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Contributions To Phenomenology

In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology

Volume 100

Series Editors Nicolas de Warren, Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA Ted Toadvine, Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA

Editorial Board Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven, Belgium David Carr, Emory University, GA, USA Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University Hong Kong, China James Dodd, New School University, NY, USA Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University, FL, USA Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Italy Burt Hopkins, University of Lille, France José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University Hong Kong, China Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Korea Rosemary R.P. Lerner, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne, Germany William R. McKenna, Miami University, OH, USA Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, OH, USA J.N. Mohanty, Temple University, PA, USA Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Japan Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, TN, USA Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Germany Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy Anthony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL, USA Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Japan Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA Scope The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than 80 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship, the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of the Series reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach of phenomenological research. The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5811 Michela Beatrice Ferri Editor

The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America

In Collaboration with Carlo Ierna Editor Michela Beatrice Ferri Holy Apostles College and Seminary Cromwell, CT, USA

In Collaboration with Carlo Ierna

ISSN 0923-9545 ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic) Contributions To Phenomenology ISBN 978-3-319-99183-2 ISBN 978-3-319-99185-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99185-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018968119

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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To Lester Embree who died on the 19th of January 2017, while this volume was under revision. Starting from the Spring of 2010 I have had the benefit of his supervision during my researches devoted to the history of the reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America. I am sure that together with me each contributor of this volume knows how immense was Lester Embree’s desire to see this book published. Preface

Edmund Husserl conceived and developed his phenomenology during the final years of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth centuries, in the brilliant intellectual environment – mathematical, psychological, philosophical – of Austria and Germany, in the cities of Vienna, Berlin, Halle, Gottingen, and Freiburg, in conversation with Karl Weierstrass, Franz Brentano, Georg Cantor, David Hilbert, and Wilhelm Dilthey. Husserl lived in a scholarly world, but the academy was obviously only part of a larger setting. The last three decades of his life were profiled against monumental historical events: the First World War, its chaotic aftermath, and the National Socialist tyranny that led to an even greater world conflict, which began in the year following his death in 1938. Husserl’s philosophical thought, being an achievement of the mind, was able to lift itself beyond its given place and time, but it came into being in a place and at a time, in the company of certain indi- viduals, and in a particular cultural and historical setting. This book describes how his philosophy was displaced from its central European origins to the much larger geographic location of North America, and how it was received there, in the more diverse academic population of that part of the world. The book is an exercise in hermeneutics. It studies how a complex ideal meaning can be constituted and exercise its effects, not just where and when it originates but also in different minds and situations, and how it can remain identifiable even while being modified in its new environment.

§ I

The title of the book speaks not of Husserl’s Phenomenology but of Husserlian Phenomenology; it uses an adjective and not a noun. The book examines a topic that is wider than Husserl’s own thought, and many other authors in this philosophical and cultural movement are examined. Husserl, however, is not just one among the many. He is the strategic and pivotal center, the one without whom it would not have come together as an identifiable whole. Even more, he is not just the necessary

