Environment, Technology, Justification 9789731997148

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ENVIRONMENT, TECHNOLOGY, JUSTIFICATION

Phenomenological Workshop Texts VOLUME 1 Editor-in-chief Lester EMBREE

Associate Editors Pedro M. S. ALVES Ion COPOERU Ivan CHVATIK LEE Nam-in Victor MOLCHANOV Thomas NENON Hans Rainer SEPP Agustin SERRANO DE HARO TANI Toru YU Chung-Chi Antonio ZIRION Q.

lester embree

ENVIRONMENT, TECHNOLOGY, JUSTIFICATION Reflective Analyses

¤

Lester Embree studied with Edward G. Ballard, Dorion Cairns, and Aron Gurwitsch. He has taught at Northern Illinois University, Duquesne University, and, now, Florida Atlantic University, where he is currently the William F. Dietrich Eminent Scholar in Philosophy. From 1985 to 2005 he was president of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. and he led the founding and early development of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations. He has translated works of Suzanne Bachelard and Paul Ricoeur; edited work of Cairns, Gurwitsch, and Alfred Schutz and also various collective volumes, the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Kluwer 1997) included; and authored a number of essays in and on constitutive phenomenology. His deepest interest is in the theory of the cultural disciplines, the theory of American theoretical archaeology in particular. www.lesterembree.net

¤ www.zetabooks.com Bucharest, 2008

The picture on the cover is from 1992 and shows the author with his “CitiCar.” The Vanguard Car Company in Sebring, Florida built 2000 of these two-seat vehicles in 1974-76. They were powered by eight six-volt lead-acid (golf cart) batteries that are recharged on house current. They could go 45 miles an hour and had a range of 50 miles. DTP & cover design : Paul Balogh © 2008 Lester Embree. © 2008 Zeta Books for the current edition. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-973-1997-14-8 (paperback) ISBN: 978-973-1997-15-5 (ebook)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 1. Action for Ecosystemic Health. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 2. The Constitution of the Vegetable . . . . . . . . . . . 41 3. Problems of the Value of Nature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 4. The Nonworldly Grounding of Environmentalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 5. The Constitution of Basic Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . 87 6. The Rationality of Scientific Technology. . . 103 7. Indirect Action and Technology Reflectively Analyzed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 8. The Where and When of Appearances . . . . . . . . . 133 9. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Existence. . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 10. When Does the End not Justify the Means?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 11. Tolerance Reflectively Analyzed. . . . . . . . . . . . 163

Dedicated to the memory of Don E. Marietta Jr. Exemplary Philosopher and Friend

Preface For years I have been among those complaining that the phenomenological tradition suffers from too much scholarship and almost an absence of investigation and thus threatens to degenerate into a species of intellectual history. Then, because positive examples have more influence than complaints, I began attempting to show how phenomenology is done. I have written a textbook that I hope will also be read as a monograph by colleagues in various disciplines as well as used in teaching college students.1 In addition to Castilian and the original English, this text has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Polish, and Romanian and will soon appear in several other languages. Then again, the present volume and others to follow in the Phenomenology Workshop Texts series by myself but above all by other phenomenologists can be used for the same purposes. Most of the essays collected here were written before I began to urge what I call “reflective analyses.” What this genre is and how the essays collected here approximate it as well as my title are discussed in the introduction. The original occasions for publication or presentations of these essays are as follows: “A Perspective on the Rationality of Scientific Technology or How to Buy a Car.” In Lifeworld and Technology, edited by Timothy Casey and Lester Embree, 145-163. Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press 1 Lester Embree, Análisis reflexivo. Una primera introducción a la fenomenológica / Reflective Analysis. A First Introduction in to Phenomenology, Edición Bilingüe Inglés / Castellano, trans. by Luis Ramán Rabanaque (Morelia: Editorial Jitanjáfora, 2003) and Reflective Analysis: A First Introduction into Phenomenology (Bucarest: Zetabooks, 2003)

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of America, 1989; “Phenomenology of Action for Ecosystemic Health or How to Tend One’s Own Garden.” In Environmental Philosophy and Environmental Activism, edited by Don Marietta and Lester Embree, 51-66. Lanham: Roman & Littlefield, 1995; “Problems of the Value of Nature in Phenomenological Perspective or What to Do about Snakes in the Grass.” In Phenomenology of Values and Valuing, edited by James G. Hart and Lester Embree, 49-61. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997; “The Constitution of Basic Culture,” translated into Slovenian, Phainomena, Vol. 10 (2001), pp. 47-60; into Japanese by Tatsuhiko Sakurai as “Kihon-teki Bunka no Kousei” in Bunka to Shakai (Culture and Society), Vol. 3 (Tokyo, 2002), pp. 75-92; into Czech as “Konstituce zakladni kultury” in Fenomenologie v pohybu, ed. Ivan Blecha, 2003, pp. 35-44; and into Castilian as “La constitución de la cultura básica” in César Moreno Márquez y Alicia María de Mingo Rodríguez (eds.), Signo. Intentionalidad. Verdad. Estudios de Fenomenologia, Sevilla: SEFE / Universidad de Sevilla, 2005, pp. 345-355; “Indirect Action Reflectively Analizad,” Conference on Technology, Nature, and Life, Korean Society for Phenomenology and Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Seoul, October 2002; “The Intrinsic and Extrinsic Existence of What is Traveled in Traveling,” Festschrift for Hans Rainer Sepp, ed. Ivan Chvatík, Focus Pragensis, Vol. 4 (2004), pp. 73-82; “The Non-Worldly Grounding of Environmentalism,” Pondicherry University Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol. I (2000), pp. 1-11, translated as “Bunus Neamhshaolta an Chomhshaolachais” Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society: Voices of Irish Philosophy (2002), pp. 35-42; “Truck Watching: The Where and When of Visual and Auditory Appearances,” Second Korean-American Conference, Memphis, October 2004; “La tolerancia analizada reflexivamente,” in Interpretando la experiencia de la tolerancia, ed. Rosemary Rizo-Patrón, Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2006, pp. 41-51; and “When does End not Justify the Means?” Husserl Circle, Prague, April 2007.

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I thank the previous publishers for permission to republish these essays and I thank my current research assistant, Daniel Marcelle, for help preparing this collection for publication. I am of course solely responsible for what I say here. Lester Embree Delray Beach October 2008

Introduction This work is dedicated to the memory of Don E. Marietta not only out of friendship and in a continuing sense of loss, but also in gratitude because he guided me into the problematics of environmentalism when I came to Florida Atlantic University in 1990.2 This problematics has continued to grow in importance not only within the world but also for phenomenology and for me since then.3 Previously, I had become interested in technology4 and Don and I soon came to agree that the separation of the philosophy of technology and environmental philosophy was unfortunate and made some effort to bring them together in a practical as well as theoretical way.5 Assembling the present set of essays continues that shared concern. In many of the essays I have published over the years there is an interest not only in how thinking and believing but also valuing and willing can be rational or, because many today seem to equate the rational merely with the logical and epistemological, I prefer to say justified and this theme arises repeatedly here. In addition, this collection is replete with implicit as well as explicit allusions to what I call “basic culture” and focus on in Essay 5; that too would have been mentioned 2 Don E. Marietta, Jr., For People and the Planet, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. 3 Cf. Eco-Phenomenology, ed. Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine, (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003). 4 Cf. Lifeworld and Technology, ed. Timothy Casey and Lester Embree (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America), 1989. 5 Cf. Don Marietta and Lester Embree, ed., Environmental Philosophy and Environmental Activism (Lanham: Rowen & Littlefield, 1995); The Philosophies of Environment and Technology, ed. Marina Banchetti, Lester Embree, and Don Marietta. Special issue of Philosophy and Technology, Vol. 18 (1999).

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INTRODUCTION

in my title if that would not have made it too long. Particular things, others (and selves), groups, situations, and worlds have value and use in how we have learned to encounter them and are thus cultural and are so prior to any cultural formations constructed in thinking. Issues in these overlapping areas have been pondered by me for some time and I have been writing about them as occasion arose. In the hope that it will help others contribute to the phenomenology of this compound problematics, let me now describe the genre the essays collected here either belong to or approximate. I. FOR A DISTINCT GENRE The essays collected in this volume fit a genre I call “reflective analysis” more or less well. This is nowise a new genre but it especially deserves to be urged because most soi disant “phenomenology” is currently not in but on phenomenology, i.e., it is chiefly philology or scholarship on previously written work. This scholarship may take the form of editions, interpretations, translations, or reviews and is quite important because our multilingual and multidisciplinary tradition today includes over 3,000 participants, most of the earlier writings, especially those by the giants of our past, are difficult to comprehend, and colleagues should help one another. But we must not lose sight of the fact that such important contributions are to the secondary rather than the primary literature and not phenomenological because they are not produced phenomenologically. In urging reflective analysis I am urging a genre of texts that centrally encourages not only the author but also the reader reflectively to observe the things in question and to confirm, correct, and extend the analyses of them. What more can be said about this genre I call “reflective analysis”? Whether it is a free-standing essay or a chapter in a monograph, a reflective analysis should be concise, i.e., about 3,000 words long. The present introduction is of that length. Professional presentations at conferences are often of this length in order to take about thirty minutes to read and

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then allow for a reasonable amount of formal discussion. And this above all seems to be an amount of material that students can be expected to study intensively the day before the discussion of it in class. As intimated, reflective analyses contrast above all with what can be called “scholarly essays.” Fundamentally, presentations and writings of the latter sort are about what others have written and they tend to include names of authorities, quotations, footnotes, and lists of implicit as well as explicit sources. Probably most teaching of phenomenology consists of lectures on and discussion of what others have written and encourages the production of such scholarly essays and seems to do so to such an extent that other genres, including even those practiced by the authors studied, are eclipsed. As also suggested, the methods by which scholarly essays are produced are not phenomenological, but of the same sort as those that are used on any works by prior figures. Thus, while a scholarly essay might be about Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, etc., the methods involved are no different from those used in scholarship on Aristotle or Kant. And when the positions expressed in such essays are examined, the central question concerns whether the earlier-expressed thought is correctly interpreted. Scholarly writings are not only not produced through phenomenological investigation but also do not foster being examined through that sort of research, i.e., by reflective and analytic observation of the things referred to. Besides not being accompanied by scholarly apparatus that might divert author as well as reader into questions of the accuracy of interpretations rather than truth of descriptions, reflective analyses are not fundamentally argumentative. To be sure, phenomenologists do occasionally rely on simple arguments for rhetorical purposes and the contents of reflective analyses can be reconstructed as arguments, but if the interest is in description, reference to assumptions, premises, validity, and conclusions can be distracting. Instead, examples to clarify concepts and distinctions are regularly quite prominent in reflective analyses. In the essays here the reader will find gardens, parks,

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INTRODUCTION

automobiles, roads, broken legs, nutcrackers, taxi drivers, etc. used as examples with which concepts, distinctions, and relations might become clearer. Explanations are similar to arguments in that they account for things through other things, i.e., by reference to causes, motives, or purposes. Genuine phenomenologists also certainly offer explanations from time to time, but they are as such chiefly concerned with accounting for things in their own terms and recognize that one needs to know what something is before attempting to say why it is. Reflective analyses thus tend to be descriptions rather than explanations. One might be tempted to call phenomenological results narratives, but ought not to do so if that word indicates respect for relations of earlier to later events in stories, even if only metaphorically. Phenomenological accounts can, however, also be called interpretations if it is clearly remembered that they are not merely about texts. It is sometimes difficult to remember that descriptions do not need to be merely factual but are more often of universal essences and sometimes the originally latent features of the things reflected on can need to be made manifest. In sum, phenomenological results are fundamentally not arguments or explanations but descriptions, interpretations, or—perhaps best—analyses. Something can briefly be said here about how reflective analyses are reflective. It is unfortunate that most post-Husserlian phenomenologists did not follow his lead where the inclusion of methodological reflections in phenomenological writings is concerned. Such reflections are to help the reader understand how results have been obtained and are then to be confirmed, corrected, and extended. Most simply put, phenomenology proceeds through reflection. What reflection is can be articulated in terms of the attitude and what is thematized in reflection. This sort of research is conducted, first of all, in a theoretical attitude. What this attitude is adopted toward has been called “ego—cogito— cogitatum.” This signifies, first, the I in whom there are, among other things, attitudes and in which changes in attitude occur, e.g., from practical or valuational to theoretical.

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In the second place, the reference is made to what is better called “mental life” since, although “cogito” in Husserl has the broad Cartesian signification, it is difficult to recall that this includes much more than dealing with concepts and propositions. In this volume the reader will find repeated descriptions of experiencing, believing, valuing, and willing as intentive processes that are abstractable components within what are often concretely best called “encounterings.” The emphasis here will be not on the reflectively discernable I or ego in the strict signification, but on the correlation between encounterings and thingsas-encountered, which Husserl also called “noeses” and “noemata.” The thing-as-encountered contrasts with the thing that is encountered, which may have seemed an unimportant subtlety for those colleagues who have overlooked it. But there is an attitude called the straightforward or unreflective attitude in which the I overlooks her own mental life and things-as-encountered in it in order to focus exclusively on the things that she encounters and, in contrast, a reflective attitude must be adopted to discern how things are given and posited in mental processes or encounterings. Perhaps there is a pile of garbage by the side of the road. As one approaches this thing, one can reflectively observe how the appearance of it changes, i.e., grows larger and at a certain distance begins to smell worse and worse, and one can also discern reflectively the negative value it has in relation to one’s disvaluing of it. To continue this example, it may be asked whether there is anything volitional involved and answer that if we say, “They ought to clean up this mess,” the thing-as-encountered indicates some others (probably the street cleaners) and their actions of using shovels or other equipment to remove the pile of garbage, i.e., it can be encountered as-able-to-be-encountered-by-others. Phenomenological results are produced through thematizing how things are encountered in various ways and the correlative encounterings of them. I am not the first to urge more of what I call reflective analysis, but probably the first in phenomenology to urge the expression. Earlier than Edmund Husserl, such analyses can be found in many

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INTRODUCTION

others, e.g., the early William James. Other living phenomenologists today, such as Elisabeth Behnke and Robert Sokolowski, have consciously produced writings that I call reflective analyses even if they do not. Autobiographically speaking, I recognized the sharp distinction between scholarship and investigation in the teaching of Dorion Cairns at the New School for Social Research during the 1960s, but, again, have only begun to urge a name for the results of the latter recently. I wish to respond to two objections by respected colleagues to my opposition to the excess of text interpretation and advocacy of more reflective analyses. One objection consists in saying that in the interpreting of texts one is doing phenomenology because one can see the things that the works being interpreted refer to. I do not dispute that one can often not only see what the other author earlier referred to but also be able to say whether the earlier analysis is correct or not. What bothers me is that corrections and extensions of analyses interpreted are then so rare. The giants of our past often did not agree with one another and even when disagreements among them are recognized, I am disappointed not to see more claims about which of them are more or less right and wrong. Interpreters frequently sympathize if not identify with some figures rather than others, but this is not a showing of how one or another author is correct about these or those things. What seems often to happen is that the question of whether texts are being correctly interpreted gets in the way of the question of whether what was said is true. It can now be added that scholarship is often done in the straightforward attitude and even argumentatively and in these respects is already not phenomenological. And finally and above all, in no way has everything been investigated thus far in our tradition, and I am regularly disappointed when I look for the continuation of phenomenology into new problematics. Retrospection can help new investigations, but it is not the same thing. The other objection concerns providing footnotes to help readers find convergent research. My problem here is that this can often be

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taken as providing support for claims through reference to the authority of others and distracts from verificational consideration of the things referred to. The commendable purpose of guiding others to other relevant work can be served by appending a discussion of such literature to one’s essay. Should reflective analysis come to be the predominant genre, this recourse would be less needed. In sum, the genre of reflective analysis is urged to foster not only reflection and analysis of encounterings and things-as-encountered for those who would do rather than talk about phenomenology, and thus those who would understand phenomenology phenomenologically, and then go on to confirm, correct, and/ or extend the earlier phenomenological accounts and possibly even dare to compose new ones of previously unexplored things. II. THE ESSAYS COLLECTED HERE The last five essays in this volume are reflective analyses by the above description of the genre and have been written recently, and I flatter myself that they are more sophisticated. The other six approximate that genre to various degrees and were written earlier. Many points made in them were incorporated into my little textbook. Some of the first essays have first parts that are non-phenomenological, some of which are even philological, and second parts that contain reflective analyses. In some essays the contents of the two types are unfortunately somewhat mixed. The first essay is of the two-part type. It begins with a summary of some ecological thought in relation to an extensive example. Its second part contains some reflective analysis that introduces many terms that will be used throughout this volume as well as the problem of justification that will also come up repeatedly in subsequent essays. And there are also intimations of phenomenology being concerned with groups as well as individual mental life.

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The second essay is also of the two-part type, but its first part is composed of scholarship on previous constitutive or Husserlian phenomenology where the vegetable is concerned. The difference between straightforward and reflective attitudes is introduced. And while most of my reflective analyses thus far written can be called “surface analyses,” what is said about synthesis in this essay shows that I am able to dig deeper, although the exposition concerning synthesis is rather scholarly in its genre. It must also be confessed that this essay has its argumentative moments and seems the essay furthest from the ideal of reflective analysis. The third essay is a bit long to be considered a reflective analysis but it is devoid of overt references to the work of others and is thus prima facie not philological. It has two main parts; the first is devoted to further clarification of basic terminology that was begun in the first essay. Its second part approaches a fundamental ecological issue phenomenologically. It may encourage further reflective investigation. The fourth essay nicely takes up where the third leaves off. It is also of a two-part structure with the first part an attempt to model what environmentalism is and the second part is a reflective analysis of how environmental action can be justified, while offering a somewhat philological and argumentative discussion of ultimate justification. That discussion might satisfy colleagues who wonder how the reflective analyses I usually practice in the worldly attitude can relate to Husserl’s transcendentalism. One must be practiced in reflecting and describing before attempting transcendental epochē and enjoying the consequent reduction and purification. The fifth essay focuses on the notion of basic culture that is in the background of most of the essays in this collection. Its first part is philological, contrasting that notion with those of Husserl and Schutz. The second is a reflective analysis that employs many terms already introduced and focuses in some detail on the example of cracking nuts. The sixth essay is again of the two-part structure, its first part offering a historical taxonomy of technological activities culminating in

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the use of science-based equipment. And the second offers a reflective analysis with the example of buying an automobile, which is a cultural thing, and then the model of justification is extended to scientific technology. This is the essay that says the most about rationality and what it says can not only be extended through more reflection but can guide some deepening of the justification of environmental action described in earlier essays. The seventh essay is the first of the reflective analyses written after my little textbook and emphasizes more broadly how technology is not direct but indirect willing or action and thus comparable with indirect experiencing. It has the most to say about indirect experiencing, which is also mentioned in a number of other essays. The eighth essay is about how the appearances of outward things such as a truck coming by have their own space and time within which they change. The ninth essay focuses on how there is intrinsic and extrinsic existence on the level of believing that parallels intrinsic and extrinsic value and use on the levels of valuing and willing. And the tenth and eleventh essays pertain to what might be called the moral sphere. The former is concerned with how means are justified and the latter with analyzing tolerance reflectively, but then ecology and technology are also moral matters on my view. Running through these essays is the development and various applications of a “stack” of components of encounterings and thingsas-encountered in which it can be seen how positings of various sorts can be justified. This is the issue of reason but is wider than the question of justified belief, much less logic and formal correctness of arguments. That these essays were written on different occasions explains how there are repetitions, but also leaves them independent essays that can be read and used in teaching separately, although, upon assembling this collection, I must suggest that these essays gain from being considered together. At risk of being tedious, let me say again that I consider these to be surface analyses that require deeper digging and that my ultimate hope is that readers and especially students learn how my results were

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produced and then go on to confirm, correct, and extend them, i.e., to come to do more phenomenology and less philology. The essays collected here have been revised moderately, beginning already with the titles. The abstracts that some essays originally had have also been eliminated. My technical terminology has evolved and hence it has been desirable to replace some earlier words. Some of the repetitions of analyses have been eliminated, but many have been kept. The use of section titles has been standardized. And the paragraphs within the essays have been numbered to facilitate reference during classroom discussion and also comparison of translations with the English original. Let me finally suggest to teachers that they devise lists of questions to distribute in advance not only to help students comprehend essays discussed in class, but also to encourage students to explore beyond what is written or obviously implied in these essays. If the approach of reflective analysis is taught successfully, new discoveries can be expected from good students and phenomenology can be continued into the future rather than have its past interpreted.

1. Action for Ecosystemic Health 1. Like other organisms, humans are parts of ecosystems, taking resources from and having impacts back upon their environments. That these en­vironments are composed largely of other organisms and indeed communities of organisms needs never to be forgotten. It may be that organisms of all species strive to increase in numbers to the extent that other factors will allow, but humans may be different in what is at least the conceit that they can understand and manage their own behavior. Against the extreme whereby some humans have taken the rest of their systems as there for their own benefit, some other humans have claimed priority for the nonhuman organisms. Against both such alternatives there is a third position that focuses on ecosystems as wholes and (1) urges to the first party that it is in their enlightened self-interest to pre­ serve and restore the rest of their ecosystem and (2) urges to the other party that nonhuman organisms can only be preserved and restored through influencing the behavior of the most disruptive of the species. Indeed, the same changes in human outlook and behavior might be preferred in all three perspectives. 2. If it is not deemed excessively metaphorical, ecosystems can be rec­ognized to be dead and alive, to be healthy and ill, and, where antici­ pated courses of events for the ill are concerned, to be medically in crisis and thus about to begin to mend or to decline into death. Ecosys­temic health can be regarded at least three ways. It can be considered a cognitive matter of establishing criteria and facts concerning life, death, health, illness, etc. It can be an evaluative matter concerning whether life, death, health, and so on are good or bad, best, better, indifferent, worse, or worst. And it can be a practical matter concerning the will­ ing of ends and means or, in other words, the using of this or that for some purpose or other, such as wellness or death.

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3. Activism has many connotations in relation to environmental philoso­phy. When philosophy is considered contemplative, as is usual, activ­ism is something that it contrasts with, although it might still be a source of problems and an area of imagined application. If activism is collective and philosophy a solitary endeavor, then there would be an­other contrast. But any effort on behalf of the environment, to protect it, enhance it, restore it, whether done by an individual or by a group, can be considered activism. Thus teaching is activism, and inso­far as it is connected as a means to practical efforts on the environ­ment’s behalf, then even the usual teaching of contemplative philosophizing is ac­tivistic, albeit somewhat indirectly. 4. Then again, if practical philosophy is understood to be the culmina­tion of philosophy and if this denotes the philosopher as not only at­tempting to understand action and its justification but actually engaging in actions for which she is prepared to provide justification, then there is individual environmental philosophical activism. Such is not the whole of philosophical activism, for two or more philosophers could be active together and thus work as a group, but it can be considered a part. And if one believes philosophically that reflection needs to go back to original lifeworldly encounters, i.e., to everyday and practical life, then beginning in one’s own backyard (and front) is not capri­cious. For purposes of justification this return is structural, but it bears mention that most people in advanced countries today begin their lives of relating to living things other than parents, pets, and houseplants in their gardens (or parks). This is a genetic originality akin to the acquisition of technology as equipment used in the home and the learn­ing of language at one’s mother’s knee. 5. The present essay is expressive of results attained through reflective theoretical observation performed on how action to foster health in an ecosystem might be justified phenomenologically. Individual action with respect merely to a domestic garden is used as the extended exam­ ple, but collective action with respect to larger ecosystemic things can readily be extrapolated. First, the ongoing gardening effort is described,

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then it is related to a model for justified habitual action, and finally an analysis is offered of how this analysis has been produced and thus of the method by which it could be examined, corrected, and refined by others of good will and competent in the method. I. GARDENING AS ECOSYSTEMIC RESTORATION 6. In the following factual sketch I describe a project I began some thirty months prior to the time of writing. I became engaged in this effort upon relocating to a subtropical suburban ecosystem after living in temperate zone cities and having last gardened in a World War II Victory Garden as a child with my father, finding much environmental content in local papers and television programming, having expert col­leagues to consult, and purchasing a home with scores of palms and live oaks, a pool, fishpond, deck, hot tub, and well. The usual thing would have been to hire a gardener and pool service, but the desire to fully enjoy the place by doing all the outdoor work myself precluded that. Once engaged in, this “yard work” evolved into a pleasantly amateur effort at changing the garden ecosystem in environmentally responsible directions. 7. To a biologist friend, this garden looked like it was originally a hammock, but was said by the son of the first owner to have been planted on empty land in the late 1940s. The place seems a relatively distinct unit, which is not to say that it is utterly cut off from its surroundings. Water, electricity, food, and other commodities are brought in artificially. Air, sunlight, rain, pollen, insects, and various small wild animals come in, and heat radiates and water evaporates out on their own naturally, and there is artificial sewage and solid waste disposal. 8. The roots of the larger trees can reach the water table, which may be more than ten feet down, and there is quite a bit of rainfall, although considerably less in the summer. The previous owner recommended running the pump to distribute well water to the garden for one hour each day. Early on, I stopped that and began to observe which plants could survive on the almost natural water supply. This supply is not

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entirely natural because both the groundwater and the rainwater depths, flows, and other patterns have been greatly affected by deliberate and nondeliberate human activities in southeast Florida. Some water in the kitchen from such activities as rinsing coffee cups is added to the bucket with plant materials that go to the compost bin daily, water from mopping floors with organic soap is thrown out near the back door, where it seems to help more than hinder the plants, and water from washing clothes with biocompatible soap and using white vinegar as fabric softener is conveyed by hose to a trench filled with compost next to one hedge, which also seems to flourish as a consequence. Otherwise, water is conserved with dams in toilets, a cut-off valve in the shower head, etc. Rainwater might be collected in future for the most used toilet and it is even possible that used water be directed from the shower drain to plants. While considerable water is thus conserved, water is still received from the city system and used chiefly for drinking, wash­ing dishes and clothes, cleaning the house, and flushing. 9. The original cost for electricity was regularly $180 a month, but has been brought down to under $40 by no longer air-conditioning the whole house constantly but only one room occasionally, using the mi­crowave oven and electric coffee and tea makers rather than the electric stove for what little cooking is done (a solar oven would be used if somebody were home more often during the day), not using the pump, turning off lights when not in rooms, replacing large incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent or at least smaller incandescent bulbs, running the pool pump only as it seems needed rather than on an automatic cycle, discontinuing the hot tub (until a solar heating system can be set up), using a solar recharger for batteries, and also maintaining the bat­tery charge in the gasoline car used about once a month with another solar device. The remaining $40 a month for electricity includes $6 for the recharging of an electric vehicle. The greatest user of electricity in a house other than air-conditioning is typically the refrigerator, and here a solar-powered, 36-quart, 12-volt, top-opening substitute might reduce the bill $10 more and thus pay for itself in

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several years. Under these circumstances, a full photovoltaic array for about $5,000 would need to pay for itself through electricity sold to the grid, which will be looked into eventually. In the meantime, some electricity is still brought in. 10. I did not realize at the time the home was purchased that the post office, market, cleaners, camera store, etc. were all within a tenminute walk, which is unusual in a car world like southeast Florida. Prices for food, etc., might be lower at larger outlets, but this does not factor in the costs in vehicle fuel and maintenance, the time, or the psychic and somatic benefits of strolling out of an evening for half a dozen oranges and a mano of bananas. Otherwise, the intake from outside is mostly newspapers, mail, magazines, and wastepaper generated by desktop phenom­enological research. 11. The routine solid domestic waste that the municipality collects at the curb is of two sorts, which might be called yard waste and the rest. The rest is divided into the recyclables (newspaper, cardboard, plastic, glass, and aluminum) and what goes to the garbage dump. The yard waste, e.g., palm fronds, grass clippings, branches, and leaves, is less and less en­thusiastically received by the municipality, which is experimenting with giving away composters. I collect banana peels, coffee grounds, tea bags, apple cores, some shredded paper, cereal and vegetable remains from meals, house sweepings, etc., and include them with the results of periodically grinding up accumulations of palm fronds, leaves, and small branches with an electric lawn mower on the deck. Weeds and sometimes lawn clippings contributed by a neighbor who does not use artificial fertilizers or pesticides are included in the composting process. Since worms do not like citrus skins, these are kept apart and tossed into some bushes with an impact yet to be observed. 12. Annual rainfall in the area is 55 to 65 inches, but this is not constant. The vast expanses of house and business lawns as well as golf courses are maintained everywhere through constant watering and applications of chemical pesticides and fertilizer and are thus on artificial life-sup­port systems. When this support is stopped, the lawns

28

Action for Ecosystemic Health

dry up or, rather, are replaced by plants deemed weeds by many but admirably able to survive and reproduce under bleak conditions. Since the water table has been lowered at least six feet and most householders do not let the normal litter accumulate and decompose on the surface, the soil is con­stantly leeched and chiefly resembles beach sand. 13. Currently, I am conducting an experiment in an area between the sidewalk and the street, locally called a swale. Shallow trenches were dug and filled with lots of fresh chopped leaves and twigs as well as compost that was well along decomposing. Under current conditions, the twigs and leaves would quickly dry between bouts of leeching instead of decomposing. Large plastic sheets were spread about 18 inches down under an area of sand and compost to hold the rainwater near the surface longer. Eventually, the plastic will break down and be penetrated by plant roots, but perhaps there will be sufficient roots by then to catch nutrients from the surface. This and other efforts are designed to help the system back toward a condition where practically no human inter­vention is needed. 14. As the litter has built up in the backyard, grass and ferns have proven to be the plants that do the best without artificial watering and specimens are being moved from elsewhere in the yard to the experimental xeriscaping project in the swale. These have grown well for six months, but the first full summer has yet to be gotten through. When the area is thriving with ferns of various types to shade them, experiments will begin with other plants. Some plants, such as dandelions, which can cast seeds onto the lawns of neighbors, are pulled as soon as recognized. The aim is to have as great a diversity of mutually supporting organisms as possible that will live well with minimal tending and without artifi­cial watering, fertilizing, etc. There is already an increase in insect pop­ulations and consequently birds are seen in this habitat practically daily. Southeast Florida is on the migratory route along the east coast of North America to and from South America. 15. Neighbors have been watching and asking about this front-yard ex­periment and three have spontaneously expressed the intention to do

