Michael Barber^[2]

Abstract

According to Alfred Schutz’s “On Multiple Realities,” the pragmatic everyday lifeworld, where we seek to dominate our environment since infancy, is the source of our knowledge in its ever-ascending complexity. But the lifeworld can also restrict knowledge by denying any seemingly impractical counter-evidence, by ideologically defending in-groups and systems of political and economic dominance—stifling open questioning and focusing attention only on pragmatically useful knowledge—and, in the case of radiplscal pragmatism, rejecting all knowledge except that found in everyday life. In his essay, Schutz refers to a panoply of non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning such as art, religion, theory, fantasy, and dreaming, all of which resist the drive of pragmatic mastery. However, as long as pragmatic motives aimed at domination penetrate, subvert, and conceal these resistant provinces of meaning, as Nietzsche saw, and insofar as Schutz considers theory only one finite province of meaning alongside others, it would seem that the author has diminished the value of theory. However, the entire essay “On Multiple Realities” is developed within the theoretic province of meaning, and, in this regard, Schutz seems to aspire to a transcendental phenomenology akin to that of Husserl.

    

Keywords: multiple realities; pragmatism; finite provinces of meaning; transcendental phenomenology; ideology.

Resumen

De acuerdo con Alfred Schutz en “On Multiple Realities”, el mundo de la vida pragmático y cotidiano, en el cual buscamos dominar nuestro ambiente desde la infancia, es la plataforma desde la cual nuestro conocimiento es generado en su siempre-ascendente complejidad. Pero este mundo de la vida también puede terminar restringiendo el conocimiento al negar cualquier contraevidencia de apariencia impráctica, al defender ideológicamente grupos excluyentes y sistemas de dominio político y económico mediante la represión de cuestionamientos, al concentrar la atención exclusivamente en el conocimiento útil en el nivel pragmático, y, en el caso del pragmatismo radical, al rechazar cualquier otra forma de conocimiento que el que encontramos en nuestra vida cotidiana. En su ensayo, Schutz señala una panoplia de provincias finitas de sentido no pragmático, tales como el arte, la religión, la teoría, fantasía y el sueño, las cuales ofrecen resistencia contra el impulso de dominio pragmático. Sin embargo, en cuanto los motivos pragmáticos orientados a la dominación pueden penetrar y subvertir estas provincias de resistencia, cubriendo así su presencia, como Nietzsche notó, y en cuanto Schutz parece localizar la teoría como una simple provincia finita de sentido al lado de las otras, da la impresión de que el autor ha reducido el valor de esta. No obstante, todo el ensayo “On Multiple Realities” es desarrollado dentro de la provincia teórica de sentido, y, en este aspecto, Schutz parece aspirar a una fenomenología trascendental afín a la de Husserl.

   

Palabras clave: realidades múltiples; pragmatismo; provincias finitas de sentido; fenomenología trascendental; ideología.

  

In this paper, a meditation on Alfred Schutz’s “On Multiple Realities,” itself a version of phenomenological psychology, I will show (1) how the author describes the pragmatic world of daily life and how it is the cradle of all knowledge; (2) how, at the same time, he constricts knowledge and, therefore, can be seen as opposed to the finite province of meaning of theoretical contemplation, of which transcendental phenomenology is an instance, and (3) how Schutz presents theoretical contemplation as a finite province of meaning that modifies everyday life, which is its genetic forerunner, and resists its governing pragmatic relevances. In addition, he fleshes out other non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning, such as fantasy and dreaming, which also resist the pragmatic relevances of everyday life, resulting in an array of diverse provinces of meaning, varied manners in which consciousness deploys itself from pragmatic everyday life to fantasy, dreaming, theory, and others that Schutz only suggests. Therefore, “On Multiple Realities” highlights the immense pluralism of conscious life. Finally, (4) I will argue that paradoxically, the theoretical province is not just one province among many, but it is the province of meaning within which the entire essay “On Multiple Realities” has been written. Theory, then, occupies an ultimate position from which the pluralistic dimensions of consciousness are recognized. However, by taking account of alternative deployments of conscious life that are in ways antagonistic to theory, theory resists any hegemonic reduction of conscious life to itself. Schutz, while not following a strict phenomenological methodology, mimics transcendental phenomenology, insofar as it upholds theory’s ultimacy while humbly refusing to exercise hegemony over other modes of conscious life irreducible to it.

