Construction and Constitution of Individuality – a Parallel Action Between Social Science and Phenomenology

The present study investigates the concept and social phenomenon of “individuality” from two different perspectives. From a social science viewpoint, I will concentrate on socio-historic expressions of concrete forms of individuality or the individual which appears in different cultural contexts. The second focus applies phenomenological reflections which describe constitutive processes of the “individual” from an egological perspective. My analysis starts from the assumption that phenomenology and the social sciences have to be seen as two disciplines with differing research methods which complement one another. Therefore I will present a “parallel action” of phenomenology and the social sciences which is used to study the constitution and construction of the phenomenon of “individuality.” The structures of the life-world from a phenomenological perspective serve as “mathesis universalis” which is considered to be the a priori of the social world. It opens up the ground for historical and cultural comparison of diverse expressions of individuality in contrast to cultural and theoretical conceptions that do not consider the individual as the primary unit of consciousness, but the belongingness to a social relation.