Action for Ecosystemic Health

29

the same or similar things. It is not impossible that the neighborhood association, which includes several dozen households, will seek support from the city to xeriscape the swales on both sides of the street, some­ thing that, if successful, might be imitated elsewhere in the wider area. Laws favoring such practices are already on the local books. We want to avoid the use of water, pesticide, fertilizer, and also the fuel, equip­ment, and labor of lawn mowing (and attendant human health prob­lems). What seems chiefly recalcitrant is the aesthetic attitude, although some neighbors say they like the look of a wild combination of native plants. Others also value having the birds back. How much lawn will be restored into habitat remains to be seen. It is hardly stylish yet. 16. The backyard of my property is fenced. Various plants have disap­peared since the artificial watering and fertilizing were stopped. Some noxious exotics and also trees that could fall on the house during a hurricane are being removed. Some native plants will probably be added in future. Parasitic plant relationships, including philodendrons on oaks and palms and other plants growing out of the tops of palms are not inter­fered with. Litter is accumulating on the ground, something that is less of a fire hazard now that fewer people smoke, although if a party were held after a dry period, the yard would probably be wet down first with a hose. Larger branches and palm fronds are picked up. A small amount of pruning is still engaged in for aesthetic reasons. 17. There are toads who breed in the fishpond, the occasional snake, liz­ards of at least two species, mice, bats, squirrels, raccoons, and opos­ sums. Blue jays, cardinals, doves, and several types of woodpecker are regularly seen, and members of probably a dozen other bird species come occasionally. Sometimes falcons land in the trees and peer about; one has been seen flying off with a toad. Owls probably come by, but specimens have yet to be seen. There were nine fat goldfish in the pond but they have disappeared, one was seen leaving in a neighbor’s cat’s mouth, but egrets could also have preyed on them. Some wire netting or per­haps some sort of a flashing device could be used to protect new and native fish from birds. These fish would control mosquitoes and

30

Action for Ecosystemic Health

also eat frog eggs and tadpoles. Once the fence around the yard is reinforced suitably, a small loud dog might help keep cats and burglars away. The heat and humidity will be taken into consideration in his selection. Given my age, this should probably be an older dog, who would live outside by day, and arrangements would need to be made to have her fed when I am away on trips. The canine excretions in the yard could be used to help feed the plants and would also be less trouble for humans if she were small. Thus far, friends have discouraged stocking the yard with land crabs, tortoises, iguanas, or an armadillo. 18. I am attempting to grow a tree for oranges. A vegetable garden will probably be started in the fall. Since shredded paper with oil-based ink is already included in the compost for the wild parts of the garden, now called the “jungle,” and what has been deposited there in previous years is simply unknown, rich previously tested soil will be brought in for a raised bed of perhaps three square meters in area and protected from some rain and sun. Rainwater will probably be collected for water­ing here. Carrots, lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, and no doubt some “Southern” vegetables will be grown for human food. Natural tech­ niques will be used to minimize sharing with the insects and birds. 19. An unsolved problem concerns the need for chemicals in the pool. These and the running of the pump to filter the water have been reduced to the minimum. A solar device will be tried that claims to reduce the chemical needs much further. Skimming leaves has become a daily meditative routine combined with a brief morning dip. The urgings of friends to convert the pool into a fishpond have been resisted thus far. II. A MODEL FOR JUSTIFYING ACTION 20. As the example sketched above shows, even “environmental action” that is rather minimal in space, time, and human effort is complex and can have short- and long-term local and distant impacts. Action supporting monocultures and alien organisms through extensive human ef­forts using artificial chemicals and large quantities of

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pumped water in a deeply modified environment can be contrasted with efforts devoted to restoring as much of an approximation to the original, stable, and self-sustaining diversity of native organisms as possible. Environmentalists would consider the latter more correct than the former. But how might this be justified philosophically? A model can be outlined (see Figure 1) based on studies of Husserl. Figure 1 Stratification of Cultural Encounters and Things-as-Encountered 4. Willing Ends and means 3. Valuing Values intrinsic and extrinsic 2. Believing in Belief characteristics 1. Evidencing Effects and causes 21. On the left in Figure 1, which is designed to be read from the bottom up, are listed types of components or strata of concrete intentive proc­esses or mental acts, the arrows represent that these process components are intentive, and that which is specifically constituted in these strata of intentiveness is listed on the right. It needs to be remembered, first, that the four types of components distinguished and named with respect to the encountering and the encountered cover abstract parts of concreta. Thus, the thing that is willed is not concretely different from the thing that is valued. The error of thinking this might be otherwise may stem from cases where, e.g., the willing is neutral while the valuing is positive, which can occur when one is simply enjoying a garden without any tendency toward action with respect to it. In this case, there would also probably be little if any recognized difference between valuing some parts for their own sakes and others for the sake of other parts, e.g., the extrinsic values of plants that foster insects that attract birds. 22. Second, encounters are cultural in that they are, in a broad significa­tion, learned, habitual, or routine. Thus they are not instinctual and also not operational or I-engaged. This is not to say that there is no foundation of primarily automatic or instinctual constitution of

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Action for Ecosystemic Health

things as alive, e.g., of insects and the lizards who eat them. It is also not to say that operations of the I are not a major source of origins and changes in habits and routines, which can also arise out of experience and under the influence of other persons. But the former are essentially unmodifiable and the latter transitory. They are the habitual processes that can be established, can be changed, endure, and are repeated and repeatable and should thus be the focus of concern. Incidentally, cultural encounters are not peculiarly human, for while it is difficult to teach the neighborhood cats to stay out of one’s yard, a dog can be taught to leave birds alone, chase out cats, and bark at and bite humans not previously established as friendly. Nevertheless, the emphasis here is on habitual actions that are human. 23. If those two global points are borne in mind, the components distin­guished in the analysis can be discussed from the bottom up. The bot­tom two levels can together be said to make up cognition. The things in question here are real rather than ideal, which they would be in logic and mathematics. They can be subject to physical and chemical obser­vation, e.g., to see how many parts per trillion of DDT are present, but the mode of evidencing that is ultimately relied on in environmental action is biological. Insofar as it justifies believing, observation can be called evidencing in phenomenology and the intentively correlative thing that is observationally evidenced is justifiably believed in. This con­cern with cognition as justified belief is plainly epistemological. As such, it can be scientific and nonscientific. To observe what has hap­ pened in a garden during over two years after the artificial life supports of watering, raking, fertilizing, etc., were stopped could be scientific if the observer were suitably trained, kept records, perhaps relied on equipment, etc., but it can also just be watched, just as the effects of digging sub­stantial amounts of compost into a former patch of lawn and then trans­planting ferns of various types and leaving the patch to depend on rain­water can also just be watched. Part of the effort described above has been happily amateurish and at most vaguely scien­tific in its understanding of food chains, symbiosis, species diversity, etc.

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24. The object of cognition represented in the bottom two levels of figure 1 can be the object specifically of knowledge when it is signified with true statements. Statements of the sort involved can affect action, as when what is being done in the front yard is explained to neighbors. But whether what is being tried works, including not only the survival of plants but also the increase in insects and birds and the diversity of all, needs to be observed through the senses. These cognitive ascertain­ments are attained in what might be called a broadly intellectual or cognitive attitude, which can be refined into scientific and also scientific-technological attitudes. 25. Thus, four types of ferns were transplanted to the front habitat, the first batch at the same time, i.e., over one weekend, in relation to what was there after months of not tending the lawn and prior to the planned experiment using plastic sheets, the ferns were planted a typical dis­tance apart, and the effect of the transplantations observed in relation to the conditions, i.e., the plants taking roots and now growing. The colors, shapes, and biological conditions of the plants as well as their spatial, temporal, and causal relations with other things are natural determinations and evidenceable. For awhile, all that nonscientific ob­servational evidencing would justify concerning effects was doxic neu­trality. Neither thriving nor languishing was sure. It was also possible that, under the circumstances specified (and certainly more precisely specifiable scientifically), the first batch of ferns would die. It is still possible, but unlikely, that they will not survive the summer. Thus far, the patch survives and attracts insects and birds (and neighbors), which more artificially sustained and chemically treated lawns do to a much lesser extent. 26. Epistemology being a far better developed philosophical subdiscipline than axiology or praxiology, the philosophical (or scientific) reader is probably able to continue the above analysis of cognition as far as a case of the sort in question requires and thus relate appro­ priate botanical, zoological, and other biological and naturalistic scien­tific knowledge to it. If enough has been said in that perspective,

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Action for Ecosystemic Health

the evaluative attitude can next be turned to. In the cognitive attitude the stratum of believing and that of the evidencing that justifies it is empha­sized and the valuing and willing strata (and, in both cases, the correla­tive positional characteristics in the thing as intended to or encoun­tered) are either subordinated or neutralized. The evaluative attitude is of the same structure, but in it the valuing rather than the believing stratum predominates. With respect to the things valued, it becomes possible to say that they are beautiful or ugly or with neutral value, value here being a property of things encountered and not the price or exchange equivalence of concern to economists. 27. As a precondition for valuing, that which is valued needs to be believed in. That it is believed in does not signify that it is, in the strict signification, cognized, for we come often to believe in things that not only we but nobody has evidenced such that the believing is justified. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that, on the cognitive level, adequate definitions of health, illness, getting sick, getting better, etc., can be established and extended not only from humans to other animals but also to plants, fungi, soils, and ecosystems. It may not be easy to com­ prehend these words purely cognitively, with no positive value placed on life, health, and getting better and no negative value placed on death, illness, and getting sick, but it appears possible and might be, if neces­sary, facilitated if artificial expressions were contrived. 28. In the present case, the former garden was artificially sustained with substantial inputs of labor, water, and chemicals and when the latter were stopped it became or showed itself actually to be sick and many organisms and perhaps the ecosystem as formerly constituted may be said to have died. In its place, a new ecosystem is developing that needs less artificial life-support, which in the main depends on rain for water and recycles nutrients from litter or is being moved toward that condition, in which a new community of soil, plants, insects, etc., is emerging in a nearly self-sustaining complexity. Thus, either the garden ecosystem is getting well or is being succeeded by a healthier one (and

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just what constitutes identity over time in a changing ecosystem is an interesting question). 29. On the face of the matter, believing is justified when founded upon and motivated by evidencing of a specific sort. Seeing the ferns take hold and grow justifies believing in what is seen. Similarly, when action is examined and relations of founding and motivating seem to hold between the willing stratum and the valuing stratum, then the willing is, to some extent, justified. It is not a full justification, but to choose strawberry over vanilla ice cream because one prefers the taste of the former to the taste of the latter and believes all other determinations equal is justified at that level, choosing as volitional and preferring as evaluational being different. Much work is needed because the matter is complex, but by and large if an ecosystem that is believed to be essentially self-sustaining fits the established definition of health for matters of the sort and if such ecosystemic health is rightly valued, then willing to foster such a healthy system is justified. 30. The complexity of the matter can be approached on the level of the ends and means to be willed within it toward the end of overall health and through consideration of means, e.g., time and effort, and ends beyond it, e.g., being environmentally exemplary in society. It can also be approached in terms of the extrinsic and intrinsic values underlying the internal and external ends and means and even with respect, cogni­tively, to the believed-in relations between organisms in the system that is getting healthier. 31. It may be wondered, for example, whether not only ferns but also other native plants will be able to thrive on the basis of leached sand mixed with compost and with more compost added from time to time on the surface to have the effect of litter. Will sufficient moisture be retained or will the nutrients be leached away in a few rainy seasons? After all, even a somewhat wild garden ecosystem needs to be observed for years before it can be said to have become self-sustaining. Then again, will the covering of trenches filled with compost on top of plastic sheets allow them to receive and retain sufficient moisture without leaching?

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32. The model sketched is least plausible where the connection between believing and valuing is concerned. Some further discussion and the identification of adverse factors may make it more plausible. To begin with, it bears repetition that what is under discussion are abstract parts of the process of culturally encountering a thing, on the one hand, and, correlatively, of cultural things-as-encountered. To take a much simpler example, suppose one follows the practical maxim, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” The things referred to in this maxim are in an end-means relationship and justified by an extrinsic-intrin­sic value relationship, which is itself justified by a believed-in causal relationship between a food of a type eaten at a specified frequency and health as an organic condition, which itself could be justified by observational evidencing of humans who do and do not regularly ingest apples and the frequency of their recourse to physicians. Then suppose that it is established that, after all, apple eating is a statistically signifi­cant factor or cause of cancer in humans. Would the new cognition of such a causal connection continue to found and motivate the valuing of apples as preventive medicine, i.e., for the sake of health? Health would continue to have intrinsic positive value, but apples, no longer believed conducive to it but now rather as conducive against it, would then have extrinsic negative rather than positive value and be routinely avoided rather than sought. 33. We do not always tend to distinguish sharply in our thinking between valuing and willing. In part this is because, once an ambivalence is overcome, the volitional hesitation automatically, as a rule, also disap­pears, and this is the case whether or not the willing follows immedi­ately or waits to be triggered at a prescribed time. We rarely engage in the willing that is thus motivated separately and separate engagement is a prominent reminder that an encountering in which one stratum predominates is different from another. Furthermore, we tend analo­gously to couple evidencing and believing in much of our thinking as well. Most of what we do directly see is automatically believed in and the cases, typically, where matters of belief are problematic are

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those where the evidencing is either indirect, absent, or conflicted. Here again, however, a classifying of the modes of believing and the correla­tive modalities of belief characteristics in things-as-encountered and then the manners of appearance and modes of givenness and the correlative ways of experiencing things can show that evidencing is one thing and the believing that it may justify is another. 34. Adding to the problem is how, when one attempts to understand one’s own intentive life, one can quickly find oneself reflecting on predominantly cognitive life, i.e., observing an encountering in which evidencing and believ­ing predominate, and when we seek to understand the intentive lives of others, we find the connections between actions and the likings and dislikings motivating and perhaps founding them prominent. In neither of these two ordinary perspectives is the believing-valuing connection central; one needs to make special reflective efforts to focus on it. Not too different is the impact of naturalism on modern thinking. This consists in a tendency to set aside the cultural characteristics, especially the values and uses—but also the belief characteristics—that things always already have in prescientific life and is done in order to focus on the naturalistic determinations on the basis of which naturalistic scientific accounts (and technology) are developed. And we are carefully taught, finally, that being emotional, which includes valuing as it occurs in everyday life, is inimical with being intellectual, something that has led to reason being confined to epistemological reason, which is one step short of confining it to formal logic. 35. If there are to be axiology and praxiology as philosophical subdisci­plines culminating in justified valuing and justified willing, the connec­tions between valuing and willing and between believing and valuing are crucial. This is all, it may be recalled, chiefly an issue of habitual life. We frequently develop incorrect habits. We can have learned, for example, habitually to prefer gardens composed of lawns and flower beds that are arranged in geometrically shaped monocultured areas and dependent on life-support systems involving more human tending than children sometimes receive and with dangerous chemical pesticides used to kill insects, gophers, birds, etc., as well as

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Action for Ecosystemic Health

weeds, over gardens in which human efforts are directed at helping as diverse a community of native organisms as possible interact. 36. Once one has established what justified believing, valuing, and will­ing are, one can seek to expose the sources of error. What makes such positings correct is not motivation alone but rather motivating coupled with founding. One may habitually believe that plants cannot find enough moisture to survive in southeast Florida all year around now that the water table has been lowered, but seeing that the incorporation of sufficient composted vegetable matter into the soil, perhaps in combination with plastic sheeting to reduce leaching and foster microbic communities and soil as well as retention of moisture near the surface, and the use of quite hardy native plants justifies the opposite belief and can also found and motivate the valuing and then the willing of a habitat in place of a lawn. The most obvious difference between motivation and founding is that the former refers to previous circum­stances and the latter refers to concurrent circumstances in mental life, beginning with evidencing. For justifiable habitual positing, the justifying evidencing can be found, and where it cannot be, the positing is not justifiable. 37. Finally, where positings in general and thus valuing specifically are concerned, while large parts of value- (and belief- and use-) systems are relative, e.g., one person likes pears while another likes apples, human health seems not only definable and ascertainable in a nonrela­ tive cognitive way but also valued for its own sake again nonrelatively. This is not to assert (nor to deny) that health is the most valuable thing, that it is the highest good in all value systems or in the one system of nonrelative values, but it is to assert that, incompetent valuers, e.g., psychotics, excluded, it has a positive intrinsic value regardless of the age, gender, ethnicity, society, class, generation, historical era, etc., of the valuers. The question is then whether or not the nonrelative defini­tion and positive intrinsic value of health can be extended to ecosys­tems. This may begin to be plausible if one considers that the health of members of one species can hardly be sustained if the health of that which sustains them is not also sustained.

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III. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF THE MODEL 38. While it is a sketch that will be refined in some of the following essays, the foregoing case and analysis emphasize the key points and make extension and refinement as well as confirma­tion and correction possible. A methodological reflection is in order with respect to such modes of continuation as well as with respect to how different the pertinent approach may still seem to some thinkers. 39. For the most part, the foregoing analysis is not argumentative and is especially not an exercise in hypothesizing some principles and then exploring what can be deduced from them. Instead, reflective observa­tion has been used to produce descriptions of two sorts. The description in the first part of this essay is chiefly factual. It describes an actual case, including re­membered and likely expected stages. The description in part two is chiefly eidetic. Using the factual analysis for illustrative purposes, it attempts to describe the universals of which the factual case is a case, example, or instance. Such an eidetic description should be able to cover other cases of the same kind. For example, rather than a personal garden being weaned from artificial life-supports and helped to sustain itself under prevailing conditions, the case might be a multinational effort to thwart the pollution and other factors currently killing tropical reefs.6 The eidetic model would need to be specified for an aquatic rather than a terrestrial ecosystem, the influences of different circum­stances being identified, and outcomes different in some respects recog­nized, but the general principles of analysis of the environmental action as cultural encounter and the cultural thing acted upon as well as the central place of health should hold. 40. The particular factual as well as the general and specific eidetic anal­yses sketched are phenomenological inasmuch as they are based on reflective observation. Reflective observation is used to approach what 6 Peter Weber, «Reviving Coral Reefs,» in State of the World 1993, ed. Lester R. Brown et al. (New York: Norton, 1993).

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discloses itself, upon reflection, as having chiefly a two-sided theme. On the one hand, there is the thing-as-it-is-encountered, and, on the other hand, there is the encountering of it. The specific components into which such a two-sided phenomenon can be further analyzed “verti­cally” are represented in figure 1. Such a theme can be approached with respect to an individual or collective life through self-observation. Then one would ask about how an I or a We relates to such-and-such a thing, e.g., a garden, and, correlatively, how the thing in question presents itself to a Me or an Us. Or the same theme can be approached through reflection on others, which can also be personal or communal, i.e., one can ask how the garden being helped become native is experienced, valued, etc., by the neighbors across the street and, correlatively, how they believe in and will with respect to it. (Interestingly, early on some neighbors seem to have called city authorities repeatedly to require that the lawn going to weeds be at least cut regularly but stopped doing so when the nature of the experiment became known. The unsolicited statements of intention to imitate came later.) 41. The proper comprehension of the model requires either serious or fictive reflective observation of cases. If the model is comprehended well, i.e., the structures eidetically described in it clearly and distinctly evidenced, then it can be extended to cover new cases and the model also refined, e.g., a distinction between aesthetic valuing of beautiful reefs for scuba divers, which would seem intrinsic, and moral valuing of healthy reefs as hatcheries for food fish and sources of new pharma­ ceuticals, which would seem extrinsic, can be undertaken. Furthermore, weaknesses in the model as expressed, e.g., where the role of thinking is concerned in the cognitive attitude, can be remedied and even any errors as yet unseen can be identified and corrected. Ultimately, the threefold account of what it is for a positing to be justified can also itself be examined in the same way, i.e., through reflectively evidencing, believing, valuing, and willing with respect to the structures in question. This is the perspective in which it is hoped the present sketch will be considered.

2. The Constitution of the Vegetable

Wie herrlich leuchtet / Mir die Natur! Wie glaenzt die Sonne! / Wie lacht die Flur! Es dringen Blueten / Aus jedem Zweig Und tausend Stimmen / Aus dem Gestrauch. — Goethe, “Mailied” 1. At least in Anglophone countries, there is a parlor game called “Twenty Questions.” In it one person thinks of something, keeps it secret except to announce whether it is animal, vegetable, or mineral, and then answers only “yes” or “no” while the other players have the twenty questions by which to discover what it is, the winner getting to conceive the next topic. The questioning proceeds by dividing categories of things into smaller categories. Thus, if the thing is known to be animal, one might ask if it is a mammal and if the answer is “yes,” then one might ask if the mammal is human, if the answer is “no,” then one knows it is a nonhuman animal, and might ask if it is larger than a dog, and so on. Amusing issues can arise, especially for philosophers, e.g., is Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception something animal? Is air mineral? There are mixed things that require determining the basic component that predominates, e.g., is the Pacific Ocean mostly water and thus mineral? And phenomenologists can recognize that there is no definite place for ideal things unless one commits psychologism. Nevertheless, it is impressive how powerful this initial threefold classification is for the lifeworldly things of commonsense thinking captured in ordinary language. 2. After (1) a review of what little prior work on the vegetable there seems to be in constitutive phenomenology and (2) an example introduced along with a description of the prescientific naturalistic attitude

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The Constitution of the Vegetable

of contemplation appropriate for this investigation, (3) a straightforward comparative sketch of the three types of naturalistic things will be offered in relation to the example, (4) the different intentive syntheses in which such matters are constituted will be sketched in general, and, finally, (5) the attempt will be made to analyze the constitution of the vegetable in its own right rather than reduce it either to the animal or the “mineral.” More issues are of course raised implicitly as well as explicitly than settled in this line of inquiry and the relevance for the theory of biology and for ecophenomenology is obvious. I. SOME PRIOR WORK 3. In practice, Edmund Husserl’s notion of nature seems to include merely two kinds of things, material or physical things, which are similar to the minerals of the parlor game, and psychophysical things, which are, of course, the animals, nonhuman as well as human. Where does he locate vegetables? Ullrich Melle is as familiar with Husserl’s Nachlass as anybody and has told the present writer that, while there may be passing remarks, there are no sustained analyses devoted to the constitution of the vegetable there, which strikes the present writer as remarkable. Some recent scholarship on Husserl also gives no sign that he investigated the vegetable.7 4. This situation can begin to be rectified within constitutive phenomenology, which is fundamentally not to say through extensive scholarship on the work of Husserl, Cairns, Gurwitsch, Schutz, etc., much less the work of phenomenologists of other tendencies 7 Cf. LEE Nam-In, “Das An-sich-Sein und die verschiedenen Gesichter der Welt,” in Phenomenology of Nature: Festschrift in Honor of Kah Kyung Cho (Seoul: The Korean Society for Phenomenology, 1998), pp. 79-91, and Peter Reynaert, “Husserl’s Phenomenology of Animate Being and the Critique of Naturalism,” in Phänomenologische Forschungen, Neue Folge 5, 2000, pp. 251-269.

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within the phenomenological tradition, e.g., Max Scheler,8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty,9 and Hedwig Conrad-Martius,10 who may have located vegetables in a vital stratum of nature above the physical and below at least the human stratum. A review of some prior constitutive phenomenology may nevertheless provide entry into the problematics. 5. In one place Husserl does explain why he does not discuss plants at length. After introducing the perception of material things and specifically the zoological sciences, he writes: We should mention here the reason why we have not mentioned general biology, and specifically not botany. The obvious kinship between brute and plant that thrusts itself to the fore and brings with it so many parallel and closely related problems in carrying out investigations directed at plant “life” and brute materiality, i.e., brings with it from this side a unity of the natural sciences (with regard to zoology as the natural science of animate material body), does not go so far that a definite interpretation of the plant as an animate organism has become possible (and ultimately as an animate organism for something psychic in the full sense), which interpretation could have posed its definite somatological problems, as is the case first with the higher brutes and then, pursuing the sequence of levels of the brutes, also with the lower ones. The universal and completely indefinitely performed empathy that permits the analogy is not enough for the investigator; he needs concrete experience of concrete sensitivities related to concrete organs, whereby the analogy of the plant organs with brute-animal ones, to which well-known 8 Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Bern: A. Francke, 1928), Ch. I. 9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La structure du comportement (Paris: PUF, 1942), Ch. III. 10 Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Bios und Psyche (Hamburg: Classen & Goverts, 1949), Naturwissenschaftlich Metaphysische Perspektiven (Heidelberg: F.H. Kerle Verlag, 1949), and Schriften zur Philosophie, Zeiter Band (München: Kösel-Verlag, 1964). I thank Jim Hart for these references.

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sensitivities belong according to experience, must be broad enough to ground the probability of the interpretation. If this is lacking, then the treatment of botany as a material natural science suffices—or rather, no other treatment then is possible. It would therefore not exclude plants having sensitivities after all; it only means that we would be incapable of recognizing them, because there is lacking any bridge of empathy and of mediately determined analysis. But I only wanted here to be as accommodating as possible to the prevailing field of physiological botany and biology in general, and I leave open the question whether interpretive experience cannot play—or whether in fact it is not playing—its fruitful role after all, as it undoubtedly does in zoology, although here, too, this is often not appreciated.11

6. Husserl is thus inclined to treat botany as a naturalistic science of the specifically material or physical sort because he is unable reflectively to reach intentional streams in plants as he is able to do in nonhuman as well as human animals. So-called empathy attempted on plants does not disclose sensitivities and sense organs and, presumably, the organs of action on the basis of which willing as well as sensing could be appresented in other animate beings (and if willing cannot be observed in plants, they cannot be said to be purposive and hence there is no more teleology there than there is in physical nature). 7. Among the second generation of constitutive phenomenologists, Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch also do not discuss plants at length, although they may mention them in passing, but in one of their conver11 Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Drittes Buch, Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, Husserliana V, ed. Marly Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), §2b. Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences, Third Book, Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl (The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), p. 8.

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sations, Dorion Cairns, arguably Husserl’s closest follower, does report a speculation by his master as well as imply its inadequacy: I asked, “What about plants?” Can we say that we have Einfühlung here, or is the plant merely a special sort of physical thing, not a psychophysical? To begin with, replied Husserl, one must distinguish two sorts of physical unities, those in which the form remains the same but the material may change and those in which the identity of material constitutes the unity. The latter is the fundamental unity of physical science, the basis for its idealizations. Physical science tries to explain unities of the other sort (I think Husserl spoke of these as “typical” unities) according to causal laws of the behavior of unities of the other sort. Plants are typical unities, as are men and animals. I interpolated that a waterfall was also a unity of the same sort, to which Husserl agreed. In the end I got no clear idea whether Husserl thinks of plants as limiting cases of Einfühlung or not. Though he did say perhaps Leibniz was right in saying that the only conceivable being was spiritual being, and that the “things” of the world are really “sleeping” monads.12 .

8. Unless waterfalls are to be considered animals or plants, more specification is clearly required. Cairns himself does not discuss plants in his dissertation of 1933, but in some notes for an undergraduate lecture course on introductory psychology a few years later he does in effect seek to provide the needed specificity when he quotes with approval the following from the great physiologist, John Haldane: 12 Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink (The Hague: Martin Nijhoff, 1976), p. 74. For how Cairns’s thought developed from here, see Lester Embree, “Aufbau to Animism: A Sketch of the Alternative Methodology and Major Discovery in Dorion Cairns’s Revision of Edmund Husserl’s ‘Fifth Cartesian Meditation,” Continental Philosophy Review (2006) 39:79-96.

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The most striking differential feature of living organisms is what may be called their active and specific stability. The bodies which we ordinarily meet with in the inorganic world possess a greater or less amount of stability; but this is interpreted as being of a passive kind, not dependent on continuously maintained activity within them. In the body of a living organism the stability of form and composition is evidently due, not to passive resistance to changes in the environment, but to continuous activity so co-ordinated that, though its material is constantly changing, the specific form and composition of the living body are, on the whole, maintained, or that if changes in these are in progress, as during development, these changes are on the whole of a definite and specific character in each species of organism. We give recognition of this fundamental fact when we say that the organism is alive, and belongs to a species. The reactions of a living organism to changes in what we interpret as its physical and chemical environment are so co-ordinated that the organism tends to be maintained, or else to undergo such changes in character as are specific to it. A distinguishing characteristic of fundamentally the same kind is the capacity an organism possesses of reproducing itself in every detail, the reproduction starting in part of itself.13

9. This passage emphasizes the difference between the physical and the organic in terms of factors outside or both outside and inside the thing in question, but it does not differentiate between the vegetable and the animal within the category of the organic. The changing material that Husserl recognized for plants and animals is also affirmed. It is furthermore mentioned how organisms of both sorts have species-specific ways of staying the same and changing, reacting to their environments, and reproducing. 10. Organisms and general biology are based on the recognition of features common to plants and animals and in contrast with material 13 J.S. Haldane, The Sciences and Philosophy: Gifford Lectures (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, and Company, Inc., 1929), pp. 9 f. Quoted by Cairns.

