TRANSLATION AS A CULTURAL-PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM: TOWARDS A

PHENOMENOLOGY OF CULTURE
Author(s): Tadashi Ogawa
Source: The Monist, Vol. 78, No. 1, Cultural Universals (JANUARY 1995), pp. 18-29
Published by: Oxford University Press
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 TRANSLATION AS A
CULTURAL-PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM:
TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF CULTURE1

The topic of translation is in my view not only a linguistic problem, but also
a problem in the philosophy of culture. In the lexicon of a foreign language we
may find an unfamiliar word that designates an object that is unknown in the eyes
of our own culture. Instruments employed in a religious ceremony of the Catholic
church, for example, an "encensoir," (censer), "reposoir," (temporary altar), or
"ostensoir," (monstrance) will have no corresponding word in the Japanese
language. But you must translate words of this type if you wish to translate
Baudelaire's poem "Harmonie du soir."2 If these Catholic words are translated
into Japanese, then we must use some traditional Japanese word as a rough equiv
alent of the original word, or we have to make up some new word in order to
effect a translation. Through this, however, the single signans of the original word
yields two meanings, since the new use of the old word or the new word must
somehow carry the traditional meaning also. In the first case two meanings come
to be involved, meanings derived from two different cultures. In the second case,
the new word must somehow be explained in terms of Japanese, if it is to bear the
new linguistic load.
The topic of translation comes to the fore because we are living today in an
age of cultural diversity and of ever-increasing cultural confrontation; we must
relate translation to the phenomenon of the differences of cultures. My essay
pertains, therefore, to the topic of "translation as a cultural-philosophical prob
lem." My starting point has to be a linguistic one, and I will begin by sketching
the effective range of the translation problem from the linguistic point of view.
But the bridging of cultural differences is a no less crucial part of the activity of
translation, and this fact requires an explanation of how cultural differences
manifest themselves and in which space they happen. In order to make a transla
tion, we must presuppose that there is something in common between cultures
and languages, in spite of all their differences. I shall refer to this shared
something as "the intercultural invariance" or "the cultural a priori." I shall argue
that this a priori is such as to underlie every cultural difference. It is a concrete

"Translation as a Cultural-Philosophical Problem:

Towards a Phenomenology of Culture" by Tadashi Ogawa,
The Monist, vol. 78, no. 1, pp. 18-29. Copyright ? 1995, THE MONIST, La Salle, Illinois 61301.

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 TRANSLATION AS A CULTURAL PROBLEM 19

a priori, inherent in its realizations, and in every case accompanying those

elements which vary from one culture to another. But what method should be
used in order to elucidate this intercultural invariance? My answer is that we can
use the method of eidetic reduction or of the intuition of essences in the Husser
lian sense, the very same method that was used by the structuralist-linguist
Roman Jakobson in working out the dimensions of his masterpiece in
phonology.3
My article therefore has two part: In Part I shall sketch the linguistic aspects
of the phenomenon of translation; in Part II I shall show why we must accept the
phenomenon of intercultural invariance in the domains of language and culture.

A translation is an activity of transposition. We must distinguish the action

of translation from the product of this action, and here we may recall the concept
of textual fixation introduced by E. Coseriu.4 Translation as a human activity is
effected between cultures and languages. Any translation presupposes two sorts
of invariance, which we might refer to as intercultural and interlingual, respec
tively. These two sorts of invariance have to be brought to light in the process of
translation. Only on this basis can we effect the transfer of the meaning com
ponent belonging to one language and culture into the framework of another
language and culture.
Translation is possible, according to Jakobson, in three dimensions:5

1) Intra-lingual translation: this is a matter of paraphrasing by means of

other words?which is to say of the interpretation of one verbal sign
through the aid of other signs in the same language. This occurs when
ever we give an explanation of an unknown word.

2) Interlingual translation: the interpretation of a verbal sign with the aid of

another language. This is translation in the normal sense.

