Horizon. Studies in Phenomenology

389-408

Authors: WITOLD PŁOTKA

This article is an attempt to present Husserl’s phenomenology as a moderate form of rationalism. By ‘moderate rationalism’ is understood, first, a theory that does not exclude the problem of irrationality, and that comprehends the rational as a correlate of the irrational. Second, it is a theory that performs its analyses by adopting the thesis that evidence can be achieved at many levels and grades. Here perfect evidence can also appear as imperfect. Yet this imperfect evidence (as an equivalent to unreason) can be a subject of evidential inquiry (as an equivalent to reason). The argument is that moderate rationalism is connected with the transcendental character of phenomenology and leads to the perennial reconsideration of the question of evidence (Evidenz). A basic claim is that irrationality is to be understood in terms of possible vague levels and grades of evidence. By developing ‘moderate rationalism’ thus understood, one is interested in understanding reason, that is, in the question of the essence of reason in its correlation with unreason. Here, moderate rationalism is directly interested not in rational arguments, but in ‘elucidation’ of reason. It is argued that phenomenology of reason also investigates ‘irrational evidence,’ for example, background evidence, evidence with respect to others, as well as all forms of fallible evidence. Therefore, the main question of moderate rationalism is Husserl’s question of evidence.

442-459

Authors: YAROSLAV SLININ

ranz Brentano takes as a premise of his theory that along with an external experience there is an internal experience. The external experience introduces us into the world of things that are transcendental with regard to our consciousness. The internal experience helps us to read the structure of the consciousness itself. While the basis of the external experience is censorial perception, the basis of the internal experience is internal perception. The internal perception shows that the consciousness is a sequence of acts in the flow of our internal time. According to Brentano each act of consciousness is an intention or an orientation towards an object, which can be called an intentional object. Intentions together with their objects are immanent with regard to consciousness. Among the acts of external experience are censorial perception, imagination, contemplation, desire, will, and etc. There is no agreement within philosophers on the issue of the relation between intentional objects of the acts of that type and transcendental things. On this basis, Brentano believes that the data of the external experience acts is not obvious. On the contrary, the data of the internal experience is obvious since the objects of inner perception are the acts of consciousness, and so the inner experience has nothing that is transcendent with regard to consciousness. Brentano points out that scholastic philosophers have already been aware of human consciousness intentional nature. The article investigates the theory of soul powers of Meister Eckhart. According to Eckhart soul powers are, among others, censorial perception, imagination, intellect, and will. The results of their contact with objects that belong to the external, created world are the images of that objects in soul. Hence, soul powers correspond to intentions of external experience acts, and images in soul correspond to the intentional objects of that acts. Furthermore, Eckhart argues that another power intended not towards external, created world, but towards consciousness profundity can be woken up in souls of specially prepared human beings. Eckhart refers to this ‘honorable’ intention as to ‘light’ or ‘spark’ of the soul. This ‘spark’ is fully related to the inner experience and meets God on its own way not in the capacity of an image, but at first hand and in a manifest manner. However, it is important to note that according to Eckhart Holy Trinity is only an intermediate point on the way of ‘honorable’ intention. The intentional object that is at the very end on the way of ‘honorable’ intention is allegorically called by Eckhart the Profundity of Profundity, Silent Desert, and Undivided Silence.

