Schütz, Alfred

Created: 2022-Oct-17

Bio: (1899-1959) Austrian sociologist. He received his Ph.d. in law from the University of Vienna. Schütz worked as a banker in Vienna for most of his life, before moving to the United States in 1939 after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. He continued to work as a banker, but at the same time, he began his academic career. In 1943, he became a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he taught for the rest of his life. Schütz's greatest theoretical contribution is the development of a theoretical approach known as phenomenology. Schütz's phenomenology had three intellectual sources: economic teachings of the "Austrian schools" of economics, primarily that of Ludwig von Mises; the sociology of Max Weber; and the philosophical teachings of Edmund Husserl, the founder of the philosophical field of phenomenology. Due to the enormous influence of Husserl's phenomenology and the frequent use of his concept of " life-world ", Schütz's approach is most often called phenomenological sociology.

At the beginning of his intellectual work, Schütz wanted to resolve the inconsistencies of Weber's use of "subjective meaning" and to further develop his methods of "understanding" (Verstehen) and ideal types. Schütz used Bergson's analysis of "duration", as a stream of conscious experience that represents the link between subjective and objective knowledge, Husserl's analysis of "internal time-consciousness" (inneren Zeitbewusstseins), and a similar concept of "stream of consciousness", which was introduced by William James, as a basis for elaborating Weber's most important concepts, and above all, the concept of subjective meaning.

In the book Phenomenology of the Social World (1967, in German 1932), Schütz states that subjective meaning grows through the unification of a constant flow of different feelings, and reactions to those feelings, into different types of experience. Through reflection, anticipation, and interpretation, people reconstruct experiences and classify different phenomena into different types, based on their own typologies. A key aspect of our understanding, awareness, and reconstruction of experience is the temporal dimension because meaning always arises retrospectively in relation to the moment when, what is perceived, has happened. People even think of future actions as already completed activities. Subjective meaning is related to the flow of mental experience and its relationship to three time periods: 1) the vivid present - the present moment; 2); past experiences that appear as memory and recollection and 3) anticipating and imagining future states and activities. Meaning is located in specific acts of consciousness itself and the emotions associated with them.

The Life-world (Lebenswelt), a theoretical concept that Schütz took from Husserl, is one of the main ideas of Schütz's sociology. The life world represents the socio-cultural world, as it is experienced and perpetuated by the people who are in it. Individual consciousness and understanding form the basis of the actor's action within the life world (social world), and the life world itself is built through „intersubjectivity“. Intersubjectivity represents the relationship between the consciousness of a person and other persons in the present. Intersubjectivity, which consists of everyday interpersonal interaction and communication, creates a "life world". The life-world is made possible by the fact that people experience and interpret the world around them through a "natural attitude", that is, by using accumulated social and cultural patterns of meaning.

Communication is a process in which two or more subjective streams of consciousness meet and harmonize, within social interaction (Wirkungsbeziehung). Every action of a person is a sign that should be interpreted by other people, so the ultimate meaning of someone's action is shown in the reactions of other people to that action. If there is a development of established patterns for the interpretation of some type of action, then these patterns represent the basis for mutual understanding between the actors. The creation and adoption of such cultural patterns for the interpretation of action takes place in long-term and lasting interpersonal face-to-face relationships, and once adopted, knowledge of these cultural patterns becomes applicable, even in situations where the actor performs an action in a completely unknown environment, with unknown co-actors.

Schütz believes that, of all the activities of consciousness, subjective meaning springs mostly from a hypothetical formulation by which the actor himself explains, to himself, his own motives. Schütz distinguishes between two types of motifs. He calls the first type of motives " in-order-to" motives ("Um-zu" -Motiven) which, from the point of view of the actor, refer to the future, that is, to the activities that the actor wants to achieve in the future. He calls the second group of motives "because" motives ("Weil" -Motiven), this group of motives refer to the past experiences of the actors that drove him to meet his needs in a specific way. The meaning that an actor gives to his own action depends on the time distance from those activities, because the actor since the action has already ended, reacts to the changes that his action has caused in the structures of meaning.

With his approach, Schütz wanted to provide a developmental theory of human action and to create a theoretical model of the life world that would be able to encompass multiple levels of reality that are created through the process of subjective meaning and intersubjectivity. This theory of action seeks to provide answers to three key questions: 1) how is meaningfully oriented human action created ?; 2) how can people understand other people ?; and 3) how is common socially valid knowledge created? In the context of such a theory of human action, the subject of sociology would be: the conscious and meaningful activities of individuals to through which they try to give meaning to reality and thus create and transform the social world (life-world).

A person's personal experience is not available to sociologists, because they cannot explain all the specifics of the process during which that person reconstructed his own experience. The social sciences can only build analytical models that use shared typologies (typologies that are common to all or a large number of actors) in order to understand the experience and motives of an actor. That method Schütz called „typification“. Schütz wanted to use the approach of methodological individualism, which takes the activities of individuals as the starting point of sociological analysis, in order to build a general theory of human action. Schütz applied the ideal-typological method used by Weber to the process of typifying subjective knowledge and life-world. He introduced a methodological postulate which he called the "postulate of adequacy". This postulate argues that scientific typologies must be constructed to fit the structure of everyday typologies. Both ordinary actors and scientists must use the same life-world typology reference system. What sets scientists apart from ordinary actors is that they do not have the same pragmatic interest as the actors. Scientists must not impose their theoretical concepts on the object of study, that is, on the life world, so they must come to knowledge by discovering already existing structures and typologies.

Schütz passed away before he could finish books in which he would further elaborate his theoretical position, so his collaborators, based on his manuscripts and previously published articles, completed and published several books attributed to Schütz. One of these works is a three-volume book called Collected Papers (1962-1966), while the book The Structure of the Life World (1973) was prepared by Thomas Luckmann, one of his most famous followers. In the first volume of the Collected Papers, entitled The Problem of Social Reality (1962), the structural characteristics of the life-world are further elaborated. In addition to the principle of typification, he introduces the principle of "pragmatic relevance", which states that the pragmatic orientation of the actors affects the choice of the field where the typification will be performed. Schütz believes that there are multiple realities, and the most important reality is that of everyday life. The second level of reality is what does not form a part of our everyday life - religion, art, politics, etc.