Michael D. Barber

Occupational Science and the First‐Person Perspective

Abstract The individualistic tendencies in occupational science can be explained in part by its proponents’ reliance on “the interpretive tradition” originating in Weberian sociology and phenomenological philosophy, and taking account of what an actor from his or her first‐person perspective means by an action. From within this interpretive perspective, one can take account of actors’ interrelationship with their contexts but in such a way that that relationship cannot be explained as simply the result of physical‐causal processes. An approach to occupational science based on the model of an “organism‐in‐relationship‐to‐its‐environment” may help elucidate the holistic, environmentally interconnected dimensions of occupation. But such a theoretical perspective risks overlooking the first‐person perspective of actors that mere organisms lack, that an adequate occupational science must consider, and that debates about the methods appropriate to occupational science themselves presuppose.

Occupational Science and Phenomenology: Human Activity, Narrative and Ethical Responsibility

Abstract Phenomenology frees us from prejudices and enables us to see things, people, and human activity freshly. It supplements and enriches the natural and social sciences by clarifying the everyday world they explain and by illuminating how actors from a first‐person point of view experience their world and the meaning of their actions. As such, phenomenology assists occupational science in understanding what occupation means to one engaged in it. Furthermore, phenomenologists have already made significant contributions to clarifying three areas of crucial importance for occupational science: human activity, narrative, and ethical responsibility. Human activity involves a three‐tiered structure of purposes, automatic behaviors, and neural‐physiological processes. Narrative, the regular method of commonsense self‐explanation, entails recovering past motives correlative to the future‐oriented purposes that direct occupations. Ethical responsibility is evoked by other persons and experienced face to face. It underlies the commencement and execution of occupations, and both informs and reconfigures narratives when they are interrupted.

Alfred Schutz and the Problem of Empathy

Although Alfred Schutz appreciated many of the contributions of Edmund Husserl’s Ideen, he objected to the treatment of intersubjectivity. This paper shows how Schutz’s criticism of the sense-transfer of “animate organism” ignores the genetic nature of Husserl’s account, the widespread tendency of mental life to identify and assimilate, the level beneath the controlling ego on which the sense-transfer occurs, the massive similarities between animate organisms, the widespread dynamism of consciousness to transpose itself, and the massive and unique manner in which the sense-transfer is validated.

If only to be heard: Value-Freedom and Ethics in Alfred Schutz’s Economic and Political Writings

Alfred Schutz’s critique of Ludwig von Mises, while not sacrificing value-freedom within economic science, opened up possibilities for a politico-ethical critique of the economic sphere. Schutz’s account of rationality, however, lacked resources for developing the theoretical bases of this critique. Although his political writings proceeded formally and descriptively, observing the constraints of value-freedom, there are potentialities in some published and unpublished works for developing an ethical theory, albeit a rather formal one. This paper articulates the lineaments of that theory, based on a concept of “participative agency” that emerges from the ethical commitments underpinning the Austrian economic tradition.

The ethics behind the absence of ethics in Alfred Schutz's thought

To write on Alfred Schutzs ethics seems as anomalous as to write on Kants hedonism, Nietzsches religious convictions, or A.J. Ayers metaphysics. Schutz never devoted a single essay specifically to the topic of theoretical ethics. His few references to ethical theory are scattered throughout his published and unpublished works and suggest an almost studied effort to avoid this entire philosophical domain. In this paper, I shall attempt to explain this reluctance, to uncover an ethical presupposition implicitly guiding Schutzs thought, and finally to suggest in which direc? tion Schutz might have developed his implicit ethics.

Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Responsibility: Darwall and Levinas on the Second Person

Abstract Stephen Darwall’s The Second‐Person Standpoint converges with Emmanuel Levinas’s concern about the role of the second‐person relationship in ethics. This paper contrasts their methodologies (regressive analysis of presuppositions versus phenomenology) to explain Darwall’s narrower view of ethical experience in terms of expressed reactive attitudes. It delineates Darwall’s overall justificatory strategy and the centrality of autonomy and reciprocity within it, in contrast to Levinas’s emphasis on the experience of responsibility. Asymmetrical responsibility plays a more foundational role as a critical counterpoint to ‘mean‐spirited’ reciprocity than Darwall’s laudable distinction between accountability and revenge, and responsibility even founds this distinction. The experience of being summoned to asymmetrical responsibility amplifies the meaning of ‘authority’, which is a presupposition for Darwall. Finally, asymmetrical responsibility helps develop decentred reasoning, invites risk beyond the boundaries of reciprocity at moments when autonomy appears endangered, reconciles respect and care at the experiential level, and presses to extend the scope of moral obligation.

Alfred Schutz: Reciprocity, Alterity, and Participative Citizenry

Alfred Schutz was born in Vienna in 1899 to Alfred and Johanna Schutz, and when Schutz’s father died before his birth, Johanna married Otto Schutz, his father’s brother. Schutz maintained very close relationships with both his parents throughout his life. He attended the Esterhazy Gymnasium in Vienna, and with the outbreak of World War I, served with the Austrian artillery divisions. Upon returning to a dispirited Vienna, he studied law and the social sciences at the University of Vienna and business at the Viennese Academy of International Trade, graduating with his law degree in 1921. He did postgraduate research in international law, sociology, economics, and philosophy under Hans Kelsen and Ludwig von Mises. In Mises’s seminar, Schutz formed lifetime friendships with Friedrich Hayek, Felix Kaufmann, Fritz Machlup, and Eric Voegelin.

Literature and the Limits of Pragmatism. Alfred Schutz’s Goethe Manuscripts

When Alfred Schutz discusses multiple realities beyond the world of working, these realities are not merely free of pragmatic motives, they do merely bracket such motives, and they do not merely exhibit a contemplative style of knowledge whose relevances differ from those governing the world of working. Rather, the literary sphere of reality, as described in Schutz’s two 1948 manuscripts on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and Lehrjahre, involves a positive opposition to the pragmatic motivations of everyday life. There is a “logic of the poetic event” that not only “runs against” (zuwiderlauft) the logic governing everyday life and theoretical endeavors, but that also explores dimensions frustrating the hegemony of everyday pragmatism and makes room for the transcendental-philosophical concerns typical of the Husserlian framework.

Literature as Societal Therapy: Appresentation, Epoché, and Beloved

Enriching Wolfgang Iser’s theory of aesthetic response with Alfred Schutz’s idea that one undergoes a certain epoche in entering the sphere of literary reality, this paper shows how the reality of the novel involves different levels of appresentation with regard to levels of transcendencies, such as the spatio-temporally distant event or place, the experience of others (characters), or a reality transcending the reality of the novel, which the novel itself appresents. These levels of transcendencies invite the reader to press forward in reading the novel. The other reality the novel appresents, for instance, the unspeakable but often forgotten or repressed cruelty of the world of slavery appresented in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, can play a role in effecting societal therapy.

Sartre, phenomenology and the subjective approach to race and ethnicity in Black Orpheus

While Appiah and Soyinka criticize racial essentializing in Sartre and the Negritude poets, Sartre in Black Orpheus interprets the Negritudinists as employing a phenomenological, anamnestic retrieval of subjective experience. This retrieval uncovers two ethical attitudes: a less exploitative approach toward nature, and a conversion of slavery’s suffering into a stimulus for universal liberation. These attitudes spring from peasant cultural traditions and ethical responses to others’ race-based cruelty, rather than emanating from mystified ‘blackness’. Alfred Schutz’s because-motive analysis, a process of narrative self-constitution, renders plausible these linkages the Negritudinists draw between themselves and peasant or slave ancestors. Such narratives, customarily constructed in common sense by European- and African-Americans, regularly involve mythic elements, serve laudable ethical purposes and require continual theoretical critique by anthropology, genetics and ethics. Theory, though, plays only a critical, corrective role for subjective, anamnestic recoveries of racial and ethnic identity, and it can never replace them.