PHENOMENOLOGY, ROLE, AND REASON:
ESSAYS ON THE COHERENCE AND DEFORMATION OF SOCIAL REALITY
By
MAURICE NATANSON
(1974)
[SK's comments]
Because the detonator on this discussion was the Institutional Theory of Art, and because I spent the second half of 2025 dabbling in Phenomenology, I can't resist bringing Schutz's sociological notion of "typification" into the current discussion of concept formation, just to see what (if anything) can be gleaned from it. This did open up plenty of new ground, far too much of it.
[33]
Chapter III
Alfred Schutz on Social Reality
and Social Science
Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.—Alfred North Whitehead
I
It has taken American philosophers and social scientists thirty-five years to catch up with the early work of Alfred Schutz.
His Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie was first published in 1932. ... It is clear that [this work] was closely studied by some of the ablest minds of the 'thirties and 'forties ...
[34]
...
Philosophy is inescapable for the social scientist who seeks clarity and rigor in his work, ...
Nor is it solely a question of interest in the logic of scientific inquiry, ...
Philosophy is rather concerned with
the phenomena of the social world:
men acting in the context of an intersubjective reality, shared and sustained by temporal beings aware of themselves no less than of one another.
...
In its historical focus, The Phenomenology of the Social World is an attempt to vindicate and deepen Max Weber's theory of social action by providing for it a philosophical grounding which derives from some of the central ideas of Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson.
In its systematic aspect, the Phenomenology is an effort to establish the outlines of a conception of meaning whose constitutive character is grounded in the reality of inner-time consciousness.
In its programmatic dimension, the Phenomenology is an adumbration of
a philosophy of social reality,
[35]
not simply a methodology but
an anatomy of man's existence with his fellow-men in the midst of everyday life,
within what Husserl called
the "natural attitude."
The axis on which this threefold movement turns is phenomenology itself, ...
The social world is primarily the world of everyday life as lived and appreciated and interpreted by common-sense men carrying on the cognitive and emotive traffic of daily life.
"Common-sense men" includes all of us insofar as
we act in the world
rather than
observe it formally as disinterested scientists.
...
Philosophy is, in fact, a reversal of the underlying attitude of common-sense life,
a primordial glance at what the mundane eye has simply accepted without even the intimation of serious question.
It is possible to be swept up and thrown headlong into this
reversal
without asking
for it.
In this sense, it is not the
eye
that is
mundane
(or not)
but rather
that which is seen.
Just as our purported morals can be broken by constructing ever more outlandish hypothetical choices, so can our
common-sense
views be broken by encountering evermore outlandish situations wherein certain questions are forced upon us.
(For left-identified transplants like me, the homelessness situation in Los Angeles is an excellent example.)
Among those not asking for it, as among those who veritably beg, there must be a full gamut of (in)susceptibility. Still, desire and susceptibility are sold separately, and every man has his price.
...
... man in the natural attitude takes for granted his being in a world, his having a world, the existence of Others like himself, the on-going reality of communicating with those fellow-men,
and,
just as important,
the assumption that everything just said
holds equally well
from the standpoint of the "other guy,"
the alter ego.
...
The "taking as real" which is involved here is not a matter of
inference or formal predication
but an
initial seeing and grasping,
a perceptual seizing of the object or event as real and as real for all of us.
... the naive, the "prepredicative" grasp of the experienced world as "ours" ...
When I hear
intersubjective
I reach for my revolver, but undeniably something like the above does happen.
Skepticism about Aesthetic Realism nonetheless flows directly from this:
All aesthetic discourse is
inferential
and/or
predicative.
There is nothing
common-sense
about it, not unless it is so plainly descriptive as to be called nonaesthetic.
Otherwise,
initial seeing
gives way to subsequent bloviating.
For Carroll, the 'supervenience' of aesthetic properties upon 'objective' (plainly descriptive) properties of art-objects is what proves the objectivity of the aesthetic properties themselves. He will not grant that 'supervenience' is an
inference,
as if to say: 'when (almost) everyone makes the same inference, it is not an inference anymore'. But a correct inference is still an inference. It is an entirely different thing from
the "taking as real"
which precedes it. That is the crucial difference which even the fact of agreement cannot touch.
More experience, less inference please. This is Sontag's prescription, and mine. 'Experience' connotes the private, but this is foremost a prescription for our collective comportment in the public sphere. Put in Natanson's terms: this is because even the soberest print discourse permits of myriad blurring of boundaries between the deduced and the inferred; the initial and the subsequent; the prepredicative and the predicative.
To be sure, the zealous rhetorician is equally well able to fool himself as to fool his 'public'; the difference is that he at least has to live with himself, whereas they have only his words to go by.
To say that the world is experienced as "ours" from the outset
[36]
is to hold that my fellow-man is initially recognized as
a "someone"
(not a "something")
and,
further,
a "someone like me." ²⁵
This is tenuous,
in as many ways
as there are ways
for people to be
unalike.
²⁵ A few cautions are necessary:
"from the outset" and "initially" are not to be taken as chronological terms, referring to events in the early lives of individuals.
It is the
phenomenological genesis
and not
the causal origin
of experience which is at issue here.
Understood.
This is further helpful terminology, re: the "inferential" quality of aesthetic properties.
In my face-to-face encounter with the Other, it is he as person who is grasped rather than a creature with the anatomical features which permit the human observer to classify him as a member of the same species.
Infamously, this is not assured. Rather, it is a delicate achievement of a certain kind of cultural evolution and institutional order.
By delicate, part of what I mean is:
the 'order' can hold together, on the whole,
but the
creature
constantly pokes his head out nonetheless.
...
[Schutz:]
"I am already Thou-oriented from the moment that I recognize an entity which I directly experience as a fellow-man (as a Thou),
attributing life and consciousness to him.
However, we must be quite clear that we are not here dealing with a conscious judgment.
This is a prepredicative experience in which I become aware of a fellow human being as a person."
Well,
nonhuman
life
is all around us,
and
consciousness
is the single most controversial topic in all of philosophy.
Was it not thought for quite a long time that animals were alive but not conscious? Or was that just silly philosophers sowing their mischief?
To me it seems possible that there is a degree of difference beyond which these ascriptions can only be made "predicatively". Similarly, only beyond a certain degree of similarity are they made "prepredicatively".
If that is wrong, still mere "life and consciousness" is far short of
a fellow
or
a person.
The social world is an intersubjective one in several senses:
first, it is the locus of my encounter with the "Thou";
second, it is the scene of my own action which is directed toward my fellow-men.
...
And, of course, the social world does not spring magically into being with my birth or yours;
it is historically grounded and bears the marks and signs of the activity of our ancestors, most remarkable of all
the typifying medium of language.
Again, what better example of "predication" could there be than that of being
historically grounded?
The notion that this is phenomenal rather than inferential is bonkers.
To be phenomenal, this "historical grounding" would have to be contentless in its "prepredicative" form: we certainly can walk in on a situation and have some prepredicative sense of things being in medias res. Yet we cannot 'just know' the granular details of "history"; inference too is usually insufficient to that task.
Without inference, the range of
marks and signs
is limited to the primitive;
but few "signs" of human
activity
can be detected this way, and fewer still will be parsed correctly. To say this is very nearly to define human social activity.
Language seems to me precisely the wrong example for Schutz/Natanson here. Just consider what all is required to discover for oneself that language has a history.
Beyond that, consider human resistance to change in the broadest, deepest sense. Typically change is denied before it is even noticed, and noticing marks the end of prepredicative bliss.
Of course we are told lots of things about the past world, just as we are often told which musical selection is about to be performed, but if we were not given the answer first we would not be half as accurate in making later identifications.
But yes, language is
typifying.
Finally, the intersubjective world has an open horizon;
it is in movement toward a future which is partly "ours" and in large part "theirs," the possession of future generations.
In sum, the intersubjective world is the epistemic context for human action, the significative horizon in terms of which individuals, events, and even things are understood.
...
The intersubjective world of daily life ... is the domain of action ...
In the Phenome-
[37]
nology the starting point is Weber's conception of action.
Although Schutz accepts and follows Weber's postulate of the subjective interpretation of meaning
(the meaning which the actor bestows on his own act and for which he is responsible as distinguished from the interpretation which the observer makes),
he presents some salient qualifications.
First, and most generally, Weber explored the philosophical foundations of his theories only as deeply as the demands of his empirical research and the application of related theoretical investigation required;
the vast insight and power of his methodology were not accompanied by equivalent philosophical analysis.
What can be the point of
philosophical analysis
if
powerful empirical research
didn't
demand
it?
How
powerful
is some
empirical research
if it less
demanding
than
philosophical analysis?
Perhaps empirical work is, by now, actually quite simple to design but mind-numbingly tedious to execute. It's like trying to stay on a diet: almost everyone fails; in one sense all for the same reason, in another sense for as many reasons as there are people. Sorting out all of this requires painstaking "analysis". However, it should never have come to all of that.
Second, and more specifically, his conception of social action took for granted the very problem of intersubjectivity which lies at the basis of all theory of action.
...
There is a serious ambiguity in the term "action," for it can refer to
the on-going course of an action's development
or to
the completed, finished product.
Moreover, action may be presented to the ego in one of three temporal dimensions:
"My action as it takes place presents itself to me as a series of existing and present experiences, ...
My intended . . . action presents itself to me as a series of future experiences.
My terminated, completed act ...
[38]
... presents itself to me as a series of terminated experiences which I contemplate in memory."
The meaning of an action is bound up with these temporal distinctions; ...
Schutz distinguished between action and act.
The ongoing constitution is termed "action";
the completed unit is the "act."
Action is subject-bound, it builds up in a temporal development, and its full significance is always on the far side of the actor's intention.
The act is a unitary phenomenon which is object-oriented and whose meaning is graspable.
...
Action (including act) and meaning are integral in their epistemic function.
Meaning is not "added" or "attached" to action by way of some sort of predication or interpretive addendum.
Instead, meaning is bound to the very conception of action and must be understood as vital to its formation.
Meaning and action are both grounded in temporality:
" . . . meaning is a certain way of directing one's gaze at an item of one's own experience.
This item is thus 'selected out' and rendered discrete by a reflexive Act.
Meaning indicates, therefore, a peculiar attitude on the part of the Ego toward the flow of its own duration."
These distinctions make it possible to see the dialectical relationship between "action" and "act."
All that I can see here is a terrible muddle.
Selected out' and rendered discrete
by a reflexive Act
sounds precisely like an
interpretive addendum.
In the process of its formation, social action is oriented toward certain goals; ...
... the individual projects his desired goal as having already been fulfilled and fancies it as completed, ...
The goal thus imagined is the projected act;
it is the meaning of the corresponding action meant to realize it.
The projecting, of course, takes place in a present.
The goal projected is time-transcendent,
for unlike the action within which its formation occurs,
the meaning of the goal, the projected act, is merely intended by the
[39]
consciousness of the imagining ego and not an actual part of his stream of awareness.
...
What is meant, ... in social action is meaningful in the present to the extent (and for Schutz only to the extent) that
a fancying or phantasying consciousness projects a corresponding act.
Thus,
"the meaning of any action is its corresponding projected act."
Apart from such projection, however,
action, strictly speaking,
has no meaning.³⁰
³⁰ Though it may still be considered as part of "behavior" in the generic sense of that term.
We have been discussing action in the present.
...
In an "irreal" or fictive way, or in a real way, the future is essential to the comprehension of action in the present, and within the present the history of acts is relived.
One is tempted to speak with Augustine of
a present of action present
(the projected act),
a present of acts past
(the act remembered),
and
a present of action future
(the anticipated act).
...
Not only the ongoing action but the entire range of awareness requires a reflexive moment in consciousness, a looking-upon, if there is to be meaningful experience.
That reflexiveness is made possible by inner time or durée which generates and sustains the multivalent order of human reality.
...
[40]
...
Phantasying is a complex activity in which
the imagined objects are granted a peculiar ontological status:
they are taken as
"irreal" or fictive beings.
Husserl speaks of them as "neutral" (as distinguished from "positional") projections.
What is thus phantasied is "real" in the mode of being entertained by consciousness but not real in the sense of being taken as actually existent or having in fact occurred as a mundane event.
The activity of phantasying is similar to Husserl's notion of
a "neutrality modification"
through which
the esthetic object emerges as "real" in the experience of the art work.³²
³² ". . . Let us suppose that we are observing Dürer's engraving, "The Knight, Death, and the Devil.'
We distinguish here in the first place the normal реrceрtion of which the correlate is the 'engraved print' as a thing, this print in the portfolio.
We distinguish in the second place the perceptive consciousness within which in the black lines of the picture there appear to us the small colourless figures,
'knight on horseback,'
'death,'
and
'devil.'
In aesthetic observation we do not consider these as the objects (Objekten);
we have our attention fixed on what is portrayed 'in the picture,'
more precisely, on the 'depicted' realities, the knight of flesh and blood, and so forth.
That which makes the depicting possible and mediates it, namely, the consciousness of the 'picture' (of the small grey figurettes in which through the derived noeses something other, through similarity, 'presents itself as depicted'), is now an example for
the neutrality-modification of the perception.
This depicting picture-object
stands before us
neither as being nor as nonbeing,
nor in any
other positional modality;
or rather, we are aware of it as having its being, though only a quasi-being, in the neutrality-modification of Being."
(Edmund Husserl, Ideas, p. 311).
Phantasying, then, means
presenting to oneself a possible state of affairs
and
taking that state of affairs as consequent.
It's not a terrible analogy, but I think we have to (in both cases) get rid of all of the words ending in
-ing.
The action words make the case (rhetorically) that this is done by us, but really it's something that is done to us in (at least) equal measure.
(Incidentally, I don't think we have to accept any extreme conventionalism as a consequence of this. When we can see only
black lines,
convention is not always to blame. TBC.)
...
If that course of action is indeed followed ... then the mode of attention given to the act by the ego in reflective attitude changes into the "positional" attitude of consciousness.
It is essential to consciousness that phantasying have the crucial reflective moment in its procedure for the experience in question to be meaningful.
Reflection marks the difference between life and thought.
...
[41]
...
The question of
which possibilities are selected or chosen in the phantasying of projected acts
leads to what Schutz calls
the problem of "relevance,"
...
... the theory of phantasying has serious implications for social action at all levels of human experience
because the projection of acts underlies the meaningful structure of the social world ...
Social action takes place in a context;
it is situationally limited and defined.
To draw
limits
of
context
'round a
situation
is quite the daunting task!
Or, perhaps it is all too easy to do this arbitrarily and far more difficult (impossible) to do it in a 'principled' or 'deductive' manner.
It seems doubtful that we could ever fully close the deductive circle in the case of so-called
social action.
The contextualist subject creates their own
problem of "relevance"
in parallel to that of their object: besides trying to determine what has been "relevant" for another, they must try to justify their own
contextual selectivity.
The analysis of "social action" multiplies it own central problem by the number of analysts.
Here again, agreement is a far more peculiar notion than it has been given credit for, ontologically and pragmatically alike. Agreement upon the relevance of contextual elements is oblique to truth, to principle, and to etiology. In these respects agreement is contentless. Only purpose gives it content. Only with a purpose in hand may principled reasoning may enter the fray.
...
What is deemed to be "likely," "possible," or "out of the question" depends, in part, on the situation at hand and the actor's assessment of it.
...
One of Schutz's criticisms of Weber ... concerned his account of motivation.
What Schutz objects to in Weber's treatment is that both
the actor's subjective feeling about the context of meaning which is the ground of his behavior
and
what the observer supposes that ground to be
are indiscriminately put together in the concept of motive.
Since it was Weber who introduced the postulate of the subjective interpretation of meaning, which insists on attention being paid to
the meaning an act has for the actor who performs that act,
it is curious that he failed to keep separate the subjective and objective aspects when discussing motivation.
As I've yet to read Weber directly,
this is not just
curious,
it's literally unbelievable.
Say it ain't so!
The reason for the confusion is the failure to explore the temporal foundation of action.
...
A consequence of ignoring the temporal grounding of motivation is that
the orientation of action toward a future event or its reference to a past experience cannot be distinguished.
The
[42]
difference, however, is a profound one, ...
Schutz marks the difference by naming the former
the "in-order-to" motive
of action
and
the latter
the "because" motive.
...
...
In response to the question, "Why are you doing X?" two answers are both common and appropriate:
"I am doing X in order to accomplish Y,"
or
"I am doing X because of Y."
In many cases it is possible to translate one form into the other:
"I am entering the diplomatic corps in order to serve my country"
translates into
"I am entering the diplomatic corps because I want to serve my country"
(and vice versa).
When translation of this sort is possible, we are dealing with what Schutz calls a "pseudo-because statement."
In the case of a "genuine because statement" translation is impossible:
"I left the diplomatic corps because I was fired"
cannot be translated into an "in-order-to" equivalent.
I don't see why we have to grant that the first pair are
translations.
There exist infinite
contexts
in which they do mean exactly the same thing; and also infinite contexts in which they do not.
The latter sentence, meanwhile, is nonsensical by way of equivocation: to "leave" and to "be fired" are exclusive explanations of a unified fact, i.e., that "I" am no longer in the corps. This is a common manner of speaking, but it is equivocal.
A sensical answer to the leading question,
'Why did you leave the corps?'
is,
'I did not leave, actually, I was fired.'
Similarly,
'I left Botswana because I was fired from the corps'
is sensical. It also resists substitution of "in order to" for "because". However, this resistance to substitution is spurious for all the familiar Wittgensteinian reasons (see Dilman here, pp. 56 and 57). The substitution is ungrammatical; it is not nonsensical.
'I left Botswana in order that I was fired from the corps.'
Daresay, if you are an astute English speaker (or if you've read this entire blue box), you stand a good chance of understanding both the sentence and the misconstruction at a glance.
Meanwhile, two available 'misparsings' of this ungrammatical sentence are,
'I was fired from the corps because I left Botswana.'
and
'I left Botswana in order to get fired from the corps.'
These well illustrate the
temporal dimensions
that Natanson is eager to isolate here. Of course if we think the sentence is grammatical then we also think we must be parsing it correctly; and if we think we are parsing the whole sentence correctly then we also think we are parsing the "temporal dimension" correctly. But I don't see how (non)translatability among these grammatical forms could hold as a criterion for validating these hunches.
...
In the in-order-to relation,
the project does the motivating;
in the genuine because relation,
the project itself is motivated.
... social action is initially defined by the project, not the causal antecedents of the project.
This in turn means that social action is fundamentally motivated by in-order-to relations which are, as they develop in the actuality of life, basically taken for granted by the actor.
This is solidly Rankian, if a bit belabored.
