Abstract
In this chapter I explore the phenomenological structure of a type of intentional act which I believe to be very important in Husserl’s conception of the constitution of intersubjectivity: the social act. Relying mainly on some key passages in Husserl and on some descriptions made by his pupil Adolf Reinach, I describe the volitive structure of these acts and comment on their foundation in experiences of valuing. One of my central points is that social acts form a certain class of intentional acts which are essentially intersubjective. These intersubjective willing actions play a key role in the constitution of social communities and institutions. For this reason the phenomenological analysis of their volitive structures and of their axiological foundations might contribute towards reflecting upon social problems that have been alien to phenomenology until now.
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Notes
- 1.
While text 9 and 10 of Husserliana XIV where drafted in the early 1920s, text 29 was written in the early 1930s.
- 2.
Here one must consider that the bodily appearance of a word is usually both a sound or an image, and the general idea of this sound and this image, that is, both a token and a type.
- 3.
Husserl takes this comparison up again in some later writings, such as text 6 of Husserliana XV.
- 4.
- 5.
Needless to say that his property only pertains to social communities in as far as it pertains to its members. To say that social communities are oriented toward volitive goals means that their members perform volitive acts together, and that by these acts they aspire to actualize goals or sets of goals held in common. This should become clearer from what follows.
- 6.
See Hua XI and Steinbock (1995). It seems plausible that the production of the idealities of words is possible thanks to the typification of appearances of the living body, and in a first instance specifically regarding its sound appearances. I suggest this because a purposeful sound appearance of a living body might already be taken as a word or a proto-word, with both a real and an ideal body, as well as an ideal meaning. By proto-word I here understand a word considered abstracting from its possible syntactical functions.
- 7.
I use here the expression “a special kind of falsehood or devious behavior”, but this possibility of a social act is not strictly speaking falsehood. According to the terminology Austin employs in his famous lectures of How to Do Things With Words, what I call here a special kind of falsehood or devious behavior that pertains to a miscarried social act would rather be a kind of infelicity (See Austin 1962, 12–24).
- 8.
One should keep in mind that in some cases it is possible to distinguish between the addressee of a promise and the person who is favored by it. For instance, this is the case when someone promises someone else to help one of her friends. It is important to be clear that all what is said here concerns the addressee of the promise and has nothing to do with the person favored by it. The fact that someone benefits from the fulfillment of a promise is a mere consequence of the social act. Moreover, when the addressee of the promise is different from the person favored by it, the latter is external to the social relationship constituted through the promise.
- 9.
I am indebted to John J. Drummond for suggesting this notion of the promise holder in the Husserl-Arbeitstage 2012, hosted by the Husserl-Archives Leuven, where I read a first version of this paper.
- 10.
Reinach’s analyses are focused on the acts of prescribing and of representing as such. However, it seems problematic to consider these acts as social acts. If we consider these acts abstracting from the social acts of acknowledging faculty of prescribing or of representing, then they could be carried out without communication between the involved parties. Thus both these acts seem to be mere consequences of the social acts of acknowledging faculty of prescription and of representation.
- 11.
I am purposefully using examples given in John R. Searle’s article “What is an institution” to suggest that one could think of social acts of prescribing as constituting what he considers status functions (Searle 2005, 1–22). However, in view of the wide variety of social acts for which phenomenology can account, Searle’s conception of assignment of status functions as responsible for the constitution of all social institutions seems questionable because it reduces all social phenomena to a single type of social act and thus impoverishes greatly the possibility of its analysis.
- 12.
It seems to me that phenomenological research into social acts could be enriched by taking into consideration some of the observations and distinctions put forward by Austin in How to Do Things with Words (Austin 1962).These analyses are in many respects close to those of Reinach. Moreover, Austin’s distinction between locutionary and illocutionary content in performative speech acts seems to correspond to the phenomenological insight that social acts of higher order are grounded in communicative acts. Therefore some of Austin’s observations could serve as enriching guiding clues for the phenomenological account of how social acts of higher order are in each case grounded in communicative acts, as well as on how these two strata are related.
- 13.
In order for these social acts to be born all that is needed from the represented or from the person that acknowledges faculty of prescription is an act of acceptance. This can be seen in that both these faculties can be explicitly granted or reluctantly acknowledged. The latter case is the one of a child that acknowledges in his parents the faculty of representing him and also the faculty to prescribe rules to which he has to submit. Whereas the first cases imply resolutions on part of the represented and of the person that grants faculty of prescribing, the latter imply resolutions on part of their counterparts, that is, on part of the representative or the prescriber. Moreover, the social act of acknowledging representation can have the form of someone acknowledging on his addressee faculty to do a particular thing on his behalf, but it can also have other more vague forms, such as someone asking his addressee to act in his best interest. Something analogous can be said of the social act of acknowledging prescription. Thus, the volitive goal inherent to these acts usually has a great degree of indetermination with regard to content. This indeterminacy can also be present in orders and requests, but it seems to be less frequent.
- 14.
Following this line of thought one could be inclined to think that when the addressee renounces her right to claim, then the promise should suffer an essential modification by which it ceases to be a social act and becomes a self-referred promise. However, one must take into account that, unlike what happens with the self-referred promise, the person who originally gave the promise can in this case renounce its inherent volitive goal without further ado.
- 15.
Regarding the concept of something valuable or desirable in itself, as opposed to something having a derivative value, see Hua XXVIII, 87–90.
- 16.
It might be questionable to consider a master-slave relationship a social one in so far as it is a relationship in which the slave is used as an object for the benefit of the master. However this relationship should be here interpreted as an extreme case of domination within the social realm. The slave must be considered by the master as having the subjective attribute of being capable of communicating and accepting orders. Needless to say that this conception of sociality doesn’t imply any ethical claims.
- 17.
In this case it would be a Konsequenzwert (a value of consequence) in Husserl’s terminology (see Hua XXVIII, 95).
- 18.
The reasons for this presumably essential fact cannot be explored here, but their elucidation should be an important part of the phenomenology of the social realm.
- 19.
Cf. Hua XXVII, 2–94, and “Wert des Lebens. Wert der Welt. Sittlichkeit (Tugend) und Glückseligkeit <Februar 1923>” in Husserl, 1996–1997.
- 20.
One might here remember the distinction between the rational and the reasonable in Rawls’s theory of justice as equity, where the rational signifies what is convenient for a single person, and the reasonable what is acceptable for a plurality of persons. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Rawls 2001).
- 21.
Cf. Hua IV, 190–200, and Hua XIV, 165–232. I am using here the word association in the broadest sense.
- 22.
As I mentioned above, it seems that the main reason for the differences between this approach and the one developed by Schutz is his deliberate renunciation of the exploration of some paths suggested by Husserl because he considered them naïve and politically dangerous. I do not think that Schutz’s account of the social world and its types is mistaken, but I do consider it incomplete. This incompleteness also derives from Schutz’s much broader concepts of social act and social relationships. I think that the same can be said from the important investigations of Luckmann and Berger, who rely on Schutz works. Thus, for example, the understanding of Schutz and his school of social institutions as sedimentations of social actions could be enriched by a more developed phenomenological account of social acts, as well as by a more complete phenomenological account of the generative process by which these social acts sediment in the form of intersubjective habitus, by a description of the axiological layer with which traditions appear to the person who appropriates them, etc.
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Marín Ávila, E. (2015). Social Acts as Intersubjective Willing Actions. In: Ubiali, M., Wehrle, M. (eds) Feeling and Value, Willing and Action. Phaenomenologica, vol 216. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10326-6_14
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