Schutz in his sociology believed that the world of everyday life is life world. Until a problematic situation arises, people are oriented to the life world in the natural attitude where they take the world for granted (Gander, 2017). Six features characterize the life world, according to Schutz: wide-awakeness, world is taken for granted, people work in the life world, people experience the working self as the total self in the lifeworld, inter-subjectivity characterizes the social life in the life world and finally, the flow of time of the actors and that of the society intersects. People’s actions in the past creates lifeworld.
Thinking like Schutz means that we focus on the problem of meaning. Meaning is a difference between the experiences and the object on one hand and the meaning attributed to them on the other (Luft, 2011). Schutz concentrated on his work on the natural attitude in the lifeworld, in order to understand the way people cope with the problem of meaning. Meaning is created through intentionality: meaning is therefore subjective and created through backward accounting. Then it involves more than just giving attention to a thing, it makes a person to be on action mode towards an object, experiences and other people. An example of objects of intentionality is the symbolic world.
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The world where we are intentional already exists in the lifeworld. An order on the universe and the experience within it is imposed by the stocks of knowledge that is produced socially; this knowledge are there for all of us and as individuals’ experience problems and difficulties these knowledge to have the knowledge that their stocks do not cover. Different people have different stocks of knowledge depending on the class of a person. The level of education and the distance from necessity are example of classes that the knowledge depends on.
References
Endress M., Psathas G. & Nasu H. (2005). Explorations of the lifeworld: continuing dialogue with Alfred Schutz . Dordrecht. Springer.
Gander H. (2017). Self-understanding and lifeworld . Indiana. Indiana University Press.
Luft S., (2011) Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology . Evanston, III: Northwestern university press.
