## 1. Life and Influence



Vienna-born Alfred Schutz joined the artillery division of the
Austrian army during World War I and served on the Italian front
before returning to pursue studies at the University of Vienna. There
Schutz studied law, social science, and business with renowned figures
such as Hans Kelsen and Ludwig von Mises, but his most significant
educational experience occurred while he was a member of the Mises
Circle, one of many Viennese circles, of which the "Schlick
Circle" was the most famous. In the interdisciplinary Mises
Circle, Schutz formed friendships that would continue throughout the
cataclysmic decades of the 1930s and 1940s and that included, among
others, economists Gottfried von Haberler, Friedrich A. von Hayek,
Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, philosopher Felix Kaufmann, and
political scientist Eric Voegelin. While continuing to pursue his
academic interests, in 1927 Schutz was named executive officer of
Reitler and Company, a leading Viennese banking firm with
international business relations, and thus he commenced a life-long
pattern that led Edmund Husserl to describe him as "a banker by
day and a philosopher by night."



From the beginning, Schutz had been taken with the methodological
writings of Max Weber, who had lectured in Vienna in the summer of
1918 and whose work was immensely popular among Viennese
intellectuals. However, Schutz felt that Weber's work rested on
tacit, unexamined presuppositions resulting from his lack of interest
in fundamental epistemological problems that had no direct bearing on
his special sociological problems. In 1925-1927, Schutz turned
to Henri Bergson's philosophy of consciousness and inner time in
order to clarify notions such as meaning, action, and
intersubjectivity, and his results have been collected in manuscripts
published as *Life Forms and Meaning Structure*. Dissatisfied,
though, with his analyses of temporality to the extent that he never
published them and prompted by comments of Felix Kaufmann, he
discovered the relevance of the phenomenology of the consciousness of
inner time of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). He then went on to
produce his major life's work, *The Phenomenology of the
Social World* (1932), a work for which Husserl praised him as
"an earnest and profound phenomenologist." He spent the
rest of the 1930s authoring brief essays showing how his phenomenology
of the social world could come to terms with the economic thought of
Mises and Hayek. Also, before any direct encounter with American
pragmatism, he developed a manuscript on personality in the social
world that stressed the pragmatic elements of the everyday social
world.



Schutz's career, academic and business, was thoroughly convulsed
when Adolf Hitler implemented the annexation (*Anschluss*) of
Austria by Germany on March 13, 1938, especially since he, on a
business trip in Paris, was separated for three months from his own
family, whose emigration to Paris he finally arranged. As an
international lawyer and businessperson, he was able to assist
numerous intellectuals to escape Austria, but the westward movement of
the Nazi juggernaut eventually compelled him to immigrate with his
family to the United States on July 14, 1939.



In the United States, he continued assisting immigrants and working
with Reitler and Company in reestablishing its business, and he
supported the United States war effort by reporting on German and
Austrian economic matters for the Board of Economic Warfare. He also
cooperated with Marvin Farber in founding the *International
Phenomenological Society*, whose initial turf-battles he often
mediated, and in instituting and editing *Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research*. In 1943, Schutz began teaching
sociology and philosophy courses on The Graduate Faculty of The New
School for Social Research, and his responsibilities included
presenting papers in the school-wide General Seminar, supervising
dissertations, and serving as chair of the Philosophy Department from
1952-1956. In spite of his many activities, he managed to carry
on an extensive philosophical correspondence with Farber, Aron
Gurwitsch, Fritz Machlup, Eric Voegelin, and Maurice Natanson, his
graduate student from 1951 to 1953. However, to date, only the
correspondences with Gurwitsch and Voegelin have been published. While
in the United States, Schutz published a collection of articles on a
wide variety of topics, explaining and criticizing Husserl's
thought; examining the works of American philosophers such as William
James or George Santanyana; engaging continental philosophers such as
Max Scheler or Jean-Paul Sartre; developing his own philosophical
positions on the social sciences, temporality, language, multiple
realities, responsibility, and symbolism; addressing socio-political
questions dealing with strangers, homecomers, well-informed citizens,
and equality; and treating themes in literature and music.



Several thinkers have continued Schutz's tradition in philosophy
and sociology, such as Maurice Natanson who emphasized the tension
between individual, existential and social, anonymizing dimensions of
everyday life experience. Thomas Luckmann, who served as co-author for
the posthumous publication of Schutz's *The Structures of the
Life-World*, developed the sociology of knowledge implications of
Schutz's thought and stressed the differences between science
and the life-world as well as the importance of language, symbolism,
and the moral order of society. While John O'Neill has fused
Schutz's thought with that of Merleau-Ponty by focusing on the
lived, communicative body, Richard Grathoff has investigated the
experience of normality within the bounded and situated context of a
milieu. Ilja Srubar developed the pragmatic dimensions of
Schutz's thought and several of its economic and political
implications, Lester Embree clarified his typology of the sciences,
and Fred Kersten has expanded his aesthetic insights. Drawing on
Schutz's thought, Harold Garfinkel launched ethnomethodology,
and George Psathas, a commentator on ethnomethodology, played a key
role initiating the new discipline of conversation analysis. Several
other scholars worldwide have dedicated themselves to Schutz's
work and to the development of his insights, and Germany, Japan, and
the United States are home to archives containing Schutz's work
and correspondence.


## 2. *The Phenomenology of the Social World*



In his principal work, Schutz placed three chapters of philosophical
discussion between introductory and concluding chapters that discussed
the social scientific positions his philosophy attempted to engage. In
the initial chapter Schutz praised Max Weber's views on
value-freedom in social science and the autonomy of science
vis-a-vis other activities (e.g. politics), and he commended
Weber's methodological individualism and ideal-type methodology.
In addition, he applauded Weber's refusal to reduce the social
sciences to the natural sciences, while allowing their ideal-typical
results to be testable for adequacy. However, Schutz also supplemented
Weber, pointing out how interpretation was involved even in selecting
an experience out of one's stream of experience and highlighting
how the meaning of an action to an actor depended upon the project
guiding the extended temporal process of the sub-acts leading to its
realization.



