Rethinking the relationship between nature and spirit

Abstract

The following contribution reflects upon the sense that the distinction between natural and cultural sciences may still have nowadays, reconsidering it within the framework of Husserl’s phenomenology. It questions whether it reflects an irreversible and insurmountable “hiatus in culture” —inherited from Cartesian dualism, Kantian critique, Comte’s naturalism and the neo-Kantian vindication of the cultural sciences— or whether a common soil as their ultimate source of sense and validity may not be conceived instead. It purports that, the said common ground, may only be discovered by transcending every ontological statement (albeit “monist” or “dualist”), and by questioning the transcendental sources of human experience. This interrogation itself reveals unexpected consequences regarding the finite and limited character of every human endeavour.