Schütz’s philosophical essay investigates how everyday action, imagination, dreaming, and scientific contemplation acquire distinct senses of reality. Moving from a phenomenology of practical life to an account of “finite provinces of meaning,” it locates this multiplicity in modes of experiencing rather than in independently existing worlds.
In a famous chapter of his Principles of Psychology William James analyzes our sense of reality.
Schütz reworks James’s problem through Husserl and Bergson. Each province has a characteristic cognitive style: a tension of consciousness, a suspension of doubt or belief, a form of spontaneity, an experience of selfhood, a sociality, and a temporal perspective. Experiences can be consistent within one style without being compatible with another. Passing between provinces involves a “leap,” registered as a shock: falling asleep, entering theatrical illusion, or adopting theoretical disinterestedness changes what receives the accent of reality.
Everyday life nevertheless remains paramount. It is an inherited, intersubjective world interpreted through accumulated knowledge and organized by practical interests. Its objects resist us, and our projects require intervention in them.
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.
Against explanations restricted to observable behavior, Schütz differentiates subjective meaning, projected action, purposive performance, and bodily working. The distinction between thinking and practical intervention is decisive:
In order to distinguish the (covert) performances of mere thinking from those (overt) requiring bodily movements we shall call the latter working.
Working produces publicly accessible changes. Projects anticipate completed acts in the future perfect, while their execution connects lived duration with the measurable time of external events.
The vivid present originates, therefore, in an intersection of durée and cosmic time.
In acting, the self experiences itself as an undivided totality; reflection instead apprehends past actions and partial, role-bearing selves. Bodily expression enables partners to share a vivid present, making face-to-face relations foundational for more distant social relationships. Standard time coordinates plans, while the bodily Here and temporal Now organize what lies within actual, restorable, or attainable reach.
Practical relevance is rooted in fundamental anxiety, the knowledge and fear of one’s death. Everyday certainty, however, rests on the natural attitude’s suspension of doubt about the world’s existence. Inherited and tested interpretations remain valid until experience resists them. Other provinces alter this attitude by withdrawing attention from practical requirements and bracketing particular aspects of everyday reality.
Imagination releases the self from the obligation to master the outer world. Imagined actions can possess projects and motives without an intention to realize them. Schütz’s Don Quixote example distinguishes mistaken perception within everyday reality from a transfer of reality to phantasy: enchantment preserves the reality of giants against the resistance of windmills. Imagination can overcome factual incompatibilities, but not logical ones, and remains bounded by the irreversibility of inner duration.
Dreaming differs because the dreamer cannot freely determine events or fulfill anticipations at will. Passive attention reorganizes sedimented waking experiences outside their ordinary pragmatic coherence. Schütz acknowledges Freud’s discoveries while criticizing a mental topography that obscures intentionality. Dreams are solitary, and communicating them requires leaving their cognitive style for waking language.
Scientific contemplation is purposive and methodically controlled, yet does not itself modify the outer world. Experiments, lectures, and writing are practical activities supporting or communicating theory. The theorist brackets bodily location, practical anxieties, and personal interests; the problem under investigation establishes a new system of relevances, constrained by scientific tradition and methodological standards.
Social science faces a particular difficulty: disinterested observation cannot directly reproduce the lived totality of persons acting together. It constructs models containing types whose assigned actions must be internally consistent and compatible with everyday experience. These constructions make explanation possible while marking its limits. The provinces are therefore not sealed worlds: consciousness moves among them, remembers them, and communicates through everyday working acts. Schütz connects reality with embodied action and intersubjectivity while showing how theoretical abstraction remains answerable to the life-world from which it departs.
This work was divided into 11 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 11 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian