The Lived Experience Of Hate Crime: Towards A Phenomenological Approach 303033886X, 9783030338862, 9783030338886

Table of contents :
Preface......Page 6
Contents......Page 7
Part I: Analysis and Descriptive Explication......Page 10
1 Introduction......Page 11
2 Overview......Page 22
3 Structure of This Study and Its Possible Audiences......Page 38
References......Page 42
1 Introduction......Page 44
2 Legal Definitions......Page 45
3 Case Example: Hate Crime on a Railway Station?......Page 49
References......Page 58
1 Introduction......Page 59
2 Objectivism as a Matter of Fact Approach to Hate Crime Issues with Scientific Aspirations......Page 63
3 The Underlying Presuppositions of Objectivism Itself......Page 69
4 Objectivism Encourages Positivist Forms of Hate Crime Research......Page 88
References......Page 93
1 Introduction......Page 95
2 The Characteristics of Closure......Page 96
3 Closure as Self-Fulfilling......Page 100
4 Closure as a Blueprint for Prejudice......Page 102
5 Closure as Exclusion(s)......Page 106
6 Restoring a Sense of What Is Excluded......Page 110
7 Husserlian Responses to Closure......Page 112
8 Closure Through Exclusion of What Is Questionable Within an Underlying Question......Page 116
9 A Husserlian Response to the “Problem of/With”......Page 131
10 Drawing Other Instructive Lessons from Our Analysis of Closure......Page 133
References......Page 140
Part II: Critique of Internal Difficulties and Contradictions with Objectivism......Page 144
1 Introduction......Page 145
2 The Overextension of a Causal-Explanatory Model?......Page 149
3 Objectivism as a Pseudo-Science?......Page 159
4 The Loss of Qualitative Foundations?......Page 166
5 Operational Definitions to the Rescue of Quantification?......Page 174
6 General Difficulties with Quantification......Page 179
7 Additional Specific Difficulties with Quantification: Classification as Constitutive?......Page 183
8 “Sticking to the Facts” as a Spurious Immediacy?......Page 186
9 Misunderstanding the Subject of (Inter)subjectivity......Page 194
10 The Displacement of Cultural Realities......Page 204
11 Contradictions Arising from Objectivism’s Subject/Object Dichotomy......Page 213
12 Difficulties and Contradictions with Naturalistic Presuppositions......Page 217
References......Page 238
1.1 Opening the Door to Intentional Analysis......Page 240
1.2 Intentional Analysis of the Negation of Communicative Possibilities......Page 249
1.3 Intentional Analysis of Hate Speech as a Limit Case......Page 251
1.4 Analysis of “Sense Constitution” Through Temporal Synthesis and Passive Association......Page 252
1.5 Towards a Phenomenological Cultural Psychology of Hate Crime as Experienced as a Distinctly Qualitative Social Science......Page 255
1.6 Recognising the Centrality of Interpretations and Acts of Interpreting......Page 263
1.7 The Neutralisation of Prejudice......Page 266
1.9 Defining Our Life-World......Page 268
1.10 The Primacy of the Life-World......Page 271
1.11 Life-World and Home and Alienworld Tensions......Page 273
1.12 The Importance and Place of Life-World Analysis......Page 275
1.13 Recovering the Life-World as Cultural Renewal......Page 277
1.14 The Life-Worldly Embodiment of Our Lived Bodies......Page 279
2 Conclusion......Page 281
References......Page 282
Summary and Conclusion......Page 283
References......Page 287

Citation preview

Contributions to Phenomenology 111

Michael Salter Kim McGuire

The Lived Experience of Hate Crime

Towards a Phenomenological Approach

Contributions to Phenomenology In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology Volume 111

Series Editors Nicolas de Warren, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA Ted Toadvine, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA Editorial Board Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven, Belgium David Carr, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong James Dodd, New School University, New York, USA Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University, Florida, USA Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy Burt Hopkins, University of Lille, Lille, France José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of) Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany William R. McKenna, Miami University, Ohio, USA Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, Ohio, USA J. N. Mohanty, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA Dermot Moran, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, Memphis, USA Thomas M Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany Gail Soffer, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy Anthony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA

Scope The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published over 100 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship, the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of the Series reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach of phenomenological research. All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance. The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5811

Michael Salter • Kim McGuire

The Lived Experience of Hate Crime Towards a Phenomenological Approach

Michael Salter Lancashire Law School University of Central Lancashire Preston, UK

Kim McGuire Lancashire Law School University of Central Lancashire Preston, UK

ISSN 0923-9545     ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic) Contributions to Phenomenology ISBN 978-3-030-33886-2    ISBN 978-3-030-33888-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33888-6 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This study is in two parts and contains six chapters. Part I is mainly analytical with an emphasis on descriptive explication, while Part Two is expressly critical. There is a deliberate step-by-step progression from descriptive elements of surface phenomena addressed in Part One to more critical analysis of depth and constitutive elements of hate crime as lived experientially, which we discuss in Part Two. Our approach is phenomenological in a distinctly Husserlian sense, as opposed to a would-be summation of post-Husserlian developments within a posited “phenomenological movement” whose borders remain both fuzzy and contentious. We have attempted to follow Husserl’s methodological as well as more substantive positions derived mainly from primary sources. Yet, we have avoided taking positions within internal Husserlian debates founded within the secondary literature or defending either Husserl or our own broadly Husserlian approach from familiar criticisms. Although this might attract criticism from those active in the secondary literature debates, our decision here remains in line with the Husserlian imperative to focus on “the things themselves,” which in our case comprise: 1. Experiential aspects of a hate crime incident as lived, the correlation of its what qualities and underlying howness 2. The demands the latter makes upon an expressly formulated Husserlian analysis of this phenomenon that seeks to adapt itself to these demands even to the point of revising aspects of a Husserlian approach Given this study is published in a book series devoted to phenomenology, not hate crime studies, the distinctly Husserlian dimension has been given far more weight and priority than our interview data and discussion of our concrete research methods. Perhaps, if the present study is well-received by those whose judgments we have come to respect and admire, we should write a second monograph to reverse this prioritisation to achieve a more complete, balanced and comprehensive balance? Preston, UK 

Michael Salter Kim McGuire v

Contents

Part I  Analysis and Descriptive Explication Overall Objectives, Structure and Possible Audiences ����������������������������������   3 1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   3 2 Overview��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  14 3 Structure of This Study and Its Possible Audiences��������������������������������  30 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  34 Legal Definitions and a Short Case Study ������������������������������������������������������  37 1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  37 2 Legal Definitions��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  38 3 Case Example: Hate Crime on a Railway Station?����������������������������������  42 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  51 Superimposing a Problematic Objectivism ����������������������������������������������������  53 1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  53 2 Objectivism as a Matter of Fact Approach to Hate Crime Issues with Scientific Aspirations ����������������������������������������������������������������������  57 3 The Underlying Presuppositions of Objectivism Itself����������������������������  63 4 Objectivism Encourages Positivist Forms of Hate Crime Research����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  82 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  87 The Natural Attitude’s Objectivism as a Type of Closure ����������������������������  89 1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  89 2 The Characteristics of Closure ����������������������������������������������������������������  90 3 Closure as Self-Fulfilling ������������������������������������������������������������������������  94 4 Closure as a Blueprint for Prejudice��������������������������������������������������������  96 5 Closure as Exclusion(s)��������������������������������������������������������������������������  100 6 Restoring a Sense of What Is Excluded ������������������������������������������������  104 7 Husserlian Responses to Closure ����������������������������������������������������������  106 8 Closure Through Exclusion of What Is Questionable Within an Underlying Question��������������������������������������������������������������  110 vii

viii

Contents

9 A Husserlian Response to the “Problem of/With” ��������������������������������  125 10 Drawing Other Instructive Lessons from Our Analysis of Closure ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  127 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  134 Part II  Critique of Internal Difficulties and Contradictions with Objectivism A Husserlian Critique of the Natural Attitude’s Prejudicial Effects����������  141 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  141 2 The Overextension of a Causal-Explanatory Model?����������������������������  145 3 Objectivism as a Pseudo-Science? ��������������������������������������������������������  155 4 The Loss of Qualitative Foundations?����������������������������������������������������  162 5 Operational Definitions to the Rescue of Quantification?����������������������  170 6 General Difficulties with Quantification������������������������������������������������  175 7 Additional Specific Difficulties with Quantification: Classification as Constitutive?��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  179 8 “Sticking to the Facts” as a Spurious Immediacy?��������������������������������  182 9 Misunderstanding the Subject of (Inter)subjectivity������������������������������  190 10 The Displacement of Cultural Realities ������������������������������������������������  200 11 Contradictions Arising from Objectivism’s Subject/Object Dichotomy����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  209 12 Difficulties and Contradictions with Naturalistic Presuppositions��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  213 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  234 Some Constructive Implications of Our Husserlian Critique of Naturalistic Objectivism ����������������������������������������������������������������������������  237 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  237 1.1 Opening the Door to Intentional Analysis ����������������������������������  237 1.2 Intentional Analysis of the Negation of Communicative Possibilities����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  246 1.3 Intentional Analysis of Hate Speech as a Limit Case������������������  248 1.4 Analysis of “Sense Constitution” Through Temporal Synthesis and Passive Association����������������������������������������������  249 1.5 Towards a Phenomenological Cultural Psychology of Hate Crime as Experienced as a Distinctly Qualitative Social Science������������������������������������������������������������������������������  252 1.6 Recognising the Centrality of Interpretations and Acts of Interpreting������������������������������������������������������������������������������  260 1.7 The Neutralisation of Prejudice��������������������������������������������������  263 1.8 Recovering a Sense of the Intersubjective Life-World as an Experiential Source and Resource��������������������������������������  265 1.9 Defining Our Life-World ������������������������������������������������������������  265 1.10 The Primacy of the Life-World���������������������������������������������������  268

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1.11 Life-World and Home and Alienworld Tensions������������������������  270 1.12 The Importance and Place of Life-World Analysis ��������������������  272 1.13 Recovering the Life-World as Cultural Renewal������������������������  274 1.14 The Life-Worldly Embodiment of Our Lived Bodies ����������������  276 2 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  278 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  279

Summary and Conclusion ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  281 References ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  285

Part I

Analysis and Descriptive Explication

Overall Objectives, Structure and Possible Audiences

Abstract [T]he most difficult problems of all are hidden problems, the sense of which is naturally concealed from all those who still have no inkling of the determinative fundamental distinctions. In fact, it is … a long and thorny way [to] phenomenological data. (Husserl 1982: 212) It is of the very essence of such prejudices, drilled into the souls even of children, that they are concealed in their immediate effects. (Husserl 1970: 120)

If true, the second short quote from Husserl, above, has major implications for the study of hate crime as a lived experience. This chapter outlines what we set out to achieve in the present study, its overall aims and objectives. It also explains our two-part structure. The descriptive-analytical Part I is concerned with the prejudicial mediation of experiences of hate crime-related issues by the natural attitude. This chapter prepares the ground for the more advanced Husserlian critique of the impact of such prejudicial presuppositions that comprises the task and bulk of Part II. The final chapter of Part II strives to spell out the constructive implications of such critique. Thus, our second part aims to both build upon and fulfil the overall potential and trajectory of an analytical movement initiated by Part I.

1  Introduction Our study has many possible audiences. Their presumed expectations have helped influence, to some extent, what we have written and how we have written it. Without indulging in the vain exercise of telling readers how they should read and interpret our work, we nevertheless identify – perhaps more precisely speculate about – three different possible audiences, while explaining how our study is intended to contribute to each. The present study contains an extended discussion of the pervasive – yet prejudicial – nature and obstructive characteristics of the so-called “natural attitude.” It considers the negative effects of the natural attitude’s objectivist presuppositions operating to embody, reiterate and reinforce societal prejudices that are familiar to

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Salter, K. McGuire, The Lived Experience of Hate Crime, Contributions to Phenomenology 111, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33888-6_1

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4

Overall Objectives, Structure and Possible Audiences

students of hate crime.1 As Moran rightly notes: ‘Clearly, the “natural attitude” as an all-encompassing attitude must be shot through with prejudices of all kinds – religious, metaphysical, cultural, educational, technological and scientific.’2 We regularly address the implications of these prejudicial characteristics for the rationale of a Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime formulated and justified as an “immanent critique” of prejudice: one that is developed from out of the implications of our experience of the topic itself, as opposed to being superimposed on the basis of external value-judgements.3 Each new chapter and section illuminate the multiple ways in which our radically experiential and reflective Husserlian approach to hate crime, as lived unfold and develop, in a manner that is fundamentally incompatible with the perspective of the natural attitude.4 The sheer degree and intensity of an experiential and reflective approach is so incompatible that it has required the researcher’s deliberate neutralisation, and then reversal, of the interpretive operations and fruits of the natural attitude. This process has, − we suggest – formed vital preconditions for the further step-by-step development of our own phenomenological approach to hate crime as lived. The initially purely methodological drivers for transcending the grip of the natural attitude supersede the bounds of the technical realm of methodological debate. This is because the implications of the reasons for such transcendence, as well as its own trajectories, both push us towards the realisation of a substantive social scientific critique of cultural prejudices relevant to hate crime-related issues.5 The latter critique develops its own momentum towards developing the constructive implications of such critique of prejudice in terms, for example, of both methodological and substantive analyses. The latter, which demonstrate that Husserlian criticism is not critiquing for critique’s sake: it embraces the “intersubjectivity” of

 Husserl elaborates on the idea of the natural attitude in his Ideas (1913, Husserl 1982), and Ideas 11 § 49 (Husserl 1953). For Husserl, all interpretive and cognitive activities of our consciousness, including those of researchers, initially take place from a position of already being entangled within the interpretive matrix of often prejudicial belief (doxa) of the natural attitude (Hua 13: 112). Our extensive concern with the natural attitude is explicable because of how it functions as an always-already available interpretive resource and cultural source for all manner of often implicit, sometimes explicit, prejudices directed against one or more hate crime victim group. 2  Moran 2012: 207. 3  We recognise that this sounds close to Hegel’s phenomenology, but we cannot argue this metamethodological point here. Instead, will carefully demonstrate its implications for the incremental critique of the societal prejudices reiterated by the natural attitude. 4  In the essay ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’ (1910–1911), this orientation is linked with a naïve naturalism/objectivism. However, the terminology here is potentially confusing. Indeed, Husserl deploys different phrases for this attitude, e.g., ‘natural theoretical attitude’ (1982: 94, Hua 3: 1 94) and, in Ideas 111, the ‘natural-naïve attitude’ (Hua 5: 148). 5  The co-existence of sporadic critiques of irrationalism and Husserlian methodological rationalism is not especially well-blended in Husserl’s own writings. The cultural critique related to “renewal” and critique of “crisis tendencies” within modern Europe is barely integrated into his more systematic critique of the prejudicial cognitive effects of the natural attitude of impeding the progress of science. We have aimed for a more coherent integration of these two elements. 1

1 Introduction

5

the life-world as well as the possibilities of developing an empathetic understanding of the impact of being subjected to hate crime victimisation.6 At the outset, one challenge stems from the potential confusion that arises with the Husserlian critique of the natural attitude. This challenge stems from the words ‘natural attitude’ themselves. The terminological difficulty and problems arise in part because the correlate of the natural attitude, what its interpretive orientation refers to, is not “nature itself” – at least not in an objectivist/naturalistic sense of an essentially physical realm supposedly independent of, and prior to, cultural understandings.7 Hence, the idea of there being a “natural attitude” orientation towards hate crime should not, in any sense, be confused with a “natural scientific” approach to this topic, such as a neurological or biochemical approach to hate crime offenders. Nor should it be thought that the natural attitude refers to the “natural” aspect of hate crime as experienced in any sense that equates what is “natural” with physical nature alone. Indeed, such a physicalist notion of reality is precisely one of the targets of our critique of the natural attitude’s objectivist presuppositions. Instead, what is meant by “natural” is “perceived of as natural in the sense of something conventional and in line with familiar and customary handed-down cultural expectations as to, say, traditional gender and sexuality distinctions. Indeed, when immersed within the natural attitude, the intentional reference of our consciousness of this (or any other) topic is primarily to the surrounding life-world of communalised ego-subjects, in the sense of whatever a more or less “shared” cultural framework currently considers (more exactly predefines, prejudges and takes for granted) as “natural” (or as “unnatural), as “normal” (or as “abnormal”). Such determinations of meaning arise relative not to physical nature in its strictly material qualities, properties, and tendencies but rather in relation to ever-contingent and historically-variable cultural projections and expectations.8 It is only through the mediation of the intermediary lens of the life-world’s interpretive schema that it is possible for the natural attitude to address the significance-­ for-­ us (a hypothetical “us-together”) of entirely natural objects, events, and processes, such as physical injuries. For its part, this mediating life-world is precisely that surrounding cultural world of meant things, situations, and relationships  We follow Husserl in conceiving of the term intersubjectivity to designate a plurality of subjects and the ontological, affective and normative intertwinement of self and other relations that exists between them. Hua 13, 14, 15. 7  Husserl’s critique of naturalism and especially its mediation of the natural attitude’s objectivism will be addressed repeatedly later in this and later chapters. 8  For example, Husserl recognises that perceived bodily abnormalities and experiences that stem from these refer not to nature itself but rather to a certain interpretation of a rule-like regularity conventionally considered “normal” that arises as something interpretively constituted. ‘the abnormal functioning of our lived-corporeality (which of course is itself only taken into account as constituted from a phenomenological perspective). However, every abnormality that belongs here as well—a blow to the eyes that modifies our visual images, a burnt hand whereby the tactile appearances break the rule of normality, and the like—even such abnormalities I say only indicate new rules for the interconnections between lived-experiences; they, too, belong in a grand preshaped constitutive nexus; …’ Husserl 1991: 267. See also ibid xx, xxix, xxxvii, xlv. 27. 6

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Overall Objectives, Structure and Possible Audiences

that we all wake up within and confront (and are confronted by), every new morning. It is an overarching life-context and cultural medium within which we subjectively “live out” and negotiate our way through the course of our days, frame-by-frame, as it were before, sleeping. That is, a frame-by-frame “handling” of the day’s questions, frustrations, challenges and opportunities as we move from, say, family breakfasts, to commuting, work activities and pressures, commuting home, to evening leisure activities etc., all of which “mean something” to us. The mediating life-world also appears as a distinctly cultural/linguistic world of acquired communicative practices supplying the necessary background context of interpretive resources for all my intentional acts of coming to an understanding of whatever I become conscious. The latter practices, to some extent, help “make sense” of hate crime issues, together with anything else I encounter within “my world” of lived experience.9 This world of everyday life is, in part, lived through as “my” relatively permanent “surrounding world,” or subject-centred “environment,” complete with its own horizons of possible current and future possibilities. For us, this the background context of our lifeworld has included possibilities for conducting academic research into hate crime-related issues. In sum, because of the natural attitude’s pervasive and ongoing mediation of the life-world, there is nothing distinctly “natural,” in the sense of physical nature, about this “attitude” (or better “orientation.”) This “unnatural” nature remains the case even, or perhaps especially, whenever subscribers to the natural attitude denigrate transgendered or gay individuals as somehow “unnatural,” or by means of other derogatory and vulgar phrases that carry a similar implication. On the contrary, the term “natural” within our conception of the natural attitude refers to the experience of having this interpretive orientation as a taken-for-granted customary and unreflective default position: one which is permanently on hand and – precisely because of its implicit character. The natural attitude only appears to “arise naturally” but – for us – this natural quality takes shape only in the culturally-specific sense of “as a matter of course,” or “it is only natural to presume that …” In other words, what is “natural “about the natural attitude is to orient oneself towards whatever takes shape within one’s lifeworld context through the lens of handed-down cultural-linguistic categories and distinctions that are typically pre-given and taken for granted as a matter of course. All derogatory and prejudicial slurs relevant to hate crime issues that rely upon customary conceptions of what is “unnatural” or “abnormal” with respect to gender, sexuality, bodily abilities etc., need to be critically analysed by our Husserlian approach. Here, they are addressed as outgrowths of customary and questionable cultural definitions whose status as such generally remains glossed over and concealed in ways that demand exposure and critique. In this sense, we will later be able to show that there is no contradiction between two distinct phenomena:

 Husserl 1982: § 28; § 50.

9

1 Introduction

7

1. Our phenomenological critique of “naturalism” (i.e., the reduction of all phenomena to the events, processes and causal characteristics of the strictly physical world of nature where these appear in the form of, say, physical injuries of a racist attack); and: 2. The authors’ endorsement of the idea of there being a “natural attitude” towards hate crime-related issues, whose prejudicial results in terms of the reiteration of, say, racism and xenophobic reactions to designated “outsiders” in a religious, nationalistic or ethnic sense, needs to be taken especially seriously. The challenge here is that even the most rigorous analytical effort to develop a Husserlian approach to hate crime issues in a strictly methodologically-controlled fashion, unaffected by any substantive social policy considerations and implications, would run up against its own limits. This is because it soon becomes apparent that the natural attitude’s interpretive practices of dogmatic closure are themselves a substantive part of the various issues raised by the experience of hate crime-related prejudices. We must recognise that this is the case insofar as the natural attitude’s orientation towards the experience of cultural difference is driven, in part, by a process of the “passive association” of perceived individual members of victim groups with derogatory general category-types, often stereotypes. These categories are handed down across generations from an appropriated cultural-­linguistic tradition that might, for example, include a range of attitudes towards questions of the perceived nature of marriage, gender, “religious truth,” ethnic, bodily and racial difference. The latter provides an always-available interpretive resource for the societal-cultural reiteration, mainly through language and sometimes physical violence, of deep-seated prejudices directed at – and against – those constituted as members of different hate crime victim groups. The result of such prejudicial understandings of meaning is that the range of positive qualities of such members are not fully perceived or otherwise grasped. Indeed, these qualities are often distorted in a one-sided way that is clearly an inadequate and insufficient basis for any credible form of cognitive judgement about what it means to be transgendered, experience physical or cognitive disabilities etc. Thus, there is a strictly methodological imperative for our phenomenology of hate crime to bracket out, neutralise, and suspend, as far as humanly possible, the operations of the natural attitude precisely to allow a less distorted and prejudicial view of members of victim groups to emerge. In this respect, and despite arising from the abstract realm of research methodology associated with a striving for a more adequate descriptive elucidation of lived experiences, the demand to suspend and neutralise the natural attitude can, in itself, operate as a critical intervention: one that Part Two of the present study shows is clearly saturated with substantive ethical

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and policy dimensions.10 In this respect, even the purely descriptive thrust of our Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime is, from the start and almost despite itself, a critical intervention. Our investigations themselves participate in the ethical becoming of the very core structures of intelligibility of this topic that the present authors are also describing and explicating from within. Hence, through our critique of prejudices reiterated by the natural attitude the present phenomenology of hate crime develops itself into a distinctly normative project. It has evolved into a contribution, albeit in a modest manner, to the way in which these ethical structures develop and unfold historically as we carry out our analysis.11 This critical interventionist dimension of our phenomenology of hate crime may appear to many as an unfortunate contradiction, as well as a failure of adequate and sufficient descriptive rigour from a strictly methodological perspective. However, it may also need to be reinterpreted as a positive gain for the potential societal relevance of our applied Husserlian phenomenology: one for which no defensive reaction or apology is called for. Our phenomenological approach to hate crime must explicitly embrace a necessarily revised and refined version of the rationalistic Enlightenment and Renaissance projects. Subscribers to these projects and orientations are expected to strive to overcome the unreasonable distortions of their prior acceptance-captivities where the latter stem from enslavement to traditional prejudices against, say, one or more hate crime victim group. Such societal prejudices, lacking any evidence-based justification of credible experiential grounding, are viewed as often shaping our perceptions of, and responses to, other people “behind our backs,” as it were; and in ways that demand both recognition and possible correction. Without ignoring evidence of deliberately and freely chosen malice among perpetrators, we must also recognise how prejudices relevant to hate crime rely largely upon a range of implicit and taken-for-granted assumptions that perpetrators themselves almost certainly have not consciously formulated as their “authors”. The latter

 For Husserl’s early work on ethical theory see his Vorlesungen iiber Ethik und Wertlehre, 1908– 1914, ed. Ullrich Melle, Hua 28. Husserl suggested that phenomenology may have to recognise the invisible power of higher ethical realities linked to an extra-factual “purposefulness” or “teleology” internal to phenomenon, in the value-driven processes of completing the still-unfinished business of culture and human development more generally: ‘In all this, since the rationality made actual by the fact is not a rationality demanded by the essence, there is a marvellous teleology. Furthermore: The systematic exploration of all teleologies to be found in the empirical world itself, for example the factual evolution of the sequence of organisms as far as human being and, in the development of mankind, the growth of culture with its spiritual treasures, is not yet completed with the natural-scientific explanation … [Phenomenological analysis] leads necessarily to the question about the ground for the now-emerging factual­ness of the corresponding constitutive consciousness. Not the fact as such, but the fact as source of endlessly increasing value-possibilities and value-actualities forces the question into one about the “ground”— which naturally does not have the sense of a physical-causal reason.’ Husserl 1982: 134. Clearly, this claim about our mediation by a higher ethical power and source of normative obligations to each other can be read in both religious and secular terms. 11  Steinbock 1995: 14–15. 10

1 Introduction

9

contrast markedly with enlightenment ideals of rational freedom, autonomy, and self-determination that inform, as well as motivate, Husserlian phenomenology.12 Considered in terms of ethics, our phenomenology of hate crime responds critically to a culture and subcultures whose social cohesion is often scarred by the effects of often vicious religious, racial and other traditional prejudices. The latter’s enduring – and in some contexts of rising and intensifying populist-nationalism – xenophobia also includes to prevailing crises of rationality generally and concrete rationalities in particular. Here, “reason” is understood as the governance of our words and deeds by experientially-grounded principles of optimal and demonstrable validity. In this sense, the negation of reason includes suppression of our latent human potential to interact largely free of unnoticed and taken-for-granted prejudices, especially those especially harmful and vicious prejudices directed against members of hate crime victim groups. It is possible to assume that various voids of rationality, including those stemming from the conviction politics and “alternative facts” of contemporary populism, mean that these prejudices are themselves often widely misunderstood. To people located within the natural attitude without reflection, the ideas are frequently ideologically-­misrepresented. The various devices of the natural attitude construct prejudicial understandings of culturally-defined difference (i.e., differences-from an always contestable and often falsely over-generalised “norm”) – as if these are both self-evidently valid and as generally applicable.13 Adopting a distinctly critical and corrective stance towards the natural attitude’s role in such misrepresentation remains integral to even the descriptive elements of our phenomenological approach. This status stems from the inner logics of Husserlian phenomenology itself; and is thus optimally independent of the personal religious moral or political value-­ judgements of those carrying out Husserlian-based experiential research. Insofar as it is rationally-grounded, such research can expose to criticism all manner of prejudices relevant to hate crime-related issues without total reliance upon its author’s value-systems. This study has not been written for propaganda purposes or to articulate our personal opinions. So, it should come as no surprise if some of our hard-won critical analyses exhibit, say, a mixture of ultra-liberal and illiberal implications that do not themselves fully harmonise with one or both authors’ prior personal convictions or opinions published elsewhere – or even their current ideological preferences. Husserl remains the founder of contemporary phenomenology. Through his published and unpublished writings, he must be recognised as a vital source of our following experiment in devising a phenomenology of hate crime as both an inquiry into, and an example of, lived (inter)subjectivity. Some of Husserl’s most important phenomenological insights were forged between 1933 and 1937. They arose both in – but also against – a specific historical context marred by the rise of extreme  Husserl 1970: § 3, 290–91.  Of course, this can be contested. Yet, attempts to think, argue and theorise ourselves out of a minimum core of rationalism are subject to performative self-contradiction akin to “fighting for peace.” 12 13

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Overall Objectives, Structure and Possible Audiences

right-wing nationalism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, militarism and outright Fascism within Spain, Italy, and his native Germany. The ideological expressions of these movements include viciously discriminatory ideas with genocidal implications that, today, would in many domestic legal systems be criminalised as cases of hate speech, or – at the level of international criminal law – as incitements to genocide. As a German and mildly nationalistic citizen with a Jewish ancestry living his final years in Nazi Germany, Husserl had personal, familial, as well as strictly intellectual, issues with the rise of this form of irrationalism.14 Professionally, his rationalistic form of social scientific and philosophical analysis was at risk of being sidelined. To many academics, it became seen as both irrelevant and outmoded relative to the fascistic spirit of the times. It was often compared unfavourably with the growing popular and academic interest in “irrationalist” life-philosophy and so-­ called existentialism, including that problematic version developed by his former mentee, and sometime Nazi supporter, Martin Heidegger, which repudiated scientific values in favour of an essentially poetic appreciation of the mysteries of Being.15 The latter extended elements of phenomenological studies fall outside the vital framework of (social) scientific critical rationalism for whom questions of evidence and evidence-based judgements, developed and refined through repeated private and interpersonal self-criticism and peer-reviewed dialogue, is pivotal. Nothing could be further from Husserl than the cult-like Being-mystique of Heidegger. The latter found a ready audience precisely because of the cultural crisis of rationality taking place in late-modern European civilisation, whose mixture of cultural and moral relativism with nihilistic implications, so disturbed and provoked Husserl’s final published studies. The tone of Husserl’s late works during the fateful period of 1933–37 radiate, for us, youthful vitality and a sense of being engulfed in an emerging crisis and in the midst of an urgent mission, which is remarkable for a person in their final years. Arguably, this urgent tone, which is not merely a question of style, stemmed from his concern to defend the rationalist legacy of his phenomenological movement shaped by Hegel, Descartes and Kant, and confront what he diagnosed as the intellectual, cultural and spiritual crises besetting mid-1930s Europe marred by the rise and expansion of extreme nationalistic, irrationalistic and fascistic prejudices that had even diverted his mentees like Heidegger. This was, he argued, a crisis in credibility and foundations both affecting and undermining the entire scientific cultural  Nazism appeared to Husserl, not as an approach that correctly registered and recognised a preexisting material reality of “racial” difference; but rather as a new worldview: one that interpretively (re)constituted such “difference” as having a particularly emphatic prejudicial significance as its own performative accomplishment. See Husserl’s correspondence in the 1930s, Briefwechsel, 4: 313 cited in Moran 2012: 206. 15  For Husserl, Dilthey, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Scheler, and Simmel each developed irrationalist life-philosophies that had lost faith in scientific rationalism. It is possibly instructive to contrast the intense humanism of Husserl 1970, with Heidegger’s nihilistic critique of such humanist ideals in his ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ (1947). It is questionable whether Heidegger’s massively important intellectual legacy, some of which was derived from Husserl not always with open acknowledgement, cannot be reduced to his deplorable one adherence to Nazism. 14

1 Introduction

11

tradition of Europe, for which elements of the often-self-contradictory practices of scientific investigations, especially by the positive sciences founded upon misplaced objectivism and naturalism, were in part responsible. Husserl begins his Crisis work (1936/Husserl 1970) by announcing a ‘crisis’ in the ‘total meaningfulness’ of cultural life within Western Europe, and belief in the continued importance of European civilisational values and goals that originated from Classical Greek philosophy, including aspirations towards enlightenment from taken-for-granted prejudices.16 For Husserl: ‘Europe’s greatest danger is weariness,’17 in that – at this time – its development was characterised by nihilistic tendencies towards ‘despair’ relative to the optimistic thrust of this continental culture’s earlier enlightenment ideals. In addition, during the early to mid-twentieth century, there had arisen a general loss of belief in generally valid and binding values, such as generic respect for cultural differences, sufficient to guide interpersonal relations. More generally, for Husserl, we have witnessed a hollowing out of the basis for the responsible and mutually respectful conduct of human life, including by reference to reasonable laws and public policies. This cultural and civilisational crisis has also surfaced in a widespread sense of alienation, estrangement, the collapse of confidence and, ultimately, to cultural conditions under which it becomes increasingly difficult to withstand a revival of xenophobic ‘barbarism.’18 For Husserl, the previous abstractions of reductive naturalism and objectivism had become expanded to the point of operation as pervasive cultural forces driving all manner of viciously prejudicial orientations and actions. Reductionism includes the tendency to take one among a range of factors about a person as somehow definitive for what they are in essence. Hence, Husserl himself, despite his Christian faith, could be categorised as “nothing but a Jew;” while “Jewishness” could, in turn, be characterised by the Nazis’ master race ideology in purely biological/naturalistic terms of “race.” In turn, the mediation of everyday “common sense” by reductive forms of objectivism and naturalism had become increasingly problematic. This mediation had made it difficult for “subscribers” to either understand or show respect not only for the importance of humanistic values and ideals, including mutual recognition and respect for difference, but also for our own subjectivities capable of being mutually recognised as persons, not as mere things. The cluster of Husserl’s already published and unpublished works associated with the Crisis of European Sciences amount to a spirited defence and would-be renewal of an increasingly endangered critical rationalism and “enlightenment” values that had always implicitly informed his own phenomenological approach. This lively defence is directed against the growing tide of European irrationalism of the times, which Husserl defined as a historical “wrong turn” and denigration of the

 Husserl 1970: 12, § 4.  Ibid: 299. 18  Ibid: 298–9. 16 17

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Overall Objectives, Structure and Possible Audiences

possibilities and goals of the human spirit. Husserl came to present phenomenological investigation as an exemplar of an endangered form of critical rationalism within both philosophy and the cultural and social sciences. Yet, such rationalism was becoming increasingly vital to help with the urgent task of restoring a critically-informed scientific culture: one grounded upon genuine and distinct human values and potential. Phenomenology must, he claimed, both defend the role of critical philosophy as a reasonable critique of prevailing irrationalistic tendencies menacing European culture; while also promoting within the realm of ideas at least the conditions for the self-creation of a ‘new humanity’.19 There may well be no direct connection between these points and contemporary hate speech and crime. Our contemporary situation is in one sense far removed from mid-1930s Europe and the emerging Holocaust. Echoes of a fascistic form of xenophobia found within the hate speech of contemporary populism, white supremacism and xenophobia within, for example, Australia, North America, Italy, Germany, Austria, Britain, Hungary, and Poland are almost certainly not precursors to an exact repeat of the 1930s. Historical events only happen once, at least in their precise details.20 Furthermore, our effort to develop a phenomenology of hate crime has, of necessity, involved plumbing the obscure deaths of Husserlian studies of highly technical subjects quite distant from Husserl’s critique of the claimed cultural crisis of the mid-1930s within Europe. For both these reasons, we need to be especially careful about drawing overly close parallels between Husserl’s 1930s critique of irrationalism and contemporary forms of hate speech and crime. It is an open question whether the latter are reflective of even a broadly similar type of 1930s xenophobia. A recent hate crime atrocity involving a mass killing of Moslem worshippers in Christchurch New Zealand appears to claim historical inspiration from Serbian anti-­ Moslem role models, including convicted war criminals.21 Contemporary populist movements, from President Trump to the Italian and Hungarian nationalist movements seem to more closely resemble Mussolini-style fascism that a genocidal Nazism. For all these reasons, it would be dangerous to draw exact historical parallels with the rise of Nazism. On the other hand, Husserl’s already published and unpublished studies still retain contemporary relevance for hate crime studies. They address the way in which the “natural attitude” of everyday life is vulnerable to a type of “common sense” awareness saturated with unnoticed and taken-for-granted prejudices, some of which overlap with the words and deeds of hate crime perpetrators. Such “common

 See Vienna Lecture, Appendix to Husserl 1970.  This perhaps over-optimistic view is based on the notorious instability of xenophobic movements, their tendency to internally fracture and ultimately disappoint their one-time supporters. The rise and fall of UKIP within the UK, and the National Front and BNP before them, is perhaps instructive. Developments in Hungary, the USA and Italy may be seen as providing counter-examples. 21  https://www.nytimes.com/.../asia/new-zealand-gunman-christchurch.htm 19 20

1 Introduction

13

sense” can be appropriated and mobilised by ideologies of cultural prejudice that are all-relevant to contemporary experiences of hate crime and speech. In part, this appropriation occurs because of a combination of the natural attitude’s interpretive naiveté, lack of critical self-reflection, and outright dogmatism. These are characteristics that not only immunise prejudicial mindsets from the overcoming of those viciously harmful prejudices all-too-relevant to hate crime issues, but also obstruct the possibility of both the identification of prejudice and critical reflection upon their “dehumanising” effects, including by phenomenologists concerned with such issues. Our final chapter’s Husserlian model of prejudice directed against those from different cultural backgrounds, or sexual or gender orientations, is vital here. This critical analysis suggests that relations between subscribers to parochial homeworlds pitted against their own projected alienworlds, need not be entirely or permanently prejudice-driven: at least not in an unreflective way immune from self-questioning. Instead, life-world overlapping commonalities can sometimes be identified through a process of understanding of differences, which begin to build bridges across divergent homeworlds. Where this occurs to some degree, members of each divergent homeworld may begin a process of overcoming – or at least diluting the intensity of  – specific prejudicial stereotypifications that each possessed regarding members of the other.22 The precondition for this is set out in our Husserlian model of prejudice that better allows us to identify and differentiate various kinds of prejudice relevant to hate crime studies. Another highly technical – and apparently non-political – element related within Husserl’s writings to the topic of prejudice, which we have investigated when preparing the present study, is “passive association.” That is, the pre-reflective form of association of all members of X hate crime victim group (all-Xs) with Y derogatory and prejudicial characterisations of the essential nature of each. A fully-developed phenomenology of hate crime, which is only foreshadowed here, must address in optimal detail how such association operates experientially to help renew, reiterate and further entrench cultural prejudices in ways that operate almost on autopilot, as it were, with a minimal degree of conscious ego-involvement. We must further recognise Husserl’s enormously complex account of how acts of making value judgements operate experientially within such passive constitution of prejudicial understandings of victims. There is also the related question of their linkages to underlying and, by now habitualised and taken-for-granted, prejudicial cultural beliefs, interests and emotionally-driven “allure” and “affections.” We must  We have no illusions that social groups who are victimised by hate crime perpetrators are entirely free of their own prejudicial stereotypes concerning other victimised groups, which can be expressed as hate speech. Identifying oneself as gay is, in itself, no protection against ingroup racism or sexism, for example; any more than becoming a victim of anti-Moslem violence a guarantee of a rejection by all victims of prejudices directed against one or more of the other legally-protected groups. Hence, we do not use the terms “victim” and “perpetrator” to refer to discrete and mutually exclusive empirical realities involving nothing but “pure” victims in both senses of this term. There are clearly degrees of prejudice relevant to each group spread across a wide spectrum, which may itself be widely shared among hate crime perpetrators and victims. 22

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also recognise the mediating connections of such value-judgements with apparently “immediate” intuitive evidence given by our perceptions of surrounding life-worlds, which appears to corroborate the prejudicial starting point of perpetrators and their supporters for example. Each of these elements operating with the depths of passive consciousness, are not only richly varied but also extremely difficult to identify, fully grasp and clearly explicate. And yet, throughout the present study our creative adaptation and extension of Husserl’s own studies, we have sought to illuminate how those one-sided value-­ judgements and prejudicial perceptions, which are so endemic to hate speech in particular, operate experientially. It has proved especially important to generate a critical understanding capable of disclosing how these interpretive sense-­constitutive operations operate, especially by exposing and analysing their often-latent preconditions and covert foundations. Only in this reconstructive way can a fully-developed phenomenology of hate crime realistically hope to find ways of both disclosing and exploiting the vulnerabilities of these prejudicial stereotypifications to being challenged and dismantled in a manner that remain consistent with Husserl’s critical social scientific and philosophical rationalism. At different stages of our analysis, this ulterior critical purpose may not always be clearly apparent to our readers. This is especially the case when our study ventures, with neither a reliable map nor a compass, through the often dense and thorny thickets of Husserl’s not always consistent ideas, claims and research methods. As a result, it may now be useful to readers to provide a brief overview of our study, a large-scale map.

2  Overview The core of the present book critically addresses the apparently “common sense” approach of the natural attitude to the experience of perceived essential differences between persons insofar as these are interpreted in prejudicial ways and expressed as hate speech and hate crime. The authors focus on how, within everyday life and more specialist social worlds, the pervasive – yet unreflective and dogmatic – orientation of the “natural attitude” both creates and sustains such prejudicial understandings within different subcultural “homeworlds.” We aim to show how, in principle, a distinctly Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime, deploying the interrelated methodologies of sense-explication, intentional analysis, and generative analysis, can be adapted and refined in ways that lead to genuinely critical insights and interventions. We refine these methodological approaches to both identify, and then successfully challenge, the interpretive basis upon which such prejudicial orientations directed towards one or more hate crime victim can be constituted, reiterated and sustained.23  There are few published phenomenological studies of hate crime in the Anglophone world, with the exception of work by Danny Willis, which focused upon gay males. D. G. Willis, ‘Hate crimes 23

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The authors are aware that our social scientific project directed critically towards one area of societal prejudice may strike many social scientists as contradictory. This is because Husserlian phenomenology is commonly associated with an essentially descriptive and static form of analysis: one that lacks any evaluative potential or social dimension.24 Yet, there is a credible argument for beginning our research work with a largely static and structural form of Husserlian analysis. The latter is concerned to correlate the perceived “whatness” of a prejudicial understanding, with the underlying “howness” of its interpretive constitution. Our Husserlian contention is that it is preferable to initially address and explicate a phenomenon “at rest” – as distinct from starting off with the complexities of its temporal movement. This static-structural starting point allows the relatively “simple” surface-level dimensions to be first clarified by first asking what-type questions. Once the qualitative whatness of experienced hate crime-related understandings have been clarified in terms of their perceived meanings, and clusters of meaning-connections, implications, and associations, we can then move on to more challenging constitutive investigations. That is, to begin to address the undoubted complexities of temporal syntheses and originating genesis involving all manner of many-levelled intersubjective dynamics. Here, there is a logical progression from the starting point of what-type questions to more complex how-type questions: e.g., how – over lived-­ time  – does the interpretive dimension of a racist perception of an individual or group continually re-constitute the latter’s enduring and habitual significance in the eyes of perpetrators? Husserl refers to phenomenology’s initially descriptive phase as: ‘the task of continuing the pure description and raising it to the status of a systematically comprehensive characterization, exhausting the breadths and depths of what can be found as data accepted in the natural attitude (to say nothing of the attitudes which can

against gay males: An overview,’ 25(2) Issues in Mental Health Nursing, (2004): 115–132. Phenomenological contributions to the study of criminology, criminal justice, sociology or social psychology exist. Yet, they are rarely adequately grounded in Husserl’s works and methodology: Cf. E. Buchbinder and Z. Eisikovits ‘Battered women’s entrapment in shame: A Phenomenological Study’, 73/4 Am Journal of Orthopsychiatry 2003: 355–366; P. K. Manning, ‘On the Phenomenology of Violence’ 14 The Criminologist (1999) 1–22; J. M. Clinton, Behind the Eurocentric Veils: The Search for African Realities, Massachusetts: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1992. 24  Following the publication of his Logische Untersuchungen at the turn of the twentieth century, Husserlian phenomenology has been widely presumed to be an essentially a descriptive science: one whose method requires faithfulness to the way in which phenomena, the “things themselves,” present themselves to our consciousness of them. This descriptive project initially appeared as a static approach focusing on the distillation of the “essential structures” (essences or eidos) of a phenomenon. Yet, almost from the start, a more credible supplementary counter-impulse that can be termed “generative” phenomenology related to experienced temporality, passive association, cultural, and historical phenomenon (including the intersubjective origins and habitual reiteration of specific prejudicial beliefs relevant to our project) also made itself felt. A.  Steinbock, ‘Generativity and the Scope of Generative Phenomenology,’ in Donn Welton (ed.) The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003: 32.

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Overall Objectives, Structure and Possible Audiences be harmoniously combined with it). Such a task can and must be fixed — as a scientific task; and it is an extraordinarily important one…’25

The vital point to recognise here is that, when taken as a whole, our phenomenology of hate crime’s descriptive impulse is a defining characteristic of only the opening and  – in one sense  – immature phases of Husserlian analysis. The descriptive ­character of the necessary first steps of a phenomenology of hate crime is not to be confused with what the entire journey aims to achieve.26 Steinbock has successfully argued, and demonstrated in impressive detail, the absolute centrality within Husserlian phenomenology of distinctly evaluative issues. These largely concern the recognition and non-recognition of interpretively constituted “difference” from continually posited and renewed cultural norms. In particular, he has critically addressed what it means to belong-to relative “insider” and comparative “outsider” communities and subcultures. Steinbock specifically cites hate crime as a topic for a renewed and essentially critical form of the phenomenology of intersubjectivity and cultural differentiation into relative “insider” and “outsider,” “homeworld” and “alienworld” groupings27: Questions concerning the philosophical problematic of identity and difference are never so poignantly formulated as when they bear directly on the dimensions of social life. It is here that such questions gain a privileged experiential weight because they are framed in terms of our very coexistence. The problematic of identity and difference is formulated when we ask, for example, what it means to belong to a family, to a group of friends, or to an organization. How is it possible to say “we” or to speak of “our” community? Is unity asserted to the exclusion of difference? Who counts as a stranger? If we tend to be the same for ourselves, how is it that we can experience ourselves as different? When we pose such questions, we are also inquiring into sharply contended political and historical issues: What is the sense of ethnic and attempts at so-called ethnic purification? … When individuals or groups are identified as “different,” say, women, who are claiming the voice of “the same”?

 Husserl 1982: 56. He immediately goes on to state that this descriptive element is not the whole of phenomenology and rapidly moves on to its other features and aspects. 26  However, as Husserl recognises, we must not discount the difficulties of securing in practice even the initially descriptive dimension, of clarifying the nature of descriptive analysis itself: ‘If phenomenology, then, is to be entirely a science within the limits of mere immediate Intuition, a purely “descriptive” eidetic science, then what is universal of its procedure is already given as something obvious. It must expose to its view events of pure consciousness as examples and make them perfectly clear; within the limits of this clarity it must analyse and seize upon their essences, trace with insight the essential interconnections, formulate what is beheld in faithful conceptual expressions which allow their sense to be prescribed purely by what is beheld or generically seen; and so forth. This procedure, followed naively, serves at first only for the sake of looking about in the new province, acquiring some general practice in seeing, seizing upon and analysing in it and becoming somewhat familiar with its data.’ Husserl 1982: 150–51. He then proceeds to show how much taken-for-granted methodological naiveté there is in such an apparently “obvious” notion of “pure description.” The idea of a purely descriptive-qualitative approach to hate crime purely as experienced is less a “solution” than a statement of a methodological problem. 27  More generally, see Klaus Held, ‘Heimwelt, Fremdwelt, die eine Welt,’ in Perspektiven und Probleme der Husserlschen Phänomenologie: Beiträge zur neuen Husserl-Forshcung, Freiburg (Br.)/München: Alber, 1991. 25

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Does asserting one’s national identity of necessity result in crimes of hate, neo-Nazism, or totalitarianism?28

We note – and draw some inspiration from – Steinbock’s final sentence in particular. As already noted, during the following phenomenological investigations, our Husserlian methodology develops itself from an initial position as a predominantly descriptive to – in later more advanced reformulations – an authentically critical social scientific approach to hate crime or other essentially intersubjective phenomena. The latter involves the phased subversion of the generally unreflective dogmatism of the natural attitude’s objectivist ideological practices. This subversion is not wholly destructive because it serves to renew an authentic phenomenological sensitivity and receptivity towards the lived experience of interpretively designated cultural differences. (Differences relevant to hate crime issues cannot – for reasons we address later, be taken to exist in themselves as simple and immutable “facts-in-­ themselves” after the fashion of natural attitude’s naturalism and objectivism.) Adequately understood, our Husserlian receptive sensibility to the experience of cultural differences is located at the very opposite end of the spectrum from the dogmatically closed orientation of many of those who are engaged in hate speech and crime. As a result, any self-reflective phenomenology of the significance of such criminality must, despite containing an initially and provisionally descriptive element, consciously develop its critical potential. This, in turn, needs to be developed in a methodologically-controlled social scientific manner. The latter cannot be confused with the all-too-common strategies of an “external” form of criticism of prejudice: one that merely superimposes the critics’ own ideological preferences and prejudicial understandings as a singular and absolute normative benchmark for the whole world to conform to.29 Instead, our approach needs to reconstruct from within its own potential critical implications for the fruits of the natural attitude, as well as in relation to the generative dynamics of this attitude itself. The latter, a form of immanent criticism, is the watchword for the majority of our chapters. In demonstrating our overall thesis concerning the often-ideological complicities of the natural attitude generally, together with the latter’s interpretive constitution and reiteration of prejudices characteristic of hate crime and speech, we also provide some substantive – as well as distinctly methodological – insights. For example, we offer an expressly formulated account of the nature, objectives and methodological stages of our version of an applied phenomenology of this topic. Our study has both reinterpreted and deployed Husserlian research methods of “sense-explication” that researchers must necessarily carry out in a reflexive and

 See Anthony J.  Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995. 29  On the immanent vs external critique distinction, see G. Pearson and M. Salter, ‘Getting Public Law Back into a Critical Condition: The Rule of Law as a Source for Immanent Critique,’ 8(4) Socio-Legal Studies, (1999): 483–508. 28

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self-critical manner: one that proceeds step-by-step.30 In particular, the practice of such explication moves our focus progressively from “surface” to more deeply “buried” levels of lived-experience of hate crime, from what-questions about the already constituted sense contents of hate speech for example, to how-questions. Here, the goal of this transition is to unveil and probe the obscure depths of how the significance of prejudicial understandings of, say, victim groups becomes is “re-­ constituted” (or “achieved again through being performed”). We can ask: “How are such derogatory interpretations constituted anew in – and through the medium of – the interaction between various interpretive acts (of perceptual- judgement, perception, recollection, anticipation, imagination, willing, fearing, linguistic signification etc.). Such interpretive acts not only arise from but are also directed towards real-­ world contexts: contexts just as these appear and take shape within the perceptual judgements, recollections, etc. themselves). As we identify and become limited by various problems arising from the initially descriptive and static methods of immature versions of Husserlian phenomenological research methods for studying hate crime as lived, it has become necessary to integrate more genetic and generative approaches. Husserl’s more mature investigations developed these but only in a patchy manner. The latter supplementations are, we suggest in the final chapter, far better attuned to addressing the distinctly cultural, linguistic and temporal characteristics of hate criminality as these take shape experientially. These aspects need to be investigated just as they are (inter)subjectively being lived and experienced within collective linguistic traditions of a homeworld’s shared cultural prejudices directed – sometimes from one generation to the next – against those constituted as relative “outsiders” or denizens of “alienworlds.”31 A vital point to stress here is the internal logic of such transitions. Husserl’s radically experiential qualitative method of sense-explication (of the “whatness” of a range of relevant prejudicial understandings) leads, by its own internal logic, to a constitutive analysis of the latter’s “howness,” whose implications explore and transcend a static structural approach. Taken together, these radically qualitative methods for carrying out experientially-grounded social research into hate crime as lived aim to provide a rich resource with still untapped potential: one that other social

 Without doubt a more fully-fledged applied phenomenology would need to include an extensive PhD-style methodology chapter outlining the character and stages of Husserlian sense-explication, bracketing of the natural attitude’s general thesis, intentional analysis of noematic-noetic correlations of whatness and howness, egological, genetic, generative and life-world analyses. However, it is not until our final chapter that we set out how a Husserlian critique of the contradictions stemming from the natural attitude’s prejudicial interpretive practices opens the door to – and provides a clear rationale for – a remedial type of intentional and life-worldly analysis. 31  The static dimensions of phenomenology include a constitutive analysis concerned with how something is given or modes of givenness, as well as identifying unfolding essential formal and material structures. e.g., the “criminality” of hate crime, etc). Such analysis can address the meant features of hate crime as experienced, the defining qualities of interpretive acts through which meaningful experiences of this topic take shape experientially, as well as intentional relations of correlation between such acts and intentional objects, e.g., between a hate incident as perceived and the structure of the act of perception through which the former takes shape. 30

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scientists – including PhD students – can usefully draw upon, irrespective of their particular topics and academic disciplines. Our general methodological aims are among the more fully developed aspects of the present study. This is because we have extracted, and then re-edited, its contents from a far longer original, yet horribly unwieldy, manuscript. The latter’s revision may, perhaps, generate further volumes in which we set out, and illustrate in far more detail, both the nature and limits of phenomenological sense-explication as an initially descriptive  – but ultimately critical  – social science research method. In such a follow-up study, themes of a phenomenology of the experience of ideologies of prejudice, as well as a passive association as a vehicle for the application and reiteration of such ideologies, would take centre stage. Nevertheless, the present study still devotes attention to critically analysing the natural attitude’s ultimately prejudicial role in reiterating often viciously negative understandings relevant to hate speech and crime. These understandings are generally reiterated in a dogmatic and unreflective manner as if they amounted to a self-­ evident “common sense” approach to designated cultural differences relevant to hate crime issues. An underlying presumption here is that such “common sense” must be accepted without radical questioning of its qualitative basis, underlying value-judgements, and other interpretive preconditions. Our initial effort to develop a self-consistent critique of such “common sense” approaches to types of cultural difference relevant to our topic is, we suggest, a vital supplement: one that is implied from the start of any form of phenomenological analysis of this topic. This is because such reiteration is the area where a distinctly critical and ethically-charged form of Husserlian analysis (as opposed to “only” descriptive, uncritical one-sided appropriations), has the most relevance for the future development of qualitative hate crime studies.32 At this point, however, we are reminded of a distinctly hermeneutic truth, which is rich in self-critical implications: namely, that every academic publication is but one necessarily partial – and non-definitive  – contribution to a forever-provisional ongoing conversation: one that has not only already started, but also which many others will continue, each in their own way. Furthermore, these future contributions can be neither predicted nor  Husserl’s advocacy of a radically experiential qualitative approach rehabilitates the potential integrity of everyday perceptions of, say, hate crime victims, founded upon a belief in what appears in the perceived world as, for all its relativities and contingencies, an integral part of the web of (social) scientific knowledge. He connects fields of knowledge to the realm of lived experience. He then orders the latter to show how they rest upon our ordinary and everyday engagement with things saturated with a primordial belief in both the surrounding intersubjectively relative lifeworld, and the integrity of our everyday perceptual engagements with it. Belief and knowledge are not, therefore, defined as polar opposites. If falsely divorced from his critique of the natural attitude, extensively discussed, developed and applied below, Husserl’s epistemological restoration of belief would encourage an uncritically descriptive form of qualitative analysis. This misapplication would lack any critical edge of the ethical and social scientific type that our phenomenology of hate crime surely requires. Instead, such a misconceived and one-sided form of qualitative analysis would merely reinterpret, clarify and cross-reference experiences of the status quo only in the latter’s own ideological terms. Our approach entirely rejects this conservative approach for reasons explained and illustrated more fully in the final chapter. 32

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controlled in advance by any single contributor to this overall ongoing dialogue. It follows that our phenomenology of hate crime can, at most, be a logbook entry of an ongoing and, in principle, unfinishable journey: one characterised by both open horizons and infinite tasks. In practice, Husserlian phenomenology does not first conceptualise a research method free of experiential concreteness, and then execute its methodologies mechanically – as if the latter constituted a self-contained, off-the-shelf and self-­ sufficient “qualitative research method.” Rather, our conceptualisation of the phenomenological method has been refined and – in part – accomplished anew through its very application in successive drafts on a “trial and error” and “learn from our mistakes” basis. In turn, the draft text’s repeated revision has been guided, even in part driven, by our self-critical reflections upon the limits of what such deployments have, to date at least, been able to accomplish in practice. Through systematic and sometimes accidental forms of self-reflection, our sense of what it could mean to “apply” Husserlian phenomenology to the lived experience of hate crime issues has developed incrementally, sometimes haphazardly, over numerous drafts. It has changed markedly as we have repeatedly attempted to describe, explicate and refine different dimensions of this challenging phenomenon through phenomenological investigations. Along the way, we have been discovering various nuances of what, for us, actually constitutes the production of viable forms of phenomenological research in a distinctly Husserlian sense of this term. The viability of the Husserlian method, (more precisely mixture of methods that are never purely methods in an empirical social science sense), and what has proved necessary to enhance a Husserlian approach, have themselves become secondary research topics.33 Hence, during our preparation of the final draft of this study not only has the adequacy, in the sense of potential experiential-grounding, of the initial approach been reconsidered and repeatedly revised but so too has our idea of what counts as the least bad starting point for a distinctly Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime. We have had to rethink anew the justification for the research methods considered appropriate to this challenging subject matter. These methods and rationalisations have – during a confrontation with aspects of different sides and dimensions of the phenomenon itself – been revised continuously. We have revised these to further advance our overall project in an optimally self-consistent, as well as suitably self-­ critical, manner. For all its shortcomings, the present version – made up of less than 50% of the draft chapters – represents a hard-won culmination. Such a process of reflexive and self-critical revision has proven necessary, and in one sense, has forced itself upon us in an instructive – if sometimes vexing – manner. This is because the phenomenologically unavoidable question of what precisely constitutes “the research field for a Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime,” remains a stubbornly open and complex question for us to confront and respond to thoughtfully. As Husserl recognised, as an interpretive realm, the research field itself is not simply “there” to be “grasped” – like the juicy, low-hanging fruits of an orchard. 33

 Ibid, 7.

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The very question of just what comprises the research field of a Husserlian interpretation of hate crime, the intelligibility of both its complex of meaning and their scope, and how best to proceed to analyse this field’s defining qualities, cannot be resolved arbitrarily. In particular, we cannot resort to the familiar type of a legislative-­ style stipulation of operational definitions from on high. Instead, and as our investigations advance, the very nature and implication of such questions must themselves carefully addressed as reflexive – and hence highly challenging – research topics in their own right. As Husserl states: But how can we find the right beginning? As a matter of fact, the beginning is what is most difficult here, and the situation is unusual. The new field does not lie spread out before our view with a wealth of salient data in such a manner that we can simply reach out and be sure of the possibility of making them the objects of a science — to say nothing of being sure of the method by which we ought to proceed.34

It follows that our analysis must, as it unfolds over time, become increasingly scientifically rigorous even though it begins from a pre-scientific basis. This goal can be achieved by optimally securing the very possibility of our methodological foundations, not least by critically reflecting upon and clarifying the core components of its own analytical procedures. It is important to give the latter a fulsome grounding in the data of lived-experience. We must, according to Husserl, expressly demonstrate and clarify the nature of those: ‘modes of givenness functioning in it, on the essence, the effect, the conditions of perfect clarity and insight as well as of perfectly faithful and fixed conceptual expression…’ For ‘any given case’ such reflective clarification of, say, hate crime as lived: ‘allows for practising a limiting and improving criticism by applying the strictly formulated norms of method.’35 In turn, we can neither avoid nor bypass a striving for reflexive self-improvement through self-critical feedback loops with respect to still-unclarified procedures and underlying analytical categories. Indeed, for Husserl, they demonstrate: ‘the essential relatedness of phenomenology to itself.’ We must no longer refer glibly to notions of “common sense,” “prejudice” “hate crime” “description,” “critical,” etc., as if the core meanings, significance, and implications of these notions and analytical practices, as well as the latter’s outcomes, are somehow self-evident and “obvious.” This is because the clarification of such analytical ideas and idea-driven practices are themselves: ‘included in the domain of phenomenology.’ Indeed, all that we can secure and acquire by such reflective analysis must be rooted in the intuitions of immediate experience: must square with the norms which they formulate. Therefore, one must be able to persuade oneself at any time, by new reflections, that the predicatively formed affair-complexes asserted in the methodological statements can be given with perfect clarity, that the concepts used actually conform faithfully to what is given, etc.36

 Husserl 1982: 147.  Ibid. 36  Ibid: 151. 34 35

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In other words, hate crime as experienced must be systematically described, clarified and critically analysed. The same also applies to the very methods we are deploying to actually carry out such description, clarification and critical analysis. The ultimate ideal here is to ensure that no part of the research field is left in that obscure, vague and ill-defined condition of taken-for-grantedness that is characteristic of – and recreated by – the natural attitude’s deeply prejudicial and assumption-­ driven orientation. As already noted, Husserl wrote his major works on phenomenology during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Inevitably, these reflect some of the quite specific historical contexts in, but also against which, he was then immersed and intervened. The present book is partly an attempt to “road test” our broadly sympathetic – but still highly selective – reconstruction of a distinctly Husserlian form of a phenomenological approach in relation to the lived experience of contemporary hate crime. Those many elements of Husserl’s published works that now appear self-contradictory, incoherent or no longer relevant to today’s world have, we hope, been simply ignored or reinterpreted to correct these difficulties. Such distancing has proven itself necessary for a combination of methodological and philosophical reasons that it would take an entirely different type of book (or book series!) to fully explain and adequately justify.37 With respect to the Husserlian legacy, we prefer the constructive role of re-­ animating and reconstructing what appears to us to be still alive, resonant and relevant for today’s world. We reject the role of destructive external critics. The latter arrogantly set up their own projected and ready-made prejudices as the sole criteria for truth and, on this extrinsic basis, critique Husserl by reference to superimposed standards that are external to – as well as alien for – phenomenology itself. By striving repeatedly to overcome its own limitations, our reconstruction further develops the optimally reflective, self-critical potential of a broadly Husserlian-­ type orientation towards social scientific research. The latter is concerned not only to illustrate and apply our interpretation of Husserlian analysis but also – in the very act of selective application – cast light upon limitations that still need to be overcome in the future. However, we have generally deferred the admittedly vital task of engaging in protracted debates with Husserlian purists and critics published in the secondary literature in favour of focusing on the “things themselves.” Here, we recall that Husserl himself was never a Husserlian purist. Instead, he was constantly entangled in the continual re-editing and revising of his work, most especially with respect to the latter’s founding axioms, presuppositions, and research methods. Whatever the pragmatic merits of our approach, it leaves us vulnerable to two charges. Firstly, of taking a specific and selective reconstruction of the Husserlian legacy as somehow definitive, without explaining the basis upon which we have filtered out elements of Husserl’s work. Secondly, we have not provided detailed arguments justifying our choice of Husserl, as opposed to Judith Butler or Jacques  Hence, unfortunately, our own project must remain abbreviated relative to its own ideals just discussed. This is because elements of our methodological rationale, notions of “contemporary relevance,” are left unclear, imprecise and unsubstantiated experientially. 37

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Derrida for example, as the main representative of modern phenomenological research. There are dozens of useful books on the relationship between Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement, and later contributors to this movement ranging from, say, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Paul Ricouer, and Derrida. In addition, there are, of course, various sub-branches of this tradition, spanning ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, Gadamer’s hermeneutics, and Derrida’s deconstruction, and interpretive qualitative social science, including phenomenological psychology, criminology, and sociology. Each of these contributions, extensions, and sub-branches, have been shaped, in various ways and – to a greater or lesser extent – by selective interpretations of only partial aspects of Husserl’s writings. Rather than rework these existing genres of comparative writing on the nature, and pros and cons of different contributions to the overall phenomenological movement, together with the latter’s various backwaters and muddy tributaries, our aim is more ambitious, if perhaps riskier. In particular, a major objective of this study is to return to the founding primary source of this complex movement: Husserl’s extensive studies and expositions of what, in practice, is involved in developing a step-by-step and self-critical phenomenology of lived experience. We highlight this issue just as it “comes to light” during our application of broadly Husserlian methods of experiential analysis to the qualitatively rich lived-experience of hate crime. This project just outlined requires a necessarily selective re-contextualisation of theories that Husserl developed in an earlier historical period to our contemporary realities, without making any impossible “purist” claims that our account is precisely the one that Husserl himself would have written during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Instead, our re-contextualisation involves a contingent and highly selective reinterpretation: one which inevitably highlights and applies those elements of Husserl’s legacy that appear to us as especially thought-provoking, insightful and potentially illuminating with respect to the interpretive dimensions of (sub)cultures of homeworld specific prejudice relevant to the phenomenology of hate crime. Our account is then written in the spirit, if not strictly to the letter, of Husserlian phenomenology. (Indeed, arguably there is no “to the letter” only diverse and often contradictory letters.) We give special attention to what a phenomenological clarification of the interpretive conditions for becoming-prejudiced and being-­ prejudiced against hate crime victim groups would actually look like. While authors cannot hope to dictate how their books will be interpreted and applied, we would make a plea that the chapters addressing the defining qualities and premises of the “natural attitude” should not be skipped over. As already explained, these are not addressing abstract methodological considerations devoid of any subject-specific relevance to the topic itself. Instead, they go the very heart of what a phenomenology of hate crime must both address and contribute to. These chapters on the “common sense” of the natural attitude progressively unfold the rationale for developing a critical sensibility in the face of the reiteration of societal prejudices against one or more victim groups. They clarify the interpretive processes in and through which various “prejudicial” understandings of victim groups

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(and perpetrators) are constituted, sustained and potentially revised, often in “common sense” ways that are dogmatic, naive, and unreflective. (The words “naive” and “natural” both stem from the same Latin root “nasci.”) The analyses contained in these opening chapters address, clarify, and explain the natural attitude’s interpretive naiveté, its dogmatism, and displacement of critical self-reflection, together with the distinctly conservative implications of its objectivist premises. They will not be repeated in later sections where we are engaged in concrete explications and detailed analysis of the meaning(s) interviewees have given to lived-experiences of hate crime, and the experience of being on the receiving end of precisely those prejudicial expressions that constitute hate speech. We are conscious of the various criticisms of both Husserl, and the application of his ideas in the field of criminology, including complaints of “essentialism.”38 Indeed, in an earlier study of phenomenological approaches to the experience of law-in-action, one of us has summarised, and in part endorsed, elements of these varied critiques39 On further reflection, however, it appears that much of the critique within this field is either superficial, or subject to a highly unsympathetic and distorted interpretation of only selected parts of Husserl’s total work. These are often taken out of their broader contexts. Possible critiques of Husserl can thus be carried out without addressing either possible broadly Husserlian responses, or those self-­ corrections contained in his writings considered as a whole. For example, our strictly and exclusively Husserlian approach cannot duck the charge of “essentialism” because this will regularly be made against our project. By “essentialism” we are referring to the idea of seeking to identify and analyse supposedly timeless “essences,” or “essential structures,” of phenomena, e.g., “prejudice as such”, “crime as such,” or “hate crime as such.” Husserl claimed that, by deploying a special – but intermediary – methodology of “eidetic analysis,” we are able to abstract such “essences” from historical experiences and concrete institutional realities.40 However, we cannot fully endorse his essence-seeking “eidetic method” in an unqualified way, as if it somehow exhausted the scope and jurisdiction of a Husserlian phenomenology that also contains a “genetic phenomenology” of origins. On the contrary, we adopt a minimalist response, largely preferring instead to deploy Husserl’s methodology of sense-explication and intentional analysis linked to his later genetic phenomenology. The latter was more centrally concerned with the interpretive dynamics of underlying intersubjective processes considered in their temporal flux.  There are many critiques of the type of essentialism deriving in part from Plato which claims that things are what they are because of some essential qualities whose absence would mean they would be different in kind. One critique is that the stereotypical quality is portrayed as all- pervasive, not contingent or historically related. However, for present purposes, it is not generally the variety of the concept under discussion that is the issue. 39  Michael Salter, ‘A Dialectic Despite Itself? Overcoming the Phenomenology of Legal Culture’, 4(4) Social & Legal Studies (1995): 453–476. 40  Husserl, 1925/77: 22–25; 53–63. 38

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Ironically, a remarkably unreflective and reductive form of essentialism is precisely one of the characteristics of the “natural attitude” that is exhibited in the words of many perpetrators of hate speech and hate crime more generally. One example could be the essentialist idea that being a “normal English person” means being a “white-skinned Anglo-Saxon,” without a physical and/or cognitive “disability,” conventionally gendered, and heterosexual. On this unreflective and prejudicial interpretive basis, it is possible to perceive and respond to those who are deemed to fall outside the narrow scope of this specific singular category, but who are ­encountered in the UK, as somehow problematic, as comparatively “alien” to the “homeworld” of the interpreter.41 Such essentialist understandings can then yield the viciously problematic idea that these individuals are, in themselves, and because of who they are, “deserving” of discriminatory abusive treatment. Crude and simplistic versions of latent essentialism can implicitly support the prejudice that, as relative “outsiders,” who form part of a fixed “them,” within an often largely taken-for-granted “us/them” dichotomy between designated “homeworlds” and homeworld-projected “alienworlds,” such individuals somehow merit verbal and/or physical abuse. Allegedly, these designated “outsiders” somehow “deserve” this abuse because it stems directly from the provocation supplied by their very “alien” presence. It follows from this spurious logic that these “outsiders” bring down such verbal and physical abuse upon themselves by the very fact of displaying their cultural difference from a taken-for-­ granted “single correct norm” (often a “type” or “stereotype”), which is routinely superimposed upon them. The criticism of exhibiting reliance upon a far less vicious form of essentialism can certainly be directed at Husserl’s middle-period, best captured in his major work Ideas (1913). Yet, his later writings on the temporal, interpretive and historical relativities of all phenomena, together with those interpretive acts that apprehend them (such as perception), surely offsets and counter-balances this critique. In particular, we are referring to his important studies entitled Crisis of European Sciences, Experience and Judgement, and the Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Here, it is interesting that, in developing her critique of gender-related essentialism, Judith Butler draws precisely upon Husserl’s constitutive-genetic phenomenology.42 There is also the point that a minimal form of essentialism, understood as the idea that phenomena can have not only context-dependent contingencies but also

 In an unpublished manuscript stemming from 1930 or 1931, Husserl addresses the generative phenomena of homeworlds and alienworlds, their (re)interpretive constitution anew as such, in terms of a “transcendental aesthetic,” defined as ‘the correlative system of validity of the world as the world of experience.’ Hua 15: 214. The task of elucidating the constitution of a homeworld: ‘becomes the task of a transcendental aesthetic ...’ Hua 15: 234. 42  Judith Butler ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,’ Theatre Journal Vol. 4, (1988), 135–49. More generally, see Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013; Andrew Sayer, ‘Essentialism, Social Constructionism, and Beyond,’, 45 Sociological Review, 1997: 456 41

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core structures – ones that endure from one fleeting episodic context to another – may be unavoidable. Take, for example, the very idea of a “phenomenology of hate crime”. There is no doubt that we could have selected an early or late Husserlian definition of what counts as “phenomenology,” or rejected both in favour of that of Sartre, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Judith Butler – or any other distinctive contributors to our still evolving the phenomenological movement. And yet, throughout all the often-profound differences between each of these contributors to this lively argumentative movement and school of thought, there remains an ­enduring sense in which their writings remain continually identifiable as distinctly “phenomenological,” at least in some core and enduring sense: one that we can identify as persisting throughout all the diverse variations. Throughout all their variations and disagreements, each remains a vital contributor to “the same” phenomenological movement, with such contributions revitalising this movement itself. If anyone stretches the critique of essentialism to the point of denying the presence of this, or any other, enduring and stable structure of experience, then he or she would be faced with irresolvable problems. For example, it is difficult to understand on what basis any of these phenomenological writers can be credibly identified as contributors to “the same” singular, if diverse and still developing, intellectual movement: one that, in one respect, remains “common” to them all. However diverse the phenomenological movement, it remains something identifiable as a distinctive academic orientation and approach to, say, the conduct of social research. As such, every instance remains different in kind from, say, naturalistic and objectivist alternatives, including quantitative social science, logical positivism, and utilitarianism. Even the hermeneutic and deconstructionist critique of Husserl’s essentialist phase, which addresses its alleged failure to recognise the interpretive contingencies, context-dependencies, and temporal becoming aspects of phenomena, has its own definite presuppositions. For instance, such critique relies upon the idea that none of these phenomena are themselves contingent, context-dependent or historically-­specific. It is not as if lived experience demonstrates that the phenomena of lived-temporality, context-dependency, and interpretive contingency come and go, apply here but not there, now but not then, with no core, enduring structures spanning different contexts. In other words, even those who are most committed to the critique of essentialism in Husserl and others do so by referring to core structures which they necessarily presuppose to be trans-contextual and invariant. Our different approach is to develop a sympathetic reading of what we have come to consider as the most “viable” aspects of a Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime in terms of producing a compelling account of lived-experience – understood as both a process and as a research topic. We have attempted to rework these salvaged aspects of Husserl’s major works in a positive constructive manner: one that is suitable for the task of redeveloping a Husserlian phenomenology of prejudice with respect to the lived-experience of contemporary hate crime. Then, and perhaps only then, can we develop a suitably nuanced and well-informed critique of applied Husserlian phenomenology, based in part upon this case-study, and developed from the ground up, as it were.

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Yet, we frankly accept that our concentration upon only a Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime to achieve sufficient depth of insight, analysis, and concrete application, risks criticism of developing an unduly narrow analysis. However, this critique, although understandable, has its own difficulties, particularly whenever it becomes self-reflective. For example, is it realistic for an applied study of hate crime to develop, say, five different models of phenomenology, and then apply each in turn to the lived experience of this phenomenon? Or to spend the first half of a book explaining the rationale for the precise synthesis of selective aspects of Husserl, Heidegger, and Butler? The former approach would risk superficiality; it would perhaps be more fitting for a postgraduate course on phenomenology that merely uses hate crime as a running illustration. The latter approach would inevitably squeeze out the applied element, or become, in effect, a multi-volume series of monographs. Our approach, although clearly open to various objections, has some pragmatic advantages relative to these two alternatives, especially as our “application” – like any good road test – also entails an implicit critical evaluation of Husserlian phenomenology itself. Indeed, defenders of a “pure” Husserlian phenomenology will notice how we have silently filtered out some elements of Husserl’s work. We have filtered out aspects we consider implausible, internally contradictory and difficult to apply without distortion, or which run up against irresolvable obstacles, including the Kantian dimensions of transcendental idealism. We recognise that, in his final major works from 1929, Husserl appears to have rejected such idealism – or at least subjected it to substantial qualification. This was because of his renewed interest in the foundational role played by the historical contingency, intersubjectivity, and temporalities of lived experiences, which such idealism either ignores or denies. In his 1935 letter to the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Husserl refers to how we live primarily in an always-already communalised ‘we-world’: Saying ‘I’ and ‘we,’ they find themselves as members of families, of associations, social units, as living ‘together,’ exerting an influence on and suffering from their world –the world, which has sense and reality for them, through their intentional life, their experiencing, thinking, [and] valuing. Naturally, we have known for a long time that every human being has a ‘world- representation,’ that every nation, that every supranational cultural grouping lives, so to speak, in a distinct world as its own surrounding world, and so again every historical time in its [world].43

We are also conscious that, even though we have not addressed the relative merits of later contributors to the phenomenological tradition, our work remains lengthy. Arguably, this length stems in part from the fact that our study excavated the depths of Husserl’s extensive primary sources. In part, this length is because an adequate account of the dense thicket of Husserl’s prose, which resists gross simplification, is simply not amenable to any simple and short summary, at least not one that avoids distorting Husserl’s complexities.  See ‘Edmund Husserl’s Letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, 11 March 1935’, trans. Dermot Moran and Lukas Steinacher, 8 New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (2008), 349–54: 350. 43

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Furthermore, the present study would be unacceptably longer if we had also addressed the relative merits and limitations of the existing massive academic literature on hate crime from other, non-phenomenological perspectives, as found in the instructive works of Iganski, Perry, and others. Such a comparative project is surely a worthwhile one. However, it can be developed as a follow-up study to our own. Indeed, this comparative project would clearly presuppose the findings of our own more basic investigation of the interpretive preconditions of the phenomenon itself. Such a project would presuppose the results of our demonstration of just what a rigorously Husserlian approach to this topic looks like and is capable of achieving in practice. In sum, our central argument is that a Husserlian approach to the lived experience of hate crime, developed rigorously in a step-by-step methodologically-­ controlled and reflexive manner, offers a fresh and insightful account of this topic’s distinctly experiential aspects. At both constituted and constitutive levels of “whatness” and “howness” respectively, this approach articulates vital experiential dimensions that more conventional social science perspectives, subject to the prejudices of various types of positivism, naturalism, objectivism, and post-structuralism, tend to either gloss over or otherwise take for granted. We are referring here to the daunting complexities contained in understanding the actual lived-experience of being-­ prejudiced and suffering from the expression of such prejudice. So, we are also referring to the experiencing of forms of prejudice that are directed towards oneself, both generally, and with respect to perceived group membership. And yet, at the same time, our study must recognise that only certain strands of Husserlian analysis that have retained their general contemporary relevance are pertinent to the study of the specifics of hate crime as lived. In other words, the “Husserlian” character of our study draws only upon a subset of Husserl’s total work. Our repeated reference to sense-constitution draw less on Husserl’s earlier emphasis on supposedly isolated and atomistic individual consciousness and static structures of individual ego-based subjectivity, than on his later genetic and generative analyses of passive “syntheses of association” and in the temporal/temporalising and distinctly intersubjective dimensions of lived experience. Following Steinbock, generative Husserlian analysis studies the various ways in which cultural worlds take on sense and are (re)constituted anew as meaningful for entire groups, subcultures, and societies.44 As our final chapter demonstrates, what is studied here is the process of historical, intersubjective movement across various generations whose primary loci are the differentiation of “normal” and “abnormal” geo-historical “homeworlds” and “alienworlds.”45 Because it focuses upon geo-historical intersubjectivity, while also  Hua 29: 329–31.  Husserl’s reflections on conceptions of normality were not incidental points made in passing at a single phase of his life-work. On the contrary, they preceded his path-breaking Logical Investigations 1900/1901 and came to fruition in the 1917–21 period, and then extended into the period 1930–37. In terms of their substantive permeation of concrete phenomenological theme, these conceptions are vital for the discussion of “constitution” as well as the lived body and the 44 45

2 Overview

29

recognising how communication operates as a constitutive feature in the regeneration of shared cultural life-worlds of prejudicial understandings, this approach ­overcomes a purely atomistic and individualistic focus.46 In addition, certain phenomena relevant to hate crime, such as long-standing vocabularies of prejudicial expressions relating to one or more hate crime victim group, as well as counterexpressions that contest such prejudice, become prominent. They take shape as constitutive not of a purely individual consciousness but that of an entire interpersonal community whose homeworld of subcultural prejudices is passed down from one generation to another. This collective dimension is concerned with the welfare of all members of a specific cultural tradition as persons and citizens. These include the distinctly emotional sphere of interpersonal belonging-together and mutual caring, out of which supportive responses to hate crime victims can arise and be strongly motivated.47 At this communalised level, we draw inspiration from Husserl’s critical analyses of the constitutive roles of (re)appropriation and renewal of meanings stemming from distinctly normative territories and cultural traditions. The latter are shaped by essentially normative differentiations of interpretively constituted homeworlds and alienworlds, populated by relative “insiders” and “outsiders.” In turn, these subcultural worlds are themselves formative of our (derivative) sense of “subjectivity,”48 of being precisely this type of an individual ego-subject belonging to this – but not that – cultural tradition. On this basis, a sense of belonging arises and is sustained, a sense of being an “insider” here but no more than an “outsider” there. In this context, we become subject to all manner of “us” and “them” differentiations related to a sense of personal, as well as a group, identity. In turn, these lived cultural differentiations may place ourselves “with” or “against” the situation of hate crime victims and the perpetrators who have abused them; or thrust us into a position of mere bystanders whose stance is one of indifference to the suffering of others, or at least some others. Our phenomenological focus on generative constitution recognises that the scope of more static forms of phenomenological description, which necessarily predominate in the early phases of an applied Husserlian study of hate crime, is not merely the unity of a singular life. Instead, it is the ‘unity of a tradition,’ the ‘unity of historicity,’ bound to the here and now of specific geographical territories understood as constitution of specific “homeworlds” set against “alienworlds.” Furthermore, the implications of a sustained phenomenology of normality and abnormality extend into the field of methodology as their analysis breaches the confines of static methodologies by pointing to the necessity for specifically genetic analyses, for a genetic methodology that recognises the streaming of temporality, the flux of historical becoming at different levels. Husserl’s collection of his papers and manuscripts gathered together in the Husserl archives under the heading of “primordial constitution” substantiate these claims. Steinbock 1995: 8. 46  Such transcendence does not mean that a constitutive/genetic analysis focusing on egological experience is entirely jettisoned. See Joona Taipale, ‘Twofold Normality: Husserl and the Normative Relevance of Primordial Constitution,’ 28(1) Husserl Studies: 2012: 49–60. 47  See Hua 15: 171–72, 472–73; Hua 29: 87–89, 332–35; Hua: 42. 48  Steinbock 1995: 14.

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distinct and never-universal homeworlds via the normative, rhetorical and cognitive resources a transmitted cultural tradition.49 For the latter, the presence of “alienworlds” is constitutive. No national community can constitute its collective sense of identity as citizens-together without the category of “foreigners;” there can be no constitution of an “us,” who belong together in a certain sense, without – during the course of the same constitutive movement – also constituting a sense of a “them” of “another people,” who belong to some other homeworld but not ours. As Husserl states: ‘The most original lifeworldly sense is the sense of a historical community, for instance, a community living together generatively in a people with a tradition,’ as they are co-foundationally intermixed with alienworlds.50 By disclosing the human world of culture normatively and constitutively in the co-relative structure of homeworld and alienworlds, we can come to grasp how such differentiation is rich in potential for all manner of vicious prejudicial abuse of victim groups. In turn, such a realisation means that our revised Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime can address not only sense-constitution at the level of individual constituting subjectivity, the sense of what is “other than – and alien for – me” but also what takes shapes as “other than – and alien for – us” with respect to constituting intersubjectivity.

3  Structure of This Study and Its Possible Audiences There is a distinctly phenomenological structure to our step-by-step methodologically-­driven analysis of hate crime as lived experientially: one whose sequencing is dictated by the demands that these phenomena make upon us. For example, it is only possible to carry out sense-explication once we have already successfully completed the tasks of many preliminary stages designed to cut through and minimise obstructions created by an overlay of prejudicial reinterpretations superimposed by the natural attitude’s interpretive-linguistic framework. Furthermore, the more straightforward descriptive “noematic” analysis of surface level phenomena, such as the “whatness” of expressly intended meanings of hate incidents, needs to be completed during the opening phases. Such analysis must be completed before it is possible to carry out more in-depth investigations of underlying interpretive preconditions of such experiences uncovered when we go on to ask how-type and for-whom questions about such lived experiences. In addition, and contrary to the obstructive resistance of so-called “common sense,” conducting sense-explication requires a high measure of methodological self-awareness in relation to precisely what does such explication itself involve. Because of the reflexive and self-critical nature of the Husserlian approach, the sense of sense-explication itself cannot be allowed to remain unexplicated. In addition to

49 50

 Hua 29: 9, 16, 57, 60, 258.  Hua 29: 211; 11, 42, 63, 198–201.

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refining an experientially well-grounded consciousness of hate crime as our research topic, we also need to develop a measure of methodological self-awareness and express justification for our own interpretive practices and general orientation. As hate crime researchers working with the Husserlian tradition, we are, therefore, faced with a spiralling and self-critical incremental process whose internal logic consists of a necessary sequence of stages. Fulfilling the demands of this process involves moving “into” a highlighted theme, such as the preconditions for grasping hate crime as experienced, and then developing and refining a qualitative methodology that is demonstrably adequate to this theme’s analysis. Next, we must carry out that Husserlian type of phenomenological analysis; while thereby also coming to better appreciate its demonstrable limitations and restrictions. The latter need to be identified in comparison to the Husserlian ideal of achieving total clarity, explicitness and distinctness; as well as a more general optimal (never complete) liberation from the prejudicial and distorting effects of previously hidden and unnoticed presuppositions, biases and normative as well as cognitive blind-spots. In turn, such appreciation of the limits of Husserlian constitutive analysis, which is forged by the researcher’s own reflexive self-critical awareness, encourages us to apply a further set of Husserlian methods. These methods are designed to remedy, as far as possible, these previously identified restrictions and limitations. There is, then, a definite logical rationale to our structure of chapters. As far as possible, its logic is dictated by, and tailor-made to, the requirements of the topic itself, at least insofar as this is susceptible to being explicated at all. These requirements amount to links within a sequentially-developed chain demanding both illustration and supportive argumentation at each stage. Each of these links not only builds upon and carries forward the accomplishments of its predecessor(s), but also lays and renews the groundwork for its upcoming successor phases. When caught up and immersed in the sometimes-intricate details of sense-­ explication of specific hate crime phenomena, it remains vital to appreciate and keep in mind the underlying rationale behind the series of phased progressions: to see the forest as well as all the trees. Even whilst focusing on the significance of detailed specific experiences, we ask readers to keep in mind the step-by-step methodological progression of our study, the trajectory of its sense of direction. That is, where we currently “are” within an incremental movement from: 1 . “Surface” to “intermediate,” and then to “depth” levels of lived-experience. 2. From express and pre-constituted surface-level meanings to those that are implied, veiled, buried and emerging; and 3. From relatively static to more dynamic forms of analysis of the temporal-genetic constitution of such meanings driven by specific interests, concerns, values and general orientations of interpreters. No doubt individual parts of our analysis can be torn from this overall methodological progression and strongly criticised, perhaps on grounds that we cannot even anticipate. However, we stand firm in our claim that, when taken as a whole and in context, our approach is robust and as true to the phenomena itself – and its demands – as we have been able to make it. We hope even our study’s inevitable

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all-too-human limitations, blind-spots, and omissions can at least be redeemed by critical readers as instructive failures that others will recognise and not repeat. We hope that different sections of the present study will be of interest to three very different potential audiences: 1. Those with a general social science or philosophical interest in Husserl, some of whom may partly contest, and – perhaps in some measure – endorse elements of our selective appropriations of his writings. Here, our emphasis upon a concrete qualitative social scientific, as opposed to a Neo-Kantian transcendental idealist, interpretation and application of Husserl, may be of special interest. 2. Individuals, like ourselves, who are primarily interested in the application of any type of rigorously-grounded qualitative social scientific approach to the lived experience of concrete contexts, including social policy and legal issues. Here, our step-by-step reconstruction provides various rich illustrations of each of the methodological stages of Husserlian sense-explication, as well as the “logic” of the various advancing transitions between them. This phased reconstruction of our radically experiential research methodology may be of particular interest to research students and other qualitative researchers who have no specific interest in hate crime. Here, we would hope that this group of readers would find good reasons to take our methodological discussions to be of primary interest and relevance; and seek to apply each stage to their own different fields, perhaps with some adaptations dictated by the exigencies of the topic and access to it. 3. Those scholars who are primarily interested in studies of hate crime who, to date, have no background or preconceived interest in any type of phenomenology whatsoever. Here, it will be the implications of our qualitative analysis of the rich interview material that could be of particular relevance and interest. This qualitative material is derived from those interviewees who have been personally and professionally involved in the field of hate crime, including British officials with responsibilities for making legal and other official responses to these phenomena. These three possible – more precisely – presumed audiences may find different parts of the present work to be of special interest for “dipping onto.” Hence, we have – as far as possible – written each chapter in a way that does not presuppose that the reader has entirely digested the full content of previous chapters. In places, this has proven especially difficult because – as just discussed – there is a spiralling process of step-by-step argumentation unfolding over each part that is akin to the links in an overall chain. Yet, authors cannot prescribe in advance how readers are to interpret their writings. Few writers are themselves the “ideal reader” that they would wish for in others. That is, readers who begin at the start and read through to the end. With respect to the present book, such readers may come across apparent repetitions of points made in one or more earlier chapters. However, without such “repetition” it would surely be difficult for those readers who tend to “dip in” to specific chapters, or even subheadings based upon the index entry, to grasp the ideas we are developing.

