CHAPTER 5

Relevance: Knowledge on Hand and in Hand

EDITORS' PREFACE

The title is by Helmut Wagner for a collection of pages from the end of the manu-
script used by Richard Zaner when he prepared for publication most of the first (and
only) part of a book manuscript originally intended to comprise five parts.l The
manuscript was written during the summers of 1947 to 1951, chiefly during vaca-
tions Schutz spent at Lake Placid in New York and at Estes Park in Colorado. 2
When Schutz approached the conclusion to the first part of the project, he wrote
to Aron Gurwitsch (4 October, 1950) that "one more thing happened to me, some-
thing which shouldn't happen at my age and which one can only blushingly whisper
to a good friend as a sweet secret: 'I am with book.' I have two chapters finished,
roughly 27,000 words, perhaps a fifth of the whole, which given my way oflife will
need six or seven years for completion."3
The text printed from the manuscript came to 182 printed pages. The remaining
pages assembled by Wagner for inclusion in this volume are either single pages or a
sequence of pages, which, if not unnumbered, bear numbers above 160 and go be-
yond 180 of the original manuscript. Wagner assumed that these pages were written
at the end of the summer of 1951 and would seem to form a textually coherent unity
even though they do not belong to the main text stylistically or textually.
Why Alfred Schutz did not complete the book on relevance is not clear. In part it
may have been his realization that, with his "way of life", he would need six or more
years to complete it. In his letter to Gurwitsch, Schutz also seems somewhat unsure
of his work, a "first draft" of which, he says, he will send to Gurwitsch "with the
request that you tell me whether I should continue with my efforts."4 For whatever
reason, Schutz did not continue the manuscript and may have even abandoned all
together the idea of the book. Of course, the problem of relevance continued to

I Alfred Schutz, Reflections on the Problem of Relevance, edited, annotated, and with an Introduc-

tion by Richard M. Zaner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).

'See Zaner's Introduction, p. viii.
3See Philosophers in Exile. The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch. 1939-1959,
p. 118. (German edition, p. 194.)
4 Ibid., p. 119 (German edition, p. 194).

67

A. Schutz, Collected Papers

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1996
68 The Problem 0/ Social Reality

occupy his thought, surfacing again, for instance, in his comments on the last part of
Gurwitsch's The Field o/Consciousness. s

In general terms: both the sufficiency of our knowledge and the required degree of
familiarity with things and events depend on the adequacy of this knowledge to
further our purposes on hand. In turn, this is determined by the system of motiva-
tional relevances originating in the autobiographical definition of circumstances at a
particular moment. So far, Scheler and some other philosophers are correct in em-
phasizing the pragmatical motive in our knowledge. But the radical pragmatist is
wrong because he considers the system of motivational relevances the only one that
governs our knowledge, and because he interprets action in too narrow a sense -
most frequently in terms of biological needs and their satisfaction.
Thus familiarity has its degrees and - as stated on an earlier page - the term
should always be conceived in its full sense, namely "familiarity sufficient for the
purpose at hand". This justifies our previous remark that familiarity defines the de-
marcation line not only between things which have to be known and those "not
worthwhile" to be known, but also between those aspects of things which are and
those which are not topically or interpretatively of interest. Sufficient familiarity
designates that point up to which inquiry and research are necessary and desirable. 6
I have to "familiarize" myself with the topic or problem at hand merely to an extent
<required by the purpose at hand>.
These considerations enable us to gain a clearer insight into the organization of
the stock of knowledge at hand at any given moment of our conscious life. This
stock of knowledge consists of stored-away pre-experiences of a sufficient degree
offamiliarity. <It is complemented by a> sufficiently well-circumscribed typicality
(and sufficiently determined expectations).' The latter term refers also to a set of
more or less empty expectations that this neutralized habitual possession will be re-
activated if typically the same or like experiences tum up in the future. What has
been stored away in this manner is no longer problematic and for the time being
does not need further inquiry. The known life-world - known in all these various
degrees of sufficient familiarity - is just taken for granted until further notice. Un-
questioned as it is, it is the general frame of open possibilities of further questioning.
Being the locus of all things with which we are sufficiently familiar, the world taken-
for-granted forms the horizon of a principally determinable indeterminacy; against
it the topics with which I am concerned at this particular moment stand out as thema-
tically relevant.
Thus at any given moment the stock of knowledge at hand is not a closed realm
but it is open in various dimensions - as described in the preceding paragraph. The
knowledge actually at hand refers to potential knowledge of things, once known but
meanwhile dropped and therefore forgotten (restorable knowledge) and to things
never known but knowable under certain conditions of inquiry (attainable knowledge).

'See for example the comments published as addendum to Schutz's letter to Gurwitsch of25 January,
1952, pp. 154ff. (German edition, pp. 247ff.).
"This sentence was crossed out in the manuscript.
7The passage in parentheses was crossed out by Schutz in the manuscript.