Alfred Schütz: Intervention on Husserl’s Problem of Constitution (1959)

Alfred Schütz’s contribution to the discussion of Roman Ingarden’s presentation is organized as three questions concerning the development, psychological antecedents, and limits of Husserl’s concept of constitution. Expressing broad agreement with Ingarden and Eugen Fink, Schütz uses the discussion to locate specific difficulties within that agreement. His questions move from the constitution of ideal objects, through temporal consciousness, to intersubjectivity, where he identifies an exception to the interpretation of constitution as constitution of meaning.

The first question proposes an explanation for a change in Husserl’s concept. Referring to the first volume of the Ideen, Schütz recalls syntheses in which an objectivity is constituted through multiple acts and can subsequently be apprehended in a single act: the movement from the polythetic to the monothetic. Husserl’s description of this synthesis as a “production” of its object suggests to Schütz that ideal objectivity supplied the original model. His objection concerns the model’s subsequent extension:

Il a élargi le concept de la constitution. Il en a fait un usage exagéré dans une intention spéculative, et ceci a mené à la constitution du n° 2 et du n° 3, comme vous l'avez montré cet après-midi.

English translation: He broadened the concept of constitution. He made exaggerated use of it with a speculative intention, and this led to constitution nos. 2 and 3, as you showed this afternoon.

Schütz thus distinguishes the explanatory force of constitution in its initial domain from what he regards as its speculative overextension. He offers this genealogy for Ingarden’s assessment, rather than demonstrating it at length. The numbered forms of constitution refer back to Ingarden’s presentation; their definitions are not supplied in this intervention.

The second question redirects the search for antecedents of Husserl’s account of temporal consciousness. Schütz doubts Bergson’s influence and points instead to William James’s Principles of Psychology, a work he says Husserl consistently admired. He finds there intentionality, the stream of consciousness, and an anticipation of the relation between protention and retention. He nevertheless preserves a distinction between explanatory levels:

Et nous trouvons aussi la constitution du temps, naturellement non pas dans le domaine transcendental, mais au niveau psychologique.

English translation: And we also find the constitution of time, naturally not in the transcendental domain, but at the psychological level.

James therefore provides a psychological antecedent, not an already transcendental theory. Schütz’s intervention asks that this conceptual proximity inform the account of Husserl’s development.

The third question carries the strongest philosophical reservation. Schütz accepts Fink’s and Ingarden’s explanation that constitution concerns meaning rather than the production of being: the object under consideration is the intentional object. Yet he denies that this substitution works universally:

Dans le problème de la conscience d'autrui, je ne peux pas procéder de cette manière et transformer la constitution de l'être en une constitution de sens.

English translation: In the problem of consciousness of the other, I cannot proceed in this way and transform the constitution of being into a constitution of meaning.

The other person marks the limit of an account in which nothing remains behind constituted meaning. Schütz identifies this difficulty as one reason Husserl’s theory of intersubjective constitution fails, while leaving its fuller demonstration for another occasion. The intervention’s significance lies in this carefully bounded challenge: agreement about intentional meaning does not settle the problem of another subject’s being. Its three questions jointly test where constitution originates, what precedes it, and how far its explanatory reach can legitimately extend.