Time as sociology’s basic concept: A perspective from Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological sociology and Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory

Introduction

Few would deny that meaning (Sinn) is a fundamental concept of sociology. Max Weber famously pioneered the introduction of meaning as a basic concept to sociology. According to him, sociologists attempting to explain sociocultural objects comprised of social actions need to understand the subjective meaning that the actor gives her/his own actions. However, Weber was not the only one who focused on meaning in relation to human action. Meaning appeared itself as meaningful to a group of people that Hughes (1958) called the “generation of the 1890s”—to which not only Weber belonged but also Emile Durkheim, Henri Bergson, and probably Edmund Husserl and Georg Simmel as well. While these people, who were active especially from the 1890s through the early 20th century, adhered to enlightenment’s rationalism, they revolted against 19th century’s positivism, and attempted to investigate human-related phenomena without reducing them to the natural sciences (Hughes, 1958). Hence, meaning (including that considered to be meaningful, such as ideals or values) became the key concept for those people to resist the positivists’ schematic perceptions of the world, and to clarify the nature of human action and human consciousness. Without insight into meaning, one would be unable to understand the reality of the human world.

There is, however, another concept that characterizes this generation’s thinking, namely, time. This is evident in Bergson and Husserl, who gave a central role to pure duration or stream of consciousness in their philosophies. Bergson thought that time plays an essential role in the meaning and impetus of life (élan vital), that is, in human freedom (free will), which is against the positivists’ scientific determinism: time, not eternity, allows the continuous creation of new forms and enables the diverse development of human life. Husserl also showed that the subjective operation of meaning-giving (Sinngebung) is performed in inner time: living conscious experience is the absolutely pre-given field to itself, and the intentional meaning of an outer object is always constituted in the stream of such living experiences. In this way, for these two philosophers, the concept of time could not be separated from meaning, and was, in a sense, even more essential.

However, in comparison with these philosophers, sociologists of the 1890s generation did not advance the concept of time so explicitly. Certainly, attention to temporality can be discreetly found; Simmel, for instance, thought of society not as a being (society = Gesellschaft) but as a becoming (sociation = Vergesellschaftung), and sublated the substantialism and reductionism of society. This focus can also be found in Durkheim, who criticized both empiricism and apriorism, and regarded the time category as an institution varying from society to society. Weber also posited that the variability and fluidity of knowledge are crucial for the advancement of science. ¹ Needless to say, these sociologists did not explore the historical laws sought by their forerunners, like Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, or Karl Marx. Such historical laws took aim not at temporality, but rather at eternity, by assuming permanent metaphysical determinism coming from positivistic thinking. In contrast, Simmel, Durkheim, and Weber were primarily oriented to the changing real world.

Nevertheless, it is hard to say that the concept of time has been given a fundamental role in the field of sociology. Time has often been regarded as a variable of action or an external parameter of social change. Even if the temporal element of action or structure is theoretically taken into account, only a particular aspect of time tends to be marked with words such as sequence, memory, and so forth. As others also point out (Adam, 1990: chap.1; Bergmann, 1983: 462–463), there is generally a lack of elaborate, consistent conceptualizations of time. Likewise, empirical research on time—in terms of cultural groups, social stratification, and social history—has surely existed and revealed interesting outcomes regarding the transformation and diversity of the sense of time, the multiplicity and historicalness of the time scale, or the development and spread of chronotechnology; but they have only been conducted independently. However, as Bergson and Husserl clearly showed, if time is as significant as meaning, or even if it is more significant, sociologists should also have considered the possibility that time is a basic concept for sociology. Insofar as they investigate human phenomena as precisely that, rather than as physical or chemical phenomena, it must be asked whether time occupies an indispensable, intrinsic position from which sociology can approach the issue of meaning in its own manner; and if time has such a position, how this occurs.

Since investigations of this agenda are closely related to an essential part of the discipline, they naturally become theoretical. In fact, in the history of sociology, two theorists have already wrestled with such a task: Alfred Schutz, in terms of phenomenological sociology, and Niklas Luhmann, in terms of social systems theory. In the aforementioned circumstances in sociology, Schutz and Luhmann stand out for their consistent and explicit ways of making temporality a central theoretical focus in connection with the problem of meaning. Therefore, in exploring how these two sociologists dealt with relationship between meaning and time, this article will attempt to find time’s proper theoretical position in sociology.

