Appendix I

ALFRED SCHUTZ

HUSSERVS CRISIS OF WESTERN SCIENCE

Edited by FRED KERSTEN

Editor's Preface

This letter of Alfred Schutz to Erlc Voegelin was written between 11 November and 13 December, 1943. It contains an extensive reply to a sweeping critique of Husserl's Die Krisis der europl1ischen WlSsenschaften und die transzend• entale Phllnomenologie1 which his friend Erlc Voegelin had developed in a letter to him. Voegelin had found merit in some of Husserl's lines of thought but on the whole rejected them as much in their references to historlcal trends in European philosophy, which he showed to be arbitrarily selective and hence at variance with historio• graphical facts and objectivity, as in their philosophical inferlority because they were merely epistemological under• takings and as such did not reach the level of genuine philosophizing (i.e., they did not constitute a metaphysics). Schutz's defense of Husserl followed two lines of thought: First, that Voegelin misunderstood the whole philosophical intent of Husserl when he considered his interest in past philosophers as serving historiographical interests instead of interest in the problems they had posed; and, second, even if the whole philosophy of Husserl could be subsumed under the heading of epistemology, it would still maintain its high philosophical respectability. At the very end of the letter Schutz spoke of the possibility of continuing this defense of Husserl's way of philosophizing in a further letter. However, no evidence has surfaced to indicate that he found the time to continue his attempt at vindicating Husserl's philosophical dignity.

1 Edmund Husserl, Philosophia, 1936.

277 S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 277-287. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. 278 ALFRED SCHUTZ

The English translation of the letter is by Helmut Wag• ner.2

* * * * *

Your extensive and important remarks about Husserl's essay labelIed by hirn Krisis der europlIischen WISsenschaften deserve a careful and extensive response. Geographical distance forces us to written exchanges; at least this shall offer us the advantage of putting our ideas into the clearest possible and most orderly form. Initially a personal word may be said about my relationship to the essay of Husserl which is the object of these considerations. I openly confess that I do not face it in a completely objective way. It is particularly close to my heart because during the years in which I was privileged to carry out many a serious dialogue with Husserl I have watched the essay originate and grow, and I was fortunate to leam something about the over-all plan of the fragment. Thus I know that Husserl planned the work to encompass six to eight essays, each of which was to be as long as the one published. He expected it to become the summary and crowning of his philosophical life• work. So it is understandable that some of Husserl's enthusiasm was trans• ferred to me. Indeed, it seems to me, as weIl as to you, that many things in this essay belong to the best of what we have inherited from Husserl. So most of all the chapter on Galileo. Your main argument against the published part, but also against the whole of Husserl's work, is the following: you accept the achievements of Husserl in the area of epistemology but deny that they are a philosophically respectable undertaking. Epistemology may be a prologue to philosophy, but it is not a philosophical beginning. In none of his published writings did Husserl touch on any fundamental problem of philosophy, and it can hardly be expected that his literary estate would reveal new dimensions. There are several things to be said to this point. In the first place, it is a matter of personal evaluation whether one will refuse philosophical rank to an "epistemological achievement," as you call Husserl's work. I am convinced that the discovery of the prepredicative sphere, the uncovering of the problem of intersubjectivity, the retracing of logic, mathematics and the natural sciences back to the grounds of the life• world, contributions to the analysis of the consciousness of inner time and to the constitution of space: these examples culled from the fullness of his work do indeed touch upon philosophically fundamental problems.

2 For the relationship between Erlc Voegelin and A1fred Schutz, see Helmut Wagner, Alfred Schutz. An Intellectual Biography, Chapter 12 (the letter of Schutz to Voegelin translated here is discussed, pp. 191ft). HUSSERL'S CR/SIS OF WESTERN SCIENCE 279

I do not know whether one has to apply the ideal-typical academic con• cept of epistemology to this kind of investigation; in principle it makes no difference to me. If this should be the case, epistemology is a pursuit worthy of a philosopher. I would go even further and say that it is just these-and perhaps only these-problems that can be treated within Husserl's ideal framework of a "philosophy as strict science. " But I fully understand and even share the notion that beyond this ideal there exist philosophically fundamental problems that cannot be made accessible with the means of a rigorously scientific method; they demand the courage to do metaphysics. (As you know, I personally feIt the need to supplement my phenomeno• logical studies through Leibniz and Kierkegaard). Perhaps you will rightly and justifiably respond that Husserl daimed to have laid out, if not constructed, a genuine and definite system of a universal philosophy in his transcendental phenomenology-and this in contrast to his phenomenological psychology under the title of which fall, with a few excep• tions, almost all his published works. I openly confess that I cannot pose as adefender of transcendental phenomenology because I fear it collapsed at decisive places. For instance, it did not escape transcendental solipsism, nor did it overcome the rift in the conception of the "constitution of the world by the transcendental ego": it begins with the construction of the world of experience by consciousness and ends up with the creation of the world by the ego-become-god. I ascribe much of the responsibility for these outcomes to Eugen Fink. What I have heard from hirn about so-called "constructive phenomenology" (dealing with birth and death, life and ageing, and other genuinely metaphys• ical questions) has not made me confident that the publication of the literary estate of Husserl will offer a solution to the metaphysical questions, and therefore to the fundamental problems in your terms. However, I expect many contributions to the solution of most important questions of the type of Husserl's posthumous essays about the "Origin of Geometry" and the "Analysis of the Constitution of Space" (essays you may know); they are for me contributions of this kind. All this does not alter the fact that we can do justice to Husserl's last work even ifwe do not find in it the solution to philosophically fundamental problems. However, for this purpose we must make the problem posed in this essay our own. Nothing is more fruitless than to reproach a writer for showing interest in problems not of interest to the reader, to accuse hirn of not having seen the world with the reader's eyes and of deeming other things more relevant than those dose to the reader's concerns. And this is what I fear you are doing in part of your otherwise excellent critique. Here I arrive at a basic remark. You treat Husserl's essayas though he intended to develop an image of the cultural history of mankind, and that from a speculative perspective. The characteristic problems ofthe Averroistic speculation, correctly characterized 280 ALFRED SCHUTZ by you, arise only from the grounds of such an ideal of the philosophical contemplation of history.3 Only from there may one explain the contradic• tion between the two possibilities of understanding the world which you characterize as the Christian Orthodoxy and the Heterodoxy of Siger of Brabant. Certainly, questions of the relationship between world soul and individual soul belong to a historically collectivist metaphysics. And in this general sphere there appear theological problems of the kind you describe as the Zenoistic, Averroistic, and Kantian types. You accuse Husserl of having shifted the problem of humanity from this universality to his tory and of having narrowed the conception of "humanity," making "man" into the finite historical product of only certain periods of human history-of antiquity and the modern age. Had it been Husserl's intention, in his essay, to carry out a philosophical speculation of the kind you specified, all three of your objections would be justified even though they do not agree weIl with one another-namely, 1) that Husserl did not occupy clearly a philosophically basic position with respect to the history of mankind, 2) that he shifted the problem from the universal sphere to that of history, 3) that his historical image of the world is insufficient because of its narrow selectiveness. Moreover, ifHusserl had aspired to write a philosophy ofhistory that was cosmopolitan in intent, and were his concepts of "originary foundation" and "final foundation" to be understood in the sense of a progressive ideal like that of Kant, then omission of the Kantian "astonishment" about the attempt to interpret all prehistory only as a step toward the final foundation would indeed be reason for concern. Were this so, the temptation would be great to view Husserl's essay as an example of a "demonic" historiography, his philosophy of history as that of a typical philosophy in the three phases [of history], and hirnself as a "messianic doomsday figure of our time." If Husserl had aimed at writing history, he certainly would not have ignored the self• witnessing of great thinkers. But, as I understand it, nothing of this was Husserl's intention. Husserl hirnself poses the problem of the self-contemplation of the Western philosopher in his acting and doing. According to my view, unlike the Greek thinkers he does not stand at the beginning of philosophical wonderment about a world to be discovered and to be interpreted. The world of philosophical problems has already been discovered and interpret-

3 A1though not explicit, Schutz is clearly referring to Voegelin's essay on Siger of Brabant published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. IV, no. 4 (1944), 508-525, a copy of which Schutz had no doubt seen in manuscript. The reference is to the transformation of Aristotelianism in the commentaries of Averroes by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris, and according to which philosophy became a form of Iife, a "style of existence," for an intellectual elite in political society. See pp. 511ff [ED.I. HUSSERL'S CRISIS OF WESTERN SCIENCE 281 ed. We are not "beginners" in philosophizing, we learned to philosophize about philosophical problems from our teachers and their teachers. A great tradition of the philosophical interpretation of the world has come down to us; it is our motivation to philosophize and our directive for the formulation of our own problems. The typical forms of the problems and the typical possibilities of their solutions are not only assigned as traditional contents to our understanding, they pre-interpret our own possibilities and tasks. Even though we partake in the happenings of philosophy only very moderately, in the chain of generations we are founders of new traditions in that we change what we inherit and, in the optimal case, augment it. Thus there results for every philosopher, not just for the phenomenologist and for Husserl, the dual problem of the originary and final foundation of the tradition in which he lives and in which he partakes receivingly and givingly. Basically, this problem is not at all limited to the philosopher; it is a most common one. With certain significant modifications which I cannot discuss here, it is the problem of effecting a pre-given world that has its own whither and whence, and whose style is predesigned by the givenness of this world. In the introductory part [of the Krisis essay] Husserl refers to the self• reflection of the philosopher as an anthropologically basic category which, as far as I know, he wanted to pursue.in many directions in his planned essays. His reference to "man" and to "mankind" are to be understood in this sense as is his declaration proclaiming the philosopher as a representative of mankind. But let us stay with the philosopher. He has two possibilities: Either he lives in the tradition, allows hirnself to be motivated by it, takes for gran ted and remains directed upon the objectives of his work without noticing how and to what degree they are determined by tradition. This attitude will be typical in the great school-bound philosophies and in periods of secure metaphysical or religious truths of salvation. Or the philosopher no longer feels hirnself secure in the inherited tradition; it remains his foundation but does not make it possible for hirn to adhere to the idealization of the Hand so on." What has been taken for granted now becomes questionable and will be questioned about its origin and its history of interpretation. It will not be questioned from the perspective of an objectivating onlooker who wants to know "how it actually was," however, but from that of a passionate participant who wishes to explicate the implications of the traditions in so far-but only in so far-as this is necessary for his self-understanding. This attitude is typical for thinking during periods of great spiritual crises in which the so-called "fundamental problems" are posed not merely in specific sciences but also in philosophy itself. This is the attitude of Husserl in the whole analysis he planned which justifiably bears the title "The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcenden• tal Phenomenology" and whose introductory chapter is called "The Crisis of the Sciences as Expression of the Radical Life-Crisis of the Life of Western 282 ALFRED SCHUTZ

Mankind. " It is not Husserl's intention to ask about the meaning of this history of philosophy. Likewise, it is not his intention to write an "apologia pro vita sua" or to manufacture a construction according to which all prior thinking was only a preamble for his own achievement: the full execution and justification of the ultimate foundation [of the ultimate truth]. In my opinion the comparison you make of Husserl with [Otto von] Gierke is an absolute misunderstanding of Husserl's attitude; it does not spring from self-satisfaction but just from that Kantian "astonishment" which you correctly recognize as a genuinely philosophical idea and which you assert is missing in Husserl. It is this astonishment about the failure of tradition to solve the present crisis of philosophy and of his own philosophizing that urges Husserl, from his deIiberately tradition-bound point of view, to ask about the origin of these handed-down contents which had been autobiographically determinate for him, for his problems, for his style of philosophizing. However, hirnself a philosopher, he describes an essential element of the philosophical tradition when he justifies his selection by his autobiographical interest.4 The word I just used, "essential element" [Wesenselement], is to be under• stood directly in a technical-phenomenological sense. Although autobio• graphical, it is an eidetic analysis of the tradition that determines Husserl's, and thereby our, present philosophical situation and poses questions for it. Tasks arise here in a two-fold sense: first, to define one's own vantage point, and, second, to understand the meaning of his own plans. In the face of the crisis of our times, these two tasks can only be carried out when the philosophizing person retrospectively gets hold of the motives and urges which have, first, brought hirn 10 philosophizing as such, and, second, to philosophizing in one or the other philosophical style. This purpose is not served by a mere inventory of the self-documentation of great thinkers, or even by a study about the his tory of the problem of cognition in the manner of Cassirer.5 To the contrary: a universal overview of the eternal treasure of philosophical problems in their contexts, a reaching-back to the specific subjective meanings which certain formulations of, and solutions to, problems had for prior thinkers-this would be directly incompatible with the specific formulations of problems for Husserl. Standing in the tradition which motivates hirn and defines his projects, Husserl selects only those

4 The importance of Schutz's understanding and assessment of Husserl's way of philosophizing as expressed in the Crisis cannot be stressed enough. Nor is it a philosophizing that Husserl comes to at the end of his Iife; it is a style present from the vel)' beginning. See Fred Kersten, Phenomenological Method: Theory und Practice (Dordrecht: K1uwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 32ff, for an account of it in Husserl's early writings [ED.]. 5 Schutz is no doubt referring here to Cassirer's multi-volumed Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und WISsenschaften der neuren Zeit (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Cassirer, 1922ff) [ED.]. HUSSERL's CRISIS OF WESTERN SCIENCE 283 elements from the historical treasure chest which he feels are alive in his own thinking. He does not judge the mode of their agreement according to the meaning-structures in which they stood for their producers but according to those in which they stand for hirnself. This may be so because they came down to hirn in many pieces and in differing reinterpretations; it may be because he gave them a specific sense within his own world of work. This last-named case deserves particular attention because it is bisected by a new circle of problems, and in particular the problem of the un• avoidable self-misunderstanding of the philosopher (in general, of the actor) with respect to his interests, goals and solutions. The basic thesis (not formulated by Husserl) may be expressed as folIows: the philosopher under• stands his problem (more generally, the actor his objective) always incom• pletely. For hirn it stands in an essentially unfathomable context of meaning comprising unclarified implications, emptily anticipated. It has its open horizons which cannot be interpreted because they are unrealized: everything is in doubt. In retrospect, the philosopher can sometimes interpret empty horizons; the co-philosophizing contemporary can do this more frequently; and the successors who stand in his tradition can always do this because the horizons have meanwhile shown their specific features and their implications have become visible. This is the vital function of [Husserl's] critique of all forms of the continuation of the philosophical tradition. (In the motivational chain of practical actions other categories of reaction replace those of criticism. However, in the present framework I cannot deal with these contexts). Of course, the critique is unending and becomes a newly-set task for every new generation. It establishes the contexts of meaning between its subject-matters and their implications which, however, can be recognized only afterwards. I am of the opinion that Husserl saw all these connections clearly, even though possibly he may not have formulated them clearly. He treated them under the labels of originary and final foundations. Pursuing his own motives back through historical tradition, he arrived at the originary foundation of philosophy by the Greeks and at the originary foundation of the mathematizing natural sciences by Galileo. Thus he pursued just what you yourself have posed in the second and third parts ofyour manuscript, namely the biographical anamnesis of one's own effective motives. Only Husserl enclosed in his autobiographical medium all of the philosophical tradition to the extent, but only to the extent, that it was or is alive for his thinking. Truly, it is curious that the parallel between Husserl's intention and that of your own manuscript escaped your attention. This much about originary foundation. The entelechistic character of the image of his tory established on this foundation results from the principle of turning back to tradition and of selecting and re-interpreting the pre• interpreted contents thus gained; the latter are interrelated with the former. [As a thinker standing in one of these traditions] I question the tradition 284 ALFRED SCHUTZ about its sedimentations in so far as they can be the foundations of my own philosophizing and the fields of my own work. Connected with all this is the regulative principle [of the preservation] of its indefinite remoteness. (There is no narrowing of the gap between the answers established by successive generations and any metaphysically conceived ultimate goal). The final foundation remains in the "same" remote "distance" [for all successive generations]. This holds for the entelechistic goal of my own design. Tradition as I transmit it enriched by my own activity will have to be interpreted by the world of my successors as traditional sedimentation. And others will come and will have to do the same thinking• back and [the results of] my philosophizing will be one of the sediments of the tradition they have to interpret-a tradition I co-created. But the problem of final foundation will arise for these successors, too, as it arose for me; land as for me] this problem will 100m in an indefinite future. Yet, when they redraw the entelechistic course of the originary foundation of their tradition, the result of my philosophical doings will be included in their inherited sedimentations. Dear friend: this is my interpretation of Husserl's basic idea. I cannot find any passage in the whole essay in which Husserl declares that the phenomenology created by hirn is the final foundation of the entelechistic movement. This would be in blatant contradiction to his spiritual and human stance. Husserl says merely that with transcendental phenomenology the "revelation of reason"-his view of the course of philosophy-has reached an apodictic beginning as human task with its horizon of an apodictic continua• tion. According to everything I have said about the self-misunderstanding of the philosopher, it is clear that only a later critique will be able to justify or correct this claim. But it is beyond doubt that the effort to reach an apodictic start in philosophizing was the determining motive of all of Husserl's philosophizing. Therefore, standing in the tradition, he interprets the telos of this tradition out of his own doing. Also, I do not believe that Husserl considered his own work-the piece of philosophical work he left behind-the executed foundation of an apodictic beginning ready for continuing execution. He does speak, with undeniable justification, as one "who lives through the fate of a philosophical existence in its complete sincerity,,6 and says of hirnself in another passage ("Nachwort zu den Ideen") that "practically" he had "to tone down the ideal" of his own "philosophical

6 Cf. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen WISSenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 15. In this letter Schutz no doubt refers to the text published in Philosophio in 1936. He gives a reference to pp. 98f, though he more than Iikely intends pp. 93f. Cf. the English translation by David Carr, The Crisis 0/ European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestem University Press, 1970), 17 [ED.]. HUSSERL'S CRISIS OF WESTERN SCIENCE 285 aspirations to that of a genuine beginner."7 And he continued: "If the years of Methuselah were allotted to me, then I could almost hope that I might yet be able to become a philosopher." Is that the attitude of Gierke and the philosopher of Progress at the time of the establishment of the German Empire? Is that the Victorian image of his tory? 1. He who stands in the tradition (in this case, the "European") asks about the sediments that motivate hirn as to their origin, their entelechies, their becoming. (Historical tradition as autobiographical element is assigned to self-contemplation, "anamnesis" in your terminology.) 2. The contents thus gained can be examined in terms of their Eidos (by way of the searching for the invariant in phantasy-like transformation). From this follows the structure included in the essence of the teleological unfolding (in this case, the "self-revelation of Reason") with its originary and final foundation (always seen from the correlate situation of the interpreting person). 3. Starting here, a new interpretation of the tradition becomes possible in that it can be shown (a) that the "obvious" starting points of the great innovators (Galileo, for instance) were by no means obvious; (b) that and why they (themselves standing in a tradition) feIt no need to make problem• atic what they posited as unquestionably given; (c) that they were not aware of the implications of their doing (for example, the indirect "co-mathe• matization of the filling" in the Galilean turn), and they could not have become cognizant of them (because "discovery" is always a mixture of instinct and method; these elements can only be separated in retrospect, p. 115, for instance)8; (d) that the procedures of the re-interpretation-set in motion by the emerging tradition-and the (explicitly or implicitly) used fundamental hypotheses posited on the grounds of this discovery remain ununderstood even though they work (p. 117); their methods are devoid of meaning (p. 119), their operational functions technified (pp. 121ft), their relations to the life-world as universal meaning-elements forgotten (pp. 130ft). (Earlier I summarized these problems under the heading of the "self• misunderstanding of the philosophizing person"). 4. [Further results have to be noted:] a typology of the positing of prob• lems, of problem-solutions, of problem-enmeshing in the course of the tradition; likewise, the latter can be examined with respect to its style. (Compare Husserl's remarks about the problem of dualism and the difficulties which arise in the course of its continuing pursuit).