Just as philosophers after Wittgenstein have proceeded apace with their explanatory theories, so have the sociologists carried forward the exaltation of
causal antecedents.
The metaphor ofcatching up
is far too optimistic. Most seem to be either running away or malingering.
It is precisely here that we locate the root of Schutz's entire theory of "the world as taken for granted."
...
The practical efficacy of past perform-
[43]
ances in a variety of situations assures a base from which each new present projecting is oriented.
Pragmatic justification
of that base in turn renders new projects of action
typically assured.
In the moment of reflection the ego looks back on his fund of knowledge gained from past acts and
makes the assumption
that
what has typically worked reasonably well in the past
will also work equivalently well in the future.
Of course,
there is nothing automatic about the decision
as to whether what was appropriate in the past is appropriate for the future
because
the "Here" and "Now" status of the individual
is
never quite the same
as his earlier placement in life.
Within the span of the project of the in-order-to relation,
the problematic aspect of experience is placed in abeyance.
Thus,
the taken-for-granted
"is always that particular level of experience which presents itself as not in need of further analysis.
Whether a level of experience is thus taken for granted depends on
the pragmatic interest of the reflective glance
which is directed upon it and thereby upon the particular Here and Now from which that glance is operating."
[Schutz]
This notion of
taking for granted
is fully mentalistic.
No observed action leads ineluctably to any of the above-proposed conclusions.
No mere repetition of an action necessarily indicates that
the problematic aspect of experience
is placed in abeyance.
These are projections of the observer upon the actor, which is precisely what this method (purportedly) seeks to avoid.
The role of
pragmatic interest
does seem clear, but such knowledge is available only introspectively.
Consider, e.g., a bluffing poker player who overlooks his hand. Another player calls his bluff but loses the hand anyway.
Perhaps the bluff analogy can be explained away as anomalous to most social situations, but the analogy of 'overlooking one's hand' cannot be. Overlooking, actually, is endemic to and infinite within social life.
Another way to put this: Logical Behaviorism's failure really is a failure of observation, not a failure of method. Observation is not (as yet) acute enough to operationalize the method on a broad (deep) scale. In the narrow domain of poker, meanwhile, the professional is and the novice is not an acute enough observer to operationalize Logical Behaviorism. Mentalistic assumptions do not help the novice to improve.
The upshot of all Behaviorism is that extrospection has proven highly amenable to consolidation and refinement. In contrast, the prospects for gaining in introspective acuity are bleak. So, if the first advances while the second stagnates, then, under mentalistic assumptions, an ever-widening gap emerges between that part of "social action" that can be observed, and that part that cannot be.
For the Behaviorist, improved observation redeems the method; for the Cognitivist and, apparently, also for the Phenomenological Sociologist, improved observation exacerbates the existing problem: the more detailed and robust Behavioristic data can be gathered, the more purported cognitive 'details' are later confounded by everything that has been 'overlooked' by the subject themselves, about themselves. This is the kind of profusion of bad information which is much worse than having no information at all. The way to stanch the flow is to eliminate mentalistic assumptions so that the Behavioristic data can be taken for whatever it is worth.
This is what is required to make good on the insight that
social action is initially defined by the project,
not the causal antecedents of the project.
If action is always situated,
Where'd I put that damned revolver?
it is a world of fellow-men which guarantees the sociality of man's existence.
The human situation is essentially intersubjective.
At the same time, the range of the intersubjective world is far larger than is ordinarily recognized,
for in addition to my contemporaries ... there are my predecessors ... and my successors ...
It is a mistake to limit the analysis of social action to the sphere of contempоraries,
though it is indeed true that
what I know of my predecessors and successors
is
dependent on the model of my experience of contemporaries.
Have we any protectives against
misknowing
the future?
...
The experience of the We is primordial.
It is gained by the presence of men in the world,
not by induction
or a theoretical proof.
...
[44]
...
the We of direct, shared, face-to-face encounter is, from the standpoint of the ego's participаtion in the social world, an experience sui generis.
The problem of intersubjectivity is a problem because of the fact of the We-relationship.
In this sense,
the We is experientially prior to the philosophical problem it generates for those who seek to understand how a social world is possible.
🥴
🥴
🥴
...
"the world of the We is not private to either of us, but is our world,
the one common intersubjective world
which is right there in front of us
.
It is only from the face-to-face relationship, from the common lived experience of the world in the We, that the intersubjective world can be constituted.
This alone is the point from which it can be deduced."
[Schutz]
Within the social world thus understood, however, there still remains
the question of how knowledge of Others is possible.
At one level this is a distinctively philosophical problem;
at another level, it is a systematic issue for the methodology of the social sciences.
Even in the face-to-face relationship with a fellow-man, the individual knows only an aspect of the Other.
...
Some aspects of the Other are manifest, others are presented in shadowy form or are completely opaque.
To say that I have knowledge of the Other is then to say that
I know him directly in very limited measure
but
indirectly
in vast degree,
through
typified constructs
which I form of him and of human behavior generally.
I want to propose that everything we've learned about 'concept formation' in the previous four posts be brought to bear in our consideration of this latter notion of Schutz/Natanson.
Of course, ...
in all face-to-face encounters
the reality of the Other is more or less vibrantly presented.
But when we move from consociates to contemporaries, a radical change is introduced:
the ego knows his contemporary by way of typifications and constructions,
models of how "someone" traditionally behaves or is expected to behave in certain situations.
In short, the ego knows his contemporaries chiefly through
a complex, con-
[45]
catenated system of ideal types.
Granted it can be onerous (for writer and reader alike) to constantly have to invent new terms; still this deployment of
ideal types
risks conflating the technical Weberian term with the literal/commonsense concept intended here. They are not the same.
To do this is to 'plant' exaggerated concepts out in the everyday
social world,
where they sow great mischief, and where the plant-er can eventually dig them up and feign wonder before his craft.
The word "ideal" of course conjures the specter of a ghastly equivocation:
namely, between concepts like
(a) 'reduced', 'condensed', 'burnished', 'rounded off', etc.;
and
(b) 'perfect', 'desired', 'exemplary', etc.
It seems crucial to the project being staked out in these pages that idealization be understood neither as something we desire nor as something we dread. It may be either of those things. It does not have to be either of these.
In the sense that all cognition bends in this direction, we do 'desire' both kinds of idealization. On the other hand, we do seem to "typify" pretty much everything, regardless of how we value it.
Anyway,
typification
will do just fine, I think.
...
"It can mean
first of all
the ideal type of another person
who is expressing himself or has expressed himself in a certain way.
Or it may mean,
second,
the ideal type of the expressive process itself,
or even of the outward results which we interpret as the signs of the expressive process.
Let us call the first the 'personal ideal type' and the second the 'material' or 'course-of-action type'.
[Schutz]
Then
ideal
here really does just mean
'of or relating to ideas',
and any harder semantic work
is being done by
type.
What happens then to the theory of the subjective interpretation of meaning is that
the social world is constituted, in large measure, by personal ideal types and by course-of-action types,
varying from
more or less specific acquaintance with a fellow-man
to
almost complete anonymity in relationships.
The means by which such types are constituted involves
the postulation of a person
and
the attribution to him of those typical attitudes, motives, interests, skills, and techniques
which would be sufficient to account for the kind of act in question we seek to understand.
The analysis may
begin either with the person and end with the act
or start with the act and from its typical structure work back to the construction of the kind of person capable of behaving in that way.
...
The personal ideal type "is a function of the very question it seeks to answer."
Finally, the personal ideal type is intimately related to the course-of-action type and indeed
must utilize its model if it wishes to create its own.
This certainly grounds the
personal
in the
social,
but in a highly artificial way.
The Laboratory is artificial in the same way, it has been the site of scientific advance, yet the artificiality has never ceased to be problematic. In recent years this has exploded into a 'crisis' in Social Psychology.
Another way to look at this, however, is to blame differences in the nature of the research being conducted. The artificiality of the lab may be elided almost entirely in one line of inquiry; another line may press the issue and fail to produce any intelligible results.
Now think of the mind as a laboratory, and recall the flash of Rankian insight on p. 42:
In the in-order-to relation,
the project does the motivating;
in the genuine because relation,
the project itself is motivated.
...
social action is initially defined by the project,
not the causal antecedents of the project.
I read "the project does the motivating" as: "a personal ideal type modeled on the course-of-action type will fail to reflect any principled nexus of individual with social cognition." The assumption that the "project" simply must be a socially typified one would create this nexus; but this assumption is baseless.
Only after the fact, with the act in the past, is it sensible to stipulate that the personal be 'idealized' exclusively in terms of the social; and then only for certain purposes. Conversely, when the act lies in the future, the future lies in the act. The role of typified sociality in something that has not happened yet is unknowable. The conceit that the actor thinks he already knows the meaning of the act is similarly unsupportable.
I gather that this issue exemplifies precisely why Existentialism began as an offshoot of Phenomenology and ended as a blood rival?
By means of both forms of ideal types, the ego is able to advance from the experience of the Thou in the We-relationship to
the increasing stages of anonymization
which mark its genesis and density as a contemporary with other contemporaries, as a successor to predecessors, and as a predecessor to successors.
II
"Whoever . . . wishes to analyze the basic concepts of the social sciences," Schutz writes, "must be willing to embark on a
[46]
laborious philosophical journey,
😭
😭
😭
for the meaning-structure of the social world can only be deduced from the most primitive and general characteristics of consciousness."
This turn to the "subjective" must be understood in phenomenological terms;
otherwise we are in danger of repeating what is by now the classical error of interpreting "consciousness" in individual, "interiorized" terms.
The
error
is rather to do only one and not the other.
The impossibility of reconciling the two does not mean that one of them alone can be sufficient.
It is not
the private contents of an introspective awareness
but
the structure of intentionality
which is meant in
the phenomenological conception of consciousness.
The perceptual model, then, is not that of a container with an "inside" and an "outside," hooked up by wires to receive messages from the "real" world,
nor is it the consequence of a separation between mind and body, ...
Rather,
for phenomenology
consciousness is conceived of as a unity
in which
the "subjective" is already in direct connection with the objects of its intentional concern
because
those "objects" are parts of the unified structure
of the streams of consciousness—
not
"things"
but
meant correlates of the acts which intend them.
To turn to consciousness, then, is to locate the essential features of meaning-structures
whose universality is guaranteed,
in part,
by the fact that
no predication of existence, ontological status, or psychological specificity is either being made or is at issue
in the phenomenological attitude.
In other words,
prepredicative experience
has a
universality
that description or analysis does not.
But how are
subjects
to communicate other than by description or analysis?
Schutz's analysis of the time-structure of social action is concerned with
what is necessarily presupposed for
any
ego which phantasies a projected act,
not with the concrete, historical individual and his particular and special characteristics.
It is irrelevant to the analysis to suggest, then, that the capacity to phantasy varies from individual to individual.
This is perfectly compatible with (and actually feeds into) the suspicion that this
necessary presupposition
is really just a mentalistic projection.
...
Subjectivity, for the phenomenologist, is then to be under-
[47]
stood as a domain which is readily accessible to the inspection of any investigator who cares to make the effort, provided that he equip himself properly.
More important than special knowledge of methodological techniques is the broad recognition that consciousness is not
an idiosyncratic wellspring
to be tapped by a haphazard or esoteric method of intuition
but
intentionality itself,
that which by its very nature is
as "public" and as "intersubjective"
as its intimates, mathematics and language.
Nor is subjectivity to be approached through more sophisticated theories of
personal intuition and empathy.
Schutz explicitly repudiates the translation of
verstehende Soziologie
['interpretive sociology']
into
either
an irrationalism which tries to seize the vital aspect of life in some non-reductive way
or
a hermeneutics of fellow-feeling which tries to enter directly into the actuality of the Other's lived experience:
" ...
["] ... the method of Weber's sociology is a rational one and that the position of interpretive sociology should in no way be confused with that of Dilthey, who opposes to rational science another, so-called 'interpretive' science based on metaphysical presuppositions and incorrigible 'intuition.'
" ... [this] arose historically from the necessity of breaking through the barriers that were erected between the rational special sciences and the understanding of living human experience.
But it was forgotten by those proposing this new approach that
life and thought are two different things
and that
science remains a matter of thought even when its subject matter is life.
... "
[Schutz]
There are a variety of reasons why
the ego cannot seize
the living actuality of the Other's experience:
his Here and Now is unique,
his stock of knowledge is built up and utilized from his perspective and by his choice,
and he alone knows when his project begins and ends.
As fellow-man, however, I can share a great
[48]
deal with the Other:
I
can
gain direct access to him
as a Thou in the We-relationship
and I
can
share a certain dimension of time
through the fact that my alter ego and I grow older together.
But even in these immediacies, I do not "become" the Other nor do I enter mysteriously into his lived experience.
Sharing is not invading.
The matter does not end there,
of course, because my knowledge of the Other in its greatest complexity comes with
the typifications and ideal types
which form the matrix of social life.
The description, analysis, and clarification
of that matrix
is nothing less than the subject matter of a phenomenology of the social sciences.
The concessions made at the beginning of the paragraph vitiate any possibility that this
description
of the social
matrix
is
a description of
anything that really has been operative
in
alter's
social life.
The task as given, rather,
results in a
formalistic rubric
of
typifications
to which alter's actions can be held up
and against which they may be viewed.
(I hesitate to say the actions may be
interpreted
this way, because the conceit to
rationality,
if it is taken seriously, doesn't leave much room for that.†)
Without as of yet having read or thunk too hard about legal formalism, it seems obvious to me that the 'rubric' being constructed here is its near-exact analog.
Some such formalism is essential to liberal democracy, but not because it generates any "rational" understanding either of
social action
or of
"interiorized" consciousness;
in fact legal formalism obliterates all such understanding, rounds off its sharp edges, so to speak, in order that the anarchy of consciousness may be rendered in a way that is (1) formally tractable per 'the system', and (2) socially acceptable to at least a substantial plurality of citizens. Those are the criteria. Explanatory power is not.
Law too is a "typified matrix" for parsing "social action". But N.B., unknowing violations of the law still are violations. This is essential to the function of law. Schutz/Natanson's project, meanwhile, simply cannot function this way: if an actor well and truly did not know about the post office or about mail, then none of their observed "typified actions" vis-a-vis the mail will be accurately "interpreted" according to the "matrix". Moreover, dropping an envelope in a mailbox is evidence of "typified" postal knowledge only in a pragmatic, unprincipled way; it can be wrong.
The post office example serves Schutz/Natanson unusually well because it is empirically unlikely that anyone would drop sealed envelopes into mailboxes for any but the "typical" reasons. This, however, has nothing to do with the permeation of typified mail-actions; rather, it's because mailboxes aren't good for much else besides their (one) intended purpose. Dressing in all black, meanwhile, is confounded: goth, mourner, usher, thief . . . I cannot possibly complete the list. Hence if I wear all black on my way to a pit orchestra gig, I am a bit like someone who makes a right turn on red in New York City without knowing that this is illegal. The difference is that the driver's ignorance cannot serve as his defense. Of course if someone on the subway calls me a goth for wearing all black, I am bound to think that they are the ignorant one. But Schutz/Natanson introduce legal form here, whereby my ignorance of goth culture is no defense against this "interpretation" of my behavior.
I imagine Schutz/Natanson want to say that typification just is what makes action "social": the person who has never heard of the mail is, in this narrow respect, functionally apart from society, perhaps ontologically apart from it too; if wearing black is amenable to a dozen "interpretations", then this confoundment is itself internalized as a typification of sorts, such that social actors come to know that there is no unambiguous social action available in this domain. My examples, then, are non sequiturs. Whatever is sufficiently typified, that is the social domain. The rest is not.
This rebuttal can handle a few isolated examples, but any more than that and one begins to wonder just what "social reality" actually consists of at scale: there would seem to be as many potential social realities as there are combinations of cells in the matrix; there would seem to be as many degrees of typification as there are people; typification would seem to be most robust on the smallest scale (i.e. intimates) and to weaken progressively as ever larger groups are considered.
In short, the family resemblance view recommends itself: there is no common nucleus of typified actions at the center of any social aggregate; each person's matrix has many empty cells; social compulsion exerts pressure only toward a minimum permeation; maximum permeation is strictly theoretical (and actually terrifying); the construction of "ideal types" goes the way of attempts to say what all games have in common.
†At TSA we spoke of the "interpretation" of x-ray images; a tacit admission, perhaps, that neither we nor the images were very good.
The distinction between life and thought which Schutz insists on demands a rigorous science of the subjective.
It is not possible, in principle, for the scientist to
enter directly into the life he observes
and to build his science from the materials of direct encounter.
...
... the sociologist or anthropologist may live with his "subjects," ...
It is from the standpoint of an observer, however, that the scientific reports of such participation are made and are methodologically warranted.
The experience of the subject as a Thou in a We-relationship genuinely established by the scientist
either
remains part of daily life
or
is made an explicit object of reflective analysis.
If it remains within life, it is
no more a part of science
than the corresponding experience of the subject.
If it is examined and reflected upon, the experience is
taken in its typified form
and interpreted by the means of constructions and ideal types.
reflection interpretation
Or perhaps
All 'so to speak.'
As always, "interpretation" is a peculiar word in the context of "scientific" pretensions.
For Schutz, ...
The sociological ascent,
then, is
from
lived experience
to
typifications of mundane life
to
personal ideal types
which account for individuals in action
to
objective ideal types
which replace all prior constructs.
With the final stage, the social scientist reaches his goal of establishing "ob-
[49]
jective meaning-contexts of subjective meaning-contexts."
And therewith he achieves
the formalization and anonymization which rigorous science requires.
This is true, and it is pernicious.
This particular
anonymization
is as pernicious as it is
rigorous
and as unjust as it is
formal.
Essentially, this system creates "social acts" where there were none before, much as a silently-enacted law creates noncompliance out of compliance.
The conceit is that this is exploratory, a mere exercise, as if a City Council were to ask:
'If we reduce the permitted number of housecats from 3 to 2 per household, without telling anyone, what noncompliance is created? how much? who? where? when? why? . . . '
This exercise is fully objective and scientific, and as long as it remains only an exercise there is no harm.
I take it as given that sociology has been more than an exercise and for this reason has caused harm. Ultimately my argument is consequentialist: everything hinges upon what is done with this science. Are we building nuclear power plants or nuclear bombs? To what urgent question is "formal" ascription of acts to actors the answer?
If a law is willfully kept secret unless and until it is violated, then suddenly ignorance is a valid defense.
In one sense,
the scientist ultimately finds
in the social world he describes
the models he has placed there.
Concrete human beings have been replaced by artificial creatures designed by the methodologist.
