The Methodological Meaning of Phenomenology
Shifting From the Eidetic to the Empirical
A key question that social phenomenology faces is its “empirical” application in the methodology of the social sciences. This is no simple question, in fact. Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, the epoché, is based on the explicit act of the bracketing of the empirically manifested world. This is done in order to problematize the empirical as normally given unproblematically in the natural attitude, via the reflective explication of the intentional-constitutional acts, forms and horizonal aspects of the given objects of lived experience. While the phenomenological reduction can be useful to the social sciences, as argued most elaborately by Schutz, unlike phenomenology the social sciences still require a “return” to empirical reality. This “return” (in the analytical rather than “ontological” sense) is necessary in the social sciences because the descriptive and explanatory accounts it aims to provide cannot be satisfied by a purely eidetic account of the kind phenomenology aims at.
Schutzian phenomenology sees the recovery and the making explicit of the eidetic structures of the lifeworld as a critical step in social analysis. Otherwise social scientific analysis, as Schutz noted, runs at least two risks.
The first is taking social reality at face value, in the sense of a naïve realism in which ordinary objects of social reality are simply taken over and assumed by the social scientist as objectively “real” in the analytical and scientific sense. The pitfalls of this step are several, from the taking-for-granted of objects of social reality which are otherwise one of a possible set of open possibilities (i.e., a lack of recognition of their intrinsic and extrinsic variations), confusion with regard to objects’ ontological status (as in Whitehead’s classic problem of “misplaced concreteness”), misconstrual of objects’ modes of existence by misrepresenting their mode of experience (e.g., assuming objects as existing in the mechanical aggregation of individual ego experiences rather than in distinct modes of shared experience, and vice versa), and the artificial detachment of objects from their horizonal dimensions, such as, for example, the social, cultural, and material forms of “embededdness” which condition the meaning structures that objects’ carry for social actors by turning them into pure abstractions. The latter can also become a form of the dangerous naturalization of social objects via their detachment from their historicity and their socioculturally conditioned existence – or alternatively, their transformation into nominal categories that exist as purely ideal “social constructs” whose “construction” is made fully transparent to the social analyst.
The second risk is in taking an entirely physicalist approach to social reality, where objectivities and object relations which enfold social actors and determine their activities are manufactured by the social scientist in a purely formal theoretical manner. Social actors are by theoretical shorthand stripped of any meaning bearing or meaning bestowing acts. They are rendered into theoretical “puppets” or homunculi – cogs operating in a social machine who are, at best, “users,” “manipulators,” or “interested seekers” of such objects, on the basis of an intrinsically (usually psychologically) assumed function at the individual level, or an extrinsically defined function on the “systemic” level (“utility,” “power maximization,” “social reproduction,” “social stability,” etc.). The theoretical humuncli otherwise lack any kind of subjectively experienced relation to social reality and the lifeworld. This approach mirrors “analytical” modes of theorizing, whether of the rational choice, game theoretic, or Marxist analytical variety, and various kinds of “hard” structuralism (such as structural-functionalism).
There may be those who accept the phenomenological critique of the social sciences, but are left wanting when seeking a phenomenologically grounded way of conducting empirical analysis. This problem is especially true at the macro-social and macro-cultural level, more so perhaps than at the level of micro-interaction where phenomenology has found greater use and deployment.
In his collective body of work, Schutz offers what I would call a “translation method” that can serve as a basic guide that links phenomenologically gained insights to distinct kinds of empirical observation. This translation method follows Schutz’s development of the concept of relevance in its thematic, interpretive, and motivational dimensions, as well as the concept of typicality, all of which I discuss in my upcoming book. It is premised on Husserl’s correspondence theory of reality, one stressed by Schutz, which suggests that (to paraphrase) “what is true in the epoché is also true in the natural attitude.” This means that the epoché of the natural attitude generates eidetic truths with correlates in empirically observable (and intersubjectively verifiable) facts of the world. Phenomenological inquiry in the epoché reveals that the manifold frames of reality we call “empirical” are in fact much more complex and problematically posited constructs, and are often erected atop of a wide range of unquestioned beliefs and assumptions. Phenomenological inquiry, thus, is not destructive of the empirical, but critically explicative of it. As others have pointed out, phenomenology offers a path towards an enriched, critical empiricism, which a naïve or “pragmatic” empiricism that simply assumes the ordinary being of ordinary objects, does not.
