Alfred Schütz and the Theory of Consciousness
An important development in my understanding of the problems that worried me throughout the 1940s and well into the writing of Order and History was marked by my correspondence with Alfred Schütz on the problems of consciousness. They were not published until 1966 as the first part of my volume on Anamnesis. The correspondence with Schütz was precipitated by reading Edmund Husserl’s Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften. Husserl’s study interested me greatly because of its magnificent sweep of history from Descartes to his own work. It also irritated me considerably because of the somewhat naïve arrogance of a philosopher who believed that his method of phenomenology had at last opened what he called the apodictic horizon of philosophy and that from now on everybody who wanted to be a solid philosopher had to be a follower of Husserl. This arrogance reminded me a bit too strongly of various other final philosophies like those of Hegel or Marx and also of the conviction of National Socialists that theirs was the ultimate truth. I was especially disgusted by Husserl’s language presumption in speaking of himself as the functionary of the spirit, because such language reminded me of recent experiences with functionaries of another sort. In continuation of my earlier analysis of consciousness in Über die Form des amerikanischen Geistes, I now went into an elaborative criticism of Husserl’s conception of consciousness, the decisive point being that his model of consciousness was the sense perception of objects in the external world. While one could agree to the sophistication of analysis that he brought to bear on this model of perception, it seemed to me ridiculous to pretend that there was nothing to consciousness but the consciousness of objects of the external world. By that time, in 1942, I already knew enough about Classic, Patristic, and Scholastic philosophy to be aware that the philosophers who had founded philosophy on an analysis of consciousness were analyzing a few phenomena of consciousness besides the perception of objects in the external world. I went, therefore, into the question of what really were the experiences that form a man’s consciousness; and I did that by an anamnesis, a recollection of decisive experiences of my childhood. As a matter of fact, I wrote twenty brief sketches, each giving such an early experience, so that they added up to something like an intellectual autobiography up to the age of ten.
The phenomena described were definitely phenomena of consciousness because they described my consciousness of various areas of reality as a child. And these experiences had very little to do with objects of sense perception. For instance, one of the experiences that had stuck firmly enough to be recollected forty years later was the story of the Monk of Heisterbach. Heisterbach was the ruin of a medieval monastery in the neighborhood of Königswinter where we frequently went for a Sunday excursion. The Monk of Heisterbach was a mythical monk who got lost, only to return after a thousand years and discover that these thousand years had passed for him like a single day. Such time concentrations and shortening, though obviously not problems of sense perception, constitute very relevant parts at least of my consciousness, even if they don’t of Husserl’s. In this manner, I went through such experiences as the anxieties and fascinations aroused by standing on the border of the known world with Hans Christian Andersen in one of his fairy tales and looking north into a mysterious horizon of infinity, or experiences of festival movements in the life of man that I felt when I watched passing steamers on the Rhine with their night parties, and so forth. These types of experience constitute consciousness; and this is the real consciousness a man has, unless somebody wants to insist that my childhood was entirely different from that of any other child in the history of mankind. These experiences of participation in various areas of reality constitute the horizon of existence in the world. The stress lies on experiences of reality in the plural, being open to all of them and keeping them in balance. This is what I understood as the philosopher’s attitude, and this is the attitude I found in the open existence of all great philosophers who by that time had come to my attention. To restore this openness of reality appeared to me to be the principal task of philosophy.
The analysis of experiences required a technical vocabulary. Fortunately I did not have to develop it from scratch but gradually to learn it from other philosophers who had gone through the same process and already found the terms by which they could signify the analytical steps in the exploration of their experiences. The center of consciousness I found to be the experience of participation, meaning thereby the reality of being in contact with reality outside myself. This awareness of participation as the central problem was fortified by the analysis of myth conducted by the members of the Chicago Oriental Institute under the category of consubstantiality, developed by Henri and Henriette A. Frankfort and probably taken over from Lucien Levy-Bruhl. If man were not consubstantial with the reality that he experiences, he could not experience it. Among the philosophers, I found important confirmation from the radical empiricism of William James. James’s study on the question “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” (1904) struck me at the time, and still strikes me, as one of the most important philosophical documents of the twentieth century. In developing his concept of pure experience, James put his finger on the reality of the consciousness of participation, inasmuch as what he calls pure experience is the something that can be put into the context either of the subject’s stream of consciousness or of objects in the external world. This fundamental insight of James identifies the something that lies between the subject and object of participation as the experience. Later I found that the same type of analysis had been conducted on a much vaster scale by Plato, resulting in his concept of the metaxy—the In-Between. The experience is neither in the subject nor in the world of objects but In-Between, and that means In-Between the poles of man and of the reality that he experiences.
The In-Between character of experience becomes of particular importance for the understanding of response to the movements of divine presence. For the experience of such movements is precisely not located in man’s stream of consciousness—man understood in the immanentist sense—but in the In-Between of the divine and the human. The experience is the reality of both divine and human presence, and only after it has happened can it be allocated either to man’s consciousness or to the context of divinity under the name of revelation. A good number of problems that plague the history of philosophy now became clear as hypostases of the poles of a pure experience in the sense of William James, or of the metaxy experiences in the sense of Plato. By hypostases I mean the fallacious assumption that the poles of the participatory experience are self-contained entities that form a mysterious contact on occasion of an experience. A mystery, to be sure, is there, but even a mystery can be clearly expressed by stressing the participatory reality of the experience as the site of consciousness and understanding the poles of the experience as its poles and not as self-contained entities. The problem of reality experienced thus becomes the problem of a flow of participatory reality in which reality becomes luminous to itself in the case of human consciousness. The term consciousness, therefore, could no longer mean to me a human consciousness that is conscious of a reality outside man’s consciousness, but had to mean the In-Between reality of the participatory pure experience that then analytically can be characterized through such terms as the poles of the experiential tension, and the reality of the experiential tension in the metaxy. The term luminosity of consciousness, which I am increasingly using, tries to stress this In-Between character of the experience as against the immanentizing language of a human consciousness, which, as a subject, is opposed to an object of experience.
This understanding of the In-Between character of consciousness, as well as of its luminosity—which is the luminosity not of a subjective consciousness but of the reality that enters into the experience from both sides—results furthermore in a better understanding of the problem of symbols: Symbols are the language phenomena engendered by the process of participatory experience. The language symbols expressing an experience are not inventions of an immanentist human consciousness but are engendered in the process of participation itself. Language, therefore, participates in the metaxy character of consciousness. A symbol is neither a human conventional sign signifying a reality outside consciousness nor is it, as in certain theological constructions, a word of God conveniently transmitted in the language that the recipient can understand; rather, it is engendered by the divine-human encounter and participates, therefore, as much in divine as in human reality. This seems to me, for the moment at least, the best formulation of the problem that plagues various symbolist philosophers—the problem that symbols do not simply signify a divine reality beyond consciousness but are somehow the divine reality in its presence itself. But I am afraid I have not yet completely worked out the details of this participatory philosophy of symbolism.