Page 336 - Contribution To Phenomenology

PHENOMENOLOGICAL SOCIAL THEORY 329

Husserl to have failed at this because it cannot be done. "Inter-
subjectivity is not a problem of constitution which can be solved within
the transcendental sphere, but is rather a datum (Gegebenheit) of the
life-world . . the fundamental ontological category of human existence
.
in the world. . . ."^ This ringing declaration is taken by many to be a
great advance over Husserl and to express the move by which Schutz,
Merleau-Ponty, and others liberate themselves from the transcendental
version of phenomenology in favor of its "existential" version. This might
be taken to mean that these philosophers are no longer concerned with
the philosophical problem of our knowledge of other minds.
The fact remains that Schutz, throughout his career, presents himself
as attempting to work out the foundation of the social sciences. And
even Merleau-Ponty rarely discussed the problem of "relations with
others" without linking it with the problem of the "sciences de Thomme."
In such sciences, obviously, the philosophical problems of skepticism,
solipsism, and concept derivation have no place, but the point is to take
this "datum of the life-world" and subsume it under the sort of rigorous
and wide-ranging concepts that make for scientific treatment.
Could it be that these thinkers, at least impUcitly, construe the other
principally as an object of knowledge, or potential knowledge? And could
this be a further effect of the concept of intentionaUty, however flexibly
it may be treated by these post-Husserlian phenomenologists?
To be sure, it is not only the concept of intentionaUty but also that
of science that they treat flexibly. Schutz and Merleau-Ponty belong to
a long line of philosophers (beginning with Dilthey and the neo-Kantians)
who adamantly refuse to treat the Geisteswissenschaften or sciences
humaines as continuous with the natural sciences. Nothing is farther from
their intentions than to reduce the human world to a collection of objects
or events to be treated according to causal relations or laws.
But there are features of the concept of science, even after we
eliminate the reductionistic connotation of the English term and are
guided by the broader scope of the term Wissenschaft, which are carried
along by Schutz and which may stand in the way of our understanding
of the social. For Husserl, of course, the other is still a Gegenstand in
the broadest sense, which belongs to a domain or region of being,
dominated by its own material a priori laws. And over against that object

^ Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers HI: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, edited
by I. Schutz (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1967), 82.