In the study of Economics, British Economist Alfred Marshall stated, that this Social Science or discipline deals with the study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.
How is the concept of Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl interplayed or integrated in the understanding of Alfred Marshall’s definition?
Husserl’s phenomenology was an approach to philosophical anthropology in all but name. However, Husserl was only ever to sketch the beginnings of this before his death and much of his thought is now known through posthumous publications of his Nachlass. And while Husserl may have held out hopes that Heidegger would be his successor, once viewed in the light of his final turn it is another figure that may be the true heir to Husserlian phenomenology. Spiegelberg, speaking of Husserl’s considerations of the life-world in Crisis as sketchy, suggests that they have received a full and concrete development in the work of Schutz (Spiegelberg, 1982:163). One significant aspect of Crisis, as recognised by Moran, is its continued focus on rigorous science. But what becomes clear about Husserl’s concept of science is that, unlike the positivist conception that was emerging at the same time, he was not advocating ‘a conception of the world to correct – or even replace – the naïve, natural, pre-scientific approach to the world’ but rather to ‘re-situate the scientific conception of the world within the life-world and show how the idealising scientific attitude requires and cannot replace the natural attitude’ (Moran, 2013:106). It is precisely this task that we suggest Schutz carried out beginning with The Phenomenology of the Social World (PSW) (1932[1967]) in which he provides an analysis of 69 Max Weber’s methodological position using Husserlian phenomenology. 1 Significantly, Husserl read PSW, delivering it the praise that Schutz was ‘one of the few who have penetrated to the core of the meaning of my life’s work’ (in Schutz, 1967:xviii). External constraints, however, prevented the two from collaborating. According to Embree, Schutz ‘fundamentally created the phenomenological theory of the social sciences single handedly’ (Embree, n.d.). Delanty and Strydom list him under their second sense of “philosophy of social science” (now subsumed under normative philosophy of social science). 2 As a follower of Husserl, Schutz argued extensively for his importance for social science. Although he admits in “Husserl’s Importance for the Social Sciences” (1959[1962j]) that Husserl himself was not concerned with the problems of social science, social sciences will nonetheless ‘find their true foundation not in transcendental phenomenology, but in the constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude’ (1962j:149). 3 The qualification contained here points to the fact that Schutz was by no means an uncritical follower of Husserl. According to Seebohm, Schutz’s account of social science makes up for certain shortcomings in Husserl’s own discussions in Ideas II and III (Seebohm, 2013:138). Based on our discussion in the previous chapter it could even be suggested that Schutz focused on the work of “mundane phenomenology” which Husserl saw capable within the study of life-world (Spiegelberg, 1982:256). But most significant for our concerns is Natanson’s comments that Schutz saw that social science required a basis in philosophical anthropology in order to proceed properly (Natanson, 1962:xlvixlvii). As Schutz himself wrote in “Symbol, Reality, and Society” (1955[1962i]) regarding the study of symbols:
The analysis of these transcendences – from those going beyond the limits of the world within his actual reach to those transgressing the paramount of everyday life – is a major task of any philosophical anthropology. At the same time, the clarification of the categories of common-sense thinking within everyday life is indispensable for the proper foundation of all the social sciences.
Further to this he claimed in “Husserl’s Importance for the Social Sciences” that Husserl’s phenomenology was ‘designed to be developed into a philosophical anthropology’ (1962j:149). 4 According to Gurwitsch, Schutz was in search of the same invariant structures as Husserl which could only have their roots in the “werisc condition”. Therefore, the search and clarification of such structures requires a philosophical anthropology (Gurwitsch, 1974:28). Schutz worked on developing phenomenology as a philosophical anthropology and on placing that within Social Science. But also significant in this regard is that as a critical follower of Husserl, Schutz also drew on the work of Scheler, Heidegger, and Sartre. 5 Though we commented that Sartre synthesised much of the previous three, it is also the case that his comments were not related to social science. In Schutz we find a similar project with the added benefit of being explicitly concerned with social science. We can also suggest that Schutz is the instigator of the fifth branch of phenomenology that Embree calls Cultural Phenomenology
Most significant in Schutz’s synthesis is his appropriation of Scheler’s sociology of knowledge, which he makes use of in numerous places without qualification. The major difference between the two is that where Scheler focused on “philosophical or theological systems” (Schutz, 1964i:249), Schutz focused on common-sense life (Berger and Luckmann, 1966:27-28). 6 This “sociological” emphasis is the main reason Schutz himself is often characterised as a sociologist rather than a phenomenologist and why this fifth branch of phenomenology has moved beyond Philosophy departments into the Social Sciences. 7 For our purposes our main focus will be on Schutz’s analysis into the essence of social science, but this can only be understood if placed into the wider framework of his work on provinces of meaning.
