Abstract
Phenomenological description is an attempt at going “toward thfrngs themselves”, that is to say, toward the world as it is encountered in lived experience; it overcomes both extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism, but does so without radically repudiating the results that it has been possible to attain by means of a critical adoption of these methods.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
In 1932, after some twelve years of research, Schütz published his basic work entitled Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie. 2d ed. (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 1960); translated by G. Walsh and F. Lehnert as The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967). This work aimed at finding the origin of the categories peculiar to the social sciences in the fundamental facts of the life of the consciousness; in this sense, therefore, it provided a link between the comprehensive sociology of Weber and Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Husserl, who had been sent a complimentary copy of the book, wrote the following words to Schütz on 3 May 1932: “Ich bin begierig einen so ernsten und gründlichen Phenomenologen kennen zu lernen, einen der ganz Wenigen, die bis zum tieftsen und leider so schwer zugänglichen Sinn meiner Lebensarbeit vorgedrungen sind und die ich als hoffnungsvolle Fortsetzer derselben, als Repräsentanten der echten Philosophia perennis, der allein zukunftsträchtigen Philosophie ansehen darf.” From 1939 onward, Schütz continued his inquiries at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he reencountered his friends and fellow disciples Dorin Cairns and Aron Gurwitsch; even though the cultural horizon was now rather different, he was still concerned with discovering the originary constitution of the fundamental interconnections of the life-world, which are taken for granted in the natural attitude but only very rarely thematicized by sociologists. In the preface to Schütz’s Collected Papers (1962), van Breda says that Schütz, after having tried to derive intersubjectivity from the transcendental ego, seems to have realized the limits of the egological approach while encountering intersubjectivity as a kind of primordial facticity. L. Langrebe, a disciple and assistant of Husserl and author of a number of works that are fundamental for modern phenomenology (Experience and Judgment, for example, which was edited from Husserl’s own manuscripts), was another who insisted on the duplicity-identity of “absolute and mundane subjectivity”; in Phänomenologie und Metaphysik (Hamburg, 1948), p. 188, for example, he says: “The duplicity of absolute and mundane subjectivity must not be understood in the sense that transcendence manifests itself in the ‘empirical human ego,’ that empirical and mundane subjectivity is an ‘apparition’ beyond which there is the absolute, but rather in the sense that the absolute is itself present.” R. Zaner, too, has touched upon this essential problem in The Problem of Embodiment and, more recently, at the Vienna Philosophical Congress, where he spoke about individuality and the private sphere (Eigensphäre) (“what belongs to me”). We may indeed ask ourselves, and in doing so put the question to the reader, whether in this respect, too, Schütz and Landgrebe may not, once again, come very close to Husserl’s latest thought.
Cf. The Phenomenology of the Social World.
Cf. L. Landgrebe, Phänomenologie und Metaphysik.
Belgrade, 1936.
Alfred Schütz, Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, in Collected Papers, vol. 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), p. 133.
Alfred Schütz, Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, in Collected Papers, vol. 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), p. 135.
M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. xv.
Phenomenology and Intersubjectivity (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970).
Cf. E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), par. 42.
Cf. E. Paci, Tempo e verita nella fenomenologia di Husserl (Bari: Laterza, 1961), pp. 140–47.
A. Gurwitsch, ‘A Non-Egological Conception of Consciousness,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1941), 325.
‘Awakening: Towards a Phenomenology of the Self,’ in Phenomenology in Perspective, ed. F. J. Smith (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970), p. 177.
Cf. the article in Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 5, no. 3 (1964).
Cf. C. E. Moustakas, ed., Existential Child Therapy (New York: Basic Books, 1966);
V. C. Morris, Existentialism in Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
Cf. Paci, ‘Sul problema dell’intersoggettività,’ II Pensiero, 1960.
Social Research, 28, no. 1 (1961), 71, and esp. 90–91.
Cf. Zaner, ‘Awakening: Towards a Phenomenology of the Self,’ p. 173.
D. von Hildebrand, Die Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft (Regensburg: Hebbel, 1954), p. 44.
Sartre, ‘Le conflit est le sens originel de l’être-pour autrui,’ in L’Etre et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 431.
Cf. Gabel, La fausse coscience (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1962).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1981 D. Reidel Publishing Company
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Callieri, B., Castellani, A. (1981). On the Psychopathology of the Life-World. In: Bello, A.A. (eds) The Great Chain of Being and Italian Phenomenology. Analecta Husserliana, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8366-3_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8366-3_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-011-7988-1
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-8366-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive