Phenomenology of Consciousness and Sociology of the Life-World

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Phenomenology of Consciousness and Sociology of the Life-world

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Phenomenology of Consciousness and Sociology of the Life-world AN INTRODUCTORY STUDY

Helmut R. Wagner HOBART AND WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGES

The University of Alberta Press

First published by The University of Alberta Press 450 Athabasca Hall The University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Copyright © The University of Alberta Press 1983 ISBN 0-88864-032-3 Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Wagner, Helmut R. Phenomenology of consciousness and sociology of the life-world Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-88864-032-3 1. Phenomenology.2. Social psychology. I. Title. B829.5.W33 142'. 7 C82-O91217-4 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright owner. Typesetting by The Typeworks, Mayne Island, British Columbia Printed by Hignell Printing Ltd., Winnipeg, Manitoba Design by Maher & Murtagh, Toronto, Ontario

In Memory of Lore Wagner who shared with me an unforgettable summer in Alberta. It became the climax of my long teaching career; it brought us new and dear friends; and it let us experience the beauty of the Canadian Rockies. The foundations to this book were laid in this happy period. Lore contributed to it her ever-pertinent advice and her keen observations in personal exchanges with me and, most of all, in remarks and comments with which she brightened our informal encounters with students and faculty members. A part of her unusual personality lives on in this study.

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Contents Acknowledgements / xi 1. Introducing the Phenomenological Approach / 1 The genesis of the book / 1 The form of the book / 2 The content of the book / 5

2. Approach to a Phenomenology of Consciousness / 8 A Preliminary question: What is phenomenology? / 8 Outside and inside approaches / 11 The behaviourist approach / 11 Images of Man / 15 The solipsist dead end / 18 The phenomenological approach / 19 Language / 21 Phenomenology of consciousness / 26 Towards the understanding of inner experience / 26 BERGSON'S CONCEPTION OF INNER DURATION /28 JAMES'S CONCEPTION OF THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS/30 THE ELUSIVENESS OF INNER EXPERIENCE AND THE MEMORY ACCESS-LANE/33 TIME AND TIME-EXPERIENCE/34 Towards the comprehension of the phenomenological method / 37 GETTING AT I N N E R E X P E R I E N C E /37 A FALLACY AND A TRAP/39

Viii

CONTENTS

APPROACHING THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHOD:

HUSSERL'S MODEL/40 PRESENTING INNER EXPERIENCE /45 CONFIRMING PHENOMENOLOGICAL DATA/46 THE LANGUAGE OF THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL PRESENTATION/49

Phenomenology of objects / 50 Perception, gestalt, apperception / 51 Experience and sensory impressions / 54 Intententionality / 56 Attention, interest, motivation / 57 The definition of the situation / 60 Vantage point / 64 Horizons / 66 Relevance / 68 The world of the phenomenologist and the world of everyone's experience / 71

3. Approach to the Social Self / 74 The fiction of the solitary Ego / 74 James's conception of the Self / 75 Cooley's "human nature" and social self / 77 Mead's genetic conception of the self / 79 Intersubjectivity / 84 We-relationship / 88

4. Approach to Social Life / 93 Experiencing the social world / 93 The social checking of individual perspectives /94 Reciprocity of perspectives / 94 Outside perspective / 97 Cognitive stance / 102 Pragmatic stance / 103 Natural stance / 105 Life-world / 109 Natural world view / 111 Social action and interaction / 113 Social action / 113 Social interaction / 115 Face-to-face interaction and social interrelations / 116

Weber's sociology of understanding / 120 The meaning of meaning and understanding / 121 From Weberian sociology to phenomenological philosophy / 125 Ideal types as methodological devices / 127 Typification as phenomenon of the life-world / 135 Theory of understanding / 140 Motivational understanding / 142 Causality, prediction, and understanding in sociology / 144 Expectations and typifications / 144 Prediction of individual conduct / 147 The causality of motivation / 149 Because motivation / 154 Gaining motivational understanding / 156

5. Living Towards the Future / 159 Fragmentation of active involvements and coherence of plans / 159 Planning—working—long-range projecting / 162 Intellectual life plans / 165 Life from the past / 169 Life expectations and limitations / 172

6. The Multi-Structure of Human Experience / 176 James's orders of reality / 176 Schutz's provinces of meaning / 180 The world of working / 181 Other provinces of meaning / 185 Leaps and transitions / 190 Enclaves and fusions / 196 Work and science as provinces of meaning / 197

7. Concluding Remarks / 207 Summing up / 207 What to study now / 210

ix CONTENTS

x

Appendices / 212

CONTENTS

I.

II.

Major figures in the development of phenomenological approach: A chronological table / 212 Readings recommended for parallel study and reference / 215 Complementary texts / 215 Publications of Alfred Schutz / 216 Additional readings to selected topics / 216

Index of Names / 221 Index of Subjects / 222

Acknowledgements As author, I am deeply obliged to Dr. Ted Aoki, chairman of the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta. He not only extended the invitation to teach the summer seminars in Edmonton to me, but also suggested converting my original seminar reports into a book. His friendship, help, and advice have enabled me to do this. My special personal thanks are due to Basil Favaro, who acted as my untiring guide and assistant during my stay in Edmonton, and who successfully negotiated the publication of the present manuscript with the University of Alberta Press. The writing of the manuscript itself has been made possible by the administration of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, who have continued to support my scholarly endeavours with a generous stipend. The book gained its final shape with the help of the readers who offered excellent suggestions made from the viewpoint of a potential user of the study in the classroom, and not in the least enabled me to reformulate some of my expositions so as to anticipate possible philosophical criticisms from writers whose interpretations of Husserl and Schutz are at variance with my own. My editor, Ms. Sandra Monteath, had the unenviable task of endowing the manuscript with an acceptable English style; in addition, her many remarks, queries, and suggestions forced me to rethink many of my formulations and to bring them to greater clarity. The above-mentioned individuals are absolved from all responsibility for possibly remaining flaws, resulting not from their advice but from my shortcomings. Finally, I wish to express my deep appreciation of the excellent contributions to the seminar sessions, and thus to this book, that were made by William Hrychuk. Having just joined the faculty of

xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

the Department of Secondary Education, he brought into the seminars his wide knowledge and his broad experience. His understanding of my often difficult presentations was remarkable. On various occasions, he acted as intellectual spokesman of the seminar group, and as mediator between students and instructor. His unexpected death early in 1981 came as a great shock to me. In him, I lost a friend as well as an ally in the scholarly and educational undertaking to which I hope the present book will make a modest contribution.

1. Introducing the Phenomenological Approach The genesis of the book This introduction to the phenomenological approach is the outcome of two seminars I had the privilege of teaching at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. The participants were graduate students and some faculty members from education departments of the university: by and large, they had an adequate preparation in general and educational psychology, but little in sociology. In teaching, I like to move from the known to the unknown. The background of the students spoke in favour of structuring the seminars, whose major theme was "The phenomenology of social relations," so that the treatment of individual consciousness preceded that of social experiences. As I shall discuss, this procedure is also in agreement with widely accepted phenomenological practice. I designed a preseminar reading program to offer a general orientation as well as to guard the participants against unwarranted psychologistic and solipsistic conclusions. This bibliography is appended to this book. The broad outline of this book, as marked out in the Contents, approximates the planned outline of the seminars. The details were shaped and articulated in slowly developing, but eventually challenging, seminar discussions, coffee-break and after-hour exchanges, and, not in the least, in personal exchanges with individual students. The contributions that resulted from these various dialogues were considerable. For me, they expanded a remarkable teaching

2 INTRODUCING THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

experience into a learning experience. I only regret that the conversion of the seminar notes and reports into the systematic, straight-line text of this book has unavoidably effaced the vivid give-and-take of the seminar sessions and exchanges. Yet, to a small extent in this book I have been able to retain the seminar practice of spiraling back over matters covered earlier, thus enhancing their understanding in a form that seems particularly adequate to the acquisition of new ways of looking at things. Cutting the ties between the content of this book and the original, interactional situations in which it was crystallized has been the price of making phenomenological considerations available to a wider circle of readers wishing to acquaint themselves with their application to the study of social experiences and relations. I hope that this book will be received as a small part of the large enterprise of the furtherance of phenomenological thinking.

The form of the book In this introduction to a phenomenological approach to the life-world, I move from inner consciousness to outer world, from the individual to the social, from the person to the group. Moving from inside to outside is thematically consistent with phenomenological theory: all that we know and do in the social world is anchored in individual consciousness, and experienced subjectively. This principle was established by Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology, and used by Schutz, the major figure in the development of a sociology on a phenomenological basis. Yet, in his later, decisive work, Schutz agreed with others who insisted that we immediately experience not our consciousness as such, but its content. He showed that this content is eminently social from the start, and is naively understood and interpreted in socially given terms. In other words, we know the common sense, everyday world first: it is given to us. By reflecting on our awareness of this world, we discover ourselves. Therefore, a common sense way of proceeding, different from that of phenomenological theory, would be to move from the group to the person, from the social to the individual, from the outer world to inner consciousness.

Each alternative has both advantages and disadvantages. 3 As a sociologist, I favour the second. Yet, I have refrained THE FORM OF from pursuing it here. I have mentioned my teaching THEBOOK practices as one reason behind my decision, and the phenomenological principle established by Husserl as a second. Another was my concern to keep the broad thematic structure of this book in agreement with that underlying the phenomenological-sociological theory that Alfred Schutz developed in 1932, which he improved and expanded until his death in 1959. This is the sociology of the life-world, discussed in the latter half of this book. By following the general expository scheme of Schutz, I facilitate comparison with individual topics in Schutz's writings. I must warn my readers that my start from the psychological does not imply that it is my intention to reduce matters of the human mind to conventional psychology, or that I wish to 'psychologize' social matters, that is, reduce them to psychological factors. The phenomenological approach is not psychologistic. Had I started from the social side, I should have had to issue the opposite warning: that way of proceeding would not mean that I intended to 'sociologize' the human mind, and reduce it to social factors. In real life, the psychological and the social are inseparable. Whatever the starting grounds, my exposition would eventually have to be emended by considerations based on opposite grounds. Each taken alone leads to incomplete and thus wrong conclusions. When we resort to any analysis, such as the one I am doing here, we make a virtue out of necessity. The inherent limitations of our intellectual capacity to reason and comprehend force us to begin at 'some particular point;' and to proceed from one single item to another single item. If we could imitate mentally our actual experience of life, then we would deal with the whole complexity at once. But we cannot. We can only think about reality by analytical separation of one aspect of a reality that offers innumerable aspects together and simultaneously. This means that here, contrary to all our experience of real life, I am postulating an isolated, individual consciousness and an individual being whose consciousness it is. The matter is still more complicated. We accept that psychology and sociology each deal with only one aspect of


reality. Furthermore, we accept that the psychological and sociological expositions themselves are not at all identical with what they purport to describe, although we insist that at least they do not contradict observable fact. Our ability to experience is almost boundless, but we analyse this experience one point at a time, and we present our analyses one point at a time. We ignore many of the details. Long ago, someone said that drawing is the "art of leaving out." We could also say that telling a story, or reporting an actual incident, or accounting for an observation, is the art of leaving out. Language gives us a sense of the experience, but not the experience itself. In their way, the human sciences of psychology and sociology practise the same art of leaving out. Only, they do it systematically. Their exponents establish by rules and principles what to leave out, and what to deal with analytically, that is, in artificial isolation. They also establish rules and principles about the language to be used. Thus, they not only look at just one aspect of reality; they look at certain aspects of that aspect, and they talk about it in a certain way. Ideas, descriptions, data, and comments must be laid out one by one, as ordered as beads on a string. Separation from concreteness, from actual life, is the price of putting experience into words, and of having order and clarity of thinking. This process of abstraction allows theoretical interpretations of highly selected aspects of human experience, endowing them with a new intellectual or scientific meaning. This is a tradition of Western culture. We deal cognitively with human and social realities by designing more or less well-ordered diagrams or paradigms that we superimpose upon a complex and manifold subject matter that would otherwise be intellectually unmanageable. Properly understood, this is no small achievement. It amounts to the creation of a new, rationally controlled dimension of human experience, a dimension not of life but of systematic interpretation. This book certainly belongs in this realm, as did the seminars on which it is based. I have, therefore, given this book a certain form to follow the phenomenological tradition established by Husserl and echoed in the development of Schutz's thought, and to locate it as an instance of systematic interpretation of human experience.

The content of the book I am writing this book as a student of Schutz, and as someone trying to apply phenomenology. Phenomenologists are no different from others concerned with matters psychological and sociological, with matters human. They must also work within the dimension of systematic interpretation, thinking and speaking about the life-world in an orderly fashion, item by item. The procedure, unavoidable as it is, poses particular problems for us. There is a tremendous difference between the realities phenomenologists are speaking about and their speaking about these realities. In presenting our ideas and our findings, we cannot do more than non-phenomenological thinkers. We have to reduce our observations, impressions, and experiences of the reality that concerns us to descriptive generalizations and interpretations. What we offer is essentially theory. If this theory is different from that of the bulk of philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists, it is so, first, because of the awareness of the difference between human realities and theorizing about human realities, and, secondly, because of the effort to capture the reflection of these realities in the ways in which we present our findings and express our interpretations. If, as I have said, this book is written from a phenomenological perspective, then what does it entail? In the next section, I ask the question, What is phenomenology? and sketch the beginnings of an answer. In a sense, this whole study is an attempt at explanation. I have already said that the form of this book, moving from consciousness to the life-world, follows that established by Edmund Husserl. However, the application of his approach, which is what we are looking at here, is predominantly the work of Alfred Schutz. He was a critical student of Husserl. Thus he followed not the letter, but the spirit of the original phenomenological investigations, and he opened them to the influence of other thinkers, notably the French philosopher Henri Bergson and, most significantly, the American scholars William James, John Dewey, and George H. Mead. These will all be discussed in this book. The term phenomenological, as I use it here, is to be taken in a broad rather than a narrow philosophical sense. In any case, the phenomenological approach is quite

5 THE CONTENT OF THE BOOK


different from the other approaches to psychology and sociology traditionally taught at most American and Canadian universities. Yet, all of the approaches are in the same boat with respect to the split between their interpretations and the realities to which they refer. Most other approaches do not come directly face-to-face with this problem: as a rule, they ignore it. By contrast, a phenomenological orientation, concerned with the experiences of individuals, has to account for this problem. Phenomenology tries to look at its own grounds, its own suppositions. How and to what degree this can be done can only be explained as part of the general exposition of the phenomenological approach. This way of proceeding may prove difficult for someone with the usual academic preparation in psychology or sociology. Although I have described myself as someone trying to apply phenomenology, this book is not a set of instructions for learning it. Phenomenology cannot be made the subject matter of instruction in the technical sense. It cannot be taught like the rules of grammar or sets of propositions in algebra. It cannot be embodied in a manual such as one for the assembly of mechanical toys, or like a book of cooking recipes. No manual on how to do phenomenology could conceivably be written. I am not even sure to what degree a phenomenological orientation can be transmitted. Whether a teacher or writer is good or bad, getting the message across will depend much on the personality and receptiveness of the students. In the end, a teacher may be in the position of the aging Hegel, who is reported to have said, "Only one of my students understood me, and he misunderstood me." I can only hope for the best. I have to confess my total inability to answer one question frequently posed by students who come face-to-face with phenomenological thoughts: "What can I do with it? How does it help me in my work or profession?" I can only respond, "I do not know." It depends on each individual whether or not what is presented here makes sense, whether or not it helps in clarifying personal orientations, and whether or not, for instance, it can improve teaching practices over the whole range from understanding children and students to achieving particular educational objectives. Is phenomenology scientific? At this point, I am not will-

ing to state whether it is or not. The body of reasoning pre- 7 sented here has been built up with that conscientiousness THE CONTENT OF that we associate with scientific procedures. It shares THEBOOK another feature with science: it is unfinished and in an essential sense unfinishable. Its findings and conclusions are offered as data and results that are "valid until further notice," as Schutz used to say. They are subject to revision whenever new evidence should warrant it. In fact, Schutz was not much concerned with the lasting truth of his findings; his foremost concern was the problems that stood behind the themes he dealt with. In 1940-1941, Schutz entered into an extensive exchange with Talcott Parsons, the American sociologist who dominated sociological theory on this continent for about a quarter of a century. Schutz referred to his own first and decisive study in the following terms: "... although I feel very humble concerning the solutions offered by me, I am quite sure that the problems treated in the book are genuine problems of the social sciences which have to be solved in one way or another." I share this view. This undertaking uses the phenomenological approach to consciousness and the life-world, making problematic what is taken for granted by traditional orientations.*

The introductory character of this book allows me to dispense with an extensive apparatus of footnotes and source references. This goes, most of all, for the work of Schutz, which, as I have said, serves as the basis of my expositions. It also applies for the rendering of selected ideas of Husserl, which, to repeat, are seen essentially in the light of Schutz's interpretations. A fair access to Schutz's whole approach may be found in my introduction to Alfred Schutz on Phenomenology and Social Relations (University of Chicago Press, 1970), a book that contains a representative selection of passages from Schutz's writings. Where I consider contributions of other thinkers, such as Bergson, James, and Mead, I have given a minimum of source references.

2. Approach to a Phenomenology of Consciousness A preliminary question: What is phenomenology? It would be convenient if I could begin this explanation of a phenomenological approach with a preliminary definition of phenomenology. However, this is hardly feasible. Phenomenology is understood by doing it. Nevertheless, I shall offer a few preliminary remarks that I hope will convey a rough idea as to what is involved in phenomenology. First of all, phenomenology is a way of viewing ourselves, of viewing others, and of viewing all else that comes in contact with our lives. In this sense, it is a system of interpretation that helps us perceive and conceive ourselves, our contacts and interchanges with others, and everything else within the realm of our experiences. This way of viewing the affairs of our lives is markedly different from the ways we ordinarily use in everyday life. It is also markedly different from the ways in which we have learned to view persons and things through the conceptions of the 'scientific' disciplines of psychology, sociology, and so on. We know that we cannot look at the subject matter of such sciences as we look at things in everyday life. We have to set our minds in a scientific way in order to deal scientifically with any matter whatever. We have to assume a scientific stance. Now, in order to deal phenomenologically with ourselves, others, and the rest of the world, we have to assume still another stance, which is

comparable neither to that of everyday life nor to that of 9 traditional science. The first is natural to us; the second is A PRELIMINARY acquired by the appropriate training in secondary school QUESTION and college or university. The phenomenological stance is more difficult to come by; it not only demands something new; it demands the unlearning of much that we have learned, abandoning habits of thought deeply engrained in our consciousness. The reason for this lies in part in the subject matter of phenomenology. In daily life and the sciences, we are usually concerned with what happens outside our individual selves in the natural or social world to which, as a matter of course, we ascribe an existence independent of our noticing it. Phenomenologists, however, concern themselves with what is experienced inside consciousness. They deal with human awareness, specifically awareness of human experience. They want to understand how we experience our selves and how we experience things outside our selves, that is, all that is non-self. Unlike solipsists, phenomenologists do not deny the existence of the world. Rather, they look at it critically. Kant insisted that we can say absolutely nothing about the 'thing as such', beyond the limits of our cognitive equipment for identifying and comprehending 'things' as they appear to us. In the same manner, phenomenologists speak of the world as it appears within the realm and possibilities of our experience and understanding. In my introduction, I suggested the possibility of a phenomenological psychology and a sociology on a phenomenological basis. In a sense, we may call the phenomenological undertaking a psychological undertaking, provided we consider consciousness a psychological concern, as William James did, and provided we do not equate the term psychology with that psychology traditionally taught in our universities. In this book, the term psychology has a particular connotation; therefore it will mostly be used with some adequate qualification. I shall speak of the psychology of consciousness when I mean our psychological concerns in general. I shall speak of phenomenal psychology when I mean descriptions of selected features of the psychology of consciousness. I shall speak of phenomenological psychology

10 APPROACH TO A PHENOMENOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

when I refer to the psychology that Husserl made part of his phenomenology. Phenomenal psychology is basically descriptive, while phenomenological psychology denotes a second stage in which descriptive data are scrutinized as to their essential features. In this book, then, I shall use the term phenomenological psychology synonymously with the term phenomenology of consciousness. The term phenomenology, as generally used today, is linked to the name of Edmund Husserl, who, without a doubt, did more for the development of phenomenological philosophy than any other thinker. To him, however, this philosophy was more than a psychology of consciousness. He divided his concerns between phenomenological psychology and what he called transcendental phenomenology. The latter became his major concern in his middle period. For our purpose, which is ultimately directed at the life-world, this part of his work can be safely ignored, except to note briefly that it does exist. As Schutz did in his sociology of the life-world, I shall confine my discussion to phenomenological psychology. This exclusion of transcendental psychology in no way takes away from Husserl's contribution, but it allows us to do justice to other contributions to phenomenological psychology. For phenomenological philosophers in Husserl's sense, these contributions may be of less importance. The strands of phenomenological thinking go back to the early centuries of the modern age. Husserl saw its beginnings in the work of Descartes; Gurwitsch and Schutz stressed the contribution of Leibniz. The British empiricists and sensualists also played their part, as did Kant. The prehistory of phenomenology, then, is linked to French, British, and German traditions. The prehistory of phenomenological psychology (from about 1875 to 1915) is similarly international. It starts with the German philosopher-psychologist Franz Brentano, teacher of Husserl, and a strong influence on William James. Then come the French philosopher Henri Bergson and the American psychologist William James. Husserl, the Austrianborn German philosopher, carried phenomenology further into the twentieth century, bringing it to full development. Students in Germany, Austria, Holland, the United States, Canada, and Japan continued his work. His influence

reaches strongly into French philosophy and into Latin 11 American countries. Phenomenological-psychological ten- A PRELIMINARY dencies appear independently of Husserl in the work of the QUESTION American pragmatists Dewey and Mead, in the work of the newer British common sense philosophers, and in the later work of the Spaniard Ortega y Gasset, who was positively influenced by the work of Schutz. To stress resemblances and common elements in the works of these diversified thinkers is not the same as claiming them all for phenomenology. Giving them a common label would be hazardous. It is enough to call them contributors to a psychology of consciousness, leaving it open whether this contribution was a major or minor part of their whole work.

Outside and inside approaches From early times on, human beings have wondered about the soul. The Greek philosophers gave us their idea of the psyche, and in recent Western society, the study of psychic phenomena has become a matter of a broad academic discipline, psychology. A great number of its exponents consider psychology a natural science, and, insofar as they concern themselves at all with phenomena of consciousness, do so strictly from the outside, that is, by way of external observations of subjects, and by experimentation. These are the behaviourists. On the other hand, the exponents of phenomenology, as I have said, try to understand consciousness from within, beginning with reflection on their experience of the life-world. Because phenomenology takes account of the world, viewing it, and consciousness of it from the inside, it is therefore not solipsistic. I shall discuss behaviourism and phenomenology in turn, making only a brief reference to solipsism in order to lay to rest the unwarranted assumption that phenomenology necessarily leads to solipsism. The behaviourist approach Behaviourism is an outside approach. For more than half a century, behaviourism has been a dominant force in American psychology. Its first theorist, John B. Watson, declared psychology a physical science, and operated in an atom-


istic-causalistic fashion, transposing the one cause-one effect principle into his stimulus-response formula. He established himself as an ardent foe of traditional psychology, and denounced the mere idea of mental processes as a ghost tale, and the notion of consciousness as an old wives' tale. Watson accepted the principles and objectives of earlier and contemporary experimental researchers of animal conduct, but did not hesitate to include his infant son in his own experiments. His contemporary, Edward L. Thorndike, introduced such devices as the maze into laboratory experimentation with animals. The Russian Ivan Pavlov provided him with the concept of the conditioned reflex, which Pavlov had gained from his famous experiments with dogs. K. S. Lashley, Watson's most renowned student, experimented widely with rats —animals that would be popular with behaviourist psychologists for many decades, but that would eventually have to yield to other species, such as B. F. Skinner's pigeons. This behaviourist research has become extremely ingenious and elaborate. The primitive stimulus-response formula of Watson has been replaced by quite complex and theoretically sophisticated systems, such as those of C. L. Hull during the fifties. Within the academic discipline, however, the behaviourists have been unable to suppress the work of psychologists with different orientations. Exponents of human-centred clinical psychologies and Gestalt psychology have done forceful empirical work based on principles that are, in a way, the opposite to those guiding behaviourist researchers. This has meant the accumulation of a body of psychological facts that cannot be denounced in the way Watson denounced non-behaviourist psychologies. Hence, the behaviourists have adopted a new strategy. They have recognized the validity of the facts uncovered by other psychologies, have admitted the inability of existing behaviourist theories to account for them satisfactorily, and have modified or expanded these theories by formally absorbing or adapting conceptions of other psychological approaches. For instance, J. Dollard and N. E. Miller managed to combine psychoanalytical and behaviourist principles; others made attempts at doing justice to the findings

of Gestalt psychology, especially in the area of perception. 13 Other undertakings tried to cope with conceptions gener- OUTSIDE AND ally linked to subjective approaches: in the fifties, APPROACHES C.E.Osgood published an article on "The nature and measurement of meaning." Such attempts, while no longer neglecting specific problem areas of other approaches, were designed to strip these problem areas of their original characteristics, and give them behaviourist connotations. Such conceptual flexibility facilitated the propagation of behaviourist orientations in related fields such as social psychology and sociology. A most interesting example of this is the collaboration between the Harvard psychologist Edward C. Tolman and the Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons to advance a general systems theory based on "personality as a system of action." Parsons adapted the sociological concepts of the meaning of action, value standards, role playing, etc. to the positivist structure of his developing systems theory. Tolman provided a quite rigorous methodological framework of independent, dependent, and intervening variables whose causal functions and interdependence followed the patterns of Parson's systems. This theory applied to any number of disciplines and, in principle, to all sciences. More recently, the Tolman-Parsons social behaviourism has been overshadowed by the so-called exchange theory. Its exponents speak of behaviour as exchange between persons, and they stress the rewards that are sought and gained. Successful behaviour is seen as that in which individuals gain net profits, that is, receive more than they give. Every specific social action is subject to an economic appraisal of profit and loss. In all the expansions, changes, and adaptations of behaviourism, its basic elements have been preserved: segments of behaviour are observed and interpreted in the 'objective' terms of the given behaviourist theory. When the stimulusresponse formula is not maintained, corresponding patterns such as pleasure-pain, reward-punishment, profitloss replace it. Most of all, behaviourism has maintained its claim to be a practical science, serving the concrete interests and objectives of its users. From Watson's days on, behaviourism was intended as an applied science. It was to yield scientific methods for in-


fluencing and changing behaviour. This was especially true with learning theory, which, up to the present, has been one of the strongest domains of the behaviourists. The whole scientific foundation of behaviourist learning theory consists of animal experimentation under rigidly controlled laboratory conditions. Because they see human beings primarily or exclusively as organisms, modern behaviourists have not the slightest difficulty in transferring their conclusions from experiments with animals to human beings and adapting the methods of conditioning animal behaviour to the conditioning of human behaviour. Buyers, employees, soldiers, pupils, children, and many other groups of people in subordinate social positions may be subjected to behaviour conditioning. This purpose is served by advertising and promotion techniques, sales methods, aptitude and personality tests, manuals of education and child-rearing, managerial methods of treating factory personnel, and so on. Of course, some behaviourists devote their efforts predominantly or completely to the gathering of scientific knowledge, but the majority are busy developing and applying techniques for the changing and rechanneling of human behaviour. In modern countries like the United States and Canada, behaviourism endures because of the support of business and industrial management, of government, and of other vested interests with a stake in the educational system of their country. If behaviourism is a useful science, it is so because it is useful to those in command of the economic, political, and educational systems. In resenting and resisting such applications of behaviourist principles, I am not condemning the work of all behaviourists. When they pursue scientific objectives, that is, try to gain knowledge within their theoretical frameworks, they produce a staggering quantity of empirical studies. The empirical strength of modern exchange theory, for instance, is considerable. The scientific workability of numerous behaviourist hypotheses has been demonstrated experimentally: for example, painful or pleasurable stimuli can discourage or reinforce behavioural impulses into "conditioned reflexes." The principles underlying behaviourism were part of practical, common sense knowledge long before behav-

iourism was established as a system. A proverb like "the 15 burnt child shuns the fire" suggest how behaviour is con- OUTSIDE AND ditioned, and the expression about "the carrot and the APPROACHES stick" suggests using reward and punishment to motivate people. Within its own realm, behaviourism is a legitimate scientific enterprise. It is a relevant approach for someone who wants to explore the quasi-automatic reactions of organisms, including the human animal, to external stimuli. The problem starts when behaviourists claim that, one, psychology in general is a natural science, and, two, only behaviourism fills the requirements of a scientific psychology. For a time, this academic-disciplinary 'imperialism' was strong enough to hamper the academic development of psychological approaches that focus on problems lying outside the spheres of behaviourist attention, but this is no longer the case. For those who wish to explore other than the reflexive and automatic spheres of behaviour, and turn to the deliberate conduct of human beings, behaviourism is irrelevant. It is a weakness of the behaviourist approach that its exponents are theoretically unable to explain their own behaviour. Schutz made up a joke to illustrate this: "Two behaviourists meet on campus. They look at each other, and one says, 'You are fine. How am I?'" It is also a weakness that behaviourists exempt themselves from the mechanistic automatism that, according to their theory, controls the behaviour of everyone else. In the same way in which anatomists establish themselves as superior to the animals that they cut to pieces, behaviourists establish themselves as superior to other human beings. For me, however, the crucial issue is not that the behaviourists naively overlook the inconsistencies in their own behaviour; the crucial issue is the assumptions that underlie their orientations, be they acknowledged or not. Images of Man* Like the neo-positivists of American sociology, who share with the behaviourists the conception of their respective * Objections may be raised against speaking of "Images of Man" when, in fact, the phrase is not directed at the male gender but the idea of


disciplines as natural sciences, the behaviourists present themselves as tough empiricists of the facts-and-no-nonsense school. Actually, they operate on possibly unrecognized or otherwise silent assumptions of a definitely nonscientific character. These assumptions concern the nature of human being, and represent the rudiments of a philosophical anthropology. If Man, for Aristotle, was a won politicon, then human beings, for behaviourists, are reflexive animals, animated by reactions to external (or maybe physiological and internal chemical) stimuli. By contrast, various thinkers of non-behaviourist orientations, among them phenomenologists, maintain a philosophical-anthropological image of Man that is, as a rule, made explicit. Human beings are more than dogs that salivate when the dinner bell rings, and more than pigeons that have learned to push the correct lever to receive a pellet of food. Human beings are endowed with consciousness, with volition, displaying an inherent spontaneity and taking part in forming their own lives. Thereby, and most of all, human beings are able to transcend themselves (as Schutz expressed it), to go beyond their original endowment. They not only assert themselves in the world in

human being at large: man, woman, male child, female child, or bisexual variation. First, any reader should be aware that the capitalized term Man aims at human being in the abstract; in this book, I shall always write man with a lower-case first letter when I mean male. Secondly, English usage compels me to accept Man as a label for species-being, the most general category in any classificatory system of human beings, and a completely abstract typological concept of the idea of human being (Would I write in German, I would use the expression Bilder des Menschen; while, traditionally, the German language is as authoritarian and male-centred as English, it provides a universal term for human being: Mensch). Of course, this usage can and in many cases should be circumvented. In the present case, however, I am dealing with a technical term widely established in philosophical anthropology. In the literature of, and the discussions within, this branch of philosophical inquiries, the term Man has lost its originally male connotation —a reminder that expressions in our language that have become objectionable may not only be changed by resorting to other (possibly new) terms, but also by giving traditional terms a new meaning. The latter, to my understanding, has happened to the philosophical-anthropological expression, Images of Man.

which they find themselves, and in which they forge considerable changes, they also sometimes abandon this world and create new worlds like those of the arts, sciences, philosophy, and religion. Behaviourists completely negate the potentiality of human beings to transcend themselves. If they do not promulgate their image of human beings as creations of the stimulus-response mechanism, behaviourists imply it. The image surfaces in the explicit rejection of metaphysical and unscientific assumptions about mind, psyche, will, or soul. I grant that these were metaphysical assumptions in traditional philosophy, but rejecting them does not necessarily invalidate the relevance of problems of consciousness, feelings, volition, and self-awareness that traditional philosophers addressed. If we remove the metaphysics from their assumptions, and treat them as metaphors rather than as revelations of the truth, we may find challenging insights such as those in the theological writings of Leibniz. Be that as it may, anyone focusing intellectual curiosity on the problems of human cognition and volition pursues matters completely outside the realm of behaviourism. The hypotheses and starting points of behaviourism have no bearing on these problems. There exists, if not an academic discipline, then an extensive scholarly literature on the psychology of consciousness and volition. Nothing forces students to become natural or social scientists, philosophers or psychologists, phenomenologists or behaviourists. The choice depends on what is important to them as human beings and to their human existence. Students are subjected to the discipline of a field only after they have made their choice. As students, and later as professionals, they are bound by the criteria and rules of procedure accepted as conventions within their discipline. Otherwise, they must show cause why any criterion or rule should be questioned. Phenomenology as a psychology of consciousness and volition gains its scholarly legitimation from the problems that it addresses, and that it tries to solve in an intellectually rigorous manner. Those who consider these problems relevant to their own orientations and to their professional work and who accept the demands of the approach give phenomenology an effective place in their thinking.

17 OUTSIDE AND INSIDE APPROACHES


The solipsist dead end An extreme inside approach would be the diametrical opposite of a consistent behaviourism. As I have already explained, behaviourism confines psychological inquiries exclusively to observable behaviour; it accepts as valid only what can be seen and established by trained observers without any information about the subject's notions or feelings. Taking the extreme inside view, on the other hand, means confining inquiries exclusively to the inner side of consciousness. This, again, means that the inquirer has nothing but his own consciousness as subject of his investigations. By the same token, he has but one kind of method at his disposal: meditation as self-contemplation and introspection as self-observation. If we pursue the implications of these two approaches to their extreme consequences, we discover a mutual exclusiveness. The consistently behaviourist approach reveals external behaviour and its external conditions, but no consciousness. A consistent inner approach reveals inner consciousness but not outside aspects and conditions. The one completely eliminates from consideration all qualities that make human beings human; the other completely neglects the realities of the outside world. For the one, only a world of causal-mechanistic properties exists; for the other, only inner consciousness. Psychologists, who are absorbed by their specific empirical research interests, are not inclined to reflect about the theoretical and philosophical implications of what they are doing. This goes most of all for behaviourists. By contrast, some thinkers have spelled out the extreme implications of the inside approach, and converted these implications into philosophical positions. Their epistemological thesis says that the only source of knowledge is the self, that is, their own self, and their ontological tenet is that nothing exists but the self-conscious self, that is again, nothing but their own self. Whatever else appears in consciousness as world, nature, other beings, is the creation of the consciousness of the self. Serious philosophers like Bertrand Russell agree that these or similar theses are undemonstrable but also irrefutable. Convinced exponents of solipsism, who write books or otherwise propagate their views publicly, are guilty of the reverse of the inconsistency committed by be-

haviourists: they deny the existence of a public and social 19 world yet appeal to others who live in it. In this sense, both OUTSIDE AND INSIDE are equally absurd. APPROACHES Unlike behaviourism, solipsism has been of little if any account in American philosophy or theoretical psychology. I would not have referred to it at all, were it not that its spectre hovers over any inside approach; neither descriptivephenomenal nor phenomenological psychology proper is exempt from solipsistic implications, even though serious exponents of either are vitally interested in escaping them. In traditional philosophical language, this is a problem. In anticipation of later considerations, I shall point out here that, for phenomenologists, this problem actually splits into two problems: that of the evidence for the existence of the external world in its general aspects, and that of the existence of fellow human beings with consciousnesses and selves similar to our own. For the time being, we shall assume that phenomenologists are well aware of this dual problem and that, in the end, they are equipped to escape the solipsistic trap that awaits the proponents of a serious inside approach. The phenomenological approach Phenomenology is an inside approach, but one that is moderated by an initial acceptance of the reality of the outside world. In everyday life, we take the existence of the world for granted. Phenomenologists do not contest this, even though they start by suspending judgments concerning this reality. Ultimately, they want to gain access to the outer world from the inside of human experience. The extreme forms of outside and inside views, as presented by primitive behaviourism and philosophical solipsism, are in themselves of no further interest to us. In different forms, however, this confrontation of outside and inside forms is quite important for the development of the central topics in this book. There is, for instance, the outside view of social phenomena that is embodied in the structural-functional approach in sociology, and the inside view that is embodied in Max Weber's sociology of understanding. I shall look at these two later. Phenomenological psychology refers exclusively to experiences that are registered in the consciousness of indi-


viduals. In content, these experiences refer either to what happens within the individual (dreams, feelings, ideas) or to what the individual considers to be outside of himself (objects, animals, people, the environment, the world). For phenomenologists and, more particularly, phenomenological psychologists, what matters is consciousness and self-awareness. Yet, for at least two pertinent reasons, the path to the cognitive understanding of the experience of consciousness leads from the outside to the inside. First, there is the genesis of consciousness in every child —provided it is biologically normal, and grows up under socially normal conditions — starting with the dim recognition of objects of gratification, such as the nursing breast of the mother, the mother, food, playthings, other people, pets. They are all objects that, the child learns, will satisfy needs, and provide comfort and pleasure. They stand in contrast to other objects that the child learns to avoid as unpleasant or painful. To distinguish these objects, to point them out, to name them, to reach or call for them is the way a child begins to make sense of its immediate environment. The objects in this environment, be they useful or pleasurable, are objects for the child. The child engages with them and learns how to manipulate them. From such experiences and achievements, the consciousness of the child emerges and becomes the foundation for the consciousness of the adult. The normal adult goes along in everyday life, acting with more or less deliberation, but still considering things, people, and events as experiences of a given world that is taken for granted as being 'out there.' Without question, this outside world is taken not simply as real, but as 'the reality.' Secondly, there is the historical and socially given equipment with which we deal with the objects and people within this world. These are tools and techniques for coping with things, and language for dealing with people. Like the means of technology, the means of language have developed under the pressure of necessity as practical instruments for human beings to use in their larger environment. Our language serves us well in this respect. No matter to what other purposes we may use it, language bears the marks of its pragmatic origin; its first and foremost purpose

is to designate the objects of the outer world in their prag- 21 matic significance. LANGUAGE

Language Language cannot be separated from consciousness, and least of all from that conscious activity that we call thinking. Conversely, we cannot separate consciousness from language: the expression of conscious experience would be impossible without language. Even more so, we cannot make reflective considerations of conscious experience without resorting to linguistic formulations. What do we mean by "our language?" Is it English, period, "the English language," and nothing more? We are told that English is spoken by more people as their first, and often only, language than any other language on earth. Probably, English is also spoken, or read, as a second language by more people than any other. But, by no stretch of the imagination can it be said that all these people speak the same language. Bernard Shaw's remark that the English and the Americans are separated by the same language comes to mind. The English and the Americans are themselves separated into different language groups. Strictly speaking, "the English language" is an abstraction from the actual languages of English-speaking peoples. It is embodied in dictionaries, that is, word inventories, and in grammar books, that is, rules of construction and usage. Actually, we have countless variations of English that are related to one another. They have in common a sufficient number of words (but always only a fraction of the words listed in a complete dictionary), and enough grammatical elements that speakers of any of these variations recognize speakers of any other as English-speaking, possibly "with a funny accent," or "in a peculiar way," or "using queer expressions," and so on. Living languages are spoken in linguistic communities, which are usually political regions. Such communities may also be social regions, that is, social circles with similar cultural-educational backgrounds, or professions. There is the Queen's English spoken at Oxbridge and on the stage; there is a school English, in contrast to the dialect spoken at home; there are the occupational idioms of crafts, disciplines, and the profes-


sions; there is the cant of the advertising industry; there is the slang of neighbourhood groups. With the exception of the first two, all these are living languages with a vocabulary and sometimes a syntax that set them apart from larger linguistic communities. Living language means first and foremost spoken language. All such living languages originated as speech, and most of them developed for a long time before attempts were made to put them in writing, and to collect words into dictionaries, or convert syntactical usage into rules of grammar. The conversion of a living language into a written language changes the character of linguistic expression: the language heard becomes the language read, to be received not by the ears but by the eyes, to be grasped not from flowing and fleeting auditory impressions but from visual images that can be re-read and re-inspected at will. The creation and use of written language allows us to transcend the immediacy of face-to-face communication, to separate the speaker from the listener both in space and in time. Thereby, they become writer and reader who communicate indirectly with the help of auxiliary means. Written or printed communication converts living sentences into thought objects, into frozen expressions of meanings. These expressions, in turn, are embodied in visible signs that are drawn on a suitable material object, for instance, a sheet of paper. Thus given material form, the meanings of communicative statements can be presented without reference to their human originator. The meaning expressed is separated from the person who wished to convey it to someone. By the same token, and as a rule, the writer of messages has no guarantee that they reach the persons for whom they were intended. A letter may easily fall into the wrong hands. This objectivation of language has a further consequence: the development of a written style that may deviate considerably from that of speaking. An old German proverb says: A speech is not a writ. Germans have two plural forms for the noun word: Worte, which are spoken words, and Woerter, which are found in the dictionary. Likewise, French language communities make a clear distinction

between la langue and la parole, the written language and the 23 spoken vernacular. LANGUAGE The inspection of any living language and its atomized presentation in dictionaries shows clearly enough that most expressions carry the stamp of their pragmatic origin. Despite this, from early times on, linguistic communities have transcended the pragmatic, and made pragmatic expressions serve non-practical purposes. For example, the narration of tales, story telling, entertains both children and adults, and epic accounts heighten the sense of community by making the past part of a cultural tradition. The collective religious concerns of the community open a still more significant dimension of language. Language is used to cope with the unforeseen and unforeseeable events of life such as natural catastrophe or disaster, hostile invasions, accidents, and unexpected deaths. Most of all, language gives sense to a world controllable only in some spheres, but as a whole out of reach of human foresight and deliberate action. For example, language can present the idea of super-natural and super-human forces that can be favourably inclined to human beings by supplication and sacrifice. Symbolic and sacred language accomplishes the religious interpretation of the world. Eventually, reason and science largely replaced religion in explaining the world. First philosophy and then science offered a purposive and rational way of dealing with the universe of human experiences and the place of human beings within this universe. We thus have philosophical and scientific languages that accomplish rational interpretations of this world. Story-telling, religion, philosophy, and science are some of the major linguistic realms developed from pragmatic languages. Each realm transcends everyday life in its own way, but its language depends, at least for a time, on the pragmatic language of everyday life. These realms are, therefore, characterized by the abundant use of pragmatic, everyday expressions for conveying non-pragmatic, special meanings. Their language is that of analogy, parable, metaphor, and symbol. Only gradually and imperfectly do they get away from such metaphorical and indirect forms of expressing thoughts, and introduce their own terminology.


The creation of a special terminology is, of course, most clearly seen in the language of modern science. Even here, the emancipation from the language of everyday life is illusory. The sciences use Greek and Latin words, taken from ancient writers, to coin new terms. However, the etymology of the borrowed expressions shows them to be symbolic transformation of an underlying pragmatic language. Turning from considerations about special or pragmatic languages to language-in-use, we find that language is used to convey information, notions, suggestions from one person to another. The words that are used for such purposes are intended to convey meanings to others. They are nothing but the vehicles of such meanings. We imply this when we say that a speaker wants to be understood by the person who is addressed. This is somewhat ambiguous, however. It means, first, that the person addressed recognizes the spoken word as English words, a language the speaker uses and knows. Secondly, it means that to get even a dictionary meaning of the words used, the person addressed must hear them in the context of a sentence or several sentences. Any living language is characterized both by having one term with several meanings—likely the result of extending a single denotation in analogy and metaphor —and by having several terms for the same object — likely the result of the intermingling of several linguistic sub-communities. Consequently, the dictionary may offer several definitions of a word, and it is only in context of sentences that a listener can select the one intended. Even syntactic context is frequently not a sufficient clue for intended meanings. The context of the social situation in which speaker and listener act together allows the listener to grasp unequivocally what the speaker means. This is the relational context of language, its ties to the situations in which it is used. Such relational contexts significantly help determine, one, a speaker's choice of terminology and form of presentation to convey intended meanings to a listener and, two, the listener's interpretation of the words. Meaning is transferred from speaker to listener only when interpretation is sufficiently close to the intended meaning. Meaning rides on the back of the linguistic formulations used and heard.

I turn now to the function of language as a vehicle of 25 thinking. Language is the form in which thought can and LANGUAGE must be presented to oneself and to others. This cognitive vehicle, like actual vehicles of transportation, has both possibilities and set limits. Driving an automobile, I can go further and more quickly than on horseback. Riding a horse, I can go over terrain that is forbidding for a car. In either case, it is I, and not the vehicle, who decides where to go. But, the horse may throw me, or the car may stall. In both cases, it will be forcefully brought to my attention that, in order to get where I want to go, I need the vehicle. Its structure, make-up, and mechanism cannot be ignored. When the vehicle is language, this means that its structure, the words and the grammar, define the form of my expression and put limits on conveying meanings to others. Speaking English, or any other European language, I have to operate at a minimum with three major kinds of words, nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and with the auxiliary categories of conjunctions and prepositions. Nouns, as denotators of things, of objects, seem to be the most conspicuous parts of our language. When used in thinking, nouns result in a solid, stable, description of the most substantial part of our world. Nouns neglect the more dynamic aspects of this world. The actions and processes of the world occur in the verb form, between and around immutable noun-objects, so to speak. The descriptive quality of our language, which rests in our noun and verb forms, makes it an excellent vehicle for coping with the practical, everyday world, that is, with our outside experiences. This same characteristics makes it almost impossible to speak adequately about our inside experiences. The structure of inside experiences is radically different from outside experiences, but we have to use the same vehicle of language for both. Our language thus creates difficulties for us when we use it to talk about consciousness. As I have said, all languages originate as spoken languages of everyday life; basically, they are eminently practical. Special languages on top of living languages, be they epic, religious, philosophic, or scientific, have their roots, often well-concealed, in ordinary language. They become what they are only through the metaphorical and


symbolical use of certain terms of everyday language. Endowing these selected terms with quite different meanings enables us to speak about what would otherwise be unspeakable, inexpressable by linguistic means. This has a great bearing on our undertaking. If we want to think about and talk about inner consciousness, we have to use a language that originated pragmatically as language serving the practical purposes of dealing with objects and events in the outer world. Forewarned, we may devise our terms as carefully as possible. In spite of such efforts, we may still find that such a language remains rather inadequate for our purpose. Yet, it will have to do, because it is the only language we have. That means we cannot escape the paradox that Henri Bergson brought forcefully to our attention.

