RESEARCH PAPER

The Role of Umwelt in Husserl’s Aufbau and Abbauof the Natur/Geist Distinction

Adam Konopka

Published online: 17 December 2009! Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract In this essay I argue that Husserl’s development of the nineteenthcentury Natur/Geist distinction is grounded in the intentional correlate between thepre-theoretical natural attitude and environing world (Umwelt). By reconsidering theNatur/Geist distinction through its historical context in the nineteenth centurydebate between Wilhelm Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians from the Baden or South-west school, it is possible to understand more clearly Husserl’s appropriations andnovel contributions. One of Husserl’s contributions lies in his rigorous thematiza-tion and clarification of the constitutive features proper to the natural and humansciences as they arise from the pre-theoretical experience of an environing world.This ordinary lived experience between the lived body and environing world ispresupposed by and forms a unity with both Natur and Geist, thereby acting as theunified ground that is inclusive of naturalized Geist and a geistig nature. Thisunbuilding (Abbau) of the Natur/Geist distinction is necessary, according to Hus-serl, for the radical clarification of the respective methodologies of the natural andhuman sciences.

Keywords Husserl ! Environing world ! Nature ! Geist ! Dilthey !Rickert

Introduction

In this essay I argue that Edmund Husserl’s development of the nineteenth centuryNatur/Geist distinction is grounded in the intentional correlate between the pre-theoretical natural attitude and environing world (Umwelt). By reconsidering the

A. Konopka (&)Philosophy Department, Collins Hall, Fordham University, 441 E. Fordham Rd., New York,NY 10458, USAe-mail: konopka@fordham.edu

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Hum Stud (2009) 32:313–333DOI 10.1007/s10746-009-9122-4

Natur/Geist distinction through its historical context in the nineteenth centurydebate between Wilhelm Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians from the Baden orSouthwest school, it is possible to understand more clearly Husserl’s appropriationsand novel contributions to it. One of Husserl’s contributions lies in his rigorousthematization and clarification of the constitutive features proper to the natural andhuman sciences as they arise from the pre-theoretical experience of an environingworld. This ordinary lived experience between the lived body and environing worldis presupposed by and forms a unity with both Natur and Geist, thereby acting as theunified ground that is inclusive of naturalized Geist and a geistig nature. Thisunbuilding (Abbau) of the Natur/Geist distinction is necessary, according toHusserl, for the radical clarification of the respective methodologies of the naturaland human sciences.

The recent publication of Husserl’s Natur/Geist lecture courses from 1919 and1927 provides an opportunity to re-evaluate the standard interpretation of Husserl’sanalysis in Ideas II as a perpetuation of a strict dichotomy between Natur andGeist.1 Even though Maurice Merleau-Ponty reportedly described the reading ofIdeas II as ‘‘an almost voluptuous experience,’’2 he nevertheless claims, ‘‘Husserldid not manage to overcome this duality [between Natur/Geist]’’ (2003, p. 72).Other commentators find fault in Husserl’s apparent neglect of an investigation ofnature proper to the personalistic attitude of the human sciences.3 For them, Ideas IIremains a failed attempt to investigate a more primordial reciprocal relationbetween Natur and Geist and it was not until Husserl’s later articulation of the life-world that he overcame this binary opposition.

In this essay I offer a foothold for an alternative to this standard interpretation byoutlining Husserl’s discussion of the correlation between the pre-scientific naturalattitude and environing world as the underlying basis for the idea of natureinvestigated in the natural sciences and the geistig world correlated with the humansciences.4 While the pre-theoretical natural attitude is only an ‘‘operative concept’’

1 Husserl also gave these lectures in 1912 and the Natur/Geist distinction plays a central role in theseminars on Phenomenology and Psychology (1917) and Phenomenological Psychology (1925).Hamauzu (2003) has given a brief overview of the 1927 course.2 See the translator’s introduction (Husserl 1989, p. XVI).3 For example, Crowell states, ‘‘Oddly, we must here recall Husserl’s insistence that in everydayexperience we have nothing to do with ‘nature-objects.’ For as far as one can tell from Husserl’s text, noparticular sense of nature arises within the personalistic attitude, no sense which specifically belongs tothat attitude and can be clarified only within it’’ (1996, p. 101). Soffer agrees with this characterization,‘‘One of the most intriguing aspects of Ideas II is its insistence on the exclusiveness of the personalisticand naturalistic attitudes, and its corresponding suggestion that either we are directed towards persons,the life world, and motivational causality; or towards nature and physical and psycho-physical causality;but never to both concomitantly’’ (1996, p. 43).4 There are a select few other commentators who also provide an alternative to the standardinterpretation. For instance, Sakakibara (1998) develops Husserl’s notion of the ‘‘natural basis of spirit’’in manuscripts surrounding those of Ideas II. While my analysis is consistent with Sakakibara’sunderstanding of the Natur/Geist distinction, where he focuses on the outright relationship between thenatural and geistig, my reading is centered on how they arise from pre-theoretical experience. Jalbert(1987) also has an interpretation of Ideas II that is consonant with the one below. Jalbert makes the casethat Husserl’s position represents an advance of Dilthey’s conception of the foundation of the humansciences because Husserl’s account of the personal surrounding world encompasses both Natur and Geist.

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in Ideas II, as Eugen Fink has suggested (1976, p. 190), it nevertheless is explicitlydeveloped in Husserl’s lectures where the naturalistic and personalistic attitudes areshown to be theoretical modifications of pre-theoretical experience of an environingworld.5 While the theoretical interest of the natural scientist modifies theapprehension of an environing world as an infinite manifold of spatio-temporalmateriality denuded of subjective accomplishments, the theoretical interest of thehuman scientist retains the environmental relation of pre-theoretical experience as itthematizes the geistig features inherent in it.

The Historical Context of the Nineteenth Century Natur/Geist Distinction

Husserl inherited the Natur/Geist distinction from the late nineteenth century debatebetween Wilhelm Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians from the Baden or SouthwestSchool (in particular—Wilhelm Windelband and his student Heinrich Rickert). Thisdebate had a decisive impact on the categories and terminology Husserl used tosituate the discipline of phenomenology within the modern scientific enterprise ingeneral. Indeed, this positioning of transcendental phenomenology and phenome-nological psychology, respectively within a broader scientific framework was one ofHusserl’s central concerns throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Given the importance ofthis debate for Husserl’s middle period, this section will review the relevantarguments between Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians in order to identify thedistinctions that Husserl appropriates in Ideas II and related texts—the differencebetween spatio-temporal materiality and environing world, the naturalistic andpersonalistic attitude, eidetic variation, and formal, regional, and fundamentalontology. As we will see, the precise character of the Natur/Geist distinction wasvigorously contested throughout this debate and Husserl’s own appropriation of thedistinction is heavily indebted to both Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians.

Husserl, Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians were united in their opposition to theappropriation of methodological naturalism in what is known today as the humansciences. Their common goal was the development of a taxonomy of the scienceswherein the methodological autonomy of the human sciences would be preserved.In order to do so, they all attempted to distinguish the methodological principlesinvolved in the Naturwissenschaften from those employed in the Geisteswissens-chaften (Dilthey) or Kulturwissenschaften (Rickert).6 The central feature of this

Footnote 4 continued‘‘This insufficiently studied aspect of Husserl’s assessment of Dilthey concerns the scope and structure ofthe surrounding world (Umwelt) of persons or, what amounts to the same thing, the breadth of a trulyfoundational science…for Husserl, the personal surrounding world…encompasses both nature and spiritand, thus, a human science that claims to provide the necessary foundation for the concrete humandisciplines must render ‘nature’ as well as spirit comprehensible’’ (1987, p. 31).5 Husserl also has a brief discussion of the theoretical modification of lived experience in the openingsections of Ideas II (1989, pp. 4–15).6 This initial distinction can ultimately be traced back to Mill’s (1974) demarcation of the physical andmoral sciences. On the early uses of this term, see Rothacker (1948, p. 6). See also Makkreel (1969,p. 424) and Plantinga (1980, p. 41).

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debate thus consisted in the development of the proper criterion of demarcation ofthe human sciences from the natural sciences.

Despite their common opposition to a ubiquitous appropriation of methodolog-ical naturalism in the sciences, Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians sharply disagreed onhow this demarcation should be established. First, they simply disagreed onterminology. In Dilthey’s Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883) the prefix‘‘Geist’’ is chosen to frame the cluster of sciences which fall outside the scope ofmethodological naturalism, i.e., psychology, anthropology, history, philology, etc.While ‘‘Geist’’ has no direct equivalent in English, it has often been translated as‘‘spirit,’’ ‘‘mind,’’ or ‘‘human.’’ For Rickert, Geist is a problematic term because ittends to connote an isolated psyche or a hypostasized supernatural reality andinvites a dangerous reference to an uncritical idealism. He provides a terminologicalalternative in his Kulturwissenschaften und Naturwissenschaften (1899) in order toavoid such dangers. By replacing ‘‘Geist’’ with ‘‘Kultur,’’ Rickert attempted toframe the non-naturalistic sciences in such a way as to avoid a tacit reference to theexcesses of speculative metaphysics.

Second, this largely insipid terminological difference can reveal a moresubstantial issue that divided Dilthey and the Baden School: the proper classificationof psychology. One of Rickert’s motivations for avoiding the appellation ‘‘Geist’’was that he (and Windelband) did not think that the science of psychology should beclassified in the domain of the non-naturalistic sciences. Rather, the discipline ofpsychology is exclusively psychophysical psychology, which is to say, a natural-istically oriented endeavor that studies both the psycho-physical dimensions ofsubjectivity and the causal relationships between them. The use of the prefix‘‘Kultur’’ allows Rickert to avoid associating psychology in the non-naturalisticdomain of the sciences. While Windelband and Rickert held this position—largelyinfluenced by the then prevalent naturalistic psychology originating in the work ofWilhelm Wundt, Dilthey maintained that non-naturalistic psychology was thefoundational discipline in the Geisteswissenschaften. In his 1894 essay entitledIdeen uber eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie, Dilthey elaborateshis position wherein psychological methodology should be descriptive and analyticrather than explanatory and experimental. A non-naturalistic psychology beginswith immediate lived experience (Erlebnis) and is able to grasp the unified whole ofthe psychic nexus (seelischer Zusammenhang) as it is given in a first personperspective. A naturalistic psychology, on the other hand, betrays the originalunification of immediate intuition and represents an atomistic approach to livedexperience because the only account of psychic unity it can offer is an artificialconstruction of a continuum of hypotheses governed by causal principles.

Third, perhaps the most significant aspect of the debate consists of the differentmethodological principles that Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians employed in thephilosophical justification of the non-naturalistic sciences. This aspect of the debateis also the most difficult to succinctly delineate because Dilthey’s positionsignificantly develops throughout a number of works. This development begins withthe Einleitung, where Dilthey’s demarcation of the natural and human sciences wasmade with regard to the alternative class of objects that are investigated. The‘‘material’’ studied in the natural sciences is physical reality whereas the human

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sciences study phenomena relating to mental processes. In his Ideen, Diltheymodified this material distinction in favor of a classification according to the type ofexperience on which the respective methodologies are based. While the naturalsciences take recourse to ‘‘outer experience,’’ the human sciences are based on‘‘inner experience.’’ Knowledge of natural events derived from external experienceis subject to explanation (Erklaren) through causal laws, whereas internalexperience is rendered intelligible through understanding (Verstandis). As Diltheyconcisely put it, ‘‘Nature we explain, human or psychic life we understand’’ (1977,p. 144). The central thrust of the notion of understanding as the proper system ofdescription and analysis of psychic life lies in its non-naturalistic character. Whilethe hypothetical aspect of explanatory and experimental psychology only allowsindividual components to be studied in isolation, the methodology proper tounderstanding is meant to preserve the whole ‘‘acquired psychic nexus.’’ Thisstructural nexus of life (Lebenszusammenhang) is comprised of the complex of alllived experience (Gesamterlebnis), such as memory, evaluations, dispositions, andthe unconscious. Finally, in Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in denGeisteswissenschaften (1910), Dilthey elaborated his mature position that alignshermeneutic description (where the complex interaction of expression, livedexperience, and understanding combine to constitute knowledge) with the humansciences and causal explanation with the natural sciences. The hermeneutic turn inDilthey’s later work was a development of his earlier psychological period and isevidenced by his characterization of expressions as sensible objects that convey a‘‘geistig’’ meaning. Expressions, in short, do not merely refer to a personal orpsychological nexus, but embody socio-historical meanings in concrete form (mostnotably, in autobiographical writing). The category of lived experience, in turn, isexpanded beyond the psychic nexus of the individual to be inclusive of a sharedmilieu that forms the context for interpretation. Understanding thus occurs throughthe comprehension of the expressions of others as they interact with theirenvironment. These expressions might be simple (such as gestures and actions) orcomplex (such as theatrical play, which requires a re-experiencing [Nacherleben] ofa temporal whole through imaginative reproduction).

