Abstract
[T]he most difficult problems of all are hidden problems, the sense of which is naturally concealed from all those who still have no inkling of the determinative fundamental distinctions. In fact, it is … a long and thorny way [to] phenomenological data. (Husserl 1982: 212)
It is of the very essence of such prejudices, drilled into the souls even of children, that they are concealed in their immediate effects. (Husserl 1970: 120)
If true, the second short quote from Husserl, above, has major implications for the study of hate crime as a lived experience. This chapter outlines what we set out to achieve in the present study, its overall aims and objectives. It also explains our two-part structure. The descriptive-analytical Part I is concerned with the prejudicial mediation of experiences of hate crime-related issues by the natural attitude. This chapter prepares the ground for the more advanced Husserlian critique of the impact of such prejudicial presuppositions that comprises the task and bulk of Part II. The final chapter of Part II strives to spell out the constructive implications of such critique. Thus, our second part aims to both build upon and fulfil the overall potential and trajectory of an analytical movement initiated by Part I.
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- 1.
Husserl elaborates on the idea of the natural attitude in his Ideas (1913, Husserl 1982), and Ideas 11 § 49 (Husserl 1953). For Husserl, all interpretive and cognitive activities of our consciousness, including those of researchers, initially take place from a position of already being entangled within the interpretive matrix of often prejudicial belief (doxa) of the natural attitude (Hua 13: 112). Our extensive concern with the natural attitude is explicable because of how it functions as an always-already available interpretive resource and cultural source for all manner of often implicit, sometimes explicit, prejudices directed against one or more hate crime victim group.
- 2.
Moran 2012: 207.
- 3.
We recognise that this sounds close to Hegel’s phenomenology, but we cannot argue this meta-methodological point here. Instead, will carefully demonstrate its implications for the incremental critique of the societal prejudices reiterated by the natural attitude.
- 4.
In the essay ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’ (1910–1911), this orientation is linked with a naïve naturalism/objectivism. However, the terminology here is potentially confusing. Indeed, Husserl deploys different phrases for this attitude, e.g., ‘natural theoretical attitude’ (1982: 94, Hua 3: 1 94) and, in Ideas 111, the ‘natural-naïve attitude’ (Hua 5: 148).
- 5.
The co-existence of sporadic critiques of irrationalism and Husserlian methodological rationalism is not especially well-blended in Husserl’s own writings. The cultural critique related to “renewal” and critique of “crisis tendencies” within modern Europe is barely integrated into his more systematic critique of the prejudicial cognitive effects of the natural attitude of impeding the progress of science. We have aimed for a more coherent integration of these two elements.
- 6.
We follow Husserl in conceiving of the term intersubjectivity to designate a plurality of subjects and the ontological, affective and normative intertwinement of self and other relations that exists between them. Hua 13, 14, 15.
- 7.
Husserl’s critique of naturalism and especially its mediation of the natural attitude’s objectivism will be addressed repeatedly later in this and later chapters.
- 8.
For example, Husserl recognises that perceived bodily abnormalities and experiences that stem from these refer not to nature itself but rather to a certain interpretation of a rule-like regularity conventionally considered “normal” that arises as something interpretively constituted. ‘the abnormal functioning of our lived-corporeality (which of course is itself only taken into account as constituted from a phenomenological perspective). However, every abnormality that belongs here as well—a blow to the eyes that modifies our visual images, a burnt hand whereby the tactile appearances break the rule of normality, and the like—even such abnormalities I say only indicate new rules for the interconnections between lived-experiences; they, too, belong in a grand preshaped constitutive nexus; …’ Husserl 1991: 267. See also ibid xx, xxix, xxxvii, xlv. 27.
- 9.
Husserl 1982: § 28; § 50.
- 10.
