Alfred Schütz, “Edmund Husserls „Meditations Cartesiennes“” (1932)

Alfred Schütz’s 1932 review essay presents Husserl’s French Méditations cartésiennes as far more than an introductory text. It reconstructs the five meditations as a radical renewal of philosophy from transcendental subjectivity, while also marking their importance for the future of phenomenological social theory.

Das Buch, das sich im Untertitel bescheiden eine „Einleitung in die Phänomenologie“ nennt, unternimmt nichts weniger als eine Begründung der Philosophie von der absolut erkennenden transzendentalen Subjektivität her und die systematische Auslegung dieser transzendentalen Subjektivität in ihrer vollen Extension.

English translation: The book, which modestly calls itself in its subtitle an "Introduction to Phenomenology," undertakes nothing less than a grounding of philosophy from the absolutely cognizing transcendental subjectivity, and the systematic explication of this transcendental subjectivity in its full extension.

Schütz’s exposition begins with Husserl’s return to Descartes. The Cartesian beginning is not merely repeated but deepened: philosophy must suspend not only the factual claims of inherited sciences, but also the unquestioned ideal of science that guides them. The phenomenological ἐποχή brackets the validity of the world, the sciences, other subjects, and even the meditator’s own worldly-psychological self, in order to disclose the field in which all validity first has sense.

Soll der cartesianische Umsturz in aller Radikalität vollzogen werden, so muß in ihn nicht nur die faktische Geltung aller Wissenschaften, sondern auch deren Zweckidee einbezogen werden.

English translation: If the Cartesian overturning is to be carried through in all its radicality, then not only the factual validity of all sciences, but also their idea of purpose, must be drawn into it.

From there Schütz follows Husserl’s analysis of the ego cogito. The transcendental ego is not an empty point but the living flow of intentional consciousness, with its actual and possible cogitationes. Phenomenology is therefore distinguished from psychology: it does not describe inner events within a pregiven world, but investigates how world, object, and evidence are constituted as meaningful. The decisive method is the noetic-noematic correlation, through which every object is treated as the correlate of modes of consciousness.

„Gegenstände“ sind daher – in der reduzierten Sphäre sowohl als auch in der natürlichen Einstellung – nichts anderes als intentionale Korrelate ihrer Bewußtseinsweisen.

English translation: "Objects" are therefore – in the reduced sphere as well as in the natural attitude – nothing other than intentional correlates of their modes of consciousness.

The fourth meditation shifts from constituted objects to the constitution of the ego itself. Schütz stresses Husserl’s account of the ego as a pole of identity and as a substrate of habitualities: the self becomes what it is through sedimented acts, confirmations, cancellations, capacities, and styles of comportment. Husserl’s “monad” names this ego in its concreteness, including its actual and potential life, its constituted world, and its passive and active genesis. Here Schütz emphasizes the importance of eidetic variation, association, inner time-consciousness, and genetic phenomenology. Transcendental idealism is not a denial of the world, but an inquiry into the intentional life in which the world can appear as valid.

The fifth meditation is, for Schütz, the boldest and most difficult part of the book because it confronts the problem of the Other. If reduction leads back to my transcendental ego, Husserl must still explain how an objective world—one and the same world for everyone—can be constituted. The analysis proceeds through the sphere of ownness, primordial nature, the special status of my lived body, and the analogical apprehension of another body as a living body. Through pairing and appresentation, the alter ego is constituted without being collapsed into my own ego.

Schütz sees this analysis as the decisive passage from transcendental subjectivity to intersubjectivity. Objectivity rests on the possibility that the same nature can be experienced through my perspectives and through those of others. From the first ego–alter ego relation, Husserl can then derive community, social acts, higher-order personalities, cultural objects, and historical worlds. Schütz’s own distinctive interest emerges here: Husserl’s unfinished program points toward an eidetic social science that would analyze the a priori structures of social meaning, social action, and communal formations.

The essay’s significance lies in this bridge. Schütz reads Husserl not as offering an abstract epistemology alone, but as grounding the analysis of meaning, world, embodiment, otherness, community, and culture. Its movement mirrors Husserl’s own: Cartesian beginning, reduction, intentional analysis, egoic genesis, intersubjectivity, and future research. Philosophy begins by suspending the world’s naïve validity, yet the path back to transcendental subjectivity ultimately opens onto the shared and social world.