487-501

Authors: GEORGY CHERNAVIN

The article deals with Wittgenstein’s interpretation of the Heideggerian thesis “the nothing noths.” The phenomenological utterances are, according to him, “unarticulated sounds.” We discuss the following unsettling situation: theses of phenomenological philosophy (in this case of existential phenomenology), transferred to the field of philosophy of language, lose their meaning, turn into “incompetent sounds.” How is mutual understanding possible if, in the course of a philosophical discussion, the words (coming from one of the interlocutors or from both of them) turn into unarticulated sounds? Nevertheless, despite the alleged “incomprehensibility” of phenomenological expressions, Wittgenstein wants to “pay tribute” to Heidegger and he is looking for similar motives in his own philosophy. The most important of these motives is the one of philosophical disquiet. Wittgenstein goes through the options of how to understand “the nothing noths,” not so much questioning what Heidegger wanted to say, but rather why he wanted to say it. What can make a philosopher utter a tautology? Is this strange phrase the symptom of something else? What does it replace, displaces? What hurts a philosopher, if he has such a strange verbal behavior? The first hypothesis of Wittgenstein is that the author of the statement “the nothing noths” wants to get rid of a philosophical disquiet. This is Wittgenstein’s own motive—an indistinct intellectual disquiet, a “mental cramp,” a “hair on the tongue” from which it is necessary to get rid of. Then Wittgenstein (quite in the spirit of Carnap) reflects on the fact that the phrase “the nothing noths” can be eliminated by introducing a notation in which this sentence cannot be written. Wittgenstein believes that the disquiet will go away with this unhappy sentence and tries to treat the “sick” verb “to noth” applying to it various metaphors: a landscape or a maritime metaphor, a mechanical, an architectural, a decorative, a didactic and, finally—a digestive one. Oddly enough, it is from here (from the metaphor of stomach pain) that Wittgenstein takes a step toward the apt remark that “the words of phenomenologists are inarticulate sounds.”

516-535

Authors: JAKUB ČAPEK

The recent philosophy of Renaud Barbaras counts among the most original contributions to the phenomenology of life. My article examines it in the light of some conceptual observations based on the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. The early phenomenological texts illustrate the complexity of the phenomenological approach to the living inasmuch as “life” can be said in different ways, it is plural in meaning; further, life is also plural in that it can be attributed to a plurality of beings (consciousness, organisms, certain forms of existence, etc.). When developing his own account, Barbaras starts from a profound analysis of the phenomenological idea of correlation and comes to a new notion of life which is no longer attributed to organisms but to the world. The article critically follows this move from the life of organisms to the life of the world and articulates certain questions that this move can raise. The background of these questions is the double plurality of the notion of life. Even though saying that “life” has multiple meanings and attributions is purely formal and general, this multiplicity can serve as a ground for the phenomenological analysis of the way life is indeed experienced in its different meanings.

573-601

Authors: STATHIS LIVADAS

This article deals with a core matter of continental philosophy which is the nature of the ego taken as a concept originating in the subjective idealism of the German school of the early nineteenth century and further developed in its various ramifications throughout the twentieth century. The main philosophical positions I will discuss are Husserl’s phenomenology of the ego in his later transcendental phase, the Heideggerean view of the nature of Dasein, and Sartre’s approach of the Being-for-itself as mainly exposed in Being and Nothingness. The central idea defended throughout this article is that self-constituting temporality as immanently induced may serve as a common foundation of the nature of the transcendental ego both in the Husserlian phenomenology and in the Heideggerean and Sartrean alternative positions; further, I will hold that, as consequence, the ultimate question about the possibility of an ontology of the pure ego is transposed to the question of the origin and foundation of inner temporality. Yet, in this case one is set to face anew the circularity of an infinite regression in terms of reflecting-reflected and the inevitability of the subjective character of the origin of temporality. Besides this key question—a primary issue of this article—I will address the issue of the convergences and differences regarding aspects of the essential nature of the Husserlian ego, the Heideggerean Dasein, and the Sartrean Being-for-itself, especially regarding the widely debated topic of the ‘exteriority’ of the latter two ‘egological’ concepts with regard to the world in contrast to the ‘interiority’ of the Husserlian absolute ego.

613-631

Authors: PETR ŠPECIÁN

The article explores novel directions in the phenomenology of economics. It analyzes how the approaches of Till Düppe and Alfred Schütz, both inspired by Edmund Husserl, may shed light on the historical development of economics. I examine the substance and meaning of economics in the context of the forceful criticism of the whole discipline recently raised by Düppe. This examination uncovers important weaknesses and omissions inherent in Düppe’s argument against the economists’ scientific aspirations. The analysis of the social scientific endeavors by Alfred Schütz who develops a phenomenologically informed ‘telescopic’ concept of an ideal type is then shown to be a more fruitful and methodologically rigorous way towards understanding the developments within economics. The Schützian view permits us to see how abstract economic models originate in the experience of the life-world and are continuous with it. Accordingly, the historical development of economic science may be viewed as consisting from two broadly defined phases, where at first the formalism is steadily increasing (the ‘zooming out’ phase) and later the discipline converges back to context-specific empirical examinations (the ‘zooming in’ phase). A case study concentrating on the economic theory of politics illustrates that both the drive towards abstraction that has culminated around 1950s and the more recent ‘zooming in’ is methodologically legitimate from the phenomenological point of view. I conclude that economics has never been completely severed from the paramount reality of the everyday life and for decades the interconnection has been growing stronger by the day.

