Appendix II

On the Phenomenology of Premonitions

Half asleep, I hear the talk of men who rest during a pause in the firing of the batteries. A

young officer had fallen the day before; shortly before the ride from which he never returned, he

had, as he otherwise never did, given his batman the trunk key, put his papers in order, and

written a farewell letter. He therefore had a premonition of his death. Other stories are tied to

this one. One was remarkably disgruntled and sad before the shell hit him; another had made his

will and testament; indeed it is reported of many that they had said directly before their deaths that

they would not be alive the next day. None of the common soldiers doubted that there are

premonitions which let us foresee the future with certainty.

A young sergeant breaks into the conversation. I hear him as he -- a bit condescendingly -

- explains how little there is to premonitions as such. Certainly everyone conjectures before a

dangerous undertaking that perhaps or probably he will be killed. Should this conjecture be

fulfilled, then it will pass as a mysterious premonition; should it not be fulfilled, then no one will

remember it. No, there are no premonitions; only rational calculations, which bear themselves out

with more or less probability, are possible. The small sergeant becomes ever more scientific and it

becomes ever more silent around him. Premonitions are matters of mood. When I am sad and ill-

humored the world appears gloomy to me and misfortune seems to lie ahead. Perhaps such a

misfortune actually occurs. Then the number of mysterious premonitions is increased by one. Or

it does not occur, and then no one talks of the affair. Should anyone wonder that the

actualizatons of dismal dispositions are especially frequent in war? For this reason there are many

premonitions in this time; therefore there are also a greater number of these premonitions before

Verdun or at the Somme than at any quiet point on the front. It is sad enough that one still
believes in such things in our time. Who could oppose these words flung out with the power of

higher education and rational enlightenment? Taken aback, the soldiers are silent. And it may

have been a full minute before their spokesman begins a new story about a cousin who not only

spoke but also wrote of his death. However, that reply to the preceding lecture is not sufficient as

a scientific claim. Shrugging his shoulders the young sergeant turns away.

In me, however, a world rises up, which for a long, long time was submerged in the

activity of soldiers at war which stifles all else. What are premonitions actually? That they are

justified in themselves has just now been denied. And the argument had advanced to the assertion

that there were no premonitions at all. Now that to be sure was a quite unscientific blunder by the

scientific sergeant: to dispute the particular essence of a thing whose essence he had nevertheless

just recognized in that he denies its inner truth and attempts to genetically explain its frequent

occurrence. But we will not descredit him for that which is found often enough in still more

scientific people than him.

Whether premonitions in themselves have authority and truth, I am not able to say, and

cannot possibly say before I know what that actually is by its essence a premonition. I do not

know yet. But already there awakens in me the desire of the phenomenologist to bring forth a

structure from the wealth of the appearances, to seize it, to submerge oneself in it and thus now to

obrain the intuitive essence (anschaulichen Wesen) -- acknowledged previously only in

accordance with the meaning of the word -- by itself.

I.

However necessarily any premonition as such requires a related content -- a premonited

as such -- just so far is the boundary of the possibilities of content drawn here. Premonitions can

refer not only to the temporal or even not only to the future. Within a scientific study a
premonition of the result can occur to me; here, something obviously atemporal forms -- a more

or less determinate proposition (Satz) or state of affairs -- the related content of the premonitions.

But not this premonition content, which also could be identical with the content of a judgment or

of a fear, but rather the premonition as such -- not the noematic, but the noetic side, to speak

with Husserl -- represents the actual problem. If we avail ourselves of the division, in itself quite

limited but sufficient for our ends, of the mental world (seelischen Welt) into the spheres of

feeling, will, and thought, then, since the premonition is certainly no act of willing, one will only

be able to be undecided as to whether it could not be claimed perhaps to be a feeling. Indeed, it

appears to have a good sense to speak of felt premonitions, indeed of the aspect of being felt of

any premonition. Yet it is immediately clear that the premonition -- for instance of a future event

-- is no feeling like joy or sadness, no state of being of the I, no finding itself so-and-so of the I.

Far more the premonition adds something new to the whole wealth of knowledge -- in the widest

sense of knowledge; here the subject appears to grasp by means of the premonition, no matter

whether corectly or incorrectly, something out of the flow of future occurrences which was not

accessible to him before. What is meant by the words aspect of being felt of the premonition,

only a further analysis can explain. But here we are already permitted to include the premonition -

- like everything which allows certain states of affairs to appear to the subject as subsisting now or

int the future or in general -- in the area of knowledge and therefore of thought, in the sense of

that tripartate division. In clear contrast with the premonition of future destiny is the dismay

which as a feeling springs from this foresightful grasping, as does all striving and resistance,

willing and not-willing, which is rooted in this feeling and knowing.

Certainly knowing is taken here in the widest sense; in a narrower and proper sense one

can indeed set premonition and knowing against one another. Thus, after this first superficial
orientation, closer determinations are indispensable. In this sphere we make the fundamental and

far-reaching distinction between grounding and grounded structures. I have already pursued

knowing in the narrower sense in an earlier essay (Muench. Philos. Abhandl., Zum negativen

Urteil). If we take knowing in the strict sense as the act in which a state of affairs comes to be

given to us, in which it shines forth for us and the corresponding proposition is understood by us,

then the conviction which develops for us on the ground of this understanding distinguishes itself

in all clearness from the state of affairs. We refer to the first as knowing, the second as judgment

(in one of the many possible meanings of this expression). Without closer analysis both contrast

with one another clearly enough, if one considers that the case of knowing concerns a temporally

punctuated act which cannot endure any more or less, whereas we can live with a conviction as

long as we like, and that furthermore a set of convictions often come to life in us without

grounding themselves in an act of knowing or at any time having been grounded. Observed from

this point there is no doubt that we have to classify premonitions with the grounding structures,

not with the grounded ones -- i.e., those which by their essence are open to a grounding.

Through premonitions we grasp -- or we believe that we grasp -- that which was previously

hidden. And a conviction can also be grounded in premonition, which in strength and inner

certainty need be in no way inferior to the conviction based upon knowing. From the premonition

of the nearness of death arises the certain conviction of having to die soon.

As knowing and foreseeing stand on the same level in this relation, the task of setting forth

the fundamental difference between the two will be all the more urgent.