Page 18 - Contribution To Phenomenology

REFLECTION ON THE CULTURAL DISCIPLINES 11

technologies to their young, hunt individually and in groups and bring
back meat to share with the larger group, engage in warfare as well as
murder and infanticide, vary by group culturally inasmuch as different
groups exploit different resources in similar ecosystems, and, as the
television programs of Jane Goodall show, have definitely individual
personalities. There are now even questions concerning how to distinguish
archaeologically between what are very early human sites and what may
actually be early chimpanzee sites! Plainly, these apes engage in cultural
practices at least like those classified as amateur above.
Phenomenological interest in the anthropoid apes goes back to the
early work of Gurwitsch, who was responding to research by the Gestalt
psychologists, especially K5hler, into the practical problem-solving
intelligence that chimpanzees and humans share.^^ This would seem part
of the structure common not only to the anthropoid apes and human
infants, but also the brain-injured adults investigated by Gelb and
Goldstein, the so-called primitive humans investigated by L6vy-Bruhl, and
"the practical attitude of normal [human] subjects.**^^ Altogether,
Gurwitsch presents the world of the natural attitude (of humans, although
probably subhumans have only this attitude) as originally practical and
habitual and made up of situations filled with interrelated functional or
practical objects (A chimpanzee world is cultural in these terms):

The life-world is essentially a socio-historical, that is a cultural, world. In
the life-world we do not encounter—at least not in the first place—mere
corporeal objects, pure perceptual things, which can be exhaustively described
in terms of what traditionally are called primary and secondary qualities. What
we encounter are cultural objects, objects of value, e.g., works of art, buildings
which serve specific purposes, like abodes, places for work, schools, libraries,
churches, and so on. Objects pertaining to the life-world present themselves
as tools, instruments, and utensils related to human needs and desires; they
have to be handled and used in appropriate ways to satisfy those needs and
.
to yield desired results . . . It is the specific sense of their instrumentality
which essentially defines these objects and makes them be what they are, that

^^ "Some Aspects and Developments of Gestalt Psychology" (1936), translated
by Richard Zaner in Aron Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology
(Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 50-52.
^^ Aron Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, edited by Lester
Embree (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 171 n. 23. In The
Structure of Behavior, translated by Alden Fischer, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963),
113-128, Maurice Merleau-Ponty also reflected at length on anthropoid life.