Myself as The Other: Schutz and Gurwitsch on Strangers, Refugees and Homecomers

When it comes to philosophical reflections on otherness, the common strategy was to initiate one’s analysis by considering the Other as a stranger who barges into the established framework of sameness: the Other is the intruder who interrupts the established order of things. Yet instead of asking how we encounter the Other, one can also entertain a different question: what does it mean for me to be the Other? How do I myself become a stranger to others?

We come across some analyses of this question in phenomenological literature. This question grew in importance with the publication of Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another (Soi-meme comme un autre) in 1990. More recently, we come across a thought-provoking analysis of this theme in various works by Bernard Stiegler under the heading of myself-an-other (moi-l’autre). Yet many decades before Ricoeur and Stiegler, Alfred Schutz had analysed this very question in some of his writings, and especially in ‘The Stranger’ (first presented at The New School for Social Research in 1942/43 and first published in 1944) and ‘The Homecomer’ (first presented at the New School for Social Research in 1944 and first published in 1945). These two essays complement each other in important ways, for while ‘The Stranger’ is concerned with the difficulties of integration into a foreign culture, ‘The Homecomer’ is preoccupied with the difficulties of reintegration in one’s own home country. Moreover, in the private correspondence between two philosophers in exile – Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch – we come across Gurwitsch’s thought-provoking critique of Schutz’s formal sociology of the Other. It is philosophically highly rewarding to revisit this often-overlooked philosophical exchange between two phenomenologists and close friends, a debate over their common destiny, which forced them to become strangers to others. This debate allows us to see how such figures of otherness as the immigrant, the refugee and the homecomer have been addressed in phenomenological literature. It also allows us to see how such themes can be addressed in phenomenologically-oriented social psychology, which focuses on the typical and the average. In that respect, it also allows us to question the limits of such a methodological approach. Last but not least, it also allows us to recognise the importance of taking the social and historical situation of the immigrant and the homecomer into consideration.

Still in 1908, Georg Simmel had published an important sociological essay, ‘The Stranger’, where he drew the distinction between the stranger, the outsider, and the wanderer, arguing that while the outsider has no relation to the social group, and while the wanderer comes today and leaves tomorrow, the stranger comes today and stays tomorrow. The stranger becomes a member of the group while still remaining distant from it: they are in the group, yet not of the group, or as Simmel puts it, ‘the stranger is near and far at the same time’ (Simmel 148). This is characteristic not only of Simmel’s, but also of Schutz’s stranger. However, while Simmel’s account of the stranger is presented from the third person point of view, Schutz is concerned with capturing the characteristic features of being a stranger. Moreover, while for Simmel, the history of European Jews provides a classic example of the stranger, and while in his analysis Simmel focuses on the social roles played by traders and judges, for Schutz, the stranger is first and foremost the immigrant.

