Imposed Relevances and Resilience

Recent authors rethinking Alfred Schutz’s social and political theory have rediscovered the importance of “imposed relevances” in his writings, and they have used this notion as a counter to interpretations that present Schutz’s theory as idealistic and incapable of handling issues of power or coercion in social and political thought. This chapter argues that Schutz takes account of imposed relevances throughout his work, and, at the same time, he repeatedly discusses how we often creatively “come to terms” with such imposed relevances, for instance, in adjusting our pragmatic projects in the face of obstacles, in the irrepressible sense that we can “do it again” when confronted with what is novel or unexpected, and in the multiple ways in which we handle the various levels of transcendences, space and time, other human beings, and limits of the world of everyday life through non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning. We are resilient meaning-givers, not causally determined by events that we encounter. Such resilience brings out a practical dimension of phenomenology itself that resists causal-empirical accounts of philosophical anthropology.