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things and physical science, but if the division is made between organisms with psyches and organisms without them and if plants lack psyches, then plants are “mineral” rather than “animal.” Then again, just as in the parlor game, however, not two but three categories of naturalistic things could be recognized. Then the whole situation can be worked through in two directions with the vegetable in the middle. Working so-to-speak downwards, the plants can be said to start where the animals stop, which raises the question of where the plants stop and purely physical things or “minerals” begin. Or, proceeding “upwards,” one can begin with the purely physical and ask where the vegetable begins and later where the animal begins. Like Husserl in Ideen III, some colleagues seem to prefer the first way, but the second way will eventually be taken here, at least for expository purposes. The three sorts of naturalistic things would then be nested so that what holds for physical things holds for the rest, but there is something additional for vegetables that also holds for animals, who themselves then have something in addition that holds for then alone. II. AN ATTITUDE AND AN EXAMPLE 11. An example may lend some clarity to the following considerations, beginning with the attitude needed for this investigation. Most of the likely readers of this essay can remember or readily feign a bench in a park where they have sat and looked around. One can feign sitting there, hearing the leaves moved by the breeze as well as some birds and children playing, and one can feign seeing trees, flowers, and grass as well as birds, children, squirrels, a small lake, and, finally, some rocks including one that is about the size of an automobile that children and other animals climb up and perch on. There do exist people who are more familiar with sea ice, seals, and kelp and some others may live deep in jungles where large rocks and grass do not occur, but most who are likely to hear or read the present essay can at least feign the situation in the park and can also recognize that it contains animals, vegetables,

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and minerals, i.e., zoological, botanical, and purely physical things. More detail will be added to this example when needed below. 12. The attitude in which the previous and subsequent sections are written and are expected to be read deserves to be described. This situation in the park is part of the lifeworld and this world that we must begin from is originally cultural. This signifies that the contents of the lifeworld have, from the outset, various values and uses as well as belief characteristics for the individuals and groups of humans in the situation, whether or not they reflect upon and recognize them in things-as-encountered. The gardener keeps the trees pruned and grass trimmed and performs her role using appropriate equipment to attain her ends, but let us confine this example to how the area is cultural for the humans who are there for enjoyment. Thus we exclude the practical activities of the gardener but include the children playing, although our emphasis will be on ourselves sitting on the bench. For us on the park bench, what we gaze out upon has predominantly the positive intrinsic value that can be called pleasantness if not beauty. 13. While observing such a situation from our park bench, we can abstract from the values and uses of its contents and, first of all, its pleasantness. In this age of naturalism, it is frightenly easy for most educated people to do this. Then we observe what are best called naturalistic things, an expression that can help us remember that this consideration of such things is not natural but artificial, i.e., the product of an abstraction. Our attitude of observation can then be said to be naturalistically contemplative, but it is not yet scientific. Prior to the abstraction of the naturalistic from the cultural, we could have gone on to relate the cultural scene to a cultural discipline, such as landscape architecture. After the naturalistic abstraction we could go on to relate the material things to physics and physical sciences such as geology, hydrology, and meteorology, and the vegetable and animal things to the biological sciences of botany and zoology. 14. Although the present reflections have significance for the naturalistic sciences and the cultural disciplines, philosophy included, it

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is fortunately not necessary for us immediately to fit our contemplation from the park bench into one or another of those disciplinary frameworks. This is fortunate because a great deal would then be included in the way of what Husserl referred to as idealizations when botany and zoology are combined, not to speak of when psychology is considered a zoological and thus biological science. Although it may require some struggle against preconceptions derived from the mentioned disciplines, it will be more useful for present purposes to remain with the division of the field of naturalistic contemplation into animal, vegetable, and mineral. 15. How the attitude expected here is contemplative deserves more explication. It is not the practical attitude of the gardener or even a landscape architect who might be considering how to rearrange things in the situation, perhaps the location of the bench, or other practical ends and means. More subtly, we are also no longer in an valuational attitude, i.e., we are no longer appreciating or enjoying what we see and also hear in the way of the chirping of birds, leaves murmuring, the smell of fresh cut grass, etc. Rather, we are contemplating naturalistic things in what can be considered a prescientific theoretical or cognitive attitude, and what we believe may change with what we see or what we see about what we see should we reflect. But it is important to recognize that this attitude is straightforward or unreflective. Reflection has been resorted to in order to distinguish what our generic naturalistic contemplation is abstracted from, but that contemplation is not itself reflective. Only the naturalistic things that are encountered are thematized, not how they are encountered. III. SOME STRAIGHTFORWARD COMPARISONS 16. We are familiar with the things of the three kinds that we contemplate. Straightforward descriptions can be provided in terms of shape, weight, surface texture, flexibility, color, warmth, smell, sound, etc. and also how these properties stay the same or change under various

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circumstances. We are well aware that the things we contemplate are as they are due to circumstances, e.g., the stones arranged in two rows on both sides of what we used to be able to call the path as having been put there by humans and the squirrels there because there is food that they like and because humans do not prey on them and reduce the cats, raptors, and snakes that do prey on them. And, of course, all of these naturalistic things are located in physical space and time. 17. Besides being straightforward, the descriptions that we could provide might be static. The opposite of static in this signification is dynamic. For present purposes, it will be useful to emphasize how things of our three categories change and the circumstances in which they do so. The large rock seems to change very little if at all. Haldane would say it is quite stable and Husserl would agree. We do know that if we fling a hard stone against the large rock we might knock off a chip. And we know that there is equipment that can pick up and move even a rock the size of an automobile. What is common in these cases is that when changes occur they do so under external circumstances, i.e., the things do not themselves decide to move. In other words, rocks do not change due to internal circumstances. It is the same with the lake. The wind may ripple its surface, the rain may increase its bulk and evaporation may reduce it, and influx and drainage as well as the wind may produce currents within it, but the water itself will just sit there like the rock if nothing else acts upon it from outside. The water and the big rock are physical things; they are “minerals” in the terms of the parlor game. 18. But vegetable things are more than that. We can observe that plants produce seeds and from the seeds come new plants and that the new plants sprout, mature, produce their own seeds, decline, and eventually die. One does not need formal education in botany to know this. Not only quite primitive peoples but also urbanites visiting parks easily learn this if they are patient and observant. At least as interesting is what happens if one throws the rock against a tree and breaks off some of its bark. Initially, this is like chipping the large rock. The

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difference is that while the rock remains thereafter with the chip missing, the tree will first excrete some sap and then form a scar where it has healed itself. Rocks do not heal themselves. What is common to these vegetable processes is that, in addition to the various external circumstances, there are internal circumstances that produce changes. Sophisticated people today know that such internal circumstances are ultimately structures of DNA, but it is probable that it was known in all societies for millennia before science arose that sap moves through the bark and that this is necessary for the plant to grow, heal itself, reproduce, and be alive. If one cuts the bark all around the base of a tree, i.e., “girdles” it, the tree will die. 19. As Husserl noted and Haldane assumed, there are similarities between plants and animals. First of all, plants and animals are like purely physical things in being located in physical space and time, in being sensuously perceivable, and in being alterable in size, shape, color, etc. under external circumstances. Secondly, both of them are born, grow, repair themselves when necessary, reproduce, and die, which minerals do not do. Animals as well as plants interact with their surroundings, drawing nutrients, which can include light as well as food and water, and returning waste, which can include oxygen and carbon dioxide as well as solid and liquid elimination, e.g., the shedding of skin cells and the dropping of leaves, to their environments. Thirdly, one can refine one’s knowledge of the mechanisms within organisms of both types by directly observing their insides when they are alive as well as dead. It is on the basis of such similarities as these that the term “organism” can be used and that there can be a science of general biology that includes both botany and zoology. 20. There is, however, reason for caution with regard to treating botany and zoology together. Husserl already saw this in Ideen III. There are internal circumstances in animals such as the birds, children, and squirrels that are not sensuously perceived when one cuts them open. In the naturalistic observational attitude relied on here, these seem best-called psychic circumstances. They are distinctive in how

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children delight in climbing on the big rock, swimming in the lake, and the squirrels scampering away when humans or dogs get too close or when they see raptors in the sky. How these psychic circumstances can be observed will be returned to in the next section. Most of the scientific psychology of the twentieth century excluded such strictly psychic circumstances in the hope that investigation of the internal biological circumstances in physiology, neurology, etc., would suffice to explain behavior and hence it may be difficult to remember that while sap, blood, wood, bone, bark, and skin are matter, the psychic is mind and not matter, but it is necessary to remember just this difference.14 21. Language, moreover, is often metaphorical and can be misleading. Is the bark actually the skin of a tree or merely somewhat like it? Is the chipped place on the rock actually a wound? Do stalagmites actually grow in the way that plants and animals grow? Are animals alive in the way in which plants are alive, and, if they are, is there nothing additional about animals that differentiates them from plants? Within philosophy, there is also need to resist the tradition going back to Aristotle of speaking of the “vegetable soul”; this tradition can be understood because of the similarities of plants and animals, but if it sheds more shadow than light, it needs to be resisted. The same can be said of Leibniz and Husserl’s sleeping monads and Cairns’s universal animism. 22. Even in lifeworldly nature there are various species of physical things, various species of plants, and various species of animals. Further research might show that trees, rocks, and squirrels are not typical of the respective categories of naturalistic things, but they do seem so to the present author and they do relate to the distinct categories of animal, vegetable, and mineral. Thus far, however, what has been said is still straightforward and is not phenomenological. 14 No assertion is here made that mind can exist independent of body or matter.

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IV. SOME TYPES OF SYNTHESIS 23. To do phenomenology, one must reflect. With our example, this signifies that straightforward naturalistic contemplation continues, but an additional attitude is adopted. This reflective attitude has already been resorted to in order the describe the straightforward attitude. In reflection one observes not the thing that is encountered but the thing-as-encountered, in other words, the thing as it is intended to, and one also reflects on the encountering or intending to it. One’s reflective attitude can be cultural, e.g., when one re-enjoys an earlier encountering by remembering with delight the earlier enjoyment and the things-as-enjoyed in it, which can include the enjoyment of the movements of one’s own body. For present purposes, however, the naturalistic abstraction is best extended to include the things reflected upon. One can even reflect on reflection, which has been done in order to compose the present methodological paragraph. When one reflects on reflection, one can recognize that, while the naturalistic contemplation of the scene of the rock, trees and grass, and birds, squirrels, and children is a sensuous experiencing, reflection upon it is nonsensuous. This reflective observation can also be pre-disciplinary, i.e., not yet related to the purposes of psychology or philosophy. 24. The sensuous experiencing that we have abstracted by disregarding the believing, valuing, and willing components within the original concrete encountering of our scene has, in one way, three forms. We can move our heads and go from focusing on the rock to focusing on a tree and then focusing on a squirrel eating a nut. It is possible to go on secondarily focusing on the first and then the second of these themes as our gaze moves to the squirrel. But we can also pause at the tree, drop the theme of the rock, and then pick it up again recollectively. In this last situation we can reflectively discern the difference between remembering the rock and perceiving the tree and say that remembering is an experiencing of something previously perceived and the perceiving is an experiencing of something in the present or, better, in the now, i.e.,

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simultaneous with the perceiving of it. And if we stop our gaze on the tree while on the way toward gazing at the squirrel, we can experience something as to be perceived in the future, which it will be useful to call expecting. It is odd to call expecting an experiencing because, while possible futures are intended to in it, they are not intuitive, while, in contrast, perceiving and also remembering are intuitive. To fully appreciate how nonintuitive expecting is, one must be sure not to mistake a character of being believed in or a feigned future for a purely expected future. Nevertheless, even though nonintuitive, expecting can be considered a form of experiencing. Its blindness or emptiness is essential, while the blindness that often occurs in perceiving and remembering is accidental. 25. Something else readily observed reflectively is how the rock, tree, and squirrel are, technically speaking, transcendent of the intentional stream in which experiencing goes on. That stream is technically called immanence. Most interestingly, if the gazing over the scene we naturalistically contemplate from the park bench is repeated, not three different naturalistic threesomes of things but three identical ones are re-experienced, each of the same things re-perceived, re-remembered, and/or re-expected. To understand how such identities are possible, we must analyze intentive synthesis. In recognizing three forms of experiencing, we have already recognized that there is complexity to the stream of intentive processes, an expression that can be preferred to that of mental life if “life” is reserved to characterize the organic. Sensuous perceiving, remembering, and expecting have been mentioned as well as intentive processes in the reflective as well as the straightforward attitudes. But there is more. 26. The processes within the immanence of the stream of intentive processes relate to one another by virtue of types of intentionality or intentiveness that can be called retrotentiveness and protentiveness, depending of whether the process intended to is in the past or the future of the process begun from. The word “process” is apt because the stream does flow like a river. Then the successive perceivings, rememberings,

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and expectings referred to above are phases of the process. There are even phases when we remain with one thing, let us say the rock that we sensuously perceive. The now phase of perceiving has the rock as its primary thing, earlier phases had the rock as their primary things, and the now phase has the primary things of the past retrotended to as its secondary things. This is where Husserl advances beyond his teacher Brentano on the topic of Intentionalität by describing not only how there is a directedness of intentive processes at things, but intentiveness to the thing in the now as the same as the thing intended to in earlier intentive processes and also the same thing as will be intended to in currently protended processes. The identical thing is constituted as identical in a synthesis, an identificational synthesis, intentive processes forming that synthesis through their protending as well as retrotending one another as later and earlier processes making up a synthesis.15 27. There are several sorts of syntheses. To begin with, there are continuous identificational syntheses of immanent things. Cairns offers the following concise analysis, still using the word “retaining” that he later replaced with “retrotending.” Consider three successive temporal phases of mental life A, B, and C. C, the latest of these phases, includes a retaining of the just past phase B and also a retaining of the earliest phase A. Moreover, C’s retaining of B is a retaining of B as, in turn, retaining A. Thus A is both a primary and a secondary thing of C. But, in this last phase, C, A as retained in C is also identified synthetically with A as already retained in the just past phase, B.

28. There are also discontinuous syntheses of immanent things, as happens when one remembers an earlier delight on more than one subsequent occasion, each subsequent remembering then joining the 15 This account benefits enormously from the terminology as well as the descriptions in Dorion Cairns, “Theory of Intentionality in Husserl,” eds. Lester Embree, Fred Kersten, and Richard M. Zaner, The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2001.

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synthesis with the earlier ones so that the delight is identified synthetically as the same delight repeatedly remembered 29. In contrast with such syntheses of immanent things, the intentive syntheses of outwardly transcendent things can now be focused on. (The constitution of the identical I who is inwardly transcendent of the operational stratum of the stream of intentiveness will also be disregarded as unnecessary for present purposes.) The tree is the same for each passing phase of intentiveness while we look at it and/or touch it, successive phases retrotending to earlier phases and their primary things being identified with the secondary things as intended to. Beyond this but simultaneously, the synthetically identified tree is differentiated continuously from the things in its background, the experiencer’s own co-experienced body as well as the rest of nature included. Hence, a more adequate title here (and for the immanent syntheses as well) is “identifying-differentiating synthesis.” 30. There are also discontinuous identifying-differentiating syntheses of outwardly transcendent things, such as how one perceives the just chipped rock and the just wounded tree and then returns in a month, six months, a year, etc., to look at the same things. In the first perceivings the later perceivings are protended as actualizable inactualities that, if actualized, will be retrotentive to the current perceiving of the now changed rock and tree. 31. This brings us to the question of the constitution of change. In the essay drawn upon here, Cairns merely mentions “the complexities... if something is perceived as itself changing in some respect.” This is not the occasion to pursue this quite complex matter, but it will be remarked that the rock seems the same rock before and after the chip is knocked off it and the tree seems the same tree before and after some bark is knocked off it and later when the scar is formed. Somehow, an outwardly transcendent thing can remain the same but nevertheless change in an observable way. 32. Cairns next discusses automatic associative syntheses, which are especially relevant for present purposes.

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To indicate their importance, it is enough to point out that they play an essential role in all sensuous perceiving and in all so-called empathy. With the associative intending of one object as similar to another in some respect in both of them, they become intended as similar also in respects that only one presents. Thus a physical object perceived for the first is apperceived as having non-perceived “other” sides. Or, again, a physical object perceived as similar to my organism is apperceived as the physical component of a psychophysical thing, because my organism is presented as the physical component of a psychophysical object.

33. And Cairns following Husserl finally discusses discontinuous associative syntheses, which can be used to begin the final section of this essay. V. MINERAL, VEGETABLE, ANIMAL 34. If one were familiar with rocks but not trees, one might expect that a month later the place where a chip was knocked out of the bark of the tree would be just like the place where the chip was knocked out of the surface of the rock and would be surprised to find the tree healing its wound. Or, if one were somehow familiar with trees but not rocks, one would be surprised to find the rock not healing its wound. But if one were familiar with both material and vegetable things, one would not be surprised upon returning to see the difference. Indeed, it is protended and possibly expected that one can return later and find the rock still chipped as it now is and the plant healing or, eventually, healed. This goes further. One does not expect rocks to grow from spouting pebbles to become immature rocks and then mature rocks, and eventually dead rocks, but this is what is expected for a tree. 35. Furthermore, one can learn to appresent the inside of the rock as devoid of factors essential for its growth, reproduction, self-repair, etc., but one can also learn to appresent just such circumstances in vegetables. In both cases there is appresentation of the sides not presented in perceptual, recollective, and expectational experiencing, and these

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sides include insides that can be presented, i.e., presentable insides, while the difference, again, is that the internal circumstances appresented within the vegetable are not appresented as presentable within what are called minerals in the parlor game. 36. The same sort of appresentation that reflecting discloses with respect to the perceiving of vegetables also occurs with respect to the perceiving of animals. They are born, grow, reproduce, heal wounds, decline, and die. And in their case, but also in the case of vegetables, there is an exchange relation with their environments that material things do not have. The “organisms” take in nutrients of liquid, solid, and gaseous sorts and return waste in the same forms to their surroundings. Indeed, plants and animals have so many similarities that they have long been both included in the one subject matter of general biology, which is presumably concerned with what they have in common. Husserl hesitated, however, to accept putting them together there because the so-called empathy (Einfühlung) that is possible for animals did not seem to work for plants. 37. This is again a matter of associative synthesis and appresentation. There are two kinds of insides that can be appresented when naturalistic things are presented. The presentable insides are those that can be presented when a thing is broken or cut open have been referred to. The other kind of inside can be called mental or psychic and, while appresented in many other cases, it can only be presented in reflection on one’s own stream of intentive processes. The psyches of other animals, human and nonhuman, can be appresented but cannot be presented; they are appresented but unpresentable insides for us, as reflection can also show. 38. Cairns follows Husserl in holding that, because one’s own body is presented as the physical component of a psychophysical thing the psyche of which, i.e., one’s own intentional stream, is also presented, other things that are similar to my organism are apperceived as having psyches as well. They are constituted as identical for us in the thus founded associative syntheses, which can be either continuous or

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discontinuous. Husserl suggests in the passage quoted from Ideen III that “concrete experience of concrete sensitivities related to concrete organs” are necessary for the pertinent type of appresentation, i.e., “empathy,” to take place. Organs for movement and types of movement may be among the concrete organs he refers to. Muscle movement may appresent willing just as sense organs appresent sensuous perceiving. 39. This is where plants and animals differ. By virtue of discernable sense organs such as eyes and ears and a sense of touch and also by virtue of styles of bodily movement, not only sensuous experiencing but also willing and even emotions are appresented in the other animal, they are what is psychic in them as psychophysical things, they are what makes the animal an animal. What if one can find no such similarities with one’s own psychophysical self? What if there are no sense organs? Nothing like eyes, ears, nose, or a sense of touch and balance? What if the tree is like the rock in having no discernable sense organs or organs of movement? What if there are “limbs” to the tree, but, while they sway in the breeze and even slowly grow, they do not react when pocked with a finger and do not literally reach out and grasp us when we walk too close and hence are not literally like our arms, legs, or fingers? And what if the tree does not locomote? What if there is no basis for apperceiving another unpresentable psyche but there are still circumstances that are internal and presentable if one cuts the organism open? Do we not then perceive a plant? And if there are no such appresented but presentable internal circumstances for reproduction, growth, self-repair, etc. are we not perceiving a material or purely physical thing, a mineral in the terms of the parlor game? 40. These seem basic questions where vegetables in contrast with material things, on the one hand, and animate things, on the other hand, are concerned. There are, however, some questions concerning possibly misleading terminology. In Cartesianische Meditationen, Husserl says that one’s own body is “the only thing ‘in’ which I ‘rule

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and govern’ immediately, governing particularly in each of its organs.”16 But are hair and fingernails organs? One might think that they are only parts of organs, but they do seem to grow independently and, more generally, there is actually a great deal of growth in one’s organism that one cannot rule and govern immediately. The shedding of hair and skin cells is rather like the dropping of leaves. Some of the processes in our bodies cannot be said to be ruled and governed immediately. 41. Psychic efforts have no basis for being appresented when hair or feathers grow in squirrels and birds. Then there are processes like pregnancy and birth and even sexual attraction and mating that in ourselves and other animals can be interfered with, but if not interfered with they go on by themselves like the growing of hair and fingernails, except for shorter durations. Perhaps they can be said to be ruled and governed indirectly. Moreover, if “organic” leads one first to think of animals and thus psyches that animate, it might be better in such cases to speak instead of vegetable processes within animals even though what might be called animal processes are what are distinctive of animals in contrast with vegetables as well as minerals. And if such processes are characteristic of the vital, expressions such as “mental life” are metaphorical and have the potential to mislead. 42. Given the different associative syntheses in which they are constituted, it seems that vegetables are not deficient animals, but instead a type of physical thing. The vital or, better, “vegetable” would seem to have necessary and sufficient conditions of physical and chemical sorts and in that sense to be reducible to them, which is not to say that they are identical with them. But that and also, more interestingly, whether there are necessary and sufficient conditions on the “vegetable” level for the emergence of the animal processes in animals must be questions for future investigations. 16 Husserliana I, cf. Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), p. 97.

3. Problems of the Value of Nature 1. The perspective of this essay is phenomenological in the original mature Husserlian or constitutive sense and not the existential, hermeneutical, or realistic forms of phenomenology that have also arisen. There are two objectionable aspects to Husserlian phenomenology today. Firstly, the texts of Husserl and his closer followers are difficult to comprehend, even in translation, and this explains in part why so much that considers itself “phenomenological” is actually no more than the interpretation of phenom­enological texts by methods that are not especially phenomenological. This is not even good hermeneutics, which is interpretation and critique, for it does not reach the phase of critique, which can be phenomenological. In this respect, then, phenomenology needs to get beyond mere scholarship and into attempts to verify, correct, and extend earlier descriptions. 2. Secondly, while it is phenomenological to combine methodological reflections with substantive investigations, too many soi disant phenomenologists are so preoccupied with the specific procedures of transcendental and eidetic epochēs or refrainings and the resultant correlative purifications of things and reductions of attitudes (and the four specific combinations of worldly factual, worldly eidetic, transcendental factual, and transcendental eidetic attitudes) that they tend to forget that phenomenological method is fundamentally reflective, theoretical, and, in a broad significa­tion, observational. 3. The following analyses have been produced through reflective theoretical observation. Whether through reflection on others (based on so-called “empathy”) or through self-observation, the phenomenologist focuses alternatively on intentive processes or encounterings (Erlebnisse) as intentive to things and on things as they present themselves to or as encountered by the personal or communal subject in question. This is

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also called noetico-noematic investigation. Proceeding thus, she can, firstly, differentiate components within encountering that belong to types and subtypes of experience, be that experience direct or indirect, if direct, then predominantly perceptual, recollective, or expectational, and if indirect, then subspecifically indicational, linguistic, and/or pictorial. Correlative to such types of experience within encounterings, real things, i.e., things in time, give themselves directly or indirectly as in the present, future, or past of the experiencing of them. There is also experiencing of ideal things, but that need not be of concern here. (See Figure 1, which is to be read from the bottom upwards) (Figure 1) Taxonomy of Some Components in Intentiveness (Noeses) and of Things-as-Encountered (Noemata) 24. 23. neutral 22. 21. negative 20. 19. volitional positive 18. 17. neutral 16. 15. negative 14. 13. evaluational positive 12. 11. neutral 10. 09. negative 08.

extrinsic intrinsic extrinsic intrinsic extrinsic intrinsic extrinsic intrinsic extrinsic intrinsic extrinsic intrinsic extrinsic intrinsic extrinsic intrinsic extrinsic

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07. positionality cognitive positive 06. 05. 04. indirect 03. 02. 01. experiencing direct

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4. Secondly, the phenomenologist can reflectively distinguish encounterings according to the type of positionality that predominates in them, which is to say, according to whether believing, valuing, or willing predominates. Then the encounters can be called cognitions, evaluations, or volitions (or actions). Then again, when it is desirable to combine allusion to the original form of experience and to the type of positionality, one can speak of cognitive encounters, evaluative encounters, and volitional (or actional) encounters. 5. It is not uninteresting that there are positive, negative, and neutral modes of believing, valuing, and willing. Emphasizing the noetic side of the noetico-noematic parallelism, there is also a difference between firmness and degrees of shakiness for the positive and negative modes in the three sorts of positionality. Practical or volitional firmness is often called “resolute­ness” and shakiness in this component is often called “hesitancy.” Cognitive firmness can be called “certitude” and cognitive shakiness can be called, to restore an old philosophical word, “conjecture” (the correlative state of the doxothetic characteristic in the noema can be called “probability” in a nonmathematical signification). There are also firm and shaky processes of valuing, the latter sometimes referred to as “ambivalence.” 6. On the side of the thing-as-encountered itself and in intentive correlation with the types, modes, and states of noetic positionality, things-as-believed in can be called “entities,” which can be positive or negative (and, as such, certain or probable), or neutral, things-as-valued can be called “goods,” “bads,” and, perhaps, “neutrals,” and things-as-

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willed can be said to be positively or negatively useful or, neutrally, useless “practical things.” Such expressions have referents by virtue of the positional characteristics of things-as-posited being focused upon and believed in, i.e., due to their being objectivated. 7. An additional difference may come to mind with respect to the voli­tional-practical stratum, namely, that between ends and means or, in other words, the end uses and the means uses that things have when willed either for their own sakes or willed for the sakes of other things. This can be considered the volitional specification of the generic intrinsic/ extrinsic difference that is usually made with respect to the values that things have as valued for their own sakes or as valued for the sakes of other things. As for the cognitive stratum, some things are believed in as conducive to other things, e.g., effects, while things believed in for their own sakes have intrinsic belief characteristics. Something being believed conducive is different from its being extrinsically valued for its conduciveness and also different from its being willed or used as a means. Conduciveness includes causation but is not restricted to it; a road is conducive to a destination without causing it. One can believe a road leads somewhere, in which case it has an extrinsic belief characteristic for the believer. 8. The extensive parallelism among the types of positionality just summarized can lead to their confusion, e.g., mistaking the end use of a goal of the will for the intrinsic value of a thing valued for its own sake. Perhaps more clarity will come below. For now it needs to be said that these differences are among components reflectively discernible within concrete intentive processes or encounters and among correlative components also reflectively observable as abstract parts of things as they present themselves or as they are encountered. Concretely, encounters can be classified handily according either to the type of experiencing or the type of valuing or willing and, conversely, cognitive encounters, evaluative encounters, and volitional encounters always include some mode or modes of experiencing or other. It is a question of what is predominantly there and what the reflective researcher is interested in.

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9. One can read characterizations from this taxonomy from right to left and with omissions and transformations, e.g., from “perceptual experiencing” (omitting “direct”) to “extrinsic neutral volition” (omitting “positional” and nominalizing “volitional”). The numbering from bottom to top is to suggest something about the orders of original and derivative and of founding to founded when justification is in question. I. A Snake in the Grass 10. Problems of the value of ecological nature include, to begin with, questions of whether it can be valued as a whole, in part (or parts), or both; whether it (or they) has (or have) intrinsic value, extrinsic value, or both; and whether it (or they) has (or have) positive, negative, or neutral value or combinations thereof. Before approaching problems of this sort, more focus on the evaluational is needed. 11. Firstly, there is the question of the differences and relations of experience and evaluation. Things as things of experience, things-asexperienced, are different from things as valued. For example, when we speak of seeing a snake in the grass and speak literally, such speech refers to a reptile located among plants of a type and given visually. If a person fears snakes, i.e., disvalues and tends to avoid them, then the snake there has negative value for that person. On the other hand, a zoologist specializing in snakes might value this specimen quite positively. And the change in the same wriggling animal as it goes from being expected to being perceived and then from being perceived to being remembered is different from the change that a valued thing can undergo when one goes from hating it to liking it. 12. Secondly, within the genus of positionality, there are differences between valuing and things-as-valued, on the one hand, and both believing in and things-as-believed-in and willing and things-aswilled, on the other hand. If we will the snake dead and use a stick as a means to kill it, there will be disvaluing of the snake involved, but the destructive willing and the negative use of means to the negative

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end are different from valuing. This is because we can value without going on to will, although there may then be a new disposition to do so. (Analogously on the linguistic level, there can be advice, which amounts to saying that something is good or at least better than something else that neither the advisor nor advisee necessarily acts on.) 13. Nor is valuing believing. Belief is not easy to distinguish from experience when the thing is given in person, e.g., when we see and believe in the snake right there before us. They can be distinguished more easily if the difference between so-called empty or, better, blind and intuitive or seeing experience is considered. Thus, while we are not seeing the snake, we can still believe or disbelieve in it being in the patch of grass. Perhaps it has just slithered out of sight, but there has not been enough time for it to leave the patch or perhaps we merely shut our eyes. In such cases, it is believed in but no longer seen. There is experience still accompanying the believing, but that experience is blind. We believe in the snake and can argue soundly that the snake is still in there somewhere. That about which we thus argue is not intuitively experienced, but rather blindly encountered. It can be intuitively remembered, but as a thing in the now it is out of sight. 14. Just as valuing and things-as-valued can be regularly discerned in the background of willing and things as willed, so too believing-in and things-as-believed-in can be discerned in the background of valuing and things-as-valued. Putting the four strata within the encountering process and of the things-as-encountered together with our running example, we can say that the willing to destroy or to protect the snake in the grass is different from but related to the valuing of it positively or negatively, that the valuing is different from but related to the disbelieving in as well as the willing of the thing, and the belief component is different from but related to one or another subtype of experience component as well as to the valuing of the snake there in the grass. 15. Valuation appears crucial to questions of the justification of willing or action. At least prima facie, if the valuing of one alternative over another is justified, then the willing that it founds and motivates,

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i.e., justifies, would be justified. This is like the way in which the believing component in a concrete encountering can be justified by the experience of the pertinent subtype, e.g., the seeing of the snake justifying the believing in it as there now and the remembering of the snake justifying believing in it as in a place previously. The problem is whether a justified believing is sufficient to justify a valuing directly and thus an action indirectly. This problem has been mentioned here in order to reinforce the appreciation of the place of valuing and things as valued and not in order to propose a solution. A solution does presuppose at least an outline of what valuation is, which is, in relation to living nature, is the present concern. II. NATURE 16. The terms distinguished in the taxonomy above will be employed in approaching some value problems in environmental philosophy after a sketch of living nature. Nature here is biological or, better, ecological nature. Without taking a position on the question of the reducibility of biology to chemistry and physics and recognizing that there is not a great deal yet in the way of a constitutive phenomenology of biology, it is still clear that nature can be observed ecologically. Then organisms are seen to have environments with which they interact. The environment of any given organism contains organisms of the same and different species. An organism takes nourishment from its environment and nourishment can be conceived so broadly that not only food and water but also air and light and other forms of radiation are included. An organism also returns waste gases as well as fluids, solids, and heat to its environment. The wastes of one organism may well be nutrients for other organisms. 17. Such interactive processes involving organisms and environments are quite complicated and vary with the temperature, minerals, wind and water currents, fellow organisms, and so on. They also result from evolution, so that, in an ongoing way, ever-changing organisms

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adapt to ever-changing environments, including environments changed by organisms and organisms changed by environments. Starting from any organism one can quickly recognize that it functions with many others in communities, ecosystems, etc. If pertinent factors and the long-term processes are considered, then one can even speak of the planet as an ecosphere. In that case ecosubsystems and sub-subsystems of various sorts can be recognized within it. Everything alive is alive amidst all else that is. 18. Nature in ecological perspective, i.e., focusing on organic bodies, interestingly parallels nature in broadly social-scientific perspective, i.e., the latter focusing on relationships and interactions among psyches rather than somas. An individual subject interacts economically, linguistically, sociologically, etc. with others and participates in families, clans, communi­ties, societies, nations, empires, etc. and ultimately the analog of the planetary ecosphere for humans is humanity. This similarity can be pursued quite far. Indeed, cultural evolution might well parallel biological evolution conceptually. Although there are interesting exceptions, philosophy and other disciplines seem thus far to have tended to emphasize the psychic and sociological. But the soma can also be emphasized over the psyche just as the psyche has been emphasized over the soma. 19. In ecological perspective, Homo sapiens sapien is but one species among others, albeit the one currently causing the greatest environmental change, and the above remarks apply to it. Since at least Descartes, however, contrasting perspectives have been popular in which the human body and its organic insertion in nature are abstracted from and the remaining mind considered apart from and relating chiefly contemplatively to the rest of nature. In that contrasting view, there tends to remain interest in how the outer world physically and neurophysiologically affects mental events and vice versa and within the mind there is a tendency in this perspective also to abstract from the valuational and volitional in order to emphasize the intellectual or cognitive. Even questions of relationships with fellow humans are at best secondary.

