This file is a single-author scholarly review-essay in which Alfred Schütz presents Husserl’s posthumously edited Ideen II as a major transitional work: unfinished, internally strained, but decisive for phenomenology and especially for the foundations of the social sciences. Schütz first reconstructs the publication history, stressing that Husserl left the manuscript unpublished because the problem of intersubjectivity had not yet been satisfactorily solved. The essay then follows the architecture of Ideen II: material nature, animate nature, the spiritual/personalic world, and finally the ontological priority of spirit, before closing with critical objections.
Das Problem der Konstitution muß für alle materialen Regionen gelöst werden: für die Region des materiellen Dinges, der animalischen Natur und der des Geistes.
English translation: The problem of constitution must be solved for all material regions: for the region of the material thing, of animal nature, and of spirit.
Schütz’s central interpretive claim is that Ideen II radicalizes the problem of constitution. Material things are not simply given as substances behind appearances; their reality is constituted through lawful dependences among changing profiles, circumstances, and bodily perspectives. A thing’s “real” properties appear as stable only through patterns of variation and correction. Hence Schütz emphasizes Husserl’s link between thinghood and causality:
Substantialität, Realität und Kausalität sind deshalb untrennbar miteinander verbunden, und reale Eigenschaften sind eo ipso kausale Eigenschaften.
English translation: Substantiality, reality, and causality are therefore inseparably bound up with one another, and real properties are eo ipso causal properties.
The analysis then moves to animate nature. The psyche is never an isolated interiority but is incarnated in the lived body, which is both a physical object and the bearer of localized sensations, kinestheses, and voluntary movement. Schütz highlights the body as the hinge between perception, agency, and world: through the “Ich kann,” the subject encounters both its capacities and resistances.
The decisive transition comes with empathy and intersubjectivity. Other bodies are not merely physical things; they are apprehended as lived bodies expressing psychic life. Through this structure, the world ceases to be merely mine and becomes objectively shareable. Schütz presents this as the point at which Husserl’s theory of objectivity becomes inseparable from the theory of others:
Jede Objektivität setzt Intersubjektivität voraus; Normalität und Anomalität müssen auch mittels der Intersubjektivität neu interpretiert werden.
English translation: Every objectivity presupposes intersubjectivity; normality and anomaly must also be reinterpreted by means of intersubjectivity.
The third region, “Geist,” brings Schütz closest to his own later concerns. In the personalistic attitude, persons do not live among neutral physical objects but in a meaningful surrounding world of tools, works, institutions, signs, values, and other persons. Here causality is displaced by motivation. Action, understanding, and social relation are not explained by physical stimulus-response chains but by meaningful contexts of reasons, tendencies, habits, and purposes.
Die Motivation ist daher das Grundgesetz des geistigen Lebens.
English translation: Motivation is therefore the fundamental law of spiritual life.
This move grounds Schütz’s interest in Ideen II for the social sciences. Husserl’s analyses of communication, mutual understanding, common environment, and cultural objects point toward a phenomenology of the social world. Yet Schütz is also sharply critical: he argues that Husserl too quickly assumes communication and shared sociality, without adequately explaining the prior social relation that makes communication possible.
The essay’s final systematic emphasis is Husserl’s claim that spirit has ontological priority over nature. Nature is constituted as meaningful within consciousness and intersubjectivity; spirit cannot be reduced to natural causality without destroying the very source of nature’s sense.
Die Natur ist prinzipiell relativ, der Geist prinzipiell irrelativ (absolut).
English translation: Nature is in principle relative, spirit in principle non-relative (absolute).
Schütz’s critical section is not a rejection but a map of unresolved problems: the ambiguity of “normal” perception, the unstable distinction among ego-concepts, the obscurity of empathy, the relation between motivation and psychic dependence, and the weak treatment of social collectivities. His final judgment is balanced: Ideen II is unfinished and sometimes inconsistent, but indispensable because it exposes the very problems later phenomenology and social theory must confront.
Zweifellos ist dieses Werk von Husserl voll tiefster Einsichten in die Grundlagen der Sozialwissenschaften.
English translation: There is no doubt that this work by Husserl is full of the profoundest insights into the foundations of the social sciences.
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