vii viii Preface condition but the font and origin. He was influenced by others but his mind was not an inflection of someone else’s; he was the philosophical self-starter and paradigm who gave what we know as phenomenology its celebrated name and its substantial form. Most of us are acquainted with fragments of the phenomenology in North America. We know several scholars and some institutions and journals, and we are vaguely aware of various other components, but we are most likely not sure who or what these others are and how they fit in. This book, in contrast, offers us the com- plete picture, rounded out in all its details and showing all the connections in time and space. It fills in the gaps and tells us what we should know about people and things that might have been just names or shadows to us. The reception of this philosophical way of thinking is not just a theoretic achievement but also a rich and varied intellectual history. The transmission of Husserlian Phenomenology to North America can be described as having taken place in four successive waves. The first, described in the first four chapters of this book, occurred in the years before the First World War. It involved especially the universities of Harvard and Göttingen, the reciprocal philosophical interest between Josiah Royce and Husserl, and two Harvard students who went to Germany to study with Husserl, William Ernest Hocking, who studied briefly with him in 1902–1903, and the Canadian scholar Winthrop Packard Bell, who studied and wrote his dissertation with him in 1911–1914. Both Hocking and Bell subsequently taught at Harvard, the former in a lifetime career and the latter for only a short time. There was another Harvard philosophy student who had a more incidental and merely literary contact with Husserl at that time, T. S. Eliot, who reports in one of his letters that he spent the month of August 1914 “immured” in Marburg reading the Logische Untersuchungen.1 Because of the outbreak of war, Eliot left Germany for Oxford without having met Husserl. We will speak of him later. The second wave took place during the 15 or so years after the First World War. It involved a number of noted American scholars, again mainly from Harvard, who studied with Husserl at Freiburg and then returned to North America and represented his thought there, figures such as Dorion Cairns, Marvin Farber, and John Wild. The third wave in the transmission of Husserlian Phenomenology, however, moved in the opposite direction. It involved not American scholars going to Europe but Europeans emigrating to North America in the 1930s, under the totalitarian and anti-Semitic regime in Germany in the years leading up to the Second World War. Dietrich von Hildebrand, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, and Herbert Spiegelberg could be mentioned among them. Finally, we can distinguish a fourth wave of transmission that took place after the end of the Second World War. Husserl himself was no longer there, but the Husserl- Archives had been established at Leuven, Cologne, Freiburg, and Paris, and

1 The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 5: 1930–1931, ed. Valerie Eliot, John Haffenden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 644, letter to Martin D’Arcy S.J., 19 August 1931. See also pp. 227–228, letter to Erich Alport, dated June 23, 1930. Preface ix

Husserlian, along with Heideggerian and other forms of phenomenology, became widely taught and studied in European universities. This fourth stage has gone on for over a half-century and continues in the present. It involves the kind of exchanges and institutions that can occur in times of relative peace and the rule of law. Scholars travel in both directions, journals and centers are established, conferences are held, texts are edited, and books are written, including books like this one, the kind that looks back at the progress that has been made. This volume describes in great detail not just the traffic in Husserlian Phenomenology between Europe and North America but also the way it has been grafted into the philosophical life in North America itself. The book shows how the New School for Social Research served as the strategic academic center for phenomenology, in regard to both philosophy and the social sciences, and how other centers were established, such as the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University. It describes how SPEP, The Husserl Circle, and other societies were formed and flourished, how the journal Husserl Studies was founded with a co-editorship in Germany and the United States, and how The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy was begun as a way to continue the tradition of Husserl’s own Jahrbuch. It describes how scholars born and bred in North America, such as Maurice Natanson and Dallas Willard, to mention only two, have contributed to Husserlian Phenomenology. This philosophical tradition has become so naturalized in North America that it has taken on some of the topography of the continent, having become differentiated into a “West Coast” or “California” variant, influenced by Husserl’s one-time critic Gottlob Frege, and an “East Coast” version, which favors Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, both of which are discussed in this book.