In PSW Schutz argues that Weber’s position fails to appreciate that there is a difference between meaning as it is intended by a person and meaning as it is received by another: ‘the subjective meaning of another person’s behaviour need not be identical with the meaning which his perceived external behaviour has for me as an observer’ (Schutz, 1967:20). Weber’s analysis of meaning takes it as a given that the meaning I observe of another is the meaning that they intend. Following Husserl, Schutz offers a different approach. At its simplest we will say that meaning is a certain way of directing one’s gaze at an item of one’s own experience. This item is thus “selected out” and rendered discrete by a reflexive Act. Meaning indicates, therefore, a peculiar attitude on the part of the Ego toward the flow of its own duration. This holds true of all stages and levels of meaning.
Each “attitude” is then ‘that frame of interpretation which sees them as behaviour’ (1967:57). In this respect Schutz extends Husserl’s discussion of “attitudes” to understand them as interpreting in a particular way Drawing further on Husserl, Schutz focuses on the idea that polythetic experiences are synthesised into a monothetic unity. For example, when I observe an object I observe each constituent of that object individually while my consciousness synthesises all these observations into a single totality. The way in which these monothetic unities are brought together are called meaning-contexts by Schutz. He gives the following definition:
We say that our lived experiences E1, E2, … , En stand in a meaningcontext if and only if, once they have been lived through in separate steps, they are then constituted into a synthesis of a higher order, becoming thereby unified objects of monothetic attention.
The meaning-contexts or “configurations of meaning”, 10 as they are alternatively called, build up within the person a “stock of knowledge at hand”: ‘the story of already constituted objectives of experience in the actual Here and Now’ (1967:78). By this “Here and Now” Schutz means the situation I find myself in as “null-point” around which that situation, as situation, is oriented (1962a:133; 1962i:306-307). 11 Thus the stock of knowledge at hand contains all the configurations of meaning that a person has gathered up until this point. Many of these configurations also contain within them further configurations which may be regarded as subdivisions. A meaning-context is then a collection of these configurations based on similarities they hold. This is not to say that they hold these similarities in a formal sense; it is the person who decides if configurations of meaning are similar and so creates a meaning-context. Both the notions of meaning-context and stock of knowledge are developed further in the later essay “On Multiple Realities” (1945[1962d]). Schutz draws upon James’ idea that within our lives our reality is divided up into “sub-universes” (1962d:207). Each of these “sub-universes” is determined by a particular set of relevancies or what Schutz later prefers to call ‘finite provinces of meaning’ (1962d:230). “Province of meaning” replaces “meaning-context”. 12 Each province of meaning is finite in that ‘there is no possibility of referring one of these provinces to the other by introducing a formula of transformation’ (1962d:232). For example, taking Husserl’s notion of a European ferhđ as a province of meaning we can contrast this with a (hypothetical) British province. As finite provinces this entails that I cannot be both European and British at the same time. They constitute exclusive monothetic unities. While it is not stated as such by Schutz, we would qualify that this point holds true only for those provinces of meaning on the same level of meaning-context. That is, we re-interpret “meaning-context” to mean how provinces are hierarchically organised depending on the situation. Thus, if we regard Europe as a higher meaning-context level to Britain the latter becomes one of its polythetic constituents.
