Lester Embree on "collective subjects"

CARLOS BELVEDERE

Memphis

Encuentro; Carlos Belvedere; 2017

Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences

Lester Embree suggested that Schutz was not a methodological individualist during most of his academic life because he came to consider the individual as an abstractum abstracted from concrete collective life because we always already are members of some groups or others. Hence, the socio-historical world cannot be understood as a mere structure of individuals because it also contains groups that are related one to another in diverse ways. As a result, Embree goes beyond Schutz?s phenomenology of the social world and claims that there is a concrete collective life since groups can serve as a collective subjects and function like the self in the structure of individuals. Therefore, the concrete subject of the social world is the collective life of groups. I conclude by stressing out three major contributions of Embre to the fields of the methodology of the cultural sciences, the ontology of phenomenological sociology and worldly phenomenology; namely: to have shown the deficiencies of methodological individualism in order to account for the social world because it conceals that it is a world of groups; second, to have found a phenomenological way to speak of collective subjects not incurring in metaphysical mystifications; third to have found a different way to access phenomena by re-specifying the first person perspective as ?first person plural.?