Tuning-in processes hold a central role in Alfred Schutz’s theory on social reality. Actors mirroring each other’s non-verbal cues and forming shared realities constitute the essence of the communicative interplay between humans. In this article, we will explore the pedagogical facets of tuning-in and focus on the interplay between teacher and students within the context of online teaching. Interview surveys with teachers have indicated that they experience major communicative problems when teaching online. When moving from the real classroom to Zoom or Teams, they find it difficult “to reach” their students and struggle to make themselves understood. However, very little research based on observational studies of online teaching has focussed on how these difficulties unfold temporally. This is the aim of this study. By using a social phenomenological approach, our analysis revolves around two video sequences of online interaction taken from a field study in a Danish seventh-grade class, conducted during the COVID-19 lockdown. Our study highlights tuning-in among teacher and students as the key challenge of online teaching. The processes of bodily exchange that should lead to synchronization of thought is truncated and the actors tend to stay in each their reality. Yet, teachers, who turn to activities characterized by a predefined interactional course can succeed in creating rhythmic processes of appeals and responses between themselves and their students.
In my first reply to Lynch’s “Promise and Silence,” I stressed the major themes of my earlier paper “Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise”—the failings of ethnomethodological field studies and ways that such shortcomings are ignored, glossed over, or hidden. I considered clarifying this material as being of first importance. On the other hand, Lynch’s paper is written from within a disciplinary approach to the ethnomethodological project. The present comment presents 1970s UCLA ethnomethodology as a foil to understand better the background and misleading character of Lynch’s critique.
Technological fatigue and exhaustion have emerged as defining features of contemporary existence, yet philosophical treatments of these phenomena remain fragmented, oscillating between ontic psychological description and broad sociocultural critique without adequate ontological grounding. This paper argues that the fatigue characteristic of our technological milieu is not a contingent malfunction of the “achievement society” diagnosed by Byung-Chul Han but rather its most authentic ontological product—a mode of resistance immanent to the Heideggerian enframing (Gestell) itself. Through a sustained dialogical reading of Heidegger’s late philosophy of technology and Han’s psychopolitical diagnostics, we demonstrate that the “achievement subject” represents the long-sought subjective correlate of enframing: a Dasein that has interiorized its own status as standing-reserve (Bestand) and experiences its freedom precisely as enthusiastic self-optimization. Burnout, on this account, is not a breakdown but the means by which Bestand-subjectivity undergoes its own exhaustibility. Critically engaging Han’s proposed remedies—contemplation, inactivity, Eastern “absencing”—we argue that these remain bound within the positivity they seek to escape. Drawing on a closer reading of Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking, we distinguish his notion of Gelassenheit (releasement) from Han’s contemplative turn, showing that the former is not a practice of subjective self-cultivation but an ontological disposition of letting-be that refuses the very logic of achievement. We argue, further, that technological fatigue itself harbors a novel form of ontological negativity, an immanent refusal of the standing-reserve logic that constitutes the only genuine site of what Heidegger called the “saving power”. The paper thus offers a rehabilitated concept of exhaustion as existential protest, opening toward what we term a “politics of fatigue” beyond the impasses of digital hygiene and contemplative withdrawal.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has, from very early on, been labelled a “philosophy of ambiguity” (Ferdinand Alquié, Alphonse de Waelhens). In the early 1950s he encountered different psychoanalytical and psychological concepts of ambiguity and ambivalence (particularly in the work of Melanie Klein and Else Frenkel-Brunswik) that he integrated into his philosophy of ambiguity. This incorporation, and particularly the reception of Frenkel-Brunswik’s concepts has so far not been studied in detail. However, this reception is important because it enabled Merleau-Ponty to articulate more clearly the relation between emotional and cognitive aspects and to move from ambiguity of perception to ambiguity in expression, from being confronted with ambiguity to dealing with ambiguity, which is central to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in the 1950s. This article traces the reception of Frenkel-Brunswik’s work by Merleau-Ponty and its further impact on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in the intermediary phase in the first half of the 1950s.