§ 1. Pragmatic everyday life: cradle of knowledge

Schutz insists that pragmatic motives govern the world of daily life, in which he remarks that “we have not a theoretical but an eminently practical interest” (1962c: 208). This interest appears most basically in the capacity of the ego agens, standing at the zero-point of all its temporal and spatial coordinates, to exchange through locomotion its hic for an illic. Once the baby, imitating parents or peers, first crawls to its parents and achieves this exchange, it acquires the idealization that Husserl described (objectively) as “and so on” and (subjectively) as “I can do it again.” Repeated locomotion, expanded to include walking and running, reinforces these typical behaviors stored in the child’s stock of knowledge, elicited and enacted without hesitancy in similar situations. The child further learns to speak; to produce typical sounds; to follow grammatical rules; to dominate a vernacular language—a “treasure house of ready-made pre-constituted types and characteristics” (Schutz 1962a: 14)—; and to acquire routine patterns (brushing teeth, tying shoes, or Sumner’s folkways). This pragmatic knowledge is achieved not through reflecting, ratiocinating, or reading, but through “passive syntheses” taking place beneath the control of the ego. Such subconscious synthesizing is fundamental for learning and knowledge, according to Dorion Cairn’s observation that “the fundamental tendencies of mental life are tendencies to identify and assimilate” (2012: 57). Fitted out with a stock of knowledge whose elements are usually elicited passively by circumstances, deployed without reflection, and yet able to conduce smoothly, regularly, and successfully to ends sought, even the undeveloped and inarticulate ego agens of the child experiences to a degree a sense of efficacy, power, and mastery over its surroundings (Schutz 1967: 90, 123, 135, 180; 2011: 93–99, 172).

Adults surpass children by projecting in advance their bodily movements to transform their environs through “working,” but for both adults and children the world itself becomes progressively typified and more and more familiar. This progressive typification of the world instantiates “rationalization” and “disenchantment” (Schutz 1964a: 71), central to Max Weber’s thought. Schutz summarizes the pragmatic knowledge that is distinctive of pragmatic everyday life as culminating in “the transformation of an uncontrollable and unintelligible world into an organization which we can understand and therefore master, and in the framework of which prediction becomes possible” (1964a: 71).

Of course, the relevances guiding the development and deployment of typifications are intertwined with them, and Schutz pinpoints an ultimate relevance encompassing all the sub-relevances and their correlative typifications to be found in the entirety of pragmatic everyday life. In contrast with the finite province of theory, the ultimate point of everyday life, the ultimate relevance toward which all its acquired knowledge is directed, is “mastery of the world,” (Schutz 1962c: 245) which we seek to dominate and modify via bodily movements.

To achieve even greater pragmatic mastery, consciousness bifurcates almost schizophrenically (Schutz 2011: 98–101), or one might say it “double-tasks,” by relying on typical behaviors that are automatized and provide an infrastructure for the pursuit of higher- level pragmatic purposes. Hence, engaging in the higher-level effort aimed at convincing a friend to go on vacation, one automatically fashions eloquent grammatical sentences, while focused on persuading instead of on constructing sentences. Or one carries on a conversation with a client while simultaneously drinking coffee and eating breakfast, hardly noticing those behaviors. Knowledge for the sake of pragmatic mastery demonstrates further creativity by flexibly ramifying in order to accommodate imposed relevances within one’s system of intrinsic relevances. For example, should one be beset with a speech disability, one might investigate and learn to deploy novel writing technologies to substitute for speech, or should arthritis cripple one’s hand movements, one might seek information about medications or physical therapies. In effect, one augments knowledge and acquires new relevances, such as having at hand and using new technologies, medications, or therapies in order to come to terms with imposed relevances so as to be able to continue to realize one’s system of intrinsic relevances.

First-level relevances engender a search for pragmatic knowledge, and imposed relevances engender in their turn a higher-level effort to come to terms with new problems and to continue achieving the goals derivative from first-level relevances. Practical everyday life then reveals itself as a continual, restless endeavor to search creatively for new solutions, to acquire new levels of knowledge, and to construct an ever more capacious stock of knowledge to cope with and master reality better. Even science, beyond everyday practical life, grows out of and comes to terms with the reality that imposes itself upon us without being clarified, and science strives to transform unclarified situations into those of warranted “assertibility” (Hua VI: 51 [51–52]).^[3] Practical everyday life, then, serves as a cradle out of which all knowledge is born and developed.

