Nature and culture constitute the object of a twofold analysis, one in terms of concepts and the other in terms of reality itself. The distinction between these two levels and their basic relation determines both our world-view and the objective value of any scientific knowledge. Is there a cosmic process which exists independently and in its own right--a nature (physis) broadly speaking--or would any positive answer to this question derive from the words of the one who enunciates it? If there is such a reality, it must be related to the meaning in which it is expressed. And if this be the case, how can one speak of "nature" without this very concept being bound up in the entire cultural history of mankind? Nevertheless the givenness (Esgibt) or existence of reality--the cosmos as such--obliges the mind to apply itself to the facts. How then could we justify the objectivity and, consequently, the value of the human sciences as distinct from the positive sciences?

These questions have been widely debated for the last century in the history of philosophy. We will review them with the help of two methods: one, phenomenological, which retraces the process genetically beginning from perception; the other, hermeneutic, which concerns the problem faced by the historical sciences. As in each of these methods the given cultural reality appears as the basic milieu of meaning, we will treat the problem of culture against the background of this relational experience with the aid of the concept of praxis, or lived action, in relation to meaning.

Thus, there are three parts in what follows:

1) the phenomenological approach of Husserl, with the concept of constitution;

2) the hermeneutic approach of Gadamer, with the concept of horizon; and

3) cultural action, which will permit us, in conclusion, to take up the question of intercultural meaning.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH: THE CONSTITUTION OF NATURE AND OF CULTURE

In his Ideas Pertaining To a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book II, which was written gradually from 1912 to 1925 and published well after its author's death, Husserl applied the theory of constitution which he had presented in the first volume of Ideas.¹ There he wished to provide a foundation for the objectivity of the positive sciences and to justify their unity. The first two sections of the work describe the constitution of nature on its material and animate levels. Both things and the soul as the form of living things pertain to physical nature, whereas the spiritual (Geist) pertains to culture which is studied, or constituted, in the third section of his work.

The Constitution of Physical Nature

Examining the natural sciences, Husserl contrasts them to the sciences of the spirit (Geisteswissenschaften) and shows that they can be established only in terms of the opposition--already present in Dilthey--between "explaining" and "understanding." Whereas the natural sciences do nothing but "explain" on the basis of objective linear causality, the sciences of the spirit must be constituted in function of an "understanding" which, in turn, depends upon the lived realization of meaning. Husserl does not reject the objectivity of the sciences, but wishes to give them a foundation in perception.²

Let us begin with the constitution of nature as a process moving from matter to spirit. One might be tempted to see this merely as a traditional analysis were it not, for Husserl, the origin of meaning, that is to say, the constitution of nature for the conscious subject, and hence at least methodologically of transcendental priority. This is not an idealism, however, because it sees consciousness as open to exterior reality given in experience, and because consciousness directs its attention to the perceived object as its phenomenal correlate. Consciousness receives its capacity to signify only from the object given in perception, that is to say, from the manifestation of the phenomenon in its own right. In this orientation to the object the consciousness passes beyond itself to grasp, through a succession of profiles, the invariant sense of the object or the eidos which fills to the object.

Husserl's first intentional analysis applies to nature. As his point of departure he takes a global idea--which has meaning for the mind--in order to elaborate the multiple senses or intentions found in the one object or nature. Beginning from this primordial correlate unfolding before the Ego, that is to say, from the universe as a totality of possible experiences, Husserl constitutes successively the thing, the soul and the body, that is, both material and living or psychic natures.

In approaching the natural object consciousness first takes up a doxo-theoretical point of view to the exclusion of such other attitudes as the aesthetic or the practical (praxis), thereby excluding all such factors as the beautiful or the useful. In this naturalistic attitude, the thing or object is constituted in terms of the first attribute of nature in general (in the strict sense), extension. What is thus extended has a form, but this scheme by itself remains ghostly; it can affirm its materiality only in function of circumstances which, despite constant variation, manifest certain permanent properties.