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20. Ecological thinking includes somas as organisms, but does not need to go to the opposite extreme of eliminating psyches such that organisms are considered merely complex physical systems causally connected. The ecological or environmental perspective can thus be viewed as between two extremes. It would then still not be too surprising to find specimens of Homo sapiens sapien considering themselves in various ways more important than other species. On the other hand, among the differences of this species is the ability to recognize ecological insertion and to value various behaviors of its own as well as of other species within the ecosphere and indeed consciously to act upon its evaluations. 21. Few until recently have appreciated the human participation in the ecosphere, but changes in the planetary atmosphere from smog to greenhouse effects, global warming, and ozone holes seem to have made the pollution of the seas and lakes and rivers and streams and groundwater and indeed ecosystems, species extinctions and various unsustainable practices less ignorable. Some of the talk is hysterical and paranoid, but just because some of us are hysterical and paranoid does not mean that really huge and dangerous things are not happening out there in living nature. 22. Essentially confining ourselves now to ecological things-as-valued and the valuing of them by humans, which can be focused upon reflectively, observed, and theoretically described, we can begin in a methodologically individualistic fashion, but need to follow through to communal life in the end. We can also begin from human life but need to end up considering the earth as ecosphere. Each human can focus on her own body or soma as a case of personal human organic life and, with respect to it, a difference between wellness and illness can be recognized. Precise scientific definitions of these terms are not necessary here. 23. Like many terms referring to somatic life, wellness and illness are equivocal. It is difficult to comprehend them without the connotations that wellness is good and illness is bad, but such a comprehension is possible in, e.g., a biological-scientific attitude. Then the effect of venom whereby illness and perhaps death replaces wellness and then that

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whereby an antidote causes wellness to replace illness can be observed and believed in. In an attitude of the pertinent type, which can be called “cognitive,” causal assertions can be true or false but normative assertions are excluded. Then the words “wellness” and “illness” as well as statements about their causes have purely cognitive significations. 24. In the valuative, axiotic, or normative signification, by contrast, one ought to be well and ought not to be ill. In other words, wellness is good and illness is bad. In yet other words and with questions of justification aside, wellness is positively valued for its own sake and illness is negatively valued for its own sake. The same holds for circumstances conducive to them, such as water and air unpolluted and polluted, except that their values are extrinsic. If illness is of negative value, then poisonous snakes who can cause illness are also of negative value. Keeping away from such a snake in the grass as well as, more drastically, killing it would be valued positively in relation to the positive value of wellness. Avoiding the bad here is seeking the good. 25. This is of course an abstract example, for the poisonous snake is, like any organism, part of an ecosystem. Suppose such snakes eat rodents who carry nasty diseases to which humans are prone. Again valuing our wellness over illness intrinsically, there seems a problem of valuing these snakes negatively with respect to the effects of snake bites on humans over valuing them positively as disease-controlling agents. Two recognitions are involved here. Firstly, the organism needs to be considered within its ecosystem and thus in relation to other organisms, and, secondly, there is more than one respect in which an organism can be valued. Snakes in the grass may be good for us if left alone and their habitat preserved. 26. This has been a case of valuating relations among organisms, namely humans, snakes, rodents, and viruses, and also the patch of grass and chiefly in relation to humans. (This anthropocentrism can have a herpecentric position substituted for it, although it seems doubtful that mother snakes warn their young about humans in the grass.) As the scope of consideration broadens, more and more organisms are

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included and are valued either for their own sakes, e.g., human wellness as good and human illness as bad, or for the sake of other organisms, e.g., humans, and in positively or negatively extrinsic ways. Since interplanetary biological interactions seem minimal and physical factors, especially the solar radiation of heat, visible and ultraviolet light, etc., are fairly constant, there is a limit to the broadening of the scope of consideration. The planet can be treated as a closed totality. 27. Of late there is an increasing recognition of planetary ecological processes. There is the ozone layer, global warming, and other atmospheric changes, circulation patterns included, there are changes in the seas, which is to say most of the surface of the planet, that include animals, vegetables, and minerals (and raise more than twenty questions), and there are solid and fluid changes on and in the land. The spread of organisms called diseases because of their impacts on other plants and animals positively valued by humans are prominent in this sphere thus ecologically considered. As more and more dependencies and interactions and feedbacks are recognized, that which is valued has become more and more complicated. Yet, if it is granted that the same thing can be valued in different respects, sometimes positively in relation to this and sometimes negatively in relation to that, it seems plausible that a value system be developed in parallel fashion. Indeed, contemporary culture can be seen to include increasing re-evaluation as more and more ecological knowledge is disseminated. III. PROBLEMS OF THE VALUE OF NATURE 28. Two issues seem especially philosophical in this connection. One concerns the relation of part and whole and the other concerns extrinsic and ultimate intrinsic values. Putting these together in a distorted or at least incomplete form, we can ask whether or not the whole of the rest of living nature ought to be valued for the sake of humans, who are alone valued for their own sakes.

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29. If we are phenomenologists, we have learned to reflect even in the formulation of our questions. Thus, when we speak of the values of things, we know to reformulate this talk reflectively into speech about things-as-valued and about the valuing of things by valuers. Then we ask about any valued thing not only “Valued how?” but also “Valued by whom?” The above discussion has been chiefly confined to human valuing and, correlatively, to things as valued by humans. It is not currently clear to the present writer whether or not plants value themselves or one another and not much clearer whether insects do. Cats and dogs and most other so-called higher animals may or may not value themselves, but it is plain that they have preferences in food and people. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that so-called lower animals can envisage and value entire ecosystems, much less the planetary ecosphere. 30. What of superhuman animals? Since most societies have been polytheis­tic, it is not prima facie foolish to speak of gods. For most societies, the gods are alive, they have minds, and indeed they have bodies, although they seem powerful enough in that case not to suffer somatic illness. They are higher than humans in various ways in various societies due to their believed-in greater powers in this or that respect. Most if not all of the gods would seem valuers and probably even more easily capable than humans at valuing the earth as an ecosphere. 31. It is not idle to speculate in this way, for the doctrine of stewardship is prominent in environmental thinking today. This doctrine seems reasonably interpretable axiologically such that either living nature is of intrinsic value for the gods or the gods themselves have the ultimate intrinsic value (for themselves, to begin with) and living nature, humans included, is valued by them extrinsically for their sake. It could also be true that the gods value humans above the rest of living nature and require humans to steward the earth secondly if not ultimately for human sake. Sometimes, of course, humans in effect believe themselves to be the gods, the ultimate good in relation to whom alone all else has value. 32. At the other extreme, the earthly ecosphere as a whole would have the highest intrinsic value. This might involve conceiving it as evaluated by all organisms counting equally, but, as just suggested, it

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does not seem that all can value it as a whole. The snake might not value more than the mouse she is currently stalking or swallowing. Setting aside superhumans, this would leave the entirety of living nature as possibly valued solely by humans. This seems possible. There is, for example, a traditional opposition whereby the godlike human is considered essentially outside nature. From this point of view, that which humans value ultimately might not be themselves but rather the big thing called nature of which they are parts, but this does not seem to have happened much in the history of philosophy. 33. There is another approach. The valuing by human persons of their own somatic wellness intrinsically seems rather common. The wellness of others such as spouses, children, parents, siblings, friends, and indeed all specimens of Homo sapiens sapien could be valued for its own sake. Then, as ecological insight increased, the believed in separateness of humans from their environments would decrease. It might even be recognized that they are inseparable and that to value one in one respect is to value the other in a related respect. Briefly, the wellness of the organism cannot be positively and intrinsically valued without the wellness of the environment, specimens of other species as well as of the same one being then positively and intrinsically valued. They are both parts of a whole that is then itself ultimately intrinsically valued. 34. By whom is it valued? At least by humans. They do not value themselves apart from nature first and they do not value living nature without them first. Rather, they value the earth, themselves included, first. Not trees before humans or humans before trees but earth as including humans and trees might have the ultimate intrinsic value. *

* * 35. This essay has attempted to show something of how environmental philosophy can be phenomenological with respect to some problems of value. The claim is not that the problems have been solved, nor even that all of them have been raised. The problem of how to value social

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systems in relation to ecological systems, for example, has only been implied. A final remark concerning phenomenology and also to show that much still needs to be done: If the approach to valuation through reflective observation of things-as-valued and the valuing of things is pursued far enough, then the problem will arise of whether intersubjective valuing can play the role of ultimate ground for nonrelative values at the same time that it is part of the valued thing that is grounded. At that point, the option of a provisional suspending of belief or refraining with respect to the being-in-the-world of the valuing intersubjectivity for the sake of a transcendental grounding of value can be considered. The purpose, again, of this essay is more to raise than to settle questions about the value of living nature phenomenologically.

4. The Nonworldly Grounding of Environmentalism 1. Recent decades in the philosophy of naturalistic science have followed Thomas Kuhn and others in taking the history of science seriously. This is not confined to Anglo-American Analytical Philosophy and even the origin of this new philosophy of science has itself come under such history oriented consideration.17 Once one has some insight into how an endeavor actually works, including what goals are pursued in it, one can attempt to discern whether of not what it is about, how it proceeds, etc., are justified and indeed ultimately justified. Or at least it will be less likely that one will not know what one is talking about. Such an approach can be extended from the small and highly professionalized endeavor of science to the huge and largely amateur endeavor of environmentalism. In the following exposition an empirical model of recent environmentalism in the United States is offered in the first section, how it can be justified is sketched in the second section, and then how it can be ultimately justified is discussed in the third section. I. A MODEL OF ENVIRONMENTALISM 2. The following model has been built and tested in relation to the teaching of four freshman seminars on environmentalism at Florida Atlantic University during 1992-1995. Some historical work was of 17 Brown, Harold I., Perception, Theory, and Commitment: The New Philosophy of Science, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978. Cf. Embree, Lester, “The History and Phenomenology of Science is Possible,” Stephen Skousgaard, ed., Phenomenology and Human Destiny, Washington D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1984.

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course studied, but most of the material considered came from magazines for or friendly to the environmental movement such as Buzzworm, Science, Scientific American, National Geographic, and World Watch; from magazines and newsletters of environmental organizations such as the Audubon Society, Greenpeace, and Sierra Club, news magazines such as The Economist, The Nation, and Newsweek; and from scores of video tapes. Several boxes of articles and videos accumulated as the seminar evolved during four years. As this mass of material grew the need was felt to ascertain the main issues. After some pondering, these seemed to be four, and subsequent reading, reflecting, and teaching found nothing that did not fit easily under what appear the best labels for them: (1) “pollution,” (2) “overpopulation,” (3) “preservation,” and (4) “conservation.” These four main sets of issues were eventually reduced to two and fit into a basically ecological view of the interaction of a species with its environment. 3. For discussion with small groups of beginning college honors students, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1975), and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) worked well for the first three issues, magazine articles were used for the fourth, and Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle (1971) was used to pull everything together. These are of course popularly written classics in the recent American discussion of environmentalism. One is hardly an educated person today if one has not read these books. The model of the four issues held up to such an extent that it has been initialized for mnemonic purposes into “POPC” (pronounced as “popsy”). 4. A few comments about these issues from the seminar context may not be amiss here. Pollution of course signifies dirtying or contaminating and includes spiritual pollution among its connotations. Young humans easily recognize the folly of fouling one’s own nest, as do the young of many species, and American college students today are well along in deepening this insight. Problems come when one tries to consider large areas, the planet even, as the nest and seeks to teach corporations not to foul it. Carson’s book shows the impact on wildlife of

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misapplied chemical pesticides. One goes on easily from there to physical pollution involving asbestos in construction, heavy metals in soil, tetraethyl lead in the air, nuclear power plant waste with a 70,000 year half-life, etc. Interesting cases of biological pollution include the introduction of exotic organisms, e.g., the melaleuca tree and the Australian pine into Florida. Pollution is the putting of stuff into an ecosystem that it is difficult or impossible for that system to process. 5. The issue of overpopulation tends to focus on Homo sapiens sapien. Some believe that the current ca. 6,000,000,000 plus humans is already three times what Earth can sustain. Fantasies by economists about how rapid modernization could compensate for the population explosion are difficult to believe. Charming complications include how the taste for meat in the wealthy north has the sheer weight of cattle, pigs, etc. exceeding that of humans on the planet and the crops that might feed starving humans in the poor south are being used to grow meat for export. It is a teacher’s delight to see bright students ask if human overpopulation is not actually another form of pollution in the above definition. So much of this stuff directly and indirectly degrades the ecosphere into which it is put. Overpopulation seems only to deserve separate consideration because it is plausibly the worst form of pollution and its causal connections with other forms, e.g., smog, are relatively easily traced. Students can be assured that Earth will survive, although the future of the species highest on the food chain seems less sure, but then maybe she would be better off without the most ecologically disruptive of her species. And it is not easy to get nations that became rich through exploiting poor nations and whose populations now grow very slowly to provide poor nations with the means for population control. 6. Preservation can be comprehended as focused on more or less wild ecosystems. Leopold’s description of nature changing through the seasons of the year are amazing and delightful for Florida students who experience only one change of season, which starts when the tourists fly down from the north in the Fall. Students in southeast Florida are happy neither about the sickness of the Everglades to their west nor about the dying coral reef system to their east. The intrinsic value and

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rights of organisms not to die out at the rate of ninety species a day was easily recognized by the sample of college students observed. 7. Conservation might be defined as taking no more stuff from an ecosystem than it can spare. Its opposite is squandering and the fact that Americans consume five times more than other Earthlings is upsetting for students to contemplate. “The Three R’s of Environmentalism,” i.e., Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, structured the fourth phase of the seminar. Students readily grasped that if we reduced what we take out of the environment, there will be less eventually to go back in and that reusing and then recycling mean even less taken out and put back in. Furthermore, just as overpopulation is a form of pollution, preservation of wilderness is a form of the conservation of resources. Figure 1 summarizes the POPC model: (Figure 1) Wrong and Right Human Action on the Environment Pollution Clean disposal Overpopulation Population control Extinction Preservation Squandering Conservation 8. Environmentalism comes down to right and wrong taking out and inputting of stuff, conservation (preservation included) being right out taking and pollution (overpopulation included) being wrong inputting. These are activities of humans, who make up the most disruptive species in the ecosphere, but also the one with the greatest potential for self-understanding and self-modification of behavior. II. REFLECTIVE JUSTIFICATION 9. Environmentalism is a political movement involving many million Americans. There is some national leadership by a dozen major organizations to which masses of people belong by paying dues and getting magazines, but the deeper long-term hope lies in vast numbers

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of small local groups because, while there are large problems that need big studies and federal laws, most of the concrete problems of pollution and preservation are, as ecology would lead one to expect, local. 10. Environmentalism is of course considered correct by those engaged in it, but it can still be examined with respect to its justification. After all, there are even some philosophers who wonder if we are justified in believing that the world exists. The attempt to discern if environmentalism is justified can be done phenomenologically and as such it can be done in two stages, which can be called prephilosophical and philosophical according to whether the justification does or does not strive to be ultimate. That the attempt to discern the justification of environmentalism can be done phenomenologically signifies that one relies upon reflectively observing, analyzing, and describing the effort as it is an encountering directed at things and, correlatively, on things-as-encountered by it. Husserlian phenomenologists call this noetico-noematic reflection. Most phenomenologists begin from their own individual or personal lives and emphasize cognition, but it is possible to reflect on the communal action of a group and to do so whether or not one belongs to that group. A multimillion person political movement like environmentalism is a group in this signification. Here one reflects through indirect experience involved in reading texts, including the popular and semi-popular literature characterized above. Analysis can be practiced in various ways. When the concern is specifically with justification, the analysis is in terms of what can be called a “stack” of components in the encountering process and their correlates in the things as encountered. This analysis can be described briefly. 11. The generic expression “encountering” can be specified according to the component of interest predominating in a given case, so that there are volitional encounterings, valuative encounterings, doxic encounterings, and observational encounterings. And correlative to the encountering there is the thing-as-encountered, which can be qualified as volitionally-encountered, valuationally-encountered, etc., the uses, values, belief characters, appearances, and manners of givenness, etc.,

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of the things-as-encountered being then also reflectively discernable. All four abstractly distinguished strata are included in every concrete encountering and all four kinds of characteristics can be discerned in every concrete thing-as-encountered, although—again —different components are of interest or predominate on different attitudes. 12. To relate environmentalism to this “stack,” pollution, for example, is the object of negative environmental action. One acts against it. One seeks at least to reduce the inputting of stuff into the ecosystem such that the system can receive it without damage to itself. Negative action is in general a predominantly volitional encountering. Reflective observation can discern the component of striving within the negative action and, correlatively, the ends and means characteristics or uses in the thing-as-encountered. Under, so to speak, the striving component that is most prominent in encounterings called actions there is a stratum best called valuing. This analytically discernible component can be positive or negative and, correlatively, pollution, for example, is bad, more is worse, less is better, etc. There is thus occasion for a reflective value analysis as well as a reflective ends-and-means analysis and, interestingly, one can observe that there are positive and negative intrinsic and extrinsic values parallel to positive and negative ends and means. 13. Delving deeper, one can reflectively discern a stratum within action of believing and, correlatively, causal connections of things-asbelieved-in. Causal connections are not the only matters that can be believed in, but they are central for the belief stratum in practical life. Finally, and at the bottom of any practical encountering, there is always some sort of experiencing, including the observation that can justify believing. But how does phenomenological justification work, if at all? Many who ponder such matters are prepared to accept that observation might justify believing. This is the core of traditional British empiricism, which accepted mental processes—here called encounterings—as observable, and also positivism, which did not; phenomenology uses this principle to include not only encountering but also ideal things, e.g., propositional forms, as observable. Many researchers are also

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probably prepared to accept that valuing might be able to justify willing. Thus, if one is eating strawberry ice cream and asked for a reason, “Because I like it” actually counts as a sensible response. Few, however, seemed disposed to take seriously the thesis that justified believing might justify valuing. There seem to be too many cases to adduce against this principle and reference to how difficult it is to overcome habits—habits of believing about relations between believing and valuing included, is rarely persuasive. 14. Nevertheless, one might consider that if an existing belief in a causal connection, e.g., between an apple eaten a day and the doctor kept away, is undermined, e.g., it is shown that apples cause cancer, then apples would no longer be extrinsically valued by us in relation to our own intrinsically valuable health and we would cease using apples as means to health as an end. Would we not consider such a change in feeding habits justified basically by the revised belief about a causal connection? For positive action, e.g., to preserve wilderness, if we have observational evidencing that wolves will make an ecosystem healthier, we are right to believe in that causal connection. And if we rightly value healthier ecosystems intrinsically and thus causes of health extrinsically, then we are right to will the restoring the wolves. It is not the aim of the present section to defend this analysis of how environmental actions can be justified. Some efforts in that direction have been made elsewhere. The purpose here is to show how a reflective analysis of the justification of positive and negative environmental action might be done. III. ULTIMATE JUSTIFICATION 15. Assuming that an analysis of justification of the sort just sketched for environmentalism stands up to examination by means of further reflective observation and analysis of the pertinent matters themselves, how might it be considered prephilosophical? Some of Edmund Husserl’s motivation is instructive. After attacking the theory

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of logic descendent from John Stuart Mill whereby logic was reduced to a subdiscipline of psychology because it was about ideas, which were considered parts of the mind and thus in psychology’s field of inquiry, Husserl described pure logic as a discipline exclusively about the forms that propositions and theories could take. Such ideal things are not parts but transcendent of mental life. But then, when he went on to describe the processes of thinking and observing in which such things and forms are constituted, he was accused of relapsing into the psychologism he had just refuted. Somewhat analogously, the above talk about evidencing, believing, valuing, and willing seems psychological or, insofar as collective practical life is concerned, sociological or even a peculiar sort of politics. The above analysis of collective practical action is peculiar or at least distinctive because it focuses on justification rather than causal explanation. But does this focus and also the higher level of analysis and the more general terms deployed suffice to make such a peculiar sociology or political science philosophical? 16. Husserl believed that the positive sciences and philosophy in the emphatic signification of first philosophy are different. In his broad signification, philosophy includes the special or positive sciences (second philosophy) as grounded in first philosophy. First philosophy, however, is different from second philosophy because it has no place for unexamined presuppositions. The assumption that mental life is in the world is such a presupposition, as is also the assumption that the world exists. This is metaphysics in the modern signification whereby Descartes’s Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641) are also called his metaphysical meditations. This line of thinking can be extended from philosophy of science to the philosophy of environmentalism. For all its status as a reflective analysis and indeed a phenomenological examination of the justification of environmentalism as communal action devoted to clean

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disposal, population control, wilderness preservation, and resource conservation, the analysis sketched above is still pre-philosophical. It is not yet part of phenomenological first philosophy or metaphysics. 17. There are at least two circumstances under which such a justification might be considered fully philosophical, namely, ultimacy and intelligibility. Recourse to a nonworldly ground might make a justification ultimate. One such recourse to a nonworldly grounding of environmentalism is widely recognized. This is in the notion of environmental stewardship. Earth belongs to God and humans are required by God to care for her. A transcendent divinity is the nonworldly ultimate source of justification. For many, even the existence of the world is grounded in its Creator, who alone exists absolutely. Stewardship is plainly an improvement over millennia of biophobic practices, but stewardship fails to meet the other condition for being fully philosophical. If we believe in God and believe the Bible is from God and if we accept a newer rather than older interpretation of the prescribed tasks for humans with respect to Earth, then we have nonworldly justification for acting against polluting, squandering, etc. But efforts to prove the existence of God have not been successful, the authorship of the Bible might as easily be human as divine, and is the new interpretation really more accurate than the old one? Can we really be sure of our instructions as game keepers and gardeners? 18. Philosophy requires grounds better able to survive examination. An intelligible and thus different nonworldly justification for environmentalism, one that is therefore fully philosophical, can be worked out phenomenologically even though Husserl himself did not allude to the environmentalism of his time.18 Historically, phenomenology is like Kant’s philosophy, except that unobservable subjective conditions for the possibility of things are not somehow deduced from forms 18 Raymond Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871-1971, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

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somehow believed to be imposed on sensuous materials, but are rather matters that are reflectively observable. One can take a phenomenological account and look to the matters themselves that are referred to in it and observe whether they are as alleged. If the intelligibility condition for a philosophical grounding can thus in principle be met, the remaining condition concerns the ultimacy of the ground used in grounding environmentalism. 19. When phenomenology is qualified as “constitutive,” things as justifiably believed in, valued, and willed are reflectively related to the evidencing, believing, valuing, and willing in which they are intended to. When they are thus considered reflectively, it is possible to distinguish correlative components in the encountering of things in parallel with those of things-as-encountered. But can mental life serve to ground environmentalism? Now mental life is, unless a special effort is made, reflectively observed in what Husserl usually calls the natural attitude. It is often better, however, to call this the worldly attitude, if only because such an attitude is originally cultural rather than naturalistic. Mental life is accepted by the reflective observer in this worldly attitude as part of the world, i.e., as located the space, time, and causality of the one nature that is believed to exist in itself. This is so obvious that it should be philosophically suspicious. How else might mental life be considered? 20. While the rest of the mental life reflected upon continues to accept itself as worldly, the reflective observer, i.e., the phenomenologist, can suspend or neutralize her own believing in the worldly status of that life. Then her reflective theoretical attitude is reduced from being worldly or “natural” to being transcendental or nonworldly and the world is purified—for her—of its character of being believed by her to exist in itself. What instead appears is a situation consisting of the world as correlate of mental life and mental life can then be explored as condition of the possibility of the world. If no observable condition beyond mental life in this role can be conceived, then conscious life in this nonworldly status is ultimate. And if the justification of action

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indirectly by evidencing is reflectively observable in this new attitude, then it is ultimate justification. 21. Husserl went on sometimes to assert that mental life has a being more fundamental than its being in the world, indeed an absolute being in relation to which the being of the world has relative being, but not all constitutive phenomenologists accept this ontology. It is difficult to see how Husserl’s self-interpretation might be the case when positive being is the correlate of positive believing and the best one might have when refraining, i.e., when the being in the world of mental life is believed in neither positively nor negatively, is neutral being. One does not have to go along with Husserl about the absolute being of transcendental consciousness. Nevertheless, mental life is nonworldly while reflected upon in this refraining way and can thus be used in the grounding role that it could not perform when believed part of that which it would be used to ground. 22. The nonworldly grounding of environmentalism centrally includes resisting the great temptation to engage in argumentation, especially causal argumentation. That sort of thinking dominates in everyday and also positive science and disciplined practical life, and so the number of philosophers who recognize nonargumentative modes of philosophizing is small. Yet if one refrains from argumentation, causal argumentation especially, one can more easily observe, analyze, and describe how action is justified by justified valuing, how justified valuing is justified by justified believing, and how experiencing in the broad signification, i.e., evidencing, is the final justifier. Such a reflective analysis can be the basis for principles used in argumentation but is not itself a product of argumentation. 23. Sometimes Husserl seems to say (and often others do read him to say) that mental life in its nonworldly status is a numerically distinct mental life, but closer study can show that he is actually referring to one matter that can have two statuses for the reflective investigator—worldly and nonworldly—depending on the attitude one takes up towards it, and on this interpretation his account can be verified

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phenomenologically. When mental life is reflected upon refrainingly in the way sketched and has thus neutral existence for the phenomenologist, it cannot be an assumption used as a premise for arguments to justify anything. But of course phenomenology is not a philosophy that relies fundamentally on argumentation. Formal logic is for phenomenology a special science that can formally unify all knowledge, but it cannot be assumed in the effort to ground itself along with the other special sciences. The task of grounding is characteristic of first philosophy or, in one signification, metaphysics, rather than the second philosophies such as logic, physics, or sociology. Along with a devotion to thorough intelligibility, the refraining from accepting the worldliness of mental life is what makes constitutive phenomenological first philosophy possible. 24. The second philosophies mentioned are positive sciences in that they are naively world-accepting sciences, while the first philosophy in question neither accepts the world naively nor attempts to ground the world in part of itself. Practical efforts, such as environmentalism, are also naively world-accepting and accept themselves as parts of the world. As interested in ultimately grounded justification, however, phenomenological philosophy as first philosophy differs from all “positive” endeavors in questioning rather than unquestioningly accepting the world and the worldliness of mental life. It is possible phenomenologically to ground and ultimately justify the world and all the worldly disciplines and even political movements such as environmentalism.

5. The Constitution of Basic Culture

Each thing that the ego ever means, thinks of, values, deals with, likewise each that he ever phantasies or can phantasy, indicates its correlative system and exists only as itself the correlate of its system. —Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, §30) 1. “Culture” is qualified in the title of this essay as “basic” for two reasons. In the first place, the tendency to construe “culture” specifically as high culture or as popular culture is opposed for the sake of a more general concept like that used in ethnology and other cultural sciences. Secondly, the tendency to consider cultural characteristics the products of interpretation is opposed not because it is inaccurate but because it is incomplete. Basic culture underlies common-sense thinking as well as scientific thinking of all sorts. 2. The following exposition begins with some explication of Husserl and Schutz and then proceeds phenomenologically, closing with remarks about the philosophical significance of the account. I. HUSSERL AND SCHUTZ ON CULTURE 3. In Cartesianische Meditationen, §38, Edmund Husserl writes: In active genesis the Ego functions as productively constitutive, by means of [mental] processes that are specifically acts of the Ego. Here belong all the works of practical reason, in a maximally broad sense. In this sense even logical reason is practical. The characteristic feature (in the case of the realm of logos) ... is that Ego-acts, pooled in a sociality ..., become combined in a manifold, specifically active synthesis and, on the basis of things already given (in modes of consciousness that give beforehand), constitute new things originally.

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These then present themselves for consciousness as products. Thus, in collecting, the collection ; in counting, the number; in dividing, the part; in predicating, the predicate and the predicational complex of affairs; in inferring, the inference; and so forth. ... On the Ego side there becomes constituted a consequent habituality of continuing acceptance, which thereupon is part of the constitution of the thing as simply existing for the Ego: a thing that can always be seized upon, be it in reiterated producings, with synthetic consciousness of the same objectivity as given again in “categorial intuition,” or be it in a synthetically appertinent vague consciousness. The ... constitution of such things (cultural things, for example), in relation to intersubjective activities, presupposes the antecedent constitution of a transcendental intersubjectivity ....19

4. Thus, an Ego or, better, an I can perform acts of various species of thinking in which categorial forms are produced. These forms are discernable in propositions after one has formalized them in order to develop formal logic, but, as Husserl also makes especially clear in Formale und transzendentale Logik, there are also forms of states of affairs ascertainable in reflection they are formally ontological rather than formally apophantic. Unless the form is nullified, the thing is thereafter encountered with that same form, producings of the form can be reactivated, and the form of the thing can also be given in categorial intuition. This is because, as an after-effect of active constitution, there are habitualities or processes of secondary passivity in which things pregiven with pertinent determinations are thereafter automatically constituted with the pertinent categorial form. 5. Husserl describes in the next paragraph of Cartesianische Meditationen how the mere naturalistic thing that is always already constituted in primarily passive experience can be thematized by disregarding “all the ‘spiritual’ or ‘cultural’ characteristics that make it knowable as, for example, a hammer, a table, an aesthetic creation.” 19 Husserl, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), p.77.

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This example of a hammer will be used as the chief running example in this essay. The originally active and afterwards secondarily passive constitution of such a cultural thing would seem, however, to involve more than ontological form, something that is somehow material or nonformal. In this respect, the thought of Alfred Schutz deserves attention. 6. Having much earlier referred to how for Husserl in the Cartesianische Meditationen “the ‘cultural world’ presupposed primordial and secondary constitution,”20 Schutz asserts that “the whole world of cultural things . . . , [includes] everything from artifacts to institutions and conventional ways of doing things.”21 A hammer is an artifact. Further along, Schutz asserts that “[t]ools are … results of past human acts and means toward the future realization of aims. One can, then, conceive the ‘meaning’ of the tool in terms of the meansend relation.” (PSW 201) This usage of “meaning” will be returned to presently. Later, we read: “All cultural things (books, tools, works of all sorts, etc.) point back by their origin and meaning, to other subjects and to their active constitutive intentionalities, and thus it is true that they are experienced in the sense of ‘existing there for everybody’…”22 7. Some years afterwards, Schutz also writes that tools are “meaningful products” and that the cultural world is “a world of signification [Bedeutsamkeiten] which the human being in question historically takes part in forming” (I 126), adding that It is a world of culture because, from the outset, the lifeworld is a universe of significations [Bedeutsamkeiten] to us, i.e., a framework 20 Schutz, Alfred, Collected Papers, Vol. IV, ed. Helmut Wagner, George Psathas, and Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), p. 164; hereafter this source will be cited textually as “IV.” 21 Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 182; hereafter this source will be cited textually as “PSW.” 22 Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 124; hereafter this source will be cited textually as “I.”

