A people is a natural growth, not a purposive society. It has no functionary in whom power and authority are vested. Membership in the community of a people implies no subordination whatsoever to officials or functionaries; no such exist. No one is empowered to issue commands in the name of a people” (1939, pp. 133–134).
The conclusion suggested by Ideas II §51—that the cultural world is the correlate of a communicative community, which is a higher level community of influence—is corroborated by Husserl’s discussion in “Gemeingeist II” of the constitution of the sensible world. “Physical nature [is] constituted by mutual overlapping of the personal subjects in a communicating community” (Hua XIV, 201). According to Husserl, by communicating we acquire together, as it were, the status of a superpersonal subjectivity utilizing the sensibility of all of us. Each person uses the senses of others through direct or indirect communication with them, and what each one knows as the sensible world he knows as the correlate of this communicatively connected intersubjectivity. As known, the sensible world is therefore an essentially communal world and an aspect of the cultural world. The attempt and claim on the part of the naturalistic attitude to abstract from all irreal or subject-relative determinations is therefore “a kind of self-forgetfulness” according to Husserl (Hua IV, pp. 183–184/193).
With communication we also have the possibility of tradition in the special sense of something handed down to a new generation unchanged. For example, sacred traditions cannot be sustained through mere influence, but require cooperative maintenance. On this sense of tradition, see, e.g., Congar (2004) and Pieper (2008). Such a tradition is not necessarily dead. On the reason for this, see note 9 above.
This easiest way is imperfect. Because of translation and bilingualism, the communicative community is broader than the community that shares a particular language. We encounter people of languages that we do not speak as communicatively linked to ourselves, but more indirectly and “potentially.”
A cultural “attitude” occurs within the natural attitude, and is not in competition with the natural attitude or with the phenomenological attitude.
As the just quoted passage from The Vienna Lecture continues, “Humanity (or a closed community such as a nation, tribe, etc.), in its historical situation, always lives under some attitude or other. Its life always has its norm-style and, in reference to this, a constant historicity or development” (1970, p. 280). And as Husserl points out in Phenomenological Psychology, works of objectified spirit “appear amid constant change in the unity of a history” such that “the experiential world as cultural world has a perpetually changeable historical countenance” (Hua IX, pp. 53, 113/39, 86).
Husserl claims that each human is not merely an individual of a categorizable kind, the important features of which are preknown by knowing the type. Because of reason and the development of personal character, each person is someone we would have to “get to know” beyond all typifications: “To see a man does not mean to already know him. To see a man is—as we have found—different from seeing a material thing. Each thing is of a certain kind. If one knows the kind, the rest can be dispensed with. A man, however, has an individual kind, and each man has a different one. According to the universal, he is a man, but his kind as his character, his person, is a unity, constituted in his course of life, as a subject of position-takings, i.e., a unity of multifarious motivations based upon presuppositions” (Hua IV, p. 274/286–287). Husserl here is discussing the human being as member of a biological species, but the same holds for our cultural memberships: the person has an individuality or personality that is never captured completely by any cultural classifications.
This claim contrasts with Husserl’s hope that, in a fully mature human culture, all people would freely subordinate themselves to a centralizing shared will, concentrating themselves into a willing-community, and philosophers would be like the brain of the body or nous of the soul ordering the community according to their insights. This is discussed in Sect. 5, below.
Drummond, in discussing Aron Gurwitsch’s account of membership, explains that we identify with others in the community because “membership… is based simply upon the fact that one has the same historical heritage as other members do, that one lives in the present in virtue of the same past, that one is born into the same life-context as they.” He also critiques Gurwitsch by emphasizing that differentiation occurs because I encounter others as involved in “autonomous thinking” and thus “as having appropriated these traditions in varying ways, ways that arise from their free and responsible exercise of critical reflection” (2002, pp. 146–148). This is correct, but it overlooks that differentiation occurs also because no one shares the same life-context completely; no one inhabits the same position in the web that is the cultural community. That is, culture is essentially not monolithic, even prior to critical reflection and idiosyncratic appropriation.
This aspect of culture, along with how Husserl understands “Europe,” might help explain why Husserl does not view a universal human culture, even one that is European in his rarified sense, as inconsistent with substantial cultural heterogeneity and national differences. And this might help address those commentators who have criticized Husserl as Eurocentric and insufficiently sensitive to diversity. Steinbock, for example, writes, “While achieving the one world seems to be Husserl’s goal, I contend that his generative descriptions of intersubjectivity challenge it forcefully: such a synthesis of homeworld and alienworld generatively examined is impossible” (1994, p. 460). Nevertheless, in this paper I will not address the question of Eurocentrism or the possibility of a universal culture directly.
As Steinbock puts it, “even within the homeworld itself there can be diverse conflicting and rivaling normalities. The renewal of a culture’s generative force may even require such diversity and such a transcending” (1994, p. 461).
Along the same lines, in a note supplementing Ideas II Husserl comments that there are “forms of community which are not full personalities and which are not societies of will and action” and offers as examples “linguistic communities [and] national communities without a national ‘will’” (Hua IV, p. 316/329).
As Aristotle puts it, “for whatever the authoritative element conceives to be honorable will necessarily be followed by the opinion of the other citizens” (1273a40–2; 1984, p. 82).