§ 2. Pragmatic everyday life: constraints on knowledge

For all their knowledge-generating potential, everyday relevances also occlude knowledge. For instance, the successful satisfaction of such relevances often leaves one indifferent to further inquiry. Observing how fulfilling practical interests leads us to be satisfied with the knowledge we have as long as we achieve the results we desire, Schutz comments, “We use the most complicated gadgets prepared by a very advanced technology without knowing how the contrivances work” (1964c: 120)—and, I would add, without any need to know further. In addition, although our different histories and relevance configurations constitute “insurmountable limits for a fully successful communication in the ideal sense” (Schutz 1962d: 323), we ignore this abyss between us as long as our communication is working well (Schutz 1962d: 323; 1967: 99). Moreover, the “man on the street” relies on every day, vague, but trusted recipes through which he preserves his comfortable sense that “I can do it again” with regard to his culture’s requirements, and he consigns to horizonal oblivion all matters not connected with his pragmatic purposes, responding to them only with sentiments and passions and preferring the comic pages of newspapers to foreign news or analyses by commentators (Schutz 1964c: 122, 130). In fact, the practical problems of everyday life are so preoccupying that the common-sense person implements without any deliberateness the epochē of the natural attitude by which he suspends any doubt that “the world and its objects might be otherwise than it appears to him” (Schutz 1962c: 229). As Schutz expresses it elsewhere, “common sense thinking is not guided by the ideal of finding truth” (1996: 142) and the very pragmatic impulse to acquire knowledge and master everyday reality ends up strangling multiple potentialities for the acquisition of new knowledge.

Schutz also engages in a thought experiment that reveals the kind of self-enclosure and resistance to knowledge that pragmatic motivations can engender. He entertains the idea of a “radical pragmatism” that is not associated with any specific pragmatist philosopher but that would discard any of the other multiple realities other than pragmatic everyday life. If this project of radical pragmatism were successful, it would of course effectively rule out the whole sphere of theoretical contemplation, including science and philosophy. Such an attempt, however, is implausible insofar as it would not be of relevance for the inhabitants of everyday life, taken up with pragmatic relevances as they are, to assume a position “above” everyday life itself and competing provinces of meaning in order to evaluate these provinces and finally, to absolutize everyday life and dismiss all other realities. In effect, the radical pragmatist position, occupying a meta-level beyond and above everyday life and other realities in order to weigh their competing values, amounts to a theoretical, philosophical position, despite its rejection of the theoretical, philosophical province of meaning. Denying that such a philosophy could ever deal adequately “with the totality of human existence” (Schutz 2011: 165), Schutz acknowledges, however, that philosophical pragmatism can play a legitimate role in describing “the attitude of man within the world of working in daily life” (1962c: 213, n. 8) and “our living on the level of the unquestioned paramount reality” (2011: 165) as long as it makes no pretense to being “a philosophy investigating the presuppositions of such a situation” (1962c: 213, n. 8).

The radical pragmatist project, self-contradictory as it is, illustrates a meta-level strategy undertaken to defend the pragmatic relevances by sealing up everyday life up against unwanted philosophical questions. Despite his criticisms of radical pragmatism, Schutz recognized how everyday pragmatic relevances can call for meta-level protection in a famous comment from the “Well-Informed Citizen”:

Our own social surroundings are within the reach of everyone, everywhere: an anonymous Other, whose goals are unknown to us because of his anonymity, may bring us together with our system of interests and relevances within his control. We are less and less masters in our own right to define what is, and what is not, relevant to us. Politically, economically, and socially imposed relevances beyond our control have to be taken into account by us as they are. Therefore, we have to know them (1964c: 129).

While the endeavor to achieve a higher-level mastery that will protect what one has mastered and is currently mastering in everyday life—which might be called “hyper-mastery”—has its legitimate place, one can easily recognize the dangerous possibility that such hyper-mastery can turn pathological, implementing, for instance, security measures that can deprive individuals or groups of rights to privacy, freedom of speech, or due process. Further—and more importantly for our purposes on how pragmatic interests limit the expansion of knowledge—by fostering an atmosphere of fear, mistrust, and secrecy, this pragmatic meta-strategy can paradoxically block access to knowledge crucial for security.

Similarly, the in-group effort to maintain the structural system, which guarantees its ability to satisfy the demands of its relevances with an untrammeled cultural sense of “I can,” no doubt prompted 19th century United States white hyper-mastery strategy to put in place segregationist Jim Crow laws and then to defend them on a higher level before the Supreme Court. Justice Brown took such hyper-mastery to an even higher level when he defended Plessy v. Ferguson through the “looking-glass,” by explaining preemptively what interpretation African-Americans would make of the Court’s decision and refuting them even before they had read the text of the decision. This court decision would stifle African-American voices and massively impede intercultural communication and knowledge for over fifty years. A pragmatically oriented strategy of hyper-mastery also appears in Schutz’s empirical analysis of the stranger who sees, with a “grievous clear-sightedness” (Schutz 1964b: 104) the rising of a crisis to which, however, the members of the in-group are oblivious because they “rely on the continuance of their customary way of life” (Schutz 1964b: 104). Moreover, the in-group, to defend its own system of everyday relevances, ends up denying itself important knowledge it could profit from when it dismisses the stranger who is perceived as threatening insofar as she manifests doubtful loyalty or ingratitude regarding the cultural patterns that do not seem to afford her shelter and protection (Schutz 1964b: 104–105).^[4]

The pragmatic relevances, which function as a powerful generative engine of new knowledge in everyday life, can also, when pursued without limits, make not only human rights but also crucial kinds of knowledge casualties of their zeal.

§ 3. Emancipation from the relevancies of pragmatic life: theory and non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning

In “On Multiple Realities,” Schutz was quite cognizant of the imperiousness of pragmatic relevances and the ambivalence of its impact upon knowledge, and, therefore, he devotes the second half of his essay to discussing non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning that challenge the hegemony of everyday life and break free from its hold, in particular, the province of scientific theory, the climax toward which the entire essay builds. Apart from whatever might be the practical implications of the scientist’s findings, her overriding relevance is “not to master the world but to observe and possibly understand it” (Schutz 1962c: 245). Like Socrates, she follows where questions and answers lead, regardless of their pragmatic consequences for herself or others. However, the scientific resistance to pragmatic relevances depends not only on a simple change in ultimate relevances but also on adopting the six features of cognitive style that appear modified in accord with the province’s ultimate relevance.

Hence, the scientist adopts an epochē by deciding to engage in theoretical contemplation and by replacing her personal biographical situation with the scientific one, as Felix Kaufmann pointed out (Schutz 1962b: 63). In addition, the scientist exercises a form of spontaneity that does not involve gearing into the world bodily to change it but theorizing in order to understand it. Instead of taking her body as the zero-point of all coordinates in accord with everyday life spontaneity, the scientist consigns it, with its movements and reflexes, to the horizons of her experience, and takes as the center of her focus the problem studied or the social group investigated and the search for solutions valid in themselves for everyone, anywhere, at any time. Moreover, the scientist’s tension of consciousness is more relaxed than that of everyday life insofar as her theorizing is revisable and commits itself to results less definitive than those expressed in bodily action. However, the theoretic province is not as relaxed as the provinces of fantasy, dreaming, religion, art, or literature, that allow greater scope for unconscious processes and passive syntheses. Furthermore, in science, one’s self experience is bifurcated and self-reflective as opposed to the undivided self of everyday life that pursues its bodily projects head-on and unhesitatingly.

What is more, the social relations within the scientific province support its guiding relevance insofar as the search for truth is cooperative and the scientist is both open to and eager for the criticisms others offer, while remaining intellectually autonomous in assessing their inputs. Moreover, while the intentional objects of one’s theoretical acts, including articulated theories, have their place in objective, cosmic time, the subjective time of the theoretician is defined in terms of her theoretical project, such as the tasks yet to be completed, the order in which they must be finished, and the solution anticipated as the culmination of her efforts. Finally, unlike everyday life, the rules governing the theoretical sphere require the consistency and compatibility of propositions with each other, the observational testing of claims, clarity and distinctness of terms, and compliance with standards of evidence. In brief, a whole network of supportive features in addition to the adoption of a different ultimate relevance assists the theoretician to transcend the limits of knowledge that characterize everyday pragmatic knowledge (Schutz 1962a: 37, 246–250; 1964a: 81).

