Phenomenology
Phenomenology
At the beginning of the twentieth century the philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) formulated phenomenology both as a philosophical perspective and as a theory of knowledge. It had a great impact on a variety of social sciences. To Husserl, reality is not given, but is constituted. It is thus apprehended in human experience and given meaning and form. Humans look upon their reality as given in a natural and unquestioned way. It is the task of the philosopher to penetrate beyond the taken-for-grantedness of the world of experience (Lebenswelt ) through a bracketing procedure (epoché ) in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the essence of phenomena. For example, the phenomenologist may look at the multiple ways in which humans experience the color red and how they give meaning to it. He or she then has to “bracket” the definitions of red as phenomena or appearances of essential redness.
In his endeavor to establish the basis for an interpretative sociology, Alfred Schutz (1899–1959) critically adopted Max Weber’s insistence that understanding social action was the methodological and epistemological foundation of sociology. However, understanding involved the two perspectives of the actor and observer, and the sociologist most frequently occupies the latter position. Taking Husserl’s notion of the everyday world of experience characterized by the natural attitude of uncritical acceptance, Schutz accounted for social reality as one in which people cognitively suspend doubt. This is the domain of first order constructs. The sociologist, on the other hand, suspends belief in the way Husserl bracketed the world of appearances. This is the domain of second order constructs resulting from sociological reflection. Schutz laid bare the structure of the life world in terms of typifications people make in everyday life along the axes of familiarity and strangeness in space and time. On the basis of these first order constructs the sociologist embarks on the construction of ideal types through a rigorous procedure. Good examples of these ideal typifications can be found in his essays titled “The Stranger” (1944) and “The Homecomer” (1945).
Schutz laid the foundations of social constructionism for a wide range of social, cultural, and feminist studies. Widening the perspective beyond the social domain was one of the main contributions of his students, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. In their seminal work The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966), they positioned phenomenology as a perspective rather than as an alternative paradigm in sociology. In their rendering of a sociology of knowledge from a phenomenological perspective, they demonstrate how reality as such, not just social reality, is constructed and installed as objective reality, which in turn affects society’s members subjectively through processes of internalization and socialization. Other social thinkers such as George Psathas adhere to the idea of a phenomenological sociology as an alternative paradigm to functionalism.
Ethnomethodology seeks to problematize the everyday world taken for granted. Its objective is not the interpretation of first order constructs, but exploring how and by what methods people achieve and sustain a sense of order, normality, and morality in their lives. Aaron Cicourel and Harold Garfinkel pioneered this approach. Garfinkel adopted a methodological procedure akin to bracketing through his breaching experiments, during which the investigator acts as a stranger in familiar situations. Society’s members’ reaction to the breaching of social order and rules demonstrate their background expectations about this order and their desire to restore rule-governed situations.
The phenomenological perspective’s focus on the subjective and everyday aspects of human existence proved attractive to investigators from a spectrum of inquiry including medicine, law, architectures, literature, the environment, ethnicity, gender, embodiment, history, and technology. Methodologically phenomenological investigations rely heavily on ethnographies and other qualitative measures.
With its emphasis on reality as a social construct, phenomenologically oriented social science provides fresh insights on local and global issues. Looking at race and racism, for example, it exposes racial orders, in whatever society they occur as historically constructed entities objectified as real. To society’s members it demonstrates how a specific racial order appears cognitively as common-sense and legitimated as natural and how they are made to believe in its inevitability and normality. Finally it throws light on how empowered insiders construct and maintain racial hierarchies and their predominance in them by remaining racially invisible while racializing other groups and assigning them to their “proper place” in society.
Some have criticized phenomenological approaches as conservative due to their preoccupation with the mundane and commonsense aspects of life. This may be true for some studies, but phenomenology’s insistence on a radical critique of knowledge resists any social structure’s self-interested appropriation of social science.
SEE ALSO Ethnomethodology
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. 1972. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books.
Crowell, Steven, Lester Embree, and Samuel J. Julian, eds. 2001. The Reach of Reflection, Issues for Phenomenology’s Second Century. Available from http://www.electronpress.com.
Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Psathas, George, ed. 1973. Phenomenological Sociology: Issues and Applications. New York: John Wiley.
Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Gerhard Schutte