Experiencing Multiple Realities

Alfred Schutz�s Sociology of the Finite Provinces of Meaning

Marius Ion Benţa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780415793322
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351811798
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a theoretical investigation into the general problem of reality as a multiplicity of 'finite provinces of meaning', as developed in the work of Alfred Schutz. A critical introduction to Schutz's sociology of multiple realities as well as a sympathetic re-reading and reconstruction of his project, Experiencing Multiple Realities traces the genesis and implications of this concept in Schutz's writings before presenting an analysis of various ways in which it can shed light on major sociological problems, such as social action, social time, social space, identity, or narrativity.

1
Theory and story

In-between encounters

1.1 A ‘residual’ discovery

The concept of ‘finite province of meaning’ enjoys, as we mentioned, a somewhat paradoxical place in the social theory of Alfred Schutz. On the one hand, it stands among the best known productions of his thought (Lester Embree calls ‘On Multiple Realities’ the most famous essay of Alfred Schutz¹ and Hisashi Nasu says that Schutz’s conception of the multiple realities is ‘an essential part of his sociology of everyday life’²). Yet, on the other hand, this theory has never occupied a central position in his system of ideas, and the project of a ‘provincial sociology’ has never been carried out extensively. In Schutz’s theoretical system, the concept of finite province of meaning appears rather as a subordinate term that has never had the opportunity to be seen in its own right: a brick in the epistemological foundation of the social sciences, an appendix to the theory of relevance, or a condition for the sociology of everyday life. Its explanatory potential has never been exploited in full neither by Schutz himself nor by his followers. The most urgent objective in Schutz’s lifelong research agenda was the building of a foundation for phenomenological sociology. This may explain why he has never developed a coherent operational sociology of the multiple realities, which he nevertheless admitted to be touching on ‘one of the most important philosophical problems.’³

In his search for an epistemological foundation for sociology, Schutz found the need to contrast this science with the realm of everyday life and its naïve forms of knowledge. In his search for understanding the structure of everyday life, he realised that he needed to understand how everyday life, science, and the other provinces emerged as particular forms of our fundamentally plural experience of the world. Like Husserl and other scholars, Schutz had clear destinations in his theoretical investigations, and he used various concepts and theories as doorsteps to the ‘rooms’ he wanted to visit. The concept of finite province of meaning was one such doorstep.

Schutz’s ideas on the multiple realities can be learned from a number of article-length texts, which at times complement each other and at other times appear redundant. ‘On Multiple Realities’ is the best outline of his theory and its first published version will serve as our main source of analysis.⁴

The text was originally written in the United States in 1943.⁵ Two years later, Schutz published a rewritten version of the article in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research – a journal that Schutz himself had founded and edited with Marvin Farber in the United States.

The paper was reprinted over the years in several versions under various titles. In 1962, Maurice Natanson included it in the first volume of Schutz’s Collected Papers.⁶ Helmut Wagner published in 1970 an adapted version of it in a Selected Writings volume of Schutz under the title ‘Realms of Experience: Transcendences and Multiple Realities.’⁷ An adapted version of the initial 1943 draft was included by Wagner in 1996 in Collected Papers IV as ‘Realities from Daily Life to Theoretical Contemplation.’

The text’s main ideas can also be found, from a slightly different perspective, in the beginning of the book co-authored with Thomas Luckmann and published 14 years after Schutz’s death, The Structures of the Life-World. Here, the section was called ‘Provinces of Reality with Finite Meaning-Structure.’⁸

In the book draft⁹ that Schutz wrote between 1947 and 1951 on the problem of relevance, an intention of revising and moving forward the ideas of the core 1945 theory could be discerned. ‘On Multiple Realities’ was intended to be the fourth of five chapters of a book¹⁰ that was supposed to be ‘a phenomenology of the natural attitude,’ as Schutz explained in a letter to Gurwitsch,¹¹ where the theory of relevance was supposed to be of crucial importance to the project. Schutz never finished the project, and one cannot guess whether the finite province of meaning (FPM) theory would have played a great part in the final theoretical construction. It is interesting to note that that those developments in FPM theory were not included by Luckmann in The Structures of the Life-World,¹² a book that was intended as a detailed overview of the Schutzian thought.

‘On Multiple Realities’ directly underpinned the ideas of several subsequent articles of Schutz. In these papers, Schutz brought new insights to his theory of the finite provinces of meaning, although it is obvious that his intention was not to perfect the theory but to make use of it as a tool for his literary analyses on Goethe and Cervantes and for a philosophical investigation of the fundamental experience of symbolisation. One of these texts is an interpretation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Journeyman Years, a handwritten draft that remained unpublished until 2013, when it was included in both the German and the English editions of Schutz’s Collected Papers.¹³ The text is somewhat difficult to read, and Schutz himself found it ‘unpublishable.’¹⁴ The second was called ‘Don Quixote and the problem of reality’ and was initially presented in December 1953 before the General Seminar of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. The Spanish version was published the following year in Mexico, according to Arvid Brodersen,¹⁵ and in English in 1964 in Collected Papers II. The third, published in 1955,¹⁶ addressed the problem of symbolic transcendences, a question that had not been addressed in ‘On Multiple Realities.’

Schutz was highly interested in music, especially in the technique of collective production of harmony and counterpoint in choirs and orchestras,¹⁷ which he saw as a powerful metaphor for our experience of society; his ‘theoretical contemplations’ on the topic materialised into several papers on the phenomenology of music.¹⁸ These articles could have been a good opportunity for him to apply the conceptual framework of the finite provinces of meaning to musical performance and dramatic production. However, he merely inserted in these texts contextual references to tangent concepts, such as durée, inner time, and intersubjectivity.

In ‘On Multiple Realities’ and the writings on the topic that followed it, Schutz gave due credit, right from the outset, to William James for having pointed out that our social world bore a character of multiplicity. One may hastily understand that Schutz’s interest in the topic of the multiple realities could have been sparkled by James. While it is obvious that William James offered Schutz an illuminating frame for his investigations, it is also true that Schutz showed an interest in the question of the multiplicity of the spheres of experience long before ‘On Multiple Realities.’

According to his biographers,¹⁹ during the summers of 1936 and 1937, Schutz worked on the draft of a paper²⁰ to take further some of the problems that he had left open in Der sinnhafte Aufbau – the only book-length text that Schutz published in his lifetime – such as the questions of social relationships, relevance, and otherness.²¹ There are two versions of this manuscript: one from 1936, and the other from 1937; both were called ‘The Problem of Personality in the Social World’ and were included in Collected Papers VI.²² Both are fragmentary, sketchy, and unfinished: the first one because Schutz saw it as mere laboratory work and the second because he ‘ran out of time to complete the writing of it, perhaps due to the circumstances that affected his life at the time,’ as his translators explained.²³

In the first version, Schutz doesn’t talk about ‘finite provinces of meaning,’ but mentions the ‘enclaves’ that interrupt the ‘unity of consciousness’: sleep, dream, phantasy, children’s play, the world of jokes, or mental illness.²⁴ The second version is actually the text where Schutz uses for the first time the syntagm ‘finite provinces of meaning’²⁵ as well as most of the key concepts of ‘On Multiple Realities,’ such as ‘shock,’ attention à la vie, durée, ‘wide awake,’ ‘modifications,’ ‘world of working,’ ‘archetype,’ Don Quixote’s ‘phantasmas,’ ‘potestativity,’ ‘accent of reality,’ or ‘pragmatic interests.’ Moreover, the text follows roughly the same structure as ‘On Multiple Realities,’ starting from a description of the ‘world of working’ (which he also calls ‘world of public life’) followed by analyses of the ‘world of phantasy,’ ‘the world of dreams,’ and ‘the theoretical world of contemplative observation.’

It is obvious that his concern with the problem of multiple realities dates back at least to those years when he was still in Austria, as Wagner remarked:

The pragmatic world of working is not the only reality known to man. However, it is ‘paramount reality,’ to use William James’s term for the identification of the dominant sphere of immediate experience and evidence. In 1937, Schutz knew neither this term nor that of ‘multiple realities,’ which it implies. Later he would adopt both. But he did work out, within the framework of The Problem of Personality in the Social World, the whole theory of what he, in 1945, called the various ‘provinces of meaning’ and made known in his famous paper ‘On Multiple Realities.’²⁶

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: realities just ‘real enough’
• 1 Theory and story: in-between encounters
• 2 Schutz’s methodological journey
• 3 The Schutzian FPM model
• 4 Revisiting the provinces
• 5 The life of the provinces
• 6 Methods of experience
• 7 Experience as discourse
• 8 Ancient FPM portals: painted screens
• Conclusion
• Index