Abstract
Nowadays one tends to approach the issue of “pluralism” almost exclusively as a phenomenon that affects human beings’ social dimension and the multifarious ethical, political, and cultural challenges that the era of globalization lays at the door of human communities all over the world. Nevertheless, the deep structural problems that are here at play are rational dilemmas upon which humanity has reflected since the dawn of Greek philosophy. We refer to two of them: on the one side, the relationship between unity and multiplicity; and, on the other, between “sameness” and “otherness,” namely, between “identity” and “difference.” These conceptual problems are so crucial that without their recognition, the possibility itself of theoretical thought, practical rules, and ethical or esthetical valuation would collapse. Yet without multiplicity unity is in need of an explicandum, and without unity multiplicity lacks determination. Ontological, theological, epistemological, axiological, and practical interrogations have kept themselves in suspense for more than twenty-two centuries at the brink of these problems.
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Notes
- 1.
See Hua I, 121–177.
- 2.
The developments in this intersubjective stratum remained mostly unedited and were posthumously published in the Husserliana volumes dedicated to intersubjectivity, especially Hua XV. However, §61 of the Cartesian Meditations, mostly unattended, gives relevant indications of these transcendental constitutive analyses of the “primary and most basic level,” that of the individual psycho-physical coming into the world, as well as the “biologic” and “psychological” phylo-genetic development (Hua I, 168–169).
- 3.
See note 1.
- 4.
Hua I, §31; Hua XIV, 26–30 passim.
- 5.
Hua I, §30.
- 6.
Hua XIV, 18 passim.
- 7.
Ibid., 21.
- 8.
Ibid., 14 passim; Hua I, §33.
- 9.
Hua IV, 230 ff., 262 ff., 372 ff., passim.
- 10.
Ibid., 236.
- 11.
Hua I, 124.
- 12.
Bernet, Kern & Marbach (1989), 145–149.
- 13.
Hua XV, 50 ff.; Iribarne (1994), 52.
- 14.
Hua I, especially §§43–49. See also Iribarne [1994], 24.
- 15.
Ibid., 51.
- 16.
Hua I, especially §§49–58.
- 17.
Iribarne (1994), 28.
- 18.
Ibid., 181–196.
- 19.
Hua XV, 670.
- 20.
Ibid., 595.
- 21.
Ibid., 605.
- 22.
Ibid., 385. The transcendental ego as factum, as Husserl points out, precedes the eidos ego.
- 23.
Ibid., 609.
- 24.
Ibid., 594.
- 25.
Ibid., 605.
- 26.
Ibid., 594.
- 27.
Ibid., 593.
- 28.
Plurality understood as establishing itself in “social acts” and in “personal human communication” See Hua I, 159. Likewise, Hannah Arendt asserts that: “Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction. (…) In man, otherness, which he shares with everything that is, and distinctness, which he shares with everything alive, become uniqueness, and human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings” (Arendt [1958], 175–176).
- 29.
Hua I, 157–158.
- 30.
Ibid., 159.
- 31.
Hua XIV, 167.
- 32.
Ibid., 166.
- 33.
Hua XV, 442 (footnote 1).
- 34.
Hua XIV, 211.
- 35.
Hua XV, 476.
- 36.
Ibid., 169–171.
- 37.
Ibid., 465, 469.
- 38.
Ibid., 225.
- 39.
Ibid., 170–171.
- 40.
Ibid., 172.
- 41.
Ibid., 174.
- 42.
Ibid., 175–184.
- 43.
Hua I, 160.
- 44.
Hua XIV, 404.
- 45.
Ibid., 194.
- 46.
Ibid., 198.
- 47.
Ibid., 221.
- 48.
As is the case with the ideological poverty of Nazi political radicalism.
- 49.
Hua I, 160.
- 50.
Ibid., §§42–62. The following reflections, even if they do not follow Dieter Lohmar’s argumentative order, have indeed been strongly suggested by his text “Zur Überwindung des heimweltlichen Ethos” (Lohmar [1993]).
- 51.
Hua XV, 429 ff.
- 52.
Here I essentially refer to the works of Edmund Husserl in Hua VI, Hua XV and Hua XXIX; Bernhard Waldenfels (1993, 2001); and Dieter Lohmar (1993).
- 53.
See Lohmar (1993), 68. They concern the “validities” that are presupposed at the life-world as “neighboring world” (Nahwelt), “world of experience” (Erfahrungswelt), “personal world” (personale Welt), “cultural world” (Kulturwelt), “surrounding life-world” (Lebensumwelt), “daily world” (Alltagswelt), “co-world” (Mitwelt). See Hua VI, §34, and Hua XV, 142, 196–197, 200, 205, 214–215, 217, 229ff., 232, 411, 428.
- 54.
Hua XV, 220ff., 224ff., 430.
- 55.
Ibid., 430–431.
- 56.
I am thinking, i.e., in the international athletic competitions, among finalists, such as in soccer games, whereby the extension of the “familiar” or “communal world” to a continental level leads a Latin American to support any South American team against a European or Asian one.
- 57.
Hua XV, 214.
- 58.
Ibid., 432–433.
- 59.
Ibid., 430.
- 60.
Lohmar (1993), 70. The underscoring is ours.
- 61.
Hua XV, 227–228, 233, 409ff.
- 62.
Lohmar (1993), 74–75.
- 63.
Ibid., 76–83. Lohmar asks whether an “ethics not tied to the familiar world” is possible, and simultaneously argues in favor of “reasonable grounds for the preservation of a plurality of forms of worldly-familiar ethos” (Ibid., 83–91). Although his concept is wide, since he also refers to it as ethos, deliberately we extend the field of his question to the possibility of recognizing the universal as such in its relation to the simultaneous preservation of particularity in general.
- 64.
Hua VI, 314–348.
- 65.
Hua XXIX and Hua XV.
- 66.
Hua VI, 320.
- 67.
Lohmar (1993), 85–86.
- 68.
Ibid., 86.
- 69.
Ibid., 87.
- 70.
Ibid., 88.
- 71.
Loc.cit.
- 72.
Ibid., 89.
- 73.
Hua XXIX, 338.
- 74.
“Precisely this normality first breaks when human beings enter from their own national vital space the alien nation’s one” (Ibid., 388).
- 75.
Ibid., 45. See also Lohmar (1993), 91.
- 76.
Waldenfels (1993), 53–56. See also Waldenfels (2001), 125–128.
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Lerner, R.R.P. (2010). Thinking of Difference and Otherness from a Husserlian Perspective. In: Nenon, T., Blosser, P. (eds) Advancing Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9286-1_11
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