Biographical Sketch of Aron Gurwitsch

by Lester Embree



In the field of science, only he who is devoted
solely to the work at hand has “personality.”

Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf”



I

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.”




Return to Main Page