Perspectives on Interculturality

The Construction of Meaning in Relationships of Difference

M. Rozbicki

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349504169, 9781137489135
• eBook ISBN: 9781137484390
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The intercultural occurs in the space between two or more distinct cultures that encounter each other, an area where meanings are translated and difference is negotiated. In this volume, scholars from diverse disciplines reflect on the phenomenon of interculturality and on the theoretical and methodological frameworks of interpreting it

Part I

Conceptualizing Interculturality

1

Apperception, the Influence of Culture, and Interracial Humor

Michael D. Barber

Recent discussions of passive synthesis and genetic and generative phenomenology have revealed a very different Edmund Husserl than the standard one—a new Husserl much more aware of how, prior to reflection and beneath the control of the ego, experiences, and aspects of experience are synthesized in us and social groups and cultures leave their imprint on us. In this chapter, I will explain how apperception in Husserl’s view provides a locus in which cultural influences make their entry into our experience. I will focus on how apperception facilitates the “culturalization” of experience in Husserl’s Die Lebenswelt: Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution.¹ I will describe what apperception is, its development and function in experience, its role in the transmission of culture, and its place in intercultural exchange. I believe that because Husserl recognized how passive-synthetic apperception is pervasively at work in us, he returned over and over again to the importance of phenomenological reduction as a philosophical method for the reflective recovery of what is taken for granted. Finally, to illustrate how apperceptive expectations work in intercultural exchange and to illustrate how humor and intercultural exchange can play a role analogous to reduction in enabling us to appropriate our apperceptive intentionality, I will consider some humorous exchanges between me and an African-American friend, whose cultural background differs from mine. I should add that I take “race” in this essay to be what Anthony Appiah has called a “metonym for culture.”²

Apperception: Its General Significance

Of course, the root of “apperception” involves a combination of “ad” (to) and “perception,” and hence apperception signifies all we bring to perception. Husserl calls apperception a “perceiving-to-perceiving perception” that involves a transference of past experience to what is occurring in the present.³ This idea of apperception as “adding to” perception appears very clearly in a passage in Die Lebenswelt:

It is evident that in this way every concrete life-world experience, as apperception ad-perceiving “meaning-predicates,” must contain a kernel content of the perceivable. Correlatively everything of the life-world under its more or less mediate-layered predicates of “valid-for” (meaning predicates) has as the purely perceivable a last substrate.⁴

This passage might lead one to suspect that Husserl begins with a confrontation between the subject and object, with the meaning predicates all on the side of the subject who brings them to bear on an object that is absolutely free of meaning. Such a view, however, would not square with the text of Die Lebenswelt, which insists that “In the pre-given world objects are normally outfitted with trusted cultural predicates; they are concrete typical cultural objects.”⁵ Even to get at “mere nature,”⁶ a process of Abstufung, de-layering, or Abbauen, unbuilding, is needed in which we leave out of sight all subjective meaning-features, feeling and valuing predicates, and anything having to do with how an object stimulates our drives or instincts.⁷ By stripping off these meaning-predicates in reflection, one reaches the “pure perceivable,” an “ultimate substrate,” “pure nature.”⁸ Ironically, even to get the pure thing, devoid of meaning-predicates, in order to determine how our meaning-predicates are brought to bear on the world or transferred to it in apperception, one has to dismantle through reflection layers of meaning-predicates that have already been bestowed on objects.

For Husserl, apperception, what we bring to the base-level perception of a pure object recovered via a process of Abbildung, can depend on the experience of one object one time, since that experience equips us with meaning-predicates that will be brought to bear when we encounter an object like it in the future. He writes,

If I recognize a strange animal, I acquire not only a knowledge of this individual as this, which I can always again remember and which I can return to again for perception at my pleasure, renewing my knowledge and proceeding in new directions. As often as later I meet once again an individual other animal, never seen before, but of the same type, I grasp it in my first look as an animal of this type, that is, I apperceive it with all its properties, which I have actually acquired for myself in the earlier experience, and this apperception occurs wholly immediately through “apperceptive transference” on the ground of analogy.⁹

Consequently, we would have to say that we do not just experience individual objects but grasp them through types that can be applied flexibly to analogous objects in the future, which of course will be like the originally experienced object but different from it in some ways and, therefore, not identical with it.