7 Cf. Edmund Husserl, Nachwort zu meinen "Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, "injahrbuchfür Philosophie undphänomenologische Forschung, VoI. 11, p. 569; cf. English translation by Richard Rojcewicz and Andr~ Schuwer in Edmund Husserl, Collected Workf, Vol. III (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 429 [ED.]. 8 The page reference is to the text of the Krisis under discussion [ED.]. 286 ALFRED SCHUTZ

5. From these analyses results the fixation of one's own point of view [in this case, phenomenology] in the tradition and with it the possibility and meaning-bestowal of further tasks. Most of a11, however, this serves as an example of a dialectical difficulty: the interpretation of the tradition is possible only from one's own perspective, while this perspective can only be clarified through the understanding of the tradition. The "methodological characteristic of our interpretation" fo11ows from Husserl's clear circumscrip• tion at the end of the chapter on Galileo (pp. 132ft) to which you have not given sufficient attention. That much about the published essay. After a11 that I have heard from Husserl, I am sure that the analyses developed in the fragment were only meant as examples (eidetic examples) of further problems within the total context of his planned book: A The position of the philosophizing person in the tradition as an example of the position of human being in the pregiven world. B. The place of phenomenology between originary foundation and entele• chistic final foundation as example for relating a11 philosophizing back to the understood life-world. (Phenomenology will understand the life-world as the root of its existence); according to Husserl, this understanding sha11 establish the apodicticity of its beginning. It is not satisfied with universal theses which remain ununderstood even if they are operatively effective. C. The set of problems mentioned under (A) and (B) together serve as examples of a possible (but not yet developed) philosophy of history. (The work on hand is by no means this, nor does it claim to be so. Your critique is based on the assumption that it is). D. The philosophy of his tory to be developed may become an example of the phenomenological analysis of the constitution the "natural attitude" (compare this to the "Nachwort" p. 567).9 I think that it would be an idle question to ask whether Husserl would have been capable of contributing an essential solution to these questions. But I believe that this thematic is worthy of a genuine philosopher. I have spent a great deal of time on the analysis of Husserl's basic position; I believe that the exposition of his intentions refutes just about a11 of the objections which you, dear friend, offer in your critique. Of course, I presuppose that the interpretation of Husserl's essay, as presented by me, is correct. Should this be the case, there is no argument possible about the question of why Husserl does not accept the Medieval, Chinese, or Indian philosophies as determining motifs of his thinking. Likewise, it is not a critical objection that he did not consider Hegel (who was ever foreign to hirn). (At one time I did ask hirn why he did not deal more extensively with Leibniz. He pointed out that he had planned to devote one of the essays of

9 Husserliana [/l, 158f; translation, 425ff [ED.]. HUSSERL'S CRIS/S OF WESTERN SC/ENCE 287 the planned series to the treatment of Leibniz's philosophy). Earlier 1 dealt with the role of philosophy in the wake of realized potentiality (Entelechie) against which you directed your critique. The concept of an unfolding world soul was completely foreign to Husserl. As in other places, this is manifested in his fifth Cartesian Meditation in full clarity. (As you know, 1 consider this meditation a failure). There remain your remarks about Husserl's interpretation of Descartes. You yourself have clearly established that, and to what degree, Husserl was entitled to begin with Descartes. Doubtless you are correct when saying that the course of Descartes' Meditations grew out of a formulation of a problem distinct from that of Husserl, that the conception of the ego as anima animae (animated soul) has an important function which Husserl did not consider, and that for Descartes the proof of God is only the occasion for an inquiry into a specific dialectical situation. 1 have no objections against any of this; on the contrary, 1 gained much from your important analysis. However, 1 am thoroughly convinced that Husserl, too, would have had no objections against your interpretation of Descartes. Likely, he would have willingly agreed that the elements you have laid bare are much more import• ant for Descartes than for the foundation of transcendental philosophy. However, according to all the things 1 have said, Husserl's problem was not that of a historian. For him-Husserl-Descartes was and remained a step toward the apodictic foundation of transcendental philosophy: This was the living and effective motivating core of his thinking as it had reached hirn in the tradition. For his specific formulation of the problem, the rest of the Cartesian philosophy was i"elevant-as relevant as it may be seen to be from different points of view, and as effectively as it may live on in other links in the chain of the tradition (which, by the way, is not the case). And thus, for me, Husserl's essay is also an important contribution to [the clarification] of the problem of relevance, which is close to my heart and which is still very much unclarified. 1 am very eager to hear from you what you think about the interpretation of the Husserl essay offered by me. The second and third parts of your manuscript deserve an analysis as detailed as this. It shall not remain missing. However, in the circumstances under which 1 presently live, it may take months before 1 will find the time write out the continuation of my response.10

10 [Note of Helmut Wagner]: No such continuation has been found in Schutz's Iiterary estate. I doubt that he found the occasion to take time out fmm his quite hectic business pursuits at the time and thus had to refrain fmm carrying out the intentions he stated at the end of the letter. Appendix 11

A CONVERSATION WITH MAURICE NATANSON

Editor's Note

This document was edited from tapes recorded over two days-June 28 and June 29, 1993-in Maurice Natanson's study at his horne in New Haven. It was neither possible nor desirable to include every utterance that found its way onto those ten hours of tapes, but the effort has been made here to preserve something of the spontaneity of our discussions. The first day was devoted primarily to bio• graphical explorations, the second to philosophical matters, but of course such a distinction, always more or less artificial, is entirely porous in the case of Professor Natanson's life and work. What emerges, then, is the emblematic paradox of phenomenology: the adumbration of the universal in the unique contours of the individual.

STEVEN CROWELL: Were you always intent on philosophy as a career? MAURICE NATANSON: 1 think the idea of a career came after 1 graduated from college and decided to go to graduate school finally. When 1 was in college 1 was strongly attracted to literature-I had a major in literature-and strongly attracted to psychology-I had the equivalent of a major in that-and 1 always had certain interests in medicine and psychiatry and thought for a while 1 would become a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst. 1 think it was after 1 graduated from college that 1 first encountered anything really higher-Ievel, intense, in graduate work in philosophy, and that was at New York University. There-about 1946-47 or so-I studied with what 1 think, for its size, was a very good graduate faculty in philosophy: Sidney Hook, Chairman for many years and widely known as a very sharp mind, and the person I wrote my Master's Thesis under-James Burnham. Burnham was at NYU in philosophy for many years from the early 1930s to the first part of the 1940s. He was a member of a wealthy Chicago family, if I'm not mistaken. He became a Trotskyist, a very important figure in the Trotskyist movement. He had a famous exchange, finally, in writing, with Trotsky, when

289 S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 289-334. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. 290 A CONVERSATION he challenged the dialectic. Eventually he left the Trotskyist movement, gave up teaching, and he became not So slowly a very conservative thinker, so that he ended up with Buckley on tfte National Review as one of its contributing editors, formally, and then he wrote a whole series of books of a highly conservative nature. SC: So a dialectical shift? MN: Very. He just swung violently. He was a very brilliant man in my opinion, whether you agree with his pOlitics or not. I encountered hirn at, I think, a very good time, after he had left the Trotskyist movement; he was in fact the only one who really stood up to Trotsky intellectually. SC: Was that political dimension part of your attraction to hirn? MN: No, not really, it was philosophical. He gave a course entitled "The Machiavellians" and had written a book under that name. The book inc1uded not only Machiavelli but, as the plural indicates, a whole group of thinkers who saw reality-especially political reality-as split in a certain way between what appears to be the case and what, in a kind of underlying fashion, is the moving force of reality; thinkers who, on the whole, look at the political world-using the word in the broadest sense possible-as a spectrum of surface and interior movement and motivation and force. I think the first assignment I was given was to report on Plato's Gorgias, taking it as a dialogue concerned with rhetoric. One can begin to see where that leads in the notion of what is said, the force of language in conversion ofthe hearer. That was one course I took with hirn, one semester. The other course I took with hirn was in Aesthetics; that was I think the specialty c10sest to his heart. He could have written a magnificent book on Dante. He was a very fine scholar in terms of preparation, languages and skills, in addition to philosophical acumen. In the course on Aesthetics he suggested I do a paper on the psychoanalyst, Otto Rank. I hadn't read Rank before, but Burnham told me about a book called Art and Artist by Rank to see if I would do a paper and report in c1ass, which I did. I got rather excited by Art and Artist, which I still think is a fine book. Rank, as you know, was a non-medical psychoanalyst, a very brilliant one who ultimately broke with Freud and established his own way of doing things. He, more than anybody else in Freud's circ1e, had a strong knowledge of and interest in aesthetics, art, myth, language in the broadest sense, culture, and so on. He is the author of a great many books which deal with problems related to that. In any case, at Burnham's suggestion I did my paper on Art and Artist-a long paper. He thought well of it, and when the time came around for me to make a dec1aration about what Iwanted to do about a Master's thesis I asked Burnham whether he thought the piece I did on Rank could be developed into a larger view of the psychoanalytic view of art, featuring Rank, and he agreed, and agreed to direct the thesis. So I wrote my Master's thesis on "Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics." I received my M.A degree from New York University in 1948. WITI-I MAURICE NATANSON 291

SC: Had you already encountered phenomenology or Husserl, or, in your earlier studies of literature, anything of the existential literature that was available at the time? MN: WeIl, at New York University of course 1 studied with other people. There was a man there named Harmon Chapman, and 1 took his seminars for a year-one each semester. Chapman taught a seminar on Husserl's phenomenology. (He had gone to Freiburg from Harvard and attended Husserl's courses). Unfortunately he didn't give the phenomenology seminar at that time, when 1 was there, so 1 couldn't take it, but 1 heard about it and that's the first 1 heard, reaIly, of Husserl. Technically the first notiee of the name Husserl 1 ever had was in Boring's textbook in experimental psycholo• gy. It was a kind of history of psychology, and you'l1 find the Germans in there, including Husserl. That was when 1 was an undergraduate. It didn't lead to anything and 1 didn't read any Husserl then, but 1 heard the name 1 think for the first time there. Then also at NYU Susanne Langer gave a course-she typically gave one-semester courses at a variety of universities (that's what she preferred to do) and wrote her own books-and her one• semester course was on symbolism. We went through her Philosophy in a New Key and took off from there. She was a good teacher, an interesting philosopher; she was 1 think the first "European" (despite the fact that she was born in New York City and educated at Radcliffe) 1 had studied philo• sophy with. But the greatest impulse came from Burnham and his steering me toward psychoanalysis, because 1 had to read a good deal of the psycho• analytic literature as a background for Rank, as weIl as reading Rank hirnself. And then there were visiting speakers at NYU. Though this did not have a very powerful effect on me, it was there, 1 went. There was a talk on the philosophy of Sartre by William Barrett-then a young man-who had been on the staff of the Partisan Review, had been to Europe, had seen the real "thing itself" going on-this was 1947; he gave his paper on Jean-Paul Sartre to a large audienee. 1 remember asking a question about what kind of ethics could emerge from a position like this-though that wasn't my eentral interest. Later on 1 came to see that it was an important question. SC: One that everyone would shortly be asking. MN: Sooner or later. So 1 heard hirn, and that's the first time ... A friend-a casual friend, a relative of a friend actually-had mentioned (we all knew the litde book on Existentialism by Sartre) that Sartre had written a big book, L 'Etre et le Neant. That was the first time I'd heard of it and decided to get hold of it and read it. That was about the time 1 was going to leave for Nebraska. At the time 1 got my M.A, 1 was at a dead end as far as what to do. 1 had held various working jobs: I was a social worker in New York City, officially, for a year, seeing the depths of Brooklyn. SC: What sort of work were you engaged in there? MN: 1 had a caseload of people who were on the dole, on relief. 1 had thirty or forty names and it was my job to visit them at least onee a month 292 A CONVERSATION and see how they were getting along, what their needs were, what they were doing. For a young man it was a dramatic sort of position. It was largely Italian, Irish, and some Jewish, a very varied stratum-une tranche de la vie, you know-of New York. I had known it myself; I grew up in Brooklyn, went to school there through high school. So I knew all that-I didn't come from a wealthy family, the family had a lot of troubles, financially, during the Depression-but now I knew it from the side of people who were on the lowest ledge, people with abandoned, sick, paralyzed breadwinners, fathers who had disappeared; there were many black people, people who didn't have enough money for a loaf of bread at the end of the month, people who were borderline psychopaths. It was astrange way to spend the day, going from one place to the other. And these people I've never forgotten, in the sense of ... We're not talking about politics or interests in the social sense, but I've never forgotten the experience. It's part of my memorial consciousness. 1'11 give you just one case, all right? I had on my list the name of an Irish lady-O'Leary, let's say. Mrs. O'Leary was in her eighties, it said on her papers, and she lived at such-and-such an address with somebody who ran a boarding house specializing in people who came from the agency. So I went to see Mrs. O'Leary and I saw a very slender wraithlike figure who screamed, "Oh thank God you've come. You don't know how I've suffered!" I went in to see what the story was, and her landlady-an Irish woman -started giving me a hard time. At that point I was not about to take that, and I gave her a hard time back. She called my supervisor and told the woman who supervised our group that I was giving her a hard time, etc. So I spoke to the supervisor and said that this woman doesn't want me to see the dient. WeH that's unacceptable. So when the supervisor backed me up, said it was a legal requirement that the person be visited at least once a month, told the woman who ran the house, "If you don't let this gentleman see our dient I will send the police immediately and I will remove your name from the list of accredited boarding houses for us," oh then! She'd called me a "damn Dutchman" (this was a long time ago!) the last time lIeft, but this time, oh! she couldn't have been sweeter, you know. But it was dear from this woman's report-evident to me-that this woman tyrannized her, and she was a very frail old lady. She had one niece who came to see her as often as she could-but she was a great distance away and couldn't do it very often-and nobody else in the world. So the landlady tyrannized her, and she couldn't do anything. The woman desperately wanted to get out, I mean just desperately. In those days I just took action. I didn't want to go through the rigmarole of the bureaucracy. I'd seen it at work, you know, and it didn't work. SC: These days you might weIl be sued. MN: That's exaclly the case. WeIl I just took action. I said, "How would you like to leave right now?" She said [Irish accent]: "Oh you dear man." . . . And, weIl, what I did was to get a taxi, went out in the street-Myrtle WIlli MAURICE NATANSON 293

Avenue in Brooklyn-got a taxi, told the guy we were going to move an old lady. I'd found a room for her with an Irish landlady who liked the idea of getting an Irish tenant, and she said "Why, O'Leary, that's as Irish as Paddy's cat!" And I just helped her move her things. She didn't have very much; what she had was packed up in little bundles which were actually shopping bags, and each shopping bag was the size of a melon-a cantaloupe or honeydew-wrapped up. So you'd open the drawer in her room and there were all of these cantaloupes and melons of brown paper, carefully packaged; then you'd find a dollar bill stuck underneath one, two or three more dollars here and there she didn't know she had. And I just carried them to the taxi. The landlady was screaming. She called the agency to protest but couldn't get anywhere because she'd had this trouble before, and she was worried about her future with the agency, from which she got most of her customers. And so I moved the woman, gave her a piece of paper with her new address-because I knew if she went out she wouldn't know where she lived. She got a fine reception from her new landlady, and that was it. Another one I won't tell you about, but just remark on: There was aperson, Salvatore somebody, who never answered my letters. Finally there's one thing you can do which will get an answer from such aperson: you cut them off, financially. The checks stopped coming. Then a small man, one of these wide, short Italians, Sicilians, comes to see me at the agency, the welfare department, and he says [Italian accent]: "Whatsamatta, no check?" And then I told hirn, "You don't answer, I came to your place six times, you don't answer the door, you got no phone, I've written you ..." He says, "Oh, no English." So I got somebody who spoke Italian to join me and she told hirn, "Look, he's got to go in and see howyou're living." "Oh no!" "All right," she said, "no see, no check." Then he let me in. When I came in, what I found was very strange ... We're in the midst of philosophy, aren't we, really? SC: These experiences live on, they echo in your work. MN: They're very strong, very vivid. I went down some steps (it was a basement apartment off Myrtle Avenue) and an old woman he was living with (the record said that his wife had died-he was in his sixties, 65 or something, 70) ... he had chained to the bed. I said [sputtering] "What are you doing here?" "Ah, none ofyour business." "Yes it is-no check." Then he untied the chain, released her. But the thing I learned from that year was that I found people in the most execrable circumstances-filth, horror, degradation-and what are they doing? They're carrying on all kinds of affairs-not just love affairs, but litigation, all kinds of things, over nothing, you know; wound up in aH sorts of business when they can barely get enough food in their bellies. They're living like a mound of ants busily at work on God knows what, some carcass-that's the image I have of many of these people. There were the opposite as weH, people with very neat hornes, didn't want anything, always did everything properly. But many of them, if 294 A CONVERSATION not most of them, were all wound up in strange interludes of reality (to rely on O'Neill). SC: Did that strike your literary imagination at the time? It occurs to me that this hooks up with the problem of mundanity and the problem of the everyday from the egologieal perspective, various social niehes ... MN: It certainly did "immanently." I didn't have the language for it at that time, I didn't have the equipment-phenomenological or existential-to characterize it, but what it linked up with was an equivalent, in a sense, in literature, in Dostoevsky, in Tolstoy, all the writers who were terribly important to me from high school on. SC: The authors who were important to you: was it primarily European authors in the early years? MN: Yeah.... I had read people like Jack London, and certainly his work, Martin Eden, was the first "philosophical novel" I had ever read, in the sense that it contained "philosophy" or philosophical discussion in it. I found out much later on that Sidney Hook had first come across philosophy in Martin Eden. That's true. So I was interested in a number of writers and poets, and I was writing poetry myself in high school, was part of what one could ca11 a literary establishment in a public high school which was of a very high level. And I found a11 of these experiences to be . . . to touch something very strong in my imagination which was, as I think you suggest• ed, an analogue of philosophy-with the other side of the analogy not yet present, but immanent; though in literary terms it was present. SC: Those authors that you mentioned-Dostoevsky, Kafka, and others-present one with a paradoxical (or at least complex, conflicted) view of the human being. MN: Absolutely. That's what appealed to me, that's what rang true in my experience, about the people I knew, the people I was concerned with, and then the people whom I found in social work were altogether like this. There were scenes out of a dozen European theaters, let alone the Yiddish Theater. And I began to understand what it is-it's almost Dickensian-to hear, once and for all and hear it reverberate forever, the cry of poverty, rank poverty. People who are on the bottom, who would never get out of the bottom; people who are paralyzed or partially paralyzed; people whose husbands or wives had run away, never to return; people whose children were in the penitentiary-you know, a11 these stories. You'd have a file that thick on somebody: this little girl, at the age of twelve, ran away, came back two years later, ran away again; aH these things in a cycle of horror. You had legal cases, you had to go to court and testify and you'd see people waiting there who were just mangled by life. WeH, I don't see how anybody can do good strong analytic work in philosophy who has had no sense of what life is about. SC: It seems to me that your insistence on radicality in the task of philosophy-philosophy as radical inquiry-is associated with these radical Wrrn MAURICE NATANSON 295 forms of existence, poverty, the experience of poverty. There is a kind of experience in the situation of poverty that demands an equally radical response on the part of the thinker who wants to do it justice. MN: And 1 suppose it's partly my own life-time-age. 1 was born in 1924 and so when the Depression came 1 was old enough. Living through it under very bad circumstances financially at horne, since my father was very ill for two years ... 1 went through-from the standpoint of a boy, eight, ten years old, old enough to know what's going on-the reality of the Oreat Depres• sion in this country. And there are certain images which are apart of me, images of WP A workers in the winter trying to warm themselves around those big cans in which they put scrap wood. That's an image that 1 don't think will ever fade from my mind, the image of people out of work, and indeed of people selling apples; these kinds of images are not just memories, they enter into my being and they remain there; and you're separated, in a way, from people who, in asense, don't know what you are talking about. SC: People who have not had those experiences? MN: Or anything like them. It is the "like," it seems to me, that is crucial. You don't have to have lived in the eighteenth century, the seventeenth century, to understand certain problems that existed, let's say, in France. 1 don't believe you have to have had the experience, in some direct fashion, in order to comprehend the experience. 1 think there is a certain set of essential features which imagination can translate not into a duplicate, but into a deep appreciation, of what took place, what was going on. 1 think there is a kind of knowing prior to experiencing, within an act of recognition via imagination, and that is very powerful in literature and presents itself in life; and 1 think there is also, in Sartrean terms, a tremendous presence of bad faith, by which people just cross something out, don't permit it to have an impact: without self-consciously saying "I'm not going to do this," in terms of bad faith that's what's done. WeH, 1 will move on to 1948 in this voyage and talk about that. SC: Yes. You were saying that you were somewhat at sea, having finished the MA. MN: That's right. 1 didn't know about any of these Assistantships and so on-I thought this is the end, you can't do any more, have to find out something else to do. 1 talked to some fellow students at NYU and they said, "Why don't you try for an Assistantship?" (they knew more about it, obviously), and 1 said, "WeH, how do you go about it?" They said, "Why don't you talk to Professor Sidney Hook? He's the Chairman and knows aH about it; a lot of people write to hirn for recommendations, he's an eminent person in the profession." So 1 went to see Sidney Hook. First 1 wrote hirn a letter. The letter was the story of my life-it was, it was a very long letter-and when 1 came in he said, "You've had an extremely interesting life." He appreciated my letter. So we hit it off in that sense (I had a course with hirn too, but the letter appealed to hirn). He had asense hirnself of 296 A CONVERSATION what life was like in New York. He said, "I've just gotten a letter from Professor Werkmeister at the University of Nebraska asking me to recommend a teaching assistant." I didn't know where Nebraska was! And he said "Would you be interested?" I said, "Sure." Both he and Burnham wrote to Werkmeister and, in sum, I was appointed as a teaching assistant in philosophy. But "teaching assistant" is-or was at any rate-a bit different than it is at Yale. I had my own classes, which I was in charge of fully, without anybody's supervision. I had a class in logic and a class in ethics. That was the thing. And I taught those classes-I guess one a semester -while I did my graduate work. Nebraska at the time I was there had an extremely interesting-smaH but very valuable-department of philosophy. W. H. Werkmeister was the head of it-a very good professor. He knew the his tory of philosophy thoroughly; he knew the natural and social sciences very weH, and he was a person who had a lot to give. He was one of the earliest people in this country to have read Heidegger, for example, and in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research there is an article by hirn about Heidegger, in the first volume, which goes back to 1940. Wen, there weren't very many people in this country who knew about Heidegger in 1940. He had been a visiting professor, through a government agency, in Germany in the thirties and he had met with Heidegger to discuss Heidegger's work. My first introduction to Husserl was in a course, for a semester, in phenomen• ology which consisted of a study of the Logical Investigations. SC: This was with Werkmeister? MN: With Werkmeister, right. He knew them thoroughly, was able to give us a sense of what Husserl was aH about, and I then took a great many of his courses. I was and remain enormously indebted to Professor Werkmeister. SC: In what form did you study the Investigaoons? MN: In addition to the texts of the Logische Untersuchungen there was Marvin Farber's book on The Foundations o[ Phenomenology, which gave a very adequate statement, a summary statement, of the Logical Investigations, and that was used as the text, I think, since it was reasonable to try it that way. That's how it started. I said it was a small but valuable department: the other members were O. K. Bouwsma, and whenever you mention the University of Nebraska, of course, people say, "Were you a student of Bouwsma's?" I took courses with hirn, but I never became his student. He was never able to get under my skin, philosophicaHy. He was certainly somebody I'd never encountered before, philosophicaHy. He was quite a remarkable presence, but it never came to ... even the very suggestion of influence. I learned a lot from hirn, in asense, about what analytic philosophy could be. He also had the tremendous advantage of being a very good stylist. He was someone who could, who did, discuss the Brothers Karamazov with Wittgenstein. That's what Wittgenstein wanted to talk about. There's a book of Bouwsma's in which he says this. Those were the WITH MAURICE NATANSON 297 reaHy important things for Wittgenstein. Clearing away the linguistic mess was only astart, shovelling it out in order to come to the Brothers Karam• azov. SC: I take it that that's a very different sense of philosophy than the one you came to Nebraska with. MN: That's right. But there was somebody there who was interested in Wittgenstein-Thomas, or Tom, Storer-whom I was very close to in many ways. We became friends. He was a younger man, in his thirties, had taken his PhD under Gustav Bergmann at Iowa. WeH Storer was, I think, a remarkable man. He was expert in logic, but logic turned out to be an entrance into problems of reality, not a cut-off discipline of its own. And why was I interested in Storer? WeIl, in the first place I hadn't studied a great deal of logic, though I taught it, so I attended, just as an auditor, all of Storer's classes in logic, just to learn enough to be decent in philosophy. But apart from that I was interested in him, I suppose, initially because he was interested in me. Which is the way things work. He was someone who'd cut through a lot of things and try to find you, you know, at the center of your life. WeIl I learned a great deal from Tom Storer, I attended his courses and participated in them-I remember giving a paper, though I wasn't registered for the course, on Peirce, to Storer's class, among others things. SC: Were you reading the pragmatists at the time? MN: I had read some James under Sidney Hook, and pragmatism under Hook, when I was at NYU; that interested me but never became a driving force, so that by the time I came to Nebraska lalready had a kind of concern, a sense of what Iwanted to do: what Iwanted to do was to read L 'Etre et le Neant and write a dissertation on it. Werkmeister welcomed that, which was tremendously useful to me. He had read it, he knew Heidegger, he knew Hegel thoroughly, he knew all the sources; and he was a very good person for organization. So I was able to write my dissertation pretty much on my own. He gave me some suggestions, but the deepest suggestions he gave me were about organization: Here something is needed, or there this chapter must end and some other chapter must begin-something like that. And Bouwsma left Nebraska for England the second year I was there, as a visitor of some sort-which is when he held discussions with G. E. Moore and Wittgenstein-so he wasn't part of my continuing study. I studied one year with him, two courses: one on Hume's Treatise and one on Bertrand Russell. It didn't much matter what you studied with Bouwsma-you got Bouwsma. Bouwsma was very vitally interested in Kierkegaard, and I'm sorry that I never had a course on Kierkegaard with him. But his Kierkegaard was the Kierkegaard of Jesus Christ, so maybe it's just as weIl that I never studied Kierkegaard with him ... SC: You have your own Kierkegaard ... MN: I have a Jewish Kierkegaard [Iaughter] ... 298 A CONVERSATION

