Abstract

Phenomenology is increasingly proposed along with critical theory as a theoretical framework for social sciences faced with the collapse of positivism. Yet Husserl's transcendental phenomenology provides the reflexivity human sciences require at the cost of a Cartesian ontology. Even in his work on the life-world, Husserl's subject is absolute and constituting. Thus he models intersubjectivity on shifts of standpoint between transcendental and everyday perspectives. He avoids positivism, but makes sociality a product of the transcendental ego. To avoid this, Schutz applies Husserl's language, but not his ontology. Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology subordinates the transcendental to the lived world, rather than the reverse. The Logos of phenomena is itself a phenomenon, as is consciousness, which thus has no privileged status. Rather than the self-experience of Husserl or Descartes, phenomenology turns to reflexivity in the life-world. Perception for Merleau-Ponty is a reversibility of the world's flesh, a fold of phenomena back upon themselves. His phenomenology does not collapse the subject-object dialectic into the former to counter positivism's collapse of it into the latter. All objects are objects for a subject, but the subject is a reflexive object. This reforms subject-object and subject-other subject dialectics. In the lived world, the subject is not constituting or constituted but instituted and instituting. In a world no less social than natural, subjective perspectives arise within intercorporeity and interperspectivality, both instituted by centripetal social forces and instituting them as sediments of their centrifugal acts. Subjectivity and social being are correlative and the dialectic of instituted and instituting is irreducible. In social science theory, neither individuals nor groups have explanatory priority if the personal and social are co-primordial. In political theory, neither liberalism's stress on class commitment nor Marxism's emphasis on class position suffice alone if social being is always a dialectic of both. Existential phenomenology yields a post-Cartesian ontology and thus renews and reforms theory of social science and political theory as well.