Abstract
The aim of this paper is to elucidate the logic of the division and coherence between science and life in Alfred Schutz. It is often said that he attempts to make common-sense and scientific knowledge consistent in his foundation of interpretive sociology. However, the dichotomy between science and daily life conceals the multiple dimensions in his concept of life. Therefore this paper examines his book The Phenomenology of the Social World and manuscripts written in Vienna focusing on the distinction between meaning and lived experience (Erlebnis). This conception derives from Bergson. By this distinction Schutz seeks to maintain a critical viewpoint on scientific knowledge and to get a foundation of doxa at the same time.
In The Phenomenology of the Social World, Schutz brings the dimensions of meaning and lived experience into the analysis of the social world. First, he scrutinizes the mechanism of self-interpretation. This act constitutes meaning by applying the given knowledge to lived experiences. Schutz claims that understanding as an act of meaning constitution is based on self-interpretation. Then, Schutz deals with the concept of simultaneity of the durée on the dimension of lived experience. The ego can see the Other’s continuous flow of experience in the simultaneity. While the unity of both dimensions is formed as subjective meaning for the everyday actor, the unity dissolves in the social science, which is “the constitution of objective meaning-contexts out of subjective meaning-contexts” and therefore excludes the dimension of lived experience. However, his recognition of the limit of interpretive sociology does not end up postulating the impossibility of it. Schutz regards the unity of meaning and lived experience in the daily life as “intermediate sphere”, which cannot be reached by the purely philosophical knowledge. Here we can find a reliable foundation of sociological reflection.
