Martin Heidegger____________________
Table of content:________________________________________________
Introduction: 2
Heidegger’s Being and time: 2
Heidegger’s rejection of traditional methods for the study of being: 2
Heidegger’s approach to study of being: 3
Journey to being: 3
The dimension of time: 4
Heidegger’s method: 4
A beginning with Husserl: 5
Against theoretical intuition: 5
Idea of Dasein: 5
Dasein in context: rediness to hand (Zuhandenheit) and presence at hand (Vorhandenheit). 6
Linguistic expression: 6
Phenomenology and hermeneutics – Heideggerian fusion. 7
Further reading: 7
Introduction:
Is is one of the most commonplace words in English language. It sleeps into sentences almost unnoticed. It is difficult to think, write or speak without it. But few people asks –
WHAT IS IS?
This negligence results in not just the neglect of a word but of every resonance that the word might have. Heidegger was an original phenomenologist of the highest rank, who attempted, in his own unique way, to carry out Husserl’s project of getting back to the ‘things themselves’. He spent ten years actively engaging with Husserl’s philosophy before his own Being and Time appeared, which at once claimed phenomenology to be much older than Husserl, as an essentially Greek way of thinking, and also, at the same time, pushed phenomenology beyond Husserl, in that it replaced the study of the intentional structures of consciousness with the more fundamental study of the relation between Dasein and Being itself.
Heidegger’s Being and time:
Heidegger’s main question begins with questioning “IS” or being. What is is? Is is a part of verb to be, the verb of being. That was Heidegger’s central occupation. He argued that Western thought has forgotten the question of being, not just recently but for more than 2500 years. Therefore, he returns to the question “how could being be understood?”
Being and time branches out the question of being in to two distinct tasks:
Part One: the Interpretation of Dasein in terms of temporality, and the explication of time as the transcendental horizon for the question of being.
Part Two: basic features of a phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology, with the problematic of Temporality as our clue.
Heidegger was of the view that a philosopher has only a single deep thought, which he or she constantly struggles to express. In his own case, his whole life’s work was a single-minded attempt to reexamine the question of Being, Thus, in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger announces that he proposes to investigate “the question of Being” that is the “question of the meaning of Being.” Heidegger argues:
If the question of Being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved. We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of Being as our clue, we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being—the ways which have guided us ever since (Being and time, 1927).
Heidegger’s rejection of traditional methods for the study of being:
Heidegger rejected traditional metaphysical approaches to the question of Being as having misunderstood the nature of beings by understanding them as ‘things’, as what is simply there, as occurrent, as ‘reality’, as present at hand. Traditional metaphysics, which thought it was simply describing things as they are, does not realise that it is constructed on the basis of a certain assumed attitude towards the world, which in fact is not fundamental, but belongs to a distorted way of experiencing due to the way humans are drawn down into everyday existing.
Heidegger’s central insight is that traditional metaphysical understanding is actually a sedimentation of a kind of everyday set of assumptions about reality, and this set of assumptions needs to be shown to be just that, through a deeper exploration of all the ways in which humans relate to the world. In particular the prioritisation of the theoretical, of theoria in the Greek sense, of the contemplative outlook so admired by Husserl, is shown to be a particular effect of tradition and not a fundamental feature of Dasein itself. This leads Heidegger to a radical questioning of the traditional metaphysical definition of human beings as rational animals as well as the traditional scriptural assumptions about human beings being made in the image and likeness of God.
Heidegger’s approach to study of being:
Heidegger argues that human existence must be thought radically in its own terms. There are two sides to this: one is an attempt at an existential analytic of Dasein; the other is an attempt to retrieve the essential meanings of key words expressing existence from beneath the weight of encrusted tradition. To highlight and expose this one-sided partiality of traditional metaphysical accounts (including the medieval Scholastic, the Cartesian, Rationalist, and Kantian approaches), Heidegger favours a new ‘fundamental ontology’, an enquiry into the manner in which the structures of Being are revealed through the structures of human existence, an enquiry, furthermore, which could only be carried out through phenomenology, now transformed into hermeneutical phenomenology, since the phenomena of existence always require interpretation, and hermeneutics is the art of interpretation. Human existence is not an entity which is simply there in the world, accessible from different points of view. Rather human existence is some specific person’s existence; it has the character of ‘specificity’ (Jeweiligkeit) or ‘mineness’ (Jemeinigkeit). So too an interpretation of human existence cannot be neutral, dispassionate, theoretical contemplation, but must take into account the involvement of the enquirer him- or herself in the undertaking.
Human beings are involved with their existence in such a way that hermeneutics must be able to accomplish this movement backwards and forwards between the existence to be examined and the nature of the examining enquirer. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, in Being and Time, will try to map out the transcendental conditions which made human existence (Dasein) possible, while recognising that humans are individual existing beings whose Being is an issue for them. Heidegger has raised to an ontological level the essential role of humans as questioning beings. It is this fundamental questioning concern with Being which marks out human existence as such. Questioning is prioritised over all other forms of interacting. Understanding what it is to be a questioner reveals the purely human mode of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Inder-Welt-Sein) as a kind of projective caring and involvement in the world.
Journey to being:
Throughout his life, Heidegger restlessly pursued a problem: the term “Being” had meant many different things to those who used it. Out of this was later to arise his first formulation of the being-question: what was the meaning of being? He searched through three major epochs: those of the ancient Greeks, the Medieval Scholastics, and Modern Philosophy. Heidegger worked on all three, reading each in the light of the others.
For Plato, every being had an ideal existence, as a perfect, unchanging form. What we experience as visible, audible, tactile beings are merely imperfect reflections or copies of the ideal beings.
For Aristotle the realm of being would be divided into different types, categories of beings. In the first place being comes either as SUBSTANCES of as ATTRIBUTES. SUBSTANCE is what something is in itself, identifiable and separable from other substances. E.g. Animals and plants, stars and planets
An ATTRIBUTE is some kind of quality or characteristic that substances have. For example a substance may be poisonous, purple in colour, 18cm in length etc. etc. This schema is close to modern, empirically oriented commonsense.
But another statement is possible. THE THING IS… we announce that it exists, that it has its being. And being is neither a substance, nor an attribute. That was Heidegger’s problem.
Aristotle had categorized beings, but offered no satisfactory account of being. Each of the categories marks out a type of being, and how it can be known – but there was no single, unified concept of being as such.
For scholastics it was important HOW the various entities are known: HOW they are thought to exist. For them, Christian theologians’ concept of GOD as something all encompassing and generating all other beings – creating all substances and attributes becomes important. So, God’s being without substance – now became the ground of being, its ultimate origin and its explanation.
The dimension of time:
In Being and Time, Heidegger does not want merely to give an existential analysis of human being. His ultimate aim is to understand the meaning of Being and its relation to time. Heidegger rightly sees that traditional metaphysics and theology had an orientation towards thinking of true Being as timeless, eternal, unchanging. In the metaphysical tradition stemming from Plato and Aristotle, Being has been understood as presence (Anwesenheit, which contains the word ‘Wesen’ which means ‘essence’, the Greek ousia) as that which has some kind of static occurrence. Heidegger, on the other hand, sees human existence as essentially taking place in time, spread out between past and future and radically limited by death and so essentially incomplete. Being must be understood radically in terms of time. Unfortunately, the concepts of time available from the philosophical and scientific tradition are inadequate to the task. Heidegger thus proposes in the second half of Being and Time to run through various fundamental human experiences in terms of their temporal character to try to develop an authentic sense of temporality as a first step towards approaching the problem of time itself and its relation to Being.
Heidegger’s method:
Being and Time is a radical attempt to rethink traditional philosophical approaches to human beings, to Being, to time and history, and, of course, to the history of philosophy itself. The book aims to be both an a priori transcendental phenomenological description of the essential structure of human existence, Dasein, and an appreciation of the temporal, cultural, and the dispersed nature of human historicality. Somehow, Heidegger saw all of these problems as capable of being clarified through a phenomenological approach, although, now, an approach which he had to some extent forged by himself. For, by the time of writing Being and Time, he had come to view Husserlian phenomenology as yet another project of idealist philosophy which had got lost from the essential historicity of human nature.
A beginning with Husserl:
Being and Time first appeared to be a radical deviation from Husserl’s phenomenology, but the publication of the drafts of Heidegger’s lecture courses from 1917 to 1927 shows Heidegger working his way through phenomenology, employing a close reading of Husserl’s texts, and situating his own problematic as emerging from them.
For Husserl, phenomenology was the approach to locate “universally-true” consciousness. By phenomenological REDUCTION. First reduction is to Suspend any attention to mere particulars, “bracket” them out… remove from the scene, and what is left will be the essential, universal structures of the mind. For Husserl, the real objects are not objects in consciousness. Second reduction is the argument that objects to appear in our minds some kind of mental activity, or ACT must be performed, that too must be studied. In Reduction three he argues that objects and acts are of many different types – therefore, they come plural. Therefore, if we can bracket out even the objects and acts, the Transcendental Ego is what remains. This is what Husserl called ABSOLUTE BEING.