Materiality reflects the durable essence or substantial unity of the thing, which, in turn, is constituted through the standard concrete causal interaction proper to normal or habitual circumstances by the aistheta which sensibly affect organic bodies. Thus, in sense experience substances present themselves through multiple sense qualities to the intuition of the Ego, which sensible qualities of the material thing "depend upon the body of the subject having the experience."

To the relative stability of circumstances there corresponds a balanced organization of bodily dispositions which, in turn, depend upon the motor and kinesthetic processes of the subject. Perception is related also to the abilities of the subject. But the body itself, as condition of perception, is subject to changes, produced or undergone, which can give way to anomalous states. This dependence regarding its changes underlines the physical character of the body as well as the contrast between the normal and the pathological. Because a radical perturbation of perception calls methodologically for some recourse of others to the perceptions, Husserl's passage from the relativity of an object to the subject, and thence to the objectivity of the thing is regulated by what is normal in everyone's perception. Hence, according to Husserl, this actual intersubjectivity becomes constitutive of theoretical objectivity.

In sum, in this section Husserl has constituted the specific trait of the object, namely, objective space as a relational system of orientations--an ideal frame in which every form and every movement is inscribed. This is physical, mathematical space which determines the objectivity of physics and is subordinated, in turn, to intersubjective determinations.

The Constitution of Animate Nature

In the second section, Husserl treats the constitution of animate nature--the psychic order. Though a part of nature, this domain emerges from the material structure of mere things to which it adds the soul as a new layer of meaning. The ego pole of the pure self has as its counterpart the animation of the body-object. Transcendental reduction makes it possible to bring to light both the reality of the Ego as a constituting source and thereby its parallel reality, the living body, which stands out from among things. Thus, psychism is ambiguous, being linked at the same time both to the objectification of a subject-object and to the level of autonomous experience.

Here the analysis of the body proper as actually lived permits Husserl to rely upon the field of experience which includes a perduring temporal reality, the Ego and the concrete fragments of actuality they live in their spatio-temporal context or world. This incarnation poses the problem of interweaving consciousness and world inasmuch as the "psyche" is a flux rather than a schema or thing and therefore depends upon historical rather than causal circumstances. The soul is a quasi nature or dual reality "in which physical nature is elevated by a layer of meaning by which it is interiorized and made immanent." In this context Husserl describes a double experience: at the solipsistic level it concerns the body proper, at the intersubjective level it is one of intropathy--the correspondence of our perceptions and feelings (Einfühlung).

The body proper--which I am--is revealed in acts of perception which interrelate the perceiving organ and its action. Thus, my hand as touching and as touched constitutes a reflexivity in which the body is revealed both as object and as actor. As both localized and spontaneous this is manifestly my body so that the psyche experiences itself in the lived space of the body, which acts as an organ of my will, being linked to my feelings and intentions, and open to others or intimate. Though the tactile sense is not the act of touching and is localized only indirectly, nevertheless what constitutes my "presence" remains the point of view from which all other points of view are organized. As a thing the body has sensations, but it is also a center inhabiting a place around which things find their orientation. It is not a natural object in the same manner as are things, but belongs to an idio-psychic order.

Husserl clarifies the difference between this original presence to oneself and the perceptive discovery, in appresentation, of another body and subjectivity present to me. The process of affective "transfer" allows me to localize in the other his own perceptions, as if I lived them in him and his expressive and affective gesture; through intropathy I am able to grasp the psychic life of the other objectively from his bodily expression. By a ricochet effect, I become an other for him (as I am also body for him) while discovering my own incarnate subjectivity. In this manner my psychic and physical identity becomes also a perceptive, intersubjective co-presence.

Thusfar, Husserl's methodology relies upon the original lived perceptions of things in order gradually to move back to the psycho-organic reality, and finally, by a lived intropathy, to actual intersubjectivity. Throughout, this constitution of nature is always in relation to transcendental consciousness.

