The Specific Character of The Social According to Husserl

Abstract

Husserl did not hesitate to apply the methods of eidetic phenomenology to social phenomena, understanding by this the descriptive but systematic study of essences. Nor did he limit himself to it either: social facts are phenomena amongst many others, it does not seem necessary to accord them special consideration. Paradoxically, it was at the point where, elaborating the simply eidetic phenomenology in order to give philosophy a firm and scientific foundation, and believing himself, by a move which recaptures and revises the Cartesian Cogito, to have found it in the individual subject and in the domain which is its own, what he called the Transcendental ego and the monadological sphere, that Husserl was led to envisage and to study social being. If there is unshakable certainty only for the subject itself, then there is no hope for a philosophy and a science which, by definition, seek to establish theories valid for all. It is necessary, at all costs, to surmount solipsism; the reduction of the social world must lead to a phenomenology of society.