641-669

Authors: NIKOLAI HARTMANN; EKATERINA ANANIEVA

he article by German philosopher of first half of XX century N. Hartmann gives an idea about his position in the contra-opposition of leading realistic philosophic projects of both XIX and XX centuries. Brought up in neokantinean tradition of Marburg’s school N. Hartmann yet in his early works (Über das Seinsproblem in der griechischen Philosophie vor Plato and Des Proklus Diadochus philosophische Anfangsgründe der Mathematik) showed his interest by ontology problematic and chose the hard way of polemic and even contra-opposition towards the school which had brought him up. The reasons for such his position were explained in his works published in 1920-1930. The project of “new ontology” polemically targeted not only gnoseologism of neokantian tradition, but also viewed development of phenomenological philosophy in a different way. As one of early strong points of this conception Hartmann chose contra-opposition of logical and ontological reality. Later to this he jointed his interest for cathegorial analysis and to apriorism. That is why categories of ontology turned out to be most primordial points of proclaimed theory. His article “Gegel and the Problem of Real Dialectic” published for the first time in 1935 in Blatter für Deutsche Philosophie allowed N. Hatmann settled his reasons for critic of Hegel’s philosophy, first of all, of Hegel’s dialectic. His called Hegel’s philosophy like phenomenology and this his point of view was naturally argued by Hegel’s interest towards “Phenomenology of Spirit,” but dialectical component of Hegel’s philosophy, as well as interest for categorial analysis allowed Hartmann advance hypothesis about a special significance of “Science of Logic” for giving ground for a realistic ontology. Significantly for that work, as one of opponents of his philosophic program Hartmann chose marxist explanation of Hegel’s philosophy. The latter was also considered by Hartmann as realistic philosophy. This polemics with marxism let go beyond the philosophy of nature into the area of social and follow up a succession of prerequisites advanced by Hartmann in conformity with of different parts of being.

676-706

Authors: SAUL KRIPKE; ALEXANDER PROKHOROV

Readers are invited to examine the translation of the lengthy paper “Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities” by Saul Aaron Kripke. In this work, the American philosopher and logician discusses the semantics of proper names. He severely criticizes the theories of reference based on Russell and Frege speculations. The focus of his attention is the predicate of existence. Kripke is challenged by the theories arguing that existence either is not a real predicate or is not a predicate at all. He shows that a predicate of existence can be truly trivial but only in a limited manifold of cases. He characterizes as a modal fallacy the impossibility to pass the limits of this narrow manifold where the doctrine of triviality of the predicate is being mistakenly universalized. To vindicate his own view, he appeals the sphere of fiction and myth, to the domain of legends and pretense. Kripke discusses counterfactual statements and propositions referring topossible worlds in relation to objects of fiction and fantasy. The core of his argumentation is the ontology of pretense describing particular kind of abstract entities. The heroes of his philosophical reflections are Sherlock Holmes and Hamlet, Moses and Jabberwocky, unicorns and bandersnatches. Kripke asks when such creatures actually exist, and how propositions about them change their truth-value in dependence on a source, a context and modality. Vivid and inventive examples help the author to illustrate a set of problems perplexing for contemporary thinkers and offer his own original solutions.

725-732

Authors: TOMAS ŠINKŪNAS

he report presents an overview of the international conference “Phenomenology of Emotions. Traditions and Perspectives of the Phenomenological Movement in Central and Eastern Europe,” which was held on the 12th and 13th of October at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. The report briefly summarizes the main aim of the conference as well as the aim of the conference series as such, it briefly presents keynote addresses, outlines the structure of the conference, and finally presents information about the participants and their talks.