This brief sketch of Dilthey’s development is sufficient for a contrast with theNeo-Kantian principle of the methodological differentiation of the two domains ofscience.7 Windelband and Rickert rightfully rejected Dilthey’s initial material orontological principle of demarcation due to its uncritical (and even Cartesian)positing of two separate modes of existence. They also denied a demarcation on thebasis of the inner/outer distinction because of the implications that psychologicalinvestigation would be a non-naturalistic sciences (which they denied). Instead ofaccounting for the methodological autonomy of the human sciences according to thesubject matter of investigation or the inner/outer distinction, their demarcation wasmade on the basis of the cognitive achievements of the scientific researcher. In hisfamous rectoral address entitled ‘‘Geschichte und Naturwissenschaften’’ (1894),Windelband characterizes these alternative constitutions in terms of the nomotheticand idiographic modes of knowledge (Erkenntnisweisen). The nomothetic mode

7 For a more detailed account of Dilthey’s development, see Jalbert (1988) and Owensby (1994).

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refers to the cognitive activity of the natural scientist that aims at general laws inorder to ascertain ‘‘what always is.’’ This theoretical interest abstracts from theunique and qualitatively distinct properties of events in order to ascertain thegeneral laws that govern them. An individual datum is relevant to the nomotheticonly insofar as it can be represented as a type, generic concept, or subsumed under ageneral law. By contrast, the idiographic refers to historical investigations whereinthe theoretical interest of the researcher thematizes the individual and unique inorder to discover ‘‘what once was.’’ Historical sciences are interested in objects orstates of affairs not because of what they share in common with other phenomena,but because of their distinct qualities manifested in singular instances. In short, thefundamental demarcating principle of the sciences, according to Windelband, ismethodologically comprised by the difference between the generalizing andindividualizing modes of knowledge operative in theoretical activity.

Rickert advances and radicalizes this principle by characterizing the alternativemodes of constitution in terms of the attitude (Einstellung) that governs the interestsof the cognitive subject. ‘‘…the validity of concepts can depend only on the kind ofactivity in which the cognitive subject engages in forming them’’ (1986, p. 216). Thenatural and cultural scientists are both interested in the same empirical reality (contrathe early Dilthey), but they take a different posture or position with regard to it. Thesealternative attitudes are the source for the concept formation in the respectivescientific domains. ‘‘If we reflect on the different kinds of attitude the cognitivesubject exhibits, then two kinds of subjectivism can be distinguished’’ (p. 216). On theone hand, if a scientist’s attitude is shaped by a theoretical interest that values thedistinctive features of individual objects and events, it is concerned with historicalknowledge (idiographic). On the other hand, when a scientist assumes a theoreticalinterest that values general laws and apprehends empirical reality through this value,her or his attitude is shaped in such a way that her or his theoretical interest is directedtowards common laws that operate generally across various objects and states ofaffairs (nomologically).8 The attitudinal demarcation for Rickert is, in short,primarily axiological in character—it is determined according to the different values(individualizing or generalizing) that animate theoretical interest.

The final point of contrast in the demarcation debate between Dilthey and theNeo-Kantians is perhaps the most important in light of Husserl’s contribution. Thiscontrast refers to the alternative characterizations of the intelligibility of the realityinvestigated by the historical sciences. For the Southwest Neo-Kantian school,empirical reality is a contingent, arbitrary, and anomic infinite manifold that onlybecomes intelligible when it is brought under concepts or when concepts are formedwhich represent it. For Dilthey, the ‘‘object’’ of historical knowing is the life-nexusthat is inclusive of a localized milieu or environment (Umgebung) that has anintrinsic intelligible structure. Let us briefly consider each position in turn.

For the Southwest school, epistemology is about the formation of concepts. Theconditions for the possibility of knowledge of an object are the conditions for thepossibility of forming concepts related to that object. Knowledge is thus constituted

8 While Rickert’s attitudinal development of Windelband’s position does not explicitly reference thedistinction between the idiographic and the nomological, an association can nevertheless be made.

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by valid concept formation. The problem of historical knowledge arises whenconcept formation is idiographic or when it refers to an individual event or state ofaffairs. By their nature, concepts are abstracted intellectual constructs and the moreabstract and generalized the concept becomes, the more it is removed from anindividual reference. Even though the ontological reality of objects and events fallunder concepts, the concepts themselves are ontologically empty and do not containreality. The result is not only that concepts are ontologically poor, but that realitylacks intelligibility itself, which is to say, it is irrational apart from concepts.9 Thistension or dualism between concepts and reality results in what Emil Lask (1923),borrowing an expression from Fichte, called a hiatus irrationalis.10 The hiatus isproduced because reality cannot be derived from concepts. It is irrational becausereality can only be rationalized by conceptualization, and given the dichotomybetween concepts and reality—this is impossible. The concrete reality of individualobjects must thus be accepted as incomprehensible in themselves and incommen-surable with the concepts that correspond to them.

The central task of Rickert’s Die Grenzen was to solve the problem posed by thehiatus irrationalis. While the attempt to retrace this proposed solution is beyond thescope of this analysis, the relevant issue concerns Rickert’s characterization ofthe irrationality of reality. Rickert’s solution does not try to surmount or close thegap between concepts and reality. As Guy Oakes puts it, ‘‘It [the hiatus irrationalis]is [for Rickert], rather, an essential condition for the possibility of historicalknowledge’’ (1986, p. xvi). The experience of reality is an experience of an infinitemanifold of single events and processes that has no temporal beginning or end andno discernible spatial limits. As Rickert states,

If we assume that empirical reality is the only material of science, and ifempirical reality forms an infinite manifold whose purely factual rendition cannever be provided by science, it is self-evident that science is possible only bymeans of the reshaping undertaken by the subject (1986, p. 217).

As we have seen, this ‘‘reshaping’’ is accounted for by alternative attitudes whichcorrespond to the alternative domains of science. For both attitudes, however, thewhole of empirical reality manifests itself as infinite in two ways. First, it isunendlich or boundless in the sense that it cannot be exhaustively grasped inexperience. Rickert calls this an extensive infinity. Second, each event and processcan be divided and analyzed into parts that are indefinitely divisible and have anindeterminate number of aspects. Rickert calls this an intensive infinity (pp. 100–102). The totality of reality (extensive infinity), in short, is irrational in the sensethat there is no criteria that can specify what would qualify as knowledge of this

9 As Friedman characterizes this position ‘‘Knowledge or true judgment would be impossible [for a naıveempiricism], for the stream of unconceptualized sense experience is in fact utterly chaotic andintrinsically undifferentiated. Comparing the articulated structures of our judgments to this chaos ofsensations simply makes no sense’’ (2000, p. 26).10 Lask wrote Fichtes Idealismus as his dissertation under Rickert’s supervision in 1901. The followingaccount of the hiatus irrationalis is taken from this, Lask’s early work. For a more systematic treatment ofLask’s later thought and its relation to Husserl and Heidegger, see the first several chapters of Crowell(2001).

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totality. Every element within the totality (intensive infinity) is also irrational in thatthere is no criterion that can specify what would constitute a complete description ofits parts and aspects (p. 53). Rickert’s characterization of the irrationality of theempirical, in sum, plays an important role in his critique of epistemological realism.Due to the irrationality of concrete reality, knowledge can only be accounted for bytaking recourse to the cognitive processes of the subject.

Dilthey counters this characterization of the intelligibility of the empirical byrejecting Rickert’s categories of infinity in favor of an account of an milieuwherein lived experience (Erlebnis) always already occurs within a pre-givenhorizon of meaning that has been habitually accumulated, received, and produced.The apprehension of concrete reality is thus not of an irrational totality thatexceeds the grasp of the understanding, but an intelligible structure comprised ofthe nexus of life (Lebenszusammenhang). This life nexus is the proper object ofstudy in the historical sciences and, according to Dilthey, descriptive psychologyis the proper methodological domain wherein, ‘‘the lived nexus is given in animmediate and living manner as a lived reality. The lived experience of thiscontinuum is at the basis of every apprehension of geistig, historical, and socialaffairs’’ (1977, p. 35).

