Schütz analyzes ordinary deliberation: how an actor determines future conduct after considering possible courses. Choice is not a mechanical selection among fixed alternatives but a temporal-practical achievement. From a typified social world and a biographically sedimented stock of knowledge, the actor projects possible future acts, encounters doubt, and converts one project into a purpose by the voluntative “fiat.”
Our purpose is the analysis of the process by which an actor in daily life determines his future conduct after having considered several possible ways of action.
The essay begins by distinguishing “action,” ongoing conduct devised in advance, from the “act,” its accomplished outcome. A project becomes a purpose only when intention supervenes. Thus covert performance, overt conduct, and even purposive omission must be understood from the actor’s anticipatory standpoint: refraining can be an action when deliberately chosen.
The decisive move is temporal. Projecting does not first picture action phase by phase; it imagines the act as already accomplished and reconstructs the means that will have led to it.
What is thus anticipated in the project is, in our terminology, not the future action, but the future act, and it is anticipated in the Future Perfect Tense, modo futuri exacti.
Because the actor projects from present knowledge while the completed act belongs to a later situation and altered self, uncertainty is built in. The same time-structure yields Schütz’s motive distinction. The “in-order-to motive” is the future state to be achieved and motivates the “Let’s go!” The “because motive” belongs to the actor’s sedimented past and is grasped only retrospectively, by observer or self-observer.
This constitutes the intrinsic uncertainty of all forms of projecting.
Projecting also differs from fancying. Fantasy may ignore reality; a project must be practicable, compatible with what the actor takes to be feasible “at least as to its type.” Practicability rests on the socially shared world taken for granted, accepted “until further notice,” and on the actor’s biographically determined situation, which defines reach, control, imposition, and relevance.
Doubt arises when biography and interest make formerly unquestioned features of the world relevant in conflicting ways. Schütz uses Husserl’s distinction between open and problematic possibilities: open possibilities are undetermined variants within a trusted frame; problematic possibilities contest one another and acquire weight. Only then is choice possible.
I can choose only between projects which stand to choice.
Choosing between objects is simpler: A and B coexist in outer time as ready-made alternatives. Social science often idealizes action as if actors always faced such defined alternatives, as in sociology’s “definition of the situation” or economics’ marginal principle. Projects, however, do not coexist like objects. They are successively produced in inner time; returning to one means returning as a changed actor to a modified possibility.
Bergson helps Schütz reject the spatial image of choice as a fork in the road. In lived durée, ego, motives, and inclinations change through hesitation. Yet Bergson tells only half the story, because projects anticipate completed acts; these imagined acts gain a quasi-coexistence and so can stand to choice.
Each project to do something carries with it the problematic counterpossibility of not doing it.
Leibniz supplies Schütz with a vocabulary of volition. Recast without theology, antecedent, intermediate, and final volitions describe positive weights, counterweights, and the decisive “Let us start!” Weight is not inherent in an isolated project; it derives from higher-order systems of plans and interests—plans for the hour, work, leisure, or life. Every choice refers to prior choices, and full rational transparency is impossible because these systems partly belong to because-motives hidden from the actor absorbed in in-order-to motives.
Schütz concludes that daily life begins in a taken-for-granted world of open possibilities. Biography and interest select what matters. If no conflict arises, project becomes purpose as a matter of course; if doubt arises, selected possibilities become problematic and must be decided. Decision restores only practical, revisable certainty.
a certainty, but an empirical certainty
The essay’s relevance for social science lies in showing both the necessity and limits of objectifying models. Observers reconstruct motives from acts without sharing the actor’s exact stock of knowledge, relevance-structure, or inner time. Scientific idealizations may treat action as choice among unified alternatives, but Schütz shows that choice is generated within lived temporality, typification, biography, and the practical transformation of doubt into conduct.
This work was divided into 16 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 16 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian