Abstract
This chapter develops a number of the constructive sides of our disclosure of the tensions, difficulties, and outright contradictions of an objectivist approach to hate crime. These constructive outcomes emerge from our close analysis of the implications of these tensions, difficulties, and contradictions in terms of refining and further legitimating a distinctly Husserlian alternative approach to hate crime-related research. In particular, reflection upon the implications of the extended critique of chapter “The Natural Attitude’s Objectivism as a Type of Closure” generates a series of questions and issues rich in detailed ramifications for a Husserlian alternative model and methodology.
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Notes
- 1.
An entirely descriptive approach that, following participant observation, simply explicates the sense in which for specific perpetrators the presence of, say, transgendered persons on a railway station provides a “reason” for their abusive mockery and abuse, and that also explicates the sense in which this actual and anticipated response negatively impacts the life-style of victims, might remain compatible with relativism if – but only if – the rationale for these contrasting interpretive responses are placed on a par, considered different but equally valid. However, such an entirely descriptive analysis would be incompatible with both the methodological and substantive approaches of Husserl, for whom a striving for optimal freedom from prejudice remained a core imperative from the start and throughout.
- 2.
This is not to say that is no possibility of a viable phenomenological study of the work of natural scientists, such as physicists, biologists, police forensic scientists, which addresses how, for example, the “bio” of biological phenomena, take shape and are sustained. See, for example, Lee Hardy, and Lester Embree, eds. Phenomenology of Natural Science. Vol. 9. Berlin; Springer 2012; Patrick A. Heelan, ‘Husserl’s later philosophy of natural science,’ 54(3) Philosophy of Science 54, (1987): 368–390. It is especially interesting that the university-level teaching of nursing, a hybrid discipline which overlaps the social sciences on the one hand with medical sciences on the other, contains a significant body of generally applied phenomenological studies, as does the related field of psychology. See Amedeo Giorgi, The Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology: A Modified Husserlian Approach. Duquesne University Press, 2009. Any research data-base search of “Husserl AND nursing OR psychology” would reaffirm our point here by multiplying these supportive references by many thousands even where the search is restricted to, say, 2018.
- 3.
Heidegger, 2005: 50–51.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Husserl defines reality as embracing both inanimate physical things and animated psychic life. He offers examples of the defining traits the latter’s defining traits: ‘What psychic life means in this context we have clarified in a manner which suffices temporarily, by examples which we can multiply abundantly. Thus, for instance, feeling sensuously, perceiving and other forms of experiencing, carrying out thought activities such as: considering together, comparing, distinguishing, exercising universalization and ideation, concluding and proving; but also passively feeling joy and pain or else actively taking pleasure or displeasure in something, instinctively striving for something or else actively setting oneself goals and being directed toward them by desiring or willing, but also achieving those goals by acting.’ Husserl, 1925/77: 79. Within this realm there are both habitual traits, skills and tendencies that endure over time, as well as an incessant streaming flux of ever-new contents. Ibid.
- 6.
Husserl refers to “mere matter, which in part has a reality on its own as that which lacks psychic life,” 1925/77: 83.
- 7.
Husserl, 1925/77: 76.
- 8.
Husserl, 1925/77: 80, noting: ‘We experience people and animals as bodily-psychic beings; we distinguish their psychic life and their psychic species from their corporeal body which, considered separately, no longer includes anything psychic and yet really belongs to men and animals.’ Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid. 81.
- 10.
Husserl states: ‘In other words, it is clear that neither one’s own nor another’s psyche can ever become experienceable except as animating one’s own or another’s body, restricted in its typicality, and that every sort of psychic existence already experienced and established must become nothing as soon as the apperceptive presuppositions of psychic experience are cancelled, therefore, whenever a body ceases to preserve that sort of organic style which is the condition of the possibility for its being capable of an animating function, or of indicating animation. Therefore, death as a real event in the world does not have the meaning of a detaching of the psyche to its own reality within this world. From the point of view of the world, death is the annihilation of the psyche, nota bene, as psyche in the world.’ Ibid., 82.
