Page 21 - Contribution To Phenomenology

14 LESTER EMBREE

What some have called "human existence," but which may be better
called "cultural life/' can be sketched in general terms. The matter in
question involves collective as well as individual subjectivity or intentive
life and is in society and in history as well as in nature, but the
distinctive thing is that it is cultural. Negatively speaking, culture is, as
intimated, not confined to humans. It is also not inherently linguistic,
which is not to say that cultural practices and cultural life may not be
extensively speech-accompanied and profoundly speech-affected, but only
that they are not in essence always infected by speech.^* If cultural life
as such were always speech-infected, speaking would have to be going on
at all times, rather as perceiving and valuing and even striving are to be
found always to go on in life. Recourse to unconscious language, to the
potential capacity for language, or to the broadening of speech to include,
curiously, non-linguistic processes, such as perception, is to hypothesize
epicycles. Seeing is not comprehending, interpreting, or reading.
Positively speaking, culture is a matter of what is learned especially
with respect to valuing and willing. "Willing" is used here in a broad
signification and is thus not confined to cases in which an I engages in
making or executing a decision. Rather, it includes all broadly volitional
or practical processes in which objects making up situations and worlds
are constituted as ends and means or, in general, as useful. Indeed, the
emphasis is also on the routine and habitual rather than the spon-
taneous. Valuing also can be positive, negative, or neutral and the
positive, negative, and neutral values of objects are correlatively
constituted in this stratum. BeUeving and the belief characteristics that
objects have correlative to it can also be learned, as are, it can further
be contended, awarenesses of various types, the perceptual included, but
recognition of the strata of learned or habitual valuing and willing and their
correlates is sufficient to distinguish cultural practices as cultural.
Since the formal and natural sciences are disciplines that are cultural
in that they essentially include learned valuing and willing but are not
cultural disciplines, it needs to be recalled that the cultural disciplines are
cultural by virtue of the cultural objects, situations, and worlds dealt with
in them. Where the objects as they are intended to or as they present
themselves in these practices are concerned, cultural characteristics can

^* Lester Embree, "zoon logon ekhon," in Lester Embree, (editor) Essays in
Memory of Aron Gurwitsch (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in
Phenomenology <fe University Press of America, 1983).