Phenomenology and Intersubjectivity: Contemporary Interpretations of the Interpersonal Situation

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Social reality depends for its existence on what people think about each other and their environments; how they intend, believe, desire, and accept social life to be organized Gilbert ; List and Pettit The organization that prevails is the organization declared or collectively willed into existence. This dependency on collectivity secures a place for social reality as epistemically objective most people recognize it but ontologically subjective without people it would not exist Searle Pornography presents this arrangement as ontological, both in terms of conveying the idea that there are two kinds of human nature, one male and the other female, and that relations between them are necessarily arrayed according to some version of this script.

Through modern technology, especially in the age of the Internet, this way of framing human nature and sociality has succeeded in attaining a ubiquity as well as a reach into our most intimate daily lives that is historically unprecedented. Moreover, pornography has seeped into the popular culture and has shifted the norms of acceptable sexual objectification and violence towards women and girls.

Rather, it is believed to reflect natural, healthy, explicit sexuality, indeed sexual liberation. And contact with such phenomena is precisely that which may dislocate us from inauthentic Mitsein to a questioning of it, which is assume our freedom to choose our existence or to confront the question of Being and thus shift our Mitsein to modalities that are more authentic, which includes collective and political action.

In the phenomenological tradition the issue of intersubjectivity becomes an issue when one starts from the position and priority of the subject, from which our basic sociality is constituted through analogical presentation. While the experience of the thou does not escape a form of analogical presentation, it does raise the further issue of the of the precise character of the sharing constituting our basic sociality, as we see principally in the work of Gadamer.

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This paper explores accordingly the notion of shared life under both historical and thematic considerations. Within phenomenology, the idea of an intrinsically social form of intentionality has to be traced back to Adolf Reinach and to his seminal work on the Apriori Foundations of Civil Law These ideas were further developed by Dietrich von Hildebrand. According to Hildebrand, there are forms of love, hate, esteem, blame, admiration etc. Indeed, Hildebrand claims that such stances generate social relations and that these relations are communities of a given kind, namely, I-Thou communities.

Fellow feelings allow us to sense how things are like for others. Characteristically, empathy, the paradigm of fellow feelings, is not a specific feeling or state or experience that I undergo, but a feeling with respect to feelings or states or experiences I do not undergo.

In Memoriam: Thomas J. Owens

Shame, by contrast, is often described as a feeling of nakedness in the presence of others. On this psychological or anthropological description, shame is not a fellow feeling. Although others are involved, there is no questi on of feeling anything of others or as of others. A different picture emerges if shame and empathy are interpreted as intentional experiences. The central claim of my contribution is that, on a phenomenological interpretation, shame and empathy are rather closely related.

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Essential to the success of my claim is a suitable reconstruction of shame. I suggest reconstructing it as a peculiar intentional structure, namely as an intentional experience of experiences which are present but not undergone. A second issue is the evidence shame and empathy provide for experiences present but not undergone. A third issue is the role of embodiment for the presentification of experiences as other — whereas Stein and Husserl think of the living body as indispensable for empathy, Sartre associates the presence of the other with a bodily materiality that is problematic.

Finally, I want to bring to bear my reconstruction of shame and empathy on the question of which phenomenological account of interpersonal relations is preferable. I argue against this customary view that the latter accounts are in conflict with a version of the conceptual problem of other minds. According to this sceptical problem, we lack the very idea of others because we cannot conceive of others unlike ourselves — a disturbing possibility given our intuitions that, ultimately, you do not think my thoughts and she does not feel your feelings.

Exploring the different ways of making sense together does not lead us to one stable and monolithic essence of sociality. Viewed phenomenologically, this approach rather unveils critical, indeed potentially abysmal, figurations of our social being.

Negativity does not merely amount to a contingent deficiency of justice, trust, responsibility, solidarity, communication, etc. This is impossible since it is extraordinary in respect to this order. To conceive of negativity in its extraordinariness hence entails a reflection on its order-constitutive function. For orders re generate through exclusion and selection—through the production of an extra-ordinary that they reproduce, i.

