Abstract

I argue that Reinach’s social acts are a new type of acts with respect to Husserl’s acts of meaning. I focus on the eidetic structure of both acts of meaning and social acts and identify the wholes-parts connections that constitute them. I point out that acts of meaning and social acts have a similar but not identical wholes-parts structure. Social acts are a new kind of wholes, irreducible to the wholes-acts of meaning that are “mental linguistic acts,” which may occur only internally in the mind of their agent without addressing another person, and that also belong, according to Husserl, to the category of “objectifying acts”. Indeed, social acts are constituted by further and new parts, with respect to those of acts of meaning: the making-known of the act to an addressee, the turning toward an addressee and their interpellation, the tendency to be perceived by the addressee, the internal experience that grounds the social act, the normative efficacy of the social act. These parts make the sociality of the social acts and characterize their intentionality as essentially social. At the same time, I show that Reinach’s eidetics of social acts provides a qualitative ontological account that distinguishes different degrees of existence and raises the question of the “good life” of social acts. I argue for these issues by referring to Husserl’s theory of parts and wholes and account of acts of meaning (1901), to Reinach’s account of social acts (1913), and to Scheler’s idea of the reciprocity of social acts (1913–1926).