This also helps us appreciate why Husserl devotes significant time to philosophy of culture while remaining regrettably poor in political philosophy. As Drummond points out, “Husserl, unlike, say, Aristotle or Hegel, does not believe that the community qua political is the telos or fulfillment of all social groupings; he reserves that privilege for the authentic moral community” (2000, pp. 41–42). Also, Husserl helps us see why a good culture is not to be gotten primarily through governmental action.
According to Husserl, “The spiritual ego” is an abstraction from the corporeal side of the human (Hua IV, p. 97/103). The empirical subject is not fully a person “in the specific sense” whose acts are free, self-responsible, and to be judged by the norms of reason (Hua IV, p. 257/269). While the “autonomy of reason, the freedom of the personal subject consists in the fact that I do not yield passively” to drives, inclinations, or influences (Hua IV, p. 269/282), the spiritual ego has “its underlying basis” (Hua IV, p. 275/288) in unfree layers of conscious life: “The specifically spiritual Ego, the subject of spiritual acts, the person, finds itself dependent on an obscure underlying basis of traits of character, original and latent dispositions, and thereby dependent on nature.” He continues: “All life of the spirit is permeated by the ‘blind’ operation of associations, drives, feelings” (Hua IV, p. 276/289).
Hart (1992a, p. 99) paraphrases Husserl on how the norms of reason need to be applied to communities: in full authenticity, the community “no longer lives in a culture of blind becoming and growth, as rich as this might be in the creation of values. Rather, now it is organized to a unity of will which is directed to its true humanity as an absolute idea and strives to take the shape suitable to the development toward an absolutely valuable human community” (Hua XXVII, p. 119).
Regarding “genuine humanity,” Husserl elaborates: “For what is that but a truly responsible humanity, which as such strives to live in self-responsibility that is wakeful at all times; that is determined at all times to follow ‘reason’ to govern itself, and only in accordance with norms that it has thought itself and into which it itself has had insight; and that is able at all times to defend the absolute, normatively justified character of its actions with reference to ultimate sources of finality” (Husserl 2003, p. 286).
Husserl’s call for a “philosophical culture” seems to mean not that all people become philosophers, but that they become philosophical in a Socratic, ethically awake sense. His call is for “renewal in the sense of ethical turnabout and the formation of a universal ethical culture” (Hua XXVII, xi; trans. in Hart 1992a, p. 91; see also Brainard 2007, p. 28).
As Depraz (1995) helps us appreciate, the role of the philosophical community here for Husserl is noble rather than forceful; philosophers lead and order community life through authority, example, and articulation of the good, rather than through force or state power.
Drummond comments that such communities “do not fulfill their teleological direction toward the fullness of community” and are not “genuine communities,” which are “those populated by authentic individuals each of whose willing activity involves a rational insight into what is valuable and an autonomous willing grounded in that insight” (1996, pp. 245, 247). I am making a further claim: it is a mistake to apply this norm to the cultural community.
On these two points, see Velkley (1987), to which this paper is, in some respects, a response. For example, Husserl implies that sin or human fallenness results only from the failure of reason to live wide awake all of the time: “A naïve, unreflective living-along leads to sin. Man as man is afflicted with the original sin; it belongs to the essential form of man” (Hua XXVII, p. 44; trans. in Brainard 2001, p. 233).
Husserl knows, and describes well, the limitations of the life of reason based on its dependences in subrational subjective life. See note 28, above. Although Husserl does not often speak of human nature, he does tell us that “every spirit has a ‘natural side,’” and that “[i]n a certain sense there is, in the obscure depths, a root soil” (Hua IV, p. 279/292).
“Culture, however, always has its milieu of civilization, the productive liveliness its milieu of externalized liveliness, its milieu of immersion, of ‘conventional,’ merely ‘traditional,’ no longer or hardly still understood spirituality” (Hua XXVII, p. 111).
For example, Krasnodębski criticizes Husserl’s philosophy of culture by reminding us about a threat that Husserl did not warn Europe against: “communism was neither cynicism nor nihilism nor a manifestation of the Asiatic spirit—or at least not exclusively—but rather a radical humanism which arose from European culture. Patočka and Ingarden had to deal with a system born not of dislike of science but excessive confidence in it, not of skepticism and irrationalism, but of rationalism” (1993, p. 349).
See Nicomachean Ethics 10.9, 1180a: “For most people are more obedient to compulsion than to argument, and are persuaded more by penalties than by what is beautiful” (2002, p. 197).
Although influence is often inauthentically passive, it need not be. I can self-responsibly take ownership of another’s spiritual accomplishment, while still taking it up as from another. As Husserl puts it in Phenomenological Psychology, “When I follow the other, it is possible that I can reproduce his insight and that I do so. In this way I follow him rationally and decide according to his reason and simultaneously according to my own, since his becomes my own when I follow his example….My decision is a decision fashioned after another’s and yet I have decided by free exercise of reason. I can justify it to myself. On the other hand, it remains true that it does not stem purely from me, I am not the author; I follow another’s authority but on the basis of my own reason simultaneously” (Hua IX, p. 213/163). This point is crucial for the possibility of reasonable traditions and traditions of reasonableness.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10.9, 1180a; 2002, p. 198.
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Flynn, M.B. The Cultural Community: An Husserlian Approach and Reproach. Husserl Stud 28, 25–47 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-011-9097-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-011-9097-7