In addition to his discussion of the theoretical contemplation, Schutz describes how fantasy and dreaming distinctively embody the six cognitive features and how they counteract everyday life and its pragmatic relevances. The worlds of fantasy and dreaming open up when one executes their particular epochē, fantasy by allowing one’s attention to drift off and dreaming by falling asleep as the panorama of the dream-world unfolds—both with less deliberateness than the decision to engage in scientific research that conveys one into the theoretical sphere. The tensions of consciousness in fantasy and dreaming are much reduced, as one marginalizes the control of the ego and allows passive associations and unconscious processes to emerge, much more so than is possible in everyday life and even in theory. Dreaming is even more relaxed than fantasy, although there is still a semblance of control in dreaming insofar as the inner censor blocks too forceful an upsurge of unconscious drives and desires by disguising them.

As far as the form of spontaneity is concerned, neither fantasy nor dreaming take as the ultimate guiding relevance an everyday project of mastering the world, and they do not seek to understand the world as does theoretical contemplation. Even though they indulge in self-enclosed imaginary depictions of themselves or others actively engaging in everyday projects, Schutz affirms that “The imagining self does not transform the outer world” (1962c: 236). In fantasy and dreaming, one experiences oneself as bifurcated, inhabiting realms at one remove from the ego agens whose concern for the single-minded pursuit of everyday projects is confined to the horizons of one’s consciousness, just as the scientist adopts her specific role as such, which contrasts with being a pragmatic actor. With respect to sociality, fantasy can be undertaken alone or with another (as two children playing house together), but dreaming is always undertaken alone, in contrast with the social world of everyday life. Finally, while durée is irreversible in both fantasy and dreaming, but not structured according to the tasks or research stages shaping temporality in the realm of theory, fantasy and dreaming, in particular, are able to jumble temporal segments, as when one projects into future events that have already occurred in the past and has the sense of déjà vu.

Not only does theory’s particular instantiation of the six cognitive features, which pertain to any finite province of meaning, bolster its resistance to the pragmatic relevancies of every day, but that opposition is strengthened insofar as theory belongs to a whole system of non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning, such as art, literature, drama, religion, play, dreaming, and fantasy that each in their unique exemplification of the six cognitive features free one from the relevancies governing the province of everyday life. Further, these non-pragmatic provinces of meaning can enhance knowledge potentials by mutually stimulating and criticizing each other. For instance, those occupying the religious province of meaning might acquire an appreciation for the sanctity of nature that might impel them to challenge theoretical perspectives too wedded merely to the effective mastering of nature. Conversely, scientific discoveries might heighten a wonder at nature that might in turn augment religious awe, or theoretical analyses might cast legitimate doubt on particular religious dogmas or practices that fly in the face of substantiated scientific fact.^[5]

These provinces represent different ways of being in the world, in which one undergoes varying kinds of experiences (i.e., art, religion, literature) disconnected from pragmatic mastery, and these experiences in turn generate whole new fields of knowledge within the theoretical province or in enclaves at the intersection of these non-pragmatic provinces of meaning and theory (such as art history or interpretation, theology, literary interpretation, or psychoanalytic dream interpretation). It is precisely this pluralism of modes of being in the world that the radical pragmatism, which arose out of everyday pragmatic values of everyday life and which Schutz criticized, sought to suppress, but failed to do so because it did not recognize the theoretical standpoint that it covertly occupied.

§ 4. On multiple realities: diminishment of rationality/theory?

In several ways, an argument can be mounted that Schutz diminishes the role of theory and reason in human life and highlights its limits. After all, in what must be seen as a kind of genetic phenomenology reaching back behind theory and reason to their origins, Schutz uncovers pragmatic everyday life as the paramount reality that establishes the base, that is, a dynamic, creative, and knowledge-generating genetic origin, aimed at pragmatic mastery. All the other provinces of meaning arise by resistance to everyday life’s predominating motives, and they introduce modifications in its cognitive features. Pragmatic everyday life is not only the starting point for theory and reason but, as Schutz shows clearly, pragmatic relevancies can short-circuit curiosity, blind one to other kinds of knowledge, promote destructive and knowledge-suppressing forms of hyper-mastery, resist questioning, and close in upon themselves.

