C 16 VII: Dating: May 1933

The pregiven world pregiven to me as our common world/ nature as the first factor in the world - preceding communalization: my nature, all of our nature. Primordiality and alien perception; what does that mean with respect to correspondence?

...[p. 4]

I do not have this unity with regard to me and the others. Every I, which I experience as other in original presentification, has his unity and his streaming life, his immanent-temporal stream of objective temporalization, his primordial nature. While however the nature is [p. 5] constituted as intersubjective unity in communalization, it is nevertheless a unity on the basis of communalization with my others. This implies: it does not lead to any possible continuation of my I-pole, or of my continuous underground of inactive intentionality along with my acts (whose outer continuity in the time stream has as correlate the contrasting continuity of the I-pole standing in a community of identity with itself), with "other" I-poles. But it is nevertheless community (the word "correspondence" points back unfortunately to correspondence in extension, to association), just as with mine, the streaming-constituting temporality bearing, not-extensive-temporal one and the same I. Community with self and others related to I-pole unification. My I as present and my past I - the pole - has no interval, between them there is no temporal stretch in the sense in which there is a temporal stretch between my present thing and my past one... The same thing as temporally persisting has its duration in its identical being, in itself an extensive temporality. The I has authentically in this direct sense no duration. Its life, its appearances, its times have "immanent" extension in the stream of time, and further that is constituted therein as objective-temporal. Everything temporalized, everything temporalized through streaming modes of appearance in the immanent-temporal stream and then again through "outer" appearances (spatio-temporal) has precisely unity of appearance, temporal unity, duration; the I as pole does not endure. Thus my I and the other I in the community of being-with-one-another also have no extensive dependence, but also [p. 6] my life, my times have no dependence on the foreign ones. But "objective" nature, nature common to us is constituted in objective temporalization in the community of mine and my life with the (in my living now-being and now original identity-being) others and their lives coming to appresentative presentification.

The I exists in itself and with itself in inner continuity; the basic distinction is with the external, the continuity of an extension: but as standing and remaining I of inner continuity it exists in the extensive continuity of its life "itself," and relates itself in outer appearances to outer unities of appearance, one and the same in these "relatednesses" and in a secondary sense continuing on, co-temporalized. As concerns the self-directing and being-directed, the act as process, it is immanently temporal and then also objectively temporalized.

...

[p. 8] Monads originate and perish - monads as constituting one world in community, their being-in-one-another in the mode of actual and potential empathy. The monadically actual being-in-one-another exists in the world, is a process of monadic genesis, an originating and perishing of monads, whereby in this monadic change an all-monadic being-in-one-another and being-with-one-another persists, an identically remaining monadic "organism," in which as standing monadic present the all-monadic past remains intentionally preserved and the future is predesignated. In this process, the standing world is constituted as real, in which the monads themselves are "realized," are constituted. Each existing monad has in itself, and in community with the monads that are constituted in mundane fashion for it, its "personal" genesis, as that of a monadically concrete I, which develops its capacities, its habitualities, constructs its personal being. The same is the case with every socially connected multiplicity of monads. But every monad also has its ontic genesis as generatively born and dying. In the world, there appears in realizing fashion, temporalization, mundane genesis of human beings and animals in determinate regulation [p. 9] (production etc.); as each mundane event is also such as implicated in my absolute being: our spiritual world, which is for us the concretely valid world, for each his own, for each group, each people its own, and each also the universal world grasped from itself outward; our world of experience as horizon; it exists - that is the same - constituted as world of a tradition, the currently actual, the personal communal and historical memory, the transmission which is to be questioned historically, the actual persons therein who are to be inferred from documentations, to be revealed through the mediacy of empathy. [?]

But co-constituted in this world, in its spatio-temporal occurrences, is also the generative as generation of individuals and of the organic, animal species, among them human beings.

While I carry out the phenomenological world-reflection with my fellow philosophers, there are revealed to me and to us the succession of steps of the absolute tradition, in which the world is already constituted, and for each and every possible communicative-social community with its developed special sense and its horizon of possible formation. Within this horizon, the access to new fellow subjects and communities, with their traditions, and the formation in the process of one in the unification of their and our traditions, awakens anew a further tradition. Thus there is already revealed to us an existing spiritual world, and for the other human communities other existing spiritual worlds - but with a universally common core of nature. Etc. Nevertheless, tradition is the correlate of accomplishing activity, which has proceeded out of it, and as human life is always newly formed. Thus indeed the process of binding together human communities [through] further activity and expanded tradition awakens on the basis of action.

Reflection, an activity of uncovering the constituting absolute subjectivity which is accessible to me in proceeding from the world which is valid for me as being. Step by step. Spiritual world as expression - as achievement of us and fellow human beings - nature, regression to transcendental subjectivity as human absolute; the horizon of history, so far as the unity of the spiritual world and its core of nature relates to human monads, thus that is nature of the historical tradition. Historical tradition of my people as theme of unveiling, the history of its unitary spiritual form, but its connection with other peoples from other cultures, from other spiritual formations and spiritual forms, particularized nevertheless in connection, but mediated through translation, or conditioned through war, through awakening bridges and incorporations of alien human beings etc. - history as historicity in formation of an inclusive popular culture and popular personality and in the formation of an outer popular connection with peoples reciprocally understood as alien; coexisting and self-conditioning, but unintelligible alien folk personalities. Such a connection also has a unity of "tradition," a unity of history. In an altered sense. More exactly: Historicity of a people, knowing itself in connection with other peoples, with "alien kinds," "barbaric," concretely non-understood [p. 11] peoples, valid for it in such a way that it understands it and authentically does not understand, and as the power co-conditioning its own historicity; moreover then a revealing history, with history as development, transformation of modes, levels of presumed self-understanding etc.

Individual persons in connection with persons, in a personal world, with a personal total temporality, personal total present, total past; more or less "understanding" itself, but nevertheless precisely understanding. Empathy as primary, as experience of present, perceptual coexistence of others. Empathy of an indirect kind in past others, or in co-present, but not directly bodily perceiveable co-existents; indirect empathy through inductive expression. I as human being, other human beings; human world as expressing and actualizing human intentions; constitution of the unity of the familiar surrounding world. Human beings bind themselves together in their practical purposes, they are communalized in their acts; they produce communalized formations, they act in common; unity of one act, in which both partners act together; that presupposes a necessary layer of authentic understanding for the act concerned.

What does authentic understanding mean here? I also understand the others who are authentically "unintelligible" to me precisely as others. And one can say: everyone who is for me other, I understand at least on the lowest level of living bodily governance, of living bodily action as perceiving, as action corporeally effective with respect to other material bodies ( shoving, pushing). [p. 12] Also the primal instincts are understood with respect to actions in at least crude typicality. All apperception, also the empathetic, as determinately as it may apprehend, have nevertheless its open indeterminateness and its determinability in its general scope. But precisely in the manner of determinable indeterminateness lies a difference of apperception.