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33

Why, however, is there any need for a phenomenology of hate crime? One possible answer is that hate crime is a field dominated by both the deep-seated and damaging prejudices of the natural attitude (discussed below), and unexplicated meanings and distinctions that still await sustained clarification. One of our interviewees, a hate crime victim support worker, admitted that he had still to grasp a key technical distinction, and felt that he was far from alone in his confusion: ‘… the difference in racially aggravated offences and a racist offence, because a lot of police officers don’t understand that one. I don’t really.’51 Arguably, this statement highlights a familiar experience. That is, of knowing implicitly that events are emphatically meaningful for those responsible for responding to hate crimes, and that such meaning arises in part through a process of distinguishing situations perceived as similar but not as identical that takes the form of a largely passive association of the X situation with Y category. And yet part of this overall experience is an awareness of one’s partial, or complete, inability to make such relevant distinctions with full confidence as to their validity. For example, to confidently distinguish between hate crime offences as such, and “simple offences,” by differentiating cases of “criminal damage” that – under specific circumstances – are capable of attracting enhanced sentences owing to perceived “evidence” of a perpetrator’s discriminatory motives. In turn, this common experience of being conscious of lacking a clear understanding of an underlying sense, or a distinction between meanings and meant values, is itself an important phenomenon. It highlights a continuing need for a phenomenology of hate crime to identify, to explicate, distinguish, compare and clarify various underlying meanings that mediate the presence of this topic to our consciousness of it, together with questions of relative doubt, probability and certainty with which such interpretations are “held to be true.” In particular, we need to identify and analyse those experienced meanings that that fall “within,” or “at the margins,” or entirely “outside,” the scope of socially and legally defined categories of hate crime; and yet which – on self-reflection – appear inadequately grasped. Although the brief quotation set out above addresses an issue of legal meaning, the lived experience of being conscious of inadequately comprehended meanings more generally, including those understood only in a vague, confused and implicit manner, encompasses the whole of conscious life.52 That which we ourselves appear experientially to be is not even fully and clearly present, even to ourselves. Even what it means for our consciousness of a topic to be a vague, confused and implicit one is rarely present to us in an optimally clear, precise, emphatic and distinct way;

 Interviewee 241, 012.  Interviewee, 131, 212. For phenomenological discussion of applied phenomenological methods, see Giorgi Amedeo (Ed.) Phenomenology and psychological research, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985; Don Idhe, Experimental phenomenology: an introduction, Albany, New  York: State University of New  York Press, 1986; Clark Moustakas, Phenomenological research methods, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994; Donald. E.  Polkinghorne, ‘Phenomenological research methods’, in R. S. Valle, and S. Halling, (Eds.) Existential phenomenological perspectives in psychology, New York: Plenum Press, 1989. 41–60.

51 52

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it is rarely given to us in the form of self-transparent lightness lacking shadowy depths. Our next section aims to clarify some formal legal classifications of designated hate incidents and hate crimes. This material is relevant at two levels: it clarifies the terminology that some of our interviewees deploy; but often without fully defining, clarifying or explicating their terms. Secondly, explicating certain legal definitions will help alert us to a subset of the various interpretive issues that need to be further developed through qualitative research addressing our interviewees’ concrete lived experiences.

References Amedeo, Giorgi, ed. 1985. Phenomenology and Psychological Research. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Buchbinder, E., and Z.  Eisikovits. 2003. Battered Women’s Entrapment in Shame: A Phenomenological Study’, 73/4. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 73: 355–366. Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal 40 (4): 135–149. Capuzzi, F.A., and M.  Heidegger. 1998. Letter on ‘Humanism’ (1946/1947). In Pathmarks, W. McNeil, W. (ed. & trans.), 239–276. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi. org/10.1017/CBO9780511812637.012. Clinton, J.M. 1992. Behind the Eurocentric Veils: The Search for African Realities. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Fuss, Diana. 2013. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. Abingdon: Routledge; Sayer, Andrew. Essentialism, Social Constructionism, and Beyond. Sociological Review 45. Held, Klaus. 1991. Heimwelt, Fremdwelt, die eine Welt. In Perspektiven und Probleme der Husserlschen Phänomenologie: Beiträge zur neuen Husserl-Forshcung, Freiburg (Br.)/ München: Alber. Hua 3. (1977). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. erstes Buch: allgemeine einführung in die reine Phänomenologie 1. and Text der 1–3. Auflage. K. Schuhmann (ed.). Hua 13. Zur Phänomenologie der intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem nachlass. Zweiter Teil (1905– 1920). I. Kern (ed.). Hua 14. (1973). Zur Phänomenologie der intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928. I. Kern (ed.). Hua 15. (1973). Zur Phänomenologie der intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem nachlass. Dritter Teil (1929–1935). I. Kern (ed.). Hua 29. (1993). Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937. Hua 42. (2014). Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie Husserl Edmund, Vongehr Thomas, Sowa Rochus (ed). Husserl, E. (1960) [1939]. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. (1964) [1907]. The Idea of Phenomenology. Trans. Lee Hardy. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. (1965) [1912/1935]. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy’ Translated with Notes and an Introduction by Quentin Lauer: Harper Torchbooks, 1965 containing the 1935 Vienna lecture as well as Husserl’s 1911/12 essay in Logos, ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.’ ———. (1969) [1929]. Formal and Transcendental Logic. (9th ed). Berlin: Springer.

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———. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanson: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1973. Experience and Judgement: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1977) [1925]. Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925. Trans. John Scanlon. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. (1980). Phenomenology and the Foundation of the Sciences. Third Book: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. Ted E.  Klein and William E. Pohl. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. (1982) [1913]. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer. Boston: Kluwer. ———. (1991) [1893]. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893– 1917). Trans. John B Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. (2001a) [1900/1901]. Logical Investigations. Ed. Dermot Moran. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: Routledge. ———. (2001b). Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Trans. Anthony J. Steinbock. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. (2006). Basic Problems of Phenomenology, From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910– 1911. Trans. Farin and Hart. Berlin: Springer. Idhe, Don. 1986. Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction. Albany/New York: State University of New York Press. Manning, P.K. 1999. On the Phenomenology of Violence. The Criminologist 14: 1–22. Moran, D. 2011. Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42 (1): 53–77. Moran, Dermot. 2012. Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction, 298. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moran, Dermot, and Lukas Steinacher. (2008). 8 New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 349–54: 350. Moustakas, C. 1994. Phenomenological Research Methods. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Pearson, G., and M. Salter. 1999. Getting Public Law Back into a Critical Condition: The Rule of Law as a Source for Immanent Critique. Socio-Legal Studies 8 (4): 483–508. Polkinghorne, Donald E. 1989. Phenomenological Research Methods. In Existential Phenomenological Perspectives in Psychology, ed. R.S. Valle and S. Halling, 41–60. New York: Plenum Press. Pollard, A. 2006. Explaining Actions with Habits’ 43. American Philosophical Quarterly: 57–68. Salter, Michael. 1995. A Dialectic Despite Itself? Overcoming the Phenomenology of Legal Culture. Social & Legal Studies 4 (4): 453–476. Steinbock, Anthony J.  1995. Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Steinbock, A. 2003. Generativity and the Scope of Generative Phenomenology. In The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, ed. Donn Welton, 32. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Taipale, Joona. 2012. Twofold Normality: Husserl and the Normative Relevance of Primordial Constitution. Husserl Studies 28 (1): 49–60. Willis, D.G. 2004. Hate Crimes Against Gay Males: An Overview. Issues in Mental Health Nursing 25 (2): 115–132.

Legal Definitions and a Short Case Study

Abstract  This chapter engages with legal definitions of hate crime, and their subjective interpretations in both formal and wider contexts. Since the types of activity that we are primarily concerned with amount to criminal offences and are dealt with by various key agencies in terms of its specific legal meaning, we cannot ignore how legislation defines hate crime and hate speech. Nor can we ignore how such official formal definitions are subject to rival interpretations and both selective and discretionary enforcement. By setting out formal legal definitions and juxtaposing these with a case study of a perceived offence on a railway station, twin elements of our phenomenology of hate crime will begin to emerge. In particular, the descriptions provided by our intuitively rich experiential case study raise a series of issues that our later chapters tackle in a more concerted fashion. We argue that these two sections counter-balance each other’s tendency towards offering only a one-sided impression of this topic.

1  Introduction Legal definitions may, however, be deemed irrelevant by perpetrators of hate crime and speech who presume they will face no liability and accountability for their activities, which they may not even recognise as criminal offences. Yet, for the rest of us, there is no avoiding how law, in our case the law of England Wales, officially defines the meaning, scope and implications of hate speech and allocates enhanced punishments to reflect the perceived seriousness of discriminatory motivations. Nor can we entirely ignore how such official definitions are avoided, selectively enforced and misunderstood in practice. For all future purposes, whenever we refer to “hate crime” we are talking about actions that fall within the likely scope of the definitions discussed in the next section unless we state to the contrary. In different parts of this book, we will refer to the factual details of case-law to illustrate our analysis. To offset the ever-present risk of formalism and abstraction that is inherent in any focus on purely legal definitions of ideas, this chapter provides a richly empirical case study of one of the author’s lived experience of witnessing a particularly unpleasant hate crime against a transgendered individual on an East Lancashire railway station. This descriptive account raises many key issues relating to the operation of societal prejudice at the experiential level that the rest of the book struggles © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Salter, K. McGuire, The Lived Experience of Hate Crime, Contributions to Phenomenology 111, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33888-6_2

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to identify, explicate and explain. Taken together these two subsections help balance out the one-sided quality of each; while shining some not always bright light on a subset of the questions that later chapters need to address.

2  Legal Definitions Explicating the specifically legal meanings ascribed to hate crime has certain advantages because many of our interviewees presuppose these, even when drawing upon shorthand versions. We need, therefore, to set out and clarify the various formal legal definitions; while – at the same time – paying some admittedly preliminary attention to what such sense explication itself involves. On the other hand, we need to recognise that these legal definitions form part of a highly specialist frame of reference: one which we cannot assume is shared by those outside the criminal justice system, or even consistently understood and interpreted by all parties to this system itself, including, for example, police, jurors and magistrates. An initial unavoidable question is: What is it that is being commonly interpreted from a legal perspective as a “hate crime” both generally, and in terms of specific subcategories or “types”? Here, we need to explicate legal definitions that are contained in both statutes, as well as within case law decisions. We need to identify and explicate, in the sense of descriptively elucidate and clarify, their meaning, scope and rationale. All this can be expressed in the idea of a cluster interrelated “what-­ type” questions related to the designated “sense” or “meaning” or “significance” attributed to the experience of X-As-Y, where the “as-Y” comprises the sense whereas the X comprises the “reference.” It is clear at the outset that, to get a well-rounded picture, the official, state-­ centred legislative understandings of hate crime and speech operating from the “top-down” also need to be counterbalanced by those that pervade an underlying life-world of everyday life. These official definitions of hate crime may be usefully be qualified by other “unofficial” definitions that can be discovered at the local and regional grass-root levels of everyday life. These informal understandings of everyday life including those of victims, police, witnesses and perpetrators of hate crimes. By addressing a combination of legal-formal and informal definitions allows our analysis to also operate from the “bottom up,” as well as from the “top down,” as it were. In turn, a phenomenological focus upon local contexts of application is vital. Such a focus allows us to both cross-reference and contrast official state-centred definitions of hate crime contained in legislation, police and prosecutors’ guidelines and case law, with those that can be discovered at work within local contexts of application. In turn, such cross-referencing makes it possible to identify relations of both harmony and differences between these contrasting levels.

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Indeed, one of our police interviewees provided us with an example of the possible tension between these two levels: …[W]e’ve got an analytical product that shows us what all the breakdown of the hate crimes are within Lancashire. But, people were actually telling a different story. So people anecdotally were saying to other members of the strategic hate crime group “Well, that’s not our experience.”1

This imperative to identify, and then consider, “unofficial” definitions and related interpretations requires our research to secure a range of first-hand accounts of this topic. We must then elucidate their distinctive and shared qualities, including both implicit as well as explicit elements, to bring out and clarify the rich diversity of the content of these meaning-saturated experiences. This allows us to compare and contrast official and informal definitions, and thereby potential bring out some interesting interpretive issues in both. At the start, however, we must now summarise relevant legal definitions in themselves purely as such. This means temporarily deferring two vital – but secondary – tasks. First, the investigation through interviews of how the official definitions are being selectively interpreted and applied to concrete situations of claimed hate incidents. Second, expressly clarifying the very processes of sense-explication itself as a Husserlian methodological practice linked to a wider form of “intentional analysis,” which we deploy throughout this study. “Aggravated offences,” created by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, only apply to the categories of race and religion. They are commonly referred to as “hate crimes.” However, these offences, in fact, require proof of “hostility”, as opposed to “hatred”. We are, therefore, immediately faced with the task of explicating the meaning the criminal justice ascribes in practice to the idea of “hostility”  – as opposed to that of “hatred,” which has wider connotations. Clearly, demonstrable hostility is a narrower category than hatred in that the latter can include pent up angry feelings that are not expressed and can be emphatically personal in the sense of being directed towards someone irrespective of their membership of any hate crime victim category. In turn, this raises the question of the significance of both the differences and overlapping qualities between the two qualitative categories of “hostility” – as opposed to that of “hatred.” According to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, an “aggravated offence” is committed when a defendant commits one of a list of “basic offences”, and  – in so doing – either “demonstrates” or was “motivated by” “hostility” towards a victim on the grounds of “race” or “religion.”2 In other words, and expressed in distinctly  Interviewee, 151112.  The basic offences that can be aggravated in this way are assault, criminal damage, and certain public order offences involving threatening, abusive or insulting conduct, harassment or stalking, and putting people in fear of violence. An aggravated offence attracts a higher maximum sentence than its basic counterpart. Sections 28–32 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and sections 145 and 146 of the (Criminal Justice Act 2003). These acts relate to England and Wales only. 1 2

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phenomenological terms, our work of sense-explication has to distinguish the “primary theme” “aggravated offence,” from its “secondary qualities” (i.e., “assault” etc.). At the same time, we must appreciate that the statutory meaning ­conventionally ascribed to each of these “secondary qualities” also demands to be explicated (assault-as-Y, assault-as-Z, stalking-as-Y, etc.). This distinction between “aggravated” and “basic” offences has practical importance in relation to sentencing. Namely, that whatever officials of the criminal justice system successfully bring under the definition of an “aggravated offence” requires courts to give a higher maximum sentence than would otherwise be allotted to its “basic” counterpart, e.g., to a “simple assault.” For example, if a Chinese student is physically attacked outside a restaurant and robbed of both his wallet and mobile phone, then the perpetrator could face a higher aggravated sentence. This aggravation would apply if magistrates accepted the prosecutor’s argument that the perpetrators had issued verbal “racist slurs” during the assault that related to the student’s nationality or “race.” This can be taken as evidence of “demonstrating hostility” towards the victim’s perceived racial identity in a manner that distinguishes this offence-type from that of a “simple” robbery, (i.e., one lacking any such overt discriminatory abuse element.) Here, there is also an interpretive requirement to explicate: namely, the difference between “demonstrating hostility” and being “motivated by hostility.” We must recognise that only the latter expressly refers to the evidence of the perpetrators’ actual subjective state of mind. However, on the other hand, sense-explication also needs to consider whether the “demonstration of hostility” contains at least an implied reference to what can be perceived as the perpetrator’s “subjective intentions,” which of course are not publicly available or recordable on CCTV. It is likely that sustained explication would suggest that this distinction between “demonstrating” and “being motivated by” hostility is far from unproblematic. Some measure of overlap could apply in specific cases. For instance, where a “hate incident” is both subjectively intended to be discriminatory, and this discriminatory “hostility” can also be identified by an external third party as clearly “demonstrated” through the perpetrator’s words and actions. From a prosecutor’s perspective, however, it appears to be more straightforward to rely upon a “demonstration” of hostility through, for example, racist words accompanying abusive deeds. This is because such reliance requires perpetrators to neither make a (true, half-true or false) confession as to their actual subjective motivation, nor for a prosecutor to prove this intent by means of some other type of evidence. The term “hate crime” is also used in the context of enhancing sentencing. The requirements of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (CJA 2003) to enhance sentences, based upon designated “bias,” in some ways mirror those of the CDA. For example, the 2003 Act states that where, in the commission of any offence, except those charged under the CDA, an offender either “demonstrated,” or was “motivated by hostility” based upon race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or transgender

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identity, the court can apply “enhanced sentencing provisions” contained in sections 145 and 146 of the CJA 2003.3 The CJA enhances the sentence a perpetrator receives for a “basic offence” – as distinct from creating a new and distinct “aggravated” form of substantial offences. This legislation does not, therefore, create the option for magistrates and judges to label an offence as, say, a “disability aggravated assault” since there is no such legal category. Although the fact that sentencing enhancement has been applied must be stated in open court, there is no record of any bias motive attached to the judgement itself. Strictly speaking, therefore, a perpetrator who receives the enhanced sentence is not convicted of a “hate crime” in the formal sense, but rather a “basic offence” to which a higher sentence has been attached because of the aggravating factors of bias. This subtle legislative distinction is unlikely to attract endorsement at the level of newspaper reporting of offences or in the understandings of the readers of such reports. For our purposes of explication of the perceived difference between the CDA and the CJA, let’s consider a ‘racially aggravated assault.’ Here, the “racial aggravation” can be perceived as the primary concept. In contrast, enhancing the sentence for an assault conviction because the perpetrator “demonstrated hostility” at the time of the offence, could be interpreted as making any biasing element a secondary concept. In the former, as we stated above, the primary concept relates to the ‘protected’ factor, race or religion. The exact amount by which a court’s sentence can be increased will depend upon the judges’ interpretation of the significance of “the circumstances of the case,” (itself a perceptual judgement as distinct from a purely “objective fact”), as well as the perceived “seriousness” of the aggravation itself. However, for our purposes, we need to explicate how even this apparently semantically unproblematic definition operates in practice. A full-blown phenomenology of hate crime needs to show how the practical operation of these legal categories is related to both “common sense” and culturally- and legally-defined understandings of “seriousness” and “circumstances.” Moreover, in practice, defence lawyers may well produce very specific definitions and persuasive arguments with respect to both questions of “seriousness” and “circumstances” in their attempts to not only “mitigate” their client’s involvement, but also to disprove the latter’s “motivation” or ‘hostility’. In some situations, the ability to define “hostility,” and to attach their specific interpretation of this term to both the offence and the offender, can have serious implications. It may result in not only an increase in a prison sentence but also incarceration in a context where this would not otherwise have been imposed. However, where an “aggravating factor” is perceived of as applying, then – in strict law – this “finding” cannot raise the sentence above the statutory maximum potential tariff  The original sentencing uplift only applied to racial hostility, but the other four strands were added by subsequent amendment, with the transgender variant coming into force more recently (in Dec 2012). Section 145 deals with racial and religious hatred and s 146 with the other three strands. Sections 28–32 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and sections 145 and 146 of the (Criminal Justice Act 2003). 3

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that the offence itself attracts. In other words, the enhancement takes place only within a pre-existing range for the “basic offence,” but without adding a new, higher “bonus level” to this tariff itself. Here, we have only scratched the surface of the type of interpretive questioning of possible ambiguities at the level of official definitions of legal meaning(s) that await a systematic explication of how the criminal justice system must respond to such examples of reported discriminatory abuse. It would be possible to compose an entire monograph reconstructing how these and related categories, distinctions and sub-categories have been selectively reinterpreted in the relevant case law. An applied phenomenology of legal doctrine relating to hate crime would also address the degrees of doubt, probability and certainty attached to specific definitions of the meaning and scope of specific judicial interpretations of the various legislative provisions, as well as considering how certain apparently convincing interpretations have been interpreted otherwise by appeal level judges on the basis of one set of interpretive protocols, such as literal interpretation, some of which have later been set aside by still higher level judges deploying other protocols, such as purposive interpretation of the presumed “spirit of the law.” Having clarified formal legal definitions, and indicated some lines of possible inquiry, we are now in a far better position to explore how interpretive issues arise outside the criminal justice system – albeit in ways that could still result in legal proceedings. In the remainder of this book, we must ask and answer the following questions: What are the underlying interpretive structures and operations of those aspects of lived experience of cultural “difference,” such as with respect to designated “race,” “religion,” “disability,” “hostility” etc., as interpreted through the seemingly self-validating presuppositions and value-judgements of the “natural attitude”? A useful starting point is with a case study of an actual hate crime based upon the first-hand experiences of one of the authors.

3  Case Example: Hate Crime on a Railway Station? Before immersing ourselves in the dense thicket of Husserlian ideas, extended methodological discussion and research methods, it may be useful to illustrate many of the points we discuss throughout this study concerning the distinctly interpretive aspects of the experience of hate crime that go beyond the semantics of clarifying formal legal definitions. That is, to illustrate experienced “hate crime” with respect to a concrete example drawn from one of the present author’s experiences. The latter, we suggest, richly illustrates the pervasive and consequential role of deep-seated prejudices and implied meanings. This example also exhibits the play of “passive association” of stereotypical attributes ascribed to members of victim groups, as well as the pervasiveness of taken-for-granted presuppositions. What follows is a concrete illustration of the presence of these themes in even a single and relatively brief “hate incident.” We set out the details of this incident to demonstrate the relevance of analysing these themes concretely in a close and intuitively rich phenomenological manner concerned to explicate layers of sense and passive association.

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When sat in a northern railway waiting room, one of the present authors became a witness to a complex hate incident. As I was waiting for a lunchtime train, an individual came to sit opposite me. I perceived her as wearing a fairly short black dress with unremarkable clothing, rather lank and thinning hair dyed a light purple colour. She appeared to me to have facial features of a rugged kind, more common amongst men than women. My unreflective immediate perceptions flip-flopped between seeing her as “a masculine appearing woman” (perceived of in the qualifying mode of appearance of “most likely”) or – perceived of in the mode of “less likely” – as “a man dressed as a woman.” These perceptual judgements, concerning which my surface-level ego made little real investment of cognitive effort, settled upon the former understanding of the significance of her presence in terms of conventional binary gender distinctions, which appeared to me pre-defined in biological terms: male or female. In my mundane unreflective consciousness of the immediate scenario surrounding me, shaped by the natural attitude, this binary distinction between designed “male” and “female” did not appear as at all problematic. For the objectivism and naturalism of my mundane “common sense” awareness, this person’s “maleness” took shape as an “obvious” and intrinsic quality exhibited by “real males” as opposed to “real females.” The interpretive aspect of my perceptions simply presumed: “There simply are men and there are women, and the cultural-legal categories of masculinity and femininity rest upon this core material-biological-natural reality given as objective to my perceptions. (Later we will discuss this type of perception as an example of the problematic effects of objectivist assumptions). As I heard the train pulling in, while perceived it from the left of my field of vision, I moved out of the Spartan, but still functional, shelter of the station waiting room to the rather bleak platform. Here, around fifteen other passengers were standing to my right in groups. The person just discussed was ahead of me to my left and standing closer to the railway lines. What was, for me, just another mundane reality of travelling back from one university campus to another after an unremarkable class with less than inspirational students, which was taking shape in a routine and familiar way for which the expression “same old, same old,” fits like a glove, was then suddenly disrupted. A perceived same-old “normality” operating at an implicit taken-for-granted level, was suddenly shattered by my perception of two males in their early twenties rushing past my field of vision. Without exerting any cognitive effort on my part, the sight and sound of these young men captured my attention with a type of cognitive but unintended “allure” as they approached the person whose gender identity I had briefly questioned previously. They then pointed at her laughing and asking repeatedly: “what is that?” I perceived this behaviour judgementally as: “mocking, aggressive and shockingly abusive.” Their responses made it clear to me that her gender identity was, for them, little more than an opportunity for “cruel mockery.” One of these men, who I perceived as a “leader figure”, attempted to make a video of her on his mobile phone as they danced around her pointing in a mocking manner. They were trying to get close up shots of her face as she attempted to block their efforts defensively by putting her hands over her face. For me, the scene resembled recollections of particularly vicious forms of school playground bullying.

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The person who I perceived as “the victim” of this incident then dialled the police asking to speak to a named detective as her “contact point.” She explained, in a frightened yet insistent voice, that she was under attack. I myself felt what I experienced as a bodily and emotional wave of sympathy and outrage at what appeared to me to be: “a wholly unjustified act of discriminatory abuse.” I felt two contradictory impulses working almost immediately upon my largely implicit sense of myself as a possible agent with a limited – certainly not total – capacity to intervene to change the situation taking shape in front of me: The first felt-imperative was to physically intervene to protect the victim but while risking, I believed, a physical confrontation that could result in violence being direct towards me within a context where I was outnumbered and possibly would suffer physical injuries. My second impulse was a self-concerned desire to remain physically safe by remaining a mere bystander. Neither of these felt-impulses stemmed from a conscious process of either deliberation or internal moral debate. The first impulse won out as I found myself intervening verbally, and in a surprisingly forceful tone, as I shouted: ‘don’t you know what you have done is on CCTV and you will get busted?” These words came out of my mouth with little, if any, premeditation – almost as if they were an automated, semi-default position response. However, this statement also reflected my experience of another incident I had witnessed earlier, this time as a perceived “victim” of violent threats (not related to any discriminatory element in a hate crime sense), which took place in my home town railway station. In this earlier situation, CCTV had played a role in subsequent police investigations. While my words may have had immediately “reactivated” that earlier awareness of the hopefully “chilling effect” of knowing one is being recorded, any such connection did not pass through a process of conscious deliberation or reflection. The association was more passively constructed than actively accomplished. Indeed, I had no consciousness of engaging in a willful and conscious action stemming from an express decision, the formulation of a plan, followed by a premeditated action designed to realise it. On the contrary, my interpretive work here appeared, at least in retrospect, to have resulted in an almost passive process of associating one earlier event of threatened violence with another currently “taking shape” in front of me. Here, the interpretive aspect of my perception of aspects of the current incident appeared to have taken shape subject to the results of an earlier life experience involving an informal learning process: one that left an enduring “association” between threatened violence on the one hand, and possible defensive “chilling” strategies on the other. In any event, the person who I perceived as the “lead perpetrator,” the more “muscular taller ‘bully” as my perception defined him, responded to my intervention by telling me to: “mind your own fucking business.” Meanwhile, the ticket clerk left her protected booth and ran out to the platform to confront him. His response was to use the same expression to her. What I perceived as her “impressively assertive” rebuttal was that: ‘all passengers on this station are under my care and responsibility.’ I understood this as effectively telling him that she was, both in fact and in law, fully entitled to intervene to protect passengers from such

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d­ iscriminatory abuse. I then heard him respond to her aggressively by saying ‘fucking lesbo’ in a sneering fashion. In turn, I perceived this expression as adding something signifying “sexual orientation abuse” to his earlier act of “transgender hate crime.” Of course, my perception was shaped by the experience of being in the middle phase of writing the present book. As the incident unfolded around me, another male passenger expressed his disapproval to the lead attacker, but in ways that I could not hear clearly. The latter’s response was to spit at him, resulting in a “stand-off” situation between the two men, but without any physical violence. Meanwhile, as the train arrived, the lady ticket clerk told the two perpetrators that: ‘you are not boarding this train.’ She blocked the doorway at the front end of the train. However, they rushed past her to get into the train via the rear door, despite the conductor’s apparent disapproval. What then followed was a further “stand-off” situation as the two perpetrators refused to get off the train, and my perception of the conductor’s “defensive body language” implied that he was not willing to take the risk of using physical force to remove them. The result was that the train was delayed as, I imagined, the conductor phoned ahead or waited for the police to respond to the victim’s 999 calls. After a delay of about 5 min, the train departed, and the conductor checked the destination of the perpetrators’ tickets and left our carriage. I assumed, from previous experience and knowledge of train journeys, that he was phoning ahead to ask the police to arrest the perpetrators at their just revealed destination station. However, this was only based upon my guesswork, presumption and imagination because I did not actually perceive any such phone call being made; nor did I know what amounted to “standard procedure” in such a situation – or even if there was one. My interpretation was instead founded upon a presumption of how “a typical case” would, in fact, play out in terms of a conductor’s required true-to-type responses, as dictated by a certain interpretation of the train company’s policies. It was not as if I knew what such policies actually were, or even whether the conductor was legally entitled to use force to eject passengers. Rather, my perceptions were drawing upon a “common sense” series of presumptions, cultural typifications and normative expectations that formed part of my everyday – and largely taken-for-granted – background understandings. Once again, my perceptions were not free of the influence of “common sense” presumptions that I had  – without reflection  – taken for granted as if they were somehow “obvious.” A similar point applies to my derogatory perception of the assailants in terms of their appearance to me as “lead bully,” as opposed to the smaller South Asian man’s appearance as “led bully/sidekick.” Any question of the possible validity or lack of validity of this binary – and apparently generically applicable – distinction never came into my consciousness. The more assertive behaviour, dress sense, aggressive confrontational way of speaking and overall demeanour of the “lead bully” met a certain preconceived stereotype that I was taking for granted concerning “the type” of young males who, I had come to believe, cause a disproportionate amount of trouble for others in society. In this respect, my perception of this designated “lead bully” was certainly not unprejudiced; I experienced it as certainly following the lead of this guiding cultural

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stereotype of brashly “anti-social young male adult.” My understanding involved a certain ascription of general traits and motivations concerning “men like that.” (I remember a local police officer telling me that over 95% of his work arose from the violent and abusive actions of about 5% of the population). Yet, these generic (stereo)typifications, together with their associated value-­ judgements, were not actually given directly to my immediate perceptions. I saw and made perceptual judgements about a young man through the lens of these generic “types,” without the types (perhaps stereotypes?) themselves ever coming into view as a topic or topics in their own right. It followed that my understanding of what was taking place around during this hate incident involved a definite interpretation of what I actually witnessed at first-hand, a specific construal of what these perpetrators and their actions signified for me: an interpretation of meaning and implications arising in a way that was strictly relative to, and contingent upon, the contents of my own interpretive framework. Within my field of vision, this framework clearly included the creative operation of “prejudicial” stereotypes, built up over a lifetime of cultural experience, including the influence of many forms of socialisation and indoctrination, including those engendered by learning a certain vocabulary and linguistic frame of reference. At the same time, relative to my own (stereo)typified interpretations, the “mockingly abusive” actions of the two attackers – including the use of videoing – signified to me a far more intense and damaging form of prejudicial response. Their actions appeared to me as “an extreme response” to the presence of another person whose appearance presumably “failed” to meet their comparatively narrow and prejudicial understandings of what counted as a “normal/natural” display of gender identities. Yet, perhaps they were deploying a type of binary opposition, rooted in biologistic assumptions, that was not so different from that which shaped my own earlier perceptions. According to these understandings, transgender characteristics are “odd” because they cannot be smoothly assimilated into the preferred binary terms of gender stereotypes superimposed upon the situation at hand. And yet these men’s stereotypes were, I remember thinking, clearly far more harmful and unwarranted than my experience of familiar social prejudices about hate crime perpetrators. This, in any event, was my own rationalisation of prejudice. As the train moved from one station to another, a young woman who appeared to be “South Asian,” boarded, apparently motivating the two perpetrators to make what to me seemed a “bizarre attempt” to duck down to escape being seen by her. This failed attempt, which I interpreted gleefully as potentially “humiliating for them,” and as certainly “ridiculous to me,” led to a brief verbal exchange: one whose details were unclear to me, but that I interpreted from their body language as ‘decidedly unfriendly’. I presumed that this person was a friend of at least one of the young men’s families. She was therefore in a position to report back to one or both of their families that they were not where they had pretended to be. I further presumed, on a “common sense” basis, that this factor of perhaps not attending college or work “explained” their attempted concealment from her.

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Once again, my negative interpretation was prompted by my stereotype of that which “men of their type” might be getting up, including “dodging study, work or other similar responsibilities.” This perception, in fact, a perception masking a perceptual value-judgement, was itself clearly prejudicial. It ruled out other possible interpretations such that they owed her money. Here, I was ascribing motivations and orientations to these two men, and perhaps a familial-centric status to the woman, that were not actually visible or otherwise given to me through intuitive evidence. However, my prejudicial perceptual judgement still represented an initially plausible “common sense” form of “explanation” that, in one sense, “worked” for the practical purposes of making some not obviously implausible sense of the situation unfolding around me. From what I could see, my interpretation was not obviously false, or otherwise contradicted by the evidence of my own eyes. My perception of what “lay behind” their actions, their “inner motivations” etc., generally made sense for me, from what I could see taking place before my eyes. I did not demand, assume or require perfect experiential evidence to ground my “common sense” perceptual judgements about the perpetrators’ actions and interactions. Instead, it was sufficient that my interpretative judgements “worked” in a pragmatic sense of generating a generally coherent account of “what is really happening.” here, good enough, in the sense of not being self-evidently wrong, was good enough for all practical purposes. As our train progressed, I was sat facing the two perpetrators, and my impression of the “lackey” or “sidekick,” as the one being led, strengthened as he repeatedly avoided eye contact with me. I interpreted this evasiveness as being due to him being ashamed of his complicities, or at least concerned to avoid a physical confrontation with me. My initial generic understanding of this person as a weak, easily-­ led, “stooge” character became both reinforced and intensified by this experience. So too was my assumption that the “lead bully” may have psychologically “needed” such a character to play a “support role” to his machismo performances of bravado. He was, I assumed, perhaps, sadly dependent upon someone playing this role to sustain his “alpha male” image of himself. Again, this premise operated almost like a hidden assumption: one that laid down in advance a certain interpretation of how I was anticipating he would respond if I was to direct a scathing look directly towards him. Had I experienced his reaction differently from, or in a way that contradicted my projected expectations, then presumably I would have had to question, and ideally modify, my starting premise. Alternatively, I might have had to reinterpret the new experience dogmatically in a way that remained consistent with what I had already projected in accord with my preconceived assumptions, effectively discounting all evidence to the contrary. As the train pulled into my work destination, I noticed the victim giving a statement to a male police officer, presumably a transport officer, and I approached them. When I caught the officer’s attention, I told him I would be willing to offer a witness statement, if needed. His appearance suggested that he was pleased and, perhaps, surprised. He took my contact details before thanking me for “coming forward.”

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This struck me as a curious metaphor. I had hardly been undercover but maybe this statement reflected the officer’s own world-weary stance of a general lack of altruism or civic obligation among the general public. Once again, this was far from a prejudice-free interpretation of what being a railway police officer must be like, and the disenchanting effects upon one’s expectations of others. Later that day, I received a telephone call from the “investigating officer” asking me to come into the police office at my work city’s railway station. We then had a brief conversation. He took a short statement over the phone, which I perceived as trying out my credibility as a witness clarifying what I was likely to say – perhaps to corroborate the statements of others. I felt I was being “tested out” as a possible court witness. No point, I thought, in the police talking to someone who would be of no use to them for their immediate tasks in hand. I experienced a sense of pervasive means-end, instrumentalism common to my previous interactions with, and jaded perceptions of, officials and administrators in all manner of modern institutions. During our phone conversation, I emphasised that I had perceived this as both a transgender and as a “homophobic hate incident,” and he freely admitted he was not sure whether the first category had become a distinct criminal offence (which it is under UK criminal law), saying that he would need to: “check this out”. This policeman also confirmed that “hate incidents” had come to make up a significant part of his workload. He also suggested that such incidents, which were ‘mainly of a racial character,’ had become ‘a major issue’ for the railway police. He also explained that, in fact, there was no CCTV at the station where the incident happened, that the local police had “arrived too late” at both that station and the perpetrators’ destination station. However, he seemed keen to reassure me that they would have good CCTV evidence from the perpetrator’s destination station if I could provide a description sufficiently precise to allow the police to “pick them out” from available CCTV footage. I then explained the physical features of both attackers, emphasising my recollections of their height, clothing, body shape, hair-­ styles and general demeanour, which I hoped would help in the police’s identification. I was then asked to come in and give: “a formal witness statement” admissible in a possible criminal trial, which I did 2 days later. The process involved another police officer talking me through an overview of what I had perceived. First, however, he asked me to refer only to what I had perceived “with my own eyes” – as opposed to relying upon second-hand information from another source (something that I recognised as “mere hearsay evidence”). I was to tell him only what I had personally seen, avoiding anything I had discussed with another witness in ways that would have caused me to reinterpret my perception in line with an “agreed version” of “what really happened.” As already noted, separating the ‘facts’ of what I had seen, from my potentially prejudicial subjective interpretation of their meaning was difficult. Similarly, clearly that not all aspects of the situation would have been perceived as “relevant” or as important: perception, I recalled, is highly selective. It was not what I had been looking at but, rather, what I had perceived that was relevant here.

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Moreover, my statement had to be written on a word processor, whose standard template form had fixed boxes for each section. Clearly, my experience now had to be reinterpreted in terms of the standard classification scheme implied by this form. Such a scheme also reflected the selective perception of “relevant” information, as well as an “appropriate way” of conveying it. The officer asked questions and wrote a paraphrased, perhaps more precise and clearly articulated “policified” version of what I had told him, using different terminology in places, and asked questions relevant to the satisfaction of established criminal law criteria. For example: ‘did I feel threatened?’ I was also asked to describe my perception of the impact upon the victim  – why I thought he appeared “distressed,” “anxious” and “under threat.” These were, I already knew, were necessary aspects to identify and designate “an incident” as “a hate crime” for which a prosecution could be warranted. My interview was probing in that it returned to what, for the purposes of the criminal justice system, appeared to be “key issues” in my overview statement. This included concerns in relation to identification evidence, which – he later informed me – was where many prosecutions often failed in practice. I then had to recall, in far more precise details, my earlier perceptions of this incident. After the interview was nearly completed, the officer read the statement back to me. He asked if it was accurate, and then made a small number of corrections based upon details I could still recall, which I finally confirmed by means of my signature and date. This experiential account and its analysis are not intended to be an “anecdote” of the kind positivist social science generally dismisses as “unscientific.” On the contrary, we can identify the following general themes whose close analysis will prove vital for much of the remainder of this book: 1. The emphasis upon immediate first-hand lived experience as a source for valid evidence of “what really happened”  – and thus the avoidance of second-hand “hearsay.” 2. The felt-capacity to recall earlier experiences and return repeatedly to them to make the intelligible aspect of was initially experienced imperfectly far more distinct, precise and clear. This was an interpretive achievement realised through a process of “explicating” the significance of this incident through repeated efforts at clarification and elucidation, as well as a no less interpretive process of identifying the “fitting words” that best articulated “legally relevant aspects of what I had perceived. 3. The experience of finding my perceptions oriented implicitly towards a cultural dichotomy of sexual identity as either 100% male, or as 100% female. My resulting perceptions, shaped by this dichotomy, had taken shape through an unwilled and implicit process of “passive association.” I had experienced no sense that these interpretive performances were being driven by any express acts of conscious judgement or deliberation on my part. Certainly, my ego was not an autonomous master in his own house of consciousness. 4. More generally, the experience of having a stream of perceptions permeated by units of meaning and meant values. During this incident, my perceptions appeared shaped by familiar presumptions, cultural assumptions and implicit

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stereotypes, which were already “possessed in advance.” Such pre-possession occurred in ways that challenge the idea that first-hand “immediate” perceptions are somehow “normally” unprejudiced and entirely unmediated by generic social and linguistically housed and transmitted categories. The potentially prejudicial cultural mediation of my perceptions suggests, perhaps, that all forms of prejudice, including those of perpetrators, witnesses, victims, prosecutors and magistrates, cannot be defined as inherently “deviant,” relative to a posited “norm” of unprejudiced perception lacking any mediation by prior assumptions, generic categories or stereotypes. From what position can my prejudice against perpetrator prejudice ground itself? 5. This first-hand account recounts an experience of the familiar routines of daily life being shaped implicitly by shared cultural presumptions, leading to a sense of inhabiting a generally peaceful “normality” that is specific to a given “homeworld.” Here, individuals are expected and presumed to be acting and interacting at railway stations and elsewhere in generally familiar, predictable and non-­ abusive ways that characterise the “normal situation.” When arising from that implicit background context of presuppositions, a hate incident can be experienced as a sudden and unexpected “breach” of this perceived sense of familiar “normality.” On this interpretive basis, I experienced the incident as an unwelcome and unexpected “intrusion” and “rupture” of a relatively “abnormal” state of exception, as it were. I defined this “rupture” not as simply “different” but as emphatically “unwelcome,” as “threatening” and as “disturbing.” 6. My interactions with officials of the criminal justice system clearly involved a highly selective process of having original interpretations of first-hand experiences reinterpreted and transposed into a different vocabulary and interpretive scheme. In turn, this transplantation operated in line with specific legal and institutional requirements for “processing a routine case” in a “standard way.” I felt that I was being encouraged to reinterpret the terms of the original experience to make my account conform to the institutional demands of providing credible “evidence” and “proof.” Such reinterpretation was oriented, for the most part, towards enhancing my perceptions’ “evidential value” within the overall prosecution process. Whether this reshaping represented either a neutral beneficial enhancement or a distortion, was not easy to determine. There may be little grounds here for feeling especially confident in one’s sense of the difference between “distortion” and “undistorted” would-be “purity” of perception here. Each of these six themes, which are immediately presented in my experiential account, and then more fully in those of the 20 plus individuals we interviewed for the present project, are significant. They point towards hidden depths of lived experiences. The latter includes the implicit operation of deep-seated prejudices, familiar presuppositions and taken-for-granted expectations operating below the surface of unreflective consciousness of hate crime. For present purposes, these often-­ hidden elements demand from us a close and concerted form of attention, disclosure and repeated analysis through our application of the distinctly Husserlian methodology of “sense-explication.”

References

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We will see how this methodology strives to take the interpretive conditions and preconditions for the intelligibility of such experience as vital topics in their own right. Indeed, the quotes from Husserl, which we listed at the start of this chapter, sum up key aspects of the agenda of our Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime: namely: 1. A striving for a radical grounding of (value)-judgements about this topic in the data of concretely lived “subjective experience.” 2. An interpretive method of conducting research that is oriented towards enhancing clarity at the experiential level of meaning, and meant or implied values, together with: 3. A sustained critique of all that obstructs us (and implicitly other people and institutions and ideologies) from gaining a more comprehensive, clear, “undistorted” and distinct understanding of this topic just as it presents itself to us experientially.

References Crime and Disorder Act 1998, ss 28–32. Criminal Justice Act 2003 ss 145 and 146.

Superimposing a Problematic Objectivism

Abstract  This chapter argues that contrary to its own self-image, the so-called “common sense” of the natural attitude is actually highly prejudicial. Far from being an unmediated direct intuition of “the facts” of, say, a hate incident, the natural attitude generates interpretations that are driven by a number of underlying presuppositions. These in effect “mediate” even the most apparently “immediate” intuition of seemingly “objective facts” and “factual patterns” of hate crime. As a result, the natural attitude’s objectivism encourages distinctly positivist quantitative forms of hate crime research. At this stage, we leave open the question of whether its mediation by far from objective presuppositions tends to contradict and undermine such positivism; and if so, do the difficulties created in this way tend to point the way forward to a diametrically opposite radically qualitative approach of Husserl?

1  Introduction During the remainder of this study, we will explore the contention that the “common sense” viewpoint upon any topic that arises from the natural attitude is characterised by a combination of tendencies. We can designate term these matter-of-fact “objectivism” – or perhaps more precisely a merger of objectivism and naturalism. The questions we now need to address include: what are the possibilities for self-­ reflection upon the interpretive preconditions of our topic that supersede this “common sense” orientation? Do we need to characterise the natural attitude as a particularly obstructive form of absolutism: one that misrepresents the character of socially and historically contingent phenomena whose significance arises from all manner of interpretive performances? We need to expressly characterise the natural attitude’s objectivism before expressly addressing the underlying presuppositions of objectivism itself whose application tends to prejudice our perceptions of victim groups and other hate crime related-issues from the ground up, and from the start and throughout. Later sections will then show how such objectivism encourages positivist forms of hate crime research that are especially insensitive to the distinctly interpretive issues of our own Husserlian alternative.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Salter, K. McGuire, The Lived Experience of Hate Crime, Contributions to Phenomenology 111, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33888-6_3

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For its part, the natural attitude may include prejudicial beliefs about different victim groups and perpetrators, as well as aspects of the criminal justice system. These beliefs are typically interpreted as if they were themselves somehow “universal,” “natural,” “essential” and “immutable.” As a result, we must ask: “To what extent, if any, does the natural attitude exhibit a form of dogmatism and self-­ justifying circular forms of would-be justification: one which the experience of hate crime suggests are a familiar part of the very vocabulary of societal prejudice?” Can we criticise the natural attitude for relying upon a type of “objectivism” that tends to confuse social constructs about, say, “normal gender” or “normal sexuality,” with supposedly “inherent” realities concerning human nature, interpreted within a pre-given “matter-of-fact” orientation? Does the natural attitude also perpetuate a form of naiveté by ignoring the ongoing interpretive constitution of the significance of the “objective facts” about hate crime, victims and perpetrators? And yet, is the naiveté of this perspective created by the natural attitude at least partly vulnerable to being ideologically mobilised, not least by relying upon circular forms of “justification” of its prejudicial judgements? Each of these questions and issues, which go to the heart of the cultural-societal reiteration of prejudices relevant to the field of hate crime and speech, will now be discussed in our next chapter. The previous chapter aimed to explain the structure, methods and aims of this overall study, ending with a brief overview of some of the specific interpretive questions not only posed by legal definitions but also by a concrete case-study of a transgender hate crime. By contrast, the following chapter is far more focused upon three main, distinct, and interrelated issues: 1. In what sense is the natural attitude informed by a combination of objectivist and naturalistic presuppositions in a manner that generates all manner of difficulties, instructive failures and contradictions? 2. How can we best characterise the general prejudicial characteristics of objectivism, it’s status within the natural attitude and core claims and assumptions, before subjecting these to a Husserlian internal critique in terms of their obstructive and distorted functioning? That is a form of evaluation that draws its benchmark criteria from within the express or implied normative framework of whatever is being critiqued. 3. In principle at least, is our adapted phenomenology of hate crime able to learn from these difficulties sufficient to formulate potentially constructive remedies that unblock the obstructions stemming from the natural attitude so as to liberate previously hidden or latent aspects of the phenomenon itself? In other words, our development of a distinctly Husserlian critique of the effects of objectivist presuppositions upon the natural attitude’s orientation towards hate crime-related issues serves two purposes: First, to identify, describe, and clarify the problematic nature of this orientation. And then, secondly, to serve as a foil against which to further develop and motivate a rationale for a distinctly phenomenological analysis of this topic as a constructive and remedial internal critique oriented towards positive outcomes in terms of disclosure of previously unnoticed interpretive and constitutive dimensions of hate crime as lived.

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Our later sections will discuss the possibility that the result of scholars adopting a fully objectivist approach to the study of hate crime as lived would be an inherently rigidified type of thinking: one that could not avoid instabilities stemming from the bursting through of a suppressed but always constitutive (inter)subjective domain.1 Within the field of hate crime at least, the vital question for a Husserlian approach is whether such a materialist approach can adequately address the vital role of constituting (inter)subjectivity in generating the very “whatness” of every actual or possible topic of analysis? Or, does this essentially qualitative founding level remain either taken-for-granted or handled in a relatively arbitrary fashion by qualitatively ungrounded definitions superimposed from the outside: “for the purpose of the present study hate crime will be defined as ….” Objectivism is not only a presupposition of the natural attitude towards hate crime but – we later suggest – is itself structured in accordance with its own prejudicial presuppositions, especially those of naturalism. These underlying presuppositions become clearer if we ask: does objectivism presuppose as self-evident that there is an external “real world: one conforming to its own presuppositions? As the overarching context of all partial contexts of hate crime phenomena, does – as materialism suggests – this posited real world of hate crime as experienced amounts to a being-in-itself independent of, and prior to, the productive interpretive work of (inter)subjective consciousness?2 Is this really a topic for which the social sciences, humanities and cultural studies have nothing to contribute because the interpretive operations these disciplines address are irrelevant to the explanation of the topic? This chapter suggests that the natural attitude’s orientation towards hate crime issues is founded, in part, upon objectivist presuppositions, a cluster of specific ideas, concerns, beliefs, and assumptions, that demand both identification and clarification. This orientation functions as an implicit, yet virtually all-pervasive, interpretative framework for making sense of the experiences of this topic: albeit an interpretive approach that denies the centrality of interpretation itself. In turn, the natural attitude’s objectivist framework claims, at least implicitly, to provide us with an unmediated and straightforward “common sense” approach to these experiences both within the contexts of everyday life, and those specialist sub-cultural worlds of, say, law enforcement, victim support counselling etc. There is, however, a good reason for our phenomenology of hate crime to question the natural attitude’s implicit claims to possess a straightforward immediacy based strictly on “the facts” of hate crime, including those codified in criminal statistics. To some extent at least, does this orientation rely upon a series of unacknowledged cultural assumptions shaping all that, say, hate crime scholarship can grasp and make sense of within its overall interpretive framework? However, to fulfil the aims of this project discussed

 Husserl 1970: 68.  In his Crisis Part Two, Husserl contrasts what he terms ‘physicalistic objectivism’ or ‘naïve’ objectivism with his own position of ‘transcendental subjectivism,’ which analyses the appearance of the life-world to our lived experience as a performance accomplishment of (inter)subjectivity. Cf. Hua 1: 5, 46. 1 2

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in the previous chapter, the character of these underlying assumptions first needs to be uncovered and addressed expressly. We cannot allow any possible prejudicial assumptions to remain entirely implicit and hidden; to shape our awareness of hate crime-related issues behind our backs, as it were. We have to characterise objectivism not only in terms of its self-image and express claims but also as a distinctly interpretive approach: one that is reiterated by the natural attitude, and which is grounded in a series of taken-for-granted premises. Such premises await analysis and assessment. Prior to the results of such assessment, we can neither accept nor reject an objectivist approach to the study of hate crime, or the implicit objectivism of the natural attitude that permeates everyday “common sense” about this topic. In short, the focus of this part of the present study is upon our claim that the natural attitude towards hate crime is structured from the inside out by a range of objectivist claims and implicit presuppositions, which in practice may well yield problematic results. It could be that these outcomes are especially relevant to the constitution of the type of vicious prejudices expressed by perpetrators and others which are commonly experienced with the field of hate crime. It is possible that our efforts to characterise objectivism involves identifying a range of taken-for-granted presuppositions that not only inform prejudicial orientations towards victim groups but – once fully characterised – also help explain aspects of its routine functioning and end-results. In other words, the following chapter narrows down our analysis to the question of what are the general characteristics of the natural attitude’s distinctly objectivist assumptions, and what practical effects these exert with respect to how specific hate crime issues are being made sense of and responded to? In one sense, our focus upon the natural attitude’s objectivist presuppositions is a distinct theme. Yet, we later suggest that this topic also helps explain some of the natural attitude’s more general interpretive tendencies and ideological practices directed towards members of one or more victim group that we discuss throughout this study.3 During this chapter, we first clarify the characteristics of objectivism before explaining how its own presuppositions can help shape orientations towards hate crime in ways that involve forms of cognitive closure and questionable “justifications” of prejudicial interpretations. Our next section begins the largely descriptive, preliminary task of defining and clarifying the general characteristics of objectivism sufficient to make it clear, at least in a provisional way that requires further refinement, what we are talking about whenever we use this term.

 Sebastian Luft, ‘Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitude,’ 31 Continental Philosophy Review (1998): 153–70. 3

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2  O  bjectivism as a Matter of Fact Approach to Hate Crime Issues with Scientific Aspirations After an extended discussion in his Philosophy as a Rigorous Science essay, Husserl continues to deploy the term “objectivism” during his later writings, such as Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis of European Sciences works.4 He uses this term to characterise any perspective, whether theoretical, mundane, policy-based or social scientific, which interprets its topic as if it amounted to an entirely “objective” realm of exclusively material things, processes, or tendencies, which is characterised primarily or exclusively by their objective properties.5 So, for present purposes, a fully objectivist approach to hate crime would be one that interprets this topic as essentially physical and material in nature, and which therefore requires a natural scientific causal-explanatory type of research and analysis: one founded upon materialist premises and presumptions about universal causation. Objectivism, in this specific sense, penetrated the European philosophical tradition after Descartes in both its rationalist and empiricist divergent schools of thought. In particular, the latter has sought to incorporate the distinctly methodological objectivism of the nineteenth century physical sciences into studies of the social and cultural realms, including, of course, studies of discriminatory practices including hate crime and hate speech. Phenomenological analysis of hate crime must, however, always attend carefully to underlying and easily-overlooked qualitative issues relating to the “whatness” quality of whatever is experienced as an example of this phenomenon. We must identify and explore the noematic core of sense that both defines and identifies what hate crime is being experienced as. As a result, we must now ask – and at least provisionally answer – the following vital question: “what is the meaning, scope and implications of objectivism itself?” The most apparent and striking surface characteristic of an objectivist approach to hate crime, which we will now address directly, lies in its apparently social scientific commitment to a purely factual, empirical approach to this topic: one whose research practices are free of subjective opinions, prejudices or assumptions.

 He argues in Cartesian Meditations that Descartes represented a major figure in pioneering a science of consciousness, a precursor to phenomenology, in opposition to traditional forms of objectivism, albeit in a way that itself ultimately relapsed back into objectivism: ‘Descartes, in fact, inaugurates an entirely new kind of philosophy. Changing its total style, philosophy takes a radical turn: from naive Objectivism to transcendental subjectivism – which, with its ever new but always inadequate attempts, seems to be striving toward some necessary final form, wherein its true sense and that of the radical transmutation itself might become disclosed. Should not this continuing tendency imply an eternal significance; and, for us, a task imposed by history itself, a great task in which we are all summoned to collaborate?’ Husserl 1973: 4. In the Crisis work he addresses the need to overcome naïve ‘objectivistic philosophy’ (Husserl 1970: 59); and why a critical selfunderstanding of the transformation that took place whereby, in early modern philosophy of say David Hume, objectivism became transformed into ‘transcendental subjectivism’ (Ibid: 68). 5  Husserl 1970: § 14. 4

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Objectivism is not only a theoretical issue for hate crime scholarship. Rather, it implicitly permeates the entire realm opened up by the natural attitude, of which this – or any other types of theory – is but a conditioned sub-set. Our naïve grasping of what we experience through the lens of the natural attitude starts from objectivism as its default understanding. Objectivism thus shapes ideas about what getting to know anything about hate crime really entails, i.e., a quasi-epistemology of would-be “common sense” knowledge about this topic. Objectivism appears experientially within an interpretive orientation that claims that its judgements about hate crime issues are “essentially objective” because they are fact-based, e.g., rooted in official crime statistics, as opposed to a certain prejudicial conception of what is deemed “subjective,” e.g., moral, ideological, religious approaches. (Later we will address the characteristics and contradictions of the underlying either/or subject/ object dualism that is at play here). These judgements about hate crime issues must, it is implied, be considered “objective” because they are based upon what can be proven to be objectively significant about “the facts themselves,” as distinct from prejudicial subjective opinions, value-judgements and assumptions of various moral, religious and ideological kinds, which – as a precondition for an object scientific approach to hate crime research – must be neutralised as far as possible. The natural attitude generally makes the implicit objectivist assumption that issues involving, say, hate crime – such as expressions of abusive prejudice against protected groups and criminality more generally – refer back to a realm of “given facts.” The latter potentially contain the answers to all conceivable issues providing that researchers manage to avoid philosophical conceptualisation and concentrate instead upon the identification, quantitative analysis and explanation of factual evidence. As such, it is assumed that such “facts” about, say, patterns of distribution of racial hate incidents, represent a bedrock level for objective knowledge and evidence-­based judgements. They are held to constitute a foundational resource and source of valid knowledge about hate crime, behind which there is simply nothing worthwhile for a criminologist or other (social) scientist to investigate. For a fully and exclusively objectivist type of hate crime research project, the process of carrying out empirical research primarily involves identifying and grasping “the facts” about the details of victimisation, such as changing patterns of demographic distribution, which are “out there” waiting to be gathered up. The cognitive task involves analysing and explaining these presumed given objectivities in a suitably impartial and social scientific fashion. For example, analysing objective facts in terms, of what statistical analysis reveals about the patterns of distribution, impact and causation of reported hate incidents. And yet, as already noted, objectivism permeates everyday life insofar as the latter is mediated by the natural attitude. Hence, issues over objectivism extend way beyond academic debates between within hate crime scholarship over research methodology. Within mundane perceptions shaped by the natural attitude’s characteristic objectivism, we “see,” with apparent unproblematic immediately, whatever unfolds in a hate incident, as well the objects of our everyday experience more generally including events, physical objects and other people, as “simply real.” The “factual details” take shape for us as straightforwardly just-there-as-existent. Here,

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we typically interpret the objects, events and persons that comprise a hate incident as “simply real, factual things,” as individual given objects of concrete experiences – this specific perpetrator, that particular victim, these witnesses, that type of later legal proceedings etc., with no addition made by our own interpretive activities. Within hate crime scholarship, objectivism presumes that there is a need for researchers to focus exclusively upon such “objective given facts” because the latter’s exact, methodologically-controlled analysis allows us to penetrate to the core of a series of intrinsic realities relevant to hate crime issues, which would otherwise remain concealed and unknown. For instance, such facts are supposed to help explain in what sense members of different hate crime groups can be categorised and differentiated in terms of what is, in itself, essentially “normal”/“abnormal” or “natural”/“unnatural” with respect, for example, to their perceived sexuality, bodily and learning capacities and gender. In other words, where the natural attitude’s objectivist presumptions prevail, the question of whether a specific robbery outside a “gay nightclub” amounts to a “hate crime” in a strictly objective sense, which is relevant for social scientific purposes, must be interpreted as a “purely objective factual matter:” one involving the application of specific legal rules/benchmark tests to a range of no less “objective facts.” Furthermore, who precisely counts as a “member of the gay community” is itself assumed to be an entirely objective question. We can, it is presumed, answer the latter by simply applying, in a strictly impartial manner, the criteria of an objective “definition” to an equally objective cluster of known and given “facts” about such members. In short, each of these issues is deemed to be a straightforward “question of fact” for which only objectively grasped and analysed “facts” can, in both principle and practice, supply the required answers sufficient to meet the exacting and rigorous standards of verified social scientific knowledge. When combined with its own naturalistic presuppositions, which we will discuss in detail later, objectivism aspires to provide a truly objective and scientific account of whatever specific topic we address using its preferred research methods. From at least the eighteenth century, it has become a dominant and self-confident orientation shaping how “truly scientific research” is generally conceived of within modern European cultures. As Husserl argues with respect to ‘strict science:’ This purpose is by no means foreign to the present age. It is fully alive precisely in the naturalism that dominates the age. From the start, naturalism sets out with a firm determination to realise the ideal of a rigorously scientific reform of philosophy. It even believes at all times, both in its earlier and in its modern forms, that it has already realised this idea.6

The naturalistic side of objectivism that shapes the natural attitude’s orientation is vital. In many, perhaps most, cases the phenomenon of objectivism appears already shaped and predetermined by distinctly naturalistic assumptions; while  – for its part – naturalism often relies upon its own objectivist presuppositions. Certainly, with respect to hate crime issues, a later section will explain why it is difficult to try

 Husserl 1965: 78.

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to neatly separate out and distinguish one element of the objectivism/naturalism combination from the other. A defining task of an objectivist approach to our topic would be to abstract the personal ego-subject from the latter’s social and cultural world. Such abstraction forms part of a wider effort to purge hate crime research of “distorting subjective factors” (such as theological, moral, ideological and personal factors); while also absolutising the supposedly residual world of physical material things, including the bodily dimensions of perpetrators and victims Through such making absolute, these material-physical elements, stripped of their cultural and interpersonal significance, alone are made to “stand out” as the core raw data for research and analysis.7 In other words, the researcher’s pursuit of objectivity with respect to hate crime issues requires the suppression and purging of the contributions to the experience of hate crimes supplied by the mediating (inter)subjectivity of the interpreter, his or her religious, moral or ideological convictions and beliefs, where these are pre-­ defined as sources of “distortion” or “bias”. The presumption here is that such suppression of the fruits of subjectivity is needed because the possible “intrusion” of such subjective factors risks “distorting” what should aim to be a strictly and purely “factual analysis” of hate crime issues, such that the scientific significance of these facts becomes degraded. Social scientific protocols of “verification” of the results of one empirical study of hate crime by others conducted by a different team at a different university, for example, is supposed to contribute to this purging operation. This occurs by allowing a common core, an overlapping common ground of “strictly factual” results, to emerge over time from a cluster of different peer-reviewed studies upon which all instances of “properly conducted” research can agree. During this intra-scientific dialogue, those aspects that fall by the wayside, as it were, which “fail” the verification test, could – all other things being equal – be attributed to the unwelcome intrusion of the subjectivities of the researchers that have biased the results of a specific study. In this respect too, types of objectivism within hate crime scholarship emulate what is presumed to be the hallmark of modern science8: Namely, the development of a value-free and fact-oriented approach to, say, studying hate crime, or simply making scientifically-valid judgements about this, or any other, topic. Here, for the same of clarification, an objectivist orientation towards hate crime issues can be usefully contrasted with a radically different and alternative  In places, Husserl terms an especially problematic manifestation of the objectivism of the natural attitude as a ‘naturalistic attitude.’ See his 1910–1911 essay ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’ (Husserl 1965) and his 1910/1911 Basic Problems of Phenomenology lecture course, as well as Ideas II § 49 where it is contrasted with the personalistic attitude of human interaction within everyday life. To avoid confusion, we will avoid this terminology by referring simply to “objectivism,” with the caveat that the latter is often shaped by naturalistic presuppositions that themselves will require clarification by a later section. 8  Whether this model of science is that of twentieth – let alone twenty-first – century natural science is open to debate, given the implications of theories of relativity and sub-nuclear randomness that problematise the idea of a Newtonian universe governed by natural scientific laws that, in principle, can explain all observed and observable facts. 7

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“­ personalistic attitude” towards the same issues. The latter is orientated towards real, yet non-physical, cultural relations of mutual understanding between ego-subjects. Such relations are clearly seen as being mediated by the intelligibility each side ascribes to situations. These subjects are engaged-with (and sometimes engaged-­against) each other within various types of linguistic and other forms of communication. From such communicative practices, arise different cultural objects, expressions, customs, subcultural entities, institutional norms and values. The latter can be observed to be structuring how people’s lives are actually being lived within historically-specific life-world situations, which are always in the process of being (re)negotiated and managed anew on a frame-by-frame basis. These situations are “handled” with varying degrees of perceived “success” and “failure” relative to projected intersubjective aims, objectives and goals. It may be helpful to contrast objectivist and personalistic orientations in order to clarify the optional and relative character of each: the “fact” that perhaps neither is grounded in anything intrinsic to, say, the reality of hate as concretely experienced? Where the natural attitude’s standpoint on hate crime questions prevails, objectivist presumptions encourage us to insists that the constituents of the research field comprises of “this fact” and then “that fact” and “other facts” As supposedly objectively “there” within an external reality, once identified and grasped adequately such “facts” about hate crime must, it is presumed, be simply accepted in their very “facticity.” To ignore or reject what can be properly identified as “objective facts” about various aspects of hate crime is, we are told, to ignore or reject the evidence of the topic itself. Only if their status as “identified facts” comes into question, perhaps as a result of the implications of fresh – but no-less fact-based studies produced by means of equally objectivist methodology, should hate crime scholars and others critically re-evaluate the propositions about this topic that rest upon their foundation. Our understanding of hate crime, which is based on its self-exhibiting facts, remains open to revision within ongoing and open-ended verification processes if – but only if – other factual evidence emerges with different or contrary implications when grasped from a strictly social scientific perspective. The guiding underlying presupposition for an objectivist approach to the study of hate crime is the circular proposition that “facts are facts, and that such “facts” about hate crime-related issues themselves provide us with the possibility of gaining “verifiably true knowledge” about such issues. This orientation permeates everyday “common sense” as well. For example, as far as the natural attitude’s “common sense” standpoint about an incident resting upon objectivism is concerned, the statement: “is that a fact?” is functionally equivalent to asking: “Is that really true?” In other words, as self-evidently “there,” such supposedly “objective facts” about hate crime are supposed to provide the basis for valid judgements about this topic always providing that these judgements can be shown: “to accord with the facts themselves.” What is especially interesting here is that the very circular nature of this “reasoning” generally escapes the consciousness of those deploying objectivistic aspects of the natural attitude. This is because such consciousness is fully immersed in “the facts,” as opposed to its own ­consciousness-­of

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these “facts” about hate crime, such that (self)reflection upon the possibilities of such consciousness itself falls outside its agenda. For these reasons, all the pragmatic interpretive concerns, purposes and interests of the natural attitude’s orientation towards questions of discriminatory practices, including hate speech and crime, are both directed towards, and terminate in, what “common sense” understands to be “the world of fact.” Furthermore, and this closes the loop of its own circular reasoning, all its “common sense” knowledge about hate crime-related issues refers to – and terminates in – “what actually exists” as a matter of “given fact.”9 For as long as we are viewing our surrounding world through the lens of the natural attitude, we remain subject to – and guided by -the cluster of assumptions characteristic of this orientation’s objectivist premises (and resulting “as-if” imaginary-interpretive projections). We can come to simply take-for-granted that our immediate perceptions of, say, a specific hate incident, take the form of direct, that is, culturally-linguistically unmediated, “recordings” of just what is being perceived within that external and directly observable material reality of that material world. As a result of this unnoticed assumption, a witness to an incident can react with righteous indignation when another witness, who was clearly occupying more or less the same physical location, provides a very different account of “what really happened” during this incident. Such a sense of felt-outrage may be based upon the “common sense” presumption that this second witness statement is implying that the first witness has “misrepresented the facts;” that she has either made “factual errors,” or is clearly deliberately lying. Based upon such objectivism, this second witness statement can be deemed to be an offensive misrepresentation because, in truth, the first witness has honestly: “told it like it really was.” In other words, and in keeping with the other more general tendencies of the natural attitude, the contribution of objectivist presumptions is to generate a specific interpretation of hate crime: one claiming, at least implicitly, to be based exclusively upon the “objective facts” of the topic itself, as distinct from distorting “subjective opinions.” From the outset and throughout, hate crime itself remains predefined as self-evidently an exclusively “factual topic.” It is further presumed that knowledge is structured according to an either/or style subject/object dichotomy or “dualism” – where a certain conception of subjectivity is defined as the polar opposite of that of objectivity. As a result, the research field of hate crime is presumed to lack vital references to, or dependencies upon, any underlying “(inter)subjective” interpretive aspects whatsoever. This dualistic standpoint can be developed and extended to the point where the concrete results of alternative qualitative approaches to hate crime, such as Husserlian phenomenology, which differ markedly in their conceptions of what constitutes relevant and appropriate social scientific evidence about this topic, simply do not need to be considered. The alternative research results can be happily dismissed as “merely qualitative,” lacking objectivity, and represent merely

 Husserl 1970: 176.

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s­ ubjective anecdotes of little or no causal-explanatory value – and hence scientific validity. An analogy can be drawn here with medical research, where the tendencies of degenerative disease processes can, it is presumed, be studied entirely independently of the consciousness of the patients, their feelings and opinions about the disease etc. In short, objectivism makes the implicit claim that its framework results in an exclusively fact-oriented approach to hate crime issues, where whatever is identified as “the facts themselves” are simply pre-given, already objective elements of our perceptions of worldly objects, events and people of various types and sub-types. We arrive at such a required “purely factual” awareness of the substance of hate crime issues by means of purging our “purely subjective” opinions, beliefs, value-­ judgements and commitments from our observations. These merely subjective factors allegedly obstruct and bias the social scientific goal of achieving a strictly impartial observation, identification and analysis of “what is factually the case” with respect to such issues. The ontological commitment here is that the real world is whatever demonstrates itself to be factually-the-­ case; while objectivism’s epistemological standpoint is that factual evidence is the primary or sole source of scientifically-valid knowledge about hate crime-­ related issues. Our next section explores the extent to which the latter, the conception of the intrinsic reality of “what is the case,” forms one important core part of objectivism’s underlying – yet ironically metaphysical – presuppositions.

3  The Underlying Presuppositions of Objectivism Itself So far, we have argued that, despite its claims, objectivism rests upon underlying presuppositions that need to be addressed. With respect to these presuppositions, we need to ask: are the latter really grounded in what is factually the case? Or are these presuppositions, as ideas-based entities of subjective belief, which exist both prior to, and independently of, “strictly empirical factual evidence,” both imported and superimposed upon our field of awareness of hate crime-related issues in a distinctly prejudicial manner? If this is the case, then does such superimposition and over-­ layering occur in such a manner that, from the start and throughout, involves the process of interpreting hate crime issues being (re)shaped by how the latter become defined at the qualitative level? Does such interpretation shape how the very intelligibility of the meaning and significant implications of such issues are understood? These are clearly challenging questions for any fully objectivist model of hate crime research to answer. In addition, and more generally, these questions raise the question of whether “common sense” perceptions of hate incidents are as direct and immediate, in the sense of lacking any interpretive mediation? An objectivist approach to hate crime questions and issues encourages subscribers to utterly reject all metaphysical ideas, beliefs and analysis. This is because these are deemed to be essentially “subjective,” and hence subjectively-variable

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from one person to another (in their status as lay people as opposed to (social) scientists). For this reason, it is presumed that metaphysical beliefs and ideas necessarily provide an inadequate basis for generating valid knowledge. Yet, this section will outline how such subscribers to objectivism dig a hole for themselves by unwittingly making their own metaphysical assumptions. For its part, objectivism is not only a presupposition of the natural attitude but it too rests upon its own often distinctly “naturalistic” core metaphysical assumptions. In performing its distinct, if generally covert, interpretive work, objectivism also joins forces and even merges with naturalistic presuppositions. As a result, the distinction between “naturalistic objectivism,” and an “objectivistic naturalism” becomes blurred. This distinction becomes blurred in ways that may be difficult – if not impossible – to disentangle. An earlier section suggested that, for the conduct of hate crime research shaped by natural attitude’s objectivism, the very “data” of designated lawful and criminal behaviour, of policing, prosecutions, courts and prisons, are reinterpreted as “simple facts.” That is, as “given facts” capable of being observed, surveyed, recorded and analysed in purely objective and exact terms by means of quantitative research methods. What we now need to emphasise is how, owing to the impact of a cluster of naturalistic assumptions, the characteristics of these objects, events, values, other persons and processes become pre-interpreted. Put simply, the naturalistic dimension of objectivism can be best characterised as a perspective that recognises as “real” only physical entities. In particular, our phenomenology of hate crime recognises the “pre-judicial” character of such pre-interpretations that predefine the empirical details of hate incidents as an inherent part of an essentially physical reality. For Husserl, ‘Naturalism looks at the world as filled-out extension and thus considers the world in general only as nature in a broader sense.’10 For its part, reality itself is presumed to be a residue, something essentially physical and material, which remains once all traces of individual and collective (inter) subjectivity, which “lack reality” in the prescribed benchmark sense of reality, have been entirely purged from our analysis of hate incidents. As if by definition, reality in general, as well as thing-like material contextual relations of objective time and space connecting different physical objects and material events, are presumed to be inherently “thing-like.” In this context, naturalism can be summarised as a reinterpretation of the world solely in terms of material objects extended in both space and time, and subject to cause and effect (causality). For example, for a fully objectivist approach to hate crime, the bodily manifestations of a victim’s anxiety and fear concerning the prospects of future victimisation would become reinterpreted reductively in materialistic terms as if they were entirely physiological and/or biochemical in nature. As a result, the question of what it is that she is anxious and fearful about, and what significant implications these chronic subjective feelings have for her subjective sense of well-being and lifestyle would, insofar as they are scientifically unmeasurable (and hence “unreal”),

10

 Husserl 1970: 315.

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never emerge on to an objectivist research agenda. Instead, both in principle and prior to the conduct of concrete empirical research, such subjectively-felt phenomena may be reduced to what is taken as “purely physical” realities: themselves defined materialistically as reality-in-itself. Here, we need to appreciate the distinctly ideological and rhetorical implications of this “cutting through” and disregarding the supposedly unreal and scientifically irrelevant cultural-linguistic dimensions of hate crime as experienced. It is important to recognise the implications of the natural attitude’s appeals to what is deemed inherently part of “the natural” and to “normality,” which are themselves understood in a strictly and exclusively materialistic manner. An important implication is how this reliance not only exhibits but also reinforces a merger of objectivism and naturalism as the natural attitude’s major underlying premises. For example, as a group characteristic, “being-disabled” would be implicitly defined by a naturalistic-objectivism as a “deviation-from” a posited singular norm of what the human body’s abilities and capabilities “naturally are,” when considered objectively in themselves. This projected “single correct norm” is supposedly grounded not on merely subjective questions of opinion. Instead, it rests upon the bedrock of material and objective factual evidence supplied by the scientific disciplines of, say, biology, medical science, biochemistry, neurology, clinical psychology and physiology. Such “objective evidence,” impartially produced and interpreted according to established and agreed methodological protocols, is deemed vital for a scientific form of hate crime scholarship. This is because of how it supplies scholars with factually-based benchmark criteria for distinguishing, say, “average,” “optimal” and “subnormal” forms of perceived “learning capabilities/incapacities,” quotas of IQ, or degrees of physical “mobility”/“immobility.” In turn, when perceived through objectivist presuppositions, these criteria themselves are made to appear as if they are entirely independent of societal prejudices related to the “mere subjectivity” of specific moral, religious, cultural or ideological value-judgements. What is especially interesting and consequential here goes beyond the realm of methodological debates. This is because of how objectivist presumptions also feature within the orientation of perpetrators of hate crime and speech. Perpetrators often, for instance, unwittingly reiterate the characteristics of objectivist presuppositions by taking the supposedly “objective” features of, say, “Pakistanis,” “homosexuals” or “gipsies,” as existing “in themselves.” Within a perpetrator orientation, these features can be perceived in naturalistic-objectivistic terms as standing “there” over and against the perpetrator’s passively recording “subjectivity.”11 In other words, the derogatory qualities interpretively ascribed to each member of such groups because of their perceived group membership, can – as a result of the natural attitude’s interpretive performances guided by objectivist premises – appear to perpetrators as “simply there” as self-evidently intrinsic features. The victims’ ascribed qualities are a factually “given” part of a surrounding world populated by numerous other “objective facts.”

11

 Husserl 1982: 54: ‘the world is a universe of “what exists in itself” … over against “us”’.

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A similar point applies to the operation of objectivist premises within the prejudicial stereotype that being “truly British” self-evidently and essentially means “having white skin.” A perpetrator’s simplistic re-appropriation of the crudest form of objectivism is able to reinforce this stereotype. Such reinforcement is possible on the basis that “the British simply are, as a matter of objective fact, a white-skinned Anglo-Saxon race.” Such positing of either a supposedly “intrinsic,” and/or “natural,” normative order of “objective reality” of “Britishness,” can also be detected in the self-righteous application of many other harmful stereotypes relevant to hate crime research. The abusive expression of these stereotypical understandings in both words – and with respect to deeds motivated by them – are legally-identifiable as instances of hate speech and hate crimes respectively. The reduction of experienced hate crime to its purely physical-material dimensions results in filtering out of the dynamism of this topic. Because of the influence of its cluster of objectivist and naturalistic presumptions, together with the interpretive practices that realise them within concrete situations, the natural attitude’s orientation towards hate crime represents a selective type of interpretive “fixation” upon stable continuities. This is because these presuppositions narrow down its focus to those phenomena whose supposedly intrinsic material characteristics, such as bodily aspects of violent attacks, are – in their very core – always remain self-­ identical and unchanging. For example, a discriminatory interpretation of “racial difference,” or any confusion of homosexuality, transgender, and disability with biological inferiority, presume that the presence of “race,” “gender” and “disability” are simply fixed and intrinsic qualities of human biology and physiology. Here, the perceived defining identity-characteristics of, say, a particular hate crime victim group, is generally ascribed a fixed and intrinsic status; while their culturally-­ defined group status, clearly an ideal (in the sense of something with cultural as opposed to physical) qualitative determination of meaning, is interpreted as if it constituted a real and inherent characteristic of the group’s own objective nature. Where a naturalistic type of objectivism prevails, a hate incident’s objective qualities and characteristic properties, which include being subject to causal relations of various kinds, would be presumed to remain self-identical  – even when perceived by different observers from different perspectives. A related assumption follows. Namely, it is possible, in principle at least, for five suitably impartial and objective witnesses to a hate incident to provide broadly “the same” account of who did what to whom, under which material circumstances, when, where and with what physical effects. The “reality” of “what really happened” is, it is presumed, revealed through an impartial analysis of the visible and observed factual details of what they observed. Heidegger’s concise, if densely worded, summary of a Husserlian critical analysis of naturalistic objectivism’s physicalist presumptions is worth citing in full. This is because it pulls together the key points of our discussion so far: The object of natural science is nature as physical nature, as the unity of a completely determinate, thingly being. As the basic character of this being, it is given that each thing in the sphere of being is perceivable as identically the same in a variety of diverse, direct perceptions. At the same time, this being of the natural thing is of the sort that this identifiable

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sameness of it is perceivable by a plurality of subjects. This thingly being is intersubjectively identifiable as being of a certain sort. Every one of these entities has, as one says, its determinate properties in the temporal and spatial expanse of things and stands at the same time in an entire complex of causal series. Each property of a thing is nothing other than a possibility, following under a causal law, of specifically regulated alterations of this thing in the context of nature as a whole. Thus, each thing is principally determinable in the context of nature by going back to the functional connection of relations among things. This specific thingly unity is exhibited in appearances.12

As a core premise of the natural attitude, objectivism thus endorses a “matter of fact” orientation towards the purely physical dimension of hate crime issues as a subset of nature and natural forces explicable in natural scientific terms and by means of natural scientific research methods, including clinical psychology and neurology. This endorsement takes place at the expense of any appreciation of the possible cultural-societal and institutional determinations of hate incidents of the type addressed by qualitative social scientific approaches to hate crime. Owing to their non-physical (or “irreal” or “ideal”) qualities, these alleged characteristics and determinants “fail” to conform to naturalism’s own benchmark criteria for reality. On this dubious basis, they become disregarded as “scientifically irrelevant.”13 Prior to any empirical investigations, a research topic is always-already typically predefined by objectivist presuppositions as the spatiotemporal physical world: one which is supposedly unified by mathematically expressible causal laws.14 In the name of “the unity of all the sciences,” objectivism then extends and superimposes its conception of this natural scientific model as somehow exemplary for science-as-­ such, that is, for a distinctly social science of hate crime. Scientific research is presumed to be an activity attuned to the discovery of laws of nature and predictions of the behaviour of physical objects, processes and events that govern all fields of human experience. This model is thereby superimposed upon both the social sciences and humanities, which are the academic home for university-level studies of issues related to hate crime and speech without any further discussion of their possible appropriateness. Furthermore, such naturalism defines valid knowledge about such issues as the outcome of a methodologically-controlled scientific investigation of entities’ material qualities. In turn, the latter must be based upon accurate observation of the external details of their factual existence, including how they may vary and change over time in response to different posited causal factors. As a result of its physicalist presuppositions, at most, naturalism is able to recognise our (inter)subjective consciousness as a type of overlaid entity: one that is represented as a problematic veneer layer superimposed on top of the essentially physical constitution of human bodies. It is this physical aspect that is presumed to

 Heidegger 2005: 50.  Later in this chapter, our section of the Husserlian critique of objectivism will argue that this tendency needs to be expressly recognised as a prejudicial bias exhibiting specifically ideological dimensions. 14  Hua 25: 8. 12 13

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constitute the core reality of being human. This narrowly-focused physicalist interpretive perspective interprets the duration of human experience merely as objective duration, as clock-measurable time (as distinct from the flowing flux of (inter) subjectively-­lived inner-time consciousness). More generally, a naturalistic research agenda for hate crime scholarship would either refuse to recognise the reality claims of the ideal realm of cultural ideas, such as cultural values in relation to a right not to be discriminated against, or else it would “naturalise” such phenomena by treating them as, at core, essentially physical. Naturalism would, for example, reduce our consciousness of hate crime, together with the cluster of ideas, beliefs and understandings associated with such criminality, to “objective data.” More precisely, to “data” stemming from the biophysical, neurological processes that accompany our brain activities. It could also analyse perceptions of a hate incident in terms of the material sensations of sight, sound and touch striking the body’s various sense organs. In short, such naturalisation effectively reduces whatever appears within an objectivist orientation to be a “non-physical” phenomenon, which is tied to consciousness, culture and the realm of ideas, to a supposedly “underlying” physical reality defined as constituting the reality of the phenomenon themselves. The naturalistic side of objectivism most certainly operates as a presupposition in an emphatic sense of this term. For instance, it rarely appears as an expressly-­ adopted and justified axiom for the conduct of hate crime-related empirical research. We would not, therefore, expect a purely objectivist approach to hate crime to begin with an open-minded consideration of the relative merits of a science-of-culture approach, as opposed to a natural science methodology (i.e., a science of the natural world). On the contrary, it derives its general model of science from nineteenth century forms of natural science, especially physics, in a largely or wholly implicit manner.15 Furthermore, all forms of naturalism presume, often without express acknowledgement or even self-awareness, a common basic understanding of what amounts to “nature;” a culturally-derived conception of the “naturalness” of nature, as it were. The natural attitude’s objectivism would certainly posit hate crime as a “real world” issue, with this positing forming a fundamental or axiomatic presupposition. This positing could be expected to occur where the interpretively-projected “reality” element of this “real world,” its qualitative “whatness,” remains implicitly prejudged and pre-determined by underlying naturalistic presuppositions. Here, the presupposed reality of this “real world” appears as simply “there” as the overarching physical-material context of all participants and researchers actually see, say

 That is from a Newtonian physics prior to the problematising effects of twentieth century theories of relativity and discoveries of the relative indeterminacy and random character of behaviour at the sub-atomic level. 15

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and do about this topic. By means of the application of objectivist presuppositions, this posited reality is made to appear as if it was so self-evidently “there” that its apparently definitive presence for us, together with its overall existential status, simply “go without saying.” Because of their reiteration of the naturalistic presumptions of objectivism, individuals caught up in the interpretive web of the natural attitude typically become conscious of aspects of “the” world of everyday life. That is, of worldly objects, individuals, groups and events for which hate crime and speech constitutes a relatively small and mediated subset of a broader real-world context, including the realities of discriminatory attitudes, assumptions and practices more generally. Subject to minor and specific exceptions, and taken as a whole, the naturalistic presuppositions of objectivism help ensure that “the” facts of “the world” appear as straightforwardly “worldly” objects and factual determinations about the “real world,” unmediated by interpretive practices. A core belief in the unmediated presence of such allegedly “worldly facts” and “factual” states of affairs, including the idea that negative qualities of victim groups are inherent in their very being, are taken as “simply there” as part of the world around us. The reiteration of this naturalistic belief comprises objectivism’s “general positing.” Whenever we wake up and focus our gaze upon whatever surrounds us, these “facts” and “factual circumstances” of “real world around us” are, as a result, presumed to be simply and unquestionable “there,” and self-evidently “on hand” for all manner of activities, such as observation, touching, holding, pushing, weighing etc. Because subscribers to naturalistic presuppositions simply accept without question and as apparently self-evident not only the definitiveness but also the simple immediacy of the “real world” context of hate crime issues, there is little or no possibility of them addressing interpretive questions. Subscribers do not, for example, feel no need to question the impact upon their lived experiences of hate incidents of either their own personal interpretive subjectivities or more general intersubjective relativities. The latter may stem from shared and mediating cultural-linguistic frameworks within which and out of whose resources their cognitions take shape. With respect to the social world opened by the natural attitude’s interpretive work, which is shaped by naturalist-objectivist presuppositions, Husserl notes that a generalised form of acceptance becomes encouraged. Such uncritical acceptance of established interpretations arises within – and is encouraged by – the natural attitude. It is, however, subject to some minor and well-known exceptions, such as misperceptions of surrounding realities created by various possible imperfections of the sense-organs16:

 For Husserl, the natural attitude involves a “common sense” form of rough and ready “knowingabout” what is pre-given as straightforwardly “on hand” involving no conceptualisation; an apparent – but superficial – pre-reflective immediacy of what’s what and who is who: ‘By my seeing, 16

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In other words, the inherently “objective,” properties of apparently “factual realities” about hate crime are implicitly interpreted by the natural attitude’s naturalistic presuppositions as simply “being out there,” simply waiting for their visible factual-­ objective properties to be conscientiously identified, observed, and grasped cognitively. These perceived properties become represented interpretively as wholly external and material realities, whose inherent qualities as such may be soaked up by presumed the passive receptivity of our own everyday and, possibly, (social) scientific observations of such realities. Mundane attention is thereby wholly absorbed in these observed real-life qualities without paying attention to how they are taking shape for us subjectively as a result of our interpretive practices. This neglect of subjectivity does not mean that an objectivist approach functions without presumptions concerning subjectivity. While apparently focused on the reality of hate incidents as essentially physical, and therefore not concerned scientifically with questions of consciousness, naturalism nevertheless continually presupposes a certain model of subjective consciousness. Of course, this presumption must embrace the would-be scientific consciousness of its own subscribers. In particular, the orientation of naturalism presumes that, by means of methodologically-­ controlled impartial observation of hate incidents, for instance, our consciousness of them can  – in principle at least  – fully soak up and absorb all their objective details. Through their methodologically-controlled observations, hate crime researchers can take in and grasped the factual details of changing patterns of incidents in a way that resembles how a paper towel passively soaks spilt coffee. On the basis of this passive model of subjectivity as pure receptivity, the “objective properties” of any actual or conceivable hate incident are assumed to be simply “there” as material given data for the observers essentially receptive observations. In other words, the factual realities are “simply there” in a no less “objective” way that an original document is “there” for a photocopier that faithfully reproduces its various details, shades, crease marks and colour tones. This means that, for an

touching, hearing, and so forth, and in the different modes of sensuous perception, corporeal physical things with some spatial distribution or other are simply there for me, “on hand” in the literal or the figurative sense, whether or not I am particularly heedful of them and busied with them in my considering, thinking, feeling, or willing. Animate beings too – human beings, let us say – are immediately there for me … They are also present as actualities in my field of intuition even when I do not heed them. But it is not necessary that they, and likewise that other objects, be found directly in my field of perception. Along with the ones now perceived, other actual objects are there for me as determinate, as more or less well known, without being themselves perceived or, indeed, present in any other mode of intuition.’ Husserl 1982: 51. 17  Husserl 1982: 57. This represents; ‘a never deviating concatenated experience…’ Ibid: n19.

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objectivist-naturalistic approach to hate crime, ideally the awareness of researchers would be no more active than a blank sheet of paper, or projector screen, upon which the positivity of “objective facts” of this topic impress themselves, almost photographically, without bias or other distortion, just as they “really are” in themselves. In short, clearly, the naturalist presuppositions of an objectivist model contain definite assumptions about the characteristics not only of “worldly reality” but also of our consciousness-of this reality, which – as a later section will explain – flatly contradict the orientation of our phenomenology of hate crime. From the outset, the comprehensive, as well as all-pervasive qualities, of this interpretive objectivist positing and projection of a “real world” context of hate incidents needs to be recognised. So too does the purely implicit and taken-for-­ granted character of the general positing of hate crime as one of many other “worldly phenomenon.” Not only is the research field of hate crime presumed to take the form of a cluster of related “material facts” awaiting impartial observation, classification and analysis, but their encompassing contextual field is equally presumed to that of “real world:” a realm whose general character is presumed to be essentially – or at least primarily – equally physical in nature. As a result of the objectivist orientation arising from such reductionism of the reality of all topics to a certain conception of physical nature, all that is categorised by cultural-linguistic categories becomes reinterpreted. It is reinterpreted as if, in themselves, the objects of our lived experience of, say, specific hate incidents, as well as official responses to them, exhibit inherent qualities. It is presumed these qualities simply are inherently “useful”/“useless,” intrinsically “agreeable”/“disagreeable,” inherently “relevant”/“irrelevant” etc.18 During such re-­ interpretative practices of naturalistic reductionism, not even the imaginary and projective qualities of this “as-if” status, e.g., as-if homosexuality was  – in itself – inherently “abnormal,” stand out as a prominent (social) scientific topic in their own right. For instance, the supposedly “unnatural” quality that hate speech and hate crime perpetrators often ascribe to “fucking queers” can appear to them to stem, self-evidently and as part of their “common sense,” from gay people simply being-queer as a simple matter-of-fact. The attribution of queerness is not experienced as an attribution but as a simple observation of what exists in itself. As a result of naturalistic presuppositions, this ascription is assumed to arise from – and itself be based upon, “their” factually-given and inherent “condition of queerness,” where the latter is itself defined as an inversion of what is, as a matter of simple fact, inherently “normal.” During such reductive forms of naturalism shaping the consciousness of hate crime victims, whatever determinations are ascribed to, say, gay males become prominent at the centre stage of awareness, and as such absorbs the attention of the interpreter at the expense of self-awareness of underlying interpretive dynamics. Here, the underlying and constitutive process of interpretive ascription itself remains largely hidden in the background – or margins – of such unreflective awareness of,

18

 Husserl 1964: 29.

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say, ascribed “queerness.” In turn, the application of objectivism’s naturalistic presuppositions reinforces the traditionally prejudicial idea that such “queerness” of gay persons represents an externally-observable, visible and thus “objectively ­present” empirical state-of-affairs about what it truly is to be homosexual. As already noted, the latter “objective state” supposedly stands there over and against the perpetrator’s essentially “receptive” perception of such “objective facts” about those defined as a member of “them,” with this supposition providing apparently compelling reasons to avoid reflecting upon how its interpretive constitution takes shape. This another example of the point we made previously about how perceptions of incidents are simply presumed, without any experiential evidence, to be essentially passive and utterly receptive. In other words, the process of perception supposedly merely “takes in” – without any addition or subtraction – what is already “objectively there” in the visible qualities of gay males. Such a belief about our perception of hate incidents, or members of victim groups for example, fundamentally misrepresents what is taking place in these perceptual judgements. When subjected to the prejudicial effects of these naturalistic presuppositions, such perception of the supposedly inherent qualities of victim groups can mistakenly pride itself on its own accuracy and efficiency in grasping these qualities of one or more of these groups. In turn, such interpretively projected and superimposed qualities are pre-defined in ontological terms of their apparently straightforwardly “factual condition.” Within hate speech, for example, the supposedly “objective” status of such qualities of victim groups is typically over-layered with those supposedly inherent features that are deemed essential to the very identity of X group as such. Here, “queerness,” for instance, can become established as a type of master stigma attaching to what it objectively means for each individual at any time to have any form of gay sexual orientation. Questions of interpretive and cultural relativity and context-dependence of the social meaning of such qualities are, thereby, evaded but hardly resolved. In short, the objectivism of the natural attitude shaped by naturalistic premises entails an interpretive projection of an interpretive model of a supposedly intrinsic, material reality. In turn, this interpretive projection yields a specific orientation towards hate crime issues, including the supposedly given qualities of victim groups and perpetrators. Despite its own claim and premises, this operates as an interpretive orientation: one that both exhibits, and remains shaped by, a form of assumption-­ driven metaphysics. The latter posits the existence of an essentially fixed realm of immutable categories mirroring those of nature itself. Such categories are presumed to be based upon the supposedly inherent character of whatever is deemed to constitute “nature”/“the natural.” Furthermore, traditional forms of objectivism draw implicitly upon the ultimately metaphysical assumption of the sheer existence of a pre-given “real world” of material entities. This “real world” is presumed to be both primary (in terms of a source of objective knowledge about hate crime) and primordial (in terms of its existential status as a core reality relative to merely relative and contingent cultural and societal realities). In this way, a certain interpretively-­ projected conception of what, for social scientific purposes, constitutes the primary

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and ultimate stratum of the “reality” becomes interpretively constituted as something self-evident and simply “there-to-be-observed” within the research field for hate crime scholarship. We have already suggested that the most basic fundamental presumption of an objectivist approach to hate crime is that, for all social scientific purposes at least, the core of the reality of this (or any other social scientific topic and societal practice) is, in itself, essentially material, and thus part of nature.19 Such materialistic physicalism prides itself on having overcome earlier metaphysical and theological approaches and explanations of events, displacing these allegedly pre-scientific, and by implication defective, orientations with an authentic scientific positivist approach based on “the facts.” What now needs to be highlighted is that, as Husserl recognises, the axiomatic presupposition of this interpretive practice is itself distinctly meta-physical (as literally both above – and prior to – the physical realm of material nature and nature-like processes, events and objects governed by causal relations). As such, and contrary to the content of its own proud claims, this presupposition is not itself grounded in the contingent results of prior empirical research; it does not arise inductively from, for example, a strictly fact-based empirical research project addressing the properties of, say, various hate incidents, as well as the latter’s material impact. Instead, this presupposition emerges initially from the life-world’s distinctly pre-scientific dimension of lived understandings of who’s who and what’s what, which are necessarily contingent, situation, episodic and context dependent. Here, it has become driven not by a strictly scientific rationale of evidence-based and methodologically-controlled judgements. Instead, it has been driven by the rhetorical power, indeed will to power, of disciplinary expansionism: one that has, over time, become habitualised and supported by self-fulfilling interpretive recipes. As Husserl recognises: Naturalism is a phenomenon consequent upon the discovery of nature, which is to say, nature considered as a unity of spatiotemporal being subject to exact laws of nature. With the gradual realization of this idea in constantly new natural sciences that guarantee strict knowledge regarding many matters, naturalism proceeds to expand more and more… In accord with …[a] dominant habit of interpretation, the natural scientist has the tendency to look upon everything as nature and …to falsify the sense of what cannot be seen in their way. Thus the naturalist … sees primarily physical nature. Whatever is is either itself physical, belonging to the unified totality of physical nature, or it is, in fact, psychical, but then merely as a variable dependent on the physical, at best a secondary “parallel accompaniment.” Whatever is belongs to psychophysical nature, which is to say that it is univocally determined by rigid laws.20

 One avowed naturalist characterised naturalism as ‘philosophical position, empirical in method, that regards everything that exists or occurs to be conditioned in its existence or occurrence by causal factors within one all-encompassing system of nature, however spiritual or purposeful or rational some of these things and events may in their functions and value prove to be.’ S.  P. Lamprecht, in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Y. H. Krikorian, New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1944: 18. 20  Husserl 1965: 79. 19

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For this naturalistic side of objectivism, the cultural realm of meaning and significance, together with its interpretive constitution, “lacks” the tangible physical qualities required for the rigorous application of scientific methods. In addition, it is presumed that – as already noted – reality itself must – in principle – be essentially physical in nature. As previously mentioned in passing, naturalistic objectivism does not deny human (inter)subjectivity. Instead, it interprets this phenomenon as a superficial type of overlay: one that is located on top of the physical constitution of bodies, akin to a deceptive veneer. For example, psychological, more precisely psycho-physical, approaches to hate crime would, under the auspices of naturalism, be able to analyse the perceptions of incidents but only in a strictly materialist manner. This analysis would proceed by focusing exclusively upon the supposedly entirely material dimensions of the sensations of sights, sounds and tactile feelings suffered by, say, a victim of racially-motivated physical assault. For Husserl, what would happen here is that: ‘physical nature is sensualistically broken up into complexes of sensations, into colors, etc., and in the same way the so-called “psychical” is broken up into complementary complexes of the same or of still other ‘sensations.’21 In other words, naturalistic presuppositions encourage a type of reductionism of distinctly cultural qualities of hate crime as experienced, in favour of a certain (re)interpretation of the latter’s physical-material properties supposedly governed by relations of cause and effect. A defining characteristic of all forms consistent naturalism thus includes not the complete denial (which would be absurd because the denial itself would be the work of consciousness) but rather the reductive “naturalising of consciousness.” Such naturalisation reinterprets even the intentional aspects of the consciousness of victims, their immanent consciousness-of-being-victimised as an experience saturated with interpretively generated significance, as essentially rooted in – and determined by – the material functions and capacities of the brain and nervous system. A similarly reductive naturalisation is applied to the realm of ideas. As a result, all ideals and norms related to hate crime and its scholarly analysis (even by implication those of science, logic and applied mathematics), are reduced to physical-material properties and then interpreted in terms of possible causal relations presumed to explain the topic itself.22 For our phenomenology of hate crime, this naturalisation of ideas, and the ideal (non-physical) interpretive outcomes of intersubjective culture(s) more generally – including, for example, hate crime legislation and policy documents – are self-­contradictory. Despite its claims, such naturalisation draws and then relies upon a certain materialist-physicalist conception of the characteristic properties of ideas as such. The latter conception, which of course is itself an idea, entirely – if implicitly – rejects the phenomenological claim that ideas all involved in the field of crime experience their life situations in terms of express and implicit meanings.

21 22

 Ibid: 80.  Ibid.

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The latter represent are ideal unities contrasting with the multitude of interpretive acts (of acts of perceiving, recalling, anticipating, judging, signifying etc.), which realise these unities in construing something as, for example, “a disability-related hate incident” – as opposed to a “simple assault.” For Husserl, although disregarded by objectivism’s reductive naturalisation, this experience of a unified sense of such a perceived incident represents a distinctly ideal – and thus not an essentially physical – unity of possible additional fulfilment and validation: one subject to a distinctive and determinate form of structural lawfulness. However, such lawfulness, which allows us to identify invariant structural relations between, say, perpetrators’ acts of interpretation, and the interpreted realities that take shape for them, differs from objectivism’s materialist causal-­ explanatory model. Contrary to the latter’s presumptions, the field of hate crime as experienced is not one of completely random events happening for no apparent reason. The realm of ideas, and intersubjective culture more generally, certainly exhibits structurally-determined regularities in the customary ascription of meanings, which allows for the identification of if/then relations. If a perpetrator is perceived of by a sentencing judge as demonstrating “remorse,” (and of course this presupposes the operation of interpretive criteria for identifying displays of not only “remorse” but also “sincere remorse”), then this perception may affect the perpetrator’s ultimate court sentence in a more lenient fashion. However; if a victim’s “impact statement” is judicially perceived of as “especially forceful” and as engendering empathy, then this perception may motivate a sense that an increase in court sentence would be “appropriate” for the “facts of this case, if this response was understood to be the ‘relevant’ method of demonstrating empathy. Yet, for Husserl, such if/then relations of regularity, and thus limited inexplicable randomness, does not appear as a material-physical form of causality. Such regularities do not involve the interplay of a cluster of external environmental causes generating specific effects in a “stimulus”/“response” manner, in an interpretively unmediated way that resembles the results of one billiard ball hitting another, at a certain speed and spin, and causing it to move in an entirely predictable manner. Instead, human actions and interactions are forever mediated by how the parties define their own situation and that of others with who they are interacting. Yet this insight is lost on objectivism because within this perspective we can only observe the data of “behaviour”. The physical actions of perpetrators of, say, a specific hate incident are – according to the positivism of a strictly objectivist approach – rightly classified as “behaviour” in an especially strong sense of this term. Such actions are presumed to be generally explicable in terms of responses to the impact of a cluster of generally external causal factors. An example would be the relationship between inhaling cigarette smoke and the incidence of lung cancer, or increased levels of CO2 emissions as causal factors for global warming. Central here is the idea that the world of physical nature is – at a certain level at least – governed by strict causation, by generally applicable “laws of nature,” such as gravity, the boiling point of different liquids, the melting point of ice etc. Such laws can, it is assumed, be scientifically-identified and clarified sufficiently to predict the behav-

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iour of natural scientific objects, including disease processes, under different conditions with a fair degree of accuracy. This realm of causally explicable realities is held to include purposeful human interventions of a material kind, such as the impact of various drug treatments for different types of cancer. What is certainly clear is that the behaviour of material objects, events and processes cannot, in principle, be explained in terms of their inner consciousness-of the significance of the situations in which they find themselves, their (inter)subjective definition of “who’s who” and “what’s what.” By contrast, for phenomenology, human actions and interactions exhibit an inner logic of motivated responses. Because two twin brothers who brought have been brought up in the same family context may adopt radically different attitudes and behaviour towards members of one or more hate crime victim group, we need to talk to them about their lived experiences. We need to ask these brothers about how their interpretive practices, driven by specific interests, concerns, fears, assumptions, and beliefs, (re)constitute the significance of the presence of these members in contrasting ways. Such “inner” factors shaping and feeding motivations help explain the reasons why one brother has become, say, a perpetrator of racist hate crime; while the other has joined a victim support group. In this respect, naturalistic causal-explanatory presuppositions shaping positivist forms of hate crime research differ sharply from the orientation of Husserlian phenomenology. Objectivistic research at least implies that a Husserlian approach is simply wrong in its claims about the existential status and motivating role of subjectively-held ideas beliefs, interests and commitments, as well as their role in explaining, in if/then terms, various patterns of human interaction. By contrast, the phenomenological critique of a self-defeating naturalism firmly rejects a naturalistically-driven objectivist approach to hate crime. The latter is rejected because it appears structurally inadequate to the patterns of motivation. These patterns are only accessible through a type of radically qualitative interpretive research. The latter needs to be receptive to the distinctly interpretive issues concerning meaning and its ever-renewed constitution, which alone can explain vital aspects of this phenomenon. The outlines of a Husserlian critique just mentioned is unlikely to be accepted by hate crime scholars who are already heavily invested in an objectivist methodological approach. Indeed, recognising the combination of the two assumptions that underlie the reductive naturalisation of not only consciousness but also the realm of ideas is especially helpful. It helps us better explain the specific reasons why subscribers to naturalistic objectivism can feel justified in dismissing, or simply ignoring, distinctly phenomenological questions and qualitative research more generally. Yet such a dismissive response makes little difference to our project because it is read as symptomatic. So, our phenomenology of hate crime continues to address qualitative questions and approaches concerning the scientific study of the interpretive preconditions for our consciousness-of hate crime. What is ironic here is that, in this sense, we take consciousness of science, scientific consciousness, more seriously than does objectivist social science.

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From the outset and throughout, our phenomenology of hate crime retains the scientific character of qualitative social science precisely by asking distinctly qualitative questions. Yet, the latter’s character and implications place them outside the scope of what is even comprehensible in social scientific terms for a naturalistic form of objectivism. Indeed, from an objectivist perspective, our Husserlian approach cannot even be recognised as a contribution to social scientific research precisely because its model of science is both radically qualitative and foundational with respect to the coming into presence of the very categories that objectivist social science of hate crime will inevitably take for granted. From a naturalistic standpoint, shaped by physicalist presuppositions, a Husserlian radically qualitative problematic “lacks reality.” This is precisely because it focuses upon hate-crime-as-perceived relative to motivated interpretive activities that are shown to be playing a constitutive function, including ongoing acts of selective perception. As a result, our phenomenological approach would stand accused of an unscientific failure to objectively study “the facts” of hate crime where the latter are (pre)defined exclusively in physicalist terms. This rejection is entirely comprehensible and self-consistent. Indeed, one result of the naturalistic definition of reality as essentially or primarily “physical,” is that non-real (or “ideal”) phenomenon of ideas, interests, beliefs, interpretations of right and wrong, fears, anxieties and desires permeating, say, a victim group’s awareness of its regular abuse, can only be interpreted as “lacking” the social scientific hallmarks of reality. This exclusion remains the case unless and until these phenomena exhibit measurable and material effects of a sufficiently physical kind to be classified as “facts,” and then only as facts of a certain type relevant to a distinctly causal-explanatory project grounded in a self-cancelling physicalist metaphysics. For example, an objectivist model of hate crime scholarship would be entirely self-consistent with its own (prejudicial) assumptions when it claims that culturally-­ derived meanings, shared beliefs, conceptions of research ethics, interpretive and ideological perspectives, as well as core notions of “discrimination,” “hostility,” “hate speech” etc., cannot, for scientific purposes, be recognised as realities at all. Within the overall order of reality-relevant-to-science, the realm of society made up of cultural traditions, intersubjective and individual subjectivities, as well as structures of communication and all manner of institutional practices related to hate crime, would – in principle – be utterly disregarded as “scientifically irrelevant.” Where scientific research is reduced to quantitative mathematical science then whatever cannot be measured is interpreted as unreal for scientific purposes. As a result of these various incompatible starting points and conceptions of science, explanation and subject-matter, it is difficult to even imagine how a mutually enriching dialogue could arise between these diametrically opposite approaches to hate crime. It is possible to conceive of a situation where these basic conflicts of orientation could lead to the outright mutual dismissal by each side of the other’s entire agenda. Yet, such “mutuality” is not equivalent. While a Husserlian critique of naturalistic objectivism plays an important role in clarifying the rationale for adopting a distinctly phenomenological approach to hate crime as a claimed remedy

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to naturalistic, objectivist and positivist forms of social science, it is doubtful whether the reverse is the case. The rationale of our phenomenology of hate crime has to build itself up discursively from the bottom up, as it were. By contrast, a naturalistically-conceived objectivist approach gains a perverse benefit from its refusal to address its own interpretive preconditions. Indeed, for an objectivist approach to hate crime, the non-physical realm, which our phenomenological approach pays special attention to, would be silently relegated to, at most, merely secondary and derivative aspects of physical thing-like material or material processes and events. Within an objectivist account of hate incidents, these social and cultural aspects of hate crime as lived can only be interpreted as little more than “in and of” the primary and pre-given world of nature, itself understood as their overarching and encompassing context. These non-physical aspects of hate crime must, from the start and throughout, be conceived of as being “in and of” the world of nature in the same way that peas are “in and of” their pods. Such apparently abstract considerations of the definition of reality-for-social-­ scientific-purposes have highly concrete and determinate effects upon the conduct of hate crime research. By means of its assumption-driven naturalistic reinterpretation, a wholly objectivist approach to hate crime would simply assume that a victim’s fear and anxiety do not have to be understood in terms of their subjective significance for her. Instead, such subjective feelings should be characterised and studied clinically only in terms of the essentially physical dimensions of neurological, psychophysical, biochemical, medical, and physiological events and processes. In other words, because naturalism refuses to either recognise or accept as “real,” anything that is not physical, all forms of “ideal” phenomenon associated with culture, intersubjectivity and consciousness, can be dismissed as “scientifically irrelevant” to the study of hate crime. On this basis, such phenomena – which are central for the research field of our phenomenology of hate crime – can be simply ignored. By contrast, the “facts” that are taken as comprising the research field of hate crime studies remain within the agenda of our alternative approach. Yet, we must analyse them as second-order interpretive constructs. The main interest and relevance of such “objective facts” lies in offering us clues to their underlying – if ongoing – processes of interpretive construction at the level of sense. There is an alternative, less extreme, possible objectivist response to the qualitative issues that our Husserlian model of hate crime prioritises. This more moderate and nuanced form of naturalistic objectivism could take the position that the presence of ideal phenomenon, including a victim’s fear and anxiety, our consciousness of specific culturally-defined aspects of a hate incident, or the latter’s police investigation, can still be “made relevant” for naturalistic-objectivist research projects. Such a qualified form of objectivism could “recuperate” these interpretive aspects of hate crime as lived by interpreting them as if they are, in themselves, constituted in a manner that is essentially physical. For example, bodily neurological and/or biochemical manifestations of, say, fear and anxiety can be scientifically identified, analysed and measured, with the results deployed within a materialist scientific approach to hate crime. The required interpretive outcome can thus be achieved by

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the expedient of systematically reinterpreting such ideal phenomena, including a victim’s consciousness of being victimised, reductively  – as if they are in themselves and at core intrinsically physical, or at least rooted in an underlying material dimension. This qualified form of objectivism does not, however, evade the main thrust of the Husserlian critique of the self-cancelling character of the naturalisation of both the realms of intersubjective ideas and consciousness. In addition to the distinctly naturalistic presuppositions that we have just outlined, a strictly objectivist approach to hate crime issues would also rest upon other specific – yet still taken-for-granted – underlying assumptions. The most basic of these is that, beyond the (inter)subjective cultural realm of reinterpreting the interpretations of others within a shared life-world of contingent and socially-established and sustained meanings, there simply is a pre-given “objective reality in itself.” That is, the naive presumption that there exists an accessible objective reality that is simply “out there,” on hand as it is-in-itself, and of which the “raw objective facts” of hate crime represent a constituent part and subset. There is another expression of naturalistic objectivism with materialist presuppositions that is potentially applicable to hate crime research, and which could be termed variations on Hume’s sensualism. We argue that such a variation presumes that it is not only possible but also scientifically-valid to reduce all physical and psychological being to collections of sensations derived from the human body  – sights, sounds, tactile sensations etc.23 While recognising a number of these and perhaps other conceivable variations and permeation, there remains a common core to a naturalistic objectivist approach to hate crime-related issues. All forms of naturalism, in the senses of the term that our current chapter has set out, share a common methodological presumption. Namely, that the ultimate justification of all (social) scientific knowledge is to be sought in observation through perceptual experiences of visible material determinations.24 It would seem to follow that a physical attack upon two individuals with disabilities who, as a matter of observable fact, have clearly been singled out because of their “factual” disabilities, simply “is” a disability-related hate crime: one that immediately merits being officially-classified and scientifically explained as such. Yet, the Husserlian critique here is that even if, for argument’s sake, it was ever possible to access every relevant observable material determinant of this incident from every angle, this would not validate an objectivist approach. Even here, there would be nothing strictly observable with respect to this incident’s “material facts” to allow us to differentiate evidence of a disability-related assault from a simple assault upon someone who incidentally had physical difficulties. The most one could determine through external observation is that this person’s behaviour involved physical contact with the body of another involving a certain measure of force, which led to specific damaging physical results capable of corrective medical interventions.

23 24

 Hua, 25: 9; Hua, 27: 264.  Hua, 30: 18.

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Yet, whether such observed physical contact amounts to a “deliberate assault” perhaps motivated by legally required evidence of “hostility,” or represents a “simple clumsy accident,” cannot be determined by observation alone. This is because the intentions and motivations of the parties, which are vital to the differentiation of hate crimes from other offences, and from the latter from lawful acts, are not visible data. There is also the more radical point that the very identification of “disability” involves an interpretive differentiation of a presupposed conception of “bodily normality” from “bodily abnormalities.” The criteria at play here remain not only culturally-specific but also interpretively relative. A person with reduced hearing and sight capacities might well complain that although she has succeeded in making considerable efforts to communicate with those with more conventional hearing and sight capacities, the reverse is rarely the case. So, on what normative-rhetorical basis is she being classified as the one who is “disabled?” Our point here is not to endorse this alternative differentiation but rather to highlight the interpretively performed character of any such differentiation. Relying upon the various presumptions of naturalism we have already discussed is the secondary derivative presumption that we can readily classify and sub-classify perceived hate incidents and hate crimes in a “no-nonsense” and straightforward manner. Such classification can, it is presumed, be carried out by simply applying a set of official formulae, which are set out in legislation and official police and prosecution guidelines, to “the facts of the case.” Such application of classificatory schemes can be based upon the presumed “inherent” qualities and characteristics of the events themselves. Earlier we suggested that objectivism, which is proud of its total rejection of all metaphysical phenomenon and forms of analysis, makes its own metaphysical assumptions. We can further substantiate this claim with additional examples of the implicit operation of taken-for-granted dichotomies. For instance, while immersed in the objectivism of the natural attitude, we interpret experiences of hate crime through the prism of a series of implicit interpretive assumptions. In turn, these are often based upon various either/or dichotomies. In keeping with an unacknowledged materialist metaphysics, objectivism encourages the projection of the idea that the twin realms of objectivity and subjectivity are mutually exclusive opposites. The implicit deployment of this dichotomy can result in a construal of the experience of hate crime through the interpretive lens of a radical opposition between the alleged subjectivity of its “internal” (or “imminent”) dimensions, on the one hand, and – on the other – the alleged transcendence of its “external” – and supposedly objective – aspects. These “objective aspects,” which alone are able to provide scientific evidence relevant to causal explanation, can include the material behaviour of perpetrators, together with its physical effects and impact upon the bodies and property of hate crime victims.25

25

 Husserl 1964: 3.

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Insofar as objectivist presuppositions shape our perceptions of hate crime-related issues, we can consider the question of whether a particular incident of abuse is (or is not) a “hate crime” of a particular sub-type to be a “strictly objective one,” as a “purely factual question.” This judgement would imply this is a question that is uncontaminated by all forms of “subjective” belief or underlying assumptions.26 It is in this way that the naturalistic objectivism of the natural attitude remains entirely reliant upon a subjective/objective dichotomy, and its secondary offshoot: the subject/object dualism. These closely related dichotomies underpinning an objectivist approach to hate crime comprise mutually exclusive either/or oppositions of the kind that have long shaped Western metaphysics. By refusing to view hate crime as lived through the lens of these dichotomies, our phenomenology of hate crime appears as an unusual approach even within a social science context. The either/or dichotomy upon which the naturalistic aspect of a strictly objectivist approach to hate crime rests, bases itself upon the assumption that our lived experience of, say, a specific hate incident necessarily inhabits two parallel realities. On the one hand, there is the subjectively-experienced incident given to us perceptually as something meaningful, meant in specific ways, and during certain modes of experience. On the other hand, there is supposed to be “the objective facts” of the incident itself. As material entities, these “facts” generally give themselves to us perceptually, to our scientific gaze, purely as they really are “in themselves.” As already discussed, the latter supposedly intrinsic and objective qualities of the incident are presumed to have a distinctive existential (or “ontological”) status: one that is entirely independent of, and transcendent to, the inner subjectivity of anyone’s actual experiences and interpretations of its meaning. This being-status of an incident is also deemed to pre-date its exact quantification, such that the process of quantification is not, in any sense, constitutive  – or even transformative  – of “the data.”27 From the start and throughout, these naturalistic presuppositions to an objectivist approach to hate crime operate in the background as silent determinants. As such, their implications both mediate and shape our concrete – and apparently entirely “immediate”  – perceptions of hate crime-related issues. They predetermine just what it is that we are now seeing, hearing, feeling etc. Yet, as far as our phenomenological approach is concerned, the assumed validity of these presuppositions, as well as those presupposition-driven perceptions that arise from their application, remains far from self-evident. Our phenomenology of hate crime needs to probe far deeper than a simple description of the surface content of second-order and derivative sense-contents. We must, instead, engage in a reflective process of identifying, grasping, addressing, and critically evaluating not only the characteristics but also the impact of these taken-for-granted assumptions upon the lived experience of hate crime. This critical examination is needed to get

 Husserl 1964: 37–8.  ‘[A]nother prejudice: the belief in an absolute world, a world existing in itself, as the substrate of truths in themselves, which, without question, pertain to it.’ Husserl 1969: 277. 26 27

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a clearer understanding of the radical character and rationale of its own diametrically opposite approach to hate crime-related issues, based upon a completely opposite series of commitments and research questions and methods. The details of the various difficulties and contradictions arising the presumptions and dichotomising of an objectivist approach will be addressed in a later section devoted to developing a fully-fledged Husserlian critique of objectivism as a topic in its own right: a critique that plays a major role in clarifying the rationale of our approach.

4  O  bjectivism Encourages Positivist Forms of Hate Crime Research This section has two aims: to demonstrate the various ways in which a combination of objectivism and the latter’s naturalistic presuppositions will tend to result in a particular type of hate crime research. And, secondly, to further prepare the ground for the tasks of a later section that suggests that such research is prone to various major difficulties and contradictions, which represent instructive failures and warnings for hate crime scholarship, and which instead point towards the need for a Husserlian approach. Indeed, a close examination of any purely objectivist form of hate crime research, shaped by naturalistic presuppositions, would illustrate, support and re-affirm Husserl’s powerful objections to a naturalistic form of objectivism more generally. Such an examination would also be helpful in pointing out the detailed rationale for a revised Husserlian alternative approach to hate crime as lived considered as both a foil and a remedial offering with significant corrective potential. The objectivist presuppositions of the natural attitude are also an especially interesting substantive (as opposed to strictly methodological) phenomenon. This is the case insofar as they shape, even encourage, the deployments of everyday prejudices some of which are especially relevant to both hate crime and hate speech. However, it would be amiss of us to neglect their potential for also influencing academic researchers’ analysis of such criminality, particularly insofar as these are characterised by distinctly traditional “positivistic tendencies” in social science research. In other words, these presuppositions can mediate hate crime research from both within established academic traditions, as well as from the influence of wider culture upon researchers. The latter arises wherever objectivism operates as a key element of the natural attitude’s “common sense.” However, in this section, our central focus falls upon the specifically methodological influence of these presuppositions upon positivistic academic research into hate crime. For Husserl, and as already discussed, objectivism strives simply to establish: ‘what the world, the physical as well as the spiritual world, is in fact’. This fact-­ based notion of: ‘objectivity which dominates our positive sciences with respect to method … is the basis for the support and widespread acceptance of philosophical

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and ideological positivism.’28 In other words, the exclusive focus on worldly-facts of hate crime as the “shining path” for authentic forms of hate crime research represents a specific and by no means necessary interpretive commitment.’ This takes the form of an implicit belief that is not only a philosophical assumption but also a distinctly ideological practice. The question we both raise and need to keep open at this stage is: “can this type of research ever hope to successfully address precisely these specifically interpretive and assumption-driven aspects of its own character as such? Is it possible for objectivist-positivist research to explain these aspects in terms that are fully consistent with its own perspective upon hate crime?” As previously noted in more general terms, the natural attitude’s objectivism endorses and reinforces an exclusively positivistic, fact-oriented approach to social scientific hate crime research. An important scholarly manifestation of the objectivist premise is the “common sense” contention that either a hypothesis that, say, “hate crimes hurt more” is supported by “the facts,” in which case it is deemed “objectively true,” at least potentially; or that it is not, in which case it is judged “false.” Objectivist premises suggests that the scholarly task of hate crime scholarship is to appropriately identify, grasp and “explain” “objective facts” in a strictly objective manner, that is, “impartial,” in terms of possible causation and patterns of distribution. Hence, if hate crime perpetrators can be identified as largely white, unemployed young men “suffering from” poor educational attainment, above average exposure to lead pollution in urban air, and poor nutrition, then certain presumptions arise. For example, it may be presumed that there is something about one or more of these “statistically significant” actual characteristics” that, as presumed causal factors, “objectively explains” the variations and distribution of this given phenomenon. If hate crime, and criminality more generally, is predefined as “objectively-­ identifiable behaviour” caused by the impact of a variety of material environmental factors, then changes in the objectively-identified levels of unemployment, relative poverty, nutrition, the effects of lead pollution on the brains of offenders etc., can all be investigated scientifically as potential explanatory factors. The presumption is that human activity is in essence “behaviour” that can be observed in terms of its correlations with external environmental causal factors. These possible external “casual factors” can, an objectivist approach suggests, be investigated to identify, narrow down, and analyse the most important objective determinants of perpetrators’ “behaviour.” Such a causal-explanatory analysis takes place within an orientation that is always-already concerned with the prediction and overall control of its subject matter. Objectivism also operates with a certain model of valid knowledge about, say, hate crime. Where a series of independently-conducted social scientific studies of offenders, which are oriented by exclusively naturalistic and objectivist-based methodologies, generate results that mutually corroborate each other, then this is taken as a vital sign of “progress” in the research. It is supposed to indicate that

28

 Husserl 1970: 6–7.

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“valid knowledge” about the causal factors behind perpetrators’ behaviour has now been, at least provisionally, secured. However, such would-be scientific knowledge remains provisional. This is because what is represented as their “empirical results” remain necessarily subject to future verification, neutralisation and falsification if – but only if – they are endorsed by the findings of later studies of a similarly positivistic, and hence comparable, type. It appears to follow from these objectivist premises and naturalistic presuppositions that hate crime scholars should “stick to the facts” about this topic. These “facts” are, it is presumed, revealed in either officially-generated criminal statistics, which are based upon state-centric definitions and classification schemas, or can be self-generated by the activities of researchers themselves. The latter is possible if researchers conduct further empirical criminological studies informed by positivist methodologies. Such scholarship should, it is further presumed in line with objectivist premises already discussed, also strictly follow exclusively quantitative research methods. The latter must be designed to analyse the implications of these “facts” in order to identify “statistically significant” patterns. Objectivism culminates in a mathematical science of nature: a science whose sense of method is exclusively quantitative. In this context, Heidegger’s concise summary of the Husserlian critique of naturalistic forms of objectivism as an extension of a natural scientific orientation into the humanities, including even philosophy and the social sciences, is especially instructive. It states29: Naturalism coincides with the discovery of nature. … The discovery of nature in question is the discovery of it as the object of a special science, the mathematical science of nature. Naturalism is a consequence of this discovery of nature. That is to say, the type of being and object in the context of nature becomes the guide to the content in comprehending every sort of being and objectivity. Accordingly, the specific rigor of the mathematical science of nature serves as the criterion for every domain of being and epistemic determination of it. The question is the extent to which a determinate idea of a science and object of this sort has in fact expanded to the thematic field of philosophy, in what sense the objective field of philosophy and its method are subjected to the idea of the mathematical science of nature.30

In this way, the naturalistic side of objectivism is able to generate a perspective on hate crime issues and questions that is particularly susceptible to the marginalisation of qualitative issues. These are marginalised in favour of practices of quantification of whatever is designated as “the true facts” in terms of “statistically significant” patterns, such as in terms of reporting, prosecution, conviction, or another type of crime statistic. It may be concluded that: “there is a problem of under-reporting of hate crimes because only 35.27% of such crimes are reported, of which only 15.89% result in prosecution.” Yet there is no quantifiable, “purely factual,” reason why so-called “under-reporting” is any more of an objective issue  Our later expressly evaluative section will consider whether such an extension amounts to a unwarranted over-extension. 30   Martin Heidegger, ‘Introduction to phenomenological research,’ Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005: 47–8. 29

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for an empirical study than “over-reporting.” This is because when viewed in objectivist terms, what is taken as matter-of-fact reality is able to exhibit no purely empirical evidence either for or against either category. Nor can it ground the idea of there being an objectively ascertainable “normal rate” of reporting hate incidents relative to actual incidence from which we can determine precise rates of underand over-reporting. If hate crime scholarship follows these two methodological imperatives of developing not only an exclusively fact-orientation but also the deployment of quantitative research methods, then it will be presumed that “unnecessary difficulties” can be largely or totally avoided. The sources of presumed difficulties may be attributed to the “distractions” created by a range of tendencies that phenomenology exhibits. These include philosophical self-reflection, the inherent variabilities of subjectivities, and even the “soft data” of radically qualitative analysis of the kind produced by our phenomenology of hate crime and related interpretive studies from other partly overlapping social constructionist traditions. From the start and throughout, a prior commitment to objectivism and its various presuppositions necessitates the dismissal of qualitative studies and their evidence and indeed “raw” qualitative evidence more generally. Such a commitment implies that the “facts about hate crime” must instead be grasped in a truly scientific manner whose rigour copies that of nineteenth century physics in its freedom from the “distortion” effects of “merely subjective” influences. As already discussed, the latter is held to include researchers’ latent beliefs, ideologies, religious, ethical and moral values, as well as other more general personal and biographically-specific prejudices that could bias the entire research process. The core presumption here is that reality-in-general, and the specific reality of hate crime themes, in particular, needs to be characterised in line with the assumptions of naïve objectivism as that which is exactly quantifiable.31 As a result of what is supposed by this assumption, it appears self-evident that the ideal of the exactitude of the “exact” natural sciences, especially physics, should – as exemplars of scientific methods as such  – should be simply imported into the social sciences. Such importation, which may itself be characterised as a rational self-refinement from within the social sciences, thereby permeates sociological, criminological, psychological and socio-legal studies of hate crime. It appears to follow logically from this cluster of related presuppositions, none of which are “facts,” that there is a strict requirement for a truly social scientific approach to hate crime to prioritises quantitative over qualitative criminological research methods, or even displace the latter altogether as inherently “soft,” overly-subjective and thereby unscientific. This is because the former alone is presumed to yield “hard,” exact and precise data; whereas the latter can, at best, generate “soft,” subjectively-relative and fuzzy subjective understandings of hate crime. The latter, it is presumed, barely merit the prestigious title “data” at all.

31

 Husserl 1970: § 67.

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The guiding underlying presumption here, which flies under the flag of the “unity of the sciences,” is that “science is science.” This mantra is deemed to apply irrespective of whether the topic is itself natural or societal. Hence, the lesson for hate crime scholarship should be that the exact mathematically-oriented sciences of nature, especially physics, are the exemplary forms of science-in-general, which any social scientific approach to hate crime issues must unquestionably follow, endorse and exemplify.32 The key point here is to simply recognise the presupposition-­ driven character of this demand. The task of its systematic Husserlian critique will be taken up later because the primary imperative here is to clarify the target of such critique, to explicate the presuppositions of an objectivistic approach to hate crime that explain its characteristic operations. Any such critique risks being misunderstood – or stigmatised for ideological reasons – as “anti-scientific.” Our phenomenology of hate crime certainly recognises the natural sciences’ clear successes in explaining, predicting and – when applied in the form of technology – controlling aspects of the physical world of nature. This appreciation includes aspects of the societal and institutional worlds that are more or less reliant upon these natural scientific aspects as their substrates, such as elements of the health service, air traffic control or the engineering work of transport infrastructure. Yet, we also must recognise that such technical successes in explanation, prediction, harnessing and control over natural phenomenon and their behaviour under different environmental conditions of weight-load, heat, cold, windy etc., has created the questionable impression that only such “exact” sciences are true sciences-in-general. In turn, this presumption can generate the idea that not only empirical studies of hate crime but also even philosophy must become an equally rigorous naturalistic science, which is oriented towards absolute laws of society, social action, and human thought.33 When viewed naively, such admiration of the natural sciences can create a specific conviction in the minds of subscribers to positivist social science: Namely, that, if hate crime scholarship, for example, is ever to become truly scientific, and thereby take its place among the other social sciences, then it too must adopt the same, or at least broadly similar notions, of scientific research. It too must be oriented towards – and centred around – purely fact-oriented scientific methodologies and quantitative research methods linked to materialist causal explanatory approaches to the conduct  ‘It is only a misleading prejudice to believe that the methods of historically given a priori sciences, all of which are exclusively exact sciences of ideal objects, must serve forthwith as models for every new science, particularly for our transcendental phenomenology – as though there could be eidetic sciences of but one single methodic type, that of “exactness.”’ Husserl 1982: 169. 33  Heidegger summary of Husserl’s critique of naturalism states: ‘The basic character of this science, apart from its rigor, is distinguished by the fact that its results can be formulated in laws. A law-likeness that is scientific in the eminent sense is called “universally binding.” The binding character of these propositions is so predominant and at the same time so imposing in human existence that it presents the genuine motive that leads to absolutizing the idea of this science. …It is thus no accident that a science that has elevated itself to such rigorousness, as natural science has, makes this task its own and that the specific objects of philosophy succumb to natural science.’ 2005: 48. 32

References

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of research. These, in turn, need to yield no less exact results that, like those of the natural sciences, are amenable to statistical analysis of their concrete implications for explanatory purposes. Husserl’s Crisis argues that naïve objectivism in the natural sciences has been assisted by the modern scientific concentration on quantifiable ‘primary’ material qualities. This has meant that subjectivity has, for many c­ enturies, become conceived by, say, modern empirical-clinical forms of “scientific psychology.” In short, the natural attitude’s objectivist premises, themselves mediated by naturalistic assumptions, pre-determine the significance of what the objectivism of positivist social scientific accounts of hate crime can interpret as the “objective facts” about not only this topic but also specific policy implications. One result can be the predominance of quantitative research over radically qualitative research, including phenomenology, and the displacement of the latter’s focus upon specifically interpretive and constitutive questions. In the next more critical sections, we will argue that this displacement is perversely counter-reflective, dogmatically anti-scientific, and thus self-contradictory. This is because qualitative and constitutive questions concerning the life-world origins of categories of meaning(s), and relations between such categories, also supply the foundations for its own research practices. Our next chapter begins to prepare the ground for a distinctly critical analysis of how the natural attitude’s presuppositions of naturalism and objectivism tend to disguise and distort access to the phenomenon of hate crime as lived. Before we can criticise the results of such prejudicial distortion, we must first describe the details of how it operates in practice.

References Heidegger, Martin. 2005. Introduction to Phenomenological Research. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hua 1. Husserl, E. 1950. In Cartesianische meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Hua 25. 1910–1911. “Philosophie als strenge wissenschaft”, logos. internationale Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und Kultur 1, pp. 289–341. Hua 27. 1989. “Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937),” Husserliana 27, eds., T.  Nenon and H.-R. Sepp. Husserl, E. 1960. [1939]. Cartesian Meditations, Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1964. [1907]. The Idea of Phenomenology. Trans. Lee Hardy. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 1965. [1912/1935] Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy’ Translated with Notes and an Introduction by Quentin Lauer, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1965 containing the 1935 Vienna lecture as well as Husserl’s 1911/12 essay in Logos, ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.’ ———. 1969. [1929] Formal and Transcendental Logic. Berlin: Springer, 9th ed. ———. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanson: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1973. Experience and Judgement: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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———. 1977. [1925]. Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, summer semester, 1925. Trans. John Scanlon. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1980. Phenomenology and the Foundation of the Sciences. Third Book: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980. ———. 1982. [1913]. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Nijhoff. Lamprecht, S.P. 1944. In Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Y.H. Krikorian, 18. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. Luft, Sebastian. 1998. Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitude. Continental Philosophy Review 31: 153–170.

The Natural Attitude’s Objectivism as a Type of Closure

Abstract  This chapter connects some of our earlier more descriptive analyses with an emerging critical stance that is more fully developed later during Part Two. In this chapter we characterise some of the distinctive effects of the natural attitude as including a form of cognitive closure and resulting exclusions of experiential aspects of hate crime. This is a highly prejudicial form whose operations tend to be self-­ fulfilling in the sense of a dogmatic and implicit form of self-validation that bypass expressly discursive justification. Going against the grain of such closure-by-­ exclusion, which is also exclusion-by-closure, we argue that it is vital to salvage what is excluded. Such a salvaging operation is needed to gain access to a mass of qualitative data, and thereby broaden out the source material of hate crime studies.

1  Introduction Below we illustrate these general points with a type of case study to illustrate the natural attitude’s tendencies towards closure-by-exclusion. The latter serves to obstruct our awareness of what is, for us, “questionable” within some questions that underlie the experience of hate crime and related official policies structured around “the problem of …” or the “problem with …” Although represented, more precisely misrepresented, in objectivist terms as “factual,” a closer analysis shows the operation of all manner of disguised value-judgements and questionable normative presuppositions. In turn, such revelation allows us to draw a range of instructive lessons from our analysis of the price we pay for allowing the natural attitude’s work of closure to go uncontested. In addition, this hard-won insight helps paves the way for the refinement of our own phenomenological approach, in particular, its attention to buried, hidden and marginalised aspects of lived experience. In short, this chapter aims to discuss the extent to which the adoption of the natural attitude’s objectivism creates a tendency towards an unreflective form of cognitive closure immunising subscribers from the possibilities and responsibilities of autonomous self-criticism. We ask: “Where the natural attitude prevails, which basic questions are, as a result of this interpretive orientation’s domination of consciousness, being avoided?” How is such closure being accomplished? And “upon what basis of assumptions is it predicated?”

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Given its subject-matter, our phenomenology of hate crime is necessarily interested in how prejudicial forms of understanding tend to operate and on what interpretive basis they do so. It follows that we need to take seriously the underlying interpretive dynamics behind both substantive, as well as methodological, forms of cognitive closure. The latter can be understood as part of a wider process of perpetuating prejudices relevant to hate crime studies. Our phenomenology of hate crime needs to gain insight into how, relative to various orthodoxies, the closure of minds to all manner of alternative interpretations is actually being achieved both routinely and systematically as performative accomplishments. For not only methodological but also substantive reasons, the various interpretive ways in which such forms of cognitive closure are actually taking shape and being sustained thus merit our close and serious critical attention: the task of this section.

2  The Characteristics of Closure The first most general point to make in this regard is that, for as long as our concerns for hate crime issues remain entangled within the natural attitude’s encompassing interpretive matrix, the latter will not generally be articulated and come into view as an express topic. Although the natural attitude takes the form of a generic and pervasive default position, it is rarely – if ever – made into an express topic for reflective and self-reflective consideration. There is nothing more like “common-sense” than taking the very criteria of so-called “common sense” itself for granted. What is supposedly “obvious” and “familiar,” even the idea of a “discrimination,” is often not adequately known, in a strong sense of this term, precisely because its qualitative basis, it’s very “whatness,” is routinely taken as emphatically “obvious” and “familiar.” For as long as our perceptions of, say, hate incidents remain shaped by the objectivist assumptions that we have already outlined, the reality of hate crime can only appear in the form of a cluster of specific material facts, which – it seems -alone deserve to capture our attention. As a result, in neither the identification of “facts” of an incident as such nor with respect to their subsequent characterisation as “the facts-of….,” can we recognise any kind of underlying interpretive perspective at work. Through such closure, the character, content and implications of the natural attitude in general, and its specific operations in concrete perceptions of specific incidents are made inaccessible. Whatever events, objects or individuals are perceived within an incident, or court proceedings, certainly appear experientially. Yet, what remains entirely closed off and hidden here is the underlying processes of their interpretive assembly and construal that, although unseen, remain integral to the seeing itself. Such processes remain integral to its constitutive role in generating the very intelligibility of whatever appears; that is, in constituting the latter’s “whatness.” In this respect, the former, itself an interpretive outcome, prevails and holds

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court at the centre stage of our conscious attention. But this appearance prevails at the expense of the underlying backstage or off-stage interpretive process of determining the qualitative “whatness” of that which is being construed as, say, a “religious” – as opposed to a “racial” – hate incident. Closure is optimised by the ongoing reiteration of a sense of “the obvious,” of what “goes without saying as a matter of course.” That which is deemed to be “obvious,” such as the contention that marriage is confined to one man and one woman in a heterosexual relationship, can become reiterated without question as a “matter of course.” When this premise is changed, for example, the recognition of non-­ heterosexual relationships, it becomes easier to recognise the initial highly subjective and contextual presumptions. Until this change, the qualitative foundations operate within the unreflective realm of passive consciousness. Here, it would function in a manner that more closely resembles a subtext than as an expressly present and transparent topic standing there before the attentive gaze of a reflecting ego-­ subject. As a result, within everyday life, this orientation – together with its various interpretive recipes and other procedures – tends to remain inconspicuously submerged below the waterline level of mundane consciousness. Yet, this presupposition-­ driven orientation itself continues to operate there as a driver of interpretive practices related to societal and subcultural prejudices but precisely as something unthematic, unthought and unpredicated. What stands out as thematic is, for example, the inconceivable character of “gay marriage” but not the underlying productive interpretive commitments and presuppositions that first enable this value-judgement to arise. The product stands and captures the spotlight of attention at the expense of self-­ awareness of the underlying interpretive process of its ongoing production, which typically remains hidden. In this way, the passive sense constitutive work of the natural attitude tends to blind its “subscribers” (which is everyone!) to the reality that it really is a specific yet pervasive interpretive orientation: one with a definite worldview and belief structure that encompasses not only the field of hate crime but the whole of social relations. These potentially ideological blinkers with respect to whatever is merely assumed, presupposed and taken for granted, can operate ideologically in ways that we need to discuss more fully later. Such blinkers narrow the field of our everyday vision to ensure that, whenever we are entangled in the natural attitude’s interpretive matrix either in a research or a more general capacity, our perceptions are partial, limited and restricted. For example, they ensure we cannot become aware, in effect self-aware, of vital constitutive features of our resulting “common sense” world of everyday life. In particular, wherever the natural attitude prevails, subscribers remain oblivious to how its various differentiations of “normality”/“abnormality,” between a homeworld’s “insiders”/“outsiders,” etc. are first arising and taking shape within our consciousness of, say, a specific and alien “them.” When for example an American President complains that the U.S. does not receive enough blond-haired blue-eyed Norwegians as immigrants, he is only indirectly stating that Haitians, Latinos, and African would-be immigrants are  – for

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racial reasons – of lesser standing.1 Yet, the prejudicial workings of the underlying racially-tinged presumptions remain hidden from sight, even possibly from Trump himself. Presumably, when the President sees on Fox News caravans of Latin American citizens moving towards the US borders with a view to immigration as a “national security threat” posed by a “dangerous invading army” that includes drug-­ dealers, rapists etc., and compares what he sees with the physical look and appearance of Norwegians, the underlying racial-cultural dimension to his immediate perceptions is not itself visible. Instead, he simply and straightforwardly perceives with his own eyes “undesirable” (an “alien them” not like us) and “desirable” (“like us”) potential immigrants. Within such differentiation of us/them, neither the implicit criteria at play nor its underlying presuppositions, become visible. We further fail to notice how these arise not as passive receipts of an external and given factual reality but as concrete performative-interpretive accomplishments, a sense made and re-constructed. Indeed, where the natural attitude prevails, we become and remain almost entirely oblivious to how our sense of hate crime-related issues, their meaning, significance, and implications, are being shaped, behind our backs as it were, by the natural attitude’s objectivist and other premises and presuppositions. We also fail to notice how this closure occurs in ways that tend to immunise their interpretive sources and foundations from reflective scrutiny – and thus accountability.2 Instead, the focus becomes resolutely fixed on issues preconceived in a prejudicial manner. It can remain fixated upon, say, extracting an answer to the question “why is it that we don’t get more Norwegian immigrants?” rather than on reflecting upon the interpretive presuppositions of the question itself. Our phenomenology of hate crime recognises, however, that there is a tendency towards objectivism in all our forms of everyday understanding and mundane knowledge about our surrounding life-world. This tendency embraces the consciousness of phenomenologists prior to undertaking their required methodologically-­controlled, critical self-reflection. This pervasiveness is explicable because objectivism represents the natural attitude’s own implicit starting point and unacknowledged default position: one that is often wholly or partly parochial to a specific cultural tradition enduring at a particular time and place. As phenomenologists, our starting point is not that “we” constitute an “us,” with subscribers to the natural attitude being perceived as an alien “them.” Rather, we too begin our reflections mired in the natural attitude albeit with a determination to overcome, incrementally and as far as possible, the types of cognitive and ethical closure that accomplishes this condition.  In mid- January 2018, President Donald Trump reported asked a group of senators why the US had to allow in immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean rather than from places like Norway.’ See the Independent, ‘Norwegians tell Trump we don’t want to come to your s∗∗∗hole country,’ 12/01/2018: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ norwegians-tell-trump-we-dont-want-to-come-to-your-shole-country-a8156666.html. See also https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/shithole-countries-where-trump-insultedphotos-beautiful-destinations-a8155676.html 2  Husserl, 1970: § 58. 1

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As we have noted already, when taken and applied together, objectivism and naturalism generally assume that the topics being encountered, including hate crime issues and questions concerning issues of race, disability, sexuality, and gender, possess an intrinsic meaning: one supposedly based upon their “inherent nature.”3 For present purposes concerning the interpretive dynamics of closure, as well as lack of both transparency and accountability, what is especially relevant is the specific rhetorical impact(s) of what is hidden from view. In particular, what impact can the assumption of an intrinsic meaning to, say, “normal sexuality” have whenever, for example, we refer to questions of hate speech in relation to all manner of cultural differences? Here, we need to ask: how, in detail, does the application of this presumption of an intrinsic nature co-generate perceptions of events that are prejudicial? How, in themselves, do the derivative perceptions about, say, Norwegians, exhibit qualities that are either largely or wholly in accord with whatever has already, without self-­ reflection, been interpretively projected and superimposed as their intrinsic nature? In their very immediacy, prejudicial perceptions arising from within the natural attitude appear to re-affirm the underlying objectivist/naturalistic prejudices that continually shape whatever is perceived as “evidence” about, say, hate crime-related issues. With respect to the natural attitude’s tendencies towards closure, we need to explore what is it that effectively “closes the loop” of this circular process of dubious self-validation by reference to the evidence of perception, more precisely, perceptual judgement posing as simple “observation of facts” or “factual issues”? Here, we could refer back to President Trump’s apparently fact-oriented (and therefore “value-free”) question: “why don’t we get more Norwegian immigrants?” The Husserlian answer is the natural attitude’s tendencies towards closure is assisted by the way in which such “factual evidence” appears to sufficiently “corroborate” the presumed validity of the initial and always presumed prejudicial biases that underpin objectivism itself. What arises is a self-validating circular process of interpretation. As a result, from the start and throughout, our phenomenology of hate crime needs to do two things. First, recognise the all-embracing mediation of the natural attitude’s own prejudicial standpoint as one of its core hallmark characteristics. Second, we need to find ways of extricating our own perceptions of this topic from the forms and processes of cognitive closure that result from such prejudicial mediation. We need to show how the question “why don’t we get more Norwegian immigrants?” is not essentially or primarily a factual one, at least not other than in a trivial quantitative sense. Rather, both the question itself, as well as any apparently value-free “factual answers” it elicits in the form of “because ….,” both operate within a prejudicial racial-tinged agenda whose presuppositions overlaps with those of hate speech perpetrators. Take another example, the idea of “normal sexuality” and “marriage” can be culturally and institutionally defined by the natural attitude in prejudicial moralistic  Havi Carel and Darian Meacham (eds.) Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature, Cambridge: CUP, 2013. 3

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terms as strictly factual phenomena that are “intrinsically” confined to heterosexual couples. I can point to a newly-wed man and woman who are holding hands and looking at each with love and passion, and then say: “Look there is a ‘normal’ couple showing a ‘natural type of attraction and sexuality.” On this perceptual but still prejudicial basis, it then becomes possible to interpret an encounter with someone self-identified as “gay and married” in terms of: 1. A formal contradiction at the level of meaning. This is because marriage “by definition” and long-standing tradition is an exclusively heterosexual institution, and this forms part of its intrinsic meaning. 2. A substantial form of deviance, i.e., a supposedly immediate experience, which is given in an intuitive form, of the presence of “abnormality,” of “queerness,” even of “evil abomination.”

3  Closure as Self-Fulfilling In turn, the results of prejudicial interpretations, which in its most crass forms can be expressed as abusive hate speech of a “homophobic” type, rest upon underlying objectivist premises. These concern the posited existence of an intrinsic objective reality and moral order: one that, by happy coincidence, just happens to coincide with the specific values of the interpreter, which – in turn – are reaffirmed by homophobic hate speech directed towards this – or any other – gay couple. As such, the “factual evidence” contained in these derivative interpretive outcomes, which are naively felt to be purely immediate and reality-based, is deceptive. This evidence appears to implicitly claim one thing, to be immediate observations of whatever is immediately there to be seen with our own eyes. However, self-reflection shows that  – in reality  – such apparently corroborating “evidence” is quite different. These interpretive perceptions of, a “normal married couple,” are, in themselves, neither entirely cognitive nor entirely grounded in the specific experiential content supplied by the perceptual process alone. If hate crime perpetrators see, in a literal sense, media images of specific classes of would be immigrants as an “invading horde of threatening invaders,” this is not corroboration of a previously unsupported contention by purely perceptual evidence. It is not the sights, sound, auditory and tactile sensations arising from experiencing, say, a newly-wed couple, or a hate incident involving the physical and verbal abuse of a gay couple, which contain the prejudicial element. Instead, because these superficially immediate perceptions of “this normal couple,” as well as that of “that deviant couple,” are clearly mediated by a range of previously acquired value-­ judgements. In turn, this mediation takes place in an unseen covert way that serves to supplement their authentic “pre-prejudicial” intuitive contents such that these become prejudiced. As a result, what is taking place here in relation to the c­ onnection between the assertions of hate speech and perceptual evidence used to corroborate the latter is best characterised as a mediated form of “perceptual judgement.”

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Our phenomenology of hate crime needs to contrast such a perceptual judgement, which could be saturated with discriminatory characterisations, as opposed to the idea (perhaps more precisely “regulatory ideal”) of a “pure perception:” one that, without making any discriminatory value-judgements, simply “takes in” what is there to be seen with little or no addition or subtraction. If we keep this standard in mind, it becomes easier for analytical purposes to better grasp how prejudicial and mediated perceptual judgements about one or more victim groups can operate to seemingly “justify” an abusive set of responses to individuals designated and identified as, say, “gay and married,” or even as “married and bisexual.” In turn, such spurious “justification” may serve as a spur to motivate specific hate crimes against gay persons. When entangled as an insider within the natural attitude’s orientation, we live in a surrounding lifeworld in a manner that, as already noted, largely takes the existence, even the presence, of this “real world” for granted, and thereby closes off any room for questioning and critical analysis of presuppositions. And yet our resulting “common sense” orientation towards hate crime issues is always-already in a condition of both presuming and building upon the prior existence and reality of this pre-­given and taken-for-granted “world.” As we go about and negotiate our life situations on an episode-by-episode basis, within our various everyday activities that we carry out with varying degrees of attentive purposefulness and inattentive drifting along, this presumptive element remains generally implicit, and even unnoticed. Yet, the latter presumption of being-immersed-in-the-world of everyday life remains forever foundational for all that rests upon it, even the conduct of social scientific studies of hate crime. When a perpetrator moves from with the world of work, to that of law and then the world of the prison, many different things are variously opened up for her “common-­sense” attention and perceptions to address. However, what typically remains closed off to her for as long as the natural attitude prevails is the sense in which each of these spheres of experience appears as in some sense a subcultural world (a mediated social world within the more generic and encompassing idea of “the world”) in the first place. In addition, such closure of consciousness also displaces the more profound question of how such worldhood takes shape and is constituted interpretively as such.4 For Husserl, although for interesting reasons systematically overlooked, this underlying world-presumption element, which receives perpetual confirmation in all wide-awake perceptual experience, is truly foundational. This is because an objectivist orientation towards, say, hate crime issues, is itself possible only upon the basis of the ‘ground of the world’, on the ‘experience of the taken for granted pre-given world.’5 In other words, the fact that the presumption of the “worldly character” of hate crime as experienced is foundational and constitutive, and  See Michael Salter, ‘On the idea of a legal world,’ 1(3) International Journal of the Legal Profession, 1994: 283: Published Online: 28 Apr 2010. cf. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/1 0.1080/09695958.1994.9960380 5  Husserl, 1970: 68. 4

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therefore (for phenomenologists) merits close analysis, means precisely that it does not stand out prominently for us within the natural attitude. On the contrary, the very opposite is the case in that this presumption is precisely among the most fundamental and deep-seated premises of the natural attitude itself. It is a presumption whose empirical realisation tends to conceal itself in that, for participants within the natural attitude’s orientation, the “worldly character” of their various social worlds, or subcultural “homeworlds,” remains deeply buried and camouflaged. As a result, this orientation operates to ensure that one of its key presuppositions remains effectively insulated from the possibility of subjecting whatever is being presupposed to a process of (self)critical scrutiny. In this sense, our phenomenology of hate crime must regard this, and every other similar presumption-structure of perceptions related to hate crime issues as – in one sense – deeply problematic. However, our own focus arises from a cognitive position of accepting all experiences that perpetually  – if silently  – corroborates the being in the world as a core part of being human.

4  Closure as a Blueprint for Prejudice The difficulty just discussed is not just that subscribers to the natural attitude as making an empirically false assumption about the worldly character of lived experience that needs to be somehow corrected and replaced with a true one. The more serious problem is more far-reaching. In this presumption’s tendency to effect closure and displacement of our potential for self-critical reflection upon the significance of our worldly existence, and how the significance of such “worldhood” is performatively accomplished, we are provided with a generic blueprint model of cognitive and (ethical) closure more generally. This general model of closure and its interpretive accomplishment is of special relevance to those more specific prejudices concerned with race, gender, sexuality and disability, which are addressed within the study of hate crime and speech. In other words, the presumptive “worldhood” context of all perceptual experience is generally taken-for-granted by us in a manner that provides a model and precedent for other far more problematic, abusive and hurtful assumptions that the natural attitude also perpetuates in all fields of its application, that is, everywhere. It is the pervasive realisation within our everyday life of this generic model of concealed closure that is of far more direct relevance to the study of those prejudicial orientations, stereotypes and assumptions that make up the substance of much hate speech for example. In other words, whilst the interpretive projection of worldhood is, in itself, a harmless presupposition, and also one capable through ­self-­reflection of being re-affirmed by compelling evidence, it lays down a dangerous precedent. It projects as a binding norm an unreflective mode of interpretive operation with respect to far more specific and viciously discriminatory and harmful prejudices of perpetrators, as well as the latter’s motivations, that is of direct relevance to hate crime studies. As a result, addressing how the distinctly unreflective

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and unself-critical perpetuation of this generic presupposition is perpetuated may offer us clues for achieving a better understanding of the specific prejudices directly relevant to hate speech and hate crime. Here, we need to recall that within objectivist projections of cultural differences relevant to hate crime issues, this basic and other secondary interrelated presumptions relating to “the real world” as essentially nothing but a physical realm, rarely, if ever, see the light of day. They are perceptual pre-judgements that are almost exemplary cases of “passive” sense-constitution, that is, the constitution of the meaning of experience with little or no conscious ego-involvement. Within the natural attitude, to perceive Norwegians as “more desirable immigrants” for America does not in any way require the interpreter to first clarify the value-judgement, and then seek to test its presuppositions in the light of evidence-based judgements that do not themselves presuppose what first has to be established about the relative merits of these people relative to, say, Mexicans. In the apparent simple immediacy of “seeing” Norwegians in these terms, within the natural attitude there can only be awareness of their relative and comparative “desirability.” There is probably no self-awareness of being an ego-subject who is actively making a contentious and prejudicial value-judgement: one that, prior to its public utterance, demands receipt of compelling evidence as a precondition for its possible acceptance by listeners. As such, examples of prejudicial understandings of cultural difference relevant to hate crime are anything but consciously-formulated and specific acts of judgement about the significance of such culturally-defined differences emanating from an ego-subject’s express decisions. Hence, and speaking more generally, it would be rare – and indeed contrary to so-called “common sense” – for an objectivist approach to hate crime to begin its research report by stating: “the facts of hate crime are real (in a distinctly naturalistic sense of “reality”), they are worldly facts, and the matter-of-fact real world that provides the encompassing context for these objective facts really does exists because …” On the contrary, as a continually effected general positing of a material world-context, the natural attitude’s interpretive work, founded upon objectivist/ naturalistic presuppositions, is continually accomplished anew in a largely implicit and self-insulating manner that serves to displace self-critical reflection and accountability. It is a performative accomplishment taking place before, during and after any possible example of, say, a hate crime researcher or perpetrator making such an express judgement about the existential status of either “the real world,” or any more specific cultural homeworlds, including specific local subcultures of racial and other forms of prejudice. Subscribers to the natural attitude might well respond to this point concerning the presumptive “real world,” and/or the reality-status of various derivative homeworlds, by saying “well of course not, why would I!” Yet, for our phenomenology of hate crime, such an exasperated response would, in itself, be both deeply revealing and highly instructive. We can take it as vital evidence of just how deep-seated, wide-ranging and entrenched this existential presumption really is, and how it provides a precedent-setting blueprint for a range of far more concrete and context-­ specific self-affirming prejudices. In other words, such a response of resolute

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“common sense” resistance to phenomenological reflection and critical questioning of underlying presuppositions is itself instructive. It is instructive with respect to how the most deep-seated and self-affirming prejudices tend to operate in practice by establishing a closed interpretive loop. Indeed, this type of dismissive response to an invitation to engage in critical experiential self-reflection is significant. Indeed, it reaffirms our contention that this “common sense” presupposition exhibits a status for the natural attitude’s subscribers as something appearing experientially as both “obvious” and “self-evident.” Here, we can recall how those who abuse the practice of gay marriage as a contradiction in terms (akin to fanciful notions of a “square circle” or “dry fluid”) take the heterosexuality of married couples as no less “obvious” and “self-evident.” Furthermore, those with deep-seated prejudices may derive additional momentum for their hate speech precisely from this quality of dogmatic resistance to self-­ questioning doubt. In short, here we need to recall how, within the naturalistic objectivism of the natural attitude, all our singular and general judgements appear to relate directly – and in an unproblematic manner – to this surrounding context of a “given” real world about us, together with its various equally given “factual” contents, and how the dynamics underlying this interpretive performance and reiteration of such an unproblematic status merit close and critical phenomenological scrutiny. Husserl also claims that it is barely conceivable that subscribers to an objectivist research project would make any such express judgements about the real existence of “the facts” of, for our purposes, hate crime, and its “worldly” surrounding political, institutional, cultural and economic contexts: a “worldliness” that remains permanently “on hand” for us as an unthematic horizon. Even if this express judgement was ever to materialise, such subscribers would, according to Husserl, be merely articulating, as an express topic: ‘what already was somehow inherent, as unthematic, unthought, unpredicated, in the original experiencing or, correlatively, in the experienced, as the characteristic of something “on hand.”’6 Indeed, such positing of the presumed objectivity of “worldly facts” about any topic, together with their “worldly” context of material and cultural circumstances, remains part of the natural attitude’s ongoing, always presupposed, background operation: one that endures throughout waking life. Hence, for Husserl, the condition of “being-there-at-hand” of worldly categories, objects, events, persons, and processes represents an always-already presupposed and taken-for-granted default position. As such, it continues to operate in the background prior to – and independently of – any express acts of reflection or analysis: It is, after all, something that lasts continuously throughout the whole duration of the attitude, i.e., throughout natural waking life. … everything which is, before any thinking, an object of experiential consciousness issuing, from the natural world  – bears, in its total unity and with respect to all articulated saliencies in it, the characteristic “there,” “on hand;”7  Ibid: 57.  Ibid: 57.

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The sheer circularity of the implicit type of self-validating “reasoning” that the natural attitude’s objectivism and naturalism encourage us to make is surely remarkable. It is, perhaps, even a defining, characteristic of all types of self-affirming prejudice relevant to the hate crime issues, especially those that are held dogmatically and asserted in a hostile manner. Within the natural attitude’s circular reasoning shaped by objectivist-naturalistic presupposition, subscribers would only be able to “see” hate crime issues in a form that has already become stripped – and thus rendered devoid – of their prior societal, cultural and interpretive determinations. They could perceive such issues as belonging exclusively to an essentially physical reality made up of clusters of objective facts. Hence, it appears to follow, such issues are fit only for a distinctly and exclusively materialist causal-explanatory type of analysis. On this prejudicial basis, subscribers can then seek to justify their stance by referring and appealing to the implications of their own resulting second-order derived content of such already-prejudicial material perceptions. Such already biased content can, in turn, become highlighted as if it constituted indisputable (scientific) “evidence” for the essentially physical nature of their core reality. In this way, whatever is interpreted as the “factual evidence about hate crime” can appear not only to repeatedly confirm that incidents are exclusively factual events, but also that this topic demands to be understood and studied purely in this and no other manner. In this way, an already potentially self-validating loop is effectively closed and made actually self-validating. However, such closure is accomplished without any accompanying awareness of how prejudicial assumptions are continuously working to generate and shape what is seemingly “experiential evidence” with a deceptive appearance of sheer immediacy: an immediacy stemming from the core of reality itself. In turn, this appearance of “evidence” is made to seem – on the surface – as it is implications yet again reaffirm and vindicate the already taken-for-granted validity of these starting presuppositions themselves. The self-fulfilling and dogmatic operation of this prejudicial loop is surely remarkable. It certainly exhibits a deceptive form that resembles a conjuring or confidence trick. As a result, among subscribers to the natural attitude who remain immersed within, and indoctrinated by, its objectivist presuppositions, there is rarely any appreciation of any of its own fake immediacy: the appearance of what is perceived as immediate when, on reflection, is clearly mediated and shaped by objectivist presuppositions. Hence, subscribers can rarely come to appreciate the extent to which their original perceptions, instantly reinterpreted as corroborative evidence, remain deceptive. There is little or no accompanying awareness that these perceptions remain, from the start and throughout, mediated, prejudiced, distorted, and biased by the prior and always-already operative requirements of mediating objectivist presuppositions. In other words, for as long as objectivist presumptions provide the prism through which our natural attitude identifies and makes sense of hate crime issues, then our shaped perceptions will generally (but not necessarily always and rarely to the same extent in every case) tend to broadly conform to the requirements of these presumptions. Where this covert prejudicial interpretation occurs, then the perceptions of hate incidents will, like a successful conjuring trick, supply these presumptions with

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an ongoing and apparently convincing source of legitimation: one that accomplishes a form of self-immunisation from doubt and questioning. In turn, this work of deception, which is linked to the perpetuation of a wider form of acceptance-captivity, may play a distinctly ideological role. It can reinforce subscribers’ more general, dogmatic sense of self-certainty. The latter’s subjective attitude of cognitive over-confidence relates to how their objectivist perspective is able to succeed in interpreting hate incidents reductively as “nothing but” a cluster of objectively pre-given “facts” already stripped of their contingent societal and cultural determinations.8 As a result, there appears to be a close family relationship between an unholy trinity of objectivism, reductionism, and “freedom” from self-­ critical doubt, all of which combine to generate distinctly conservative ideological effects that we will discuss more fully in Part Two.

5  Closure as Exclusion(s) The latter point suggests that something else in this general tendency towards cognitive closure also demands our attention. That is, the other side of such selective and assumption-driven perceptions resulting in the reiteration of prejudicial and one-­ sided understandings for subscribers to the natural attitude. This “other side” comprises that which such reiteration succeeds in excluding from these subscribers’ prejudicial fields of vision. In other words, there are two distinct but interrelated sides to the type of selective perception of a hate incident that arises from the deployment of unnoticed objectivist presuppositions. On the one side, there is a distorted and one-sided perception that is biased emphatically towards the purely material and physical dimensions of that perceived hate incident. On the other side, there is all that which is selectively marginalised, or even entirely excluded. Such displacement is explicable in terms of how these contents “fail” to conform with the prejudices reiterated by objectivist presuppositions, and – to vindicate the imperative of closure – are required to be banished from subscribers’ perceptual fields. As a result, here we need to differentiate as carefully as possible between: 1. whatever appears within the natural attitude’s prejudicial perspective as the supposedly “immediate content” of our perceptions, i.e., that which we actually see and understood as “really happening;” and: 2. That which is systematically excluded owing precisely to the prejudicial operations of closure characteristic of the operation of the perspective itself. The latter process of exclusion and closure, perhaps more precisely characterised as closure-by-exclusion, demands an especially incisive but difficult form of  Husserl describes what passes as a “normal” perception within the natural attitude as follows: ‘Original, normal perception has the primordial mode, “being valid simpliciter”; this is what we call straightforward, naive certainty. The appearing object is there in uncontested and unbroken certainty.’ 1991: 75. 8

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phenomenological analysis. It is always easier to perform sense-explication on what is selectively included within, say, a victim’s perception of being victimised, than it is to address whatever he or she “fails” to identify, or pay attention to, because of the operation of this person’s selective perceptions. Only a process-focused phenomenological analysis, which is able to cross-reference the (noetic) subjective acts of perceiving, with a (noematic) analysis of the sense-content of what is perceived intuitively as “really happening,” will suffice. Only this constitutive analysis of the correlation of these two elements will be able to fully address the process of exclusion. This type of cross-referencing involves noematic and noetic analysis, of what is perceived and how the selectivity of acts of perceiving is actually operating. When considered together, these two types of analysis reveal how the exclusion of non-conforming content from the centre stage of attention, remains endemic to the selectivity of perceptions of hate incidents. The natural attitude’s closure-by-exclusion of consciousness of present – but as yet unrealised – possibilities also draws attention to the extra-cognitive, societal dimension. Perhaps, the conservative effect of such exclusion can be regarded as neither value-­ free nor even as politically neutral? Here, our phenomenology of hate crime needs to clearly identify and recognise that, among the most problematic aspects of spurious self-validation exercises, are included distinctly ideological-rhetorical practices that reinforce existing societal prejudices. Most notable here, and relevant to our analysis of what may successfully challenge the mindset of hate crime perpetrators, is the displacement of reflective possibilities of both self-criticism and self-awareness of being-prejudiced. For reasons already discussed, such problematic features of selective perception typically escape the attention of those caught up in this type of “common sense” response to hate crime issues. As a result, the basis on which such selectivity is performed may often evade those forms of both transparency and accountability. For our phenomenology of hate crime, such evasion is especially problematic because tendencies towards transparency and accountability are precisely what is required to potentially challenge their dogmatic reiteration of prejudices as an integral part of what, within “common sense” passes for what is “obvious” about questions of sexuality, gender, racial differences and both physical and mental (dis) abilities. In the absence of transparency and critical self-awareness, whatever is concretely perceived within a natural attitude orientation towards these phenomena will remain an interpretive outcome of selective perceptions, whose very basis of inclusion/exclusion operates in an invisible and unthematic manner. Without critical self-reflection of the type encouraged by our phenomenology of hate crime, this practice of closure will continue to reiterate itself as subscribers to the natural attitude remain entangled within the latter’s interpretive orientation, shaped and determined by objectivist presuppositions. In turn, this circularity of self-affirmation of deep-seated prejudice itself serves to reinforce the natural attitude’s more general tendency towards a defensive form of cognitive closure: one that is highly resistant to having its prejudicial operations brought to light in a manner that makes the orientation itself, together with its underlying objectivist presuppositions, fully thematic. For as long as we remain

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stuck fast within the natural attitude, the latter itself remains invisible, and therefore immune from being held to account by insiders at least. As a result, our phenomenology of hate crime needs to weaken this resistance by moving, in part and incrementally, to a relatively “outsider” stance.9 Only then, by taking this step back, does it become possible to more fully engage in a conscious striving to overcome the natural attitude’s highly defensive form of resistance to both transparency and accountability. Only then can we better grasp the downstream implications of how this form of cognitive closure of possibilities tends to operate, in effect, as the natural attitude’s default position. Already prejudicial perceptions of the facts of, say, racial, gender and sexuality difference are what arises as a matter of course. This tendency may explain why the type of phenomenological self-reflection upon the what, how and for-whom dimensions – and levels – of the natural attitude’s interpretive performances will remain a disruptive exception to this orientation’s “rule” and sovereignty over us. As Husserl rightly argues: As long as we live in the naturalistic attitude, it itself is not given in our field of research; what is grasped there is only what is experienced in it, what is thought in it, etc. But if we carry out phenomenological reflection and the phenomenological reduction, make the attitude itself thematic, relate to it what is investigated in it, …then all our investigations are transformed into purely phenomenological ones.10

It follows that the task this tendency sets up for a Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime is to: 1 . Recognise the clear reality of such practices of resistance. 2. Grasp how such practices operate as performative accomplishments of closure-by-exclusion. 3. Identify the conservative impact of such closure in terms not only of cognitive impoverishment but also perhaps more generally in terms of ideology. And then: 4. Find ways of challenging the deceptive qualities of natural attitude’s self-image and self-understanding by identifying precisely its prejudicial character and operations in ways that ideally would be challenging to, and disruptive of, the business as usual of objectivist presuppositions contribute to this orientation. An integral part of such evasive tendencies towards closure arising out of the natural attitude’s objectivist presuppositions involves the glossing over and concealing of two vital aspects of consciousness of hate crime issues that our approach ultimately seeks to salvage and explicate. First, there is the evasion of the latter’s

9  The reasons why this can at most be a relatively outsider position have been explored by the hermeneutic tradition, which denies the possibility of anyone ever being able to step entirely outside the confines, assumption and prejudices of their cultural tradition. Our own position is that an insider/outsider distinction is not an either/or black and white relationship but rather a broad spectrum, and it is clearly possible, despite everything, to distinguish between different shades of grey. Over time and in stages, it remains possible to push our consciousness of our own prejudices relevant to hate crime issues further towards the self-reflective “outsider” end of this broad spectrum. The fact that this discussion is even possible is surely experiential evidence of this? 10  Husserl, Ideas 11: 183.

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specifically “intentional” dimensions, (i.e., the consciousness-of-an incident-as-­ something-meant-as-X-and meant-in-modes-X-or-Y). In part, this stems from a problematic reliance upon a subject/object dichotomy that we will discuss and critique later, and which plays a significant role here. Secondly, there is the glossing over of distinctly normative features of the presence of hate crime to our lived-­ experience, including, for example, the value-judgemental aspects of all our perceptual judgements about this topic, that is, their lack of value-neutrality. Both with respect to questions of discrimination and more generally, our phenomenology of hate crime draws the following conclusion about the significance of the forms of closure that characterise the performance-accomplishments of the natural attitude’s characteristic objectivism: 1. We need to compare an idealised state of being-rational based upon an open-­ minded weighing up of credible and experientially-grounded evidence, with the condition of being-prejudiced in the manner of hate speech perpetrators for example. 2. If we can make such comparison with respect to questions of culturally-defined “difference,” we may well conclude that the condition of being-prejudiced does not occur at, or occupy, the same higher level of active consciousness compared with an idealised rational stance. 3. Rather, it often operates at the level of passive constitution, including performances of passive constitution characterised by little or no evidence of ego-involvement. 4. As a result, the condition of being-prejudiced about, say, one or more victim group, fails to connect with the type of self-reflective consciousness, promoted by Husserlian analysis, which is concerned with taking active responsibility for its own presuppositions, express and implicit prejudices, and related value augments. In other words, and in line with other features of the natural attitude to be discussed later, the form of closure accomplished by the natural attitude’s objectivism effectively veils the underlying interpretive performances (or “performative accomplishments”) that both constitute and reconstitute the concrete intelligibility of every aspect of hate crime issues, as well as every other topic. This point, as well as its wider downstream significance, become clearer once we recognise as a core experiential reality that such closure typically veils and excludes from our attention elements that are decisive for accounting for the presence of hate crime as ­phenomena: Namely, that as a cultural expression, in its disclosed experiential content, verbal hate speech contains two distinct elements. First, there is its material-physical content, i.e., the material sound of the words and, perhaps, the sights of accompanying bodily gestures capable, in the form of sensory data, of being perceived by witnesses and recorded on CCTV cameras. Secondly, there is an expression of the content of a sense (a real – but intangible – unity of meaning and possible implications). This additional element of experience does not exhibit any material characteristics of weight, mass, chemical composition etc. whatsoever; a unity of meaning is, therefore, neither recordable by a camera nor

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visible to the naked eye. Instead, it has to be constituted through intentional acts of interpretation directed towards the task of making sense of the incident itself. Our next section extends the results of the present section by focusing more directly on the price we pay if we allow such exclusion to go unchallenged.

6  Restoring a Sense of What Is Excluded For us to analyse such hate speech insightfully, we need to pay close attention to both the material and ideal elements of its reality precisely as this appears experientially. For Husserl, whose example of a cultural object is a hand-carved stone arrow, we need to recognise how examples of cultural expression present our lived experience with a two-sided reality involving the intertwining of both ideal and physical components. In turn, this reality positively requires from us a willingness to engage in acts of interpretation sufficient to grasp the object’s significance for us: The purpose and sense of the work which accrued to the object in its original production is something permanently appropriated to that material object. The corresponding experience has therefore the basic form of an interpretation; physically the arrow is sensuously seen and is at the same time, as we say, understood in its final sense as an arrow. It shows itself to be that in possible and actual experience whenever it is shown and demonstrated as having been produced for the sake of this sense and as corresponding to it.11

For our phenomenology of hate crime, this means recognising that the sense-­content element itself refers back to the distinctive mentality of a particular cultural (and/or sub-cultural) community of persons out of whose specific homeworld-based orientation it first arose as an interpretive performance. As Husserl states: ‘every expressed sense and the object entirely endowed with sense, itself refers back, in its disclosed experiential content, to a psychic subjectivity, universally speaking: to a human being or a human community out of whose … performance it has arisen.’12 To analyse hate speech in social scientific terms informed by Husserl involves a type of analysis that points in two directions at the same time. As Husserl states: ‘In these [socio-cultural] sciences, research has continually a double direction since culture and culture-creating subjectivity are inseparably related to each other.’13 The first direction is oriented towards identifying and explicating the meaning-content of what is being expressed, implied, or assumed in the expression itself, i.e., the what-qualities of a specific sense-content). For example, we need to ask: what does it mean to either implicitly or expressly ascribe sinfulness to gay sexuality, and what is presupposed by such ascription? Secondly, there is the far more challenging task of unfolding the underlying interpretive performances that together constantly generate such sense-content, which effectively label all

 Husserl, 1925/77: 85.  Ibid. 13  Ibid. 11 12

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forms of gay sexual expression as sinful acts demanding eradication and divine punishment for example. In short, the natural attitude’s objectivism’s veiling operation with respect to underlying interpretive dimensions of hate crime needs to be analysed as a form of selective closure that opens up this topic with vital interpretive aspects already removed from the agenda of possible discussion. In particular, the effect of this orientation obstructs the possibility of developing precisely that two-pronged line of cultural research, which the experiential content of, say, hate speech itself clearly requires, if not demands. In turn, this silently accomplished veiling and glossing over is significant in that it creates a void at the foundational qualitative level. This void is one that, we claim and will continue to demonstrate in detail in later chapters, positively requires the corrective contribution of our phenomenology of hate crime to reveal, address and, ideally, to remedy. For example, given the natural attitude’s circular and dogmatic form of self-­ validation, it is unsurprising that, outside the realm of social science, its objectivist orientation is able to implicitly define itself as an everyday, or “worldly,” way of being aware of whatever is encountered within an individual’s surrounding world. As such, it generates a self-styled “common sense” approach to hate crime issues that, in keeping with objectivist premises, regards itself as essentially straightforward unmediated grasping of whatever “factually exists.” However, despite this powerful sense of self-certainty and confidence in its own cognitive adequacy to the “reality of the situation,” this “common sense” orientation’s specific qualities of premature self-validation and cognitive closure merit close and far more critical investigation of their interpretive preconditions by a suitably qualified Husserlian analysis. To better grasp and advance our Husserlian analysis of these self-validating and self-reaffirming dimensions along the lines already discussed, we now need to: 1 . Recall some other features of objectivism already discussed; and then: 2. Refocus our attention on their concrete implications for the performance accomplishments of dogmatic closure, including some possibly conservative ideological implications. Here, a particular focus has to be upon the ideological implications of objectivism’s implicit commitment to the idea that, through impartial “factual analysis,” its orientation is able to gain access to an intrinsic material reality of real-world phenomena. Whenever immersed and entangled within the natural attitude’s orientation shaped by objectivist presuppositions, we can implicitly rely upon a particular understanding of an objectivist approach to a hate incident. As previously discussed, owing to the mediation of objectivist and naturalistic presuppositions, this takes shape as a familiar form of “common sense:” one supposedly rooted in the very nature of what “has really happened” as an apparently matter-of-fact event. In other words, within our everyday lives, the mediation of our natural attitude by objectivist/naturalistic premises allows us to understand our own perspective towards an incident, or a series of related incidents, as self-evidently appropriate. It can appear to us as apparently straightforwardly directed towards whatever appears

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to have “factually occurred” during these events in terms of who did what to whom, when, how and with what physical or psychological consequences primarily for the victim. The incident itself can be presumed to be both “obviously there” as a “real life” event unfolding within a “real world” context, and to be exhibiting its intrinsic characteristics as, say, a “discriminatory hate crime.”

