Aron Gurwitsch was born January
17, 1901, in Vilna, Lithuania, then a part of
Imperial Russia. The Jews of Lithuania were long
known for their austere rationalism, and, With the
exception of his father, Gurwitsch is descended from
rabbinical scholars on both sides. Meyer Gurwitsch
exported timber from Russia to Germany before the
Great War and westernized himself by reading deeply
in English, French, and German literature. After his
fortune was destroyed by the war and the Russian
Revolution, Gurwitsch’s father came to America.
When Aron Gurwitsch was six years
old, his family had moved to Danzig, a German
peninsula into Poland. As a Russian citizen residing
in Germany, Gurwitsch was classified as an enemy
alien during World War I, a classification he was to
receive twice again in his life. While in Danzig he
attended! the classical Gymnasium for twelve years,
studying Greek, Latin, French, English, mathematics,
and history.
Looking back upon entering the
University of Berlin in 1919, Gurwitsch today speaks
of having found his liberation there and dates the
development of his life in its own right from that
time. But at first this process of liberation seems
to have led to anarchy. He was attracted to
everything and attended the maximum number of
classes possible, eight a day. Then he came to the
attention of Carl Stumpf. Through an error on the
part of Stumpf’s assistant, the young first-year
foreign student was admitted to an advanced seminar
on Hume. He kept silent for six weeks. Then he asked
how Hume could know that an idea was fainter than
the corresponding impression unless the impression
was preserved or reactivated for the comparison.
Stumpf remarked that this was indeed a genuine
problem and thereafter took a special interest in
Gurwitsch.
Under Stumpf’s advisement,
Gurwitsch thoroughly prepared himself in mathematics
under Karatheodory, Schur, Schmidt, and Rademacher
and in theoretical physics under Max Planck and
others. He studied philosophy under Riehl, Erdmann,
Dessoir, Hofman, and, of course, Stumpf, from whom
he also had his psychology.Yet the impact of Stumpf
on Gurwitsch was more that of a teacher’s guidance
than of a thinker’s influence; Gurwitsch has always
had great theoretical differences with Stumpf. After
he had been at Berlin for two years, Gurwitsch was
sent by Stumpf to Freiburg, where Husserl was
teaching.
Due to bureaucratic error (he was
still a stateless alien), Gurwitsch was allowed to
reside in Freiburg but was allowed to study only in
Heidelberg. Therefore, he audited seminars and
lectures by Husserl. Personal relations did not
develop between the two men until 1928; but as to
the influence of Husserl, which began in 1922, we
have this, from the Introduction to Gurwitsch’s
Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology:
When the author made his
first acquaintance with Husserl’s philosophy
about forty years ago, he was overwhelmed by the
spirit of uncompromising integrity and radical
philosophical responsibility, by the total
devotedness which made the man disappear behind
his work. Soon the young beginner came to
realize the fruitfulness both of what Husserl
had actually accomplished and of what he had
initiated, the promise of further fruitful work.
... It was the style of Husserl’s
philosophizing, painstaking analytical work on
concrete problems and phenomena rather than the
opening up of large vistas, that made the young
student take the decision to devote his life and
work to the continuation and expansion of
Husserl’s phenomenology—in a word, to remain a
disciple forever, faithful to Husserl’s spirit
and general orientation, but at the same time
prepared to depart from particular theories if
compelled to do so by the nature of the problems
and the logic of the theoretical situation.
After Gurwitsch had been in
Freiburg for a year, Stumpf suggested that he take
his growing interest in the problem of abstraction
to Frankfurt, where he might study cases in which
abstraction seemed absent from behavior. Kurt
Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb were there, working with
veterans at a special institute set up by the
Prussian government for the investigation of the
psychological aftereffects of brain injury.
Gurwitsch went there and came to be on a close
personal basis with both men and participated in
conducting the research behind Goldstein’s Der
Aufbau des Organismus and other works involving
abstraction and language. Reflection on the work of
Gelb and Goldstein permeates Gurwitsch’s writings.
Gurwitsch’s interest in and
familiarity with Gestalttheorie began during
his study under Gelb. During one of Gelb’s lectures,
it occurred to Gurwitsch that the abandonment of the
“constancy hypothesis” amounted to an incipient and
partial phenomenological reduction. This he
explained to me recently in the following fashion in
a letter:
In an article of 1913, “Über
unbermerkte Empfindungen und Urteilstäuschungen,”
Koehler showed that modern psychology,
particularly in the nineteenth century ,
proceeds on the taken-for-granted and hardly
ever explicitly formulated assumption that
sense data, as the ultimate elements of
conscious life, depend exclusively and
exhaustively on local stimulation; When a
sense organ is stimulated in the same way, the
same sensation is bound to arise. Koehler called
this assumption the “constancy hypothesis.” In
it the logicohistorical continuity of modern
physics and modern psychology is apparent: the
latter relies upon the former and avails itself
of its results.
Of equal if not greater
theoretical importance is the dualistic
theory of perception that the constancy
hypothesis entails. When the phenomenal state of
affairs differs from what was expected by virtue
of the constancy hypothesis, as happens in most
cases, particularly outside of laboratory
situations, such a deviation was explained in
terms of a “higher” supervenient factor, which
factor was variously specified, depending on
which school of psychology t was involved. Thus,
the “true” phenomenal state of affairs,
perfectly corresponding to the stimulus, is
“somehow” distorted. The constancy hypothesis
can never be falsified experimentally, since
every observed difference between what is
observed and what ought to be observed is
explained away by resorting to the
aforementioned “higher” factors.
If the constancy hypothesis
is dismissed, no distinction can be made between
“genuine” contributions of the senses and what
is, in the percept, due to supervenient factors.
In other words, there is no further basis for a
dualistic theory of perception. Even more
important, the dismissal of the constancy
hypothesis makes possible and even necessitates
a strictly descriptive orientation. Thus
a psychological theory which does not proceed on
the basis of the constancy hypothesis presents a
certain affinity or kinship with Husserl’s
phenomenology, whose first fundamental
methodological device is the phenomenological
reduction. Thereby it becomes legitimate to use
the descriptive results of Gestalttheorie
within a phenomenological context.
Gurwitsch has thus read the
descriptive content of Gestalt psychology as
noematic phenomenology of perception, the phenomenal
state of affairs being identified with the noema of
perception, the perceived object just and precisely
as perceived, or the perceptum qua perceptum,
as he likes to say. On Gurwitsch’s view, Husserl did
not fully recognize the problems of the internal
organization of the noema. To approach Gurwitsch’s
“constitutive phenomenology,” one must begin with
his critique of the theories of sense data and of
sense-bestowing acts and then proceed to his
reconception of the intentionality of consciousness
as a noetico-noematic correlation.(1)
The product of Gurwitsch’s years
at Frankfurt was his dissertation, now available in
English as “Phenomenology of Thematics and the Pure
Ego: Studies of the Relation between Gestalt Theory
and Phenomenology.” The Husserlian texts available
to him in preparing it were the Philosophie der
Arithmetik, the Logische Untersuchungen,
and the Ideen. He steeped himself in these works
without aid. In addition, there was nobody at
Frankfurt with whom he could discuss his topic, much
less have supervise his work. Most of the people
there thought he would never finish. Of course he
did, after four and a half years. The professor
ordinarius at Frankfurt, Cornelius, had very little
sympathy for Gestalt theory and none at all for
Husserlian phenomenology. Though Gurwitsch knew him
well, Cornelius could not be expected to accept the
dissertation. A search then had to be undertaken.
Gelb was of no service because,
as a psychologist, he belonged to the faculty of the
natural sciences. Goldstein could not be of any help
either, for he was a professor of neurology and
belonged to the faculty of medicine. Hence Gelb
referred Gurwitsch to Wertheimer in Berlin, who in
turn sent him to Max Scheler, who had just accepted
a chair in Frankfurt. Gurwitsch had met him earlier.
Scheler read the work and was willing to accept it,
but six weeks later he died. Then Heinemann, who
taught in Frankfurt but was not ordinarius, referred
Gurwitsch to Moritz Geiger in Göttingen, who
accepted the dissertation. Three weeks after he
arrived in Göttingen, Gurwitsch passed his orals.