For Husserl’s early work on ethical theory see his Vorlesungen iiber Ethik und Wertlehre, 1908–1914, ed. Ullrich Melle, Hua 28. Husserl suggested that phenomenology may have to recognise the invisible power of higher ethical realities linked to an extra-factual “purposefulness” or “teleology” internal to phenomenon, in the value-driven processes of completing the still-unfinished business of culture and human development more generally: ‘In all this, since the rationality made actual by the fact is not a rationality demanded by the essence, there is a marvellous teleology. Furthermore: The systematic exploration of all teleologies to be found in the empirical world itself, for example the factual evolution of the sequence of organisms as far as human being and, in the development of mankind, the growth of culture with its spiritual treasures, is not yet completed with the natural-scientific explanation … [Phenomenological analysis] leads necessarily to the question about the ground for the now-emerging factualness of the corresponding constitutive consciousness. Not the fact as such, but the fact as source of endlessly increasing value-possibilities and value-actualities forces the question into one about the “ground”— which naturally does not have the sense of a physical-causal reason.’ Husserl 1982: 134. Clearly, this claim about our mediation by a higher ethical power and source of normative obligations to each other can be read in both religious and secular terms.
- 11.
Steinbock 1995: 14–15.
- 12.
Husserl 1970: § 3, 290–91.
- 13.
Of course, this can be contested. Yet, attempts to think, argue and theorise ourselves out of a minimum core of rationalism are subject to performative self-contradiction akin to “fighting for peace.”
- 14.
Nazism appeared to Husserl, not as an approach that correctly registered and recognised a pre-existing material reality of “racial” difference; but rather as a new worldview: one that interpretively (re)constituted such “difference” as having a particularly emphatic prejudicial significance as its own performative accomplishment. See Husserl’s correspondence in the 1930s, Briefwechsel, 4: 313 cited in Moran 2012: 206.
- 15.
For Husserl, Dilthey, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Scheler, and Simmel each developed irrationalist life-philosophies that had lost faith in scientific rationalism. It is possibly instructive to contrast the intense humanism of Husserl 1970, with Heidegger’s nihilistic critique of such humanist ideals in his ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ (1947). It is questionable whether Heidegger’s massively important intellectual legacy, some of which was derived from Husserl not always with open acknowledgement, cannot be reduced to his deplorable one adherence to Nazism.
- 16.
Husserl 1970: 12, § 4.
- 17.
Ibid: 299.
- 18.
Ibid: 298–9.
- 19.
See Vienna Lecture, Appendix to Husserl 1970.
- 20.
This perhaps over-optimistic view is based on the notorious instability of xenophobic movements, their tendency to internally fracture and ultimately disappoint their one-time supporters. The rise and fall of UKIP within the UK, and the National Front and BNP before them, is perhaps instructive. Developments in Hungary, the USA and Italy may be seen as providing counter-examples.
- 21.
- 22.
We have no illusions that social groups who are victimised by hate crime perpetrators are entirely free of their own prejudicial stereotypes concerning other victimised groups, which can be expressed as hate speech. Identifying oneself as gay is, in itself, no protection against ingroup racism or sexism, for example; any more than becoming a victim of anti-Moslem violence a guarantee of a rejection by all victims of prejudices directed against one or more of the other legally-protected groups. Hence, we do not use the terms “victim” and “perpetrator” to refer to discrete and mutually exclusive empirical realities involving nothing but “pure” victims in both senses of this term. There are clearly degrees of prejudice relevant to each group spread across a wide spectrum, which may itself be widely shared among hate crime perpetrators and victims.
- 23.
There are few published phenomenological studies of hate crime in the Anglophone world, with the exception of work by Danny Willis, which focused upon gay males. D. G. Willis, ‘Hate crimes against gay males: An overview,’ 25(2) Issues in Mental Health Nursing, (2004): 115–132. Phenomenological contributions to the study of criminology, criminal justice, sociology or social psychology exist. Yet, they are rarely adequately grounded in Husserl’s works and methodology: Cf. E. Buchbinder and Z. Eisikovits ‘Battered women’s entrapment in shame: A Phenomenological Study’, 73/4 Am Journal of Orthopsychiatry 2003: 355–366; P. K. Manning, ‘On the Phenomenology of Violence’ 14 The Criminologist (1999) 1–22; J. M. Clinton, Behind the Eurocentric Veils: The Search for African Realities, Massachusetts: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
- 24.
