Abstract
EDITOR’S NOTE
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Notes
- 1.
HRW: Literally, the term Geisteswissenschaften means sciences of the spirit—a choice only explainable in terms of the German philosophical-idealist tradition. It is, by the way, hardly stranger than the classical British choice of “moral science” as designation of social-science fields in accordance with the pragmatic-religious tradition of Scottish Protestantism. Interestingly, in both cases political economists played a conspicuous role if not in introducing then in propagating and popularizing the respective labels. The German term has been variously translated, for example as cultural sciences: term occasionally used by Schutz. Basically, it resists translation; I prefer to render it in its German form. The Geisteswissenschaften comprise fields of inquiry other than those of the natural sciences but only in so far as they are treated not in natural-science fashion but take cognizance of the human uniqueness of their subject matter and consider both human cognition and human volition as essential factors in their inquiries.
- 2.
HRW: In the first major part of the project of 1924–27, published above under the title, “Life Forms and Meaning Structure.”
- 3.
HRW: This passage (and its continuation in the following paragraphs) is remarkable because it is a first extensive formulation of the conception of intersubjectivity which Schutz, in 1932, should express in his “General Thesis of the Alter Ego” (in Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, Wien: Springer, 1932: 106ff.)
- 4.
HRW: In his American period, Schutz spoke of the “relative irrelevance of the vehicle.” The stress, here, is on the reservations: “differences of degree” in the present text and “relative” in the later formulation. For purposes of inter- subjective communication, as Schutz emphasized already in the present study, gestures and facial expressions may be more important for conveying meaning than the words which are spoken.
- 5.
HRW: See Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolishen Formen: Die Sprache. Berlin: Cassirer, 1921.
- 6.
HRW: See Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. 2 vols. Halle: Niemeyer, 1900-l.
- 7.
HRW: Here follows a whole page of text which was set in brackets and crossed out. I maintained it in this translation, placing it in square brackets.
- 8.
HRW:–This sectional title, like all those which follow and are marked by Roman or Arabic numerals, and subsection headings marked by letters, has been provided by Schutz. Next to the present title, he pencilled the mark “*S 26.” An asterisk without any further reference is found on p. 26 of the handwritten MS, clearly referring to the subsection labelled “b. Kasus.” I concluded that the mark after “I. Substantives” does not refer to this heading but to that of the subheading on the next line: “a. Numerus.” This may be interpreted as a note Schutz wrote to himself, expressing the intention to switch the position of the two subsections, taking “Kasus” first and “Numerus” second. Since this (a) is not certain and (b) could not be done without textual changes, I have maintained the original order of these subsections.
- 9.
HRW: German = Wald. On occasions, the English language expresses a collective in the plural. So, the proper translation of Wald would be “woods.” I had to choose “forest”’ the equivalent of the German word, Forst, that is, woods which are carefully planted and kept. In addition, English contains singular nouns which stand for pluralities in which the pronouns assigned to them are singular if a plurality of objects, but plural if a plurality of people are to be designated (the forest = it, the crowd = they).
- 10.
HRW: But the German word, Forst, would be.
- 11.
HRW: As it stands, the sentence about attention to parts of the tree as attention to the tree is misleading; at the least, it would demand explanation. At face value, attention to the “trunk” would lead to the term “trunk.” I doubt that Schutz would have introduced the idea of attention to specific parts of an object if, at the time, the incipient work of the Gestalt psychologists had been available to him and which made clear later that, at least in perception, attention moves from the whole to details and not from details to the whole.
- 12.
HRW: The next passage in the original text is marked at its beginning and its end by an inverted T, preceded by the abbreviation, “Anm.” (Anmerkung). I take this as an instruction to separate it from the text and bring it as footnote.
HRW: AS: Note. For instance, with the introduction of the microscopic technique in the natural sciences, it became necessary to formulate a series of names for things which, up to then, were sufficiently characterized by a common name.
- 13.
AS: Note. Certain words in certain languages have the same form in plural and singular. It is self-understood that this is no objection to these basic considerations; (the occasional identity of plural and singular, HRW) merely points to (accidental, HRW) phenomena in the histories of these languages.
- 14.
HRW: Schutz abandoned this MS before he turned to the study of this topic.
- 15.
HRW: Schutz inserted here the following remark.
AS: (To add: Note about the dial). (I assume “dial” stands for dialect, HRW.)
- 16.
HRW: It is a safe assumption that Schutz referred to the neoKantian philosopher Emil Lask.
- 17.
HRW: I apologize for this poetically poor translation of Rilke’s poem. Schutz rendered the original text as follows:
Ich fuerchte mich so vor der Menschen Wort,
Sie sprechen alles so deutlich aus.
Dieses heisst Hund und dieses heisst Haus und das Gute liegt hier und das boese dort.
- 18.
HRW: “Name ist Schall und Rauch”—a popular expression taken from Goethe’s Faust.
- 19.
HRW: “Romeo and Juliet,” Act II, scene ii.
- 20.
On top of the next paragraph, Schutz wrote in pencil: * S 34. A line links it to the second sentence of this paragraph, which starts with a square bracket. An asterisk is found on p. 34 of the original MS, followed by a short remark which was crossed out and is not readable on my xerox copy of the MS. Another lone asterisk is found near the bottom of p. 37. It is possible that Schutz intended to place the first passage marked (on p. 28) to p. 34 and then to p. 37. The whole paragraph on p. 28 begins with a double square bracket. However, various shorter passages in this long paragraph are also set in square brackets. It is practically impossible to ascertain how much of the paragraph Schutz intended to transfer to a later place. Omitting the initial dual square bracket, I maintained the whole paragraph as originally written, converting the other square brackets into parentheses, in agreement with the here adopted method of indicating passages set off by Schutz.