His degree was granted summa cum laude on
August 1, 1928. He had spent nine years at four
universities, written on an unusual topic without
direction, and had had his thesis accepted twice. It
was published in the organ of the Gestalt school,
Psychologische Forschung, in 1929.
Husserl read the essay and told
Gurwitsch: “Since you have seen so well this far,
you will come to see further” (i.e., come around
more fully to Husserl’s position!). On another
occasion, after discussing the investigations of
Lévy-Bruhl and of Gelb and Goldstein with Husserl
for eight hours, Gurwitsch was told:, “Well, perhaps
you see further than I do because you stand on my
shoulders.” (Gurwitsch admits that he was never able
to convince Husserl that the doctrine of hyletic
data contains the unexamined assumption of the
constancy hypothesis.) When Gurwitsch reviewed
Husserl’s “Nachwort zu meinen Ideen ...” in
1932, Husserl sent him a postcard: “… about the only
review based upon real understanding of any of my
writings (since the Logische Untersuchungen).”
But the greatest compliment from Husserl came at the
end of another long discussion: “There are
philosophers aplenty; someone must do the dirty
work—that is me and you.”
Gurwitsch was Geiger’s personal
assistant at Göttingen for a semester, and then,
through the aid of Husserl as well as Geiger, he
became a research fellow of the Prussian Ministry of
Science, Art, and Public Education. He married at
this time “ and moved with his wife, Alice, to
Berlin. In about three and a half years a book
entitled Die mitmenschlichen Begegnungen in der
Milieuwelt was sufficiently advanced to be
submitted as a Habilitationsschrift to the faculty
of philosophy at Berlin university. The theme was
significant since every German intellectual of the
time was familiar with Max Weber’s work. Both
Koehler and A. Vierkandt, a sociologist and social
philosopher, were pleased with the writing. But it
became a political casualty.
On January 30, 1933, National
Socialism came to power in Germany. Gurwitsch had
become a German citizen in 1930; but, since he was a
Jew, his committee, as he puts it, “exploded” and
the Nazi minister canceled his recently renewed
fellowship. Gurwitsch had read Mein Kampf and
had been searching for an academic existence outside
Germany during the preceding year; but since nobody
of influence that he knew believed his pessimistic
prognosis, he had gotten nowhere. On the day of the
boycott of Jewish shops and offices (April 1, 1933),
Gurwitsch and his wife left Berlin—without visas—for
Paris. Lehrjahre gave way to Wanderjahre
in a special sense.
II
The intellectual world of France
was different from that of Germany. A few French
students had been to Germany before and after the
Great War, but there was nothing at all like the
exchange of thought that can be seen today. When
Husserl lectured at the Sorbonne in 1929, it was the
first public appearance of a German philosopher
there since the war. Although men like Berger,
Cavaillès, Minkowski, Mounier, Levinas, and Sartre
were emerging, phenomenology was still somewhat
alien. Some interest was beginning to appear where
Gestalt theory was concerned, for Paul Guillaume had
been reviewing most of the articles in
Psychologische Forschung in Année
psychologique. Except among a few young men,
such as Raymond Aron, there was little interest in
Max Weber. Nevertheless, the ground was ready for
phenomenology and kindred thought. There was the
Cartesian tradition, to which Husserl attempted to
relate himself in the Paris lectures. Lévy-Bruhl’s
ethnological work and Gurwitsch’s bringing of it to
Husserl’s attention have been mentioned. There was
also French Neo-Kantianism (Brunschvicg et al.)
and a non-positivistic philosophy of science.
Finally, Bergson’s thought—historical precondition
for the existentialisms yet to come—was very much
alive.
