Alfred Schütz · 1942
Genre and scope: despite collected-volume page headers, the supplied file is a single 1942 scholarly essay by Alfred Schütz; no contributor-chapter structure is present. Its seven sections reconstruct Scheler’s theory of intersubjectivity and replace it with Schütz’s own “Generalthese vom alter ego.”
Sections I–II reconstruct Scheler’s anthropology. Schütz moves from Scheler’s hierarchy of psychic life—drive, instinct, associative memory, practical intelligence, and spirit—to the distinction between objectifiable ego and unobjectifiable person. The human being is not defined by intelligence alone but by spirit, freedom from environment, and the capacity to objectify world and self. Yet this makes the problem of the other acute:
Die Person existiert ausschließlich in der Ausführung ihrer Handlungen.
English translation: The person exists exclusively in the execution of his acts.
If personhood is act rather than thing, another person cannot be reached by treating bodily movement as an external clue to an inner soul. The other must be approached through acting-with, co-executing, or following acts.
Section III presents Scheler’s achievement: he separates the alter-ego problem into ontological, epistemological, constitutive, empirical-psychological, metaphysical, and axiological questions. Scheler rejects both analogical inference and empathy. We do not first inspect our own inner states, observe similar movements in another body, and infer a second consciousness; expression is originally meaningful, and doubt comes later.
Wir beginnen erst da zu „schließen“, wo wir meinen, unserer Wahrnehmung der Erlebnisse des Anderen mißtrauen zu müssen, wo wir also zum Beispiel das Gefühl haben, ihn nicht zu verstehen, oder entdecken, daß wir einen Geisteskranken vor uns haben.
English translation: We begin to "infer" only where we believe we must distrust our perception of the Other's experiences—where, for instance, we have the feeling that we do not understand him, or discover that we have a mentally ill person before us.
Schütz values this anti-inferential insight, but argues that Scheler overreaches when he treats an undifferentiated supra-individual stream of experience as if it solved the constitutive problem.
Sections IV–V carry out Schütz’s critique and transformation. Scheler correctly distinguishes levels of analysis, yet answers transcendental questions with metaphysical hypotheses and empirical references to developmental or cultural evidence. Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation is also judged insufficient, because the reduction cannot simply subtract all reference to others from a lifeworld already intersubjectively meaningful. Schütz therefore suspends the transcendental problem and turns to the mundane natural attitude.
Wir sind in eine Welt von Anderen einfach hineingeboren, und solange wir in der natürlichen Einstellung verharren, wird uns die Existenz vernunftbegabter Mitmenschen nicht zweifelhaft.
English translation: We are simply born into a world of Others, and so long as we remain in the natural attitude, the existence of rational fellow human beings does not become doubtful to us.
This is not a logical proof of other minds but a phenomenology of ordinary life: before philosophy demands certainty, people already encounter, address, and understand one another.
Schütz’s core conceptual move is temporal. In practical life I am directed toward objects and future possibilities; in reflection I grasp my own act only after it has elapsed. The self is therefore not first given as a present object.
Mit anderen Worten, Selbstbewußtsein kann es nur modo praeterito, also in vergangener Zeitform geben.
English translation: In other words, self-consciousness can only exist modo praeterito, that is, in the past tense.
By contrast, another’s speaking, acting, playing, or responding can be followed in a shared living present. The alter ego is not a hidden substance inferred from the body, but another stream encountered as simultaneous with mine.
Das alter ego ist der subjektive Gedankenstrom, der in seiner lebendigen Gegenwart erlebt werden kann.
English translation: The alter ego is the subjective stream of thought which can be experienced in its living present.
Thus Schütz preserves Scheler’s priority of the “we” without adopting a collective-consciousness metaphysics: the “we” is co-presence, a shared aging together, while the explicit “I” arises through reflective return.
Sections VI–VII refine the implications. Whether the other is “perceived” depends on how perception is defined; the existence of the other belongs to the immediate “we,” while claims about particular thoughts remain fallible. Bodies, signs, tools, artworks, and institutions are sedimented performances through which another subjectivity can be reactivated. Schütz ends by extending Husserl’s here/there analysis into a broader theory of perspectives—spatial, temporal, social, and personal. The essay’s relevance lies in grounding psychology and social science in this mundane, temporal intersubjectivity.
Jede empirische Psychologie und alle Sozialwissenschaften setzen diese Lösung aber als selbstverständlich voraus.
English translation: But all empirical psychology and all the social sciences presuppose this solution as self-evident.
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