Abstract
As a point of departure, I propose to focus here on the lived patterns in terms of which the things, living entities, and events I encounter are placed within the scope of my immediate experience. It would be impossible to overemphasize the fact that the structural approach I am about to adopt is not purely formal in nature. No matter how insistent I may be in bringing out the organizational dimensions of the world, such will necessarily appear, to some degree or other, to be determined by contributions made by the contentual aspects of experience, just as elsewhere it was found that placing emphasis on the contents of the world did not exclude but required some attention to matters of pattern and organization.1 With such admonitions in mind, I may now safely attempt to enter into the analysis of the structural features of the life-world.
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Notes
Cf. my paper, “Of Bearings in the Lifeworld,” Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch, ed. L. Embree (Washington, D.C.: The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and The University Press of America, 1983), where I have concerned myself with the basic contents of the life-world and their guiding role in our lives.
Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch in E. Husserl, Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, Husserliana, 1976), III-1, ed. by K. Schuhmann, § 27 (henceforth I shall refer to this work as Ideen I), and Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 52 (henceforth I shall refer to this version as Ideas I).
Ibid., p. 51.
Here I may pass over the questions involved in the constitution of things as opposed to that of animals and men, as well as those pertaining to the constitution of men as opposed to that of animals and of myself against others. It is not that such problems and accounts are unimportant and inconsequential. Quite the contrary; but I am not primarily concerned here with matters of content or with the problems of intersubjectivity (cf. E. Husserl, Ideen II in Gesammelte Werke, Husserliana, 1952, IV, ed. W. Biemel, iv; Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960, §§ 42 ff.). In fact, I am operating here under the guidance of what I may call “individual-systematic” abstraction (cf. Alfred Schutz, Reflections on the Problem of Relevance, ed. R. M. Zaner; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970, pp. 74, 134, and 154; henceforth I shall refer to this work as Reflections). My purpose is to focus on the dimension of organization and orderliness, insofar as such is immediately available in my spontaneous dealings with my surroundings.
Ideas I, p. 51.
Ibid. Cf. p. 53.
Ibid., p. 52.
Ibid., p. 53.
Ibid. Cf. §§ 39 and 152. This mutuality is so fundamental and intimate that it suggests a conflation, indeed a reciprocal tingeing and undividedness between them, speaking both noematically and noetically.
Cf. Ideas I, p. 53.
Cf. A. Schutz, “Multiple Realities” (henceforth referred to as MR) in Collected Papers, I, ed. M. Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), pp. 229 ff. (Henceforth I shall refer to this volume as CP I).
Yves Simon, Introduction à l’ontologie du connaître (Louvain: Desclée de Brouwer, 1934), pp. 11–12; cf. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value, trans. M. S. Frings and R. L. Fink (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 197–98;
Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 233–35; per contra, see Ideen I, §§ 37, 95, 116, and 130.
Cf. A. Schutz, MR, pp. 208–209, especially for the concept of practical interest or pragmatic motive.
Reflections, p. 67.
Cf. Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964), pp. 110 ff., 320 ff., and 356 ff. (Henceforth I shall refer to this work as FC.) Vide also E. Rubin, Visuell wahrgenommene Figuren (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, Nordisk, 1921), I, §§ 4 ff.;
K. Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1935), chapter 5;
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 9 ff. and 378 f.; A. Schutz, Reflections, p. 67. To all intents and purposes, Gurwitsch’s terminology seems to be more exacting and comprehensive. He means by “margin” the indeterminate zone of things and events which coincides with the sector of the “unlimited” (Ideas I, p. 52) to the extent and only to the extent that the latter comprises contents which are materially irrelevant to the topic. Again we come across the intimate nexus of the material and the formal in the given. The margin is that set of contents related to the theme-field core of the experienced only by way of simultaneity. Cf. A. Gurwitsch, FC, p. 353.
Cf. A. Gurwitsch, FC, pp. 131 ff., 237, and 352, especially for the notion of Gestalt coherence and its application to the nexus between theme and inner horizon. Vide also Ideen I, p. 80.
