Abstract
One of the most puzzling facts about Husserl is that, up to a certain point, questions such as “what is phenomenology?,” “what is the difference between philosophy, religion and myth?,” “how do we draw a line between nature and culture?,” and many other more, can all be answered thanks to the same concept, namely the concept of “attitude” (Einstellung).
Mais la connaissance est la seule des dimensions du vif que je peux t’enseigner en une nuit. Je t’abreuve de concepts parce que ces concepts t’aideront à mieux lire les phénomènes et à mieux éprouver; parce que savoir ce que peut un vif t’épargnera des contresens fatals.Alain Damasio
Never opened myself this way | Life is ours, we live it our way | All these words, I don’t just say | And nothing else matters. Metallica
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Notes
- 1.
Two noteworthy exceptions to this trend have to be mentioned. The first is Herbert Leyendecker’s Zur Phänomenologie der Täuschungen. In this book, the author seems to rely on a Husserl-inspired concept of attitude though developed in a somehow original way (Leyendecker 1913, pp. 45–74). Though he does not provide any strict definition of this concept, in his study on the phenomenology of perception and illusions, Leyendecker singles out a series of attitudes, such as “considering in view of testing,” “scanning,” “investigating,” “looking,” “ordering,” “searching for,” “working with,” “counting,” “collecting,” and the like (Leyendecker, p. 47). He also shows how attitudes select certain aspects of a perceived thing and discard others (Leyendecker, pp. 47–50), bringing out what he calls a phenomenon of “acceptance” (Akzeptes) (p. 53). Finally, he also goes as far as to sketch some general forms of what he calls the “fundamental attitudes” (Grundeinstellungen) (Leyendecker, p. 66). Leyendecker’s contribution, however, despite its appeal, has been utterly uninfluential in the phenomenological tradition. The second noteworthy exception is Karl Jasper’s Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919). Worldviews, Jaspers says, have to be studied from both sides, that of the subject and that of the object. Seen from the subjective side (vom Subjekt her) world-views appear as “attitudes” (Einstellungen), seen from the objective side (vom Objekt her) as “world pictures” (Weltbilder) (Jaspers 1919, p. 38). According to this stipulation, Jaspers devotes the first chapter of his magnus opus to the ordered classification of three main groups of “attitudes,” namely the “objective” (gegenständliche) (Jaspers 1919, pp. 40–78), the “self-reflective” (selbstreflektierte) (pp. 78–103) and the “enthusiastic” (enthusiastische) (pp. 103–121). These main attitudes are further divided into the partially overlapping sub-categories of “active” (active), “contemplative” (contemplative) and “mystical” (mystische), and correlated to their corresponding “world pictures”. The objectual Einstellung, for instance, is the subjective counterpart of the sensible-spatial Weltbild, the self-reflective one corresponds to the psychological Weltbild, the contemplative and rational Einstellung is correlated to the philosophical-metaphysical Weltbild, etc. (Jaspers 1919, p. 38). Jaspers also goes as far as to provide a tentative definition of “attitudes,” understood as “general modes of behavior (generelle Verhaltungsweisen) that could be studied objectively, at least to some extent, as transcendental forms,” as “directions of the subject using a certain gridwork of transcendental forms (Richtungens des Subjekts, die ein bestimmtes Gitterwerk der transzendentlen Formen). The leap from attitudes to world pictures is the leap from the subject to the object, from the subjective mode of behavior to the objective expression, from subjective creation to the one which is impressed from the outside, from the mere possibility to the actual spread in the objectual expanse” (Jaspers 1919, p. 39). As we shall see shortly, Husserl’s “attitudes” could hardly be characterized as “modes of behaviour functioning as transcendental forms” or simply as “directions of the subject”.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
The quote appears in the Textkritische Anmerkungen to the 1950 edition of Husserliana III/1 edited by Walter Biemel but has been removed from the 1976 edition edited by Karl Schuhmann. It is a Randbemerkung to the 1922 second edition of Ideas I.
- 5.
This point is neatly identified in Staiti (2009).
- 6.
“Personal life means living communalized as ‘I’ and ‘we’ within a community-horizon, and this in communities of various simple or stratified forms such as family, nation, supranational community. The word life here does not have a physiological sense; it signifies purposeful life accomplishing spiritual products” (Hua VI, p. 314/270).
- 7.
Since the universality of the world is not that of a genus, awareness of the saliency of all saliencies is not achieved by adding piecemeal salient experiences, carried out in the theoretical attitude. It is only when the world as a whole has become salient, through a kind of theoretical “leap,” that the regions of the world also become salient as regions. The correct movement, then, according to Husserl, goes from philosophy (as the universal science of the whole of the world) to the particular sciences, not vice-versa.
- 8.
The importance of this latter point will become manifest in Chap. 11 of this volume.
- 9.
This is the famous passage where Husserl talks of attitudes metaphorically in terms of “style”. It should be clear, however, that this is not a general attempt to define the concept of attitude, but, more specifically, the description of the latter’s normative import on one singular life within the collective life of a community. A description that Husserl needs to provide, in the Vienna Lecture, in order to explain how the “universal interest towards the world” unifies in a rather distinctive way the singular lives of all the members of the community of philosophers and scientists through time. On this point, see, again, the developments in Chaps. 10 and 11 of this volume.
- 10.
Something still different is what Husserl calls the “fictional attitude” (die Einstellung einer Fiktion), i.e. the attitude I am-in when I try to explore a phantasy landscape in a harmonious way, as if I were trying to grasp or discover some of its cognitive features. In this case the act of phantasy is part of a Gesamtakt which includes acts of the δόξα. See the example of the depicted centaur-landscape, one of Husserl’s favourites (Hua XXIII, p. 586/704).
- 11.
On this point, see Huemer (2003).
- 12.
See below Chap. 11 of this volume.
References
II – Other Works
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Majolino, C. (2023). The Reach of Attitudes. In: The Invention of Infinity: Essays on Husserl and the History of Philosophy. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 124. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34150-2_3
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