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Some Problems in Alfred Schutz's Phenomenological Methodology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

N. Patrick Peritore
N. Patrick Peritore*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri, Columbia
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Abstract

Alfred Schutz created a systematic methodology for the social sciences by integrating sociological concepts derived from Max Weber with the philosophical foundation provided by Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. However, much of the rigor of Schutz's analysis of social life is vitiated by his failure to come to grips with the philosophical problem of “other minds.” Analysis and critique of Schutz's “general thesis of the alter ego” reveal the sterility of either pragmatic or dogmatic use of philosophic concepts in social science conceptualization, and the failure of his methodological system demonstrates the serious epistemological consequences of doing social scientific work without rigorous and radical philosophical foundation.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , March 1975 , pp. 132 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1975

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References

1 Regarding the program and terminology of Husserl's phenomenology: The philosopher removes himself from the naive, mundane, or natural attitude, the unreflective realism of the man on the street who takes the world and his knowledge of it as merely given, by means of the epochē, a conscious “bracketing” or abstention from utilization of received philosophical judgments about cognition. Under the discipline of the epochē, the philosopher returns to the raw phenomena presented to perceptive consciousness. The phenomena are the substance of knowledge, and the philosopher researches the manner in which such knowledge is constituted or given form in the stream of conscious experience; hence “phenomenology”—discovery of the structure of phenomenal experience. Husserl's philosophic researches revealed that consciousness is intentional, that is, all consciousness is consciousness of something. For analytic purposes, Husserl differentiates the intentional stream of consciousness into the noesis (νόησις), mode of judging or attitude toward the “object of consciousness,” and a correlative noema (νόημα), the intended meaning immanent in the noetic judgment, the pure intended form of experience. Consciousness here “sees” through ideation (Wesensschau) the essence (eidos, εἳδος) of the pure object of consciousness by abstracting a common core from all its various modes of appearance.

Thus Husserl, a mathematician and philosopher of science by training, intends to create an eidetic science (science of essences) in order thereby to provide a logical and epistemological foundation for the empirical sciences. From noetic analyses can be generated an essential science of the possible modes of judging, correlative to which is regional ontology or a theory of the possible kinds of noematic “objects of consciousness” given in the various modes of judging. For example, by varying Euclid's 23rd definition regarding parallel lines, it is possible to generate an infinity of different geometries, i.e., noetic modes of judging spatiality (Euclidean, Lobichev-skian, Riemannian, etc.). Correlative to these different geometries is a multiplicity of different noematic types of space (plane, spherical, negative, etc.). An eidetic science would range all possible types of judging (noeses) with all of their possible correlative noemata, becoming thereby an analytic tool for the generation of systematic theoretical sciences concerning the various relevant fields of being (regional ontologies). These eidetic or theoretical sciences give both form and epistemological validity to the inductive propositions of empirical science, just as mathematics structures and grounds the propositions of observational physics. The system of eidetic sciences finds its foundation, in turn, in the apodicticity (absolute self-evidence) of the transcendental ego which is a sort of Cartesian cogito ergo sum.

See Husserl, Edmund, Ideas I, trans. Gibson, W. B. (New York: Collier, 1967)Google Scholar, the best systematic statement. For the philosophy of science see Husserl, Edmund, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. Carr, D. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, and Husserl, Edmund, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Cairns, D. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the problem of ego, body and other minds see Husserl, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Cairns, D. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an overview of the program see Husserl, Edmund, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Lauer, Q. (New York: Harper, 1965)Google Scholar.

For Schutz's phenomenology see Schutz, Alfred, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. Walsh, F. and Lehnert, F. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967)Google Scholar. Collected Papers, Vol. 1, The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Natanson, M. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967)Google Scholar, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, Studies in Social Theory, ed. Broderson, A. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966)Google Scholar, Collected Papers, Vol. 3, Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966)Google Scholar.

2 Schutz, , Phenomenology of the Social World, p. 44Google Scholar.

3 Schutz, , Collected Papers, Vol. 1, pp. 150–179 and pp. 180–203Google Scholar, and Vol. 3, pp. 51–91.

4 Schutz, , Collected Papers, Vol. 1, pp. 56–59Google Scholar.

5 Schutz, , Collected Papers, Vol. 1, p. 174Google Scholar, Phenomenology of the Social World, p. 98.

6 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations. Schutz, , Collected Papers, Vol. 3, pp. 51–91Google Scholar.

7 Schutz, , Collected Papers, Vol. 1, p. 175Google Scholar. Phenomenology of the Social World, p. 98, p. 44 (my emphasis).

8 Husserl, , Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 36Google Scholar.

9 Zaner, Richard M., “Theory of Intersubjectivity: Alfred Schutz” in Social Research, 28 (Spring 1961), 72Google Scholar.

10 Husserl, , Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 37Google Scholar.

11 Schutz, , Phenomenology of the Social World, p. 37Google Scholar.

12 Husserl, , Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 238Google Scholar.

13 Ibid.

14 Husserl, , The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, p. 260Google Scholar.

15 Schutz, , Collected Papers, Vol. 1, p. 59Google Scholar. Phenomenology of the Social World, p. 223.

16 Schutz, , Collected Papers, Vol. 2, pp. 83–86Google Scholar. See also, Vol. 1, pp. 43–44, and Vol. 2, pp. 18–19.

17 Zaner, , “Theory of Intersubjectivity,” p. 72Google Scholar.

18 Husserl, , The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, p. 148Google Scholar.

19 Mannheim, Karl, “On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 33–83Google Scholar.

20 Husserl, , Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, p. 142Google Scholar, passim.

21 Schutz, , Phenomenology of the Social World, pp. 213–214Google Scholar.

22 Husserl, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, Part 2, Nos. 8–10.

23 Schutz, , Phenomenology of the Social World, p. 101Google Scholar.

24 See Barnouw, Victor, Culture and Personality (Illinois: Dorsey Press, 1963), chapter 12Google Scholar.

25 Goldstein, Kurt, Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology (New York: Schocken, 1966) especially chapter 2Google Scholar.

26 Schutz, , Phenomenology of the Social World, pp. 52–53Google Scholar.

27 Ibid., p. 51.

28 Ibid., p. 52.

29 Ibid., p. 70.

30 Husserl, , Ideas I, p. 245Google Scholar.

31 Ibid., p. 241.

32 Schutz, , Phenomenology of the Social World, p. 102Google Scholar.

33 Ibid., p. 103.

34 Ibid., p. 115.

35 Ibid., pp. 174–175.

36 Ibid., pp. 188–189.

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