Page 20 - Contribution To Phenomenology

REFLECTION ON THE CULTURAL DISCIPLINES 13

I am conscious of a world endlessly spread out in space, endlessly
becoming and having become in time. I am conscious of it: that signifies,
above all, that intuitively I find it immediately, that I experience it. By
my seeing, touching, hearing, and so forth, and in the different modes
of sensuous perception, corporeal physical things with some spatial
distribution or other are simply there for me, "on hand*' in the literal or
figurative sense, whether or not I am particularly heedful of them and
busied with them in my considering, thinking, feeling, or willing. Animate
beings too—human beings, let us say—are immediately there for me: I
look up; I see them; I hear their approach; I grasp their hands; talking
with them I understand immediately what they objectivate and think,
what feelings stir within them, what they wish or will.

In my waking consciousness I find myself in this manner at all times,
and without ever being able to alter the fact, in relation to the world
which remains one and the same, though changing with respect to the
composion of its contents. It is continually "on hand" for me and I
myself am a member of it. Moreover, this world is there for me not
only as a world of mere things, but also with the same immediacy as
a world of objects with values, a world of goods, a practical world, I
simply find the physical things in fi*ont of me furnished not only with
merely material determinations but also with value-characteristics, as
beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant, agreeable and disagreeable,
and the like. Immediately, physical things stand there as Objects of use,
the "table" with its "books," the "drinking glass," the ^Vase," the
"piano," etc. These value-characteristics and practical characteristics also
belong constitutively to the Objects "on hand" as Objects, regardless of
whether or not I turn to such characteristics and Objects. Naturally, this
applies not only in the case of the "mere physical things," but also in
the case of humans and brute animals belonging to my surroundings.
They are my "friends" or "enemies," my "servants" or "superiors,"
"strangers" or "relatives," etc.^^

^^ Edmund Husserl, Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, translated by Fred Kersten (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), 51-53. Cf. Second Book the recently translated,
by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1989), Part Three, "The Constitution of the Spiritual \geistes can also be rendered
as "cultural"] World," Edmund Husserl, "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,"
translated by Quentin Lauer, in Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of
Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1%5), Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the
European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology translated by David Carr
(Evanston, III: Northwestern University Press, 1970), etc.