§ II

Phenomenology was a broad and diverse development in German and Austrian thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The School of Brentano, the Munich and Göttingen groups, and various logicians and psychologists were engaged in philosophical analysis of the forms of consciousness and the things pre- sented in them. The event that condensed phenomenology into a more crystalized and unified movement was Husserl’s transition into transcendental idealism. This occurred in his Göttingen lectures in 1907 and more publicly in the first volume of his Ideas, which appeared in 1913. This step in his philosophy involved two distinct moments: the epoché, in which we suspend our assertions and beliefs and “bracket” the world and the things in it, and the reduction, in which we turn to the conscious subject and see it as the field for philosophical exploration; we go on to describe the many forms of our intentional activity and the objects that are their objective cor- relates, and we acknowledge the transcendental ego as the identity that is active in and responsible for them. Husserl claims that in this subject we find a domain of absolute being, with the world and things in it now understood as relative to that x Preface domain, since from this perspective they are taken as constituted by the subject. It seemed to many readers that in this step Husserl adopted an idealism like that of Berkeley or Fichte. The Cartesian flavor of this development in his thinking and the vocabulary he used to express it reinforced the impression of a radical idealism, which contrasted with the realism of his earlier work. Many people who had been attracted to Husserl’s earlier thought were disap- pointed and even repelled by this development. They continued to admire his particular analyses but did not follow him in his adoption of transcendental phenomenology. On the other hand, because Husserl went so far toward a unified theoretic philosophy in this move, he seemed to provide an extreme focal point, a kind of north star, in relation to which all other scholars and approaches in phenomenology could find their philosophical orientation and be classified either positively or negatively, in different degrees of attraction or repulsion. Husserl’s turn to idealism seemed to offer a capstone to phenomenology. This fundamental contrast between transcendental phenomenology and a less idealist, more bourgeois kind still prevails, even in the Husserlian Phenomenology now present in North America. The scandal of his idealism remains to be dealt with. It comes up frequently in the essays in this volume. I would like to offer an alternative and less disaffecting interpretation of Husserl’s use of the epoché and reduction. Instead of interpreting it in terms of a transition from realism to idealism, I suggest that we take it as similar to what Plato does when he introduces the Eleatic Stranger into the Sophist and the Statesman and the Athenian Stranger into the Laws. In both instances the Greek term is ξέvoς, a stranger or foreigner, someone alien. These outsiders resemble Socrates himself, who insofar as he was a philosopher became somewhat of a stranger to his friends and compatriots in Athens. Many of Socrates’ own people did not get the point of what he was doing and could not understand why he was worried about the things that concerned him, and many of Husserl’s academic associates were equally puz- zled when he tried to clarify how exactly his work was not logic or psychology but something quite different. Husserl is more like the Eleatic Stranger than the Athenian, because he and the disciple of Parmenides and Zeno deal with logistics and mathematics, with the names of things and their definitions, and both of them proceed by making strategic distinctions. The Athenian Stranger, in contrast, is more concerned with the laws of a city, how the laws make a city to be what it is, and how a city can be brought into being, and these concerns make him different as a philosopher from Husserl, who did not turn his mind in that direction. Husserl discovered philosophy within the context of modern mathematical science, not within political life and the human things that are associated with it. In other words, the main issue is not that Husserl was simply converted to idealism as opposed to realism. It is that he understands more clearly that philosophy as such requires a more radical break with ordinary experience and life, that it must distance itself in a strange and distinctive way from our normal involvement with things, and that it needs to go beyond the mathematical sciences and distance itself even from them and from the kind of psychological science that accompanies them. Philosophy needs to take on a new kind of responsibility as it achieves a new kind Preface xi of evidencing. Unless philosophy establishes its own autonomy and closure, it cannot clarify what the sciences are, nor can it clarify what we are as agents involved in truth. Even the natural sciences, marvelous as they are, cannot account for themselves; there cannot, for example, be a biological justification of the science of biol- ogy. Another kind of inquiry is needed, and this other kind of knowing is terminal; it must accept the obligation of justifying itself. It needs to be concerned with things that we inevitably take for granted and to people who are engaged in practical life or in specialized forms of inquiry; such an interest in the obvious seems strange or foreign as a way of thinking. Husserl’s epoché and reduction are devices he uses to nudge his early phenomenology into being first philosophy. In the historical circumstances in which he found himself, Husserl discovered resources in Descartes that helped him make this move, and it is easy to see how his readers thought that he was simply swallowed up by modern idealism, like Don Giovanni being engulfed by flames and visions at the end of the opera (with Descartes as the Commendatore, with his deadly ice-cold grip; once you shake hands with Descartes, you can’t let go). But Husserl always insisted that although he was inspired by Descartes, he differed from him in every philosophically important respect. He said that his own turn to the subject did not leave the world behind but rediscovered it from a new and unsurpassable perspective, from which he could describe philosophically how things differentiate themselves and show up to us who are datives of their manifestation.

