Page 149 - Contribution To Phenomenology

142 /. N, MOHANTY

of familiarities" (Unbekanntheiten im still der Bekanntheiten), they are
understood as "possibilities for experience" (ibid, 430).
Taken together with various remarks I made earlier (to the effect
that within the home-culture, there is also an other), the above implies
that the contrast between the home and familiar culture and the foreign,
the unfamiliar is a permanent feature of every **world" (ibid, 431), one
does not have to go out to meet the other, the unfamiliar, the unintel-
ligible, the strange, the unknown. One meets it within one's own home
world.
The other, the alien, is the limit to the understood and the known.
The native is "foreign" because, and in so, far as he is different, he is
different because, and in so far as he is not understood. Even when the
social scientist, or the empathetic traveller understands the native, this
understanding can overcome the foreignness (Fremdheit), only when it is
based on mutual communication. More often than not, the attempt to
understand the other is, in such cases, one-sided. The scientist "observes"
and "interprets" the native. At most, there is an informant who "tran-
slates" the native's speech for the scientist. Only when this one-way track
of "making sense" of the native is overcome by the "mutuahty" of
"making sense" of each other, the foreignness is overcome. A common
world, mutually shared, thereby begins to constitute itself.
In view of the fact that there is the other's homeworld which is
different from mine, which I do not fully understand, and also in view of
the fact that even within my home-world not everyone has the same
access to all its dimensions ("science," "reUgion," "music" etc.)—how is
it possible to say that we all experience—in some sense of "experien-
cing"—the one and the same world? Husserl asks this question repeatedly
in the intersubjectivity papers. What does the identical world and the
constitution of it mean, how is the subject as subject "for" this world
constituted? ("Was besagt da identische Welt and Konstitution derselben,
was characterisiert die Subjekte als Subjekte *fur' diese Welt?") (Hua
XV, 228). The question, for him, amounts to asking:

. . . to what extent and how far I can take over, through understand-
ing, their (i.e., of the strangers') experiential structures, and so can
progress towards a synthesis of their homeworld with mine? How do I
arrive at, and I must, a comprehensive consistency?

(. . . inwiefern ich und wie weit ich ihre (die Fremden).
Erfahrungsgestalten in Nachverstehen uhemehmen, also zu einer Synthesis