Yet it is extremely important to remember that
the genesis of construct and type-building
goes back in naive form to the natural attitude
within which men in daily life interact with one another.
To paraphrase Kronecker's aphorism,
"God made the integers;
all else is the work of man."
we might say that the natural attitude gives us the primary constructs, the rest is the work of the social scientist.
In a strange and tortuous way, it is through thought that life is able to return to its source.
... Schutz's Phenomenology ... is not without its internal discomforts and challenges.
... three large issues which invite critical discussion:
phenomenological method,
the nature of intersubjectivity,
and
the problem of relevance.
1.
Phenomenological Method
...
The analysis of inner time-consciousness is done within the phenomenological reduction.
The rest of his book, however, is a phenomenology of the natural attitude ...
...
". . . since
all analyses carried out within the phenomenological reduction hold true essentially also in psychological introspection,
and thus within the sphere of the natural attitude, we shall have to make no revisions whatsoever in our conclusions concerning the internal time-consciousness
[50]
when we come to apply them to the realm of ordinary social life."⁴⁴
⁴⁴ ... Compare the following formulations by Schutz:
". . . a true psychologу of intentionality is, according to Husserl's words, nothing other than a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude.
In this eidetic mundane science
(thus in the psychological apperception of the natural attitude),
which stands at the beginning of all methodological and theoretical scientific problems of all the cultural and social sciences,
all analyses carried through in phenomenological reduction essentially retain their validation.
It is precisely here that the tremendous significance of the results achieved by Husserl for all the cultural sciences lies."
(Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. 1, p. 132)
and:
". . . Husserl himself has established once and for all the principle that analyses made in the reduced sphere are valid also for the realm of the natural attitude."
(Ibid., р. 149.)
Phenomenological method, of course, is not a special instrument which the phenomenologist uses as a jeweler his loupe.
Use is bound at one end to a philosophy of perceptual experience and at the other to pragmatic considerations ...
...
It is not altogether clear why Schutz restricts his transcendental glance to inner-time consciousness.
Granted that time is the cardinal theme underlying social action, ... the social itself ... is not only equally deserving of transcendental investigation but in need of such inquiry ...
The We-relationship, for example, is in many respects a primordial given for Schutz, ...
From the standpoint of the transcendental attitude, it is necessary to ask,
How is it possible that there is such a structure?
Within the natural attitude the We-relationship is a fact of life,
but in the phenomenological attitude it is deeply problematic.
...
[51]
...
Perhaps an even deeper methodological difficulty ...
Schutz accepts it as absolute that the correspondence [of levels of phenomenological inquiry] holds.
But that insight can be gained only from the vantage point of transcendental reduction.
...
2. The Nature Of Intersubjectivity
...
The acceptance of the We-relationship means that the epistemological issue of intersubjectivity is, in certain respects, set outside the province of a phenomenology of the natural attitude.
... though we are clearly told that within the common-sense world of daily life intersubjectivity is a primordial fact of that life and so is taken for granted by common-sense men,
still the problematic status of intersubjectivity ... intrudes obliquely into the discussion ...
...
Inevitably in philosophical analysis of social reality there is a kind of circularity ...
[52]
... a seemingly inescapable correlation:
the reality to be interpreted
is already understood in a naive or hidden way.
...
When the social scientist turns to the intersubjective world and begins his description of it,
the data he locates are already
marked and charged with intersubjective intent.
...
The uneasiness I sense here may have something to do with Schutz's position on Husserl's approach to the problem of intersubjectivity ...
Like Husserl himself,
Schutz was not completely satisfied with the attempt
to account for intersubjectivity in terms of the doctrine of the transcendental ego.
... I think that on the basis of the Phenomenology alone it would be possible to say that
part of the reason for Schutz's curtailment of his use of tran-
[53]
scendental phenomenology was the increasing realization
that
it could not provide a solution
(apart from the clarification of the constitutive process)
to the philosophical problem of intersubjectivity,
and that,
in principle,
intersubjectivity is an irreducible given
within which and over against which philosophy struggles.
3.
The Problem Of Relevance.
Both social action by men in daily life and the observation and analysis of that action by social scientists
presuppose
a fundamental
interest
in goals taken to be desirable or necessary
for carrying out the affairs of life and the work of science.
...
The entire discussion of motivation, because and in-order-to statements, phantasying, and the construction of types turns on a concept of vast proportions which Schutz terms the general problem of relevance.
...
Most simply,
the problem of relevance is posed by
". . . the question of
why these facts and precisely these are selected by thought from the totality of lived experience and regarded as relevant."
The question strikes all levels of man's involvement in the social world
...
because
it points to
the source of his agency in life,
the vital principle underlying what I would call
the motility of consciousness.
...
[54]
...
In all motivation, choice, projection, phantasying, and decision there is the force which drives the action and expresses the vitality of the actor.
I suggest that the identification and comprehension of the nisus of consciousness would be the solution to the source of relevance.
See: Rank and Becker.
The Phenomenology gives us some reason to think that relevance is grounded in the phenomenology of inner-time consciousness, and a remarkable passage in a later essay, "On Multiple Realities," may lend support to that claim:
". . . the whole system of relevances which governs us within the natural attitude is founded upon the basic experience of each of us:
I know that I shall die and I fear to die.
This basic experience we suggest calling the fundamental anxiety.
It is the primordial anticipation from which all the others originate.
From the fundamental anxiety spring 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."
This is exactly what Becker says.
Becker's account is uncannily explanatory in many respects. Still, it is unclear if
the problem of relevance
is among them.
The ascription of relevance in terms of action taken is post hoc. As such, it says nothing about everything that might have been relevant to the action. This is the real "problem" to be addressed: the problem of the 'lost' glasses that one was wearing the whole time; the problem of the scrambling quarterback who grounds the ball while a receiver runs open down the opposite sideline.
Pop-psychology says that the harder we look, the more we overlook. This is inadequate as a total explanation, but it nicely stakes out the nature and depth of the problem: intensity of motive determines that something will be noticed, but not what it will be.
Moreover, Becker's argument is an argument about what happens if and when
the fundamental anxiety
is indeed the "fundamental" psychic force. There are, however, people who shed this anxiety by way of religious awakenings or near-death experiences; there are people who are relatively unburdened by it in the first place; and, to Becker's main point, there are people whose "projects" succeed in lifting the burden for them: the soldier falling on a grenade is a 'hero' not only to his immediate cohort but to the entire 'hero-system' within which he serves. Again, "the fundamental anxiety" can explain form but not content.
...
[55]
...
Turning from the
Phenomenology
to the more than twenty-five years of work which followed,
one is struck by
the consistency of Schutz's thought
Well, the conspicuous absence of self-contradiction is a bit like empty virtuosity.
Sometimes I wish I could be less
consistent
As it is, I repeat myself too much.
as well as the richness and clarity of the initial statement of his position in 1932.
...
... [later] Schutz enlarged his sociologic and philosophic horizon by studying the works of such thinkers on the American scene as George H. Mead, W. I. Thomas, and Charles H. Cooley, as well as Santayana, Whitehead, and Dewey.
Although there are repetitions in the formulation of certain notions in
the
Collected Papers,
there is no sense of conceptual redundancy.
...
[56]
...
... the nerve of what is truly original in Schutz's effort to come to terms with a philosophy of man in the natural attitude [is . . . ]
...
the illumination of mundanity
as typified by
the intentional structure of inner-time consciousness.
Everything comes back to that—
action, projection, phantasying
(and ultimately even relevance, in my opinion)
are all
the materials of a typifying consciousness
for which temporality is the secret of the social world.
...
In phenomenology ... Schutz found the meaning of temporality, and with that the clue to social reality.
...
[57]
...
... [Schutz] was not influenced by philosophy; he was a philosopher!
He was not influenced by phenomenology; he was a phenomenologist!
...
... Schutz took as the content and focus of his work
precisely that field of action whose sociologic status is defined by the system of constructs endemic to the natural attitude and the ideal types of the social scientist,
as well as that ground of intentional consciousness the investigation of which is the privileged responsibility of the phenomenologist.
...
...
in Schutz's sociology,
examining ideal types
is
exploring the intentionality constitutive of all typification.
Conversely,
in Schutz's phenomenology,
turning to the nature of innertime consciousness
is
investigating the exemplifications of intentional life in the natural attitude.
At their theoretical fundament, sociology and philosophy are one.
...
[58]
...
The period when phenomenology was considered a Germanic mystery is over.
Accordingly, it is time for both philosophers and social scientists to declare a moratorium on, if not a final halt to, the pseudo-questions and academic clichés which have clung about the corpus of phenomenology, not as gadflies but as fruit flies, buzzing and pestering without knowledge or purpose.
...
With the publication of Schutz's book, phenomenology has finally come of age in America.
...
Phenomenology is a way into the common source which unites philosophy and social science;
its fulfillment would mean the illumination of life by thought.
...
[59]
Chapter IV
Phenomenology and Typification
...
...
This paper is divided unevenly into three parts.
... first ... an exposition of a few central concepts in Schutz's work.
...
... second ... an interpretation of
[60]
some of Schutz's' fundamental convictions.
...
The final part—and the longest—is concerned with the fundamental theme of the modes of typification.
And there I must take sole responsibility for the views expressed.
...
I
It is perhaps the essential characteristic of our everyday lives that any problem which arises has as its tacit background the unproblematic status of the mundane reality which commonsense men share.
However profound and far-reaching the problem may be, it is a problem over and against something which is taken for granted: ...
"Believingly" we take the world as given, and our social action bears the implicit mark of that faith.
Thus, we take for granted that the world exists, ... that, for all practical purposes, each of us can, in Schutz's language, "come to terms" with experience.
...
But it is necessary
to step outside the circle of the taken for granted
in order to inspect the taken for granted,
and so a radical effort is called for
...
[61]
...
...
Whether with others or alone, our actions and thoughts, our attitudes and concerns, intend an intersubjective reality.
There are two aspects ... :
first, the world intended is
a shared or social reality
in the sense that
the object of our thoughts and attitudes
is itself an ensemble
of selves and interrelationships.
My intention is of the social, of what is "ours."
Re: artworks qua artworks, Carroll refers to the relational properties of works as 'nonmanifest' properties.
But, obviously, we cannot
intend
something which is not manifested to our phenomenal field.
Danto is more incisive and coherent with his (in)famous line: "To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry."
But even with vision per se ruled out, still there must be some avenue of object-intention; otherwise there is not "something" but rather, nothing.
Meanwhile, for Natanson/Schutz here,
the object of our thoughts and attitudes is itself an ensemble of selves and interrelationships.
But exceedingly little of this beyond the first order is in fact phenomenally 'manifest'.
This marks out the mistake common to both cohorts:
- the bulk of social and institutional relationality really is not manifest even from the standpoint of the best-integrated subjects;
- often and easily enough, "selves and interrelationships" can be 'seen'; it is more that they usually are not seen because they lie outside the subject's phenomenal field.
As a proportion of the entire
reality,
the truly
shared
portion is small enough as to be called negligible.
So goes one argument for ontological nominalism about 'society'.
But second,
the intending itself
—not the object intended but the act of intending it—
has a social inflection.
...
I see an intersubjective reality
and I see it intersubjectively.
A crucial point, and undoubtedly true.
Still, we cannot
intend
what is not present to us.
(To argue the 'paranormal' as an exception is actually to argue that it is not an exception.)
The analyses that Schutz offers help to elucidate both poles of the intersubjective ...
The clue to those analyses is Schutz's conception of typification.
We may see it at work in the example of intersubjectivity.
On the object or social side, the intersubjective world is a tissue of constructs or typifications.
Groups, organizations, associations, institutions
all have their
anatomy of rules and relationships
which any individual actor on the social scene
must recognize and accept
if he is, in Schutz's language,
to "gear into" the social world.
The operation of the post office—one of his favorite examples—involves
men, machines, activities, and procedures
I know next to nothing about
but
whose regulated performance I count on.
This
favorite example
is not really an example of
association,
not if we simply
must
assimilate ourselves to its
rules
(as opposed to the other way around).
One presumes to
know
something
of-and-about one's "associates", beyond some "rules" abstracted from conduct.
Nominally this is an example of
organization.
By this time in history there is some bitter irony in applying that term to the Post Office, but on the whole the shoe fits.
What the Post Office really is, semantically, pragmatically and ontologically alike, is an
institution;
and as we've since learned, institutions per se are not inherently
prosocial
entities, no matter how apt it may be, for whatever purpose, to describe their nature, constitution or function as "social".
If "institutions" don't
gear in
to us, there is nothing we can do to gear into them.
Apart from my understanding of post office routine, the structure of that enterprise, its organization and involvements, is assumed by common-sense men to be in principle available to all those interested in using or entering the postal service.
What they will find is a pattern of requirements and norms, stipulated
[62]
in manuals and supervised by officials,
which
in its very public character
presupposes placement in a world
assumed to be valid in the same way
for all of us.
This also is, of course, a central
assumption
of Liberal regimes.
What the Liberal project shows, however, is that
requirements and norms
do have to be
stipulated
in order for this practical
public
universalism to be successfully engineered. In absence of forceful "stipulation", particularist social artifacts quickly resurface and propagate.
It's quite silly to mistake the epiphenomena of Liberal Universalism for evidence of the universality of 'prepredicative experience'. That line of argument is confounded by the concurrent presence of vast Liberal social engineering projects. These projects gain their initial traction via the intellect; they culminate in the indirect coercion of the 'settled matter'.
To be sure, "stipulation" does succeed in engineering universality; or at least, it can succeed. The lesson here, however, is the sheer fragility of the achievement, not its mere possibility in ideal circumstances. Poverty, war, particularism . . . thus far in human existence these have been the rules; wealth, peace and universalism have been the exceptions.
Pragmatically: the scope for successful "stipulation" is finite. Not just any tack will work.
Rationally and morally: many among these already limited options contravene Liberalism, or at least are unpalatable to Liberals.
The viable remainder is small.
Moreover,
the point of access
which the individual has to the structure of the typified world
may itself be understood as part of that world.
...
". . . the
common-sense constructs used for the typification
of the Other and of myself
are to a considerable extent
socially derived and socially approved.
Within the in-group the bulk of personal types and course-of-action types is taken for granted (until counter-evidence appears) as a set of rules and recipes which have stood the test so far and are expected to stand it in the future.
Even more,
the pattern of typical constructs is frequently institutionalized as a standard of behavior,
warranted by traditional and habitual mores
and sometimes by
specific means of so-called social control,
such as the legal order."
[Schutz]
All of this is correct, as far as it goes. How far is that?
We have only to look as far as the frustrated office worker who complains of the vastly different 'cultures' of accounting, logistics and HR.
-
scaling-up requires
functional differentiation; -
differentiation erodes
typification; -
erosion requires tightened
social control.
Functional differentiation is de-typification.
For the individual to find his way in the social world he must come to appreciate the order of its typical procedures and the typified manner in which those procedures are to be followed.
Such appreciation demands a recognition that social reality is itself typified and, indeed, incomprehensible apart from that essential priority.
At the same time,
there is a subject-pole to all of this,
a no less vital priority
of the individual's schema of interpretation.
Ah yes, that part! . . .
If what is intended is social, then the intending has an intersubjective dimension.
...
Given a typified world,
I also expect the same typified result.
Not only do I expect the post office to discharge its duties in the way in which it "usually" does, but I also expect that the letter I plan to mail tomorrow will be processed in the same way as the one I mailed today.
There is
an open horizon of typicality
involved,
for
what constitutes my act as typical is not only that it is like similar acts performed by others in similar circumstances
...
but that in acting I have
seized a variable
which I interpret to be
generalizable and fundamentally repeatable.
...
[63]
...
Still further,
the typified act points to
the capacity of my alter ego
to repeat his act
in essentially the same way.
...
Both of us take for granted that each of us can repeat typified acts.
And that means that sharing a social world comes down to
the individual's intending the world
as intersubjectively valid.
In sum:
the social is a pattern of typifications grasped and interpreted by a typifying consciousness.
...
II
...
the duality of self and world
is a primitive fact of philosophical experience.
No transcendental idealism which understands itself could claim that the world is manufactured by the ego;
neither can it be properly said that the world is what it is independent of the individual who lives within its confines and who interprets its possibilities.
Rather,
at any moment in which philosophical analysis begins,
the self is situated
historically, linguistically, and culturally.
Given in terms of
situatedness,
the puzzle of
intersubjectivity
is to reconcile
the view
from
the situation
with
the view
of
it.
Natanson can reasonably reject the
manufacture
of
the world by the ego,
but he cannot reject the infinite generativity of symbolic and semantic space. Language and culture are the standard tropes here, but they do not begin to exhuast the issue: it is extinguishable (death) but not exhaustible.
Why create of the world when you can create from the world? Daresay, if "the ego" can infer
an open horizon of typicality
from the trifling machinations of the Post Office, what races might it run along life's profoundest courses?
The mistake, then, is to think that convergence betokens intersubjectivity. Agreement is a mentalistic artifact, a broken clock that is right twice a day. But the view-from is also a view-of, that is, of the infinite ticker-tape of symbols and meanings; and this time each tape really does have only one viewer.
Put another way: given the "openness" of this "horizon", the static expectation of any "agreement" between any two tickers is zero.
Each of us has his
biographical situation,
...
At the same time,
it is in my interpretive activity that my situation is recognized and, in turn, transformed.
Raw givenness and subjective interpretation are then inevitable partners in philosophical analysis;
...
But it is in the relationship between the given and the construction placed upon it that the difficulty before us lies.
...
By "systemic history," as distinct from either chronology or
[64]
reportage, I mean the career of the ego in its organization and articulation of an experiential world.
... there is no other choice [than to "approach the relationship between world and self from the perspective of the self"],
for starting from social reality means, in effect, trying to understand something,
an activity which is
bound to the realm of the self.
In its systemic history, however, the self is grounded in a perceptual involvement with the world
which
logically precedes any act of overt or self-conscious interpretation.
The history of each of us, in these terms, includes most vitally a huge domain of what might be termed
"proto-interpretation,"
the intending of signs and attributes which are
below the threshold of reflective awareness
and which presuppose what Husserl termed
a "pre-predicative" realm of experience.
Schutz writes:
Phenomenological analysis shows . . . that there is a pre-predicative stratum of our experience, within which the intentional objects and their qualities are not at all well circumscribed;
that we do not have
original experiences of isolated things and qualities,
but that there is rather a field of our experiences within which
certain elements are selected
by our mental activities as standing out against the background of their spatial and temporal surroundings;
that within the through and through connectedness of our stream of consciousness all these selected elements keep their halos, their fringes, their horizons;
that an analysis of the mechanism of predicative judgment is warranted only by recourse to the mental processes in which and by which pre-predicative experience has been constituted.