740-759

Authors: ALEXANDR POGONYAILO

The project of rewriting the history of structuralism conceived and partially realized by philosophers implies clarifying relationship between structuralism and phenomenology. It transcends the scope of research in history of science and in history of philosophy (phenomenology) because discussing such a significant scholarly and philosophical phenomenon of the first half of the past century which still exists, albeit with the prefix ‘post,’ ineluctably involves ‘post-science,’ ‘post-philosophy’ and all kinds of ‘posts’ including post-politics. This is due to the turning point that we are going through and to the crisis (in the positive sense of the word) of all the concepts and ideas habitual for the European and global culture, above all as far as science and philosophy are concerned. In this context it is instructive to address the history of formation of structuralism, its development in interaction with different currents of thought, notably with phenomenology and finally, that of its transformation into poststructuralism.

17-32

Authors: JOACHIM FISCHER

Every semester from 1920 to 1950, Nicolai Hartmann organized at his different universities (Marburg, Köln, Berlin, Göttingen) disputations with selected students and doctoral candidates. This series of discussions covered a variety of different topics, questions, and disciplines. All these dialogues were carefully recorded (handwritten or typewritten) by selected participants of the discussions and collected by Hartmann. These so-called “Circle-Protocols” (Cirkel-Protokolle) are an important finding in German history of philosophy because Hartmann (as well as a group of young intellectuals working under his guidance) followed a dialogical principle from the twenties (the Weimar republic) throughout the thirties and forties (the Third Reich) up to 1950 (the postwar era). He stuck to this principle when dealing with topics in epistemology, ethics, philosophy of nature, philosophy of history, social philosophy, aesthetics, metaphysics etc. This paper examines these debates. Though Hartmann’s discussions are already mentioned here and there in the memories of some participants (always remembering their importance for Hartmann himself), this collection as a whole was discovered only when German Hartmann researchers convinced the Hartmann family to entrust the unpublished papers of Hartmann to the German Literature Archive at Marbach. According to Frieda Hartmann, Hartmann’s deep interest in such discussions and the experience with such formats of knowledge stem already from his academic life when he studied philosophy and classical philology at Saint Petersburg Imperial University. It has been decided that these unique (from the viewpoint of the history of German philosophy) papers documenting those discussions would be published in an open access edition and separately as a selected book-edition in order to present Hartmann’s discussions to the scientific public. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has acknowledged the disputation-corpus as an important finding of modern intellectual history and supported the edition. This testimony of an ongoing philosophical debate seems to be a treasure in the philosophical history of the first half of 20th century. The reasons for this are four-fold: a) since the papers cover an enormous range of philosophical topics and disciplines: from epistemology to ethics, from philosophy of language to philosophy of religion, from philosophical anthropology to social philosophy; b) due to the principle of dialogue put in practice in the first half of the twentieth century; c) because they are relevant for writing the history of philosophy; there seems to be no other such document of German history of philosophy of this epoch; d) owing to the inspiring role of these discussions for Hartman’s later works (Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, Ethik, Der Aufbau der realen Welt, Probleme des geistigen Seins, Philosophie der Natur, and Ästhetik).

52-66

Authors: SERGUEÏ GACHKOV

The article aims to show some particularities of the reception of Nicolai Hartmann’s philosophy in post-war France. In my viewpoint, one of the recurrent problems in Hartmann’s philosophy is the status of ‘real being’ on all its levels (Gegebenheit, trans-objectivity, historical, natural being, etc.). According to Hartmann, ontology does not deal with a particular being, but rather with the transcendence of the real toward trans-objectivity. With that in mind, Hartmann seems to give solutions to many philosophical problems and difficulties engendered by the interaction of realism and spiritualism, phenomenology and criticism, by showing the multiplicity of forms of the real under the conditions of subject-object relation. It is shown in the article that Hartmann’s new ontology of the real does not completely go outside of the framework of the classical metaphysical and anthropological conception of the world. As such, our approach is not purely historical, but also hypothetical and theoretical. The article presents the following conclusions as regards Hartmann’s ontology: 1) the question about the real was considered as one of the most important questions in Hartmann’s ontology by its French interpreters, 2) these interpreters connected the question of the real with that of the irrational (Vuillemin), the multi-level structure of Being (Breton) or the intentional flow of phenomena (Gurvich), 3) the question about inter-objectivity was not discussed by Hartmann, nor by his French interpreters.

87-102

Authors: BIANKA BOROS

This paper deals with Nicolai Hartmann’s realism in light of its contemporary critics and recent concepts of realism. The main topic of the article is the so-called Copernican counter-revolution, which is the decisive factor both in Hartmann’s ontology and in the recent realist projects. In Hartmann’s text the Copernican counter-revolution means the rehabilitation of ontology, which is realized through the critique of the one-sided epistemological interest of logical idealism. We enter on the same path following the program of new realism, which arises against constructivism. While Maurizio Ferraris emphasizes the distinction between epistemological and ontological perspective and wants to identify those application fields, the point of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology is the coequality of beings. He achieves an anti-Copernican perspective, which means that the human-world relation loses its priority. He also invents a litmus test of realist theories: A true realism should treat all relations between beings equally. Initially I’m examining Hartmann’s realism, also called realism ‘without ism,’ in its contemporary context, followed by the analysis of the acts that can provide the givenness of reality. These examinations will highlight the similarities between Ferraris’ and Hartmann’s realism, especially the ontologically motivated conception of the act of cognition, correspondingly the concept of resistance. In the subsequent analysis of experience of resistance, Max Scheler’s concept is highly relevant. Scheler’s ideas are based on the critique of Wilhelm Dithey’s and Martin Heidegger’s definition of resistance. The last chapter submits Hartmann’s realism to Harman’s litmus test, whereby Hartmann’s realism proves itself to be a sustainable, modern theory.

123-139

Authors: MARTIN HÄHNEL

The following paper presents the three most powerful approaches to the metaphysical phenomena of generation and corruption stemming from Aristotle, Alfred North Whitehead and Nicolai Hartmann. After starting with a general overview of the historical developments of philosophical concepts on the issue of generation and corruption, the article sheds light on different criticisms evaluating the classical Aristotelian account of substance. Thereafter, I refer to the work of Nicolai Hartmann whose aim is to ontologize the fundamental processes of coming-into-being and passing away while his contemporary A. N. Whitehead sets up a certain process philosophy conceptually refraining from an Aristotelian conception of substance. In my view, both approaches require an overall re-examination of Aristotelian metaphysics. In his rediscovered and attention-getting work De generatione et corruptione Aristotle gives an impressive account on how to understand substance out of the processes of coming-into-being and passing-away. Against this backdrop, I finally argue that Aristotle’s conception of becoming is closer to Whitehead’s process philosophy than to Hartmann’s positivistic ontology because in De generatione et corruptione the self-standing character of substance emerges as a subsequent moment of an encompassing processuality (described as a teleological alternation of generation and corruption). In contrast, Hartmann claims that the process itself has to be taken as a self-standing substance.

160-181

Authors: STEFFEN KLUCK

This essay traces the reception of Nicolai Hartmann’s philosophy of objective spirit based on his colleagues’ reviews of his works. By examining this reception, important aspects of Hartmann’s work can be elucidated, for example, in the context of phenomenology (Martin Heidegger) and philosophical anthropology (Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen). In addition, any new ideas in the philosophy of the objective spirit will be likely to face objections analogous to those Hartmann’s theory encountered, which is why this analysis can probably have a systematic significance. In this connection, the article describes and analyzes some contemporary reviews and highlights principle arguments pro et contra Hartmann’s philosophy. It aims to show which authors criticized Hartmann with which frameworks to point out the position of his theory in the philosophy of the early 20th century. Furthermore, striking features and missing topics within the reviews are discussed. The conclusion of the article is that the reviewers praise Hartmann’s work for its phenomenological-empirical approach with rich, insightful descriptions and emphasize its ontologically founded middle position between Hegel and Marx, but at the same time characterize the book as theoretically weak and ambiguous. This finding can help to understand the work’s marginal reception and at the same time provides hints in which way it seems to be still up-to-date and relevant.

211-229

Authors: MORITZ VON KALCKREUTH

The aim of this paper is to discuss Nicolai Hartmann’s conception of personhood as developed in his philosophy of spiritual being. Many contemporary accounts of personhood are systematically focused on rational phenomena as self-consciousness or practical reasoning, which are understood as ‘conditions of personhood’. Apart from having some technical problems, those accounts limit our self-understanding as persons on distinct rational properties and often fail to consider the sociocultural aspects of the personal situation. Nicolai Hartmann—although respecting the role of reason—understands personhood particularly as participation in a shared spiritual sphere called Objektiver Geist (objective spirit), which includes various intersubjective phenomena as languages, religion, moral, arts, and the sciences. Being part of this sphere seems to be more fundamental than having distinct rational properties, which requests a spiritual frame to be exerted. Further it is shown that Hartmann’s ontology of person also includes a notion of being affected by the existential weight of situations and other person’s actions—an idea often maintained by phenomenological positions. By regarding rational, intersubjective and affective aspects, Hartmann’s philosophy of person succeeds in offering a broad articulation of our self-understanding and may also be seen as providing a background to understand certain phenomena that are part of the personal situation.