§ III

A passage from T. S. Eliot can be used to amplify my reading of what Husserl does in his transcendental reduction. Eliot completed his dissertation on F. H. Bradley at Harvard and traveled to Europe in the summer of 1914. In several letters he says that he was reading the Logical Investigations at the time and that he found it very inter- esting but very difficult. In one of these letters he speaks, correctly enough, of “the great Husserl, who really is good, I think, though far from lucid.”2 Seventeen years after his 1914 stay in Marburg, Eliot read another work of Husserl’s, the W. R. Boyce Gibson translation of Ideas I, a book that was published in German in 1913. The translation appeared in 1931, reversing the final two digits of the original publication date. In that same year of 1931, Eliot wrote a two-part, unfinished poem entitled Coriolan, inspired by Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The first part was entitled Triumphal March and the second Difficulties of a Statesman. Triumphal March records what is said by people waiting for and watching the great parade and the great man. They describe what they see, using the first-person plural. In the first 15 lines, they describe the tumult: crowds, trumpets, eagles, and

2 Letters, Volume 5, p. 529, to Stephen Spender, March 28, 1931. See also The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1: 1898–1922, Revised Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 48–49, to Conrad Aiken, July 25, 1914; and p. 65, to J. H. Woods, October 5, 1914 xii Preface flags. Suddenly, in all this jostling, color, and excitement, the poem freezes. A single line stands still and solemn. It is taken from Husserl’s Ideas I, §39. It reads: “The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a perceiving.” An odd, impersonal remark. Who is the speaker of this line? Where does it come from? Why does it interrupt our enjoy- ment of the spectacle? Right after this line, the poem relaxes, and we are back among the spectators waiting for the parade. Eleven lines follow that tell us what happens next. The first part of the march is made up of the products of mathematical science: millions of rifles and carbines; tens of thousands of machine guns, mortars, and field guns; and thousands of “aeroplanes” and “waggons.” “What a time that took.” Other groups follow and then, finally, the great man himself, the leader of the people, of whom it is said, “There is no interrogation in his eyes.” The sentence of Husserl used by Eliot is longer in the Boyce Gibson translation. There, it reads: “The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a continuous perceiving, actual or potential.” This longer version is better philosophically. It would be desir- able to have retained the adjective “continuous” (beständiges), which reminds us that our perceiving is not an episodic occurrence but goes on uninterruptedly, like a long line drawn under everything we do, and to have kept the words “actual or potential,” which tell us that our perceiving has highs and lows, moves here and there, and comes in and out of focus. But if these words had been kept, the sentence would not fit the prosody of the poem, so Eliot shortened it. He was quoting the sentence in a poem, not in an essay. Rhetorically the most impressive feature of the line is its being so obviously out of place. It is alien to everything that comes before and after. It does not speak about the parade, which is the objective correlate of the intentionalities of the spectators; it speaks about the spectators themselves, their lives, and their intentionality. It is spoken by someone who has carried out the epoché and transcendental reduction, even though it speaks in the plural about “our” Ego and not just “my” Ego (the German text also says “unser”). All the other lines before and after are spoken from within the natural attitude, where we are captivated by the things that we see and think about, but this one line is spoken from within something like the transcendental- phenomenological attitude. Eliot’s sudden placement of the sentence is as effective as many paragraphs of philosophical explanation in helping us execute the crucial shift in perspective. It helps us carry out the philosophical defamiliarization through which even the most ordinary things, as well as the more spectacular, show up as worth wondering about. The tension between poetry and philosophy has been with us for a long time. The discoveries and inventions of mathematical science have neither resolved nor extin- guished it. In Triumphal March, poetry and philosophy are nicely reconciled, with a philosophical quotation being used in a poem (usually we find the reverse, with quotations from poetry illustrating a point in philosophy). One of the contributions of Husserlian Phenomenology has been its restoration of the lived world, the Lebenswelt, as a domain in which things can truly show up for what they are. Phenomenology shows that the substance of things, with essentials and accidentals suitably distinguished, does indeed appear to us in our natural experience of them. Preface xiii

