Page 19 - Contribution To Phenomenology

12 LESTER EMBREE

is, what they mean to the members of the socio-historical group to whose
life-world they belong.^^

This notion of culture that can include the practices of apes is
certainly not the same as "high culture," which can be said to include the
cultural disciplines of art, literature, organized religion, science, and high
technology. It may best be called "basic culture." Basic culture can—but
does not need to—include high culture within it, and, while high culture
requires basic culture, the contrary is not, again, the case. This is crucial
for any approach to culture from below rather than from above, an
approach that thus does not leave "lower" combinations of cultural
practices under-appreciated if not ignored. As members of the 61ite,
intellectuals can be tempted to look down on the practical disciplines,
e.g., engineering, as well as the sub-disciplinary practices of the crafty
and amateur sorts, such as plumbing and housework. If one prefers to
approach culture from above, the reasons for doing so should be explicit
and well-argued. Also, one should recall in which type of profession
Socrates was able to discern some non-philosophical wisdom (and the
folly it was prone to) and think about where his scheme might be
expanded to include the disciplined combinations of cultural practices.
Contributions to the phenomenology of cultural life or cultural worlds
thus viewed can be found before Gurwitsch in the early Heidegger,^^
Scheler,^* and even Husserl, who in 1913 writes.

^^ Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, 143, cf. 92 ff. Cf. also Lester
Embree, "Some Noetico-Noematic Analyses of Action and Practical Life," in John
Drummond and Lester Embree, (editors) The Phenomenology of the Noema,
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), Part II. and "A Gurwitschean
Model for the Explanation of Culture or How Spear Throwers are Used,"
forthcoming in the volume of essays edited by J. Claude Evans from the symposium
in memory of Aron Gurwitsch held at the Graduate Faculty of the New School in
December 1991.
^^ Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie & Edward
Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962). Some later works are also relevant.
^* Works such as Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, translated by Peter
Heath, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), Formalism in Ethics and Non-
Formal Ethics of Values, translated by Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk,
(Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), and Selected Philosophical
Essays, translated by David L. Lachterman, (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University
Press, 1973) contain many insights relevant for the cultural disciplines.