Abstract
The problem of the destruction of nature and the natural environment is one of the most serious problems that confronts humanity at the end of the twentieth century. This destruction has its basis in the dualistic way of thinking that has dominated the Modern age: Humanity has been accustomed to think of the world dualistically as a confrontation between subject and object, soul and body, and spirit and nature. Both Modern natural sciences and scientific technology in general are grounded in such a dualistic way of thinking But this way of thinking itself, in other words, the Modern dualistic paradigm, is now one of the most serious problems of present-day philosophy. It has become clear that a new relation between humanity and nature must be established. In this paper, I will re-examine the relationship between “nature” and “spirit” in the context of Husserl’s phenomenology in which, in my opinion, a new concept of nature can be found. In the course of this investigation, I shall try to elucidate the present-day situation of human spirit in a phenomenological way.
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Notes
Cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch. Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed., Marly Biemel, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1952 (Husserliana Vol. IV), pp. XIII—XX. Husserl’s works that are published in Husserliana are hereafter cited as “Hua” followed by volume and page number. In the quotations from Hua IV, I have generally used the following translation: Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/London, 1989.
Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts used in this paper are cited according to archival organization and documentation found in the Husserl-Archives in Leuven.
The “original pencil manuscript of Ideen II” (“Ursprüngliches Bleistiftmanuskript von Ideen H,” written in October to December 1912) and the “central manuscript of the third section of Ideen II (The constitution of the spiritual world)” (“Hauptmanuskript zum dritten Abschnitt der Ideen II (Konstitution der geistigen Welt)”: the so-called “H-Blätter” of 1913). The former is now preserved in the Husserl-Archives of Leuven under the signature F III 1,5–36. The latter is to be found there in the convolute M III 1 I 4. In the quotations from the “Blätter,” I will, as an exception, give first the original page number of the papers (with the signature “H”) and then in brackets the present signature and page number of the Husserl-Archives. Concerning the original manuscripts of Ideen II cf. also Tetsuya Sakakibara, “Das Problem des Ich und der Ursprung der genetischen Phänomenologie bei Husserl,” Husserl Studies,14(1), 1997, pp. 21–39.
According to M. Biemel, the text of the section 64 of the present Ideen II was formed in its final version approximately in the years of 1924 and 1925, on the basis of E. Stein’s second elaboration of 1918 ( Cf. Hua IV, XVIIIff )
Cf. Hua IV, 334. In the central text of Ideen II,Husserl also calls these sedimentations “secondary passivity” (cf. Hua IV, 12, 20). The secondary sensibility or passivity is made possible only by retentional consciousness. In a supplement of Formale und transzendentale Logik,Husserl speaks clearly of a retentional sensibility as the first form of secondary sensibility (cf. Hua XVII, 319ff.).
The “laws of association and reproduction” are “more general ones, which extend beyond primal sensibility” to the stratum of unauthentic, spiritual sensibility (Cf. Hua IV, 337).
According to M. Biemel, the text of section 61 was formed approximately in the years of 1924 and 1925 on the basis of E. Stein’s second elaboration of 1918 (cf. Hua IV, XVIHff )
In the development from the Ego of the soul to “the free personal subject,” not only “laws of association,” but rather especially those “of reason” must determine the Ego (cf. Hua IV, 339–340).
Husserl writes: “[…] each free act [of the Ego] has its comet’s tail of nature” (Hua IV, 338).
Two years later in his lecture on “Nature and Spirit” from February 21, 1919 and his manuscripts regarding this lecture Aufsätze and Vorträge (1911–1921),eds., Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp, Hua XXV (Boston: Kluwer, 1987), 316–330], Husserl explicitly speaks of “nature” that is “sensuously given” before all spiritual Ego-acts (329): In order to ground the distinction between natural and human sciences, Husserl analyzes there the “stratification Schichtung of the pre-given surrounding world” (325), and through a “reductive” method of “dismissing abtun” (326) all “meaning-predicates” belonging to the “surrounding objects” (325), Husserl discovers the stratum of “natural Objects in themselves Naturobjekte an sich” as “the lowest level” of the surrounding world (328). This stratum is a “nature” that is “originally and perceptually given in pure receptivity” (329) before any egoic act that gives spiritual meanings to those objects. It is now clear that this nature is primal nature’ as a ground stratum of the surrounding world. However, it should be noted at the same time that Husserl, in the course of this lecture, also speaks of “nature” in a “new sense” (317). He says: Those “directly intuitive natural Objects,” to be sure, do not have any meaning-predicates arising from egoic acts, but they do still have “sensuous qualities” relating to the “living body” of the respective subjects (316, 329), so that these qualities must always be “subjective-relative” (316). Now it was precisely “Galilean natural science” that brought “what remains invariant” out of all subjective-relativities of the intuitive natural Objects and recognized it to be the “In-itself of natural Objects in a new sense An-sich’ der Naturobjekte in einem neuen Sinn” (317). This new nature in itself’ “can no longer contain anything sensuous” (317). It is rather a “mathematically exact nature” determined “only in pure logical and mathematical predicates” (317). Against this nature, the “sensuously intuitive nature” is no more than a “mere appearance” of that one (317). Thus, the “new natural science” substituted the “mathematically exact nature” for the directly intuitive one as a ground stratum of the surrounding world (cf. 317). In his lecture-course on nature and spirit from the summer-semester 1919, Husserl describes “the ideal lowest level die ideell unterste Stufe” of the surrounding world as “mere nature” and correlatively describes the “subject of mere nature” as a “subject of possible, passively sensitive apperceptions, namely, those which gain their sense-contents without any co-participation of spiritual producing” (F 135, 117a—b). In the lecture-course on ethics from the summer-semester 1920 he also tries, through a method of “dismantling Abbau, to go back from the “spiritual stratums of our surrounding world” to the “world of pure experience” as a ground stratum (cf. for example A IV 22, 42b, 47bff., Ma). But it should be noted here that there can be seen a tendency in these two lecture-courses to take the ground stratum under the surrounding world as an abstract object of Modern physics: Husserl himself has a tendency to regard this stratum as a physical, lifeless, mechanical nature, and his spirit itself has a tendency to forget nature, the tendency which we will see later in Section V. In my opinion, however, the problematic of the ground stratum under the surrounding world and of the giving stratum of authentic sensibility leads directly to that of “instinct” or “impulse-intentionality Triebintentionalität” in the latest Husserl. In Merleau-Ponty, the natural basis of spirit, especially its ground stratum of authentic sensibility, might be also called “un esprit sauvage” or “l’esprit brut, and “primal nature” called “un monde sauvage” (cf. “Le philosophe et son ombre,” in Signes,Gallimard, 1960, p. 228). In this paper, however, I cannot go into this problematic in detail. On those lecture-courses from 1919 and from 1920 cf. Guy van Kerckhoven, “Zur Genese des Begriffs Lebenswelt’ bei Edmund Husserl,” in Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte,Vol. 29, 1985, pp. 182–203; Ullrich Melle, “Nature and Spirit,” in Thomas Nenon and Lester Embree (eds.), Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II,Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/ London, 1996 (Contributions to Phenomenology,24), pp. 15–35.
