The Golden Age of Phenomenology at the New School for Social Research, 1954–1973

Lester Embree, Michael D. Barber, Lester Embree, Michael D. Barber

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780821445518
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

This collection focuses on the introduction of phenomenology to the United States by the community of scholars who taught and studied at the New School for Social Research from 1954 through 1973. During those years, Dorion Cairns, Alfred Schutz, and Aron Gurwitsch—all former students of Edmund Husserl—came together in the department of philosophy to establish the first locus of phenomenology scholarship in the country. This founding trio was soon joined by three other prominent scholars in the field: Werner Marx, Thomas M. Seebohm, and J. N. Mohanty. The Husserlian phenomenology that they brought to the New School has subsequently spread through the Anglophone world as the tradition of Continental philosophy.

The first part of this volume includes original works by each of these six influential teachers of phenomenology, introduced either by one of their students or, in the case of Seebohm and Mohanty, by the thinkers themselves. The second part comprises contributions from twelve leading scholars of phenomenology who trained at the New School during this period. The result is a powerful document tracing the lineage and development of phenomenology in the North American context, written by members of the first two generations of scholars who shaped the field.

Contributors: Michael Barber, Lester Embree, Jorge García-Gómez, Fred Kersten, Thomas M. T. Luckmann, William McKenna, J. N. Mohanty, Giuseppina C. Moneta, Thomas Nenon, George Psathas, Osborne P. Wiggins, Matthew M. Seebohm, and Richard M. Zaner.

PART I

Teachers

CHAPTER 1

ALFRED SCHUTZ

Schutz and the New School

Michael D. Barber

Long before he was invited by Alvin Johnson to lecture in the sociology department in the spring of 1943, Alfred Schutz cooperated with Else Staudinger and Johnson to recruit endangered European faculty and participated in the General Seminar of the Graduate Faculty. He served as visiting professor in sociology from 1944 to 1951, and in 1952 he was appointed a full professor in the philosophy and sociology departments, with a salary of $3,000 per year. Schutz taught evenings from 8:20 to 10:10, after a day’s work, and then returned home to play the piano for an hour and do a few hours of philosophy writing. He coordinated teaching with research interests, offering courses on sociological theory; social action; Mead; social groups; the sociology of knowledge; everyday life situations and current events; self and society; social roles; social scientific methodology; man and his tools; sociology of language; other minds; signs and symbols; equality, prejudice, and discrimination; causality; and contemporary philosophy.¹

Over the years, in the General Seminar he presented work concerning the well-informed citizen, T. S. Eliot, Santayana, Don Quixote, and Mozart. He regularly undertook initiatives on his own, for example, proposing in 1945 that the Graduate Faculty edit Anglo-American social scientific books in German to promote democratic ideals in Germany. He delivered a moving memorial address for Felix Kaufmann, at Hans Staudinger’s request helped Kaufmann’s wife dispose of her husband’s pension, and strove to republish Kaufmann’s Methodology of the Social Sciences. He spoke on a panel on the sociological aspects of literature. As early as 1948, he began efforts to have Aron Gurwitsch hired at the New School. When Staudinger asked him to evaluate the Graduate Faculty in 1955–56, he characterized the school’s program’s major weakness as the lack of teaching experience for its graduates, who had to earn their livelihood in nonacademic professions. He alerted Staudinger to health insurance opportunities for the faculty and suggested to President Hans Simons possibilities for distributing dignified publicity about the New School’s programs throughout New York City. He was regularly searching for opportunities to bring money to the New School, developed a plan to bring microfilms of the Husserl Archive in Louvain to the school, and found the needed funding.²

In 1952, he resisted an invitation to chair the philosophy department because the school was involved in retrenchment, canceling contracts, losing faculty (Löwith moved to Heidelberg), and anticipating retirements (Kallen and Riezler)—he even urged Gurwitsch not to come at this time. Nevertheless, he accepted the chairmanship and held that position until 1956–57, when he returned to a regular teaching position and discontinued his outside employment as a business person. As chair, he handled the department’s day-to-day affairs and showed himself gracious with administrators, carrying on, in particular, a mutually encouraging relationship with Alvin Johnson, the school founder, president, president emeritus after 1945, and editor of Social Research. He and Johnson shared intellectual impressions and jokes, even though Johnson reportedly informed him, “Don’t try to teach my children phenomenology, they do not swallow this stuff.”³

In order to cope with the diminishments that Schutz anticipated upon assuming the chairmanship, he developed a memorandum on the scope and function of the department. In that memorandum, he argued that the department could compete with larger, better-financed departments by emphasizing its unique strengths: its flexible program, faculty tutorial style, interdisciplinary linkages, and theoretical rather than applied orientation. He also proposed that the social sciences be integrated around a philosophical anthropology such as that in Kurt Riezler’s Man, Mutable and Immutable. Such rapprochement was perfectly consistent with Schutz’s outlook because he considered philosophy one of the Geisteswissenschaften.⁴

As chair, Schutz handled with diplomacy complicated situations, such as obtaining a teaching position for Werner Marx, whose recent graduation from the New School might have made him ineligible to hold such a position. In addition, he facilitated Hans Jonas’s becoming part of the faculty, even though resolving immigration issues and coordinating his teaching schedule with those of the rest of the faculty were difficult tasks. He also negotiated touchy faculty disputes—always with courage and diplomacy. Freed from the chairmanship for the school year 1957–58, he agreed to reassume it in the fall of 1958 before his sabbatical in the spring of 1959, the year of his death. Though the New School did not provide pay during sabbaticals, Schutz was happy to have the time, and since he was sixty years old that year, he claimed that he deserved a sabbatical “every sixtieth year.”

He carried on many rewarding, intellectually stimulating relationships with other professors. He was closest philosophically to Dorion Cairns. When Cairns completed his glossary of Husserl’s terms, he refused to send it through the mail for fear of its being lost and his losing twenty years of work, and Schutz joked with Gurwitsch that someone could perform a great service for phenomenology by hiring a robber to steal the manuscript and mail it. Schutz engaged both Kaufmann and Adolph Lowe regarding the relationship between the life-world and social scientific theory, especially in answer to the question of whether actors and social scientists refer to the same reality. Lowe also criticized Schutz’s essay on equality for opting for laissez-faire solutions to the problem of objective inequality of opportunity, as if collectivism were the only other alternative.⁵

Schutz developed a close, encouraging relationship with Albert Salomon and had interchanges with Horace Kallen, Eduard Heimann, and Carl Mayer. He corresponded with Leo Strauss, editor of Social Research, who depicted him as “a philosophically sophisticated sociologist,” though Schutz preferred the description “sociologically sophisticated philosopher.” His work with graduate students Helmut Wagner, Thomas Luckmann, Maurice Natanson, and Richard Zaner is renowned.⁶

In sum, Schutz was a true participating citizen in the New School community. Johnson’s tribute to him, in a letter of condolence that Ilse Schutz considered a “holy possession,” captures his character.

May I beg you to let me share your sorrow? For I, too, loved Alfred Schutz. I admired him as one of the greatest scholars I have known in my life. I loved him as a man who used his scholarship, not imperially, to subjugate inferior men, but humanly, to help them to a higher level of thought.⁷

NOTES

1. Michael D. Barber, The Participating Citizen: A Biography of Alfred Schutz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 98–99, 131, 132, 153–54.

2. Ibid., 131–32, 154, 157, 201–2, 204.

3. Ibid., 155.

4. Ibid., 153–157.

5. Ibid., 156–58, 200–203.

6. Ibid., 99–100, 132, 158–60, 198.

7. Ibid., 218.

Unintended Consequences in Schutz

Michael D. Barber

Acknowledging his indebtedness to the thought of Alfred Schutz, Roger Koppl has argued that Schutz failed to recognize that human action may generate systematic but unintended consequences. For Schutz, “any object of scientific inquiry within economics must have passed through the mind of some economic agent.” As a result, his approach cannot undertake “invisible-hand” explanations of economic phenomena, such as market equilibrium, that appear designed but are not, that occur in spite of actors’ disregard for invisible-hand results, and that are meaningless and mechanistic in character insofar as their overall results depend on no deliberate planning in the way that written texts or individual rational actions might.¹

In a sense, Schutz could concur with Professor Koppl since Schutz circumscribed his own approach to the social sciences by embracing the Weberian project of explaining the meaning of particular social phenomena as the “subjectively intended meaning of human acts” and by calling for the subjective interpretation of action from which a great part of social science, such as statistical analyses, abstracts. To buttress this Weberian methodology and to keep in view the “forgotten man of the social sciences,” Schutz provides a philosophical foundation through his phenomenological psychology that focuses “on the ground of inner appearance as the appearance of that which is peculiar to the psychic.” Aware of the specific limits of his own approach to the social world and social science, he nevertheless displayed an awareness of how societal-wide, structural features were generated unintentionally. For instance, he discusses how barriers to equality of opportunity might be “the outcome of a historical development” and have “highly important functions for the maintenance of the social system,” even though their being barriers to equality is an unfortunate by-product that it was not necessarily the primary motive of dominant groups to bring about. Furthermore, when he describes the modern convergence between the extending reciprocal anonymity of partners and the increasing proximity created by technological advances, including the development of nuclear weapons that could result in a worldwide catastrophe, he shows himself attuned to how a multitude of individual actions can yield unintended consequences exceeding any individual’s control and yet needing to be addressed by a well-informed citizenry.²

