When We Think We Have Understood Each Other

What Husserl and Alfred Schütz can teach us about what we take for granted in everyday life

The woman is standing in the hallway with her coat on. Her handbag hangs over her arm, and a bag of empty bottles stands beside the door. When the home care worker arrives, she hands him her shopping list.

“Shall we get going, then?”

He pauses.

“I’m doing your shopping for you today. You can sit down and wait.”

She draws the list back a little.

“I thought we were going together.”

Both have acted on an arrangement for help with shopping. Yet they have prepared for different events. He is there to carry out a task. She is going out.

Good care requires the person providing it to explore what the situation means to the other person, even when the arrangement seems clear. Alfred Schütz can help us understand why this is so easily overlooked: everyday life works because people take a great deal for granted. But what one person takes for granted is not always shared by another.

From Husserl’s lifeworld to everyday interaction

For Husserl, the lifeworld is the world of experience that precedes science and on which scientific activity also depends. Before anyone measures the distance to the shop, someone already knows the route as short or long, safe or demanding. Before a situation is described in professional terms, it already has meaning for those living through it.

In The Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl explores how scientific idealisations can obscure this grounding in experience. The problem arises when a description is taken to be the whole of reality and its connection to the lived world is forgotten.

Schütz directs this attention towards social life. Drawing on Husserl’s phenomenology and Max Weber’s interpretive sociology, he examines how people understand actions and make everyday life work.

It is a life full of small expectations. Someone joining a queue assumes that the others know what the queue means. Someone asking for help expects that another person has understood what that help is meant to make possible. Usually, none of this needs to be explained.

In the woman’s hallway, just such an expectation has broken down.

The shopping list and the coat

The care worker sees the list and recognises a task. He has shopped for other people before. He knows how the visit usually goes: collect the list, buy the groceries, put them away.

This recognition is necessary. His working day would become impossible if every situation had to be understood from scratch. Experience gives him a stock of knowledge to draw on.

But experience also leads him to place the situation quickly within a familiar category. This is what Schütz calls typification: people understand what they encounter through something they already know.

The woman does the same. She has been told that she will receive help with shopping. To her, this means that someone will accompany her and carry what she can no longer carry herself. She has shopped this way with her daughter many times.

Both are following a familiar pattern. Their patterns are different.

The care worker’s understanding brings the shopping list into focus. The woman’s understanding also gives significance to her coat and handbag. They are signs of what she has prepared for, but signs he has not yet read.

Experience helps a person to see. It can also bring that looking to an end too soon.

What is at stake

In this imagined situation, the woman has been looking forward to the outing since the day before. She wants to choose her own bread and see which apples are available. A man at the checkout usually asks how she is. On the way home, she wants to find out whether the autumn air feels as cool as it looks through the window.

For her, shopping involves more than the items on the list.

The care worker has a different morning ahead of him. After this visit, he must go on to other people who are also waiting. He knows that an early delay can follow him through the rest of his shift. When he looks at the clock, he is thinking of them.

Here, Schütz’s understanding of relevance becomes concrete. A situation contains many things, but those involved direct their attention towards what matters to their own concerns and purposes.

The care worker notices how quickly the shopping could be done. The woman notices that he does not take the bag of empty bottles.

The clock and the waiting belong to the same situation. They give it a different weight.

Neither person is being unreasonable. But if only the care worker’s concerns shape the visit, the woman’s morning will be organised around an understanding she does not share.

Meaning cannot be read from the outside

Schütz distinguishes between what someone acts in order to achieve and the background of experience that helps explain why that particular aim matters.

The woman has put on her coat in order to go to the shop. The outing gives her an opportunity to choose, meet someone and take part in something outside her home. Its importance is connected to the life she has lived and the everyday life she now has.

She has done her own shopping throughout a long adult life. Since walking became more difficult, other people have taken over several of her usual activities. Going to the shop is one of the few she still imagines herself taking part in.

The care worker cannot know this simply by seeing her standing in the hallway.

Nor does her disappointment tell him precisely what is at stake. She may be disappointed about losing the outing, anxious about being left alone, or annoyed that someone has made a decision without asking her. He must give her an opportunity to explain.

What she tells him may also need clarification. People do not always have a ready explanation for their own wishes. Sometimes, what matters most only becomes clear when someone listens long enough.

When one understanding becomes the record

After the visit, the care worker must document what happened. Here, the difference between their understandings takes on a new significance.

He might write: “The service user had misunderstood the arrangement and expected to be accompanied to the shop.”

The sentence sounds matter-of-fact. Yet it determines who understood correctly. The care worker’s interpretation becomes the standard, while the woman’s expectation becomes a departure from it that needs explaining.

Another formulation leaves the situation open: “She had understood the arrangement to mean that someone would accompany her to the shop. I had understood the task as shopping on her behalf. We need to clarify what the support should include.”

The difference is small in words and large in effect. The first account places the misunderstanding with her. The second shows that two understandings have met without fitting together.

The care record is more than a reminder of the visit. It becomes something the next worker reads before ringing the doorbell. An interpretation can thus outlive the conversation from which it arose.

The account can make it easier to approach the woman with an open mind. It can also mean that the next care worker already expects to meet someone who misunderstands.

There is a form of power here that requires neither harsh words nor bad intentions. Whoever gets to describe the situation gains influence over how others will later understand it.

Understanding before deciding

Schütz analyses how social understanding becomes possible. The ethical obligation requires a further step: when one party has greater authority to define the situation, that party also has a particular responsibility to examine their own understanding.

This does not mean that the home care service can always give the woman the outing she wants. Other people need help, the working day has limits, and a shared shopping trip may require a different arrangement.

But there is a difference between declining a wish that has been understood and organising support without discovering that the wish exists.

An understood wish can be considered. It can provide the basis for a new arrangement or reveal that the service leaves something important in her everyday life unmet. An undiscovered wish leaves scarcely a trace. The groceries go into the cupboard, the task is recorded as completed, and she remains at home.

For the person providing help, it is therefore necessary to pause at whatever does not fit their expectations. The shopping list drawn back. The coat still on. The sentence revealing that the arrangement was not so clear after all.

The care worker puts down the list and looks at her:

“What had you imagined we would do today?