INTRODUCTION

Typically, it is through introductory textbooks that we receive our introduction to social psychology, as to any scientific discipline. They are the primary socialization devices in the process of becoming a social psychologist. They present and define the topics or the subject matter, the methods or dominant research procedures, and the results or the research findings which the discipline has accumulated.

When I started my professional career in social psychology in the early 1960s under the tutelage of Professor Gordon Allport, the dominant textbooks were: Proshansky and Seidenberg, Basic Studies in Social Psychology (1965) and Lindzey, The Handbook of Social Psychology (1954). In these textbooks a good deal of emphasis was placed on the varieties of theoretical approaches. The major recognized theories were: Stimulus-Response, Contiguity and Reinforcement Theory, Cognitive Theory, Psychoanalytic Theory, Field Theory and Role Theory.

It was taken for granted that different theoretical approaches would generate particular topics for study, offer alternative interpretations for research findings and represent divergent and yet complementary interests with regard to such social psychological phenomena as prejudice, which was one of the standard social psychological topics:

The latter can be easily illustrated if we consider, for example, how different psychological theorists would describe the behavior of a prejudiced person. Psychoanalytically oriented investigators would be primarily concerned with the existing affective tendencies of the individual as indicators of unconscious psychodynamic conflicts. Reinforcement theorists, on the other hand, would give far more attention to the instrumental nature of the prejudiced person's behavior as a means of acquiring rewards or avoiding punishments. For the cognitive theorists emphasis would be on that person's perceptions of the minority group member, the nature of his beliefs about them, and the extent to which there are distortions in these cognitions. And finally, those investigators who stress the individual's group memberships as a source of his attitudes will be concerned with the individual's group identifications and the prevailing norms of these groups. (Proshansky & Seidenberg, 1965, p. 9.)

There was also a recognition of a variety of methodological approaches.

In recent textbooks, however, scientific-method oriented experimental social psychology has dominated textbooks which are basically a-theoretical and present a restrictive vision of social psychology to the beginning student. The plurality of theoretical and methodological approaches disappears, as in the popular and influential book by Aronson: The Social Animal (1988). Social psychology is presented as a laboratory-based research discipline in the natural scientific tradition centered on the key social psychological phenomenon: social influence, and its facets:

Conformity

Mass Communication, Propaganda, and Persuasion

Self-Justification

Human Aggression

Prejudice

Attraction: Why People Like Each Other

Interpersonal Communication and Sensitivity.

Social psychology thus appears as a monolithic discipline of cumulative research findings which progressively shed light on the social dimensions of human behavior. Traditional experimental research on groups of subjects responding, under controlled conditions, to experimental manipulation in terms of independent and dependent variables becomes the norm of legitimate social psychological work. The traditional researcher stays in the perspective of an observer, "running the subjects"; typically one is not interested in the subject's point of view or experience, the perspective of the actor. Subjects as participants in the research are not enlisted as co-researchers who report on their subjective processes of conscious experience, on how they perceive and personally process what is happening to them, and how they deliberate and decide to act. The whole realm and reality of personal experience and meaning typically is excluded in traditional social psychological research. Thus, only an external view of human behavior is obtained; its dependence on external conditions is studied. The aim of traditional social psychology and its operative "research guiding interest" is technical, namely, the prediction and control of behavior.

This is essentially a behavioral engineering approach in which the social psychologist is privileged. The "subject", the actor, is not set free, empowered or emancipated to achieve a larger degree of freedom and greater possibilities for self-determination. Such traditional, natural-science social psychology is one-sided, operating from the observer or scientist's perspective. It needs to be complemented by a human science psychology (Giorgi, 1970) which enters the actor's point of view and investigates personal experience and personal meaning which mediate personal action and enhance the individual's freedom of choice and participation.

I prefer the definition of Gordon Allport, my mentor, who describes social psychology as: "The attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of other human beings." (1954, p. 5) In this definition emphasis is placed both on the action and the experience of individual persons, both on behavior and consciousness. It expresses both an objective and a subjective component reflecting two basic complementary orientations in psychology, the perspective of the observer perspective and that of the actor.

In terms of this distinction I will present the plurality of social psychological approaches as falling into two major camps. One considers social psychology as a "natural science" dedicated to experimental methods. The human science approach sees social psychology as a "human science" dedicated to the study of conscious human experience and action from the actor's perspective. This approaches its subject matter through descriptive-reflective methods which disclose the constitution and structures of meaning which guide human actors. It is not interested in the prediction and control of behavior, but in articulating and understanding the meaning of experience and action for the actor. Many approaches, both as regards theory and method, can be identified in this human science social psychology camp:

- Existential-Phenomenology: focusing on acts and structures of consciousness elicited by narrative protocols and clarified by reflection. This is represented by the work of Husserl, Schutz, Berger, Scheler.

- Hermeneutical Dialectics: focusing on human expressivity, texts, art works and the mediation of the tradition. This is represented by the work of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricouer.

- Dialogical Existentialism: focusing on the role of speech in establishing interpersonal relationships and the realm of the in-between. This is represented by the work of Buber and Rosenstock-Huessy.

- Critical Emancipatory Theory: focusing on implicit ideological, political, and power constellations which impact on, and inhibit, free human development and emancipation. This is represented by Habermas and Radnitzki.

As can be seen from this brief introduction, social psychology, both in its traditional natural scientific and its human scientific camps, is not a monolithic discipline. Instead, a variety of theories and methods and a plurality of schools of thought coexist, united in their desire to study the social dimensions of human activities and experiences, but divided as to the appropriate methods of study, the ways of conceptualizing human functioning and motivation and the implicit philosophical anthropology, i.e., the proper understanding of the essential nature of human beings.

