Table Of ContentTO 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.