Cf. A. Gurwitsch, FC, p. 369; E. Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. L. Landgrebe, 2nd. ed. (Hamburg: Gkassen and Goverts, 1954), pp. 28 ff.
Cf. A. Gurwitsch, FC, pp. 352–53 and 354–58 for the application of the notion of unity of relevance or context to the nexus formed by theme and field, as opposed to the situation verified within the theme itself between kernel of meaning and inner horizon.
Cf. my paper, “Of Bearings in the Lifeworld,” p. 181.
E. Husserl, Ideas I, p. 52.
Ibid.
Ibid. It is worth noting that the line of division between the contiguous “circles” is not hard and fast, as the notion of “reaching-into” clearly suggests.
Ibid.
I do not mean here inner time but time as immediately lived in worldly events and belonging to their flow. Just as I may distinguish the space of immediate experience from that of the geometries or the sciences of Nature, I would like to “separate” lived time from both inner (qualitative) time and measured time (whether in the world of science or at the level of everydayness). It is recognized, of course, that there is a difference in kind between inner and measured times (whether the latter is of events in the world or of those in the subject). Cf. A. Schutz, MR, p. 215 and especially p. 222: “[Standard time] is an intersection of cosmic time and inner time… [or, more exactly, that aspect of inner time] in which the wide-awake man experiences his worldly acts as events within his stream of consciousness. Because… [it] partakes of cosmic time, it is measurable by our clock and calendars. Because it coincides with our inner sense of time in which we experience our worldly acts, if — and only if — we are wide-awake, it governs the system of our plans under which we subsume our projects, such as plans for life, work and leisure. Because it is common to all of us, standard time makes an intersubjective coordination of the different plan systems possible. Thus, to the natural attitude,… [it] is in the same sense the universal temporal structure of the intersubjective world of everyday life within the natural attitude, in which the earth is its universal spatial structure that embraces the spatial environments of each of us.”
For a now classical critique of this tradition, cf. Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, chapter 2 in Oeuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), pp. 51 ff. Cf. also Matière et mémoire, chapters 1 and 4 (Oeuvres, pp. 169 ff. and 324 ff.); Durée et simultanéité, chapters 3–5 in Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), pp. 97–212.
Say, a two-or three-dimensional geometrical or conceptualized space of one kind or another.
That is, the life-world as an open-ended spatio-temporal context given pre-predicatively.
Everyday expressions, such as “to take place”, “avoir lieu”, “tener lugar”, “statt haben”, etc., point to the fact that space and time are distinct but indissoluble dimensions of one world, as indicated by the conjunction of activity (time) and location (space). In this light, to occur (or to be real) in the life-world means at least to be perceived as having a systematic placement in lived space-time.
Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961), A 108–109, 117 n., 129; B 133–40. Cf. H. J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), I, p. 386.
What I am talking about are those rules which govern spontaneous constitution, and not the conceptual rules that arise from some form of reflection or other. The possibility of the former may be gathered in Husserl’s discussion of the concentric structure of the spatiality of the life-world, and the various sorts of relations obtaining between the zones of the world which are determined through such a discussion. It may also be appreciated in terms of the possible consequences and correlates that such an analysis could uncover for lived temporality, and which perhaps can be derived from Husserl’s examination of inner time if mediated by the notion of intentionality. Cf. E. Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal and Time-Consciousness, ed. M. Heidegger and trans. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964).
Cf. I. Kant, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis, §§ 7–8 in I. Kant, Sämtliche Werke, ed. E. Cassirer, II, p. 411, as referred to in Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. J. Haden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), ii, # 4.
Cf. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 67.
Cf. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1960), Book I, Part IV, § 2, p. 207: “a mind… is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations…” Vide also I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 42 (B 59), A 50 (B 74), A 97, and B 140; Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), pp. 84–85; H. J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience, I, pp.357, 359, and 507, n. 5.
Cf. Phénoménologie de la perception, passim; Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph in Obras Completas, 2nd. ed. (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1961), III, p. 161: Aleph is “the place where all worldly places are found and viewed from all angles and yet remain distinct.”
