Page 251 - Contribution To Phenomenology

244 STANFORD M. LYMAN & LESTER EMBREE

end-use and means-use, correlating intentively with willing and being thus
different from belief characteristics and values in objects as they present
themselves.
Probably the most interesting issue for our concern is how some
determinations are selected and used for the recognition of people as
belonging to ethnic and racial groups. I could imagine most researchers
approach this in terms of language and concepts or interpretation, but
what I would pursue is the pre-predicative and non-verbal structures of
awareness and beheving and how these are motivationally connected with
valuing and willing. One can change the language and the rules rather
easily, but it is in these deeper areas of life that change is difficult and
yet necessary. If there were no problems at this level of cultural
encountering, language and thinking would follow easily.
The point is that somatic and psychic artifactual and non-artifactual
naturalistic determinations of various sorts, whether clearly seen or not,
are believed in, valued, and willed in different deeply learned (or
conditioned) ways in different ethnic groups. In other words, they are
cultural. That they are learned signifies that they are deeply habitual, so
deep that it can be doubted by those who have these habits that they
are learned at all and instead are believed to be natural in the biological
way, which seems easiest believed in within traditional agricultural
societies or at least parts of societies concerned with such things as
breeding. In that case people will often fight to the death over what I
am trying in general to describe.
In any case, perhaps this intimates how a philosophical generalist
might attempt to deepen and widen the answer to the question of what
race and ethnicity are. Note that I did not get into the completely
legitimate questions of the circumstances under which members of an
own or other group come to have the cultural characteristics constituted
in deeply habitual believing, valuing, and willing. The first direction I
would go in order to develop an explanation would, however, be with
respect to the structures of the value system and the use system for the
group, the higher and lower values and purposes it has, which has to do
with teleological accounts. But, plainly, one does not have to be engaged
in philosophy to comprehend and examine whether what I have outlined
is at all insightful. Is this analysis in terms of visible naturalistic deter-
minations and their cultural characteristics as constituted in deeply
habitual believing, valuing, and willing by insiders and outsiders at all
relevant?
/ would say that is a necessary feature of any sound approach to the
analyses of race and ethnicity. Indeed, without such analysis, I do not think
the work could be pursued.