Beilage XII: Language, Surrounding World (Homeworld)

Beilage XII: Language, Surrounding World (Homeworld).

The Function of Linguistic Communication for the

Constitution of the Surrounding World

<Contents:> The problem of the objectivity of predicative truth with reference to the pregivenness and givenness of the world in stages of environmentality, to which stages of relativity the corresponding truths correspond, thus a relative surrounding world as situation. Homeworld and inaccessible distance. The function of linguistic communication in the constitution of a human surrounding world. Very incomplete - no adequate clarification of the achievement of language and the difference between animal communication and human communication in language.

Objective validity of predicative judging in its various stages. Its grounding in evidence.

Without carrying out constitutive thinking here, I as a beginning philosopher can nevertheless say:

What "the" world is for us and that it is on the basis (in and on the ground) of our experience, and indeed on the basis of our all-combining, harmoniously streaming-along experience. It is experienced by me in every moment of my waking life as finitely present world, which behind itself has an open past available to me through memory but only step-by-step, and before itself a future as horizon of future presents which are actualized in my future life. This surrounding world that belongs to me is at the same time a world for the co-present, co-past, and co-future Others, each of whom has, had, and will have his own world-experience. To my surrounding world belong Others as existing in their and at the same time in our common world, and it belongs to this world also that they are born and have come after in the future, that human beings will be born and will have come after in open endlessness, and the same in relation to the past. The communal experience surpasses my and everyone's finite life; it extends through all of our lives and through the open chain of generations. It also reaches beyond Other's who are known to me and throughout the individuals who can become known to me through history; it also reaches into the indeterminately general number of additional human beings, which are determined as national, political, and other kinds of communities under the title of historical peoples and so on. Moreover the common world carries indirect indications in itself of animal and human being, which our history can no longer comprehend, and also indirectly founded possibilities for the coexistence of animal and perhaps human kinds of generations, which would not belong to our generational chain, the earthly. Our surrounding world, which is joined to us historically-generatively, from the present outward in the unity of generatively bound history, gradually accessible and possibly yet to become accessible, has an open horizon of a nature, which transcends the nature that belongs to this circle and that is actually accessible, as a continually inaccessible persisting "astronomical nature," which might belong to the generative nexuses of world-experiencing subjects, subjects which only enter into community with us (and eventually could even be bound with us generatively), if sometime in a future present the inaccessibility of stellar nature could be overcome and it could be transformed into an accessible near-nature. Also however then an inaccessibly enduring far-world with unknown subjects would be predesignated behind the stars that had been accessible.

Thus in this way the communal or objectively existing world is given in universal experience as a world for us humans first of all - and "we humans," that designates an endless generational chain to which we can assign no beginning and no end (both must be problematical for us according to whether and how), within which however we have an at all times movable, openly expanding and still to be expanded history, which indeed makes not only generally a surrounding world of ours, of historical humanity, but it also opens up our experiential knowledge in advancing degrees of determinateness. Therein again relative surrounding worlds for relatively self-enclosed human communities differentiate themselves, and ultimately everyone has his own private surrounding world, while nevertheless all these surrounding worlds come together into the unity of one surrounding world (of the whole generational chain centered in us). And this itself has its horizon. On the one hand its inner horizon pertaining to the interiority of the universal trusted familiarity (of the individual and its type in the construction of each relative surrounding world) unfamiliar in its own open endlessness; on the other hand, the outer horizon of the distant, in which the distant is familiar according to its own style, the proximate indicating what remains inaccessible.

Universal world-experience also has a special structure of its own; it is 1) for everyone oriented from him outward, or it offers the world as oriented from here to there, from near to far, from surrounding world to far-world; 2) it is however also oriented as communal experiential-world through the way in which the Others are experienced as experiencing by me, ...the way in which they are given as immediate Others, as immediate for them, but as mediate Others for me and so on.

The openness of world-experience which expands itself and is eventually yet to be expanded, with the one "infinite" world (at first as endlessly open) becoming my own, extends throughout this openly endless mediation of the Others who are for me, where it is at the same time clear that what is valid for me is also valid for each of these Others. We the subjects of world-experience, have the openly endless world in accordance with its familiar actualities and unknown possibilities at all timeas from ourselves, each from himself through the mediation of Others and ultimately their communication.

Now to consider the latter, there belongs to it the involuntary expression of experiencing, what one can see in the Others' corporeal behavior and apperceptively attribute to them, as well as the mediate expressions of their bodies and therein their self-evidently accompanying experiencing, for example those of work, and what was thereby "present" as their product, as a work in the same world, in which I exist, grow perceptually etc.

In addition, however, deliberate and specifically linguistic communication.

Communal experience, the to us communal, endless world, and the world which in oriented succession becomes the infinite world given to all, is not an affair which is finished in a single act, but a process of becoming and a developing achievement, which contains within itself an achievement which has already come into being and then a new still developingly grounded passive and active achievement. The surrounding world, at least in the lowest stage which is already communal, expands itself, corrects itself in part or determines itself forward, leading to a greater determinateness, through linguistic communication, and this is always participating in the construction of the experiential meaning of the world, in which we live actively, in which we produce knowledge-formations in acts of theoretical interest, in scientific acts, which we then accept as scientific statements, "propositions," premises, conclusions, scientific "facts of experience" and such like.

