Alfred Schütz · 1953
This file is a scholarly review-essay by Alfred Schütz, presenting Husserl’s Ideen III as an early but unusually unified manuscript on the phenomenological grounding of empirical science. Schütz’s main thesis is that the volume clarifies how regional ontologies, rational psychology, and transcendental phenomenology relate to one another, and why empirical sciences require eidetic clarification of their basic concepts.
Der vorliegende Band, den wir kurz „Ideen III" nennen, basiert auf dem Manuskript von 1912, das zur gleichen Zeit wie die „Ideen I" entworfen wurde und – anders wie die Manuskripte des zweiten Bandes – nie vom Autor oder seinen Assistenten umgeschrieben wurde.
English translation: The present volume, which we shall briefly call "Ideas III," is based on the manuscript of 1912, drafted at the same time as "Ideas I" and—unlike the manuscripts of the second volume—never rewritten by the author or his assistants.
The essay follows Husserl’s structure closely. The first chapter distinguishes regions of reality: material thing, animated body, and soul. Schütz stresses that material reality is not substance in the Cartesian sense, but something constituted through causal relations and intersubjective confirmation.
Die Objektivität der Natur wird nur im einheitlichen raum-zeitlichen Kausalzusammenhang der Erlebnisse einer Mehrheit von Ich konstituiert, die vermittels ihrer Leiber in wechselseitige Kommunikation miteinander treten.
English translation: The objectivity of nature is constituted only in the unified spatio-temporal causal nexus of the experiences of a plurality of egos who, by means of their bodies, enter into reciprocal communication with one another.
This move is crucial for the social sciences: objectivity already presupposes embodied subjects in communication. The body is then treated not merely as matter, but as the bearer of localized sensations; the soul is the unity of conscious life founded upon bodily existence.
Die Seele als die Einheit dieser Erlebnisse, welche unter den Titel des Bewußtseins fallen, ist eine eigene Realität, obwohl sie immer auf die Realität des Leibes gegründet ist, der wiederum auf der Realität der materiellen Dinge basiert.
English translation: The soul, as the unity of those experiences which fall under the heading of consciousness, is a reality of its own, although it is always grounded in the reality of the body, which in turn is based on the reality of material things.
The second chapter turns to psychology and phenomenology. Schütz presents Husserl’s argument that empirical sciences operate within a priori regional structures they cannot themselves ground. Thus psychology needs a rational, eidetic counterpart, but phenomenology does not compete with experimental psychology; it clarifies its foundations.
Überall geht die eidetische Wissenschaft (im Sinn der Fundierung, nicht genetisch) der empirischen voraus.
English translation: Everywhere the eidetic science (in the sense of foundation, not genetically) precedes the empirical.
Schütz sharply separates phenomenology from ordinary descriptive psychology. Description in empirical psychology still concerns real states of real beings, while phenomenology investigates the field of possibility within which such realities can appear.
Die phänomenologische Beschreibung bezieht sich aber nicht auf Existenz und das reale Erlebnis der Existenz. Ihr Ziel ist die Untersuchung des apodiktisch gesetzten Rahmens von Möglichkeiten, innerhalb derer die empirischen Realitäten auftauchen.
English translation: Phenomenological description, however, does not refer to existence or to the real experience of existence. Its aim is the investigation of the apodictically posited framework of possibilities within which empirical realities emerge.
The third chapter addresses a methodological difficulty: transcendental reduction brackets transcendent being, yet ontologies seem to reappear as eidetic structures within pure consciousness. Husserl’s solution, as Schütz reconstructs it, depends on distinguishing ontological judgment about beings from phenomenological judgment about noemata. The key conceptual move is the separation of meaning-positing from object-positing.
Wir müssen zwischen dem Bedeutungs-Setzen und dem Setzen eines Gegenstandes unterscheiden.
English translation: We must distinguish between the positing of meaning and the positing of an object.
The final chapter concerns Klärung, clarification. Schütz presents it as the culminating phenomenological method: science must be led back from symbolic, technically useful constructions to intuitive givenness and transparent concepts. This applies first to formal concepts, then to regional concepts, and finally to material specifications within regions.
Die höchst dringende Aufgabe ist die, die Wissenschaften auf ihren Ursprung zurückzuführen und sie durch die intuitive Methode der Klärung in Systeme verständlichen Wissens zu verwandeln.
English translation: The most urgent task is to trace the sciences back to their origin and, through the intuitive method of clarification, to transform them into systems of intelligible knowledge.
The essay’s relevance lies in showing how Husserl’s phenomenology can ground the sciences without replacing them. For Schütz, Ideen III matters because it formulates the program of a rigorous clarification of the regions—nature, body, psyche, and consciousness—within which scientific knowledge becomes possible.
So ist die Phänomenologie der Nährboden, aus dem alle ontologischen Einsichten erwachsen.
English translation: Thus phenomenology is the fertile soil from which all ontological insights grow.
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