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"world" had not, at the time, become a theme in its own right. He
approachedthese inquiriesin two different ways: first,'in the course of
detailed investigations undertakento clarify the nature of perception;
second, in connection with the problem of the phenomenologicalre-
duction. In the latter context one also finds the motives that, in the
period beginning about 1920, led Husserl to probe ever more deeply
and minutely into the problem of the world.
Let us, for the present, confine our attention to the approach
first mentioned-which was also the earliest to bring to light certain
world-structures.
While elaborating his Logische Untersuchungen, Husserl had al-
ready preparedto continue them by seeking, in the sphereof intuition,
for the "fullness" that, as the substrateof judgments, gives-them their
sense and is a presuppositionfor their "evidence." Thus perception,
with its modifications (rememberingand other "re-productive"acts),
became his theme. Analysis of the perception of a particular thing-
analysisof the synthesesin which the perception of a thing comes
about-shows that one cannot confine oneself to the thing-percep-
tion as an isolated phenomenon, if one intends to discover its concrete
sense. The perceptual thing is always a thing in front of its objective
background, a background of objects consciously and more or less
explicitly meant along with it. The concrete nature of that as which
the thing stands before our eyes always involves such co-meanings:
the table is "'atable in the room," "in front of the window," "in my
house"; the house "on the street," "in this town"; etc. Thus, every
particular datum involves references to perceptions that might take
place from thereon-references to them as potentialitiesof experience:
"I can go on from here and, if I do, I shall see this and that." These
references need not always become conscious as explicit themes; how-
ever, they can at any time become "actualized." Every particular
percept brings its horizon of possible further perceptions, not only
those perceptions in which it would itself become more precisely
known with respect to its constituents but also those relating to the
surroundingsin which it stands, the surroundingsthat we are always
conscious of as belonging to the thing. In other words, the thing has
its horizon: first of all as a spatialhorizon, which, taken in its full con-
cretion, is our surrounding world. On every hand this world we live
in offers open possibilitiesof further exerienceso that, as we apprehend
it, it is a part of "the" world-that part, namely, which is directly ac-
cessible to us. And, though it is a part, it is not rigidly limited. On
all sides it admits of enlargement, by which, as we say, new aspects
of "the" world become accessible to us. But the horizon of the per-
if we look and do not find the thing where we expected it, then we
find somethingelse there; every "not" is a "not so but otherwise." The
process of conflict and negation may go on thus without limit, but
even if we ultimately see ourselvescompelled to cancel whole sections
of our supposedlyperceptual life-to regard them as illusory with re-
spect to their supposedvalidity-still everything else in our surround-
ing world remainsas it was before. No matter how large the segments
that prove erroneous, there always remains a basis: ultimately and
underlying everything else, the basis which is our world. On that
basis not only every confirmed experience but also every negation,
indeed, every considering of anything as probable or possible, takes
place.
