social phenomenology

Self and World

Self and World (a phenomenological excursus)

When I regain the day, upon awakening, the mode of reality into which I am extended shifts. I had been asleep, traveling within the world of dreams, for the most part autonomic in orientation; the involuntary communication of states of bodily function. We do not know precisely the ratio amongst dreams of anxiety, of neurosis, and those simple ‘public service’ announcements that prevent me from minor midnight mishap, but what is clear is that in each genre of dream, hyperbole, metaphor, and desire are employed to get the message across. The ‘reality’ of dreams is not entirely unreal, since it borrows heavily from my waking experiences with real others alive to our shared world, but due to their unshared and unshareable character, dreams lack the sociality of the social which our daily interactions with those same others possess. Though I may sometimes discover a limited volition within the dream-sequence, I am never ‘in control’ of the space of action itself. In this, dreams also mimic the wide-awake reality; the world at large is as well mostly beyond my individual control. Yet neither are dreams irreal, the mode of reality befitting the vision. Instead, it is their surreality that, upon awakening, either shocks or amuses us. The most important factor for any model of reality is that the distinctions between its modes must be quite significant. For realities, by their nature and definition, cannot share their selfsame presence.

In experiencing a vision, for instance, I depart from the mutually shared social reality of my contemporaries. This irreality is sudden, prompting Kierkegaard to note that it is often received by us as a form of evil. Yet the unplanned and unexpected irruption of the Nothing or perhaps only the non-rational is, as a phenomenological event, no different in its structure than that of the phantasm, wherein we consciously plan for ‘projects of action’. My responses to it are inverted, as I can only react consciously to the irreal, rather than plan for it and thus expect it, but the elements of the ‘interaction’ do not differ from any other self-world experience that may come my way. In waking, social reality too I find that I am oft only reacting to others’ actions rather than initiating my own before being overtaken by events local or general. The chief difference demarcating the irreal from the real is that the former attempts a waking dream. The vision is the middle ground between dreaming and waking, between fantasy and reality. As Rod Serling might have it, ‘it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge’. This is perhaps too strong a characterization of the vision proper, but apt enough for a theatrical version thereof. Yet within this eloquent line does lie the sense that radically other forms of knowing present to us a challenging choice: do we take them into ourselves and thus become somewhat different than our human fellows, or do we leap into their fire and thus potentially lose our humanity entire?

If an excursus into the ‘twilight zone’ of irreality is not always to our advantage, we do maintain an anchor out to the windward cast of the realismus, where, appropriately, the sensus communis of normative social life rules the day. We have no such access when dreaming, and must first awaken to once again partake in the world as we know it to have been, and as we assume it shall continue to be. The world as a worlding being provides this safer succor to our mortal self. It does not need us, and thus is able to nurture our finite beings with the goal understood to be itself a confrontation with both tradition, on the one hand, and finitudinal futurity, on the other. Neither dreams nor visions have either of these goals, nor are such recognizable when we are ourselves within their odd, even oddball, embrace. The waking dream of the vision might appear to be shared and thence shareable, but in fact the visionary finds that he must retreat from the irreal source of wisdom in order to share it with others. This is why the descent from the mountaintop is a near universal feature of the cosmogony of morality, for instance. From Moses to Zarathustra, the visionary, as a vehicle for the new sociality and as a midwife for the world to come, cannot remain in the space of the vision itself. Dreams, by contrast, present no radically liminal landscape, for each night everyone enters into her own version thereof, and upon awakening, returns to the collective consciousness of both symbolic forms and behavioral norms.

This is the ‘lifeworld’ of Schutz. It implies, without specific judgment, that neither do visions nor dreams possess that which animates conscious being; life itself. As Lennon sang, ‘it is not living’, referring to dreams in what was arguably the most important song of the 1960s, simply taken as creating a break from the going-rate. Given that ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (1966) was used as the sonic backdrop to a crucial moment in the series Madmen, marking the advent of the new social reality of the then youthful baby-boom, we are thrown into both a cultural maelstrom as well as a pop-culture event. Born in that same year, I had no conscious experience thereof, even though I was alive therein. And this distinction too is of import, because lived experience must first be in possession of a modicum of rational consciousness, the very thing generally absent in both dreams and visions. The lifeworld enumerates the structures of shared consciousness, including the conscience, self-consciousness, and self-understanding. The lifeworld thus has its ‘personal’ side, if you will, wherein I, as a reflective agent in the world, come face to face with my ownmost being as a social character. The Husserlian might protest that the lifeworld is a model only for the phenomenological psychology of hyletic reality alone, but though this is a reasonable criticism which brings our attention toward not abusing the language of phenomenology, it is not as germane when we as well become aware that eidetic structures must, if they are to themselves animate the ‘collective consciousness’ without recourse to mythos, remain as part of the scientifically irreal. In ‘On Multiple Realities’ (1953), Schutz implies that scientific reality is in fact the practical means by which cross-cultural communication can occur in reality at all. Phenomenology, when examining the structures of consciousness rather than those of the lifeworld, is the irreal version of science.

