Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde

3. The Primacy of Listening: Toward a Metaphysics of Communicative Interaction

37 3 The Primacy of Listening: Toward a Metaphysics of Communicative Interaction Lenore Langsdorf The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things. —Emile Durkheim . . . to judge rationally or scientifically about things signifies to conform to the things themselves or to go from words and opinions back to the things themselves, to consult them in their self-givenness and to set aside all prejudices alien to them. —Edmund Husserl . . . the old High German word thing means a gathering, and specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion . . . that in any way bears upon men, concerns them, and that accordingly is a matter for discourse. —Martin Heidegger Emile Durkheim urged us to “consider social facts as things”1 and Edmund Husserl urged us to attend “to the things themselves.”2 In contrast to this ontological focus, the social sciences are marked by a focus on competing methodologies that (their advocates claim) enable us to gain knowledge of social things—a focus that’s encouraged by traditions in Euro-American scholarship as well as institutional exigencies. The result is an emphasis on epistemology and methodology at the expense of ontological inquiry. The meliorative efforts of much social scientific research are hampered, I suspect, by investigation of the phenomena of the social world that begins with 38 Lenore Langsdorf unexamined conceptions of the nature of social things and incorporates (rather than investigating the validity of) commonsensical as well as traditional metaphysical conceptions of “things.” These preconceptions obscure the potential value of Durkheim’s and Husserl’s injunctions for social scientific research, and especially for research seeking “practical” knowledge that serves meliorative goals. Don Ihde’s use of “second phenomenology” in analyzing auditory and “multistable” visual phenomena enables ontological investigation of social things that challenges those preconceptions, suggests an alternative ontology, and enables us to interpret Durkheim’s and Husserl’s injunctions as supporting interpretive modes of inquiry, rather than (as critics have done) as requiring empiricistic and even positivistic methodologies. In the early work that informs this chapter, Ihde explicates phenomenology as a two-stage mode of analysis. He uses that explication, grounded in the work of Husserl and Martin Heidegger, for an analysis that’s “intended as a prolegomena to an ontology of listening” (LV ix). Throughout his teaching and writing career, Ihde has emphasized the primacy of doing phenomenology, in contrast to and conjunction with tendencies to dwell in textual exegesis or in talk about phenomenology as an epistemological method. In other words, he follows phenomenological tradition in holding text and talk as secondary to investigating “the things themselves.” In what follows I sketch Ihde’s phenomenological ontology and suggest its value for investigating the nature of social things. Toward a Phenomenological Ontology . . . as a radical philosophy, phenomenology necessarily departs from familiar ways of doing things and accepted ways of thinking. It overturns many presuppositions ordinarily taken for granted and seeks to establish a new perspective from which to view things. —Don Ihde (EP 17) Only as phenomenology is ontology possible. —Martin Heidegger Ihde distinguishes a “first phenomenology”—a “method and field of study” for which Husserl is the guide—from a “second phenomenology,” which, with Heidegger as the guide, builds from the first “toward a fundamental ontology of Being,” and so evolves into “a hermeneutic and existential philosophy” (LV 17–18). “The things which are intended and the acts by which their meanings are constituted occupy first phenomenology centrally,” Ihde tells us; thus, first phenomenology “operated like a science and is . . . a The Primacy of Listening 39 statics of experience” (LV 18–19). Husserl’s early attunement toward stasis was even more thoroughgoing than Durkheim’s, perhaps because his initial subject matter was the formal objects of arithmetic and logic. Durkheim took the “natural” or physical sciences of his day—physics and chemistry, focused on the stable structures of diverse particulars—as the appropriate models for sociology . Thus both were concerned with developing a methodology for identifying and describing, in isolation from the particularities of their contexts, stable elements that justify descriptions (Husserl) or explanations (Durkheim) of “the same phenomenon” despite the observed diversity of multiple instances. Durkheim’s third rule for sociological method, “investigate . . . social facts . . . in isolation from their individual manifestations” was joined to his advocacy of statistical analysis as the means for “isolating” “beliefs, tendencies , and practices of the group taken collectively” from “individual...