- 11.
Ibid, 83.
- 12.
Husserl states: ‘we have questioned the experiential world according to the universal style in which it gives itself to all possible experience. In doing so we have found necessities which are structural, permeating the entire unity of possible experience.’ Ibid.
- 13.
Husserl boldly states: ‘that all the matter of the world is situated in one single corporeal nexus in which it can be considered on its own and which is governed throughout by the closed unity of an all-inclusive causality.’ 1925/77: 83.
- 14.
Husserl, 1965: 82.
- 15.
Discussed in detail below.
- 16.
Husserl, 1980: 84.
- 17.
Heidegger, 2005: 49.
- 18.
It remains an open question, however, whether a Husserlian phenomenology possesses the internal resources to develop a fully-blown “critique of ideology” other than along the lines of a criticism of “objectification-as-reification,” overlapping in part with the wayward and unorthodox Marxism of the early Lukacs of History and Class Consciousness.
- 19.
Husserl, 1965: 84.
- 20.
Husserl, 1917/1981: 13.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Husserl, 1980: 84.
- 23.
Cf. L. Vandervert, ‘Operational definitions made simple, useful, and lasting,’ In M. Ware & C. Brewer (Eds.), Handbook for Teaching Statistics and Research Methods, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988: 132–34.
- 24.
This is a point we develop more fully below.
- 25.
Such game playing may be partly restrained where state statisticians enjoy a measure of autonomy from the political process, but even here their findings are open to variable political reinterpretations. Notoriously, it has proved possible in the UK to reduce official unemployment figures by reclassifying unemployed individuals as incapable of work on grounds of health, and then later cutting the welfare benefits of these individuals in periods where unemployment rates are no longer politically contentious.
- 26.
We can claim no originality here. There is a massive and varied literature on indexicality more generally, and we are not following the ethnomethodological notion here, which for Garkinkel refers to implicit subtexts behind statements that conversational partners rely upon without expressly addressing them. See Michael Silverstein, Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life, NY: Elsevier Ltd., 2003; Elinor Ochs, ‘Indexicality and Socialization,’ In J. Stigler, R. Shweder & G. Herdt (eds.) Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Geoff Georgi, “Demonstratives and Indexicals,” The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/dem-indx/. Our notion is closer to that of the critical broadly phenomenological legacy of Aaron Cicourel. See John I. Kitsuse, & Aaron V. Cicourel, ‘A Note on the Use of Official Statistics,’ 11 Social Problems: 1963: 131–139. Cf. Robin Smith, & Paul Atkinson, ‘Method and Measurement in Sociology, Fifty Years On,’ 19 International Journal of Social Research Methodology: 2016: 99–110.
- 27.
Husserl, 1925/77: 85.
- 28.
Husserl, 1925/77: 85.
- 29.
Husserl, 1925/77: 85.
- 30.
Husserl, 1925/77: 75.
- 31.
Husserl, 1975: 59.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Ibid: 62.
- 34.
‘The modalities of predicative judgement must be understood as modes of decision. In addition, one should certainly take note of the fact that the expression “decision” is ambiguous. That is, even in the domain of receptive experience one can already speak, in a certain sense, of a decision: in passing through the irresolution of [conflicting] apprehensions, in the fulfilment of possible prescriptions as open in the course of the activity of perception, there is already a kind of decision. But these are passive … modal variants of the passive doxa, fulfilments of the passive intentions of expectation, the resolution of the obstructions passively grown up around them, and so on.’ Ibid, 272.
- 35.
Husserl, 1982: 52.
- 36.
Husserl, 1925/77: 86–7.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
See BBC news: ‘PFA chairman: Spurs should stop ‘offensive chants’ 18 September 2013: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24145270; cf. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-london-24118197/tottenham-hotspur-fans-asked-about-anti-semitic-chants
- 40.
