The “Naturality” of Alfred Schutz’s Natural Attitude of the Life-World

Abstract

The everyday world, the life-world, the world of everyday life, the practical taken for granted world, and the like are now commonly used concepts in the social sciences and to an extent even in philosophy. However, much debate and even entrenched positions in regard to them in the social sciences primarily occur only by a reliance upon their mediated reinterpretation as abstract units within later theories and without regard to their original emerging phenomenal meaning within phenomenology and especially social phenomenology. In taking up the work of Alfred Schutz, which more than any other was responsible for the introduction of these notions into the social sciences, this paper focuses upon his more general, inclusive, and refined notion of the “natural attitude of the life-world” which appears throughout all of his lifework. Schutz’s notion of the natural attitude of the life-world is seen to be related to the works of Husserl, Fink, and Gurwitsch, and as possessing a continually developing character in regard to concrete living or what is here called “naturality.” The natural attitude of the life-world is especially seen as that which cannot be reduced to any one-sided theoretical conceptualizations, as an ongoing social phenomenological research realm which in principle is always open for further fruitful investigative explorations, and as fundamentally lending to his entire work that sense of a “living class” for future generations of both social phenomenological and social scientific researchers.