Beilage VII: Normality in the Realm of the Personal World

(Custom, etc.) (July-August 1930)

<Contents:> I, we humans in "human existence," in human life. Goals in life and life goals, life-ideals. Life - of adult human beings - in normality. Breech in normality itself as part of normal existence. Striving after greatest possible voluntary expansion of normality, of the cope of what one can consider. Normality of nature. The normal in the realm of the personal, of the cultural world. The kathekon [that which is proper]. Self-accompanying reflection about the kathekon. Custom. History as reflection with its goal. Description of the normal style of the human surrounding world (individual form of "our" surrounding world), individual form, not essential form.

Goal in Life and Life-Goals. Life-Ideals.

The human being - I - in human life, life in common with others in the world; I with my life goals with and against others with their life-goals.

I. Self-reflection about the best way to an end. (Changing goals in life, thus for each goal one possibly repeated reflection. Goals of the will, of a life-span as prefigured, governing as pre-form of something wished, wanted. The possible ways are in general many, the way is ambiguously indeterminate; also with regard to this, it is not yet clear which preconceived possibilities are actual possibilities, possibilities of I-can.

II. Self-reflection about the goal itself - self-reflection about the whole possible life-horizon as horizon of my ability, and conceived in general as a successful life of goals; the question, which total life - from the present on - filled with achieved goals - would be thought to be a happy one, a life, which I could affirm as a whole.

1. Ideal of "happiness." A life filled with positive goods, which are enjoyed, and indeed with the highest goods, or the humanly best ordering of goods, highest good.

2. Reflection about accidents, about the frustration of abilities, about the subjective restrictions of freedom as belonging to human life in general, about inter-human restrictions, about conflicts, how they all appear, how thereby the regard is to apprehend [them].

3. Life in normality, which makes possible a plan, a purposive life. Life in the breach of normality - life has learned to regard the anomaly as belonging to the general form of life, in higher normality.

4. Striving toward the greatest possible expansion of normality - normality as unitarily self-controllable.

a) Normal nature - natural science, the presumption of a general natural lawfulness, the progressing knowledge of complete lawfulness. Scientific knowledge of nature as means of nature-praxis.

b) The normal communal world - normal everyday life with other human beings in normal custom, in the normality of the political order, in the normality of the common ground of experience, of the common ground of common tradition, of common modes of judgment and evaluation, of anticipatory modes of reaction in each typical situation. The human being in normal existence, not merely like a thing in empirically inductive facticity behaving in typically the same way under typically normal circumstances: the human being lives in the norm, while he himself is conscious of it as norm. Normal style of life of communal life is not only a fact for him, but something that ought to be and a being on the basis of willing life according to the ought. Life in its life-form is affirmed, and although it is not conceptualized in the form, the individual is sanctioned, affirmed in its form, by willing it form. The child is begotten into the form of tradition, and what is more, the transgressing of the form by the "egoism" of the individual is disapproved and punished, and the mode of punishment itself belongs to the form. The normal form is that upon which one counts (as on the normal form of nature) in modes of givenness in the surrounding world, but it is form on the basis of will. It is and ought to be, and it is always already what ought to have been and lay as such in the will of the fathers and ancestors. And that belongs to its ought- and will meaning. It ought to be so now because it always was so, because one lives in this norm. This norm, insofar as it has an indefinitely open horizon as form, is more precisely determined through the examination of the oldest, how it was earlier in such cases.

This is the milieu of the humanly communalized normality, and the milieu of the "customary" in the widest sense, of the kathekon [in Greek]. In it are contained also the types of the normal, proper personal life, vocational goals, and vocational life-goals etc.

A correlative normality, namely as correlate of proper personal life, is the proper form of the communal surrounding world, its surrounding world formed in the form of the traditional and as what is proper for the individual and as taking part in the communal achievement; the form of construction of houses, of dwelling houses, of stables, etc., the form of construction of "communities" [Gemeinde] and therein the place and form of "community houses," of cultic sites etc. In life, in the normally formed ongoing life of persons, and "communities," and communities of higher order, self-reflection on form plays a necessary role: reflection on what is proper, mediately in connection with the examination of the oldest.

Thereby however traditional custom or propriety in many component parts is known as something which has become historically; certain practices have been instituted on the basis of a definite occasion in the past.

Egoic Individual Form of "Our World" and the Kathekon

Description of the normal style of the human surrounding world, of the world as world of experience, of normal nature (with its normal regularity, so to speak, its habits), as well as the normal personal and cultural world, world of cultural things as world of things, in which "one" lives, the world of means- and end-objects in the style of the customary, in the general form of the "ethical" ought. It is an essential part of the human individual form "our" world and its formal articulation, formal stages.

The human world as "world" of persons, as communalized personality or as plurality of persons, which are personally livingly intertwined with one another in their families, their "communities," in their tribes etc. According to the gradation of personal intertwining. It exists as personal present, possesses its personal memory, its past, communally-personally its history, which however is awakened only occasionally and in special cases, in disordered fashion immediately and mediately, namely in the narrative (of the old), through the memory-signs of thing-culture etc., which has however a horizon of progressive wakability, of unveilability.

