Between the Subject and Sociology: Alfred Schutz's Phenomenology of the Life-World.

This article begin with a presentation of researcher Alfred Schutz's phenomenology by way of his great mentor, Edmund Husserl. Schutz sees an artificiality in the concept of "life world" produced by Husserl's method of reduction and as an alternative, proposes to assume intersubjectivity as a given of everyday life rather than a category which needs to be derived philosophically. The phenomenology that Schutz develops thus appears to replace Husserl's search for apodicticity with a sociological project aimed at describing the "structures of the life-world." Schutz, however, actually retains Husserl's emphasis on the subject and this creates a tension between the assumption of intersubjectivity and individual experience upon which, it transpires, Schutz's account is based. Thus caught, between intersubjectivity on the one side and the subject on the other, Schulz presents the social world as an achievement in the face of solipsistic intransigencies in which understanding between individuals is a mysterious and chancy affair. The burden of overcoming this purported weakness in the commonsense structures of everyday life falls to the social scientist.