Abstract
Relevance (or relevancy) is used from the beginning to the end of Schutz’s research and a convergent notion is independently advocated by his friend Aron Gurwitsch. Thematic-relevance and ego-relevance can thus be spoken of and study of the analyses offered by the two friends shows that they are not only compatible but complementary.
Embedded citations refer to works of Schutz that are listed at the end of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1890), Vol. I, p. 286.
- 2.
Aron Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, ed. Fred Kersten, The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch (1901–1973) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 193–318. Hereafter: Studies.
- 3.
Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964), p. 342. Hereafter: Field.
- 4.
Because functional characters like other noematic constituents are ideal entities or “meanings” in the broad sense, it is understandable that they be mistaken for significations or meanings in the narrow sense. Besides “functional characters,” or, as I would prefer to call them in technical phenomenological terms, “praxothetic statuses,” there are the characters objects have as correlates of emotion and belief, i.e. “pathothetic” and “doxothetic” statuses. A cultural object would include the habitually constituted thetic statuses of all three sorts, although in a practical attitude the praxothetic predominates just as the doxothetic predominates in the theoretical attitude and the pathothetic predominates in the aesthetic attitude. Gurwitsch has suggested that the practical attitude of normal western adults, primitives, aphasiacs, infants, and the higher animals have something in common where functional objects are concerned (1974:171 n., cf. 1966:51 ff.). Let me add that in The Field of Consciousness the word perception has a broad signification perhaps equivalent to “cultural perception,” while in later essays (cf. the world of perception, in a narrower sense, is something beyond the cultural world and reached through an abstraction. While the natural scientist is concerned with objects of perception in the narrow sense, the human scientist abides by cultural objects.
- 5.
(Studies 327, 50) It is possible that the change in behavior be significant in the strict sense, i.e. carry a meaning for someone prepared to understand it. But that would be something founded upon and different from the thing perceived. A gait as such is a perceptual structure as much as a melody is.
- 6.
Maurice Natanson has extended the explicitly Schutzian and, for us, now, implicitly Gurwitschian line of analysis in these terms to the past in “History as a Finite Province of Meaning,” in his Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962).
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Works of Schutz
Works of Schutz
Note: Unless done otherwise, the following works will be cited with the embedded abbreviations as listed down the left margin below, plus the page number(s).
I = Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I, The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962).
II = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. II, Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Broedresen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964).
III = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. III, Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. Ilse Schutz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).
IV = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. IV, ed. Helmut Wagner, George Psathas, and Fred Kersten, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996).
V = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. V, Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, ed. Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011).
VI = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. VI, Literary Reality and Relationships, ed. Michael Barber (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013).
PSW = ––, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967).
PP = –––––, “Positivistic Philosophy and the Actual Approach of Interpretive Social Science: An Ineditum from Spring 1953,” Husserl Studies, Vol. 14 (1998): 123–149. Reprinted in Dermot Moran and Lester Embree, eds., Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, 5 vols. London: Routledge, 2004, III, pp. 119–145. Also available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/t52u22v305u28g04/
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Embree, L. (2015). Everyday Relevancy in Gurwitsch and Schutz. In: The Schutzian Theory of the Cultural Sciences. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 78. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13653-0_12
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