LEBENSWELT AND LEBENSFORM

Introduction

The following essay contrasts the views of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Edmund Husserl with regard to the possibility of intercultural communication. Although one can locate points of agreement in the linguistic philosophies of Husserl and the later Wittgenstein, this essay will focus on the differences in the view of these two philosophers with respect to the nature of language and meaning, the nature of communication in general, and the possibility of intercultural communication in particular. Since communication occurs, among other things, through the medium of language and since the primary unit of linguistic communication is the expression, the essay will first examine each philosopher’s views on the nature of language, meaning, and linguistic expressions. This discussion will be followed by a discussion of how communication occurs according to each philosopher. Lastly, the essay will discuss and contrast Wittgenstein’s notion of Lebensform with Husserl’s notion of Lebenswelt and will show how the notion of Lebensform, coupled with Wittgenstein’s conception of language and meaning, is the one that best allows for the possibility of communication between cultures.

I. The Wittgensteinian Conceptions of Meaning, Language, and Communication

I shall begin my discussion by examining the Wittgensteinian conceptions of language and meaning as they are developed in his later writings, more specifically, in The Blue and Brown Books and in the Philosophical Investigations. After this, I will show how Wittgenstein’s notions of language and meaning, coupled with his notion of Lebensform, contribute to his theory of linguistic communication. Wittgenstein’s later views on language and meaning depart radically from the ‘truth-functional semantics’ and linguistic atomism that he had developed in his earlier work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In his later work, Wittgenstein develops a conception of linguistic expressions as acquiring their meaning and their truth-value not from a correspondence with extra-linguistic reality but, rather, from their function and use within a linguistic practice. Although in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had proposed a logic of ‘truth-conditions’ that would serve as the ground of evidence to which one could appeal in order to justify the acceptance of a proposition, his later works defend what has appropriately been called a logic of ‘use-conditions’. In The Blue and Brown Books, which serve as preliminary studies for the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein first examines the Fregean notion that the important thing in an expression is not the sign but the meaning and that this meaning is what gives life to the sign. Wittgenstein quickly rejects this idea and concludes that, if this were the case, “what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere sign.”1. As an alternative to this problematic conclusion, Wittgenstein proposes that

if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use. If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then […] [t]he mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of the reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a ‘thing corresponding to a substantive’).2

Wittgenstein, therefore, moves from a ‘truth-functional semantics’ to what I call a ‘use-functional semantics’. I call it this precisely because Wittgenstein’s later approach to semantics looks to use and function within a linguistic practice, rather than to referentiality, in order to determine the truth-value of propositions and the meaning of expressions. “[T]o say that a proposition is whatever can be true or false amounts to saying: we call something a proposition when in our language we apply the calculus of truth functions to it.”3. Although, in the Tractatus, the primary function of language was that of accurately depicting an extra-linguistic reality, Wittgenstein’s later writings present us with a conception of language as having multiple functions.

In the Philosophical Investigations, meaningfulness is no longer a function of truth-value and of the verifiability of a proposition but, rather, a proposition is considered meaningful if it makes a correct move in a language-game. The metaphor of ‘game’ is apt here, since Wittgenstein is providing a view of linguistic practice that is governed by rules and conventions rather than by reference to an extra-linguistic reality. Thus, although tractarian semantics can be said to endorse ontological realism and linguistic atomism, Wittgenstein’s later, constructivist view of language “does not look to the world to determine form, sense, and truth.”4. Instead, the standards used to evaluate language and to make judgments about its effectiveness are, on the whole, holistic and pragmatic ones. Thus, although the Tractatus had been primarily concerned with logic and mathematical language, the post-semiotic account of language that is presented in The Blue and Brown Books and the Philosophical Investigations is concerned with ‘ordinary’ language as discursive and situated. In The Blue and Brown Books, Wittgenstein tells us that “[t]he sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.”5.

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had explicitly embraced a conception of meaning as expressing a thought or mental state and had declared that “[i]n a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses […] I call the sign with which we express a thought a propositional sign.”6. However, Wittgenstein’s later writings reject the notion of ‘intention’ and he claims, instead, that the application of a word or expression is determined not by intentions but by linguistic practices within a language-game. It is important to clarify here that, by ‘intention’, Wittgenstein is referring to a psychological state of a particular mind in which a mental picture is formed as the meaning of a word7. The later Wittgenstein rejects the view of meaning as logical and intentional and, instead, embraces the view of meaning as contingent and as conferred “by the active participation of the human being in the social community in the empirical world.”8.