Gurwitsch was acquainted with but
two people when he arrived in Paris: Alexandre Koyré
and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. He had spoken French since he
was a child and through his father had acquired a
deep respect for French culture. A number of refugee
scientists were allowed to find an existence on the
academic fringes during this period.(2) Soon
after arriving, Gurwitsch began lecturing at
L’Institut d’Histoire des Sciences (Sorbonne), first
on Gestalt theory, later on the work of Gelb and
Goldstein, and finally on constitutive
phenomenology. An article on the place of psychology
in the system of the sciences was commissioned and
appeared in 1934. In short, Gurwitsch became a
member of the French intellectual community, a
membership certified after the fact when he was
asked to speak before the Société française de
philosophie in 1959. Over all, Aron Gurwitsch came
to himself in France between 1933 and 1940 and today
looks back on his Paris years as among the happiest
and most productive of his life.
Because of his need to find a
place in French science quickly, Gurwitsch abandoned
his work on the basic categories of sociology as
requiring too much time to complete and translate.
But there was another reason. In 1932, during his
last visit to Freiburg, Gurwitsch was telling
Husserl about his Habilitationsschrift, which was
nearly completed at the time. Husserl took out a
copy of Alfred Schutz’s Der sinnhafte Aufbau der
sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende
Soziologie, which had just appeared, and said:
“Do you know this man? Quite interesting. He is a
bank executive by day and a phenomenologist by
night!” Gurwitsch ordered the book and planned to
write a lengthy review of it for the Göttingische
Gelehrte Anzeigen, a review which was not
written because after 1933 a Jewish author could not
get a manuscript accepted in Germany, even by a
learned periodical. In reading the book, however,
Gurwitsch found that, while the approach and themes
were different from his own in some respects, Schutz
had in principle said almost all that needed to be
said from the phenomenological position.
One evening at the home of
Gabriel Marcel in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
Aron Gurwitsch were introduced. Merleau-Ponty asked
Gurwitsch if he were related to the author of the
Phänomenologie der Thematik und des reinen Ich,
and Gurwitsch acknowledged his work. Merleau-Ponty
remarked that he had been quite influenced by it,
and he began attending Gurwitsch’s lectures and saw
him frequently.(3) Gurwitsch was invited to
Merleau-Ponty’s home. Merleau-Ponty read some of
Gurwitsch’s articles prior to publication, including
the published version of Gurwitsch’s lectures on
Gestalt psychology. Gurwitsch conveyed unpublished
observations on Goldstein’s famous patient Schneider
to Merleau-Ponty. The translation of Husserl’s
phrase “das Wahrgenommene als solches” as “le perçu
comme tel” passed through Merleau-Ponty to Sartre.
Although Sartre did not meet Gurwitsch until after
World War II, he knew about him through
Merleau-Ponty. The first article on Sartre in
English was published by Gurwitsch in Volume I of
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research; I do
not know whether Sartre was aware of an
earlier-published “nonegological conception of
consciousness.”
While in Paris, Gurwitsch
continued his study of Piaget, begun in 1928, with
the trilogy on the development of intelligence,
world construction, and play in the infant. He wrote
on Goldstein, on Gestalt theory, and on the
psychology of language. But an unfinished project
from this time is particularly interesting. Needing
money, Gurwitsch accepted the suggestion that he
compose an introductory exposition of phenomenology
of perhaps one hundred pages for Actualités
scientifiques et industrielles, a series of
expository works edited by Jean Cavaillès. After two
pages were written, however, he realized how much it
was against his nature merely to summarize. So
another book, based on his lectures at the Sorbonne,
began to take form, Esquisse de la phénoménologie
constitutive. In 1939, since he was again an
enemy alien, having been classified as a stateless
person of German origin since 1935, Gurwitsch’s work
on this book was subsidized by the French state. But
this book also became a political casualty.
Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch
finally met in Paris in 1937 and quickly became
close friends. On Gurwitsch’s side, the relationship
went back intellectually to 1932. As a friendship it
was to continue for more than twenty years.
According to the men’s wives, the discussions were
endless. A considerable correspondence exists. They
read each other’s work prior to publication.
Gradually an image of their converging interests
emerged: They were “making the tunnel,” one digging
from the social and the other from the perceptual
side of the mountain. However, Schutz openly
expected Gurwitsch to be disappointed if the bores
did not meet precisely! This is not to say that
there were no unresolved differences between them;
Schutz, for instance, rejects the “argument of
Sartre-Gurwitsch against the egological theory.”
