Alfred Schütz · 1955
Schütz’s German essay, originally framed as a symposium contribution, asks why concepts such as sign, signal, symbol, image, and meaning so often blur into one another. His answer is phenomenological: signifying relations are grounded in Husserlian Appräsentation, the pairing by which something directly given makes something absent, hidden, past, future, or otherwise transcendent co-present in experience.
Die zeitgenössische Diskussion zum Problem der symbolischen Verweisungen enthält einige Unklarheiten.
English translation: The contemporary discussion of the problem of symbolic references contains a number of ambiguities.
After surveying Whitehead, Morris, Ducasse, Wild, Cassirer, Langer, Aristotle, and others, Schütz argues that many disputes arise because theorists privilege different “orders” within the same relation. Any appresentational situation involves a bearer, an appresented meaning, a referential schema, and an interpretive context. The same object may function as mark, indication, sign, image, or symbol depending on the structure of relevance in which it is taken up.
Es gibt keine Bestandteile der Erfahrung, die nur Symbole oder nur Bedeutungen sind.
English translation: There are no components of experience that are only symbols or only meanings.
The essay’s central sections build a scale from ordinary indications to strict signs. A private mnemonic mark, such as a broken branch, helps the actor recover a past intention. An indication, such as smoke for fire, points typologically to something not now perceived. Signs proper arise in intersubjective life: gestures, expressions, artifacts, and words appresent another person’s experiences. Communication therefore depends on the shared world of bodies, movements, tools, and speech, even when what is communicated is inward or absent.
Mit anderen Worten, Kommunikation kann nur innerhalb der Wirklichkeit der Außenwelt stattfinden, und dies ist einer der Hauptgründe, wie wir gleich sehen werden, daß diese Welt die ausgezeichnete Wirklichkeit ist.
English translation: In other words, communication can take place only within the reality of the outer world, and this, as we shall shortly see, is one of the principal reasons why this world is the paramount reality.
Schütz then links this analysis to William James’s “sub-universes,” recast as closed provinces of meaning. Everyday life is the paramount reality because it is the sphere of bodily presence, work, resistance, social action, and communication. Yet dreams, play, art, science, religion, and theory each possess their own cognitive style and internal coherence. Symbols, in Schütz’s strict sense, mediate between these provinces: a worldly object, gesture, formula, emblem, or narrative appresents meanings belonging to another finite domain of sense.
Wir können daher die symbolische Beziehung definieren, indem wir sagen, daß sie eine Appraesentationsbeziehung zwischen zwei Größen ist, die mindestens zu zwei geschlossenen Sinnbereichen gehören, während das appraesentierende Symbol ein Bestandteil der ausgezeichneten Wirklichkeit des Alltags ist.
English translation: We can therefore define the symbolic relation by saying that it is an appresentational relation between two entities that belong to at least two closed provinces of meaning, while the appresenting symbol is a component of the paramount reality of everyday life.
This definition explains why symbols are indispensable for society. Human beings confront transcendences of nature, history, death, power, community, and institutional order that exceed direct mastery. Myths, rituals, political emblems, religious images, legal documents, offices, and collective names make such transcendences socially accessible without reducing them to mere physical things. The state, church, nation, marriage, or office is not perceived like smoke or stone; it is appresented through representatives, ceremonies, documents, roles, and habitual expectations.
The closing sociological argument is that everyday reality is already preinterpreted. Language, custom, institutional typifications, and socially approved knowledge provide recipes by which members define situations and recognize statuses, obligations, and authorities. Schütz thereby joins phenomenology to sociology of knowledge: symbolic reality is neither subjective fantasy nor detached metaphysics, but an intersubjectively organized mode of access to what exceeds immediate experience.
This work was divided into 9 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 9 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian