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Schutz's Bergsonian Analysis of the Structure of Consciousness Author(s): Lenore Langsdorf Source: Human Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1985), pp. 315-324Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20528797Accessed: 20-09-2015 18:25 UTC

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Human Studies 8:315-324 (1985). ?1985 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht. Printed in the Netherlands.

SCHUTZ'S BERGSONIAN ANALYSIS OF THE STRUCTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

LENORE LANGSDORF

Department of Philosophy, The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington,

TX 76019

Alfred Schutz returned to Vienna in 1918 to study law and economics, and thus prepare himself for the banking career in which he was to

make his livelihood during most of his life. At the same time, however

(as he noted years later):

I was under the spell of Max Weber's work, especially his meth

odological writings. I recognized, however, very soon that Max Weber had forged the tools he needed for his concrete research but that his main problem, understanding the subjective meaning a social act has for the actor, needed further philosophical founda tion (Schutz, 1977:41-42).

The intellectual task that was to continue throughout his philosophical career was thus developing along with his professional studies. First in

the neoKantians, then briefly in Husserl and Bergson, and then at length in Husserl, Schutz sought a philosophical grounding for his ideal-typical

analysis of consciousness as meaning-bestowing in human action.

In his later reflections upon this period, he says this in regard to his

attempt to use Bergson's work in developing that philosophical basis:

I was conviced that his analysis of the structure of consciousness and especially of inner time could be used as a starting point for an interpretation of the unclarified basic notions of the social sciences, such as meaning, action, expectation, and first of all

intersubjectivity (Schutz, 1977:41-42).

From 1924-1928, Schutz studied Bergson intensively, in hopes of

building a bridge from "duration" - the basic structure of conscious

ness, in Bergson's analysis - to intersubjectivity; and thus, providing

the basis for the understanding of social action from the actor's point

315

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316

of view which Schutz sought. This was a bridge on which he "stopped construction well before completion" (Wagner, 1984:1), however, and

our task here is to understand both the potential that Schutz saw, and

the barriers that brought his project to a halt.1

The impetus for looking again at Schutz's Bergsonian period is pro

vided by the recent publication of manuscripts from that period - first

in German, edited by Ilja Srubar and published in 1981 as Theorie der

Lebensformen, and then in English, edited by Helmut Wagner and pub lished in 1982 as Life Forms and Meaning Structure. Even more recent

ly, we have Wagner's extensive commentary and critique, woven to

gether with Srubar's summary and commentary upon the life forms, and published in 1984 as A Bergsonian Bridge to Phenomenological

Psychology. This last work provides the basis for my comments here.

I shall focus on one theme in that book: why the life forms structure

fails to provide the "unbroken analysis of the constitution of meaning"

(Wagner, 1984:41) that Schutz saw as essential to developing a phi

losophical foundation for Weberian sociology. The schema Schutz developed during his Bergsonian period is one of

six "life forms," which are ideal types hierarchically ordered within a

continuum. The discussion of these by Ilja Srubar (Wagner, 1984:

21-34) uses the listing in Schutz (1982:52-53):

(a) the life form of pure duration of the I; (b) the life form of the memory-endowed duration of the I;

(c) the life form of the acting I; (d) the life form of the Thou-related I; (e) the life form of the speaking I; (f) the life form of the conceptually-thinking I.

Each of these has its own "system of establishing meanings," and each

is explicable in terms of the next-higher form. This combination of

autonomy and. dependence is most clearly evident in the three most

basic forms which are actually discussed in the finished portion of Schutz (1982), although the editor's (Srubar's) "reconstruction of

the other life forms" (Wagner, 1984:27) from fragmentary portions of the manuscript displays this same dual character.

The primary level of consciousness - to which the content of all other levels "must be reducible" ? is explicated as Bergson's "dura

tion." Although "pure duration" is not itself expressible or trans

ferable, it serves as something of an abstract limit-point for analysis of "memory-endowed duration," which preserves

- in a transformed

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317

and interpreted manner, rather than as merely mirrored - the flow of

lived experience which comprises consciousness. Duration is thus ex

periencable ?

by means of introspection - and so, is accessible to re

flection.

