PHENOMENOLOGY

Phenomenology is a philosophical theory developed by the German Philosopher, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and his ‘discipline’ Alfred Schutz (1889-1959), an Austro-American businessman and social philosopher who, in combining Husserl’s ideas with those of G.H. Mead, developed phenomenology as a leading school of ‘interpretative’ sociology in the late 1960s and 1970s. During this period, phenomenology became the major challenge to positivism and the idea of sociology as a science.

The word ‘phenomenon’ has two meanings. It is an object of perception, something we see, feel or perceive through our senses. Secondly, however, a phenomenon is something ‘extra’-ordinary, something out of the normal which we cannot yet explain or understand – a spiritual force, an ESP (extra sensory perception), a UFO.

The first definition is the scientific everyday one based on the assumption that the world around us actually exists and has a reality of its own that we perceive objectively, through our senses. The second definition is the ‘interpretative’ view; that far from the physical world having a reality of its own, we, through our senses, make sense of it and so in a sense recreate it according to our own interpretation. There is, for example, according to phenomenology, no such thing as a chair or a table, or even a mountain or a tree. They are all names or labels we have given to man-made or nature-made objects to make sense of them. Phenomenology therefore takes the philosophical view that the physical world is not a ‘real’ world that never changes and is the same to all people. Rather it is ‘relative’ world dependent for its existence on human interpretation and the meaning we give to it.

Phenomenologists see the ‘social’ world in even more relative terms than the physical world. While objects in the physical world do physically exist, ‘objects’ in the social world do not. Concepts like crime, love and family are entirely human creations, entirely dependent on human perception, interpretation and meaning for their existence. There is, for example, no such thing as a crime; it all depends on human interpretation of a particular act in a particular situation (e.g. killing someone may be self-defence, an accident or heroism as well as murder). All human knowledge is, therefore, relative. Equally, society is not a thing out there with an existence of its own as portrayed in positivist analyses but is something we create and recreate in our everyday lives through our routines, interaction and the common assumptions we share with others. The key to such interpretation and communication is language and we learn our particular societies’ common assumptions about life through socialization. The social world is a world known in common with others through lived experience.

Phenomenology, therefore, is the study of human consciousness and the way people make sense of the world around them. Edmund Husserl’s was to go ‘back to basics’ and to discover the very essence of man’s ‘Life world’. Alfred Schutz sought to apply such ideas to the study of society and in particular to analyze how, if our social world is so relative, so fluid, it all holds tighter on a daily basis. He identified three key elements in everyday social order:

a. Common sense – a common stock of knowledge about how to interpret and act in our own particular society or social group.

b. Typifications – common ways of classification objects (house, man) and experiences (hate, nightmare) which build up into ‘stocks of knowledge’;

c. Reciprocity – common assumptions that others see the world in the same way that we do.

Schutz sought to uncover and to understand the underlying assumptions that underpin everyday life, the ‘typifications’ by which people organize their lifestyles, routines and construct common-sense knowledge as the basis of communication with and living with others. People operate in and make sense of the world about them on the basis of a general presumption of a common world. They assume that others see and interpret the everyday world in the same way as they do and so there is a ‘reciprocity of perspective’, a ‘natural attitude’ that underpins and holds together social order and intersubjectivity.

As Alfred Schutz points out there are different forms of rationality in the lifeworld; the most basic is its commonality, the common commitment to society and to a social life without which we would all live like hermits and there would be no society. Thus our everyday knowledge is therefore never fixed, it is constantly in flux, requiring re-interpretation and recreation and repair as we actively and consciously live life to the full. Life has to be worked at; it never stands still. Relationships are fragile and every changing; they need constant nurturing and repair.