Because Wittgenstein no longer embraces a view of meaning as intentional, he claims that “the meaning of a word is not […] a certain sort of ‘private’ mental state which is conventionally tied up with certain verbal or written signs, but [is] rather an extremely complicated network of public, conventional correlations between circumstances and signs.”9. The problem associated with identifying meanings with psychological states or mental pictures is that, besides rendering meanings ‘private’, this association renders the process of explaining how meanings arise mysterious and inexplicable. “It seems at first sight that that which gives to thinking its peculiar character is that it is a train of mental states, and it seems that what is queer and difficult to understand is [sic] the processes which happen in the medium of the mind, processes possible only in this medium.”10. In addition to denying a ‘private’ mental foundation for meanings, Wittgenstein also claims that there is not one meaning or referent of a word that serves as the meaning or referent of that word for all time.

I want to say the place of a word in grammar is its meaning.

But I might also say: the meaning of a word is what the explanation of its meaning explain […]

The explanation of the meaning explains the use of a word.

The use of a word in the language is its meaning.

Grammar describes the use of words in the language. So it has somewhat the same relation to the language as the description of a game, the rules of a game, have to game11.

Given this analysis, communication occurs when a person uses the grammatical rules of a language-game correctly and another person understands those rules and how they are being applied in the given circumstance. Because interpretation is involved in this process of trying to understand how the other is applying the rules, it is possible for there to be indeterminacy in the context of communication. This is because rules do not always eliminate ambiguity.

A rule stands like a sign-post. – Does the sign-post leave no doubt open about the way I have to go? Does it shew [sic] which direction I am to take when I have passed it; whether along the road or the footpath or cross-country? But where is it said which way I am to follow it; [in] the direction of its finger or […] in the opposite one? – And if there were, not a single sign-post, but a chain of adjacent ones or of chalk marks on the ground – is there only one way of interpreting them? So I can say, the sign-post does after all leave room for doubt. Or rather: it sometimes leaves room for doubt and sometimes not. And now this is no longer a philosophical proposition, but an empirical one12.

In interpreting these ‘sign-posts’, however, we are assisted by the behavior of other participants in the language-game, which helps us to understand and interpret the moves that they are making in the game. The fact that some indeterminacy persists, however, should not make us uncomfortable about the possibility of communication. Communication is, after all, one of the primary pragmatic functions of a language-game. If it were not successful most of the time, the language-game would cease to exist.

Wittgenstein’s views on communication can be better understood once one examines his notion of Lebensform or ‘form of life’. Lebensform is the given foundation that grounds a language-game and, thus, all human speech, communication, and community. A ‘form of life’ functions as “a metaphysical ultimate in terms of which the functioning of language is to be understood.”13 It is, therefore, by observing human ‘forms of life’, or Lebensformen, and human practices that one can better understand linguistic behavior and linguistic meaning. When one becomes immersed in a ‘form of life’ and in a language-game, one is in a position to understand when the rules are being correctly applied, and it is through the correct application of rules, by making correct moves in the language-game, that communication occurs successfully.

II. The Husserlian Conception of Meaning, Language, and Communication

I will now turn to examine Husserl’s account of communication in the broader context of his views on meaning, language, and linguistic expression. I will first examine Husserl’s early account of ‘transcendental subjectivity’ and its constitution of meaning and then move on to a discussion of Husserl’s later views with respect to ‘transcendental intersubjectivity’. This background is necessary to ground the discussion of Husserl’s early and late views on communication.

