Phenomenology of Consciousness and Sociology of the Life-World: An Introductory Study

Gene Olson was Reference Librarian at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, University of Alberta, Edmonton.

By its double-barrelled title, Phenomenology of Consciousness and Sociology of the Life-World reflects its beginnings in a couple of graduate seminars presented by Dr. Wagner in the summer of 1980 to the Faculty of Education of the University of Alberta. Derived from his seminar notes, the text is tightly structured paedagogically and editorially into seven chapters. It follows an “internal approach” to elicit from a person’s experience of everyday examples some cognitive appreciation of phenomenology as a method and its utility in dealing with interpersonal events.

Wagner’s credentials for discussing the complex of issues surrounding phenomenology are impressive. The current synthesis of the original phenomenological method of Husserl et al. with American pragmatism and the human-centered sociology of knowledge of Max Weber’s later writings was formulated by Alfred Schutz. As Schutz’s protégé, translator, and biographer (Alfred Schutz: An Intellectual Biography, University of Chicago Press, 1983), Wagner is thoroughly grounded in the development of the phenomenological approach and its academic impact on the social science disciplines.

Despite his contention that “no manual on how to do phenomenology could conceivably be written,” Wagner is reasonably successful in introducing the topic to the beginning reader. His intention was to assist his seminar students (and his later readers) to better understand understanding, and to “know what is going on in the consciousness of individuals when they experience the world in which they live — a world with its objects and events, and, most of all other human beings — and... to know how to make sense of these experiences.”

On the surface the book proceeds from an introduction of his educational objectives and methods through the realization of his goals to a summary and review. Along the way the psychology of consciousness, intentionality as meaning, negotiation of shared experiences through communication, and various conceptions of reality are all touched on as he “spiralled” around his topic. In his review he suggests additional reading of some of the basic items listed in his bibliography but more emphatically he suggests a re-reading of the book. Paradoxically this suggestion is not a condemnation of the book’s value but a recognition that to the willing reader the value of the book, like that of its topic, increases with examination. For the unwilling reader, the style, content, structure, and oblique approach may create a phenomenal headache.