Page 142 - Contribution To Phenomenology

Chapter 5

The Other Culture

J. N. Mohanty
Temple University

Abstract: / question the idea of the purely "my own" world, and
so have found no way of formulating the problem of constitution
of the other culture analogously to what Husserl does in the Fifth
Meditation. The other is a part of my world—as much as the
strange, the unfamiliar and the unintelligible are.

How is the sense "other culture" constituted? That is the question I will
be reflecting upon in this essay.
I start with the assumption that phenomenological constitution is
constitution of sense, not of the thing. So when in the Fifth Cartesian
Meditation, Husserl undertakes to solve the problem of the constitution
of the alter ego, he was—on my view—concerned with the constitution
of the sense "alter ego" but not with the constitution of the alter ego
itself. The charge of soUpsism therefore is misplaced. He, i.e., Husserl,
knew there are other egos. He wondered how transcendental phenome-
nology, with its thesis that all meanings are constituted within the
experiences of the transcendentally purified life of the thinking ego, could
have room for the sense "other ego." The extreme methodological solip-
sism practised in the Fifth Meditation, along with the reduction to one's
sphere of ownness, is undertaken only to be able to formulate this
problem in its most radical form and, from that radical solipsistic
position, he tries to build up step by step the genesis of the sense "other
ego." Understandably, many who otherwise admire Husserl's work have
questioned the success of this project. But before one wants to judge
the success or the faflure of Husserl's execution of the task, we must be
clear as to what the task was. For example, Husserl never set upon

135
M. Daniel and L. Embree (eds.), Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, 135-146.
© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.