SC: What were your first impressions upon arriving in Nebraska? MN: 1 came out during the summer, and of course the heat was overpow• ering, but it was a new part of the country-I'd never been there before-and it was a1l somehow different in a way that accent and architecture couldn't explain. A different kind of people, midwesterners. And so 1 tried to find out ... A friend of mine who was going on to UCLA to study parasitology had arranged the whole thing so that he would stop off in Lincoln and pick up a plane there to get to his destination. So we had an afternoon free to do things, and we found out very quickly that there were not very many things to do in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1948. But there was something going on, and it was, as you might imagine, agricultural. The state fair. Since nothing else was going on, we decided to go out to the fairgrounds. And then you'd hear it: "Mooo," "Baa," and a1l the noises, pigs and swine and oxen and everything. All that out there: Angus bulls were being auctioned off ... all that stuff. So we wandered around, and neither of us was very agricultural but we noted the presence of chickens and everything else there is on the farm, and before lieft I noticed a rather elderly farmer who was in charge of one of the exhibits. He interested me because (I didn't have a beard then) he had a beautiful Old Testament beard, a very long, white, patriarchal beard, and 1 decided to introduce myself to hirn, which 1 did, to see if there were any possible bridge. WeIl, the bridge in 1948 was politics. Presidential election year. So 1 said, "Do you mind telling me who you are going to vote for?" And he said, "Not at a1l. I'm going to vote for Joe Louis." I said, "Seriously?" He said, "Oh yes. 1 know he's not on the ballot, but 1 think he's the only honest man in America. I'm going to write the name of Joe Louis in as my vote for the President." It was extremely interestingl That's the last thing you could think of imagining, at all, and that's what was going on. Who could dream up a dialogue of that kind? The wildest playwright would be hard pressed to think that up. WeIl, anyway, it happened. And later on 1 met members of the department -Werkmeister and Bouwsma and Patterson. One man who, again, is not weIl known, who came to join the faculty, is Professor Bruce Waters. He was rea1ly in love with philosophy itself. He had studied at Ohio State, and the German set of the Logical Investigations 1 have was given to hirn by his Professor-named Chandler, Albert Chandler-who was a fairly well-known man in the thirties, twenties and thirties, and 1 think he wrote in it a dedication to Bruce: "Just passing on the torch. Don't burn your fingers." SC: A dangerous set of books, there. MN: It is. But Waters' interests lay elsewhere and he just kept it as a token of his teacher's affection and then gave it to me as a token of his affection. But 1 had a course with hirn. He was an unusual man in several ways. He was split ... 1'11 just say a little about hirn; he became a friend. One side of his life was philosophical logic and the theory of logic; he was a very good technical philosopher. He always wanted to teach logic, and Wrrn MAURICE NATANSON 299 always did-as a kind of ... oh, the way some people use Listerine in the morning. There was another side to hirn: he was a Kierkegaardian, and 1 took a course with hirn on Kierkegaard. He was on my orals committee and we became great friends. He published only a few things. He had been Bertrand Russell's assistant when Russell was teaching at the University of Chicago, but he never wrote much, didn't care to write much; he wrote under protest, usually, from a colleague who'd say, "Look you've got to keep up your end of the pact, you've got to write an article to show that you've published something." He always did it out of need, or out of respect for the person. But he was genuinely in love with philosophy, and Bouwsma, 1 think, goaded hirn on, because Bouwsma was hard. He wrote a certain paper and Bouwsma wouldn't accept it-didn't like it, disagreed with it-and he rewrote it and gave it to Bouwsma a second time and Bouwsma didn't like it. He did a third version of it and Bouwsma said, "No, this won't do." So Bruce said, "WelI, then, the hell with it," and just walked out. Well, he followed Bouwsma down; he retired to Texas Tech for a number of years, then retired to Arkansas; his idea was to live on the land. He was an extremely interesting man. We also went to conventions-my first APA meeting in Columbus, Ohio. We had an interesting life and a group of friends. My wife, Lois, taught English at that point, in the English Department at the University of Nebraska. SC: What did you see as your road during this period? MN: 1 saw my road at that time-Iet's sayat the time 1 did my disserta• tion, which became my first substantial publication, on Sartre-as continuing in those sorts of studies: existential and phenomenological. Getting a job was a blisteringly difficult problem. 1 got my degree in 1950, and then 1 was appointed as an instructor for one year at Nebraska. That was my first full• time employment. But by the time 1951 came, there were no jobs to be had. It was a terrible depression as far as jobs. So, just by fortune, the Arnerican Council of Learned Societies, recognizing the situation not only in philo• sophy but in the humanities generally, came up with a new program for 1 don't know how many-twenty, twenty-five-applicants who, out of a great many, would become Arnerican Council of Learned Societies Scholars. 1 ap• plied for that, had support from all the people 1 worked with in Nebraska, and 1 got it. 1 got the equivalent of a fair salary for a year and 1 could go anywhere 1 wanted to. SC: Unlike the more recent Mellon Fellowships, which were constituted for similar reasons, these were not attached to specific universities? MN: No, you could do this anywhere-or nowhere, in asense: just by yourself. Well, at that time 1 happened by chance to come across a catalogue from the Graduate Faculty of the New School, and 1 saw the names and courses of Alfred Schutz, Kurt Riezler, Karl Löwith. 1 read their catalogue and found out that they even offered a degree called "Doctor of Social Sciences" for someone who already had a PhD in some other field and 300 A CONVERSATION wanted to explore the social sciences. If you go somewhere, you have to have a claim on somebody's time. You can't just drop in and be the equivalent of a dissertation student and not be a student, technica11y, at a11. What claim do you have? I had met Herbert Spiegelberg, who was a very friendly man, at a number of APA meetings in the midwest, and I had been in cor• respondence with him on a number of subjects ... SC: Did you already know Schutz's work before you went? MN: No. I started looking at some of his things, but the first thing I did was write to Spiegelberg-he knew a11 these people-and ask for his opinion of them. He sent me a fairly long letter describing each one. Without going in to what he said about a11 of them, it amounted to this: "But for me, persona11y, the one I like best is Schutz, for his Viennese charm and warmth, in addition to his qualifications as a phenomenologist." And that was enough for me. I could see ahead of time that he was the one I would choose. But I studied with a11 these people, and others. It was through the American Council of Learned Societies which-thank God-renewed that award for a second year; they had faith in me. I was able in those two years to work with Schutz very closely and do a dissertation on George Mead which, together with a11 the examinations, qualified me for the degree of Doctor of Social Sciences.1 So that was in a way a great event in my life. SC: And a fortuitous one. Was it Schutz's idea to work on Mead? MN: Yes. He suggested it to me. SC: Had he written on Mead? MN: No. He mentions Mead a few times in his articles, but he never wrote what he ca11ed his "Mead paper." Now, The New School establishes another phase of my existence, and an absolutely critical one: I wouldn't be, in asense, who I am, without the experience of the New School-and that means, centrally, the experience of Schutz. I took a11 his courses; the courses I couldn't take I audited. Everything he ever gave. And I had-you could call it-"private seminars" on Husserl. We went through parts of the Cartesian Meditations in French, which was the only thing available at the time. SC: Did you feel like you had similar readings and appreciations of Husserl, for example, or was there a big gap to overcome initia11y? MN: There wasn't-because, I think, of the character of his individuality. I mean, what Spiegelberg said was that he was charming and warm and Viennese-which he was, to the roots-and it was that that you immediately feIt, that warmth. In terms of whether he agreed with what turned out to be my rather existential reading of Husserl and phenomenology, an aberrant reading of phenomenology in some ways, whether he agreed with it or not (he sometimes didn't) didn't matter. He mattered to me. And he recognized

1 Maurice Natanson received the degree of Doctor of Social Science (summa cum laude) from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in 1953 [ED]. WITH MAURICE NATANSON 301 that people cannot be molded in an absolute form, without becoming puppets. SC: He wasn't a "European" in the sense of insisting on a "School"? MN: No. He was very suspicious of all that, and he didn't like pomposity. He thought you ought to strike out and declare yourself in your work. And I did. It wasn't that I simply wrote what I pleased; he read everything I wrote and criticized it. At certain points we had differences, and I stood up, where I thought it important, for a certain interpretation, and so on. But he was a man who was so rich, and had such depth of comprehension as a human being, had so many strata of social existence, that I learned not only a lot about Husserl, about a lot of thinkers, but a lot about human existence. It's weH-known that he had been most of his life in the business world, in a firm that dealt with contracts, and he told me later on that he found it much easier to deal with businessmen than with philosophers and academics, who were big crybabies that had never grown up. I learned a lot about human existence from Schutz precisely in terms of what's at issue when you're dealing with another person. And at one point he told me, "Natanson, these are human beings." You say, "WeIl, Professor So-and-So's done this, and this person's done that; there's this quarrel and that difficulty." But basicaHy it isn't whether the paper was given the right grade, or whether you did the right thing, or the position you took was this, that or the other. It was basically that you're dealing with persons, and that's what I came to realize, through instruction by a master. SC: It seems that Schutz represents a type that both attracted you and you were attractive to throughout your inteHectual formative years, teachers who saw to the person, who taught in a maieutic way by drawing out the insights from you. MN: I think that's correct. I think teaching is a mysterious and hidden business, or transaction, and it does take enormous skill to find the heart, as weH as the mind, of the alter ego, and develop it appropriately. That doesn't often happen. In my terms, I recognized myself as a good teacher for certain kinds of students-not by classification (whether they are interested in European philosophy or this, that, or the other) as much as in terms of whether I could reach them as a person . . . I think "indirection" in Kierkegaard's sense is absolutely critical. SC: And so also the time at which the student and the teacher encounter one another. One point of life is the right time to encounter this sort of teacher, while another time is a quite different matter. MN: Quite right. That's a statement that Schutz could have, and certainly did, make. SC: The biographical situation makes the difference. MN: Exactly. It's when and how something happens. SC: Earlier you mentioned an interest in medicine. Would this be a good time to speak of that? 302 A CONVERSATION

MN: Yes, some years were left out of my story. I graduated from college in 1945 and I think it was 1946-47 that I went to medical school. SC: So you actually had formal training? MN: Yes, and the circumstances were these: 1 had taken enough courses 10 meet pre-medical requirements, but there were certain things against me when 1 was applying, in 1944, for the next year. Though 1 did weIl in my courses, New York then (my horne state) did not have its own medical school. There were medical schools in New York, but they were private. So 1 had no state university, the natural place for me to apply. The second thing was that 1 had graduated from a small college in Tennessee, which was relatively unknown in most places. But in the summer of 1946 1 was working at a place in upper New York for a charitable organization for children who had rheumatic fever, as a counsellor. There was a man who was an MD doing some kind of summer's research with these kids, and 1 10ld hirn the story of how 1 couldn't get into medical school. He said, "Have you heard of this new school in New Jersey? It has been in existence for one year, in Newark. I've heard some good things about it. You might get their catalogue and find out what you can." So 1 did. 1 had an uncle in those days-a lawyer, my favorite uncle-who had a lot of connections with lawyers in New Jersey, and he asked them about the status of the school. WeIl, it had provisional approval from the State Board of Medical Examiners-which was the first official body to approve a school-so it had this "so far, so good" sort of approval. From what he'd heard, they had strong likelihood of having that approval continue. And so-he was a cautious man, as most lawyers are-he said, "I think you ought to try it." 1 applied and was admitted to the first-year dass, with one dass ahead of me. And I can tell you that that one year was at the same time exhilarating, remarkable, punishing in the extreme, and unforgeuable. 1 wanted to be a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. As with many people interested in psychoanalysis, 1 feIt it was important to be a psychia• trist and have medical experience; I'd read Zilboorg, the American psychiatrist, who argued that there is such a thing as "therapeutic intent." Whether he is right or wrong, 1 accepted that argument. "Therapeutic intent" means an unconscious desire to heal, which can be gained only through what a physician goes through dealing with patient after patient. Being in touch with people in their physical being as weIl as in their emotional being. The lay psychoanalyst misses out on all of that. WeIl, Freud didn't think so, and his daughter didn't think so, but that's the way it was. Put very briefly: 1 had to go through the hardest year of medicine, the first year, with terrific, intense study of anatomy, physiology, histology, biochemistry; and 1 had, with the President of the college (who was hirnself a lay analyst), a course in psychiatry. And 1 can tell you that that is the hardest work-academic work-that 1 have ever done of its kind. WeIl, as the year ended astrange thing occurred. The President and the administration of the medical school got into so me sort of political baule with the State Board of Medical WITII MAURICE NATANSON 303

Examiners. This was the first medical school in New Jersey because there were ancient-relatively, for our time, ancient-anti-vivisection codes and rules and statutes still on the books. So you could not open up a medical school in New Jersey; it would be against the law because you couldn't dissect corpses. The way they got around that was rather clever: they (the administration) constituted themselves first as a board of pathologists who, as pathologists, could do dissections. Then they incorporated that division of pathology into the medical school so we could get bodies and work on them. But bizarre things happened. Sometimes your cadaver, or a piece of it, would disappear. 1 once ... I'd be studying very, very late and I'd go out on so me cold night and go a half a mile off for a hamburger. The gross anatomy room of the medical school was in the basement, and one of the windows was open, and 1 saw a man (who was called "the Diener," tradition• ally, the servant) handing a leg to someone outside. There was a good deal of bOdy-snatching going on. It was a weird scene. SC: Who was snatching these bodies? Other students? MN: It was the administration of the college arranging with this board of pathologists for acquiring stray bodies and limbs. 1 had the odd experience of seeing in dissection-it wasn't "my" body-a man 1 had seen on the streets of Newark. So it was a singular operation altogether. The teachers were quite good, for the most part. We had a man in biochemistry who was a very well-known chemist and theoretician. He was also, in his earlier days, a Marxist, and in the midst of his lectures in biochemistry he looked at his class-a hundred students or so-and said, "I'll give an A to anybody who can tell me the correct title for what is really happening behind these chemical equations." The answer was: dialectic. There was a French doctor from the Sorbonne working on Hodgkin's disease. It turned out he hirnself had Hodgkin's disease. We had a man from Columbia in histology, and an absolute bastard in physiology. He used to go around with a white rat on his collar; so you'd be talking to hirn and all of a sudden two pink eyes would be staring at you, peering around. He was really a kind of sadist. SC: Did they close down the school? MN: WeIl, they got into a battle with the wrong people. It's like getting into a battle with the President of your school. So eventually in a couple weeks the situation got worse and worse, and by the end of the month (which was the end of the school year) it was all over. We had lost. The worst thing was, you couldn't transfer. No one wanted to touch you with a ten foot pole. SC: So you had a real foot in the door, and you might very weIl have continued ... MN: Oh, 1 would have continued, the whole thing; it would have been all much more to my liking as it went along-going through clinical years and so on. I feIt that I had ... All right, I'll say it: that I had therapeutic qual• ities. 304 A CONVERSATION

SC: That elearly emerged in your later interests-not only in the subjects of your writing but in your style as weil, the dialogical style. MN: The only time I referred to medicine was in the book on Anonymity. There, in the bibliography at the end, I said that I once attended an autopsy performed by a very famous American pathologist. I got very involved in anatomy and dissection, and the whole experience. SC: 00 you find that that anatomical experience is reflected in your descriptions? MN: Oecisively. A elose friend from my medical school days recently said to me that he wouldn't trade his year in medical school in Newark for anything he had. And I feel the same way. It was enormously formative. The year in anatomy, it strikes me, was just like my meeting with Schutz: it was something that has made me myself. SC: In your writing and teaching one is struck by the evocativeness of your examples, their vividness. The anatomical training rounds out the picture of the origins of a philosophical sensibility that is both phenomen• ological and, as you put it, therapeutic. But there is another dimension. A book like Anonymity, for example, seems to be a kind of tour de force of indirect communication. Where does that come from? MN: I think it comes in in the Sartrean work and is elaborated further through that, through Kierkegaard himself-my reading and study of him-and through a source which is still different: a sense for what might be called "theatricality." The fact that my father was for all his life a profession• al actor-in Europe, in England, in Africa, Johannesburg, in this country-that has had, and still has, a tremendous power for me. SC: Do you think of yourself-both as a writer and a teacher-in terms of acting categories? MN: Not in the sense of, "This is a performance," in the bad sense ofthat term, but "performance" in the good sense, which means: a presentation of self. But the presentation must be . . . what? . . . it must be first of a11 forceful, not because you go into ... As Hamlet instructs the actors, you know: don't go into a11 these large gestures, that's out. Instead the intent must be powerful, and it must be on the side of the student. This comes also from Max Weber, that the professor must place hirnself on the side of the student and use a11 his knowledge for the student's good-give that to the student, not as a gift, but as a prized possession won; that's the professor's wish, and strength through his teaching: that in a sense to teach somebody (in some ideal sense) is to require that that student go through you. SC: What complications enter in when the student is anonymous, that is, when you are writing? Is the same sort of dialectic of presentation at issue, and if so, is there a difference between the face-to-face experience (mediated though it may be in the classroom) and the situation of writing? MN: There has to be. And therefore the notion of indirection meets its crossroads: In the case of active, face-to-face teaching there are certain Wlrn MAURICE NATANSON 305 things that can be done: pause significantly, the point is made. In the case of writing, you offer some chaHenging formal statement which is arresting; interestingly enough, one says "arresting," but it's an arresting for the sake of motion and movement, to carry the student forward. SC: Perhaps we'H have a chance to return later to some of these issues about indirection and presentation; those are important aspects of your work. But could we talk a moment about what happened right after your time at the New School, how things worked out? MN: WeH, what happened basicaHy was that now I had a second doctor's degree and a wife and child, and I had to get a job! The New School was (at least when I was there) very welcoming, and so on, but there's one thing they lacked, and that's money. They were always poor. I taught a course in the Graduate Faculty in my second year there, and my salary was based on the number of students you had and a certain percentage of the fee they paid. So it turned out that I earned $75 for the semester. The man who was then Dean of the Graduate Faculty was an economist named Neisser and he said, "How's the course you are giving going?" I said I thought it was aH right, and he said, "Do you mind if I ask you how much you are being paid far it?" I said, "WeH Dean Neisser, to tell you the truth, it's not much money, it's $75." And he said, "Shameful!" And it was. But that was the problem with the New School in the early 1950s. So if I stayed there I could teach a course or two, but I couldn't afford that. My grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for the second year was coming to an end, and I had to have a job. I went to the philosophy meetings in search of one, but it turned out that there were very few jobs. I got a few inter• views. One man said, "I see you're interested in phenomenology." I said, "Yes," and he said, "WeH you know, it's too bad. We do need a person for our department, and your letters speak weH ofyou, but we have no room for a mystic." SC: That was the perception of the things you were doing? MN: "Seeing essences" was a mystical event. Nobody but phenomeno• logists could see them. It was like occult voices, and so on. It wasn't kosher; it wasn't considered legitimate. You might have read Husserl and aH that stuff, but after aH, that's European and foreign and German and this, that, and the other. We want somebody who is a good sense-data man. SC: Was there any interest in the Sartre side of your work? MN: Suspicious interest. SC: Not much philosophy there, mostly a literary terrorist or something? MN: It was also political. They connected it with terrorism, and in a certain way it was a kind of conceptual terrorism. They didn't understand what that might mean, but I would recognize that as true. I'm a conceptual terrorist. That's what a good philosopher ought to be-whether it's Sartre or Nietzsche or whoever it iso But I went to another meeting and gave a paper on Sartre, and a man got up and said-this was a philosopher, a smaH group 306 A CONVERSATION meeting-li I came here with my wife! And whether it's in the regulations of the Southeast Philosophy Division of such-and-such a Society or not, I think matters of this kind should not be discussed in front of ladies." I was talking about Nausea, you see. So that's the kind of response I got there. There was a terrible suspicion, in other words, around 1951, about all of this stuff. SC: Was there any red-baiting? MN: There was a suggestion of that, and then as it went along and Sartre got into his more nearly Mandan period, he was put under suspicion. I'd say, "Look, the communist party is an enemy of his, won't let hirn in-he wants to get in and they won't let hirn," and go through all of that. That didn't matter. SC: So how did you manage, then, to land that job? MN: Well, it was by mail, correspondence. And it was terrible. University of Houston. It was a ghastly place in 1953. Four years I was there, and during those four years I gave talks to every organization that ever existed. I once gave two papers by flying from one society to another in different states, on the same day-one in the morning, one in the evening. I wrote, wrote, wrote myself out. Unlike the medical school, which was terrific work, this was work under a different kind of press ure, and the place itself . . . nine-tenths of the University of Houston was just grim and ghastly. A faculty member said to me, "By God, we beat the Aggies!" Well, there was nothing to be done there. On the other hand, I had some good students-not only in philosophy, but elsewhere. Perhaps my best, greatest student was Don Barthelme. He was the most remarkable. In philosophy I had Zaner, and Robert Jordan was a student of mine at the University of Houston. I had a few very loyal, hard-working, good students. SC: Were you teaching courses in phenomenology? MN: No. What I did actually was to teach the standard courses-you know, ethics, philosophy of value, whatever they thought ... the latest language which captured them. Philosophy of value! I wasn't interested in value-theory, but anyway I had to teach it. I taught history of philosophy -ancient, medieval, modern. By then I had gotten a number of students• six, eight, ten, twelve students at different times-who became interested in phenomenology and Husserl, and I met them as a group, privately, without a classroom. SC: Was there anational network that you feit yourself apart oft MN: No, there were people, individuals. In addition to Schutz there was Gurwitsch who, as you know, was so close, as a friend and as a philosopher, to Schutz; and there was Fritz Kaufmann-with whom I corresponded and finally met at a philosophy meeting-who was a very knowledgeable and profound phenomenologist. I corresponded with Spiegelberg and met hirn at meetings, talked with hirn at some length, and a few other people like that. I just worked at what I knew about and furthered that knowledge by working at it. The people that I counted on for criticism were people like WITIi MAURICE NATANSON 307

