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234 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Vigil, Jos~ M. Catalogos de ta Biblioteca Nacional. Tercera Divisi6n. (Mexico: Oficina Tip. de la Secretarfa de Fomento, 1889) SOME HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS ON GRACE DE LAGUNA'S ON EXISTENCE AND THE HUMAN WORLD The collection of essays gathered and published by Grace A. de Laguna in her volume On Existence and the Human World (Yale, 1966) raises and clarifies several basic issues that have troubled both cultural anthropology and existential philosophy. I call attention to four of them: (1) the relation of the cultural sciences to the natural sciences and to the theory of evolution; (2) the origin and scope of the "teleonomic" structure of human existence; (3) the relation of Lebenswelt to cultural environment; and (4) the confusions created by the co-existence of phenomenological and behavioral methods in the analysis of these issues. I wish to supplement Mrs. de Laguna's excellent discussion of these matters by a few historical considerations that both complicate and clarify the issues. My analysis departs in minor ways from hers, but I shall try to follow her argument and terminology on the whole, indicating here and there the points that seem to me to require further clarification. 1. The attempt of the anthropologists to "put culture into nature" is intelligible enough in view of the artificial separations that had been created by the GeisteswissenschaJten, and it follows the attempts of William James and his associates to make psychology a natural science. But the development of cultural anthropology has certainly overshadowed this issue, just as it has made ridiculous the German name for primitive cultures, NaturviSlker. Man is no doubt the selfdomesticating animal, but he has long since passed the state of mere animal existence, so that, even among the most primitive tribes, scientists are required to study customs, laws, arts and languages. Therefore it seems to me just as necessary to distinguish between the natural and the cultural environments of men as between natural inheritance and the cultural heritage. And this implies a further distinction between the course of natural evolution and the course of human history, human experience and human institutions. One can always argue that by "natural selection" the human world and its "teleonomic" structure has emerged in the course of natural evolution of a solar system, even though man's appearance involved "the existence and activities of many generations of proto-human individuals . Yet his appearance involved a radical restructuring of the teleonomic organization of his predecessors" (p. 103). But all this may be a mere incident in the history of the solar system, of no general significance or enduring existence in cosmic evolution. The important fact is that this emergence marks the beginning of "the human world." 2. The essential difference between the teleonomic structure of other organisms and that of human individuals, according to Grace de Laguna, is that other organisms are naturally designed for individual self-preservation, whereas human NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 235 beings do not have individual self-preservation either as their means or their end. A human individual "has a further and more general potentiality which may be actualized in a number of specific ways of acting. His existence as a human being is possible only through the actualization of this more general potentiality, and this depends on the formation of a further and more complex organization of his being" (p. 104). These potentialities are realized only through the cultural environment . Mature human personalities are cultural products and they have a cultural structure in addition to their natural existence as organisms. 3. Grace de Lagtma shows that the phenomenological idea of Lebenswelt is a compound of the natural and the cultural environments. All living organisms have an environment to which they are related in a way that is different from the relations of inorganic beings. Just as a machine is more than a group of mechanisms , having a functional unity and individuality that is created by the cooperation of its mechanisms, so an organism has a functional unity or teleonomic structure. As a living organism a human being exhibits a pattern of action that has an intentionality derived naturally from its Lebenswelt. But in addition to such animal reactions with...

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