These initial criticisms of Weber required Schutz to develop his
*own* theory of meaning and action, beginning with
Husserl's study of the consciousness of internal time, in
particular consciousness's capacity to capture reflectively and
distinguish lived experiences, which at first appear as undefined
phases melting into each other. Schutz had appropriated this notion of
flowing consciousness, or *duration*, from Bergson, on whom he
had relied in the manuscripts later published as *Life Forms and
Meaning Structure*. Those manuscripts, for analytic purposes,
split the ego, indivisible in its lived experience, into ideal-typical
constructs of various life forms, that included the "I"
living in duration, remembering, acting, thinking, and relating to a
"Thou." Though Schutz never made explicit his reasons for
not publishing those earlier manuscripts, Helmut Wagner rightly
speculated that he was ill at ease since one could only have access to
duration through acts of memory, which, of course, constituted a
life-form entirely separate from duration itself. As a result of this
methodology relying on distinct ideal-types, duration began to appear
as an inaccessible *Ding-an-sich*. Husserl's account of
the consciousness of inner time remedied just this problem by
carefully describing how the stream of duration was changed at every
moment into a remembered *having-just-been-thus*, as the primal
impression passed into into primary remembrance, or retention. The
continuum extending backward from the *now* of the primal
impression through its retentions formed a "specious"
present, to which the reflective acts of secondary remembrance, that
is, recollection or reproduction, turned, differentiating one
experience from another. In sum, Husserl's phenomenological
description of experience uncovered the process of retention that
bridged the duration/(reflective) memory gap that had bedeviled
Schutz's earlier efforts insofar as he had relied on an
ideal-typical methodology, which prevented insight into what goes on
within conscious processes themselves.



Schutz, though, turned the Husserlian account of temporality in the
direction of an action theory, demarcating levels of passive
experience (e.g. bodily reflexes), spontaneous activity without a
guiding project (e.g., acts of noticing environmental stimuli), and
deliberately planned and projected activity, known technically as
"action" (e.g., writing a book). In planning an action to
be realized in the future, one relies on reflective acts of
"projection," like those found in reflective memory, only
now oriented in a future as opposed to past direction. Through such
reflectivity, one imagines a project as completed in future perfect
tense, that is, what will have been realized after one's acting,
and this project, also of central importance for Martin Heidegger and
the pragmatist tradition, establishes the "in-order-to
motive" of one's action. By contrast, one's
"because motives" consist in the environmental, historical
factors that influenced the (now past) decision to embark upon the
project and that can only be discovered by investigating in the
"pluperfect tense," that is, exploring those past factors
that preceded that past decision.



Schutz's distinctions here are relevant to contemporary debates
about whether freedom is compatible with determinism since from the
perspective of the lived in-order-to motive, one experiences oneself
as free and morally responsible, but from the perspective of examining
one's because motives after completing one's action, one
correlates, as an observer of oneself, the choice of the project with
its historical determinants. Of course, Schutz, working within the
parameters of Husserl's non-naturalistic account of
consciousness, would have conceived such determinants not so much as
empirico-mechanical causes but rather as influences discoverable
through an interpretive process, associating earlier events with the
later ones they seem to have influenced. Schutz's position comes
closest to the roughly compatibilist outlooks of P.F. Strawson and
Thomas Nagel, who distinguish between the participant and observer
attitudes prior to theoretical discussions and who align the
participant attitude with freedom and the observer attitude with
determinism. Schutz, however, contributes the unique insight that
these attitudes take place within distinctive temporal frameworks,
oriented toward the future or the past.



Schutz's account of the temporal framework of motivation
permitted criticism of Weber's view that one could orient
one's action to the past behavior of others, since, while such
behavior might have served as the because motive of an action, one
could not aim at affecting another's already completed action.
Similarly, failure to appreciate temporality often leads to
*misinterpretations* of action, as when one assumes that the
outcome of an act may have been its motive without considering the
actor's in-order-to motive, which due to unforeseen events may
have been adjusted or may have led to results contrary to those
intended. Likewise, one can interpret an economic action after the
fact as less than rational without taking sufficient account of the
limited information that was available to the actor at the time of
deciding to act and that might make her action seem perfectly
rational. Moreover, the fact that one's own temporal stream of
consciousness never completely coincides with that of another, whose
sequence of events and intensity of experience inevitably differs from
one's own, places limits on one's understanding of
another. As a consequence, the objective meanings of language, defined
in dictionaries as invariant regardless of users, also bear subjective
connotations for language users due to their unique histories of
linguistic experience, even though for practical purposes of
communication they are able to set aside such differences. For
instance, one would have to consider in depth Goethe's works as
a whole to understand what he meant by "demonic."
Schutz's basic point in all these examples involves getting
behind constituted meanings to the temporal processes by which actors
build up the meaning of their own actions--a meaningful build-up
accentuated by the German title of his *Phenomenology of the Social
World* (*Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt*).



In addition to this account of consciousness, motivation, and action,
he examined the structure of the social world, including Consociates
who share the same time and spatial access to each other's
bodies, Contemporaries with whom one shares only the same time, and
Predecessors and Successors with whom one does not share the same time
and to whose lived bodies one lacks access. Consociates, present to
each other physically, partake of each other's inner time, that
is, the on-rolling life of the other, grasp the building up of the
other's experience, and live in a We-relationship that entails
"growing older together." While Consociates revise their
types of each other immediately, one must proceed more inferentially
with Contemporaries, Predecessors, and Successors, constructing ideal
types based on letters or reports and running greater risks of
misunderstanding, depending on the degree of anonymity of the person
to be understood. One could say, then, that Weber's method of
ideal type construction, illustrated in his sociological account of
the Protestant at the origins of capitalism, is not really that
foreign to the everyday life-world in which actors beyond the
Consociate level continually relate to each other via such type
construction. Human actors in everyday life already adopt toward each
other the attitudes of social scientists.



