THE PROBLEM OF THE ONTOLOGY OF THE LIFE-WORLD AND THE EXISTENTIAL SITUATION IN MODERN SOCIAL SCIENCE

Abstract

This article analyses three variants of a situation characteristic for modern social science called `Roquentin's situation', the main character in Sartre's Nausea who symbolises the mutual estrangement between a researchers' standpoint and their social object.

The first variant is represented by the transcendentalist position of Edmund Husserl. We find Roquentin in the passages of the transcendental ego expanding the philosopher's position by a certain constellation of inner viewpoints of the social object itself. The idea of a possible ontology of the life-world appears to be an indispensable condition for this reassessment. But the lack of a sociologically worked out concept of everyday life as a self-problematising layer of the culturally formed life-world confines it to an idea `en passant' and results in privileging the self-evidences of the philosopher as `functionary of European mankind'.

Everyday life as a `paramount reality' has already become privileged in Alfred Schutz's social phenomenology. Thus emerges the intersubjective drama between the ego agens and the objective observer, which leads to the figure of the ontologist of the life-world. Schutz's solution tacitly leads to ensuring a firm position for scientific consciousness.

Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology provokes the figure of the objective observer as an ontologist of the life-world as well as the figure of the philosopher as a functionary of European mankind. The ethnomethodological attitude provokes not only functioning intentionality itself, but also gains access to its own mode of functioning. Thus the peculiar mobility of the researcher's position becomes clarified as a continual gaining of marginal grounds between practical everyday worlds and scientific reality as everyday reality par excellence. In other words, Roquentin's situation here is not resolved but becomes a motif for its own incessant reproduction.

We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.

(Wittgenstein 1969: 149)