Phenomenology of the consocial situation

advancing the problems

Lester Embree

pp. 119-133

in: David Carr, Chan-Fai Cheung (eds), Space, time, and culture, Berlin, Springer, 2004

Abstract

Aron Gurwitsch used to say that since the tasks of constitutive phenomenology are infinite, we cannot solve problems, but we could nevertheless advance them. In case one finds this formulation idiosyncratic, it can be construed as signifying that accounts can be refined. This view intimates that we can receive problems that have been worked on from our own earlier efforts (something Husserl did to a great degree) as well as from others alive and dead. The present essay is devoted to advancing several aspects of a set of issues or matters, i.e., a problematics addressed in the work of Alfred Schutz (1899–1959). These pertain to the situation centrally involving what he calls "consociates," who immediately share space as well as time, it being understood that when an other is a consociate for a self, the self is a consociate for that other. It will suffice here to go back only to Schutz, but it deserves mention that he found the equivalent of this notion in Husserl.¹

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Gurwitsch Aron

Schütz Alfred