Abstract
The chapter contextualizes and reconstructs Walther’s theory of social acts. In her view a given act qualifies as social if it is performed in the name of or on behalf of a community. Interestingly, Walther’s understanding of that notion is patently at odds with the idea of a social act originally propounded by Reinach. According to Reinach, an act is social if it “addresses” other persons and if it, for its success, requires them to grasp it. We claim that to explain Walther’s reconfiguration of this concept, one has to look into the use that Husserl makes of it. Husserl adopts this idea from Reinach to tackle a problem that is not discussed by the latter. This is the problem of how communities, by means of social acts, are “constituted” in consciousness. Walther shares with Husserl the concern about the constitution of communities and her radical revision of Reinach’s idea is presented as an attempt to offer an alternative solution to Husserl’s problem.
The authors equally contributed to this chapter. Uemura’s research was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (KAKENHI, Project No. 26770014).
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Notes
- 1.
To the best of our knowledge, Reinach only mentions the possibility of social acts performed in the name of other individuals, but not of groups. Yet, this possibility is essential for Edith Stein to develop a theory of state (on the basis of Reinach’s theory see Gombocz and Salice 2006): “The state requires one person or a group of persons, to make itself audible [um sich vernehmlich zu machen], and a domain of persons to be heard and to come to existence. The state can perform acts only if persons who represent [vertreten] it perform those acts on its behalf [für ihn]” (Stein 1922: 313, our translation).
- 2.
These lectures were followed by Saturday discussions, which Walther also attended. See Schuhmann 1977: 234–235.
- 3.
For more on Husserl’s discussions of Nature and Spirit in his 1919 lectures and elsewhere see Melle 1996.
- 4.
Husserl holds the same idea in his Cartesianische Meditationen (Husserl 1950: 159–160) and Ideen II (Husserl 1952/1969: 194), in both of which he claims that sociality is constituted in social acts (see below). For further reading on Husserl’s notion of social acts and their role in his phenomenology of sociality see also Perreau 2013: 100–107.
- 5.
In a posthumously published manuscript of his from 1911, Reinach writes that “social relations are constituted by social acts” (Reinach 1989b: 360). However, as the phrase “are constituted by [durch]” shows, he is obviously not operating with the Husserlian concept of constitution. His contention here is rather that social relations (such as promissory claims and commitments) are produced or brought into existence by social acts. In other words, the term “constitution” here should be understood as meaning what Walther calls ontological constitution (see section “Conclusion”). This interpretation is further corroborated by the fact that in his lectures in 1913 Reinach talks about the constitution of an object [Gegenstandskonstitution] when he deals with ontology or theory of objects [Gegenstandstheorie] as opposed to the investigation into the givenness of objects (see Reinach 1989c: 394).
- 6.
Not all unifications are pathological, though. See “[The human soul] is absolutely not an isolated creature [Wesen], it is no monad, but from its beginning it is essentially a group member [Gliedwesen] (that is, it lies in essence to stay in intentional contact of unification with other creatures)” (Pfänder 1933: 225, our translation). For Pfänder’s discussion of unification and Walther’s adaptation of it see also Caminada 2014 (though note that Einigung is translated as “joining” in Caminada’s paper).
- 7.
According to Walther, unification may be habitual from the beginning, without being occurrent [aktuell] (see Walther 1923: 44, 69; see also Zahavi and Salice 2016: 521). She does not give any example of such habitual unification, but the following would probably serve as one. A child who has grown up in a family may have habitual unification with the family without having any occurrent feeling of unification with it. Let us note that it may be difficult to convincingly argue for such a claim from a phenomenological point of view. We do not go into this issue any further, for the main line of our discussion would remain the same, even if this part of Walther’s theory turns out to be untenable.
- 8.
- 9.
Thus, she explicitly rejects the conception of the we as a super-individual subject of experience (see Walther 1923: 70).
- 10.
This view is clearly echoed in Searle’s idea of a background sense of the other as collaborative partner: “Collective intentionality presupposes a background sense of the other as a candidate for cooperative agency; that is, it presupposes a sense of others as more than mere conscious agents, indeed as actual or potential members of a cooperative activity” (Searle 2002: 104).
- 11.
This claim follows from the following two points Walther makes in her 1923 piece. First, Walther holds that a community itself [Gemeinschaft selbst] is different from the sum of items that founded it (namely, subjects and their relationship, see Walther 1923: 97; for a discussion of communities as objects of higher order within phenomenology, see also Salice 2016). Second, she qualifies that a community is founded primarily on the social self of its members (see Walther 1923: 147).
- 12.
Walther’s ideas are in line with recent work in the theory of group agency. See “If we reach an alignment between what the group requires of us and our individual attitudes through adopting the group’s viewpoint, […] then we, the members, each have attitudes in whose propositional expression the group figures as we. Each of us acts on beliefs and desires that call for expression in first-person plural terms. They are desires that we do so and so, or beliefs that we can do such and such, that link up with our responses without the mediation of any belief about our membership in the group” (List and Pettit 2011: 192).
- 13.
A similar idea is also found in Stein’s Beiträge, but her discussion is conducted in slightly different terminology. According to her the key to the communality of an experience is the Richtigkeit, rather than Echtheit, of that experience in accordance with the relevant community (see Stein 1922: 125–126).
- 14.
To be precise, her claim is that a communal experience is genuine if it conforms either to the empirical viz factual characteristics and behaviors (at a given time) or to the essence viz idea of the community. According to her, this parallels the genuineness of experience from an individual point of view. In the present chapter, however, we do not go into details of this and related issues such as her discussion of the alleged personality of communities (see Walther 1923: 112–118).
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Salice, A., Uemura, G. (2018). Social Acts and Communities: Walther Between Husserl and Reinach. In: Calcagno, A. (eds) Gerda Walther’s Phenomenology of Sociality, Psychology, and Religion. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97592-4_3
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