In Husserl’s early philosophy, his conclusions regarding meaning, language, and linguistic expression are reached by following the phenomenological method of investigation which involves performing what Husserl calls the phenomenological, transcendental, and eidetic reductions. Husserl develops phenomenology as a purely descriptive, rather than a constructive (system-building), philosophy. Phenomenology seeks to describe the objects of its study through a method that is free from presuppositions and from epistemological and metaphysical commitments. By following this presuppositionless method of investigation, Husserl hopes to uncover the essences of ‘things-in-themselves’ and to, thereby, provide a foundation for all other sciences. Husserl also wishes to develop a notion of meaning that is neither Platonistic nor psychologistic. In other words, for Husserl, meaning is neither located in some transcendent and extra-mental realm of abstract forms nor is it located “in the head”, that is, it is not the function of a ‘private’ mental state of some empirical ego. Husserl hopes to arrive at the objective and eidetic foundation of meaning precisely by adopting a presuppositionless attitude and following the phenomenological method of investigation. In order to arrive at a presuppositionless attitude, however, the object of study must undergo a series of consecutive reductions or epoché with the purpose of bracketing all assumptions about the data being investigated. The first of these epoché is the phenomenological reduction that brackets the natural world and the presuppositions of the natural attitude. The second epoché is the transcendental reduction that serves to isolate consciousness as such from the consciousness of this or that particular ego. The third epoché is the eidetic reduction that allows the investigator to access the realm of the transcendental Ego and, thereby, conduct an “intuitive examination of essences or universal concepts”14.

Let us examine how the method functions and what is revealed about the nature of consciousness through phenomenological reduction and investigation. First of all, mental processes are lived by the Ego. They are given “as actually being lived, as existing ‘now’” and as not having been reflected on (though reflections are mental processes also and can themselves become the objects of new reflections). When the phenomenological reduction is effected, its findings can be systematically and appropriately studied as eidetic universalities making possible the observation of something immanent. In this reduction, mental processes become “evidentially apprehensible and analyzable” by becoming objects of reflection. Thus, the mental process is lived through before becoming the object of reflection and continues to be lived as the object of reflection. In order to clarify the difference between the mental process as lived without being regarded and the regarded mental process, one must further reflect upon reflection. Through phenomenological reduction, then, the stream of mental processes and process-moments can be subjected to a systematic and scientific eidetic investigation and, through a second level of reduction, these same reflective acts can become the objects of phenomenological analysis.

The eidetic findings concerning the reflectionally unmodified consciousness and the necessary precondition of their possibility are the result of reflections about essences. Eidetic insight, Husserl argues, is not only possible but also always attainable because “the phenomena of reflection are, in fact, a sphere of pure and possible perfectly clear data.”15. In the natural attitude, each and every mental act is an act of the Ego and is lived by the Ego. But, when the phenomenological epoché is performed, the ‘I’ undergoes exclusion and all that remains is the pure act-process and its essence. Processes of the ‘cogito’ type, though the ‘human being’ is excluded, remain essentially human mental processes, and no exclusion can change this. The Ego, though, cannot be investigated for itself since it lacks essence-components and content. It can only be investigated through its ‘modes of relation’ to the mental processes in which the pure Ego lives.

There are two sides that can be distinguished in consciousness: The subjectively oriented side (in the purely subjective moments of consciousness) and the objectively oriented side (when the content of the mental process is turned away from the Ego). The objectively oriented begins from the natural attitude. Each reflection of the Ego on a mental process has its background horizon of unregarded mental process. But there is always the ‘eidetic possibility’ of making the unregarded object the object of reflection. The seizing upon of the stream of consciousness as a unity occurs in the manner of a Kantian idea, ‘an absolutely indubitable givenness’ that itself contains a series of distinguishable modes of givenness, the investigation of which, Husserl claims, must constitute the chief task of phenomenology. No mental process is entirely self-sufficient since it belongs, with other mental processes, to one stream. Further, each mental process influences the “halo of further mental processes” of the pure Ego. This inner characteristic of streams of consciousness makes it inconceivable that two streams of consciousness be essentially identical. The general theme of objectively oriented phenomenology, though, is intentionality, the name given by Husserl for all-inclusive phenomenological structures. Intentionality or directness, is what characterizes consciousness and unites mental processes as the stream of one consciouness.