3) Intersemiotic translation: the interpretation of a linguistic sign with the

help of a non-verbal sign system (or vice versa: the interpretation of a
non-verbal sign with the help of a verbal sign).

It is interlingual translation which is the human activity which yields

authentic translation. What are the pre-conditions for such authentic translation?
Human cultures are differentiated. Some would identify the culture with the
language, or more precisely they would see the essence of culture or language as

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 20 TADASHI OGAWA

being entirely intertwined. This however is to fall prey to a linguistic and cultural
relativism of the sort that is conveyed, for example, in the hypothesis of Sapir and
Whorf. When a culture is identified with its language, this results in a closed
cultural ball which excludes all other cultures and the sense components which
belong to these other cultures. If interlingual translation is to be possible at all,
then there must be something common between the relevant cultures and
languages. Indeed there is a hard core of invariants common to all cultures:
eating, sleeping, dwelling, having clothes on etc. are invariants of this sort, as is
shown by Malinowski in his Scientific Theory of Culture.6 It is this invariance, I
shall claim, to which we are directed in the activity of translation, and through
which every intercultural and interlingual understanding is made possible. It is
this invariance which makes it possible for us to read Dostoevski's novels or
Shakespeare's plays, notwithstanding our own spatio-temporal distance from
these works as originally conceived by their respective authors.
Human beings are tied to language via objectified sense and meaning. A sign
which carries no meaning is not a part of language. There are, as we have seen,
certain signs in one language which find no correspondent in another language.
But then it is always possible to let such signs be understood via verbal explana
tion and paraphrasing. Only certain special forms, e.g., the gender of nouns, may
perhaps be impossible to translate. For example the sun (die Sonne) of German is
feminine, but it is masculine in French (le soleil) and Japanese has no gender for
its nouns and adjectives at all. The translator is of course aware of such factors,
and this awareness plays an important role in his/her effecting the right transla
tion and in determining what are the reasonable claims we can make upon a
translation. This might appear rather obvious, but Western readers would be
amazed by the difficulties, resulting from the differences in linguistic structure,
facing translators from an Oriental language into a Western one, and vice versa.
On this basis I will now propose the following three theses:

a) Language presupposes an interlingual a priori.

b) Culture presupposes an intercultural a priori.

c) It is on the basis of these that translation between languages and cultures

is possible.

As a system of signs, language has two aspects?the signons and the

signatum?which are as inseparable as are the two sides of a single coin. The
signons is that moment of the sign through which it comes to sensual appearance
as sound or written mark. This signons is always perceptible. The signatum is the

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 TRANSLATION AS A CULTURAL PROBLEM 21

sense or concept that is expressed by the sign: its translatable aspect.7 The
signatum is indeed embedded in the verbal system, but it has something in
common with a foreign language insofar as it participates in an ideal form. What
is shared in common is nothing other than the interlingual-intercultural invariance
referred to above. This is something highly abstract, though we can come to an
understanding of what it involves by appealing to what Husserl calls "assimilat
ing apperception," a term of art introduced by Husserl in the third part of his
Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity. Husserl is here discussing the manner in
which alien bodies and alien environments and their constituent objects appear to
us, for example when we travel in remote regions. The interlingual-intercultural
invariance is a "functioning a priori" put to work when we identify certain kinds
of things in a foreign cultural environment on the basis of what we are familiar
with in our own. A European can, for example, exercise assimilating appercep
tion while recalling, when confronted with pieces of raw fish on a Japanese table,
that the Dutch, too, eat raw herring.8 While the invariances capable of being
grasped in such a case are abstract and conceptual, they at the same time manifest
themselves in history. Indeed, if we take them together, then we might describe
them, with Husserl, as together constituting the "style" of what it is to have a
history.9 The interlingual-intercultural invariance is, therefore, both general
(because it runs through all of history) and concrete (because it is having a history
itself).
This ultimate a priori (what all cultures share in common in virtue of having
a history) can be understood and realized in different ways. But as the general
style of human life, of the human being in the world of his environment as a
cultural-historical being, it is not affected by any cultural difference. Thus, for
example, every human being is familiar with and constantly lives through the
schema: motivation-achievement-fulfilment or impulse-activity-satisfaction,10
i.e., the schema of intentions.11 This schema may receive different implementa
tion in different cultures, but it is implemented in every culture. The human being
has his family; he lives in a society that is ruled by norms. On the basis of the in
tercultural a priori any culture is able to understand any other culture and express
with its own language what is thereby understood.
Translation refers to the things of the environment, to states of affairs, to
mental events. For instance in Dostoevski's novel Crime and Punishment there
can be seen streets, lanes, bridges, a river, infinite repulsiveness and youthful
imagination. But everything is tinged with Russian. We Japanese can, however,
understand this world of Raskolnikov even from a large spatio-temporal distance.
For every description refers to two aspects of the culture: the interlingual-inter
cultural a priori on the one hand, and the cultural-historical differences, here with
a Russian tinge, on the other. Every cultural language has the interlingual a pri

