Dear Peter,
See the following from Crisis:

> On Apr 1, 2021, at 1:19 PM, Peter Philippson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> I think they are relevant, but my question was how they are relevant?  To you or to Fuchs?  I've said how they are relevant to me, and given a quote to show how Husserl treated the natural attitude.
> 
> Show me one place where Husserl talks about the natural or personal attitude 

Hi - I'm reading "Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)" by Edmund Husserl, David Carr and wanted to share this quote with you.

"Attitude toward nature, which is not naturalistic: 4 If we now speak of different experiential attitudes on the ground of the natural world, we must distinguish: (1) the attitude focused upon nature, in this case experienced nature, upon mere things, or abstractly upon animals’ bodies or cultural objects as mere things; (2) personalistic attitude: attitude focused upon persons or upon human beings as persons. What belongs to this? What persons are as persisting unities, what characters they have, what makes up their “life,” what they do and suffer as persons, how they “behave” in different life-situations in respect to their surrounding world, how they are personally affected by this world and how they react to it in a personal way; and finally their “surrounding world” itself, which exists for them, is valid for them, determines them. Here the question will also be: how their surrounding world is transformed, what types of objects belong to it; thus, in generality: what essential structure does a personal surrounding world have, and, in particular, what general structure does it have specifically as a surrounding world which has taken shape, and continues to take on new shapes, through the personal world-life itself? What types of cultural objects does it have? The structure of the personal surrounding world stands in essential relation to the structure of personal life (with personal habituality) which, as world-life, is a comporting of oneself toward objects appearing in the surrounding world and their properties belonging to the surrounding world.”

In this quote also consider what Buber said about I-It (natural world of things) and I-Thou personal world of persons.

And this:

"What is that, the personal attitude? Human beings, like animals, are in space; the world of realities is always pregiven with human beings in it. Interest is directed toward human beings as persons who, in personal actions and passions, are related to “the” world, who, in the community of life, of personal interrelations, of activities and other ways of being determined by and comporting oneself toward worldly things, have one and the same surrounding world, a world of which they are conscious [that it is] one and the same. The world toward which they comport themselves, which motivates them, with which they constantly have to deal, is of course precisely the world, the one existing world; but, in the personal attitude, interest is directed toward the persons and their comportment toward the world, toward the ways in which the thematic persons have consciousness of whatever they are conscious of as existing for them, and also toward the particular objective sense the latter has in their consciousness of it. In this sense what is in question is not the world as it actually is but the particular world which is valid for the persons, the world appearing to them with the particular properties it has in appearing to them; the question is how they, as persons, comport themselves in action and passion—how they are motivated to their specifically personal acts of perception, of remembering, of thinking, of valuing, of making plans, of being frightened and automatically starting, of defending themselves, of attacking, etc. Persons are motivated only by what they are conscious of and in virtue of the way in which this [object of consciousness] exists for them in their consciousness of it, in virtue of its sense—how it is valid or not valid for them, etc.”

So, perhaps you can imagine that it is in the personalistic attitude that psychotherapists do what we do, that is, if we have any value for the relationship of persons, one to another.  All approaches to therapy are more or less equally effective, but what is not equally instrumental is the relative ability therapists have for relationship. That makes a difference.

Phil
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