Life Forms and Meaning Structure

Alfred Schutz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134479245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

This volume contains a translation of four early manuscripts by Alfred Schutz, unpublished at the time, written between 1924 and 1928. The publication of these four essays adds much to our knowledge and appreciation of the wide range of Schutz's phenomenological and sociological interests. Originally published in 1987.

The essays consist of: a challenging presentation of a phenomenology of cognition and a treatment of Bergson's conceptions of images, duration, space time and memory; a discussion of the meanings connected with the grammatical forms of language in general; a consideration of the relation between meaning-contents and literary forms in poetry, literary prose narration and dramatic presentation; and an examination of resemblances and differences in the inner forms and characteristics of the major theatrical art forms.

PART I

Theory of Life Forms and Symbol Concept

Editor's note

According to Schutz's outline, the first part of this project was to serve three purposes. The first was to introduce the concepts of life form and symbol in their general ideal-typical structure. Secondly, it was to offer the analysis and discussion of six specific life forms, representing cross-sections of an actually continuous life of consciousness and forming a hierarchy of ideal types in ascending order, ranging from the spontaneous flow of inner duration to the highest forms of rational thinking. Finally, a general treatment of the concept of symbol relations and the concept of meaning was foreseen.

The first main part is the only one which Schutz managed to execute to a substantial degree. Yet, it was broken off before the analysis of the fifth life form had been finished. Nevertheless the themes of symbol relations and meaning have found considerable attention in the given text, since they were needed for the treatment of the relationship of adjacent life forms to one another.

Schutz sectioned off the manuscript into numerous parts, separated by dividing lines. I have numbered these sections and provided them with adequate sub-titles.

This manuscript offered the relatively greatest difficulties for the translator and posed serious problems for the editor. After careful consideration, I decided to circumvent the seven quasi-mathematical diagrams and their algebraic denotations which Schutz introduced into the manuscript and discussed at considerable length. In justification of this circumvention, I state the following: The ‘mathematization’ of parts of Schutz's expositions served merely illustrative purposes. It cannot possibly serve any function in the development of the substantive argument. To the contrary, it shows Schutz resorting to extreme quantitative means for the description of by definition unquantifiable happenings and experiences, all located in or connected with ‘inner duration.’ This purely qualitative concept of Bergson, for instance, is in utter opposition to the linear conception of a mathematical continuum which, in addition, consists of an infinite series of discrete points laid out in space.

As the reader will learn from remarks of Schutz, found both in the text and in notes, he himself was highly concerned with undoing the unwarranted effects of his quasi-mathematical illustrations. He was, of course, completely aware of the general paradox of speaking about inner duration in a language which, as Bergson said, laid out everything in space, and knew that the language of a mathematical formalism drives the spatialization of time to its uttermost extreme.

That there was no inner necessity for making use of this formalism is demonstrated by Schutz 's discussion of duration and inner time in ‘Der sinnhafte Aufbau’ of 1932. Here, he expressed the gist of his earlier expositions in terms of a language which, in spite of its pragmatic character, at least allows for description with the help of qualitatively-descriptive terms.

I suggest that Schutz, in the mid-1920s, used quasi-mathematical illustrations for pedagogical reasons. He planned to address himself to fellow intellectuals who, like him, had had a good general mathematical training and could be expected to gain an easier access to the strange considerations of Bergson if they faced it first in, for them, convenient mathematical terms and made the corrections later. Whether such expectations were justified, I am unable to decide. In any case, fifty-five years later and for an English-speaking audience – at least in North America – the effect of an illustrative mathematization would likely to be the opposite of that expected at the time from a German-Austrian readership. It would confuse the issues even more than any ordinary descriptive language could.

In this part as well as the second part, consecutive page numbers (p. 1, p. 2, etc.) appear in the margins. They indicate the pages on which the given text begins in the German original manuscripts. They will be helpful to anyone who wishes to compare the translation with the original text in the German edition of these studies or with the original manuscripts on microfilm.

Life Forms and Meaning Structure

(1) IMAGES, DURATION, SPACE AND TIME

My experiencing I is placed into the cosmos. I may allow the latter to affect me; and I may take the world into myself, without cognitively objectifying it, simply as stuff of my being-here and as material of my existence: accepting, processing, and transforming it. If I accept the World not as mental representation but as ex-perience, the abundance of its phenomena yields to me ‘images’ which, although differentiated, are not at all heterogeneous.¹

They are differentiated: when I move, within finite spheres, in various directions, I seem to move toward the infinity of that which is forming itself. Nevertheless, these differentiations are unitary; all these experiences belong to me. The experiences of my environment are different in quality, quantity, and possibly also in intensity; they are most differentiated in their intentional content. Yet, they unify themselves in the experience of my own I in a manifold unity which is not merely the unity of my consciousness (in the logical sense). Between nature and art, God and world, feeling and spirit, the sensuate and the supernatural, I experience this many-colored life colorful and undifferentiated as a constant change in the mode of succession. I differentiate it only afterwards and artificially on reflection. Only conceptually do I grant the quality of coexistence to the separate phases of my ideal I.

Many dreams leave in the awakening person at first nothing but the vague feeling of having experienced something. The situation which caused – or more accurately accompanied – the dream experience reveals itself only after some reflection. Similarly, all that which is observed, felt, and enjoyed during the experience of a summer evening, remains closely bound to this experience in its unity – even though only for its duration. That which is remembered differentiates itself into mountain and lake, sun and tree, ringing of the bell and conversation, movement of the row-boat and color of the woods only for the consciousness which turns back (to an experience after it has passed away, HRW) and now forms sharply delimited images. Established in retrospect, their simultaneous side-by-side makes the experience, ‘summer evening,’ comprehensible and easily remembered. But, nevertheless, reflection is not capable of bringing back the experience.²

What resulted for us originally was only an ever-changing but steady succession, a unitary but manifold development of the experience of the I. For reasons still to be given, it cannot be communicated in concise form, and therefore not at all.

The first philosopher who forced modern philosophy to accept this basic difference between experiences as such and the reflection about experiences – a difference important for many reasons – was Bergson. He showed, for the first time, the unity of the manifold in the stream of duration whose criterion is continuous change of quality. He was the first to make matter, as an order of memory images, into a function of memory.

But already Bergson has pointed out that we are rarely allowed to self-contemplate the experiencing I, to become absorbed in pure duration. Our I-experience is banished into time and space; it is tied to consociates through language and emotions; it is accustomed to thinking, that is, to spatialize streaming changes of quality and to form them into concepts. Therefore, we have to push aside the whole layer of our habits of thinking and living in order to achieve a first primitive surrender to duration. This is so because our world of thinking, our concepts, our science demonstrate their time-space character at every move. Nothing, however, can suppress the experience of continual change of quality more than the constant reflection on the world around us. Reflection represents a realm of side-by-side quantities; even movement, which most resembles duration, is spatialized through concepts. Our adaptation to commerce with the external world and our acquisition of habits of thinking have forced us to replace our experience of duration by the experience of space and time, and to remain entangled in reflection and thinking. Our experiencing is almost ever coupled with reflection about the experience. We control ourselves by our thinking; often we are unable to see the image on account of the concepts. Our consciousness of the stream of duration holds on only timidly to the unambiguous ‘now’ and ‘thus’, using them as rigid boundaries between which we squeeze our experiences-turned-into-concepts.

At first glance, it seems to be most of all one circumstance which forces me to exchange the subjective experience of duration with the conceptual experience of time and space, nay more, to project duration into time and space. This is the fact that I live in duration not alone. I am surrounded by objects which exist simultaneously with me. I know about consociates, that is, of other egos who experience their own duration and whose consciousness flows similarly to mine. Initially, we shall examine this dual experience of the object and the knowledge about a Thou and we shall investigate whether and in what way we are thereby forced to modify our experience of duration. Further, we will examine the means at our disposal for unifying in our consciousness the two realms of our existence: the experience of the I in duration and the Thou experience in space and time. Further, we will try to ascertain, within the realm of science, the systematic possibility of the recognition of this state of fact.