More generally, Husserl states that once formulated a cultural expression’s purpose and sense: ‘which accrued to the object in its original production is something permanently appropriated to that material object.’ Husserl, 1925/77: 87.
- 41.
See, for example the debate over the word “globalist” as a form of encoded anti-Semitism, including in relation to US President Trumps use of this controversial phrase. Cf. Peter Beinart, ‘What Trump Means When He Calls Gary Cohn a ‘Globalist,’ The Atlantic, 9 March, 2018: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/trump-globalist-cohn/555269/
- 42.
Husserl, 1925/77: 81–2. He goes on to say that a failure of such recognition through a quasi-empathetic analogy means that the other persons status as such becomes invisible.
- 43.
For Husserl, presumably face-to-face hate speech could be analysed as a mutually disempowering and obstructive failure to realise a communicative possibility presented by that the immediate presence of others from outside our particular homeworlds to a gain a mediated access into their orientation: ‘…. we each have as given our own body as original locus of our own animating lives and likewise, have others’ bodies given in analogising experience of others, as the locus of others’ psychic lives.’ Husserl, 1925/77: 82.
- 44.
For Husserl the upshot of such a failure of recognition of common humanity is the non-person becomes alien with minimal significance relative to a fellow insider. ‘The other’s psychic life then ceases in principle to be experienceable. Whatever is in principle not experienceable for me does not belong to my experiential world, is nothing in it, is not something existing in the world.’ Husserl, 1925/77: 81–2. Although Husserl was not addressing the shortcomings of a genocidal mindset, the parallels are stark.
- 45.
Hua 13: 112.
- 46.
Through its importation and copying of the methods of the nineteenth century natural sciences, this type of psychology misinterprets the core character and meaning of human subjective and intersubjective intentional life. It does so in ways that require a radical reconceptualisation of its core ideas and procedures. Husserl, 1970: §§56–72, especially: 238, 243.
- 47.
Husserl, 1964: 34. The objectivism of this “common sense” orientation then feeds without critical questioning into the qualitative foundations of more exact natural science of empirical psychology. Ibid.
- 48.
Husserl, 1925/77: 79.
- 49.
Husserl, 1925/77: 83.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Ibid. 85.
- 52.
Husserl, 1925/77: 83.
- 53.
Husserl, 1925/77: 84.
- 54.
Ibid: 86.
- 55.
Husserl, 1925/77: 86.
- 56.
Ibid.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
Husserl, 1925/77: 85.
- 60.
Ibid.
- 61.
Husserl, 1925/77: 80.
- 62.
Ibid: 84.
- 63.
Ibid, 84.
- 64.
Ibid, 84.
- 65.
A monistic type of naturalism is a simpler variant assuming that everything real is physical. A dualistic type recognises the reality of non-physical entities; but subjects them to a subjectivity/objectivity dichotomy which relegates the former to a subordinate position. Neither alternative arises out of factual research but are rather always-already presuppositions of such empirical research, presuppositions that – as our latter critique will argue – are themselves anything but factual.
- 66.
Husserl, 1970: 230; §67.
- 67.
In other words, this approach relies upon the difference between scientific truth and error, and the possibility of confirming and verifying empirically the former at the expense of the latter, which the objectivist-physicalist presuppositions about knowledge of its own perspective (“its epistemology”), renders entirely unsustainable.
- 68.
Husserl, 1965: 85.
- 69.
Husserl, 1982: 51.
- 70.
This is not to deny the point many medical professionals make based on their work experience that the patient’s attitude towards sickness or injuries can play a noticeable role in their possible recovery process. However, this interaction between interpretive orientation and bodily elements relates to a different point. A positive attitude towards recovery is different from a denial that one has already become injured or sick.
- 71.
Husserl, 1925/77: 76.
- 72.
Ibid, 78.
- 73.
Husserl detects such ‘transcendental subjectivism’ within the approach of Hume, whose legacy has led to an ‘unhealthy academic scepticism.’ Husserl, 1970: 68; 193.