The fact that the monadological viewpoint belonged to the background of Husserl’s phenomenological descriptions after 1908–1910 can be seen in his following descriptions: “[…] to consciousness itself belongs the unconditional essential possibility that it can become an alert consciousness, […]. Or, to speak like Leibniz, that the monad passes from the stage of involution into the one of evolution and becomes [in higher acts] self-consciousness spirit’ ” (F III 1, 5a (1912); cf. Hua IV, 108); “[…1 This subject [= person] is conscious of itself and thereby is a developed subject at the stage of spirit’ in Leibniz’ sense.” (Hua IV, 351 (1916–1917)); “To the pure essence of the soul there belongs an Ego-polarizing; further, there belongs to it the necessity of a development in which the Ego develops into a person and as a person. The essence of this development includes the sense that the Ego as person is constituted in the soul by means of self-experience.” (Hua IV, 350 (Husserl’s insertion into Landgrebe’s version, after 1924/25)).
The page 19b of A VI 10 includes a writing dated December 7, 1914.
I cannot go into this point in detail here. Cf. Hua XIII, 346–357 (Beilage XLV, 1916/17); Hua XI, 336–345, “Statische and genetische phänomenologische Methode” (1921); Hua XIV, 34–42 (Beilage I, Juni 1921). The latter two articles will be included in Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic,trans., Anthony J. Steinbock, Husserliana Collected Works (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, forthcoming). They are available separately in English as “Static and Genetic Phenomenological Methods,” and “The Phenomenology of Monadic Individuality and the Phenomenology of the General Possibilities and Compossibilities of Lived-Experiences. Static and Genetic Phenomenology,” trans. Anthony J. Steinbock, “Static and Genetic Phenomenology: Introduction to Two Essays,” Continental Philosophy Review (formerly Man and World),Vol. 31, No. 2 (1998). Concerning a first seed to the idea of genetic phenomenology in Husserl, see Tetsuya Sakakibara, op. cit.
Cf. Erfahrung and Urteil,Felix Meiner, Hamburg, 1985 (ph B 280), §8, pp. 26–36; §§8185, pp. 385–408.
It seems to me that the ambiguities in Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld that Claesges pointed out correspond to those in the idea of typified nature that I clarified here: The distinction which he made between the lifeworld in the narrower sense and the one in the widest sense might be compared to the difference between primal nature and the surrounding lifeworld with spiritual sedimentations. Cf. Ulrich Claesges, “Zweideutigkeiten in Husserls Lebenswelt-Begriff,” in Ulrich Claesges and Klaus Held (eds.), Perspektiven transzendental-phänomenologischer Forschung, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1972 (Phaenomenologica, 49 ), pp. 85–101.
Cf. Heraclitus, Fragment 123.
Cf. for example Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique,Gallimard, 1972. Husserl’s ideas of “europeanization of humanity” and of “teleology of european reason” in Krisis should also be remembered here.
Cf. Tetsuya Sakakibara, “Husserl on Phenomenological Description” (in English), in The Ritsumeikan Tetsugaku (The Proceeding of the Philosophical Society of Ritsumeikan University), No. 6, 1994, pp. 1–18.
This paper is written as a result of my research in the years 1995–1996 in Wuppertal, Germany. I would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the support of my research. I am deeply grateful to Professor Dr. Klaus Held, PD Dr. Dieter Lohmar, Professor Dr. Guy van Kerckhoven, Professor Shigeto Nuki, and Dr. Sebastian Luft for useful advice and comments on the earlier version of this paper. To PD Dr. Lohmar and Mr. Michael Weiler who kindly helped me at the Husserl Archives in Köln and in Leuven, and to Professor Dr. Rudolf Bernet, the director of the Husserl-Archives in Leuven, who allowed me to cite Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts, I owe a special debt of gratitute. Last but not least, I thank Mr. Mark Sainsbury for his kind help regarding English formulation.
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Sakakibara, T. (1998). The relationship between nature and spirit in Husserl’s phenomenology revisited. In: Steinbock, A.J. (eds) Phenomenology in Japan. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2602-3_3
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