7  Husserlian Responses to Closure The vital point here for us is not to deny every aspect of this common-sense account. Rather, it is to immerse ourselves in all available first-hand experiential evidence; and then strive to account experientially for how these various self-reinforcing features of objectivism are able to combine together to both encourage and reinforce the natural attitude’s essentially unreflective and self-affirmative dimensions and tendencies towards the closing off of additional interpretive questions and dimensions. It is not that the questions and answers of the “common sense” approach developed within the natural attitude are necessarily empirically-false. It is more the case that they must remain necessarily one-sided, inadequate and insufficient in comparison with how a Husserlian account of the same incident is able to supply by way of corrective supplement. They also are prone to ideological manipulation in ways that Part Two will discuss more fully. In response, we need to account for how these deficiencies are interpretively produced, and thereby make them explicable. For example, as already noted, one outcome of a natural attitude approach to hate crime issues is the continual perpetuation of a type of understanding that, for insiders, can immediately feel itself to be “worldly,” in the sense of mundane and uncritical immersion into an apparent “world-of-fact”. Yet, for us comparative or would-be “outsiders,” this is an orientation that is also unacceptably “naïve” as to what such immersion itself actually signifies. Furthermore, as an apparently down-to-earth, no-nonsense and matter-of-fact approach to hate crime issues, including research findings based upon, say, ­government statistics, subscribers to the natural attitude can, as a result, become uncritically trusting of officially-defined realities. If studied informed by government statistics claim to confirm that one type of hate crime is a “rising problem” here but less so there, where other types “are becoming more prevalent,” then subscribers to a common-sense orientation may be predisposed to accept this analysis uncritically. Why? Because it is based on the objective facts themselves! The may become prone to simply accepting the status of whatever is represented as “the facts” about hate crime, which  – for us, relative outsiders  – itself amounts to an interesting ideological phenomenon in its own right: one that certainly merits the title “acceptance-captivity.” In other words, the combination of objectivism and naturalistic presuppositions means that, in its circularity of implicit rationalisation and self-justification, the natural attitude encourages us to both become and remain uncritically naïve about

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the underlying interpretive and ideological dimensions of our experiences. The implicit message is to continue to take for granted the idea that, for instance, transgendered individuals are, in themselves, “deviant,” and that a medical model of disability itself sufficiently characterises a condition of being-disabled because it is the body as such that is judged to be disabled. These presupposition-driven aspects of the natural attitude further encourage naive acceptance of the belief that “discrimination” simply “exists” irrespective of, and prior to, its identification and interpretation as such, and that “minorities” are self-evidently “there” in society as a matter of “sociological fact” and so forth. One distinctly ideological result of such naiveté is that specific and underlying conceptual issues about the qualitative “whatness” of these categories themselves, their meaning, scope, relations, dependencies and core preconditions, are kept buried from the sight of insiders in ways that “safeguards” prejudicial foundations and contentious formulations. This concealment not only arises from a problematic condition of conservative acceptance-­ captivity but also surely actively contributes to the reinforcement of that questionable condition of complacency. If our phenomenology of hate crime is able to begin to expressly grasp both the ideological and other aspects of this displacement, we should then become better able to further advance our own agenda. In particular, we would then become better able to explain, in concrete experiential terms, the details of how these qualitative dimensions and interpretive issues are, despite being suppressed and marginalised, still able to exert their influence “behind our backs,” as it were. These dimensions and issues become suppressed owing to the overwhelming weight of “facts” about “deviants,” “discriminatory practices” directed against “minority groups” etc. By narrowing down our focus to “the facts about hate crime,” the constitution of the significance and significant implications of these “facts” is actively – if unknowingly – displaced by the natural attitude from our mundane field of awareness in ways that themselves demand a close phenomenological investigation. For example, we have already touched upon the “common sense” cliché that: “seeing is believing,” which a later section will subject to a Husserlian critique. Under the present heading of “closure”, it is enough to characterise aspects of this belief. Here, we can recall how, from within the natural attitude’s interpretive matrix, perceptions arising upon the basis of the natural attitude’s objectivist and naturalistic presuppositions, and whose meaning is constituted in part by these assumptions and suppositions, appears to present the immediate reality of an incident “just as it is in itself.” What appears to be “immediately given” about this incident then takes centre stage and basks in the spotlight of attention; while the mediation of this spurious concreteness by underlying presuppositions operates unnoticed in the background horizon to which is relegated. This forms part of the phenomenological explanation of why, when entangled in the natural attitude’s interpretive orientation, we become unwittingly encouraged to simply accept as self-evidently true whatever is presented to our field of awareness as “the facts of this incident,” or “changing factual patterns of hate crime in the UK.” By contrast, grasping these “facts” and “factual trends” as the outcomes of suppressed underlying interpretive performances also helps us explain why it is that we

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fall into the trap of a naive and uncritical belief that these “facts” alone reveal the truth – and nothing but the truth – about, say, the incident itself. Husserlian analysis can, in this way, begin to explain the sheer ideological power of “common sense” resistance to its own analysis as a distinct and vital research topic. Here, we recall that our earlier analysis of objectivism has already helped us better understand the workings of the “common sense” assumption that these “facts” simply are – in themselves – this incident’s self-exhibiting material reality. It has also clarified how  – with equal self-certainly  – the assumption arises that such “facts” must be uncritically accepted as a matter of course. Even these brief explanatory points are sufficient to highlight not only how reductive simplifications of lived experience, together with the latter’s connection to perpetuating a conformist type of acceptance captivity, take shape, but also the somewhat complex and challenging nature of our task to unearth and analyse the underlying interpretative dynamics at play here. The difficulties here stem from at least the following three sources: 1 . The ideological self-concealment of these interpretive dynamics. 2. The latter’s sheer complexities; and 3. The reality that our own efforts to identify and explain the workings of the natural attitude can never entirely step back from, and break free, of its ideological grip upon us. Clearly the forms of naïve trust in “the facts about hate crime” forms part of a wider condition of subjective acceptance-captivity that both accompanies – and is partly generated by – our entanglement within the natural attitude’s objectivist orientation. For instance, from within a perpetrator’s interpretive perspective shaped by the latter’s objectivism, the answer to “the problem” with X victim group can lie in whoever (or whatever) is deemed to “provoke” his or her hostile response to the presence of the designated cultural differences associated with X. Seen from within, it is the sheer presence of those appearing as, say, “gay,” “racially-different,” “disabled” or “transgendered” that, without question or doubt, simply is “the problem.” What appears here as entirely unproblematic is precisely what needs to be problematised: Namely, the vicious hostility of the perpetrator’s own response. However, when viewed as an insider, it may appear to be “only natural” for someone to react forcefully to whatever presents itself to them as “unnatural.” This can be felt to be especially the case wherever such a response to perceived “abnormality” itself serves to both re-affirm and re-assert a sense of a single true and immutable “natural order.” For purposes of illustration, let us take another example of the natural attitude’s interpretive closure that provokes a Husserlian response. A perpetrator given a deterrent criminal sentence of imprisonment may identify this as, in fact, a “miscarriage of justice.” Yet, it is likely that when making this “factual” claim and supporting it with “factual evidence” of other far lower sentences handed down for comparable offences, she would be simply taking for granted the interpretive preconditions of her own claims. In particular, it is likely that her “consciousness of injustice” would be operating without any clear sense of what justice itself does or

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could mean in this specific context. Those who deny her claim while remaining within the natural attitude, are likely to suffer from the same type of oblivion with respect to the qualitative foundations of their own counter-claims. Yet, in both cases, it is clear that any identification of a “miscarriage of justice” positively relies upon a certain conception of what justice itself is and the difference between its “carriage” and “miscarriage.” However, this distinction and all that it implies in terms of the meaning of ideas of justice, injustice and their relationship between them, is being taken-for-granted as somehow “obvious” and as “common sense.” In this way, and for both sides, the natural attitude’s closure operations ensure that the underlying interpretive preconditions and foundations are thereby relegated to a state of oblivion. As a result, they are made generally inaccessible to both parties’ consciousness-of the meaning and significance of this contested court sentence, which thereby remains stuck fast at a mundane surface level. Another aspect of closure that is accomplished by the natural attitude concerns awareness of the synthetic performance accomplishments of mundane consciousness. When a criminal court, for example, is addressing the alleged offence committed by a specific perpetrator the various perceptions of witnesses generate a consciousness-­of both this action and the perpetrator as “one and the same.” This occurs even when viewed from different spatial perspectives (nearer or far away, from a higher or lower vantage point etc.), and by different witnesses, including the victim. Self-­ reflection disclosures that this consciousness of self-identity arises and is sustained through ongoing synthesises that, through synthesis, combine together a mass of different sight and sound sensations in ways that are not noticed by these witnesses or those who listen to their testimony. Instead, the natural attitude accomplishes a type of “normalisation” that focuses on “the same” incident and the “the same” perpetrator’s actions without noticing the underlying perceptual synthesis constantly at play that constitutes this sense of self-identity as an ongoing performative accomplishment. By contrast to such unreflective customary naiveté, our phenomenology of hate crime involves a radical type of self-reflection. The latter is directed towards such synthetic interpretive work, and which thereby “swims against the tide” of such habitual normalisation.14 Such reflection, which treats as thematic aspects of lived experience that the natural attitude previously buried, left unthematic and taken-for-­granted,  In his lectures in passive association, Husserl states: ‘Let us begin with any external perception. If we observe an unchanging object at rest, for example, a tree standing before us, we pass over it with our eyes, now we step closer to it, now back away from it, now here, now there, we see it now from this, now from that side. During this process the object is constantly given to us as unchanged, as the same; we see it as such; and yet a slight turn of our attention teaches us that the so-called perceptual images, the modes of appearance, the aspects of the object constantly change. In a constant variation of modes of appearance, perspectives, that is, during a constant variation in the actual lived experience of perception, we have a consciousness that runs through them and connects them up, a consciousness of the one and the same object. This variation is given to consciousness, and yet it is hidden in a certain way; in the normal attitude, the natural attitude that is turned outward toward things, we do not consciously notice the variation.’ 2001: 34. 14

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and which therefore results in an implicit type of “pre-figuring,” itself merits sustained phenomenological clarification. Our radical self-reflection strives to reverse the “naiveté” of the natural attitude’s habitual perceptual orientation by focusing on the details, interpretive procedures and structures of the interpretive generation of any sense of continuous identity.15 Such acts of reflection take shape as a deliberate and targeted reversal, or “conversion,” of the “normal” (in the sense of “customary”) direction of a type of perceptual “normalisation.” To the natural attitude’s subscribers, our reflective analysis may well appear “strange,” even  – relative to their habitual tendencies – “abnormal.”16

8  C  losure Through Exclusion of What Is Questionable Within an Underlying Question Having made some general points about the natural attitude’s defensive and self-­ validating strategies of closure, we are now better equipped to focus in upon a specific sub-species of this tendency: closing down potential awareness of how all “facts about hate crime and speech” themselves presuppose the guiding presence of an underlying question. At this point in our discussion of different aspects of the natural attitude’s performance-­accomplishment of closure, it may be useful to reflect upon how “the problem of/with” the very presence of one or more hate crime victim groups can take shape. This presence, or at least those aspects of a group’s distinctive form of existence that make themselves felt subjectively within the life-worlds of perpetrators, needs to be addressed in terms of how it actually appears experientially. We need this focus to better characterise the underlying interpretive dynamics that lie behind such a coming into presence of “the problem of/with”.  Husserl goes onto to state: ‘This is to say that instead of carrying out a conscious lived-experience naively, we can make any kind of conscious lived-experience thematic by reflecting on it; and then – be it with respect to the temporal stretches of its variable continuity, be it in comparison with other such separated lived-experiences – we can always find they make possible an evident consciousness of the identity of the content, that what two consciousnesses intend is the same.’ Ibid, 35. 16  Husserl recognises this when he states: ‘I spoke of a turning of attention. More specifically, I spoke of a turning of the thematic regard and even more precisely of a reflection. In fact, we speak of a reflection in all cases, where in any kind of conscious lived-experience a direction of the thematic regard is prefigured from the very start as normal, that is, as a necessary, thematic attitude that serves as a starting point from which we must turn away in order to get hold of something new in our conscious lived-experience. Customarily and from the very outset, we consider attentive perceiving, that is, this normal thematic directedness toward the external object, as belonging to the concept of external perception. But a reflective conversion of the thematic regard is possible at any time and in an evident manner, and then our perceptual images themselves become graspable and grasped’ Ibid, 34. 15

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Our central claim here, following Husserl but also Heidegger, is relatively simple. However, its downstream implications are anything but. We claim that behind every apparently “purely factual” statement about hate crime issues, we can identify an always-already posited – but implicit – question, to which whatever passes as “the facts” represents a contingent interpretive “response.” This is especially the case whenever discussions of hate crime issues deploy and rely upon the language of “the problem of X,” or “the problem with X.” Here, “X” could refer to the projected qualities of a certain victim group as perceived by perpetrators, or to changes in the patterns of victimisation. It could also include allegedly problematic aspects of “under-reporting” of hate incidents. X could also include the alleged “failure” of responsible state officials to respond adequately to the posited “equality rights” of victims. Clearly, X could also refer to numerous other contexts treated as problematic,17 and all this needs to be born in mind when we refer in a shorthand way to “the problem of/with X.” Here, and in anticipation of some latter points concerning ideological aspects of closure, we need to ask: “Do we better appreciate the difficulties caused by the natural attitude’s objectivist strategies of closing down conscious awareness when we come to recognise that not only is this underlying question rendered inaccessible but so too is the possibility of contesting that question? That is, of calling it to account and then openly discussing what may or may not be questioned about whatever the question itself states, implies or presupposes?” In response to this issue, the first point to make here is that it is self-reflection upon lived experience which suggests that, behind every hate crime expression of “the problem of/with …” lies a taken-for-granted question to which “the facts” represents a distinctly and emphatically interpretive response. To some extent at least, we have already suggested that behind, say, every perpetrator’s supposedly “fact-­ oriented” complaints of suffering a “miscarriage of justice” at the hands of a magistrate or judge lies an underlying question: Namely, “what would constitute justice in this context from which interpretations of an empirical “miscarriage” and “injustice” arise as derivative claims? Addition illustrations may help clarify and support this point, which is intended as an entirely general one. Behind every fact-oriented statement about “desirable” and “undesirable” nationalities for immigration into the USA, which borders on hate speech in European legal definitions, lies a founding question. This is a question concerning: “what is it that constitutes the alleged relative superiority of one candidate group of nationalities (e.g., white-skinned, blue-eyed often Christian Norwegians) when compared to others from, say, Latin America, Haiti or the Middle  In other words, “X” in “the problem of X or with X” can stand for not only members of hate crime victim groups in the sense of, say, “the problem with these immigrants” but also government, media and even academic studies into any aspect of hate crime and hate speech, such as “the problem with underfunded victim support services.”

17

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East?”18 Statements of concern regarding “factual evidence of the problem of under-­ reporting of hate incidents” rest upon a specific answer to the following always-­ already presupposed question: what is the normatively “right level” of reporting from which we can determine “under-” and perhaps even “over-reporting”? These examples could be multiplied but without adding anything new to the core general point we are making. For the most part, with respect to those who, for instance, express or witness hate speech about one or more victim group and interpret this in line with the natural attitude, this question-status will remain largely or wholly implicit and taken for granted. Given the pervasive dynamics of the closure of awareness we have already discussed above as one of the natural attitude’s core elements and devices, neither the presence nor the nature of the underlying question will probably have been addressed, let alone answered adequately. The exceptions would be those rare cases where the closure aspects of the natural attitude’s objectivism have, for some reason, broken down, at least in part. The furious international reaction to President Trump’s stated preferences for Norwegian immigrants, sometimes identified as an example of hate speech, would be a case in point where the assumptions underlying the presupposed question were most certainly called into question, not least in Norway and America itself.19 It follows that our phenomenology of hate crime’s effort to better understand what is taking place needs to “rub up against the wrong way” the underlying interpretive dynamics at work here. It must both identify and clarify the question itself, refuse to go along with any such prejudicial closure of any questioning of the underlying question. Our approach must also aim to identify the details of how this question lies behind the assertion of “the problem of/with X”. To better “open up” the

 To be fair to Donald Trump’s notorious borderline hate speech on this topic, most Western “liberal” states’ immigration, entry visa and nationality criteria are at least covertly racist in some sense of this term. See Kevin R.  Johnson, ‘Race, The Immigration Laws, And Domestic Race Relations: a “Magic Mirror” into the Heart of Darkness, 73 Indiana Law Journal (Fall, 1998): 1111–1159; Alan Travis, ‘Ministers saw law’s ‘racism’ as defensible: Powell wielded influence over bill’s direction,’ The Guardian, UK, 1 Jan 2002: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/ jan/01/uk.race.; Some advanced modern “liberal democratic” states, such as Israel, extend racial/ religious standards of inclusion/exclusion to criteria for full citizenship status as well, even to the point where Arab-Israeli citizen has become a problematic term. See Peter Beaumont, ‘EU leads criticism after Israel passes Jewish ‘nation state’ law: Legislation stipulates only Jews have right of self-determination in the country,’ The Guardian UK, 19 July 2018: https://www.theguardian. com/world/2018/jul/19/israel-adopts-controversial-jewish-nation-state-law 19  See, for example, Jonas Bergman, ‘Donald Trump prefers immigrants from Norway but more Americans move to Scandinavia than vice versa: Controversial US President favours affluent Norwegians over asylum seekers from ‘s∗∗∗thole countries’ but feeling seemingly not mutual,’ The Independent, UK, 15 January 2018: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ donald-trump-shithole-countries-norway-immigration-american-emigrants-scandinavia-a8159441.html; Robert Kuttner, ‘How Do You Say Shithole In Norwegian?’ Huffington Post, 01/14/2018: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-do-you-say-shithole-in-norwegian_ us_5a5c0fe4e4b0fcbc3a1167fe. More generally, BBC News: ‘Donald Trump: Free speech v hate speech,’ 8 December 2015: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-35041402 18

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phenomena of the natural attitude’s tendencies towards closure-by-exclusion, our approach needs to deliberately “go against the grain,” as it were, of these habitual tendencies. At the same time, such “transgression” is also an act of disclosure of how these habitualities themselves are working implicitly within the realm of passivity as mental energy-saving processes of typification and stereotypification. Our focus here seeks to show how such habitualised interpretive work inhibits or even blocks the possibility of questioning and subjecting to verification our own taken-for-­ granted assumed “truths” about one or more victim group. Passive memory sediments of prior abusive expressions work to secure in advance the preconditions for the reiteration of the objective meanings of prejudicial understandings of cultural difference. Habituation is partly – but perhaps only partly – complicit in a dogmatic relinquishing of the rationalistic search for original undistorted or “presuppositionless” evidence in favour of the supposedly ready-made “truths” of received prejudice. Although part of passivity there remains evidence of a minimal form of ego participation in the performance of acts of habituation, a type of stubborn refusal to reflect self-critically, for which perpetrator of hate speech can be held personally responsible. As a result, our focus on the differentiation of linguistic categories presumed within the natural attitude to be expressions of the inherent nature of things will appear to subscribers to the natural attitude be a type of inexplicable and undesirable “abnormality.” Its perceived “abnormality” will arise as a perceived failure of expectations of the continuation of expectations of “normality,” understood (by our Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime but not by subscribers to the natural attitude) as a coercive type of conformity to a forever-contingent cluster of historically specific and variable societal expectations.20 For us, any operative sense of “normality” and “abnormality” applicable to hate crime and hate speech-related issues exhibits interpretive qualities that contradict any objectivistic or naturalistic model. Perceived “abnormality” is not a matter of objective fact, an intrinsic quality of a certain type of sexuality or gender characteristics explicable in natural scientific causal-explanatory terms. Rather, it takes shape for us as a secondary and derivative modification of an always-already prior “sense  The relativity of notions of normality and their emergence out of specific performative practices and discourses is clear if we reflect on how a clearly well-fed body represent the ideal of healthiness in some societies, while in others thing and athletic bodies are widely interpreted as “healthy.” Similar points apply to variations concerning other material aspects of social life perceived of as normal and abnormal. Husserl, 2001: xxix. xxxvii. xlv. liii. 27, 267; A. Steinbock, ‘Phenomenological concepts of normality and abnormality,’ 28 Man and World, (1995): 241–260; J. Taipale, ‘Twofold normality: Husserl and the normative relevance of primordial constitution,’ 28 Husserl Studies, (2012): 49–60. Cf. M.  Wehrle, ‘Normality and normativity in experience,’ In M.  Doyon & T.  Breyer (Eds.), Normativity in Perception, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015: 128–139; S. Heinämaa, ‘Transcendental intersubjectivity and normality: Constitution by mortals,’ In R. T. Jensen & D.  Moran (Eds.), The phenomenology of embodied subjectivity, Dordrecht: Springer 2013: 83–104; Judith Butler, Bodies that matter, New York: Routledge, 1993. 20

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of normality.” This means it can only be defined or even recognised at the experiential level of concrete perceptions in relation to what is presumed to constitute an overall interpretive frame of “normal experience.” While some sense of ‘normality’ is a pre-condition for regularised experience comprehensible in familiar habitualised terms, “abnormality” can only take shape for us as a perceived “deviation” on the basis of this prior “sense of normality.” Indeed, the latter appears to be anything but a static, descriptive or measurable category because it more closely resembles the forever contingent interpretive outcome of an ongoing process of normalisation according to prevailing cultural-institutional norms. The latter exhibit a purposeful orientation towards the approximation of a normative as well as cognitive “ideal” of optimal presence. As a result, individual perceptions and actions with respect to hate crime-related issues are embedded within experiential horizons that transcend current perception. As a result, there is something problematic about the apparently neutral statement “I just take people as I find them.” The problem here is that all perceptions are motivated by already learned aspirations and cultural expectations, with the latter embedded in broader cultural and historical horizons.21 Here, the intertwining of interpretive recipes for differentiating individual perceptions of Y group as “normal” and X group as “abnormal” with intersubjective norms, value-judgments and normative expectations becomes clear. Indeed, our intersubjective horizons of “normality”/” abnormality” are saturated with historically specific cultural norms that, in turn, generate specific expectations about, say, nationality, race, sexuality, gender etc. in individual’s perceptions that then inform how subscribers to the natural attitude respond to members of various hate crime victim groups. Such intersubjective “normality” has to rely on the presumption that all relative perspectives refer to what is more or less the same objective world, as distinct from numerous purely individual subjective worlds, each of which has its own idiosyncratic notions and interpretive recipes. As a result, subscribers to the natural attitude can differentiate normality and abnormality confident in the belief that those situations to which these categories apply themselves exhibit this differentiation as part of their intrinsic nature. As a result, even though subscriber’s mundane unreflective perceptions of X group as “abnormal” will be informed by strictly relative,  When we perceive someone else, there is also in play a source of a certain “aiming beyond” what is concretely intuited, with habitual – and possibly stereotypical – expectations delineating a horizon of supplementary determinations that contribute to the overall determinacy of the experience itself. Meeting a priest for the first time always-already brings with it both a knowledge and a potential knowledge about what being a priest means for us which refers to something of the already understood “priestly qualities” of this person which has not yet come into view. This preknowledge is often partly indeterminate as to its content, but it is never completely empty as in “I take people as I find them.” See Husserl 1973: 32 Habitual expectations always exist according to which there is always more to be seen in a phenomenon than what presently appears to intuition. As a result, each determination of what someone or something is, will always be is apprehended as a fulfilment or disappointment of a previous anticipation; while each new determination generates new expectations for future determinations. 21

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contingent, provisional and parochial conceptions of “normality”/“abnormality,” the influence of naturalistic presuppositions ensures that these will not be recognised as relative, but rather mask and misrepresent themselves as ideal, generally applicable and indeed “natural.” As a result, all deployments of categories of normality and abnormality can never be entirely descriptive of, say, the “normality” of heterosexuality or the “abnormality” of gay sexuality or transgender orientations. Instead, such deployments remain mediated by implicit value-judgements related to historical specific and culturally relative normative augments. For us, such “going against the grain” of these and other normalising habitual expectations is anything but a symptom of abnormality.22 On the contrary, breaking this habitual tendency it is rather a sign of an emerging form of cognitively (and perhaps ethically) more healthy and mature developmental state of enhanced freedom from the restrictive effects of traditional prejudice, a subset of which includes those exemplified in examples of hate speech. In turn, this cognitive liberation can be carried out by exposing and retracing the interpretive origins, grounds and presuppositions of the underlying and always-­ already presupposed question itself. We can begin to carry out this vital step of liberation by asking the following series of critically probing and problematising questions: 1. How does “the problem of/with X group,” as defined by perpetrators themselves, stand in relation to a particular underlying question: one that is posing an issue about culturally-defined “difference” in an especially prejudicial manner? 2. What type of question is being expressed in the form of “the problem of/with …”? Within the always-already underlying – but typically unanswered – question, what is it that is “standing out” thematically as “the problem needing a solution”? 3. How is it even possible to interpret a situation so that “the problem of/with X” is made to become thematic, and thereby, prominent as an “obvious” empirical topic for interrogation and response? 4. Yet, is it the case that, at the same time, as some elements of “the problem” become selectively “thematic,” the interpretive preconditions of the entire process are not only co-posited but also concealed, suppressed and thereby rendered unthematic?

 Husserl’s lectures in passive association suggest that if we switch our focus away from consciousness of an interpreted signified reality, to the process of its signification  - including the meaning of the sign, this involves a deviation from the natural attitude’s expectation of “normality:” ‘The moment our interest is directed toward the signs themselves and is arrested there (rupturing this normal function), like when it is directed toward the written signs or toward the flag that serves as a signal, abnormality shows up in the lived-experience itself. One feels that it goes against the grain, so to speak, and that one is not only violating a habit, but a habitual determinative end, a practical imperative. In this way we have thus also gained a deeper insight …’ Husserl, 2001: 27. 22

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5. Is selective openness of some aspects of the experience of hate speech and hate crime to becoming included as thematic also a form of selective closure of the remainder?23 The challenging nature of these probing Husserlian questions directed towards generating a better understanding of the problem of/with X may itself prove to be instructive. Perhaps, it gives some indication of the extent to which these assumption-­ driven interpretive preconditions behind such expressions of, say, hate speech or official reactions to it, often fail to receive the explicit and (self)critical consideration that a phenomenology of hate crime considers vital. We must, therefore, recognise that, with respect to, say, hostile verbal responses to members of one or more hate crime victim group, “the problem of/with X” cannot itself be defined as an externally observable and self-evident matter-of-fact. Instead, such responses to X appear as belonging to the emphatically interpretive realm of what is “obvious” to, and self-evident for, our everyday “common sense.” As such, these responses, together with the various reactions they engender from others, belong to what is, in itself, a highly questionable form of a question: one whose fruits our phenomenology of hate crime cannot take at face value in the manner of such “common sense.” On the contrary, we are confronted experientially here by a latent and always-already presupposed question: one whose very status as such requires a close phenomenological examination and explication. Such investigation must, in turn, be developed in ways that are deliberately oriented to superseding the natural attitude’s orientation in general. This entails a concerted effort to overcome its defensive forms of resistance and closure in particular. In particular, a phenomenology of hate crime needs to address what is being not only posed  – but also presupposed  – during the highly selective positing of “the problem with/of X” itself. We must also strive to identify and adequately characterise all that is being included as thematic, as well as that which – as the other side of this process – is being rendered obscure, glossed over, and rendered invisible by the natural attitude. It is equally vital to recognise what occurs here as a structurally-­ determined by-product; to recognise exclusion as a necessary consequence of adopting the natural attitude’s specific objectivist interpretation of designated cultural differences. In other words, it becomes clear how selective inclusion of “X as a problem of/with” has another side, selective exclusion of whatever is deemed to fall outside X as a non-problem, even as a non-issue. Yet in practice, the task of grasping and analysing the interpretive dynamics behind the generation of this “waste product”-to-be-excluded still remains extremely challenging owing to the practices of closure we have already discussed. At least now, with the benefits of our earlier discussion, we can better appreciate why such analysis is so difficult to accomplish in practice, and what are the sources of the various difficulties that our phenomenology of hate crime needs to be struggled with and hopefully overcome. Put simply, it is relatively straightforward for researchers to deploy qualitative-phenomenological research methods to investigate and explicate “in what sense the presence of, say, an Asian shop owner managing a business 23

 Arguably, question five is closely related to question four.

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on an overwhelmingly “white housing estate” is being selectively defined by a group of local resident hate crime perpetrators as a problem-of/with.”24 Participant observation and in-depth qualitative semi-structured interviews will largely suffice to clarify what is being spuriously rationalised here as “the problem” of” having a shopkeeper from South Asia on “our estate.” Such descriptive analysis can even cast light on the surface operation of an “us”/“them” process of differentiation in which the shopkeeper is, simply by being south Asian, relegated to the latter category within the perpetrator’s interpretive framework. We can investigate the sense-­ content of perpetrators’ taken-for-granted beliefs concerning: 1. Who is truly entitled to belong-to this localised homeworld as a rightful inhabitant? 2. And who else is being negatively characterised as an emanation from a comparative “alienworld” to be rightfully excluded and driven from this homeworld, perhaps in a self-styled act of communal “self-defence”?25 By contrast to this surface-level descriptive analysis of express and implied meanings, attitudes and beliefs (noematic analysis), it is far more challenging for researchers to address how the constitution of what is widely taken-for-granted by this group as “no problem” is being constituted as such. For example, to investigate the underlying prejudicial basis for perpetrators’ hostility as a self-constituting “us” defending its own territorial patch against the perceived incursions of an alien “them.” It remains extremely challenging to account for how this supposedly  See ‘Shopkeeper quits after years of racism’ The Guardian, 13 April 2005. ‘Mr Hussain and Linda Livingstone bought the Ryelands Mini Market in 1991, and within days they were subjected to racist attacks after a man walked into the shop and demanded: “Get out of your chair, you fucking black monkey, and give me 20 cigarettes. … Mr Hussain has recorded more than 4000 separate incidents, including a fire-bomb and being shot at with live bullets on two occasions.’ https://www. theguardian.com/uk/2005/apr/13/race.ukcrime. Despite a well-documented campaign of racial harassment, leading to 46 separate criminal convictions of the perpetrators, no one was evicted from the Ryelands council estate in Lancaster. Nine people were convicted in July 1997 of crimes related to the petrol bombing of the shop. They included five juveniles who were sentenced to a total of 24 years and a seven-year sentence against 38-year-old Craig Wareing. A number of these and other earlier offenders were council tenants. In addition to physical violence, Mr Hassain and his partner had suffered hate speech including having ‘gangs outside chanting “If you want the Paki out clap your hands. If you want the Paki dead stamp your feet.”’ https://www.independent. co.uk/news/race-hate-victims-win-landmark-judgment-1233733.html 25  There is an entire Husserlian problematic of homeworlds and alienworlds, of self and others, which a multi-volume phenomenology of hate crime would need to address at some point. Klaus Held, ‘Le monde natal, le monde étranger, le monde un,’ In Samuel Ijsseling (ed.) Husserl Aussgabe und Husserl Forschung, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990: 9; J. N. Mohanty argues the constitution of the alter ego and the constitution of alien culture are both analogous in some respects and not analogous in others. Both are transcendental questions about the constitution of very sense of “otherness.” At the cultural level, our sense of “ownness” and “belonging” to a community of fellow members is always intertwined with the designated “otherness” of those who, for us, do not belong, and the sense of home and homeworlds is always intertwined with the foreign and alienworlds. See “The Other Culture” in Mano Daniel and Lester Embree eds., Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994: 135–146. Cf. Michael Heunissen, The other, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984: 89. 24

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unproblematic orientation is being continually interpretively-constituted and reiterated as a parochial group norm: one that is almost certainly interconnected with other, no less prejudicial assumptions.26 What is excluded by closure is a far deeper and more challenging question: Namely, how is this deeply illiberal us/them differentiation, with their often vicious and violent consequences in terms of friends/enemies, being constantly rendered unproblematic? How is the “no problem” part of this underlying differentiation itself being performatively accomplished so as to render it as apparently “self-­ evident?” How is the “us” part of the “us/them” differentiation being constituted and reiterated as supposedly “normal,” “only natural,” and even as somehow “obvious?” Later, we will argue that answering these type of deeper-level underlying questions requires a far more sophisticated set of Husserl methods than participant observation and semi-structured qualitative interviews with perpetrators. We need to identify and characterise the vehicle for achieving this state of oblivion regarding the projected no-problem. A clear example of the constitution of “no-­ problem” can be contexts where victims of hate crime and speech who complain repeatedly to the police about the latter’s perceived “inaction” or “disbelief” or even their “dismissal attitude” in the face of evidence of criminality, are themselves interpreted by the police as “the problem”.27 At this point, we can suggest that this vehicle is the apparently necessary linkage between the “recognition” of “the problem,” on the one hand, and – on the other – the apparently urgent and overriding public policy task of acting decisively to “(re)  In terms of the interpretive constitution of the “X as no problem” with it is remarkable that, in March 1996 a defence lawyer in the Lancaster shopkeeper case just mentioned, involving the victimisation of Mel Hussain, sought to argue in mitigation for his client, who had been convicted of repeatedly racially harassing Mr. Hussain, that: ‘If one is abused occasionally, one can take offence. But if one is abused for four to five years, one becomes immune to it. It is like water off a duck’s back.” Mr Hassain had, over many years, recorded more than 4000 separate incidents, including a firebomb and being shot at with live bullets on two occasions. Ibid. See also the BBC report from 13 April, 2005: ‘Shopowner quits after ‘race hell:’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/4440683.stm. In addition, another implicit “no problem” claim is found in the reported statement of a local councillor for the Ryelands estate area, Jean Horner, who allegedly stated: ‘It’s a case of least said, soonest mended with Mal. Other coloureds seem to have managed to make a success of shops in this area without any of these problems.’ Furthermore, on 4 August 2000, The Lancaster Guardian printed an article, ‘Put a sock in it Mal’, which Mr Hussein claimed increased hate crime attacks. Ian Herbert, op cit: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/how-racists-forced-storeholder-to-shut-up-shop-8002552.html 27  In the Mel Hassain case, Carol Broad, then a Labour councillor for Ryelands Estate, stated: ‘These appalling incidents and the sparsity of prosecutions shaped the couple’s view of the police more as ‘spectators. … the police saw Mal Hussain as the problem.’ In 1995 he made a successful complaint against one police officer for failing to take action over nuisance and damage to his shop and for a dismissive attitude. … Mal said that when he was shot at in 1993 the police failed to carry out a forensic investigation, take a statement or search for the bullet in his shop. He also produced evidence which disputed a council and police survey of crime and disorder in the region. The section concerning Ryelands reported zero racial incidents. Yet Mr Hussein had recorded details of five serious racist attacks with police log numbers during the six-month survey period.’ Michael Gillard and Melissa Jones, ‘Shot at, bombed, abused: life for one couple in racist Britain,’ The Guardian, UK, 2 March 1999. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/mar/02/race.world 26

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solve” it. For instance, there appears to be a direct connection between identifying “the problem of under-reporting of hate incidents”28 or “inadequate prosecutions,” and proposal for solving “the problem” by increasing access to and knowledge about local and online reporting mechanisms and renewed police focus on increasing the level of prosecution rates.29 This sense that “all concerned parties” in the field of hate crime are confronted with supposedly urgent practical tasks of correction is surely an ethically-positive stance, and the failure of responsible local authorities and police to respond with a proportionate urgency can be grounds for a legal challenge.30  Research literature discussing designated “under-reporting” and its various alleged contexts and explanations that interprets this as a purely factual issue is massive. Most recently see F. Pezzella, M.  Fetzer, T.  Keller, ‘The Dark Figure of Hate Crime Underreporting,’ American Behavioral Scientist, 2019, Jan. 28; K.  Plumm, K.  Leighton (2019) ‘Sexual Orientation and Gender Bias Motivated Violent Crime,’ In: Bornstein B., Miller M. (eds) Advances in Psychology and Law, Vol.4, Berlin: Springer, 2019: 258–280; Neil Chakraborti, ‘Responding to hate crime: Escalating problems, continued failings,’ 18(4) Criminology & Criminal Justice, (2018): 387–404. 29  For example, those campaigning on race hate crime issues, such as The National Assembly Against Racism (NAAR), have tended to make these connections. Lee Jasper, Secretary of NAAR commenting on the Hassain case, stated: ‘that of the thousands of incidents reported to the police, only a fraction were taken to court, despite the severity and consistency of the racist attacks… The news of Mal and Linda’s departure from the estate comes as an indictment on the record of the Lancashire Constabulary and the city council’s abject failure to enforce existing legislation, which provides them with the powers to prosecute racists.’ Ibid. In the Hassain case, litigation was brought by the hate crime victim against those he claimed had in effect, in terms of their deeds, “no problemed” his plight, at least to a large degree. The claimants claimed that their severe racial harassment was predominantly from Council tenants and their families from the same housing estate, and that they had informed the Council of such harassment from 1991 and updated them regularly. The court transcript cites their claim of partial no-probleming by the City Council as a series of failures to act despite having a duty and power to do so: ‘Has failed to cause the nuisance and acts of violence towards the Plaintiffs to cease. Has failed to institute and pursue possession proceedings and/or appropriate injunction proceedings or take any or any effective steps against the perpetrators of the nuisance and acts of violence. Has failed as set out above despite ample information being available from the Plaintiffs, the police and from its own officers or agents that would enable it to do so.’ https://court-appeal.vlex.co.uk/vid/-52584838. The harassment took the form of congregating outside the shop, intimidation, shouting abuse and threats, throwing bricks, stones and balls, smashing windows, burning objects put through the door. The defendant council clearly had the power to evict these perpetrators, a proportion of who had already been convicted, for causing a nuisance under the tenancy agreements and under the Housing Act 1985. However, their main response was to send letters to the designated perpetrators threatening them with eviction if they continued to harass Mal Hussain. Yet this response was ineffective because the council did not in fact take possession proceedings against any of the perpetrators for later acts of harassment. Hassain then brought an action against the council for their failure to prevent the nuisance when it was in their power to do so. 30  In the High Court and Court of Appeal litigation arising from the Hassain case discussed above, Lancashire Police, who admitted shortcomings, were initially found not liable for negligence with respect to their responses and non-responses to racist hate speech and crimes. See ‘Appeal to end racism hell,’ BBC News: Thursday, November 4, 1999: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/504484.stm. However, a later High Court judgement reversed this decision that there was no case to answer, holding that Lancashire Council, as a landlord of many of the perpetrators, could in principle have a legal duty to evict those responsible for racist hate crimes under the law of nuisance. See Patricia 28

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Yet, it is one that is worth reflecting upon from a certain cognitive and emotional distance. Our phenomenology of hate crime needs to take a step back and thereby achieve a certain distancing, even – or perhaps especially – where the urgency is reflected in initiatives at the highest constitutional, parliamentary and even governmental levels.31 This is because otherwise this emphatic sense of urgency, which in some contexts maybe entirely commendable at one level, can tend to be ­overwhelming. It may overpower any sense that there could be a prior and alwaysalready presupposed question worth addressing in the specific manner being proposed: Namely, the question underlying the very definition of “the problem of/with X”. This very sense of urgency can overwhelm and displace the possible radically qualitative investigation of the topic itself, of what is interrogated in itself. By resorting to the rhetorical form “the problem of/with X …,” the supposedly “urgent task” becomes reinterpreted as something within which everything else connected with “the problem of/with…”, including its wider context, source, and proposed “solutions,” is already both predefined and effectively positioned in a certain manner as well. These tendencies towards being caught up with, and manipulated by, a default “correctionist stance” merit some caution. This is because they Wynn Davies, ‘Race-hate victims win landmark judgement,’ The Independent, UK 4 October 1997: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/race-hate-victims-win-landmark-judgment-1233733. html. After this preliminary ruling, Hassain’s lawyers stated: ‘This is a very welcome and even historic ruling … Up to now the law has been unclear. Now the High Court has ruled that local authorities can be liable as landlords for acts of nuisance including racial harassment when they fail to take action against the perpetrators.’ However, at the full High Court hearing his case against the council was rejected on 24 March 1998. Later, in 14th May 1998 the Court of Appeal rejected Mr Hussein’s action refusing him leave to appeal to the House of Lords. See Ian Herbert, ‘How racists forced storeholder to shut up shop: A storekeeper who has suffered up to 4000 race attacks in 13  years has finally had enough.’ The Independent, 23 July, 2003: https://www.independent. co.uk/news/uk/crime/how-racists-forced-storeholder-to-shut-up-shop-8002552.html; Hussain and another v Lancaster City Council: CA 14 May 1998; Times 27 May 1998, [1998] EWCA Civ 834, [2000] QB 1, [1999] 4 All ER 125. In essence, this exercise in judicial formalism concluded that a local Authority, as landlord of tenants committing gross racist acts, was not liable in nuisance or negligence to neighbours for its failure to control their behaviour even though it set out to attempt to do so. The case was held to be outside the scope of nuisance since the acts of the perpetrators did not involve the tenants’ use of the tenants’ land, and the Council had neither authorised nor adopted the nuisance. 31  On 17 March 1997, The Hassain case even generated a Parliamentary Early Day Motion No. 672 directed at “the problem of/with” the lack of effective official responses to his racial victimisation, which allegedly had largely no-problemed his case despite massive evidence to the contrary. This stated that: ‘although there have been 29 convictions for crimes against Mal Hussain and his property, the local police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Lancaster local authority have not so far taken the necessary action to protect Mr Hussain, Ms Livingstone and their property; therefore calls upon Lancaster City Council to evict the perpetrators of racial harassment under its racial harassment guidelines, and to give Mr Hussein and Ms Livingstone the option of buying their business at its full commercial value; calls upon the Lancaster police to take all action necessary to protect Mr Hussain, Ms Livingstone and their property; and calls upon the Crown Prosecution Service to vigorously pursue legal action against all appropriate individuals to bring the campaign of racial harassment on the Ryelands estate to an end.’ https://edm.parliament.uk/early-daymotion/13845/racial-harassment-of-mal-hussain

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may serve to reduce the scope for critical self-reflection on whether there is good evidence to subscribe to not only the proposed definition of “the problem with/of” but also the proposed “solution.” For example, there is understandable scepticism in liberal circles in response to press headlines proclaiming the “problems of asylum seekers,” which imply the need for the introduction of yet more tighter immigration controls. Yet, the issues raised here also apply to the equally understandable “common sense” linkage of instances of perceived “racist abuse” to “the problem of under-reporting and inadequate levels of prosecution.”32 In both cases, the rhetorical form of “problem of/ with” establishes a supposedly logical necessity to connect a designed “problem” with a preconceived “solution.” As a result, the discussion of the practicalities of the latter, such as “how best to increased reporting levels,” rapidly leads us to subscribe to a wholly instrumental orientation. The latter instrumental rationality involves connecting technical means with ends, but often at the expense of any critical reflection upon the justification of the ends themselves.33 In this respect, not only within the field of hate crime but also more generally, we can identify within the natural attitude an apparently logical-rhetorical “necessity” for veiling aspects of the topic itself, including – as just noted – the validity of policy ends or goals. This is a structurally-determined type of veiling: one which is necessarily grounded in the very way of actually posing or framing “the problem” itself. As Heidegger’s incisive commentary on Husserl recognises, what arises here is a potentially spurious – but apparently rhetorically compelling – circular form of pseudo-reasoning: one that is characteristic of the most fundamentalist way of justifying even the most dangerous of traditional societal prejudices: Every problem that is well known and discussed in public is not so much the sign of a thoroughly well-grounded character as it is instead a prejudice of the most dangerous sort, since the problems are as such apt to obscure matters insofar as the problem hits upon the answer and depends upon what is asked. In the context of the problem, what is interrogated is only interrogated as something traditionally taken up to be interrogated and only interrogated in the regard in question, taken up with the problem itself.34

It is clear from what we have already discussed that, when entangled in the natural attitude, an individual’s sense of “the problem of/with …” – where “the problem” relates to a hate crime victim group for example – are mostly not present or fully present to his or her field of awareness. Indeed, the meaning of what it is that underlies “the problem” is rarely if ever, allowed to become thematic and prominent. This sense of “the problem-needing-a-solution” rarely takes shape as an explicit and open question: one that is clearly grounded in a compelling interpretation of the qualitative forms, content and style, of lived-experience. Instead, this sense often appears merely linguistically, often in the form of glibly repeated clichés about projected aspects of, say, different victim groups. The linguistic form  Ibid.  On instrumental rationality see T. Kelly, ‘Epistemic Rationality as Instrumental Rationality: A Critique,’ 66 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2003): 612–40. 34  Heidegger, 2005: 56–7. 32 33

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here can include statements such as “it’s what everyone knows about X,” or “you know what they say about X.” The choice of “dehumanising” words describing, for example, desperate asylum seekers in terms generally reserved for natural disasters such as “a flood” or “inundated,” or their linguistic characterisation as military threats, such as “invading army,” who are threatening to steal our country” should not go unnoticed here.35 In turn, the linguistic form point towards a taken-for-granted understanding of meaning attaching primarily to the words deployed. Here, understanding is, from the start, thrust, in specific – yet highly selective – directions of pre-scripted questioning and problematising. As Heidegger further notes, the linguistic dimension here is vital. This is because our vocabulary is a bearer of many often-unnoticed traditional assumptions and handed-down stereotypes. These can serve to restrict and prejudice the answers and responses we can give to hate crime issues. As a result, with respect to the ongoing reiteration of stereotypical conceptions of “the problem of/with,” we cannot discount the potential agency of this received vocabulary itself, in which, as Heidegger notes: ‘The words traditionally carry the inquiry in themselves.’36 Furthermore, we must recognise precisely how “the problem of/with X…” can itself be set up interpretively by a received vocabulary in a distinctly prejudicial way. It may be clear that, in some contexts relevant to hate crime, it is set up in a manner that itself invites no less prejudicial “answers,” together with proposed ultimate “solutions.” At one ideological extreme, a radically genocidal mindset culminating in the horrors of a “final solution” must first devise a fitting vocabulary of dehumanisation to constitute the victim group as “the X problem,” to which some type of ultimate “solution” is – as if by some type of inherent logic – called for by

 See ‘Trump claims ‘caravans’ of migrants in Mexico mean US ‘is being stolen,’ Guardian, UK, April 2, 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/02/trump-caravans-migrantsimmigration-daca. More generally, BBC News: ‘Donald Trump: Free speech v hate speech, 8 December 2015: ‘Donald Trump has used his right to free speech to forge his way to the front of the race for the Republican presidential nomination - but elsewhere he might have been prosecuted. The First Amendment right to freedom of speech under the US constitution permits Donald Trump to make claims and proposals that others might deem unacceptable incitement. Mr Trump has claimed variously:

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that Arab Americans cheered on the 9/11 attacks, despite a lack of evidence that many Mexicans in the US are criminals and rapists that there should be a mass deportation of illegal migrants in the US most recently. That Muslims should be banned from entering the US solely on grounds of their religion

In other countries, including many European ones where the experience of fascism is still deeply etched, some of these claims might well have fallen foul of hate-speech laws. … One UK citizen has even launched a petition – currently being considered by the parliament petitions service – seeking to ban Mr Trump from the UK for allegedly violating hate-speech laws. … The former leader of the far-right National Front in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been convicted of hate speech and anti-Semitism, including Holocaust denial, by both French and German courts.’ 36  See the earlier references to the Mal Hassain case. ‘Appeal to end racism hell,’ BBC News: Thursday, November 4, 1999: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/504484.stm

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this discourse.37 At a less extreme end of the spectrum, the language of “enemy of the people” or the “enemy within” may, if widely endorsed, accepted and copied, also serve the cause of societal exclusion, and even physical attacks on those singled out in this way, a subset of which may include members of hate crime victim groups.38 We also need to recognise other linguistic dimensions to this type of closure. Although often expressed in emphatic and absolute terms as “the” problem of/with X is …”, the stock of these clusters of “problem-words” (and whatever they refer to and designate in negative terms) are themselves clearly historically and cultural variable. Hence, and contrary to the implied claim to be articulating a timeless and immutable truth concerning the presumed absolute “essence” of all members of X, these problem-words are subject to change over time. The clearest example is, perhaps, the transformation within Western Europe of notions of gay sexuality from signifying an “inherent” and “obvious” “crime issue/ psychiatric problem,” to a question of both the “inherent” and no less “obvious” problem of “the denial of equal rights to fellow citizens from minority groups.”39 As a result of these historical changes, hate speech can now be perceived and spoken about of in terms of a “violation” of the “inherent human right” of all citizens to  While the Nazis’ extermination of around 6 million European Jews, as well as thousands of Roma, is perhaps the most emphatic example, broadly similar aspects of this tendency towards singling out a specific group of citizens as supposedly “other-than-the-rest-of-us” can be seen throughout the history of genocidal programmes. See, for example, Susan Sontag, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, NY: Picador, 2006 which discusses the frequency with which Tutsi victims in the Rwandan genocide were characterised by their murderers in terms of a dehumanising terminology of snakes and cockroaches: one that had been actively encouraged to deploy by those whose words actively incited this genocide. Once the very existence of a group is singled out as raising, by the very existence of its own particular and distinctive cultural (or religious or ethnic) orientation a “question,” then the interpretive performance of that very act, which will often be based upon crude and prejudicial stereotypes and over-generalisations, may turn out to have sinister downstream implications irrespective of the original subjective interests and intentions of those carrying it out. Cf. The highly polarised debate on the significance of Karl Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question,’ 1844” where issues of authorial intent and the unintended meaning of crass stereotypes of Judaism as capitalistic have been debated fiercely. https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/ 38  Diane Frost, ‘The ‘enemy within’? Asylum, racial violence and ‘race hate’ in Britain today,’ 2(3) Twenty-First Century Society (2007): 227–248. 39  S. Jeffery-Poulter, Peers, queers, and commons: The struggle for gay law reform from 1950 to the present, London: Routledge, 1991; Mary Kite, and Kinsey Blue Bryant-Lees, ‘Historical and contemporary attitudes toward homosexuality,’ 43(2) Teaching of Psychology (2016): 164–170; R. S. Mitchell, The Homosexual & the Law, Arco; 1969; Kees Waaldijk, ‘Civil developments: Patterns of reform in the legal position of same-sex partners in Europe,’ 17 Can. J. Fam. L. (2000): 62; C. Waaldijk, Legal recognition of homosexual orientation in the countries of the world. A chronological overview with footnotes, [conference paper] 2009: https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/14543/Waaldijk+2009+-+Legal+Recogniton+of+Homosexual+Orientat ion+-+Chronological+Overview.pdf?sequence=1; Kees Waaldijk, ‘Standard sequences in the legal recognition of homosexuality-Europe’s past, present and future,’ 4 Australasian Gay & Lesbian LJ (1994): 50; D.  A. Salzberg, Sexuality and Transsexuality Under the European Convention on Human Rights: A Queer Reading of Human Rights Law, London Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. 37

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receive “equal treatment.” On this basis, as late modern and increasingly secularised societies, Western European states no longer seek psychiatric “cures” for “the illness” or “abnormality” of homosexuality. Nor, despite their Christian heritage(s), do these societies follow Old Testament imperatives to stone gay persons to death. On the contrary, the urgent policy task has relatively recently been redefined. It has been redefined within the linguistic terms of a new largely “liberalised” vocabulary: one that embraces overlapping “anti-discrimination” and “human rights” agendas” underpinning the criminalisation of, say, stirring up hatred against gay persons.40 In turn, such vocabularies direct their attention to the question of “how best to overcome remaining legacies of discrimination,” to which hate speech and hate crime legislation may be deemed to form one vital symbolic and a practical part. The “problem of/with” formulae has been largely redefined officially, even in the European Court of Human Rights, as about how best to achieve the most effective enforcement of “human rights.”41 “The problem” now is not so much open expressions of gay love and affection but the hostility such officially “unproblematic” expressions “prompt” in those individuals who are pre-disposed towards “homophobic” hate speech and crime. Hence, promoters of Islamic Sharia law in the UK who call for a return to the criminalisation of gay sexuality themselves face prosecution and imprisonment for hate crime-related offences.42 In short, our phenomenology of hate crime needs to respond constructively to a certain tension that is has identified. This tension exists between essentialist claims to the timelessness and inherent truths about “the-problem-of/with X”, and the empirical presence of ongoing historical changes in the very qualitative categories used to identify and define both the meaning and scope of X itself, together with the latter’s specific normative implications. While the historical element is undoubtedly present within and confirmed by lived-experience, the essentialist element operates as a prejudicial distortion of such experience. For present purposes, essentialist conceptions of the various hate crime victim groups, which claim to identify what their members are “in themselves” by virtue of their exhibition of a timeless essence, merit displacement by a Husserlian Marian Duggan, ‘Homophobic hate crime in Northern Ireland,’ In Hate Crime, Willan, 2017. 98–118; BBC News: ‘Derby men guilty over gay hate leaflets,’ 20 January 2012: https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-16656679. Here, three Moslem defendants, successfully prosecuted and convicted of stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation claimed that their distribution of leaflets calling for the state killing of gays by hanging or stoning to death were simply following and quoting what their religion taught them about homosexuality, and that they did not intend to threaten anyone. In this case, taxi driver Ihjaz Ali, 42, was sentenced to 2 years imprisonment, while Kabir Ahmed and Razwan Javed, both 28, received 15 months. See Jonathan Brown, ‘Three Derby men jailed for anti-gay leaflets,’ The Independent, UK, Feb.15, 2012. https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/three-derby-men-jailed-for-anti-gay-leaflets-6720010. html 41  Paul Johnson, ‘“An Essentially Private Manifestation of Human Personality”: Constructions of Homosexuality in the European Court of Human Rights,” 10(1) Human Rights Law Review (2010): 67–97; Frances Hamilton, ‘The case for same-sex marriage before the European Court of Human Rights,’ 65(12) Journal of homosexuality (2018): 1582–1606. 42  Ibid. 40

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inspired critique of prejudice. Indeed, the letter reaffirms the temporality of not only the intentional objects of lived experience (as noematic) but also each of the various interpretive acts that, generally working in combination, constitute, reiterate and revise such objects as meaningful phenomena. In addition, as ego-subjects, we appear to ourselves and others in open-ended temporal streaming of intuited contents.43 Hence, neither noematic, nor noetic, nor ego logical forms of Husserlian experiential analysis provide support for an essentialist conception of, say, the membership of hate crime victim groups as somehow “forever-X-and-nothing-but-X.”

9  A Husserlian Response to the “Problem of/With” At this point, it is also necessary to contrast this problem/solution “logic” with our own, very different, phenomenological response to the lived experience of hate crime issues. As already suggested, the latter attempts to understand and appreciate the significance of these and other phenomena strictly on their own terms. It consciously avoids and, for expressly argued methodological reasons, strictly opposes reinterpreting them in alien and superimposed terms of whether they can be perceived of as either constituting “a problem” or as the latter’s alleged “solution.” Indeed, our Husserlian response needs to critically problematise the very presuppositions and qualitative assumptions at the level of first-order categories of meaning upon which rest the very sense of “the problem of/with.” Yet, to remain optimally self-consistent, this challenging form of Husserlian analysis of hate crime issues must also avoid falling into a similar trap with respect to “the problem of/with” for which it criticises the natural attitude. We must reply to the possible criticism that our own critical approach to the natural attitude’s objectivist orientation also posits these phenomena in terms of the problem of/with, and thereby renders itself subject to its own critique of such positing. In response, we would argue in our defence that there is a significant difference in kind between these two positings of “the problem of/with.” The vital difference is that, although we are critically engaging with the natural attitude towards hate crime issues, albeit initially as insiders and reluctant subscribers, our analysis of the problem of/with this orientation is utterly distinct. Our phenomenology of hate crime carefully addresses, spells out, and illustrates the precise sense in which we are entitled to understand the natural attitude in these terms. In particular, we are not taking its problematic status for granted in a dogmatic, naive and unreflective manner. Instead, our analysis respects and exemplifies a rationalistic social scientific imperative.

 E. Husserl and M. Heidegger, The phenomenology of internal time-consciousness, Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 1964; T. Kortooms et al., Phenomenology of time: Edmund Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness, Vol. 161, Berlin: Springer, 2002. 43

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In other words, we expressly illustrate with apt examples the specific reasons why we judge that the natural attitude is rightly considered problematic by the Husserlian tradition. Our phenomenology of hate crime expressly describes and explicates the sense in which we experience the natural attitude’s orientation as an unreflective, dogmatic, ideologically-complicit, reductionist and interpretively naive perspective, and illustrate in some detail the various contradictions, distortions and other difficulties that, for reasons why explain, typically arise from its application to the lived experience of hate crime issues. At its best, our own phenomenology of hate crime strives to provide evidence-­ based and experientially-grounded judgements, not merely presupposition-driven assertions. Indeed, the above analysis of “the problem with/or” tendency of the natural attitude is itself an effort at sense-explication of this orientation’s sub-textual implications: one that puts into reverse the natural attitude’s tendencies towards unreflective and dogmatic closure. Only our approach strives to expressly open up for debate both the what and the how levels of closure, including the subset of closure-­by-exclusion, as interrelated themes in their own right. At this point, we seem to be in the process of developing a concrete example of the difference between a purely descriptive account of “the facts” of hate crime and speech on the one hand, and – on the other – at least the beginnings of a more critically probing and evaluative character of a more fully-developed and mature phenomenological analysis.44 Despite its initially descriptive early stages focused upon incremental sense-explication, when brought to maturity, such analysis tends to consciously disrupt and  – through efforts at rigorous critical reflection and self-­ reflection – subvert the core dogmatic strategies of closure perpetuated by the natural attitude’s objectivism. As a result, it is now clearer to us how the results of the interpretive accomplishments of closure may well be vital to the reiteration of many prejudices directed against a range of people, including those common to different forms of hate speech for example. It is no less clear that our own Husserlian approach must seek to engage with not only these results but also the interpretive processes of their generation and reiteration in both descriptive and, later, critical ways. Indeed, it becomes vital for us to aim to actively expose just how such apparently “factual,” or “fact-based,” statements of prejudice, which overlap with hate speech, are nothing of the kind. On the contrary, they appear experientially in the form of perceptual value-judgements subject to a regime of closure and deceptive camouflage. Here, it is vital to clarify how the very sense of “what is the problem of/with X…?” arises only within and for a certain pre-given interpretive standpoint, which itself largely succeeds in concealing both its presence and its underlying interpretive dynamics. We need to grasp in express terms how this sense arises just as the standpoint of the natural attitude currently unfolds its distinctive character traits and values within a specific time, context and place.

 We generally follow those who characterise the latter as generative phenomenology but want to avoid being side-tracked into intra-Husserlian debates. This is despite the risk of dogmatism that our evasion brings.

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10  D  rawing Other Instructive Lessons from Our Analysis of Closure Such exposure and recognition of interpretive contingencies, historical changes and contextual relativities of “the problem of/with” by our phenomenology of hate crime is an important first step but – within the context of a fully-fledged phenomenology – only a first step. Through our analysis of the natural attitude’s practices of closure, we have accomplished something that is potentially rich in potentially instructive lessons for us in terms of what is required of our subsequent phases of analysis. Indeed, reflection upon these insights into such contingencies, changes and relativities allows us to not only identify and describe but also later go on to actively contest the natural attitude’s tendencies towards cognitive closure that this section has outlined. In addition, awareness of such contingencies, changes and relativities inspires us to begin a process of striving to consciously subvert the performative accomplishment of closure. In turn, such subversion is possible in principle providing we deliberately open up the prospects of carrying out well-targeted, radically qualitative and ultimately critical research work that consciously puts into reverse the trajectory of these processes of closure in order to begin to reopen up for analysis what has previously been closed down and concealed. Critical analysis strives to acquire sufficient momentum to allow it “go against the grain” of the interpretive recipes followed by these performances of closure by highlighting, opening up and bringing to light the details of the interpretive dynamics of closure itself. In particular, such radically qualitative research may be capable of investigating, identifying and explicating the character of the underlying question(s) to which the prejudicial statements contained in, say, homophobic hate speech represents a crudely simplistic type of response. At this late point in our Husserlian analysis of the performance of closure, including closure-through-exclusion and “the problem with/or” formulae, we can raise a cluster of research questions with a critical cutting edge. These are designed to more fully open up such cognitive closure to sustained processes of critical scrutiny. We can accomplish this in ways that also put additional wind into the sails of developing a more fully-fledged and comprehensive Husserlian approach to hate crime issues. These questions are: 1. How do expressions of hate speech both hold onto and lay down a particular implicit question: one based upon the premises of that interpretive standpoint from which they implicitly draw their values, meanings, and general orientation towards one or more victim group? 2. How does this underlying interpretive standpoint provide perpetrators with a certain implicit guide, or default “recipe,” for articulating aspects of their already prejudiced mindsets? 3. What is the unarticulated “methodology,” as it were, at play for constructing a certain social designation for each member of a specific victim group, often of a reductive-essentialist kind, which typically takes the form of “all Xs are nothing but Y?

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4. How are this methodology’s interpretive recipes being deployed to possibly “resolve” the latent question always-already presupposed, from the outset and throughout, about the supposedly “essential nature” of the victim group in question? 5. For violent hate crime perpetrators does, say, the abuse they inflict on one or more victim group members within a locality, such as a particular housing estate, “resolve the problem” of how to “deter one of them” from “encroaching” into what is deemed to be “our” localised “homeworld”? Or are such violent responses often explicable in terms of other factors, such as sheer hedonistic malice? 6. To what extent, if any, can homophobic violence be perceived by perpetrators as a problem-solving response serving to deter open expressions of same-sex love and affection, and forcing openly gay couples to avoid certain “dangerous” homeworld areas, at least at specific times such as Friday and Saturday evenings and nights? 7. How can, for example, the question posed by the presence of a transgendered person at a railway station become “settled,” or “answered,” by means of invoking a specific conception of “abnormality,” and interpretive recipes deployed to differentiate designated “normality”/“abnormality” etc.?45 8. Is it possible that to some degree at least, what is being constituted as “the problem of/with X” seeks to secure a cognitive grip upon whatever it is that is being defined as “at issue” in and within the following? (a) the underlying question itself;  Phenomenology includes analyses of both generic species levels conceptions of normality and – as previously discussed – culturally relative aspects. At the level of perception and bodily experience operates as a general precondition of access to a coherent, unified and communicable perception of the world of nature and the life-world, which can be shared across cultures and different epochs because it is based upon our common species-specific sensory and kinaesthetic skills and possibilities. Without such commonalities, societal cooperation and communication within and across cultures would be impossible. Here we have to frankly accept that some conceptions of bodily ability and disability, normality and abnormality are linked to species specific material phenomenon; and are widely accepted as such. This explains why despite all other relativities few if any historical cultures have regarded hearing or visual impairments or children borne with missing limbs as either on a par or superior to those with more conventional bodily capabilities. Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), Hua XXXIX, ed. By R.  Sowa, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Springer, 2008: 657–58; and Husserl Ms. D 13. XII, 90. Far from providing an endorsement for disability related hate crime or speech, this point adds weight to the claims that societies have a positive – even absolute – obligation to take all reasonably practical steps to provide enhanced access for those recognised as having bodily disabilities to minimise the practical restrictive effects of physical disabilities upon the life-chances of those effected by them. In addition, phenomenology recognises how all manner of culturally variable and historically specific and changeable prejudices and discriminatory responses, which can include omissions as well as actions (e.g., refusal to install wheelchair access ramps), that serve to multiply the disempowering effects of bodily impairments are often superimposed upon the life-contexts of those with bodily impairments. Such practices, which may in a minority of cases be accompanied by hate speech, are not in any way grounded in – or justifiable by reference to – the material impairments themselves. 45

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( b) the thematic topic; and (c) the underlying tendency of the posited “answer” that offers a specific way of “resolving” the claimed “problem?” In short, behind the apparently “factual” nature of hate speech expressed in the form of “the problem of/with, say, all members of X victim group,” lies the challenge of how to better understand the underlying objectivism of the natural attitude’s latent interpretive framework: one which specifically makes its presence felt through the performative-accomplishment of practices of closure-by-exclusion and the problem of/with formulae. This is a self-concealing framework that – for our phenomenology of hate crime – merits ever-deeper excavation along the lines that our questions set out. Indeed, this latent framework itself warrants fulsome analysis and clarification of its various stratum. At the same time, there is a need for a clear and express appreciation of the reasons why such analysis involves deliberately opposing the framework’s modus operandi of resisting its resistances and subverting its defences. We have by now come to learn that to achieve an appropriately critical cutting edge, our Husserlian analysis must move on to study and explain the form, character and operations of the defensive insulating procedures of closure-by-exclusion, which the natural attitude deploys to resist such disclosure and analysis. Such explanation does not serve purely theoretical enlightenment but rather also the practical task of weakening the natural attitude’s overall ideological power, not least as a precondition for strengthening the potency and opportunities for penetration of our own Husserlian approach to hate crime issues. Our phenomenology of hate crime must, in other words, become sufficiently self-reflective to be able to draw some positive lessons from its own ultimately critical analysis of the natural attitude’s practices of closure in terms of what is needed to further develop the critical potential and penetrative possibilities of our distinctive approach towards hate crime as lived. For example, on reflection, these practices have shown us why there is a vital need for both grasping and articulating how the awareness of perpetrators of hate crime and speech, who react to victims in what, to others, appears as a clearly and viciously prejudiced manner, can practice a form of self-justifying denial that positively aborts the very possibility of developing a distinctly Husserlian analysis. If we take stock of the implications of our analysis of closure, we become better placed to both ask and answer the following question: “how does such denial serve to insulate the perpetrators’ mindset in a dogmatic way from even the possibility of self-doubt or self-criticism, and how does its disclosure tend to weaken it and open up the possibility for us to transcend it? By contrast, our phenomenology of hate crime has good reasons to insist that when it comes to the contents and qualities of concrete (individual or cultural) experiences relevant to the plight of victims or hate crime and speech references to normality and abnormality merit close and critical scrutiny.46 This is especially the case  Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), Hua. XXXIX, ed. By R. Sowa, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Springer, 2008: 640, 657–58.

46

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where these are based upon naturalistic and essentialist notions of normality in contexts where these are in reality less general and more relative to specific social prejudices and/or where the quality and content of the experience of perceived “abnormality” depends more on the interpreters’ individual bodily skills, customary value-judgements, habitualities of thought and belief, and specific interests, concerns and commitments.47 Such never-universal and forever-contingent elements, as opposed to the value-free recognition of an unchanging “essence,” may well be the drivers that, in practice, define the interpreter’s specific ways of interacting with the cultural, institutional and socials worlds. The individual habitual styles of the perceptual experience of those who express or harbour discriminatory beliefs in relation to one or more hate crime victim group merit close attention. These styles may be built up in interaction with the life-world and other members of local homeworlds and subcultures of prejudice. As a result, and contrary to the objectivist-­ naturalistic premises of much hate speech, they are necessarily historically and culturally-specific, contingent, parochial and provisional, and need to be confronted with this inconvenient experiential truth about themselves. For our phenomenology of hate crime, it now becomes clearer how a vital task here for our research programme is to draw out, as clearly as possible, the concrete implications of an earlier insight. Namely, that whatever takes shape as the unproblematic reality of the perpetrator’s situation, whatever “just is,” cannot be taken and accepted purely descriptively at face value. Perpetrators can interpret their experience of members of a victim group in a prejudiced manner, and then appeal to the contents of this experience as an alleged justification for abusing these members. Yet, clearly, this does not mean that the abuse is validated by that prejudicially mediated experience itself. This is because these members appear to subscribers to the natural attitude only through the lens of objectivist presuppositions. The latter serve to predetermine and substantially “bias” the significance of their presence in a particular pre-determined manner. In turn, this means that discrepant and contrary aspects of that experience supportive of a less prejudiced interpretation are subject to selective closure-by-­ exclusion and, therefore, never see the light of day. So, when our Husserlian approach complains of the “spurious concreteness” of whatever appears within the natural attitude’s “common sense” orientation towards hate crime issues, we can appreciate a vital point about prejudice as an interpretive performance. Namely, the need to recognise how it is this very process of closing off and concealing an  A fully-developed and exhaustive Husserlian model of the interpretive preconditions for prejudice and its expression would need to draw upon and clarity the idea of “habituality” as this appears often implicitly at various levels of lived experience, especially perception, including those relating to subjective dispositions, bodily abilities, personal and sub-cultural convictions, value-judgments and attitudes. For Husserl, habitualities are extensive and pervasive appearing as not only individualised but also as intersubjective/social, as not only corporeal but also as emphatically cultural and sub-cultural. For an excellent analysis, see D.  Moran ‘Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus,’ 42(1) Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2011: 53–77, 61. More generally, see A.  Pollard, ‘Explaining Actions with Habits’ 43 American Philosophical Quarterly, (2006): 57–68. 47

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underlying constitutive form of mediation that is being meant and referred to as an object of future close investigation and – later – downstream critiques. Indeed, this insight concerning the spurious immediacy and closure accomplished by the natural attitude’s orientation is especially valuable for a phenomenology of hate crime. For example, it allows us to better appreciate why, as a result of what is concealed by such closure, perpetrators can subjectively feel a need to re-­ assess neither the damaging effects of their actions upon victims, nor the interpretive preconditions of their own derogatory, even abusive, responses to the victims’ manifestations of designated cultural difference(s). In this way, through self-­ disregarding and unreflective practices, dogmatic forms of cognitive closure can successfully feed upon themselves as a matter of course. This can clearly lead to and reinforce all manner of self-fuelling and self-validating prejudicial practices. In turn, the outcomes of such practices are able to regularly re-affirm, and thereby reinforce, the presuppositions that guide their own prejudicial objectivist starting point. All this can take shape in a way that is all the more powerful at the rhetorical level precisely because, as a deceptive form of closure or closure-by-exclusion, the underlying interpretive dynamics generally escape the perpetrators’ attention. The latter instead remains fixated upon the interpretive outcomes of prejudicial perceptual judgements as if these expressed experientially-grounded insight. More generally, as a result of these operations of interpretive closure and spurious concreteness misrepresent as direct perception, subscribers to the natural attitude can subjectively feel no apparent need to be “distracted” by the rigours of conceptualisation with respect to the qualitative grounds for their own perceptual judgements. Nor do they often feel any need to either identify or radically question their own interpretive practices by subjecting these to an incisive type of qualitative analysis. As a result, they are generally content to remain oblivious with respect to not only their practices’ underlying interpretive foundations but also their array of always-already presupposed conceptual definitions. Indeed, if these reflective conceptual possibilities were ever to be even fleetingly considered at all within a perpetrator’s natural attitude, then they would probably appear and become defined as an “unnecessary distraction.” Such possible reflection would appear unnecessary relative to the preferred default state of “straightforward consciousness-of X-as …” In other words, these possibilities of conceptualisation would probably be (mis)represented as little more than unwelcome “detours” from the supposedly “obvious” need to directly grasp to “the facts of what has really happened” during, say, a specific hate incident. As Husserl recognises: ‘Natural human understanding and the objectivism rooted in it will view every transcendental philosophy as a flighty eccentricity, its wisdom as useless foolishness …’48 In other words, another hard-won lesson we need to learn is the need to gain a significant cognitive distance from the natural attitude’s defensive operations of self-concealing and self-validating procedures of closure sufficient to allow their 48

 Husserl, 1970: 200.

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prejudicial operations to become thematic for us as targets of critical engagement. We must learn how to take a step back from the apparently “obvious” need to accept, as a matter of course and hence uncritically without question, the results of our natural attitude’s “common sense” perceptions of a hate incident. In turn, this means interpreting as problematic what would otherwise appear as self-evident “common sense.” Our phenomenology of hate needs to re-examine Husserl’s methodological writings to find research methods allowing to effectively break out of the closed loop of such circular pseudo- “reasoning,” (in a very loose sense of that term). Only a position of cognitive distance can allow us to identify how the natural attitude’s underlying objectivism serves, in practice, to reinforce its more general tendencies towards a self-validating and protective form of closure among subscribers who, unlike ourselves, remain “insiders” to this closed loop. However, for the would-be “outsider” approach of a Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime, such closure of possibilities is itself an interesting phenomenon: one that both exhibits and perpetuates unreflective and dogmatic qualities. Hence, to better appreciate such closure requires us to distance ourselves from the acceptance-captivity that is part of its operation, with this “distancing,” in one sense, being the precondition for us being able to “get closer” to its characteristic tendencies in another sense. Metaphorically, we must learn how to distance ourselves from such closure precisely to see its operation more closely. For present purposes, it is these qualities of self-immunisation and closure, together with their implications for the reiteration of prejudices relevant to hate crime and speech, which require from us a particularly close and ultimately critical form of analysis. This appears the case, not least with respect to their covertly ideological dimensions, as well as the latter’s downstream implications. As a result of these insights, when entangled in the natural attitude, it is now far clearer to us why we tend to become remarkably naïve about the contributions made to what we straightforwardly perceive as “the facts” about such incidents that are being contributed by our own underlying interpretive perspectives. It becomes equally clear why an especially rigorous, penetrating and concerted form of self-­ reflection is not only needed from our phenomenology of hate crime but also extremely difficult to achieve in practice. Such reflection is required to, ideally, slam the mechanism of this closure-by-exclusion practice into reverse, as it were. At the same time, we are now better able to appreciate the reasons why perpetrators may readily detect the presence of interpretive relativity at play within the orientations of those of us who adopt a more positive, welcoming attitude to the phenomenon of cultural differences exhibited by one or more hate crime victim groups. These alternative responses, which may be closely related to the underlying ethics of a Husserlian approach, could be explained away by perpetrators dismissively as “mere opinions.” Such responses are vulnerable to being dismissed as “ill-informed subjective expressions of a middle-class liberal elitism” emanating from up-market areas of the country largely unaffected by, say, mass immigration. Yet, owing to the tendencies towards defensive closure-by-exclusion that we have already outlined, awareness of the equivalent process of mediation of the

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perpetrator’s own interpretive framework by a no less pre-given prejudicial perspective is far less likely to come into view. It now becomes far clearer why we cannot expect our Husserlian critique of the natural attitude to be positively welcomed by subscribers who then become happy to acknowledge the status of their prejudicial interpretations of members of hate crime victim groups as but one interpretation amongst many other possible ones. We must not, therefore, expect a welcoming response to our critique; or regard a hostile response in psychological terms as an expression of immature churlish ingratitude on the part of subscribers. On the contrary, we have every reason to expect that the better developed, more clearly expressed, and incisively penetrative our Husserlian critique of closure, the greater will be the dismissive resistance it engenders. While our analysis requires methods that liberate researchers from the prejudicial effects of our own starting point within the natural attitude, we cannot – given the results of our analysis – expect others – least of all hate crime perpetrators – to regard ourselves as their “liberators.” Although perhaps at one level, the latter point remains especially instructive in another respect. It clearly illustrates why, when the natural attitude’s objectivism prevails with respect to hate crime issues, practices of closure ensure subscribers can grasp neither how nor why they are being interpretively naïve about such interpretive mediation and relativities. Here, the very source of the obscurity of such suppressed mediation itself remains necessarily obscure to subscribers. Closure ensures not only that subscribers forget about such mediation but that they forget about their very forgetting of it. In other words, when entangled within the natural attitude’s interpretive matrix shaped by objectivist presuppositions, subscribers can rarely – if ever – perceive, or otherwise either recognise or acknowledge, the active prejudicial shaping or biasing role being played by these underlying presuppositions. When entangled within the natural attitude, we are preventing for coming to the realisation about how our unnoticed “common sense” deployments of objectivist interpretive frameworks are covertly responsible for first giving intelligibility to all that we experience. For example, we prevent ourselves from seeing how our interpretive framework contributes to us perceiving, say, a certain “type” of hate incident taking placing in a specific “type” of place and committed by a specific “type” of perpetrator etc. Such “typification,” perceiving a specific cluster of sights, sounds and other sensations as instances of more general categories, involving the merger of immediate intuitive sensory content and already-possessed generic cultural categories, is as pervasive within lived experience shaped by the natural attitude as it is routinely unnoticed and left unacknowledged. In other words, the obstructionist power of objectivist presuppositions, their role in achieving unreflective cognitive closure, initially prevents us from appreciating the dynamics of how these interpretive frameworks first make possible, and then actively ascribe, the quality of “whatness” to all that we experience as a hate incident of a certain type or subcategory, for example; while also interpreting the latter as a certain “type” of incident carried out by a specific “type” of perpetrator upon a certain “type” of victim. Only once we have succeeded in taking a step back from

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unreflective immersion within the natural attitude’s characteristic orientation can we expect the latter to stand out for us first as a theme for description, and then secondly as a target for critical engagement. Only from a position of cognitive distance is it possible to grasp that these type/stereotype categories, which are routinely deployed to make sense of “the given facts” of hate incidents, are themselves anything but “facts,” at least not in the objectivist-materialist sense of this term. In short, when subjected to the interpretive orientation of the natural attitude, shaped as it clearly is by a mixture of objectivist and naturalistic assumptions that we have unfolded above, we become generally disempowered cognitively. We also become caught up in a cognitively closed state of acceptance-captivity with distinctly conservative ideological implications that challenge us to find Husserlian research methods able to liberate us from their ideological-rhetorical gravitation pull over us. When entangled in this way in different aspects of closure, we effectively, if unwittingly, blind ourselves from recognising the active aspect of consciousness. The latter only appears in a fulsome way once we have escaped from acceptance-­ captivity. Only then can we adequately grasp how such underlying interpretive work, which deploys a range of cultural-linguistic categories lacking any physical qualities whatsoever, is constantly selectively constituting and reconstituting the evolving meaning and wider significance of every aspect of the hate crime research field. We can now appreciate how all these underlying interpretive dynamics are more or less effectively camouflaged within subscribers’ field of awareness. Despite all its disempowering qualities and effects, such remorseless practices of cognitive closure never emerge onto the centre stage of our field of “common sense” awareness as problems-to-be-resolved. It follows that to be successful our efforts to slam these processes of closure into reverse, to swim against the current as it were, must be no less concerted, powerful and remorselessly executed.

References BBC News. Appeal to End Racism Hell. Thursday, November 4, 1999. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/uk/504484.stm. ———. Derby Men Guilty over Gay Hate Leaflets. 20 January 2012. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-england-derbyshire-16656679. ———. Donald Trump: Free Speech v Hate Speech. 8 December 2015. https://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/world-us-canada-35041402. BBC Report 13 April, 2005. Shopowner Quits After ‘Race Hell’. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/4440683.stm. Beaumont, Peter. EU leads criticism after Israel passes Jewish ‘nation state’ law: Legislation stipulates only Jews have right of self-determination in the country. The Guardian UK, 19 July 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/19/ israel-adopts-controversial-jewish-nation-state-law. Bergman, Jonas. Donald Trump prefers immigrants from Norway but more Americans move to Scandinavia than vice versa: Controversial US President favours affluent Norwegians over asylum seekers from ‘s∗∗∗thole countries’ but feeling seemingly not mutual. The Independent,

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Johnson, Paul. 2010. “An Essentially Private Manifestation of Human Personality”: Constructions of Homosexuality in the European Court of Human Rights. Human Rights Law Review 10 (1): 67–97. Kelly, T. 2003. Epistemic Rationality as Instrumental Rationality: A Critique. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66: 612–640. Kite, Mary, and Kinsey Blue Bryant-Lees. 2016. Historical and Contemporary Attitudes Toward Homosexuality. Teaching of Psychology 43 (2): 164–170. Kortooms, T., et  al. 2002. Phenomenology of Time: Edmund Husserl’s Analysis of Time-­ Consciousness. Vol. 161. Berlin: Springer. Kuttner, Robert. How do you say shithole in Norwegian? Huffington Post, 01/14/2018. https:// www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-do-you-say-shithole-in-norwegian_us_5a5c0fe4e4b0fcb c3a1167fe. Karl Marx. On the Jewish Question, 1844. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/ jewish-question/. Mitchell, R.S. 1969. The Homosexual & the Law. New York: ARCO. Mohanty, J.N. 1994. The Other Culture. In Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, ed. Mano Daniel and Lester Embree, 135–146. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Moran, D. 2011. Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42 (1): 53–77, 61. More generally, see A. Pollard 2006. Explaining Actions with Habits. American Philosophical Quarterly 43: 57–68. Moran, Dermot. 2012. Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction, 298. Cambridge: CUP. Parliamentary Early Day Motion No. 672. https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/13845/ racial-harassment-of-mal-hussain. Patricia Wynn Davies. Race-hate victims win landmark judgement. The Independent, UK 4 October 1997. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/race-hate-victims-win-landmark-judgment-1233733.html. Pezzella, F., M. Fetzer, and T. Keller. The Dark Figure of Hate Crime Underreporting. American Behavioral Scientist, 2019, January 28 Plumm, K., and K. Leighton. 2019. Sexual Orientation and Gender Bias Motivated Violent Crime. In Advances in Psychology and Law, ed. B. Bornstein and M. Miller, vol. 4, 258–280. Berlin: Springer. Salter, Michael. 1994. On the Idea of a Legal World. International Journal of the Legal Profession 1 (3): 283. Published Online: 28 Apr 2010. cf. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/ 09695958.1994.9960380. Sontag, Susan. 2006. Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak. New York: Picador. Steinbock, A. 1995. Phenomenological Concepts of Normality and Abnormality. Man and World 28: 241–260. Taipale, J.  2012. Twofold Normality: Husserl and the Normative Relevance of Primordial Constitution. Husserl Studies 28: 49–60. The Guardian, 13 April 2005. Mr Hussain and Linda Livingstone bought the Ryelands Mini Market in 1991, and within days they were subjected to racist attacks after a man walked into the shop and demanded: “Get out of your chair, you fucking black monkey, and give me 20 cigarettes. … Mr Hussain has recorded more than 4,000 separate incidents, including a fire-bomb and being shot at with live bullets on two occasions. https://www.theguardian.com/ uk/2005/apr/13/race.ukcrime. ———. Trump claims ‘caravans’ of migrants in Mexico mean US ‘Is being stolen. Guardian, UK, April 2, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/02/ trump-caravans-migrants-immigration-daca.

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The Independent, 4 August 2000. The Lancaster Guardian printed an article, ‘Put a sock in it Mal’, which Mr Hussein claimed increased hate crime attacks. Ian Herbert, op cit. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/how-racists-forced-storeholder-to-shut-up-shop-8002552.html. ———, 23 July, 2003. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/how-racists-forced-storeholder-to-shut-up-shop-8002552.html. ———. Norwegians tell Trump we don’t want to come to your s∗∗∗hole country,’ 12/01/2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/norwegians-tell-trump-wedont-want-to-come-to-your-shole-country-a8156666.html. See also https://www.independent. co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/shithole-countries-where-trump-insulted-photos-beautiful-destinations-a8155676.html. ———. https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/shithole-countries-where-trumpinsulted-photos-beautiful-destinations-a8155676.html. ———. If you want the Paki out clap your hands. If you want the Paki dead stamp your feet. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/race-hate-victims-win-landmark-judgment-1233733. html. Travis, Alan. Ministers saw law’s ‘racism’ as defensible: Powell wielded influence over bill’s direction. The Guardian, UK, 1 January 2002. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/ jan/01/uk.race. Waaldijk, Kees. 1994. Standard Sequences in the Legal Recognition of Homosexuality-Europe’s Past, Present and Future. Australian Gay and Lesbian Law Journal 4: 50. D. A. Salzberg. 2019. Sexuality and Transsexuality Under the European Convention on Human Rights: A Queer Reading of Human Rights Law. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. ———. 2000. Civil Developments: Patterns of Reform in the Legal Position of Same-Sex Partners in Europe. Canadian Journal of Family Law 17: 62. Waaldijk, C. Legal recognition of homosexual orientation in the countries of the world. A chronological overview with footnotes [conference paper] 2009. https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/14543/Waaldijk+2009+-+Legal+Recogniton+of+Homosexual+Orientat ion+-+Chronological+Overview.pdf?sequence=1. Wehrle, M. 2015. Normality and Normativity in Experience. In Normativity in Perception, ed. M. Doyon and T. Breyer, 128–139. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Part II

Critique of Internal Difficulties and Contradictions with Objectivism

To date, our analysis of the prejudicial operation of the natural attitude has largely been pitched at the purely cognitive level, with a focus upon its methodological implications for our own clearly contrary diametrically opposite approach to the lived experience of hate crime. Only in passing have we made brief references to the distinctly ideological - and hence in part political – aspects of the natural attitude’s prejudicial performance-accomplishments and their concrete effects. This section aims to remedy that omission. We do this in part by revisiting some earlier themes and highlighting some of their specifically ideological dimensions that we previously left unthematic so as to avoid overloading the analysis. In this section we examine how, when applied to hate crime and other associated concrete policy-related issues, the natural attitude’s objectivist presuppositions may generate contradictions in practice, and  – in this way  – potentially cancel themselves out. We then set out the grounds for a Husserlian critique of these presumptions considered not only in themselves but also with respect to the problematic results of their application with respect to hate crime-related issues. Here, we aim to put wind into the sails of our wider contention that, from the application of its own strictly methodological logic, our phenomenology of hate crime develops itself progressively into an authentically critical (and later self-­ critical) approach to the conduct of social science research. The latter includes formulating a sustained internal critique of those ideological aspects of the natural attitude encouraged by the interaction of the latter’s objectivist and naturalist presuppositions. This contention is especially relevant to the specifically cultural-­ linguistic reiteration and application of those prejudices that are characteristic of hate crime and speech. In this and other ways, developing a Husserlian internal critique of the natural attitude’s objectivism should be most valuable. Indeed, this should be able to serve us as a springboard and foil for not only explaining the need but also the rationale for developing a distinctly phenomenological alternative approach to hate crime issues.