Phenomenology of consciousness Towards the understanding of inner experience In 1889, Bergson published his famous essay on the immediate data of consciousness (the English translation bears the title Time and Free Will). Approaching his subject matter, he dealt in detail with one basic aspect of language: it is "laid out in space." That means, it is built on a kind of geometrical conception of the world as two-dimensional space, which is cluttered with our linguistic terms as if they were isolated and independent objects. We even deal with time as if it were spatial, that is, consisting of discrete separate units. Bergson stressed that this structure of our language is excellently suited to its practical purposes, but completely unsuited for dealing with the phenomena of consciousness. Inner experiences occur within a continuous flow of "duration"; no isolated things appear in it but only ongoing happenings. By the same token, "inner time" bears no resemblance to our clock time. With these considerations, Bergson underlined the precariousness of his own attempt to describe, in terms of a spatialized and discrete language, that which is of a completely different character. I have mentioned Bergson's paradox as a warning about the difficulties that must be expected when we pursue our objective to gain insights into consciousness in human

experience, of human experience, and as human experi- 27 ence. Not only do we face the task of moving from the out- PHENOMEside to the inside, but we have to do it with a language ill- CONSCIOUSNESS suited to the task. You will remember that I have given at least two connotations to the terms, outside and inside. One, I opposed the outside approach, of which behaviourism is characteristic, to the inside approach, of which phenomenology is characteristic. Two, I have indicated in my brief consideration of language that it is a cultural instrument for dealing predominantly with pragmatic objects in an outside reality, and as such is itself an elementary yet universal form of the outside approach. Whether scientific or philosophical, outside approaches and language both present modes of interpreting the world. These modes must be clearly distinguished from the subjective experience of the same world, which occurs inside human consciousness, but is directed upon objects seen as being outside one's body and consciousness. Other experiences, which come to awareness in consciousness, are viewed as being within consciousness and self. Thus we deal with a mode of interpretation of the world that by definition is in inner consciousness but that is directed at events either inside or outside of our selves. In describing these events of consciousness that, by definition, are inside, we use a language that, by definition, is an outside approach. We are trying to jump over our own linguistic shadow. Our attempt will be guided by two thinkers, who, in the successive years of 1889 and 1890, published fundamental studies in which they undertook psychological investigations in a manner that made both into great pioneers of phenomenal psychology. I have already mentioned Henri Bergson (1859-1941). The second thinker is the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910). Bergson stands out as the creator of an "intuitive philosophy" and a psychology of consciousness. Particularly in his earlier work, he attempted to use introspective and intuitive methods to get hold of the inner workings of consciousness. I shall discuss his challenging contributions forthwith. In his later work (after 1900), he combined his own evolutionary theory with his original intuitionism. Later still, he made concessions to traditional metaphysics.


Our interest in his work is confined to his early theory of consciousness. James is best known as an early exponent of American pragmatism. In his early work, however, in parts of his weighty two-volume Principles of Psychology (1890), he developed his own psychology of consciousness. This is every bit as important as that of Bergson, which was published one year earlier. James's later writings on pragmatism are of secondary interest to us. The respective contributions of Bergson and James touch upon each other at some points, and complement each other on various occasions. This is the more remarkable as James at first worked in complete independence, without knowing Bergson's publications. The two men took notice of each other in the early years of the twentieth century, and corresponded with each other. James encouraged a number of his students to study with Bergson in Paris. BERGSON'S CONCEPTION OF I N N E R DURATION Bergson opened his Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience (translated into English as Time and Free Will) with a critical exposition of the outside approach embodied in scientific reasoning and everyday language. Numbers are the extreme expression of this approach. Objects are placed in space, or lined up in space, and can thus be counted. Counting ignores all differences between objects; it fastens exclusively on their being units of identical numerical value, completely ignoring their individuality and their particular qualities. In the same fashion, non-material objects, such as opinions, are counted by means of quantitative "symbolic representations." Non-material objects are treated as if they were objects, that is, quality-less quantities symbolically laid out in space, and all having the same numerical magnitude. This is like counting the separate peals of a church bell, instead of experiencing these sounds together as the melody, thereby getting "the qualitative impression of the whole series." By counting each tone individually, we separate ourselves from the original qualitative experience. Counting, either of material or non-material objects, is an operation in time, laying out quantitatively even units with intervals between them. This is the equivalent of spatial distribution. As Bergson said, "When we speak of time, we

generally think of a homogenous medium in which our 29 conscious states are ranged alongside one another in space, PHENOMEso as to form a discrete multiplicity." Similarly, he defined CONSCIOUSNESS space as that which "enables us to distinguish the number of identical and simultaneous sensations from one another; it is thus a principle of differentiation other than that of qualitative differentiation, and consequently it is a reality with no quality." In spite of the efforts of earlier philosophers to establish space and time as independent categories, Bergson plausibly demonstrated that their time concept "is nothing but the ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness." Likewise, what happens in everyday thinking is simply that "we project time into space." (1916: 90, 95, 99, 101) By the same token, Bergson said that motion is explained as taking place externally "in space and thus as homogeneous and divisible" and depicted as "successive positions of the moving body in space." He said that doing this creates a "confusion between motion and space traversed," killing the chances of understanding motion as much the chances of understanding real time. (1916: no, 112) By contrast, pure or inner duration "is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live." It "might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another... it would be pure homogeneity," maintained in the "melting of states of consciousness into one another," and in "succession without mutual externality." We endure and gain a sense of inner time, but "the interval of duration exists only for us and on account of the interpenetrations of our conscious states." (1916:100, 104, 107, 108, 116) That means, our inner experiences flow freely into each other. They may be likened to an ever-rotating kaleidoscope in which the coloured glass pieces have been replaced by drops of coloured liquids that ever run into each other, separate, and recombine in ever new, fleeting combinations. The most startling characteristic of Bergson's pure duration is its complete inaccessibility. It cannot be reached by introspective efforts; it can only be established by a "vigorous effort of abstraction." (1916:90) He argued its existence by way of thought experiments, and in terms of logical necessity. Speaking in methodological terms, this pure dura-

30 tion is a theoretical construct. While Bergson opened access APPROACH TO A lanes to the understanding of inner experience, we shall NOLOGY OF have to turn to men like James and Husserl in order to make CONSCIOUSNESS the working of consciousness more comprehensible. JAMES'S CONCEPTION OF THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Chapter IX of James's Psychology is called "The Stream of Thought." The term is to be taken broadly, including not only ratiocination but consciousness and "subjective life" in general. (1890:239) In the abridged edition of his Psychology, James named the corresponding chapter "The Stream of Consciousness." He came directly to the point: to begin with, psychologists can only posit that "thinking of some sort goes on." Thoughts appear only in individual consciousness. If there are "states of consciousness," then they are only "in personal consciousness, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and you's." The personal self, and not thought, is "the immediate datum in psychology." That "I think" and "I feel" is basic. James's theory of consciousness is subjective in a radical sense: its centre is what Husserl later called the mundane ego, the concrete human self. This ego "must form a liaison between all the things of which we become successively aware." (1890:224-226, 242) Like Bergson, but without knowing yet of his work, James viewed sensations (perceptions) and other "states of consciousness" as "subjective facts," which, once gone, cannot recur. As he put it, "Our sensibility is altering all the time, so that the same object cannot easily give us the same sensation over again." We cannot ever "descend twice into the same stream" of elementary sensations and of life as a whole. Likewise, every one of our thoughts is unique: "When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner...." And, conversely, permanently existing ideas making periodical appearances in consciousness are "as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades." (1890:230-233, 236) Like inner duration, the stream of consciousness is characterized by qualitative changes that do not disrupt its continuity. If we look for breaks, we may look at "the breach from one mind to another," which "perhaps [is] the greatest breach in nature." The sense of continuity, which in-

heres in consciousness, withstands interruptions; it "does 31 not appear to itself chopped up in bits;" it flows. Time gaps PHENOMEoccur. When they are felt, they do not destroy "the sense of CONSCIOUSNESS the parts being inwardly connected and belonging together because they are parts of a common whole." This whole is simply me, myself, or I. (1890:237-238) Again like Bergson, James stressed that though external things "are discrete and discontinuous," they often make "explosive appearance" in "the flow of the thought that thinks them." To illustrate his point he said, "Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear... is ... thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it." (1890: 240) James underlined his dynamic conception of the flow of consciousness by contrasting it with the static conceptions of traditional psychology. Its exponents are like people who say "a river consists of nothing but pailfuls, spoonsful, quartspotsful, barrelsful.. .forms of water." Even if the pails were put into the stream, "still between them the free water would continue to flow." (1890:255) In a different fashion from Bergson, James acknowledged inner duration by speaking of a "difference in the rate of change" in subjective states of consciousness. A slow rate creates the impression of resting places, which he called "substantive parts." Not only thoughts, but also sensory images "can be held before the mind for an indefinite time." Where Bergson's pure duration seems to consist of nothing but free-floating fantasies, James's stream of consciousness is not so homogenous. It not only contains the spontaneous flow of sensations, impressions, and feelings; it also displays controlled, slow-moving passages of reflecting, of deliberate thinking. This is a very significant step beyond Bergson. For Bergson, thinking in rational terms is identical with laying out ideas in space, making them part of the patterns of a conceptually constructed world outside the stream of duration. For James, "resting places" keep deliberate reasoning and thinking inside the stream of consciousness. James held that the "transitive parts" of the stream of consciousness are filled with "thoughts of relations" between substantive parts, and serve as transitions "from one substantive conclusion to another." Considering the cognitive


aspects of the flow of consciousness, James pointed out that thought, in its substantive stage, is accessible to scrutiny; in any transitive stage, it resists introspective observation. Trying to grasp thought in transitivity is "like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion." (1890:243-244) To James, thought in transition was as elusive as inner experience was in Bergson's pure duration. Regardless whether the stream of thought was substantive or transitive, James saw it as continuous, as an "unbroken stream" in which all states "melt into each other like dissolving views." He underlined its irreversibility, but also its forwardness, by speaking of a "feeling of tendency." He wrote that "large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we have an acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever." He even estimated that "a good third of our psychic life consists in these premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate." (1890:248-249, 252-253) For our purposes, the most significant part of James's theory of consciousness, is his notion of a "halo or penumbra" that "surrounds and escorts" the images in our consciousness. It is like the free water between the conceptual pails of traditional psychologists or the barrels of common sense of ordinary people that both place into the stream of consciousness. The halo is one of "felt relations," that is, of the free associations we make within a given context of sensations and thoughts. For instance, in language, these haloes cast their influence over the whole of a sentence as it is formulated and pronounced. This happens particularly when we are fresh and alert, because "our minds carry an immense horizon with them." For the individual, words have acquired "fringes of mutual repugnance or affinity with one another." When we think in an orderly way, such fringe associations embrace the formulation of thoughts and their conclusions. In other than orderly thought, they "run exactly parallel with like fringes in the visual, tactile and other ideas." One important element of such fringes is "the mere feeling of harmony or discord"; here we feel there is a "right or wrong direction in the thought." Subjectively, the "psychic 'overtone' of feeling" predominates over the denotative meaning of words: "any collocation of

words may make sense ... if one only does not doubt their belonging together." (1890: 255-256, 261, 264) No doubt, Husserl was influenced by James's theory of consciousness, and, in particular, by his theory of fringes. I shall return to the latter when I discuss Schutz's conception of meaning. THE ELUSIVENESS OF INNER EXPERIENCE AND THE MEMORY ACCESS-LANE The Bergson paradox arose from the total inadequacy of our language, which "lays out in homogenous space" discrete and tangible things, intangible objects of thinking, sensations, or even time, to describe the "heterogeneous manifoldness" of the qualitative experiences occurring in inner duration. In spite of his impressive insights into the workings of consciousness, in principle, Bergson settled for establishing duration as a cognitive-analytical category. Apparently, James was more stubborn in his attempts to gain access to the stream of consciousness by introspective self-observation. Yet, he also found it difficult to detect in observed activities of consciousness "any purely spiritual element at all." He said, "Whenever my introspective glance succeeds in turning around quickly enough to catch one of the manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all I can ever feel distinctively is some bodily process, for the most part taking place within the head." (1890:299-300) The spontaneous process of consciousness eluded him: as pure becoming and passing away, it remained introspectively invisible. Instead, James caught an inkling of "some bodily process" that, we guess, physiologically carries the elusive stream of consciousness. This may be called James's paradox. In the case of either Bergson or James, the result is the same. Whether one speaks of pure duration or the pure stream of consciousness, the original flow of inner experience remains shrouded in mystery. Possibly, James reached the limits of introspection. Neither he nor Bergson saw the paradoxical situations in which they found themselves a hindrance to the pursuit of the problems of consciousness. They had considered consciousness within given limits, to the best of their abilities and as far as possible. Where introspection failed, retrospection became a sub-

33 PHENOMECONSCIOUSNESS


stitute; where direct access was denied, an indirect approach could be tried. This approach was human memory. Human beings have the capacity to remember what has passed away in their experiences, beginning with what has occurred a short span ago, and reaching back into more remote times of their lives. In fact, Bergson's second major study was devoted to Matter and Memory. He explained that every experience leaves its traces in consciousness. The flow of experiences, so to speak, deposits a semi-continuous series of memory images, not unlike the frames of a cinematographic film strip. Whenever present experiences evoke it, appropriate memory images are brought back, reproduced, to become part of the present experience. Through looking at the memory image of that which has just passed, we obtain an indirect image of the experience just passed. We cannot summon the experience itself; we can summon the memory of it. To this understanding of memory as access lane to experience James added two fruitful notions, both of which have been mentioned before. In his thesis of the substantive parts of the stream of consciousness, he pointed to a moving platform, a drifting float, from which deliberate glances can be directed upon memory images of past experiences. In his theory of fringes, he accounted for the spontaneity of some memory experiences by locating them, so to speak, within the fringe regions of the stream of consciousness. In later phenomenological-psychological usage, memory snatches occur as fringe phenomena, often simultaneously evoked with an ongoing experience. So far, my presentation of an approach to direct experience through memory has avoided one crucial factor: that of time. I shall now look at it. TIME AND TIME-EXPERIENCE Life is lived in the present. We experience being alive only at the present moment. The present moment comprises the Now-Here-Thus of the living individual. In the mathematical theory of time, a moment is a point without extension located on a continuum, separated from other such points by an interval measurable as an interval of time but laid out in a spatial manner. This time conception was gradually derived from the human experience of

natural or cosmic time, that is, the alternation of day and 35 night, and the succession of the seasons. Calendar time PHENOMEwas derived from cosmic time. Calendar time was ex- CONSCIOUSNESS pressed in terms of years, which were sub-divided by the lunar cycle. This calendar time was further refined through the invention of sundials, hourglasses, and mechanical clocks, which arbitrarily divided days into hours. In our practical life we naively take calendar time and clock time as 'real' and 'objective,' and we admire the technical advancements in the measurement of time, from minute time particles such as micro-seconds on the one hand to abstract concepts of time in theoretical mathematics on the other. The precise measurement of time by clocks and calendars is contrary to the way we experience time in ordinary life. Everybody knows that "time flies" when we are involved in an activity that captures our interests to an unusual degree, and that "time stands still" when we are bored or waiting for something to happen. Subjective time varies with our involvement in situations and events, and, possibly, also with our age. When I was a child, the year from one Christmas to the next was half an eternity; now I am a "senior citizen," the year from one birthday to the next passes quickly. The present moment of the Now-Here-Thus of our living has duration: it is a process of experiences becoming and passing-away. It is not the same as the present of objective time, which is a moment without extension. In this sense, the present of human experience is a specious present, as E. R. Clay wrote in 1882. Clay was a member of the early British common sense school of philosophy. The specious present, he reasoned, is not simply "a time that intervenes between the past and the future." Rather, "it is really part of the past," namely, the "recent past," which he characterized further as the "obvious past." If time is considered "relatively to human apprehension," it cannot be understood without the idea of a specious present. (1882:168) Describing the human present as specious, as a "fiction of experience," was a concession to the conventional theory of objective time. From a different standpoint, time as experienced is real, and objective time a fiction. James and later thinkers modified Clay's notion of the specious present by adding an obvious future to his obvious past. Thus, we get a conception of the subjective


present, the present we actually experience, wherein the immediate past and the immediate future meet in the NowHere-Thus of the living moment. Of course, the obvious past and the obvious future in the present moment do not exhaust the time dimensions of consciousness. If by obvious, we mean what is just passing and what is just becoming in our consciousness of the Now, then the specious present contains traces of the Now that just was, and the anticipation of the Now that will immediately follow. Beyond this obvious past, however, is a more remote past that can be recalled only in memory. Beyond this obvious future is a more remote future that is foreshadowed only in (as yet empty) expectations. By using my mind, I can bring selected aspects of past experiences into the present Now, and anticipate aspects of future events. We do not know whether or not Husserl read James on the specious present. Husserl developed his own idea of the experienced present as midsection of the flow of experiences between becoming and passing-away in the stream of consciousness. He showed that what has gone on immediately before the moment of the Now is still retained, and what is immediately to come is already protended. Both retention and protention are simultaneous with present experience, occur spontaneously, and thus belong to what Husserl called "pre-predicative" experience. Husserl's introduction of the terms, retention and protention, was both a theoretical refinement of the analytical description of inner duration by Bergson and a substantive penetration into the manifold, qualitative nature of human consciousness. You will remember that Bergson considered the inner duration of human consciousness impenetrable. This does not mean that Husserl caught time in the fashion in which James thought of catching consciousness. It means that immediate experience is the original experience of time, experienced primarily as inner duration. Retention becomes immediate memory of something passing, and protention, immediate anticipation of the emerging future. From this dual-direction of living experience in the Now-Here-Thus springs the larger understanding of time both as past experiences partly restorable in memory, and as future experiences partly anticipated. Man is endowed with memory: retentions recede, and become memory im-

ages, while protentions turn into projections of anticipated 37 events, actions, and so on. Thus, present experience in any PHENOMEgiven Now has a 'historical' dimension, issuing from a past CONSCIOUSNESS life, and leading into a future life. This, by the way, is related to what Schutz called our "biographical situation" - a topic that I will treat later. Towards the comprehension of the phenomenological method So far, I have attempted to describe, theoretically and conceptually, inner experience, and to discern a kind of structure in the unstructured flow of consciousness. I still have to consider the ways in which we may possibly gain access to consciousness, and impose, if not discover, a structure to it. In other words, I am turning from the substance of phenomenology to its method. GETTING AT INNER EXPERIENCE I have spoken of James going after inner experience with the help of introspection, that is, self-examination. I have also pointed out that he came up with considerable insights, but not with completely satisfactory results. Like Bergson, James dignified introspection as a serious and relevant method of inquiry into consciousness. He showed that what is a dubious and dangerous tool in the hands of fools can be very useful to a serious thinker. He showed that introspection can be an empirical method in its own right, that is, an empirical method turned inside, and adapted to its elusive subject matter. Handled properly, introspection is inner observation, and yields descriptive data of a particular kind, which, in principle, are as viable as the descriptive data of the outside observation of the conduct of other people. When James did not quite achieve what he set out to achieve, he did not discredit this method. As every researcher in any field can tell us, negative results are also data, and also yield knowledge. James reached a limit of introspective inquiry, going as far as he could go. Maybe, no one could go any further. Maybe, a shift in the line of approach or the scope of inquiry could achieve a bit more. It seems to me that we in the West are approaching an absolute limit to our rational quest for knowledge. Perhaps meditation — not the rational kind of Western philosophy,


but the non-rational kind of Eastern wisdom-can open up realms of experience now closed to us. I am concerned here with our culturally conditioned heritage of thinking, and our intellectual, philosophical, or scientific objectives. We are, as Max Scheler* said, pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowing, not knowledge for the sake of salvation. By the latter, he meant the quest for mystical insights that can serve the human soul rather than human reason, what he called the "ratio" of Man. Neither are we pursuing what Scheler called knowledge for the sake of domination. This was his third type of knowledge. By it, he meant knowledge that can serve the practical purposes of mastering natural objects and forces, and dominating and manipulating people. Behaviourism as an applied science is an example of the third objective. Husserl took up the introspective method about fifteen years after Bergson, and ten years after James. The paradoxes encountered by Bergson and James were less of a problem to him. Maybe his teacher Franz Brentano had prepared him better for the task of coping with the paradoxes that inhere in all phenomenal-psychological undertakings. Maybe his reading of Bergson and James had offered him the benefit of the results of their approach to the matter. Whatever the reason, he managed to approach the latter from two angles, each of which led him more closely to the core of phenomenological-psychological concerns. I shall present one of these angles in the next part of this exposition; I introduced the other here as Husserl's treatment of the retentional-protentional dimensions of the Now. His idea of the experienced present contains the possibility not for catching the stream of consciousness but for catching a glimpse of it.

Scheler (1874-1928) was one of the most outstanding early students of Husserl. He wrote a phenomenologically accentuated sociology of knowledge, concerned himself with the phenomenology of emotions, and advanced his own theory of intersubjectivity. His work is always challenging and relevant, although often disorganized. In one period of his life, he became a Catholic, and attempted to create an objectively valid theory of ultimate values and value priorities, informed on principles drawn from Catholic theology.

39

A FALLACY AND A TRAP I have mentioned the risks of using introspection. James spoke of the "psychologist's fallacy/' where the psychologist may confuse "his own standpoint with that of the mental fact," or may ascribe to the mental fact "a consciousness which belongs to the psychologist." (1890 1:196-197) This means that when data of consciousness can be obtained, the psychologist may subject them to interpretations that issue from pre-conceived orientations. The data are recognized, but are subjected to personal bias or theoretical slants. Worse still, the data themselves are coloured by pre-conceived opinions, and even their description is interpretatively slanted. This, of course, can also happen with the non-mental data of a behaviourist or any other approach. Fallacies like this are serious threats, especially to a subjective approach. To avoid them, the psychologists must keep their own operations and activities under critical scrutiny. Those using an introspective method must watch themselves constantly, and make clear to themselves whether what they are doing agrees with their intentions. This watchfulness is in keeping with the phenomenological approach. Beyond this, there may be outside controls, which I will discuss later. A still more serious risk of introspective undertakings is that of falling into the ontological trap that looms behind any serious subjective approach. James hinted at it in the surprise ending of his statement concerning his conception of "the central active self." Having reached this conception by way of introspection, he recommended it to the attention of others, "if others there be." (1890 1:299) The weight of instrospective evidences may crush our conviction of the existence of others. The same doubt that leads to philosophical or psychological inquiry into all things otherwise taken for granted turns from a critical inspection of the form or nature of things taken for granted to the ontological denial of their existence. The inquirer falls into the trap of solipsism. That is, he changes Descartes's philosophically liberating statement cogito ergo sum into an ontological absurdity: I think, therefore alone I am. As I have already mentioned, phenomenologists and exponents of other subjective approaches are not solipsists.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS


Rather, their opponents have called them solipsists in spite of their declarations to the contrary. The opponents have said that a consistently subjective approach leads unavoidably to solipsistic consequences. The opponents have declared the results of introspective attempts to gain knowledge to be philosophically or scientifically worthless because the results cannot be duplicated by others: they are beyond scientific confirmation; they are no better than poetry, which is also derived from self-feeling or self-inspection. This is fine for those who like that sort of thing, but not for philosophers or scientists. To the opponents of phenomenology, the trap is built into its method. For the phenomenologists themselves, the trap is real enough, but not unavoidable. They fall into the trap only when they are unable to extricate themselves from possible solipsistic implications of their data and the theoretical consequences of this. There are safeguards within the phenomenological method itself. Its adherents are obliged to make use of them. APPROACHING THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL

METHOD:

HUSSERL'S MODEL Before speaking of the phenomenological method, or of phenomenological methods, I have to say a few words of caution. Most of all, in our context, the term method does not signify what it usually signifies in such academic disciplines as psychology or sociology: a specific technique for the gathering of specific data (observational or experimental techniques) or else for the presentation (analysis) of these data (statistical techniques). I am the last to belittle the how-to skills of psychological or sociological researchers, but these are technical skills and, as such, do not constitute a method. As the term implies in its native Greek, method is pursuit, that is, pursuit not of the limited objectives of a specific project but of the ultimate goal of the cognitive quest chosen by any genuine thinker. Therefore, method is inseparable from the ultimate goal that we pursue with its help. At least, the term phenomenological method has to be understood in this sense. For our purposes, we can designate the ultimate quest of phenomenology as the recognition of the working of human consciousness both in its actual course and its essential character. Since its core subject matter is simultaneously closely familiar and most elu-

sive to our inquiring minds, the ongoing task is extremely 41 difficult and, in a sense, unfinishable. For this reason, Hus- PHENOMENOLOGY OF serl called phenomenology "perennial philosophy." This CONSCIOUSNESS implies that its method also is unfinished. If there is a growth of phenomenological knowledge, it entails a growth of its method; the substantive investigation and the method of conducting it are interdependent. And conversely, the incompleteness of phenomenological knowledge is reflected in the incompleteness of the phenomenological method. Add to this the fact that the inquiry into the working of consciousness is a solitary task-the notion of a phenomenological research team does not make sense —and you have one pertinent explanation why individual phenomenologists only partially agree as to what is reliable knowledge in their field and, in consequence, what the phenomenological method actually entails. If anything unifies them, it is neither the same knowledge nor the use of the identical method, but the phenomenological quest. In order to keep the appraisal of the phenomenological method as simple as possible, I shall confine myself to Husserl, the first and foremost protagonist of modern phenomenology. I shall take his method, as it can be grasped in retrospect, as the prototype of the phenomenological method. Needless to say, his method itself has a history, that is, it developed and changed over the more than thirty-five years during which he worked on his phenomenology. For more than twenty years of this development, Husserl treated phenomenology and phenomenological method as synonymous, refusing to consider the emerging body of his thinking a philosophy in the systematic sense of the discipline. From the outset, his method was two-faced. Positively, it began to serve him in the slow pursuit of his ultimate goal: it helped him to find out what to look for. Negatively, it helped him to discern what to avoid. I do not hesitate to call both aspects equally important. In fact, I shall introduce the "first step" of this method in its preventive rather than its constructive aspects. Its critical function was both to avoid inadvertently falling prey to the traditionally given interpretations of the data of consciousness and to find safeguards against the pitfalls of introspective techniques. His most basic methodological measure is his original


"phenomenological reduction." He designated it "reduction" because he wanted to reduce the observed phenomenon to its own features, instead of observing it in the light of preconceived interpretations and evaluations. Distantiation from preconceptions became the first condition of seeing things as they actually were. To practise reduction you had to look at what you found retrospectively in your consciousness as if it were something new. You had to put aside reminders of earlier involvements with similar objects, and the standard interpretations such an object might invoke in you. You had to take a 'neutral' stance, observe, and suspend judgment, including judgment concerning the 'reality' of the object. Prior knowledge of objects of a similar kind, of their general characteristics, of their ontological status, were not to be discarded, but rather to be "put in brackets." Later, when it seemed warranted, the objects could be unbracketed, and considered on their own. What you grasped of an object of consciousness after this basic phenomenological reduction became a phenomenological datum. This datum, Husserl postulated, would have to be subjected to a second reduction, which he called "eidetic." Its purpose was to obtain the "eidos" of the object, the essential image. The eidetic reduction was to yield essences of universal validity, in contrast to accidental, individual features. In some of his writings, Husserl distinguished a specifically eidetic region of phenomenology, which he also called "eidetic psychology," setting it off from mere descriptive psychology in one direction, and from his "transcendental phenomenology" in the other.* Foregoing a consideration of the transcendental region, I am treating only the regions of descriptive and eidetic psychology here. Husserl admitted only the second into the realm of phenomenology proper. The first was confined to an auxiliary role in support of eidetic investigations. The distinction between the descriptive and eidetic psychol* In various of his writings, Husserl's eidetic and transcendental considerations frequently run into each other. This is especially the case in the later phase of his work in which he referred to his philosophy as "constitutive phenomenology." This indicates clearly enough that he preferred to treat eidetics and transcendental phenomenology rather as different aspects of the same phenomenological reasoning than as

ogy has played a role in the appraisal of the two early 43 psychologies of consciousness that I discussed earlier: PHENOMENOLOGY OF CONthose of Bergson and James. A number of phenomenol- SCIOUSNESS ogists relegate them not only historically but also theoretically to a pre-phenomenological sphere. Yet, these two authors usually did not confine themselves to mere descriptive representations; practically speaking, they operated on the level that Husserl called eidetic. That is, rather than giving full particulars, they tried to ascertain, and stress, general and universal features. In this sense, they practised a kind of phenomenological reduction without being directly aware of it, and, thus, without pinpointing it as a specific method of their investigations. There is considerable justification for designating large parts of their psychologies of consciousness as phenomenological psychology: they produced effects and expositions similar to those of Husserl in comparable areas of concern, albeit inadvertently, that is, without discovering and deliberately applying the procedure of eidetic reduction. Therefore, some refuse to call their psychologies of consciousness, phenomenological psychologies. This judgment is debatable, but I shall not argue against it here. In any case, in the light of the whole bodies of the philosophies of Bergson and James, it would be wrong to claim them wholly for phenomenology. different layers of the 'structure' of his philosophy. ("Eidetics" is the established label for all knowledge of the essential aspects of consciousness gained in the stance of eidetic reduction, while transcendental phenomenology refers to the insights into the 'pure' ego as the subject of consciousness, gained after the performance of the additional transcendental reduction.) Nevertheless, he established the conception of a stratified structure of phenomenology, as late as in 1929, in his article on "Phenomenology," which he contributed to the i4th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Since he wrote it in German and the translator reduced it considerably, the correctness of the published English text has been repeatedly put in doubt. However, my comparison of the Britannica translation with the by now published German text showed clearly that the three-layer layout of descriptive psychology, eidetic psychology, and transcendental phenomenology was Husserl's idea. Whatever distortions of his reasoning may be contained in the translation, they will have to be sought in other parts of it. Schutz, then, was fully justified when he based himself on Husserl's Britannica article—in the shortened translated version available to him — in order to stress the distinction between eidetic psychology and transcendental phenomenology.


For this reason, I have previously referred to their psychologies of consciousness as phenomenal rather than phenomenological psychologies. With Husserl, phenomenology is not exhausted by eidetic investigations. He postulated a third reduction, which he called "transcendental." It was placed on top of eidetic psychology, reducing the eidos of objects of consciousness and finding its universal centre in the "transcendental ego" — a kind of pure essense of subjectivity. Husserl developed this idea of transcendence in his transcendental phenomenology. He claimed a priori validity for some of his eidetic findings, and, most of all, for his transcendental insights or conclusions. This meant he saw some things in consciousness while not as innate yet as spontaneously given; they are not derived from experience. Therefore, they would be universal. He argued this on the power of insights that appeared to him in sharpest self-evidence. Thus, he had to conclude, this is it, it cannot be otherwise. The objectives of his transcendental phenomenology called for such certainty. For many phenomenological philosophers, such Husserlian apriorities exist and guarantee the unconditional validity of his findings. However, from my limited knowledge of post-Husserlian phenomenological literature, I should say that the later phenomenologists do not agree as to what specifically constitutes aprioristic truth and what represents mere expectation and intention in Husserl's writings. Some even question the a priori character of transcendental findings. We shall leave this particular problem to the experts. From the start, Schutz invoked Bergson quite a lot, and in his American work, he increasingly used James's writings. Yet, since 1930, he considered himself a phenomenologist. Originally, he was inclined to accept Husserl's philosophy — as far as it was then available —in all its basic aspects. However, for purposes of developing his own sociological theory and methodology, he essentially confined his phenomenology to eidetic psychology. Yet, philosophically, he expected great things from the further development of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. In these expectations, he found himself disappointed. In the course of his later scholarly life, he became more and more critical of more and more aspects of Husserl's reasoning on the trans-

cendental level. However, I shall not discuss these matters 45 here.

PHENOME-

Our purposes will be served when we pay attention to Schutz's use of phenomenological-psychological insights for deepening the understanding of the subjective and inter subjective substratum of social conduct and interaction.

CONSCIOUSNESS

PRESENTING INNER EXPERIENCE I have indicated that phenomenological reduction, as posited by Husserl, is the safeguard against the trap of solipsistic implications. None the less, when phenomenological descriptions and observational accounts are provided, they are made "subjectively speaking." When you read phenomenological expositions, you will find that their authors related their findings to themselves; they use the first-person singular pronoun, "I." This is not a sign of vanity and selfimportance. Rather, it indicates modesty in the sense of asserting no more than what can be truthfully asserted: the experiences reported are my experiences. Any presentation of introspective observations and insights that does not underline the I-experiences that they represent may be read as a claim to universal validity for observations that, strictly speaking, are of a particular case. For anyone concerned with phenomenological psychology, the adoption of the I-form for observational accounts is absolutely necessary. It is necessary because I can gain access to the data of consciousness only by observing the one consciousness directly accessible to me: my own. As you have probably noted from the quotations from James, he used the I-form. Staying within the sphere of psychology of consciousness, he was keenly aware of the necessity of using the first-person singular pronoun. For instance, he asked whether or not one can tell what the feelings of the "active self" are, and answered: "I think I can in my own case." Being aware that "what I say [will] be likely met with opposition if generalized," he decided that "I had better continue in the first person." (1899: 299) Why, then, do I insist that strictly subjective observations are not solipsistic? To ask this question means to ask about the possibility of obtaining valid phenomenological-psychological data, that


is, data that can be accepted by others who are competent to judge them. This restriction is common to all sciences: the results of scientific investigations are open to critical inspection or retest by, and solely by, fellow scientists conversant with the existing knowledge, the problems, and the methods of the field in question. The results do not have to satisfy theological criteria nor agree with common sense ideas. Do phenomenological-psychological data actually stand up to such inspection? Can they be confirmed by others? CONFIRMING PHENOMENOLOGICAL DATA By data I mean abbreviated descriptions of phenomena as they appear, and as they present themselves in observation. In phenomenology, data refer to phenomena of and in consciousness, whether they be called objects, feelings, ideas, or images. Any descriptive statement about any kind of observed phenomena of and in consciousness is a phenomenological datum. We call the sets of phenomenological data, the generalizations made about them, and the conclusions drawn from them, phenomenological knowledge. Interpreting data, drawing from observations, and making conclusions yield what amounts to phenomenological theory. Theory depends on knowledge of the phenomena; opinion does not. Theory is different from mere opinion. It is good to remember James's warning against the psychologist's fallacy. The trick is to establish theory while keeping opinions out. Opinions may become accepted as theory only after adequate preparation. One of the most outstanding American students of Husserl, Dorion Cairns,* set down the following rules: [1] No opinion is to be accepted as philosophical knowledge unless it is seen to be adequately established by observation of what is seen as itself given 'in person.' [In person' here means as phenomenon in itself.] [2] Any belief seen to be incompatible with what is seen to be itself given is to be rejected. [3] Towards opinions that fall in neither class. .. one is to adopt an 'official' philosophical attitude of neutrality. (1940: 4) Cairns (1901-1972) first studied at Harvard with two earlier American students of Husserl, Winthrop Bell and William E. Hocking, and later

These rules, first or all, concern individual psychologists and the scrutiny of their own opinions. Further, the rules instruct psychologists to examine critically the opinions of others. By the same token, the rules prepare psychologists to expect others to view their own work in the same manner. As much as any other kind of psychology, sociology, or natural science, phenomenological psychology is a public affair. Its public is composed of those who are trained, educated, and prepared in principle to comprehend, and thus to appraise, the work of all those presenting parts of their work to their scholarly confreres. However, in contrast to most other fields of knowledge, phenomenological psychology is based on data that are not reproducible. The repetition of prior observations and results cannot be guaranteed by a correct set-up of observations, experimental conditions, and technical instruments. First of all, introspective methods cannot be learned in the way that objective laboratory methods can. Introspective methods depend on purely subjective abilities and sensitivities. Secondly, even if we presuppose similar abilities and sensitivities, I cannot take it for granted that other phenomenological psychologists will come up with results that resemble mine. Again, it was James who pointed out these facts. I quoted him earlier on as saying he was sure that he could state on his own behalf, "in what the feeling of the central self consists," but he freely admitted that his findings "indeed may be inapplicable to other individuals." For this reason, he said he was "leaving my description to be accepted by those to whose introspection it may commend itself as true, and "confessing my inability to meet the demands of others...." (1890: 299) The last statement may mean that the "demands of others" were outside the range of his own psychological interests: what he did was without relevance to them; their problems were not his. The statement can also mean that others shared James's problems but what they found in studied for two years in Freiburg with Husserl. After the Second World War, he taught at a small college in Illinois. At Schutz's suggestion, he joined the Graduate Faculty of the New School, where he established himself as one of the few American philosophers who interpreted and critically developed Husserl's philosophy.

47 PHENOMENOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS


their own consciousness did not agree with James's data. Our interest, of course, is confined to those others who tried to arrive at an understanding of James's data by doing what he did. James, Husserl, and all later phenomenological psychologists needed these others because they claimed to be involved in the legitimate pursuit of knowledge. For this reason, they had to present their findings and interpretations publicly. James seems to say: if you proceed like me, you will make observations of phenomena occurring in your consciousness; if they are like those I have described as mine, you confirm what I have found, you find the same. Since, however, every actual experience in consciousness is unique and unrepeatable, I have to add here that the same does not mean identical; it means a similar experience, an experience comparable or at least compatible with an earlier experience. Such similarity and compatibility can only be understood eidetically, by grasping retrospectively the essentials of an experience. Going beyond James, I shall now add: if you make observations that are not similar to or compatible with mine, we do not have to let the matter go at acknowledging and respecting the difference. In fact, as psychologists, we should realize that we have a problem on our hands. We ought to recheck our findings, that is, to see whether new observation yields the same results or not. Possibly, you confirm yours while I cannot confirm mine, or I become doubtful about them. Thus, I shall have to pursue my findings further, and may eventually come to an agreement with you. On the other hand, we may both confirm our original observations. Then, we must conclude that your consciousness works differently from mine. What these differences are may, in turn, become a new problem of a joint investigation. In phenomenological psychology, factual observations do not occur as frequently as would be desirable. As I mentioned in regard to Husserl's writings, observation frequently flows into expectations as to what would be found were the psychological inquiry carried further. Likewise, re-tests and repetitions by others are not frequently found. Often enough, findings and suggestions are simply accepted as plausible, or rejected as implausible. Yet, at the level of theoretical interpretations, real differences occur when

data are linked to broad frames of reference that themselves 49 display a dual character. On the one hand, they are built up PHENOMEon the principle that they should contain no substantive CONSCIOUSNESS assertions that are contradicted by given data; on the other hand, they are oriented on principles that are beyond empirical test, for example, the philosophical-anthropological image of Man, mentioned earlier. We should not, therefore, be surprised to find that people who call themselves phenomenologists fall into various groups distinguished by their basic frames of reference. There are orthodox phenomenologists who do not all allow critical deviations from Husserl's teachings; there are phenomenologists who accept Husserl's philosophy over its whole range, but critically; there are critical phenomenologists who are essentially phenomenological psychologists, and who draw freely from the work of others; there are existential-philosophical phenomenologists who integrate either or both of Heidegger and Sartre in their thinking; there are the critical theorists who combine phenomenological orientations with Marxian theory, notably in its Hegelian aspects. This is nothing to worry about. As soon as we realize the immense complexity, and possibly inexhaustible range of the phenomenological subject matter, we can accept the idea that no group of phenomenologists, whether starting from Bergson or James, Husserl or Heidegger, Sartre or Merleau-Ponty, Marx and Hegel, have the key to ultimate truth in their hands. All tackle their subject matter from some philosophical angle, and make up their frames of reference accordingly. We can learn from all of them, and cannot accept any of them dogmatically. This established, I can say that conscientious mutual criticism, and, most of all, serious dialogue between exponents of the different phenomenological or existential approaches can only serve the advancement of phenomenological knowledge. THE LANGUAGE OF THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL PRESENTATION I have already mentioned that the I-form is necessary for observational accounts in phenomenology. In the foregoing discussion, however, I switched my pronominal references from I, to I and you, and, eventually, to we. The subjective reference was augmented by intersubjective references. I shall explain the full significance of this shift in a


later section. In the present context, it means that as a phenomenological psychologist, working in solitude, I address myself to one of my confreres, and indicate exchange, cooperation, and, possibly, common undertakings. This presents the idea of a community of phenomenological scholars, which is converted from potentiality to living reality only in such acts of inter-personal communication. In other instances, phenomenologists may switch in their expositions from the I to the we-form in an appeal not to a specific person or community, but to others in general. These others might be readers of their work, personally unknown to them, or members of an audience listening to a lecture of theirs, or, in short, anyone interested in what they offer, and thus willing to listen, and maybe to respond. Applying this to the presentation of phenomenological data, I can say that the we-form contains an appeal of the kind that James had in mind when he recommended to his readers to try to confirm introspectively in their own consciousnesses what he had found in his, always leaving open the possibility of disconfirmation. The we-form that has so far appeared in these expositions and that will reappear in later parts is essentially such an appeal to my readers, inviting you to share the views offered, and to find out whether, and to what degree, you can accept them.

Phenomenology of objects Up to this point, we have concentrated our attention on gaining an inside view of consciousness. But, in various ways, we have had to realize that this inside view cannot be consistently maintained. Every so often, we have had to consider matters that, to our ordinary understanding, appear outside of ourselves. Sometimes, it was other people in the social world; sometimes, it was objects or events in the natural world. We shall be looking at our experience of the social world later. At present, we shall look at the contents of consciousness that are neither our inner, personal experiences nor fantasies, but what we, the rugged realists of everday life, call the things, objects, happenings existing in, or going on, in our surroundings. Earlier, we attempted to look from the outside in; now,

we shall try to look from the inside out. Our senses are 51 gates to the outside world. Thus, I shall start with a short PHENOMEcharacterization of sensory perception. I shall follow this by OBJECTS considering the ways in which our consciousness deals with perceptions, both spontaneously, and in more or less deliberate efforts. Perception, Gestalt, apperception We perceive outside objects by the mediation of our sense organs. We notice or approach objects through our eyes, our ears, our fingers. However, because I am not concerned here with the physiology of the sense organs, but with sensory experiences, I shall speak of seeing, hearing, feeling, and touching objects and thus of sensory experiences. At the moment, I shall deal only with one kind of perception, choosing, for convenience and simplicity, seeing as visual experience. In doing so, I must make two reservations. One, it cannot be taken for granted that observations pertaining to vision pertain to the other senses as well. It may well be that the reception of sensory impressions from the different sense organs is as differentiated as the quality of the sensations issuing from seeing, hearing, or touching. In any case, generalized, descriptive patterns of seeing cannot be transferred, without much ado, to auditory or tactile experiences. Two, it is not at all typical for sensory experiences to occur in that splendid isolation in which they appear in texts on the physiology of sense organs and the psychology of sensory impressions. In dealing with seeing alone, or hearing alone, we proceed analytically, for reasons of theoretical convenience, but we do not offer a trueto-life representation of sensory experiences that, as a rule, occur in combination. Of all our senses, we seem to put greatest confidence in the sense of sight. What could we say in everyday life that bears more conviction and more confidence than "I have seen it with my own eyes"? When we see something with our own eyes, what happens in our consciousness? Physiologists of sight offer us, first of all, a physical picture of the emission and propagation of light rays, and, secondly, a description of the working of certain nerve cells that receive sensory impulses and transmit them to corresponding groups of brain cells —or something of that sort. A theory of sensory perception is built upon these pro-


cesses. We remember the diagrams showing the human eye as a camera: an object emits light rays; light rays hit the lens of the eye, are refracted, and caught by the retina; an image of the object appears on the retina. The physiological process is, of course, somewhat different: nerves in the retina transmit the impressions of the light rays to brain cells where the impressions are assembled into an image of the object. The assembling is done so well and so quickly that we see the object, rather than the light rays that hit our retina. I am not going to contest the scientific nature of such a physiological theory of human sensory perception. The only trouble with it is that it tells us nothing about sensory experiences. I have already hinted that our brain organizes visual impressions in the form of whole images. Moreover, as the Gestalt psychologists have convincingly demonstrated, our consciousness is spontaneously involved in perception. From the outset, we structure what we see into dominant configuration (Gestalt) and surrounding field, into "figure and ground." Beyond this, the configuration itself is organized in such a way that its whole is perceived prior to all its details. Its parts are determined by the whole, but the whole is more than the sum of its parts. We get the Gestalt immediately. Details have to be sought out in a more or less deliberate effort. The problem is not the synthesis of the whole picture from small pieces, as atomistic approaches assume; the problem is the analysis of the whole Gestalt by singling out details. The Gestalt principle has revolutionized the whole psychology of human perception. On their part, phenomenological psychologists have widened the Gestalt approach to perception by re-introducing the idea of apperception. Apperception relates to the fact that sensory images do not occur in conscious experiences as isolated and self-contained phenomena. Rather, sensory images spontaneously invoke memories. Unique sensory images appearing at the present Now are spontaneously checked against memory images that have been stored away in an individual's "stock of knowledge," to use Schutz's phrase. The perceived Gestalt instantaneously activates the traces of past sensory experiences that are sedimented in memory. Thus, a perceived object, which is unique, and which has never been

seen before, is directly identified, for instance, as an object like certain other objects encountered (some time, or many times) before. The newly experienced object is familiar; it is known from past experiences with similar objects. Such familiarity does not dwell in the sensory impulses; these are not endowed with memory. Such familiarity occurs to, and is in the person who perceives the object in question. This person is not a bunch of disconnected sense organs, but a human being who experiences each sensory impression as part of being alive, having a self with a life story. Snatches of this past life get thrown into present experience. We add to our sensory impressions without being aware that we do so. We see an object before us, automatically identifying it as round, as red, as tri-dimensional, as a ball. The first three of these characterizations denote aspects of a unitary, and direct sensory experience; the last goes beyond it. Two-dimensional roundness and redness are directly perceived; tri-dimensionality comes from the depth perception of binocular vision. The identification of the qualities of roundness, redness, and tri-dimensionality as a ball issues from sensory memory, where the denotation, ball, is designated for "things that look like this." If I want to test my identification, I can walk around the object, or turn it around. I expect it to look like a ball from whatever angle I see it. Furthermore, although redness is an essential quality of the given sensory experience, I know from past experience that colour is accidental to a ball. By any other colour, the given object would still be a ball. Even if I had never laid eyes on a red ball, but only on blue, green, and yellow ones, I would immediately recognize the red ball as a ball. Colour, then, is accidental to the identification of the given object. Furthermore, as long as I do not change my point of vision and the ball does not move, the tri-dimensional roundness is not a datum of my sensory perception. Were the identification of the seen object as a ball a cognitive act, it would be conjecture. However, since it is a spontaneous event, it will have to be characterized in a different way. It is not perceived; it is apperceived. What I don't see, I spontaneously add. I add the unseen back part of the round object to my sensory impression. This occurs with the perception of every spatial object (it may occur also with

53 PHENOMENOLOGY OF OBJECTS


the comprehension of an 'ideal object,' an idea, etc.) Because I immediately convert perceptions into apperceptions, I do not have to check my identification of objects. I take it for granted that things are what they apperceptively seem to be. Either by accident or curiosity, I may discover that the red ball disappoints my apperceptive expectations. Its other side is not red, but green; it is sliced in half, and exists only as a hollow semi-sphere; or, it turns out to be a solid semi-sphere. If this happens, the spontaneous, apperceptive image has been ruined: I have a problem on my hands. I "stop and think," as Dewey said, and redefine the object. Apperceptions are not infallible. In spite of occasional disappointments, however, they function because, more often than not, tests bear them out. If apperception shows that perception is not an automatic process, then the occasional disappointment of apperceptional expectations, and the ensuing correction of first impressions make clear that the apperceptive process itself is not fixed in its spontaneity. Conscious mental activity replaces spontaneity whenever it is necessary to correct apperceptive errors. Apperception, then, yields to deliberate appraisal, to a redefinition of the object. Neither the eyes nor any other sense organs are the human window to the world: apperception is. What is perceived is but the raw material to be utilized selectively in fashioning apperceptive images. This holds also for Gestalt perception. As it can be said that all perception is Gestalt perception, so it must be said that Gestalt perception is apperceptive. This has great consequences for the Gestalt principle, although these were not necessarily drawn by the pioneers of the approach. I shall discuss these consequences later. Experience and sensory impressions Awareness, cognition, and spontaneous memory all convert the physical-physiological processes of perception into sensory experiences. Visual, aural, tactile sensations turn into someone seeing, hearing, touching something. All sensory activities, insofar as we are aware of them, are experiences endowed with a significance that is not lost with the passing moment of their happening to us. Because we

endow them with meaning, sensory activities turn into hu- 55 man experiences. PHENOMEThis topic of meaning, which is by no means confined to OBJECTS °F sensory experiences, will occupy me in the rest of my exposition. When I say that seeing is experiencing — not a physicalphysiological process, but a human activity—I am not disparaging the theories of physicists and physiologists about the emission of light and sound waves, or about the physiology of sensory organs and brain centres. I recognize that these theories tell us about sensory activity. However, my interest is sensory experience. I recognize that our sensory organs are a necessary but not sufficient condition of our sensory experience. Without eyes, we would not see; without ears, we would not hear. What we experience visually or accoustically is made possible by our sensory vehicles. Its content, its meaning, is not. Let me introduce a mechanical analogy. A film cannot be shown without a projector. However, the mechanism and optical system of the projector have no bearing on the content of the film. Once started, the projector will run an unexposed film, a documentary, a comedy, a propaganda film, a soap opera. Human perceptual equipment is, of course, much more complex than a projector, and by no means operates as mechanically. Nevertheless, the physiological vehicles of sensory perception are as indifferent to the kind and meaning of the experience that they mediate as a projector is to the film itself. The difference is that the film has been prefabricated; its content remains the same whether it is projected once or many times on the same screen, or whether it is shown on different screens by different projectors. Experiences, on the other hand, are not prefabricated; strictly speaking, they cannot be repeated; and still less can they be had by different persons. The same individual is simultaneously co-film maker, editor, projectionist, screen, and audience. In contrast to a reel of film, which can be preserved and reused, an individual's experiences are invariably marked, one performance only. Experiences fade into memory; they cannot be relived. At best, they can be retold, but not without abbreviation and re-editing.