Schutz conceived his work as developing a "phenomenological
psychology" of "inner experience" and focusing on
the invariant features of the life-world toward which theoreticians,
including social scientists, turn reflectively. Although Jurgen
Habermas criticizes Schutz's account of the life-world for being
"abridged in a culturalistic fashion" and not addressing
institutional orders and personality structures (Habermas 1987,
2:126-132), it would seem that Schutz himself delimits his own
work in just this fashion. According to him, social scientists develop
constructs, ideal types, of the meaning-contexts of life-world actors,
and they test these types to determine if they are causally adequate,
that is conforming to past experience, and meaning adequate, that is,
consistent with whatever else is known about the actor. Responding to
Mises's critique that Weber's ideal-types are too
historically specific, Schutz suggested that the later Weber's
ideal types in *Economy and Society* attain a generality
comparable to that of Mises' own economic theory, which itself
could be interpreted as presenting ideal-typical descriptions of the
behavior of economic agents. The later Weber's types depict the
invariant subjective experiences of anyone who acts within the
economic framework as defined by the principle of marginal utility,
that is, choosing to maximize satisfaction.


## 3. Extensions


### 3.1 The Bergson Writings



Schutz's manuscripts on Bergson, produced from 1925 to 1927 and
finally published in English in 1982, illuminate his subsequent works,
with which they share the general purpose of "the grounding of
the social sciences in the Thou experience." (Schutz 1982, 34)
In reaction to positivistic approaches of the Schlick Circle (in which
Felix Kaufmann participated) that reduced experience to what the
method of natural scientific observation found tolerable, Schutz
sought to give an account of the life-form of pre-scientific
experience preceding conceptual-categorical comprehension, the
"highest and most powerful life-form" (Schutz 1982, 53).
Of course, by moving in this direction, he encountered the problem,
faced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wilfrid Sellars, John
McDowell, Robert Brandom, and others, namely, how it is possible to
access the pre-conceptual without conceptualizing it. Hence, he
acknowledged that his work is "in conflict with its
material" since it "is forced to resort to conceptual
formulations" (Schutz 1982, 70). This problem parallels the
problem of reaching the life-form of the present unfolding of
experience (duration) since one can only speak of it by arresting its
flow, distinguishing its moments, and thus remembering what has
lapsed--but then one is in the new life-form of memory. Although
this gap between present duration and memory prompted his turn to
Husserlian phenomenology, the problematic itself highlighted for him
the pervasiveness and hiddenness of interpretive activity as one moves
between interpretive frameworks--a principal theme of all his
later work. He took notice of this theme when he frequently pointed
out how one's reconstitution of a past experience in memory
varied according to the interests of the *present* from which
one remembered the past. Indeed a favorite example from
Bergson's work involved an actor reflecting upon a prior process
of choosing and interpreting it as if it had been a choice between two
clearly defined possibilities, whereas in fact the process often
oscillated between several options, retaining, reproducing, comparing,
and modifying them in succession. In general, Schutz concurred with
Bergson on such notions such as attention to life, planes of
consciousness, the body as the intersection of outer and inner
temporality, music as the model of duration, and multiple types of
ordering, but rejected his bio-evolutionary theory, vitalism, and the
idea of a supra-personal elan.


### 3.2 The Social Sciences



Although Schutz defended Weber against Mises, he agreed with many
basic premises of Mises and the Austrian tradition that focused on the
subjective preferences of the purchaser conferring value on objects
instead of explaining value as the result of objective processes such
as production costs or labor time invested. He also shared
Mises's suppositions about value-freedom in economic science,
the need to describe rather than evaluate preferences, and the
instrumental task of science, namely, of showing how to achieve ends
rather than assessing their value. Since Mises considered all acting
economic insofar as any consumer choice involved maximizing
satisfaction in the widest sense, he opposed the narrow type of the
*homo economicus*, modeled on the businessperson driven solely
by economic motives at the expense of all others. Schutz, however,
posited the life-world with its wide diversity of motivations at the
base of economic theory. He conceived such theory as adopting a
reflective perspective governed by the principle of marginal utility,
namely, that ideal types ought to be constructed *as if* all
actors "had oriented their life-plans to realize the greatest
utility with minimal cost." (Schutz 1964, 87) Besides thus
resuscitating a version of *homo economicus*, Schutz insisted
that economists study purposive-rational actions, which, in
Weber's sense, involved a reflective comparison of alternative
projects before adopting one as an in-order-to motive. In addition, he
classified the sense of uneasiness that Mises described as prompting
the search for satisfaction under the category of because motives; one
first adopts an rationally determined economic project and in
retrospect discovers the preceding dissatisfaction. To understand the
difference between conceiving all action as economic and conceiving
economic action as one type of action within an more encompassing
life-world, one might compare Mises with Schutz with reference to a
problem raised within contemporary discussions of collective action,
namely, how traditional non-economic values (e.g., those of politics
or ethics) ought to intersect the market. Mises would countenance
economic agents registering their values economically, that is, by
deciding to purchase or not (e.g. as a protest against polluting
companies), thereby converting all values into economic ones, whereas
Schutz would call for a process negotiating the boundaries between
different life-world value domains.



