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Abstract. Taking his point of departure from William James and, by implication, Franz
Brentano, Alfred Schutz made explicit the multifaceted experience of sub-universes (or mul-
tiple realities) as a phenomenon for phenomenological clarification on an entirely different
foundation from James, Brentano and Husserl. The rethinking of Brentano, James and Husserl
makes the phenomenon explicit in such a way that a vast new domain of phenomenological
investigation is opened up.
Preface
Some years ago Jacques Barzun (1983) published a lovely and loving study
of the thought of William James. He called it A Stroll with William James. The
book, Barzun says, is the record of an intellectual debt resulting from keep-
ing an open account with William James. Reading that statement recalled to
me the first time I met Alfred Schutz, the beginning of my stroll.
I had signed up for one of Schutzs courses at the Graduate Faculty, and it
was his custom to interview students who enrolled. Almost the first question
he asked me, perhaps because I was an American student, was whether I had
read William James. The question struck me as especially odd and disappoint-
ing because I had come to Schutz to read, not James, but Husserl. For the
undergraduate philosophical background I had been brought up in, James was
not only declass but also pass. My impression at the time, however, is that
it was not so important that I had read James but rather that James was very
important to Alfred Schutz.
34 FRED KERSTEN
In those days, when your teacher told you to read something with pen in
hand, as Schutz did me, you went home and read it really read it. So I went
home and read William James Principles of Psychology,2 with special at-
tention to be paid to the chapter on Perception.
I mention this because in addition to dating the beginning of my stroll with
Alfred Schutz, it was only when I studied with Alfred Schutz that James made
any real sense to me, that he became more than a promoter of pragmatism
which C. S. Peirce had invented anyway. Only then did I understand why
James was so important to Schutzs thinking.
And it was only after having read James with Schutz that Husserl finally
began to make important sense to me.
Accordingly, this lecture is as much a stroll with William James as with
Alfred Schutz. It is yet another stroll of many over the years. Its purpose is
not just to take the vapors, as my neighbor Jean Schneider says, but also to
record my own intellectual debt in the open account I have been keeping with
Alfred Schutz over the many years which have elapsed since I was briefly his
student. But it is always only a stroll because it is a debt (like my financial
ones) I can never repay. The account, like the vapors, always remains open
and in the open, and I always find that there is no hope of closing it: I can
never seem to do justice either to the man or to the depths of his thought.3
In retrospect that is not at all surprising. After all, Alfred Schutz had a re-
markably original talent for bringing problems of philosophy and sociology
into the domain of genuine phenomenological clarification. My open account
includes the problems of:
1. Understanding the ways in which the structures and forms of everyday
life the wide-awake world of working and social action play a formative
rle in scientific theory about human nature in economics, political theory and
law.
2. Developing the manifold nature of (social) scientific theory, including
the exploration of a meta-theory and the establishment of limits to otherwise
ostensibly universal scientific propositions.
3. Establishing the essential building blocks for the phenomenological
rather than the logical or ideological foundation of scientific knowledge of
the social world.
4. Seeking, in that connection, to critically establish the limits of the phe-
nomenological foundation of the social world and of the phenomenological
clarification of philosophical and sociological problems on the basis of reject-
ing Husserls idea of a single, universal structure of the life-world (such as
Husserl insisted on in Formal and Transcendental Logic and The Crisis of
European Sciences). Thus, for example, the attempt to show that our experi-
ence of someone else is not wholly amenable to phenomenological clarifica-
tion so that certain aspects of the sociality of our lives requires a rather different
kind of clarification.
A STROLL WITH ALFRED SCHUTZ 35
The springboard for Schutzs theory of multiple realities lies in James Prin-
ciples of Psychology, in the famous, well-thumbed Chapter called The Per-
ception of Reality. When now I read that chapter, for the first time with
Schutzian optics, I suddenly realized that, as the centerpiece of his argument,
James translates the now-famous passage from a book by Franz Brentano: The
Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.4 That passage, and others which
James paraphrases,5 form the basis of Brentanos famous three-fold classifi-
cation of psychic phenomena and which James uncritically takes over as the
foundation for his theory of sub-universes of reality.6
I had been acquainted with the writings of Brentano before meeting Schutz.
Brentanos writing seemed like the photos I had seen of him: heavily bearded,
Germanically serious and remote. But after meeting Schutz, through his pres-
ence in James, Brentanos thought came close to home and decisively changed
the way I observed and described my experience.
For I now realized that in his Psychology Brentano makes the down-home
distinction between merely thinking of something and believing and judging
something along with other mental acts such as loving, hating, willing, desir-
ing and choosing. Merely thinking of something is the most fundamental, as
the passage translated by James clearly insists. We cannot believe in something,
judge it to be the case, desire it, unless that something is thought of in the first
36 FRED KERSTEN
place good, empirical common sense, it would seem. Universally, with Bren-
tano James was saying that all acts of consciousness either are merely thinking
of something or if not then based on merely thinking of something.7
That distinction rests on another equally down-home distinction between
an act which makes something objective, and an inner awareness of the act,
of being party to the act. This latter, however, is not to be understood as a
supervenient and distinct act making the original psychic act its primary
object. Instead the inner awareness of each and every act is conveyed as an
intrinsic component by that very act itself8 were it the case that being party
to the act follows upon the act itself bearing on something objective, or is the
superinduced effect of the act, or somehow supervenient to it, then it is con-
ceivable that we would experience the things with which we are busied the-
matically without ever knowing that we do.9
Let us grant, then, that in an act of consciousness we are, as a rule, themati-
cally concerned with the object or affairs the something objective upon
which the act bears. Whether materially relevant or not to our thematic busied-
ness, inner awareness is an a priori condition for consciousness. James will
use this insight to his advantage when formulating his law that the same,
which is thought of before, can be thought of again.10
Ostensibly, the phenomenological datum at issue is this: Built upon on the
mere thought of something is the belief in it as existent in this or that manner
even though the mere thought itself offers no clue as to the manner in which
it is to be believed (or disbelieved).11 In short, the world and things in it are
presented as existent only in acts of belief. Belief is our very sense of real-
ity. As such, it is an acquiescence, James says, an emotion of conviction
akin to consent.12 As we may also say, belief is that further supervenient act
of consciousness in and through which our world is presented as existent, real.
To be sure, as a good pragmatist James limits his discussion of belief to the
active gearing into the real, wide-awake world of work belonging to our emo-
tional and active life.
Now, it is only by virtue of this theory of belief and the adoption of Brentanos
classification of psychic phenomena that James introduces the idea of sub-uni-
verses of reality. If the Brentano-James notion of belief and of the classification
are valid, it follows that, phenomenologically, reality is correlative to super-
venient acts of belief and not to mere thought or objectivating presentation.
Existence, reality, we may also say, is experienced on the basis of an exis-
tential void, an existentially indifferent manifold entertained by my thought
of it. Existentially, there is neither nothing nor not nothing. I found this con-
clusion unsettling and, with James, risked all by asking the first question con-
cerning our gearing believingly into the world:
Under what circumstances do we think things real?(James, 1950, vol.11:
287).
In my zeal to find out I found myself face-to-face with James horse.
A STROLL WITH ALFRED SCHUTZ 37
I dont know if James had a dog. (Pragmatists and existentialists are alike,
apparently, in not having dogs.) But he did have a horse named Maggie.
And his chief example for clarifying the question of the circumstances un-
der which we think things real is that of imagining a winged horse and having
nothing else before the mind.13 In such a case, the mind cannot help but believe
in the winged horse existing precisely as having wings, as really there and no-
where else. The only situation in which it could be believed in as unreal would
be one in which it would be experienced as cancelled or contradicted:
But if, James (1950: 289290) says, with this horse I make an inroad
into the world otherwise known, and say, for example, that is my old mare
Maggie, having grown a pair of wings where she stands in her stall, the whole
case is altered.
The alteration consists in the fact that the horse and its place are identified
with a horse and its place otherwise known, and what is known of the latter
objects is incompatible with what is perceived with the former. Maggie in
her stall with wings! Never! The wings are unreal, visionary. I have dreamed
a lie about Maggie in her stall.
This and other cases and situations provide James with a basis for distin-
guishing various kinds of contradictory phenomena mental phenomena such
as the winged horse contradicted by something non-mental, Maggie in her stall;
or physical phenomena contradicted by others, where one thing turns out to
be other than it was at first thought to be. On the other hand, one and the same
thing, for instance, the horse Maggie, can at one time be construed as a winged
horse, at another without wings.
