Alfred Schütz 1945

On Multiple Realities

Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 5, No. 4 (June,

1945), pp. 533-576;
Published: by International Phenomenological Society.

In a famous chapter of his Principles of Psychology William James

analyzes our sense of reality.[1] Reality, so he states, means simply
relation to our emotional and active life. The origin of all reality is
subjective, whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real. To call
a thing real means that this thing stands in a certain relation to
ourselves. “The word ‘real’ is, in short, a fringe."[2] Our primitive impulse
is to affirm immediately the reality of all that is conceived, as long as it
remains uncontradicted. But there are several, probably an infinite
number of various orders of realities, each with its own special and
separate style of existence. James calls them “sub-universes” and
mentions as examples the world of sense or physical things (as the
paramount reality); the world of science; the world of ideal relations;
the world of “idols of the tribe”; the various supernatural worlds of
mythology and religion; the various worlds of individual opinion; the
worlds of sheer madness and vagary.[3] The popular mind conceives of
all these sub-worlds more or less disconnectedly; and when dealing
with one of them forgets for the time being its relations to the rest. But
every object we think of is at last referred to one of these sub-worlds.
“Each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion; only the
reality lapses with the attention."[4]With these remarks James’ genius
has touched on one of the most important philosophical questions.
Intentionally restricting his inquiry to the psychological aspect of the
problem he has refrained from embarking upon an investigation of the
many implications involved. The following considerations, fragmentary
as they are, attempt to outline a first approach to some of them with the
special aim of clarifying the relationship between the reality of the
world of daily life and that of theoretical, scientific contemplation.

I. THE REALITY OF THE WORLD OF DAILY LIFE

(1) The natural attitude of daily life and its pragmatic motive.

We begin with an analysis of the world of daily life which the wide-
awake, grown-up man who acts in it and upon it amidst his fellow-men
experiences with the natural attitude as a reality. “World of daily life”
shall mean the intersubjective world which existed long before our
birth, experienced and interpreted by others, our predecessors, as an
organized world. Now it is given to our experience and interpretation.
All interpretation of this world is based upon a stock of previous
experiences of it, our own experiences and those handed down to us by
our parents and teachers, which in the form of “knowledge at hand”
function as a scheme of reference. To this stock of experiences at hand
belongs our knowledge that the world we live in is a world of well
circumscribed objects with definite qualities, objects among which we
move, which resist us and upon which we may act. To the natural
attitude the world is not and never has been a mere aggregate of colored
spots, incoherent noises, centers of warmth and cold.
Philosophical or psychological analysis of the constitution of our
experiences may afterwards, retrospectively, describe how elements of
this world affect our senses, how we passively perceive them in an
indistinct and confused way, how by active apperception our mind
singles out certain features from the perceptional field, conceiving them
as well delineated things which stand out over against a more or less
inarticulated background or horizon. The natural attitude does not
know these problems. To it the world is from the outset not the private
world of the single individual, but an inter-subjective world, common
to all of us, in which we have not a theoretical but an eminently practical
interest.
The world of everyday life is the scene and also the object of our
actions and interactions. We have to dominate it and we have to change
it in order to realize the purposes which we pursue within it among our
fellow-men. Thus, we work and operate not only within but upon the
world. Our bodily movements kinaesthetic, locomotive, operative-gear,
so to speak, into the world, modifying or changing its objects and their
mutual relationships. On the other hand, these objects offer resistance
to our acts which we have either to overcome or to which we have to
yield. In this sense it may be correctly said that a pragmatic motive
governs our natural attitude toward the world of daily life. World, in
this sense, is something that we have to modify by our actions or that
modifies our actions.

(2) The manifestations of man’s spontaneous life in the outer world

and some of its forms.

But what has to be understood under the term “action” just used?
How does man with the natural attitude experience his own “actions”
within and upon the world? Obviously, “actions” are manifestations of
man’s spontaneous life. But neither does he experience all such
manifestations as actions nor does he experience all of his actions as
bringing about changes in the outer world. Unfortunately the different
forms of all these experiences are not clearly distinguished in present
philosophical thought and, therefore, no generally accepted
terminology exists. In vain would we look for help to modern
behaviorism and its distinction between overt and covert behavior, to
which categories a third, that of subovert behavior, has sometimes been
added in order to characterize the manifestation of spontaneity in acts
of speech. It is not our aim to criticize here the basic fallacy of the
behavioristic point of view or to discuss the inadequacy and
inconsistency of the trichotomy just mentioned. For our purpose it
suffices to show that the behavioristic interpretation of spontaneity can
contribute nothing to the question we are concerned with, namely, how
the different forms of spontaneity are experienced by the mind in which
they originate. At its best, behaviorism is a scheme of reference useful
to the observer of other people’s behavior. He, and only he, might be
interested to consider the activities of men or animals under a relational
scheme of reference such as stimulus-response, or organism-
environment, and only from his point of view are these categories
accessible at all. Our problem, however, is not what occurs to man as a
psycho-physiological unit or his response to it, but the attitude he
adopts toward these occurrences and his steering of his so-called
responses – briefly, the subjective meaning man bestows upon certain
experiences of his own spontaneous life. What appears to the observer
to be objectively the same behavior may have for the behaving subject
very different meanings or no meaning at all. Meaning, as has been
shown elsewhere,[5] is not a quality inherent to certain experiences
emerging within our stream of consciousness but the result of an
interpretation of a past experience looked at from the present Now with
a reflective attitude. As long as I live in my acts, directed toward the
objects of these acts, the acts do not have any meaning. They become
meaningful if I grasp them as well-circumscribed experiences of the
past and, therefore, in retrospection. Only experiences which can be
recollected beyond their actuality and which can be questioned about
their constitution are, therefore, subjectively meaningful. But if this
characterization of meaning has been accepted, are there at all any
experiences of my spontaneous life which are subjectively not
meaningful? We think the answer is in the affirmative. There are the
mere physiological reflexes, such as the knee jerk, the contraction of the
pupil, blinking, blushing; moreover certain passive reactions provoked
by what Leibnitz calls the surf of indiscernible and confused small
perceptions; furthermore my gait, my facial expressions, my mood,
those manifestations of my spontaneous life which result in certain
characteristics of my hand-writing open to graphological
interpretation, etc. All these forms of involuntary spontaneity are
experienced while they occur, but without leaving any trace in memory;
as experiences they are, to borrow again a term from Leibnitz, most
suitable for this peculiar problem, perceived but not apperceived.
Unstable and undetachable from surrounding experiences as they are,
they can neither be delineated nor recollected. They belong to the
category of essentially actual experiences, that is, they exist merely in
the actuality of being experienced and cannot be grasped by a reflective
attitude. Subjectively meaningful experiences emanating from our
spontaneous life shall be called conduct. (We avoid the term “behavior”
because it includes in present use also subjectively non-meaningful
manifestations of spontaneity such as reflexes.) The term “conduct” –
as used here – refers to all kinds of subjectively meaningful, experiences
of spontaneity, be they those of inner life or those gearing into the outer
world. If it is permitted to use objective terms in a description of
subjective experiences – and after the preceding clarification the
danger of misunderstanding no longer exists – we may say that conduct
can be an overt or a covert one. The former shall be called mere doing,
the latter mere thinking. However the term “conduct” as used here does
not imply any reference to intent. All kinds of so-called automatic
activities of inner or outer life-habitual, traditional, affectual ones – fall
under this class, called by Leibnitz the “class of empirical behavior.”
Conduct which is devised in advance, that is, which is based upon a
preconceived project, shall be called action, regardless of whether it is
an overt or covert one. As to the latter it has to be distinguished whether
or not there supervenes on the project an intention to realize it – to
carry it through, to bring about the projected state of affairs. Such an
intention transforms the mere forethought into an aim and the project
into a purpose. If an intention to realization is lacking, the projected
covert action remains a phantasm, such as a day-dream; if it subsists,
we may speak of a purposive action or a performance. An example of a
covert action which is a performance is the process of projected
thinking such as the attempt to solve a scientific problem mentally. As
to the so-called overt actions, that is, actions which gear into the outer
world by bodily movements, the distinction between actions without
and those with an intention to realization is not necessary. Any overt
action is a performance within the meaning of our definition. In order
to distinguish the (covert) performances of mere thinking from those
(overt) requiring bodily movements we shall call the latter working.
Working, thus, is action in the outer world, based upon a project and
characterized by the intention to bring about the projected state of
affairs by bodily movements. Among all the described forms of
spontaneity that of working is the most important one for the
constitution of the reality of the world of daily life. As will be shown very
soon the wide-awake self integrates in its working and by its working
its present, past, and future into a specific dimension of time; it realizes
itself as a totality in its working acts; it communicates with others
through working acts; it organizes the different spatial perspectives of
the world of daily life through working acts. But before we can turn to
these problems we have to explain what the term “wide-awake self,” just
used, means.

(3) The tensions of consciousness and the attention to life.

One of the central points of Bergson’s philosophy is his theory that

our conscious life shows an indefinite number of different planes,
ranging from the plane of action on one extreme to the plane of dream
at the other. Each of these planes is characterized by a specific tension
of consciousness, the plane of action showing the highest, that of dream
the lowest degree of tension. According to Bergson these different
degrees of tension of our consciousness are functions of our varying
interest in life, action representing our highest interest in meeting
reality and its requirements, dream being complete lack of interest.
Attention à la vie, attention to life, is, therefore, the basic regulative
principle of our conscious life. It defines the realm of our world which
is relevant to us; it articulates our continuously flowing stream of
thought; it determines the span and function of our memory; it makes
us – in our language – either live within our present experiences,
directed toward their objects, or turn back in a reflective attitude to our
past experiences and ask for their meaning.[7]
By the term “wide-awakeness” we want to denote a plane of
consciousness of highest tension originating in an attitude of full
attention to life and its requirements. Only the performing and
especially the working self is fully interested in life and, hence, wide-
awake. It lives within its acts and its attention is exclusively directed to
carrying its project into effect, to executing its plan. This attention is an
active, not a passive one. Passive attention is the opposite to full
awakeness. In passive attention I experience, for instance, the surf of
indiscernible small perceptions which are, as stated before, essentially
actual experiences and not meaningful manifestations of spontaneity.
Meaningful spontaneity may be defined with Leibnitz as the effort to
arrive at other and always other perceptions. In its lowest form it leads
to the delimitation of certain perceptions transforming them into
apperception; in its highest form it leads to the performance of working
which gears into the outer world and modifies it.
The concept of wide-awakeness reveals the starting point for a
legitimate,[8]pragmatic interpretation of our cognitive life. The state of
full awakeness of the working self traces out that segment of the world
which is pragmatically relevant and these relevances determine the
form and content of our stream of thought: the form, because they
regulate the tension of our memory and therewith the scope of our past
experiences recollected and of our future experiences anticipated; the
content, because all these experiences undergo specific attentional
modifications by the preconceived project and its carrying into effect.
This leads us immediately into an analysis of the time dimension in
which the working self experiences its own acts.

(4) The time-perspectives of the “ego agens” and their unification.

We start by making a distinction that refers to actions in general,

covert and overt ones, namely between action as an ongoing process, as
acting in progress (actio) on the one hand, and action as performed act,
as the thing done (actum) on the other hand. Living in my acting-in-
progress I am directed toward the state of affairs to be brought about
by this acting. But, then, I do not have in view my experiences of this
ongoing process of acting. In order to bring them into view I have to
turn back with a reflective attitude to my acting. I have, as Dewey
formulated it once, to stop and think. If I adopt this reflective attitude,
it is, however, not my ongoing acting that I can grasp. What alone I can
grasp is rather my performed act (my past acting) or, if my acting still
continues while I turn back, the performed initial phases (my present
perfect acting). While I lived in my acting in progress it was an element
of my vivid present. Now, this present has turned into past and the vivid
experience of my acting in progress has given place to my recollection
of having acted or to the retention of having been acting. Seen from the
actual present in which I adopt the reflective attitude my past or present
perfect acting is conceivable only in terms of acts performed by me.
Thus I may either live in the ongoing process of my acting, directed
toward its object, and, then, I experience my acting in the Present Tense
(modo presenti); or I may, so to speak, step out of the ongoing flux and
look by a reflective glance at the acts performed in previous processes
of acting in the Past Tense or Present Perfect Tense (modo praeterito).
This does not mean that-according to what was stated in a previous
section- merely the performed acts are meaningful-but not the ongoing
actions. We have to keep in mind that-by definition-action is always
based upon a preconceived project, and it is this reference to the
preceding project that makes both the acting and the act meaningful.
But what is the time structure of a projected action? When projecting
my action, I am, as Dewey puts it,[9] rehearsing my future action in
imagination. This means, I anticipate the outcome of my future action.
I look in my imagination at this anticipated action as the thing
which will have been done, the act which will have been performed by
me. In projecting I look at my act in the Future Perfect Tense, I think of
it modo futuri exacti. But these anticipations are empty and may or may
not be fulfilled by the action once performed. The past or present
perfect act, however, shows no such empty anticipations. What was
empty in the project has or has not been fulfilled. Nothing remains
unsettled, nothing undecided. To be sure, I may remember the open
anticipations involved in projecting the act and even the protentions
accompanying my living in the ongoing process of my acting, But now,
in retrospection, I remember them in terms of my past anticipations,
which have or have not come true. Only the performed act, therefore,
and never the acting in progress can turn out as a success or failure.
What has been stated so far holds good for all kinds of actions. But
now we have to turn to the peculiar structure of working as bodily
performance in the outer world. Bergson’s and also Husserl’s
investigations have emphasized the importance of our bodily
movements for the constitution of the outer world and its time
perspective. We experience our bodily movements simultaneously on
two different planes: Inasmuch as they are movements in the outer
world we look at them as events happening in space and spatial time,
measurable in terms of the path run through; inasmuch as they are
experienced together from within as happening changes, as
manifestations of our spontaneity pertaining to our stream of
consciousness, they partake of our inner time or durée. What occurs in
the outer world belongs to the same time dimension in which events in
inanimate nature occur. It can be registered by appropriate devices and
measured by our chronometers. It is the spatialized, homogeneous time
which is the universal form of objective or cosmic time.
On the other hand it is the inner time or durée within which our
actual experiences are connected with the past by recollections and
retentions and with the future by protentions and anticipations. In and
by our bodily movements we perform the transition from our durée to
the spatial or cosmic time and our working actions partake of both. In
simultaneity we experience the working action as a series of events in
outer and in inner time, unifying both dimensions into a single flux
which shall be called the vivid present. The vivid present originates,
therefore, in an intersection of durée and cosmic time. Living in the
vivid present in its ongoing working acts, directed toward the objects
and objectives to be brought about, the working self experiences itself
as the originator of the ongoing actions and, thus, as an undivided total
self. It experiences its bodily movements from within; it lives in the
correlated essentially actual experiences which are inaccessible to
recollection and reflection; its world is a world of open anticipations.
The working self, and only the working self, experiences all this modo
presenti and, experiencing itself as the author of this ongoing working,
it realizes itself as a unity. But if the self in a reflective attitude turns
back to the working acts performed and looks at them modo
praeterito this unity goes to pieces. The self which performed the past
acts is no longer the undivided total self, but rather a partial self, the
performer of this particular act that refers to a system of correlated acts
to which it belongs. This partial self is merely the taker of a rôle or – to
use with all necessary reserve a rather equivocal term which W. James
and G. H. Mead have introduced into the literature – a Me. We cannot
enter here into a thorough discussion of the difficult implications here
involved. This would require a presentation and criticism of G. H.
Mead’s rather incomplete and inconsistent attempt to approach these
problems. We restrict ourselves to pointing to the distinction Mead
makes between the totality of the acting self, which he calls the “I,” and
the partial selves of performed acts, the takers of rôles, which he calls
the “Me’s.” So far, the thesis presented in this paper converges with
Mead’s analysis. And there is, furthermore, agreement with Mead’s
statement that the “I” gets into experience only after he has carried out
the act and thus appears experientially as a part of the Me, that is, the
Me appears in our experience in memory.[10]
For our purpose the mere consideration that the inner experiences of
our bodily movements, the essentially actual experiences, and the open
anticipations escape the grasping by the reflective attitude shows with
sufficient clearness that the past self can never be more than a partial
aspect of the total one which realizes itself in the experience of its
ongoing working. One point relating to the distinction between (overt)
working and (covert) performing has to be added. In the case of a mere
performance, such as the attempt to solve mentally a mathematical
problem, I can, if my anticipations are not fulfilled by the outcome and
I am dissatisfied with the result, cancel the whole process of mental
operations and restart from the beginning. Nothing will have changed
in the outer world, no vestige of the annulled process will remain. Mere
mental actions are, in this sense, revocable. Working, however, is
irrevocable. My work has changed the outer world. At best, I may
restore the initial situation by countermoves but I cannot make undone
what I have done. That is why from the moral and legal point of view –
I am responsible for my deeds but not for my thoughts. That is also why
I have the freedom of choice between several possibilities merely with
respect to the mentally projected work, before this work has been
carried through in the outer world or, at least, while it is being carried
through in vivid present, and, thus, still open to modifications. In terms
of the past there is no possibility for choice. Having realized my work
or at least portions of it, I chose once for all what has been done and
have now to bear the consequences. I cannot choose what I want to have
done.
So far our analysis has dealt with the time structure of action – and,
as a corollary, with the time structure of the self – within the insulated
stream of consciousness of the single individual, as if the wide-awake
man with the natural attitude could be thought of as separated from his
fellow-men. Such a fictitious abstraction was, of course, merely made
for the sake of clearer presentation of the problems involved. We have
now to turn to the social structure of the world of working.

(5) The social structure of the world of daily life.

We stated before that the world of daily life into which we are born is
from the outset an intersubjective world. This implies on the one hand
that this world is not my private one but common to all of us; on the
other hand that within this world there exist fellow-men with whom I
am connected by manifold social relationships. I work not only upon
inanimate things but also upon my fellow-men, induced by them to act
and inducing them to react. Without entering here into a detailed
discussion of the structure and constitution of social relationship we
mention just as an example of one of its many forms that my performed
acts may motivate the other to react and vice versa. My questioning the
other, for instance, is undertaken with the intention of provoking his
answer, and his answering is motivated by my question. This is one of
the many types of “social actions.” It is that type in which the “in-order-
to motives” of my action become “because motives” of the partner’s
reaction.
Social actions involve communication, and any communication is
necessarily founded upon acts of working. In order to communicate
with others I have to perform overt acts in the outer world which are
supposed to be interpreted by the others as signs of what I mean to
convey. Gestures, speech, writing, etc., are based upon bodily
movements. So far, the behavioristic interpretation of communication
is justified. It goes wrong by identifying the vehicle of communication,
namely the working act, with the communicated meaning itself.
Let us examine the mechanism of communication from the point of
view of the interpreter. I may find as given to my interpretation either
the ready-made outcome of the other’s communicating acts or I may
attend in simultaneity the ongoing process of his communicating
actions as they proceed. The former is, for instance, the case, if I have
to interpret a signpost erected by the other or an implement produced
by him. The latter relation prevails, for instance, if I am listening to my
partner’s talk. (There are many variations of these basic types, such as
the reading of the other’s letter in a kind of quasi-simultaneity with the
ongoing communicating process.) He builds up the thought he wants to
convey to me step by step, adding word to word, sentence to sentence,
paragraph to paragraph. While he does so, my interpreting actions
follow his communicating ones in the same rhythm. We both, I and the
other, experience the ongoing process of communication in a vivid
present. Articulating his thought, while speaking, in phases, the
communicator does not merely experience what he actually utters; a
complicated mechanism of retentions and anticipations connects
within his stream of consciousness one element of his speech with what
preceded and what will follow to the unity of the thought he wants to
convey. All these experiences belong to his inner time. And there are,
on the other hand, the occurrences of his speaking, brought about by
him in the spatialized time of the outer world. Briefly, the
communicator experiences the ongoing process of communicating as a
working in his vivid present.
And I, the listener, experience for my part my interpreting actions
also as happening in my vivid present, although this interpreting is not
a working, but merely a performing within the meaning of our
definitions. On the one hand, I experience the occurrences of the other’s
speaking in outer time; on the other hand, I experience my interpreting
as a series of retentions and anticipations happening in my inner time
interconnected by my aim to understand the other’s thought as a unit.
Now let us consider that the occurrence in the outer world – the
communicator’s speech – is, while it goes on, an element common to
his and my vivid present, both of which are, therefore, simultaneous.
My participating in simultaneity in the ongoing process of the other’s
communicating establishes therefore a new dimension of time. He and
I, we share, while the process lasts, a common vivid present, our vivid
present, which enables him and me to say: “We experienced this
occurrence together.” By the We-relation, thus established, we both –
he, addressing himself to me, and I, listening to him, – are living in our
mutual vivid present, directed toward the thought to be realized in and
by the communicating process. We grow older together.
So far our analysis of communication in the vivid present of the We-
relation has been restricted to the time perspective involved. We have
now to consider the specific functions of the other’s bodily movements
as an expressional field open to interpretation as signs of the other’s
thought. It is clear that the extension of this field, even if
communication occurs in vivid present, may vary considerably. It will
reach its maximum if there exists between the partners community not
only of time but also of space. that is, in the case of what sociologists
call a face-to-face relation.
To make this clearer let us keep to our example of the speaker and the
listener and analyze the interpretable elements included in such a
situation. There are first the words uttered in the meaning they have
according to dictionary and grammar in the language used plus the
additional fringes they receive from the context of the speech and the
supervening connotations originating in the particular circumstances
of the speaker. There is, furthermore, the inflection of the speaker’s
voice, his facial expression, the gestures which accompany his talking.
Under normal circumstances merely the conveyance of the thought by
appropriately selected words has been projected by the speaker and
constitutes, therefore, “working” according to our definition. The other
elements within the interpretable field are from the speaker’s point of
view not planned and, therefore, at best mere conduct (mere doing) or
even mere reflexes and, then, essentially actual experiences without
subjective meaning. Nevertheless, they, too, are integral elements of the
listener’s interpretation of the other’s state of mind. The community of
space permits the partner to apprehend the other’s bodily expressions
not merely as events in the outer world, but as factors of the
communicating process itself, although they do not originate in
working acts of the communicator.
Not only does each partner in the face-to-face relationship share the
other in a vivid present; each of them with all manifestations of his
spontaneous life is also an element of the other’s surroundings; both
participate in a set of common experiences of the outer world into
which either’s working acts may gear. And, finally, in the face-to-face
relationship (and only in it) can the partner look at the self of his fellow-
man as an unbroken totality in a vivid present. This is of special
importance because, as shown before, I can look at my own self
only modo preterito and then grasp merely a partial aspect of this my
past self, myself as a performer of a rôle, as a Me.
All the other manifold social relationships are derived from the
originary experiencing of the totality of the other’s self in the
community of time and space. Any theoretical analysis of the notion of
“environment” – one of the least clarified terms used in present social
sciences – would have to start from the face-to-face relation as a basic
structure of the world of daily life.
We cannot enter here into the details of the framework of these
derived relationships. For our problem it is important that in none of
them does the self of the other become accessible to the partner as a
unity. The other appears merely as a partial self, as originator of these
and those acts, which I do not share in a vivid present. The shared vivid
present of the We-relation presupposes co-presence of the partners. To
each type of derived social relationship belongs a particular type of time
perspective which is derived from the vivid present. There is a
particular quasi-present in which I interpret the mere outcome of the
other’s communicating – the written letter, the printed book – without
having participated in the ongoing process of communicating acts.
There are other time dimensions in which I am connected with
contemporaries I never met, or with predecessors or with successors;
another, the historical time, in which I experience the actual present as
the outcome of past events; and many more. All of these time
perspectives can be referred to a vivid present: my own actual or former
one, or the actual or former vivid present of my fellow-man with whom,
in turn, I am connected in an originary or derived vivid present and all
this in the different modes of potentiality or quasi-actuality, each type
having its own forms of temporal diminution and augmentation and its
appurtenant style of skipping them in a direct move or “knight’s move.”
There are furthermore the different forms of overlapping and
interpenetrating of these different perspectives, their being put into and
out of operation by a shift from one to the other and a transformation
of one into the other, and the different types of synthesizing and
combining or isolating and disentangling them. Manifold as these
different time perspectives and their mutual relations are, they all
originate in an intersection of durée and cosmic time.
In and by our social life with the natural attitude they are
apprehended as integrated into one single supposedly homogeneous
dimension of time which embraces not only all the individual time
perspectives of each of us during his wide-awake life but which is
common to all of us. We shall call it the civic or standard time. It, too,
is an intersection of cosmic time and inner time, though, as to the latter,
merely of a peculiar aspect of inner time – that aspect in which the
wide-awake man experiences his working acts as events within his
stream of consciousness. Because standard time partakes of cosmic
time it is measurable by our clocks and calendars. Because it coincides
with our inner sense of time in which we experience our working acts,
if – and only if – we are wide-awake, it governs the system of our plans
under which we subsume our projects, such as plans for life, for work
and leisure. Because it is common to all of us, the standard time makes
an intersubjective coordination of the different individual plan systems
possible. Thus, to the natural attitude, the civic or standard time is in
the same sense the universal temporal structure of the inter-subjective
world of everyday life with the natural attitude, in which the earth is its
universal spatial structure that embraces the spatial environments of
each of us.