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of meaning (Sinnzusammenhang) which we have to interpret, and of interrelations of meaning which we institute only through our action in this lifeworld. It is a world of culture also because we are always conscious of its historicity, which we encounter in tradition and habituality, and which is capable of being examined because the “already-given” refers back to one’s own activity or to the activity of Others, of which it is the sediment.23

8. In subsequent essays Schutz describes conventional ways of doing things, cultural patterns of group life, cultural groups of several sorts (including social classes), and emphasizes how culture is chiefly received from others and taken for granted unless and until there is evidence to the contrary. In other words, it is unquestioned but questionable. 9. In slightly different terms, he furthermore agrees with Husserl on how one gets from culture to the nature of naturalistic science: The concept of Nature ... with which the natural sciences have to deal is … an idealizing abstraction from the Lebenswelt, an abstraction which . . .excludes persons with personal life and all things of culture which originate as such in practical human activity. Exactly this layer 23 (I 133) While this passage is from a translation from German approved by him, there is a somewhat richer parallel passage written by Schutz himself in English: “In analyzing the first constructs of common-sense thinking in everyday life we proceeded, however, as if the world were my private world and as if we were entitled to disregard the fact that it is from the outset an intersubjective world of culture. ... It is a world of culture because, from the outset, the world of everyday life is a universe of significance to us, that is, a texture of meaning which we have to interpret in order to find our bearings within it and come to terms with it. This texture of meaning, however—and this is what distinguishes the realm of culture from that of nature—originates and has been instituted by human actions, our own and our fellow-men’s contemporaries and predecessors. All cultural things—tools, symbols, language systems, works of art, social institutions, etc.—point back by their very origin and meaning to the activities of human subjects.” (I 10, emphasis added)

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of the Lebenswelt, from which the natural sciences have to abstract, is the social reality which the social sciences have to investigate. (I 59)

10. There is, moreover, Schutz’s classic statement on how the social scientist actually relates to her data: The thought things constructed by the social scientists refer to and are founded upon the thought things constructed by the commonsense thought of man living his everyday life among his fellow-men. Thus, the constructs used by the social scientist are, so to speak, constructs of the second degree, namely constructs of the constructs made by the actors on the social scene, whose behavior the scientist observes and tries to explain in accordance with the procedural … rules of his science. (I 6)

11. Where the transmission as well as, above all, the content of commonsense thinking are concerned, there is finally this passage. The typifying medium par excellence by which socially derived knowledge is transmitted is the vocabulary and the syntax of everyday language. The vernacular of everyday life is primarily a language of named things and events, and any name includes a typification and generalization referring to the relevance system prevailing in the linguistic in-group which found the thing significant enough to provide a separate name for it. The pre-scientific vernacular can be interpreted as a treasure house of ready-made pre-constituted types and characteristics, all socially derived and carrying along an open horizon of unexplored content. (I 14, cf. I 75 & I 349)

Thus the social or, better, the cultural scientist uses scientific concepts or constructs in her interpretations and her data are especially the material concepts or constructs produced in commonsense thinking. These give content to Husserl’s categorical forms. 12. When one encounters a thing, perhaps a dog in the street, and is not only familiar with such a thing but has also learned the words “dog,” “street,” etc., the words and the concepts they convey come to mind, as it is sometimes said. On occasion one must struggle to find the

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appropriate words, particularly if one is speaking or merely experiencing in a foreign language in which one is not completely fluent. This association of thinking even (or especially!) on the commonsense level seems to have lead many to believe that all experiencing includes thinking and all things-as-experienced include material concepts as well as categorial form. Whether this is true will be considered presently. 13. The approach sketched by Schutz has proven enormously rich in the social sciences and now goes by the title of social constructionism. If it were a philosophical approach, it would have to deal with the problem of cultural relativism, but as a cultural-scientific approach it does not, for the cultural sciences as such assume cultural relativism legitimately. They are not philosophy although some individuals think they are. II. BASIC CULTURE 14. Commonsense interpretation is undoubtedly of great importance for understanding cultural life. But one may ask whether or not one comes to merely naturalistic things when one sets categorial form and commonsense constructs aside, which Schutz claims that one can do, or whether one then actually gets at subcategorial or basic cultural things that are more than naturalistic things. The thesis of this essay is that abstraction from the categorial leaves what can be called “basic cultural things,” which are things equipped with what are best called “cultural characteristics.” This is the lifeworld as cultural world and that is what one must also abstract from to reach lifeworldly nature. There are at least three species of cultural characteristics, namely, uses, values, and belief characteristics. Husserl emphasized the species of doxic or belief characteristics but also referred to the other two. 15. These and related matters are better presented phenomenologically than through text interpretation. Cultural characteristics are reflectively discernible determinations of things as they present themselves, but they are not significations, concepts, or constructs. The latter are constituted in thinking, while the former are constituted in

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positings (also called “theses” by Husserl) of the volitional or praxic, valuational or pathic, and believing or doxic sorts. Nevertheless, they are both often referred to in English with the words “meaning” and “significance,” a practice at least tacitly endorsed by Husserl and Schutz with such expressions as Bedeutsamkeit and Sinnzusammenhang. But “meaning,” “signification,” and also “concept,” “construct,” and “categorial” and their derivatives can be reserved for analyses pertaining to grammar, logic, and linguistics and what Husserl called “the realm of the logos,” and the expression “cultural characteristics” can then be reserved for uses, values, and belief characteristics, which, it is here contended, can be discerned beneath, as it were, categorial forms and commonsense constructs. What does the word “hammer” refer to? Is it merely a naturalistic thing with conceptual “meaning” bestowed upon it in commonsense thinking and ordinary language? 16. We have the example of the hammer. It seems possible that human infants and some nonhuman animals can use hammers but have no concept “hammer.” Adults may learn to use a new device, e.g., the computer mouse, prior to having a name for it. Such possible cases may make discussion of the subconceptual plausible, but the consciously clearest access is through abstraction from the higher stratum of thinking and concepts. As the cases of infants and non-human animals also indicate, one can reflect on how others have cultural things, but self-observation seems a more reliable approach even though it most easily works through reflection in memory. This reliance occurs because practical things are encountered with their actual uses in the actual using of them and it is at least difficult reflectively to observe what one is doing while one is doing it, whereas it is relatively easy to reflect right afterwards upon what one has just been doing. 17. What is a hammer? To begin with, it is something with which one hammers. Hammering can be said, behavioristically, to be holding something hard and fairly heavy in the hand and then swinging it against something else. One does not hammer thin air, pressing a thing against something is not hammering, and one can hardly hammer with

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a tomato, a feather, or a Volkswagen. But these are essentially matters of somatic behavior and the naturalistic properties of size, hardness, and weight of the item with which behavior is done. Such behavior and properties are necessary, but they are not what makes hammering hammering and a hammer a hammer. 18. Phenomenologically, however, what stands out noetically in mental life is that hammering is volitional and one can correlatively discern reflectively in the noema of hammering a cultural characteristic of the practical sort, i.e., a use. More specifically, the hammer has means- or extrinsic use and can be referred to as useful. If one tried to hammer with a tomato, one’s “hammer” would probably not, as we say, work. That the use is extrinsic raises the question of what the intrinsic use or purpose of the hammering might be. After all, just pounding on something is not hammering properly speaking, for hammering properly speaking is hammering to some end. Our running illustration can be expanded so that one is hammering on nuts to break their shells so that one can eat the meat within. This expansion brings out that there are immediate purposes, e.g., broken shells, intermediate purposes, e.g., eating the nut meat, and ultimate purposes, e.g., the alleviation of hunger or boredom. 19. The twofold claim advanced here is that by reflectively observing hammering one can discern not only a component in mental life that can be called, in a broad signification, willing and, correlatively, that one can grasp extrinsic and intrinsic uses or practical cultural characteristics in the things-as-encountered, i.e., noematically. Going further, the willing component in tool using can be positional or neutral, which is to say that one can will-for or will- against something or be neither for nor against it. Neutrality must not be confused, however, with cases where one wills-for some future event by willing not to act but rather to let matters take their course. The difference here has to do with whether one is interested in the outcome or not. And that which there is willing-for or willing-against can already exist or not, so that,

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if the outcome is within one’s power, one’s willing-for can be creative or preservative and one’s willing-against can be destructive or preventative. 20. Then again, when one’s efforts are not the sole factor for something’s coming to be or passing away, one’s willing can be helpful or hindering. Noematically, there are modes of end use or purpose that might be called createdness, preservedness, destroyedness, preventedness, helpedness or assistedness, or hinderedness, provided these expressions are not taken to refer to the past, but rather, actually, the future things that would be one’s end and means. Being completed or spoiled as well as started, half-finished, etc. are also practical characteristics. In addition, positive and negative willing have degrees along a continuum from firmness or, specifically, resoluteness to shakiness or, specifically, hesitancy, while there are no such degrees to volitional neutrality. Finally, it is an interesting feature of willing that what is willed is always in the future of the willing of it. 21. The analysis thus far has been of willing on the operational level, i.e., acts of willing-for, -against, or being-neutral in which an I is or I’s are engaged, which is willing in the narrow signification. This is pertinent to understanding how volitional habits and traditions are instituted. One might be familiar with hammers used for other purposes, but have lived previously in a world where nuts are cracked with devices called “nutcrackers” with two handles between which the nuts are squeezed. One’s first use of a hammer to crack nuts may then be in imitation of others, on their recommendation, or by experiment when there are nuts and hunger, but no nutcracker around. Once one has first tried it, a habit or, since it is a desirable habit, a skill begins to take form. A bit of practice may be needed because one can hit the nut too hard, not hard enough, or just right. When one has the skill, however, one need only will the end of eating some nutmeat and the “nut hammer” is automatically wielded well, but the process can then still be understood with respect to how it has been instituted. There is analogy here with the categorial forming and the commonsense constructing and secondary passivity that Husserl and Schutz describe, and this is another basis

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for confusion, but this is now a matter of volitional positionality and cultural characteristics, not thinking and concepts. 22. Four final remarks about willing. Firstly, there is a difference between the proper and improper use of implements, the proper use being what the implement was designed and is typically used for in one’s group. But a hammer intended as a “nut hammer” might also be used as a paperweight if one were nibbling on nuts while writing at a table where a breeze was blowing. Then again, one might have a stone that one habitually uses as a paperweight that one also uses to crack nuts when one has forgotten to bring the nut hammer to the porch with the bowl of nuts. Clearly an improper use can evolve an alternate use and the paperweight-stone become equally a nut-hammer and viceversa, i.e., a dual-use thing. 23. Secondly and as the nut-hammer stone can also illustrate, it is not necessary for a practical or use thing to have been materially modified in order to have a use. If it is objected that there is material modification in the fact that the stone was brought from where it was found by the creek to the table on the porch where one eats nuts while writing, the example of the stone outcropping in the woods on which one sits to rest during one’s regular walk in the woods and which thereby becomes a seat cannot be objected to in that way. While “artifact” might name an item that is created or modified to suit a purpose, “practical thing” can be used more broadly to name something that is constituted with use in operational and then secondarily passive willing by one or more persons whether or not there is any modification of the naturalistic properties or relations. 24. Thirdly, while the nut-hammer example has been analyzed in terms of individual habit, there are cultural patterns of action in which multiplicities of persons participate. Here a better case is that of automobile driving where there is relatively little sharing of particular destinations driven to, although there can be considerable sharing of sorts of destinations, e.g., workplaces in the morning and homes in the evening, and otherwise there is shared using of the road system by all

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who drive. Another interesting case of intersubjectivity is hunting with a bird dog. Here two persons work together, but they belong to different species and the communication between them is nonverbal. 25. Finally, the case of the nut-hammer/paperweight-stone might seem trivial but is actually a good example on the basis of which one can not only see exemplified quite a variety of practical structures, but also recognize other plainly not trivial use things. The same analysis fits the table, the porch, the house, the car, the streets and roads, and the woods in which we walk and rest. An interesting question concerns humans. That dogs are pets or working dogs and as working dogs are guard dogs, hunting dogs, sheep dogs, war dogs, etc. is clear. Does the same apply to cab drivers, conference organizers, and colleagues? Do they have uses for us when we go to conferences? What are often called social roles involve the practical or use-characteristics that we have for one another. There is a tendency to contrast humans and cultural things, but this seems mistaken. When are humans in the cultural world not cultural things, things that we learn to value and use, for each other? 26. The analysis of the practical or volitional has been begun with here in part to challenge the emphasis on cognition and thus believing and experiencing in the epistemologically oriented constitutive phenomenology of Husserl, Gurwitsch, Schutz, and others, but chiefly because cultural life is more practical than valuational or cognitional. Differently put, there are attitudes and the practical attitude is the one in which we live most of our cultural lives and from which the others are derived. 27. We can also acquire valuational attitudes. These are affective or emotional but expressions based on the verb “to value” are preferable because the other expressions connote irrationality. Habitual valuational attitudes originate in operations of valuing things and can be positive, negative, or neutral, positive and negative valuings can be firm or, to various degrees, shaky, and the values of things can be intrinsic or extrinsic and, when extrinsic, can be immediate, mediate, and ultimate. The parallel with willing does not include restriction to

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future things, however, for plainly one can also like or dislike or be apathetic about things in the now and in the past and even value ideal or atemporal things. 28. Sometimes valuing and willing are difficult to distinguish because of how valuing motivates willing and words like “desire” denominate combinations. But the nut-hammer stone can be looked at in such a way that its use is held in abeyance while not its size and weight but rather its color and quartz streaking are focused on and aesthetically valued for their own sake. Then again, if one values one’s papers staying on the table rather than blown away by the breeze, the effect of the stone placed upon them is a thing of an extrinsic valuing, a valuing of the thing for the sake of another valued thing, which is the papers staying where they are. Sometimes the expression “inherent” is used as a synonym for “intrinsic,” but seems best reserved for determinations of the valued thing, e.g., the quartz streaking or the weight of the stone, while “intrinsic” best qualifies the uses and values with which things are constituted positionally not only for their own sake but also by some person or group, something too often forgotten by those who uncritically absolutize their own personal and communal values. 29. The third species of positing is best called believing. It includes cognition, which is justified believing and, when expressed in words, knowledge, and it is sometimes easier to use “cognitive” in a broadened signification rather than “believing” or “doxic” as the adjective. Again, one cannot only believe but also disbelieve and do both of these firmly (certainly) and shakily (conjecturally) and then one can be neutral by suspending judgment or being skeptical in one signification of that ancient word. Correlatively, the things of believing have belief characteristics that are neutral or certainly or probably positive or negative and that can be discerned through reflective observation and analyses of things-as-encountered, i.e., through noematic reflection. Whether there are intrinsic and extrinsic belief characteristics is a interesting issue that does not need to be pursued here (see Essay 9).

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30. Believing is like valuing in including atemporal as well as past, now, and future things believed in and is thus unlike willing. But just as valuing and willing are often grasped together, believing and seeing or, better, evidencing are often taken together. Evidencing is of course the experiencing in which a thing is given in the most adequate, clear, and distinct way for a thing of its kind. As mentioned, constitutive phenomenology has seen considerable epistemological interest in believing, but when one is interested in sketching basic culture that interest is not primary. Where basic culture is concerned, the great hope for science of all sorts ought not to obscure how humans in everyday life believe in the most amazing things; two millennia ago it was commonsense in the West that winds and rivers were the bodies of gods. Then again, it is curious what many humans have persuaded themselves to disbelieve and deny the existence of, e.g., the minds of fish. 31. Finally, there is a cognitive operation called objectivating that deserves comment. Once one discerns positional characteristics in things as they present themselves reflectively, such things can be categorially formed and believed in as subjects with predicates of use, value, and existence predicated of them. This is the precondition for saying that something is useful, or good, or exists, i.e., producing what can be called practical and valuational as well as cognitive judgments, the latter being then cognitive in a double way. III. SIGNIFICANCE 32. In sum, there is stratum to mental life and also to the world that is below that of categorial forms, commonsense constructs, and thinking or interpreting and above that of the sensuous perceiving of naturalistic things. This stratum can be called “basic culture,” it can be abstracted from along with the categorial stratum in order to reach the level of naturalistic things, which naturalistic things, incidentally, are physical, vital or biological, or psychophysical. Commonsense statements are, arguably, about cultural things, i.e., thing essentially and

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importantly equipped with uses, values, and belief characteristics prior to any thinking and speaking about hem. Showing the place of such cultural things, which are what make the lifeworld concretely cultural, is the first claim of this essay. 33. Beyond this, however, we live in an age of naturalism due to the great successes of science and technology conducted in the naturalistic attitude. Regrettably, even Husserl, Gurwitsch, and Schutz show naturalistic emphases, which are fortunately not a matter of essence because all three recognize valuing and willing and all explicitly assert that the lifeworld is a cultural world. Nevertheless, they often regularly proceed without mention that special efforts are required to routinely disregard value and use. The resultant naturalistic attitude has extended beyond naturalistic science and technology into philosophy as well as everyday life and also beyond the West since the seventeenth century. It is part of why many find the modern world “meaningless,” i.e., devoid of value and purpose. Recognition of basic culture contributes to the struggle against naturalism, which is not a struggle against naturalistic science and technology, but against the deplorable worldview developed from them. 34. Thirdly, the analysis sketched here is relevant for special analyses in what can be called the phenomenology of culture. Thus humans are members of various cultural groups and have identities in relation to members of their own and other groups. These groups can be ethnic groups relating first of all to language, race, and religion, with us-them similarities and differences not only believed in but also valued and willed in various ways and thus subject to noetico-noematic analysis and description not only of how things are currently constituted culturally, but also with respect to how they were once actively constituted, then became secondarily passive in that way for groups that is best called traditional, and can finally be reactivated and examined. Then there is differential valuing and willing with respect to abilities and dispositions in the same and other gender(s) as believed in. Social class is amenable to the same approach. And, where the environment

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is concerned, perhaps belief in the opposition of man versus animal is being replaced by a recognition of animals some of whom are human and others nonhuman and perhaps the traditional valuing and willing of humans above all else has been in some quarters at least shaken. 35. Besides thus providing categories with which to approach specialized problematics in phenomenology of culture, reflection on the constitution of basic culture also supports the most philosophical of all concerns, that with reason. Familiarity with how the world as we initially encounter it is full of cultural things equipped with values and uses as well as belief characteristics facilitates reflecting on how evidencing can justify believing, valuing, and willing.

6. The Rationality of Scientific Technology 1. Scientific technology is changing the world at an accelerating rate. According to Lynn White Jr., “The emergence in widespread practice of the Baconian creed that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature can scarcely be dated before about 1850, save in the chemical industries, where it is anticipated in the eighteenth century. Its acceptance as the normal pattern of action may mark the greatest event in human history since the invention of agriculture, and perhaps in nonhuman terrestrial history as well.”24 Was there non-scientific technology prior to 1850? Does it still exist? What makes technology scientific? Is scientific technology ipso facto the only rational technology? What is rationality? These and related questions are addressed in the following discussion. Examples are included for the sake of clarity, especially examples related to the using of the automobile, the most complex and powerful type of equipment familiar to most readers of this essay. I. TECHNOLOGICAL LIFE 2. Technology bears much pondering. Considerations of history are especially valuable and readily show that so-called applied science is merely the most recent and most conspicuous part of an older and a greater whole. A general definition is needed. The word “technology” 24 “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” Science, Vol. 155 (March 10, 1967), reprinted in Machina Ex Deo (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1967), p. 77. According to his review of Needham in Isis, Vol. 75, White here depends on Daumas, “Rapports entre science et techniques: Etude generale du point de vue de l’histoire des sciences et des techniques,” Revue de synthese, Vol. 83 (1963).

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often merely signifies equipment today, but a modicum of reflection shows that things are equipment only in relation to how they are used. If “equipment” can then be used to signify equipment, “technology” can signify the using of equipment. Driving a car, for example, is using equipment, yet this characterization is essentially incomplete because equipment is always used for some purpose. Perhaps the car is used to get the driver to her workplace or to bring groceries home from the market. As a rule, equipment is used to change some part of the world, i.e., to create, foster, or preserve or to destroy, impede, or prevent (whether there is neutral as well as such positive or negative total and partial purposes regarding things that already exist or not does not need to be pursued here). “Equipment” denominates a practical thing used as means to another practical thing which is its end. Both practical things are essential to technology. If the world is a vast totality of practical things, then technology may be defined as the using of equipment on the world. 3. As used here, the signification of “equipment” is broadened in two major respects. First, not all equipment is artifactual. If one picks up a stone and flings it at prey, the stone becomes a missile but remains nonartifactual (“natural” is a word conveying too many significations). How much of the world remains unaffected by at least inadvertent human action is an interesting question and perhaps the best way in which to appreciate the vast extent of the artifactual is to search for nonartifacts in it. The sun and stars, which can become equipment in the technologies of navigation and astrology, are certainly nonartifactual. 4. Second, a distinction between active and passive equipment is necessary. There seems to be a tendency to think of equipment chiefly as items that are moved and guided like tools and cars. Lewis Mumford, however, also recognized “utensils, apparatus, and utilities. The basket and the pot stand for the first, the dye vat and the brick kiln stand for the second, and reservoirs and aqueducts and roads and buildings belong to the third class.”25 Utensils, apparatus, and utilities 25 Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1934), p. 11.

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can be considered subspecies of passive equipment (Mumford does not, however, use “equipment” to express the here broadened signification nor write of “active” and “passive” species). If it is difficult at first to call utilities such as reservoirs and roads “equipment,” at least they are plainly artifactual. But the forests in which one hunts, which are therefore hunting grounds, and the seas over which one sails, which then have sea routes, are both nonartifactual and passive equipment, if, that is, they are not essentially affected by human action. Clearly, active equipment is active in relation to passive and vice versa and not only is equipment only in relation to the use of it on the world, but it is also artifactual or not and active or passive in relation to such action. 5. Several comments are in order at this point. First, seemingly nontechnological activities, e.g., teaching, become technology insofar as they require at least passive equipment, e.g., classrooms, but the requisite equipment might not be task-specifically artifactual, as the case of Socrates and Meno’s slave boy on an Athenian street shows, and if the teaching occurred out in the wild woods or on a beach, the teaching place would not need to be artifactual in the signification of “modified by human action” at all. In this case, the aspect of the world to be modified is hopefully the student’s understanding. Second, one might think that this line of thinking leads to everything being technological. But equipment use pertains to a practical attitude in which some aspect of the course of the world is at issue, which is not the case in attitudes in which things are simply enjoyed or in which the goal is knowledge. And perhaps there are some activities that are utterly indifferent even where passive technology is concerned. Nevertheless, it seems wiser to begin with the technological and search for the nontechnological than vice versa. Third, the present perspective on technology can make the relations between philosophy of technology, on the one hand, and ethics and politics, on the other hand, problematic. Perhaps politics and moral philosophy should no longer be modeled on social relations not mediated by equipment, as was the case in Plato and Aristotle, but recognize technological mediation, e.g., through television and the internet.

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6. Technology as use of equipment on the world can be classified in many ways, e.g., regarding the aspects of the world affected, the types of equipment used, and the skill and social structure of the equipment users. The following sketch may be attractive because systematic questions about the relations among technologies of various sorts as well as events in the history of technology can be related to it. 7. (1) Nonspecialized Technology. Humans are not the only animals using equipment, but, as with communication, the complexity involved is vastly greater in humans. Nevertheless, comparison with nonhumans can be valuable. Among other things, “technology” connotes skill, which can be defined as learned ability. To use a stick to rake bananas into one’s cage or to strip the leaves off a twig in order to fish dinner out of a termite hill does not require training, for they are techniques that can be learned through imitation of unwitting example. There seems a great deal of this in human life. “Specialization,” as used here, refers to the users of the equipment. In non­specialized technology, practically anyone can use the equipment at the skill level required. Thus, according to Fernand Braudel, the chair (and furniture is plainly equipment) has an interesting history: The chair probably arrived in China in the second or third century AD, but took a very long time to become a general item of furniture .... It was probably European in origin, whatever detours it may have made to arrive in China (via Persia, India or northern China). Moreover, its original Chinese name, still current today, means “barbarian bed.” It was probably first used as a seat of honor, either for lay or religious purposes. And even recently in China chairs were reserved for guests of honor and old people, while stools were used much more frequently, as in Europe in the middle ages. But the important thing is the sitting-up position that the chair and stool imply, and therefore a way of life unlike that of ancient China and the other Asiatic countries, indeed unlike all non-European countries.26 26 Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol. I, “The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible,” trans. Sian Reynolds (New

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8. This suggests that there is some skill involved even in using chairs, as the attempt to learn to live on the floor using cushions and carpets will confirm for chair users. And, of course, to drive an automobile, it is necessary to sit in the seat. The case of chair using suggests, furthermore, that a skill may be nonspecialized within a society but specific to that society in comparison with other societies, i.e., be culture specific. Then again, humans (and nonhumans) need at least a little learning in order to stay out of traffic by walking on the sidewalk and even simply to climb steps, but such skill is not specialized. The extent of nonspecialized equipment use is probably underappreciated because of its ubiquity and because much of the equipment is passive and/ or nonartifactual, but it is the technology in the background of all other technology. 9. (2) Specialized Technology may not be as old as non-specialized, which humans have had for millions of years. Specialized technology probably began with divisions of labor in foraging societies between adults and children and males and females, but, then again, perhaps that also goes back as far as Homo sapiens sapien ought to be considered human, which is a matter of hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. Since then, many types of specialized premachine technology can be distinguished, especially in relation to agriculture and urbanization. Possibly it could all be called “craft technology.” Here there are not only specialized skills, social roles, and groups, but also specialized equipment and localities for production and consumption. The equipment is relatively simple (although the flail, loom, and potter’s wheel certainly have moving parts) and usually powered by humans. To be sure, nonhumans and also some inanimate power, e.g., the wind in sailing ships, was harnessed in ancient times, but the technological focus in craft technology is on the use of hand tools by humans. Even in America today, much of the domestic technology, e.g., cooking and eating with sinks, stoves, pots, pans, knives, forks, dishes, tables, etc., York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 289.

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as nonspecialized equipment, is rarely beyond the craft stage, although of course much of the making or at least repair of clothes and the cleaning of clothes, carpets, dishes, etc. has recently been mechanized and even scientized through applied physics (microwaves) and applied chemistry (detergents). It deserves repetition that much more classification is possible with respect to what can be called craft or specialized non­machine technology. Like nonspecialized technology, craft technology here chiefly serves as a contrast with other sorts of technology. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of it in advanced societies still. 10. (3) Machine Technology. Driving a car is specialized socially inasmuch as younger children are excluded from it (not to speak of the difference between amateur and professional driving and special licensing for the latter, e.g., taxi and truck drivers), but it is more than merely craft technology when one considers the mechanical complexity and nonhuman power sources involved in the equipment. With such complex power technology there can be greatly concentrated and increased industrial production. 11. According to the work of Lynn White Jr., equipment thus generally characterized as machines (“engines” could be an alternative expression but “machine” has the related modifier “mechanical”) became technologically focal in the Western Middle Ages with the heavy plow, refinements in equipment for the use of horses, the water wheel, the windmill, improved ships, and the mechanical clock. (Once one recognizes that machines can include nonhumans as sources of power and, for that matter, guidance, as in the case of the horse who knows his own way home, one can begin to wonder whether humans can similarly be parts of equipment, e.g., the drivers as parts of conveyances such as taxies, trucks, and busses, but this question does not need to be pursued here.) The conquest of steam and then internal combustion are later substages of a stage of technological development that had dramatically accelerated practically a millennium before. Especially if electric power transmission is added, it may seem that most of the equipment humans in advanced societies live with today is of the machine type.

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But, then again, if one again ponders the extent of nonspecialized and craft technology and also nonartifactual and passive technology, this may not be so sure. With power machines or engines, society came to have mechanics and engineers in addition to craftspeople. 12. (4) Scientific Technology. The most recent and for many the most conspicuous sort of technology is or involves so-called applied science (so-called “high technology” is only a very recent type of scientific technology or “sci-tech”). For example, the scientific discovery of the effects of light on silver nitrate led to the invention of the camera and thereby the modern revolution in the use of pictures (and are not pictures equipment?). In this most recent subspecies of specialized technology, where there is greater skill, more extensive and intensive training processes, and ever more powerful and complex machines the difference is in the incorporation of scientific methods and results in the designing, producing, exchanging, and perhaps even the consuming of the equipment. If “applied science” connotes the existence of the science before the technology, then it is a misnomer, for usually a long existent technology is improved through the inclusion of science. “Scientized technology” seems too ugly a name, but “scientific technology” is felicitous and readily subsumes scientific medicine, scientific bridge and road building, etc. “Science-based technology” is a good alternative. 13. Only a few remarks about science are necessary here. Despite popular preoccupations with the immediately applicable, it might be preferable to support purely theoretical investigation because the eventual applications are greater. Second, it is unfortunate that “science” has come to denominate merely naturalistic science, for certainly the cultural sciences, e.g., sociology and history, are sciences as well (and also “applicable”), in which case the noun science ought always to be qualified. Third, it is probably typical that scientific technologies incorporate methods and results from various sciences, so that there is no isomorphism between the taxonomy of theoretical naturalistic and cultural sciences and the taxonomy of scientific technologies. Fourth, not all technological advance is in scientific technology today: the recent breeding of milk

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cows down to the size of large dogs to fit third-world situations involved techniques familiar for thousands of years. There is also serendipity, e.g., the case of the planting of the verges of superhighways in the USA with wildflowers, which was part of Lady Bird Johnson’s highway beautification program, led to ground cover that required much less water and mowing and thus saves millions of dollars a year. 14. Nevertheless, how science fits into technology needs to be looked at more closely and that requires some analysis of equipment using. II. THE CONSTITUTION OF EQUIPMENT 15. Technology qua using of equipment on the world can be analyzed phenomenologically. In such investigation, on the one hand, one reflectively observes, analyzes, and describes the intentive process of using as intentive to its immediate and mediate things, i.e., one reflects noetically, and, on the other hand, one takes the same approach to the equipment and purposes-as-encountered, i.e., reflects noematically. Proceeding in this manner, the most conspicuous feature of reflectively observable equipment using is that it is predominantly volitional. Whether or not there was deliberation and decision behind a process of equipment using and whether or not it is actively engaged in or goes on habitually in what Husserl called secondary passivity, it is a striving or endeavoring. As such it can be positive or negative and, if firm, it is resolute, or if shaky, it is hesitant or tentative. 16. Correlative to the equipment using is the reflectively observable equipment and the world it is used on as used, which can similarly be operational or habitual, positive or negative, and resolute or hesitant. To be sure, only aspects of the world of a given society are thematized, but impacts can be rather broad, especially if the inadvertent ones are included. The subtle thing to grasp about things-as-willed is their functional or use character. This can be intrinsic or extrinsic, i.e., it can be the end use or the means use. When the hose and soap are used as means to wash the car, the clean car is the end, but then

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again the car, clean or not, can be used to get to work or bring home food, in which case it has means use for the driver. The chains of ends and means can seem endless. It needs constantly to be asked just for whom and in relation to what is something a means or an end. And it needs to be recognized that the same item can for the same subject on different occasions or for different subjects on the same occasion have use characters of both the end character and means character sorts. Analysis becomes complex in other ways. For example, not only is the automobile active equipment by means of which one travels, for whatever purpose, but also the road is another and related means, another equipment, but passive. Finally, for this level, and returning to the noetic side, there is a difference to be recognized between the willing of ends and the willing of means to those ends. 17. While the volitional, just sketched, predominates in technology, there are also valuational and cognitive components in the using of the equipment on the world. The general point may be easiest established with reference to the difficulties one encounters when attempting to will the creation or preservation of something one values negatively, e.g., buying a car one does not like. Valuing, like willing, can be positive or negative (set aside the neutrality of apathy), i.e., liking or disliking, and also firm or shaky. Remaining in noetic perspective, there is also a cognitive component in the intentive process. The cognitive is a matter of believing, which can be positive or negative (set aside the neutrality of skeptical doubt), i.e., believing and disbelieving, and also operational or habitual. The species of the genera of the firm and shaky in this “doxic” sphere are certainty and uncertainty. 18. Noematically, the thing-as-valued, i.e., as-liked or as-disliked, has positive or negative value characteristics, it is good or bad. Such values are intrinsic or extrinsic, i.e., X can be valued for the sake of Y and Y can be valued for its own sake. And analogously the thing as believed has its belief characters, it is believed in or disbelieved in (in ordinary English, propositions are “believed” and things “believed in”). Sometimes, one thing is believed in on the basis of belief in another

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thing, e.g., effects of causes and vice versa, and then there is intrinsic and extrinsic belief character to the things. In constitutive phenomenology, the belief character, when objectivated, is called “existence” (including “inexistence”), just as value characters in that event are called “goodness” and “badness” and use characters are called “usefulness” and “uselessness.” Then one can go on to say that something not only exists or does not exist but also that it is good or bad and useful or useless. 19. Besides that which has just been sketched and which can also be called the praxic, pathic, and doxic modes of positionality, technology as using of equipment on the world includes experience in the user. Correlatively, that which is used, valued, and believed in is also something-as-experienced. For technology this seems basically sensuous experiencing, but when the equipment or what it is used on includes a psyche, it is more than that. Automobiles are sensuous things. One can expect to see a car, then see one, and later remember seeing it. The changes from “expected” to “seen” and from “seen” to “remembered” are changes in the car’s manner of givenness. That which is thus variously given has color, shape, hardness, weight, smell, sound, etc. Plainly what a car is can be described in such terms, but insofar as it is equipment, i.e., fully what “car” signifies, the use character needs also to be described as intrinsic or extrinsic, positive or negative, firm or shaky, habitual or operational, etc. This is clear when equipment is reflected upon in correlation with the using of it. 20. Often when something is said to be “expected” this signifies that it is believed possible and likely to be given in the now, whether or not it is already thus given either to the person who is “expecting” it or to another. Thus, if one saves money in order to purchase a new automobile in five years, the goal of the saving, i.e., ownership of a car not yet produced, is expected in this way, but the car to be owned is not believed actually to exist, much less to have previously existed. In contrast, one may own an automobile and believe it to be in its garage now as well as to have been there all night and in other places in the past. When one uses the car to go shopping, however, it is not its being given where it

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is or was but where it will be, i.e., at the market or back home with the purchases, that is willed. The valuing involved in using equipment is also futural for the user while she is doing the using. One prefers the car on the road going, at the store, on the road returning, and back in the garage later over the car continuing in the garage during the same future time. Then again, one can prefer that the car belong to someone else, and on that basis strive to sell it, or even prefer that it cease to be able to be given anywhere and on that basis strive to destroy it. 21. As suggested earlier, equipment as such is a means. Hence it can relate to other means and also to ends. Other means involved with using an automobile include roads, which are passive equipment in relation to it as active. But there is much more than that. There is an entire street and highway system, stoplights, traffic police and courts, technologies for designing, building, and maintaining such, technologies for fueling the vehicles, etc. Where ends are concerned, they might be classified as proximate, intermediate, and ultimate. One may use the car to get to work, but working is not an ultimate end if one works to buy food, which one does in order to eat, etc., and perhaps even surviving is not the ultimate end for an individual or a group, which might seek to prevail in some way. If the above description tends to emphasize individual equipment using, that emphasis can be adjusted by recognizing that there are many cases where not an I but rather a We uses equipment. Millions individually and in groups, e.g., covered wagon trains, use a national highway transportation system. The state police use it to make a living, as do truck drivers. Some use it to get to a place for vacation fun. 22. Yet another dimension of analysis is valuable for understanding technology. This relies on the distinction between production and consumption traditional in economics. In a broad signification, the distribution of the equipment produced can be included in the production process. That would include not only sales rooms for new cars and used car lots, but also various advertising and financing techniques, as well as all that is involved in extracting and transforming the various materials

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into parts that are assembled into automobiles. The operation of designing cars can also be included in production in this broad signification. What then are the relations among the operations of designing, making, and selling cars? Plainly these are related such that the designing precedes and is for the sake of the making and the making is for the sake of selling cars. Thus there is an automotive industry. 23. A historical study of automobile technology would probably relate the automobile to earlier types of transportation equipment, such as the wagon, the stagecoach, and the carriage before it became horseless and focus on how the designing, making, and selling of such equipment became more and more complex, going from craftsmanship to a highly mechanized industry, and even now includes much science at every stage. But what might be forgotten in such a consideration of the automobile is that it is to be used by its consumer. In the narrow signification, equipment using connotes this goal and is equivalent to consumption. It is nowise necessary that the consuming of the equipment destroys it. When the equipment is nonartifactual, e.g., the stones thrown at prey, there is consumption without production. The consumer or user may use the equipment for various purposes, perhaps as transportation, perhaps as an indicator of social status or as a means to an imagined better erotic life. There can be multiple purposes and if automobiles of various makes are effectively equal in one respect, perhaps buyers can be attracted through emphasis on other aspects. For simplicity’s sake, it will here be assumed here that the use is transportation, e.g., to get to work and to bring home groceries (but the analysis could be extended through recognizing primary and secondary purposes). If the car is for transportation, then that is what it is designed, built, and sold for. Yet given how little car using in the narrow signification is socially specialized and the passivity of so much of the rest of the transportation system, e.g., the sidewalks, highways, lines on the highways, etc., and how comparatively specialized, mechanized, and scientized the active designing, making, and selling of cars has become, a focus of attention on production to the disregard of consumption can be understood.

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24. Technology as equipment use can thus be analyzed with respect to the willing, valuing, believing and the experiences involved in the consumer’s using and the use, value, and belief characters as well as the sensuous things carrying them that make it up. Such an analysis can be conducted on every part of any simple or complex technology, e.g., the automobile production and transportation industries and systems, and all of the components seen to relate teleologically. Moreover, this analysis is general and thus can be specified for nonspecialized, craft, and machine as well as scientific technology. Technology can be analyzed further, e.g., resorting to what Husserl calls intentional analysis and genetic analysis. These few pages of sketchy analysis should be sufficient to clarify technology as equipment using and to make attempts to answer the questions of how scientific technology can be scientific and of how scientific technology can be rational. III. RATIONAL SCI-TECH? 25. Can technology be rational? This is a philosophical question that is advanced if it can merely be presented in a promising perspective. Some preliminary remarks are in order. First, it is best not to conceive of something as either rational or irrational. Instead, one can consider something as more or less rational in relation to other things. Second, things that may be rational in some degree are not inherently rational but are made rational by other things, which may be better connoted by expressions based on the verb “to justify.” Then one needs to seek that which would justify or make something to be more rational than something else to some degree. Third, it is well to consider that sorts of technology other than scientific technology might more obviously indicate increased rationality. The wheel barrow, for example, requires one person and a wheel to transport the same load that previously two persons had carried in a box with handles at both ends. Except that the equipment would cost a bit more, it is twice as efficient in terms of labor, no adverse side effects are evident, and hence it is a more rational

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way to move loads, but nothing scientific is necessary to its design, construction, or use. 26. With regard to the automobile, there is plainly a great deal of science incorporated into the design, construction, and distribution of cars and science now can play a role in the construction of roads and bridges and other passive technology in the transportation systems of advanced societies and, as well, in the training and behavior of relevant personnel at all levels, including sometimes the drivers of cars. Yet the case of active car consumption, which production serves, is not so clear. The skill involved is specialized, sometimes at a craft level, and a power machine is used. Consumption is focused on using the car for transportation, carrying people to work, bringing food home, etc. The consumption of equipment begins with its acquisition and gaining use of it. Here the focus will be on buying a car as a mode of acquisition (one could also beg, borrow, steal, or even rent or lease). Not only is the operation of acquisition subordinate to using the car but other equipment is also involved in that act. The new car showroom or the used car lot are passive equipment and money is active equipment. Probably it is wisest, however, to remember that the salesperson is more the automobile seller’s equipment than the automobile buyer’s equipment. 27. It might be that buying a car can be done somewhat scientifically. If so, that might show how science is incorporated into technology. But first it can be asked whether nonscientific buying can be rational. Two commonsense maxims (certainly there are many more) by virtue of which the act in question is more rational are (1) Decide in advance what one wants! and (2) See for oneself! 28. In the first respect, by attempting to decide in advance, one resists being distracted by relatively irrelevant factors. It may be that one has loved blue things and hated green things since childhood. If one decides in advance, however, that a four-door vehicle that can seat six adults is essential, then there is less chance of preferring a blue two-door over a green four-door. To be somewhat less simplistic, one ought to get clear in advance on whether one wants a status symbol or

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transportation and then, if it is transportation, then just what sort of transportation is to be sought, e.g., around town or cross country. 29. In the second respect, one should experience for oneself the cars among which one is to choose. Direct experience of the thing is more reliable than hearsay even from friends or depictions in magazines or on television, which nevertheless do influence buyers and are perhaps not entirely useless for the process, at least insofar as they stimulate consideration of additional possibilities. Not only should one look at the vehicle but also get into it and drive it and indeed drive it under a relevant variety of conditions rather than merely around the block and also preferably without the salesperson there to distract one’s attention from weaknesses that might appear. Finally, if it is a used car, one ought to have one’s own auto mechanic examine it. Since she is working for the buyer rather than the seller, she can be considered an extender of the consumer’s vision. 30. The foregoing may seem merely “common sense.” Hopefully it is. The point is to suggest that, without being scientific, car buying as technology can be more rational in some respects than it would be otherwise. Closer analysis of seating capacity may make this clearer. Suppose the choice is between the two-door blue car and the four-door green car. It might look as if three adults could sit the front and in the back seats of both and the salesperson and the advertising might also assert it firmly. If, however, one found six adults and had them get into first one and then in the other of the two cars, one would more clearly see whether those assertions and impressions about capacity were true. Moreover, something would be seen about how easy the different vehicles were to get into and out of and how well they carried what might be more than the typical amount of weight. 31. With reference to the second part of this essay, the question of what reason is can now begin to be approached. Phenomenologically analyzed, the “seeing” practiced in the above case would function as Evidenz (since “evidence” in English regularly designates things rather than the experiencing in which they are given, “evidencing” is a better

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equivalent). The first epistemological role of evidencing is to justify believing. Seeing for oneself how well the two cars carry six adults would justify believing one more capacious and/ or stronger than the other when loaded that way. (How the car so loaded would handle at speed on curves in the rain would still be undecided, however.) Such a believing would be better justified in that case than the believing based on what the salesperson or the advertising said. Indeed, in ordinary English one would probably say that one knew which car could carry six adults more comfortably, safer, etc. The more adequate the evidencing, the more rational the believing. 32. How science is incorporated into technology is now also clearer. Science differs from commonsense in the sophistication with which it justifies believing beginning from evidencing. Through care in inference, it can justify believing with various degrees of probability where there is no direct evidencing. Suppose the six adults are often going to be carried at fairly high speed on torturous roads in bad weather. For their protection one is interested in such things as how crush resistant the body and how effective the safety belts and airbags would be if the car were to leave the highway and roll over a few times. It might be expensive and immoral, but beliefs in those respects could be decided by sending a few cars-full of people off the wet road at speed, i.e., by the same nonscientific type of experimentation that decided whether six would comfortable fit inside. Then again, there are science-like methods by which the forces acting on the relevant bodies can be estimated and beliefs then established without destroying cars or killing people. 33. Technology can become scientific through the incorporation of scientific results, but it can also become scientific through using scientific, or more likely, science-like methods. Science-like methods are not strictly scientific methods because they are more particularistic and practical in their aims than is typical for science. Thus dummies might be fitted with sensors and cars driven off the wet curves by remote control. This would be more moral. It could be more than commonsensical seeing with respect to the control of conditions and perhaps even

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involve the testing of hypotheses. At the same time, it would hardly bring new theoretical understanding about inertia, gravity, centrifugal force, friction, or even the properties of rubber, nylon, glass, and steel. Much that is derived from science and applied to technology in the way of methods as well as results may not be very scientific. Probably it will become more so in the future. After all, scientific technology has only been seriously underway since about 1850. 34. If it is thus clear how the automotive engineer might be somewhat scientific in designing and testing cars, the question remains concerning the car buyer. The tendency to focus on production to the disregard of consumption needs to be resisted. Since few consumers can undertake science-like testing, the best available resort is to relevant experts. There are presumably independent government and private testing agencies whose results can be considered before a purchase is made. Automobiles are probably reviewed more carefully than films and the reviews often seem somewhat scientific when technical data are considered. And the lay consumer can cultivate suspicion about interested information, e.g., that which comes from the car producer and distributor or a government attempting to keep an industry afloat, and seek independent scientific information instead. This would again seem the most rational of the approaches available and perhaps it manages to earn the qualification “scientific.” 35. In view of the enormous sophistication of science, one could be tempted to identify the rationality of scientific technology with the degree that it is scientific. This identification could be mistaken in two respects. In the first place, there can be conflicts between commonsensical and scientific “evidencing.” Thus an engineer might develop a science-like account about tire traction on wet roads in various speed ranges and with a certain distribution of weight in the vehicle and on that basis deem the car safe, but an experienced driver can find that the car feels unstable under the specified conditions. Might it not be wiser to respect the latter evidencing at least to the extent of seeking more data? Nonscientific equipment using is not devoid of rationality.

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36. In the second place, there is the question of the relation between the cognitive and other sorts of rationality in technology, which after all is a predominantly volitional process of equipment using. And even if the rationality of the volition is derived from the scientific or at least science-like believing in the foundations of the equipment using, the derivation can be examined. The mediator between epistemological and praxiological reason is axiological reason. When one subjects technology to examination or critique, one needs to examine valuation as well as belief. One needs to consider values. 37. By the commonsense “experimental” method sketched above one can come to know that it is more difficult for six adults to get into and be carried by the blue two-door than the green four-door car. By the principle of deciding in advance what one wants, a more effective conveyance is preferred. Preferring is a matter of valuing. Here it is also a matter of not intrinsic but rather extrinsic value, so that one of the two cars can be said to be better for carrying the six to wherever they need to go. Their being thus conveyed is what has relatively intrinsic value, although it may also have extrinsic value, so that getting all six to the place together is good for something else. Evaluation is applied to what is known to be possible. In this perspective, one is examining values and valuing, not belief. 38. Valuing is often habitual, ill-founded, and thus prejudicial. As intimated, one might have a preference of blue things over green. If the utilitarian aspects of the car one would buy are preferred to the aesthetic, then that aesthetic prejudice would be diminished in influence. Valuing is more rational when one reflects in such a way as to recognize what the possibilities are and considers what leads to what, e.g., an overloaded and ill-balanced smaller vehicle to more accidents. Knowing that, one is right to disvalue it. Not being cognitive, valuing is not scientific intrinsically, but when based on scientifically established believing, it is scientific extrinsically. Just as evidencing justifies believing, making it knowing, knowing justifies valuing. Most of deliberation seems a matter of sorting out the values involved in the complexes of possibilities that are already known.

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39. If rationality of willing is based upon valuing and the valuing is rational, then the willing is rational. Often the difference between valuing and willing is overlooked because action frequently follows automatically upon the settling of preferences. Yet one can prefer X to Y as conducive to Z and yet not go over to willing X as a means to Z as a purpose, which establishes that willing and valuing are separable and thus distinct. Just as the believing component within equipment using can be somewhat scientifically rational, so too can not only the valuing but also the willing that is founded upon it be rational, but in a derivative and then a doubly derivative way. Examination of volition not only involves consideration of the believing or knowing and the evaluation that would justify it, but also the review of the equipment and purposes to which one is already habituated. For example, writers familiar with one word-processing program tend irrationally to consider it normal and to consider faster and more powerful programs abnormal. But that can be corrected. 40. The examination or critique of technology begins in everyday life and can be carried to a philosophical level when one pursues ultimate justification for knowledge, evaluation, and willing. It centrally consists of an examination of the using of equipment on the world. Insofar as it weakens bad habits and strengthens good ones it already has technological consequences. The uses of equipment may be scientific, or nonscientific, mechanical, crafty, and even nonspecialized. There is rationality on the level of volition and evaluation as well as cognition. The present discussion has been devoted to sketching a framework and approach to such matters. Further investigation will show whether other cases can fit this framework and whether sophisticated principles might be developed by which to judge technology rational or not. It is at least clear, however, that if technology is equipment use, then its critique is ultimately teleological. And for all the attractiveness of power machines and scientific technology in the production of equipment, production is for the sake of consumption.

7. Indirect Action and Technology 1. Among other things, “indirect action” will be explored in this essay as an expression for a generic concept under which the expression “technology” denominates a species. Some members of the phenomenological tradition are preoccupied with the ontological disclosure foundational for the structure and understanding of human life and see the increasingly complex and powerful types of technology of modern times in these terms. But for all its cognitive foundations, technology itself is predominantly a practical phenomenon. And against the tendency of designating merely equipment as technology, it has been characterized in the previous essay as the using of equipment. 2. If indirect action is spoken of, the questions immediately arise of what direct action might be and how they differ. In the case of direct action, courses of events in the surrounding worlds of individuals and groups are affected in omission as well as commission through bodily movements and without resort to any intermediary. To build a sandcastle on the beach with one’s bare hands is direct action, while additionally resorting to a bucket and toy shovel will make that endeavor a mixture of direct and indirect action. To scratch an itch is also direct action, bodily movements then being used on the same body in which they occur. Some use the term “action” to include cases of distinctly mental activity, e.g., struggling to remember a name, but the expression “mental operation” can include that, leaving “action” for processes that include bodily movements. A bit of pondering can lead one to recognize that direct action—which is frequently overlooked, although quite valuable (lovemaking often omits specialized equipment)—occupies a relatively small part of life. In contrast, indirect action occupies an enormous part of life, so much so that it would be easy to conclude that all action is indirect, although, as just shown, this is not the case.

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3. The question of what is involved in technology conceived as a species of indirect action can be approached through reflective analysis. The present essay will attempt to distinguish and describe various aspects and types of indirect action, as well as objects, subjects, and intermediaries. Emphasis will be on the individual self and her action because for historical as well as methodological reasons this is the easiest point of entry to the topic. But this is not to say either that reflection on others is impossible or that types of passivity in which subjects are objects of actions performed by others might not be more common in a given life than the activities the individual herself performs. This essay may not reach what many thinkers consider the big philosophical issues of technology, but contributes to laying the foundations needed for doing so clearly. 4. “Reflective analysis” denominates what the present writer considers essential to the phenomenological approach in general, i.e., prior to the disciplinary specification of this approach as ethnological, medical, philosophical, psychological, sociological, and so on. To perform reflective analysis, one adopts the theoretical attitude, and then turns within it from the straightforward to a reflective attitude. Thus one turns from the attitude in which things-as-encountered (constitutive phenomenologists speak of “noemata”) as well as, more conspicuously, the encounterings of things (“noeses”) are overlooked, and turns instead to the attitude in which encounterings and things-as-encountered are focused on. In the latter attitude, one can then recognize many differences among things (taking “things” in the broadest signification whereby anything is a thing) and produce descriptions in which many distinctions are expressed by a writer for readers to attempt to verify. These descriptions may be factual, but fictive cases are more often offered to help clarify universal essences or eidē, i.e., one does not need seriously to perceive or remember the building of sandcastles with or without tools in order to gain some clarity about what “direct action” designates. Such an analysis succeeds to the degree that the things in question comes to be understood with greater articulation and clarity.

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I. INDIRECT ACTION AND ITS SUBJECT 5. More will be said about action than that it involves bodily movement in the second part of this essay, but it can be added here that bodily movement in the broad signification includes cases where the body does not move in whole or part. A so-called “poker face” resorted to in order to reduce the experiencing by others of whether one likes or dislikes the cards one has been dealt, how strongly one plans to bet, etc. is a case of especially one part of the body being kept from moving (but of course nothing should be betrayed by other parts either). Thus we can say that ceasing a particular bodily movement is a form of movement in the broad signification, which seems a reasonable use of words. Deceptive behavior, e.g., to stimulate belief by others in one’s confidence about the value of one’s cards when one is actually bluffing, can also involve bodily movements, which can include an over-intensified stillness. More could be said about bodily movement, but this may suffice to show its place and role in direct and indirect action. 6. What of the mental process that makes a bodily movement an action? Indirect action—and indeed, action in general—is practical because the abstractly discernable thetic or, better, positional component best called, in a broad signification, “willing” predominates in it. This is not the only component necessarily involved in action, but the positional components of valuing and believing, as well as those of experiencing, are subordinate here. Moreover, it needs to be recognized from the outset that willing in general is immediately directed at—or, better, intentive to—things that are real, i.e., things in time (in contrast to atemporal idealities), and more specifically, to things lying in the future of the process of willing. That is to say, one cannot immediately will things in the past or in the now, much less ideal things such as numbers, though of course one can will a future remembering of a past event or some future calculating with numbers and thus mediatedly will things that are not future realities. 7. In other respects, immediate willing is like believing and valuing. Thus it can be positive or negative, i.e., willing-for or willing-against,

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or neutral, and is thus like valuing, disvaluing, and apathy or indifference. Then again, the positive and negative modes of positionality can be firm or shaky, i.e., certain or conjectural for believing and resolute or tentative for willing. There are analogous parallels in the thingsas-encountered, e.g., positive and negative values, on the one hand, and the positional characteristics which seem best called uses of things willed-for and willed-against, whereby some things are negative as well as positive ends and others means. And there are intrinsic and extrinsic uses just as there are intrinsic and extrinsic values. These matters will be returned to. 8. Willing in the broad signification includes what seem best called “volitional operations,” which are willings in which an I is engaged actively or passively. These include choosings in a broad signification that also covers cases that do not involve considering and selecting among alternatives, but something that arises is passively accepted, i.e., simply gone along with willingly rather than resisted. (Note that an I is actively engaged in willing-against when she resists something being imposed upon her.) In addition to operations, specifically habitual willing falls under the broad or generic signification of intentive process or encountering and there is indeed far more of this than there are operations. Habitual willing is affected by past experience such that similar actions (whether direct or indirect, or some combination of the two) are performed in similar situations without any I engaging in them; not all actions, then, are operations. Often, for example, one brushes one’s teeth routinely while engaged in thinking of other things. 9. Thus far the emphasis in this analysis has been on action in individual human life, but of course humans belong to groups, and in many of these a collective willing often called cooperation occurs (which is not to deny that a group member can act against the wills of other group members). For groups it is best to speak of “customs” and even, where they long endure, “traditions,” reserving the term “habit” for individual mental lives. Thus all the members of a skilled sports team adjust themselves in a coordinated way to changes in the actions and preparations to act they encounter in the opposition, as when a left-handed batter

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approaches the plate in baseball and the defense shifts in accordance with the game situation, the hitter’s skills, etc. In this case the tradition is not especially deep, while a society devoted to monogamy for millennia has a deep or long-standing tradition. (It deserves mention that there is habit and perhaps tradition among some nonhuman animals as well, but no more needs to be said about this here.) 10. The habitual and/ or traditional stratum of human life underlies or founds the operational stratum. Thus to engage in answering the telephone, one must already live in a world including telephones, which is to say a cultural world, and things like telephones (and the desk on which it is kept, and the chair on which one sits at the desk in the room where one works, etc.) have cultural characteristics. These are constituted in tradition for the family, the business, or other social organization concerned, and in habit for the individual who lives and/ or is working there. 11. However, even more fundamental than the stratum of habit and tradition, which Husserl called secondary passivity, is the stratum of automatic mental processes, which he called primary passivity. It is in these processes that nature is constituted, including other animate things. And just as operations presuppose the cultural things constituted in habit and tradition, habitual and traditional processes presuppose the constitution of natural things, which operations thus also indirectly presuppose. Thus a knife must have a size and shape and above all an edge for it to be able to cut whatever it is used for cutting (and perhaps be specifically designed for cutting). But a knife is typically an artifact, i.e., something deliberately shaped by human action, although there are sharp rocks and sticks and fragments of sea shells and bones. 12. The world today has so many artifacts that one might think that everything is artifactual, which is even more plausible if things nondeliberately affected by human action are considered artifacts. What about the path worn over time in the ground between the house and the well to which people go for water? If the path is merely determined by getting to the well and back, without any planning of where it should go, e.g., on which side of the big tree that stands in the way—it is not strictly an

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artifact even though the path is worn by human walking. And if one is walking across the land by no predetermined route, then whatever one’s feet fall on might be thought natural. Yet the land is already cultural because we have learned that what is flat can be walked on, but it is not artifactual, unless, of course, the land has been deliberately flattened or otherwise shaped, which is often the case. Perhaps the surfaces of bodies of water are more obviously nonartifactual, but they too are cultural because one can encounter them in work and play. 13. There is positing—i.e., believing, valuing, and willing—in automatic conscious life, but types of what is best called “experiencing” are foundational there as well as in habit and traditions, on the one hand, and also in operations, on the other. Experiencings in the broad signification can be intentive either to ideal things or to real things. Setting aside the intentiveness to ideal things, real things have three sorts of givenness. Perceiving is intentive to things occurring in the same now with it; remembering is intentive to things in the past of the time in which the remembering occurs; and expecting has what is encountered in it in its future. But these are species of direct experiencing. In contrast, there is also an enormous amount of indirect experiencing through depictions, indications, and verbal expressions, so much so that direct experiencing may be as omitted by thinkers as direct action is. Expecting and indirect experiencing are especially important for indirect action, which is, as already told, mediated and volitional. II. THINGS-AS-ENCOUNTERED IN INDIRECT ACTION 14. Probably most philosophy of technology begins with relatively straightforward notions of various sorts of equipment and then focuses on cognitive foundations. Even with simple hand tools, e.g., brooms, there are questions of what is rightly believed in as their ends and how the equipment might or might not cause effects in them, e.g., whether trees can be chopped down with a broom. The emphasis for most thinkers is probably not on hand tools, but on machines with moving parts and nonhuman power sources, such as windmills, or

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equipment whose cognitive foundations are scientific, including, of late, electronics. 15. With the preparation in the previous section, however, the approach in the present essay is different. A classification of equipment is good, but much else needs to be understood first. To begin with, indirect action differs from direct action by essentially involving an intermediary. If one flies to another city and takes a taxi from the airport to one’s hotel, the taxi, along with the highways and streets one travels on and money to pay for the ride, are all intermediaries. While some thinkers may resist accepting it, the taxi driver is functionally part of the taxi as a means of travel, and thus part of an intermediary. Similarly, in a restaurant, the waiter is central to the set of intermediaries including the cook, manager, table, chairs, dishes, etc., through which the diner gets her food. In these cases, the roles of the human intermediaries might best be called “service.” 16. Some comparisons may bring further clarification. Indirect action is like indirect experiencing in that the representation, e.g., a photograph, is reflectively discernable and can be considered a species of intermediary. If one begins from the experiencing stratum, direct or indirect, in concrete encountering, then the typical tendency in much phenomenology of technology is to turn next to the believing that this experiencing founds, motivates, and possibly justifies. But for indirect action, the first component of the encountering properly considered is, as shown above, that of willing in the broad signification. Thus the comparison should run as follows: in indirect experiencing the representatum is originally overlooked, and what is represented is what is focused on; in indirect action, the intermediary is likewise often ignored for the sake of what might be called the “final thing” of the action, which includes staying in the hotel or enjoying one’s meal. Similarly, the focus is not on the shovel and pail, but on the sandcastle being built. 17. Analogously again, practical intermediaries and experiential representations can both be easily recognized. No matter how intimately connected they are with willing, valuing, and believing, experiencings via depictions, indications, and verbal expressions are not as such

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positional, while action of all sorts is. If we reflect upon a thing-asvalued, we can likewise distinguish the value from the thing valued. Similarly, the belief characteristic can be recognized as different from the thing believed in and the thing that is willed can be distinguished from its volitional characteristic or use. For indirect action, discerning and describing uses is needed not only for understanding the intermediary, but also for understanding the final thing. 18. Values have long been recognized. It is now common for them to be distinguished into intrinsic values and extrinsic values. These are the values that things have as valued for their own sakes and as valued for the sake of something else. A thing can have values of both sorts simultaneously. Setting a broken leg without anesthesia is quite painful, and the pain has intrinsic negative value. But a healed leg has extrinsic positive value, and the doctor’s realignment of the broken bones has extrinsic value for the sake of that expected good condition. 19. Valuing and values are not the same as willing and uses, yet the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction also holds for things of willing. Indeed, the distinction between ends and means was probably recognized first in the history of thought, and the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic values derived from it. (How there are intrinsic and extrinsic belief characteristics in things-as-believed-in can be addressed in Essay 9 below.) Although “end characteristics” and “means characteristics” can be spoken of, the parallelism with the two types of values also deserves recognition. To form a parallel locution, the noun “use” can be specified as “extrinsic” or “intrinsic.” For example, in the two cases of indirect action given above, the waiter and the taxi (driver included) have extrinsic use, whereas eating the meal and staying in the hotel have intrinsic use. Thus extrinsic and intrinsic uses are what ends and means have and correlate with two related sorts of willing, while extrinsic and intrinsic values correlate with two sorts of valuing. 20. As the examples given also intimate, intermediaries originally have extrinsic use, while the final thing willed in action (recall that direct action does not include an intermediary) has intrinsic use. Can something have both intrinsic and extrinsic uses analogous to the way

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the setting of the broken leg can have intrinsic and extrinsic values? The answer is yes, provided sequences of action, including indirect actions and chains of ends and means, are recognized. Flying to the other city, taking the taxi to the hotel, and having a meal are phases in the larger sequence of actions called going to a conference. Then the plane (with pilot), taxi (with driver), and the plate of food (with waiter) are ends for means including tickets and money and thus have intrinsic use at the same time that they have extrinsic uses in a chain of ends and means extending beyond them. 21. Just as values can be positive, negative, and neutral, uses have these modes as well. This depends on whether or not the final thing wholly or partly exists prior to the willing: if something already wholly or partly exists, the willing of it can be preservative or destructive; if it is wholly or partly inexistent, then the willing of it can be creative or preventative. Setting aside neutral willing as relatively rare but not unimportant, there is also the question of things that change. In this case, things already exist in whole or part, and the addition and removal of parts are again positive and negative, respectively. In many cases, at least a modifying can be analyzed into a combination of addings and removings. This may seem rather mechanical, but readily applies actually to changing of one’s habits in learning, e.g., to perform the services of a waiter. 22. The behavior of a waiter soliciting orders, bringing food, collecting money, etc., makes up a case of what was termed service above. Service has extrinsic use when the waiter is used as a means to get one’s meal, and in that connection the meal itself has intrinsic use—it is the end. The waiter is the intermediary in this case of indirect action. III. DEFINING TECHNOLOGY 23. What now of technology? There is value in speaking of “equipment” and of the using of equipment, where technology is concerned, particularly if the artificial adjective “equipmental” is also accepted. Provided a clear difference can be found for it, equipment can be

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recognized as a species of intermediary, and can also be used to differentiate a species of indirect action. Probably most readers accept that inanimate things can be equipment and would also accept that things including nonhuman animals, e.g., horse drawn wagons, are equipment as well. But what of the taxi, which includes a human driver? Inasmuch as the driver is the most important component of the taxi, the entire ensemble (including both the driver and the vehicle), it can be categorized as belonging to the species of indirect action by means of human intermediaries rather than the species where equipment predominates. If one distinguishes between the driver and the vehicle, the former provides service and the latter is equipment by which the driver provides it. In short, here is indirect action employing other humans predominantly and indirect action employing equipment predominantly and only the latter is best called technology. 24. Analysis can go on further from here to distinguish types of equipment, e.g., by power source that is inanimate, nonhuman, or human, by form and degree of complexity, etc. In non-technological indirect action there are types of what might be called “functionaries” who perform services, some of whom are highly skilled and perform science-based actions (e.g., engineers and nurses), and are called “professionals,” etc. The practical world is a field of action some of which is direct but most of which is indirect and technology is a species of indirect action.

