Page 22 - Contribution To Phenomenology

REFLECTION ON THE CULTURAL DISCIPLINES 15

be recognized as belonging to the species of positional characteristics,
above all values and uses, that are constituted in learned, perhaps skilled
(but there are bad habits), and thus habitual and routine life. The
automaticaUy or instinctually valued and willed is not cultural.
Not all combinations of cultural practices are cultural disciplines.
Besides those combinations that are amateur and crafty, there are
disciplines made up of cultural practices that are not cultural disciplines.
In these the cultural characteristics that objects, situations, and worlds are
ahvays akeady equipped with are set aside. In the cultural disciplines, by
contrast, these characteristics are not only not set aside but are central
to what the objects dealt with are. When reflected upon, cultural
practices can be recognized to be intentive to focal objects that are in
situations that themselves are in worlds, all three of which, by virtue of
the values and uses they have always already acquired in habitual life,
i.e., their cultural characteristics, are cultural. Thus generically charac-
terized, cultural life can be thematized in different respects and in
different manners by different individual cultural disciplines and species.
This general statement may become clearer when the question of the
three species of cultural disciplines is discussed presently.
To close these remarks about the subject matter in general of the
cultural disciplines, it may be pointed out that in his Guide to Translating
Husserl Cairns also alternatively proposes "cultural sciences" as a
translation of Geisteswissenschaften and that the title of what is arguably
the central essay of the philosopher who has written the most in the
phenomenological philosophy of such sciences, i.e., Alfred Schutz, which
title is translated as "Phenomenology and the Social Sciences," was
originally entitled "Phaenomenologie und Kulturwissenschaft (Larchmont
6.8/1939)"^' Schutz uses Geisteswissenschaft and Sozialwissenschaft as well
as Kulturwissenschaft repeatedly in his German writings from the
beginning and, although his emphasis was on Weberian or verstehende
sociology and so-called Austrian economics, he additionally recognized
archaeology, art history, ethnology, history, linguistics, philology, psychol-
ogy, and political science as belonging to the same class of sciences.

^^ Schutz Nachlass, 13,758-13,790. The original of this Nachlass is held at
Yale's Beineke Library and copies are held in the Sozialwissenschafts Archiv,
Konstanz, and The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc., Rorida
Atlantic University. The English translation of this essay is reprinted in Alfred
Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I, edited by Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1962).