As a philosophical movement, phenomenology was founded by Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher. Its main concern is to provide philosophy with a foundation that will enable it to be a pure and autonomous discipline free from all presuppositions. Its method is essentially descriptive, and its aims are to uncover the fundamental structures of intentionality, consciousness and the human life-world (Lebenswelt). The idea of the ‘life-world’ of ‘lived experience’ that is always ‘taken for granted’, even by the empirical sciences, is one of the main concepts of phenomenology which has interested many social scientists, including psychologists and psychiatrists. Nevertheless, critics have argued that when phenomenological concepts are transferred from their original domain to the context of social science, their meaning is radically transformed.
The key figure in the transition from pure phenomenology to modern sociology is undoubtedly Alfred Schutz. Schutz, with a background in law and social science, and personally acquainted with Husserl, arrived in the USA from Austria in 1939; from then on he considerably influenced successive generations of philosophers and social scientists at the New School for Social Research in New York. In his major work, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, 1932 (The Phenomenology of the Social World, 1967), Schutz examines Max Weber’s ideas about the methodology of the social sciences. Central to Weber’s account is the view that sociology is concerned with an ‘interpretive understanding’ of human ‘social action’. Although this is essentially correct, in Schutz’s opinion Weber’s ideas require further clarification which is best achieved through a phenomenological analysis of the structure of social reality and of the interpretation of that reality.
Schutz’s ideas are clearly set out—although his position remains unchanged—in his Collected Papers (3 vols. 1962–6). A central argument is that
the thought objects constructed by the social scientist refer to and are founded upon the thought objects constructed by the common sense thought of man living his everyday life among his fellow-men. Thus the constructs used by the social scientist are, so to speak, constructs of the second degree, namely constructs of the constructs made by the actors on the social scene, whose behaviour the scientist observes and tries to explain in accordance with the procedural rules of his science.
The relationship betweeen social scientists and their subject matter is totally unlike that between natural scientists and their subject matter. The social world is an interpreted world, and the facts of the social sciences are interpreted facts. According to Schutz, this essential characteristic of social reality provides social science with its central problem: attempting to construct objective accounts of a subjective reality.
In contemporary sociology, the use of Schutz’s ideas has taken several directions. But common to all is an effort to clarify the philosophical and methodological foundations of sociological knowledge. These different trends are to be found in P.Berger and T.Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966), which is primarily concerned with how a phenomenological approach can redirect the traditional sociology of knowledge towards an investigation of the taken-for-granted world of common sense knowledge; in A.V. Cicourel’s Method and Measurement in Sociology (1964), a critique of the research methods of conventional social science, which fails to recognize the implicit use of common sense knowledge; and in H.Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), the most radical use of phenomenological ideas resulting in fundamental scepticism of the achievements of conventional social science.
Inevitably, all who claim to be working within the broadly defined phenomenological tradition have radicalized or reinterpreted many of the original ideas of phenomenology Most phenomenological sociologists have concentrated upon relatively small-scale problems and have been sceptical of the achievements of mainstream sociology and its concern with the macroanalysis of social structures. In part, this can be traced back to Schutz’s analysis of Weber’s work in which he discusses Weber’s methodological essays without looking at Weber’s own substantive sociology; but it also mirrors an underlying failure of the whole phenomenological project to understand the nature of science.
In a wider context, phenomenology has influenced philosophers interested in the nature of the human sciences, many of whom have tried to combine phenomenological ideas with those from other traditions such as, for example, Marxism. Representative figures here are M.Merleau-Ponty, J.P.Sartre and H.Arendt.
Peter Lassman
University of Birmingham
Further reading
Luckmann, T. (ed.) (1978) Phenomenology and Sociology, Harmondsworth.
Piucevic, E. (1970) Husserl and Phenomenology, London.
Wagner, H.R. (ed.) (1970) Alfred Schutz: On Phenomenology and Social Relations, Chicago.