Previous conversation-analytic research on action sequences accomplished through embodied conduct has shown that such sequences may proceed according to temporal orders that differ from those of the turn-taking system—an issue discussed under the rubric of multiple temporalities. In line with this analytic orientation, this paper investigates how, in Japanese instructional contexts, instructions and instructed actions are organized as action sequences with their own temporal order. Drawing on a large corpus of naturally occurring everyday Japanese interactions, a collection of instruction sequences was assembled in which instructions were produced through embodied resources and were immediately followed by the recipients’ embodied actions. Conversation analysis revealed that the participants recurrently coupled verbal expression with bodily demonstration—termed an instruction articulation unit—to enable the recipients to (1) recognize an instruction as a coherent unit of action and (2) understand the timing for initiating the instructed action independently of turn-taking organization. Turn-constructional units were also observed as resources for establishing coherence across multiple instruction sequences. On this basis, the analysis explicates how multiple temporalities are systematically interrelated in the constitution of instructional activities.
I argue that attention is always placed in the lived body-environment as the locus of control of bodily resources, which are activated, oriented, and made manifest as centered in joint engagement there. Since these resources are constitutive of our possibilities for being in the world, it follows that attention is how the self is made manifest in relation to and in engagement with other entities. I also argue that while attention itself is typically passive in reacting to situation demands, active attention (or mindfulness) can enable a holistic response that more fully actualizes the human being vis-à-vis its present possibilities.
Although customer categorization has long been regarded as a key practice for promoting sales outcomes, its communicative dimensions have received limited analytical attention. This paper examines customer categorization as an interactionally accomplished phenomenon embedded in sales interaction. Drawing on Membership Categorization Analysis of video-recorded interactions in Japanese jewelry retail stores, the study demonstrates that customer categorization is systematically integrated into salespersons’ persuasive actions that encourage customers to consider purchasing products. The analysis identifies two broad categorization practices. The first involves categorizing co-present customers, often through inferences based on appearance. This practice functions as a customer-targeting resource that establishes a relationship between particular products and customers without explicit reference to articulated needs. By invoking normative category–predicate relations and mobilizing hypothetical others’ preferences, salespersons implement suggestive selling at an early stage of the encounter. The persuasive force of such categorizations is further strengthened through salespersons’ professional expertise and accumulated experience. The second practice concerns categorizing absent but relevant potential users, particularly in gift-purchasing situations. Here, salespersons infer attributes of absent users from information provided by co-present customers and mobilize imagined customers to support adaptive selling. The analysis also shows that categorization may involve multiple individuals and include salesperson self-categorization as a persuasive resource. Moving beyond cognitive accounts, the study highlights customer categorization as a dynamic, locally produced mechanism through which customer segmentation and adaptive selling are accomplished in situ.
Previous conversation analytic studies of instruction have observed that instructors use deictic expressions, accompanied by gestures and other body movements, to demonstrate how to complete a task. In most examined cases, these deictic expressions are proximal and refer to the object of the speakers’ (i.e., the instructors’) pointing gestures or their body movements themselves. By contrast, in this study, we focus on uses of the Japanese medial (so-type) spatial deictic pronoun (soko or “that place”) in instructive actions to explore aspects of the organization of instruction and instructed action. We observe that this medial deictic expression refers to the site of the recipient’s (i.e., the novice’s or student’s) specific operation or their current posture. We use conversation analysis to analyze videotaped interactions in instructional settings. We demonstrate that the instructors incorporate the novice’s or student’s action of following a just-given instruction, or its result, into an incipient follow-up or next instruction by using the medial deictic expression. We also discuss some theoretical implications of the demonstration by highlighting the distributed nature of the medial deictic reference and the “co-operative” nature of instruction.
The World Health Organization defines health as physical, mental, and social well-being, yet Western public health still tends to treat the social as a population-level variable captured by measurable indicators. Drawing on Husserl’s critique of naturalistic reductionism, this paper argues that such framing reifies persons and eclipses the lifeworld conditions through which health becomes intelligible in the first place. Extending Gadamer’s account of health as an invisible equilibrium, we propose that social health names a largely tacit background of trust, relevance, and belonging that is typically noticed only when it breaks down. Steinbock’s homeworld/alienworld dynamic shows why social equilibrium cannot be secured by exclusion. To articulate the vital dynamics of this equilibrium, we place Aristotle’s notion of entelechy in dialogue with Hedwig Conrad-Martius’s stratified anthropology (leiblich, affektiv-seelisch, geistig-seelisch) and Husserl’s account of empathy as the condition for intersubjective givenness. We define social health as the entelechial, affectively mediated capacity of persons and institutions to sustain and renew a shared homeworld that can integrate alienworlds, resonating with Buen Vivir’s relational and ecological conception of flourishing.
