PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

A DIALOGUE
 PHENOMENOLOGY
AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES:
A DIALOGUE

edited by

JOSEPH BIEN

•
1978
MARTINUS NIJHOFF
THE HAGUE I BOSTON I LO,NDON
© I978 by Martinus Nijhoft, The Hague, Netherlands
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form

ISBN-13: 978-90-247-2040-8 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-9693-9

DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-9693-9
 CONTENTS

Editor's Introduction VII

Eidos and Science

RICHARD M. ZANER r

Durkheim and Husserl: A Comparison of the Spirit of Positivism

and the Spirit of Phenomenology
EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN 20

Can There Be a Scientific Concept of Ideology?

PAUL RICOEUR 44

The Problem of Anonymity in the Thought of Alfred Schutz

MAURICE NATANSON 60

Genesis and Validation of Social Knowledge: Lessons from

Merleau-Ponty
FRED R. DALLMAYR 74

Notes on Contributors r07

 EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

The five essays in this work attempt in interpretive and original ways
to further the common field of investigation of man in the life-world.
Richard Zaner in his examination of the multi-level approach of the
social sciences to the social order points us toward essences and the
manner in which they are epistemically understood. By contrasting
the work of the later Durkheim with that of Husserl, Edward Tiryakian
is able to suggest a commonality of endeavor between them. Paul
Ricoeur, after phenomenologically distinguishing three concepts of
ideology, examines the supposed conflict between science and ideology
and its resolution through a hermeneutics of historical understanding.
Maurice N at anson in his discussion of the problem of anonymity reflects
on both the sociological givenness of the world and its phenomenological
reconstruction, showing the necessary interrelationship of both prior-
ities. Fred Dallmayr, after a presentation of the state of validation in
the social sciences and their problems in attempting to ground them-
selves either in regard to logical positivism or phenomenology, refers
us to the perspective of Merleau-Ponty concerning the relationship of
cognition and experience.
The origin of this work was a symposium sponsored by the Depart-
ment of Philosophy in conjunction with the Graduate School of the
University of Missouri-Columbia. All but one of the papers were com-
missioned for the symposium. I wish to thank Professor Walter Sprondel
for allowing me to publish Maurice Natanson's paper which had
previously been presented at the University of Konstanz. The research
for this book was funded by a grant from the Research Council of the
Graduate School, University of Missouri-Columbia. Franyoise Bien,
Jean Coy, John Kultgen and William Wilcox were helpful in various
ways. My special thanks go to Richard Zaner without whose encourage-
ment and many useful suggestions this project would not have been
completed.
 RICHARD M. ZANER

E1 DOS AND SCIENCE

§r. I have become increasingly convinced that alongside the more well-
known themes of Husserlian phenomenology, such as intentionality or
the Lebenswelt, is another which is of equal significance, even though
its treatment by Husserl is troublesome, and not finally thought
through.
It concerns "essences," judgments about and evidences for them,
and the method by which they are apprehended. There is a seminal
insight here which must be secured; to do this, I must presuppose some
knowledge of Husserl's work. This is not to be an exegesis, though it
is in a way a probing of what Merleau-Ponty called the Ungedachte, of
Husserl's reflections.

§2. To set up the issue, it is necessary to point out what is troublesome

about Husserl's treatment. In a word, it seems able to support two
conflicting positions - and has given rise to both. On the one hand,
much of it is devoted, ponderously, to the disclosure and analysis of
essences, and is replete with eidetic claims: judgments regarded as
apodictic. Distinct from these are judgments held to be "de facto":
tentative, revisable, probable. Intuition (Wesensschau) is the mode of
access to, and provides evidence for, eidetic claims. About those things
capable of being given only through an indefinite series ot experiences
- e.g. physical things, through sensory perception - only de facto
claims are possible. These stand only "until further notice." Eidetic
affairs, to the contrary, not being such "realities" (spatio-temporally
individuated affairs), but rather "irrealities" or "idealities," are given
"at once," immediately and thus as intuitively evidenced, are able to
be apodictically grounded. Here, Husserl seems unambiguously an
essentialist, an absolutist, even a metaphysical realist: the austere
Husserl of strenge Wissenschaft.
2 RICHARD M. lANER

§3. On the other hand, other parts of his work - some of the Nacklass,
and especially that of the later period - go in quite another direction,
in line with an apparently increasing recognition of the historical and
situational placement of all experience. The strongly affirmed dis-
tinction between the eidetic and the de facto (apriori and aposteriori)
is no longer so firm, and the significance of eidetic claims as apodictic
seems abandoned. Nothing of consciousness can escape the surge and
press of continually emerging experience. Husserl now is taken to have
finally surmounted his deep fascination with a matkesis universalis;
Kant's influence wanes, while Hume looms larger. Logic and epistem-
ology seem less central, and concrete descriptions of actual human
scenes are prominent. The plodding caterpillar has unfettered itself
from the cocoon of essentialism, emerging as the more lovely butterfly.
The richness and infinite variety of living experience replaces the
rather more arid skies of essence: the sensitive Husserl of the Lebens-
welt and the Krisis.

§4. If the bete noire of the first is relativism and sensualistic empiricism,
that of the latter is dogmatic absolutism. If the first is deeply suspicious
of the loss of firm, scientifically secured epistemic footings (norms of
judgment) inherent in the historical and social relativizations ot his
time, the second is most suspicious of the felt loss of contact with
concrete human life seemingly inherent in absolutism or logicism. If
the first fastened onto stasis (static, structural phenomenology), the
second discovered dynamis (genetic, historical phenomenology). If the
first seems readily able to be domesticated to a sort ot "conceptual
analysis," the second seems directed towards the world, the push and
pull and subtle shadings of life.
Neither interpretation, I think, really comes to grips with the issue,
and both require much constrained modifying, even ignoring, of central
parts of Husserl's work. Rather than engage that quarrel directly,
however,l I propose instead a more fruitful task: to elicit the issue. To

1 I have tackled some of this in other places. Cf. R.M. laner, "The Phenomenology of
Epistemic Claims: And Its Bearing on the Essence of Philosophy," in Maurice N atanson, ed.,
Phenomenology and Social Reality. Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz. (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1970), pp. 17-34; "Reflections on Evidence and Criticism in the Theory of Con-
sciousness," in Lester E. Embree ed., Life- World and Consciousness. Essays tor Aron Gur-
witsch (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 209-230; "The Art of Free
Phantasy in Rigorous Phenomenological Science," in F. Kersten and R. laner, eds., Phenom-
enology: Continuation and Criticism. Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 192-219; "Examples and Possibles: A Criticism of Husserl's
Theory of Free-Phantasy Variation," Research in Phenomenology, Vol. III (1973), pp. 29-43.
 EIDOS AND SCIENCE 3
do this, I shall use Husserl's work, mainly his Formal and Transcen-
dental Logic. 2

§5. The point is this. Alongside his definitive critique of relativism and
psychologism (which repeats and advances that of the Logical In-
vestigations 3 ) , Husserl has an equally trenchant refutation ot "logic-
ism."4 The first, as is well known, conducted against the critical errors
of psychologism and historicism, traces the root of the matter to the
"naturalization of consciousness,"5 and succeeds in disclosing the
grounds for norms of judgment, hence knowledge, in eidetic affairs.
Relativism fundamentally violates the sense of reason itself and, if
consistent, is ultimately self-destructive. In the end, only the scien-
tifically grounded and articulated principles inherent in knowledge
itself can withstand and give the lie to the vagaries of relativism in all
its forms.
But at the same time, such a critique runs a profound risk: that of
logicism, of pontificating aprioristically "from on high," as he says.
This is exemplified clearly by Descartes, who, after supposedly locating
the apodictic foundations for knowledge in self-consciousness and its
clear and distinct ideas, believed it nevertheless necessary to posit a
sort of epistemological underwriter in order to secure these very
foundations. This he believed he found in God's benevolence. Such a
move was, for Descartes, quite necessary, but only given his conception
of "ideas" and his assumption of the prevailing distinction between the
"formal" and "objective" reality of ideas. Ideas are denizens of the
mind, even those clear and distinct ones; yet many of them are "of"
something other than mind or its activities. Taking that "of" to
signify representation, his concern had thus to be focused on guaran-
teeing that certain classes of these subjectively subsistent entities are
really representations "of" realities existing outside the mind. Such
ideas, conceived as such, require an anchor other than their own
clarity and distinctness, and this assurance is posited outside the ideas
themselves, in God's benevolence.

2 Edmund Husser!, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1969). Hereafter cited as FTL.
3 Edmund Husser!, Logical Investigations, two volumes, trans. J.N. Findlay (New York:
Humanities Press, 1970). See especially Volume One.
4 Cf. FTL, pp. 161,277,280-82,284-85,289.
5 "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science," in Edmund Husser!, Phenomenology and the Crisis
of Philosophy, trans. (with intro.), Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), see
especially pp. 79-122.
4 RICHARD M. ZANER

§6. That ab extra epistemic move, necessitated by the presumed con-

ception of ideas, HusserI insists, is fundamentally wrong-headed -
whether it be Descartes' turn to godly benevolence, or subsequent
philosophers' turn to "principles" functioning as criteria to legitimate
epistemic claims. Whether posited as logical or metaphysical, such
principles must themselves be submitted to critical inspection, neither
simply accepted nor facilely taken as somehow intui.tively or "self-
evidently" certain. Evidence for them is called for, and for HusserI
this meant relevantly fulfilling encounters with, or experiences of,
even such exalted affairs as the principles of logic. Thus this urgent
and laborious task can be carried out only by systematic descriptive
explication of those specific types of consciousness (Bewusstseinserleb-
nisse) which have such "categories," "principles," or "norms" as their
noematic correlates. "Evidence" for these affairs, and for any possible
judgment about them, can only be found in the direct encounter with
them; it cannot be brought in "from on high," since in that case
whatever is thereby called on would itself have to be evidenced.
If the error of relativism is that it vitiates the very idea of reason,
that of logicism is that it presupposes having already legitimated
norms on hand. Both are equally devastating for the project of
knowledge and, ultimately, of action. The force of HusserI's criticisms
of both relativism and logicism is not only, as has been noted many
times, to reject the traditional dualisms (appearance/reality, phenom-
enon/noumenon, impression/idea, phenomenal object/physical object,
etc.) and their associated "theory of ideas" - which left unthematized
that critically significant preposition, "0£." It also, just as importantly,
has the force of bringing into question the very sense of eidetic and de facto
claims, and their differences.

§7. HusserI is not merely skating between the Scylla of relativism and
the Charybdis of logicism. Nor has he silently endorsed either a subtle
form of the latter (under the guise of a kind of traditionally conceived
Platonic essentialism or Kantian idealism, or "conceptual analysis")'
or a brand of the former (under the guise of an existentialism focusing
on the historical situatedness of consciousness and human life). Rather,
he is on the verge of a quite different insight, and this is the issue I
want to focus upon.
In a number of central passages, HusserI insists that while some
eidetic claims are apodictic in the strongest sense, nevertheless even
such claims as these cannot be regarded as immune to continual critical
 E1 DOS AND SCIENCE 5
inspection. The possibility of error is inherent in them, and this is so not
simply because of the facts of the finitude and vicissitudes of human
life, but rather because of the epistemic character of judgments per-
taining to them. 6 If the possibility of error is inherent in any claim
whatever, then that cannot figure in a principle of distinction between
them. If on the other hand, evidence is always a matter of experience
or encounter (Erfahrung), for the eidetic or the de facto, then neither
can that figure in a principle of distinction.
What sense, then, or status, can be given to the eidetic or the de
facto? Is it not absurd to posit both that an eidetic claim is open to
question and that it is, or can be, apodictic? If experience, never mind
which kind, plays a role here, then does this not in truth abolish the
very possibility of anything eidetic, or at least make phenomenological
inquiry whole cloth with empirical research? Has not Husserl merely
asserted that philosophy is really but empirical science, and his much-
vaunted transcendental phenomenology mistaken?

II

§8. Although what follows will, I suspect, go some way toward vindi-
cating Husserl, I will not claim that this is his position.
To make the insight in question salient, it is necessary to emphasize
the intrinsic connection between any claim and what it purports to be
about - the way in which the latter is given, encountered, or otherwise
apprehended. The question concerning the sense of eidetic claims must
therefore be intrinsically related to that concerning the mode by which
one is at all aware of anything eidetic (and similarly for de facto claims,
or those having to do with values, goals, and the like). If it is essential
to eidetic claims that they inherently include the possibility of error
and necessitate continuous critical inquiry, this has to do with the
kind of evidence pertaining to the eidetic sphere - that is, with the
specific mode of given ness (Gegebenheitsweise) appropriate to it, since it is
this which must ultimately be appealed to as confirming or legitimating
any possible judgment about something eidetic.

§9. Without rehearsing, even briefly, the complexities of intentionality,

it is important to remind ourselves of several significant points. First,
6 Edmund Husser!, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,
trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 159-60.
6 RICHARD M. ZANER

an analysis of any particular phenomenon must always be a correlational

one: any possible object is strictly correlated to the various ways in
which it is and can be presented, and conversely every mode of aware-
ness is strictly correlated to that of which the awareness is had. This
"correlational apriori"7 of method has its roots in and is justified by
the correlational apriori of consciousness itself. Second, it thus becomes
necessary to recognize that for any specific phenomenon there are
specific ways by means of which it is given or otherwise apprehended,
and these vary according as the phenomenon varies. Thus, we ex-
perience, and make jUdgments about, a tremendous variety of things:
physical things, numbers, music, laws, social groups, past and future
affairs, words, mythical entities, as well as the variety of mental
activities such as memory, anticipation, judging, inferring, sensory
perceiving, loving, valuing, and on and on. Though evidence does
indeed have an essential meaning - the direct encounter with the
affairs judged about themselves "in person" - no one type of encounter
could possibly serve to bring all the variety of objects, and mental
activities, to such "in-person" givenness. The task of phenomenological
inquiry, thus, after recognizing something at least of this range of
different objects and mental activities, is to seek out those specific
types of noetic awarenesses by or through which one is at all aware of
this or that type. The noematic-objective correlate serves as the "clue"
(Leitfaden) for discovering the correlated noetic awarenesses through
which it is encountered. Third, these "ways of being aware," in so far
as some of them - namely, those which are "in person" encounters -
comprise the modes of evidence, in the strictest sense, for their respect-
ive noematic correlates, turn out to be methods, and the theory of such
"ways" a methodology. Hence, the theory of knowledge is necessarily a
theory of method.

§IO. The wedge into the general problem of eidetic claims is to be found
in a remarkably pervasive feature of human life itself. A nything what-
ever can be considered in one of at least two ways, and we do so all the
time. I may either focus on something just for its own sake, paying
attention to it itself ("John, this particular child in need of help");
or, I may take it as an example of something else, in which case I attend
to the individual, not as or for itself, but as exemplifying ("John,
whose mode of life reveals that of autism"). In the latter case, some-

7 FTL, pp. 156,284-89.

 EI DOS AND SCIENCE 7
thing is indeed presented, but it is presented in a complex manner:
it is presented by means of the exemplifying item, which is also itself
presented but not focused upon for its own sake (I may focus on John,
concernfully for instance; or I may focus on the phenomenon of
autism as presented through John's life, actions, words, behavior,
etc.).
If anything whatever may be thus exemplifiedly presented, this
means that the particular example could be any actual or any possible
one. Now, without in the least straightforwardly asserting the existence
of whatever is thus exemplified (and whether there is reason to do so or
not), I am clearly quite able to focus my attention on the inherent sense
any exemplified affair must exhibit in order to be able to be exempli-
fied, and correlatively on the sort of awareness itself. I can, in short,
reflectively attend to the noematic and noetic correlates of this partic-
ular phenomenon, where reflection signifies not at all a sort of "in-
ternal perception," as it has traditionally been called, but rather the
apprehension of the correlated" objective/subjective" affairs themselves as
such: the exemplified-as-exempliiied, and as presented through the
exempli eating awareness.

§n. For what concerns me here, the sense of something exemplified

(for shorthand, I term this the "kind" or "sort") is complex in a
determinable manner. First, any kind has the sense of being exempli-
fied or exemplifiable by any number of particular items. Not just any
number one may arbitrarily select, however: for the kind is precisely
that which, being "common to" a specific range of items, makes it
possible for that set to be that set which it is, namely "examples of the
kind" in question. Second, the sense of kind is that it is what it is only
as exemplified, or exemplifiable through actual or possible items. Third,
the kind has the sense of being able to be exemplified by any possible
example of the kind, i.e. it inherently refers to possibles (to every
possible exemplifying item), whether or not some of these are actualized
or indeed even actualizable - the determination of that being a matter
for further inquiry.
Finally, and I believe most significantly, there is a fundamental
reciprocity between the exemplifying particulars and the exemplified
kind. Any particular item, it is clear, exemplifies many kinds: or, we
can say, any such item is an example of a kind solely by virtue of its
having certain features or properties, and it is these which exemplify,
whether well or poorly. The kind is presented through or by means of
8 RICHARD M. ZANER

the latter: it "runs through" or "is common to" them. Precisely in this
sense, the kind cannot be properly taken or regarded as something
additional to, more than, independent of, or reducible to, the system of
characteristics by virtue of which the set of particular actual or possible
items constitute the kind's range of exemplifications. When I encounter
the child, John, the variety of his behaviors (linguistic as well as
physiognomic) suggests, points to, or refers to other such behaviors (in
ways which cannot be explored here) as "alike," "similar," or "com-
mon" - i.e. as exemplifying "something common," and this "something
common" - the "kind" - while it may itself be attentively focused
upon and examined is itself precisely that system of common features
exemplified by the number of particular items. It would seem more
proper, then, to say that we face here a specific type of contexture.
Aron Gurwitsch has shown that perceptual adumbrations of, say, a
house, form a veritable system, a complex set of mutually interrelated,
cross-referential constituents, and "the house" as perceived is
nothing but that system, or contexture, itself. To speak of "the whole"
is to refer to the specific contexture constituted strictly by the recipro-
cally interrelated "parts" or constituents. Each "part" is thus func-
tionally significant: it is what it is strictly as having its systematic
placement within this system of references. The whole is thus neither the
sum of parts, reducible to the parts, nor something more than the parts; it is
the system of functional interrelationships itself.8
An individual thing - any actual or possible thing - is part of a "set"
precisely in that sense: it refers to, and is referred to by, other actual
and possible things exemplifying the kind in question. It is not that a
constituent (intrinsic sense component) of an Eidos exemplifies the
Eidos; rather, an individual item exemplifies an Eidos by virtue of its
having or exhibiting that constituent. These constituents constitute a
genuine contexture, and the kind, being "what is common to" and
thus definitive of the system of constituents, is precisely the "whole,"
the context of mutual, functional interrelationships. Such a contexture
is the fundamental sense of essence. "Eidos" is the specific "sense" con-
stituted by the multiple functional significances of constituents of a con-
texture: it is in this sense a "whole."

§I2. Noetically, there are several basic points to note. First, the in-
tentive awareness of kinds, i.e. essences, is a complex act. It necessarily
8 Cf. Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, zd impression, 1964), pp. 85-154.
 EIDOS AND SCIENCE
9
involves an awareness of an individual, not for its own sake, but as
exemplifying some kind. This awareness of kinds by means of exem-
plifying individuals may be termed exemplicating. Second, however, an
exemplicating awareness inherently refers to other possible acts of
apprehending the kind exemplified - either by means of variations on
the individual already exemplicated, or by way of other exemplicated
individuals. Exemplicating, we may say, necessarily includes, indeed
presupposes as its condition, what I may term possibilizing. In briefest
terms, in order to be able to take any particular individual as an
example, one must already be in possession of at least the bare notion
of something other than the actual exemplicated individual, and this
"other than" has the significance of "the possibly other" (or "other-
wise"). In different terms, to apprehend a kind is inherently to
apprehend it as possibly exemplified by individuals other than the one
by which one has apprehended it in the first place, and this awareness
of the other possible exemplifying individuals is what I call possibilizing
in its core form.
A third point is now clear. The complex act of exemplicative pos-
sibilizing, because it is a complex awareness of actual and possible
constituents of a context, is necessarily an awareness of the contexture
itself. As such, every such act, by referring to other possible acts of
apprehending the contexture, is constituted as itself a member of a
contexture - albeit a noetic one, and thus would reveal distinctive
differences from the noematic contexture which is the essence appre-
hended.

§I3. The essence is what is common to a set of individual items, and

though it may itself be focused on, studied, analyzed, and so on - in-
deed, may itself be exemplicated and possibilized - it does not have the
sense of being reducible to those items, something added to them, nor
the sum of them. Its sense is rather that it is the very contexture itself
which they form, and in this sense alone, it is their "principle," their
"condition of possibility." Every conceivable act which is intentively
aware of an Eidos, therefore, is necessarily at the same time an aware-
ness of exemplifying individuals; or, what is eidetic is given by necessity
only by way of or through exemplicated and possibilized individuals.
That is its specific mode of givenness, and thus is quite distinct from the
ways in which other affairs are given.
To set out deliberately to disclose any essence, thus, requires a
painstaking and systematic focusing on individuals not for their own
10 RICHARD M. ZANER

sakes but as examples. Such a project has for its fundamental task the
step-by-step inspection of, not merely one, but as many actual and
possible individuals as it takes to set up what HusserI calls a "coinci-
dence in conflict," by which one can become cognizant of what is
invariant throughout all the variations and variations on variations.
This invariant, the "what is common" among otherwise differing ex-
amples, is, he says, the Eidos. 9 This method of systematic variational
inspection he calls free-phantasy variation. What I have tried to make
salient are the noetic and noematic features of this method and what it
is designed to uncover.

III

§14. HusserI's critique of relativism and logicism led him to the position
that every epistemic claim, even the eidetic, is open to the possibility
of error, hence to continual critical inspection. Every eidetic claim
relies for its sense and legitimation on the specific mode of evidence
pertaining to it, and this means the mode of apprehension of essences,
i.e. contextual exemplicative possibilizing or free-phantasy variation.
As HusserI points out, this process is essentially characterized by a
certain "free optionalness" (Beliebigkeit) , and in two senses at least.
First, I am free to begin an eidetic inquiry with any possible example
I choose; but second, while I am also free to stop at any time
I choose, the process has the sense of being able to be continued indefi-
nitely. One of its constitutive moments is the idealization, "and so
forth and so on": I am under no obligation to "go on" inspecting further
and further variations (examples), but I could do so indefinitely. Hence,
the process does not have any definitive closure to it, and just to that extent
any judgment made about what has "up to now" been viewed and become
prominent is necessarily open-ended in the same sense as is the process
which grounds the judgment. In this sense, there is a unique sort of
arbitrariness ("free optionalness") inherent even to eidetic claims.
Furthermore, as HusserI emphasizes in discussing the Cartesian
sense of intuition, it is absurd to regard evidence of eidetic affairs as
"an absolute apodicticity, an absolute security against deceptions - an
apodicticity quite incomprehensibly ascribed to a single mental process
torn from the concrete, essentially unitary, context of subjective mental

9 FTL, p. 248.
 EIDOS AND SCIENCE II

living."lo Every awareness of the eidetic has its locus in an entire

context of other noeses, including other possible awarenesses of the
eidetic affair in question, and there is no way of determining before-
hand ("from on high"), outside of the actual labor of systematic
variation in exemplicative possibilizing, whether the present cogni-
zance is at all adequate to make an eidetic judgment definitive. Only
continuous, repeated inquiry - that is, continuous evidentiary en-
counters - can possibly yield such a determination, and even then
further inquiry is always necessarily possible since there is no definitive
closure to the process of evidencing the affair in question.
Finally, as perhaps begins to become apparent, any contexture may
be properly regarded as more or less adequate. For instance, while three
dots placed about ten inches apart on a blackboard may form the
points of a perceptual triangle, and thus do form a contexture, how
much "better" it would be were they placed closer together, or were
they connected by lines. "Better" or "poorer" here signify that the
contexture, the "whole" formed thanks to the functional significances
of each constituent, can be well or poorly formed and well or poorly
apprehended. A particular patient may well exhibit behaviors which
roughly remind one of autism, while another may exemplify this far
more clearly; a particular act may only poorly seem to be brave (or:
niggardly, self-serving, etc.); a particular English sentence may only
after considerable analysis be shown to exemplify a specific logical
form - and so on.
To say that the Eidos is a contexture - the system of functional
significances of every possible constituent - is in this sense to recognize
that not every exemplifying individual is equal in its value as exem-
plifying the essence in question, even though all of them in fact do
exemplify it, more or less well or poorly. Thus, undertaking eidetic
inquiry of necessity requires what Husserl calls a "fertile imagination":
one must "fertilize one's phantasy by observations in originary in-
tuitions that are as abundant and excellent as possible," he wrote, and
went on to stress that:
if one prefers paradoxical expressions and already understands the multiple
senses of the term, one can actually say, in strict truth, that "fiction" is the
vital element of phenomenology, as it is of every other eidetic science, that
fiction is the source from which the knowledge of "eternal truths" draws its
nourishment. 11
10 Ibid., pp. 156f.
11 Edmund Husser!, Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und phanomenologischen Philo-
sophie, Erstes Buch, Hrsg. Walter Biemel, Husser!iana Band III. (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1950), § 70.
r2 RICHARD M. ZANER

Considering all this, it seems unavoidable that eidetic claims must,

being about contextures, be open to error, but also open to enrichment
and modification.

§r5. It is thus clear that what distinguishes eidetic from de facto claims
is not at all either the possibility of error, or that the one refers and the
other does not refer to experience. Every judgment, to be legitimated,
requires evidence; and every mode of evidence is an experience of, or
encounter with, the affairs judged about. To be sure, not every possible
experience of the affairs judged about is evidence of or for them, and
not every evidence is equal in value. Some experience, e.g. depiction or
other representational modalities, may not have the sense of being
evidence for the affairs depicted; in this case evidence is had of the
depicting affair but not or what is depicted. And, of evidences, only
those which deliver the affair itself "in person" are originary, the
"best" sorts of evidence; other modes are less adequate. Hence, while
evidence is experience of the affairs themselves in respect of the quali-
ties or determinations judged about, there turns out to be a hierarchy of
evidences - originary, non-originary, and still other degrees.1 2
As already noted, what is originary evidence for one type of affair
will not be for another; hence, along with the hierarchy of evidences,
one must allow for different kinds of evidence as a function of the differ-
ent affairs at issue at any time (indeed, the determination of this turns
out to be a matter of eidetic inquiry into the noematic/noetic sense
of "evidence" itself as exemplified and possibilized by or through
specific evidences). What distinguishes one sort of epistemic claim
from another, then, is (r) the kind of affairs at issue, and (2) the kinds
of originary experiences (evidences) appertaining to them (the "ways"
in and through which these affairs are at all presented or otherwise en-
countered).

IV

§r6. Quite in general, the region of the de facto is that of actuality -

what actually is (was or might be) as distinct from what ought to be
(i.e. the normative), or what must under any circumstances be (i.e. the
eidetic, or the purely possible). Any inquiry which thus focuses ex-
12 Cf. Part II, Chap. rVof FTL, pp. 202-222; and Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations,
trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), §§ 4-7. pp. 9-17.
 EIDOS AND SCIENCE I3
clusively on the actual, or a set of actualities, is one which necessarily
involves a decision to restrict the field of objects (correlatively, the
range of focal attention) to those which are evidently actual. Thus
restricted, any such de facto inquiry is similarly restricted to only those
modes of evidence which are determinably appropriate to those affairs.
Such inquiries inevitably come up against crucial problems con-
cerning the extension of the set of actualities, and to that degree become
involved in a different epistemic level of inquiry, one which focuses on
the delimitation of the set itself, and thus has the epistemic sense of
greater completeness, as Landgrebe calls it,13 or is more foundational
precisely in so far as it is more comprehensive, focusing as it does on the
sense of the restriction itself. Such a level of inquiry bears important
resemblances to the purely eidetic we have already talked about. Con-
cerned with "the kind," it nevertheless still maintains a restriction:
its focus is not on any possible instance of the kind, but only on actual
ones, and seeks to determine the sense of that thus restricted kind. As
such, one may term it a "pure" de facto level of inquiry. Restricted to
the actual, and not focused on the purely possible, the inquiry is not
eidetic; instead, its object, the set itself, is the pure type of actuality in
question.
And, inasmuch as there are no pure types except as the contextual
sense or meaning of the set of reciprocally related actual examples, the
mode of inquiry into the purely de facto type turns out to be a species
of free variation. The logic of de facto inquiry has its sense in this phenom-
enon of exemplicational inquiry. To the extent that it brings into focus
other possible actualities, finally, it is a mode of possibilizing inquiry,
but one restricted to actualized possibles.
Finally, any region of actuality seems as susceptible as any other to
rigorous de facto inquiry. "Rigorousness" here signifies systematic
variational study of a more or less clearly restricted region of actualities,
with the aim of giving as complete an account of it, and of the sense of the
restriction (the type) itself, as possible, where the sense of "giving an
account of" must vary according as the specific, delineated region and
modes of access to it vary since "evidence" (the principal meaning of
"account") will vary depending on what affairs are to be accounted for
and thus what evidences are possibly obtainable with respect to them.
Thus, not only physical things, biological entities, or economic activi-

13 Ludwig Landgrebe, "Das Problem der phanomenologischen Psychologie bei Husserl,"

Proceedings ot the XIVth International Congress ot PhilosoPhy, Volume II. (Vienna: Herder
and Co, 1968), pp. 151-63.
 RICHARD M. ZANER

ties, but human emotions, art objects, historical configurations, and

still other regions of actuality, are equally susceptible of rigorous de
facto inquiry - so long as it is clearly recognized that evidence (i.e.
"ways" of encountering, hence "methods" for disclosing) differ ac-
cording as the region itself differs. With respect to each, a level of pure
de facto inquiry is necessary in order to achieve greater epistemic
completeness - i.e. grounded knowledge.