Schutz, to whom 1 sent everything that 1 wrote. There 1 knew 1 could get a real answer. So 1 just waited for possibilities of getting on programs, sending in articles to various journals, and so on. SC: So then how did the "writing yourself out" work? Did you go on to North Carolina at that point? MN: WeIl it worked out, literally, at a meeting. 1 gave one of my papers-it was on death, of all subjects.2 1 compared Sartre and Heidegger on death. This was ... what? ... 1957. It was at a meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Religion, and in the audience were Everett Hall-who was the Chairman at Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina -and another professor of the same school. It turned out that 1 had friends who had taught at Houston but had moved to Durham, and when they heard that 1 was giving a paper-wherever it was, Knoxville 1 think-they invited me to come out and visit them. 1 told the Chapel Hill people, "I'm going to Durham to visit these friends," and was told, "WeIl, Everett Hall and 1 are driving. Would you like to come with us?" So I said, "Yes," and from Knoxville-about four hours or however long it took to Durham-it was philosophy every second of those four hours. By the time 1 got to Durham, the next thing on the agenda was, "Would you like to meet the other people in the department of philosophy?" I said, "Yes," and it turned out 1 got the job. I didn't know there was a job there. WeIl, that was a good experience for my family. By then we had three children, and Chapel HilI was a lovely place in which to raise children-quiet, much smaller than it is now. Everett Hall was an extremely good Chairman; he was a good philosopher, knew a lot. He has a book on categories which is still worth reading, published by the University of Chicago Press. He wrote a book called What is Value? which is still considered a first-rate study. I found him to be a very clever, forceful (not dramatic, but quietly forceful) philosophical presence. He sometimes didn't agree with things, or thought they were better done in literature or something-you know, that's the kind of response you get about some of the things I do. But he was a good person, excellent as aChairman. Generally it was a fine place until Hall died. He died of a heart attack. I got a call from his wife, his children were in distant places. So 1 went to Duke, to the hospital, with Mrs. Hall, and Everett died there. With his death the whole department changed. SC: Who were the philosophicallights that people were being guided by at the time? MN: C. I. Lewis was an early name in this period: Analysis 0/ Knowledge and Valuation and his earlier book on Mind and the World Order. Quine had made astart. Wittgenstein had made astart, people were starting to get

2 "Death and Situation," in Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968),212-220; first published in American Imago, XVI (1959) [ED]. 308 A CONVERSATION interested in hirn. There was relatively little interest in the his tory of philosophy. Nobody emerged very strongly. Carnap, Reichenbach: these were the figures who were best known. Still young men were Sellars (his father was still alive at that time-and he was to me a more interesting person), and Anderson-Omar Khayylim Anderson-(both of them taught at Yale for a while). The chief interests were British. We were only seven miles from Duke, so between the two departments we were able to get a speaker to come, and money enough, to speak twice. We got all the visiting English• men. They all made the rounds with their papers-Austin, Hare, any of these people you can name. Duke then thought of itself as an ivy-Ieague school; they were terribly concerned then (it's totally different now) with being correct, and Chapel Hill was a "me too" place, in those terms, and they were terribly impressed with British-Oxford, Cambridge-philosophers. There were exceptions. We did have Dorion Cairns down-I recommended him-once, but that was about it. He gave two papers: one at Duke and the second at Chapel Hill. So that's as far as we got in phenomenology. But the names were really coming from England. It was ordinary language analysis, Wittgensteinian thinking; von Wright came, and so on. That was the sense of what was "it" at the time. That was "doing" philosophy. SC: In terms internal to phenomenology and to the reception of phenomenology in America, how did Farber's attempt to "naturalize" phenomenology appear to you? MN: It wasn't an issue because I identified with the early Farber, the Foundations o[ Phenomenology Farber; I knewabout Farber's Marxism and naturalism, and so on, and I didn't think it went anywhere. So that part of it didn't impress me. I published my first article in Philosophy and Phenom• enological Research, so I had some connection with Farber. That was when I was still a graduate student in Nebraska. SC: Which one was that? MN: "H. B. Alexander's Projection of a Categoriology." So I was in touch with Farber, in a certain way, and I met hirn later on. SC: It has always struck me as odd that there was that attempt early on to overcome Husserl's anti-naturalism ... MN: True ... SC: ... and then that sort of faded out, I think. Yet now, if there is a contrast between naturalistic and transcendental phenomenology, the tide has turned back, via pragmatism, to the naturalistic side. MN: WeIl, in the case of both Gurwitsch and Schutz, William James became a common, sympathetic figure-through his Principles o[ Psychology, the doctrine of "fringes," and all the rest. And that seemed to me to be quite natural and respectable, obviously, and developable; I mean, there was something there to be done. But the other person who probably comes in at this point whom I should mention is Horace Kallen, who was the assistant to William James and the editor of Some Problems o[ Philosophy by James WITII MAURICE NATANSON 309 as weIl as an assistant to Josiah Royce and an assistant to Santayana. WeIl, I was an assistant to hirn when I was at the New School. He had an effect on me, but I was already formed by the time I came in. I wrote a paper on Sartre for his seminar on freedom, at his request-"Sartre's Philosophy of Freedom"-and when I finished he said, "This is publishable." He had it published in Social Research. WeIl, he had an effect on me as a person. He wanted me to take his place, at one point, at the New School, and I had the opportunity. But I had a family. New York would have been wrong. SC: The economic reason again? MN: There would have been special funds, in his name, which would have perhaps made a difference. But we didn't want to live in New York, and I'm not sure that if lever went to the New School as a teacher that I would ultimately have been happy. Later on Gurwitsch tried to get me to come, but there were too many ... problems. SC: You were talking about how the department changed at Chapel HilI when Hall died. MN: Yes. When Hall died everything changed philosophically as weIl as departmentaIly. At that time I received a telephone call asking whether I was interested in being a visiting professor of philosophy at Berkeley. I accepted, went out there in the great year of 1964-65-the Free Speech Movement year, very exciting in itself-and then I had a whole bunch of offers from different places. The one that interested me most was from Santa Cruz. They had just started the new branch of the University of California, and it struck me that, in a man's lifetime, how many opportunities do you have to come to a college which is in its first year? Happens very rarely. I was there the first year. SC: That was 1965. MN: Correct. SC: Who made the contact at Santa Cruz? Was the historian, Page Smith, there? MN: Yes, Page Smith was there and he was already going to be the Provost of Cowell. They had maybe a dozen people there, making plans, getting names, getting names from people whose names they were given, and other names. My name surfaced that way, and I got a letter from Page Smith saying they were starting this new venture and would I be interested in coming down and having a talk and bring my family; we'd all have a picnic. So I went down with my wife and children, we did have a picnic, I met McHenry, but I delighted in Page Smith because he was so much the individual and not the pompous administrator that I'd always met. So that's how it started. SC: What were your feelings about the place? MN: It was sort of a "beginning," and therefore alluring. I thought, "WeIl, this is a place that is developing and .. ." Some good things did develop, but it took time. My argument was, basicaIly, you can't impose anything on a 310 A CONVERSATION place like this. If you get good people, or some good people (and they had good people), it has to come out of them. How? When they get to know each other. And the best thing that came out in my opinion were the joint seminars, which 1 participated in. 1 think there were three or four of them. SC: Yes 1 remember. It was an interesting place, an interesting mix. With you and Albert Hofstadter there the Philosophy Department had a certain phenomenological cast to it, and it was nicely pluralistic (we didn't use the term in those days). And Santa Cruz now? MN: John Rice, who founded Black Mountain College, says in his autobi• ography, I Came Out ofthe Eighteenth Century, that the life of an experimen• tal college is just about ten years. And that really hit the mark. lieft in my eleventh year.

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SC: Before moving on to some philosophical issues, could you elaborate on one further aspect of your background? You mentioned that you had gone to college at a small school in Tennessee. What was that? MN: Lincoln Memorial University, in Harrogate, Tennessee. SC: How did you end up going there? MN: 1 was a kind of wanderer, a bohemian, as an undergraduate, and I always liked the very idea of going somewhere new and sort of starting all over again with nothing. Not that 1 had anything to hide or a bad record where 1 came from-just the opposite, I did pretty well-but 1 liked the idea of being an explorer, of having something new. I had a professor whose wife had graduated from Lincoln Memorial and she mentioned it to me. It's at the meeting point of the three states-Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee -the Cumberland Gap. It's a very beautiful place, in a way, but that's not why 1 went there. It just seemed to me astrange world, and by God it was! Students looked on me, 1 think, as a little mad. 1 used to have a hotplate and drink a lot of coffee, stay up late, study, and so on, and a group of these students ... Most all of them were from Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, and Kentucky, with a sprinkling from other places, and 1 overheard one of the group talking as 1 was passing: "He makes coffee all night." 1 made some good friends there and it was . . . one is tempted to say "an educational experience. " SC: Had you started there? MN: No. I went to a variety of colleges-I started off at Brooklyn College and then went to other colleges. 1 was attracted to these places for very unsound reasons. At that time people would say, "Look, you did weIl last year, why do you want to go somewhere else?" and 1 had weird explanations. 1 was just a wanderer, and 1 finallyended up in Lincoln Memorial, spent about two and a half years there, and completed my work. And as 1 say, 1 found some very good things; culturally it's about as far from New York as WITI-I MAURICE NATANSON 311 you can get. SC: O. K. I just wanted to clear up a couple of points about your Wanderjahre. I would like to turn to some philosophical issues and just see where they lead. MN: Sure. SC: I'd like to start with the issue of philosophical radicality and the notion of origins in your work. Specifically, how do you conceive those issues in light ofrecent attacks on "certainty," "foundations," the "given," and so on? MN: I'm still absolutely convinced that Husserl is right in searching for origin-I won't go into that now in the sense in which I've used it myself, but consider the traditional Husserlian sense. I'm still convinced that Husserl is absolutely right in being concerned with origin and with the whole notion of radicality as the source or essence of philosophy-and of phenomenology itself for that matter (because I think in the end that philosophy and phenomenology are one for Husserl). What "origin" means really divides into a variety of things. At one level it's methodological, concerned with returning, in the traditional sense, to sources-prior interpretations, decisions, analyses; going back to them, seeing what they are based upon, and in a certain sense "uncovering" this whole sedimentation of meaning. So radicality means a "turning back." As I interpret phenomenology (always understanding "Husserlian phenomenology," basically my own interpretation of it), radicality means a "turning back" to one's own origins in the sense of perceptual origins in experience, and so on. Now here a certain thing enters via Schutz, namely the whole notion (in Husserl) of a pre-interpreted world, which Schutz made a great deal of. So when I look at these books on the walls and at the papers on the floor of my study, I don't see masses or conglomerates, I see individual volumes, sometimes sets. I have a new Kierkegaard set of the new Hong translation: I can go back and recollect -not only that I got it from Princeton University Press, that they announced it and I subscribed, and all the rest of it, but basically that all that now becomes built in to the very perception of seeing the Kierkegaard set. "Seeing" it is not seeing just the jackets which face me and remarking, "WeIl by now there are ten, fifteen volumes out" (whatever it is); it is seeing that the announcement of the new translation (which I was interested in, most certainly), and the acquisition of it from year to year over a considerable number of years, becomes part of what I perceive in direct apprehension. So what was, what preceded-the pre-experience of any event or any set of events or phenomena-becomes part of what I have to disentangle, come to terms with, and understand if I am to understand my own experience of the world, and also if I am to understand the experiential world. SC: Is that process of uncovering those layers of sedimentation part of a phenomenological history of the individual's experience, and then by extension a kind of eidetic of history? 312 A CoNVERSATION

MN: That's correct because, as 1 view it, phenomenology is concemed with the interpretive act which looks at its material "world" (let's just say blundy) as having already been interpreted by others. SC: Is the uncovering of that, as a task for phenomenology, not an infinite task? And if so, does that undermine a certain conception of philosophy as science? MN: Yes. l've actually discussed this in some papers, that there is a kind of paradox in Husserl between philosophy as strenge WISsenschaft leading to a kind of "absolute," solid, "founded"-in quotes "scientific" (in the best sense)-set of results, and the open-endedness necessarily built in to phenomenology, which says in effect, not only is this an infinite task, but even getting started is an infinite task. These two don't seem to go together. I think it is a paradox, and I think Husserl recognized this as a paradox but pursued the whole thing. So what if it's a paradox? You go on and pursue it. To say that we are concemed with the pre-interpreted world-this is in certain respects an infinite task, but you can look at the eidetic features of this given-this vast notion of the given-and see something of types, forms, structures, which don't involve knowing what somebody who lived in the fourteenth century made of some phenomenon. That that person interpreted his world meets certain lines of eidetic formation. SC: This seems to me to be a proper description of what one does in pursuing phenomenological reflection on the sedimentation of meaning, but it also sounds like a description of a hermeneutic process, and therefore it would seem to fall within the purview of a hermeneutic phenomenology. MN: WeH, I've never feIt committed to the idea of using the language of hermeneutics, though I'm acquainted with it. I recognize that what I've described is a hermeneutic task, but I've never feIt the need to draw in Gadamer or traditional hermeneutics, Dilthey. It is an interpretive task, phenomenology, but 1 think more deeply it says something to me that hermeneutics doesn't. It's not only an interpretive task, it's a task which is a movement toward the root of experience, or the roots of experience and, with respect to the pre-interpreted world, the roots of that pre-interpreta• tion. And if it can be said of hermeneutics that it is an unending task, an infinite task in phenomenology has this difference, I think: it is more, to me, a matter of the way an individual thinker moves from one thing to another, or from one thinker to another, in the world. In phenomenology Husserl conceived it as generations of phenomenologists carrying out his work, as you know. I never thought much of that; I didn't think that that was going to happen. But 1 thought, positively, that there was something in phenomenology which was very powerful, namely, this very notion of battering oneself against the world again and again. Not that there aren't going to be new interpretations, as in hermeneutics, but despite the fact that the truth is elusive ... 1 believe in the truth, I don't believe that it comes straightforwardly; I believe much more that it is problematic, ambiguous, WITH MAURICE NATANSON 313 ambivalent, elusive, and ... sly. SC: The notion of foundations was dear to Husserl. 00 you see this process as a foundationalist one-either as resting on foundations in some way, or as heading to foundations? MN: I'm a foundationalist. I'm obviously not an anti-foundationalist. I'm a foundationalist, and 1 think that one is, in philosophy, on the way. So you have to make a distinetion. Foundationalism doesn't mean that its like the arehaeologists discovering what others thought to be a mythical eity and 10 and behold it's real, one can uncover it. 1 don't think the foundations are of that type. 1 think foundations are more nearly of the type in whieh one sees the whole development of one's life, of one's time, of one's grasp of prior times, down to whatever roots one can find. 1 mean, there's no perfection that's assured. But it's the task of philosophy to be belligerent, to keep going in spite of that faet. That seems to me a feature of every human life: not only that we die and therefore something remains contingent, namely, our own life-now unfinished, incomplete-but that there is no escaping this ultimate given of incompleteness. What that means, given my existential orientation toward Husserl and phenomenology, is that a movement downward toward roots, toward the root of the matter, of existence, may depend on the interpretation of the whole doetrine of the transcendental ego. SC: You said someplace (in the Husserl book, 1 believe) that the phenomenological reduction was equivalent to the entryway into philosophy per se. MN: That's right ... SC: But of course that's a contested notion, and for many people it is hard to reconeile with the existential dimension that you point toward. MN: !t's contested, 1 know; but the last strikes me as preciselyexistential in the sense that it is not dear at all what the reduetion signifies. One goes through it, one meets ehallenges along the way, there's a certain pragmatie dimension to the whole thing: you introduce special reduetions in order to overcome special problems as theyarise. It's not an automatie procedure, for me. The movement on a large scale is toward the transcendental ego, and there 1 find a difference between transcendental subjectivity and the transcendental ego. The phenomenologist Fritz Kaufmann has a remarkable essay in the Farber volume, Philosophical Essays in Memory o[ Edmund Husserl. It's on phenomenology and art, but it's more deeply-though unwritten, in a sense-on phenomenology and religion, or religious experi• ence. And toward the end of his essay he comes to the entire problem of how one is to interpret, in effeet, the reduetion, the ultimate reduetion. It's dear (if you read between the lines, 1 think, and 1 know from hirn) that he is saying that the transcendental ego is God. He doesn't write that in the essay; he says instead, "Suffice it this time to have asked the ultimate question." Well, if one distinguishes between transcendental subjectivity and 314 A CONVERSATION the transcendental ego one can work all of phenomenology by moving down to transcendental subjectivity, in which a kind of vast eidetic is established, and one can see the notion of origin in terms of what pillars and founda• tions are. The transcendental ego has always been a problem for followers of Husserl, and it's well-known that they are divided. I had a discussion with Dorion Cairns, and I asked him whether the transcendental ego was one or many. His answer was, "There are as many transcendental egos as there are individuals. Each individual has a transcendental ego." I asked Fritz Kaufmann, person to person, "Dr. Kaufmann, how do you interpret Husserl's notion of the transcendental ego? Is it one or many?" And he said, "Absolutely one." So these were the division lines-both were profound phenomenologists-and if you interpret it along the lines of Dorion Cairns, there's a much easier defense made of moving from transcendental subject• ivity to a kind of basal level underlying it which is, for each individual, the transcendental ego. But I myself believe, with Fritz Kaufmann, that there can be only one transcendental ego. I can try to explain what I mean by this at length, but I would say, simply or straightforwardly put: If there is a foundation-not only of experience, but of possible experience-then it must come forth in terms of a formative character, and I don't see how that formative character can coincide and be identified between different egos unless it has the shaping power of one ego, one authority. SC: This is something quite different than the move from a plurality to one through an eidetic variation. It's rather a transcendental argument from the conerete level in terms of constitution conceived, if not as ereation, then as a phenomenologically reduced equivalent of ereation. MN: I believe that; I think that's correct. SC: In your work you often diseuss the pair of terms, "symbol" and "transcendence," where the symbolie order points toward the transcendent, whieh seems to point outward or away, toward a broader context. Now it seems that we discover the same sort of thing by going inward, down ... MN: I never thought of it as "outward," I always thought of it as "inward. " I think it's the ultimate inwardness. SC: So transcendence is really going deeper and deeper into a kind of immanence, into a phenomenological immanence? MN: Absolutely. And this is why I find Kierkegaard congenial, and it's why I think that many things involved in religious experience are relevant. I don't want to get started with hasidie stories, but there's the famous story of the hasidie master, Zusya, and he says, "In the world to come they will not ask me, 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me, 'Why were you not Zusya?'" Now that states, I think, as deeply and tersely as one can put it, the movement downward. Again, in a story I love, as you know, "The Death of Ivan Ilyeh": What if everything has been a fraud? What if everything I've done has been wrong? It's too late to reverse maUers, I'm dying; what then? He reviews his life in a different way. One begins to see that these WITII MAURICE NATANSON 315 statements are not very far apart. So one interpretation of the very end of the story-the black bag-is 10ward a religious interpretation; but one can move away from that and say that whenever the possibility offered itself to Ivan Ilych to discover himself, to uncover his own being, his own inwardness, he turned to ... what? ... to what the "best" people in society thought. He saw himself reflected in their views and then wanted to associate himself with them. WeH, aH of that is always a refusal. My own existential impulse here is toward a movement-not away but inwardly-toward, if you like, the transcendental ego, transcendental consciousness, and that means a lot of defeated charges, movements, and efforts. I believe that life consists, to a good measure, in defeats. SC: Induding the perennial coHapse of the philosophical project? MN: I think it collapses again and again; beginnings have 10 be made again and again. SC: Here one often talks about "self-discovery," but this movement toward the transcendental ego as we've been talking about it now seems also to uncover an "other" within oneself. I put it that way because some sources -and one thinks here primarily of Levinas, but also perhaps Buber-develop the same notion of religious transcendence by invoking the Other in a move• ment "outward," a transcendence that seems to follow a different trajectory from the almost Augustinian "inwardness" that ... MN: I think they are merely two different faces of one reality. I remem• ber I wrote somewhere that Schutz said to me, "Buber is right on the Other." There is that element, and I'm attracted to Buber, I'm attracted to Levinas. I'm also attracted in certain different ways to Augustine and Kierkegaard. The attraction perhaps ultimately is that there's no assurance in one's movement inward that you're going to reach the foundations. It isn't a technicolor trek toward, you know, this "promised land." It's a different sort of thing in which perhaps the better analogy would be: to understand, at least in one case, what something finally is-whether it's in love, whether it's in the matter of friendship (profound friendship as in Montaigne and Augustine as weH). Whatever example is chosen, it has to be very serious and one then has a primal setting, a primal resolution. I believe that's possible and that occurs. I believe in this person's love, or in this person's basic reciprocity. We talked last time about whether a professor is simply interested in a student. That by itself establishes a relationship sometimes, and perhaps most often-whether you find something in somebody. When the thing comes-whether it's love, recognition-the primal sense that this is aresolution of some feature of a relationship on sound ground, then it's like evidence, absolute evidence. It doesn't mean that it's the whole of what you could caH the experience of the transcendental ego, but it's a pushing forward which gives a transcendental due. SC: This transcendental due, then, this discovery in evidence, is at least a movement toward the ultimate being of something ... 316 A CONVERSATION

