Abstract
This article analyzes the structure of the “we relation” drawing on Alfred Schütz's theoretical framework. It argues for a flexibilization of the initial framework in order to capture not only the tension, but also the variations in the relation between the lived experience of the other in lived duration and the reflection upon the other, through which meaning is constructed. In order to do so, it revisits Schütz’s claims about immersion into togetherness as part of the experience of copresence and it bridges them with the apparently opposite Sartrian view of the other as either objectifying or being objectified. This leads to certain shifts in the distinction between consociates and contemporaries and sheds light upon the ways in which the process of constructing the other as meaningful is not an added layer, but a co-constitutive element in the vivid experience of copresence and of absence.
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Notes
For Schütz, “here and now” is the domain of that which is experienced in lived duree. It does not refer to measurable and divisible objectified time. The term does not capture a given spatio-temporal context, but a subjectively lived experience of unfolding physical events within a flow of internal time consciousness. Thus, “here and now” must not be understood as two separate conditional factors in the construction of togetherness, but as an altenative, perhaps more accessible, manner of refering to Bergson’s duration.
Throughout the course of this article, I will refer to the Schützian understanding of “we relationship” as it appears in The Phenomenology of the Social World. However, his argument has not fluctuated significantly in other writings with respect to intersubjectivity and the relation with the other. Thus, the points I am making can also be put in dialogue with other works by the same author, as well as with the co-authored Structures of the Life World (Schütz and Luckmann 1973).
Here “a priori” is not understood in its Kantian signification. It does not designate the categories of reason which precede and structure any empirical experience, but the reflection upon events which precedes and structures the very events that are its object, by means of previously solidified meaning conctructions.
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Ivana, GI. Present Contemporaries and Absent Consociates: Rethinking Schütz's “We Relation” Beyond Copresence. Hum Stud 39, 513–531 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-016-9381-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-016-9381-9