Surroundings of the present

We will first confirm a discussion by Schutz. As is known, he critically examined Weber’s interpretative sociology (verstehende Soziologie; understanding sociology), guided by Bergson’s and Husserl’s discussions, and showed that the subjective meaning of action is indivisibly united with the actor’s inner time. “[T]he meaning problem is a time problem” (Schütz, 1932: 9, emphasis original). From this viewpoint, Schutz insisted that the explanatory, motivationally adequate understanding (erklärendes, motivationsmäßiges Verstehen) in which an observer traces back to the inner motive of action—unlike the actual understanding (aktuelles Verstehen) of action in which an observer only sees the surface of its bodily motion as observing a thing (chose)—requires knowledge about the actor’s past and future (see Schütz, 1932: 25). According to Schutz, meaning is going to be first produced by the actor directing a reflexive gaze at the inner flow of her/his own living experiences (Schütz, 1932: 49–50). The same holds for the meaning of action. If one turns one’s attention from the present to the future in the inner duration (durée) and preoccupies a bygone living experience as the goal, a unit act will be demarcated in one’s consciousness. This act (Handlung), which is purposively motivated and internally pre-projected in a temporal sense of the future perfect tense (modo futuri exacti), is the meaning of an ongoing action (Handeln) that the actor her/himself subjectively thinks of (Schütz, 1932: 55–62). For instance, s/he is about to grip a door handle, but from her/his own point of view, s/he is not performing this action in order to (um zu) close the door. The intended or planned act that is imagined as already being completed in the future perfect tense, “I will have repaired the door,” is exactly the subjective meaning of her/his action currently in progress. Indeed, the actor would reply that s/he is repairing the door, not closing it, if asked what s/he is doing.

In parallel to this future projection, living experiences in the past can also contribute to the subjective constitution of an action’s meaning by being reflectively bounded and integrated into the connection of experiences (i.e., the scheme of interpretation), or by being recollected as the reason for projection in the past tense (modo praeterito, or, in German, in the past perfect tense; modo plusquamperfecti). If the meaningful unit of action thus depends on the inner time of each actor, the common normative value that Talcott Parsons assumes to be shared by actors cannot be the ultimate source for action’s meaning.

Incidentally, Schutz clearly denied the expression “meaning attached (verbunden) to an action” (Schütz, 1932: 40). Meaning itself is a given medium for an actor to reflexively look on inner time, and therefore an indicated living experience is already a meaningful unit. As is known, Husserl also says, “all real unities are ‘unities of meaning’” (Husserl, [1913] 1950: 134, emphasis original). In other words, an actor’s life is completely steeped in the world of meaning. No one can get away from meaning. All one can do is choose a certain meaning from the unlimitedly complex possibilities of meaning. The positivistic worldview is itself also a choice of meaning. “[I]t is the meaning of our experiences, and not the ontological structure of the objects, which constitutes reality” (Schutz, [1955] 1982: 341). Therefore, what should theoretically be explored more deeply is summarized in how this meaning, not that meaning, selectively emerged as a now and so (Jetzt und So) in the present moment of the actor’s inner consciousness.

Schutz solved this problem of a choice of meanings without introducing the transcendental. That is, he clarified the self-referential structure of consciousness and its intrinsic temporality. This is visible in the fact that he called his own attempt “phenomenological psychology” (Schütz, 1932: 42). One person who provided a theoretical foundation for this “psychology” appears to have been William James, the father of the notion of the “stream of thought,” ² although this psychologist may pale in comparison to Husserl and Bergson in Schutz’s works. It is known that Schutz, after going to the United States, often liked to use James’ concepts. One of the reasons for such a preference lay in James’ view of consciousness, which Schutz described as follows: “The passing Thought is itself the only Thinker” (Schutz, [1941] 1966: 4). ³ For James, the individual’s mental life was neither reducible to separated, isolated psychic atoms, nor to an unchanging metaphysical entity like the Soul, nor to a principle like the transcendental Ego viewed as out of time (James, 1892: 215–216; Schutz, [1941] 1966: 3). Consciousness constitutes the temporal continuity and temporal horizons within itself only by referring to consciousness itself. A new unit of thought can emerge as a new demarcated unit only in the entirety of the conscious stream. What James called “fringe” (James, 1892: 166, emphasis original) refers to this whole consciousness that surrounds the momentary mental image of the present phase. ⁴ As the ground is required for a figure to appear in a Gestalt, the stream of consciousness is the pre-given basis for an image—to be more precise, not that but this image—to appear selectively in the now and so. Thus, James thought that the continuous whole of consciousness is the very “minimum” (James, 1892: 464, emphasis original), and the empirical object of individual psychology. ⁵