THE PARADIGM APPROACH

In recent years there has been an increasing discussion of the nature of scientific activities and revolutions (Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962), as well as an autonomous philosophical-reflective discipline called "MetaScience", i.e., a science of scientific activity (G. Radnitzki, Contemporary Schools of Metascience, 1968). In this approach researchers are seen as belonging to "schools" or "research traditions". It is within such a social structure and within the conceptual framework of a "paradigm" characterizing a school that research proceeds. Kuhn says:

By the concept of paradigm . . . I mean to suggest that some accepted examples of scientific practice--examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together--provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research (1962, p. 10).

Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice (1962, pp. 10-11).

Thus, a paradigm constitutes a particular school of thought.

Kuhn's work was based on the history of the natural sciences as one of "scientific revolutions" in which new paradigms replace old ones. Innovation comes as new observations which cannot be accommodated by the ruling paradigm lead to the creation of a new model, typically by a member who is new or marginal to the discipline and not yet fully socialized. As the new paradigm is articulated, it draws adherents to itself and grows in prestige and numbers until it replaces the old paradigm whose proponents are seldom converted, but just fade in influence or die.

The situation in the humanities and the social sciences is different. In these disciplines, as well as in religion, philosophy, and political persuasion paradigm, replacement does not really occur. New paradigms are created, it is true, but the old paradigms continue to exist and perpetuate themselves. They exist side by side, sometimes in critical dialogue with each other, but mostly as self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing communities of discourse. These disciplines are inherently poly-paradigmatic.

In the social and human sciences we are dealing with a situation of epistemological pluralism. All conflicting schools of thought coexist and compete for followers and audiences in a dynamic fashion. There is a sociopolitical battle for "ways of seeing" and "ways of speaking" shared by a network of participants, i.e., by a school of thought which promotes its own paradigm. In the human and interhuman sciences paradigms do not replace and supersede each other, but wax and wane in distribution, popularity, and credibility.

The human sciences are polyparadigmatic because human behavior involves action that is a result of human deliberation, choice, and the attribution of motives, goals and values, about which there is no universal agreement. Another way of saying this is that human action--as contrasted with animal behavior--is evoked, conceived, and executed in a cultural context along parameters of an historically created way of life to which one is existentially committed, but which allows of various interpretations. Historically, several distinct ways of thinking, such as materialism, rationalism, idealism, and agnosticism, have been created which continue to be options for looking at and interpreting the meaning of human action. Psychological paradigms coexist and continue to be available in the total epistemological field. Sometimes a genuinely new vision is revealed, as in psychoanalysis, Marxism, and existential-phenomenology. As they draw adherents and become popular movements, paradigm shifts may seem to take place. Sociologically speaking, however, we are witnessing merely a shift of membership and popularity, but never really a paradigm replacement. Each articulated theoretical position, once it has been named and has achieved a certain level of articulation, seems to become institutionalized by a coterie of adherents constituting a cross-generational orthodoxy which defends the purity of its own creed.

Paradigm shifts occur however, quite frequently within the career of particular psychologists who come to believe in and represent a new school of thought, undergoing something like an intellectual conversion experience. Paradigms stand in critical dialogue and in competition for proselytes in the tradition of democratic pluralism, which is ruled by the implicit ideal of the "communicative free society" in which everyone who is able is invited to speak out and contribute. This situation of dialogue is also called the "criticist frame," the shared fundamental agreement and commitment to communicate through critical dialogue (Radnitzki, 1970). Even if we disagree violently on the issues, we nevertheless trust the process of communication and language itself to find and set truth free; and we give all participants a fair hearing. Rosenstock-Huessy (1970) recognizes in the dialogue of differences the founding principle of university life as contrasted with church schools which taught only one truth and did so dogmatically. The university, by contrast, represents always at least two points of view on the same issue, thus it is based on a non-dogmatic dialogical principle which builds criticism into its very approach and institutional arrangement.

The coexistence of a plurality of paradigms is comparable to life in a multi-religious society under democratic pluralism. Paradigms are "conviction communities" (Bruteau, 1979) in the sense that the shared commitment to, and the grounding assumptions about the essentials of human nature assume the strength of an indubitable faith which is shared by the members. Unfortunately, these groups often develop xenophobia and avoid critical dialogue with each other.

There are dimensions of power, politics, and success--or marketing thinking--operating in the complex field of discourse and debate we call social psychology. Radnitzki (1970) speaks of sciences and hence also of schools of social psychology as "knowledge-producing industries" with a complex set of role-types which aim for market shares in the market place of ideas, practices and programs:

The "cast" of an intellectual tradition is a system of role-types that may be defined in terms of the "plot" (i.e., in terms of program, resources, etc.). The bearer of these roles are publications rather than persons. Here we can only give some brief indications. The following role-types are conspicuous: The precursors--they may be causally effective; but often they are "appointed" ex post by members of the tradition. The pioneers--they are polemically oriented on other intellectual traditions flourishing in the intellectual milieu. They formulate the raw program of the tradition, and often they produce its manifesto. The masters--they carry out a part of the program and their work sets the standards by means of which the disciples measure their success. The carriers of the traditions are all those who "carry" the tradition so that it lives on and is talked about. This role type may be subdivided into the following subtypes: the "followers" who administer the intellectual estate of the tradition; the "disciples" (including emulators and epigones) who hand down the tradition; the Vermittlerschichten, or teachers who provide an enculturation process for adepts; the expositors and propagandists of the tradition, etc.

Another important role type is that of the critic of the tradition: the internal critics--those who draw out the consequences, expose tensions, etc., and the external critics--those who, from a platform outside the tradition, attack the very program of the tradition and the adequacy criteria assumed by it.