Yet Schutz also notes that we become strangers in other ways as well: the stranger is also the applicant for membership in a closed club, the prospective bridegroom who wishes to be admitted to the new family, the farmer’s son who enters college, the city-dweller who moves to live in the province, the soldier who joins the army. When Schutz presented ‘The Stranger’ to the Graduate Faculty at The New School for Social Research, his broad conception of the stranger, especially the likening of the immigrant to a college student who moves from the province to a big city to study at a university, stirred controversy. Reportedly, Arnold Brecht was among those who attacked Schutz especially strongly: all that is unique to the existential situation of the immigrants appeared to be levelled in Schutz’s sociological perspective. As we will see, Gurwitsch’s critique of Schutz’s essay unfolds according to similar lines. As Richard Grathoff, the editor of Philosophers in Exile, has noted,  Schutz’s intention of presenting the modes of everyday knowledge was misunderstood’ (Grathoff, 42). As the subtitle of ‘The Stranger’ suggests, Schutz’s essay was concerned with social psychology. What is the typical situation in which strangers find themself as they attempt to understand and orient themself within the new cultural pattern of a social group? This is the question to which ‘The Stranger’ aims to provide an answer. Methodologically, Schutz’s starting point lies in the analysis of how a common form of life presents itself to those who have grown up within it. Of central importance in Schutz’s analysis is the concept ‘cultural pattern of group life’. This concept designates ‘all the peculiar valuations, institutions, and systems of orientation and the guidance (such as the folkways, mores, laws, habits, customs, etiquette, fashions) which … characterize – if not constitute – any social group at a given moment in its history’ (Schutz, 92). Our lifeworlds, understood as homeworlds, are characterised by such a cultural pattern, which is accepted as something unquestionably valid. Such a cultural pattern is a certain configuration of sedimented meanings that one inherits from one’s predecessors and accepts as legitimate. To be at home is to accept such a cultural pattern and organise one’s daily life within its established parameters. Throughout the essay, Schutz compares the group of those who have grown up within the cultural pattern and the approaching stranger. He begins by analysing how the cultural pattern of group life presents itself to common sense. Our homeworlds are given to us as unquestionably valid cultural patterns, understood as sets of accepted patterns of behaviour, shared beliefs and institutions that constitute any social group at any given moment. It is not given to the members of the group as an object of thought, but as the field of actual and possible actions. For those who have grown up within the cultural pattern, the typical attitudes are given as unquestioned ‘matter of course’. To be born into an established cultural pattern that makes up our homeworld is to be in possession of a certain knowledge that is acquired and that is correlated with the cultural pattern. The system of knowledge possessed by those who live their lives within the group of fellow-people is incoherent, inconsistent and only partially clear, although these inadequacies do not affect its practical usefulness. While being accepted unquestionably as self-evident, this knowledge relies on basic assumptions that have never been clarified explicitly. For those brought up within their homeworlds, the inherited and accepted cultural pattern is given as a shelter, as a matter of course, as the foundation that enables them to disentangle problematic situations. By contrast, strangers find themself in a cultural pattern of a new and more or less unfamiliar group life, which they do not fully understand and which they do not accept as unconditionally valid. Strangers have left behind an unquestionable cultural pattern and have transitioned to a new one. They do not share the basic assumptions that underlie the established cultural pattern. For the stranger, this same pattern is given as a field of adventure, as a questionable topic of investigation, and as a problematic situation that is hard to master. The ‘thinking as usual’ is strange to the stranger, who does not share its basic assumptions and who places in question what others accept as unquestionable. This is because they do not belong to the cultural and historical reality to which the members of the group belong. Schutz even claims that the stranger appears to the approached group as someone ‘without a history’ (Schutz, 97). This is questionable, as my subsequent comments will make clear: it would be more accurate to claim that the stranger is someone with a different history and a different set of values, patterns of behaviour, commitments, convictions, etc. The stranger is someone who has integrated their own biography into a history which their new consociates neither share nor understand, and soon realises that they should not judge the events unfolding around them in terms of their own history. Everything that unfolds in front of their eyes belongs to a different cultural pattern, which they need to master.

Schutz is interested in the stranger insofar as they are about to transform themselves ‘from an unconcerned onlooker into a would-be member of the approached group’ (Schutz, 97). What is at stake in Schutz’s analysis is the process of integration and assimilation. Yet Schutz himself provides reasons why this integration can only be partial. One of these reasons concerns language. ‘In order to command a language freely as a scheme of expression, one must have written love letters in it; one has to know how to pray and curse in it and how to say things with every shade appropriate to the addressee and to the situation’(Schutz, 101). It is, however, unlikely that a stranger ever masters the new language to this degree. Some rare exceptions notwithstanding, as far as the average situation is concerned, this is hardly the case. An element of strangeness is irreducible from Schutz’s sociological analysis of typical everydayness. The process of assimilation can only be carried out in part, not in full.

While being focused in his analysis on the attitude of the stranger, which precedes social adjustment and social assimilation, Schutz points at two modes of resolution that the process of adjustment can lead to: the newcomer will either adapt to the new environment and learn how to appropriate the new cultural pattern as a shelter, a matter of course, and an unquestionable way of life; or the process of social adjustment will not be completed and the stranger’s seclusion will not be overcome. Schutz considers the second possibility to be undesirable, and he invites us to ask what conditions need to be met if the process of assimilation is to be successful. Presumably, the stranger must lose the inherited ‘thinking as usual’ and adopt a new mode of ‘thinking as usual’, characteristic of the approached group. If in their undertaking the stranger does not succeed, then, claims Schutz, the stranger can only be ‘marginal’, i.e. ‘a cultural hybrid on the verge of two different patterns of group life, not knowing to which of them he belongs’ (Schutz, 104).