A Husserlian Critique of the Natural Attitude’s Prejudicial Effects

Abstract  This chapter develops a number of the constructive sides of our disclosure of the tensions, difficulties, and outright contradictions of an objectivist approach to hate crime. These constructive outcomes emerge from our close analysis of the implications of these tensions, difficulties, and contradictions in terms of refining and further legitimating a distinctly Husserlian alternative approach to hate crime-related research. In particular, reflection upon the implications of the extended critique of chapter “The Natural Attitude’s Objectivism as a Type of Closure” generates a series of questions and issues rich in detailed ramifications for a Husserlian alternative model and methodology.

1  Introduction This chapter aims to further demonstrate in some detail how the natural attitude’s claim to objectivism, including its reiteration of naturalistic prejudices, is deeply flawed. Furthermore, whenever objectivism is applied to the field of hate crime, or perhaps other social scientific topics, its methodological approach, which in part is founded upon taken-for-granted dichotomies – shows itself to be self-contradictory. The reasons for such self-contradiction are – we suggest – clearly explicable in distinctly Husserlian terms. First, however, we need to highlight some cautionary points about the very possibility of our own would-be critique of prejudice. For our phenomenology of hate crime, any type of assumption-driven question that underpins apparently fact-oriented statements about cultural differences must be explicitly regarded as both needing and deserving an adequate response. An adequate response would no longer be subject to the tendencies towards circular reasoning, self-validation and closure that we discussed in the last chapter because it can be clearly shown to be sufficiently grounded in lived-experience. Behind any statement about, say, “the problem of immigrants,” lies an underlying more radical question: one that, in response, we should explicitly pose for ourselves precisely in our role as phenomenologists. The latter needs to be formulated in accordance with the critical-theoretical imperative of identifying, bringing to the surface, unveiling, and finally explicating the sense-content of qualitative dimensions. As already discussed, these dimensions would otherwise tend to remain buried insofar as the natural attitude’s closure tendencies have been allowed to prevail © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Salter, K. McGuire, The Lived Experience of Hate Crime, Contributions to Phenomenology 111, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33888-6_5

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without effective contestation. In turn, such explication of the express and implied senses of both such prejudicial statements and the underlying presuppositions that first make them seem “credible” requires distinctly reflective and analytical work. The latter comprises the tasks of making clear, precise and determinate whatever has previously been both latent and obscure within the express statements of perpetrators of hate speech, as well as what these presuppose; of bringing out and problematising the latent subtext behind these expressions and their interpretive grounds. Here, our phenomenology of hate crime’s confrontation with hate speech, for example, becomes challenging. It becomes challenged by the vital need for us to distinguish an authentic analytical and/or ethical problem with respect to statements of prejudice directed at members of a hate crime victim group, from an essentially and distinctly arbitrary question contained in  – or presupposed by  – such assumption-­driven statements themselves, e.g., “the problem of too few Norwegian immigrants to the USA.” Put simply, our references to “the problem of hate crime and speech” have to be shown to be a response to a genuine problem widely experienced as such, and which pre-dates the application of its own interpretive framework. In turn, this means that a Husserlian critique cannot rest upon unexplicated subjective, moral, religious or ideological preferences of those individual phenomenologists who are carrying out hate crimes research. If not, then we would face the accusation that our entirely subjective preferences are, both cognitively and ethically, on a par with those of perpetrators themselves. If that was ever to become the case, then a Husserlian critique of the types of prejudicial closure, and prejudice more generally, would run aground. It would become shipwrecked on the rocks of moral, cognitive and cultural relativism. This is because  – to remain self-­consistent  – a Husserlian critique of prejudices relevant to hate crime would have no choice but to define itself as amounting to little more than a self-cancelling prejudice against prejudice. To avoid this absurd and contradictory outcome, the requirement is to demonstrate, with compelling experiential evidence, the precise sense in which cases of hate crime and speech really are widely perceived of as problems of a certain kind affecting societal, as well as sub-cultural, well-being and community cohesion. In addition, it must be shown that such prejudice-driven activities of victimisation demonstrate the operation of a comparatively inferior, question-begging, unreflective and dogmatic mindset. This negative judgement arises through a comparison to the revised social scientific rationalism of our own Husserlian orientation. Our methodology actively seeks to purge itself as far as possible from the prejudicial effects of all manner of taken-for-granted presuppositions and all self-validating and question-begging argumentation. Finally, our phenomenology of hate crime needs to show it can account for our experience of these cases in clear and compelling terms that are more transparent to themselves, open to self-aware application, as well as being both ethically and intellectually justifiable by reference to evidence-based argumentation and illustration. Only if the levels of such transparency, openness and accountability of the phenomenologists’ response to hate crime can show that these are of a significantly higher level of worth than those of perpetrators can a Husserlian approach with critical aspirations hope to escape the pitfalls of relativism. Here, we recall that for relativ-

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ism, there are simply “different” pre-judices (in the sense of negative value-­ judgments shaping perceptual judgements), each of which has, in principle, to be treated equally and on a par with all the others. Here, the rationalism of a self-­ critical social scientific approach is, for example, treated as it were necessarily on a par with the irrationalism of xenophobic hostility to “foreigners” and other “outsiders.” Hence, in the absence of objective benchmarks of evaluation, there can be no compelling reason to affirm the former at the expense of the latter. Instead, all values must, from the outset, be presumed to have equal status as a cluster of merely subjective preferences, akin to different tastes in food. For relativism, each context-dependent and interest-driven value-system and associated mindset occupies a flattened-out world of simple cultural differences free of generalisable benchmarks to evaluate them. It is this threatening spectre of a collapse into the contradictions of relativism that nevertheless claims universal validity that haunts and challenges the idea of us developing a distinctly critical, as distinct from essentially descriptive, Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime.1 The latter meets this challenge by insisting upon the general validity of the following propositions considered to be a minimal core of what social scientific rationalism would mean in the context of hate crime-related issues: 1. Clarity about cultural differences and their significance is better than obscurity, ambiguity and vagueness. 2. Openness to alternatives is a superior stance to cognitive and ethical closure towards those defined as “one of them” who inhabit an “alienworld” relative to one’s own contrasting homeworld. 3. An open-minded investigation that clarifies its own premises and approach is far better than the contrary stance of dogmatic fundamentalism concerned primarily to “vindicate” the superiority its own unacknowledged prejudices. 4. In the context of modernity at least, the promotion of critical self-awareness of one’s own prejudices and their presuppositions, seen as part of a striving for rational self-determination, has a higher cognitive, as well as ethical value, than the alternative of living an unreflective and pre-scripted life. 5. Taking personal responsibility for the impact on others of one’s expressions about victim groups is, in ethical terms, superior to its denial on the basis that: “this is how everyone around here refers to X.” These may be bold and contentious claims, each of which has its own presuppositions. Yet, their implications animate Husserlian phenomenology, which  – at its  An entirely descriptive approach that, following participant observation, simply explicates the sense in which for specific perpetrators the presence of, say, transgendered persons on a railway station provides a “reason” for their abusive mockery and abuse, and that also explicates the sense in which this actual and anticipated response negatively impacts the life-style of victims, might remain compatible with relativism if – but only if – the rationale for these contrasting interpretive responses are placed on a par, considered different but equally valid. However, such an entirely descriptive analysis would be incompatible with both the methodological and substantive approaches of Husserl, for whom a striving for optimal freedom from prejudice remained a core imperative from the start and throughout. 1

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best – both exemplifies these values and demonstrates the problems, contradictions and incoherencies of the opposite positions. For example, arguably, the application of the objectivist presuppositions of the natural, which then leads to contradictory results and substantive theory/practice inconsistencies, calls the very validity of these very underlying presumptions into question; and does so in a fundamental manner. Yet, these deep-rooted difficulties lying at the heart of objectivism may themselves prove to be unintentionally instructive in laying down a range of challenges and suggestions for our own Husserlian analysis of hate crime issues and questions that are informed by the five core values recently mentioned above. These difficulties may even serve to both pre-figure and illuminate part of the very rationale for adopting our alternative, and  – in many ways  – diametrically opposite, phenomenological orientation. As a result, the latter arises as a remedy to a problem it is uniquely qualified to diagnose. As our critical investigations unfold during the rest of this section, we will see how these difficulties and contradictions both indirectly and unintentionally point towards what will be required of our distinctly phenomenological approach, while also providing some illustration and justification for the five core value-commitments that underpin it. It will become increasingly clear that this constructive and forward-pointing dimension becomes ever-more prominent whenever we expressly address and consider those suppressed elements of key cognitive value within hate crime phenomena. When we grasp how the natural attitude’s objectivist orientation tends to suppress, displace and pass over in silence foundation qualitative elements, we also grasp what it is that our own approach needs to carefully salvage and restore. Perhaps, the acquisition of phenomenological knowledge of this topic, guided by the core values, needs to advance on a trial and error basis? It may need to realise these values in part by means of thorough internal criticism of the alternative approach of the natural attitude, with the latter’s revealed difficulties proving to be especially instructive? A useful starting point is to remind ourselves in summary form about how the natural attitude’s objectivism directs the focus of our attention exclusively upon the results of its own interpretative performances, upon interpretive outcomes represented as if they were “factual givens.” In other words, socio-linguistic categories belonging to – and extracted from – the realm of an encompassing cultural-­linguistic tradition, are constantly being projected upon what is being experienced as “a hate incident.” The latter is thereby “objectified” in a particular way, but without the underlying interpretive grounds for its objectification and construal ever being allowed to see the light of day. The resulting objectified, categorised and sub-categorised lived reality of hate crime, whose qualities now appear within the natural attitude’s orientation as a straightforwardly “objectively given” series of events, persons and contexts relevant to one or more hate incidents, for example, becomes interpreted naturalistically. It is interpreted as exhibiting its own inherent nature: one which the official ­classification schema to which it is being subjected, including different

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categorisations of hate incidents in terms of religion, gender, sexuality etc., merely “recognises” as such and clarifies descriptively. The Husserlian critique of this interpretive outcome begins by asking of this objectifying and naturalising process what is thereby being concealed? Is the implied model of consciousness and subjectivity at play here really as scientifically-­ credible and evidence-based as it may appear at first sight? Or does it involve a self-cancelling over-extension of a specific causal-explanatory methodology: one whose validity is strictly limited to its “natural habitat” within the sciences of nature? Each of these issues will now be examined in turn.

2  The Overextension of a Causal-Explanatory Model? The first point of Husserlian criticism concerns the extension of causal-explanatory methodological approaches derived from the natural sciences, which – we argue on Husserlian grounds – may, in some but not all contexts, be more appropriately redefined as contextually inappropriate over-extensions. To maintain our specific focus, our critique remains strictly neutral with respect to questions of the validity of causal-explanation within the purely natural sciences, which are concerned with materialistic forms of explanation and especially prediction and control (e.g., the why-question regarding earthquakes and other natural disasters as well as human, animal and crop disease processes).2 Instead, our Husserlian criticism of naturalistic objectivism is more concerned with whether the causal-explanatory model needs to be questioned from the ground up with respect to its possible appropriateness to the distinct research fields of the social sciences and humanities, within which nearly all hate crime studies are located. Our preliminary contention is that the very grounds for the jurisdiction of an objectivist-naturalistic approach to scientific causal-explanation and prediction of this topic must first be established independently before such an approach can be credibly extended and applied to the social sciences and humanities. While accepting that this belief in the fabled unity of all sciences could prevail in a ­fully-­developed  This is not to say that is no possibility of a viable phenomenological study of the work of natural scientists, such as physicists, biologists, police forensic scientists, which addresses how, for example, the “bio” of biological phenomena, take shape and are sustained. See, for example, Lee Hardy, and Lester Embree, eds. Phenomenology of Natural Science. Vol. 9. Berlin; Springer 2012; Patrick A. Heelan, ‘Husserl’s later philosophy of natural science,’ 54(3) Philosophy of Science 54, (1987): 368–390. It is especially interesting that the university-level teaching of nursing, a hybrid discipline which overlaps the social sciences on the one hand with medical sciences on the other, contains a significant body of generally applied phenomenological studies, as does the related field of psychology. See Amedeo Giorgi, The Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology: A Modified Husserlian Approach. Duquesne University Press, 2009. Any research data-base search of “Husserl AND nursing OR psychology” would reaffirm our point here by multiplying these supportive references by many thousands even where the search is restricted to, say, 2018. 2

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objectivist approach to hate crime adopted by social scientists, at various points the present expressly evaluative section will directly challenge its credibility. This challenge is based upon our contention that there exist clear differences in kind between the characteristics of action/behaviour in the realms studied by the natural and social sciences, and that these basic differences both resist and contradict the comprehensive extension of causal-explanatory approaches from the former into the latter leaving no remainder. Within a naturalistically-conceived psychology of hate crime, the characterisation of the reality of this topic, together with its various contexts, as belonging to the distinctive being of nature cannot, we claim, be simply accepted on trust. On the contrary, this characterisation represents a taken-for-granted and unarticulated horizon into which “the facts” of the behavioural traits of, say, perpetrators are gathered. Yet, the qualitative characterisation of the “whatness” of such behaviour, as well as the different interpretive modes through which it makes its appearance to us subjectively, is only vaguely and arbitrarily taken over from a life-world’s specific cultural tradition. These basic qualitative features of the phenomena of hate crime, not only its categories of significance but also their interpretive constitution and renewal, do not themselves become thematic within this type of psychological approach to the topic. On the contrary, in connection with them, “the facts” of the psychological aspects of such criminality are reinterpreted in such a selective and predetermined manner that only evidence of determinate regularities and law-likenesses are focused upon, made thematic, and articulated as research topics. However, these nature-like “psychological laws” continue to bear within themselves the basic qualitative concepts, such as the “abnormality”/“normality” contrast, out of which they emerged from the life-world, and which continue to sustain them. However, within a naturalistically-­ driven psychology of hate crime, these founding categories, which could be deployed in assessing the “personality types” of different perpetrators, would continue to be implicitly characterised. They would be characterised by the same unreconstructed lack of clear intelligibility and careful differentiation that they also exhibit within the pre-scientific life-world. In this way, the appearance of the phenomenon itself, the perpetrators’ “abnormal behaviour” or “personality traits”  – understood as interpretive designations – are simply skipped over. As Heidegger’s summary of the Husserlian critique recognises: ‘This basic deficiency of psychology is grounded in the predominance of the natural scientific manner of examination which looks for regularities of events and skips over the appearing thing. Psychology accordingly overlooks the fact that its specific domain is no such domain as that of natural science.’3 No less problematic is the glossing over of perpetrators’ inner motivations towards, and interests in, pre-defined contexts of societal interaction with members of different victim groups. What remains entirely neglected here is the causal-­ explanatory interest in knowing why some people’s prejudices against one or more

 Heidegger, 2005: 50–51.

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victim group motivate them – but not others with similar prejudices – to commit acts of violent abuse. Such neglect arises despite the pretensions of an objectivist-­ naturalistic approach to be uniquely equipped to provide scientific explanations of “behaviour.” In its critique of the over-extension of a causal-explanatory model, our phenomenology of hate crime suggests that we must begin by identifying and respecting some difference(s) in kind between the “behaviour” studied in the natural, as opposed to the social sciences/humanities. This qualitative difference could render problematic the extension  – more precisely the over-extension  – of the former’s methodological framework into the realm of hate crime studies. Within this specific realm, an objectivist framework ceases to be contextually appropriate. This is because an interpretive framework of this type remains structurally incapable of recognising the difference in kind between the behaviour of objects (and thing-like material processes reacting to an external environmental stimulus) as well as meaning-oriented and largely purposefully-oriented human actions. Only the latter are explicable in terms of the research topic’s (more precisely research subject’s) definition of the situation to which the “behaviour” in question is, in part, a motivated response. There is an unfortunate, but utterly predictable, side-effect to this over-extension of a natural scientific approach to the social sciences and humanities. Namely, to implicitly displace the primary and founding “what is” and “how” questions from the field of hate crime studies for instance. The latter two questions, more precisely, directions for critical questioning and qualitative research for hate crime scholarship, belong, in the first instance, to the interpretive social sciences alone, which a Husserlian approach recognises as clearly foundational. As Heidegger’s concise summary of the Husserlian critique of naturalism within empirical psychology recognises: ‘This basic deficiency of psychology is grounded in the predominance of the natural scientific manner of examination ... Psychology accordingly overlooks the fact that its specific domain is no such domain as that of natural science.’4 The initial scientific imperative for the social scientific study of hate crime is to first reflect upon and closely look at what it is that is being experienced as a hate crime. We must then carefully describe and characterise what appears experientially precisely as something meant and meant in a specific manner. By contrast, and in violation of this initially descriptive imperative, objectivist psychology would immediately selectively reinterpret – and thereby distort – what appears to our intuition. The latter would be distorted to render it fit for the purposes of its own pre-­ determined quantitative-explanatory method of analysis. As a result, the phenomenon itself evades analysis. There are further problems with objectivist presumptions of universal causality within the specifically societal, cultural and linguistic realm of human interaction relevant to the distinctly (un)natural habitat of hate crime studies. Here, what proves itself inappropriate to the extension of natural scientific objectivism to the social

 Ibid.

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sciences is not only the would-be causal-style explanation in terms of fixed and externally operating “laws of nature,” but also the methodological disregard of questions of the subject-matter’s (i.e., research subjects’) own (inter)subjective definitions of the meaning of the situation. The latter we argue must be factored into any explanation of the actions of, say, perpetrators but also witnesses, victims, police officers, court officials etc. If we accept this aspect of the phenomenological critique, then the following question arises. Are the various external factors that an objectivist orientation to this topic crime presumes to be core causal-explanatory determinants of this phenomenon, and which it seeks to identify for the sake of prediction and control, themselves fully and exhaustively grounded in even its own conceptions of “the facts?” Indeed, within a naturalistically-conceived psychological approach to hate crime, “the facts” would be reinterpreted in a highly selective manner. For example, only determinate regularities and law-likenesses would be directly focused upon, made thematic, and articulated as research questions, themes, and project topics. The difficulty here is that these nature-like “psychological laws,” which are being appealed to as would-be explanatory principles to explain hate incidents, will tend to bear within themselves the basic qualitative categories and concepts out of which they first emerged from the psychologist’s life-world. From the start and throughout, these categories and concepts that are native to (inter)subjectivity sustain these researcher’ practical investigations. This remains the case even with respect to a purist form of objectivist psychology of hate crime. Hence, the qualitative categories took over as “givens” will often be characterised by the same lack of clear intelligibility and differentiation that they exhibit within the pre-scientific “common sense” life-world. In other words, the would-be social scientific explanation of hostility to, say, transgendered individuals or to those exhibiting racial, religious or other relevant forms of designated “cultural difference,” remains predicated upon purely “common sense” – not scientifically clarified and grounded  – notions. From the outset, it relies upon the intelligibility of conceptions of what is “normal gender?” What constitutes “race,” “religion,” “disability?” and so forth, but also interpretations of what these categories actually ‘mean’ for the individual. It follows that, for our phenomenology of hate crime, any presumption of universal causality of a type that has proved itself so successful within the natural sciences is entirely problematic in both principle and practice. It certainly cannot – at least not without profound adaptation – be simply extended into, that is effectively superimposed upon, the research field of the social sciences, at least not without generating contradictions. The rationale that “science is science,” and hence the claim concerning the need for a “unity of all the sciences,” is simply a question-begging rhetorical slogan because it glosses over in silence the clear difference in kind between these two realms. Only action and interaction within realm studied by the social sciences is explicable in terms of the definitions of meaning actors ascribe, actively or passively, to their life-situations and orientations towards the challenges and opportunities these situations are interpreted to possess.

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For our phenomenology of hate crime, the imperative to seek to explain in causal terms such hostility as a type of “abnormality” affecting perpetrators, to answer the why-question in relation to whatever takes shape in human perception, tends to gloss over the very appearing of whatever appears to be “normal” etc. Because of the prejudicial influence of those objectivist presuppositions that we previously unveiled, the “fact”-orientated “that-is” and why-is” questions seeking to discover law-like causal regularities, tend to predominate at the expense of the prior qualitative question: what is? Yet, the what-is question, which our phenomenology of hate crime for good reasons regards as primary, cannot be skipped over in this way without undermining the very possibility of both “that-is” and “why-is” forms of secondary and derivative level analysis. Given this primacy, the designated “abnormal psychology” of hate crime perpetrators must first be identified and established as such in ways that transcend mere operational definitions that stipulate what in reality needs to be first established. In turn, such identification presupposes the entirely qualitative-­ interpretative question of how the “normal psychology” of those of us who do not commit hate speech or hate crime is first constituted as such. (The same point clearly applies to the identification of “disability.”) A basic Husserlian question is whether it even makes sense to try to explain in causal terms the matter-of-fact actions of perpetrators in terms of a cause and effect model of the type projected as appropriate by objectivism? There are clearly problems with presumptions of causality within the specifically societal, cultural and linguistic realm of human interaction: the (un)natural habitat of hate crime studies, as it were! The various external factors that an objectivist orientation to hate crime presumes to be core determinants of this phenomenon, and which it seeks to identify for the sake of prediction and control, are not themselves grounded in “the facts.” On the contrary, the presumption of universal causality of the type that has proved itself within the natural sciences, cannot – at least not without substantive adaptations that are inconsistent with objectivist presuppositions  – be simply extended into the social sciences. In sum, our phenomenology of hate crime argues that three core aspects of the (over)extension of a natural scientific causal-explanatory model are entirely inappropriate: 1. The attempted causal explanation of, say, a perpetrator’s actions abuse of victims in terms of the impact of fixed and externally operating “laws of nature” located within the external environment, such as the effects of pollution, poor diet etc. The difficulty here is that to be effective, any such posited “material causes” first need to be understood as such, if only implicitly. Yet, this element of qualitative understanding of significance, in turn, re-introduces an interpretive dimension to the causal explanatory framework: one that objectivism, with its preference for exclusively quantitative methods, needs to banish. 2. The methodological disregard of questions of the subject-matter’s (i.e., the research subjects’) own (inter)subjective definitions of the meaning of their situation (which defines “who’s who” and “what’s what” and, thereby, provides the

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raw material for explaining what it is that they are doing when they are abusing members of a victim group). Clearly, what a perpetrator may intend as “good-­ humoured friendly banter” could, in some contexts, be (re)interpreted as “hate speech,” and of course vice versa; while in other contexts there may be little doubt on either side (and by witnesses) that hate speech was both originally intended and correctly understood as such 3. Perpetrators inner motivations towards  – and interests with respect to  – pre-­ defined contexts of societal interaction in which, say, a perpetrator considers herself to be “acting.” Here, we are confronted with an agency-driven form of action in a fulsome sense of this term involving inner-directed and goal-oriented actions. It is a form of, say, perpetrator “action” in an emphatic sense that differs in kind from a condition of being passively moved by the “agency” of external natural or nature-like forces.5 The latter alone is akin to one billiard ball hitting another, or the laws of physics and medical science shaping what happens when we inadvertently fall down a flight of stairs and crack some ribs. Here, our phenomenology of hate crime recognises the entirely reasonable distinction, which is commonly made within everyday life, between actions that persons carry out as their own doing, to which varying degrees of personal and legal responsibility attach, and things that only “happen to” persons without evidence of the exercise of identifiable agency on their part. To end this section with an important caveat, there is a difference in kind between criticising the assumption of causality across the board in the social sciences and humanities, and a more nuanced Husserlian critique which holds fast to the experiential evidence. The latter is more nuanced because it explicates, from the ground up, the appearance of causal relations within lived experience. It suggests that such determination appears to be confined to the material element of experiences that fall within the scope not only of the natural sciences but also the social sciences and humanities, including, of course, hate crime studies. Thus, Husserl elucidates the characteristics that make not only a material thing but also the material bearers and substrates of cultural objects, identifiable as “real things” in the first place. Against certain types of philosophical idealism, Husserl re-affirms a contention that everyday experience constantly verifies, that material objects possess an independent existence and self-sufficiency in relation to any

 Husserl defines reality as embracing both inanimate physical things and animated psychic life. He offers examples of the defining traits the latter’s defining traits: ‘What psychic life means in this context we have clarified in a manner which suffices temporarily, by examples which we can multiply abundantly. Thus, for instance, feeling sensuously, perceiving and other forms of experiencing, carrying out thought activities such as: considering together, comparing, distinguishing, exercising universalization and ideation, concluding and proving; but also passively feeling joy and pain or else actively taking pleasure or displeasure in something, instinctively striving for something or else actively setting oneself goals and being directed toward them by desiring or willing, but also achieving those goals by acting.’ Husserl, 1925/77: 79. Within this realm there are both habitual traits, skills and tendencies that endure over time, as well as an incessant streaming flux of ever-new contents. Ibid. 5

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p­ ossible act of consciousness that grasps aspects of their significance.6 Indeed, Husserl states frankly that he reaffirms approaches: ‘which place the concept of causality in the focal point, [recognising that they) ‘are indispensable for the concept of a thing.’ In a vital passage that merits fulsome quotation, he then goes on to claim that causality, a causal regularity between a thing and its external environment, belongs to the general familiar style of sensuously perceivable, material things: If we ask what specifically makes real unity and what makes anything experienceable in a mundane experience a thing, something real in the specific sense, then it is best to answer: real unity is such a unity that its inner determinations not only preserve a unity universally in their non-alteration and alteration but such that they preserve a stable causality in the change of these determinations; or, as we can also say, stable causal properties make themselves known in their temporally changing determinations as in causal conditions. … This implies that the immediately experienceable determinations of things of material, sensuously perceivable things, are dependent in their processes of transformations on their environment of things, or on the sensuous determinations of these surrounding things, and likewise vice-versa. These dependencies are experienced in their way; and every thing itself is from the start apprehended as such a lasting individual which has its familiar style of causal behaviour, its familiar style of behaving in such a way in its momentary real conditions, of comporting itself in such and such a way in lighting, in warming and cooling, in pressure and impact, etc., of changing in such and such a way with the change of the sensuously experienceable determinations of the circumstantial realities.7

Take, for example, the body of a physically assaulted victim, doctors are entirely justified experientially in ascribing causal qualities to the properties of various medications and medical procedures designed to restore them, as far as possible, to their prior physical condition. They are equally justified in generally relying upon a casual-explanatory form of medical science in predicting the likely or – at least possible – stages of recovery from these various injuries based largely upon their concrete experiences with past patients and those case studies written up in medical journals. It follows that there can be no phenomenological critique of causal-­ explanatory models in this sphere where there is a clear overlap between natural scientific and social scientific aspects of hate crime. The same point holds true where someone elderly with no prior history of aggressive racial prejudice suddenly takes to making racist verbal attacks owing to senility, the effects of a brain tumour or similarly medically explicable factors. Yet, these human bodies have not only two sides but also relations between these sides. They are not only organic things but also animated by the ego-subjects whose mentality, psychic life, will, agency, drives, desires and overall personality “inhabit” these bodies as “their own vehicle,” as it were.8 These features are widely recognised as expressed by bodily gestures, verbal sounds and expressions more g­ enerally

 Husserl refers to “mere matter, which in part has a reality on its own as that which lacks psychic life,” 1925/77: 83. 7  Husserl, 1925/77: 76. 8  Husserl, 1925/77: 80, noting: ‘We experience people and animals as bodily-psychic beings; we distinguish their psychic life and their psychic species from their corporeal body which, considered separately, no longer includes anything psychic and yet really belongs to men and animals.’ Ibid. 6

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both individually and, most importantly, through interactions with other persons. Husserl argues: ‘My psychic life is for me quite directly and in the strictest sense of the word perceived, and directly perceived not alongside my body but as animating it. Here alone I experience in an originally perceptual manner this unity of body and psyche, this intermingling of bodily and animating happening.’9 The external contingencies subject to material causation in natural scientific terms that are necessary for our organic-biological survival are at least indirectly linked to the psychic life of consciousness. The later removal of these preconditions, most clearly water and food, results in the organic decline and ultimate death of our bodies. At the same time, the latter also “takes down” our consciousness which ceases its animating, expressive and indicative functions.10 In other words, a phenomenology of our consciousness of hate crime needs to recognise that organic-­ biological death of our bodies entails the annihilation of the psychic life as well. In this way, the mortality of human bodies and the inevitability of our death is a spectre that haunts any discussion of individual consciousness. The latter point reminds us to avoid positing this topic as something supposedly self-sufficient and disembodied, and utterly disconnected from the external material world of causal relations. These insights qualify but do not flatly contradict, the implications of our more general Husserlian critique of the reduction of consciousness to the field of clinical neurological science. On the one hand, the reasons why, say, a victim or court interprets a certain incident in a specific way are not reducible to causal material factors made visible on brain scanners etc. Instead, these reasons demand to be studied qualitatively through communicative interaction with the interpreters themselves. On the other hand, it does not follow that such individual consciousness of an incident – or pattern of incidents – is utterly autonomous from the material causal factors affecting our bodies and their well-being. On the contrary, our phenomenology of hate crime must recognise how the contents of consciousness remain subject to the organic-­biological condition of its bodily substrate, and that the “lived body” is characterised by a certain causal style. The well-known failures of reductive materialism do not, in any way, lend support to a no less reductive idealism. Instead, our recognition of these bodily presuppositions of consciousness gives our phenomenology of hate crime additional reasons to call into question the very materialism/idealism dichotomy itself. In other words, while our analysis of intentionality as the unification of sense and reference,  Ibid. 81.  Husserl states: ‘In other words, it is clear that neither one’s own nor another’s psyche can ever become experienceable except as animating one’s own or another’s body, restricted in its typicality, and that every sort of psychic existence already experienced and established must become nothing as soon as the apperceptive presuppositions of psychic experience are cancelled, therefore, whenever a body ceases to preserve that sort of organic style which is the condition of the possibility for its being capable of an animating function, or of indicating animation. Therefore, death as a real event in the world does not have the meaning of a detaching of the psyche to its own reality within this world. From the point of view of the world, death is the annihilation of the psyche, nota bene, as psyche in the world.’ Ibid., 82. 9

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points beyond the subject/object dichotomy, a similar point applies to the either/or orientation encouraged by the closely related materialism/idealism dichotomy. Our resulting position beyond these mutually exclusive dualisms is to posit hate crime issues as neither wholly reducible to the material realm addressed by natural science, nor to a realm of “pure mind” addre4ssed by a would-be philosophical science of consciousness in the abstract. Instead, it is a question of patiently explicating the levels of dependence, partial dependence and autonomy of each stratum within our own specific research field. In one respect, corporeality has greater self-­ sufficiency because it independently furnishes and makes visible to the eye the injured organic-biological body of a victim in a fully concrete manner. By contrast, the victim’s psychical life of consciousness can: ‘never become a real thing in the world in concrete self-sufficiency.’11 Instead, other people have access to this life only indirectly through the often-selective disclosures of body gestures, demeanour, facial expressions, eye-movements, word and tone of voice. Furthermore, each of these partial disclosures remains open to two or more possible interpretations by others as to their significance as expressions of the victim’s inner life generally and the impact of victimisations itself in particular. Husserl’s reflections suggest that we need to hold fast to the evidence of lived experience itself and resist the prejudicial simplifications stemming from various dichotomies. Providing we can do this, it becomes possible to identify evidence of the material impact of various structural necessities, not least in connection with the role of our material bodies.12 In turn, this subset – whose contents are generally independent of human agency – are clearly open to some type of causal-explanatory analysis. The latter would remain consistent with a Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime, despite Husserl’s forceful critique of the whole-scale superimposition of such analysis from the natural sciences. It follows that to remain self-consistent, a Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime cannot over-extend its own critique of the over-extension of causal-­explanatory approaches to every aspect of this subject. Instead, this critique must confine itself to those aspects of the cultural and societal aspects of this topic that are distinctly and emphatically cultural or societal in nature, such as normative expectations, customs, values, legal standards, beliefs, and linguistic categories. In addition, such critique only applies to those aspects which can, without distortion, be disentangled and abstracted from their material bearers, i.e., the ideas of “discrimination” and “hostility.” In other words, insofar as aspects of hate crime, including injuries to the human body, have both cultural and physical sides, the critique of causal-­explanatory aspects confines itself to objectivist attempts to entirely reduce the distinctly cultural subset to the emphatically material subset, as if it were “nothing but” physical material. Our critique needs to recognise its own limits by stating that its target is a type of reductionist use of causal-explanatory models where the distinctly cultural dimensions –  Ibid, 83.  Husserl states: ‘we have questioned the experiential world according to the universal style in which it gives itself to all possible experience. In doing so we have found necessities which are structural, permeating the entire unity of possible experience.’ Ibid. 11 12

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perhaps more precisely “layers” – are more or less entirely displaced from the agenda of hate crime studies in favour of entirely material factors posited as causes. In short, the Husserlian critique of a causal-explanatory approach to hate crime involves recovering suppressed dimensions of the interpretation of meaning and degrees of agency, which constitute important differences between the behaviour of things, and the actions of persons. This involves both rejecting the universal jurisdiction and primacy of causal-explanatory models of “behaviour” that displace qualitative-interpretive questions of meaning, the definitions research subjects ascribe to their life-situations and the latter’s inner motivations. Our critique of the contextual appropriateness of causal-explanatory models recognises its own limits. This is especially the case with respect to those areas where we can identify the mediation of hate crime-related topics by material-biological-­ medical dimensions. Indeed, for good experiential reasons, this criticism confines its focus to contexts where a casual-explanatory model is being superimposed only in a reductionist and over-extended fashion, and at the clear expense of the subset of hate crime’s uniquely cultural-interpretive dimensions, which thereby are placed at risk of becoming displaced from the research agenda entirely. As such, the Husserlian critique is best considered to be generally defensive. It is concerned to defend the interests of a subset of the fields studied by the social sciences and humanities, not to reject causal-explanation as such within hate crime studies, even those carried out by social scientists. Insofar as the causality affecting human bodies that are the supportive substrate of the interpretive work of consciousness, provides limits to consciousness itself, then our critique can only be qualified and limited in scope to the subset just mentioned.13 The extent to which phenomenological analysis is justified within this field will vary, but what is clear from our examples of bodily injuries is that such analysis also needs to recognise the limits of both its critique and – by implication – its own jurisdiction. It thereby gives us reason to reconsider phenomenology’s own defensive and safeguarding role with respect to that subset of the experience of hate crime where it is uniquely qualified to make a distinctive contribution. For example, the scope of and for phenomenology may, to some degree, be greater in studying courtroom interactions than in hospitals’ Accident and Emergency Wards on Saturday nights, or with respect to the work of police forensic scientific investigators and pathologists. This would, of course, depend upon what exactly the phenomenologist was seeking to study. In making these qualifications and nuances, we are not only recognising but also drawing conclusions concerning the implications of the mutual intertwining of cultural and material dimensions within the fields addressed by hate crime studies. Only in those subsets where experiential evidence clearly suggests that distinctly qualitative issues raised by what-type, how-type and for-whom type questions have a definite primacy over quantitative ones related to the causal explanation of the  Husserl boldly states: ‘that all the matter of the world is situated in one single corporeal nexus in which it can be considered on its own and which is governed throughout by the closed unity of an all-inclusive causality.’ 1925/77: 83. 13

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facts of incidents, can our phenomenology of hate crime even begin to claim a justified jurisdictional prominence. This qualification, in particular, applies to its sometimes-­overstated claims to play a foundational role relative to more conventional approaches to this topic that are shaped, to varying degrees, by the naturalistic premises and positivistic research methods and practices of objectivism.

3  Objectivism as a Pseudo-Science? For its part, the naturalistic foundations of objectivism tend to be highly expansionist, even imperialistic, and this feature is – in itself – a good reason to suspect its validity for our phenomenology of hate crime with social scientific aspirations. As already discussed, objectivism creates the presumption that its own materialist approach is applicable not only to natural scientific objects, events and processes but also to the societal, cultural – even psychological – realms as well. It is on the basis of this dubious presumption, which we have already had good reason to critique, that naturalism interprets even psychological events and activities of consciousness, including the perceptions of victims, as, in essence, physical phenomena grounded in, say, neurological phenomena. For this reason, Husserl recognises that the appeal by objectivism to its own scientific credentials has effectively hijacked science as an instrumental vehicle for promoting an approach to the conduct of research. As a result, an objectivist approach to hate crime, which belongs to academic disciplines other than those of the natural sciences, may well lack scientific credibility. For example, such self-promotion relies upon the cultural prestige and authority of science. Yet, it fails to recognise that such authority derives from clear evidence of actually being an authentic scientific approach based upon self-critical rationality, as opposed to mere instrumental rationality that claims a scientific status for ulterior purposes. As Husserl recognises, this is a powerful rhetorical claim: ‘Precisely in the energy with which naturalism seeks to realize the principle of scientific rigour in all the spheres of nature and spirit, in theory and practice, and in the energy with which it strives to solve the philosophical problems of being and value—thinking it is proceeding in the manner of “exact natural science” its merit and the major part of its strength in our era. There is, perhaps, in all modern life no more, more irresistibly progressing idea than that of science. Nothing will hinder its victorious advance. In fact, with regard to its legitimate aims, it is all-embracing. Looked upon in its ideal perfection, it would be reason itself, which could have no other authority equal or superior to itself.14

Insofar as there is a legacy of objectivism within hate crime studies, then whatever is being experienced as a hate crime in all its diversities, interpretative relativities and contingencies, can – at best – only be incompletely “given” to the latter’s quantitative social science approach. Indeed, we have already suggested that the most scientifically relevant qualitative foundations are silently filtered out. Worse still, in 14

 Husserl, 1965: 82.

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the absence of systematic and radically qualitative sense-explication of the type we are developing and advocating during the present study, the underlying conceptual materials, including qualitative categories of hate crime, as well as many-layered relations between the latter’s different sub-categories, will be either: 1 . be left in a pre-scientific condition. Or, 2. expelled in favour of purely external “operational definitions.”15 In both cases, lacking both explication or experiential grounding, these categories will themselves suffer from their continuing relative obscurities, vague formulations and unclear relations to related conceptions, such as the significance of “discrimination,” “hostility,” “criminality,” etc.16 All these factors, which result in obscure criteria in the very identification and classification of aspects of hate crime, call into question the scientific credentials of an objectivist approach to this topic by leaving uncorrected all manner of obscurities and ambiguities. However, many common-­ sense classifications are operationalised, and thereby rendered fit for the protocols of measuring and quantitative research, they still remain merely pre-scientific and common-sensical. We can show, for example through in-depth interviews and observations, that the natural attitude’s “common sense” understandings of hate crime within everyday life are, for distinctly analytical purposes, cognitively inadequate for social scientific purposes. For instance, they tend to exhibit all manner of obscurities, presuppositions, unacknowledged value-judgements and extensive lack of clarity. It is so easy to refer to this prosecution as a “miscarriage of justice”, that acquittal of a perceived perpetrator as “unfair,” etc., without reflecting upon the meaning of justice/injustice, unfairness/fairness. The words flow out of the mouth and can achieve a rough and ready type of communication without engaging either party to communication in any reflective mental effort of conceptualisation. Indeed, within everyday life, such conceptualisation would represent a diversion from getting on the with the various pressing tasks at hand. A surgeon operating on a victim of violent crime to save her life simply does not need to conceptualise the meaning of life itself whether by Husserlian or other methods. In short, everyday life is characterised by a general pragmatism, which can include a generally instrumental approach to situations, objects and even other people. It is rarely oriented towards the achievement at the cognitive level of scientific precision, determinacy and exactitude, and indeed such qualities may even be unnecessary and counter-productive in some pragmatic contexts. There are, then, no credible purely cognitive grounds for a phenomenological critique of everyday knowledge and “common sense” about hate crime issues in terms of its lack of concern for scientific rigour and conceptual clarification. There can and must be a Husserlian critique of how everyday common sense is affected by, and dogmatically reiterates ideological manipulations of various kinds,

15 16

 Discussed in detail below.  Husserl, 1980: 84.

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and how the combination of objectivist and naturalistic prejudices support these forms of closure. But that is a related but still different issue. Indeed, the grounds for our critique of entrenched prejudices against various hate crime victim groups dressed up as “common sense knowledge” are, indeed, of a quite different kind. These grounds relate to benchmark criteria of dogmatism, interpretive naiveté, acceptance captivity, complacency, circular reasoning, latent endorsement of conformist ideologies, and a general lack of self-responsibility. By contrast, in terms of phenomenological critique, the situation is quite different with respect to would-be social scientific accounts of hate crime, such as those of positivist-objectivist forms of criminology and psychology. The latter generally seek both the kudos and authority-effects of being recognised as “truly scientific” within academia, research funding institutions and state policy circles. However, the grounds for critique arise where such approaches to hate crime issues uncritically – if selectively  – incorporate problematic and unexplicated lay “common sense” understandings of basic state-centric categories and subcategories of hate crime into the very qualitative starting point of their research. In these contexts, there certainly are grounds for a sustained phenomenological critique. This is because such selective incorporation of unclarified qualitative foundations undermines the following three core claims of such criminological research to: 1 . Possess social scientific status; 2. Embody objectivity; and 3. To be capable of yielding strictly evidence-based and statistically significant conclusions of patterns of hate incidents and criminality based upon “the facts of the case.” The various difficulties with the superimposition of an objectivist model, which of course are not unique to hate crime scholarship, explain Husserl’s critical response to examples of this model. Examples of this model certainly present themselves in scientific dress, including with respect to quantification and statistical analysis within criminology. However, once de-robed, their substantive body appears as anything but scientific. Husserl argues that, outside the authentic natural sciences directed towards exclusively physical objects and object-like processes, the dubious premise that all “genuine science,” even within the social and historical realms, involves exact quantification and causal explanation is problematic. In neither theory nor practice does this approach serve to advance the cause of science itself. Instead, it promotes and extends an essentially ideological-dogmatic mobilisation of an orientation that is merely dressed up to resemble science, like a drag artist playing at being a “glamorous lady,” If such was their aim, − this would itself involve all manner of ‘taken for granted’ assumptions about the concept. This over-extension of a natural scientific causal-explanatory model into the social and cultural spheres has proven possible only because the subject matter addressed by natural science are primarily material objects, forces, events, and processes. Clear examples are disease processes, earthquakes, calculations of space rocket trajectories, predictions of the spread of global warming and human disease processes. Yet, the behaviour of such natural objects, events and processes is utterly

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distinct from actions within the cultural, social, institutional and interpersonal realms. Such behaviour is not – from the outset and throughout – oriented and explicable by reference to how people subjectively define for themselves the significance and implications of the various situations they confront purposefully. Each us faces our own pre-defined life-situation which we need to “handle” and respond to, in part, through communication with others, as we navigate our goal-oriented ways through different surrounding contexts of work, leisure, family life etc., on a scene-­ by-­scene and episode-by-episode basis. These distinctly interpretive, more precisely re-interpretive, aspect of human activities and interaction within a largely pre-defined surrounding life-world, is readily apparent from the goal-directed and communalised research activities of social scientists themselves. Such qualitative meaning-driven dimensions are even undeniable in relation to the life-situations of those whose research is conducted in a naturalistic-objectivist manner that, as part of the claims to being scientific, deny their relevance for the conduct of research. What is denied in theory is constantly re-affirmed in the daily practice of carrying our research, creating an ironic theory/ practice contradiction. As highlighted by Heidegger’s summary of the Husserlian critique of naturalism, the result of the latter’s predominance and over-extension into the cultural realm of ideas, meanings, values and purposes is highly problematic. Such over-extensions lead to a type of self-oblivion affecting the intentionality of the researcher’s own consciousness-of scientific ideas as such. This lack of self-awareness also applies to those actions that, in the research field, routinely realise some version of these ideas, meanings, values and purposes in practice. In short, for our phenomenology of hate crime, the uncritical reliance upon a causal-explanatory model that arises from objectivist presuppositions must be subjected to a critical investigation. We must address not only what this model takes-for-granted but also what such reliance upon underlying presuppositions tends to selectively ignore. Husserl points out the absurdity of the naturalisation of both consciousness and ideas. In the name of law-like objectivity, such naturalisations discount, or at least minimises, the very consciousness of (social) scientists oriented towards the fulsome realisation of their scientific projects taken purely as such. Such naturalisation (“or reification”) of consciousness leads to absurdity. This is because it must logically encompass the self-reflective consciousness of those individuals carrying out objectivistic social scientific studies into, say, hate crime. As previously explained, this would-be scientific consciousness must also be treated as an exclusively, or primarily, physical reality. Yet, such self-reflection by hate crime scholars cannot but reveal that their consciousness exhibits a degree of self-directed purposefulness and relative autonomy in relation to environmental pressures. The deterministic idea that scientific findings and truths are causally-­ determined reflexes generated by external environmental factors alone is clearly self-contradictory since the very claim itself must aspire to general truth in any environmental context. Violating their own axiomatic presuppositions, the consciousness of hate crime researchers cannot be reduced to the law-like regularities characteristics of any other

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piece of nature or natural processes. On the contrary, as with any other sub-­type of consciousness, scientific consciousness exhibits its own distinctive characteristics and forms of partly rationally-motivated and goal-directed actions and interactions that are different in kind from the causally-determined events studied by, say, Newtonian physics. Here, we can ask, what if those carrying out an objectivist form of hate crime research project were to reflect strenuously – and in an unprejudiced manner  – upon their own (intentional) consciousness-of what they were actually doing during the course of their professional lives? How would they interpret the meaning and rationale of whatever they were thereby striving to achieve? Whatever their concrete conclusions in terms of the specific details, their accomplished selfawareness would, precisely as self-consciousness – be addressing a radically different phenomenon from that of material nature and nature-like causalities. They would inevitably and for good reason refer to the meaning of life-­contexts, the living significance of their various purposes, hopes, aspirations, frustrations, rivalries, expectations, and disappointments as life-world phenomenon saturated with meaning and sense, and subject to all manner of interpretive contingencies and relativities. Furthermore, these results of such an honestly conducted critical self-reflection would demonstrate clearly the self-cancelling character of the naturalisation of (social)scientific consciousness. As Heidegger’s highly concise and reflective summary notes, the reductive naturalisation of consciousness tends to provide a self-­ affirming pretext for a refusal to engage with the scientific evidence provided by consciousness itself whenever this realm is approached in its own terms undistorted by naturalistic presuppositions: The philosophy that looks on everything as natural science reinterprets this specific lawfulness of the sense into a lawfulness of the natural course of the process of thinking: the lawfulness of norms and ideas is reinterpreted into a lawfulness of the course of thinking. The idea, the lawfulness of ideas, is not seen at all. The critique at work in natural science is the sort of critique that is made in the course of achieving knowledge in natural science with its focus on the matters involved. As a critique in natural science, it is the sort that is bent on the facts of the matter under investigation. It is absurd, Husserl says, that the critical possibilities of an individual science should not include the possibilities of investigating this science purely insofar as it is science. In the latter sort of investigation, a completely fundamental change of object has taken place. Mistaking this niveau is what enabled natural science to claim for itself the solution to epistemological problems and, as a result, to block the path to bringing the specific sort of object that "consciousness" is into view as such, and to clarifying from this vantage point the set of problems that knowledge and acting pose as being in their own right.17

Whatever may be the case in the natural sciences, which are concerned with materialistic forms of causal explanation and especially prediction (e.g., of earthquakes and other natural disasters but also disease processes), the importance of this orientation into the social sciences needs to be questioned. Indeed, its own experiential grounds must be first established before a natural scientific model of science is applied to the natural habitat of hate crimes studies within the social sciences and humanities. 17

 Heidegger, 2005: 49.

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While accepting that, as an empirical matter, this belief in the fabled unity of sciences would prevail in a fully developed objectivist approach to hate crime that remains consistent with its core premises, our phenomenological approach challenges its credibility by pointing out the various incoherencies, internal tensions and contradictions that it generates, not least when its own naturalistic and naturalising claims are applied back to the consciousness and activities of subscribers. A genuine social scientific approach to hate crime as lived requires a critical, and ultimately self-critical, response to the presence of various dogmatic prejudices. This is required both generally and, of course, in relation to recognised victim groups. Here, we need to recall and summarise the upshot of the distinctly negative implications for the viability of hate crime scholarship of the type of cognitive closure our previous section outlined in some detail. What is ironic is how subscribers to naturalist psychology can owing to the rhetorical over-confidence stemming from objectivist premises, reinterpret all possible alternatives to their own approach with dismissive disdain. The latter clearly includes – but is not limited to – the radically qualitative constitutive orientation of our own phenomenology of hate crime. For present purposes, we need to reflect upon the implications of this dogmatic rejection and displacement of all actual or possible alternative approaches to hate crime as experienced. In particular, we need to ask: 1. How, that is by means of which specific interpretive strategies and interpretive recipes, are all manner of alternative approaches to this topic that “fail” to comply with objectivism’s own characteristic diktats, protocols and underlying metaphysical presuppositions subjected to dismissal? 2. Does this resort to such dismissive responses to alternative approaches to the study of hate crime subscribers to naturalism/objectivism thereby demonstrate the distinctly ideological nature of this orientation?18 3. If an approach whose scientific credentials depends upon its own objectivity while itself exemplifying inbuilt ideological dimensions than surely this creates tensions, even contradictions, in the very heart of the entire approach? For an objectivist-naturalistic psychological approach to hate crime issues, the presence of ideology within its own orientation can – given its core premises and adherence to a subject/object dichotomy – only be considered as the very opposite of what a genuine social science of hate crime requires. Such mediation of wouldbe scientific analysis must be perceived as akin to – and no less problematic – than that of religious convictions, morality and customary value-judgements: all features that, given the implications of a subject/object dichotomy, are generally considered obstructions to the goals of scientific impartiality. Yet, as we have already seen at various points in this part of the present study, for a Husserlian analysis, 18  It remains an open question, however, whether a Husserlian phenomenology possesses the internal resources to develop a fully-blown “critique of ideology” other than along the lines of a criticism of “objectification-as-reification,” overlapping in part with the wayward and unorthodox Marxism of the early Lukacs of History and Class Consciousness.

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objectivism’s own ideological characteristics and dogmatic effects are clear and deeply entrenched, not least with respect to its dogmatic reliance upon circular argumentation and conservative implications. For our phenomenology of hate crime, the chronic difficulties facing potential application of a naturalistic-objectivist approach to the psychology of this topic are particularly instructive. This is especially the case with respect to their dogmatic form of question-begging pseudo- “justification:” one which actually presupposes as self-evidently true, precisely that which is actually in question: namely, whether or not a purely naturalistic/objectivist approach to the psychology of hate crime has – or could ever have – the foundational status for a social scientific research into this topic that it aspires to. As Husserl recognises: Above all, however, we are concerned with a method and a discipline whereby this philosophy believes that it has definitely attained the rank of an exact science. So sure is it of this that it looks down disdainfully on all other modes of philosophizing. … They stand … like alchemy in relation to the exact chemistry of a Lavoisier. If we ask about exact though as yet scarcely developed philosophy, the analogue of exact mechanics, we are shown psychophysical and, above all, experimental psychology, to which, of course, no one can deny the rank of strict science. … In addition, strict psychology is obviously the foundation for all humanistic sciences and not less even for metaphysics ...[although] physical natural science also has a share in supplying a foundation for this general theory of reality.19

That experimental psychology generally, and potentially this type of psychological analysis of hate crime perpetrators, is certainly able to remodel itself as an exact science of material “facts.” Our critique does not deny that it is possible to construct an apparently credible research funding proposal claiming to identify, by means of clinical research, various causal factors determining perpetrator “behaviour.” Such a proposal could be constructed in a manner that appears to have clear policy relevance in terms of the prediction and control of such “behaviour.” Our phenomenological response can freely concede that a materialist-­ psychological approach to aspects of hate crime reliant upon a naturalistic-­objectivist orientation is certainly possible, both with respect to perpetrators’ abusive behaviour and its psychological impact upon victims. It would certainly be possible, for instance, to conduct all manner of experimental clinical research measuring and contrasting the varied psycho-physical responses to images of, say, individuals conventionally-­categorised as “transgendered,” “homosexual,” “disabled,” members of “racial,” “religious” ethnic “minorities”/“majorities” etc. It is entirely conceivable that such research could become institutionalised even within prestigious university research centres. Yet our critique contends that considered in itself, this possibility, which is mainly based upon institutional recognition, proves nothing of decisive value for the foundations of hate crime scholarship. On the contrary, it merely demonstrates the truism that, when we disregard those cognitive restraints and the necessary limits imposed by processes of rational argumentation, anything can be interpreted in almost any way whatsoever. Indeed, in this context, pointing to the actual or 19

 Husserl, 1965: 84.

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potential institutionalisation of broadly positivistic developments within the research practices of, for example, universities and clinical research establishments, would – as an argument based upon conventionalism alone – prove little. It establishes nothing of value with respect to the underlying validity and coherence of the objectivist/naturalistic premises underlying such contingent institutional developments. Indeed, such premises remain presupposed from the start and throughout. For a millennium, millions of people have followed, and even institutionalised, ideas and beliefs in the name of “true explanations” for, say, events such as plagues and crop failures, which later proved themselves to be entirely spurious. For hundreds of years, scientists and philosophers working at universities firmly believed that the sun and other planets moved around the earth, and the earth itself was clearly a flat surface, not a globe. Galileo paid a high price for questioning this firmly institutionalised traditional belief. It is sobering to consider which of today’s self-evident truths will, following scientific advances, later be redefined as no less remarkable prejudices that for decades were not identified as such. Our Husserlian argument is that, irrespective of its prevailing institutional status, it is clear that a psychological approach to hate crime issues, insofar as it is fact-­ oriented social science resting upon an alliance of objectivist, naturalist and metaphysical assumptions, is problematic; it is structurally unable to lay the foundations for the academic study of this topic more generally. Meanwhile, and notwithstanding their systematic and structurally-determined neglect by subscribers to exclusively quantitative research methods, the specifically interpretive and re-interpretive aspects of hate crime under study continue to manifest themselves in an underground and undefeated manner. However, under such repressive conditions, these interpretive aspects present themselves in that curious and, perhaps, distinctly ideological form of being-attentively-unnoticed. They can appear this way only because  – as primarily non-physical and culturally-derived  – objectivism has already pre-defined them out of “relevant existence,” and thereby banished them from the agenda of study. For our phenomenology of hate crime, the results of such dogmatic predefinition and silencing operation(s) amount to the victory of quantitative social scientific methods over the scientific aspirations of social science itself. This represents an inglorious defeat that is left to phenomenology and, perhaps, other radically qualitative approaches to hate crime as lived, to redress precisely in the name of science itself.

4  The Loss of Qualitative Foundations? Earlier we asked: not only how is the significance of hate crime being selectively constructed when viewed through the lens of objectivism, but also what of social scientific relevance is being lost sight of whenever the latter prevails? In particular, the objectivism of any highly selective research focus upon “the facts of hate crime”

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would operate at the expense of any phenomenological or other qualitative sensitivities concerning the emergence and ongoing reiteration of shared meanings within the (inter)subjective sphere. Where this systematic neglect occurs, which it surely would in most cases of purely objectivist hate crime scholarship shaped by naturalistic presuppositions, the resulting research projects will be essentially naïve and “common-sensical.” They will simply refuse to acknowledge either the presence or the foundational social scientific importance, of underlying interpretive dynamics of sense-constitution. This will remain the case even for the genesis of those vital cultural substantive categories, such as those of “hate crime,” “hate speech,” “discrimination,” “disability” etc. The difficulty here is that these categories are the founding resources out of which arise the possible intelligibility of such perceived criminality, which then may become a meaningful part of the life-world. What would be no less neglected are its own indispensable methodological categories. Included here would be the intelligibility ascribed to the meaning(s), scope and rationale(s) of ideas of “scientific method,” “research ethics,” “objectivity,” “causation,” “effect,” “probability,” “logic” “statistical significance” and even “environmental variables.” An objectivist approach to hate crime, which remains premised upon a naturalistic conception of a supposedly pre-given and intrinsic reality, lacks credibility in that it silently passes over without acknowledgement the constitutive role of (inter) subjectivity. It, therefore, blind itself to how intersubjectivity is involved in determining the qualitative “whatness” of whatever or whoever is experienced-as raising a “hate crime-related issue.” In this respect, objectivism both produces yet – at the same time – blinds itself to a self-denying form of “typification.” That is, an interpretation of specific experiences in terms of their presumed membership of pre-­ given and generalised “type” e.g., generic legal and other categories. However, such “types” are not themselves derived from the intuited details of the specific experience itself. We can observe, perhaps via a CCTV recording, what a perpetrator has done but nothing that is given intuitively in our perceptual field, no behaviour that is actually “seen,” identifies either the perpetrator as such or his or her actions as those of “hate crime.” Rather the type-categories must first have been acquired prior to the act of perception themselves in which the “typified” events and persons appear as concretely given “offences” and “perpetrators” for example. Through such mediation of intuited contents with pre-given culturally-derived “types,” the lived experience of witnesses can become understood as rich evidence of a certain “type of case” shared in common with others. Since, this qualitative evidence involves a merger of material and cultural dimensions, of material sight-sensations with type categories, an objectivist approach that remains trapped in the ­materialist-­naturalistic framework can, at most, address only the physical dimension of such witness perceptions of a hate incident. The distinctly cultural aspects of the mediation of experience by generic types remain unavailable as a research topic for hate crime scholarship. With respect to a witness’s perceptions of an incident, a type-category (or in some cases stereotype-category) can be subsequently superimposed upon her original experienced intuitions of a specific hate incident in order to render it meaning-

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ful. Yet, originally the incident itself may well have been intuited and made sense of through a quite different type, or combination of cultural, “types,” a subset of which are “stereotypes” potentially implicated in hate speech and hate crime-related issues. It follows that hate crime researchers operating with the natural attitude’s objectivist premises will, as a direct result of implicitly keeping faith with these premises, simply ignore  – or perhaps fail even to notice  – a whole level of vital underlying interpretive phenomena, and related issues and questions resting upon qualitative foundations. All they are left with is the material sensations of sights, sounds, tactile feelings etc., without ever being able to even identify  – let alone explain – what these are the sights-of, sounds-of or feelings-of. These qualitative questions relate to the meaning(s), scope, value and rationale for a whole tranche of foundational qualitative types, categories and norms. The latter’s fulsome explication is, however, an absolutely vital remedial task for our phenomenology of hate crime. Such sense-explication is vital if our approach is ever to provide a fulsome account of the underlying interpretive preconditions for the experience of this phenomenon. By contrast, the central research agenda of a naturalistic/objectivist approach to this topic will simply refuse to address interpretive questions. It will ignore how underlying interpretive orientations are, from the start and throughout, operating to ascribe specific meanings, purposes and values to even those events that their own research identifies “hate incidents.”20 In other words, hate crime researchers operating with the natural attitude’s objectivist premises will simply ignore the whole strata of vital underlying interpretive questions that our phenomenology of hate crime considers primary and foundational. Their central research agenda will simply refuse to address questions concerning how underlying interpretive orientations are ascribing specific meanings and values to those events their research identifies as examples “hate incidents.”21 Of course, an objectivist research project into hate crime may shift its attention away from the-incident-perceived towards, say, a witness’s act of perceiving a situation as a “hate incident.” This modified focus could take place in objectivist forms of psychological research. However, where such a shift occurs within an objectivist framework, then this apparently more promising line of interpretive questioning will be instantly cut down. As a result, the potential of this altered focus as a springboard for a phenomenological analysis of sense-constitution, for studying the sense-­ constitutive role of acts of perception, will be effectively disarmed. Such disarmament of more profound qualitative potential, the abortion of the latter’s possibilities for hate crime scholarship, can occur by reinterpreting such acts of perceptions as themselves “purely factual events” to be studied by clinical experimental means. For example, where an objectivist approach prevails, the interpretive acts of perception and perceptual judgement of perpetrators, victims, investigating police officers and witnesses would be instantly re-interpreted  – and thereby transformed – entirely in line with the diktats and metaphysical premises of objectivism

20 21

 Husserl, 1917/1981: 13.  Ibid.

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itself. As a result, these perceptual phenomena would appear as “objectively given” within a materially-­determined slice of objective time (i.e., clock-measured time) and materially-­determined spatial locations. In this way, the vital interpretive issues are reinterpreted as just another “set of given facts” and “factual events” to be studied by the research methods of, say, clinical psychology, perhaps by laboratory-based methods. By means of these self-fulfilling, dogmatic and naïve reinterpretations, even the interpretation of the subjective acts of perception internal to consciousness become recuperated for an objectivist worldview. The same is true for those passive associations through the interpretive medium of which the significance of events studied by hate crime scholarship first arises and becomes prominent. Yet, these recuperations and re-affirmations of objectivist premises clearly involve cognitive impoverishment. The problems stemming from hate crime scholarship relying on objectivist premises become even clearer if we emphasise some basic interpretive truths, whose validity scholars of all stripes can confirm through sustained experiential self-­ reflection. Mainstream social scientific accounts of hate crime inevitably address a research field that contains essentially conceptual material, i.e., cultural, institutional and legal categories of meaning, value, and purpose. It includes a range of diverse – and sometimes contradictory – ideas and beliefs about both the significance and implications of “hate crime,” “hate speech,” “crime,” “criminals,” “victims,” “responsibility,” “the role of policing,” “arguments for law reform,” “victim support” etc. Such ideas-based material, whose presence can never be value-neutral or independent of specific beliefs, interests and commitments, necessarily provides an interpretive lens. This material provides the lens through which scholars not only initially identify – and then make sense of – this topic, but also characterise its policy implications going forward. However, where social scientific studies of hate crime remain reliant upon objectivism’s subject/object dichotomy, they will typically fail to adequately either clarify or evidentially ground such conceptual material at the founding experiential level. They will rarely if ever, ask  – let alone answer – the following question: “on what interpretive basis is it possible to experience and identify something as a hate crime?” And: “how does the perceptual construal of experiences in just these  – and not some other possible socio-linguistic terms – operate in practice”? This woeful inability of objectivist approaches to identify  – let alone grasp  – basic qualitative issues involving cultural categories and societal norms, and to do so in a manner that respects and ideally enhances their integrity prior to analysis, is not confined to hate crime studies. It is most emphatically the case with respect to other social science disciplines, as well as those of the humanities. The latter are typically expressly and centrally concerned with the operation of both societal norms and cultural expectations as to normative judgements in relation to actions and interactions. Viable forms of hate crime scholarship can barely avoid addressing either the nature or the implications of relevant examples of such societal and cultural norms,

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including those of legal and law-related institutions – such as police and prosecutors. Scholars can hardly afford to ignore how their research fields have been shaped by claims that victim groups have both a legal and moral “right” – recently interpretively re-framed in species-specific terms as a “human right” – to experience “freedom from discrimination.” A similar point applies to the presence of distinctly methodological, epistemological and normative questions about the “most appropriate” means and procedures for first making  – and then corroborating with evidence-­based judgements – logically coherent academic knowledge-claims about hate crime. At first sight, these may appear to be entirely technical. However, these questions also include norms in relation to what is deemed to be “right” (and “wrong”), “acceptable” (and “unacceptable”), “appropriate” (and “inappropriate”) in various contexts relating to the conduct and publication of research about hate crime-related issues. In short, both at the substantive and methodological levels, the activity of conducting research into hate crime is, from the start, unavoidably entangled in a founding stratum of distinctly qualitative questions concerning the meaning, scope, and implications of specific societal norms. Viable research cannot ignore the question of how, during ongoing interpretive performances, these norms are being created, selectively invoked/ignored, refined, modified and revised anew. However, a substantial contradiction arises the moment hate crime scholars decide to adopt an objectivist orientation towards this subject. Namely, that the entirety of this rich and underlying qualitative resource of norms and normatively-saturated phenomena, which define and delimit the research field itself, become jettisoned and cast into oblivion. The specific answers to the various vital and unavoidable qualitative research questions with a foundational status that we have highlighted in this section have profound implications for the conduct of hate crime research and scholarship. They require us to address and unravel many different interconnected strata of underlying interpretive dynamics and processes. Such analysis necessarily includes attending repeatedly to distinctly interpretive underlying questions relating to entire constellations of meaning(s), purposes, truths, beliefs and underlying convictions concerning normative right standards or right and wrong. It also includes a need to analyse both perceptual and reflective augments in relation to their application to concrete contexts. Yet, and here lies an irony that our earlier analyses have touched upon in passing: Namely, that none of these core phenomena, which a Husserlian approach demonstrates mediate every actual or possible “fact” about hate crime, themselves appear experientially in the form of physical “worldly facts.” In other words, the meaning of a culturally-derived and culturally-defined norm consistently appears experientially as different in kind from the properties of “facts” as conceived of and projected by an objectivist approach in purely naturalistic-physicalist terms. Hence, the action-orienting ideas, convictions, and beliefs giving meaning, purpose and life-­ significance to the practices of perpetrators, as well as to those of hate crime scholars (including possible subscribers to naturalistic-objectivist approaches), are clearly not “factual realities,” at least not in the naturalistic sense of an exclusively

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physical reality. Instead, they are normative and culturally-derived ideas, saturated with specific beliefs, whose very ideational and non-real (or “irreal”) status demands to be taken seriously as a research topic in its own right. The very meaning, value and implications of these ideas and ideas-related phenomena arise repeatedly from ongoing re-interpretive performances of various kinds, including those of hate crime scholars themselves. It follows that hate crime scholars need to recognise that these guiding action-orienting collective norms do not appear as “given material facts” consistent with an objectivist conception of the latter. Rather, they take shape as performative-accomplishments linked to all manner of interesting underlying dynamics, such as the passive association of X with Y.  They also take place at different strata of consciousness, many of which are “below” that which unreflective consciousness focuses upon, or is even aware of. As such, these dynamics merit being studied precisely as ongoing performative accomplishments by radically self-reflective qualitative methods. Unlike the quantitative methods of objectivist approaches, these qualitative methods are designed specifically for this demanding analytical task. We can further identify and clarify some related problems created by objectivism by considering the case of a distinctly psychological approach to hate crime issues informed by this orientation. Here, our criticism concerns both the possible applicability and scientific credentials of naturalistically-conceived psychology of hate crime, which is founded upon objectivism and, thereby, the latter’s underlying premises. Such an approach would, as previously discussed, involve characterising the reality of this topic, together with its various surrounding contexts of different kinds, as belonging to the distinctive being of nature – as opposed to that of culture. Yet, the vital and distinctly critical point here is that such a characterisation is not itself an empirical scientific finding that both feeds, into and grounds, an objectivist approach to hate crime issues. Instead, this characterisation amounts to a specific pre-judgement. It is pre-judgement that, in itself, has an interpretive structure resembling a prejudice in the literal sense of a judgement characterising something that is made prior to – and independently of – a fulsome grasp of evidence about that topic itself. The latter appears in terms of whatever is being assumed as valid from the outset. Indeed, this interpretive structure represents a largely or wholly taken-for-­ granted and unarticulated horizon of – and for – acts of interpretation that draw and rely upon its resources. Within this framework, the intelligibility of all actual and conceivable “facts” of hate crime, together with specific patterns of incidents, takes shape in a particular pre-determined manner. Generally, this manner will not enter into the express consciousness of those making these prejudgements about different aspects of hate crime. In this way, the framework itself, which is carried primarily by language, represents an interpretive horizon into which “the facts” of, say, the behavioural traits of perpetrators, are gathered and take shape in their intelligibility in a manner that is pre-scripted by whatever is being taken-for-granted. Here, and contrary to the always already presupposed implications of objectivism’s own subject/object dichotomy, we cannot contrast the objectivity of “the facts” of hate incidents, with the subjective prejudices of “mere opinions” of those

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who witness such events. Any such contrast is impossible because, on closer examination from a perspective liberated from acceptance-captivity with respect to this either/or dichotomy, “the facts” take shape as a subset of the opinions, attitudes, beliefs, commitments and value-judgements that saturate the underlying presuppositions. In particular, within an objectivist psychological approach to hate crime, the following foundational qualitative elements will only vaguely and arbitrarily be taken over from a life-world cultural tradition, with this very appropriation remaining generally unnoticed: 1. The characterisation of the “whatness” of such behaviour, or any other constituents of a hate crime scholar’s research field. 2. The different interpretive modes through which this behaviour make its appearance to us subjectively and become reiterated, supplemented, and revised as something meant in a certain manner, i.e., as something perceived, judged-about, evaluated, recalled, anticipated and signified through words. Within a psychological approach to hate crime issues informed by objectivism, these basic constitutive features of the phenomena, its categories of significance, as well as their interpretive constitution, concrete application and renewal, do not themselves become fully thematic. This defect is a fundamental, as distinct from a purely technical, problem. In other words, the basic difficulty of a loss of qualitative foundations remains the case irrespective of the degree of rigour with which researchers apply their objectivist-naturalistic research methodologies. As a result, this neglect of such foundations and interpretive preconditions within the life-world is not a trivial defect that can, for example, be taken as a problem capable of being ironed out with purely technical refinements to objectivist-­ naturalistic causal methodologies. Such a defect cannot be resolved by enhancing the efficiency of those procedures involved in the application of such methodologies to specific case studies. The basic problems of hate crime scholarship relying on objectivist premises that gloss over their own qualitative foundations that we have addressed above become even clearer if we go on to emphasise some basic interpretive truths. Scholars of all stripes can confirm the latter’s validity through sustained experiential self-­reflection. Mainstream social scientific accounts of hate crime inevitably address a research field that contains essentially conceptual material, i.e., distinctly cultural and legal categories of meaning, value, and purpose. It includes a range of diverse and sometimes contradictory ideas, norms and beliefs about “hate crime,” “hate speech,” “crime,” “criminals,” “victims,” “responsibility,” “the role of policing,” “arguments for law reform,” “victim support” etc. Such ideas-based materials are clearly characterised by their distinctly cultural – not physical – qualities. These materials provide the interpretive lens through which scholars not only initially identify – and then make sense of this topic – but also characterise its policy implications going forward. However, where social scientific studies of hate crime are reliant upon objectivism’s subject/object dichotomy, they will typically fail to adequately clarify or ground such conceptual material at the founding experiential

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level. They will rarely, if ever, even ask a cluster of absolutely vital founding questions, the answers to which therefore remain presupposed. This cluster includes questions such as: on what interpretive basis is it possible to experience and identify something as a hate crime (as distinct from a “simple assault”), and as a “religious” (as opposed to a “racial”) hate incident? How does the perceptual construal of experiences in just these – and not some other possible – socio-linguistic terms, actually operate as an interpretive practice of those responsible for identifying events as legally recognisable “criminal offences”? What are the underlying interpretive dynamics and core presuppositions that, as constitutive factors, first enable and sustain such performative-accomplishments? Hence, when we ask these questions, the contradiction becomes readily apparent. What begins as a commendable effort in the name of positive science to overcome customary religious, metaphysical and other prejudices, such as theologically-based or ideologically-derived evaluations, by grounding knowledge-­ claims in “the facts alone,” turns into its very opposite. That is, it becomes an exercise in groundlessness and sheer assertion. The underlying experiential preconditions for its own claims relating to qualitative categories, together with the interpretive recipes for their realisation in different contexts, remain entirely unexplicated. In short, the glossing over of qualitative foundations, which is a structurally inbuilt feature of objectivist research, is simply not a viable option for hate crime scholarship because it generates all manner of contradictions. It results in empirical research into hate crime issues that cannot be sure that its analysis of this topic is actually about this topic and not something else. What begins as a commendable effort to over the relativity of subjective opinions and prejudices by appealing to “the facts of the case” turns into the very opposite of what was originally intended. As a result of such neglect of qualitative foundations, whatever is being experienced as a hate crime in all its diversities, interpretative relativities and contingencies, can  – at best  – only be incompletely “given” to such quantitative social science approaches to this subject. Worse still, in the absence of systematic and radically qualitative sense-­ explication of the type we are developing and advocating in the present study, the underlying conceptual materials, including qualitative categories of hate crime and relations between different sub-categories, will forever remain in a pre-scientific condition even after they are codified through quantitative methods. As a result, they will themselves suffer from relative obscurities, vague formulations and unclear relations to related conceptions, such as the significance of “discrimination,” ­“hostility,” “policing,” etc.22 The next question, which follows on from our current discussion and which we will now discuss is: “can an objectivist approach to hate crime avoid these issues by deploying “operational definitions” as a substitute for radically qualitative phenomenological analysis; and thereby avoid at least part of the force of a Husserlian critique? 22

 Husserl, 1980: 84.

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5  Operational Definitions to the Rescue of Quantification? Supporters of objectivist forms of hate crime scholarship could reply to our Husserlian critique that qualitative issues are both glossed over and disregarded by claiming that such issues are already resolved by their deployment of “operational definitions” (i.e., “for the purposes of this study hate crime will be defined as X …,” where X is itself formulated in a manner to allow for measurement and quantitative analysis”). The issue here is whether the absence of qualitative foundations and grounding, of the kind Husserl insists, are vital can be “resolved” by resort to an externally-derived “operational definition.” The latter will typically be superimposed upon the empirical details of the research field. Such definitions are, in themselves, predetermined by the technical requirements of a fixed quantitative research method for, say, categories that facilitate social scientific “coding.” In other words, the issue here is whether an objectivist approach to the social or individual psychology of, say, hate crime perpetrators, can be salvaged from our critique by deploying operational definitions, such as: “for the purposes of this research, hate crime is defined as ….” where the definition is itself shaped by the imperatives of measurement and exact quantitative analysis.23 However, the problem with this possible defensive response is that such an externally-­formulated and externally superimposed “definition” only adds to the difficulties we have already set out. Such operational definitions will generally become formulated and refined not by reference to an independently determined experientially-grounded analysis of the topic itself. On the contrary, they will be devised primarily to facilitate the application of the given protocols of an off-the-­ shelf quantitative research method: one whose resulting “hard data” is deemed optimally suitable for analysis by computer software to generate results that are ideally statistically significant for causal-explanatory purposes. Hence, it becomes possible that the most far-fetched operational definition that hate crime researchers who are operating within an objectivist methodological framework, will either select or themselves devise, an operational definition that most readily allows for the statistical analysis of the results of, say, questionnaire surveys. Where objectivism prevails, researchers will tend to prefer applying an operational definition over even the most descriptively adequate one. This would typically remain the case even where the latter is carefully and thoroughly grounded in the richest conceivable intuitive evidence of lived experience, but which – as a result – resists being operationalised to meet the ulterior-technical requirements of exact quantification. What becomes inconceivable in this context is that the best data may be characterised by a qualitative ambiguity, multiple possible shades of meaning, context-dependency and internal complexity. Yet, these are precisely the features  Cf. L.  Vandervert, ‘Operational definitions made simple, useful, and lasting,’ In M.  Ware & C.  Brewer (Eds.), Handbook for Teaching Statistics and Research Methods, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988: 132–34. 23

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of meant and perceived realities, including hate incidents, which are often revealed by qualitative research conducted independently of objectivist presuppositions. In other words, objectivism resists adapting its definition of hate crime-related categories and subcategories to the phenomenon themselves precisely as the latter unfold their defining qualities and features over successive lived experiences of them. As a result, the qualities and properties of operational definitions will tend to become determined by wholly external  – and typically inappropriate  – methodological considerations. The latter are formulated prior to – and independent of – any contact with the research field itself. In this way, the defensive response of subscribers to objectivism that the application of operational definitions is a valid alternative to qualitative analysis is, in effect, little more than a dogmatic and unsatisfying evasion of the key issues at stake. What is silently ignored as inconvenient here is a vital scientific imperative of central relevance to any viable phenomenology of hate crime. That is, the methodological requirement to develop and refine research methods which have themselves demonstrated that they are clearly optimally adequate to the specific qualities and characteristics of the progressively unveiled phenomena themselves, in all the latter’s rich and many-layered qualitative features. Indeed, where objectivism prevails, this vital imperative, which drives our phenomenology of hate crime, will – as already noted – be substituted by another wholly external criterion: “suitability of operational definitions for generating results amenable and susceptible to exact statistical analysis by quantitative methods.” Yet, in an essentially dogmatic and prejudicial move, reliance upon such definitions-as-criterion entirely begs the more fundamental question of the suitability of quantification itself within the field of hate crime research, together with those difficulties that arise in basing research upon official or other statistical data.24 Such question-begging is another aspect of our central critique that, contrary to its own claims, objectivism entails the reiteration of all manner of taken-for-granted presuppositions. From the start and throughout, these presuppositions severely bias objectivist-style research practices, while also prejudicing the credibility of its ultimate research findings. Once again, this Husserlian critique holds good even for – indeed especially for – the most technically proficient, accurate, and conscientious application of an objectivist approach to hate crime research. The difficulty here is that this presumption, together with a resort to merely operational definitions, serves to prejudge the very meaning of hate crime from the start and throughout. As a result, the phenomenon itself – hate crime as an intentional object of the consciousness of those who experience it – tends to evade analysis. It follows that there will rarely be an acknowledgement of the social scientific relevance of either these alien, second-order operational definitions superimposed upon the topic itself nor those first-order constructs that comprise the interpretive frameworks of their research subjects (perpetrators, witnesses, victims, etc.). 24

 This is a point we develop more fully below.

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These first-order understandings of “what’s what” and “who’s who” are not clarified, rendered distinct and precise. Instead, dogmatic reliance upon second-order operational definitions of whatever is supposed to constitute hate crime is problematic; it prevents the creation of a degree of cognitive validity at the founding qualitative level of meaning of concretely intuited lived experiences of hate crime. A vital question is never even asked: namely: “What is the relationship between our research’s operational definitions of hate crime on the one hand, and – on the other – the various definitions of those who experience being abused, or witnessing discriminatory abuse, in terms of different understandings of hate criminality?” Objectivism’s dogmatic refusal to engage with the phenomenon itself, with the first-order qualitative understandings of the meanings of various lived experiences, leads to fundamental contradictions. For example, there is simply no way of independently determining the validity of the particular operational definitions deployed by hate crime researchers operating within the natural attitude’s objectivist framework. While remaining within this framework, if one operational definition of hate crime constructs understanding X (expressly not Y), while another constructs the understanding Y (expressly not X), there can be no evidence-based and non-­arbitrary manner of choosing between the two opposed interpretation of the meaning and scope of hate crime. The attempt to overcome the claimed arbitrariness of subjective relativity turns into precisely that, but with a renewed form of dogmatic closure. In turn, such closure may become even more problematic than the “unscientific,” so-­called “common sense” orientation of everyday life which – in the name of science – it seeks in vain to overcome. As a result of the cluster of contradictions this broadly Husserlian critique has identified and analysed, our radically alternative phenomenological approach lays down a direct challenge to objectivism’s self-image. We can critically explore a vital question by asking: “Is this understanding of hate crime derived from operational definitions anything other than an arbitrarily superimposed external definition: one which may turn out on closer inspection to be utterly irrelevant to how the topic itself is being lived, construed and (inter)subjectively understood by those with first-­ hand experience of it?” When we ask and pursue such critical questioning in a probing manner, it soon becomes clear that this aspect of objectivism is prone to an ironic self-contradiction: what is simply being multiplied here is precisely that type of “subjective arbitrariness” that is supposed to have been finally been overcome by researchers adopting the apparent objectivity of quantitative social science research methods, which merely mimic those of the natural sciences. Yet, for as long as hate crime research subscribes to this approach, such operational definitions are – despite their clear limitations – still needed. This is because they provide the potentially groundless foundation upon which rests their second-­ order, “exact” statistical analysis of hate crime’s claimed “causal factors,” “patterns of distribution” and “effects” In other words, the frequent lack of sufficient in-depth qualitative grounding of such operational definitions means that purely quantitative studies of hate crime risk defining the very nature of this topic only in a way that best suits the already established general demands of quantitative social science

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methods, e.g., for drafting questionnaires, coding etc. However, we have already argued that even where these demands are fully complied with, reliance upon such operational definitions may yield interpretations of hate crime that are quite unrecognisable to those with first-hand experiences of actually being a victim, being a witness, perpetrator, police investigator etc. There are further related difficulties and contradictions stemming from reliance upon operational definitions based upon will often be inappropriate factors external to the phenomenon of hate crime itself, just as the latter is being lived experientially. Here, the commendable imperative to use social scientific methods to break out of subjective prejudices, whose perceptions merely confirm the presuppositions that shape them, involves a clear rejection of such prejudicial and self-validating self-­ referentiality. However, the contradiction here is that as a consequence of the various interpretive-rhetorical practices we have already discussed, an objectivist form of quantitative analysis of hate crime is, despite itself, at high risk of becoming entirely self-referential. That is, of referring to and addressing with quantitative methods only an intersubjectively-projected reality which they have themselves both projected and reinterpreted according to their own operational definitions and methodological requirements more generally. Such self-referentiality is entirely unobjectionable in the field of pure mathematics itself, and nothing in our Husserlian critique should be taken to imply a critique of mathematics as such; or even quantification within the analytical work of natural sciences. This is because mathematics, with its own distinctive theorems and controversies, quite properly refers only to itself; it makes no claims beyond the borders of its own interpretively projected “world of mathematics.” How train-spotters, supermarket checkout workers, and quantitative hate crime scholars actually deploy or mis-deploy numbers – as well related mathematical and statistical formulae and axioms  – is of no concern whatsoever to the discipline of pure mathematics. No such empirical experiences of using numbers, even in the most complex and sophisticated manner, can alter the controversies of this purely theoretical and self-­ referential discipline. Indeed, the latter maintains its integrity in splendid isolation from these, and any other types, of applied quantitative operations taking place outside the discipline itself. Within pure mathematics, there is an absolute theory/ practice divide: one that ensures the entirely unobjectionable rigour of pure mathematics. However, a quantitative type of social science research about hate crime that is underpinned by objectivism cannot avoid claiming to be “about” something other than the projections of its own discipline’s interpretive framework. It has no choice but to claim that this research is about something other than both itself, and its own prejudicial methodological and ideological projections pre-superimposed upon its specific research field. While self-referentiality is a virtue in pure mathematics, it is anything but a positive value within an objectivist-naturalistic approach to hate crime. Such “applied research” must directly, or at least implicitly, claim to reach out beyond both its own methodological-disciplinary world and the subjectivity of the researcher. Such self-transcendence is needed to impartially identify, grasp,

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describe and explain – in precise and exact terms – whatever is statistically significant about the core reality of hate crime itself, just as this material significance – and assorted causal-explanatory factors – is revealed by the “objective facts.” For us, and as already discussed, the chronic difficulty here is that this resort to merely operational definitions serves, from the start and throughout, to prejudge – and thereby to potentially distort – the very meaning and significance of hate crime as lived. What an objectivist form of such scholarship addresses turns out, on closer and independent inspection, to be a creature generated, at least in part, by its own methodological prejudices. In other words, such distortion may occur to the point where it becomes unclear whether self-styled hate crime scholarship reliant upon objectivist presuppositions is even addressing – let alone successfully analysing – hate crime as the latter is concretely defined by those first-hand experience of this topic. As a result, within such a would-be social scientific project, there can be an acknowledgement of the social scientific relevance of neither these relatively alien, second-order operational definitions superimposed upon the topic itself, nor those first-order constructs that comprise the interpretive frameworks of their research subjects (perpetrators, witnesses, victims, etc.). Indeed, the difficulty here is that wherever objectivism prevails within hate scholarship, first-order understandings of “what’s what” and “who’s who” are, as already discussed, left in an unclarified state. These understandings of the intelligibility of specific meaning(s), values and purpose(s) are not rendered distinct and precise either in themselves or in relation to other closely  – and more distantly related – qualitative ideas and cultural-linguistic categories, which are also drawn implicitly from the life-world. Instead, objectivism’s dogmatic reliance upon second-­order operational definitions of what hate crime is presumed to be is entirely problematic for any authentically self-reflective approach to this topic that is concerned with its own interpretive preconditions. In other words, any academic approach to hate crime with scientific claims must necessarily seek to minimise any part of its interpretive-analytic work lacking a clear grounding in evidence-based perceptual judgements, which are demonstrably and optimally derived from the phenomenon itself. For example, we have already discussed how an objectivist approach is characterised by a dogmatic reliance upon second-order operational definitions. Such reliance fails to allow for the creation of that degree of cognitive validity at the founding qualitative level of meaning of concretely intuited lived experiences of hate crime. Yet, such a sense of validity is surely a vital precondition for any authentically social scientific approach to hate crime concerned to act consistently with its own scientific self-image and legitimating claims. By contrast, within an objectivist research agenda, what is surely a core and vital research question is never even asked: Namely: “What precisely is the relationship between our research’s operational definition of hate crime in general, together with legally-recognised subcategories in particular, and the various de facto implicit definitions of those who experience being abused in terms of different understandings of hate criminality?” There are negative consequences of this dogmatic refusal to engage with the coming-into-presence of the phenomenon itself, i.e., with the first-order qualitative

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understandings of the meanings of various lived experiences. One of these negative outcomes is that we become disempowered from credibly determining the validity of the specific operational definitions deployed by hate crime researchers operating within the natural attitude’s objectivist framework. As a result, and in response to this difficulty, our radically alternative phenomenological approach must ask: “Is this understanding of hate crime derived from operational definitions something other and more than an arbitrarily superimposed external definition: one which may well be entirely irrelevant to how the topic itself is being lived, construed and (inter)subjectively understood by those with first-hand experience of it?” Whenever we ask and pursue such critical questioning, it soon becomes clear that there is an ironic self-contradiction here. Resort to external operational definitions simply multiplies is precisely a type of “subjective arbitrariness” However, and as already discussed, the overcoming of such subjective arbitrariness is, from the start, supposed to form a key part of the rationale for adopting quantitative social scientific research methods underpinned by a merger of naturalistic and objectivist presuppositions. Yet, for as long as hate crime researchers subscribe to this objectivist approach, such operational definitions are – despite the clear limitations which we have just highlighted – still needed, at least in one sense. This is because they provide the indispensable – yet potentially groundless – pseudo-qualitative “foundation” upon which rests their second-order, “exact” statistical analysis of hate crime’s claimed “causal factors,” “patterns of distribution” and “effects” In other words, the frequent lack of sufficient in-depth qualitative grounding of such operational definitions, even within pilot studies, means that purely quantitative studies of hate crime risk constructing their entire edifices upon foundations of quicksand. By defining the very nature of this topic only in a way that best suits the already established general demands and technical requirements of quantitative social science methods and methodologies, e.g., for drafting questionnaires, coding etc., operational definitions will almost certainly yield problematic. Interpretations of hate crime. The latter need to be critiqued insofar as they take shape in ways that are quite unrecognisable to those with first-hand experiences of actually being a victim or witness, perpetrator, police investigator etc. Such individuals with concrete first-­ hand experiences are, as a result, likely to look aghast at even the most technically competent research project and proclaim: “they do not know what they are talking about.”

6  General Difficulties with Quantification Our Husserlian critique has to date focused upon the question of contextual appropriateness of the causal-explanatory character of an objectivist approach to hate crime. We have mentioned the resulting “preference” for quantification only in passing, and then only as a secondary matter. Our previous neglect of issues of the validity of associated quantitative methods now needs to be remedied. At this point,

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however, we need to make clear that the adoption by an objectivist study to hate crime of quantitative research methods is not a secondary, optional and more or less accidental “preference.” Given the character of their founding presuppositions, including physicalism, it is not as if subscribers to a naturalistically conceived-­ psychological, sociological or criminological approach to hate crime have the option of adopting wholly qualitative research methods, which are oriented, from the start, towards the question of the societal (re)construction of culturally-derived meaning. Here, we need to remember how objectivism’s physicalist presuppositions posit reality as if it was essentially, or at least primarily, a physical reality, accessible only through an analysis of “material facts” in ways that mimic a certain conception of the natural sciences. As a result, an objectivist approach to hate crime can feel confident in considering exclusively qualitative research methods  – and underlying methodologies – to be utterly irrelevant to its research practices. Such methods are concerned with how the consciousness of social actors interpret the significance of their life-situations, and act purposefully based upon the results of these ever-­ contingent and always culturally-mediated interpretive practices. By contrast, medical scientists who sought to define how their thing-like research topic itself, such as a specific disease process, defined the meaning of its own immediate situation while also acting upon this provisional definition, would – for entirely understandable reasons  – face utterly derision from their colleagues. These colleagues could rightly accuse this research practice of inappropriately personifying a material phenomenon that  – precisely as a material object, or thing-like process detectable on clinical equipment – entirely lacks the defining characteristics of a person. The accusation would be that these researchers were personifying something that lacked the qualities of a person, which may be acceptable within the metaphors of daily life, but – in the field of science – is a crass type of basic category mistake. Such derision would stem from the experientially-grounded truth that the topics in question, including, say, a tumour disease process, unfailingly present themselves as possessing – in themselves – neither consciousness nor any measure of inner-directed ego-like agency characteristic of sentient beings. Hence, qualitative methods designed to uncover and explicate how human consciousness defines its life-contexts and gives action-orienting meaning to its own position within those contexts is an entirely inappropriate method and methodology. Indeed, the association of an assumption-driven objectivist approach to hate crime issues with wholly quantitative, as opposed to exclusively qualitative, research methods is hard-wired into the former as the sole practical means for attaining its causal-explanatory ends. In a failed attempt to mimic the natural sciences, these means are supposed to provide the basis for future prediction and control. As such, the adoption of exclusively quantitative methods appears as an unavoidable structural necessity for hate crime scholars who subscribe to an objectivist starting point and general orientation towards this topic. Our critical responses to the preference of a naturalistically-inclined positivistic study of hate crime to prioritise quantitative methods for conducting empirical

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research cannot, therefore, be based on inconsistency with its underlying presuppositions. On the contrary, adopting an array of quantitative methods is utterly consistent with, and logically required by, these very presuppositions. Nevertheless, we contend that there remain issues with quantification that certainly require closer analysis as a topic in its own right. Within certain important limits, quantification within the mathematically-­oriented natural sciences, especially physics, has undoubtedly yielded valid scientific results about the physical world of nature and nature-like processes and events. In turn, these have permitted massive technological breakthroughs in numerous fields of everyday experience ranging from medical science, transportation and civil engineering, through to industrial automation and internet-based communications. As a result, our phenomenology of hate crime has no difficulties in accepting both the theoretical and the practical achievements of mathematically-oriented natural sciences. On the other hand, we contend that the over-extension of the exactitude of the natural science model of science to the social sciences, including in the fields of types of psychology, criminology and sociology reliant upon objectivist presuppositions, is problematic. It is predicated upon not only a deceptive appearance but also a false argument. A Husserlian-style critique would, for example, insist that any instances of apparently impressive “scientific exactitude” within quantitative social scientific research on hate crime, which accords with objectivist premises, will – at first sight  – tend to appear free of self-contradiction. Yet, this appearance is also deceptive. This is because any such appearance of coherence is itself accomplished only by successfully concealing its own interpretive preconditions. In response, our phenomenological approach can expose and address at least some of these preconditions by asking the following more probing questions: By what qualitative standards is the “true rate” of hate crime being identified as such? “In what sense has there ever been “a crime” when the sole alleged perpetrator has been found not guilty by a court, or where prosecutors have refused to prosecute because of a lack of credible evidence. If alleged witnesses and victims have not perceived an incident they have encountered within their first-hand experience as being any kind of criminal offence meriting reporting to, say, the police, then how valid is it for social scientists to substitute their own contrary definitions of “what really happened” by identifying this event as an “unreported case” of a hate crime?” How can we quantify “under-reporting” of incidents without – at the same time – naively projecting some notion of “the true rate,” for which there can little or no empirical evidence? Why is “under-reporting” even a distinctly social scientific issue, as distinct from, say, “over-reporting”? How can a self-styled “factual ­analysis,” whose objectivity supposedly lies in a rejection of value-judgements, claim that, as a matter of fact, there is either “too little” or “too much” reporting of hate incidents since both of these contentions are clearly based on extra-factual value-­judgements, and therefore value commitments? For reasons we have already discussed, objectivism promotes uncritical respect for apparently “exact” quantitative statistical analysis of “the facts” of hate crime,

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or any other topic. Yet, as our implicitly critical distinctly phenomenological questions indicate, such respect remains at least potentially dogmatic; and  – in this sense  – essentially unscientific. This argument represents a powerful Husserlian internal critique of the over-extension of naïve quantification into the social sciences. It is an argument with important implications for the conduct of empirical research into hate crime. Such critique is certainly needed insofar as the phenomenological analysis of the interpretive creativities of objectivist premises is – despite its remedial potential and for reasons already explained – simply ignored. Given the essentially interpretive nature of whatever is encountered as more or less intelligible within the hate crime research field, qualitative understandings of meaning cannot be so easily displaced by researchers adopting exclusively quantitative research methods. More precisely, and as an empirical matter, such understandings can certainly be displaced from social scientific consciousness. However, the price to be paid by hate crime scholarship for this displacement is that is the evaporation of the overall credibility of the very foundations of their projects. For example, the cluster of interrelated methodological requirements – of which quantification forms a central part – operates prejudicially in a manner that is highly problematic for our phenomenology of hate crime. These requirements substitute a third-party type of quantitative exactitude for our first-hand experiential insights into the very “whatness” and “howness” of the phenomenon itself. Yet, these two features of qualitative “whatness”  – together with the “howness” of whatever appears experientially – are both logically and experientially prior to, and foundational for, attempts to answer the why-type and how-much type questions by reference to quantitative evidence. In short, efforts to salvage the scientific credentials of an objectivist approach to hate crime by resorting to a striving for the exactitude possible in, say, the discipline of physics run aground on the differences in kind between the social and natural worlds. This means that the scope of quantification as part of a causal-explanatory analysis is best suited to the latter because here alone behaviour itself (of those objects, events and processes that make up the natural world) is not explicable as a function of the interpretive performances of the behaving entity under study. By contrast, in the social world, human “behaviour,” more precisely characterised as “interaction,” not only raises interpretive questions in terms of its whatness and howness with respect to its identification and classification, which are shared with the natural sciences, but also the behaviour itself is only explicable by reference to the interpretive performances of human beings themselves. This twofold mediation of human interaction by interpretive performances of various kinds is responsible for the requirement that such action should be studied primarily by distinctly qualitative methods, and that qualitative analysis of the phenomenon’s ­whatness and howness is both primary and foundational. It follows that quantification can, at most, represent a second-order analytical practice most appropriate to those “thing-like” aspects of the social world lacking human agency and motivated action.

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7  A  dditional Specific Difficulties with Quantification: Classification as Constitutive? For an objectivist approach to hate crime, the process of classification is akin to putting the right document in the correct folder of a filing cabinet. Both the document and the filing cabinet pre-date and are utterly independent of, the activity of classifying the former in terms of the latter’s folder headings. The Husserlian critique calls this model of classification and sub-classification into question by drawing attention to their constitutive role. Defining X as a case-of-X-not-Y-category constitutes (or reconstitutes and reinforces) the significance of its presence as X in ways that can have real-world outcomes with material effects. For example, those concerned with hate crime issues at both theoretical and practical policy-based, or law enforcement levels, have little choice but to seek to come to terms with the various classifications that differentiate different “types” of hate crime, which distinguish religious from racially-motivated incidents for example. Previously, we suggested that an objectivist orientation would seek to explain the empirical details of hate criminality by reference to an impartial analysis of given “factual evidence” about, say, different types of hate crime. Yet, the critical question here relates to the interpretive constitution of the guiding intelligibility of these “different types.” We have to ask: can an objectivist orientation able to provide a convincing analysis of the interpretive aspects and dimensions of such processes of classification and sub-classification? We argue no because what such an approach would entirely ignore here, without any methodological or any other type of justification, are the implications of a vital phenomenological insight: namely, that the classifications of hate crime, and associated official police and governmental statistics on hate crime (as well as any other topic), represent an index of the classificatory work itself. In other words, that acts of official classification and sub-classification are, in themselves, culturally-­ mediated and selective re-interpretations of already culturally-mediated and selectively interpreted events. These reiterations are as much constitutive of the significance of those events being classified and sub-categorised, as they are, at the surface level, descriptive of the intelligibility of the latter’s factual details. Where classifications are expressed in the apparently neutral, actually depoliticised vocabulary, of numerical indicators and statistics, then we argue that it is even easier to ignore this insight. The natural science emphasis on exact analysis expressed numerically is at least an outward sign of the hallmark of the objective science itself. To cut through the deceptive quality of this presumption within the social world, we should never forget that is possible to substantially lower “the” official level of both hate crime incidents and unemployment by recalibrating what constitutes as hate crime and unemployment for official purposes. Expressed in exact quantitative terms, the new rates can be made to appear as if were entirely “objective” and “factual,” i.e., nonself-referential, by the expedient of superimposing a revised, far more restrictive, definition for classificatory-statistical purposes.

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A similar point applies to any governmental or social scientific statistical index relating to hate crime, criminality more generally, or any other government statistics: their quantitative exactness and appearance of depoliticised self-evident objectivity do not arise from the intrinsic character of what is being counted. Instead, and contrary to naturalistic presuppositions already discussed, it is derived from the very process of superimposing an essentially qualitative and culturally-derived definition of the “whatness” of the topic itself. The latter is one which – as a relatively arbitrary linguistic-cultural signifier – can be conveniently broadened out, retained as-is, or narrowed down. Here, much depends upon the pragmatic requirements of the ideological game state officials are currently playing.25 It follows that the statement: “I possess a high IQ (only) because of my competence, on the day in question, at successfully completing one version of a certain IQ test,” is not at all cynical. Nor would a similar statement about the interpretive relativities in play with respect to the classification and sub-categorisation of “learning difficulties” as a form of “disability.” On the contrary, both empirical references here reflect vital insight into the very indexicality of measuring and classifying people and their qualities: the paradox that what is being measured and classified produces apparently objective “factual” claims expressed with a high degree of precision and exactitude; and hence apparently objectivity. Yet, these are not, in themselves, grounded in material-physical worldly facts existing prior to, and independent of, the very interpretive processes of measuring and classifying them. Rather, classified realities relevant to incidence and distribution of hate crime, for example, inevitably appear experientially as interpretive constructs, whose indexicality arises from reinterpreting the significance of other such constructs through the lens of a superimposed classificatory schema. The stability of classifications presupposes a broad consensus at the level of cultural definition as to what, for present purposes, constitutes “disability,” “race,” “religion,” “unemployment,” “measurable intelligence,” “learning difficulties,” “disability” etc. Whenever this broad consensus breaks down, the apparent solidity, facticity, exactitude and precision of statistical expressions relevant to, say, hate crime issues simply melts away. What once appeared as a solidly objective ­matter-­of-­fact, which no rational person can doubt, now melts into air. This is clearly because, within the social realm at least, “the facts” upon which these expressions are based, can simply never be “facts” in an objectivist/naturalistic sense of this term. In other words, “the facts” that are identified, grasped, and quantified, can – as culturally-mediated and linguistically-dependent constructs  – never appear in a form that even approximates objectivism’s notion of “facts.” The latter cluster of

 Such game playing may be partly restrained where state statisticians enjoy a measure of autonomy from the political process, but even here their findings are open to variable political reinterpretations. Notoriously, it has proved possible in the UK to reduce official unemployment figures by reclassifying unemployed individuals as incapable of work on grounds of health, and then later cutting the welfare benefits of these individuals in periods where unemployment rates are no longer politically contentious. 25

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insights, derived from Husserl, flatly contradict the objectivist presuppositions relating to the conflation of social science with an exact quantitative analysis that we previously outlined. When our phenomenology of hate crime emphasises the “indexicality” of such “hard quantitative data,” we are drawing an analogy with the stock market. As something also expressed exactly in numbers, the rising and falling of the prices of various stocks and shares is an apparently “objective” index, part of “hard economic data” summing up the objective behavioural trends of “the economy.” Yet, whatever the precise numbers the index expresses on any particular day – and however accurately they are compiled – the index itself always arise from the relative degrees of confidence investors possess with respect to the perceived future trajectory of different sectors of the local, regional, national and international economies. These relative degrees of investor confidence are generally exhibited in their decisions to buy certain stocks while selling off others. Investors who are faced with what they perceive as “turbulent and difficult times” often switch their investments from “higher risk” to “lower risk” investments, such as gold and government bonds, before returning to higher risk – but higher return – investment options once their confidence has finally been restored. The more general phenomenological point here, which is clearly demonstrated in each of the examples we have cited above, is that, as with hate crime and other official statistics based upon quantitative classification as performative accomplishments, the numbers themselves are an ever-provisional index. As such, these statistical indicators represent a cumulative averaging out and generalisation, of underlying intersubjective processes of decision-making by an indeterminate number of individuals. For a phenomenology of hate crime, broadly defined as including aspects of ethnomethodology, the initially vexing term “indexicality” can be usefully recast in these specific terms.26 In short, our Husserlian critique of objectivism also embraces the latter’s resort to exclusively quantitative research methods when carrying out research into hate crime. This critique draws attention to the spurious character of such reliance whenever exactitude based upon the unreflective superimposition of second order cultural-­linguistic constructs, including sub-categories of hate crime offences, upon

 We can claim no originality here. There is a massive and varied literature on indexicality more generally, and we are not following the ethnomethodological notion here, which for Garkinkel refers to implicit subtexts behind statements that conversational partners rely upon without expressly addressing them. See Michael Silverstein, Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life, NY: Elsevier Ltd., 2003; Elinor Ochs, ‘Indexicality and Socialization,’ In J. Stigler, R. Shweder & G. Herdt (eds.) Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Geoff Georgi, “Demonstratives and Indexicals,” The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/dem-indx/. Our notion is closer to that of the critical broadly phenomenological legacy of Aaron Cicourel. See John I. Kitsuse, & Aaron V. Cicourel, ‘A Note on the Use of Official Statistics,’ 11 Social Problems: 1963: 131–139. Cf. Robin Smith, & Paul Atkinson, ‘Method and Measurement in Sociology, Fifty Years On,’ 19 International Journal of Social Research Methodology: 2016: 99–110. 26

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the intuitive evidence of lived experience. The questionable character of what is claimed here lies in the misrepresentation of exact “statistically significant” findings as a sign of rigorous scientific truth-in-itself, where these findings are based on nothing other than “the facts themselves.”

8  “Sticking to the Facts” as a Spurious Immediacy? We have already suggested that objectivism relies upon the idea that advances in our social scientific knowledge about hate crime must be based upon strictly empirical, quantitative studies, whose objective nature stem from their basis in given “facts”. Such reliance encourages a reductionist and decontextualizing interpretation of a hate incident as “this and nothing but this.” Within the resulting mindset, the empirical details of who did what to whom, when, how and with what immediate physical bodily effects, is given centre stage but without any express methodological justification for this methodological decision. Here, resorting a certain materialist conception of “the facts about hate crime” signifies one of the highly negative, downstream implications of any possible social scientific embrace of objectivism within studies of prejudice generally and hate crime in particular. For our phenomenology of hate crime, there is a core difficulty here. Namely, that this conception encourages a spurious sense of the “immediate givenness” of “the facts” and their concrete characteristics. There is an assumption that a single incident can signify no more than what is contained and evident in its “factual details.” More specifically, the application of this fact-driven and fact-based orientation lead to a loss of awareness of the importance and implications of the ongoing mediation of the lived experience of hate crime by a cluster of historically-specific and cultural-linguistic societal values, parochial beliefs and normative expectations. The result is another basic contradiction concerning how objectivism results in both the application of the cultural mediation of all encounters with an incident with a cluster of type-categories, and the simultaneous denial of such mediation. Where objectivism prevails within the natural attitude, subscribers will wrongly assume that whatever appears to the consciousness of victims, witnesses, perpetrators, as well as other involved or affected parties, is entirely free of any such cultural-­ categorial mediation. Whatever appears simply is simply immediate, as “strictly factual,” as its appearance claims. Hence, there can be no question of such consciousness being mediated by a range of taken-for-granted cultural assumptions, prejudices and social beliefs, rooted in ongoing linguistically-sustained traditions, concerning the significance of cultural differences relevant to hate crime issues. This interpretively naïve position arises as a result of the false assumption that our perceptions are operating in a way that is unmediated by the presumptions of objectivism itself. As a consequence, those presumptions actually shaping our perceptions are not themselves perceived and thereby are reiterated all the more powerfully because they operate behind the backs of subscribers.

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By contrast, Husserl has shown that the experience of such facts is generally mediated by cultural-linguistic determinations involving elements of always-­ emergent and interpretively-performed social meaning and being-meant in a certain manner, that do not themselves possess the traits of facts themselves: But, in the present sphere of experience, of culture, what expresses is not a body and what is expressed is not a psychic life, nor a disposition which makes itself known in it. A tool or a work of art is a physical thing, but not merely that: in it a rich mental sense is embodied; in it a formation originating from a subjective performance is objectified. The multiple material articulation of the thing, e.g., of a Gothic cathedral, is not an arbitrary articulation, but one which is senseful and which is comprehended in its sense.27

In other words, the material factual side of an incident – who did what, to whom, when, why, where, under which circumstances, and with what consequences for the victim – all rely, for their very intelligibility, upon the mediation of cultural categories. While “the facts” of an incident may appear to common sense awareness as primary and as an objective bedrock for all subsequent credible judgements, this primary is – for Husserl – spurious. This is because it conceals the origins of these “facts” in prior and underlying interpretive performances of various kinds, which represent their conditions of possibility. This derivation and dependency explain why the resulting “spurious immediacy” and “misplaced concreteness” of such “facts” are highly deceptive, as well as internally incoherent. When seen in this light, the fact-orientation of objectivism encourages a crude and reductive simplification of the complexities of lived experience. Worst among these simplifications is a de-contextualising disregard of an entire spiders’ web-like constellation of material, as well as cultural-linguistic, mediations operating at different levels. These levels include those of economics, politics, institutional imperatives; as well those of outright traditional parochial prejudices of numerous kinds, including xenophobia, directly relevant to the study of hate crime. There is a difficulty here. Reflection shows that the mediations that are disregarded in this way in favour of the “facts of the case” may have as much – or even greater  – explanatory potential compared with whatever is included as somehow “factual.” This is because we can often identify all manner of cultural, institutional, ideological, economic, political and other mediations at play within the lived experience of “this incident.” Such mediations link what is immediately experienced during an incident to other at least indirectly related phenomena that appear to be of the same, similar or contrasting “types.” This establishes a series of contrasts of X-as-like-but-not-the-same-As-Y type, as Z type etc., (and more indirectly ­Y-as-­like-but-not-the-same-as-Z type etc.) In this way, both types Y and Z enter into the determination of the full contextual meaning of X itself. At least in part, such mediating associations involves performative-interpretive accomplishments of passive consciousness. Here, the very activity of making sense of “what really happened” involves the work of both cognitive and extra-cognitive forms of mediation. In turn, this activity of sense-construal entails bringing to bear 27

 Husserl, 1925/77: 85.

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an entire interpretive framework, including a cluster of specific and general “types” and “stereotypes” upon the lived experience of these empirical details. As a result of such mediation, the experience of a hate incident itself, including its inner and outer horizons, becomes more or less intelligible in terms of how it realises one or more of these generic “types-of-case.” For their part, the latter are not themselves given to us intuitively as the sensory contents of acts of perception, e.g., as material sensations of specific sights, sounds, etc. In other words, the experience of this specific incident tends, despite its unique features, to contain far more than what we can directly and immediately intuit with our eyes, ears, nose and skin. For example, hate crime may often be experienced as a form of generic criminality. But not all such criminality takes the form of hate crime. Hate crime appears as discriminatory hostility. Yet, not all instances of either felt-discrimination or felt-hostility involve the experience of hate crime, and so forth. Hence, despite not being intuited with the body’s familiar senses, the general ideas of “discrimination,” “hostility” and “criminality” may clearly mediate the intelligibility of the details of any specific incident. Writing in a more general context, Husserl argues that such mediation by cultural meanings, typifications and stereotypes, which express (or perhaps “betray”) a certain orientating “mentality,” is nevertheless present within our lived experience in both a “blended in” and an integral manner. This is the case even though, under the influence of the natural attitude’s generic objectivism, we tend to skip over and overlook the mediating layer of forms of cultural sense in favour of whatever is “obvious, as a matter-of-fact.” Nevertheless, whenever we seek to distinguish the material from the cultural dimensions of, saying, hearing hate speech, we find ourselves involved in a type of abstraction from the prior concreteness of their blended togetherness found in the original experience itself: Every [mediating] component has its particular form or even its multiplicity of particular forms and contains in its entirety and according to every form-element a mentality which is expressed in it, which is – literally or figuratively – uttered in it. It is not associated in a merely extrinsic fashion but is intrinsically blended in, as a sense included in it, and expressed – we might even say "impressed" – in it. A separation between the matter of the sense and the sense itself, which is possible at any time, is an abstractive distinguishing of layers. In the concrete contemplation of … any cultural object … we experience not duality but unity, which can then only afterwards and abstractly be considered according to two sides: of that which expresses and of the expressed sense, the cultural significance.28

In other words, such mediation by pre-established and more generally applicable cultural-linguistic categories of meaning, value(s) and purpose(s) takes place in ways that are neither confined to nor exhausted by, the concretely intuited sensory aspect of “what happened as a matter of fact.” Contrary to what is presupposed by objectivism, once we recognise the always constitutive and often creative underlying role of such mediation, we have to reject the contention that there are or could ever be “facts-in-themselves.” Indeed, Husserl goes on to claim: 28

 Husserl, 1925/77: 85.

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The genesis of such mentally endowed realities manifestly refers back to activities of a creative subjectivity. The sense refers back to a sense-forming subjectivity which creates the expression as an expression of this sense, and the concrete work as a work of this form of purpose.29

For a Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime, a naturalistic objectivist approach centred around a certain presumption-driven conception of “the facts” involves a fundamental misrepresentation of the nature of lived experience. The latter is misrepresented as being, at base, a form of passive receptivity to “the facts out there” that are presumed to amount to a firm and given bedrock level: one which is entirely devoid of selective construal of questions of meaning. However, for Husserl, even the most passive consciousness of an object, topic, condition, or event involves the ongoing constitution and construal of its meaning for us. To perceive a person who clearly cannot see the world around them as “suffering from a physical abnormality” is not entirely a statement of fact. Rather, it presupposes a prior interpretive constitution of “bodily normality.” Any departure from cultural standards of normalisation alone makes possible the perceptual judgement: “X suffers from the physical abnormality of blindness.” To grasp “disability” thus entails transcending facts and figures about who is disabled, in which ways, and what proportion of this designated group have been victimised in which particular ways. Similar points apply to the perceptual judgement that the use of sign language is, as a matter-of-fact, a display of bodily “disability” related to the impairment of hearing, as distinct from the alternative interpretation of a display of membership of a linguistic minority with the same cultural rights of recognition and respect as is due any other minority language. Underlying the perception that, as a straightforward matter-of-fact, X and Y “simply are disabled” in terms of blindness and deafness lies a specific value-judgement: one whose interpretive work reaffirms a specific conception of “bodily capacities” projected as, say, “the norm for all humanity.” In other words, in contrast to the presumption of consciousness of disability as a “matter of fact” passively taken in by perceiving the details of what is perceived, lies a phenomenological approach which insists on the element of interpretive activity and normative value-judgement. The Husserlian critique of all that is displaced by an exclusive objectivist focus on its own model of “the facts” does not involve a simplistic denial or inversion of any element of passivity within a lived-experience. Our phenomenological critique of passive receptivity does not posit that a perpetrator’s identification of victims singled out by virtue of their perceived membership of a group necessarily relies upon a model of consciousness as a conscious and voluntary activity. Instead, this critique recognises that, at the primordial level of sensory experience of ultimate substrates, our experience of seeing X person as a unity of appearances, while noticing in a similar unity, that they cannot see the details of their surrounding

29

 Husserl, 1925/77: 85.

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world, there can be core elements of both passivity and pre-givenness, whose operation is buried and opaque even to the interpreter in question. For example, when a person identified as physically-disabled-through-blindness reports being the victim of hate speech, the police officers who take her statement do not experience the sheer presence of this person, or the impairment of their eyesight, as their suddenly invented mental perceptual construct lacking any other reality. On the contrary, that which these officers perceive as a “possible disability-related hate crime victim” displays, from the start and throughout, an objective pre-­ givenness and transcendence. It is the significance, not the sheer existence, of the victim’s material characteristics that is being variously interpretively-constructed and reconstructed anew. More precisely, this victim, together with her bodily condition, is forever experienced through perception as a transcendent substrate to which various cultural-legal determinations related to, say, the requirements of different possible criminal offence categories, may then be “attached” with various degrees of clarity, (in)determinacy, and (un)certainty.30 Amongst these pre-given elements are patterns of passive subjective belief (doxa) in whatever appears to consciousness as transcendent of that consciousness. Indeed, Husserl claims: All experience in this concrete sense rests at bottom on the simple pregiving protodoxa [Urdoxa] of ultimate, simply apprehensible substrates. The natural bodies pregiven in this doxa are the ultimate substrates for all subsequent determinations, cognitive determinations as well as those which are axiological or practical. All come into being from these simply apprehensible substrates. But this domain of the protodoxa, the ground of simple doxic consciousness is a merely passive pregiving consciousness of objects as substrates. In this domain, the existent is pregiven as a unity of identity.31

Hence, the simple presence of a victim’s body within a perpetrator’s field of vision, or the presence of that of the perpetrator within the victim’s visual field, exhibit a measure of sheer givenness, indeed pre-givenness, as well as relative self-sufficiency. The material existence qualities of a specific hate crime victim consistently appear to consciousness as being-there prior to them being expressly  – or even implicitly – addressed and construed by such consciousness. These qualities do not appear perceptually as the results of, say, an imaginative projection, fantasy or delusion that will entirely disappear following a change in orientation. However, and this is another vital ground for rejecting objectivism’s metaphysical form of ­materialism, even these pre-given substrates do not appear experientially only or in an unmediated way, as nothing but the so-called “brute facts,” existing “in themselves,” as posited by objectivism. Instead, they appear experientially only through the medium of interpretive performance-­accomplishment. That is to say, by virtue of processes of interpreta-

30 31

 Husserl, 1925/77: 75.  Husserl, 1975: 59.

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tion that immediately animate inrushing sensory data, which are derived from the sounds and visibility of a transcendent object, event, or process, with culturally-­ derived meanings and implications. As a result, the very identification within lived experience of just who is (and is not) taking shape as “a perpetrator” and as “a victim,” what is (and is not) appearing as a “hate incident,” as a “hate crime,” and as a “hate crime offence of a certain legally recognised sub-category” do not remain questions of “brute fact.” It is always something more than receptive suffering of sense-impressions from our body organs. On the contrary, even at the level of immediate perceptual experience, these are questions of selective (re)interpretation and construal of meaning: ones which we have every reason to designate as “performance-­ accomplishments.” As Husserl recognises more generally: However, this domain of doxa is a domain of the fluid. A passively pregiven unity of identity is not yet one which is grasped as such and retained as an objective identity. On the contrary, this apprehension, e.g., the perceptive contemplation of the pregiven sensuous substrate, is already an activity, a cognitive performance of the lowest level. It is so in pure perception, in which we let our glance wander here and there over the pre­given object which affects us. … Thus, even the purely perceptive contemplation of a pregiven substrate proves to be our achievement, an act, and not a mere suffering of impressions.32

In this respect, the interpretive work in and through which a sense of “this particular hate incident with X and Y characteristics” arises as something meant, and meant in a certain manner, has to be analysed not as the reception of facts but rather as an as a performance accomplishment. In turn, and notwithstanding our fulsome recognition of the transcendence of material dimensions of hate crime experience, such synthetic and identity producing accomplishments have, according to Husserl, to be recognised as – through synthesis – constitutive of that which appears as something meant, i.e., of the phenomenon as such: ‘all passive consciousness is already “constitutive of objects”  – more precisely, it is preconstitutive.’ Indeed, for Husserl: ‘Objectification is thus always an active achievement of the ego, an active believing cognizance of that of which we are aware, this something being one and continuously the same through the continuous extension of consciousness in its duration.’33 It follows that the perceptions of victims, witnesses and perpetrators (as well as the secondary reinterpretations of prosecutors, defence lawyers and judges) must be recognised by our phenomenology of hate crime as inherently selective. Such experience is expressive, in part, of the interpretive frame of reference they bring to bear upon whatever is being “received” experientially, even in modes of more or less original “passive” receptivity to the sights, sounds and tactile sensations of a hate incident involving physical violence and its bodily aftermaths. As essentially selective, these acts of perception involve an opting for one possible interpretive construal of an incident over another perhaps equally possible one to which that interpreter in question was – from the start – disinclined. A second witness whose perceptions received more or less the same sensory input as the first might because they were standing together at

32 33

 Ibid.  Ibid: 62.

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the time, may – as a result of inhabiting a partially different interpretive framework – prefer the interpretation of the incident that the first witness was disinclined to accept. In turn, such interpretive selectivity is based on the interpreter’s often unwitting superimposition upon what is received experientially of their specific habitual expectations awaiting possible fulfilment. It is less a question that seeing is believing than recognising how even the interpretation of the evidence of our own eyes and ears takes shape selectively relative to what we already expect and already believe to be the case. These expectations of witnesses, police, victims and perpetrators typically derive from a witness’s prior occupancy of a selectively appropriated cultural or highly localised subcultural “homeworld.” In terms of a Husserlian critique of supposedly fact-based objectivism, the vital point is that even receptive perceptual experience about, say, what happened during a hate incident, thus expresses not “the facts” as such. Rather, what is expressed is an (inter)subjective perceptual judgement involving an often unacknowledged decision as to what now should (and should not) count as “the relevant facts for present purposes.”34 In turn, the latter intersects with a no less selective judgement as to what counts as the “appropriate way” of making sense of, rationalising, and articulating whatever has been decided upon here. These points explain why our phenomenology of hate crime cannot but subject the objectivism of the natural attitude to a sustained critique resulting in both its rejection and hoped for displacement by a Husserlian approach whose cognitive superiority has proved itself and carved out space for its own agenda during the course of this critique. It is vital for our phenomenology of hate crime to interrupt this condition of taken-for-grantedness, to disrupt and challenge interpretive objectification(s) by asking a range of distinctly interpretive questions with critical import. These questions can take the form of: “what precisely constitutes the determinate meaning, value and purpose of all phenomena related to this topic” Where we ask such questions, a widespread and generalised lack of determinacy and clarity at the level of meaning will often readily becomes apparent. Indeed, it then becomes clear that the “common sense” surrounding world of given and determinate facts about hate crime issues and questions, which are reiterated by the natural attitude’s concealed and prejudicial interpretive performances, is characterised by what Husserl terms: ‘an empty mist of obscure indeterminateness’ and: is populated with intuited possibilities or likelihoods; and only the “form” of the world, precisely as “the world,” is predelineated. Moreover, my indeterminate surroundings are infinite, the misty and never fully determinable horizon is necessarily there.35

34  ‘The modalities of predicative judgement must be understood as modes of decision. In addition, one should certainly take note of the fact that the expression “decision” is ambiguous. That is, even in the domain of receptive experience one can already speak, in a certain sense, of a decision: in passing through the irresolution of [conflicting] apprehensions, in the fulfilment of possible prescriptions as open in the course of the activity of perception, there is already a kind of decision. But these are passive … modal variants of the passive doxa, fulfilments of the passive intentions of expectation, the resolution of the obstructions passively grown up around them, and so on.’ Ibid, 272. 35  Husserl, 1982: 52.

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More generally, during the application of objectivism’s matter-of-fact orientation to hate crime-related issues, a basic phenomenological insight is simply ignored. Namely, that the intelligibility of whatever is interpreted as “objective facts” does not reside wholly in what are taken to be “the facts themselves.” Rather, such intelligibility arises from an ongoing interaction between the possibilities of meaning presented by the objects of experience, construed as possible crimes, and the framework of interpretation brought to bear upon such objects by those who perceive and thereby make sense of them in various ways. Yet, the problem here is that this interaction takes place in a space that is inaccessible when hate crime scholarship approaches empirical examples from the either/or framework established by objectivism’s subject/object dichotomy. This because, as already discussed, this dichotomy posits a certain notion of subjectivity and objectivity as mutually exclusive opposites. For example, it is possible to deploy a framework of interpretation that pre-­ defines the meaning of “intelligence” in terms that are loaded in favour of already socially advantaged groups, and then to apply this category during a social scientific survey that “discovers,” apparently as an objective matter of social scientific “fact,” that, say, “black-skinned people are less intelligent than their white equivalents.” However, by adopting an alternative frame of reference that redefines the category of intelligence (and its indicators) in a different manner, and repeating the survey, it may be possible to “prove” that as a matter of fact: “black people are more intelligent than white-skinned persons.” One could then present this social science survey finding as no less objective and factually-based than the earlier one it flatly contradicts. This type of crass interpretive naiveté concerning the interpretive nature of all our encounters with elements of our life-world of lived experience could be identified in every area where the natural attitude is at work. Our point here is not restricted to objectivism within social scientific studies of hate crime-related issues, or even social science research more generally, which – we argue – represents an apt example of a more general Husserlian insight. Instead, our critical point here relates more generally to the problematic ways in which such “matter-of-fact” objectivism glosses over its own interpretive preconditions. This is especially the case when this orientation is: 1. Selectively projecting frames of reference upon a certain selective interpretation of “objective reality;” and then: 2. Selectively reinterpreting segments of the latter through the terms so projected in order to yield the significance of “objective facts.” In other words, our phenomenology of hate crime is oriented towards the intuited content of empirical experiences. However, this section shows that we have good reasons to reject the idea that the bedrock unit of analysis is made up of an array of “facts” as conceived of through the lens of an objectivist approach to this topic. This is because the appearance of a bedrock of objective facts with a primary status is both illusory and deceptive, serving – as it does – only to conceal the latter’s status as second-order interpretive constructs.

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One result of our analysis in this section is that the objectivist’s focus upon entirely and exclusively physical – and hence observable and measurable – decontextualised “facts” can, at most offer us an incomplete picture of “what happened,” even with respect to a single hate incident. The objectivist claim to impartiality is contradicted by the practice of misrepresenting a secondary derived part of the experience as the whole of it, without any recognition of what has been excluded or marginalised. This point about the mediation of apparently immediate experience becomes clearer if we try to imagine experiencing, say, a racially-motivated incident if we lacked any idea what our shared linguistically-embodied culture currently defines as “race,” or as “singling out,” or as “discrimination” etc. In short, once we realise the various ways in which the lived experience of even the most specific instance of a hate incident or crime is complexly mediated, we must come to reject the contention that the analytical isolation of facts-in-themselves provides a viable and sufficient methodological practice.

9  Misunderstanding the Subject of (Inter)subjectivity A related Husserlian criticism of an objectivist approach to, say, hate incidents is that reliance upon objectivism’s underlying subject/object dichotomy results in a complete misunderstanding of the enigmatic presence within the experience of hate crime of the interpretive and constitutive role of the (inter)subjectivity of individual, yet always-already communalised, ego-subjects. A purely objectivist orientation towards hate crime would necessarily draw and rely upon an entirely unexplicated model of the ego-subject for whom there is “this incident” meant as X and Y. We have already noted that among objectivism’s presuppositions is the idea of subjectivity as a passive, wholly receptive “taking in” of what is “out there,” akin to how efficient photocopiers record and faithfully duplicates an original document. For us, this model of subjectivity as an essentially passive receptivity is problematic. Arguably, it represents a necessary and integral element of this orientation’s exaggerated and over-emphatic conception of not only “objectivity” but also both “scientific neutrality” and “value-freedom.” In other words, objectivism maintains a fourfold structural relationship between a passive conception of human subjectivity, and linked notions of objectivity,” ­“scientific neutrality” (as the avoidance of active subjective “biases”) and “value-­ freedom” (impartial freedom from any specific value-commitments pre-understood as prejudices). For hate crime scholars personally concerned with the clearly damaging impact of societal prejudices directed against one or more victim groups, this fourfold cluster of notions may appear seductively attractive as well as scientifically necessary. When viewed from within, these various linkages within objectivism’s overall approach to hate crime can appear logical and even necessary. Yet, if we step outside this specific orientation, the position is entirely different. It now appears that this orientation clearly lacks the resources to offer a compelling and

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experientially-­grounded account of, for example, not only a victim’s (inter)subjective consciousness but also the interpretive fruits of his or her ongoing performance-accomplishments. For Husserl, any form of cultural expression, including hate speech and related articulations of discriminatory prejudices, point back to the purposeful “mentality” of the specific (sub)cultural formation that first generated them, and which continues to sustain, intensify, qualify or replace them within its overall orientation. As a cultural object, hate speech can be analysed in Husserlian terms, not as a simple and isolated factual utterance that simply “is.” Instead, and in flat contradiction with the demands of objectivism, it demands to be studied and accounted for more broadly and in dynamic terms. That is, in terms of the performative work of potentially goal-­ directed and purposive actions involving the connection of specific means with particular ends. Here, a single incident of hate speech could be studied as: ‘a product of a subjective fashioning, arisen from intention, aim, setting of goals and means, realizing action – and finally the total performance, therefore, in the broadest sense, a product of work.’36 As originally a socio-cultural creation, the instance of hate speech itself can be studied as it arises as ‘a production in producing activity.’ Between the intended insult and the abusive utterance itself that realises this intention to insult, offend and perhaps intimidate, hate speech can unfold in a series of different shapes, each of which bears this animating sense of purpose.37 Husserl argues that the original form of a cultural product may possibly be, at least in part, unintelligible and incomprehensible for those who are outsiders to the community that first created it.38 Here, we need to be especially careful in terms of hate speech. Allegations in the UK that the use in football supporters chants of the word “Yid” directed towards Tottenham Hotspur are hate speech and should be prosecuted as such because this word is an insulting term for being Jewish have been met with arguments that some of this club’s own supporters have appropriated variants of this term themselves, e.g., the terms “Yid”, “Yid Army,” or “Yiddos.”39 On Husserl’s argument, this empirical detail of divergent interpretations would be no defence because the term itself has an infamous anti-Semitic history that resides within it and continues to resonate in repeated expression in ever-new contexts of its utterance.40 An expression formulated to be anti-Semitic does not lose that quality when it is, on occasions, used in a different way. Furthermore, the fact that those to whom it is directed may not all be equally offended or threatened by its  Husserl, 1925/77: 86–7.  Ibid. 38  Ibid. 39  See BBC news: ‘PFA chairman: Spurs should stop ‘offensive chants’ 18 September 2013: https:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24145270; cf. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-london-24118197/tottenham-hotspur-fans-asked-about-anti-semitic-chants 40  More generally, Husserl states that once formulated a cultural expression’s purpose and sense: ‘which accrued to the object in its original production is something permanently appropriated to that material object.’ Husserl, 1925/77: 87. 36 37

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angry deployment by groups of rival supporters who intended to denigrate them misses the vital point. It is almost inevitable that any term within the depressingly wide vocabulary of racial, religious, ethnic, national, sexuality-related and gender-related slurs may have an original and intended derogatory meaning: one that is not fully appropriated, understood or accepted by those to whom it is directed. The empirical fact that some black-skinned individuals use the word “nigger” within banter between themselves as a self-characterisation, does not mean that the hostile and threatening use of the same word by a white supremacist marcher on a demonstration or website somehow loses its quality of being hate speech. A similar experiential point applies to terms such as “queer” which, if intended to offend and intimidate, still constitute hate speech even though some members of the gay community have re-appropriated this term. (Here we resist the temptation to consider the issue from the semantics of a criminal law perspective.) The wider phenomenological point here is that  – as a cultural object  – hate speech points back towards the orientation, mentality and agenda of those who originally deployed its terms of discriminatory abuse, which may not be entirely transparent to those who are abused by such speech. The reality that some forms of hate speech are somewhat encoded does not affect the question of their sense-content in a given context of purposeful deployment.41 Clearly, we can experience victims striving, sometimes with extreme difficulties, to “come to terms” with the significance of having been victimised. In other words, when considered experientially, the sense that incidents have for such victims appears to arise, at least in part, from how they make sense of them in ways that are not essentially passive or entirely receptive. That is, how – as ego-subjects – they “actively” accomplish – or “perform” – specific sense-making interpretive activities. In turn, such activities are involved in such victims addressing and given a specific construal of both the immediate meaning and significant downstream implications of “what has happened to me”. In contrast to the stance adopted by objectivism, our Husserlian phenomenology of crime expressly defends the need for an expressly formulated and rigorous social science of such (inter)subjectivity as a research topic in its own right. The latter’s radically qualitative orientation and research methods are, in principle, optimally adapted to the phenomenon itself, taken purely as such. That is, to the concrete lived experience of being that ego-subject who is actively and passively involved in “making sense” of all our experiences based upon a selective (re)appropriation of the linguistic and other resources of a shared cultural tradition. However, there is another side of this coin whose recognition offsets the dangers of an overly-­ voluntarist conception of subjectivity. Namely that, during such appropriations,

 See, for example the debate over the word “globalist” as a form of encoded anti-Semitism, including in relation to US President Trumps use of this controversial phrase. Cf. Peter Beinart, ‘What Trump Means When He Calls Gary Cohn a ‘Globalist,’ The Atlantic, 9 March, 2018: https:// www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/trump-globalist-cohn/555269/ 41

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ego-subjects themselves become (re)appropriated by their own traditions as sites for the latter’s reiteration and perpetuation. The interpretive work of those ego-subjects who we ourselves are is thus a vital research topic for a fully-fledged phenomenology of hate crime. Indeed, the explication of this topic is itself a vital dimension of the claims to objective social scientific rigour of a Husserlian approach. As phenomenologists, not only must we graduate from what-type to how-type questions, but also further progress towards the analysis of for whom-type questions concerning the implication of ego-subjects within combinations of active and passive sense-making practices that (re)constitute the various intelligibility of our topic. A fully-developed Husserlian approach to the ego-subject represents a more complex analysis that we can summarise or apply here. It would certainly include the varying degrees of activity and passivity, of ego-involvement and the latter’s absence, found within victims’ different interpretive acts, such as their selective perceptions, recollections, anticipations etc. A Husserlian approach would also include the mediation of such selectivity by (inter)subjective interests, expectations, and concerns of various kinds, as well as the ego-subject’s ongoing condition of being always already embodied within various intersubjective – yet specific – homeworlds (of familial relations, sports affiliations, local subcultures etc.) as well as an overall, general and more encompassing cultural “life-world.” In addition to these intra-temporal collective aspects, the ego-subject appears as essentially temporal in nature, as dragging along with its overall orientation the baggage of an entire – if selectively recalled – “legacy” of earlier experiences of, say, having been victimised at a certain place, by a specific perpetrator (or “type” of offender) and overall context. Through the interpretive work of passive association that re-awakens such prior experiences, the latter can continue to condition and shape (or perhaps “pre-judice” in the sense of “bias”) current perceptions. In turn, the conditioning of these perceptions can occur in a manner that continues into the victim’s immediate future; it can even influence behaviour with respect to whatever is being seen as “associated with” the earlier victimisation. Such an association is not a product of human reasoning. The latter might make evidence-based arguments against the conditioning effect of such passive association. These might aim to reassure a hate crime victim that he or she is no more likely to be victimised by that “type” of the person – or within that “type” of context – than was previously the case. However, such rational reassurance is surely beside the point. This is because such interpretive association of X with prior experience of Y does not, strictly speaking, aim at predicting the future, at least not in any causal sense reliant upon evidence. A fear of re-victimisation does not have to be rationally-­ grounded in order to be real. In addition, a Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime concerned with the ego-­ subject must also recognise the presence of an agency-force within, for example, both passive and more active types of “association” of X with Y. For example, a victim’s more or less unwelcome association of this number 8 local bus, with being previously victimised on the upper deck of a bus on that bus route. Such association

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is itself an interpretive accomplishment, albeit not one generally carried out in a rational or deliberate manner. In this context, the phenomenon of agency embraces more than voluntary and deliberate action. Within the experience of hate crime, the ego-subject also appears as a source of wilful action, of specific plans, particular desires and felt-needs. It also appears to us as embodied in a material human body that localises this phenomenon in a particular “here and now” of a given spatial, material and temporal relations. This sense of “being-in-a here/now”, provides an orienting zero-point: one from which every sense of something else as relatively close/far, left/right, in front/ behind and above/below receives its meaning precisely in its relativity to my current position as “here.” On the basis of directly perceiving ourselves as ego-subjects embodied within corporeal bodies which we animate as our vehicles for self-­ expression, we can by analogy ascribe and equal personhood-status to other human beings perceived of as “fellow subjects,”42 or we can differentiate these others as somehow “alien” to our particular and parochial homeworld notion of what, for us, being-human entails.43 Racist hate speech that degrades black-skinned people as apes or members of a different African grouping as “cockroaches” (as was the case with incitements to genocide in mid-1990’s Rwanda) appears as a negative case of such recognition of personhood through bodily analogy.44 The key point here is that none of this rich complexity of the presence of the ego-­ subject, that is, the presence of ourselves to our consciousness of being a particular self, which we have only been able to outline here in very broad brush-strokes, can possibly be addressed adequately on its own terms by an objectivist approach to hate crime. Rather than conceptualising (inter)subjectivity as a research field within which all that we experience “takes shape” for us, becomes constituted in its intelligibility-­for-us-and-others, objectivism can only relate to it as a source of bias and distortion. In other words, objectivism can, given the prejudicial effects of its underlying premises and subject/object dichotomy, only conceive of the interpretive contributions of subjectivity – and intersubjectivity more generally – to our perceptual experience as an obstructive distorting factor. That is, as a distortion of the “thereness” of what is supposedly already “objectively there” as a matter-of-fact  Husserl, 1925/77: 81–2. He goes on to say that a failure of such recognition through a quasiempathetic analogy means that the other persons status as such becomes invisible. 43  For Husserl, presumably face-to-face hate speech could be analysed as a mutually disempowering and obstructive failure to realise a communicative possibility presented by that the immediate presence of others from outside our particular homeworlds to a gain a mediated access into their orientation: ‘…. we each have as given our own body as original locus of our own animating lives and likewise, have others’ bodies given in analogising experience of others, as the locus of others’ psychic lives.’ Husserl, 1925/77: 82. 44  For Husserl the upshot of such a failure of recognition of common humanity is the non-person becomes alien with minimal significance relative to a fellow insider. ‘The other’s psychic life then ceases in principle to be experienceable. Whatever is in principle not experienceable for me does not belong to my experiential world, is nothing in it, is not something existing in the world.’ Husserl, 1925/77: 81–2. Although Husserl was not addressing the shortcomings of a genocidal mindset, the parallels are stark. 42

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material reality. As a result of objectivism’s prejudicial conception of (inter)subjectivity, we are offered only a highly abbreviated model of (inter)subjectivity and consciousness: one that seeks to naturalise these phenomena in that type of prejudicial manner already discussed. An especially challenging question for this aspect of objectivism is whether, despite its claims to have purged the claimed distortions of subjectivity and – as a result – to have become focused only upon a residual objective realm of material facts, it too remains implicitly rooted in the (inter)subjective orientation of the natural attitude? Here, a critical question arises: Even when strongly influenced by objectivism and the latter’s naturalistic prejudices, is the natural attitude towards hate crime questions itself a necessarily (inter)subjective mode of being conscious of the world around us: one which necessarily refers us back to the shared intersubjective culture of its practitioners?45 A positive answer to this question would add another element to the Husserlian critique of objectivism’s self-cancelling character, interpretive tendencies and results. The upshot of this critical discussion is that the approach to (inter)subjectivity that our phenomenology of hate crime requires must differ in kind from positivist-­ materialist forms of modern scientific criminology (including psychological approaches the to criminological study of perpetrators) dominated by an unholy trinity of reductionism, naturalism and objectivism.46 For example, as far as our phenomenology of hate crime is concerned, there is a major difficulty with the naturalistic forms of objectification already discussed. It is that the (inter)subjective characteristics, involvements and preconditions of such classification and sub-­ classification of hate incidents and crime become fundamentally misrepresented. They are distorted as if ego-subjects’ cognitive activities of selective understanding, interpretation, and reinterpretation involve no more than a passive recognition of intrinsic qualities already belonging to, and exhibited by, segments of a reality-­ in-­itself. That is, to pre-given and material realities supposedly existing factually prior to  – and independent of  – two neglected phenomena: First, the cultural-­ linguistic-­ legal categories specific ego-subjects are deploying to define and ­distinguish different “types” of hate crimes; and, secondly, their underlying interpretive work of classifying incidents, itself understood as ongoing performative accomplishments. The intelligibility of these classified realities of hate incidents arise as performance-­ accomplishments of specific and typically institutionalised ego-­ subjects, including police officers, working more or less in coordination with other “players” in the hate crime field, such as prosecutors, courts and victim support counsellors. Their generally (but only generally!) coordinated and purposeful

 Hua 13: 112.  Through its importation and copying of the methods of the nineteenth century natural sciences, this type of psychology misinterprets the core character and meaning of human subjective and intersubjective intentional life. It does so in ways that require a radical reconceptualisation of its core ideas and procedures. Husserl, 1970: §§56–72, especially: 238, 243. 45 46

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application of shared classificatory schemes to clusters of lived experiences of victims and witnesses is a vital and distinct Husserlian topic. In this context, we can ask: How are different ego-subjects involved in routinely – and yet selectively – superimposing such classificatory schemes upon what is intuited within these experiences to transform them into “cases” of various types and sub-categories? How does the sense-making interpretation of both “the facts” and “the relevant rules” depend, at least in part, upon the details of how subjective discretion is being exercised, including decisions not to exercise discretion in a particular case? Regarding reported hate incidents, which cluster of subjective interests, concerns, felt-needs, and purposes appear to be driving not only the overall classification process but also the exercises of discretion within it? The subject/object dichotomy upon which we have already seen objectivism rests is problematic. It results in a disregard for what our approach takes to be the vital (inter)subjective aspects of hate crime as lived and experienced in ways that remain forever subject to discretionary reinterpretations. For example, what would be passed over in silence by an objectivist approach to this topic are the specifically interpretive dimensions of a court’s selective interpretation of the investigating police officer’s equally selective perceptions of a witness’s no less selective account of the hate incident in question.47 In all these respects, and for us, the performance-accomplishments of discretionary outcomes are an interesting research topic in their own right. Their presence as phenomena allows us to investigate both what-type and how-type questions concerning their presence to our consciousness of them. For example, we can ask: does the implication of different ego-subjects in the interpretive work of such classification and sub-categorisation provide our phenomenology of hate crime with vital clues as to both the presence and character of implicit norms? That is, to those norms contained in, or which underlie, not only these classification schemes themselves but also the specific procedures that all manner of interpreters selectively deploy during both their “routine” and (relatively) “exceptional” applications. We can further ask: How, in practice, do different ego-subjects involved in responding to reported hate incidents both identify, and then distinguish between, apparently “normal cases,” to which a standardised response is felt to be institutionally called for, and “exceptional cases?” With respect to the latter, there may be no such standardised response other than to ask a higher-level official to exercise an “executive decision” perhaps based on ambiguous and/or indeterminate general policy guidelines? In asking these interpretative questions, our phenomenology of hate crime becomes guided beyond the surface-level question of “what is” being constituted as, say, a “disability-related hate incident/crime” based upon a pre-given subcategory. Instead, we are beginning to probe the deeper-level issue of how such “whatness” is itself being reconstituted anew by the interpretive work of more or  Husserl, 1964: 34. The objectivism of this “common sense” orientation then feeds without critical questioning into the qualitative foundations of more exact natural science of empirical psychology. Ibid. 47

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less coordinated ego-subjects? How is this “type” of incident being constituted and made intelligible as such during these ego-subject’s various interpretive performative-­accomplishments that involve deploying a pre-given classificationcategory to make sense of segments of experienced reality? A Husserlian critique of objectivist approaches to hate crime would also highlight their gross misrepresentation and distortion of the characteristics of intersubjectivity. These generally arise from how such approaches need – in order to remain faithful to their core presuppositions – to entirely ignore the various phenomenological questions and related insights discussed throughout this chapter. In particular, what such approaches would pass over in complete silence is all experiential evidence of the distinctly constitutive role of the involvement of ego-subjects in more or less actively classifying, sub-categorising, and quantifying “different cases” of hate crime. A Husserlian critique would insist that the crude model of passive and entirely receptive subjectivity relied upon by objectivism flatly contradicts vital aspects of our lived experience. In particular, it clashes with the lived experience of mutual dependencies between material and cultural dimensions of lived experience, their intertwining. As Husserl notes, we need to take seriously the: ‘fundamental insight that in the concrete world of sheer experience, physical nature and mentality are everywhere inseparably intertwined, though each can nevertheless be pursued purely on its own as a self-enclosed nexus.’48 An objectivist position reliant upon the subject/object dichotomy also contradicts our recognition of how the interpretive process of labelling a designated victim group in a certain way, of defining transgendered persons as “freakish-in-­ themselves,” and thus as something radically other than “one of us,” is far from a purely descriptive exercise. Rather, this activity itself not only produces but also then reaffirms anew the traits and presuppositions of a distinctly prejudicial viewpoint. The latter appears experientially as something “held” by those ego-subjects who are wilfully performing, and thereby interpretively accomplishing, such labelling of victims as their own uncoerced and purposeful doing. The social scientific explanation of the actions of, say, perpetrators is not that of deterministic response to external stimulus. On the contrary, for a Husserlian approach, such explanation cannot avoid referring back to the conscious, subconscious and (in a certain sense) “unconscious” motivations, interests, concerns and value-prejudices of perpetrators themselves. These are culturally-acquired through socialisation and indoctrination into different subcultural homeworlds that are located within a more general life-world. Nevertheless, a phenomenology of hate crime may still be able to identify grounds for ascribing to perpetrators some contextually-­variable degree of individual moral and legal responsibility insofar as they can be credibly understood as deciding to act upon these motivations, interests, concerns and value-prejudices in a context where restraint was clearly possible.

48

 Husserl, 1925/77: 79.

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Our current focus upon ego-subjects as an inner-directed possible – if perhaps only partial – “sources” and well-springs of purposeful and motivated actions relevant to the field of hate crime research is significant as evidence supportive of a Husserlian critique of objectivism. This focus contrasts markedly with the prejudicial naturalistic assumption that each member of a hate crime victim group possesses, as part of their designated “intrinsic nature,” the ascribed features of the label itself, which can be simply “read off” material aspects of their “factual” presence. Our phenomenology of hate crime also analyses the coming-into-presence of hate speech for example as something that is neither exclusively “subjective,” nor wholly “objective” considering both in the sense of mutually exclusive opposites prescribed by objectivism’s subject/object dichotomy. Instead, what appears to our lived experience is a continual interaction between: 1. given features and qualities, such as visible displays of a victim’s bodily “impairments,” attributes, skin colour and styles of clothing with religious significance etc.; and: 2. the interpretive framework brought to bear upon these extra-subjective material features and transcendent qualities as part of their construal, which both identifies and makes sense of them. In other words, the intelligibility of someone victimised by abusive labels superimposed by a perpetrator’s hate speech arises through an interaction involving two distinct sides. There is a coming together of their material visible presence, on the one hand, and – on the other – the specific interpretive frame of reference that perpetrators superimpose upon this presence precisely through their labelling and stereotypifying responses to their victims. It is only by embracing both material and cultural-linguistic sides of the experience of hate crime that a Husserlian approach can bypass the tap set either/or thinking that crudely classifies social theories into either “materialist” or “idealist” camps. Our phenomenology of hate crime has little difficulties identifying Husserlian reasons to reject this either/or dichotomy in favour of an alternative both/ and approach. The latter needs to reflect systematically upon the lived experience of hate incidents and carefully identify and differentiate material-physical elements from ideal/cultural dimensions. Here, Husserl’s approach giving the material side its due, including with respect to its mediation of consciousness, merits quotation: [T]hus merely by following experience, to study on one side what comprises the essence of mere matter, which in part has a reality on its own as that which lacks psychic life and in part has to function as the support for a psyche, as its body. It would surely become obvious here that all the matter of the world is situated in one single corporeal nexus in which it can be considered on its own and which is governed throughout by the closed unity of an all-­ inclusive causality. It would become equally obvious that spatiality and spatiotemporality belong in a distinctive manner to matter and that everything psychic participates in objective extension only mediated by its matter and the spatiotemporality belonging to it.49

49

 Husserl, 1925/77: 83.

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Having given materiality its due, Husserl then turns to the other side of the coin, the mediation of lived experience by distinctly cultural dimensions, whose distinctive characteristics and “types” merit a no less close descriptive analysis as their material counterparts: In the direction of the other layer, that of the psyche, corresponding descriptive problems would ensue: questions concerning the fundamental descriptive characteristics of everything psychic, concerning its elementary types, concerning the connecting forms of unity, concerning what makes necessary the unity of one psyche purely as psyche, and how, further, several psyches can gain unity by purely psychic relationship and connection in spite of all concrete separation, and how in this way mental association among human beings and animals, personal unity of a higher order, becomes possible.50

Husserl is clear that the cultural elements of experience raise distinct and vital cognitive challenges concerning, for example, their unities. Hence, the unity of a “victim group” which – despite being physically separate and highly differentiated – may, in a social sense, perceive themselves as “together” as “fellow insiders” of a certain homeworld. While the material side of, say, a physical assault exhibits a simple identity, any perceived unity on cultural side necessarily arises only as a concerted interpretive performance and, therefore, disappears if those vital to it simply no longer carry out this performance. Yet, the key point here is that, after having recognised the distinct material and cultural aspects of lived experience, we need to close pay attention to their immediate togetherness, to the unity of the appearing of cultural-linguistic meanings and the physical materials or “matter” that express them. As Husserl notes: A separation between the matter of the sense and the sense itself, which is possible at any time, is an abstractive distinguishing of layers. In the concrete contemplation of … any cultural object … we experience not duality but unity, which can then only afterwards and abstractly be considered according to two sides: of that which expresses and of the expressed sense, the cultural significance.51

Once again, this focus upon ongoing interaction between the material and (inter)subjective aspects, as manifested in concrete lived experiences, contrasts markedly with the either/or framework of objectivism’s subject/object dichotomy. The latter’s framework sets up and projects conceptions of subjectivity and objectivity as if they necessarily constituted mutually exclusive opposites. Clearly, as far as our phenomenology of hate crime is concerned, this represents an unfortunate failure to recognise such interaction between extra-subjective and (inter)subjective realities. In particular, it ignores the vital phenomenon of intentionality whereby all consciousness of hate crime is consciousness-of this topic (a relation to reference beyond consciousness itself) as-something-meant, while being-meant in a certain manner of appearing to consciousness (clearly, obscure, precise, vague etc.). Such a failure to recognise intentionality – as well as its implications – signals another highly problematic aspect of objectivism’s prejudicial naturalistic assumption: an

50 51

 Ibid.  Ibid. 85.

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assumption-­driven prejudice of universal causal determinism shaping the very core terms of how, say, every transgendered person may be “normally perceived.” In short, objectivism’s presumption-driven model of passive and externally-­ determined subjectivity of ego-subjects as an entirely receptive realm is open to various Husserlian objections. Such objections insist that what needs emphasising is a range of suppressed and entirely different interpretive questions and levels of analysis. These include the phenomenon of qualified agency, inner motivation, the discretionary choice between different available options of classification, and the working of intentionality unifying our consciousness of (inter)subjective and material realms of lived experience.

10  The Displacement of Cultural Realities A Husserlian approach to hate crime identifies a related difficulty with objectivism relating to its metaphysical definition of reality as exclusively  – or primarily  – a physical reality, whose characteristics we have already described. This interpretive commitment reflects a metaphysical commitment that, from a Husserlian perspective, appears as a groundless prejudice: one which is flatly contradicted by experiential evidence to the contrary. An honest self-reflection upon our own experience suggests that human beings are neither wholly physical nor entirely cultural creatures. Rather we experience ourselves as always in a condition of being entwined between physical and cultural dimensions of life as lived. Here, we must recognise that, in some respects, the material reality of the latter exhibits a greater degree of self-sufficiency at the existential level. As Husserl recognises: ‘that real subjects of the sort of animals and human beings are, taken concretely, two-layered, but in such a way that these layers may not be taken as completely equal. Corporeality has greater self-sufficiency inasmuch as it can furnish by itself something fully concrete, though by a transformation of its real form as an organic body, while the psyche can never become a real thing in the world in concrete self-sufficiency.’52 The upshot is that our phenomenology of hate crime must recognise the complex intertwining of cultural with material realities, describing both their qualities and dependencies, but without prioritising one over the other. This is far cry from naturalistic objectivism which has, in practice, already arbitrarily settled the whole issue by arbitrarily assuming that cultural phenomena, such as ideas, beliefs, prejudices, assumptions etc., lack reality because they are not physical realities. For our phenomenology of hate crime, the series of objectivist arguments justifying a physicalist metaphysics take the form of a rarely-stated underlying commitment. As such, they may seem so self-evident to subscribers that they “go without saying.” However, for us, these claims are – in themselves and for substantive reasons  – essentially flawed and prejudice-driven. The cluster of meanings, value-­

52

 Husserl, 1925/77: 83.

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judgements, purposes and intentions of an objectivist approach to hate crime, for example, are focused upon a domain of (inter)subjective experience of discriminatory abuse. And yet, by these subscribers’ own definition of reality as something essentially physical and material, the content of this cluster of ideal/non-physical phenomena, which are clearly derived from the cultural life-world and the latter’s shared – if sometimes conflictual – communicative practices, can never be more than a surface veneer. They can never be more than an ‘epiphenomenon’ relative to the posited “reality” of hate crime itself. A Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime must surely recognise that the distinctly and specifically cultural aspects of hate crime issues raise a series of interesting analytical questions and descriptive themes concerning the nature, types, interpretive constitution and “identity” of various individual and communal psychic phenomenon: questions concerning the fundamental descriptive characteristics of everything psychic, concerning its elementary types, concerning the connecting forms of unity, concerning what makes necessary the unity of one psyche purely as psyche, and how, further, several psyches can gain unity by purely psychic relationship and connection in spite of all concrete separation, and how in this way mental association among human beings and animals, personal unity of a higher order, becomes possible.53

There are other distinctly cultural dimensions to the world of lived experience relevant for present purposes. These include the cultural world’s ‘perpetually changeable historical countenance,’54 relative to which objectivism’s fact-oriented approach tends to generate a static freeze-frame, or screenshot, of what is actually a flowing ever-shifting process. In addition, given that culture and culture-creating intersubjectivity are inseparably interrelated, hate crime studies need to address both the results of relevant interpretive performances and then relate these to underlying constitutive interpretive practices. But once again, this imperative is utterly impossible within an objectivist approach. The same difficulty applies to the dynamics involved in the relationship between expressed cultural meaning on the one hand, and  – on the other  – the particular material means of its expression. Here, our experience of a cultural object, such as racist graffiti daubed on a community centre door, manifests a reality which undoubtedly: ‘includes a mental sense which it expresses, has its way of being endowed with open horizons.’ The significance of this graffiti itself is not a discrete “fact” but more of an unfolding event that threatens to escalate in one or more possible directions that cannot be predicted in advance. In that sense, the cultural meaning of such hate speech can unfold itself as a process-in-flux. Part of the overall intersubjective constellation here is that such cultural expressions also bear within themselves a sense that has both surface level express meanings and, perhaps, other implications. Furthermore, the latter cannot be immediately

53 54

 Husserl, 1925/77: 84.  Ibid: 86.

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grasped unless and until one becomes better familiar with and capable of intuiting the “mentality,” “orientation” and “agenda” of which it forms a part. With respect to a cultural object more generally, Husserl refers to: ‘its way of disclosing that sense which is expressed but which is nevertheless at first only imperfectly grasped, merely indicated. In turn, the act of disclosure itself demands a corresponding intuition; it requires projecting oneself into the corresponding purposeful striving, the determination of purpose, and the ways of fulfilling the purpose.’55 In other words, a single expression of racist hate speech brings with it as an integral part of its meaning, a demand to be understood in a certain manner expressive of a type of purposefulness and what implied in terms of the latter’s agenda and its practical fulfilment under contemporary circumstances. This agenda-revealing aspect of a cultural object, including expressions of hate speech: ‘always refers back also to the corresponding subjects,’ both immediate ego-subjects but also less obvious individuals whose agenda it is; and whose interests are being served by its realisation in practice. There is also a reference back to the: ‘circumstances of their temporal surroundings and the broader systems of goals’ within which, say, the promotion of a xenophobic agenda is included. What is referenced back to are ‘isolated persons,’ but the particular ‘communities in whose communal living all the aims of the time are rooted.’56 With these comments, Husserl sketches a range of cultural and possibly institutional mediations demanding retracing and analysis, which saturates even a single incident.57 Following Husserl, we can strive to characterise the “mentality” objectified in various subcultures of prejudice, and then retrace how what is objectified refers back by way of origin to a specific “mentality” – itself understood as a deeply personal – and by no means extra-subjective – feature of an underlying animating psychic life. As Husserl states: ‘For, what makes a human being a personal subject is not contained in the physical, in his matter, but in what animates that.’58 Objectivism blinds itself not only to such issues and questions but also to a further range of interesting dimensions of the distinctly and uniquely culture aspects of hate crime. Those involved in – or affected by – hate crime experience the cultural dimension of this topic in numerous sorts of possible collective forms. These include normative expectations of many kinds, and qualitative determinations of purpose impressed upon them, which can be variously experienced in the differentiated surrounding contexts of their life experience. To remain self-consistent a wholly objectivist-naturalist approach to this topic, shaped by a physicalist metaphysics, cannot hope to grasp the offensive significance of, say, ultra-nationalistic hate crime perpetrators, spraying swastika emblems onto Jewish headstones. Considered in objectivist terms, this emblem is not more than a

 Husserl, 1925/77: 86.  Ibid. 57  Ibid. 58  Ibid. 55 56

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visible physical mark on a stone structure; while the Christian cross symbol can be characterised as two pieces of joined wood. The point here is that such displays of offensive hostility require us to understand the significance of, say, the emblems of Nazism and its revival for the Jewish community. A similar point attaches to emotionally-­ charged cultural symbols of other communities, flags, national anthems, slogans, uniforms, badges and other apparel. Yet, a fully objectivist approach could not consistently differentiate between, say, burning a cotton sheet and burning the same sized national flag. In addition, such an approach prevents itself from grasping the complex ways in which physical objects “lose” (in a figurative sense) their purely physical qualities when they are perceived as expressing certain emotionally-charged cultural ideas, convictions and beliefs. It is precisely these, which may be saturated with emphatic religious, national or ethnic significance, that perpetrators of hate speech may deliberately seek to denigrate or mock. Such negative responses amount to an effort to reinvent an “us”/ “them” division. Yet, in every specific example, the “whatness” of cultural expression as a mental formation exhibits a certain autonomy from those specific material items serving as their vehicle of expression, and it is precisely this remarkable relationship actually works that is a vital research topic for hate crime studies. Perpetrators sat behind a computer with only a minimal technical competence can post numerous images and modified images designed to be blasphemous, insulting, offensive and degrading to one of more designed victim group in a matter of minutes, and without any material involvement with, say, spray paint, which might have previously been involved in pre-digital hate speech. The point of this example is to illustrate how offensive hate speech can articulate a message in numerous material forms and is not confined to – or substantially determined by – any of them. Hence, any legislative attempts in the UK to prescribe, say, public displays of Nazi symbols, regalia or songs in the name of hate speech, could only function by remaining utterly permissive with respect to the specific material aspect of any specific expression, possible using an indeterminate phrase such as: “no matter how and in what form and medium it is publicly expressed’. On the other hand, to be viable in practice such criminal legislation would need to be as determinate as possible with respect to the specific meaning-content of the cultural meanings themselves. This relative autonomy of cultural meaning in relation to its material bearer escapes the interpretive framework of objectivism for reasons we have already discussed. Yet, this incapacity is especially unfortunate. As Husserl states in a more general context: it is evident that whatever is already given in community experience as such a mental formation (in the broadest sense of the word), whatever is already given as a cultural object, can serve again and again for new purposeful activity and can take on ever new cultural sense. Quite universally, there is nothing objectively real which cannot take on some determination of purpose or contain a sense impressed by a subjectivity; it can then eventually be subsequently understood in just that sense by everyone who belongs to one and the same community of those who can mutually understand one another, and be experienced as a constant article of the surrounding world.59

59

 Husserl, 1925/77: 85.

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A related point concerns not external cultural symbols, like national flags and crosses but the sheer manner in which we dress and adorn our bodies’ physical appearances in ways that embody, express and communicate a range of possible messages to those who look at us. Husserl notes that, in this respect, the “subjects” of a particular culture themselves become cultural “objects.” As cultural objects we embody, even symbolise, the ongoing performative-accomplishment of a certain “mentality:” one that is saturated with societal value-determinations: Even human beings themselves, however much they function as subjects creating culture, are at the same time cultural objects for one another. For example, they are simultaneously educated and capable of being educated. Educating is the performance of an art, and one can recognize good or bad education in a person. Scientific, artistic, or technically practical training is a cultural performance, which gives human beings a form of sense embodied in them.60

Husserl makes additional points about the cultural differentiation of different “types” of persons, in terms of their positions within various institutional hierarchies, Yet, without belabouring the point, these vital cultural-symbolic aspects of hate speech, in particular, remain necessarily invisible to an objectivist framework mired in physicalist metaphysics for which the idea of non-material cultural realities is a contradiction in terms. As we previously discussed, this relegation and general downgrading of the cultural level of human experience as a source of scientific judgement is consistent with objectivism’s overall world view. It takes place because naturalistic objectivism has, from the start, already implicitly characterised the whole of reality as essentially physical in nature. Yet the critical question here is whether such characterisation is not only prejudicial but also self-contradictory? For example, when we ask: “what does it mean to say that reality is essentially physical?” we are not directed towards anything physical. Instead, we are referred to a metaphysical interpretive construct: one whose own defining qualities are primarily non-factual in that they stem from a distinctly cultural understanding of the significance and implications of the reality/non-reality distinction. The fact that the type of metaphysics involved here is a materialist one, and hence a self-styled “fact-based” realism, does not alter its status as metaphysical. On the contrary, it intensifies the self-­ contradictory and self-cancelling dimensions of objectivism itself. The idea that reality must, for the purposes of hate crime scholarship, be predefined as that material realm which is exactly quantifiable merits substantive phenomenological critique. For example, this idea cannot itself be credibly claimed to represent a “fact-based” scientific finding: one arising from empirical studies of the scientific type objectivism requires and advocates. Rather, for our phenomenology of hate crime, this idea represents little more than an arbitrary decree. It is a prescription that refuses to recognise as real anything that differs from its own arbitrarily posited metaphysical stipulations about reality, where what is rhetorically stipulated to be the core of the latter’s essence is laid down in advance of actual

60

 Ibid.

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empirical experience. What is stipulated here in a presupposition-driven manner is how reality must, in principle, present itself to scientific consciousness if it is to ever to become recognised as real. It follows that any hate crime scholarship subscribing to objectivism must presume, despite an absence of experientially-compelling supportive evidence to the contrary, that the reality of hate crime simply is whatever can be identified as “physical” in the sense of being able to be externally observed and quantified exactly. We would add in passing the related objectivist presumption that only quantitative research methods can ever be adequate to grasp the posited reality of this topic rests, at least in part, upon the presumed validity of this ultimately metaphysical and scientifically unverifiable stipulation. Despite the deceptive first impression of logical necessity connecting each stage of this objectivist argumentation, the latter nevertheless clearly appears as an entirely circular position, akin to religious fundamentalism. Such argumentation simply begs – not answers – those key interpretive/constitutive questions that our phenomenology of hate crime considers absolutely vital and foundational for hate crime and related social scientific scholarship. That is to say: the what, the how and the for-whom aspects of the topic itself, just as these three levels present themselves to our consciousness experientially. For our Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime, what is undeniable is that reality, as lived, includes both physical and cultural realities as suborders. It includes not only transcendent material but also ideal/irreal phenomena, such as victims’ physical injuries and their cultural-legal interpretation respectively, together with many interesting combinations of the two. The second category of cultural realities encompasses all manner of shared meanings, beliefs, assumptions, prejudices, insights, and linguistic orderings relevant to the field of hate crime research. In the name of science, objectivism’s prejudicial exclusion of these cultural realities, which nevertheless take shape to us with the support of ample experiential evidence, is itself anything but scientific. As Husserl argues: ‘Subjects – animals and people – are concrete real things, but only if we take their psychic characteristics together with their underlying extra-psychic ones.’61 He further advocates a clear recognition of the complexity of the intertwining of cultural and material dimensions of the lived experience of, say, hate crime issues in ways that also respect their differences. The racist killing of someone by a group which promotes hate speech is both a material-biological and a cultural-political event, a mental endowment,’ which is saturated with meaning, with both appearing together within our lived experience. Take for example the perceptions of a gay victim by a perpetrator of a violent hate crime. What the perpetrator “sees” is a unity of the victim’s body and their psyche, their animating mental life or orientation. When observing the victim’s features, gestures, posture, words, tone of voice, etc., it is not something merely physical that is being experienced. Rather, what appears experientially is what Husserl terms: ‘the animated physical: and that is precisely

61

 Husserl, 1925/77: 80.

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the manner of an expression, an expression which by continuing, agrees and confirms.’62 The interpretive element involves seeing another person in terms of certain presumptions about what distinguishes “one of them” from “one of us”. The implicit claim is the perpetrator has correctly identified “one of them” by grasping their sexual orientation from all manner of “clues,” many of which may include stereotypes. The actual orientation of the victim as part of the latter’s psychic functioning, is not itself given perceptually in the direct way that the perpetrator understands his or her own sexual orientation because the latter is simply incapable of making itself fully perceptually given. As a result, this “grasping” of the victim as “one of them” involves not a direct intuition but rather an indirect analogy different in kind from the perpetrator’s self-­ perception of his or her own bodily-psychic unity. So, from an outsiders’ perspective, elements of doubt should exist irrespective of how sure perpetrators are about the victim’s membership of the group of which he or she is taken as an emblem or “instance.” This point holds good even where this identification of victim X with membership of Y group is interpretively performed in the confident manner of an originally lively and fitting indication that satisfies the perpetrator that there is no mismatch between what the victim’s demeanour expresses and his or her own categorisation of the latter as “one of them.” It follows that what is required is research that avoids and overcomes the type of reductionism characteristic of a naturalistic objectivist approach, for which cultural questions related to shared significance are displaced from the research field by arbitrary stipulation. Rather, what is needed is an approach that reinstates that which objectivism displaces regarding the two-sided character of cultural objects: But we must also note that things, even lifeless things, if we take them as they are experienced by us, can include or embody, as it were, a mental endowment, even though they are lifeless things and therefore not organic bodies in which the mental is embodied in the form of animation proper. Most of the things of our life-world, as the world which constantly surrounds us as our experiential world, can serve us as examples: desks and other furniture, houses, fields, gardens, tools, pictures, etc. They are immediately experienced by us as mentally significant things; they are not seen as merely physical, but in their sensuously experienced shape, in their spatial form and every turn of this form, and in their other sensible features, a mental sense is expressed.63

Interestingly, Husserl does not prioritise experienced irreal phenomenon, such as “mental endowments”, over the intuition of transcendent physical dimensions: This sense, in its often very complicated mental structure, has its counterpart in the structure of the formings and divisions of the sensuously experienced matter in which it is embodied by way of expression. The sense is not found next to the matter which expresses it; rather, both are experienced concretely together. Thus, a two-sided material-mental object again stands before our eyes.64

 Ibid: 84.  Ibid, 84. 64  Ibid, 84. 62 63

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Indeed, part of the social scientific rationale for a Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime lies precisely in its deliberate inclusion of – and receptivity to – cultural phenomenon treated not reductively according to materialist prejudices but rather as vital topics in themselves. That is, our approach involves a recognition of the social scientific relevance of a whole level of the lived experiences of victims, witnesses and others that is more than strictly physical. By contrast, and despite its own scientific pretensions, objectivism excludes the contents of this cultural level on essentially prejudicial metaphysical grounds, including – as we have already seen – its faith in a problematic subject/object dichotomy. There is a further reflexive theory/practice difficulty with an objectivist approach to hate crime. This concerns the relationship between its theoretical presuppositions, on the one hand, and  – on the other hand  – the preconditions for its own application in practice. This approach tends to culminate in one of two equally metaphysical positions: either a dualist or a monist type of naturalism.65 Yet, as essentially metaphysical positions, ideas and beliefs, neither of these two alternative theoretical positions about the nature of reality can, in practice, ever be “verified” as worldly “facts” in the manner that objectivism otherwise demands as a precondition of scientific truth. In particular, neither can be validated by deploying objectivism’s own preferred positivist and quantitative research methods.66 It is clear to us that these adopted research methods and underlying methodologies cannot succeed in verifying their own underlying theoretical presuppositions and axiomatic premises, at least in terms that are logically consistent with objectivism’s own major claims. It follows that this inability is clearly problematic. Indeed, in response, our phenomenology of hate crime must ask: what chance is there of an objectivist approach, whether this takes the form of positivist psychology, criminology or sociology of hate crime, ever being able to create a credible and internally coherent account of this topic? It is hard to conclude that a coherent account of this topic could ever arise on the basis of an interpretive framework characterised by chronic theory/practice contradictions. Our Husserlian argument is most clearly illustrated if we focus upon the credibility of an objectivist form of a psychological approach to hate crime issues and questions. The latter would claim to represent an entirely fact-oriented social science resting upon an alliance of objectivist and naturalist premises, as well as those associated metaphysical assumptions, stipulations of reality and subject/object dichotomy, which we have already discussed. Insofar as this is the case, then such a psychological approach would – we argue here – almost certainly be structurally unable to lay the foundations for hate crime studies more generally.  A monistic type of naturalism is a simpler variant assuming that everything real is physical. A dualistic type recognises the reality of non-physical entities; but subjects them to a subjectivity/ objectivity dichotomy which relegates the former to a subordinate position. Neither alternative arises out of factual research but are rather always-already presuppositions of such empirical research, presuppositions that  – as our latter critique will argue  – are themselves anything but factual. 66  Husserl, 1970: 230; §67. 65

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Although our immediate focus now falls upon an objectivist psychological approach to hate crime issues, this can be seen as a case study illustrating more general problems. These problems are also clearly applicable to other social science disciplines, and those of the humanities, which – in their own characteristic ways – address these issues. All these disciplines are expressly concerned with the concrete operations of societal norms and cultural expectations. The clearest example is an expectation of a legal and moral “right” – recently reframed in species-specific terms as a “human right”  – to experience “freedom from discrimination.” A similar point applies to distinctly methodological and epistemological questions about the “most appropriate” means and procedures for both making – and then corroborating – logically coherent forms of academic knowledge-­ claims about hate crime. The specific answers to such questions will necessarily include distinctly interpretive questions of meaning, purpose, truth, belief, perceptual judgements, reflective augments and underlying convictions. Yet, as we previously argued, these do not appear experientially in the form of physical “worldly facts.” These non-­ physical, culturally-derived phenomena, which are necessarily extracted from the cultural-linguistic resources of the surrounding life-world, cannot be reduced to the status of, say, neurological events taking place in the brains of social scientists and detectable through, say, brain scanners. Any such reduction would entirely psychologise the very process of coming to know anything whatsoever about hate crime, or – for that matter – anything else. In turn, the latter objectivist contention that the facts about hate crime have the status of neurological events is problematic. Indeed, it leads to a self-cancelling form of scepticism about the very possibility of distinguishing scientifically-valid from scientifically-false knowledge-claims, including those of a positivist/objectivist form of psychology itself. If it is true that the knowledge claims of a positivist form of hate crime research are no more than neurological events, then an unfortunate consequence logically follows. That is, in terms of their epistemological status as knowledge claims, these contentions can be recognised as having as much – but no more – validity than the equally strongly-held subjective opinions of perpetrators of hate speech for example.67 No brain scanner, whatever its degree of technical sophistication, can be expected to differentiate the truthfulness of one contention from the false character of another. As a result of this contradiction stemming from objectivism’s reductive naturalisation of ideas, our Husserlian approach is surely on firm ground when we argue that any attempt to ground hate crime studies upon an objectivist-naturalistic form of psychological perspective would evidently bring us back what Husserl recog-

 In other words, this approach relies upon the difference between scientific truth and error, and the possibility of confirming and verifying empirically the former at the expense of the latter, which the objectivist-physicalist presuppositions about knowledge of its own perspective (“its epistemology”), renders entirely unsustainable. 67

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nises as the familiar: ‘sceptical absurdities of epistemological psychologism and physicism.’68 At a surface level at least, the existence of a strong and widespread prejudicial belief about one or more victim group can, without doubt, be adequately verified by experimental psychological research based upon objectivist presuppositions. It would be possible to conduct all manner of experimental clinical research measuring and contrasting the varied psycho-physical responses of a sample of research subjects to images of, say, individuals categorised as transgendered, homosexual, disabled, members of various “racial,” “religious” ethnic minorities/majorities etc. But here a vital problem remains. Namely, that the very difference between such outbursts of harmful prejudice on the one hand, and – on the other – scientifically-­ valid truths about such beliefs, cannot itself be determined from within this approach. Furthermore, this inability cannot be resolved however conscientiously subscribers apply its technical requirements in practice. In short, objectivism’s displacement of cultural realities in favour of a physicalist metaphysics leads to reductionist consequences that, in turn, generate a basic theory/practice contradiction. This contradiction means that it is difficult to accept that the deployment of objectivism within the field of hate crime studies can ever provide a coherent approach to this subject capable of establishing a viable relationship between its theoretical underpinnings, and the actual conduct of empirical research into this topic. On the contrary, the status of “the facts” appealed to as a founding bedrock upon which to ground analysis, turns out to be a surface-level derivative outcome of a dogmatic application of essentially metaphysical postulates. In turn, this difficulty provides another illustration of the power of a Husserlian critique of both the theory and practice of objectivism.

11  C  ontradictions Arising from Objectivism’s Subject/ Object Dichotomy During earlier sections, we encountered evidence in passing of objectivism’s reliance upon a largely taken-for-granted subject/object dichotomy, particularly with respect to its conception of “objectivity” and “factual reality” considered as residues with a bedrock epistemological status. Our earlier characterisation was, however, more descriptive than critical. The purpose of this section is to demonstrate that such reliance merits an incisive and radical critique. For example, within the natural attitude’s orientation towards hate crime issues, we unwittingly undertake a taken-for-granted deployment of radical conceptual oppositions between the external object and inner subject of experience and knowledge. We allow this either/or dichotomy, whose status is metaphysical, to influence 68

 Husserl, 1965: 85.

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our subjectivity as if they were somehow “obvious” and unproblematic. In this respect, the practice of objectivism is, contrary to its own claims and self-image, itself highly subjective. Yet, the influence of subjectivity and metaphysical beliefs within interpretations of hate incidents and crimes is precisely what objectivism claims to have liberated us from owing to its reliance upon an objective approach to the “given facts” about, say, hate crime. Yet, such implicit reliance upon such subjectivity itself serves to conceal the very metaphysical quality of the subject/object dichotomy. It also contradicts the claim to provide an account of hate crime that goes direct to “the facts,” and thereby rightly avoids taking any irrelevant detours such as those represented by reflective conceptualisation, metaphysics or any kinds of philosophical reflection or analysis. The exclusive focus of hate crime scholars upon “the facts of the case” is supposed to free their awareness of hate crime-related issues from such distractions. Yet, through its reliance upon either/or dichotomies, which are themselves anything but factually given, objectivism covertly reiterates the very metaphysics and subjectivity it claims to have liberated us from. In other words, while entangled within the natural attitude, we can, through our grasp of “the facts,” feel ourselves to be immediately in touch with the “factual reality” of hate crime issues. In turn, this encourages the belief that renders “irrelevant” and an unnecessary “distraction” any recourse to conceptual or philosophical reflection, or even phenomenological forms of radical qualitative analysis of how this phenomenon is being interpretively constituted, reiterated and modified. Yet, the contradiction here is that such an objectivist stance is itself a form of metaphysics: one resting upon premises and a subject/object dichotomy that are anything but “in touch” with immediately given experiential realities. No purely “factual” analysis can validate the metaphysical idea that valid judgements about hate crime must necessarily stem from objective factual analysis alone. Hence, to strive to justify itself, the natural attitude’s objectivist approach has to transcend itself by incorporating extra-factual considerations and modes of analysis that the approach otherwise banishes as distractions. This is surely a chronic contradiction – albeit one that a later chapter will show is also instructive for the development of our own diametrically opposite approach to hate crime research. In addition, and in a related aspect, the appeal to objectivity as the polar opposite of subjectivity is prone to cancelling itself out. Indeed, the natural attitude’s objectivism can mislead us into concluding that the results that arise from its interpretive projections directed towards hate crime issues are straightforwardly “there for me.” We can believe that such outcomes are self-evidently and immediately “on hand” for us as the “hard data” of “given facts” about, say, the pattern, distribution and effects of hate crimes. We may even confuse them with “objective data” amenable to a form of statistical analysis: one that is capable of revealing the “objective truth” about hate crime itself.69 However, despite claiming to be based on non-subjective

69

 Husserl, 1982: 51.

