Lived Experience and the Idea of the Social in Alfred Schutz: A Phenomenological Study of Contemporary Relevance
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Lived Experience and the Idea of the Social in Alfred Schutz: A Phenomenological Study of Contemporary Relevance Bansidhar Deep1,2 Received: 7 July 2019 / Revised: 21 February 2020 / Accepted: 10 July 2020 © ICPR 2020
Abstract The concept of lived experience plays a significant role in the social sciences in general and in philosophy in particular. The idea of lived experience as a social reality has been philosophized and given prime importance in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy. However, the work of Alfred Schutz, one of the phenomenologists on lived experience, has not been given adequate attention by either sociologists or philosophers. This paper attempts to understand how lived experiences are not merely individual or subjective experiences but are also collective or social. Firstly, it suggests that lived experiences need to be understood in a broader context, namely that of the social and inter-subjectivity, which can be found in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz. Thus, there is an attempt to show how Schutz’s philosophy broadly helps us understand lived experience as a social reality. Secondly, to justify how lived experiences are social and collective experiences, illustrations of the studies related to race, gender, and caste are given as a marker for lived experiences throughout the paper. So far, lived experience has been understood within the domain of individual or the subjective or merely in the first-person perspective. Hence, this paper provides some insights into investigating lived experience from the third-person perspective. Keywords Alfred Schutz · Lived experience · Social ontology · Inter-subjectivity · Race · Gender · Caste
* Bansidhar Deep [email protected] 1
Centre for Philosophy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
2
Present Address: Logic and Philosophy, Jawaharlal College, Patnagarh, Odisha 767025, India
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research
Introduction Lived experience is a central subject matter for understanding the nature of the social world. It has different dimensions, such as the sociopolitical, epistemic, ethical, ontological, and methodological. Various scholars have defined and understood lived experiences from different perspectives and dimensions. Wilhelm Dilthey, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty1 are some of them. So far, lived experience has been understood from the first-person point of view.2 But there are scholars who have studied it from the third-person point of view and located it in the larger contexts outside of the personal and subjective domains.3 For example, within the phenomenological tradition Alfred Schutz, a prominent philosopher and sociologist4 has written on lived experience, focusing on its social and collective dimensions, which is a critique of the subjectivity framework used by most of the existentialists and phenomenologists. Studying Alfred Schutz’s perspective on lived experience enables us to better understand the social world both methodological
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