More or less outside of the tradition, yet related to it, are the sympathizers of a tradition--those among non-members who accept the image and ideal of X-ology of the tradition. (For instance in the Anglo-Saxon-Nordic world many social scientists are sympathizers of logical empiricism.) The users of a tradition--those among the sympathizers who also apply the output of tradition to their own work in X-ology. The instrument makers--those who forge or enrich the resources of the tradition. (For instance the logicians are instrument makers for logical empiricism.) The instrument makers may be, but need not be, members of the tradition (1970, pp. 9-10).

Radnitzki presents a schematic model of the dynamics of the research process within an intellectual tradition or school which holds true for all specific schools of thought. It is a fruitful approach to develop a meta-science, i.e. a science of scientific activity.

Our contemporary world-market civilization certainly makes very attractive and relevant the economic metaphor of knowledge production and distribution, and of knowledge and discourse competition. Thus paradigms compete for acceptance as do political ideologies.

Both paradigm-conviction and ideology-conviction are species of faith commitments which cannot be rationally justified (von Eckartsberg, 1983). The foundational concepts expressive of one's beliefs about the essentials of human nature (i.e., one's philosophical anthropology) act as axioms which cannot be proven by the theory itself. Myth is another example of a foundational story as origin and basis for a conviction and a shared way of life which transcends logical argumentation. We live in these stories and identify with them. This is the source of their truth-value for us. It grounds our conviction and practices.

As I have indicated, a paradigm is a way of seeing reality; it is a way of speaking together in a group or a school of thought, and of using an agreed-upon vocabulary of concepts. These concepts together map the territory of relevant processes for the group and prescribe the accepted way of doing research, the methodology.

Typically, the school or research tradition has a founder whose name is associated with the school: Freudian psychoanalysis, Skinnerian behaviorism, Marxist psychology, etc., or the school is a group name which characterizes the work of several founding members each of whom can be said to be a founder such as "Existential Phenomenology" which represents the work of Husserl's phenomenology and that of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, or "Hermeneutic Dialectics" which encompasses the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur among others.

Experienced human reality is so rich and complex that it allows many types of conceptualizing and mapping, i.e., many ways of interpreting, all of which yield valid insights and plausible understanding. There is an irreducible relativity in our attempts to understand and explain human affairs and human motives which founds the polyparadigmatic nature of psychology and of all the social sciences and humanities.

The important distinguishing characteristics of any paradigm or research tradition are two assumptions which may be hidden and need to be articulated:

1. The philosophical anthropological question: who and what is a human being? Any attempt to understand human action and experience already brings certain automatic convictions into play. We already think we know what is important and essential about human personality and motivation to interpret and explain the action. These philosophical anthropological assumptions always already rule our thematizations. They can be investigated and identified by critical reflection and dialogue, but they cannot be removed from the epistemological scene.

2. The research-guiding interest: what and for whom is the knowledge? Our quest for knowledge and understanding serves our purposes. We have motives for our study and research. Habermas has used the notion of "research guiding interest" to identify this dimension of human sense-making. In his analysis of the relationship between knowledge and interest he has criticized the idea that knowledge is interest-free. He has shown that natural science and, hence, also traditional social psychology, are ruled by a technical interest, i.e., the prediction and control of behavior, while existential-phenomenology and hermeneutic-dialectical approaches serve the epistemological interest of understanding, i.e., becoming cognizant of the meanings which animate and rule our actions and expressions.

INTENTIONALITY

Social Psychology as a Human Science

Existential-phenomenological psychology has been developed into an empirical qualitative research tradition by the Duquesne group, which I have analyzed and articulated in my book: Life-World Experience: Existential Phenopmenological Research Applications in Psychology (1986). It was inspired by the reflective philosophical work of the phenomenologists Husserl, Schutz and Scheler, and the existential-phenomenological reflections of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.

Edmund Husserl: The phenomenological approach centers on the experienced fact that the world appears to us through our stream of consciousness as a configuration of meaning. Facts of consciousness, i.e., perceiving, willing, thinking, remembering, anticipating, etc., are our modalities of self-world relationship. They give us access to our world and that of others by reflecting on the content (i.e., its meaning or "the what") which we thus encounter, and also by reflecting on the process, (i.e., "the how"). Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, hoped to clarify in a descriptive/reflective manner the foundation and constitution of knowledge in human consciousness. Phenomenology became the study of human meanings as constituted by the stream of consciousness. Consciousness itself is understood as being intentional. It is as always directed toward something. As phenomenologists are fond of saying, consciousness is always consciousness of something. It recognizes and treats meanings which subsequently are here in the world as experienced.

With Husserl, from 1900 on, we enter an era in philosophy and psychology which recognizes the participation of the subject in the creation of meaning. The subject's role is acknowledged even in physics through Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. In both physics and psychology the assumption of the "objectivity of reality" collapses under the realization that the observer as well as the actor is existentially and epistemologically implicated in the creation of meaning. There is no "really real" world of independent objective facts. Rather, the world comes into being for us as meanings which we constitute, and as political realities for which we fight. Husserl's fundamental contribution was to call our attention to the study of the meaning constituting power of the acts of consciousness.

He developed systematic reflection as a research method. In working out some of the implications and strategies of this new reflective philosophical methodology, Husserl (1913-1962) discovered the complexities of the horizonal nature of consciousness. That is, our field of awareness always extends beyond the factually given to that which is implied, remembered, anticipated, generalized, etc. Husserl focused mainly on the temporal horizons of "inner time consciousness", i.e., on the way people experience their embeddedness in the stream of time: past, present, and future. He explored how these horizons cooperate in creating the temporal meaning of the here and now. He also developed the notion of "inner and outer horizons"--what we might call cognitive horizons--which refer to contexts of knowledge playing on the here and now. Such horizons contextualize experience in terms of consensually available cognitive frameworks of perceived meaning. Husserl is the master of the articulation of the "mind space" within the larger sphere of the unified field of a person's consciousness and existence, "the psychocosm" (von Eckartsberg, 1981).

