Alfred Schütz, Some Leading Concepts of Phenomenology

Alfred Schütz’s essay, first published in 1945 and republished in this version in 1967, introduces Husserl’s phenomenology as an inquiry into the foundations of knowledge with implications for social science. Its starting point is the difficulty of approaching a philosophy whose presentation obscures its purpose:

The published part of his philosophy, characterized by a condensed presentation and highly technical language, is of a rather fragmentary character.

Schütz reconstructs the connections among phenomenology’s leading concepts. Its ambition is rigorous philosophical analysis, but rigor does not simply mean mathematical formulation. Empirical sciences presuppose the existence of the world and the possibility of experiencing and understanding it; phenomenology investigates these presuppositions. Its foundational position complicates conventional classification:

This outline of Husserl's general aim may explain the great difficulties encountered by a beginning student of phenomenology who attempts to attach to this philosophy one of the customary textbook labels, such as idealism, realism, empiricism.

The essay develops this position through Husserl’s transformation of Cartesian doubt. Descartes establishes the certainty of conscious experience, but leaves difficulties concerning both the structure of thought and the status of the reflecting ego. Schütz identifies one limitation:

To start with the latter, Descartes handled the cogitations that appear within the stream of thought as isolated entities.

Intentionality replaces this isolation with an analysis of consciousness as directed toward something: perceiving, remembering, or fearing necessarily concerns an object. Phenomenological reduction addresses the further problem of treating the reflecting ego as an ordinary human mind within the world. It suspends judgments concerning worldly existence, including those concerning the investigator’s embodied and psychological self. This suspension neither denies nor destroys the world; it makes experience and its intentional correlates available for analysis without presupposing their independent existence.

Examples of a chair and a blossoming tree clarify the distinction between noesis, the experiencing act, and noema, the object as experienced. The remembered appearance of something remains available even if the worldly thing is subsequently destroyed. Analysis concerns objects’ modes of appearing and their transformations within consciousness.

Schütz then shows why experience cannot be reconstructed from isolated sensations. Perception incorporates previous experience and anticipates further appearances. An object’s inner horizon encompasses its unseen aspects, while its outer horizon connects it with surrounding things and ultimately the world. Retention, recollection, attention, and anticipation connect experiences within inner time. Evidence concerns the possibility of referring derived experiences back to originary ones, rather than an unexplained certainty attached to judgments.

Ideal objects extend the argument beyond perception. Numbers, propositions, and cultural meanings can be expressed through different perceptible signs without being identical to those signs. The Pythagorean theorem illustrates how an achieved understanding remains available after the operations establishing it have ceased to be explicitly performed. Knowledge thus bears the sediment of earlier mental processes. Constitutional analysis retraces these processes instead of treating their results as self-explanatory.

This leads to transcendental logic. Whereas formal logic employs determinate things, properties, and concepts, phenomenology investigates the pre-predicative experience from which such determinations emerge. Intersubjectivity presents a related foundational question: how can truth concern a shared world rather than merely an individual’s private experience?

Eidetic inquiry approaches essences through imaginative variation. Varying a cube’s material, color, or size distinguishes alterable features from those indispensable to its being a cube. Schütz presents this as disciplined investigation, not mystical intuition, and distinguishes the eidetic–empirical contrast from the transcendental–mundane distinction.

The conclusion turns to phenomenological psychology and social science. Schütz acknowledges the limits of his introductory account while identifying affinities with James, Mead, and Gestalt theory. Phenomenology’s social-scientific contribution is foundational rather than a direct solution to substantive research problems. Other minds, meaningful action, communication, and institutions are ordinarily presupposed by social inquiry. Examining how another’s action becomes intelligible, and how interpretation depends on sedimented experience, makes those presuppositions explicit. Phenomenology thereby clarifies the structures of consciousness and meaning on which empirical investigation relies.