§r7. Since every actuality is in one crucial sense a possibility which has
been actualized, and since epistemic completeness ("knowledge") de-
mands at some point that even the level of pure de facto inquiry itself
be grounded and justified, it is clear that the very sense of de facto
restrictions demands a still more complete, or fundamental, level of in-
quiry: that which takes up the region of the purely possible itself,
"essences" in the most unrestricted sense. This I have been calling
eidetic phenomenological inquiry, although now it is possible to see
that this term has been used too broadly.
Strictly, and for greater clarity, it is necessary to recognize that,
just as, say, currently existing societies are actualities and as such
actualized possibilities, so they may, and for epistemic completeness
must be, regarded along with other possible societies (which have not
been actualized, and may not even be actual;zable) as exemplifying the
pure Eidos, "human society as such." This delineated region of inquiry
is an instan~e of what Husserl calls transcendental phenomenological
inquiry, and concerns the variational study (descriptive explication),
in pure exemplicative possibilizing ("free phantasy"), of the purely
possible. And, just as there is a necessary level of the purely de facto,
so there is that of the purely transcendental - a level which is the
eidetic in the strictest sense: the study of the essence as the contextured
sense of possibles. It is in this sense that one must, despite his objec-
tions, consi.der Schutz's phenomenology of the social as transcendental,
and even as eidetic in many ways.

§r8. All of this was necessary in order to make two basic points. (r)
Transcendental, and transcendentally eidetic, inquiry concerns con-
textures of possible affairs in respect of their being purely possible. It
concerns as well the problems of determining the sense in which such
affairs are actualizable or inactualizable, and under which conditions
("worlds"). Clearly, too, any study ot the purely possible has a direct
bearing on the study ot the actual: if any possible society, e.g., must
 EI DOS AND SCIENCE IS
show certain features in order to have the sense of being a possible
society, then every actual society must similarly show those same
features, for they are not only possible (as well as actual) but are as well
"parts" going to constitute that "whole," that contexture whose
meaning is the Eidos in the strictest sense. Thus, everything discovered
transcendentally and eidetically is directly relevant for de facto levels
of inquiry.
But, the reverse is also manifestly true: since judgments about the
purely possible concern every possible example, including actual ones,
any actuality which is seen to fail, or seems to fail, to conform to what
it purportedly discovered transcendentally, has a direct relevance for
such judgments. At one extreme, it could signify that the transcenden-
tal claim was incorrectly or prematurely asserted; at the other, such a
finding could signify methodological inattentiveness. It is hardly any
surprise, given these considerations, that one finds in Husserl's writings
what might otherwise seem to be inexcusable mixing of levels: i.e. the
copious use of examples in the midst of his purportedly eidetic in-
quiries. Far from mixing of levels, it can now be seen, what is going
on is precisely exemplicative possibilizing in order to maintain con-
tinuous checking and testing of the eidetic claims vis-a.-vis actualities.
The point here is fundamental: there is a profound reciprocity among
all levels of inquiry so far as the significance of judgments and findings
is concerned, just as there is a profound reciprocity between actual
and possible examples (constituents) and essences (contexts). In sim-
pler terms, philosophical and de facto inquiries are epistemically bound
in a continuum defined by increasing completeness inherent in the very
idea of knowledge, but it is a continuum with inherent levels. To try
and conceive them otherwise is an absurdity, and an open invitation to
either relativism or logicism.
(2) The relevance of all this to social science, while probably not as
plain as I would like, can be expressed in the following sketch.
So far as any such inquiry seeks to thematize some region of "the
social," it necessarily gets its sense, methods and goals, from that region
itself. As it would be peculiar for one concerned to find out why interest
rates are increasing today by using a divining rod, so is it senseless to
insist that the ways for investigating chemical substances must be used
by one trying to understand prevailing political values. Each inquiry
takes its crucial clues from what it takes to be accounted for, as Dilthey
already showed, i.e. from the object of inquiry itself.14 The initial, and
14 "Ideen iiber eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie," in Wilhelm Dilthey's
r6 RICHARD M. ZANER

continually pressing question, is always: what is the most appropriate

way ("method") for one to "get at" and then "account for" these
actual affairs?

§r9. Emphasizing this makes it clear that de facto inquiry generally,

and social science particularly, presupposes some mode of access to its
region. In a strict sense, every social scientist must already be in
possession of the very thing ("the social") he sets out to research:
to inquire into social reality I must already in some way know what
social reality is, for otherwise I might find myself interviewing stones
and recording the gentle noises of sleeping birds.
This circle, one which has occupied so much effort since Plato,
cannot be ignored, for ignoring it is in fact already to preclude the very
question at issue. Among the many ways Alfred Schutz speaks of it is
this: the fundamental task of the social sciences is of necessity to form
second-order constructs. Since its subject-matter itself (social agents,
social groups, etc.) has and interprets a world, acts in and on it,
endowing it with meaning, purpose and value, the social scientist has
no choice but to interpret interpretations, or form constructs about the
constructs social agents themselves use at every level and in every
respect in their lives. In these terms, if the theory of nature is conse-
quent upon the discovery of nature, the theory of social reality is
likewise consequent upon its discovery.
But this latter discovery is unique and definitive of that context: on
the one hand, social scientists themselves are members of the social
world which they want to study (hence, their own constructs necessarily
form a part of their region of inquiry), and on the other hand the social
agents they want to study form constructs, act in, and interpret their
world, within which one also finds social scientists (among other sorts).
The circles themselves rapidly begin to circle! But, far from being
vicious, what can be seen in light of what has been pointed out already,
is that a series of systematically connected inquiries emerges. Some
of these constructs concern artistic affairs, some religious ones, some
everyday sorts of situations, and so on. Certain of these constructs,
furthermore, concern, or more properly depend upon and presuppose,
experiences of the "social world" itself. Finally, some of these con-
structs one finds in the social world concern, or are found within, the
very "science" which seeks to study the social world: not only con-
Gesammelte Sehri/ten, V. Band: Die Geistige Welt, Erste Hiilfte ("Abhandlungen zur Grund-
legung der Geisteswissenschaften"). (Leipzig and Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1924) pp. 139-240.
 EIDOS AND SCIENCE 17
structs developed by scientists, but constructs about science held by
those who do not practice a science.

§zo. The thrust of these remarks should be clear enough: social science
is itself within the social world, and not only do social scientists form
constructs but among the other constructs they find in the social world
are constructs (interpretations, values, beliefs, etc.) about social science
itself. People "in the street," artists, politicians, ministers, as well as
social scientists have views about the social world, and about social
science. All these, moreover, have "ways" of dealing with the world,
and with one another, and in different social settings or contexts. And,
this very social science sets itself the task of elaborating and accounting
for this complex of social constructs. That, on the one hand, one's
very subject-matter itself interprets its world, but also social science
and scientists; and on the other, that social scientists themselves in-
terpret their world and their own scientific doings; and, finally, that all
these rest on constructs pertaining to the "social" itself - these cannot
be excluded from those constructs which social science must try to
account for. Not only, then, must there be social scientific inquiries
into these or those social groups, strata, and the like, but there arises of
necessity a de facto social scientific inquiry into art, religion, politics,
and so on. Perhaps most intriguing, there is also a necessary inquiry
which must focus specifically on social science itself: a sociology of
science (prevailing constructs pertaining to science, held by whomever
it may be) is of a piece with social science generally.

§2I. This set of interlocking circles, and circles within circles, rather
than stunning one into a sort of relativistic muddle, or sending one off
into a desperate logicism, can be cut through, in the case of social
science, with a stroke. Some mode of access to "the social," we said, is
presupposed by that de facto science. The ground on the basis of which
social science is at all able to recognize some phenomena as "social" is,
to be blunt, that social scientists are themselves social beings, indeed before
they even begin to become scientists they are social beings, always
already doing very much the sort of thing they will later do as scientists.
Not only are they social beings, but in many ways social beings are
already scientists of a sort. I mean to indicate here that before becoming
scientists, whatever else goes into that, such human beings have already
engaged in "asking," "exampling," "inquiring," "inferring," "ob-
serving," "talking," "accounting for," and so on. In the idiom of
18 RICHARD M. ZANER

ethnomethodology, people are in a way already "folk sociologists,"

whose talk and actions are precisely "methods" to organize and account
for the social situations of their daily lives, and the task of social science
is then to note, explicate, and practice those already available and
practiced modes of thought and their correlated constructs with care,
rigor and thoroughness. To learn to "construct second-order constructs"
is on this view to learn to listen to and observe attentively and respect-
fully one's social environs, and to oneself as a social member of that
environs, concerned to organize, account for, and understand it, and to
communicate that understanding to one's fellow beings. Precisely this,
I believe, is what James Agee accomplished in his remarkable Let us
Now Praise Famous Men,15 and which many others - poets, novelists,
historians, playwrights, and plain citizens - do as well, and from which
social scientists must learn in order to accomplish their tasks.

§22. A final methodological reflection seems in order. Inasmuch as

social scientists are themselves social beings attempting to understand
the social milieu in which they find themselves, they are faced with
two distinct but quite intimately connected tasks, and both of these are
epistemically connected with a third one. On the one hand, they must
get at and elucidate prevailing constructs in that social milieu; on the
other hand, they must be capable of attending to, appraising and
critically accounting for their own actions and results - among other
things, arriving at a kind of reflexive account of themselves and their
scientific discipline as social phenomena in their own right. To the end
of clarifying these distinct but inseparable tasks, what I would call
sociography - the systematic study of prevailing social typifications -
should be differentiated from what might properly be called sociology -
the systematic study of the phenomenon of sociality itself, including
thereby what might be called the sociology of science. If the first is
straight-forward de facto inquiry, the second is pure de facto inquiry
and lies at another epistemic level from the first, as noted earlier. The
"logos" of "socius" is, it seems to me, a f00us on the sense of de facto
restriction to a region of actualities itself: on the "type" itself within
which social scientific inquiry goes on. To that extent, the "graphing"
of the social is distinct from the "theory" of the social. Both, however,
achieve greater epistemic completeness through specifically transcen-
dental phenomenological (and transcendentally eidetic) inquiry, where
15 James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1960).
 EIDOS AND SCIENCE 19
the focal issues are the conditions for the possibility of, and the eidetic
sense of, "any possible social world." If pure de facto inquiry may be
called a sociology of science and the social world itself, then it joins
with philosophical concerns in the most significant way: namely,
through common issues. A clarification of the range of the eidetic thus
has profound consequences for the understanding of the de facto, and
conversely, the articulations of the latter bear directly on the achieve-
ment of the former. It is that deep convergence around issues, and the
recognition of multiple levels of concern as regards them, which gives
the lie ultimately to the false and divisive territoriality conception of
knowledge which has too long been among us.
 EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN

DURKHEIM AND HUSSERL: A COMPARISON OF THE

SPIRIT OF POSITIVISM AND THE SPIRIT OF
PHENOMENOLOGY

Some years ago, I began to consider the possibility of a meaningful

rapprochement between sociology and philosophy by examining simi-
larities and differences in the perspectives of Durkheim's sociologism
and that of existential thought concerning the basic relation of the
individual and society.1 The intention of this endeavor was to renew
the ties between two disciplines which I feel are complementary and in
need of one another. Since this initial venture, I have become increas-
ingly aware of a third voice in the dialogue, and this tertius gaudens is
that of phenomenology.2 As the title of this paper indicates, it is the
relation between sociology and the latter which is the horizon of the
present essay.
To be sure, in several respects, existential thought and phenomen-
ology may be seen as forming an integral philosophical stance. Their
core denominator is the radical exploration of subjectivity, and their
common genealogical tree can be traced back to Hegel, whose absolute
idealism might be seen as a formulation of transcendental subjectivity;
Hegel's Phenomenology ot the Spirit, for example, may be seen as the
trunk from which both phenomenology and existential thought (via
Kierkegaard) branched out. Both phenomenology and existential
thought grasp the experiential aspect of the world in its subjectivity.
Phenomenology's contribution to the division of labor is its detailed
examination and comprehension of the meaning-structures of con-
sciousness, while the thrust of existential thought is to uncover (and

1 Edward A. Tiryakian, Sociologism and Existentialism (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-

HaU, 1962).
2 See my essays, "Existential Phenomenology and the Sociological Tradition," American
Sociological Review, 30 (1965), pp. 674-688, and "Sociology and Existential Phenomenology,"
in Maurice Natanson, ed., Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, vol. I (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1973), pp. 187-222.
 DURKHEIM AND HUSSERL 21

recover) the sensory world, the world which is both sensed and given
sense in subjectivity. My thinking (or intending) the world and my
feeling the world are interrelated aspects which structure my being-in-
the world. So, a philosophy of subjectivity, paving the way for a
genuine philosophical anthropology grounded in the experienced world
of human beings, is one which necessarily completes itself in the con-
vergence of phenomenology and existential thought into an existential
phenomenology.
The synthesizing of phenomenology and existential thought is sug-
gested in Jaspers and Heidegger, but even more clearly realized by
Merleau-Ponty, particularly in his seminal work on the modalities of
perception, 3 which brings to the fore of philosophical consciousness the
incarnation of consciousness in the body. This has great implications
for sociology, particularly for general microsociology, albeit Merleau-
Ponty has yet to receive the recognition he deserves as a crucial bridge
figure between existential phenomenology and the social structures of
intersubjectivity, which is at the heart of the phenomenon of society.
Even more than that, Merleau-Ponty in his synthesizing endeavor was
formulating a philosophy of ambiguity 4 (but not an ambiguous phil-
osophy), whose outline is clearly suggested in his unfinished work, The
Visible and the Invisible. 5 Once we perceive the fundamental ambiguity
of the Lebenswelt, including the ambiguous nature of social interaction
and social existence, Merleau-Ponty's meaning for the social sciences,
as perhaps the modern philosopher of the social sciences, should become
patent.
However tempting and fruitful a discussion of Merleau-Ponty and
sociology might be, I will back off from this venture in order to treat a
more pressing matter namely the relation between phenomenology and
sociological positivism. I am backing off, in other words, from treating
existential phenomenology as a fait accompli or as a given integrated
philosophical stance, and will simply consider certain aspects of the
relation of modern phenomenology and sociological positivism. Where-
as barely a decade ago sociological positivism had such a monopoly
in the methodology of empirical research that most practicing sociol-

3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology ot Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).
4 See the foreword by Alphonse de Waelhens, "A Philosophy of the Ambiguous," in
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure ot Behavior, trans. Alder L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1963), pp. xviii-xxvii.
5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. by Claude Lefort, trans. by
Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
22 EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN

ogists in the United States would have tended to equate them as

identical, today there is an increasing awareness of meaningful alterna-
tive methodologies which are actively competing for attention and
professional recognition. Among these alternatives, phenomenological
sociology as such is gaining increased visibility. 6
Before proceeding further, let me point out that the expression
"phenomenological sociology" carries with it a certain ambiguity as to
its referent(s), an ambiguity which is also the case for "positivistic
sociology," but since I shall be dealing with the latter in the body of my
exposition, I will gloss over this now. If we use "phenomenological"
in a very broad sense as pertaining to the subjective or "inner" aspect
of social reality, that is, to an elucidation of the meaning component of
social situations and social structures, then we must recognize that
there have been various spokesmen for phenomenological sociology,
many of whom are not readily thought of as "phenomenological"
sociologists: such diverse figures as Max Weber, Talcott Parsons,
Pitirim Sorokin, Florian Znaniecki, Robert McIver, Georges Gurvitch,
and Erving Goffman come to mind in this context. If we use "phenom-
enological" in a more restricted sense as pertaining to a demonstrable
filiation and identification with the formulator of modem philosoph-
ical phenomenology, then the circle becomes more restricted. In the
contemporary situation, the circle would seem to have as its nucleus
those whose affiliation with HusserI is chiefly through Alfred Schutz,
and here we would find Maurice N atanson, Harold Garfinkel, Peter
Berger, and Thomas Luckmann. Several contemporary figures have
been students of Schutz, some have been students of these students,
and yet others have gotten their phenomenological perspective through
other sources than Schutz. Since I do not mean to provide an inventory
of names, there is no need to mention many other contemporary figures
who might constitute the "phenomenological school" in sociology. 7
Certainly there is need for a systematic historical and structural
delineation of the development of phenomenological sociology, along
the lines of Herbert Spielberg'S excellent study of phenomenology and

6 See, for example, George Psathas, ed., Phenomenological Sociology: Issues and Applica-
tions (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1973); Paul Filmer, Michael Philipson, David
Silverman, and David Walsh, New Directions in Sociological Theory (London: Collier-
Macmillan, 1972).
7 Nicholas C. Mullins provides a fairly extensive Inventory (subject to some sins of omis-
sion and commission) in his chapter "Ethnomethodology" in his volume Theories and Theory
Groups in Contemporary American Sociology (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 183-
212.
 DURKHEIM AND HUSSERL 23
psychology. 8 Such an assessment would have to go beyond a chronology
and a categorization; it would need to clarify internal relations of
phenomenological sociology. For example, what is the relation of
today's generation of phenomenological sociologists to those of the
first generation, the contemporaries of Husserl such as Mannheim and
Scheler? Is it the" Americanization" of phenomenological sociology in
the post World War II period that accounts for the present micro- and
ahistorical tendency whereas the direction of phenomenological sociol-
ogy in pre-war Europe under Scheler, Mannheim, and Gurvitch had a
pronounced macro-historical emphasis? Thi s seems to be the case, but
if so, is phenomenological sociology itself a cultural phenomenon rather
than a general methodology of cultural phenomena? At another level
of assessment, how does phenomenological sociology relate to other
stances in opposition to positivistic sociology, such as so-called "re-
flexive" sociology or even "critical" sociology? Where do they come
together (is it again in Hegel?) and where do they part ways?
But no matter how amorphous the boundaries of "phenomenological
sociology" are, those who identify themselves with this stance have as
a common front an opposition to the dominant methodology ot positi v-
ism. Their critique has various facets, and a brief exposition will
suffice. The positivistic orientation takes for granted, or as a given, an
objective world out-there constituted by an invariant, determinate
(and determinable) set of objective relationships, one that can be
adequately represented by formal, quantitative formulae, obtained by
elaborate inductions from empirical facts and observations which are
ascertained by increasingly precise and reliable measurements. The
guiding techniques for this cognitive mastering of the workings of the
social world are provided by the recipes of "statistical inference."
Although improvements in sociological knowledge ("harder data,"
more powerful techniques of analysis, etc.) may lead to new "paths"
besides the well-trodden one of statistical analysis, all positivistic roads
lead to the same heaven: the grasping of the determinate, objective
forces which produce, independently of observers, an objective social
reality. This is the great beatific vision of the positivistic sociologists
... a vision which for phenomenological sociology is a pathetic delusion.
It is a delusion because the world does not exist independently of
our perception of it; a delusion because the social world is constituted
by multiple realities of consciousness, rather than being an unprob-
8 Herbert Spiegelberg, Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1972).
 EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN

lematic unitary entity; a delusion because the objective depictions of

the positivists are intellectual abstractions which are not validated by
the world of experience; a delusion because social reality is an emergent
process of intersubjective interactions which relate to a texture of
meanings (tacit and explicit) that is always present but undetectable
by objective or quantitative procedures. In brief, the phenomenological
critique essentially amounts to a condemnation of the naIvete of
positivism for the latter's unawareness and neglect of the validity of its
findings.
The methodological dispute between phenomenological and positiv-
istic sociology, while real, has also been muted. In part this is because
the positivists lack awareness of the philosophical grounds of the
phenomenological tradition, or else they ignore the contentions of
phenomenological sociologists in the way that a dominant majority
may unfortunately ignore the contentions of a minority group. But
fairness also dictates to my pointing out that the fault is also partly
that of the phenomenological sociologists. Many students who begin
their sociological studies hoping to gain a better understanding of the
social world have their interests stifled by the intricate sleight-of-hand
formalizations and quantifications of the positivists, which tend to
turn the social world into an obscure matrix of calculations, far removed
from the concrete reality of direct experience. And yet, if students
turn to phenomenological sociology - for example the writings of many
ethnomethodologists - they encounter an even more formidable jargon
which not only mystifies the social world but seems to contain as few
profundities and as few insights as the productions of positivism.

***
What I propose to do in this essay is to get a certain "historical"
perspective on the contemporary controversy between phenomenolog-
ical and positivistic sociology by means of returning to their sources of
inspiration, to their respective "spirit." For this purpose I take as their
respective foundations and fountains of inspiration the thoughts of
Emile Durkheim and Edmund Husserl. Let us keep in mind that
Husserl and Durkheim did not originate the tradition of positivistic
sociology and that of phenomenological philosophy. However, each is
recognized in contemporary circles as the figure who articulated for
modern times the paradigmatic structure of the respective intellectual
 DURKHEIM AND HUSSERL 25
tradition, who imparted a new vitality to that tradition, and whose
intellectual leadership produced, inspired, and guided new generations
of students into broadening the areas of inquiry in the horizon of their
respective paradigm of investigation.
I will not compare Durkheim and Husserl in terms of the totality of
their writings; rather, I wish to concentrate on the relation of their
respective last work, namely The Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life and The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phe-
nomenology.9 I will do this for several reasons, but foremost because I
see these works as a coming-together in certain crucial respects of the
two masters. In a sense Durkheim and Husserl had commonality in
their beginnings: they were born a year apart (Durkheim in r858,
Husserl in r859), which means that for about six decades they shared a
common European history; they also shared in their formative years,
though not at the same time, the same teacher, Wilhelm Wundt, the
founder of experimental psychology (although both Durkheim and
Husserl came to reject "psychologism" as an accounting of the phe-
nomenal world). But these common "beginnings" have something
accidental about them.
On the other hand, the "essentials" in comparing their standpoint,
and through this obtaining a perspective on the relationship of phe-
nomenology and sociology beyond what Merleau-Ponty has already
indicated,lO may be more adequately discovered by examining their
culminating works, the end-point of their life task as formulators of
modern sociology and modern phenomenology, respectively. It is in the
last work of Durkheim and Husserl that their initial vision of their
intellectual mission reaches full fruition; the actualization of the
possibilities of sociology and of phenomenology attains in The Ele-
mentary Forms and in The Crisis the culmination of the telos that
structured their antecedent explorations. And why a comparison of
their last works may be even more apposite for us today, whether we
be sociologists or philosophers, is that each work is not simply an
"end-point," a conclusion of an intellectual career; each work also has
the significance of a new beginning, so that in a sense all their previous

9 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (I9I2), trans. Joseph Swain
(New York: Collier Books, I96I); Edmund Husseri, The Crisis of the European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, I970). Hereafter these will be cited as The Elementary Forms, and The Crisis, and
references will be given to their respective English edition.
10 Maurice Merieau·Ponty, "The Philosopher and Sociology," in Signs, trans. Richard
C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, I964), pp. 98-II3.
26 EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN

writings may be thought of as a prefiguration of the new beginnings,

of the New Dawn for sociology and philosophy, announced in The
Elementary Forms and in The Crisis. And beyond that, their respective
last works, taken together, have a contemporary timeliness for us
seeking to fathom our own world situation, or at least the situation of
Western Civilization in the world.