In his later work, Husserl (1954-1970) developed his idea of the "life world," the world of everyday activities that are taken-for-granted, and of common sense meanings. Because we are embedded within the socially constituted meanings of our common sense world, we are explicitly aware neither of its nature as taken-for-granted nor of how we constitute it. Yet this unacknowledged realm of the life world is the basis of all scientific activity whose constructs are built on indubitable taken-for-granted common activities and the associated constructs of common sense. The life world is the unexamined foundation and matrix of scientific activity: phenomenology makes these common sense constructs and phenomena its object of investigation.

Alfred Schutz: Whereas Husserl was concerned with how we construct our reality in general, Schutz (1962, 1964, 1966) focused more specifically on our construction of social reality. He took up the challenge of Husserl's phenomenology and related it to sociology and social psychology. He was primarily concerned with articulating the common sense structures of consciousness, which he called typifications of consciousness, by means of which individuals comprehend the nature of social reality and are enabled to act in everyday life.

Temporal typifications articulate our experienced life world in terms of the "world within reach" (here and now), the "world within restorable reach" (the past), and the "world within attainable reach" (the future). A related set of temporal constructs concerns our social partners in life as "contemporaries", "predecessors", and "successors" in terms of which our biographical stock of knowledge is organized. For Schutz, the experienced scheme of temporality itself is formed from the interplay of lived time, social calendar time, and cosmic time which regulates the natural rhythms of days and seasons.

Schultz devoted much effort to an articulation of the biographical stock of knowledge organized in terms of what he called "hierarchical orders of typifications" (schemes of interpretations, recipes for action, or role conceptions) and in terms of schemes or orders of relevance which both express the interests and motivations of individuals and groups and thematize the world in a relativistic manner. His work opened up within phenomenology the phenomena of encounter, social interaction, and the reflective articulation of intersubjectivity.

Schutz's (1962) work on "multiple realities" or "finite provinces of meaning" sheds light on the problem of how consciousness conceived as a "cognitive style", composed of the interplay of several dimensions--tension of consciousness, form of spontaneity, time perspective, self experience and form of sociality--differ in response to different situations or worlds. The "world of work", which Schutz considers to be foundational or "paramount", requires a certain style of consciousness which is different from that of the world of science, of art, of play, of religion, etc. According to Schutz we are living in multiple worlds of human meaning which need to be articulated phenomenologically (von Eckartsberg, 1988).

Schutz maps out how the subject's stock of knowledge of the life world is constituted by reciprocal typifications of typical actions by typical actors--roles--which make possible social interaction, planning, and projecting. He also develops Weber's notion of the "subjective interpretation of meaning", i.e., the notion that action always is based upon reinterpretation of the actor, elucidating the motivational, the biographical and the social-historical horizons of experience and their role in intentionality.

Peter Berger: Schulz' important studies of the social structure of the life world have been extended and deepened by the social phenomenological work of Peter Berger (1966, 1973) on the "social construction of reality" and the problem of modernity. He represents a dialectical position which holds that humans are both the products and the producers of their own activities. We internalize the existing and objective social structures in the process of socialization, and we externalize our subjective processes through action, thus affecting and recreating social reality. Externalization, objectivation, and internalization are the dynamic moments of the personsociety dialectic creating institutional structures through habituation and structures of legitimation which justify these creations.

The sociological phenomenology of Berger pursues an examination of the consciousness structures generated and imposed by the social institutions of the modern bureaucratic and technological state and the dynamics of the "capitalist revolution". He brings us to a greater awareness of the meaning of "modernity" defined as the organization of consciousness created by the work and influence of technologically driven economic development. Berger's work elucidates the workings of the "social construction of reality" and yields emancipative insights for collective and personal world-constructions in its dialectic of society as subjective reality (consciousness) and as objective reality (institutionalization and legitimation).

Max Scheler: While the main concern of Husserl and Schutz was to articulate the purely rational structures of the human being, Scheler (1961) was preoccupied with the phenomenological description and analysis of the non-rational essences in experience, with the invariant structures in emotional life. Scheler was the phenomenologist of values, feelings, social sentiments and love. He forged a philosophical anthropology guided by the basic notion of personhood as a spiritual reality, by belief in the essentially social nature of human existence, and by the absoluteness of values and the eternal in human nature. His concern was to determine the place of the human being in the cosmos. His starting point was the irreducibility of the person as "ens amans," as a loving and ethical being. His method for this was phenomenological and was developed in an original way.

Scheler explored the phenomena involved in the immediate apperception and emotional cognition of values--value-ception: value-awareness and value-perception--which he considered to be prior and hence foundational for all other acts of cognition. He was a passionate proponent of the primacy of the emotional and the vital sphere. He worked out an influential phenomenology of ethics which articulated an objective hierarchy of values ranging from sensible to vital values--both values of life--and then to spiritual values and the value of holiness--both values of the person.

Scheler made important contributions to the phenomenology of religion. He brilliantly described the key interhuman phenomena of love and hate, and the variety and forms of sympathy (1954a). He provided us with the exemplary study of the phenomenon of resentment (1954b) (ressentiment). He made important contributions to the sociology of knowledge distinguishing three types of knowledge: knowledge of control, as in the aspirations of science and technology; knowledge of essences, as in the aspirations of philosophy, metaphysics and phenomenology; and knowledge of salvation, as in the religious quest for spiritual fulfillment.

