Motivation and phenomenological foundation: A Schutzian response to a current dilemma in African-American studies

Abstract

Two philosophical approaches are prominent in race studies: (1) an interpretive phenomenological method, utilized by Sartre, Fanon and Schutz, that describes how Blacks and non-blacks interpret each other and (2) Marxist methodologies, wielded by Sartre, Fanon and Stephen Ferguson, that investigate the economic structures underpinning race relations. Schutz’s theory of motivation accommodates these often antagonistic approaches. Future-oriented ‘in-order-to motives’ constitute a domain of lived, subjective meanings, operative in the interpretive interrelations the first method thematizes. Because motives, an ‘objective category’, include the historical, social-structural factors that the second methodologies focus on, that influence actors ‘behind their backs’ and that are discoverable to reflective observers. Further, Schutz’s situating of economic science with reference to his phenomenological psychology of the everyday lifeworld permits scientific-type analyses that provisionally omit the freedom of social actors that is, however, recovered in the subjective meaning of everyday actors that some Marxist economic reductionists neglect.