The Status of Everyday Life (Routledge Revivals) by Fiona Mackie

Author:Fiona Mackie [Mackie, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, Movements, Existential, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781136821950
Google: vYGsAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-12-15T03:39:14+00:00

Doors closed, ways covered over

Space allows only the brief mention of three related themes from Schutz’s Collected Papers where areas fruitful to our concern are similarly foreclosed. The critical motive we have pursued throughout the earlier cited works is abandoned by Schutz in favour of ‘a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude’ (1962, p. 138). In claiming to take this up from Husserl he passes over the radical stream in Husserl’s work and follows only Husserl’s classificatory motive. Having, as he believes, dispensed with the ‘epoché’ as Husserl meant it he offers the following apologia (1962, p. 229):

Man within the natural attitude also uses a specific epoché, of course quite another one than the phenomenologist. He does not suspend belief in the outer world and its objects, but on the contrary, he suspends doubt in its existence. What he puts in brackets is the doubt that the world and its objects might be otherwise than it appears to him. We propose to call this epoché the epoché of the natural attitude.

Schutz does not point out that the abeyance of such doubt in the exclusive reality of the world as it appears is one of the crucial features whereby the natural attitude can gain its absolutism. Here, then, from the point of view of our possibilities—of our alternatives—we have as outcome the opposite of what Husserl’s epoché could mean to us. What Schutz thus describes leads to foreclosure; a reversal of motive which he fails to point out. Thus Schutz’s reversal of Husserl’s meaning means, in fact, the loss of reversal as a capacity. The consequences of this unarticulated loss can be traced throughout Schutz’s work.

The critical in Husserl becomes neutralized (e.g. Schutz, 1962, pp. 59, 101–15, 131), the issue of domination ignored (pp. 79– 83, 276–7). Husserl’s tendency to accept the monad as given is, by contrast, uncritically accepted (pp. 124–7) and extended with grave consequences. Where Husserl’s meaning of ‘Lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt) was not merely synonymous with its appearance and construction in the natural attitude, here it becomes so (p. 149; see also 1966, p. 84). In Schutz’s analyses we become concerned only with meaning bestowed (e.g. 1962, p. 145), but not with meaning betrayed, lost or limited. Schutz speaks of a ‘horizon’ or ‘fringe’ round experience (1966, pp. 8–11), but does not look critically at the consequences of its constitution in our vision. Since ‘reflection’ is, for him, an abstract and ex-post-facto phenomenon; he considers it is acquired late and that children are unreflective (1962, p. 171). Lost to view become suggestions in reverse; that an early primordial mode of experience becomes unavailable through exclusions and accretions. The ‘thing’ as it presents in perception is described rather than rendered critical. Thus its relationship to the constitution of the isolated subject is similarly left uncovered but instead accepted as given (e.g. 1966, pp. 19 and 22). For Schutz ‘“rational action”…is always action within an unquestioned and undetermined frame of constructs of typicalities of the setting, the motives, the means and ends, the courses of action and personalities involved and taken for granted’ (1962, p.

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