The true identity of things can be given to us when we intelligently perceive and articulate them. A second contribution of phenomenology has been its recognition that mathematical science is indeed a legitimate source of truth – but it is not the only one. Such science is not just a way to manipulate nature; it helps us see what things truly are – but it is not the only way to do so. The lived world, with the things and goods in it, has its own ways of being known. Both these contributions have been achieved by showing philosophically what we are as transcendental subjects, that is, minded animals or agents of truth. Husserl wished to accomplish these aims in response to what he saw as the crisis in European sciences; Husserlian Phenomenology serves the same purpose through its reception in North America.

Catholic University of America Robert Sokolowski Washington, DC, USA Acknowledgments

This volume finds its roots in the long and passionate work for my doctoral dissertation, dedicated to the history of the reception of phenomenology in the United States, elaborated during my years of work as a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Philosophy of the “Università degli Studi di Milano.” The structure of this book is the result of my researches but also of my dialogues with Simona Chiodo, Elio Franzini, and Gabriele Scaramuzza. I want to remember the precious suggestions that Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, Steven Crowell, William McKenna, Paolo Spinicci, Andrea Pinotti, Carmine Di Martino, Vincenzo Costa, and my collaborator Carlo Ierna gave me addressing a theme as chiefly historical as full of theoretic insight. The spiritual support from Sebastian Mahfood, Cynthia Toolin, and Ronda Chervin, and of all the members of the Holy Apostles College and Seminary, was fundamental. My special thanks go to Michael Barber, a great scholar and a reliable reader. For what concerns my researches on field, I want to thank my friend Carmen Hendershott – the New School Libraries and Archives – for her constant help I never forget. I thank also James Dodd, director of the Husserl Archives in memory of Alfred Schutz at the New School, and Thomas Vongehr, of the Husserl Archives in Leuven, for having been patient guides during my visits, and Massimo Mazzotti for our dialogues between Milan and Berkeley. Thank you also to all those archives with which I entered in touch for my researches: Jochen Dreher for the Sozialwissenschaftlichen Archivs Konstanz, Angelle Pryor for the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at the Duquesne University, Miranda Rectenwald and Sonya Rooney for the Archives of the Washington University in Saint Louis, Amy Vilz for the University at Buffalo Archives, the staff of the Beinecke Library at Yale, the staff of the Archives of Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the staff of the Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives of the University at Albany, the staff of the University of Southern California Libraries Special Collections, and the staff of the Rockefeller Archive Center. Special thanks also go to the staff of Springer, particu- larly Anita van der Linden-Rachmat, Cristina Alves dos Santos, Werner Hermens, for having kindly guided me through the publishing process.

xv xvi Acknowledgments

This work would not have been possible without the help of my husband, Luca Stucchi, Computer Science engineer with a particular interest for the history of Phenomenology in North America. Introduction

The roots of the historical connection between phenomenology as a movement and its presence in North America find their origins in the last years of the life of Edmund Husserl. After the promulgation of the racial laws, in April of 1933, Husserl himself had thought about leaving Europe; and, on November 10, 1933, he received a proposal negotiated by E. Parl Welch1 for him to take a position at the University of Southern California. Husserl was forced to refuse this offer for various reasons such as that he would not have been able to support financially Eugen Fink, his assistant, and that he would not have been able to continue his academic relationship with Thomas Dorion Cairns, one of his last students in Freiburg.2 In 1936, thanks to the help of Marvin Farber, Husserl’s son Gerhart emigrated into the United States where he started to work as a visiting professor at the University of Virginia and in 1940 obtained a position at the National University School of Law in Washington DC. In 1937 Husserl’s daughter, Elizabeth, departed for the United States with her husband, the art historian Jakob Rosenberg, who received a professorship at Harvard. This hardship of being forced to flee Europe because of the Nazi ascendancy, which many scholars experienced, created the historical setting for the transplanting of Husserl’s thought on another continent. This volume represents the concretization of my research devoted to the history of how Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology arrived and spread in North America and reflects the inquiry I conducted for my doctoral dissertation. Each of the 27 chapters here collected analyzes a specific aspect of the process through which Husserl’s Phenomenology came to play a significant role in the history of the philosophy in the United States and in Canada. This historiographical question regarding the

