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PHENOMENOLOGICAL SOCIAL THEORY 321

ological approach itself, rather than Schutz* faithfuhiess to it, is respon-
sible for some of the shortcomings of his work. So I want to address
myself to some of the basic tenets of phenomenology in what follows,
which means that I will speak as much about Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty, and others as about Schutz. But Schutz' work is crucial
here, since my worry is that phenomenology might for reasons of
principle be incapable of an adequate social philosophy. The understand-
ing of the social thus becomes for me the crucial test of the capacity of
phenomenology to do what it wants to do.
To some extent my worries are influenced by the widespread
questioning of the "philosophy of the subject" that has dominated recent
continental philosophy. The motives and sources of this questioning are
as diverse as the thinkers involved in it and are only partly prompted by
concern for a philosophy of the social. In some cases, such as late
Heidegger and Derrida, concern for the social seems decidedly lacking;
in other cases, such as Habermas and, in a related but distinct way,
Levinas, it is central. What these thinkers question in different ways is
a reflexive philosophical method and what it presupposes about the
nature of the reflecting subject. But many of them also share the view
that this approach inevitably construes the relation between "man and
world" in terms of instrumental or technological reason and thus of
power. If this is so then the relation between persons will be conceived
in this way as well. Those who find such a view of social relations
objectionable may think that phenomenology, if it does not actually
encourage such a view, at least offers us no conceptual resources for
constructing an alternative.
Could this be true? Everyone knows that the first attempts by
phenomenologists to comprehend the social were not great successes. The
Fifth Cartesian Meditation is a tangle, and ahnost everyone agrees that
it fails, though there is no agreement on why. The two great opera
magna of existential phenomenology, Heidegger's Being and Time and
Sartre's Being and Nothingness, fare no better. The former gives
notoriously short shrift to Mitsein, and some read Heidegger as equating
social existence with inauthentic existence. Sartre's famous account of "the
look," brilliant as it is, seems to bear out perfectly the contention we are
examining: relations between persons are inevitably relations of power
and domination.
These shortcomings were recognized by critics from the start, of
course, and the work of two other great phenomenologists, Merleau-