Dilthey explicitly makes this contrast with Kant and the Southwest school in theopening chapter of his Ideen. In arguing that his proposal of a descriptivepsychology has distinct advantages over the Neo-Kantian epistemology, Diltheyidentifies the false dichotomy between concepts and the intuition of reality:

The classification theory of the faculties during the time of Kant resulted in thedrastic separations, the divisive compartmentalization of his critique of reason.This can be seen clearly as regards to the separation between intuition andlogical thought, as well as between the matter and form of knowledge. Bothdistinctions, as sharp as they are with Kant, destroy the coherence of a livingnexus…Kant attributes to none of his discoveries any greater weight than tohis rigorous separation between the nature and principles of intuition andthought (p. 32).

It is an analytic mistake, according to Dilthey, to rigorously separate the concepts ofthought and the intuitions of the empirical as the fundamental data of theintelligibility of experience. Insofar as any distinctions of the sort can be made, theyare founded on the inherent harmony of lived experience within a life-nexus. ‘‘Theillusion that it can be otherwise rests in the end on the fact that the theoretician ofknowledge is in possession of this nexus in his own living consciousness, fromwhich he transports it into his theory. He presupposes it [the life-nexus]. He makesuse of it, but he is not in control of it’’ (p. 32). As Gadamer puts it, ‘‘For Dilthey theconnection between life and knowledge is an original datum’’ (1999, p. 236).

The contrast between the hiatus irrationalis and the pre-given structure of thelife-nexus can be further highlighted by indicating the alternative historicalinfluences at work. For Kant, Newtonian physics plays the decisive role in thecharacterization of the empirical as the absolute continuum of space and time.Dilthey’s notions of milieu, environment (Umgebung), and environing world(Umwelt) can be traced back to the English naturalization of psychology through

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biology.11 While Dilthey rejects this naturalization project, he neverthelesscreatively appropriates the notion of milieu and environment by transforming itinto the first person procedures of his descriptive psychology, thereby shedding thenaturalistic connotation. ‘‘Descriptive psychology has corresponding to the sciencesof organic life, the following methodological resources: description, analysis,classification, comparison, and the theory of evolution’’ (44). As is well knownamong Dilthey commentators, there is thus a strong organic overtone to Dilthey’spsychological writings.12 For example, ‘‘Thus, there is a constant interactionbetween the self and the milieu of external reality in which the self is placed, andour life consists of this interaction’’ (1997, p. 185). For another example, ‘‘Theorganism endowed with sensation and deliberative motion is determined in itspreservation and improvement by its relations to the milieu in which it lives’’ (1977,p. 72). The interaction between an organism and its environment is predominantlyan evaluative and purposive relation, rather than a cognitive or formal one. ForDilthey, the former grounds the later, ‘‘The categories of life do not originate fromthe formal clarity of pure reason, but from the structure of life itself. They are not atall grounded in reason, but in the life-nexus itself’’ (1997, p. 361).

The life-nexus is inclusive of the milieu in which it occurs and this inclusioncontributes to the intelligibility of the purposive and evaluative structure of the life-nexus. The empirical is thus given to the human scientist, not as an irrationaltotality, but as inherently connected to the structure of life. As his work progressesto his later hermeneutical period, Dilthey increasingly refers to the lived milieu asan Umwelt, usually by qualifying it as a ‘‘geistig Umwelt’’ (spiritual environingworld) (2002, p. 161) in order signal a break with naturalistic biology.

In conclusion, this brief overview of the nineteenth century demarcation debatereveals a complex interchange which is not reducible to a simple material orontological dichotomy following the Cartesian categories of res extensa and rescogitans. From terminological differences and alternative classifications ofpsychological methodology, to differing criteria for demarcation and contrastingcharacterization of the intelligibility of the empirical, the debate produces a set ofproblematics that Husserl appropriates as he situates his new phenomenologicaldiscipline into the modern scientific framework. The problematics represented inthis overview are sufficient to demonstrate that the Natur/Geist distinction Husserlinherits is epistemological, which is to say, it concerns the methodologicalframework of the modern sciences. This concern is governed by the search for ajustification for non-naturalistic methodology in the historical sciences. WhenHusserl appropriates the term ‘‘Geist,’’ he does not simply acquire the connotation

11 Herbert Spencer is the central figure for this appropriation, ‘‘This psychological school was supersededin England by Herbert Spencer…He undertook to subordinate psychic phenomenon to the real system ofphysical phenomenon and, accordingly, psychology to the natural sciences. In effect, he foundedpsychology of general biology after having further developed in it the notions of adaptation of livingbeings to their milieu…He thus interprets internal states and their connection by basing them onneurology, the comparison of external organizations of the animal world and the pursuit of adaptation tothe external world’’ (Dilthey 1977, p. 44).12 For those commentators who deal with this organic dimension and its appropriation, see for instance,Owensby (1994), Reid (2001), and Rodi (1987).

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of a hypostatized metaphysical entity removed from nature, but a reference to thepossibility of scientific research that is not reducible to the causal explanation ofmethodological naturalism. The Natur/Geist distinction, in short, is fundamentallythe distinction between the Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften.

This is not to say that the Natur/Geist distinction is not deeply problematic forHusserl. As we will see below, Husserl’s task is to unbuild the epistemologicaldichotomy through a radical sense investigation that discloses the proper groundwherein the distinction arises in the first place. This will relativize the scientificdistinction in favor of a more fundamental dimension of pre-theoretical experiencethat is presupposed by and forms a unity with the theoretical interests of both thenatural and human sciences. Husserl is in a difficult position, however, in that whilehe must penetrate through the dichotomy in order to discover its proper ground, hemust do so in a way that clarifies the methodological autonomy of the non-naturalistic sciences. He must dismantle the distinction, in short, while preservingits proper application.

Husserl’s Synthesis and Radicalization of the Demarcation Debate

On the one hand, Husserl’s position regarding the demarcation problem can be seenas a synthesis of Dilthey and Rickert’s formulation in that he borrows terminologyand concepts from each and conclusively sides with one or the other on the fouraspects of the debate outlined above. On the other hand, Husserl’s position is notreducible to the conglomeration of the two alternatives. Whenever he references thisdebate, Husserl expresses dissatisfaction with the insufficient radicalism on the partof Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians. This insufficiency initially stems from theirneglect to provide a rigorous account of the constitutive procedures of both forms oftheoretical interest. Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians, according to Husserl, uncriticallyaccept natural scientific cognition. In order to avoid this oversight, Husserl proposesa radical return to ordinary lived experience that operates prior to the Natur/Geistdistinction and can thus render both forms of scientific cognition intelligible. In thissection, Husserl’s position will be briefly presented in both its indebtedness toDilthey and Rickert on the one hand, and its radicalization of the debate on theother.

