Abstract
This chapter argues that contrary to its own self-image, the so-called “common sense” of the natural attitude is actually highly prejudicial. Far from being an unmediated direct intuition of “the facts” of, say, a hate incident, the natural attitude generates interpretations that are driven by a number of underlying presuppositions. These in effect “mediate” even the most apparently “immediate” intuition of seemingly “objective facts” and “factual patterns” of hate crime. As a result, the natural attitude’s objectivism encourages distinctly positivist quantitative forms of hate crime research. At this stage, we leave open the question of whether its mediation by far from objective presuppositions tends to contradict and undermine such positivism; and if so, do the difficulties created in this way tend to point the way forward to a diametrically opposite radically qualitative approach of Husserl?
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Notes
- 1.
Husserl 1970: 68.
- 2.
In his Crisis Part Two, Husserl contrasts what he terms ‘physicalistic objectivism’ or ‘naïve’ objectivism with his own position of ‘transcendental subjectivism,’ which analyses the appearance of the life-world to our lived experience as a performance accomplishment of (inter)subjectivity. Cf. Hua 1: 5, 46.
- 3.
Sebastian Luft, ‘Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitude,’ 31 Continental Philosophy Review (1998): 153–70.
- 4.
He argues in Cartesian Meditations that Descartes represented a major figure in pioneering a science of consciousness, a precursor to phenomenology, in opposition to traditional forms of objectivism, albeit in a way that itself ultimately relapsed back into objectivism: ‘Descartes, in fact, inaugurates an entirely new kind of philosophy. Changing its total style, philosophy takes a radical turn: from naive Objectivism to transcendental subjectivism – which, with its ever new but always inadequate attempts, seems to be striving toward some necessary final form, wherein its true sense and that of the radical transmutation itself might become disclosed. Should not this continuing tendency imply an eternal significance; and, for us, a task imposed by history itself, a great task in which we are all summoned to collaborate?’ Husserl 1973: 4. In the Crisis work he addresses the need to overcome naïve ‘objectivistic philosophy’ (Husserl 1970: 59); and why a critical self-understanding of the transformation that took place whereby, in early modern philosophy of say David Hume, objectivism became transformed into ‘transcendental subjectivism’ (Ibid: 68).
- 5.
Husserl 1970: § 14.
- 6.
Husserl 1965: 78.
- 7.
In places, Husserl terms an especially problematic manifestation of the objectivism of the natural attitude as a ‘naturalistic attitude.’ See his 1910–1911 essay ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’ (Husserl 1965) and his 1910/1911 Basic Problems of Phenomenology lecture course, as well as Ideas II § 49 where it is contrasted with the personalistic attitude of human interaction within everyday life. To avoid confusion, we will avoid this terminology by referring simply to “objectivism,” with the caveat that the latter is often shaped by naturalistic presuppositions that themselves will require clarification by a later section.
- 8.
Whether this model of science is that of twentieth – let alone twenty-first – century natural science is open to debate, given the implications of theories of relativity and sub-nuclear randomness that problematise the idea of a Newtonian universe governed by natural scientific laws that, in principle, can explain all observed and observable facts.
- 9.
Husserl 1970: 176.
- 10.
Husserl 1970: 315.
- 11.
Husserl 1982: 54: ‘the world is a universe of “what exists in itself” … over against “us”’.
- 12.
Heidegger 2005: 50.
- 13.
Later in this chapter, our section of the Husserlian critique of objectivism will argue that this tendency needs to be expressly recognised as a prejudicial bias exhibiting specifically ideological dimensions.
- 14.
Hua 25: 8.
- 15.
That is from a Newtonian physics prior to the problematising effects of twentieth century theories of relativity and discoveries of the relative indeterminacy and random character of behaviour at the sub-atomic level.
- 16.
For Husserl, the natural attitude involves a “common sense” form of rough and ready “knowing-about” what is pre-given as straightforwardly “on hand” involving no conceptualisation; an apparent – but superficial – pre-reflective immediacy of what’s what and who is who: ‘By my seeing, touching, hearing, and so forth, and in the different modes of sensuous perception, corporeal physical things with some spatial distribution or other are simply there for me, “on hand” in the literal or the figurative sense, whether or not I am particularly heedful of them and busied with them in my considering, thinking, feeling, or willing. Animate beings too – human beings, let us say – are immediately there for me … They are also present as actualities in my field of intuition even when I do not heed them. But it is not necessary that they, and likewise that other objects, be found directly in my field of perception. Along with the ones now perceived, other actual objects are there for me as determinate, as more or less well known, without being themselves perceived or, indeed, present in any other mode of intuition.’ Husserl 1982: 51.
- 17.
Husserl 1982: 57. This represents; ‘a never deviating concatenated experience…’ Ibid: n19.
- 18.
Husserl 1964: 29.
- 19.
One avowed naturalist characterised naturalism as ‘philosophical position, empirical in method, that regards everything that exists or occurs to be conditioned in its existence or occurrence by causal factors within one all-encompassing system of nature, however spiritual or purposeful or rational some of these things and events may in their functions and value prove to be.’ S. P. Lamprecht, in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Y. H. Krikorian, New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1944: 18.
- 20.
Husserl 1965: 79.
- 21.
Ibid: 80.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Hua, 25: 9; Hua, 27: 264.
- 24.
Hua, 30: 18.
- 25.
Husserl 1964: 3.
- 26.
Husserl 1964: 37–8.
- 27.
‘[A]nother prejudice: the belief in an absolute world, a world existing in itself, as the substrate of truths in themselves, which, without question, pertain to it.’ Husserl 1969: 277.
- 28.
Husserl 1970: 6–7.
- 29.
Our later expressly evaluative section will consider whether such an extension amounts to a unwarranted over-extension.
- 30.
Martin Heidegger, ‘Introduction to phenomenological research,’ Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005: 47–8.
- 31.
Husserl 1970: § 67.
- 32.
‘It is only a misleading prejudice to believe that the methods of historically given a priori sciences, all of which are exclusively exact sciences of ideal objects, must serve forthwith as models for every new science, particularly for our transcendental phenomenology – as though there could be eidetic sciences of but one single methodic type, that of “exactness.”’ Husserl 1982: 169.
- 33.
Heidegger summary of Husserl’s critique of naturalism states: ‘The basic character of this science, apart from its rigor, is distinguished by the fact that its results can be formulated in laws. A law-likeness that is scientific in the eminent sense is called “universally binding.” The binding character of these propositions is so predominant and at the same time so imposing in human existence that it presents the genuine motive that leads to absolutizing the idea of this science. …It is thus no accident that a science that has elevated itself to such rigorousness, as natural science has, makes this task its own and that the specific objects of philosophy succumb to natural science.’ 2005: 48.
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Salter, M., McGuire, K. (2020). Superimposing a Problematic Objectivism. In: The Lived Experience of Hate Crime. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 111. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33888-6_3
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