Abstract
This chapter investigates the ambiguity of Husserl’s conception of cultural objects. The significance of this ambiguity is explored by highlighting its resemblance to Husserl’s own articulation of “the experience of the other” (Fremderfahrung). Drawing on Waldenfels’ concept of the other (das Fremde), the chapter argues that encountering cultural objects from foreign cultures should not lead to a neglect of the differences between cultural objects in favor of recognizing their commonalities, as Husserl ultimately suggests.
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Notes
- 1.
In regard to the origin of cultural sense, Molly Frigid Flynn explains, “Understanding cultural objects, including words, requires, first, the recognizing the living body’s fullness-of-soul, and second, noticing how its spirituality spreads to things involved in the body’s movement” (Flynn, 2012, pp. 73-74). She also points out that “all cultural sense begins here. The spirit of the person, which animates the person’s living body, animates also things in the world by way of the person’s bodily involvement with them” (p. 73). Flynn emphasizes that cultural sense originates from the human body’s engagement with cultural objects through the evocation of spirit, without necessarily producing or utilizing them. However, one may question whether the human body can engage with natural objects in the same way. If this is the case, it becomes difficult to distinguish between cultural and natural objects, resulting in a loss of the specificity of cultural sense.
- 2.
Similar examples are to be found in regard to the difference between Europe and China, see Hua XXXIX (p. 159).
- 3.
According to Klaus Held’s interpretation, this “one world” is constituted in the same way as the intersubjectivity illuminated in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. Just like the other subject (alter ego) is to be recognized through his body, especially through the similarity of his body and mine, so is the forerunner of the other cultural world recognizable through basic human phenomena like birth and death. The experience of generality creates so to speak the bridge between culture and culture (Held, 1991).
- 4.
See Hua IX (p. 380) and Hua XV (p. 632), where Husserl says, “For all that, no matter how foreign, there is commonality, earth and heaven, day and night, stones and trees, mountain and valley, diverse animals—everything that can be grasped analogically in the most general type, albeit as strange.” I take this citation from Dermot Moran (2011, p. 463-494).
- 5.
In the essay “A Gurwitschean Model for Explaining Culture or how to use an Atlatl,” Embree mentions a student who happens to encounter an artifact used by ancient Indians in North America while wandering in the wild. The student begins with little knowledge about the utensil, seeing it first as “a stick of wood less than a meter long with a small protuberance at an end” or at most “a piece of equipment of some sort from the caves.” He ends up knowing the item as “a spear thrower,” which is named “atlatl” by professional archeologists (Embree, 1997).
References
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Yu, CC. (2023). Cultural Objects with or Without Cultural Difference?. In: Belvedere, C., Gros, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Macrophenomenology and Social Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34712-2_11
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