Alfred Schutz
Alfred Schutz was an Austrian-American philosopher and sociologist whose work applied Husserlian phenomenology to the study of everyday social life. Forced to flee Vienna in 1939, he rebuilt his career at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he worked during the day as a banker and wrote his phenomenological sociology at night. His Collected Papers, published posthumously, introduced the distinction between the natural attitude — the unreflective stance of daily navigation — and what he called wide-awakeness: the state of full attention to life. Greene seized wide-awakeness and made it the cornerstone of her educational philosophy, transforming Schutz's descriptive phenomenology into a normative demand about what education must cultivate.
In the AI Story
Schutz's project was to understand how the social world is constructed through the meaning-making activities of ordinary people. His analysis of typifications — the categories through which we parse experience — revealed how much of daily life operates below the threshold of conscious attention, on automatic interpretive patterns inherited from the culture.
Against this backdrop, Schutz identified wide-awakeness as a specific tension of consciousness — the highest degree of attention to life, in which the person is fully engaged with the present moment's demands. Most of the time, even when awake, we operate at lower tensions: half-attending, running on typifications, letting the natural attitude carry us through.
Schutz's essay 'The Stranger' (1944) analyzed the specific epistemic position of the person newly arrived in a culture — the one for whom the natives' typifications are not yet automatic, who must attend consciously to what natives perform without thinking. Greene would later transpose this analysis into pedagogy with Teacher as Stranger.
Greene's contribution was to recognize that Schutz's descriptive categories carried normative weight. If the natural attitude is the condition of unreflective automaticity, and wide-awakeness is its opposite, then education's task is not merely to transmit information but to cultivate the tension of consciousness that makes genuine inquiry possible.
Origin
Schutz studied with Hans Kelsen and was shaped by Husserl, Weber, and Bergson. His 1932 Phenomenology of the Social World established his philosophical program. After emigration to the United States, he taught at the New School from 1943 until his death.
Key Ideas
Natural attitude. The unreflective stance in which daily life is navigated through inherited typifications.
Wide-awakeness. The highest tension of consciousness — full attention to the demands of the living present.
Typification. The pre-conscious categorization through which experience is parsed and made manageable.
The stranger. The figure for whom native typifications are not automatic, producing a specific epistemic position of forced attention.
Greene's reception. The normative transformation of Schutz's descriptive phenomenology into a pedagogical demand — wide-awakeness as the goal of education.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality (Nijhoff, 1962).
- Alfred Schutz, 'The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology,' American Journal of Sociology 49, no. 6 (1944): 499–507.
- Alfred Schutz & Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World (Northwestern University Press, 1973).