Much more on this from Schutz, below.
Let us turn to an example.
Sitting at my typewriter or standing at a podium, I occupy a "Here" which appears on no map yet which is deeply familiar to every one of us, for each of us is always Here at every moment.
Further, from my present Here I look out over a sector of the world which includes you, my fellow-man, as "There."
I know that for you
what I call There
is a Here.
Optimistic.
What
I know
cannot predict what I do.
And anyway, what do I really "know" here? Mere contentless form, and nothing more.
i.e. Try to coax out evidence of this "knowledge" by asking direct or indirect questions, and perhaps you will succeed. But then, given social action 'in the wild', try to interpret this action so as to conform to the supposition of such "knowledge" in the actors; not all action will so conform.
In certain cherrypicked (because salient) scenarios, these exceptions to intersubjective
reciprocity
are called 'objectification'. But really objectification is endemic; it is vastly wider than mere victimhood. We ignore the unsalient instances unless and until one of them comes back to bite us. (Silent Evidence/Dog Not Barking.)
Given ample 'interpretive' leeway, all social action could be interpreted as contradicting the assumption of reciprocity, but only some of it could be interpreted as affirmative. A "typified" basis for interpreting social action is an easy target for the skeptical interpreter.
The unstated reciprocity between us
allows for the translation of my Here into your There and vice versa.
Beyond that translation there is what might be called
a subjunctive reciprocity:
that were I to move to where you are, I would not only have a new Here but
[65]
would in addition
view the surrounding world
in essentially the same way you do.
No one ever taught me about such reciprocities, yet they are an integral part of my placement in the world.
In a large sense, I have learned about perspectives without formal tutelage.
... a slow and continual process of accretion ...
The jump from exchanging places in childhood games to recognizing that a principle of exchange underlies such movements is a qualitative one which need not ever occur in self-reflective fashion in mundane life.
...
We "know" all of this in a fugitive way;
it lies sedimented in our experience,
awaiting philosophical reconstruction.
In fact, it may be said that
the exploration of unexamined life
is an inescapable task of the philosopher.
As Merleau-Ponty suggests,
"It is necessary to place consciousness in the presence of its unreflective life in things and awaken it to its own history which it has forgotten: that is the true role of philosophical reflection . . ."
Something like this
accretion
must happen.
Whether its
reconstruction
is either possible or necessary is less clear.
But in reflecting seriously on the sedimentation of the Here and There and the reciprocity of perspectives, as Schutz called it,
we are bound to ask,
in the present context,
What is the given
[?]
and
what is the construction?
In what sense can there be said to be an object and a subject pole in intersubjective experience at the pre-predicative level?
The direction of an answer lies in the nature of typification.
Suitably hedged!
Most simply put,
at the most rudimentary level in our systemic history,
the given
and
the construction
or interpretation of it
are
a unity of world and self.
What later is splintered into a duality is in its originary expression one.
I don't quite understand this.
What is clear, at least, is that such higher-order stuff as
subjunctive reciprocity
is higher-order, in the sense of supervening upon a basis in some lower-order stuff.
Beyond that, all I can venture to guess, re: the above, is:
if our
typifications
necessarily take
a unity of world and self
as their object,
then
this is how the "self" enters the fray.
Now the self is in the mix; but the mix, prepredicatively at least, is a "unity"; hence this is not quite (not yet?) 'empathy' or 'projection' in any standard technical sense. To explain the constitution of "intersubjectivity" by way of empathy or projection was always unsightly and unparsimonious; here, then, the desired parsimony is achieved by 'unifying' the phenomenal field.
I'm not sure this is what is being argued, but if it is then I can't quite agree.
First, I don't see how the self-world boundary can be so conveniently elided by some supposed "unity" existing at the most immediate level of perception. I don't doubt that there is such a 'level'; but immediacy is not integration. It seems possible (for someone else who has the requisite Cognitivist bonafides) to argue that the Fast Brain, e.g., does not obliterate all lines of differentiation, just some of them. (Perhaps there are select domains within which blink-thinking actually restores or even exaggerates differentiations that deliberative thinking works to blur?)
Second, though I concede that this type of argument cannot (and should not) cut any ice with philosophers, it seems obvious to me that there is a deep existential fatwa against 'self-typification'. Rather, the thrust of all self-interpretation, if I may distinguish that from self-observation, is, as Becker says, towards the causa-sui conceit, and therefore towards everything that is unique and special. ("If you took a blind and dumb organism and gave it a self-consciousness and a name, if you made it stand out of nature and know consciously that it was unique, then you would have narcissism.")
This explains one 'line of differentiation' which even the Fast Brain must respect. And then, not only would "typification" no longer suffice as the constitutive basis for intersubjectivity, but in fact all typification would be other-typification, expressly excluding the self; this is the 'Glass House' phenomenon which is so well attested to in both laboratory and folk psychologies.
Admittedly, it seems that we must notice, here and there, that we ourselves indeed conform to type; the storehouse of subliminal or repressed perceptions to this end must be extensive, and surely some of it must rise to consciousness. The question is whether we revise our typifications in light of this. This I remain to be convinced of. Each of us is a living, breathing exception in our own mind.
Typification, on this account, is
itself the relationship between the
social and subjective polarities of experience.
Thus,
the world is
[66]
given to the individual by way of types
and of open horizons associated with
or attached to those types,
but
that givenness is at the same time
constituted by consciousness
as
typical.
Type and typification are modalities of the same constitutive process.
Their sundering into object and subject
is a later stage
in the career of their systemic history.
The force of those later stages, however, need not be denied.
I am not suggesting that the weight of societal demands somehow disappears in a transcendental transformation.
Nor is the power of Nature abdicated in phenomenological analysis.
We are, as Schutz says,
"born of mothers and not concocted in retorts."
And,
we may add,
the obstetrical slap that starts us howling
is
flesh against flesh,
not
concept against concept.
👍
Granted the compulsion of social reality and its compelling power, it is still necessary to search out its origins and understand its structure.
It certainly is interesting.
Is it truly
necessary
?
We do better to anchor ourselves to the brute fact of
compulsion,
if it is one. Any brute fact is infinitely more valuable than provisional speculation.
The
search
begins when we suspect that we have our facts wrong.
The force of the intersubjective does not negate the status of the self or short-circuit its becoming in the world.
Rather, part of the meaning of the "taken for granted" world of everyday life is that within our naive acceptance of its efficacy and strength lies the history of a typifying consciousness which establishes the meaning of both givenness and interpretation.
This view of typification is not without its problems and most certainly not without its critics.
✋ ✋ ✋
...
Of the critical difficulties which might be considered, I have time for only one, ... :
the historical world cannot be caught by phenomenology;
at best what I have said about systemic history and pre-predicative experience is a descriptive report,
one which cannot explain the phenomena it points to and which stops short of entering the realm of genuine historical action.
I have no idea what
genuine historical action
is, and I don't want to know.
If the point is that sociality does not exhuast subjectivity, then I agree; but I see this as a far larger issue than just "history".
I keep coming back to the intersection of what Becker says about 'symbolic life' with what Chomsky et al say about generativity: this is limitless appetite meeting with limitless supply. It seems we must constantly be manufacturing "systemic history" in the mind's backyard furnaces.
The historical world, then, remains fugitive.
Who has true access to it?
Perhaps a clue might be found in a position which
[67]
appears to start with and stick to empirical reality.
Marx and Engels write:
". . . not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history . . .
history does not end by being resolved into 'self-consciousness' . . . but . . . in it at each stage there is found
a material result:
a sum of productive forces,
a historically created relation
of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor;
a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions,
which,
on the one hand,
is indeed modified by the new generation,
but also on the other
prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development,
a special character.
It shows that
circumstances make men
just as much as
men make circumstances."
Yes, but ...
The circumstances which make men
include
the responses men make to their circumstances.
At bottom,
mundane existence is the arena in which revolution erupts,
whatever may be the causal framework for violence and transformation or the proper logic which accounts for its actualization.
Yet it would appear that in the materialist interpretation of history we have action, whereas in the phenomenological approach only "criticism" emerges.
Blood flows for the Marxist while the phenomenologist contemplates the essence of gore.
I must condense my reply to the claim that phenomenology is insulated from the actualities of history.
The central consideration is that
"actuality" and phenomenological analysis are neither other-excluding nor independent categories.
All philosophy of history, whether idealist or materialist, reflects upon phenomena and attempts to comprehend them.
The act of reflection is directed toward the historical and may also be taken as part of history.
Preliminarily, I wrote (now edited):
I consider
history
to be something like the documentation accompanying some complex software program: It explains functions perfectly but can be nonetheless totally incomprehensible when one comes to it through the lens of a particular task. And if we are bothering to 'view' it in the first place, then this just is the nature of our task: too particular to be specifically addressed in the manual; to find the answer in amongst the jargon and the reduncancy, we would have to already know what the answer is.
We can
reflect
all we want, but the only thing we'll ever
comprehend
this way is ourselves.
Now:
I have nothing urgent to say about the Marxist critique of everything-that-is-not-Marxism, but I did stumble on something the other day which clarified an important issue for me. Having nowhere else to log this, it might as well go here.
Notice, in red and black above, the tension between "material result" and "historically created relation". Conventionally, relations are not themselves material, no matter how often or how forceably these two words are smashed together. Hence to speak of "handing down" relations is mildly ungrammatical.
Regarding Carroll, I have argued that the "sum" of all relations is visible to no one social actor. Perhaps Marxists are eager to embrace this point in the context of 'mystification' and 'hegemony'. However, it also suggests that the "sum of productive forces" is a nominal artifact rather than a real (read:"material") force, something which I imagine Marxists would deny.
Here is Phil writing on Engels, Marx and Timpanaro:
Unfortunately, Marxism in the academy and in wider left culture have a tendency to regard Engels as a bit of a bad 'un, as someone who ended up forcing the material world into a stultifying philosophy of nature. The sins of mechanism, of a clunky, vulgar materialism was the negative legacy he bequeathed the political and theoretical tradition he co-founded. So the story goes.
Nevertheless, all Marxists would agree that only by being resolutely materialist can we understand the social world. ... Unfortunately, the disuse into which Engels has fallen is a symptom of a flight from a properly materialist approach and partly explains why Marxism became old hat in the 1990s. When you're having a hard time getting to grips with things, and the pomo new kids appeared to make a better fist of it, you can understand why. ... Timpanaro argued that too much of Marxism, like bourgeois thought, had become caught up in epistemology as opposed to ontology. ... how we know things vs being/existence in the world ... Timpanaro argues that philosophical struggle within bourgeois culture is between two families of idealism (idealism, ultimately, being the assumption the world is driven and determined by thought or figures of thought ... ). The first, which Timpanaro refers to as 'empirio-criticist', or the reduction of knowledge to pure experience, is better known to us as pragmatism and is the dominant form of bourgeois thought. We can see it today in the fetishisation of "what works", of so-called evidence-based policy making in which politics is reduced to a managerial exercise, ... Subordinate to and sometimes opposed to it is historicist and humanist idealism. This emphasises the otherworldly or the transcendent capacities of human beings to overcome their surroundings, and we find it in the celebration of entrepreneurs, the great men of history, ...
Despite the uses to which idealism is put, it appears to have a positive, creative quality: both varieties emphasise agency, of the preternatural powers of the subject, of the thinking mind, to do things. ... In different ways that are fundamentally the same, the pragmatic and the spiritual maintain the view that qualities of thought are independent of and can transcend the social and the natural world. ... we confront the world as an object external to our subjectivity, but in a relation in which we are primary. Hence why questions of epistemology are central to idealist thinking. ...
By way of contrast, materialism turns this on its head. As Timpanaro puts it:
Cognitively (...) the materialist maintains that experience cannot be reduced either to a production of reality by a subject (...) or a reciprocal implication of subject and object. We cannot, in other words, deny or evade the element of passivity in experience: the external situation which we do not create but which impresses itself on us. Nor can we in any way absorb the external datum by making it a more more negative moment in the activity of the subject, or by making both the subject and the object mere moments, distinguishable only in abstraction, of a single affective reality constituted by experience (p.34)
[Phil's (...) elipses this time]
Therefore the relation of materialism to idealism is hostile and necessarily polemical. ... "passivity", for Timpanaro, refers to the irreducible character of the material. ... The world, its movements and events simply present themselves, and the people and cultures affected either adapted, migrated elsewhere, or died. The refusal to acknowledge passivity then is to deny the manifold ways in which nature impinges on, conditions and configures the social. It is to set up a dualism, an opposition and ontological separation of the natural world from the human world when in fact both exist in the same material world. For Timpanaro this is why Engels is important ...
However, this has seen Engels cast as some kind of mechanical materialist because of his insistence that social and natural phenomena cohabit the same ontological plain. ... As far as Timpanaro was concerned, because the natural world was/is Darwinist did not mean the social world was the same - though Engels and Marx both understood how the realities of class struggle in capitalist societies might appear that way. Nevertheless, over the years commentators have tried to drive a wedge where no division existed between the two. ... Somehow, despite writing an unfinished fragment entitled 'The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man', in which Engels hypothesised that the growth of our brains, our evolution as a species was a consequence of our labouring to meet and overcome the challenges thrown at us by the natural environment, and in Anti-Duhring defining freedom in terms of the consciousness of necessity (passivity), these positions are supposed to be at odds with Marx. Instead, as Timpanaro rightly observes, what they demonstrate is a consistency of approach between the two.
... Why should we care? Timpanaro argues passivity is politically crucial. Approaches fetishising epistemology and therefore privileging activity and agency denigrates the material world and pretends anything is possible all of the time. Marxist materialism is fundamentally opposed to this. ... reasserting monist, Marxist materialism has acquired some political urgency. ... Political education ... has to compete with conspiracy theory, Fabianism, old labourism, new labourism, liberalism, dogmatism and all the rest. This isn't to substitute Engelsian monism for a pessimistic moan-ism, but acknowledging the passivity of our own position so we can think about and work toward overcoming it.
For now I have to beg off when it comes to monism/dualism, and I have to confess I do find epistemology far more urgent today than ontology.
This notion of "passivity" in the face of "irreducible material" could name exactly what troubles me about Natanson/Schutz, or it could name precisely the argument they are making. I'm not sure. If they are right about the unity of prepredicative experience, does that make them Idealists or Materialists? Their deterministic streak suggests the latter, whereas the purported objects and contents of this experience (i.e. relations, roles, typifications) suggests the former. Which is it?
Is "material relations" a contradiction of terms? Are relations inherently second-order phenomena? Are they mere ideas? Or is the supervenience of "relations" upon "materials" sufficiently isomorphic as to permit us to speak interchangeably of "a historically created relation" and "a material result"?
As many of Phil's posts have, this one elicited a lively and informative comment thread.
Speedy said...
...
It is right to observe that most people's fortunes are decided at birth, but from their perspective, they are free agents. If you don't acknowledge this dual nature then you fail - as they did in the Soviet Union.
13 September 2018 at 00:37
This is more or less what I would say about the determinism inherent in the Natanson/Schutz account of typification. But saying that people only think they have agency is an incomplete rejoinder, albeit one I'm prepared to accept. The bigger point is that, from our own point of view, our "fortunes" are as granular as is our phenomenal experience, whether 'done by' us or 'done to' us. The notion of "fortunes" is excellent for demonstrating this, actually. Both the illusion of agency and actual agency (so called) generate divergence, as in the idea that siblings raised together can have 'different childhoods'. In other words, no alter ego can parse one's fortunes with first-person granularity. The "place of the other" into which one "places" oneself is therefore barely worthy even of being called 'reductive'; it would be better to call it 'synthetic'.
Evidently all of this functions shockingly well vis-a-vis intersubjective consciousness; that is, ideas. Intersubjectivity is a domain where 'ideas' are 'what works'.
Epistemically, however, "subjunctive reciprocity" is a train wreck. This we can safely label a 'material' question. Nothing works when we start from the presumption that "were I to move to where you are, I would not only have a new Here but would in addition view the surrounding world in essentially the same way you do" (pp. 64-65, above). We may seem to do this, but when we stake explicit predictions on purported knowledge of the other, we are not very good.
Both of these aspects of Natanson/Schutz's "reciprocity", the material as well as the ideal, are very inconvenient for Marxists.
Putting oneself in the place of the other is always highly reductive: its 'informal' reductiveness is indeed not very different from the 'formal' reductiveness of social science; most importantly, different stuff is 'reduced out' of the same person depending on who is doing the reducing.
The "typify" family of words honors these points semantically, but the Natanson/Schutz account is at best intermittently reverent of what I have called 'first-person granularity'.
The validity of a reduction is entirely a function of the work it is asked to do. One of several unexpected parallels between Becker and Taleb, writing in entirely different domains, is the idea that stability can be illusory: Becker points out that 'primitive' beliefs were generally outrageously wrong by modern scientific standards, yet if circumstance never poked at their weak points, they survived, often for a very long time; Taleb says much the same about traders and forecasters, likening them to turkeys before Thanksgiving.
Typification also is like this, no?
LBird said...
You wrote "Nevertheless, all Marxists would agree that only by being resolutely materialist can we understand the social world."
This is simply not true. The only 'Marxists' who would would agree are those who are actually 'Engelsists'. Marx was, if anything, a resolute idealist-materialist, who placed human conscious activity (social production, theory and practice) at the centre of his ideas, and not 'matter', as do the materialists, who follow Engels on this key point.
21 September 2018 at 10:41
Phil said...
Labour, as matter consciously changing matter, is central to Engels. There is no difference between Marx and Engels on this.
22 September 2018 at 09:58
LBird said...
...
But ... Marx does not use 'matter' as a concept. ... we can even find quotes from Engels that agree with Marx, that 'matter' is a human product, a social product of conscious human activity, and so (and this is what centrally concerns Marx), WE can change 'it'. But 'materialists' focus on 'matter', as you do above, ... That's why the contributor(s) above stress 'passivity', which is entirely alien to Marx's thought.
Also, even 20th century science moved on from 'matter', to 'mass' and 'energy'. Whatever 'it' is, we can change 'it'. To remain wedded to 'matter and passivity' is to destroy Marx's insights, and his unifying of 'idealism' and 'materialism'.
22 September 2018 at 11:06
LBird said...
To further illustrate
Marx's unifying idealism-materialism,
...
it's better to think in terms, not of 'matter' and 'mind', but of
'mind-matter'.
...