Nevertheless, to fully understand either man’s work,
one should familiarize oneself with that of the
other.
III
Schutz had gone to the United
States in July, 1939. He was there instrumental in
Gurwitsch’s becoming a visiting lecturer at Johns
Hopkins. Gurwitsch arrived in 1940 and found himself
for the third time an enemy alien, although this
time only in the most technical sense. He was
naturalized In 1946.
In contrast to the situation in
France, there was a genuine possibility for an
academic career in America. Gurwitsch was
thirty-nine when he arrived. Unfortunately, however,
the intellectual situation he entered was not in
other respects as receptive as the one in France.
During the war and for some time afterward, it was
difficult for anyone to find a position in
philosophy. Moreover, Goldstein and some important
Gestaltists had long since arrived and were
vigorously representing themselves. More crucially,
phenomenology had been introduced already by other
men and was struggling for survival.(4) As
late as 1958, Gurwitsch himself wrote in a Preface
written for an English translation of Q. Lauer’s
Phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris, 1955): “It
still remains true that phenomenology plays no role
in contemporary American philosophy. ... American
philosophy is overwhelmingly dominated by several
varieties of what is called ‘analytical
philosophy.’”
Gurwitsch taught physics and
mathematics for several years and changed schools
several times: Today he refers back to his first two
decades in the United States as “climbing the
mountain of cotton.” The steps up that mountain
might be considered:
1940-42 Lecturer in
Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University
1942-43 Grant from the American Philosophical
Society
1943-46 Instructor in Physics, Harvard
University
1946-47 Grants from the American Philosophical
Society and from the American Council for
Emigrés in the Professions (directed by Else
Staudinger)
1947-48 Lecturer in Mathematics, Wheaton College
1948-51 Assistant Professor of Mathematics,
Brandeis University
1951-59 Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Brandeis University
1958-59 Fulbright Professor of Philosophy,
University of Cologne
1959-71 Professor of Philosophy, The Graduate
Faculty of Political and Social Science, The New
School for Social Research
Although the situation in the
United States was not particularly receptive,
Gurwitsch continued his research in the directions
he had taken in Germany and France. Naturally he
participated actively in the International
Phenomenological Society and in the new journal,
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.(5)
While at Harvard he continued his study of the early
William James, to whom Stumpf had called his
attention two decades before, turning up two minor
James manuscripts in the Harvard Library and writing
two articles on James. Today, of course, there is
much interest in the James of the Principles of
Psychology, who is being read, as he was then by
Gurwitsch, as a phenomenological psychologist.(6)
Gurwitsch also began to write his
systematic work while at Harvard. This book, into
which much of the unfinished Esquisse de la
phénoménologie constitutive was incorporated,
was written in English but was first published in
the French translation of Michel Butor, now a
prominent novelist, as Théorie du champ de la
conscience (Paris, 1957). It bears the
dedication: “A ma femme, la compagne de ma vie, et à
Alfred Schutz, le camarade de mes pensées.” During
the revisions of this treatise, Schutz came to call
Gurwitsch “Penelopus.” The resultant composition is,
in my opinion, a model of scientific exposition.
Spiegelberg judged it “the most substantial original
work produced by a European phenomenologist in the
United States.”(7) The English edition
appeared in 1964 as The Field of Consciousness.
Then eighteen essays from forty years of work were
published in 1966 as Studies in Phenomenology and
Psychology. Another volume, Phenomenology and
the Theory of Science, is in preparation.
Leibnizs Panlogismus has been completed and is
due to appear in 1972. Another book, tentatively
entitled Logic and Reality, is projected. In
short, the seeds germinated in Berlin and cultivated
in Paris have unquestionably borne fruit in New
York.
The last dozen years of teaching
at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social
Research in New York City have been the happiest.