MN: It's like Friday's print, when Robinson Crusoe finally discovers that there's somebody else ... SC: The shock of a being ... MN: ... that there's another. SC: Is that what allows you to criticize the early Sartre's position on the impossibility of authentie relations between people? MN: I think he's wrong on that; the dialectic has caught hirn up and brought hirn into it. At certain levels you have to ask embarrassing ques• tions. Schutz once asked me, "When you look at your litde boy do you find hirn as an alienated Other?" How could I possibly say yes? Because Sartre said so in Being and Nothingness? I think Buber is far c10ser to the truth. On the other hand, I am attracted to the Sartrean position because he explores possibilities of alienation, distraction, and destruction. He's a good pathologist. Over the years I've come to see the inadequacies of Being and Nothingness, but I'm still fascinated by its strong pull toward uncoverings of possibilities in human beings-especially since I'm still interested in psychi• atry, teach courses in philosophy and psychiatry, and deal with people that we say are "disturbed." Some people argue-Wittgenstein-that philosophers are disturbed people until their language is disenchanted, c1eansed, and so on, whereas I think that the disenchantment is deeply woven into human reality, human experience, and there is no c1arification by saying, "You've been befooled by language." Language itself in a certain sense delivers, truly, the complexities of normality and the possibilities of pathology. SC: But you would agree with Wittgenstein that philosophy is a kind of therapeutic enterprise that seeks to get c1ear, to c1arify things? MN: Yes, but I wouldn't restriet it to the clarification of language. SC: No. Nor does it strike me that your sense of therapy is the idea that philosophy itself is to be driven out of the temple. MN: "Quite," as the British say. Whieh is where you get with Wittgenstein. But where does he come to? He comes to Dostoevsky, where I am too. Now we don't join forces there because we come not only by different routes, but we come for different purposes and reasons. I agree that a philosopher who hasn't read the Brothers and absorbed it isn't anywhere. Bouwsma held the same position. But Bouwsma believed, with Wittgenstein . . . Bouwsma had a nice, fine handwriting on the blackboard; he'd be endlessly putting down sentences from Hume or Russell or somebody and then changing them: "Will this do? Will this? This?" Well, nothing would do in the end. But I was in this sense a foundationalist; I thought that it wasn't just defeats-that this "won't" do-but that the defeats involve the dialectie of vietory. SC: You see the goal ofvictory as adumbrated beyond the language that is ever coming into defeat? MN: Completely. I think its ultimate source or ground is the individual uncovering or discovering hirnself; that is, again, inwardness in Kierkegaard's WlTII MAURICE NATANSON 317 sense, as a movement which displays subjectivity. Inwardness is subjectivity, as Kierkegaard maintains. But the sense of subjectivity, if one translates it into phenomenological terms, is that the whole of reality has a built-up structure, that it is constituted, and that the task of the individual in discovering himself is to discover the constitution of this world, of which he's apart. SC: Is that subjectivity a participant in this constitution as you see it? If so, a problem arises concerning the relation between the uncovering of one's own transcendental subjectivity and the move back to the unique transcen• dental ego. What sort of participation is involved there? MN: 1 think it is an activity, the strongest term possible here. The movement toward the transcendental ego is itself the central activity of the philosopher's life. The movement of philosophy, into philosophy, through philosophy, is the basic movement of the individual's life. And that's an activity not in the sense of a thing to do, like squash; it is a thing to do as one loves, hates, fears-that kind of activity; it is achanging activity: it changes what there is, as what there is presents itself; it changes what we find and reconstitutes what we find. It is also the point at which one says, "We11, we're defeated; we've reached aporias, we're stymied." But here 1 think (as in the article that Fink wrote, of which Husserl approved) that it is exactly in these aporias that we discover certain basic paradoxes, and these paradoxes aren't failures but victories; they're recognitions of the way things are in the world, and the way they'll always be for every person. SC: This reminds me of a phrase that occurs in your work: "Philosophy is the discipline of subjectivity." It seems to me that the movement of transcendence that you've indicated-which moves in and down, but at the same time can be thought of as out and away, toward the world-may be found in Kakfa. Kafka's stories are undecidable, it seems to me, between (let's say) a religious interpretation that moves out toward a "transcendent" in the traditional sense, and a psychoanalytic interpretation that moves in. Those interpretations are like the duck-rabbit: you can't decide which one is getting the stronger pull. What is the connection between philosophy, as the discipline of subjectivity, and such ambiguous or undecidable interpreta• tions, yielded by the literary project? MN: WeIl, 1 think the whole literary project is the statement of the deepest ambiguity to be found in what we're discussing-philosophy basicaIly, which means then phenomenology for Husserl-and that Kafka's work is a portrayal of this double ambiguity. The transcendence which you ca11 "outward" is there: it's there in the sense that Count West-West is there in the castle; it's there in the sense that the highest courts are there; it's there in the sense that when the priest ca11s to Joseph K and there's abrief discussion and Joseph K cries, "I'm innocent!" the priest replies, "That's the way a11 guilty men talk." That's the clinching force of this movement outward and this movement downward-here Kafka has come to its statement. I'm 318 A CONVERSATION not going to force this, but if "the way up and the way down are one," it seems to me that this is a profound illustration of that view. What one finds in Kafka's work is, constantly, this absolute penetrating demand of what's to be taken for granted from the beginning: Gregor has been transformed into a gigantie, horrid insect. How can it be "given"? You may say that it's Kafka's art to make it given. Undoubtedly. But if one pursues it philosophi• cally, it's given in the way in whieh there is always an outward (in your terms) yearning of subjectivity; and there is philosophically, in Husserlian terms, a movement downward to utter, absolute foundations: the real meaning of evidence. Maybe these pass each other, as it were, in movement; but Kafka's genius makes the far-away authentie, undeniable, transforms it into the transcendent-a different transcendent than the movement downward and inward, though clearly related. There is the Law, and at the most primordiallevel the Law is basically a recognition, by (let's say) Joseph K, that something is the case. And-at least if you take the text of The Trial as it ends, in that absolutely haunting scene where Joseph K is killed by the warders, and he sees the lights from distant apartments-it is the world. SC: Friday's footprint ... MN: It's the Other. And those Others will never be discovered. Theyare also the continuation of the race, the continuation of all sense of otherness, whieh remains in certain respects necessarily elusive-what Schutz refers to as "successors," those who will be born after we die; and in different terms it is the rest of the world that we don't know-billions upon billions of human beings ... an anonymity that is hostile in its striking power as it knocks at the door of consciousness. In that final scene Joseph K asks, "Where are the judges of the high court?" that he'd never penetrated. Who are these people? Where are the sources of power? Why haven't they revealed themselves to the individual? Why must I die-"like a dog"? In The Stranger Mersault hears that he's condemned in the name of the French State, the French People. Why not the Chinese people? It's all completely anonymous and distant; it has no reference to hirn. In this sense I think the whole business about transcendence ... I can't deny what you refer to as an "outward" movement as such; that is, this has to be confronted. But I think fundamentally what I've pursued-and want to be understood as pursuing--is the movement inward. And ultimately inwardness can only achieve a certain kind of recognition-and there's no assurance that it does-a certain kind of recognition of love for another person, a certain kind of recognition of a deep, profound friendship for another, in the sense of achieving absolute evidence in human terms, without regard to whether this is traced back, in phenomenologicallanguage, to the transcendental sources that produce it. SC: The encounter with this kind of "evidence" is not really an epistem• ological problem, then? MN: No, I don't think so. Again, this is existential for me. There's little left of all of that, God knows, today, but that's part of me. I've talked to WIlli MAURICE NATANSON 319

people who are very learned in phenomenology and existential philosophy, and some were quite bewildered by how 1 could ever introduce any such existential claims. Phenomenology was simply a method to reach certain kinds of grounds in a rigorous fashion. And that is true in asense. But the further force of phenomenology is-not a worldview or Weltanschauung, not at all-but a recognition that in reality one has to penetrate the strangeness of mundane experience to find its sources. If you don't find that strangeness to begin with in the Lebenswelt, in your own life, then in a way you'll never find philosophy "consequent," consequential, to begin with, no matter what kind of philosophy you pursue. If everything is somehow obvious, agreeable, and natural; if you never question it radically; then you are on secure Wittgensteinian grounds, then you've escaped. But those few who do question it in some radical way face, in Husserlian terms, several questions. The question of motivation: How does this happen? That's a very difficult question for phenomenology. But whether we can get a definitive answer to it, it may happen that the Other presents this strangeness to uso Fundamen• tally, associating with another human being intimately-in whatever domain one wants, whether it is rational discourse or a sexual relationship, the whole range-is astrange event. SC: The fundamentally "unfamiliar" is in some sense the Other? MN: Rimbaud says, "I is an other." SC: The examples that you've given of what one discovers in the move• ment "inward"-love, relationship-have as a matter of fact all involved the Other. MN: Without doubt. Now the temptation is to say that these are "out• ward" forces. 1 recognize the sense of that, and 1 don't want to say that the experience of God, of the transcendental ego, or something like that (which 1 can make no claims about) is a "downward" experience, in that God is not transcendent in the other sense. 1 don't want to make that kind of an argument. But on the other hand, 1 think there are recognitions of others which bring us to the sense that something is "awry" in the ordinary world, and there are a few tormented people who pursue that. They are philoso• phers. SC: Your work is characterized by a deep "humanism," a movement in• ward toward the innermost resources and dimensions of one's own exper• ience in order to discover something evidential, something phenomeno• logically insistent. How then do you view current "anti-humanisms"; in particular-since you yourself have emphasized the deep sense in which the self is socially constituted-the quasi-structuralist anti-humanism that erases or effaces the dimension of subjectivity in the name of a system of power, or a categorial scheme in which the subject becomes a sort of "virtual reality"? MN: 1 think this is a kind of betrayal of the task of philosophy. 1 don't even think that sociologically (in say Schutz's or Simmel's sense of "sociolo- 320 A CONVERSATION gy") that this is true to the structure of society. For me it's not possible to deny-without bad, devastating, consequences philosophicaIly-the alive, forceful, multi-faceted creativity of the individual. And if you simply want to build up a grid in place of the human being, to place the human being in the grid and treat society in that sense, 1 think what one has done ... It's not simply that 1 don't like it-and 1 don't-but beyond that level of argumenta• tion 1 think that there is no way of discovering the identity, let alone the motives, of the one who constructs that kind of a system. So the argument goes back to Kierkegaard and his critique of Hegel. There's a kind of system being built up, and Kierkegaard wants to know, "Where's the master builder? I'd like to have a word with hirn. They say they'll be finished next week, but I've been here many years"-which is again very Kafka-like. K never reaches the castle; Joseph K never reaches the final courts which decide his fate, and he dies. Gregor's transmogrification into a giant insect yields a most sad and hideous death, when he is swept up by the charwoman and disposed of in the dustbin. But you know, in every horne (this will seem to be irrelevant, but it's not to me) there's a certain sense of security: the doors are ordinarily c1osed. And in that story, when they send the sister out for help she leaves the door open-because it is so urgent to get somebody, a locksmith, so they can find out exactly what Gregor is up to, what's going on in his room, what's happened-and at that point Kafka says something about houses with open doors and the alarming character they have when that is observed. It's a kind of terror; it's the terror of the horne as a metaphor. SC: Ahorne exposed .. . MN: Horne violated .. . SC: ... open to the alien .. . MN: ... horne vulnerable ... This is the outward reach of Gregor's transformation as it affects others: the locksmith must be sought out until finally, with his mandibles dripping his own ... liquidity, Gregor manages to turn the key. The Metamorphosis is the most extraordinary-"brilliant" isn't enough-the most extraordinary image for seeing the character of an inner and outer transformation, which moves "outward" in the terms you've suggested, but which is basically a tragedy of the inwardness of the self. SC: By the end of the story the horne has been c10sed up again, every• thing has settled back, the daughter stretches her body, she has a life now, the parents are much happier, the door is c1osed, everything is c10sed in again. Which suggests the possible illusion in placing too much emphasis on the constitutive power of the individual's position within a system. An externality keeps imposing itself. Perhaps there is another system-I won't call it an "Hegelian" system but perhaps an inscrutable "Kafka" system• which makes a mockery of a certain kind of humanism. MN: WeIl, 1 don't think it makes a mockery of it. 1 would disagree with that. 1 would say that what it does is to seek its destruction or its consolida• tion under another regime, as it were-a death machine such as Kafka Wrrn MAURICE NATANSON 321 describes in his story. Merleau-Ponty has this wonderful sentence fragment: "The urge finally to have it out with the world." 1 think that's wonderful. It's one of those victories of language. Each individual ultimately has this pivotal stance and may deny this in bad faith or, in other terms, shy away from it, or refuse it, or seek a more careful life, try to become what the system demands. But the individual at least has the challenge of accepting this, of having it out with the world, finally, in the course of a finite life. Now, if one asks what brings the individual to philosophize, it is that a choice has been made. And 1 think one must again return to the question, What about Hegel hirnself? What about the system-builder? Weil, you can say-and this has been said at book-Iength-that the Hegel Kierkegaard railed against is really a phantom, that Hegel recognized Kierkegaard's problems and included them. But that's astrange notion: "Included" them in what way? How? And is Hegel hirnself "given" in his work, in the way in which Kierkegaard is "given" to the reader in his work? The choice of structuralism and positions of that kind, as a philosophic choice, is a choice of retreat from pursuing both what you call the "outward" and what 1 call "inwardness," from reaching for the ultimacy that one wants in philosophy. These authors are not at risk, not in question, in their endeavor. The individual is not an endangered creature, though 1 think, as 1 said, that there is a danger involved in encountering the Other, other people. SC: To what extent does that evidence you spoke of before, that definitive ontological encounter-the moment of genuine love, let's say• stand outside the general grid which even the phenomenologist acknowledg• es in the notion of "horizon" for example, the horizon that pre-forms one's experience, "pre-interpreted" experience? MN: 1 think there are differences between "horizon" and such aprioris (let us call them) in Husserl's position, and elements of structuralism or attempts to build a grid. One thing in the notion of horizon is that though it is apriori, its recognition and in a certain sense its fulfillment involves the movement of the individual both in time-the inner horizon-and outward along a certain line involving a project or something of the sort. One has never, 1 would say, "abandoned" the individual, and 1 think the structuralist does. The structuralist wants to get rid of the individual, to get rid of hirn by once and for all knocking the stuffing out of hirn and fixing hirn on the grid; whereas 1 think the stuffing is everything. To knock it out is to commit philosophical suicide. There are no resolutions to oppositions of this kind; 1 think there are basic existential choices. But of what I've called "primordial experiences" which have a kind of finality to them, like love and friendship . . . Given these experiences 1 think one is forced to ask questions, as in psychiatry. Homelessness-the ultimate pathos of it. We have an individual who has been taken out of his horne, has been put into a "horne" (in quotes), and then is finally released from that "horne" and finds hirnself in the streets with no horne at all. That's a dialectic worth exploring. To 322 A CONVERSATION explore it phenomenologically is to see that the Lebenswelt, "the current of existence" (as 1 refer to it, out of Tolstoy), has been invaded by cross• currents and shifts, the individual has been transported out of the current of his existence into a new stream, a new wOrld, and in that new world he's asked, "How do you describe your missing home?" Fundamentally one may find a certain rage against the wOrld, which 1 find comprehensible. Henri Ey, the psychiatrist, makes the statement, "When a psychotic rages he rages far more than you think he does." That to me is very penetrating. What is that "more"? It's a kind of ontological assault upon reality; it's often seen, and not only in terms of individuals who want to leave, get out. 1 once worked in amental asylum one summer and of course they had the doors locked in these wards. One woman spent the entire day, every day, throughout the whole summer, as long as 1 worked there, waiting for someone to come in, with the idea that she could slip out through the door. Well, you know, it's hopeless. What is that? It's not so far away, phenomenologically, from this hope beyond hope the individual has that there is an escape, that escape is possible, that things could be different. The individual comes to the end of something in his marriage, in his life, his work, and thinks, "WeIl, I've gone as far as 1 can and now some fundamental changes have to be made." All right. But with these changes one can begin to see the evidence of turning away from a certain given project toward something quite uncertain and something quite new. Father Zossima teIls Alyosha, as you know, that he is not to stay in a monastery; he is to go into the world. There's evidence that there was to be a second volume in which Alyosha ends up as an anarchist. Now one can begin to see that sweet innocence turned inside out toward what is ultimately incoherence, the destruction of order. And the ending of a whole life ... To go back to some things you were saying about Metamor• phosis, in a way things are not quite "all right" at the end of that story. What you describe is perfectly accurate, but it's not just hermeneutics because the interpretation of it is left open: the daughter arches her back, and the image is, in the critical sentence, that she is "growing into womanhood" as her parents observe; they look significantly at each other, a husband will have to be found for her, a new life is opening up. But that is the tragedy of Gregor. Gregor by now has been thrown into the dustbin by the charwoman. And it's at the expense of Gregor's life. You interpreted The Metamorphosis more nearly in the direction of stability and restitution, but 1 would argue against that. 1 think that that arching of the back is a powerful symbol of maturation. It is at the expense of Gregor's death and is therefore a tragic metaphor. It was Gregor who was paying for his sister's violin lessons, he was saving up to pay for her going to the conservatory. To be sure, in parts of the story she's the only one who will try to see to his feeding, what kinds of food he will eat; but basically at the end she denies him. And 1 think by the time he is out of the world- dead, a carcass-she has bloomed out of the flesh of his death. And so 1 regard that final scene as a tragic statement. WITH MAURICE NATANSON 323

SC: At the same time, the family and the sister are perfectly indifferent to the sacrifices the individual makes, the world as a whole is perfectly indifferent to the sacrifices that are made by the individual on its behalf, on behalf of future generations. The role played by the individual is a vanishing moment in a cycle. MN: WeIl, 1 think that this whole business of indifference is perfectly correct. It's a given for someone who ... what? ... matures, achieves maturation as an adult in the world and comes to recognize that smiling faces don't necessarily mean smiling hearts, or hearts at all. There's indif• ference, you get a pink slip. You work for all these years, then you've got to leave. It's a cruel business and this is the result. But to say that is not to lose sight ... There is a continuing story of the individual involved, the one who receives the pink slip, the one who leaves the hospital, who leaves prison, who leaves horne; who "lights" out, in Huck Finn's sense, for the Territory. There is a necessity, in my way of looking at social reality, not only to follow up and see what the individual becomes and what becomes of the individual, but to recognize (in Schutz's terms, about which I have written and would still defend) that there are metaphysical constants. Among these are the constants of having to work in the world and having to die in it. And in between 1 don't see that these are "outward" givens or necessities; it's the comprehension that we must live in the world, each of us, and die in it, and do in the world, that makes the difference-the recognition. It's a recognition which comes at certain points, or doesn't come; and for so me people I don't think it comes at all. The question is whether the individual has been recognized, whether his face has been seen, or whether one is dealing with "We have this many people on your caseload." Last time we were talking about doing social work. WeIl you can say, "Here is a typical case of a family-a mother and two children, three children-living on the dole, living on welfare." To do this is to generalize the individual, to put the individual down as a cipher. And the cry of that individual, if it arises (and 1 think most often it does) is: "See me not as a case but as an individual!"--though 1 know that is not likely, and though I know that my efforts to help are just absorbed, the way Gregor's are absorbed. His family are takers; they are not givers. SC: It cannot be typicality "all the way down," then. Once again we come to the point of "evidence" in the face-to-face, in the relation with the other person. If there is a grid, the only thing that breaks through it is contact with an other-whether it's the strange or, finally, the rediscovery of contact beyond typicality, beyond typification. MN: Anonymity and recognition. SC: As you were describing the psychotic who rages more than you think he does, I asked myself, "What then is the difference between the philoso• pher and the psychotic?" Both refuse, in a certain sense, the notion that meaning is constituted exclusively by the grid. 324 A CONVERSATION

MN: How does mental pathology present itself? It presents itself, oddly enough, in the world of work, in the "paramount reality." The individual who goes to work each day and then suddenly has to wash his hands constantly is finally told, "Look, you can't monopolize the toilet. All you do all day is wash your hands. You're here to do some work." In one way or another the individual finds himself at odds with the outside world, with anonymous figures. He's in the line to buy a ticket to see a movie, and somebody else leaves and then comes back, and he doesn't recognize that person, starts an argument: "You weren't here." Well, it's a trivial thing, maybe, but then it enlarges itself into a fight, the police are called, the manager is called. These small sorts of things explode, and the individual is then no longer in the current, he's out of it: taken to the police station, sent horne, or whatever. This intrusion of the disease, the pathology, into the working world, into the Lebenswelt, is what finally shows the individual to the world as unsound, unacceptable, to be treated, to be put away, to be taken away. Though there are fantastic ranges to the breakdowns, they show themselves first of all to the individual within his own setting. SC: The philosopher too is at odds with the world of work, but there's aspace carved out in the world of work for the philosopher. Were the philosopher to pursue his philosophical interest single-mindedly, without the benefit of the academy, however, you might find a similar kind of descrip• tion. MN: You very often would. If the philosopher were thrown on his own into the world he would be somewhat like the person in Hyde Park, with the soapbox. We were in England and we went to Hyde Park many times. It was so interesting to hear these strange speakers: some were on politics, some were on religion, some were on individual cranky bents. One man who had a Cockney accent got up on his stand, and he said to the audience, which had started gathering around hirn, "Now you may think it absolutely insane that someone my age is standing here, having nothing better to do than talk to a group of strangers. You must think I'm crazy to be doing this sort of thing. Well, 1 want to prove one thing: I'm not crazy; I'm sane. But unlike you, I can prove that I'm sane." And he took out of his pocket an old yellow document which said, "This will certify that Mr. Wilbur MacDougall has been released from St. Mary's mental hospital and pronounced ready to go back to his job"-signed R. M. S. Wilson, M.D. And he said, "Here is proof of my sanity. Where's yours?" SC: You've written about the role of the philosopher as a representative of the life of reason, but your conception of philosophy seems also to be a matter of working out for oneself one's place in the wOrld, clarifying the hidden order, coming to terms with the paradoxes, so that it is, finally, a solitary pursuit. How are these social and solitary conceptions related? MN: There are individuals-we call them our students-who don't go to graduate school to get degrees in philosophy, but for whom philosophy has WI1H MAURICE NATANSON 325 a very powerful impact. It's not just that they remember a course or a professor, but they continue to read philosophy, continue to think about these problems. There are these people, and I think in a not inconsiderable number. And there are those who go into other professions. I've had students (and you have as weH, I'm sure) who have gone into medicine or law or become ministers, whose work in philosophy is not to be assessed by whether ethics is somehow nowan element of medical school, and so on. It's not that at a11. It's that they themselves have absorbed certain things, or haven't; but those who have, continue in their lives to think about these problems. I'm convinced that the individual is a problematic instance of humanity confronted with its own problematic nature, and that once having been truly bitten by philosophy, the individual continues with it in many ways. SC: Can one point to some public virtue that such an obsession has? Some people try to suggest that it has something to do with ethics. But I've never seen that; I don't see that philosophers as a whole are more ethical than other people, or that they are clearer about ethical issues than other people are ... MN: One part of it is what I ca11 (and what you quoted) the "representa• tive" role of the philosopher, the one who is concerned-or should be concerned, or claims to be concerned anyway-with ultimate problems of this kind. Now some people may think, "We11 it's nice to have some people worrying about things like that, but I'm a practical guy and I deal with the marketplace." We11 that's one story. A person who is thought of as a representative in some sense undertakes tasks. It's like paying the Church to have masses said for some departed soul, or to have a professional prayer• reader read prayers for one at a funeral, or something like that. But the other side of it is that there are people who are recognized as seriously concemed with all these issues, though most people would say, "I'm a plain man, a practical man, in business, and it's very nice of you to be worried about the ultimate and a11 of that, but apart from attending a few prayer meetings or special holiday meetings or masses, I don't go in for that." That's one side of it, the representative side. As far as other aspects of it are concerned, one may say that changes are in fact going on. They tried to cut off sociology at Yale. Now they may try to cut off philosophy at City University. Who knows? But it's undoubtedly the case that in every gener• ation there are people desperately attracted to this miserable set of problems, and no matter what, some of them are going to become philoso• phers-"fina11y," at last-whether there is an APA or no APA People are going to insist, and I think the reason for this is not to be found in terms of any interpretation of psychology, let alone psychoanalysis. SC: Husserl, of course, thought that philosophy had a foundational role to play in regard to other sciences. Do you share that view, and what do you see as the relation between philosophy and fields like sociology (but not only 326 A CONVERSATION sociology)? MN: The large question of whether a perfectly fulfilled phenomenology could provide evidential grounds for all disciplines (sciences included)-I think that turns into a kind of mathesis universalis, that whole dream of Descartes and Leibniz. One can only respect it, but I don't believe much in it. I think more of the idea of phenomenology having to do with the humanities and eertain social sciences. I think sociology is a domain, as Schutz has shown, in which Husserl's phenomenology has a genuine role to play, and I think Schutz has done it! He's shown-together, obviously, with referenee to Weber and Bergson-how the grounding of sociology requires phenomenological scrutiny. That seems to me the point of his philosophical career. So I don't think of it as part of a larger mathesis universalis-a grand founding of all the sciences and disciplines, as Husserl thought was going to take plaee eventually-but I see it as concrete work accomplished. Schutz has clarified eertain things in sociology and social scienee by pointing out, for example, that the mundane world conceals within it the whole question, What is mundanity? and, How does that relate to the sociological project or venture? I'm strongly convinced that a contribution of a very solid and lasting kind has been made by Schutz. SC: In Anonymity you go to great lengths to separate Schutz's contribu• tions to what you call "theory" (or "sociological theory") from his "unwritten philosophy." Are you distinguishing here between a philosophical contribu• tion in the strict sense and contributions to the theoretical clarification, say, of eertain sociological presuppositions? MN: I was really following up on a very strong-indeed astonishing-point (which I indicated in the book) made by Schutz hirnself. I onee asked hirn about (as I wrote), "Your philosophy ... " "My what?", he said. And he made me realize that to speak of philosophy is not just to speak casually-to have a philosophy is not just to say "I'm a neo-Kantian" or "I'm a Logical Positivist;" it is to have wrought for oneself in a very rigorous and talented way a new vision of reality-and that philosophers weren't all around the plaee. He took a very modest attitude toward his own philosophical ac• complishments, which were largely occult, in the sense of "occult blood," hidden, to be developed if he had maybe three or four lifetimes ... SC: Much like Husserl ... MN: Like Husserl hirnself. His philosophy remained hidden in many respects. So what I'm saying in that book on anonymity is, "I'd like to take eertain things as transeendental clues to what I think might underlie the surfaee and might be aspects of this hidden philosophy." When I turn to theory, it's something which is more-not superficial, but on the surfaee, manifest. SC: Is philosophy in that sense destined to remain hidden, and thereby communicated only indirectly? MN: That's a strong question, a proper question. I'm sure it has a WITH MAURICE NATANSON 327 number of answers in different directions. In one sense I think it's hidden almost in a Cabalistic sense. That is, the truth (one might say, vis-a-vis Cabalism) is so powerful that it scorches you. And so, in the Cabalistic image, the sparks must be kept in leaden caskets, because if they were revealed they would tear up the world in fire and destroy everything. So one might say that truth, phenomenologically, is so philosophically powerful that it must remain hidden and show itself only by way of indirection. I couldn't make a claim to be a philosopher in the sense of having developed an original philosophy-that claim would be ridiculous, I think. By the same token, 1 don't believe that many of the people who are writing philosophical books are doing any original philosophy. They're often applying certain insights gained from other people-as 1 am applying insights gained from Husserl, gained from Schutz, most positively and concretely, who had a lasting, absolute influence on me. And I do it in a way which 1 think is different, obviously, from Schutz's way or Husserl's way. Apart from describing myself as an existential phenomenologist, which not many people do, I am strongly interested in literature. It is my belief that the relationship of literature to philosophy remains a hidden one, and perhaps ... (if you start talking about what you are going to do, you don't do it) ... perhaps 1 might do something in a book concerning this subjecL That, it seems to me, is orie of the hidden issues, and perhaps it's a way into ... as 1 think of psychiatry also in certain respects. Without making vast claims about my technical knowledge, I've done a lot of reading in psychiatry, I've done a lot of associating with psychiatrists-Erwin Straus in particular, with whom 1 worked-experience working in hospitals. All the reading in the world won't make you a psychiatrist; on the other hand, 1 think 1 have a therapeutic feeling, and some knowledge of certain aspects of it. My kind of psychiatry is "literary" psychiatry, some might say. WeIll'm not so sure that label isn't acceptable to me, because my notion of literature is atypical. SC: Not a mere illustration of this or that, but a tool for uncovering. MN: That's right. And it's an indicator and a mode of indirection, a realm of indirection. Literature offers some remarkable, penetrating, examples-as has been appreciated by some psychiatrists-of various states of psychosis, neurosis, and psychopathology. I'm much interested in that. SC: 1 wonder if you could identify something that might be considered the "tone" or "great bass" of your thinking, some problem or affect, that carries your thinking at its root. Is there something that the problems circle around and seem to be carried by? MN: WeIl it's a difficult question to try to answer. 1 think ... There are primordial concerns that 1 have. One such concern has for many years been with death and the philosophical problems associated with death, in the sense that to philosophize is to learn how to die. This goes back to Montaigne, to Cicero, and so on, but (I've written a few things about death, but nothing very solid or overpowering) 1 have an enormous interest in the 328 A CONVERSATION thematic meaning of death as a philosopher tries to interpret it (and I think this is one of the tasks of the philosopher)-the importance of death for human existence. Certain works l've read, like Landsberg's The Experience o[ Death, have had a great and lasting impact on Me. I mentioned "The Death of Ivan Ilych," and there are many other things. But I would say one primal problem, task, deeply grounded theme, in my concern is what I call "death." Another very central task is that of trying to define where justice lies in dealing with myself in the midst of fellow human beings. I'm not interested, I've never been interested, in ethics. I've taught ethics many times but it always seemed to me to be ... a lie. Abstract and not really there. On the other hand, I am intensely interested in the kind of ethical problem made real by Sartre, or in speaking of "If God does not exist then everything is permitted" in Dostoevsky's terms, and so on. I'm deeply interested in Dostoevsky's terms. We're back to the Brothers Karamazov; the book had a great impact on Me, as the teaching of Schutz has had a decisive impact on me and, through hirn really, the life of phenomenology coming through Husserl. I don't think I'm the kind of phenomenologist of whom Husserl would have approved. He thought highly of Dorion Cairns-quite rightly, because he was a very brilliant man-as a phenomenologist, and I'm perhaps more of a visionary. But I'm not so sure I have to apologize. The question is, what are the visions and what do they reveal? How do they show themselves in human experience-in teaching and in one's personal life? That's the kind of question which I think is crucial: What is personal life? Just yourself, your wife, your relatives, your children? Well, that's one everyday meaning of it, of course, and certainly a valid one. But I think there's something deeper involved which is not just the sense of Gemeinschaft; it's even more deeply a sense of building up a reality which "holds" integrally for yourself and for a few-if only one-other human beings. In marriage, for example, or living with someone, you have in a deep sense "elected" or "chosen" this person, and with the choice-it's not merely let's share the rent, let's share the house, let's have children (whatever it may be)-comes the interior challenge of moving into a new realm of human existence that is indeed constituted, phenomenologically, and bears the weight of that constitution all the way through. The marriage ceremony says, "In sickness or in health, for better or for worse." But those things are true. Like a lot of banal-seeming experiences, they turn out to be truths. To have gone through a life in which there is indeed profound suffering-sickness or whatever the suffering may be-of oneself or the members of one's family is a devastating experience. Simmel said that human suffering was a subject about which philosophers have had relatively little to say, have spoken about in a very superficial way. I think that's true, and I think human suffering is, at its depth, as much a philosophical problem as anything that can be identified as deeply philosophical. SC: The connection made, the choice for another person, and the Wrm MAURICE NATANSON 329 involvement in the suffering that that inevitably implies: is it that only with such a choice does one discover that not everything is permitted? MN: Everything is not permitted, even if God is dead (which I don't believe) in the sense in which it's stated that "if God does not exist ..." I believe God does exist, I believe in God. I believe in the human soul. We're not about to start an examination of those subjects-and I have no proofs to offer, or evidence-but I believe that when one comes to (the word should be used, Marcel used it, others used it) the "mystery" of suffering, it is the point-one point anyway-at which the limits of "everything is permitted" are observed. Everything is not permitted. It is not permitted to destroy another human being for the simple sake of seeing if one can do it. It is not permitted to savage another human being just for the sake of a little sense of power (which one sees every day in c1assrooms). In the Jewish religion it is considered a sin-I mean areal sin-purposely to humiliate another individual in the presence of a group. That is proscribed behavior. I believe in that, and I've made every effort in my teaching never to do that. Well, one begins to understand problems not just of that sort but the whole range of the suffering creature and relationship to God in terms of trying to understand and justify a world of the sort Ivan describes in the famous scene with Alyosha: Soldiers who disembowel mothers with bayonets, throw up the baby to screams of delight and then catch it with the tip of their bayonet in front of the mother; the general who sets his hounds after the boy who threw a stone and hurt one of the general's favorite dogs. Well, those moments in literature are to me signposts. They aren't just things I've read and which have made an impression on me; they are really part of me. And 1 believe, with Wittgenstein in this sense, that this is what you come to when you c1imb up and over the "ladder": the real problems then open up. 1 would say that for myself the primal questions are those I've expressed (and there are others), which give you at least some idea of how one tries to reach vindication and resolution in one's life. I know that these have theological or religious equivalents or analogues, but I'm not as much interested in the analogue as 1 am in the other side, the philosophical grounding ... SC: The questioning ... MN: ... and the continual questioning of it, because it isn't a static affair. These problems are not only perennial; they are problems that must be met again and again. That's the sense that "beginnings" had in the phenomen• ology of Husserl, I think. SC: That need to begin again seems to presuppose a gnawing-away at the insight or conviction at the very moment it's attained, so that there seems to be a temptation in another direction. Let me put this in terms of the problem that we were just discussing. To see suffering as the limit on what is permissible-or as a c1ue that there is a domain that is beyond trespass-vies with a more Sartrean consideration, saying, "That depends on the choice, and that choice is groundless." 330 A CONVERSATION

MN: WeIl, if you turn to a segment of the Sartrean notion that you're talking about, there is a groundless-ontologically groundless-domain; there isn't a fixity supponing once and forever the choice that is made. Just taking that itself I would agree. The affirmation must be continued, and the choice must be sustained again and again-not only at critical points where there are difficulties but all the way through. 1 believe that underlying mundane existence is a seeret affirmation: "Yes, there is a mundane world." But it's my affirmation. There's a good solipsism and a bad solipsism, and this seems to me a good solipsism. It's my choice, and 1 have to make it again and again. It isn't just, "I've deeided to get married, that's my choice," but there is no ontological foundation, there's a nihilation instead, and 1 have to continue the choice, even though it isn't self-conscious, all the way through. The bottom can fall out at any time-and often does. People's lives are changed, obviously, for a variety of reasons. What seems to be solid and absolute always regards the Other, about whom you know nothing: "Oh 1 thought they were so happy;" it turns out they're not happy; "I thought they were wealthy"-no, they were poor, living beyond their means; "I thought ...," it turns out you know nothing about anybody else, really. And the truth is, as Conrad would say, you don't know much about yourself. SC: There's all that fixity "out there" while one's self seems to be always in flux. But when you come to realize that you know nothing about anybody else, you get the Cartesian temptation to say, "Ah, but 1 do know about myself," and then the bottom falls out of that too. MN: And so here 1 would turn to Conrad-I'm much impressed with the kind of point he makes in The Secret Sharer, namely, that freedom is gained through risk. A first command, the captain of the ship: "And if the truth be told 1 was astranger to the ship, and also to myself. " And how is that then to be changed? Well, at risk: bringing the ship so close to the land to let the secret sharer have a chance to swim and get away. Indeed one of the mates on board screams, "We're all ruined, we'll never get out of this, we're too close!" They catch the breeze, the secret sharer is off the ship, his white hat (given to him at the last minute by the Captain) gives the Captain the possibility of knowing whether the ship is moving. So it is in a certain sense himself, released, and he is finallya free man-the secret sharer having gone out of his life, he is a free man moving on to his own destiny. It appears again in major stories by Conrad, and 1 think that what it contains is this notion of the self realizing its freedom by way of risk. And 1 believe that it's true. To tie it together with philosophy, and our previous discussion, 1 believe that choosing philosophy involves a risk. The risk is that you are dealing with odd, strange questions, and that you may never be the same again. SC: Again we return to the ineluctable involvement of the individual. MN: Yes. The philosopher has been described as a kind of "mortar-and• pestle" man, always grinding away. Well that is an image that makes a WITH MAURICE NATANSON 331 certain type of sense, but with it there's also "finer and finer and finer"-the more you grind, you grind it away into dust-which 1 don't accept. But there is all of this heavy load, heavy freight, of introductions and beginnings. All of these books of Husserl's: introductions. What does one make of that? 1 mean surely he could think of another title. Well, but that's the point: the notion of beginnings is present to hirn (I can only say) as an "existential" problem-though he wouldn't put it that way. On the other hand (as I've pointed out and has been said by others), he was a reader of Kierkegaard. And 1 can't help thinking that he thought of philosophy as a kind of dark underworld which phenomenology would ultimately illuminate. 1 think of human existence as a dark underworld which 1 think phenomenology makes an effort to illuminate. SC: Husserl makes some statements about that which are surprisingly direct-at least they surprised me in looking at Ideas II recently where he is talking about the realm of spirit and mentions a certain facticity that is beyond our comprehension, that wells up in us, sets limits to our freedom. He describes it in a variety of ways: a "root soil," an "obscure ground of spirit." And it seems very much in line with what you are saying. MN: And you know that article by Schutz in which he visits Husserl on his deathbed. Husserl got very excited and said that he'd found a transcen• dental-phenomenological proof for the existence of God, and Mrs. Husserl had to come in because he got so disturbed and agitated about it. Well he did believe in God; his conversion was a genuine one. It wasn't the usual thing of having to do it, ifyou were a Jew, to get a jOb, to have a profession• allife, and so on. He was a sincere convert to Protestantism, and he believed in God. Whether his proof could prove anything is another story. I don't know what he had in mind; he never published anything on it as far as 1 know, or wrote it out. But even if he did, and even if it made some sense as a transcendental argument of some kind ... You know, I myself think that the ontological argument, Anselm's argument, is the most brilliant of such arguments. But what its brilliance does is to provide a matrix through which one can conceive of the meaning of God. I don't think it proves anything, but what it does is give this provision for formulating the concept of God. And that's a brilliant achievement. Beyond that I don't see what philosophi• cal proofs can do. 1 agree with Pascal-not the Pascal of the "wager," but the one who speaks against "the God of the philosophers." SC: I've been thinking lately about a distinctive aspect of your appro• priation of Husserl: while many interpreters, especially now, tend to emphasize the intersubjective elements in Husserl's view, you've always insisted on an egological emphasis and have even argued for a certain kind of solipsism (as you said a moment ago: good solipsism and bad solipsisrn). Even if one properly acknowledges the intersubjectivity of the social world, why is it important to recognize an inescapable stratum of solipsism? MN: Gurwitsch used to speak of the problem of "access," and 1 think that 332 A CONVERSATION comes in at this point. How does consciousness gain access to the social world? There's never a denial of sociality or the social world, but there is a question about how consciousness, the individual instantiation, gains access to this sociality. Which is really the question Simmel asked, "How is society possible? How is sociality possible?" And Simmel comes up with eertain aprioris which make the social world possible, make society possible. I would say here that for Husserl there definitely is a good solipsism that becomes-as you put it-a "stratum" ofwhat is being considered. In my book on Husserl I mention, as it were in passing, the idea that there is nothing outside of consciousness. There isn't any outside, because whatever is outside is coneeived of being outside by consciousness. WeIl there is sociality, and there's no denial of the reality of the Other, but there remains the problem of access of consciousness to that reality, the positing of the Other, and even more important, the continual probing-not in an artificial and self-conscious sense, but in the course of daily life-of the Other, which means an interest in the Other. "What did you think of this? What did you think of that? Shall we go to this movie? Shall we go to this play? Shall we be volunteers for this or that or the other? What about this and that?" SC: There seems to be a potential point of convergenee here between the phenomenological approach and the "structuralist" in the broad sense• though someone who takes the problem of access seriously will have very different views from someone who holds that all access, all the effort put into coming to terms with the Other, is finally not decisive because all those approaches, avenues and experienees are pre-figured by institutional expect• ations. MN: WeIl isn't this the inverse side, one might say, of Dr. Ey's statement that when a psychotic rages he rages much more than you think he does? The other side of it is that in having built a microcosm of a relations hip with another human being and being in the social world-being in the macrocosm as a small unity with the other, facing this world, living in it-what one finds is that there is much more intense constitution going on than one suspected; even though there is a great deal ofwarmth and sharing, talking to the other, there is infinitely more going on than even the indiv• iduals themselves recognize. SC: They are embedded in a context which co-determines them and pre• forms the possibilities that are adumbrated in their relationship. MN: That doesn't rule out the choiee that these people are making out of what's given. No one of us creates sociality-it's a contradiction in terms-and eertainly no one is claiming here that the physical world is created by any one of us in so me arcane sense. That notion of solipsism no one was ever interested in. It's phony. Christine Ladd-Franklin wittily wrote, "Solipsism is eertainly a correct position, and I can't see why more people don't agree with it." What we have is a reality that is shared in such a way that it is at onee constituted by individuals, contains or bears a eertain WI1H MAURICE NATANSON 333 secrecy of relationship between individuals, and demands continual reconsti• tution if it is to survive. Or it may not survive in its original form and may survive in changed forms, or not at all. It's changing aspect is like a phantas• magoria, and we ask, "Where is the line of advance, where is the burden or weight of this whole existence?" If it is a phantasmagoria, what keeps it in movement, not permitting it to collapse into disorder? And 1 think that part of the answer is (in Schutz's terms) that we are able to move through "multiple realities." This is what sustains uso We are beings who are capable of doing that, of recognizing the paramount reality of everyday life, but at the same time being able to move through a variety of other worlds. It is that which makes human existence possible. SC: Here 1 recall Schutz's views on the "fundamental anxiety" as underlying sociality. Can one really say that the impetus toward sociality is informed by a fear of death, a "fundamental anxiety," or is it, quite otherwise, motivated by a fundamental desire? Is there a difference? MN: They're different, but they don't rule each other out. It would be wrong to speak of sociality as being constituted out of fear; 1 think it is constituted out of love. This is a way of saying it is constituted out of desire. But it is also the case that mortality-the whole domain of death in a certain sense-gives us the confines for the possibility of love. That is, if we had infinite time, if our lives just went on and on, 1 don't think love would be possible; you wouldn't have human existence. So death makes human existence possible, just as (one might say, with the arguments about Theodicy) death makes human freedom possible. Why is death introduced into the world? God could have created it otherwise, if one takes the Biblical story; being all-powerful he could have done other things. He had Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden fruit precisely in order to give human beings freedom (as this argument runs-which 1 believe), and that kind of freedom is the freedom made possible by mortality. It's this way in which death enters the world, hard labor, pain in giving birth, and so on. It's the stamp of precisely what human existence involves, and it certainly doesn't leave out desire-it is included-but it is another "along with" element, fitted into a frame which is not a grid. The whole egological domain is simply crushed in the system or in the grid. And 1 just don't accept that, basically, as "polite" philosophy. SC: Perhaps the reason the grid is so popular, whether it's the logical positivist kind or the Foucauldian post-structuralist kind, is that one can be "polite" in its terms, one doesn't need to talk about ... MN: 1 think that the difference in phenomenology is that it operates at such a fundamental depth; even if it is swept away-in terms of acceptance, of "schools" of philosophy, or interest among graduate students and professors, books on it, journal articles-it is inevitable, 1 believe, that it will remain as a permanent contribution to philosophy in the sense of Plato and Aristotle and Descartes and Leibniz, precisely because its depth is so 334 A CONVERSATION profound. Even if it is wrong on X and Y, that, in asense, doesn't matter. SC: This suggests some final questions. I would like to know, first, whether you see any promising developments in the philosophical communi• ty today, that respond to the things you think are important. And second, what are the crucial places where more work needs to be done? MN: 1'11 give you a very short answer to the second one, for myself: it's the book I plan to write. I won't talk about it, but I think the locus of it is philosophy (or phenomenology) and literature. Now to the first, I don't see anything very promising on the horizon, but it may weH be that ... You know, there are people who read every journal every time it comes out. I don't. I read selective things occasiona11y, but I don't like to go to the library because they have guards. I've told you my story. I have a copy of Being and Nothingness in hardback that I've used over the years-I teach Being and Nothingness every two years here-and, though I'm a book lover, a biblio• phile in a general sense, I do a terrible thing to that book anyway: I put in paper clips. And now its expanded so that it looks monstrous. So I had it in my briefcase and I took a trip to the library, and as I was leaving (you have to open your bookbag or briefcase or whatever you have) the guard-the uniformed guard-took one look inside and said, "What's that?" I said, "That's Being and Nothingness," and he said, "Oet out!" He thought it was a bomb. So I don't go to the library; I don't like to. That, and I have my own library; my great sin is to buy too many books. I work here in my study at home, in the midst of this incredible disorder. I don't make a claim to be HUp" on the latest thing that's going on everywhere; I don't go to many meetings anymore. I stay at home. So I can't claim to be in touch with the latest thing that's going on. But the only answer I can give to your first question is that, within my limitations as expreSSed' I don't see anything very promising on the philosophical scene. And so I cultivate my phenomeno• logical garden. SC: In the end it seems as though that's pretty much what you've been doing right along. I mean, there's never been a time when there's been a lot of coHeagues around and a lot of movements that have captured your attention ... MN: Just the opposite. I won't do something because it is current, I won't accept it because it's being talked about or written about, and I frankly don't give a damn if anybody writes about X. I want to go deeper and wider where I am. And it seems to me that the movements and subjects I've found-in phenomenology, existential philosophy, philosophy in literature, psychiatry, and philosophy itself-provide me with world enough to do what I want to do. And so I'm making my own way. I'm a solitary figure, ultimately. MAURICE NATANSON: A BIBLIOGRAPHY

compiled and edited by DAVID ROYAL

Editor's Note

A substantial number of Professor Natanson's articles have been reprinted in a wide variety of collections and periodi• cals, in some cases several times. Only the original publica• tion has been listed, with the exception of those articles published in a foreign language, in which case both the foreign and the English versions are included.

