Intersubjectivity

The Fabric of Social Becoming

Nick Crossley

• Verlag: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Jahr: 1996
• ISBN:
  9781446230299
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophy
• Thema: Philosophy History & Theory

This clearly written and broad-ranging text introduces and explains the notion of intersubjectivity as a central concern of philosophy, sociology, psychology and politics. The main purpose of the book is to provide a coherent framework for this important concept against which the various and contrasting debates can be more clearly understood. Beyond this, Nick Crossley provides a critical discussion of intersubjectivity as an interdisciplinary concept to shed light on our understanding of selfhood, communication, citizenship, power and community.

The author traces the contributions of many key thinkers engaged within the intersubjectivist tradition, including Husserl, Buber, Koj[gr]eve, Merleau-Ponty, Mead, Wittgenstein, Schutz and Habermas. Intersubjectivity is an important and accessible volume which promotes cooperation between various disciplines addressing shared concerns.

1

Dimensions of Intersubjectivity

The concept of intersubjectivity is multilayered. In this chapter I unpack some of these layers through a discussion of three important philosophical analyses of intersubjectivity: Husserl’s (1991) Cartesian Meditations, Buber’s (1958) I and Thou and the analysis of the ‘struggle for recognition’ in Kojève’s (1969) Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. None of these analyses provide an adequate account of intersubjectivity and their respective limitations are not overcome by a synthesis of the three. It is important to discuss them as a preliminary step in our investigation for three reasons, however. Firstly, they each argue persuasively for the importance of the concept of intersubjectivity. Secondly, they each provide a (different) map of the conceptual terrain of intersubjectivity, which together provide us with a comprehensive account of both the issues which we must address in our study and the relationships between them. Thirdly, each has been of considerable significance in the recent history of academic debate on ‘intersubjectivity’. They have raised the questions and posed the problems which have provided the point of departure for later writers in the intersubjectivist tradition, including many of those discussed in subsequent chapters of this book.

Through the course of the chapter I will be identifying issues which are taken up and discussed at later points in the book. In addition, I use the chapter to outline a conceptual distinction (between radical and egological modes of intersubjectivity) which I take to be central and which I use to structure the earlier part of the book. The general structure of the book is outlined in the concluding section of the chapter.

Husserl’s Other: Against Transcendental Solipsism

Husserl (1859–1938) begins Cartesian Meditations (1991) by retracing the Meditations of the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes (1969). Like Descartes, he elects to doubt, for methodological purposes, everything of which he cannot be absolutely certain. And as with Descartes, he is thereby led to doubt the existence of a ‘real’ world beyond and external to his thoughts and perceptions. He even doubts all empirical facts about himself, such as the existence of his own body and the contents of his memories and biography. Such phenomena could, he argues, be hallucinations or dreams. How would he know the difference? All that he can be certain of is that he thinks and that he must therefore exist qua thinking being. This truth is still affirmed if everything that he believes and thinks is incorrect because incorrect thoughts are no less thoughts than correct thoughts and as thoughts they presuppose the existence of a thinker.

Descartes’s strategy from this position was to prove the existence of God, to reason that God is good and that a good God would not completely deceive him, at least with respect to his fundamental ways of thinking, and thus to gradually reinstate the beliefs that he had previously doubted. He thus advocates a realist epistemology. Husserl takes a different path. He does not reason his way back to ‘the real world’. What we learn from Descartes’s method of doubt, he argues, is that nothing is changed in the world of our conscious experience by suspending the belief that this world of experience refers to a world external to it. We still continue to experience a meaningful world of objects, even if their claim to external reality is suspended. This fact has two implications for Husserl. Firstly, it suggests that, for us, the world can never be anything other than the world of our conscious experience. We can never know if there is a world beyond our conscious experience. And if there is, we can never know what it is like. Secondly, it suggests that consciousness is necessarily ‘intentional’; that is, it is the very nature of consciousness to be consciousness of something or other. One cannot be conscious without being conscious of something.

From this position, Husserl outlines a philosophical project, phenomenology, which is concerned to investigate the various ways in which different objects are ‘intended’ in consciousness; that is, the ways in which different objects are presented to consciousness. In order that this project be carried out rigorously, moreover, he advocates that phenomenologists swap the Cartesian method of doubt for a process of ‘phenomenological reduction’. This entails a similar bracketing out of the external world to that achieved by Cartesian doubt, but rather than doubting the existence of the world beyond their experience, which would always involve the possibility of reaffirming the existence of that world, as Descartes did, phenomenologists merely suspend their belief in it, so that they can examine how it or parts of it are intended in consciousness. The existence of the world is neither doubted, rejected nor affirmed in this process of reduction. All such possibilities are bracketed out of consideration so that its manner of being-for-consciousness can be examined.

This position involves a direct criticism of Descartes. His attempt to affirm the existence of a world beyond consciousness is taken to be an impossible project because it entails that we must know that which is, by definition, beyond our knowledge and experience. This is rejoined by a further criticism regarding his failure to examine the ‘transcendental ego’ that was left over after he had doubted all empirical facts about himself; that is, the disembodied thinker that knows that it exists because it thinks. In Husserl’s view, the existence and character of such an ego was the key discovery of Descartes’s Meditations, but it was a discovery which Descartes himself remained largely ignorant of.

Following this criticism, Husserl advocates a thesis of ‘transcendental idealism’; that is, he argues that the contents of consciousness are necessarily meaningful to it and that these meanings are dependent upon its own constitutive actions qua transcendental ego. The transcendental ego is said to bestow meaning upon the objects intended in consciousness. Furthermore, he argues that the phenomenological analysis of modes of intentionality should therefore necessarily entail an analysis of modes of constitution. Phenomenology thus becomes an analysis of the active constitution of the objects of experience. This thesis begs an important question for Husserl, however, which he spends a large part of Cartesian Meditations attempting to answer; namely, the question of the existence of other consciousnesses and his relationship to them. This is the Husserlian version of the question of intersubjectivity.

The question is posed in relation to the problem of solipsism or, more particularly, in relation to Husserl’s anticipation of the objection that his thesis leads to and is inevitably solipsistic. Critics, he speculates, might object that transcendental idealism necessarily reduces the other (i.e. other conscious subjects) to the consciousness that one has of them:

But what about other egos, who surely are not intending and intended in me, merely synthetic unities of possible verification in me, but, according to their own sense, precisely others? (Husserl 1991:89, original emphasis)

The importance of this question and of avoiding solipsism is argued for, by Husserl, on ethical, epistemological and, later in Cartesian Meditations, social-ontological grounds.

At the ethical level, the problem of solipsism and the corresponding necessity for an intersubjectivist position is quite clear. Recognition of other (autonomous) subjectivities or consciousnesses is fundamental to any ethical relationship. We enter into ethical relations with others precisely to the extent that we recognise that they exist in their own right and have projects of their own, that they are not reducible to our thought about them but are precisely ‘other’. If the other is nothing more than the idea which I have of them, as the solipsist claims, then I can have no obligation towards them because there is nobody, in a strict sense, to be obliged to.

At the epistemological level, Husserl expresses concern regarding solipsism because, he claims, other perspectives on the world than my own are necessary if the objectivity of the world is to be established. Objectivity, in this sense, is intersubjective. It is a view of the world arrived at through mutual confirmation and negotiation between different and independent perspectives. Rationality is also at stake here. Rationality, for Husserl and other phenomenologists, is not an individual but an intersubjective attribute. It manifests in a form of interpersonal persuasion and decision-making which relies neither upon force nor upon deception but upon an appeal to common evidence and argument, and thus to a reciprocity of individual perspectives and an interchangeability of individual standpoints. Such interchangeability is, of course, impossible in the solitary world of the solipsist because there are no others with whom one’s perspective can reciprocate or interchange.

Finally, Husserl is concerned about the problem of solipsism and intersubjectivity because he aims to provide a philosophical elaboration of collective human phenomena, such as culture and community, and such phenomena are strictly inaccessible to the solipsist. They rely upon the possibility of a human ‘interworld’, a world of shared meaning which transcends individual consciousness. This is antithetic to the solitariness of solipsism.