***
In approaching the last work of Durkheim and of Husserl, respectively,
let us note that some commentators have treated it as a "break" or as a
discontinuity with earlier writings. So, in the case of Durkheim's
Elementary Forms we have the following considerations which might
seem to indicate a discontinuity, if not a reversal, with his previous
undertakings. First, here is a sociologist whose previous major works
dealt with structural aspects of modernization and modernity, who
now seems to leave the domain of modern society for an extensive and
prolonged examination of Australian totemism and aboriginal social
organization. Second, here we have Durkheim the formulator of socio-
logical positivism who see~s to abandon positivism in favor of a
transcendental idealism concerning the nature of society, who leaves
the realm of objectively documentable facts given in statistical data
in favor of a structural-functional analysis of religious symbols and
experiences! And as to H usserl' s Crisis, here is the philosopher of
radical subjectivity, the philosopher of solitude,u not only plunging
himself into the lifeworld of intersubjectivity but at the same time en-
gaging phenomenology in a bold grasp of history, and in fact doing less
than a radical interpretation of the historically manifested essence of
Western civilization!
Are we then dealing with the paradox of Durkheim, the guiding
spirit of modern sociology, turning his back on Western, modern
society and on positivism, and on the other side, Husserl turning his
back on descriptive phenomenology and its quest for apodictic knowl-

11 Thus, did not Husserl say "Autonomous philosophy ... comes into being in the solitary
and radical attempt of the philosophizing individual to account and to be accountable only
to himself"? And later in the same text, the theme of the solitary ego, detached from his
fellow men, is further accentuated, for "Due to this epoche, human solitude has been trans-
formed into transcendental solitude." These citations come from his I93I Berlin lecture,
"Phenomenology and Anthropology," reprinted in Roderick M. Chisholm, ed., Realism ana.
the Background of Phenomenology (New York: Free Press, 1960), pp. 133, 135, respectively.
 DURKHEIM AND HUSSERL 27
edge, which surely cannot be established by the contingencies of
history? Should we consequently treat The Elementary Forms and The
Crisis as perhaps interesting detours if not outright deviations from
their authors' preceding investigations?
I think not. Having absolutely no pretension of being a Husserlian
scholar, I gladly accept the independently arrived at judgment of two
authorities on Husserl that there is no essential continuity between
The Crisis and the anterior phenomenology of Husserl. I have in mind
the penetrating studies of Husserl done by Paul Ricoeur and Maurice
Natanson. 12 As to Durkheim's Elementary Forms, I feel better qualified
to assert that it has a fundamental continuity with the development
of Durkheim's thoughts; in fact, in some respects, it is the culmination
of themes he had broached in his earliest essays.13 In particular, Durk-
heim had in r886 outlined the profound interrelationship and inter-
dependence of religion, morality, and social organization, and these
themes are the contextual background of his "middle period," the
period of his most pronounced "positivistic" investigations. The back-
ground comes to the fore in The Elementary Forms, which should be
properly seen as much more than a study of the social structures of
religion: it is an investigation into the essential structures of social
consciousness. This culminating work of Durkheim places his "positiv-
ism" in a new light, one which enables us to rethink the controversy
between phenomenological philosophy and positivistic sociology.
So much by way of a prologue; let us now see whether a dialogue
emerges out of the comparison of The Elementary Forms and The Crisis.
To reiterate the intention of this essay: I wish to bring out essential
aspects of the two works, features essential to our grasping the spirit of
Husserl's phenomenology and of Durkheim's sociology. Consequently,
the reader should not expect an exposition of the contents of the
respective works, which should be read independently of my present
"commentaries. "

12 Paul Ricoeur, Husserl, An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans., Edward G. Ballard

and Lester E. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967); Maurice Natanson,
Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1973).
13 "Les etudes de Science Sociale," Revue Philosophique, 22 (1886); pp. 61-80; "La
Philosophie dans les universites Allemandes," Revue Internationale de l'Enseignement, 13
(1887), pp. 313-38,4 2 3-440.
28 EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN

II

Husserl in his essay "Phenomenology and Anthropology"14 had pre-

pared an overture to his later momentous Crisis by suggesting what
he intended phenomenology to be. It is worthwhile to dwell on some
points of this I930 essay which heralds his culminating philosophical
endeavor. He tells us that phenomenology is a "hermeneutic of the life
of consciousness," and adds in the same paragraph, "Rather than
'interrogate' nature, as Bacon recommended, we must, therefore, in-
terrogate consciousness or the transcendental ego in order to force it to
betray its secrets" (p. I40). Further on in his essay, Husserl observes:
Starting out from myself as ego constituting existential meaning, I reach the
transcendental others, who are my peers, and at the same time the entire open,
infinite transcendental intersubjective realm. In this transcendental community
the world as "objective" and as the same for everybody is constituted. 15

Lastly, Husserl concludes his essay by declaring:

If one has understood our aims ... one can no longer doubt that there is only
one ultimate philosophy, only one kind of ultimate science, the science insepa-
rable from transcendental phenomenology's method of exploring origins.16

Now here we have three themes which announce the coming Crisis and
which place in relief essential aspects of the thrust of phenomenology.
First, phenomenology seeks the truth of the world by deciphering
consciousness rather than by deciphering the mysteries of bio-physical
"nature" ; this statement of Husserl points to the naivete of empiricism
which assumes that the truth of the world, its foundation, lies in an
objective realm of nature. The second theme prefigures the re-emer-
gence of the phenomenologist from his solitary explorations into the
communal world, much in the fashion of Plato's figure in The Republic
who leaves the shadowy cave of darkness but then reenters it after
having been illuminated in order to inform his fellow men of true
knowledge of reality,17 And in The Crisis the nexus between transcen-
14 In Roderick M. Chisholm, op. cit.
15 Ibid., p. 14I.
16 Ibid., p. 142.
17 Not only do I find a strong affinity between Husser! and Plato concerning the doctrine
of essences, which might make us consider Husser! a neo-Platonist, but also a case might be
made for both as participating in the esoteric tradition of Western civilization (as manifested
in the allegory of the cave). Although I lack evidence as to whether Husser! was in fact an
initiate of a school of esotericism, there are passages in The Crisis, for example, Part IlIA,
sections 39-41, which are remarkably akin to the language of esotericism, such as theosophy
or anthroposophy. For materials on the esoteric, see my volume, On the Margin of the Visible
(New York: Wiley and Sons, 1974).
 DURKHEIM AND HUSSERL 29
dental phenomenology and the European community as a global,
historical phenomenon, will become a major probe of Husserl's anal-
ysis. Finally, the concluding theme stresses what is distinctive and
radical about phenomenology as a philosophical method, namely, it is
a method of exploring origins.
What does exploring origins mean? It means to get to the ground of
phenomena, to the roots, to that which makes possible the appearance
of things as phenomena. Now there is involved an interrelated task: on
the one hand, to get to the origins entails going back in the historical or
temporal process, back to the historical seedbed of the visible phe-
nomenon which is before our consciousness. On the other hand, to go
to the origins is not only an historical task but also a structural task,
that is, a task of discovering the fundamental structures which ground
the phenomenon that we are concerned with. So, we now see phenom-
enological analysis as entailing a structural as well as an historical
analysis.
We can now understand why Husserl's phenomenology was not
only a method entailing both eidetic and transcendental reductions,
but more important in this context, why The Crisis is the appropriate
culmination of Husserl's entire phenomenological investigations. Why
appropriate? Because the phenomenon that is the appropriate subject
matter of transcendental phenomenology is the phenomenon of West-
ern civilization, which is not an "objective," "natural" object that can
be understood by empiricism or by historicism, but a global, historical,
spiritual phenomenon, a phenomenon of intersubjective consciousness.
It is a phenomenon that has a unity and whose historicity has a telos:
Husser! will find as the essential theme of Western civilization (or
"Europe") that of rationalism. This is the core structure of the hi3tor-
ical emergence of Western civilization, and what underlies the profound
malaise of our century, will add Husserl, is the destructuration of
rationalism. IS Husserl's Crisis is both a phenomenological analysis and
a diagnosis of the "crisis" of the modern world; it is, as he suggests,

18 "In order to be able to comprehend the disarray of the present 'crisis,' we had to work
out the concept of Europe as the historical teleology of the infinite goals of reason; we had to
show how the European world was born out of ideas of reason, i.e., out of the spirit of philos-
ophy. The 'crisis' could then become distinguishable as the apparent failure of rationalism,"
(The Crisis, p. 299, emphasis in the original).
Although I limit myself in this essay to a dialogue between Husser! and Durkheim, it
would be germane to consider here the convergence between Husser! and Max Weber. More
than Durkheim, Weber saw the unfolding of rationalism as the central theme of the modern-
ization of Western civilization, and like Husser!, Weber perceived the tragic exhaustion of
the spirit of rationalism as having the gravest implications for the future of Europe.
30 EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN

a thoroughgoing radical critique of what underlies the crisis. And here

we have yet to recognize the full import of HusserI's declaration:
I would like to think that I, the supposed reactionary, am far more radical and
far more revolutionary than those who, in their words proclaim themselves so
radical today.19

I t is only by going to the origins, to the roots, to the depth structures of

consciousness, that one can be truly radical; by going below the surface
of phenomena one ascends or transcends the place of mundanity. The
epoche had provided HusserI with the means of liberating the philos-
opher from the natural attitude. In The Crisis this liberating heuristic
device will permit HusserI to grasp the sense of the "crisis" of Europe
as the alienation of rationalism from its existential roots in transcen-
dental consciousness. He will see this alienation as involving philosophy
falsely identifying itself with the positive sciences, leading to a funda-
mental crisis in epistemology, a crisis in the grounding of knowledge.
So much for a preliminary view of HusserI's Crisis and its back-
ground. Let us suspend further consideration of it until we have
introduced into the discussion Durkheim's Elementary Forms. I wish
to explore how this work complements The Crisis, or more broadly,
how Durkheim's stance in approaching sociologically the phenomenon
of the religious life converges with HusserI's phenomenological endeav-
ors. Let us start our examination of The Elementary Forms by asking
the question, what is it that Durkheim has in mind in analyzing the
most primitive religion he knew of, that of totemism ?20
To be sure, as he tells us at the very beginning of his introduction,
he will seek in studying totemism to deepen our understanding of an
essential feature of humanity, namely "the religious nature of man."21
But the horizon of Durkheim's research project is wider than this, for
as he adds a few pages later:
... the study of religious phenomena gives a means of renewing the problems
which, up to the present, have only been discussed among philosophers. 22

And this statement gives us an inkling of the relevance of his study for
phenomenology as philosophy. What is the fundamental problem of
philosophy if not the grounds of knowledge? Is this not the central

19 The Crisis, p. 290.

20 To be sure, several scholars have criticized Durkheim for accepting that Australian
totemism is the simplest, i.e., most primitive, religion; this controversy is of no relevance to
the present discussion.
21 The Elementary Forms, p. 13.
22 Ibid., p. 21.
 DURKHEIM AND HUSSERL 3I
theme of Husserl's Crisis which is posed in the beginning of Part I,
where Husserl sees the original establishment of philosophy in the
Greek awareness of reason, of episteme as opposed to (unreflective)
doxa? Here philosophy in its origins "conceives of and takes as its
task the exalted idea of universal knowledge concerning the totality
of what is."23
Durkheim enters The Elementary Forms having conducted a pre-
liminary investigation (with Mauss) concerning the fundamental forms
or categories of knowledge. 24 He had in his formative years received
a thorough exposure to philosophy, and was an active member of the
French Society of Philosophy. We may say that Durkheim and Husserl
came to their respective last works with a felt concern to ground the
structural foundations of knowledge; why each felt the pressing need
to ground knowledge apodictically will be discussed shortly. But that
Durkheim in The Elementary Forms was returning to philosophy, or to
its renewal, and this in terms of the central theme of knowledge is
self-evident in his very introduction where he indicates his concern
with accounting for the fundamental categories of the understanding
(time, space, cause, etc.) as structures which are collective representa-
tions (i.e., which in effect are the structures of the lived world); and
he adds,
This hypothesis, once admitted, the problem of knowledge is posed in new
terms. 25

So it is with the structures and the ground of knowledge that Durkheim

and Husserl are concerned with, and in fact, it is with renovating the
traditional notions of knowledge that is at the heart of both The
Elementary Forms and The Crisis. Moreover, just as Husserl's radicalism
entails a phenomenological investigation of beginnings, so also does
Durkheim take sociological investigation as a going to beginnings. In
taking the categorizations of knowledge to the setting of the most
primitive society, he is surely going as much to the structural grounds of
knowledge as was Husserl by taking it back to the early Greek ap-
prehension of episteme, wherein Husserl found the original unity of
science and philosophy, the unity of knowledge contained in philos-
ophy as science. Durkheim in The Elementary Forms takes us to the

23 The Crisis, p. I3.

24 Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification, trans., Rodney Needham
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I963).
25 The Elementary Forms, p. 25.
32 EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN

beginnings and finds in his "primitive" data ideas which "while being
of religious origin, still remain at the foundation of human intelli-
gence. "26 And just how radical this exploration is can further be ap-
preciated if we take cognizance of the fact that in Durkheim's days the
prevailing opinion was that "primitives" or those living in non-
Western societies were considered to have a very different and inferior
mentality than the modern mind. There is thus an added audacity in
Durkheim's last work to go to the roots of the social world by going
back to Australian society. But why is this search for beginnings
common to both Durkheim and Husserl? Asking this brings to view a
fundamental concern of Durkheim's positivism and Husserl's phe-
nomenology, namely their awareness of a deep-seated crisis in con-
temporary society.
Husserl's diagnosis of the crisis of Europe goes beneath the political
and economic turmoils of the I930s, the period in which he prepared
The Crisis. He finds it a crisis at the heart of the telos of Europe, which
telos he saw as the unfolding of rationalism. What underlies the crisis
for Husserl involves (a) the separation of science from its original
philosophical conception, (b) philosophy losing its own identity in
identifying itself with the model of the natural sciences, and (c) the
separation of nature from the spiritual life of the psyche or soul. Not
only has there been a separation of science from philosophy, but with
it a separation of one science into compartmentalized sciences. And
this fragmentation of knowledge from "the intuitive surrounding world
of life, pregiven as existing for all in common,"27 is the product of
"objectivism" and positivism, whose very overt successes mask modern
science's epistemological shallowness.
To accentuate the point, Husserl invokes Helmholtz' image of Plane-
beings "who have no idea of the dimension of depth, in which their
plane-world is a mere projection."28 All activities of science in the
modern world take place on the "plane." Positive science ignores and
dismisses its own foundations, the substratum of the "life-world"
which will have to be discovered by transcendental phenomenology,
for the ground of the plane-world lies in "transcendental conscious-
ness." And Part II of The Crisis prepares the way for the task of
restoring the unity of science and philosophy by liberating the idea of
unity which has been deformed by positivism and objectivism; ob-

26 Ibid., p. 33.
27 The Crisis, p. 121.
28 Ibid., p. II9.
 DURKHEIM AND HUSSERL 33
jectivism has objectified the Lebenswelt into an objective, mathe-
matical world rendition of nature, a model first conceived by Galileo. 29
In the historical process of objectification of the world, that is the
transformation of the world by modern science from an existential,
pretheoreticallife-world into one which conforms to the hypothesis of
a mathemathical nature, Husserl notes that psychology (stemming
from the influence of Wundt?) has lost the sense of the psyche, of the
soul; modern psychology is not the science of the psyche but rather of
an objectified ego, which far from being the true ground of knowledge
has become an object of knowledge, like other scientific objects. Hence
Husserl's rejection of psychologism, as part of a general critique of
positivism.
But then, are not Husserl and Durkheim poles apart? If one is the
champion of phenomenology, which has as one of its fundamental
tasks the liberation of man in the phenomenological attitude from the
prejudices and philosophical naivete of the positive sciences,30 and
the other the champion of sociological positivism, does this not, once-
and-for-all occasion end any real possibility of a dialogue? Perhaps,
and then again, perhaps not.
Durkheim's "positivism" is a good deal more complex than its
contemporary image (just as Husserl's phenomenology is also "multi-
valent," so to say). On the one hand, Durkheim participated in the
general scientific ethos of the second-half of the 19th century, including
the commitment to a universally valid scientific method in observing,
measuring, analyzing, and reporting objectively the "facts," of the
facticity of the science-specific domain of phenomena. In this re-
stricted sense, Durkheim's positivistic sociology and Husserl's phe-
nomenology have little in common. But Durkheim's "positivism" has
another tradition feeding into his formulations, one which transcends
the tradition of the natural sciences, and that is the primary sociological
tradition of positivism, which has as the key figure Auguste Comte,
although this tradition began with Saint-Simon (Comte's mentor) and
also owes much to Comte's contemporary, Leplay (the founder of
comparative empirical research in sociology). Let me limit my brief
remarks here to Comte, who after all not only coined the term "sociol-
ogy" but also "positivism." Comte understood by "positivism" firstly

29 "One can truly say that the idea of nature as a really self·enclosed world of bodies first
emerges with Galileo," ibid., p. 60.
30 I base this interpretation of the task of phenomenology on materials in The Crisis.
P·59.
34 EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN

the positive knowledge obtained by science, in contradistinction to the

knowledge obtained in two earlier evolutionary forms of mankind's
mentality, namely "metaphysical" and "theological" knowledge - and
in passing, we might point out that HusserI himself seems to have an
emergent perspective on knowledge which is, at least the way I look at
it, structurally similar to Comte. 31
Secondly, and even more important, Comte took "positive knowl-
edge" to be the opposite of the "negativism" of the philosophes of the
r8th century, of the negative, critical spirit whose analysis helped to
undermine the organic unity of man and society by dissolving in
critical ideas the essential unity of knowledge. For Comte there was no
question of restoring the social order of the ancien regime; yet, the
political malaise of modern society was a surface symptom of the
fragmentation of knowledge. Political divisions and cleavages re-
flected this condition of crisis of modern Europe, and positivism was
intended not only as the synthesis of knowledge but, in fact, as pro-
viding the basis of a new synthesis for the social order by providing
the ground for its restructuration. And the later Comte, as we know,
saw in "positivism" more than a new cognitive system of knowledge
which would unify society; he also saw it as a religion, a religion ground-
ed not in revelation but in sociological observations. Sociological posi-
tivism, in Comte, is animated then by a spirit of social reconstruction,
and by a concern with the spiritual crisis of modern Europe that leads
it to probe beneath the surface, beneath the "objective" appearance
of Europe to its spiritual depths.32
Durkheim was the heir of Comte's positivism; although he rejected
certain features of Comte's over-all system, for example, Comte's
monistic evolutionary principle of the "law of three stages." Never-
31 The relevant materials here are to be found in Husserl's "Vienna Lecture" (1935), in-
cluded in The Crisis as Appendix I, pp. 269-299. The first mentality, common to all mankind,
Husserl calls the "religio-mythical attitude"; it is geared essentially to practical ends. With
the pre-Socratics in the seventh century B.C. there arises a distinctively new world attitude
which will differentiate Europe from other civilizations radically. That is the "theoretical
attitude" which itself undergoes evolution, and in the process, it transforms the "whole
praxis of human existence" (The Crisis, p. 287).
The late phase of the "theoretical attitude" might be seen as Comte's "positivistic attitude,"
but I would also suggest that the third attitude Husser! has in mind, namely the emergent,
"phenomenological attitude" is from another consideration similar to what Comte had in
mind. Namely, for Comte the "positivist attitude," that of science, would not be complete
until the establishment of a science of society, that is, a science of the most complex domain
of reality, social (or intersubjective) consciousness. And is not for Husser! transcendental
phenomenology a rigorous science of consciousness whose ultimate endeavor is the accounting
of intersubjective consciousness?
32 For a recent succinct overview of the dimensions of Comte's positivism, see Pierre
Arnaud, Sociologies de Comle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969).
 DURKHEIM AND HUSSERL 3S
theless, the spirit of Comte's positivism underlies Durkheim's task in
developing sociology. And the spirit of this sociological positivism has
two aspects which are highly germane for our discussion. First, socio-
logical positivism goes beyond the mere scientific inquiry of the social
world; it seeks a new moral basis for the modern social order, one
which will reconcile social cleavages by providing the religion ap-
propriate for integrating the constituent parts of society. Second,
Comte's positivism (and that of Durkheim) repudiates the attempt to
reduce the specificity of the socius to a mathematical and physicalistic
interpretation of nature. For Comte "science" is fundamentally a
human activity, one which emerges in the historical process, and we
may say that the development of science is for Comte a stochastic
process. This implies that although the emergence of a new science,
such as biology, is contingent on the anterior development of previous
sciences, each science is a new level of knowledge since its phenomenon
has a complexity which is irreducible to the previous level of develop-
ment. Sociology deals with a reality, that of "social existence" (the
expression is formulated by Comte in his Systeme de politique positive,
II, chapter 6) which cannot be reduced to biological/physiological
existence, much less to the reality of chemical or physical being. It is a
reality of intersubjective consciousness, manifested in what Comte
terms human "consensus," differentiating human society from animal
society by its spontaneous and volitional elements.
I said that Durkheim accepted the patrimony of Comte's sociology;
we need to amplify this observation for a proper consideration of the
full significance of The Elementary Forms. That aspect of Comte's
sense of sociological positivism as the repudiation of physicalistic
reductionism of social reality is clearly to be found in Durkheim's
famous anterior methodological work, The Rules ot the Sociological
Method, where in his preface to the first edition Durkheim had an-
nounced a theme that runs throughout his treatise:
Just as the idealists separate the psychological from the biological realm, so we
separate the psychological from the social; like them, we refuse to explain the
complex in terms of the simple. 33

I have also indicated that the spirit of Comte's positivism has a second
dimension, namely the quest for restructuring the moral substratum of
33 Emile Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method (New York: Free Press, 1950),
p. xxxix. This is reaffirmed in his conclusion: "Sociology, then, is not an auxiliary of any
other science; it is itself a distinct and autonomous science, and the feeling of the specificity of
social reality is indeed so necessary to the sociologist that only distinctly sociological training
can prepare him to grasp social facts intelligently" (ibid., p. 145).
 EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN

modern society; this is emphasized or accentuated by Comte's intention

for positivism to be the new religion of humanity. To be sure, Comte
sought a "secular" or what might even be termed a "civil religion,"
but nevertheless, a religion, and for Comte, positivism had a trinitarian
basis albeit not that of Christianity.34
Durkheim, I have said earlier in this essay, had expressed in his
first sociological articles an interest in religion's relation to society. In
The Elementary Forms this interest becomes paramount, and that
because over the years Durkheim had become convinced that every
society's existence has to be organized around a core set of religious
beliefs and practices: these are the elementary or fundamental forms of
social life. Modern society is characterized by a heterogeneity of groups
and by a division of labor which render social organization more com-
plex than those of "traditional" society; yet, however arduous the
task, sociology must seek to find the religion appropriate for the ideals,
aspirations, and cohesion of the modern social order. This is the latent
quest of The Elementary Forms.
And Durkheim in this work also seeks to reconcile the fragmentation
if not the opposition between science, religion, and philosophy. Thus,
in his concluding chapter, Durkheim proposes:
... the realities to which religious speculation is then applied are the same as
those which later serve as the object of reflection for philosophers: they are
nature, man, and society ... Religion sets itself to translate these realities into
an intelligible language which does not differ in nature from that employed by
science ... We have even seen that the essential ideas of scientific logic are of
religious origin. 35

We can see from this argument that Durkheim's positivism does not
"surrender" social reality (which is inextricably related to the religious
life) to a naturalism or a physicalistic conception of nature, but rather,
like Husserl, he sees science as grounded in the activities of inter-
SUbjective consciousness. And let me make a further comparison be-
tween them in terms of their last work. For Husserl, the phenomeno-
logical-psychological epoche enables us to proceed from "the external
attitude" of empiricism and psychologism to the "inner perception"
of structures,36 and Husserl takes us to fundamental and universal
structure of the life-world, which is transcendental consciousness.

34 Comte's formula for positivism as the religion of humanity was: "Love as its principle;
Order as its basis; Progress as its goal."
36 The Elementary Forms, p. 477.
36 See the crucial discussion in The Crisis, Part III B, esp. pp. 247-50.
 DURKHEIM AND HUSSERL 37
It is the source of consciousness, the pure consciousness which under-
lies all specific projects, all intentional aspects of psychic experience.
And has not Durkheim similarly located the ground of consciousness
in the transcendental aspects of society, in its religious life, when he
declares in his conclusion:
... the collective consciousness is the highest form of the psychic life, since it is
the consciousness of consciousness. 37

I think, then, that Husserl and Durkheim have traveled different

paths, and yet they come in their respective last work to the same
cross-road; phenomenology and sociology come to a meeting on the
cross-road of transcendental consciousness. And their respective dis-
covering of this structure of structures gives a fuller sense to their
intellectual endeavors when we take into account their respective sensi-
tivity to the crisis of Europe, a crisis that stems from the losing sight
of the transcendental ground of our civilization.
In brief, then, Husserl's and Durkheim's last work are both ex-
plorations of origins and both go from the exteriority of the world to
its interiority in transcendental consciousness. In this respect, their
endeavor bears a striking resemblance with modern figures of esoteric-
ism such as Rudolph Steiner and Rene GUenOn,38 who have also sought
to recover the truly spiritual dimension of man which has been blocked
from view by the prejudices of objectivist science, of mathematical
natural science which abstracts subjectivity out of existence. 39 It
should be borne in mind that Husserl and Durkheim do not reject
"science" any more than they reject "rationality," for surely both
saw themselves as "rationalists;" what each rejected in his own way
were the imperialistic claims of mathematical natural science which
reduce the reality of the life-world to an "object" reality, one in which
the depth of experience, of meaning, of SUbjectivity has been shallowed
out of existence.
My remarks in the preceding pages point to the rapprochement be-
tween Husserl's phenomenology and Durkheim's sociology, yet I have
also suggested there exists an area of disagreement, which now deserves

37 The Elementary Forms, p. 492, emphasis mine.

38 Rudolf Steiner, The Stages of Higher Knowledge (New York: Anthroposophic Press,
I967), and Macrocosm and Microcosm (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, I968); Rene Guenon,
The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972).
39 "Someone who is raised on natural science takes it for granted that everything merely
subjective must be excluded and that the natural-scientific method, exhibiting itself in
subjective manners of representation, determines objectivity," Husseri, The Crisis, p. 295.
 EDWARD A. TIRY AKIAN

to be acknowledged. Let me term this a disagreement as to the ontolog-

ical nature of consciousness. However radical Husserl saw his philos-
ophy in terms of the corpus of philosophy, I will be bold enough to
suggest there is one limitation of his radicality, or in other words,
there is one presupposition, one pre-reflexive "given" that he shared
in common with his fellow philosophers (from Socrates through Kant),
and that is the following: subjectivity and its activities of conscious-
ness are grounded in the individual cogito. For Durkheim, on the other
hand, consciousness has two irreducible constitutive modes, those of
the individual and those of the collectivity; for Durkheim, our knowl-
edge of the world, our representations of reality, in terms of which we
experience the world is a dual product of individual and collective
consciousness, without one being more fundamental than the other.
Man qua social human being in homo duplex. 4o
Consequently, although The Crisis shows an increasing awareness of
intersubjectivity and of community, Husserl's transcendental grounds
of worldhood remains an I-pole at its core, whereas Durkheim's
transcendental grounds of worldhood emphasizes its We-pole. Durk-
heim could not accept the following declarations of Husserl:
This individual psychology must, then, be the foundation for a sociology and
likewise for a science of objectified spirit (of cultural things) ... 41

Human beings are external to one another, they are separated realities, and so
their psychic interiors are also separated. Internal psychology can thus be only
individual psychology of individual souls ... 42

Have we then traveled all this way only to reach an impasse between
Husserl's phenomenology and Durkheim's positivism? I would like
to think not, but rather that the dialogue has just begun. Just as
currency tends to become debased in the modern world, so do words
become debased as they become popular. The word "dialogue" is no
exception. To have efficacy, a dialogue should start with an awareness
on the parts of the conversants of their initial premises, which entails
an agreement as to where they disagree. If disagreement is "masked,"
dialogue may be rewarding social "small talk" but not an intellectually

40 Durkheim treated this in one of his last articles, "Le Dualisme de la Nature Humaine et
ses Conditions Sociales," Scientia, IS (1914), pp. 206-21. An English Translation of this
important sequel to The Elementary Forms appears in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., Emile Durkheim
I8S8-I9I7 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1960), pp. 325-340. The reader will
find in Husserl's The Crisis, pp. 229ff., a complementary discussion of the self's dualism.
41 The Crisis, p. 220.
42 Ibid., p. 247.
 DURRHEIM AND HUSSERL 39
rewarding discourse. So, a dialogue between Husserl and Durkheim
must entail an awareness of their differences as to the ontological
nature of consciousness, albeit it must also entail an awareness that
for both the life-world is constituted by consciousness. And that the
dialogue has just begun is also indicated by the unfinished nature of
their respective last work. As the reader of The Crisis will know,
Husserl achieved in this work only parts of his intended reconstruction,
or reformulation of philosophy.43 The Elementary Forms seems more
conclusive, yet I would argue that it is a prolegomenon. To what? To a
sociological formulation of the religious life appropriate for the ideals
and actualities of modern society, one which would give society a firm
anchor to withstand the twin tendencies of nihilism and totalitarian-
ism. 44
Although far from being an apologist for traditional religion, Durk-
heim was more worried about the dissolution of intermediary groups
between the individual and the State than he was about the dangers of
religion in secular society. That is, I would suggest, he saw as part of
the crisis of modern society the tendency of polarization between
radical individualism, or nihilism, and Statism; he has in earlier works
given attention to restructuring professional groups as buffers, but
ultimately these by themselves are not sufficient. Hence my belief that
The Elementary Forms is as much an introduction as Husserl's Crisis is
an introduction; an introduction to religious sociology whose starting
point is the sociology of religion - that is to a sociology bold enough to
help society formulate its necessary religious structure, which is needed
to overcome the anomie or spiritual malaise of the modern world. For
sociologists in their sociologizing to seek the spiritual reconstruction of
the society in which they live, is this not the spirit of Durkheim's
positivism echoing the spirit of Husserl's phenomenology:
In our philosophizing, then - how can we avoid it? - we are functionaries of
mankind. The quite personal responsibility of our own true being as philosophers,
our inner personal vocation, bears within itself at the same time the responsibility
for the true being of mankind ... 45

So I think there is not an impasse between Husserl and Durkheim,

although neither is there a fusion of the two. I think there is ground for
43 In this context, see Appendix X of The Crisis for Fink's outline of what Husser! had
envisaged (pp. 397-400).
44 One must read Durkheim's Le~ons de Sociologie, Physique des M oeurs et du Droit (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), esp. pp. 52-130, for a background discussion of this
point. The English edition is Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, trans., Cornelis Brookfield
(London: Routledge and Regan Paul, 1957).
45 The Crisis, p. 17. Emphasis in the original.
40 EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN

a fruitful dialogue. And if sociology can profit from this dialogue by

enriching its method in terms of the riches of the phenomenological
method, let me also add that phenomenology has something to learn
from Durkheim's positivism, and specifically from a thorough con-
sideration of The Elementary Forms. Husserl's phenomenology of con-
sciousness, if it limits itself, even in its transcendental aspects, to the
solitary ego as the primary soil of consciousness, cannot adequately
account for the moral and religious dimensions and structures of con-
sciousness; yet, these are cardinal aspects of human experience, how-
ever varied the contents of the experience may be. Durkheim's Ele-
mentary Forms has brought out in full relief these modes of conscious-
ness as structures of the life-world, and his analysis is an integral aspect
of his reformulation of the theory of knowledge, which well merits
serious attention by phenomenology since its core concern is also an
epistemological one.

