ALFRED SCHUTZ (1899-1959) PHENOMENOLOGY and SOCIAL REALITY PHENOMENOLOGY and '" SOCIAL REALITY Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz

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ALFRED SCHUTZ (1899-1959) PHENOMENOLOGY AND SOCIAL REALITY PHENOMENOLOGY AND '" SOCIAL REALITY Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz

Edited by

MA URICE NAT ANSON

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