“Intersubjectivity”: The Emergence of a Socio-Phenomenological Concept

Abstract

The article outlines the author’s vision of the formation and development of “intersubjectivity” as a concept of socially oriented thought. Introduced into sociohumanitarian knowledge by E. Husserl’s phenomenology, this notion initially possessed powerful sociological potential and was called to explain on an abstract-philosophical level the existence of social order from an egological perspective (which is the perspective of a subject with a sphere of consciousness that other participants of interaction have no access to). The main tendency inherent to the post-Husserlian change in the concept’s semantic profile is linked to the gradual loss of its metaphysical potential, as well as its psychologization and instrumentalization. Intersubjectivity — which is something that was brought into sociology by A. Schütz’s social phenomenology — gained a pragmatic interpretation, effectively becoming an axiomatically presupposed attribute of the “life world”. Constructivist semantic valences of the analyzed concept were implemented in the social constructivism of P. Berger and T. Lukman, and at this point said concept had pretty much exhausted its initial analytical potential. The reinvigoration of sociological interest towards this category is associated with a postclassical redirection of attention towards interactive processes of generating meanings within situations of the “life world”, processes that are multidimensional, conditioned by context and cannot be fully reduced to just the subject. The matter of whether returning to Husserl’s intuitions is appropriate demands further consideration, in order to consider other interpretations of intersubjectivity, including those that focus on the historical course of the social process.