The first sense in which Husserl synthesizes the demarcation debate can be seenthrough his agreement with Dilthey regarding the classification of psychology as thefoundational discipline of the human sciences and his adoption of the then prevalentterminology of ‘‘Geist.’’ Much of Husserl’s output in the 1920s was directed towardestablishing an eidetic psychology that could serve as the founding discipline in thehuman sciences. His 1925 lectures on phenomenological psychology, for instance,extensively reviewed Dilthey’s own development of a non-naturalistic psychologyas Husserl sought to phenomenologically improve on Dilthey’s methodology. As wewill see, Husserl understands the category of Geist as that which is non-naturalistically constituted.

Secondly, while Husserl unambiguously sides with Dilthey regarding theterminology of ‘‘Geist’’ and the proper classification of psychology, he nevertheless

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appropriates Rickert’s attitudinal distinction as the formal principle that demarcatesthe two general domains of science.13 While Husserl makes extensive use ofRickert’s attitudinal terminology to describe the cognitive activity of the scientist,he also transforms and pluralizes the notion of attitude as he concretizes them in thecontext of intentional lived experience. As Husserl states in ‘‘Philosophy asRigorous Science,’’ ‘‘The question of philosophy’s relation to the natural andhumanistic sciences…demands fundamentally new attitudes that in turn involvefundamentally peculiar goals and methods…’’ (1981, p. 166). While Husserl usedattitudes as the formal criterion for the demarcation of the sciences, he wasnevertheless wary of the empty formalism that results from positing attitudinaldistinctions without establishing how they arise from different types of immediatelived experience. Husserl called all formalism of the sort ‘‘extremely dangerous’’(sehr gefaehrlich) in that the resulting evidences have a tendency to be mere‘‘illusory evidences’’ (Scheinevidenzen) that lack intuitive grounding insofar as theyare not traced back to their source in lived experience. In order to guard againstRickert’s formalism, the requirement is nothing less than ‘‘a genuine concreteepistemology or, better, a phenomenological foundation that draws the etherealformal universalities from their intuitive sources’’ (Husserl 2001a, p. 90). Thisphenomenological concretizing of Rickert’s attitudinal terminology is especiallyevident in Husserl’s establishment of the ‘‘natural attitude’’ of pre-theoreticalexperience that characterizes the ordinary lived experience of objects and states ofaffairs prior to assuming a theoretical interest that results in a scientific attitude. Theapplication of the notion of attitude to the ordinary or mundane concerns andinterests of pre-theoretical life is an application to what Dilthey considers to be thenexus of life—the complex of perceptual, practical, affective, axiological modes ofpre-theoretical lived experience. Husserl thus synthesizes Rickert’s attitudinalterminology with Dilthey’s call to lived experience and thereby attempts toovercome the formalism of the Neo-Kantian position while at the same timeimproving on Dilthey’s vague theorizing.14

13 Even though Dilthey’s position developed to accommodate the Neo-Kantian criticisms, henevertheless remained opposed to Rickert’s attitudinal distinction. ‘‘The difference between the humanand natural sciences is not just about the stance [Einstellung] of the subject toward the object; it is notmerely about a kind of attitude [Verhalten], a method. Rather, the procedure of understanding is groundedin the realization that the external reality that constitutes its object is totally different from the objects ofthe natural sciences’’ (2002, p. 141).14 Husserl’s critique of Dilthey’s lack of methodological rigor is well known and while Husserl agreeswith the necessity of returning to concrete lived experience, he attempts to do so with a moresophisticated methodology. ‘‘Dilthey, a man gifted with the intuition of genius, though not a man ofrigorous scientific theorizing, saw, to be sure, the problems leading to the goal and the directions of thework to be done, but he did not penetrate through to the decisive formulations of the problems and tothe methodologically certain solutions, no matter how great was the progress he made here especially inthe years of his wise old age … Ever new significant investigations joined up with Dilthey’s research.Windelband, Rickert, Simmel, Munsterberg, and others tried their utmost to do justice, from new sides, tothe opposition in question [Natur/Geist]. Yet following them we do not penetrate to the actually decisiveclarifications and rigorously scientific conceptions and foundations. Only a radical investigation, directedto the phenomenological sources of the constitution of the ideas of nature, Body, and soul, and of thevarious ideas of Ego and Person can here deliver decisive elucidations and at the same time further therights of the valid motives of all such investigations’’ (1989, p. 181).

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Thus, in one sense Husserl’s position can be seen as a synthesis of thedemarcation debate in that he agrees with Dilthey’s classification of psychology andadapts his retrieval of the lived relation to the environing world on the one hand, andyet appropriates and transforms Rickert’s attitudinal categorization of scientificcognition on the other. However, to simply characterize it as an adaptation of anearlier debate would be to dismiss the novelty and radicalism of the phenomeno-logical program. There are three aspects of this radicalism that are especiallyinstructive. First, Husserl rejects the operative distinctions in demarcation debate(idiographic/nomological) that contrasts the generalizing methodology of thenatural sciences and the individualizing methodology of the human sciences.Whereas both Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians maintain that the human scientificinvestigation is relegated to individual events and objects (i.e., the fall of Rome, therituals of the indigenous people of Easter Island, and an individual’s psychologicalstate), Husserl maintains that universality can be achieved in both scientific domainsthrough the identification of essential structures that correspond to the empiricalfacts of human scientific investigation.15 Eidetic analysis provides the possibility ofascertaining the invariant types and laws that categorize a given field ofinvestigation and thereby ‘‘give order to the concrete singularities of the worldand co-determine the order and connection of the methodic world for the eventualsciences which, as concrete sciences, extend to these singularities’’ (1968, p. 65).16

The phenomenological procedure of eidetic variation allows Husserl to maintainthat human scientific investigation can be generalizing and categorial. Thisprocedure arises from Husserl’s affirmation of both (1) real objects determinedaccording to perception (i.e., an oak tree, the Statue of Liberty, and the ruins of theColiseum) and (2) ideal objects that are built up from perceptual experience but arenot themselves reducible to the sensuous (i.e., the Pythagorean theorem, theEuropean Union, and the law of non-contradiction). Parallel to this broadcharacterization of objectivity is Husserl’s broad characterization of intuition thatis applicable to both sensuous and categorical acts (2001b, pp. 670–676). Asensuous intuition is a fulfilled perceptual intention that brings an object toawareness, i.e., seeing and retrieving the mail in the mailbox or examining thebackside of the door. A categorial intuition is a higher order act that results from acomplex of sensuous intentions but nevertheless transcends the perceptual sphere.When we are perceptually directed toward a door, for example, it is sensuouslygiven with a variety of features, i.e., color, size, spatial determination, and materialcomposition, and our sensuous intuition is of the door as a whole withoutaccentuating any of these features. We can, however, also focus our attention on aparticular feature of the door, i.e., its brown color. When we relate the intention of

15 As Husserl would later say in the ‘‘Vienna Lecture,’’ Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians (among others),‘‘totally failed even to see the problem of a universal and pure humanistic science and to inquire after atheory of the essence of spirit [Geist] purely as spirit which would pursue what is unconditionallyuniversal, by way of elements and laws, in the spiritual sphere, with the purpose of proceeding from thereto scientific explanations in an absolutely final sense’’ (1970, p. 273).16 As Jalbert (1988) has argued, ‘‘what distinguishes Husserl’s view most clearly from that of Dilthey,Windelband, and Rickert is the conviction that phenomenological psychology, as the foundational sciencefor the particular human disciplines, must be in its aim and method a purely eidetic science’’ (p. 286).

