Schutz, Seebohm, and Cultural Science

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Lester Embree, ‘A Problem in Schutz’s Theory of the Historical Sciences with an Illustration from the Women’s Liberation Movement’, Human Studies, 27 (2004), pp. 281–306. 2 Thomas M. Seebohm, Hermeneutics: Method and Methodology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004) (hereafter cited textually as HMM), pp. 2, 98; Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962) (hereafter cited textually as CP I), p. 132. Schutz’s source in Husserl is the Epilogue for the Boyce Gibson translation of Ideen I, retranslated in Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), pp. 405ff. 3 If the social world is defined in terms of relations with others, it is not inconsistent of Schutz to recognize experiences that, for a self, ‘are subjectively not meaningful’, for eample, ‘the mere physiological reflexes, such as the knee jerk, the contraction of the pupil, blinking, blushing … my gait, my facial expression, my mood, those manifestations of my spontaneous life which result in certain characteristics of my handwriting open to graphological interpretation, etc.’, which he calls ‘essentially actual experiences’ (CP I, 210f.) Such subjectively not meaningful experiences are nevertheless interpretable by others. 4 ‘A piece of music is a meaningful context. It is meaningful to the composer; it can be understood as meaningful by the listener; and it is the task of the interpreter to bring about the correct meaning. Applied to music, the terms, “meaning” and “context”, “understanding” and “interpretation”, are used, however, in a specific way which is different from other meaningful systems such as languages. … Music is an instance of a meaningful context without reference to a conceptual scheme and, strictly speaking, without immediate reference to the objects of the world in which we live, without reference to the properties and functions of those objects. Music does not have a representative function. (Musical notation, of course, does have a representative function.)’ Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. IV, ed. Helmut Wagner and George Psathas in collaboration with Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996) (hereafter cited textually as CP IV), pp. 243f. Cf. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. II, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964) (hereafter cited textually as CP II), pp. 159–178. 5 Lester Embree, ‘Phenomenology of the Consocial Situation: Advancing the Problems’, in Space, Time, and Culture, ed. David Carr and Cheung, Chan‐Fai (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), pp. 119–33. 6 See Lester Embree, ‘A Problem in Alfred Schutz’s Methodology of the Cultural Sciences’, trans. Irie, Masakatsu, Bunku to Shakai, 1 (1999), pp. 105–31. 7 His only comment is this: ‘In philology it is always a basic question whether what is being studied is the objective meaning of a word at a definite time within a definite language area or, second, the subjective meaning which the word takes on in the usage of a particular author or of a particular circle of speakers or, third, the occasional meaning which it takes on in the context of discourse.’ Alfred Schutz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (Vienna: Springer, 1932), §28, quotation from Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evansto, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), hereafter cited textually as PSW, p. 138, see CP I, 333. The word ‘hermeneutics’ occurs once as well and in connection with an undeveloped developed defence of Dilthey against misunderstandings that speak of ‘hermeneutics’ with ‘some sort of mystical vision [Schau]’ (CP IV, 92). 8 ‘[I]n every branch of the social sciences which has arrived at the theoretical stage of its development there is a fundamental hypothesis which both defines the fields of research and gives the regulative principle for building up the system of ideal types. Such a fundamental hypothesis, for instance, is in classical economics the utilitarian principle, and in modern economics the marginal principle.’ (CP II, 87); see Alfred Schutz, The Theory of Social Action, ed. Richard Grathoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 211. 9 ‘I agree with Professor Nagel that all empirical knowledge involves discovery through processes of controlled inference, and that it must be statable in propositional form and capable of being verified by anyone who is prepared to make the effort to so through observation’ (CP I, 51).