But how can the appearance of solipsism come about? Obviously only
by
artificially
suspending the hidden intentionality of the founding mun-
dane intersubjectivity and eliminating, by means of the reduction, the
essential content of the world accepted by me as a world for everyone.
Neither the fact that the world, even in its reduced status as transcenden-
tal phenomenon, is a world of all of us, nor the facts that my experience
of the world refers a priori to Others, requires explanation. What does
require clarification is the desperate attempt to escape from the appear-
ance of solipsism by introducing the second epoche leading to the pri-
mordial sphere—since it is precisely this attempt which gives rise to that
appearance (p. 83).
(
2
) But Schutz’s criticism of the Husserlian account of transcendental inter-
subjectivity goes even further. He not only casts doubt on the single steps
Gros
234
Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 48 (2017) 214–239
taken by Husserl to solve the problem of transcendental intersubjectivity, but
also puts into question the philosophical pertinence of the problem itself. To
put it in Helmut Wagner’s words (1983, p. 313), the late Schutz “began to view
Husserl’s problem of ‘transcendental intersubjectivity’ no longer as a problem
of intersubjectivity; rather, formulation and presupposition of the ‘problem’
were in doubt”.
More precisely, in the Royaumont paper, Schutz (1970, p. 82) argues that in-
tersubjectivity is not to be understood as a problem to be solved by means of
“transcendental constitutional analysis”, but rather as “the fundamental onto-
logical category of human existence in the world and therefore of all philo-
sophical anthropology” (p. 82). Indeed, for Schutz (in Wagner, 1983, p. 304),
the only viable
habitat
for sociality is not the transcendental sphere, but the
everyday lifeworld. On this account, intersubjectivity is, quite simply, an ines-
capable “datum [
Gegebenheit
] of the lifeworld” that has to be taken as a given
by both philosophers and social scientists (Schutz, 1970, p. 82).
Arguably, late Schutz’s main
fundamental
objection to Husserl’s account of
intersubjectivity rests on his above-mentioned “creationist” interpretation of
the transcendental method of constitution. According to the Vienesse thinker,
what Husserl attempts to do in the 5th
Meditation
is to “constitute intersub-
jectivity in the sense of the
creation
of a universe of monads” within the tran-
scendental subjectivity of the meditating philosopher (Schutz, 1970, p. 90, 84.
My emphasis).
Now, in Schutz’s view (p. 90), insofar as Husserl tries to “found the existence
of the social world on constitutive operations of the consciousness”, he makes
an “extravagant use” of the transcendental constitutive analysis. More pre-
cisely, the attempt to show how my isolated subjectivity can
create
or
produce
other subjectivities is for Schutz a
speculative
move that lacks any philosophi-
cal pertinence. This becomes visible, for instance, in a rhetorical—and, in my