1 In 1933 E. Parl Welch (born in 1905 – it is difficult to find other biographical informations on him) was a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California and in 1934 defended a dissertation titled “Max Scheler’s Philosophy of Religion.” Probably, the request of E. Parl Welch to offer a position to Prof. Edmund Husserl was accepted with enthusiasm by the Faculty of the University of Southern California. 2 Husserl, Edmund. 1973. Letter to E. Parl Welch, June 17–21, 1933. In Phenomenology: Continuations and Criticism. Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns, ed. Fred Kersten, Richard Zaner, 171–181. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff

xvii xviii Introduction reception of phenomenology is part of the more comprehensive question for me of the division of philosophical discourse in North American that has been called the “Analytic-Continental Divide.”3 Some important texts have already provided us with a clear vision on the history of phenomenology in the United States. They include Phenomenology in the United States by Steven Crowell;4 the entry in The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology entitled “United States of America” by Lester Embree, James Edie, Don Ihde, Joseph Kockelmans, and Calvin Schrag;5 Phenomenology in the United States by James Edie;6 Phenomenology in America and Britain by Dermot Moran;7 Phenomenology in North America and “Continental” Philosophy by Robert Sweeney;8 and volumes such as The Context of the Phenomenological Movement by Herbert Spiegelberg;9 American Phenomenology, edited by Eugene Kaelin and Calvin Schrag;10 and The Golden Age of Phenomenology at the New School for Social Research, edited by Lester Embree and Michael Barber.11 By studying these readings, one can begin to understand the complexity of this part of the history of the Western philosophy.12

3 Embree, Lester. 2003. Husserl as Trunk of the American Continental Tree. International Journal of Philosophical Studies. 11: 177–190. Moran, Dermot, 2001. Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology. In The Reach of Reflection. Issues for Phenomenology’s Second Century, ed. Steve Crowell, Lester Embree, Samuel Julian. Boca Raton: Electron Press/Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. Harold Durfee, ed., Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology (Den Haag : Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). Jeffrey Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, Paul Livingston, eds., Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide: Plurality Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2016). Tiziana Andina, ed., Bridging the Analytic Continental Divide. A Companion to Contemporary Western Philosophy (Boston: Brill, 2014). Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, Harald Wiltsche, eds., Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Methods and Perspectives (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016) 4 Crowell, Steven. 2012. Phenomenology in the United States. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. 12: 183–197 5 Embree, Lester, Edie, James, Ihde, Don, Kockelmans, Joseph, Schrag, Calvin. 1997. “United States of America.” In Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embree et alii, 718-724. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 6 Edie, James. 1974. Phenomenology in the United States. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. 5: 199–211 7 Moran, Dermot. 2002. Phenomenology in America and Britain. In The Phenomenology Reader, ed. Dermot Moran, Timothy Mooney, 21–22. London: Routledge 8 Sweeney, Robert, 2002. Phenomenology in North America and “Continental” Philosophy. In Phenomenology World-Wide. Foundations – Expanding Dynamics – Life-Engagements. A Guide for Research and Study, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 286–293. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 9 Spiegelberg, Herbert, ed., The Context of the Phenomenological Movement (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981) 10 Kaelin, Eugene, Schrag, Calvin, eds., American Phenomenology. Origins and Developments . Series: Analecta Husserliana (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989) 11 Embree, Lester. 2017. The Golden Age of Phenomenology at the New School for Social Research. Athens: Ohio University Press 12 Moran, Dermot. 2005. Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology. Malden: Polity Press. Crowell, Steven. 2006. Husserlian Phenomenology. In A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. Hubert Dreyfus, Mark Wrathall, 9–30. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Yoshimi, Jeffrey. 2016. Husserlian Phenomenology: A Unifying Interpretation, Dordrecht: Springer Introduction xix

