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.