Page 148 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE OTHER CULTURE 141

Thus, to exhibit the constitution of the concept "material object" is to
identify the type of intentional experiences which originarily present
something as a material object. It is thus that one says, in phenomen-
ology, that material objects—not these things, but their sense as material
object—are constituted in outer perceptions, not, to be sure, in one single
outer perception, but in a concatenation of them. To return to our
question, we may construe it, then, as: how do we recognize a culture as
a foreign culture? How is a foreign culture given as a foreign one?
There is no problem in recognizing that they, the natives, have a
culture. To perceive them as other egos is to perceive them as having
intentional experiences like mine, as conferring meanings on their
intersubjectively shared world, to perceive them as dying and new ones
as being born, to take them as having a generative history of their own
as we have ours; thus they have their own culture. But what experiences
on our part serve to present their culture as being a "foreign" culture?
There is a spurious notion of "foreign" which, if my arguments are
correct, we need to reject. In that sense of "totally foreign" (and its
correlate "purely ours"), we only presumptively apply those concepts to
their culture (and to ours, respectively). That is the best we can say.
Even these presumptive ascriptions need to be correctly evaluated.
There is a large common framework, within which—and only within
which—differences show themselves. First of all, the different cultural
worlds all belong to the same Nature; they, rather their territories, are
parts of the same spatio-temporal system. We and they perceive the same
nature—plants, trees, animals, rocks, mountains, waters, and heavenly
bodies, although they may not be ascribing to them the same meanings
as we do. Secondly, we, as well as they, are embodied, and our bodies
are human bodies—similarly structured. Third, it would be a fairly
reasonable assumption that our mental lives of some level have the same
structure, even if possibly our different cultures allow for differences at
some other level. Fourth, our biological needs and the basic human drives
are at some level the same. Given these over all shared framework, it is
only reasonable to expect that no culture can be totally different from
ours. Consequently, as Husserl writes, "Everything that is so foreign, so
unintelligible, has a core of familiarity" {Unbekanntheiten im still der
Bekanntheiten) (Hua XV, 432). The completely foreign is still familiar
inasmuch as there are there spatial things (Raumdinge), men and animals,
villages, landscapes, etc. (Ibid,, 430). They are "unfamiUarities in the style