Before an explicit theoretical interest is awakened in man, he has already acquired an image of the world, which takes shape without any conscious elaboration on his part. This image itself has two components: one that can be called “givenness,” the other a complementary element of explanation or interpretation. The element of givenness comprises all formed sense-material, all past and present intuitive experience of one’s own and of others; we include in the explanatory element all naive and spontaneous extension of the domain of genuine experience in quasi-experiences. This naive extrapolating cannot be termed theorizing, or only cum gram salis, for the theoretical tendency has not yet crystallized and become differentiated from other tendencies, and the critical exigency remains dormant. Yet there is here already spontaneous thought production, which goes beyond the limits of practical utility. Before all explicit thinking, primitives and children form, on the things of the world, opinions that they are often unable to distinguish from givens, and which, as personal development progresses, may automatically give way to clearer, more elaborate views. Of course, the structure of this interpretive element differs for people at various stages of the historical process; and many believe that even the categorial structure of the element of givenness shows essential differences. Yet the fact remains—and it alone interests us here in exposing and formulating the problem—that prior to all theorizing in the sense of the explicit positing of theoretical problems, objectivity is already given to us through multifarious sorts of experience, and that we imagine that we have immediate access to this objectivity and a certain freedom in disposing of it on the basis of our personal aims and decisions; life in this naive world is life among realities, and though our anticipations are frequently corrected, that in no way modifies the overall character of our living with things. Since this entire domain of realities is given naturally, i.e., without our explicit theoretical intervention, calling on no theoretical efforts or skills, we call it the “natural” or naive world; its most characteristic feature is precisely that it is there for us without any act of our free will, by virtue of the mere fact of our experience, prior to any theoretical attitude. We call the attitude of this simple, naive experience the “natural” attitude; traditionally, it is also termed the natural worldview or world-concept.
It must be said here, with regard to a currently very widespread life-feeling, that man who has experienced modern science no longer lives simply in the naive natural world; the habitus of his overall relationship to reality is not the natural worldview. This, however, is not to be attributed to the fact of theorizing; theorizing had been going on long before man abandoned the natural worldview with its way of seeing immediately given reality and life in the heart of the real. There had, of course, been Parmenides of Elea, but also Aristotle, whose ingenious synthesis of idea and reality “saved the phenomena” for over a thousand years. The reason why modern man, i.e., man having gone through the tradition of the main ideas of modern natural science, no longer lives in the natural worldview, is that our natural science is not simply a development but rather a radical reconstruction of the naive and natural world of common sense, it has often been pointed out that the tendency of modern natural science, in particular physics, has something in common with Eleatism. However, the analogy lies not only in the conception of being as an eternal, omnitemporal thought-object, but also in the human consequence of splitting the life-milieu in two, between life in a world of truth and life in a world of mere appearance. The naive world is similarly devalued in both cases. Descartes’s struggle against “confused ideas” is not merely a fight against Aristotelianism; the historical opposition here conceals a deeper one— the conflict between the scientific world and the naive world. What had hitherto been deemed reality is real no longer; reality, at least in its ultimate root, is something else—above all it obeys mathematical laws, it is to be understood sub specie of a formal mathematical model. All concepts and principles contrary to this model must be—and progressively are— barred from the reflection on true reality. The one and only thing that comes into account is mathematical mechanism, the “opus quod operatur Deus a principio usque ad finem, summaria nempe naturae lex,” the mathematical structure of what happens. What then is to become of the natural attitude and the world corresponding to the natural view? The question, of course, still arises. The first and, still today, most widespread interpretation is causal-psychological. The naive world is the result of a causal connection (in a broad sense that does not exclude “psycho-physical parallelism”) between certain “physical” and “psychical” processes; it is the subjective phenomenon of objectivity. There is a certain degree of conformity between the objective and the naive world, but it is a purely structural (having to do with the structure of relationships), by no means a qualitative conformity. What is important for us, though, is the orientation of this explanation: going back from the results of natural science to “subjective givens,” which are lawfully correlated with them.