A basic law of constitution pertaining to consciousness, of which inner
awareness is an a priori condition, is that we can at any moment think of the
same thing which at any former moment we thought of, but we cannot think
of it incompatibly with our other ways of thinking of it at the same time.14
Expressed phenomenologically what is the significance of James line of
thought here? Phenomena of all kinds are merely thought of. On the basis of
merely thinking of them we can proceed to believe or disbelieve in them as
existent or as non-existent. Because believing and disbelieving are based on
merely thinking of things in no way contradictory, such believing or disbe-
lieving is prima facie justification for believing or disbelieving in them as
existent or non-existent. The visual having is prima facie justification for
believing in the winged horse as existent precisely with respect to those deter-
minations, qualities, relations it is merely thought of as having. As it were,
the existential void makes room for the reality of the world and things in it,
or for the world of dreams and phantasy.
So it would seem that Brentano, and James, have led me strolling down a
primrose path to what? Surely it is not nothing, but it would not appear to
38 FRED KERSTEN
. . . in the strict and ultimate sense of the word existence, everything which
can be thought of at all exists as some sort of object. . . . The mere fact of
appearing as an object at all is not enough to constitute reality. . . . what we
need is practical reality, reality for ourselves; and, to have that, an object
must not only appear, but it must appear both interesting and important.
The worlds whose objects are neither interesting nor important we treat
simply negatively, we brand them as unreal . . . In this sense, whatever ex-
cites and stimulates our interest is real. . . .
The fons et origo of all reality, whether from the absolute or the practical
point of view, is ourselves. But, as thinkers with emotional reactions, we
give what seems to us a still higher degree of reality to whatever we select
and turn to with a will. These are our living realties; and not only these,
but all the other things which are intimately connected with these.
So far so good.
Because the sub-universes are co-presented with one another, neither be-
lieved nor disbelieved in, because the manifold of givenness turns up in our
experience ordered and formed but reality-neutral, there is room for will,
choice, attention, finally belief and disbelief.
Belief is based on choice of something merely thought of to believe in. In
turn, this is based on attending to something as there to be believed in. Yet
because what is thought of offers nothing in itself as a criterion for the selec-
tion of one sub-universe over another, and because neither choice nor atten-
tion are ipso facto belief or disbelief, a willing is required to motivate belief:
the will to believe. Even if I had paid attention to, and chosen, a certain sub-
universe as paramount, believing in it does not follow automatically. Only if
there is a supervenient will to believe do I finally believe. 16
But is this enough to get the insomniac off, let alone the Bintz brothers? A
theory of free will may account for the difference between the sub-universe
of dreams and of waking reality, but not of their interaction.
In the essay, Does Consciousness Exist, James (1958: 80, 124ff) tries to show
that the law, that the same can be merely thought of as well as believed in with
respect to a given sub-universe, cuts across the boundaries of several sub-
universes. The way James arrives at this conclusion is by rejecting the idea
that there is a hypothetical, unpresented world which explains what is merely
present and which assigns the distribution of what is merely presented into
the various sub-universes.
Brentanos view rests, according to James, (1958: 9ff, 42) on that demon
of modernism, a Cartesian dualism, the rejection of which is tantamount to
rejecting the hypothetical, unpresented world. By universalizing his law of
consciousness James calls into question the sharp, clear-cut distinction Bren-
tano makes between psychical and physical phenomena. Sticking to what is
presented, all that one can say is that, in Jamess words, a given undivided
portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, <plays> the part of
a knowing, of a state of mind, of consciousness; while in a different context
the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known. The
existential void is like an equal opportunity employer. Or, as James says, the
concept expressed by the term, phenomenon, is a double-barreled one.
Yet if we reject Brentanos view, we are left with the paradox of pure experi-
ence: How is it that the one, self-same thing, e.g., the room in which I stand, in
Jamess (1958: 1112) words, should be in two places at once, both in outer space
and in a persons mind? How is it that a crime should be in two places at once?
A STROLL WITH ALFRED SCHUTZ 43
But if what is given is truly what is merely thought of, then the first struc-
tural feature of experience is that it is nothing more than a place of two proc-
esses, and that place could be counted twice over, as belonging to either
<process,> and spoken of loosely as existing in two places, although it would
remain all the time a numerically single thing. On such a view, things look
bad indeed for the Bintz brothers. But this is only the beginning of James
puzzlement.
