Schutz’s Life Story and the Understanding of his Work

Abstract

In this paper, I will deal with two issues. The first is an exposition of the general reasoning behind its title; the second is an attempt at showing that this reasoning is significant for the specific objective announced in the title. In other words: I will speak about the matrix I developed while writing Schutz's biogra? phy in order to show that it served its purpose not only technically but also theoretically. For the purpose of setting up my agrument, I will reduce my title to a tentative but not exhaustive hypothesis: The biography of Schutz is relevant for the comprehension of his scholarly life work. This assumption links biography, a descriptive account of the course of an individual's life, to the intellectual comprehension of the work a scholar has done during his lifetime. I take 'course of life' and 'lifetime' as references to the same span of calendar time between the dates of birth and death of the person in question. An auxiliary base line for both biography and life work is formed by selected dates in chronological order, e.g., the date of marriage or the publication of a book. Of course, scholarly dates will occur only within a section of a scholar's biographical chronology. But, by definition, a chronology makes not a biography; yet, a scholarly chronology, essential dates for which are contained in the bibliography of an author, suffices for an account of the intrinsic development of his thinking. I will refrain here from dealing with either the hermeneutic approach