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22 TADASHI OGAWA

ori: nouns, sentences, and the rules of the structure of grammar, although the
latter may be difficult to capture in the crystal-clear formulas of a universal
grammar.
Translation is possible, we can now state more precisely, only in virtue of
both the interlingual and intercultural a priori. The first a priori shows what is
common among different languages. Every language has something universal,
and it is on this basis that we can understand, learn, and teach not only a foreign
language, but also our own language. The second a priori makes it possible for
us to understand that there are similar objects and similar facts that lie behind dif
ferences of language and culture. Intercultural understanding is thus grounded in
intercultural parallelism.12 For instance, it is possible for a Japanese to identify a
Russian tea-cooking device known as a "samovar" on the basis of his acquain
tance with a different-looking Japanese instrument for making tea. Similarly, it is
possible for him to understand Catherine's passionate love for Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights (" . . . because he [Heathcliff] is more myself than I am.")13

II

Our question can now be formulated thus: How do we grasp the a priori of
language and culture? How does this a priori appear to us? What is to be our the
oretical approach to the intercultural parallelism?
As already indicated, I would like to answer these questions by starting out
from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, more especially from his method
of eidetic reduction or "intuition of essences."14 Indeed it is on the basis of my
interpretation of the Husserlian method of eidetic reduction that I arrived at my
conception of the intercultural parallelism itself. The nature and limits of the in
tercultural parallelism and of the cultural a priori are established via the
phenomenological method of the intuition of essence. Husserl calls this method
also "the intuition of ideas" (Erfahrung und Urteil, ? 87a) and explains that the
general essence so intuited and taken hold of is the eidos, the idea in Plato's sense
of the word (loc. cit.), and the technique of intuiting ideas is called "ideation."
Husserl regarded free variation as the fundamental preliminary to the
intuition of an essence. The process of variation can be described in terms of three
stages:15
(1)1 begin with a chosen example?a table, given in perception or imagina
tion. I then allow the starting example to vary in my mind along all conceivable
dimensions, but always in such a way that it remains a table. Such variation is a
potentially endless open process. Its openness is shown in the fact that the real or
imagined example that is taking as starting point is chosen arbitrarily.

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 TRANSLATION AS A CULTURAL PROBLEM 23