As a whole, our world, the world in which we find ourselvescon-
sciously living, remains certain, no matter how many details become
doubtful or invalid. Only particular parts of it ever undergo the
correction, "not so but otherwise." This means that every particular
positing or negating presupposesa universal basis: belief in the world,
certainty of the world. Every positing is a positing and every can-
celling is a cancelling on this basis,which we can never disturb in the
natural attitude. Therefore, if the bracketing is to be really universal
and not limited to particularacts and their meant objects qua meant,
it must embrace this basis of all particular positings: "the general
thesis essentialto the natural attitude" must be "put out of action."3
In this way, while developing the doctrine of the phenomenolog-
ical reduction, Husserl acquiredan initial definition of the concept of
the world, a clarification owing to his insight into the horizon-struc-
ture of every experience. The world is the all-embracing doxic basis,
the total horizon that includes every particular positing. If, in these
analyses,Husserl was primarilyconcerned with acts of believing (acts
of doxic positing as existence-positing) and acts of perceiving
(as doxic, existence-positing acts of a lower level), the reason
is that, according to his conviction, existence-positing acts and es-
pecially acts of perceiving (in the sense of immediate aisthesis) are
fundamental to acts of every other kind. If anything is to be the
object of a valuing or of a practical action (a striving, goal-setting act
of willing), it must be-first and fundamentally-something perceiv-
ed. Acts of believing, acts in which being is posited with doxic cer-
tainty, found all other acts.4 It follows that, in being the basisof every
doxic positing, the world is, at the same time, the basisfor all our atti-
tudes and acts of valuing or willing, which are built on our beliefs in
being, the acts in which being is posited. In brief, the world is the
3. Cf. Iden. ? 32. p. 56.
4. Cf. Erfahrung und Urtell, pp. 66ff.
are set up, new insights won, new standardsof action established. But
no matter how far we go-not only back into actual history and pre-
history but also in that free varying of the conditions of human ex-
istence which affords us a survey of the possibleforms of living with
one another in a world-we still find communities living in a world.
It is essentially impossible to find men in any "pre-worldly" state,
becauseto be human, to be aware of oneself as a man and to exist as
a human self, is preciselyto live on the basisof a world-at first quite
as a matter of course and without any cognizance of the fact; then,
perhaps, reflectively, with an awarenessof the limits of that world,
an awarenessof its horizontal character. The world has always been
there already, as a presupposition for the possibility of particular
experiencesin it, a presuppositionfor anyone anywhere finding him-
self as a human being. And this having-already-been-theremeans, on
the other hand, that men have already been at work fashioning such
a world-horizon and have transmitted their awarenessto those who
followed after. Accordingly, this possession of a world points to
previous subjective accomplishments. It does not mean simply that
something ready-given was there; rather, what is alreadythere is there
precisely as what one has learned from others to apprehend. And
this continues to be the case, no matter how far back we inquire. Such
analysesare significant because they show, on the one hand, that any
surroundingworld, with its form at any particular time, is functimn-
ally dependent on, and inseparablefrom, the community of men who
shape it, and, on the other hand, that intentional analysis is also a
method by which the historical development of surrounding worlds,
and of the communities of men living in them, can be understood
from the inside, as a subjectivelyproduced result. Analysis of this sort
is what Dilthey envisagedwhen he required that the human-historical
world be comprehendedas a tissue of effects (Wirkungszusammen-
hang); it is what he himself initiated at several points. Its goal is to
comprehendhistorical processesas completely human, and that means
comprehendingthem as processesthat can, as it were, be relived from
the inside in other words, the goal is to acquire deeper knowledge
of the kind striven for in any cultural science, by an intentional
analysis of the essential structures of human world-shaping co6per-
ation.
But this way of considering things-i. e., the "mundane" way,
which, when carried over into the empirical sphere, is also the way
characteristicof the cultural sciences-is limited in that it can bring
to light only this correlation between a particular form of world and
a particular community of men. In so doing, we always presuppose
a period when he did not yet possess the clues eventually unravelled
by his mundane-phenomenologicalanalysis of the world. Thus his
initial constitutional analyses were guided by an as yet unclarified
awarenessof world-structures, and this circumstance imposed limi-
tations that were only gradually, and perhapsnever completely, over-
come. This meant that Husserl's early analyses were guided not by
such elaborated clues but by what is most immediately given in ex-
perience. And a world as a whole, as the horizon of every possible
particularexperience-even though it be conceived as the above-men-
tioned "minimum" world of Nature, still in no way formed by men
but ready-given as a basis for all their deeds-is precisely not the
pre-given existent that lies most immediately at hand in experience.
As has been shown, no "world" is an immediate object of experience;
the eventual experiencing of a world is mediated and complicated in
many different ways. In our experiencing we are directed first of all
towards the particularexistent,as given in perception. (As already
said, all other attitudes or acts are built on "perception," in the sense
of aisthesis.) Therefore, the particular object of perception and the
togetherness of perceivable things became the immediately available
clues for Husserl'sconstitutional analysis. They determined the path
that he followed beyond what is at first given immediately in natural
experience, as his inquiry penetrated gradually into the deeper layers
of constitutive accomplishment. For this very reason, the question
of the world in its above-formulated sense, as the total horizon of
experience and as something of which the community is conscious-
something that is pre-given as the basis for every communal accom-
plishment and yet is itself formed through communal accomplish-
ments-this question could not arise at the outset. In the constitu-
tional analysesthat lie closest at hand, the world is encountered chiefly
in the guise of the immediate horizon of perception, the perceptual
situation, and Husserl did not go on immediately to raise the problem
of the world as a whole. Therefore the question of this horizon as
always already there, and the fact that these predelineationsalso are
products of subjective accomplishments, could not enter his field of
vision at the outset; subjectivity, as producing this horizon, could be
in no way comprehendedforthwith.
