Beilage XXVII: Experience and Praxis - Surrounding World.

<The Limits of Understanding>

(New Year 1931/32)

<Contents:> Especially significant the contrast in the modes: a) nature-experience (the accessibility of natural being for everyone) b) the experience of fellow human beings and all objective spirituality; as I also express it here: a) the being "of nature for everyone," b) the being "of human beings and the human surrounding world for everyone." There is a layer of the spiritual surrounding world which is intersubjectively understood by everyone in general. On the other hand, it is clear that everyone (and every communalized-historical subjectivity) has his or their world-horizon with the predesignation, stemming from his and their experience and formation, of a (thus relative to him) ontological structure of familiarity, and therein the limit of his understanding of other subjects and other historical-human worlds. The problem of historical method in its relativity and the method of universally directed history, to understand being foreign to the self and foreign history etc.

Praxis is immediate or mediate. Immediate praxis in the world presupposes world-experience, experience of mundane beings. And indeed I accomplish the immediacy of praxis in the experiential present, which however exists as present of an experiential past and future - but not only in the sense of that which I myself have experienced etc. The experiential present is the present of the world of experience, which is experienced as a time-world with present, past, and future. It is the ontic ground for all becoming-conscious, being able to become practical possibilities, thus also for all designs, purposes, actions. Every actual praxis of human beings acting in the world proceeds already from entities, in other words from what has made the transition within it from a past becoming to a being that has become as something enacted. Being is what is experiencable, knowable for everyone. Out of beings beings are made. Action is voluntarily actualizing being-directed-to entities which do not yet exist... The entity which is not yet is the ought-entity in the widest formal sense. In action the ought-entity comes into exist in the sense of will (I become = I will, which is in becoming - in "work" etc.), in this coming into being ultimately present being as "actualized," voluntarily. Thus there exists from present to present a new world of experience whose content depends on entities, a world of actual and possible experience, a new practical ground for new practical possibilities - mine, for every one of us in communalization in life and "action" with one another, for one another, and against one another.

Now it is the case that out of already existing nature (the primal region of sensuous values so to speak) newly existent nature is produced as something present, and nevertheless this is the same nature, transformed nature. But it is present not merely as nature, but it is equally capable of being understood by us at any time, capable of being apperceived as a practical formation - so for everyone, among us - within the surrounding world as correlate of this "us." Thus to it belongs not only the circle of personally familiar persons, but the typicality of persons and a horizon of such persons as persons, with the I standing in immediate and mediate connection, and belonging to them as practical subjects an interwoven practical typicality. Along with that correlatively the typicality for all existing practical objects, the known and unknown, lying in the horizon, the horizon which constitutes the inner horizon of the surrounding world, determines its style of meaning.

The human being is "objectively" existent in another sense, experienceable as identical for everyone because it is a natural object. Such an object exists for everyone purely as an object of possible perception in the form of direct perception... But for that reason nevertheless what its individual being, its own-essence as this human being (and in particular, as this person, as this soul) comprises, is not already directly, perceptually experienceable for me. ...

That needs exact delimitation. Also with regard to the modes of experience of others we have the relative distinction of normality and anomaly. We understand the Others on the basis of our acts... We understand them in general in their being and their action-being, acts of whatever type they engage in, on the basis of our acts... Thus we can understand them and what they do, which practical paths they establish, what they produce as a result, which has the purposive sense of something developed from them. In further consequence, we understand products of this type apperceptively in their enduring purposive meaning.

Nevertheless, that at first produces only the region of the lowest sphere of purposes, and with respect to enduring ontic purposes so to speak, the region of artifacts. This however is in general only a core for a higher purposive meaning that cannot be understood in this way. E.g. the Chinese painter we indeed understand as painter, the product as painted image, but nevertheless not its authentic artistic intention, correlatively not the authentic meaning of the work, the work as artwork with its determinate artistic meaning. Only the empty generality that it could be a matter of an artwork, we suppose on the basis of our own experience of signs, paintings, and accordingly we of course already in our surrounding world have understood painting artists and their work. Now perhaps music, religious actions and symbols. We do not have the historical heritage, which operates in their mediateness of intentionality. Within the same cultural world one can understand "without further ado," but there is apparently also here already the above designated distinction over and against natural experience, as indeed there is therein also demonstrated that we in this understanding "without further ado" are related to a situation of our human experience, in other words to our "formation." Through our own progressing experience and also through communal experience - as living experience of the present and the experience which progresses from present to present in the future - we could, insofar as this formation is not correspondingly extended, to that degree not see and enter into and seek to understand a work of art, or not observe exactly an alien human being: we come to no actual self-expanding and full understanding.[?] The child can observe an adult only insofar as he is in community with his life, this does not extend farther than his own narrow sphere of understanding, not to his personal type as citizen, as worker, social democrat etc. The same is the case for the adult, he has his region of possible apperceptions, and nevertheless all together belong to an existing world within which the world of the child, the adult peasant etc., the German, the Chinese etc. are embedded. Everything objective concerning these relative worlds is accessible to everyone, in whichever world he exists - for everyone in a universal normality that is again relative to himself: that of the adult. But not as if everything objective were actually accessable in its full special meaning, but rather understandable as belonging to a universal historical humanity- and world-horizon...