According to Husserl, meaning is constituted by such intentional acts of consciousness and, in the case of language, meaning is conferred upon linguistic signs in order to make them expressions. The constitution of meaning by the transcendental Ego is the precondition for the meaningfulness of linguistic signs. For Husserl, therefore, there is a pre-predicative basis for predication. A linguistic sign without meaning is not an expression, and meaning can only be conferred upon linguistic signs by the noetic acts of transcendental subjectivity. Such objectifying acts in which meaning is constituted and conferred upon linguistic signs are called meaning-intentions. These meaning-intending acts belong to a narrower group of acts in the set of all intentional acts. In order for a linguistic sign to become an expression, it is essential that such meaning-intending acts be performed. This means that, for Husserl, an expression is more than a physical event in the world. It is the unity of a physical sign and a fixex meaning. “If an expression as such is constituted by its meaning and is not an expression without it, it follows that one cannot even strictly say that an expression ‘expresses’ something. To be an expression is to be animated by its entire meaning.”16. Meaning-intentions serve as foundation for certain fulfilling relationships. These relationships occur through meaning-fulfilling acts that are not, themselves, essential to the expression. These meaning-fulfilling acts are those through which the object meant by the expression is experienced17. “In the realized relation of the expression to its objective correlate [which includes not only objects in the narrower sense but also states of affairs, properties, and non-independent form, whether real or categorical] the sense-informed expression becomes one with the act of meaning-fulfillment.”18.

The content of these meaning-intending acts, as intended meaning, is identical in all possible acts that intend the same object. The essence of ideal meaning is found in its content, in the “singe, self-identical intentional unity set over against the dispersed multiplicity of actual and possible experiences of speakers and thinkers.”19. It is important to note however that, by ‘essence’, Husserl does not mean any sort of Platonic Form.

Husserl’s essences are not to be construed as ontological or metaphysical objects of any sort, but as legitimating structures. The sense of ‘structure’ here is identical with algebraic structure […] He claims […] to find an epistemological legitimation which enables us to apply the same word in different contexts. This essential structure is logically and epistemologically independent of any given (de facto) instance of it. Thus for Husserl essences are not objects or processes, but structures which obtain independently of their instances, in the same way as do logical or algebraic structures, and should not be confused with any metaphysical notion of ‘existing Forms’20.

The content of expressive experiences taken in their psychological sense is distinct from the content of expressive experiences taken in the sense of a unified meaning. Psychology considers ‘content’ to be any real part of an experience, that is, all experience has its psychological component, and this includes all of the sensual and phenomenal elements of that experience. If one were to examine an expression from this psychological perspective, its content would include the phenomenal sign and the appearance of the word, in its purely visual or auditory mode. This psychological content, even with respect to the same linguistic expression, varies greatly from one individual to the other and can also vary, even in the same person, from one moment to the next21. This psychological content of expressions, however, differs radically from the phenomenological and ideal content of meaning. The ideal content of meaning goes beyond the particular experience of understanding and expression and is “nothing which could, in a real sense, count as part of our act of understanding.”22. This ideal content as unified meaning does not vary from person to person or from time to time. “Through this character, expressive experiences strongly differing in psychological make-up first become experiences endowed with the same meaning. Fluctuation of meaning here certainly involves restrictions which make no essential difference.”23. Husserl stresses that propositional meanings do not multiply, though individual egos and meaning-intending acts can multiply indefinitely. In their ideal and logical sense, judgments remain single. The content of ideal meaning, then, is its essence understood as legitimating structure. Furthermore, this meaning is universal since it is the “single, self-identical intentional unity set over against the dispersed multiplicity of actual and possible experiences of speakers and thinkers.”24.

The relationship between intentionality and meaning, for Husserl, can therefore be summarized as follows. In perceptual intuition, consciousness is given uninterpreted hyletic data. Through an intentional objectifying act called noesis, consciousness endows this data with ‘sense’ and constitutes it into a ‘perceived x as such’. The content of this intentional noetic act is the noema. Both the hyletic data and the noetic act are considered real moments of mental processes because they are given. The noema, on the other hand, is an ideal moment of the mental process because it is not given in the mental process but is, instead, intended or constituted by the noetic act. In other words, it is a product of acts of consciousness. The noema itself has a noematic core that has two moments: The ‘content’ and the ‘object’. The ‘content’ is the noematically modified predicates and the ‘object’ is the ‘bearer’ of those predicates. In the case of perceptual noema, the ‘content’ of the noematic core consists of the noematically modified hyletic data, that is, hyletic data that has been endowed with ’sense’. This means that the ‘content’ of the noema of perceptual intuitions is both ideal and concrete. It is ideal, as already explained, because it are not given but is, instead, the product of intentional acts, and it is concrete because its noematic core contains hyletic (sensuous) data. The ‘content’ of the noema of conceptual intuition, on the other hand, is both ideal and abstract. It is ideal for the reasons already explained, and is abstract because it does not originate from sensuous hyletic data. Instead, the noematically modified predicates of the ‘content’ of conceptual noema are the abstract ascriptions associated with the object when it is intellectually intuited25.

When discussing meaning, according to Husserl, there are two ways in which this term can be understood. One way of understanding meaning is as the noetic mening-intending acts described above. The second way of understanding meaning is as the noema or intentional object of meaning-intending acts. In both cases, meanings must be understood as being dependent on consciousness for, without consciousness, there would be no intentional acts or products of intentional acts. Even so, we must keep in mind that, for Husserl, meanings capture the universal essence or structural legitimation of what is meant. Such universal essences are revealed to consciousness in eidetic intuition. Therefore, for example, the meaning of ‘triangle’ is ‘a closed, three-sided figure with angels that total 180 degrees.’ This meaning captures the universal essence of ‘triangle’, and it is revealed to my intellect in an intuition that is the result of a process of abstraction in which all contingent attributes of a particular triangle are subtracted and only the necessary attributes remain.

Some philosophers find it problematic to claim that meanings are dependent on mind or that meanings are merely ideal, for to claim this is to render meanings private and communication impossible26. Husserl would reply to this criticism that meanings must be mind-dependent, i.e., without mental acts there would be no meanings. However, this does not render communication impossible. In communication, according to Husserl, the expression serves the function of indicating intentions. The sign or sound-complex is endowed with sense or meaning by the writer or speaker and becomes an expression. It, thereby, indicates the meaning-intending acts of the person using the expression. The expression communicates to the reader or auditor the meaning intended by the writer or speaker. According to Husserl, the auditor listens to the sound-complex chosen by the speaker to express his/her meaning and intuits the inner mental experiences, i.e., the intentions, of the speaker. In intuiting the meaning conveyed by the speaker, the auditor understands what is being expressed.

Expressions were originally framed to fulfill a communicative function […] The articulate sound-complex, the written sign etc., first becomes a spoke word or communicative bit of speech, when a speaker produces it with the intention of ‘expressing himself about something’ through its means; he must endow it with a sense in certain acts of mind, a sense he desires to share with his auditors. Such sharing becomes a possibility if the auditor also understands the speaker’s intention […] If one surveys these interconnections, one sees at once that all expressions in communicative speech function as indications. They serve the hearer as signs of the ‘thoughts’ of the speaker, i.e., of his sense-giving inner experiences, as well as of the other inner experiences which are part of his communicative intention […] The content of such intimations consists in the inner experiences intimated […] it consists simply in the fact that the hearer intuitively takes the speaker to be a person who is expressing this or that, or as we certainly can say, perceives him as such […] Mutual understanding demands a certain correlation among the mental acts mutually unfolded in intimation and in the receipt of such intimation, but not at all their exact resemblance27.

In order to make the assertion that ‘a triangle is a closed three-sided figure with angles that total 180 degrees’, a person must first perform an act of judgment and judge that ‘a triangle is a closed three-sided figure with angles that total 180 degrees’. Husserl determines that what the auditor hearing this assertion is intimating is not the act of judging upon which the assertion is based. What the auditor intimates is the content of the assertion, i.e., the meaning of the assertion.

If I sincerely say – we shall always presume sincerity – ‘The three perpendiculars of a triangle intersect in a point’, this is of course based on the fact that I judge so. If someone hears me and understands my assertion, he likewise knows this fact; he ‘apperceives’ me as someone who judges thus. But is the judging here intimated in the meaning of my assertion, is it what my assertion asserts, and in that sense expresses? Plainly not […] What this assertion asserts is the same whoever asserts it, and what it asserts is precisely this, that the three perpendiculars of a triangle intersect in a point, no more and no less. One therefore repeats what is in essence ‘the same’ assertion, and one repeats it because it is one, uniquely adequate way of expressing the same thing, i.e., its meaning […] The state of affairs is what it is whether we assert that it obtains or not […] My act of judging is a transient experience: it arises and passes away. But what my assertion asserts, the content that the three perpendiculars of a triangle intersect in a point, neither arises nor passes away. It is an identity in the strict sense, one and the same geometrical truth28.