(6) The strata of reality in the everyday world of working.

The wide-awake man with the natural attitude is primarily interested

in that sector of the world of his everyday life which is within his scope
and which is centered in space and time around himself. The place
which my body occupies within the world, my actual Here, is the
starting point from which I take my bearing in space. It is, so to speak,
the center of my system of coordinates. Relatively to my body I group
the elements of my surroundings under the categories of right and left,
before and behind, above and below, near and far, and so on. And in a
similar way my actual Now is the origin of all the time perspectives
under which I organize the events within the world such as the
categories of fore and aft, past and future, simultaneity and succession,
etc.
Within this basic scheme of orientation, however, the world of
working is structurized in various strata of reality. It is the great merit
of G. H. Mead[11] to have analyzed the structurization of the reality at
least of the physical thing in its relationship to human action, especially
to the actual manipulation of objects with the hands. It is what he calls
the “manipulatory area” which constitutes the core of reality. This area
includes those objects which are both seen and handled, in
contradistinction to the distant objects which cannot be experienced by
contact but still lie in the visual field. Only experiences of physical
things within the manipulatory area permit the basic test of all reality,
namely resistance, only they define what Mead calls the “standard
sizes” of things which appear outside the manipulatory area in the
distortions of optical perspectives.
This theory of the predominance of the manipulatory area certainly
converges with the thesis suggested by this paper, namely, that the
world of our working, of bodily movements, of manipulating objects
and handling things and men constitutes the specific reality of everyday
life. For our purpose, however, the otherwise most important
distinction between objects experienced by contact and distant objects
is not to be overemphasized. It could easily be shown that this
dichotomy originates in Mead’s behavioristic basic position and his
uncritical use of the stimulus-response scheme. We, on the other hand,
are concerned with the natural attitude of the wide-awake, grown-up
man in daily life. He always disposes of a stock of previous experiences,
among them the notion of distance as such and of the possibility of
overcoming distance by acts of working, namely locomotions. In the
natural attitude the visual perception of the distant object implies,
therefore, the anticipation that the distant object can be brought into
contact by locomotion, in which case the distorted perspective of the
objects will disappear and their “standard sizes” reestablished. This
anticipation like any other may or may not stand the test of the
supervening actual experience. Its refutation by experience would
mean that the distant object under consideration does not pertain to
the world of my working. A child may request to touch the stars. To the
grown-up with the natural attitude they are shining points outside the
sphere of his working and this holds true, even if he uses their position
as a means for finding his bearings.
For our purposes, therefore, we suggest to call the stratum of the
world of working which the individual experiences as the kernel of his
reality the world within his reach. This world of his includes not only
Mead’s manipulatory area but also things within the scope of his view
and the range of his hearing, moreover not only the realm of the world
open to his actual but also the adjacent ones of his potential working.
Of course, these realms have no rigid frontiers, they have their halos
and open horizons and these are subject to modifications of interests
and attentional attitudes. It is clear that this whole system of “world
within my reach” undergoes changes by any of my locomotions; by
displacing my body I shift the center O of my system of coordinates and
this alone changes all the numbers (coordinates) pertaining to this
system.
We may say that the world within my actual reach belongs essentially
to the present tense. The world within my potential reach, however,
shows a more complicated time-structure. At least two zones of
potentiality have to be distinguished. To the first, which refers to the
past, belongs what was formerly within my actual reach and what, so I
assume, can be brought back into my actual reach again (world within
restorable reach). The assumption involved is based upon the
idealizations, governing all conduct in the natural sphere, namely, that
I may continue to act as I have acted so far and that I may again and
again recommence the same action under the same conditions. Dealing
with the universal role of these idealizations for the foundation of logic
and especially pure analytic Husserl calls them the idealizations of the
“and so on” and of the “I can do it again,” the latter being the subjective
correlate of the former.[12] To give an example: By an act of locomotion
there came out of my reach what was formerly “world within my reach.”
The shifting of the center O of my system of coordinates has turned my
former world in the hic into a world now in the illic.[13] But under the
idealization of the “I can do it again” I assume that I can retransform
the actual illic into a new hic. My past world within my reach has under
this idealization the character of a world which can be brought back
again within my reach. Thus, for instance, my past manipulatory area
continues to function in my present as a potential manipulatory area in
the mode of illic and has now the character of a specific chance of
restoration. As this first zone of potentiality is related with the past, so
is the second one based upon anticipations of the future. Within my
potential reach is also the world which neither is nor ever has been
within my actual reach but which is nevertheless attainable under the
idealization of “and so on” (world within attainable reach). The most
important instance of this second zone of potentiality is the world
within the actual reach of my contemporaneous fellow-man. For
example, his manipulatory area does not – or at least does not
entirely[14] – coincide with my manipulatory area because it is only to him
a manipulatory area in the mode of the hic, but to me in the mode of
the illic. Nevertheless, it is my attainable manipulatory area which
would be my actual manipulatory area if I were in his place and indeed
will turn into an actual one by appropriate locomotions.[15]
 What has been stated with respect to the manipulatory area of the
contemporaneous fellow-man holds good quite generally for the world
within your, within their, within someone’s reach. This implies not only
world within the other’s actual reach, but also worlds within his
restorable or attainable reach, and the whole system thus extended over
all the different strata of the social world shows altogether all the shades
originating in the perspectives of sociality such as intimacy and
anonymity, strangeness and familiarity, social proximity and social
distance, etc., which govern my relations with consociates,
contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. All this cannot be
treated here. It has to suffice for the purpose in hand to show that the
whole social world is a world within my attainable reach, having its
specific chances of attainment.
Yet the specific chances of restoration, peculiar to the first, and of
attainment, peculiar to the second zone of potentiality, are by no means
equal. As to the former we have to consider that what is now to me a
mere chance of restorable reach was previously experienced by me as
being within my actual reach. My past working acts performed and even
the actions which in the past I had merely projected pertained to my
world then within actual reach. On the other hand, they are related with
my present state of mind which is as it is because the now past reality
was once a present one. The anticipated possible reactualization of the
once actual world within my reach is, therefore, founded upon
reproductions and retentions of my own past experiences of
fulfillments. The chance of restoring the once actual reach is, then, a
maximal one. The second zone of potentiality refers anticipatorily to
future states of my mind. It is not connected with my past experiences,
except by the fact that its anticipations (as all anticipations) originate
in and have to be compatible with the stock of my past experiences
actually at hand. These experiences enable me to weigh the likelihood
of carrying out my plans and to estimate my powers. It is clear that this
second zone is not at all homogeneous but subdivided into sectors of
different chances of attainment. These chances diminish in proportion
with the increasing spatial, temporal, and social distance of the
respective sector from the actual center O of my world of working. The
greater the distance the more uncertain are my anticipations of the
attainable actuality, until they become entirely empty and unrealizable.

(7) The world of working as paramount reality; the fundamental

anxiety; the epoché of the natural attitude.

The world of working as a whole stands out as paramount over

against the many other sub-universes of reality. It is the world of
physical things, including my body; it is the realm of my locomotions
and bodily operations; it offers resistances to overcome which requires
effort; it places tasks before me, permits me to carry through my plans,
and enables me to succeed or to fail in my attempt to attain my
purposes. By my working acts I gear into the outer world; I change it,
and these changes, although provoked by my working, can be
experienced and tested both by myself and others, as occurrences
within this world independently of my working acts in which they
originated. I share this world and its objects with others; with others, I
have ends and means in common; I work with them in manifold social
acts and relationships, checking the others and checked by them. And
the world of working is the reality within which communication and the
interplay of mutual motivation becomes effective. It can, therefore, be
experienced under both schemes of reference, the causality of motives
as well as the teleology of purposes.
As we stated before, this world is to our natural attitude in the first
place not an object of our thought but a field of domination. We have
an eminently practical interest in it, caused by the necessity of
complying with the basic requirements of our life. But we are
not equally interested in all the strata of the world of working. The
selective function of our interest organizes the world in both respects –
as to space and time – in strata of major or minor relevance. From the
world within my actual or potential reach those objects are selected as
primarily important which actually are or will become in the future
possible ends or means for the realization of my projects, or which are
or will become dangerous or enjoyable or otherwise relevant to me. I
am permanently anticipating the future repercussions I may expect
from these objects and the future changes my projected working will
bring about with respect to them.
Let us make clearer what is meant by “relevance” in this context. I am,
for instance, with the natural attitude, passionately interested in the
results of my action and especially in the question whether my
anticipations will stand the practical test. As we have seen before, all
anticipations and plans refer to previous experiences now at hand,
which enable me to weigh my chances. But that is only half the story.
What I am anticipating is one thing, the other, why I anticipate certain
occurrences at all. What may happen under certain conditions and
circumstances is one thing, the other, why I am interested in these
happenings and why I should passionately await the outcome of my
prophesies. It is only the first part of these dichotomies which is
answered by reference to the stock of experiences at hand as the
sediment of previous experiences. It is the second part of these
dichotomies which refers to the system of relevances by which man with
his natural attitude in daily life is guided.
 We cannot unfold here all the implications of the problem of
relevance, upon one aspect of which we have just touched. But in a word
we want to state that the whole system of relevances which governs us
with the natural attitude is founded upon the basic experience of each
of us: I know that I shall die and I fear to die. This basic experience we
suggest calling the fundamental anxiety. It is the primordial
anticipation from which all the others originate. From the fundamental
anxiety spring the many interrelated systems of hopes and fears, of
wants and satisfactions, of chances and risks which incite man with the
natural attitude to attempt the mastery of the world, to overcome
obstacles, to draft projects, and to realize them.
But the fundamental anxiety itself is merely a correlate of our
existence as human beings within the paramount reality of daily life
and, therefore, the hopes and fears and their correlated satisfactions
and disappointments are grounded upon and only possible within the
world of working. They are essential elements of its reality but they do
not refer to our belief in it. On the contrary, it is characteristic of the
natural attitude that it takes the world and its objects for granted until
counterproof imposes itself. As long as the once established scheme of
reference, the system of our and other people’s warranted experiences
works, as long as the actions and operations performed under its
guidance yield the desired results we trust these experiences. We are
not interested in finding out whether this world really does exist or
whether it is merely a coherent system of consistent appearances. We
have no reason to cast any doubt upon our warranted experiences
which, so we believe, give us things as they really are. It needs a special
motivation, such as the upshooting of a “strange” experience not
subsumable under the stock of knowledge at hand or inconsistent with
it to make us revise our former beliefs.
Phenomenology has taught us the concept of phenomenological
epoché, the suspension of our belief in the reality of the world as a
device to overcome the natural attitude by radicalizing the Cartesian
method of philosophical doubt.[16] The suggestion may be ventured that
man with 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.[16a]