- 21.
HRW: After this sentence, Schutz inserted a closing square bracket and an asterisk. Possibly, this marked the end of the whole segment (covering almost two MS pages) which he wanted to transfer to a later place.
- 22.
HRW: It is of interest to see that Schutz already here expressed the idea which he should later discuss as the “biographically determined situation” of the individual [see, for instance, “Common Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14 (1953): 6].
- 23.
HRW: Here follows an unfinished sentence, heavily crossedout: “Conceptually, of course, results an unbridgeable difference between substance and quality—so that all concepts are synthetical …”
- 24.
HRW: I assume that the name was inadvertently misspelled and that Schutz referred to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (174299), the German essayist who is best known for his aphorisms.
- 25.
HRW: In his Faust, Goethe lets Mephistopheles give this as advice to a student, crowning it with the mixed metaphor, “Green is the golden tree of life.”
- 26.
HRW: Lacking expertise in theory and history of logic, I am at a loss to pinpoint meaning and origin of the term, teleological definition. According to the comments Schutz wrote after mentioning this term, it seems that he had in mind identification by description; the latter cannot serve as definition because it makes it impossible to separate accidental from essential features (so, a square or round shape of the surface of a table). In the back of his mind may have been the overcoming of this hindrance to defining “table” by resorting to the collection of purposes for which tables of all shapes, materials, and sizes have been built. This, again, fails to satisfy the rigid requirements of logicians, although there is no question that such a purposive-teleological “definition” is quite useful in practical life and, in fact, typical of it.
- 27.
HRW: The first sentences of the paragraph repeat the formulations of a slightly differently worded and unfinished paragraph which was crossed out in the original text. With this reformulation, the MS switches from handwritten to typed pages. The latter run from MS page 39–49. The last two text pages (50 and 51) are again handwritten.
- 28.
HRW: Peter and Paul are figures populating some of Bergson’s writings. Schutz met them there. However, they seem to be of long ancestry in Western Philosophy of the Christian era.
- 29.
HRW: This sentence was written by hand on the left margin.
- 30.
AS: If, as before, we speak here of ideal types of an experience, we mean thereby no conceptual type at all but exclusively the sum of several elements of those memory images which—in spite of all manifoldness and determination by duration–display an invariable character. Just they make it possible for Peter to reinterpret, as names, quality experiences in the sphere of the acting I and in the sphere of the speaking I.
- 31.
HRW: Schutz wrote on the margin of the passage which he crossed out (given here in square brackets): Vorwelt! (world of predecessors). The meaning of this note, which Schutz addressed to himself, becomes clear in the next sentence. He obviously intended here to write more explicitly about the historical fact of formation and structuring of any language, its historical g’ivenness, its creation as achievement of untold generations of linguistic ancestors.
- 32.
HRW: This paragraph was handwritten on the lower margin of the MS. A line on the left margin linked it to the middle of the preceding paragraph. This indicates that he intended to integrate it into this paragraph. However, he made a question mark next to the connecting line. Thus, he had second thoughts about the transfer. Its integration in the earlier paragraph, in addition, would have demanded a reformulation of parts of both paragraphs.
- 33.
HRW: In the original MS, this paragraph is followed by another one which covers two-thirds of the page (45). It is crossed out. In the midst of it is a mark referring to the marginal note, Zettel (separate sheet). This indicates that the content of the handwritten sheet is to be inserted at the point marked. However, its content is a reformulation of the original paragraph; it has been placed here in its stead.
- 34.
HRW: An incomplete sentence followed, crossed out by Schutz:
AS: [As can be clearly seen in the example above and will become still clearer when we now occupy ourselves with the analyses of the predicative adjective].
- 35.
HRW: That means, their suitability for comparison with, evaluation by, integration in, and correction or rejection by the ensemble of ideas about the realities of a person’s spheres of life by way of commonsense conclusions rather than (scientific) empirical propositions.
- 36.
HRW: The central part of this paragraph has been emphasized by a vertical pencil line on the left margin, and its last line by a triple-lined cross. The meaning of these marks remains unclear.
- 37.
HRW: Abbreviated to “mgr Sth” in the original.
- 38.
HRW:A verb form connecting subject and predicate in a “weak” manner, such as “seem,” “appear.”
- 39.
HRW: The last three sentences (two in the original) consist of a partially changed rendering of the passages which fill the first six lines of p. 24 of the handwritten MS. They are the conclusion of the existing text of Schutz’s Language MS. This MS is obviously incomplete. A consideration of the “basic grammatical forms” of European languages, at a minimum, would comprise not only noun and adjective but also the verb forms. But their treatment is missing.
- 40.
HRW: This note was written on a separate sheet. It was not numbered; it was found at the end of the Language MS. The page itself carries one word of text (“Morphismus”) on its top line. A comparison with the extant pages of the MS shows that this word is not a continuation of the text of any of them. A date given at the end of the note (29!VII 25) is identical with the last date occurring in the written part of the MS. Thus, it can be assumed that Schutz jotted the note down at the very end of the vacation period in which he drafted the Language MS, thus indicating the topic for a continuation of the work he had to interrupt. The stray word at the top of the page indicates that Schutz had written at least one other page which he either discarded or which did get lost. The note itself abounds in word abbreviations. In the translation, I have of course restored these words to their full lengths.
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Schutz, A. (2013). Meaning Structures of Language. In: Barber, M. (eds) Collected Papers VI. Literary Reality and Relationships. Phaenomenologica, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1518-9_8
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