Scheler's philosophical anthropology has been called "ethical personalism" within a Christocentric spiritual tradition emphasizing the multidimensional nature of human existence as bodily/vital, egoic/mental, and personal/spiritual. The highest good must be personal. Scheler emphasized love and the study of the "ordo amoris"--the configuration of love--as the core of the person and as the foundation for social relationships and societal forms. Scheler's work has great originality and masterful phenomenological subtlety. It is fertile and offers many challenges and invitations for corroborative psychological work (Frings, 1965).

The Emergence of Existential Phenomenology

The pure phenomenology of Husserl was later enriched by the "existentialist movement" in the tradition of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Expanded into existential-phenomenology, associated primarily with Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, it recognized the importance of preconscious lived experience, i.e., the phenomenon of the "lived body". It emphasized that being in the world involves more than human consciousness and encompasses the total embodied human response to a perceived situation. Such insights led existential-phenomenologists to focus their research on situated human experience. Intentionality was redefined as a dialogal, relational dynamic of self-other interaction. Existence refers to the concrete, biographical, and embodied life of named persons who are characterized by uniqueness and irreplaceability. Existential-phenomonology studies existence in terms of the person's involvement in a situation within a world.

Martin Heidegger: The main contribution of Heidegger (1927/1967, 1971) lies in his radical questioning of the traditional Cartesian subject-object distinction, which leads to a dualistic universe and the dichotomy of subjective consciousness versus objective matter. With the subject-object split as an operative life world assumption, there is always a gap and separation to be bridged between the two ontological realms of matter and consciousness, leading to unresolvable epistemological difficulties. But if we conceive of our existence completely in theoretical relational and field terms, as a field of openness in which things and the world appear and reveal themselves in a dynamic way (Dasein as being-in-theworld), then we can avoid this problem. Persons are not selves separated from their world which is presumed to exist completely independently of them. Rather, they are personal involvements in the complex totality of a network of interdependent ongoing relationships which demand response and participation.

Heidegger advanced the thesis that for us the world comes into existence in and through our participation. He worked out the essential structures of being-in-the-world as grounded in care, i.e., in concernful presence and openness to the world and others. He developed the general approach of phenomenology into an interpretative understanding of Dasein's total being. He called this approach the hermeneutics of existence, i.e., the interpretative characterization of existence in the world.

Heidegger's work issues a call for action, personal movement, authentic participation, and a change in one's way of thinking from a calculative to a meditative mode. The movement depends on one's resoluteness to face basic existential contingencies, primarily the anxiety over one's own death. It requires one to acknowledge one's self as an illuminator and creator of one's world. Heidegger also talked about ultimate horizons and concerns. He postulated qualitative transformations in authentic moments and movements of personal existence. By doing so, he brought in a transpersonal context and went beyond a strictly rational world view. His attitude and concrete examples of existential-hermeneutic work (Heidegger, 1971) place him in kinship with the tradition of Zen (von Eckartsberg, 1981).

Jean-Paul Sartre: Sartre (1943/1953, 1963) contributed greatly to the "existentialization" of phenomenology through his challenge that "existence precedes essence." According to Sartre, the person is the totality of his or her life choices, for which he or she is fully responsible. His idea of the fundamental project of a person's life refers to the way each person chooses him or herself. This project can be disclosed by existential psychoanalysis, Sartre's method of personalistic reflection, which was applied in his famous book-length case studies.

The concept of the fundamental project is of great potential value to clinical and personality psychology. It refers to the unique configuration of meaningful existential choices, i.e., the total web of existential moves which a person makes. The project is the inner principle of coherence that we can perceive and articulate in our own and in other's lives.

The study of individuals entails gaining an understanding of how they go about the actualization of possibilities, their "not yet". Sartre emphasized the fact that one is always moving beyond oneself towards something else. He worked out what he called a "progressive-regressive" dialectical method which is said to be able to betray the "secret of the self", namely, the implicit purpose for which one strives. Sartre's method aims at comprehension, a mode of understanding wherein one lives the existence of the other in intuitive and empathic behaviors. To comprehend the action of another we enter the original situatedness of that person biographically in terms of the operative historical and cultural conditions (regressive move). We seek to understand the purpose or goal choice that governs the direction of the action taken (progressive move) by means of which the person surpasses the givens in the direction of his or her possibilities.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962, 1964/1968) broadened the meaning of intentionality to include preverbal thought (thinking that exists in action) or the pre-personal dimension of bodily intentions and meaning. He maintained that the acting body always already understands its situation as well as its own possibilities, quite before we pay any explicit attention to it. For Merleau-Ponty intentionality, no longer merely a matter of cognitive consciousness, includes the life of embodied existence and interactive communication which precedes, and is the foundation for, explicit and thematic consciousness.

In the most global terms, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the mystery that I am part of the world and that the world is an extension of my body. Body and world mutually imply each other and are of the same nature. They stand in a relationship that he characterizes as "j'en suis" (I belong to it). This is the primordial ground of all our awareness, a kind of prolongation of our body which Merleau-Ponty in his later writing expresses metaphorically as the flesh of the world. The subject-object dichotomy of traditional thinking is overcome by Merleau-Ponty. We are always in the midst of the world and have no vantage point outside it. We can never achieve total clarity even in our reflective and critical orientation because we cannot fully penetrate the darkness of our primordial awareness in which meaning is always already constituted. We cannot attend the birth of meaning in our life. Bodily existence itself is a giver of meanings: our body has the power of expression; it gives rise to meaning.

Our body gives us our power of motility, the "I can" or "I am able to". This happens on a pre-reflective level, on the level of operative intentionality, of practognosie. By virtue of our embodiment we find ourselves always already situated and capable of meaningful interaction.