In a letter written to Schutz on 16 July 1944, Gurwitsch provides a deeply thought-provoking critique of Schutz’s analysis of the stranger. Schutz had informed Gurwitsch, also by letter, that he had finished ‘The Stranger’ on 9 November 1942, but as Michael Barber has noted, since then, something went awry in their relationship. ‘They had exchanged twenty or more letters per year until 1943, but then they sent only two letters; and in 1944, the only letter was Gurwitsch’s critical reaction to ‘The Stranger’’’ (Barber, 117). After that, their correspondence stopped for another year. While recognising the legitimacy and even necessity of formal sociology, and especially when it focuses on the structures of everydayness, Gurwitsch nonetheless insists that such a standpoint remains blind to the specific situation of the immigrants during the 1930s and 40s. In general, the concept of the refugee cannot be addressed under the formal concept of the stranger, and especially the refugee of their times. ‘The specific characteristics of this curious being, dear Schutz, don’t allow themselves to be simply formalized’ (Grathoff, 70). The refugees are involuntary immigrants and as such, they are not, contra Schutz, without history. Quite on the contrary, they are well aware of the history they belong to. Alluding to Schutz’s and his own situation, Gurwitsch writes: ‘We have not, after all, broken with this world of ours; on the contrary, it has been shattered … We didn’t want to break with our past, we didn’t want to leave the world in which we grew up … We had to leave Europe precisely because we were Europeans. And it is just this that makes us exiles’ (ibid).

Gurwitsch’s letter is full of allusions to the difficulties he himself had faced as an emigre. He makes it clear that in contrast to Europe of the earlier days, he considered the United States to be quite anti-philosophical: ‘We wanted to understand the world and now we learn that the only thing that matters is a smooth and effortless operation in which certain results can be produced’ (ibid). He further qualifies their common situation in terms of a crisis, understanding it in the etymological sense, as a situation that calls for a decision. But what must the decision be? Is Schutz right in claiming that it is assimilation? Despite the relative legitimacy of formal sociology, Gurwitsch insists that when it comes to truly important philosophical issues, he faces the moral and intellectual duty to resist the new consensus communis. Appealing to Schutz the philosopher,  Gurwitsch reminds him that the whole history of philosophy goes back to the figure of the stranger. With references to Thales and Socrates, Gurwitsch writes: ‘our genealogy as philosophers goes back to a fool and a martyr’ (Grathoff, 91). Schutz’s central concept of the pattern of behaviour can therefore have only limited legitimacy. What restricts the process of assimilation and adaptation is the sense that one finds oneself in a ‘clash between different worlds’ (Grathoff, 72) and one harbours a sense of responsibility to preserve a world that is on the brink of collapse. ‘Why do we find such an interest in the average in our times and not in substantive issues? Why does one no longer pose the question concerning truth but only the question concerning the average opinion? … I will never accept that for man the important thing is a well-oiled operation, that it is all a matter of making a smooth functioning possible via adjustment’ (ibid). In short, according to Gurwitsch, the problem with Schutz’s analysis lies not in what it says, but in what it leaves unsaid. For methodological reasons, Schutz cannot help but must leave the substantive issues that concern the stranger aside.

One can only agree with Gurwitsch that Schutz’s analysis is formal, abstract and thus incomplete, for it disregards the historical and sociocultural components that are of great importance for understanding specific groups of strangers. But how are we to understand these limitations? For Schutz, they are methodological and self-imposed. By contrast, for Gurwitsch, they are representative of the latent nihilistic tendencies that he detects in Schutz’s analysis, which unwillingly reduces humanity to trainable animals who can adjust to any environment whatsoever. Michael Barber has insightfully suggested that Gurwitsch’s critique of ‘The Stranger’ must have been related to Gurwitsch’s unpublished manuscript, ‘Some Philosophical Roots of Nazism’, where he criticised the view that he ascribed to Fichte and Hegel, according to which an individual emerges out of sociohistorical processes to which he must adjust. In a later essay, ‘On Contemporary Nihilism’, which was published in 1945, Gurwitsch deplored the tendency in psychological and sociological sciences to consider human beings merely as social animals who face the task of adjusting themselves to their environment and not raise questions about the structure and organisation that societies ought to have. Presumably, Schutz does not recognise that, much like the philosopher, so also the stranger is in a privileged position not to conform to conventions, but precisely to challenge and criticise them. Nonetheless, one could respond on Schutz’s behalf that it is of great importance to understand the typical situation the strangers find themselves in and that this typical situation can be developed while following the method of phenomenological description. For Schutz, our understanding of the historical and sociocultural  components should be founded upon a more basic understanding of the essential features that make a stranger into a stranger. For Gurwitsch, however, the consideration of historical and sociocultural components would require that one give up some of Schutz’s characterisations of the stranger.