In "Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences,"
Schutz addressed the broader issue of the relationship between
philosophy and the social sciences in general. In that essay, Schutz
responded to Ernest Nagel's positivistic view that the social
sciences should make use of natural scientific methods, identifying
evidence with sensory observable data and criticizing the Weberian
method of "understanding" as appealing to uncontrollable
and unverifiable introspection. Schutz agreed with Nagel on several
counts, namely that social scientists needed to validate theoretical
beliefs, that lack of predictability in the social sciences did not
disqualify their scientific character, and that Weber would have been
wrong if his method of "subjective interpretation" implied
empathy with unobservable, introspective states. The problem was,
though, that the natural scientific approach to the social sciences,
insofar as it separated verifiable observable behavior from
unverifiable inner states (purposes, emotions), seemed to play on the
map drawn by Descartes who divorced body from mind and allowed only
statements about the former to be scientifically verifiable. Further,
the natural scientific approach depended on a basic presupposition
since without first examining the object of social
science--social reality, in Schutz's terms--one would
be simply presupposing that the methods of the natural sciences were
appropriate to its study. Therefore, Schutz attempted first to clarify
social reality, described in depth by his own phenomenology of the
social world, and to indicate how actors sustain that reality by
understanding each other's in-order-to motives in typical terms
(e.g., going to school, making a purchase, marrying). Such mutual
understanding takes place without either somehow or other penetrating
into the other's private, inner sanctum, or reducing the other
to the status of animal organism responding to stimuli. Given this
account of social reality, in which actors give meaning to their
world, as opposed to physical reality whose objects (e.g., electrons,
quarks) do not interpret their world, Schutz argued that the
appropriate social scientific method involved developing constructs of
everyday actor's constructs. Social scientific constructs, ideal
types in Weber's sense, aimed at capturing the subjective
meaning of the actor, that is, according to Weber's intentions,
the meaning of the actor as opposed to the social scientist and not
some introspective inner process. Schutz conceived statistical and
other formulations of social scientific laws as a legitimate kind of
intellectual shorthand, always presupposing the meaningful activity of
the individual social actor, the "forgotten man" of the
social sciences (Schutz 1964, 6-7). To ensure the kind of
validation that Nagel sought, mistakenly though, by restricting
himself to sensory observable data, Schutz proposed that social
scientists displace their everyday practical interests in favor of a
guiding interest in accurate scientific description and observe
postulates of logical consistency and adequacy to the experiences
described.



In order to elucidate the meaning of rational action, Schutz
hypothesized what a rational actor would have to know, even though
such completely rational actions might never be realized in everyday
life. Such an actor would have to know: an end's relationship
with other ends, the consequences and by-products of realizing an end,
the means suitable for the end, the interaction of such means with
other ends and means, and the accessibility of those means. In
addition, the rational actor would need to understand: her
interactors' understanding of all the previous factors, the
interpretation of her act by others, the reactions of other people and
their motivation, and the useful categories she had already discovered
in the social world. Although social scientists might use such models
of completely rational action to assess the rationality of everyday
actors, Schutz cautioned social scientists that if their task were to
describe life-world actors, they also needed to be wary of replacing
the viewpoint of everyday actors with a fictional, non-existing world
constructed by scientific observers. In fact, a central point of
discussion in the published correspondence between Schutz and Talcott
Parsons concerned the subjective viewpoint of the actor, whose
sub-acts, for example, could not be adequately understood without
comprehending the actor's overarching project, whose temporal
span is at first accessible only to that actor. Finally, it should be
noted that Schutz himself produced two pieces of applied research in
which he constructed ideal types of the Stranger and the Homecomer,
taking account of what their experiences meant to them instead of what
social scientists or others might think they meant.


### 3.3 Other Philosophies



Although references to philosophers in the pragmatist tradition, such
as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead are scattered through
Schutz's writings, it was to William James that he devoted his
first full-length essay after arriving in the United States. Briefly
alluding to the methodological differences between Husserl and James,
he emphasized two points where the "great masters"
converged: the stream of thought and the theory of fringes. Both
thinkers stressed that personal consciousness involves no multiplicity
of elements needing to be reunited, but rather a unity from which one
separates out components, and they each examined the modifications
that reflection introduces into the lived stream, converting an
"I" into a "Me" or uncovering the workings of
intentionality. Further, Husserl's idea that the kernel of
meaning distinguishing an object stood out against the unthematized
network of relationships that makes up its horizon paralleled
James's belief that topics have their "fringes."
Such fringes connect a topic with other experiences, such that, for
instance, one does not hear merely "thunder," but
"thunder-breaking-in-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it."
Similarly, the Jamesian idea about grasping as a unity what must be
learned through a many-stepped processes, such as the Pythagorean
theorem, could be translated into the Husserlian terminology regarding
the monothetical grasping of polythetic processes. Likewise,
James's discussion of focusing on an object within a broader
topic resembled Husserl's view that one could discern a noema,
that is, a perspectival aspect through which a thing constituted of
many such aspects presented itself.



Another American philosopher to whom Schutz dedicated an entire essay
was George Santayana, whose *Dominations and Powers* he
reviewed. While most of the essay was expository, Schutz praised
Santayana's effort to base politics on a philosophical
anthropology and his insights into the enslaving potential of
technology. However, Schutz, no doubt convinced by Mises's
positive assessment of economic activity, resisted Santayana's
reduction of it to domination. Likewise, as a phenomenologist opposed
to a Santayana's naturalistic founding of spirit on the physical
order of nature, Schutz dissented from a conviction derived from this
naturalism, namely, that democracy could solve it problems only by
returning to the "generative order" of agriculture.