Within the lifeworld, I am presented with two agentive options: the social reality of my peers and contemporaries, and the social world of humanity as a whole. I take the former as a given, and also take that others will do the same, on our mutual behalf. I do not question the ‘whys’ of the day-to-day, but rather duly perform them, without much conscious effort, and the affront I take when others do not live up to the standards of the day reminds me that this form of agency, acting in the social reality, is both a performance and does require some effort after all. Most of the tension in today’s political life emanates from the emerging sense that a growing number of these others are unwilling or unable to ‘do their part’ in upholding the performance-based version of the social world. If they refuse to do so, or recuse themselves from this shared effort in some other manner, they move from simply being an ‘other-like-myself’ to a more authentic otherness, and thus may constitute a threat to the reality of the lifeworld itself. Through this possibility, I discover that in fact social reality is not a given, since it requires daily upkeep. Part of that work is expressed in me being able to take this reality as a given, which mirrors the selfhood about which I too am required to make certain assumptions. None of this, however, touches the question of ‘existence’, which is contiguous with other kinds of ‘why’ questions that the normative person leaves for the philosopher. Within the phenomenology that seeks to understand the structures of consciousness itself, a kind of ‘Kantian’ sensibility is present. But in social reality, we are not Kantians but rather Jamesians; wholly pragmatic in outlook and aware of the general rubric that only the outcome matters.

It is not quite the same stance that I bring to the social world, which, in contrast with social reality, includes the past, as well as something of the sense of a general future, within its phenomenological ambit. History is our chief source of what has been in relation to the career of our species. Archaeology and paleoanthropology extend the technical and temporal reach of history, but they neither alter its mandate nor its scope. Here, instead of simply living out the day in a calculated indifference to its ‘how’ – why these norms instead of others, for instance – I can delve into their history, their own careers, and the politics presented in other times and places that eventually combined to bring us to where we are right now. The social world does not attempt to examine itself as an ontological form, but it also does not simply shrug off any epistemic analysis. The discourses of the sciences too are available in the social world, whereas once again in social reality they are sloughed off as areas for the specialist alone. It is clear, then, that on any given day, I can cross from social reality into the social world more widely, precisely in order to explain, at least to myself, why and how the former functions the way it does. Indeed, if I am a cultural newcomer, I must make this crossing not only on a daily basis, but many times per day. Schutz’s ‘The Stranger’, (1944), remains the most exacting, and even poignant, account of this challenging dynamic. Here, I am presented with the ultimate problem of distinguishing what constitutes social reality for my new hosts, and am flummoxed by the realization that social ‘reality’ is itself plural in nature via human culture itself. This is why it is scientific reality which is the only generalizable form. Dreams, phantasms, visions, and most vexingly, even wide-awake social reality are not portable in any ultimate sense. All the more so the altered realities of the addict or the mentally ill cannot provide the species with any kind of useable works in view of the future. For it is specifically Dasein’s future-orientedness that both allows me to shore up the waking reality with which I am most familiar, as well as take occasional forays into the more aware and reflective space of the social world.

But in order to do so, I must myself maintain the rational consciousness which not only befits social reality but as well reproduces it. This dynamic, between reproduction and reflection, between action and contemplation, and between the historical act and the aesthetic work, compels me to attend to its inherent tension: without respect of its origins, social reality’s primary goal is to simply get through each day, just as my own goal is the same. This goal can conflict with any sense that I should more deeply understand why I have this goal in the first place. To what end, I might ask, is the effort expended in and for mundane life? What is the ‘me’ that is offered such solace in the routine, the otiose, and the repetitive? And why do I often prefer this version of myself over against the human being possessed of, and indeed, created by, the confluence of reason and imagination and given an existential hold upon temporality through both memory and anticipation? At first, this appears a pressing issue: social reality neither requires nor encourages reflective or critical thought. The social world contains the discourses of both, but it is still up to me to both access them and thence put them to living use. If I take a second glance at my predicament, I realize that it is not quite as tense and dire as it seems. In fact, even in daily life, there are times when I have to reflect upon my actions. Very often it is through the presence of others which cautions me to take a step away from action, and thereby enter into a more contemplative stance. When this does occur, I find myself able to question more generally the reality of my hearth. I need not become a philosopher to do the work necessary to engender self-examination with a view to attaining a mature self-understanding. I need not even alter social reality to engage in this species-essence project. I only need to alter my own sensibility which I usually bring to it.

