Alfred Schütz · 1953
Alfred Schütz’s review essay, originally published in June 1953 and republished in 1970, reconstructs the four-chapter argument of Husserl’s Ideas III. Based on an unrevised manuscript of 1912, the volume presents an early position that Schütz cautions cannot always be reconciled with Ideas II or later phenomenology. His central concern is how phenomenology grounds the sciences by clarifying the essential structures of their objects and the acts through which those objects are apprehended.
The first chapter distinguishes material things, animated bodies, and psyches through their corresponding forms of apprehension. Material reality is understood through causal relations, not through self-sufficient substance. Its objectivity requires more than the experience of an isolated subject:
The objectivity of Nature is constituted only in the unified spatial-temporal causal context of the experiences of a plurality of Egos which enter into intercommunication, through the intermediary of their bodies.
Embodiment thus connects the constitution of nature with intersubjective experience. Somatology considers the body as the bearer of localized sensations, while psychology considers sensations within conscious experience. These are different apprehensions of interwoven phenomena. Their relationship is ordered through levels of foundation:
The psyche, as the unity of these experiences which fall under the heading of consciousness, is a reality of its own, although always founded upon the reality of the body which, in turn, is founded upon the reality of the material thing.
The second chapter asks what establishes psychology’s proper domain and methods. Schütz presents this as a particular instance of the relationship between phenomenology and empirical science. Each science presupposes a regional structure that empirical investigation alone cannot establish.
The examination of this structure as to its constitution in pure intuition would lead to an ontology of this particular realm.
Eidetic variation discloses such structures by imaginatively changing an object’s contingent properties while identifying what must remain for it to belong to its region. A “thing” names an essential form of possible experience, not merely a classificatory universal. Eidetic investigation has foundational rather than chronological priority: it clarifies what empirical inquiry presupposes without replacing observation or experiment.
An eidetic investigation of perception preserves its essential content while setting aside its occurrence as an actual state of an actual individual. Husserl’s rational psychology consequently aims to make experimental psychology conceptually adequate. Psychological description also differs from physical description: conscious experiences constitute psychology’s subject matter directly, whereas sensible appearances serve physics as manifestations of objective processes.
Rational psychology nevertheless considers consciousness as the state of a human or animal psyche founded upon nature. Transcendental phenomenology investigates purified consciousness and the pure Ego. Schütz notes a tension in the early terminology: psychological eidetics can be called phenomenology because an experience retains its essence when apprehended as a psychological state, but the two orientations remain distinguishable.
The third chapter addresses a difficulty within transcendental reduction. Bracketing transcendent being and its sciences seems also to exclude ontologies, yet ontological concepts and axioms remain accessible as essential contents of pure experience. The resolution distinguishes judgments about objects from judgments about consciousness and its intentional correlates. Ontology investigates things, space, or spirit in their essential generality; phenomenology investigates acts and what is meant in them without positing the corresponding objects. Noema and essence therefore cannot be identified, although a change of attitude permits movement between these investigations.
The final chapter concerns clarification. Scientific concepts originate in everyday knowledge, but their symbolic elaboration can obscure their foundations even while increasing practical effectiveness. Clarification proceeds from logical-formal concepts through regional concepts to material concretizations. Verbal explication prepares this inquiry but cannot complete it: what is meant must be brought into congruence with what is intuitively given, following the object’s levels of constitution toward self-givenness.
The essay’s significance for social science lies in this demand for conceptual accountability. Through psychology and the general grounding of knowledge, Schütz explains how phenomenology makes explicit structures already presupposed by scientific inquiry. The concluding ideal is a systematically articulated body of clarified concepts grounded in eidetic intuition—a distant goal that nevertheless supplies a standard for examining scientific foundations.
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