It was Engels who resurrected the old philosophical divide between 'mind' and 'matter', and (rightly) said that 'materialism' places 'matter' prior to 'mind', and that 'idealism' places 'mind' prior to 'matter'.
Marx, however, had completed
the contemporary task of German Idealism, in its aim to unify both.
Marx achieved this, by stressing the idealists' ACTIVITY, but linking it to 'material' HUMANITY, and thus overcame the materialists' passivity.
For idealism, activity was divine;
for materialism, humanity was passive.
Marx's social productionism ensures humans produce their world, as so can CHANGE it.
This applies to everything related to humans, whether 'natural' or 'social'.
Our 'nature' is our socio-historical product, and so we can change 'nature-for-us'.
Engels didn't understand what Marx had achieved, and knowing nothing about German philosophy, reverted to a pre-Marx 18th century materialism, which remained dominant in 'science' until Einstein.
Marx was a thinker for the 20th century, decades ahead of his times.
Engels was a pedestrian copier of his social influences.
23 September 2018 at 10:00
LBird said...
...
...
we have to make clear the massive political differences between Marx and Lenin.
Put simply, this is whether the class dictates to the party, or the party dictates to the class.
The former means workers’ democracy, the latter means workers’ passivity.
The philosophical origins for the latter is in Engels’ complete misunderstanding, and unwitting destruction, of Marx’s views.
Marx argued for the SELF-EMANCIPATION of the working class,
...
As Marx argued, a ‘nature’ that is not our social product is a ‘nothing for us’.
Engels never understood this about ‘nature’, and merely accepted the ruling class ideas about ‘bourgeois physics’ that were dominant during his own life.
...
since WW2 and the new domination by the US, we’ve returned to a variation of ‘materialism’, which sees ‘nature’ as ‘nature-in-itself’, which is not related to the social production of humanity, and thus can be simply ‘discovered’ by ‘objective scientists’.
...
25 September 2018 at 09:39
LBird said...
...
a little advice
...
...
wherever Marx writes ‘material’, strike through that word with a pencil, and insert ‘social’ above.
That simple edit will enhance one’s understanding of the fundamental difference between
...
Marx’s ‘idealism-materialism’ and Engels’ ‘materialism’.
By ‘material’, Marx meant ‘human’ (as opposed to ‘ideal’, meaning ‘divine’).
For Marx, ‘material’ was nothing whatsoever to do with ‘matter’, which was Engels’ own equating.
...
Marx was simply
rejecting the religious basis of idealism
(his previous intellectual environment),
and wanting to put the focus on humanity, and its conscious activity, its social production.
He seems to have thought that
employing (in opposition to the divine ‘ideal’) the profane ‘material’,
would achieve this new focus –
...
27 September 2018 at 14:22
This indeed explains a whole lot and clears up a latent confusion on my part.
That said, I do think Engels was onto something. If that 'something' arises from a "complete misunderstanding" of Marx, then I say: so much the worse for Marx.
(It's possible that I only think this because I can usually understand Engels but can rarely understand Marx. Moreover, the more directly Marx is grappling with German Idealism, the less of him I understand. TBC.)
Before we get back to business, this exchange between Phil and a commenter deserves to be included here.
Herbert Marcuse on Dialectical Logic
In order to really know an object, one must grasp and investigate all sides of the object, all its relations and 'mediations' (...) Second, dialectical logic requires that the object be taken in its development, in its 'self-movement' (...) in its transformation. Third, the whole of human praxis must enter into the 'definition' of the object, as well as the critique of its truth, since as a practical determination the object is bound together with what is necessary to man. Fourth, the dialectical logic teaches that 'there is no abstract truth'; truth is always concrete.
Cit Douglas Kellner (1984), Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism, p.52.
Kapitano said...
So,
(1) To understand a thing, you've got to know everything about all its relationships of all kinds to every other thing.
(2) You also need to know how it's changing. Plus apparently it changes itself in some mysterious way.
(3) You also need to know everything that everyone could possibly use it for or feel about it, in any social context.
(4) Every answer to every question depends on the context in which one is asking.
(1) and (3) - impossible
(2) - impossible and meaningless
(4) - platitude
You know, one of the tells of falling into cultishness is treating banalities as revelations, and gibberish as profound.
We'd better hope marxism doesn't really depend on this pseudo-philosophy.
24 August 2014 at 15:45
...
Is the exposure of false
[68]
consciousness deed or thought?
Is the understanding of class struggle action or interpretation?
To defend the historical concern of phenomenology at this point is
to maintain that
philosophical reflection is a mode of action.
What is transformed is the mundane world in which man and fellow-man locate and define the material order of existence.
...
"the true is the whole";
"there are no immobile absolutes";
"there is no such thing as a spiritual beyond";
"the true is also the concrete."
It would seem, at first glance, that utterances such as these would qualify as philosophical claims.
On Marxian grounds then, they are contemplative proclamations ...
Now those statements, in fact, are excerpted bits from a passage by Henri Lefebvre...
...
...
If it be argued that the statement "the true is also the concrete" is validated when it receives "meaning from some historical, empirically verifiable content,"
then we have at least as much reason to believe that traditional philosophical claims, those of phenomenol-
[69]
ogy included, find their legitimation in the matrix of man's comprehension of himself in history.
In short,
it is a truncated view of philosophy,
let alone phenomenology,
that severs thought from action.
...
The theme of typification whose inner horizon has occupied us comes to this result:
its roots in pre-predicative experience comprise a constitutive unity of which the social and the subjective are facets.
...
But there is also an outer horizon of the theme of typification.
Systemic history leads us to pose the more generalized question,
What transformations does typification undergo in the social world it helps to constitute?
...
III
...
for Schutz, the social world is typified by
common-sense men
in the course of their daily lives.
That is the paramount stratum of social reality.
Thus, a typifying consciousness is not, in the first instance, a product of the analysis, interpretation, or attitude of the philosopher, ... but rather the taken for granted creation of ordinary men going about their business in the ordinary world.
The task of the philosopher and the scientist is
to bring to explicit clarity the structure of mundane life.
...
To typify is to abstract.
The stamps and envelopes sold at the post office are not known individually by postal employees ...
[70]
...
A six-cent stamp is what we want, and we set aside the question of which exemplars of the type we are actually given.
The abstractive act of "setting aside" consists in the willingness to accept
a something or a someone
whose function is solely of interest.
...
If to typify is to abstract,
it is no less true that
to abstract
is to abstract
from.
The ordinary procedure of the postal service necessarily takes for granted trivial variations ...
Whether the stamp is on the upper right hand corner or a little further down cannot be made into a topic of discussion unless the point of such discussion is to damage postal routine.
In fact,
"work according to rule"
was used by employees of the British Postal Service some years ago as a way of striking without formally being on strike.
"Now let's see whether this letter meets the minimum-maximum measurement criteria for first-class mail.
Where's the ruler?
All right, it appears that the length is quite satisfactory,
now let's have a look at width, shall we?"
...
It took weeks to catch up on the backlog of tens of thousands of pieces of mail.
Imagine what
"experiencing according to rule"
would mean!
Abstraction involves more than a given reality,
portions of which are set aside for certain purposes.
It is one of Schutz's most significant insights that the social world includes
men and events which are
not
present to immediate experience
and which, in some cases,
cannot be present.
...
It includes those who are my contemporaries in a broad sense but with whom I do not share a common segment of space and time in a face-to-face relationship.
... [it] points pastward to my predecessors and futureward to my suс-
[71]
cessors.
It is the history-laden locus of my action.
When I attend to some event in the social world, then, I am, whether consciously or not,
abstracting from a larger domain of what is given.
On the contrary, the process thus far described is one of extrapolation, not interpolation.
If the result includes
men and events which are not present to immediate experience,
then the
domain of what is given
is smaller than the resulting
abstraction,
not
larger
than it.
Why should we think that "abstraction" respects the bounds of
historical
fact?
It is possible to believe this only if "abstraction" is in fact a reduction from the "given". But if "abstraction" is generative, there is no reason to think that symbolic generativity is bounded in the social domain in a way that it is not in every other domain. That is why the distinction is crucial.
...
The social world is
a mutually held and sustained matrix of abstractions
from the concretely given actualities of experience.
Whatever is
mutually held
from among the possibilities,
this
just is
the
social
part. The rest is noise.
This gives the Realist and the Nominalist exactly what they each want, and hence settles nothing.
Even the experiences of the "We-relationship" and of the "Thou" in friendship and love are moments in a social process which involve familiarity and strangeness as typifying structures.
It would seem, then, that our discussion of typification and abstraction leads to a stratum of social anonymity, of types of men interlocking with their typified analogues in a schematized reality in which personal identity has been bracketed into oblivion.
Indeed. This is
experiencing according to rule.
This is not the case in Schutz's portrayal of the social world nor is it the view I am advancing here.
What I hope to show is that
anonymity has a creative part to play
in the organization of experience and that, paradoxical as it might seem, anonymity is a clue to selfhood.
For
creative,
substitute "generative" or "compositional" or "extrapolative". Which is to say: unbounded; irreverent of the given; riffing, not recapitulation; a hot chorus.
...
We may distinguish,
first of all,
between
acts and performances by anonymous agents
and
aspects of person-bound acts
which carry signs of anonymity.
The individual who announces the arrival and departure of flights on a loudspeaker at an airport does his job well if his diction is clear, ...
Any announcer who meets such criteria is acceptable for the post as far as the traveler is concerned.
...
[72]
...
Or take the example of a chess game.
...
It can be shown in the end game that Black is ahead in material by a knight and a bishop, ...
Any chess master can demonstrate the winning line of continuation in such a simple position.
...
His expertise is almost separable from his placement in the world as a concrete being.
...
...
[73]
...
Pristine anonymity may be lunacy.
But I turn now to the other part of my distinction, to aspects of person-bound acts which may be termed anonymous.
The most evident examples are to be found in the performance of social roles,
but the more subtle cases involve
acts whose authors are distinct persons
but where a portion of the act is anonymous.
...
Imagine the following scene: in a restaurant a family of three, middle-aged parents and a college-age son, are discussing the latest campus riot.
"So you're telling me they have a right to throw stones and firebombs? ...
"What I'm saying is that the police used needless, senseless, sickening force . . ."
"Isn't there some fault on both sides, dear?"
"Helen, will you stop interrupting? We're having a sane, calm discussion, and I'll ask you to keep out of it. And another thing, the language they use! What do you expect the police to do when they're called such names?"
"But it's a different life-style. Those words don't mean the same thing to you that they do to us. We take them for granted."
"And that's what we're sending you to college for? That's what being educated means? So you can talk like a sewer?"
"Dessert time, everybody!"
It does not make much sense to say that father, mother, and son are playing roles in this scene.
...
The father is not playing at being a father nor is the son assuming the role of a young man of his generation.
The argument is real, ...
Now in what sense do their words carry the sign of anonymity?
Before turning to the words, we must look at the form of the dialogue, to what happens between the words.
All of the participants tacitly recognize that statement, asser-
[74]
tion, and argument
presuppose a response from the alter ego,
that persuasion is essentially contingent on attending to, listening to, thinking about, consideration of.
...
The form of the scene
is
a set of universal recognitions
which in their universality and utter familiarity may be understood as agents of anonymity.
If only these Phenomenologists had lived to see what has become of that
social action
which
presupposes a response.
'Oversocialization' and 'the performative epidemic' are yet further proof that we are dealing here with infinite generativity, not with mere reduction from the given.
'Dance like nobody's watching' could not have become a therapeutic platitude if 'watching' was the whole of the matter. Rather, the trauma is all in the "presupposed response": namely, in its revealing of differing presuppositions on each side of the transaction; or perhaps in the mere possibility of this.
The cure is simple: suppose nothing; don't respond, initiate.
By the theory sketched out in these pages by Natanson/Schutz, this comes off as a further erosion of social life rather than a restoral of it. If any
universal recognitions
are left standing, now they are to be ignored in any case.
It remains to be seen (it will be interesting to see) if Therapeutic Antiperformativity proves to be a desperate contingency borne of desperate times and desperate people, a temporary measure to be abandoned at the first possible opportunity; or if it proves, in fact, to be the recovery of (better) bygone ways. The latter result would show that, when it comes to "universal recognitions", less is more.
...
I am suggesting that such forms are the possession of all men and that in virtue of the commonality of possession they in truth belong to no individual.
Hence a 'tragedy of the commons' ensues.
...
... not only have the forms of speech an aspect of anonymity, but so does language itself.
The words exchanged by the participants in our scene are only partly theirs, no matter how honest and fervent they may be in their speech.
The part which does not belong to them is the fringe of meaning which the times have shaped and which language reflects.
We can't own the words, and we can't control the meaning.
What's left, then, is the expressive form our utterances take. Here is a goad to deviant generativity.
A debilitation of language underlies their usage, as though father, mother, and son were searching for an alternative mode of communication and falling back in exasperation on all they have:
words and phrases which are only partly their possessions and which remain elements of a ritual they practice without acknowledgment or release.
Lasch: "the superior performance has the quality of being unobserved."
What is required to give such a performance while one is, in fact, being observed?
What is it to observe a performance without disturbing its 'quality' of unobservedness?
It seems this must require a more thoroughgoing "anonymity" than Natanson/Schutz's, one which, yes, verges on the anti-social.
i.e. If the recognition of the other as a person already entails the potential participation of that person, then mutuality must be suspended and, yes, objectification given a limited run.
'Mutual recognition' just is the basis for (the possibility of) 'mutual participation', i.e. 'audience participation', i.e. 'mutually observed performance'.
Of course 'superior' is a value-judgment. The pomos theorize 'unobserved performance' just this way but find it lacking. For them, art is social, first and foremost. But what they end up arguing this way, totally unwittingly, is that art is over-social, transacted by the oversocialized, always observed and counterobserved, always and endlessly presupposing response and counterresponse.
This is madness, or at least trauma.
To be effective, the corrective platitudes have to take and hold both sides of the transaction. Hence: 'Watch like no one is dancing' is the necessary companion to 'dance like no one is watching'. This is the really delicate 'social' and institutional achievement which Modernism glimpsed: the collected work of two millennia; and which Pomo demolished in a mere heady decade.
Of course, anonymity has a larger horizon than I have allowed for in these distinctions.
The social world includes signs which are addressed to all of us, ...
And to the extent that one responds to those signs as a "something" or a "somebody,"
he participates in anonymity and becomes anonymous.
Thinking through some possible examples, it seems to be quite difficult, actually, to manage a truly
anonymous response.
As stage performers know about their audiences, 'if you can see them, they can see you.
As economists and game theorists know, every "response" is itself a signal containing information.
The signal of response-by-person cannot match the entire
social world
for "anonymity". These are two vastly different levels of "abstraction".
The aggregation of 'personal information' into what might similarly be called a 'person-world' is of course both recent and contingent. This aggregation enables new "social actions" to be 'read' for signal with unprecedented accuracy. Most basically, this just is a loss of that anonymity which Natanson describes above. As such it is no counterexample to his account. On the other hand, it seems the only thing previously preserving this anonymity was (comparatively) poor record keeping. Transactions have always sent the same signals: "participation" was never anonymous prospectively, but it became anonymous retrospectively so long as any 'personally identifying information' was not logged and aggregated. After all, most of those "anonymously"-mailed letters have two names and two addresses written right on them. The "anonymous" conventions for addressing a letter in fact ensure that everyone knows exactly where to look for this information, and that when they look there, what they see will be legible. That the U.S. Post Office does not (or is not supposed to) aggregate this information the way Google now does has nothing to do with phenomenal horizons; rather, it is a legal norm imposed from the top down.
(The case of mailing cash is quite interesting, or at least ironic. Here are two regimes of anonymity which don't play well together. The workaround is to create a 'paper trail' of 'personally identifying information' so as to telescope the 'signal'. All of this culminates (for now) in the supersession of pickpocketing by 'identity theft'. But 'identity' was all over the cash transaction the entire time, unless you used emissaries (as some sports bettors still do) or resorted to some more elaborate spy-movie tactics. What was missing was not identity but aggregation.)
In Heidegger's terms, anonymity precedes identity, ...
[75]
..
Schutz and Heidegger may be profitably compared at this point, though their positions are quite different.
...
... it might be of interest to report that Schutz once told me that he thought Heidegger's analysis of death "perfectly phony."
But even if we were to grant that, Heidegger's treatment of the larger problem of anonymity deserves attention.
...
I said that anonymity might prove to be a clue to selfhood.
It would seem that everything in my discussion demonstrates the opposite:
...
The apparent contradiction can be resolved in this way:
within the essential anonymity of social structure, the individual
locates the limits of the typical
and
comes to recognize what transcends those limits.
A measure becomes a target.
If you can see them, they can see you.
This recognition is achieved by a self that encounters transcendence, a self that is formed in and through that encounter.
I am not using the term "transcendence" in any esoteric sense.
To transcend is to go beyond;
transcendence is the going beyond the bounds of mundane existence.
The recognition of transcendence is an event within our experience; that which is recognized points beyond our world.
Within the bounds of everyday life, then,
I come to understand
the realm of the historical past as transcendent,
the realm of art as transcendent,
and the realm of religion as transcendent.
Very simply, I come to recognize these realms as transcendent to any mundane existence
because I did not create myself or the world.
Unfortunately, mere tacit knowledge to the latter effect does not seem to guarantee recognition or acceptance of the former reality; and it will not do merely to insult those so afflicted, with threadbare gibes such as, 'He thinks he's God.' Very few people 'really' think that about themselves, but
lots and lots
of people comport themselves in a manner which invites the gibe. In some sense,
all of us do.
(". . . Gods with anuses . . . " —Becker)
In Schutz's terms, it is an ultimate fact of my biographical situation that the historical world of my predecessors is given, ... that successors will inhabit the world I must eventually give up ...
The meaning of such incontrovertible
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givens which point to transcendence, which are the bearers of transcendence, announces itself in this world.
The signs of transcendence,
then,
are
features of experience
and not possibilities on the far side of human reality.
Transcendence in these terms manifests itself within experience at the same time that its signs point beyond the limits of mundane existence.
They also point beyond the limits of an anonymous self.
I believe that this conception of transcendence is consistent with Schutz's views.
Speaking of the transcendence of nature and society, he writes:
I find myself in my everyday life within a world not of my own making.
I know this fact, and this knowledge itself belongs to my biographical situation.
There is, first, my knowledge that Nature transcends the reality of my everyday life both in time and in space . . .
I know, furthermore, that, . . . the social world transcends the reality of my everyday life.
I was born into a pre-organized social world which will survive me . . .
I experience both of these transcendences, that of Nature and that of Society, as being imposed upon me in a double sense:
on the one hand, I find myself at any moment of my existence as being within nature and within society;
both are permanently co-constitutive elements of my biographical situation and are, therefore, experienced as inescapably belonging to it.