Merleau-Ponty has contributed greatly to our understanding of the person as a participant in, and creator of, meaning--even as a creature condemned to meaning. He also makes us aware of the limits of our power of reflection and of the fact that we find ourselves in a situation of essential ambiguity, of "chiaroscuro", not being fully able to penetrate the sources and origins of our meaning making. This ambiguity is grounded in our bodily participation in being and on the paradox that we ourselves are constituted by the very being of which we become aware. Merleau-Ponty rejects both materialism and idealism, i.e., the reduction of man's world to an idea. He establishes his own position of existential-phenomenology, which is a middle ground centering on one's embodied subjectivity and focusing on the primacy of perception.

FROM INTENTIONALITY TO RELATIONSHIP-BUILDING

AND DWELLING

We have surveyed how Husserl's original inspiration of phenomenology has undergone significant development and change through the work of his successors. If we focus on the key phenomenological notion of intentionality we can gain a measure of the development that has taken place in our thinking.

Originally, intentionality was metaphorized as an "intentional arrow" symbolizing the one-directional act of ego-cogito-cogitatum, an ego directing its attention toward an object revealing its sense or meaning. Reflecting on intentionality revealed to Husserl the existence of horizons or halos extending from the perceptual or cognitive object and linking them to their relevant contexts of interpretation and familiarity; cognitively, i.e., in terms of outer horizons; perceptually, i.e., in terms of the horizons engendered by bodily movement; and temporally, i.e., in terms of inner time-consciousness. The early phenomenological work of Husserl expanded the notion of intentionality to include operative intentionality, i.e., the intentionality of spontaneous and competent autotelic bodymovement. Metaphorically this could be referred to as "auto-pilot intentionality." Merleau-Ponty takes up and elaborates this idea in the context of his notion of the lived body, the "body subject" (le corps propre) and motility. By means of our bodily insertion into reality, we are always already vitally responsive to the demands of our situation upon our body. Our body moves in terms of pre-reflective intelligence and lived involvement which exceeds our conscious awareness and control. Operative intentionality establishes and utilizes secret bonds of correspondence and interdependency which constitute our reciprocal involvements. In this way of thinking the "intentional arrow" has become a two-way street of interaction, inter-experience and co-constitution.

For Scheler, the primordial human act is one of value-ception. He emphasizes the emotional and trans-rational nature of our relating to the world and to one another, and concentrates on loving and hating, i.e., on value-laden acts by means of which we construct our lives. For Sartre, the notion of intentionality is linked with existential choices and radical freedom to make commitments and to choose our future. Sartre's key notion in this context is the existential project, characterizing the way a person chooses his or her long-range life commitments and life direction in and through all particular acts of involvement.

In Heidegger's hyphenated notion of being-in-the-world, which radicalizes the subject-object notion and bridges the subject-object split, Dasein's basic ontological structure is characterized as care, concernful presence, and world-openness. The priority of the subject, person, or ego yields to the unitary and coequal relationship of mutual implication or "relational totality": caring-being-in-the-world. In his later work Heidegger develops this notion into dwelling by which he means our caring, sparing, spatializing and temporalizing, presenting and happening "eventing" of being, which we might call: culture-building. Revealed by a new epistemological attitude of meditative, responsive, "thanking thinking" (von Eckartsberg, 1981), dwelling is concerned with our authentic presence to our situations, our things, our people. Heidegger ushers in a normative dimension: our concern with the authentic and good life in deep relationship to the ground of Being.

In my reading, the concept of intentionality in the phenomenological tradition seems to continue to evolve. We can discern a spectrum that ranges from intentionality in the original Husserlian sense to relationshipcultivation and culture-building or dwelling in the sense of the later Heidegger. As we widen the context of understanding of the contributing dimensions in the constitution of meaning to include the role of our selfmoving body, our essential intersubjectivity, and our embeddedness in language and culture, the meaning of intentionality changes from an emphasis mostly upon cognitive understanding to one of existential engagement in the creation of a way of life (dwelling). Heidegger's understanding of dwelling is akin to the understanding and praxis of Zen and Taoism.

Thus, over time, our understanding of intentionality undergoes a shift in emphasis or focus from consciousness to culture-building acts, from value-free phenomenological reflective analysis operating under the self-imposed disciplines of several steps of bracketing (epoché) to passionate value-engagement and existential commitment. We move from the primacy of knowing to the primacy of life praxis, to enactment.

Hermeneutical Dialectics

Central to the work of hermeneutical dialectics, especially in the work of Heidegger and Gadamer, is the so-called "Hermeneutical Circle." This thought figure describes the open-ended and continuously spiraling nature of hermeneutical inquiry and the sense-making process. We always have foreknowledge about most aspects of life. We come to any phenomenon with a precomprehension of its meaning, yet we are in search of deeper understanding and more precise differentiation by means of the work of interpretation. Gadamer (1975) reinterprets prejudice as a virtue:

This recognition that all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice gives the hermeneutical problem its real thrust. . . . The fundamental prejudice of the enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself. What is necessary is a fundamental rehabilitation of the concept of prejudice and a recognition of the fact that there are legitimate prejudices, if we want to do justice to man's finite, historical mode of being (1975, p. 239).

Hermeneutical dialectics is interested in studying and preserving the cultural heritage: it is concerned with the mediation of the tradition (Traditionsvermittlung). The research's guiding interest is meaning enrichment which is accomplished by the fusion of the horizons of the author of the work or text and the interpreter who engages the work from his or her own perspective. For Gadamer, the work of hermeneutics is one of dialogue, the original phenomenon of language.