Following the publication of his Logische Untersuchungen at the turn of the twentieth century, Husserlian phenomenology has been widely presumed to be an essentially a descriptive science: one whose method requires faithfulness to the way in which phenomena, the “things themselves,” present themselves to our consciousness of them. This descriptive project initially appeared as a static approach focusing on the distillation of the “essential structures” (essences or eidos) of a phenomenon. Yet, almost from the start, a more credible supplementary counter-impulse that can be termed “generative” phenomenology related to experienced temporality, passive association, cultural, and historical phenomenon (including the intersubjective origins and habitual reiteration of specific prejudicial beliefs relevant to our project) also made itself felt. A. Steinbock, ‘Generativity and the Scope of Generative Phenomenology,’ in Donn Welton (ed.) The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003: 32.
- 25.
Husserl 1982: 56. He immediately goes on to state that this descriptive element is not the whole of phenomenology and rapidly moves on to its other features and aspects.
- 26.
However, as Husserl recognises, we must not discount the difficulties of securing in practice even the initially descriptive dimension, of clarifying the nature of descriptive analysis itself: ‘If phenomenology, then, is to be entirely a science within the limits of mere immediate Intuition, a purely “descriptive” eidetic science, then what is universal of its procedure is already given as something obvious. It must expose to its view events of pure consciousness as examples and make them perfectly clear; within the limits of this clarity it must analyse and seize upon their essences, trace with insight the essential interconnections, formulate what is beheld in faithful conceptual expressions which allow their sense to be prescribed purely by what is beheld or generically seen; and so forth. This procedure, followed naively, serves at first only for the sake of looking about in the new province, acquiring some general practice in seeing, seizing upon and analysing in it and becoming somewhat familiar with its data.’ Husserl 1982: 150–51. He then proceeds to show how much taken-for-granted methodological naiveté there is in such an apparently “obvious” notion of “pure description.” The idea of a purely descriptive-qualitative approach to hate crime purely as experienced is less a “solution” than a statement of a methodological problem.
- 27.
More generally, see Klaus Held, ‘Heimwelt, Fremdwelt, die eine Welt,’ in Perspektiven und Probleme der Husserlschen Phänomenologie: Beiträge zur neuen Husserl-Forshcung, Freiburg (Br.)/München: Alber, 1991.
- 28.
See Anthony J. Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995.
- 29.
On the immanent vs external critique distinction, see G. Pearson and M. Salter, ‘Getting Public Law Back into a Critical Condition: The Rule of Law as a Source for Immanent Critique,’ 8(4) Socio-Legal Studies, (1999): 483–508.
- 30.
Without doubt a more fully-fledged applied phenomenology would need to include an extensive PhD-style methodology chapter outlining the character and stages of Husserlian sense-explication, bracketing of the natural attitude’s general thesis, intentional analysis of noematic-noetic correlations of whatness and howness, egological, genetic, generative and life-world analyses. However, it is not until our final chapter that we set out how a Husserlian critique of the contradictions stemming from the natural attitude’s prejudicial interpretive practices opens the door to – and provides a clear rationale for – a remedial type of intentional and life-worldly analysis.
- 31.
The static dimensions of phenomenology include a constitutive analysis concerned with how something is given or modes of givenness, as well as identifying unfolding essential formal and material structures. e.g., the “criminality” of hate crime, etc). Such analysis can address the meant features of hate crime as experienced, the defining qualities of interpretive acts through which meaningful experiences of this topic take shape experientially, as well as intentional relations of correlation between such acts and intentional objects, e.g., between a hate incident as perceived and the structure of the act of perception through which the former takes shape.
- 32.
Husserl’s advocacy of a radically experiential qualitative approach rehabilitates the potential integrity of everyday perceptions of, say, hate crime victims, founded upon a belief in what appears in the perceived world as, for all its relativities and contingencies, an integral part of the web of (social) scientific knowledge. He connects fields of knowledge to the realm of lived experience. He then orders the latter to show how they rest upon our ordinary and everyday engagement with things saturated with a primordial belief in both the surrounding intersubjectively relative life-world, and the integrity of our everyday perceptual engagements with it. Belief and knowledge are not, therefore, defined as polar opposites. If falsely divorced from his critique of the natural attitude, extensively discussed, developed and applied below, Husserl’s epistemological restoration of belief would encourage an uncritically descriptive form of qualitative analysis. This misapplication would lack any critical edge of the ethical and social scientific type that our phenomenology of hate crime surely requires. Instead, such a misconceived and one-sided form of qualitative analysis would merely reinterpret, clarify and cross-reference experiences of the status quo only in the latter’s own ideological terms. Our approach entirely rejects this conservative approach for reasons explained and illustrated more fully in the final chapter.