I have organized this volume into three parts, each of them divided into sections – for a total of 7 sections – that encompass the 28 chapters, in order to articulate how Husserlian Phenomenology has taken root in North American universities. While reading this historical overview, the reader should also take into account how Husserl’s Phenomenology itself underwent a series of changes from the 1890s, until the late 1930s. In the first part, “Husserl’s Students Between Europe and North America,” the attempt is to explain how the arrival of phenomenology in the United States set the stage for the broader reception and diffusion of phenomenology that was to follow. In order to understand the modalities and the times of entry and, thus, the incor- poration of Edmund Husserl’s thought into some US academic environments, it is necessary to distinguish between, on the one hand, what the exponents of pragmatism and of American philosophy of that time, in general, could learn about Husserlian Phenomenology in the first 20 years of the twentieth century. On the other hand, one must also take account of how the nine Americans who had studied with the father of phenomenology between 1902 and 1932 interpreted the significance of phenomenology. In both these two cases, it is too early to talk about any kind of “reception” of Husserlian thought in North America, but, rather, in both cases, we can talk about “encounters.” These “encounters” helped prepare for the subsequent promotion of phenomenology that was launched in the United States in 1939, the year that marked the official creation of the “International Phenomenological Society” – by Marvin Farber, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, Thomas Dorion Cairns, and Herbert Spiegelberg. The penetration of Husserl’s thinking in academic environments dominated by pragmatism and by an idealism of German and of British matrix was at first minimal, especially given the mistrustful attitude toward phenomenological thought exhibited by the great American pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, and John Dewey. However, some thinkers at Harvard were more positively disposed, and I refer to them as the “forerunners.” The preliminary encounter with phenomenology occurred among these forerunners who were students of the American pragmatists and who included William Ernest Hocking, Winthrop Pickard Bell, Walter Boughton Pitkin, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, John Wild, and Vivian Jerauld McGill. These scholars had the occasion to study with Husserl, and, consequently, to their credit, they made phenomenology known to some of their students – like the young Farber and Cairns. Thus, starting around the mid-1920s, Farber and Cairns became the two linking rings between this phase of the early presence of Husserlian Phenomenology in the United States and the time of its definitive reception in 1939. Both were “born American,” as were the other seven forerunners. In the mid-1930s when some of the first European scholars came to the United States because they had been persecuted by the racial laws in Europe, they found Farber and Cairns who were already thor- oughly familiar with Husserlian Phenomenology and who could have already been seen as “promoters” of the study of the Husserlian thought in their native land. In other words, Farber and Cairns played a decisive role in that historic moment when radical changes were introduced into the United States philosophical scene because xx Introduction of European emigrants who represented phenomenology, but among these emigrants, other philosophers espoused logical positivism. Husserl’s first two North American students were Hocking (1873–1966) and Bell (1884–1965). In different years, they both had studied at Harvard with Josiah Royce – and, in the case of Hocking, also with William James. Both of them went to Göttingen to study with Husserl; both were subsequently teachers at Harvard, where Cairns had the occasion to study with them. Hocking had been in Germany in 1902 after receiving a fellowship for travel and study. He ignored the directions of Royce and James, and of Hugo Münsterberg, who proposed that he study in Leipzig, Berlin, and Heidelberg. Instead, Hocking followed the advice given to him by Paul Natorp through Karl Schmidt – at that time at Harvard – namely, that he should go to Göttingen to study with Husserl. He stayed in Göttingen for a couple of months, and during that time he maintained an amiable relationship with Husserl, and this first American student of Husserl followed the evolution of the system of the Husserlian Phenomenology with a vivid interest until the end of his academic career. It is significant that his essay entitled “From the Early Days of the Logische Untersuchungen” appeared as the first contribution in the volume entitled “Edmund Husserl 1859–1959: Recueil Commémoratif Publié at Occasion du Centenaire de la Naissance du philosophie,” which Professor Jacques Taminiaux and Father Herman Leo Van Breda dedicated to Husserl on the centenary of his birth.13 Hocking was quite fortunate to have studied the Logische Untersuchungen with the author himself. Unfortunately, Hocking was forced to stop abruptly his stay in Göttingen and to go to Berlin because Hugo Münsterberg, who disapproved of Hocking’s choice to study with Husserl, had written his student to inform him that Harvard would no longer support financially those who were studying in isolated settings at unimport- ant university centers. After many years, Hocking was able to reverse this spurning of Husserlian Phenomenology by sending to Freiburg two of his Harvard students who would become the first promoters of phenomenology in the United States: Farber and Cairns. Winthrop Bell, a Canadian, a pupil of Royce’s at Harvard, and later a student in Cambridge, was the first North American student who stayed for a long time in Göttingen, and he defended his dissertation, entitled “Eine kritische Untersuchung der Erkenntnistheorie von Josiah Royce,” in Germany in 1914. Bell had heard about Husserl during a period of study in Leipzig. Once back to the United States, he first taught at Harvard, and later in Toronto, and then moved to Nova Scotia – his birthplace. Another US student that met Husserl in Göttingen was Walter Boughton Pitkin (1878–1949). His encounter with the father of the phenomenology occurred first through an epistolary exchange in which Pitkin advanced a proposal to translate the text of the Logische Untersuchungen, and eventually he was able to spend time with Husserl, commencing in 1905. As Herbert Spiegelberg recalled, because of James’s

