Why Did They Do That? A Banker-Philosopher Explains
The double life of Alfred Schutz
Not many people lead two lives. Alfred Schutz (1899–1959) really did. By day he was an executive at a Viennese bank, juggling international accounts in a sharp suit. By night he sat in a quiet study and became one of the most careful thinkers about something you do every single moment: trying to make sense of other people.
He didn’t start out wanting to be a philosopher. As a young soldier in World War I and later as a law and business student, he kept noticing a gap. The famous sociologist Max Weber had brilliant ideas about how societies work, but he never dug into the basic question: What is it like to actually live an action and understand another person from the inside? Schutz decided someone needed to fill that gap. A quiet banker-philosopher, he set out to describe the hidden architecture of everyday social life.
What’s really going on when you act
You text a friend “I’m sorry” after a fight. Why? The ordinary answer is “to make things better.” Schutz would say that’s your in-order-to motive — the future result you picture, the way you imagine the project will have been completed. But there’s another layer. Maybe you said it because your parents always taught you to apologize, or because you remembered a time when nobody apologized to you. That’s your because motive, the past experiences that shaped your decision.
Schutz made this split razor-sharp. When you’re planning, you live in the in-order-to motive. You feel free, like you’re steering toward a finish line. Afterward, when you look back, you switch to the because motive. Suddenly your choice seems to have been pushed by everything that came before. This is why you can feel entirely responsible for a decision now and yet later explain it as “just how I was raised.” Neither story is a lie — you’re just standing in two different parts of your own timeline.
The clock inside your actions
Schutz borrowed a big idea from Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of phenomenology — the study of how things appear to your consciousness from the inside. Husserl noticed that your inner life isn’t a series of snapshots; it’s a flowing stream. At every instant, a fresh “now” appears, and the previous now slips into a special kind of memory called retention, a just-happened feeling that still lingers. This creates something Schutz called the “specious present” — the tiny stretch of lived time in which a melody makes sense instead of being just separate notes.
Schutz realized this flow changes everything about how you understand actions. You grasp your own project as a whole while you’re living it, but someone observing you only gets the outward pieces. They might later say your action was irrational or obvious — but they’re looking backward with information you didn’t have. And because your inner time never runs exactly in sync with anyone else’s, there’s always a gap. Your friend’s “sad message” might arrive when you’re feeling joyful, and the same words mean two different things.
The social map: friends, strangers, and ghosts
Schutz drew a simple but powerful map of your social world. Consociates are people who share your physical space and the same stretch of flowing time — a friend you laugh with at lunch, a sibling who sees your face change in real time. In a We-relationship like this, you “grow older together” second by second and constantly adjust your picture of each other.
Move out a ring and you find contemporaries — people who live at the same time as you but aren’t right there. You build mental ideal types of them: “the postal carrier,” “a typical eighth-grader in another city.” These types are useful but flimsy; you’re working from reports, messages, or rumors, not from the rolling live stream of their inner life. Even further out are predecessors (people in the past, like a grandparent you never met) and successors (people not yet born). The less you share someone’s lived time, the more you fill in blanks with guesswork — and the bigger the chance you’ll get them wrong.
Worlds within worlds
Schutz noticed that you don’t live in just one reality. You slip between what he called finite provinces of meaning. The world of working and moving your body — the “paramount reality” — is the one you share most with others. But you also step into the province of a daydream, where logic softens; the province of a theater, where a painted forest becomes a real one for an hour; the province of science, where you temporarily set aside everyday biases to hunt for impersonal truth.
Each province has its own rules about what’s possible and what counts as evidence. The interesting thing is that you don’t physically travel anywhere. You take on a different attitude. Schutz used the term epoché (ep-oh-kay) — a suspension of your usual kind of belief — to describe how you enter each world. When the play starts you willingly stop believing the stage is just wood. When you fall asleep you no longer treat a flying elephant as impossible. And when you return to everyday life, you carry back only tattered memories, which is why describing a dream to a friend always feels a little wrong.
Why scientists can’t ignore your story
Schutz spent a lot of time arguing with thinkers who wanted to make the study of society just like physics — measuring only what you can see from the outside. He agreed that social scientists must check their theories. But he pointed out that human beings, unlike electrons, interpret their own world. When you buy a birthday gift, you’re not just moving money; you’re aiming at a meaning someone else will understand.
So the job of a social scientist, Schutz said, is to build constructs of constructs — careful models of how everyday people already make sense of each other. A good researcher doesn’t replace your lived motives with a tidy label. She tries to capture the “in-order-to” that guides your project and respects the fact that your action might look completely different at the time of deciding than it does in hindsight. Statistics are helpful shorthand, but they always rest on a forgotten man or woman whose actual experience the numbers can’t fully replace.
Why this still matters
You live this every day. You judge someone’s angry post without knowing they just got devastating news. You wonder why a friend’s project seems chaotic until you hear what she was picturing in her head. Schutz’s philosophy doesn’t give you a magic code to read minds. It gives you something quieter: a map of the cracks.
Once you see that every action has a future face and a past face, and that you’re always interpreting people through types and guesswork, you might pause before you decide a person is “just that way.” You might ask, “What was she aiming at? What might have come before?” That doesn’t make misunderstandings disappear. But it can turn a flat label back into a whole person — which is exactly what Schutz, the banker who stayed up late, spent his life trying to help us do.
Think about it
- If you could watch a recording of someone’s entire inner stream of consciousness, would you still sometimes misunderstand them? Why?
- When you explain why you did something in the past, do you ever feel like you’re telling a different story than the one you lived while doing it? What does that difference mean for how well you know yourself?
- Is it fair to judge a historical figure’s choice using information they couldn’t possibly have had? Where would you draw the line?