Statements of every kind, normal serious statements (not playful phantasy-statements and other anomalous modes, among which we now also count monological statements in silent thinking) have their function for the construction of a world-experience and all have their "objectivity;" of course, the scientific statement is entirely distinguished, whose clarification is my special purpose here, where it is a question of making intelligible to me on what science as a system of propositions, or the scientific subjectivity, builds such scientific knowledge, aiming at authenticity.

Experience originates in experience. Experience produces, in its part passive, part active course, knowledge as an enduring possession, henceforth available in memory. It also preindicates what is to be expected in the future. Moreover it grounds its future experience of the new according to the analogy of the familiar old; it is determining for the future; it is apperception and, in unison with this, the apprehension of the new in familiar typicality, the knowledge of the new as a house (as of such and such a kind that has already been experienced repeatedly), as wooden, the color of the house as yellow and so on.

World-experience is from the beginning always already communal experience, which always then broadens itself while the world itself may always receive an expanded sense. The oriented construction of the ontic meaning of the world, in which it has its typical access and at the same time its manner of receiving identity under the reception of an always new other meaning, has an environmental typicality, which we must still describe somewhat more precisely.

Environmental Typicality, Homeworld, and Homeworld-Experience

As an experiencer, I have a most proximal surrounding world, a near-world, which we may perhaps call the homeworld, the world in which I am already at home on the basis of my own experience, as originally through this, my acquired, well-known, old familiar world. The homeworld is an individually typical identity in the change of manifold modes of givenness. In self-modifying actual experience, everyone has an actual momentary present with a horizon, and this in the mode of givenness of the presentation of the surrounding world which receives its identity in the activity or passivity of such modes of givenness. To it the nearest Others also belong, which participate in the same "home" with me, namely entirely the same world which they have acquired on the basis of their own experience. In that, we include also immediate experiential interchange, in which the well-known common home grows (home in a wider sense). Of course, each has his home as that of his own actually original experience, and in the communalization there are differences. All home-things as familiar and identified by the home-companions in direct interchange as belonging to the same proper home are not without differences. The one knows it precisely, and also each "knows" that on the basis of original interchange. For each that therefore belongs to the inner horizon.

In the case of each individual, the old familiar home also has a non-open horizon, which eventually opens itself through occasional occurrences, eventually intentional ones in the progress of practical life and its new goal-positings: as when I want to rebuild my house and dig up the unknown foundation in order to secure it. In general, what will be familiar and trusted to one - without detriment to the commonality of the homeworld - is nothing to the Others.

The content of the homeworld changes itself in spite of the preservation of a constant typicality, and especially the preservation of individual objects (things, work-places, tools, humans and animals) in their individual typicality as well; new objects appear, new on the basis of the passivity or activity of experience (eventually through its productive activity); they become familiar through experience and persist through time; others vanish, alter themselves, thus also altering the concrete type of the homeworld for the present. But these modes of transformation themselves belong to the general type of the being of the homeworld.

We can expand the sense of this homeworld, and it expands itself in the natural process of experience; perhaps one's own home with one's own garden, one's own field and so on, then expanded, one's own village, one' own city, and at the same time our village, our city. Thereby the expansion immediately serves - and just as what is already in the narrowest sense home, so first properly in the homeworld that is always expanding further - as a synthetic completion of one's own and originally common experience through mediating statements.

Original Mediation as Expansion of the Experience of Understanding

The most original mediation is the explication and linguistic expression of that which I directly experience or have experienced, and what the Other has likewise in favorable cases in his experiential field, so that, when the statement is sufficiently complete and determinate and is related to the homeworld which is already communal and held to be certain, he not only understands it completely, but also can accomplish it immediately in co-belief. Thus through mediation he also participates in an experience which he himself does not have originally; he thus acquires a secondary experience (experience of the experiential contents of the experiences of experiencing Others), which can refer only in small part to the same contents within his own experience, and in any case has its own legitimacy, its own modes of verification, namely on the basis of the harmony of communal experiential life, in which every original experience and the mediate, the secondary experiences through mediation in harmony are bound together, and the harmony persists in the progression of validity. Where that is not the case, where communication, be it immediate or mediate, conflicts with that which I myself experience, or with what the Other...has experienced, then unbelief develops from the believing assumption; what then is alleged or true - that is and was not.

Understanding attains an original secondary experience as soon as it understands the communication and its intuitive accomplishment, thereby participating in it, as if he were the Other, and so had the experience intuitively, "as if" he saw it. In this way, this as-if experience of its intersubjective meaning is accordingly at the same time a possible experience for me of the same thing that I actually would see if I "went there" and so on. Statements however are understood emptily without passing over into an intuitive quasi-accomplishment...

The statement has a statement-content which can pass in the community from person to person, and it has its objective sense...which everyone can understand and eventually believe...

We thus have objective statements related to this homeworld:

1) Immediate and mediate descriptive statements for individuals, everyone, which are experienceable directly or through the mediateness of communication, familiar and attainable in well-known ways. Determination in experiential concepts. Direct experience: perception, recollection, original expectation (proto-induction) of the similar under similar circumstances, empathy.

2) General description, typical generalities as generalities of induction; inductive inferences mediate such generalities. Through the "it is generally so under such typical transformations of familiar circumstances," I lead companions by communicating to experience secondarily a typicality, which he has not acquired in his actual experience through actual experiencing.

3) Further, thought achievement not only in described statements, but also determination of individual objects through thought determinations like quantity and number...

Production of a linguistically documented objective "world"-knowledge as intersubjective judgment acquisition as universal knowledge, as a general condition which one presupposes, which one can expand, in which each can receive the acquisitions of Others and communicate them with one another, expand their world-knowledge in determinate ways, at first as foundation of an individual and intersubjective life-praxis.

Human and Animal Communication

Thus we do not have like the animal a familiar homeworld through mere direct experience belonging to oneself and others, and a common immediate understanding and direct acceptance of foreign experiential belief and experiential content on the basis of the communality of synthetically connected, reciprocally totalized and adjusted experience, also not the animal type of communication through indication of something directly experienceable, but expression, communication through speech, which strongly distinguishes and can distinguish the typical thought-constructions as meanings [Bedeutungen], indicating at the same time and correlatively the executing activities, the activities of explication to be executed on the ground of the passive pregivenness of experience (the synthetic precipitates of earlier experience), the conceptual form, the entire thought activities that belong to the unity of predicative judging, in which the related formations were originally awakened to evidence. In communication, understanding signifies a quasi-accomplishment of these activities and their beginning experiences, which the one who is engaged in understanding has in general never lived through, that to him a possible experience is communicated through an indication of linguistic intentions, and a co-belief is motivated in him, and in further communication, what for him lacks determinateness becomes determinate for him through explication and his own apprehension of types.

Discuss the function of language in the chain of generations.

A human communal life thus becomes possible as the life of a linguistic community, and this is of a wholy different kind from animal communal life. The homeworld of the human being, which is the basic element in the structure of its objective world or which is capable of becoming in higher development in always meaningful form, is fundamentally essentially determined by language. Not only a sensuous common world, a concrete world of the present (in a broader sense, one that concerns the co-living co-present- and past-horizon as well as a part of the living future) first grows thereby, but a practical human homeworld, whose incomparably wider experience-circle also actively contains in itself the linguistically mediated experiences of companions, and not only those which are actually understood in intuitive fullness and accepted in belief, but also the incompletely or not entirely intuitively understood linguistic knowledge-formations as such, which, where necessary, can be clarified and realized. In each present the experiencer thus has not only his "sensuous" surrounding world, which is actually present to him in original experience, or co-present in original "empathy" as a secondary sensuous experience united with his own, but this present surrounding world also has a linguistic layer and a linguistic-apperceptive horizon; to this world belong manifold self and alien linguistic formations, with their new kinds of validity, accessibility, provability. And this surrounding world is now typically one and the same for all, namely those who live with one another communally. In it lies the practical goals of each, their achievement-formations, the work-activities related to them, but also the predicating life that constantly serves someone's praxis, in which the surrounding world is intersubjectively determined as the same world but as enriched and expanded.

Communal life expands itself and tends in "political form" to the universality of a praxis, as far as possible communication reaches. Universality of praxis ass universality of a harmoniously satisfying and intersubjectively satisfied praxis. Universality of the linguistic community, spanning of foreign linguisticality, unity of practical surrounding world, unity of the homeworld of a higher order on the ground of the synthetic construction of homeworlds of lower levels.

The theoretical interest. Knowledge in general, in order to attain power (without regard to knowledge on the basis of curiosity). Universal knowing in the service of a universal rational, gratifying, thus gratified praxis. Tendency toward a systematic science, a systematic construction of an objectively valid universe - the universal home in its possible expansion - of completely encompassing judgment, including of course its open individual typicality and general typicality. This universal knowing, as objectively accessible to everyone, gives everyone universal information concerning the practical homeworld - of course a universal information, which has adapted itself to the continuing transformation - and therewith the scientific foundation for all practical plans, and especially for all practical possibilities, goals, and ways proceeding to the final goal of the making possible of a universal politically satisfactory praxis.

Homeworld - non-homeworld. Relativity. A nonetheless constant distinction: earthly world and heavenly world, that which is inaccessible, which lies at an always non-homely distance...which can idealiter be brought closer, which can be transformed into proximity.

Universal world-knowledge; the world which also encompasses all distances on the basis of theoretical interest - ... The construction of an objective universe, a universe constituted through linguistic thought, and constitution itself through thinking, constituting iteration, and in infinitum.

This new kind of objective knowledge as exact, the objective world already a thought-formation, a formation of method, and this then as the theme of objective "exact" science, an objective world that is not merely like a homeworld, which is explicated and then brought nearer.

Radically insightful science is only science that this method itself makes thematic. Universal doctrine of the forms of the constitution of the all-world on the basis of the doctrine of forms of iterative homeworlds, etc.