Page 327 - Contribution To Phenomenology

320 DAVID CARR

But the circumscribed focus and the decided methodological commit-
ment of Alfred Schutz did not prevent him from producing a body of
work which is extraordinary for its breadth, its richness, and above all for
its undoctrinaire flexibiUty and openness. When we think of the relatively
short career of this man, made even more difficult by his being uprooted
and relocated in the new world, we are amazed by what he ac-
complished. Perhaps most important for those of us who consider
ourselves part of the phenomenological tradition, Schutz has done the
most to make good on phenomenology's promise as a method extending
beyond philosophy into other disciplines. His influence on sociology,
through his students and through his writings, has been immense.^ Part
of this is due to phenomenology itself, part to Schutz' ability to present
it clearly and undogmatically to his English-speaking students and readers,
part no doubt to his own flexibility in adapting himself to and addressing
the concerns of colleagues in his adopted country and culture.
The features of Schutz* thought and writing I have just mentioned—its
openness, its flexibility, its undoctrinaire and undogmatic character—lead
me to think he would have responded well to sympathetic and construc-
tive criticism. In my own work I have drawn much from Schutz, but I
have also been critical of many features of his thought. It is inevitable
that such criticism take place, and as is the case with the really important
thinkers, the kinds of criticisms I have developed would not even have
been possible if I had not already absorbed the basic outlines of Schutz'
thought. I often think of Schutz what I think of Husserl, that he was not
always true to his own best intentions and insights. But we owe those
intentions and insights to hun, and our careful and critical attention to
them is the most important homage we can offer to their author.
All this is by way of justifying the fact that my intention here is not
to provide exposition or commentary on Schutz' work but to engage it
in critical debate. But I fear that my concern runs deeper now than the
sort of internal criticism I have attempted in some of my previous work,
for it is aimed not at Schutz' consistency with his own fundamental
insights but the acceptability of those insights themselves. I am beginning
to wonder if Schutz' work, while exploiting phenomenology's promise to
the full, is not also revealing to us its limits. I wonder if the phenomen-

^ See Worldly Phenomenology: The Continuing Influence of Alfred Schutz on North
American Human Science, edited by Lester Embree (Washington: Center for Advanced
Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1988).