ABSTRACT
There is a long history of the use of the concept 'phenomenon' and 'phenomenological' in sociological writing, traceable at least back to Emile Durkheim. Durkheim's social phenomena are constituted by the power of external coercion, by diffusion within the group, and by an existence independent of individual forms they assume. The phenomenological imagination necessary for effective comparison could be regarded as akin to sociological imagination, and the 'imaginative variation' sounds similar to the 'concomitant variation' introduced by Durkheim. And so it could well be claimed that the acceptance of phenomenological approaches by social scientists has led to a redefinition of fact and data: the object of research is now not only the quantifiable or the manmade world of culture, but the most fundamentally given becomes the basic datum: moods, concerns, death. Herbert Spiegelberg, by referring to Martin Heidegger, makes it clear that appresentation transcends culture and extracts meaning from the existentials of the human condition.