247-260

Authors: SAULIUS GENIUSAS

I argue that Hartmann’s engagement in the question of the value of aesthetic experience (especially as addressed in Chapter 35 of his Aesthetics) is a specific reinterpretation of the standpoint that we come across in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Hartmann completed his Aesthetics at the end of World War II and some of the central claims in his work echo Nietzsche’s standpoint, as presented in the early work on tragedy, which Nietzsche completed during the Franco-Prussian war. Both studies invite us to ask: what are we to expect from philosophy under such circumstances? Like Nietzsche, Hartmann holds the view that 1) our lives are intrinsically meaningless, that 2) the world is indifferent to meaning, and that 3) aesthetic experience has value insofar as it bestows meaning both on the world and on human existence. Despite the far-reaching thematic and stylistic differences between Hartmann and Nietzsche, both thinkers see aesthetics not as a form of apolitical escapism, but as a direct way of confronting the fundamental problem, which concerns “the sense and meaning of the world and of human life.” They both leave us with the paradoxical and provocative thesis that aesthetic experience is exactly what is needed at the times of political crises.

267-310

Authors: NICOLAI HARTMANN. Trans. by A. Fomin, A. Frolov, ed. by N. Artemenko, G. Chernavin

The article by Nicolai Hartmann is devoted to the problem of sense both in its history and its current state. Hartmann addresses the problem of sense in the 30’s, when the Zeitgeist itself contributed to such reflections, and it is no coincidence that at this time various existential interpretations of the sense of human life became popular. In his own turn, Hartmann develops a kind of metaphysics of sense. He reinterprets the constructions of classical metaphysics (starting with Plato) from a new point of view, correlating the category of sense with traditional metaphysical categories, such as ‘idea,’ ‘Nous,’ ‘The One,’ ‘God,’ ‘substance,’ ‘spirit,’ and ‘absolute.’ Furthermore, the German philosopher adds his own considerations and conclusions to the historical review. The article consists of six sections. Section I sets the problem; section II outlines the main features of Ancient (Plato, Aristotle, Stoa, neo-Platonism) and Medieval metaphysics of sense; in section III Hartmann focuses on the modern metaphysics of sense, with an emphasis on German classical philosophy (Kant, Fichte, Schelling and especially Hegel). Section IV examines the problem of sense in Hartmann’s philosophical context (in this regard, Hartmann is interested in Nietzsche and the philosophy of values), while at the same time aiming to strictly distinguish between the concepts of sense, values, and purposes. Section V draws conclusions from the historical review and the subsequent explication of the concepts; further, Hartmann offers his own solution to the problem of sense. Finally, in section VI, the problem of sense is interpreted from the perspective of the philosophy of history.the main theses and ideas of the translated work are presented in which Edith Stein tried to compare the seemingly uncompatible philosophies of Edmund Husserl and St.Thomas Aquinas.

318-327

Authors: NICOLAI HARTMANN. Trans. by V. Belov, ed. by M. Belousov

This publication provides a translation of Nikolai Hartmann’s review into an article by Vasily Sesemann, which is so voluminous that the reviewer mistakenly calls it a book. The publication provides Hartmann’s review of Sesemann’s study 1932 “Logical Laws and Being” („Die logischen Gesetze und das Sein“). Sesemann undertakes this research in order to accentuate the nature and essence of the logical, rational-reflexive sphere, on the one hand, its naturalness in the process of cognition, but, on the other,—derivativeness and limitations. In his review, Hartmann assesses this article not as logical, but as strictly ontological, although it would be more accurate to call it nevertheless ontological and epistemological, since not only the problems of being are the focus of attention of the Russian philosopher, but also the problems associated with the various possibilities of its comprehension.