This last quality is especially important to Schutz's explication. For

his theory holds that the meaningfulness of any aspect -

e.g., this

inner, non-discrete temporal flow - is conferred retrospectively. In

this case: reflection transforms the fleeting glimpses we have of this

"original stream of time" by accomplishing

the isolation, fixation, and spatialization of lived experience which

elapse in the duration of the continuous I. ...Spatialized, homo

geneous, discontinuous and thus quantifiable time, then, is to be viewed as the external symbol of dur?e (Wagner, 1984:18).

This symbolic manifestation of the inner, subjective content of con

sciousness is in turn a prerequisite for the next level of Schutz's analy sis. Here, the "acting I" makes use of its subjective awareness of itself

as unified with a particular body, and thus delineated from the world; available to be "viewed from the outside" because of its embodied character (Wagner, 1984:27).

Given this unification and delineation, the next level of analysis

explicates the "Thou relationship" in terms of a special sort of delin

eation: that between one establisher of meanings and another. Here, as in the two highest levels, Schutz finds a linguistic subject: i.e. an I

which relates and speaks to, as well as conceptually-thinks with, others.

"Unfortunately," Srubar writes, "Schutz's study breaks off at this

point"; thus, the analysis of the three remaining life forms is a "re

construction" (Wagner, 1984:27).

Immediately founded upon the "Thou-related-I" is the "speaking

I," and upon that life form, the "conceptually-thinking-I." For both, the analysis must shift its perspective: we are no longer considering one consciousness in flux, or in reflection upon itself, or as delineated

actor. Rather, the "bipolarity of conversation," with language as the

"medium" between speaker and hearer, is crucial to both of these

life forms (Wagner, 1984:31). This difference between the two highest life forms and the four prior ones needs the "Thou-related-I" - which

introduces bipolarity - as a transition from the consciousness-centered

perspective that dominates "pure duration" and "memory-endowed

duration," and remains prominent in the "acting I."

Along with this bipolarity - which clearly is grounded in prior life

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318

forms - comes an objectivity, neutrality, and anonymity that seems to

have no clear precedent:

The language-pervaded world is not that which I have experienced in duration, but in the first place in space and time. It depends neither on me or Thou; it has created a 'ghostly' and 'truly unreal

world'(Wagner, 1984:31).

After discussing the limitations and tensions which Wagner finds in this analysis, I will return to this point of disjuncture. For, I will sug gest, there is a factor in the nature of language which would serve to

preserve the continuity of dependence that Schutz saw as essential to

his project, and which does break down at this point.

Although Wagner adds two implicit life forms (body, and unified

ego) to this listing of the six explicit ones, he does not suggest that inclusion of those as explicit levels in the structure would have alle

viated the tensions and problem areas he identifies.

Whether composed of six or eight levels, we have here a structure

which Schutz developed in order to serve as an experiential bridge be

tween two extremes in the nature of human subjectivity. These can

be variously identified: e.g. "inner" and "outer"; "consciousness" as

non-discrete flow and "social actor" constrained to discrete achieve

ments by space and time. On the theoretical level, the disjunction to

be bridged was that between introspection, claiming (or at least, seek

ing) a description of subjectivity from the actor's perspective; and ob

servation, claiming (or, again, at least seeking) an explanation from the

sociologist's viewpoint. Insofar as that disjunction cannot be bridged, this approach via

Bergson cannot accomplish Schutz's task - carrying out "pre-socio

logical investigations" (Wagner, 1984:11) so as to achieve "a viable

psychology of consciousness" that would extend Weberian sociology

beyond its presupposed starting point, "the subjective meaning a social

act has for the actor" (Wagner, 1984:8). Thus, despite the "wealth

of insights and suggestions" which remained within his mature work,

Schutz realized that he was at an impasse: the project could not be finished with the means offered by Bergson or developed from a baseline constructed with their help (Wagner, 1984:55).

