1. Meanings and Norms

3Schutz was fully aware of the importance of norms, but I think that in this particular he was influenced by the opinion of the Japanese philosopher of law Tomoo Otaka, who came to Europe in the early 1930’s to study phenomenology with Husserl and was intellectually and friendly connected with Schutz. In fact, Otaka underpinned the fact that human agency is much more determined by a “feeling of the law” peculiar to a people than by the prospect of coercion in case of its violation. That feeling constituted for Otaka the immediate guarantee of the efficacy of the law (Schutz, 1996c, pp. 218-219).

2. “Because-Motives” and “In-Order-To-Motives”

5To show what can possibly be an action according to norms I will begin with an analysis of the general structure of human agency. Three things must be taken into account. First, projects of action have a temporal character that reflects the temporal structure of consciousness; secondly, actions do not have necessarily the same meaning for agents and observers; thirdly, the reflection about human action carried out by the social sciences and philosophy is a special case of the reflection agents make about what they have done; moreover, the former must give an account of the latter.

6Now, Schultz differentiated between two types of motives for action: “in-order-to” motives and “because-motives”. The distinction between the two will only become clear after an analysis of the temporal structure of consciousness. Projects of action are subjective in the sense that they are the outcome of a subjective evaluation of the context of action, of deliberation about the ends and about the means. Action, as Schutz says, unfolds in the modus futuri exacti; it is always future oriented (Schutz, 1974, p. 116); this means that the agent phantasies a future state-of-affairs not only as achievable, but also as already accomplished in imagination. This temporal character entails the fact that the agent is aware of having begun and achieved the action and is able to acknowledge the phases between the beginning and the end as his own deeds. To explain this fact Schutz resorts to Husserl’s concept of monothetical acts; they are a special kind of acts in which the intended events can be grasped all at once, without the need to analyze them step-by-step in their successive phases.

7We can look to norms as a kind of frame that accompanies the choosing between projects of action. I will address this issue later. I just want to point out now to the fact that normative frameworks are not always thematically present in the mind of an agent, which does not mean that they are completely absent. Not unfrequently, norms are just a part of a stock of knowledge acquired through education and the sedimentation of past experiences.

8Social Sciences are little concerned with in-order-to motives because they are difficult to study scientifically. However, Social Sciences can study because-motives, or retrospectively take a glance into the past factors (for example, the personal background, the individual’s social milieu, the environment) that caused individuals to behave as they did. Since because-motives are “objective” they can be studied using scientific methods and dealt with as a special kind of causes. Since the actions have already occurred, the reasons for them are accessible to both the actor and the social scientist. The social scientist, however, has little or no concern for specifically individual motives. He wants above all to grasp the typical motives that led certain kinds of people, in certain circumstances, to do what they did. Moreover, the typical motives grasped by the social scientist, for Schutz, are not the final goal of his work. They must be related to the common-sense concepts of the life-world, if they want to claim any scientificity. Schutz labeled this relation the postulate of adequacy (Etzrodt, 2013, p. 31).

9Because-motives have their roots in someone’s former lived experiences, which determine the agent’s present biographical situation; together, these experiences and their outcomes constitute the stock of knowledge available to grasp the present situation. The distinction between in-order-to motives and because-motives is central to an understanding of Schutz’s theory of action. The distinction is not always easy to grasp, but the following example may help us. Suppose that I say that “the individual A undertakes the action B to get the state-of-affairs C”. I am speaking of in-order-to motives; I suppose that A has a certain representation of C and looks at B as the surest way of getting it. The choice of B is determined by the knowledge at hand that A disposes of (Schutz, 1990, p. 20). However, someone could also say: “Circumstances X and Y explain the fact that A, since he wanted to get C, chose the means B to get it”. Now, I am speaking of because-motives. The difference between the two can now be grasped. When we speak of in-order-to motives, the line that connects B and C is directed to the future; in the second case, the line that connects C with X and Y is directed to the past. Of course, a social scientist can follow the line B – C backwards, but in this circumstance his analyze will stop at B as the moment in which A, after having decided to get C, chose B as the most adequate means.

10The observer and the agent don’t share the same point of view. While engaged in action one is not focused on what one has acted: on the other hand, while acting one is always producing things enacted. (I am coining the expression “things enacted” to refer to the outcome of actions – the Handlungen, in German, in contrast to handeln – , which can be acknowledge as his own actions by a social agent.) This possibility is grounded on what Husserl, in his 1905 Lessons on Time Consciousness, labeled “double intentionality”. This means that one can look either to the stream of one’s intentional lived experiences or to what one intentionally addressed during the stream (Williame, 1973, p. 32). When the former case prevails, one becomes an observer of oneself and no longer remains just an actor. Of course, someone could argue that any in-order-to sentence can be rephrased in a because-sentence. It’s true; however, the opposite is not true. This is clear if we think that although we can say that someone committed a murder because he grew-up in a violent milieu, we cannot rephrase this because-sentence in an in-order-to sentence.

