A Phenomenological Approach to the Study of Social Distance

The observatory reports that the governor of the Veneto region of Italy told journalists in February that the country would be better than China in handling the virus due to Italians’ “culturally strong attention to hygiene, washing hands and taking showers, whereas we have all seen the Chinese eating mice alive”. It also states that the Brazilian Education Minister ridiculed Chinese people in a tweet, suggesting the pandemic was part of the Chinese government’s “plan for world domination”. This increment in racist rhetoric has coincided with an increment in racist attacks: “Since February, Asians and people of Asian descent around the world have been subjected to attacks and beatings, violent bullying, threats, racist abuse, and discrimination that appear linked to the pandemic”.

The peculiarity of social interactions that is made explicit in reference to the role of social distance in the modern metropolis is examined more fully in Simmel’s essays on space.

In the first footnote of his article “The Stranger” he mentions the works of Simmel, Stonequist and Bogardus among others. However, he refers the reader to “the valuable monograph by Margaret Mary Wood” (Schutz 1964c: 92).

For an in-depth analysis of this issue, see López 2021; forthcoming).

This idea was developed by Alice Koubová (2014), and refers to the existence of opacity and invisible aspects of agents in social interaction. She analyses the hypothesis according to which there is “an aspect of invisibility that functions as a subtle source of ungraspable meaning, as an excess of sense, whose function is performative”. We propose that this “invisible excess of sense” is particularly important in the experience of the Other as a stranger.

For instance, Schutz shows how universal symbols originate in universal traits of the general human condition. In this respect, some cultural constructions are found in the structure of our own body, which is considered “as a center 0 of a system of coordinates” under which we group the objects of our environment in terms of ‘above and underneath,’ ‘before and behind,’ ‘right and left.’ That system of coordinates organizes our experience in the life-world and is the basis of the construction of different cultural symbols. In Chinese thought, for example, the head symbolizes the sky whereas the feet symbolize earth; because the sky has to send rain in order to fertilize the earth, the sky also symbolizes the male principle, the positive principle, Yang, and earth the negative, female Yin. “And this symbolism of higher-lower has its correlate in Chinese medicine, music, dance, social hierarchy, etiquette, all of which are correlated and can be brought into symbolic appresentational reference one with the other” (see Schutz 1962c: 334f.).

“We begin our considerations as human beings who are living naturally, objectivating, judging, feeling, willing ‘in the natural attitude.’ What that signifies we shall make clear in simple meditations which can best be carried out in the first person singular” (Husserl 1983 [1913]: §27).

It is important here to mention the different levels of analysis proposed by Husserl and Schutz. For Husserl, the aim is the transition from an ontological-logical consideration (which stops with a pregiven reality) to a transcendental consideration (which inquires even into this pregivenness as such). His reflection “ascends from a mundane alienness, to a transcendental alienness which engenders the genesis of the world” (Waldenfels and Steinbock 1990: 24). However, while Husserl intended to clarify the problem of intersubjectivity in transcendental phenomenology, Schutz found his task in clarifying the problem in the constitutive phenomenology of natural attitude or in the ontology of the life-world (Hamauzu 2009: 60).

The reciprocity of perspective also means, as Anthony Steinbock (1995) states, a “reversibility of perspectives” where home and alien are interchangeable and mutually accessible, that is, symmetrically accessible to the same degree. Steinbock is critical of this idea, since he considers that the co-generative structure of home-world/alien-world has an axiological asymmetry. In this respect, he agrees with Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the experience of the Other is the experience of a non-reciprocity, of an asymmetrical relation. This is because the experience of the Other is for Levinas an ethical and not an ontological experience, and because this experience of the face of the Other is the experience of a speaking and not in the first place corporeal presence (Dastur 2011). For a development of this topic see the discussion (Steinbock 1995: 252f.).

Despite its significance, the phenomenological study of the construction of political orders exceeds the aims of this article.

Schutz states that this distinction is also the foundation of Weber’s concepts of subjective and objective interpretation.

The term “Folkways” was originally coined by William Graham Sumner and refers to the learned behavior and social conventions shared by the members of a group. Schutz makes use of this concept in the context of his reflexion of the relationship between in-group [Eigengruppe] and out-group [Fremdgruppe].

As Schutz mentions, strictly speaking, nearly all administrative and legislative measures involve the placing of individuals under imposed social categories.

It should be mentioned that not all typifications lead to a reification process of the Other; in the same way that not all typifications are discriminatory. In this respect, Schutz’ account of intersubjectivity does not suffer from the antipathy characteristic of the Sartrean view, since one does not relate “allergically” to another consciousness appearing on the scene (Barber 2001). According to Sartre, a relationship between the I-subject and the Other-subject is impossible. Either I am the object and the Other is the subject or vice versa (Schutz 1962b: 198). Indeed, Sartre’s theory of “We” marks the difference between a “We-subject” and a “We-object”. Schutz reformulates Sartre’s idea that the subjective orientation towards the Other implies “converting the Other into an object” into the idea of “using inadequate types or typifications from an objective point of view without sufficient sensibility towards the subjective meaning of the Other”. In this sense, he understands that intersubjectivity involves two subjectivities: “[b]oth seize one another as a co-performing subjectivity” (Schutz 1962b: 203).

For a more detailed discussion on this topic see (Dreher 2009).

“Every American has a role to play in defending our nation from this invisible, horrible enemy,” said the president of the United States in a public conference on March 21^st 2020. However, militaristic imagery is not unique to government leaders, news media and social media in the USA; it is possible to find similar imagery being propagated in different parts of the world.

Testimony of a patient infected by COVID-19 in Argentina taken from a Journal article. See Chaluf (2020).