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the door as a whole to the intention of brown color as a component part of the doorand make the judgment ‘‘The door is brown,’’ this predication is a result of acategorial performance. It is categorial in that it makes use of the categories of partand whole, categories that are not given in mere sensuous intuition.

Husserl distinguishes between two types of categorial acts: synthetic andideative. The example above of the brown door is a synthetic intuition in that itremains directed towards a particular object (the door) and cannot be intendedindependent from the door and its brown color. An ideative or eidetic act, bycontrast, abstracts from a particular object in order to grasp the universal categoriesthemselves, i.e., if the aim of the categorial act is to determine doors as such orbrown as such, the ideative process may start with a particular object but does notremain tied to it.

This account of eidetic intuitions underlies the methodological procedure ofeidetic variation wherein an ideal object or state of affairs is imaginatively varied asbeing different than it currently is. This imaginative variation lead to certainproperties of the object that cannot be varied without it being different than the kindof object it is, i.e., in order for a door to be a door it must have a front and backsideand so on. The variations that do not alter the recognition of the door are consideredaccidental (i.e., doors can be brown, white, etc.), while those that do change theidentity of the object are considered essential (i.e., all doors have color and thereforecolor is an essential feature of all doors). These essential properties make up aninvariant structure that provides a typology relating to other particular objects, i.e.,doors, with the same essential features.

Eidetic analysis is thus a certain kind of conceptual analysis that for Husserlsupplements the idiographic and factually oriented dimension of human scientificinvestigation with essential insight (Wesensschau). Corresponding to ‘‘sciences offacts’’ are ‘‘sciences of essences’’ that formalize and clarify the operative categoriesin a particular scientific investigation and allow for generalizations and categorialjudgments to be made in the human sciences (Husserl 1998, p. 15). It is through thiseidetic component of phenomenology that Husserl referred to the human sciences as‘‘nomological.’’17

Second, the introduction of eidetic analysis not only allows Husserl to overcomethe idiographic characterization of the human sciences by Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians, but it also enables Husserl to develop a special kind of ‘‘material’’principle of demarcation of the sciences called ‘‘regional ontologies.’’ This materialor regional demarcation advances beyond the Neo-Kantian formalism thatexclusively relies on the cognitive procedures of the scientist in the demarcationof the domains of scientific investigation and, moreover, characterizes the‘‘material’’ principle of demarcation such that it does not metaphysically presupposeor uncritically posit the subject matter of the different sciences. This ‘‘material,’’ inother words, has no resemblance to Dilthey’s early material demarcation in theEinleitung that classified the respective domains of inquiry according to theirsubject matter (where the natural sciences study physical things and the humansciences study mental processes). Rather, Husserl’s ‘‘material’’ distinction is made

17 This reference is from the unpublished manuscript A IV 8, 32 and is quoted in Jalbert (1988 p. 290).

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through a second order reflective act corresponding to essences arrived at througheidetic variation. The apprehension of the ideal structures and laws are considered‘‘material’’ because they remain subject to intuition, rather than being reducible tothe subjective features of concept formation proposed by the Neo-Kantians. ForHusserl, in short, a formal account of the demarcation is a necessary, but notsufficient criterion for the taxonomy of the sciences.

Whereas positivism claims that there is only one structure of the world (thecausally governed world of spatio-temporal materiality derived from methodolog-ical naturalism), Husserl developed the category of regional ontology to charac-terize various ‘‘spheres of being’’ (Seinspharen) or ‘‘regions of being’’ (1998, p. 32).While the sphere of objects produced from sense perception are the basis for all theother spheres (1998, p. 18), the objects of mathematics and logic (for instance) arenot reducible to this founding sphere. Rather, a variety of different regions arecomprised of an aggregate of objects or states of affairs available for scientificinvestigation whose unity is arrived at through eidetic analysis. The essence whichcharacterizes a particular region corresponds to what it means for an object in agiven region ‘‘to be,’’ thus the ontological designation. In an ‘‘ontologicalinvestigation,’’ the phenomenologist attempts to clarify the fundamental categoriesthat are operative in a particular science by gaining insight into the essentialstructure of the laws and regularities that govern its respective region. Theseinvestigations are not developed prior to or independently of an establishedempirical science, but provide an important redundancy to their efforts, albeit it withideal objectivity which extends beyond atomistic facts.

Husserl makes the distinction between a formal and regional (material) ontologyto account for higher and lower levels of abstraction in ontological determinations.A formal ontology investigates the essential categories that characterize ‘‘the formalessence of any object whatever’’ (1998, p. 20), which is to say, the most formalcharacteristics of objectivity as such. The discipline proper to the determination ofthese categories is formal logic. The empirical sciences, however, cannotsufficiently be grounded in the formal logic common to all the sciences, butrequire the clarification of the basic categories relevant to the particulardetermination of objectivity within a given region. A mathematical object, forinstance, does not qualify as an object of biology nor would a psychological statequalify as an object of physics. The clarification and determination of the basiccategories of objectivity proper to each empirical science is the goal of constructinga regional ontology which, in turn, allows for a ‘‘material’’ taxonomy of the sciencesdetermined by the types and structures of objectivity within a given region.

The Environing World as a Critique of the Hiatus Irrationalis

In the remainder of this essay, I would like to consider in more detail a third aspectof Husserl’s engagement in this demarcation debate that concerns his use of anenvironing world as a critique of the Neo-Kantian problematic of the hiatusirrationalis. Husserl’s analysis of the environing world can be seen both as anappropriation and radicalization of Dilthey’s characterization of the life-nexus as the

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proper object of the historical sciences. While Husserl was wary of the biologistictenor of Dilthey’s appropriation from naturalistic biology, he neverthelessextensively utilizes the basic feature of the life-nexus: the relation between anorganism and its milieu. As we have seen, the immediate intuition of concretereality, for Dilthey, is not an irrational totality that exceeds the grasp of theunderstanding (as the Neo-Kantians would have it), but an intelligible structurecomprised of a purposive and evaluative life-nexus that is intrinsically determinedby its milieu. The proper object of the human sciences is this life-nexus with all itsgeistig, i.e., psychological, cultural, and historical, features.

