Abstract
Every time the totality of the existing is called into question as such, there is raised, either implicitly or explicitly, the problem of the originary. In general, calling into question the generality of the existing, subtracting it from the enchantment of the obvious with which it is normally and almost hypnotically assumed and exploited in everyday life, constitutes an introduction into the specifically philosophical attitude, distinguishing it clearly from the scientific one, where the continuous calling into question of the assumptions and results gradually achieved does not normally go beyond the functional economy of those methodological reasons within which scientific activity is rigorously accustomed to operate. The mysterious and even gratuitous attraction of the originary must necessarily be presupposed as the call that renders both possible and comprehensible the conversion of an existential and cognitive attitude, one that has become diffused and consolidated beyond measure, the attitude of general belief in the obvious, the naturalness of what explicit and implicit ethnical inculturation, for reasons of survival, has transmitted and rooted in the brain of every man right from the moment of birth, profoundly conditioning his everyday actions and thought.
The moderns are incapable of experiencing the sacred in their relations with Matter. M. Eliade, Forgerons et alchimistes, p. 129
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Notes
For a further discussion of these themes, I take the liberty of referring readers to my Prolegomeni ad una fenomenologia del profondo, Vol. I (Rome: 1970).
Cfr. E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, Vol. I (The Hague: 1950), §24.
The indigenous Westerner must suspend the attitude of objectivation typical of our culture if he wants to proceed with a phenomenological analysis. The non-Westerner, i.e. the indigenous of exotic cultures, must suspend the hyleticizing attitude typical of all the cultures of mythico-magico-religious cogency if he wants to inquire into the phenomenological sense of the data of his own culture. Further on in this paper we shall try to clarify this by introducing the important phenomenological distinction between objective noema and hyletic noema. One should however recall the solid and general principle of phenomenology by virtue of which an analysis of the sense of any cultural object, be it Western or exotic, is quite impossible without the rigorous suspension of every belief in its obvious existence.
In this connection, cfr. D. A. Conci and A. Ales Bello, Phenomenology as Semiotics of Archaic or “Different” Life Experiences. Toward an Analysis of the Sacred, Phenomenological Inquiry 15 (1991), (Belmont, Mass., USA), pp. 106–128
The general function of the hyle as manifestative power is already present in my Prolegomeni, op. cit., p. 149, where the reader can find, albeit presented in schematic form, the results attained at that time by the morphological reform of the Husserlian Erlebnis.
The loss of intentionality is an event common to all the cultures on our planet and is not, as Husserl holds, especially in Krisis, a pathological European phenomenon deriving from the decay of the Western sciences into theoretical techniques. Among others, it is my opinion that one must seriously and quite generally cast doubt on the efficacy of an inculturation that transmits to the newborn of the various ethnic groups not only the often unquestionable data of their own cultural traditions, but also the complex sense that has constituted them. The invisibility of this fundamental sense that acts in a hidden manner at the roots of each culture is therefore a physiological fact, and the specific task of phenomenology, which suspends once and for all every indigenous attitude, is precisely that of bringing it out from the hidden depths and into the full light of day.
Cfr. the interesting study by E. Fiorani, II naturale perduto, Una crisi ecologica nella modernità (Bari: 1989), especially pp. 16 and 91
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Conci, D.A. (1998). Disinterested Praise of Matter: Ideas for Phenomenological Hyletics. In: Kronegger, M., Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Life. Analecta Husserliana, vol 57. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5240-2_3
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