Description of environmental nature (empiriographical), of the history of nature, as well as of the specifically personal surrounding world with the personally formed thing-world: the history of culture and history in general, insofar as it unfolds from the historically essential, that pertains to the individual form of the world, in which we as persons live, and the actual co-instituters of this form in historically accessible time, insofar as they exist and themselves live on in memory as determining tradition (in a double sense).

Custom and history (the reflectively repeatedly disclosed history of the communal life in which there is included a formed and always newly forming communalized surrounding world) are in general inseparable. To propriety belongs the veneration of the old, of the ancestors, of the "great" men of the past and of the way in which they lived their lives, the ay in which the have intervened in the life of the community. History - historical narrative, what the old and the oldest recount as that which their elders have recounted to them etc. in further mediateness, insofar as they were not themselves there and hence do not narrate on the basis of their direct experience.

One lives in community and has experience of the lives of others in extension, one thereby also has experience of one's own life as with the lives of others, most immediately those of the members of one's on family; and indeed the older one becomes, the more extensive is the self-experiencing life-span and communal expanse, certainly as far as it reaches in actual experience. In life one judges others according to the kathekon (at first) and is judged oneself and is already motivated earlier, to exercise self-judgment - judgment of the past, and perhaps of the whole past life, which exists in memory, or of the whole vocational past, the whole past from maturity on, with which the "serious" life begins. Self-reflection and self-judgment serve the regulation of life, they enter into the past in order to will the future, and enter into the future in order to will the life possibilities, in order to will the possible teleological forms, among those which are and should be selected in valuing-judging fashion.

In privileged fashion we now have in view within the widest individual form the form of the kathekon, of the personally appropriate which at the same time has the character of an imperative of being - of course with deviations, of the form "not in the way in which propriety demands," which as deviation then belongs to the appropriate in a wider sense.

Here there is still much to consider with respect to the division between the humanly appropriate [menchlich Gewoehnlichen], and that which corresponds to "ethics [Sitte]." The personally appropriate; to this belongs the "professional" thief, swindler etc., the apparently honorable person, the apparent citizen who in truth violates the imperatival form of ethics, but included under this is also the band of robbers which often places itself in opposition to it, in opposition to the state form, which belongs to the "ethical" ought-to-have-been [Gesollten]. We thus have "authentic" vocations and inauthentic ones, also honorable and dishonorable ones (executioner, usurer). What is thereby essential and what generally occurs can at first remain undistinguished.

At first that will also be sufficient for the general talk of the person. But now more precisely: what belongs to a "person," which lives in this form and has it own form on its basis (form of the civil servant, of the officer, of the private man etc., functionary of the political community, nonfunctionary etc.). Yet in different but related senses each has his private sphere, in which he is not a functionary.

Now come the character types of persons and the modes of a humanly personal life as purposive life, the surrounding world as my field of purposes, as realm, field of governance, in which I rule, in which I posit and actualize my life-goals, in accordance with which I want to form myself [?].

Our Life-World as Individual Form

The "form" of the world, in which the human being - the factical human being - lives with personal consciousness and to which he himself belongs, for himself in his personal conscious life, is an individual form. More exactly stated: I, the introspective psychologist or the phenomenologist, describe myself originaliter as factically human, and finding myself in "our" collective humanity, in my family, my city etc., in my open human community, in our world - precisely this world, containing ourselves, according to its individual form, according to the form which this world (life-world but not understood as outer world) possesses. Everything belonging to this world, i.e. everything that belongs to the same community as my We, describes the same and necessarily the same individual form. A Chinese, insofar as he does not belong to it, describes another [form]. World as individual form is not world as essence-form for each conceivable human being, that is for the human being as "essence." But each conceivable human being is indeed individual and lives in the milieu of an individual form. We must distinguish the universally essential [world] in general, from that which belongs to the human being and his world, and that includes the essence-form "individual form in general," of the determinate individual form, any factical human being, and what holds equally, has his factical universality ("we all" in the widest sense). In describing essential generality, it presupposes (or includes) the essence-form of human community in general, which we now conceive in a generality, which can be transferred, before one approaches the essential-general "individual form," which we have in view. E.g. the essence of the single human being, which intentional psychology pursues in its deepest structure, and the intentional essence of a human community, seen from a pure introspective psychological point of view, wherein a personal world is constituted for it, is presupposed and does not need to be explicated. The individual form of personal being in community, and the community can, so to speak, be described naively, and not only in an empirical-typical, but in an essentially general way; one needs therefore the essence-form person (the eidos); but for that purpose one does not need the preliminary elaboration of the concrete pure "soul," or the concrete monadic subjectivity as well as the intermonadic. It can remain undisclosed how much of a deficit that also remains for the understanding. There is a naive ontology of the personality and personal world as individual form.

The form is for me, is for each human being the totally most familiar, not of course as theoretically expounded, perhaps abstracted out, but as the familiar horizon-structure, of which all particular acts and drives become a part.

Each individual has this form oriented from himself outward and accomplished as his personal surrounding world, as more or less indeterminate, known-unknown personal world experienced "from himself outward." It is described in greater or lesser generality and according to circumstances then also with its most individual content.