Something that should be objectively identical can have different meanings for each subject, because of the different eigen times (Eigenzeiten) subjects have respectively built by themselves. Eigen time is comprised of the subject’s own choices—not only those actually made in the past but also those that were possible in the past, or will be possible in the future. It makes a certain way of perceiving reality self-evident, and defines the direction of further choices. This inner order based on temporality is, as it were, a spontaneous order, and is neither formed nor controlled from outside. Parsons could not understand Schutz in Correspondence (Grathoff, 1978) is because Parsons had presupposed that the atemporal, non-mundane ideal object that orients actors in the same direction is real, although only analytically. ⁶ He tried to “dissolve” the problem of social order or double contingency through anachronistic value-monotheism. As a result, he focused exclusively on socialization (the internalization of common values), not on individuation, in the process of human growth.

To be fair, on this point, a subsequent development in phenomenological sociology is not that different from Parsons. Some followers of phenomenological sociology rode the wave of a linguistic turn hailed in the postwar human and social sciences, but this also seemingly had an intention to “dissolve” the difficult problem of understanding others’ subjective meanings by replacing them with the task of understanding intersubjective linguistic meanings. Here it is assumed that people in the lifeworld should share (or internalize) the same language. However, the extensive sharing of a common language is, at least in modernity, achieved much more through the educational system of the nation-state. ⁷ Even if this point was to have been ignored, sociologists should have directed attention to the eigen inner time of each person, in order to interpret the increasingly individualized meaning of modern human life, and to capture multiplying social realities.

It seems to be Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory that genuinely inherited Schutz’s insights about inner time, although it is generally regarded contradictory to action theory. Luhmann rejected the linguistic turn outright, because he thought that meaning is determined not through language itself, but through the eigen time of each system. ⁸ To begin with, it is not possible to ignore the social contexts behind the use of language, and semantical changes in response to social structural changes in the long term. Hence, the problem of meaning in sociology cannot be reduced to language theory. Furthermore, the belief that something, whether normative value or language, is homogeneously shared is no longer realistic in this increasingly complex society. Today’s society should be characterized by endless differentiations based on the autonomy and closure of systems, and the time concept is resurrected in sociological theory to explain this situation.

Meaningful world and temporal order

It is well-known that Luhmann introduced the phenomenological concept of meaning into his systems theory. However, it has gone almost unnoticed that he also built the phenomenological notion of time into the essential part of his theory, beyond the spatial size differences between human consciousness and social systems. ⁹ First, eigen time allows systems to stop responding one-to-one to environmental events, and thereby to operate as autonomous, closed systems (see Luhmann, 1997: 83–84). The meaningful unit of a system’s element is neither a self-existing atom nor is it determined by something external; it is always defined as a system-internal choice through before-and-after relations in the present progressive process of operations, and through horizontal structures of the past and future (recollection and expectation), which are extensions correlated with the present. The self-referential systems that Luhmann means are thus temporalized, that is, dynamically stabilized systems. To refer to the self is to refer to one’s own temporality. By organizing eigen time, a self-referential system can reduce the world’s enormous complexity (the complexity of meaning itself), successively put its own elements in order, and reproduce them continuously as coming and going instantaneous events. For Luhmann, such a social system with eigen time-based autonomy and closure was sociology’s empirical minimum.