III

We have examined in the course of this essay aspects of Husserl and

Durkheim whose respective last work, The Crisis and The Elementary
Forms at the Religious Lite is truly seminal and truly radicaL We have
done this in the context of a comparison of the guiding of phenomenol-
ogy and that of sociology. We have sought to bring them together, to
indicate they have a common meeting ground, although this will not
blur their standpoint.
In the process of our exposition, the reader may have begun to
wonder about his image of "positivism." I think it appropriate in this
conclusion to state the paradox that "there is positivism and positiv-
ism," or to put it in a less ambiguous way, Durkheim's positivism is
perhaps more divergent from contemporary sociological positivism
than it is divergent from Husserl's phenomenology. Let me elucidate
this as briefly as possible.
A succinct overview of contemporary positivism is contained in
Abraham Kaplan's article on the subject in the International Ency-
clopedia at the Social Sciences. 46 Kaplan mentions two forms of positiv-
ism, that of the nineteenth century, associated with Comte, and that of
the twentieth century, which was formulated first by the Vienna Circle
46 Abraham Kaplan, "Positivism," International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol.
12 (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1968), pp. 389-395.
 DURKHEIM AND HUSSERL 41
(Carnap, Neurath, Feigl), somewhat later in Berlin (Reichenbach), and
having a laterlocale in the 1930S at Chicago. It is this form of positivism,
which we may call1ogico-mathematical positivism, that has come to be
tacitly accepted as to what sociological positivism is all about. This
contemporary form of positivism is in its spirit analytical and re-
ductionist. Let us consider what its major components are.
The thrust of logical positivism is linguistic analysis, and involved in
this is a reduction of philosophical activity to an analysis of language;
meaning is therefore reduced to rules of language. And there is one
language which seems to be given primacy, namely mathematical
language. Hence, modern positivism seeks the linguistic formalization
of the world into mathematical language, whose structure is seen as the
Logic of scientific inquiry. Whether by induction or by deduction, the
end sought is the reduction of world phenomena to mathematical
language. This form of positivism, this pursuit, characterizes today's
positivistic sociology which tacitly seeks the mathematization of social
reality, whether we see it in its labels of "theory-construction,"
"axiomatization," or other labels. There is an echo in this of Comte's
original vision of the unity of scientific knowledge, which he saw as a
new synthesis of science and philosophy but it is an inversion of the
vision, for neither Comte nor Durkheim for one minute believed in the
reduction of social phenomena to the model of natural sciences, much
less to their being expressed in formal or mathematical expressions.
Husserl's objection to positivism, to its imperialistic claims, is well-
founded. He undoubtedly would repudiate the positivist conception
that

Philosophy is not a doctrine embodying 'wisdom' - it is an activity; it is neither

a theory nor a way of life but rather a way of analyzing what is said in the
course of living or in theorizing about life. 47

Husserl would object to this for logical positivism does not address
itself to the life-world but to a lifeless world, the world of intellectual,
logical, mathematical abstractions. Philosophy, or philosophy of sci-
ence, in this positivistic framework is not a critique of science; it has
renounced its mission and its telos. And if Husserl would repUdiate
this positivistic conception, so also would Durkheim deny this as being
in accordance with his awareness of positivism. Yes, of course, Durk-
heim believed that one could study objectively social phenomena, and

47 Kaplan, op. cit., p. 389.

42 EDWARD A. TIRY AKIAN

when he said the sociological attitude must treat these phenomena as

"things," he clearly meant not that social phenomena are to be treated
as if they were in the same domain as physical "entities" but that they
must be approached free from the prejudices of the natural attitude
which makes naive assumptions as to how social phenomena are con-
stituted. Hence his injunction "all preconceptions must be eradicated"48
is of the same methodological import as Husserl's dictum, "to the
things themselves;" in both, there is an emphasis on the bracketing of
the natural attitude if we are to go behind appearances to the ground
of reality. Both Husserl and Durkheim would agree, I believe, with
Phillipson's apt comments:

Phenomenology requires a suspension of belief in mathematization of social

phenomena in sociology because mathematical objects and languages do not
correspond to the social processes of meaning construction. Mathematization
may appear elegant but it obscures the problems of meaning and language and
thus mystifies the events the sociologist is trying to understand. The formal
elegance of mathematics is a stark contrast to the social realities of the lived-
world. 49

The life-world, the everyday social world, does have regularities and
"typifications" (to borrow from Schutz) which may even be expressed
in mathematical relationships. Certainly, Durkheim's famous positiv-
istic monograph, Suicide, is a demonstration that even such a seemingly
individual act as "suicide" is a phenomenon having a sociocultural
context whose objective manifestations may be approximated in sta-
tistical relationships. But even in this monograph, to say nothing of
the later Elementary Forms, Durkheim went on to explore the layers of
meaning-structures that are constitutive of this phenomenon. Suicide,
like religious activity, is a phenomenon of the life-world; in this sense
they are "natural" phenomena, but they are not phenomena that can
be interpreted or explained in terms of a natural science model of
physical nature. They are phenomena of inter-subjectivity ... just as
the natural science model(s) of physical nature are themselves not
objective entities but essentially phenomena of intersubjectivity.
To summarize this essay, I propose that the respective last work of
Emile Durkheim and of Edmund Husserl discloses a similar spirit in
their endeavor. Both Husserl and Durkheim should be seen as striving
for a rigorous foundation of knowledge, a foundation far more rigorous

48 Rules of the Sociological Method, p. 5 I.

49 Michael Phillipson, "Phenomenological Philosophy and Sociology," in Paul Filmer,
et ai., op. cit., p. 145.
 DURKHEIM AND HUSSERL 43
than that provided by today's prevailing definition of "positivism."
Husserl's phenomenology and Durkheim's sociology are complemen-
tary in seeking to restore the fundamental unity of philosophy and
science in the original Greek apprehension of theoria. If we, the
functionaries and successors of Husserl and Durkheim, have under-
stood their spirit, then our own immediate task becomes clear: to begin
anew the dialogue between genuine philosophy and genuine sociology,
a dialogue whose intentionality is not idle academic talk but is to
restore speech to a deaf-and-dumb civilization suffering a paralysis of
ratio. Working together, philosophy and sociology can assist Western
civilization in renovating its telos of rationalism, which Husserl aptly
saw as

ratio in the constant movement of self-elucidation. 50

50 The Crisis, p. 338.

 PAUL RICOEUR

CAN THERE BE A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT

OF IDEOLOGY?

1. TOWARD A PHENOMENOLOGY OF IDEOLOGY

In this paper I will attempt to elaborate what I would like to call a

phenomenology of ideology. Why a phenomenology? Because the ex-
pression "ideology" suffers from both misuse and abuse when it occurs
in a polemical framework. Only a rigorous semantics controlled by an
accurate description of the situations in which this expression is rele-
vant could put an end to this abuse; such would be the approach which
I call phenomenology. (I could also say a semantical phenomenology,
but it is enough to say phenomenology, since the delineation of such a
phenomenon has necessarily a linguistic dimension.)
My claim is that the basic meaning of the word "ideology" should
not be the Marxist one, which is merely pejorative and more or less
identical with a distortion of reality under the influence of covert class
interests. I do not deny that this has become for us a part of the whole
meaning; but the negative overtones of the word "ideology" must be
introduced as qualifications of a more general, and above all, more
positive, conception of ideology. The Marxist connotations of the world
are linked to an analysis of society in terms of class, and of struggle
between classes. As a function of class struggle, ideology is indeed a
fundamentally negative phenomenon, close to error, lie, and illusion.
I shall come to this, but not start from it. We are warned against a
premature identification between ideology and "false consciousness"
(to use a term of Georg Lukacs' in History and Class Consciousness!) by
the fact that ideology was once the name of a method of thought,
typical of the French Enlightenment, expounded by people like
Geoffrey of St. Hilaire and Destutt de Tracy. For these thinkers
ideology meant the theory or the doctrine of ideas. And it was Napoleon
1 History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(London: Merlin Press, I97I).
 A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY 45
who coined the word in its negative sense, calling his enemies, the
"intellectuals," "ideologues;" this first polemical use of the word by
Napoleon warns us against all further abuses of the word. It is quite
possible that the mere pejorative use of ideology requires some
"N apoleon" - real or potential- to transform a descriptive term into a
polemical weapon. Even when it is directed against the hidden effects
of domination, the mere polemical use of the word expresses the claim
of another's will to power; for this will to power, ideology is the name of
the thought of the Other, my adversary.

I. The first concept of ideology

I want to find a starting point in analysis according to which the
suspicious use of the term would not be prominent, even if it is finally
required by the description itself. I find this starting point in a de-
scription of the conditions of social integration, which owes more to
Max Weber than to Karl Marx, inasmuch as it considers the phenom-
enon of social relationships more comprehensive than that of conflict
and domination. (Let me remind you of the definition which opens the
great work of Max Weber: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft:
meaningful action - makes sense for the individual- behavior of the one directed
toward that of the other - chance or probability of a regular course of action. 2)

It is at the level of such meaningful, other-oriented and socially inte-

grated action that the phenomenon of ideology receives its primary
function. It expresses the necessity for any social group to make and to
give itself an image, to "represent" itself, in the theatrical sense of the
word. In this fundamental use of the word, ideology has no negative
connotation. Let us consider the relation which a historical com-
munity may have with the founding events in which its existence is
rooted: the American Bill of Rights, the French Revolution, the Octo-
ber Revolution, etc. Ideology is a function of the distance which
separates the social memory of an event, which is no longer there and
which must be nevertheless re-enacted; the task of ideology is to
preserve and diffuse the initial conviction of the Founding Fathers
in order not only to make it the credo of the whole group, but perpetu-
ate its initial energy beyond the period of effervescence. The gap which
time enlarges between the first event - maybe itself a more or less
mythical event - and the present life of the group, calls for images,
2 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott
Parsons (New York: The Free Press, 1968). See especially pp. 89-90.
 PAUL RICOEUR

symbols, interpretations, through which the initial event remains

efficient. In general terms, it is always through interpretations which
reshape it in a retractive way that the founding act of a group keeps
being re-enacted. It is quite possible that no social existence is possible
without this indirect relation to its own foundation. I wonder whether
this kind of interpretation - this practical hermeneutics - is not a
primary component of what Max Weber calls sinnhaftes Verhalten,
"meaningful action." Meaningfulness is neither linked to the present
agent nor contained in the present time; it implies social memory and
with it an interpretation of the social group's existence in terms of its
indirect relation to some founding events. In that way the mediating
role of ideology is more primitive than any distorting function.
I should like to show how some potentially negative qualifications
proceed from this initial integrative function of ideology.
a) The indirect relation to the initial founding events or acts implies
that justification and rationalization, in a psycho-analytical sense of
the word, tends to replace conviction. This shift from conviction to
rationalization results from the growing gap between past and present;
and ideology is an answer to the challenge of temporal distance; as
such it is a permanent trait of social motivation; ideology does not
merely reflect some underlying forces, it belongs to the symbolic
constitution of the group; it links project to memory; it has a "genera-
tive" character as regards enterprises, institutions towards which it
has an apologetic role. Ideology is an argumentative device which
tends to prove to the members of a group that they are right to be
what they are.
b) Hence a second feature - a second potentially negative feature:
as justification, rationalization, or apology, all ideology appears simpli-
fying and schematical. It is a kind of code which allows the group to
get an all-encompassing comprehensive view not only of itself, but of
history, and, finally, of the whole world. This code-character is un-
avoidable, inasmuch as the capacity of a creed to animate and trans-
form is linked to the reduction of complex ideas to more manageable
opinions, as if thought could preserve its social efficiency only by
losing something of its rigorous character; in that sense, everything can
become ideological: ethics, religion, philosophy. This shift from thought
to opinion is the ideological phenomenon. This alteration can be ob-
served as early as the first celebrations of the founding events; ritu-
alization and stereotyping tend to alter the creativity and the enthu-
siasm of the beginnings; it is mostly in the vocabulary that this ritu-
 A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY 47
alization and stereotyping may be observed; typified expressions ap-
pear; the reign of -isms has begun. Ideology is par excellence the reign
of -isms: liberalism, socialism, humanism - even for speculative thought,
the ideological process proceeds hand-in-hand with the proliferation of
-isms - spiritualism, materialism. This propensity for maxims, slogans,
and lapidary formulas reveals the kinship between rhetorics and politics,
well known by Greek and Latin thinkers. Inasmuch as rhetoric is the
use of discourse as probable and persuasive, ideology expresses the
rhetorical dimension of all political discourse. Once more, before ac-
cusing fraud and pathology, we have to acknowledge that this sche-
matism, this rationalization, this stereotyping, and all this rhetoric of
ideology represent the price to pay for the social efficiency of ideas.
c) The following feature reinforces the potentially negative role of
ideology: As a code of interpretation, an ideology is something out of
which we think, rather than something that we think. It works hinter
dem Riicken, "behind our back." We do not have it in front of us,
as an object of thought. Dissimulation and distortion are fundamental-
ly possible because of this lack of control that puts us under the spell
of an ideology. But we must be aware that an individual, a group,
cannot formulate everything, cannot thematize everything and posit
it as an object of thought. I shall return later to this impossibility of
total reflection from a more philosophical point of view. This im-
possibility implies that of total critique. All critique is partial - we
speak from somewhere, from where we stand. And this Standort re-
mains the where and cannot become the what of our thoughts. In that
way a certain lack of transparence is a condition for the production of
social messages.
d) We proceed a step further in the direction of social pathology if
we now examine the inertia which seems to be the counterpart of this
non-transparence. We could describe this inertia as an aspect of the
temporality of social phenomena. It means that we cannot receive
anything new, except on the basis of something else which has pre-
viously been sedimented and typified. Hence the limits of acceptance
of any proof for novelty and the trend to orthodoxy and intolerance.
Each group, by virtue of its sedimented structure has a limited power
of acceptance, and therefore a certain amount of intolerance toward
marginality. No society, perhaps, can claim to be radically pluralistic,
radically permissive. There is always somewhere something which
cannot be tolerated. From the intolerable to intolerance, the shift is
easy. The intolerable begins when novelty threatens the capacity for a
 PAUL RICOEUR

group to identify itself, to situate itself. That means that the initial
energy has a limited capacity. A certain amount of blindness and
closedness - of ideological blindness and narrowness! - unavoidably
belongs to this spontaneous self-hermeneutics at work in any social
group.

2. The second concept of ideology

We are prepared to introduce a second concept of ideology, in which
distortion comes definitely to the forefront. It seems to me that the
negative traits become prominent as soon as we take into account the
phenomenon of domination, or in other words, the hierarchical structure
of society. Nevertheless, this second concept is not yet the specific
concept Marx considered in the German Ideology. The phenomenon of
domination has many more aspects than domination in terms of class
and class-struggle. This is why I prefer to proceed step-by-step and
preserve for a third stage the specifically Marxist conception of ideol-
ogy.
Our second step may still be taken on the basis of Max Weber's
sociology. For him there is a phenomenon of domination, of authority
(Herrschaft), as soon as there appears in a given group a differentiation
between a governing entity and the rest of the group. The governing
body has the leadership, it has the power to implement order by means
of force. Ideology enters at this point, because such authority raises
a claim to legitimacy, and ideology serves as the code of interpre-
tation which secures integration by justifying the system of authority
as it is. Inasmuch as the systems of authority and domination differ
according to their basis of legitimacy, the typology of these systems
of legitimacy tend to coincide with the typology of ideologies.
What new features appear with this new function? In a sense, this
second concept presupposes the former one: most founding events are
political events (wars, victories, revolutions, coups d' hat, declarations
of independence). In that sense the phenomenon of authority is tightly
connected with the constitution of a social group. The founding act,
which is reflected and re-enacted ideologically, is essentially political.
But the second concept of ideology adds something new, i.e., the
hierarchical aspect of the social order, or more precisely, the asymmetrical
character of social structure. To this hierarchical structure new func-
tions of ideology are linked:
a) Max Weber, once more, has described quite well the phenomenon:
to every claim to legitimacy corresponds a belief on the part of the
 A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY 49
citizen, the belief that the authority is legitimate and therefore so is
the social order itself. Now there is always more in the claim raised
by the authority than in the belief held by the members of the group.
I propose to speak here of a phenomenon of over-value (M ehr-Wert) in
order to describe this excess of claim compared to belief. It is quite
possible that this over-value is a genuine phenomenon of over-value:
all authority requires more than what the members may offer in terms
of belief or creed. But it is at this point that ideology works as the
justification which fills the gap of political over-value; i.e., ideology
serves as the justification of over-value.
b) With this function of justification the aspect of distortion becomes
definitely prominent, over against that of integration, inasmuch as the
excess of the claim raised by the governing body over the belief of the
members of the political group requires some amount of dissimulation.
Over-value is the place par excellence of dissimulation and distortion.
No system of legitimacy is completely transparent and therefore quite
convincing. This is not only the case with charismatic types of domina-
tion since all systems of domination preserve some hidden kernel of
charismatic authority, what we euphemistically call personification
of power. Even rational systems of legitimacy, such as systems sup-
ported by constitutional rules and bureaucratic organization, rely on
value systems which require more compliance on our part than they
deserve. Some ideology always has to fill the remaining gap between
the claim to authority and our response to this claim.
But if the first function of ideology - the integrating function - is
scarcely to be found without this second one - the justification of
claims to legitimacy raised by systems of authority - that does not
mean that ideology is exhausted in this job of justification. I am in-
clined to think that the most corrupt use of ideology would not work
if at the same time it did not preserve a minimal interpretive function.
This is why we cannot start with a merely negative or pejorative con-
ception of ideology. We have rather to concern ourselves with a super-
imposition of functions which makes of ideology an overdetermined
concept.

3. The third concept of ideology

By this way we are already on the threshold of the Marxist concept of
ideology, which can be introduced as a specification of the second
concept of ideology. With Marx ideology is not a function of domination
in general but of domination by a ruling class in a situation of conflict.
50 PAUL RICOEUR

With this specification some new features appear which do not cancel
the previous ones, but make the concept of ideology more complex.
I see three new features:
a) The first one is introduced by Marx, at least at the time of the
Manuscripts ot I84o-44, by way of a metaphor borrowed from physical
or physiological experience: the metaphor of reversal. What he has in
mind is the experience of the inverted image in the camera obscura and
on the retina. We get from this physical experience the metaphor of
distortion as reversal. Ideology, according to the young Marx, works as
an inverted image of reality.
b) But this first feature would be incomprehensible if there were not
a basic phenomenon which is already constituted as an inverted
image of reality. Following Feuerbach, Marx does not doubt that
religion is such an inverted reflection of reality, which puts everything
upside down and formulates in heavenly terms what is primarily
earthly. There is a reversal, therefore, because a certain human pro-
duction is as such constituted as an inverted image. Such is the second
feature of the Marxist concept of ideology: There is a paradigm of
ideological reversal which is first religious, then idealistic hypostasis of
thought. Enlarging the concept of religion borrowed from Feuerbach,
the young Marx extends to the whole realm of ideas this paradigmatic
functioning. All ideas, when separated from the process of life, from
the process of common work, tend to appear as an autonomous reality.
If we call idealism the doctrine according to which ideas precede and
generate things, then idealism as an extension of religion - as seen by
Feuerbach - becomes the model of ideology. Then the concept of
ideology gets its purely negative connotation to the extent that it
describes a general device, thanks to which the process of real life is
obscured and replaced by what human beings say, imagine, conceive.
Ideology becomes the name given to this mistaken substitution of
image for reality.
c) A third feature is added by Marx to this description: if ideology
is a process generated by real life itself, only the revolution of the
material basis of ideology is capable of putting an end to the illusion.
No critique ot ideas may by itself dissolve the illusion. Only praxis may
undo what praxis has done. In that sense, the end of ideology is
identical with the suppression of the social process which has generated it.

When I consider this concept of ideology, my tendency is not to

discard it, but to make it more efficient by relating it to the two pre-
 A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY 5I
vious concepts of ideology. Let us take, in succession, the three features
provided by Marx.
a) The metaphorofthe camera obscura is more seducing than illumin-
ating. It may even be deceiving. It seems to imply that there is first a
real process, then an inverted image, similar to the optic image of a
physical object. But our first analysis has shown that the so-called
"real" process already has a symbolic dimension. Social action and
social relationship are mediated by representations, beliefs, images.
It is the mediating function of ideology to secure the dimension of
meaningfulness to social action and relationship. In other words, a
pre symbolic , and therefore pre-ideological, stage of real life can no-
where be found. Symbolism in general is not a secondary effect of social
real life ; it constitutes real life as socially meaningful. This implies that
we cannot treat the concept of inverted image as the origin of the con-
cept of ideology, but only use it as a secondary distortion of the sym-
bolic function. It is because the symbolic function is originary that it
can be distorted in the sense that Marx says. In other words, the
Marxist concept of ideology as inverted image of reality presupposes
the symbolic constitution of social entities and can be saved only as a
secondary distortion of this symbolic constitution of social reality.
b) As concerns the second trait, i.e., the definition of ideology by its
content and not only its form, this requires a similar qualification. I am
inclined to think that it is because religion constitutes an autonomous
sphere of experience, of symbolism and of discourse, that it can be
exploited in an ideological way, that is, as a means of justifying the
existing system of domination. Within these limits. I think that Marx
is fundamentally correct when he describes Western Christianity as an
apology of the existing order. But the same function of justification may
be supported by other modes of discourse and experience. The Frank-
furter Schule has conspicuously shown that in advanced industrial
societies, science and technology play the same role as the one held
by religion in the first stage of capitalism. This is understandable if,
according to our initial analysis, every kind of discourse, every mode of
thought, may be schematized, typified, sedimented in the form of an
ideology; it is still more understandable if, according to our second level
of analysis, any ethical or religious system of thought may be used to
fill the gap between the claim raised by authorities and our spontaneous
belief in their legitimacy. An ethical or religious conception becomes
ideologized the very moment that it is diverted from its own role to
justify the existing system of authority. Religion may be used and
52 PAUL RICOEUR

abused in that way, but it is true of science and technology as well, as

can be seen in the military-industrial complex of our time. But if
science and technology are diverted and distorted in that way, we have
no right to say that this distortion is constitutive of their existence.
Not only science and technology may be used and abused in an
ideological way, but Marxism itself may work in a way which satisfies
its own definition of ideology, i.e., become a distortion of reality - un-
known by those who hold it - and reflecting the distortion of social
relationships. As soon as Marxism is used as a system of justification
by the Party, i.e., as an apologetical tool at the service of the Party's
claim to be the avant-garde of the working class, Marxism itself works
ideologically.
c) The third feature given to ideology by Marx raises a still more
difficult problem, the claim that ideology may disappear. It is true that
Marx postponed the end of ideology until the end of the period during
which the distorting forces are at work. In that sense, the end of
ideology is merely eschatological and we shall not know what is
ideological and what is not until revolution has practically dissolved
the social roots of ideology. It is a way of saying that the end of ideology
coincides with that of class struggle; this tends to project it into a
cloudy future and to subs tract it from empirical discussion, along
with rational prevision. But what does fall within the field of discussion
is the claim that a science of ideology, which would be itself completely
non-ideological, is already possible. This can be questioned: Is a non-
ideological science of ideology possible?

II. IDEOLOGY AND SCIENCE

We are now prepared to raise the epistemological problem raised by the

concept of ideology: To what extent, and under what conditions, is a
science of ideology possible? This second problem is closely related to
the previous one. It is commonly taken for granted (1) that ideology is
merely, and without qualification, a false representation, a distorting
image of reality, and (2) that the suspicious thinker who denounces it
speaks from a place which is not itself infected by ideology. According
to this second assumption there does exist a non-ideological science of
ideology. But this assumption has to be questioned, as well as the
previous description of ideology as distortion. It is too quickly taken
for granted that the man of suspicion is himself unscathed by the
 A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY 53
defect which he denounces. Ideology is the thought of my adversary,
the thought of the other; he does not know it, but I, I know it. Now,
the question is to know if there exists a point of view on action which is
capable of escaping the ideological condition of knowledge engaged in
praxis. To this claim is joined another: not only does there exist a
non-ideological place, but this place is that of a science, comparable to
that of Euclidean geometry or that of Galilean or Newtonian physics
and cosmology. It is remarkable that this claim, made particularly
by the most celebrated of Marxists, is exactly that which Aristotle
condemned in the Platonists of his day in ethical and political matters,
and to which he opposed the pluralism of methods and the degrees of
rigor and truth. But we have new reasons for justifying this pluralism,
reasons which may be drawn from the modern reflection on the prop-
erly historical condition of the comprehension of history.
In the relation between science and ideology it is not only the concept
of ideology but that of science, too, which has to be questioned. Both
terms of the anthithesis are problematic.
I see two stages in the discussion, according to the way we define
science, either in a positivistic or in a non-positivistic sense.
Let us start with the positivistic one. In my opinion, this is the only
interpretation of science which legitimates a clear-cut opposition be-
tween science and ideology. Unfortunately, social science - at least
science in the sense of an all-encompassing theory (as it is presumed at
this stage of our discussion) - does not meet the positive criteria of
scientificity. Only positive mathematical physics of Galileo was able to
radically expel the so-called impetus from pre-Galilean physics; only
positive astronomy, with Kepler, Copernicus, and Newton was able to
destroy Ptolemaic cosmology. A general social theory would have the
same relation to ideology if it could satisfy the same criteria as those
positive sciences did. Now the epistemological weakness of a general
social theory is equal to the energy which it exerts in denouncing
ideology. Nowhere, in fact, does social theory reach the level of scien-
tificity which would allow it to use scornfully the term "epistemological
break" to describe its distance from ideology. To do so social theory
should meet both the criteria of intelligibility and of falsification: the
first requires one to make sense with as many known phenomena as
possible; the second, to disprove allegedly contrary facts. The im-
portant point is not the separate formulation of these two criteria,
but their joint application. A theory may be a powerful explanation
but poorly supported by evidence. It is this kind of convergence which is
54 PAUL RICOEUR

still lacking in the social sciences. Either we have unifying, but not
verified, theories or we have theories well supported by evidence, but
lacking connecting power, such as demography and in general all
mathematically or statistically based disciplines. Those most vocal
against ideology are precisely those who are advocates of theories with
great integrative power, but poor empirical support.
I should like to explore some of the pitfalls into which it is too easy
to stumble.
A common argument is to say that ideological discourse is a surface
discourse unaware of its real motives. The argument seems to become
formidable when we succeed in exposing the unconscious character of
those real motives to the conscious appearance of the public or official
motives. But it is important to notice that the mere assumption of the
real unconscious causes of public creeds and beliefs is not scientific as
such. Indeed, the shift from illusory to real motives and from conscious
to unconscious reasons has, as such, a great explanatory power. But
this explanatory power is precisely the epistemological snare; this shift
in level provides in itself a vast intellectual satisfaction, which inclines
us to believe that the mere opening of the unconscious field and the
transference of explanatory discourse to this field are, as such, scientific
operations.
This epistemological naivete may be reinforced by the conviction
that this transference of explanatory discourse to the unconscious field
helps reduce the role of subjectivity in explanation. Indeed, in Althus-
ser's Marxism, compared to Weber's social theory, explanation by the
subjective motives of the social agents has been replaced by the inter-
play of structural sets deprived of SUbjective meaning. But the elimi-
nation of subjectivity on the side of historical agents does not guarantee
that the scientist - the one who does science - has successfully produced
a subjectless discourse. The epistemological snare enters here. Thanks
to a semantic confusion, which is no less than a fallacy, the explanation
in terms of structures and not of subjectivity is taken as a discourse
which would be held by no specific subject. At the same time, and for
that very reason, the vigilance with respect to verification and falsifi-
cation is weakened. Simply, the more we understand, the less we verify.
This process is exactly what the theory denounces as ideology, i.e., a
rationalization that hides reality.
To conceal the epistemological weakness of this position, several
tactics have been tried. I shall mention only two of them.
Some try to compensate for the lack of empirical support by im-
 A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY 55
provlSlng the formal structure of the theory. But, once more, the
explanatory criteria are reinforced at the expense of the verificative
criteria. Moreover, I tend to think that the kind of demystifying thought
exemplified by Marxism suffers more than any other from this formal-
istic reformulation. Is not its principle argument that classical and
contemporary economics conceives abstract models, severed from re-
ality?
Some others try to balance the epistemological shortcomings of
isolated critical sciences by combining their insights and results. The
conjunction of the critique of ideologies and of psychoanalysis is a
good example of this exchange between disciplines. But the temptation
is to think that what is merely assumed but not verified in one disci-
pline is better confirmed in the other. To my mind, this exchange
makes more sense in the non-positivist perspective which I shall assume
later. It seems to be merely misleading in terms of the criteria of
explanation and verification of a positive theory. The price paid is a
lower degree of precision concerning the facts that could make the
decision between opposite hypotheses. The broader the hypothesis is,
the less verifiable it is.
This first stage of the discussion tends to prove that social theory
has not reached the level of scientificity which would allow it to
denounce so-called ideological positions with an authority equal to
that with which astronomy could supersede astrology and chemistry,
alchemy.
But the discussion does not stop here; one may object that in the
preceding argument, social theory has been submitted to criteria which
are not relevant, to the extent that they rely on a positivistic concep-
tion of social science. I agree entirely with the objection and I am
eager to inquire into criteria of scientificity other than explanatory
capacity and resistance to falsification procedures. But in that case one
must be quite aware of what one is doing. By giving up positivistic
criteria, one gives up at the same time the claim to treat social science
and ideology as mere contraries. One cannot enjoy both advantages
simultaneously: either one gets rid of the burden of meeting the re-
quirements of a positive science or one uses the model of a positive
science for stating the "epistemological break" between science
and ideology. Unfortunately, this double-talk about ideology is not
rare in contemporary contexts.
Let us explore this second way, with the intention of elaborating
afterwards a new framework of thought for the dialectic of science and
ideology.
 PAUL RICOEUR