II. THE MANY REALITIES AND THEIR CONSTITUTION

In the beginning of this paper we referred to William James’ theory

of the many sub-universes each of which may be conceived as reality
after its own fashion, whilst attended to. James himself has pointed out
that each of these sub-universes has its special and separate style of
existence; that with respect to each of these sub-universes “all
propositions, whether attributive or existential, are believed through
the very fact of being conceived, unless they clash with other
propositions believed at the same time, by affirming that their terms
are the same with the terms of these other propositions”;[17] that the
whole distinction of real and unreal is grounded on two mental facts-
"first, that we are liable to think differently of the same; and second
that, when we have done so, we can choose which way of thinking to
adhere to and which to disregard.” James speaks therefore of a “sense
of reality” which can be investigated in terms of a psychology of belief
and disbelief. In order to free this important insight from its
psychologistic setting we prefer to speak instead of many sub-universes
of reality of finite provinces of meaning upon each of which we may
bestow the accent of reality. We speak of provinces of meaning and not
of sub-universes because it is the meaning of our experiences and not
the ontological structure of the objects which constitutes
reality.[18] Hence we call a certain set of our experiences a finite province
of meaning if all of them show a specific cognitive style and are – with
respect to this style – not only consistent in themselves but also
compatible with one another. The italicized restriction is important
because inconsistencies and incompatibilities of some experiences, all
of them partaking of the same cognitive style, do not necessarily entail
the withdrawal of the accent of reality from the respective province of
meaning as a whole but merely the invalidation of the particular
experience or experiences within that province.
What, however, has to be understood under the terms “specific
cognitive style” and “accent of reality"? As an example let us consider
again the world of everyday life as it was defined and analyzed in the
preceding chapter. This world is certainly a “sub-universe” or “finite
province of meaning” among many others, although one marked out as
ultimate or paramount reality for the reasons mentioned in the last
section. If. we recapitulate the basic characteristics which constitute its
specific cognitive style we find (1) a specific tension of consciousness,
namely wide-awakeness, originating in full attention to life; (2) a
specific epoché, namely suspension of doubt; (3) a prevalent form of
spontaneity, namely working (a meaningful spontaneity based upon a
project and characterized by the intention to bring about the projected
state of affairs by bodily movements gearing into the outer world); (4)
a specific form of experiencing one’s self (the working self as the total
self); (5) a specific form of sociality (the common intersubjective world
of communication and social action); (6) a specific time-perspective
(the standard time originating in an intersection between durée and
cosmic time as the universal temporal structure of the intersubjective
world). These are at least some of the features of the cognitive style
belonging to this particular province of meaning. As long as our
experiences of this world – the valid as well as the invalidated ones –
partake of this style we may consider this province of meaning as real,
we may bestow upon it the accent of reality. And with respect to the
paramount reality of everyday life we, with the natural attitude, are
induced to do so because our practical experiences prove the unity and
congruity of the world of working as valid and the hypothesis of its
reality as irrefutable. Even more, this reality seems to us to be the
natural one, and we are not ready to abandon our attitude toward it
without having experienced a specific shock which compels us to break
through the limits of this “finite” province of meaning and to shift the
accent of reality to another one. To be sure those experiences of shock
befall me frequently amidst my daily life; they themselves pertain to its
reality. They show me that the world of working in standard time is not
the sole finite province of meaning but only one of many others
accessible to my intentional life. There are as many innumerable kinds
of different shock experiences as there are different finite provinces of
meaning upon which I may bestow the accent of reality. Some instances
are: the shock of falling asleep as the leap into the world of dreams; the
inner transformation we endure if the curtain in the theater rises as the
transition into the world of the stage-play; the radical change in our
attitude if, before a painting, we permit our visual field to be limited by
what is within the frame as the passage into the pictorial world; our
quandary, relaxing into laughter, if, in listening to a joke, we are for a
short time ready to accept the fictitious world of the jest as a reality in
relation to which the world of our daily life takes on the character of
foolishness; the child’s turning toward his toy as the transition into the
play-world; and so on. But also the religious experiences in all their
varieties – for instance, Kierkegaard’s experience of the “instant” as the
leap into the religious sphere – is such a shock as well as the decision of
the scientist to replace all passionate participation in the affairs of “this
world” by a disinterested contemplative attitude. Now we are able to
condense what we have found into the following theses:
(1) All these worlds – the world of dreams, of imageries and
phantasms, especially the world of art, the world of religious
experience, the world of scientific contemplation, the play world of
the child, and the world of the insane – are finite provinces of
meaning. This means that (a) all of them have a peculiar cognitive
style (although not that of the world of working with the natural
attitude); (b) all experiences within each of these worlds are, with
respect to this cognitive style, consistent in themselves and
compatible with one another (although not compatible with the
meaning of everyday life); (c) each of these finite provinces of
meaning may receive a specific accent of reality (although not the
reality accent of the world of working).
(2) Consistency and compatibility of experiences with respect to
their peculiar cognitive style subsists merely within the borders of
the particular province of meaning to which those experiences
belong. By no means will that which is compatible within the
province of meaning P be also compatible within the province of
meaning Q. On the contrary, seen from P, supposed to be
real, Q and all the experiences belonging to it would appear as
merely fictitious, inconsistent and incompatible and vice versa.
(3) For this very reason we are entitled to talk of finite provinces of
meaning. This finiteness implies that there is no possibility of
referring one of these provinces to the other by introducing a
formula of transformation. The passing from one to the other can
only be performed by a “leap,” as Kierkegaard calls it, which
manifests itself in the subjective experience of a shock.
(4) What has just been called a “leap” or a “shock” is nothing else
than a radical modification in the tension of our consciousness,
founded in a different attention à la vie.
(5) To the cognitive style peculiar to each of these different
provinces of meaning belongs, thus, a specific tension of
consciousness and, consequently, also a specific epoché, a
prevalent form of spontaneity, a specific form of self experience, a
specific form of sociality, and a specific time perspective.
(6) The world of working in daily life is the archetype of our
experience of reality. All the other provinces of meaning may be
considered as its modifications.[19] It would be an interesting task to
try a systematic grouping of these finite provinces of meaning
according to their constitutive principle, the diminishing tension of
our consciousness founded in a turning away of our attention from
everyday life. Such an analysis would prove that the more the mind
turns away from life, the larger the slabs of the everyday world of
working which are put in doubt; the epoché of the natural attitude
which suspends doubt in its existence is replaced by other epochs
which suspend belief in more and more layers of the reality of daily
life, putting them in brackets. In other words a typology of the
different finite provinces of meaning could start from an analysis
 of those factors of the world of daily life from which the accent of
reality has been withdrawn because they do not stand any longer
within the focus of our attentional interest in life. What then
remains outside the brackets could be defined as the constituent
elements of the cognitive style of experiences belonging to the
province of meaning thus delimited. It may, then, in its turn, obtain
another accent of reality, or, in the language of the archetype of all
reality, namely the world of our daily life – of quasi-reality.
The last remark reveals a specific difficulty for all attempts at
describing those quasi-realities. It consists in the fact that language –
any language – pertains as communication kat exochin to the
intersubjective world of working and, therefore, obstinately resists
serving as a vehicle for meanings which transcend its own
presuppositions. This fact leads to the manifold forms of indirect
communication some of which we will meet later on. Scientific
terminology for instance, is a special device to overcome the outlined
difficulty within its limited field. We have to deny ourselves embarking
here upon the drafting of a thorough typology of the many realities
according to the principles just outlined. We are especially interested in
the relations between the provinces of the world of daily life and the
worlds of the sciences, especially of the social sciences and their reality.
We cannot, however, work out this problem with all its implications in
a single step. We shall, therefore, proceed by stages and start with
confronting the world of working with two typical examples of other
finite provinces of meaning, namely the world of imageries and the
world of dreams. Based upon the results of our analyses of the cognitive
style of these two provinces, we shall investigate the structure of the
world of scientific contemplation.

