Beilage XI: <Homeworld, Foreign World, and "The" World>

<1930 or 1931>

[Paraphrase and Exerpts]

"I and we come to know strangers as subjects of a foreign world, one that is harmoniuosly experienced in their communal life. In correlation with this world, as practical life-world and as world that is in general valid for them, they are human beings of other experiences, other natural surroundings, other life-goals, other convictions, other practical modes of behavior, other traditions. For me my world expands itself (or for my home-community) in such a way that there is another home community, living differently, behaving differently, apprehending "the" world differently, but in fact also possessing another cultural world as valid for them, not us.

"Thus a foreign human community, a foreign humanity, perhaps as foreign people [Volk] constitutes itself. Precisely along with this there is constituted for me and for us "our own" home-community, popular community in relation to our cultural surrounding world as world of our human validities, our special ones. I thus have (if I understand that in quasi or actual genetic-historical fashion) a transformation of my and our world-experience and world itself. In `the' world we exist, my people and the other peoples, and each has its popular surrounding world (with its horizon of the nonpractical). `Surrounding world' distinguishes itself from world. But how? If I say further the world, what is present for me (and so for us) as existing and as verifying itself under this title, if we, we at least in unified and advancing circumferences, attain knowledge from a foreign people? At first, we may hold fast entirely to our ontic validities, while we nevertheless separate and in a certain way unify the world, in its distinction between our world as surrounding world of life and that of other peoples.

"Here is then the task of clarifying the foundation of the ontic validities which I and the other subjects of an initially simple homeworld must have accomplished in order to distinguish between world and homeworld, or in order to understand an other, different human community in distinction from mine. Or expressed still more clearly: on the first level of validity of intersubjectivity and the intersubjective lifeworld, I have simply the world in the open endlessness of lifeworld as my sole sphere of interests, the surrounding world of interest expanding itself outward; afterwards however I have instead of this world (with the correlative We that belongs to it, a We that signifies all human beings) rather this We as a special human community, and I have our lifeworld no longer in the old manner as the lifeworld. Rather over and against this we a foreign We has constituted itself, over and against our humanity another humanity, each locating itself in its homeworld, no longer in the world refered to as something universal: in the ordinary human sense (lifeworld). From me and us outward an expanded humanity constitutes itself, and in further consequence then in a self-reiterating constitutive process, a multiplicity of popular human communities constitute themselves which form a single humanity (but at first as a mere collection of popular human communities related to their territories and their concrete cultures), and belong to one and the same world, which in the first manner is world for them all. But first in the form of an advancing and always further advancing world of realities with always new forms of `We' and `our world.'"

The continuingly common is the natural structure with the humanity which understands the all-common and posits it in validity: human beings existing, communalized, acting, constantly encountering their cultural ontic sphere as a sphere of relativity, while an overreachingly valid being penetrates through these relative spheres as a universal world of realities.

I disclosing the world on the basis of my "We." What can I maintain in validity in the face of the disharmony between my and the other human communities universal experience, universal conviction? I become motivated to the constitution of a new world, new in any case in the sense that foreign human communities and cultures in the world have been accepted as facts, however that is not thereby accomplished in the manner of a synthesis, in such a way that it takes over the foreign validities. My expanded world is not constituted in such a way that my world and other worlds are connected in one harmonious experiential conviction. How does the original world strictly speaking persist through these transformations? Apparently through the fact that the world which exists for me and for us in validity, on the basis of the harmony of experience, <has> a spatio-temporal horizon of possible individual-real being... The open spatio-temporal real horizon includes in its determination as other a bordering by the foreign people and the foreign-popular surrounding world. Thereby however the real world in general is contrasted with the particular human community and its human surrounding world, popular surrounding world, wherein is contained the contrast between our culture and another culture. That is already understood in the constitutive foundation of the concrete first level of validity which encloses the homeworld: beginning from the primordially reduced "world" with "nature," own body, "culture;" then in the homeworld the corresponding layer of validity and being, in accordance with which are distinguished physical nature, the multiplicity of living bodies or human beings, the human particular community, the artifact culture. Of course that does not mean that an own layer of universal mere nature and the layers of human subjects and personal communities etc. are articulated for me and for my home-communal We. The world acquires for us new, foreign human beings, which are nevertheless human beings, realities, animated bodies, persons, which live with one another in particular communities, making culture, forming special communities, thereby creating culture in connection with their unique convictions, theoretical, axiological, and practical, according to their unique life purposes. They appear to us with the ontic sense of realities individualized through their physis and its spatio-temporal position, living bodies which serve as organs for ruling psychic subjects, these as mediately individualized in spatio-temporal fashion, but as identically persisting in and for themselves, and related intentionally to the universal nature which is common to them and us, and to their neighbors. The commonality of experience concerns realities, and concerns all co-human beings who co-include the new sphere in their real individuality, but in a horizonal way, which is something different for us (who were earlier all of humanity and who now are no longer so) and for others.

Can I accord validity to the mythical convictions of others, to their fetishes, their gods, their mythical causality, etc? In contrast with my beliefs, their belief are superstitions; in contrast with my world, their world does not exist. Foreign human communities exist for me as matters of facts, and as subjects of matter of fact convictions, factually meant worlds, which I designate as their mythical world-representations.

How do I then come to speak of one world of experience for all human beings in general? One world which each human community experiences differently? What is the common harmonious experience to which a common world corresponds? What is the one truth that reveals itself in the total synthesis of actual and possible homeworlds?