- 33.
Ibid, 7.
- 34.
Husserl 1982: 147.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Ibid: 151.
- 37.
Hence, unfortunately, our own project must remain abbreviated relative to its own ideals just discussed. This is because elements of our methodological rationale, notions of “contemporary relevance,” are left unclear, imprecise and unsubstantiated experientially.
- 38.
There are many critiques of the type of essentialism deriving in part from Plato which claims that things are what they are because of some essential qualities whose absence would mean they would be different in kind. One critique is that the stereotypical quality is portrayed as all- pervasive, not contingent or historically related. However, for present purposes, it is not generally the variety of the concept under discussion that is the issue.
- 39.
Michael Salter, ‘A Dialectic Despite Itself? Overcoming the Phenomenology of Legal Culture’, 4(4) Social & Legal Studies (1995): 453–476.
- 40.
Husserl, 1925/77: 22–25; 53–63.
- 41.
In an unpublished manuscript stemming from 1930 or 1931, Husserl addresses the generative phenomena of homeworlds and alienworlds, their (re)interpretive constitution anew as such, in terms of a “transcendental aesthetic,” defined as ‘the correlative system of validity of the world as the world of experience.’ Hua 15: 214. The task of elucidating the constitution of a homeworld: ‘becomes the task of a transcendental aesthetic ...’ Hua 15: 234.
- 42.
Judith Butler ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,’ Theatre Journal Vol. 4, (1988), 135–49. More generally, see Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013; Andrew Sayer, ‘Essentialism, Social Constructionism, and Beyond,’, 45 Sociological Review, 1997: 456
- 43.
See ‘Edmund Husserl’s Letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, 11 March 1935’, trans. Dermot Moran and Lukas Steinacher, 8 New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (2008), 349–54: 350.
- 44.
Hua 29: 329–31.
- 45.
Husserl’s reflections on conceptions of normality were not incidental points made in passing at a single phase of his life-work. On the contrary, they preceded his path-breaking Logical Investigations 1900/1901 and came to fruition in the 1917–21 period, and then extended into the period 1930–37. In terms of their substantive permeation of concrete phenomenological theme, these conceptions are vital for the discussion of “constitution” as well as the lived body and the constitution of specific “homeworlds” set against “alienworlds.” Furthermore, the implications of a sustained phenomenology of normality and abnormality extend into the field of methodology as their analysis breaches the confines of static methodologies by pointing to the necessity for specifically genetic analyses, for a genetic methodology that recognises the streaming of temporality, the flux of historical becoming at different levels. Husserl’s collection of his papers and manuscripts gathered together in the Husserl archives under the heading of “primordial constitution” substantiate these claims. Steinbock 1995: 8.
- 46.
Such transcendence does not mean that a constitutive/genetic analysis focusing on egological experience is entirely jettisoned. See Joona Taipale, ‘Twofold Normality: Husserl and the Normative Relevance of Primordial Constitution,’ 28(1) Husserl Studies: 2012: 49–60.
- 47.
See Hua 15: 171–72, 472–73; Hua 29: 87–89, 332–35; Hua: 42.
- 48.
Steinbock 1995: 14.
- 49.
Hua 29: 9, 16, 57, 60, 258.
- 50.
Hua 29: 211; 11, 42, 63, 198–201.
- 51.
Interviewee 241, 012.
- 52.
Interviewee, 131, 212. For phenomenological discussion of applied phenomenological methods, see Giorgi Amedeo (Ed.) Phenomenology and psychological research, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985; Don Idhe, Experimental phenomenology: an introduction, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1986; Clark Moustakas, Phenomenological research methods, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994; Donald. E. Polkinghorne, ‘Phenomenological research methods’, in R. S. Valle, and S. Halling, (Eds.) Existential phenomenological perspectives in psychology, New York: Plenum Press, 1989. 41–60.
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Salter, M., McGuire, K. (2020). Overall Objectives, Structure and Possible Audiences. In: The Lived Experience of Hate Crime. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 111. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33888-6_1
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