Husserl appropriates Dilthey’s basic strategy of resisting the Neo-Kantiancritique of epistemological realism by challenging the phenomenological accuracyof world experience as an irrational totality. Husserl’s most extensive confrontationwith Rickert occurs in his 1919 and 1927 lecture courses, where he focuses onRickert’s characterization of the world through extensive and intensive infinities.The fundamental issue of Rickert’s overall demarcation, according to Husserl, is‘‘the cognitive overcoming (Uberwinden) of the infinite (unendlichen) manifold ofthe world’’ (2001a, p. 86). How do our concepts surmount the infinite totality ofchaotic sense data? How, more importantly, is the world given as an infinitemanifold to begin with?

Husserl’s critique of Rickert occurs through a ‘‘thorough investigation ofexperience and the essential correlation between world experience and thescientifically true world’’ (2001a, p. 93). Such a thorough phenomenology requiresthat we do not merely consider world experience from the vantage point of thetheoretical interests of the natural and human sciences, but that we rather start fromthe pre-given sense of the world prior to assuming a theoretical attitude with regardto it. What is needed, in other words, is an unbuilding of theoretical attitudes thatretrieves the grounding soil (Boden) upon which they are built up. This pre-theoretical ground is characterized by (1) a naturalness—it is the way we ordinarilyexperience the world in the context of our everyday interests, (2) practicality—it isgoal oriented with means-end or instrumental interests, and (3) naıvete—it does notrecognize its interest as one among many, but assumes they are the only possibleinterests. These interests are together habituated to shape an overall pre-theoreticalattitude and are theoretically modified by (1) an extra-ordinary curiosity towardsobjects and states of affairs that are (2) considered as significant in themselves,rather than with mere practical instrumentality, and (3) an interest in universalityand explanation (1989, p. 13; cf. 2002, p. 15).18

The pre-theoretical attitude is intentionally correlated with a horizon of certainobjects and states of affairs. In our ordinary experience, according to Husserl, wealways already find ourselves in a variety of different contexts, i.e., our workplaces,homes, and communities. To have an interest at all is to already be in a situation—the very etymology of the word ‘‘interest’’ (inter-esse) implies to be among or to bein a certain context. The overall context of the pre-theoretical attitude is the worldalways already pre-given in a certain way—as an environing world. ‘‘That whichhas already resulted for us in this regard is the first terrain of the reasonable origin of

18 For a more detailed discussion of the theoretical modification of the natural attitude, see Luft (1998).

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the determination of the concept ‘world,’ namely, the necessary form of thecorrelation ‘I and my environing world,’ and the correlation ‘I am my pre-theoretical environing world’’’ (2002, p. 228). The environing world is theimmediate context of our pre-theoretical interests which Husserl calls the ‘‘scene ofall human praxis’’ (2001a, p. 201). Our workplaces, homes, gardens, and vacationdestinations are environing worlds wherein environing objects and states of affairshave a manner of givenness that has become habituated to the point where it isunthematic in our everyday lived experience. This manner of givenness of the wayin which environing objects and states of affairs unify around us has complexperceptual, practical, axiological, and volitional structures that combine to form alife-nexus or nexus of meaning. When, through a process of eidetic variation, theessential characteristic features of these basic intertwining structures are thematizedaccording to their overall unity, they form what Husserl calls ‘‘the a priori structureof world experience,’’ the ‘‘bare mobile core of the world,’’ or the ‘‘factical lived-environing-world (Lebensumwelt)’’ (2001a, p. 200).19

This ‘‘circumscribing concept of the world’’ is the ‘‘first concept of the world’’(2002, p. 222) and is the Grundschicht of Husserl’s phenomenological theory ofworld constitution, ‘‘The world unnoticed in its being-in-itself, in accordance withthe sense of this being-in-itself is thereby given as my environing world’’ (2002,p. 224). In pre-theoretical experience the world does not appear as an irrationaltotality of absolute space and time that only subsequently becomes intelligiblethrough the formation of scientific concepts, e.g., laws of nature. The world forHusserl first and foremost is manifested as an environing world that inherentlystructures and is structured by the lived body that surrounds it. As we will see in whatfollows, environing objects and states of affairs are organized in relation to eachother as they take up a relation to the lived body through horizons of referentialimplication and harmonious associations, i.e., environing objects occupy a ‘‘there’’ inreference to the ‘‘here’’ of the environed lived body and a ‘‘beside’’ to otherenvironing objects (1989, pp. 166, 212; cf. 1968, p. 298). The order of environingobjects results from a habituated empirical style of world experience that contributesan intelligibility that is not reducible to concept formation produced by the cognitiveachievements of the scientist. The inherent intelligibility of environmental experi-ence for Husserl thus implies a rejection of the Neo-Kantian affirmation of theirrationality of the world through a characterization of its extensive and intensiveinfinity. In pre-theoretical experience, in short, the world does not present itself as anirrational totality that is infinitely expansive and complex, but it appears first andforemost as a finitely determined environing world harboring within it an unthematicintelligible structure that remains latently operative in theoretical interests.

When Husserl turns toward the lived relation to the environing world (andthereby avoids the Neo-Kantian formalism), he is not merely interested in

19 Husserl maintains this position of the pre-givenness of the world as an environing world throughout hiswriting. For instance, ‘‘From the current concern of the pre-occupation with which we take ever newcontents as present-at-hand, as pre-given. It is a basic fact. Units of this world for ‘us all’ is a correlativeunit that is indirectly or directly together in a nexus of life which is experienced as an evaluative andultimately practical nexus, as immediately human, and as this world itself for us. This world is a practicalenvironing world’’ (1973, p. 232).

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establishing the formation of the human sciences (as is Dilthey), but also clarifyingnatural scientific cognition as well.20 In order for a genuine demarcation of thesciences to be made, a radical investigation of experience must also establish howthe nature investigated by the natural sciences is built up from pre-theoreticalexperience. Husserl was not content to merely buttress the human sciences fromtheir naturalistic counterpart, but was committed to demonstrating how both formsof theoretical interest arise from pre-theoretical experience. It is only when thisgrounding of the theoretical in the pre-theoretical is established that the directrelationship between Natur and Geist can ultimately become clarified.

One way to clarify the difference between the two general spheres of scientificinvestigation is through their respective theoretical modification of the pre-theoretical environing world. Both the natural and human scientists, according toHusserl, have a theoretical interest that is animated by an appeal to universality. Alluniversals are derived from particular instances, but universals can be more or lessconcrete. Concrete universals arise from the types immanent to our lived experiencethrough an as-structure—we always see a tree as a tree (having the type of tree)(2001a, p. 200). On the basis of our past experience of trees, the common features oftrees are synthesized such that they accompany our experience of new trees. Thesetypes operate as unthematic universals in the flow of lived experience even thoughattention is not explicitly directed toward them, ‘‘Universals are situated to a certainextent on the road, first in the form of typical apperceptions’’ (2001a, p. 200). Giventhat our lived experience always already functions in the immediacy of anenvironing world, there are typicalities and concrete universals proper to thisenvironmental experience, i.e., objects are always already perceptually given inorientation to my lived body, they take up certain relations to each other (above,below, behind, etc.), and so on. These universals proper to environmentalexperience are different from abstract universals that apply without limit to theworld understood as the total universe. These abstract universals not only abstractfrom the possible experience of particular objects within the environing world, butfrom the environing world itself.

