Schutz and Gurwitsch on Agency

Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz differ over the paramount reality, with Schutz stressing the importance of meaningful action in everyday life and Gurwitsch the perception of objects in objective time. On the ego, Schutz and Husserl rightly argue for its epistemological accessibility, while Gurwitsch defends a non-egological consciousness that seems counterpoised to the self-appropriating, agential ego of Husserl and Schutz. However, Gurwitsch’s endorsement of Sartre’s non-egological consciousness might have facilitated a rapprochement with the agency to be found in Schutz’s and Husserl’s egological accounts. John Drummond’s criticisms of Gurwitsch’s phenomenalist account of the object suggest an object less appropriate for interaction with the bodily agency that Schutz highlights. Gurwitsch pays less attention to agency insofar as he extends his noematic focus to the ultimate ontological suppositions of various orders of being. The differences between Schutz and Gurwitsch on agency result from their diverging overarching strategies within a common phenomenological framework.