Abstract
This article aims at clarifying the philosophical (=phenomenological) implication of Talcott Parsons’s analytical realism. Generally, his theory is understood as being confrontational to phenomenology; however, in his first book, The Structure of Social Action, Parsons positively referred to Husserl’s Logical Investigations. They shared a sense of crisis: Husserl thought that there was no certain basis in modern science, and Parsons had the feeling that there was no common theory to establish sociology as a science. Thus, both of them criticized the factual sciences of positivism (positivistic empiricism) and showed a strong orientation to the general theory. For this, they depended on conceptual realism (Platonic realism). According to Husserl, scientific knowledge will be arbitrary if the Ideal is not there as the norm of fact. He believed that in truth all people always see Ideas. Similarly, Parsons thought that in truth all people always act toward the Ideal, because the Ideal element is necessarily found through the logical framework of sociology, i.e., the action frame of reference. Hence, he maintained that the Ideal element that gives a normative orientation to actions is real, though analytical, insofar as the social order is established.
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Notes
Although positivism and empiricism do not necessarily logically imply one another, the scientific materialism of classical mechanism and the utilitarianism of classical economics are considered examples of a combination of positivism and empiricism. See Parsons (1968/1937: 70).
According to Whitehead, this fallacy was produced by the mechanistic theory of nature, which has resigned supreme since the seventeenth century, and which is the orthodox creed of physical science. It corresponds to a distortion of nature that Henri Bergson called the intellectual “spatialisation” of things. However, unlike Bergson, Whitehead himself thought that such distortion is not a vice necessary to the intellectual apprehension of nature, but is merely the accidental error that results from expressing concrete facts under the guise of very abstract logical constructions (1967/1925: 50f.). In sum, he considered that criticism should be directed towards mistaking such abstraction for concrete realities, because the abstraction itself is inevitable in order to apprehend concrete objects.
Incidentally, the reason why Parsons expressed skepticism about Schutz’s phenomenological analysis appears to be because Schutz looked like an empiricist. Parsons thought, “what you [Schutz] mean essentially is an ontological reality, what a concrete real actor ‘really’ experiences” (1978/1941: 88; see also 90).
The version of Logical Investigations referred to in the bibliography of The Structure of Social Action is not the revised second edition, but the first edition published in 1900 and 1901 (see Parsons 1968/1937: xxxvii). This article uses the former. Incidentally, judging from Parsons’s description, his concern about this book seems to have been limited to the objectivistic part from volume one to the fourth investigation of volume two. In contrast, Husserl himself later developed the other part (the fifth and sixth investigations of volume two) into the phenomenology of transcendental subjects, although it was criticized as an anachoresis to psychologism at that time.
This note was documented in the second edition of Logical Investigations. The part to which Husserl refers in his own article about logic shows the distinction between independent content and non-independent content: “[b]ecause it is naturally not considered that the accidental living experience of self-evidence, which enters only in the belated reflection and by the favorable disposition, makes the content a dependent one, so the determination ought to be objectively turned in an easily understandable way. There is objectively the law that a content of the concerning kind can exist only as a part of a whole, that is, associated with other contents” (1979/1894: 133, fn. 1).
Especially in the third investigation, “On the Theory of Wholes and Parts,” and in the fourth investigation, “The Distinction between Independent and Non-Independent Meanings and the Idea of Pure Grammar”.
According to Arthur O. Lovejoy, Gottfried W. Leibniz was one of representative philosophers who exemplified the Platonic idea of the “Chain of Being”. Lovejoy says, “Leibniz was less concerned (I do not say he was not at all concerned) to maintain that the reason for a thing is a ‘good,’ in the common sense of conduciveness to the subjective satisfaction of God or man or animal, than to maintain that the thing at all events has some reason, that it is logically grounded in something else which is logically ultimate” (1936: 146).
Such anti-intellectual determinism, i.e., scientific fatalism of positivism, was severely criticized by the “generation of the 1890s” mentioned above. This generation was never interested in irrationalism. Rather, it regarded the late nineteenth-century vogue of positivism as a travestied form of reincarnation of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and sought the reinstatement of reason and freedom to their original status.
About these two types of observations, see also Tada (2010).
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Tada, M. Edmund Husserl in Talcott Parsons: Analytical Realism and Phenomenology. Hum Stud 36, 357–374 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9277-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9277-x