Culture

In the third section Husserl completes what remained ambiguous in the natural self by introducing the dimensions of person and community. He describes Geist or spirit as the empirical counterpart of the pure subject with the cultural world and the Ego (man, the objective self), reacting against the scientific milieu of his time which had naturalized man without taking account of the Geisteswissenschaften or the sciences of the spirit. Phenomenological reduction brackets such a naturalistic attitude and by changing perspectives looks disinterestedly into each human attitude.

The naturalistic attitude constituted the person or Ego-man as one appears bodily. Though not localized, the soul was considered to be so integral to the body that the psychic was inseparable from the qualities of the physical body. Thus, the states of consciousness were seen to coincide with physical or measurable time. As susceptible to measurement, man was defined by the naturalistic attitude merely as an animated being or a zoological entity.

Here Husserl returns to the question of method, observing that the ultimate attempt to reduce man to nature produces a reversal of attitude which, in turn, makes manifest the absolute consciousness which constitutes nature. By "virtue of the eidetic correlation between the constituting and the constituted all nature must be relative." Hence, the transcendental reduction of man focuses no longer upon man as nature, but upon our life in common. In our daily life the world which surrounds us and which we inhabit contains not simply things, but objects for our use, works of art, literary products, juridical and religious symbols and institutions. The persons we encounter are members of our family, state, Church or community, all cooperating toward the same political and social goals. The people we encounter are not mere beings of nature, but beings of culture located in surroundings or Umwelt which can be attained by the natural attitude.

Thus our convergent motivations bind us into mutual person-to-person relationships in common activities directed toward the constitution of works of culture. Scientific objectivity, in turn, is constructed on the basis of this common cultural world, which is the original or basic context expressed by the term Lebenswelt.

The other attitudes depend upon this constituting consciousness. Husserl returns "to the eidetic context of consciousness in its primordiality and plenitude." In the doxo-theoretical attitude we had bracketed the beautiful and the useful--all that belongs to the practical, axiological and affective attitudes--whereas here opening once again to our entire context changes the way we look at what we experience. Husserl underlines the loss which had been sustained in objectifying the cultural given, reduced thereby to the same level of abstraction as the natural sciences. Psychic acts or states were treated inductively, rather than as lived modes of feeling or of will. In The objects we use and social structures were considered according to their attractiveness, exchange value or potential for conflict, so that in sociology human groups were analyzed in terms of causal links.

On the contrary, the new method converts our aperception of the world of things into a world of persons according to an intuitive rather than an inductive approach. To perceive our everyday world in terms of the actions of persons with whom I am dealing enables it to take on a continually developing meaning in a reciprocal production of sense. This world emerges as the horizon of our mutual existences in which objects have personal meaning and, like symbols, a motivating power. Thus, a flag can be the sign of an entire people aware of the interrelationships they have built. Here the person is no longer reducible to an object of nature, even if one finds one's bearings physically in the surrounding world and in relation to other persons. He/she dwells in the sphere of the spirit and of intentional sharing so that the world is no longer merely nature or what is there in front of one but what is organized according to a process of mutual understanding. In its evaluations and interactions the cultural world is based upon the motivations which produce its meaning.

This world is not for one individual, even though it is through the Ego that the others, each for him/herself, exists within cooperative action. To be a person is to be an Ego freely motivated by the presence of the other. The world of persons manifests this capacity of social subjects for mutual promotion. This is true also in the preparation of people for the future on the basis of a living tradition as experienced through language, style and art. Science itself does not exist but is supported by the intention to learn through action which, in turn, is supported by reason and hope in what is reasonable.

Thus, the environing cultural world is first of all an understanding of the universe of persons and from this motivating intuition the spirit or Geist descends upon "things" and permits the constitution of explanatory science.

THE HERMENEUTIC APPROACH: CULTURAL HORIZONS

In his study of hermeneutics and ideologies, referring to the discussion between Gadamer and Habermas regarding historical science,³ Ricoeur underlines the opposition between critical and hermeneutic consciousness understood in terms of Gadamer's Wahrheit und Method. This analysis is important for our reflection upon culture because it introduces a critical conception of objective knowledge as tied to culture and locates therein the role of reason.