(2) Through all the differences that are yielded by the performance of
variation there will be some invariance?there will be an overlapping, or
"coupling," as Husserl calls it. The progression of variants converges around
what is common in all the variants and there is generated thereby a unity which
binds them together. Starting with a particular table which we see, and going
through a series of other tables which we also see or merely imagine, we eventu
ally arrive at the eidos "table" as "this here necessarily in common."16 If we
started a new process of varying with a new example of a table, we should
discover that the two processes merge into one as far as their result is concerned,
that the variants occurring in either are those of one common eidos.17
(3) The identity of the overlapping moments is then grasped by active
intuition. This identity is the eidos. In grasping it, intuitions which come from the
empirical dimension of what is spatio-temporally defined begin to transcend this
dimension and take in what is ideal.18
How can we make use of this method in relation to the problem of transla
tion and of cultural comparison? An essence, according to Husserl, is brought to
appearance via a process of free variation. The essences treated of by Husserl are
however, as a rule, such as to belong to the realm of what is general and abstract
in Husserl's sense. They are simple essences like: red, square, tone, number. In
contrast to this, the sphere of cultural historicity is a complex part of empirical
reality, and the spheres of ideal generality and real particularity seem to be
separated from each other by a veritable abyss. Must we, then, suppose that the
constitution of the eidetic dimension has nothing to do with the explication of the
historical dimension?
Can we extend Husserl's method in such a way that it will apply also to the
sphere of culture and history? That such an extension is possible follows from the
claim above to the effect that the cultural a priori is at once general-abstract and
concrete-empirical.19 It is this which will explain why, from the Husserlian per
spective, the intuition of essences is possible and useful for the purposes of
cultural comparison, and is indeed such as to make possible comparative inter
cultural analysis in general.
How can we pass from the realm of abstract ideality to the realm of histori
cal meaning or sense? To answer this question we must examine more closely the
concept of similarity or of identity-in-variations that is involved in the process of
eidetic variation.
In the process of free variation we eventually arrive at an invariant identity
in that manifold of variants through which we proceed. The starting point of free
variation is an arbitrarily chosen example. In free phantasy modifications of this
starting example are produced. These modifications are new images, similar to
the image which served as a starting point. There is both a passive and an active

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24 TADASHI OGAWA

dimension to the process of generating this series of successively modified

images. Activity is involved, clearly, in our making ever new images appear.20
But it is passivity that, according to Husserl, provides the ground to all such
activity and makes it possible. For in order that phantasy can produce images
which are similar to the starting-image, a certain similarity-synthesis must
already have taken place. A similarity had as it were to be already apprehended
in a passive pre-objective consciousness, a consciousness which is not yet that of
an objectifying subject.21 Not only the active production of new images but also
the active comparing of successive images in objectifying consciousness presup
poses a prior passive "synthesis of similarity" in this sense.
Similarity is on the one hand a form of equality. On the other hand, however,
it also has the moment of inequality which emerges in the act of consciousness as
we contrast unequal determinations one with another. This inequality, too,
appears to us first of all in a passive way, and is then transformed in active
phantasy in such a way that it is brought into relief within the wider context of
the remaining determinations.22
In eidetic variation we find an overlapping between variants; we become
conscious that each variant has parts which it shares with other variants. We see
the identical through the conscious achievement of this overlapping. If an eidos
emerges within our field of consciousness, then this emerging is a fact, it belongs
to what is empirically given. But the identical something which is seen as an
eidos is rooted in that passive dimension of our consciousness which lies always
in the background of our active phenomenological analyses.
In those of Husserl's manuscripts in his last years collected in the third
volume of his Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity in which he analyses our un
derstanding of what is culturally alien or strange, we see the similarity-synthesis
again, but now under the title of "similarity apperception."231 come to an under
standing of the culturally alien person or thing through a passive synthesis of a
certain similarity with me and my cultural environment. I can then assimilate the
strange thing in active consciousness, I can acknowledge the invariance between
what is alien and what pertains to me. Because the variation through which the
identities as invariances appear is prepared for in a passive way.
Passivity is the depth dimension of consciousness in which lies the origin of
the sense of all appearances. It is the "stream," the "flowing along" of a con
sciousness which has no subject correlated to any object of which the subject
would hold this or that to be true. Human life depends on our capability ["Vfcr
moglichkeit"] to reach from passive synthesis in this pre-objective and
pre-predicative stream to an active intentional synthesis; and vice versa, human
life depends on our capability to understand how the results of the intentional
synthesizing are related to the proto-phenomenal stream that is passively given.

