Abstract
In this essay I argue that Husserl’s development of the nineteenth century Natur/Geist distinction is grounded in the intentional correlate between the pre-theoretical natural attitude and environing world (Umwelt). By reconsidering the Natur/Geist distinction through its historical context in the nineteenth century debate between Wilhelm Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians from the Baden or Southwest school, it is possible to understand more clearly Husserl’s appropriations and novel contributions. One of Husserl’s contributions lies in his rigorous thematization and clarification of the constitutive features proper to the natural and human sciences as they arise from the pre-theoretical experience of an environing world. This ordinary lived experience between the lived body and environing world is presupposed by and forms a unity with both Natur and Geist, thereby acting as the unified ground that is inclusive of naturalized Geist and a geistig nature. This unbuilding (Abbau) of the Natur/Geist distinction is necessary, according to Husserl, for the radical clarification of the respective methodologies of the natural and human sciences.
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Notes
Husserl also gave these lectures in 1912 and the Natur/Geist distinction plays a central role in the seminars on Phenomenology and Psychology (1917) and Phenomenological Psychology (1925). Hamauzu (2003) has given a brief overview of the 1927 course.
See the translator’s introduction (Husserl 1989, p. XVI).
For example, Crowell states, “Oddly, we must here recall Husserl’s insistence that in everyday experience we have nothing to do with ‘nature-objects.’ For as far as one can tell from Husserl’s text, no particular sense of nature arises within the personalistic attitude, no sense which specifically belongs to that attitude and can be clarified only within it” (1996, p. 101). Soffer agrees with this characterization, “One of the most intriguing aspects of Ideas II is its insistence on the exclusiveness of the personalistic and naturalistic attitudes, and its corresponding suggestion that either we are directed towards persons, the life world, and motivational causality; or towards nature and physical and psycho-physical causality; but never to both concomitantly” (1996, p. 43).
There are a select few other commentators who also provide an alternative to the standard interpretation. For instance, Sakakibara (1998) develops Husserl’s notion of the “natural basis of spirit” in manuscripts surrounding those of Ideas II. While my analysis is consistent with Sakakibara’s understanding of the Natur/Geist distinction, where he focuses on the outright relationship between the natural and geistig, my reading is centered on how they arise from pre-theoretical experience. Jalbert (1987) also has an interpretation of Ideas II that is consonant with the one below. Jalbert makes the case that Husserl’s position represents an advance of Dilthey’s conception of the foundation of the human sciences because Husserl’s account of the personal surrounding world encompasses both Natur and Geist. “This insufficiently studied aspect of Husserl’s assessment of Dilthey concerns the scope and structure of the surrounding world (Umwelt) of persons or, what amounts to the same thing, the breadth of a truly foundational science…for Husserl, the personal surrounding world…encompasses both nature and spirit and, thus, a human science that claims to provide the necessary foundation for the concrete human disciplines must render ‘nature’ as well as spirit comprehensible” (1987, p. 31).
Husserl also has a brief discussion of the theoretical modification of lived experience in the opening sections of Ideas II (1989, pp. 4–15).
While Rickert’s attitudinal development of Windelband’s position does not explicitly reference the distinction between the idiographic and the nomological, an association can nevertheless be made.
As Friedman characterizes this position “Knowledge or true judgment would be impossible [for a naïve empiricism], for the stream of unconceptualized sense experience is in fact utterly chaotic and intrinsically undifferentiated. Comparing the articulated structures of our judgments to this chaos of sensations simply makes no sense” (2000, p. 26).
Lask wrote Fichtes Idealismus as his dissertation under Rickert’s supervision in 1901. The following account of the hiatus irrationalis is taken from this, Lask’s early work. For a more systematic treatment of Lask’s later thought and its relation to Husserl and Heidegger, see the first several chapters of Crowell (2001).