Before considering the intrinsic tensions and limitations of the Berg sonian framework, we should note its contributions to the bridge which

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319

Schutz did go on to build on the "baseline" of Husserlian phenome nology, rather than Bergsonian introspective psychology.

As Srubar (Wagner, 1984:34-40) stresses, central components of

Schutz's later theory are developed in this Bergsonian period. Perhaps the most crucial are his egological approach to the positing of mean

ings, and the correlated thesis of reflective meaning constitution.

The former relies upon Schutz's understanding of the intersubjective

world of social actors as constituted from parallel (rather than inter

acting) streams of experience, lived by an ego and alter-ego. The latter

relies upon the hierarchical dependency of life forms. Schutz's thesis - that meaning is constituted only retrospectively; i.e. in the elapsed

act, rather than in the ongoing action - may be an instance of the

conflation between introspective description and theoretical explana tion which Wagner finds in the entire project. (For a critical discussion of this thesis, see Cox, 1978:117-127.) Two less problematic aspects of Schutz's mature theory also appear here: our access to the spatial,

temporal, and social world is through typifications; and, language is

the bearer of symbolized typifications. The limitations of the Bergsonian basis, in contrast, do not affect

Schutz's developed theory, because it (the later theory) replaced in

trospection - the method essential to Bergson's psychology

- with

genetic analysis, as practiced in Husserl's phenomenology. The basic

limitation is the disjunction already noted between the "inner" and "outer" life forms. Extending the Bergsonian analysis in the way

necessary if it is to be used for Schutz's purpose "did not allow him to achieve an unbroken analysis of the constitution of meaning" (Wagner,

1984:41). The extension yields, rather, two distinct sorts of meaning:

"subjective" meaning, prepredicatively posited in duration; and "ob

jective" meaning, retrospectively established in the spatio-temporal social world. Manuscript fragments indicate that Schutz was aware

of this fundamental problem; he sketched out seven topics lacking ex

position in Bergson's work (Wagner, 1984:48), and even a cursory consideration of those remarks reveals that the lack of unbroken analy sis was evident to him.

There are other "basic tensions" within the Bergsonian project, of

which (it seems) Schutz was less aware. The first of these remained as unresolved by his study of Kant and Husserl as it was by his use of

Bergson. Schutz sought an "ontology of the life world" (Wagner,

1984:58) which was outside the espitemological interests of both Kant and Husserl. Although Bergson's "vitalism" did imply a meta

physic, Schutz rejected that aspect of Bergson's work and (perhaps

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320

not coincidentally) he did not find an "adequate" ontology in the latter's work. At best, Bergson supplied "the nucleus of an ontology,

'

heavily dependent upon "intuition" and set within a "biological natu

ral-science orientation" (Wagner 1984:57). Intuition as a philosophical method was employed, but not investigated, by Bergson. When Schutz

followed that practice, however, he was in effect attempting to use a

"private" mode of access appropriate to introspective psychology, where a "public" mode of discourse was essential if his foundational

work was to be relevant to sociology's empirical and theoretical charac

ter. Furthermore: if it is the case that "the experiences of and in inner

duration are utterly unsuitable for expression and description in every

day language" (Wagner, 1984:60), the very core of Schutz's endeavor

was threatened.

Despite the tensions and limitations evident in this portrayal of Schutz's early work, reconsidering the structure he built from the

viewpoint of its usefulness for a phenomenologically (rather than

introspectively) derived "ontology of the life world" suggests that Schutz may have had a more useful bridge design than he realized.

In other words, his awareness of the inadequacy - or perhaps, inap

propriateness - of the foundations may have resulted in a too-thorough

rejection of the entire structure. Before sketching my own thoughts as to how the life forms structure could be used both as the "bridge" Schutz sought, and within a social ontology, it will be useful to state

Wagner's basic and subsidiary criticisms.

The basic criticism may be summed up as "methods syncretism":

he had two opposite 'methods' on his hands: the ideal-typical construction of a theoretical framework and the introspective

way of gathering 'empirical' evidence for this framework. ... this

methodological dualism did not faze him at all: ... [it] was merely a neat division between theoretical and empirical labor (Wagner, 1984:105).