- 74.
Husserl, 1964: 2.
- 75.
Husserl, 1964: 3.
- 76.
Hua 30: 18.
- 77.
Ibid 20; Hua, 25: 9.
- 78.
Treating material objects as such is clearly different in kind from treating persons as objects.
- 79.
See, for example, Husserl’s Prague Treatise, Hua 27: 209.
- 80.
Husserl, 2006: 44, n13.
- 81.
Hua, 25: 9.
- 82.
Hua, 25: 15.
- 83.
Husserl recognises the powerful critiques of these traditions by both Berkeley and Hume. Husserl, 1970: §56.
- 84.
Heidegger summary of the Husserlian critique argues: ‘Naturalism is, first, naturalism of ideas; second, naturalism of consciousness. [It is] the ideal connection of ideal laws which, when viewed with respect to life’s modes of behavior, can be designated as various sorts of normative lawfulness to which the disciplines of theoretical science, axiology, and practical science correspond. The ultimate constant factors, in which these sorts of normative lawfulness are grounded, are ideas. It is characteristic of naturalism not to see the ideas, to be blind to ideas.’ 2005: 49.
- 85.
Heidegger, 2005: 48.
- 86.
See Husserl 1925/1977.
- 87.
Ibid.
- 88.
Husserl developed this idea of having to reject self-cancelling perspectives in his “Prolegomena” to the Logical Investigations §32.
- 89.
Husserl, 1970: 68.
- 90.
Husserl, 1965: 78.
- 91.
Husserl, 1965: 80.
- 92.
This is a central argument of Husserl’s Vienna Lecture 1935 in Husserl 1970: Appendix.
- 93.
Husserl, 1982: 37.
- 94.
Ibid.
- 95.
Husserl, 1965: 80–81.
- 96.
Husserl, 1965: 81.
- 97.
For Husserl: ‘It is manifest, of course, by this very circumstance how slight is the practically effective force of arguments based on consequences. Prejudices blind, and one who sees only empirical facts and grants intrinsic validity only to empirical science will not be particularly disturbed by absurd consequences that cannot be proved empirically to contradict facts of nature. This sort of argument he will put aside as “Scholasticism.” Ibid, 81–2.
- 98.
Husserl, 1965: 80.
- 99.
To be clear, our phenomenological critique of objectivist-naturalistic deployment of quantitative methods is very far from a rejection of mathematics. As Husserl recognises: ‘No reasonable will doubt the objective truth or the objectively grounded probability of the wonderful theories of mathematics and the natural sciences.’ 1965: 74.
- 100.
Hua 27: 238. Cf. Heidegger’s 1938 essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge, CUP: 2002: 57–85.
- 101.
For Husserl, ‘a critique of reason … is the foremost prerequisite for being scientific in philosophy…’ 1965: 77.
- 102.
Husserl, 1965: 61.
- 103.
See Husserl’s Vienna Lecture, Husserl 1970: Appendix.
- 104.
See the introduction to Husserl’s Logical Investigations, especially §6, 176; Hua 19/1 23.
- 105.
Husserl 1991 Intro. I §6/176; Hua 19: 123. In his 1928 Amsterdam Lectures, Husserl characterises such psychological approaches as a study of animal (including human) mental ‘behaviour’ taking place in the context of a culturally unmediated “real world” of nature (Hua 9: 303).
- 106.
Husserl develops this more in Ideas 11, 368/Hua 4: 357.
- 107.
Husserl, 1970: §67.
- 108.
Ibid, 231.
- 109.
Husserl, 1970: 233.
- 110.
More generally for this critique, see the first volume of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, ‘Prolegomena to Pure Logic,’ 56, and §§25–6; Hua 18: 88.
- 111.
Heidegger, 2005: 49.
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Salter, M., McGuire, K. (2020). A Husserlian Critique of the Natural Attitude’s Prejudicial Effects. In: The Lived Experience of Hate Crime. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 111. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33888-6_5
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