Joining the Background: Habitual Sentiments Behind We-Intentionality
How can the inner structure of we-intentionality be described? The early phenomenological account of Gerda Walther (Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaft. In: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, vol 6. Niemeyer, Halle, pp 1–158, 19
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Joining the Background: Habitual Sentiments Behind We-Intentionality Emanuele Caminada
Abstract How can the inner structure of we-intentionality be described? The early phenomenological account of Gerda Walther (Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaft. In: Jahrbuch f¨ur Philosophie und ph¨anomenologische Forschung, vol 6. Niemeyer, Halle, pp 1–158, 1923) offers interesting insights into the nature of human sociality: according to her we-intentionality is embedded in a network of intentional habits a network that shapes individual minds. She claims that the core of community is grounded in a concrete, intentional background that arises through a particular structure of affective intentionality: habitual joining. In Walther’s approach, the core of the We is pre-reflexive and non-thematic and it is formed in habits through a web of conscious and unconscious sentiments of joining. This us-background, a non-reducible basic level of community, is a necessary condition for actual we-intentionality. Common intentionality can therefore neither be understood as involving a unique super-individual bearer, nor simply as a habit shared by multiple individuals—it is a web of intentional relations between individuals with which several habits are linked. In Walther’s work we find no monological conception of intentionality, but a relational, interpersonal account of mind. A fresh look at her account could free the current debate from old prejudices concerning the phenomenological concept of intentionality. There is no preconstituted subjectivity that joins the community: in habitual joining, subjects and community reciprocally form each other.
E. Caminada () a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany e-mail: [email protected] A. Konzelmann Ziv and H.B. Schmid (eds.), Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 2, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6934-2 12, © Springer ScienceCBusiness Media Dordrecht 2014
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1 Introduction The task of this chapter is to present Gerda Walther’s theory of community, and to situate it within the contemporary debate about collective intentionality. Gerda Walther (1897–1977) wrote Zur Ontologie der Sozialen Gemeinschaft in 1921 as a Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of the Munich phenomenologist Alexander Pf¨ander. The text was published in 1923 in the phenomenological Jahrbuch edited by Edmund Husserl, for whom she also prepared the index of his Ideas I (Hua III/1, pp. 360–427), the work that ratified the “transcendental turn” of Husserl in the eyes of his students. Those who did not accept the transcendental frame of Husserl’s constitution theory declared themselves realistic phenomenologists and rested on the project of descriptive ontology and psychology. Walther herself chose Pf¨ander as her supervisor because she felt more acquainted with his realistic approach than with the methodologies Husserl was still working out during her studies in Freiburg (Walther 1960, p. 244).1 W
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