III. THE VARIOUS WORLDS OF PHANTASMS

Under this heading we shall discuss some general characteristics of

the cognitive style peculiar to a group of otherwise most heterogeneous
finite provinces of meaning, none of them reducible to the other. This
group is commonly known as that of fancies or imageries and embraces
among many others the realms of day-dreams, of play, of fiction, of
fairy-tales, of myths, of jokes. So far philosophy has not worked upon
the problem of the specific constitution of each of these innumerable
provinces of our imaginative life. Each of them originates in a specific
modification, which the paramount reality of our daily life undergoes,
because our mind, turning away in decreasing tensions of
consciousness from the world of working and its tasks, withdraws from
certain of its layers the accent of reality in order to replace it by a context
of supposedly quasi-real phantasms. For the problem in hand a fugitive
survey of what all these worlds have in common has to be sufficient.
Living in one of the many worlds of phantasy we have no longer to
master the outer world and to overcome the resistance of its objects. We
are free from the pragmatic motive which governs our natural attitude
toward the world of daily life, free also from the bondage of
“interobjective” space and intersubjective standard time. No longer are
we confined within the limits of our actual, restorable, or attainable
reach. What occurs in the outer world no longer imposes upon us issues
between which we have to choose nor does it put a limit on our possible
accomplishments. However, there are no “possible accomplishments”
in the world of phantasms if we take this term as a synonym of
“performable.” The imagining self neither works nor performs within
the meaning of the aforegiven definitions. Imagining may be projected
inasmuch as it may be conceived in advance and may be included in a
hierarchy of plans. But this meaning of the term “project” is not exactly
the same in which we used it when we defined action as projected
conduct. Strictly speaking the opposite holds good, namely, that the
projected action is always the imagined performed act, imagined in the
future-perfect tense. Here we are not particularly interested in
investigating whether all or merely some or no form of our imaginative
life may be qualified as “action” or whether fancying belongs exclusively
to the category of mere thinking. Yet it is of highest importance to
understand that imagining as such always lacks the intention to realize
the phantasm; it lacks in other words the purposive “fiat.” Using the
language of Husserl’s Ideas[20] we may say that all imagining is “neutral,”
it lacks the specific positionality of the thetic consciousness. However
we have to distinguish sharply between imagining as a manifestation of
our spontaneous life and the imageries imagined. Acting may be
imagined as a true acting and even working within the meaning of our
previous definitions; it may be imagined as referring to a preconceived
project; as having its specific in-order-to and because motives; as
originating in choice and decision; as having its place within a hierarchy
of plans. Even more: it may be imagined as endowed with an intention
to realize the project, to carry it through, and may be fancied as gearing
into the outer world. All this, however, belongs to the imageries
produced in and by the imagining act. The “performances” and
“working acts” are merely imagined as performances and working acts,
and they and the correlated categories bear, to borrow Husserl’s term,
“quotation-marks.” Imagining itself is, however, necessarily inefficient
and stays under all circumstances outside the hierarchies of plans and
purposes valid within the world of working. The imagining self does not
transform the outer world. But how? Does not Don Quixote gear into
the outer world if he attacks the windmills, imagining them to be
giants? Is not what he does, determined by motives valid within the
world of working, namely, his in-order-to motive to kill the giants and
his because-motive to live up to his mission as a knight which involves
the duty to fight bad giants wherever they are met? Is all this not
included in the hierarchy of Don Quixote’s life-plans?
The answer is that Don Quixote, acting as described, does not
trespass the boundaries of the world of working. To him who is a fantast
confronted with realities (as Eulenspiegel is a realist confronted with
phantasms) there are no imagined giants in the reality of his world of
working but real giants. Afterwards he will recognize that his
interpretation of the object before him was invalidated by the
succeeding events. This is the same experience we all have with the
natural attitude if we discover that the distant something which we
believed to be a tree turns out to be a man.[21] But then, Don Quixote
reacts differently than we do in similar situations. He does not submit
to the “explosion of his experience,” he does not acknowledge his
delusion and does not admit that the attacked objects have always been
windmills and never giants. To be sure he is compelled to concede the
actual reality of the windmills to the resistance of which he succumbed,
but he interprets this fact as if it did not belong to the real world. He
explains it by the theory that, in order to vex him, his arch-enemy, the
magician, must have transmogrified at the last moment the formerly no
less real giants into windmills. And only now, by reaching this
conclusion, has Don Quixote definitely withdrawn the accent of reality
from the world of working and has bestowed such an accent upon the
world of his imageries. Seen from the latter, the windmills are not
realities but mere appearances, mere phantasms. The existence of
magicians and giants and the transformation of the latter into
windmills, incompatible as it may be with the natural attitude prevalent
in the world of working common to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and
the barber, is very well compatible with Don Quixote’s other imageries
in his finite province of private phantasms and, there, it is as “real” as
anything. – Mutatis mutandis, similar analyses could be made with
respect to other quasi-realities such as the magic world of primitive
men or the make-believe world of children’s play, etc. If we transform
this result into more general terms we find it corroborated by William
James’ statement that “any object which remains uncontradicted
is ipso facto believed and posited as absolute reality.” “If I merely
dream of a horse with wings, my horse interferes with nothing else and
has not to be contradicted. That horse, its wings, and its place, are all
equally real. That horse exists no otherwise than as winged, and is
moreover really there, for that place exists no otherwise than as the
place of that horse, and claims as yet no connection with the other
places of the world. But if with this horse I make an inroad into the
world otherwise known, and say, for example, ‘That is my old mare
Maggie, having grown a pair of wings where she stands in her stall,’ the
whole case is altered; for now the horse and place are identified with a
horse and place otherwise known, and what is known of the latter
objects is incompatible with what is perceived in the former. ‘Maggie in
her stall with wings! Never!’ The wings are unreal, then visionary. I have
dreamed a lie about Maggie in her stall."[22]Husserl,[23] who has studied
the problem involved more profoundly than any other philosopher,
comes to the same conclusion. He distinguishes predications of
existence (Existenzialprädikationen) and predications of reality
(Wirklichkeitsprädikationen). The opposites to the former are the
predications of non-existence, of the latter the predications of non-
reality, of fiction. Investigating the “origin” of predications of reality
Husserl concludes: “With the natural attitude there is at the outset
(before reflection) no predicate ‘real’ and no category ‘reality.’ Only if
we phantasy and pass from the attitude of living in the phantasy (that
is the attitude of quasi-experiencing in all its forms) to the given
realities, and if we, thus, transgress the single casual phantasying and
its phantasm, taking both as examples for possible phantasying as such
and fiction as such, then we obtain on the one hand the concepts fiction
(respectively, phantasying) and on the other hand the concepts
‘possible experience as such’ and ‘reality’ ... We cannot say that he who
phantasies and lives in the world of phantasms (the ‘dreamer’), posits
fictions qua fictions, but he has modified realities, ‘realities as if’.... Only
he who lives in experiences and reaches from there into the world of
phantasms can, provided that the phantasm contrasts with the
experienced, have the concepts fiction and reality.” From our analysis
of Don Quixote’s conduct and the preceding quotation from Husserl we
may derive another important insight. The compatibilities of
experiences which belong to the world of working in everyday life do
not subsist within the realm of imagery; however the logical structure
of consistency, or, in Husserl’s terms, the predications of existence and
non- existence, remain valid. I can imagine giants, magicians, winged
horses, centaurs, even a perpetuum mobile; but not a regular
decahedron, unless I stop – as I would have to do in full awakeness – at
the blind juxtaposition of empty terms. Put otherwise: within the realm
of imagery merely factual, but not logical incompatibilities can be
overcome. The corollary of this last statement is that chances of
attainability and restorability of factual situations do not exist in the
same sense within the world of phantasms as they exist within the world
of working. What is a chance in the latter is in the former what Roman
jurists call a condition potestativa, that is, a circumstance which to
bring or not to bring about is under the control of the party involved.
The imagining individual masters, so to speak, his chances: he can fill
the empty anticipations of his imageries with any content he pleases; as
to the anticipating of imagined future events he has freedom of
discretion. This remark leads us to the time perspectives of the world of
imageries which is of highest importance for its constitution. In his
admirable investigations relating to the dimension of time of
phantasms Husserl[24]has pointed out that phantasms lack any fixed
position in the order of objective time. Therefore phantasms are not
individualized and the category of sameness is not applicable to them.
The “same” phantasm may recur within the uninterrupted continuity of
one single phantasying activity the unity of which is warranted by the
continuity of inner time within which this activity occurs. But
phantasms pertaining to different strands of phantasying activities or,
in our terminology, pertaining to different finite provinces of meaning
– cannot be compared as to their sameness or likeness. It is
meaningless to ask whether the witch of one fairy tale is the same as the
witch of another. For our purpose it is not necessary to follow Husserl
into the depth of the problems of constitutional analyses here involved.
Yet it is important to point out that the imagining self can, in his
phantasies, eliminate all the features of the standard time except its
irreversibility. It may imagine all occurrences as viewed, so to speak,
through a time-retarder or through a time-accelerator. Their
irreversibility, however, eludes any variation by phantasies because it
originates within the durée which itself is constitutive for all activities
of our mind and, therefore, also for our phantasying and the phantasms
produced therein. Imagining, and even dreaming, I continue to grow
old. The fact that I can remodel my past by a present imagining is no
counter-evidence against this statement. In my imageries I may fancy
myself in any rôle I wish to assume. But doing so I have no doubt that
the imagined self is merely a part of my total personality, one possible
role I may take, a Me, existing only by my grace. In my phantasms I may
even vary my bodily appearance but this freedom of discretion has its
barrier at the primordial experience of the boundaries of my body. They
subsist whether I imagine myself as dwarf or as giant. Imagining can be
lonely or social and then take place in We-relation as well as in all of its
derivations and modifications. An instance of the first is the day-
dreaming, of the second the mutually oriented intersubjective make-
believe play of children or some phenomena studied by mass
psychology. On the other hand the others and also any kind of social
relationship, social actions, and reactions, may become objects of the
imagining. The freedom of discretion of the imagining self is here a very
large one. It is even possible that the phantasm may include an
imagined cooperation of an imagined fellow-man to such an extent that
the latter’s imagined reactions may corroborate or annihilate my own
phantasms.

IV. THE WORLD OF DREAMS

If full-awakeness is the name for the highest tension of consciousness

which corresponds to full attention to life, sleep may be defined as
complete relaxation, as turning away from life.[27] The sleeping self has
no pragmatic interest whatsoever to transform its principally confused
perceptions into a state of partial clarity and distinctness, in other
words to transform them into apperceptions.[28]Nevertheless it
continues to perceive as it continues to recollect and to think. There are
the somatical perceptions of its own body, its position, its weight, its
boundaries; perceptions of light, sound, warmth, etc., without any
activity, however, of regarding, listening, attending to them, which
alone would make the percepts apperceived; there continue,
furthermore, the small perceptions, which, in the state of awakeness,
by the very pragmatic orientation toward the tasks of life, remain
indiscernible and ineffable – or as modern use likes to call them:
unconscious. These small perceptions, escaping the censorship of the
attention to life, gain high importance in the world of dreams. Although
they do not become clear and distinct, but remain in a state of
confusion, they are no longer concealed and disturbed by the
interference of active, pragmatically conditioned attention. It is the
passive attention, that is, the total of the effects exercised by the small
perceptions upon the intimate center of the personality which alone
determines the interest of the dreamer and the topics which become
themes of his dreams. It is the incomparable performance of Freud and
his school to have clarified this reference of dreamlife to the
unconscious, although his concept of the unconscious itself (and also
his theory that the mental apparatus is – “topographically” – composed
of an Id, Ego, and Super-ego) misunderstands the basic character of
intentionality of the stream of thought.[27]
The dreaming self neither works nor acts. This statement would be a
mere truism had we not made a similar one with respect to the
phantasying self. We have, therefore, to show briefly the principal
modifications which the “bracketing of the world of working”
undergoes in the provinces of phantasms on the one hand and in the
province of dreams on the other. I submit that the worlds of imageries
are characterized by what we called the freedom of discretion, whereas
the world of dreams lacks such a freedom. The imagining self can
“arbitrarily” fill its empty protentions and anticipations with any
content and, strictly speaking, it is these fillings upon which the
imagining self bestows the accent of reality. It may, as it pleases,
interpret its “chances” as lying within its mastery. The dreamer,
however, has no freedom of discretion, no arbitrariness in mastering
the chances, no possibility of filling in empty anticipations. The
nightmare, for instance, shows clearly the inescapableness of the
happening in the world of dream and the powerlessness of the dreamer
to influence it. All this, however, does not mean that the life of dreams
is confined exclusively to passive consciousness. On the contrary, most
of the activities of mind which Husserl calls the activities of
intentionality (and which, of course, are not to be confused with
intentional actions) subsist, but without being directed toward objects
of the outer world of working and without being steered by active
attention. Yet among these activities there are none of apperceiving and
of volition. The life of dream is without purpose and project. But how
can such a proposition be sustained, since Freud and his followers have
taught us the predominant role of volitions and instincts within the
world of dreams? I do not think that there is any contradiction. Actual
volitions, actual projects, actual purposes, etc., do not exist in the life of
dreams. What can be found of volitions, projects, purposes in dreams
does not originate in the dreaming self. They are recollections,
retentions, and reproductions of volitive experiences which originated
within the world of awakeness. Now they reappear, although modified
and reinterpreted according to the scheme of reference prevailing in the
particular type of dream. We may consider the whole psychoanalytic
technique of dream interpretation as an attempt to refer the contents of
the dream to the originary experiences in the world of awakeness in
which and by which they were constituted.
Generally speaking the world of working or at least fragments of it are
preserved within the world of dreams as recollections and retentions.
In this sense we may say that the attention à la vie of the dreamer is
directed to the past of his self. It is an attention in the tense of the past.
The contents of dream life consist primarily in past or past perfect
experiences which are re-interpreted by transforming previously
confused experiences into distinctness, by explicating their implied
horizons, by looking at their anticipations in terms of the past and at
their reproduction in terms of the future. The sedimented experiences
of the world of awakeness are, thus, so to speak, broken down and
otherwise reconstructed – the self having no longer any pragmatic
interest in keeping together its stock of experience as a consistently and
coherently unified scheme of reference. But the postulates of
consistency and coherence and of unity of experience themselves
originate in pragmatic motives in so far as they presuppose clear and
distinct apperceptions. They, and even certain logical axioms, such as
the axiom of identity, do not, for this very reason, hold good in the
sphere of dreams. The dreamer is frequently astonished to see now as
compatible what he remembers as having been incompatible in the
world of his awake life, and vice versa. All this Freud and
psychoanalysis have thoroughly studied, and our present intention is
restricted to translating some of their results, important for the topic in
hand, into our language and to giving them their place within our
theory.
I may dream myself as working or acting and this dream may be
accompanied frequently by the knowledge that, “in reality,” I am not
working or acting. Then my dreamed working has its quasi-projects,
quasi-plans, and their hierarchies, all of them originating in
sedimented pre-experiences I had in the world of daily life. It happens
frequently that the dreamed Me performs his work without any
intention to carry it through, without any voluntative fiat, and that this
Me attains results with either disproportionately great or small effort.
The time perspective of the world of dreams is of a very complicated
structure. Aft and fore, present, past and future seem to be
intermingled, there are future events conceived in terms of the past,
past and past-perfect events assumed as open and modifiable and,
therefore, as having a strange character of futurity, successions are
transformed into simultaneities and vice versa, etc. Seemingly – but
only seemingly-the occurrences during the dream are separated and
independent of the stream of the inner durée. They are, however,
merely detached from the arrangement of standard time. They have no
position in the order of objective time. They roll on within the
subjectivity of the inner durée although fragments of the standard time,
which was experienced by the past self and has fallen to pieces, are
snatched into the world of dreams. The irreversibility of
the durée subsists also in dream-life. Only the awakened mind which
remembers its dream has sometimes the illusion of a possible
reversibility.
This last remark reveals a serious difficulty for all dealing with the
phenomena of the dream and also of the imagery. As soon as I think of
them I am no longer dreaming or imagining. I am wide-awake and –
use, speaking and thinking, the implements of the world of working,
namely concepts – which are subject to the principles of consistency
and compatibility. Are we sure that the awakened person really can tell
his dreams, he who no longer dreams? It will probably make an
important difference whether he recollects his dream in vivid retention
or whether he has to reproduce it. Whatever the case may be, we
encounter the eminent dialectical difficulty that there exists for the
dreamer no possibility of direct communication which would not
transcend the sphere to which it refers. We can, therefore, approach the
provinces of dreams and imageries merely by way of “indirect
communication,” to borrow this term from Kierkegaard, who has
analyzed the phenomena it suggests in an unsurpassable way. The poet
and the artist are by far closer to an adequate interpretation of the
worlds of dreams and phantasms than the scientist and the
philosopher, because their categories of communication themselves
refer to the realm of imagery. They can, if not overcome, at least make
transparent the underlying dialectical conflict.
We, within the modest limits of our purpose, have no reason to shrink
back from the difficulty outlined. Our topic is to give an account of the
specific cognitive style peculiar to the provinces of phantasms and
dreams and to explain them as derivations from the cognitive style of
experiencing the world of everyday life. We therefore, feel entitled to
apply categories derived from this world to the phenomena of imagery
and dream. Nevertheless, the dialectical difficulty involved has to be
understood in its full importance, since we will meet it again in the
analysis of the world of scientific contemplation. Then we shall have to
study the specific device which science has developed for its
overcoming, namely the scientific method.
Concluding the fugitive remarks on the realm of dreams, we want to
state that dreaming – otherwise than imagining – is essentially lonely.
We cannot dream together and the alter ego remains always merely an
object of my dreams, incapable of sharing them. Even the alter ego of
which I dream does not appear in a common vivid present but in an
empty fictitious quasi-We relation. The other dreamed of is always
typified, and this holds true even if I dream him to be in very close
relationship to my intimate self. He is an alter ego only by my grace.
Thus, the monad, with all its mirroring of the universe, is indeed
without windows, while it dreams.

