Schütz begins with Tiresias as a limiting fiction for a phenomenology of anticipation. The seer knows “things to come” while blind to the present; his knowledge is certain, private, and powerless, verifiable only when others later live through what he has seen. The myth separates knowledge from the conditions that make it human: action, interest, and intersubjective confirmation.
"A fearful thing is knowledge, when to know helpeth no end," says Tiresias in Sophocles' Oedipus, King of Thebes.
The first section tests possible structures of prophetic consciousness. If Tiresias experiences the future as an oncoming flux, he can have only open anticipations and likelihoods. If he knows it like a playwright, he would be creator of what he foresees. If he knows it like a historian, then he foretells not what will happen but what “will have happened.” None of these models explains conditional prophecy or the apparent gaps in seercraft. The point is to show that perfect future knowledge in a finite mind is incoherent.
Tiresias is neither a Laplacian demon nor an ordinary human being.
Schütz then turns to ordinary life in Husserl’s Lebenswelt. Unlike Tiresias, we anticipate from a “stock of knowledge at hand,” we care practically about what is coming, and our knowledge is social. Much of what I know derives from others’ communicated experience, and everyday prediction depends on assuming partial congruence among our stocks of knowledge: institutions, calendars, markets, and routines are expected because others act from similar typical motives.
The Lebenswelt of man is from the outset socialized, one world common to all.
The central conceptual move is Schütz’s account of this stock of knowledge. It is sedimented from past experience, unevenly structured, and organized by relevance: the present problem determines what must be clear and what may remain vague. Recognition itself is typifying; we encounter events and objects as instances of familiar styles, not as isolated data. Anticipation therefore projects future occurrences only as types. Husserl’s everyday idealizations express this confidence in typical continuity: “and so forth and so on” and “I can do it again.”
Yet these assumptions hold only until counter-evidence appears. Future horizons are empty and may be fulfilled or may “explode.” Because events arrive in their own unique contexts, and because our interests change before they arrive, common-sense expectation can match reality only retrospectively and typologically: “whatever occurs could not have been expected precisely as it occurs.”
This also distinguishes common sense from science without making science absolute. Scientific prediction has a more homogeneous, methodically controlled stock of knowledge, but its certainty too remains hypothetical, “certainty until further notice.”
The essay’s decisive extension concerns action. Some future events are imposed on us; toward them we are interested spectators, governed by hopes and fears. Other events seem controllable, and toward them we form projects. A project is not mere fantasy but fantasy motivated by an intention to act and constrained by what now seems performable. Schütz argues that we do not primarily imagine the future action phase by phase; we imagine the completed act and then reconstruct the steps that will have produced it. Projecting thus works in the future perfect, modo futuri exacti: “not the future action, but the future act.”
Projects bind relevant past sedimentations to anticipated future accomplishments, giving shape to the “specious present.” But carrying out a project changes the actor’s stock of knowledge, so the accomplished act never has exactly the meaning it had when projected. Foresight resembles hindsight because it imagines an event as already accomplished, but unlike genuine hindsight it remains open until occurrence.
“Foresight, as anticipated hindsight”
Schütz’s thesis is therefore that human knowledge of the future is not direct cognition of things to come, but socially grounded, biographically situated anticipation through types, relevances, and projects. Against both prophetic omniscience and deterministic fantasy, he shows that the future is practically usable precisely because it is only partially determined. The closing Platonic prayer gives the ethical consequence: without seercraft, we do not even know securely what future good to desire.
King Zeus, grant us good whether prayed for or unsought by us But that which we ask amiss, do thou avert.
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