Clearly, Husserl, equates being with absolute consciousness. Heidegger was skeptical about this abstract, sovereign consciousness. Did it rule unchallenged? Entities might turn up… but did they turn up only for a purified, disembodied Ego?
He therefore, argues that, one can step in an arithmetic world, as long as one adopts the arithmetic standpoint, bu the ordinary, natural world is always there for me. If the ordinary practical world is there, always, it comes first. It has to be there for someone before they can launch into abstract calculations, theorizing about transcendental egos etc. Husserl, having noticed it, kept putting it back in brackets. But Heidegger set off dramatically new path – towards being as it was encountered and mand meaningful, in PRACTICAL EVERYDAY LIFE.
Against theoretical intuition:
In his lectures of the early 1920s Heidegger had criticised Husserl’s account of intuition as not sufficiently recognising that our original understanding is not theoretical, but grounded in our practical engagements (comportment, Verhalten) with the world. Our understanding is interpretative from the very start and that interpretative involvement with things need not be at a level of intellection or cognition, but more usually comes in concernful, practical dealings.
Idea of Dasein:
In Being and Time, Husserl’s notion of intentionality is replaced by a phenomenological account of Dasein’s practical comportments within the world of practical relations with things (Zuhandensein). This leads Heidegger to revise Husserl’s conception of intentionality and finally to drop it altogether in favour of the conception of Dasein’s transcendence. Heidegger promises to show how intentionality is grounded in the ec-static nature of Dasein, that is, the manner in which human existence always runs ahead of itself in expectation and lingers behind in memory.
Dasein… that entity in its being which we know as human life; this entity in the specificity of its being, the entity that we each ourselves are, which each of us finds in the fundamental assertion: I amDasein in context: rediness to hand (Zuhandenheit) and presence at hand (Vorhandenheit)
In Being and Time he first introduces Dasein in terms of his discussion of the formal structure of the question of Being:
Thus, to work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity—the inquirer—transparent in his own Being. The very asking of this question is an entity’s mode of Being; and as such it gets its essential character from what is inquired about— namely, Being. This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term “Dasein”.
Dasein is not an entity that stands on its own, like a stone or a chair; it is always caught up in a world. The fundamental nature of Dasein is always to be in a world. World here means a context, an environment, a set of references and assignments within which any meaning is located Human being is ‘Being-in-the-world’. Furthermore, it is not as if Dasein is somehow sitting side by side with the world. Dasein is world-involved, and as Heidegger will later argue, world-disclosing. Being-in-the-world is such a basic state of Being that it is through it that all the other ‘existentialia’ (Dasein’s equivalent of the categories which apply to inanimate things) of Dasein get determined.
Heidegger explicates this conception of Being-in-the-world through an account of our basic contacts with things in the environment. Traditionally, Heidegger feels, philosophy, including even Aristotle, has prioritised the theoretical encounter with things, things as they are to sight.
Sight stands at a distance and seeing does not tamper with the thing seen. Against this traditional metaphysical view, Heidegger emphasises that our initial contact with objects is in terms of their use and availability to us for certain assigned tasks, tasks generated by our interests. We tamper with and manipulate things as determined by our interests and our goals. Things initially present themselves with this kind of available being, what Heidegger calls Zuhandensein, ‘readiness to hand’, or what Hubert Dreyfus renders as ‘availability’.10 Normally we reach for an object to act as a hammer, we see a tree as a source of wood or shelter from the rain, and so on. Heidegger’s descriptions give a certain priority to these kinds of ‘workworlds’ —the work-world of the carpenter, for instance (BT § 26). Only subsequently, and by a separate act of intention—one which is much more theoretical—do we see the tools as things in themselves, as things standing on their own, available for inspection. This theoretical way of viewing things leads to science, to the pure interest in examining things as they are, bracketed from their connections and engagements with our interests. Things seen in this theoretical mode are vorhandene—present at hand, simply there.
Linguistic expression:
According to Heidegger Husserl’s conception of intentionality is not sufficiently tuned in to express our practical engagement with the world. Much more than Husserl, Heidegger is interested in the linguistic dimension of intentionality. Our whole comportment towards things is expressive, and this expression can appear as linguistic assertion (Aussage).
Heidegger says:
It is not so much that we see the objects and things but rather that we first talk about them. To put it more precisely: we do not say what we see, but rather the reverse, we see what one says about the matter.
Understanding is not just a matter of having a sensory input, conceptualizing it, and reacting to it. The sensory dimension of the experience falls short of what the assertion says about it: I say the chair is yellow but I do not literally see the being-yellow of the chair. ‘Being’, ‘this’, and so on are not in the subjective reflection, but are correlates of the act. Heidegger develops Husserl’s notion of categorial intuition into his account of the experience of being and truth. Heidegger is coming to see that the essential disclosure of things takes place through Dasein’s concernful dealing with things in the environment, that it takes place essentially in expression. Relating to things, disclosing them, always relates to our concerns in advance, our relation is primarily interpretative, or hermeneutical.
Phenomenology and hermeneutics – Heideggerian fusion
Heidegger gives Husserl’s account of practical intentionality an entirely new shape by connecting it with the tradition of hermeneutics. Heidegger later recalled that he had first encountered hermeneutics as a branch of theological interpretation during his Catholic seminary days. By ‘hermeneutics’ Heidegger does not just mean the method specific to the historical and cultural sciences, but the whole manner in which human existence is interpretative. All our experience is interpreting and encountering what has already been interpreted by ourselves and by others.
Heidegger calls this way of approaching things the “existentialhermeneutical as”; it is a kind of approach which gets pushed into the background when we adopt the more neutral view of a thing as an entity with specific properties. All neutral understanding of things, for example scientific understanding, presupposes our existential encounter with things and our original interpretation of them in the light of our concerns and dealings with the world. If this is forgotten, according to Heidegger, we end up with a theory of truth as judgement instead of an experience of truth as revelation. Heidegger then is seeking to replace the traditional view of knowledge as a kind of intellectual representation with a new view which sees knowing as a sub-species of a kind of concernful dealing with the world. In Being and Time Heidegger struggles to develop a new vocabulary to express this kind of relating to the world, using terms like ‘Umsicht’ (circumspection) which suggest a connection with ‘Umwelt’ (environment).
Further reading:
Mortan, D. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. London: Routledge
Macann, C. (1993). The four phenomenological philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau – Ponty. London: Routledge
M.Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language”, trans. Peter D.Hertz, On the Way toLanguage (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 9–10.
Dermot Moran, “The Destruction of the Destruction: Heidegger’s Versions of the History of Philosophy”, in K.Harries and C.Jamme, eds, Martin Heidegger. Politics, Art and Technology, op. cit., pp. 175–196.
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
Phenomenology and Edmund Husserl
Phenomenology and Edmund Husserl
Introduction: 2
Brief views: 2
A simplified understanding of phenomenology: 2
Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl 4
Husserl’s central concern – consciousness. 4
Husserlian phenomenological method: 4
Presuppositionless starting point: 4
Getting towards Intuition – the pure form of knowledge. 5
The suspension of natural attitude: 5
Rethink the lifeworld: 6
Unearth the structure of intentionality: understanding the consciousness. 6
Principal concepts: 7
Life world: 7
Natural attitude: 7
Introduction:
Though there are a number of themes which characterise phenomenology, in general it never developed a set of dogmas or sedimented into a system. It claims, first and foremost, to be a radical way of doing philosophy, a practice rather than a system. Phenomenology is best understood as a radical, anti-traditional style of philosophising, which emphasises the attempt to get to the truth of matters, to describe phenomena, in the broadest sense as whatever appears in the manner, in which it appears, that is as it manifests itself to consciousness, to the experiencer. As such, phenomenology’s first step is to seek to avoid all misconstructions and impositions placed on experience in advance, whether these are drawn from religious or cultural traditions, from everyday common sense, or, indeed, from science itself. Explanations are not to be imposed before the phenomena have been understood from within.
Brief views:
Most of the founding figures of phenomenology emphasised the need for a renewal of philosophy as radical enquiry not bound to any historical tradition; and they advocated a rejection of all dogmatisms, a suspicion of a priori metaphysical premises and earlier accounts of the nature of knowledge, especially as found in Neo-Hegelianism and in positivism, and a steady directing of attention to the things themselves. Phenomenology was seen as reviving our living contact with reality, and as being remote from the arid and academic discussion of philosophical problems found in nineteenth-century philosophy, for example in the Neo-Kantian tradition.
