Reflection on Planned Operations

Abstract

Alfred Schutz was an exemplary phenomenologist. Chief among the ways in which I am moved to emulate him is the manner in which he related himself in his own philosophizing to that of Edmund Husserl. Schutz was not interested in being a mere interpreter or transmitter of phenomenological doctrines. Rather it is manifest in his writings that he used Husserl’s findings to facilitate his own phenomenological investigations, adopting and adapting those results which he found sound and relevant to his own problematics and revising and extending them where he found them in one or another way wanting. As a tribute then to Schutz, I shall here attempt to treat a part of his theoretical product after that same fashion. Thus while the theme of this investigation was important for Schutz and while my results largely confirm those of Schutz and Husserl which bear on it, I am not so much concerned here with the thought of my phenomenological predecessors as I am with the matters themselves in question and in that respect I claim to have made some philosophically useful advances within constitutive phenomenology.

“Phenomenology is a serious and difficult endeavor. Its job has only started, and the task ahead is enormous.” Alfred Schutz

This is an expanded, reorganized, and annotated version of a paper read under the same title in October, 1972 in the Philosophy Colloquium Series of Northern Illinois University and in the symposium on Alfred Schutz at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy meeting at Duquesne University.