In this discussion, though, I would like to argue that Schutz’s philosophical understanding of the temporal/socially perspectival finitude of the human condition would actually render him much more hospitable to the idea of unintended consequences than previously suspected. I will make this argument on the basis of Schutz’s comments on theology, fate, and providence, precisely the kinds of considerations that underlay Adam Smith’s original usage of the invisible-hand metaphor. Of course, as is illustrated by Schutz’s and Koppl’s comments, there is no need to presuppose the existence of a divine designer to explain consequences that appear designed. In a final section, I will consider briefly the objective viewpoint of the economist to whom these unintended consequences appear and appear as surprisingly rational and to situate that viewpoint with reference to a broader Wissenschaftlehre.

TEMPORAL/SOCIALLY PERSPECTIVAL FINITUDE AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Schutz suggests the origins of invisible-hand explanations in The Phenomenology of the Social World.

The tendency to look for a subjective meaning for everything in existence is so deeply rooted in the human mind, the search for the meaning of every object is so tied up with the idea that that object was once given meaning by some mind, that everything in the world can be interpreted as a product and therefore as evidence for what went on in the mind of God. . . . This is only to make a passing reference, of course, to a whole area of problems that lie outside the strict sciences. In any case, the problem of subjective and objective meaning is the open door to every theology and metaphysics.³

Applying this final comment to historical events (rather than the natural order), one can imagine how within a theological context events can appear to one’s subjective point of view as a meaningless concatenation until one adopts the objective viewpoint of an outsider, say, a God’s-eye point of view, and discovers their providential purposiveness. In like fashion, the distinction between the subjective viewpoint of economic actors, whose actions seem to have no relation to an overall scheme, and the objective viewpoint of the economist, who discovers unanticipated orderly relations between such actions, can be fruitful for economic invisible-hand explanations. Indeed, this distinction between the subjective viewpoint of an actor and the objective viewpoint of an out-group observer is fundamental for Schutz’s understanding of everyday life and social science. Schutz often characterizes the objective point of view as disadvantaged with respect to the subjective, as when he urges economists not to attribute irrationality to investors who, on the basis of information available at the time of investment, may have made the most rational investments possible that only the subsequent course of events could have proved to be irrational. There is no reason, however, to suppose that objective observers might not have access to better information, as when they observe revealing, expressive movements of another who is unaware of them, or when psychologists grasp psychological determinisms of which their clients are oblivious, or when economists consider past decisions with new information or detect an equilibrium that economic agents had no idea they were producing. As a result, in the Schutzian scheme, since we are always susceptible to being apprehended from an objective point of view grasping implications we could not have foreseen or intended from our subjective point of view, it should almost be expected that our intended actions will have unintended, unexpected consequences.⁴

Indeed, Schutz’s commentaries on Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wanderjahre and Lehrjahre open a panorama occupied by the objective viewpoint of the reader or a character, especially Wilhelm, who ascertains the outcomes of actions that were not even imagined within the subjective viewpoint of characters in the novel at the time of their actions. Schutz often delights in pointing out the ironies and disproportions between actions and consequences, as for example, when Wilhelm in the Lehrjahre, as a kind of prank, dresses up in the nightclothes of a count who returns unexpectedly and, thinking that he mysteriously sees himself from outside his own body, is plunged into a religious melancholy that eventually prompts him to commit himself to a religious group. Similarly, Wilhelm in a moment of passion embraces a countess, pressing a brooch against her breast, and later learns from a physician that she subsequently began to imagine that she would die of breast cancer and eventually lose her youth and loveliness—all as the consequence of a loving embrace. As Schutz expresses it in his Wanderjahre manuscript, “And are not also in the Years of Travel little causes seemingly unmotivated, and still, in a deeper sense clearly bound up with the most significant of effects?” It should be observed that the reader or principal character who occupies an objective viewpoint and appreciates the consequences of action that characters at the time could not have foreseen or intended does not undertake the task that Schutz typically assigns to objective observers, namely, constructing types of what “must have passed through the mind” of an actor. Objective observers need not only construct types, they can also, as in this case, simply observe an action’s outcome downstream from its inception.⁵

It is not just the conceptual differentiation between subjective and objective perspectives that makes Schutz’s thought more hospitable to unintended consequences, but also the notion of temporality, implicit in all that has been said so far, since it is only from a later perspective that one understands the significance of what may have seemed of little consequence earlier. Indeed, invisible-hand explanations rely on temporal differentiations, since they grasp th...