Ø Husser’s Logical investigations – a fresh start of traditional logical problems
Ø Heidegger’s students of the 1920s claimed the experience of thinking came to life in their classes, as both Arendt and Gadamer have confirmed.
Ø This call to renew philosophy went hand in hand with an appeal to return to concrete, lived human experience in all its richness.
Ø In the 1930s, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty saw phenomenology as a means of going beyond narrow empiricist, psychological assumptions about human existence, broadening the scope of philosophy to be about everything, to capture life as it is lived.
Ø Sartre sees phenomenology as allowing one to delineate carefully one’s own affective, emotional, and imaginative life, not in a set of static objective studies such as one finds in psychology, but understood in the manner in which it is meaningfully lived.
Ø Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenology is closely attentive to the way in which other human beings inhabit the horizons of my experience and present themselves as a demand to me, a call on me to get outside the sphere of my own self-satisfaction, my own preoccupations.
A simplified understanding of phenomenology:
Husserl envisaged phenomenology as the descriptive, non-reductive science of whatever appears, in the manner of its appearing, in the subjective and intersubjective life of consciousness. He was fascinated by what he regarded as the 'mystery of mysteries': namely, the life of consciousness (Bewusstseinsleben), with its unique, inner temporal flow and its ability to gain objective knowledge of what transcends it. Phenomenology is therefore, the study of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.
By etymology, phenomenology is the study of phenomena, in the root meaning of appearances; or, better, the ways things appear to us in our experience, the ways we experience things in the world around us. We practice phenomenology (with or without the name) whenever we pause in reflection and ask, “What do I see?,” “How do I feel?,” “What am I thinking?,” “What do I intend to do?,” answering in the first person, specifying the way I experience what I see, feel, think, and so on. We produce a phenomenological description of an experience as we declare, attending to our own experience, “I see that fishing boat in the fog,” “I feel angry about what was just said,” “I think that Husserl read Hume,” “I intend to sweep the patio tomorrow.” Phenomenology thus characterizes a given form of consciousness from the person’s own subjective, first-person perspective. By contrast, neuroscience studies how consciousness is produced in a person’s brain, characterizing his neural-mental state from an objective, third-person perspective. Thus, where a brain scan (an MRI image) shows which parts of the brain are most active (burning glucose), a phenomenological description characterizes what the person is experiencing (“I see a fishing boat” or “I feel a pain in my left foot”).
We practice phenomenology, most basically, when we give first-person descriptions of various types of conscious experience. Here are some elementary forms of such descriptions:
I see that fishing boat on the edge of the fog bank rolling in on the Pacific.
I hear that helicopter whirling overhead.
I think that the whales are migrating south along the coast.
I desire a warm cup of green tea.
I feel exhilarated at the sound of the aria I hear being sung in the opera.
I recall the look on her face – I can see it right now (in vivid memory).
I imagine driving into the traffic at the Etoile roundabout in Paris.
I intend to make that phone call in just a minute.
I am walking briskly up the stairs to get to the noon meeting.
I am hitting a spin serve to his backhand, springing upward with my legs.
Such characterizations of experiences we may call phenomenological descriptions. Each characterizes a particular act of consciousness from the subject’s point of view. If carefully crafted, as the subject attends to his or her own experience, the description captures the essence of that type of experience.
In practice, phenomenologists develop much more elaborate accounts of experience, analyzing complex structures of consciousness and interpreting their roles and significance in our experience. However, it is important to recognize the basic domain of study that is indicated by such simple descriptions of experience. Here our understanding of mind begins, and it is only by abstracting from such elementary phenomenological descriptions that we begin to develop the science of phenomenology as Husserl advocated it.
Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl
Husserl is considered by many as the founder of phenomenological movement. He was born is Prossnitz – then part of the Austro Hungarian Empire, now under Czech republic, on 8th April, 1859. His university education was done in Leipzig. His primary interest was is astronomy, mathematics, physics and philosophy.
Husserl’s central concern – consciousness
Consciousness is the basis of all experience and its mode of appearing seemed to be inextricably linked to the nature of time itself. Indeed, no experience would be possible without time consciousness; it enters into every experience. Somehow, out of this living flux of consciousness come the ‘achievements’ of ideal, timeless meanings, the graspings of transcendent objects and truths. For Husserl, objectivity was always a particular ‘achievement of consciousness’ and he was fascinated by the miracle of this process. Furthermore, consciousness was always particularised as someone’s consciousness and so the process of investigating this ‘originary sphere’ of meaning-origination must begin with oneself, with the rigorous self-examination which Husserl characterised as the standpoint of “transcendental solipsism” in the Cartesian Meditations.
Husserl’s central insight was that consciousness was the condition of all experience, indeed it constituted the world, but in such a way that the role of consciousness itself is obscured and not easy to isolate and describe. Husserl therefore constantly sought to explain how to overcome prejudices which stood in the way of the recognition of the domain of pure consciousness, leading to a new beginning in philosophy.
Husserlian phenomenological method:
in his mature years, Husserl thought phenomenological practice required a radical shift in viewpoint, a suspension or bracketing of the everyday natural attitude and all ‘world positing’ intentional acts which assumed the existence of the world, until the practitioner is led back into the domain of pure transcendental subjectivity. Without this leading back, this reduction, genuine phenomenological insight would be impossible in Husserl’s eyes; at best it would be no more than a naturalistic psychology of consciousness, which treated consciousness as just “a little tag-end of the world”.
Presuppositionless starting point:
Right from the outset, Husserl laid great stress on phenomenology’s principle of presuppositionlessness (Husserl, 1975). That is, the claim to have discarded philosophical
theorising in favour of careful description of phenomena themselves, to be attentive only to what is given in intuition. Phenomenology, at this stage, is a kind of conceptual clarification which is to form part of a wider ‘critique of reason’. But the key feature of this conceptual analysis was not that it engaged in an examination of the role of concepts in a language, but rather that it relied on the self-evident givenness of insights in intuition. The clarion cry of phenomenology, “back to the things themselves” (Husserl, 1975: 252) first announced in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, summed up this dependence on intuition. Indeed, this emphasis on the importance of ‘intuition’[1] in philosophy was, of course, in line with the mood of the times.
Getting towards Intuition – the pure form of knowledge
Husserl’s understanding of phenomenology grew out of his attempt to understand the nature of mathematical and logical truths, and from his more general concern with a critique of reason whereby all the key concepts required for knowledge would be rigorously scrutinised as to their essential meanings, their validity, and justification. Intuitions are the highest stage of knowledge and as such are hardwon insights, akin to mathematical discoveries. When I see that ‘2+2=4’, I have as clear an intuition as I can have. Husserl thought, however, that similar intuitive fulfilments occurred in many types of experience, and were not just restricted to the truths of mathematics. When I see a blackbird in the tree outside my window under normal conditions, I also have an intuition which is fulfilled by the certainty of the bodily presence of the blackbird presenting itself to me. There are a wide variety of different kinds of intuitive experience. Husserl was led by reflection on these kinds of experience to attempt to develop a classification of all conscious experiences, with an eye to considering their essential natures and the kinds of intuitive fulfilment which were proper to them.
In his mature works, Husserl called these intuitions ‘originary giving’ or ‘presentive’ intuitions. Thus, even after his transcendental turn, first publicly announced in Ideas I (1913), Husserl retained the primacy of intuition. In Ideas I, he announces his principle of all principles:
…that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing sourceof cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak in its “personal” actuality) offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.
The suspension of natural attitude:
In works written subsequent to the Logical Investigations, Husserl came to believe that the scrutiny of the structure and contents of our conscious experiences was inhibited and deeply distorted by the manner of our engagement with experience in ordinary life, where our practical concerns, folk assumptions, and smattering of scientific knowledge all got in the way of a pure consideration of experience as it is given to us. In order to ensure against theoretical stances creeping back in to the phenomenological viewing of the phenomena, Husserl proposed a number of steps, most notably the phenomenological epoché, or suspension of the natural attitude, as well as a number of methodological reductions and alterations of viewpoint (including the so-called ‘eidetic’ and ‘transcendental reductions’), in order to isolate the central essential features of the phenomena under investigation. This bracketing meant that all scientific, philosophical, cultural, and everyday assumptions had to be put aside—not so much to be negated as to be put out of court (in a manner not dissimilar to that of a member of the jury who is asked to suspend judgements and the normal kinds of association and drawing of inferences in order to focus exclusively on the evidence that has been presented to the court). Thus, in considering the nature of our conscious acts, we should not simply assume that the mind is some kind of a container that memories are like picture images, and so on. Nor should we assume any scientific or philosophical hypothesis, for example that conscious events are just brain events. Indeed, in genuine phenomenological viewing, we are not permitted any scientific or philosophical hypotheses. We should attend only to the phenomena in the manner of their being given to us, in their modes of givenness.