On the other hand, they constitute the framework within which alone I have the freedom of my potentialities, and this means they prescribe the scope of all possibilities for defining my situation.
In this sense, they are not elements of my situation, but determinations of it.
In the first sense, I may—even more, I have to—take them for granted.
In the second sense, I have come to terms with them.
The recognition of transcendence, in my own judgment, demands of the individual that he enlarge himself, transcend his anonymity, if he is to come to terms with the world.
The very presence of anonymity is a sign of the limits of das Man.
How I define my presence in the social world is a question for the self I am capable of becoming, a self for whom symbolic order is significant and consequential.
...
[77]
...
Although I cannot develop the claim here, I would say that it is in the taking of social roles that the elements of anonymity become transposed into the possibilities of transcendence.
To be sure, roles may desiccate the spirit.
...
But there is also a liberating dimension to roles and a good sense of anonymity ...
We may come to discover something about ourselves in taking roles, and the discovery can be illuminating.
Most concretely, the first step toward the enlargement of the self comes in taking the role of the Other;
Beyond that which we were told above happens all but automatically?
the next in assuming the role of the "generalized other," to use George H. Mead's language,
that is,
to take the standpoint of "the group," "the community," "the state," "the law."
In placing myself in the position of the Other, I come to understand the needs of a larger reality and so transcend the provincialism of my own sector of mundane existence.
At the same time, I keep my bearings in the world of daily life, which remains my home.
...
There is a continuous line of development in the career of consciousness from its intentional roots in pre-predicative experience to its expression in roles and social action.
As an essentially typifying agency, consciousness is capable of ordering and honoring a coherent world, one in which mundane life is both the necessary framework for anonymity and the locus of transcendence.
Typification, then, constitutes the social world and also makes possible the achievement of selfhood.
...
... in turning to [Schutz's] phenomenology I have placed the emphasis on
[78]
the philosophical implications of typification rather than on methodology.
...
In Schutz's own words,
"phenomenological philosophy deals with the activities of the transcendental ego, with the constitution of space and time, with the constitution of intersubjectivity, with the problems of life and death, with the problems of monads; indeed, it is an approach to the questions hitherto called metaphysical."
If I have not entered the domain of genuine phenomenological philosophy, I hope that I have at least posed some of its questions, which are part of the tradition of perennial philosophy.
...
...
Life-World and Consciousness:
Essays for Aron Gurwitsch
ed. Lester E. Embree
(1972)
[565]
Choice and the Social Sciences
Alfred Schutz
(orig. ca. 1945, ed. Embree 1972)
[SK's comments]
INTRODUCTION
...
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...
THE CONCEPT OF ACTION
... "action" ... shall designate human conduct as an ongoing process which is devised by the actor in advance, that is, which is based upon a preconceived project. ... "act" shall designate the outcome of this ongoing process, that is, the accomplished action. Action, thus, may be covert ... or overt, ... But not all projected conduct is also purposive conduct. ... My phantasying may be a projected one ... But it remains mere fancying unless what W. James called the voluntative "fiat" supervenes and transforms my project into a purpose. If a covert action is more than "mere fancying," namely purposive, it shall be called ... a "performance." ... An overt action is always both projected and purposive. It is projected by definition, because otherwise it would be mere conduct; and since it has become overt, that is, manifested in the outer world, the voluntative fiat which transforms the project into a purpose ... must have preceded.
... The case of purposively refraining from action [action "by omission"] ... I may bring about a future state of affairs by noninterference. Such a projected abstaining from acting may be considered in itself as an action and even
[567]
as a performance within the meaning of our definition. ... I may even interpret my deliberation whether or not to carry out a projected action as a cholce between two projects, ... The deliberation of the surgeon whether or not to operate ... or of the businessman whether or not to sell ... are examples ...
WORKING AND PRODUCT
For the sake of convenience, we shall call a projected and purposive overt conduct "working." The change materialized in the outer world by an act of working shall be called "product."
An example may help ... Some time ago, ... it occurred to me that the problem of choice deserves further clarification. I thought of the possible ways in which such a clarification might be obtained, imagined that certain theories of Leibniz, Bergson, and Husserl might be helpful, ... etc., and then returned again to the work with which I was at that time occupied. This process of "thinking of" was certainly action, ... But this action was still mere fancying, since I did not sit down and "think it out"; later on I returned to the previous chain of my fancying and "made up my mind" to carry the preconceived project through, ... While writing this sentence, I am "working"—the project and purpose being to make my thought ...
[568]
... understandable—and this white paper covered with inkstrokes is the "product" of this, my working, the change in the outer world brought about by my working activity. It can easily be seen that this "product" of my working does not coincide with the project and purpose of it, that is, to convey my thought to an anonymous fellow man, ... to make myself understandable ... and—in the twilight of the more or less empty horizon which surrounds any anticipation of future events and therewith also of all projected acts—to provoke a reaction ... in the form of assertion, rejection, ... My working activity of covering this paper with inkstrokes is thus just one means by which to obtain the intermediate end of the "product," which, in turn, is itself merely means to other projected ends, and so on. And it is easily possible that ... all my present working and its products will remain unknown to [the reader] , that is, that it will be entirely immaterial to his understanding of the thought conveyed. In this case the product will drop out of the chain of means and ends as seen from his, the reader's, point of view. ...
As our definitions have shown, there is a class of conduct without project. This class of conduct is still an emanation of our spontaneous activity and as such is distinguished from the mere physiological reflexes, which, although not spontaneous, are frequently subsumed, together with conduct, under the notion of behavior.
Well,
this depends on
what kind of
behaviorist
you are. TBC.
Covert conduct without project shall be called "mere thinking," overt conduct without project "mere doing." The notion of conduct as used here therefore does not imply any reference to " intent."
As to "mere thinking," it is a moot question, widely discussed by philosophers, how the most general concept of thinking should be defined. Thinking is certainly an activity, an emanation of our spontaneous life. But where, in the depth of our minds, does it start? To Leibniz, not only apperception but mere perception is an activity of the mind, and he defines spontaneity as a faculty of proceeding to continually new perceptions. Perhaps Husserl is right in stating that the mere tending of the ego toward an intentional object, its directing itself toward it, its taking interest in it, is the lowest form of the mind's activity. Psychologists handle the problem under the heading of "attention," Kant and other
[569]
philosophers under the title of "receptivity." It is easier to give examples for "mere doing," because we are all familiar with this category. Any kind of so-called automatic activities of inner or outer life—habitual, traditional, affectual ones—fall under this class, called by Leibniz "the class of empirical behavior." Moreover, certain phases of most of our actions have to be considered as "mere doing." The writing of a letter is an action, and even a working action. But, at least for the educated adult of our civilization, the drafting of the single characters, their composition into a word, is a mere doing. If mere doing and mere thinking lack the project, they are, therefore, not without motive—using this term in a specific sense.
THE TIME STRUCTURE OF THE PROJECT
According to Dewey's pregnant formulation, deliberation is "a dramatic rehearsal in imagination of various competing possible lines of action. ... " ... All projecting consists in an anticipation of future conduct by way of phantasying. ... I have to have some idea of the structure to be erected before I can draft the blueprints. ... What is thus
[570]
anticipated in the project is, in our terminology, not the future action [the "ongoing process"] but the future act [the "outcome" of that process] , and it is anticipated in the future-perfect tense ... This time perspective peculiar to the project has rather important consequences. First, I base my projecting of my forthcoming act in the future-perfect tense upon my knowledge of previously performed acts which are typically similar to the prescribed one, upon my knowledge of typically relevant features of the situation in which this projected action will occur, including my personal, biographically determined situation.
N.B.
At least THIS much CAN be said on behalf of
biographical
factors:
- SO WE DO have knowledge of previously performed acts;
- SO WE DO pick out and hold onto relevant features of [such] situations;
- SO WE DO so often find that our situation has been determined rather than willed;
BUT perhaps the wilful element is hiding in plain sight here:
- relevance is willed;
- knowledge depends upon relevance;
- hence knowledge too is willed;
In other words, we've 'forgotten more than we ever knew' about our own "biography." This too could be considered cosmically "determined," if that sort of thing is to your taste; here on Earth, meanwhile, Schutz gives this motivated forgetting a more accurate and useful name: covert conduct.
What exactly,
then, is any "biography"
a biography OF
if
a vast expanse of "conduct"
remains "covert"
?
Can anything really be
typical
of a
situation,
as opposed to merely
typical of the typifier?
But this knowledge [of "previously performed acts," "relevant features of situations," etc.] is my knowledge now ... , at the time of projecting ... projecting, like other anticipation, carries along its empty horizons, which will be filled in merely by the materialization of the anticipated event. This constitutes the intrínsic uncertainty of all forms of projecting.
Second, the particular time perspective of the project explains the relationship between the project and the various forms of motives.
IN-ORDER-TO AND BECAUSE MOTIVES
... the term "motive" is equivocal and covers two different sets of concepts ... We may say that the motive of the murderer was to obtain the money of the victim. Here "motive" means the state of affairs, the end, which the action has been undertaken to bring about. We shall call this kind of motive the "in-order-to motive." From the point of view of the actor, this class of motives refers to his future. ... the projected act ... constitutes the in-order-to motive ... What is, however, motivated ... ? It
[571]
is obviously not the projecting itself. I may project in my phantasy the commission of a murder without any supervening intention to carry out such a project. Motivation by way of in-order-to, therefore, is the "voluntative fiat," ... which transforms the inner fancying into a performance or an action ...
... we have to distinguish another [class of motives] ... the "because" motive." The murderer has been motivated to commit his acts because he grew up in an environment of such and such a kind, ... etc. Thus, ... the because motive refers to his past experiences. ... What is motivated in an action in the way of "because" is the project of the action itself. In order to satisfy his needs for money, the actor had the possibility of providing it in several other ways ... His idea of attaining this goal by killing a man was determined ("caused") by his personal sítuation or, more precisely, by his life-history, ...
Life history
is at least mildly preferable to
biography,
but "history" too
has its
-ographies
and
-ographers.
For what precious task are we reserving 'experience' here?
Anyone can spin the narrative.
Only the
actor
has the experience.
The distinction between in-order-to motives and because motives is frequently disregarded in ordinary language, which permits the expression of most of the "in-order-to" motives by "because" sentences, although not the other way around. It is common usage to say that the murderer killed his victim because he wanted to obtain his money. Logical analysis has to penetrate the cloak of language ... [How does] this curious translation of "in-order-to" relations into "because" sentences [become] possible [?]
Far be it from me to suggest that 'we know exactly what we're doing' when we do this. But IF this were the case, then there would be no cloak to be penetrated; there would be no logic to be deployed and nothing upon which to deploy it.
Instead, the answer would be:
'that bastard Pete, he knew exactly what he was doing when he stated my proximate motive as if it were an ultimate cause. Now Carol thinks I'm a pervert when I'm really just extremely horny.'
The answer seems to be a twofold one ... Motive may have a subjective and an objective meaning. ... [To] the actor who lives in his ongoing process of activity ... motive means what he has actually in view, what bestows meaning upon his ongoing action; and this is always the in-order-to motive, ...
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bring about a projected state of affairs, to attain a preconceived goal. As long as the actor lives in his ongoing action, he does not have in view its because motives. Only when the action has been accomplished—when ... it has become an act—may he turn back to his past action as an observer of himself ...
And,
unfortunately for him,
others may do so as well.
And if he eventually moves on, perhaps only with great difficulty, to live what remains of his life as if unobserved, no one else is under any such compunction.
This retrospection may even be merely anticipated modo futuri exacti. Having ... anticipated what I shall have done ... , I may ask myself why I was determined to take this and no other decision. In all these cases the genuine because motive refers to past or future-perfect experiences. It reveals itself by its very temporal structure only to the retrospective glance. This "mirror effect" of temporal projection explains why, on the one hand, a linguistic "because form" may be and is frequently used for expressing genuine "in-order-to relations" and why, on the other hand, it is impossible to express genuine because relations by an "in-order-to" sentence. ...
This is, so to speak, grammatically impossible, whereas the reverse, oddly enough, is grammatically seamless; or so it appears so to me, in English, and (ostensibly) also to Schutz, (ostensibly) in several European languages. This is indeed worth close scrutiny (of a type which I myself am ill-equipped to provide).
To fully establish that this is due to temporal structure and not to 'grammar' per se requires (at least) examination of as many disparate languages as possible. If there is no universal grammatical stricture which ensures the mirror effect, then there could be languages from which this effect is absent.
On this, presumably Lakoff is a good place to start. TBC.
... the in-order-to motive refers to the attitude of the actor living in the process of his ongoing action. It is, therefore, an essentially subjective category ... The genuine because motive, however, as we have found, is an objective category, accessible to the observer who has to reconstruct from the accomplished act ... the attitude of the actor to his action. ...
Good luck and godspeed.
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...
... the problem of genuine because motives has its age-old metaphysical connotations. It refers to the controversy between determinists and indeterminists, the problem of free will and liberum arbitrium.
The term "free will" (liberum arbitrium) was introduced by Christian philosophy (4th century CE). It has traditionally meant (until the Enlightenment proposed its own meanings) lack of necessity in human will, so that "the will is free" meant "the will does not have to be such as it is". This requirement was universally embraced by both incompatibilists and compatibilists.
... the time structure of all projecting is of the highest importance ... Our analysis has shown that it always refers to a certain stock of knowledge of the actor at hand at the time of projecting and nevertheless carries its horizon of empty anticipations, namely, that the projected act will go on in a typically similar way as had all the typically similar past acts known to him at the time of projecting. This knowledge is an exclusively subjective element, and for this very reason the actor, as long as he lives in his projecting and acting, feels himself exclusively motivated by the way of in-order-to.
THE METAPHYSICAL ASSUMPTIONS OF UTILITARIANISM
It would be erroneous to assume that the conflict between determinists and indeterminists had been overcome by the utilitarian theory of choice and decision, ... Utilitarianism also ... indulges in metaphysical theory of a sort that eminent philosophers long ago discarded.
Some (by no means all) of the outstanding features of the utilitarian model of human actions ...
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... : Any human being is at any moment of his life aware of his likings and dislikings. These ... are arranged in a hierarchical order, ... Men are incited to act by the wish to obtain something more preferable, ... more generally, by a feeling of uneasiness or by an urge, drive, need, etc., ... Sometimes it is even assumed that if there were no such uneasiness ... , man would be in a state of equilibrium ...
It can easily be seen that all these assumptions constitute merely a scheme of interpretation which an observer may use —and, to be sure, may even successfully use—in order to explain the because motives of actually accomplished acts. They do not describe what happens in the mind of a presumptive actor, ...
Hmm. WHAT IS success here, if not description of what happens in the mind? How do you explain the because motives without "describing what happens in the mind"?
To do this, as here given, is simply to isolate the role of circumstance (outside) from that of mind (inside). But this cannot be a "successful explanation of motives" in any reasonable sense of such terms. Such an explanation could evade falsification only by being unfalsifiable.
How WOULD such an explanation be falsified (be made/shown falsifiable)? It would be so if we could test for the validity of 'outside' causality, i.e., for the (isolable) effect of circumstance upon the actor, in (total) exclusion of cognition; this would have to turn up positive results; and from there, we would need to ask whether or not the 'effect' thus revealed is consistent with the facts (the actions) which it is to explain.
Unless I have made a hash of this, I have no idea how any of it would be made to work. The reason is that the scheming interpreter must face up to the selfsame utilitarian assumptions as previously mentioned; most particularly the "assumptions" of awareness and hierarchy. The interpreter doesn't know what he doesn't know. Hence the task of 'isolating' relevant circumstance from among the abyssal flux of mind and matter is a task which is intractible unless and until the observer himself "decides" (but it almost certainly is NOT a "decision") to privilege certain data over others. He is just as wrong to assume full optionality in himself qua "interpreter" as he is to assume it in the other qua actor.
The theory of "uneasiness" ... goes back at least to Locke ... the theory of a state of equilibrium of the soul ... [was] discussed for centuries by the various groups of Schoolmen. Both were refuted by Leibniz.
... we must say a few words on [Leibniz's] concept of "small perceptions," which pervades his whole philosophical system; ... According to Leibniz, there is at any moment in our mind an infinity of small perceptions, which, however, are neither attended to nor reflected upon. More correctly, these small perceptions are changes of the mind itself that we are not aware of, either because these impressions are too small and too numerous or because they are unified to such an extent that they can neither be separated nor distinguished. ... To quote a metaphor frequently used by Leibniz, our impression of these small perceptions can be compared with our perceptions of the noise of the sea ... This noise is cocreated by the sound of each single wave; but what we hear is not the
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separate sounds but the confused murmur of hundreds of thousands of them. Nevertheless, we [do] perceive the sound of the single wave, ... but in a confused and indistinguishable way. ... Not quite incorrectly, modern interpreters have compared Leibniz' concept of small perceptions with a concept of the unconscious in psychoanalysis. How Leibniz explains by this basic concept ... the connection of everything with the whole universe ... [is] of no concern to us here. But we are very much interested in his statement that it is these small perceptions which determine, without our knowing it, many of our actions (a term which for Leibniz includes the activity of our thinking). According to Leibniz, all actions without deliberation ... originate in, and are directed by, small perceptions, which induce the mind to act without compelling it ... According to Locke, it is a state of uneasiness which induces man to act ... Leibniz agrees, but points out that the so-called state of uneasiness itself originates in small solicitations which, in their turn, refer back to confused small perceptions.
Notice here that there are (at least) two especially potent variables to consider:
(1) there is overall acuity of perception ('overall' here means: encompassing both noticed and unnoticed perceptions taken as a whole);
(2) there is what might be called acuity of awareness; i.e., the proportion of the 'noticed' to the 'unnoticed' in perception.
Much depends upon whether or not (1) and (2) may vary independently.
e.g. Say that Bob is a more acute 'perceiver' than Jim, but Jim is more 'aware' than Bob.
If all actions without deliberation ... originate in ... small perceptions, then Jim's greater awareness here is a greater transparency of the reasons for his own actions; he is more introspectively adept despite being an inferior perceiver overall. Jim encounters mysteries out in the world which are no mysteries at all for Bob, yet Jim is less 'a mystery to himself' (and likely also to others) than Bob is.
Now, say that Sue and Liz both are even more acute than Bob but even less aware than Jim. Sue and Liz then will be forever aghast at Bob and Jim's dunderheadedness, while Bob and Jim will be perpetually nonplussed by the opacity of Sue and Liz's motives.
Perish the thought.
