Page 334 - Contribution To Phenomenology

PHENOMENOLOGICAL SOCIAL THEORY 327

as we say, like the dedicatory preface to the princes of the church and
to the greater glory of God at the beginning of a seventeenth-century
philosophical treatise. It is a decision, a confession of faith, and it is one
that phenomenologists refuse to make. Instead, they choose intentionality
and go on from there. Their decision, too, is a confession of faith, and
again like a confession of faith it imposes obUgations. The obUgation in
this case is to explore to its Umits the intentionality of human experience,
the meaning-bestowing character of consciousness or Dasein, and the
human world as a complex of meaningful, i.e., intentional objects and
entities.
And this is, of course, what the phenomenologists have done. The
results, it seems to me, bear out my contention that the intentional
approach is essentially designed to deal with our relation to nature. After
his initial preoccupation with logical thinking, it was perception that really
captured Husserl's attention and served as the guiding thread and
paradigm for all his investigations. What is most striking about
Heidegger's Being and Time, what is the thing that most captured the
attention of its first readers? The distinction between Zuhandenheit and
Vorhandenheit, of course, a fundamental revision of our way of thinking
about how we relate to the material world around us. Indeed, the very
concept of world, as Heidegger describes it, is the totaUty of reference
(Bewandtnisganzheit) among such entities. The later Husserl's concept of
Lebenswelt retains its links to perception and arises out of the context
of questions about the epistemic status of natural science. For Merleau-
Ponty, of course, all phenomenology is centered in the phenomenology
of perception.
But can the concept of intentionaUty, which so clearly arises out of
problems of the relation between man and nature, and is so useful in
that context, prove equally useful when it comes to describing inter-
subjectivity, relations among persons, social reaUty? Or does it instead
prove to be a hindrance? Let us examine some features of the phenome-
nological approach to these topics with a view to answering this question.
The description of an intentional relation is typically a reflexive
procedure in which each of us examines his or her own experience. In
the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, thus, I reflect on my experience
and my world and try to describe how the other turns up in that world.
How does my intentionality bestow the meaning alter ego or "other
person" on certain entities within my world, and what are the essential
features of the entities that bear that meaning? In other words, the other