Articles (and a few poems):

"High on the Mountain" [poem], Lincoln Herald, v. 46, 1944, p. 47.

"I Have Seen Their Faces," The Land, v. 5, 1946, pp. 196-198.

"H. B. Alexander's Projection of a Categoriology," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, v. 10, 1949, pp. 244-250.

"The Prison of Being," Prairie Schooner, v. 23, 1949, pp. 261-271.

"An Introduction to Existentialism," University of Kansas City Review, v. 17, 1950, pp. 130-139.

"The Rock Cried Out," Prairie Schooner, v. 24, 1950, pp. 7-12.

"Sartre's Fetishism: A Reply to Van Meter Arnes," Journal of Philosophy, v. 48, 1951, pp. 95-99.

"Hacia una Fenomenolgica deI Objecto Estetico," (translated from English), Notas y Estudios de Filosofia, v. 3, 1952, pp. 127-134.

"Jean-Paul Sartre's Philosophy ofFreedom," Social Research, v. 19, 1952, pp. 364-380.

335 336 NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

"George H. Mead's Metaphysic of Time," Journal of Philosophy, v. 50, 1953, pp. 770-782.

"The Concept of the Given in Peirce and Mead," Modem Schoolman, v. 32, 1955, pp. 143-157.

"The Limits of Rhetoric," Quarterly Journal of Speech, v. 41, 1955, pp. 133- 139.

"Defining the Two Worlds of Man," University of Houston Forum, 1956, pp. 14-16.

"Phenomenology from the Natural Standpoint: A Reply to Van Meter Ames," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, v. 17, 1956, pp. 241- 245.

"La Historia corno Ambito Finito de Sentido," (translated from English), Convivium, v. 2, 1957, pp. 143-150.

"Philosophy and the Social Sciences," University ofHouston Forum, v. 2, 1957, pp. 25-30.

"The Privileged Moment: A Study in the Rhetoric of Thomas Wolfe," Quarterly Journal of Speech, v. 43, 1957, pp. 143-150.

"Existential categories in Contemporary Literature," Carolina Quarterly, v. 10, 1958, pp. 17-30.

"Phenomenology: A Viewing," Methodos, v. 10, 1958, pp. 295-318.

"A Study in Philosophy and the Social Sciences, " Social Research, v. 25, 1958, pp. 158-172.

"Being-in-Reality," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, v. 20, 1959, pp. 231-237.

"Death and Situation," American Imago, v. 16, 1959, pp. 447-457.

"Phenomenology and Existentialism: Husserl and Sartre on Intentionality," Modem Schoolman, v. 37, 1959, pp. 1-10.

"Sartre and Literature: The Implications of Jean-Paul Sartre's Contributions to Aesthetic Theory," University of Houston Forum, v. 3, 1959, pp. 4-11. NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY 337

"The WeH Balanced View," Southern Speech Journal, v. 24,1959, pp. 123-128.

"Albert Camus: Death at the Meridian," Carolina Quarterly, v. 11, 1960, pp. 21-26 and 65-69.

"Causation as a Structure of the Lebenswelt, " Journal o[Existential Psychiatry, v. 1, 1960, pp. 346-366.

"Existentialism and Literature," Rejlections [rom Chapel Hili, v. 1, 1961, pp. 3-16.

"His tory, Historicity, and the Alchemistry of Time," Chicago Review, v. 15, 1%1, pp. 76-92.

"Knowledge and Alienation: Some Remarlcs on Mannheim's Sociology of Knowledge," Revista Mexicana de Filosofia, v. 3, 1961, pp. 87-94.

"Rhetoric and Philosophical Argumentation," QuarterlyJournal o[ Speech, v. 48, 1962, pp. 24-30.

"On Academic Madness," Carolina Quarterly, v. 16, 1%3, pp. 42-47.

"On the Death of a Logician" [poem], Dust, v. 1, 1964, p. 74.

"The Dialectic of Death and Immortality," Pacific Philosophical Forum, v. 3, 1964, pp. 70-79.

"The Lebenswelt," Review o[ Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, v. 4, 1964, pp. 126-140. Polish translation, "Swiat ~cia" ["The Life-World"], by Jacek S6jka in Studia Metodologiczne [Methodological Studies], Poznan 1993, pp. 171-188.

"On the Meaning of Death," New Wme, v. 2, 1964, pp. 23-29.

"Alienation and Social Role," Social Research, v. 33, 1966, pp. 375-388.

"Death and Mundanity," Omega, v. 1, 1966, pp. 20-22.

"The Discipline of Passion," New Wine, v. 4, 1966, pp. 11-15.

"Here is the Gate" [poem], Gato, v. 1, 1966, p. 30.

"Is Intentionality Intelligible Without Causality?," Journal o[ Existentialism, v. 6, 1966, pp. 397-404. 338 NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Man as an Actor," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, v. 26, 1966, pp. 327-341.

"The Phenomenology of Alfred Schutz," Inquiry, v. 9, 1966, pp. 147-155.

"Rhetoric and Counter-Espionage," Existential Psychiatry, v. 1,1966, pp. 188- 194.

"Phenomenology as a Rigorous Science," International Philosophical Quarterly, v. 7, 1967, pp. 5-20.

"Disenchantment and Transcendence," Journal of Value Inquiry, v. 1, 1967/1968, pp. 210-222.

"Alfred Schutz on Social Reality and Social Science," Social Research, v. 35, 1968, pp. 217-244.

"The Fabric of Expression," Review of Metaphysics, v. 21, 1968, pp. 491-505.

"Nature, Value, and Action," Man and World, v. 1, 1968, pp. 293-302.

"Existentialism and the Human Condition," Existential Psychiatry, v. 7, 1969, pp. 19-33.

"Phenomenology and Typification: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz," Social Research, v. 37, 1970, pp. 1-22.

"Phenomenology and Social Role," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, v. 3, 1972, pp. 218-230.

"The Philosophy of Anonymity in Gurwitsch and Schutz," Research in Phenomenology, v. 5, 1975, pp. 51-56.

"A Philosophical Perspective on the Assessment of Risk-Benefit Criteria in Connection with Research Involving Human Subjects," The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects, Appendix Volume 11 (Washington, D. C.: The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1978), Ch. 21, pp. 1-34.

"The Nature of Death" (an editorial followed by a bibliography), The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, v. 3, 1978, pp. 1-7.

"Phenomenology, Anonymity, and Alienation," New Literary History, v. 10, NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY 339

1979, pp. 353-346.

"Tbe Sleep of Bad Faith," New Literary History, v. 12, 1980-81, pp. 97-106.

"Gurwitsch Ascending," The Journal ofthe British Society for Phenomenology, v. 12, 1981, pp. 115-124.

"Tbe World Already There: An Approach to Phenomenology," Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, v. 3, 1981, pp. 101-116.

"Erwin Straus and Alfred Schutz," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, v. 42, 1982, pp. 335-342.

"Tbe Schematism of Moral Agency," New Literary History, v. 15, 1983-84, pp. 13-23.

"Alfred Schutz on Everydayness: Fragment of a Work in Progress," The Envoy (New Haven, Connecticut, n.d. [co 1984-85]), n.p.

"From Apprehension to Decay: Robert Burton's 'Equivocations of Melancholy'," The Gettysburg Review, v. 2, 1989, pp. 130-138.

"Tbe Iliac Passion," The Yale Journal ofBiology and Medicine, v. 65, 1992, pp. 165-171.

Some Selected Reviews:

Review: Phenomenologie de l'Experience Esthetique by Mikel Dufrenne, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, v. 15, 1954, pp. 140-142.

Review: Phenomenologie de Husserl by Quentin Lauer, Philosophical Review, v. 65, 1956, pp. 563-567.

Review: Martin Buber by Maurice S. Friedman, Social Research, v. 24, 1957, pp. 113-117.

Review: Thomas Mann by Fritz Kaufmann, Judaism, v. 7, 1958, pp. 86-88.

Review: Theorie du Champ de la Conscience by Aron Gurwitsch, Philosophi• cal Review, v. 68, 1959, pp. 536-538. 340 NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

An Interview:

"The Life and Work of Alfred Schutz: A Conversation with Maurice Natanson" (ed. Rodman B. Webb), Qualitative Studies in Education, v. 5, 1992, pp. 283-294.

Contributions to Books:

"The Empirical and Transcendental Ego," in For Roman Ingarden: Nine Essays in Phenomenology, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), pp. 42-53.

"Afterword" to The Death o[ a Nobody by Jules Romains (New York: Signet Classic, 1961), pp. 115-124.

"Existentialism and the Theory of Literature," in The Critical Matrix, ed. Paul R. Sullivan (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1961), pp. 154-170.

"Phenomenology and the Theory of Literature," in The Critical Matrix, ed. Paul R. Sullivan (Washington D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 1961), pp. 137-153.

"Philosophische Grundfragen der Psychiatrie I: Philosophie und Psychiatrie," translated from English by Robert O. Weiss in Psychiatrie der Gegenwart Band If2, ed. H. W. Gruhle, R. Jung, W. Mayer-Gross, M. Müller (Berlin and New York: Springer, 1963), pp. 903-925.

"Anonymity and Recognition: Toward an Ontology of Social Roles," in Conditio Humana: Erwin W. Straus on his 75th Birthday, ed. Walter von Baeyer and Richard M. Griffith (Berlin and New York: Springer, 1966), pp. 255-271.

"Humanism and Death," in Moral Problems in Contemporary Society: Essays in Humanistic Ethics, ed. Paul Kurtz (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 285-298.

"On the Nature of Social Man," in Patterns o[the Life-World: Essays in Honor o[lohn Wild, ed. James M. Edie, Francis H. Parker, and Calvin O. Schrag (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 248-270.

"Phenomenology, Typification, and the World as Taken for Granted," in Philomathes: Studies and Essays in the Humanities in Memory o[ Phillip NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY 341

Merlan, ed. Robert B. Palmer and Robert Hamerton-Kelly (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 383-397.

"On Conceptual Nihilism, " in Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester E. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 287-305.

"Alfred Schutz Symposium: The Pregivenness of SOciality," in Interdisciplinary Phenomenology, ed. Don Ihde and Richard M. Zaner (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), pp. 109-123.

"Philosophy and Social Science: A Phenomenological Approach," in Foundations ofPolitical Science: Research, Methods, and Scope, ed. Donald M. Freeman (New York: The Free Press, 1977), pp. 517-552.

"The Arts of Indirection," in Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Literature: An Exploration, ed. Don M. Burks (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1978), pp. 35-47.

"Foreword" to The Theory of Social Action: The Co"espondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons, ed. Richard Gtathoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. ix-xvi.

"The Problem of Anonymity in the Thought of Alfred Schutz," in Phenomenology and the Social Sciences: A Dialogue, ed. Joseph Bien (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 60-73. Translated into German by Astrid and Bruno Hildenbrand as "Das Problem der Anonymität im Denken von Alfred Schutz," Alfred Schutz und die Idee des Alltags in den Sozialwissenschaften, hrsg. Walter M. Sprondel und Richard Grathoff (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1979), 78-88.

"The Original Chaos," in Man and Value: Essays in Honor of William H. Werkmeister, ed. E. F. Kaelin (Tallahasse: University Presses of Florida, 1981), pp. 97-108.

"The Problem of Others in Being and Nothingness," in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Arthur Schilpp (LaSalle: Open Court, 1981), pp. 326-344.

"Foreword" to Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology: A Critical Commentary by James M. Edie (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. ix-xv.

"The Strangeness in the Strangeness," in Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition, ed. Robert Sokolowski (Washington, D. C.: 342 NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Catholic University of America Press, 1988), pp. 183-195.

"Foreword" to Philosophers in Exile: The Co"espondence Between Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939-1959, ed. Richard Grathoff, trans. J. Claude Evans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. vii-xi.

"Transcendental Resonance," in Falling in Love with WlSdom, ed. David D. Karnos and Robert Shoemaker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 253-255.

"On Seeing and Being Seen," in Die Objektivität der Ordnungen und ihre kommunikative Konstruktion: fi1r Thomas Luckmann, ed. Walter M. Sprondel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), pp. 17-28.

Contributions to Encyclopaedias:

"Alfred Schutz," in International Encyclopaedia ofthe Social Sciences, v. 14, ed. David L. Sills (New York: MacMillan and Free Press, 1968), pp. 72- 74.

"Jean-Paul Sartre," in Encyclopaedia of Religion, v. 23, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: MacMillan, 1987), pp. 74-75.

Books Edited:

Collected Papers, v. I: The Problem of Social Reality by Alfred Schutz, with an Introduction by Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhhoff, 1962).

Philosophy of the Social Sciences: AReader, with an Introduction by Maurice Natanson (New York: Random House, 1963).

Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Argumentation, co-edited by Henry W. Johnstone, Jr.,; with an Introduction by both editors and a Foreword by Robert T. Oliver (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1965).

Essays in Phenomenology, with an Introduction by Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).

Psychiatry and Philosophy, with aPreface by Maurice Natanson and Erwin W. Straus (Berlin and New York: Springer, 1969). [Note: Natanson's contribution to this volume includes the English version of NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY 343

"Philosophische Grundfragen der Psychiatrie I: Philosophie und Psychiatrie" (1963)].

Phenomenology and Social Reality: Essays in Memory 0/ Alfred Schutz, with an Introduction by Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).

Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, 2 vols., with an Introduction by Maurice Natanson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

Books:

A Critique 0/ Jean-Paul Sartre's Ontology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Studies, 1951). Reprinted by Martinus Nijhoff, 1973.

The Social Dynamics 0/ George H. Mead, with an Introduction by Horace M. Kallen (Washington, D. c.: Public Affairs Press, 1956). Reprinted by Martinus Nijhoff, 1973 (translated into Japanese and published in Japan in 1983).

Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962).

The Joumeying Self: A Study in Philosophy and Social Role (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1970).

Edmund Husserl: Philosopher 0/ Infinite Tasks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

Phenomenology, Role, and Reason: Essays on the Coherence and Deformation 0/ Social Reality (SpringfieId: Charles C. Thomas, 1974).

Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy 0/ Alfred Schutz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). CONTRIBUTORS

MICHAEL BARBER is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis U nivers• ity. He has published two books, Social Typijications and the Elusive Other and Guardian of Dialogue as weH as numerous articles in such journals as Philosophy Today and Human Studies.

JUDllli BU1LER is Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987); Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (Routledge, 1993). She is currently at work on two projects: a philosophical consider• ation of "subjection," and aseries of essays on speech and conduct in contemporary political life.

STEVEN GALT CROWELL, Associate Professor ofPhilosophy and Humanities at Rice University, learned the phenomenological craft in Maurice Natanson's courses at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Crowell's current research centers on the ethical ground of transcendental philosophy, and on aesthetics. Among his recent publications are essays on the early Heidegger, Husserl's philosophy of nature, and neo-Kantianism.

JAMES M. EDlE, Professor of Philosophy, a native of Grand Forks, North Dakota, received his bachelor's degree at Saint John's University, then studied at the Athenreum Anselmianum in Rome, before completing his doctoral studies at the University of Louvain in Belgium in 1958. Edie has spent almost his entire career at Northwestern University. Arriving in 1961, he rose to the rank of professor in 1971, and chaired the Department for six years in the 1970s, and helped build its current strengths in Continental philosophy. Edie pioneered the introduction of phenomenology and exist• entialism into the United States, as a translator, editor, philosopher, and one of the founders of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philoso• phy. He also helped establish the Northwestern University Press Series in Phenomenology and until recently served as its editor. He is the author of four books in phenomenology and language, Speaking and Meaning, The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, William fames and Phenomenology, and Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy ofLanguage, and he is the editor or translator of

345 346 CON1RIBUTORS nine more. He is currently working on two books, one on existential philosophy in the theater and one a history of medireval philosophy, centered around the development of the notion of "Christian philosophy." He has served on a variety of executive committees in his profession, inc1uding the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and the International Association for Philosophy and Literature.

LESTER EMBREE (Ph.D., New School for Social Research, 1972) is the William F. Dietrich Eminent Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University. He has written, translated, and edited a number of essays and volumes in phenomenological philosophy of the cultural, naturalistic, and formal sciences and is currently interested in the constitu• tive phenomenology of ethnicity, gender, and environmentalism.

LEWIS R. GORDON teaches in the philosophy department and African American Studies and Research Center at Purdue University. He also taught at Yale University, where as a Danforth-Compton Fellow he received his doctorate in philosophy under the supervision of Maurice Natanson. He is a Fellow of the Society for Values in Higher Education and an associate editor of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience. He is the author of a number of articles on racism, identity, existential phenomenology, and social philosophy, and author of the book Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands: The Humanities Press, 1995).

NOBUO KAZASHI is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of International Studies at Hiroshima City University in Japan. After receiving Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, he went to Yale University to work under the advisorship of Maurice Natanson. His dissertation was entitled Four Variations on the Phenomen• ological Theme of 'Horizon '; James, Nishida, Merleau-Ponty, and Schutz.

FRED KERSTEN studied at Lawrence University, Brown University and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he received his PhD in Philosophy. In addition to translations of Edmund Husserl, Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz, he has published studies in various fields of phenomenology. Dr. Kersten is currently FrankenthaU Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

THOMAS LUCKMANN was born in Jesenice, Slovenia, in 1927 and has been, for the past twenty-two years, Professor of Sociology at the University of Constance, Germany. After studying at the Universities of Vienna and Innsbruck, he worked with Alfred Schutz at the New School for Social Research, receiving his PhD there with a dissertation comparing four CONlRIBUTORS 347

German Protestant parishes. He has published numerous articles on soci• ology, phenomenological foundations of the social sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and the sociology of religion. Among his books are The Invisible Religion, The Social Construction 01 Reality (with P. Berger), The Structures olthe Lifeworld, vol. 1&11 (with Alfred Schutz), The Sociology 01 Language, and Lifeworld and Social Realities. His books and articles have been trans• lated into numerous European and non-European languages, and he serves on the editorial boards of several journals and series in the social and cultural sciences.

MICHAEL F. McDuFFIE is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio. As an undergraduate he attended New College of the University of South Florida, and he pursued graduate work at Yale University, where he received his doctorate in 1992. At Yale he worked extensively with Maurice Natanson, as a student and teaching assistant, and his doctoral dissertation, World and Life-World: A Study in Husserl's Phenomenology, was directed by Natanson.

JOSHUA MILLER took courses in the philosophy of existence and Edmund Husserl with Maurice Natanson at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of The Rise and Fall 01 Democracy in Early America, 1630- 1789 (Penn State Press), and teaches political theory in the Department of Government and Law at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Tbis essay was written during a Fellowship year at the National Humanities Center in 1993-94.

VICTORIA MORA is Tutor at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her particular interests focus on a phenomenology of the lived body. She received her PhD at Yale University, under the direction of Maurice Natanson. Tbe early drafts of the essay published here were written during a Fellowship year supported by the Ford Foundation.

GILBERT T. NULL was introduced to Husserlian phenomenology by Maurice Natanson at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and pursued graduate studies at the New School for Social Research. His dissertation (undertaken under the direction of Aron Gurwitsch and accepted by J. N. Mohanty upon Gurwitsch's death) examined intentionalities involved in physical science. He is the author of sixteen articles concerning Husserlian phenomenology and formal ontology, many ofwhich concern the part-whole analysis of dependent and independent universals and particulars characteris• tic of Husserl's early writings.

DAVID ROYAL graduated summa cum laude from Yale College, where he studied with Maurice Natanson and wrote a senior thesis, "Tbe World as 348 CONTRIBUTORS

Taken for Granted," on Husserl, Schutz, and the phenomenological reduc• tion. In 1993-94 he taught in the English department at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany.

ALFRED SCHUTZ (1899-1959) was educated at the University of Vienna. His book, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, appeared in 1932 (and was translated as The Phenomenology o[ the Social World, 1967). Three volumes of his Collected Papers have been posthumously published. Dr. Schutz was Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research.

