ABSTRACT
All interpretation of this world is based upon a stock of previous experience of it, our own experiences and those handed down to us by parents and teachers, which in the form of ‘knowledge at hand’, function as a scheme of references. To this stock of experiences at hand belongs our knowledge that the world we live in is a world of well circumscribed objects with definite qualities, objects among which we move, which resist us and upon which we may act. Philosophical or psychological analysis of the constitution of our experiences may afterwards, retrospectively, describe how elements of this world affect our senses, how we passively perceive them in an indistinct and confused way, how by active apperception our mind singles out certain features from the perceptional field, conceiving them as well delineated things which stand over against a more or less unarticulated background or horizon. The natural attitude does not know these problems. To it, the world is from the outset not the private world of a single individual, but an intersubjective world, common to all of us, in which we have not a theoretical but an eminently practical interest. The world of everyday life is the scene and also the object of our actions and interactions. We have to dominate it and we have to change it in order to realize the purpose which we pursue within it among our fellow men. We work not only within but upon the world. Our bodily movements-kinaesthetic, locomotive, operative-gear, so to speak, into the world modifying or changing its objects and their mutual relationships. On the other hand, these objects offer resistance to our acts which we have either to overcome or to which we have to yield. Thus, it may be correctly said that a pragmatic motive governs our natural attitudes towards the world of daily life. World in this sense is something that we have to modify by our actions or that modifies our actions (On Multiple Realities, Alfred Schutz).
