Phenomenology and Social Reality: Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz

316 Pages·1970·14.072 MB·English

by  Marvin Farber (auth.), Maurice Natanson (eds.)

ALFRED SCHUTZ (1899-1959)
PHENOMENOLOGY AND SOCIAL REALITY
PHENOMENOLOGY AND
'"
SOCIAL REALITY
Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz
Edited by
MA URICE NAT ANSON
MARTINUS NIJHOFF / THE HAGUE / 1970
© 1970 by Martinus Nijhojf, The Hague, Netherlands
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-13: 978-90-247-5010-8 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-011-7523-4
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-011-7523-4
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction IX
Values and the Scope of Scientific Inquiry. MARVIN FARBER, State
University of New York at Buffalo 1
The Phenomenology of Epistemic Claims: And Its Bearing on the
Essence of Philosophy. RICHARD M. ZANER, University of Texas 17
Problems of the Life-World. ARON GURWITSCH, Graduate Faculty of
the New School for Social Research 35
The Life-World and the Particular Sub-Worlds. WERNER MARX,
University of Freiburg/Br. 62
On the Boundaries of the Social World. THOMAS LUCKMANN,
University of Frankfurt 73
Alfred Schutz on Social Reality and Social Science. MAURICE
NATANSON, University of California at Santa Cruz 101
Homo Oeconomicus and His Class Mates. FRITZ MACHLUP, Princeton
University 122
Toward A Science of Political Economics. ADOLPH LOWE, Graduate
Faculty of the New School for Social Research 140
Some Notes on Reality-Orientation in Contemporary Societies. ARVID
BRODERSEN, formerly of the Graduate Faculty of the New School
for Social Research 174
The Eclipse of Reality. ERIC VOEGELIN, the Hoover Institution,
Stanford University 185
Alienation in Marx's Political Economy and Philosophy. PHILIP
MERLANt, Scripps College 195
6 TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Problem of Multiple Realities: Alfred Schutz and Robert Musil.
PETER L. BERGER, Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social
Research 213
Phenomenology, History, Myth. FRED KERSTEN, University of
Wisconsin-Green Bay, Fox Valley Campus 234
The Role of Music in Leonardo's Paragone. EMANUEL WINTERNITZ,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 270
Alfred Schutz Bibliography 297
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A number of people have helped in various ways in bringing this voiume to
appropriate completion. Valuable suggestions and advice have come from
many of the contributors. In addition, I wish to thank Drs. Carl Mayer,
Herbert Spiegelberg, and Helmut Wagner for bibliographical information.
I am especially grateful to Mrs. lIse Schutz for biographical and biblio
graphical material and for the photograph which appears as the frontispiece.
Other assistance came from Mrs. Joan Hodgson of the Library of the Uni
versity of California at Santa Cruz and Mrs. Phyllis Halpin and Mrs. Char
lotte Cassidy of the Cowell College Steno Pool at UCSC. Lois Natanson has
helped me solve some problems of language and style. Dr. H. J. H. Hart
gerink of Martinus Nijhoff has been patient and understanding in his treat
ment of this work.
The paper by Adolph Lowe is reprinted with the permission of Prentice
Hall, Inc., and the paper by Maurice Natanson is reprinted with the per
mission of Social Research.
It was my hope that Dr. Albert Salomon would be part of this venture,
but he died before my letter of invitation reached him. I would like, how
ever, to record his name here. And, alas, Dr. Philip Merlan did not live to
see the publication of his essay.
The kindness and cooperation of colleagues, friends, and assistants have
enhanced this tribute to Alfred Schutz, but responsibility for the volume
rests solely with the editor.
INTRODUCTION
Alfred Schutz was born in Vienna on April 13, 1899, and died in New
York City on May 20, 1959. The year 1969, then, marks the seventieth
anniversary of his birth and the tenth year of his death. The essays which
follow are offered not only as a tribute to an irreplaceable friend, colleague,
and teacher, but as evidence of the contributors' conviction of the eminence
of his work. No special pleading is needed here to support that claim, for it
is widely acknowledged that his ideas have had a significant impact on
present-day philosophy and phenomenology of the social sciences. In place
of either argument or evaluation, I choose to restrict myself to some bi~
graphical information and a fragmentary memoir. *
The only child of Johanna and Otto Schutz (an executive in a private
bank in Vienna), Alfred attended the Esterhazy Gymnasium in Vienna, an
academic high school whose curriculum included eight years of Latin and
Greek. He graduated at seventeen - in time to spend one year of service in
the Austrian army in the First World War. For bravery at the front on the
battlefield in Italy, he was decorated by his country. After the war ended,
he entered the University of Vienna, completing a four year curriculum in
only two and one half years and receiving his doctorate in Law. Upon ob
taining his degree, he became secretary to an association of banks in