Intentionality As I indicated, sensory experiences are not passive processes; they do not occur without active participation of the individual. Such participation is already at work in apperception: sensory impressions lead into sensory acts. We can speak, for instance, of the act of seeing. By act, we mean always a deliberate effort, expended in order to do and achieve something. In seeing, this something is visual orientation to the surroundings. Stressing this kind of purposefulness, Schutz used to say: I do not see, I look. With this formulation, he underlined that we give direction to our senses; we reach out with them. Yet, Schutz's formulation is abbreviated. I can say, I see, and mean I have the ability to see, but I cannot say, I look, and express the same ability. Such a statement is incomplete: I have to say, I look for something. As soon as we pay attention to it, the statement, we look for something, sounds quite obvious. But, to a considerable degree, phenomenological psychologists deal with the obvious. First, they point it out, and, secondly, they put it into question, making it a theme of their investigations. This step was first carried out more than a hundred years ago by Franz Brentano, the most influential teacher of Husserl. He considered mental activities—hearing, seeing, sensing, and also thinking, judging, etc.-as activities directed upon something. I am looking for something; I am listening for something; and also, I am thinking of or about something, I am judging something. This quality of having direction is called intentionality. Intentionality of consciousness is one of the building blocks of phenomenology. Intentionality is not the same as having an intention before doing something, that is, making the decision to act before starting the action. Intentionality is not deliberate in the sense in which intention is deliberate, that is, as a kind of forethought. Intentionality is spontaneous, particularly in sensory action. Just like apperception, intentionality is a characteristic of sensory action. I expressed this immediacy earlier when I said our sensory activities are directed upon something, and when I spoke of looking for something. This means concentration of attention, pointing, and going in one specific direction to the exclusion of all other possible directions. When I seek something, it is to the exclusion of all other things within reach. These other things are also

specific in themselves but, at the moment, they are not so 57 for me.

PHENOME-

The pervasiveness of intentionality may be illustrated by the following two examples. One, it is well known that a mother living in a noisy section of a city sleeps through loud disturbances in the street, but wakes up as soon as her baby starts to cry. Two, a person shown a Rorschach plate covered with ink blots sees distinctive figures in them. The person organizes an apparently chaotic field in a way that has specific meaning for him. Others may also organize the ink blots in meaningful ways, but they are unlikely to arrive at the same Gestalt. Each person sees in the plate what he or she unconsciously wants to see. Intentionality is a bipolar concept. It presupposes the intentional subject, the person who intends, and the intentional object, the object he or she intends. That means, on the one hand, that there is no recognition of objects without the subject who intends them; and, on the other hand, that there is no consciousness, as inhering in a subject, without the intentional objects that are its content.

OBJECTS °F

Attention, interest, motivation Although intentionality operates quite spontaneously, it is selective. I have deliberately left open the question, What makes for this selectivity? Before turning to it. I shall speak about the shift from a spontaneous to a deliberate fixation on a specific object. I invest energy to keep a specific object in focus, and watch, or scrutinize it for a time for a hidden or overt purpose. This is called attention. Attention is wilful concentration on a specific object, keeping my mind on it. I pay attention to it. The payment here is not of money but of energy. Where does attention come from? Speaking generally, we can say that it is part of living. To live means to try to exist in a given environment, to have needs, to find what enables us to live, and to avoid what threatens us. Bergson expressed this in the phrase, attention a la vie, attention to life. To live demands alertness, that is, an active tension of mind and body, a readiness to act and to react. Attention, then, is readiness to cope with our given environment. This givenness of the environment is not passive or static: the objects and the beings in it, be they plants, animals, or other human beings, are themselves in movement. They


change, they impinge upon our sphere of life and upon us; they make demands on us, as well as offer opportunities for us. We may view attention as a manifestation of striving to secure our existence, of our will to live. The foundation of attention is quite pragmatic. Furthermore, the foundation of phenomenological psychology is pragmatic. Later on, I shall consider this pragmatism of human life. Like intentionality, attention is highly selective. What makes for this selectivity is nothing but interest. As soon as we are interested in something, we assume a searching stance; we seek out what interests us in our surroundings, and we direct our attention upon the specific object of our interest. Since interest leads to directed sensory activity and, from there, often to physical action, it may be called a motivational term. In fact, part of our general idea of human beings is that they are motivated in their conduct. But motivation means many things, causes, or impulses, or reasons, for reacting and acting under given circumstances in a certain way. Consider the following examples. (1) He stole a loaf of bread because he was hungry. She cried because she was in pain. (2) He hit him because he was in a rage. She acted foolishly because she was in love. He did not know why he did it, but it was because, when he was little, he wanted to kill his father so he could have his mother all to himself. (3) He cut the boards in order to build a bookshelf. She wrote a diligently researched paper in order to get a good grade in the course. These are examples of three kinds of motivation: (1) instinct or physical impulse; (2) affect or emotional impulse; and (3) the desire to achieve a tangible objective. Notice I used the word "because," for the first two groups of examples, and the phrase, "in order to," for the third. In doing so, I follow Schutz who distinguished between "because motives" and "in-order-to motives." According to

Schutz, one essential characteristic of because motives is 59 that the actor is not aware of them during the action itself. PHENOMEThe motives do not enter into consciousness either because OBJECTS °F they are totally hidden from the actor or because they are temporarily hidden from view. That is, after the action has been completed, the actor may say, I don't know why I did this or the actor may realize the because motive only in retrospect, behind the in-order-to motive of a deliberate action. Thus, athletes training rigorously for extraordinary feats may realize, after accomplishment or failure, that they really wanted to prove something to themselves, or that their vanity made them want the gold medal bestowed in a moment of glory. The because motive may also be imputed to an actor by others, possibly by psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, or amateur judges of character. The Freudian Oedipus complex is the classical case in point. I must stress here that psychiatric motives are motives for the professional purposes of the analysts to explain to themselves what they think are their patients' symptoms. The meanings that the analysts ascribe to symptoms are not those of the patients, but refer to so-called scientific psychiatric theories. Freud based his theory of the Oedipus complex on his misinterpretation of the myth of Oedipus Rex and on an anthropological fantasy of the rebellion of the sons against the father who monopolized all the females of the primeval tribe. This may sound like fraud. But it has to be said that psychiatric theories do not have to be statements of pure fact; they are frames of reference, and as such, tools for dealing with elusive elements of psychic derangement. The only condition for such tools is that they work. Of course, the analogy between real tools, which are definite, solid objects, and psychiatric tools is precarious. From their theories, psychiatrists gain assurance about their clinical procedures, and guidance for mapping out their course of treatment for individual cases. To them, their theories are justified when they help them to cure patients. That these theories may withstand neither philosophical nor empirical-factual criticism is beside the point. Psychoanalysts may gradually transfer their motivational theories to their patients so that patients accept the theories as the because motives for their strange conduct. The because motive is not theirs, but handed to them by the authoritative figure of the analyst. No doubt, patients find


it helpful to believe this because motive. I suspect, however, that psychoanalytical treatment works because of the intensive interaction between analyst and patient, which has its emotional high tensions, and its dramatic high points. Be this as it may, imputed motivation, and, in particular, psychiatrically imputed motivation, is of no further concern to us. We are not interested in mental pathology or in hidden causes of human conduct. We are interested in socalled normal people. When I speak of motivation, it will be in the Schutzian sense of because motives, which are discernible, at least in retrospect, by the actors themselves, and in-order-to motives, which are deliberate guides to essentially pragmatic actions. I am vitally interested in the reasons that persons give themselves to explain their conduct. In pursuing my interest, I am treating people as rational beings. By rational, I do not mean the rationality that governs the reasoning of mathematics and the exact sciences. I mean the tendency that people have to view their conduct as reasonable and to explain it as reasonable. Sometimes, people make up reasons for their actions when, in fact, they are at a loss to explain them. Psychologists aptly call this rationalization. In the light of psychological theories of motivation, or of common sense judgments of a person's conduct, rationalizations appear to be self-deceptive. This is no reason for us to discard them. For us, rationalizations, as because motives offered by people to explain their conduct, are just as important as the because motives that we accept as their "real motives." The definition of the situation Anyone familiar with the history of American sociology will remember the situational approach developed by the Chicago School during its most vigorous years between 1900 and the Second World War. The dominant principle of this school was always seeing human conduct in the context of the immediate surroundings in which it occurs: persons always live, act, think, and explain in concrete situations. This is also one of the ground rules of the sociology developed by Schutz. In order to act effectively in a specific situation, people must make themselves a picture of the situation. One of the

outstanding figures of the Chicago School, William I. 61 Thomas, called such a picture "the definition of the situa- PHENOMEtion." In explaining it, he made a highly significant contri- OBJECTS °F bution to the sociology of the life-world. In one of his discussions of the concept, he used the following example: the warden of a prison refused to carry out a court order to send a specific inmate outside the prison; this prisoner had killed several strangers simply because they were talking to themselves; he killed them because he was convinced that they called him vile names. Thomas concluded, "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."* Schutz called this the Thomas theorem, and considered it one of the most relevant contributions made by American sociologists to the kind of sociology he propounded. Of course, the example of paranoic behaviour does not exhaust the theorem. Thomas himself offered many other examples from, and applications to, everyday conduct. The Thomas theorem applies, for instance, in pre-defined situations, most of which are socially and culturally established. All conduct that is guided by custom falls into this category. The traditions of every community contain many practical prescriptions for proper conduct in all routine situations of community life. To the members of the community, these traditions appear as the way things are supposed to be. Small groups within the larger community, such as specific families, have definitions of the situation that echo those of the larger community, and that are real to the members. For example, I spent the first fifteen years of my life in a constitutional monarchy whose guiding social principle was that of authority. In family life, this meant that the father made all decisions; his wife had to obey him at all times, although he might delegate punishing the children to her. The children were subordinate to both, but feared their father the most. My father worked long and hard hours. Until he was inducted into the army during the First World War, his coming home from work always brought the same scene. Tired, my father plopped himself down, and my mother knelt down and took his shoes off. Upon the command, "Washing water, slippers," I filled the wash basin with hot water, and my little brother scurried to bring * William I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, The Child in America (New York: Knopf, 1928), p. 572.


my father's slippers from the bedroom. For the two of us, this was the socially pre-defined situation. We accepted our father's authority as real, just as he accepted the authority of the state, and for us the consequences were very real indeed. The early American sociologist, William Graham Sumner, treated folkways and mores as socially pre-defined situations. These may be subsumed under the "collective representations" that were the cornerstone of the sociological theory of Emile Durkheim. Both Sumner and Durkheim stressed the automatism of Thomas's definition of the situation, and both used the terms, compulsive and coercive, when discussing the validity and acceptance of socially defined situations. This notion of automatism is basic to all positivist sociology, but it is not quite correct. Of course, I frequently find myself in situations that I do not have to define myself because they have been defined for me. During my socialization and education, I have picked up a great number of such definitions that, as Schutz said, amount to my socially approved knowledge of recipes for my practical conduct. But, the selection of the recipe appropriate to a given situation is not automatic. Ritualization, such as in the scene of my father's homecoming, is not the rule. Strictly speaking, social situations retain a modicum of uniqueness. Prescriptions for socially correct conduct have to be applied in situations that are not simple repetitions of each other. Therefore, first of all, I have to decide which of my broad supply of ready-made definitions of situations applies to the case on hand. Further, the coerciveness of pre-defined situations lies in the fear of social disapproval, which may range from ridicule to ostracism. I may, however, defy such disapproval by ignoring the established rule, seeing what will happen, and being ready to take the consequences. That human beings defy the tyranny of custom just as they defy the tyranny of political rulers, in spite of the consequences, contradicts Sumner's and Durkheim's theories about automatism in socially pre-defined situations. These theories explain social and political obedience, and, thus, the preservation of a social order. They do not explain social change as the transition to a different social order. They see only the destructive effects of social and political disobedience, rather than the emergence of different sets of defini-

tions of social situations, which may make a social system 63 acceptable to more people. PHENOMEThose who speak of the compulsion of social rules actual- OBJECTS °F ly speak of the compulsion of the social definition of the situation. This difference may be explained by the example of the compulsion inherent in any political order. Even the most compulsory order does not rest solely on brute force concentrated in the hands of a government. As Max Weber put it in his unsurpassable way, order rests in "the belief in the ... legitimate ruling power" of the rulers on the part of those whom they rule. Ultimately, all power rests on the chance that those who are ordered to obey actually do obey. That is, they maintain the belief in the legitimacy of the given government and define all political situations accordingly. Any political order is safe only as long as this chance obtains. A political order will not persist when the ruled, in their great mass, define the political situation as illegitimate, and not warranting obedience. They may still obey in the face of naked coercion. But any highly repressive and oppressive regime is doomed because it cannot survive situations of extreme external stress. This was the case with Hitler after the Allied invasion of Normandy. Not only were his armies defeated by the superior military power of the Allied troops, but Hitler himself was defeated when his charisma evaporated, and he could no longer maintain belief in the legitimacy of his political order. The social situation was redefined when the German population, the German soldiers, and eventually his generals defined the war as being lost. Some situations in daily life are not pre-defined. These are situations that for me are new and strange. When I encounter such a situation, I have no ready-made recipe at my disposal; I cannot act automatically. Instead, I have to assess the situation on hand, reflect on it, and try to come up with my own definition of the situation—regardless of whether situations of this kind are nothing new to others, and regardless of whether they have a ready-made definition of this situation. I have no knowledge of it; it is strange to me. Should I not be able to puzzle it out, I remain at a loss. Either I act blindly, and risk considerable trouble, or I refrain from acting, postponing, or abandoning action altogether. I may define the situation vaguely, for instance, as potentially dangerous, and, choosing discretion as the


better part of valour, run away. I may define the situation tentatively by comparing it in part to one kind of situation, in part to another. In this case, I have a chance to work out something that would allow me to act cautiously. Finally, if what is to me an unknown situation allows, I may lie back, and define the situation as one calling for observation, saying to myself, let's see how things develop. This means that I look for further clues that may allow me eventually to define the given situation in content, structure, and requirements. Or, I may decide to make a direct inquiry. If the persons involved in the situation seem friendly enough, I may simply ask them, "What are you doing?" "Why are you doing it?" Then, I assume a temporary role as an observer—more about this later—but my objective is still to be informed by people in the know. I try to learn about their definition of the situation so that I may apply it in interaction with them. Most definitions of situations that we apply in our daily lives are socially pre-defined; they greatly simplify our lives by reducing mental effort to a minimum, but they do not eliminate it. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations that we must define for ourselves, whether in doing so we are true innovators or merely re-inventors. The latter will be the rule, as we may have found in situations where we thought we had a new definition for something that, alas, had been defined long before.

Vantage point In his second book, Human Nature and the Social Order, Charles Horton Cooley introduced a notion that will help us to specify further the characteristic ways in which we orient ourselves to our surroundings: the vantage point. Standing in a field of corn in spring, all plants appear to be arranged in such a way that they form a system of rows radiating in all directions from our feet. Cooley concluded that such appearances are characteristic of all of our experiences : "There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point." (1908:117) To view things from a particular vantage point is a general feature of our lives. This does not exhaust the matter. I can develop the notion of always seeing my surroundings from a specific physical and social place further. We all have heard, and

possibly used, the phrase, "From where I stand, the matter looks like this." At first, this sounds simply as if the vantage point is spatially determined. On second thought, however, I want to ask whether the place where I am at a particular moment is a sufficient determinant of what I see. Let us look, first of all, at the spatial aspect of the vantage point. Suppose we were attached to one point in space, somewhat like a tree, but capable of looking in all directions. If I were in Cooley's corn field, I should know beyond a doubt that I was standing at the centre of the field. My eyes, which I trust more than any other sensory organ, are witnesses to this. I could say that I have seen it with my own eyes. Seeing ourselves at the centre of a world radiating about us, and believing the evidence of our eyes is a universal human experience, a fact of our existence. This existential fact can be expressed in other ways. For instance, Schutz at one point applied the mathematical conception of systems of co-ordinates to the ego that locates itself at the zero point of his system of co-ordinates. Whatever aspect of my surroundings I pay attention to, be it object, person, or activity, I view it from my zero point, my vantage point. In this sense, we may speak of the egocentric characteristic of our lives. Ego-centred space co-ordinates are built into our daily language. We speak of left and right, backwards and forwards, above and below-all locations that cannot be determined without reference to a specific, individual vantage point. In mathematics, the zero point in all systems of coordinates is a universal, presenting the ideal centre of an ideal scheme for any actual co-ordinate system. In everyday life, however, this rule becomes questionable. In the case of natural co-ordinates such as those mentioned above, they make no sense without a subjective centre. The left page of a book is called left because it is to the left of the reader. We are, however, inconsistent in our linguistic usage. When a person is facing us, we do not, as we did with the book, call the side that is on our left side the person's left side. Instead, we grant that people are individuals like us, and are at the centre of their own co-ordinate systems. We concede that what we see on the left of them is on their right. To speak in general: the effect of the spatial vantage point corresponds to a basic, existential feature of all human ex-

65 PHENOMENOLOGY OF OBJECTS


periences, and it expresses the subjectivity (or ego-centredness) of these experiences. Horizons The notion of the horizons of human experience is related to that of the vantage point. If I stand in a certain spot, I have before me, and, turning on my axis, all around me, a limited field of vision that varies according to circumstances. The extent of my vision depends on at least two factors. First, my field of vision depends on how good my eyes are, and on visual perspective that makes single items disappear into a blur beyond a certain distance. My natural vision has limits. I may extend the limits of my vision by using glasses, field glasses, or telescopes, only to discover new limits. Secondly, my field of vision depends on the physical properties of my surroundings, quite apart from varying conditions of light. In a room, there are walls; in a street, there are buildings; in a valley, there are mountains. Indoors or outdoors, objects cut my field of vision short. Only looking from the highest mountain, or over a huge plain, or far out to sea can my eyes reach the furthest horizon. Using the analogy of vision, we may speak of horizons of apperception. To mind comes James's distinction between substantive parts of the stream of consciousness, and its penumbras or fringes. These fringes contain anything that is not a central thought or impression but accompanies the latter, or is marginally evoked by them. In phenomenological language, fringe phenomena are "co-present." While I formulate a sentence, variations of its formulation occur in the back of my mind, the preceding sentence lingers on, hints of the next sentence appear, the suggestion of a digression pops up, snatches of memories of various sorts pass by, feelings are evoked. When I stop my central activity of speaking or writing about a specific subject matter, and try to focus on the fringe phenomena of the just arrested activity, I can sort them out into zones, like rings around a core, forming so many horizons. By applying the terms core, ring, and horizon to activities and phenomena of consciousness, I generalize observations and place them into a matrix of theoretical interpretation. Fringe rings with their horizons denote potentialities. What we could see within a given horizon, and what we

actually see, are two different things. Intentionality and 67 interest are ever at work: we fill given horizons at given PHENOMEmoments very selectively, and always below their theoreti- OBJECTS °F cal capacity. This intentional selectivity is superimposed upon the spatial limitations of apperception. We can apply the spatial metaphor of horizons quite usefully to inner phenomena of consciousness, provided we remember the Bergson paradox: the language used to describe space outside ourselves cannot fully do justice to the interior phenomena we are investigating. Husserl developed the phenomenological notion of horizon. He was concerned with two kinds of horizons. First, inner horizons: these are arranged around what he called ideal objects, that is, those intangible, elusive ideas, notions, fantasies that we see as being part of ourselves. Secondly, outer horizons: these are arranged around real objects, that is, those tangible, touchable things in the outer world that we see as being apart from ourselves. Speaking in the language of Gestalt theory, we could say that if an object is the figure, then the horizon is the ground. However, the horizon is not as rigidly determined as the figureground scheme suggests. The fringes are subject to multiple structuring: a figure has not a uniform ground but one of many shades. The field of consciousness has many horizons. Beyond the horizon of perception lies apperception. Beyond these are the horizons of all kinds of experiences and knowledge. Experience and knowledge each have multiple horizons of their own. In knowledge, we have what we know intimately and expertly; what we know relatively well; what we know only vaguely; and what we do not know at all. Knowledge has rings or horizons, ranging from complete mastery to total ignorance. These rings are not fixed, but change as our knowledge itself changes. We may become better informed about a topic, or we may forget things that we once knew well. Things of which we knew nothing come to our attention. The outer horizon forever remains an empty possibility: we may come to know things currently unknown to us, but as we do, we realize that there is ever more that we do not know. We can never exhaust what there is to know of the world. New light always creates new shadows.

68

Relevance

APPROACH TO A PHENOMENOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Our vantage point physically determines what we can see, hear, reach, or otherwise directly experience. No vantage point ever determines what, at any given moment, we choose to see, hear, reach, or otherwise directly experience. Another factor is involved. A vantage point has so much potential experience that we can exploit or not. In Husserl's words, these potentialities are "empty." This means, one, that the potentialities are not part of the vantage point itself, but part of our awareness operating in the particular situation of the vantage point. This means, two, that the potentialities become fulfilled or realized when we act within the particular situation. This means, three, that in fulfilling or realizing the potentialities of a given vantage point, we select some potentialities as being worth our attention and ignore others. What makes us choose to realize some potentialities while ignoring others? Intention, attention, interest, and motivation are all at work. What we see is what we look for. And, of course, what we look for is what interests us. Such interest may be new or long standing, fleeting or persistent, reaching into our past life or stretching towards the future. What matters theoretically is that our interest gives things their significance to us, it makes them relevant. Relevance is the factor that determines what we choose to experience out of all the things we can experience. Schutz wrote on relevance throughout his scholarly career. In fact, he called the "problem of relevance" the key problem of all sociology. Relevance gives access to all crucial areas directed towards understanding human conduct. From 1947 to 1951, Schutz concentrated on a specific investigation of the topic of relevance. His unfinished work was published in 1970 as Reflections on the Problem of Relevance. I shall concentrate here on its most important points. I shall take first a distinction that Schutz made only in the context of other considerations, but that, in my opinion, is the most crucial point of his whole theory of relevance. This is the distinction between intrinsic and imposed relevances. Intrinsic relevances are those that issue from a person's own inner inclinations and interests. Since they result from what Schutz called "volitive acts," I suggest calling them volitional relevances. They obtain every time I turn my attention to something because I wish to do so. By con-

trast, imposed relevances come into play every time some- 69 thing forces itself on my attention. PHENOMEWhen I stop a passer-by on the street in order to ask him OBJECTS °F for direction, I do so because I want to. My act has volitional relevance. If the passer-by responds to my query, he does so because he feels he ought to. His action has imposed relevance for him. I imposed it by my decision to stop to ask him. When I interrupt my work because I am hungry, my empty stomach is forcing itself on my attention. This is an imposed relevance. If, however, I decide to go into the kitchen and raid the refrigerator, my action has volitional relevance for me. Later, I ignore my wife's call for dinner because I am engrossed in developing a theoretical point on paper. This action is quite volitional. When, however, my wife appears in my study, and demands that I stop to get something to eat because dinner is on the table and will get cold, I do not really have a choice. My act has imposed relevance for me—her volitional relevance! Schutz developed a theory of three kinds of relevances, topical or thematic, interpretative, and motivational. Topical relevance is not hard to figure out. It means something is the topic of my interest. In daily life, I make something topical or thematic when I find that for some reason, I can no longer take it for granted. It has become problematic. This problem is of topical relevance to me: I shall probably spend some effort in investigating the matter in the hope of getting some clarification. Specific theoretical investigations, by the way, issue from similar topical relevances. While the given body of knowledge of the field in question is accepted, and its validity taken for granted, one or a few specific aspects are made problematic, gain thematic relevance, and will be subjected to investigation. In every case, topical relevances stand out against a large field of accepted fact and knowledge that, as a whole, remains unchallenged. In this context, Schutz spoke of the distinction between the familiar and the unfamiliar. What has lost its familiarity, or what was never familiar, evokes an "actual interest." Schutz examined the relevance of the unfamiliar by looking at the elaborate analyses of the Greek sophist, Carneades. Carneades used the example of a man returning to his hut and discovering something unusual in a badly lit corner, something that could be a rope or a coiled-up snake. The


something unusual takes on topical relevance to the man. This topical relevance is imposed, it is "thrown before him" in the original sense of the Greek term for problem. The problem is solved when the unfamiliar object is linked to something familiar. In the Carneades' example, the man's problem is solved when he identifies the "something unusual" as either rope or snake. The identification helps the man decide what action to take. Topical relevances may also be intrinsic or volitional. I can decide to make something problematic. In this case the problem has not been thrown before me. Rather, I have sought it out. I do this by structuring a field that has come to my attention into familiar and problematic features. I want to know more about the latter. They make a topic for me. Sometimes by approaching the problematic features from a different angle, seeing them in a different way, I can create a new topic. As a rule, interpretation follows the description of phenomena; thus, interpretative relevances follow topical relevances. Topical relevance brings objects to our attention. Pursuing a topical problem means to take notice of the existence or occurrence of things, people, or events and to clarify our impressions of them. From this, a new problem arises: What does the thing, the person, the event mean? What has been descriptively identified now gains an interpretative relevance. Speaking generally, interpretation means explaining a fact or phenomenon by relating it to a larger scheme or frame of reference. In daily life, whenever our curiosity about something is satisfied with labelling it—this is a dog — we unwittingly resort to the primitive classificatory system inhering in our vernacular. Or, maybe, we are referring deliberately to a more systematized classificatory system as we remember it from our schooldays. For example, I have seen a strange new animal. On describing it to a person who knows a lot about animals, I am told that it is a burrowing mammal, a badger. Again, my curiosity is completely satisfied. Such rudimentary interpretation by classification does not suffice in sociology. Essentially, we need a theoretical frame of reference, or some kind of paradigm, that will offer more sophisticated answers to questions of interpretative relevance. The third kind of relevance, motivational relevance,

occurs when something has to be done about the topic that 71 has come to our attention. Every action, whether consid- PHENOMEered or carried out, requires motivation. Thereby, topical OBJECTS °F and interpretative relevances become motivational relevances. Such relevances, too, may be either imposed or volitional. In Carneades' example, the man may decide the unusual object is a snake. Being afraid of snakes (because motive), he runs from the hut, slamming the door shut behind him (in order to gain safety). His motivational relevance is imposed. On the other hand, the man may be on the lookout for snakes, being confident that he can handle them. He would then decide to identify the something unusual. Having identified it, he will chose a course of action, either leaving the rope where it is or removing the snake. Effective action motivates him. The motivational relevance is volitional. Now, the question is, What does motivational relevance have to do with motives? The motivational relevance that is imposed is dominated by because motives although it may release in-order-to motives for deliberate action. The motivational relevance that is volitional is characterized by inorder-to motives although it has its own because motive. The former leads to reaction; the latter to action, no matter whether the situation itself is imposed or sought out. Motivational relevances have dual aspects; they are because relevances and in-order-to relevances. The world of the phenomenologist and the world of everyone's experience I want to close this part on the "Phenomenology of objects" with some elementary considerations about the outer horizons of what phenomenologists call the 'world,' that is, what is experienced as being its actual and potential entirety. You will note that I began by setting off the word 'world' in single quotation marks. This indicates that I and the phenomenologists give a special meaning to the word. This world is neither the physical universe nor the world of creation. In speaking of the world, phenomenologists mean the many and ever-changing worlds in which every individual lives. At any given moment of life, all individuals have their own unique worlds, the worlds of their experiences and of their cognitive understanding. Both of these include sedi-


ments of their earlier experiences and of the knowledge acquired earlier. These earlier experiences and knowledge are seen against present experiences and knowledge. It follows, therefore, that the worlds of Here and Now must be different from those of earlier Heres and Nows, which are slipping into past memory if not into oblivion. In the course of individual life histories, worlds change constantly and — as a rule-expand. This does not mean that people must be particularly aware of such change. They may live for long periods in what seems to them to be the same world. Only in retrospect do they become aware of how their worlds have changed. In actuality, all individuals live simultaneously in more than one world. They may not note this. Living in a particular field of activities, they tend to give themselves fully to it, and thus to experience each world as a whole, at least during the time spent in it. There are worlds of work, worlds of family, worlds of play. But at work, at home, or at play, individuals see themselves as being the same people. Worlds may change; identity remains (is experienced as remaining) constant. I shall look at the phenomenon of living in "multiple worlds" later on. At present, I am concerned with the opposite phenomenon, that is, the idea of the world as a single, unified whole. For phenomenologists, the term world means more than just worlds of experience. It includes an assumption about the givenness of the world as a whole. This world is a given for every individual. It existed before the individual was born, and will exist after he or she is dead. Although the world is known to each of us, and is knowable exclusively in human experience, it is bigger than all of us. Were it possible to pool everything everyone knows about the world, it would still not be known in its entirety. Even with the light of all knowledge, there would still be shadows. Beyond the sphere of the known lies the unknown. What the unknown is, and remains, unknown. We know this much because human experience of the outer world is the experience of converting bits and snatches of the unknown into the known. How could this process ever be exhausted? The last horizon of the world is that of unknown potentialities. We may suspect some of these potentialities as being there, and expect to realize them in some future, but others we may

never know about at all. Knowledge of the world is an in- 73 finite pursuit. As we move into the unknown, we push the PHENOMEultimate outer horizon further away; it ever remains before OBJECTS °F us. The phenomenological "world thesis" acknowledges the finiteness of human experience and human consciousness. In a phenomenology of consciousness, the world is what we experience as being situated outside ourselves; it is the polar opposite of the self that experiences.

3. Approach to the Social Self 'I' and 'me' are the elementary terms of a speaking person's self-references. To philosophers and psychologists, the I and me become Ego and Self. The latter are 'objective'sounding terms for the subjective first-person pronouns. In everyday language, I may say, "I myself," but I will hardly use the terms my Ego or my Self. In the form of "the Ego" or "the Self," the terms of self-reference become theoretical terms. After this provisional terminological clarification — I shall get more specific as I go along — I can turn to the topic of the social Self.

The fiction of the solitary Ego You will remember why I began this exposition confining my considerations to an individual consciousness, the phenomenological I, Ego, or Self. It was a convenient way to treat inner phenomena and the workings of consciousness and its apperceptions and interpretations of the objects of the outer world. But, convenience does not alter the fictional nature of a solitary Ego. As I shall show, a solitary Ego in any strict sense is unthinkable: the Ego, by its very nature, is social. In this sense, the term, social Self, as used in the title of this part, is redundant. I have decided to keep it, regardless, in order to accentuate the inalienable characteristics of the human Self against the fiction of a solitary Ego, which some psychologists of consciousness have accepted as the actual self of human beings. Such an as-

sumption has caused considerable theoretical difficulties. 75 According to some of his followers, even Husserl was en- THE FICTION OF trapped by his own idea of the solitary transcendental Ego. THE SOLITARY Avoiding such a trap depends on more than the awareness of the fiction of the solitary Ego, even though a tenable theory of the Ego cannot be developed without it. Such a theory depends on, one, focusing on the egos of human beings living their actual lives in their everyday surroundings and involvements with others, and, two, defining the concepts of Ego and Self to correspond both with the underlying genuine subjectivity and the social character of these human beings. Theoretically, a viable Ego theory has to be based on the twin principles of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. These conditions are better fulfilled by the best American writers in cognitive psychology than by Husserl. Even James has the advantage of not blocking the transition to intersubjectivity by lifting the solitary Ego to the transcendental level. Cooley and Mead, on their part, entered the scene not as individual but as social psychologists. I shall discuss the Self-conceptions of these three here.

James's conception of the Self In the chapter on "The consciousness of self" in the first volume of his Psychology, James spoke of every individual dividing the universe into two halves, each one doing so differently. One half is seen as "me," the other as "not me." Any man's self, he explained, "is the sum total of all that he can call his," not only "his body and his psychic powers," but also "his wife and children, his ancestors and friends," "his reputation and works," and finally his various possessions. (1890:291) This proprietory view of the Self goes well with the pragmatic bent in James's thinking; it fits the condition of descriptive concreteness well. This Self is identical with the way that any individual conceives him or herself, and is, therefore, not identical with the actual I that does the conceiving. In the fashion of contemporary Anglo-Saxon theories about the Self, James divided this Self into four sub-Selves. One is a "material Self" comprising a person's body, clothing, adornments. Two is a "social Self," which

76 "is the recognition" a person gets from others, for "we are APPROACH TO not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our felTHE SOCIAL SELF lows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed ... by our kind." Three is the "spiritual Self," which is our "inner or subjective being" and our psychic dispositions as concretely given to the reflective view. It results from "our abandoning the outward-looking view" and the intention "to think ourselves as thinkers." This Self is "the active element in all consciousness" and the "source of efforts and attention, and the place from which emanate the fiats of the will." And, finally, four is the "pure Ego"-not identical with the pure Ego of Husserl's transcendental philosophy-that stands for "a distinct principle of selfhood." It is a person's sense of identity and of sameness. (1890:292-332) We may accept James's list of Selves as an analytical device for orderly speaking about aspects of a self-consciousness, which, in spite of the innumerable facets of its fleeting experiences, is unitary (as "pure Ego"). The "sense of personal identity ... is the sense of sameness perceived by thought and predicated by things thought-about. These things are a present self and a self of yesterday. The thought not only thinks them both, but thinks that they are identical." Regardless of how psychologists judge such identity, it is "actually felt" by an individual "with warmth and intimacy." This characterizes not only the "present self" but also any "distant self" of which we think with some degree of emotion. This is so because "resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings (especially bodily feelings) experienced along with things widely different in other regards... constitutes the real, and verifiable 'personal identity' which we feel." (1890:332-336) But neither feelings nor metaphysical theories can remove the difference between "the thought which... knows another Thought and the Object of the Other," and the thinker and his thought "appropriating" another thought. The latter "is still a perfectly distinct phenomenon from that Other," hardly resembling it and being "far removed from it in space and time." Such appropriation is an act of choice; it is "the hook from which the chain of past selves dangles, planted firmly in the present, which alone passes for real...." Yet, it too will become a link in the

chain, being replaced by "new thought in the new present." (1890:340-341) It is here that James, again, discovered the paradox of self-recognition. With the British philosopher Shadworth H. Hodgson, he called the present moment of consciousness "the darkest in the whole series." Nothing, added James, "can be known about it till it be dead and gone." Yet, it is "the real nucleus of our personal identity," which, however, is found only in the me or, more correctly, in the past me's and the "long procession" of me-related memories. They yield, as James said, only a "relative identity, a slow shifting in which there is always some common ingredient retained." (1890 : 341, 372) The distant me's yield the possibility-foreseen by Schutz in his earliest manuscripts—of remembrances of earliest childhood experiences being not remembrances of the episode itself but of the experience of having been told about it at a later time. This, aside from a person's present selfimage, will have to be seen as a result of a specific biographical development with its sedimented experiences, but influenced by projection of the self into the future. Where they want to go, what they want to be—these are in particular younger people's concerns with their future me's. If what I want to be is relevant for me in that it co-shapes my present actions, it will also enter into my interpretation of my past. The future me, in this sense, may not only filter the memory of more recent experiences, but may interpret past memory images.

Cooley's "human nature// and social self The early Michigan sociologist, Charles Horton Cooley, developed highly pertinent ideas about the human self and the small social group. Unfortunately, he combined these ideas with lengthy but well-meaning liberal-ideological considerations of "primary ideals" and the "larger mind" by way of refuting Social Darwinism. Nevertheless, his notions of the social self and the "primary group" constitute lasting contributions to sociological knowledge. In his book, Social Organization, he summed up his idea of

77 COOLEY'S "HUMAN NATURE" AND SOCIAL SELF

78 APPROACH TO THE SOCIAL SELF

"human nature": it is embodied in "those sentiments and impulses that are human in being superior to those of lower animals, and also in the sense that they belong to mankind at large, and not to any particular race or time. It means, in particular, sympathy and the innumerable sentiments into which sympathy enters...." (1909:28) The reference to "lower animals" is directed against the Social Darwinists, who saw human beings as predatory animals engaged in a bloody struggle for survival. Cooley's notion of "human nature" is a philosophical-anthropological statement: the humanity of human beings rests in the ways they relate to their fellows. They are tied by love and resentment, by ambition and vanity, by ideas about right and wrong, and by "hero-worship" through which children model themselves after adults. Cooley was sure that emotions like sympathy were universal, transcending cultural variations. "The more insight one gets into the life of savages, even those that are reckoned the lowest, the more human, the more like ourselves, they appear." Cultural differences do not hide human similarities. No one who sees any of the recurring film reports of the recent wars in Southeast Asia where mothers clutching small children flee in terror from soldiers and guerrillas needs an interpreter to understand their feelings. Cooley offered a conception of the self that differed from that of James in two basic respects: James's was acquisitive, his was emotive; James's began in solitude, his in social life. To Cooley, the self and social self are identical. Within his framework, then, he could make concessions to elements of James's self-conception. In his earlier study, Human Nature and the Social Order, Cooley admitted "the correlation of self-feeling with purposeful activity," combining pragmatic and emotional aspects or motives. When he called the social self an "idea" that the individual has "drawn from the communicative life," and that finds "its chief scope within the general life," he stressed that the mind cherishes this idea "as its own." The I of everyday speech "includes some sort of reference to other persons": there is no sense of "I... without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they." What we call me or mine is "both general and individual," not "separate from the general life, but the most interesting part of it." The I does not comprise "all of the mind," of consciousness, but is its "peculiarly central, vigorous, and

well-knit portion of it, not separate from the rest but gradu- 79 MEAD'S GENETIC ally merging into it." (1902:146-151) CONCEPTION OF Cooley's most original and insightful notion of social self THE SELF as self-image is that of "the reflected or looking-glass self." Face-to-face with another person-especially when this person is, for one reason or other, important to us—we imaginatively perceive his or her "thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it." There are "three principal elements" to this. One, we imagine how we appear to the other person: two, we imagine how he or she judges our appearance; and, three, we react with "some sort of selffeeling, such as pride or mortification." While this is but "an imputed sentiment" it is as effective as Thomas's definition of the situation. (1902:152) In further contrast to James, Cooley also concerned himself with the development of self-feeling, of the understanding of I and me and of the genesis of "human nature" in children including, of course, the "looking-glass effect," as Schutz called it. Cooley's astute observations were made on his own children, and written down in a diary that represents a classical descriptive and commentary text on this topic, well worth close consideration by anyone working in this area. (1902:157-169)

Mead's genetic conception of the self George Herbert Mead, whose main works were published posthumously three to four decades after those of James and Cooley, focused essentially on the genesis of the human self. We may re-formulate his basic problem as that of the emergence of the self in a human being, born as an animal with relatively weak instinctive tendencies but with potentialities to transcend its animal nature. Because he started with an organism whose reflexive behaviour was most conveniently explained in behaviourist terms, Mead adopted a behaviourist language. His approach is characterized as "social behaviourism" by some of his followers. This is a dubious label, although it is apparently justified by Mead's tendency to use the same behaviourist terms whether he referred to reflexive behaviour or deliberate conduct. But, as Natanson has shown


(1956), Mead went far beyond his behaviourist baseline and moved toward the realm of phenomenological conceptions. As shown by the course he frequently gave at the University of Chicago on "Movements of thought in the nineteenth century," Mead was quite familiar with Bergson, and presented his philosophy extensively. His occasional references to Bergson in his other major works show that he concurred with a number of Bergson's basic conceptions although he did not subscribe to his radical subjectivism. Mead cannot be claimed for behaviourism. In the best-known of his books, Mind, Self and Society, Mead asserted that the self, "arises in the process of social experience." The problem, then, was to find out "how can an individual get outside himself (experientially) in such a way as to become an object to himself?" The answer to this question must be sought within "the process of social conduct or activity" in which a person is involved. Only in it can an individual come "into the same experiential field as that of the other individual selves in relation to whom he acts in any given situation." Mead added that the individual does not experience himself directly but indirectly, first, "from the particular standpoint of other individual members of the same social group"; and secondly, "from the generalized standpoint of the social group as a whole." Each individual must take "the attitudes of other individuals toward himself" within the given social environment. (1934:135, 138) In social-situational experiences, the self separates itself from the organism by communication. Communication makes it possible for a person to respond "to one's own self as another responds to it." The communicative process centres in a "conversation of gestures." On the animal level, this occurs as stimulus-response. (1934:140, 144-145) As an example, Mead referred to a fight between two dogs in which each 'reads' the aggressive or defensive movements of the other as so many signals of its 'intentions' and reacts accordingly. Calling this a "conversation of gestures" is misleading in the light of what Mead himself describes as a proper conversation on the human level. How can we speak of a conversation when there is not any intention to communicate? For example, a pair of prizefighters in the ring are in a socially contrived situation in which each tries to "emerge victoriously" from the boxing match. They are supposed to obey pre-established rules. Mead applies his

term conversation of gestures to them. Now, they may con- 81 verse before the bout by shouting insults at each other, in MEAD'S GENETIC CONCEPTION OF the style made popular by Muhammad Ali; they may even THE SELF converse in gestures during the fight, as when one delivers an illegal blow, and makes up with the other by touching gloves. But, they will not converse, that is, have a "conversation of gestures" when they box. Each wants to hide his intentions from the other, and will feint or half-execute moves in order to mislead the opponent into expecting a blow from one side and thus leaving himself open to one from the other. What each reads in the other's gestures is either betrayal of intentions or else deliberate deceit. Only after Mead left behaviourism behind does his theory of the "conversation of gestures" become interesting. He begins to speak of "significant gestures" and, in particular, of "verbal gestures." Significant stands for "meaningful to both partners of a conversation." This applies primarily to oral conversations: what we say "calls out a certain response in another"; the response "in turn changes our own action, so that we shift from what we started to do because of the reply the other makes." Verbal conversation makes use of linguistic "symbols" —"signs" in Schutz's terms. (1934: 140-141, 146) Significant speech emerges in significant conversations with others; the participants seek each other out as reciprocal audience. Individuals also carry out conversations with themselves. Reflective thinking is simply "inner conversation." Essentially, such conversation "becomes preparatory to social action"; thinking "remains part of a social process." This social process displays various aspects, each of which involves only an "elementary self" adapted to and circumscribed by the types of social situations in question. Such elementary selves —which we may call role-selves — are "organized into a complete self corresponding to "the structure of the social process as a whole." (1934:141-142, 144) These statements sound like a conventional sociological theory of roles, according to which personality is the sum of a person's roles. But, as Mead explained, this does in no way eliminate the selves of the role players. The ability to converse with others are individuals' keys to themselves: "I know of no other form of behaviour than the linguistic in which the individual is an object to himself, and, so far as I can see, the individual is not a self in the reflexive sense un-


less he is an object to himself." Conversely, the individual's self enters into any communicative interaction with others. However, it does so only partially: "what determines the amount of the self that gets into communication is the social experience itself." That is, it depends on the requirements of any specific social situation and on the specific objectives pursued in it. We are different selves in different situations and for different people. Finally, there are "parts of the self which exist only for the self in relationship to itself." (1934: 142) It seems that those who claim Mead for an additive personality-role theory are wrong. Instead, Mead apparently concurred with Georg Simmel, who long before had shown that the self is more than the sum of its roles. There is an "inner self" that, in Mead's terms, never enters conversation, and thus is never revealed to others, not even in the most intimate relations. Mead's role theory is most important for his theory of the genesis of the self in children's play and games. Playing at something is role taking, enacted with imaginary playmates as well as in interplay with other children. The process changes significantly when children advance from spontaneous play to organized games, such as any ball game. Here, they encounter rules. Such rules must be learned; Mead calls them "the set of responses which a particular attitude" of the players "calls out." When the children obey the rules not because they are imposed, but because they have internalized them and made them their own, they have found the bridge to full self-consciousness. The "organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self" is, like the team, "the generalized other," in a larger sense. (1934:152, 154) Self-consciousness exists in the "awakening in ourselves of the group attitudes which we are arousing in others," and in the "ability to call out in ourselves a set of definite responses which belong to the others of the group." Such an awakening and ability occur only in social interaction; they not merely reflect group attitudes but have always, "implicitly at least, the reference to an T in it." Some experiences "we may at all times identify with selves"; "we call them subjective because we alone have access to them" in reflective experiences. The I is active self and thus different from the me that is the depository of the generalized attitudes of others: "we distinguish that individual who

is doing something from the me who puts the problem up 83 to him." It is the ego, the I, and not the me that makes any MEAD'S GENETIC "movement into the future." Thus, the I "gives the sense of THE SELF °F freedom and of initiative. It is never entirely calculable"; it may face "moral necessity but no mechanical necessity" for its acting. Yet, "exactly how we will act never gets into experience until after the action takes place." But, even when individuals act according to existing "common organized habits," because they feel "that they have to act in a certain common fashion," they are not thereby deprived of originality. They may all use a common language, but each uses it differently. Mead considered the "expressive individual" who rises above social institutions, and "is able to do something of his own." He paid tribute to the "social creativity of the emerging self." (1934:163-166, 176-178, 198, 209-213, 214-222) Mead saw the self as originating and remaining anchored in social-interactive processes and as the internalization of the "generalized other." In spite of this, the basic aspects of his theory of the I and the me resemble that of James. Both saw the I in terms of action and volition. Both spoke of the specious present. Mead saw the specious present, however short, as the time of the direct experience of passing events "including some of the past and some of the future." James stressed the elusiveness of the I-in-action, stressing that it can be grasped only retrospectively. As a depository of the generalized attitude of the community, the me is the result of past experiences of the I. Realizing that access to selfconsciousness and the me calls for reflective action, Mead agreed with James that self-recognition is "a cognitive rather than an emotional phenomenon." (1934:176,173) Like James, he insisted that I and me are inseparably linked in the human self, yet clearly distinct from one another. Mead formulated the relationship between the two this way: I talk to myself, and I remember what I said and perhaps the emotional content that went with it. The "I" of this moment is present in the "me" of the next moment. There again I cannot turn around quick enough to catch myself. I become a "me" insofar as I remember what I said. It is in memory that the "I" is constantly present in


experience.... The "I" in memory is there as the spokesman of the self of the second, or minute, or day ago. The "I" is in a certain sense that with which we do identify ourselves. (1934:174) In his theory of the I and the me and the relationship between the two, Mead moved from his behaviourist starting point towards phenomenological-psychological considerations. Those who claim him for "social behaviourism" exploit his ambiguous terminology, in which individuals may be referred to as "organisms" and their volitional conduct as their behaviour. It seems that Mead was convinced that he needed the behaviourist starting point for his genetic theory of the development of the self, but also that this starting theory was unsuitable to explain volitional human conduct and self-consciousness. When he switched from reflexive behaviour of organisms to deliberate human conduct, he pulled the rug from under the behaviourists' feet.