Besides, Luhmann discusses time not only from this theoretical viewpoint but also in terms of sociocultural evolution. According to him, the time concept (time semantics) was still undifferentiated from spatial phenomena such as continuous (before-and-after relation-based) movement in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and was also subordinated to the eternity of God. However, with the arrival of modernity, where situations started to change more frequently and the appreciation for novelty grew, time was reflexively characterized by the difference between the past and future—discontinuously and asymmetrically divided by the present—and thereby became an independent form of meaning (see Luhmann, 1980: 235–300, 1990, 1997: 997–1016; Takahashi, 2002: 141–147). In this light, time is not given with the self-reproductive operation of each system, but is one of three meaning dimensions (the physical–spatial and social dimensions are the other two), which were differentiated from each other to specify an event’s meaning in more detail (Luhmann, 1984: 111–122). In other words, time is a kind of scheme by which to observe realities, and can therefore only be relevant as such in a particular social structure. For instance, the societal change from stratificatory differentiation to functional differentiation created a future opening to individual choice, and led to society’s future orientation (see Luhmann, [1973] 1975: 115, 122–124, [1976] 1982, 1992: 133, 1993: 115–116). ¹⁰

Not history, with its complexity already reduced, i.e., with its other possibilities already excluded, has the absolute priority over the present any longer, but the future. The past is now completed, and is conceivable as done. […] The coercion of tradition is replaced by the coercion of selection in proportion as the exercisable space by human being enlarges. “We were,” Sahlins [MD] comments on this development, “chosen people; now we are chosing [sic] people.” (Luhmann, 1971: 57–58, emphasis original)

The first thing to be noted is that, as phenomenology made a discovery about consciousness, communication (the elemental operation of social systems) also has intentionality: Communication is always a communication of something (Tada, 2010, 2013a). This necessary intentional correlation between communication and external reality will ground a social system’s own observational ability to its environment. Social systems are not mere macro structures (choses; things) confronting individuals, but are themselves autonomous observers, or subjects, sui generis, who respectively cognize the world from their own perspectives.

As is probably clear, the agenda for systems theory in sociology took an epistemological turn through Luhmann. His theory does not aim to ontologically uncover the inner structure of a system, as Parsons intended, but rather to observe the subjectivity or the subjective view of a self-referential system. Self-referentiality is another expression of subjectivity. That is, Luhmann’s theory aims to understand how social systems autonomously observe the external world in their own way, and how the outside world selectively appears as a unique reality to social systems. For this purpose, Luhmann relied not on the inner-structural, ontological distinction between whole and part, but rather on the outside-perceptional, cognition-relative distinction between system and environment, and considered second-order observation (the observation of other observers) based on the latter’s distinction as the task of systems theory. In this sense, the history of sociology should be rewritten to treat Luhmann’s theory as belonging to the tradition of subjectivism: His social systems theory is, as it were, interpretative sociology that understands social systems (Soziale Systeme verstehende Soziologie) (Tada 2013a: chap. 10), which will be founded on phenomenology, as Weber’s interpretative sociology was treated by Schutz.

Note here that the term “subjective” does not mean “arbitrary” (random). As with the actor’s consciousness, a social system’s choice of meaning has its own consistency, which engenders stable, and therefore multiple, social realities, which differ across systems. Hence, we should ask what condition enables such consistent choices. From a phenomenological standpoint, time is the answer. Phenomena appearing to a social system through the intentionality of communication from moment to moment could be called social phenomena, in contrast with conscious phenomena, which are weighted in relation to the system’s own past and future, and are thus selected as meaningful units in the present. The eigen time that a system has itself constructed via self-reproduction orders possibilities, and determines the quality of a current reality perception as a “now and so,” which varies from system to system.

The complex world of meaning is itself atemporal and chaotic, because all possibilities simultaneously exist there, with equal probability to be actualized. If one were an omnipotent observer (like God), one could actualize all such possibilities at once: This describes the eternal space in which all are simultaneously com-present. Every empirical observer living in mundanity, however, has to make a choice. Choosing is compelled, and an initial choice must somehow be (contingently) made. It then creates a small ditch in the dead, flat world of equiprobable meanings, and, as a water channel, orients subsequent choosing operations. In a theoretical word, a path-dependency occurs in meaning choice. Because of this dependency, the ditch becomes increasingly deep and firm, leading to the formation of a river, and stretches to further horizons. Just the same, other rivers of varying size and shape are also formed here and there (not only through gradual changes but sometimes with sporadic cataclysms as well). Consequently, a poly-contextual and multidimensional landscape of social realities emerges, with many ups and downs. This landscape could have been intrinsically otherwise as well, but for people of natural attitudes, it has already become accepted, familiar, self-evident scenery.