Rethink the lifeworld:
Focusing on what is given intuitively in experience led Husserl, in his late writings such as Experience and Judgment (1938),20 to focus on what he termed “prepredicative experience” (die vorprädikative Erfahrung), experience before it has been formulated in judgements and expressed in outward linguistic form, before it becomes packaged for explicit consciousness. As Husserl put it, all cognitive activity presupposes a domain that is passively pregiven, the existent world as I find it. Returning to examine this pregiven world is a return to the life-world (Lebenswelt), “the world in which we are always already living and which furnishes the ground for all cognitive performance and all scientific determination” (Husserl 1938: 38). Husserl claims that the world of our ordinary experience is a world of formed objects obeying universal laws as discovered by science, but the foundational experiences which give us such a world is rather different: “This experience in its immediacy knows neither exact space nor objective time and causality” (Husserl, 1938 p. 41). Returning to the life-world is to return to experience before such objectifications and idealisations (Husserl, 1938, p. 44).
In attempting to rethink the life-world, one has to understand the impact of the scientific world-view on our consciousness. Phenomenology has to interrogate the supposedly objective view of the sciences, what has been termed the ‘God’s eye’ perspective, or the ‘view from nowhere’. Husserlian phenomenology did not dispute the possibility of our gaining a ‘view from nowhere’, understood as the aperspectival, theoretical, ‘objective’ understanding of things.
Unearth the structure of intentionality: understanding the consciousness
The basic insight which allowed Husserl to explicate this conception of objectivity-for-subjectivity was his radical understanding of the intentional structure of consciousness. sserl took this basic structure of intentionality and, having stripped it of its metaphysical baggage, presented it as the basic thesis that all conscious experiences (Erlebnisse) are characterised by ‘aboutness’. Every act of loving is a loving of something, every act of seeing is a seeing of something. The point, for Husserl, is that, disregarding whether or not the object of the act exists, it has meaning and a mode of being for consciousness, it is a meaningful correlate of the conscious act. This allowed Husserl to explore a whole new domain—the domain of the meaning-correlates of conscious acts and their interconnections and binding laws—before one had to face ontological questions concerning actual existence, and so on. Phenomenology was to be true first philosophy. While it is true, then, that phenomenology turns to consciousness, it is proposing above all to be a science of consciousness based on elucidating the intentional structures of acts and their correlative objects, what Husserl called the noetic-noematic structure of consciousness.
Principal concepts:
Life world:
Of all the basic ideas that phenomenology developed, perhaps none is better known or widely appropriated across a number of disciplines than the concept of lifeworld. Most general sense of the word, lifeworld is itself derived from the problamitcs of a prior notion, that of the world. In fact Husserl had developed the notion of world in a transcendental register before he enriched it with his notion of the lifeworld. The life-world is a world as phenomenon, as correlative of our intentional experiences. Especially in his researches around Ideas II, Husserl gradually began to see the life-world as a layer to be inserted between the world of nature and the world of culture (or spirit). The life-world is the world of pre-theoretical experience which is also that which allows us to interact with nature and to develop our own cultural forms. Though, in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty presented the life-world as a turning in Husserl’s thought away from transcendental idealism, it is more accurate to view the layer of life-world as one more constituted layer of meaning uncovered by Husserlian reduction and itself constituted by the anonymous transcendental ego.
Natural attitude:
In his mature work, from 1905 onwards, Husserl distinguished between the 'philosophical' or 'transcendental' attitude and the 'natural attitude' (Husserl 1983: 17), according to which we accept the world and its forms of givenness as simply there, 'on hand' for us. The philosophical attitude arises when we recognize the natural attitude as one of naive. Borrowing from the Greek sceptics, Husserl terms this disruption or break with the natural attitude, epoche (literally 'check' or 'suspension', but used by ancient Greek philosophers to mean 'suspension of judgement'). He characterizes it as a 'certain refraining from judgement',12 an 'abstention' (Enthaltung), 'bracketing' (Einklammerung) or 'putting out of play7 (ausser Spiel zu setzen). According to this epoche, the objects and contents of our experience are now treated simply as phenomena: 'Thus to every psychological experience there corresponds, by way of the phenomenological reduction, a pure phenomenon that exhibits its immanent essence (taken individually) as an absolute givenness' (Husserl, 1983: 45).
[1] Bergson defines intuition in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1913) as “By intuition is meant the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within the object in order to coincide with that which is unique in it and consequently inexpressible.”
Introduction: 2
Brief views: 2
A simplified understanding of phenomenology: 2
Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl 4
Husserl’s central concern – consciousness. 4
Husserlian phenomenological method: 4
Presuppositionless starting point: 4
Getting towards Intuition – the pure form of knowledge. 5
The suspension of natural attitude: 5
Rethink the lifeworld: 6
Unearth the structure of intentionality: understanding the consciousness. 6
Principal concepts: 7
Life world: 7
Natural attitude: 7
Introduction:
Though there are a number of themes which characterise phenomenology, in general it never developed a set of dogmas or sedimented into a system. It claims, first and foremost, to be a radical way of doing philosophy, a practice rather than a system. Phenomenology is best understood as a radical, anti-traditional style of philosophising, which emphasises the attempt to get to the truth of matters, to describe phenomena, in the broadest sense as whatever appears in the manner, in which it appears, that is as it manifests itself to consciousness, to the experiencer. As such, phenomenology’s first step is to seek to avoid all misconstructions and impositions placed on experience in advance, whether these are drawn from religious or cultural traditions, from everyday common sense, or, indeed, from science itself. Explanations are not to be imposed before the phenomena have been understood from within.
Brief views:
Most of the founding figures of phenomenology emphasised the need for a renewal of philosophy as radical enquiry not bound to any historical tradition; and they advocated a rejection of all dogmatisms, a suspicion of a priori metaphysical premises and earlier accounts of the nature of knowledge, especially as found in Neo-Hegelianism and in positivism, and a steady directing of attention to the things themselves. Phenomenology was seen as reviving our living contact with reality, and as being remote from the arid and academic discussion of philosophical problems found in nineteenth-century philosophy, for example in the Neo-Kantian tradition.
Ø Husser’s Logical investigations – a fresh start of traditional logical problems
Ø Heidegger’s students of the 1920s claimed the experience of thinking came to life in their classes, as both Arendt and Gadamer have confirmed.
Ø This call to renew philosophy went hand in hand with an appeal to return to concrete, lived human experience in all its richness.
Ø In the 1930s, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty saw phenomenology as a means of going beyond narrow empiricist, psychological assumptions about human existence, broadening the scope of philosophy to be about everything, to capture life as it is lived.
Ø Sartre sees phenomenology as allowing one to delineate carefully one’s own affective, emotional, and imaginative life, not in a set of static objective studies such as one finds in psychology, but understood in the manner in which it is meaningfully lived.
Ø Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenology is closely attentive to the way in which other human beings inhabit the horizons of my experience and present themselves as a demand to me, a call on me to get outside the sphere of my own self-satisfaction, my own preoccupations.
A simplified understanding of phenomenology:
Husserl envisaged phenomenology as the descriptive, non-reductive science of whatever appears, in the manner of its appearing, in the subjective and intersubjective life of consciousness. He was fascinated by what he regarded as the 'mystery of mysteries': namely, the life of consciousness (Bewusstseinsleben), with its unique, inner temporal flow and its ability to gain objective knowledge of what transcends it. Phenomenology is therefore, the study of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.
By etymology, phenomenology is the study of phenomena, in the root meaning of appearances; or, better, the ways things appear to us in our experience, the ways we experience things in the world around us. We practice phenomenology (with or without the name) whenever we pause in reflection and ask, “What do I see?,” “How do I feel?,” “What am I thinking?,” “What do I intend to do?,” answering in the first person, specifying the way I experience what I see, feel, think, and so on. We produce a phenomenological description of an experience as we declare, attending to our own experience, “I see that fishing boat in the fog,” “I feel angry about what was just said,” “I think that Husserl read Hume,” “I intend to sweep the patio tomorrow.” Phenomenology thus characterizes a given form of consciousness from the person’s own subjective, first-person perspective. By contrast, neuroscience studies how consciousness is produced in a person’s brain, characterizing his neural-mental state from an objective, third-person perspective. Thus, where a brain scan (an MRI image) shows which parts of the brain are most active (burning glucose), a phenomenological description characterizes what the person is experiencing (“I see a fishing boat” or “I feel a pain in my left foot”).
We practice phenomenology, most basically, when we give first-person descriptions of various types of conscious experience. Here are some elementary forms of such descriptions:
I see that fishing boat on the edge of the fog bank rolling in on the Pacific.
I hear that helicopter whirling overhead.
I think that the whales are migrating south along the coast.
I desire a warm cup of green tea.