Intersubjectivity If we speak of the social self, we concentrate on the individual who has become what he or she is in experiences with others. These others, however, remain on the margin of all considerations of the self. The same obtains when we speak of a social actor, an individual who acts while considering and collaborating with others. In either case, we adopt an individual-subjective perspective directed upon the social. A shift in focus overcomes this limitation: we consider the ego and the alter ego equally, the I and the Other, or the actor and the partner(s) in action. In doing so, we take the step from subjectivity to intersubjectivity and from action to interaction. Concentrating for the time being on the first of these steps, we are faced with a number of related problems: (1) The recognition of the other as a self similar to me. (2) The reciprocity of relations between I and Thou and the recognition of the We formed by both.

(3) Possibilities and limits of the expansion of two subjectivities into genuine intersubjectivity.

85 INTERSUBJECTIVITY

As it turned out, the recognition of the alter ego became an insoluble problem for Husserl, who was forced to pose the "problem of intersubjectivity" on the transcendental level of his philosophy, which was dominated by his solitary transcendental ego. These difficulties do not exist for phenomenological psychologists who deal with the mundane ego, the ego of the individual in everyday affairs. A child, in the experiences of the awakening of consciousness, knows of the existence of others before coming to clear recognition of his or her own self. The basic experiences of the process of our humanization offer us others as given in 'natural' and self-understood experiences in everyday life situations. These experiences, also, allow us to take for granted that others sufficiently recognize us as human selves. For the maturing and the mature individual, the selfunderstood existence of others forms what Schutz called a Thou-orientation. This does not emerge from conscious judgments and the deliberate analysis of observations made on others. It is a "pre-predicative experience"; the other is immediately given. The resulting orientation towards the given Thou, simply, is the "mode in which I am aware of another human being as a person." I am Thou-oriented from the very moment I recognize a directly encountered 'entity' as a human being. I immediately presuppose that the recognized other person is actually present and being there where I perceive him to be. Speaking phenomenologically, Schutz defined the Thou-orientation "as the intentionality of those Acts whereby the Ego grasps the existence of the other person in the mode of the original self." (1970b: 185) This, of course, results at best in the apposition of two selves: I here — You there You there - I here Two persons, facing each other, display a Thou-orientation directed upon the other. This may be called co-


subjectivity (a term once suggested to Schutz by Herbert Spiegelberg).* It is one of the crucial achievements of Schutz that he went beyond co-subjectivity and opened the door to genuine inter subjectivity in the sense of a mutuality and simultaneity of experiences that actively involve both the I and the Thou. In a fashion more characteristic of earlier rather than contemporary phenomenological thinkers, Schutz called his central theory of intersubjectivity "The general thesis of the alter ego." Let me explain it. In our daily lives, we are "living in our acts" and experience their objects "in the vivid present." Notably among them are other persons in their actions and conduct. Schutz referred to a lecture in progress as an example: "We seem to participate immediately in the development" of the speaker's stream of thought. We vicariously participate in its formulation and development; we catch his unfolding ideas in their vivid present immediately in the given Now (this means, not just after the present moment). The lecturer's speaking and our listening are experienced "in vivid simultaneity." We already have absorbed prior sentences that flowed together synthetically in an emerging larger meaning. The new sentence, just beginning, taken in itself, is listened to in some uncertainty as to how it will end. The sentence in progress, like the whole lecture in progress, is open, (1970b: 166-167) Our emerging understanding of both the sentence and the lecture may run ahead of the speaker; we anticipate the specific meaning of a sentence in the light of the evolving meaning of the whole lecture, as absorbed while listening. If this happens, vicarious participation becomes near-active participation: we anticipate the end of the thought before we have heard it fully. Of course, our anticipations may be disappointed. The lecturer may surprise us with ideas that did not occur to us on the basis of the information we had on hand. (Schutz did not stress this point.) * Spiegelberg had been a student of Alexander Pfaender, a thinker who himself had moved from philosophical psychology towards phenomenology. He is best known as the historian of The Phenomenological Movement, which he published during the sixties and which he revised and expanded twice. He is a phenomenologist, however, in his own right. Sharing the fate of other refugee phenomenologists in the United States, he was befriended by Schutz and had various theoretical exchanges with him.

A most poignant characteristic of the ongoing relation- 87 ship between lecturer and listeners is its asymmetry, not INTERSUBonly in the external sense of the lecturer being an expert JECTIVITY speaking to a less informed audience, but in the internal sense of the reciprocity of the understanding of each other. Phenomenologically, the relationship between speaker and listener, between the initiator of action and the person to whom it is addressed, is skewed. Concerning himself with an ego in the active vivid presence of an other, Schutz stated, "I can grasp the other's stream of thought," that is, "the subjectivity of the alter ego in its vivid present." In other words, the subjectivity of the other is directly grasped in immediate experience. This is more, Schutz continued, than I can manage with my own stream of thought, of which I can get hold only by way of reflection, that is, after it has passed away. The other's stream of consciousness, as revealed in a lecture, for instance, is the immediate object of my experience. "The alter ego is that stream of consciousness I can seize by my own simultaneous activities," being in this case those of listening. By contrast, my experiencing of the lecture becomes only reflectively accessible to me: As a whole, I understand it only after the fact. With this clarification, I can say that I can comprehend my stream of experience as running parallel to the stream of experience of the other with whom I am involved in a vivid present. I see vicariously, so to speak, the vividness of my immediate experience of the stream of consciousness of the other. We can pursue this further. The example of the lecturer and listeners is less than perfect because of the external asymmetry of the relationship. Let us imagine a dialogue in which thoughts are developed in address and response, statement and counter-statement. Here, the development of the intellectual argument is not fixed in the mind of one speaker; it is taken up by various speakers in turn, each giving it some direction, picking up ideas expressed before, and carrying them further according to understanding of theme and arguments. All are alternatively listeners and speakers, participating in the development of the stream of thought of the others and making these others participate in the development of their own stream of thought. This is what I understand as genuine

88 intersubjectivity: its highest form is the dialogue in its alterAPPROACH TO nation of speaking and listening, which means an interTHE SOCIAL SELF lacing of the various streams of consciousness: now immediately experienced in listening to another, now spontaneously lived in addressing others. Sharing the same vivid present means, as Schutz said, that the other "has the genuine experience of growing old with me as I know that I do with him." Usually, we speak of "growing old together" when thinking of a married couple who live together into their "ripe old age." But Schutz emphasized "growing older" as a characteristic of every episode and every situational involvement in our ongoing life. The mere watching of a bird in flight, shared by two persons, would make them grow older together. Schutz used this expression to stress the importance of meaningful common experiences. He once said to Herbert Spiegelberg after a long theoretical discussion, "Tonight, we grew older together."

We-relationship Schutz accepted the term "face-to-face relationship" from Cooley, making direct situational encounters into the exclusive setting of intersubjective experiences. "The face-toface relationship in which the partners are aware of each other and sympathetically participate in each other's lives for however short a time we shall call the 'pure We-relationship'." Basically, the We-relationship is already given to me by the mere fact that I am born into the world of directly experienced social realities. The We of intersubjective experiences itself is like the stream of consciousness with a significant difference: What is given to me of other people is always given in my apperception of their bodily presence and their "bodily movements," such as speech, gesture, and facial expression. Therefore the "act of grasping" the thoughts and feelings of others "is for me a lived experience that transcends my own stream of consciousness." Yet, "among all self-transcending experiences, the We-experience remains closest to the stream of consciousness itself." Living in a We-relationship means "living in our common stream of consciousness." Being immediately involved with one another, the whole common experience "is col-

oured by that involvement." Should we decide to think about this experience, "we must to that degree withdraw from each other. If we are to bring the We-relationship into the focus of our attention, we must stop focusing on each other" and must step out of the relationship. In other words, the attempt to get hold of a We-experience presupposes the assumption of a reflective stance that suspends the experience itself. (1907b: 186-188) Each experienced We-relationship, each concrete face-toface involvement, is unique in itself. There are also differences that come from the uniqueness of the combination of two personalities encountering each other not only in individual situations but in those chains of encounters that sociologists designate by the term (enduring) social relationships. The partner, remarked Schutz, "maybe experienced with different degrees of immediacy, different degrees of intensity, or different degrees of intimacy." Partners may also be seen from different angles, or role perspectives, and may be in the centre or at the periphery of my attention. Thus, people come to know each other in many ways: "Compare, for instance, the knowledge two people have of each other in conversation with the knowledge they have of each other in sexual intercourse.... Not only do the partners experience the We more deeply in the one case than in the other, but each experiences the self and the partner more deeply. It is not only the object, therefore, that is experienced with greater or less directness; it is the relationship itself, the being turned toward the object, the relatedness." Beyond this, it will not do to consider only the typical aspects of one or the other kind of We-relationships: "The conversation, for instance, can be animated or offhand, eager or casual, serious or light, superficial or quite personal." (1970b: 190) Turning now to the face-to-face situation as one of ongoing interaction, not as a setting but as a process, we have to pay attention to the inner dynamic of the We-relationship-in-action. There is no fixed attitude of each partner to the other but ongoing "attentional modifications." When I begin to interact with someone, "I take for granted as constant in that person a set of genuine because- or in-order-to motives" on the basis of my past experiences with this "particular person" and of "people generally." Yet, in planning my own action in a given face-to-face situation, I project what I

89 WERELATIONSHIP

90 expect the other's conduct to be, although this is as yet unAPPROACH TO confirmed: "I have to see what my partner will actually do." THE SOCIAL SELF Since our attention to each other continually changes in the course of interaction, "I can actually live through and participate in the constitution of his motivational context" in the "present lived experiences" that allow me to impute motives to the unfolding conduct of the other. The same goes for my partner: we reciprocally "orient" our actions to the motivational context thus perceived. Since such orienting "takes place within the directly experienced social realm" of the interactional situation, it is "witnessing": "When interacting with you within this realm, I witness how you react to my behaviour, how you interpret my meaning, how my in-order-to motives trigger corresponding because-motives of your behaviour." Thus, "I can add to my expectation of what you are going to do the actual sight of you making up your mind, and then of your action in all its constituent phases." (1970b: 193-195) Interactive We-relations arise in all types of face-to-face situations. We may add to those named by Schutz actual work situations and all other kinds of "doing things together." Since Schutz was deeply involved in music, both as listener and performer, he offered an intriguing presentation of the interactive We-relation between musical performers, especially in the playing of chamber music, and its subtle non-verbal forms of communication during the performance. His essay "Making Music Together" warrants close attention. However, I shall confine myself here to one of his conclusions that is relevant not only to the study of the inperformance co-operation of musicians but to all interactive We-experiences. Schutz used an exposition of a collective musical performance to speak of the simultaneity of intersubjective and interactive experiences that occur both in inner and outer time. The musical performance, the playing of the instruments in use, is an event in outer time, measured by the clock or marked by the ticking of the metronome. Yet, the harmonic co-operation of the musicians depends entirely on their reciprocal participation in each other's streams of consciousness that are filled with the players' experience of the particular meaning of the musical composition. They are, as Schutz said, "tuned in" to one another. (The same,

by the way, goes for the relationship between musical per- 91 formers and listeners.) WESchutz generalized that "it appears that all possible com- RELATIONSHIP munication presupposes a mutual tuning-in relationship between the communicator and the addressee of the communication. This relationship is established by the reciprocal sharing of the other's flux of experiences in inner time, by living through a vivid present together, by experiencing this togetherness as a 'We'." In every case, "the simultaneity of the ongoing flux of the communicator's experiences in inner time with the occurrences in the outer world" occurs in combination "with the addressee's interpreting experiences in inner time." But, Schutz emphasized, "partaking of the partners in various dimensions of outer and inner time" is identical with "growing older together." (1970b: 216-217) Within the same discussion, Schutz stressed that all his considerations of intersubjective communication refer to the "paramount situation" of face-to-face interaction. All other possible forms of communication are derived from and can be explained in terms of this paramount constellation. I hope that the expositions dealing with the social self and with intersubjectivity offered in this part will help you gain a better understanding of the contribution American thinkers have made to phenomenological psychology in the conception of the self and, in particular, in the transition of the conception of the self from an individual to a social definition. The prevailing pragmatic bent of American thinking has fostered this transition, which was decisively enhanced by the interest in the genesis of self-understanding and self-image. Both are individual achievements possible exclusively in the social process of sympathetic interaction between child and "significant others." In comparison, Schutz's contributions to intersubjectivity, face-toface interaction, and We-relations grew out of the tradition of European phenomenology. The American pragmatic and the European phenomenological approaches complement one another. In my opinion, the Americans have done considerably more than the Europeans in describing the 'obvious' phenomena of consciousness and self-consciousness within the spheres of


everyday experiences. On the other hand, Europeans like Schutz, guided by the phenomenological method, have penetrated to depth structures that, by and large, have remained untouched in the American contributions. I can say confidently that the strength of the phenomenological-psychological approach to social relations and social interaction of all kinds and descriptions hinges on this combination of the strongly pragmatic tradition of American thinking with the painstaking European philosophical tradition that looks at the fine details within a broad context. Schutz's work issued from the European tradition, but its most conspicuous feature is the integration of the best achievements of American pragmatic approaches into the body of his phenomenologically transformed sociological theory.

4. Approach to Social Life In this part, I abandon essentially psychological considerations for the social sphere - a sphere that is subject to socialpsychological study on the one hand, and sociological study on the other.

Experiencing the social world In discussing the human self as a fundamentally social self, I have brought out that human beings are always "in situation"; as existentialists say, they find themselves in given surroundings. The natural conditions of human life make up part of the given situations; another part consists of man-made (cultural) objects. But, most frequently and importantly, given situations are the settings of encounters with others. Situations are social in a triple sense. One, the orientation to any natural phenomenon occurring in a given situation depends on socially accepted definitions of natural processes and objects. Two, the same goes for the orientation to cultural objects, with the added realization that they have been made by others for specific technical purposes. Three, the presence of others turns given situations into interactive occasions where various human beings work towards various objectives. Individuals necessarily experience social situations from their personal vantage points, but the egocentric interpretations of these experiences are likely to be subjected to correction by the presence of others. Interpretations of the situations thus become socio-centred.

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The social checking of individual perspectives I can illustrate this shift by returning to Cooley's notion of the vantage point. Let us assume that I walked into the corn field with a friend of mine, who is now standing fifty metres away from me. When I stop to look around me, I suddenly realize that I am in the centre of the field. I call out to my friend, "Come here, I just discovered the centre of the field." My friend stops, looks around, and shouts back, "No, the centre is here, I can see it clearly." We may argue the point, but, being practical people, we agree to put the matter to test. My friend walks over to the place where I am standing, looks around, and finds to his astonishment that, as I had asserted, the centre is here. Then, we walk together to the place where he had stood, and, lo and behold, we are again in the centre of the field. Possibly, we walk to a third point in the field, and again discover a centre. On the basis of this evidence, we may conclude that, strange as it seems, the field has three centres. Or, if we are sophisticated enough, we may make up the theory that the field is multi-centred. What did we do? We projected a subjective phenomenon, that of the egocentricity of perception, into the perceived object, the outside reality of the field. We can go no further in that 'naive' stance. However, even in daily life we do not always act that naively, especially when we cannot depend simply on direct sensory evidence.

Reciprocity of perspectives My example of the two friends in the cornfield foreshadows the reciprocity of perspectives. But the example only hinted at reciprocity when the two people changed places and compared impressions. The problem becomes complicated when it is a social situation and not a perceived object that is at stake. In this case, egocentricity rests in a person's subjective reactions to, and interpretations of the situation where others are also involved. Social location comes into play. Let me give an example: when children of the same family deal with one another, their relative ages are very important. Being the eldest, the one in the middle, or the youngest is a decisive factor in the way a sibling looks at its involvement with the others. The hierarchy of these children is seen in a social perspective. With adults the age factor fades into the background. But, like quarreling children,

adults may get involved in a clash of individual perspectives; unlike children, they have a chance to avoid quarrels by acquiring an understanding of the social perspective of others. People can gain such an understanding even in daily life. They are able to concede that their outlook on a situation is not the only one. They may say, "From where I stand, the matter looks like this." Beyond this, they may vicariously place themselves into another person's social place: "If I had been in your shoes, I would have done the same." Speaking of being in another's shoes is a metaphor for showing understanding of another's social place, for seeing things from another's vantage point. In some cases, human beings can do this, but not always. We find it easiest to do when we have similar interests in the same social situation. We can also achieve it when we have opposing interests, as when two chess players try to anticipate and counter each other's moves. The success of any "con game" rests on the ability of the "con man" to put himself in the victim's shoes and manipulate him accordingly. Assuming honesty and good will on both sides, partners in a social situation have the potentiality to appreciate the other's vantage point. If both are successful in doing so, they transcend their individual subjective perspectives and supplant them with a common, intersubjective perspective. This is the reciprocity of perspectives. Schutz called it an idealization, using Husserl's particular term for this kind of general expectation in daily life. In fact, as Schutz pointed out, common-sense thinking makes assumptions that override strictly individual perspectives and, thereby, make common action possible. Human beings usually assume an "interchangeability of standpoints" with the partners in everyday dealings. They take this interchangeability for granted. When I change places with you in the literal sense, your Here becomes my Here, and vice versa. I can now reach what you could formerly, you can reach what I could formerly. When we change places in a social sense, we get a "congruency of the system of relevances." This is a second idealization. When it happens, the differences in our life histories are irrelevant; we each assume that the other has the same objective and is interpreting all relevant objects in the same way. Congruency does not mean taking on another's complete identity, but

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taking on an "empirical identity" sufficient for the limited common purpose on hand. The idealizations of both the reciprocity of perspectives and the congruency of the system of relevances lead to the "general thesis of reciprocal perspectives." In this, shared typifications of objects of common interest "supersede the thought objects of my and my fellow man's private experience." This reciprocal acceptance of thought objects as common transcends the actually experienced We of the partners in the given situation. It includes "everyone who belongs to us," that is, everybody who shares the system of relevances that we share. In this way, "the general thesis of reciprocal perspectives leads to the apprehension of objects and their aspects actually known by me and potentially known by you as everyone's knowledge." Finally, such knowledge becomes "objective and anonymous," detached from all vestiges of its subjective origin. The reciprocity of perspectives goes beyond the two of us to everyone in the life-world, so that what we know together everyone typically and generally knows, (1970b: 183-184) Let me return to the immediacy of situations in which two persons interact with each other and assume a reciprocity of perspectives. Regardless of the broader typifications and generalizations, the common knowledge, that may be attached to these perspectives, there are structural differences among actual social situations that come from the pre-determined relationships that persons have with each other. In situations of "give and take" between peers, friends, social equals, there exist a balance of perspectives, constituting a reciprocity of perspectives and interests. Mutual concern, mutual respect, mutual appreciation count in a balanced reciprocity of perspectives. Reciprocal perspectives may be also skewed. Partners in situations may not be social equals; their pre-determined social relationships may be imbalanced. Hegel's master and slave is an extreme example. Child-adult, student-teacher, foreman-worker, boss-secretary are also examples of unequal relations and relevances. Differences in power and influence make for two instead of one common relevance system. While unequal, the two systems are complementary. Each partner understands the perspective, the expectations, and the rights of the other. The reciprocity of perspectives blends with the inequality of roles. The weaker

(less powerful) participant accepts the superior perspective 97 of the other, and consents to play the role of the inferior. EXPERIENCING The functioning of skewed reciprocities hinges on the will- THE SOCIAL ingness of the inferior to accept the definition of the situation made by the superior. If this does not happen, the inferior is resentful, devious, and rebellious, looking for ways to "beat the system." In turn, the superior may lower his opinion of the inferior, increase supervision, increase threat and execution of punishment, and put down any attempt at insubordination with draconian counter-measures. When this happens, the reciprocity of perspectives turns into a clash of conflicting perspectives. WORLD

Outside perspective Reciprocal perspectives, like all aspects of human relationships-in-action, are bound to particular situations. Furthermore, when there is any reciprocity of perspectives, the partners both have to consent to a definition of the situation that can be made by either or both of them. Co-operation and agreement about what constitutes the situation underlie any reciprocity of perspectives between the partners in that situation. The question is, What happens when someone is apparently outside the situation, looking on? Is that person's perspective still situation-bound, or does it become situation-free? Is an outside perspective truly free of the situational relativity of inside views? Is it truly 'objective'? Let us go back to the situation in the corn field. You will recall that my friend and I were walking in the field when we each thought separately that we were in the centre of the field. Our attentions were caught by this fact. After a moment's confusion, we decided that the field must have two centres. We shifted our attention from our individual, subjective experiences of the field to our mutual, inter subjective experience of the field. In doing so, we redefined the field that we were in from being single-centred to being double-centred. When we first walked in the field, the separate discovery of the centre by each of us was accidental. The steps taken consequently were deliberate. At first, each of us concluded that he had found the centre of the field, and offered a theoretical explanation to this effect. After a brief exchange, however, we verified the other's observations, and decided


we needed a new explanation to account for this. We then revised our first theory, and declared that the field was multi-centred. Each of us made individual observations and theorized about them. We disagreed with each other's conclusions. We co-operated in new observations, and we arrived at a new theory that we shared. This may sound funny, but in giving this example I am speaking of empirical science, or, rather, of the roots of empirical science in everyday life situations. At least three elements of genuine scientific, empirical inquiry are present: one, an "idle curiosity," as Thorsten Veblen called it, a renunciation of practical purposes and their replacement by a mere interest to know, the assumption of a scientific stance; two, the testing of given evidence, here of visual impressions, and the beginnings of verification by way of collectively gathering further evidences; and, three, the formulation of a theoretical conclusion, an explanatory hypothesis. In any scientific inquiry, however, certain "necessary and sufficient" conditions must be met before there can be adequate and satisfactory theorizing. It is a question whether, in our example, the steps taken under point two were not only necessary but sufficient conditions for the theoretical conclusions under point three. The theory that the field is multi-centred is untenable because it does not stand up logically. By definition, there can only be one centre. What is a tenable theory in this case? It would be one that states that every vantage point within the field gives a similar picture of the field. My observations were relative to where I was standing, as were my friend's. What was observed was a characteristic not of fields but of vantage points. Instead of saying, "Where I stand is the centre of the field," I should have said, "It looks as if I am standing in the centre of the field." It may be that an 'objective' picture of the structure of the field cannot be got from within the field. I may have to observe it from the outside, outside meaning spatially outside the field or situation under observation. This, in fact, is a basic principle of scientific observation in the traditional sense. Now, back to the corn field. Let me introduce a third person sitting on a little hill overlooking the field. He will tell us two friends that the rows of corn do not converge at one or

various centres within the field. He will tell us they con- 99 verge at a point on the far horizon outside the field. But, he, EXPERIENCING too, is mistaken when he thinks he speaks about the struc-THESOCIAL ture of the field. He is only speaking of the field as it looks from his vantage point. Let us speak to the farmer who planted the corn. He will insist that he plowed and planted in straight and parallel lines. In planning and executing the planting, he had a set picture of the structure of the field in his mind. He was thus oblivious to the relative perspective of every spot on the field. Even if he had paid attention to them, he would have experienced a series of moving vantage points, running together and, in their successive combinations, giving the impression of straight and parallel rows. Now let us imagine a fourth person, flying over the field in a small plane. He takes a picture with his aerial camera, thus getting the evidence to deny both the friends' assertion and that of the person on the hill, and to confirm the farmer's. It is a fallacious but widespread notion that scientific objectivity is gained when observations are made with the aid of gadgets. It is not so. The aerial photographer is simply presenting another vantage point, that of above the field. Let us look at what we now have: one, the friends' relatively stable vantage point within the field; two, the farmer's moving vantage point; and, three, two different perspectives with outside vantage points. All of them are bound to particular places in relation to the object of observation, here the field. Our examples show that all of them are partial, that is, reveal certain aspects that happen to be visible from their point of observation and are codetermined by it. With regard to objects in external space, the difference between inside view and outside view is reduced to the difference between inside perspective and outside perspective. All are relative; all are examples of Cooley's vantage-point effect. Thus, not one merits the dignified title "objective scientific observation." All human observation, whether it is done with the naked eye or with the help of the most sophisticated scientific apparatus, has a perspective, and issues from a given or chosen vantage point. Scientific observation is no exception; it presents observation gained from vantage points purposefully established outside the observed object. It is objective only in the

100 APPROACH TO SOCIAL LiFE

sense in which any ordinary outside vantage point is objective: it precludes involvement with the things, events, and situations under study. None the less, there are several differences between everyday life and scientific observation. Perspective or lack of it is simply not one of them. One difference is the establishment of specific safeguards for the correctness of observations—the methods of inquiry —in various scientific fields. Another is the establishment of rules for testing and retesting given findings in any science. A third is the scientific obligation to look systematically for counter evidence. A fourth difference is the combination of the scientific stance with scientific motivation. In everyday life, once an initial interest (or curiosity) is satisfied, detached observation breaks up. In a science, after the objective of the investigation is stated as an assumption (or hypothesis), the observation continues until the initial problem is resolved, that is, the hypothesis is confirmed, refuted, or found unanswerable at present. A fifth difference lies in the development and use of a scientific vantage point that has specific content - a theoretical frame of reference. In everyday life, a theoretical conclusion following everyday observation is made ad hoc. It does not matter whether or not it agrees with similar ad hoc statements. In a science, however, theoretical conclusions following scientific observation must fit into the given frame of reference, which collects all the established knowledge of the field. If they do not, the researcher must show cause why his or her conclusions are valid, even though they go counter to the established theory. If the researcher is proven correct, the given frame of reference must be modified to accommodate the new evidence. This last point is crucial for the definition of inquiries as scientific. They qualify if they issue from theoretical problems stated in terms of the given theoretical frame of reference, and if they find theoretical confirmation within the same framework. The empiricist slogan, "Let the facts speak for themselves," is deceptive. Facts do not speak for themselves; they belong to, are situated in, a theoretical frame of reference. Mere empirical data do not constitute a science. Finally, we have the sixth, and most important, difference between everyday life and science. Scientific observa-

tion leads ultimately to universal abstractions; everyday 101 observation does not. A scientific-theoretical position is not EXPERIENCING SOCIAL exhausted in generalizations from observations; it leads to THE WORLD the abstraction from empirical substance, that is, from the accidents of physical phenomena, visual observation, spatial vantage points. This aspect of scientific activity reaches its apex in the pure sciences of mathematics and geometry. In geometry, to which we have already indirectly referred in our considerations about vantage points, there exist completely abstract constructions of spatial configurations with universal rules about their general structural features—the shapes, contours, lines, angles, the dimensionality. Any scientific observation involving spatial configurations must conform to the rules of geometry—indeed, even everyday observations conform to them to a fair degree. The same conformity to universal rules goes for mathematical operations. In addition, all scientific endeavours have in common requirements for logical consistency. Only the ad hoc theories of everyday life are exempted from such formal requirements. Yet, although we may be impressed by the complicated theoretical frameworks and methodological apparatus of any science, we should not automatically grant any scientific perspective an a priori superiority over everyday perspectives. Both scientific and everyday perspectives are valid in their own realm. In the light of this discussion about the scientific perspective, let us look once more at the question posed at the beginning of this section. Is an outside perspective free from the situational relativity of any inside view? The answer is neither a simple yes or no. No individual, whether involved or detachedly observing, is free from the conditions imposed by his or her bodily existence, which is also existence in space. The observer is as much in the centre of a subjective field of vision as is the involved actor. The first difference between the two is that of purpose and attention: one wants to see what is going on; the other wants to get something out of his involvement. They focus on the 'same' situation with a different mind-set, a different mental stance. This granted, the insider's attention is exhausted by what is going on in the present situation. The observer also is 'in situation,' but in an observational situation. He is—literally or figuratively — at a distance from the observed situation.


The outside view is directed, from the vantage point of one specific situation, upon another situation outside its boundaries but within its horizons. These considerations alone show how precarious and, in fact, misleading it is to reduce the difference between inside and outside view to the difference between subjective bias and objectivity as a scientific virtue. If you as the observer are a social scientist— I leave here the natural sciences aside—then you find yourself in an observational situation that, in a sense, is as unique as any interactional situation you may observe. Yet, your observational situation is converted into a scientific situation by the pre-given imposition of, one, a definition of the situation that is more rigid than any situation you may encounter in daily life, or even in church; and, two, similarly strict rules of scientific conduct, called rules of procedure. This rigorous subjugation to scientific definitions and scientific rules creates the illusion of an absolute objectivity. Cognitive stance In the last section, I spoke of the assumption of an outside scientific stance as a precondition for any kind of scientific activity. In the first part, I alluded to the phenomenological stance of a philosopher-psychologist who has decided to suspend all pre-existing knowledge about phenomena of consciousness in order to observe them anew. These stances are two among a number of cognitive stances that human beings assume. What do I mean by cognitive stance? I may characterize it as a readiness to see things, to accept things, to deal with things (or processes, events, people) in a pre-determined way. This could also be called an attitude; in fact, the translators of Husserl used the word attitude where I have used the word stance. I have a good conceptual reason for getting away from using the word attitude. In sociology, attitude is a term used to mean a specific set of beliefs about and conduct towards blacks, or janitors, or school assignments. What I mean by stance is much broader: a single stance takes in all kinds of objects, people, situations. A person taking a cognitive stance sees whatever it is that warrants attention among the many objects visible from his vantage point. Any cognitive stance requires a certain state of mind and a readiness not only to focus on certain phenomena to the exclusion of all others but also to ex-

perience these phenomena in a certain way. Both the phenomenological and the scientific stances must be assumed by fiat: I must decide to look at things phenomenologically or scientifically, as the case may be. Only those cognitive stances that occur within the world of everyday life do not have to be assumed by fiat. They are stances that we habitually assume, and that we assume without any particular effort. They are the stances we have 'naturally'; they are ours unless we explicitly decide to abandon them for another cognitive stance. All the everday cognitive stances can be grouped together. Husserl spoke of the natural stance (natuerliche Einstellung), using this overall label for the stance in which people act and react in the pursuit of their daily affairs. However, because of our present sociological interests, I am going to separate one conspicuous aspect of the natural stance from the rest, and speak of the pragmatic stance as the stance of the social actor who is purposefully and deliberately involved in activities designed to bring about positive and tangible results. Pragmatic stance The scientific stance is one of deliberate non-involvement and bracketing of all practical interests. It stands in contrast to the pragmatic stance, which is characteristic of individuals involved in a practical way with their given natural and cultural surroundings and with one another. These are tangible outside 'realities' for everyone, and objects of pragmatic concerns. Our pragmatic concerns may become sociological concerns, at least for that sociology that is of interest to us here, and that is identified with the work of Max Weber and Alfred Schutz. We may thus experience the pragmatic concerns from within the everyday life-world, as social actors, and observe them from the outside, as sociologists. When I speak of a concern with the pragmatism of everyday life, I am not speaking of a concern with pragmatism as a philosophy. The pragmatic stance does not focus on theoretical justifications or truths. Rather, I am speaking of the pragmatic thinking that guides people in everyday affairs. Such thinking is oriented to practical results. The question is whether or not things, procedures, and actions work according to plan. Of the American pragmatists, James's writings on prag-



matism are important philosophically but not sociologically. When he wrote about the notion of the stream of consciousness, to which I referred earlier, James was not writing as a pragmatist. John Dewey is much more important, sociologically speaking. He dominated American educational theory and practice for many decades, and gave us a fascinating theory of Human Nature and Conduct. This study presents the pragmatic concerns of everyday action and interaction exactly as I have in mind. Like Schutz, but ten years before him, Dewey grounded his theory in everyday life and unthinking conduct, which he described as habit. Habitual actions, although acquired, become as automatic as physiological functions. Dewey compared habits to arts (that is, crafts): the senses and motor skills are involved in the handling of "objective materials." These are part of a given environment that, most of all, is a social environment. This environment provides the means and opportunities for habitual conduct, and the latter, in turn, influences the environment. In particular, the "medium of habit filters all the material that reaches our perception and thought"; it "adds new qualities and rearranges what is perceived." Habits, then, are not like tools in a box, being there in case you want to use them. Rather, "they are active means that project themselves" as "energetic and dominating ways of acting." (1922:15, 32, 25) In spite of his concern with aspects of habitual conduct that he judged morally negative, Dewey's ideas of the "dynamic force of habit" are of general validity. He stressed that the "continuity of habits with one another" secures the "unity of character and conduct." It is impossible, he said, to separate "motive and act, will and deed." Will, in particular, "is a cause of consequences; it is causation in its personal aspects." Will goes hand in hand with deliberate forethought. When we want something, or want to do something, we think about how we may achieve our desire, we consider the appropriate actions. Will and thought are thus driving forces in human conduct. Such volitional and deliberate action remains linked to habits: "unthinking routines" become deliberate actions, habitual conduct becomes part of the plan of action. Dewey reasoned that even thinking is a kind of habit. He felt justified in doing so because "all life operates through a mechanism," the term being given the 'higher' meaning of the technical skill in-

volved in producing simple artifacts as well as works of art. (1922: 43, 44, 67, 69, 70) Dewey had a functional, dynamic conception of human life, seeing its processes as coherent and unified. He protested that the traditional psychology of his time "cut human nature off from its natural objective relations" through the severing of human beings from nature and of their minds from their bodies, "and then of each man from his fellows." Although it seems that the phenomenology of consciousness, as I presented it earlier, could be subjected to the same reproach, its exponents started from individual consciousness simply for analytical reasons. They did not deny that mind cannot be separated from body, or thought from action, or human beings from their natural environment, or individuals from their social experiences. Dewey used the integration of these aspects of human experience as his starting point, thereby foregoing that penetration into the deeper structures and functionings of consciousness that James and Husserl achieved. In principle, their starting from the individual did not contradict Dewey's synthetic and social point of departure: all three thinkers subscribed to an integrative view of Man as biological, social and conscious (volitional) being. (1922: 85) In the vein of his linkage of habit and knowledge, Dewey developed his own theory of action with a proper consideration of impulse, motivation, projection, purpose, concrete ends, and deliberation as factors in the choice among several possible courses of action. His concern with morality is diffused through all this. I am not concerned with that here, though I shall return to his theory of action in later contexts. Natural stance In turning towards pragmatic orientations, we left phenomenological psychology behind: introspection is the opposite of pragmatism. In the pragmatic stance, attention turns completely to the outside; people are guided by tangible interests. Thereby, they manifest in active conduct what Husserl called the natural stance. By natural stance, Husserl did not mean that the stance is inborn, a result of biology. Rather, he meant that we accept everything that occurs to us as being natural: that is, the way things are. I display the natural stance in everyday life



attending to my usual affairs. I simply "find myself" in my everyday world. Heidegger would say, I am "thrown" into this world. I am not in it by my decision and choice but by the accident of birth and the geographical as well as social place of my parents. As the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of my colleagues expressed it after an altercation with her father: "I know that all kids have to have fathers, but why does it have to be you?" My everyday world is an essentially pragmatic sphere and as such is from the outset —as Schutz stressed —a social world populated with other human beings. Now that I have said this —and it is a crucial point —I can postpone its discussion, and turn first to a description of the subjective features of the world. Even if this world of everyday life is not of my making, I have to cope with it, which I first do by accepting it as it is as far as possible: I take its existence and its characteristics for granted. I may call it the world, pure and simple; in any case, it is the world for me; it is my world. But, most of all, I accept my place in it "with my eyes open," that is, with a maximum of alertness. The natural stance is conspicuously a stance of being wide awake. As Husserl said, I deal with my world as a world of facts and practical affairs, and, at the same time, as a world of "goods and values." As world of goods, it contains objects and artifacts that I may obtain, that I can reach in order to satisfy my practical interests. As a world of values, it sorts itself out for me into things desirable and things undesirable. In this world, I come in contact with and establish relationships to natural objects, artifacts, and other persons. These relationships invariably have their pragmatic aspects, but are not exhausted by them. Often, they gain an emotional character: I relate to them and I relate them to me, with positive or negative feelings. In James's term, they carry emotional fringes. Thus, I like sand but hate stones; I like my car but hate buses; I like dogs but hate cats; I like my mother's sister but do not care for her husband; I like my foreman but hate the boss; I am fond of my teacher but hate the principal. Such emotional judgments are, in the first place, an outcome of pragmatic interests: I like what serves me, or benefits me, or is my own, or makes me feel good. My favourite aunt always gave me cookies when I was a kid, and even

defended me when my mother scolded me for some mis- 107 chief. My uncle always gave me lectures, and was a bore. EXPERIENCING SOCIAL Emotional judgment, to a considerable degree, springs THE WORLD from emotional dispositions that I have acquired, that I take for granted, and that I use spontaneously to make immediate judgments of other persons. One kind of person "rubs me the wrong way"; I "take to" another kind; and a third kind I "can take or leave." Beyond the ordinary emotional sphere, I make aesthetic judgments: some things, places, people, even ideas are beautiful to me; others are ugly. Without a doubt, cultural factors play into such judgments. Art educators or more sophisticated peers have influenced many of my aesthetic judgments. Thus, while I am personally convinced that a sunset over Massachussetts Bay, seen from certain spots on Cape Cod, is breathtakingly beautiful, I reject any colour photograph of the same spectacle as Kitsch. Aesthetic judgments lie at the outer boundaries of the natural stance. Aesthetic judgments are a kind of emotional judgment, but differ in that the pragmatic tinge disappears in them. They are directed upon things themselves, not things for usage. I shall look at the problem of the boundaries of the natural stance—which do not appear just in matters of aesthetic judgment—in the last part of this book. In the first volume of his Ideas, Husserl described the natural stance. One, the natural stance rests on the acceptance of the world around me as simply being there, whether or not I pay attention to the things in it. This is a naive realism. Two, I know that many things are there even if I do not see and encounter them. I simply think of them as there, as existing. In other words, in the natural stance, the world around me consists of the immediate surroundings that I experience, given my present interests and involvement. These surroundings always contain more than I can pay attention to at any one time; they have potentialities of which I may make successive use. Beyond this is a larger zone that, at present, is out of my reach; but I am familiar with its potentialities, can think of some of them, and realize one or the other by moving, for instance, from one room in my house to another one. Again, beyond this are larger zones, the most remote being the outer horizon of my daily existence. I take it for granted that it, too, contains


things, people, and so on, although they remain unspecified: they are empty potentialities. I do not know what or who they are but I am convinced that I shall encounter some of them in the future. Vague as they are, such expectations bear witness of the indestructable realism that comes with the natural stance. Three, although constant changes are going on in my world of everyday life, it remains "one and ever the same" for me. This world is dynamic: something is going on in it all the time, at least as long as I am awake and alert. However, underneath all the movement and change, the makeup of this world remains the same. It maintains its basic structure for me. I take this world as being permanent, as being reliable and orderly. My conviction about reliability allows me to see my world as predictable: I plan my actions in it and expect that conditions I have foreseen will prevail and make the execution of my plans possible. There is also a fourth characteristic of the natural stance, which was not stressed very much by Husserl. In the world of the natural stance, things are given as they appear to us; they have their own inertia and resistance that we must consider in our plans for action and that we must overcome when acting. Similarly, but less calculably and predictably, other people have their own wills and pursue their own purposes within the same concrete situation as I. The task of coping with them is simplest when they and I pursue similar or complementary interests; in this case, I can take it for granted that we shall find a way of co-operation. The task is less simple when interests do not coincide; cooperation may yield to conflict and a contest of wills. Results are less predictable. Incompatibility of interests is not necessarily unforeseeable; it may be calculated into a project of action. When this happens, I see others not so much as human equals and partners in a more or less common enterprise but as objects that display not only inertia but active resistance and, thus, have to be made to serve my own purposes by suitable specific efforts. We take for granted that, if need be, people can be influenced or made to do what they would not do of their own free will in order to serve our purposes. In such cases, manipulation, if not coercion, replaces human co-operation. Whether I co-operate, fight, or manipulate, I live actively in the world of my daily life, and can and do influence and

modify some things, some events, and some people. I am part of the dynamic of the world. This stress on the manifold social dimensions of my world takes me beyond the span of Husserl's fruitful idea of the natural stance to the ideas developed by some of his students, notably Max Scheler and Alfred Schutz. Scheler and, most of all, Schutz selected co-operation among human partners as the basis of social action in the world of daily life. This stands in contrast to other authors who made either conflict or manipulation the primary form of social relation. I am not going to look at these theories here. Instead, I shall follow Scheler and Schutz and give priority to the interactive forms of co-operation. Life-world When we place the aspects of social co-operation and social action at the centre of our theoretical attention, we move from the description of the active conduct of the individual in the natural stance, which is seen as a cognitive disposition of the individual, to social conduct proper, which is how individuals follow this disposition in everyday encounters with others. We observe the cognitive make-up of individual actors in the arena of pragmatic social interaction. In presenting the notion of the natural stance, much of what I have said about the everyday world has in substance referred to this area of social interaction. This indicates that the discussion of one cannot be separated from that of the other. In his later work, Husserl used the term life-world to refer to the world of everyday life. Although he did not explore the idea of the life-world extensively enough, Schutz did, even before he got the term from Husserl. Nevertheless, even Schutz's broad conception of the life-world invites further development. Such development is called for, first, because of the complexities of the phenomenal structure of the life-world, which Schutz variously indicated but did not develop systematically and in sufficient depth. Secondly, as mentioned in the context of the previous discussion of the natural stance, the whole problem of the boundaries of the life-world in its relation to other spheres of cognitive orientations and interests warrants thorough analysis. I should go beyond the framework of this introduction to the phenomenological approach if I pursued these theoretical



concerns, but you should keep in mind that the whole undertaking of a sociology of the life-world remains unfinished. There are other points in Schutz's conception of the lifeworld that we should keep in mind. They were summed up by Aron Gurwitsch* in an article on "The Common-Sense World as Social Reality-A Discourse on Alfred Schutz." (1962) He stressed the following points. One, Schutz explicity contrasted the life-world, as given in immediate experience, with the social world or society as constructed by sociologists and other social scientists: the life-world is independent of, and prior to, all sociological theories and constructs. Two, when Schutz, with Husserl, stressed that the lifeworld is taken for granted, he did not imply that it is free of doubt and puzzlement: "the life-world produces doubts that may or may not be resolved in or after the course of experiences from which they arise. Some expectations are disappointed, some assumptions have to be dropped or changed. However, as Gurwitsch formulated it, such doubts and corrections "always concern details within the world" but "never the world as such and as a whole." It remains as an "essential precondition of every activity" in that it forms "a general background or horizon" of all our activities. As such a background, it "appears and discloses itself as accepted and taken for granted." The general belief in the existence of the life-world, then, is not shaken by occasional doubts in certain of its aspects or properties. (1962:52) Three, from the outset, the life-world occurs to us as a "public world" and an "intersubjective world." In it, we not only encounter others as our fellow human beings, taking their existence for granted as much as that of the life-world in general. Most of all, we "take it for granted that they are * Gurwitsch (1901-1973) based his work on a synthesis of Gestalt psychology and phenomenology. His most famous work is The Field of Consciousness; it appeared first in a French version (1957; Eng. trans., 1964). Schutz met him first in France; for twenty years in the United States, they were close friends and intellectual co-operators; they both felt that they were working from opposite sides (sociology and psychology) towards the same philosophical objectives. The article named in the text appeared three years after Schutz's death.

confronted with the same world and the same mundane existence as we are." We notice, of course, that all individuals see this world from their own perspectives, and tend to act accordingly: "But notwithstanding such differences as to manner of appearance and presentation, we regard the lifeworld as a matter of course, as identical for us and for our fellowmen and, quite in general, for everybody." And not only this — simultaneously "we take it for granted that our fellowmen take the world for granted in substantially the same way as we do." It is only on the basis of such assumptions that social interaction and all forms of social co-operation become possible and, more often than not, can be carried out successfully and to the satisfaction of all concerned. (1962: 52-53) By reviewing Gurwitsch's summary considerations of Schutz, I can emphasize that Schutz's conceptions of social life, as much as they stress the common features of social conduct and the possibilities of successful social interaction, leave room for failure of expectations and possible human caprice. The life-world presents chances of successful social undertakings and no more; it does not automatically dovetail social actions or enforce robot-like co-operation. Natural world view In one more respect, this given sketch of the life-world needs complementing. As Schutz knew, the sphere of social conduct in everyday life is the main sphere of socially typified and traditional conduct. The success of life-worldly expectations hinges largely on the likelihood that the others with whom I co-operate or those on whose co-operation I depend act on established social prescriptions or recipes, known equally well to them as to me. While I am not going to discuss such typification of action here, I am going to discuss some of its social presuppositions. When Schutz spoke of the life-world "for everybody," he actually did not mean for everybody regardless of race, religion, culture, or nationality. Rather, everybody is "everybody who belongs to us." But, who is "us"? "Us" is primarily everyone who, in Scheler's words, belongs to the same cultural "community of life" that stresses its common ancestry or invokes any other strong justification of a common tradition. Any such community preserves traditional knowledge and truths, which need no


112 APPROACH TO SOCIALLIFE

other justification than their existence within the tradition. This means, of course, that anything that is given as community knowledge is accepted without question; the shared traditional conceptions are accepted as realities. In such a community of life, the shared rules and ideas are not taken in isolation; they are embedded in a communal world view that pictures community life and its natural setting as an organic unity of growth- and life-cycles, of organic interdependence and the overriding significance of the whole. When anthropologists or sociologists try to construct an interpretative system of such a community, they resort to a theory modelled after the organism. Even if such a community did not have an elaborate 'system' of self and world interpretation, all their taken-forgranted bits of knowledge and truth would make up their "natural view of the world," or, as Schutz translated Scheler's expression, die natuerliche Weltanschauung, the "relative-natural aspect of the world." The term relative carries the idea that such a world view is culturally related to the specific community in question. The term natural has the same sense that Husserl's term natural stance has. Schutz substituted the phrase aspect of the world for world view because Scheler did not claim that the natural world view of a group exhausts its interpretation of the world. He knew that, for example, the religious dimensions of the life of a cultural community rest on a quite explicit cosmology, on a creation myth, or on a theory of divine mission. If I use the literal translation of Scheler's term here, then I do so because this agrees with American cultural anthropologists' long-standing use of the term world view in their description of cultural communities. I use the term with qualification, in keeping with the distinctions that Scheler worked out and that Schutz preserved. The natural world view originates in pre-literate tribal societies and in literate but essentially self-contained cultural communities like the pre-industrial village communities and their modern-day remnants. Even modern forms of social organization tend to develop some traditions and to accept without question community ways of conduct. People in suburban communities, ghettos, professional groups, educational institutions, intellectual associations, and even business firms may be the Us to which Schutz referred

when speaking of ways of conduct that are taken for granted by everybody. Such groups present new formations of natural world views, often intermingling them with bits of accepted scientific knowledge or professional information. The factors that are instrumental in bringing about lifeworldly orientations in individuals and in establishing prescriptions for social conduct are as much at work in modern life as they were in the past. They are an existential condition of human life. The form and the content that they have in any given case are subjective or culturally relative. Their existence is universal.