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 TRANSLATION AS A CULTURAL PROBLEM 25

All of our intentional life is embedded in the pre-objective dimension of the

passive stream. This dimension is none other than the hidden dimension
described by the anthropologist E. T. Hall who tells the following story:

As a young man, I spent several summers with students making archeological

surveys. . . . Everyone on these expeditions was highly motivated to find stone
artifacts, arrowheads in particular. We marched along in single file with the typical
head-down, ground-scanning gaze of an archaeological field party. In spite of their
high motivation, my students would repeatedly walk right over arrowheads lying on
top of the ground. Much to their chagrin, I would lean down to pick up what they had
not seen simply because I had learned to "attend to" some things and to ignore others.
I had been doing it longer and knew what to look for, yet I could not identify the cues
that made the image of the arrowhead stand out so clearly (loc. cit.)

I interpret this as an example of pre-objective seeing.24 The pre-objective

dimension precedes any intentional objectification and is therefore not perceived.
How, then, can we become aware of it, as a reader might ask? Husserl's answer
would have been: in a pre-objective way, namely passively. How this is done,
however, is a difficult question, submitted by Husserl to his "hermeneutics"25 of
a "sytematische und reine Innenbetrachtung der sich selbst im Au?en '?u?ernden'
Subjektivit?t" [a systematic and pure interior consideration of the subjectivity
that shows itself in the outer world] (Krisis, p. 116.), also referred to as "Zuriick
frage" [questioning back] (Krisis, p. 114), or "Rekonstruktion" (Husserliana XV,
p. 608). The pre-objective dimension provides the deep ground of every culture
and carries latently all cultural phenomena that are explicitly perceivable. We are
born and grow up in a culture in which the depth dimension is not known on the
intentional, objectified level. Every culture has placed blinkers over its own
hidden dimension. We do not know how the passive, pregiven and cultural
context binds us to the peculiarities of our own culture. For we are embedded in
our cultural context in all our daily activities, in our use of gesture in conversa
tion, in the forms of our city life, and so on. It is because of the opacity of the
depth-dimension that it so often happens that there is intercultural friction and
even dispute. Normally we cannot come to the speculative point in which we can
objectify and thematize the depth-dimension of our own respective cultures. In
fact, in order to reach this point, we must overcome our own culture. Only then
do we have the possibility of acknowledging the spell of our own cultural depth
dimension. And the objectification of this passive dimension is all the more easily
achieved the more we transcend our own culture and stand at a distance from it.
Is this act of going-beyond limited to the realm of one's own culture? Or has
the intersubjective depth-dimension an objective reach, so that, in discovering it,
we would be discovering also the intercultural foundation? As should by now be
clear, the depth-dimensions of cultures are in my view not excluded from each

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26 TADASHI OGAWA

other. I do indeed think that it is possible to effect a concrete transcending act

which moves from our own culture to the intercultural identity. This is because
the intercultural invariance is not tied to the sphere of the concrete case but is
conceivable also in a formal and abstract way. That which is invariant in histor
ical development can appear as an abstractly isolatable dependent moment of this
development and as something that is itself constant through history. The
identical a priori at the core of all historical-cultural worlds is at the same time
open to the historically variable figures of different cultures.
At this point I will come back to the question I posed above: What is the
relation of essence-intuition to cultural comparison? In what does cultural com
parison consist, if it relies upon free variation? The comparing act illuminates the
identity-in-difference. In the act of comparing, human thinking executes one of
its most important functions, namely the function of relating one thing to another.
The success of the comparing act relies on the circumstance that the difference
must remain in the field of view at the same time as the sameness. Comparing can
take place only via a relating of the compared entities to each other, or more
precisely in that sort of overcoming their separation from each other which takes
place through the discovery of something which they share in common which
was until that time hidden.
What, then, of culture? Culture refers to the manner of existence of the
human being, to the style of life of the human being in the world of his environ
ment. But this world, as Husserl sees it, is a spiritual formation of man.26 The
human being, as a matter of principle, is always living in a world of such a sort
that a culture is manifested in it. Even abnormal individuals?cranks, or madmen,
or perhaps hermits of certain sorts?must be regarded as modifications of
normality, and thereby as belonging to the horizon whose core is the normal.27
But the concept of culture seems to mean something more than the life-style of
human beings, for otherwise we could speak about culture in principle in relation
to all the environments?including criminal, asocial and decadent environ
ments?in which many human beings live. There would be no differences of
value between different cultures. For it would be nonsense to say about a culture
that it is of a high level or that it is especially well developed. We would have to
give up the idea of any such evaluation because of the relativity of each given
life-style to its own corresponding culture. Have we then the possibility to go
beyond a culture-concept of this type and to come to an historical understanding
of culture which could imply a difference of value and rank? Perhaps we have, if
we bear in mind that every culture can be regarded not merely as a life-style but
also as a way of "living better" or "self-transcending" on the part of its partici
pants.28 Culture in the first sense is indispensable for culture in the second sense,
but the latter gives us, perhaps, criteria for evaluating different styles of life.