V. THE WORLD OF SCIENTIFIC THEORY

In restricting the following analysis to the world as object of scientific

contemplation we intentionally disregard for the present purpose the
many forms of contemplative attitudes which we frequently adopt
amidst our working activities and which in contradistinction to the
practical attitudes of working could also be called theoretical attitudes.
If we “sit down” in a major crisis of our life and consider again and again
our problems, if we draft, reject, redraft projects and plans before
making up our mind, if as fathers we meditate upon pedagogical
questions or as politicians upon public opinion-in all these situations
we indulge in theoretical contemplation in the wider sense of this term.
But all this contemplative thinking is performed for practical purposes
and ends and for this very reason it constitutes rather an “enclave"[28] of
theoretical contemplation within the world of working than a finite
province of meaning.
Another type of contemplation which we intentionally disregard in
the present chapter is the pure meditation which is not based upon a
project to be brought about by application of operational rules, such as
the religious meditation. We have to deal exclusively with scientific
theory. Scientific theorizing – and in the following the terms theory,
theorizing, etc., shall be exclusively used in this restricted sense – does
not serve any practical purpose. Its aim is not to master the world but
to observe and possibly to understand it. Here I wish to anticipate a
possible objection. Is not the ultimate aim of science the mastery of the
world? Are not natural sciences designed to dominate the forces of the
universe, social sciences to exercise control, medical science to fight
diseases? And is not the only reason why man bothers with science his
desire to develop the necessary tools in order to improve, his everyday
life and to help humanity in its pursuit of happiness? All this is certainly
as true as it is banal, but it has nothing to do with our problem. Of
course, the desire to improve the world is one of man’s strongest
motives to deal with science and the application of scientific theory
leads of course to the invention of technical devices for the mastery of
the world. But neither these motives nor the use of its results for
“worldly” purposes is an element of the process of scientific theorizing
itself. Scientific theorizing is one thing, dealing with science within the
world of working is another. Our topic is the first one but one of our
chief problems will be to find out how it is possible that the life-world
of all of us can be made an object of theoretical contemplation and that
the outcome of this contemplation can be used within the world of
working.
All theoretical cogitations are “actions” and even “performances”
within the meaning of the definitions given hereinbefore. They are
actions, because they are emanations of our spontaneous life carried
out according to a project and they are performances because the
intention to carry through the project, to bring about the projected
result supervenes. Thus, scientific theorizing has its own in-order-to
and because motives, it is planned, and planned within a hierarchy of
plans established by the decision to pursue and carry on scientific
activities. (This “action-character” of theorizing alone would suffice to
distinguish it from dreaming.) It is, furthermore, purposive thinking
(and this purposiveness alone would suffice to distinguish it from mere
fancying!) the purpose being the intention to realize the solution of the
problem at hand. Yet, theoretical cogitations are not acts of working,
that is they do not gear into the outer world. To be sure, they are based
upon working acts (such as measuring, handling instruments, making
experiments); they can be communicated only by working acts (such as
writing a paper, delivering a lecture); and so on. All these activities
performed within and pertaining to the world of working are either
conditions or consequences of the theorizing but do not belong to the
theoretical attitude itself, from which they can be easily separated.
Likewise we have to distinguish between the scientist qua human being
who acts and lives among his fellow-men his everyday life and the
theoretical thinker who is, we repeat it, not interested in the mastery of
the world but in obtaining knowledge by observing it. This attitude of
the “disinterested observer” is based upon a peculiar attention à la
vieas the prerequisite of all theorizing. It consists in the abandoning of
the system of relevances which prevails within the practical sphere of
the natural attitude. The whole universe of life, that which Husserl calls
the Lebenswelt, is pregiven to both the man in the world of working and
to the theorizing thinker.[29]
But to the former other sections and other elements of this world are
relevant than to the latter. In a previous section[30] we have shown that
for man with the natural attitude the system of relevances which
governs him originates in what we called the basic experience of
fundamental anxiety. The theoretical thinker once having performed
the “leap” into the disinterested attitude is free from the fundamental
anxiety and free from all the hopes and fears arising from it.[31] He, too,
has anticipations which, on the one hand, refer back to his stock of
sedimented experiences and, on the other hand, to its special system of
relevances which will be discussed later. However, unlike man in daily
life, he is not passionately interested in the question, whether his
anticipations, if fulfilled, will prove helpful for the solution of his
practical problems, but merely whether or not they will stand the test
of verification by supervening experiences. This involves in the well-
understood meaning of the aforegiven definition a certain detachment
of interest in life and a turning away from what we called the state of
wide-awakeness.[32]
Since theoretical thought does not gear into the outer world it is
revocable within the meaning of this term defined hereinbefore.[33] That
means it is subject to permanent revision, it can be undone, “struck
out,” “cancelled,” modified, and so on, without creating any change in
the outer world. In the process of theoretical thinking I may come back
again and again to my premises, revoke my conclusions, annihilate my
judgments, enlarge or restrict the scope of the problem under scrutiny,
etc.
The latter point has its corollary in the peculiarity of theoretical
thought of being in a certain sense independent of that segment of the
world which is within the reach of the thinker. This statement, of
course, does not refer to the availability of certain data to which
theoretical thinking may refer such as ultramicroscopic objects or the
structure of the interior of the earth. As data they are-and in the latter
case will probably forever remain-outside of our reach. But this does
not prevent the building up of scientific theories concerning both sets
of data. Biology and geology have developed methods to deal with them;
they are for both sciences realities, although realities outside of our
reach, realities ex hypothesis[34] But this is not the point we have in view
with our statement. As we have seen,[35] the concept of “world within our
reach” depends upon our body which is conceived as center O of the
system of coordinates under which we group the world. In turning to
the sphere of theoretical thinking, however, the human being “puts in
brackets” his physical existence and therewith also his body and the
system of orientation of which his body is the center and origin.
Consequently, unlike man in daily life, he does not look for solutions
fitting his pragmatic personal and private problems which arise from
his psycho-physical existence within this peculiar segment of the world
which he calls his environment. The theoretical thinker is interested in
problems and solutions valid in their own right for everyone, at any
place, and at any time, wherever and whenever certain conditions, from
the assumption of which he starts, prevail. The “leap” into the province
of theoretical thought involves the resolution of the individual to
suspend his subjective point of view. And this fact alone shows that not
the un- divided self but only a partial self, a taker of a role, a “Me,”
namely, the theoretician, “acts” within the province of scientific
thought. This partial self lacks all “essentially actual” experiences and
all experiences connected with his own body, its movements, and its
limits.
We may now sum up some of the features of the epoche peculiar to
the scientific attitude. In this epoche there is “bracketed” (suspended):
(1) the subjectivity of the thinker as man among fellow-men, including
his bodily existence as psycho-physical human being within the
world;[36](2) the system of orientation by which the world of everyday
life is grouped in zones within actual, restorable, attainable reach etc.;
(3) the fundamental anxiety and the system of pragmatic relevances
originating therein. But within this modified sphere the life-world of all
of us continues to subsist as reality, namely as the reality of theoretical
contemplation, although not as one of practical interest. With the shift
of the system of relevances from the practical to the theoretical field all
terms referring to action and performance within the world of working,
such as “plan,” “motive,” “projects” change their meaning and receive
“quotation marks.” We have now to characterize with a few words the
system of relevances prevailing within the province of scientific
contemplation. This system originates in a voluntary act of the scientist
by which he selects the object of his further inquiry, in other words, by
the stating of the problem at hand. Therewith the more or less emptily
anticipated solution of this problem becomes the supreme goal of the
scientific activity. On the other hand by the mere stating of the problem
the sections or elements of the world which actually are or potentially
may become related to it as relevant, as bearing upon the matter in
hand, Are at once defined. Henceforth, this circumscription of the
relevant field will guide the process of inquiry. It deter- mines, first of
all, the so-called “level” of the research. As a matter of fact the term level
is just another expression for the demarcation line between all that does
and does not pertain to the problem under consideration, the former
being the topics to be investigated, explicated, clarified; the latter the
other elements of the scientist’s knowledge which, because they are
irrelevant to his problem, he decides to accept in their givenness
without questioning as mere “data.” In other words, the demarcation
line is the locus of the points actually interesting the scientist and at
which he has decided to stop further research and analysis. Secondly,
the stating of the problem at once reveals its open horizons, the outer
horizon of connected problems which will have to be stated afterwards,
as well as the inner horizon of all the implications hidden within the
problem itself which have to be made visible and explicated in order to
solve it. All this, however, does not mean that the decision of the
scientist in stating the problem is an arbitrary one or that he has the
same “freedom of discretion” in choosing and solving his problems
which the phantasying self has in filling out its anticipations. This is by
no means the case. Of course, the theoretical thinker may choose at his
discretion, only determined by his inclination, which is rooted in his
intimate personality, the scientific field in which he wants to take
interest and possibly also the level (in general) upon which he wants to
carry on his investigations. But as soon as he has made up his mind in
this respect, the scientist enters a preconstituted world of scientific
contemplation handed down to him by the historical tradition of his
science. Henceforth he will participate in a universe of discourse
embracing the results obtained by others, problems stated by others,
solutions suggested by others, methods worked out by others. This
theoretical universe of the special science is itself a finite province of
meaning, having its peculiar cognitive style with peculiar implications
of problems and horizons to be explicated. The regulative principle of
constitution of such a province of meaning, called a special branch of
science, can be formulated as follows:
Any problem emerging within the scientific field has to partake of the
universal style of this field and has to be compatible with the
preconstituted problems and their solution by either accepting or
refuting them.[37] Thus, the latitude for the discretion of the scientist in
stating the problem is in fact a very small one.[38]
No such latitude, however, has been left as soon as the problem has
been stated. It is a shortcoming of our precedent presentation of
theoretical thinking that it represents an ongoing process in static
terms. For a process it is, going on according to the strict rules of
scientific procedure to describe the epistemology and methodology of
which is not within our present purpose. To mention just a few of these
rules: There is the postulate of consistency and compatibility of all
propositions not only within the field of that special branch of science
but also with all the other scientific propositions and even with the
experiences of the natural attitude of everyday life insofar as they are
safeguarded, although modified, within the finite province of
theoretical contemplation; moreover the postulate that all scientific
thought has to be derived, directly or indirectly, from tested
observation, that is, from originary immediate experiences of facts
within the world; the postulate of highest possible clarity and
distinctness of all terms and notions used, especially requiring the
transformation of confused prescientific thought into distinctness by
explicating its hidden implications; and many others more.
The logic of science and the methodology of the special branches of
science have established the rules which guarantee the operational
procedure of the scientific performance and the testing of its results.
The total of these rules sets forth the conditions under which scientific
propositions and, in particular, the system of those propositions which
form the respective special branch of science can be considered as
warranted-or, in our language: the conditions under which an accent of
reality can be bestowed upon the finite province of meaning in question.
This leads us to an important distinction. As we have had to distinguish
between the world of imagining and the world of imageries
imagined,[39] now we have to distinguish between the theorizing
cogitations and the intentional cogitata of such a theorizing. By their
intentionality the latter refer to the one objective world, the universe
within which we all live as psycho-physical human beings, within which
we work and think, the intersubjective life-world which is pre-given to
all of us, as the paramount reality from which all the other forms of
reality are derived. “With the theoretical attitude the objects become
theoretical objects, objects of an actual positing of being, in which the
ego apprehends them as existent. This makes possible a comprehensive
and systematic view of all objects, as possible substrates of the