11In contrast with because-motives, the in-order-to motives are always given to the agent in the agent’s very acting. One is always aware of them. It is an orientation of the action to a future event, accompanied by the achievement of its goals in future perfect tense. For instance, if someone asks me: “why did you go out?” my answer can be: “in order to meet my friend”. In-order-to motives refer to a future state that an actor wishes to bring about by his actions, a future state that he imagines as having already been accomplished by these actions. Otherwise, he would not even begin to act. What makes it possible for me to imagine the outcome of the actions that I will carry out is the fact that I have already carried out in the past similar actions in similar situations, at least according to the knowledge I have regarding the situation in which I now find myself. Of course, I am not going out for the first time. However, since my former experiences of going out to meet someone proved successful, I retrieve the same behavior according to the idealization “I can do it again”. From a sociological point of view, I am not going out for the umptieth time; I am doing a typical behavior.

12The in-order-to motive is an important concept because it makes even more clear the temporal structure of the action. As we saw, an action is in the first place motivated by a desired outcome, or, in other words, by a different state-of-affairs that is judged preferable to the current one. Insofar as an action is motivated by a desired outcome, it is legitimate to say that it tends towards the future, aiming to fulfill an expectation. As I have already said, an agent may be conscious of his in-order-to motives. It is possible, however, that he does not have them explicitly present while acting. Nevertheless, once the action has come to an end, retention gives the agent the possibility of going back to those motives that triggered his action. Another example may help us understand this fact. Suppose that someone decides to murder in order to get some money. During the execution of his crime, he is probably not thinking about his in-order-to motive. The cautious execution of his act, with the aim of not being caught, fills probably his attention (Schutz, 1990, p. 22).

13I think it has become clear that events must be “lifted out” from the stream of consciousness to become clear to the agent and get a meaning. This process of “lifting out” an event is what I have called above “reflection”. Reflections may start due to different factors, like for example a question addressed to the agent about his motives. The question will cause the agent to answer and to provide the information the person wants to get. That’s what happens in a judicial interrogation in a court of justice, but this scheme applies in a great number of other everyday situations.

14Now, suppose someone asks a simple question: “where is my black ball pen?” The motive is to fill the form to apply for a scholarship which is known to the person only. Another person simply understands that he needs a pen. To grasp the ultimate motive, he has to gather additional information and observation. Therefore, Schultz says that it is by no means certain that we truly understand each other in everyday life. Fortunately, this is not always necessary. Social relations are characterized by a certain level of anonymity. For Schütz, the relationship with the other is always marked by a process of typifications. This means that a set of sedimented experiences that form part of the stock of knowledge that the lifeworld has made available to us will determine in advance our expectations regarding that relationship; shared experiences in a common spatial-temporal framework give rise to an identical system of relevances.

3. Lived Experiences and Juridical Norms

[…] in the face-to-face situation, directness of experience is essential, regardless of whether our apprehension of the Other is central or peripheral and regardless of how adequate our grasp of him is. I am still Thou-oriented, even to the man standing next to me in the streetcar. When we speak of “pure” Thou-orientation or “pure” We-relationship, we are ordinarily using these as limiting concepts referring to the simple givenness of the Other in abstraction from any specification of the degree of concreteness involved (Schutz, 1974, p. 245).

17Now, we face two very similar procedures, the procedure of the social actor in his biographical situation and the procedure of the social scientist. Both execute a reflective going-back to the social agent’s real actions. However, the procedures of the social scientist are, so to speak, second degree constructions (Williame, 1973, p. 102), which means that they must be constructed upon the personal ideal types I mentioned above. One of Schutz main concerns – a concern also felt by some Austrian social scientists and economists of his generation and of the precedent one – was to determine to what extent these personal ideal types correspond to the scientific models of social and economic behavior drawn by social scientists. Jurisprudence, for instance, badly needed some clarification about this issue. Allow me to make a quotation from Felix Kaufman:

The correct description of the legal method requires – as has been convincingly demonstrated within the Pure Doctrine of Law – two groups of separate, if not unrelated analysis, namely the determination of the legal proposition as such, i.e., of those moments which, by virtue of its content, make a sentence a legal sentence, and the determination of the legal context, i.e., of those moments that allow a legal proposition to appear as a legal proposition of a specific legal order (Kaufmann, 1931, p. 16).

18The example of making a Testament can shed some light on the problems that arise not only when we keep to the distinction between a subjective and an objective meaning, but also when we distinguish the sociological fact that someone wants someone to inherit his assets and the normative framework that bestows a legal character to this will. Someone may think that he has made a Testament just by writing some words concerning the destiny of his assets in a sheet of paper and signing at the end of the sheet. If a court of law cannot accept that document as a real Testament, it’s due to the fact that some norms for writing a Testament – norms belonging to the invariant domain of the legal acts – have not been respected.

