Alfred Schütz’s essay reconstructs Sartre’s theory of intersubjectivity while arguing that its most brilliant analyses end in a practical solipsism. The article treats Sartre’s inquiry as separable from existentialism’s broader claims: even critics must acknowledge that the problem of the Other is where Sartre is strongest.
Sartre's pertinent inquiry represents the most valuable part of his thought
Schütz first follows Sartre’s rejection of both realism and idealism. Realism cannot prove that the visible body is a fellow mind; idealism cannot reduce the Other to my presentations, because gestures and conduct refer to an organizing unity beyond my experience. The issue is not an inference from signs but the disruption of my world by another center of experience.
The Other is not only he whom I see, but also he who sees me.
The middle sections survey Sartre’s criticisms of Husserl, Hegel, and Heidegger. Husserl makes the Other necessary to the constitution of the world, but, for Sartre, leaves the Other as a meaning within my intentional life rather than as an extramundane being. Hegel improves on this by making self-consciousness dependent on recognition, yet remains trapped in cognition and assumes a reconcilable reciprocity between consciousnesses. Heidegger’s Mitsein avoids epistemological proof, but its anonymous “being-with” does not explain concrete relations with Peter or Anny. Schütz presents Sartre’s own starting point as a return to the cogito, not to prove the Other, but to find him as a subject who affects my being.
Such a theory need not prove the Other’s existence, the affirmation of which is rooted in a “pre-ontological” understanding.
Sartre’s decisive phenomenon is the look. When another enters my perceptual field, the objects of my world are reorganized around a point of view not mine. I discover that I can be an object for another, and this possibility reveals the Other as subject. Shame, pride, and uneasiness are not added psychological reactions; they disclose my altered ontology.
The Other is he who looks at me.
This is why Sartre can say that my selfhood is never purely private. Under the gaze, my possibilities become visible as probabilities for another; my freedom is limited by an alien perspective. I am no longer simply the one for whom the world is arranged.
Thus my being for myself is from the outset also being-for-the-Other.
Schütz then outlines Sartre’s theory of the body. My body is first the lived center of orientation and action: I do not observe it as one thing among others, I am it. The Other’s body, by contrast, appears as meaningful conduct in a situation; Peter’s gesture is not a bodily sign behind which a hidden psyche must be inferred, but an intelligible act within a world. The third dimension arises when I experience my own body as seen by another and learn, through language and social intercourse, to conceive it as an object. This is also where Sartre rejects the classical appeal to analogy.
Analogy or similarity can never originally constitute the object-body of the Other and the objectivity of my own body.
Schütz’s critique turns on this point. He agrees that Husserl never fully constitutes a transcendental alter ego; Husserl explains how the fellow man appears within the mundane world, not how a coexisting transcendental subject is constituted. Yet Sartre’s solution is also defective, because it assumes the very interchangeability between my experience of the Other and his experience of me that intersubjectivity must explain. Sartre’s opposition between subject and object makes reciprocity unstable: either I am objectified by the Other, or I objectify him.
Against this, Schütz insists on the everyday social world in which persons understand one another as centers of meaningful action. The jealous lover at the keyhole is not merely transformed by being caught; before that, he already understands the observed person as acting freely in a situation. More decisively, speech requires co-performance, not domination or alienation.
Peter's activity of speaking presupposes Paul's activity of listening and vice versa.
The essay’s relevance lies here: Schütz redirects the alter-ego problem toward the foundations of social action. Sartre’s analyses of the gaze, shame, and embodiment are subtle and philosophically important, but they do not account for mutual orientation, communication, or the interpretive structures presupposed by the social sciences. Schütz’s final judgment follows from that critique.
Thus mutual interaction in freedom has no place within Sartre’s philosophy.
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