In addition, pragmatic relevancies pose an even further threat to the potentials for theorizing and rationality in that they are able to commandeer the theoretical province of meaning itself, as they can do in other provinces such as law (as Plessy v. Ferguson illustrates) and religion (as the efforts of magic to press deities into sending rain and satisfying practical necessities shows). Moreover, all the bulwarks in defense of theory against the impetus of pragmatic relevancies that Schutz proposes—such as its break with everyday life through an epochē fortified by further accompanying cognitive features, social relationships, and typical ways of proceeding and its teaming up with other non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning—neither guarantee that one’s theorizing or science will in the end adequately understand the world nor preclude the possibility that the everyday life drives for mastery might infiltrate one’s theory.

As Nietzsche showed so well, theoreticians often defend false claims whose appearance to be true disguises, even from theorists themselves, the hidden (pragmatic) purposes such claims protect. However, such workings of ideology do not undermine the theoretical sphere’s general aspiration to find truth insofar as the very recognition of falsehood presupposes that one has some hold on what one takes to be true, in line with Husserl’s insistence that one can only correct a false perception with a true one.^[6] Moreover, one cannot appeal to examples of the ideological perversions of theory to undermine theory since that appeal itself—pointing to misuses of theory as evidence—would have to take place within the finite province of theory itself. Furthermore, one might ask how one can be certain that what one takes to be the accurate (later) perception (or evidence) that corrects the (earlier) false misperception (or belief) is itself actually accurate. Isn’t it conceivable that from a subsequent perspective the (later) perception taken to be accurate will itself be proved false by a perception later to it and taken to be accurate that in turn could itself later be proved wrong—and so on ad infinitum? Just as Schutz recognized that in action hindsight reveals what foresight may have been oblivious to (1964d: 293), so subsequent perception can correct earlier erroneous perception, and that opens the possibility that any later perception can correct a later correcting perception. Even if that is so, it would be legitimate to stand by what one takes to be correct perception unless or until counter-evidence appears. Time, then, always injects an element of fallibilism into all knowing, and consequently, the dialectic between theoretical knowledge and the pragmatic relevancies that threaten to overtake it can never be definitively put to rest.

In addition, although the theoretical province of meaning in its struggle against the force of pragmatic relevancies might draw support from its alliance with a variety of non-pragmatic provinces of meaning that Schutz depicts in the second half of “On Multiple Realities,” which withstand pragmatic pressures in their own, distinctive manners, there appears to be a trade-off. The theoretical province of meaning is now only one among many finite provinces of meaning, apparently on the same level as fantasy and dreaming. Schutz designates the everyday life-world, and not the theoretical province of meaning, as the “paramount reality” “since only within it does communication with our fellow-men become[s] possible” (1962d: 294). One could make the case, in conclusion, that by highlighting how the pragmatic, everyday life, genetic origins of theory marginalize, infiltrate, and undermine theoretical interests and investigations, and positioning theoretical contemplation as just one among many finite provinces of meaning in relation to which it seems to possess no ultimacy, Schutz diminishes and contains the role of theory. One might speculate that the limited role for theory and rationality seems consistent with Schutz’s privately voiced misgivings about Husserlian phenomenology and his public rejection of the constitution of the other within transcendental phenomenology.

However, it is important to reflect that in “On Multiple Realities,” the theoretical province is, in fact, not merely one province among others, but it is the very province within which the essay itself is written. Consequently, in “On Multiple Realities” theory itself is giving an account of how theory itself is circumscribed and imperiled and how it takes its place alongside other provinces of meaning such as fantasizing, dreaming, literature, drama, art, religion, and play—whose distinctiveness over against pragmatic everyday life it articulates and maintains. This situating of theory converges with Husserlian transcendental phenomenology that strives to capture the fullness of human life, which is irreducible to theorizing, and that shows how the transcendental subject deploys itself in many ways, such as an inhabitant of the natural attitude, as a body, in fantasy, and in the different sciences. Furthermore, any objections against the theorizing province of meaning, even Nietzschean ones, have to resort to giving evidence and so will inevitably proceed under the canopy of the theoretical province of meaning explained in “On Multiple Realities.” So seen, it might appear as if Schutz himself were aspiring to a kind of transcendental philosophy akin to that of Husserl. As a result, “On Multiple Realities” needs not imply skepticism, misology, or a hankering to be postmodern, but instead it shows theory at its best, sufficiently confident in itself and self-critical to recognize its own fragility, vulnerability, weakness, its proneness to succumb to unknowing and ignorance, its limits and its relativity—without ceding its never-ending responsibility to resist the relevancies that can subvert it and to protect diverse spheres of meaning and life against reductionism and homogenization.

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