In his Notebooks dating from 1905 to 1908, and after reading a review of
the Principles by Brentanos student, Anton Marty,19 James realized he was
operating with two rather conflicting views in his radical empiricism. There
is a pluralistic dualism (many experiences assigned to different sub-universes
based on the dichotomy between the psychical and physical) and a redupli-
cative monism (the same parcel of experience figuring many times over in
different sub-universes).20 And James cannot decide which doctrine to stand
by. Among many other things, perhaps what is really troubling is the still
persistent haunt of the existential void and the heady novelty it affords.
If something is merely thought of as potentially belonging to this or that
sub-universe, this would imply after all that the object is meant as this-rather-
than-that-kind of object. It is already there standing in certain possible rela-
tions, e.g., of exclusion as in the case of Maggie in her stall and Maggie with
wings.
And if things are already present in our experience as of potential kinds does
this not mean that they are already believed in as possibly existing in this or that
sub-universe? Does this not further mean that the belief-characteristic, to use
Husserls phrase, is not a matter of difference in class of psychical phenomena
but of a quality (Husserl) of the object meant, precisely as presented?
If that is the case, does this not mean that choice, will and attention are rather
based on a belief-presentation of something instead of a merely thinking of
something, instead of a mere presentation of something? Mere presentation
would then be inconceivable except so far as the already imputed belief-
characteristic were deliberately disregarded in a supervenient act. In that case,
the existential void, merely thinking of something, is a neutrality modifica-
tion (Husserl) of a belief-presentation.
It is here that Alfred Schutz joins our stroll. He had, after all, insisted many
times that William James had silently carried out many of his descriptions in
the phenomenologically reduced sphere. But why?
What are the deeper consequences of radical empiricism such that our whole
picture of human experience is, as it were, turned upside down? In his Psy-
chology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano developed the idea of psy-
44 FRED KERSTEN
We begin with factual individuals which fall as examples within the ideal
extension of a valid Eidos, which are ideally possible individuals, and, more-
over, which exhibit eidetic necessity. There are eidetic existents which are
singularizations of eidetic universality such as what Schutz calls the pure
(or: ideal) we-relation, or pure thou-relation etc. 25 Here I learned that my
stroll with William James was already one with Alfred Schutz.
This is because the whole problematic of Brentanos classification of psy-
chic phenomena and the question of merely thinking of something silently
but phenomenologically reduced is now better expressed by what Schutz called
multiple realities.
Intellectually my stroll with Alfred Schutz really began with his essay, On
Multiple Realities, first published in 1945, and which he must have had in
46 FRED KERSTEN
mind when I first met him ten years later. There Schutz begins with a sum-
mary of James praise-worthy account of the various orders of reality, of
sub-universes of reality, which is flawed, Schutz says, (1962: 207f) because
James deliberately restricts himself to a psychological aspect of the theory
that is to say, James still operates with the theoretical interest of the psycholo-
gist in Brentanos sense of Psychology operative in the Principles. Schutzs
task is to broaden James focus and establish the relation between the world
of daily life and that of scientific theory rather than a well-founded scien-
tific hypothesis of how the world of daily life is caused or generated by
the real physical world. Schutz heeds the essential rather than the factual
characterizations James provides.
Schutzs (1962: 208229) version of the phenomenology of sub-universes
is anchored in the structure of our being geared for and gearing into the daily,
intersubjective world within the natural attitude: our basic unavoidable
existential stance toward the world. Thus the question, under what circum-
stances do we think something real, is moot.
The daily world so structured is not just one sub-universe among others,
but the paramount sub-universe, the paramount reality. A feature of be-
ing geared for and gearing into the daily world is not a supervenient act of
belief (Brentano/James), nor a neutrality-modification of underlying belief
(Husserl). Instead, it is the suspension of the doubt that the world and its
objects might be otherwise than it appears Schutz refers to this as the
epoch of the natural attitude a striking but not especially felicitous ex-
pression, as Aron Gurwitsch observed, yet one quite consistent with the con-
trast between Brentanos idea of psychology and radical empiricism.
Gurwitsch also noted, in that connection, that one of the reasons for Schutzs
anchoring the theory of multiple realities in this suspension of doubt is that it
has its origin in the fundamental anxiety (Schutz) of the cessation of life:
death.26 I mention this because it points to the first difference of Schutzs from
James account of sub-universes: instead of an existentially neutral stuff, it is
existential Angst and not a choice which underpins and motivates our belief in
the paramount reality of the world, or even one or another multiple reality.
Indeed, it is just seeing this difference which makes the multiple realities
distinct as phenomena within the domain of phenomenological clarification.
