To Work at the Foundations: Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch PDF
Preview To Work at the Foundations: Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch
TO WORK AT THE FOUNDATIONS CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY IN COOPERATION WITH THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY Volume 25 Editor: John Drummond, Mount Saint Mary's College Editorial Board: Elizabeth A. Behnke David Carr, Emory University Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University J. Claude Evans, Washington University Jose Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University Joseph J. Kockelmans, The Pennsylvania State University William R. McKenna, Miami University Algis Mickunas, Ohio University J. N. Mohanty, Temple University Tom Nenon, The University of Memphis Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universitiit, Mainz Elisabeth Stroker, Philosophisches Seminarium der Universitiit Koln Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University Scope The purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy through creative research. Contemporary issues in philosophy, other disciplines and in culture generally, offer opportunities for the application of phenomenological methods that call for creative responses. Although the work of several generations of thinkers has provided phenomenology with many results with which to approach these challenges, a truly successful response to them will require building on this work with new analyses and methodological innovations. TO WORK AT THE FOUNDATIONS Essays in Memory of Aran Gurwitsch edited by J. CLAUDE EVANS Washington Dniversity, St Louis, MO, D.S.A. and ROBERT S. STUFFLEBEAM Washington Dniversity, St Louis, MO, D.S.A. SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-94-010-6287-9 ISBN 978-94-011-5436-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-5436-9 Printed an acid-free paper AU Rights Reserved © 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1997 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover lst edition 1997 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permis sion from the copyright owner. Table of Contents Introduction J. Claude Evans .............................................................. Vll I. Aron Gurwitsch the Philosopher 1. Keynote Address: Concerning Aron Gurwitsch Maurice Natanson ............................................................. 3 2. The Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch Fred Kersten .................................................................... 21 II. Critical Studies of the Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch 3. Gurwitsch's Interpretation of Kant: Reflections of a Former Student Henry E. Allison .............................................................. 33 4. Phenomenalism, Idealism and Gurwitsch's Account of the Sensory Noema Robert Welsh Jordan ...... ........ ...... ........ ...... .............. ....... 55 5. Conditional Identity and Irregular Parts: Aron Gurwitsch's Gestalt-Theoretic Revision of the Stumpf-Hussed Conception of Independence Gilbert T. Null ................................................................. 65 III. Gurwitschean Themes in Philosophy 6. Relevance and Aesthetic Perception P. Sven Arvidson ........................................................... 131 7. A Gurwitschean Model for Explaining Culture or How to Use an Atlatl Lester Embree ................................................................ 141 VI IV. Philosophy in the Spirit of Aron Gurwitsch 8. On the Difference Between Transcendental and Empirical Subjectivity David Carr .................................................................... 175 9. On Confronting Species-Specific Skepticism as We Near the End of the Twentieth Century James M. Edie ......... ..... ....... ..... ..... ....... ..... ....... ..... ........ 193 10. TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: The Question of the Philosophic Interlocutor Jose Huertas-Jourda ............................................ '" ..... 229 11. Beyond Foundationalism and Functionalism: Phenomenology in Exchange with the Human and Social Sciences Bernhard Waldenfels ..................................................... 241 V. A Bibliography for Gurwitsch Studies Robert S. Stufflebeam .................................................... 261 Index 275 Introduction J. Claude Evans Washington University In his contribution to this volume, Maurice Natanson recalls Aron Gurwitsch telling him an anecdote about Edmund Husserl: Husser! had once told Gurwitsch, "We are both destined to work at the foundations." Husserl knew of what he spoke, both about himself and about the young Gurwitsch, and it was surely no accident that Gurwitsch repeated this story to Maurice Natanson. From Edmund Husser!, through Aron Gurwitsch, to Maurice Natanson and two further generations of phenomenologists represented in this volume, this has been the ethic of labor in the fields of phenomenology: concentration of the problems themselves. System comes later as a higher level activity which is built upon rather than dictating the work on the problems themselves, the work at the foundation. To have heard a lecture by Aron Gurwitsch, to have sat in a seminar under his leadership, to read a text he wrote, is to learn in the most direct manner possible what it means to work at the foundations. On November 7-9, 1991, friends and students of Aron Gurwitsch met at the New School for Social Research in order to do honor to his memory in the only appropriate way: by working at the foundations. They are joined in this volume by yet another generation, represented by P. Sven Arvidson. The range of papers would, I think, have pleased Gurwitsch. Maurice Natanson's keynote address, "Concerning Aron Gurwitsch," takes its task to be "to wander across some of the philosophical terrain of Gurwitsch's intellectual life, sounding and occasionally probing places in his work which might give the Vll Vill J. ClAUDE EVANS audience as a whole an indication of what kind of philosopher he was." Ranging over such Gurwitschean topics as the non-egological conception of consciousness, Gestalt theory-and the rejection of the