1 Kant and the Scandal of Intersubjectivity: Alfred Schutz’s Anthropology of Transcendence Jan Strassheim jan.strassheim@fu-berlin.de Draft for: Strassheim, Jan 2021: “Kant and the Scandal of Intersubjectivity: Alfred Schutz’s Anthropology of Transcendence.” In: Coe, Cynthia (ed.): Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Phenomenology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 131–152. Online access at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66857-0_7 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” (phaenomena) and “things in themselves” (noumena) can be read as an anthropological (rather than metaphysical) account of how human experience propels itself into the unknown without ever crossing its own boundaries. Introduction Alfred Schutz, it is often said, used phenomenology to build a philosophical foundation for the social sciences. Although this statement is correct, it can distract from Schutz’s contribution to philosophy itself. This paper outlines some central ideas of Schutz’s philosophy as part of an ongoing dialogue between German Idealism and phenomenology. As will become clearer, Kant and Husserl differ in how they assess “transcendental” conditions of subjectivity vis- à-vis the anthropological fact that as human beings, we experience the objective world as something that transcends us. Husserl rejects Kant’s “anthropological theory” with its idea of “things in themselves.” He argues that our world is objective not because it transcends subjectivity, but because the world is intersubjective, i.e., based on a relation between subjects. Schutz agrees with this status of intersubjectivity. But he claims that it can only be understood once Husserl’s insights are related back to the anthropological level. A key question of Schutz’s anthropology is how we experience the transcendence of the world and the other subjects around us. Tracing this question through three Schutzian concepts (“transcendence,” “meaning,” and “types”), I will suggest that Schutz’s theory allows us to articulate a crucial condition of intersubjectivity on the anthropological level: human experience is inherently open to an ‘Other.’ I will argue that this openness is formulated as an anthropological principle in Kantian philosophy, from which Schutz had started out in the 1920s. Kant’s contentious idea of “things in themselves” may help us further develop the account of intersubjectivity which Schutz could not complete before his early death in 1959.