theoretical attitude.[39a]But unlike the world of phantasms which always
lack any fixed position in the order of objective time[40] the intentional
objects of theoretical contemptation, insofar as they are not “ideal
objects of higher order,” have their well defined place within the order
of objective (cosmic) time; and insofar as they are “ideal objects of
higher order"[41] they are founded upon objects having such a place in
objective time.[42]This statement, however, covers merely the time
structure of the objects of theoretical thought and does not refer to the
perspective of time peculiar to the process of contemplative theorizing
itself. The theoretical thinker too lives within his inner durée, he also
grows old, since his stock of experiences changes permanently by the
emergence and sedimentation of new experiences. The theorizing self,
therefore, has its specific form of the past, namely the history of its pre-
experiences and their sedimentations, and its specific form of the
future, namely, the open horizons of the problem in hand (the “project”
of the ongoing theorizing) which refer to other problems to be stated
afterwards and to the methods by which they may be solved. But the
time perspective which the theorizing self lacks is the vivid present
constituted with the natural attitude by the bodily movements as an
intersection of the inner durée and the objective (cosmic) time.
Consequently, it cannot share a vivid present with others in a pure We-
relation and it stays even outside the different time perspectives of
sociality originating in the vivid present of the We-relation. It does not,
for this very reason, partake of the time structure of standard time,
which, as we have seen, is nothing else than the intersubjective form of
all the individual time perspectives including the vivid present of the
We-relation as well as all of its derivations. Insofar as scientific activity
goes on within the standard time (in working hours, according to time
tables, etc.) it consists in acts of working within the world of everyday
life which deal with science but not in acts of pure theorizing. Although
the theorizing self does not know the time dimension of the vivid
present, it has, nevertheless, a particular specious present,[43] within
which it lives and acts. This specious present is defined at any moment
by the span of the projects conceived. Its “fore” embraces the problems
previously stated as projected tasks the solution of which is just in
progress; its “aft” consists in the anticipated outcome of the ongoing
theorizing activities designed to bring about the solution of the problem
in hand. We have seen before that the theoretical thinker puts his
physical existence and, thus, his body in brackets. He has no physical
environment because there is no section of the world marked out as
being within his immediate reach. We stated furthermore that the
“actor” within the province of theoretical thought is never the “I” of the
scientist as the unbroken totality of his personality but only a partial
self, a Me. Now we have seen that the dimension of the vivid present
and its derivation are inaccessible to the theorizing self. Consequently,
it can never grasp – even not as a potentiality – the other’s self as an
unbroken unit. All these statements can be summarized in a single one:
The theorizing self is solitary; it has no social environment; it stands
outside social relationships.
And now there arises with respect to the relationship between
sociality and theoretical thought a dialectical problem similar to that
which we encountered in our analysis of the world of dreams.[44] Here,
however, it has a twofold aspect: (1) How can the solitary theorizing self
find access to the world of working and make it an object of its
theoretical contemplation? (2) How can theoretical thought be
communicated and theorizing itself be performed in intersubjectivity?
Ad (1). As long as theorizing deals with objects which exist merely
in objective time, as is the case in the sciences of nature and
especially in those available for mathematical treatment, the
dialectical problem in question does not become fully visible.[45] But
the whole intersubjective world of working in standard time
(therein included the working self of the thinker as a human being,
his fellow-men, and their working acts) and even the problem how
the existence of fellow-men and their thought can be experienced
in natural attitude is a topic of theoretical contemplation. It is the
 actual principal subject matter – of the so called social sciences.
But how is it possible that the solitary thinker, who with his
theoretical attitude of disinterestedness stands outside all social
relationships should find an approach to the world of everyday life
in which men work among their fellow-men with the natural
attitude, the very natural attitude which the theoretician is
compelled to abandon? How is this possible, since all working acts
occur within standard time, within the vivid present of the We-
relation or forms derived from it, that is, within the very dimension
of time of which, as we have seen, theoretical contemplation does
not partake? Moreover, only in the We-relation, in which there is a
com- munity of space and time (a common social environment in
the pregnant sense), can man with the natural attitude experience
the other’s self in its unbroken totality whereas outside the vivid
present of the We-relation, the other appears merely as a Me, as a
taker of a rôle, but not as a unity. How, then, can man in his full
humanity and the social relationships in which he stands with
others be grasped by theoretical thought? Yet, that all this is
possible is the unclarified presupposition of all theoretical social
sciences. Furthermore, the theoretical social scientist has to refer
to his stock of pre-experiences of the existence of others, of their
acting and working, and the meaning they bestow upon their acts
and works. He has acquired these pre-experiences while living as a
human being with others in the everyday world of the natural
attitude, the same attitude which he had to bracket in order to leap
into the province of theoretical contemplation. We have to face the
difficulty here involved in its full earnestness. Only then will we
understand that the theoretical thinker while remaining in the
theoretical attitude cannot experience originarily and grasp in
immediacy the world of everyday life within which I and you, Peter
and Paul, anyone and everyone have confused and ineffable
perceptions, act, work, plan, worry, hope, are born, grow up and
will die-in a word: live their life as unbroken selves in their full
humanity.
This world eludes the immediate grasp of the theoretical social
scientist. He has to build up an artificial device, comparable to the
aforementioned “indirect communication,” in order to bring the
intersubjective life-world in view-or better, not this world itself, but
merely a likeness of it, a likeness in which the human world recurs, but
deprived of its liveliness, and in which man recurs, but deprived of his
unbroken humanity. This artificial device-called the method of the
social sciences-overcomes the outlined dialectical difficulty by
substituting for the intersubjective life-world a model of this life-world.
This model, however, is not peopled with human beings in their full
humanity, but with puppets, with types; they are constructed in such a
way as if they could perform working actions and reactions. Of course,
these working actions and reactions are insofar merely fictitious, as
they do not originate in a living consciousness as manifestations of its
spontaneity; they are only assigned to the puppets by the grace of the
scientist. But if, according to certain definite operational rules (to
describe which is the business of a methodology of social
sciences)[46] these types are constructed in such a way, that their
fictitious working acts and performances remain not only consistent in
themselves but compatible with all the pre-experiences of the world of
daily life which the observer acquired with the natural attitude before
he leaped into the theoretical province-then, and only then, does this
model of the social world become a theoretical object, an object of an
actual positing of being. It receives an accent of reality although not that
of the natural attitude.
Ad (2). There is, however, another aspect of the dialectical problem
involved which is not restricted to the question how sociality can
be made the subject matter of theorizing but which refers in general
to the sociality of theorizing itself. Theorizing-this term always
used in the restricted meaning of scientific theorizing, and,
therefore, excluding pure meditation- is, first, possible only within
a universe of discourse that is pre-given to the scientist as the
outcome of other people’s theorizing acts. It is, secondly, founded
upon the assumption that other people, too, can make the same
subject matter, with which I deal in theoretical contemplation, the
topic of their theoretical thought and that my own results will be
verified or falsified by theirs as theirs by mine.[47] Yet this mutual
corroborating and refuting, approving and criticizing presupposes
communication, and communication is possible only outside the
pure theoretical sphere, namely in the world of working. In order
to communicate my theoretical thought to my fellow-men, I have,
therefore, to drop the pure theoretical attitude, I have to return to
the world of daily life and its natural attitude-that same world
which as we have seen remains inaccessible to direct approach by
theorizing. This seems to be a highly paradoxical situation, similar
to that which we encountered in our analysis of dream life where
 we found that only he who no longer dreams can communicate his
experiences as a dreamer. This is just one form of the age-old
problem which recurs in any type of pure meditation; it is the
problem of indirect communication itself. To follow it from the
beginning of philosophical thought up to our time would require
the writing of a complete history of ideas. We, therefore, take just
as an instance the particular form the problem has found in the
latest phase of phenomenological theory. We find it in the first two
of the three paradoxes besetting the phenomenologist, which Dr.
Fink has developed in a now famous essay endorsed completely by
Husserl as representing his own views.[48] Borrowing widely from
Prof. Farber’s excellent presentation[49] we may sum up Fink –
Husserl’s argument as follows: After having performed the
phenomenological reduction the phenomenologist finds himself in
the difficulty how to communicate his knowledge to the
“dogmatist” who remains with the natural attitude. Does not this
presuppose a common ground between them? This is the first form
of the paradox. The problem involved is solved by showing that the
phenomenologist does not leave the transcendental attitude and
return to the natural one but that he places himself “in” the natural
attitude as a transcendental situation that is seen through by him.
The second paradox-called the “paradox of the phenomenological
proposition,” which interests us especially – is based upon the first.
It relates to the mundane world – concepts and language which are
alone at the disposal of the communicating phenomenologist. That
is why all phenomenological reports are inadequate because of the
attempt to give a mundane expression to a non-worldly meaning
and this difficulty cannot be met by the invention of an artificial
language. Farber has criticized this argument to the point by
showing that there is no “inner conflict” between mundane word-
meaning and the indicated transcendent meaning itself.[50]
As we have shown, this problem is not a specific phenomenological
one but far more general. It is more complicated in the sphere of
transcendental phenomenology because of its concept of a plurality of
transcendental egos, a community of monads, which, nevertheless, can
communicate directly and immediately merely by the mundane means
of bodily gestures in the broadest sense including language of any kind.
It is, however, a serious question whether intersubjectivity is a problem
of the transcendental sphere at all; or whether sociality does not rather
belong to the mundane sphere of our life-world.[51] But the “paradox of
communication” – the phenomenological as well as the mundane one
with which the preceding analyses have dealt exclusively – exists only
as long as we take what we called the finite provinces of meaning as
ontological static entities, objectively existing outside the stream of
individual consciousness within which they originate. Then, of course,
the terms and notions, valid within one province, would not only, as is
the case, require a through and through modification within the others,
but would become therein entirely meaningless, comparable to coins of
a peculiar country which cease to be legal tender when we cross the
border. (But even then, to keep to this metaphor, we can exchange those
coins for domestic currency of the new country.) The finite provinces of
meaning are not separated states of mental life in the sense that passing
from one to another would require a transmigration of the soul and a
complete extinction of memory and consciousness by death as the
doctrine of metempsychosis assumes. They are merely names for
different tensions of one and the same consciousness and it is the one
and same life, the mundane life, unbroken from birth to death, which is
attended to in different modifications. We have said before, my mind
may pass during one single day or even hour through the whole gamut
of tensions of consciousness, now living in working acts, now passing
through a day-dream, now plunging into the pictorial world of a
painting, now indulging in theoretical contemplation. All these
different experiences are experiences within my inner time; they belong
to my stream of consciousness; they can be remembered and
reproduced. And that is why they can be communicated in ordinary
language in working acts to my fellow-man. We have mentioned
frequently that working acts may be the “contents” of phantasms, of
dreams, of theoretical contemplation. Why should not experiences
originating in the finite provinces of phantasies, of dreams, of scientific
theorizing become the contents of communicative-working acts? If
children play together in their make-believe world, if we discuss with a
fellow-beholder a work of art, if we indulge with others in the same
ritual, we are still in the world of working connected by communicative
acts of working with the other. And, nevertheless, both partners have
leaped together from the finite province of meaning, called “world of
everyday life,” into the province of play, of art, of religious symbols, etc.
What formerly seemed to be a reality while attended to may now be
measured by another yardstick and prove to be non-real or quasi-real
but in the specific form of a present non-reality, whose reality may be
restored.
The paradox of communication arises, thus, only if we assume that
sociality and communication can be realized within another finite
province of meaning than the world of everyday life which is the
paramount reality. But if we do not make such an unwarranted
assumption then science be- comes again included in the world of life.
And, conversely, the miracle of symphilosophein brings back the full
humanity of the thinker into the theoretical field.

Notes

1. Loc. cit., Vol. II, Chapter XXI, pp. 283-322.

2. Ibid., p. 320.
3. Ibid., pp. 291 ff.
4. Ibid., p. 293. 533
5. A. Schuetz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt., Vienna 1932, pp. 29-
43, 72-93.
6. As to the “reflective attitude” cf. Marvin Farber, The Foundation of
Phenomenology, Cambridge 1943, pp. 523 ff; also pp. 378 f; cf. furthermore
Dorion Cairns: “An Approach to Phenomenology,” in Philosophical Essays in
Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. by M. Farber, Cambridge 1940; pp. 8 ff. The
concept of “essentially actual experiences,” however, cannot be found in
Husserl’s writings. Husserl’s view was that, as a matter of principle, every act
can be grasped in reflection.
7. The presentation given above does not strictly follow Bergson’s terminology
but it is hoped that it renders adequately his important thought. Here is a
selection of some passages of Bergson’s writings significant for our problem:
“Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience” (1889), pp. 20 ff; pp. 94-
106; “Matière et Mémoire” (1897), pp. 189-195; 224-233; Le rêve (1901) [in
L'énergie spirituelle, pp. 108-111]; L'effort intellectual (1902) [ibid., pp. 164-
171]; “Introduction A la métaphysique” (1903) [in La pensée et le mouvant, pp.
233-238]; “Le souvenir du present et la fausse reconnaissance” (1908)
[L'energie spirituelle, pp. 129-137]; “La conscience et la vie” (1911) [ibid., pp.
15-18]; “La perception du changement” (1911) [in La pensée et le mouvant, pp.
171-175; pp. 190-193]; “Fantômes de vivants” et “recherche psychique” (1913)
[L'énergie spirituelle, pp. 80-84]; “De la position des problems” (1922) [La
pensée et le mouvant, pp. 91 ff].
8. With very few exceptions vulgar pragmatism does riot consider the problems
of the constitution of conscious life involved in the notion of an ego
agens or homo faber from which as a givenness most of the writers start. For
the most part, pragmatism is, therefore, just a common-sense description of
the attitude of man within the world of working in daily life but not a
philosophy investigating the presuppositions of such a situation.
9. Human Nature and Conduct, New York 1922, Part III, Section III: “The
Nature of Deliberation.”
10. Cf. G. H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, Chicago 1934, pp. 173-175, 196-
198, 203; “The Genesis of the Self,” reprinted in The Philosophy of the Present,
Chicago, 1932, pp. 176-195, esp. pp. 184 ff.; “What Social Objects Must
Psychology Presuppose?,” Journal of Philosophy Vol. VIII, 1910, pp. 174-180;
“The Social Self,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. X, 1913, pp. 374-380. See also
Alfred Stafford Clayton’s excellent book on G. H. Mead: Emergent Mind and
Education, New York 1943, pp. 136-141, esp. p. 137. It is doubtless Mead’s
merit to have seen the relations between act, self, memory, time, and reality.
The position of the present paper is of course not reconcilable with Mead’s
theory of the social origin of the self and with his (modified) behaviorism
which induces him. to interpret all the beforementioned phenomena in terms
of stimulus-response. There is much more truth in the famous chapter (X) of
W. James’ Principles of Psychology, in which not only the distinction between
Me and I can be found, but also its reference to bodily movements, memory,
and the sense of time.
11. The Philosophy of the Present, Chicago 1932, pp. 124 ff.; The Philosophy of
the Act, Chicago 1938, pp. 103-106, 121 ff, 151 f., 190-192, 196-197, 282-284.
12.Formale und Transzendentale Logik, ?74, p. 167.
13. The terminology follows that used by Husserl in his Meditations
Carte’siennes ?? 53 ff.
14. In the face-to-face relation-and this is an additional peculiarity of this para-
mount social relationship-the world within my reach and that within my
partner’s reach overlap and there is at least a sector of a world within my and
his common reach.
15. G. H. Mead in his essay “The Objective Reality of Perspectives,” reprinted
in the Philosophy of the Present, comes to a similar conclusion; “Present
reality is a possibility. It is what would be if we were there instead of here” (p.
173).
16. Cf. Farber, loc. cit., pp. 326 f.
16a. Although the point of view of the present paper differs in many respects
from his I should like to call attention to Herbert Spiegelberg’s very interesting
paper “The Reality-Phenomenon and Reality” in “Philosophical Essays” (op.
cit.) pp. 84-105, which attempts an analysis of dubitability and dubiousness
with respect to reality. According to Spiegelberg reality-criteria are the
phenomena of readiness, persistence, perceptual periphery, boundaries in
concrete objects, independence, resistance, and agreement.
17. James, Principles, Vol II, p. 290.
18. Cf. Husserl, Ideas, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology,
translated by Boyce Gibson, London-New York, 1931, §55, p. 168: “In a certain
sense and with proper care in the use of words we may say that all real entities
are ‘unities of ‘meaning’.” (Italics Husserl’s)
19. A word of caution seems to be needed here. The concept of finite provinces
of meaning does not involve any static connotation such as if we had to select
one of these provinces as our home to live in, to start from or to return to. That
is by no means the case. Within a single day, even within a single hour our
consciousness may run through most different tensions and adopt most
different attentional attitudes to life. There is, furthermore, the problem of
“enclaves,” that is of regions belonging to one province of meaning enclosed by
another, a problem which, important as it is, cannot be handled within the
frame of the present paper, which admittedly restricts itself to the outlining of
a few principles of analysis. To give an example of this disregarded group of
problems: Any projecting within the world of working is itself, as we have seen,
a phantasying and involves in addition a kind of theoretical contemplation,
although not necessarily that of the scientific attitude.
20. L.c., 306-312, especially §111, in particular the distinction between
neutrality modification (in the strict sense) and phantasy.
21. This situation has been carefully analyzed by Husserl, Ideas, § 103 and
in Erfahrung und Urteil, Prag 1939, pp. 99 f. and 370 f.
22. Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, p. 289.
23. Erfahrung und Urteil, § 74a, pp. 359 ff; cf. Farber, i.e., pp. 525 ff. It should
be noted that the term “experience” is used here by Husserl in the restricted
sense of Erfahrung.
24. Erfahrung und Urteil, §§39-42, pp. 195-214.
25. Cf. Bergson’s lecture “Mechanism du Rove,” 1901, reprinted in L'Energie
spiituelle, pp. 91-116, esp. p. 111.
26. That sleep is a state of consciousness which is free from apperceptions
distinguishes the world of dreams from the world of phantasms. The imagining
self continues to apperceive but the scheme of interpretation it applies to what
it apperceives differs radically from that which the wide-awake self applies to
the same apperceptions in the world of working.
27. But Freud himself-in contradistinction to many of his followers – has
especially admitted that his “mental topography” is in every respect open to
revision and like the whole theoretical superstructure of psychoanalysis still
incomplete and subject to constant alteration. (Cf. Freud’s article
‘Psychoanalysis” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed., Vol. 18, p. 673.)
28. Cf. Supra footnote 19, page 554.
29. Cf. Husserl, “Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die
Transzendentale Phänomenologie,” Philosophia, Vol. I, Beograd, 1936, pp.
124-129.
30. Cf. Supra page 550.
31. This does not mean that the fundamental anxiety is not the chief motive
inducing human beings to start philosophizing. On the contrary, philosophy is
one of the attempts – perhaps the principal one – to overcome the
fundamental anxiety. An immortal Being – say an angel in the system of
Thomas Aquinas – would not need to turn philosopher. But having performed
the leap into the realm of theoretical contemplation the human being exercises
a peculiar epoché from the fundamental anxiety, putting it and all its
implications in brackets.
32. I hope that this statement will not be misunderstood as bearing any
pejorative connotation. The term “wide-awakeness” as used in this paper does
not involve any valuation whatsoever. By no means is it the writer’s opinion
that life as such has a higher dignity than theoretical thought, a point of view
advocated by certain so-called “philosophies of life,” especially modish in
Germany.
33. Supra page 541.
34. In order to master or to influence these hypothetical realities we must,
however, bring them within our reach. To give an example: The mere
assumption that infantile paralysis is caused by an invisible virus of minute
size which passes through the pores of earthenware filters may or may not be
justified. But as long as this virus is outside of our reach-and, more precisely,
outside our manipulatory sphere-we cannot prepare efficient measures to fight
it-except an “antivirus,” no less invisible and no less outside of our reach.
35. Supra page 545 ff.
36. Needless to say, this form of epoche must not be confused with the epoche
leading to the phenomenological reduction by which not only the subjectivity
of the thinker but the whole world is bracketed. The theoretical thinking has to
be characterized as belonging to the “natural attitude,” this term here
(otherwise than in the text) being used in contradistinction to
“phenomenological reduction.” As to the ambiguity of the term “natural” cf.
Farber, i.c., p. 552.
37. As to the latter problem, cf. Felix Kaufmann Methodology of the Social
Sciences, New York, 1944, Chapter IV.
38. We disregard here-as surpassing the purpose of the present study-the
many interdependencies among all possible systems of questions and answers
(the Aristotelian problem of a universal aporetic) and also the special problem
of key-concepts, that is of concepts the introduction of which divides the
formerly homogeneous field of research into parts relevant or not for the topic
under consideration.
39. Supra page 556.
39a. Farber, l.c., p. 525.
40. Cf. Supra page 559.
41. Cf. Farber, l.c., pp. 457, 460, and Husserl, VI. Logical Investigation, §§ 47-
48.
42. Cf. Farber, l.c., p. 49 1.
43. The particular problems involved in the concept “specious present” cannot
be analyzed here. For the purpose in hand a reference to William James’ use of
this term (Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, pp. 608 ff. and pp. 641 f.) has to
suffice.
44. See Supra pages 562 f.
45. It appears, however, as soon as the scientific observer includes himself in
the observational field, such as, for instance, in the famous Heisenberg
principle of uncertainty. If this is the case, so-called crises in the foundation of
the science in question break out. They are just one form of the general
dialectical situation outlined in the text.
46. Cf. the present. writer’s paper, “The Problem of Rationality in the Social
World,” Economica, London, May 1943, Vol. X, pp. 131-149, esp. pp. 143 ff.;
and his before- mentioned book, esp. pp. 247-286.
47. Cf. Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik. pp. 172-173, pp. 200-
201, pp. 205-215, esp. 209 and 212.
48. Eugen Fink, “Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserl’s in
der gegenwärtigen Kritik” with a preface by Edmund Husserl, Kant-Studien,
(Berlin 1933) pp. 319-383.
49. L.c., Chapter XVII B. esp. pp. 558 ff.
50. L.c., pp. 559-560. The third paradox called “the logical paradox of
transcendental determinations,” the most important among the three
(although not for the problems of the present paper) refers to the question
whether logic is equal to the task of solving problems arising in the
determination of basic transcendental relations.
51. Cf. the present writer’s “Scheler’s Theory of Intersubjectivity and the
General Thesis of the Alter Ego,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
(March, 1942) pp. 323-347, esp. 335-337.