To understand this, let us consider how Husserl's reflective in-
quiry proceeded,starting with the thing given in perception, the per-
ceptually Meant as such.
After analyzing all the intentional accomplishmentsthat provide
an initial understanding of the character of a perceived thing as
standing before us-its givenness in adumbrations (Abschattungen),
Only in one direction did Husseri overstep this limit and inves-
tigate what subjectivity accomplishesnot only by way of constitution
inside the predelineatedhorizon but also by way of constitutively
forming the horizon itself. In this one direction, however, he did so
very early, namely in his analysesof the consciousnessof time. These
went back to his establishmentof the fact that even the simplest
sensuous "data" are not mere data but always unities of duration
which must first be constituted as unities in the temporal flow of con-
sciousness. According to the clear wording of these investigations,
the consciousnessof time accomplishes not only the production of
immanent unities of duration in inner time but also-in the structures
of primitive impression, retention, and protention-the constitutive
production of the possibilityof enduring and passing away in general,
the possibility of apprehendingsomething as enduring, becoming, or
remaining. The producing of the temporal horizon itself becomes
the theme when these structures are considered; they involve more
than the apprehendingof a temporal content and temporal relation-
ships. But the consciousnessof time is precisely an accomplishment
that produces a universalform; and this form is nothing, unless it has
a content. In the beginning, and for a long time after, "content"
meant for Husserl that which is passively pre-given-the sensuously
given and its arrangement in a field-which then becomes the basis
for every constitutive grasping of an object. If the world, in its
entire horizonal structure-which, after all, is not only temporal-
is to be understood as a constituted product of transcendental sub-
jectivity, then this ultimate pre-givennesscannot be allowed to stand
simply as such. Rather one must show how the distinction between
activity and passivepre-givennessis only provisional,how that which
at first we find as passivity has its constitutive origin in subjective
accomplishments,a task which Husserl seems to have attacked many
times during his last years.
On the other hand, the horizonal structure of the world implies
that everything apprehendedon the basis of something pre-given, no
matter how the latter has come about, is itself pre-given in a certain
manner as an acquainted object of some type or other, and that the
apprehending of it can be orientated and deepened only according
to the pre-given horizon. No matter how far back we go in tracing
the genesis of the world, no matter how greatly we impoverish the
predelineationof already acquainted types of existents, a ready-made
horizon always remains,if anything at all can still be grasped. There
must always be the horizonal anticipation that the object will be an
existent of some kind, "something or other" of the type "object- in-
general," assuming that the latter should still be called a type rather
than an a priori condition for the forming of any type. It is always
presupposedthat, as a matter of fact, the passively pre-given "data"
are somehow united synthetically in a pole (which we subsequently
call an object) and, accordingly, that for every apprehending even
the first apprehending,guided by the poorest horizons-this at least
is pre-delineatedas a horizon: intentional pole, "unity of a manifold."
This cannot itself be an acquired type; it is a necessarypresupposition
for every intentional acquisition. Only when this predelineation is
also exhibited in its origin, as deriving from accomplishmentson the
part of the transcendentalego-only then has the task been completed.
Only then can we say that the origin of the world as horizon has been
clarified, and that our transcendentalconstitutional analysishas fully
displayed the sense of the world as something fashioned in transcend-
ental subjectivity.
The thoughts developed by Husserl in his last years must be
surveyed before we can see how far he progressed with this task;
until late in life he remained unaware of the problem. Only then
shall we be able to judge how far his concept of the world, as an in-
clusive a priori originating from subjectivity itself, is superior to tra-
ditional philosophical concepts, and whether the tradition, with its
conception of the a priori, involves something to which Husserl, fol-
lowing his own course, could not do justice.'0
LUDWIG LANDGREBE.
INSTITUT SUPERIEUR DE PHILOSOPHIE
LOUVAIN, BELGIUM.