Herbert Spencer is the central figure for this appropriation, “This psychological school was superseded in England by Herbert Spencer…He undertook to subordinate psychic phenomenon to the real system of physical phenomenon and, accordingly, psychology to the natural sciences. In effect, he founded psychology of general biology after having further developed in it the notions of adaptation of living beings to their milieu…He thus interprets internal states and their connection by basing them on neurology, the comparison of external organizations of the animal world and the pursuit of adaptation to the external world” (Dilthey 1977, p. 44).
Even though Dilthey’s position developed to accommodate the Neo-Kantian criticisms, he nevertheless remained opposed to Rickert’s attitudinal distinction. “The difference between the human and natural sciences is not just about the stance [Einstellung] of the subject toward the object; it is not merely about a kind of attitude [Verhalten], a method. Rather, the procedure of understanding is grounded in the realization that the external reality that constitutes its object is totally different from the objects of the natural sciences” (2002, p. 141).
Husserl’s critique of Dilthey’s lack of methodological rigor is well known and while Husserl agrees with the necessity of returning to concrete lived experience, he attempts to do so with a more sophisticated methodology. “Dilthey, a man gifted with the intuition of genius, though not a man of rigorous scientific theorizing, saw, to be sure, the problems leading to the goal and the directions of the work to be done, but he did not penetrate through to the decisive formulations of the problems and to the methodologically certain solutions, no matter how great was the progress he made here especially in the years of his wise old age … Ever new significant investigations joined up with Dilthey’s research. Windelband, Rickert, Simmel, Münsterberg, and others tried their utmost to do justice, from new sides, to the opposition in question [Natur/Geist]. Yet following them we do not penetrate to the actually decisive clarifications and rigorously scientific conceptions and foundations. Only a radical investigation, directed to the phenomenological sources of the constitution of the ideas of nature, Body, and soul, and of the various ideas of Ego and Person can here deliver decisive elucidations and at the same time further the rights of the valid motives of all such investigations” (1989, p. 181).
As Husserl would later say in the “Vienna Lecture,” Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians (among others), “totally failed even to see the problem of a universal and pure humanistic science and to inquire after a theory of the essence of spirit [Geist] purely as spirit which would pursue what is unconditionally universal, by way of elements and laws, in the spiritual sphere, with the purpose of proceeding from there to scientific explanations in an absolutely final sense” (1970, p. 273).
As Jalbert (1988) has argued, “what distinguishes Husserl’s view most clearly from that of Dilthey, Windelband, and Rickert is the conviction that phenomenological psychology, as the foundational science for the particular human disciplines, must be in its aim and method a purely eidetic science” (p. 286).
This reference is from the unpublished manuscript A IV 8, 32 and is quoted in Jalbert (1988 p. 290).
For a more detailed discussion of the theoretical modification of the natural attitude, see Luft (1998).
Husserl maintains this position of the pre-givenness of the world as an environing world throughout his writing. For instance, “From the current concern of the pre-occupation with which we take ever new contents as present-at-hand, as pre-given. It is a basic fact. Units of this world for ‘us all’ is a correlative unit that is indirectly or directly together in a nexus of life which is experienced as an evaluative and ultimately practical nexus, as immediately human, and as this world itself for us. This world is a practical environing world” (1973, p. 232).
D’Amico (1981) contrasts Husserl and Dilthey on this point, “There is no need for a unique understanding according to Husserl since in the human sciences, from the viewpoint of foundation, all sciences have the same essential structure. An original, meaning-giving act constitutes an objectivity or ideal object from a Lebenswelt. Dilthey was led to the division between the natural and human or cultural sciences because he took the objectivism of the natural sciences at face value and without question” (p. 7). In referencing this role of the life-world, D’Amico is drawing on Husserl’s later articulation of pre-theoretical experience while the present analysis makes the comparison and contrast with Dilthey through Husserl’s most direct engagement which occurs in the 1910s and 1920s.
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Konopka, A. The Role of Umwelt in Husserl’s Aufbau and Abbau of the Natur/Geist Distinction. Hum Stud 32, 313–333 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-009-9122-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-009-9122-4