Gadamer's original conception of the impact of culture upon science recalls Husserl's analyses. According to Gadamer, scientific knowledge, being based upon objectification, supposes that the facts under study be placed at some distance. Ricoeur notes that this position of Gadamer reflects the influence of romanticism as a turn to the past, in contrast to Habermas who, in facing the same problem of objectivity, followed the Enlightenment tradition of rejecting tradition. For Gadamer history would have no object unless persons were primordially related: we are immersed in history and this, in turn, calls into question our capacity for radical objectivity.

In order to demonstrate this, Gadamer proposes three forms of distancing: aesthetic, historical and linguistic. Focusing mainly upon the historical, Gadamer places himself resolutely in the German tradition of the human sciences (or Geistwissenschaften), a new romanticism in the sense of Dilthey and, in a way, of Heidegger.

The romantic tradition enables Gadamer to rehabilitate the notion of prejudice, which had been disparaged by the Enlightenment as authoritarian and opposed to pure reason. Gadamer wants to restore a sense of prejudice which is not opposed to reason. Where the romantic solution failed by interchanging the truth-value of the two antithetic terms, mythos and logos, Gadamer displaces the question by redeveloping the meaning of prejudice.

Dilthey had first pointed to this in the essay he wrote to provide a foundation for the human sciences (or Geistwissenschaften), but he remained imprisoned in a traditional theory of knowledge based upon the primacy of the subject. Gadamer criticizes this primacy of subjective consciousness as a reflexive return upon oneself. "History precedes me and goes ahead of my reflection,"⁵ writes Ricoeur, adding "I belong to history before belonging to myself." This clearly differentiates his position, not only from all idealistic philosophies, but equally from philosophers of the Frankfurt School as heirs of the Enlightenment. Thus, we escape from the traditional point of view which founds ontology on epistemology and, following Heidegger's Vorstruktur des Verstehens, look for what Ricoeur calls "the structure of anticipation in the very situation of our being in Being."⁶

This Heideggerian conception influences Gadamer, who notes especially its two dimensions of pre-understanding and temporality as the integral power-to-be of Dasein or the human manner of being in the world. This redirects our attention from the history of historical facts to the meaning of Being, which is connected intimately to the destiny of Western metaphysics. Following Heidegger Gadamer underlines the structure of anticipation for "prejudice" is rooted in the history of metaphysics itself: the "history of Being" is the "prejudice" which is always already there; it is the historical anchoring whence every reflection--especially hermeneutic reflection--arises.

Analyzing the dimensions of this foundational metaphysical prejudice in every historical search for meaning, Gadamer presents them under three headings: (1) the phenomenological link which connects prejudice with tradition, and through this to authority; (2) the ontological link which unites prejudice, tradition and authority on the basis of the "consciousness of the efficacy of history" (Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein); and (3) the metaphysical consequence of this state of affairs. We shall consider in sequence each of these steps in Gadamer's historical hermeneutics.

(1) The phenomenological essence of prejudice or pre-understanding is linked to the historical character of human beings as such. This is what had been rejected by the rationalist critique due to its more fundamental prejudice, namely, its identification of authority with violent domination. It is fundamental for Gadamer that because authority belongs to persons, far from being a degrading act of submission, an abdication of reason or blind obedience, authority is "the link through which we recognize in the other a judgment or aperception with priority over our own."⁷ In this sense, tradition is endowed with authority, even where it has become anonymous, for it molds our understanding and behavior: "tradition is continually a factor of liberty and of history itself." Between reason and tradition there is, therefore, not a fissure, but a relationship in which tradition supports the work of reason by opening the mind to the realm of the reasonable. Between the spirit of innovation and the spirit of tradition there is dialogue rather than opposition as between Verstand and Vernunft.

(2) Gadamer goes on to show that prejudice is legitimate because we cannot extract ourselves from the historical process, but must take charge of ourselves within this process. Though we must distance ourselves in history through a process of objectification, history acts upon us through this distance and it would be an illusion to believe that we could master it completely or render it objective. Because it is not possible to escape the effects of history inasmuch as a part of us is always engaged therein, history cannot be recovered as an objective past: "An historical being," says Gadamer, "never knows itself."

