Alfred Schütz · 1957
Schütz’s 1957 essay is a compact immanent critique of Husserl’s attempt to derive alter ego, objective world, and “world for everyone” from transcendental subjectivity. Its thesis is not that Husserl misplaced the problem: Schütz stresses that intersubjectivity is central from the beginning of phenomenology. The difficulty is rather that Husserl’s egological method cannot constitute the very shared world that it must already presuppose.
Schütz reconstructs the decisive argument through the fifth Cartesian Meditation. Husserl’s “second epoché” is meant to isolate a primordial sphere of ownness by bracketing everything foreign. Within that reduced sphere, the other body is supposed to be apprehended analogically as another living body; from there Husserl hopes to reach common nature, common time, communication, and finally the monadological community. Schütz’s recurring objection is that each step tacitly relies on what it claims to generate. To distinguish the foreign from the own already requires some prior sense of otherness, normality, and worldly co-presence.
His strongest phenomenological criticism concerns the analogy between my body and the other’s body. My body is not first given to me as one object among others; it is lived kinesthetically, as the operative center of orientation and action. The other’s body, by contrast, appears in the perceptual field as an external body. Thus the supposed similarity on which analogical transfer depends is already compromised.
Husserls Annahme einer analogisierenden Auffassung des fremden Leibes auf Grund einer Ähnlichkeit mit meinem eigenen Leib widerspricht dem phänomenologischen Befund, daß mein Leib in meinem primordialen Wahrnehmungsfeld in grundsätzlich anderer Weise „abgehoben“ ist als der darin auftretende, vorgeblich ähnliche, Körper des Anderen.
English translation: Husserl's assumption of an analogizing apprehension of the other's body on the basis of a similarity to my own body contradicts the phenomenological finding that my body, within my primordial perceptual field, is "set off" in a fundamentally different way from the ostensibly similar body of the Other appearing therein.
The same circularity appears when Husserl moves from the apprehension of another living body to a common objective world. Even if an alter ego were appresented, Schütz argues, this would not yet yield the other’s full stream of consciousness, primordial temporality, or world-horizon. Nor can communication supply the missing bridge, because communication already takes place in a shared environment of interpretable gestures, signs, and mutually oriented action.
Alle Kommunikation, ob es sich um eine sogenannte Ausdrucksbewegung, eine Zeigegeste, oder den Gebrauch visueller oder akustischer Zeichen handelt, setzt bereits einen äußeren Vorgang in eben jener gemeinsamen Umwelt voraus, die nach Husserl erst durch die Kommunikation konstituiert werden soll.
English translation: All communication—whether it involves a so-called expressive movement, a pointing gesture, or the use of visual or acoustic signs—already presupposes an external process within precisely that common environment which, according to Husserl, is only to be constituted through communication.
Schütz therefore extends the critique to Husserl’s accounts of social communities, cultural worlds, and “higher-order personalities.” For social theory, these cannot be built up from isolated monads that subsequently enter relation. The elementary phenomenon is already the We-relation: subjects encounter one another within a meaningful world that is practically, temporally, and communicatively shared before theoretical reflection begins.
Es steht zu vermuten, daß Intersubjektivität nicht ein innerhalb der transzendentalen Sphäre lösbares Problem der Konstitution, sondern eine Gegebenheit der Lebenswelt ist.
English translation: It is to be surmised that intersubjectivity is not a problem of constitution solvable within the transcendental sphere, but a datum of the life-world.
The essay’s conclusion is critical but not anti-phenomenological. Schütz does not reject constitution as clarification of intentional sense; he rejects its expansion into a transcendental production of others and of the world-for-all. Husserl’s achievement was to formulate the problem of intersubjective validity with unmatched rigor. Schütz’s correction is to relocate its ground from solitary transcendental subjectivity to the always already intersubjective lifeworld.
Die Kreation des Monadenalls und der objektiven Welt für jedermann erweist sich allerdings innerhalb der transzendentalen Subjektivität des meditierenden Philosophen, die ihm und ihm allein gelten soll, als unmöglich.
English translation: The creation of the universe of monads and of the objective world for everyone, however, proves impossible within the transcendental subjectivity of the meditating philosopher, which is supposed to hold for him and him alone.
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