Furthermore, it is possible for me to know when someone is mistaken in his/her meaning. The person who means by ‘triangle’ a four-sided figure is mistaken. I can know this because I know that the essence of ‘triangle’ is to be a closed, three-sided figure with angle that totals 180 degrees. My intellect arrives at an intuition of this essence when all non-essential characteristics of particular triangles are bracketed and only the essential characteristics remain to reveal the essence of ‘triangle’. Therefore, because Husserl posits universal essences, his position that meanings are mind-dependent neither leads to relativism nor to the view that communication is impossible. For the meaning of ‘x’ to be the true meaning of ‘x’, it must capture the essence of ‘x’ as revealed in eidetic intuition.

It is imperative, at this point, to discuss Husserl’s notion of the Lebenswelt, the ‘lifeworld’, as he developed it in his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Through the notions of decentralization of egocentric space and of the living body’s reflexive awareness of itself, Husserl gives an account of the transcendental Ego’s indirect apperception of other egos as subjects via its direct perception of their bodily presence and behavior. Further, through genuine reciprocity as product of ‘empathy’, the ego becomes aware of the other as s subject with intentions. It is thus that the transcendental Ego becomes aware of other egos as populating the lifeworld. In this manner, Husserl is able to give an account of the intersubjective constitution of the lifeworld through the intentional acts of ‘transcendental intersubjectivity’. Thus, although Husserl’s earlier works presented the individual ego as the foundation and the possibility for the noetic constitution of meaning, his later philosophy presents the lifeworld as the subsoil for all constitutive acts. In the Crisis, therefore, meaning becomes a shared, intersubjective noematic structure, and the lifeworld provides the a priori condition for the constitution of meaning and for communication. This is because, for communication to be possible, it must presuppose a foundation of shared meanings when using expressions.

III. Husserl and Wittgenstein on the Possibility
of Intercultural Communication

Although I have, thus far, discussed each philosopher’s account of language, meaning, and communication, I have not yet touched on the question of the possibility of intercultural communication which will require me to contrast the notion of Lebenswelt with that of Lebensform and to see which of these two notions best allows for the possibility of communication between cultures. Husserl’s introduction of the notion of the lifeworld in the Crisis goes far beyond merely undoing the solipsism implied, in his earlier works, by the method of phenomenological reduction and by the conclusion that meaning is constituted within ‘transcendental subjectivity’. In the Crisis, Husserl does not stop at the claim that the lifeworld is the subsoil in which meanings are intersubjectively constituted but goes one step further by plunging the lifeworld into the matrix of cultural and historical praxis. By doing this, he undermines the notion that meaning-intending acts intend essences that are universal for, if meanings are intersubjectively constituted within a lifeworld that is itself a product of historical contingencies and if the subsoil of truth itself is found within this historically constituted lifeworld, then communication would only seem possible within the boundaries of one’s own culture or social group. Husserl tells us that “[w]hen we are thrown into an alien social sphere [that of other cultures] we discover that their truths, the facts that for them are fixed, generally verified or verifiable, are by no means the same as ours.”29 Intercultural communication, that is, communication between communities that have constituted entirely different lifeworlds, does not seem possible within the radical historicism towards which Husserl turns in the Crisis. If the historical and cultural lifeworld provides the subsoil that serves to ground intersubjective meaning-intending acts and if different lifeworlds have different histories and cultural practices, the intersubjective meaning-intending acts of a cultural lifeworld that is different from my own will yield meanings that are different from those of my own lifeworld. In the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl had already spoken of this notion of an ‘alien’ lifeworld:

[M]en belonging to one and the same world live in a loose cultural community – or even none at all – and accordingly constitute different surrounding worlds of culture, as concrete life-worlds in which the relatively or absolutely separate communities live their passive and active lives. Each man understands first of all, in respect of a core and as having its unrevealed horizon, his concrete surrounding world or his culture; and he does so precisely as a man who belongs to the community fashioning it historically. A deeper understanding, one that opens up the horizon of the past (which is co-determinant for an understanding of the present itself), is essentially possible to all members of that community, with a certain originality possible to them alone / and barred to anyone from another community who enters into relation with theirs […] Here I and my culture are primordial over against every alien culture. To me and to those who share in my culture, an alien culture is accessible only by a kind of “experience of someone else”, a kind of “empathy”, by which we project ourselves into the alien cultural community and its culture30.

