Human Studies 14: 181-198, 1991. 9 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. "Paramount reality" in Schutz and Gurwitsch ELIZABETH SUZANNE KASSAB Fakultiitfiir Soziologie, Universitiit Bielefeld, PosOCach 8640, D-4800 Bielefeld 1, Germany 1. Daily life as paramount reality in the Schutz-Gurwitsch debate The issue of the manifold character of reality occupies a central place in the Schutz-Gurwitsch debate. Indeed, it is with respect to the notion of Multiple Realities that Gurwitsch presents in The Field of Consciousness (hereafter referred to as FC) a critical discussion of Schutz' thought (Gurwitsch, 1964: 342, 399), comparing it with his own notion of the various "orders of existence". The issue of Multiple Realities is also the one which inspires Gurwitsch to formulate the metaphor of the tunnel in his correspondence with Schutz (Grathoff, 1989: 75), in order to illustrate the converging paths of their respective researches. In reaction to Schutz' newly published article "On Multiple Realities" (Schutz, 1945) in 1945, Gurwitsch writes in September of that year (Grathoff, 1989: 75): But I also have my personal reasons to take pleasure in your work. Myself digging a tunnel, I hear the knocking which announces the worker from the other side. What you call 'multiple realities' is called 'orders of existence' in the chapter of my book ... To be sure, my way of posing the question is different: you use a few paradigmatic examples to demonstrate the existence of multiple realities; I ask what constitutes the context (Zusammenhang) of an 'order of being' qua order. My answer is relevance, and this phenomenon is the object of investigation. We are not really as far from one another as it often appears to us, the half-undressed ones, in the heat of the debate and of the New York summer. You have my complete agreement with your exposition of the 'daily life world' as world of work. Once again, we come to the same result working from completely different ways of posing the problem. Indeed, both Schutz and Gurwitsch, maintain that reality as experienced is a unity of diverse spheres and orders among which one realm is to be charac- terized as "paramount reality" - a term borrowed by both from William James (James, 1890/195011: 283-324) - as, so to say, the "most real"; and