How can this critical empiricism be put to work in the social sciences? How can the insights of phenomenological scrutiny be redeployed and “discovered” as facts with empirical manifestation in the social world? In other words, how can the phenomenological method be retranslated back into an empirically observable and intersubjectively verifiable reality adequate to the social sciences? Following Schutz, in the case of the study of social actors and social action, our primary means is via the route of relevances. Relevance, for Schutz, is the master frame of phenomenological analysis of social actors and social action. Employing its aspects empirically as a specific social science methodology results in the following:
The translation process carries several assumptions. First, in the epoché, objects are understood in the form of Husserl’s “unities of experience.” The purpose of phenomenological inquiry is to understand and break down objects in the mode of their cognitive construction as experienced in the temporal dureé of the natural attitude. Objects in the phenomenological mode are not redescribed in their physical, chemical, biological, or other material and other scientifically established form. Phenomenological description is opposed and prior to any form of scientific redescription of the ordinarily experienced objects, situations, and relations of the lifeworld. Using the terms of Erwin Straus, phenomenology examines the incarnate lived experience of reality, prior to that reality’s expression in excarnate ideal, abstract, or scientific forms.
Second, the phenomenological reduction of empirical objects results in their decomposition into “monothetic” elements of constitution. For actors in the natural attitude, objects of all kinds exist as “polythetic” syntheses. For example, the notion of “car” normally subsumes the notion of “tires,” as well as notions of make and model, old or new, gasoline or electric powered, working or broken down, and other typical aspects of experience of the ordinary car user. All of these monothetic elements and “variations” of the polythetic concept of “car” represent its constitutive elements, some essential and other inessential to the object, whose thematization varies depending on the context within which they are invoked (the daily routine user driving a car, a consumer purchasing a car, a mechanic repairing a car, a designer building a new car model, an assembly line worker mounting pieces that will produce a “car” out of a set of disaggregated components, etc.). In the shift from the eidetic constitutional analysis of “car” to the concrete empirical situation of observation, we are able to pinpoint the principle of relevance, what aspect of “car” (as a general category or as a specific manifestation – this car and its operational status, its aesthetic appeal, its age, etc.) appears relevant to the concretely observed actor. In other words, the observed actors do not ordinarily engage in the kind of eidetic analysis of the phenomenologist, and so to them, “car” appears as such, a reified, “polythetic” form in their stock of knowledge, as appearing (in the appresentational sense) in its relevant aspects (car-to-be-driven, car-to-be-purchased, car-to-be-built, etc.), ultimately related to the general empirical type “car” by which actors (including the phenomenologist) relate to a shared understanding of the master thematic object in its varied contextual manifestations and relevances.
Finally, the translation assumes the principle of the reciprocity of perspectives between observer and observed, and moreover, between observer and her alter (in this case, fellow social scientist, whether individual or in community). Any proper understanding of socially constituted objects, situations, and relations of the lifeworld requires a degree of shared understanding of these by observer, observed, and alter. This assumption can be minimalist, as in the approach from the standpoint of anonymity, or maximalist, as in the approach from the standpoint of intimacy.
1) From the standpoint of anonymity: the observer is a member of the general cultural group of the observed, thus sharing with them the general social stock of knowledge in terms of relevances and typicality. Basic cultural competence with the shared objects, situations, and relations of the lifeworld suffices to establish basic knowledge of the shared empirical types that underlie the shared experience of the social world, as manifested empirically in indirect forms of observation (media, symbolic representations, and other anonymous sign systems). This approach is in line with methods of cultural criticism, surveys, archival reconstruction, and other forms of approaches to the understanding of the generalized “social other” as an anonymized other.
2) From the standpoint of intimacy: the observer exists in a we-relation with the observed, thus being able to gain insight into actors’ social environment and interpret a much more expansive array of signs, including the uses of language, the body, and other expressive vehicles, that express to the observer in a much more empathetic sense the thematic, interpretive, and motivational relevances of the social other. Methods of close observation, such as interviews and forms of participant-observation, fall into this category.
3) In the case of observer and alter, the relationship exists somewhere between total intimacy and total anonymity. To be sure, this varies by level of shared expertise (is alter a fellow professional social scientist sharing certain intellectual orientations with the observer, or a fellow expert in the specific domain studied by the observer?). In either case, the relationship is governed by a shared “protocol” of judgmental rationality, the collectively agreed upon relevances that make up the formal and informal systems of professional norms, and other institutionalized practices of (primarily academic) research, including its hierarchies and internal power relations. To be sure, this relationship can be problematized and even identified as the source of “collective error” in the social sciences with regard to scientific attributions of the ontological structure of the social world (as emergent in social scientific discourse), but that is a question for the sociology of social sciences. Its critical importance, however, in the construction of legitimate objects and legitimate methods of scientific inquiry cannot be ignored, as Pierre Bourdieu among others has rightly pointed out, indicating the practical limits of any formal definition of “methods” as a covering law operative in the social sciences. It also speaks to the indispensable necessity for phenomenology to serve as the central point at which “methods” and the “empirical” are problematized, as a means not only of the scientific construction of empirically adequate concepts, but also as a defense against forms of theoretical and methodological hegemony in the social sciences that impose themselves on practitioners of social science as what Bourdieu once called the “unthought structures of thought.”