On the other hand, there is no absolute limit, because the historian can always take another point of view. Nevertheless-- and it is here that Gadamer's thought is the most interesting-- the historian can never acquire an "objective vision." For were a text to be treated as an object it would lose its intentionality and hence its claim to tell us by a word-in-act some living truth. The word cannot be understood unless there is previous agreement about the subject of this word; without this it dies, crushed upon itself for lack of an horizon of meaning to sustain it.

Gadamer shows thereby that history is not reducible to the absolute point of view of Reason which contemplates all from above; but neither can it be reduced to the punctual analysis of limited facts. Rather, the horizon carries us along with it for we are implicated in it: the event is not a fact, but keeps its value as an horizon by which we are continually engaged.

Thus, we are not closed in an horizon for we can move to another point of view or another culture. In doing this, however, we do not cease to be ourselves, for then we would not "understand" what "the other" means. Though there is no absolute knowing, there is prior understanding because every point of view exists only against the background of other points of view. Thus, there is a fundamental "fusion of horizons" which has the form not of an objective totalization of all, but of living relationality linking one horizon with the other. Gadamer thus rehabilitates the prejudice of tradition as the horizon of my present in its openness to the future.

(3) The meta-critical consequence of such an hermeneutics is the impossibility of an exhaustive criticism of prejudices and, with them, of ideologies. As there is no absolute horizon and as it is always from a tradition and our present position that history is understood, we are induced by a kind of criticism of the critique itself to speak of a living universality. This is not the universality of a totalizing and objectifying reason, but the kind of universality which in everyday experience founds the becoming of the world as an openness of horizon. It precedes and envelops the very possibility of the sciences, because historical time of history is always already there: the historian or philosopher fights to distance him/herself for purposes of objectivity from that in which they already are implicated. Gadamer's hermeneutics plays upon this methodological paradox by inserting distance in our understanding of the meaning by which we are borne along. Even our failures of mutual understanding become apparent only in this founding horizon which is constituted by language and art as the living flux of historical time.

THE APPROACH OF PRAXIS: ACTION AND WORD

Thusfar we have interpreted culture in its relation to nature from a phenomenological point of view. According to this the objectivity proper to the sciences of nature is founded upon the Lebenswelt which supports all cultural works. Further hermeneutic critique shows that we are always involved in a basic horizon which is becoming or changing in a manner which precludes any possibility of absolute observation. It is in the relations between our points of view that we are differentiated one from another. In mutual implication we can take the measure of our own points of view without any of us being privileged over others in the historical process.

The two methods, the phenomenological and the hermeneutic, have opened up the field of mutual cultural understanding. We must now work out a concrete realization of this understanding, not merely in terms of the general meaning of culture, but in historically situated existing cultures, East and West, North and South.

In The Human Condition⁸ Hannah Arendt speaks of the "vita activa" as the essential political dimension of the human condition. In this context she writes:

Human plurality, the fundamental condition of action and of speech, has the twofold characteristic of equality and of distinction. If men were not equal, they would not be able to understand each other, nor would they be able to understand those who have preceded them, nor would they be able to prepare the future and to anticipate the needs of those who will come after them. If men were not distinct, each human being distinguishing himself from any other being, present, past or future, they would need neither language nor action in order to make themselves understood. Simple signs would suffice to communicate the immediate and identical needs. . . . Now man only communicates himself, . . . and human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings.⁹

For Arendt the Greek city is the model of the "polis," that is, of the place where free men are allowed to speak in the "agora" or public market and, through this interchange of words, overcome physical violence and bring it under control. The essence of liberty is in political action through the use of words.

For people to free themselves in action, however, they must take initiatives so that something new happens in their world, that is, something is produced through direct contact in the community. Persons reveal their identity in this work, which becomes the work of all. This active word is the mediation which imposes itself in relations with others; it is the place of interrelation and communion, and the expression of freedom. By analogy, every particular culture is the product of a community and can be linked to the choice of a singular innovative action which promotes the entire cultural field.