Concerning time as immediately lived, Ricoeur points out, for example, that it is distentio, or extension which is “dialectically connected to the intentionality of consciousness.” (Paul Ricoeur, “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative,” Studies in the Phenomenology of the Human Sciences, ed. J. Sallis; Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1979, p. 21; for a more complete version of the analysis, see P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984, I, Part I, i, especially pp. 16 ff.; cf. St. Augustine, Confessions in Obras Completas, ed. Félix Garcia, bilingual ed.; Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1957–67, II, xi, 28:38; 26:33–30:40). And this, in my opinion, implies that the attempt to unify time by means of the search after or a postulation of an Aleph or a géométral is altogether impossible. Time is a manifold in constitution, which is systematically connected with the lawful multiplicities of intentionality — and these are also in fieri. Accordingly, just as we are on our way towards the totality of the world in terms of the latter’s unity in via, so are we moving towards the totality of time as a function of each unit of time qua self-abolishing presentation of the past and the future in the now. In all these remarks (and the attendant possible analyses), one ought to remain alive to the distinction between inner time and lived outer time, as mediated by intentionality and resulting in the synthesis of standard time. (Cf. supra, n. 24.) And if this is true of lived time, it is also a fortiori the case with the space of immediate experience, insofar as lived space is the paradigm of extendedness.
In other words, the world is a unity in constitution along two dimensions already at the pre-conceptual and pre-reflective level. It should be obvious, then, that I am speaking here of the problem of the constitution of the unity of this world and not of the multiplicity of possible worlds, realms which may or may not be in competition with one another for factual existence.
Reflections, pp. 67–68.
Cf. my paper, “Of Bearings in the Lifeworld,” pp. 175 and 177 ff.
Reflections, p. 135.
Ibid., p. 134.
Ibid., p. 135. To be exact, one ought to have spoken in these terms not of the world but of my habitation or way of dwelling in it. On the other hand, we should say that my world is the noematic correlate of such a noetic network. What we find here is not an error on Schutz’s part but an inexactitude that I am not sure is unintentional and which, in any case, is most fruitful in the task of underscoring the ever-present and undivided correlation which consciousness is, at all levels, but especially in the sphere of things and events lived pre-predicatively. To be sure, this is no mere formal point, for it is fraught with material consequences. At any event, it is wise to insist on the difference — which is never annulled — between my world and the transcendent universe, not only at this point but at any stage.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Here I take the word “outer” in two senses at once, namely, as what is other than I and as that which lies beyond my world. Moreover, I keep both meanings in a dynamic interrelationship, so as to illumine our path towards the constitution of the world and the analysis thereof.
Reflections, p. 135.
Ibid., pp. 135–36.
Ibid., p. 136. Cf. A. Schutz, MR, pp. 229 ff.; E. Husserl, Ideen I, §§ 28 and 31–32.
Ibid., p. 136. Cf. A. Schutz, “Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,” CP I, pp. 7 ff.; MR, pp. 218 ff; “Symbol, Reality, and Society,” CP I, pp. 312 ff.; “The Dimensions of the Social World,” CP II, ed. A. Broderson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), pp. 20 ff.; The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), especially chapter 4.
In this context, I am excluding the consideration of any sociohistorical components of the life-world and of the experience thereof, by means of what I have already characterized as individual-systematic abstraction. (Cf. supra, n. 4). And yet this is one of the places where we come across a situation in which the effectiveness of the methodological decision here involved not only breaks down, but it itself counsels a work of revision of the findings of the study in the light of an inquiry conducted on socio-historical and cultural premises. This is, of course, work for a separate investigation. However, it is not out of place to indicate that the dialectical intercourse between both kinds of investigation would have to seek completeness and promote not only socio-historical questioning (as the other side of the present inquiry concerning individuality) but also (and by rebound) a renewed search into the individual recesses of consciousness (as the counterpart of and as motivated by the findings of the complementary analysis).
