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The Visible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, Literature and Reality pp 81–115Cite as

The Hidden Realities of the Everyday Life-World in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Genet’s The Balcony

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Part of the book series: Analecta Husserliana ((ANHU,volume 75))

Abstract

The social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz applied Husserlian methodology to the study of the everyday life-world. Schutz described the eidetic structures of the everyday (the paramount reality of the life-world), e.g. social interaction, direct and indirect social observation, Other-orientation, contemporaries, predecessors and successors, etc., which manifest as the necessary a priori parameters that hold for any historico-cultural contents that by circumstance fill in the everyday reality. This paper presents an analysis of a structural transformation whereby certain components comprising usually non-thematic structures of the everyday life-world are uncovered and manifest existentially (within the lived-experience of the everyday rather than through theoretical meaning-contexts). These particular structures are a fabric in the “structural weave” of the everyday horizon, but remain hidden from the cognitive style of everyday experience unless a crisis emerges that brings a structure out of the horizon and into everyday experience. The structural horizon of the everyday provides the conditions for the limits of everyday cognition. Under most circumstances everyday cognition remains unaware of its own structural horizon, and that is what is meant here by “hidden.”

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Notes

  1. I am using the word “idiographical” to mean a reality that is unique and unrepeatable, the definitive qualities of a historical phenomenon. This notion was first introduced by the neo-Kantian, Wilhelm Windelband. See Heinrich Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science, ed. and trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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  2. By using the word “feel,” I mean Being-attuned or mood in the Heideggerian sense, i.e., how one is faring with the burden of Being. The feel is a pervasive mood, one that is capable of alethea, letting something be seen as unhidden. That which has become “known” is “felt” in experience. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962).

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  3. See Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1944), pp. 12–13.

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  4. I am using “non-independent contents” to mean parts of a comprehensive whole (life-world) that cannot be separately presented. The life-world only manifests as a temporal/spatial/social phenomenon. See Edmund Husserl, “Investigation III, On the Theory of Wholes and Parts,” in Logical Investigations, Volume II, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 436–462.

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  5. Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, “The Fundamental Intransparency of the Life-World,” in The Structures of the Life-World (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 169–171. Schutz and Luckmann state, “From the theoretical viewpoint, knowledge of the life-world is thus necessarily fragmentary, even if the limitation of knowledge appears subjectively as the result of biographical ‘accidents.’ In the natural attitude the fundamental intransparency of the life-world does not become a ‘problem,’” p. 171. The reason it is not a problem is because everyday cognition does not form an awareness of it.

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  6. “Existentiale” is a term employed by Heidegger to characterize the Being of humankind versus categories, which is a term that designates other entities. The characterizations, existentialle, are ontological, not psychological, descriptions of the Being of the kinds of beings that humankind are. See Heidegger, op. cit., p. 70.

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  7. Schutz and Luckmann, op. cit., p. 164.

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  8. Ibid., p.170.

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  9. Ibid.

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  10. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 11.

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  11. Ibid.

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  12. Ibid., p. 7.

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  13. Ibid.

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  14. Ibid., p. 8.

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  15. Ibid.

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  16. lbid., p. 10.

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  17. Ibid., p. 12.

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  18. Bonaventura, The Tree of Life (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1978).

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  19. Beckett, op. cit., p. 11.

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  20. Ibid., p. 52.

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  21. Ibid., p. 51.

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  22. Ibid.

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  23. Ibid., p. 44.

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  24. Ibid., p. 31.

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  25. Ibid., p. 44.

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  26. Ibid., p. 58.

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  27. Ibid.

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  28. Ibid., p. 41.

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  29. Ibid., p. 51.

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  30. Ibid., p. 25.

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  31. Ibid., p. 57.

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  32. Ibid., p. 54.

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  33. Ibid., p. 42.

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  34. Ibid., p. 39.

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  35. Ibid., p. 39.

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  36. Ibid., p. 14.

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  37. Ibid., p. 41.

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  38. Ibid., p. 7.

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  39. Ibid., p. 8.

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  40. Ibid., p. 51.

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  41. Ibid., p. 52.

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  42. Ibid., p. 54.

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  43. Ibid., p. 58.

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  44. Ibid., p. 41.

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  45. For a thorough examination of the contradiction between objective culture and subjective culture, see Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 1971).

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  46. This is Chapter XXI of William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume Two (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1950), pp. 283–324.

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  47. Ibid., p. 295.

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  48. Ibid., p. 297.

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  49. Ibid., p. 299.

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  50. Ibid., p. 289.

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  51. Ibid., p. 290.

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  52. Ibid., p. 291.

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  53. Schutz and Luckmann, op. cit., p. 22.

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  54. Luckmann, “The Fundamental Intransparency of the Life-World,” in The Structures of the Life-World (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) Ibid., p. 23.

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  55. Luckmann, “The Fundamental Intransparency of the Life-World,” in The Structures of the Life-World (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) Ibid., pp. 35–36.

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  56. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), pp. 43–44.

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  57. Ibid., p. 21.

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  58. Ibid., p. 83.

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  59. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 4.

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  60. Schutz and Luckmann, op. cit., p. 28.

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  61. For an illustrative study of the hyperreal order of reality, see Douglas Kellner, Television and the Crisis of Democracy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990). Kellner discusses how the media constructed the TV president (a simulacrum); Ronald Reagan was perfect for the role.

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  62. Irma’s house of illusions will continue to exist, but in a new role, similarly to what Baudrillard says about Disneyland. “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of hyperreal and simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that real is no longer real, and thus saving the reality principle.” Op. cit., p. 25.

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  63. Jean Genet, The Balcony, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1966), pp. 8–9.

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  64. Ibid., p. 10.

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  65. Ibid.

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  66. Ibid.

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  67. Ibid., p.11.

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  68. Ibid., p.15.

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  69. Ibid., p. 26.

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  70. Ibid., pp. 26–27.

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  71. Ibid., p. 13.

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  72. Ibid.,.p. 17.

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  73. Ibid., p.31.

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  74. Ibid., p. 40.

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  75. Ibid.

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  76. Ibid., p. 41.

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  77. Ibid., p. 68.

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  78. Ibid., p. 50.

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  79. Ibid., p. 51.

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  80. Ibid., p. 68.

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  81. Ibid.

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  82. Ibid., p. 75.

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  83. Ibid., p. 80.

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  84. Ibid., p. 93.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Morgan State University, USA

    Gary Backhaus

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  1. Gary Backhaus
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The World Phenomenology Institute, USA

    Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Backhaus, G. (2002). The Hidden Realities of the Everyday Life-World in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Genet’s The Balcony . In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Visible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, Literature and Reality. Analecta Husserliana, vol 75. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0485-5_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0485-5_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-3881-2

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