For James our basic confrontation with the world is not that of anxiety about
our own existence, but merely thinking of the world. Anxiety is then a super-
venient act. This is hardly the case for Schutz. Our existential anxiety instead
discloses the intrinsic accent of reality presupposed by merely thinking about
the world. Had Schutz not read Husserl and simply taken over the underpin-
nings of James theory, he would have had to explain how there is a shift in
the accent of reality27 from one sub-universe to another since the same, which
can be thought of again, is only merely presented: the same would then have
no intrinsic accent of reality of its own.
A STROLL WITH ALFRED SCHUTZ 47
For Schutz, then, as for James, the question remains: How can the same,
which can be thought of again, figure once of twice or more times in differ-
ing sub-universes? The James-Brentano answer is that in each case there is a
different and supervenient act of belief.
But how is it for Schutz (and Husserl) for whom the Jamesian psychology
of belief is rejected but not James essential characterizations of belief?
Schutzs (1962: 230, 231ff) first step is to distinguish, on the one hand, be-
tween finite provinces of meaning the temporal currents of our experi-
encing and, on the other hand, the multiple realities the objectivities
meant in them. Each case of meaning and each finite province, regarded as
an eidetic existent, has its own cognitive style, such as its own determinations
of essential necessity which include attention to life, suspension of doubt,
spontaneity and forms of sociality.
The second step requires developing the various phantasy modifications
of the unity of meanings comprising the paramount reality of daily life. To be
sure, Schutz limits himself to examining the motivation for each such phan-
tasy modification instead of working out the features of each set of phantasy
modifications, instead of working out what we might call the empirically
evidential phantasying-meanings peculiar to each of the multiple realities, or
of working out the non-phantasy evidence of the essential possibilities of in-
dividual affairs having the determinations presented in phantasy.
His (Schutz, 1962: 231) idea, then, is that each cognitive style of phan-
tasy modification results from a
shock which compels us to break through the limits of this finite prov-
ince of meaning and to shift the accent of reality to another one. . . . those
experiences of shock . . . show me that the world of working in standard
time is not the sole finite province of meaning but only one of many others
accessible to my intentional life (emphasis is mine F. K.).
On Schutzs view, our experience is not comprised by neutral stuff but in-
stead our basic existential conviction is, rather than wrested from existentially
indifferent stuff, based upon a manifold of essentially possible accents of
reality essentially intrinsic qualities of the temporal existential currents of
our lives which may be characterized in each case by its specific form of the
suspension of doubt28 and by its own time-perspective (cf. also Schutz, 1967:
52ff.).
Strictly speaking, I think that Schutz should have said, multiple shifts of
the accent of reality, instead of multiple realities. Sub-universes originate
from a shock in daily life, which alters the form of suspension of doubt and
48 FRED KERSTEN
founds one or another shift in the accent of reality. The newly shifted accent
then becomes, until further notice, the existential organizing principle of ex-
perience.
But the shock and suspension of doubt are only necessary conditions for
the shift in the accent from one of the multiple realities to another. Pheno-
menologically, of what does their essential possibility consist? To answer this
question we have to at least answer the following questions:
(c) In terms of the dream and oneiric justice, or of the Bintz brothers, is
the reverse possible? Is the momentary shift of accent, of whatever du-
ration, of any moral let alone legal consequence? Precisely what rela-
tionship is presupposed by oneiric justice?30
5. Are there sub-universes within sub-universes (e.g., dreams and the super-
natural)?
6. Is there a cognitive tension among the accents of reality? Is there a play
or competition among multiples realities (or multiple accents) in the
fashion of Leibnizs monadology so that the paramount reality of the world
of working and daily life proves to be the best possible one because it is
actual rather than feigned or phantasied? Schutz, after all, refers to such a
logic of everyday thinking in the spirit of Leibniz.
7. What is the existential grounding of multiple realities? Is there not a meta-
physics at work here, a metaphysics of daily life?
These questions and ones deriving from them are part of my open debt to Alfred
Schutz. My line of credit was opened when he asked me if I had read William
James. My stroll with Alfred Schutz began with the encounter of the existen-
tial void and ends with clinging to the wreckage of anxiety-ridden underpin-
nings and metaphysics of daily life.
My open account with Alfred Schutz is now greater, my intellectual debt
now deeper than ever before. My stroll with Alfred Schutz is still far from over.
