Page 145 - Contribution To Phenomenology

138 / N. MOHANTY

II

Are the two questions really analogous? Or, do they only seem to be
alike, that is to say, alike only verbally? As a matter of fact, closer
examination reveals important disanalogies between the two questions.
The solipsistic ego is arrived at by a special reduction Husserl
instituted in the Fifth Meditation—namely, the reduction to the sphere
of one's ownness. In this reduction, one removes from one's experience
all that refers to other egos, so all experiences of material objects and
all cultural predicates, all intersubjectively constituted predicates. One
thereby reduces one's experience to experience of one's Uving body with
its sensations, kinaesthesias, also one's internally experienced ego-pole. It
is only after such a methodological step has been carried out, that the
genuinely transcendental problem regarding the genesis of the sense
"other ego" can be formulated: how could my experiences, as so reduced,
nevertheless provide motivations for predicating "other ego" of something
that appears within that reduced sphere? Husserl's solution to this
problem is well-known, and need not be recapitulated here.
Can an analogous step be taken with regard to the genesis of the
sense "other culture"? Such a step would require me, us rather, to
remove from our soUpsistic cultural experience all components that derive
from commerce with other cultures. But how can I ever be sure that
some components of my culture are not derived from other sources? In
other words, a corresponding reduction to the sphere of my, or our,
ownness cannot be carried out at this level. Only the myth of purity of
a culture may mislead one to beheve that one can have such a sphere
of one's ownness at this level.
The disanalogy can be pressed stiU further. At the level of the ego
and its other, there is a real otherness, a discontinuity, a discreteness,
which is hard to deny. It is, in other words, hard to deny that A and
B, two different persons, have two different egos—howsoever their
contents may overlap. A reduction to the sphere of ownness is therefore
a meaningful project. You just strip away whatever contents you may owe
to others conceptually. For example, that my experience contains
perceptions of a physical Nature is undeniable, but perception of a
physical Nature implies possible intersubjectivity. Striping such contents
away nevertheless would leave my ego standing in its own sphere of
ownness, which does not contain anything it conceptually owes to others.
The fact of my ego's self-contained purity, at this level of discourse, is