constancy hypothesis, the correlation conception of the transcendental, and the problem of access, Natanson leads his audience back from the work Gurwitsch did at the foundation to the work to be done-the infinite task-at the foundation: "What 'access' could be at work in the Akedah, the story of Abraham and Isaac and the near sacrifice of the son by the father?" This question leads, at the very beginning of the Symposium, beyond the work done by Aron Gurwitsch, and in so doing honors him. Fred Kersten's "The Philosophy of Aron Gurwitsch" moves from a "Then", focusing on the way Gurwitsch understood and approached the task of scholarship and learning, to a "Now", in which he considers "what happens when Gurwitsch's philosophy is treated in the way in which he considered his contemporaries and predecessors." To treat Gurwitsch's work in this way is to join in the task of constitutive phenomenology as what Gurwitsch called a "working philosophy, a philosophy living and developing in the actual work of research. " Section II contains three critical studies of Gurwitsch's work. I suspect that many phenomenologists were surprised when Henry Allison, the leading American Kant scholar of the generation which followed the path-breaking work of Lewis White Beck, wrote the following dedication in his Kant's Transcendental Idealism: "To the memory of Aron Gurwitsch, with whom I began my study of Kant." Until the publication of the correspondence between Gurwitsch and his close friend Alfred Schutz, only a very few people knew that in the 1950s Gurwitsch had virtually completed a monograph containing what he called his "Kant interpretation in Leibnizianperspective."l Now Allison the student returns to the work of Gurwitsch the teacher in order, respectfully but decisively, 1. Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, Philosophers in Exile, p. 260. INrRODUcnON lX to c'riticize it. To Gurwitsch's reading of Kant as a phenomenalist Allison opposes his own reading of Kant's transcendental idealism. At the memorial symposium, Robert Welsh Jordan read a paper entitled "Multiple Heideggers? An Early, Still Prevalent Misreading," since he felt that his paper "Phenomenalism, Idealism and Gurwitsch's Account of the Sensory Noema" was too technical to present at a symposium, even to a group of students of Gurwitsch. Happily, he agreed to publish it here. In this essay, Jordan the student takes Gurwitsch the teacher to task for developing an account of the perceptual object which "precludes.. . the very possibility whose defense was a major part of Husserl's concept of phenomenology as a philosophical theory, viz., that what is given be something that is no mere system of appearances." Gilbert T. Null is one of the few phenomenologists who has taken up the work Husserl and Gurwitsch did in the phenomenology of logic. His essay on Gurwitsch's revisions of the concept of independence is an important and original contribution to formal ontology, and one can only hope that Null's work, along with the work of Barry Smith and a few others, will revitalize phenomenological analysis in this field. Null has gone on to use the results attained here in the philosophy of art. Section III contains two studies which take up the results of Gurwitsch's philosophical work at the foundations and apply them fruitfully in new ways. P. Sven Arvidson, who did not speak at the Memorial Symposium, takes up Gurwitsch's analysis of the theme, thematic field, margin structure of consciousness and applies it in an investigation of the structure of aesthetic perception. In particular, he is concerned "to articulate the dynamics of the relevancy relation between theme and thematic field" in aesthetic perception. His work is yet another powerful confirmation of the usefulness of Gurwitsch's work, here in a field which, as Arvidson notes, Gurwitsch did not address in any detail. Lester Embree's contribution is a continuation of his investigation of cultural objects in distinction to ideal and natural objects. Study of these objects requires thematization of the strata of x J. ClAUDE EVANS valuing and willing which are excluded from the experience of purely natural objects as such. Taking some remarks by Aron Gurwitsch as his point of departure, Embree develops a set of phenomenological analyses which demonstrate that the cultural sciences have to make use not only of teleological explanation, but of aitiological explanation as well. In a style typical of work at the foundations, Embree ends not with a statement of results achieved, but with a brief discussion of additional issues and problems which emerged in the course of his investigation. Section IV contains four studies which, while not specifically picking up on or studying the work of Aron Gurwitsch, do him honor by dealing with themes which he took very seriously. Husserl's response to skepticism in the form of psychologism stands at the very beginning of phenomenology. The critique of psychologism found in volume one of the Logical Investigations (1900-1901) set the stage for the first mature statement of phenomenology as a program in volume two, and the later turn to transcendental phenomenology in the Ideas of 1913 can be seen as a completion of this program, merely drawing out explicitly commitments which were already at work in the Investigations. Aron Gurwitsch's essay "On Contemporary Nihilism,"2 written before the end of World War II and published in 1945, pursues these same issues into the dominance of naturalism in the form of sociologism and social psychologism, tracing out their nihilistic consequences. James M. Edie takes up these issues in the context of the post-modern decentering of the subject in Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction and the sociology of knowledge. Edie argues that the antidote to this skepticism is to be found in Husserl's conception of eidetic truth and in his conception of transcendental consciousness. While the theme of a specifically transcendental phenomenology has fallen out of favor in many quarters in this post-modern time, all too often intellectual fashion stands in no real relation to the reasons 2. Review oj Politics 7: 1945, 170-198.
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