I feel exhilarated at the sound of the aria I hear being sung in the opera.
I recall the look on her face – I can see it right now (in vivid memory).
I imagine driving into the traffic at the Etoile roundabout in Paris.
I intend to make that phone call in just a minute.
I am walking briskly up the stairs to get to the noon meeting.
I am hitting a spin serve to his backhand, springing upward with my legs.
Such characterizations of experiences we may call phenomenological descriptions. Each characterizes a particular act of consciousness from the subject’s point of view. If carefully crafted, as the subject attends to his or her own experience, the description captures the essence of that type of experience.
In practice, phenomenologists develop much more elaborate accounts of experience, analyzing complex structures of consciousness and interpreting their roles and significance in our experience. However, it is important to recognize the basic domain of study that is indicated by such simple descriptions of experience. Here our understanding of mind begins, and it is only by abstracting from such elementary phenomenological descriptions that we begin to develop the science of phenomenology as Husserl advocated it.
Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl
Husserl is considered by many as the founder of phenomenological movement. He was born is Prossnitz – then part of the Austro Hungarian Empire, now under Czech republic, on 8th April, 1859. His university education was done in Leipzig. His primary interest was is astronomy, mathematics, physics and philosophy.
Husserl’s central concern – consciousness
Consciousness is the basis of all experience and its mode of appearing seemed to be inextricably linked to the nature of time itself. Indeed, no experience would be possible without time consciousness; it enters into every experience. Somehow, out of this living flux of consciousness come the ‘achievements’ of ideal, timeless meanings, the graspings of transcendent objects and truths. For Husserl, objectivity was always a particular ‘achievement of consciousness’ and he was fascinated by the miracle of this process. Furthermore, consciousness was always particularised as someone’s consciousness and so the process of investigating this ‘originary sphere’ of meaning-origination must begin with oneself, with the rigorous self-examination which Husserl characterised as the standpoint of “transcendental solipsism” in the Cartesian Meditations.
Husserl’s central insight was that consciousness was the condition of all experience, indeed it constituted the world, but in such a way that the role of consciousness itself is obscured and not easy to isolate and describe. Husserl therefore constantly sought to explain how to overcome prejudices which stood in the way of the recognition of the domain of pure consciousness, leading to a new beginning in philosophy.
Husserlian phenomenological method:
in his mature years, Husserl thought phenomenological practice required a radical shift in viewpoint, a suspension or bracketing of the everyday natural attitude and all ‘world positing’ intentional acts which assumed the existence of the world, until the practitioner is led back into the domain of pure transcendental subjectivity. Without this leading back, this reduction, genuine phenomenological insight would be impossible in Husserl’s eyes; at best it would be no more than a naturalistic psychology of consciousness, which treated consciousness as just “a little tag-end of the world”.
Presuppositionless starting point:
Right from the outset, Husserl laid great stress on phenomenology’s principle of presuppositionlessness (Husserl, 1975). That is, the claim to have discarded philosophical
theorising in favour of careful description of phenomena themselves, to be attentive only to what is given in intuition. Phenomenology, at this stage, is a kind of conceptual clarification which is to form part of a wider ‘critique of reason’. But the key feature of this conceptual analysis was not that it engaged in an examination of the role of concepts in a language, but rather that it relied on the self-evident givenness of insights in intuition. The clarion cry of phenomenology, “back to the things themselves” (Husserl, 1975: 252) first announced in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, summed up this dependence on intuition. Indeed, this emphasis on the importance of ‘intuition’[1] in philosophy was, of course, in line with the mood of the times.
Getting towards Intuition – the pure form of knowledge
Husserl’s understanding of phenomenology grew out of his attempt to understand the nature of mathematical and logical truths, and from his more general concern with a critique of reason whereby all the key concepts required for knowledge would be rigorously scrutinised as to their essential meanings, their validity, and justification. Intuitions are the highest stage of knowledge and as such are hardwon insights, akin to mathematical discoveries. When I see that ‘2+2=4’, I have as clear an intuition as I can have. Husserl thought, however, that similar intuitive fulfilments occurred in many types of experience, and were not just restricted to the truths of mathematics. When I see a blackbird in the tree outside my window under normal conditions, I also have an intuition which is fulfilled by the certainty of the bodily presence of the blackbird presenting itself to me. There are a wide variety of different kinds of intuitive experience. Husserl was led by reflection on these kinds of experience to attempt to develop a classification of all conscious experiences, with an eye to considering their essential natures and the kinds of intuitive fulfilment which were proper to them.
In his mature works, Husserl called these intuitions ‘originary giving’ or ‘presentive’ intuitions. Thus, even after his transcendental turn, first publicly announced in Ideas I (1913), Husserl retained the primacy of intuition. In Ideas I, he announces his principle of all principles:
…that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing sourceof cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak in its “personal” actuality) offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.
The suspension of natural attitude:
In works written subsequent to the Logical Investigations, Husserl came to believe that the scrutiny of the structure and contents of our conscious experiences was inhibited and deeply distorted by the manner of our engagement with experience in ordinary life, where our practical concerns, folk assumptions, and smattering of scientific knowledge all got in the way of a pure consideration of experience as it is given to us. In order to ensure against theoretical stances creeping back in to the phenomenological viewing of the phenomena, Husserl proposed a number of steps, most notably the phenomenological epoché, or suspension of the natural attitude, as well as a number of methodological reductions and alterations of viewpoint (including the so-called ‘eidetic’ and ‘transcendental reductions’), in order to isolate the central essential features of the phenomena under investigation. This bracketing meant that all scientific, philosophical, cultural, and everyday assumptions had to be put aside—not so much to be negated as to be put out of court (in a manner not dissimilar to that of a member of the jury who is asked to suspend judgements and the normal kinds of association and drawing of inferences in order to focus exclusively on the evidence that has been presented to the court). Thus, in considering the nature of our conscious acts, we should not simply assume that the mind is some kind of a container that memories are like picture images, and so on. Nor should we assume any scientific or philosophical hypothesis, for example that conscious events are just brain events. Indeed, in genuine phenomenological viewing, we are not permitted any scientific or philosophical hypotheses. We should attend only to the phenomena in the manner of their being given to us, in their modes of givenness.
Rethink the lifeworld:
Focusing on what is given intuitively in experience led Husserl, in his late writings such as Experience and Judgment (1938),20 to focus on what he termed “prepredicative experience” (die vorprädikative Erfahrung), experience before it has been formulated in judgements and expressed in outward linguistic form, before it becomes packaged for explicit consciousness. As Husserl put it, all cognitive activity presupposes a domain that is passively pregiven, the existent world as I find it. Returning to examine this pregiven world is a return to the life-world (Lebenswelt), “the world in which we are always already living and which furnishes the ground for all cognitive performance and all scientific determination” (Husserl 1938: 38). Husserl claims that the world of our ordinary experience is a world of formed objects obeying universal laws as discovered by science, but the foundational experiences which give us such a world is rather different: “This experience in its immediacy knows neither exact space nor objective time and causality” (Husserl, 1938 p. 41). Returning to the life-world is to return to experience before such objectifications and idealisations (Husserl, 1938, p. 44).
In attempting to rethink the life-world, one has to understand the impact of the scientific world-view on our consciousness. Phenomenology has to interrogate the supposedly objective view of the sciences, what has been termed the ‘God’s eye’ perspective, or the ‘view from nowhere’. Husserlian phenomenology did not dispute the possibility of our gaining a ‘view from nowhere’, understood as the aperspectival, theoretical, ‘objective’ understanding of things.
Unearth the structure of intentionality: understanding the consciousness
The basic insight which allowed Husserl to explicate this conception of objectivity-for-subjectivity was his radical understanding of the intentional structure of consciousness. sserl took this basic structure of intentionality and, having stripped it of its metaphysical baggage, presented it as the basic thesis that all conscious experiences (Erlebnisse) are characterised by ‘aboutness’. Every act of loving is a loving of something, every act of seeing is a seeing of something. The point, for Husserl, is that, disregarding whether or not the object of the act exists, it has meaning and a mode of being for consciousness, it is a meaningful correlate of the conscious act. This allowed Husserl to explore a whole new domain—the domain of the meaning-correlates of conscious acts and their interconnections and binding laws—before one had to face ontological questions concerning actual existence, and so on. Phenomenology was to be true first philosophy. While it is true, then, that phenomenology turns to consciousness, it is proposing above all to be a science of consciousness based on elucidating the intentional structures of acts and their correlative objects, what Husserl called the noetic-noematic structure of consciousness.