And this is precisely where the perspective of all the generally available realities come into play. I may be inspired by a vision, enlightened by a dream, shuttered by a passing addiction, relieved of a mental illness, become learned and rational through the sciences, or take on the guise of the future within the phantasm. Social reality does itself engage, willingly or no, with these other six forms, all of which may be found within the combination of the social world and that which abruptly breaks in upon it, emanating from some lesser known function of consciousness itself. When I do gain the perspective of multiple realities, I find that both my self and my being within the world’s worlding of itself become more adeptly apt and more deeply alive. For the selfhood of the world rests in its ability to go its own way, apart from my intents or desires. Just so, any authentic worldliness that I accrue to myself, living within the landscape of both a shared and waking social reverie, must do the same.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Understanding and Comprehension

Verstehen und VerstÄndnis (Understanding and Comprehension)

In my life I am confronted with both history and world. Neither of my own making, nevertheless they dominate my existence, and could be said to both originate and predestine it. History includes the tradition, all that which is customary in the sense of Hexis, which I must learn in order to function as a viable being in the social world-as-it-is. But history also includes all that has come to be known as ‘cultural capital’; the very ‘stuff’ of the human career, from ancient archaeology through to contemporary popular culture. It is an open question how much of this capital must be possessed in order to maintain social viability. To each is granted his specialties, perhaps, and in a complex organic social organization wherein each of us plays multiple social roles and thus wears many hats, the daily discourse of informal interaction is muted to the point where Verstehen, or ‘interpretive understanding’ is rarely called upon. This bracketing of interpretation is significant due not only to it being so by design, but also, and as a result of this, that each of us is left to assume that the other knows what she is about, as well as knowing what we ourselves meant by this or that interaction. In a word, we favor Deutung over Verstehen in everyday life.

Since our very sanity is at stake, both in terms of our self-perception and that of the others, Deutung, or ‘interpreted meaning’ must indeed carry the day to day upon its presumptive shoulders. Most of us presume one another to already and always understand what is called for, and thus what is also called forth, in a great variety of social contexts. But since all of these are learned, and mostly in our childhood and youth, we cannot be certain that either we ourselves or any other person has fully comprehended every possible social context and thus knows how to act to a tee in each. The ‘social’ person used to be casually equated with the most ‘sociable’ person. The very conception of what can constitute a ‘social’ gathering might be interpreted by class and status, ethnicity or language, work relationship or family pedigree. Though all are social in the anthropological sense, the vast majority of us are not students of society in any formal way. It is perhaps ironic that though we do learn to tread on much or even most of the stages upon which civil behavior is to be enacted, very few of us choose to dive more deeply into just how all of this ‘sociality’ actually works.

And there is, on the face of it, no good reason to do so. If all of us know the score in terms of how to act, what to say, and of course, the opposite as well – the shalt not is duly implied by the shalt – then what would be the point of expending the effort in order to take everything apart just to see how it functioned? Would there not be a risk, in reassembly, that I would then get it wrong? Taking society apart to examine its mechanics and its organics both would seem a risky, even radical act. And since there is no clear consensus on society itself being ‘broken’ – though many claim to know just where and how this or that part of it is broken and should be replaced by some other part, equally proclaimed as being ‘obvious’ – the idea of taking it all down and reconstructing from point zero seems to have little merit. Even the most astute and vigorous social scientist does not attempt such a cosmogonical feat, contenting herself with an examination only, noting the parts and how they interact, just as the ethnographer of modern culture might stalk the streets and observe actual human interactions. An examination of society generates the means by which Deutung can be performed. It does not require any consistent interpretation but rather looks more like a connect-the-dots diagram. The pieces lack order until the connections are made, surely, but just as certainly, all the pieces are present and can be ordered. And it is the resulting order that generates both customary performance but also much of the history of the world itself.