While the constitutive features of both Natur and Geist share the theoreticalmodifications that result from the non-instrumental apprehension of objects andstates of affairs, they differ in what qualifies as an object of theoretical interest andthe universal features of these objects. The naturalistic attitude of the naturalscientist, for instance, isolates the physical features of objectivity (res extensa) byneutralizing subjective accomplishments in experience and universalizes thesepurely physical features as the world understood as the total universe of spatio-temporal materiality. It thus conceives of the world as an infinite totality. While the

20 D’Amico (1981) contrasts Husserl and Dilthey on this point, ‘‘There is no need for a uniqueunderstanding according to Husserl since in the human sciences, from the viewpoint of foundation, allsciences have the same essential structure. An original, meaning-giving act constitutes an objectivity orideal object from a Lebenswelt. Dilthey was led to the division between the natural and human or culturalsciences because he took the objectivism of the natural sciences at face value and without question’’(p. 7). In referencing this role of the life-world, D’Amico is drawing on Husserl’s later articulation of pre-theoretical experience while the present analysis makes the comparison and contrast with Dilthey throughHusserl’s most direct engagement which occurs in the 1910s and 1920s.

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personalistic attitude, by contrast, is not relegated to the idiographic, it neverthelessfunctions with universal conceptions of the motivational, social, cultural, spheres inthe concrete context of individual persons, societies, and cultures. The anthropol-ogist, for instance, who studies the social behavior of indigenous tribes in PapuaNew Guinea operates with a universal conception of the social, but only considersthe social in this particular context. While the universality proper to the naturalisticattitude modifies the pre-theoretical environing world as an infinite totality, theconcrete universality proper to the personalistic attitude remains inscribed to anenvironing world.

Here [in the personalistic environing world], thus, belong most of the likelywell-known descriptive sciences – descriptive botany, mineralogy, thedescriptive personal and cultural sciences. They are all environmental[Umweltlich] sciences and hold themselves in the context of the concrete-descriptive accessibilities of the world (whether directly or indirectly) – whichis the universe of the human environing world, the scene of all human praxis.One will not object that individually, they are each a science of the world. Theyare sciences of the universal – the universe – and not only the descriptivelyaccessible environmental universe. The holistically determined structures inthis sense are no longer individual. This individual, factual universe has all thestructures concerned and it has them in an essential necessity…In this regard,we will find still other knowable universals – those which are always divorced,in principle, from the descriptive sciences (2001a, p. 201).

While Natur, understood as the correlate of the naturalistic attitude, is conceived asan infinite manifold of physical objectivity, Geist is inclusive of the environingworlds in which motivational, social, and historical events occur.

Conclusion

When Husserl’s Aufbau of the Natur/Geist distinction is seen in light of his Abbauof theoretical interest as grounded in the pre-theoretical environing world and whenIdeas II is read in conjunction with the lecture courses from 1919 and 1927, it ispossible to respond to the claims of Husserl’s critics mentioned above. Merleau-Ponty’s claim that Husserl was not able to overcome the dichotomy of Natur andGeist was likely a reference to Ideas II, which only considers one in juxtapositionwith the other. Indeed, Husserl does not seem to overcome the binary opposition inthis text. The analyses of the pre-theoretical environing world in the Natur/Geistlecture courses, however, present a different overall picture. In this picture, the pre-theoretical environing world is presented as a naturalized Geist and a geistignature—fundamentally interwoven with each other prior to the alternative interestsof the naturalistic and personalistic attitudes.

…there are keenly felt…unclarities concerning the mutual relation of natureand Geist…The natural and geistig do not confront us clearly and separatelyso that mere pointing would suffice: here is nature, and here, as something

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completely different, is Geist. Rather, what seems at first obviously separated,upon closer consideration turn out to be obscurely intertwined, permeatingeach in a manner very difficult to understand (1968, p. 39).As scientific themes, nature and Geist do not exist beforehand; rather, they areformed only within a theoretical interest and in the theoretical work directedby it, upon the underlying stratum of a natural, pre-scientific experience. Herethey appear in an originally intuitable intermingling and togetherness (1968,p. 40).

While the regional ontologies developed in Ideas II and elsewhere are validlyconstituted according to various theoretical interests, they are regions that have avalidity that are built upon a fundamental ontology arrived at in and through pre-scientific experience (1989, p. 327; cf. 1970, pp. 137–141). The term that Husserleventually settled onto characterize the intertwining of Natur and Geist in the pre-theoretical environing world was ‘‘life.’’ ‘‘The fundamental character of phenom-enology is thus scientific life philosophy…that has as its scientific primal themeconcrete universal life and its life-world, the actual concrete environing world’’(2001a, p. 241).

In addition to providing a foothold for a defense of Husserl against Merleau-Ponty’s criticism, the analysis above provides an opportunity to make a preliminaryremark concerning Husserl’s development that culminates in his later articulation ofthe life-world. The first references to the life-world occur in the context of the Abbauof the Natur/Geist distinction and in association with the environing world. The life-world in this context is nothing other than the pre-theoretical, concrete environingworld—or what Husserl more aptly called the lived-environing-world (Lebensum-welt). While earlier commentators such as David Carr have pointed to Husserl’sappropriation of Richard Avenarius’ notion of ‘‘the natural concept of the world’’ asthe notion that prefigures the later articulation of the life-world (Carr 1974, pp. 151,163), theNatur/Geist lecture courses demonstrate that the natural concept of theworldthat Husserl considered was precisely the environing world itself. As Husserl’s workprogressed into the 1930s, his notion of world constitution was gradually enrichedthrough important intersubjective considerations. The environing world is dealt withas a home-world (Heimwelt), foreign-world (Fremdwelt), cultural-world (Kultur-welt), and so on. The concept of environing world, however, remains throughout thesediscussions as the fundamental basis (Grundschicht) of world experience. In his 1935‘‘Vienna Lecture,’’ for instance, Husserl’s critique of the idealizations of modernrationality is made from the grounding soil of the environing world. The term life-world does not appear in this text. In the first part of the Crisis, moreover, Kant’sforgotten meaning fundament is not the life-world, but the lived-environing-world,the life-world in its factical concreteness.

In conclusion, Husserl’s analysis of the constitution of Natur/Geist are not onlyappropriations from Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians, but radicalizations that push thedebate forward by not only considering the methodological autonomy of the humansciences from their naturalistic counterparts, but the fundamental constitution ofnatural scientific cognition as well. Perhaps nowhere is this radicalization morepertinent than in Husserl’s unbuilding of the theoretical interest that, from the start,

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considers the world as an infinite manifold. If this were the grounding soil of worldexperience, then Rickert would be correct when he claims that the world has nointelligible structure of its own. This conception of world experience, however,presupposes and forms a unity with a more basic apprehension of an environingworld that makes an essential contribution to experience. If the proper relationbetween Natur and Geist is to be fully identified and clarified, then it must bedemonstrated how each arise from this grounding soil.

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