Accounting for Disability in the Phenomenological Life-World

Thomas Abrams And Deniz Guvenc

doi:10.22329/p.v10i0.4281

Abstract

This paper critically assesses Edmund Husserl's concept of the ‘life-world’, found in his Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. We argue that Husserl's phenomenology fails to consider the social and material arrangements that allow subjectivity to emerge in our shared world. We begin by outlining the concept as formulated in Husserl’s Crisis. We then entertain Husserl’s critique by his most famous student, Martin Heidegger. We suggest a reformulation of intersubjectivity, along the lines of Heidegger’s mitdasein, accounts for subjectivity as it emerges in the shared world. Next, we introduce ethnomethodology, pioneered by Harold Garfinkel, which gives sociological support to this argument. Through the ethnomethodological disability studies of A.B. Robillard, we argue that the life-world is not always as democratic as Husserl's philosophy may suggest. This shows the necessity of disability politics. We end by asking what a phenomenology sensitive to this fact might look like, in terms of both disability studies and phenomenological philosophy more generally.

Highlights

Husserl, the life-world, and The Crisis Husserl’s elaborate and often-shifting conception of the life-world is developed primarily under two modes of inquiry: epistemological and
An analysis of the life-world as pre-given in its objective totality necessitates an abstraction from the natural attitude: it requires a transcendental epoché from the everyday lived-experience or natural way-of-being-in-the-world
Ontologically speaking, the existence of the life-world is always pre-supposed in the natural attitude, but this presupposition must be exposed and bracketed in the transcendental epoché in order to reach objective knowledge

Summary

Ethnomethodological critiques

Of this paper, we want to introduce ethnomethodological critiques of the intersubjective basis of the lifeworld. We want to read Robillard as a phenomenologist, in thinking about the life-world Though each of his papers stem from a distinct interactive event, the point is the same: his communication problems, both in chance meetings and medical encounters, are moments where subjectivity is “up for grabs.”. Robillard’s case demonstrates that when these are adjusted, through more attendant party guests, or nurses with the time for his means of communication, alternate embodiments are not denied subjective status In both cases, better accounting means that subjective rationality can be distributed more widely, and more bodies are member to the lifeworld.

Conclusions

Works Cited