Each province involves its own cognitive style by which is meant that each province determines how an object should be engaged with – i.e. the attitude taken towards object. Britain, then, as a polythetic constituent of Europe entails that its cognitive style is in some way derivative of this higher level. 13 According to Schutz, the natural attitude is the primary province of meaning in that it is the one we occupy most regularly and is indeed fundamental to most of our ability to interact with others. While he does not give a full exposition to the matter, he suggests that some, if not all, of these provinces of meaning form “enclaves” within the world of working (the natural attitude) by which he means each province becomes a variation upon this fundamental province (1962d:233). 14 This seems to follow in the line of Husserl’s comments of “Crisis of European Man” in which different attitudes derive from the natural attitude This emphasis on “work” as the equivalent of the natural attitude can lead to a confusion, however, as Schutz does not mean “jobs” in the sense of “going to work”. Rather, work is anything dominated by the pragmatic motive (Berger and Luckmann, 1966:36): anything concerned with the surviving and thriving of the person. Berger and Luckmann note that a similar confusion has occurred in interpretations of Marx’s thinking. Marx’s discussion of “substructure” and “labour” led many to equate this substructure with the economic structure alone. However, this is to miss that by “labour” Marx meant any “human activity” that produces “superstructure” understood as “human thought” (1966:18). 16 This sub/superstructure scheme can then be found in Scheler’s sociology of knowledge as the difference between “real factors” and “ideal factors”: ‘the “real factors” regulate the conditions under which certain “ideal factors” can appear in history, but cannot affect the content of the latter’ (1966:20).17 In order to avoid confusion later when we discuss science in relation to jobs18 we will replace Schutz’s “work” with the Old English “swincan” 19 to indicate his particular meaning. Further, it is important to recognise that swincan as concerned with surviving and thriving avoids the criticism of entailing egoism that Scheler levelled against Spencer. 20 “Thriving”, understood here as prospering, requires not only one’s own survival but also the securing of future generations.
“Stock of knowledge” therefore comes to be defined as the totality of these provinces of meaning. Because these provinces are finite, access into each requires a specific form of epoché in which the person brackets out the cognitive style of the natural attitude in order to enter the cognitive style of the appropriate province (Schutz, 1962d:231). Again, to draw a connection with Scheler, this is similar to the idea of sublimation. 21 To avoid conflation with the technical use of epoché by Husserl, Schutz states that moving from one province to another requires a “leap” or a “shock”.
To each province of meaning belongs a “practical attitude” and a “contemplative/theoretical attitude”23 (1962d:245). This distinction has potentially come from Scheler who speaks in Formalism of the “practical man” who ‘is surrounded, as it were, by thinglike units representing a realm of graduated and qualitatively differentiated efficacies independent of their being perceived. They are already differentiated and structured as points of departure of possible acting. The practical man “learns” to “handle” these units without needing to have any theoretical knowledge of the laws that govern such units’ (Scheler, 1973b:141). This is in contrast to the “theoretician” who seems concerned with this theoretical knowledge of these units. Where Schutz seems to differ is in not making this differentiation of persons. Thus, the practical attitude and the contemplative attitude constitute the two possible modes of the cognitive style a person adopts when operating within a particular province of meaning. We may usefully think of this in Heidegger’s terms, likely also drawn from Scheler, of ready-to-hand and presentat-hand (Heidegger, 2010:72-73). Each cognitive style determines the ready-to-handness (practical attitude) and the present-at-handness (contemplative attitude) of an object. The use of “ness” is meant to convey that how an object is ready-to-hand, say, is dependent upon on the cognitive style in use. Take Heidegger’s hammer as an example. The ready-to-handness of the hammer differs if my intended project is to put nails in a wall or to kill someone.
In order to proceed in a phenomenological analysis of the crisis of social science we must develop an understanding of both phenomenology and social science as cognitive styles. In the case of the former this will lead to a phenomenology proper. “Proper” means here both “accurate” and “designating a particular”. More specifically, we understand the Phenomenological Movement to be a province of meaning with a particular cognitive style that we call “phenomenology”. In so doing we make the ideological claim to “proper phenomenology”. That is, returning to Spiegelberg’s discussion of various inventions of “phenomenology”, we are so far capable of dividing these inventions into simpliciter phenomenologies and pseudo-phenomenologies. But as these simpliciter phenomenologies all share in the philosophical anthropological concern they may be regarded as having the same contemplative attitude. What differentiates them, therefore, is the differences in their practical attitudes, i.e. how they go about approaching the question “what is wer?”. All these phenomenologies are cognitive styles and once we have grasped their practical attitudes we have their definition in the proper sense. It is for this reason we can carry forward Spiegelberg’s distinction of “unrelated phenomenologies” to designate those phenomenologies proper whose practical attitudes are not the same as that of the Phenomenological Movement. In this respect the “proper” of “proper phenomenology” can be understood in its Old French root propre meaning “one’s own”. 24 The definition of the Phenomenological Movement as a phenomenology proper thus requires that phenomenology possess all the necessary constituents of a cognitive style.
In the study of Economics, British Economist Alfred Marshall stated, that this Social Science or discipline...