Dialogal-Existential Social Psychology

Although Husserl's phenomenology and existential-phenomenology address one of the key issues in social psychology, intersubjectivity, most scholars agree that the intentionality model fails to account properly for person-to-person relationships. The model of constitution tends to objectify the other and cannot transcend the solipsism of the individual. The otherness of the other cannot be done justice to in the intentionality model. As Buber would say, phenomenology remains in the "I-It" attitude and fails to do justice to the "I-Thou" quality of genuine encounter. The other is essentially different from me; we meet and enter into relationship with each other as autonomous and irreducible subjects through dialogue which establishes a new ontological domain between us: the between. We move from phenomenology and existentialism to "co-existentialism."

Dialogal existentialism focuses on the role of speech in establishing interpersonal relationships and the realm of the in-between. The emphasis shifts from the primacy of consciousness to the primacy of language. Consciousness becomes a species of self-talk. There is also a shift from an I-orientation to a we-orientation. What we generate together through our interaction and speaking together--our relationship--becomes central. Intentionality is reconceptualized as meeting, in which we are coequal partners rather than dominant subjects. The self as subjectivity is taken out of its isolation, loneliness, and the grandiosity of its world-construction; it is placed into responsible relationship and partnership with others who limit or augment my freedom and power. Subjective constitution yields to the joint construction of reality in the dialogal-existential view. My project is modified as a cooperative venture; my freedom of choice is tempered by the need to achieve consensus and agreement with the other. The autonomy of my will is challenged by the reality of the will of the other and the need to negotiate a consensus. Personal embodiment is affected by my involvement as a member in a shared body politic; we affect each other in a shared situation. We stand in an ethical relationship to each other, engaged in a dialogal field of yes-saying and no-saying, of agreement and refusal. You, as other, set limits to my freedom and autonomy, but you also enlarge my possibilities through affirmation and support.

Dialogal-existentialism, exemplified by the work of Buber, is a speech-based, relationship-centered, religious and ethically inspired world view. Its philosophical anthropology considers humans primarily as relationship-builders and communicators, as socially engaged and responsible beings. The research-guiding interest of dialogal-existential work is to promote genuine dialogue, to cultivate optimal human interrelationships. It aims at articulating an ethic which is conducive to peaceful coexistence, to loving-caring encounter and relation.

The Christian dialogal existentialism of Rosenstock-Huessy (1966) can be characterized as transpersonal existentialism. For him the key human phenomenon is inspired speaking between interlocutors. In speaking to one another by name, in address and response, we transfer cosmic processes and are enlisted in the transmission of spiritual and transpersonal powers. Rosenstock-Huessy (1988) emphasizes the social meaning of the transpersonal or spiritual dimension:

We call spiritual only that which concerns and is appropriate to more than one soul. A reality is spiritual (like socialism, the state, the church) when several souls in succession have to occupy a designated position in it. Everything spiritual, therefore, has to be understood as soul succession. The spirit takes hold of more than one person (p. 55-56).

Rosenstock-Huessy shows us how language establishes social relations and accomplishes the work of multi-generational cooperative and peaceful world-building. Speech, i.e., people speaking and listening seriously to each other, achieves this in an ecologically balanced manner by means of a budgeting of the efforts of individual persons as well as that of collectivities, to create and sustain the space-axes inside (us) and outside (them) and the time-axes of past and future which constitute our individual and social worlds, organized as the cross of reality.

As a world-community of different races, religions, genders, and nations we are moving toward the establishment of a planetary culture which is economically integrated and interdependent, ecologically responsible, peaceful, cooperative and just, but nevertheless diverse in terms of regional spiritualities and cultural traditions.

Through language we create a super-time of all of humanities' experiences, accomplishments, failures and yearnings, and a super-space of global and cosmic interconnectedness. In these the irreplaceability and sacredness of all individual lives and life forms can be celebrated. The meaning of intentionality in this transpersonal existential context has now become inspired speaking, accomplishing the creation of an ethical and inspired way of life. Thus, the rhetorical horizon becomes relevant.

Rosenstock-Huessey's work would appear to present the widest cultural, historical, ecological and spiritual context to date. It shows how this is an accomplishment and reality of the meta-institution of language, enlisting all speakers and writers in an historical calling toward global peaceful coexistence in the fullness of time, an authentic celebration of differences, and a genuine welcoming of uniqueness and full personhood in social bodies.

It is perhaps not surprising that the key contributors to dialogalexistentialism, Buber, Rosenzweig, Rosenstock-Huessy and Levinas, are committed religious thinkers who ground their thinking in an explicit moral-ethical orientation and world-view--the biblical heritage--which transcends individual interests and stresses social responsibility and the good life in community.

Critical Emancipatory Human Science

In the critical emancipatory movement (Radnitzki, 1968) the relationship of the individual to societal and political structures, to institutions and ideologies, becomes thematic. It studies how we are located in society and culture in terms of social dimensions of classes, professions, races, gender and age and how this placement in social-historical contexts shapes us in our actions and experiences. The interdependence of knowledge and interest are investigated by Habermas (1971). Our fundamental anthropological and communal assumptions become articulated in terms of how they serve vested interests and the existing power and economic structure of society. The struggle for emancipation and liberation from actual or hypostatized social forces--ideological, political, and economic domination--becomes the guiding research interest and practical intention. The meaning of intentionality is changed into responsible ethical action: the struggle for universal human liberation from the falsifications, mystifications and injustices of the system. Habermas considers steering and governance as the key ethical phenomena in the life of the individual and of society; he promotes the idea of democratic pluralism and the open communication society as the pre-conditions for self-realization through genuine forms of communicative acts.

In contrast to the dialogal approach which focuses mostly on the I-Thou situation of dyadic encounter, the critical emancipator school addresses our social life in the aggregates of institutional life and ideology. It has a sociological, economic, and political emphasis and tries to explicate these macro-social contexts as they impact upon and co-constitute, the experience and action--"experiaction"--of the individual and groups.

Communicative action and the quest for consensus and agreement are central concerns for Habermas and the critical emancipatory movement. The life-world is understood as the intersubjectively shared collective life-context, a culturally transmitted and linguistically organized background of taken-for-granted meaning patterns which act as the ground for all specific communications and actions. Through critical reflection these operative contexts for communicative action have to be identified, made conscious, and then taken into account in our life-praxis.

Toward a Way of Life Psychology

In the presentation of social psychology as a polyparadigmatic discipline and as a human science, I have emphasized the actor perspective which places the person at the center of his or her world, actively involved in construing conscious meanings and trying to act from this understanding in establishing relationships. It became clear that the person cannot achieve total transparency due to operative pre-personal and body emotional patterns and also due to opaque trans-personal social political patterns and values which rule our involvement in situations and our actions.

Being involved not only in terms of consciousness but also in terms of speech and language, and hence with others in relationships under the rule of chosen values, the dialogal life and communicative action become central issues for social psychology. Thus, the existentialist "actor" point of view has come to be complemented by the coexistential partnership model of people acting together, with or against each other, seeking con-

sensus and agreement, as well as mutual exploitation and domination. The ethical questions of good and bad, of pro-social and antisocial, of optimal and destructive relationships arise and are formulated in terms of "communication phenomenology" (Wyss), "communicative action theory" (Habermas), and "communicative praxis" (Schrag). These are important emergent paradigms which I have not considered fully in this presentation. They take the "linguistic turn" and shift their perspective from the primacy of consciousness of the individual to the primacy of speech and communication between partners in interaction, including the rule of imperatives which express value-commitments.

If we study the life of a person as a pattern, as a way of life, we realize that the individual actor is involved with others as an existential cast of characters. The individual creates and maintains many relationships simultaneously. He or she plays many roles in one-on-one relationships: friendships, love relationships, functional partnerships; in small groups: family, teams, congregations, fellowships, etc.; and in larger collectivities: citizenship, political parties, audiences, the "masses", etc. Every person is simultaneously a unique and irreplaceable individual actor, a member, a co-actor in myriad social bodies constituting cultural life, and an anonymous functionary in collectivities.

We seem to be obliged to take a holistic and ecological point of view which addresses the totality of an individual's involvements and the husbanding and budgeting of his or her efforts and activities in order to enter into and to sustain existential relationships. There is a limited lifetime for opportunities for engagement, and a person must learn to distribute his or her communicative actions selectively so as to cultivate all relationships making up his or her life, and to coordinate and orchestrate them into a meaningful and thriving pattern: what we call a person's way of life.

This is a matter of rhythm and balance, of not overextending one's capacity leading to stress and burnout, and of not underutilizing one's potential leading to boredom and isolation. Every person has to experiment to find the optimal balance of communicative involvement and flow within the constraints of the given cultural context. This, in turn, needs to be optimized in the direction of an ideal society of open communication which offers maximal educational, economic, and spiritual opportunities for all of its members.

Every person is involved in creating, shaping and sustaining a way of life: everyone incarnates a "lifestyle". We have to engage in comparative research to determine what distinguishes one lifestyle from another. This hinges on the chosen or imposed regulative principles and value commitments made by an individual, a group or a whole culture. Is the

ruling ideal material success-orientated or even greed; is it the ideological conviction of class or racial superiority which oppresses outsiders; or is it the value-attitude of welcoming openness, hospitality and egalitarianism? Is it the vision and inspiration of the rule of love (Das Reich der Liebe), as one might call it? What are the auspices and regulating principles which shape a particular way of life as the discernable pattern of a lifestyle?

There seems to be a need to articulate an organismic and ecological paradigm for the creation and cultivation of a way-of-life valid for individual persons as well as for social bodies and their interdependence. The various coexisting paradigms of social psychology as a human science offer the necessary insights and research tools to begin to articulate such a "way of life" psychology as an integrative new paradigm.

The creator of a new paradigm always hopes to find the last word, the ultimate vision of a theory which will make all other paradigms superfluous. Perhaps every founder needs this illusion to sustain conviction in the validity and truth-claim of his or her paradigm. Is the integrative vision of the essence of human nature as creator of a way of life and the guiding research interest of creating a lifestyle an ultimate insight which can lead to paradigm replacement in the spirit of Kuhn's model?

I wish this were so, but I suspect that the adherents and creators of other paradigms will not be convinced enough to abandon their positions and switch over to a "way of life" study. Social psychology will remain a poly-paradigmatic discipline; this is no wonder in the face of the indubitable truth that social life is always more than what we can say about it. Our theories remain partial approximations and incomplete mappings of the existential theatre. In matters of intellect and rationality we sooner or later realize, with Adorno, that it is an illusion to believe that thought is able to grasp reality as a whole. We probably have to learn to proceed in the manner of "negative dialectics" by "realizing the insufficiency and incongruence of (our) conceptual tools" (Dallmayr, 1987, p. 62).

Nevertheless, as we seem to be at a turning point in the historical and political development of humankind and our relationship to our ecological environment, we need specific research which will allow us to discern the dimensions and components of an optimal way of life. What is the way-of-life pattern which is most promising, creative, fulfilling and responsible, while being least self-defeating and self- other- and earth-destructive for individuals, nations, and the entire world community?

In the wake of the manifest failure of both the communist and the capitalist systems, to promote human welfare and ecological balance we are called upon to find alternative optimal ways of life, individually and collectively, which respect the dignity of persons and the limits of our resources, and which do not over-stress, exploit and destroy the supportive and self-regenerative capacity of our human and world environment.

I consider this to be the emergent task of social psychology as a human science.

Duquesne University

Pittsburgh, PA

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