‘Empathy’ can allow me to recognize another subject in a different cultural lifeworld as a subject with intentions. But, how do I intuit these intentions so as to understand what he/she means when using certain expressions? Behavior can only take me so far since even the most basic human behavior can take on different meanings in different cultural contexts. To say anything less would be to strip culture and language of its depth and richness. Because, even in the Crisis, meanings are still the products of noetic acts, albeit the noetic acts of ‘transcendental intersubjectivity’, they are still reducible to intentions. For Husserl, through empathy, I can intuit another subject’s intentions but that subject must not only be in the same environment as me but must also be aware of the same things of which I am aware. “It is implicit in the sense of my successful apperception of others that their world, the world belonging to their appearance-systems, must be experienced forthwith as the same as the world belonging to my appearance-system; and this involves an identity of our appearance systems.”31 Thus, it would seem that, although another subject’s intentional life is indirectly accessible to me through apperception and that the genuine reciprocity between us which arises through empathy is what makes communication possible, genuine reciprocity and indirect accessibility are themselves only really possible within the context of a shared cultural and historical Lebenswelt.

Wittgenstein’s notion of Lebensform, on the other hand, seems to hold out more hope for the possibility of intercultural communication. If one does not appeal to intentions, if meaning is reducible to use and rules, if these are publicly accessible through behavior and if, as Peter Winch has claimed, we assume the rationality of other subjects who are involved in a different language-game and ‘form of life’, we can learn the rules of grammar of their language-game and, thereby, the meanings of their expressions. In order to understand the rules of their language-game and to understand their Lebensform as a whole, one must also take into consideration the pragmatic function that these rules have in their Lebensform.

[T]he forms in which rationality expresses itself in the culture of a human society cannot be elucidated simply in terms of the logical coherence of the rules according to which activities are carried out in that society. For, as we have seen, there comes a point where we are not even in a position to determine what is and what is not coherent in such a context of rules, without raising questions about the point which following those rules has in the society32.

Once we understand these things about another culture and they understand the same things about us, communication becomes possible between us. This is also true of social groups that exist within a larger culture and who, for various reasons, may adopt a language-game and embrace a Lebensform that differs from that of the dominant culture. Rather than approaching the Other (represented here by the different language-game and Lebensform) as an incomprehensible and, possibly, irrational Other, one must assume the rationality and pragmatic usefulness of the other’s rules of grammar and Lebensform in order for both understanding and communication to be possible. Certainly, learning a new language-game and immersing oneself in a new ‘form of life’ takes time. It is also true that indeterminacy will continue to exist even when one has learned a new language-game. However, and despite the skepticism that W.V.O. Quine expressed about the possibility of overcoming indeterminacy33, whatever indeterminacy remains will not render communication impossible. Let us remember that indeterminacy and the need for interpretation continue to exist even within our own language-game, according to Wittgenstein, and yet communication occurs. If it didn’t, the language-game would cease to exist. Thus, the fact that indeterminacy and the need for interpretation will exist when we learn and have mastered a new language-game and attempt to communicate with others who embrace a different Lebensform, we can still be successful in such an attempt at intercultural communication. In a sense, success is mandatory, for there is much to learn from those who embrace a different ‘form of life’.

Language games are played by men [and women] who have lives to live – lives involving a wide variety of different interests, with all kinds of different bearing on each other. Because of this, what a man says or does may make a difference not merely to the performance of the activity upon which he is at present engaged, but to his life and to the lives of other people […] The ability to see this sort of sense in life depends not merely on the individual concerned […] it depends also on the possibilities for making such sense which the culture in which he lives does, or does not, provide.

What we may learn by studying other cultures are not merely possibilities of different ways of doing things, other techniques. More importantly we may learn different possibilities of making sense of human life, different ideas about the possible importance that the carrying out of certain activities may take on for a man, trying to contemplate the sense of his life as a whole34.

