Paramount Reality
Paramount Reality refers to the ordinary everyday life-world, the world of "sense or physical things"[1] the taken-for-granted world of common sense.[2] The world of Normal Consciousness.
Syncretic Terms
Normal Consciousness > Dullness, Ordinary Consciousness, Paramount Reality, Usual Consciousness
Notes
Paramount reality is "the world of daily life which the wide-awake, grown-up man who acts in it and upon it amidst his fellow-men experiences with the natural attitude as a reality. “World of daily life” shall mean the intersubjective world which existed long before our birth, experienced and interpreted by others, our predecessors, as an organized world."[3]
Peter Berger on paramount reality...
"One would begin with an understanding of the ordinary everyday "life-world," the taken-for-granted world of commonsense which Schutz aptly called the "paramount reality." This is the reality that we apprehend when we are "wide awake," when we go about our various mundane project (Schutz also called this the .. world of working"), and which we presuppose as the common context of almost a1J social interaction. This is the reality that we massively bare with our fellowmen, and which therefore is the most massively plausible to ourselves: Almost everyone around us, almost all the time, confirms and reconfirms the basic contours of this reality. It is thus a domain of familiarity and of safety-indeed it is the principal domain of reliability in our experience."[4]
Schutz distinguishes paramount reality from other "many realities..." which have different "provinces of meaning." These other realities often come after a "shock" of realization.
"Even more, this reality seems to us to be the natural one, and we are not ready to abandon our attitude toward it without having experienced a specific shock which compels us to break through the limits of this “finite” province of meaning and to shift the accent of reality to another one. To be sure those experiences of shock befall me frequently amidst my daily life; they themselves pertain to its reality. They show me that the world of working in standard time is not the sole finite province of meaning but only one of many others accessible to my intentional life. There are as many innumerable kinds of different shock experiences as there are different finite provinces of meaning upon which I may bestow the accent of reality. Some instances are: the shock of falling asleep as the leap into the world of dreams; the inner transformation we endure if the curtain in the theater rises as the transition into the world of the stage-play; the radical change in our attitude if, before a painting, we permit our visual field to be limited by what is within the frame as the passage into the pictorial world; our quandary, relaxing into laughter, if, in listening to a joke, we are for a short time ready to accept the fictitious world of the jest as a reality in relation to which the world of our daily life takes on the character of foolishness; the child’s turning toward his toy as the transition into the play-world; and so on. But also the religious experiences in all their varieties."[5]
Footnotes
- ↑ Schutz, Alfred. “On Multiple Realities.” In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 5:533–76. International Phenomenological Society, 1945. p. 533.
- ↑ Berger, Peter L. “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive versus Functional Definitions of Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 13, no. 2 (June 1, 1974): 125–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384374.
- ↑ Schutz, Alfred. “On Multiple Realities.” In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 5:533–76. International Phenomenological Society, 1945. p. 533.
- ↑ Berger, Peter L. “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive versus Functional Definitions of Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 13, no. 2 (June 1, 1974): 125–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384374. p. 129.
- ↑ Schutz, Alfred. “On Multiple Realities.” In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 5:533–76. International Phenomenological Society, 1945.