All is not lost here. There is a crucial and exceedingly simple remedy baked right into all of this: notice that it is only those actions taken without deliberation which are induced without being compelled. This suggests the complementary thesis that explicit "deliberation" draws upon explicit thought, i.e., upon the noticed rather than the unnoticed. I would think that this is true only 'on the whole', but even this much is an adequate lifeline. If perception itself is the real source of the disagreement (as I think it often is, and as Analytic Philosophers of Art seem quite reluctant to grant), then the mere fact of this being the source of conflict, at least, can be determined by way of "deliberation." The Sleeping Dog of unconscious motives need never be stirred.
What of the purported uncanny accuracy of the undeliberative gut-level and of the emotions? The above passage renders this part of the problem exactly as the contemporary skeptic would: accurate or not, we do not know where these insights come from; we do not know what 'motivates' them. The person making the insight can know nothing of its source; the onlooker can think they know but can never be sure.
There is no need to further complicate the 'where?' issue. My remarks mean exactly what they say. We can see immediately that there is no problem so long as our actions do not need to be justified; we might say, so long as we are not forced by circumstance to "deliberate" over someone's actions. Or, dare I say, perhaps no 'circumstance' is 'forcing' this project upon us at all, but we ourselves desire to undertake it recreationally. All the same in that case, now we are deliberating; we are motivating ourselves rather than being motivated by everything we have perceived without noticing. We have elected to exit the gut-level and to enter deliberation. Though we may be litigating the actions of others, any gut-level evidence introduced into the deliberation is the evidence of our own past actions, including (especially) those which Schutz calls covert. This is fertile ground for skepticism.
By this time there is no sense in disputing the Cognitivist account of the gut-level, but I see no more sense in disputing the (skeptical) conclusion that proffering one's own past actions as evidence of another's past actions is to play a dangerous game. Whatever the ultimate philosophical fate of Empiricism, here it seems vastly (comprehensively) preferable to that kind of introspective 'knowledge' which purports, all at once, to be both self- and other-directed. It is specifically the introspector themselves who cannot know what all they have perceived without noticing, nor can they know which (if any) of such things have been operative in a given 'gut feeling'.
It seems to me entirely appropriate here to speak of a project projected within a system of projects of higher order. This indeed allows us to account for the notion that "deliberate" action is perfectly transparent qua the kind of action it is, yet its place in the "system of projects" is perfectly opaque.
Dilman writes, "my judgement is objective if it is responsible to criteria that are independent of my thoughts." The typified criteria of a life-world certainly qualify under this definition of objectivity; actually, they may qualify whether or not the judger has any knowledge of the "order" of the actor's "system". In the end, all that this proves is that a judgment of "social action" can be perfectly 'objective' without being the least bit accurate.
Last but hardly least: If it is granted that there can be perception without noticing, then there must also be 'nonempirical perception' which leaks into the pool of unwitting motivation. By this I mean especially but not exclusively what has come to be called Media; I mean to say that we have been looking for 'media effects' in all of the wrong places, i.e., we have been looking for simple aping of violent and sexual acts. These are acts which, of course, have remained abhorrent to the vast majority of people who consume such media. This is why simple aping is the exception rather than the rule. Instead, consider the unwitting 'effects' of repeated witnessing of such abhorrent events in such a manner as to attenuate the immediate trauma and to therefore enable the event to be witnessed over and over, open-endedly, for an entire lifetime, to the point where at times such things are, yes, barely noticed at all. Going unnoticed does not attenuate the effect; rather, it changes the effect: instead of "deliberation", we find "solicitation"; instead of being "compelled", we are "induced". This explains why the 'media effects' smoking gun never turns up: it's because greater exposure begets less noticing; instead, exposure diffuses the 'effect' weakly throughout the entire "system of projects" rather than building up like water behind a dam. The full 'effects', then, are essentially undetectable empirically; rather, we can only rationally deduce their presence from premises such as Leibniz-Schutz's here. Only recently has the further deduction been made that there are, in fact, Sues and Lizzes as well as Bobs and Jims, all of them 'consuming' vast amounts of 'media', and evincing widely varying combinations of 'perceptiveness' and 'awareness'. This is not much of a deduction, actually, because it is prompted by a clear empirical signal: an ever-widening political polarization of the sexes, coinciding exactly with the widespread adoption of smartphone-based Social Media apps. This is a 'strong media effect'. As it turns out, what has been required for such a thing to be empirically detectable is for the 'content' to be virtuous rather than salacious. That is the whole thing right there. The 'effects' of abhorrent content don't work quite this way. They evade detection for the simple reason that 'detection' is socially costly for the one who is thus detected . . . presuming of course that this kind of costliness is a deterrent to that person; and of course this too is a variable trait whose variation is well understood, and this too suggests that our Great Perceivers are also our Great Voyeurs, sneaking glimpses and sublimating any direct, surface-level inclinations to act out socially stigmatized behaviors, and hence destined to land in a 'diffusion' of 'weak effects' whose 'strength' is measured in the breadth of the diffusion rather than in the depth of any one 'effect'.
To him, ... It is our inclinations, thus created, which drive us to pleasure. It is our taste which determines, at least partially, what we consider our pleasure. And our tastes, like our habits and passions, are again constituted by a concourse of small perceptions.
In other words, Leibniz shows that the concepts of "uneasiness," of a "scale of graduated preferences," of "tastes," "habit," and "passion," are unable to serve as final explanations of what determines our activities. They are just different names for the
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same phenomenon—namely, the interplay of small perceptions. It is not possíble to deal with these motions as if they were well-defined and recurring states of mind. On the contrary, they are changes of the mind itself, which thus determines itself.
The same argument is valid for the assumption of the existence of the perfect equilibrium of indifference as the initial situation to start from in formulating a theory of action and choice. A case like that of Buridan's ass, who stands between two stacks of hay placed at an equal distance from him and cannot decide which to turn to, is, according to Leibniz, imaginary and entirely fictitious. ... the universe ... will never be divided by a vertical plane drawn through the middle of the length of the ass's body into two equal and congruent halves.
I would prefer to say that this IS possible, but it is extremely (incomprehensibly) unlikely.
... There will ... always be things within and without the body of the ass which will, by small perceptions, determine it to turn either to the right or to the left.
... it is by no means Leibniz' position that the small perceptions are the sole determining factors of volition and choice. Here we are concerned only with Leibniz' contribution to the theory of "action without deliberation," ...
THE BASIC ASSUMPTION OF UTILITARIANISM
... there is no isolated situation of choosing between a pair of isolated projects. Any project is projected within a system of projects of higher order; any end is merely means for another end; ...
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... It is our pre-experience of these higher forms of organization—of which the problematic possibilities open to choice are merely elements³—which determines
³Possibilities and counterpossibilities, contesting with one another and originating in the situation of doubt, are called by Husserl problematic or questionable possibilities—questionable, because the intention to decide in favor of one of them is a questioning intention. Only in the case of possibilities of this kind, that is, of possibilities "for which something speaks," can we speak of likelihood. It is more likely that "This is a man" means: more circumstances speak for the possibility that this is a man than for the possibility that this is a dummy. Likelihood is, thus, a weight which belongs to the suggested beliefs in the existence of the intentional objects. From this class of problematic possibilities, originating in doubt, must be distinguished the class of open possibilities originating in the unhampered course of empty anticipations. If I anticipate the color of an unseen side of an object of which I know only the front side, ... any specific color I anticipate is merely contingent; but that the unseen side will show "some" color is not contingent. All anticipation has the character of indeterminacy, and this general indeterminacy constitutes a frame of free variability; what falls within the frame is one element among other elements of possibly nearer determination. I know merely that these will fit in the frame, but they are otherwise entirely undetermined. This exactly is the concept of open possibilities.
The difference between problematic and open possibilities is first a difference of their origins. The problematic possibilities presuppose tendencies of belief which are motivated by the situation and are in contest with one another; something can be said for each, each has a certain weight. None of the open possibilities has any weight whatsoever; they are all equally possible. There is no alternative preconstituted, but, within the frame of generality, all possible specifications are equally open. Nothing speaks for one which would speak against the other. An undetermined general intention, which itself shows the modality of certainty—although an empirical or presumptive certainty—"until further notice"—carries along an implicit modalization of the certainty peculiar to its implicit specifications. On the other hand, the field of problematic possibilities is unified: in the unity of contest and of being apprehended by disjunctive oscillation, A, B, and C become known as being in opposition and, therefore, united. To be sure, it is quite possible that only one of these contesting possibilities is consciously observed, whereas the others remain unnoticed in the background as empty and thematically unperformed representations. But this fact does not invalidate the pregivenness of a true alternative. ...
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the weight of either possibility; and the positive or negative weight of the possibility is positive or negative merely with and by its reference to this system of a higher order. No choice and no decision was the first one we ever made. We always already have some previous decisions and previous choices constituted as previous experience for future acts of choice and decision. The mere fact that we always have a certain knowledge of the systems of higher order to which the alternative at hand belongs is sufficient for explaining evaluation as far as the theory of action and choice is concerned. No assumption whatsoever is needed as to the particular content of the higher system involved or of the existence of the highest one; no assumption, either, as to the structure of our preknowledge, i.e., as to its degree of clarity, explicitness, consciousness, etc. On the contrary, on any level the phenomenon of choice and decision may be repeated: I may have to choose between God and Caesar, between ethics and law, between life and science. All attempts at bringing these systems under one single denominator must fail, whatever this denominator is. The assumptions of utilitarianism, for instance, must not be confused with an explanation of this complicated relationship. They are at best a retrospective interpretation of performed acts and are mostly based on naïve petitio principii. ...
"a fallacy in which a conclusion is taken for granted in the premises; begging the question"
(Google, 5 Mar 2026)
...
THE PROBLEM OF RATIONALITY
Leibniz' discussion of choice and preference ...
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... read[s] like paragraphs by a modern methodologist of the social sciences. How often do we hear a modern author regret that men do not know very well what is for their own good:
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... in brief, they do not act reasonably. And they do not act "rationally" (as modern use puts it) if their choice is not based on full, clear, and distinct knowledge ... Eminent scientists such as Pareto postulate in addition that an act must not be qualified as a rational one if the term "knowledge" just used coincides merely with the best judgment of the acting individual ... [rather than] the warranted knowledge of scientific experience—the highest degree of clear, distinct, and consistent knowledge.
This seems to lead to the conclusion that reasonable, let alone rational, knowledge hardly ever occurs ... On the other hand, the social sciences, and especially economics, presuppose not only the possibility of purely rational action but even take such action as archetypal of all economic acts. ...
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THE ROLE OF THE OBSERVER
... the scientist is ... an observer. He is, therefore, excluded from direct participation in the ongoing conscious life of the observed individual. ... he discloses by retrogressive analysis the underlying decisions, the choice which preceded these decisions, ... and so on. ... It is clear that objective and subjective meaning do not coincide; and, ... it can safely be stated that it is impossible that they can ever fully coincide, except in cases where actor and scientist use one and the same preconstituted frame of reference. ... only the actor really knows his in-order-to motive and, therewith, the projected end of his action and also the alternatives he had to choose from. ... The observer has only a segment of this working act accessible to his outer observation, ...
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... The observer, and this is the important point, knows, as a rule, from his own knowledge merely the product and, in some cases, the working act by which it has been produced. ... Without asking [the actor] , the observer has to draw his conclusions in accordance with his general experience of the types of projects and counterprojects by which an actor of this or that type is typically induced to produce this type of product.
We have already seen how contingent the connection between product and purpose is and that the product as intermediate means for bringing about the projected end may even drop out entirely from the chain connecting the because motive with the in-order-to motive. ... These contingent working acts have merely the function of tools, and the products produced by them ... are at best by-products of my performing activity.
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This statement does not mean, of course, that products cannot or do not frequently coincide with the materialization of the projected activity.
THE METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEM OF ECONOMICS
This double function of the product is especially important for ... economics. Several eminent economists limit their interest to products within the meaning of our definition and refuse to embark upon an investigation of the human activities which lead to their production. It is the "behavior of prices," not the behavior of men ... the "shape of demand curves" and not the anticipations of economic subjects which these curves symbolize, that interest them. ... Modern achievements of economic theories would make it preposterous to deny that an abstract conceptual scheme of this sort can be used very successfully ... But in economics, as in all the other social sciences, we always can—and for certain purposes must—go back to the activity of the subjects within the social world: to their ends, motives, choices, and preferences.
DOES Behavior-al economics, even, truly consider such things as ends, motives, choices, and preferences?
Are these "behaviors" at all? Perhaps "choices" are behaviors, or at least they can be rendered unproblematically as such. I can't see that this true of the remaining three. Preferences, especially, seem to require significant mediating assumptions in order to be rendered as behaviors: to assume that I "prefer" the chicken to the beef, you have to assume that I ingest based on "preference", whereas I may merely be on doctor's orders.
But for economics, as for all social sciences, these human activities and the frame of reference within which they occur are not the unique acts, the unique choices of unique individuals in their settings within a unique situation ... All of them represent ideal types, designed and constructed by the scientist as disinterested observer for the purpose of erecting a model of the social world within which only events relevant to the problem of the particular science occur. All the other happenings within this world are merely contingent, are data, which can be eliminated by appropriate devices, such as the ceteris paribus. Yet, on the other hand, this constructed model is not a mere play of fancy ...
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... The social sciences, too, refer to the life-world of all of us. But, unable to participate immediately in the ongoing stream of consciousness of the individual actors, restricted to the position of an observer, and limiting themselves to typical events, they have to develop certain methodological devices when dealing with phenomena like choice and decision. ...
THE DEFINITION OF THE ECONOMIC FIELD
No economist considers the totality of human actions as falling under the province of his science. ... by defining the field of his science, the economist has established a definite frame of indeterminateness which contains all open possibilities of economic behavior. ... all occurrences outside the frame are excluded.
... what [does] this delimiting of the economic field [mean] to the actor ... whose behavior is studied ... [?] ... The actor in the economic world is not a man who lives his full life among his fellow men. He is, so to speak, reduced ...
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... Still more precisely, he is not an actor at all. He is a homunculus, a model, an ideal type which is supposed to behave and act exactly as ... if the attainment of economic goals by economic means based on economic motives constituted the exclusive content of his stream of consciousness. ... the system of economic actions determines the weight and the positive or negative evaluation of all competing projects which may emerge within this system as problematic possibilities.
THE BASIC ASSUMPTION OF ECONOMIC THEORY
FOR DEALING WITH THE PROBLEM OF CHOICE
... The establishment of a highest system of "values" ... is, however, not sufficient for the unification of this field. Economic theory makes the additional assumption that all possibilities within this field are necessarily comparable with one another, that any of them can be chosen, and that the economic subject has it always within his power to decide in favor of one— ... to "prefer" one of them. In other words, the possibilities ... have to be con-
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strued not as open possibilities, none of which would have any specific weight, but as problematic possibilities. This implies that all of them, not merely a pair, are unified as possíbilities with their pertinent counterpossibilities, each of them having its own weight, each having something in its favor, each being potentially preferable under certain circumstances.
Such a unification of possible economic projects would allow the interpretation of any activity of the economic homunculus as a chain of choosing and preferring. Whatever, then, the economic subject performs, ... he has preferred it to all the other possibilities of realizing the preferred project by other means. ... it was the introduction of the principle of marginal utility which for the first time solved this problem systematically. It eliminated the question of the intrinsic (economic) value of goods, derived from their possible use or from the worth bestowed upon them by other reasons.
i.e.
Perhaps paradoxically,
the
system
of
intrinsic values
cannot be closed:
the
possibilities of
use
are too
open;
ditto the
bestowal
of
worth.
Instead:
Value must (first) be
relativized
in order to be (later)
universalized:
Perhaps this 'paradox' is only verbal-semantic and not ontological or metaphysical. It seems to operate unproblematically in many domains of life and thought. But it is quite the verbal-semantic paradox even so.
'Relativized' means:
(1) 'determined extrinsically . . . '
(2) ' . . . within a closed universe of possibility'
'Extrinsically'
means:
"a property something has in virtue of
the way it's related to something else":
i.e.,
'Relatedness'
is necessarily
'relatedness
to
something (else)'
Now, the author I just linked to gives the example of "being thought about." Then, are Schutz's examples of possible use and worth bestowed not in fact examples of extrinsic determination of "value"? What do these acts come down to, if not goods merely 'being thought about' in various ways? What else to do prior to executing an act but to 'think about' executing it? Prospectively, then, there can be no such things as 'intrinsic properties' at all.
Can intrinsicness be rescued from this predicament? Here is one idea: The problem remains that we simply do not know about very many of the 'relations' of object-to-object upon which our valuations might be based. We know not of their mere existence, to say nothing of their provenance, contours, abstract veracity, etc. Moreover, it seems that we cannot learn about them at all, not 'in the wild' anyway. Rather, we must contrive a data filter and an abstract schema per which certain 'relations' become knowable, against the backdrop of the schema, as it were.
Our knowledge and experience is bounded, and in that broadest sense some boundary upon "value" is in fact predrawn. In this sense, all objects in our field have the minimum 'intrinsic' quality of being in our field.
'What did he know,
and when did he know it?'
Why does the 'predrawn boundary' of garden variety awareness-and-ignorance not permit the unification sought by the economist? This is the opposite problem of the above definition of the economic field. In that case, the 'total' field was a motley: Too much noise, not enough signal. In the case of life's 'predrawn boundary', it is precisely the reverse: The Husserlian 'natural attitude', e.g., is pure signal with all the noise (pre-)filtered out; but we are such zealous filterers that most of the signal is suppressed too.
If I'm in the ballpark here, then we can hold onto the concepts: 'intrinsic value' and 'intrinsic property', at least as heuristics: If a value or property of some object first-and-truly strikes us as 'intrinsic', we cannot rule out what might be called The Ultimate Extrinsicality Thesis: Most likely we would value or identify the object differently if some relevant perception of ours of some other object(s) had been different. But we have to admit, concurrently, that such extrinsically-determining 'relations' as exist are highly opaque to empirical verification. If they were not so opaque, Schutz's summation above could not be as it is: Economics would have gotten further than it in fact did before anyone thought to draw a definite frame around its field of inquiry; the frame would already have been in place, i.e., in the form of a plurality of empirically verifiable 'relations' among the elements in question. But really we have no empirical access to the vast majority of these relations; we have only the rational deduction that they must exist in far greater numbers than we can directly observe. The conclusion as above that there are no truly intrinsic properties is the generalized form of this rational deduction. But if we are serious about reconstructing the empirical experience and cognition of the actor, then we do require a working concept of 'intrinsic properties', so as to acknowledge the respects in which human consciousness simply does not admit of the kind of relativity that constructivist science trades in.