Principal concepts:
Life world:
Of all the basic ideas that phenomenology developed, perhaps none is better known or widely appropriated across a number of disciplines than the concept of lifeworld. Most general sense of the word, lifeworld is itself derived from the problamitcs of a prior notion, that of the world. In fact Husserl had developed the notion of world in a transcendental register before he enriched it with his notion of the lifeworld. The life-world is a world as phenomenon, as correlative of our intentional experiences. Especially in his researches around Ideas II, Husserl gradually began to see the life-world as a layer to be inserted between the world of nature and the world of culture (or spirit). The life-world is the world of pre-theoretical experience which is also that which allows us to interact with nature and to develop our own cultural forms. Though, in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty presented the life-world as a turning in Husserl’s thought away from transcendental idealism, it is more accurate to view the layer of life-world as one more constituted layer of meaning uncovered by Husserlian reduction and itself constituted by the anonymous transcendental ego.
Natural attitude:
In his mature work, from 1905 onwards, Husserl distinguished between the 'philosophical' or 'transcendental' attitude and the 'natural attitude' (Husserl 1983: 17), according to which we accept the world and its forms of givenness as simply there, 'on hand' for us. The philosophical attitude arises when we recognize the natural attitude as one of naive. Borrowing from the Greek sceptics, Husserl terms this disruption or break with the natural attitude, epoche (literally 'check' or 'suspension', but used by ancient Greek philosophers to mean 'suspension of judgement'). He characterizes it as a 'certain refraining from judgement',12 an 'abstention' (Enthaltung), 'bracketing' (Einklammerung) or 'putting out of play7 (ausser Spiel zu setzen). According to this epoche, the objects and contents of our experience are now treated simply as phenomena: 'Thus to every psychological experience there corresponds, by way of the phenomenological reduction, a pure phenomenon that exhibits its immanent essence (taken individually) as an absolute givenness' (Husserl, 1983: 45).
[1] Bergson defines intuition in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1913) as “By intuition is meant the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within the object in order to coincide with that which is unique in it and consequently inexpressible.”
Saturday, 15 January 2011
Functionalism and Structural Functionalism
Functionalism and structural functionalism
Table of content__________________________________
Introduction
Functionalism is
–
1. An ethnographic methodology distinctive
of cultural anthropology.
2. A historical school of anthropology
(also known as British school).
3. A school of sociology, which attempted
to integrate sociology, psychology, and anthropology.
4. A philosophy of social sciences in the
Anglo-American philosophical tradition.
Roots and basic premises
Underlying
functionalist theory is the fundamental metaphor of the living organism, its
several parts and organs, grouped and organized into a system, the function of
the various parts and organs being to sustain the organism, to keep its
essential processes going and enable it to reproduce.
Mentors:
Auguste Comte:
In trying to
legitimate the new discipline of sociology, Auguste Comte (1830–1842,
1851–1854) revived analogies made by the Greeks and, closer to his time, by Hobbes
and Rousseau that society is a kind of organism. In so doing, Comte effectively
linked sociology with the prestige of biological science. For functional
theory, then, society is like a biological organism that grows, and as a
consequence, its parts can be examined with respect to how they operate (or
function) to maintain the viability of the body social as it grows and
develops. Functionalist analyses therefore, examine the social significance of
phenomena, that is, the purpose they serve a particular society in maintaining
the whole (Jarvie 1973). As Comte emphasized (1851–1854, p. 239), there is a
‘‘true correspondence between Statistical Analysis of the Social Organism in
Sociology, and that of the Individual Organism in Biology’’ (1851–1854, p. 239).
Moreover, Comte went so far as to ‘‘decompose structure anatomically into
elements, tissues, and organs’’ (1851– 1854, p. 240) and to ‘‘treat the Social
Organism as definitely composed of the Families which are the true elements or
cells, next the Classes or Castes which are its proper tissues, and lastly, of
the cities and Communes which are its real organs’’ (pp. 211–212). Yet, since
these analogies were not systematically pursued by Comte, his main contribution
was to give sociology its name and to reintroduce organismic reasoning into the
new science of society.
Herbert Spencer:
Spencer used the
organismic analogy to create an explicit form of functional analysis. Drawing
upon materials from his monumental The Principles of Biology (1864–1867), Spencer’s
The Principles of Sociology (1874–1896) is filled with analogies between
organisms and society as well as between ecological processes (variation,
competition, and selection) and societal evolution (which he saw as driven by
war). Spencer did not see society as an actual organism; rather, he
conceptualized ‘‘superorganic systems’’ (organization of organisms) as
revealing certain similarities in their ‘‘principles of arrangement’’ to
biological organisms (1874–1896, part 2, pp. 451–462). In so doing, he
introduced the notion of ‘‘functional requisites’’ or ‘‘needs,’’ thereby
creating functionalism. For Spencer, there were three basic requisites of
superorganic systems: (1) the need to secure and circulate resources, (2) the
need to produce usable substances, and (3) the need to regulate, control, and
administer system activities (1874–1896, part 2, p. 477). Thus, any pattern of
social organization reveals these three classes of functional requisites, and
the goal of sociological analysis is to see how these needs are met in
empirical social systems.
Emile Durkheim:
Later
functionalists produced somewhat different lists of requisites. Émile Durkheim
argued that sociological explanations ‘‘must seek separately the efficient
cause [of a phenomenon]—and the function it fulfills’’ (1895, p. 96), but, in
contrast to Spencer, he posited only one functional requisite: the need for
social integration. For Durkheim, then, sociological analysis would involve
assessment of the causes of phenomena and their consequences or functions for
meeting the needs of social structures for integration.
Two major versions:
The initial
split between functionalists and structural functionalists began with two
pioneering sociologist philosophers, viz. Herbert Spencer who adopted what is
later termed as functionalism, and a second version by Emile Durkheim, later termed
as structural functionalism. Two versions of functionalism developed between
1910 and 1930: biocultural (or psychological) functionalism, the approach
advocated by Malinowski, and structural- functionalism, the approach advanced
by Radcliffe-Brown. With Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski pushed for a paradigm
shift in British anthropology, a change from the speculative, historical to the
ahistorical study of social institutions. This theoretical shift gave rise to
functionalism and established fieldwork as the constitutive experience of
social anthropology (Kuper 1973, Young 1991).
Mentors:
Functionalism/ biocultural/ psychological functionalism:
A functional
explanation accounts for the existence of a phenomena or carrying out of an
action in terms of its consequences – its contribution to maintaining a stable
social whole.
Contributors:
Bronislaw Malinowski:
Polish, intellectual, aristocratic family Doctorate
in math & physics 1908, age 24 Inspired by Frazer's Golden Bough 1910
London School of Economics Ph.D. with C.G. Seligman (Torres Straits expedition)
1913, The Family Among Australian Aborigines Age 30, 2 doctorates, a book--no
fieldwork 1915 - 1918 Trobriand Islands.
Approach towards functionalism
Malinowski
suggested that individuals have physiological needs and that social
institutions develop to meet these needs. There are also culturally derived
needs and four basic "instrumental needs" (economics, social control,
education, and political organization), that require institutional devices.
Each institution has personnel, a charter, a set of norms or rules, activities,
material apparatus (technology), and a function. Malinowski believed that
uniform psychological responses are correlates of physiological needs. He
argued that satisfaction of these needs transformed the cultural instrumental
activity into an acquired drive through psychological reinforcement
(Goldschmidt 1996:510; Voget 1996:573).
Malinowskian explanation:
Malinowski's
functionalism is best discussed in relation to the Trobriand ethnography with
the aid of which it was developed. One theme here was the distinction between
magic, religion, and science, which Malinowski broadly took over from Frazer
(1890). In this view, science was empirical, rational knowledge, while magic
was reasoning from false premises, though both had instrumental purpose.
Malinowski detected both in Trobriand society, a derogation from Frazer's
placing of them at opposite ends of a simple evolutionary sequence that linked
but did not unify different societal types. This is connected with Malinowski's
further observation that while some rituals, such as healing, were means to an
end, others, such as the festival of Milamala (when ancestral spirits return
briefly from Tuma, the next world), were not. Further, the Trobrianders could
give a clear reason for the former, but could only refer the latter to
"custom." This also appears to be the distinction between magic and religion
for Malinowski, though he also grouped them together as being miraculous,
mythological, and linked with emotional stress. However, this was no picture of
the Trobrianders being sunk in fear and awe for most of their lives. On the
contrary, Malinowski regarded them as essentially practical and rational: it
was only when reason, the empirical and scientific, could no longer provide an
explanation that magic and religion was resorted to. Thus a Trobriander knew
how to build a canoe technologically, but to cope with the emotional stress of
going on a sea voyage into the unknown he needed magic and ritual. Similarly,
inshore fishing was a purely technical matter of no great consequence, but
open-sea fishing required magic. Religion, on the other hand, was essentially a
response to the fear of annihilation through death (cf. Milamala above), while myth
was important in providing a charter for present social norms and action,
especially as regards the points of tension in society (e.g., the fact that the
matrilineal rule of descent in Trobriand society meant that a man had to
support his sister's children as much as his own).