Social action and interaction In this section, I am going to concentrate on the concepts of social action and interaction. I have already made scattered references to these concepts. My purpose here is to provide the key sociological concepts necessary for the comprehension of the subjective aspects of human intercourse. Social action Action is always a deliberate effort of an individual to bring about changes in material objects, in the arrangement of ideas (ideal objects), or in the conduct of others. Action is social insofar as this deliberate effort of an individual is intentionally directed upon other human beings, be it in involving them in the efforts or in making them a target of such efforts. Without social intentions, there is no social action. As a social actor, my deliberate effort may concentrate on involving another person in a material task I cannot carry out alone (pushing a stalled car off the road, building a large piece of furniture). This is work in the technical sense: the appeal to others is a request for technical co-operation. I may also turn into a social actor if I try to involve someone else in dealing with ideal objects, be it starting an ordinary conversation or entering into a serious discussion. I may also turn into a social actor when I deliberately direct myself towards others with the intention of enjoying their company, spending some time together with them for the sake of being together. Finally, as a social actor, I may turn to

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others in order to enlighten them about some area of knowledge (as in writing this book), to correct conduct that I find objectionable, or—in a common, general phrase—to educate them. These are four forms of social action. They differ in their objectives: two concentrate on common efforts in a technical or broadly intellectual sense (work or discussion); two concentrate on the person at whom the social action is directed (sociality or education). In work and intellectual effort, objectives are shared by the social actor and the person addressed. In sociality and education the other person is the objective. In order to keep things as simple as possible, I shall refrain from considering further possibilites of social action. The ones I have mentioned are the most important for my purposes. In presenting them, I have assumed that social actors expect their counterparts to be inclined to enter into a specific relationship with them under their own free will, that is, to collaborate voluntarily in the suggested work task, in the proposed discussion, in the social interplay, or in the educational undertaking. The four forms of social action are prefixed by a positive sign. I shall now discuss cases in which this willingness to co-operate is either not expected or else refused against expectations. Social action here has a negative prefix. I may direct social action towards people who, on their own, have no intention of getting involved with me. In this case, I have to make them co-operate against their own intentions and possibly interests. Social action becomes linked to the exertion of power over others. If I have power, then I have control over the means that others want but cannot get without my consent, and I have command over punitive sanctions that can be applied to unco-operative people. People who have to earn a livelihood will work for others who control available jobs. Witnesses standing before a judge will answer the questions of the prosecutor or defence lawyer lest they should be prosecuted for contempt of court. Children and students will do as teachers tell them lest they should fail a course or be expelled from school. The children of an autocratic father will do as he bids them lest they should be punished or lose their privileges. Power always means the ability to make people do things

that they would not do on their own accord. Those in pow- 115 er will stress the virtues of service, obedience, and disci- SOCIAL ACTION pline. They will take the unwillingness of those they exhortANDINTERACTION in this fashion into their consideration, and will hold the threat of sanctions over their heads. Under these conditions, social action tends towards coercion. A variation of negative social action occurs independently of coercion. Those without power are made to do what they would not do on their own accord by being led to believe that they are acting through their own choice and in their own interest. This is manipulation. It occurs in many forms and in all areas of social action. While I cannot discuss it here, it would be worthwhile to analyse prevalent theories of education and prevalent educational practices in regard to their having manipulative techniques integrated into their frameworks. Social interaction Social action refers to the intentions of one individual, the social actor, to establish some kind of active relationship with another person, a potential co-worker, partner, companion, or student. A social actor can carry out his intentions only when the person being addressed intends to or can be made to co-operate. The intention to initiate social action is thwarted when the other person refuses to follow the actor's initial suggestions. Yet, as Max Weber stressed, the deliberate refusal to react to any invitation to common action is itself social action. As much as the acceptance of the invitation, refusal has social consequences. Social action is a concept that denotes only one actor's social intention. With regard to execution of an intention, it is in need of a complementary action. Action in a social context is bi-polar, and presupposes at least two social actors reciprocally and intentionally directed upon each other for the sake of like or complementary interests, inclinations, or feelings. Contrary to the impression you might gain from reading Weber, the key concept of sociology is not social action but social interaction. The reciprocity of intentions, which is the prime condition of social interaction, does not hinge on the identity of interests and long-range objectives, but only on their compatibility. Like the because motives of those interacting, their interests and long-range objectives may be at


considerable variance as long as the discrepancies do not interfere with the immediate, concrete objectives and the technical course of the action carried out in common. As long as the objectives are practical or rational, as in work or in an intellectual discussion, personality differences and emotional factors are theoretically irrelevant. In actuality, two people may be unable to co-operate because of interfering emotional factors. Face-to-face interaction and social interrelations Social interaction only takes place in the immediate presence of partners in interaction. Consequently, as Cooley has said and as Schutz has stressed, interactional situations are face-to-face situations. They offer all the advantages that come from being able to speak directly with one another, and from being able to observe one another directly while speaking or performing. During work or playing a game, the need for exchanging words or other direct contacts may be reduced. Obviously, mutual presence is most advantageous when the interaction is essentially verbal, that is, consists of conversation and discussion. Whatever the purpose of the situation, work, play, sociallity, or education, face-to-face interaction is the prototype of all other possible forms of interaction and communication. This, by the way, is one of the reasons why Cooley's considerations of face-to-face relations, especially those in small social groups he labelled primary groups, are so important to sociology. I do not want to carry on a detailed discussion of indirect interaction, which, it seems, greatly depends on linguistic communication. Of indirect interactions, the telephone conversation is closest to face-to-face interaction as it preserves both the hearing of each other's voices and the immediacy of the verbal responses (reciprocal actions). All other forms of indirect communiction have time gaps between statement and response. The indirect interaction that ties individuals into larger organizational and social networks, from large communities and giant corporations to economic markets and complex societies and political structures, has a different character. Weber pointed out that even the largest societal organization is an interactional network. I can add that in any interactional network, many face-to-face work groups, ad-

ministrative groups, commercial groups are linked to each other through some persons in each group having face-toface or indirect contact with some persons in other groups. It is impossible for individuals, given their limited spheres of involvement, to oversee the whole network. Individuals thus feel they are "just a cog in the machine," which they hypostatize variously as "the company," "the community," "society" with an independent will and seemingly unrestricted and uncontrollable powers. Such collectives, no matter how large, can be reduced in principle to interactional networks formed by people who, as a rule, act in agreement with established rules and procedures; they alone are the company-in-action, the community-in-action, or the society-in-action. Between the late thirties and the early fifties, American sociologists relied largely on Weber for their organizational theory in general and their theory of bureaucracy in particular. Because they chose to ignore his theory of social action and what it entails, they shared the mystification of the social-interactional aspects of large-scale organizations. In their own reifications of association and society, they denied the crucial human element. Even the most fleeting intentional contact between two persons constitutes a relationship, governed for the moment by reciprocal intentions and complementary purposes. The relationship dies the moment the purposes have been served. Buying a newspaper from a street vendor in a strange city is a face-to-face transaction lasting only seconds. Other situational interactions may last longer, but always occur in a limited period of time. They all are relationships-in-action. However, social relations are not limited to interactional situations any more than interactions are limited to face-to-face encounters. Most significant relationships among individuals are longer, whether they are factual or personal. Weber indicated that, when I am an outsider observing someone working, it is difficult and often impossible for me to know whether the work project is completed when the worker ceases to work. I may have watched him from start to finish. Yet, the apparent start of work may actually be the continuation of activities, interrupted earlier, and its finish may only be the postponement of the continuation of the task at hand. Without knowing the intentions, the work

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118 plan, the in-order-to motives of the actor, I cannot make APPROACH TO judgments about beginning and end of a projected action. SOCIAL LIFE This is most obvious in a big and complex project, which, by its technical nature, could not possibly be finished in a working day. The same goes for the work that is carried out by a work crew. For instance, the building of a house demands the co-ordinated efforts of a number of workers, some of whom are highly skilled, in a task that will take many working days to complete. It is executed in stages, separated by lunch breaks and, most importantly, by the end of the shift. The work crew is not dissolved every evening and newly formed every morning: it persists for the duration of the building job. Not only are the workers under contract, but each considers the crew to be his working crew, and sees himself as belonging to it. In this manner, the work relation-in-action becomes a continuous interrelationship, lasting either for predetermined periods or indefinitely. When social interrelations are personal, they are particularly relevant to individuals. In the same way that a Werelation is experienced prior to the recognition of the self, so the personal social interrelation is experienced before any other. In fact, the We-relation and the social interrelation are identical in the experiences of the small child. The dependence on the mother, the ever recurring experience of her giving care and comfort, turns into the child's first and formative personal interrelation. From it grow interrelations with other members of the family. Cooley was correct when he focused on the family as the origin of the experience of intimate face-to-face relations, reinforced by various sentiments, which he summed up under the label of "sympathy," and functioning as the prime factor in the development of the child's "human nature." As long as the family functions in this manner, it and the other "primary groups" with comparable emotional qualities that the child later enters and that the adult may choose constitute the "home world." All personal interrelations issue from intensive face-toface experiences in which 'being-together' is at least as important as the possibly more factual purposes that may be connected with the encounter. Going with friends to a concert or a gallery, playing ball or swimming with them, hearing lectures or getting involved in discussions, are forms of

'doing-things-together' in which not the things in them- 119 selves but the sharing of experiences makes for the person- SOCIAL ACTION al significance of such face-to-face encounters. Of course,ANDINTERACTION the fundamental face-to-face encounter in shared experience is not a permanent state but an intermittent event in two or more lives that otherwise take place in separate spheres. Friendships, as one basic type of personal interrelation, are unique combinations of shared interests in things that matter greatly to each friend. Friendships tie two individuals emotionally together; they accept each other for what they are. The shared interests are not usually material, but concern the common pursuit of ideals, unselfish causes, or intellectual-spiritual quests demanding not only persistence but devotion. Emotionally, friendships are characterized by the desire to be together as much as possible, not only for the sake of exchanges about the common concerns but also for the sake of enjoying each other's company. One reinforces the other. Being-together, however often, does not tend to diminish the intensity of the relationship. Conversely, the feeling of belonging-together lasts through periods of separation, however long. Ideally, friendships centre on a common cause-for-life and last a lifetime. The intensity and experienced importance of teenage friendships rival that of young love. As they become more mature, teenagers may outgrow their friendships, but sometimes the friendships will endure for life on a more subdued basis. As long as they last, they are characterized by an astonishing need of being together. A girl coming home after having spent hours with her best friend may rush to the telephone and call her up, in order to have another long conversation. Even nights cannot always keep the friends apart: sleeping over is one of the high points of such a friendship. On the other hand, there are friendships among adults wherein emotional inclinations and wishes are controlled by other demands on their time and attention: social obligations, professional duties, family ties, civic responsibilities. If friends live far apart, visits may be rare. Friends may keep in touch by letter. Even if they seldom write, they will remain friends, especially when they pursue similar philosophical and theoretical interests. Alfred Schutz, for instance, maintained a number of


friendships with philosophers and social scientists. Some of these friendships were established during his formative years in Vienna; others were started during his Parisian exile; and some were initiated in his early years in the United States. In all cases, these relations lasted a lifetime. None of his friends saw completely eye to eye with him in theoretical matters. All of them respected his efforts as much as he respected theirs. Beyond this, they were quite frank with one another and discussed their differences as much as they spoke about their agreements. This was possible because they considered each other as intellectual co-workers in a huge philosophical and social-scientific field, sharing the same ultimate purposes but pursuing their chosen tasks according to their own specific interests and in their own ways. This feeling of separate progression towards similar goals was especially strong in the most important of these interrelationships: that between Gurwitsch and Schutz. Both repeatedly compared their respective efforts to those of two workers who begin to excavate a tunnel from converse points, eventually meeting at the centre. Schutz's friendships were more than just intellectual. They covered the whole range of human and personal concerns: the well being of the other and of his family, their mutual professional and publishing problems, each other's literary output, with considerable effort spent in reading and helping to bring into shape drafts of manuscripts. With a few exceptions, Schutz and his friends lived far apart and often did not see each other for years. Correspondence was maintained between him and each of them. Although a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction, the letters remain an invaluable key to the intellectual and personal relationships between Schutz and his friends. Generally speaking, social and, in particular, personal interrelationships overcome the intermittency of the fundamental face-to-face encounters; they are one of the main threads out of which the fabric of social life is woven.

Weber's sociology of understanding Max Weber wrote about his sociology of understanding, which was the crowning of his immensely fruitful work, in

the last years of his life. The work was published only after 121 his death. In a sense, his sociology of understanding is ra- WEBER'S ther an afterthought to his voluminous substantive socio- UNDERSTANDING logical and historical work. He wrote it hastily, as a theoretical skeleton, a series of necessary theoretical definitions and explanations to be dispensed with as quickly as possible so that he could devote himself to the substantive tasks that still were all-important to him. The German text of his theoretical sketch forms the first twenty-five pages or so of his book, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), which appeared in 1922. Although an English translation exists, done by Henderson and Parsons, I am going to rely here on the German original for reasons that will soon become obvious.

The meaning of meaning and understanding Weber defined sociology as a science that aims at interpretatively understanding and, thereby, explaining social action in its cause and effects. Action is human conduct that the actor links to a subjective meaning. Social action is human action that, according to the meaning given to it by the actor, relates and orients to the conduct of others. The German term for meaning is Sinn. Philosophically, it is best translated as sense; but, sociologically, the term meaning is to be preferred. Weber spoke of vom Handelnden gemeinten Sinn, literally, the meaning meant by the actor. Henderson and Parsons translated this as "actual existing meaning," in doing so circumventing Weber's precise formulation as to whose meaning he was referring: Weber meant the meaning of the actor, in contrast to that of a sociological interpreter, which is a different kind of meaning. Weber, of course, was also concerned with this. I am not simply quibbling about a formulation; I am speaking against an interpretative change in the meaning of Weber's term. The implications of this change became a key point in the argument that developed in 1940-1941 between Parsons and Schutz about the proper interpretation of the conception of subjective action. Many years later, Parsons reinforced his side of the argument by making the point that his own philosophical position —a neo-Kantian view — demonstrates the impossiblity of getting at the meaning meant by involved actors; meanings are always construe-

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ted or imputed by the scientific observer. (1978: 115-124) Parsons eventually parted ways with Weber in order to .

construct his own theory or the social system-an undertaking that Weber himself had declared impossible. Schutz, on his part, steadfastly maintained that sociologists, when their investigations require it, can and must get at the meaning meant by the actors. This implies that, in certain cases, they can evoke their own experiences within the spheres of their own daily life; in other cases, they will have to establish a We-relationship with the 'subjects' of their investigations, so that they may understand their lifeworlds. (On this, see my paper on "Ideal Type and Surrender," 1978:153-164.) Weber defined the meaning of action in three different ways. One, the meaning of action is the meaning meant by the actor as actually given in any specific "historical case." The term historical in this context does not necessarily refer to a historical past, but, in agreement with common usage among German thinkers contemporary with Weber, to the historicity of any given case of currently concrete action. The actor finds himself in a specific situation, which he entered with the history of his own experiences behind him, and which itself is a moment in the ongoing flow of the present as history-in-the-making. The historical case, then, is any given actual case. Two, the meaning of action is the average or approximate meaning meant in a given "mass of cases." That is, statistical considerations on the part of the social scientist come into play. The way in which the original data are collected is left open. Three, the meaning of action is the construction of a pure type of action. This is the result of a theoretical effort on the part of the sociological investigator. Here, the aim is not to produce a descriptive concept but to produce an ideal-typical construction that does not resemble any concrete case even though it is in no way an arbitrary creation.* As Schutz pointed out, such ideal types of social action fall into two distinct categories: ideal types of actors and ideal types of courses of action. At This condensed exposition of Weber's position is already an extension of the definition style of his statements. They can be found in the German original of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, vol. I, 3rd ed. (Tuebingen: Mohr, 1947), p. 1. All expressions ocurring between quotation marks are directly translated from Weber's text.

the moment, I am not going to concern myself with their 123 feasibility and sociological usefulness. WEBER'S What I am going to concern myself with is a critical dis- UND'ERSTANDING cussion of the uses Weber made of the term (subjective) meaning in the context of his three definitions. Schutz insisted that Weber's first category must be sharply distinguished from the other two categories. The crucial question, when talking about meaning, is, Meaning for whom? The meaning meant by the actor alone is subjective, if the term is taken in a strict sense. It implies that actors are the exclusive sources of information about the meaning of their conduct. Weber's two other categories are meanings established by, and in this sense for, the inquiring sociologists. If average or approximate meanings are to be established, sociologists can interview either all people with whom they are concerned, or a representative sample of them, and proceed with the data on hand towards a descriptive composite picture of the meanings represented in the data, possibly accentuating a tendency prevalent in them. When this is the case, sociologists may claim that they base themselves on the subjective meanings of the actors concerned, but they cannot claim that their composite and possibly generalized picture represents the subjective meaning of any specific person. However, if they use questionnaires with predesigned questions and choices for answers, they obtain materials that do not refer at all to the meanings meant by the actors but to the answers pre-formulated by themselves and marked by their 'subjects.' The relationship between answer marked and meaning meant is spurious and, in any case, cannot be ascertained from questionnaires. From questionnaires, sociologists gain numerically precise statistical averages with established margins of error, but they are averages of answers marked on sheets of paper, not meanings meant by the respondents. In the case of the ideal-typical construction of the meaning of a type of action, which is Weber's third category, the intention or pretension of establishing actual subjective meanings does not exist. By definition, all terms entering into an ideal type are not meant to refer to actualities; they are the sociologists' pure constructions, carried out for exclusively methodological purposes. The ideal-typical actor, as Schutz said poignantly, is a puppet created by a sociologist; it contains


only the features the creator wants it to have. If this puppet 'has' meanings, they are imposed upon it by its maker. As long as we maintain a phenomenological perspective, we have to agree with Schutz and confine the term subjective meaning to the first of Weber's three categories. Furthermore, it is clear that the second category, average or approximate meaning, divides into two sub-categories. The first contains an empirical reference to subjective data; the second stands for meanings that have been pre-formulated and, in this sense, manufactured by the sociologist as the designer of questionnaires. As I have said, Weber set down his definitions of social action and of all concepts related to it hastily, without ever asking himself about their presuppositions and implications: he had no patience for meta-sociological contemplations. This was the methodological starting point of Schutz's critique of Weber, as set down in his first published study. Schutz did not want to throw out Weber's second and third categories in favour of the first. He wanted to bring to light the hidden presuppositions and implications in all of them, thereby showing that the connotation of the term subjective meaning shifted from one to the other without any indication that it did. Schutz simply started with the critical scrutiny of the terms of Weber's definitions. In doing so, he did what was necessary, but had not been done by Weber. So far, I have given the gist of Schutz's scrutiny of the term subjective meaning. Schutz's original investigation actually went beyond this key term to the presuppositions, implications, and consequences of that sociology of understanding that Weber had outlined on the first twenty-five pages of Economy and Society. All sociologists are free to introduce conceptions with a subjective ring into their terminologies, like those of motivation, intention, objective, and meaning in relation to social action. A theory of social action can be created on such a basis; its subjective terminology will be used to interpret certain data collected in one way or the other. Subjective here refers to actors as subjects of study. Subjective does not refer to the individual experience registered in an actor's consciousness. Apart from this focus on social actors, subjective terminology is in principle no different from so-called objective terminology that refers to categories

such as group, status, social rules. Schutz did not contest 125 this principle as such, but he stressed that it has nothing to WEBER'S do with the first of Weber's categories, the meaning meant UNDERSTANDING by the actor-provided this is taken seriously and not misguidedly as a claim for the validity and intention of the other categories. A crucial distinction exists between sociologists' concerns with subjective aspects of observed and sociologically described actions and the subjectivity of the actors themselves. This distinction must not be blurred: genuine subjective meaning must be kept distinct from the interpretations and operations of sociologists or social psychologists. From Weberian sociology to phenomenological philosophy As far as Schutz was concerned, Weber had initiated a tremendous break-through in sociology by turning his attention to the subjectivity of the actor. Weber had breached the wall of sociology as objective science. Schutz took it upon himself to clarify the immense consequences of this step and to develop the sociology of understanding consistently in the direction that had been opened up by Weber. Husserl, in his turn towards phenomenological subjectivity, had spoken of the necessity of being philosophically radical. In a similar sense, Schutz intended to be sociologically radical, that is, to go the the roots of human conduct, which are given in the subjectivity of human beings, in their consciousness of self, their volition, and their subjective interpretation of their own experiences, including their awareness of themselves as actors among other acting individuals. In seeing his task, Schutz realized that Weber's set of definitions was not simply a preliminary clarification of key terms for "doing sociology" as sociology of understanding. Almost inadvertently, Weber had pierced the conceptual and theoretical shell of his own sociological work, opening an access lane that led to a new area of sociological observation, investigation, and reasoning. This area, which was still essentially unrecognized, is concerned with a basically different subject matter and demands methods as well as conceptualizations unrelated to the sociological enterprise itself. Schutz's genius manifested itself early in the realization


— at the age of twenty-five—that, in order to do sociology in Weber's sense, he had to do something else: he had to explore the areas of subjective experiences, of consciousness and volitions. This would add a whole new dimension to Weberian sociology. Schutz knew that he could find guidance and support for this apparently non-sociological undertaking only in the work of a few thinkers: first Bergson, then Husserl, and later Leibniz and James. That is, he had to turn to a few philosophers who had dealt with subjectivity and consciousness, had to do philosophy of a specific phenomenal-psychological and phenomenological kind. Schutz the sociologist turned into Schutz the phenomenological psychologist and philosopher. Thereafter, he would work in both the sociological and the philosophical dimension, always aware of both the interdependence of and the distinctions between the two. As a philosopher, Schutz did not confine himself just to the areas of phenomenology that were indispensable for his social-psychological purposes. Following the logic of his selected readings and putting them into a larger context of phenomenology, he was led not only into epistemology but also into ontology. I am not going to consider these interests of Schutz here. I am going to concentrate on his interest in a phenomenology of consciousness that served him—and will serve us—as an access lane to a social psychology enlightened by phenomenological insights and considerations. Subjectivity leads into intersubjectivity, the apperception of intended objects leads to the reciprocity of interactive experiences. However, I must stress that such a social psychology, gained with the help of introspective observations and certain phenomenological methods, neither exhausts Schutz's overall objective nor the intentions of this book. Ever after, Schutz alternated his work between phenomenological-psychological concerns and sociology proper. I may say that he periodically returned through Weber's breach into the realm of Weber's sociology, to his methods of the construction of sociological concepts, and crucially to the formation of ideal types. When he expanded his methodological work, he let himself be guided by insights he had gained, and continued to gain, from his social-psychological and phenomenological studies. This work helped him to develop the sociology of understanding in a new direction,

freeing it from its original ambiguities and making it consistent. Ideal types as methodological devices The ideal type stands at the centre of Weber's and Schutz's methodological considerations. Weber claimed that most of his predecessors in the fields of history, economics, and other social sciences had also used the device, though they had no name for it, and often were not clearly aware of what they were doing. Historians came up with concepts of historical periods like Renaissance, Counter-Reformation; economists with concepts like economic man, enterprise; political scientists with concepts like absolute monarchy, city state; sociologists with concepts like family, society, community. To Weber, these concepts, which social scientists constructed for the purposes of formulating theories and doing research, were a form of ideal type. As a rule, social scientists make up the concepts on the basis of pre-existing knowledge, and the pre-existing knowledge in turn validates the concept. How do they do this? From the pre-existing knowledge, features that are common to various concrete cases are abstracted; variations of these features are generalized; all particularizations are excluded. The "construct" or concept that results from this process of abstraction is pure, free of all admixtures of features that occur in all real cases, but that deviate from or contradict the construct. The whole abstract construct is treated as if nothing but the selected features existed, as if the resultant ideal type were real. The ideal type, however, is ideal only in this sense of an artificially created, logicaltheoretical consistency. I should point out that even the exact natural sciences operate at least in part with constructs of physical laws that display ideal-typical features. Consider the classical laws about falling bodies, which assert that every physical body, regardless of weight, size, or form, falls with the same rate of acceleration. Even the most primitive experiment with two objects of different weight, size, or form suggests that this law does not apply to the falling bodies that we handle and encounter under everyday conditions. Why do we have this discrepancy? One of the German texts on the natural sciences that I read as a student answers this way: "It is most of all clear that the two simple laws, which Galilei

127 WEBER'S SOCIOLOGY OF UNDERSTANDING


found, came into being exclusively on the basis of a certain stylization or idealization. They ignore air resistance, friction, and other. disturbances. According to conventionalism or rationalism, such idealization is just the means with the help of which reason, so to speak, makes phenomena tractable for itself."* The author himself did not share this view; he argued that experimentation will bring about a whole series of approximations to the idealized laws. In doing so, he pointed to a specifically natural-scientific method of constructing ideal types. These ideal types are not arbitrary but come from the attempt to interpret given observable phenomena; they can only be maintained if they do not contradict observed facts but are, within their methodologically restricted function, compatible with empirical observation. If this condition were waived, they could not be part of any scientific body of theory and knowledge. This also holds for sociological ideal types. Within the wide scope of his work, Weber used diversified kinds of ideal types. The ideal types that served his theory of social action became crucial for our sociological work. They were either built up or else derived from his concept of rational action. That is, for his methodological purposes, he considered the subjective aspects of individual conduct, such as motivations and meanings, as "deviations" from a purely constructed and purposive-rational course. The ideal-typical construction aims at establishing what the course of action would have been had all those involved known all relevant circumstances, including each other's intentions, and had chosen and used their means without the interference of non-rational considerations. Of course, the exclusion of any and all factors that detract from the ideal type of conduct presupposes a strictly rational selection of the goals of ends of the action. Weber made clear that the construction of a course for a "rigidly rational action" is preferable solely for reasons of its "evident understandability" and "methodological purposiveness." He expressly warned that it should not be taken as an expression of a "rational prejudice" of sociologists and of "the belief in the actual preponderance of rationality in life." An ideal type of rational action says "not the least bit" about the * Bernard Bavink, Ergebnisse und Probleme der Natumnssenschaften. gth ed. (Zurich: Hirzel, 1948), p. 259.

characteristics of any living person. (1922: 2-3) The ideal 129 type is a convenient fiction serving the purely heuristic pur- WEBER'S SOCIOLOGY OF poses or£ sociologists: it is neither true nor raise but merely UNDERSTANDING useful or inadequate, as the case may be, in investigation and theory formation. In Schutz's terms, this ideal type is a course-of-action type, or, rather, is the basic scheme for the construction of such types. His scheme of the ideal type finds its complement in the scheme of the "rational actor." This simply translates the general characteristics of the rational-action scheme into a personal form. Ideal-typical rational actors disallow all of their sentiments, value preferences, and so on; they are set to pursue a rational course of action. They know and correctly consider all the factors involved, all the means at their disposal, and have the correct information about the purposes and means of those other actors with whom they have to deal in order to achieve their own objectives. Clearly, any complete scheme of social action would require two ideal-typical actors. If, following Weber's precept of rational action, they are both rational actors, each of them would also be endowed with a perfect knowledge of the rational objective, the rational use of available means, and a rational action strategy. The sociologist constructing both ideal-typical actors will, of course, have no trouble equipping both with sufficient rational knowledge of one another. According to the theoretical statement of Weber that I have just cited, an ideal type is a rational action type. But, Weber's own work allows for and invites the construction of other ideal types of action, for instance, of traditional conduct. Here, courses of action and types of actors can be constructed from the social rules that are embedded in the customs of a community. These ideal types would be based on two unrealistic presuppositions: one, that all members of the community understand the rules in identical fashion and apply them in the same way, and two, that the members forego any attempt to yield to their own impulses to act differently, and under no circumstances make use of their own volition and ability to think, that is, think differently. Although the structural-functional theory of social systems is built on exactly these or similar assumptions, its exponents fail to realize that they operate in ideal-typical fashion. Instead, they tend to consider their theories about such


things as role as realistic-descriptive theories of social life. It is possible to construct ideal types of completely nonrational or irrational behaviour. Such constructions are embedded in the typifications of pathological behaviour of various sorts. Weber's own ideal types, as encountered in his various investigations, are not confined to the precept of rational action. For purposes of his investigations into the major types of social orders, he introduced three archetypes of rulers or leaders that correspond to three ideal types of political authority. One is the legitimate ruler who derives his authority from law and especially from a legal constitution that is recognized by all and considered binding for all. The corresponding political actions are justified by, and interpreted in terms of, the principles of law and constitution. An example of such rule is the political system of the United States. A second type of political authority is the traditional ruler or leader who derives his authority from traditions that are likely unwritten, treated as unchangeable and seen as justification in themselves. Tribal chiefs are traditional rulers. A third type is the political authority of the charismatic leader who is without power in both the legal or traditional sense. His charisma rests in the belief of his followers, his authority in their consent. Yet, charismatic leadership breaks established traditions or legal systems; it is a great driving force behind fundamental social change. The founders of the great religions and the leaders of revolutions before the attainment of power are examples of charismatic leaders. When constructing these ideal types of power and authority, Weber used his great familiarity with historical sources. In a sense, these ideal types parallel his types of rational, traditional, and non-rational actions. Schutz's two essays "The Stranger" and "The Homecomer" contain examples of his development of ideal types of actors. The one concerns the immigrant; the other the soldier returning from war. Both were written in his early American years. Schutz drew from an abundance of recent literary sources, many of them by American sociologists. He also drew on an immediate, albeit hidden source. Unlike Weber, who had to rely on historical sources, Schutz was able to draw from his own experiences as a recent immigrant to the United States and as a combat soldier in the First World War.

I suggested earlier that sociological concepts are made up 131 from pre-existing knowledge. We can see where Schutz WEBER'S and Weber got their ideal types. To a considerable degree, UNDERSTANDING both used secondary sources augmented by any primary historical or personal documents like letters that had been published. In his historical interests, Weber depended completely on such sources; in his focus on contemporary problems, Schutz relied on his own experiences as most direct and immediate source materials. In doing so, he pointed to a heretofore almost completely unrecognized aspect of the activities of sociologists. If they define their task as that of observers of the social conduct of others, including their statements about selected social experiences, then sociologists have no reason for not observing themselves in their own social conduct. I know of no good reason why sociologists should not consider themselves as a primary source of social information. In principle this source is as important as the source of information they consult when, in their research, they direct themselves to the people they are studying. Or rather, we should say, in their part-time roles of sociologists, sociologists can and should direct themselves to themselves in their individual existences as ordinary citizens, as actors in the social affairs of daily life, and as persons with their own life experiences and life histories—provided, of course, that they, as sociologists, deal with topical areas with which they are familiar as persons with experiences in their own life-world. It is not enough, of course, for sociologists to depend on their more or less unclarified everyday notions about social affairs. In doing so, they would commit the sociological equivalent of James's "psychologist's fallacy." But if, for reasons of an illdefined and misinterpreted conception of scientific objectivity, they forego consulting a relevant source at their disposal simply because that source is identical with themselves as actors in their life-world, they fall short of their obligations as social researchers. In Schutz's treatment and construction of sociological ideal types, he relied on secondary or literary sources but also on his own experiences. Furthermore, he used his relationships with the philosophers and social scientists close to him to consult them about theory, and to use them as informal and convenient sources of information that corroborated, augmented, or corrected his own personal observa-


tions. The general theoretical framework of his sociological thinking and those insights that he had gained from the ranges of phenomenological psychology guided his work in this respect also. Schutz was aware of the empirical requirements for the construction of sociological ideal types. In his methodological writings, he offered guide-lines for this purpose. In his theoretical expositions, he introduced specific ideal types, actually general classes of sociological types, such as that of the ideal type of the course of purposive action and that of the purposive actor. Between methodological prescription and theoretical product, however, lies an area that is quite crucial for any empirical science. In it methodological guide-lines are applied to a subject matter, here the actual process of the construction of ideal types. Schutz has given us examples of such undertakings in his papers on "The Stranger" and "The Homecomer." Otherwise, he largely confined himself sociologically to the broad investigation of theoretical problems. The question is: Did he do so because the severe imposed relevances of his demanding business job left him little time for the pursuit of his intellectual interests, so that he had to confine himself to what, on his scale of relevances, was most important? Under the circumstances, he ascribed a strong priority to his theoretical and philosophical concerns. Or did he do so because the tedium of actual empirical work was hardly necessary for his purposes? As an accomplished phenomenologist, could he not also arrive at reliable sociological results with the help of eidetic procedures that served him so well in his phenomenological-psychological investigations? As a sociologist, I am inclined to adopt the first possibility. Philosophers acquainted with Schutz's work may prefer the second possibility.* It is not surprising that such dif* I hold that this possibility is very remote. In his last article on "Husserl's Importance for the Social Sciences" (1959c), Schutz distantiated himself from some of Husserl's close students "who believed that concrete problems of the social sciences could be solved by direct application of the method of eidetic reduction to unclarified notions of common-sense thinking or to equally unclarified concepts of the empirical social sciences." Such a "naive use of the eidetic method" only contributes "toward discrediting phenomenology among social scientists" (CP I: 140-141).

ferences in the interpretation of aspects of Schutz's work 133 exist. Their discussion, however, does not lie within the WEBER'S SOCIOLOGY OF scope of this book. UNDERSTANDING Whether external circumstances prevented Schutz from pursuing the systematic acquisition of empirical sociological knowledge outside the spheres of his own life experiences and the consultation of secondary sources, or whether he felt no compelling need for it, the fact remains that he never engaged himself in serious sociological field work. Due to his almost life-long involvement in business activities, his experiences of aspects or areas of social life were significantly broader than those of most of his academic colleagues. He broadened them further by participating vicariously in the experiences of his friends. None the less, the essential sphere of his life experiences was restricted to the loose community of European-educated intellectuals who had been transplanted-by the force of circumstances not of their own making—to North American soil. They were more observing strangers than immigrants in the process of cultural assimilation. For a sociologist, such marginality is an asset as well as a liability. In one respect, he is no worse off than his native colleague: for both, the subject matter and foundation of sociology are significantly broader than the fields of experiences of any particular social and cultural group. Schutz himself demonstrated this strikingly in his paper on "The Stranger." Most sociologists take it for granted that they have gained and can gain reliable knowledge about any socio-cultural group from their scientifically detached perspective: it guarantees 'objectively valid' knowledge. Sociologists pursuing a sociology of understanding, however, cannot let it go at that. If they are serious about ascertaining the meanings meant by social actors, they will have to find ways to enter into face-to-face relations with members of groups whose cultural life-styles and world view are remote from their own. This is what I meant in my earlier reference to "serious field work." This is one of the places where Schutz's sociological work has to be carried beyond the boundaries or cut-off points that he had set or was forced to set for his own efforts. Yet, the further away social phenomena and areas of theoretical and empirical concern are from the life-world and experiences of social scientists, the more it becomes necessary for


them to engage in systematic and thorough field work at the source—the daily life of the people who represent different occupational strata, cultural backgrounds, and so on. Insofar as the social phenomena connected with the lives of groups that are socially and culturally remote become topical, the more it becomes necessary to amend the methods of gathering knowledge and constructing theoretical concepts. This concerns the question of the acquisition of an empirical basis for all kinds of theoretical tasks, the question of the construction and testing of sociological ideal types, and not in the least the question of putting the latter to empirical use in substantive investigation. If, as I shall develop later on, the aim of sociological inquiry is to gain an understanding of the meaning that life has for people within their given socio-cultural environment, the prime concern of the sociological field workers will be to gain access to this meaning. This presupposes, wherever there are large gaps between the life-style and life experiences of the sociologists and the life-style and experiences of the people they wish to study, a temporary suspension of all theoretical preconceptions and ideal-typical preconstructions. Instead, the sociologists will have to try to live among these people, to learn about their lives through "participant observation" or, better, "observing participation." I showed what this means and implies in the paper I mentioned previously, "Between Ideal Type and Surrender." There, I argued as follows. Empirical investigations in the spirit of the sociology of understanding presuppose more than a recognition of the subjective motives and objectives of the actors and the researchers' knowledge of these actors and the situations in which they are involved. They also involve the personalities of the researchers themselves. There is a great difference between the theoretical application of ideal types to collections of sociological data—even the notes of field workers — and the prior efforts of researching sociologists to sufficiently understand the people about whom and the situations about which they intend to gather data. Kurt H. Wolff, like Schutz a refugee sociologist from Central Europe, * spoke of the prior period as that of the "surrender" Kurt H. Wolff studied with Karl Mannheim; his original sociological concern was —and to a degree remains—the sociology of knowledge.

of the would-be researcher to the encounters with com- 135 munity members. In this period, he lives as a human being WEBER'S among other human beings, putting into brackets every- UNDERSTANDING thing he knew before from secondary sources and forgetting about the sociological objectives that brought him into the community of those others in the first place. Only after he decides to detach himself from the community and his personal experiences within it, should he remove the brackets around his sociological objectives and inspect the "catch" hidden in his remembrances of the period of surrender. I think that, on the basis of my own experiences as sociologist, both phases of field work are equally necessary : " ... the methodology of sociology in the tradition of Weber and Schutz hinges not only on the ideal-typical conceptual tools as instruments of theory and research, but also on a stance, and the concomitant conduct, of the field worker which allows him to 'understand' his subject matter in a genuine subjective-human sense." (1978: 164) I introduced the sociological ideal type as a sociological tool. However, it is more than that. It is, or may become, a part of sociological theory, a conception in its own theoretical right. For its construction, it demands empirical investigations; as a methodological and theoretical concept, it requires retesting and, if necessary, amendment. In its application to substantive research, it falls under Schutz's crucial proviso: it is accepted as valid "until further notice." Beyond this, I must stress that the ideal type is one important theoretical device and methodological tool, but not the only one. Neither theory nor methodology of sociology—or other social sciences—is exhausted by it. Typincation as phenomenon of the life-world For Schutz, the topic of typification was not exhausted with the sociological ideal type. Inspired by Husserl, he set out to show that typification is a quite important feature of thinking and of communication in everyday life, and that, in historical and subjective-genetical terms, the roots of sciDuring the fifties, he published a paper "Before and After Sociology" (see the source references at the end of my paper) that contains an exposition of his application of the term, "surrender and catch" to matters sociological. A reader of Wolff's paper should be aware that Wolff, from the outset, gave the coupling of these terms a wider connotation that, by now, has grown into an important contribution to existential philosophy.


entific typification are found in the life-worldly phenomenon of typification as a characteristic feature of cognition in the natural stance. His work on typification represents one of his original contributions to the sociology of understanding. I shall present his conception of life-worldly typification below. The naming of objects is a rudimentary typification. I do not mean personal names, which designate specific individuals, but class names of people and objects, which are generalizations. When we encounter them, these class names evoke a notion of a kind of person, object, or event that has already been experienced. We are thus able to classify the person, object, or event as being essentially the same as other such things encountered in earlier experiences, or known from the descriptions by others. These class names are an important part of our living language, and, when they are acquired by individuals as they learn the language, become the labels for and nuclei of their typifications. As Schutz said, the vernacular of any linguistic-cultural group represents its socially approved typifications, its generalized interest, and its general relevance system. In this sense, the bare bones of everyday typifications are socially imposed with the language spoken in any community. However, the absorption of a naming system is not identical with typification in the proper sense, that is, in the sense of its understanding by any particular individual. As they grow, individuals must not only learn the linguistic denotations for all culturally important things, but they must also fill them with meanings beyond those linguistically given. As a rule, children learn the names of things when encountering them in their little life-spheres. The name and the experience with the thing flow into each other. Later encounters with the same thing may add new and different experiences to the first; they may not be preserved in memory in their full individuality; rather they are sedimented, that is, settled down in a more general form. Aspects of the thing that occur more frequently in sedimented experiences stand out while other, accidental features recede. These generalized characteristics are spontaneously evoked whenever a thing of a similar kind is encountered or even when its general name is mentioned. In both cases, it may be naively called 'the same' thing. This implies that, for all individuals, such typifications

contain, first, particular personal meanings that issue from 137 the particularity of the experiences in which the thing nam- WEBER'S ed appeared and reappeared in their lives. Secondly, the UND'ERSTANDING ensuing typifications are themselves open, that is, bound to change not only with further encounters with their object but also with the progression of experiences in the ongoing life of the individuals. Beyond this, the character of such typifications is co-determined by their interests each time corresponding objects come to their attention. The relative importance the object gains in comparison to other objects within the field of their interests is governed by their own systems of relevances. These factors seem to stand in the way of successful communication among persons who use the same terms with an individualized, typified meaning. This is not the case for two reasons. First, among the experiences that are most formative for the building up of typifications are those in which children are given 'official' explanations of the terms. Parents, teachers, and other significant figures do this frequently. Such official cultural definitions then enter into the sedimentations of the experiences of the name and object of a given type. Adults not only have their individualized typifications, but are well aware of the existing public expectations as to common definitions of terms; they hand down the common rather than their individual versions. Under favourable conditions, where human relations and activities in a cultural-linguistic community are relatively stable, the cultural definitions are absorbed well enough to form the core of each person's actual typifications. Their private significance, then, would be mostly confined to the fringe areas of the cognitive processes involved. Secondly, even a stronger differentiation of typified meanings of linguistically named objects will not necessarily prevent successful communication. The use of the same linguistic terms is a common medium that allows individuals to fill these terms with their own meanings and significances. While I link the name to my meaning, you link it to yours; but for both of us, the object referred to remains recognizable as the object meant by the term; and for both of us it is endowed with a different although somehow comparable meaning. Thus, a fair number of individual variations of typical meanings of common terms can be absorbed


in conversation without interrupting the talk. As long as this happens, public typifications will prevail linguistically without eliminating the private variations of their meaning and interpretation. Aside from the typifications that are needed for maintaining the collective life of a cultural community, there exist personal typifications that are to a considerable extent typifications of individual persons—in contrast to the typification of vocational figures (teacher, principal), or civic categories (voter, neighbour), or familial categories (husband, wife) which in James's sense, are appropriated: my teacher, my neighbour, my wife. Such typifications emerge in longlasting interrelations and, like any other kind, result from the sedimentation of the experiences of the recurring encounters with the person in question. This includes established habits in the daily routine of working and living together, such as the common breakfast of spouses. But more important, even moods, modes of reaction to certain news, expressions of affection or signs of indignation fall together into a typified image of the well-known person. Like public typifications, such private typifications are used as predictors of conduct. I can tell someone in advance what my wife will say when she hears what he has to convey to her, and I fully expect her to act in a set way while greeting me when I come home from my job. When any of these many expectations are not satisfied, I do not conclude that my typification of her is at fault but that there is something wrong with her. "She is not herself today," I think, and I ask her: "Is something the matter with you?" It may turn out that she got news from her mother that upset her. Once she explains this to me, I not only sympathize with her, but I am also relieved that such a disturbance does not disprove my typified expectations of her conduct. On the other hand, I may discover that occasional bad news, which she used to take in stride, now affects her mood so as to change the way she welcomes me home. I will integrate this discovery into my typified image of her to such a degree that I may tend to withhold bad news from her because it would upset her too much. The ultimate form of private typification is the typification of one's self. When we speak of a person's self-image we speak, at least in part, of self-typification. This is not in

the least surprising when we consider how we deal with 139 the Me as the I who I was, that is, essentially in the Thou- WEBER'S form, as if this past I were another person particularly well UNDEMANDING known and—usually—dear to us. Other factors, from wishful thinking to lack of self-confidence, heavily influence a person's self-image. If things go well, we may see ourselves more or less as others see us: our self-images will be in concordance with the typified images others have of us. This is Cooley's looking-glass effect. However, because children and adults are exposed to interactions and interrelations with various kinds of persons, the looking-glass effect may create uncertainties and conflicts. We all know about the vicious effects of negative labelling, of name-calling, on children and adolescents, be it due to some personal peculiarity or handicap or ethnic characteristic. The labelling may invalidate the positive effects of acceptance within the family and lead to the development of negative self-images that act as self-fulfilling prophecies in all practical conduct. When I define myself as inferior, I act in ways that perpetuate the inferiority ascribed to me. In contrast to this, children who gain inflated self-images because they are the pampered centre of attention in their families may blissfully ignore the less flattering reactions of their peers in school, and proceed to walk through their lives with the unshakable conviction of their unique worth. All experiences to the contrary are interpreted as irrelevant. More moderate positive self-images will also tend to be self-fulfilling: people who think of themselves as capable of succeeding, are likely to succeed in everything they try. Schutz stated that all kinds and variations of typifications on the common sense level "emerge in the everyday experiences of the world taken for granted." I may have made it sound as if a considerable amount of deliberate effort enters into their formation. This only is the case when expectations based on typifications are disappointed. Only when what is taken for granted in typifications becomes doubtful, do we notice them, and have to stop and think and make deliberate modifications in them. As Schutz said, these typifications usually occur "without any formulation of judgments or of neat propositions with logical subjects and predicates." That is, they are not constructed in the manner in which sociological typifications are constructed. Instead,

140 APPROACHTO SOCIAL LIFE

phenomenologically speaking, "they belong to the prepredicative thinking." (1970a: 120) They also appear spon7 i taneously. l

r

Theory of understanding Sociological typification is a means of getting hold of typifications of everyday life. This is one concern of the sociology of understanding. Its overall objective is understanding. The question is, again, Understanding what or whom? In common use, understanding has two meanings. It means, first, to comprehend something. To comprehend something is an individual matter: either I comprehend (understand) what I read, or I do not. But, it is also a social matter: I comprehend (understand) what you say, but I did not get one word of his lecture. Comprehension, here, is always related to the content of a statement, its linguistic meaning. Understanding also has a special, sociological meaning. In Weber's and Schutz's sense, and in the sense I use the term here, understanding always refers to the speakers' or writers' intentions and the meanings they attach to or express with their statements. Thus, I may say to someone, "I understand what you are saying but I'll be darned if I understand why you are saying it." Or, conversely, "I don't get what you are driving at, but I understand why you are so excited." Understanding is always a social matter concerning individuals, their intentions, meanings, and motivations. English-speaking people use the terms comprehension and understanding interchangeably. This may cause a lot of trouble. Germans also have two words, begreifen and verstehen. As a rule verstehen or understanding is the more popular term, and made to do the service of both. Even sociologists often ignore the significant distinctions between the terms, and gloss over a vital difference in nature and content of certain cognitive phenomena. Max Weber, who fully recognized the substance of this difference, nevertheless followed the accepted usage of making one term do the service of two. Weber's basic objective was the understanding of social action. Such understanding could be of two kinds. One, something could be rationally evident, an evidence maximized in logical and mathematical propositions. Here the

objective is to comprehend rationally the meaning of such 141 formalized statements. Two, something could be "empa- WEBER'S thetically evident": the evidence is revealed in the empa- UNDERSTANDING thetic experience of feelings of others. To Weber, such experiences consist of "vicariously experiencing in fantasy." This points to understanding other individuals in the sense stressed above. Indeed, empathy can play a role in such understanding, but it has its limits and restrictions. I am only going to warn of them; they cannot be discussed here. Weber added another distinction to the definition of understanding: that between actual and explanatory understanding. Sociologically speaking, the misleading expression "actual" understanding is identical with the comprehension of the course of an action as observed from the outside. This amounts to the comprehension of an observed act. For instance, I observe a person involved in an activity I identify from prior observations or experiences of mine as cutting wood. Cutting wood is the descriptive label for the actual observation; it does not lead to the question of the inorder-to motive of the activity beyond its obvious technical purpose. If I start considering motivation, actual understanding changes to explanatory or interpretative understanding. I direct actual understanding upon the action, not the actor. Actual understanding is similar to comprehension. On the other hand, I direct explanatory understanding upon the motivation of the actor. Explanatory understanding thus refers to understanding a person. You may recall my discussion of Weber's triple notion of subjective meaning. It can also be applied to the understanding of motivations. Only the concrete case of the meaning meant by the actor and his actual motivations qualifies as genuine interpretative understanding. The construction of approximate motives for a multiplicity of actors or the construction of corresponding ideal types does not repesent the understanding of subjectively experienced meanings and motivations but the understanding imputed by sociologists. Given all this, I can no longer avoid using the full title of Weber's sociology. In its common abbreviated form, it is sociology of understanding. This abbreviation serves extremely well as a short label for the sociological approach that Schutz critically developed from Weberian starting points. Weber himself had spoken of the "interpretative


understanding" of social action. The full title of Weber's basic sociology should be sociology of understanding and interpretation. In fact, sociologists who focus on the interpretative aspects of his theoretical concepts prefer to abbreviate its title to interpretative sociology. As far as I can see, interpretation is a theoretical undertaking. Essentially, it means to assign descriptive data to a place in an existing theoretical frame of reference and to explain their significance in this context. Interpretation is a theoretical task of sociologists. It is a way in which they make sense out of their descriptively discrete data, and bring them into a coherent theoretical scheme. Interpretation helps sociologists comprehend their data. Formulating approximate meanings and constructing ideal types are technical means of an interpretative sociology. As I said earlier, in no way do they give sociologists access to the meanings meant by the actor. For this reason, Weber introduced the term empathically evident for the result of efforts to gain an understanding of a person's feeling. As with everything else in the first part of Economy and Society, Weber did not stop to elaborate this point. Yet, here he clearly entered into the realm of phenomenological psychology. This implies that strictly sociological methods do not offer direct access to genuinely subjective data such as the personal meanings and motivations underlying an individual's social conduct. By the way, this is one of the reasons why Schutz developed a sociology of understanding informed in subjective matters by phenomenologicalpsychological insights. Motivational understanding I am now going to consider Weber's scheme of motivational understanding, looking first at establishing average or approximate meanings. In concentrating on this, I am temporarily refraining from acting as a sociologist operating at the rarified heights of theory formation and ideal-type construction. Instead, I shall act as a man thinking in terms of common sense likelihood about his experiences in daily life. When I was watching the man cutting wood in a yard, I could speculate as to why he was doing it. Was it to have firewood for himself or his family, or to sell it, or to get

some exercise? Those are common sense considerations of 143 an everyday experience. WEBER'S If I step out of the tracks of common sense reasoning and UNDERSTANDING assume a critical stance, I realize that I referred to a number of plausible reasons for the woodcutter's activity, each of them an exclusive alternative. I used a comfortable rule of thumb that says: one specific act serves one specific purpose. But, the man may have had more than one reason for chopping wood. Doing it for the sake of exercise does not exclude selling the split pieces as firewood. One act may serve a number of purposes or in-order-to motives. The converse is also true: one single purpose may be satisfied by a number of different acts. Think of the innumerable ways in which individuals may earn their living, to name only one most common in-order-to motive for the greatest variety of types of economic and technical conduct. In everyday life and in sociology, resorting to typical explanations may not yield usable interpretations of any specific type of action. Mere description of a course of action contains no dependable clue to motivation. Without further information, which can only be reliably obtained from the actor, we cannot choose any of the possible purposes of an action, even if we had them all neatly typified and catalogued. This is a genuine limitation to the application of pre-established type concepts. Neither Weber nor Schutz stressed these limitations. Weber did not because, in his empirical work, he dealt extensively with historical cases for which he likely had at his disposal the necessary data for the typification of motives. Schutz did not because he was only marginally involved in practical research. His methodological concerns were essentially concentrated on the construction of ideal types. He touched only occasionally and in general ways upon the questions of how to secure the empirical data for the construction of adequate theoretical concepts or of the ways of re-testing or reapplying these types empirically. Schutz's general considerations leave no doubt that, in principle, his methodology would allow, even call for, procedures for securing empirical data, for revising given ideal types, and for revising the methodological theory of ideal types, when practical evidence demands it.