19Let’s try to make all this a bit clearer. For someone who writes his Testament in a sheet of paper (knowing nothing about the formalities necessary to give such an act its legal force), being understood by whoever reads it in the future may be the only relevant problem. He is not making a true Testament – at least from a normative point of view – although he is truly expressing his wishes. He also believes that his intentions are interchangeable, i.e., if he found another person who did not understand the meaning of what he has done, he would be able to explain it easily. The jurist, of course, has quite another system of relevances.

• 8 P means “possible”, T means “testament”, and N means “acting according to norms. The signal ~ mean (...)

~P (T ˄ ~N).8

21These norms have a mandatory character, they constitute an obligation to everyone who wants to make a valid Testament. Regarding specific human actions, only in circumstances similar to this one are we allowed to use the word “necessary”. That’s the reason why I think that the question: “is an ineffective norm still a norm?” must be answered in the affirmative. A true norm is just a norm that has been made in accordance with certain formal procedures, regardless of the fact that everybody, only somebody or even nobody complies with it. It is, at least in my opinion, difficult to imagine what a false norm could possibly be. Perhaps one can think of two different cases: 1) a norm that establishes a human behavior that is impossible to carry out from a physical point of view; 2) a norm that establishes something that everyone would be willing to do if he or she had the right opportunity of doing it,

22However, the fact that A just fears the consequences of not respecting a norm while B agrees with its content may be irrelevant for a jurist, while the same fact can be relevant for a social psychologist. The important issue here, regarding the methodological question, is the fact that the jurist and the social psychologist address the social reality on the basis of specific questions – according to their specific scientific domains – that will determine the answers they will get. For both, however, the specific individuality of A and B, the content of their stream of consciousness that accompanies the way both live the lifeworld situation in which they are engaged, is not relevant. Albeit both – the jurist and the social psychologist, and the same could be said, for instance, of the economist – always face individual actions, i.e., individual tokens of a universal type of action, it’s on the basis of universal types that they address the individual tokens. The specific biographical situation of an agent is not their business as social scientists. For them, what matters is what Kaufman labelled Gelten auf Grund (validity stemming from a basis): the validity of a Testament that stems from the fact that it was made on the basis of certain general norms (regardless of the person who made it, or the quantity of his assets).

4. Problems of Meaning and Relevance

23Now, language enables men to share ideas about their respective worldviews and the respective systems of relevance (and the ensuing expectations) in their everyday lifeworld existence; for its part, imagination enables men to put themselves in the place of others and see things as they are seen by the others. (“As if I were there”, so to speak.) But this means two different things: 1) I can anticipate the possibilities of action of my fellow men, since we both share, to an approximately similar degree, the same system of relevances and the same system of norms; 2) I can put myself in the place of the others even when no other human being is factually present and evaluate my own action as it would be evaluated by another man, perhaps, ideally, by all the human beings that share with me the same evaluative community. Of course, I can figure out a stream of consciousness completely different from my own and imagine my real life, the world in which it occurs and the others with which I reciprocate, as well as our accepted normative framework, as being totally different from what they really are.

24Language plays an important role here. Language is always more than a process of communication of specific information, a communication that would in any way be impossible if two conditions were not taken for granted: that a minimum of effort to understand each other sense-bestowing activities is put into practice by the one who speaks and by the one who hears; at the same time, that an effort is intersubjectively carried out in order to ground a common world of understanding, based in pragmatic motives. Of course, in special cases, observation of alien behaviors may also be a means of transmission of certain normative values, like it happens frequently when someone has to live in a foreign evaluative community, but without the help of language the process of transmission would be less efficacious and more ambiguous.

26Now, what about relevance? First, let’s make clear that we don’t live exclusively concerned with the normative correctness of our actions. While driving my car, I may be attentive to the legal maximum of speed allowed or to other basic traffic rules, but my immediate concern will be, perhaps, the amount of traffic and how it will delate or not my arrival to an appointment. Shall we say that norms are not relevant in this situation? The answer must be “yes” and “no”. Lifeworld experiences are characterized by full attention to life, not to the normative frameworks.

28The Schutzian concept of “provinces of meaning” may also help us here. A province of meaning is not a set of objects with a similar ontological structure, but rather a set of objects defined by the relation they have with the subject’s experience (Schutz, 1973, p. 23). Juridical norms are a province of meaning, constituted by a certain kind of intentional acts characteristic of the community of jurists. Those norms establish the framework within which human actions are legal human actions. Now, normative predications can only describe in a typified way life situations with a possible juridical meaning. This typified way may derive from many kinds of experiences, but not in the empiricist meaning of this word; rather it is a constructive process that resorts to abstraction, generalization or formalization. Clearly, this is not the way types are constructed in the lifeworld (Schutz, 1974, p. 343). We face then two different cognitive styles: the style of the social scientist and the style of the lived experience in the lifeworld. The job of a phenomenology of the social sciences is to show how the former grounds itself in the latter (Schnettler, 2007, p. 107).