Blackwell Reference Online

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Maurice Natanson (1973 , p. 166), first a student and later a colleague and friend of Alfred Schutz (1899–1959), wrote of Edmund Husserl what might also be said of Schutz, namely that his work put him “in the company of those who labor at foundations.” Schutz's focus was the “primordial foundation… that makes all understanding possible” (in Grathoff, 1989 , p. 212), namely the life-world ( Lebenswelt ) or the world of everyday life. He aimed to show what makes the everyday world possible at all and how it in turn makes understanding possible, including scientific understanding. Schutz's theorizing goes to the roots of social reality where consciousness moves beyond its own duration and naively grasps its world. For him, that world can be had only in and through mutuality; it is inescapably intersubjective. The world given to consciousness as a taken-for-granted certainty is also marked by multiplicity – its multiplicity of forms and structures, its multiplicity of worlds of experience, its multiplicity of members spanning the past (predecessors), the present (anonymous contemporaries and interacting consociates), and the future (successors). Finally, Schutz shows that to have a world means to make meanings, both the subjective meanings individuals constitute in grasping their own acts and the objective meanings they constitute in interpreting others’ subjectively meaningful acts. ... log in or subscribe to read full text