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 TRANSLATION AS A CULTURAL PROBLEM 27

We have this possibility if we draw a distinction between the pre-philosoph

ical and the philosophical attitudes. In the pre-philosophical attitude we are living
straightforwardly ("geradehin" as Husserl says) in the environmental world; in
Husserl's terms we give ourselves over to environmental objects, we are in a
sense infatuated ("verschossen")29 with them. The human being lives in self
oblivion, but this is not absolutely without qualification, for as the Greek said:
one would like to live better (to eu zen)30 and one comes to live better by
following norms. There is, then, a normativeness even in the pre-philosophical
style of life.
In the philosophical attitude, now, the relation in which men find themselves
in the environmental world is itself thematized. This takes place in its most
pregnant form in philosophical reflection?a new attitude to the world of a sort
which results in a way of life which is on a higher plane in relation to the pre
philosophical, selfless attitude to the world. But it is precisely through such
raising of oneself to a higher level that high culture becomes possible.
This moving to a higher plane depends on the human capability for
reflexive-critical commentary, a capability that is expressed most fully in philos
ophy, which puts man in a situation in which he can thematize the world qua
totality as the horizon of all horizons. The human being thus overcomes through
philosophy the natural attitude's relation to the environmental world and
discovers the infinite openness of the world by letting himself relate explicitly to
the environmental horizon of the world as totality, i.e., to what ancient Greek
culture named the cosmos or uranos. The opposition insisted upon by Husserl
between the pre-philosophical natural attitude and the philosophical attitude has
thus its roots in the oldest, classical idea of philosophy as propounded by Hera
clitus and Parmenides.
As Husserl said in his fifth Kaizo-article of 1922-23, which was only
posthumously published, human freedom is the capability for that sort of act of
critical commentary through which the human being gains a reflexive distance to
all the things that look right to him.31 In the light of this distance, critical thinking
becomes possible. This act of standing at a distance in relation to the environment
is none other than that of philosophy. The human being demands through philos
ophy to overcome his natural pre-philosophical attitude. This overcoming act
implies a transcendence of the pre-philosophical understanding of cultures as
mere styles of life. It is when we begin to philosophize that we make the first step
in going beyond our own culture, but precisely in order to understand it more
deeply than before.