Similarly, every culture presents itself in its properly historical identity as the act of a singular community. Just as the identity of every culture is related to a tradition which precedes it as an horizon, always open to a future understanding, the same is true of all existing cultures. They are not juxtaposed wholes without doors or windows, but are co-determined in their relations to the horizons of others. Just as words are exchanged in a universe of meaning which already exists, cultures are constituted in a lived context or Lebenswelt in which the singular points of view are interchanged. There, each one finds him/herself already engaged in the whole inter-related history of the world and implicated in the becoming of all humankind. No all-embracing view is possible because that too would be part of this history. Hence, cultures can in no way objectify each other, for as in a mirror they themselves are implicated in the horizon of others.

There remains then our initial requirement for the specific character of human interrelation. Is language this indispensable point of political action, the pre-cultural dimension upon which every culture constitutes itself? To be sure, we are not dealing here with a common linguistic rootedness--a syncretic basis of all cultures or some practical esperanto. Rather, we are suggesting a relation whose pre-understanding enables everyone to remain themselves while opening in a reciprocal horizon to all others. Merleau-Ponty defined language by reference to "body" as no more than bodily behavior elevated to expression through an interweaving of meaning by which we are united to each other. From the point of view of Being language is this relationality of meaning. It is neither nature nor culture, but the juncture of the two at which meaning is born.

CONCLUSION

In referring to the "Lebenswelt," the historical horizon and action as operative word, we linked together many concepts in order to describe the mutually related meaning of "nature" and "culture." "Nature" exists only in terms of man who, in turn, is understandable only in nature. There is then but one meaning which gradually unfolds itself.

Meaning is the radical outcome of the phenomenological and hermeneutic methods themselves. It is elaborated through a lived temporality, which exists, in turn, within the cosmic givenness of time. To be sure, persons in nature alone are capable of encompassing in one glance this becoming from which they are emerging and on the basis of which the whole cultural process progressively takes shape. Nevertheless, the problem of time clings to the cosmos. Kant said, "Give me matter and I will build from it a world, that is to say, give me matter and I will show you how the world has emerged." (Preface to General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens).¹⁰

However, it is always from my lived time, from the present word, that I re-read the meaning of history, the paleontological meaning whence we draw our present reality. It is always from a world which is already acquired culturally and from a language which is already constituted that we can designate what nature and matter are. The "in-itself" is but an idea projected backwards through a time that is already full of meaning.

The same reasoning with respect to cultural action suggests a similar process of reverse constitution for cultures. Just as the origin of time has meaning only with respect to the present, it is from the present that the look backward tries to recover the archeology of the first man or the appearance of the first atom. Similarly, we can change the present only on the basis of a future which calls us to self-understanding. Hope for progress through intercultural cooperation would seem then to lie in the compenetration of our horizons, in the inter-relation of a living plurality of meanings differentiated according to the differences between cultures: each is unique and nevertheless part of the horizon for the others. Is not this metaphor of meaning that is to come, and which manifests itself as the progressive unfolding of historical time, that pole of every human action which Kant called the "City of ends"?

Institut Supérieur de Philosophie

Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

1. E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982), Book II.

2. P. Ricoeur, "Analyses et problèmes dans Ideen II de Husserl," in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 56 1951, p. 359.

3. P. Ricoeur, "Herméneutique et critique des idéologies" in E. Casteli, Demythisation et idéologies (Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1973), pp. 25-64.

4. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Method (Tübingen: Mohr, 1969).

5. P. Ricoeur, Du Texte à l'action. Essai d'herméneutique II, Paris: Seuil, 1986).

6. Ibid. p. 34l.

7. Ibid. p. 344.

8. H. Arendt, La Condition de l'homme moderne (Paris: Calman-Levy, 1982); The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958).

9. Ibid. pp. 197, 198.

10. Kant, Histoire générale de la nature et théorie du ciel, (1755), Préface; Allgemeine Naturgescbichte und Theorie des Himmels (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1898), Preface.