Between Max Weber and Georg Simmel, ‘Verstehen-Sociology’ gained much traction in the first third of the twentieth century, making a deep impression upon other seminal sociological thinkers such as Alfred Schutz and Robert Merton. It faded post-war given the ascendence of functionalism, which is instructive for our topic as interpretation was just that tool of questioning that mere examination need not access. Taking it all apart and rebuilding it required interpretation, poring over it and noting its connections, as functionalism mostly did, required only already interpreted meaning. Not that this is an either/or situation. Indeed, one might argue that one would have to come to an understanding of the parts themselves before generating an overall comprehension of the whole. While interpretational understanding could do the first, it seemed only functionalism could do the second. Even so, in between these two stood social phenomenology. This third stance suggested that it was the very interactions of living persons that constructed and reconstructed the cultural parts of the social whole in an ongoing and even daily basis. In short, society itself was a performance, or better, a performative understanding of itself.

The roots of this more active interpretation are diverse. Durkheim’s famous epigrammatic definition of organized religious belief is a case in point: ‘Religion is society worshipping itself’. No more concise editorial can be imagined. But within this pithy fruit is the very essence of performative social action. Borrowing from the older idea that in order for a deity to exist at all it must be actively worshipped, the very structure of society itself has to be borne up by our participation in its manifestations. I am a social actor, yes, but I am also a social founder through my action in the world. Similarly, and perhaps just as profoundly, history too is enacted insofar as we are historical beings. This is not to say that what is known as ‘the past’ must be reenacted – though Mesoamerican cultures have this as a benchmark understanding of human history; the most famous of these consistent performances is the re-enactment of the Columbian Conquest – but at the very least, history ‘continues’ only due to our actions in the present and our resolute being oriented towards the future.

What is interesting for both the student and the social actor is the fact that performance requires interpretation. The customary scripts may be given and learned by rote, but there is always slippage between an ideal and a reality. The spectrum of improvisation is vast, ranging from stifling a belch during a dinner conversation to reworking a political speech given the pace of world events. Society in its mode of being-social is very serious theater indeed, and part of the fulfilling quality of actual theatrical performance, stagecraft and script, paid actors and paying audience, is that all involved recognize themselves outside of the drama and cast upon the wider social stage. We are, in our own way, not so different from the conquered cultures of Central America, though our settings are perhaps more abstract and work not so directly with historical narratives but rather with an indirect allegory. This too is by design; like the examination of the mechanisms of society without taking the whole thing apart, allegory allows each of us to take the broader view without fully imbricating, and perhaps thus also immolating, ourselves within or upon society’s reason-of-being. For if it is only the ‘moron’ who resists social custom and flouts both mores and moralities alike, most of us would rather preserve our semblance of sanity as part of our own social performance, so that we never risk the ire of others who can justifiably say to us, ‘Well, I’m doing my part to keep all this nonsense together, why aren’t you?’.

Hence the suspicion and even aspersion cast up against all those who question things ‘too much’. The professional philosopher, who is only doing his job, is perhaps the only socially sanctioned role wherein the practitioner can legitimately say as part of his vocation that nothing is sacred. Outside of this, we are all expected to give at least nominal service to specific renditions of what the majority feels society to be, and to be about. The ‘what’ of society is the first, the ‘why’ the second. Even the thinker, in order to be judged as human at all, must bracket her radical investigations, insights, and indictments some of the time. Society is at once a performance and a comprehension. In true Durkheimian fashion, it performs itself in order to comprehend itself. But because such real drama requires ongoing improvisation and interpretation, society is also made up not so much of cut and dried mechanisms as quick-witted examinations and re-enactments. Society gives the appearance of a machine only insofar as we social actors have honed our individual and thence collective skills upon its various stages. A well-polished theatrical performance never leaves the fiction of its allegory, but a well-staged social performance upshifts itself into a stable social reality.

The question for each of us then is, do I continue to improve my acting skills within the historical context of the culture into which I was born, in order to preserve the manner in which that culture enacts itself in the wider world, or do I pretend only and ever to be an understudy, letting others do the work which is in fact the duty of all? Or, do I walk off the stage entirely, into a hitherto obscured human drama called ‘conscience’ by the world and ‘the future’ by history? In fact, it is our shared birthright, as both gift and task, to accomplish both of these essential acts. For society as mechanism is only the resulting case, and society as performance the manner in which the present presents its case. In order for any modern culture to reproduce itself, it must eschew pure reproduction in favor of a self-understanding, a Selbstverstandnis or holistic comprehension-of-itself that is developed in history but seeks the future of and in all things. Interpretive understanding is both a tool and yet a way of life for human beings. But comprehension is the mode of being of the social whole, which means no one person can provide it, even for himself. That we are social beings tells upon us in two elemental ways: we are called to conscience by the ongoingness of the world, and we are called toward the future by the ongoing presence of history, which distinguishes the social world from the world at large. That I am myself never socially larger than that historical life is for me the Kerygma of existence.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.