Causality, prediction, and understanding in sociology When I talk about sociology here, as elsewhere in this book, I am using it as a short form for sociology and other social sciences, including social psychology. My use of the term social research or investigation has similar breadth. In my introduction, I asked whether phenomenology was scientific. The same question can be asked of any field of social inquiry and theory. Are they sciences? It is, of course, a matter of definition: you may call sociology a science if you define science differently from the way you define physical science. Some methodologists of science insist that you can find rules of scientific procedures common to both the natural and the social sciences, if you move to a high enough level of abstraction from the substantive aims and the concrete operations of any branch of science. This is uncontestable. Only, such rules are formal, in the sense of logical formalism: they have no direct significance for the actual practical operations of any field of empirical investigation. You should bear this in mind as you turn to the next sections on the scientific problems of causality and prediction. Expectations and typifications We learned in high school that predictability is one of the signs of any true science. A science establishes that specific causes bring about specific effects. Many social scientists, notably economists, assume that social events are predictable in a similar sense. They base this assumption on the observation of many regularities in social life, the repetition of certain kinds of social events under certain conditions. Such regularities are social facts as observed. Similarly, we can observe that people tend to conduct themselves in similar ways in similar situations. Psychologists speak here of habits; sociologists speak also of customs and other socially prescribed rules of conduct. As I have already mentioned, Schutz developed his observations of the habitual actions of everyday life into a theory about the typifications of daily life. You will remember that this discovery provides a life-worldly underpinning to the formation of type concepts and ideal-types

in fields of social inquiry. There is no doubt that when we know the habits and customs of people, we can predict their future conduct - within certain limits. Some psychologists and sociologists think that because they can typify individual or social conduct in psychological or sociological constructs and propositions, they are entitled to call their respective fields predictive sciences. Thereby, they do two things: one, they follow a quest for scientific respectability among all scientists (their field is supposed to be science in the rigid natural science sense); two, they imitate what they themselves and 'everybody else' do in everyday life—they take it for granted that the routines of life will continue without fail into the most distant future. Even in daily life, there are problems with this smug assumption: routine existence is not guaranteed to last forever. Economists, sociologists, and psychologists thus have trouble with their predictive undertakings. Yet, this may not deter them because in the natural science model, the predictability of physical events on the basis of physical laws stands up in theory or in controlled experiments if not in actual occurrences in nature. The principle of causality is only a principle, an explanation after the fact, and not a precise prediction of an event before the fact. Let me give you an example. Assume that when I am on a hike in the mountains, a falling stone just misses hitting me. I may say the stone fell on account of the law of gravity. This does not make much sense because I am confusing a scientific construction with a natural event. There was no law of gravity busy on top of the mountain, wedging the stone loose and throwing it at me. That the falling stone almost killed me is the result of an inexplicable coincidence of two bodies being in nearly the same spot at the same moment. I may, of course, theorize about the crossing of two causal chains at this moment, one bringing about the fall of the stone, the other making me take the last step towards the spot hit by the stone. But this chain-of-causality theory, which can be developed on a naive one cause-one effect basis, does not hold water since every single linkage point between one cause and one effect is also the linkage point for many other causal chains. There is no single, infinite causal chain but rather a multitude of causal chains at every temporal and spatial instance. To follow these up for even one case is

145 CAUSALITY, PREDICTION, AND UNDERSTANDING IN SOCIOLOGY

146 APPROACHTO SOCIAL LIFE

simply impossible. The exactness of a natural science disappears outside the laboratory in the concrete physical events occurring in nature. This is old hat for physicists. They have long known, for example, that with gaseous substances, the movements of any individual particle is unpredictable: predictions about gases can only be made in statistical terms. In modern physics considerations of probability modify the causal laws of classic physics. This seems to have encouraged rather than discouraged natural-science sociologists who, by and large, were rather frustrated in their efforts to apply causal laws. Now, statistical averages and probabilities seem to serve their purposes better. None the less, there is a great difference between statistical predictions in the natural sciences and the social sciences. Where approximations are adequate for practical purposes, the margin of error in prediction poses no great problem. This holds for the natural sciences. It is not quite the same for the social sciences. Take, for example, the statistical predictions of election polls. That they are shaky and sometimes biased is not the real problem. Neither is the statistical margin of error. The real problem with statistical prediction in social science is that the statisticians are dealing with people and not things. While gaseous molecules have no minds to change, voters do, without due notice to the pollsters. Although people's conduct can be predicted on account of established habits and customs, things may change. People may decide they can no longer rely on established routines and redefine their own life situations. Let us assume a community that is well integrated, has solid traditions, and functions to the satisfaction of most if not all its members. This is the model of society as advanced by Durkheim. Now, let us assume this community is hit by events over which its members have no control. Factories owned by large corporations are shut down, prices for imported goods are inflated. The community, economically shaken, begins to lose its coherence. Traditions offer no defence against the economic collapse; common beliefs in honesty, thriftiness, and hard work no longer make sense. Dissent occurs while different people are blamed for the bad situation —the mayor, the business community, the workers, the school teachers. The community approaches a

state of anomie, as Durkheim would have said. Before all this happened, everbody's conduct was predictable; each person knew what was expected of him, and what he could expect from everybody else. No more. Some leave traditional religion to find solace in fundamentalism. Others join left or right wing political groups, stand up against the local government, refusing to pay taxes and voting down school budgets. Some become ultra-conservative, upholding traditions everyone else thinks are meaningless. A few take to crime. And a good many become completely apathetic. I have indicated in what way shared, established patterns of conduct disappear and are replaced by maybe dozens of divergent patterns. Personal crises of any kind force individuals to redefine their situations and change their conduct more or less drastically. If public crises such as a recession appear, many people are thrown into personal crises; for them, yesterday's reliable world turns unreliable. By the same token, their responses to political and other appeals become unpredictable. In any case, however, predictions of the future conduct of a population universe represented by a statistical sample are actually only predictions of an opinion prevailing at the time of the poll in the chosen universe. By the time they are published, they are not pre- but post-dictions. The so-called validity of statistical predictions of attitudes, opinions, etc., depends not on the correctness of the statistical procedures but on the chance that the post-dieted patterns of attitudes or conduct do not change in real life. As predictions, they are good only until further notice. Sociologists have to read this notice in the ongoing life of the observed group by continuing their observations or getting other reliable information about it. Many community researchers have found that, by the time they had analysed, written up, and presented their data, their reports were history, and no longer applicable. Subtle changes in a community may, however, go unobserved. I say all this not to devalue community and group studies but to point out the necessity of follow-up studies.

Prediction of individual conduct As I said earlier, the typifications of persons help us predict their conduct under specific circumstances. I shall illustrate the use of personal typifications for predictive purposes



with the example of husband and wife. Predictions about a marriage partner's conduct are as risky as an outsider's (or marriage counsellor's) prediction of success or failure of a marriage not yet consummated. Psychologists may establish "personality profiles" of individuals, sophisticated forms of personality typification that they use in order to predict the conduct or future performance of a person on the job or in marriage to someone with a different personality profile. I believe that this is a precarious undertaking. Leaving the scientific instruments of the prediction of individual conduct aside, I turn to the predictive use of established social personality types. Traditional role conceptions of husband and wife do not imply that any husband or any wife is interchangeable with any other, like the parts of cars of a certain model. Any marriage is a unique relationship between two unique partners; nothing can predict their long-range compatibility— not how well they got along during courtship, nor common sense or psychological judgments about personality traits, nor truisms about the attraction of opposites. It is commonly assumed that the first year of marriage is the most critical one. Insofar as this is true, it is because the marriage must be created under mutually unexpected demands of two individuals. According to how the initial mutual adjustments are made, after a while, the marriage will be considered a trap, a convenience, a mistake, or a good relationship destined to last. If the marriage lasts, it leads ideally to the formation of a We-constellation- mutual adaptation, respect, tolerance; common interests, accepted areas of agreement and disagreement; satisfactory arrangements concerning the routines of everday life, and relationships with family and the rest of the world-all this in addition to the perpetuation of the initial mutual fondness and love, and the confirmation of sexual compatibility. It is unlikely that the typified image each partner developed of the other during courtship will stand up in married life. Rather, while working out the problems of mutual adaptation in order to form the common life-patterns of their We-constellation, each partner will re-form the typified image he or she has of the other. This becomes an essential part of their interrelationship. Consequently, they feel that they know each other well and can comfortably

predict the reaction of the other to by now usual situations and guess it in the face of unusual ones. The establishment of a typified image of the marriage partner may blind the one to the subtle signs of change in the other's conception and understanding of the interrelationship. In the comfortable routine of married life, each may ignore signs that, earlier on, would have caused concern. Conflict, where parts of the typified routines of life together are openly questioned, or where one partner fails to meet the other's expectations, may also be typified. Some quarrelsomeness, then, becomes part of the typified features of the other. The partners take for granted that they eventually "kiss and make up" after a quarrel. Thus, it may come as a complete surprise, when, for instance, a wife calmly tells her husband one evening that she is going to leave him. She gives not a further notice but a final notice; his typification of her needs a last revision: from the woman who always comes around, and whom he knows how to handle, she turns into the woman who does not take it anymore. The causality of motivation While Weber was not concerned with the typifications of everyday life, he was convinced that his ideal-typical method lent itself to the prediction of social conduct. Schutz, with his treatment of life-worldly typifications, gave the idealtypical method an underpinning that enhances its usefulness. I have said that Weber looked for the foundations of sociology in a theory of social action, and that he made establishing the motivations of social actors the key to interpreting their conduct. He developed a model of rational action, selecting deliberately planned and purposeful activities as the social conduct most accessible to observation and sociological interpretation—the purpose behind a rational action is, in Schutz's terms, the in-order-to motive. Through looking at the in-order-to motive of a rational action, it should be possible to come to an interpretative understanding of social conduct. Weber thought that such understanding would serve as the basis for the "causal explanation" of all social action, "both in its course and in its effects." (1922 : i) Careless reading of Weber's definition of social action has induced some sociologists to confuse his quest for causal



explanation with the equation of social causality and physical causality by positivist sociologists. Applying their conception to Weber's notion of social causality would yield a general law, saying that motivation A causes action B, and action B causes consequence C. However, Weber's concept of causal explanation has nothing to do with either the causality of natural laws or any other notion of inescapable necessity. Rather, Weber's notion of causality is inseparable from the notion of contingency. Given a certain pragmatic motivation of individuals in particular social situations, chances are that they choose a specific course of action that, in turn, is likely to have particular consequences. These consequences are not pre-ordained in the in-order-to motive; they occur only retrospectively as unavoidable consequences of the execution of a purposive motive in a course of action. Only after the fact it is possible to say that the consequences were brought about by the action, and that both were caused by the initial in-order-to motive. To my understanding, this is the only possible interpretation of Weber's concept of causal explanation. The reason for the action itself, its cause in a loose manner of speaking, is identical with its purpose, its in-order-to motive. This means, strictly speaking, the purpose or the goal (the telos) of the action determines the action itself and, with it, its consequences. Weber's "causal explanation," consequently, refers to a quasi-causality that could just as well be called a kind of teleology: while co-determined by past conditions, it gains its positive direction-and thus is co-caused-by the will of the actor to bring about a future state of affairs. In this sense, the in-order-to motive is the telos of the planned action; it is carried out for its sake. But, leaving further consideration of the interplay - not the opposition-of cause and telos aside, we still face the following facts: Weber aimed at the interpretative understanding of the effects of social action in terms of the purposivemotivational decision of the actor. Even with the introduction of the term causal, Weber's sociology of understanding remains a volitional theory: he used the purposive-rational decisions of the actor to gain an interpretative understanding of the effects of social actions. Weber's introduction of in-order-to motives as causes of social actions and reference to them as causative factors with regard both to actions and to their consequences is

theoretically sound. The question is, Can it be successfully applied within the framework of his ideal-typical methodology? If social researchers confine themselves to it, they may encounter considerable difficulties. Weber thought that motives (in the purposive sense) were meaningful both for actors and for sociological observers. Since actors and sociologists have different perspectives, inside and outside respectively, I disagree with him. Weber seems to assume an ideal case in which both meanings coincide. In actual investigations, the ideal may never be realized as long as sociological observers remain observers, that is, do not make serious efforts to get at the inside. I shall speak about this in the next section. Sociologists using Weber's methodology will be guided by his concept of ideal types. Ideal types contain typical reasons for typical courses of action. Although Weber did not mean his ideal types to be used as direct interpretation of actual cases, it is a temptation to impute ideal-typical motives to living social actors who do not resemble idealtypical puppets. Avoiding this demands a keen awareness of the difference between the inside and the outside perspectives, and a serious attempt to gain a minimum of understanding of the motives of actors in actual cases. Any discrepancies are the fault of the sociologists. When speaking with their subjects, sociologists may not listen carefully enough, or probe deeply enough, or they may suggest answers by the formulation and content of their questions, or they may not communicate well with their subjects because they are not familiar enough with their vernacular. In these cases, the data obtained are spurious. Sociologists may also operate with ideal types that do not fit the case at hand. If they had previously investigated apparently similar cases for which they established sufficient agreement between fact and type, they may be tempted to discard the ill-fitting cases as atypical. Thereby, they save themselves the trouble of finding out whether those cases are either points of departure for the construction of a different ideal type, or significant variations of the first one. Then, when these sociologists have found confirmation in a number of practical cases for their ideal-typical meaningful reason for a type of action, they resort to unwarranted generalizations and impute the same motives to similar courses of action without considering that different actors may



have different motives for doing the same thing. On the other hand, sociological observers, noticing stronger discrepancies between their ideal-typical motives and the motives named by actors in explanation of the conduct they have observed, may decide that the actors are wrong. Thereby, the sociologists adhere to a conviction often voiced by many sociologists and psychologists: they know the actors better than the actors know themselves. Sometimes, they think they are able to look right through their subjects to discover their "real" motives behind the "false" ones given by the actors. Such judgments imply that the outside perspective is superior to the inside perspective and produces an infallible standard of truth and error. But the matter is not that simple. To show this, I am going to discuss two kinds of cases in which sociologists frequently consider actors to be in error. First, Weber spoke of pretended motives. More or less deliberately, actors may not give their real reasons but reasons they think sound better. This pretension may stem from social conformity: people give socially approved reasons for their conduct. These are the proper reasons; the actual reasons are kept private. When such pretence is not dictated by conformity, it may come from vanity: some people want to appear to be better than they know they are. Others may follow the conventions of politeness: they feel that a question posed to them is none of the questioner's business, but politeness demands suppressing rude counter-remarks. Thus, they answer with evasions or tell white lies. Finally, pretended motives are prominent in any case of intended manipulation, that is, in any kind of "con game," including those played for educational purposes. Pretension is not confined to interviewing situations. In our society, it occurs frequently enough to be considered an aspect of daily life. Social researchers ought to be aware of the possibility. Neither theoretical nor research training is much help in spotting pretension and deception; common sense is the best guide. Social researchers must recognize pretension, or at least part of their research data will be unreliable. Secondly, Weber spoke of "repressed motives," that is,

those that actors do not admit to themselves. Where pretension serves to deceive others, repression serves to deceive oneself: the actors do not know their real reasons. Judgments of self-deception are based on observers' outside perspectives. In Weber's view, assuming repressed motives is not the same as implying that the repressing actors have no motives. They may well have their reasons that they may convey willingly to others, even sociologists. Their accounts, however, even if perfectly honest, are at best of very limited and often of no use for the inquiring researchers. For sociologists, assuming repressed motives is a questionable activity. As long as people are able to give formally coherent accounts of their own conduct, these accounts are of considerable sociological use, especially in the sense of the motivational-causal interpretation of actions. I can adapt the Thomas theorem for application here: if persons define their reasons as real, they are real in the consequences of the actions that they carry out on their basis. Sometimes in daily life, we experience people who seem to have gone beyond self-deception. These people act bizarrely, and we account for their conduct by saying they are suffering from delusions. If, however, we assume the premises of their strange conduct, the actions may appear to be quite reasonable. The problem does not lie with the everyday logic of the course of actions; the problem lies with the premises. In everyday life, we judge others' actions by common standards of reasonableness that all 'normal' people share. In an analogous fashion, sociologists and psychologists judge the conduct and the reason of their subjects by the public standards of the formers' theoretical frames of reference or clinical conceptions. They thus feel qualified to assume they know when actors are deluding themselves, and what the actors' real reasons are. Such theoretical pretension is propped up in at least two ways. One is using the ideal-typical construction of motives for typical courses of action and conduct as measuring sticks for the normalcy of apparent or overtly given motives. If given or suspected motives fall short of this definition of normalcy, they will be classified as abnormal. A second way is using ideal-typical conceptions of abnormal conduct and motivation. This may



be achieved through the acceptance of clinical theories dealing with unconscious motivation: the term repression itself has been borrowed from Freud. Such clinical theories will contain descriptive typologies of mental illnesses and their typical symptoms on the one hand, and a corresponding typology of the motivational causes or complexes or syndromes of mental illnesses on the other. Like clinical psychologists or psychiatrists, who apply such a theoreticalclinical framework in their work, social observers may try to match strange conduct they have observed with clinical typologies of symptoms. Then they reason from the symptoms to the corresponding motivational causes for the conduct, which they define as mental illness. If social researchers resort to clinical frames of references in their interpretation of certain persons and their conduct, without, for instance, training in psychoanalysis, they assume the role of amateur psychiatrists. I cannot stress enough that clinical psychology, in whatever form, ought to be left to the experts. This goes the more for sociologists, who should not consider the social world as one big madhouse, but as a place where most people cope with practical problems and with one another in what are generally thought of as reasonable ways. Because motivation I have previously used the term motivation in the same broad sense in which it occurs in Weber's writings. In doing so, I have neglected to point out that he, when speaking of repressed motives, essentially abandoned the realm of deliberate action with its purposes or, in Schutz's term, its in-order-to motives. Instead, without indicating the drastic thematic shift that this step implies, he turned to what Schutz called because motives. It does not make sense to speak of repressed motives when dealing with deliberate purposes. If the term makes any sense, it does so only when the theoretical attention is shifted from what to why, that is, from motivational purposes to the inner reasons for making the choice of purposes. These inner reasons are less accessible, are not as well understood by the actor himself, and thus particularly invite theoretical speculation. First a warning: when someone says, for instance, I split the wood because I want to use it for heating my house, he

does not state a because but an in-order-to motive. Schutz 155 called this a "pseudo-because statement." Whenever I can CAUSALITY, AND replace because by in-order-to, I am not dealing with a PREDICTION, UNDERSTANDING IN SOCIOLOGY genuine because motive. Schutz suggested that we are not necessarily aware of such a motive beforehand. In particular, while we are planning and carrying out a project, we are absorbed by the necessary technical considerations and activities. We are moving practically towards the realization of an in-order-to motive that stands clearly in our mind as the anticipated product in its finished form; we live actively in the in-orderto motive. The task finished, we may now retrospectively turn to the why of this undertaking. Especially in the case of extended projects with many discrete actions in their gradual fulfilment, we may take account of the essential because motives only after all is done. Looking back, we may ask ourselves for the first time, Why did I get involved in this? It is then that we clearly realize our because motive for the whole undertaking. This implies that, when we make a decision, like that of entering a career training program, we may be following an impulse that directs us, for instance, towards teaching rather than anything else. We may think about this decision before committing ourselves, but we do this, especially when we consult a career guidance counsellor, essentially in the in-order-to mode. What course of study to pursue, where to study-all are first line in-order-to concerns; what the earning and employment chances will be-these are second line in-order-to concerns. You may be well into professional training or even already into your professional work before you recognize retrospectively the because motive(s) for your career choice. Possibly, a number of your childhood and adolescent experiences will come to your mind that, you now realize, were influential and, in a manner of speaking, guided you towards a decision you made five or ten years ago. However, if we concern ourselves with restricted projects, we cannot exclude the possibility of becoming aware, with a little mental effort, of a because motive at the time we make the decision to do something, or at any time during its execution. When I bring my wife a bunch of fall flowers, which she likes more than roses or any other kind of flower,


I know that I do not do it in order to follow one of the rules in a booklet on "How to keep your marriage going," but simply because I love her. To sum up: because-motives originate in non-rational spheres of our selves, and are linked to feelings rather than rational considerations. They have a potential existence before any conscious decision to project and pursue a certain course of action with an in-order-to objective. They persist within the fringes of the mental activities that make up or accompany the execution of planned actions. As such, they are not thematic in the course of action itself. Retrospective considerations attempt to make them thematic. The success of the attempt depends on the circumstances of the case at hand. A because motive may offer itself immediately, as in my last example, or may emerge only slowly after the conclusion of a complex set of activities linked together by an overall plan. On the other hand, psychoanalysts may insist that in many cases the real reasons for people's conduct remain forever unknown to them: what they discover retrospectively are no more than rationalizations. Be this as it may, for our purposes there are no other real reasons or because motives for people's actions than those that they believe to be their reasons. A little boy who hugs his mother and says, "I love you, Mommy," does not do it because he has an Oedipal fixation on her but because "I love you" is for him the perfectly adequate expression of the feelings he has towards her. Gaining motivational understanding Returning now to the first point of Weber, the concrete meaning meant by actors in any concrete case, we ask how to get at such subjective meanings and motivations, taking the latter term in the initial in-order-to sense. Having excluded mere observation and simple application of average types, we are left with a simple enough answer: we will have to ask the actors about their intentions, their purposes, and motives. Only actors can tell us whether the activities in which we were watching them amounted to finished acts or were just one phase in an intermittent series of activities that only taken all together made an act that completed the initial purpose. This reliance on information from the actors brings up the question of the reliability of the information they offer to us.

They may, of course, give us a story because they like to 157 make fun of ignorant strangers, or they think stupid ques- CAUSALITY, AND tions deserve stupid answers. Although this does not PREDICTION, UNDERSTANDING usually happen, when it does, sociologists have to rely on IN SOCIOLOGY their own reelings for imponderable elements in the observational situation as much as they depend on their own judgment when they try to detect pretension and deception. Even the best field workers and interviewers may be deceived occasionally. The risk comes with the task. They can best cover themselves by including in their reports characterizations of their informants, adding their own assessment of the reliability of each of them. In small communities, members may withhold information because traditional rules prohibit divulging certain beliefs and customs to outsiders. Or else, they nourish a deep distrust of them: "In these parts, we do not cotton to strangers." Likewise, certain groups limit the information that may be given publicly, and swear their members to secrecy in some matters. Some communities or groups offer inquisitive outsiders stories that are at variance with what they know and believe about themselves. Here, anthropologists and sociologists encounter cultural limits to their efforts to gather information from insiders. They have only two acceptable ways to deal with them: to respect them and let it go with that, or to respect them but try to prove themselves worthy of the confidence of the community or group members. This presupposes good faith on the part of the social scientists. If they resort to other means, such as trying to infiltrate, they are making deceit into a research technique. Doing so is contrary to the ethical code of field work that demands that we treat the subjects of our research first and foremost as human beings. In most cases of small-community and group studies, cultural barriers are not in evidence. Here, researchers have a chance to get at the 'whole' information. Thus, they can check the reliability of any of their informants by comparing his or her account with that of others. An apparently more serious problem, especially in the case of prolonged and essentially unstructured interviews, is the conversion of the interviewing situation into an interactional situation in its own right. A We-relationship in which question and response, comment and reaction are no longer purely inquisitive and informative but genuinely


inter subjective becomes established. If this happens, the interactional effects of the interviewing situation may tinge the objective data. On the other hand, the interaction may bring about a better understanding of the personality of the other and of the meanings that some of his actions have for him. In this sense, it may improve the subjective data. If the researchers want to gain understanding of social actors, the establishment of We-relationships is a good thing. Researchers should try to achieve them-you may remember the reference to my paper, "Between Ideal Type and Surrender." Researchers should try to insert themselves into the actual life-sphere of their subjects, share part of their lives, and interact with them, gaining We-relationships with them that are not set up for their purposes as interviewing situations, but that are governed by the natural purposes of their subjects. This means that researchers have to adapt to situations in which they appear as strangers. But, if they bracket their theories and notions for the duration of their stays, and act as human beings among other human beings, they open up chances of learning-by participation and intersubjective exchanges-that they could never get with the more conventional methods of observation and structured interviewing. William F. Whyte's Streetcorner Society and the more recent studies of Ceylonese life and ritual by Clifford Geertz show what can be accomplished in participatory sociology and anthropology. These works, and others like them, attempt not just to understand the motives of actions, but to understand the actors' motivations within the configuration of a whole style of life. This would be the ideal achievement of a serious sociology of understanding.

5. Living Towards the Future I am going to turn now from the concerns of sociological observers to those of individuals who pursue their various purposes under different conditions in different situations with other people. In doing so, I am shifting my attention to the broader meanings that people give to their involvement in the life-world, especially when they say they are thinking ahead or planning for the future. Recently, many young people have believed that it is preferable to live for the Now and exist from day to day without spending much time and effort thinking about a remote and uncertain future. This belief is apparently less in evidence now. I may thus say quite safely that for most people in Western societies, life is lived in a present that is recognized both for itself and for being a transition to the near or distant future. In other words, people still plan ahead.

Fragmentation of active involvements and coherence of plans To Weber and Schutz, action is based on projecting a mental image of the final product and of the steps required in its execution. In planning the steps, an exact blue-print is not always required: a vague or general idea may be enough. The steps of the execution may be revised and refined as things progress. The final product as the reason for doing anything in the first place —the pragmatic motive —may not change, but the way in which it is realized is flexible.

160 LIVING TOWARDS THE FUTURE

You will remember that Schutz stressed that observers cannot always tell where a planned action begins and ends. What appears to be a stretch of unbroken activity with a beginning and an end, a single work session, is not necessarily a complete action. In fact, most projects in daily life require more than one work session to complete. Looking at planned courses of action, however extended, is relatively simple. Looking at the actors who plan and execute these actions is considerably more complicated. First of all, people are usually involved in more than one specific, on-going project at any one time. Secondly, any specific project, extended or not, may be part of a larger project that is only realized in a sum of specific projects. What in technical terms is finished action may be only one sub-project among others, all serving a larger long-range project. Let us take graduate studies as an example. Whether you are studying psychology, sociology, or secondary education, you are involved in a complex, long-term project. It all starts with the decision to become a psychologist, sociologist, or secondary school teacher. Setting aside all secondary preparations, such as choosing a university, meeting with admissions officers and counsellors, enrolling in courses, you begin by going to class sessions, taking notes, studying, writing term papers, taking examinations. If you are a full-time student, you do this not for one but for several courses over several terms, as required by your department. Once you fulfil your course requirements, you must do the research for and write your thesis in consultation with your advisers. Finally, you graduate with an advanced academic degree; this qualifies you to apply for certain positions for which your degree is an initial requirement. The advanced academic degree is the final product of an extended planned course of action that was made up by many discrete projects ranging from digesting a lecture or reading assignment to writing an acceptable thesis. Even such discrete pursuits have many steps, and they are only part of your day-to-day activities. You have many other things to do: eating, exercising, socializing, relaxing. If you kept a log of all your activities for a week, you would notice, one, the splinter character of your education in psychology, sociology, or secondary education, and, two, the way this education intermingles with non-academic activities. Your daily experiences are multi-layered. Different activi-

ties do not occur simultaneously, but shift back and forth. They occur in different situations and involve different interactive relations-with yourself, with your peers, with your teachers—and require switching attention and interest, combined with dropping and resuming varieties of near or short-range objectives. Everyday projects of action are amazingly fragmented. Some persons take the fragmentation of daily life in stride, some complain about it. Sometimes, people are simply overwhelmed by the demands that this fragmentation makes on their time and energy, and can no longer cope with it. Generally speaking, however, we do not feel fragmented. We settle into a routine of alternating activities and situations; we take it for granted and think no more about it than necessary. Just as James said, we maintain a sense of the unity of ourselves in the face of a multitude of experiences, so we maintain a feeling of the unity of our most diverse activities. If nothing else, they all are our activities. Inconsistencies and contradictions do not bother us: the inconsistencies and contradictions are our doing. Beyond this, we have more or less mastered a most convenient technique. In the typification of our experiences of any active interests and life activities in which we are involved, we only engage a part of our personalities. We are playing roles appropriate to given types of situations, and we see the persons whom we encounter as also playing roles. This is not to say that we may not become totally absorbed in what we are doing. If this happens, the given situation and all it entails claim all our attention, and we forget other spheres of experience. For a time, our world is reduced to that of our present involvement. However, as soon as we pause and reflect about what we have just done, we realize that we were involved in just one of our many spheres of experience: we see ourselves as role players. Role acting, as sociologists say, is situationally specific. The smooth course of action and co-operation in specific types of situation is guaranteed when I play my role consistently and when my partners understand the interplay of our actions in a fashion similar to the way I see it. Consistency among the roles that I play in different spheres of experience is neither required nor—as a rule — obtainable. Role requirements and role playing techniques for different spheres of life are as unrelated as the objectives that in-

161 FRAGMENTATION OF ACTIVE INVOLVEMENTS


dividuals pursue in them. If compared reflectively, they may be incompatible and even clash with one another. The trick is not to let any one role interfere with any other. We tend to ignore possible moral contradiction or other inconsistencies of conduct in different spheres of life, following the biblical admonition not to let the right hand know what the left is doing. This explains how Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, who routinely administered the persecution and annihilation of all "enemies of the State" and the "final solution of the Jewish question" in Nazi Germany, was defended at the Nuremberg trials as a caring friend and loving head of his family. Himmler is an extreme case of moral role compartmentalization. We see the same, in a less dramatic way, in ruthless businessmen and unfeeling bureaucrats who are none the less good family men and church-goers, or in sensitive writers and artists who are none the less fellow travellers of political extremists. The mere pragmatic-purposive treatment of the practical incompatibility of role requirements in different spheres of life may lead to nihilistic consequences if not tempered by overarching ethical principles. Keeping this in mind, I may say that compartmentalization remains a handy means of lessening the strain of multilevel activities of vastly different character, in which we all are involved in the course of our lives.

Planning—working—long-range projecting Planning, I have said before, is imagining a desired result of future action and anticipating the course of action for achieving it. The execution of a concrete plan is always action, and, in some cases, that specific form of action called working. Not all persons executing plans are workers. Intellectuals who write books may say they are working on a book. But Schutz called such action a "performance." "Working," for him, concerns "actions which gear into the outer world by bodily movements." Individuals who take materials from the world of physical objects and shape or combine them according to their concrete plans are working. Working is making bricks, cutting and dressing timber, building walls

and roofs; working is doing something like constructing a 163 hoUSe.

PLANNING -

Writing a book requires mental effort, thinking thoughts LONG-RANGE and reflecting how to express them. Yet, writers, too, are PROJECTING "gearing into the outer world," even if only in an auxiliary manner. They make notes on paper; they write the pages of their book either in longhand or on a typewriter, or dictate them into a dictaphone or tape recorder. They may speak before an audience about the book in the making. They interact with their publishers and editors, and eventually have to read and correct the galley proofs they receive from the publisher. Finally, they may mail copies of the book to their friends, and respond to reviews, critical or kind. All such overt activities are means to the end of conveying ideas, theories, results of investigations, or fictional stories to audiences. A book, as a physical object, serves as a vehicle for its intellectual content. This intellectual content is not affected by the way the book is designed, produced, or promoted. Decisions about mode of typesetting, kind of type face, quality of paper, type of cover and binding affect the appearance of the book, its technical form, but not its content, except to make it easier or harder to read. While authors write books to express their ideas, their thoughts in a systematic way, publishers sell books to earn their living. To publishers, books are not just vehicles for their intellectual content; they are pieces of merchandise, to be marketed for profit. However a book is considered, as intellectual vehicle or merchandise, both its intellectual formulation and its material production represent multi-stage projects. Some intellectuals write only one book - possibly a revision and expansion of their doctoral dissertation. Many people from central Europe did just this. For other intellectuals a single book is but part of a long-range intellectual project, to be carried out in middle-range stages: a second book picks up certain considerations suggested in the theme of the first one. For publishers, of course, a single book is but a small part of a publishing program extending over a number of years; the publishing program itself is but part of a commercial enterprise intended to perpetuate itself indefinitely. Graduate studies, which I mentioned earlier, may be part of a long-range project leading to a career that is to be pursued indefinitely. We may speak of the project of becoming


a teacher, or a sociologist, or whatever, as a preparation in the long-range plan of being a teacher or sociologist for the rest of our lives. This is planning for life, although its remoter phases may still lie beyond projecting in the narrower sense. I may as yet have no idea as to later stages of my professional and personal life. As yet, I cannot see that far ahead. Beyond a certain point, my life plan stays open. At first, my plan of being a teacher or a sociologist may be confined to the actual starting point of a professional career and to my first job. Only after entering this phase may I project a further intermediate goal. Beyond this, the overall plan of my professional career is more like a sheet of paper with notations about past stages, present 'location,' and lines towards the foreseeable future. The rest is a mere arrow pointing towards the still unknown. Schutz spoke of plans for the day, for the week, and for life. Of course, other things being equal, the rule is: the further away the target, the less concrete the project. Details of long-range projects can only be worked out in successive phases. This, in itself, does not mean that longrange plans are not pragmatic. It means simply that longrange planning has its expanding horizons. In choosing a professional career as an example of a project for life, I have underlined this pragmatism: such a project issues from one line of in-order-to motivation: the necessity of gaining a livelihood. This is an ever-present and perpetual need, a prime relevance imposed on everyone in our society, where all individuals are responsible for fitting themselves into the socio-economic system. Some things are, however, beyond the control of individuals. Preparation for employment is one thing; opportunity is another. The in-order-to motive that leads to the choice of a profession may be based on an interest in economic gain or security: lawyers get rich, teachers always have a job. The in-order-to motive may also be based on what I shall call an avocational interest, a sustained commitment to the pursuit of artistic, intellectual, and other kinds of interest regardless of expectations of material concerns. Avocation transcends the pragmatism of planning for life. Avocational life plans present a new dimension in human experience. They represent commitment to life-long philosophical, scholarly, and theoretical pursuits; I shall call them intellectual pursuits and I shall speak of intellectual life plans.

Intellectual life plans

ies INTELLECTUAL

Some people enter teaching, whether at the secondary school or university level, because it is a comfortable way to earn a living. Their in-order-to motive is pragmatic. They have a routine conception of their profession, and may find more excitement in school or faculty politics than in their teaching. Of these, I shall say nothing more. I am interested in those for whom teaching is not just a vocation but an avocation, something they want to do for reasons of its intrinsic relevance to them, regardless of remuneration and external conditions. Teachers with an avocational commitment divide into three basic kinds. The first kind is teachers who teach for the sake of instructing their students in technical skills, from the mastering of the three R's to statistical operations, from simple crafts to artistic techniques. The second kind is those who teach for the sake of their students. As well as instructing or informing about a given subject matter, they are concerned with their students as human beings with potential to grow and develop in their own ways. The first are the trainers and technical instructors essential to a school system assigned the societal task of training workers and citizens. The second are educators in the best sense of the term. Regardless of the prevailing beliefs about nurture and development of future generations, they are primarily concerned with the inner development of children or adolescents, the unfolding of their personalities, the realization of their potentialities as human beings. Such teachers, I should add, are guided by an image of Man that they have accepted from some genuine educational philosopher or other, and by a corresponding conception of the unfolding of human personalities, of the ideal growth processes of children as human beings. A school staffed only by instructors would be skillcentred; it might be a harsh place for the tender personalities of children. A school staffed only by educators would be child-centred; it might fail in preparing the children for the everyday world of work. A good teacher is both an instructor and an educator. Ideally, the teaching of technical skills should be a vehicle for reaching children on a human level, thus fusing both objectives into one. The third kind of teacher is not usually found in either

LIFEPLANS


elementary or secondary schools. The third kind faces adults—usually young adults—in the classroom. If he considers himself essentially either as an instructor or as an educator, he fails his academic vocation: to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowing, as Scheler said, to be a scholar in the tradition of European humanism. At modern universities, this ideal is not much in evidence. Tremendous pressures, issuing from the socio-economic power centres of our business society, have pushed the universities to assume the role of scientific handmaidens of technology, even though they have not eliminated the counter-trend of liberal arts education. The modal type* of the modern academic teacher combines a good measure of technical instruction in the higher skills needed for academic research in specific disciplines with a minimum of human understanding of individual students, especially when they are 'promising/ In many academic institutions, the demonstration of success within the larger discipline is a strong requisite for keeping the job and for being granted tenure. Presentation of papers at the meetings of respectable professional organizations, the publication of papers in respectable academic journals, and, best of all, the publication of books with respectable publishers all count as scholarly productions. Possibly, these productions are proof of scholarship, although this is not necessarily so. On principle, genuine scholarship is independent of academic affiliation: it is an avocation that need have nothing to do with an academic title or an academic career. Generally, affiliation with a university creates the best conditions for scholarship, but some of the best scholarly works in Europe and North America have been written by non-academics. What are the characteristics of genuine scholarship? Expertise in a chosen intellectual field; ability to work in this field creatively; strong and lasting commitment to the pursuit of self-chosen tasks and long-range projects. I speak here of intellectual quest for the enhancement of what the Greek philosophers called theoria, the exploration and development of basic ideas. I also speak here of a lasting intellectual passion, an unswerving commitment that becomes * The term is meant in a statistical sense. It refers to the type of case that is most frequent.

the crucial and overriding purpose and the ultimate meaning of a whole life. We may be familiar with such an intense devotion to a personal mission from the life stories of some artists, driven people who may eventually consume themselves in and through their avocational passions. But, when we become familiar with the more personal writings and letters of some scholars, we catch glimpses of this passion in or between the lines. There is no doubt in my mind that Husserl was such a man. It seems to be another characteristic of extremely committed scholars that their entire work, however apparently wide-ranging, is thematically consistent, with a singlemindedness not of thinking but of intellectual purpose. As Maurice Natanson wrote in the introduction to the first volume of Schutz's Collected Papers, "According to Bergson, a true philosopher says only one thing in his lifetime, because he enjoys but one point of contact with the real." Natanson explained "that whatever variegation and richness a philosophical mind may possess, however extensive its interests and research, there is ultimately but one cardinal insight into reality that it achieves, one decisive illumination on which everything turns and which is the philosopher's claim to truth." Applying these considerations to Alfred Schutz, Natanson said that his work "articulates a single intuition, the discovery in full depth of the presuppositions, structure, and signification of the common-sense world." (CPI-.xxv) I fully concur with this appraisal of Schutz's scholarly work. It has been gained from an overview of the whole body of this work, as available after his death. As biographer of Schutz, however, I am more interested in the initial establishment and the gradual realization of this life plan through deliberate and volitional decisions made throughout the various drastic changes of Schutz's external life. In retrospect, the inner course of Schutz's intellectual life reveals one single scholarly purpose realized in a piecemeal way in his life plan, a plan which, by its very nature, remained open-ended. It is not only that his work remained unfinished at the end of his natural life; his intellectual life plan was itself essentially unfinishable. Husserl had spoken of phenomenology as perennial philosophy. He called no less than three of his major works beginnings of such a philosophy. In doing so, he showed that

167 INTELLECTUAL LIFE PLANS


his intellectual life plan, which he called phenomenology, was not comparable to a master plan that only needed to be executed in detail. The steps he took to execute his initial conception did not follow a straight path to a final goal; they yielded only partial results. Husserl consequently had to abandon the resulting thematic sequences and to find another starting point, revising his line of attack on the fundamental questions of the phenomenological approach. Apparently, Husserl pursued his life work as if time would never run out on him; at the same time, he realized that he could never finish what he had set out to do. Others would have to continue his work. I should be oversimplifying if I said that Schutz's life work followed that of Husserl in its specific characteristics. Rather, the unfinishability of his life plan showed itself in the way he broke off investigations at a certain level and returned to earlier investigations, again breaking them off at a certain point. During his early maturity, Schutz wrote a brilliant exposition of the foundations and intentions of his whole theoretical endeavour in the form of Der sinnhafte Aufbau. He never managed to follow it up in the announced second volume. After World War I he could not even try to combine his professional career with his avocational commitments; until the last few years of his life, he was bifurcated between imposed obligations and avocational undertakings. As a result, his scholarly life-work was done piecemeal, in the form of a large number of published articles and unpublished manuscripts. A consistent inner purpose runs through this externally disconnected work. The pursuit of Schutz's intellectual life plan became more sophisticated with time, gaining broader foundations. Its execution was severely disturbed but its course was undeflected by the violent political events in the wake of Hitler's triumph. There were five years of helplessly watching the systematic destruction of the German humanistic culture; there were two years of life as a refugee in France, and finally the decisive move to the United States. On top of external uncertainties, Schutz faced the difficulties, in a relatively short time span, of acquiring two different languages and adapting to two different intellectual cultures, life-styles, and climates of opinion. Schutz managed all this, remaining true to his intellectual life plan. Drawing from his experiences of seven years of uprooting and crises, his work

became richer. The double displacement from home coun- 169 try and home continent did not deflect the inner purposes LIFE FROM THE of Schutz's avocational life-world. Approaching death in PAST 1959, he used the last of his failing energies to secure the continuation of his life work.

