Modern man has no unified worldview. He lives in a double world, at once in his own naturally given environment and in a world created for him by modern natural science, based on the principle of mathematical laws governing nature. The disunion that has thus pervaded the whole of human life is the true source of our present spiritual crisis. It is understandable that thinkers and philosophers have often attempted somehow to overcome it, yet they have generally gone about this in a way meant to eliminate one of the two terms, to logically reduce one to the other, to present one—usually on the basis of causal arguments—as a consequence and a component of the other. These problems are alive particularly in modern positivism, which has however never formulated or attempted to solve them in a wholly unprejudiced manner.
Yet a solution other than by means of these alternatives is possible, a solution answering to our modern historical understanding of all reality: a solution which, instead of reducing the natural world to the world of science or vice versa, converts both to a third term. This third term can be nothing but the subjective activity that shapes both worlds, in different yet, in both cases, lawful, ordered ways. The unity underlying the crisis cannot be the unity of the things composing the world; rather, it must be the dynamic unity of the acts performed by the mind or spirit.
That being said, has not the history of modern philosophy beginning with Descartes brought such a variety of conceptions of the subject and its activity that any attempt to found rigorous philosophy on a subjective basis must, at first, seem hopeless? It can be shown, however, that the main conceptions of the subject, in particular those known to us from modem idealistic systems, all have good grounds and are stages on the way toward the ultimately creative region to which we as well propose to bring our problem. Whenever we encounter in serious thinkers divergent conceptions of subjectivity, it is a sign that the subjective level has not been rigorously purified, that the distinction between the result of subjective activity and this activity itself is as yet incomplete. Another important question is that of the subjective method. Is not subjectivism a synonym of arbitrariness? Is this not confirmed, for example, by a certain fancifulness of the dialectic method? In answer to this objection, we shall try to show that there is a positive, analytical subjective method that has philosophical and not merely psychological significance, ft is the method of what we call phenomenological analysis.
From these methodological presuppositions, we proceed to actual consideration of the relationship of man to the natural world. Though not explicitly aware of it, man possesses an overall schema of the universe around him. This overall schema has a typical, relatively constant structure, the main features of which we attempt to distinguish. The human world is characterized by the opposition of home and alien, by a temporal dimension and mood coloring. Things are given to us only within such a schema. The task is then to find, through reflection, the activities of the ultimate, independent subjectivity in which man’s relation to the natural world is constituted. The activity that accompanies and makes possible the whole of human life is perception; however, perception itself is impossible without an extensive structure, it presupposes the original consciousness of time, in which both perceiving and the perceived take form and shape. It also proves necessary to determine and analyze the original tendencies and activities presupposed in the automatic, so to say, passive course of everyday experience, activities not necessarily bound to the intervention of the freely acting, i.e., decision-making self. The main issue here is to clarify the process of perceiving, unifying, and typifying that forms the necessary basis of all our experience. Problems of time, space, substratum, and causality in the natural world are also dealt with in this context.
After this examination of the foundations of our world, the next question is that of the activities that can be termed personal in the proper sense, those whereby the free person rises above what is immediately present to or immediately determining for it (above its organic tendencies). These activities are thought and linguistic expression. The fact that the person rises here above the immediately given implies that these activities are not possible in themselves, but only on such immediate foundations. Thought and language are an expression of human freedom, an expression of the fact that the world is at our disposal, that we are not purely passively determined by our environment and the tendencies emerging in it, but rather actively appropriate reality and dispose of it.
Philosophical and scientific theory becomes possible only on the basis of linguistic thought. Theoretical activity too has its objective result: theoretical concepts and judgments are cultural products, and their relation to thought-activities is similar to the relation between the realities of the natural world and activities of a receptive character (perceiving, unifying, and typifying). Theoretical thought always relates to a pre-given, natural reality, but that does not always mean that it is merely a conceptual transcription of the given world. Philosophy alone is radical theory, aiming at conscious grasping of the essential in the world process, whereas the sciences often introduce hypotheses that have to do with our practical endeavors and may or may not subsequently prove valid. In no case, however, do our theories arise on their own; all necessarily presuppose the nourishing soil of the natural world and human life. We should not therefore hold the results of theories to be independently existing beings; we should not separate them from their life-function; rather it is out of this function that they must be understood.
Such are the broad lines of a demonstration that the unity of the world is not the unity of the materials composing it but rather of the spirit that shapes and sustains it.