Besides these interchanges with American philosophers, Schutz (later
in his career) interpreted the work of Max Scheler and (earlier)
engaged thoroughly his treatment of intersubjectivity, a topic that
Schutz insisted was to be treated within the natural attitude, in
which one never doubted the existence of others. Schutz agreed with
Scheler's belief that the "We" is given prior to the
"I"--a position that the latter defended on the basis
of the psychology of children and cultures less accustomed to
self-reflection. Schutz supported this priority, however he did so on
the grounds that while living in one's acts in the natural
attitude and living also in the other's present experience as it
unfolds, one at first does not clearly distinguish one's own
thoughts from others'. Nevertheless, as soon as one reflects on
his own stream of consciousness--and children and cultures may
develop this capacity for self-reflection later--he becomes aware
that his experiences are his own. Schutz found plausible
Scheler's belief in the inner (indubitable) perception of the
other, if "inner perception" refers to anything connected
with mental life or if one locates the experience of living in the
vivid simultaneity of the "We" within his own conscious
stream, as Schutz believed possible. However much in that vivid
simultaneity one might be unable to doubt the other's existence,
one could still be mistaken about specific thoughts of the others,
since by belonging to the *other's* stream of
consciousness these thoughts share the dubitability characterizing
outer perceptions, likewise transcendent to one's stream of
experience.



Another figure, more or less within the phenomenological tradition,
whose views on intersubjectivity Schutz examined and criticized, was
Jean-Paul Sartre, particularly the Sartre of *Being and
Nothingness*. In "Sartre's Theory of the Alter
Ego," Schutz elucidated Sartre's attempt to develop an
extra-empirical, real communication with the other that avoids the
extremes of an empiricist intersubjectivity beginning with the
other's body and an idealist reduction of the other to a series
of presentations. After explaining Sartre's differences
regarding intersubjectivity with Husserl, Hegel, and Heidegger, Schutz
laid out Sartre's existential account of how the other is given
as a subject through the Look and how one can in turn objectify the
other by returning the gaze. Although Sartre had intended to describe
how one's body is given to the other, he instead portrayed how
the other's body is given to oneself, assuming that such
descriptions were reversible. Schutz, who did not believe that the
problem of intersubjectivity could be addressed adequately within the
transcendental sphere, applauded Sartre's rejection of
Husserl's transcendental approach to intersubjectivity; however,
Sartre's emphasis on the other as a center of activity reflected
a continuing Husserlian influence. The main problem, though, with
Sartre's doctrine was that its starting point in a mutual
looking, by which each subject reduces the other to an object,
precluded any possibility of a relationship between the I-subject and
other-subject. Further, Schutz wondered how Sartre would know that the
other's body was given to him in the same way that his body was
to the other if the other's subjectivity escaped his
"I." Moreover, Schutz acknowledged that the other's
interests might not coincide with his own, but he failed to see how
this fact entailed that either the other or he reduce each other to a
utensil. Instead, he pointed to the "mutual tuning-in" to
be found in making music together and in language as proof that
subjects interact as "co-performing subjectivities" and
that mutual interaction in freedom better describes intersubjectivity
than Sartre's practical solipsism.


### 3.4 Applications



In 1945, Schutz published an essay, "On Multiple
Realities," that extended the theory of *The Phenomenology of
the Social World* and anticipated later essays applying that
theory. While he reiterated earlier views about levels of activity,
Bergsonian tensions of consciousness, and the structure of the social
world, his work took a decidedly pragmatic twist, emphasizing
"working" (*Wirken*) as involving bodily movements
as opposed to the covert performances of mere thinking. In manuscripts
in the 1930s and after *The Phenomenology of the Social World*,
Schutz had already turned in this pragmatic direction. In "On
Multiple Realities," he enlarged upon the "world of
working" by demonstrating how reflection dissolves the self
unified in lived action into partial, role-taking selves and by
expanding Mead's idea of the "manipulatory sphere"
to include worlds within "potential reach," either
restorable (from the past) or attainable (in the future). This
"world of working" constitutes the paramount reality,
organized in its interests in the face of the fundamental anxiety that
derives, as it did for Heidegger, from the inescapability of
one's own death. Following Husserl's views on how
consciousness can modify its stances toward reality and
de-ontologizing James's sub-universes of reality, Schutz
developed the notion of various finite provinces of meaning. One
enters any of these provinces, such as those of phantasms, dreams, the
theater, religious experience, or theoretical contemplation, by
undergoing different types of *epoche*, analogous to the
phenomenological prototype, as when one slips into a daydream, falls
asleep, watches theater curtains open, commences a ritual, or assumes
the scientist's role. Each province contains its distinctive
logical, temporal, corporal, and social dimensions, and movement
between the provinces only becomes paradoxical (e.g., asking how
phenomenologists are able to communicate their private findings
publicly) if one conceives the provinces as ontological static realms
to which one transmigrates as a soul to another world. Rather the
provinces are permeable, and one adopts the attitudes of scientist or
religious believer *within* the world of working as if it were
seen through by another viewpoint, all the while that its
communicative activities subtend these other provinces. There is
something paradoxical, though, about describing one's dreams or
theorizing about religious experience since to give an account one
must absent oneself from the province for which one accounts, and
Kierkegaard's notion of indirect communication and various
postmodern critiques of theory address themselves to just such
paradoxes.



The essay on multiple realities underpins Schutz's theory of
signs and symbols in "Symbol, Reality, and Society,"
published almost ten years later. Synthesizing the notion of potential
reach from the earlier essay with Husserl's concept of
*appresentation*, namely that one element of a pair refers to
another not directly given in experience, Schutz describes how agents
overcome whatever transcends them. Hence they leave *marks* to
bring within reach what they leave behind (e.g., breaking a twig to
remind oneself to turn when one returns) or follow
*indications*, that is, regular connections not of their making
(e.g. smoke indicating a not yet visible fire), to bring within their
knowledge what lies beyond it. *Signs*, however, appresent in
an intersubjective setting the meanings of one person to another, but
an insuperable transcendence still remains insofar as the each
one's stream of consciousness and therefore meanings are never
identical with another's. Finally, through *symbols*,
developed within groups, something given within everyday reality
appresents a reality belonging to a entirely different province of
meaning, an ultimate transcendence (e.g., the stone where Jacob
dreamed of a ladder to heaven memorializes God, accessible within the
religious province of meaning).



Schutz dealt with this theme of language in other contexts, comparing
Husserl's distinction between prepredicative (prepropositional)
and predicative levels with Kurt Goldstein's separation, based
on studies of brain lesions, of a concrete attitude relying on
automatic speech associations from an abstract attitude forming
propositions and utilizing rational language. Husserl's
prepredicative/predicative differentiation plays a key role in
Schutz's essay "Type and Eidos in Husserl's Late
Philosophy," in which he shows a gradual development from
empirical types passively constituted within the prepredicative sphere
to presumptive universals spontaneously formed in the predicative
sphere. At the predicative level, scientific reflection further
transforms nonessential types (e.g., that whales are fish) into
essential ones (whales are mammals), and philosophy seeks eidetic
universals. At the end of this essay, Schutz speculates whether the
Husserlian method of freely varying examples to determine the
essential features that survive through such variations is not
constrained by both ontological structure (e.g., sounds are not
colors) and the socially shaped, natural-attitude experience of types.
In his essay "Tiresias, or our Knowledge of Future
Events," produced contemporaneously with the type essay, Schutz
explains how knowledge based on natural attitude types functions in
contrast to the mythical Tiresias' knowledge of the future,
which is private and detached from his present or past experience.
These types, based on past experiences or socially transmitted, aim at
future occurrences not in their uniqueness but with an emptiness that
future events will fill in, such that only in retrospect, after an
event occurs, is one able to determine how much that event was
expected or unexpected. Finally, there are future events lying beyond
one's influence that one expects only to conform with past
experience and there are indeterminate projects that provide
direction--not too tightly, though--as one gives shape to
what is within one's power.



Schutz, himself a trained pianist and widely read musicologist,
integrated his phenomenology with his understanding of music. Music,
differing from language in being non-representative, lends itself to
phenomenological analysis in the meaning it carries beyond its mere
physical nature as sound waves and in its character as an ideal object
that must be constituted through its unfolding stages, i.e.,
polythetically. Further music is bound to inner temporality, and its
themes, even though their note sequences are the same, vary according
to context, require reflection for their recognition, and emerge
through an interplay between musical elements and the listener's
attention and interest. Schutz found music instructive in regard to
social relationships insofar as, prior to any communication, parties
to musical performances establish a non-linguistic, non-conceptual
"mutual tuning in relationship." This
"tuning-in," this sharing of another's flux of
experience in inner time already described in his
*Phenomenology*, is very clearly exhibited whenever a listener
to a musical performance participates in quasi-simultaneity in the
composer's stream of consciousness or when co-performers orient
themselves to each other, the composer, and the audience. Hence,
Schutz disagreed with Maurice Halbwachs who posited musical notation
as the basis of social relationships between performers, when in fact
it is merely a technical device accidental to their relationship. In
another essay, Schutz depicted Mozart as a social scientist,
presenting a succession of situations that different characters
interpret, and Schutz showed how orchestral representations of
characters and their moods in melody made possible a simultaneity of
fluxes of inner time that the non-operatic, non musical dramatist
could only unfold successively. Without self-consciously
philosophizing, Mozart conveyed in music and better than most
philosophers in their own medium, how human beings meet each other as
a "We."



Fred Kersten discovers in Schutz's musical writings important
philosophical insights. For instance, music and inner time unfold
polythetically and cannot be grasped monothetically; that is, one must
live through the unfolding of a symphony or inner experience, and any
conceptual summary of their contents inevitably fails to do justice to
their meaning. However, since all conceptualization consists in a
monothetical grasping of polythetic stages, Schutz is actually
realizing that certain dimensions of consciousness elude
conceptualization and thus demarcating the limits of rationalization,
just as he had pointed out how certain provinces of meaning (e.g.
dreams) evade theoretic comprehension or duration eludes memory.
According to Kersten, Schutz has seen clearly that the passive
associations of listening (e.g. recognizing the appearance of
symphonic theme) differ from those of sight (e.g., apprehending an
object like a house) and that listening does not identify numerically
distinct items but produces an illusion of identification.
Schutz's conclusion that sameness in music involves not
numerical unity but recurrent likeness challenges the fundamental
Husserlian thesis that the synthesis of passive identification is
universal, at the basis of the constitution of the world.



Schutz was also a master of literature, a careful student of the works
of Goethe, and author of an article that analyzed Miguel de
Cervantes's *Don Quixote* through the prism of the theory
of multiple realities. Cervantes repeatedly brings Quixote's
"world of chivalry"--an order of reality with its
arguments for its own reality, its stock of knowledge, modes of social
reinforcement, and views about space, time, and causality--into
conflict with the worlds of drama, common sense, and science. Although
Quixote is capable of constructing a defense of his own chivalrous
world from within that world, the fact that this phantasied world
contains an enclave of dreams (at the cave of Montesinos) ends up
undermining it by raising the possibility that it itself is but a
dream. Quixote's withdrawal of the accent of reality from his
private province of meaning reveals for Schutz the importance of the
paramount reality of everyday life and the value of Sancho Panza who
"remains deeply rooted in the heritage of common sense."
(Schutz 1964, 158)



Schutz also brought his phenomenology to bear on political issues such
as citizenship or racial equality. His essay "The Well-Informed
Citizen," dealing not only with citizenship but also the
sociology of knowledge under the rubric of the social distribution of
knowledge, constructs ideal types of the expert, the man on the
street, and the well-informed citizen (to whom it falls to determine
which experts are competent). Schutz delineates various zones of
interests, or relevances, extending from those within reach to those
absolutely irrelevant, comments on the constant changeability of
relevance configurations, and differentiates between relevances
intrinsic to a theme, which one chooses, and those imposed.
Paradoxically, as modernity's rationalization processes heighten
anonymity, modern technology also brings everyone within reach, as the
nuclear arms race demonstrates, and Schutz suggests as a solution that
citizens become broadly informed rather than succumb to the narrow
dogmatism of the man on the street or the short-sighted specialization
of experts. In becoming well-informed, one depends on knowledge
socially derived through the consultation of eyewitnesses, insiders,
analysts, and commentators, depending on their access to facts and
governing relevances, much as Alvin Goldman's social
epistemology involves appraising the 'veritistic' value of
assorted agents' claims and practices. Schutz, usually the
value-free describer of social reality, in his conclusion endorses a
normative notion of democracy in which it is a duty and a privilege,
frequently not available in non-democratic societies, for
well-informed citizens to express and defend opinions that often
conflict with the uninformed opinions of the man in the street.



Schutz composed "Equality and the Meaning Structure of the
Social World" at the time of the legal decision of *Brown v.
Board of Education* that ended racially segregated education in
the United States. With typical dispassion, Schutz explains how the
meaning of the term "equality" depends on the domain of
relevances to which it pertains (e.g., economic equality, equality of
civil rights, etc.) and on the in-group or out-group utilizing
it--and here he conceives interpretation in terms of groups
rather than individuals. He spends most of the essay contrasting
subjective and objective interpretations of group membership,
equality, and equality of opportunity, construing
"subjective" and "objective" in terms of
in-group and out-group interpretations. As regards group membership,
he illustrates that the mere categorization of another as a member of
a group need not be discriminatory, but depends upon an appropriate
evaluation of the category from the viewpoint of the categorized
individual. In-groups and out-groups differ in whether they understand
equality merely as "formal," i.e., as nondiscrimination,
or "real," calling for special rights and services.
Similarly groups think of equality of opportunity from an out-group
perspective as "the career open to all" without
appreciating how in-group members might subjectively experience
insuperable obstacles in trying to avail themselves of opportunities
supposedly objectively equal. In this essay, Schutz is concerned not
to present a final definition of equality, but to highlight the
differences between in-group and out-group understandings that serve
as the preconditions of any discussion about it.



Some recently published texts that Schutz authored during an ethics
institute in 1956 make possible an even richer awareness of his views
on politics. In these documents, he recognizes the complex, unforeseen
consequences resulting from social change, urges active engagement
with others as crucial for developing social and civil judgment, and
examines the barriers to sound civil judgment created by government,
political parties, pressure organizations, mass media, and
educational, familial, religious, and professional institutions. At
one point, he even criticizes views that limit democracy to mere
majoritarian rule insofar as they neglect the importance of the single
individual's ability "to make his personal opinion be
heard and appreciated," preferably in smaller publics, such as
families, schools, local communities (cited in L. Embree 1999, 271).
One could take Schutz's thoughts here to converge with political
theories favoring what is today known as deliberative democracy.
Moreover, his normative judgment against implementations of democracy
that increase the anonymity of citizens suggests that a parallel
normative, even ethical, dimension informs his many theoretic
endeavors to retrieve from anonymity the neglected subjective
viewpoint of actors, whether strangers, homecomers, victims of
discrimination, or the "forgotten man" of social
sciences.


### 3.5 Phenomenology



Schutz's philosophical targeting of the social world had its
repercussions upon phenomenology, particularly in his critique near
the end of his career of Husserl's account (also referred to as
a "transcendental constitution") of how the other person
comes to appearance in consciousness. In "The Problem of
Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl," Schutz first
objected when Husserl in his Fifth Cartesian Mediation prepared the
ground for the other's appearance in consciousness by the
methodology of screening off everything that referred to other minds.
Husserl had begun the *Cartesian Meditations* by reflectively
abstaining from believing in the existence of what appeared in
experience in order to refrain from any dogmatic suppositions, but
since this first *epoche*, or phenomenological
reduction, still left meanings with intersubjective references, the
screening off methodology, or second *epoche*, became
necessary. For Husserl, one's actual or potential experiences
*of* correlates that were not properly of the ego still would
belong to one's sphere of ownness, but one had to seek to
exclude any reference those correlates, as products of the
sense-determining of other subjectivities, might have to those other
subjectivities. For Schutz, however, insofar as those experiences of
what was not properly of the ego, supposedly confined within the
sphere of ownness, had their origin in the intersubjective world of
everyday life that higher level phenomenological reflection
presupposed, it seemed difficult to see how one could exclude from
such correlates any reference to the sense-determininng of other
subjectivities. It was as though Husserl was striving for a
theoretical detachment that the ontological origins of theory would
not allow. In addition, for Schutz the very consciousness of another
inevitably instituted a relationship with her. Husserl's
argument in the Fifth Meditation continued by affirming that a
non-ratiocinative "pairing" occurred through which one
transferred the sense "another living body" to another.
One could then verify that the other's living body was like
one's own if it continued manifesting behavior congruent with
what one would expect of a living body. Schutz challenged this
sense-transfer, however, since one experienced the other's body
from the outside, unlike one's own, which was given interiorly
(but might the similarities suffice for the transfer?), and he
suggested that verification through what was "congruent"
behavior drew on social-world presuppositions of how bodies ought to
behave. Finally, he questioned whether the philosopher, refraining
from belief in the existence of the world or others and entering into
a certain reflective solitude, could ever experience the
transcendental community of which Husserl spoke, since she only
constituted the world for herself and not for all other transcendental
egos. Intersubjectivity, Schutz concluded, was a matter of everyday
life to be simply described and not to be constituted within the
transcendental sphere of a self-reflective consciousness giving an
account of how the other comes to appearance. Just as Schutz had
argued that the social world dictated the methods for its own social
scientific investigation, so here it seemed to prescribe to
phenomenology the approach appropriate to its description.



In the last thirteen years of his life, Schutz was preparing a
comprehensive phenomenology of the natural attitude, and one
manuscript, edited by Richard Zaner, was posthumously published as
*Reflections on the Problem of Relevance*, and another,
co-authored by Thomas Luckmann, appeared as *The Structures of the
Life World*. The former book distinguishes different sets of
interests, or relevances: topical (which focus attention on themes),
interpretive (which confer meanings on experiences or objects), and
motivational. Such relevances often involve a subject, with more or
less systematic interests, or relevances, interacting with the world,
and from this interaction between subject and world, it becomes
evident what is "of relevance" to an actor. These
relevances, interdependent on each other and conjoined with
one's system of types or categories, constitute a stock of
knowledge, which Schutz examines in terms of its genesis and
structure. He further explores the meaning of one's biographical
situation, including types and relevances, one's body, and the
ontological constraints of space and time that, for instance, prevent
one from being at certain places at certain times or compel one to
wait (for salt to dissolve in water).



*The Structures of the Life-World* represents a most complex
and thorough restatement of many of the themes Schutz addressed
throughout his life. After a more general account of the life-world
and its relation to the sciences, the book takes up its various
stratifications, such as provinces of meaning, temporal and spatial
zones of reach, and social structure. Schutz and Luckmann then comment
on the components of one's stock of knowledge, including learned
and non-learned elements, relevances and types, and trace the build-up
of such a stock. The authors study the social conditioning of
one's subjective stock of knowledge and inquire about the social
stock of knowledge of a group and different possible combinations of
knowledge distribution (generalized and specialized). They consider
how subjective knowledge becomes embodied in a social stock of
knowledge and how the latter influences the former. In addition, the
authors pursue such issues as the structures of consciousness and
action, the choosing of projects, rational action, and forms of social
action, whether such action be unilateral or reciprocal, immediate or
mediate. A final section analyzes the boundaries of experience,
different degrees of transcendencies (from simply bringing an object
within reach to the experience of death), and the mechanisms for
crossing boundaries (e.g. symbols).


## 4. The Schutzian Tradition



In the years after Schutz's death in 1959, his works have been
posthumously published and his thought expanded in several directions.
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote *The Social Construction of
Reality*, which focused on how subjective human processes
construct objective structures that human subjectivity in turn
interprets and reacts to and which was among the most widely read
books of social science in the twentieth century. Ilja Srubar
emphasized the importance of the pragmatic dimensions of
Schutz's corpus, just as Hans-Georg Soeffner, along with Jochen
Dreher, has developed its symbolic aspects. On Schutzian grounds,
Lester Embree produced a theory of science in the model of a
*Wissenschaftslehre*, and George Psathas extended
Schutz's thought in the direction of ethnomethodology and
conversation analysis. Recently, sociologists Hubert Knoblauch and
Carlos Belvedere have shown the relevance of Schutz's framework
to communication theory and questions of social ontology,
respectively. The Austrian Economic School has continued to make use
of Schutz's works, as Daniela Griselda Lopez has shown.
Lopez and Dreher have further argued that Schutzian theory can
adequately account for the exercise of institutional power through the
interplay between objective structures and subjective
meaning-interpretation and the idea of relevances that are imposed
upon agents. Michael Staudigl and George Berguno have edited a
collection of essays on the connection between the Schutzian approach
and various hermeneutic traditions. And Staudigl and Michael Barber
have highlighted the connections between Schutz's philosophy of
multiple realities and religion and humor. Furthermore, collections of
essays have addressed the value of Schutz's paradigm for music,
literature, and the arts. The work of Alfred Schutz opens a wide field
that is fruitful for addressing multiple themes and underpinning and
supporting multiple disciplines.



In 2016, the scholarly community in the Schutzian tradition
commemorated both the passing of Thomas Luckmann, one of
Schutz's renowned students who developed his thought in diverse
ways, and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of *The
Social Construction of Reality*. These commemorations took place
through the editing of three major collections: *Social
Constructivism as Paradigm?*, *Lebenswelttheorie und
Gesellschaftsanalyse*, and *Mathesis Universalis*. While
these works focus on Luckmann's work, including *The
Structures of the Life-World* that Luckmann co-authored with
Schutz, several of the essays address aspects of Schutz's
thought: the objective dimensions of societal institutions in contrast
to interpretations of such institutions as subjectivistic and devoid
of power-relationships (Eberle 2019, Knoblauch 2019, Mijic 2018,
Srubar 2019); the possibility of a communicative construction of
reality (Knoblauch 2019); the Schutzian paradigm's preservation
of agents' potential to resist societal control in contrast to
Bourdieu's account of *habitus* (Dreher 2019); the role
of the body in We-relationships (Meyer 2018); the capacity of the
Schutzian framework to account for resilience in the face of trauma
(Endress 2021); inequality as imposed relevance (Lopez 2021);
space and bodiliness as pertinent to the life-world as protosociology
(Mijic 2018, Dorfler & Rothfuss 2021, Steets 2021);
degrees of freedom within Schutz's relevance theory
(Gottlich 2021); linkages between Schutz's phenomenology
and recent representatives of the Frankfurt School, such as Hartmut
Rosa (Gros 2021, Wannenmacher 2021); and the role of the life-world as
a *mathesis universalis*, that is, the ground-structure of all
human experience that makes possible any comparison between cultures
without reliance on the specific features of any one culture (Dreher
2021, Meyer 2021, Sebald 2009).