Beilage XIV: On the Problem of
World-View. Transformation
of Foreign Experience into One Possibly Belonging to Me.
(
...[239]
I can place
myself into all times, into all historical times, related to the generative and
communicative humanity in the unity of one humanity. I "interpret" sun, moon, stars,
Milky Way etc. as foreign bodies, their appearances as far-appearances, to
which near-appearances must belong like those in my closest environmental
sphere. Can I place myself
everywhere? I can think that I am and am
moving in the way in which I easily move in my near-world, as though I could
also reach through movement the far and farthest space - my factical
capacities do not reach that far, they are necessarily finite. And I know that the heat of the sun would
necessarily destroy me if I came near to it - but I also cannot come near to a
blast furnace. How can I apperceive all
appearances of my primordiality with an ontic meaning, which has validity for all the bodies of a
uniform system of possible appearances, and how can I regard all
appearance-systems or all primordial things and worlds, my own and foreign
ones, as one world on the basis of a homogeneous appearance-system, and indeed
in such a way that I treat what appears in the empathized system precisely as
like that in the empathized system of the near-sphere which I can realize as
such in my own experience?
...[p. 240]
While I pursue
the synthesis of my own appearances with their primordial horizons of
appearance, with those of unmediated Others as simultaneously bound to the same
present objects, my total perceptual field and the total horizon that belongs
to it with the perceptual field horizon of Others, if I then pursue the
synthesis of various primordial pasts and futures, then these syntheses finally
lead to a universal intersubjective system of
appearances for the world, exactly in the way that, in my primordiality,
every thing and the whole primordial world has its system of appearances. This appearance-system adds itself not only
with the appearance system experienced and experienceable
in universal empathy, but we have an objective world, in it each object as a
unity of its actual and possible appearances, each has its system of possible
appearances, and this is not an external sum of systems of individual subjects,
but one that constitutes an intentional unity in its intelligibly producing intersubjective synthesis.
Here is now something remarkable and problematic, that the appearance
system of each object, and each in the universal objective nexus, can be
constituted and described by every I-subject, in the way that it appears and
with its mode of evidence, as if it were only one in the infinitely extending
primordial system. Thus it appears, and
apparently even in evidence. Indeed we
also constantly employ empathy, and with reference to nature history passes
over into its own nature-historical past- and future-manifestation, but we
nevertheless attain a unitary intuition, in which experience-possibilities are
united with experience-possibilities, and in consciousness of their validity,
which are not our experience-possibilities, but which nevertheless are united
as if they were. But how then can they
be valid for us? With regard to the
empathy of foreign subjects they are at least possibilities of being valid for
Others and co-valid in connection with us.
But nevertheless: we connect them with our own actual one's
not as they are valid for them, but as if the being of Others were thereby
irrelevant. Thus if we perhaps, always
incompletely, construct a remembering intuition in ourself
of the growth and the successive stages of being of the fig tree under which
Buddha had learned and which persisted through the millennia to the present (as
one says), or of Rome which existed from Romulus' time to the present. Of course by such we mean, it also being a
hypothetical construction, that
However, that
which arrives at the universal nature-intuition on the basis of natural
history, does not take any notice of the impossibility of an intuition of the
past, which leads back behind my birth.
Is this the
way in which the world and all mundane intuition makes a naive pursuit of a
world-view within the scope of the normal human community?...