Malinowski produced a similar
psychological theory of needs in his treatment of kinship. Following Edward
Westermarck (1891), one of his teachers at the LSE, he postulated the universal
existence and primacy of the monogamous nuclear family, seeing it as the
location of the satisfaction of human needs, such as food, shelter, and
companionship. Further, he distinguished it from wider groupings, such as the clan,
which he thought was never a domestic institution, a separation later
articulated especially strongly by Meyer Fortes. The link between the two was
provided by his theory of the "extension of sentiments," namely, that
sentiments generated within the family were extended to more distant
relationships within the clan. This theory reappears in respect of how terms
for relatives are learned in infancy: the child learns to identify his
relatives by starting from the nearest and proceeding to more remotely related
ones, by an analogous process of extension from the nuclear family
outwards here, of knowledge as much as
sentiment. Generally, however, Malinowski was derisive of what he called
"kinship algebra"; this was part of his reaction to Rivers's approach
to kinship, which he felt was unduly reliant on the analysis of kinship
terminologies as well as of clan systems. Instead, he postulated that kinship
extensions were essentially metaphors, the real meaning being the primary one.
The extensionist view was to bear fruit in the later American school of
semantic analysis, led by Harold Scheffler and Floyd Lounsbury (1971).
SYNOPTIC
SURVEY OF BIOLOGICAL AND DERIVED NEEDS AND THEIR SATISFACTION IN CULTURE
|
Basic Needs (Individual)
|
Direct Responses (Organized, i.e.,
Collective)
|
Instrumental Needs
|
Responses to Instrumental Needs
|
Symbolic and Integrative Needs
|
Systems of Thought and Faith
|
|
Nutrition
(metabolism)
|
Commissariat
|
Renewal
of cultural apparatus
|
Economics
|
Transmission
of experience by means of precise, consistent principles
|
Knowledge
|
|
Reproduction
|
Marriage
and family
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bodily
comforts
|
Domicile
and dress
|
Characters
of behavior and their sanctions
|
Social
control
|
|
|
|
Safety
|
Protection
and defense
|
|
|
Means
of intellectual, emotional, and pragmatic control of destiny and chance
|
Magic
Religion |
|
Relaxation
|
Systems
of play and repose
|
Renewal
of personnel
|
Education
|
|
|
|
Movement
|
Set
activities and systems of communication
|
|
|
|
|
|
Growth
|
Training
and Apprenticeship
|
Organization
of force and compulsion
|
Political
organization
|
Communal
rhythm of recreation, exercise and rest
|
Art
Sports Games Ceremonial |
(SOURCE:
Malinowski’s Basic Human Needs as presented in Langness 1987:80)
Malinowski’s works:
Malinowski's
main work consists of his Trobriand ethnography, published piecemeal as a
series of separate studies, each treating a different theme. The first, Argonauts of the western Pacific (1922),
dealt with exchange through the Kula cycle and considerably influenced Marcel Mauss’s
(1954) exchange theory. The sexual life
of savages (1929) contains his views on the family, kinship, and marriage
(see also Malinowski 1930), and Coral
Gardens and Their Magic (1935) treats of the relationship between technique
and ritual in Trobriand gardening. Also important is the self-explanatory
collection Magic, science and religion (1948). The early The family among the Australian Aborigines (1913) is an application
of Westermarck's theories of the Family to published sources on Australia,
whereas the posthumously published collection A scientific theory of culture
(1944) is more explicitly theoretical. Mention should also be made of
Malinowski's personal diaries (1967) from the years he was in the field, which
were published posthumously by his second wife without his authority. They give
considerable insight into his state of mind in this period and are frequently
shocking because of his unsympathetic attitude toward the people with whom he
was living, which is quite at variance with his published writings.
Structural functionalism:
Structural
functionalism is one type of consensus theory it posits that society is based
on mutual agreements. It sees the creation and maintenance of shared values and
norms as crucial to society, and views social change as a slow, orderly
process. Examples of prominent consensus theorists include Auguste Comte, Émile
Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, Talcott Parsons, and Robert Merton. These theories
stand in contrast to conflict theories, such as those of Karl Marx, that view
the world as based on a system of oppressive hierarchies, social order at the
whim of dominant groups, and social change as rapid and disorderly resulting
from struggles between groups.
Contributors:
Talcott persons:
Although he had
published The Structure of Social Action in 1937, it was not until The Social System (1951) and Towards a General Theory of Action (1951)
were completed that Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) emerged as the most influential
contributor to structural functionalism. There are important differences in
Parsons’s major writings, but constant throughout his career was the ambition
to formulate a systematic general theory that he described as “… a conceptual
scheme for the analysis of social systems in terms of the action frame of
reference” (Parsons 1951: 3). For Parsons, the fundamental starting point for
constructing any scientifi c theory is to establish an abstract frame of reference.
In the scientifi c study of social action, the empirical basis for the frame of
reference is a group of interacting individuals (social actors). Social actors
have particular goals that they wish to achieve, and to realize those goals
they must take advantage of opportunities (means) that are available under a
particular set of conditions (situations). Parsons was clear that none of these
elements can be reduced to the others, and he sought to formulate an action
frame of reference for the study of social action that was capable of
accounting for the individual and situational factors motivating people to act
in the ways that they do.
The systems(structure) point of view:
He answered this
question from the viewpoint of structural functionalism and outlined what he
believed are its major tenets:
(1) Systems
are ordered and their parts are all interdependent.
(2) systems
tend toward a goal of equilibrium or self-maintenance;
(3) systems
may be either inert or change in an ordered manner;
(4) each
part of the system has an effect on the forms the other parts can take;
(5) systems
create and maintain boundaries separating them from their environments;
(6) allocation
and integration are necessary for a system to reach a certain state of equilibrium;
and
(7) systems
will tend toward self-maintenance by maintaining their boundaries,
the interdependent relationship among parts, and the relationship between
parts and the whole; by controlling variations in the environment; and by controlling
tendencies of the system to change from within.
The functions [AGIL scheme]:
In addition to
structures, Parsons was also concerned with functions. Parsons saw functions as
those activities that had the goal of fulfilling a need of the system. He
believed that there were four necessary functional imperatives of all systems: [A] adaptation (how a system copes with
its outside environment by both adapting to it and by adapting the environment
to meet the needs of the system), [G] goal
attainment (the definition and achievement of the primary goals of the system),
[I] integration (how the system
regulates the relationship of its various parts as well as the relationship
among the other three functional imperatives), and [L] latency, or pattern maintenance (how the system provides,
maintains, and rejuvenates the motivation of individuals and the cultural
patterns that stimulate and maintain that motivation). These functional
imperatives are known as Parsons’s AGIL scheme.
Functions become
integrated with systems in Parsons’s theory as each component of the AGIL
scheme is handled by a different system. Most generally, adaptation is handled
by the behavioral organism that adjusts to and transforms the outside world.
Goal attainment is handled by the personality system that defines the goals of
the system and mobilizes he necessary resources to reach outlined goals.
Integration is done by the social system that controls the various components
of the system. Latency is performed by the cultural system that provides
individuals with norms and values to motivate them to action.
Robert K. Merton:
Merton
(1910–2003) became one of Parsons’s most influential collaborators in the
structural functionalist orientation, but he also emerged as one of Parsons’s
most important critics. Merton believes that Parsons’s emphasis on developing
comprehensive theoretical systems did not facilitate the process of actually
doing sociological research. In contrast to the abstraction and deduction that
Parsons promotes, Merton argues that sociologists should work on testable and
researchable hypotheses in specific situations. He also argues that
sociologists should gradually develop theories from empirical evidence. What is
lacking in functional analysis, insists Merton, is an integration of theory and
research, a problem confounded by the failure in sociological discourse to
distinguish progressively between “the history of theory” and “the systematics
of theory.”
Functional explanation: the net balance
Merton defined
functions as those consequences that lead to the adjustment or adaptation of a
system. In addition, he argued that not all functions had positive consequences
and that some, in fact, were better described as dysfunctions. In addition,
nonfunctions are those consequences that have no effect at all on the system.
The development of dysfunctions and nonfunctions to complement the existing
theory of functions led Merton to develop the idea of a net balance. A net
balance is an understanding of the relative weight of functions and
dysfunctions in a given system. It is more of a theoretical orientation then an
empirical tool because the magnitude and evaluation of what constitutes
functions and dysfunctions are highly subjective. The issue of how to study a
net balance led Merton to the idea of levels of functional analysis. He argued
that society did not have to be studied as a whole but those organizations,
groups, and other subcomponents of society were also valid as research topics.
Merton, in fact, was a proponent of “middle-range” theories. Thus, what is the
net balance of those functions, and dysfunctions, at one level may well be
different at another level.