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and straightforwardly “given facts,” this objectivist approach certainly fails to transcend the subjectivity and prejudices of its subscribers. In Husserlian terms, the effect of applying objectivism’s subject/object dichotomy is utterly problematic, even though its contradictions may ultimately prove instructive. Such deployments fracture the very intentionality of consciousness that unifies questions of sense (e.g., hate incident X meant-as-an-instance-of-Y-category or subcategory), with those of reference (consciousness-of-X). Questions of sense relate to the intelligibility of whatever we experience; whilst those of reference concern that which is being experienced and made sense of. In the case of a violent hate incident resulting in physical injuries, questions of reference relate to transcendent realities of material bodily harms whose reality is typically experienced (inter)subjectively as anything but subjective. The felt-­ existence of such bodily injuries cannot be interpreted in and out of existence by a victim simply pretending to herself that they do not exist. The message the injuries themselves tell us that they clearly exist and – for a period of time at least – will continue to exert tangible material effects irrespective of how the victim interprets them.70 Instead, they regularly and consistently appear to our consciousness as having an existence-status that is both emphatically and stubbornly independent of our consciousness of them.71 As Husserl recognises: If accordingly, we make a survey of the entire world of pure and simple experience, then it is clear that it is articulated throughout into single real things, which can then be further united in real complexes of things, as things of a higher order. Every such reality in the specific sense is a causal unity related causally to its real environment and a substrate of stable causal properties in this play of changing causal transformations, therefore stably preserving its causal habitus.72

By contrast, the question of the legal and cultural intelligibility of the significance of such an act of discriminatory criminality, together with the meaning of its tangible results for a variety of different individuals, remains an interpretive outcome; a performative accomplishment, which is entirely relatively to practices of intersubjective definition and activities oriented towards such definitions of meaning. The subject/object underlying dichotomy create further problems whenever they serve as the interpretive basis for making sense of lived experiences of hate incidents. When immersed in the natural attitude’s objectivism, our implicit reliance upon such either/or dichotomies can also result in us “flip-flopping” between two equally problematic and reductionist standpoints upon hate crime: First, there is the naturalistic-objectivist presumption that hate crime simply “is” an “objective factual reality:” one which is capable of being analysed scientifically as such, and in a man This is not to deny the point many medical professionals make based on their work experience that the patient’s attitude towards sickness or injuries can play a noticeable role in their possible recovery process. However, this interaction between interpretive orientation and bodily elements relates to a different point. A positive attitude towards recovery is different from a denial that one has already become injured or sick. 71  Husserl, 1925/77: 76. 72  Ibid, 78. 70

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ner that is free from any possible contributions from the (inter)subjectivity of perceivers (or criminologists or other social scientists). As far as this objectivist-driven natural attitude perspective is concerned, our understanding of this topic can, when methodologically-controlled, hit upon its “true nature.” That is, upon hate crime as it is “in itself” present within the observer’s stream of passively receptive and direct consciousness. It may be further assumed here that the (inter)subjectivity of interpreting ego-subjects neither adds nor subtracts anything significant from whatever witnesses observe “really happened” during a specific hate incident. Second, the subject/object dichotomy can encourage an opposite – but equally problematic – belief arising from a subjective type of reductionism. The latter presumes, contrary to all evidence of the pervasiveness of intentionality, that hate crime topics only exists “in the mind” of those who claim to have experienced them.73 That is, it can be presumed that hate crime takes shape for us as a purely and “psychological” phenomenon. It arises as “nothing but” an interpretive construction of meaning: one lacking any reference whatsoever beyond the inner confines of consciousness itself. Contrary to the evidence of intentionality, hate crime as lived is thereby reduced to a purely subjective phenomenon.74 In short, the either/or opposition characteristic of the subject/object dichotomy generates a simplistic opposition between two diametrically opposite orientations: 1 . Either an entirely “objective” (because subjective-free) approach; or: 2. A purely “subjective” (because free of material objectivity) perspective upon hate crime suggestive of a self-cancelling relativism. As a result of such dichotomising of lived experience between either supposedly “entirely subjective” or “wholly objective” dimensions of lived experience, where the two halves of this pairing are (mis)represented as if they amounted to polar and mutually exclusive opposites, the natural attitude’s objectivist premises become self-destructive. Neither of these alternative and equally reductionist perspectives can generate either a coherent or sustainable approach to the lived experience of hate crime issues: one that is capable of adequately explaining our consciousness of hate crime in its pervasive and undeniable intentionality. That is, in its condition of being: 1 . consciousness-of hate incidents experienced-as something meant; 2. meant-in-a-certain manner (e.g., meant clearly, or obscurely or vaguely present to us); and 3. appearing through one or more mode of consciousness, such as acts of perception, recollection, judgement.

 Husserl detects such ‘transcendental subjectivism’ within the approach of Hume, whose legacy has led to an ‘unhealthy academic scepticism.’ Husserl, 1970: 68; 193. 74  Husserl, 1964: 2. 73

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One wholly negative consequence of this explanatory failure is that the experience of Reference-X-as-an-instance-of-category-Y, unifying Y-sense and X-reference, is entirely lost. Yet, it is precisely the implications of this type of suppressed experience that is capable of explaining the performatively accomplished unity-in-difference of subjective, intersubjective, material and objective dimensions of hate crime as lived. In other words, as a result of reliance upon this subject/object dichotomy, which by implication denies the intentionality of consciousness, the founding premises of the natural attitude’s objectivism are, despite themselves, equally capable of yielding up a one-sided subjectivist orientation towards hate crime issues, as they are of generating a no less reductionist and one-sided objectivist standpoint of the type it claims to endorse. Under the influence of objectivism, subscribers to the natural attitude may, when challenged, for example, flip-flop between these two equally one-sided orientations towards this topic in an essentially ad hoc and unprincipled manner. Within the natural attitude, such unprincipled flip-flopping may occur but without generating any penetrating insight into the incoherence of this response. Rarely, if ever, would it become possible by these means to gain an insightful appreciation of the interpretive preconditions underpinning such presumption-driven prejudicial operations.75 Furthermore, for a phenomenology of hate crime, when considered in ideological terms, objectivism’s process of veiling its own dichotomous foundations can make sense only at the instrumental level. This is because, for reasons already discussed, such metaphysical pseudo-foundations within the material level of “pure facts,” cannot themselves be recuperated as “objective foundations” for social scientific research – at least not in a manner that is consistent with the dualistic premises of objectivism itself. In short, the either/or oriented subject/objective dichotomy that underpins an objectivist approach to hate crime issues leads, by virtue of its internal logic, to all manner of difficulties, incoherencies and contradictions. In turn, a recognition of these resulting problems – and their implications for our phenomenology of hate crime – adds a further strand to the Husserlian critique of this possible approach.

12  D  ifficulties and Contradictions with Naturalistic Presuppositions In addition to objectivism’s problematic foundations in a metaphysical subject/ object dichotomy, our earlier sections demonstrated how a purely objectivistic approach to hate crime issues and questions would tend to rest upon naturalistic presuppositions. We have already outlined the latter’s general characteristic in a largely descriptive manner. This section must now take a more critical approach to 75

 Husserl, 1964: 3.

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objectivism’s naturalistic foundations by considering the possibility that the superimposition of an objectivist-naturalistic interpretative framework, claiming to be grounded upon the objective bedrock of a supposedly intrinsic reality, which is expressed in the form of “objective facts” existing in themselves, is prone to cancelling itself out. We must ask: “Can a certain understanding that, while interpreting both itself and aspects of perceived hate crime, denies its very own status as inevitably an interpretation-of …, avoid contradicting itself?” Is it the case that such potential self-cancellation stems from the implications of the very contradictions that the application of naturalistic presuppositions necessarily generates in practice? According to Husserl’s extended critique, naturalism is essentially one-sided and unacceptably narrow in two vital respects. First, as a strictly and purely materialist orientation, it is able to recognise only a single domain of possible knowledge, namely physical nature just as this appears in – and is addressed by – the natural sciences.76 Secondly, naturalism presumes that there is only one true methodology for gaining valid scientific knowledge: empirical observation and induction from “given facts.”77 For Husserl, there is ample and ever-growing qualitative evidence, including that of the regular instructive insights of the qualitative social sciences addressing distinctly cultural and socially constructed events routinely perceived of as social realities, to both challenge and contradict such presumptions. For example, within an objectivist approach to hate crime issues shaped by naturalistic presuppositions, the superimposed defining qualities of, say, homosexuals, cannot in principle be recognised for what they really are experienced as being. That is, as specific and highly selective interpretations of the intelligibility of the significance of members of that “group.” The latter may both contain  – and be shaped by – all manner of taken-for-granted cultural stereotypes, biases and background assumptions about sexual “normality;” or be determined by more empathetic and affirmative concerns with the “rights of minorities to live free of discrimination” for example. Within our natural attitude shaped by naturalism, this naiveté about the always-already interpretive nature of our dealings with all manner of lived realities is clearly present. It arises because the underlying interpretive performances that covertly superimpose these interpretations, categories, and distinctions between categories upon the themes of experience, which “label” this victim or perpetrator in specific prejudicial ways that go beyond whatever is strictly intuited perceptually, are never themselves allowed to come into view. Instead, the field of awareness is always dominated by “the facts of the case,” or – more precisely – a certain interpretation of such facts presenting itself as an undistorted photocopy of “the facts themselves.” As a result, these underlying interpretive-qualitative strata, which are cognitively vital for hate crime scholarship, are suppressed and displaced. As a result, and contrary to social scientific imperatives, they cannot become express and distinct research topics.

76 77

 Hua 30: 18.  Ibid 20; Hua, 25: 9.

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Such suppression continues as a default – at least not unless and until scholars succeed in overcoming these obstructions by consciously transcending the naturalistic premises of objectivism itself. At the political level, such naturalistic-grounded objectivism, which prides itself upon – and legitimates itself by reference to – its own claims to embody scientific objectivity, value-neutrality and impartiality, is capable of lending ideological legitimacy to forms of hate speech, as well as other forms of prejudicial discrimination. This perhaps unintended form of legitimation is especially clear with respect to those interpretations of victim groups that posit an intrinsic “essence” to either supposedly “natural” sexuality, or to “normal” gender-determinations. In this way, objectivism – which claims to be able to provide and exemplify a truly scientific, value-free approach to hate crime issues – can serve to mirror highly prejudicial and ideologically significant forms of essentialism, overlapping with those of many cases of hate speech. By contrast, for our Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime, such essentialism is anything but scientific and must be rejected precisely because of its unscientific nature. This lack of scientific credentials stems from how naturalism falsely seeks to ground what – for us – are clearly socially constructed – and thus changeable – realities in immutable biological, instinctive and genetic realities for example. Such a position lends indirect support to a form of hate speech that presumes “it is only natural and normal” to react with outraged hostility to the presence of “abnormality,” broadly akin to how medical science responds to cancer for example. An additional key argument of a Husserlian phenomenology of hate crime is that objectivism, insofar as it remains shaped by naturalistic premises, is a highly instructive form of cognitive failure. Furthermore, the resolution of these contradictions points the way towards the requirements and tasks of our radically different, alternative approach. Here, we follow Husserl’s argument that, after Descartes, both rationalism and empiricist traditions in modern European thought developed along generally objectivist lines that coincided with the less problematic methodological objectivism of the physical sciences.78 At the level of the philosophy of research methodology claiming universal jurisdiction at least, this naturalistic objectivism has proved itself to be highly problematic, one-sided self-contradictory and crisis-ridden.79 For example, naturalism’s narrowly restrictive commitment to a conception of knowledge as observations of material “factual realities” of various kinds aiming at identifying causal explanation and control of, say, hate crime related behaviour, is grossly one-sided. It ignores the many other ways we both can and do acquire credible and reliable knowledge about hate crime for instance. These alternative sources include structural analysis of key ideas taken purely as such, e.g., the very idea of “discrimination,” of “crime,” as well as the various offence-categories for different victim groups.

78 79

 Treating material objects as such is clearly different in kind from treating persons as objects.  See, for example, Husserl’s Prague Treatise, Hua 27: 209.

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Such structural analysis, which Husserl terms “eidetic analysis,” addresses and differentiates their necessary, possible and impossible qualitative determinations, Here, we can ask: in terms of religious hate crime, for example, what must necessarily be proven to have occurred as an absolute precondition for criminal liability; and  – secondly  – what other forms of proven evidence are compatible (but not strictly necessary) for a judge to hold that this offence has occurred. As strictly optional, such qualitative features can  – but need not  – be present in any viable determination of a specific event as a distinctly “religious” hate crime for example. Thirdly, what types of evidence could, if verified and accepted would – under the relevant statutory tests – prevent any such conviction because they are fundamentally incompatible with the very idea of religious hate crime as currently legally defined? Such clarification of the core structures of the very idea of this, or any other recognised hate crime offence, or related conceptions, such as a “discriminatory singling out” or of “hostility,” clearly generates a vital form of knowledge. Without such conceptual knowledge, the qualitative foundations for studies of hate crime would be fundamentally lacking. Insights that arise as a result of such structural analysis of ideas taken purely as such, is surely of key relevance to any credible study of hate crime insofar as these are properly concerned with their own qualitative basis at the foundational level of meaning. Yet, the fact-centric empiricist orientation of a self-consistent naturalistic approach to hate crime issues would, given its premises, have to flatly reject this mode of acquiring knowledge on the grounds that it is “non-empirical.” And yet the contradiction here is at the same time this concept-­ oriented approach continues to rely upon its results, if only implicitly. In response to this assumption-driven naturalistic aspect of objectivism, its ontological position on “the real world” as it conceives of the latter, Husserl argues that knowledge-oriented investigations deploying eidetic analysis can successfully unfold the core structures of categories and concepts relevant to, say, hate crime, or any other topic for that matter. Such analysis is possible without, in any respects, subscribing to the fact-based empiricisms of a naturalist position. In other words, it is both possible and vital for hate crime scholarship to identify, clarify and carefully distinguish the various necessary, optional, and impossible determinations of the meaning(s) of, say, “hate crime as such,” and “discrimination as such.” Such ideas-oriented investigations, which ideally culminate in experientially-­ grounded explications, judgements and truths, positively require scholars to free themselves entirely from a presupposed naturalistic-objectivist conception and latent physicalist ontology of “the real objective world out there” made up of a cluster of known or knowable “facts.” They must no longer naively predefine the latter as a cluster of “given facts” about, say, physical realities. Instead, scholars need to recognise that – as distinctly cultural realities – the cultural realm of ideas exhibits a degree of relative autonomy from the “real worldly” physical structures, events and processes studied by natural scientists. As a Husserlian approach recognises, as a strictly methodological thought-experiment we can envisage, say, “the idea of disability-related hate crime” even in a situation

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where there was no longer any real world “disability” understood in objectivist-­ materialist and medical terms. In other words, it is possible to disengage conceptual-eidetic analysis from any claims about the existence, the “thatness,” of the topic itself. Such disengagement allows hate crime scholars, and to focus instead on differentiating, say, the idea of “racial” from “religious” categories of hate speech as possible more or less autonomous themes of (and for) self-reflecting consciousness. Far from being a dependent sub-order of an essentially physical matter-of-fact reality, as presumed by naturalism, the conceptions and differentiation of conceptions of hate crime, which even the most empirically-oriented studies rely upon, exhibit a measure of autonomy that can even survive the loss of their original material support. To change examples, neither the study of Roman Law or classic pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, presuppose the continuing existence of their respective historical worlds corresponding to these clusters of ideas. Indeed, for Husserl: Now what alone is here important is that I can make purely phenomenological augments and that I can gain phenomenological evident truths without taking an ontological position on the matter. And as to the reality of nature, it is important to see that eidetic judging alone does not presuppose the existence of the world. In contrast to empiricism (here that means objectivistic empiricism which recognizes only ‘positive,’ objective, experiential sciences), it is worthwhile to show that there is pure consciousness and that pure consciousness, even if modified, remains as my ego cogito, even if the world did not exist. I then see that I cannot erase my ego, but that both the realm of ontological possibilities as well as that of pure eidetic phenomenology are independent of the existence of “the objective world.”80

Husserl is not denying that there is a world. On strictly phenomenological terms, such a denial would be absurd and is flatly contradicted by the constantly reaffirmed steam of experiential evidence to the contrary. It is contradicted by the “coming into presence” of our consciousness of having and dwelling within a surrounding world, and the worldly embodiment of such consciousness itself, not least through our material bodies. His critique of naturalism is rather pointing out and highlighting the relative autonomy of consciousness of the intelligibility of any world of meaning (worlds of sport, religion, social science etc.), from a purely objectivist conception of the world as a realm of physical nature alone as manifested in empirically-ascertainable “factual realities.” For our phenomenology of hate crime, such empiricism also fundamentally misunderstands both the intentionality of our consciousness of this topic, as well the extra-factual norms governing our potential rationality as human beings.81 The former involves not merely an inward flux disconnected from worldly realities. Instead, it entails an ongoing “directedness-towards” both physical and cultural realities, a consciousness-of whatever is meant by a “hate crime” or “hate incident.” The objective and outward-facing side of consciousness, its dimension of being consciousness-­ of-­X-As-Y, is not, therefore, purely “subjective” (at least not in terms of the always

80 81

 Husserl, 2006: 44, n13.  Hua, 25: 9.

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presupposed subject/object dichotomy discussed already, and upon which objectivism/naturalism itself rest). In addition, we have already seen how naturalist presuppositions reject any form of rationality that cannot be shown to be grounded upon clearly corroborated “factual evidence” about, say, statistically significant patterns of hate crime, its demographics etc. But, in this context, the very process of explaining and justifying naturalistic/objectivist research methods as supposedly appropriate to hate crime research, is itself instructive. Contrary to its own claims, such justification clearly involves displaying precisely an extra-factual form of rationality. The latter includes non-material, non-­ physical, (i.e., “irreal” / “ideal”) criteria of respecting logical self-consistency. For these two reasons, when taken strictly at its word, naturalism tends to culminate in absurdity (or “counter-sense”). It makes knowledge claims of a type that its own axiomatic premises have already rejected as lacking the status of authentic scientific knowledge because they are not – and can never become – entirely grounded empirically in “the facts of the case.” Furthermore, in the name of scientific truth and following the exclusion of extra-­ factual criteria of rationality, the deployment of naturalism generates a self-­ cancelling type of relativism and scepticism. The latter is clearly subversive of the possibility of valid knowledge that continues to hold good from one relative context to another, including that of mathematics. For hate crime studies, such resulting cognitive relativism and scepticism entirely is problematic. It is unable to supply any consistent basis for scholarship differentiating prejudicial beliefs about, say, black-skinned immigrants expressed in the form of hate crime, from critical social knowledge about such beliefs and their implications. Naturalist presuppositions ensure that both sets of belief are, in practice, levelled down to empirical “beliefs about …” As mere “subjective preferences,” broadly analogous to our food preferences, each of these are, in principle and practice, necessarily presumed to be on a par with each other in terms of their overall cognitive status. Such an extreme relativistic outcome is problematic. First, and despite its own relativism, it must nevertheless claim implicitly make a claim to be universally true, i.e., not to be a truth that is strictly relative to any specific context of application. Hence, this approach is self-cancelling at the level of theory. In addition, at the level of application, its adoption also leads to consequences that are also politically and ethically disempowering. It can, for example, offer us no reason why those who express deeply-felt convictions in the form of the most extreme hate speech, which even overlaps with the international crime of incitement to genocide, should ever reconsider their position and change their mind. Furthermore, where the truth-about-hate-crime is reduced to “whatever is the case” in the sense of verified or verifiable “facts,” which are presented as expressive of only factually established realities, the outcome is anything but politically neutral. On the contrary, here the status quo is, in practice, being implicitly endorsed as itself a “true arrangement” in a political and ethical sense. Where naturalism prevails, in relation to official policy concerning hate crime, or existing legally-­ recognised categories of victim groups, there can literally be no reason, no form of

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possible critical insight, supporting the idea that aspects of the status quo should be changed. Whatever goes beyond “the facts of the case,” itself understood as the sole repository of any actual or conceivable truth-about-hate-crime, is, by that very move alone, entering the realm of groundless error. At both the theoretical and practical levels, such negative and self-contradictory outcomes also arise from the characteristic efforts to “naturalise” consciousness that we have already described and discussed. Now, and in keeping with the purpose of this chapter, we need to subject such naturalisation to a more critical form of examination. Such naturalisation reduces our intentional consciousness-of hate incidents, and prejudices more generally, too little more than, say, a series of neurological events taking place in the brains of perpetrators. Where the naturalisation of consciousness takes place as enforcement of objectivist-naturalistic definitions of the nature of reality-as-essentially-physical, such consciousness-of is treated reductively. It is effectively degraded to the status of little more than a piece of physical-­ biological nature. Hence, even the most sophisticated conceptual analysis of the legal framework regulating hate crime in England and Wales could only be addressed as merely “factual occurrences” within the objective psycho-physical world of nature and the nature-like processes of the kind disclosed clinically by brain scans etc.82 For Husserl, even Descartes had surrendered his conception of the ego-subject to a similarly misconceived objectivist-naturalistic terms as a ‘substance’, lending support to the objectivism found both in both the rationalist and empiricist traditions of, for example, Hobbes and Locke.83 Such naturalisation of our consciousness of hate crime clearly involves making contentious assumptions about not only what consciousness itself is, its core structure and traits, but also how the latter itself operates. Such presumptions remain in place exerting a behind the scenes guiding role despite a complete absence of empirical evidence. In particular, these presumptions are most clearly not derived from an investigation of the intentionality of consciousness on its own terms as a constitutive medium; one that is responsible for generating the intelligibility of “whatever is the case.” Naturalisation makes it difficult, if not impossible, to appreciate that the very consciousness of, say, psychologists conducting experimental criminological research into hate crime perpetrators, is itself first responsible for identifying and delimiting the intelligibility of both this topic and the idea of what amounts to “truly scientific” investigations into its presence. While generally denying or ignoring the relevance of phenomenological insights into the intentionality of consciousness-of-­ X-meant-as-Y to this type of psychological research, in practice subscribers would continue to conduct their research in ways that contradict their own naturalistic premises. Indeed, they act as if the practitioner’s own consciousness has somehow

 Hua, 25: 15.  Husserl recognises the powerful critiques of these traditions by both Berkeley and Hume. Husserl, 1970: §56. 82 83

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become an exception to a generally applicable naturalising characteristic of consciousness as such. They continue to presume in practice would they deny in theory. Somehow their own would-be scientific consciousness is far more than a material-­ physical entity and series of thing-like events and material processes that are subject to a universal law-like form of causality. As Heidegger’s impressive summary of Husserl’s critique of the naturalisation of consciousness recognises, the latter itself becomes self-cancelling. This becomes especially clear if we turn the tables on subscribers by asking them to account for their own consciousness of any category of hate crime as X and not Y, like but not the same as Z. This is because a naturalistic approach remains unable to explain the processes of its own would-be scientific consciousness following the requirements of both logic and applied mathematics. In other words, and at the risk of labouring the critique, such naturalisation of consciousness is, given its presuppositions, incapable of explaining itself in terms that are consistent with a core naturalistic premises: namely, that reality itself is essentially physical. Yet, the very reality of these requirements of would-be scientific practice is not expressed in the form of “material facts.” Rather, the form is that of specific ideas, norms and beliefs. Clearly, these do not derive from nature itself but rather from the impressive accumulated achievements of scientific cultures and cultural traditions more generally. Because the naturalistic aspect of objectivism recognises as real only physical realities, it can only blind itself to the reality and practical efficacy of ideas, beliefs, prejudices, and axioms both generally. Here, it becomes subject to a self-contradictory and self-cancelling move because this encompasses even those ideas that define just what it means to engage in hate crime research in ways shaped by a naturalistic form of objectivism.84 The power of this Husserlian critique becomes clearer if we ask a series of probing questions that go against the grain of naturalistic research. For example: How is it possible that the consciousness of the naturalistic psychologist can, as something purely physical and causally determined, be directed towards something outside of itself, towards something meant as an aspect of the reality of hate crime, sufficient to adequately grasp the latter’s significance? Does the naturalisation of consciousness deny, in principle, the very quality of intentionality, of being conscious of something as something combining relations of both reference and sense? If so, then how can it possibly account for the clear fact that its concrete application in the form of an experimental psychology of, say, identified hate crimes and their perpetrators, itself routinely demonstrates the intentionality of scientific consciousness in practice? As Heidegger’s summary of the Husserlian critique notes:

 Heidegger summary of the Husserlian critique argues: ‘Naturalism is, first, naturalism of ideas; second, naturalism of consciousness. [It is] the ideal connection of ideal laws which, when viewed with respect to life’s modes of behavior, can be designated as various sorts of normative lawfulness to which the disciplines of theoretical science, axiology, and practical science correspond. The ultimate constant factors, in which these sorts of normative lawfulness are grounded, are ideas. It is characteristic of naturalism not to see the ideas, to be blind to ideas.’ 2005: 49. 84

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The first aspect of the effect of naturalizing philosophy lies in the fact that this same naturalist tendency leads to the naturalization of consciousness. (This juxtaposition of the idea and consciousness points back to Descartes.) How does it come to the naturalization precisely of consciousness, and what does that mean insofar as philosophy’s task is to establish the sorts of lawfulness pertaining to modes of behaviour in terms of their meaningful connection? The task arises of acquiring the legitimate grounds for the fact that something like consciousness speaks of an object as actually being and identifies it as such. For this justification of the legitimacy of the claims and acts of consciousness, there is need for a study of these connections themselves. A critique of knowing is needed. Being that has the character of the soul or mind, regarded as [part of] nature, is determined in the sense of natural scientific categories. The uniform organization of this misunderstanding is what one can designate as experimental psychology, insofar as it lays claim to being significant in a fundamental way.85

Heidegger goes on to recognise that Husserl’s critique is limited to the naturalistic aspect of some types of experimental psychology that reduce and subordinate consciousness to nature-like “laws.” Hence, the critique is not directed against the discipline of psychology as a whole, parts of which have been developed along phenomenological lines.86 Yet, the core contradiction remains: namely, that, despite the metaphysical form of their naturalistic physicalism, in practice (but not in theory) even practitioners of such science tend to act as if they respect non-material, non-physical aspects of reality, including the binding principles of logic and mathematics: It never entered into Husserl’s mind to say something against experimental psychology as such. [What he does oppose is how] ideal laws are reinterpreted into the sorts of lawfulness pertaining to sheer processes of consciousness. This is done not only in the domain of thinking, but also in the domain of voluntary action. The norms valid here are also reinterpreted into laws of psychological processes. Husserl explicitly stresses that the laws of formal logic make up the exemplary index of all ideality.87

At this point, more fundamental issues arise. If a phenomenology of hate requires a radically qualitative experiential approach, then why does this rule out those experiences determined prejudicially by a combination of the natural attitude’s naturalistic and objectivist presuppositions? An adequate theory of hate crime arises from the strenuous work of reflective, thoughtful and ultimately self-critical experiencing that both builds upon and unveils experiences of aspects of this topic found in advance of such reflection. As a cognitive resource, such experience is inevitably far from “pure” in that it is mediated by both subjective opinions and cultural prejudices, as well as other implicit or express theories about criminality, discrimination etc., including the ideological-rhetorical legacies of objectivism and naturalism. Husserl gives his reasons for excluding naturalistic objectivism both as a generally latent and assumption-driven source of such experience and as a theoretical position for addressing and explaining whatever appears experientially. Primarily, this is because, relative to lived experience, this source is an externally-formulated  Heidegger, 2005: 48.  See Husserl 1925/1977. 87  Ibid. 85 86

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and developed theory-about hate crime or any other social science topic. It is an external theoretical position adherence to which would make it impossible for us to develop a distinctly phenomenological qualitative analysis of hate crime as lived; while also demonstrating quite unintentionally the very reasons why such analysis has become absolutely vital if we are ever to advance our insights into hate crime as lived. It follows that our phenomenology of hate crime needs to learn an important methodological lesson here. There is a vital methodological need to exclude one type of theory, or methodological orientation, from the lived realities of whatever appears experientially in advance from within the life-world of our research subjects. Such exclusion is needed because the natural attitude’s naturalistic objectivism is so prejudicial that it effectively denies any ontological sense whatsoever to what appears experientially within the lived experience of hate crime issue.88 Such theories, especially naturalism’s one-sided naturalistic physicalism, end up by denying what they necessarily presuppose, i.e., the very appearing of what appears to us experientially as something far more meaning-saturated, meaning-­ dependent and intentional than what is presumed to characterise their core reality, e.g., stimulated neural fibres or neurons. In sum, there is a core theory/practice contradiction involved. This is exposed by observing and reflecting upon the very conduct of objectivist-naturalistic research and comparing what such practice actually presupposes with what the rationale for such practice presupposes at the level of theory. What we discover is that an objectivist-naturalist approach to hate crime itself involves an intersubjective orientation and value-judgement: one that “merely subjective” considerations concerning the lived experiencing of the topic itself can be jettisoned in the name of scientific objectivity and objective impartial causal-­ explanatory analysis based upon the pre-given facts-in-themselves. Here, there is a self-denying reliance upon various subjective, cultural and normative factors which are supposed to have already been strictly excluded as a precondition for authentically social scientific research even to begin. A clear problem is how this development within a naturalist-objectivist framework of a certain dualistic conception of objectivity-as-residue tends to distort how we think about and respond to the presence of subjectivity within the hate crime field. In addition to creating a rigid and inflexible conception of subjectivity, the rise and dominance of objectivism, even in rationalist philosophy, has become essentially unstable at its very foundations. The suppression, at the level of ideas, of our actual lived-through-subjectivity, becomes unstable and ultimately breaks down whenever it is pushed beyond a certain point. Such suppression cannot remain stable precisely because the entire subjective domain continues to operate underneath as it were, bubbling up and exerting effects that flatly contradict the premises and claims of objectivism itself.

 Husserl developed this idea of having to reject self-cancelling perspectives in his “Prolegomena” to the Logical Investigations §32. 88

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Such contradictions help inspire the creation and development of alternative transcendental clusters of ideas and philosophies. These burst through in partial recognition of the implications of the self-cancelling tendencies of approaches shaped by objectivism, which supplied a key part of their rationale. However, for Husserl, the “solutions” to these contradictions developed by such transcendental alternatives, provided by the ‘transcendental subjectivism’ of Berkeley, Hume and Kant, have proved to be far from perfect.89 This is especially the case with respect to their capacity to clarify the details of how lived experience actually operates in practice to define and redefine the very identity and significance of everything worldly that we can become conscious of. Husserl argues that, despite its appropriation of the banner of science as its own, naturalism does not deserve to be considered scientific at all. This criticism is based not only on problems with its practical results, including the technocratic erosion of culture. Nor is it a critique of the aspirations to be scientific. Instead, Husserl’s critique represents an internal scientific orientation directed against naturalism’s basic premises at the level of principle, including its methodology and research methods. For Husserl, although naturalism exhibits: a firm determination to realize the ideal of a rigorously scientific reform of philosophy. … But all this takes place, when we look at it from the standpoint of principle, in a form that from the ground up is replete with erroneous theory; and from a practical point of view this means a growing danger for our culture. It is important today to engage in a radical criticism of naturalistic philosophy. In particular, there is need of a positive criticism of principles and methods as opposed to a purely negative criticism based on consequences. Only such a criticism is calculated to preserve intact confidence in the possibility of a scientific philosophy, a confidence threatened by the absurd [i.e., “illogical”] consequences of a naturalism built on strict empirical science.90

For a phenomenology of hate crime, closer and more sceptical investigation reveals that the naturalistic dimensions of objectivism exhibit a remarkable theory/ practice contradiction. In theory, naturalism rejects resort to subjectivity, to “subjective” values, ideological beliefs, conceptions of “essence,” religious convictions, cultural preferences, normative expectations, and aesthetic sensibilities, in favour of a hard-headed and fact-based materialism. The latter defines being objective as the polar and mutually exclusive opposite of being-subjective. Precisely through its apparently objective, impartial and authentically scientifically-grounded appearance, the natural attitude becomes able to silently reiterate an array of cultural prejudices, grounded in naturalistic assumptions, concerning sexual, mental, gender and physical “normality”/“abnormality.” The latter are all-too-familiar to students of hate crime. Naturalism complains that the realm of subjectivity is literally inexplicable scientifically. It is a sphere in constant flux: one whose inner workings cannot be observed and investigated in a third-party impartial manner comparable with how external events can be scientifically observed and investigated. Furthermore, 89 90

 Husserl, 1970: 68.  Husserl, 1965: 78.

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s­ ubjectivity lacks causal patterns and cannot, therefore, be explained causally, that is, scientifically. As a result, the Husserlian idea of a science (logos) of phenomena, (i.e., “subjective” appearances taken purely as such), is a contradiction in terms: like dry fluid. Owing to its very nature, the realm of consciousness and the psychical cannot yield objectively valid and, therefore, stable scientific cognition. It is incapable of being studied as a realm of material facts and factual connections explicable in causal terms. Yet, this argument is entirely prejudicial and question-begging. The so-called “problem” with (intersubjectivity) and its fruits only appear as a difficulty when it is addressed, more precisely misrepresented, through the distorting lens of an objectivist approach that insists upon naturalising both consciousness and cultural ideas.91 The problem does not lie in the characteristics of (inter)subjectivity itself, or the ideal (non-material) quality of ideas that arise out and flow back into consciousness. This intersubjective cultural world does not have a fixed nature governed by causal or quasi-causal laws of physics, biochemistry etc. Yet, this is only a “lack” if one presumes that culture should not have its own distinctive qualities. This intersubjective realm does not possess a nature in the same way that the objects of medical science have more or less stable and predictable natural qualities and determinants. Not having a fixed material nature, governed by causality, and amenable of being observed from the outside does not mean it cannot be studied scientifically. What it does mean, however, is that a quite different, qualitative type of scientific approach is required: precisely that of phenomenology or something very similar. Yet, for its part consciousness remains governed by rule-like procedures and subject to inner determination by its own core structures. The relationship between hate crime phenomena as anticipated, then perceived and later recalled, and later subjected to acts of judgement expressed in language, is far from a random series of structureless happenings. On the contrary, we can identify invariant structural relationships of an if/then quality governing the operation of, say, anticipation, perception, recollection, judgement and linguistic signification. There are layers of consciousness, including depth layers of passivity with which predictable patterns of more or less law-like association operate. In carefully identifying, explicating, cross-referencing and mapping out these structures and structural relations, our phenomenology of hate crime can generate results that demonstrate an objective social scientific validity. Any of the interpretive acts already mentioned can be grasped by inward directed intuition as what they really are as invariant structures and structural relations. Nor can any judgement in relation to these structures and relations be either verified or contradicted by the experience of material facts. If anything, the reverse is true in that the physical identity of anything experienced becomes intelligible only through the interpretive acts in which this thematic object made present to consciousness as something meant. This is because it is precisely the relation to consciousness in these interpretive acts that give them their intelligibility (or quality of “whatness”) as objects-of a certain

91

 Husserl, 1965: 80.

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“type.” Such structures belonging to the ideal sphere can be grasped as immediately and scientifically in intuition, as can “the facts” of physical reality be grasped in perception. In addition, in its actual practices and procedures for conducting research into hate crime and other social and natural scientific topics, the naturalistic side of objectivism tends to be idealistic, not materialistic. In particular, researchers who subscribe to naturalist premises are guided by their understanding of the significance of everything they must carry out for the completion of their distinctive type of research project on hate crime. Any objectivist-naturalistic type approach to hate crime would itself arise as a product of culture and a cluster of cultural understandings, including scientific ideals, which subscribers are bound to accept. However, as a result, these cannot be investigated by the methods of natural science whose exclusive object is material “nature.”92 The minor argument here is that the empiricist form of naturalism is, in its own terms, prejudiced, contrary to the demands it itself places on science to be entirely objective. On the one hand, a naturalistic approach to hate crime research prevents itself from acknowledging core structures of meanings because these do not appear in the mode of “given facts.” And yet subscribers do indeed perceive such structures constantly in the sense of interpreting hate crime-related issues through the lens of all manner of non-factual cultural categories of meaning, including those defining scientific research itself. As a result, subscribers place themselves in the contradictory position of refusing to either recognise such ideal, non-factual structures in principle in their specific character; while constantly and of necessity reinterpreting the facts of hate crime” precisely through the lens of such structures and structural differentiation(s). Efforts to naturalise the cultural realm of ideas is thus both counter-sensical and self-contradictory So, the more significant argument is this would-be orientation makes use of conceptual cognitions into, for example, the essential meaning of “science,” of “facts,” “research,” “discrimination” etc., while – at the same time – disputing the validity of any such thinking in terms of core meaning structures.93 By insisting that the material realms of sheer fact themselves provide the sole ground for valid knowledge about hate crime, while also presuming that only such knowledge merits recognition as genuine science, generates problems for itself. Indeed, it creates an approach to hate crime that is incompatible with the possibility of a (social) scientific approach to this topic. Such a presumption is necessarily self-refuting because – as Husserl recognises – it leads to countersense, to absurd conclusions: ‘One need only ask the empiricist about the source of the validity of his universal theses (for example, ‘all valid thinking is grounded in experience as the solely giving intuition’), and he gets entangled in demonstrable counter-sense. For direct experience gives only singulars and no

92 93

 This is a central argument of Husserl’s Vienna Lecture 1935 in Husserl 1970: Appendix.  Husserl, 1982: 37.

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universalities; thus it is insufficient.’94 In other words, owing to its own claims, empiricist forms of naturalism cannot account for themselves without contradicting their own starting point. Subscribers appeal to ideas and concepts in regions of experience to which – in the name of science itself – they have denied themselves access to. Here, a theory/practice tension intensifies into an outright contradiction. For example, Husserl claims that within their specific research practices, subscribers to naturalism cannot avoid being oriented towards non-material notions of what is genuinely true, authentically scientific etc.: He believes that through natural science and through a philosophy based on the same science the goal has for the most part attained, and with all the enthusiasm that such a consciousness gives, he has installed himself as teacher and practical reformer in regard to the true …from the standpoint of natural science. He is, however, an idealist who sets up and (so he thinks) justifies theories, which deny precisely what he presupposes in his idealistic way of acting, whether it be in constructing theories or in justifying and recommending values or practical norms as the most beautiful and the best. He is, after all, going on presuppositions, to the extent that he theorizes at all, to the extent that he objectively sets up values to which value augments are to correspond, and likewise in setting up any practical rules according to which each one is to be guided in his willing and in his conduct.95

In other words, not only would a naturalistic-objectivist approach to hate crime contradict its own premises and principles by orienting itself according to non-­ physical ideas and aspirations, including those of logic, but it would also fail to comply with the demand to act in an impartial, value-free manner oriented only towards the scientific truth claims of evidence-based judgements grounded in the facts themselves. Such an approach to the experience of hate crime would inevitably be polemical and value-oriented, preaching against alternative approaches for example as unacceptably deficient in their scientific credentials. Yet, precisely by acting in this way, subscribers would be denying in practice what they demand of others: to formulate judgements about hate crime in any impartial, factually-based manner. Yet this demand is one aspect of claims to scientific rationality, which of course is itself a normative ideal. By subscribing to naturalistic doctrines that, to render them scientifically knowable, reduce all issues, questions and beliefs that make up the research field of hate crime to things or thing-­ like processes, events or objects, such naturalism cancels itself out. It implicitly claims the very opposite of what it advocates, including by undercutting the very rationality of social science itself: that the only rational thing to do is to deny reason, as well as theoretical, axiological and practical reason. He would, in fact, banish that sort of thing far from him. The absurdity is not in his case evident, but remains hidden from him because he naturalizes reason. From this point of view the controversy has been factually decided …96

In this way, the move towards naturalism in modern theoretical analysis mirrors the embrace of naturalism and objectivism within the natural attitude. In turn, this has  Ibid.  Husserl, 1965: 80–81. 96  Husserl, 1965: 81. 94 95

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led to a loss of any understanding of the importance of human values, beliefs, and interests. It has resulted in a complete misunderstanding of what has become the enigma of subjectivity, including that of natural and social scientists themselves. Yet, it is only the latter subjectivities that are responsible for defining what scientific practice itself has come to mean form these scientists themselves. Worse still, authentic science includes a critique of prejudices grounded in no more than traditional authority of custom, religion and superstitions of all kinds whose judgements lack any credible evidence. Yet, by refusing to confront the implications of these self-contradictions, the naturalist – flying the banner of authentic science – is no less guilty of a similar form of unscientific dogmatism. In this respect, a naturalistic approach to hate crime could only sustain its own agenda in two equally problematics ways: 1 . By blinding itself to its own prejudices; and 2. Dogmatically refusing to even consider the type of criticisms made from Husserlian and other perspectives.97 Such anti-scientific dogmatism arises because naturalism refuses to accept anything that is not physical as “real.” The only source of falsification is the discovery of facts whose naturalistic analysis proves to be contrary to earlier studies. Hence, all forms of “ideal” phenomenon associated with culture, intersubjectivity and consciousness, including critiques of naturalism itself, can be dismissed as scientifically irrelevant, and for this reason, ignored. Alternatively, they can be forcibly “made relevant” by interpreting such ideal phenomenon reductively as somehow in themselves physical. For example, the bodily manifestations of a victim’s anxiety and fear of future victimization become understood in materialistic terms as entirely physiological. As a result, the question of what it is that she is anxious and fearful about, and what sense and significant implications do these subjective feelings have for her desired lifestyle, never emerge on the research agenda. This neglect is utterly self-consistent however with an interpretive framework that reduces all phenomena purely physical realities. It is precisely by naturalising consciousness of the manifestations of this topic and ideas, beliefs and values associated with it, including criteria of formal logic that guide scientific judgements, that the naturalistic dimension of objectivism cancels itself out, leading to manifest absurdities at many different levels. Hate crime researchers who aspire to be entirely naturalistic, and thereby reject the scientific significance of anything that is not physical, cannot act consistently with this position. On the contrary, in their concrete research practices, oriented as these are by the cultural meaning given to logical standards, research ethics, and scientific ideals  For Husserl: ‘It is manifest, of course, by this very circumstance how slight is the practically effective force of arguments based on consequences. Prejudices blind, and one who sees only empirical facts and grants intrinsic validity only to empirical science will not be particularly disturbed by absurd consequences that cannot be proved empirically to contradict facts of nature. This sort of argument he will put aside as “Scholasticism.” Ibid, 81–2. 97

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of rationality more generally, they would inevitably act as idealists as well. In other words, they would manifest in their own practical actions precisely the opposite of what their express position rejects in principle. As Husserl recognises, such reductionism runs aground when confronted with the “fact” that the ideas, beliefs, norms etc., which emanate from cultural traditions, simply cannot be reduced to natural objects, processes and events: Without realizing it, naturalism refutes itself. If we take an exemplary index of all ideality, formal logic, then the formal-logical principles, the so-called “laws of thought,” are interpreted by naturalism as natural laws of thinking. … this brings with it the sort of absurdity that characterizes every theory of scepticism in the fullest rise has elsewhere … One can submit naturalistic axiology and practical philosophy (including ethics) as well as naturalistic practice to a radical criticism of the same sort. For theoretical absurdities are inevitably followed by absurdities (evident inconsistencies) in actual theoretical, axiological, and ethical ways of acting. The naturalist is, one can safely say, idealist and objectivist in the way he acts. He is dominated by the purpose of making scientifically known (i.e., in a way that compels any rational individual). Whatever is genuine truth, the genuinely beautiful and good; he wants to know how to determine what is it’s universal and the method by which it – namely, that is in every act of consciousness an element which is simply irreducible to nature. This we might call the basic that path to transcendental phenomenology.98

The objective qualities of the realities of hate crime, which it presupposes to exist in the form of material facts about physical states of affairs, provide the preconditions for its claims to representing a truly scientific approach for generating valid knowledge about this topic. However, what is clear is that these qualities are not themselves anything physical. They appear to our consciousness as existing in the ideal form of the meanings ascribed to the significance and implications of various scientific communities’ aspirations, expectations, methodological and other beliefs, guiding their conceptions what amounts to the practice of “true science,” and ideas more generally. Hence, the precondition for naturalism in practice involves a contradiction with naturalism’s theoretical starting point and its own core principles. Our phenomenology of hate crime also recognises difficulties and contradiction arising from the preference for objectivist-naturalistic approaches for deploying exclusively quantitative methods. On the one hand, the development of the discipline of pure mathematics offers an exemplary model of how human rationality can collaborate across national borders and across generations of self-correcting scholarly research oriented towards open-ended and shared cognitive goals.99 However, the way that quantification is deployed in objectivist-naturalist research in the social sciences (as opposed to pure physics for example) is a degenerate and, in some ways, quite opposite phenomena relative to pure mathematics. This is because even

 Husserl, 1965: 80.  To be clear, our phenomenological critique of objectivist-naturalistic deployment of quantitative methods is very far from a rejection of mathematics. As Husserl recognises: ‘No reasonable will doubt the objective truth or the objectively grounded probability of the wonderful theories of mathematics and the natural sciences.’ 1965: 74. 98 99

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its most technically proficient and exact manifestations involve a form of cognitive closure of rational possibilities. Quantitative methods and analysis are appropriate only to the natural sciences governed – at one level – by causal or quasi-causal relations, which in principle can explain and often predict the behaviour of the topic. Yet, all academically significant aspects of hate crime lie in how they exhibit real societal, cultural, policy-political and linguistic forms as expressions of the human spirit, not nature. The reality we address when we encounter hate crime issues is a distinctly social reality: one which is not real in that physical-material manner that nature and natural objects are. As a result, our phenomenology of hate crime, which aspires to social scientific status, is not faced with two equal realities that we can address and analyse by means of the same “objective” quantitative methods. We must approach the experience of hate crime scientifically with a model of distinctly qualitative/interpretive science: one equipped with radically qualitative social scientific methods of investigation oriented towards the contents, forms and operations of lived experience. It follows that the most vital lesson taught by the prospects of objectivistic-­ naturalistic accounts of hate crime lies in their highly instructive self-cancelling nature. We cannot but draw the conclusion that, for our phenomenology of hate crime, objectivistic premises have the status of unhelpful and obstructive prejudices: ones that must be jettisoned as a precondition for even starting viable social scientific research. The latter is radically scientific because only the intersubjective realm of culture can be the object of a self-sufficient, i.e., self-grounding, and fulsome type of scientific analysis. Unlike the natural sciences, a phenomenology of hate crime is able to draw its very concepts from the same field as it studies. These conceptual underpinnings can be derived from and grasped with genuine insight based upon immediate intuitions and intentional” experiential investigations of consciousness. A further contradiction with objectivist-naturalistic approaches to hate crime concerns the state of rationality: a potential feature that distinguishes the self-­organisation of human beings relative to specific self-determined cultural norms, from most other forms of life. A phenomenology of this topic can contrast the authentic rationalism stemming originally from classical Greek philosophy with the degeneration of rationality exhibited by an objectivistic type of mistaken and technocratic-­instrumental European rationalism the emerged from the seventeenth centuries. Husserl (and then later Martin Heidegger, and Herbert Marcuse) criticised what became termed the one-dimensionality of the framework of technologically organised, instrumentalist and calculative reasoning as a degenerate form of reason relative to the classical Greek notion. What passes for contemporary rationalism is overly determined by a combination of objectivism and naturalism that push in the opposite direction of what is needed for the self-development through radical reflective investigations of a viable phenomenology of hate crime. The latter needs to develop the most radically imaginable transcendental phenomenological reflections on the buried and abbreviated role of human reason in the interpretive genesis of all meaning-formations. Such an exposure, as the reasonable self-­development of reason by bearers of human reason, needs

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to evolve into a revised conception of reason capable of supplying a new form of ‘groundedness of existence.’100 With its universalistic philosophical ideals and self-criticism of the rationality of whatever is currently considered “reasonable,” the former model has a progressive potential for human liberation.101 This stems from how it projects ahead of the status quo a realm of open-ended, even infinite, possibilities for reconfiguring our social world to create a more rational society. Indeed, Husserl argues: From its earliest beginnings philosophy has claimed to be …the science that satisfies the loftiest theoretical needs and renders possible from an ethico-religious of view a life regulated by pure rational norms. This claim has been pressed with sometimes more, sometimes less energy, but it has never been completely abandoned, not even during those times when interest in and capacity for pure theory were in danger of atrophying, or when religious forces restricted freedom of theoretical investigation. During no period of its development has philosophy been capable of living up to this claim of being rigorous science; not even in its most recent period …It is, in fact, the dominant characteristic of modern philosophy that it will by means of critical reflection and by ever more profound methodological investigation constitute itself as rigorous science.102

By contrast, the rise and domination of the means-end instrumentalism of objectivist-­ technocratic rationality generate a foreclosure of this potential. As a result, its ideological dominance lies at the root of Europe’s cultural crisis. The originally Greek model of universal rationality embodied in the idea of critical scientific practice, strives, through cultural works and self-reflection, to raise human beings to a new level.103 Furthermore, any attempt by a phenomenology of hate crime as experienced to address ideal phenomenon, which of course are nonphysical realities is dismissed as by naturalism as, for example, mere “scholasticism.” Our phenomenology does not rely on the validity of its own critique of the consequences of naturalism to support the contention that a scientific approach to non-physical phenomena associated with subjectivity and consciousness is simply impossible, and should in principle be jettisoned as, in principle, impossible. On the contrary, this contradiction exposes the dogmatism, arbitrariness and general lack of scientific rigour of naturalism; while itself displaying precisely that sort of rigorous scientific critique itself. In other words, we critique naturalism’s pretension to be a scientific approach to hate crime in the first place. We can presume for the sake of argument that scientific theory’s role is to work towards providing an axiological foundation for normative disciplines that transcend naturalism’s notion of “material facts,” including research and medical ethics. Yet, it is clear that no science of facts based upon naturalistic premises can make any

 Hua 27: 238. Cf. Heidegger’s 1938 essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge, CUP: 2002: 57–85. 101  For Husserl, ‘a critique of reason … is the foremost prerequisite for being scientific in philosophy…’ 1965: 77. 102  Husserl, 1965: 61. 103  See Husserl’s Vienna Lecture, Husserl 1970: Appendix. 100

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contribution whatsoever to this vital part and guiding aspect, of scientific research culture. Instead, naturalistic approaches to hate crime are necessarily a form of naiveté entangled in the sheer contingencies and context-dependencies of empirical existence. As a result, they cannot consistently make claims that are absolute or logically necessary. Yet, these are precisely the nature of the very claims that define naturalism itself – that all scientifically relevant phenomena are essentially and necessarily physical in nature. Not even the most rigorous investigation of observable facts about the behaviour of perpetrators can address, let alone answer, the most vital questions about the lived-experience of such behaviour. Instead, for this vital task, a naturalistic project on hate crime would need to import into its research framework a distinctly non-­ naturalistic theory: such as our own phenomenology. Yet, the implications of such importation, together with a recognition of the reasons why the latter has proven necessary, would subvert naturalism’s own core claims. Indeed, the importation of phenomenological approach that brackets out all ontological claims to “thatness” in favour of exploring the “whatness” of the lived-experience of hate crime would evaporate from a naturalistic research project the possibility of addressing any topic whatsoever. What is needed to remedy this contradiction is a social scientific study of consciousness of hate crime taken purely as such. Yet, this is the polar opposite of a distinctly naturalistic psychology of this topic. We can only appreciate this difference once we grasp consciousness not in naturalistic terms as a physical entity but rather as the seat for all manner of constitutive interpretive practices characterised by intentional performance-accomplishments. Naturalism seeks to discredit precisely the type of introspective self-reflection on how the experience of hate crime takes shape experientially. As a result, it renders impossible any direct grasp of the data of consciousness itself. This is unnecessary, arbitrary and self-destructive. By blocking off any access to the essential structure of the very qualitative conceptions which it must deploy even to identify what is and is not a “hate crime-related issue,” it cuts the very ground from under its feet. This aspect of naturalism is also incapable of becoming aware of these and other difficulties and contradictions in its own research methods of procedures. Any effort to overcome the deep-seated problems and contradiction of its naturalistic methods by employing these same methods is, of course, to avoid the problem, not to solve it. By rejecting qualitative research into hate crime as lived subjectively, based upon a directly grasping of intentional consciousness, as “unscientific,” naturalism refuses to resolve its own contradiction by accepting the only method that would make it scientific. Yet only such qualitative approaches that deploy some version of phenomenological methods are able to access the phenomenon of hate crime as such. While naturalistic approaches seek to access and directly grasp “the facts” of the topic itself, the research methods deployed to achieve this goal are incapable of determining what hate crime itself is. No method consistent with naturalistic premises can determine what precisely is meant by hate crime in all its various connotations, sub-categories, subjective contingencies, discretionary redefinitions, and interpretive nuances. These are essentially and necessarily qualitative questions

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founded upon the reinterpretation of already interpreted realities, and – as such – require a distinctly phenomenological approach. Only the latter, which entails a complete reversal of naturalism core premises, can achieve the comprehension of experiences of hate crime precisely and strictly as experience. There can be no “solution” to the contradictions arising from the application of naturalism that is consistent with naturalism’s core premises. For example, hate crime research that takes the form of psycho-physical logical processes arising from victims’ anxiety studied by psychologists under laboratory conditions, only duplicates and reiterates the core difficulties exposed by our Husserlian critique. For Husserl, modern psychology is in a state of near-permanent crisis of foundations because it has become dominated by a reductive naturalism and objectivism motivating practitioners to incorporate the methods of the nineteenth century natural sciences. As a result of this overextension of a materialist science of external things, whose methods are thing-oriented, to psychological aspects of hate crime, such as victim suffering and perpetrator motivation, an only create problems. In particular, this would misconstrue these individuals’ defining core characteristics and the meanings of their human subjective and intersubjective intentional lives. A naturalistic/objectivism empirical psychology of hate crime takes the form of an essentially causal and/or inductive science of facts about the psychic state of those research subjects involved in or affected by this type of “behaviour. Here, human beings are studied as primarily physical organisms with various psycho-physical states that can be detected with laboratory equipment, such as brain scanners and other neurological devices. As such, the research subjects of this type of empirical psychology of hate crime would investigate human beings as largely akin to animals embedded directly in a natural world of which they are themselves along with other animals are but one piece, without the intermediary of language, culture and society.104 The effort to identify psychological laws, including in relation to how the association of among ideas, and ideas in relation to objects of experience, actually operate would be defined as vital for a purely naturalist/objectivist approach to the psychology of hate crime. This effort would aim to be developed sufficiently to explain and predict this activity. Yet, such laws can at most be merely inductions from experience, certain contingent generalisations.105 These cannot be true “laws” in a natural science sense of physical laws, such as gravity or mechanics. This is because they can at most be expressible only as probabilities,106 and thus as weak imitations of ideal laws found natural science. So, this type of psychology of hate crime remains theoretically dependent on genuine fundamental natural sciences, including physics, zoology and physical anthropology). Here, the reduction of the culturally-mediated inner life of individual consciousness is reduced to the  See the introduction to Husserl’s Logical Investigations, especially §6, 176; Hua 19/1 23.  Husserl 1991 Intro. I §6/176; Hua 19: 123. In his 1928 Amsterdam Lectures, Husserl characterises such psychological approaches as a study of animal (including human) mental ‘behaviour’ taking place in the context of a culturally unmediated “real world” of nature (Hua 9: 303). 106  Husserl develops this more in Ideas 11, 368/Hua 4: 357. 104 105

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s­ patiotemporal world and to the embodiment of individual subjects in various causal interactions with nature and natural forces. In this sense, a naturalistic/objectivistic psychology would be strictly empirical stuck fast to a form of ‘physico-psychology’ where – if only for methodological reasons – physical nature has priority over the specifically and distinctly psychological aspect of consciousness. For example, this approach would seek to “explain” a victim’s perceptions of her attackers in causal terms of the neurology of brain processes as physical-psychological realities as unitary material natural beings. The core of such “explanations” would seek to connect so-called psychological laws to better-grounded natural scientific causal laws, possibly by means of materialist research methods that are based upon a distinctly atomistic type of sensationalism: one which (following the lead of the Vienna Circle positivists such as Ernst Mach or Bertrand Russell), breaks the perception of a hate incident down into a cluster of material sight, sound, tactile and other sensations striking a victim’s sense-organs from the “outside world.”107 Here, the inner life of research subjects is presumed to be a hermetically sealed-off realm in which thing-­ like material sensations, or “sense data,” appear as such.108 This approach simply presumes that we are first and foremost in contact with such sensations such that these must be considered “primary data.” The problem is that position culminates not in the promised hard science of subjectivity but in a position that entirely refuses to acknowledge the essential role of the ideal senses and ideal objects that mediate consciousness in the interpretive processes of constituting intelligible objectivities of all kinds. Naturalism blinds itself to the force of ideas, even the ideas of naturalism itself. As a result, an objectivist approach to hate crime as experienced would entirely fail to recognise the core significance of the life-world of those individuals who are involved in, or affected by, this abusive activity. The ontological significance of the idea of our life-world has necessarily evaded being considered in an objectivist manner. This is despite the fact that, as a realm of ideal meanings, cultural expectations, communicative practices, interactions, traditional values and customary beliefs, the life-world of researchers supplies the very interpretive resources for objectivism itself. Furthermore, self-reflection upon whatever is immediately given to our consciousness confirms the very opposite of what such atomistic materialism presumes to be the case.109 Instead, here we discover grounds for a more holistic account of the interconnectedness of world of intentions, meanings, expectations and values mediated by intersubjective phenomena, including a shared culture, traditional customs and language. As a result, when considering the possible contribution of objectivism to hate crime scholarship we are faced with a contradictory type of psychologism: one presuming that even logical and mathematical ideal truths do not express necessary relations between purely ideal concepts. Instead, they are reducible to so-called

 Husserl, 1970: §67.  Ibid, 231. 109  Husserl, 1970: 233. 107 108

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“psychological laws” explicable in terms of how specific individuals within the hate crime field sometimes actually think. And yet the very processes of describing and justifying such an objectivist position, as well as applying quantitative research methods and then analysing what is statistically significant in their results, presumes the very opposite to be the case: that the ideal realm of mathematical and logical ideas have a generally applicable rational basis outside of the immediacy of any empirical case of sensory perception. Mathematical truths are not true because someone somewhere thinks so, nor do they become false because someone else thinks 1 + 1 = 3. Once again, the actual activities of subscribers to objectivism tend, of necessity and for instructive reasons, to contradict this position’s central claims. Hence, for Husserl: ‘it is only inconsistency that keeps psychologism alive: to think it out to the end is already to have given it up.’110 In short, there is every reason for hate crime scholarship to cast doubt on the core contentions and presuppositions of a naturalistic form of objectivism. Once we taken consciousness-of-hate crime seriously and ask what, how and for-whom questions about both the objective and subjective aspects of such consciousness, we can – as Heidegger’s summary well-expresses it – come to better appreciate that: ‘There is a question whether the natural scientific method can in principle be expanded, the question of how it is in a position even merely to understand, let alone to justify the legitimacy of the exertions of consciousness.’111

References BBC News. 2013. PFA Chairman: Spurs Should Stop ‘Offensive Chants’, September 18. https:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24145270; cf. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/ uk-england-london-24118197/tottenham-hotspur-fans-asked-about-anti-semitic-chants. Beinart, Peter. 2018. What Trump Means When He Calls Gary Cohn a ‘Globalist’. The Atlantic, March 9. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/trump-globalist-cohn/555269/. Georgi, Geoff. Demonstratives and Indexicals. The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. http:// www.iep.utm.edu/dem-indx/. Giorgi, Amedeo. 2009. The Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology: A Modified Husserlian Approach. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Heelan, Patrick A. 1987. Husserl’s Later Philosophy of Natural Science. Philosophy of Science 54 (3): 368–390. Heidegger, Martin. 1938. Essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’. In Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track. Ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: CUP, 2002, pp. 57–85. ———. 2005. Introduction to Phenomenological Research. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hua 18. 1975. In Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band Husserl Edmund, ed. Holenstein Elmar. Hua 19: Logische Untersuchungen II. Hua 25. 1910–1911. Philosophie als strenge wissenschaft. Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und Kultur 1:289–341.  More generally for this critique, see the first volume of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, ‘Prolegomena to Pure Logic,’ 56, and §§25–6; Hua 18: 88. 111  Heidegger, 2005: 49. 110

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Hua 27. 1989. Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937). Husserliana 27, eds. T. Nenon and H.-R. Sepp. Husserl, Edmund. Pure Phenomenology: Its Method and Its Field of Investigation; Inaugural Lecture at Freiburg im Breisgau (May 3, 1917); Die reine Phänomenologie, ihr Forschungsgebiet und ihre Methode. ———. 1964 [1907]. The Idea of Phenomenology. Trans. Lee Hardy. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 1965 [1912/1935]. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. Translated with Notes and an Introduction by Quentin Lauer. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965 Containing the 1935 Vienna Lecture as well as Husserl’s 1911/12 Essay in Logos, ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.’ ———. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1977 [1925]. Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925. Trans. John Scanlon. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1980. Phenomenology and the Foundation of the Sciences. Third Book: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. Ted E.  Klein and William E. Pohl. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1982 [1913]. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1991 [1893–]. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893– 1917). Trans. John B. Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 2006. Basic Problems of Phenomenology, from the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910–1911. Trans. I. Farin and J. Hart. Berlin: Springer. Kitsuse, John I., and Aaron V.  Cicourel. 1963. A Note on the Use of Official Statistics. Social Problems 11: 131–139. Lukacs, G. 1967. History and Class Consciousness (1919–23). Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin Press. Ochs, Elinor. 1990. Indexicality and Socialization. In Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, ed. J.  Stigler, R.  Shweder, and G.  Herdt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life. New York: Elsevier. Smith, Robin, and Paul Atkinson. 2016. Method and Measurement in Sociology, Fifty Years On. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 19: 99–110. Vandervert, L. 1988. Operational Definitions Made Simple, Useful, and Lasting. In Handbook for Teaching Statistics and Research Methods, ed. M. Ware and C. Brewer, 132–134. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Some Constructive Implications of Our Husserlian Critique of Naturalistic Objectivism

Abstract  The criticisms we set out in the preceding chapters concerning the various difficulties and self-cancelling contradictions affecting objectivist premises are intended to be fundamental. They go to the heart of our research by casting serious doubt upon the adequacy of a naturalistic form of objectivist approach to the study of hate crime. There remains, however, more constructive implications to the Husserlian critiques we set out during our earlier chapters. This chapter will, therefore, consider the various difficulties arising from the natural attitude’s subject/object dichotomy, and argue that this generates a vital need to consider the diametrically opposite position of Husserlian phenomenology as a possible constructive alternative response to, even remedy for, the problems that our own radically different phenomenological approach to hate crime has already diagnosed. Moreover, that the various criticisms already contain in seed form the basis of a distinctly “intentional analysis” of hate crime as experienced. The next section will show how, at least in principle, such analysis may be able to resolve some of the methodological problems we have already diagnosed with academic approaches that are shaped by the natural attitude’s merger of objectivism and naturalism.

1  Introduction 1.1  Opening the Door to Intentional Analysis If Husserlian phenomenology can be understood as a possible remedy for the difficulties and contradictions stemming from naturalistic objectivism, then the meaning(s) of this vital claim need to be clarified. For a phenomenological approach to the lived experience of hate crime, what is first needed as a methodological precondition for, or preliminary stage of, such intentional analysis is the bracketing out and purging of even the residues of objectivist and naturalist premises. At the outset, we must recognise the extent to which these have been operating as prejudices within not only everyday “common sense” accounts of hate crime but also, say, contemporary psychological and other social scientific approaches. In turn, this methodologically-required purging of prejudice must lead to a radical reconsideration of the possible remedial potential of phenomenology’s most © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Salter, K. McGuire, The Lived Experience of Hate Crime, Contributions to Phenomenology 111, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33888-6_6

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basic concepts, research methods, and methodological procedures. During their application to hate crime as experienced, these concepts, methods, and procedures need to be at least reformulated to liberate researchers from the influence of all residues of naturalistic and objectivist prejudices that previously distorted and biased their understanding and responses to this topic. It is, for example, vital to purge all residues of that materialist form of sensationalism that reduces the perceptual experience of an incident to, say, merely the empirical sensory data arising from our eyes, ears, nose and skin. Such purging and resulting liberation are required in order to make “the” disciplines of psychology, criminology, or other social scientific approaches, truly fit for their purpose of providing a coherent and self-consistent account of hate crime as experienced. In turn, a reformulation and purging of this kind are vital preconditions for the development of a two-sided form of interpretive analysis of hate crime as experienced. Such analysis needs to be focused first on the correlation between what appears to consciousness as pre-interpreted intentional objects, and then secondly upon the underlying interpretive dynamics of the appearing itself. In other words, we need to address the correlation of the concrete results of noematic and noetic analyses of the whatness and how-qualities of hate crime as experienced. Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality and the resulting type of “intentional analysis” of the lived experience of hate crime-related issues, which is based upon the correlation of noematic and noetic analysis, is suggested implicitly by aspects of everyday discourse. Here, we note that in everyday life, the idea of “meaning” is deployed to combine the following three related elements: 1. ‘to intend something’ (“I meant to give her the most appropriate medicine but forgot.”). 2. ‘to mean’ (this is the sense I want you to fully understand …”) and. 3. ‘to refer to a specific reality ….’ (I meant for you to do this not that!) These three everyday designations of the term “meaning” clearly express a linking of “sense” with both relations of “reference” and, to a lesser extent, “referring itself.” As a result, everyday discourse indirectly recognises the intentionality of our conscious states, i.e., their reference towards something meant and meant in various modes of appearance. Recognition of these distinctions helps prepare us for carrying out a distinctive form of intentional analysis that focuses exclusively on the intentional character of our conscious experiences of hate crime as lived, as well as how this character appears to us in numerous ways. As a corrective to the natural attitude, our phenomenology of hate crime recognises the importance of respecting the structurally-determined differences – as well as mutual implications – between the following: 1. Relations-of-sense (e.g., the significance of her eye injuries for her and others); and. 2. Relations-of-transcendent-reference (the appearing of the injured eye itself), as well as their intentional differentiated-unity within consciousness itself.

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As a later section strives to demonstrate in more depth, these differences are surely vital for any discussion of the grounds for the different jurisdictions of natural scientific and social scientific approaches to hate crime issues. Yet, our earlier critique showed how whenever objectivism’s subject/object dualism prevails, this unity-within-complexity is typically ignored. The result is a severe cognitive loss and all manner of interpretive naivetes and superficial analysis ignorant of its interpretive preconditions. The latter analyses of hate crime tend to gloss over the intentional aspect of the phenomenon itself, which our own intentional analysis needs to address and, ideally, remedy in an express, deliberate, and methodological-­ controlled manner. Our central claim here is that this neglectful omission represents a considerable cognitive loss for hate crime scholarship; while its correction and restoration through intentional analysis signify a positive cognitive and methodological gain. For example, what is concretely experienced during an incident is itself something intentional: this-specific-incident-meant-as … combining – not dissolving in a reductive manner – relations of sense with those of reference. Take, for instance, a crime victim’s experience of suffering eye injuries during a physical assault whose perpetrator was motivated by racial hatred. The physical shape of these injuries can certainly be sensuously experienced by the victim and others, in the sense of being seen with the eyes, and even felt with the fingers. But the form of motivated “purpose” that renders these injuries as those of a “hate crime victim,” or as “criminal injuries” – as opposed to some other designations in terms of “illness” or “an unfortunate accident,” or “a case of self-­harming” – is not itself amenable to this strictly perceptual-materialist form of cognitive grasping. The strictly perceptual sensory evidence arising from just looking at a victim’s outwardly visible injuries as one passes by her hospital bed does not – in itself – identify their socially-defined character as “criminal injuries.” Instead, this meaning arises non-sensuously from a certain presumption-driven interpretation concerning the assumed aims, guiding purposes, motivations, and will of the perpetrators as expressed by their words and deeds around the time they carried out the attack. We are now in a better position to provisionally define intentionality. The idea of intentionality expresses the insight that all consciousness-of, say, a hate incident, takes the essential form of consciousness-of-something-meant-as-X.  Such intentionality appears as the structurally-determined ‘directedness’ or ‘aboutness’ of our conscious states. For example, within every perceptual judgment about a specific hate incident, we can identify the following: 1. Subjective acts-of-judging and perceiving occurring as events and performances within the interior space of subjective consciousness. 2. A correlative presentation of something-being-judged and something being-perceived.1  For Husserl’s Logical Investigations: ‘in perception something is perceived, in imagination, something is imagined, in a statement something stated, in love something loved, in hate hated, in desire, desired, etc.’ Hua 19/1: 380. 1

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As previously discussed, none of this mutual correlation and dependencies become apparent to subscribers to the natural attitude. This is because their interpretive performances are prejudicially structured behind their backs by the rhetorical effects of an always presupposed subject/object dichotomy, leading to a rigidly either/or mindset regarding questions of both (inner)-subjectivity and (external)-objectivity. By contrast, our intentional analysis addresses the experience that everything we interpret as something meant, including entirely fictional and prejudicial stereotypes about victim groups or a victim’s recollections of her earlier abuse, are transcendent of subjective consciousness. These intentional objects are never “merely subjective” in a naturalistic sense dependent upon a subject/object dichotomy. Take the case of the perpetrator of the March 2019 New Zealand mass killings of Moslems at worship. If he was imagining something entirely non-existent, such as a fantasised “final victory” within a future race or religious civil war, then the imagined war itself is not experienced as merely internal to the interior space of his subjective consciousness. Whether experienced and intended as real or as purely fictional, whatever reference is intended, interpreted and construed is never itself a real element or material part of the victim’s inner subjective experience.2 This is because, contrary to the implications of any subject/object dichotomy, intentional experience always transcends its subjective interiority in its structurally-determined directedness-­towards the intended object of interpretation. The racial and religious war being referred to here is a potentially worldly event with a grim history whose cultural-linguistic definition, overall significance and meaningful implications transcend the inner psychological events of individual consciousness. Such transcendence occurs because of a basic structural character of intentional experience as a pointing-­beyond-­itself-towards-something-meant (and meant in a certain way and mode), via interpretive acts of perceiving, judging, imagining, etc. A phenomenological approach to hate crime involves studying and clarifying how such intentionality actually operates in practice within specific case studies. Indeed, for Husserl, intentional analysis amounts to an: ‘actual and genuine way of explaining, making intelligible.’3 Such analysis responds constructively to the need, uncovered by our earlier critique, to go back to and retrace the ‘intentional origins’ of phenomena (intentional objects) taken purely as such. This entails following up upon the incremental accumulation over lived time of sense-formations, which we previously we could only experience in a completely immediate way as already given elements of our whole intuited life-world.4 In sum, we suggest this doctrine of intentionality, as well as its its methodological offshoot intentional analysis, recognise subjectivity and objectivity, not as those mutually exclusive opposites projected by the natural attitude but rather as mutually dependent elements of lived e­ xperience.

 Husserl discusses this further in the 5th part of his Logical Investigations, § 11.  Husserl, 1970: § 49, 168; Hua 6: 171. 4  Ibid: 284, 378; Hua 6: 331, 386. 2 3

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Their correlations need to be carefully described, explicated and analysed in terms of their ongoing structurally-determined interrelatedness. For instance, the injured face and ribs of a victim belong only partly to her physical body. She experiences the latter as, in part, “there-for doctors” as something thing-like and objective with its characteristic biochemical qualities and familiar subjection to natural laws of causality, gravity etc. However, at the same time, another part of her bodily appearance within self-experience equally belongs-to and is there-for her subjective consciousness. As a phenomenon and intentional object, this lived-body takes shape for her first-hand experience as something-perceived, something-sensed, and inhabited as a vehicle for her personality to animate. The bloodshot eye the doctor attends to as something objectively real and physically malfunctioning is also “the same” eye she sees the doctor with and thereby senses her other injuries; it is the “same eye” with which she orients herself within her surrounding lived environment whose subjective spatial sense of left and right, up and down, in front and behind is centred around and constituted interpretively on the basis of her body’s current absolute “here-point”. In short, the example of the objective-­physical body-as-object whose other side is the subjectively lived-body-­ as-expressive-vehicle illustrates one of the two-sided correlations that intentional analysis seeks to clarify: the relationship between sense and reference. Our recognition of the insight that, say, a perpetrator’s interpretive acts “intend” an object towards which they are directed is a general truth-claim about consciousness. As such, it applies irrespective of whether this object itself appears to us as something existent in a strictly physical sense, like an injured eye, or existent as an entirely cultural, mythic or intersubjective entity, such as a victim’s belief she will soon lose both her sight and job. The latter category of “irreal” intentional objects, (i.e., cultural entities with no physical properties), includes all manner of prejudicial value-judgements and negative beliefs about a victim group. Our recognition and analytical response to the structurally-determined intermingling and mutual implication of subjectivity and objectivity within lived experiences of hate crime-related issues is surely vital. In particular, it opens the possibility of us developing a richly empirical and intentional analysis of the details and structural qualities of such experience over a succession of follow-up case studies developed under the auspices of the programme the present study sets out. What our phenomenology of hate crime can ultimately identify, describe, and explicate here by means of intentional analysis are, as already noted, relations of correlation. That is, the correlations between the inward-subject-facing and the outward-object-facing sides of our consciousness-of hate crime as something meant and referred to, while being meant in different modes of appearance to consciousness. Intentional analysis needs to address the question of how, for instance, does a victim’s “worryingly badly injured eye,” which she perceives and focuses upon in a mirror, correlate with her ongoing interpretive acts of perceiving and worrying about this eye in just these anxiety-oriented terms? A key research goal of intentional analysis is to develop a distinctly (social) science of the “inner life” of victims, perpetrators, police officers, prosecutors, witnesses, and legal officials, and to do so within a distinctly personalistic or

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subject-to-subject orientation. Our constructive response to the notorious lack of qualitative foundations that characterise positivist quantitative research is to reformulate the Husserlian alternative of intentional analysis of the interpretive work of such psychic lives and the interpretations that constantly arise from them. This alternative radically qualitative and experiential approach could be developed and deployed in a manner that at least a subset of hate crime scholarship could eventually find insightful. Perhaps, it could be perceived as useful for explicating the otherwise neglected founding qualitative level of (noematic) meaning and (noetic) meaning-constitution through the interpretive work of acts of perceiving, judging, imagining etc.5 This reformulation must result in a new “purely” experiential qualitative approach to the “inner life” of the consciousness of these individuals and groups: one which is clearly descriptively adequate to the intuited qualitative data that can be discovered by unprejudiced self-reflection upon their lived experiences.6 Such reflection and self-reflection can provide the vital source material for a distinctly two-sided form of intentional analysis of hate crime-as-lived addressing the ongoing correlation of whatever appears as an intentional-object-for-my-consciousness, with the underlying interpretive dynamics of the appearing-to-me itself.7 Such analysis of the correlation of whatness with howness entails describing and explicating, in optimal detail, these individuals’ subjectively-lived experiences. These experiences are explicated in terms of their intentional acts of being-directed-­ outward-beyond the realm of an entirely individualised and atomistic personal subjectivity and towards a surrounding subjectively-lived life-world. When the victim’s perceptual judgements address the downstream consequences of her injuries, we need to clarify how it is the “injured eye” itself – in its transcendence of her consciousness – has taken shape for her as an object-of her judgement. By drawing upon the descriptive contents of her lived experiences, our intentional analysis can then address and clearly illustrate the underlying distinction between: 1 . The meant object which is intended (the actually injured eye); and: 2. The object just as it is now being interpretively intended and construed in terms of its significance (“my painful eye as a worrying source of concern…”).8 By reference to empirical case study materials, we must further recognise and demonstrate how the actually injured eye as an intended object can itself become meant by interpretive acts in contrasting ways. For instance, this injury understood as signifying a distinct legal, and/or cultural and/or medical issue. In addition, even within a single homeworld’s interpretive framework, different types of interpretive acts (of judging, or desiring, fearing, perceiving, wishing,

 Husserl, 1970: 243.  Ibid, 238. 7  Husserl, 1960: § 4 and § 20. 8  See Husserl’s analysis in his Fifth Logical Investigation, § 17. 5 6

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q­ uestioning etc) may be directed towards “the same” intentional object. So, a single doctor can perceive the injured eye, anticipate its future phased recovery, recall the extent of its original damage relative to its “currently improved condition,” and then make a medical judgement about likely prognosis etc. In each case, it is “the same” injuries that are being intended by each of these interpretive acts. This is the case even though the act-qualities of each themselves contribute something distinctive to the total intentional object, such that the “worryingly injured eye” appears with supplemented by the distinctive and characteristic contributions of perception when it is being perceived, recollection when it is being recalled, etc. Intentional analysis is, therefore, required to differentiates between a common inner core of what “the injured eye” means for this victim, which holds good irrespective of the mode in which it is realised, and how this core appears with additional supplements depending upon whether the presentational mode is perception, judgement, recollection, anticipation. We can, therefore, identify both an enduring inner core of intelligible sense and a periphery supplied  – as a supplementary ingredient  – by a specific act-quality, such as perception or judgement. If a white supremacist perpetrator is seeking to contribute to a future imagined race and/or war, then the meaning of such wars makes up a core of the sense in question. However, the remainder of its sense shifts in its act-quality supplementary components when his consciousness shifts from imagining to anticipating and then linguistically signifying such an imminent war, or when it moves from wishing to perceiving, and then recalling this event. Within the content of the intentional object “injured eye,” intentional analysis can further differentiate the contribution of the interpretive act that presents it, the act-quality, from the relations of reference-towards the reality of the eye’s condition itself, i.e., act-quality and the act-matter. Here, we may come to appreciate just how the “worrying injured eye,” the intentional object of interpretive acts of perceiving, judging, evaluating, willing etc., becomes both modified and supplemented by the types of the interpretive act under which the injured eye is being apprehended. Where the intentional act is ‘the victim’s perceptions about her inability to see properly in the future,” intentional analysis must address how the core structure of this interpretive act has two-sides. It includes not only the intentional object ‘injured eye” but also the fuller or more complete intentional object: ‘this injured eye just as she is currently perceiving it (as opposed to recalling it or judging about it).’ In other words, the descriptive content of her experience our intentional analysis addresses and explicates includes both the specific act quality of being perceived, and the latter’s contribution to the unity of sense, the “whatness” of the eye experience. Such analysis then investigates the mutual implication and correlation between the following constituent elements of the total lived-experience: 1. Interpretive act. 2. Core plus and peripheral sense; and: 3. Whatever material or cultural reality the sense itself refers to, e.g., the injured eye itself.

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Our phenomenology of hate crime insists upon first recognising and then analysing the complex intentionality of the lived experience of incidents themselves. This means investigation how they “take shape” experientially as a result of the intentionality, more precisely, intentional interpretive performances, of consciousness itself. This involves researchers explicating precisely how the intentionality of our consciousness of a specific hate incident manages to unify the constituent elements of sense and reference. That is, the unification of, say, a hate incident’s meaning in terms of which “type” of hate crime is possibly involved here relative to a certain specific legislative, policy, or other, generic criteria for its identification, and its reference understood as that towards-which of all acts of consciousness of hate crime-related issues is directed by virtue of their intentionality. Contrary to objectivism’s subject/object dichotomy, the physical conditions of a victim’s injured eyes are experienced as realities that are clearly transcendent to – and independent of – her consciousness. When she closes her eyes and sleeps, she never has any sense that her eyes disappear despite neither being visible to her nor being available as sensory organs for sight. It is not her consciousness of having eyes that she experiences as constituting the realities of the eyes themselves. On the contrary, what her consciousness constitutes is the personal and perhaps interpersonal significance and implications for her of the real, material state and current functioning of these eyes experienced as pre-given realities transcendent to subjective experience. Her acts of perceptual judgement about the possible impact of these eye injuries and othe’s determinations of their downstream significance in terms of criminal prosecution, criminal injuries compensation etc., are clearly interpretive, sense-­ constituting and sense-construing acts of consciousness occurring only within the interiority of her mental life. Furthermore, intentional analysis can also address how the accomplished significance of these injuries as unities of meaning tends to co-­ join and mediate between the spheres of experienced objectivities and experienced subjectivity. Here, and contrary to any objectivist subject/object dichotomy, intentional analysis asks: “By means of which types of ongoing interpretive syntheses of unification-together, identification, association-between etc., are there constituted relations of reference-towards the empirical details of often transcendent, yet still subjectively-lived, material realities, such as a victim’s physical injuries?” Concerning the latter, our phenomenology of hate crime addresses the question of: “who did what, to whom, when, where and under which specific set of circumstances?” We need to study how such concrete material elements of the transcendent hate incident itself, its visual, auditory and tactile constituent parts, are given to our intentional consciousness of this incident primarily through the sensory element of our bodies’ perceptual experiences. Unlike the interpretive sense elements of the intentional objects, such material (or “hyletic”) elements are not themselves intentional. This remains the case even when such elements participate in the intentionality of the perception of a hate crime incident. The victim’s overall perception of her injuries is intentionally directed towards the significance of the injuries-as-perceived. Furthermore, the flux of sensory data of sight sensations striking her eyes is clearly a vital and enabling

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part of that overall experience. Yet, it is only the specifically interpretive part of this perception that is intentionally directed towards making sense of the eye itself as an intentional object, as the “perceived as such.” In this sense, it is more precise to refer not to the intentionality of consciousness as a whole but rather to the intentionality of the interpretive aspects of consciousness in which “raw” sensory data becomes instantly ensouled and animated with meaning derived from already possessed cultural-linguistic categories. It is certainly possible to abstract these categories, such as the “criminality” of hate crime, and then analyse them as “pure forms,” as “the concept of crime.” However, such abstractly conceptual analysis of founding categories remains problematic and artificial. It certainly fails to do justice to their actual and concrete mediating role within the intentional operations of lived experience of perceiving specific incidents. This role is to interact with non-intentional sensory content to generate an intuited sense of “what is now happening there.” Intentional analysis further addresses how – through the synthetic work of consciousness – it is possible for doctors, lawyers, nurses – as well as the victim herself – to each perceive “the same injuries” during their own distinctive interpretive performances. Throughout all these diverse interpretations, each homeworld-­ specific interpretation of the significance of such injuries can still contain a shared and overlapping core of sense. Without this overlapping core arising through synthesis, these different concerned parties would remain incapable of comparing and communicating about how “the same” injuries are being variously made sense of by each of them. Instead, the medical and police and prosecutor’s reports would, as a result of clear differences in their homeworld interpretive orientations and characteristic interpretive recipes, each be referring to entirely different injuries lacking any overarching “thatness.” Instead, what concretely appears is “the medical character of the victim’s injuries,” “their criminal justice elements,” whose differences do not negate the sense that each discourse is referring to “one and the same” set of physical injuries. Recognition of difference does not annihilate any overlapping measure of interpretively-generated commonality in terms of the intentional reference of each one. Here, we need to recall how we regularly and without fear of contradiction refer to different versions of “the same” melody appearing within – and instantiated by – a potentially infinite number of quite different arrangements. We can debate over which arrangement of a specific melody is the best one. Yet the vital point, which is easily overlooked by those who prioritise “difference,” is continuing assumption of all parties to this debate that each of them are referring to the same melody as realised in this, as opposed to that, arrangement of the song. What is interesting here is not that they are different versions, but that when listening to each one, we hear these differences without losing the continuing idea that what we are listening is a variation upon “the same melody” whose core overlaps with all others. Such unity-­ within-­differences (or differences-within-unity), cannot be understood in terms of the natural attitude’s rigidly either/or approach. The latter cannot avoid misunderstanding these relations of strictly relative differences and mediating commonalities as if they constituted mutually exclusive opposites.

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By means of this Husserlian model of intentional analysis, we can further illustrate that it is only through engaging in communicative interactions that we can arrive at a more or less “common” and “shared” understanding of these injuries’ cultural  – as well as legal and medical  – significance-for-us. Here, the injuries’ significance-­ for-her and their significance-for-doctors would constitute distinct subsets. With respect to each of these sometimes related – but forever distinct – homeworld orientations, our phenomenology can strive to analyse the patterned and structural relations of correlation between whatness and howness of phenomena within their respective interpretative performances. We can certainly investigate the underlying interpretive dynamics behind the correlations of ongoing sense-making (noetic) interpretive acts and the intentional or meant objects of such acts (noema). However, such analysis of structural correlations also needs to be supplemented by more intensive and detailed studies of the role of communicative interaction. It is important to address how, within different contexts of, say, victimisation and victim services, the intersubjective “sharing” of individual and group interpretations operate. For example, during conversations between doctors, nurses and police investigators, how over time does such “pooling” and communising of interpretations solidify an ever-more enriched core of accumulated shared understandings of cultural meaning(s), including the injuries’ distinctly medical, cultural and legal significance? Yet, what about contexts where words and deeds are used to negate communication, to destroy the very possibilities of communicative enrichment and expanded horizons between members of different subcultural homeworlds?

1.2  I ntentional Analysis of the Negation of Communicative Possibilities To date, we have focused on more ethically positive dimensions of intentionality relevant to the creation of a shared interpretation of, say, the medical and legal significance of a victim’s injuries. However, given our topic is hate crime as experienced, we must now emphasise how intentional analysis is also able to uncover sources of structurally-explicable miscommunication between members of different, and perhaps at least partly incompatible, homeworlds. Our starting point is that most – if not all – instances of reported hate speech fall outside the normative category of “sincere attempts at cross-cultural communication oriented towards the enhancement of mutual enriching understanding.” It follows that it is especially important for the present study to recognise the significance of systematic non-­ communication, and even the negation of communicative possibilities by deliberately divisive forms of hate speech and hate crimes for example. A doctor’s interpretive framework may, for instance, relate to the eye injuries in the same instrumental-technical and objectifying manner that, say, a car mechanic

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relates to a defective engine. By adopting a more personalistic subject-to-subject orientation, nurses and medical social workers may become far more concerned with “caring for the patient’s overall sense of relative comfort and well-being.” In addition, the significance of these injuries will, to some extent, take shape differently again for those officials involved in criminal injuries compensation determinations, and for others employed to organise and adjudicate upon criminal prosecutions. Phenomenological research can deploy intentional analysis to address instances of hate speech as a socio-linguistic expression of meaning linked to a type of cultural belonging to a specific homeworld: one that is characterised, to some extent, by a prejudicial mentality of resolute closure in relation to one or more victim group. Here, we are confronted with a type of expression that can be utterly and wilfully indifferent to even the possibility of communicative interaction and cross-­ cultural exchanges. In contrast to the coordinated perceptions and communicative interactions of doctors, nurses and hospital social workers with respect to a victim’s injuries, this is not a consensus-seeking expression aiming at the creation and consolidation of a central core of more or less “common understanding” Perpetrators of hate speech generally make no effort to performatively-accomplish any form of empathetic or sympathetic “fusion” of their own horizon of understanding with those of their victims. Indeed, to do so would be inconsistent with the very project of expressing hate speech whose prejudicial character is typically wilfully divisive and affirmative of dissonance. In the context of a perpetrator’s violent negation of even the possibility of empathetic and sympathetic co-understanding, our intentional analysis must explore how a victim’s experience of being abused, as well as the perpetrators’ experiences of carrying out such divisive abuse, can take shape as mutually inaccessible and incapable of effective two-way communication. (It remains an open question whether this claimed insight is subversive of the possibility of restorative justice.) The rosy presumption that the use of linguistic expressions or “speech acts” are primarily consensus-seeking because they aim at mutual enrichment of perspectives, appears flatly contradicted by the dissensus-oriented character of hate speech. It follows that in the specific context of hate speech and crime, intentional analysis of the correlation of the sense-content of intentional objects (their whatness) and clusters of underlying and interacting interpretive acts becomes especially complicated. Indeed, such analysis needs to address how the words of the perpetrator directed towards her victim both encounter – but also reconstitute and perpetuate afresh – radical “cultural barriers” between these two parties. We may also need to show how such “barriers” arise anew from these parties’ divergent interpretive schemas and memberships of incompatible homeworlds, which the perpetrator at least will almost certainly interpret as emanations from a relative and ever-threatening alienworld. For example, the emphatic experience of homosexuality as “a damnable sin,” which makes sense from – but perhaps only from – an emphatically religious orientation of a distinct subcultural homeworld, for example by Christians referencing Leviticus, may become strictly and literally inaccessible to others. Such

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i­ naccessibility is more radical than something that one can grasp but find incomprehensible. This particular determination, which may also be expressed as an abusive and hostile form of hate speech, may appear utterly alien and incomprehensible to another person, or alternatively as ‘understandable’ in context, even if unacceptable. This is especially the case where the latter’s divergent homeworld is characterised by a liberalised atheistic ideology for whom the eradication of all forms of discrimination is deemed to constitute an ultimate and overriding value. Each party may constitute the orientation of the other as a threatening emanation from an alienworld that demands to be suppressed – or even punished – by a higher power. Any discussion of this topic between these parties, including legal responses to “homophobic” hate speech, would probably (but not necessarily) fail to represent authentic dialogues about the significance of homosexuality: ones that could generate an overlapping measure of mutual understanding. This is because the would-be “conversation” would probably entail an empathy-free and entirely instrumentalised exchange of monologues oriented to scoring debating points at the other’s expense. Here, the parties would, in effect, talk past each other without meaningful engagement or mutually enriching learning experience about homosexuality occurring between their respective home and alienworld orientations. During a face-to-­ face meeting, there could almost certainly be a meeting of individuals but not their minds. In this respect, our phenomenology of hate crime can address the other side of its earlier account of how intentional analysis reveals the production of a core “sameness” of intentional object over different interpretative performances directed towards “the same” topic or object, which is akin to hearing “the same” melody within a succession of distinct arrangements. An intentional analysis must also explain the other side of the correlative dynamics concerned with generating and sharing a common understanding of controversial topics within the field of hate crime.

1.3  Intentional Analysis of Hate Speech as a Limit Case In a curious way, as a case study, addressing the negation of communicative interaction by hate speech allows phenomenology to refine and supplement its analysis of communicative aspects of intentionality by addressing the limit cases of systematic non-communication between home and alienworlds. Given their respective prejudicial starting points, neither side to a verbal exchange could take on board and substantially empathise with the divergent position of the other as even a potentially valid and contextually appropriate one. By focusing on the interpretive grounds for miscommunication and non-communication, by addressing how each sides’ interpretive acts of perceiving, judging etc. correlate with their own rigidly-conceived, closed off and dogmatically defended intentional objects, (homosexuality as perverted sin and homosexuality as an equal rights issue) intentional analysis can, in principle, offer vital additional insights. It can cast new light on both the details and

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structural conditions of underlying interpretive dynamics of prejudice generally, as well as hate speech in particular. An intentional analysis would strive to adequately grasp and reflect upon the structural characteristics of the ongoing synthetic unification of (already-­ intersubjective) questions of the intelligibility of cultural meanings of specific hate incidents. We can address how the latter are drawn from the cultural-linguistic resources of the interpreter’s homeworld and life-world, as well the exterior material references towards-which such acts of perception are typically directed. If we can grasp and characterise these structural correlations of noematic and noetic levels in fitting expression, that should prove to be instructive for better explaining a vital aspect of the underlying interpretive dynamics of prejudice at play here. Indeed, our intentional analysis must grasp the mediating role of intentionality conjoining the lived experience of consciousness-of hate crime, with those hate crimes we become conscious of and make sense of. Such analysis also aims to explicate the implications of such mediation of subjective and objective realms by the intentionality of consciousness. If successful, this Husserlian accountof intentional mediation could contribute significantly to remedying the rarely noticed various contradictions created by the natural attitude’s objectivistic-naturalistic reliance upon its own underlying subject/object dichotomy by the intentionality of consciousness. The remedy would consist of a restoration to hate crime scholarship of a vital sense of the interpretive complexities of analysing the coming-into-presence of the intelligibility of even the most empirical “straightforward” hate incident. In short, the noematic and noetic analyses that make up intentional analysis highlight, as well as addresses empirically, the correlation of the following relations: those of intended reference, categories of sense, hyletic sensory data, intentional objects, and, lastly, underlying interpretive acts of perception, judgement etc. Such analysis also strives for an experiential-interpretive explanation of the role of communicatively-­generated and sustained “shared” understandings of core meanings, as well as how non-communication – and even the divisive negation of the possibilities of cross-cultural communication – can be interpretively accomplished and reiterated by perpetrators of hate speech for example.

1.4  A  nalysis of “Sense Constitution” Through Temporal Synthesis and Passive Association Intentional analysis of the interpretive preconditions of both relative intelligibility and un-intelligibility also need to address the inner dynamics of ongoing meaning-­ constitution within both individual and communalised (or “intersubjective”) consciousness of hate crime-related issues. Amongst these dynamics are included an interplay of both active and passive syntheses of identification-of, unification-with, association-between, and differentiation-of, as well as intentional implicated horizons and core structures of interpretive acts. Here, our phenomenology of hate

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crime distinguishes between active and passive syntheses in terms of degrees of ego involvement; while also suggesting that both types involve ongoing acts of combining together otherwise different constituent elements to generate contingent unities of sense and reference with respect to, say, “the same incident” across divergent streams of lived experience. A distinctly “passive” synthesis involves the accomplishment of a combining together taking place without the active involvement – or directorial role – of an identifiable ego-subject to whom the interpretive outcome can be attributed as an aspect of the latter’s agency, i.e., the sense of “I can do this and do otherwise.” The latter type of ego-involvement is rather the defining characteristic of active syntheses.9 These two types of synthesis are not on a par. Instead, every type of deliberately-­ executed active synthesis, such as producing hate crime statistics or identifying who is a deemed an “insider” or “outsider” with respect to a specific legally-protected hate crime group, already presupposes the covert achievements and ground-laying work of prior passive syntheses. For example, through the performance accomplishments of passive synthesis, the ‘always already there’ character of our surrounding sensible world presents itself to us as already organised, as already predefined and socially constructed. We can further identify a distinction between primary and secondary forms of passive synthesis. The former consists of the ongoing unification of the streaming flow of my own life experiences, my experiences of real-world criminality, victimisation, policing and conducting hate crime research, into an ever-expanding unity of a single life-story. Throughout all its diverse contents, the latter is passively reconstituted anew through ongoing synthesis as distinctly “my own.” My experiences of being my parents’ child, a lover, commuter, worker, hate crime researcher, author etc., are all quite different in terms of their content. However, within my consciousness each of these phases becomes passively unified together as segments of a singular unfolding “life-history.” By contrast, the idea of “secondary passivity” refers to the life-experiences of the intersubjective and socially-constituted and renewed homeworlds of distinct peoples and subcultural groups as already pregiven, as always-already “there” (in their different ways). For both (relative and designated) “insiders” and “outsiders,” these cultural worlds take shape as already pre-formed intersubjective realities with no single “author” or “creator,” as it were.10 Here, our phenomenology of hate crime needs to investigate how both active and passive forms of ongoing syntheses can interact. Such interaction can generate our sense of experiencing “one and the same” distinctive incident (differentiated from a similar synthesis of associated as “like but not the same”).

 For Husserl, the original unification of the stream of conscious experiences within inner timeconsciousness is a case of passive synthesis Husserl 1982: § 118; Hua 15: 203. So too is the type of synthesis which presents sensory patterns as already unified in a certain fashion through our ego-free interpretive work of “association.” 10  Hua 15: 203. 9

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A related research theme is sense-constitution more generally. The element of the experience of a victim’s injuries made up of sense-content and a generally intelligible meaning can be “seen” – in the sense of “intuited.” However, it cannot be literally “seen” through the sensory data that strikes our eyes. Sense-constitution accomplished through the ongoing mediation of our experience of these injuries by such culturally-derived sense-content, is highly significant here. It means that the sight of these bodily injuries themselves can immediately appear to us as “this hate crime victim’s horrific injuries.” They can take shape for our consciousness precisely through a passive synthesis of a flux of rich sensory content (my sight and tactile sensations), as well as more structurally-stable cultural-linguistic forms (such as cultural-legal categories of “hate speech, “hate crime,” “assault” “criminal injury” etc). Only on this basis of the ongoing interaction of form and content can we say that the phenomenon of a hate incident arises as an outcome of something that was purposefully-accomplished and effected as “a criminal act” by “a criminally-­ motivated perpetrator.” Here, we may be able to distinguish a perceived hate incident from a situation where similar bodily damages had been “caused accidentally.” In other words, as a perennial structure of consciousness itself, such intentionality and associated active and passive syntheses generally succeed in unifying together both (inter)subjective categories of meaning, and objective-transcendent dimensions of lived experience to, for example, differentiate various types of experience. A Husserlian constitutive analysis is also able to address how – on what underlying interpretive basis – this synthesised sense of unity of a single incident (or perpetrator or victim or trial etc) itself arises. We need to ask how such phenomena come to be both generated and sustained over time as an ongoing interpretive performance-­ accomplishments. Our phenomenology of hate crime analyses how each intentional object and interpretive acts of perceiving, judging, recalling etc., which realises the former, exhibits a characteristic contextual “horizon:” one that comprises both core and peripheral aspects, as well as relations between them. Finally, experiential aspects of inner temporality can also be explored by means of Husserlian constitutive analysis. Here, our phenomenology of hate crime could, for instance, usefully address the sedimentation of retentions (aspects of an incident that was experienced “just now” and which have yet to sink back into memory). Our approach can also investigate the creation and influence of various habitualities, including vicious prejudices against one or more victim group, which have over time become ever-more entrenched, deep-seated, and habitualised responses to the presence of members of specific victim groups. Through noetic analysis and then later generative analysis, each of these interpretive levels of consciousness would need to be optimally investigated in terms of their temporal origination, streaming forward and overall becoming. Such analysis brings together the temporal dynamics involved in both the sinking-back of retentions of an incident and the selective reactivation of “triggered” memories of an earlier incident by means of passive association. It is no less important for a phenomenology of hate crime to clarify these underlying processes of passive association as an interpretive performance. The involves

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a situation whereby the very sight of X, such as the place where a victim was once racially abused, “triggers-off” a perhaps unwelcome recollection of Y, i.e., the abusive incident itself as previously lived through subjectively. As a result, Y can become effectively “relived” in whole or part. Clearly, such intermixing and cross-referencing within the living present of aspects of a victim’s inner-temporality, of past, present and emerging future life, requires intricate analyses that can only be touched upon here. For example, a more fully-developed phenomenological approach to hate crime can address the strata and temporal dynamics of relevant interpretive practices both successively in themselves, and also in terms of all their living interconnections, mutual influences, and dependencies upon other related phenomena. Our programmatic statements here illustrate the width depth, and intricate complexities of the research programme opened by our proposed phenomenology of hate crime. In sum, the noetic element of intentional analysis raises a host of extremely intricate and far-reaching research questions and issues concerning the different ways in which hate incidents become more or less intelligible as such. This is because over time such incident become constituted in terms of their meaning(s) and downstream significance in different synthetic ways, including by means of passive association.

1.5  T  owards a Phenomenological Cultural Psychology of Hate Crime as Experienced as a Distinctly Qualitative Social Science Previously we criticised the objectivism and naturalism of one-sided positivist approaches to hate crime for failing to address the distinctly cultural and qualitative dimensions of this topic as experienced. One reasons for this neglect stems from the detrimental influence of both materialist metaphysics, and a related prejudice that reality is exclusively and inherently physical in nature. We argued that adopting such an approach generates contradictions that cannot be solved without transcending its own underlying presuppositions. In this section, we aim to show that a revised phenomenology of hate crime can begin to remedy this omission to the overall benefit of hate crime scholarship. Indeed, if the ambitious reformulation of Husserlian experiential approaches to hate crime could be achieved in practice through a succession of follow-up studies and case studies, this could provide scholarship with a valuable additional perspective: namely, that of a phenomenological cultural-social psychology of hate crime purely as experienced, built up over time through a succession of radically qualitative empirical research studies. Such a reformulation and applied research programme could supply a far more convincing, experientially-grounded account of relevant aspects of perpetrators and victims’ inner lives. These aspects would include the role of conscious and non-conscious motivations and motived responses to the realities of victimisation, as well as opportunities for victimisation.

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Ideally, the cumulative results of a coordinated series of empirical phenomenological research studies and case studies would over time allow hate crime scholarship to develop an enhanced and more nuanced understanding of the structures of the inner lives of those involved in – or affected by – hate crime and hate speech. These inner lives would need to be grasped in terms of their characteristic motivations, instinctive drives, underlying (inter)subjective concerns, as well as both the emergence and possible negation of degrees of partial, selective and restricted “empathy” and “sympathy” for specific others. If hate crime and speech can be understood as, in part, a radical negation of even the possibility of empathetic and sincere communication and mutually supportive interaction with members of a designated alienworld, then we first need to better grasp the nature of the possibilities that are being negated here. It would be useful to identify the specific motivations for these more or less deliberate acts of negation. It may also prove important to explain how perpetrators and their supporters may decide to “neutralise,” “explain away” or “rationalise” such motivated negations of social solidarity and cohesion. Yet, these responses can coexist with an appreciation that hate speech and crime are widely socially accepted as having an anti-social and unacceptably discriminatory character. Those who abuse members of victim groups on a discriminatory basis do not necessarily hold the view that “discrimination in general is a good thing.” Indeed, perpetrators and their supporters may be especially sensitive to populist questions of “majority rights” including allegations that, say, white “working-class” residents of council estates are themselves discriminated against by vote-seeking governing elites. The other side of this research issue is to explain in distinctly intersubjective terms how specific and localised subcultural homeworlds of extreme prejudice can first arise and then – in various ways – be both sustained and renewed. Here, it is possible to investigate how members of these homeworlds may positively encourage – or at least not effectively sanction – the behaviour of perpetrators of hate crime and speech, not least by granting enhanced subcultural status and prestige to especially “remarkable” hate crime attacks. Within the sphere of inner life, our phenomenology of hate crime must also strive to clarify the distinctly “affective” (i.e., desire and interest-driven) tendencies with both groups and individuals or lone perpetrators. What is first needed is to develop a more generic analysis of these tendencies of attraction. How does attraction direct us towards whatever “allures” our attention towards, say, a specific aspect of hate crime, including specific victims, and thus away from those other aspects within our perceptual field? How, without active ego-involvement, do the latter become passive relegated to mere “background phenomenon?” Academics and advanced postgraduate students can get a sense of this phenomenon by answering the apparently simple question: “what first motivated you to choose hate crime as your main research topic?” The proposed radically experiential and qualitative social psychology, or psychologically-­informed criminology, of hate crime that is opened up by Husserlian analysis, is clearly distinctive.11 Compared with more conventional alternatives

11

 There is the disciplinary question of whether even the most open-minded psychologist or crimi-

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within the two relevant disciplines that too-often remain shaped by naturalism, objectivism and aspects of the natural attitude, this Husserlian approach aims to develop radically different methodologies, research methods, and founding premises. This is especially the case insofar as the more mainstream approaches within criminology, psychology, and the so-called “sociology of deviance” have, to some degree, been shaped by an alliance of naturalism and objectivism. One results has been the reiteration of one-sidedly materialist orientations towards this topic: one that remains neglectful of its specific and distinctly cultural and intersubjective dimensions concerned with how founding categories of meaning, as well as heir complexes of distinctions, become reiterated.12 More generally, Husserl recognised the importance for social science of analysing a series of interconnected distinctions resting upon the complex differences between the experiential realms of material nature and culture. It is from the latter that we can differentiate between those natural-scientific and qualitative-cultural studies disciplines, including phenomenological social science, which are relevant to the study of hate crime.13 By implication at least, what hate crime scholarship needs is a new type of culturally-grounded social psychology: one forming part of a universal ‘science of the spirit’ that, according to Husserl, is itself neither “psychophysical,” nor “natural scientific.”14 Husserl even complains that objectivist forms of psychology cannot even grasp the difficulties that stem from their own “naturalisation” of psychological experience, which treats ego-subjects as primarily material things and processes, as merely a physical substratum. Yet, awareness of this problem – and its self-contradictory downstream implications  – is itself highly instructive for our phenomenology of hate crime. Indeed, it points the way forward to a phenomenon that is itself vital for a phenomenological approach aiming to grasp the experience of this topic as an intersubjective phenomenon: one that is itself interpretively co-constituted with others through a mixture of active and passive syntheses over inner time, i.e., towards a distinctly transcendental psychical experience. The key point here is that recognising the problems arising from naturalism’s blindness to the vital  – yet suppressed  – qualitative foundational dimension is, in itself, highly instructive and suggestive. At this point, we can now better appreciate that what is needed is to further advance radically qualitative forms of hate crime scholarship that strive to be

nologist would identify this approach as psychological or criminological in any conventional sense. 12  In Ideas 11, Husserl partly endorses Dilthey’s critique of naturalism in psychology despite his continued allegiance to a modified form of objectivism that prevented his appreciation of phenomenology. Husserl, 1970: 296; cf. Husserl, 1952:376/Hua 4: 365. 13  Husserl supported Dilthey’s critique of objectivism with psychology, and the latter’s naturalistic self-interpretation, as anticipating that of phenomenology. He also praised Dilthey as someone who for the first time recognised an essential distinction here and first provided a lively awareness of the fact that traditional psychology, being a natural science of the psychic, is incapable of providing for the concrete sciences the foundation they require according to their specific essence. 14  Ibid, Ideas 11, S.48.

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optimally receptive to not only the latter’s interpretive quests but also their need to secure that form of interpretive-experiential grounding which is entirely lacking in the natural attitude’s “common sense” orientation. A vital task for a fully-developed Husserlian social psychology of hate crime is to grasp the implications of the culturally-linguistically mediated quality of all parties’ experience of this topic. Our earlier critique of the prejudicial operations of objectivist orientations has additional instructive implications for our evolving phenomenology of hate crime. For instance, earlier we suggested that there is a compelling argument that, when describing and explicating whatever is experienced as a hate incident or crime, i.e., the sense-contents of that experience taken purely as such, we have no choice but to deploy a mediating cluster of interrelated ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and conceptual distinctions. Furthermore, reflection upon lived-experiences suggest that these ideas and concepts are, in themselves, emphatically ideal, as opposed to being physically “real,” in their essential and defining characteristics. A victim’s injured eye as that which is intended as the reference of interpretation is consistently experienced as biophysical. However, this injury’s status as an intentional object amounting, for criminal justice purposes, as “evidence of grievous bodily harm” has no weight, height, density, mass, chemical composition, causal dependencies, etc. The involvement of such idea-driven interpretive work is, we have argued, necessary even for the very identification, as well as the later descriptive explication, of whatever is identified and observed as a “hate crime-related issue or question.” It follows that, at this late stage of our present study, we need to reflect upon how reflective experiences of ongoing mediation of lived experiences can exhibit subversive – yet for us highly instructive and constructive – implications for challenging and overcoming the natural attitude’s objectivist premises. Such categorial mediations by qualitative intersubjective conceptions and conceptual distinctions need to be expressly addressed just as these take shape and become reiterated within our own phenomenological investigations into the phenomenon of hate crime. In particular, it is important to illustrate empirically how even our most apparently immediate and fact-based perceptions of, say, “the facts” of a hate incident are typically and continually mediated by pre-conceived categories and categorial distinctions. It follows that a fully-developed phenomenology of hate crime would need to show the experiential details of how these perceptions are mediated by a cluster of interrelated and pre-defined values, beliefs, cultural assumptions and societal prejudices. In turn, taken tothese comprise of what amounts to a historically and socially specific socio-linguistic interpretative framework handed down from one generation to the next.15 Hence, traditional prejudices relevant to hate crime issues can exercise  The problem with objectivism is that it assumes a pregiven world as primarily existent. However, what is truly primary is the sense-constitutive (or “transcendental”) (inter) subjectivity whose interpretive performances accomplish it. Husserl, 1970: § 14: ‘it is not the being of the world as unquestioned, taken for granted, which is primary in itself … rather what is primary in itself is subjectivity, understood as that which naïvely pregives the being of the world and then rationalizes or (what is the same thing) objectifies it.’ Husserl 1970: 69. 15

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a mediating effect even at the very heart of the most personal and intimate self-­ experience and self-understandings of individual identities. In turn, both the recognition and encouragement of such subversion and implosion forms a vital dynamic part of the process of achieving a necessarily critical transcendence of every aspect of the natural attitude: something that characterises a core part of the overall mission of Husserlian phenomenology.16 Our earlier critique of spurious immediacy showed clearly that the very conceptions naturalistic analysis deploys are themselves derived not directly from our lived experience of the physical reality of hate crime and material/objective “facts” about such realities. Instead, these mediating conceptions arise from the performative-­ accomplishments of coordinated and synthetic acts of consciousness, primarily the interpretive work of perception and its modifications in acts of recollection and signification. These types of interpretive act fall within the scope of a distinctly Husserlian cultural psychology of the inner life of those who are involved in – or affected by – hate crime and its implications. Indeed, an entire PhD project could usefully investigate how these interpretative acts operate within the prosecution and trial process of hate crime perpetrators to selectively reconstitute a legally relevant sense of: “what happened, when, where, by who and with what consequences.” Only those area of hate crime research whose subject-matter comprises or overlaps with corporeal being, such as medical responses to victims’ physical injuries, fall outside the scope of a Husserlian cultural psychology. These instead fall within the competences of materialist-oriented empirical investigation. It this material-­ corporeal realm of physical objects, events and processes, which our Husserlian approach must recognise as being subject to causal laws, the causal explanation of which falls outside the scope of distinctly qualitative Husserlian social scientific research methods and methodologies.17 A phenomenology of hate crime can address all manner of interpretive issues concerning a victim’s hospital admission, categorisation, perceived prioritisation and successive medical interpretation by a range of professionals and administrators. However, its jurisdictional competence stops short at distinctly medical-physiological research questions concerned the empirical adequacy of medical diagnosis, intervention, drug treatments and prognosis. We need to better justify the radically qualitative social science research methods of our Husserlian social psychological approach to hate crime, as well as to appreciate the limits of its jurisdictional competences. This quest means expressly ­characterising – and thereby delimiting – the parameters of “the social,” as distinct  Dermot Moran, Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction Cambridge: CUP, 2012: 298. 17  This is not to say that such issues are outside the scope of phenomenology more generally of which social science is but a subset. There is nothing contradictory about Husserlian studies of natural scientific consciousness, including the intersubjective dynamics of underlying paradigm shifts for example. Husserl’s complex discussion in the “origin of geometry” is instructive here. It is contained as an appendix to Husserl 1970. See also L. Hardy and L. Embree, Phenomenology of Natural Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992; Elisabeth Ströker, The Husserlian Foundations of Science, Boston: Kluwer. 1997. J.  Kockelmans and T.  Kisiel, Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. 16

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from, say, the “world of nature.” What is integral to and falls inside and outside the delimited borders of the distinctly “social” part of our Husserlian “social psychology” of hate crime? For Husserl, in contrast to the physical and natural world, the worlds of criminal justice, culture, fashion, religion, art, education, sport etc., are distinctly human spheres. As such, they are continual reconstituted anew, often with modifications, on the basis of living and handed-down intersubjective traditions by means of interpretive, linguistic and communicative forms of human-to-human interaction. Within each of these homeworldly suborders of the social world, research methods devised for material non-social phenomena, which are oriented towards generating purely causal explanations of material processes and entities, are necessarily inappropriate. So too, are attempts to differentiate, say, the judicial interpretation of a perpetrator’s “hostility” towards a victim with what is “in itself hostile” independent of this or any other type of interpretation of its significance. Our approach cannot emulate a purely conceptual jurisprudential analysis of legal categories abstracted from all contextual and interpretive practices, and then analysed in isolation from lived experiences, such as the “concept of crime,” the “concepts of hate crime and discrimination as such” etc. On the other hand, the very differentiation of what is constituted as belonging to social and natural determination is itself an interpretive practice not determined by nature itself. It follows that our Husserlian research methodology must recognise that perceptual and other judgements about hate crime categories made by, say, police, academics, prosecutors, victims, witnesses, and judges cannot be “factually inaccurate” in the same way that, say, a medical judgement can involve a complete misdiagnosis. Only the latter can be empirically inaccurate in the sense of demonstrating a failure of coincidence between the judgement about the object, and evidence from the external and independently existing and functioning object of medical science. For these reasons, Husserlian research methods must operate with entirely internal standards for assessing strictly relative, provisional and contingent truths about hate crime as lived. Furthermore, we must adopt models for studying the would-be verification of interviewees’ claims about this topic, for example, that both embody and respect the vital differences in kind between the natural and social sciences. That two different Appeal Courts may first reject and then reinstate a lowers court’s interpretation of a piece of hate crime legislation does not mean that this interpretation began life as factually accurate, then became factually invalid before finally becoming accurate again. Being in accordance with the facts is simply the wrong criteria. It is the authority of the court, more precisely it’s senior judicial staff, that alone determines the recognised truth-value of its determinations. The upshot of these points is that it is important to explore some specific interpretive contexts where the relevance of the differentiation of natural from social science, as well as the downstream implications of this distinction for the actual conduct of experiential research, become more readily apparent. In short, the challenge for any fully-developed phenomenology of hate crime is to provide experientially-compelling grounds for two of its main foundational claims:

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1. That it constitutes a distinctly social science that is different in kind from a natural science. 2. That our approach, therefore, requires entirely different, qualitative-interpretive methods of research: namely, sense-explication and constitutive-generative analysis, to both demonstrate and fulfil its scientific status. The vital argument here is there can be no viable distinction between appearance to the consciousness of members of a cultural tradition, and the independent qualities of the being of whatever appears. In other words, the difference in kind between being/appearance that allows for a strictly empirical type of verification and falsification is viable only for the natural but not the social sciences.18 This cluster of apparently abstract methodological insights has direct relevance to our phenomenology of hate crime. They suggest we must exercise a degree of caution before succumbing to the ever-tempting idea of classifying perpetrators’ prejudicial and ethically appalling understandings of victim groups as a form of “false consciousness.” Our own critique of ideological prejudices reiterated by the natural attitude has good reasons to critique their dogmatic expressions, their resort to question-begging forms of circular reasoning, and confirmation-bias; it also has grounds for criticising such expression’s more general lack of reflective self-­ awareness and resulting interpretive naivetes. These tendencies, we have argued, culminate in their manifestation of an ideologically-problematic form of acceptance-­ captivity. Our internal critique has also provided experiential evidence and reasons to support each of these interrelated critical judgements about the impact of the natural attitude. However, at no point can we say these prejudices and prejudicial expressions are somehow examples of “false consciousness” is akin to how that of those who assert the earth is flat, etc. In sum, a phenomenology of hate crime draws distinctly methodological lessons from our earlier critique of the various difficulties and contradictions of naturalism recognising that such lessons support the need for hate crime scholarship to adopt radically qualitative research methods. The latter edge progressively towards the practice of immanent (as opposed to external) criticism of both the content and reiteration of those hostile expressions of prejudice that are familiar to hate crime scholarship.19 In addition, these methods strive, in a reflexive self-critical manner, to delimit the scope of their own jurisdictional competences, and then restrict the conduct of hate crime research to working within the resulting provisionally delimited boundaries of the social sciences. This is a vital lesson drawn from the implications of those contradictions stemming from the over-extension of natural scientific quantitative methods of research into the social and cultural realms.

 Husserl, 1965: 82.  Immanent critique hoists its target by the latter’s own petard potentially finding it wanting relative to criteria that the target itself either advocates, or at least implicitly relies upon. Hence, there is no need to import and superimpose external benchmark standards that may be alien to the approach itself. 18 19

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In turn, a Husserlian critique of objectivism points the way forward to a series of other distinctly experientially-grounded research issues relevant to our evolving phenomenology of hate crime. Certainly, at the reflexive self-critical level, hate crime researchers must concede that they must already possess and deploy at least generic forms of lived experiences to acquire the specific conceptions of “hostility,” “group,” “discrimination,” “crime” etc., which inform their empirical analyses. Any supposedly empirical and entirely “fact-based” studies are misleading insofar as they do not admit to their reliance upon qualitative foundations that evade capture by their own methodological tools. Yet, our Husserlian critique has shown that these conceptions are not themselves justified by the methodologically-controlled observation and analysis of “facts” as conceived in objectivist-naturalistic terms. Indeed, the difficulty here points towards a distinctly constructive lesson. Namely, the need for a distinctly (self)reflective type of experiential cultural psychological analysis: one that is concerned with the structural preconditions of meaningful lived experience as revealed by in-depth and extended forms of intentional analysis. That is, a self-critical type of conceptualisation of underlying interpretive dynamics that transcends – but without disregarding – the intuited contents of the lived-experience of hate crime incidents. For reasons our critique has already demonstrated, the spuriously immediate form of purely empirical studies needs to be transcended through a recognition of the pervasiveness of cultural mediation. Nevertheless, the intuited contents of empirical experiences must themselves still be preserved precisely as expressly grasped mediated contents. We can further develop this movement of the transcendence of spurious immediacy by focussing upon the question of what it is that first makes the intelligibility of such intuited contents of hate crime related-issues possible in the first place? This question focuses attention upon the identification and analysis of the interpretative preconditions of these concrete lived experiences rooted in questions of cultural meaning and distinctions between meanings. We recall from our earlier critique that a contradiction arises from how, according to objectivism, “verification” of researchers’ claims necessarily appeals to a realm of rational deliberation and judgement about research methodology. Yet, the latter realm entirely and of strict rational-logical necessity transcends the sphere of “facts” and empirical knowledge of “facts” about hate crime, at least with respect to objectivism’s distinctly metaphysical-physicalist conception of the nature of “facts”. The vital claim that all valid knowledge is fact-based contains this inherent contradiction byt appealing to a realm of possible knowledge and knowledge-­ generating practices of cognition that is not itself fact-oriented. The key lesson here for our alternative and radically qualitative Husserlian approach to what and how questions developed through an extended form of intentional analysis is to optimally harness and further boost the momentum of this contradiction towards transcendence. In turn, this element of transcendence entails striving to liberate the possibilities of rational and open deliberation, debate and judgement from their general subordination to a certain presupposition-driven conception of “the facts about hate crime.” Once liberated in this way, these cognitive tendencies and possibilities are p­ otentially

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freed to contribute to our own diametrically-opposed Husserlian approach to this topic. Here, a vital lesson for our phenomenology of hate crime concerns the cognitive significance and limits of lived experiences of hate crime as a source of insight and knowledge. Certainly, a distinctly phenomenological approach needs to include an empirical experiential dimension developed in the form of intentional and later generative analysis. As already discussed, the former involves providing a descriptive explication of the intuited content of the “whatness” of whatever is experienced as a hate crime-related phenomenon, followed by an analysis of how this whatness of “hostility” etc. correlates with the underlying howness achievements of various ongoing acts of interpretation. Generative analysis follows up on intentional analysis by supplementing its overly static and methodologically individualistic structural analyses of correlation with wider historical and temporal questions of inter-generational transmission of cultural traditions and intersubjective relations more generally, including those related to communication. Nevertheless, a key lesson from our critique of the natural attitude’s objectivism is that we cannot confine our analysis to this richly intuitive experiential dimension if selfcontradiction is to be avoided. Questions about credible knowledge cannot be answered adequately by simply inspecting the supposedly direct and unmediated contents of empirical-material experiences of hate incidents, for example, in terms of sensuous data derived from whatever was seen, heard, felt on the skin etc. This need for transcendence is itself an interesting and vital phenomenon. It arises because, within the experiential realm itself, we are confronted by distinctly phenomenological questions combining sensations, categories of meaning, meant intuitive contents, and our striving towards rationality. Within this realm, we encounter clues and traces pointing towards a transempirical element of valid knowledge about hate crime. These elements comprise already implicated categories of meaning, value and purpose that are embedded, often latently, within the cultural traditions of specific homeworlds and the wider life-world that both mediate and cannot be reduced to purely individual experience. Our Husserlian critique points towards the vital importance of not only resisting the naturalisation of consciousness and its intentional objects but also expressly and systematically addressing consciousness-of hate crime in both its empirical and trans-empirical constitutive roles and dimensions. A phenomenological cultural psychology of concrete lived-experience must also expand its horizons to include a phenomenology of critical and reflexive forms of historically-embedded human reason.

1.6  R  ecognising the Centrality of Interpretations and Acts of Interpreting The last chapter’s arguments and analysis suggested that for researchers to presume that hate crime occupies, and forms part of an ‘objective world’ existing in itself, is the hallmark of a naïve objectivism: one that remains not only unaware of its own

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interpretive preconditions but also prone to structural crises whenever proponents fail to suppress consciousness of such reliance.20 The present section claims that there are vital lessons to derived from the explanation of such contradictions. Our earlier Husserlian critique demonstrated that attempts by objectivist orientations to avoid or discount interpretive questions are always doomed to failure. This is because they generally rely upon certain preconceived interpretations of both the meaning and scope, as well as perhaps the cognitive value and ethical implications, of distinctly qualitative categories related to the topic, such as “group,” “victim,” “discrimination,” “criminality” and “hostility.” Objectivist orientations also characterise themselves in ways that all-too conveniently disregard all evidence of their actual status as presupposition-driven interpretive perspectives saturated with clusters of prejudice that contradict their own claims to embody certain conceptions of impartiality and objectivity. As a result of appreciating these contradictions, our diametrically-opposed phenomenology of hate crime must learn how to positively and fully embrace openness towards both surface-level and deep-levels of interpretation. We must finds ways of embracing interpretive practices not only as a topic for the noematic side of intentional analysis (hate crime as interpreted as this not that), but also as an ongoing process of coming to an understanding of topics at every level we encounter them, including within the sense-making activities of encountering itself investigated by the noetic side of intentional analysis. For example, a lesson for our phenomenology of hate crime is the need to expressly address as a core research question concerns how the interpretive nature of how the natural attitude – together with those institutional practices its shapes – manage to continually gloss over and deny the interpretive quality of their own interpretive practices and associated relativities, contingencies and provisionality. But at this point, a more positive and constructive question arises: How can our Husserlian approach characterise the different ways in which these performative-­ accomplishments are being carried out based upon their own interpretive grounds and preconditions? For example, during immersion into the natural attitude’s object-­ facing orientation towards an incident being interpreted, we generally remain transfixed on that towards which our interpretative work is oriented. Under the influence of objectivist and naturalistic assumptions, we become fixated upon the material qualities of what we take to be “the incident itself,” allegedly stemming from various objective facts about “what really happened.” For present purposes, this subjective condition of being-transfixed-by, and subjectively-­absorbed-into, “the facts” of a hate incident is particularly important, not least because it exemplifies ideological aspects of the natural attitude. By contrast, our critical exposure of such acceptance-captivity represents a key part of this study’s major claim that, because of the application of the natural attitude’s premises, hate crime issues are re-interpreted naively as matters-of-objective-fact. Yet, in

20

 Husserl, 1970: §§ 9–14.

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truth, these issues take shape for us primarily as distinctly intersubjective questions of interpretation and reinterpretation. Although valuable in its own right, this Husserlian insight is also rich in downstream implications for our own alternative approach. The latter must come to more fully appreciate how all perception, even social scientific observation, is a seeing X-as-Y, (e.g., seeing X victim as nothing-but-Y where Y comprises a derogatory slur-category, or where Y is “victim.”). Furthermore, our earlier critique of the natural attitude’s spurious immediacy clarified how the as-structure itself necessarily derives from a nexus of pre-formed cultural categories and cultural distinctions always-already mediating the interpretative framework of the perceiver. This insight underlies our earlier critique of how, in flat contradiction to its self-image, objectivism itself necessarily operates as a culturally-embedded presupposition-driven interpretive approach, richly pre-loaded with its own value-judgements and naturalistic commitments. Yet, to keep faith with its own prejudices, this is an approach that bizarrely denies its own status as such. It follows from this critique that our phenomenology of hate crime must recognise the reasons why the natural attitude’s objectivism forever transforms itself into a conflicted, even contradictory, phenomenon: one whose verbal claims to have grasped the facts about hate purely “as is,” strictly objectively in the sense of objectivism itself, are fundamentally contradicted by the implications of its own interpretive deeds. They are contradicted by “the fact” that all the natural attitude’s evidence-based judgements about hate crime are selective (re)interpretations not of extra-subjective “facts themselves” but of the intelligibility of meaning-saturated lived experiences. The positive and constructive implications of this critical insight are that a core and unavoidable research goal for our alternative phenomenological approach seeking to transcend a purely negative critique is to further extend our programme of intentional analysis. This means that we must first explicate the intelligibility of these noematic what-qualities, then the underlying noetic “how dimension” of sense-constitution before finally the egological for-whom dimensions of hate crime as lived and experienced. These research issues can be simplified in terms of a striving to answer three questions: 1. What is being interpreted as, say, a hate crime, an instance of hate speech and their various subcategories? 2. How is this process of selective interpretation being performatively-­accomplished synthetically through a cluster of ongoing acts of perception, recollection, anticipations, judging etc.? And: 3. Which qualities of ego-subjects, including value commitments, habitual prejudicial beliefs and specific societal interests are shaping, by both their acts and omissions, this meaning-generative dimension of interpretation and reinterpretation? This final question goes beyond the static, methodologically-individualist and structural correlation analysis of intentional analysis. In other words, a further lesson our approach needs to draw from the momentum of objectivism’s contradictions is the need to systematically retrace and recover an

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awareness of the underlying interpretative processes and practices whose constitutive dynamics and performative-accomplishments first enable something to take shape and become intelligible as, say, “a racist hate incident.” Through such noetic analysis of “the how” of hate crime phenomena, we can address how underlying social-cultural prejudices and biases of observers, including social scientists such as ourselves, become typically buried, dogmatically immunised from a challenge, and glossed over in ways that, for us, merit uncovering and critical analysis. This, in turn, leads us on to the question of how best to defuse and neutralise such concealed prejudices? – the theme of our next section.

1.7  The Neutralisation of Prejudice We cannot respond to the contradictions stemming from objectivism and naturalism merely in a descriptive-analytical manner. On the contrary, we need to address critically the very idea of mediating pre-judices, identifying “pre” in the sense of being possessed already, and “judices” in the sense of judgements. The latter are shaped by the contents and implications of what has already being presumed and taken-for-­ granted as somehow self-evidently true as a matter of course. Understood in this way, our phenomenology of hate crime can come to recognise how the dominance of the natural attitude’s objectivism and naturalism means that their own characteristic types of prejudice and presupposition-driven interpretations can, ironically, be pushed off the agenda of studies of hate crime. This displacement occurs despite – or even because – of the clear relevance of the theme of prejudice to the topic itself. By contrast, our exposure of these entrenched and dogmatically-­ insulated prejudicial presuppositions represent a suggestive precedent for a more general critical questioning and exposure of all types of prejudicial modes of interpretation specifically relevant to hate crime issues. There are further constructive lessons to be drawn for our Husserlian approach. Arguably, coming to an understanding of hate crime issues entails the study of applied prejudices creating outcomes widely experienced as “harmful” in many ways and at different levels. If so, then surely every type of prejudicial understanding implicated in the research field itself, including those of natural attitude’s objectivism, should be be opened up to intensively questioning and critical study. This means that we must become and remain as receptive as possible to the various ways in which prejudicial understandings, which are rooted in a mixture of not only objectivism and naturalism but also more specific homeworld-based xenophobic reactions to outsiders, tend to operate. It follows that our phenomenological of hate needs to address and publicly expose precisely how a range of prejudicial understandings internally shape the perceptual judgements not only of perpetrators of hate crime and speech but also, to some extent, those of police officers, magistrates, legislators, judges, probation officers, and – of course – hate crime scholars such as ourselves. It is also important to develop methodologically-informed ways to optimally purge these express and implicit prejudices in the ways we have discussed.

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However, it no less important to avoid resorting to deceptive clichés about the “false” consciousness or the reflectively denunciatory language of pathology (he is “homo-phobic,” she is “Islamo-phobic” etc), as well as the crass demonisation of those who use certain slur words to characterise victim groups. These reflections take us further along the road to a genetic and generative type of phenomenological critique of prejudice understood as a culminating phase of constitutive-generative Husserlian analysis. The type of critical methodological approach involves developing a cognitive orientation towards the pre-possession of a specific, handed-down, and culturally-acquired interpretive frameworks peculiar to distinct homeworlds. In turn, such potentially prejudicial frameworks are made up of an interrelated cluster of more or less shared subcultural beliefs, concepts, assumptions, and interests, each of which needs to be explicated. It is vital to demonstrate how a subset of the latter, properly identified, will include one or more vicious types of prejudice directed against legally-protected victim groups. The Husserlian research question that arises at this point concerns the exposure of structural-interpretive preconditions for prejudicial characterisations of members of victim groups. It is necessary for us and our collaborators to clearly demonstrate how, in principle, it becomes possible for us to carefully explicate the ongoing interpretive constitution and renewal of the sense-contents of these prejudicial characterisations. However, it remains an open question whether we can realise this ethical goal in a manner that is itself as free as possible from traditional prejudicial assumptions and presuppositions about “(ab)normality,” “(in)appropriateness” and what is “(un)natural” that are relevant to hate crime. It follows that, as social scientists, we must recognise how this imperative to minimise our own prejudices represents a key constructive outcome of our earlier Husserlian critique of naturalism and objectivism: one that is, rich in implications for the onwards development and unfinished business of our still-evolving phenomenology of hate crime. In particular, this highly relevant insight concerning the importance of clarifying the interpretive preconditions of ongoing prejudice is not a moralistic superimposition from the outside, an external critique. Rather, the insight stems from our own hard-won grasp of the self-cancelling results of the natural attitude’s objectivist claims, which we have already set out. The collapse in credibility of objectivism’s various presuppositions and presupposition-­driven claims under the weight of their own contradictions is not, therefore, an entirely negative insight. On the contrary, it alerts us to some of the interpretive, methodological and even ethical complexities of striving to provide our readers with experiential grounds for arriving at truths about hate crime phenomena that, without being value-free, timeless or trans-contextual, are still as reasoned and evidence-based as humanly possible.

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1.8  R  ecovering a Sense of the Intersubjective Life-World as an Experiential Source and Resource The analysis of empathy in the context of a communalised and communalising life-­ world also overlaps with Husserlian investigations of the lived experience of intersubjectivity, and being-intersubjective, which is discussed in considerable detail in the 5th of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations.21 Take, for example, the question of whether expressions of members of a national minority can be adequately grasped by outsiders? Perhaps, this task could be realised in principle insofar as these expressions can be appropriated by – and assimilated into – the established terms and the interpretive matrix of a wider more encompassing and shared “lifeworld?” Yet, we have to ask whether the overarching life-world can, at most, only partially and imperfectly “bridge” various home and alienworlds barriers by supplying them with a possibly unifying – or at least overlapping – “common ground?” A focus upon intersubjective experience is vital for our phenomenology of hate crime because of the role it plays in the constitution of individual and group “identity” (and associated “identity politics” associated with xenophobic expressions of, and familiar responses to, hate speech). Our phenomenology of hate crime recognises how the performative accomplishments of our intersubjective culture constitute a sense of both ourselves and others as existing ego-subjects equipped with defining identity characteristics, as well as all that we encounter as objectively existing in the material spatiotemporal world. We must, therefore, uncover and describe the wider context for the underlying and intersubjective interpretive recipes and structures that enable these performative accomplishments to be carried out.

1.9  Defining Our Life-World The Husserlian conception of lifeworld encompasses two related elements. First, a belief in the pre-givenness of a worldly context to our personal and interpersonal worlds that provides a type of warranty for the reliability of our lived experiences. Secondly, there are those socially established cultural meaning of objects, events, other people (as group members and individuals) and societal norms, values and orientations. This second aspect of the life-world is itself differentiated into various clusters of common and communalised homeworlds and, set against and relative to these, comparative alienworlds. From the perspective of a homeworld insider, there are numerous existing and unknown alienworlds which could only become known if one travelled the world and encountered every existing culture and subculture. The homeworld and lifeworld provide us with a system of meanings that at least partly are embodied in a common language and set of linguistic practices. An insid See also Hua, 13–14. D. Zahavi, ‘Beyond empathy: Phenomenological approaches to intersubjectivity,’ 8(5) Journal of Consciousness Studies, (2001): 151–67. 21

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er’s condition of being equipped with such an interpretive framework allows them to experience and conceive of both their surrounding world and themselves  – together with their place within the homeworld, in the type-categories provided by this shared language. The term “life-world” thus denotes the way the members of one or more social groups immersed in subcultures and linguistic communities structure the world into a range of familiar categories of objects, events, people and institutions.22 Whether as perpetrators, victims, witnesses, police officers or academic researchers, all of us belong – albeit in distinct ways – to a culturally-emergent and subjectively-relative “life-world.” Indeed, the latter provides us with the already given “horizon” (i.e., interpretive framework) and an all-pervasive shared medium through which we experience and make sense of all that we encounter. As the always shifting dynamic horizon of all our lived experiences, the lifeworld provides a background context. This is context on which all meaningful things, persons and events appear to us as variously arranged in concrete spatial and temporal relations whose here and now are relative to perceiving/co-perceiving ego-subjects. For such subjects, the life-world is already-always “there” as a pre-given and largely taken for granted horizon; it operates as the contextual “ground” for all our shared experiences that occur within its overall and all-encompassing experiential nexus. As such, the life-world is not only a life-medium but also a surrounding cultural context: one which lives with us, as it were, in the sense that nothing can appear in our lifeworld except as we are currently living, interpreting, and experiencing its presence for us as something meant and meant in certain ways. For all its historical relativities of content, forms and styles, the life-world remains a type of basic ground and ever-present background horizon of – and backdrop to – all our experiences, beliefs, presuppositions, aims, prejudices, convictions and concerns. The life-world is a realm of our interests, concerns, purposeful group and individual activities as well as customary habitualities.23 Indeed, each of these elements of our homeworlds and homeworld orientations relies upon a ‘certainty-­ of-­the-world,’24 in the sense of the pre-scientific world of immediate experience. Contrary to the subject/object dichotomy that generates so many self-cancelling contradictions for an objectivist orientation towards hate crime, this life-world straddles both subjective interiorities and external objectivities, in a way that facilitates, even grounds, intentional analysis. As humans, we appear at least to date to have a general tendency to create and live in specific homeworld communities of various kinds, to belong to collectivities that, in turn, belong-to and take their localised place within the wider more encompassing context of the life-world. As humans we are both expressly “homeworldly,” and more implicitly “life-worldly” creatures forever enmeshed in social bonds and normative obligations to others of different if sometimes ambiguous kinds.

 Hua 6: 126–138, 140–145.  Husserl, 1970: § 36. 24  Ibid: § 37. 22 23

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What is vital for our phenomenology of hate crime is to appreciate how the life-­ world is a world of pre-scientific and largely taken for granted understandings, belief and cultural presuppositions: one that is expressed as a “mentality” of set attitudes, a subset of which includes all manner of prejudices directed towards outsiders and alienworlds more generally. In this sense, the life-world touches upon the interiority of our subjectivities in an especially affective and emotionally-resonant manner, including with respect to questions of identity and identity-related prejudices. The life-world is also a ‘subjective-relative’ realm of “doxa,” that is, commonly-­held customary beliefs out of which arise all manner of assumptions, opinions, attitudes and prejudices. The life-world is the world as immediately or directly experienced in the subjectivity and intersubjectivities of everyday life; our surrounding environment “as lived” prior to any reflective representation or analysis, including that of our phenomenology of hate crime. As a subjectively-lived cultural surrounding environment, the life-world is sharply distinguished from the supposedly “objective worlds” of the positive causal-explanatory sciences deploying quantitative methods of research and analysis. The life-world is a social, political, historically-changing, and cultural environment where ego-subjects (re)interpret, communicate together, strive to realise their goals in a purposeful manner, and more generally socially interact and engage in numerous communal spheres. Clearly, we have said enough already to indicate that the life-world is an essentially intersubjective world of various homeworld communities. It takes shape for us as a context of all contexts in which even those who exemplify the characteristics of alienworlds nevertheless appear, like me, as also belonging to the wider life-world understood as a world of and for “other people.” Given this complex and universal intersubjective dimension, the notion that every individual has their private little life-world is nonsensical. The current version of the life-world is always experienced as something essentially singular and inclusive as the: ‘one, existing world,’25 such that: ‘the plural makes no sense’ when applied to it.26 The life-world is also that all-embracing realm of the living of everyday life in which we can encounter all known and still unknown or partly known realities about hate crime – or any other topics – that catch our interests and attention in line with our own style of existing within a general personalistic orientation. The life-world also provides a cluster of contextual “horizons” and interpretive grounding for all practical human activities, including the social scientific activity of conducting phenomenological research into hate crime.27 It is also the realm in which through our physical bodies we are “thrown” into a specific social, historical and cultural context to encounter not scientifically exact and precise conception of space and time but rather a subjectively-relative and dis-

 Husserl, 1970: 317; Hua 6: 296.  Ibid, § 37. 27  Husserl, 1970: § 34e, § 37. 25 26

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tinctly inexact form of “lived-space” and “lived-time,” that is, spatial and temporal relations as subjectively experienced and construed. The experienced life-worlds of the research subjects of our phenomenology of hate crime include the legacies of their past lives as well as emerging and projected future life. It also includes cultural dimensions of being-with-others as ‘co-subjects’ sharing a communalised societal existence within an interpersonal, as well as purely personal, cultural world. The latter can include those often highly localised subcultures of implicit and explicit prejudice whose established life-styles often predispose a subset of their members towards hate speech and crime, which are of special interest for present purposes.28 Such prejudices are learned from others as a subset of a wider orientation through the research subject’s belonging first to a family, local schools and subculture and then – more indirectly – an entire self-defined “people” existing within one generation’s characteristic cultural milieu and specific historical period.

1.10  The Primacy of the Life-World While the life-world contains a differentiation of the worlds of culture and nature, it appears as something that is prior to and more primordial than, any secondary radical either/or division between the physical and psychical-cultural realms of experience. This primordial and founding status arises because of how our life-world continually supplies the qualitative categories, the ‘meaning-fundament’, for all other possible social and subcultural and contextual homeworlds, including even the worlds of science, sport etc. However, this primacy can be masked, even apparently reversed by tendencies to elevated science and technology as higher-level autonomous and directing spheres of life.29 It is this “subjective-relative life-world”, or lived environment, that provides the qualitative foundations, or “grounding soil,” for the supposedly more “objective” world of natural and social sciences, including criminological approaches to hate crime issues.30 For instance, scientific conceptions of, say, “hostility” and “discrimination” derive their (sub-)propositional content and thus their reference to social reality to distinctly and emphatically prescientific conceptions that their research methods and practices merely formalise and “naturalise.” This dependence becomes especially clear in periods of a paradigm shift in which common sense notions of, say, sexual or gender-related “normality”/“abnormality” become subject to contestation and revision. Here, the only available defence for psychiatric classifications

 Husserl, 1970: 184; Hua 9: 488.  Hence, the proper order of primacy can become forgotten, even reversed by a type of scientifism that ignores its dependency upon the wider the life-world for, say, distinctions between normal and abnormal behaviour, sexuality etc. Ibid, § 9 h. 30  Hua 6: 134. 28 29

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of homosexuality as a “mental illness” involves making reference to the earlier prevailing state of prejudices within the prescientific lifeworld. While causal-explanatory social and natural sciences originate in – and also rely upon – the interpretive resources of the life-world for their basis qualitative foundations, they are not social sciences of the life-world. This is because of how they ignore the experience of everyday life as lived. This is one of the points we identified in our critique of the loss of qualitative foundations in a previous chapter. The objectivism of both the natural attitude and some forms of positive science of hate crime obscure not only the origin of their qualitative founding categories of “prejudice,” “discrimination” and “hostility” in the (inter)subjective (co)perceptions of the life-world but also the life-world itself. In this sense, our efforts to restore a sense of the primary of the surrounding world as a lived environment just as it takes shape within our consciousness of it is itself a vital constructive response to the results of our earlier critique of objectivism’s lack of qualitative foundations. Yet, as noted above, all forms of objectivism remain oblivious to the life-world’s primacy relative to whatever the natural attitude’s orientation deems to count factually as “the natural/intrinsic.”31 It follows that a key lesson for our alternative Husserlian approach is the need to encourage ever-wider acceptance of the primacy of the life-world within analyses of hate crime-related issues, including a retracing of the cultural-linguistic origins of prejudicial stereotypes and related attitudes. Attaining such wider acceptance would signal a win-win outcome. It would not only represent a cognitive and scholarly gain but also a welcome contribution to the subversion of core parts of the natural attitude’s credibility. When seeking out the underlying qualitative grounds for any definition of “discrimination” or “hostility,” it is the life-world that supplies us with: ‘a realm of original self-evidences’32 that, for all practical purposes, appears absolutely valid. Yet our version of the life-world also remains historically specific; it is therefore shaped by all manner of historically-developing tendencies towards, say, technological and scientific innovations that are then afforded a generalist or lay understanding. So, in one sense, the life-world is prior to the worlds of social and natural sciences and provides the primary context out of which these secondary realms evolve, Yet, in another sense, aspects of science and technology selectively feed into the historically-evolving life-world itself, not least for example via computers and mobile phones. Thus, as part of social science, our phenomenology of the life-world itself – like every other scientific practice – belongs to the life-world as second-level sub-order.33 Because one of the major contradictions arising from objectivism lies in its failure to grasp cultural mediation, as we previously argued, then it follows that we must recognise the importance of dense and linguistically-embodied cultural traditions and localised subcultural homeworlds, which both exhibit the invariant form

 Arguably, this primacy is both existential and epistemological.  Ibid, § 34d. 33  Ibid, § 34e. 31 32

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“life-world.” So, another related type of contradiction that our phenomenology of hate crime strives to grasp, overcome and ideally resolve concerns how objectivism both denies – and yet still implicitly relies upon – the hand-down communal interpretive resources of the life-world, such as a stock of qualitative generic categories. Previously we characterised this omission under the heading of a loss of qualitative foundations, without addressing the life-worldly character of these foundations. These interpretive resources involve a collective intersubjective “pool,” as well as an underlying ongoing “pooling,” of actual and possible acts of perceiving and co-­ perceiving to create an expanding cultural repository. The latter is based upon the interactions of the novel and specific intuited content(s) on the one hand, and – on the other – more generic handed-down categories. The latter include all manner of cultural and sub-cultural stereotypes, a subset of which are directly relevant to hate speech and hate crime issues, including possible “counter-categories” that can potentially challenge and disrupt more prejudicial stereotypes.

1.11  Life-World and Home and Alienworld Tensions The more generic life-world provides for the possibility of members of homeworlds to experience outsiders in two ways. First, reductively and prejudicially within homeworld terms alone, which may include all manner of stereotypical and derogatory classifications a subset of which comprise hate speech type slurs. The secondly alternative is more expansive and perhaps less prejudicial; it allows an outsider to be experienced in personalistic terms as a fellow-subject belonging to different communities but also sharing in an overlapping common life-world that, in some cases, can bridge cultural barriers. The life-world provides a more general framework that of specific homeworlds tied constitutively to alienworlds, and whose structures of meanings allows for the mutual translation of their respective languages and vocabularies (with their different associated “homeworlds”) into one another. The respective lifeworld serves to effectively “predelineate” a “world-horizon” of actual and potential future experiences of its members in the form of normative expectations for a given group member at a specific time and place, under various circumstances and “environments.”34 These normative expectations follow typical patterns embodied in a system of often implicit intersubjective standards, ­precedents and customary conventions. In turn, these determine what, for diverse communities, is judged to counts as “normal” or “abnormal” under “normal conditions.”35 A subset of these normative standards and expectation, which may include all manner of prejudicial stereotypes familiar to students of hate crime, are confined to a specific subcultural “homeworld.”36 However, these remain subject to trans-­contextual val-

 Hua 3/1: 100.  Hua 5: 135 ff, 142. 36  Hua 15: 141 f, 227–236. 34 35

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ues, such as would-be universalistic anti-discriminatory standards, that determine a “general structure” that can claim to be ‘unconditionally valid for all subjects.” Such more generic standards define an overlapping sphere of common values, include respect for human dignity, allowing representatives of each of our current world civilisations to endorse them ‘in spite of all relativity.’37 As a result of the rightful primacy of the life-world, multiple homeworlds, set against comparative alienworlds, can only appear as secondary subsets of this primary, wider, and pre-given “environing world.” This is important because one of the tendencies towards xenophobic hostility to outsiders, to those identified as coming from or embodying alienworlds, stems from a parochial treating as absolute the beliefs of highly relative homeworld orientations. As, in part at least, a communalised world of homeworldly beliefs and customary prejudices, the life-world exhibits a type of socially-constructed cultural expectations of compliance with standards of (for us strictly relative) “normality.” However, and as we have already discussed, these are regularly misconstrued dogmatically by subscribers to the natural attitude as a field of “universal objectivity” and unquestioning certainties of fixed belief. As a result, for Husserl, these are regularly made to appear: ‘fixed in advance.’38 To overcome the contradictions of objectivism, as well as to better develop our own phenomenological approach of hate crime, we must address the role of the life-­ world as both a medium and intersubjective life-context comprising a cluster of specific and evolving shared meanings, values, prejudices, norms and purposes of various kinds.39 These norms include expectations of an absence of discriminatory singling out, as well as perpetrators’ rationalisations for discriminatory abuse. Together, these continually – and generally without conscious deliberation – work to shape and reshape how we make sense of, and thereby respond to, whoever or whatever takes shape for us within our “surrounding world.”40 The question of how the significance of examples of hate speech and hate crime arises out of – and exercises an impact within – specific life-world contexts, and how certain handed-down cultural and subcultural understandings both allow, as well as block or selectively channel, inter-cultural and intra-cultural communicative interaction, would all fall within the scope of life-world analysis.

 Hua 6: 142.  Husserl 1970: § 36. 39  For Husserl: ‘In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each “I-the-man” and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this ‘living together.’ We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world... Obviously this is true not only for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have the world pre-given in this together, belong, the world as world for all, pre-given with this ontic meaning... The we-subjectivity... [is] constantly functioning.’ 1970: 108–9. 40  See Husserl, 1970. 37 38

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So too are vital ethical and political questions concerning how this interpretive matrix can both enable and impede the possibilities of empathetic identification within and across cultural differences. Here, we recall how each individual perpetrator, victim, witness and others involved in  – or affected by  – hate speech and crime necessarily carry with them their own subjectively meaningful homeworld understood as a subcultural suborder of the wider and encompassing life-world. The meaning of their actions and responses remains broadly intersubjectively accessible within certain limits. This meaning can be communicated and thereby shared or “pooled” with the experiences of other homeworld insiders. However, as a subset of the life-world, such homeworld-specific understandings, some of which may be highly prejudicial or driven by prejudice against one or more victim group, will always be limited by an “alienworld.” Those identified as members of alienworlds appear as other-than-one-of-us on, for example, or racial, religious, gender-related, ethnic or other grounds related to legally recognised hate crime victim groups.

1.12  The Importance and Place of Life-World Analysis Life-world analysis, assisted by a comprehensive understanding of empathetic understanding of all manner of others who differ from ourselves with respect to gender-attributes, race, nationality etc., is perhaps the culmination of our phenomenological approach to hate crime. This is because the intersubjective life-world, which is experienced as the concrete surrounding world environment of everyday lived experience, a mundane “everyday world” of mundane pre-reflective experience,41 remains a perennial fixture of all lived experience, not least the world opened up the prejudices of the natural attitude. The pre-scientific and pre-reflective life-world is not consciously constructed but is rather concretely intuited and on hand as a pre-given’ and always-already-there’ surrounding background context whose perceived familiarity allows us to take for granted its core structures, levels and presuppositions.42 It follows that our phenomenology of hate crime should insist that – despite all contrary tendencies – the life-world should be recognised as having an overall primacy and first-order founding status out of whose extensive interpretive resources, including qualitative understandings of the meaning and scope of “hostility,” “discrimination,” “criminality” etc., all natural and social scientific approaches to hate crime develop.

 In Ideas I § 28, Husserl addresses ‘my natural surrounding world’ as somewhere in which I always find myself and which supplies the necessary background context and interpretive grounding for all our intentional acts directed towards our environment. See also the more extensive analysis in Husserl 1960: § 58 and especially Husserl 1970: § 40. 42  Husserl, 1970 § 9 h; Hua VI: 50. 41

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The recovery of the life-world is vital for a phenomenology of hate crime because it draws our attention to the importance of historical change, the dynamics of the handing down of traditional understandings from one generation to the next, and centrality of distinctly cultural and intersubjective questions. In turn, this focus offsets the tendencies of intentional analysis to become overly static and structural at the expense of more dynamic, mobile and variable elements of hate crime as lived. It is also important in providing clues to intersubjective aspects of prejudices relevant to hate crime issues, not least the interpretive mechanisms through which a subsoil of presupposition-driven interpretations can become habitualised, taken-for-­ granted, and thereby freed from being made thematic, transparent or accountable.43 Life-world analysis helps us better explain the ideological phenomena of acceptance-­captivity characterised by our “common sense” condition of being completely absorbed in and bewitched by routines of our familiar world that we become captivated and entangled in it’s taken for granted prejudices. Such analysis also allows us to develop a study of hate crime as one part of a more general social science of the various social entities and types of routine interpretive practices and procedures that, precisely as experienced (inter)subjectively, comprise a vital segment of the life-world.44 The recognition of the life-world as a primary phenomenon, helps our phenomenology of hate crime overcome tendencies towards static and methodologically individualistic forms of structural analysis. The latter forms of intentional analysis focus on the correlation of noema/intentional objects with individual’s sense-­ constituting noetic acts of perception, recollection, judgement etc. This framework has proven insufficiently attentive to a range of questions that the experience of hate crime raises in a significant manner. That is, questions concerning time-­ consciousness, historical change, intersubjectivity, embodiment, everyday communication and intergeneration dynamics. As a result, life-world analysis amounts to a welcome recognition that consciousness of, say, hate crime-related issues, is not solipsistic and individually isolated. Instead, it has a communal, intersubjectively-­ shared elements and related intergeneration dynamics arising from its belonging to a shared cultural-linguistic tradition and clusters of subcultural homeworlds contrasted to alienworlds. In analysing and describing the life-world as the directly experienced context of all more specific contexts, including homeworld/alienworld relations related to cross-cultural conflict, non- communication and violent negations of the possibility of empathetic co-understanding, our phenomenology of hate crime can make a constructive contribution to scholarship. This contribution is possible if we address and explain how all academic social and natural scientific theory and knowledge about this  – as well as every other topic  – originates from the life-world’s interpretive resources, it’s stock of qualitative categories of “criminality,” “discrimination,” “disability,” “transgender,” “hostility” etc.

43 44

 Ibid: 124; Hua 6: 127.  Husserl, 1970: § 38.

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Life-world analysis also strives to discover and explicate the mundane phenomena of the life-world itself made up of individual, group, social, perceptual, and practical experiences. We need to ask: How does this surrounding and all-­ encompassing nexus take shape for us within our experiences of it? Phenomenology strives to clarify how the experience of the generally taken for granted life-world is itself possible. We can do this by analysing the following: 1 . The displacement of awareness of the life-world. 2. The phenomena of lived time, including the life of prejudices as “habitualities.” 3. Space and spatial contexts. 4. The embodiment of persons who “animate” their linguistic, communicative and other bodily expressions. 5. The sheer givenness  – and even pre-givenness  – of our worldly lived-experiences. When entangled within the world-views that arise from the natural attitude’s subscription to objectivist prejudices, we generally remain oblivious to both the presence and priority of our surrounding life-world. We fail to expressly acknowledge it as a spatial and temporal context of meaning, significance, intelligibility, cultural identities, customary expectations, and collective values. Although passive, such a mental state of complete or partial oblivion and acceptance-captivity serves to perpetuate ideologically-resonant forms of interpretive naiveté: one that, as we have already suggested, is strategically important for the credibility and reiteration of objectivism itself. Because of such naiveté, the natural attitude prevents subscribers from recognising the very need to apply phenomenological approaches for investigating and understanding how this intersubjective, and therefore intrinsically “unnatural,” realm of social-cultural relations, mediates our understanding of hate crime-related issues. Indeed, we fail to realise how the always-already presence of our life-worlds helps determine the intelligibility of these issues themselves.45 One conclusion we need to draw here is the need to better understand the conservative and tradition-­ driven forces within the life-world that resist our own phenomenological analysis of the underlying dynamics of prejudice relevant to hate crime issues.

1.13  Recovering the Life-World as Cultural Renewal The opening paragraph of Husserl’s first published Kaizo article from 1923 states: ‘Renewal is the universal call in our present, sorrowful age, and throughout the entire domain of European culture’. There was a need to renew European and modernist values to overcome tendencies towards irrationalism, cynicism, pessimism

 On intersubjectivity as the collective and integral being-with-others dimension to our subjectivity, see Husserl, 1970: 184, 202, 264. 45

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and despair about cultural and social possibilities.46 A phenomenology of the life-­ world developed according to the personalistic subject-to-subject orientation: one that rejects the prejudices reiterated by naturalism, objectivism and the stereotypical objectification of persons more generally that is a hallmark of hate speech in particular. A phenomenology of the life-world renews a distinctive if immanent normative ‘idea of humanity’ as a measure to assess the types of dehumanisation and populist xenophobia and other forms of irrationalism that are all-too-familiar to students of hate crime and speech. Such a phenomenology both advocates and seeks to demonstrate during its own practices, vital principles of rationality as standards to shape our individual, familial, group and collective lives in an optimally autonomous manner.47 This means that a ‘rigorous science’ of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which belongs to the social sciences and humanities, can help us restore and renew the ideal of a life lived according to what has been demonstrated to be reasonable standards that are apt to our personalistic orientation at its best.48 The latter would strive to become an authentic humanising science of humanity understood in critical and normative terms oriented towards the critique of irrational beliefs and prejudices as these appear in all forms of sub-cultural, cultural, institutional, social, ideological and political activities and interpretive practices. As a humanistic approach, the phenomenology of the life-world developed according to a post-objectivist and post-­ naturalistic orientation would take the form of a rigorous social science of the ‘human spirit.’ The latter needs to successful orient itself towards the ‘inwardness’ of each individual’s conscious life and most personal sphere of subjectivity, recognising how each human being deserves to be understood and treated as an ‘ego-­ subject.’ We must recognise how each individual exists in possible relations of mutual empathy (but also its denial) with other humans establishing and renewing communities together through their common intersubjective, social acts. This rationalistic striving remains impossible for as long as the natural attitude dominates everyday life, and its objectivist and naturalistic variants prevail in academic, cultural and artistic life. For Husserl, a phenomenology of the life-world developed in a distinctly personalistic orientation allows us to criticise prejudicial aspects of our culture from the standpoint of ideal norms based upon our ideal concept of authentic humanity understood as a historical telos and goal.49 Husserl introduced the notion of life-world in the posthumously published second volume of Ideas, under the heading of “Umwelt”, translated as “surrounding world” or “environment”. The life-world takes shape as an intersubjective world of entities, events, persons and social groups that are “meaningful” to us in that they

 Hua 28: 3. Hua 27: 4.  Hua 27: 6. 48  Ibid. 49  Ibid:118. 46 47

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are able to exercise a “motivating” force upon us and present themselves to us under familiar egocentric aspects, including preconceived group identity characteristics. Any individual oriented according to the “personalistic attitude” will develop a cluster of such culturally meaningful relations and objects. The personalistic attitude, as already discussed, is encouraged by a recognition of the importance of the life-world as a source of individual, group and societal motivation, as well as interpretive accomplishments. Following Husserl, we can ask: ‘how did I hit upon that, what brought me to it? That questions like these can be raised characterizes all motivation in general.’50 The entities exercising motivating force upon and over us derive their corresponding significance to certain cultural forms of intentional consciousness and intersubjective processes of interpretation oriented towards practical utility and appropriateness to pre-defined and already-valued purposes, such as meeting communal needs for shelter, heating, clothing, food and clean water.51 Husserl’s own critique of naturalism and objectivism culminates in his analysis of the life-world and assertion of the vital importance of understanding all that appears within it as a manifestation of “objectivity” is actually a constituted result of (inter)subjective activity of interpretive performances drawing upon the life-­ world’s categories and distinctions. In this sense, the life-world’s resources operate as the qualitative grounds and interpretive preconditions for all that appears as “the facts” about hate crime.52 So, one of the lessons here is the requirement for our phenomenological approach to highlight and emphasise the reasons for the centrality of communalised interpretive dynamics in every aspect of hate crime as experienced. Another is to explain the reasons why it is often difficult to grasp these dynamics from within a condition of acceptance-captivity encouraged by the natural attitude as a precondition for the latter’s reiteration. The Husserlian imperative is to investigate the life-worlds of our research subjects precisely as these are being experienced, starting from the present and from intersubjective dimensions of our own consciousness and empathetic co-­ consciousness. Such investigation must strive to become as free as possible from the prejudicial biases of all such reductive tendencies.

1.14  The Life-Worldly Embodiment of Our Lived Bodies A vital part of life-world analysis extends to the topic of the subjectively and intersubjectively lived-body, that is the human body precisely as a phenomenon appearing to us in our consciousness of its presence. Our earlier critique of the tendencies towards materialist reductionism was careful not to simply invert the prejudices of

 Hua 4: 222.  Ibid: 186f. 52  Husserl, 1970: Part II §§ 25–7. 50 51

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the latter by developing a cultural reductionism in which the materiality of lived experience is disregarded in favour of a focus on supposedly disembodied and purely cultural-ideal phenomena. The latter would be so fixed on the meaning that victims of hate crime give to their situation that it would blindly pass over the experience of suffering bodily harms, whose material characteristics cannot be interpreted into and out of existence. The implication of this point is that a detailed descriptive and structural analysis of subjectively lived embodiment, together with the latter’s implications, remains an important constructive response to the issues raised by our earlier critiques. For example, through their bodies and the latter’s self-moving or assisted “mobility,” the research subjects of our phenomenology of hate crime appear experientially as “localised” in specific clusters of spatial relations. They take shape for us as “here” and then as “there” and then as …These subjects appear – more generally – as part of real material nature, with all its all-too-familiar physical vulnerabilities and bodily dependencies, for which, say, the materialist orientation of medical science is, as already discussed, entirely appropriate. The more difficult question for of our phenomenology of hate crime is a topic entirely disregarded by naturalistic approaches: namely, the localisation of “the person” within the lived-body of victims, its place “above” the layers of physical nature. As Husserl notes, we “see” the “animating personality,” with its ability to feel things like pain (materially as well as emotionally) through the more directly visible bodily side; it appears as something of a surplus: one which – contrary to naturalistic reductionism – is irreducible to that bodily aspect of a purely physical organism addressed by doctors for example. Yet, the difficult question to answer is where is the residence of the “being-a-person” side, which animates our bodies while also receiving and “sensing” bodily sensations as “its own”? As Husserl recognises, others appear experientially as neither pure persons nor as inert and uninhabited physical objects. Rather, they appear within our consciousness of them as living beings somehow “animated” by more or less “expressive” personalities that exceed the purely physical dimensions which they animate. We also need to clarify the intimate  – yet also non-reductive  – relationship between the psychological “soul” of the person, and the latter’s body, their co-presence within the lived experience of both fellow individuals and even higher animals. Hence, there is no question of our phenomenology simply inverting naturalistic reductionism. That is, of simply asserting the supremacy of the social and cultural sciences and humanities, and the irrelevance to hate crime studies of natural sciences, including those of medicine and clinical psychology. Human beings appear to themselves experientially as clearly a complex mixture. There is a mixture of material nature, addressed by medical services and the biochemistry, physiological and neurological sides of medical science, which overlaps with sciences of animal life more generally; and distinctly and irreducible cultural dimensions. In other words, there is no warrant for a reverse reductionism of every aspect of hate crime as experienced amounting to a type of sociological imperialism. In other words, our phenomenology of hate crime must draw lessons from its own analysis of embodiment as well as bodily aspects of empathy. One such lesson

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is the need to avoid either the reduction of the cultural-linguistic aspects of the experience of this topic to its purely material dimension side of the natural world, nor the latter’s equally one-sided reduction to nothing but the world of culture, ideas, meanings, and beliefs.

2  Conclusion In short, this section has highlighted the various ways in which the combination of the unholy alliance of objectivism and naturalism generates difficulties, tensions even outright contradictions whose implications discredit the viability and coherence of this approach to hate crime research. These difficulties also point beyond objectivism and naturalism by highlighting the research questions and topics that a more viable Husserlian approach to this topic must address, and further develop, while also at the same time revising its own methodologies and research methods on a self-critical trial and error basis. At the most general level, our various sections tell a consistent story that a Husserlian approach to hate crime as lived amounts to a radical challenge to all forms of objectivism and naturalism, in whatever combination, including would-be scientific psychological accounts of this topic, which claim to be authentic scientific approaches. For our phenomenology of hate crime at least, it is precisely the excluded interpretive realms of cultural meanings, values and beliefs, patterned social interactions, and communicative exchanges of various kinds between those involved or personally affected by this form of criminality that demand close and contextual analysis. It is these distinctly social and cultural dimensions of the life-­ world that are central to a social scientific analysis of the link between hate crime and subcultures of entrenched shared prejudices. A major task for our phenomenology of hate crime is to reverse the natural attitude’s structural naivete about the prejudicial role of its own interpretive practices. We can do this in two ways: 1. By grasping this phenomenon of positing of a “normal”/“abnormal” and “insider”/“outsider” differentiation; and: 2. Recognising this interpretation of designated “difference” as an ongoing performative accomplishment. If we carry out these two operations, then prejudices relevant to hate crime research can stand out as such for us, as well as becoming unveiled in all their socially constructed prejudicial qualities. This is precisely how they can become interpreted by those who have, to some measure, liberated themselves from the natural attitude’s underlying objectivism. Here, it is instructive to recognise the phenomenological complaint that objectivism actually reverses the concrete evidence of lived experience, and that  – as a result – this reversal itself needs reversing. What is truly primary is the intersubjective constitution, the transcendental performative accomplishment of the very sig-

References

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nificance of the qualitative “whatness” of everything that appears to our consciousness as “belonging-to” our life-world in one way or another, as something “worldly.”53 For Husserl: ‘it is not the being of the world as unquestioned, taken for granted, which is primary in itself … rather what is primary in itself is subjectivity, understood as that which naïvely pre-gives the being of the world and then rationalises or (what is the same thing) objectifies it.’54

References Husserl, Edmund. 1952. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch. Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution [1912]. Ed. Marly Biemel. Husserliana 4. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1960. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1965. Phenomenology and the crisis of philosophy: Philosophy as a rigorous science, and philosophy and the crisis of European man. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

53 54

 Husserl 1970: § 14.  Husserl, 1970: 69.

Summary and Conclusion

In this study, we have argued that objectivism is a vital but prejudicial presupposition of the natural attitude. Objectivism posits a world of “given facts” as both the primary object of lived experience and as the source of valid augments culminating in ‘true knowledge.’ In this sense, objectivism needs to be characterised as an underlying presumption that there exists an intrinsic normative reality. Objectivism is not merely a technical flaw that calls into question methodological aspects of hate crime scholarship. Rather, its premises permeate and distort everyday aspects of the lived experience of perceived hate crime in various problematic ways. Furthermore, aspects of this orientation facilitate the ongoing reiteration of prejudices routinely directed against hate crime victim groups. The phenomenological critique of objectivism thus goes beyond purely methodological criticism of how scholarship has been conducted; it focuses on how objectivist presuppositions tend to contradict themselves in practice. According to a Husserlian critique, one problematic result of any reliance upon the natural attitude is the implicit adoption of the objectivism of a matter-of-fact perspective upon hate crime that remains utterly insensitive to the nature and operation of its own underlying interpretive performances. This interpretive naivete is a major problem. This is because such performances constitute, perpetuate, and revise the meaning of both hate crime as such, and each of its various sub-categories as well as the derogatory classifications of victim groups. As a result, we have illustrated how the routine application of objectivism, understood as an interpretation denying its own interpretive nature, leads to various difficulties, omissions and contradictions that discredit its credibility. Once again, we have been able to identify a basic incompatibility between this feature of the natural attitude towards hate crime issues, and the requirements of a fully-developed phenomenology of hate crime.1 It follows, that neutralisation of  For Husserl, this would be a subset of a more general tension between the two opposed tendencies of naturalism/objectivism and transcendentalism. The latter is defined as any academic approach that opposes naïve objectivism and recognises that all experience of objectivity are interpretive achievements of “transcendental subjectivity.” Husserl, 1970: 70. 1

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this dogmatic closure may prove to be a necessary methodological precondition for the realisation of our research project. Our critique of the inadequacies, rhetorical power and contradictions of such objectivism may, therefore, have started to function as a clarification of the rationale for our own Husserlian approach, at least in terms of its possibly remedial function. In sum, our study has clarified some British legal definitions of hate crime, while providing a detailed case-study describing phenomenologically-important aspects of the empirical manifestation of prejudice. We have analysed how the natural attitude operates to superimpose a series of objectivist and naturalistic presuppositions. Our analysis has characterised objectivism as a matter-of-fact approach that encourages positivist forms of hate crime research with aspirations towards (social) scientific validity. However, in practice, these aspirations become contradicted and undermined by its own prejudicial presuppositions. We have further argued that the natural attitude promotes a type of cognitive closure to alternative understandings and perspectives, whose interpretive accomplishment requires close and ultimately critical analysis. Such closure has a cluster of related tendencies, including self-fulfilling types of prejudicial understanding whose dogmatism both displaces and excludes the possibility of alternative interpretations from ever arising. We have also suggested that hate crime scholarship pays a high price for allowing this exclusion to go uncontested. The cost involved here becomes far clearer when we restore a sense of all that the natural attitude systematically excludes from the agenda of research. We then illustrated this general point with a detailed and extensive case study of the natural attitude’s dogmatic exclusion of what is questionable within hate crime-related issues that take the common form of the “problem of/with X.” The critical results of this case study express in microcosm the more general instructive lessons offered by a Husserlian analysis of the natural attitude’s tendencies towards closure. The theme of critique was more fully and expressly developed in Part Two. We discussed ways of refining and extending a Husserlian approach to embrace an expressly formulated critique of the natural attitude’s distinctly ideological dimensions. First, we clarified the meaning and downstream implications of the idea of ideology for present purposes in terms of interpretive dynamics involving the habitual entrenchment and legitimation of ideological prejudices. Next, we showed how deeply-entrenched ideological prejudices, including prejudicial characterisations of victim group members, can operate as concrete motivations for hate speech and hate crime. On the other hand, it is no less important for an expressly critical phenomenology of hate crime to recognise potentially destabilising experiential elements of ideological prejudice, not least because these overlap with its own agenda and implicit ethics. We then applied this two-sided approach to the natural attitude’s ideological tendencies to not only render particular interests seemingly “anonymous” but also

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with respect to the identification and differentiation of both ­ideological and nonideological aspects of passive consciousness. Next, we discussed how the natural attitude’s so-called “common sense” about, say, members of victim groups generate an extremely naïve and unreflective form of cognitive closure: one whose orientation of dogmatic self-certainty has distinctly conservative ideological effects and implications. Part of the reiteration of these ideological effects lies in the generally successful strategic concealment of underlying practices of exclusion of alternative, less prejudicial characterisations of, say, victim group members. Another relevant factor here is the distinctly ideological practice of over-generalising particular interests and values as somehow “universal,” and thereby generally applicable to the exclusion of all alternatives. This is an exclusionary practice that further reinforces the natural attitude’s more general tendencies towards dogmatic closure, exclusion, and merely circular forms of self-validation of prejudices relevant to hate crime studies. Our final two sections of Chap. 5 developed the contention that a fully-developed phenomenological research agenda must extend its scope to embrace an expressly justified critique of these ideological practices. In turn, this innovation entails devising methodological devices that are not only consistent with Husserlian analysis but also capable of effectively reversing the natural attitude’s tendencies towards ideologically-­powerful forms of unreflective interpretive naivete, dogmatism, and circular reasoning. In Chap. 6, we set out a distinctly Husserlian critique of the natural attitude’s prejudicial effects in relation to objectivist forms of hate crime research. These were identified as including an overextension of a causal-explanatory model into the social sciences resulting in a pseudo-scientific approach to this topic that suffers from a loss of qualitative foundations. We have argued that attempted responses to this Husserlian critique by deploying highly prescriptive “operational definitions” entirely fail. This response is unable to rescue an objectivist approach from the difficulties and contradictions stemming from its reliance upon exclusively quantitative methods. Furthermore, the latter are subject to more general difficulties and contradictions, including with respect to the essentially constitutive role played by the classification of hate incidents into discrete sub-categories of “race,” “religion,” “disability” etc. Our Husserlian critique also argues that objectivism’s mantra of “sticking to the objective facts about hate crime” involves a spurious form of immediacy: one that not only misinterprets the subject of (inter)subjectivity but also displaces from the agenda of hate crime research all manner of distinctly cultural realities that are vital elements of the phenomenon itself. A Husserlian critique further identifies various difficulties arising from objectivism’s subject/object dichotomy, as well as more general contradictions stemming from with the prejudicial effects of naturalistic presuppositions

284

Summary and Conclusion

It is always easier to criticise than to do better. Hence, our final substantive chapter sets out some of the specifically constructive implications of our Husserlian analysis and critique of naturalistic objectivism. In particular, we show how this type of critical analysis opens up the prospect of a valuable form of intentional analysis of hate crime as lived. In turn, the latter can then be subjected to an in-depth analysis of “sense constitution” operating through processes of temporal synthesis and passive association. Furthermore, our critical analysis opens the door to a distinctly phenomenological cultural psychology of hate crime as experienced: one that needs to be developed as a self-consistent social science which has purged itself of the difficulties identified above. Such an approach to hate crime is able to not only explicate the cultural, linguistic and societal values, beliefs and interests that mediate our experience of hate crime but also to make us more fully aware of still unrealised possibilities for future reform. What is now needed is to further build the momentum of the present study by developing additional supplementary analyses of the concrete implications of the interpretive naiveté of the natural attitude, and its essential dogmatism. It would be useful to take transcripts from trials and other sources of expressions of hate speech and then unfold how aspects of the difficulties with the natural attitude that we have addressed here are borne out or perhaps only partly corroborated, or even falsified. It would also be useful to focus extensively on interview-based materials concerned with the specifics of hate crime as experienced to better allow the phenomena itself to speak out as clearly as possible. Another line of future analysis concerns the role of passive association, a highly demanding theme of Husserlian analysis in that it reaches into what we could consider the subconscious or even unconscious aspects of the reiteration of habitual prejudices of relevance to hate crime-related issues. Such a project would be further assisted by a closer examination at the specific methodological tools for the bracketing and neutralisation of the natural attitude, which we have left implicit even while we were practising them. In addition, there is a massively complex theme of embodiment. How does the human body appear in the lived experience of hate crime and as a “subjective” precondition for the appearance of anything, including its own presence? This is not a topic that can be summarised without simplification and distortion even in a single book chapter. Yet, it is surely an implied missing dimension of our analysis above. Finally, we relegated the analysis of ideological aspects of the natural attitude in relation to societal prejudice to a single section; yet surely this topic – so central to phenomenology’s contributions to the social sciences – merits far more extensive analysis.

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