Having established the importance of intersubjectivity, Husserl states that his method of establishing it philosophically will be phenomenological. Given the importance of transcending solipsism, he notes, the temptation is to opt for a Cartesian realism which rushes to establish the concrete existence of the other. But this road is not open to us because we cannot transcend the world of our own consciousness. And it is not necessary, in any case, because (in phenomenology) we do not doubt that existence. We have only suspended our belief in the independent existence of the other, and we have done so only to know better how they are intended and constituted in our consciousness of them.

The first stage of Husserl’s analysis of this mode of intentionality addresses the manner in which other consciousnesses are routinely present to our consicousness in mundane situations. He suggests three ways. Firstly, others are presented to us as wordly, psycho-physical objects which are governed psychologically by motives, reasons, cognitions, etc. We experience them as intelligent but nevertheless as objects. Secondly, we experience others as subjects who experience and know the world and who experience and know us as a part of that world. In this way we can experience ourselves as experienced by the other (e.g. when we feel that we are being watched). Finally, Husserl maintains that we experience the world as an intersubjective world; that is, as a world experienced by others. This is exemplified when we point things out to others, or when we argue with them about things. Such argument presupposes that they can see the world as we do. Together, Husserl notes, these three elements comprise an ‘empathic intentionality’.

What particularly impresses Husserl in this analysis is the genuine sense of otherness that is embodied in our perceptions and experiences. We seem able to transcend the particularity of our own perspective and to actually experience the experience of others. Or again, to experience our world as experienced by others. This observation raises the next and most important question for Husserl: how is this possible? How can one, as a particular consciousness, experience the consciousness of another? The question is perplexing because the consciousnesses of others are not tangible and visible percepts, as are our usual objects of experience. They are not objects and do not assume the form of objects. They are intentional experiences in their own right and seem only to be accessible, therefore, from within.

As a first step to solving this problem, Husserl performs a further methodological reduction. Having bracketed out of consideration the question of the external reality of that which he consciously perceives, he now reduces this phenomenological level to his ‘sphere of ownness’. This involves a (methodological) bracketing of all traces of otherness which were revealed in his brief description of mundane consciousness. Others are no longer perceived as subjects. They are perceived as objects of his perception. And his experience of the world is deprived of its objective feel. It is reduced to his singular sense perception of it. This considerably affects his experience of his world, he claims, but it does not affect his sense of his psyche.

There are two purposes behind this second reduction. Firstly, given that his experience of his psyche remains intact at this level, it reveals a level of experience more primordial than that in which otherness is experienced and it thus reveals that the psyche is monadic at its most fundamental level. Secondly, it reveals the nature and forms of his psyche to him. He is able to identify himself both as a transcendental ego and as an empirical, psycho-physical ego which is composed of perceptions, memories, imaginings and is irreducibly embodied. This self-knowledge and the fact that it is still available in the reduced sphere of ownness is important to Husserl’s case because it indicates a knowledge base (of consciousness and subjectivity) from which knowledge and experience of others might be constructed.

Having explicated his sphere of ownness, Husserl is finally ready to explain the empathic intentionality that constitutes otherness within consciousness. This explanation involves the interrelated processes of ‘analogical apperception’ and ‘pairing’.

‘Apperception’, in this context, is a process which phenomenologists commonly identify in relation to perception. It refers to the manner in which our perceptions are informed by prior expectations and understanding, such that we perceive more than we actually see. A common example of this involves the perception of a house. When we look at a house we inevitably see it from a particular perspective and, as such, we do not see a whole house. We see a house front or a house back etc. We do not say that we see a house front, however, and neither do we experience our perception in this way. At our most pedantic we experience and say that we experience a house from the front, which entails that the whole house is there but that we are seeing it from an angle. The significance of the difference between perceiving a house front and perceiving a house from the front is revealed in the shock that we experience when the expectations that inform our apperception are revealed to be incorrect; when, for example, we discover that we are on a film set and that the houses don’t actually have backs and sides. This shock reveals that there was an assumption, embodied in our perception, that we were seeing a house from the front and not merely a house front. It indicates that we perceived more than we actually saw. A similar process to this happens between the senses. Visual materials, for example, provide us with an expectation about and a sense of taste, smell or weight, as is revealed when that expectation is found to be incorrect; for example, when something which we perceived to be heavy is found to be quite light and we tumble backwards as a consequence of the excess of force that we applied to lifting it.

