{"id":1160,"date":"2013-03-27T16:49:54","date_gmt":"2013-03-27T23:49:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phenomenologyblog.com\/?p=1160"},"modified":"2013-06-24T16:12:41","modified_gmt":"2013-06-24T23:12:41","slug":"fads-phenomenology-and-cultural-psychology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phenomenologyblog.com\/?p=1160","title":{"rendered":"Fads, Phenomenology, and Cultural Psychology"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/fb:like><\/span>

\"Marc<\/a>I love Teo and Febbraro\u2019s (2002) observation that \u201cPsychology\u2019s history can be studied as a history of fads\u201d (p. 458). Teo (1996) has written that psychologists \u201chave tended to value meta-theoretical constructions from outside their discipline more than those from inside their disciplines,\u201d with the popularity of these constructions shifting as one or another current in philosophy achieves popularity!<\/p>\n

As a psychologist who reads philosophy I sometimes feel I’m living through an interminable, shared philosophical hangover in my teaching life\u2014as if I’m groggily stumbling through popularized, overly simplified versions of philosophical ideas that are presented as somehow new within psychology, though they were penetratingly critiqued by philosophers decades ago! Of course philosophy is prey to \u00a0faddism as well\u2026in a laconic footnote to his book Italian Marxism <\/i>(1983), <\/i>Piccone remarks that \u201cearlier in the century, discredited philosophical fads used to leave the continent for the greener pastures of the United States, where they would survive for another couple of decades\u201d (p. 119).<\/p>\n

This strange zombie afterlife of philosophical fads is close to what I mean by a hangover. My first experience of it was during the popularization of Postmodernism that was rampant on American college campuses in the 1980\u2019s. At that time peers of mine with their dog-eared copy of Madness and Civilization <\/i>or Writing and Difference <\/i>breezily claimed to \u201cdeconstruct\u201d any argument one attempted to make in something resembling a linear manner. At least, that\u2019s how I remember those days.<\/p>\n

To be clear, my point isn\u2019t that the philosophers known as \u201cpostmodern\u201d weren\u2019t and aren\u2019t important. For example, I think Foucault\u2019s brilliant work is critical for anyone concerned with grasping the social power of psychiatric diagnosis. It\u2019s not philosophical ideas that are the problem. On the contrary: the problem as I see it is the superficialization of philosophical ideas and their too-casual importation into psychology. This is especially true for those of us who are qualitative researchers, because we already bear the stigma of our marginalization as non-measurers and hence (for the mainstream) non-scientists.<\/p>\n

\"coke<\/a>But the corollary to the problem of faddism in philosophy or psychology is our capacity to seek to prematurely transcend our elders\u2019 ideas in order to assert ourselves. OK, this is a psychological interpretation! But I wonder whether the generations that followed Husserl sought to overturn his authority a bit too quickly, and without adequately understanding him?<\/p>\n

Regardless, it is undeniable that so much of Husserl\u2019s work remained unpublished (in any language) at the time of his death, that the full picture of the work of the \u201clate Husserl\u201d is still emerging today. So the adequacy of readings of Husserl by distinguished philosophers such as Levinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, and Gadamer is open to debate. And for example, the \u201creceived view\u201d\u2014as Sebastian Luft (2011) describes it\u2014of the value of Husserl\u2019s work in relation to Heidegger\u2019s must be challenged. In this \u201creceived view\u201d nicely summarized by Luft, all that was of value in Husserl\u2019s work was incorporated by and transcended by Heidegger–a highly questionable claim.<\/p>\n

So the received view that Husserl was eclipsed long ago deserves to be challenged; I find there’s much in Husserl that can be tremendously valuable for psychology. In particular in this post I want to emphasize the value of Husserl\u2019s work for cultural psychology.\u00a0 Highlighting this for psychologists is important because the intrinsically intercultural dimensions of Husserl\u2019s work, while emphasized by philosophers like J. N. Mohanty, has to my knowledge been largely neglected by psychologists. So what follows is an unsystematic introduction to some aspects of Husserl\u2019s writings that bear directly on cultural psychology\u2014to give a taste of what\u2019s available, not a full exposition.<\/p>\n

The life-world<\/strong><\/p>\n

Husserl referred to \u201cthe encompassing world of our immediate experience\u201d as the \u201clife-world\u201d (Spiegelberg, 1965, p. 720). For Husserl, the life-world always implies intersubjectivity because it is intersubjectively constituted (Gurwitsch, 1966). Indeed, it can be said that this intersubjectivity is <\/i>the ego\u2019s opening to world as such (Khosrokhavar, 2001).<\/p>\n