Notes
1. The Alfred Schutz Memorial Lecture presented at the University of Oregon on 8 Octo-
ber 1999, sponsored by the American Philosophical Association, the Center for Advanced
Research in Phenomenology, and the Society for Phenomenology and Human Sciences.
I am also indebted to the Butterfly Lady for her encouragement and help.
2. When I had read the book before, I had learned perhaps more about other thinkers than
I did about James from James I had first learned about the tedious grindings in the
Kantian machine-shop, that Wilhelm Wundt was the most unmeaning philosopher who
had ever written, more unmeaning than the unspeakable Meinong. Too I even learned
a little more about Mozart from James, who translates part of a spurious letter of Mozart
the only copy of which was in the possession of Bettina Brentano, and which Schutz
cites in his unfinished Phenomenology of Music (see Collected Papers, IV, p. 248 and
p. 248 note 5).
3. Other accounts of my stroll with Alfred Schutz may be found in Franz Brentano and
William James, Phenomenology, History and Myth, Some Reflections on the Ground
of Comparison of Multiple Realities, Phenomenological Method: Theory and Practice,
and Galileo and the Invention of Opera.
4. William James, (1950, Vol. II: p. 286). James translation reads, in part: Every object
comes into consciousness in a twofold way, as simply thought of [vorgestellt] and as
admitted [anerkannt] or denied. The relation is analogous to that which is assumed by
most philosophers (by Kant no less than by Aristotle) to obtain between mere thought
50 FRED KERSTEN
and desire. Nothing is ever desired without being thought of; but the desiring is never-
theless a second quite new way of receiving it into consciousness. No more is anything
judged (i.e., believed or disbelieved) which is not thought of too. But we must insist that,
so soon as the object of a thought becomes the object of an assenting or rejecting judg-
ment, our consciousness steps into an entirely new relation towards it. It is then twice
present in consciousness, as thought of, and as held for real or denied; just as when de-
sire awakens for it, it is both thought and simultaneously desire. The original passage
appears in Brentanos Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, mit ausfhrlicher Ein-
leitung, Anmerkungen und Register von Oskar Kraus, II, p. 38. James of course refers to
the first edition of 1874, p. 266. Krauss edition is cited hereafter.
5. E.g. in Essays in Radical Empiricism and a Pluralistic Universe, pp. 27ff. which para-
phrases the famous passages on intentional inexistence and the distinction between
psychic and physical phenomena (Brentano, Psychologie, I, p. 124).
6. It is a classification Husserl will reject eight years later when formulating his own theory
of intentionality.
7. See Brentanos formulation, Psychologie, I, p. 136. In this connection, see Husserls pen-
etrating discussion Logische Untersuchungen,2 Volume II, 1, pp. 428ff.
8. What Brentano calls inner awareness (inneres Bewutsein), Volume I, Book II, Chap-
ter 2, 7ff., would seem to be what, in contemporary terms, is called consciousness
e.g., by Searle, Chalmers, etc., and the problem of causal patterns of consciousness
stem from the idea that inner awareness, rather than conveyed by the act itself, is
caused by the act, or that in some (unknown) fashion the psychic act yields or gives
rise to inner awareness. And if the act itself is considered as the operation of the brain,
or neurons and synapses, then inner awareness can be said to be caused by the brain.
9. Although the classification itself does not pass muster with either James, or Schutz or
Husserl, this latter distinction is one on which they agree.
10. For our discussion, more important than certain differences with Brentano is the area of
agreement between Brentano and James: the idea that mere presentation, or thought of
something (Vorstellung) comprises our basic experiential confrontation with the world.
To take a simple example: I see in front of me a dog. The seeing is not, per se, a believ-
ing in the dog as existent. That is rather a supervenient act based on the mere visual having
of the dog. Likewise, the desire to pet the dog is based in turn on believing in the dog not
only as existent but as friendly and, on that account, only in a still further act do I desire
to pet the dog.
11. As in Brentano, so in James, judgment, belief, is employed in a very broad sense
comprising everything from propositional believing to holding that something, no mat-
ter what, has some degree or other of existence. See Principles,II, p. 283; Essays in Radical
Empiricism, pp. 141f. A variety of problems arise here, one of which concerns whether
or not, at the level of mere presentation things are presented as of possible kinds.
12. James, Principles, II, loc. cit.; James would seem to blur the distinction between phe-
nomena of belief and phenomena of love and hate in Brentanos classification.