8. The Where and When of Appearances 1. Reflective analyses can benefit from carefully selected examples. Here the case of standing by the side of a road and watching trucks approach, pass, and then recede will be used. Trucks have been selected because they tend to be louder than passenger cars, but once the analysis is understood, other examples may well come to mind. The example of someone walking toward a noisy thing might have been selected if watching it as one walked away by looking over one’s shoulder or walking backwards away from it were not awkward. If opportunities to watch trains were more common, they might be preferred to truck watching. “Watching” here is intended to include hearing and seeing together. They often typically occur together, but will often be commented on separately hereafter. 2. Watching trucks go by may be so common for most readers that some effort may be needed to focus on their appearances. There are several abstractions involved that not everybody automatically makes. To begin with, passing trucks are originally “encountered,” which signifies that they are “posited” after various fashions as well as “experienced.” Thus they are believed in, liked and/ or disliked, and also willed with respect to at least in the way of not being stepped in front of. A great deal can be said about positionality of these three sorts in such a case, but they are only mentioned here and then abstracted from. 3. Where “experiencing” is concerned, that of ideal things such as universal essences will be implicitly relied on in order to go beyond particulars to make general claims about the things in question, but this experiencing of ideal things will also not be discussed further. Analogously, the nonsensuous perceiving in which encountering and things-as-encountered are reflectively perceived and knowledge developed for the reader’s examination is relied on but again not further

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discussed.27 The perceiving that remains can be observed reflectively in three ways. One could expect to perceive trucks passing when one reaches the road during one’s walk and one can remember perceiving them after one has crossed the road and walked on. These ways of expectation and recollection will be mostly avoided in this essay. This leaves sensuous perceiving as it goes on in the now, which is sensuous perceiving perceived reflectively. 4. Seeing and hearing can be called “distance senses,” while taste and touch require contact of the sense organs with the thing tasted or touched. Touch includes a great deal of complexity and taste is also not simple, but they too are for the most part abstracted from here, as is smelling and its complexity. The last three of the traditionally counted five outer senses will be ignored here. Descriptions of visual and auditory appearances can nevertheless serve as starting points for exploring appearances in other spheres. 5. The example employed here is furthermore a matter of “direct experiencing.” By contrast and in the area of touching, the shaking ground beneath one’s feet when a heavy truck is passing may indirectly present the truck, as may something functioning as a mirror, such as a store window. With further modest effort, however, one can focus exclusively on the truck-as-directly-seen-and-heard. It seems easy to believe that one can simply see and hear something, but if done rigorously this involves the various abstractions mentioned above. After all, the thing as sensuously perceived is actually or possibly sensed in all the ways mentioned, so that “seeing” is best characterized as predominately visual perceiving, the visual component dominating over other sensings, and “hearing” is best characterized analogously. 6. There are other interesting situations, such as when the coming truck is watched at quite a distance, so far away that it is seen but 27 It deserves mention, however, that while appearances pertain to things-as-encountered, phenomenology as the “science” of phenomena is not confined to them, but includes all aspects encountering and of thingsas-encountered in its subject matter.

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not yet heard. Then what is presented visually also appresents how the thing can be presented auditorially under specific conditions, i.e., when close enough, and the reverse is also the case, e.g., the truck is heard approaching but not seen due to the intervening stand of trees, yet it is nevertheless appresented as visible. Moreover, when one is both seeing and hearing the truck, the truck-as-seen and the truck-as-heard each refer to the other, but this is yet another thing that will be chiefly ignored here. 7. There are two more preliminary points. Sensuous perceiving occurs within perceivable circumstances, e.g., through media and in relations to states and movements of one’s own body, and sensuous appearances can be explained by such circumstances. (All recourse to unobservables, such as photons, airwaves, and processes of the central nervous system, is also excluded from the present reflective analysis.) Already in everyday life there are standard or normal conditions of illumination, media, distance of the thing from the perceiver’s body, the posture of that body, etc., and conditions for scientific observation are developed from them. The air seen and heard through in the example is considered mist- and wind-free, while the sound and sight of the truck would have a different appearance in fog or a strong wind. 8. What is seen and heard is also subtly affected by how the eyes and ears are oriented and arranged with respect to the thing perceived, e.g., the truck passing. Here the example shall include the eyes and ears being unblocked and the head held still in three orientations: (1) toward the truck coming down the road toward where the watcher is standing, (2) the truck going by the watcher facing straight ahead, and (3) toward the truck moving away from the watcher. There would have been subtle differences if one were walking rather than standing or if one were continually moving one’s head about or if one shut one eye or stuck a finger in one ear, but these are excluded. Except to say that the appearance is closest to the properties of the reality when the truck is going by and that it is most difficult to distinguish them then, little more will be said about the second orientation listed. These are

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not unusual orientations, but deserve to be specified for the sake of completeness. And also for that sake, normal hearing and eyesight are also specified in the example. 9. Finally, while the present analysis is presented as of serious perceiving and is best examined through further serious perceiving, the reader may be inclined to verify it through feigning and/or remembering cases of passing trucks. The present writer cannot prevent that, but does urge that one then also reflect on the serious watching of trucks from the side of the road as occasion arises. I. WHAT, WHERE, AND WHEN ARE APPEARANCES? 10. In the example now prepared, the passing truck can be “watched” in three ways, i.e., as it approaches from a distance, as it passes in front of the watcher, and as it recedes. If one reflects on it as it approaches, one can notice that there is a curious way in which the appearances of the truck are continuously larger and louder as the truck approaches and then continuously smaller and quieter as it recedes. Yet the truck itself has its unchanging size and sound. What these real properties are is most apparent as the truck passes before the observer and would also appear if one watched from a quiet car driving alongside the truck or rode on the truck. And the example fosters distinguishing between the appearances and the real thing that appears. 11. Careful attention to terminology is also important for reflective analyses. What “appearance” signifies should become clear in the course of the present one. The names for things that appear deserve some comment. The truck has its own size, color, shape, sound, etc. and it can be called a thing in a narrow signification in contrast with “thing” in the broad signification whereby anything is a thing. There is then the “the appearing thing” or simply “the thing” over and against “the appearance of the thing.” Unfortunately, the word “thing” does not bring a felicitous adjective. “Reality,” which has many significations, can, with care, be used as a synonym and has “real” as its adjective. Care with this word is needed for several reasons. Sometimes reality is contrasted with

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illusion, but that contrast is yet another topic evaded here. Sometimes it is contrasted with appearance, but in such a way that one is thought not actually to perceive, e.g., the truck moving along the road. Then one is allegedly confined to directly perceived appearances and has the classical epistemological problem of inferring the unobservable external reality on the basis of appearances cum ideas or representations in the mind. This second contrast is denied here phenomenologically and will be returned to below. Lastly, any tendency to speak of “physical” things ought to be resisted so that the realities accessible in everyday life are not confused with entities idealized in the naturalistic sciences. 12. The appearances in the example are visual and auditory. They can be discerned through reflecting on the thing-as-seen-and-heard. Interestingly, the visual appearance in good light seems to be the same colors and shape as the appearing thing, but that appearance in the example is, especially in the beginning (and at the end), somehow smaller than the truck itself. Furthermore, the appearance of the truck’s constant shape changes as it gets closer, passes, and then moves off, so that the front, side, and then rear of the truck successively appear. Similarly, the auditory appearance is quieter earlier (and quieter later) than the real noise itself of the truck, which, again, best appears as it passes before the truck watcher. Furthermore, the sonorous appearance might have a rhythmic quality very like that of the truck itself in its engine noises and tires rolling along the road. Once again, however, the real size, real shape, real color, and real sound are constant while the appearances vary. 13. “Where” are the appearances? According to whether the question is asked about appearances in relation to other appearances or appearances in relation to things that are not appearances, there are two issues here. In the first respect, the appearance of an approaching truck is located between the appearances of the two sides of the road, the appearance of the road itself, the appearance of the sky above, etc. It will not be pursued here but one can go on to consider whether there are structures to this field, such as that of figure and ground, and

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thus whether appearances form the subject matter of Gestalt theory. It will suffice for present purposes to observe that visual appearances form their own sort of spatial field. Although there is greater vagueness involved, sonorous appearances are also located in spatial fields, the sonorous appearances standing out when focused on from a background or surrounding of other such appearances. 14. The situation concerning the temporality of appearances is similar. If the truck perceived were parked across the street, the appearance of it might be more obviously simultaneous with the appearances of the trees and buildings around it. And then there is successiveness such that the appearance of the passing truck appears after the appearance of the approaching truck and before the appearance of the truck moving off down the road. Such simultaneity and successiveness holds for sonorous as well as visual appearances. Indeed, such appearances are a type of spatio-temporal field and hence the analysis of spatiality in the just preceding paragraph is based on an implicit disregarding of time. These claims about the fields of sonorous as well as visual appearance are submitted to the reader for confirmation through reflective observation and analysis. This may not be as easy as one thinks because reality is also spatio-temporal and thus confusion is possible. 15. The situation is more complicated where relations of appearances with things other than appearances are concerned. If one considers just temporality, one might find it difficult to distinguish the time of an appearance from the time of the reality and also from the inherent time of mental life. What is reflectively perceived as now or recollected as perceived previously might seem to be “at the same time” as the appearances through which the real things appear or appeared. Due to an assumption that everything is either physical or psychic, appearances are either in one or the other. If appearances are parts of realities, there is the curious consequence that the truck is successively small, large, and small again while it is constantly of one unchanging size. This may be why many try to place appearances in the other of the two regions, i.e., “in the mind,” and even speak of them as “contents,” which is again curious.

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16. To begin with, for something to be “in” the mind literally, then the mind must be spatially extended, but of course “in” in this signification is metaphorical in modern thought and something like “part of” it is intended more literally. Since Husserl at least, the mind, psyche, or consciousness is recognized to be temporal and intentional but not inherently spatial. As intentional or, better, intentive, mental life includes encounterings in which perceivings intentive to things and awarenesses intentive to appearances can be found as components of the flow of encountering. These intentive process components are observably simultaneous or successive and can occur between encounterings in the past and future, i.e., as recollectable and expectable. Thus they are in what phenomenologists call “inner time.” What they are outwardly intentive to sensuously, such as the real truck on the real road, can be in real space, but the stream of conscious life or, better, the intentive flux, has no inherent location in space and is also not spatially extended. It is then difficult to claim that the spatio-temporal field of sensuous appearances discernable in relation to things-as-seen-andheard occur within the processes in the intentive flux of encounterings, for then that flux would have components with size, shape, color, rhythm, and so on. 17. If one does not find through reflective observation that the intentive flux includes within it things of any sort that are spatially extended, shaped, and colored and also in some way sonorous, then “where” do these sensuous appearances occur? Is there not a third alternative that consists in accepting that the fields of at least visual and auditory appearances have a spatio-temporal order of their own, which is not to say that this different order is independent either of the intentive flux or of the transcendent realities, bodies included, that appear? This is a question that a phenomenologist can attempt to answer through reflective observation and analysis. Considering whether the I belongs to yet another temporal order distinct from that of the intentive flux may help one’s meditations in this respect.

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II. MORE QUESTIONS 18. Other questions can be asked. The most urgent concerns the relation between the outwardly transcendent thing and the appearances of it. In his New School lectures, Dorion Cairns explored how mental life is stratified in various ways and referred to how what we can call the awarenesses intentive to appearances are infrastrata within sensuous perceivings. Possibly going beyond what he asserted, this can be interpreted to signify that one can abstract from the founded intentiveness to the real truck itself moving along the real road in front of one’s real body and focus solely upon the intentiveness to appearances involved. This may well be something that is also done with deceptive ease. When one focuses on the awarenesses of an appearance, one can find that there is protending and retrotending already in this infrastratum and indeed one can recognize that the appearance is itself the thing of an identifying and differentiating synthesis, such as was described in Essay 2 above. 19. If one relaxes this abstraction from the superstratum of sensuous perceiving and instead lets that perceiving take its normal form, then there is a stratified intentiveness that culminates in the intentiveness to the outwardly transcendent reality that appears, the infrastratum motivating the superstratum. In ordinary English, one then says either that one perceives the thing “through” appearances or “on the basis of” appearances in a way equivalent to saying that “the real thing appears” or is presented. 20. Against some attempts at solving the traditional problem of external things or realities through arguing from appearances, it can be said to begin with that no argumentation or thinking is involved in such perceiving. This, again, is something proposed for confirmation through reflective analysis. Then again, appearances are not things that exist independently but rather depend upon both the surrounding realities, one’s body included, and the intentive fluxes involved. Thus the appearance getting larger and smaller is due in part to the real truck

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moving along a particular stretch of the real road and also in part due to somebody being there to watch it and, more subtly, to focus on it. If “in” signifies “being conditioned by,” then visual and auditory appearances are “in” both the realities and the intentive flux. 21. Another question concerns how the images captured by equipment for audio and film recording are similar to but not the same as appearances. If one plays a video of an approaching and receding truck and watches it in the usual unreflective or straightforward attitude, one sees and hears the truck itself approach, which is what is represented by the colors and shapes and sounds located in the video player. But with a little effort one can reflectively observe how the image on the screen gets larger and then smaller and the sound gets louder and quieter just like appearances of the real truck itself watched from the roadside can. Moreover, video watching is plainly stratified, the indirect intentiveness to the truck moving along the road being founded upon the direct intentiveness the shapes and sounds on the video player. Is this not what happens in perception? 22. The comparison is valuable not only for the similarities but also for the differences. The sight and sound on the video player can be considered in their own right and thus not as representing other things. These properties are rapidly changing visible and audible real properties of the real box across the room. They are parts of something concrete and at least independent of whatever they would depict if one should return to the usual attitude of enjoying television. The sights and sounds in the video player are not appearances, but aspects of real things perceived. Indeed, they have their own appearances that are easily distinguished if one reflects while moving away from that equipment so that the sound gets quieter and the shapes on its screen get smaller. Mirror images also have their appearances that can be recognized to change similarly. And it may be that the “way of ideas” in modern thought is based on taking appearances as independent things like depictions clearly are if their role in indirect experiencing is suspended.

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23. Yet another area that deserves reflective attention is the role that appearances play in art, be they carefully depicted or studiously ignored. Children and other so-called primitives often draw realities rather than appearances, e.g., using size to distinguish power or importance. Then there is the role of such technology as eyeglasses, microscopes, and telescopes. Do these make distant realities move closer or “really” get larger or do they merely affect the appearances of such outwardly transcendent perceived things as trucks, microbes, and stars, so that those realities appear in different and better ways? What happens to the field of auditory appearances when one puts a finger in one ear or suppose one presses an eyeball from the side gently? Suppose one is intoxicated or quite fatigued? Nonnormal appearances can help normal ones to be better understood. Can more than one subject have the same appearance at the same time or can two or more subjects only have similar ones simultaneously or successively? Is how the passing truck appears to somebody else on the other side of the road appresented when its appearance to oneself is presented? Finally, given the example of Thales well over two millennia ago, the reader of this analysis is warned to be careful when reflecting on his or her watching from the side of the road as trucks are passing.

9. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Existence 1. It is somewhat unfortunate that Husserl believed he was founding a new primal science, i.e., a first philosophy in which all other sciences could be grounded, and hence named his effort with a word ending in “-ology.” This is unfortunate because we who follow him and call ourselves phenomenologists are regularly asked what “phenomenology” signifies by people having difficulty pronouncing the word. One might respond to this recurring question by asserting that phenomenology is the approach of “reflective analysis.” If the questioner wants more, one might try making just two points. 2. The first is that while most scientific work is highly argumentative and often seeks to produce a deductive system, phenomenology properly deserves the title “analysis” because it chiefly produces sequences of distinctions more or less well clarified with examples. This is not to say that phenomenologists never offer arguments, especially when opposing other positions, or that phenomenological results cannot be arranged into deductive systems. But it is to say that argumentation and deductive systematization are not the central concerns for phenomenology that they are for other approaches. 3. The second point concerns the way in which phenomenology is “reflective.” Perhaps the curious will be satisfied if one tells them that phenomenologists analyze and describe the encounterings of things and the correlative things-as-encountered, following this up with some examples of encountering-encountered correlations, such as that between valuing and things-as-valued, including loving and personsas-loved. Since informal discussions tend to be brief, the questioning may well stop there, and one can then avoid having to explain how phenomenology can be either transcendental or worldly; how phenomenological philosophy includes epistemology, axiology, and ethics; and

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how phenomenology is also employed in disciplines beyond philosophy, such as education, psychiatry, nursing, and sociology. 4. The running example in the present investigation will be what is traveled in traveling, which appears best called a route. A route can be selected on one or more roads, superhighways, streets, railroads, or footpaths, and it can also be a way through a building, e.g., down the hall, up the stairs, around the corner to the left, etc. There are also routes across oceans and through the air, as well as combinations of ways via air, land, and water. But land routes will be focused on here. Routes are originally encountered not in contemplating them theoretically but in traveling them practically. If reflective analysis of routes and the traveling of them occurs, it comes only secondarily. Prior to such analysis, we can say that we encounter a route and thus signify that we recognize one as an already constituted cultural thing, i.e., a thing encountered with value and use. 5. The present analysis begins with the correlation of concrete encountering and routes-as-encountered and proceeds to analyze the abstractly discernable components within encountering of willing, valuing, and experiencing and correlatively, routes-as-willed, routes-as-valued, and routes-as-experienced as abstractly discernible components within the route-as-encountered. Finally, the analysis will turn to believing and routes-as-believed-in and the objectivation of belief characteristics. Most of what is stated here is novel only with respect to terminology and emphasis, but the recognition of intrinsic and extrinsic existence of things like routes is a small discovery, at least for the present writer. I. ROUTES-AS-ENCOUNTERED 6. A route is originally encountered in traveling it, and as such, it is something that is also experienced, believed in, and valued, but is predominantly “volitional.” It will be important to bear in mind throughout this essay that “volitional” and parallel words are, unless

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otherwise indicated, employed in broad significations that include willing that is learned, habitual, or traditional, i.e., forms of what Husserl calls secondary passivity—rather than referring solely to explicitly egoic or operational willing. Even if one gets to places by following others who seem to know the way, this routine action is predominantly volitional. It is true that an I may occasionally engage in willing a trip in a narrow signification, i.e., perform volitional operations, particularly when a route is being chosen, when it is taken for the first time, or when an unexpected problem arises during the execution of a decision. But what usually happens is a more or less skilled movement along the route, whether on foot, on horseback, or as driver or even as a passenger. In other words, speeding up, slowing down, turning, continuing straight, pausing, etc. tend to happen in rather automatic ways when someone skilled at traveling a familiar route is on her way. 7. As volitionally encountered, a route is a means to a goal, purpose, or end, which is to say the destination at the end of the route. In traditional Husserlian terminology, things-as-encountered are called “noemata” and include thetic qualities or, better, positional characteristics. Husserl’s emphasis is on doxothetic characteristics, but this is not the only species. There are also practical-volitional positings and what can be called functions or, better, uses that can be discerned and described through reflectively observing and analyzing things-as-encountered. For example, if, while en route, one decides to go elsewhere, the initial destination recognizably loses its actual use for us as a goal while at the same time the new place acquires it. We might think that the abandoned route then becomes merely a strip of space, but closer reflection discloses that it is still a road, albeit one no longer being taken. If the road is found to be washed out, however, then it is not properly a road until repaired, because it cannot function as part of a route from here to there. Nevertheless, a thing that is spoiled is still a practical thing in the broad signification. 8. The abstractly discernable willing components in a concrete road-encountering are, along with the correlative uses characteristics

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in the things volitionally encountered, reflectively discernable components of larger practical wholes. When one is taking one road in order to reach another road, the latter road is the immediate end, but it is also simultaneously a means to reach the final destination of the trip, which is the ultimate end in the case of traveling. Just as a stretch of road within a route can be both an end and a means, an encountered thing can have an intrinsic value and an extrinsic value at the same time. For example, setting a broken arm without anesthesia will hurt greatly and thus be intrinsically valued negatively, but at the same time the bone setting has a positive extrinsic value in relation to the intrinsic positive value of the healed and pain-free arm expected in a few weeks. 9. One can also find components of valuation in the background of the willing that predominates in volitional encounterings and their intentive correlates in the things-as-encountered. The preferring of one way over others that are believed possible is not a volitional but a valuational component and is also in the background of the willing component. There are other parallels between willing and valuing, all in broad significations. Thus, noematic positional characteristics of all three sorts can be positive, negative, or neutral in modality. One can disvalue a possible route and will-against as well as will-for a route believed possible. This analysis can be expanded by considering the other modes, but it will suffice here to focus on positive willing and valuing and, later, positive believing. 10. Another parallel between volition and valuation concerns the intrinsic/ extrinsic distinction. This distinction holds for all positings. Thus things can be willed for their own sakes and then called ends and things can be willed for the sake of other things and then called means. Analogously, things can be valued for their own sakes, or valued for the sakes of other things and one can then speak of intrinsic or extrinsic values. One can readily find expressions parallel to intrinsic and extrinsic values by choosing a suitable noun for the adjectives to modify. Use seems appropriate in this connection. Thus ends have intrinsic uses and means have extrinsic uses.

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II. BELIEF AND OBJECTIVATION 11. The foregoing does not go beyond what Husserl writes in Ideen I except terminologically and with respect to emphasis.28 His publications do have a naturalistic tendency that can be overcome through fully appreciating all components in that encountering and the correlative things-as-encountered include willings and uses as well as valuings and values. These are crucial for practical life, which is the original form of mental life. Nevertheless, believing and also experiencing cannot be omitted from the analysis. It is unfortunately all too easy for modern intellectuals to adopt a naturalistic attitude and thus naturalistically abstract from the volitional and valuational components within encounters. Under such an abstraction, what remains is the experienced core of the thing encountered, along with how it is believed in. 12. In the case of a route, the core abstracted from the concrete thing-as-originally-encountered might be called a strip of space extending from one spot to another with segments and other spots distinguishable 28 Perhaps this passage establishes prima facie that Husserl would not be unsympathetic with what has been said: “[T]his world is there for me not only as a world of mere things, but also with the same immediacy as a world of things with values, a world of goods, a practical world. I simply find the physical things in front of me furnished not only with merely material determinations but also with value-characteristics, as beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant, agreeable and disagreeable, and the like. Immediately, physical things stand there as Things of use, the ‘table’ with its ‘books,’ the ‘drinking glass,’ the ‘vase,’ the ‘piano,’ etc. These value-characteristics and practical characteristics also belong constitutively to the Things ‘on hand’ as Things, regardless of whether or not I turn to such characteristics and the Things. Naturally this applies not only in the case of the ‘mere physical things,’ but also in the case of humans and brute animals belonging to my surroundings. They are my ‘friends’ or ‘enemies,’ my ‘servants’ or ‘superiors,’ ‘strangers’ or ‘relatives,’ etc.” Edmund Husserl, Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. Fred Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 53.

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within it. In the naturalistic attitude such spots are not places, much less starting places, stopping places along the route, or the final stopping place or destination because the uses are abstracted from. It seems best to speak of the experienced cores of what is encountered as strips and spots rather than lines and points because lines and points tend to designate ideal rather than real things. The strips alluded to here tend to be more or less indeterminate, so that, for example, one can wait until one reaches where a turn is needed and then find how to make it. It would also be an error to believe that a route needs to be found already demarcated in space, as occurs with pavement, highways, or with a path worn through the woods by the feet of humans or other animals. If it occurs to a person out walking to take a shortcut across an open field, the segment of the strip where she may well be the first to cross the field is not marked out in advance at all. 13. A strip of space can be experienced in several ways. Perceiving is the original form of the direct experiencing of real things, i.e., temporal things, including spatio-temporal things sensuously perceived. The reality perceived occurs at the same time as the perceiving of it, and reflection on the thing-as-perceived can readily disclose that the perceived thing’s manner of givenness is perceptual. Then again, a reality can be remembered, in which case the reality remembered is distinctly earlier than the remembering of it; here reflection can disclose within what is remembered not only the thing-as-previously-perceived, but also the earlier perceiving of it, as well as the memorial manner of givenness in the perception-as-remembered. Finally, there can be expecting, and in its future, the thing expected, the thing-as-expected, and the expected future perceiving of the thing, all of which can once again be reflectively distinguished and described. 14. While the things perceived and remembered can be more or less clear, expected things are always obscure when the expecting is serious. But expecting can also be fictive, in which case one can imagine or, better, feign the thing expected as if it was perceived or as if it was remembered or expected and then it has a fictive-clarity. And of

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course one can also fictively perceive and remember; indeed, one can even fictively believe, value, and will. Fictive expecting plays a rather important role in deliberation and thus in ethics and politics. 15. In the perceptually encountered route, there is a segment of the strip of space that can be said to be presented. This is the segment in view in predominantly visual perceiving. (There can be predominantly auditory or even tactual presenting through the feet as well, but vision will be focused on here.) One might then contend that the segments out of sight ahead of and behind the traveler are expected and remembered. But expectings and rememberings are distinct mental operations with I-engagement, and this does not typically take place as we travel along. Instead, it needs to be recognized that the other segments are appresented along with the segment presented and that the whole strip, much of it rather obscure, is what is perceived. 16. A great deal can be said about believing and things-as-believed-in, but merely a few remarks will suffice here. Belief includes “believing-in,” which is prepredicative, and “believing-about,” which includes the believing of propositions and is then predicative. A spot on the strip can be believed in just as the whole strip can be. The original belief characteristic discernable in noematic reflection is actuality. But there are other modalities, including possibility, which are important in deliberation, where one cannot seriously consider choosing something that is believed impossible. It is not unusual for the characteristic of being believed in of a thing perceived or remembered not to be recognized. For example, if a segment of the strip of space is presentively seen to be straight or curved in some way, its being straight or curved is simply believed in. But with reflective-analytic effort the manner of givenness and doxothetic characteristic can be distinguished. 17. Belief characteristics can be objectivated and predicated. Thus the noematic doxothetic characteristic of possibility of the apperceived straight or curved continuation of the strip of space can be focused on, distinctly believed in, and attributed to the strip. It can then be said, perhaps, that “curves ahead are possible.” Possibility, which is a mode

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of existence, is then predicated. More often predication takes forms like “the strip is curved,” but modes of existence are sometimes predicated. When they are, what were described as the thetic characteristics of things-as-believed-in, i.e., belief characteristics, are renamed using such ontological terms as actuality, possibility, probability, etc., or one might simply say that “the strip of space exists.” This operation on things-asbelieved-in, including the renaming, is called objectivation. III. THE EXISTENCE OF ROUTES AND DESTINATIONS 18. With these preparations, a question pertaining to the belief stratum in the encountering and thing-as-encountered in a route, for example, can now be addressed. Recognizing that believings and belief characteristics, objectivated or not, are abstractly discernable correlative components in concrete encounters, the focus can shift back and forth between the abstract naturalistic and the concrete personalistic or, better, cultural attitudes. A route has a start, and may include junctions where one changes roads, and stopping places. But, above all, a route has a destination. 19. It is, of course, possible merely to wander around, as we say “purposelessly,” but this is not traveling. Wandering does have a starting place, but having a starting place is not definitive for traveling. If one is traveling for enjoyment, e.g., just going for a walk or taking a ride to enjoy the day, but deliberately ends up back home when finished, there is a destination, and indeed a case of traveling. Having a destination is definitive for a route; a route leads somewhere. When one gets lost, there is still a destination but there is no route. Similarly, while one is searching for a place, there is a destination but the route that leads there is not yet found. 20. Abstracting again from willing and the characteristic of being willed, i.e., the use, the abstractly discernable strip of space that remains has two extreme spots. When something moving along the strip is considered, it is possible to recognize not only the direction of

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movement, but also the spot from which and the spot toward which there is movement. (As just contended, however, the former can be disregarded here because, although wandering has a starting place, only cases of traveling have a willed ending place or destination.) The connection of the strip and the spot toward which there is movement is crucial for traveling. On the level of experiencing, e.g., perceiving, the relation between the strip and the extreme spot toward which there is movement can be called “conduciveness.” The strip leads or conduces to that extreme spot. (The interesting connection of the verb, to conduce, with the noun, conduct, cannot be pursued here.) 21. The selection of expressions is often difficult. Some believe that leading to, conducive, and conduciveness are strictly practical. But it can also be contended that, e.g., a strip along which there is something moving and the extreme spot moved toward are such that the former leads to the latter and hence there is conduciveness in what is experienced and volitional or praxothetic characteristics that make a route practical is founded on that. The words end and means are similarly used for the things with their praxothetic characteristics, but also often used for the cores that are foundational. 22. When the naturalistic abstraction is relaxed, the route-as-traveled is again predominantly willed as conducive to the destination; the route is a means and the destination is an end. This is a matter of volition. Choosing a route will typically be founded as well upon a valuational preferring of one way to the destination over possible others. On these levels, the destination has not only intrinsic use, but also intrinsic value, and the route is not only willed for the sake of the destination, but also valued for the sake of the destination, i.e., it has extrinsic value as well as extrinsic use. 23. Is there not a parallel contrast of the intrinsic and extrinsic for belief? This is, finally, the question for the present essay. If there is, then the belief characteristic of a thing believed-in as conduced to, e.g., the extreme spot moved toward, is intrinsic, and the belief characteristic of the route believed-in as conducive to it, e.g., the strip of space, is

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extrinsic. In other words, if conduciveness is believed in, there are two things, the one conduced to that is believed in for its own sake and the other one conducive to it that is believed in for the sake of the other thing. 24. With objectivation, the destination is a place that can be traveled to and it is at least implied that there is a route to it. Encounterings and things-as-encountered have four discernable strata in them, three thetic or positional strata, i.e., willing, valuing, and believing (in broad significations), and experiencing. If one wants to understand, much less justify the positings, one needs to distinguish and describe these strata. Search for the relations of foundation and motivation on the basis of experiencing can then begin. In the stratum of belief, there are belief characteristics in the thing-as-believed-in that can be objectivated. When they are believed in as in connections of conducing and conduced to, things in conduciveness connections have intrinsic and extrinsic existence analogous to how things can have intrinsic and extrinsic values and uses. Perhaps a chart to summarize the distinctions and relations described in this essay will be helpful: ENCOUNTERING | THINGS-AS ENCOUNTERED Willing | Intrinsic and extrinsic uses Valuing | Intrinsic and extrinsic values Believing | ditto for belief characteristics Experiencing | X as conducing to Y IV. CONCLUDING REMARK 25. The above analysis does not hold merely for routes and destinations. It is easily extended to causes and effects, so that effects have intrinsic existence and causes have extrinsic existence. One can believe in fire and one can believe in boiling water, but there is a difference

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when one believes in a connection of fire leading to boiling water. Then again, perhaps a case can be made in phenomenological theory of logic for premises in arguments having extrinsic and the conclusions they lead to having intrinsic existence. The example of travel is good, however, because it shows that the existential statuses of the conduced to and the conducing also occur in real connections other than causal ones.

10. When Does the End not Justify the Means? 1. It is often said that the end does not justify the means. Sometimes the reference is to how a particular end does not justify some proposed means and sometimes a general maxim is expressed. But what is an end, what is a means, how do they relate, and how are they justified? These questions can be investigated phenomenologically. It will not be necessary to leave the natural or, better, “worldly” attitude, but one will need to adopt the theoretical attitude, to reflect noetico-noematically, to describe eidetically, and to submit results for replication by others. To agree or disagree wholly or in part with the results of this reflective analysis, the hearer or reader will need to reflect noetico-noematically in the theoretical attitude on the relevant things themselves and she may also find ways to correct or extend it by the same approach. 2. A main example will be useful: One can seek to own a house to live in and to gain the money to buy one (a) by working, saving, and investing wisely or (b) by robbing a bank. In such a case, owning a house to live in is the ultimate end, money is the intermediate end, and legal and illegal means are under consideration. 3. A set of terms will be introduced in the first part of the following exposition and then an answer to the question posed in the above title will be ventured. I. TERMS FOR ANALYSIS 4. What can be said about ends and means before the question of this analysis is focused in on? In the first place, seeking is a type of willing and willing is an intentional or, better, “intentive” process and, more precisely, an abstract component that predominates in a concrete intentive process (Erlebnis) and gives it such a title. What is distinctive

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of a willing is that what is intended to in it is in the future. One cannot will something in the present or, better, the “now,” much less in the past. One might strive to change thinking about a past event, but that thinking to be changed is in the future of the willing of it. One also cannot directly will ideal or, better, “atemporal” things, such as universal essences, although one can, again, will future intendings to them. 5. Unlike willings, however, valuings and believings are not exclusively intentive to things in the future. Their things can be atemporal as well as temporal and, if temporal, in the now, the past, or the future. Set aside atemporal things, there are, finally, experiencings of things in the now, in the past, and even in the future, if the concept of experiencing is broadened to include (a) necessarily empty or blind experiencing and/ or (b) imagining or, better, “fictive experiencing,” which conceptual broadenings can be useful. 6. In the second place, while we typically do not concern ourselves with what might justify willing, we can always in principle do so. In constitutive phenomenology, justification is sought in how positings are immediately or mediatedly founded upon and motivated by experiencings. When experiencing plays the justificatory role, it can be called evidence, although “evidencing” may be clearer. Founding and motivating are both necessary for justification, willings without foundation can occur in habit or tradition, but willings without at least vague motivation do not occur at all. 7. Willing is often routine, so that, e.g., “of course” everybody seeks to own a house to live in, but the means of gaining money to buy one, i.e., hard work vs. bank robbery, are sometimes deliberated about. Most of the time, however, our ends and our means are accepted from others without justification, so that we usually proceed simply according to the examples and recommendations of our parents, teachers, friends, etc. But operations of willing in which we engage as I’s are more readily observed and analyzed than routine processes and will accordingly be focused on here. Most of our ends and means also pertain to collective life, i.e., to the groups whose processes we participate in. But, again, individual volition can and should be begun with when the concern is

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with justification because that is where such things are most originally disclosed reflectively for each of us. 8. There are several interesting parallels between willings and valuings. Valuings are also components giving their names to concrete intentive processes. They are accessible through what constitutive phenomenologists call “noetic reflection,” i.e., reflective analysis of intentive processes as they are intentive, which are also called “noeses.” Correlative with such reflecting on noeses there is what such researchers call “noematic reflection,” i.e., reflective analysis of things-as-intended-to, which are also called “noemata.” Among other things, noematic analysis can disclose the difference between the valuing and willing of a house of one’s own to live in and the values and uses that such a thing intended to has. 9. Values are often spoken of, but “uses” as used here may have an unfamiliar signification. While “value” tends to denote intrinsic values, but is traditionally broadened, “use” tends to denote extrinsic uses, which is what means have, but this too can be generalized to cover two species under which fall the intrinsic uses of ends as well as the extrinsic uses of means just as “value” as well has extrinsic and intrinsic types. 10. Uses can be positive or negative according to whether the things used are used totally or in part to create, foster, improve, or preserve other things or whether they are used totally or in part to destroy, impede, harm, or prevent things. It can also happen that things have neutral uses, e.g., be neither helpful nor harmful. (“Things” as used here include not only inanimate things but also nonhuman as well as human animals, e.g., positively speaking, hunting dogs and allies or, negatively speaking, vermin and enemies.) The values of things can analogously be positive, negative, or neutral. Moreover, they can be objectivated and then predicated of subject matters with the result that a thing can be said to be good, bad, or indifferent or, better, valuationally neutral. This is like a thing being said to be positively, negatively, or neutrally useful. And apathy or indifference correlating intentively with neutral values is not unheard of.

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11. As said, both values and uses can be intrinsic or extrinsic. Thus a coin or a person can have aesthetic value and be said to be beautiful or ugly apart from any connections with commerce or social relationships, i.e., in their own rights. By contrast, a weapon or warrior can be valued for its potential effect on enemies. Analogously, just as something can be valued either for its own sake or for the sake of some other valued thing, e.g., one’s own house, a thing can be willed for its own sake and other things, e.g., (a) working and saving or (b) bank robbing, can be willed for the sake of house owning. In one signification, if something has extrinsic value or extrinsic use, something else must have intrinsic value or intrinsic use, but it is important to recognize that something can have value or use without relation to something else that is valued or willed. Values and valuing and how they are justified is a central concern of the theory of value or axiology, which includes aesthetics, and uses and willing and how they are justified is a central concern of the theory of action or praxiology, which includes ethics and politics. 12. These parallels further extend to believing and things-as-believed-in. Upon noematic reflective analysis, things-as-believed-in include abstractly discernable belief characteristics, which are analogous to uses and values. A thing can be believed in for its own sake and thus apart from connections with other things and then it has an intrinsic belief characteristic. When something is believed in as causing an effect, e.g., money paid producing home ownership, the cause has an extrinsic belief characteristic and the effect has an intrinsic belief characteristic. When a belief characteristic is objectivated, phenomenologists call it “existence,” so that “I believe in the gods” correlates with the assertion, “The gods exist.” There is a great deal of concern in most science and technology as well as in everyday life with what can cause what and in epistemology with how believing in causal connections can be justified. 13. As stated, most willings and, for that matter, most valuings and believings go on habitually for individuals and traditionally for groups. In the latter connection, others institute habits in us, e.g., our mothers teach us to brush our teeth before we go to bed. But there are also personally instituted habits, such as where one routinely carries

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one’s keys. As also stated, we can confine our reflections to operations. These have us ourselves as Is engaged in them and can be passive, as when we engage in music that carries us away, as is said, or active, as when we decide for ourselves how to conduct our lives. 14. There is a harmless equivocation in this sketch that nevertheless deserves comment. When a child is offered candy and eats it, there are no means involved, but there is a goal to her action and the candy can then be said to have intrinsic use and also intrinsic value for her even it does not have them for her in relation to something with extrinsic use or value. “Intrinsic” is then used in two significations, i.e., also in relation to extrinsically useful and valuable things and not in such relations. 15. As partly summarizing the above frame of reference, the following chart of noetic and noematic components may be useful. NOW Willing  Valuing  Believing  Experiencing 

FUTURE intrinsic & extrinsic uses intrinsic & extrinsic values intr. & extr. belief characteristics causes and effects

II. JUSTIFYING THINGS FIRST INTRINSICALLY AND THEN AS ENDS AND MEANS 16. On the basis of the above sketch, questions of justification can be considered more closely. The ultimate question of the present reflective analysis concerns the relations of ends and means where justification is concerned. What are called ends and means in the main example can initially be analyzed separately with respect to justification. 17. Owning a house to live in is something that can be sought. This is plainly a complex thing within which end-means and other relations can be discerned, but it can be treated as a complex whole, as one thing, which it will be here. As sought, owning a house to live in is something that is an end, i.e., it has positive intrinsic use for the person seeking it. The striving to own a house to live in is motivated by a positive valuing

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of such a thing for its own sake and, correlatively, the thing valued has positive intrinsic value. Here “intrinsic” has the first signification distinguished above. If the willing is also founded upon such a valuing, it is somewhat justified. If that valuing is founded upon and motivated by believing, the willing is more deeply justified. This believing does not need here to be a believing in causes and effects, but only in the thing as possible. This believing can be justified by the evidencing of other people owning houses to live in or the feigning of oneself doing so. 18. What of the means in our main example? (a) Working, saving, and investing wisely and (b) the robbing of a bank are also complex things that can be analyzed into manifold processes, but they too can be treated as wholes. These wholes can, moreover, be considered apart from their relations with other things, e.g., not as causes and effects, as ends and means, etc. Thus, one can work and save money without a definite purpose in view, perhaps waiting for an accumulation before considering what to spend it on, and it even seems conceivable that some people rob banks without purposes beyond getting the money. 19. The whole of working hard, saving, and investing is positively useful, but can require considerable time before there is much money accumulated and then one may be ambivalent about that delay even though one believes it possible and one is justified in believing this by feigning oneself or seriously experiencing others doing it. Bank robbing is clearly possible, faster, and some people do it, but it is also stressful and risky, especially where the police are honest and efficient. In this connection, comparative valuing can lead to preferring the legal over the illegal activity and then choosing it as a means. 20. If these remarks suffice to show how what can be connected as ends and means can be separately evidenced and then justifiably believed in, valued, and perhaps even willed for their own sakes, i.e., intrinsically (in one signification), another step can be taken toward answering the question posed in the title of this essay. There seem only two possibilities with respect to that question: Either (a) justified means justify ends or (b) justified ends justify means.

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21. Could getting money by robbing banks or by working hard, etc. justify buying a house to live in rather than, e.g., buying a boat in which to sail around the world? Or suppose one gets an unexpected inheritance. While getting a house to live in requires money, having money does not require seeking a house to spend it on. There is an expression in American English whereby money can be said to be “burning a hole in one’s pocket,” i.e., demanding to be spent, but in that case, what it needs to be spent on is not specific. If there are only two possibilities and means do not justify ends, then the question at least reduces to whether a justified end can justify means to it. 22. If one justifiably wills owning a house to live in, having the needed money and then making the efforts to get it are required. Besides how the end has intrinsic use and value, etc., apart from other things, there is how it has such characteristics in the other signification of “intrinsic,” i.e., when it is correlated with means to it. When owning a house to live in is willed, valued, etc. for its own sake, either (a) working, etc. or (b) bank robbing can be considered as for the sake of the end. If the end is justified, then both means are as well, other things being equal, which they may not be if one prefers legal over illegal activities. 23. If ends do justify means, it is curious that the comment and even the maxim whereby the end does not justify the means is heard so often. What could this signify? Once more, there seem two possibilities. One is that a particular end does not justify a proposed means, e.g., owning a house to live in does not justify spending all one’s spare money on books. The other possibility is that there is another justified end that outweighs the one in view, e.g., using one’s accumulated money not to buy a house but to send one’s children to college. Then one end does not justify a particular means because there is a different and superior end that justifies use of that means. 24. This answer leads to the question of how one end can be superior to another, this is a different connection than that between ends and means, and comparative valuing would seem to play an important role in it, but this issue calls for reflective analysis beyond the scope of the present essay.

11. Tolerance Reflectively Analyzed 1. The expression “reflective analysis” is my attempt to capture concisely what phenomenology is as an approach. In a recently published book of the same name, I attempt an extensive introductory reflective analysis of reflective analysis itself. The present essay is another exercise in reflective analysis or phenomenology. 2. Some colleagues have heard me complain in recent years about research that is considered by its authors to be phenomenological when it is merely scholarship on texts by grand figures and not investigation of any things themselves. Such research is merely scholarship not only because it is about texts, but also because it relies on methods no different than those used to interpret the work of Aristotle, Descartes, or Kant. Its method is not that of phenomenological investigation, which is, of course, reflective analysis. Philology is not phenomenology. 3. And, in my opinion, what phenomenology most needs today are modest reflective analyses that can show by example what phenomenology can do. Here I am undertaking one of these on the cultural attitude called tolerance. 4. One can attempt merely to describe tolerance phenomenologically, but to be philosophical, one’s account also needs to address how the thing in question is justified. Accordingly, the present essay has two main parts: the first is on what tolerance is, and the second explores how it can be justified. I. WHAT IS TOLERANCE? 5. Most of us have some sense of what tolerance is, so the task here is chiefly one of clarifying something already encountered more or less well. The effort of clarification involves reflective observation and the feigning of examples. Sometimes such an effort can begin with

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a dictionary definition and this can be done here. According to The American Heritage College Dictionary (3rd ed., Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993), tolerance is “The capacity for or practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others.” Most would probably agree that this is a fairly good definition, while also acknowledging that it could be more elaborate. Thus it can be added that the values and valuings encountered in others can also be tolerated in tolerance. Beyond this, what might “the capacity for or practice of,” “recognizing,” and also “respecting” in this definition signify? 6. Before looking into these matters, it may be stated methodologically that the approach of reflective analysis has a twofold theme consisting of encounterings (noeses) and, correlatively, things-as-encountered (noemata), and that investigation can then be guided by recognizing two parallel or correlative sets of components: on the one hand, there are the abstractly discernable components that are, in the broad significations experiencings, believings, valuings, and willings within any concrete encountering and, on the other hand, there are the abstractly discernable manners of givenness, belief characteristics, values, and functional characters or, better, uses in any concrete things-as-encountered. If one is clear about what experiencing, believing, valuing, and willing in the broad significations are, then one is better able to find what a phenomenologist has reflectively observed and described and thus what one is invited to search for in attempting to verify, correct, and refine an account. 7. The words “capacity” and “practice” in the dictionary definition can be clarified (a) by recognizing what are best called attitudes, which involve repeatable patterns of encountering; (b) by recognizing that the thetic or positional attitudes are specified according to whether it is believing, valuing, or willing that predominates in them; (c) by recognizing that attitudes can be actualized or inactual; and (d) by answering the question of what sort of attitude tolerance is. 8. An analogy may help clarify the last point mentioned: the experiential attitude of recollection is actualized when one is actually

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remembering something previously encountered, but it is inactual when one is instead perceiving or expecting something. And for positional attitudes, when one is in, for example, a doxic attitude, and thus predominantly engaged in believing in something, the attitudes of the volitional-practical sort, in which one would be predominantly engaged in willing something, and those of the affective-valuational sort, in which one would predominantly be valuing something, are inactual. With this clarification of the contrast between actualized and inactual attitudes, the words in the dictionary definition, “the capacity for or practice of…,” can be replaced by “the inactual or actualized attitude of….” 9. While tolerance is a possible attitude that is actualized or inactual, it appears not to be a necessity. In other words, one can feign a person who has no attitude of tolerance. But many people in many societies today not only have this attitude toward some things, but also deliberately teach it to others. Then tolerance is an acquired or habitual attitude; it is part of some traditions, and can thus be said to be cultural. If this is so, and if it is justified, then it is right to foster it. 10. If tolerance is an attitude, if an attitude is composed of encounterings, and if encounterings are intentional (or, better, intentive)—i.e., encounterings of things in the broad signification whereby anything can be a thing, then attitudes are attitudes toward things, and it can be asked what a case of tolerance is an attitude toward. By the amended dictionary definition used as the point of departure here, the things encountered in tolerance are the beliefs, values, and practices of others. These can be more precisely described as believings and things-asbelieved-in by others; valuings and things-as-valued by others; and willings and things-as-willed by others. Concisely put, “the attitudes of others” are what are tolerated in tolerance. What the tolerated attitude is an attitude toward then becomes central because it specifies the tolerance. For example, a vegetarian might tolerate carnivores. 11. “Tolerance” might be used in an extended signification for cases in which inanimate things are focal, such as the sand in one’s shoes

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chafing one’s feet while one walks on the beach, but in the broad signification it is restricted to animate things. What one tolerates may also include a nonhuman animal, e.g., a dirty dog sleeping in the bed of a sick child and comforting her. What tolerance in a strict signification is directed toward are the beliefs, values, and practices of other humans. The present initial analysis will be chiefly confined to that signification. 12. What might “recognizing and respecting” in the definition signify? These two words refer to different matters. Recognizing can be taken to refer chiefly to experiencing and belief. The vegetarian, for example, recognizes that the carnivore is willing to eat meat, and in contrast, the nonvegetarian believes that the vegetarian is not willing to eat meat. Attempts to justify such believings can be undertaken on the basis of hearing what the other says as well as what she is observed to do at meals. We readily understand the attitudes of others in most cases. There may be more to what “recognizing” can signify with respect to tolerance, but it suffices here to take it as referring to believing along with its evidential basis in comprehending the speech from others as well as perceiving the actions of others. 13. The thing apparently referred to with the word “respecting” in the initial dictionary definition also needs clarification. Then the whole situation becomes considerably more complex and interesting because of how valuing and values are involved. As already implied, tolerance is a social as well as cultural attitude. Both the tolerating person and the person tolerated have relevant attitudes that include valuings intentive to things that correlatively have values. There are two values in tolerance. On the first level, there is a difference between the valuing in the tolerating, and the valuing in the attitude tolerated. If they were the same, it would not be a case of tolerance, but of sympathy. 14. Whether or not the valuings predominate in the attitude, it can be asked whether the ones of interest within the attitude of tolerating are positive, negative, or neutral. Here neutral valuing can be excluded; if the allegedly tolerant person was entirely apathetic about the thing in question, it would also not be a case of tolerance. This leaves positive

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and negative valuing. The first-level valuing involved in tolerance is comparative or, more specifically, contrastive. Thus each of the intolerant people in our example is prepared to say, “My attitude toward the eating of meat is good and yours is bad.” Each of the parties positively values her own attitudes toward meat eating at the same time that the vegetarian disvalues aspects of the diet of the carnivore or omnivore and the nonvegetarian disvalues the herbivore’s diet. 15. Perhaps not in all cases, but in this sample case of vegetarianism vs. nonvegetarianism, both sides can usually go on to give reasons— the vegetarian referring, perhaps, to health advantages, environmental benefits, and the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals and the nonvegetarian referring, for example, to traditional diets and the genetically determined instincts in omnivores. There are also counter-arguments. Such arguments, however, are arguments for attitudes toward meat eating and not attempts to justify tolerance itself. 16. Tolerance involves more than the complex first-level contrastive valuing composed of positive self-valuing and negative other-valuing. This can best be seen in relation to the component predominating in the attitude of respect also mentioned in the dictionary definition. Even though the types of valuing involved are essential to it, the attitude of respect is a volitional or practical attitude, one in which willing predominates. This may not be obvious in the many cases where the thing respected—the other’s attitude—does not require conspicuous support, i.e., where one simply lets the attitude of the other be, i.e., volitional neutrality, but it can be discerned through reflective analysis. 17. Neutral letting-be is a volitional-practical neutrality such that even though one disagrees with the other’s attitude, one does not will against it. Praxically negative attitudes might include arguing against the other attitude, discouraging inclusion of particular food items on restaurant menus, engaging in political actions, or even resorting to terrorism. But if there is such negative action against other attitudes, it is not a case of tolerance but of intolerance. The same must also be said about aggressively promoting one’s own attitude against those of

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others, “aggressively promoting” being more than making one’s attitude known politely, teaching it to one’s children, and urging equal representation for meat or for vegetables in menus. Thus, tolerance must be classified as a predominantly volitional-practical attitude. Despite the importance that valuing also has within it, it is always a neutral willing of the attitude of the other that predominates there. The tolerant person refrains from opposing the attitudes that she disvalues. 18. Moreover, even though tolerance is a practical attitude, yet another valuing can be discerned within it, one that functions at a different level than the first-level contrastive valuing described. Reflective observation discloses that tolerance include altogether three valuings. They are involved in two combinations. First, there is the reflexive valuing by which the self’s own attitude is approved of. Second, there is the valuing by which the other’s attitude is disapproved of. And third, there is a valuing of something else. If there were only self-valuing and other-disvaluing, then willings and actions against the other would indeed be motivated for both parties, but with tolerance this does not happen. Vegetarians could intolerantly oppose carnivorous others and nonvegetarians could intolerantly oppose herbivorous others. But when the parties are tolerant they do not do so. 19. From what has already been said, it is clear that tolerance is not an attitude in which the own and other attitudes are valued equally, i.e., neither the vegetarian nor the nonvegetarian would say, “We have different attitudes each of which is as good as the other.” Rather, there is the comparative valuing of one’s own attitude, whichever it is, over the other’s attitude. And still, when there is tolerance, there is no willing against others of different attitudes. Why? 20. When the third valuing comes into play, it overrides the valuing that otherwise would have motivated willing against the other person. This third and overriding valuing is essential for tolerance. Why, for example, does a person of one position not act against somebody of the opposite position on the eating of meat? At one extreme, a vegetarian might not kill a meat eater because the positive valuing of human life

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overrides the disvaluing of meat eating. At the other extreme, a meat eater might not ridicule a vegetarian because she prefers not to disrupt the pleasant meal, the pleasant meal thus being valued higher than striking a blow against vegetarianism. Then again, sand chafing feet within walking shoes can be preferred to the burning sand and the comforting of the sick child can override the disvaluing of the dirty dog in the bed. It is this third and overriding valuing that motivates the neutral willing in the practical respecting found in tolerance. 21. The overriding valuing in tolerance is thus a valuing directed toward something other than the disvalued attitude of the other: something is valued more highly than either the aggressive advancement of one’s own attitude or the impeding of the opposite attitude, and this valuing is the stronger when it comes to motivating action. And the willing or action here is indeed a type of respect, one that is action actively neither in support of nor in opposition to the attitude of the other that is respected in the case of tolerance. 22. The dictionary definition taken as point of departure—namely, “The capacity for or practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others”—has now been clarified with respect to inactual and actualized attitudes; positive, negative, and neutral believing, valuing, and willing; respecting as a predominantly volitional-practical attitudes, involving noninterference with the attitudes of others; and higher-level valuings that can override other valuings. II. THE PROBLEM OF THE JUSTIFICATION OF TOLERANCE 23. For a person raised in a culture of tolerance, the question, “Why be tolerant?” might seem odd. In philosophy, however, even the most taken-for-granted things need to be questioned. This “why question” can, of course, be construed as a question of causes or influences. Then one is interested in how a person who is tolerant came to have that attitude. Such a question can indeed be relevant for ethnology, psychology,

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sociology, or another cultural science. Answers to that version of the why question are also crucial for practical disciplines such as politics and pedagogy. For philosophy, however, the “why question” is construed as a question of rationality or justification. In phenomenology, justification is a matter of the relation between the experiencing playing the role of evidencing (Evidenz), on the one hand, and the believing, valuing, and willing directly or indirectly founded upon and motivated by such experiencing, on other hand. 24. Although one also needs to observe how things-as-encountered have manners of givenness, belief characteristics, values, and uses that can be objectivated if one wishes to formulate arguments, the problem of justification is clearest with respect to the components within the encountering, and thus the attitude. 25. To begin with, there is the epistemological question of the justification of believing in, for example, an attitude toward eating meat. The believing in question might be intentive to the self’s own attitude or intentive to another’s attitude. Self-observation would be relied on in the former case and, in the latter, there is reflection on others based on observing their public eating behavior as well as comprehending their linguistic expressions. The question of epistemological justification is a question of whether the believings can be founded upon and motivated by evidencing of these sorts. As mentioned, it is not difficult in most cases to justify believing that the other is an herbivore or an omnivore. 26. That such direct and indirect experiencing can serve as evidencing that justifies believing is plausible for most trained in Western philosophy, which is not to say that extensive reflective analysis is not still called for. Furthermore, many people are similarly comfortable with the justification whereby valuing justifies willing or action. If one chooses chocolate ice-cream and is asked to justify that choice, it is a prima facie justification to say, “I like the taste of chocolate more than the tastes of other flavors, i.e., I prefer it.” The attempts at justifying herbivorous and omnivorous actions might also begin in this way, but

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then go on to claims about health and environmental consequences, genetic inheritances, culinary traditions, etc. 27. These claims raise epistemological questions of believings about what conduces to what. In parallel fashion, there are, axiologically speaking, intrinsic values—e.g., for someone who enjoys chocolate, the positive intrinsic value of its taste—and extrinsic values, e.g., the negative extrinsic value of fattening food where obesity has intrinsic negative value. 28. An acute problem for philosophy is the justification of valuing, more than a few saying that “there is no accounting for taste.” To be sure, there are many things that are beyond justification. For example, some people prefer to back into parking places in parking lots while others prefer to park their cars facing inward. The many things that are indeed merely matters of taste would entail skepticism if there were not also some things that were not merely subjective in this way. It is justified for all sane and informed adult humans whether the gender, society, social class, etc., that there is a difference between health and illness, that health is justifiably preferred, and that it is justifiably chosen over illness. With such a significant case of justified valuing and willing, skepticism is refuted. Is tolerance such a thing, or is it merely a matter of taste? 29. Although people raised in a culture of tolerance may speak of being tolerant in general, reflective analysis discloses that tolerance itself only occurs as specified. Exactly what is being tolerated, and for the sake of what higher good, will vary. Thus what can be offered here is not a justification for tolerance in general, but a method of justification that might be employed in particular cases. The thing encountered in tolerance is, as established above, the attitude of an other or others, and this will always be a specific attitude, e.g., the vegetarianism in vegetarians. Upon reflection, that which is encountered in such an encountering, i.e., the attitude tolerated in the other, can be analyzed with respect to its being experienced, believed, valued, and willed by the self who tolerates it. As tolerated, the attitude tolerated then has its own manner

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of givenness, belief characteristics, values, and uses for the tolerating person. The other’s attitude is indirectly experienced on the basis of perceiving behavior and comprehending linguistic expressions. It can have positive belief characteristics for the person tolerant of it and thereby be said to have positive existence, or one can simply say that it exists. 30. As established, the practical characteristic or use for the tolerant person of the attitude tolerated is neither positive nor negative but neutral. Then one abstains from either supporting or opposing the attitude in question of the other. When this neutral willing does indeed predominate, so that tolerance is a practical attitude, there is an interesting complexity concerning the values involved. On a lower level, for the tolerant person her own attitude has positive value and she can say that it is good, while the attitude tolerated has negative value for her and she can say it is bad. On a higher level, however, there is something (e.g., the preservation of human life or of a pleasant dining atmosphere) that has a higher and positive value for the tolerant person, and one can speak of such more highly valued things and their positive values in arguing for the justification of tolerance. Thus the question of justification must above all address the third, higher-level good and show not only how it is positive, but also how it outranks the lower and bad attitude in the other person. One must also examine the higher end and the intrinsic value and existence of that which is tolerated. Whether actualized or an inactual disposition, tolerance is always encountered as specified, and the work of justification must discern and examine the higher-level value involved in each specific case. III. CLOSING REMARKS 31. Clearly the above analysis needs to be deepened. For example, is there not an antecedent positive willing of the neutral willing characteristic of tolerance? But there is space on this occasion for only two additional comments. In the first place, is there something that is nonrelative in the area of tolerance somewhat like how health is nonrelatively valuable? Here at least one thing comes to mind. This is the

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form of intolerance called genocide, i.e., the attempt of some peoples to destroy other peoples, such as the invading Europeans did to the aboriginal peoples in the Americas.29 No doubt many tolerated that intolerance in that era, but can that tolerance of intolerance be justified? 32. Secondly, one might distinguish between shallow and deep tolerance. In the former, one has been conditioned to be tolerant of various things, many of them being quite significant, e.g., differences of religion, and one can also have learned strong arguments in support of these serious tolerances. These arguments would be epistemological and praxiological as well as axiological. Still, they are chiefly arguments received in childhood, when one was taught by others to be tolerant. Such a type of tolerance ought not to be disparaged, but it can still be mistaken and naïve. It needs constantly to be examined. 33. In deep tolerance, as it may be called, it is recognized, on the other hand, that whether or not to be tolerant in old as well as new situations, on the other hand, and how tolerance might be justified in each case, on the other hand, are both critical tasks—indeed, infinite critical tasks. 34. With rapid social change in the present era one faces situations where previously overlooked differences—e.g., the different cultural attitudes encountered in men and women, the different attitudes toward other ethnic groups, or the different attitudes toward nonhuman animals—become focal and new types of tolerances may be called for. In such cases, one recognizes that there is an especially pressing need for justifying not only the first-level self-approval and other-disapproval, but also the second-level positive valuing that overrides the other-disapproval and motivates the mode of willing that makes tolerance a practical attitude in which neutral willing predominates. Whether to be tolerant or intolerant is constantly a problem for reflective people.

29 See David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).