The second meaning which the word "science" may receive in

relation to ideology is a critical meaning. This usage is in accordance
with the requirements of left-Hegelians in establishing, beyond Kant,
a critique which would be truly critical. Marx himself - in the period
which some authors consider to be posterior to the "epistemological
break" which is supposed to disconnect his work from any philo-
sophical anthropology - does not hesitate to give Capital the subtitle:
"Critique of Political Economy."
The question is whether any social theory, conceived of as critique,
may enjoy a radically non-ideological status, according to its own
criteria as to what is ideological?
A first difficulty results from the Leninist conception of a "com-
bative" science, of a science which would claim a status similar to that
of Euclid's geometry or Galileo's natural science, and which would at
the same time preserve its polemical status as a weapon in the hands
of a class and of a party. How could such a science escape the ideolog-
ical distortions which it denounces on the other side of the "Party-
line," especially when this so-called science is advocated by the bureau-
cracy of a party?
A second difficulty concerns the concealed presence of the Hegelian
tradition under the cover of the definition of ideology as an inverted
image of reality. The "inversion" remains a mystical term as long as
the distortion of reality is not applied to a phenomenon which has
already a symbolic dimension. Otherwise, the inverted image of reality
remains the inverted image of some implicit Hegelian Weltanschauung.
This unavowed tie to philosophy in general, and to German idealism
in particular, greatly jeopardizes the scientific claim of the theory of
ideologies.
The most formidable difficulty has not been mentioned. It results
from the impossibility of building a critique which would be radically
radical. Such a critique would require a total reflection.
Let me develop this argument with some accuracy. It concerns only
social theories which claim to be total. A model of explanation can be
total in two ways, either in terms of purpose or in terms of system. The
first is exemplified, in different ways, and to a different extent, by
the comprehensive sociology of Max Weber, and also by the Marxism
of Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Lukacs and Lucien Goldmann. This model
would make quite impossible the radical objectivity of a "value-free"
position. An explanation in terms of purpose is an explanation upon
which the scientist is embarked. Therefore it is required that he eluci-
 A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY 57
date completely his own situation and his own purpose. This is pre-
cisely what he cannot do, because this presupposes, without acknowl-
edging it, a total reflection, i.e., a perspective both from above and from
nowhere.
The second model of explanation, that in terms of system, does not
escape this radical criterion either. At first glance, it could seem that an
explanation in terms of system, having nothing to do with purpose,
would therefore not be compelled to total reflection. But the scientist
is no less committed to a total reflection to the extent that he claims a
certain totality for the scope of his inquiry. The critical turn here con-
cerns the necessity of elaborating a theory of the evolution of systems.
This adjunction requires either borrowing from physical theory - such
as cybernetical models - or non-scientific arguments, such as those of
a dialectical theory. In both ways, the requirement of completeness
corresponds to that of total reflection as in the case of an explanation
in terms of purpose. A whole philosophy is implied according to which
there exists at each time a point of view on the totality, and according
to which this point of view may always be described and explained in
an appropriate discourse.
Only the presupposition of total reflection, or of absolute knowledge
could raise a critique to the level where its opposition to ideology would
become itself entirely non-ideological. In other words, a social theory
cannot tear itself away from ideology because it cannot reach the
perspective which would dissociate it from the ideological mediation
to which the other members of the group are submitted.

II 1. IDE 0 LOG Y -C R I TI QUE AND HER MEN E UTI C S

The question, then, is the following: Have we no choice but to accede to

the opposition between science and ideology? I must say that very
often I came close to thinking that way. Nevertheless, I rather think
that we have more to lose by not dealing with this tension, although
it can never be stabilized either as a clear-cut antithesis or as an obvious
confusion.
The conditions of the solution of this paradox seem to belong to a
hermeneutical reflection on the status of historical understanding. This
problem is not foreign to those of prejudice, prejudgment, and pre-
comprehension, which in turn are related to the ontological structure of
understanding. In other words, the merely epistemological difficulties
 PAUL RICOEUR

linked to the use of such expressions as ideology and prejudice have a

common root in the structure of a being which can never enjoy the
sovereign position of a subject able to disconnect itself entirely from its
conditioning. We could have come directly to this Daseinsanalyse con-
cerning the finitude of historical knowledge. It was better to be led to
the same kind of acknowledgement by the round-about way of an
epistemological discussion of the conditions of the possibility of a
theory of ideology. Thus we could rediscover from within, through the
failure of the project of total reflection, the legitimacy and the necessity
of this other kind of discourse: the hermeneutics of historical under-
standing.
I propose for discussion four propositions which could help to make
sense out of the "science-ideology" pair.
r) All objectifying knowledge concerning our position in society, in a
social class or in a cultural tradition is preceded by a relation of
belonging to ... which can never become completely transparent to
reflective thought. Before all critical distance, we belong to a class, a
nation, a culture, one or several traditions. By assuming this partici-
pation we assume the first function of ideology, which we described as
the integrative function of the images that a group makes of itself.
Through this mediating function of ideology, we also share, more or less,
the other functions of dissimulation and distortion. We know now that
the ontological condition of preunderstanding precludes the kind of
total reflection which would pretend to put us in the otherwise favor-
able position of radically non-ideological knowledge.
2) If objectifying knowledge always refers back to some previous
relation of participation, it can nevertheless enjoy a relative autonomy.
This autonomy proceeds from a factor of distanciation inherently co-
extensive with our relation of participation to history. The recognition
of authentic precomprehension implies a struggle against bias and
prejudice, i.e., against inauthentic preunderstanding. In that way a
critical moment belongs to the mode of questioning which points back
toward the structure of precomprehension which constitutes us and
which we are. A critical sorting between precomprehension and preju-
dice is thus required by the hermeneutic of precomprehension. A
dialectic of participation and distanciation seems to be the ultimate
condition for a dialectic of science and ideology. Participation makes
absolute knowledge impossible. Distanciation makes partial critique
possible. Distance, here, means not only temporal distance, which is
something passive, but an active taking of a distance. As Gadamer
 A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY 59
says when he describes Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein - "con-
sciousness delivered to the effects of history:" I understand myself as
an historical being only under the condition of distanciation. This
process is easy to understand when the mediation between past events
and ourselves is secured by texts, and other documents and monuments
which have the same objectifying function as writing. To understand a
text is to use distance as a mediation for the sake of proximity. To my
mind, this hermeneutics of texts is one of the best introductions to a
fair appreciation of the critique of ideologies. Ultimately, there is no
self-understanding without self-criticism, and no self-criticism without
a critique of the illusions of the subject. A critique of ideologies is a part
of this overall critique. Such is my second proposition: distanciation, as
the dialectical counterpart of participation, is the condition of the pos-
sibility of a critique of ideologies, not without, but within hermeneutics.
3) If a critique of ideology relies on a partial objectification of our
historical conditioning, the knowledge which this critique displays can
not become total; it is condemned to remain partial, fragmentary,
insular. Its lack of completeness is a hermeneutical feature resulting
from the dialectical relation of distanciation to participation. To forget
this insuperable condition is to assume the equally insurmountable
contradictions of a theory of ideology which is, of necessity, ideological.
The epistemological status of incompleteness reflects the hermeneutical
condition of historical understanding which excludes totalization.
4) My fourth and last proposition is merely deontological. It con-
cerns the good use of a theory of ideologies. The whole discussion tends
to prove that the critique of ideology is a task which we must always
start, but which we cannot ever complete. Ideology remains the code
of interpretation of a concrete community which supports us. Thanks
to this belonging-to, we are not merely rootless intellectuals - frei
schwebende - but remain rooted in what Hegel called "ethical sub-
stance" (Sittlichkeit). I call this last proposition a deontological one,
because nothing is needed more today than a bit less arrogance and a
bit more modesty in carrying on the task of critiquing and of retrieving
our historical substance.
 MAURICE NATANSON

THE PROBLEM OF ANONYMITY IN THE THOUGHT

OF ALFRED SCHUTZ

This paper is, in a way, a history and a result of a good part of what I
have been trying to do in my own work for a long period of time. And
in thinking about the problem of what I have termed anonymity, I
find myself reflecting on themes which have occupied me for the last
twenty-five years. That is not to say that I have been directly, ex-
plicitly concerned with the concept of anonymity for all of that time
or that I have worked on it systematically during all those years, but I
think it is fair to say that the problem as I will develop it follows my
own personal intellectual career from the beginning to the present
time. I propose to begin by trying to trace out that career in terms of
the theme of anonymity and to try to show where the problem came
from in terms of my interests and how it developed.
Before I do that, let me say a word about the way in which I am
proceeding. It is certainly reasonable - and I have been taught since
I was a high school student - to begin the discussion of a paper which
has a central term such as that of "anonymity" with a definition of it.
Thus one begins by saying: so that there will be no misunderstanding
and perfect clarity, I mean by usage of the term "anonymity" the
following. Or in more contemporary terms, in philosophy meetings in
the Anglo-American scene usually there are five or six or eight or more
different senses of the meaning of the central term presented. These
are sorted out, they are sifted, they are examined, and in fact a con-
siderable part of the life of meetings involves a dependence on the
possibility of finding at least four or five different meanings of the
central term under discussion. I am going to proceed in a completely
different way because I believe that the effort of philosophy funda-
mentally is not to begin with definitions but to end with them. I hope
that by the time I finish at least my notion of the term "anonymity"
will be a little clearer than it is at the outset.
As far as my first interest in the problem of anonymity, I think it
 ANONYMITY IN ALFRED SCHUTZ' THOUGHT 61
would be fair to say that it started with a strong concern with existent-
ial philosophy. If one wanted to try a little history of existentialism
with regard to anonymity, I would begin for my purposes with Kierke-
gaard and with his notion of the aesthetic stage, where I believe for the
first time clearly - as far as my problems are concerned - one begins
to get the sense of a disparity, a distan<;e, and a distancing between
what might be termed, on the one hand, the concrete self, the concrete
individual, the person, anyone of us in his immediacy and identity and,
on the other hand, the notion of the they, the crowd, the idea of men or
man in general and the sense that there is a sphere or aspect of human
life which involves a world going on, which is only distantly and
remotely related to the concrete possibilities of the individual. In
terms of the Kierkegaardian notion of the aesthetic stage, for my pur-
poses, the individual in a sense has not yet emerged; the immediacy
of the scene in terms of sensory elements and qualities, affections,
aesthesis in the etymological sense is a surface attraction. It is as if one
were in the midst of a carnival, or in the midway of a carnival, attracted
to a variety of sights and scenes, but never really being at issue con-
cretely as a person in anyone of them. Or in a different example, going
down Fifth Avenue in New York City or the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich
and windowshopping, floating along as part of the crowd and not
being involved at anyone moment concretely in anything that is
going on but simply moving in a distancing way through a rather - now
we might begin to say - anonymous domain of existence. Part, then,
of the source of my own concern with the problem of anonymity has its
proper beginning in the analysis which Kierkegaard brilliantly presents
of the aesthetic stage.
Another central source of the concept of anonymity in the larger
sense of existential philosophy can be found in Heidegger's treatment
of das Man. That is evident enough, so that it is unnecessary for me
either to try a little reconstruction of it in a few minutes or to go on in
any further way with that reference. It is clear that one begins the
very possibility of becoming a concrete individual, an existent in the
world, by first of all separating oneself out of or transcending the
notion of "everyman" or "they" or "the crowd." And these two
notions in Heidegger and Kierkegaard, I think are also related to each
other though they function in different ways.
But the central point of my concern with existential philosophy was
in the thought of Sartre, and there I think one begins to find the
notion of anonymity focused in the particular way which will be useful
62 MAURICE NATANSON

for our purposes here. I refer specifically to the Sartrian conception of

Bad Faith (mauvaise foil. It is perfectly reasonable to say that for
Sartre's analysis of mundanity, human beings are engaged in activities
in which they become remote from their own concrete possibilities. They
become remote from their own individual existence and function as
though they were in effect a thing or a passion, a flight from freedom
and individuality. Sartre's illustrations in Being and Nothingness and
elsewhere of Bad Faith are well known. Interestingly enough, they
begin to display something of the transition in the development of the
problem of anonymity from a general concept (indeed, one also having
ontological ground) to a particular focus which is that of the theory or
at least some of the elements of a theory of social role. The first location
I wish to make of the problem of anonymity is in the domain of social
role as presented in Being and Nothingness. There one is given the
philosophical equipment to organize a theory of social role.
Now I move out of order in terms of the history of my interests in
these problems, and turn for a moment to George Herbert Mead, the
American philosopher and social scientist, who developed the concept
of role in a remarkable way and for whom the idea of what he terms the
"generalized other" becomes especially important. That idea, for those
not acquainted with Mead, can be presented very simply. Mead traces
out the way in which the child develops in his history, becomes an
adult, a part of the social world, and operates along the lines of role
development. The final stage of that development, for Mead, presup-
poses that the individual can take the role, the standpoint, the pers-
pective, not only of another fellow man, a concrete person, but also
ultimately of a large body, organization, institution or domain - for
example the state, the law, the community. And I find myself, Mead
says, reacting to a given event or responding to a given situation not
as I myself but as though I were confronted with the needs, demands,
requirements of the community, the family, the law firm that I
practice with, the hospital, ultimately the state, and even further the
world community. But at least basically, for Mead, that history is
traced out, and the notion of role involves what now may come to be
seen as varying relationships between roles which are more or less inti-
mately taken, where I know the concrete individuals involved, as for
example, the parents in the family, and, at the other extreme, the
generalized other which remains largely remote to me and which I
may never meet except in the form of given specific representatives,
agents, officers, officials of the community, the courts, or of the state.
 ANONYMITY IN ALFRED SCHUTZ' THOUGHT 63

But as I say, this is moving out of the order of my own develop-

ment, because between Sartre and Mead the central concern which
occupied me and continues to do so was and remains the work of
Alfred Schutz. It was in fact Schutz who introduced me to the study
of Mead, and had it not been for him I never would have turned to
Mead at all, for when I was trained as a graduate student the idea was
that if you had read John Dewey there was no need to turn to Mead
because everything worth saying in this domain had been said by
Dewey. Mead was important, he was valuable, but his work lived in
Dewey's shadow. There was no overwhelming necessity to read him if
you studied Dewey with appropriate care and sophistication. To be
fair, it should be pointed out that Dewey himself did not say anything
of the kind. He wrote appreciatively of Mead's work and in the preface
to Logic: The Theory 0/ Inquiry mentions his indebtedness to him. In
any case, that was the style of training in American philosophy, and
had it not been for Schutz, I never would have turned to George H.
Mead. It is interesting that it was not a pragmatist or a naturalist who
suggested that I read Mead; it was a phenomenologist.
Now, it seems to me possible to turn to my central topic, which is
the notion of anonymity in the work of Alfred Schutz and to try to
clarify what I think are some problems as well as difficulties and to
try to understand and to illuminate some (but not all) of Schutz's
ideas regarding anonymity. That is the point of my being here: to try
to make Schutz a little bit clearer and to point out some problems
involved in trying to make him a bit clearer with regard to the theme
of anonymity. In Schutz's work, as I read him, it is very simple to
begin with a larger and a narrower sense of the term "anonymity."
In the first place, to make it absolutely clear, it is evident from reading
Schutz that he himself uses the word anonymity and variant forms of
it in many places. Quotations are unnecessary for the moment. Cer-
tainly a reading of his texts would very quickly verify my claim,
should anybody wish to turn to them for that purpose.
A more difficult question is what he means by anonymity. In what
I call the broad term for Schutz, anonymity is utilized in a rather
ordinary, everyday way of speaking of what is anonymous in human
society or in social order. So I can say that I know my brother in-
timately: I'm profoundly acquainted with his life. But certainly I
know a colleague that I met only once at a meeting twenty-five years
ago in a more distant way. I begin to approach a more anonymous
relationship to him. If one moves beyond that colleague I once met
 MAURICE NATANSON

twenty years ago who asked me if I had a match to light his cigarette
and proceeds to a domain of all those colleagues I never met, presum-
ably because they didn't smoke, and beyond that into the realm of all
those who are not my colleagues and that I don't know at all and will
never know, then one begins to get a sense of degrees of increasing
anonymity, which in fact is what Schutz appeals to in a variety of his
discussions. We have intimacy and its antonym, anonymity. There
is nothing terribly difficult about that use of the word. In fact, we can
all accept such usage, whatever Schutz's position with regard to the
special problem at issue may be. But our analysis inevitably leads to a
different and narrower sense of anonymity which is at the center of
Schutz's thinking and which is allied to his doctrine of typification. The
discussion of anonymity involves a series of more complex descriptions
and analyses. I will begin by clarifying the meaning of the narrower
sense in Schutz of the notion of anonymity. That can be done rather
simply by appealing to two versions or aspects of the word which
Schutz utilizes. In addition to anonymity he speaks of anonymization.
It is not always consistently the case that you can separate anonymity
in the larger sense that I have given it here and anonymization in the
narrower sense which I am going to try to develop, nor is it necessary to
make that kind of a claim. In fact, I think it would be a waste of time
to try to do so. It is enough to show that whether or not we pit the
word anonymity against anonymization, we could find in Schutz two
different aspects of the meaning of the problem. When I approach the
notion of anonymization now, I am interested in the generic problem
rather than in linguistic usage - usage which was, in fact, employed
rather freely if not erratically in his writings.
The best way to present a close reading of the notion of anonymiza-
tion is by starting with a quotation from Schutz, which, I believe, is of
extraordinary importance and which is drawn from a well-known
essay on Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action.
It is not as though this were the first time this quotation was being
referred to, but it may be that in this context close attention to it may
help us to clarify the narrower sense of anonymity, namely anonymi-
zation in Schutz's work. Let me read the quotation, which unfortunately
is not easy to listen to. I will try to read it as carefully as I can and then
comment on it.
All projects of my forthcoming acts are based upon my knowledge at hand at the
time of projecting. To this knowledge belongs my experience of previously perfor-
med acts which are typically similar to the projected one. Consequently all pro-
 ANONYMITY IN ALFRED SCHUTZ' THOUGHT 65
jecting involves a particular idealization, called by HusserI the idealization of
"I-can-do-it-again," i.e., the assumption that I may under typically similar cir-
cumstances act in a way typically similar to that in which I acted before in order
to bring about a typically similar state of affairs. It is clear that this ideali-
zation involves a construction of a specific kind. My knowledge at hand at the
time of projecting must, strictly speaking, be different from my knowledge at hand
after having performed the projected act, if for no other reason than because I
'grew older' and at least the experiences I had while carrying out my project
have modified my biographical circumstances and enlarged my stock of exper-
ience. Thus, the 'repeated' action will be something else than a mere re-perfor-
mance. The first action A' started within a set of circumstances C' and indeed
brought about the state of affairs S '; the repeated action A" starts in a set of
circumstances C" and is expected to bring about the state of affairs S". By neces-
sity C" will differ from C ' because the experience that A' succeeded in bringing
about S' belongs to my stock of knowledge, which is an element of C", whereas to
my stock of knowledge, which was an element of C', belonged merely the empty
anticipation that this would be the case. Similarly S" will differ from S' as A"
will from A'. This is so because all the terms - C', C", A', A", S', S" - are as such
unique and irretrievable events. Yet exactly those features which make them
unique and irretrievable in the strict sense are - to my common-sense thinking -
eliminated as being irrelevant for my purpose at hand. When making the ideali-
zation of 'I-can-do-it-again' I am merely interested in the typicality of A, C, and
S, all of them without primes. The construction consists, figuratively speaking,
in the suppression of the primes as being irrelevant, and this, incidentally, is cha-
racteristic of typifications of all kinds'!

Were I to offer a more imaginative title for my paper, it would be:

"Suppressing the Primes." I believe that the narrower sense of anonym-
ity in Schutz - what I've referred to as anonymization - is presented
exactly in this notion of the suppression of the primes. I would like
now to say something about it.
First of all let me try to restate, without in effect repeating the
quotation, what I think is at issue. Schutz, starting with the idealiza-
tion Husserl presents, is saying that there is a fundamental repeata-
bility at work, constitutively, in the stream of my perceptual life.
The "I-can-do-it-again" (elsewhere presented as "I-can-again") is a
very awkward phrase in English and I think a simple way of putting it
is "repeatability." There is a fundamental domain of experience at the
level of which events are typically expected to be repeatable. I picked
up the key at the desk to go to my hotel room yesterday and I expect
to be able to do the same thing again today. I expect to be able to
perform the same act tomorrow. In eating, I sit down at the table and
expect to be able to use the ordinary utensils in typical ways. The

1 Alfred Schutz, "Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action," Col-

lected Papers, Vol. I: The Problem at Social Reality edited by Maurice Natanson (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1962) pp. 20-21.
66 MA URICE N ATANSON

basic repeatability at issue has little to do with the surface event or the
facti city of that event, i.e., what is empirically involved. As an idealiza-
tion, repeatability assures the expectation that, for any content, there
is in principle something that can be typically secured again and again
in the course of future experience. It is in this sense that one thinks of
repeatability as an idealization, meaning simply that it is a basic
constitutive a priori of experience, just as HusserI's notion of "and so
forth and so on," which I would call "continuity," is also such an
idealization. Now with regard to anonymization, what happens in any
given experience is the possibility that not only may it be typified,
indeed must it be typified in Schutz's terms, but that the way in
which such typification occurs includes, in principle, the possibility
and ultimately the necessity of its being able to take the form or the
formal aspect of the event and bracket or set aside tacitly what con-
cretely binds that event in terms of person, time, or particular subject.
I can repeat again and again essentially the same kind of action by
virtue of the fact that I have suppressed the specific historicity of my
having used it in the past. The kind of examples that Schutz uses is
especially interesting. He tells us in several passages that if I wish to
send a letter to my friend in Chicago, then I must address the envelope
in a standard way, put sufficient postage on it, and drop it in a mailbox.
Then I can reasonably expect that my friend will receive the letter,
posted from New York, in two or three days. Were that written today
we would have to make the obvious allowances, but we expect delivery
within whatever can be called an average if not a reasonable period of
time. The example which Schutz appeals to is worth examining more
closely. Of course, I have written letters before, I have written letters
to Chicago before, I have written to this person before or I've written
to people like him before or else I am first starting out by writing
people in a certain category, for example, applying for a job or a re-
commendation. Whatever the case may be, there is already a stock of
typically constructed knowledge at hand which is similar in principle
or quality to the act that I am now performing in certain ways. In
suppressing the primes, what I am able to do tacitly in effect - this is
not a self-conscious procedure for the most part, or the region in which
it is self-conscious is a restricted and sophisticated one - is to handle
the generalized situation of putting the letter in the mailbox, expecting
that the addressee will receive it within a given period of time. Whether
or not my typifications are effective, whether they work, whether they
are warranted, whether they are legitimate - these are different order
 ANONYMITY IN ALFRED SCHUTZ' THOUGHT 67
questions. Nowhere is Schutz making the claim that all you need do in
life is proceed in a typified way and everything will follow automatical-
ly in a beautifully fulfilled and articulated fashion. A good part of life is
misunderstanding, misgauging of situations, failure to receive letters,
failure to get all sorts of things done we hope or expect to get done, and
reliance on typical procedures which prove to break down at critical
points. All of this is certainly understood by Schutz and is stated or at
least implied at various times in his writings.
But the notion of anonymization here, it seems to me, requires still
a further clarification. What Schutz is describing through the process
of the suppression of the primes is a deeply rooted aspect of the entire
process of typification, as in fact he indicates in the final sentence
of the quotation which I read. He says that this procedure of the sup-
pression of the primes is characteristic of typifications of all kinds. I
believe that it is indeed at the root of all typification. One might now
begin to ask what we mean by typification when we talk about anonym-
ity and anonymization. Part of the answer lies in the following direction.
Typification itself is one way of approaching the meaning of an even
more fundamental concept in Schutzian phenomenology and phenom-
enology broadly, and that is the concept of abstraction. If one wanted
to find the locus in the most primordial sense for the operation of
abstraction in all spheres, including anonymity and anonymization,
one would have to find it in the abstractive character of consciousness,
phenomenologically interpreted. Alternatively, one might say that in-
tentionality, the phenomenological doctrine of intentionality, is also
a doctrine of the mechanism or the process of abstraction in human
consciousness, which finds its articulation at all levels (including
language) but especially in the common-sense world, which was Schutz's
paramount concern. The abstractive mechanism basically proceeds in
such a way that one is able to locate an object, an intended object,
which may be called a noematic structure, which can be referred to
from a variety of adumbrated standpoints, and which, as a coherent
and unified object intended in many ways, remains one and the same
and identical despite the different orders and standpoints of reference.
So, to use a Schutzian kind of example,2 one may refer to the 37th
president of the United States or to the man who succeeded Lyndon
Johnson or was succeeded by Gerald Ford. Or you can speak about the
individual who was vice-president in the administration of Eisenhower

2 Cf. "Symbol Reality and Society," ibid., p. 304.

68 MAURICE NATANSON

and later was defeated when he ran for governor of California in I962.
Still further, there is the individual who assumed a major role in the
congressional investigation of the Riss case. And there is the author of
Six Crises, the husband of Pat, the father of Julie, let alone Watergate.
All of these possibilities of reference refer to one and the same indivi-
dual, who is Richard Nixon. In these terms, all of the possible adum-
brative perspectives proceed qualitatively in quite different ways in
making their referential point from a political, sociological, or histor-
ical context. But the referential possibility is that one and the same
intentional object may be located, allowing for all of its empirical
articulation and its historical locus. Now what Schutz is trying to
suggest by proceeding in this way is that the fundamental nature of
consciousness at the intentional level is abstractive. It is possible
therefore for us to utilize language so that we can repeat the same
word again and again, apply the same syntactic structure again and
again, and repeatedly refer to or point to the same object. Abstractive
consciousness also makes it possible for all of us to listen to someone
speaking and for certain purposes and within certain limits to dis-
regard accent, to disregard the volume of the voice, to disregard style
of presentation, and to be able to appreciate the meaning of what is
being said. Whether such abstraction always succeeds is by no means
necessary or crucial to what is being claimed here. Rather, a process is
being described. Anonymization, I am suggesting, proves to be part of
the organon of abstraction in which the process of typification, accord-
ing to Schutz, may be seen at work. The example of the suppression of
primes is only one of the more overt or explicit moments in Schutz's
writings where he discusses the nature of that process. Elsewhere, he
examines RusserI's idealizations and a variety of features of the prob-
lem of typification.
Consider one further implication of the notion of anonymization,
especially in relation to the simpler, more straightforward notion of
anonymity. Going back to the concept of anonymity we have a straight-
forward, common-sense articulation of the notion of something at
distance, not known intimately, not known directly, not confronted,
but known only in the vaguest way. And there are various degrees of
such anonymity. In terms of anonymization we have a phenomenolog-
ically abstractive process at work which is able by way of suppression
of the primes to yield the typification we may make use of again and
again and without which we could not have a social world at all. What
that world would look like if we did not have anonymization and the
 ANONYMITY IN ALFRED SCHUTZ' THOUGHT 69

suppression of the primes would, in certain ways, begin to approach

some aspects of psycho-pathological behavior, where the very capacity
to move from one conceptual order to another or even the utilization of
language, the utilization of names and categories, becomes awkward,
faulty, or even impossible. The afflicted person, in terms, lives in a
particularized, fragmented world of moments, each one isolated from
each other one, there being no way of abstracting from particulars
so as to be able to climb over or move through them into a publicly
available, intersubjective and communicable world. Social reality pre-
supposes and is built upon the principle of anonymization.
There is another feature of the relationship between anonymity and
anonymization. The discussion of Schutz's work sometimes leads to the
consideration of a duality between what can be simply called an
egological approach to the phenomena of the social world and that
social world itself, fully blown, actually lived as intersubjective through
the We-relationship, the 1-Thou-relationship, with a fully structured,
intercommunicative reality directly given to its members, to all of us
who live within it. There is also a differentiation made between noetic
and noematic phenomenology, between, on the one hand, an emphasis
on the subject side of consciousness and intellection in the constitution
of phenomena and, on the other hand, that which has been constituted,
the unity that is already SUbstantively structured. Perhaps the dis-
tinction between anonymity and anonymization may be at least useful
for the further aggravation of these discussions.
I suggest that one way of looking at Schutz's concept of anonymity
is to say that it represents the noematic aspect of the entire phenom-
enologically ordered or unified structure of social reality, and that
anonymization represents the noetic counterpart to that process. If
this is so, then what Schutz is trying to do through his discussion of
typification, abstraction, and the concern with anonymization, is to
show how the social world comes to be built up as a world, i.e., to
display the world's sedimented elements and to delineate the steps in
the constitution, the building up of its manifold strata. At the same
time, it is perfectly clear from a variety of standpoints that anonymiza-
tion also involves as its authentic counterpart the noematic side, the
anonymity side, if you like, which is the aspect of the world already
there when we are born into it. It would seem that in terms of our
approach to Schutz and also in terms of his writings, there are two
different moments in his thought which might appear to be difficult
to reconcile. One, the attempt as a noetic phenomenologist to account
70 MAURICE NATANSON

for the processes of anonymization. The other the effort as a noematic

thinker to account for the We-relationship, fellow-men in conjunction
and working in correlation with each other, i.e., a full, strong and
profoundly rich domain of sociality in which we are actually in touch
with each other as fellow human beings.
What I propose regarding these two ways of considering Schutz is
the following. The relationship between noesis and noema must be
understood ultimately as comprising two sides of one unity. It is
extremely difficult and certainly inadequate to discuss any noematic
structure and leave hanging, leave aside the correlative noetic problems.
Yet if one had only a kind of noetic analysis and no concrete social
world that was ever yielded up noematically then one would be com-
pelled to say that whatever interest this work might have, it certainly
does not look very much like what Schutz has done. After all, Schutz
turns concretely to the social sciences and tries to describe and analyze
their specific content. In these terms, he would seem certainly to be
concerned with an actually given and already structured world. These
views are, in my judgment, essentially reciprocal; the noetic and the
noematic demand each other. Furthermore, it becomes impossible to
understand Schutz if you split off the two. Then you would have on one
side an already formed social world with its denizens, the human beings
in it in I-Thou, face to face relationships, in genuine We-relationships.
Starting with that, you would drift off into noetic considerations. On
the other side, you would start with the constitutive process which
helps to establish the social world, in which case the danger is that you
never reach the actual social reality with which you are supposed to be
concerned. My thesis is that anonymity and anonymization form an
integrity which must be honored by anyone who seeks a phenom-
enological comprehension of social structure. Moreover, that integrity
of noetic-noematic analysis must be sensitive to an internal difficulty
in all phenomenological work concerned with the social world. The
difficulty is this: on the one hand, it would seem that an egology is
responsible - whether you call it constitution or not - for actually buil-
ding up the social world we have. On the other hand, if one starts with the
historical social world in all of its weight and givenness, then one would
have to say that the We-relationship is primary and that it is only
after that relationship is established that individuals are born into
the world, even phenomenologists.
Schutz's response, and I think it is phenomenology's response as
well, is that we are concerned here with two different structures: one
 ANONYMITY IN ALFRED SCHUTZ' THOUGHT 71

is a horizontal, the other is a vertical structure. The horizontal

structure involves chronology, which means that the world is al-
ready there, with all of its continuity, with the career of our prede-
cessors and their relationships, their troubles, their promises and
dreams, with all of the involvements of historical existence. Yet that
already given world, which indeed has profound status in this entire
discussion, nevertheless also has a vertical dimension, which is the
structural history of its intentional becoming. The two cannot be put
into the same interrogational camp by asking which comes first.
Neither comes first. One comes first or the other comes first depending
on what standpoint or perspective you take in terms of philosophical or
sociological analysis. In sociological terms, the actually realized and
historically fulfilled world of human reality is first. From a philosoph-
ical, phenomenological standpoint, the reconstruction of that world
from an egological base comes first, first in the sense that such analysis
is demanded if we are to comprehend the social world.
N ow let me conclude with one point and with a promise. I do not
intend to talk until the cows come home. The one point that I want
to make is concerned with Schutz's placement of transcendental
phenomenology. Is he interested in transcendental questions or is he
operating in the more restricted sphere of constitutive phenomenology?
As I understand him, Schutz believes that a kind of transcendental
question is unavoidable for any philosopher who seeks to understand
social reality. That question can be formulated in the following way:
Given a social world, how is it possible? What are the conditions
necessary for the possibility of a social world? Or to say it differently,
given various phenomena within the social world, the transcendental
turn asks about those conditions a priori which make it possible that
there can be such phenomena and such a social world. In this kind of
transcendental inquiry, the phenomenologists with whom I have been
associated (and Schutz in particular) certainly have recognized the
legitimacy of such questions and indeed have devoted themselves in
various ways to their exploration. That is the last point, but I have
still a promise to keep, though I cannot do justice to it here.
I started the discussion by briefly tracing the career of my own
interest in the problem of anonymity, locating it first in existential
philosophy, where I indeed believe it has an important part to play.
But having concluded the discussion of the concept of anonymity in
Schutz's thought, it is only fair to point out that he was largely
irritated by and in opposition to most existential thought. Neverthe-
72 MAURICE NATANSON

less Schutz had a profound appreciation of existential problems as

distinguished from existential philosophy in the sense of Sartre or
particular thinkers. In terms of existential problems, I think that there
are existential implications in Schutz's distinction between anonymity
and anonymization. What Schutz called "metaphysical constants"
may serve as the clue to the relationship between anonymity and
anonymization, taken as basic existential themes of social reality. By
metaphysicalconstants-a phrase which he repeated many times during
his lectures and obliquely referred to in his writings - Schutz meant
primordial and invariant features of human existence: that we are
born into a world, that we are born of parents who are unique to us,
that we are "born of mothers and not concocted in retorts,"3 that we
are born into a world in which we must grow older, and that we are
born into a world in which we must die. The whole relationship between
predecessors, contemporaries, consociates, and successors is deeply
enmeshed in the meaning of the metaphysical constants. Speaking for
myself alone, I suggest that both anonymity and anonymization have
an existential implication in terms of the metaphysical constants, be-
cause the constants give us an image of a world outside of our imme-
diate microcosm, a world that transcends us not because we are
destined to die in it but rather because there will always be the Other-
someone who will look back upon us, an other who is ultimately
historically not only a successor, and not only an anonymous successor,
but someone who will always occupy a transcendent standpoint.
We are concerned, then, with a fugitive transcendence which does
not readily lend itself to concrete illustration. Yet there is an oblique
way of pointing to the existential force of otherness. In the context of
an essay on Kafka's Metamorphosis, Paul-Louis Landsberg tells the
following story:
"Once, years ago, very late at night, I was in my native village. I was climbing
a stairway which led to a restaurant on the second floor of a house. It was im-
possible to climb the stair without seeing oneself in several mirrors. It was
surprising, and all the more so for Germany, where mirrors in restaurants are
much less common than they are in Paris. As I ascended, I could see my image
from the rear, in a great mirror. Suddenly I noticed that there was a small round
bald spot on my head which had formerly been abundantly covered with hair.
All at once this slow metamorphosis, for certainly I had lost my hair little by
little, shocked my sense and my conscience. The feeling which overcame me at
that instant was not wounded vanity, nor, as a psychoanalyst would have it, a
manifestation of the castration complex, but was, without doubt, a mortal

3 "Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences," ibid., p. 57.

 ANONYMITY IN ALFRED SCHUTZ' THOUGHT 73
anguish, the anguish of living, a fear of its rapidity, of its incessant progress, and,
like all fear of life, a fear of its ripe fruit - death."4

Although it appears here that the individual is discovering something

about himself, Landsberg, as I choose to read him, is pointing toward
the transcendence of human experience which intimates an otherness
or betrays another perspective which reveals us to ourselves and which
eventually is going to have the final say about who we were.

4 Paul L. Landsberg, "The Metamorphosis," in Angel Flores, ed., The Kalka Problem,
trans. Caroline Muhlenberg (New York: New Directions, 1946) p. 129.
 FRED R. DALLMAYR

GENESIS AND VALIDATION OF SOCIAL

KNOWLEDGE: LESSONS FROM MERLEAU-PONTY

The social sciences today are again in a period of self-scrutiny. The

trust in the self-sustaining virtues of scientific methodology - so
prevalent in the postwar era - is a matter of the past; evicted from the
position of undisputed sovereign, positive science finds itself in the
more modest role of a partisan perspective competing for attention
and credibility in the professional community. Among alternative
views, phenomenology in recent years had gained particular pro-
minence in debates on the premises and functions of social inquiry. As
Maurice Natanson has observed: phenomenology - broadly "in the
ascendancy" in English-speaking countries - represents today "a dis-
tinctive voice in the conversation of social scientists."! The argument
advanced by phenomenologists in this conversation is by no means one-
dimensional or univocal; yet (as it seems to me), it is not impossible to
discern a major thrust or common inflection. Broadly speaking, this
thrust involves a stress on, and special attentiveness to, the peculiar
features or distinctive traits of social phenomena as compared to
purely natural phenomena; as a corollary of such attentiveness, the
social scientist is commonly assumed to be less rigidly detached from
his subject matter than the natural scientist and to be able to grasp
not only the external sequence but also the intrinsic significance of
social events. In the words of Alfred Schutz - words which reverberate
widely in contemporary discussions - the task of social inquiry is to
discover "what the actor 'means' in his action, in contrast to the
meaning which this action has for the actor's partner or a neutral
observer" ; in trying to explain social reality, social science propositions

1 Maurice Natanson, ed., Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, vol. I (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1973), pp. XV, 4. For additional evidence of the impact of phenom-
enology compare, e.g., George Psathas, ed., Phenomenological Sociology: Issues and Applica-
tions (New York: Wiley Press, 1973); John O'Neill, Sociology as a Skin Trade (New York:
Harper and Row, 1972), and several essays in Marvin Surkin and Alan Wolfe, eds., An End
to Political Science: The Caucus Papers (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
 LESSONS FROM MERLEAU-PONTY 75
consequently "must include a reference to the subjective meaning an
action has for the actor."2
The reaction of empirical social science to the emergence of phenom-
enology has been variegated and occasionally vehement. However,
after some initial outbursts and fulminations in which the phenom-
enological outlook was castigated as inimical not only to scientific
objectivity but to Western rationalism in general, the empiricist re-
sponse has been, on the whole, remarkably subdued if not nonchalant.
As it turned out, once the dust had settled, logical empiricism was not
entirely averse to some facets of the phenomenological enterprise,
especially to HusserI's insistence on conceptual clarification and to his
(early) attempt to convert philosophy into a "rigorous science." At a
closer look, moreover, empiricists discovered the possibility of an
almost effortless modus vivendi. As far as the comprehension of object-
ive social reality is concerned, positivists found that they could safely
disregard phenomenological arguments as they were unable to match
the canons of explanation and validation prescribed by scientific
method; whatever phenomenologists might wish to say in this domain,
could be treated as harmless albeit supernumerary obiter dicta. To the
extent that phenomenologists stress the actor's "meaning" (in a sense
not accessible to empirical psychology), the reaction was to regard such
meaning as inferentially related to social behavior or social interaction
and, in any event, as an hypothesis in need of confirmation. To the
extent that emphasis is placed on the observer's ability to "understand"
social meaning patterns, such ability was viewed as a crucial facet of
the scientist's heuristic ingenuity or serendipity, but as a facet signifi-
cant only at the threshold of empirical research. Seen from these
various angles, phenomenology was in any case irrelevant to the truth
claims of social science. While redundant in the formulation of valid
propositions, phenomenology's insights in the eyes of logical empiricism
serve at best as a preamble or antechamber to empirical inquiry.
Faced with this assessment, phenomenologists by and large have
tended to accept the offered settlement. Provided they are unen-
cumbered in the exploration of (nonempirical) consciousness, many
seem ready to adopt a stance of tolerance predicated on mutual
neglect and indifference. Despite occasional assertions of special truth
qualities inherent in intuitive evidence, partisans frequently identify

2 Alfred Schutz, "Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences," in Maurice
Natanson, ed., PhilOSOPhy of the Social Sciences: A Reader (New York: Random House,
1963), pp. 240, 245.
 FRED R. DALLMA YR

phenomenology with the discovery or generation, rather than the con-

firmation, of propositions. If tranquillity were the only yardstick
operative in the republic of letters, one might welcome this state of
affairs. As it seems to me, however, phenomenologists have reason to
be wary of the bargain. Construed as a purely "genetic" enterprise,
their endeavors are liable to be reduced to impotence if not irrelevance.
Viewed as an innocuous embroidery of empirical research or as a
subjective supplement to objectivism, phenomenology is in danger of
losing the radical impulse which animated its leading spokesmen: the
effort to give a new sense to the source and fabric of human knowledge.
The basic thesis of the present paper is that - to remain faithful to its
task - phenomenology has to proceed from SUbjective meanings to a
concern with pre-reflective and pre-subjective patterns or structures of
experience; especially in application to the social domain, the tradi-
tional focus on transcendental consciousness or subjectivity has to be
modified in the direction of a hermeneutical ontology elucidating man's
encounters with being. After sketching, in an initial section, the
contours of the empiricist reaction to phenomenological overtures, the
paper proceeds to indicate some connections or complementary features
linking this reaction with prevalent formulations of a phenomenological
social science. Relying chiefly on Merleau-Ponty's writings, a final
portion seeks to delineate the possibility of a more intimate fusion
between phenomenology and social research and, in particular, between
the genesis and validation of social knowledge.

1. THE CHALLENGE OF LOGICAL EMPIRICISM

In order to obtain a flavor of the logical-empiricist rejoinder to phenom-

enology, I would like at the outset to cast a brief glance at a text which
enjoys wide currency among both social scientists and theoreticians:
Richard Rudner's Philosophy of Social Science. The text admittedly
is an introductory treatise ranging over a broad compendium of topics;
but its comments on phenomenology (or on issues typically associated
with phenomenology) are concise and instructive. Rudner addresses
himself to questions arising both from the peculiar subject matter of
social inquiry and from the relationship between the observer and the tar-
get of his investigations. In each case his arguments are phrased in a man-
ner which places the accent squarely on the process of validation or on
the confirmation or falsification of the truth claims of social science.
 LESSONS FROM MERLEA V-PONTY 77
From the start, Rudner concedes without qualification the special
status or quality of social phenomena - the fact that such phenomena
typically have "meaning," significance or value for human beings.
"We may grant at once," he writes, "that not only do objects and
acts that have value or importance come within the purview of social
inquiry, but also that acts of valuing (whether or not such acts have
value) are likewise suitable objects of investigation for the social
scientist." What is at issue, he adds, is whether the character of the
subject matter vindicates a special type of investigation distinct from
scientific method. In tackling this issue, the text forcefully rejects the
claim that social phenomena are somehow impervious to, or completely
exempt from, scientific validation - a claim based on the premise that
meaning refers to entirely subjective or internal states of mind which
are unobservable and empirically elusive. Although, according to
Rudner, subjective or internal attitudes may diminish the cogency of a
hypothesis or the reliability of a proposition, they regularly do not
preclude empirical investigation due to the broad linkage between
observable behavior and evaluative acts or mental dispositions: "For
the scientific validation of the types of hypothesis involved is not
dependent on the synonymy of valuational predicates with any set of
observational (or introspective) ones. All that is required for scientific
validation of the relevant hypothesis is that some observable state of
affairs be a likely conco'mitant of the value phenomenon in question and
not that any observable state of affairs be both a necessary and
sufficient condition for it."
Turning to the role of the social scientist, Rudner recognizes again
a special relationship between observer and investigated phenomena;
however, this relationship in his view is significant at best as a preface
or corollary to the acquisition of knowledge. What is at stake, he notes,
is not simply the problem of how to gain access to the social world but
how to acquire valid knowledge; the question of the applicability of
scientific methods belongs strictly speaking "in the context of valida-
tion and not in the context of discovery." This caveat has particular
relevance for the inclination of some (Weberian and phenomenological)
social scientists to substitute for empirical research a method aiming
at the "understanding" of meaningful social action. According to
Rudner, the method of understanding is valuable as a heuristic device
and should be cultivated by social scientists as a means for gaining
familiarity with social phenomena and for asking initial questions
about their data. In his words: "The issue is not whether achieving
 FRED R. DALLMA YR

empathic understanding of some subject of inquiry (presumably by an

imaginative act of psychologically 'putting oneself into the place of'
the subject) is a helpful, fruitful, or indispensable technique for dis-
covering hypotheses, or means for testing hypotheses. The issue is not
even whether such techniques of discovery are peculiarly techniques
of the social scientist. What is at issue is whether empathic under-
standing constitutes an indispensable method for the validation of
hypotheses about social phenomena." A negative response to this
query is mandated, in Rudner's eyes, by the purely ancillary character
of understanding. "What check," he asks, "does the empathizer have
on whether his empathic state is veridical (i.e., reliable)? We need not
argue against empathy or discard it as a validational step, but clearly,
in order to accept some specific empathic act as validational, we must
presuppose an investigation establishing the hypothesis that this act
is veridical." In other words, in order to secure the reliability of
understanding, the dispositions, goals or intended meanings which are
the target of inquiry must be established independently through em-
pirical research; but if this knowledge is obtained, "What more could
be methodologically required?" While helpful in the domain of dis-
covery, understanding thus is basically superfluous for purposes of
validation. "It is possible," the text concludes, "to accept empathy
as a validational method in those cases where its veridicalness or
reliability has been independently established in such a way as to have
made it redundant. "3
Despite serious flaws in regard to the interpretation of "under-
standing," Rudner's study highlights an important dilemma in social
inquiry. What interests me at this point is not so much the misre-
presentation of the Weberian Verstehen method (in the direction of a
psychological reenactment or reproduction), but rather the distinction
between discovery and confirmation.4 Needless to say, in all these
matters Rudner cannot (and does not) claim any theoretical originality
or innovative insight. By and large, his comments reflect standard
opinions prevalent among logical-empirical philosophers of science,
especially among adherents of the so-called "covering-law" model of
3 Richard S. Rudner, Philosophy of Social Science (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966),
pp. 72-73, 79-80.
4 Regarding the misrepresentation of Verstehen theory, Rudner basically replicates the
arguments of Theodore Abel in "The Operation Called Verstehen," American Journal of
Sociology, vol. 54 (1948), pp. 2II-2I8. Compare also Murray Wax, "On Misunderstanding
Verstehen: A Reply to Abel," Sociology and Social Research, vol. 51 (1967), pp. 323-336;
and Thomas A. McCarthy, "On Misunderstanding Understanding," Theory and Decision, vol.
3 (1973), pp. 35 1-370.
 LESSONS FROM MERLEA U-PONTY 79
explanation. For purposes of illustration, I wish to turn briefly to
Ernest Nagel's The Structure oj Science. In discussing the "methodolog-
ical problems of the social sciences," Nagel, like Rudner, focuses on the
distinctive features of social phenomena - especially on their "subject-
ive" or "value-impregnated" character - and queries whether such
features erect an effective bar against scientific method. According to
many writers, he comments, "motives, dispositions, intended goals,
and values are not matters open to sensory inspection, and can be
neither made familiar nor identified by way of an exclusive use of
procedures that are suitable for exploring the publicly observable
subject matters of the 'purely behavioral' (or natural) sciences. On
the contrary, these are matters with which we can become conversant
solely from our 'subjective experience'." Those who argue in this
manner typically plead in favor of "nonobjective" techniques of in-
quiry, and especially in favor of the method of "understanding." The
social scientist from this perspective must" 'interpret' the materials
of his study by imaginatively identifying himself with the actors in
social processes, viewing the situations they face as the actors them-
selves view them, and constructing 'models of motivation' in which
springs of action and commitments to various values are imputed to
those human agents. The social scientist is able to do these things only
because he is himself an active agent in social processes, and can
therefore understand in the light of his own 'subjective' experiences
the 'internal meanings' of social actions."
After thus delineating the terrain of the battle, Nagel proceeds in
deft strokes to disarm or at least to rebuff the opponents of scientific
method. Even granting that social sciences deal largely with purposive
human action or subjective meaning, he observes initially (and in my
view correctly), this concern does not rigidly circumscribe their legiti-
mate subject matter. To the extent that causal factors or objective
correlations are involved, the relevant categories of inquiry cannot be
"exclusively 'subjective' ones." More importantly, the regime of science
does not come to a halt at the boundaries of conscious human purpose.
As Nagel points out, behaviorist and behavioral science today is no
longer restricted narrowly to overt or publicly observable types of
behavior: "Behaviorism has undergone important transformations
since its initial formulation, and there are perhaps no psychologists (or
for that matter, social scientists) currently calling themselves 'be-
haviorists' who subscribe to the earlier version's unqualified condemna-
tion of introspection." What is true of psychologists is equally true
80 FRED R. DALLMA YR

of social investigators following the "behavioral" (or natural science)

model of inquiry. As a result of the development of new investigative
techniques, psychologists and social scientists in our time are able to
probe internal dispositions and aspirations - without tampering with
their scientific conscience: a behaviorist can "readily acknowledge
that men are capable of having emotions, images, ideas, or plans; that
these psychic states are 'private' to the individual in whose body they
occur, in the sense that this individual alone can directly experience
their occurrence, because of the privileged relation his body has to
those states; and that consequently a man can in general attest to being
in some psychic state without having to examine first the publicly ob-
servable state of his own body." Admissions of this kind, according to
N agel, are by no means necessarily at odds with reliance on the canons
of empirical science: "Accordingly, a behaviorist can maintain without
inconsistency that there are indeed such things as private psychic
states, and also that the controlled study of overt behavior is never-
theless the only sound procedure for achieving reliable knowledge con-
cerning individual and social action."
Viewed against this background, the method of understanding plays
at best a limited or subordinate role in social inquiry. Whenever the
strict correspondence between acts of understanding and the social
phenomena to be understood needs to be tested, the social scientist
requires tools of empirical analysis which are not derived from the
Weberian (or phenomenological) legacy: "The crucial point," Nagel
notes, "is that the logical canons employed by responsible social
scientists in assessing the objective evidence for the imputation of
psychological states do not appear to differ essentially (though they
may often be applied less rigorously) from the canons employed for
analogous purposes by responsible students in other areas of inquiry."
His conclusions on the topic thus parallel in essence the comments
voiced by Rudner; although moderately potent in generating heuristic
insights, understanding in his view is devoid of any validational force.
"In sum," Nagel concludes, "the fact that the social scientist, unlike
the student of inanimate nature, is able to project himself by sym-
pathetic imagination into the phenomena he is attempting to under-
stand, is pertinent to questions concerning the origins of his explana-
tory hypotheses but not to questions concerning their validity. His
ability to enter into relations of empathy with the human actors in
some social process may indeed be heuristically important in his effort
to invent suitable hypotheses which will explain the process. N evert he-
 LESSONS FROM MERLEA U-PONTY 8r

less, his empathic identification with those individuals does not, by

itself, constitute knowledge."5
It would not be difficult to multiply statements of this kind culled
from contemporary "philosophy of science" literature. However, my
concern here is not so much with the stance of philosophers as with the
attitudes and predilections of social scientists. For this reason, I want
to offer a few examples illustrating the pervasive influence of logical
empiricism on the social sciences, and especially on the discipline in
which I am domiciled: political science. Among political scientists
teaching courses dealing with the nature of their discipline, a text by
Alan Isaak entitled Scope and Methods ot Political Science has for
some time enjoyed considerable popularity. A central topic discussed in
the study is the question of the compatibility between political inquiry
and rigorous scientific analysis. Regarding the basic character and
thrust of scientific analysis, Isaak forcefully endorses the so-called
"nomological" or "covering-law" model of explanation according to
which factors or variables are said to be explained if they can be
successfully subsumed under general laws or propositions (commonly
with the help of stipulated "initial conditions"). In elaborating on the
range or applicability of this explanatory model, the text pays atten-
tion to the distinctive features of social and political phenomena, in-
cluding the purposive or value-related quality of social and political
action; according to Isaak, however, the distinctiveness of the subject
matter imposes no restriction on scientific method. Given the avail-
ability of a broad arsenal of social-psychological techniques of in-
vestigation, he argues, there is no reason why purposive or meaningful
behavior should elude empirical research; in fact, intentional explana-
tion figures in the text as simply one type of nomological analysis.
Turning to proposed alternative avenues of inquiry, Isaak finds
little or no explanatory merit in the method of understanding. Ver-
stehen or "empathic understanding," in his view, involves the claim
of a special access to the social world "by somehow 'getting into' other
people's heads in order to speculate about how others would behave in
certain situations;" but such access provides merely a subjective

5 Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, I96I), pp. 474-477, 479-480, 484. Compare also his
comment in another context: "The imputation of emotions, attitudes, and purposes as an
explanation of overt behavior is a two-fold hypothesis; it is not a self-certifying one, and
evidence for it must be supplied in accordance with customary canons of empirical inquiry."
See "Problems of Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences," in Natanson, ed.,
PhilosoPhy of the Social Sciences: A Reader, pp. I89-209.
82 FRED R. DALLMA YR

familiarity and is unable to contribute anything to the task of ex-

planation. "The psychological fact of familiarity," Isaak observes,
"has nothing to do with the logical requirements of explanation." In
the investigation of purposive or intentional behavior, these require-
ments are met through nomological analysis, while understanding
offers at best an innocuous embroidery: "An intention explains a
political fact only insofar as it is lawfully related, directly or indirectly,
to it. That the fact is thereby made psychologically meaningful is
neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of the explanation." While
thus discounting understanding as an explanatory tool, Isaak willingly
acknowledges its usefulness as a heuristic device for the purpose of
generating imaginative hypotheses. The difference between explana-
tory and heuristic force, he notes, is founded on the more basic dis-
tinction between scientific validation or justification and the genesis
or discovery of knowledge. While the power of validation lies in "the
logical connection between evidence and the conclusion (fact to be
explained)," discovery refers to the process "how scientists find out
about scientific facts." This process is anchored to a large extent in the
"psychology of scientists" and revolves around "an activity which
emphasizes creativity." Isaak cites in this context with approval
Hans Reichenbach's statement in The Rise of Scientific Philosophy:
"The act of discovery escapes logical analysis; there are no logical
rules in terms of which a 'discovery machine' could be constructed that
would take over the creative function of genius. "6
A further example may serve; a text which frequently competes
with Isaak's in courses of the same kind: Eugene Meehan's The Theory
and Method of Political Analysis. Meehan actually does not subscribe
fully to the nomological model of logical empiricism, but inclines more
toward the instrumental conception of scientific inquiry espoused by
Karl Popper and his school; despite a preference for more subdued
and circumspect formulations, however, his stance in the end does not
differ markedly from Isaak's argument. In contrast to more doctrinaire
brands of positivism, Meehan concedes the tentative character of all
scientific knowledge and the crucial role in empirical research played
by creativity and innovative insight. "A scientific explanation is always
partial and particular," he writes; "science does not have a total and