13. James (1950, Vol. II: 1988). The example is drawn from Spinoza, Ethics,II, p. 49 (Scho-
lium).
14. In James words, (1950: 290): The whole distinction of real and unreal, the whole psy-
chology of belief, disbelief and doubt, is thus grounded on two mental facts first, that
we are liable to think differently of the same; and second, that when we have done so,
we can choose which way of thinking to adhere to and which way to disregard.
15. This is tantamount to a modification of Brentanos classification of psychic phenomena
which classes choice among phenomena such as affections and conations in turn based
on belief or disbelief. As we shall see in what follows, it is not the only modification of
Brentano which James will make.
A STROLL WITH ALFRED SCHUTZ 51
16. Although James clearly deviates from Brentano by erasing the distinctions between feel-
ing, willing, paying attention, and believing, he nevertheless retains the basic structure
of Brentanos classification of psychic phenomena with its rock-bottom stratum of merely
thinking of something, of Vorstellung. For ambiguities of the term, Vorstellung, see
Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, V, 44f. In later writings, James translates
the term, Vorstellung, by presentation rather than by merely thinking of. Toward the
end of the chapter, The Perception of Reality, James identifies willing with believing.
17. See Ludwig Landgrebe, Husserls Phnomenologie und die Motive zu ihrer Umbildung,
in Phnomenologie und Metaphysik, p. 60 (my translation). See also Brentano, Psychologie,
II, pp. 103, 145ff., and Oskar Kraus Einleitung, pp. lxixf. In the light of Brentanos
influence on James, Landgrebes statement about Brentano is as relevant to Brentano and
James as it is to Brentano and Husserl the context in which he makes the statement.
18. See Landgrebe, (1949: 60). Cf. Brentano, (1924: 124, 138ff., 153ff).
19. See Anton Marty, Anzeige von William James Werk, The Principles of Psychology,
Zeitschrift fr Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, III (1892), pp. 297333.
(Reprinted in Anton Marty, Gesammelte Schriften,Halle: Niemeyer, 1916, 1 Band, 1
Abteilung, pp. 105156). James copy of Martys review, with his comments, can be found
in the library of Harvard University; see also Aron Gurwitsch, William James Theory
of the Transitive Parts of the Stream of Consciousness, Studies in Phenomenology and
Psychology, pp. 318f.
20. The Notebooks are reprinted in part in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character
of William James, Vol. II, pp. 750ff.
21. Schutz reads James in the light, primarily, of Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phno-
menologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie, 55f. See Alfred Schutz, On Multi-
ple Realities, Collected Papers, Volume I, pp. 230f. As early as 1940, in connection with
his article on William James (published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
I, June, 1941, Schutz insisted in a letter of 11/16/1940 to Aron Gurwitsch that James
unconsciously or rather silently, carries through many of his descriptions within the
<phenomenologically> reduced sphere. But to the extent he does so, he is only one link
in a long chain of philosophers and psychologists, all of whom were already acquainted
with intentionality, even if they did not use the term. See Schutz (1989:28).
22. This was a point repeatedly emphasized by Schutzs colleague at the Graduate Faculty,
Dorion Cairns.
23. This is especially the case with James idea of the fringes of consciousness, just as
Gurwitsch did with the idea of the noematic core in James and Husserl (the object of
thought).
24. See Helmut Wagner with Ilja Srubar, A Bergsonian Bridge to Phenomenological Psy-
chology, 1984, Chapter 1. And Alfred Schutz, Life Forms and Meaning Structure, 1982,
Chapter 1.
25. Just as Gurwitsch read it back into Brentano e.g., in Marginal Consciousness, Chapter 1.
26. See Gurwitschs comment, (1964: 398, note 46). See also Schutzs (1989:156) comment
on Gurwitschs treatment of his view.
27. An eidetically necessary quality of the various diverse currents of the flow of mental living.
28. See, for example (Schutz, 1962: 249), for that specific to scientific theory, which is
Schutzs interest in the first place.
29. For development of this aspect of Schutzs thought, see Fred Kersten, (1998: 14ff).
30. Gurwitsch insists that it is only with respect to the world of working, the paramount re-
ality of daily life, that we can assign moral and legal meaning. Precisely the story of the
insomniac and the Binz brothers suggests that this may not be the case. In the Republic,
571b576b, Plato had already suggested the danger of substituting the morality of
dreams for the thos of the good Polis.
52 FRED KERSTEN
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