GAIL WEISS is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University and Associate Director of the PhD program in the Human Sciences. She has authored articles in continental philosophy and feminist theory and did her graduate work at Yale with Maurice Natanson, where she completed a dissertation on Merleau-Ponty and Mead entitled "The Hermen• eutics of Gesture. "

OSBORNE P. WIGGINS, JR. is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky. He has published articles on phenomenology, ethics, philosophy of medicine, and psychiatry. He is one of the founding members of the Association for the Advancement of Philo• sophy and Psychiatry and of its journal, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psycholo• gy. Along with John Z. Sadler, M.D., and Michael Alan Schwartz, M.D., he has edited Philosophical Perspectives on Psychiatrie Diagnostic Classification (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

RICHARD M. ZANER is Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor of Medical Ethics and Director, The Center for Clinical and Research Ethics, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He founded and directs the Clinical Ethics Consulting Service for Vanderbilt University Hospitals and Clinics, and established the Clinical Ethics Program at Saint Thomas Hospital (Nashville, TN). He holds secondary appointments in Philosophy, Graduate Religious Studies, Divinity, and Nursing. In addition to more than 80 articles and book chapters, he has edited ten books and published five original studies, the latest of which are: Ethics and the Clinical Encounter (Prentice-Hall, 1988) and Troubled Voices: Stories o[ Ethics and Illness (Pilgrim Press, 1993). INDEX

Abraham, 239 255-263 absolute, 49 artworld, 256 absurd, 23, 110, 19n Asclepius, 161 act, 232; creative, 214n asymmetry, physician/patient, 159-160 acting, categories of, 243; theatrical and Augustine of Hippo, 315 mundane, 232, 234, 248-249 authenticity, 237. See also existence action, 144, 208-209, 243, 255; psycholog• authority, 159 ical roots of, in James, 133, 136 Averroes, 280 actor, dramatic, 234; political, 134 n.12, awareness, types of presentational and 140-141, 142; unavoidable self-mis• representational, 60-70; non-Iinguistic, understanding of, 283 65; combination of types of, 68 adequacy, 66; pictorial, 65, 66; indicational, axiology, 81 66-67 Ayer, A J., 238 aiila (between), 180 Albert, Hans, 101, 103-104 bad faith, 108-110, 113, 114,243,295; alienation, 28; and racism, 125; as theatri• Fanon's failure to acknowledge, 125- cal tool, 249-250; Gregor Samsa's, 226, 127; in psychiatrie treatment, 39-41; in 229. See also Verfremdungseffekt Sartre's theory of human reality, 234- aloneness, 239 237; Natanson's definition of, 107 alter ego, 84-91. See also Other Barrett, William, 291 anamnesis, 283 Barthelme, Donald, 306 anatomy, 304 beginnings, philosophical, 15, 73, 278, 284; Anatomy 0/ Melancholy (Robert Burton), as an existential problem, 331. See also 4, 7 evidence, origin Angst. See anxiety being, 172, 206; and meaning, 5,12; solip- anonymity, 185, 186, 227, 228, 229, 318 sistic, 21; sonority of, 186 Anse1m, 331 belief, 133. See also faith anthropology, Sartre's philosophical, 235, Berger, Gaston, 45 237,241. See also human reality Bergson, Henri, 211 anticipation, horizonal, 211 Berkeley, George, 15 anti-foundationalism, 95, 105 biographical situation, 155-156. See also anti-humanism, 319-320 situation anxiety, 6, 28, 186, 239-240; fundamental bodily movement, 193-194, 197, 200 (Schutz), 26, 187, 333 body, 85-86, 113, 159 n.13, 198, 202; in Apel, Karl-Otto, 93, 99-106 bad faith, 109; psychic experience re• apprehension, 6; and tragic narrative, 7 vealed in motion oe, 191, 193-194, 195- appresentation, of Iifeworld in art, 218, 196. See also lived body 219n Borges, J. L., 262 argumentation, 99, 100-101 Bouwsma, O. K., 296, 297, 299, 316 Aristotle, 7, 232, 247 Brecht, Bertolt 244, 247-248, 251 art, lnstitutional Theory of, 256, 259, 274; Buber, Martin, 315 ontology of, 260; phenomenological ap• Bumham, James, 289-290, 291, 296, proach to, 210-212; relation to life, 217- Bumham, Walter Dean, 134 219 Burton, Robert,4,6,7 artwork, 257, 261; ontological problem of,

349 350 INDEX

Cabalism, 327 Douglass, Frederick, 123 Cairns, Dorion, 54 n.17, 73 n.2, 308, 314, drama, 252. See also play, theater 328 dreaming, 33-34 Cassirer, Ernst, 282 dream-Iife, 210 catharsis, 7, 8, 247 Du Bois, W. E. B., 118 causality, solipsistic, 22 Duchamp, Marcel, 259-260, 273 causal explanation, 35-37 dur~e, 214 Camus, Albert, 23 Dussel, Enrique, 93, 95 Centeno y Rilova, 251 Chandler, Albert, 298 ego, 9, 10-11,25,51,50-52; and proto• Chapman, Harmon, 291 identity, 84-91; as responsible, 91; choice, 81, 123, 328; free, 239-240, 330; solipsistic, 17, 27; transcendental, 51 moral. See moral choice; of racism, 115 n.11, 121 n.44, 175, 279, 313-314, 315, cognition, 59. See also evidence 317. See also self, individual cognitive styles, 206-208, 210-211, 212 Ego anti the Id, The (Freud), 10-11 commitment, 144, 164 eidos, 285 communication, 77, 79,177-178; in c1inical eidetic analysis, 282 practice, 149, 152-153; indirect, 304. See eidetic singularity, 176 also indirection embodiment, 113, 201 Conrad,Joseph,330 empathy, 248, 249 consciousness, 80-81, 133, 183, 194n, 203, enclave, 216-217 214,235-236. See also experience, encounter, c1inical, 154, 156, 163 intentionality, subjectivity epilogismos, 149, 150 constitution, phenomenological, 46, 83, epistemology, 278-279 57-58,175,179,182-183,314,328 epocM, 47, 53, 198; and the existential contradiction, performative, 102, 104 dimension, 40; in aesthetic experience, conversation, clinical, 149, 153, 156-157, 213, 215. See also reduction 158; of attitudes, 178; of gestures, 178. equality, 137 See also communication essai,5 conversion, 243, 290 essence, 236-237, 244. See also eidos Cooley, Charles Horton, 87n ethics, 238, 240,291, 328. See also morality Copernican Revolution, Kant's, 43, 49 evaluation, 81. See also valuation courage, 149 nA evidence, 15, 103, 323; existential sense of, crisis, 281-282 315, 318; in bad faith, 110, 116. See also experience Danto, Arthur, 255-263, 272-274 evidencing, 59, 68 Danton's Death (Georg Büchner), 27n existence, 185, 227, 331; and essence, 236- Darwin, Charles, 143-144 237; current of, 322. See also human Davis, Angela, 111 n.13 reality death, 26-27, 186,327-328,333 existential dimension, 39 decay,5-6 experience, 19,31-32, 197, 295, 321; aes• democracy, 133, 135, 138, 146 thetic, 210, 212-214, 215; and meaning, depiction, 65, 66 188,205,219; musical, 173, 174-176, Derrida, Jacques, 95-97, 99 180, 181, 184, 185 n.27; political, 133. Descartes, Rene, 17, 53, 287 See also consciousness, evidence description, 36, 37, 75, 190. See also meth- expression, Iinguistic, 62, 64, 65 od extensionality, mereological, 259 Dickie, George 259 extentionalism, linguistic, 261n; mereolog- Dilthey, Wilhelm, 312 ical,263 discourse, 128 n.66, 151. See also commun• Ey, Henri, 322 ication, conversation disease, 150, 158 falIibilism, 101-102, 104 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 233, 294, 316, 328 familiarity, 189, 226 INDEX 351

Fanon, Frantz, 114, 117, 120, 124-127 ideals, 142, 143-144, 145, 186 Farber, MaIVin, 308 ideal types, 35. See also typification faith, 141-42, 144. See also belief ideas, musical, 173-174 feeling, affiliative, 164, 166 identification, 11, 175-176, 247 femininity, 191, 198-201 identity, personal, 82-83, 122, 223, 224, fetishism, 25 230; mereological, 258, 259. See also Fink, Eugen, 44, 53, 279 proto-identity, Self Flamenco, 191-197 illness, 150, 151, 154 foundations, BO, 99, 105, 314, 315, 318; imaginal)', the, 57, 236 original)' and final, 280, 281, 283-284. imagination, 250, 295 See also evidence indication, 66-67 foundationalism, 94, 104, 313 indirection, 301, 304-305, 327. See also freedom, 24, 127, 231, 239-240, 245, 330. communication See also choice individual, 8, 41, 122, 314, 320-321, 323, Freud, Sigmund, 9, 10, 27, 109 n.4, 241 325. See also ego, Self, subject friendship, 186 individuality, 37 individualization, 186 Gadamer, H. G., 312 individuation, principle of, 261, 271 gender, 190-191, 198, 199, 203n; and race, Ingarden, Roman, 51 112-113; of transcendental ego, 51 n.ll institutions, political, 145 genderfication, 200 intentionality, 55 n.19, 95, 242. See also Gierke, Otto von, 282, 285 consciousness Godkin, E. L., 132 intentive processes, 69 good, actions typified as, 90 interpretation, 151-152, 158,286. See also Great Depression, 292, 295 hermeneutics, semeiosis Gyges the Lydian, 162 intersubjectivity, 32-33, 41, 184. See also Gurwitsch, Aron, 74 n.2, 308 aida,Other inwardness, 314-315, 317, 318 Hall, Everett, 307 Habermas, Jürgen, 94 n.1, 101, 104 James, William, 131 passim, 181, 206, 308 Hegel, G. W. F., 121 n.43, 286, 320-321 Jaspers, Karl, 37-38 hermeneutics, 157-160,233,312 justice, 118-119, 127 n.62, 328 Heidegger, Martin, 26, 186, 221n, 296 Hippocratic Oath, 152n, 160-161 Kafka, Franz, 221, 225 n.6, 317-318, 320 histol)', 121-122, 128, 250; philosophy of Kallen, Horace, 308-309 120-123,280,286 Kant, Immanuel, 22, 43, 51, 238, 239, 280 historicism, 75 Kaufmann, Fritz, 306, 313 homelessness, dialectic of, 321-322 Kierkegaard, Soren, 119,211,239,297, Hook, Sidney, 289, 294, 295 299,301,314,320-321 horizon, 94, 182-183, 187, 216-217, 283, Kimura, Bin, 180-181, 183-184 321 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 137 n.19, 143 human comportment, 201 knowledge, 242. See also cognition, truth human condition, 80, 84 human interaction, 184 Lange~Suzanne, 147,291 human nature, 244 language, 8, 61, 316; and the Other, 86, 95, human reality, 236, 239 97. See also expression humanity, 109, 280 Lasch, Christopher, 138 Husserl, Edmund, 15 passim, 44 passim, Leibniz, G. W., 259, 286-287 98,103,175,189,222,232,277-287, Levinas, Emmanuel, 20, 94-99, 104-106, 291,296,300-301,311,327,331 186-187, 315 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 171-173 idealism, transcendental 48 liberation, 111, 127, 129 ideality, 173, 174, 186 life, 211, 217, 232, 241, 247, 328; as tran- 352 INDEX

scendental ground, 45, 48; everyday, moral institutions, 79 158, 224 moral judgments, 81 lifeworld, 41, 84, 98, 122, 185, 205, 206- moral order, 78 207, 285; and art, 212, 215; and pathol• moral principles, 240 ogy, 32-35, 324 moral recognition, 163 literature, 327, 329 moral reflection, 119 Litt, Theodore, 85 n.16 morality, 77, 83, 91. See also proto-morali• lived body, 20, 21, 23, 24. See also body ty Logosvergessenheit, 100 morals, 78-79 London, Jack, 294 morbidity, eidetics of, 31-32. See also lonliness, 28. See also aloneness, solipsism pathology Look, the, 114,237-238,249; and gender, motivation, political, 134; for philosophiz- 194-195,201-203 ing, 281, 319 Louis, Joe, 298 Mozart, W. A, 179 love, 98, 137 n.19, 186, 333 multiple realities, 184, 205, 333 Murdoch, Iris, 238 ma (synonym for aiäa), 180-181 music, 172-174, 176, 179, 229. See also Machiavelli, Niccolo, 135 experience MandeIa, Nelson, 138 musical inteIVals, 181, 182-183 Manichreism, 116, 124 MusiI, Robert, 75 material counterpart, 257, 258-259 myth, 173, 241, 245 masculinity, 191, 198-201 Marcel, GabrieI, 39, 329 narrative, 7-8, 152, 173 Me, the, 222, 230, 238 Natanson, Maurice, 3, 4, 7, 11, 19, 26, 27, Mead, G. H., 86, 87n, 178, 300 31 passim, 43, 56, 73-74, 84 n.14, 107- meaning, 16, 19, 32, 172, 176, 178, 185, 108,114,121-122,128-129,178,185, 187, 242, 283, 311; finite provinces of, 186, 218, 224, 227-228 206-208, 209; in art, 219; in theater, nature, solipsistic, 19-23 253; Iinguistic, 5; of a text, 233; solipsis• natural attitude, 114, 190, 206-207, 212- tic, 20, 28-29. See also significance 213, 222-224, 226, 286 medicine, 147-150, 153, 162, 301-304; natural law, 76-77 ancient traditions in, 147-148; and natural standpoint. See natural attitude hermeneutics, 157-160 negritude, 123, 124-125 melancholy, 4-6; and world-horizon, 7-8 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 25 mental process (Erlebnis), 52. See also con• Nightwatch, The (Rembrandt), 57 sciousness, intentionality nihilation, 235-236, 330 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 20, 44 passim, Nishida, Kitaro, 183 171-174,182,321 noema, 17, 51 metamorphosis, 21, 223, 226, 230 Noh drama, 180 metaphysical constants, 323 nothingness, 249. See also consciousness, metaphysics, 279. See also ontology, being nihilation method, c1inical, 154; phenomenological, 35-37,46,47,55,191,279 obligation, 84, 91. See also morality MiII, John Stuart, 132, 138 objectivity, 61, 89 mirroring, 86-89. See also Other, intersub- Ockham, William of, 239 jectivity O'Neill, Eugene, 293 Montaigne, Michel de, 5, 315 ontology, 52, 113, 125, 127, 204; regional, moral absolutism, 76, 135 256 moral character of medicine, 161, 163-164 origin, of moral order, 75; phenomeno• moral choice, 239-240, 247 logical, 83, 282, 311 moral claims, 246 Ortega y Gasset, Jos~, 54 n.17 moral function in communication, 78 Other, the, 11-12, 29, 95, 97-98, 110, 188; moral hero, 240-241. See also theater and race, 125; and reason, 99; and INDEX 353

religious transcendence, 315; as funda• being, meaning mentally unfamiliar, 319; givenness of, reason,98 12, 93, 95, 238, 318, 332; encounter reasoning, medical, 148-149 with, 163, 178, 185, 323; work of art as, recognition, 139, 163, 295, 318, 323 214 recollection, 64. See also anamnesis ownness, 18, 19, 21 reduction, phenomenological, 52, 54, 55, 313; to ownness, 17-18. See also meth• painting, 172,217-218 od, phenomenology Parallelaktion, 75, 80 reflection, 68, 69, 191; diagnostic, 3; phen- part relation, 258 omenological, 16, 46, 70, 103, 207 parts, theory of irregular, 265, 267-269 relativism, 76 Pascal, Blaise, 331 relevance, 82, 85, 87, 208-209, 287 pathology, 118, 316, 324. See also morbidi• Rembrandt, 57 ty representation, varieties of, 59 Peirce, C. S., 297 respect, 133, 136-140. See also recognition person, 137, 150,241,249; morbid, 32-35. Respectjul Prostitute, The (Sartre), 116-117 See also ego, Self responsibility, 16, 118, 240 perspectives, 110; reciprocity of, 85, 88, 89 Rice, lohn, 310 phenomenology, 15-16,44,46,55,69,73, Ricoeur, Paul, 18 213,255,279,286,305,308,311-314, roles, 40, 123, 235 326, 333; constructive, 48, 56, 279; Rorty, Richard, 13 existential, 114, 127, 129, 319; transcen• dental, 15, 279, 284 sameness, 176; substantive, 260, 262, 263, Phenomenology 0/ Perception (Mealeau• 273 Ponty), 44-47 Samsa, Gregor, 221 passim, 320, 322 phenomenology of phenomenology, 46, 48, Santayana, George, 132 50, 54 Sartre, lean-Paul, 57, 108-110, 113, 119- philosopher, 281, 324-325 120,123-124,195, 231passim, 291, 305- philosophy, 39, 278, 287, 317, 324-325, 306, 316, 330 326. See also phenomenology Scheler, Max, 240 philosophy of philosophy, 98 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 229 physician, 148, 155-157; and power, 162 Schutz, Alfred, 41,73-74,82,98,158,174- Pirandello, Luigi, 233, 234 180, 182-183, 205-206, 211, 216, 224, play, 232, 248. See also drama, theater 227, 277, 300-301, 304, 307, 326 pluralism, 133, 136, 140-142 seeing, 66, 311; phenomenological, 41; pluralistic universe, 140, 145 therapeutic value of, 37-39. See also politics, 135-136, 145. See also democracy evidence, phenomenology pragmatism, 140, 297, 308-309 Self, the, 5, 7-8, 85, 235; and proto-identi• presuppositions, 100-102 ty, 88; and social roles, 40; as object, proto-identity, 84-91. See also ego, Self 238; in aesthetic experience, 214; in proto-morality, 76-77, 80, 82-91 natural attitude, 222-224; in solipsism, Proust, Marcel, 173 24; insubstantiality of, 6, 12; inwardness psychiatry, 31 passim, 289, 327 of, 320; presentation of, 304. See also psychic restraint, 191, 194, 197, 201-202 ego, person, subject psychic saturation, 191, 194, 197,201-202 self-consciousness, of blacks, 121 n.43 psychoanalysis, 291, 302; existential, 241 self-contemplation, Husserl's, 280-282, 285 self-deception, in chronic iIIness, 165 n.18 race, 111 n.13, 112-113, 128 self-discovery, 315 racism, 115-118, 125 self-explication, 16-17 radicality, philosophical, 311 self-misunderstanding, philosopher's un• Rank, üUo, 290 avoidable, 283, 284, 285 rationality, 179; communicative, 102, 105 self-interpretation, patient's, 153 reality, 179, 206, 210, 290, 332. See also self-reflection, 95, 99 354 INDEX self-reflexivity, 221n therapeutic intent, 302 selfhood, 40, 186. See also authentieity thing, solipsistic, 20-22 semeiosis, 149, 152. See also interpretation Thou, 177, 227. See also Other seriousness, spirit of, 111, 124-125 time, 46-47, 48, 52, 53; and moral identity, sex, and gender, 190, 198-199 83; musical, 182 Siger of Brabant, 280 toleration, 139 significance, existential, 242. See also Tolstoy, Leo, 294, 322 meaning trace, 97 signification, non-conceptual, 175, 176-177 tradition, 281, 282, 284 Simmel, Georg, 89, 196,328,332 tragedy, 7, 247, 250 situation, 177, 209; and raeism, 115-118, transcendence, 46, 314, 315, 317-318; of 120; face-to-face, 185; postcolonial, 128 the Other, 29 n.66; theater of, 244-245 Trotsky, Leon, 289 Smith, Page, 309 trust, 156-157, 162 soeial competence, 79-80 truth, 13,60,61, 144; in James, 134, 140; soeial conflict, 133-134 in theater, 247, 250; in philosophy, 312, soeial constructions, 76 327 social theory, Sartre's early, 113-114 Tugendhat, Ernst, 83n soeial world, 179 tuning-in relationship, 177-178. See also sociality, 214, 332-333 Other solipsism, 14-15, 17,20,21-22,330,331- typification, 32, 40, 41, 85, 88, 185, 226- 332; and bad faith, 109; and morbidity, 227,323 33; transcendental, 17, 279; truth of, 23, Tyson, Mike, 111 n.13 238 solUY ipse, 33 uncanny,29 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 300 uncertainty, in medieine, 165-166 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 249, 251 unconscious, 242 Storer, Thomas, 297 understanding, 37, 39, 139 strange, the, 19, 23, 28, 35 universality, 102 strangeness, 32, 319 universals, cultural, 80 strangers, 156, 228 Straus, ElWin, 34, 327 validity, 89, 105 Stroud, Barry, 15 values, 81-82, 89-90, 111 structuralism, 171-172,233,321 value predicates, 22 subject, and object, 109; ethical, 249; of value-solipsism, 87 liberation, 111, postmodern, 121 n.44; valuations, 89-91 solipsistic, 22, 23-29. See also ego, Self Verfremdungseffekt, 248 subjectivity, 172,239,317-318,319-320; violence, 95 transcendental, 47, 313-314. See also virtues, 160. See also morality conseiousness, existence Voegelin, Eric, 277 suffering, philosophical problem of, 328- vulnerability, patient's, 160-162 329 symptom, 149, 151, 154; in history of Waters, Bruce, 298-299 medieine, 147-149 Weber, Max, 178, 304 synthesis, passive, 175-176 Werkmeister, William, 296, 297 wholes, coextensivity of, 270-272 Takemitsu, Tohru, 181, 182 will, and political action, 144-145 talk, 164n, 165. See also conversation, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 100, 255, 273, 296- dialogue 297,316,329 teaching, 301, 304 wisdom, medical, 160 theater, 233, 244, 246, 250, 252 world, 18, 53-54, 76, 234, 236; pregiven, therapy, 41, 150-151,316. See also medi• 281; pre-interpreted, 311-312; morbid, eine, psychiatry 34; transcendental, 47. See also horizon, INDEX 355

lifeworld world soul, 287 wriling, and indirection, 304-305 Contributions to Phenomenology

IN COOPERATION WITH THECENTERFORADVANCEDRESEARCHINPHENOMENOLOGY

1. F. Kersten: Phenomenological Method. Theory and Practice. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0094-7 2. E. G. Ballard: Philosophy and the Liberal Arts. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0241-9 3. H. A. Durfee and D.F.T. Rodier (eds.): Phenomenology and Beyond. The Self and Its Language. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0511-6 4. J. J. Drummond: Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism. Noema and Object. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0651-1 5. A. Gurwitsch: Kants Theorie des Verstandes. Herausgegeben von T.M. Seebohm.1990 ISBN 0-7923-0696-1 6. D. Jervolino: The Cogito and Hermeneutics. The Question of the Subject in Ricreur. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0824-7 7. B.P. Dauenhauer: Elements of Responsible Politics. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1329-1 8. T.M. Seebohm, D. F011esdal and J.N. Mohanty (eds.): Phenomenology and the Formal Sciences. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1499-9 9. L. Hardy and L. Embree (eds.): Phenomenology ofNatural Science. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1541-3 10. J.J. Drummond and L. Embree (eds.): The Phenomenology ofthe Noema. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1980-X 11. B. C. Hopkins: Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger. The Problem of the Original Method and Phenomenon of Phenomenology. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2074-3 12. P. Blosser, E. Shimomisse, L. Embree and H. Kojima (eds.): Japanese and Western Phenomenology. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2075-1 13. F. M. Kirkland and P. D. Chattopadhyaya (eds.): Phenomenology: East and West. Essays in Honor of J. N. Mohanty. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2087-5 14. E. Marbach: Mental Representation and Consciousness. Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Representation and Reference. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2101-4 Contributions to Phenomenology

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15. J.J. Kockelmans: Ideas /or a Hermeneutic Phenomenology 0/ the Natural Sciences. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2364-5 16. M. Daniel and L. Embree (eds.): Phenomenology 0/ the Cultural Disciplines. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2792-6 17. T.J. Stapleton (ed.): The Question 0/ Hermeneutics. Essays in Honor of Joseph J. Kockelmans. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2911-2; Pb 0-7923-2964-3 18. L. Embree, D. Carr, J.C. Evans, J. Huertas-Jourda, J.J. Kockelmans, W.R. McKenna, A. Mickunas, J.N. Mohanty, T.M. Seebohm and RM. Zaner (eds.): Encyclopedia 0/ Phenomenology. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2956-2 19. S. G. Crowell (ed.): The Prism 0/ the Self. Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3546-5

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