Originally the University in Exile and a haven for
emigré scholars, some of whom remained while; others
went on to other schools, this institution has been
unique. Its original faculty and orientation stemmed
from pre-Nazi Europe. Alfred Schutz joined the
Graduate Faculty in 1943 and became professor of
philosophy and sociology .He had the idea of making
the philosophy department a center for phenomenology
. Dorion Cairns had been added to the department by
1956, and plans were well advanced to add a chair in
1960 for Gurwitsch. Then Schutz died suddenly, and
Gurwitsch was called to replace him as professor of
philosophy. The last part of Alfred Schutz’s idea
was realized in 1969 when the Husserl Archive at the
New School was established in his memory. Gurwitsch
is the chairman of the board of directors. The
Graduate Faculty would seem, then, the natural place
for Aron Gurwitsch.(8)
As for the philosophical movement
to which Gurwitsch belongs, it is perhaps too soon
to offer a firm judgment about its native growth in
the United States. Nevertheless, there are many
indications that an American current, specifically
different from the French and German currents of
that movement, is appearing. Should such an event
come to pass, Aron Gurwitsch will have to be seen
for his unswerving and unrelenting effort to have
been centrally instrumental in its production.
IV
Although I cannot claim a
detached attitude with regard to my teacher, let me
close this sketch with some less factual remarks
about the man and thinker I have come to know and
admire during the past decade. And, to begin with,
it seems to me that Gurwitsch is best observed in
his natural habitat, the university. Not long ago he
was expressing concern to a colleague that
politicized students might destroy the university.
His colleague remarked that he must have led a
rather normal life to hold such an opinion. “Yes,”
Gurwitsch said, “sometimes stateless and
impoverished-that is a normal life.” I think that
one thing that must be recognized is that through
all his dislocations and struggles Gurwitsch has
always had his home community in the university. He
seems to regard it as an international society which
is organized in terms of mutual obligation and thus
humane and valuable. Moreover, he tends to see his
colleagues as siblings, and several can testify to
the paternal care and concern he shows students who
become adopted. Consequently, he has a personal
concern that the university milieu and its
function—the expansion and communication of
theoretical insight—not be destroyed, either by
popular preoccupations with “useful” knowledge or by
dogmatic ideologies of any sort.(9)
It is clear to me from knowing
him that what he has studied and investigated is
what was of theoretical interest to him. Despite
significant reconstructions, Gurwitsch’s
problematics is basically the same as Husserl’s: the
descriptive investigation of constitutive
consciousness and its perceptual and intellectual
correlates as a means to the grounding of the human
and natural sciences, as well as logic and
mathematics. In working on this problematics, he has
shown little respect for disciplinary frontiers,
taking his data wherever he could find them,
something which has led to his demonstrating many
convergencies in contemporary thinking. He is
sometimes called a psychologist in Europe, but
labels make no difference to him. A source of his
thinking, second only to phenomenology, is, of
course, Gestalt theory. Within phenomenology and in
contrast with Schutz, for example, he classifies
himself as a “noematic phenomenologist.” In
this sense, his central problem for nearly fifty
years has been organization in consciousness. Even
his new book on Leibniz will reflect this.
As a teacher in the classroom,
Gurwitsch’s stock of scholarly knowledge at hand is
enormous. I recall, for instance, a historical
catalogue I once heard him give of the
interpretations of Kant. His facts and arguments in
lectures always reflect his orientation; after a
while, one can see a thoroughgoing
interconnectedness in all that he teaches and
writes. His lectures are delivered firmly and are
unusually well prepared, rich with examples, and
elaborated with an astonishing coherence. He uses no
notes, but he does occasionally take out a book in
order to quote from the text rather than from memory
or to sight-translate Plato, Leibniz, Kant, Husserl,
etc. In both his lectures and his writings he uses
the fewest possible technical terms, trying, I
believe, to make his hearers and readers enter into
the theoretical context and “see” the things
discussed through the words rather than let the
words be themes in their own right. He seems to fear
words becoming catch phrases and degenerating into
slogans. Nevertheless, his speech has many images
that are fresh to English-accustomed ears, and he
has an accent that must be heard to be appreciated.
Yet to me the most remarkable thing about his
expression is the way that he seems to form his
thoughts as thoughts and then attempt to fit them
into the clothes of language. This quality of his
expression is intelligible from his life, to be
sure, but it also points to what I think is the
central quality of his existence: his scientific
vocation.