Life from the past A scholarly commitment, as illustrated in the last section, may be viewed as an overall because motive for thousands and thousands of discrete activities that, in their totality, can be called the pursuit of an intellectual life goal. We have seen that the in-order-to motivation for the formation and pursuit of professional life plans divides into the pragmatic effort to secure a livelihood on the one hand and the exercise of a specific profession on the other. Practising a specific profession may serve material ends but it may also provide the means for transcending the pragmatic overall motive in favour of an avocation. For avocation to be the overriding in-order-to motive, there must be a strong commitment. What Schutz said about because motives in general applies here: a person may act from such a commitment without being explicitly aware of it for long periods. Retrospection makes the commitment accessible and brings it over the threshhold of self-awareness. The existence of the commitment, whether explicitly recognized or taken for granted, has its own because motives in form of earlier experiences, which become sedimented in a disposition towards making a strong commitment to an intellectual-or any other kind of-cause. This cause is seen as worthwhile; it justifies every effort and sacrifice. Human beings are not only always "in situation," as existentialists say; they are in a "biographically determined situation," as Schutz explained. To put it differently, everyone has a past. Individuals experience their present situational involvements and consequently define them on the basis of their past experiences. Each present situation is the Now of an ongoing life history; individuals bring to it the stocks of knowledge that they have accumulated, their typifications, and their personal outlook upon life, people, experiences. These all determine the possibilities as well as


the limitations of the activities planned now and projected into the near or remote future. Because motives determine the choice of in-order-to motives that guide individuals in their present activities. In contrast to the actual pragmatic purposes of action, because motives emerge from life histories of individuals, from the accumulative and long-range effects of especially crucial past experiences upon their outlooks, tendencies, personalities, and life plans. Schutz's intellectual commitment to the formation of a sociology of the life-world was biographically determined. During his years in secondary school, Schutz developed his avocational involvement with Goethe's literary work and, most of all, with music; these aesthetic interests remained with him throughout his life. When he was seventeen, he was sent to war on the Italian front with its heavy artillery battles and gas attacks. He left a boy, he returned a man. Schutz was a homecomer who, in a personal sense, remained a stranger in his society, although he still had the capacity to make close friendships with kindred spirits. He studied law conscientiously and dutifully, but in a detached way. His detachment brought him close to the social sciences. Part of his study of economics was vocational, but the marginal utility theory of the Viennese school caught his intellectual interest. This theory was the only one that emphasized that individuals as buyers are a contributing factor to actual economic life, however mechanical it may seem. However, it was the writings of Max Weber that most caught Schutz's attention. Weber's sociology was not taught at the University of Vienna, but, in the first years after the war, Weber became a hero for the sceptical new generation of students. Schutz fully agreed with Weber's sociological theory: society is made by human actors whose volitions and meaningful interpretations are the decisive factors of human life. After experiencing the complete depersonalization of the individual in army life, after experiencing the complete disregard for human life itself, after experiencing the victimization of masses of individuals in grand societal events and processes (war, defeat, starvation, and depression), Schutz reached for Weber's sociology of understanding because, contrary to appearances, it restored individuals to their human and social importance. Bowing to pragmatic concerns, Schutz opted for a career

in private business where he could use his knowledge of 171 law on the one hand, and of various aspects of economic LIFE FROM THE conditions on the other. Even here he shunned direct in- PAST volvement in management and business operations; he affiliated himself with economic organizations and banking firms in a predominantly advisory capacity. He was unusually competent in his professional work, although it had no intrinsic interest for him; it was an imposed duty that enabled him to exist economically and to take care of his aging parents and later his own family. Schutz's real involvements began where his job ended. He devoted a substantial part of his spare time, his evenings, weekends, and vacations to his intellectual avocation. Schutz's life plan was essentially laid out when he decided to become a Weberian sociologis: not a faithful interpreter, but a critical student. His chosen task was to improve and expand the contributions of the man whom he appointed as his teacher without ever having met him or heard his lectures. However, as I emphasized before, Schutz had only marginal interest in Weber's tremendous empirical-historical investigations; he focused instead on Weber's definition of sociology as a sociology of understanding the subjective meanings through which social actors explain their own conduct and interpret their social experiences. In intellectual temperament, Weber and Schutz were opposites. Weber was politically active, publicly criticizing the policies of the emperor and denouncing the catastrophic economic policies of the ruling Prussian nobility. Weber even occasionally but successfully acted as a defence lawyer for persons whose civil rights had been grossly violated. On the other hand, in spite of his concern about the course of political events, Schutz avoided all political involvement. As I said before, Weber had no patience with theoretical-analytical considerations but rushed from them into his immense empirical investigations. In contrast, Schutz took one crucial theoretical point of Weber and subjected it to a detailed analysis of its implications and consequences. He ascribed the utmost relevance to Weber's tenet of subjective meaning, arguing that it must be taken seriously: all sociological theory must be made consistent with it. If sociology is to be a science of subjective understanding, it must be so in a radical sense.


To follow Weber's concept of subjective meaning though all its consequences, to gain solid foundations for it, to bring all aspects of social life under the same subjectivetheoretical focus became Schutz's intellectual life plan. It was a task he pursued for the rest of his scholarly life, a life of intellectual commitment and devotion. The search for the proper psychological foundations of this undertaking led Schutz first to Bergson, then to Husserl, and later to other French and new American thinkers. He critically mobilized all of them in support of the overall objective of his whole scholarly life: creating a sociology of the lifeworld—as I have called it—from the skeletal outlines of Weber's sociology of understanding.

Life expectations and limitations In characterizing the various aspects of the natural stance, Husserl formulated two important "idealizations." One expressed the conviction that the routine events and experiences of daily life will go on indefinitely: the idealization of "and so forth, and so on." The other was the subjective corollary of the first: "I can ever again." Through them, individuals express their confidence in their own abilities to repeat indefinitely actions and achievements that they have done and accomplished in the past. Taken literally, these idealizations are typified expectations of daily life; they presuppose that, one, the world in which I live is and will remain stable, two, anything that worked in the past will work forever, and, three, my capacity for performing all acts that I have successfully performed in the past will remain undiminished in all foreseeable future. Occasional experiences of others or myself falling short in these expectations do not impair my idealizations of continuity and repeatability. These experiences may be explained proverbially as exceptions that confirm the rule. Thus, instabilities, uncertainties, and occasional disappointments are seen as accidental, and the idealizations persist as expressions of a naive optimism that inheres in the natural stance. As a rule, I do not even consider that the routine of my daily life could be severely disrupted. Even my growing older in the physical sense happens so imperceptibly that I do not admit to myself that my own capacities could and will diminish: set-

backs are temporary and due to passing causes. That 173 tottery old man there is not me in my last stages; he belongs LIFE to a different category of beings: old people. Optimism AND LIMITATIONS overcomes moments of doubt about the permanence of my world, the permanences of its objects and happenings, and my own permanence. In the abstract, I may know that I am not immortal; in actual, everyday life, I act as if I could live forever. In my sketch of Husserl's philosophical life plan, I emphasized that he acted as if the time for its execution were unlimited, while realizing that it would be impossible for him to finish what he had set out to do. It may well be that naive optimism accompanies intellectual commitments as well as life-worldly expectations. If this is the case, the only difference is that thinkers are more given to reflection, and thus come to a clearer realization of the infinite character of their ultimate objectives in contrast to the finiteness of their own lives and efforts. A few months before his death, Schutz wrote a thoughtful statement about the need to revise the two idealizations of Husserl, which I introduced earlier. Schutz insisted on the possibility that people may retrospectively become aware of changes in their capacities and abilities even under relatively unchanged conditions. I have merely to think back far enough to realize that things I once did well and with ease, I now only do with difficulty. Other things, I sadly realize, I can never do again. Just by reflecting on my daily life, not as a sociologist but as an individual, I know that things have changed, and I am getting old: I become aware that I shall die. Some might think that, in this statement, Schutz was speaking more as a philosopher than a sociologist, but we should keep in mind that awareness of dying and death is part of our life-world, and should be considered in any sociology of that life-world. Death is not a philosophical truth; it is a phenomenon of the life-world. Schutz, probably as a result of his early encounter with senseless death on the battlefields of World War I, was acutely aware of human finiteness. For him, it was a feature of the awareness of life under the most ordinary circumstances. He suggested that the finite cycle of human life from birth to death is universally known and generally recognized. It seems to me, however, that this is more so in traditional and family-bound societies than in the individu-


alized social order of industrial and commercial societies. Until quite recently, our society has tried to put death aside, by not speaking about it, and by having it take place, insofar as possible, in institutionalized settings away from the everyday world. Schutz spoke of the "fundamental anxiety" of human beings: "I know that I shall die and I fear to die." Put in this form, the truism turns into an existential insight. It expresses a "basic experience" that becomes "the primordial anticipation from which all the others originate." We thus plan for the future to avoid the inevitable as long as possible. People in the natural stance live towards the future, hoping and anticipating, taking chances and risks, because they, too, are beset by their own "fundamental anxiety." (1945:250) How universal is this assertion? It remains questionable whether all deliberate actions in daily life directed towards the future find their ultimate motivation in such a fundamental anxiety. In any case, as Schutz at least implied, it takes a particular experience, which breaks into the spheres of the ordinary, to jolt the naive optimism of everyday existence and to push a person to the sudden realization that death is a frightfully real possibility not just for everyone but for me. This may occur indirectly, through encountering extreme situations at any age in later childhood, in adolescence, or in adulthood. It may occur as a direct experience, such as having an accident and escaping death by the skin of my teeth. It may occur, through the death, especially if it is sudden and unexpected, of a person close to myself, the destruction of a life close to mine. In this sense, death is not part of the life-world but a violent interruption of life as usual. As such, it can be encountered by anyone. But whether everyone in question will actually and noticeably be guided in all his other anticipations by the primordial anticipation of his own death is a question better left open. It is clear, however, that all those who pursue a life plan to whose objectives they are strongly committed are likely to display a fundamental anxiety that indeed will drive them to continue their effort relentlessly, lest they be prevented from finishing their life plan. For Schutz, the fundamental anxiety that accompanied him throughout his whole mature life turned into fundamental despair when, somewhere in the early fifties, he realized that he would never be able to reach one tangible

goal of his life plan, namely the finishing of his second 175 book; it was to present systematically the progress he had LIFE made in his theoretical thinking since the first book had AND LIMITATIONS been published. Having said that in his early years Schutz experienced what he later called the fundamental anxiety, I have to point out that for him, and, in the existential sense, possibly for everybody, lived experience precedes if not the knowledge of the concept so the understanding of its innermost meaning. This, I may add, did not prevent Schutz from seeing that phenomenological thinkers have to face this issue philosophically as well. The problem of life and death, together with a few other problems—in particular that of the ontological foundations of the whole theory of the life-world-was for him also a metaphysical problem. He did not thereby aim at traditional metaphysics but pointed towards the need for creating a different metaphysics enlightened by, and in agreement with, the insights gained in and through phenomenological philosophy. He even was convinced that, in this respect, one would have to go beyond Husserl, especially in the general ontological sense and, in particular, in the sense of the development of a phenomenological-philosophical anthropology of Man. But all this points far beyond the limitations of the present book. For its purposes, it is enough to consider the fundamental anxiety as a potential or actual human experience, which may be further illuminated by phenomenologicalpsychological considerations. Summing up the present part of this book, I can say: living meaningfully towards the future is part of being human. It makes for the optimism and confidence needed to pursue and reach long-range objectives and, in some cases, think in terms of plans for life. However, it also makes for the realization that all such pursuits will have to come to an end, that life is finite. When we realize this, we realize that living towards the future also means living towards an ultimate end: our own death.

6. The Multi-Structure of Human Experience For a phenomenology of consciousness, experience is the key word designating the link between the consciousness of the individual and the world. This refers to the artificial treatment of a solitary consciousness in its relation to its intended objects, and it applies to the social self in the interrelations with consociates and fellow human beings. All of my many references to experience in the earlier part of this book have been general, or else they have been offered in theoretical discussions as examples of particular types of experience. These examples refer to a variety of areas of experience. My consideration of the fragmentation of active involvements in the course of everyday activities of any individual has reinforced this impression of the existence of areas of experience. Now, I want to look at the way these areas of experience differ from one another in relevant aspects. These differences lie in the nature of the experiences, in the basic meanings individuals give to them, and in the ways in which they deal cognitively with them. This topic is best known under the title multiple realities but alternate titles have been proposed and I shall consider them in turn.

James's orders of reality James offered the first significant treatment of the theme of multiple realities in the second volume of his Psychology (Ch. XXI, "The Perception of Reality"). He used the term belief in order to characterize the act of "cognizing reality"

in all its variations of "degree of assurance, including the 177 highest possible certainty and conviction." Thereby, he JAMES'S ORDERS OF made it clear that, for him, reality was not ontological REALITY essence but a matter of subjective conviction. Real is what "stands in a certain relation to ourselves," belief is what "sense of reality feels like itself", and that is about all we can say about it. (1890II: 283, 286) The problem, then, is not to demonstrate the existence of things in outer space; things themselves are "mental objects" and "have existence as mental objects." As such, they are "situated in their own spaces," spaces that are cognitive and that we can liken to areas of experience. As such, again, they have nothing to do with spaces in an outer world that ontological realists insist is equivalent with reality as such. James's reasoning, here, represents sound phenomenological psychology. (1890 II: 289) There are "many worlds" or "sub-universes" of human belief and experience. James considered them innumerable but mentioned seven general categories. First choice goes to the "world of sense, or of physical 'things' as we instinctively [in immediate spontaneity?] apprehend them." "The world of science" comes second. The world of "ideal relations," as constructed in logic and mathematics but also in all branches of philosophical speculation, follows. Next come the "idols of the tribe," the "illusions and prejudices common to the race" or, in modern terms, to specific cultural communities. After them follow the "various supernatural worlds" of religions and mythologies. From here on, the last two categories are literally inexhaustible: The "worlds of individual opinion, as numerous as men are," and "worlds of sheer madness and vagary, also indefinitely numerous." (1890II: 291, 292, 293) Each of these sub-universes displays its own "style," which sets it off from all others. Every "object we think of gets at last referred to one world" on James's list. A person attends to them one at a time, and usually has no idea of the relations among different sub-universes. When turning to a new sub-universe he or she simply drops the prior one. "Each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion." But this reality "lapses with the attention" paid to it. Thus, these worlds exist side by side for an individual without necessarily interfering with one another. (1890 II: 292, 293)

178 THE MULTISTRUCTURE OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

On the strength of this argument, it seems that all orders of reality are equally real, not merely in actual experience but also in reflection. This, however, is not the case. At least, any of these orders in which deliberation and reasoned choice plays a part could gain a privileged position for any given individual. James wrote: "Each thinker... has dominant habits of attention; and these practically elect from among the various worlds some one to be for him the world of ultimate realities. From this world's objects he does not appeal. Whatever positively contradicts them must get into another world or die." (1890II: 293-294) The basis and origin of all reality, James argued further, is subjective; it "is ourselves." The "dominant habits of attention" may be purely rational. As "bare logical thinkers ... we give reality to whatever objects we think of" by virtue of making them "objects of our passing thought": to borrow Husserl's term, they are ideal objects, pure phenomena of consciousness. Yet, "giving reality" to objects is usually more than mere theoretical insight. The "accent of reality" becomes strongest when emotions combine with reasoning: "as thinkers with emotional reaction, we give... a still higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to WITH A WILL. These are our living realities...." Thus, reality starts "from our Ego" and spills over "upon all objects which have an immediate sting of interest for our Ego" and from these to "the objects most continuously related with these." (1890 II: 296-297) Therefore, "a whole system may be real, if it only hang to our Ego by one immediately stinging term." It seems to be clear that this statement offers the key to an explanation of the decision of "thinkers with emotional reactions" to ascribe highest reality to the religious realm. But any other system of high emotional sting could be elevated to the same dignity, overriding everything else. So, the "sense of our own life which we at every moment possess" is "the ultimate of ultimates for our belief" and the "uttermost warrant for the being of all other things." (1890 II: 297) James discussed this quite radical linkage between Ego and reality in a section that he surprisingly named "The World of 'Practical Realities'." Contrary to what the expression practical reality suggests, namely a pragmatic-practical approach to experienced realities, in James's use it designates a genuinely phenomenological consideration of the

whole problem of reality. Possibly, it was for this reason 179 that he put the expression in quotation marks. (1890II: 293) JAMES'S ORDERS OF In the continuation of his expositions, James implied that REALITY the thinkers who see in (non-pragmatic) "systems" their own highest "living reality" are not the general rule. He turned now to "most people" for whom, obviously, all experienced reality does not hang on a single stinging term. Rather, their realities are not predefined and prejudged by a system; they occur, so to speak, from case to case and from one experience to the next. This makes for the likelihood of "discrepancies and contradictions" and the possibility that "a contradicted object maintains itself in our belief." Being an "object of sensations," it will be accepted as real as long as it displays one or several of the following characteristics: one, a "coerciveness over attention," presenting, in Schutz's terms, a strongly imposed relevance; two, a "liveliness, or sensible pungency," manifesting itself in "exciting pleasure or pain"; three, a "stimulating effect upon the will", four, an "emotional interest"; five, a congruity with "favorite forms of contemplation," such as unity, simplicity; or, six, the object's "own causal importance." (1890 II: 300) Rationality and reasonableness are not decisive in such judgments: "sensations are more lively" and judged "more real than conceptions." Things "met within every hour" are "more real than things seen once"; but a "rare experience" may be judged "more real than a permanent one" if it is "more interesting and exciting." Attributes "perceived when awake" are "more real than attributes perceived in a dream." (1890 II: 300, 301) None of this is an expression of a pragmatic bent. What Husserl later called the naive natural stance, James expressed in his own manner as follows: "We would believe everything if we only could," but we cannot when we are unable to ignore contradictions between two "objects" of similar "coerciveness over attention." In this case, we have to make an orderly decision. We introduce a kind of pragmatic criterion. Thus, a "conception, to prevail, must terminate in the world of orderly sensible experience." For this reason, "sensible vividness" is "the vital factor in reality when once the conflict between objects, and the connecting them together in the mind, has begun." It follows that "sensible objects are thus either our realities or the tests of our realities." This


occurs when we are forced to abandon the naive gullibility of the natural stance, when we have to "stop and think/' as Dewey said. Here, James made clear, we fall back on the "tangible qualities" of the objects of our experiences. This is so simply because "they are the least fluctuating. When we get them at all we get them the same." James summed all this up under the label "the paramount reality of sensations." Thereby, he established the "world of sense, or of 'physical' things," as the privileged realm among all other of his sub-universes. (1890 II: 299, 301, 306, 299)

Schutz's provinces of meaning Schutz was greatly impressed by James's conception of the orders of reality: it inspired him to write one of his most exciting papers, the "Multiple Realities" of 1945. Since he feared that James's term sub-universes could be misread as a statement about the ontological structure of the world, he substituted the expression provinces of meaning. Thereby, his terminology stresses the "meaning of our experiences," with which James also had been concerned. Like James, Schutz stated that the number of such provinces of meaning was practically inexhaustible. He mentioned six of them: the world of daily life, religion, science, art, fantasy, dream. But he confined his analyses to four of them, leaving out religion and art. Provinces of meaning are areas of experience upon which, for the duration of the experiences, "we bestow the accent of reality." Each of them is characterized by its own cognitive style, which in turn rests on a "specific tension of consciousness." The highest degree of such a tension is presented in the "wide-awakeness," with which we pursue our active efforts in the spheres of everday life. For other provinces of meaning, the tension is less; it may be reduced over the whole range of a continuum. At its lowest end, it disappears. This occurs when a person abandons himself to his daydreams, or when he dreams during sleep. Unquestionably, during any such experience, its reality is not in doubt: all realities are equally real. But James's notion of a paramount reality pertains, and Schutz accepted it in principle, but widening it from the "reality of sensations" to the sphere of everyday life in all its aspects. This sphere, as

shown before, is dominated by common sense thinking 181 and the taking for granted of the objects, the events, and SCHUTZ'S the other persons as encountered. Taking for granted is, of LEANING S °F course, equivalent with belief in James's sense. I shall show later that Schutz, like James, allowed for doubt and deliberate testing within everyday life without thereby undermining the belief in the paramount reality of it, by and large and as a whole. James had hinted that each of his orders of reality had its own style; Schutz accepted this notion and—in contrast to James - systematically described at least one of them, the cognitive style of the paramount reality of daily life. Its prominent features are: one, a "specific tension of consciousness," that is, "wide-awakeness" and "full attention to life"; two, a "suspension of doubt" that Schutz called a "specific epoche," a bracketing of critical considerations; three, a "prevalent form of spontaneity, namely working" — a feature that warrants specific consideration; four, a "specific experiencing [of] one's self," that is, "the working self as total self"; five, a "specific form of sociality" embodied in inter subjective communication and interaction; and six, a "specific time-perspective" that an individual's duree intersects with outer time. (1954b: 253-254) For us, in our natural stance, this province of meaning is paramount "because our practical experiences prove the unity and congruity of the world of working as valid and the hypothesis of its reality as irrefutable. Even more, this reality seems to us to be the natural one...." (19701254) Let me bring James's and Schutz's terms together: the world of working is the sphere of the paramount beliefs in the realities of practical life.

The world of working Schutz identified the world of everyday life as essentially the world of working. The German term that he had in mind is Wirkwelt; it cannot be faithfully translated. Wirken means to effect anything in the broadest sense possible, it includes the notions of schaffen, which means to make something from scratch, possibly creatively, and of arbeiten, to work physically in the making of physical objects through the use of tools for the shaping and transforming of given mater-


ials. The term, Wirkwelt, then, combines all three of these connotations. The paramount reality of the world of working contains all "physical things, including my body"; it is the scene of my moving around in space, of my bodily movements and operations; "it offers resistances which require efforts to overcome"; it poses tasks that I have to carry out; it allows me to carry out my plans; and it contributes to success or failure in my attempts to achieve my purposes. Through working in the physical sense, "I gear into the outer world" and bring about changes in it. Such "working acts" have lasting effects that are open to "be experienced and tested both by myself and others, as occurrences within this world independently of my working acts in which they originated." The tangible effects of work, then, become the clearest evidence for the pragmatic reality of the objects and products of the paramount sphere of life. But its most outstanding feature is its thoroughly social character: "I share this world and its objects with others," I have ends and means in common with them, I co-operate with some; and, "in manifold social acts and relationships," I am "checking the others" and, in turn, I am checked by them. Thereby, the social reality of the sphere of working is tested and confirmed. (1945C: 227) In the world of working, an individual lives in the vivid present of his ongoing acts of working; the working self experiences himself as "originator of ongoing actions." Overt working acts deal with physical materials that are fashioned and changed. Covert working acts, such as solving a mathematical problem, are called performances by Schutz. In contrast to physical work, which creates irrevocable results, performances as mere mental operations are easily corrected and revised. Overt working changes the outer world in various degrees within my "manipulatory area," as Mead said. This area is circumscribed by the direct physical reach of my hands; it is surrounded by a wider area within my view or within ear shot. What can be seen but not reached is in my potential phsyical reach; as a rule, it can be physically attained by the adequate locomotion of the body. A craftsman who, in the course of his various working operations, moves from workbench to machine, and from there to

another work or storage area of his shop, brings about and 183 thereby actively experiences the conversion of areas in THE WORLD OF attainable reach into areas of actual reach. He also knows, WORK1NG and takes for granted, that an area of actual reach that he leaves now is re-attainable or restorable later. Of course, the spheres within my potential reach are not confined to those that, at a given time, are within my sensory reach. The craftsman moves beyond the workshop, the student beyond the classroom. Even when we assume that neither of them moves routinely beyond the community in which he lives and works or studies, we obtain an impressive amount and variety of things in his potential reach, many more than he will ever try to bring within his actual reach. These considerations indicate that in the working world an everyday spatial and geographic structure parallels a cognitive structure. Moving around in the workshop and from the workshop to temporary working places elsewhere, moving around in a classroom, going from a classroom on the second floor to one on the third, or leaving one university building and entering another one are all spatialgeographic movements; they can be traced out on a floor plan, a building diagram, a map of the university or community. Yet, even this objective presentation has a subjective tinge: it is personalized. Each craftsperson, each student would require his own set of diagrams. These diagrams would require corresponding timetables, which I have omitted here for simplicity's sake. A sociological observer collecting all these diagrams from the individuals concerned would define the given geographical space as an external field with a great number of possible working places. Each one could be a seat of someone's working actions and thereby a temporary centre of things in his potential physical reach. During a given period of time —the cycles of a day, a week, a month, a calendar year, or an academic year—each of the working or performing individuals will touch upon a rather limited number of possible working places; no two individuals will share the same pattern of places, although they may meet at a few or touch upon them at different times. Considering these work mobility patterns from the viewpoint of the individual who is involved in them, we get the


vantage point effect of human experiences, as discussed earlier. The cognitive structure of working actualities and potentialities presents itself in the experience of shifting horizons, of things-that-can-be-done-here-and-now in my immediate physical reach, and things-I-can-do-when-Imove-to-the-spot-over-there, or to another room, another building, another part of the town, and so on. Actualities and potentialities are interchangeable, whether we speak of things-to-be-done-for-the-first-time as being attainable, or things-to-be-done-again as being restorable. Nearness and remoteness are discerned within a set of horizons. The penultimate of them contains things within my geographical reach that others can do although they are beyond my own abilities. That is, they are out of my reach in a very different sense. The outermost horizon, finally, is completely unspecific: it contains things unknown to me that I or maybe somebody else could bring into an attainable reach. Within these horizons of the working world, I encounter other people. In co-operation with them, the experiences of the zones of reach become social experiences and collective horizons: our common reach surpasses the individual potentialities of each of us alone. The effects of gearing into the outer world are multiplied by social co-operation springing from shared and complementary objectives. Collective work increases the effects we can have on the physical character of our everyday working reality, and it also provides for a notion of common purposes. I shall remark only in passing that, for Schutz, communication itself was a working act, at least insofar as it involves the release of physiological energies and physical processes, such as the activation of the speech apparatus, the emission and reception of sound waves, or the use of writing instruments and other means of indirect communication. However, the products of such working efforts, be they fleeting sounds or durable letters, are only auxiliary means; earlier, I called them vehicles of meaning that carry messages (meanings) on their backs. The work embodied in acts of communication is thus of a kind different from all other kinds of work. This difference will show up when I discuss the relationship of the world of working to some of the other provinces of meaning.

Other provinces of meaning All other finite provinces of meaning are non-paramount realities. They all have their own cognitive style, experiences within their spheres are "consistent in themselves and compatible with one another,' and they all obtain their own particular accent of reality. Such characteristics are exclusive: the style of one province cannot be carried into another; the consistencies of one would be inconsistencies in all others. Most of all, there is no "formula of transformation" according to which the experiences and meanings of one could be transferred from any one into any other. (1945C : 553-554) In his essay of 1945, Schutz discussed three non-paramount provinces of meaning: the realms of fantasms, of dreams, and of scientific theory. For now, I am only going to consider the first two. The third one warrants a separate treatment; I shall set it in juxtaposition to the paramount reality of everyday life. Schutz spoke of the "various worlds" of fantasy that in themselves are as many provinces of meaning of widely differing natures but that share certain general characteristics of cognitive style. These areas of "fancies or imageries" comprise "the realms of day-dreams, of play, of fiction, of fairy tales, of myths, of jokes," and many others. By shifting the accent of reality to "quasi-real fantasms," we free ourselves from the rigour of pragmatic objectives and the limiting conditions of objects and situations. Fantasy is free of all conditions of acting in the world of everyday life; it creates its own realities in which, so to speak, everything is possible. The price to be paid for this freedom is the utter impossibility to "perform" anything of tangible consequence. In his day-dreams, Walter Mitty performs the most daring deeds, but he is always jolted out of his fantasies into the realization that the deed remains undone. In Schutz's formulation, "the imagining self does not transform the outer world." (1945C : 556) The world of dreams is furthest removed from the world of everyday life. Schutz called it "complete relaxation" of attention to life, a complete turning away from it. Dreams are without purpose and without volition: they are pure spontaneity. Attention to a dream is passive; there is not

185 OTHER PROVINCES OF MEANING


the slightest possibility that we can interfere in the course of a dream - except, possibly, to wake up in order to escape the climax of a nightmare. According to Schutz, it must be assumed that unnoticed experiential influences upon the "intimate centre of the personality" determine dream interests and dream contents. Freud is often credited with discovering the relation between dream and unconsciousness. It might be more accurate to say that he most consistently interpreted this relationship according to his psychoanalytical frame of reference. Schutz was convinced that Freud's dream theory, and particularly his thesis of the universality of dream symbols, is open to doubt. Schutz agreed with Freud that dreams may be filled with volitions and projects and purposes. In contrast to Freud, he maintained that such 'active' ingredients of dreams do "not originate in the dreaming self." Rather, they are drawn from the reservoirs of memory: "they are recollections, retentions, and reproductions of volitive experiences which originated within the world of awakeness." Yet, any dream occurs with its own "scheme of reference." The latter, then, is responsible for modification and reinterpretation of the memory snatches that serve as its materials. Although not accepting Freud's theory of the instinctive driving forces of the human self-Eros and Thanatos, life force and death instinct — Schutz granted that the Freudian technique of dream analysis is "an attempt to refer the contents of the dream to the originary experiences in the world of awakeness in which and by which they were constituted." (1945c: 560, 561) A last point of Schutz merits mentioning. While dreamsin-process occur in inner duration and thus are not exempt from the unidirectionality of experienced time, the dream materials occur independently of the time order of the snatches of memory to which they refer: present, past, and future seem to be intermingled; things a person expects to happen in the future occur as having already taken place: past experiences may seem to lie ahead in the future; and, finally, "successions are transformed in simultaneities and vice versa." (1945c: 562) Of course, the realization of the arbitrariness of dreams is not part of the dream experiences themselves. The realiza-

tion occurs to us only after we wake up and try to recall the dream we had while sleeping. Usually, we have difficulty doing so. I am not going to invoke Freud's argument that the manifest content of a dream is vastly different from its latent, hidden content, which we should not dream to admit to ourselves and which we are still more bent on censoring when we are awake. While we are dreaming, we take the cognitive style of dreaming completely for granted, as real, although it resists later representation in the world of everyday life. Whether we try to account for a dream to ourselves or whether we want to tell it to somebody else, the style of our wide-awake consciousness does not tolerate the chaotic manner in which the dream appeared to us. In recounting it, we impose upon it a minimum of orderliness and coherence and, thereby, deprive it of its vividness and kaleidoscopic quality. We try to find a plot line, and reorganize a skeleton of dream happenings that make sense to our ordinary thinking. Schutz justifiably asked, "Are we sure that the awakened person really can tell his dreams, he who no longer dreams?" (1945C : 563) Day-dreams are related to dreams in that they, too, exclude volition and tangible effects. Beyond this, significant differences obtain. Insofar as we can speak of the motives for dreams, they are because motives that are completely hidden from the dreamer. By contrast, a day-dreamer's fantasies serve in-order-to motives that are fully manifested in the day-dream. A day-dream is the fantasied fulfilment of a strong in-order-to motive without any of the effort, longrange planning, and painful overcoming of obstacles required to achieve a long-range project in the world of everyday realities. Likewise, a day-dream excuses me from that self-scrutiny that, in my everyday projects, would indicate whether my goals are within my capabilities and possibilities, whether I am equipped to reach them. As a rule, daydreams concern most of all the person I want to be in my relations to, and in comparison with, others. In my daydreams, I can make myself into anybody I want to be: the fastest miler, the strongest man in the world, the greatest poet, the richest man, the hero who rights wrongs, the greatest physicist ever, the most irresistible ladies' man, the greatest leader the country ever had. Whether I speak of dreams as fancy accounts of my past

187 OTHER PROVINCES OF MEANING


life, or day-dreams as wish fulfilment in a fantasied present, I am speaking of experiences that, in their essence, are lonely. Other persons populate my dreams, where they may help or frighten me. Others are necessary for daydreams, whose topics usually relate to eminently social matters. In day-dreams the quest for recognition turns into a quest for ultimate superiority, and the people are there as foils to my deeds and my achievements. In every case in either dreams or day-dreams, the other is not there "in a common vivid present" as a person like me; my relationship to him or her is "an empty fictitious quasi-We relation." The other remains an object of my dream; he "is an alter ego only by my grace." If there is any justification for Leibniz's conception of the individual as a "windowless monad" who carries his own universe within himself, it is in the dreamer. (1945:563) Among the other realms of fantasy, there is one that is similar to the worlds of dreams and day-dreams: that of the imaginary playmates of lone children. This phenomenon is the strongest support for Cooley's contention that children are humanized in primary groups, among which the family is the first, and the children's play group the second. Where children are deprived of the company of their peers, or even the company of siblings close to their own age, they may resort to inventing playmates of whose existence they have no doubt. In the other kinds of fantasy worlds, as mentioned by Schutz, sociality is not merely imagined but exists in the genuine form of interactive We-relations. Play may occur in solitude; in fact, the play of small children starts as solitary activity that allows them to develop their first flights of fantasy. Insofar as such play is connected with play objects, puppets, building blocks, it contributes to mastering the outer world and to overcoming the resistance of its objects. The pragmatic goal is missing, but the exercise itself is real, as parents will confirm after they have busied themselves collecting all the objects their children have thrown out of the playpen. Later on, children get involved with other children, playmates. Then, their playing occurs in two forms. First is the improvisation of scenes of life experiences, such as playing house. This is a first form of "taking the roles of (specific) others." Second is group games, beginning with little singing games like "London bridge is falling down" and

leading into team sports as occasions to learn how to "take 189 the attitude of the team" and internalize the "generalized OTHER ,1

Otner.

//*

When Schutz mentioned fairy tales, he referred to a significant part of oral folk literature that in our literate society has become children's literature. Fairy tales give rein to fantasy in plots and characters. Their presentation is essentially a social matter, whether the story teller is entertaining the villagers sitting around the evening fire or reading a child a bed-time story. The origin of fairy tales is "lost in mystery," to transfer William Graham Sumner's expression from folkways to folk literature. Modern literature is the creation of individual writers who put down their stories and novels in solitude but who write for an imagined audience, for what they think are their typical readers. Like the writing of a novel, its reading — as a rule — is a solitary affair set within a social framework. Writers give an intellectual performance in putting down their stories; the publishing industry turns manuscripts into merchandise; the consumers of this merchandise become the readers who transform it back into literature. Yet, the book the author planned, reflected on, and wrote is not the same book that the readers read. Authors create novels out of their own imaginations, reducing their fantasies to words, communicative signs that, in themselves, are without fringes of deeper meaning. The readers read these words that spin out the plots and develop the themes, and find deeper meanings in them. The readers fill out the fringes of the words according to their fancy. If books are means of communication and, in the form of novels, narrations of stories, they are also vehicles of meaning, mediating between the meanings meant by the authors and the meanings understood by the readers. Fantasy can be completely solitary, as in dreams and daydreams; it can be a truly collective undertaking as in children's face-to-face play; it can be direct communication from a story teller to listeners; and it can be indirect com* This paragraph is an extension of Schutz's suggestions. The informed reader will have noticed that it leads up to the contribution of George H. Mead in his famous essay on "Play, the Game, and the Generalized Other." (Mind, Self, and Society, Chicago University Press, 1934, 152-164)

PROVINCES OF

MEANING


munication, keeping story teller and readers apart both spatially and temporally. With the exception of dreams and day-dreams, the "various worlds of fantasms" are kinds of social worlds or, at the least, reach into the social world. Insofar as they do, they cannot possibly be hermetically sealed off from the paramount reality of everyday life. The interplay of persons and all forms of communication between them take place within the life-world. Any form of social interplay occurs within the sphere of James's "sensible vividness" and involves at least some aspects of Schutz's "world of working." This is particularly so in the realm of fantasy called literature. Here, the process of communication from authors to readers reaches beyond the social sphere of positing meanings on the one hand and subjectively interpreting them on the other into the realm of economic action, of industrial production, and commercial merchandising. As it turns out, the "most heterogenous provinces of meaning," which Schutz treated as "worlds of fantasms," are not only greatly differentiated in their cognitive style and the meanings they contain for us but also in their technical or external relationship to the realm of the paramount reality.

Leaps and transitions As Schutz explained, the finite provinces of meaning are not quasi-spatial regions with fixed boundaries. In fact, he did not call them sub-universes, as James did, "because it is the meaning of our experiences and not the ontological structure of the objects which constitutes reality." That means they are not there like the Canadian provinces, to which I ascribe a geographical and social-political reality independent of my visiting one or your living in one. As I quoted James earlier, each of the finite provinces of meaning is equally real "whilst it is attended to." In this sense, Schutz wrote that it is it not "as if we had to select one of these provinces as our home to live in, to start from or to return to": "Within a single day, even within a single hour our consciousness may run through most different tensions and adopt most different attentional attitudes to life."

(1945C : 551, 554, n. 19) That is, we move frequently, although not freely, from one province of meaning to others. Yet, it would be wrong to treat them solely in terms of fluctuating "tensions of consciousness." They remain in my consciousness as potentialities. I am aware of a world of dreams even though I am currently not dreaming. For this reason, Schutz spoke of the "constitution" of provinces of meaning in the consciousness of human beings who experience not one but many kinds of realities. The term constitution, taken phenomenologically, means just "the act by which an object is built up in consciousness." (Spiegelberg, 1962, II : 713) Strictly speaking, this constitution is the achievement of each individual; yet, under the given ranges of existentialcultural potentialities, it assumes structural similarities with the comparable achievements of others. This allowed Schutz to analyse it phenomenologically and present it in form of a general conceptual scheme. The structure of this scheme, abstracted from experiences of "multiple realities," is embodied in the six basic characteristics of provinces of meaning, as mentioned before. If we follow Schutz, we will confirm that, during any single day, individuals cross the boundaries of provinces of meaning frequently and seemingly arbitrarily. For this reason, we need here to pay careful attention to the shift of attention from one province of meaning to any other. To do so, we must ask a preliminary question: is there a general mode of transition applying, in principle, to all provinces of meaning, or do we have to assume that there are various modes, each depending on the confrontation of the unique characteristics of the cognitive style of the two provinces of meaning involved in each specific case? Schutz did not really investigate this issue. He intentionally restricted his essay on "Multiple Realities" to the "outlining of a few principles of analysis." (1945C : 554 n. 19) On account of this decision, he could confine himself to a few general points about transitions from one province of meaning to another, and to sketches of a few selected provinces themselves. This served his restricted theoreticalanalytical purposes at the time, but gave us only the beginnings of the typification of content and meaning of experiences that he, for theoretical reasons, described in terms of a geographical metaphor. Before dwelling on the stated problem, I shall have to

191 LEAPS AND

TRAN5ITIONS


make an important amendment of my prior exposition of Schutz's position. While he insisted on the ontological equality of experiences in all provinces of meaning in agreement with James, he also followed James in singling out one by calling it the "paramount reality." As stands to reason, this was the finite province of meaning of everyday life and thus of working. This may seem like a contradiction, but it is not : it is "privileged" somewhat in the sense in which the I, actually my I, is privileged among all other egos. For our purposes, the difference between the privileged I and the privileged reality of everyday life is most of all a question of relevance, or rather of the kind of relevance involved. The relevance of my I for myself is volitional : I am closer to myself, whether I call this an existential fact or others call it egocentricity. In the end, it remains my choice. By contrast, the relevance of the everyday life-world is imposed. As soon as I interrupt my spontaneous involvement in my experiences and reflect on the larger ranges of these experiences, the province of daily life, so to speak, forces its importance upon me. Of course, I am a thinking and an autonomous being, and I might decide, for philosophical or other lofty reasons, not to recognize this imposed relevance. But, "alas, we seldom do." Theoretically, Schutz bowed to this relevance. He explained: "this reality seems to us to be the natural one"; we are "not ready to abandon our attitude toward it without having experienced a specific shock which compels us to break through the limits of this 'finite' province of meaning and to shift the accent of reality to another one." Thus, it takes the push of a momentary shock for me to get my consciousness out of the natural stance and to assume the cognitive style of another province of meaning. We shall assume that, although it is not stated in so many words by Schutz, the re-entrance into the sphere of the paramount reality occurs in the same fashion: one is shocked back into everyday life. (1945C : 552) Schutz emphasized that finite provinces of meaning do not smoothly adjoin themselves, as do two Canadian provinces when I travel along the Trans-Canada highway. A large sign announces to me, "You are now entering Manitoba," but the landscape does not betray any difference between Saskatchewan and its neighbouring province. By contrast, provinces of meaning are cut off from one another

by unbridged gaps: one must "leap" over them. Schutz 193 borrowed this expression from Kierkegaard who used it in LEAPS AND the context of his description of the "instant" of an ex- TRANSIT10NS traordinary religious experience in which a person does not only leave the world of daily life behind, but his old personality as well. Separating the notions of shock and leap from the significance of ultimate experiences that drastically change the whole course of a person's life, Schutz applied them to experiences of a life that, in its general trend, goes on as usual. Thus, he wrote, such "experiences of shock befall me frequently amidst my daily life; they themselves pertain to its reality." (1945C:552) Coming as daily affairs, these shocks seem not to acquire that quality of familiarity that characterizes other kinds of recurrent experiences. Schutz considered shock the universal form in and through which all possible provinces of meaning are entered. Schutz thus answered my first question about a general mode of transition affirmatively. But, he also answered my second question about modes peculiar to certain provinces affirmatively. "There are as many innumerable kinds of different shock experiences as there are different provinces of meaning upon which I may bestow the accent of reality." Since he did not dwell on the qualitative uniqueness of each single experience of the repeated entry into the same province of meaning, I conclude that he thought about these shocks in terms of a typification of the experience of them. Thereby, Schutz paid theoretical homage to the tremendous variety of finite provinces of meaning, which I may enter and leave, and the multiplicity of the experiences connected with such moves. Unfortunately, in the article of 1945, he was compelled to confine himself to broad general considerations. Thus, he merely listed eight examples of leaps into different spheres of reality but did not provide any comments about the differences among them. Yet, the list itself indicates not only that the qualitative differences are considerable but also that the intensity of the shock experiences is tremendously varied. Each boundary, so to speak, has its unique characteristics: the gaps may be narrow or broad. If I could construct a continuum of shock-intensity along a psychological Richter scale from one to ten, I could roughly sort out and distribute Schutz's examples, adding as many others as I want to consider, and


I might expect them to be distributed practically over the whole range of the scale. Needless to say, this is just an illustration; it does not imply that shock experiences could be measured and quantified as to their intensity, like the shock waves of an earthquake. I am going to choose two examples from Schutz's array as presenting the extremes of the imagined continuum. His first example is "the shock of falling asleep as the leap into the world of dreams." In my personal experiences, falling asleep is not a leap but a sliding transition, a fading out of a relaxed "attention to life." As to the how of the occurrence of dreams, I am unable to say anything: the unconsciousness of sleep somehow and unnoticeably yields to the beginning of a dream. The second-last example of Schutz refers to "religious experiences in all their varieties," mentioning Kierkegaard's " 'instant' as the leap into the religious sphere." In this instant, the finite province of meaning of everyday reality is stripped of its paramount character; the religious sphere becomes the paramount reality of the converted person. Kierkegaard was serious about this. With sleep becoming dreams, we cannot speak of a leap at all; with daily life becoming religious existence, the leap is tremendous. People who are truly reborn in the religious sense abandon what was until then their paramount reality. They break away from their family, their community, their occupations; they may become hermits, devoting themselves to solitary contemplation; they may become charismatic preachers, inciting people to leave their families, communities, and occupations and to follow them in spreading the new gospel of salvation. I do not want to get into a discussion of the many other cases that fall somewhere between these two extremes, but clearly, a broad field of serious investigation lies before us. These extreme cases allow me to point out a curious fact: the mode of the entrance into provinces of meaning is no indicator of the mode of exit from them. In the case of sleep, I may experience a gradual return of consciousness and awareness of the realities of a new day that I expect will be much like many others. I may also be rudely awakened by the shrill tone of an alarm clock, a sharp clap of thunder, or by someone shaking me and shouting, hey, wake up. As with sleeping, so with dreaming. I may wake up from

a pleasant dream feeling happy, wanting to sing, "Oh, 195 what a beautiful morning." I may also jump from the high- LEAPS AND point of panic reached in a nightmare into wakefulness, TRANSITIONS and only slowly realize it was all a bad dream. With religious rebirth, according to Kierkegaard, the consequences of the religious instant are permanent. This is why, in his sense, we cannot speak of a return to the paramount reality of daily life. However, here we are merely concerned with the depth and sincerity of the instant itself, that is, of the experience of the shock and leap involved. The history of North America after European settlement is full of reports of religious revivals, from Jonathan Edward to Billy Graham, all of which were followed by large amounts of backsliding. We must assume the backsliders were sincere when they had their religious experiences; what is in doubt is that these experiences were of Kierkegaardian consequences: Many are called, but few are chosen. If religious conversion replaces the paramount reality of everyday life with the paramount reality of religious experience, backsliding does the reverse, replacing the extraordinary with the ordinary. As the term backsliding suggests, the re-entry into the ordinary spheres of life or, rather, the restoration of everyday life as the dominant reality, is a gradual process. The backsliding may long go unnoticed by the backsliders, who may only be occasionally disquieted by signs of lagging fervour and devotion. Only when the process gets to a critical point are the backsliders shocked by some event or other into realizing retrospectively that they are back with both feet in the paramount reality of daily life. A closer investigation of other shifts in the accent of reality from the paramount reality of everyday life to the multiple universes outside it may yield a large variety of modes of transition back and forth. Clearly the terms shock and leap are not happy choices for summing up the most general characteristics of all these modes. It might be better to speak of a shift of the accent of reality and a corresponding shift from one province of meaning to another one, and to characterize the typified cases of shifts from one typified province to another typified province by a number of terms, ranging from sliding transitions to long leaps, and from slight cognitive disturbances to extreme shocks.


Enclaves and fusions If we maintain Schutz's initial quasi-geographical analogy of provinces of meaning, then the shift from one to the other appears as the initiation of a more or less extended visit in the province entered, even though the traveller, so to speak, has a return ticket in his pocket. So far, I have carried out my discussion on this assumption. However, Schutz mentioned a second analogy, that of "enclaves" as "regions belonging to one province of meaning enclosed by another." He did not elaborate this point, but he obviously meant cases in which people stand, in a manner of speaking, with one foot in one province of meaning and the other foot in a different one. Creative artists are a prime example: they would not be artists were they not also skilled craftsmen. The creation of a work of art is the forming of artifacts - statues, pictures-out of suitable materials with the help of refined manual techniques. The artist, while creating, is working. It is clear that the idea of the transitional leap does not apply here. The meaning of the work of art in the making is identical with the in-order-to motive for the making of the artifact. It is thus that, more likely than not, painters who are asked about pictures of theirs will dwell on technical problems and difficulties. That is, they speak about their work in technical terms: they think about it as workers at a craft, not as artists. There are two possible reasons for this. First, the meaning of the painting is expressed in the picture itself; while the translation of this meaning into ordinary language may make sense to the art critic, it may not make sense to the artist — or to the viewer. Secondly, the because motives for works of art may forever be closed to artists who may be given neither to retrospection nor introspection. (1945C : 554) Literary writers also live in two provinces of meaning at once. Although they do not create artistic artifacts, they must fashion their ideas and develop their characters and plots in the material form of written manuscripts. While writing stories or novels, writers are concerned not with the techniques of writing itself, which are automatic, but with the selection of words, syntax, and style that best express what they have in mind. Conscientious writers, in this respect, are those who carefully reread and correct their writings stylistically.

In general, artistic creations must be expressed in tangible, material forms; their fashioning is as much craftsmanship as it is artistic inspiration. To speak of an enclave of the working world in the finite province of meaning of the arts, does not seem an adequate characterization of what is taking place. Rather, I suggest, what we have here is a fusion of artistic intentions with the purposeful work of craftsmanship. This fusion, of course, transforms the material product from a mere practical utensil to something that carries symbolic meanings. The in-order-to motive behind the creation of an artistic artifact may appear to be pragmatic, but it is essentially artistic.

