Alfred Schütz, “Husserls Bedeutung für die Sozialwissenschaften” (1959)

This file is a single scholarly essay: Schütz’s compact assessment of what Husserl can and cannot contribute to the foundations of the social sciences. Its governing distinction is sharp from the outset. Husserl did not solve social-scientific problems directly, yet his analyses of intersubjectivity, time-consciousness, appresentation, typification, and the life-world supply indispensable conceptual tools.

Husserl war mit den konkreten Problemen der Sozialwissenschaften nicht vertraut.

English translation: Husserl was not familiar with the concrete problems of the social sciences.

Schütz first clears away inadequate appropriations of phenomenology. Edith Stein and Gerda Walther, in his view, too readily applied eidetic reduction to unclarified common-sense and social-scientific notions, producing dubious “a priori” claims about community and state. Scheler is treated more ambivalently: his early idea of a “Gesamtperson” leaves collective acts obscure, but his later work on sympathy, philosophical anthropology, and the “relativ-natürliche Weltanschauung” moves closer to a viable phenomenological sociology. Merleau-Ponty is read as similarly recognizing the social not merely as object but as lived situation. Ortega y Gasset then becomes Schütz’s strongest foil: by insisting on the ego’s radical solitude and rejecting Husserl’s analogical constitution of the alter ego, Ortega exposes the unresolved circularity in appeals to a common surrounding world.

Diese Frage steht nach wie vor im Mittelpunkt jeder phänomenologischen Forschung, aber daß sie bisher keine hinreichende Lösung gefunden hat, beeinträchtigt nicht im geringsten die hervorragende Bedeutung des Husserlschen Lebenswerks für die Grundlegung der Sozialwissenschaften.

English translation: This question still stands at the center of every phenomenological inquiry, but the fact that it has thus far found no adequate solution in no way diminishes the outstanding significance of Husserl's life work for the foundation of the social sciences.

The essay’s decisive move is therefore not to defend Husserl’s transcendental theory of intersubjectivity, but to relocate his importance. Social science, Schütz argues, begins in the natural attitude, with actors born into an already organized sociocultural world. This world is not philosophically proven before it is lived; it is practically presupposed, navigated, communicated, and only later questioned.

Diese Welt ist ihnen vorgegeben und wird von ihnen als fraglos selbstverständlich hingenommen – „fraglos“ in dem Sinn, daß sie bis auf weiteres fraglos ist, aber jederzeit in Frage gestellt werden kann.

English translation: This world is pregiven to them and is taken by them as unquestionably self-evident—"unquestioned" in the sense that it is unquestioned until further notice, but can be called into question at any time.

From here Schütz links Husserl to Weber. If sociology seeks the subjective meaning of action, then it requires phenomenological clarification of action, meaning, understanding, temporality, and signs. The numbered middle section sketches this program: action as a projected plan requires Husserl’s theory of inner time-consciousness; action also presupposes a stock of knowledge sedimented from previous experience, structured by horizons, relevances, and idealizations such as “und so weiter” and “Ich kann immer wieder.” Choice depends on open and problematic possibilities. Face-to-face relations require analysis of “Here” and “There,” zones of reach, and the reciprocity of perspectives. Communication rests on appresentation: the other’s body, gestures, products, and cultural objects function as signs of another consciousness. Symbolic systems—language, myth, religion, art—belong to the social life-world and require analysis as socially derived yet world-constituting formations.

Max Weber hat gezeigt, daß alle Phänomene der soziokulturellen Welt in sozialem Handeln gründen und auf soziales Handeln zurückverwiesen werden können.

English translation: Max Weber has shown that all phenomena of the socio-cultural world are grounded in social action and can be traced back to social action.

Schütz’s most sociological theme is typification. The social world has dimensions of spatial, temporal, intimate, and anonymous distance; its actors interpret others through types of persons, roles, and courses of action, while also typifying themselves for communicative understanding. This is where phenomenology meets the sociology of knowledge: everyday typifications are historically concrete, socially approved, and unequally distributed within groups.

The conclusion states the essay’s thesis in its most programmatic form. Husserl’s failed or incomplete transcendental account of intersubjectivity is not the foundation social science needs. What it needs is a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude: an analysis of the life-world as the taken-for-granted field in which action, meaning, communication, institutions, and culture are constituted.

Zusammenfassend können wir sagen, daß die empirischen Sozialwissenschaften ihre eigentliche Grundlage nicht in einer transzendentalen Phänomenologie, sondern in einer konstitutiven Phänomenologie der natürlichen Einstellung finden werden.

English translation: In sum, we may say that the empirical social sciences will find their proper foundation not in a transcendental phenomenology, but in a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude.