Alfred Schütz, Scheler’s Theory of Intersubjectivity and the General Thesis of the Alter Ego

Originally published in 1942 and republished in 1967, this essay reconstructs Scheler’s account of understanding others and develops a phenomenological alternative. Schütz preserves Scheler’s insight into the priority of the “We,” but rejects its grounding in an initially undifferentiated consciousness. His alternative distinguishes accompanying another’s unfolding activity from retrospectively reflecting on one’s own experience.

In order to make Scheler's theory of intersubjectivity and its role within his philosophical thought fully understandable we must glance at his concept of a philosophical anthropology.

Scheler’s anthropology distinguishes levels of psychical existence, from emotional impulse through instinct, associative memory, and practical intelligence to Mind. Human distinctiveness cannot be reduced to superior intelligence: it involves freedom from organic impulses and the capacity to apprehend an objective world.

The animal hears and sees but without knowing that it does so and it experiences even its impulses but just as attractions and repulsions emanating from things in its environment.

The contrast concerns the relation to experience, not merely perceptual capacities. For Scheler, the Person is the center of mental acts, distinct from the psychical I available to observation. Understanding another Person requires participation in acts through co-performance, anticipation, or re-performance, rather than treating the Person as an object. Schütz nevertheless detects a tension between Scheler’s acceptance of self-knowledge and his denial that acts can become objects of reflection.

To be sure, this world is an individual world correlated to an individual Person.

This correlation situates intersubjectivity within Scheler’s account of persons and their worlds. Schütz reconstructs his distinctions among ontological, epistemological, constitutional, psychological, metaphysical, and value questions. Social feelings already imply others, while knowledge of community need not depend on acquaintance with particular individuals. Scheler’s criticisms of inference by analogy and empathy follow: both presuppose what they purport to explain, risk reproducing oneself in the other, and wrongly assume that one initially knows one’s own mind while encountering others only as bodies.

Scheler instead understands expression as immediately meaningful: joy appears in a smile and suffering in tears. Yet his perceptional theory also proposes an originally undifferentiated stream from which individual selves emerge. Schütz accepts the criticism of inferential theories but rejects this foundation. Childhood development cannot establish a transcendental claim about consciousness; using it in this way confuses empirical and constitutional problems.

Schütz also questions Husserl’s transcendental approach. Isolating a sphere free from reference to others already employs otherness as a criterion, while constituting other transcendental egos raises difficulties about the plurality of the transcendental ego. Schütz turns instead to the mundane life-world, where the existence of others is ordinarily presupposed.

Against an ownerless stream of experience, he distinguishes unreflective absorption from reflective self-awareness. Living toward others does not erase the difference between their experiences and mine. Even uncertainty about where a thought originated remains my present experience. The development of explicit self-awareness therefore concerns a capacity for reflection, not the emergence of ownership from an impersonal consciousness.

The constructive argument turns on temporality. Reflection apprehends an experience after its occurrence, whereas attention to another’s speech or action accompanies its unfolding in the vivid present. Listening to a lecturer, one follows a thought before knowing its completion. This experienced simultaneity grounds Schütz’s general thesis of the alter ego: the other is apprehended as a consciousness whose present activities can be followed through one’s own simultaneous activities. The priority of the “We” thus receives a temporal explanation without requiring supra-individual consciousness.

This access remains limited. Participation in the “We” belongs to one’s own experience, while the other’s particular thoughts remain transcendent and open to doubt. Understanding also reaches beyond bodily encounters through signs, tools, and artworks. Nevertheless, the body remains crucial as a center of orientation: my “Here” is another’s “There,” and common objects appear through distinct, potentially exchangeable perspectives. Schütz concludes by extending this inquiry toward temporal, social, and experiential contrasts. Shared time makes understanding others possible; differences of perspective define further problems that psychology and the social sciences ordinarily presuppose.