Thus, within order inheres a constitutive moment of negativity. Therefore, it is imperative torecognize that in its indissoluble extraordinariness , negativity plays a constitutive role for the accomplishment of social order—and thus for socialization. Religion, indeed, is beleaguered by a fundamental ambivalence: On one hand, it re presents itself as an inherently social or socializing practice, on the other hand it remains haunted by a variety of violent practices that pervade its specific traditions.

More precisely, I focus on religion in terms of a socializing symbolic practice that entails negative, i. This paper shall evaluate these hitherto rather neglected phenomenological accounts of group personhood and reassess their contributions against the background of contemporary social ontology. The argument of the paper has three strands: According to the collectivist accounts, group persons are not only analogous to individual persons, but literally individuals in their own right, comprising in some mereological sense or another individuals within themselves and exhibiting all significant properties of personhood autonomy, agency, moral accountability, etc.

Thus, group persons, though they bear intentional, volitional and rational centres or points of views of their own cf. The aim of this essay is to discern the eidetic structure of social institutions. To do so, I draw upon the resources and insights of both the realistic and constitutive tendencies within the phenomenological tradition, but, rather than engaging historical issues, the essay seeks to make a fresh attempt to work out the nature of institutions. I treat social institutions as one of the principal objects comprising the material ontology of social order and I employ eidetic methodology to ascertain their fundamental features as a distinctive type of object within this domain.

It is clear that various kinds of institutions stand at the very center of our lives forming the social space within which we engage in our most basic activities and marking out the resilient contours of our most developed forms of shared existence. Theoretical reflection on this fact—whether in the phenomenological tradition Edith Stein, Adolf Reinach, Aron Gurwitsch, and Alfred Schutz or in the analytic tradition Margaret Gilbert, John Searle, and Raimo Tuomela —has principally revolved around two basic theses: I contend that this model is rooted in a profound misdescription of the matter at hand.

Specifically, the model allows institutions to be conflated with phenomena to which they are related, but from which they, nonetheless, stand distinct. States, schools, families, markets, and museums are not the same kind of objects as handshakes and traffic laws. Institutions are neither customs nor conventions. But this does little more than raise the fundamental question: I propose a phenomenological account of institutions as temporal and spatial sites.

It is, of course, trivially true that all institutions exist for some specific period of duration and at some definite location. But these features are wholly formal. The temporal and spatial dimensions of institutions that shall be our concern here are the determinate temporal order fostered by procedural requirement and the concrete spatiality established by a built environment, what I shall call the institutional technologies of ceremony and construction.

Social institutions, on this view, are defined not by the uniformity of the practices that they instill, nor by the normativity of the constraints that they put in place, but by their ritual ordering of time and their architectural allocation of space. As sites, institutions serve two basic functions: My contention is that they do this precisely in and through the techniques of ceremony and construction that define their fundamental structure.

Shyness has remained an underexposed affect within the philosophical realm, contrary to shame. My thesis is that shyness can be explained as both an anticipation of shame and as a fear of self-knowledge. This occurs when the body is treated as an object among other objects.

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The body is no longer purely mine, but the Other has taken ownership of it in a quasi-violent act of objectification. I believe that this notion of shyness is adequate, but does not go far enough. I would like to present a view on shyness that goes further than the alienation and objectification of the body. As Sartre understands shame, it is a revelation that makes the subject realise what he in fact is in a certain situation. In the famous example of the voyeur, he feels ashamed because through the look of the Other it is revealed to him that he is in a compromising situation.

Discovering the “We”: The Phenomenology of Sociality

In my view, shyness is an anticipation of this realisation. The shy person knows that the look of the Other is capable of revealing to him what he is. It is precisely this revelation that he fears. The person is afraid of what he really is, and he knows that the Other is capable of exposing this essence. He was tremendously valuable.

In particular, he was very successful in teaching introductory and core courses," said Cobb-Stevens. Cobb-Stevens visited with Dr. Owens last year when he was recuperating in a nursing home. He was a man of great faith and I think that gave him consolation.

Owens was born in Saugus and grew up in Lynn. Further information on the Library's opening hours is available at: Phenomenology and intersubjectivity; contemporary interpretations of the interpersonal situation. Request this item to view in the Library's reading rooms using your library card. To learn more about how to request items watch this short online video. You can view this on the NLA website.

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