6 See Alan C. Isaak, Scope and Methods of Political Science: An Introduction to the Method-
ology of Political Inquiry (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1969), pp. 105-106, II9-120, 149,
152; also Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific PhilosoPhy (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1951), p. 231.
 LESSONS FROM MERLEAU-PONTY

final structure, like a jigsaw puzzle, in which every piece has its place."
Given the possibility of new data and new perspectives, "explanations
are conditional, approximate, and valid only so long as they serve
their purposes; when a better explanation appears, the old explanation
is absorbed and superseded." In social inquiry the empirical proposi-
tions offered by science are even more precarious than usual, due to the
distinctiveness of the social subject matter. "Few persons would argue,"
Meehan continues, "that political science ought not to be, or need
not be, empirical. And virtually everyone would agree that we ought
to employ the most stringent construction of empiricism compatible
with the conduct of inquiry into political science. But it is clear that the
rigid form of empiricism that physics employs would emasculate polit-
ical science and, in any case, the fact that physics has been enormously
successful while remaining within specified limits is not prima facie
evidence in favor of the belief that political science could do the same."
The chief reason for the discrepancy between political science and
physics resides in the purposive or goal-oriented character of social and
political conduct: "The significance of subjective or psychic factors in
human behavior may be denied, though that position hardly seems
tenable at the present time." Finding both simple dismissal and the
reduction of psychic factors to overt activity unsatisfactory, Meehan
opts in favor of the strategy of investigating "the psychic element in
human behavior with those means at our disposal. Necessarily, this
requires a weakening of the standards of empirical evidence imposed on
the inquiry."
While willing to accept a weakening of scientific evidence, Meehan is
by no means ready to abandon canons of scientific validation: "Politics
involves the behavior of man - individually and socially - and if the
richness and diversity of human behavior is the despair of the system
builder and if the factors of subjective motivation and value preference
are the monkey wrench in the systematic theorist's gear box, these are
not sufficient reasons for either denying the existence of the problem or
oversimplifying it grossly. However imperfectly, we can study the
goals men seek, the justifications they employ, the motivations that
drive them, the social machinery they construct for these purposes, and
the effect of that machinery, and of each other, on the behavior of
individuals and groups." According to Meehan, the techniques avail-
able for empirically investigating SUbjective intentions and purposive
action may not be completely reliable but they are far superior to
guesswork: "Inferences from public data to private conscious states
 FRED R. DALLMA YR

necessarily involve the application of theory and the interpretation of

perceptions and this softens the rigor of the total inquiry. That cannot
be helped, and it is always possible that psychology and other related
disciplines will in time produce a stronger apparatus for conducting
such investigations. The point is that political scientists do not face a
choice between strict empiricism and metaphysics, as some of the
earlier logical positivists seemed to think." Among tools of inquiry
widely employed at present, Meehan finds promise primarily in opinion
polls and survey research: "Studies of public opinion will employ
evidence obtained by a variety of techniques (questionnaires, inter-
views, analysis of publications, and so on) and though the value of the
findings will depend upon an evaluation of the standards employed
to gather evidence, there are no grounds for asserting that such studies
are worthless."
The need in social inquiry of lowering validational requirements
offers no warrant, in any case, for a resort to non-empirical evidence.
"Science seeks to establish relationships," Meehan asserts. "It does not
seek 'understanding' if that term implies some peculiar or undefinable
relationship between observer and object - if it goes beyond the order-
ing and classification of empirical or observable properties." Despite
"the gradual decay of strict logical positivism" which has "somewhat
weakened the fear and distrust of terms like Max Weber's verstehen
conception of understanding," science - he insists - "continues to
reject, or at least ignore, claims to knowledge based on supernatural
intuitions, or indeed on any grounds other than the operation of the
human sensory apparatus." To the extent that understanding involves
"some 'higher' form of knowledge, some 'getting inside things' in
search of their 'essence' after the manner of Henri Bergson and others,
science does not accept the validity of the suggestion." While thus
rejecting understanding as a tool for validating knowledge, Meehan
cheerfully accepts its function for purposes of discovery. The procedure
through which hypotheses or propositions are generated, he observes,
"remains a mystery, for there is no set of formal rules which can be
applied to a body of facts in some mechanical fashion to produce
general statements." Together with "most philosophers of science" he
holds that "there can be no logic of discovery, though a few sturdy
souls continue to examine the problem in hopes of finding a solution."
Although some scientific authorities claim to derive hypotheses through
inductive operations from a body of data, "others like Karl Popper
 LESSONS FROM MERLEA U-PONTY 85
assert with equal emphasis that generalization cannot be formalized."
As Meehan adds, he finds Popper "most persuasive in this matter."7

II. TRANSCENDENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE NATURAL

ATTITUDE

Phenomenology as a subjective corollary of empirical research, as a

facet pertaining to the genesis rather than the validation of social
knowledge: such is the settlement or division of labor which emerges
from the preceding examples and illustrations. Yet, phenomenologists
may not be impressed by the cited passages and may prefer to view
the bargain as a unilateral fiat. After all, logical positivists are noto-
rious for misconstruing intentionality and Verstehen and thus can
hardly be expected to offer reliable testimony. Moreover, the advocates
of "empathic understanding" typically invoked by logical positivists
may not necessarily be regarded by phenomenologists as authoritative
spokesmen on phenomenological issues. Nagel refers primarily to such
writers as Hayek and MacIver, while Isaak bases his argument largely
on a reading of Brown's Explanation in Social Science and Runciman's
Social Science and Political Theory;8 none of these authors are affiliated
in a direct and intimate manner with the phenomenological perspective.
7 Eugene J. Meehan, The Theory and Method of Political Analysis (Homewood, Ill.:
Dorsey Press, 1965), pp. 35,44, 117-181. For broadly comparable arguments see also Fred M.
Frohook, The Nature of Political Inquiry (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1967). Frohook
distinguishes between "naturalism" - or the view that "the methods of the natural sciences
are appropriate and efficacious in the study of social phenomena" - and "subjectivism"
whose parentage points to "continental philosophers like Nietzsche and Husserl" and
which focuses OIl intentional acts and on the "meaning" social agents attribute to their
actions. Regarding the explanation of "subjective meaning" he writes: "What is at issue here
is a kind of inside property to acts which is not available to the techniques of science; or, at
least, not wholly available. This qualification needs to be made because of the possibility of
directly penetrating into that meaning constructed by actors to introduce an attitudinal
variable which intervenes between sociological data and behavior: one can always ask the
participants exchanging shells what meaning they give to their behavior ... One of the
distinctive features of behavioralism is the introduction of an attitudinal variable between
sociological data and political behavior. This attitudinal variable is brought into the analytic
framework as a means of reconstructing the political system from the viewpoint of the
participant, and in this way merging the subjective and objective dimensions of the social
world as Weber attempts to do with the ideal type" (pp. 114, rr7, 130). The confidence of
social scientists to find empirical evidence for intentional activity and thus to preempt the
aspirations of phenomenology is illustrated in a leading study of electoral behavior which
labels it,df a "phenomenological" inquiry; see Argus Campbell et aI., The A merican Voter
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960), p. 29.
8 See F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1952);
Robert M. MacIver, Social Causation (:\few York: Ginn and Company, 1942); Robert Brown,
Explanation in Social Science (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1963); and W.G. Runciman,
Social Science and Political Theory (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1963).
 86 FRED R. DALLMA YR

For this reason it may be advisable to take a quick glance at some

writers on social inquiry whose credentials in the phenomenological
movement are unimpeachable. Perhaps, what will result from such a
review is the impression that the sketched bargain is not entirely
unilateral and that there is a reciprocity of arguments sustaining the
prevailing modus vivendi.
Among both partisans and critics, Alfred Schutz is commonly re-
garded as the chief proponent of a phenomenologically oriented social
science - a reputation which is well deserved given his painstaking
exploration of the theoretical parameters of social inquiry. Despite his
impressive contributions, however, his perspective is not entirely free
of ambiguity; as it seems to me, Schutz's thought is lodged precariously
at the crossroads of a transcendental and a hermeneutical or ontological
phenomenology. As a student of Husserl, he was deeply attached to the
notion of "epoche" (or reduction) and to the elucidation of transcen-
dental consciousness; one of his earlier works was, at least in part,
devoted to the task of providing a more solid underpinning for Weber-
ian sociology in the constitutive functions of transcendental subjectiv-
ity. 9 At the same time, however, Schutz was profoundly sensitive to
the dilemmas of the transcendental approach. In the course of his life,
he became increasingly convinced that the investigation of social ex-
perience required a different perspective and that Husserl in the end
had failed to account for intersubjectivity on the basis of a purified
(or reduced) subjective consciousness. To the extent, he held, that
intersubjectivity or a "we-relationship" is the premise for any phe-
nomenological inquiry of society, such a premise cannot in turn be
derived from a transcendental egological source. These considerations
inclined him increasingly toward a phenomenology of the "natural
attitude" or a concern with everyday experience in the social life-
world; in one of his later essays he even argued that "the empirical
sciences will find their true foundation not in transcendental phenom-
enology, but in the constitutive phenomenology of the natural atti-
tude."lO The question remains, however, what is meant by the new

9 Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick
Lohnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967).
10 As he added in the same context: "Husserl's signal contribution to the social sciences
consists neither in his unsuccessful attempt to solve the problem of the constitution of the
transcendental intersubjectivity within the reduced egological sphere, nor in his unclarified
notion of empathy as the foundation of understanding, nor, finally, in his interpretation of
communities and societies as subjectivities of a higher order the nature of which can be des-
cribed eidetically; but rather in the wealth of his analyses pertinent to problems of the
Lebenswelt and designed to be developed into a philosophical anthropology." See "H usserl's
 LESSONS FROM MERLEAU-PONTY

focus. Occasionally the dimension of the "natural attitude" as depicted

by Schutz appears simply as a factual condition or environment - which
definitely seems amenable to empirical research and its standards of
validation. On the other hand, if the new perspective is meant to be
"constitutive," phenomenological inquiry seems to point beyond the
"natural attitude" toward a level of consciousness and, in any event,
toward a "constitution" of meaning which is a facet of the genesis or
discovery of knowledge. In these respects, Schutz' outlook continues to
reflect Husserlian quandaries. Despite frequent protestations to the
contrary, Husserlian phenomenology at many junctures remains heir
to Cartesian mind-body or subject-object dichotomies and also to the
Kantian distinction between constitutive apriori categories and apos-
teriori research.ll
Some of the indicated quandaries can be detected in one of Schutz'
most widely cited and read essays, entitled "Concept and Theory
Formation in the Social Sciences." The essay takes its point of depart-
ure from the world of everyday, common-sense experience and under-
scores strongly the intersubjective character of this context. "By the
term 'social reality' ," Schutz argued, "I wish to be understood the sum
total of objects and occurrences within the social cultural world as
experienced by the common-sense thinking of men living their daily
lives among their fellow-men, connected with them in manifold re-
lations of interaction." From the outset, he added, "we, the actors on
the social scene, experience the world we live in as a world both of
nature and of culture, not as a private but as an intersubjective one,
that is, as a world common to all of us, either actually given or potenti-
ally accessible to everyone; and this involves intercommunication and
language." The intersubjective character of common-sense experience,
according to Schutz, provided the basis for reciprocal understanding or
Verstehen in human affairs. Verstehen, thus, was "primarily not a

Importance for the Social Sciences," in Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. I: The Problem of
Social Reality, edited by Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), p. I49.
Compare also his "The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl," in Collected
Papers, vol. III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, edited by 1. Schutz (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), pp. 5I-91.
11 Compare, e.g., Husserl's own characterization of the "natural attitude" or "natural
standpoint": "I find continually present and standing over against me the one spatio·
temporal fact-world to which I myself belong, as do all other men found in it and related in
the same way to it. This 'fact-world', as the world already tells us, I find to be out there, and
also take it just as it gives itself to me as something that exists out there. All doubting and rejecting
of the data of the natural world leaves standing the general thesis of the natural standpoint."
See Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce
Gibson (New York: Macmillan, I93I), p. 96.
88 FRED R. DALLMA YR

method used by the social scientist, but the particular experiential

form in which common-sense thinking takes cognizance of the social
cultural world." Logical empiricism and all forms of naturalism were
based but failed to reflect on this experiential infrastructure: "Inter-
SUbjectivity, interaction, intercommunication, and language are simply
presupposed as the unc1arified foundation of these theories." What
was commonly ignored by positivists was the fact that "an inter-
SUbjective understanding between scientist B and scientist A occurs
neither by scientist B's observations of scientist A's overt behavior,
nor by introspection performed by B, nor by identification of B with
A." Until recent explorations of the life-world, philosophers in general
had been unable to grapple with the notion of intersubjectivity and
with the experiences of social life. In Schutz' view, it was "a 'scandal
of philosophy' that so far a satisfactory solution to the problem of our
knowledge of other minds and, in connection therewith, of the inter-
subjectivity of our experience of the natural as well as the socio-
cultural world has not been found and that, until recent times, this
problem has even escaped the attention of philosophers."
While the preceding passages adumbrated contours of a hermeneu-
tical phenomenology, Schutz' elaboration of the implications for social
inquiry revealed the imprint of Cartesian bifurcations. When discussing
methodological problems peculiar to the social sciences, Schutz focused
strongly on the distinctiveness of the social subject matter, and especi-
ally on the patterns of common-sense experience. "The observational
field of the social scientist - social reality," he wrote, "has a specific
meaning and relevance structure for the human beings living, acting,
and thinking within it. By a series of common-sense constructs they
have pre-selected and pre-interpreted this world which they experience
as the reality of their daily lives." The investigation of this observa-
tional field, in Schutz' view, required a phenomenological analysis of
the "natural attitude," that is, of the domain of everyday life. The
life-world, he noted, was encountered first of all from a "biograph-
ically determined situation" which provides a "system of relevances"
and practical interests. "At least one aspect of the biographically and
situationally determined systems of interests and relevances," the
essay stated, "is subjectively experienced in the thinking of everyday
life as systems of motives for action, of choices to be made, of projects
to be carried out, of goals to be reached. It is this insight of the actor in-
to the dependencies of the motives and goals of his actions upon his
biographically determined situation which social scientists have in
 LESSONS FROM MERLEAU-PONTY 89
view when speaking of the subjective meaning which the actor 'be-
stows upon' or 'connects with' his action." What is unclear at this
point is why the life-world, when treated as a topical subject matter and
as a "biographically determined situation," eludes the techniques of
empirical psychology and, in particular, why purposive or goal-oriented
behavior is not amenable to intentional explanation (allowance being
made for the need inferentially to bridge the gap between behavior and
psychic conditions). Ambiguities increase when Schutz turns from
individual motives to the social or intersubjective character of the life-
world. In large measure, this character is said to be derived from the
fact that "the common-sense knowledge of everyday life is from the
outset socialized in many respects" - an aspect which, apart from
structural arrangements, entails that "the greater part of our knowl-
edge" tends to be "socially derived, and this in socially approved
forms." While biography and individual socialization seem to fall
within the province of empirical psychology, the reference to the social
origin of ideas transforms the life-world into a target of the sociology of
knowledge.
Queries regarding the methodological status of the life-world are not
so much resolved as multiplied and further complicated by Schutz'
comments on the distinction between common-sense experience and
scientific inquiry. According to Schutz, "the most serious question
which the methodology of the social sciences has to answer is: How is
it possible to form objective concepts and an objectively verifiable
theory of subjective meaning-structures?" Social scientific propositions
in his view had to be built upon, but were by no means identical with
the common-sense experiences of everyday life; rather, the conceptions
formed in the mode of the "natural attitude" had to be viewed basically
as "first level constructs" upon which the network of social science
propositions had to be erected. As he wrote: In order to grasp social
reality, "the thought objects constructed by the social scientist" had
"to be founded upon the thought objects constructed by the common-
sense thinking of men, living their daily life within their social world" ;
in other words, the constructs of the social sciences were "constructs
of the second degree, that is, constructs of the constructs, made by the
actors on the social scene." To the extent that common-sense ex-
perience involved "subjective" elements, namely, understanding of an
action from the actor's perspective, social scientific constructs on the
second level had to "include a reference to the subjective meaning
an action has for the actor." In which sense, however, could social
go FRED R. DALLMA YR

science be said to be "founded upon" or to "include a referent to"

common-sense experience? As Schutz insisted, the move from the
natural to the scientific attitude was not simply a minor step but in-
volved a major change of perspective. When assuming the role of
scientist, the social observer exchanged his own "biographical situa-
tion" for a new "scientific situation" with its own system of relevances:
"The problems with which he has to deal might be quite unproblematic
for the human being within the world and vice versa. Any scientific
problem is determined by the actual state of the respective science, and
its solution has to be achieved in accordance with the procedural rules
governing his science, which among other things warrant the control
and verification of the solution offered."
Once the process of scientific investigation was underway, the meth-
odological rules endorsed by Schutz were on the whole convergent
with those invoked by positivist philosophers of science. Despite the
injunction of careful observation, the social scientist could not simply
derive his propositions from his subject matter but had to invent
hypotheses and artificial models through which specific relationships
could be isolated and explored; yet, these models were not simply
arbitrary constructs but were "subject to the postulate of logical
consistency and to the postulate of adequacy" - in the sense that
propositions were supposed to be logically coherent and amenable to
empirical testing and confirmation or falsification. Notions of this
kind would hardly be objectionable to logical empiricists. As Schutz
acknowledged, the scientist's constructs are "theoretical systems em-
bodying testable general hypotheses in the sense of Professor Hempel's
definition" and this applies to all empirical inquiries "whether they
deal with objects of nature or with human affairs." At another point,
he agreed "with Professor Nagel that all empirical knowledge involves
discovery through processes of controlled inference, and that it must be
statable in propositional form and capable of being verified by anyone
who is prepared to make the effort to do so through observation."
However, seen from the perspective of empirical science, the signifi-
cance of phenomenology - and especially of a phenomenology of the
"natural attitude" - becomes cryptic and elusive. As previously in-
dicated, within a logical-empiricist conception of science, the metho-
dological status of the life-world is bound to be marginal if not apoc-
ryphal. On the level of scientific constructs, the life-world furnishes at
best a set of data which enter into the process of testing and verifica-
tion - a process which, strictly speaking, confirms (or disconfirms) the
 LESSONS FROM MERLEA U-PONTY 9I
validity of propositions rather than the simple occurrence of phenom-
ena. On the other hand, the life-world can be viewed as a context of
discovery which is helpful in the formulation of hypotheses and in the
design of research projects. Construed in neither of these two senses
does the phenomenology of the natural attitude make an independent
contribution to the truth claims of scientific analysis? 12
If quandaries of this type beset the thinking of Alfred Schutz, one
should not be surprised to detect similar dilemmas echoed and perhaps
aggravated in the writings of his students and collaborators. For
present purposes, the arguments of Maurice Natanson may serve as an
illustration. Although sympathetic to a concern with the "natural
attitude," Natanson - especially in his early writings - sought to evade
its dilemmas through an emphasis on the constitutive function of
transcendental consciousness; but in doing so, he merely succeeded in
shifting the weight of phenomenology further in the direction of the
genesis of meaning (a genesis complicated by the paradoxes of trans-
cendental subjectivity) and away from the dimension of validation. In
his contributions to Philosophy of the Social Sciences - a reader which
he published over a decade ago - he divided social investigators into
two broad camps: the camp of "naturalism" or "objectivism" on the
one hand, and of "subjectivism," on the other. While naturalism,
exemplified by behaviorism and positivism, was said to be concerned
with "the location of 'hard' data," with "exact measurement of
social phenomena" and with' 'intersubjectively verifiable propositions,"
subjectivism attempted "to comprehend the way in which social life
is lived by the actors on the social scene." Differently phrased, the
struggle between objective and subjective perspectives revolved around
the respective significance or prominence of scientific explanation and
the constitutive role of consciousness. "A naturalistic conception of con-
sciousness," the "Introduction" observed, "places the individual within
a world that promises to explain him in the course of its general
business of explaining the natural order. A phenomenological view of
social reality considers the intersubjective world as constituted in the
activity of consciousness, with natural science being one aspect of the

12 For the above citations see Alfred Schutz, "Concept and Theory Formation in the
Social Sciences (1954)," in Natanson, ed., Philosophy ot the Social Sciences, pp. 231-249,
esp. pp. 232, 235-237, 239-240, 242-247. The same basic thrust and the same difficulties
emerge also in the essay "Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action"
(1953), ibid., pp. 302-346, where the differences between common-sense constructs and
scientific constructs and the distinctive features of social science propositions are delineated
in greater detail.
92 FRED R. DALLMA YR

productivity of consciousness." While scientific knowledge was gained

through the empirical verification of propositions, evidence from the
phenomenological perspective was lodged in immediate experience and
"immediate presentation." The choice between the two perspectives
involved ultimately an act of commitment predicated on a preference
for one or the other world view. 13
In a subsequent portion of the reader, Natanson strongly sided with
Schutz or at least with Schutz' specific argument that "social reality
is made up of the meanings which actors on the social scene give to
their actions and to their situations." Paraphrasing this argument, he
insisted that "the consciousness or subjectivity of the actor is the axis
of social action" and that "the cardinal problem of the philosophy of
the social sciences is the illumination and reconstruction of the essential
features of sUbjectivity as it founds and structures a social world."
The notion of the social life-world, he added, could be traced to the
term Lebenswelt which Husserl had introduced "to refer to the im-
mediately experienced world each of us lives in, unmediated by the
sophistication of science, and which each of us interprets for himself."
From the vantage point of social inquiry, the implications of the life-
world were basically twofold. At an initial level common-sense inter-
pretations and constructs could be captured by a descriptive phenom-
enology portraying how "the individual caught up in daily life utilizes
them naively with no realization that daily life itself presupposes such
philosophical problems as that of intersubjectivity and of there being
a social world." Relying on Husserl and deviating at least in part
from Schutz, Natanson stressed another more important phenomeno-
logical aspiration - the ambition to reveal the life-world as "a con-
stituted structure, that is, a vast network of meaningful relationships
which have a developmental history in the activity of consciousness as
much as they do in historical genesis." In relation to empirical science,
the cited passage placed the importance of the life-world not in "its
status as knowledge but its focus on the meaningful ground of human
action." Summarizing the controversy over empathetic understanding,
the section juxtaposed "Nagel's stress on the claim that 'the method of
Verstehen does not, by itself, supply any criteria for the validity of
conjectures and hypotheses concerning the springs of human action'
13 See "Foreword" and "Introduction," ibid., pp. VIII-IX, 15-16. In the end, it is true,
Natanson did not abandon the choice simply to an arbitrary or irrational act of commitment.
"Nihilism," he wrote "can be defined as the refusal of existential commitment, and the
consistent nihilist can offer neither explanations for his choices nor reasons for his decisions.
A rationale of nihilism at this fundamental level ... is a contradiction in terms" (pp. 22-23).
 LESSONS FROM MERLEA U-PONTY 93
and 'Schutz' insistence on treating Weber's postulate of sUbjective
interpretation as being primarily (though not exclusively) a structural
feature of common-sense life rather than of social scientific inquiry."
With these comments, Natanson in essence replicated the previously
sketched modus vivendi or division of labor between logical empiricism
and phenomenology, a bargain based on the distinction between dis-
covery and validation. Another essay in the same volume placed the
demarcation line between naturalism and phenomenology in the cir-
cumstance that the latter aimed at "metaphilosophical inquiry, that is,
a necessarily a priori, dialectical, categorical analysis," while the
former was restricted to a posteriori, empirical research. 14
Natanson's stress on the genetic role of phenomenology carries over
into and permeates his more recent writings - although he now seems
willing to acknowledge more readily the possibility of alternative
phenomenological perspectives. In his introduction to the two-volume
collection entitled Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, he emphasizes
at the outset that the term "phenomenology" as used in the collection
should be understood chiefly "as centered on the thought of Edmund
Husserl." Interpreted in this manner, the term is said to imply a focus
on "essential form" rather than contingent content, a form revealed to
immediate intuitive experience which is the evidential basis and source
of all knowledge. Viewed as a logic of inquiry, Natanson notes, pheno-
menology "treats the genesis and development of phenomena from
their most primordial roots in prereflective consciousness to their most
reflectively sophisticated exemplification in science." The different
facets and accents of Husserl's writings, in his view, are linked together
by the concern with the genealogy of knowledge and with the a priori
structures of experience in intentional consciousness. "If we ask what
phenomenology is in a searching, genuinely attentive manner," he
writes, "then we may begin to recognize that we can understand
essence only by comprehending the status of intentional objects, that
intentional objects are rendered available for inspection and analysis
by way of reduction, that so long as we restrict ourselves to the psy-
chological origin and actuality of thinking we can never attend to
structural features of phenomena, that opening up the phenomenologi-
cal field is, ultimately, to inquire into the conditions, a priori, for the
possibility of there being a field at all, that the mundane world of

14 See Natanson, "Introduction to Part III," ibid., pp. 186-188, and "A Study in Philos-
ophy and the Social Sciences" (1958), ibid., pp. 271-285, esp. pp. 275-280.
94 FRED R. DALLMA YR

our daily, taken-for-granted activities itself harbors the most complex

philosophical commitments, and that the naive life we live as common-
sense men possesses an infinitely rich logic upon which the whole of
reality is founded."
Turning to phenomenology's significance for social inquiry, N atanson
recognizes at first the legitimacy of a descriptive phenomenology of the
"natural attitude" or a phenomenological sociology portraying the
typical features of the social life-world. A social inquiry operating on
this level need not be entirely unreflective but it cannot move beyond
the limits of a more or less routinized activity and intentionality. There
are "at least two senses of being 'in' the natural attitude," Natanson
observes. On the one hand, man naively experiences everyday life
without any "self-conscious awareness that all of this is going on"; on
the other hand, an individual may have awareness of a "circum-
scribed activity" against the foil of a larger common-sense context.
Both levels, according to Natanson, "share the same essential identifi-
cation with the natural attitude." Phenomenological analysis properly
speaking, by contrast, explores the roots or underpinnings of the social
life-world and mundane reality; to accomplish this goal, "we need the
vocabulary of a radicalized imagination through which the world and
its parts are seen in their constitutive becoming, as features of what
is possible for consciousness reflectively concerned with its antecedent,
prepredicative condition." The "unity of phenomenology" is said to
reside in an investigative thrust of this kind, a thrust providing
it with "philosophical momentum" and preserving it from "doctrinal
fragmentation." Regarding the relationship between empirical science
and phenomenology, Natanson expressly endorses their mutual com-
plementarity, founded on their respective concerns with discovery and
validation. "Phenomenology," he affirms, "cannot present its method
or its results in empirically verifiable terms because it does not accept
empiricism as an adequate philosophy of the experiential world." In
contrast to empiricism, phenomenological analysis probes questions of
origin which are "either presupposed in empirical philosophy or un-
available to its procedures." As a result, the two perspectives pertain
to different domains - which rules out the possibility of conflict (and
even, it would seem, of serious contact). "Empiricism," we are told,
"begins where phenomenology leaves off - that is why it is pointless to
ask the phenomenologist for some sort of equivalent for empirical
verification." Since "Phenomenology and empirical science operate
 LESSONS FROM MERLEAU-PONTY 95
at qualitatively different levels," they "relate to but do not contradict
each other."15

III. RECIPROCAL ENVELOPMENT OF DISCOVERY

AND VALIDATION

Compartmentalization and reciprocal non-contamination cannot be the

final verdict in this matter. As it seems to me, such a verdict is de-
trimental both to the task of science and the aspirations of phenomen-
ological inquiry; a bargain neatly segregating discovery from validation
abandons science to an empirical research without legitimacy or re-
flective roots and phenomenology to the probing of constitutive evi-
dence without intersubjective truth (and ultimately without lan-
guage),16 Actually, if it has ever been observed, the sketched settle-