And then, what is not in the least paradoxical here? I don't think it's a coincidence that the instrumental aims of intellectuals would demand that Particularism be cut off at the knees. Particulars are un- typified constructs. Particularism is the absence of typification. And again, the Ultimate Relativist: perhaps there is only 'typification' and no such thing as its outright 'absence' from thought and perception. Only in a certain sense; and by that time we have missed the forest for the trees. The Opacity Thesis applies here too: We do poorly to valorize an Ultimate Relativity that we cannot ever account for scientifically, other than to say that some such thing must be afoot, somehow; all while the details (those we would of course need to know before we could instrumentally operationalize them) remain opaque.
What the card-carrying Relativists among us seem most of all to overlook is that this opacity is salvation. Why? Because the less aware we are of our perceptions, the less is desire able to warp them. It's actually crucial that we not charge too hard beyond our 'predrawn boundaries.' Certainly we like the twin conceits of 'intrinsic properties' and 'particularism' too much to be able to bear parting with them; but these conceits also, it must be admitted, can get us into a whole lot of trouble, so our liking them cannot be a very good defense. I think the better-and-best defense of Particularism writ large is that the Particularistic stance just is the truest sort of thought-and-perception that we are capable of; and this is quite specifically a consequence of the strong positive correlation between cognitive salience and cognitive distortion. Put the other way: It's amazing how accurately we can perceive and think about 'reality' when that reality is unimportant to us. It is cause for optimism, then, not pessimism, to realize that our strongest cognitive skill is indeed filtering, not absorption; keeping stuff out rather than letting it in. That is the only way that a Beckerian "self-reflective animal" can stay sufficiently grounded in materiality (just barely, it might be added).
On this, Leibniz'
infinity of small perceptions
seems like the linchpin. That is the passage I was looking for, the one which I thought was worth sticking in here, alone, just for a little seasoning. But now the whole paper is here!
Surprise!!
With admirable clarity the marginal-utility principle establishes from the outset all possible decisions with respect to economic goods as choices between problematic possibilities. ... [each having] its own positive and negative weight for the economic subject; and although this weight originates in the higher order of the presupposed eсоnomic system itself, it is a different one for each of the economic subjects by reason of his position within the system.
In other words: the marginal-utility principle does not postulate that all problematic possibilities are available to any individual actor or that all of them have equal weight for everybody. But it postulates that any way of action open to the individual actor originates in a choice between the problematic possibilities accessible to him and that each of these possíbilities has for him its own weight, ...
The assumption of varied accessibility to the unified field of problematic possíbilities ... is identical with the principle of scarcity, ...
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... [Recall] our previous analysis of projecting and mere fancying. We found there that projecting is a phantasying within an imposed frame of open possibilities—which is of course another order of possibilities than that created by the project—which delimits what can and what cannot be performed or what is and what is not within my power. Whereas mere fancying is done in the optative mode, projecting presupposes potentiality. The performability of the project, so we said, is the condition of all projecting. The principle of scarcity establishes the limits, the frame within which the individual economic subject can draft his performable project. (Otherwise my fancy of a million dollars to spend daily would be economic projecting.) It is, incidentally, one of the most important links connecting the province of economic theory with that of everyday life and warrants the applicability of the theory to this sphere.
A fourth assumption, which very rarely is made explicit, is that of the constancy of motives. Not only are the in-order-to motives assumed to be constant, but also the because motives. They are supposed to be the same before and after a particular act occurs. We may also speak of the assumption of constancy of plans of economic action, since these plans are nothing but interrelated systems of because and in-order-to motives. ...
These four methodological devices of economic theory for dealing with cholce and decision are impressive by their simplicity and efficiency. The fifth one ... has so far not been developed with the same clarity ... It is the assumption that all acting within the economic sphere is rational. This implies not only that all preferring and choosing between projects fulfills the conditions of rationality but also that all projecting itself is done in a rational way. ... It is sufficient for our purpose to remember that rationality refers always to the stock of knowledge at hand, to the organized pre-experience of the projecting or choosing subject at the time at which he drafts his project or performs his choice. Perfectly rational choice presupposes, to use Leibniz metaphor, perfect knowledge of all the items of the balance
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sheet—their evaluation, grouping, summing-up—and avoidance of all errors in judgment. In a system like that established by economic theory, ... such a perfect knowledge can be presupposed only if the economic homunculus ... is from the outset endowed with the consciousness, with the stock of knowledge at hand, and a safeguard against misjudgment which will enable him to come to rational decisions. Such an assumption is by no means inconsistent in itself. As a matter of fact, economic theorists have operated very successfully with such a fictitious model of economic homunculi, which, though highly complicated, were constructed to behave in a specific way, like automata. ... But another question is whether a theory based on the assumption of perfect rationality is widely applicable to occurrences within the everyday economic life-world, in which, as we have seen, pure rational actions are impossible and in which only a certain stereotyped institutionalized action can approach more or less closely the ideal of rationality. In this predicament, economic theorists invented the possibility that the economic subject may err, ... Of course, a man living among men in the everyday life-world of economics cannot but err, cannot but commit misjudgments, if for no other reason than because his knowledge, after performing an act, will be different from the knowledge he had when he projected it. But such an interpretation of error and misjudgment is too abstract and theoretical; and, in addition, since it involves the retrospective interpretation of past acts, it leads to the dilemma criticized by Bergson.
Wouldn't I like to know what this refers to.
...
...
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... the economic homunculus, who does not live, who does not perform real acts of choice in a unique situation, but who has been invented in order to make fictitious typical choices which are supposed to result in typical states of affairs, cannot commit errors and misjudgments unless this personal ideal type was constructed especially for the purpose of erring and committing misjudgments. But if this was the case, this type no longer participates in the basic assumptions of economic theory. ...
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
... Summing up what we found, we may say that the social sciences are only seemingly interested in the processes of choosing and deciding. In reality it is merely the choice made, the decision arrived at, which interests them. Likewise, it is not the projecting or acting which they study but the project once drafted, the act once performed. This is only natural if we keep in mind that the position of the social scientist is that of an observer ... he does not live like a man in his daily life in the becoming of his inner time. Therefore, the social sciences (inasmuch as they aim at being theoretical sciences) have to create particular devices for eliminating the contingency inherent in the situation of choice and decision in daily life. ... These
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devices work so successfully that some theoreticians ... are inclined to assume that their postulates are a priori conditions ... Our preceding investigations have shown the fallacy of such an assumption ...
... we have frequently touched on the age-old metaphysical struggle between determinists and indeterminists. We have carefully avoided entering into a full discussion of this problem ... But, rather unexpectedly, we encounter now the same metaphysical confict ... The relationship between the social scientist and the puppet he has created is exactly the same as the relationship between God and man according to the assumption of the metaphysician. The puppet ... cannot act otherwise than in the way in which the scientist in his wisdom has determined it should. Nevertheless, it is supposed to act as if it were not determined but could determine itself by free choice ... Either or both metaphysical assumptions, determinism and indeterminism, require a theory which recognizes both positions ... In order to solve this problem, Leibniz developed his famous hypothesis of the pre-established harmony. We found the same conflict within
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the realm of theoretical social sciences itself. And we may interpret the different methodological devices established by the sciences for dealing with the problems of choice and decision as an attempt to pre-establish total harmony between the determined consciousness bestowed upon the puppet and the preconstituted economic universe within which it is supposed to make its free choices and decisions. This harmony is possible only because both ... are the creation of the theoretical scientist. And by keeping to the principles which guided him in such a creation, the scientist of course succeeds in discovering within the universe, thus created, the perfect harmony established by himself.
WITTGENSTEIN AND PHENOMENOLOGY:
A Comparative Study of the Later Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty
NICHOLAS F. GIER
(1981)
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| 6. The Life-World |
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ALFRED SCHÜTZ ON LEBENSFORM AND SINNSTRUKTUR
Husserl sketches the outlines of a life-world phenomenology in the Crisis, but it is
Alfred Schütz,
more than any other phenomenologist, who has been the "founding father" of this form of phenomenology.
He has the almost exclusive distinction of being accepted by both orthodox and existential phenomenologists.
... There is no evidence whatever to suggest that Wittgenstein read anything of Schütz; ... Schütz was
strongly opposed to positivism
and refused to read the Tractatus, which he considered to be, as Helmut Wagner told me in a letter, the Bible of the "Enemy."
In 1925 Schütz began a book entitled Lebensform und Sinnstruktur, which could have been an appropriate German title for Wittgenstein's Investigations or other later works. This typescript is as yet unpublished and the only scholar who has access to it, Helmut Wagner, explains that
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Schütz's Lebensformen are
meaning structures which are found in hierarchical arrangement:
"The higher life forms are grounded in the lower ones, but the meaning of the lower forms depends on the meaning structures of the higher ones. . . . No life form is self-contained, no meaning structure explains itself." Although Schütz's life forms are basically psychological ... and are therefore quite different from Wittgenstein's, this hierarchical and interdependent model fits very well the various statements about Lebensformen in the later works. Indeed, this idea of what David Carr calls
"phenomenological stratification"
is a pervasive theme throughout all forms of phenomenology.
Schütz's concept of forms of life was strongly influenced by Henri Bergson, the French embodiment of life-philosophy. We have characterized life-philosophy as
a sociological neo-Kantianism,
and Schütz's phenomenological sociology is definitely in the tradition of life-philosophy. The translators of Schütz's The Structures of the Life-World describe Schütz's philosophy as a "sweeping and novel epistemology:
a phenomenological account
of
knowledge as
basically social,"
primarily because
"we are always in situation
and
the situation is always socially conditioned."
Well . . . sure, this is basically true.
I am "basically" 6 feet 2 inches tall, but I am actually 6 feet 1.5 inches tall.
Only so long as the difference is unimportant can I in good conscience claim the extra half inch.
For Schütz the Lebenswelt is above all the province of Praxis, of social action.
... Wittgenstein and Schütz do share some key basic assumptions. Both hold to
phenomenological description which is sharpened by the use of intermediate, hypothetical cases.
Intermediate between what and what??
Both are aware of what is appropriate to empirical sociology and therefore
disavow "historical-causal hypotheses"
and concentrate on
the "basic pre-suppositions for the constitution of social knowledge".
Furthermore, both recognize the value and the limits of the implicit epoché in everyday life and ordinary language. Because of this similarity both thinkers do not have the traditional obsession for "justification," because grounds for what we do and say are simply in ordinary, "life-worldly" doing and saying.
By way of contrast, Wittgenstein would frown at
Schütz's penchant for psychologizing
—characterized generally by his choice of the Lebensformen mentioned above and specifically by his claim that knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem depends upon "whether I can 'more or less' repeat the polythetic steps of the derivation or not". Schütz contends that William James was limited by his "psycholog-
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ical perspective," but this criticism applies to Schütz as well. The psychological Lebensformen of "pure duration," "the acting I," etc. serve as the basis for
a genetic account of meaning that Wittgenstein would definitely have rejected.
Although Wittgenstein would disagree with the details of Schütz's psychology of learning, he would definitely assent to the claim that
our "stock knowledge" is built up "polythetically" in such a way that the steps cannot be traced empirically.
I don't understand what the difference is between the causal and the genetic accounts.
The polythetic aspect at least makes more sense. This is the now-familiar "classification or grouping method where members share a large number of characteristics, but no single feature is both necessary and sufficient for membership." (Google, 7 Mar 2026) Presumably the reason why the steps cannot be traced empirically is because the absence of a common feature will eventually be hit upon; at that juncture, the next "step" we are aiming for is not there and we go tumbling down the staircase.
This of course points to the possibility that "typified" actions are much more fragile than they appear.
On the other hand, Lakoff, e.g., points to the near universality of metaphorical imagery within a culture: when we "spill the beans", they are almost always dry beans, stored in a vessel of a particular size, scattering in all directions, and so on.
And yes, on the third had, he also emphasizes that not all metaphors converge so neatly upon on a set of imagery.
I need to spend much more time with these issues, but provisionally: the scope for true typification-of-actions in Natanson's vein cannot be very great; it seems, actually, that it must be vanishingly small; and even within this narrow domain, the "polythetic" aspect is as easily detected as anywhere else, and the "empirical tracing of steps" is as recalcitrant as ever. All to say, once again: if and when we do really need to know why we do certain things, we are in big trouble. It just would be better if we did not need to know this.
The concept of "stock knowledge," and the images which Schütz uses to develop this concept, bear striking similarities to Wittgenstein's ideas about knowledge in On Certainty. Both thinkers believe that
knowledge acquisition has a definite and specific history
and that all our knowledge, characterized as it is by a "situational relatedness," is profoundly affected by history and culture.
Well, what does this really mean? The more definite and specific the knowledge-history, the less widely shared it is. Conversely, any knowledge which is widely converged upon stands as evidence of historical broadness and generality, not "definiteness" and "specificity".
As many writers have before him, Lakoff (1987) refers to such convergences upon metaphorical imagery as 'remarkable'. But why should he of all people find this remarkable? Why should the empirical scientist himself be bowled over by his own findings? Perhaps if he utterly failed to anticipate them. Or perhaps if he is just being a good salesman for his own ideas. Or perhaps if he feels he cannot explain them, even after their sheer preponderance has carried the day. But if knowledge acquisition has a definite and specific history, it should not be so difficult to say what that history is; it should not be the least bit 'remarkable' that spilled beans are always dry and never cooked. This image should have a history, and we should be able to peg it.
What is 'remarkable' is when "histories" diverge while knowledge converges. That is how I read such remarks. If the intended meaning of such remarks is perfectly contrary to my reading, then I would like to recommend expressing equanimity rather than wonderment. It doesn't take a PhD in cognitive science to parse wonderment as a bit of a tell.
In each philosopher the historicity of knowledge is described in terms of a river metaphor; our "stock knowledge" is the result of
"the sedimentation of current experiences
in meaning-structures, according to relevance and typicality". Like
Michael Polanyi's "tacit knowledge,"
"stock knowledge" does not begin as explicit scientific or theoretical thought, but as Gurwitsch phrases it, "loosely connected rules and maxims of behavior in typical situations, recipes for handling things of certain types so as to attain typical results."
How 'remarkable' indeed if such loose connections could beget such 'tight' meaning-structures. But again, the more empirically robust this nexus is shown to be, the more strongly we must doubt the verbal characterizations (here 'tight' and 'loose') which cause an established fact to appear 'remarkable'. Either that, or else we do not really understand all of this very well at all: the incongruity of 'tight structures' arising from 'loose connections' just is the fact which remains to be accounted for.
In other words, the logical lines of the arena of this pre-reflective knowledge are, as Wittgenstein would put it, "blurred," or as Schütz says, "what is taken for granted does not form a closed, unequivocally articulated and clearly arranged province".
In On Certainty Wittgenstein proposes that
the process of sedimentation will give us both "hard" and "soft" facts,
some which are indubitable and solid and others which are easily washed away. As Schütz's phrases it: "My 'knowledge' that I can't be in two places at the same time can never be problematic; no lifewordly experience can gainsay it".
Even errors
like "whales are fish,"
if sufficiently grounded in lifeworldly experiences,
are truths.
Our "stock knowledge" is made up of "sedimented group experience that has passed the test and which does not need to be examined by individuals as regards its validity". This sounds surprisingly much like Wittgenstein's claim that hard facts are a priori because
"nothing in my picture of the world speaks in favor of the opposite".
Schütz continually encloses "knowledge" in scare quotation marks, and I suspect that he does this for the same reason as Wittgenstein: that
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"framework facts," as we shall call them, are so fundamental that they are pre-epistemological.
Schutz is very much cognizant of the "linguistic turn," and realizes that the turn to the life-world means a move towards linguistic phenomenology. Schütz sometimes psychologizes about the origin of language, something of which Wittgenstein would disapprove, when, e.g., he speaks of subjective experiences being objectified in language as a part of the social a priori. He is closer to
Wittgenstein's type of behaviorism
when he talks about the pre-linguistic stage in which the child assimilates "gestures, facial expressions, and typical conduct" and the general "grammar-gestures of the current historical-cultural age". Wittgenstein and Schütz would also agree on the "intersubjective constitution of signs" and the claim that "the categories are to a great extent socially objectivated, above all, in
language, as a highly anonymous system of meaning".
Ah yes, our old friend anonymity.
If the imagery of "spilling the beans" is significantly more convergent than are its various "histories" in the lives of language-users, then the metaphor is indeed a "highly anonymous" one, in the sense that it itself bears little or no imprint of the person uttering it or the person parsing it: the metaphor is hardly changed at all in the process of being possessed by language-users. Remarkable! we shout, since the more familiar course is for language (and memory) to change more, the more it is accessed, possessed, used. But again, what of the 'silent evidence' of near-typifications, near-constitutions, near-objectivations? This evidence is silent only if we cannot hear it.
To return finally to the idea of phenomenological stratification, we find that Schütz follows Husserl in delineating
a multiplicity of subworlds
as
the various strata
beneath the universal life-world.
Each sub-world constitutes a "finite province of meaning" (Sinngebiet), each with its own style and, as Husserl phrases it, its own "particularized a priori forms".
i.e. Here is where the 'silent evidence' holes up.
... A new province of meaning, like Wittgenstein's new language-game, may open up as a result of new technical language or new slang, while other provinces may fade away from disuse, ...
Schütz's Sinngebieten also have instructive parallels with Wittgenstein's forms of life: there are those which are cognitive, religious, aesthetic, and that which is preferred depends on where the "accent of reality" is placed. Furthermore, there is sometimes no simple conversion from one province to another, and a Kierkegaardian leap of faith is necessary to change from one style or form of life to another This is exactly Wittgenstein's point in On Certainty about taking on the views of certain primitive tribes. Schütz also observes that many jokes are based on the immediate juxtaposition of conflicting Sinngebieten. ...
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... For the same reason, Wittgenstein asks us: "Why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep?"
Schütz's Lebenswelt and provinces of meaning compare favorably with Wittgenstein's Weltbild and forms of life with their linguistic expressions. In both Schütz and Wittgenstein the Lebenswelt is a concept in which nature and culture are merged: the Lebenswelt is where physical bodies are transformed into cultural objects, or persons whose physical movements are then meaningful acts, gestures, and communication. In a major move away from Husserl, which means
a move towards existential phenomenology and Wittgenstein,
Schütz claims that the Lebenswelt can change:
"The Lebenswelt is thus a reality which we modify through our acts and which, on the other hand, modifies our actions". This reminds one of Merleau-Ponty's image of centrifugal and centripetal forces operating within the field of human intentionality.