It took almost a year for Schutz to write back to Gurwitsch after receiving his critique of ‘The Stranger’. Resuming their correspondence, Schutz thanked Gurwitsch for sending him the off-print of ‘On Contemporary Nihilism’, which, he added, allowed him to better understand Gurwitsch’s critique of what he had called ‘formal sociology’. Yet Schutz added: ‘you throw the baby out with the bath water in this critique in attributing to all sociology the nihilistic tendencies’ (Grathoff, 74). Moreover, in this letter Schutz further remarked that he ‘heartily and unrestrictedly’ agreed with everything said in Gurwitsch’s essay.

In a short essay, ‘We, Refugees’, originally published in January 1943, Hannah Arendt suggested that the wish to assimilate on the part of European Jews in the 1930s and 40s was an instance of an inescapable bad faith. The ‘insane desireto be changed, not to be Jews’ (Arendt, 63) is understandable, for  being a Jew does not give any legal status in this world’ (Arendt, 65), and therefore, admitting who one is would in effect require acknowledging that one is just a human being, who is not protected by any political laws or political conventions. ‘I can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous’ (ibid). We can recognise the tension between an impossible truth and a necessary self-deception in the Schutz-Gurwitsch correspondence. On the one hand, Schutz’s sociological analysis of the difficulties that surround assimilation is symptomatic of what Arendt identifies as the wish to lose one’s self and to explore the infinite possibilities of human existence. On the other hand, Gurwitsch’s response is expressive of the ‘apparent uselessness of all our odd disguises’ (Arendt, 65), for recovering a new personality is not just difficult but hopeless.

As mentioned, besides reflecting on the difficulties that surround integration in ‘The Stranger’, Schutz also addressed the dangers that surround reintegration in ‘The Homecomer’. With recourse to ‘The Stranger’, Schutz remarks that while the approaching stranger anticipates what lies in the future in a more or less empty fashion, the homecomer relies on their memories as they think of their life back home. The problem, however, is that these memories are deceptive.

Methodologically, Schutz s approach in both essays is very similar. Just as ‘The Stranger’ bore the subtitle, ‘An Essay in Social Psychology’, so in the opening pages of ‘The Homecomer’ Schutz also makes clear that in his analysis he will rely on the concepts of social psychology. While in ‘The Stranger’ he starts with analysing the primary cultural pattern of group life, in ‘The Homecomer’ he begins his analysis by asking: what are we to understand by ‘home’? Schutz draws an important distinction between ‘home’, ‘abode’, and  residence’: ‘Where I happen to be is my “abode”; where I intend to stay is my “residence”; where I come from and whither I want to return is my “home”’ (Schutz, 107). Home is the place where our social lives unfold in primary groups, from which all other social relations are derived. Yet home means one thing for those who have never left it, and something different for those who are far from it. While those who are far away relate to their home through memories, their memories are deceptive even when they are accurate, for they can only reestablish the relation to the past and not to the present world. They infuse one with the false belief that the home one has left has not changed and is still the same today. For this very reason, home means something different not only for those who have never left it and for those far away, but also for the returnees. ‘The home to which he returns is by no means the home he left or the home which he recalled and longed for during his absence’ (Schutz, 115–116). As the jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker, following novelist Thomas Wolfe, put it, you can’t go home again. All you can do is return to the place of your origin and try to readjust to all the changes that have affected it while you were gone.