This process of apperception is relevant to the question of our perception and experience of others because it addresses the manner in which our perceptions go beyond what we see, to incorporate invisible dimensions. Just as we apperceive the back of a house when we see it from the front, so too we can apperceive consciousness in the movement of a body or face. There is a problem here, however, concerning the source of our apperceptions. I apperceive the back of a house from the front view, and I am able to do so because I have seen numerous house backs which are connected to fronts and sides. I have a wealth of direct experiences of houses to draw from in my apperception. But this is not true of others, because I have never seen another consciousness directly. If I had, then ‘intersubjectivity’ would not be a philosophical problem, or at least it would not be the problem that Husserl takes it to be. Thus, in itself, ‘apperception’ is not a solution to the problem of intersubjectivity. This is where the ‘analogical’ aspect of ‘analogical apperception’ comes in.

We do not have direct experience of other consciousnesses, Husserl notes, but the earlier stages of his meditations have already shown that we do have direct experience of our own conscious, subjective life. Thus our experience and perception of others qua conscious subjects, which is an undeniable aspect of our conscious life, must be based upon an imaginative analogical transfer of our own experiences onto others. Empathy is an imaginative process, or at least a conjunction of perception and imagination (Ricoeur 1967a). This analogical transfer is not a process of conscious reasoning, according to Husserl, but it is nevertheless a reasonable process which might be reconstructed (consciously) as follows: the other has a body which is identical to mine and they move as I do, my body and movements embody conscious life and experience, therefore the other’s probably does too. Furthermore, there is always room for verification or refutation of this imaginative hypothesis. One will continue to believe that the other is a conscious subject and to imaginatively transfer experiences onto them for as long as they continue to behave in a way which is understandable from the point of view of a conscious subject. Hammond et al. (1991:217) liken this situation to a sci-fi thriller scenario, where an android replica is distinguished from the red-blooded conscious hero on the basis of its lack of all-too-human traits; for example, it doesn’t appear anxious when it should from a human point of view.

Integral to this process is what Husserl refers to as pairing. Whenever we perceive things (any things) that are alike we transfer attributions and treat them alike, he argues. We treat them as a pair. There is nothing peculiar about the perception of the other in this respect, except that it is ourself qua embodied ego which we pair with the object of our perception.

From this point in the argument, Husserl moves on to consider how the different position of our body, relative to the other, further facilitates a sense of otherness. We perceive the other as ‘there’ in relation to our ‘here’, he observes, and thus we recognise both that they have a distinct point of view on the world and that the world can be seen from different points of view and under different perspectives. This (again tacit rather than reflective) imaginative process is the origin of objectivity, rationality and community in the senses already discussed for Husserl and he spends the final pages of Cartesian Meditations adding the finishing touches to his discussion of them. The main work is already achieved, however, in the form of ‘analogical apperception’ and ‘pairing’.

Husserl Assessed

Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity is of considerable value. His concern with the problem of solipsism emphasises the importance of establishing ‘intersubjectivity’ as a grounding concept and thus of intersubjectivism more generally. Moreover, his account of the manner in which otherness is given to us in ordinary experience provides a useful account of the types of phenomena which must be considered in our discussion of intersubjectivity. He is at least correct in this respect, or partly so. There are major problems with the Husserlian account of intersubjectivity, however. These problems, which I outline below, do not completely undermine it. There is a place for the Husserlian version of intersubjectivity, as I show in Chapter 3. Nevertheless it cannot serve the fundamental role which Husserl would seem to believe that it can.

The first and most general objection which one can make to Husserl is that his methodological position of phenomenology, particularly in its transcendental and idealist form, seems condemned to a form of solipsism. Transcendental phenomenology will always have a solipsistic element because it begins and ends with an analysis of the constitutive operations of a solitar...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: A Book About Intersubjectivity
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Dimensions of Intersubjectivity
• 2 Subjectivity, Alterity and Between: On Radical Intersubjectivity
• 3 Imagination, Self and Other: On Egological Intersubjectivity
• 4 Concrete Intersubjectivity and the Lifeworld: On Alfred Schutz
• 5 System, Lifeworld and Communicative Action
• 6 Intersubjectivity and Power
• 7 Citizens of the Lifeworld
• Conclusion: The Fabric of Social Becoming
• Bibliography
• Index