As Wittgenstein claims, human beings do not merely live but have a conception of life. Our conception of life is reflected in our language-games. And, therefore, our language-games, with their rules of grammar, have ethical implications, implications that touch at the very core of how we live our life and how we experience life. Understanding difference and communicating difference are not only possible and desirable tasks. These are crucial tasks, especially in an age of expanding awareness about other cultures. The most important lesson of all that we can learn from this process of communication is that our way of making sense of the world through language and of operating in the world are but one of many possible and successful ways of living in the world and of extracting meaning from the world and from life.

• 1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1958), p. 4.
• 2. Ibid, pp. 4-5.
• 3. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), §136m, 52e, p. 216.
• 4. Munitz, Milton, Contemporary Analytic Philosophy (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1981), p. 272.
• 5. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, The Blue and Brown Books, p. 5.
• 6. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, with the introduction by Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 3.1-3.12, p. 11
• 7. If this is what Wittgenstein means by ‘intention’ here, then Husserl would agree with him that intentions do not determine in advance the use or application of a word. Husserl and Wittgenstein both reject the notion that meaning is something that is either identified with psychological states or accompanied by a ‘mental picture’. However, as will be later explained in this essay, what Husserl means by ‘intention’ is quite different from what Wittgenstein means. For Husserl, ‘intention’ does not refer to a psychological state of a particular mind but, rather, refers to an act of ‘directedness’ in which meaning is constituted by transcendental consciousness. Since meaning is the content of noetic, objectifying intentional acts, it cannot be reduced to a mental picture. One of Husserl’s primary concerns when developing the phenomenological method of investigation was, precisely, to seal the lid on the casket of naturalism and psychologism to which the picture theory of meaning is intimately wedded.
• 8. Kenny, Anthony, The Legacy of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 9.
• 9. Reeder, Harry P., Language and Experience: Descriptions of Living Language in Husserl and Wittgenstein, Current Continental Research 301 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1984), p. 145.
• 10. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, The Blue and Brown Books, p. 5.
• 11. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Grammar, translated by Anthony Kenny, edited by Rush Rhees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 59-60.
• 12. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, §85, 39e-40e, p. 134.
• 13. Smart, H. R., “Language-games”, Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1957), p. 232.
• 14. Husserl, Edmund, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, “General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology,” translated by F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), §24, 44.
• 15. Ibid, §79, 187.
• 16. Mohanty, J.N., Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Meaning (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1976), 30-31.
• 17. For further discussion of the relationship of meaning-fulfilling acts to meaning-intending acts, see my “Husserl’s Theory of Language as Calculus Ratiocinator”, Synthese 112 (1997), 303-321.
• 18. Husserl, Edmund, Logical Investigations, translated by J.N. Findlay, from the second German edition of Logische Untersuchungen, Routledge & Kegan Paul (New York: The Humanities Press, 1970), Volume One, Investigation I, §9, 280.
• 19. Ibid, §30, 327.
• 20. Reeder, Harry P., Language and Experience: Description of Living Language in Husserl and Wittgenstein, 145.
• 21. Husserl, Edmund
• 22. Ibid.
• 23. Ibid, §30, 328.
• 24. Ibid, §30, 327.
• 25. This interpretation of the noema, and the distinction between ‘ideal’ and ‘abstract’ as it relates to noema, forms the basis of my critique of Dagfinn Føllesdal’s notion of the Husserlian noema as a Fregean Sinn. For this critique, see my “Føllesdal on the Notion of the Noema: A Critique”, Husserl Studies 10 (1993), 81-95.
• 26. Hilary Putnam, for example, has taken a position against philosophers who rely on intentionality to determine meaning. In Reason, Truth, and History, Putnam argues that the claim that meanings are, metaphorically speaking, ‘in the head’ makes meanings publicly inaccessible. Therefore, Putnam concludes that, in order to have public access to meanings and to make communication possible, we cannot get to meanings from private mental acts. See Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 17ff.
• 27. Husserl, Edmund, Logical Investigations, §8, 277-278.
• 28. Ibid, §11, 284-285.
• 29. Husserl, Edmund, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, translated and with an introduction by David Carr, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), §36, p. 139.
• 30. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: A Introduction to Phenomenology, translated by Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1973), §58, 133-135.
• 31. Ibid, §55, 125.
• 32. Winch, Peter, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” in Understanding and Social Inquiry, edited by Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 172.
• 33. See: W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1960).
• 34. Winch, Peter, Ethics and Action (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 41.