Manifest and latent functions:
Another valuable
contribution of Merton to the field of structural functionalism was the idea of
manifest and latent functions. Manifest functions are those that are intended,
whereas latent functions are those that are unintended yet still functional for
the system. Closely related to the idea of latent functions is that of
unanticipated consequences, although this term encompasses not only those
unintended consequences that are functional for the system but also those that
are dysfunctional and nonfunctional as well. In sum Latent functions are those
objective consequences of a cultural item which are neither intended nor
recognized by the members of a society. Manifest functions are those objective
consequences contributing to the adjustment or adaptation of the system which
are intended and recognized by participants in the system (Kaplan and Manners
1972:58).
Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore:
In1945, they
wrote what is perhaps the best-known piece of structural functional literature on
the topic of social stratification. They argued that a system of stratification
is not only functional but also necessary for societies to persist and remain
healthy. This idea led them to argue that a classless society had never existed
because the need for a system of stratification had always created such a
system. They did not, however, believe that the creation of such a stratified
system was always a conscious undertaking on the part of society but, rather,
that it could be, and often was, an “unconsciously evolved device.”
Following their
structural functional orientation, Davis and Moore saw stratification in
society not in terms of people but in terms of positions. This meant that they
were primarily interested in how certain positions came to be ranked higher or
lower than other positions, not in how certain individuals came to fill those
ranked positions. They did believe, however, that one of the biggest problems
faced by society was how to get the right people to fill the right positions
and then, more important, how to keep them there. Their argument was that some
positions in society are more pleasant to occupy, some are more crucial for the
health and continuity of the society as a whole, and different types of
positions require different types of knowledge and skills. Those positions that
are generally attributed with a higher social ranking (e.g., politicians,
bankers, lawyers) are not as pleasant to occupy, are more important to the
overall health of society, and require the highest level of skill and
education. Consequently, it is these positions that must also carry the highest
level of social prestige, monetary compensation, and available leisure time.
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown:
Born 1881, Educated
at Cambridge, Fieldwork 1906 - 1908, Andaman Islands, Influenced by
Durkheim--rewrote his thesis Published The
Andaman Islanders in 1922, 1910 - 1912
Western Australia, 1916 - 1919
Tonga, then South Africa and Australia University of Chicago, 1931.
Approach towards structural functionalism:
Radcliffe-Brown
focused attention on social structure. He suggested that a society is a system
of relationships maintaining itself through cybernetic feedback, while
institutions are orderly sets of relationships whose function is to maintain
the society as a system. Radcliffe-Brown, following Auguste Comte, believed
that the social constituted a separate "level" of reality distinct
from those of biological forms and inorganic matter. Furthermore, he believed
that explanations of social phenomena had to be constructed within the social
level. He believed that individuals were replaceable, transient occupants of social
roles. Unlike Malinowski's emphasis on individuals, Radcliffe-Brown considered
individuals irrelevant (Goldschmidt 1996:510).
Drawing influence from Durkheim sets
his goal of investigation as Compare social structure cross-culturally. He felt
that culture was a particularly useful mode of investigation. What was
important was not what indigenes were thinking or believed, but how they
behaved and what structural features shaped this. This derived from his
positivism, that is to say he stressed observable social facts rather than
abstract ideas. Social structure was the network of actual social relations. Given
his attempt at scientific rigor his anthropology was a nomothetic inquiry. The
search for laws and generalisations was paramount and it is not surprising that
he launched telling attacks on what he called ‘conjectural history,’ the mode
of reconstructing cultural history so popular among theorists who sought to
explain non-functional customs as ‘survivals’ from an earlier epoch.
Radcliffe-Brown believed that employing an inductivist and supposedly
empiricist approach could develop natural laws of society – he made much of
verifiable facts and observations – and comparisons. Such an approach he
believed could lead to a single unified social science. His articulate espousal
of positivism, done with exceptional economy and clarity at a time when many
believed that a scientific anthropology was attainable, led to a cult like
status Indeed he did much to ingrain the notion that fieldwork was of a lower status
than the comparative analysis of other people’s ethnographies of what he had an
outstanding knowledge. He investigated what principles account for different
structures which in turn Leads to function which is to investigate How do
structures maintain society? For him Function is the role of structure in
social continuity. He stated that Social system (society) has a functional
unity: All parts work together well enough to maintain society. As the
traditional societies studied by early anthropologists were generally without a
written history, anthropologists were confronted with the problem of explaining
the existence of activities and structures in these societies. The explanatory
problem became particularly acute in the post–World War I period with the
demise of evolutionism and diffusionism as deciphering tools (Turner and
Maryanski 1979). Functional analysis provided a novel alternative: Analyze
structures such as kinship or activities such as rituals in terms of their
functions for maintaining the society. It was A. R. Radcliffe-Brown ([1914]
1922, 1924, 1935, 1952) who sustained the Durkheimian tradition by emphasizing
the importance of integrative needs and then analyzing how structures—most
notably kinship systems—operate to meet such integrative requisites.
In order to
break with the older mode of anthropology, and as a tribute to Durkheim’s
influence, he labelled his interests comparative sociology rather than
anthropology Together with some of the ideas propounded by Malinowski this
approach is often seen as the basis for what becccame known as Structural-Functional anthropology. This
very abstract theoretical formulation displayed a number of characteristics.
All customs served a functional purpose. Its key metaphor was the organic
analogy that compared society to a biological organism, which was derived from
Spencer and Durkheim. Everything was interrelated and changing one part would
result ina ripple effect. Except at such timings of change, it was assumed that
society existed in equilibrium. Ultimately, distortions would self re-adjust,
and following from this it was implied that societies were normally static.
More than Malinowski, he seemed aware of the potential flaws of Functionalism. Certainly he did not
naively be,ieve that every custom had had a positive function, noting that
people could be bonded together by shared hatred as much as by shared love, and
in later life he proved to be quite amenable to historical studies His
theoretical musings had a significant influence beyond anthropology on
sociologists such as Kingsley Devis and Robert K. Merton.
Criticisms:
structural
functionalism has also been critiqued by many in the field. A number of the
more noteworthy critiques include (1) that it is ahistorical (it did in fact
develop in reaction to the historical evolutionary approach of many
anthropologists at that time); (2) it is unable to deal with contemporary
processes of social change; (3) it cannot adequately deal with conflict (it is
generally viewed as a consensus theory and hence in contradiction to conflict
theory); (4) it has a conservative bias that maintains the status quo and the
dominating power of the elite class; (5) it is generally too abstract, vague,
and ambiguous to bear much relationship to the real world; (6) the theories are
too grand and ambitious when more historically and situation relevant theories
might be more appropriate; (7) there are inadequate methods to research the
questions of interest; and (8) comparative analysis is virtually impossible.
Turner and
Maryanski (1979) also saw the problems of teleology and tautology plaguing
structural functionalism. More specifically, they saw illegitimate teleology as
a problem. It is legitimate to assume that society has certain goals and that
it brings certain structures and functions into creation to achieve these
goals. What many structural functionalists do, however, that is illegitimate is
to assume that the current structures and functions in society are the only
ones that could have been created to achieve these goals. In addition,
tautology is a problem because both the whole and its parts are defined in
terms of the other. The whole is defined in terms of its parts and the various
parts are then defined in terms of the whole. Hence, neither is truly defined
at all.
Further reading:
Related articles in this blog:
Functionalism - the basic anthhropological idea - click here
Basic theories - click here
ü Alexander, Jeffrey C., ed. 1985. Neofunctionalism. Beverly Hills , CA
ü Bourgatta, E.F. and Montgomery New York
ü Camic, Charles. 1992. “Reputation and Predecessor Selection: Parsons and the Institutionalists.” American Journal of Sociology 57: 421–445.
ü Davis, Kingsley. 1959. “The Myth of Functional Analysis as a Special Method in Sociology and Anthropology.” American Sociological Review 24: 757–772.
ü Kroeber, Alfred L., and Talcoo Parsons. 1958. “The Concept of Culture and of Social System.” American Sociological Review 23: 582–583.
ü Ritzer, G. (Ed.). Encyclopaedia of social theory, vol – 2. Thousand Oaks
ü http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/functionalism/#WhaFun (Stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy)
ü http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/cultures/cultures.php?culture=Functionalism (Murphy’s collection of anthropological materials)
ü www.soci.canterbury.ac.nz/resources/biograph/parsons.shtml (Talcott persons biography)
ü www.2fmg.uva.nl/sociosite/topics/sociologists.html (Famous sociologists)
ü www.faculty.rsu.edu~felwell/Theorists/Merton (Merton’s functional analaysis)
ü www.bolender.com/Sociological%20Theory/Parsons,%20Talcoo/parsons,_talcoo.htm (all about parsons)
Brief introduction to functionalism and structural functionalism
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