Thomas Luckmann’s The Invisible Religion (1967) represents a seminal intervention in the sociology of religion, challenging ecclesiastical-centred conceptions of religious practice in Western societies. While the theory has generated considerable scholarly engagement in Euro-American contexts, its reception within African universities – particularly in departments of religious studies and sociology – remains underexamined and uncertain. This article interrogates the promise and perils of applying the invisible religion paradigm to the African religious field. The uncertainty surrounding Luckmann’s reception in Africa is not incidental but structural. Since initial contact with European traders, travellers, exiles, Christian missionaries, anthropologists, and colonial administrators, African intellectual traditions have been subjected to externally imposed theoretical frameworks and worldviews that categorised African realities and lived experiences according to foreign epistemologies, concepts and ideologies. Africa thus became a testing ground for Western-generated theories, with its diverse peoples, cultures, and practices moulded to fit alien conceptual schemes. This colonial epistemological legacy continues to shape contemporary theoretical engagements with African religious practices. Against this backdrop, the article critically examines whether Luckmann’s framework can illuminate African religious phenomena without reproducing the very epistemic violence it seeks to move beyond. It identifies both the analytical possibilities the invisible religion paradigm offers for understanding non-institutionalised religious expressions in Africa, and the conceptual risks inherent in applying a Western-derived theory to a context shaped by different historical and cultural logics. Ultimately, the article argues for a reflexive approach that acknowledges the theory’s limitations while exploring its potential for decolonising sociological understandings of African religious lifeforms, lifeworlds, and lifestyles.
According to Husserl and Luckmann, the relationship between phenomenology and the human sciences should be the relationship of foundation. Phenomenology acts as the First Philosophy, describing the constitutive laws of the world and providing the universal matrix for the empirical analysis. Some philosophers argue against this approach and, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, claim a more dialogical relation between these two domains of knowledge. However, in Merleau-Ponty’s reasoning, we can find a more radical approach that dissolves the demarcation boundary between phenomenological and empirical inquiries and represents them as the “degrees of the clarification of the same knowledge” about the human being and the world. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that we can conceive the relationship between phenomenology and the human sciences through the idea of the “fundamental homogeneity” in which there are no separated eidetic and inductive modes of investigation, but rather a “movement back and forth from facts to ideas and from ideas to facts”.
This work presents a comprehensive conceptual analysis of empathy and introduces the neologism empathesis. It begins with a brief historical overview of the concept of empathy, whose definitions vary widely, ranging from emotional involvement to helping others. These differences are not a problem per se but, when unacknowledged or unanalysed, have often led to both theoretical and empirical confusion. Drawing on Edith Stein’s phenomenological perspective and Gilbert Ryle’s philosophy, we deepen the conceptual understanding of empathy. Following Stein, it is conceived as a primordial experience of perceiving another’s emotions and needs, even though the content (the other’s emotion itself) is non-primordial. This process involves imagining oneself in the place of the other. We use conceptual analysis to discuss the shortcomings of theories strongly grounded in processes of simulation and, especially, of inference. We argue that empathy is not a mental inference but an embodied, interactive experience that requires ethical openness and responsiveness. Finally, we analyse the use of the concept of empathy in ordinary language using the techniques proposed by John Wilson: paradigm case, counterexample, related concept, and borderline case. We conclude that clearer conceptual boundaries are needed and propose the neologism Empathesis to highlight the inseparability of empathy and understanding of the other. This unified concept emphasizes empathy as an active, ethical stance rather than a passive emotional response.
This article endeavors to outline potential insights and impulses for the sociological debate on community arising from Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology. The focus is on an examination of non-rational elements of social relationships, non-rational insofar as they do not primarily rely on an intellectual basis. The starting point of the examination is a re-reading of Ferdinand Tönnies’s seminal work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. As a kind of sociological bridge between Tönnies and Schmitz, insights from recent sociological discussions on social phenomena as the body or emotions are used – subjects that tended to play a rather marginal part in classical sociology. Within Schmitz`s work, it is above all his concepts of situations and felt-bodily communication that prove to be significant for the sociological debate on community. The dicussion of these concepts is supplemented by findings from studies in the sociology of work that felt-bodily perception is a very relevant phenomenon in the midst of technical-functional environments and contexts. On this basis, features and specifics of communital social relationships are derived that might give new impulses for sociological debate. The paper ends with a discussion of potential threats to community in the realm of social relationships. According to Schmitz, such threats emerge from the repression of felt-bodily communication rather than from the tendency to individualization, as is often surmised.
