Self-understanding and Understanding of Others

Abstract

Forty years from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century in Europe is now being called an “Era of rebellion against positivism”. The current of thoughts in social sciences at that time was dominated by pessimism, which rejected the historical view of the progress of civilization. While people looked with their sceptical eyes at an “instrumental reason” which had long been leading to the positivistic empirical sciences in the 19th century. They were, on the other hand, very interested in the problems of human consciousness and the symbolic world.In this paper we will undertake an estimate of Alfred Schutz's theory of the constitutional phenomenology of natural attitude in its relation to the intellectual current of his days, so that we can understand correctly the meanings of Schutz's theory and its significance. We can see the basic point of his profound studies on “self-understanding” and “understanding of others”. It is characteristic of Schutz's theory that its method is “reflexive” and its perspective “ego-logical”. Therefore, it demonstrates a striking contrast with the positivistic empirical social sciences, of which the method is “inductive”, the perspective being “cosmological”.I conclude as follows ;(1) The construction of reality in terms of the constitutional phenomenology of natural attitude is not the same as the analysis of reality in terms of the standard positivistic social sciences.(2) The contribution of Schutz's study is to give us useful knowledge about the structure of society, which presents itself like a “thingness”, and about the characteristics of the scientific concept formation.