Alfred Schütz, “Phänomenologie und die Sozialwissenschaften” (1940)

Genre and scope: This is a single-author philosophical-methodological essay with an attached 1939 programmatic draft (“I. Teil”) and the 1940 article (“II. Teil”). Its question is how Husserl’s phenomenology can ground the social sciences while preserving their mundane, natural-attitude orientation.

The draft states the governing thesis with stark economy:

Die phänomenologische Philosophie ist vor allem eine Philosophie des Menschen.

English translation: Phenomenological philosophy is above all a philosophy of man.

For Schütz, Husserl’s late thought matters because it restores the Lebenswelt as the meaning-ground forgotten by objectivist science. But the life-world is not a private field later supplemented by society; it is common from the start, constituted in reference to others and open to interpretation.

Die Lebenswelt und ihr Sinn sind also von vornherein auf den anderen bezogen: Es ist unsere gemeinsame Lebenswelt, ihr Sinn ist durch unsere gemeinsamen Leistungen gestiftet und uns gemeinsam zur Deutung aufgegeben.

English translation: The life-world and its meaning are thus from the outset referred to the other: it is our common life-world, its meaning is instituted through our common accomplishments, and it is given to us jointly for interpretation.

This immediately raises the problem of intersubjectivity. Schütz reconstructs Husserl’s fifth Cartesian Meditation—primordial sphere, lived body, pairing, appresentation, alter ego, and the constitution of an objective world—but the draft already doubts whether Husserl’s published solution overcomes solipsism. Schütz’s decisive move is to detach that transcendental difficulty from the direct field of the social sciences.

Alle Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaft ist nämlich prinzipiell mundan und nicht auf das transzendentale ego oder das transzendentale alter ego bezogen, sondern auf Phänomene der mundanen Intersubjektivität.

English translation: All cultural and social science is, in principle, mundane and refers not to the transcendental ego or the transcendental alter ego, but to phenomena of mundane intersubjectivity.

The 1940 article gives this claim its systematic form. It situates the issue in Husserl’s path from the Logical Investigations to Formal and Transcendental Logic, the Cartesian Meditations, and the Crisis, then asks four questions: how the natural attitude can remain phenomenology’s foundation; how the other can be understood; why mathematical natural science loses sight of its sense-foundation; and whether phenomenology can help the concrete methods of cultural inquiry. Schütz accepts the success of natural science, but follows Husserl in arguing that geometry, physics, and formal logic work through idealizations whose origin in pre-scientific experience is easily forgotten. When formulas and ideal objects replace the life-world that gives them sense, method is mistaken for being.

Social science must not copy that objectivism by treating psychic or cultural life as natural fact. Its foundation is an eidetic clarification of intentionality in the natural attitude: a descriptive analysis of acts together with their intended meanings, objects, horizons, and sedimented histories.

Eine solche echte Psychologie der Intentionalität ist aber nach Husserls Worten nichts anderes als eine konstitutive Phänomenologie der natürlichen Einstellung.

English translation: Such a genuine psychology of intentionality is, however, in Husserl's words, nothing other than a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude.

Schütz’s own sociology emerges in the second section. The everyday actor is born into a meaningful, historical, practical, and intersubjective world organized around the actor’s here-and-now, interests, relevance structures, stock of experience, familiarity and strangeness, and relations to Umwelt, Mitwelt, Vorwelt, and Folgewelt.

Mir, dem naiv in der Welt Lebenden, ist diese Welt, zentriert um das eigene Ich, zur Deutung aufgegeben.

English translation: To me, living naïvely in the world, this world, centred around my own ego, is given as a task for interpretation.

This world is built through reciprocal sense-bestowal and interpretation. I act expecting others to understand; I interpret their acts, tools, signs, and institutions by asking after the meaning they may have intended. Cultural objects are therefore sedimented meanings, not brute things.

So baut sich in diesen wechselseitigen Sinnsetzungs- und Sinndeutungsakten meine soziale Welt der mundanen Intersubjektivität auf, die auch die soziale Welt des Anderen ist, und auf der alle anderen Kulturphänomene fundiert sind.

English translation: Thus, in these reciprocal acts of meaning-positing and meaning-interpretation, my social world of mundane intersubjectivity is built up, which is also the social world of the other, and upon which all other cultural phenomena are founded.

The methodological conclusion is Weberian but phenomenologically sharpened. The social scientist adopts the attitude of the “uninterested observer” and substitutes a constructed zero-point—such as the economic actor or legal subject—for the actor’s own practical center. Ideal types are necessary transformations of life-world meaning, but they become false when reified.

Auch in den Kulturwissenschaften besteht die eminente Gefahr, daß ihre Idealisierungen (hier: Typologien) nicht als Methode, sondern als wahres Sein angesehen werden.

English translation: In the cultural sciences, too, there is the eminent danger that their idealizations (here: typologies) will be regarded not as a method, but as true being.

The essay’s relevance lies in this double lesson: against positivism, the social sciences must begin from a pre-interpreted world of actors’ meanings; against naïve Verstehen, those meanings require rigorous analysis of temporality, relevance, sedimentation, symbolization, and typification. Schütz thus turns Husserl’s phenomenology into a program for interpretive sociology while preserving the autonomy of mundane social science.