This ditch’s flow, which carves itself into the complex world of meaning, is none other than a self-referential system, or time itself that the system continuously self-produces. Well-known metaphors such as duration or streams describe this state of affairs: A system is not in time, nor is it a system that first exists and then has time, but rather, a system is time (Tada, 2013a: 515). Therefore, a second-order observer of other self-referential systems’ observations should, to borrow from Bergson, see “all things sub specie duration (sub specie durationis)” (Bergson, 1934: 162, 199), not sub specie aeternitatis. If digging deeper, theoretically, into a social system’s self-reference, one should have noted that temporality underlies it. Time plays an essential role in enabling a system to converge through the entanglement of definite meanings in a chaotic world. The emergence of units of meaning in the present can constitute order, not randomness, insofar as they are accompanied by eigen time, which stretches toward past and future horizons; Eigen time is a certain system-state in the present, and provides a fringe or background for orderly emergence of instantaneous system-events. That is, the unit of meaning in a “now and so” is a function of the system’s eigen time. ¹² Such a unit quickly disappears, becoming part of eigen time again, and then continues to determine other units of meaning.

The symmetry or simultaneity of non-biased, equiprobable possibilities thus breaks, and an island of the spontaneous time order emerges in the atemporal world. Whereas a non-biased state is the chaotic world dominated by randomness, the significant bias of probabilities of possible events is an order (a regularity), i.e. a system (Tada, 2013a: 254–256). In this context, time is also a solution to the problem of social order: In the initial random state, any event is characterized by an improbability (Unwahrscheinlichkeit) of being actualized, because an infinitely large number of possible events with equal probability of occurrence are simultaneously com-present. There is no weighting among them yet (hence, a hundred percent must be equally divided between infinite possible events, so to speak). However, once a system is (contingently) formed, it always makes a particular choice of meaning in the present more probable (wahrscheinlich) by referring to its own past or future. A system constitutes itself as an autonomous, self-referential order in this way. For this reason, time plays a fundamental role in the understanding of meaning in the present. A probable choice of meaning always refers to the system’s own temporality: A choice can be meaningful, not chaotic, only if it is consistent with a fringe, that is, the system’s time.

Further perspective: Time and freedom

It is said that the task of sociology is to doubt that which is self-evident. This recognition has itself become so self-evident to sociologists today that it is never doubted. But how can one originally doubt what is self-evident? This question requires theoretical reflection, and, in a sense, that has been the intended purpose of the discussion so far. A reality that appears self-evident to a first-order observer is a correlative of her/his subjectivity or self-referentiality, and is therefore only one reality selected from unlimited possibilities: It could have been otherwise. What sociological observers are actually attempting to achieve with the slogan “doubting self-evidence” is an understanding of how a first-order observer has meaningfully chosen a reality in the now and so, and we argued above that for this reason, time has to be a basic concept of sociology.

According to Schutz, what interests an observer of the social world is “neither the interpretation of what is expressed, namely, the ideal objectiveness of expression, nor its meaning remaining invariant no matter who posits the expression. Rather, an observer of the social world attempts to interpret a phenomenon that the very A [a particular person who is neither B nor C] performed this positing now, here, and so” (Schütz, 1932: 32, emphasis original). Indeed, modernity should be characterized not by the congruence of cognitive perspectives, but by their interindividual differences, that is, by the multiplicity of cognized realities. Here again, such differentiated realities derive from eigen times. Even if several observers see the world at the very same time and from the very same spatial position and angle, the meanings of reality must appear to be different to the observers, because their self-produced eigen times have inevitably formed their individualities.

The theoretical advance from Schutz to Luhmann lies in that the latter enables us to think about the problem of meaning at the social level. It is true that Schutz pointed out the temporal foundation of subjective meaning, which Weber had overlooked, but he still conveyed 19th century positivist reductionism: The social is reduced to a lower level, that is, individual actors. Conversely, in Luhmann’s social systems theory, one can avoid such a reduction and consider the social in terms of itself by starting from communicative intentionality. In other words, one can understand not the subjective construction, but the social construction of meaning under the aspect of the eigen time of social systems.