Tadashi Ogawa
Kyoto University

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 28 TADASHIOGAWA

NOTES

1. I would like to thank Wojciech Zelaniec for his editorial assistance with the final
version of this paper.
2. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal (Paris, 1961), p. 52.
3. Roman Jakobson, Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze (Frankfurt
am Main, 1972), p. 54, 66f?.; cf. his Selected Writings II, p. 274; Six Lectures on Sound
and Meaning (Cambridge, MA, 1978), Part IV, esp. pp. 79ff.
4. Eugenio Coseriu, "Falsche und richtige Fragestellungen in der ?bersetzungstheo
rie," in ?bersetzungswissenschaft, ed. by Wolfram Wilss (Darmstadt, 1981), pp. 21-Al.
What Coseriu means by "textual fixation" is the product of the activity of translating,
which is to say the linguistically definite form into which the translated text is cast.
5. Roman Jakobson, "Linguistische Aspekte der ?bersetzung," in: ?bersetzungswis
senschaft, ed. by Wolfram Wilss (Darmstadt: 1981), pp. 189-98.
6. A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays, 2nd ed'n. (Oxford: Oxford Uni
versity Press, 1960).
7. Jakobson, op. cit.
8. Cf. Ph?nomenologie der Inter Subjektivit?t, vol. III (Husserliana XV), p. 632.
9. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europ?ischen Wissenschaften (Husserliana VI),
Beilage XXV, pp. 500f.
10. See my Phenomenology and Cultural Anthropology [in Japanese], (Tokyo: 1989),
pp. 176-79
11. This schema, proposed by Malinowski, and construed by him in a naturalistic
fashion, is ultimately congruent with the description of the intentionality of instinct
(Triebintentionalit?t) supplied by Husserl (Husserliana, XV, p. 593-94).
12. Loc. cit.
13. See Emily Bront?, Wuthering Heights, ed. W. M. Sale, Jr. (New York: 1972), p. 72.
14. The method of the intuition of essence is outlined by Husserl in his lecture manu
scripts on Ph?nomenologische Psychologie (Husserliana IX) and in his posthumous work
Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. by Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1963). English
trans, by J. S. Churchill and . Ameriks, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in the
Genealogy of Logic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).
15. Husserl summarizes the process in which the intuition of essences is effected as
follows:

1. Erzeugendes Durchlaufen der Mannigfaltigkeit der Variationen; 2. einheitliche Ver

kn?pfung in fortw?hrender Deckung; 3. herausschauende aktive Identifizierung des Kongruier
enden gegen?ber der Differenzen. {Erfahrung und Urteil, ? 87e).

16. Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, ? 87a.

17. Edmund Husserl, loc. cit., p. 412. Cf. also the interpretation of the Wesensschau in
Maurice Merleau-Ponty in terms of what is called un double enveloppement, cf. his Le
probl?me des sciences de Vhomme selon Husserl (Paris: C.D.U., 1976), p. 36.
18. Edmund Husserl, Ph?nomenologische Psychologie (Husserliana IX), pp. 72-93.
19. As illustrated by our table-example above.
20. Edmund Husserl, op. cit., p. 77.
21. Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, ? 17.
22. Manuscripts of the 1930's show that Husserl was very much interested in (what he
called) proto-passivity (Urpassivit?t), i.e., that sort of synthesis which is originally

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 TRANSLATION AS A CULTURAL PROBLEM 29

achieved without the cooperation of the subject, rather than just being a sedimented result
of an originally active synthesis (this latter type he calls "secondary synthesis"). Cf.
Husserliana XV, p. 203:
Mein Leben ist durchaus Leben in Verm?glichkeiten, durchaus ein Leben intentionaler
Synthesis, einer passiven Synthesis, die vielfaltige Fortgangsrichtungen hat, in jeder Richtung,
die verwirklicht wird, urzeitigend ist im urph?nomenalen Strom.

23. Edmund Husserl, Husserliana XV, p. 632.

24. E. T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Doubleday: New York, 1966), p. 69. Note that
Hall interprets his data naturalistically.
25. See "Ph?nomenologie und Anthropologie," Husserliana XXVII, p. 177.
26. Edmund Husserl, Die Kr?sis des europ?ischen Menschentums, (Wiener Vortrag),
Husserliana, VI 319). Cf. also Klaus Held, "Husserls These von der Europ?isierung der
Menschheit," in: Ph?nomenologie im Widerstreit, ed. by P?ggeler/Jamme (Frankfurt am
Main, 1989).
27. Edmund Husserl, Krisis {Husserliana, VI), p. 369; cf. Husserliana XV, p. 159.
28. Cf. A. Finkelkraut, Die Niederlage des Denkens (Reinbek, 1990).
29. Husserliana VI, p. 179.
30. Plato, Crito, 48, b 5-6.
31. Edmund Husserl, Husserliana XXVII, p. 63.

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