Alfred Schütz’s review essay, first published in March 1953 and republished in 1970, reconstructs Husserl’s Ideas II and evaluates its significance for the foundations of the social sciences. He approaches its posthumously edited manuscripts as a developing inquiry whose unresolved problems should not be reconciled retrospectively with Husserl’s later phenomenology.
It is a transitional phase in the development of phenomenology, a camp erected for the still unachieved conquest of the Himalaya in the thin air of an awe-inspiring altitude.
This assessment joins admiration to methodological caution. The manuscripts preserve competing solutions, and the unresolved question of intersubjectivity bears directly on their account of objectivity. Schütz follows the progression through material nature, animal nature, and spirit before testing the conceptual distinctions and treatment of social relations. Constitution concerns how an object acquires unity and sense through manifold experiences, not its causal production by consciousness.
The problem of constitution has to be solved for all material regions, that of the material thing, of animal nature and of the spirit.
The analysis of material nature distinguishes perceptible appearance from material reality. Shape and color alone do not establish a material thing: changing appearances must be understood as dependent on circumstances and expressive of enduring properties. Knowing a thing thus involves grasping its causal dependencies.
By this apprehension the changing qualities are not perceived as mere sensorial schemata but as manifestations of a real quality of the state of a "substance" at the time of such apprehension.
This constitution already involves embodiment. Bodily movements motivate changes in appearance, making the perceiving subject more than a detached spectator. Husserl provisionally distinguishes normal from anomalous perception within a solipsistic account before introducing agreement among subjects. Schütz questions both this ordering and the identification of normal perception with optimal perception.
The next stage enlarges the field beyond inanimate objects.
Over against the material nature of inanimate things there stands out a nature in a second and enlarged sense, another region of reality, namely animal nature. A soul or psyche is predicated to the animalia which also include human beings.
Schütz traces distinctions among the transcendental ego, psychological subject, and everyday embodied person. The psyche is a unity of experiences and qualities, historically conditioned by its past rather than divisible like a material thing. The body is simultaneously a perceived object and the locus of sensations. Touching one hand with the other exemplifies this double status; as the immediately movable organ of the will, the body also grounds practical capacities.
Empathy introduces other subjects whose bodies are perceived while their experiences are appresented, not directly given. Exchanging standpoints allows differently appearing things to be identified as the same objects and enables subjects to apprehend themselves as visible to others. Objectivity consequently depends on intersubjectivity, which also requires reconsidering normality and anomaly.
The transition to spirit replaces the naturalistic treatment of persons as psychophysical objects with the personalistic attitude of everyday life. Here the environment contains meaningful tools, artworks, possessions, and other persons. Motivation, rather than physical causation, makes conduct intelligible: even a nonexistent object can motivate action. Understanding another requires reconstructing that person’s meaningful context. Sedimented experience and habitual capacities support expectations about oneself and others without making conduct mechanically predictable.
The exposition culminates in the precedence of spirit: the subject through which nature acquires sense cannot be exhaustively reduced to nature. Spiritual individuality rests on a distinctive history of motivations and habitualities. Schütz nevertheless questions how capacities and character are distributed among Husserl’s conceptions of the ego, and whether motivation encompasses too many heterogeneous relations.
His strongest reservations concern empathy and sociality. Recognizing another body as analogous to one’s own may presuppose what the analysis seeks to establish. Communication likewise cannot constitute social relatedness without already assuming reciprocal orientation and a shared environment of gestures, signs, and language. Apprehending another does not itself establish understanding or agreement, while collective personal unities require explanation through individual interaction. Schütz’s appropriation is selective: embodiment, motivation, and historical typicality provide valuable foundations for social inquiry, but the constitution of communication and collectivities remains insufficiently demonstrated.
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