Work and science as provinces of meaning So far, I have deliberately refrained from dealing with what, in Schutz's list of examples of shock experiences, appeared as "the decision of the scientist to replace all passionate participation in the affairs of 'this world' by a disinterested contemplative attitude." (1945C : 553) I shall now consider the particular relationship between science and daily life as two provinces of meaning. My discussion should add some further insights to those I offered before. As explained earlier, the transition from the spheres of daily life to those of the sciences is made by suspending the natural stance and assuming a scientific stance. This takes a deliberate decision, an act of will: "The 'leap' into the province of theoretical thought involves the resolution to suspend the subjective point of view." Since the effect of this decision is sudden, it may be called a leap; since it is deliberate, it does not come as a shock. In daily life, we start to think when we need to cope with situations in which things can no longer be taken for granted, or when accepted tangible objectives are actively pursued with the help of preplanned projects. In either case, pragmatic considerations govern thinking. In this sense, thinking is a part of daily life. By contrast, scientific thinking is "theoretical contemplation," thinking for its own sake or, rather, for purely cognitive purposes. (1945C : 553, 567, 564) Yet, as Schutz stressed, all "theoretical cogitations are 'actions' and even 'performances'." "They are actions be-

197 WORK AND SCIENCES AS PROVINCES OF MEANING


cause they are emanations of our spontaneous life carried out according to a project and they are performances because the intention to carry through the project ... supervenes." Scientific thinkers operate in terms of in-order-to and because motives, and the execution of a present plan is part of a "hierarchy of plans" within the framework of their field. Nevertheless, these cogitations themselves are not acts of working: "they do not gear into the outer world." (1945C: 564, 565) At the same time, scientists, while acting as scientists, are involved in genuine working acts: they take measurements, handle instruments, make experiments. They also work in Schutz's technical sense when they give lectures and when they write treatises. All these acts, Schutz stressed, "can be easily separated" from the scientific attitude. However, separating them changes neither their technical character as genuine acts of working nor the necessity for scientists to execute them while pursuing their theoretical objectives. In the natural sciences, the distinction between scientific thinking and the tedious work of testing hypotheses in controlled experiments that use various technical devices is often emphasized by a division of labour that excuses the scientists proper from doing the technical work. Graduate students, assistants, and lab technicians execute the tasks of scientific investigation. The scientists themselves remain directors of their projects, and more: they have to make the technical arrangements for the experiments, design pieces of apparatus, and train and supervise their research staff. Larger research corporations may convert a whole science into a manufacturing enterprise, but academic natural scientists, who organize their work on a smaller scale, have to play many roles at once: theorists, managers, engineers, and supervisors. In this sense, they do not at all escape the involvement with the technical work that is a necessary part of their activities. The material-technical processes of scientific investigations — the work—are indispensable for the production of scientific results—the theory in Schutz's meaning of the term. Even when all the necessary work performances for a specific scientific project are done by one individual, they are not his private affair. Sciences are in principle public undertakings; they collectively involve the whole scientific fraternity. Therefore, any scientist is obliged to communi-

cate his findings and his conclusions to his fellow scientists, that is, submit them to their critical scrutiny and control. Whether offered in lectures or publications, such communication involves working acts, which are a legitimate part of any science as going concern.* What sets all these forms of scientific work apart from the forms of working in daily life is their scientific, that is, non-pragmatic purpose. Schutz, of course, was not primarily concerned with the working of natural scientists. The theorists he had in mind were social scientists of broad theoretical interests or else philosophers concerned with matters psychological or social. For the core activities of both, the term scientific contemplation is an adequate label. Their intellectual undertakings are essentially solitary. Since they work only with a minimum of technical instruments (pen, pencil, paper, and maybe typewriter or tape recorder), their technical work operations are much less elaborate and can be taken much more for granted than those of natural scientists. Under usual circumstances, the use of writing instruments is so automatic that the user pays no attention to them. Yet, under certain circumstances, they do impose themselves upon the theorists; first, when their thoughts run faster than the instrument that is used to set them down; and secondly, when the instrument breaks down. The tip of a pencil breaks off, and it must be resharpened; a pen runs out of ink, and must be replaced, typewriter keys get stuck, or other mechanical defects show up. The process of thought is suddenly interrupted. While functioning, the instrument seemed to be part of the process of developing certain ideas or conceptions; when failing to function, it imposes itself upon the writers' attention as a material object belonging to the outside province of technology. Here, a mild shock occurs. The writers must shift their attention from theory to writing instrument: the sphere of technical reality has invaded the sphere of theoretical contemplation. * To round off the picture: the teaching of scientific subjects in institutes of higher learning is a concern with the sciences as crafts. The students may be likened to apprentices. If their teachers are accomplished scientists, they are the masters of the trade; if they are trained science teachers, they are more like journeymen. This distinction implies no judgment of the quality of teaching involved. A scientist may be a poor teacher, a science teacher a brilliant conveyer of scientific knowledge. But the opposite may also obtain.



Should they have no other instrument on hand that is in working order, the writers' momentary annoyance will turn into frustration. In attending to balky instruments used in their work, and in taking remedial action, theorists or other scientists become workers in the ordinary sense of the term. In my earlier discussions, I referred to the necessity of theorists and researchers communicating with their fellows. I reiterate this most important point here. This has to be done not merely for the sake of communicating ideas and findings, but in order to offer them for discussion and expose them to the critical scrutiny of others. Schutz spoke of the "sociality of theorizing itself." Theorizing may begin in solitude, where the only help and guide is the thoughts that have been thought by others. (1945C573) By reading the books of others, theorists acknowledge the sociality of philosophy or any other area of theoretical concern. While they may neither publish nor lecture, they write for an audience if they write at all. In doing so, they subscribe to Schutz's second point, which is recognized by all theorists and philosophers who do not think of themselves as intellectual recluses: "other people, too, can make the same subject matter, with which I deal in theoretical contemplation, the topic of their theoretical thought"; "my own results will be verified or falsified by theirs as theirs by mine." (i945C: 573) In what is possibly his strongest statement about the linkage between scientific or philosophical thinking and the world of working, Schutz said, "mutual corroborating and refuting, approving and criticizing presupposes communication, and communicaton is possible only outside the pure theoretical sphere, namely, in the world of working. In order to communicate my theoretical thought to my fellow men, I have, therefore, to drop out of the pure theoretical attitude; I have to return to the world of daily life and its natural attitude." (1945C :573) Schutz spoke of this as a "highly paradoxical situation." As I am not able to analyse a dream except after awakening and, thus, after my return to the paramount reality of everyday life, so I have to return to this paramount reality in order to speak about past theorizing. Everyone involved in theorizing will experience the changes of attention and activity whenever they occur. But,

they will mostly take them for granted. As Schutz would 201 be the first to admit, the thematic recognition of the clear- WORK AND SCIENCES AS cut separation of the theoretical activity of thinking in the PROVINCES OF scientific stance and the communication of the conclusions M E A N I N G within the spheres of working is achieved analytically. I explain to myself and others that I did "drop out" of the one in order to "return to" the world of working: I made some kind of leap when I effected this. However, this explanation is an analytical simplification, sufficient as a first approach to the problem. Undoubtedly, the cognitive processes and activities involved in making this leap are more intricate. Do the theorists, in Schutz's sense, actually become workers when they lecture in the classroom or before an audience of their scholarly peers? Obviously, no fixed and definite answer can be given to this question. It is indeed possible that theorists report about the process in which they reasoned out the conclusions of their reflections about their chosen topic in a manner that bears some formal resemblance to the telling of a dream. However, in most cases in which thinkers confine themselves to reporting their intellectual findings, they will not tell about the process in which they reached them but, rather, they will systematize that process to present it in a way that elicits theoretical comprehension. That means, presentations are the result of transformations of what they have done into a form directed towards an imagined audience with a certain level of knowledge and ability. Its responsiveness has been anticipated : What to say is modified by how to say it. We may call this the pedagogical transformation of scientific presentations. Chances are that such presentations will be well received when the speaker imagines an audience with levels of interests and intellectual preparation close to that of his actual audience. When he is considerably off the mark, his lecture will fall flat unless he is able to ignore his preformulated text and improvise one in accord with the actual expectations of his audience. In teaching, of course, the pedagogical transformation of pre-established knowledge-the teachers' own or that of the authors who are their sources-is a crucial factor in classroom presentations. Lecturing at a more senior level-senior in the sense of dealing with young adults rather than children, and thus with people who should


have more intellectual and factual preparation-may well go beyond the adequate pedagogical transformation of a pre-established segment of substantive and theoretical knowledge. Let me give you an example from my own experiences. When speaking before an advanced audience, I use a well-prepared outline, covering what I want to convey and how I have thought to present it. However, since I am hardly ever convinced that what I have to convey is in any way final, my outline has gaps in it, sometimes marked by questions. When I reach a spot, I find myself picking up the thread of my earlier considerations where I had left it, seeing now that it can be drawn further. In these instances, I abandon the prepared script; instead of presenting previously developed theory, I develop theory while speaking to my audience. More frequently, members of my audience trigger such intervals of—so to speak—original theoretical efforts by their questions and remarks during, say, a seminar session. The easy kind of questions are those to which I know the answers: either I resort to bits of knowledge I retrieve from memory and answer on the spot, or else I postpone the answer until I come around to discuss themes I have scheduled for later. In this case, I may frustrate the questioner who jumped ahead of me and my outline, but I explain that this can not be helped. The difficult kind of questions are the creative ones for me: they hit one or another gap in my outline and, maybe, point to one that I had hardly noticed until then, even in my private notes on the theme. Facing this gap in my theorizing for the first time consciously, I may have to confess my own present ignorance. On the other hand, the question may well make me attempt to come to grips with the theme it introduces. Here, I improvise new theory in the classroom. This is quite an unusual form of the sociality of theory: public theorizing on public provocation. The participants in the seminar may not be aware that I am doing some original theorizing rather than pulling answers from a fund of preestablished knowledge. It is a popular but fallacious idea that established scholars know it all. Scholars are good scholars not when they share this conviction but when they are fully aware that they, on their level, have as much to learn as their students on theirs. Such scholars know how much they learn from their students, and how much they owe them, not simply as teachers but also as theoretical

thinkers. I mentioned this at the beginning of this book, 203 WORK AND and I mention it again: we never stop learning. SCIENCES AS The example of my lectures illustrates at least two points. PROVINCES OF The first is that it is not enough to characterize communi- M E A N I N G cations and discussions of knowledge before audiences as forms of sociality that are essentially acts of working. They will be that, of course, but they are more. Reporting, lecturing, discussing are technically necessary uses of the universal medium of communication, language, in order to offer theoretical meanings for interpretation by others. But, contrary to the slogan coined by Marshall McLuhan, and propagated by proponents of mass communication theory, the medium is not the message: at best, the medium carries the message. Theorists giving lectures do not simply drop into the paramount reality of the world of working, leaving behind the world of theorizing. If they are good, they use the available technical means of communication for their own non-pragmatic and theoretical purposes. In the ideal case, I could even say that theorists pull the technical means of communication out of the paramount reality into the finite province of theorizing in the same way as they lift writing instruments and the techniques of their use out of the world of working and into the sphere of solitary thinking. In both cases, technical forms of linguistic communication are as necessary for the execution of theoretical projects as the actively functioning body is for the actively functioning consciousness. Provided we are adept at using a pen or typewriter or at speaking to an audience, we use these techniques of communication as automatically as skilled persons use their tools. The same goes for the use of language in oral presentations. We are seemingly unaware of the way we use both utensils and words until we have problems with them. Thus, an outside interference may interrupt the flow of the words of my lecture: a latecomer creates a commotion while seeking his seat in the classroom. Or the disturbance occurs in my consciousness: the right expression will not come to mind; the flow of thinking that parallels the flow of my speaking is interrupted; I hunt for the elusive word, or try to find a substitute so that I can go back to what I was going to say. It is only in moments of external disruption or internal blockage that the technical character of the linguistic medium asserts itself and forces a shift of attention from the


meaning developed and expressed to the word used to present it to others. Analytically speaking, the sociality of theorizing is multilayered : from the basic process of reasoning out a segment of theory, through the pedagogical transformation of the theory into terms that an imagined audience can comprehend, to the face-to-face presentation of the pedagogically transformed theory. Beyond this, the speaker may modify his pre-formulated thoughts further if he or she is sensitive to the subtle 'feedback' of unvoiced audience reactions. This may stimulate additional public theorizing triggered by public provocation. While public modifications of stated theories and the public development of new ones occur relatively infrequently, they are significant. As said before, they bring a temporary transformation of the usually solitary process of theorizing into a social process. This transformation is accidental. By contrast, in the intimate dialogue between two or three individuals it becomes deliberate. They intend to generate theory together. Consequently, the dual pattern of speaker and listener, of lecturer and audience, disappears. In dialogues, all participants are alternately speaker and listener: the solitary process of theorizing has been transformed into an interactive and intersubjective process. Great philosophers, almost by definition, are solitary thinkers. Yet, some of them were unhappy in their isolation. Husserl, certainly a lonely thinker for whom exchanges even with close students seemed to turn into monologues,* spoke yearningly of "philosophizing together" as the ideal form of thinking. I am not going to attempt to sort out these analytical layers according to the various provinces of meaning, complete with sub-regions, to which they may be ascribed. With the exceptions I have already noted, the transitions are rather fluid and subtle. I am going to follow Schutz's happy suggestion, and treat the whole cognitive-communi* This is confirmed by Schutz's vivid report on the days of his first encounters with Husserl and of the famous "philosophical walks" that Husserl took either with Schutz alone or in the company of one or the other of students close to him. This report is contained in an unpublished letter Schutz wrote to Felix Kaufmann in 1933, but on various later occasions, Schutz alluded to the way Husserl transformed what started as a dialogue into a monologue.

cative complex as a "dialectical problem." For phenomenological-psychological purposes, it is best to see the relationship between the world of theorizing and the world of work as one of complex intertwining; in it the ego of the theorist can not be separated from the mundane ego that holds the pen and speaks to an audience. Schutz, in fact, expressed the same in the concluding paragraphs of his article of 1945. There, he warned once more not to consider the finite provinces of meaning as "ontological static entities existing outside the stream of individual consciousness within which they originate." Neither, I should add, ought they be given undue significance as analytically established divisions of consciousness. All the provinces named present "not separated states of mental life in the sense that passing from one to another would require a transmigration of the soul and a complete extinction of memory and consciousness by death as the doctrine of metempsychosis assumes." Actually, they are "merely names for different tensions of one and the same consciousness": it is the "same life, the mundane life, unbroken from birth to death, which is attended to in different modifications." (1945C : 573, 574-5) It is for this reason that experiences occurring under such different tensions, regardless of how far removed from the wide-awakeness of everyday life, "can be communicated in ordinary language in working acts to my fellow man." A "paradox of communication" of, for instance, telling about dreams or inner experience in everyday language, results merely from the fallacious assumption that genuine communication between humans could be realized in any province of meaning instead of being possible exclusively in "the world of everyday life which is the paramount reality." (1945C: 575) As you will remember, the Bergson paradox issued from the literal impossibility of expressing inner experiences in language, that is, an outside means laying out the world in space and spatialized time. But, Schutz has shown that the tension, if not the contradiction, of inner and outer realities occurs within one and the same individual consciousness. It is the same conscious human being who uses the language, given to him socially, in order to induce others to share with him experiences of or within the spheres of multiple realities. In this sense, we may say that all provinces of meaning are part of the same country, the same world of human experiences in their inexhaustible



variety. They all are manifestations of our being in the world. This being so, we may as well use the language of the paramount reality of the world of our existence; insufficient and unsuited as it may be, it remains the only language we have when we wish to reason about our experiences in all spheres of our lives or at least to account for them as best we can. This being the case, I feel vindicated in my critical comments directed upon a number of formulations in the highly condensed sections of Schutz's paper of 1945. My comments were made essentially in order to prevent the rise of the unwarranted assumption of an ontological —in contrast to a phenomenological-reality of the non-paramount provinces of meaning. This fallacy eliminated, I can indeed suggest that, in a certain way "science becomes again included in the world of life." Schutz concluded his essay of 1945 with these words, adding that it is this linkage between science and life-world that makes possible the "miracle of philosophizing together," which allows us to bring back "the full humanity of the thinker into the theoretical field." (1945C : 575) I can think of no better words than these for closing my considerations not only of the multiple realities of human experiences but of the whole spectrum of topics through which I have taken you in the effort to convey to you a basic understanding of the phenomenological approach to the psychology of consciousness and its reflections in the basic conceptions of a sociology of the life-world.

7. Concluding Remarks Summing up What did we cover? We started by choosing an inside approach to our subject matter in contrast to the traditionally prevailing outside approach. Thereby, we exercised a choice that is our privilege to make — not as sociologists or psychologists but as human beings. Scientific rules can neither prescribe nor proscribe this choice; it is prior to scientific work and remains outside its spheres. In opting for the inside approach, we affirm that it is needed for the treatment of the problems that interest us: we want to know what is going on in the consciousness of individuals when they experience the world in which they live — a world with its objects and events, and, most of all, with other human beings — and we want to know how they make sense of their experiences. These problems, again, are important to us insofar as we have acquired and/or deliberately adopted an image of Man that depicts human beings as being able to reason, to make choices, to pursue goals, and to adapt to or withstand external pressures. This image is the opposite of that put forward in the behaviourist approach, which sees human beings as stimulus-response biomechanisms, or of that put forward in a sociological neo-positivist approach, which depicts Man as a puppet animated by external social forces. Accordingly, the scientific problems those two approaches pose either ignore or deny the humanity of human beings. For us, the results of their labours are, in principle, not false but irrelevant.

208 CONCLUDING REMARKS

Within the vast realm of our overall topic, the decision to apply the inside approach leads us into two basic areas of investigation. In one direction, we enter the fields or a psychology of consciousness opening up into a full-fledged phenomenological psychology. In another direction, we are led to a sociology of understanding opening up into the sociology of the life-world. We may characterize the difference between the two in terms of the dichotomies of subjective-intersubjective and individual-social. But these are analytical distinctions, made for the logical consistency of the theories of two artificially separated disciplines. The phenomena of the life of consciousness and those of social relations do not appear in dichotomies; they present one and the same life. This discrepancy between phenomenological or sociological presentations and actual human life causes difficulties in the execution of our project. The concentration on artificially isolated "aspects" of life under study is dictated by the limitations of our power to reason. It brings the everpresent danger of taking aspects for the whole. This danger is reinforced by the general means of reasoning: language. Basically, language is adapted to serving practical purposes of everyday life; through it, we bring all phenomena of experience into a neat quasi-spatial order of thing-nouns and the relationships between them. Scientific and other rational concepts only increase the generalizing and typifying simplifications of everyday language, and convert the complex uniqueness of phenomena into a quasi-simple category within a "natural" system of classification. While these gross simplifications work — one way or other — when dealing with external matters, they become completely misleading when applied to matters of human consciousness and inner experiences. Bergson showed that we face a paradox when we try to speak about the phenomena of consciousness. Our expositions of Bergson's notions of inner duration and memory, of James's notions of the stream of consciousness and its fringes, of Husserl's notions of intentionality and horizons — all demonstrated how these thinkers dealt with this paradox as best they could. They have in common a tenacious insistence on placing the experiencing and reflecting I into the centre of their considerations. Admitting the irrefutable correctness of this starting

point, we found ourselves face-to-face with another arti- 209 ficially created paradox: the problem of the transition from SUMMING the I to the We, from subjectivity to intersubjectivity. Fol- UP lowing Schutz, we did not occupy ourselves with this problem directly. Rather, we started anew from a social baseline. Phenomenologically, we began now with the experience of the We; socially, we focused on shared experiences within social situations shared with us by others. Here, the dominating theme became that of reciprocal understanding and face-to-face interaction, mediated by the typifications of things, persons, relations, forms of conduct, patterns of actions and interactions. Such typifications prevail in everyday life; they are substantial ingredients of common sense thinking. Husserl named the whole sphere of daily life and experience the life-world. When Schutz adopted this term, he had already developed a large array of characteristics of this fundamental area of human life. It is a life in "full awakeness" yet based on the dominant inclination to take for granted what is experienced. Sociologically, both the restart on the basis of intersubjective experiences and relations and the recognition of the life-world as the foundation of all social life called for a new sociological approach. In it, key concepts would be: meanings with which individuals endow their experiences, understanding of the motives from which and for which persons move, act, and interact within their given social spheres. We found that Max Weber had sketched the outlines of such an approach, and we saw how Schutz "radicalized it"—that is, made it consistent — and built it up to a sociology of the life-world. He achieved this by making the best use of phenomenological insights he had gained from Husserl, from Bergson, and from James, and of further enhancements drawn from the sociological works of Simmel and Scheler on the one hand, and various American sociologists and social psychologists on the other (so Cooley, Thomas, Mead). We rounded out our explorations with forays into two further thematic areas. While we had faced the life-world as the Present of the persons now involved in it — a Present coinfluenced by their past lives and experiences — we now turned towards another unique feature of their existence: their living towards the future in form of plans and projects

210 CONCLUDING REMARKS

of all kinds and descriptions, up to plans for life. This done, we returned to the ongoing flow of human life in order to deal with the astonishing multi-dimensionality of human experiences, with James's orders of reality and, mainly, with Schutz's finite provinces of meaning. This offered us the opportunity to confirm the most crucial conclusions suggested by Husserl and concretely pursued by Schutz: the life-world, especially in its most pragmatic form of a world of working, is the unshakable and irreducible ground of all human life, the original foundation of all human experiences, and the root-soil of all other finite provinces of meaning. There being no exceptions, the sciences are included, and notably for us, the areas of investigations that we name sociology, psychology, and phenomenology.

What to study now No introduction to any serious topic would be complete without a final section on further readings. Such readings, provided a book has served its introductory purpose, may be called advanced readings. In the present case, I should be fully satisfied if I could say: we have completed the first loop of the spiral around our subject matter; it is up to you whether or not to continue on the second one. However, this would be incorrect on two counts. One, my own loop has not been traversed without gaps. Thus, I refrained from discussing the quite important topic of a sociology of knowledge. If you wish to close this gap, you will find excellent guidance in Berger and Luckmann's Social Construction of Reality. Two, there is no reason why you should simply follow the outline of this book a second time around, although it is not forbidden either. In other words, no cut-and-dried methods, no sure-fire prescriptions can be offered for the advanced study of our overall theme. You are best advised when following your given substantive interests. If you have no strong preferences in specific directions, you may follow the advice of Goethe: "Simply reach into the fullness of human life; wherever you get hold of it, it will be interesting." The same, I suggest, applies to the substantive areas that I have tried to illuminate with the help of the phenomenological approach. The latter, after all, is meant to serve as a guide to

the fullness of human life, from which it issued and to 211 which it should lead you back. WHAT TO STUDY Nevertheless, the second list appended to this book con- NOW tains a number of items that could be called aids for further study. This annotated list of further readings is necessarily arbitrary; the readings might be studied in any sequence. But, most of all, they should not prevent anybody from consulting other books and articles simply because they have not been named here. The list of recommended readings also serves as a bibliography for the present book.

Appendices I. Major figures in the development of the phenomenological approach: a chronological table In the text, I have paid little attention to the chronology of the appearance of main contributions to the phenomenological approach and its social-scientific applications. In this list, I offer a skeleton of a historical perspective: the first column gives the dates of the appearances of the first main publications of the authors named in the central column. This central column also contains the title of the work in question in the original language and if necessary, in translation, a short characterization of the author's most general contribution, and the country of his origin, addended by the names of other countries if he did an essential part of his work there. The third column contains the dates of the authors. The thinkers who appear in this table are ordered according to the year of publication of the first major contribution rather than by year of birth. It should be understood that for this list I selected only thinkers who are important for the development of the topics I have covered in this book. Using this criterion for including any thinker, I neither automatically claim him for phenomenology nor assert that the publication I have mentioned and the key-words I have given for his contribution are necessarily representative of his work as a whole.

1874

1889

1890

1902

1913

BRENTANO, Franz/ Germany, Austria Psychologie Psychologic vom empirischen Standpunkt (Psychology from the empirical point of view) Intentionality of consciousness. Main teacher of Husserl.

1838-1917

BERGSON, Henri/ France Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience (Essay on what is immediately given in consciousness) Inner duration, memory. Corresponded with William James.

1859-1938

JAMES, William/ U.S.A. The Principles of Psychology (2 vols.) Stream of consciousness. Teacher of George H. Mead.

1842-1910

COOLEY, Charles Horton/ U.S.A. Human Nature and the Social Order Face-to-face relationship, lookingglass self, primary group.

1864-1929

HUSSERL, Edmund/ Austria, Germany Ideen zu einer reinen Phaenomenologie und phaenomenologischen Philosophie (Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einfuehrung in die reine Phaenomenologie) * (Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology) Phenomenological method. Teacher of Dorion Cairns, Aron Gurwitsch, Eugen Fink, and (unofficially) Alfred Schutz.

1859-1938

In terms of the whole body of philosophy of Husserl, the selection of Ideas I as his first main work is not justified. Historically, his first main works were the Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) in two volumes (1900-1901). I have chosen the work of 1913 as that which offers Husserl's first comprehensive approach to the phenomenology of consciousness, the main concern of the present book.

213 MAJOR FIGURES

214 APPENDIX

APPENDIX I

I

1913 1913

1922 1922

1927 1927

1932 1932

1933 1933

1934 1934

1940 1940

1940 1940

WEBER, Max/ Germany "Ueber einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie" ("Concerning some categories of the sociology of understanding") Sociology of understanding.

1864-1920

DEWEY, John/ United States Human Nature and Conduct Pragmatic theory of human conduct and action.

1859-1952

H E I D E G G E R , Martin/ Germany Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) The most influential version of existential philosophy.

1889-1976

SCHUTZ, Alfred/ Austria, U.S.A. Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (The meaningful construction of the social world) Sociology of the life-world. Teacher of Maurice Natanson.

1899-1959

F I N K , Eugen/ Germany "Die phaenomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwaertigen Kritik" ("The phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl in contemporary criticism")

1905-1975

MEAD, George Herbert/ U.S.A. Mind, Self, and Society The I and the Me, the generalized other. Inspired the movement of social interactionism.

1863-1931

CAIRNS, Dorion/ U.S.A. "An Approach to Phenomenology" Most outstanding and original American student of Husserl.

1901-1972

GURWITSCH, Aron/ Germany, France, U.S.A. "On the Intentionality of Consciousness"

1901-1973

The field of consciousness (a synthesis between Gestalt theory and phenomenology).

1945

1956

1957

1967

215 RECOMMENDED READINGS

M E R L E A U - P O N T Y , Maurice/ France Phenomenologie de la perception (Phenomenology of perception) Phenomenological theory of perception and consciousness.

1908-1961

G O F F M A N , Erving/ U.S.A. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life A phenomenal theory of manipulation.

1922-1982

N A T A N S O N , Maurice/ U.S.A. The Social Dynamics of George H. Mead The foremost student of Schutz. An outstanding phenomenologist philosopher.

1924-

G A R F I N K E L , Harold/ U.S.A. Ethnomethodology His point of departure was Schutz. Originator of the ethnomethodological approach.

1920(?)-

II. Readings recommendedfor parallel study and reference Complementary texts Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday, 1966. This excellent and well-written study covers a highly relevant topic not treated in my own expositions. Wagner, Helmut R., ed. Alfred Schutz on Phenomenology and Social Relations. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970. This is a fair selection from Schutz's writings, offered in systematic order. Readers should carefully peruse the editor's introduction before turning to the texts.

216 APPENDIX II

Publications of Alfred Schutz 1962 Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality 1964 Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory 1966 Collected Papers III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy The Hague: Nijhoff. (Titles in text are abbreviated as CP I, CP II, CP III.) These three volumes contain the essential essays and papers the author wrote and published in the United States. Of these, the following are called to the particular attention of the reader. The year given in front of the title is the year of its original publication. 1941 "William James' Concept of the Stream of Thought Phenomenologically Interpreted." CP III: 1-14 1944 "The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology." CP II: 91-105 1945a "The Homecomer." CP II: 106-118 1945C "On Multiple Realities." CP I: 207-259 1951 "Making Music Together: A Study of Social Relationships." CP II: 159-178 1953 "Common Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action." CP I :3–47 1966 "Some Structures of the Life-World." CP III: 116-132 1967 "The Statement of our Problem: Max Weber's Basic Methodological Concepts." In Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. This is the first part of Schutz's Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (1932) in translation. It contains his basic critique of Weber's conceptualization of the sociology of understanding. 1970 Reflections on the Problem of Relevance. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. An extensive (not quite finished) study of relevance, written 1950-1953. 1976 "Subjective Action and Objective Interpretation." The Annals of Phenomenological Sociology I : 34–46. A selection of pertinent passages from Schutz's essay on Parsons (published in full in 1978 as The Theory of Social Action).

Additional readings to selected topics Berger, Peter. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963. A very readable discussion of the field of sociology, written by

a former student of Schutz and enlightened by his approach. Especially noteworthy, after the first two chapters, are the chapters on: "Man in Society," "Society in Man," and "Society as Drama." Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will. London: Allen and Unwin, 1910. Particularly noteworthy is the second chapter, "The Multiplicity of Conscious States," but other chapters warrant attention. . Matter and Memory. London: Allen and Unwin, 1911. Crucial are: chapter 2, "Recognition of Images" and chapter 3, "Survival of Images." The two volumes cited here contain all essential ideas of Bergson's psychology of consciousness. Cairns, Dorion. "An Approach to Phenomenology." In Marvin Farber, ed., Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940. A philosophical introduction to phenomenology by an American student of Husserl. Not easy reading. Cooley, Charles Horton. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner's, 1902. Of interest are the two chapters on "The Social Self." They must be read critically and against the background of the time in which they were written. Cooley was not immune to the influence of Darwinist ideas, and he freely followed unsubstantiated notions, such as that of "primary ideals." Nevertheless, the core passage of chapter 5, expressing his idea of the looking-glass self (pp. 151-153) is particularly fruitful. So is his notion of the vantage point (chapter 4, p. 117). . Social Organization. New York: Scribner's, 1909. Chapter 3, "Primary Groups" (pp. 23-31) contains Cooley's most pertinent contribution to sociology and social psychologyDewey, John. Human Nature and Conduct. New York: Holt, 1922. Part I, section 1-4; Part II, section 7; Part III, sections 1-6 demand particular attention. The book is a most pertinent contribution to the conception of the "world of working," as Schutz called it later. Dewey's pragmatic theory of social action and conduct, as developed here, deserves careful study. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959. In my book, this is by far the best work of the Canadian-born author, who has presented here a still unsurpassed study of the management of impressions in face-to-face encounters, a form of not uncommon manipulation. He illuminates an as-

217 RECOMMENDED READINGS

218 APPENDIX II

pect of interaction not treated by Schutz in his consideration of We-relations (which nevertheless remains the basic constellation of all sociality). Gurwitsch, Aron. "The Common-Sense World as Social Reality: A Discourse on Alfred Schutz." In Social Research 29 (1962): 50-72. . "Problem of the Life-World." In Maurice Natanson, ed., Phenomenology and Social Reality: Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970. Both essays, written by Schutz's closest intellectual friend, dwell on the basic conception of the life-world. See especially pp. 35-61 of "Problem of the Life-World." James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. I and II. New York: Holt, 1890. The crucial sections are: "The Stream of Thought" (I: 224-290), "The Consciousness of Self" (I: 291-401), and "The Perception of Reality" (II: 283-324). The bulk of this lengthy treatise on psychology, written at the end of the eighties of the last century, is outdated. Yet, if we scan other chapters, we shall find other insights of interest. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy. First book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, Fred Kersten, trans. The Hague: Nijoff, 1982. Concentrate on chapter 3, "The Thesis of the Natural Standpoint and its Suspension" — a vital point in the development of Husserl's phenomenology. A student edition is in preparation. Luckmann, Thomas. "The Constitution of Language in the World of Everyday Life." In Lester E. Embree, ed., Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aron Gunuitsch. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972. This outline of a phenomenologically inspired theory of language, by an outstanding student of Schutz, is the best introduction available to the whole area of socio-linguistics. See especially pp. 469-488. Machlup, Fritz. "If Matter Could Talk." In Methodology of Economics and Other Social Sciences. New York: Academic Press, 1978. This essay, written by a well-known economist and close friend of Schutz, is a cogent argument for the recognition of the basic difference between the natural and the social sciences and against the obfuscation of the issue by logical positivists.

Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.

Of main interest are: Part 1, sections 2-3; Part 2, sections 9-11, Part 3, sections 1-6. Next to James and Dewey, Mead is the foremost American thinker whose work has advanced the approach that forms the basis for a phenomenologically oriented sociology of the life-world. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology and Perception. London, 1962. . The Primacy of Perception. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. The first title represents the most important contribution to phenomenology. The second book is an essay collection; the first four essays are directly related to phenomenological psychology. . Consciousness and the Aquisition of Language. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. The main part of this book consists of condensed transcripts of a course the author offered at the Sorbonne. It, too, was based on the phenomenological method. Natanson, Maurice. The Social Dynamics of George H. Mead. Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1956. A thorough and convincing study of the relationship between Mead's social psychology and phenomenology. . The Journeying Self: A Study in Philosophy and Social Role. Reading, Pa.: Addison Wesley, 1970. In this study, Natanson deals with the Self and Other selves, the sociality of interaction and role playing (typification), and ventures into some provinces of meaning (science, history, art, and religion). The value of the volume is greatly enhanced by a very extensive bibliography, and most of all by an appendix of many notes, which offers substantive guides to further literature, quotations, and interpretations of multiple points. . Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. A book for those who wish to occupy themselves seriously with the broader ranges of Husserl's philosophical work. While not written as an 'introduction' to Husserl, this study should simplify the difficult task of coming to grips with Husserl's own writings. Psathas, George and Frances C. Waksler. "Essential Features of Face-to-Face Interaction." In George Psathas, Phenomenological Sociology: Issues and Applications. New York: Wiley, 1973.

219 RECOMMENDED

READINGS

220 APPENDIX II

A quite systematic presentation of face-to-face relations on the basis of the works of Schutz and Goffman. Spiegelberg, Herbert. "What William James knew about Edmund Husserl: On the Credibility of Pitkin's Testimony." In Lester E. Embree, Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aron Gurwitsch. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972. This title is included here for the sake of those who have heard that James rejected Husserl and his phenomenology outright. The author, the competent historian of the phenomenological movement, offers the necessary background evidence for putting this rejection in perspective: James's negative reaction was based on information fed to him by one of his students (Pitkin), and solely concerned Husserl's Logic. However, the reaction was not based on a first-hand acquaintance with this or any of the later works of Husserl. Wagner, Helmut R. "Phenomenology and Contemporary Sociological Theory: The Contribution of Alfred Schutz." Sociological Focus 2 (1969): 73-86. . "The Scope of Phenomenological Sociology: Considerations and Suggestions." In George Psathas, ed., Phenomenological Sociology: Issues and Applications. New York: Wiley, 1973. . "Signs, Symbols, and Interaction Theory." Sociological Focus 7 (1974): 101-111. . "The Influence of German Phenomenology on American Sociology." Annals of Phenomenological Sociology 2 (1976): 1-29. . "Intersubjectivity: Transcendental Problem or Sociological Conception." The Review of Sociological Theory 4 (1977a): 13-31. . "Between Ideal Type and Surrender: Field Research as Assymetrical Relation." Human Studies 1 (1977b): 153-164. These essays stress various aspects of the intellectual inheritance Schutz left to his successors, point to some of the unfinished tasks, and indicate directions in which his work may be continued. Weber, Max. The Theory of Social and Economic Organizaton, A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, trans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947. Of prime interest is the first chapter on "The Fundamental Concepts of Sociology" up to the end of the fourth section (pp. 87-123). The translation is not completely reliable.

Index of Names Bergson, Henri, 10, 26ff., 34, 43f., 57, 80, 126, 167, 172, 208, 213 Brentano, Franz, 10, 38, 56, 213, Cairns, Dorion, 46-47 n., 214 Clay, E.R., 35 Cooley, Charles Horton, 64, 77ff., 88, 94, 99, 116, 118, 188, 209, 213 Dewey, John, 104ff., 180, 214 Durkheim, Emile, 62, 146 Fink, Eugen, 214 Freud Sigmund, 186 f. Garfinkel, Harold, 215 Geertz, Clifford, 158 Goffman, Erving, 215 Gurwitsch, Aron, 110 n., 111, 120, 214 Heidegger, Martin, 106, 124 Husserl, Edmund, 10, 33, 36, 38, 41, 44, 48, 67, 85, 105ff., 109, 112, 125f., 135, 167f., 172f., 178f., 204, 208f., 213 James, William, 10, 27f., 3off., 35, 37, 43, 45, 47ff., 75, 103f., 126, 138, 161,

I76ff., 208, 213 Kaufmann, Felix, 204 n. Kierkegaard, Soren, 193f.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 126 Mead, George Herbert, 79ff., 182, 189 n., 209, 214 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 215 Natanson, Maurice, 167, 215 Parsons, Talcott, 13, 121f. Scheler, Max, 38, 38 n., 109, 111f., 166, 209 Schutz, Alfred, 7, 15f., 44f., 61, 65, 68f., 81, 85ff., 95, 103f., 109ff., 116, 119ff., 129ff., 135f., 139ff., 149, 154f., 159f., 162, 167ff., 179ff., 184ff., 196ff., 204ff., 209f., 214 Simmel, Georg, 82, 209 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 86 n., 191 Sumner, William Graham, 62, 189 Thomas, William I., 61, 209 Watson, John B., 11f. Weber, Max, 103, 115, 117, 120 ff., 127ff., 140ff., 149f., 152, 154, 156, 159, 170f., 209, 214 Whyte, William F., 158 Wolff, Kurt H., 134 n.

Index of Subjects Act, 56; working, 182 Action, 113; concept of rational, 128; by Dewey, 104,105; as execution of plans, 162; negative social, 115; projected, 117; as projecting, 159; social, 113-115 Actor: ideal-typical, 123; social, 84, 113-114 Alter ego, 87; general thesis of, 86-87 Anomie, 146-147 Apperception, 53-54 Artistic creation, 196, 197 Attention, 57-58 Avocation, 169 Avocational commitment, 165; interest, 164 Behaviourism, 11-15 Belief, 176-177 Bergson's paradox, 26-27, 33, 67, 205 Biographically determined situation, 169 Book as merchandise, 163, 189; as physical object, 163, 189; as vehicle of content, 163, 189 Causality, 145-146 Cogitation: theoretical, 197-198 Cognitive style of paramount reality, 181 Compartmentalization, 162

Communication, 80, 184; paradox of, 205 Community: of life, 111-112; of phenomenological scholars, 50 Compulsion of social rules, 63 Consciousness: genesis of, 20; by James, 30-33; stream of, 30; time dimensions of, 35 Constitution of object in consciousness, 191 Co-subjectivity, 85-86 Contingency and (social) causality, 150 Conversation of gestures, 8o-81 Data, 46; confirmation of in phenomenology, 46-49; phenomenological-psychological, 45-46

Datum: phenomenological, 42, 46 Death as phenomenon of life-world, 173-174, 175 Definition: common, 137; cultural, 137; of situation, 61-62 Dialogue, 87-88, 204 Dream, 185-188 Duration by Bergson, 26-30; inner, 29; pure, 29-30 Ego, solitary, 74 Ego-centred experience, 66

Ego-centricity of perception, 94 Eidetic reducation and social sciences, 132 n. Eidetics, 43 n. Empirical investigation in sociology, 134 Evidence: empathetic, 141, 142; rational, 140-141 Experience, 176; areas of, 176; inner, 29; pre-predicative, 36, 85; present, 37; sensory, 52, 54 Explanation, typical, 143 Face-to-face: encounter, 119; interaction, 91, 116; relationship, 79, 88; situation, 89 Fairy tales, 189 Fantasy, 185, 189 Field of consciousness, 67 Field Work, 183-184; and werelationship, 158 Fragmentation of daily life, 161 Friendship, 119 Fringes of consciousness, 32, 34, 66 Fundamental anxiety, 174, 175; despair, 174-175 Future as expectation, 36 Gearing into outer world, 182 Gestalt, 52; approach, 52-53; perception, 54 Gestures: significant, 81; verbal, 81 Growing old(er) together, 88, 91

Image of Man, 16, 165 Imaginary playmates, 138 Information, cultural limits of, 157; reliability of, 156-157; withheld, 157 Intentionality, 56, 57, 67 Interaction, 84; indirect, 116-117; situational, 117; social, 115-116 Interest, 58,67 Interpretation, 142; ego-centric, 93; socio-centered, 93 Interrelationship: continuous, 118; personal, 118 Intersubjectivity, 84-88; problem of, 85 Interviewing as interactional situation, 157-158 Introspection, 33, 37 Introspective glance, 33; method, 47 James's paradox, 33 Judgments: aesthetic, 107; emotional, 106-107 Knowledge: empirical-sociological, 133; phenomenological, 41; Scheler's three types, 38

Habits by Dewey, 104 Home world, 118 Horizons of human experience, 66-67; inner, 67; outer, 67, 184; shifting, 184 Human nature, 78

Language, 20, 21-26; as cognitive vehicle, 25; living, 21-22, 23; in relational context, 24-25; spoken, 22, 25-26; symbolic, 23; written, 22 Language-in-use, 24 Life plan: of Husserl, 167-168; intellectual, 164; of Schutz, 167, 168-169, 170-172 Life-world, 109-111 Listener and speaker, 87-88 Looking-glass self, 79

I, 82, 83; and me, 83 Idealizations of daily life by Husserl and by Schutz, 172-173 Ideal Type, construction of, 122, 131-132; as sociological method, 127, 129; as sociological theory, 135 Ideal types, kinds of, 129-130; by Weber and by Schutz, 129-133

Manipulatory area, 182 Meaning of action, 122; average or approximative, 122-123; idealtypical construction of, 123; meant by the actor, 122 Memory, 34, 36 Method, 40 Motivation, 58-60

223 INDEX OF SUBJECTS


Motive: abnormal, 153-154; because, 58-59, 154-156, 170; imputed to actors, 151-152; in-order-to, 58, 150; pretended, 152; psychiatric, 59-60; repressed, 152-153 Naming as classificatory typification, 136

Predictability: as criteria of science, 144, 145; according to social scientists, 144-147 Prediction: causal, 145-146; as postdiction, 147; statistical, 146 Present, 34, 35-36; specious, 35; vivid, 88 Project: career, 163-164; long range, 64

Observation, scientific and everyday life, 99-101 Observer, sociologist as, 131 Opinion, 46 Other, generalized, 82, 189; given in everyday experience, 85 Outside approach in science and language, 28; perspective, 97-98, 101-102 Outside and inside, 27 Paramount reality by James, 180; by Schutz, 180-181, 192 Partner, 89, 90, 97 Pedagogical transformation of knowledge, 202 Penumbra of consciousness, 32 Perception, 51 Performance, 162, 182 Phenomenological exposition, 45; knowledge, 46; method, 40-44; reduction, 42 Phenomenological-psychological approach, 92 Phenomenology, 6, 8-9, 10, 11, 17, 19, 40-41; of consciousness, 105, 176; eidetic, 42-43; observational accounts in, 49-50; subject matter of, 9; transcendental, 43 n., 44 Philosophers as theorists, 199 Philosophizing together, 204; miracle of, 206 Planning, 162; for future, 159; for life, 164; long-range, 160 Play, 188 Playing at, 82 Potentialities: of awareness, 68; empty, 108; of surroundings, 107 Power, 114-115 Pragmatism of everyday life, 103

Protention, 36 Provinces of meaning, 180-181, 205-206; boundaries of, 190-191; enclaves in, 196; modes of transition between, 191, 193, 195 Psychologist's fallacy, 39 Psychology, of consciousness, 9; eidetic, 42, 44; phenomenal, 9, 44; phenomenological, 9-10, 19-20 Purpose determines action, 150 Rationalization, 60 Reach: actual, 183; attainable, 183; common, 184; potential, 183 Reality, 177; and ego, 178-179; nonparamount, 185; orders of, 178; paramount, 180, 182 Reasons: "real," 156 Recipes for practical conduct, 62 Reciprocity: of intentions, 115; of perspectives; 94-97 Reduction: eidetic, 42; phenomenological, 42; transcendental, 44 Relationship-in-action, 117 Relevance, 68-71; types of, 68-71 Retention, 36 Retrospection, 33-34 Role acting, 161; playing, 161; taking role of the other, 188-189 Scholarly commitment, 169 Scholarship as avocation, 166-167 Schutz's commitment, 170; objectives, 125-126; phenomenology, 44-45, 126; sociological radicalism, 125-126; Weber critique, 124-125 Science: and daily life, 197; as

province of meaning, 197; as public undertaking, 198-199 Scientific division of labor, 198 Self: consciousness of, 82; by Cooley, 77-79; genesis of, 79, 82; by James, 75-77; by Mead, 79-84; personal, 30; recognition as paradox, 77; working, 182 Situation: definition of, 61; not predefined, 63-64; pre-defined, 61-62; social, 93 Social actor, 84

Social Relationship, 89 Social scientist as theorist, 199 Social self, 74-75, 78, 84 Sociologist as his own source, 131 Sociology: of life-world, 206; of understanding and interpretation, 142; of Weber, 121, 149, 150 Solipsism, 39 Solipsist dead end, 18-19 Speaker and listener, 87 Stance, 102; cognitive, 102-103; natural, 103, 105-107; phenomenological, 42; pragmatic, 103-105; scientific, 100; transition from natural to scientific, 197 Stream of consciousness, 30 Subjective meaning: getting at, 156-158 Substantive and transitive parts of consciousness, 31-32, 34 Sub-universes, 177 Surrender and catch, 134, 135, 135 n. Sympathy, 78 Theorizing: paradoxical situation of, 200, 204; public, 201-202; sociality of, 200, 204; in solitude, 200 Theory, 46 Thing, external, 31 Thinker, in full humanity, 206 Thinking, scientific, 197 Thomas theorem, 61, 153 Thou-orientation, 85-87 Time, calendar and clock, 35; experience of, 35; inner, 26; outer,

28-29; subjective, 35 Tuned in, 90-91 Turning-in relationship, 91 Typification: from everyday experience, 139-140; in everyday life, 135-140; of individual persons, 138, 148; open, 137; with personal meaning, 136-137; of self, 138-139; of social (role) figures, 138; sociological from everyday life, 140; in vernacular, 136 Understanding, 140; actual, 141; as causal explanation, 149-150; explanatory, 141; interpretative, 141; motivational, 142-143; of social action, 140-141 Vantage point, 64-66 Vehicle: of meaning, 184; sensory, 55; word as, 24 Weber's break-through in sociology, 125 Weber and Schutz, 171 We-constellation, 148 We-relationship, 88-92; interactive, 90 Will by Dewey, 104 Witnessing, 90 Words as vehicles of meaning, 24 Work, 132; collective, 184 Working, 162; of scientists, 198 World: of daydreams, 187; of dreams, 185-187; everyday, 106; of fantasy, 185, 190; of Here and Now, 72; of phenomenologists, 71-73; as predictable, 108; relativenatural aspect of, 112; as one whole, 72; of working, 181-184 Worlds of experience, 72 Writer, 189; literary, 196 Zones: out of reach, 107; within reach, 184


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