Cf. Reflections, p. 8: “My writing of these lines is a series of working acts in the outer world, acts which change it by the ink strokes on this sheet of paper. But at the same time I am involved in theoretical contemplation in the effort to organize and articulate my thoughts on the problem at hand.” For the notion of working act, see below pp. 198 ff. See also Reflections, p. 85 for similar questions pertaining to oral communication in terms of the distinction between monothetic and polythetic forms of constitution. Cf. A. Schutz, MR, pp. 233 f.; “Symbol, Reality, and Society”, pp. 321 ff.; A. Gurwitsch, FC, pp. 1–2; Jean-Paul Sartre, The Emotions, Outline of a Theory, trans. B. Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), pp. 53 ff. and also pp. 8–9, where Sartre misses the phenomena pertaining to the simultaneity of conscious activity in more than one realm (occurrences which are central here), while he stresses — quite correctly — the unreflective character of action at the level of primordiality.
Cf. Reflections, pp. 103 ff.
To the extent that sedimentations and seeds are available for that purpose in my present stance.
Cf. A. Schutz, MR, pp. 218 ff.
Ibid., p. 211. “Conduct” is opposed to behavior in that the latter “includes in present use [i.e., that of behaviorism] also subjectively non-meaningful manifestations of spontaneity such as reflexes.” (Ibid.) Among such manifestations, Schutz lists what he describes as “essentially actual experiences” (Ibid.), which are not limited to reflexes but comprehend as well such things as “passive reactions provoked by what Leibniz calls the surf of indiscernible and confused small perceptions” (Ibid., p. 210; cf. p. 213), my gait, my facial expressions, my mood, etc. (cf. ibid., p. 217.) Such “exist merely in the actuality of being experienced and cannot be grasped by the reflective attitude.” (Ibid., p. 211.) Schutz acknowledges that here he disagrees with Husserl, since for the latter “every act can be grasped in reflection” (Ibid., n. 6) as a matter of principle. A difficulty inherent in this view is found in having to account for the event in which I remember such experiences, at least in certain cases, as evinced by the fact that Schutz is developing here a theoretical position with regard to them, and yet they would have to be, according to Schutz, inaccessible to reflection and therefore to primary memory. Perhaps one way out might be to say that I am presently aware of them (or of some of them) as this or that, but that I remember later not so much what they are as just the fact that I had them. But even this approach is fraught with difficulty, for I may ask how it is possible to remember a mere that, i.e., something traceable in memory as entirely bereft of whatness of any kind. Even when our memory is of this sort (as when we remember a scent or a color of I know not what), it is not the case that I remember a pure that, the traces of the nature of which would be completely dissolved. Rather, in those cases we recall a “that,” about which we could say, first of all, that it is of some sort (say, a scent or a color) and, secondly, that it pertains to something, the nature of which, so far as it is given, is experienced as blocked. It seems to me that, if this were not the case, we would have no memory at all. This suggested interpretation lies between the extreme theses already identified, namely, that of the existence of essentially actual experiences (as understood by Schutz) and that of complete accessibility to reflection (which, insofar as acts are concerned, Schutz attributes to Husserl himself). Obviously, this problematic is too complex and obscure to be dealt with here in any satisfactory way, however important it may prove to be in the constitution of individual consciousness and its logical and empirical histories. Cf. Henri Bergson, “Introduction à la métaphysique,’’ La pensée et le mouvant in Oeuvres, p. 1398.
A. Schutz, MR, p. 211.
Ibid. Here is, it seems to me, where I should place most of Schutz’s examples of what he calls “essentially actual experiences,” say, my facial expression in a given circumstance, if it is to be so subtle as not to be accessible to anything but marginal consciousness. If indeed such are genuine experiences (as opposed, say, to occurrences in the vegetative system or the like), then they must be conscious in some sense (although, granted, they may be ingrained forms of consciousness, something similar to what Schutz characterizes as routine but which he limits to certain forms of conscious gearing into the outer world. (Cf. Reflections, pp. 138 ff., 143, and 177.) Unfortunately I cannot examine this matter any further. Suffice it now to suggest that established, self-referring modes of consciousness are marginal, non-reflective forms of awareness, such that they disclose, however fleetingly and by the way, certain aspects of the life-world.
