Intersubjectivity

In this paper I discuss some significant aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology which could not be adequately known without studying the manuscripts, unpublished during his lifetime and then published gradually since 1950 by Husserl Archives in Leuven founded by Father van Breda in 1939. The aspects I discuss here are listed under 6 subjects: Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of the constituting corporeal subjectivity, Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of the conditions of possibility of representifications, concept of I-consciousness, conception of transcendental subjectivity as intersubjectivity, the development of Husserl’s conception of phenomenological philosophy, and Husserl’s metaphysics. This paper is drawn from, and an extension of, a lecture given at the Catholic University of Louvain in the occasion of 80th anniversary of the foundation of the Husserl Archives.

The aim of this work is to demonstrate that Alfred Schütz's contribution to the social sciences is understandable only within the framework of his troubled relationship with Husserl's phenomenology. We will see how Schütz tries to take charge, to face and resolve a good part of the critical issues present in Husserl's work and, above all, to make a turning point in the field of investigation of phenomenology which will prove decisive for the human sciences as it will focus his attention on the question of intersubjectivity, considered no longer as a problem concerning only the phenomenological sphere but as a fundamental category of human existence. Therefore, we will try to show how Schütz's path assumes a considerable critical value as it contributes to raise the expectations of sociology and to strengthen the confidence of this discipline which tends to go beyond the narrow boundaries outlined by Husserl and to go in a direction diametrically opposite to "The Crisis of European sciences" outlined by the father of phenomenology, since Schütz provides stable and adequate bases for the social sciences that allow to analyze the fundamental structures that support the social world, and, in this way, at the same time, he manages to safeguard the basic nucleus of the phenomenological discipline, since, stripped of metaphysical lure and devoid of verbal and oracular enchantments, it is traced back to the Husserlian idea of rigorous science. From this point of view, Schütz's merit lies primarily in having made a critical revision of phenomenology, in having initiated a broad debate on the role of the social sciences, and in having provided the first ideas for the foundation of a phenomenologically oriented sociology.

Human being is ontologically a relational being living with others in organized communities and institutions. By focusing on the intersubjective and collective levels of human experience, this essay considers the possibility of a critical dialogue between Paul Ricœur’s and Alfred Schütz’s phenomenological works in the direction of a renewed socio-phenomenological approach to social reality. Through reference to Ricœur’s interpretation of the most important of Husserl’s writing presented in his 1967 collection of essays entitled Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology and Schütz’s masterpiece The Phenomenology of the Social World, this article will show a remarkable continuity and a coherent complementarity between these two authors. I begin with a broad framing of Husserl’s second epoché or reduction to the sphere of ownness as performed within the egological sphere, and then turn to Ricœur’s and Schütz’s critiques of the Husserlian conception of intersubjectivity. These reflections will lead us to discuss the inconsistency of Husserl’s idea of the intersubjective acceptance of the common objective nature and his formulation of the higher-order case of communal constitution.