This article develops a post-praxeological approach to multispecies assemblages through a video-based study of human-plant interaction on a regenerative farm. Combining ethnomethodology and conversation analysis with process philosophy and assemblage theory, the paper examines how planting cucumbers emerges as a distributed accomplishment among humans, plants, soil organisms, tools, plastic infrastructures, weather conditions, and a companion dog, among other elements. The study shows how agency is not located in individual actors but distributed across heterogeneous participants. By integrating a flat ontological stance with a first-person ethnographic account and fine-grained multimodal analysis of transcribed segments, the article offers a methodological contribution to multispecies and interactional research, demonstrating how non-human participation can be rendered empirically observable without resorting to abstract generalisation or critical accounts of multispecies, posthuman justice.
Even though virtual reality (VR), taken in a narrow sense, i.e., as a virtual environment generated by a binocular head-based system, has been developing since the 1960s, there only exist a handful of authors from the phenomenological tradition who have focused on its nature so far, and fairly recently at that. This paper will attempt to add to the Husserlian discussion of VR environments and the corresponding exprience, by both treading in the steps of current contributors and by disputing a key presupposition made in most of them. Indeed, one of the claims commonly put forth regarding VR experience is that it amounts to what, in Husserlian terms, one would call acts of image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein). Against this claim, the main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that VR experience consists in acts of phantasy (Phantasie) instead. My analysis will involve two steps: (1.) demonstrating that VR experience should not be understood as Husserlian image consciousness, given that it does not display the structural features which distinguish it from phantasy; (2.) and demonstrating that it should be understood as phantasy instead, specifically as a kind of “perceptual phantasy” (perzeptive Phantasie).
Compassion is a fundamental component of social existence. However, in late modernity, several structural transformations undermine it. This article analyzes the paradox contemporary constellation characterized by the ‘inevitability’ and ‘impossibility’ of compassion. First, the general components of compassion – corporeal proximity (Zahavi), interaffective responsiveness (Rosan), and responsibility (Levinas) – are examined from a transcendental phenomenological viewpoint. Second, the late modern structural constraints of compassion – functionally and structurally differentiated roles (Goffman), rational, indifferent behavior patterns (Weber), and expert institutions of care (Castel) – are examined from a sociological perspective. Finally, the broader consequences of ‘inevitable’ yet ‘impossible’ compassion are examined by combining transcendental and sociological phenomenology. Although unambiguous compassion becomes improbable, substitute forms emerge. While these substitutes play an important role, they also contribute to the paradoxes surrounding contemporary compassion: by offering a compromising strategy, they normalize a narrowed, potentially amoral pattern of compassion.
This article contributes to phenomenological sociology by establishing a dialogue between Hermann Schmitz’s “new phenomenology” and Erving Goffman’s microsociology. The focus is on synthesizing the two authors’ central scholarly themes: in Schmitz’s work, feelings as atmospheres; in Goffman’s, the interaction order. The text demonstrates that neo-phenomenological sociology, drawing on Schmitz and Goffman, is a microsociological approach centered on atmospheres—an object unknown in classical phenomenological sociology (Schütz and his successors). Because atmospheres are the product, shaper, and stabilizer of and a threat to any microsocial situation, the interaction order always proves to be an atmosphere order as well. A phenomenological sociology based on Schmitz and Goffman thus simultaneously corrects the activist bias of the sociological tradition and points to the fundamentally pathic dimension of the social.
Max Picard, in his illuminating book, The World of Silence, offers a gripping phenomenological account of silence. His work is valuable in rescuing silence from the conventional stance that characterizes and theorizes it as a form of absence. In contrariety, Picard interprets silence as a presence and this proportion underscores the phenomenological account of it. However, Picard’s project, plating as one of the first philosophical examinations of silence, has a limitation of being ‘gender-neutral’. In this background, the fundamental aim of this paper is to address this limitation and to theoretically dilate and escalate the notion of silence, in a feminist pneuma. Here, the primary purpose of undergoing a re-consideration of silence in a feminist spirit orbit around three ideas: first, the idea of highlighting gender neutrality in philosophical theories of silence, second, to unveil gender-biasness that persists in those theories and third, to establish a newfangled ‘gendered’ theory of silence, by and large. To institute these ideas, we shall predominantly, employ the philosophical stance of the philosopher of sexuate difference, Luce Irigaray. We argue that Irigaray’s revelatory contribution can be accommodative and symbolic of our re-modeled understanding of silence and the views shall be illustrated not by employing empirical references, but everyday examples.