A. Schutz, MR, p. 211. 59 Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 212. Cf. p. 215: “We experience our bodily movements simultaneously on two different planes: inasmuch as they are movements in the outer world we look at them as events in space and spatial time, measurable in terms of the path run through; inasmuch as they are experienced together from within as happening changes, as manifestations of our spontaneity pertaining to our stream of consciousness, they partake of our inner time or durée.”
Ibid., p. 212.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Cf. p. 212: “Working, then, is the action in the outer world, based upon a project and characterized by the intention to bring about the projected state of affairs by bodily movements.” Two important caveats are to be mentioned here. First of all, it goes without saying that intent is not, primordially speaking, the fruit of reflection and self-consciousness. Secondly, and in order to avoid any possible confusion with the political-economic concept of labor, I shall not use the locution “work,” but the term “working” or “working act.” In this sense, labor or work would be a particular (albeit most important) form of working. I will not even attempt to proceed into the characterization and development of the notion of labor, consistent with the methodological decision at the root of this study.
Ibid., p. 212.
Ibid., p. 213.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. That is to say, the “form, because they regulate the tension of our memory and therewith the scope of our past experiences recollected and of our future experiences anticipated; the content, because all these experiences undergo specific attentional modifications by the preconceived project and its carrying into effect.” (Ibid., pp. 213–14).
In brief: this correlational unity between the effort characteristic of the working self and the basic stratum of the life-world is the locus for the reciprocal constitution and belongingness of the various relevance systems and the place of origination of our primordial stock of knowledge. Cf. my paper, “Nexus, Unity, Ground: Reflections on the Foundation of Schutz’s Theory of Relevance,” Man and World (The Hague), XV (1982), pp. 227 ff.
MR, p. 213. This state of alert must not only be presented as the result of a static analysis or description; its genesis and motivation have to be inquired into. It may very well be that such a state is the halloo of embodied consciousness to the permanent possibility of its own destruction in and by the world. Being alive to the surrounding world is a function of the dangers and solicitations of the world and the finitude of life or, expressed noetically, of our fundamental experience or anxiety, “the primordial anticipation from which all the others originate… the many interrelated systems of hopes and fears, of wants and satisfactions, of chances and risks which incite man within the natural attitude to attempt the mastery of the world, to overcome obstacles, to draft projects, and to realize them.” (Ibid., p. 228; the emphasis is mine). Cf. José Ortega y Gasset, El hombre y la gente in Obras Completas (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1961), VII, chapter 1 and Arnold Gehlen, Man in the Age of Technology, trans. P. Lipscomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 68.
MR, p. 213.
Cf. MR, pp. 214 ff.
Reflections, p. 49.
MR, p. 216.
Cf. supra, n. 24.
MR, p. 216.
Cf. supra, pp. 197–98.
MR, p. 217.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
To show this, however, I would have to proceed to an inquiry into one of the complex areas that, as I pointed out before, I have to leave out of consideration. In this case, I am referring to the distinction and relationships between desire, motive, volition, and action. Cf. Alexander Pfänder, Phänomenologie des Wollens and “Motive and Motivation” in A. Pfänder’s Gesammelte Schriften, 3rd. ed. (Munich: 1963), only partially available in English in A. Pfänder, Phenomenology of Willing and Motivation and Other Phaenomenologica, trans. H. Spiegelberg (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), chapters 1 and 2.
That is to say, a meaning of the ego for himself about himself.
In other words, such a subjective change is essentially concomitant with a significance by which the world appears to the self in a new light. After all, the self essentially is the struggle to accommodate the world to himself, or the effort to realize the project that he is, to some degree or other, under the compulsion or the pain of self-annihilation.
Cf. supra, p. 194 and n. 38.
Cf. Max Scheler, “Repentance and Rebirth,” On the Eternal in Man, trans. B. Noble (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), pp. 33 ff.
Cf. Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), chapter 2, §§ 3–4; The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. G. B. Phelan (New York: Scribner’s, 1959), Appendix VII.
Cf. J. Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, chapter 2, § 4.
Cf. Plato, Timaeus, 47–48.
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García-Gómez, J. (1987). Moral Responsibility and Practice in the Life-World. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Morality within the Life - and Social World. Analecta Husserliana, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3773-4_12
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