However, this division became a conflation as Schutz used "parts of the

intuitively gained 'material' (subject matter) as constitutive elements of

ideal-typical theory formation" (Wagner, 1984:107). It may be helpful to state the problem in general terms, in order to

see that the impasse reflects current problems in epistemology and

philosophy of the human sciences. The most general issue is that of

the difference between description and explanation. Schutz's descrip tive method uses introspection and yields data, or content. In this

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case, that would be the intuitively grasped flux underlying action in an

observable, spatiotemporally discrete social world. Schutz's explanato

ry method uses ideal-typical concepts developed in reflection upon and abstraction from what has been observed - i.e. the actual - and

yields a theory. In this case, the life forms would be the structural

elements of the theory. But we have, rather than a theory, "a project

aground" (Wagner, 1984:123). For introspection was used here to posit concepts

- the life forms ? rather than to describe components. We have, as a result, a theoreti

cal explanation that is not grounded in observed data; not an unusual

situation, to be sure, but one that Schutz set out to remedy, rather

than repeat. Curiously, the two implicit life forms mentioned earlier

provide, for me, the clearest clue to both this terminal difficulty in Schutz's Bergsonian period, and a path toward the social ontology that

he was no more capable of developing from Husserlian and Kantian

foundations, than from the Bergsonian base. Before concluding with

my own suggestions towards that end, some more explicit indication

of the nature and implications of those forms should be useful.

The general purpose of the life forms structure is to provide a bridge between the "inner," duration-determined levels of the I, as explicated

by Bergson, and the "outer," spatiotemporally-determined levels that

are the starting point for Weber. For Bergson, these levels are intrin

sically divided; he maintained a strict dichotomy between experience

(duration; flux; continuum) and language (conception; discrete units;

spatiotemporal entities). Seen from a philosophy of science context, that dichotomy is the subject-object division - a useful theoretical

position, perhaps, but one with dubious philosophical justification and

problematic empirical validation.

The two implicit life forms (proposed by Wagner) do not assimilate to the six explicit ones (explicated by Srubar) because they resist

ideal-typical formulation. The "I-consciousness of the body, the feeling of life, the feeling of existence" is "an essential mode of my being," but it is "not a matter of knowledge" (Wagner, 1984:91). Aspects of

this feeling ?

e.g. the heartbeat's "periodicalizing rhythm," which

"creates an experiential bridge from inner to outer time" (Wagner,

1984:98) quite at variance with Bergson's dichotomy - raise serious

questions as to the experiential as well as theoretical justification for

that dichotomy. Similarly, the second implicit life form, "unity of ego" (to which Wagner directs less attention than to somatic experience) seems to be an essential experience of the concrete ego that both

experiences (and, is thus "inner") and theorizes about those expe riences (and, is thus "outer").

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322

After four years of intensive effort, the increasing number and im

portance of discrepancies had their effect: Schutz abandoned his

Bergsonian bridge. Without minimizing the epistemological contribu

tions he went on to make to the foundations of sociology, I would

like to suggest that those of us interested in an ontology of the social

world, and without any commitment to Bergson's dichotomy, will

find much of interest here. In order to read the work of the Bergsonian

period for this purpose, however, we must exercise care to avoid the

tendency in Schutz which Wagner identifies as conflation of descriptive and explanatory tasks, as carried out by observation and introspection in contrast to reflection and abstraction (respectively). An analogy, to the question of the role of language in a social ontology, may pro vide an example of how we can use this work of Schutz, as presented and constructively criticized by Srubar and Wagner.

The question here, simply stated, is: do life forms constitute the I

of duration, action, relation, speaking, and theorizing? Or, do they

merely describe, retrospectively and from within some theoretical

position, processes that elude delineation? Or, do they function in

both ways? That is: are they both aspects of the process, and parts of the product^ That last alternative is suggested

? but only as an il

lustration of ambiguities in Schutz's work ? by Wagner, in a brief

remark on Schutz's consideration of

'symbol series' which are not merely established as ideal-typical constructs but which are also experienced by the unitary I. That

is, symbols are not only concepts abstracted and generalized by the philosopher or sociologist for his theoretical purposes, they are also phenomena in the consciousness of individuals in every

day life... (Wagner, 1984:133)

Rather than ambiguity, we may have here an example of a process

product that is of special ontological significance precisely because of this dual nature, which allows "it" to serve as a unifying force within

the I as it develops both prior to and within symbolic (e.g. linguistic) systems. If we can identify symbolic structures on the experiential/ duration levels, as well as on the theoretical/reflective levels, we can

begin to dissolve the Bergsonian dichotomy, inherited by Schutz as a

discontinuity in analysis that frustrated the project of grounding Weberian sociology.

In the course of his investigation (1974) of the social ontology of a halfway house, Lawrence Wieder discovered that language was present in just this dual way. He expected that it would be used in "telling of

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the code"; i.e., in retrospectively describing events. But he found that

it was also intrinsic to "telling the code"; i.e., in the ongoing process

of constituting those events. (For a discussion of the philosophical

implications of this discovery, see Langsdorf, 1983.) Our everyday as

well as empirical-sociological attitudes, however, make it unlikely that

we would notice such a duality. In other words: neither introspection, as employed by Bergson, or observation, as employed by a compara

tively traditional sociologist, would be able to identify this phenome non in its dual nature and function. However, a Schutzian (which is

to say, phenomenological) orientation of the sort currently informing

ethnomethodological research such as Wieder's can discover a phenome non of this sort. It is evidence that violates Schutz's early, Bergsonian,

conception of the role of language:

The language-pervaded world is not that which I have experienced in duration, but in the first place in space and time. It depends

neither on me nor Thou; it has created a 'ghostly' and 'truly un

real world' (Wagner, 1984:32).

Once we recognize that language is a constitutive factor within dura

tion, as well as a descriptive system, we can make a start toward dis

solving the limitations and tensions which Bergson's theory placed upon Schutz's observations. For this example suggests that the bridge from "subjective" duration to "objective" spatiotemporality may be

constructible from aspects of the life world that are present in different modes at various levels ? rather than, as hierarchically ordered addi

tions. A phenomenological approach (i.e. using the epoche and reduc

tion) may then enable us to identify these aspects, in their different

modes of appearance, as unifying factors in the "unbroken analysis of the constitution of meaning" (Wagner, 1984:41) which Schutz

sought as the bridge between consciousness and the social actor.

NOTE

1. There are interesting parallels here to Aron Gurwitsch's earliest work, which he characterized as "drilling a tunnel." That work was also set aside. Lester Embree suggests this reason for the abandonment ofthat construction project: "Gurwitsch found that, while the approach and themes were different from his own in some respects, Schutz (in Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt) had in principle said almost all that needed to be said from the phenomenologi cal position" (Embree, 1972:xxiv).

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REFERENCES

Cox, R. (1978). Schutz's theory of relevance: A phenomenological critique. The

Hague: M. Nijhoff. Embree, L. (1972). Introduction, in Life world and consciousness: essays for Ar on

Gurwitsch, ed. L. Embree. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Langsdorf, L. (1983). Linguistic constitution: The accomplishment of meaning fulness and the private language dispute. Human Studies 6:167-183.

Schutz, A. (1977). Husserl and his influence upon me. The Annals of Phenome

nological Sociology 11:41-44.

Schutz, A. (1981). Theorie der Lebensformen. Eingeleitet und herausgegeben von

Ilja Srubar. Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp Verlag.

Schutz, A. (1982). Life forms and meaning structure, translated, introduced and

annotated by Helmut R. Wagner. London: Routledge Kegan Paul.

Wieder, D.L. (1974). Language and social reality: The case of telling the convict code. The Hague: Mouton.

Wagner, H. with Srubar, I. (1984). A Bergsonian bridge to phenomenological psychology. Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenome

nology and University Press of America.

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