Abstract

Alfred Schutz agreed with Husserl that our objective world is based on an interrelation among a plurality of subjects. But to grasp this “intersubjective” dimension, Schutz argued, we need an “anthropology on a phenomenological basis.” A key notion of such an anthropology is that we experience the world and the other subjects as “transcending” us. Human experience is inherently open to an “Other.” However, Schutz’s philosophy of a transcendence immanent to experience remained unfinished. It can be further developed with the help of Kant, to whom Schutz had referred since the 1920s. Kant’s distinction between “appearances” and “things in themselves” can be read as an anthropological account of how human experience propels itself into the unknown without ever crossing its boundaries.