Vienna. After a few years, he joined a private banking firm in Vienna with
international interests. His work involved legal contracts, agreements, and
tax matters. In 1938, the Nazi occupation of Austria compelled Schutz and
his wife and two children to emigrate. After a stay in Paris, they came to
New York City in 1939 and settled there. From 1943 on, he taught at the
Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research as a lecturer and
professor of philosophy and sociology, offering such courses as the Meth
odology of the Social Sciences, Theory of Social Role, Sociology of Lan-
* This is not intended to be a history of Schutz's career. For further information
see Professor Van Breda's Preface to the first volume of Schutz's Collected Papers.
x INTRODUCTION
guage, and Self and Society. For most of his life, Schutz continued to work
full time as - in his own words - a businessman. His philosophical-academ
ic career was an additional labor, carried on at the expense of an enor
mous and precious effort. Husserl once called him "a banker by day and a
phenomenologist by night." The union of the businessman and the philoso
pher seemed to me not only understandable but even necessary - as re
markable yet as natural as the combination of insurance and poetry in the
life of Wallace Stevens. That Schutz chose to be a teacher as well, however,
was a supreme and priceless gift.
Now I turn to the memoir, recognizing how paradoxical it is to ask a
reader who did not know Schutz to remember him with me. Still, I insist on
addressing those who never knew him. Those who did have no need of this
report. The paradox is that to grasp the essential meaning of the description
you need to have known the man, at least to have had some direct im
pression of him. Bergson made the point when he wrote of the artist who
is passing through Paris and who makes a series of sketches:
Now beneath all the sketches he has made at Paris the visitor will probably
by way of memento, write the word "Paris". And as he has really seen Paris, he
will be able, with the help of the original intuition he had of the whole, to place
his sketches therein, and so join them together. But there is no way of perform
ing the inverse operation; it is impossible, even with an infinite number of
accurate sketches, and even with the word "Paris" which indicates that they
must be combined together, to get back to an intuition that one has never had,
and to give oneself an impression of what Paris is like if one has never seen it.
Of course, the reader can "typify" the description given. He can appre
ciate the qualities of what some might call Schutz's "old world charm" or
"Viennese manner." Yet such characterizations tend to avoid as well as
obscure the truth. In trying to suggest the semblance of a fugitive intuition,
I prefer to approach the past more obliquely, starting with some physical
description.
Schutz was slight. His face was profoundly lined, and although his eyes
were penetrating and searching, his gaze was never demeaning or scathing.
The expression was intense without any sense of strain. It was the face of
a man capable of extraordinary discernment. The first time he looked at
me, I thought that the ventricles of my brain were exposed. Yet his apprais
al was reassuring, not surgical. He spoke of "common work," and I left him
challenged to intellectual candor and my best effort. In class, Schutz de
manded a great deal of himself. His courses were thoroughly prepared, and
he was painstaking in developing a new course (for example, he spent years
collecting and organizing material in preparation for a course on the
INTRODUCTION XI
sociology of invention and technical progress). Notes for his classes filled
large loose-leaf books. While lecturing, he would tum their pages with long
fingered hands - hands which were often in movement, playing with a
cigarette lighter as he talked or holding a cigarette in a way which could be
fully described and accounted for only by one who had a subtle grasp of
the last one hundred years of European civilization. Schutz was a teacher
by instinct - the only dramatic and unrehearsable way. The warmth and
wit which gave ballast to his lectures and discussions were the joy of those
he taught. Very often after class, he would go to a cafetaria or coffee house
with a band of students interested in continuing the analysis, pursuing other
questions, or just delighting in a man whose manifold concerns included
them as it did so many others and so many realms: the worlds of children
and music, philosophy and social science, business and poetry.
Presupposed in this souvenir is a philosophical conversation which must
remain unstated and unexamined. Yet looking back eighteen years to the
time I first met him, I find it difficult to separate in Schutz the philosopher
and the person. In my copy of his Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt,
he inscribed a favorite quotation from Hume: "Be a philosopher; but amid
all your philosophy, be still a man." Alfred Schutz was both.
M.N.
Santa Cruz, California
1969