The source is an edited German-language presentation centered on Alfred Schütz’s 1945 study of multiple realities. Its volume-form matters: Schütz supplies the central philosophical-sociological contribution, while the editorial framing, notes, and bibliographical apparatus place the text in conversation with William James, Bergson, Husserl, and debates over social-scientific method. The chapters and sections move from James’s psychology of reality-sense to the everyday world, then to finite provinces of meaning, fantasy, dream, and scientific theory.
In einem berühmten Kapitel seines Buches Principles of Psychology bringt William James eine Analyse unseres Wirklichkeitssinnes.
English translation: In a famous chapter of his book Principles of Psychology, William James provides an analysis of our sense of reality.
The opening movement adopts James’s problem but changes its level. Schütz is not mainly listing separate ontological worlds; he asks how different domains become real for consciousness. A province is real so long as its experiences cohere according to a specific cognitive style. The volume’s scholarly apparatus helps show why this question is both phenomenological and sociological: reality is constituted through attention, temporality, practical interest, bodily capacity, and relations with others.
Für sie ist die Welt von Anbeginn nicht eine Privatwelt des einzelnen, sondern eine intersubjektive Welt, die uns allen gemeinsam ist und an der wir kein theoretisches, sondern ein vordringliches praktisches Interesse haben.
English translation: For them the world is from the outset not a private world of the individual, but an intersubjective world common to all of us, in which we have not a theoretical but a paramount practical interest.
The central chapters on everyday life identify it as the paramount reality because it is inherited, shared, resistant, and practically urgent. The everyday actor is a bodily agent among tools, obstacles, other persons, schedules, risks, and plans. Schütz distinguishes mere conduct from projected action and gives “working” a privileged place: it is action planned in advance and carried out bodily in the external world. This makes everyday reality the sphere in which inner duration, public time, communication, and social reciprocity intersect.
Unter allen beschriebenen Formen der Spontaneität ist das Wirken für die Konstitution der Wirklichkeit der alltäglichen Welt die wichtigste.
English translation: Of all the forms of spontaneity described, working is the most important for the constitution of the reality of the everyday world.
The later chapters and sections compare this working world with other provinces. Fantasy suspends the pragmatic pressure of action and can elaborate “as if” worlds, though it does not transform the external world and remains answerable to logical coherence. Dreaming relaxes waking attention more radically; it is solitary, passively organized, and unable to sustain genuine reciprocity with dreamed others. The transitions between provinces are therefore not smooth translations but leaps or shocks: falling asleep, waking, entering play, being absorbed by art, praying, laughing, or adopting theoretical detachment.
The chapter on science completes the collection’s architecture. Schütz separates practical applications of science from the attitude of theorizing itself. Scientific inquiry may require instruments, writing, institutions, and collaboration, but pure theory brackets immediate bodily urgency and replaces the actor’s private system of relevance with disciplinary problems, ideal types, and rules of consistency.
Die Bildung wissenschaftlicher Theorie – und in den folgenden Ausführungen werden wir die Begriffe Theorie, Theoriebilden etc. lediglich in diesem eingeschränkten Sinn gebrauchen – dient keinem praktischen Zweck. Ihr Ziel ist es nicht, die Welt zu beherrschen, sondern sie zu beobachten und sie nach Möglichkeit zu verstehen.
English translation: The formation of scientific theory—and in what follows we shall use the terms theory, theorizing, etc. only in this restricted sense—serves no practical purpose. Its aim is not to master the world but to observe it and, so far as possible, to understand it.
The volume thus coordinates contributors and functions: Schütz provides the systematic account of finite provinces; the editorial apparatus supplies historical placement and textual guidance; the cited philosophical interlocutors give the problems and vocabulary against which the argument develops. Read chapter by chapter, the work shows that everyday life, fantasy, dream, art, religion, and theory are patterned modifications within one stream of consciousness. Its lasting contribution is to make communication, embodiment, and working action the practical ground from which other realities are entered, understood, and left.
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