In fact, since time remained unnoticed for about a century after meaning was introduced as a basic concept of sociology, it will be significant today to observe society anew in light of its temporality. For instance, society should be more and more integrated spatially through globalization, but, as an actual feeling, it seems to be limitlessly subdividing. One might well be able to think that the context for this paradox is the differentiation between eigen times. All social systems exist in the present simultaneously, but they share neither an exactly identical past nor an exactly identical future, as long as they are closed and autonomous. Hence, the meaning of reality appears differently in different systems. Traditional values and norms, or even future hopes and ideals, function not as an integrating principle but as a differentiating one: Not something transcendental orients all systems uniformly from above, but systems respectively choose something transcendental in a “now and so” from below, based on their own eigen time. The transcendental is only a function of time. Choosing is always compelled.

From a different angle, however, this means that time is the basis of those self-referential systems’ freedom, both for conscious subjects (conscious systems) and for social systems. Each other’s direct interference or intersystem controls are prevented in principle by eigen time (Tada, 2013a: 554–556). Time enables a system to operate autonomously, thereby producing a diversity of meaningful choices in the present. Of course, systems could be externally forced to obey specified disciplines or to transform their organizations. However, even in such cases, it would still be sociologically significant to observe the pressure, resistance, conformity, and obedience through each system’s perspective, taking into account its eigen time. Even if a system looks as if it is being obedient with the other, there must remain the system’s eigen meaning as a now and so in eigen time; there also remain the seeds of possible disruption, variation, and different thinking.

Hence, the theory of social systems will primarily stake its principles on temporality. For instance, it is said that human and social sciences are in crisis today because of the political system’s “selection and concentration.” However, whereas transcendental phenomenology has pushed the eternal scientific (philosophical) ideal since ancient Greece, this systems theory consistently observes the political system in terms of time: It doubts the political vision of the future, clarifies its naive selectivity, and shows possible, much riskier different futures, that is, unintended consequences or blind spots that will be brought to an end only by pursuing the Galilean sciences. Even if reconciliation with the political system is impossible, ¹³ there still remains the possibility of bringing sociological enlightenment to it by appealing to the time horizons. The chance to alter the flow’s direction is not zero.

However, such a radical temporalization of theoretical thought would also require that human and social scientists self-reflect. Above all, the 1890s’ “revolt against positivism” must first be revised. Bergson once said that modern science should be defined by “its aspiration to take time as an independent variable” (Bergson, [1907] 1940: 335, emphasis original), but today’s natural sciences have utterly different perspectives on time and world. For instance, Einstein’s theory of relativity has already proven that time is never an absolute being independent of reference systems. Quantum mechanics has also converted the causal-determinist worldview based on the assumption of perpetually fixed before-and-after relations into an opposite assumption of coming and ongoing momentary events described only in terms of probability. Furthermore, the study of thermodynamics has revealed that irreversible temporality, that is, asymmetry between the past and the future—the distinction that emerged as the leading semantics of time in modern society—exists in the realm of nature, too. As Barbara Adam points out, “most of what social scientists preserve exclusively for the human realm is generalised throughout nature” (Adam, 1990: 150).

The problems of meaning and time are concerned with the essential part of human existence; therefore, humanists and social scientists tend to believe that they themselves are superior to the natural sciences in this regard. In reality, however, it would more likely be humanists and social scientists that dualistically distinguish between natural time and human social time, and still maintain a 19th-century view about the former (see Adam, 1990: 49–69, 152). Such a stereotypical image of the natural sciences and an anthropocentric worldview can no longer be presupposed as self-evident. While natural scientists have advanced their research forefront by opening themselves up to findings that go against their intuitions or common sense, humanists and social scientists have often fallen into a fruitless ditch in which they only repeat the cliché “eternal scientific (philosophical) ideal” as justification, being obsessed with prejudiced views of the natural sciences. ¹⁴ They will have to enlighten themselves and become free from their outdated mind-sets if they genuinely want to stake their own principles in temporality and to make human and social sciences relevant to the future. Human and social sciences are also temporal systems. For academic autonomy and advancement, they must continuously revise their own temporal structures by reflecting that their own views are merely a choice in a now and so.