Some men who, like Gurwitsch,
have been immersed in a series of cultures firmly
accept various relativisms. But Gurwitsch often
fondly quotes another refugee, Xenophanes of
Colophon, to the contrary effect:
The Ethiopians imagine their
gods as black with snub noses. The Thracians
imagine their gods as blue-eyed and red-haired.
The Egyptians imagine their gods as
light-complexioned with black hair. If oxen or
lions had gods and could paint them, their gods
would be like oxen and lions. But the divine is
one and has no countenance and no color.
That is the earliest expression
of the ideal goal of episteme. That goal is
still being pursued by Aron Gurwitsch.
Notes:
1. Let me reserve the title “A
Philosophy of Organization: The Constitutive
Phenomenology of Aron Gurwitsch” for a future study.
2. The following sentences from the Preface of
The Field of Consciousness are more significant
than most such statements: “I wish to acknowledge my
obligation to some organizations for their help
during a most difficult period of my life. While I
was living in France, the Comité pour les savants
étrangers (founded and presided over by Sylvain
Levy), the Comité d’accueil et d’organisation de
travail pour les savants étrangers résidents en
France (whose president was Paul Langevin), and the
Caisse nationale de la recherche scientifique made
it possible for me to continue my studies, parts of
which resulted in the present book.”
3. Father Van Breda has told me that Merleau-Ponty,
when he visited the Archives-Husserl in April, 1939,
informed him at length about Gurwitsch’s 1937
lectures in Paris on phenomenology. Alexandre
Metraux informs me that some of Merleau-Ponty’s
notes on these lectures have survived.
4. The early fate of phenomenology in America is
reviewed by Dorion Cairns in his article
“Phenomenology” in A History of Philosophical
Systems, ed. Vergilius Ferm (New York, 1950), p.
353.
5. On the origins and intents of these institutions,
cf. Marvin Farber, “Descriptive Philosophy and the
Nature of Human Existence,” in Philosophic
Thought in France and the United States, ed.
Marvin Farber (Albany, 1950), pp. 422-24.
6. James Edie has recently devoted a thorough
critical review to this new reading of James in
“William James and Phenomenology,” Review of
Metaphysics, XXIII, No.3 (1970), 481-526.
7. The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), II, 630.
8. The trustees of the New School have formed the
category of “distinguished service professor” so
that Aron Gurwitsch can continue to teach on the
Graduate Faculty beyond the mandatory retirement age
of seventy. Concerning the origin of the New School
and the original intentions that led to establishing
it and the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social
Science see the autobiography of Alvin Johnson,
Pioneer’s Progress (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1960), esp. Chaps. 27 and 31.
9. Gurwitsch’s position on the significance for life
of philosophy and of the philosophical ethos was
expressed years ago in a review (Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, I [1940], 515):
“There is no doubt that philosophers have to be
concerned with historical conditions, all the more
as the very importance of these conditions consists
of more than providing materials for discussions on
‘existential philosophy.’ Perhaps these situations
would not have turned out as they did, had not so
much time and energy been wasted in ‘existential
interpretations’ of concrete human situations, but
had rather been concentrated upon the examination of
these conditions with minds of impartial
intellectual probity to disclose their structures,
to obtain, that is to say, insight and rational
knowledge about them. Action might then have been
guided by knowledge. Philosophy is concerned with
human welfare and has to promote it. It cannot do so
except by contributing knowledge and by criticizing
knowledge already acquired. In other words,
philosophy has to become knowledge in the sense of
episteme, not satisfied so long as it has to carry
along implications and presuppositions not yet
cleared up, seeking to expand itself to all fields
of being. This task, perhaps, is an infinite one; at
any rate it does require the cooperation of
generations. But for the sake of the supreme
practical interests of mankind—if not for
theoretical needs—this task must be tackled. We may
be sure that the more we proceed in its realization,
the more reasonable life will become, the more it
will become human life. Hence, I think, we
ought to persist on the path opened by Husserl,
regardless of the higher or lower esteem we will
enjoy as philosophic personalities because we are
mere disciples.”
