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HUMAN STUDIES 2, 21-30 (1979)
A Further Investigation
of the Life-World*
THOMASMEISENHELDER
California State College, San Bernardino
INTRODUCTION
... sustain that kind of shock and disengagement and then methodically to
systematically
explore in depth what then is disclosed to us. (Zaner, 1970, p. 50; emphasis in original)
*The author wishes to express his gratitude to Susan Meisenhelder, Psathas, and
George
Richard Zaner for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
1 this paper, the notion
Throughout of "shock" is used in the Schutzian sense.
21
22 MEISENHELDER
The set of events that provide me with a "way to phenomenology" was the
experience of being the victim of a violent crime. I have reflectively studied
this particular experience in order to discover what it can reveal to me
concerning everyday social reality and the essential meanings that underlie
the taken-for-granted life-world.
the person assumes, assumes the other person assumes as well and assumes that as he
assumes it of the other person the other person assumes it of him that a relationship of
undoubted correspondence is the sanctioned relationship between the actual appearances
of an object and the intended object that appears in a particular way. (1972, pp. 11-12)
In short, we trust in the world of everyday life, its objects, and the others that
populate it.
The assumptively constituted world of everyday life is centered around
one's self and one's interests. My own "here and now"is the center coordinate
of my life-world, and the experience of one's self is a unique experience
described by Husserl (1973) and Schutz (1967) as a primordial sphere
to the individual alone. Thus, the self is a truly fundamental
belonging
phenomenon. Around it stretch spatial and temporal zones of personal
relevancy ordered according to my inter?st-at-hand. These zones of social
knowledge are composed of received, constructed, and largely monothetic
typifications, acquired through previous experience and language acquisi?
tion. Thus at any given moment of my waking life, my consciousness of the
life-world is centered around myself within a particular biographically
determined situation and an accompanying set of pragmatic interests. This
central core is in turn surrounded by a field of decreasingly relevant
typifications (Gurwitsch, 1964). Functionally, the life-world provides us with
a frame with which to understand the situations and events of everyday social
existence (Heeren, 1970).
However, what if a situation is atypical or problematic? Schutz (1970) and
Schutz and Luckmann (1973) offer some brief suggestions concerning an
individual's confrontation with problematic situations, but do so only in
passing. They seem to believe that the naive life-world is always accepted as
real and is never truly doubted. Within the life-world, it is argued, one can
even typify the atypical. One of the goals of this paper is to analyze a
problematic situation in order to investigate this aspect of Schutz's
description of the life-world's structure.
BEING A VICTIM
2Schutz (1970) also seems to be saying that this process is conducted primarily through
interactions between self and others.
A FURTHER INVESTIGATION OF THE LIFE-WORLD 25
and what they meant for me. In the context formed by the actions and verbal
threats of these two men, the guns signified for me the increasingly real and
immediate possibility of my own death. Within the field of the robbery, the
death of myself and my wife stood out as quite probable and my thoughts
centered on the question of whether we would get out of this situation alive.3
Other concerns of less relevance or urgency moved to the horizons of my
consciousness. For instance, the protection of our property was no longer of
any concern to me; now I merely wanted to live.
The gun, as an element of my everyday world and an element of the present
irreal situation, symbolized for me the very real possibiity of my own death.
Thus, the experience of being a victim fundamentally altered my attitude
toward social life and the life-world: Death had become, "here and now," a
possibility for me. I no longer could deal with my own death as a distant
typicality; rather it was imposed upon me as a singular, immediate
potentiality. My knowledge of my vulnerability to death changed from the
routine anticipation that one dies eventually to the frightening knowledge
that / may die now. This is a point which I shall return to later in this paper.
During these experiences, my consciousness of the temporal and spatial
structure of the life-world underwent a dramatic change. Time seemed to slow
during this experience: The twenty minutes of "social standard time" that
enclosed these events felt like hours. My acceptance of the taken-for-granted
reality of intersubjective clock time was shaken. This new consciousness of
time included an altered sense of the future. As I became totally engrossed in
the present situation, the distant future was in large part irrelevant. Further,
since my stock of typifications could not anicipate what would happen to or
around me in the very near future, the future had become clearly unknowable
for me. Perhaps because the future was seen as so unfamiliar, Iwas unable to
project myself into it. I moved toward it slowly, haltingly, and with some
resistance. In a very real sense, time slowed down/or me, and time was slowed
down by me.
Also, spatially my life-world narrowed during these events. Like the "now,"
"here" became all-encompassing. The space outside of my immediate
situation became irrelevant and were shifted to the margins of my
consciousness.4 With my awareness of my own vulnerability to death, I no
longer was able to take the spatial horizons of the life-world for granted. I
realized that, spatially and temporally, my world and my life might end "here
3In considering my experiences as a victim, my mind seems to function in what can be called
the "editorial I."With reference to being confronted with death and the resultant effects on my
life-world I can only speak for myself. My wife has shared her experiences with me and has
commented on this paper. She agrees with much of it. Yet the use of the first person reflects the
sense of isolation that these experiences produced in me.
