The individual in situation

・ Being born into a world that is already there, made of pre-existing meanings and culture, individuals are engaged into actions and interpretations that are made possible by an antecedent stock of acquired experiences that others transmit.

・ The body occupies a central position and melds with the self, which holds the centre of the world; bodily activity (kinesthesis, sensorialities) transforms the world and connects each individual both, to the subjective duration of time (internal), and to shared spatial time (external).

・ At each moment of everyday life, each individual exists in a biographically determined situation, whose history is constructed by the sedimentation of previous experiences and constitutes a unique and exclusively personal resource.

・ These biographically determined situations position each individual within the world, in physical and temporal space, but also according to his/her own role and his/her moral and ideological position.

The world to the individual and the “texture of meaning”

Each individual constructs his/her own “world”, however this is enabled through others, and more precisely, through the “texture of meaning” given to him/her, composed of: cultural objects, symbols, arts, institutions and, especially, language systems.

・ The “texture of meaning” is therefore originated in “human actions” (one’s own and those of others). It constitutes a cultural world or universe of significance whose interpretation allows individuals to situate themselves.

・ The individual shares a community of space and time by participating in the development of others’ lives through his/her actions.

The “I” and the “other”

・ The I in its corporeality constitutes the centre of the world from which We, You and They can be distinguished. The We includes others who present systems of relevances deemed to be in conformity with that of the individual.

・ Among the others, Schütz’s distinguishes different groups:

a) contemporaries, with whom individuals share a community of time and space in the present cultural world. Individuals are closer to some than to others.

b) consociates are part of our contemporaries. This group refers to others with whom we are most often in physical proximity and with whom our relationships occur face to face; they can be either close individuals or strangers (with whom we find ourselves on the bus, for example);

c) predecessors are those on whom individuals cannot act, but whose past actions influence human actions in the present;

d) successors are those towards whom individuals can direct their actions by means of a certain degree of anticipation.

Typifications and meanings

・ Experiences tend to sediment into “available knowledge” (that is, relatively circumscribed knowledge concerning the everyday life-world).

・ A minute portion of this knowledge comes to the individual directly from personal experiences, while the greater part is acquired by way of socialisation.

・ Organised by “types”, this knowledge forms frameworks of potential experiences that individuals expect will be similar to those lived in the past. What they experience when they perceive an object is transferred onto other similar objects, from which individuals tend to retain only its belonging to a given typified framework. These types are essential to giving meaning to the everyday life-world.

・ The individual does not analyse these “types” (the researcher does). He/she retains only certain aspects of typified objects. The individual is concerned with aspects that represent aspects of intentional interest. Schütz underlines that the object ‘dog’, for example, interests the dog’s master not by what it has in common with other dogs, but by what the dog represents specifically for the master (its meaning), in this case: friend, companion, pet, etc.

・ Typification and meaning are therefore connected, but the individual retains only those meanings that are useful to him for the everyday life-world (pragmatically).

・ Typifications are transmitted through language; the shared knowledge of a given system of relevances becomes the “correct way of life” (what seems “natural” for members of a given group)

Intersubjectivity

・ A separation of the I and the other appears impossible, given the shared character of language and culture.

・ The latter are indispensable to the accumulation of available knowledge, to typification, and to the one truly important element of everyday life: the meaning of lived experience.

・ The establishment of intersubjectivity implies, however, two cognitive functions:

a) the interchangeability of perspectives (structural socialisation of knowledge), which presumes similarities based on the self-model, based on the illusion that if others took the “I” perspective, they would understand what “I” am living (sharing of the same typicalities);

b) the idealisation of congruence, which allows for collaboration based on the assumption that the other and “I” interpret objects common to both in a manner that is sufficiently identical to achieve pragmatic goals.

・ These two functions underpin the construction of “common prescriptions” allowing to manage “typical situations”. This is “typified knowledge with a highly socialised structure”.

・ The typified models of others’ behaviour become models that shape the actions of the self: they constitute the foundation of self-typification.