Just as the homecomer does not understand the homeworld to which they return, those who still abide there do not understand the homecomer and view them with suspicion and distrust. Just as the home has changed, so has the homecomer, and therefore, just as the homeland shows to the homecomer an unaccustomed face, the homecomer appears strange to the members of the primary group. In his own respective private correspondence with Schutz, Eric Voegelin had criticised ‘The Homecomer’ in a similar way to how Gurwitsch had criticised ‘The Stranger’: ‘Also the customary social-psychological categorization of “adjustment”, “adaptation”, etc., appears to me not only theoretically insufficient, but above all as a perfidious immorality, which proceeds on the supposition that the “environment” is something within which one has to fit. The question is not even raised whether the Homecomers might not do better if they attempted to adjust the environment to themselves, etc’ (quoted in Barber, 122). Voegelin’s critique does not appear to be fully justified, for precisely in this regard there is an important difference between ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Homecomer’. In contrast to his analysis of the stranger, Schutz explicitly contends that the homecomers find themselves torn between two tendencies: the wish to reintegrate within the home community and the wish to preserve what life elsewhere has taught them. Does this not compel the homecomers to look for ways to adjust the environment to themselves, and not just to fit within the existing environment? The chief problem of the homecomers is that, while refusing to discard their own past, the essential roles they have played elsewhere cannot be easily transplanted into the home environment. Back home they need to choose new goals and new means to attain them. In Schutz’s final analysis, just like the homecomer, the home community needs to prepare itself for the challenges that homecoming brings with it.

In their subsequent correspondence, as Schutz never responded to Gurwitsch’s critique of ‘The Stranger’, Gurwisch never expressed his view of ‘The Homecomer’. This is regrettable, for it would be highly interesting to see whether the important difference mentioned here had any bearing on Gurwitsch’s critique of Schutz’s social psychology, understood as formal sociology. Schutz’s explicit admission that he wholeheartedly agrees with what Gurwitsch had stated in Gurwitsch’s ‘On Contemporary Nihilism’ was sufficient for them to resume their remarkable correspondence. Many of Gurwitsch’s critical observations still retain their importance, for the historical and autobiographical element that Gurwitsch was capitalising on in his critique is conspicuously absent from Schutz’s analysis in ‘The Homecomer’. Due to personal circumstances, the theme of homecoming must have had great personal importance for Schutz (and for Gurwitsch). Nonetheless, Schutz’s model of the homecomer is a returning war veteran and not a Jewish European returning back to the continent. This can be clarified both historically and methodologically. As Maurice Natanson remarks, ‘these refugees did not escape Europe that made them possible; that Europe no longer existed’ (Grathoff, vii). Moreover, throughout his analysis, Schutz relies on the method of the phenomenological epoche: what is at stake in his analysis is a careful description of the phenomenon, guided by the goal of grasping its essential features, and not a reflection on personal experience. Nonetheless, building on Gurwitsch’s critique of ‘The Stranger’, one has to ask: to what degree can formal sociology take into account the specific cultural and historical situation that is characteristic of different kinds of homecomers? It seems painfully obvious that this analysis leaves too much unsaid, and especially when it comes to the prospects of two Jewish intellectuals returning back to their homes, which no longer exist, after the Second World War. Yet, on the other hand, Schutz’s explicit admission that the process of reintegration calls for preparation not only on the part of the homecomer but also on the part of the primary group, and especially his explicit contention that the homecomer is not a person without history, but someone who has a unique biography and has good reasons to preserve it, are of great relevance when considering Gurwitsch’s critique. While Schutz’s analysis in ‘The Stranger’ was one-sided in that it only emphasised the importance on the part of the immigrant to learn how to adjust to the new cultural pattern of group life, in ‘The Homecomer’ we come across a more holistic perspective, which recognises that readjustment is a two-sided process.

If one were to integrate this insight into the problematic of ‘The Stranger’, would one not eventually be led to the conclusion that the homogeneity of our homeworlds is itself abstract and formal, that we have always already been not only surrounded but also shaped by strangers, and that we encounter Others not only around us, but also within? Would this not lead us to the further realisation that the interplay of sameness and otherness constitutes the selfhood of the self?

In a letter to Schutz on 17 February 1952, Gurwitsch quotes Goethe with approval: ‘One is always indebted to others for what one is’ (Grathoff, 160). Recognising this fact requires that one supplement social psychology with historically oriented sociology. Such a supplementation would correlate with what in classical phenomenology is recognised as the transition from static to genetic phenomenology. Genetic and especially generative phenomenology could provide us with important resources for such an undertaking. To what degree such an undertaking would provide a convincing response to Gurwitsch’s objections remains an open question.

Endnotes