4For instance, I never concerned myself with what was going on outside of the room of the
house in which these events occurred.
26 MEISENHELDER
and now." I could not take time, space, or my fellow men for granted. All were
problematic and uncanny.
During this experience I tried to typify what was happening?to make it
predictable, to order it within my everyday life-world. Were these "normal"
men? Seemingly not, for they did not appear to share my perspective on the
world. I could only define their actions negatively, e.g., they were irregular
and unpredictable. I searched their conduct and dialogue for some clues in
order to categorize them: Were they murderers? Would they kill? How could I
know? In short, I soon discovered that, for all practical purposes, I had no
way of knowing or even estimating what they would or would not do. Being
unable to typify the projects of action intended by these men, I could not give
their actions sure meaning. In the end, I relied on simple hope. I did not
"believe" (in the Husserlian sense) that I knew what these men would do; I
simply hoped that they would not kill me or my wife.
Being a victim, then, shocked me out of my "naive "acceptance of the world
of everyday life. It also revealed to .me two heretofore unemphasized
primordial elements of my life-world: my vulnerability to death and the
quality of hopefulness that was essential to my constituted sense of social
reality.
For myself, after the initial anxious pulling away from my own vulnerability
to death, nothing was calmly accepted. I no longer possessed a taken-for
granted reality in which to constitute a meaningful sense of the strange or
uncanny: I had nothing to be fearful of and nothing could be assumed. I
became still, at rest, passive.
to constitute in oneself a feeling that what is desired will in fact occur. Hope is
not supported by reason, for it is not known ifwhat is hoped for is in fact true
or even probable. A person hopes not because of, but in spite of reason. I, for
instance, felt that to be hopeful was the only route available for the practical
reconstruction of my sense of social reality. I dealt with the experiences I had
just lived through as if they were exceptions and not likely to happen again. At
least, I hoped that this was the case. Perhaps this is the foundation of all our
assumed knowledge of social reality; that is, one's sense of reality, one's life
world, may be at its origins an act of hoping undertaken to shield oneself from
a full awareness of one's own death. The bare, naked hoping that was revealed
to me by the threat of my own death is simply more transparent than what is
normally and naively taken to be factual knowledge. My experiences as a
victim forced me to become conscious of the fundamental hopefulness of all
the taken-for-granteds of the everyday life-world.
Heidegger (1962) has argued that a mood of "concern" is basic to "being-in
the-world." I would propose that, rather than concern, the primary mood
underlying social existence is hope. I am not simply "concerned"about social
reality; rather I actively hope that things are as I desire them to be. I have no
way of knowing that I can trust others or that actions are repeatable: I can
only hope that these idealizations are factual. For instance, I talk to another
person hoping that he or she will understand the intended meaning of my
words. If so, I hope that these results are generalizable to all "normal"
conversations. Further, hoping ismore than merely assuming things to be a
certain way. To assume is to believe something true; to hope is to wish that
something is as desired even though there is no reason to believe it is true. My
attempted reconstitution of my life-world was then a hopeful activity.
Conscious of the fallibility of the routines and types that make up my sense of
social reality, I could only hope that my life-world would not fail me again.
As implied in the preceding discussion, by the phrase, "the hopefulness of
the life-world," I also mean to say that we behave "as if" our constructions of
reality are in fact valid. By acting in such a fashion, we create within ourselves
a feeling that what we hope to be so is so. We act "as if" our life-world were
factual and thereby produce the evidence upon which one can build a
practical conviction that it is real. However, my experience as a victim and the
perception of the immediacy of my own death convinced me that noth ing at
all founded my sense of social reality, my life-world. Still, I continued to rely
on hope and slowly began to act as ifmy everyday sense of reality remained
valid; that is, I hoped so.
CONCLUSIONS
Death is the ultimate problematic event and the individual is shielded from
it by his or her life-world. We hope that actions are repeatable and that others
are trustworthy so that we will not confront our own isolation and our own
mortality. Although one is alone in death, we act as ifwe are, and always will
be, fundamentally with others within a shared and orderly social world. In
short, we avoid our finite individuality through the hopeful construction of a
sense of permanent and fundamental sociability. By sheltering ourselves
within the life-world, we are, in essence, hoping that we will not die. In this
sense, the life-world is a fundamentally deceptive construction. Yet, in this
same sense, the life-world is also the source of social and cultural progress.
Paradoxically, our sense of everyday reality is both deceptive and productive.
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