Page 24 - Contribution To Phenomenology

REFLECTION ON THE CULTURAL DISCIPLINES 17

refers to how we learn to value neatly trimmed lawns positively. A society
can be feigned in which people are enculturated in such a way that a
lawn, neatly trimmed or not, is a strange, unnatural, even frightening and
thus negatively valued object. After all, plants do not normally grow in
homogeneous, flat, and rectangular forms like outdoor imitations of
carpets and thus lawns are as unnatural as trees lined up in orchards or
in tree farms like soldiers on parade. For the suitably prepared, however,
these arrangements are not unnatural.
To take another example and to look at it differently, the owners,
coaches, players, etc., in professional sports may all be out themselves to
make money, but the combination of practices that is the sport is a
failure rather than a success if the fans do not enjoy the game. Baseball
as much culminates in evaluation as fine art does. Whether art and sport
are crafts or disciplines is a different question. The cultural is, of course,
often taken for granted, but reflective examination, particularly when
stimulated by comparisons or history, can challenge whether mowed
lawns, like artfully slaughtered cattle (i.e., bull fights), are universally and
necessarily beautiful things. And the highly trained landscape architect
may also be seeking money and reputation and pursuing a career, but if
that discipline is about the design, creation, and maintenance of
landscapes (within the standards of the given cultural world), then lawn
mowing is sometimes part of something that culminates in the apprecia-
tion of beauty in gardens, parks, boulevards, etc.
The trifurcation of cultural practices offered above in Part I and the
trifurcation of the cultural disciplines in the present section can be
combined into a cross-classification (See Figure 2). As has been intimated,
the distinguishing of the species of cultural disciplines is best done with
respect to the type of positionaUty that predominates in the culmination
of the practice that pertains to the discipline. Cultural life and cultural
practices always concretely include types of awareness, such as perception,
recollection, and representational awareness, but they also concretely
include positionaUty of all three already mentioned types, which can
alternatively be referred to as the doxic, praxic, and pathic strata and
positional characteristics.
When the doxic component, i.e., the stratum of believing that always
occurs in the concrete intentive process and the correlative belief
characteristic in the concrete object as it presents itself, predominates,
then the cultural practice can be called, in a broad signification, cognitive.