For this reason, Husserl (1982) consistently used expressions such as \u201cour\u201d and \u201cfor us\u201d when discussing perceptions or knowledge. Intersubjectivity is in its largest sense \u201cthe human race in its totality; in the narrower sense, a more or less confined socio-historical group\u201d (Gurwitsch, 1966, p. 433). As Landgrebe (1981) commented, \u201cThe life-world is not only a world for me, the single individual; it is a common world, a world for a particular human community\u201d (p. 132). Hence, life-worlds are intentional and shaped by the local \u201ccustoms and habits of particular communities\u201d (Landgrebe, 1981, p. 133). Furthermore, the life-world is \u201csomething that continuously grows and develops . . . something that carries the impress of the communal history\u201d (Kockelmans, 1967\/1978, p. 279).<\/p>\n

We begin to see the outlines of a phenomenological way into the study of shared cultural life.<\/p>\n

Turning explicitly to culture, Husserl (1973) wrote that in daily life, varied communities constitute \u201cdifferent surrounding worlds of culture\u201d (p. 133). One\u2019s \u201ccultural world\u201d is founded upon the life-world but \u201cby no means reducible to it\u201d (Carr, 1974, p. 195).<\/p>\n

And of course, in everyday life the cultural world is lived within what Husserl calls a natural attitude<\/em>: Husserl observed that in the normal state of affairs one tends to regard the objects of everyday experience in communal life such as physical objects, other people, and even implicitly theoretical conceptions as simply real and straightforwardly existent.<\/i> Husserl (1982) termed this unreflective attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as <\/i>a perspective, the \u201cnatural attitude\u201d (p. 5).<\/p>\n

Exploring the cultural world<\/strong><\/p>\n

A community\u2019s shared cultural world reflects a type of natural attitude replete with unexamined values and narratives most often regarded as self-evidently real. Husserl\u2019s late work was keenly concerned with the constitution of the intersubjective, cultural realm and the way in which individual egos are shaped by and discover freedom within community. So for example Donohoe (2004) argued that Husserl\u2019s later, genetic phenomenology offers \u201ca method endowed with the flexibility to understand the cultural and historical fluctuations of meaning and the ever-changing relationship between the individual and its surrounding world\u201d (p. 180).<\/p>\n

\"Stone<\/a>Turning specifically to the religious dimension of communal life, Hart (1994) observed that in his correspondence with Dilthey, Husserl asserted that the phenomenology of religion is \u201can empathic study of the inner life of religious persons and communities in terms of the various motivations and life-forms\u201d in the attempt to explicate the \u201cessential-ideal[s]\u201d intended in a religious tradition (p. 267).<\/p>\n

The demanding, descriptive quality of phenomenology, its self-reflectiveness as an approach, keen interest in the other\u2019s life-world, and the stance of ontological neutrality vis-\u00e0-vis the other\u2019s experience make Husserlian phenomenology particularly well suited for use in cultural psychological studies. Mohanty (1992) wrote that Husserl\u2019s phenomenology is distinguished by an \u201copenness to phenomena, to the given qua <\/i>given, to the intended meanings precisely as they are intended\u201d (p. 8). This feature, Mohanty wrote, \u201cChallenges you to face up to the task of understanding the other, the other culture…the other person\u201d (p. 8).<\/p>\n

Following Husserl, key figures in the phenomenological movement have been keenly focused on explicating the structure of alterity (Theunissen, 1977\/1984). Consequently, phenomenology is particularly well suited to the study of \u201cother cultural worlds\u201d (Mohanty, 1992, p. 9). Moreover, Mohanty (1994) argued, for Husserl knowing another culture \u201cis not simply one-sidedly knowing the other, but \u2018mutual\u2019 communication which removes \u2018strangeness.\u2019<\/p>\n

Mohanty (1994) indicated that Husserl\u2019s discussion of culture undermines the notion of strict cultural otherness, writing that for Husserl \u201cwhen this one-way track of \u2018making sense\u2019 of the native is overcome by the \u2018mutuality\u2019 of \u2018making sense\u2019 of each other, the foreignness is overcome. A common world, mutually shared, thereby begins to constitute itself\u201d (p. 142).<\/p>\n

\"J.<\/a>

J. N. Mohanty<\/p><\/div>\n

Importantly, Mohanty wrote, \u201cThe idea of one world for all is constituted through such communication, and may serve as a norm <\/i>for critiquing one\u2019s home-world\u201d (p. 144). So here we see phenomenology not only as a means of accessing the other\u2019s world, but also of critiquing one\u2019s own society\u2014a project carried forward by Merleau-Ponty (see Coole’s Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Mohanty (1992) acutely pointes out that phenomenological research cannot properly be framed as \u201ccomparative\u201d analysis; rather, it is intended as a tool \u201cfor understanding the other\u2019s point of view as a noematic structure\u201d meant \u201cto go behind it in order to lay bare the experiential phenomenon that is embodied in this structure\u201d (p. 8). Turning to psychology, then, a phenomenological approach seeks to render the other\u2019s account more fully intelligible <\/i>as a possible experience by unearthing its implicit structure, while simultaneously bracketing ontological claims concerning that experience. As a result, Giorgi\u2019s (1970) psychological adaptation of Husserl\u2019s work is neither constrained to adopt the Platonizing universalism critiqued by the cultural psychologists nor the methodological relativism they sometimes advocate in its stead (Shweder & Bourne, 1991).<\/p>\n

One might even argue that phenomenologists, to the extent they are personally engaged by the problems of globalization,\u00a0 are intrinsically inter-cultural in their outlook.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

Carr, D. (1974). Phenomenology and the problem of history: A study of Husserl’s transcendental philosophy<\/i>. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.<\/i><\/p>\n

Coole, D. (2007).\u00a0Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism. <\/em>Lanham:\u00a0Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.<\/p>\n

Donohoe, J. (2004). Husserl on ethics and intersubjectivity: From static to genetic phenomenology<\/i>. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.<\/p>\n

Giorgi, A. (1970). Psychology as a human science: A phenomenologically based approach<\/i>. New York: Harper & Row.<\/p>\n

Gurwitsch, A. (1966). Studies in phenomenology and psychology<\/i>. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.<\/p>\n

Hart, J. (1994). The study of religion in Husserl\u2019s writings. In M. Daniel & L. Embree<\/p>\n

(Eds.), Phenomenology of the cultural disciplines <\/i>(pp. 265-296). Boston: Kluwer.<\/p>\n

Husserl, E. (1982). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy: First book, General introduction to a pure phenomenology <\/i>(F. Kersten, Trans.). Boston: Kluwer.<\/p>\n

Kockelmans, J. J. (1978). Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological psychology: A historico-critical study<\/i>. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. (Original work published 1967)<\/p>\n

Khosrokhavar, F. (2001). L\u2019instance du sacre: Essay de foundation des sciences sociales. <\/i>Paris: Les Editions du Cerf.<\/p>\n

Landgrebe, L. (1981). The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six essays by Ludwig\u00a0<\/i>Landgrebe<\/i>. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.<\/p>\n

Piccone, P. (1983). Italian Marxism.<\/i> Berkeley: University of California Press.<\/p>\n

Luft, S. (2011).Subjectivity and lifeworld in transcendental phenomenology. <\/i>Evanston: Northwestern University Press.<\/p>\n

Mohanty, J. N. (1992). Phenomenology and Indian philosophy: The concept of rationality. In D. P. Chattopadhyaya, L. Embree, & J. N. Mohanty (Eds.), Phenomenology and Indian philosophy. <\/i>New Delhi, India: Indian Council of Philosophical Research.<\/p>\n

Mohanty, J. N. (1994). The other culture. In M. Daniel & L. Embree (Eds.), Phenomenology of the cultural disciplines <\/i>(pp. 135-146). Boston: Kluwer.<\/p>\n

Shweder, R. A. & Bourne, E. J. (1991). Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally? In R. A. Shweder (Ed.), Thinking through cultures: Expeditions in cultural psychology <\/i>(pp. 113-155). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.<\/p>\n

Spiegelberg, H. (1965). The phenomenological movement: A historical introduction <\/i>(2nd ed.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.<\/p>\n

Teo, T. & Febbraro, A. R. (2002). Attribution errors in the postmodern landscape. American Psychologist, (57), 458-460.<\/p>\n

Teo, T. (1996). Practical reason in psychology: Postmodern discourse and a neo-modern alternative. In W. Tolman, F. Cherry, R. van Hezewijk, I. Lubek (Ed.), Problems of theoretical psychology (pp. 280-290). Ontario, Canada: Captus Press.<\/p>\n

Theunissen, M. (1984). The other: Studies in the social ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber <\/i>(C. Macann, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work published 1977)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Credits<\/strong><\/p>\n

Coke billboard:photo credit: SeeMidTN.com (aka Brent)<\/a> via photopin<\/a> cc<\/a><\/p>\n

Stone artefacts: photo credit: gbaku<\/a> via photopin<\/a> cc<\/a><\/p>\n

Thanks to J. N. Mohanty for permission to use his photograph<\/p>\n<\/fb:like><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love Teo and Febbraro\u2019s (2002) observation that \u201cPsychology\u2019s history can be studied as a history of fads\u201d (p. 458). Teo (1996) has written that psychologists \u201chave tended to value meta-theoretical constructions from outside their discipline more than those from inside their disciplines,\u201d with the popularity of these constructions shifting as one or another current

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