Abstract

This treatise argues that "rationalism" and "individualism," two metaphysical frameworks of modern thought, have affected sociology in its effort to understand man in relation to society. Sociology has failed to reconcile its objective view of social structure and its subjective image of individual action. ;The thought of major philosophers of the 20th century is examined in order to consider possible resolutions of this problem. This examination includes Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, who see contradictions as due not to the inherent nature of the object of human studies but to the dualist epistemology of modern metaphysics. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty demonstrate a way to overcome dualism by examining "phenomena" directly given to sensibility and tracing them to the lived meaning which constitutes the human world and the basis of all knowledge. Heidegger and Wittgenstein, on the other hand, argue that the phenomenal world is linguistically constituted in communicative activities. Their linguistic philosophy provides a possibility for overcoming both subjectivism and rationalism. ;Major sociological theorists are then examined to see how their thought has dealt with these same issues. They include Dilthey, Scheler and Mannheim, all of whom opposed the individualist position separating individuals from society and proposed an interpretive methodology and a sociology of knowledge for treating the individual, culture and knowledge as a unity, historically developed and developing. Weber, Simmel, Durkheim and Marcuse are shown, by contrast, to have conceived individuality as the loftiest value of Western civilization and developed divergent critiques of society. Schutz, through a phenomenological sociology, and Garfinkel, in ethnomethodology, are considered critical of the metaphysical framework of conventional sociology. ;This treatise aims to clarify how meaning and the understanding of action have become de-subjectivated, particularly as exemplified in the approaches of phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology which may offer an alternative to sociology's entanglement with individualism and rationalism.