15 See Natanson, Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, vol. I, "Preface," p. XIV, and
"Phenomenology and the Social Sciences," pp. 4-5, 9, 12-13, 24-25, 32-34. Natanson realizes,
however, that a rigid segregation between constitution and validation would condemn
phenomenology to impotence or at least to the inability to say anything concretely about the
social world. Restricted to an apriori level, he writes, "all the intentionality in the phenom-
enologist's world will never touch, literally come into touch with, a single piece of the real,
joy-possible, and death-turned world within which each of us finds himself locked. The
logical conclusion of this line of argument is that no application of phenomenology to social
science is possible in principle because a discipline concerned with irreality cannot converge
with one which deals with fact." At this point he remembers (belatedly and somewhat
half-heartedly) the intimate nexus between intentionality and intended world: "There will
be a separation of intentionality from reality only if there is first an acceptance of a split
between consciousness and being. We are the inheritors of Descartes's metaphysical fission.
But the point of phenomenology is to show that the separation was a false one to begin with
and that philosophy can heal itself by reapproaching both consciousness and world in
integral fashion" (p. 36). The antinomy between apriori reflection and aposteriori sociological
research, between transcendental genesis and natural attitude recurs in Natanson's essay in
the present volume, "The Problem of Anonymity in the Thought of Alfred Schutz." Dis-
tinguishing between a "horizontal" and a "vertical" structure relating respectively to
"philosophical" and "sociological" analysis, he writes: "In sociological terms, the actually
realized and historically fulfilled world of human reality is first. From a philosophical,
phenomenological standpoint, the reconstruction of that world from an egological base comes
first, first in the sense that such analysis is demanded if we are to comprehend the social
world." Although insisting on the "essentially reciprocal" character of these perspectives,
the essay nowhere indicates how their postulated reciprocity and "unity" can be articulated.
As it seems to me, one of the merits of Merleau-Ponty is precisely that he implemented the
vague postulates of egological phenomenology. If this is so, however, he cannot fairly be
accused (as happened in the course of the symposium) of having abandoned transcendental
or eidetic concerns in favor of a vulgar and relativistic mundanity - options which simply
replicate the antinomy furnished by egology.
16 What is involved here is this: With the increasing sophistication of empirical social
science and the development of research techniques capturing the concrete intentions of
actors in everyday life, "genetic" or egological phenomenology is driven back further and
further into the apriori recesses of transcendental subjectivity. A subjectivity completely
divorced from the world, however, is also deprived of access to intersubjective language;
thus, the success of empirical science threatens egological reflection with aphasis (or rather
96 FRED R. DALLMA YR

ment or armistice has been breached for a long time on many fronts,
both by phenomenologists and by philosophers of science. In the
phenomenological camp, Heidegger's existential ontology implied a
radical departure from the focus on transcendental subjectivity. With-
out relinquishing reflection in favor of a descriptive account of the
"natural attitude," Being and Time and subsequent writings reoriented
phenomenological (or' hermeneutical) concerns in the direction of the
encounter between experience and being - an encounter not simply
derived from the constitutive functions of consciousness. At the same
time, some philosophers of science trained in the positivist camp have
come to challenge the exclusive restriction of scientific method to
questions of verification or falsification; rejecting the identification of
invention and private fancy, they have tended to stress the importance
of discovery not only for gaining heuristic insights but for the entire
process of inquiry and ultimately even for purposes of validation. 17 A

seals and ratifies a fate implicit from the beginning in methodological solipsism). The paradox,
or one of the paradoxes, of egology becomes apparent at this point: invoked for the purpose
of making sense of the world, transcendental sUbjectivity at every turn presupposes the
domain of intersubjective language which it is supposed to constitute. For a probing critique
of egological or "eidetic" phenomenology compare James L. Heap and Phillip A. Roth, "On
Phenomenological Sociology," American Sociological Review, vol. 38 (1973), pp. 354-367.
17 Compare, e.g., Norwood R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge: At the University
Press, 1958); Paul Diesing, Patterns of Discovery in the Social Sciences (New York: Aldine-
Atherton, 1971); John G. Gunnell, "Deduction, Explanation, and Social Scientific Inquiry,"
American Political Science Review, vol. 63 (1969), pp. 1233-1246; also Theodore Kisiel,
"Zu einer Hermeneutik naturwissenschaftlicher Entdeckung," Journal for General Ph.ilosoPhy
of Science, vol. 2 (1971), pp. 195-221. According to Hanson, discovery is embedded in a
context of everyday experience and ordinary language, a context which also provides a
basis for the community of scientists involved in the testing and validating of empirical
propositions. In the treatment of some "contextualists," it is true, the investigative frame-
work is portrayed as a given environment amenable to empirical analysis - a portrayal which
shortchanges its "genetic" capacity. Against the foil of contextualism, in any event, both
transcendental phenomenology and logical empiricism are marked by the neglect of inter-
subjectivity, although the neglect is prompted by different motives in the two cases. While
egology rests on the apodictic evidence of subjectivity, empiricism bases its truth claims on
logical consistency and on empirical "adequacy," that is, on the correspondence between the
observer's statements and the observed data. Relying on the notion of communicative
interaction as a matrix for purposes of both discovery and validation, Karl-Otto Apel
writes: " . " the famous distinction between the 'context of discovery' and the 'context of
justification' - stemming from Kant - cannot be used to show the methodological irrelevance
of 'understanding,' as many 'logicians of science' seem to suppose. For, as the analytical
philosophers could have learned from Wittgenstein's theory of language games, the way by
which knowledge has to be 'justified' is not independent of the kind of question to which it is
answering ... To neglect this internal connection between the context of discovery and the
context of justification amounts to an abstractive fallacy which leads to a totalization of the
leading interest of just one kind of knowledge and its corresponding kind of justification."
See "The Apriori of Communication and the Foundation of the Humanities," Man and World,
vol. 5 (1972), pp. 3-37, at p. 21. A "discursive" theory of truth, stressing communication as a
prerequisite in the search for valid knowledge, is delineated by Jiirgen Habermas in "Wahr-
hcitsthcoricn," in Wirktichkcit und Reflexion: Festschrift fur Walter Schulz (Stuttgart:
Neske Verlag, 1973), pp. 2II-26S.
 LESSONS FROM MERLEAU-PONTY 97
detailed review of these diverse intellectual trends would vastly over-
burden the format of my presentation. In the present context, I want
to concentrate attention on arguments advanced by Merleau-Ponty -
a philosopher whose thought, in my judgment, correlates and brings to
fruition some of the mentioned developments in a manner which is
instructive to phenomenologists and social scientists alike.
In Merleau-Ponty's conception, the relationship between science and
phenomenology could not simply be one of complementarity and
mutual non-intervention; his views on the topic were eloquently stated
and summarized in his essay "The Philosopher and Sociology." The
disciplines of philosophy and sociology, the opening sentence affirmed,
"have long lived under a segregated system which has succeeded in
concealing their rivalry only by refusing them any meetingground,
impeding their growth, making them incomprehensible to one another,
and thus placing culture in a situation of permanent crisis." The
system of mutual segregation had been fostered for a long time on both
sides, both by philosophers and social scientists. In the philosophical
arena, a myth about reflection has been instigated and promoted which
"presents it as an authoritarian affirmation of the mind's absolute auto-
nomy." So conceived, philosophy was "no longer an inquiry," but
rather "a certain body of doctrines, made to assure an absolutely
unfettered spirit full possession of itself and its ideas." On the other side,
a myth about scientific knowledge had been cultivated which" expects
to attain from the mere recording of facts not only the science of the
things of the world but also the science of that science - a sociology
of knowledge (conceived of itself in an empiricist fashion) which should
make the universe of facts self-contained by including even the ideas
we invent to interpret the facts, and thus rid us, so to speak, of our-
selves." As Merleau-Ponty added, "the two myths sustain one another
in their very antagonism. For even though the philosopher and the
sociologist are opposed to one another, they at least agree upon a
delimitation of boundaries which assures them of never meeting."
Countering professional mythologies on both sides, Merleau-Ponty
stressed the close interaction and interdependence of reflection and
empirical research. Segregation, in his view, was equally detrimental
to both enterprises. "The sociologist's equations," he wrote, "begin to
represent something social only at the moment when the correlations
they express are connected on one another and enveloped in a certain
unique view of the social and of nature which is characteristic of the
society under consideration and has come to be institutionalized in it
98 FRED R. DALLMAYR

as the hidden principle of all its overt functions." Therefore, if scientism

"were ever to succeed in depriving sociology of all recourse to significa-
tions, it would save it from 'philosophy' only by shutting it off from
knowledge of its object." Conversely, the philosopher cannot assume
an "air of absolute autonomy," for he always "thinks about something"
relating to his experience and the world: "Except by decree, how could
he be given the right to forget what science says about this same
experience and world?" According to Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology
was uniquely predestined to assist in the mutual rapprochement.
"Russerl's great merit," the essay stated, "is that from the time he
reached philosophical maturity, and increasingly so as he pursued his
efforts, he made use of his 'intuition of essences,' 'morphological
essences,' and 'phenomenological experience' to mark out a realm and
an attitude of inquiry where philosophy and effective knowledge could
meet." Although he "began by affirming, and continued to maintain, a
rigorous distinction between the two," Russerl's idea of a "psycho-
phenomenological parallelism" - in Merleau-Ponty's view - led him
"in truth to the idea of reciprocal envelopment." From the perspective
of this envelopment, empirical science could no longer pretend to be
self-contained and without roots in everyday experience; at the same
time, reflection signified no longer "the return to a pre-empirical
subject which holds the keys to the world." Once philosophy was seen as
consciousness "of the open and successive community of alter egos
living, speaking, and thinking in one another's presence and in relation
to nature," it could no longer be defined "by a peculiar domain of its
own." Actually, philosophy thus understood was not merely "compat-
ible with sociology," but rather "necessary to it as a constant reminder
of its tasks." Reflection could not be pitted against scientific knowledge
once it was "recognized that the 'interior' it brings us back to is not a
'private life' but an intersubjectivity that gradually connects us ever
closer to the whole of history. "18

18 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Philosopher and Sociology," in Signs, trans. Richard
C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 98-113. As Merleau-
Ponty concedes, Husserl was not always sympathetic to the notion of envelopment; his early
writings in fact asserted "philosophy's rights in terms which seem to abolish those of actual
knowledge." However, his growing concern with the phenomenology of ordinary language
and especially his later turn to the Lebenswelt tended to replace his "initial delimitations"
with a more complex relationship: "In spite of all his trenchant formulations constantly
reaffirming the radical distinction between the natural and the transcendental attitude,
Husserl is well aware from the start that they do in fact encroach upon one another, and that
every fact of consciousness bears the transcendental within it" (pp. !O2, 106). The topic of the
nexus of reflection and social inquiry is developed in greater detail in the essay "Phenom-
enology and the Sciences of Man," in Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other
 LESSONS FROM MERLEA U-PONTY 99
Merleau-Ponty's notion of envelopment was not simply the out-
growth of a predilection for "ambiguity" or "ambivalence" (labels
which are sometimes indiscriminately applied to his thought); nor
was it merely the result of a conciliatory temper (as Natanson suggests).
Far from being a marginal gloss, the nexus of reflection and science
related to the basic thrust of his philosophical endeavors, especially
to his effort to delineate a realm of pre-predicative experience under-
cutting and bridging the bifurcations between subject and object,
"transcendental" and "natural" attitude - and ultimately also the
gulf between discovery and validation. First exploratory steps in this
direction were undertaken in The Structure ot Behavior, a study dealing
in a critical manner with conceptions of experience and cognition
prevalent in modern psychology and post-Cartesian philosophy. The
central target of the study was (early) behaviorist psychology ac-
cording to which human behavior is the result of external stimuli just
as cognition is the product of external impressions on the sensory
apparatus and the mind. According to Merleau-Ponty, behaviorism
was drastically flawed by its inability to account for the emergence of
meaning patterns. Given their dispersal over time and place, no amount
of empirical stimuli could account for the emergence of a coherent
image or a coherent knowledge of an object. Likewise, no amount of
psychic circuits and conditioned reflexes could render intelligible the
transformation of external data into mental replicas. The relationship
between object and perception, he noted, was reducible neither to "the
relation of effect to cause" nor to "that of function to corresponding
variable. All the difficulties of realism arise precisely from having
tried to convert this original relation into a causal action and to inte-
grate perception into nature."
Considerations of this type lent at least initial credence to transcen-
dental reflection or a perspective stressing the constitutive role of
consciousness. Since the time of Descartes, modern philosophy, and
ultimately much of modern science, have relied on the distinction
between extended matter and thought, elevating mind to the status of
a transcendental observer able to analyze the world in accordance with
clear and distinct concepts or ideas. While improving on the causal
model, however, transcendental idealism was itself basically deficient:
Essays, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 43-95.
There Merleau-Ponty wrote: "Husserl began like all philosophers; that is, he tried to achieve
a radical reflection. He tried to reflect on this power of thought which he was, and this
radical reflection finally discovered, behind itself, the unreflected as the condition of its
dossibility, without which it would have no sense" (p. 92).
roo FRED R. DALLMA YR

preoccupied with absolute conceptual comprehension, it left no room for

concrete experience and the actual encounter of perception with reality,
reducing cognition to a series of predicative judgments. On the level of
concrete perception, an object always presents itself in a partial or
"perspectival" manner - an aspect which is due to temporal and
spatial constraints and to the insertion of the observer in his own
"lived body." Partiality of this kind, however, is not necessarily a
"subjective" distortion and does not reduce the object to a subjective
idea or intention - since every perception points beyond itself to a real
world not exhausted by subjective awareness. The focus on embodied
perception and "lived experience" (monde vecu) thus offered a new
avenue to cognition and a crucial means for overcoming the traditional
subject-object dichotomy: "The perceived is grasped in an indivisible
manner as 'in-itself' (en soi), that is, as gifted with an interior which I
will never have finished exploring and as 'for-me' (pour moi), that is, as
given 'in person' through its momentary aspects." Despite this stress
on the existential dimension of perception and the ontological roots
of cognition, the study did not completely dismiss or bypass the issue
of validation, but differentiated broadly between lived experience and
objective (or intersubjective) knowledge and truth. "The zone of
individual perspectives and that of intersubjective significations must
be distinguished in my knowledge," Merleau-Ponty affirmed. What
was involved, in his view, was not the antinomy between sensibility
and intelligence nor that between matter and form: "The distinction
which we are introducing is rather that of the lived and the known. The
problem of the relations of the soul and body is thus transformed in-
stead of disappearing: now it will be the problem of the relations of
consciousness as flux of individual events, of concrete and resistant
structures, and that of consciousness as tissue of ideal significations."19
While The Structure of Behavior was mainly a critical review of
traditional doctrines, Merleau-Ponty's second work delineated in great-
er detail his own approach and especially his notion of the "primacy"
of perception. Phenomenological inquiry, Merleau-Ponty noted in
paraphrasing the thrust of his study, "has finally revealed that the
perceived world is not asum of objects (in the sense in which the sciences
use this word), that our relation to the world is not that of a thinker to
an object of thought, and finally that the unity of the perceived thing,
as perceived by several consciousnesses, is not comparable to the unity of
19 Merieau·Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden P. Fisher (Boston: Beacon
Press, I963), pp. I86, I93, 2I4-2I5.
 LESSONS FROM MERLEA U-PONTY ror

a proposition." On the basis of phenomenological perception, cognition

of an object could never be derived from the mere amalgamation of
discontinuous external impressions; at the same time, the object was
not synonymous with a concept or an abstract definition: "We observe
at once that it is impossible, as has often been said, to decompose a
perception, to make it into a collection of sensations, because in it the
whole is prior to the parts - and this whole is not an ideal whole. The
meaning which I ultimately discover is not of a conceptual order."
Since, according to Merleau-Ponty, the perceived world was neither an
external object nor imprisoned in subjective awareness, perceptual
cognition involved a confluence of immanence and transcendence - a
confluence incompatible with either realist or idealist premises. Simil-
arly, since it signified the acquisition of knowledge, perception was
neither a private (or subjective) nor a purely objective (or inter-sub-
jective) endeavor. To permit genuine communication, intersubjectivity
had to operate not merely on the conceptual or cognitive level but on
that of experience: "The thing imposes itself not as true for every
intellect, but as real for every subject who is standing where I am."
As in his previous study, Merleau-Ponty acknowledged that perception
did not simply coincide with knowledge or objective truth: "We
willingly admit that we cannot rest satisfied with the description of the
perceived world as we have sketched it up to now and that it appears as
a psychological curiosity if we leave aside the idea of the true world, the
world as thought by the understanding." However, the emphasis now
was clearly on the internal linkage of the two spheres. If perception was
contradictory and paradoxical in many ways, this aspect was not
irrelevant to cognition once it was seen that "the acknowledged contra-
diction appears as the very condition of consciousness." Instead of
involving a mere psychological preamble or the dark fringes of reason,
perceptual experience pointed to the genealogy of knowledge itself,
to the emergence of valid reflection from its own pre-reflective and pre-
rational background. 20
The exploration of the genealogy of truth and of the relationship
between lived experience and knowledge became the consuming pre-
occupation in Merleau-Ponty's subsequent writings. The last decade
of his life found him preparing a complex study to which he gave such

20 Merleau-Ponty, "The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences," in

The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, pp. I2-27. The essay was an address given in
I946 shortly after publication of Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (New
York: Humanities Press, 1962).
102 FRED R. DALLMA YR

working titles as "Being and Meaning," "Genealogy of the True," or

"The Origin of Truth." A communication of 1952 - a prospectus of
past and future endeavors, written at the time of his candidacy for the
College de France - provides intriguing insights into his evolving
thought. "We never cease living in the world of perception," the com-
munication stated, "but we go beyond it in critical thought - almost
to the point of forgetting the contribution of perception to our idea of
truth." Despite its important role in the task of verification and in
"specifying criteria and demanding from our experience its credentials
of validity," critical thought was "unaware of our contact with the
perceived world which is simply there before us, beneath the level of
the verified true and the false. Nor does critical thought even define
the positive steps of thinking or its most valued accomplishments." In
view of these limitations of traditional conceptions of knowledge, the
prospectus delineated a new approach to the "relation between mind
and truth," predicated on the experience of perception. A comparison
between the perceived world and "the field of knowledge properly so
called" gave rise to such questions as: "Does not the realm of the
perceived world take on the form of a simple appearance? Is not pure
understanding a new source of knowledge, in comparison with which
our perceptual familiarity with the world is only a rough, unformed
sketch?" Questions of this kind required the development of a "theory
of truth" and a "theory of intersubjectivity" which differentiated
between experience and knowledge without rupturing their linkage.
"It seems to me," Merleau-Ponty noted, "that knowledge and the
communication with others which it presupposes not only are original
formations with respect to the perceptual life but also they preserve
and continue our perceptual life even while transforming it. Knowledge
and communication sublimate rather than suppress our incarnation,
and the characteristic operation of the mind is in the movement by
which we recapture our corporeal existence and use it to symbolize
instead of merely to coexist. "21
The project outlined in the prospectus was not completed; the
manuscript devoted to the topic remained a torso - which has recently
been published under the title The Visible and the Invisible. In its
published form, the manuscript offers both a critique of traditional
philosophies and tentative steps toward a reorientation. All thinking or
reflection, Merleau-Ponty observes at the outset, emanates from a
21 Merleau-Ponty, "An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of
His Work," in The Primacy 01 Perception and Other Essays, pp. 3-7.
 LESSONS FROM MERLEAU-PONTY r03

concrete encounter with the world, from the background of a "per-

ceptual faith" which itself is pre-reflective and at least initially obscure:
"We see the things themselves, the world is what we see: formulae of
this kind express a faith common to the natural man and philoso-
pher - the moment he opens his eyes"; but "what is strange about
this faith is that if we seek to articulate it into theses and statements,
if we ask ourselves what is this we, what seeing is, and what thing
or world is, we enter into a labyrinth of difficulties and contra-
dictions." In an effort to overcome obscurity, traditional philosophy
has tended to place experience in a procrustean scheme, by dividing it
into a subject and object pole and by either levelling the perceiver into
the world or the world into the perceiver's mind. The thrust of realist
approaches in the past has been to treat perception as an "exterior
relation between a world in itself and myself, conceived as a process of
the same type as those that unfold within the world - whether one
imagines an intrusion of the world in myself, or, on the contrary, some
excursion of my look among the things." The paradoxes encountered
by these approaches have prompted the formulation of alternative
vistas stressing the place of mind or consciousness in the acquisition of
knowledge. Important sections of The Visible and the Invisible are
devoted to a detailed discussion of several versions of mentalism - in-
cluding the legacy of critical reflection (deriving from Descartes and
Kant), Sartre's dialectics of radical freedom or negativity, and theories
of immediate intuition (espoused chiefly by Husserl and Bergson).
Although valuable for undermining the naturalist claim of a self-
contained universe, these perspectives in Merleau-Ponty's view are
ultimately misleading, by being insufficiently attentive to their own
premises and to the experience of perception which they seek to explain.
Pure reflection in particular is guilty of neglecting its own origins: "It
thinks it can comprehend our natal bond with the world only by
undoing it in order to remake it, only by constituting it, by fabricating
it. It thinks it finds clarity through analysis, that is, if not in the most
simple elements, at least in the most fundamental conditions implicated
in the brute product, in the premises from which it results as a conse-
quence, in a source ot meaning, from which it is derived." Proceeding in
this manner, transcendental thought "falls short of its task and of the
radicalism that is its law"; it "recuperates everything except itself
as an effort of recuperation, it clarifies everything except its role."
Given the predicaments of traditional philosophy, The Visible and
the Invisible proposes a radical type of inquiry which overcomes the
I04 FRED R. DALLMA YR

half-hearted character of radical doubt: "If it is true that as soon as

philosophy declares itself to be reflection or coincidence it prejudges
what it will find, then once again it must recommence everything,
reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves,
and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished,
in experiences that have not yet been 'worked over,' that offer us all
at once, pell-mell, both 'subject' and 'object,' both existence and
essence, and hence give philosophy resources to define them."
An inquiry of this kind requires a return to perceptual faith, that is,
a faith which "knows itself to be beyond proofs, not necessary, inter-
woven with incredulity, at each instant menaced by non-faith" and
which is the emblem of our original "openness upon being" or upon the
world. Once the "experience of brute being" is accepted as the "source
of meaning for us," the customary distinction between subject and
object emerges as dubious and in need of revision. In the encounter of
perception, Merleau-Ponty writes, the perceived or visible world
"seems to rest in itself"; yet, "it is not possible that we blend into it,
nor that it passes into us, for then the vision would vanish at the
moment of formation, by disappearance of the seer or of the visible.
What there is then are not things first identical with themselves,
which would then offer themselves to the seer, nor is there a seer
who is first empty and who, afterward, would open himself to them."
As will be noted, the relation between observer and object, between
the seer and the visible, is not one of a simple identity but rather
involves a complex interaction and mutual interrogation - what
Merleau-Ponty sometimes calls an "intertwining" or a "reversal." In
perception, he observes, "he who sees cannot possess the visible unless
he is possessed by it, unless he is at it, by principle, according to what is
required by the articulation of the look with the things, he is one of the
visibles, capable by a singular reversal of seeing them - he is one of
them." The connecting linkage as well as the distance between observer
and object is provided by embodiment, by man's insertion or participa-
tion in the "flesh" of the universe. If the human body is able to see and
to touch visible things, "this is only because, being of their family,
itself visible and tangible, it uses its own being as a means to participate
in theirs, because each of the two beings is an archetype for the other, be-
cause the body belongs to the order of the things as the world is
universal flesh." Reducible neither to matter nor to mind, embodiment
in Merleau-Ponty's view constitutes the cornerstone of a pre-reflective
(and thus pre-subjective and pre-objectivist) ontology.
 LESSONS FROM MERLEAU-PONTY 105

The relationship between cognition and experience, against this

background, is no longer that between a transcendental spectator and
contingent reality. Once perception serves as "the umbilical cord of our
knowledge," cognition has to be more attentive to, and more intimately
connected with, the lessons of pre-reflective encounters. "The words
most charged with philosophy," the manuscript states, "are not ne-
cessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most
energetically open upon Being, because they more closely convey the
life of the whole and make our habitual evidences vibrate until they
disjoin." Thought or mind, from this perspective, appears not as the
antipode of a world of objects, but rather as "a sublimation of the
flesh," just as the "idea" is "a second or figurative meaning of vision."
Knowledge, Merleau-Ponty comments, is "a relationship with oneself
and with the world as well as a relationship with the other"; hence,
"it is established in the three dimensions at the same time" and must be
"brought to appear directly in the infrastructure of vision." Once,
instead of being "the contrary of the sensible," thought is seen as "its
lining and its depth," the bond between the "flesh and idea" is
equivalent to the nexus between "the visible and the interior armature
which it manifests and which it conceals." Regarding the notion of a
"pure" idea or objective knowledge surpassing the "ideality of the
horizon" or the ideality implicit in the flesh, the study does not reject
its possibility but stresses its roots in indirect vision and articulation:
"Let us only say that the pure ideality is itself not without flesh nor
freed from horizon structures: it lives of them, though they be another
flesh and other horizons. It is as though the visibility that animates the
sensible world were to emigrate, not outside of every body, but into
another less heavy, more transparent body, as though it were to change
flesh, abandoning the flesh of the body for that of language, and
thereby would be emancipated but not freed from every condition."
The genealogy of knowledge thus emerges as a complex (partially
circular) learning process. Genesis and validation of cognition are not
simply synonymous; nor is knowledge a detached, intelligible sphere
hovering above experience. In Merleau-Ponty's words: "The meaning
is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer
of "psychic reality" spread over the sound: it is the totality of
what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain."
In a sense, he adds, "the whole of philosophy, as Husserl says, consists
in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning,
an expression of experience by experience, which in particular clarifies
106 FRED R. DALLMA YR

the special domain of language. And in a sense, as Valery said, lan-

guage is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very
voice of the things, the waves, and the forests. And what we have to
understand is that there is no dialectical reversal from one of these
views to the other; we do not have to reassemble them into a synthesis:
they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth."22

22 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. by Claude Lefort, trans. by Alphonso
Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 3,28,32-33,88, !O2, 130-131,
134-135, 137, 145, 149, 152-153, 155, 157. The linkage between perceptual experience and
cognition, as delineated by Merleau-Ponty, bears a resemblance to some of the discussion
points put forth in Paul Ricoeur's paper in this volume ("Can There Be a Scientific Concept of
Ideology?"), especially to the theses that the search for knowledge is ontologically conditioned
by pre-understanding or a "belonging-to" premise, and that valid knowledge can neverthe-
less be approximated through elucidation and distantiation. Seen in conjunction with the
task of clarification, the "belonging-to" premise emerges as a multidimensional notion. While
initially lodged in an accidental or contingent speech or language context, the search for
knowledge necessarily belongs to a community of truth or true speech, and ultimately to the
solicitation of Being.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

JOSEPH BIEN (born 1936) received his doctorate from the University of Paris,
has taught at the Ecole Centrale de Paris and the University of Texas at Austin,
and is presently chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of
Missouri-Columbia. He is the translator of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adventures
of the Dialectic and co-editor of Political and Social Essays by Paul Ricoeur.

FRED R. DALLMAYR (born 1928) is chairman of the Department of Political

Science at Purdue University. He has taught at the University of Georgia and
has been visiting professor at the University of Hamburg. A native of Germany,
he received his Doctor of Law degree from the University of Munich and his
Ph.D. from Duke University. He is the co-author of Freedom and Emergency
Powers and the editor of M aterialienband zu H abermas' Erkenntnis U nd Interesse.

MAURICE NATANsoN (born 1924) has edited a number of volumes dealing with
phenomenology and the social sciences and is the author of A Critique of J ean-
Paul Sartre's Ontology, The Social Dynamics of George H. Mead and The Jour-
neying Self: A Study in Philosophy and Social Role. His book Edmund Husserl:
Philosopher of Infinite Tasks received the 1973 National Book Award for philos-
ophy and religion. He received his doctoral degrees from the New School for
Social Research and the University of Nebraska. He is professor of philosophy at
Yale University, has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the
University of North Carolina, and has been visiting professor at the New School
for Social Research, the Pennsylvania State University and the University of
California, Berkeley.

PAUL RICOEUR (born 1913) is professor of philosophy at the Universities of

Chicago and Paris. He has lectured widely in Europe and has been visiting
professor at Yale University and the Universities of Montreal and Toronto as
well as giving the Terry Lectures at Yale University and Brick Lectures at the
University of Missouri. His works have been translated into many languages.
Among those translated into English are History and Truth, Freedom and Nature:
The Voluntary and the Involuntary, The Symbolism of Evil, Fallible Man and
Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation.

EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN (born 1929) is professor of Sociology at Duke University.

He received his Ph.D. from Harvard and later taught there as well as at Princeton
University. He has been visiting professor at Bryn Mawr College and the
University of the Philippines, and directeur associe (6e section) of the Ecole
Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He is editor of such volumes as Sociologism
and Existentialism, The Phenomenon of Sociology and On the Margin of the Vi-
sible: Sociology, the Esoteric, and the Occult.
Io8 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

RICHARD ZANER (born 1933) is the author of The Problem of Embodiment: Some
Contributions to a Phenomenology of the Body and The Way of Phenomenology.
He has co-translated Alfred Schutz's Structures of the Life World, is the editor of
Alfred Schutz: Reflections of the Problem of Relevance and co-editor of Phenom-
enology and Existentialism and several volumes of Selected Studies in Phenom-
enology and Existentialism. He is a graduate of the New School for Social
Research, has taught at the University of Texas at Austin and SUNY at Stony
Brook, and has been visiting professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
He is Easterwood Professor and chairman of the Department of Philosophy at
Southern Methodist University.