Furthermore, in some sense, the earlier experience of the animal or any object is not thematically present when I encounter a like animal or object later. In fact, the previous experience can pass out of my thematic focus and assume a place within the nonthematized horizon that will accompany me in future experiences in which I am focused on something else. Husserl describes this horizon, into which a present experience sinks as an “unconscious background”¹⁰; but in this horizon there are possibilities that eventually can be wakened by experience in the present, that can be relived in intuitive memory, or that can enter into synthesis with a new perception, with that new perception now presenting itself as a perception of the same thing which had been earlier perceived. The earlier experience thus remains as something still valid for me. As Husserl puts it, “The first validity establishes a horizon of continual validity,”¹¹ with the possibility that the encounter with a similar object can reactivate the expectations generated by the earlier situation. What had been part of my horizon suddenly will be evoked out of the horizon of my experience to apply to what is now my thematic focus. All our outer experience of new objects establishes an original pattern of experience (they are urstiftend)¹² that can be brought to bear on any future situation (if aspects of that future situation are analogous to what I have experienced before). It is conceivable that even if I encounter something new, I transfer to it predicates of previous experience insofar as I take it to be at least minimally a “thing” or an “object,”¹³ since I have previous experiences of things and objects. Something known creates an apperceptive type available for the experience of analogous objects.¹⁴

In all apperception and the genesis of it, the coincidence of one similar being paired with another in coexistence or succession plays a defining role. Dorion Cairns once correctly commented, “The ultimate generalization is that the fundamental tendencies of mental life are tendencies to identify and assimilate.”¹⁵ Again, “there is a fundamental tendency to believe in the likeness of everything to everything else.”¹⁶ Hence, in encountering what is present, whatever it may be, an object, a color, a texture, a pattern of acting, it will remind us of what we have previously experienced as carried forward in the nonthematized horizon of our perceptual activity, and what we have experienced will be brought to bear on what we are experiencing. Of course, analogical connections need not imply that what in the present is analogous to what one is reminded of is identical with what one previously experienced. A red square can remind me of a previous red circle, even though the shapes of the objects are very different. Such assimilations take place through passive synthesis, automatically, beneath the level of the controlling I or theory. Hence Cairns believes, for instance, that on a lower level we can experience the world as expressing a mind (by apperceptively transferring our own spiritual properties to the world, as animists do), as when we say that “Mother Nature is angry.” We do this, even though on the theoretical level we may be hard-nosed scientists who reject all animism.¹⁷

The apperceptive transferences of which Husserl speaks take place at the lowest levels, with data joining with similar other data to produce higher-level unities in a passive, associative manner, as occurs, for instance, when the experience of the object at one time and place leads me to expect that its identity will be continuous across the manifold of new experiences. Hence, when I experience a unity such as a dog, despite the passage of time or the different acts in which the dog engages (eating, playing, etc.), I approach each new experience with the expectation that the dog will continue as a unity through a manifold of experiences. In this regard, it is to be noticed that one does not only apply a type or a meaning-predicate (e.g., “dog”), but also with the application of that meaning-predicate, there are future expectations that this dog will behave in a manner like dogs. In addition and beyond the constitution of an individual unity, pairs of objects alike in some way function together such that a present object evokes transferences from past experience of an object to which it is similar in a kind of pairing (Paarung) that takes place automatically, beneath the level of the controlling I. In fact, I live in continual apperceptive transferences.¹⁸

Although Husserl insists that we experience things directly, he does state that the meaning-predicates apperceptively evoked by and applied to an object are cultural in nature, and hence we experience things as typewriters, synagogues, or dogs—all of which terms and meanings draw on a cultural heritage. “Cultural things are seen as things in their thingly qualities, but they alike (zugleich) are apperceived as cultural formations in their cultural properties.”¹⁹ Objects are fitted out (ausgestattet) in one’s everyday environment (Umwelt) with cultural predicates that are trusted and typical.²⁰ If one’s encounter with a single object is able to set up a type to be apperceptively applied to a future similar object, how much more efficient are the cultural types which one acquires via education, imitation, and other mechanisms of secondary passive synthesis and which give one an extensive network of types that enable one to assimilate a wide variety of objects, without having to proceed one by one.

Phenomenology, Intentionality, and Apperception

Phenomenological method has been presupposed by the above account of apperception. Phenomenological method basically involves adopting a disciplined reflective stance, known as the phenomenological reduction, toward one’s lived experience with the result that the intentional acts aimed at the world and the objects given to those acts can be clearly seen and analyzed. Since one focuses carefully on how the objects given to those acts appear, without committing oneself to or making focal their existence, the objects are spoken of as “phenomena” and hence the method as “phenomenology.”

What one discovers, when undertaking the phenomenological reduction, is a whole field of diverse kinds of previously anonymous intentional orientations that aim at the world and objects given within it. Examples of intentional orientation include an act of perception that aims at the object perceived, or an act of valuing aiming at an object desired, or an action aimed at an outcome that my act of will aims at realizing. Besides such intendings or encounterings, which involve individual acts and can often be expressed in belief statements that are oriented toward the world, our bodies and their movements are mutely directed toward the world, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has shown, and hence when one leans on a desk or steps on an icy sidewalk—bodily intending takes place, without much intellectual activity being involved. Apperception, then, the transfe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction—Intercultural Studies: The Methodological Contours of an Emerging Discipline
• Part I   Conceptualizing Interculturality
• Part II   Interculturality and Social Identity
• Part III   A Global Stage for Interculturality
• Part IV   The Practice of Interculturality
• Notes on Contributors
• Index