(2) THE PASSAGE FROM DURATION TO SPACE-TIME

The experience of space and matter became a major problem of philosophy long before Kant. The central point of the Aristotelian logic and of the whole medieval scholastic is the concept of substance. Since Kant, the problem received a different formulation, but did not lose anything in significance. The ‘Kopernican turn’ of Kant did not concern the question of the essence of the object but our possibility of cognitively realizing the object. This reversal of the question subsequently proved itself extremely fruitful. But it presupposed a fundamental insight into the nature of the world outside ourselves which was apriorily given and relegated the conception of the ‘phenomenon’ into a pre-scientific sphere. Thus, the transsubstantiation of the sensorily perceptible into a conceptual-categorical recognizable had to be made possible through the mystery of the transcendental schematism. The experience which, according to the system, was focusing on the external world, could only in this way be brought in agreement with the (neither denied nor considered) discrepancy between the intensive experience of continuous quality changes and the quantifiable discontinuum (of space and time fulfilled). Now, when the Kantian philosophy demonstrated space and time as pure forms of our thinking, it deliberately banned from its field of vision the experience of the concept of space (and thus of matter) through apriorization. It limited itself to demonstrating that phenomena are given to our senses and that space and time are a-priorily given prior to all thinking and, in fact, making the latter possible. Starting with the configuration of experience of science, and especially of mathematical natural science, it made the latter possible and produced a critique of pure reason, that is, of scientific experience. It demonstrated the laws of scientific experience which themselves were conditioned in many ways. It had to renounce the efforts to assume that scientific experience is secondary and that space and time is relative. And it was right in doing so. It found as object of its investigations an intellectual world in which, indeed, space and time were postulated as a-priorily given. In the course of our investigation, we hope to show why this is so: the world of space and time, into which we are placed in the experience of our inner duration, is socially conditioned by way of memory and Thou experience; and our ‘concepts’ (in the sense of the original materials of our experience) are erected upon the socially conditioned fundament of the linguistic symbol. The transition from the world of the inner I experience to the outer world of the Thou is already executed in memory image and symbol.

To clarify this difficult linkage, we will initially try to retrace the path from the inner experience of pure duration to the concept of space. We will do this on hand of Bergson's conception, especially as formulated in his later writings. Thereafter, we will speak about the phenomenon of memory and, after closer inspection of this fundamental factum, to derive the symbol from it. Having made ourselves familiar with these basic factual complexes, we may calmly return to the social world of space and time, of concepts and experience. But more, we have to do it if we want to come close to the actual purpose of these investigations: the grounding of the social sciences in the Thou experience. Practis-ing science, we will intentionally move within the sphere of the ‘space-timely’ conditioned concept. In reverse, it will therefore be our task to investigate in what way is possible a science, that is, a conceptually-categorically comprehensible ‘series of experi-ences’ of the Thou. The experience of the thou by far precedes conceptual-categorial comprehension. The former conditions the latter and makes it possible just by resisting it. We will ask which method such a science would have to use in order to lift the irrational fundamental experience of the thou out of its own specific sphere and to transfer it into the rational realm of science without abandoning the circle of ‘symbols,’ to wit, the language-directed concepts of experience.

(3) DURATION OBSERVED

When I lock out all sensory impressions and turn completely into myself, I become aware of a steady and continuous change, a continuous transition of qualities which is comparable to a melody. I distinguish an altered Before which through change became a Now. This Now itself, however, having become noticed by me, passed at that very moment into a Before by way of a change of which I became conscious with the help of my memory. But, by making these considerations, I already have left the sphere of the pure experience of duration. Only by remembering a Before have I been able to get hold of the qualitatively different Now. I have ‘made present’ the immediately following Now only through letting it become rigid, through fixation by fiat as the Now which just was, as one qualitatively different from the other. Intentionally disrupting the eternal stream, I formed an image of my inner ‘condition’ out of the Now, which is just forming itself, and the Now which just had been. This image was preserved in my memory; through comparison, it shows to me my present ‘I am’ in contrast to my ‘I was.’ Thus, if I wish to distinguish the qualitative change in my sphere of the stream of duration, I have to fixate, as it were, some points in the course of my inner experience. I will have to have noticed the second-last tone of the melody in order to know whether the tone sounding now is higher, lower, stronger, weaker, or of different timbre – in short, whether it is different from its predecessor. I achieve this by an artificial process, through an image which I form in my memory.

If I now open my eyes and look around, I notice images of objects which are in movement or in rest, which are changeable or, apparently, non-changeable. I become aware of my body as an image in the outer world. While writing these lines, I see my hand executing movements on this paper; I remember that I intended to make these movements. Now, they participate in my inner duration...