13 Hocking, William Ernest. 1959. From the Early Days of the Logische Untersuchungen. In Edmund Husserl 1859–1959: Recueil Commémoratif Publié à l’Occasion du Centenaire de la Naissance du Philosophe, ed. H. L. Van Breda, J. Taminiaux, 1–11. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff Introduction xxi mistrust of the value of Husserl’s text, Pitkin never did translate Husserl’s texts for the English-speaking world. Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) and Paul Weiss (1901–2002) went to Freiburg to study with Husserl before becoming the two curators of the first six volumes of Peirce’s Collected Papers. Hartshorne, a former Harvard student, was in Freiburg during the academic year 1924–1925, while Weiss was in Freiburg during the academic year 1929–1930 – after having completed his dissertation at Harvard under Whitehead. Toward the mid-1920s, Husserl’s thought began to attract further attention, thanks to the fact that some of these students that met Husserl eventually became Harvard professors. This attention that was centered in Harvard resulted in six other students traveling to Freiburg in order to study with Husserl. Consequently, after Hartshorne and Weiss, also the American students McGill, Wild, Farber, and Cairns, were in Freiburg between the 1920s and the 1930s. V. J. McGill (1897–1977) studied in Freiburg during the academic year 1925– 1926, before teaching at Hunter College in New York from 1929 until 1954. John Wild (1902–1972) went to Freiburg in 1931. Both Wild and McGill, in fact, had a role in the history of the promotion of phenomenology in the United States because of their involvement with Farber’s project of creating the “International Phenomenological Society” in 1939 and later with the development of the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Wild taught at Harvard from 1927 until 1961 and then moved to Northwestern University in 1961 and to Yale in 1969. He became famous for his role in the creation of the “Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy” in 1962. These two students of the Freiburg years branched out beyond the Husserlian paradigm, with Wild devoting himself largely to existentialist analysis and McGill to the study of literature. Farber, a student at Harvard, received the Sheldon Fellowship to pursue his studies in Freiburg during the academic year 1923–1924, and, once back at Harvard, he worked on the dissertation entitled “Phenomenology as a Method and as a Philosophical Discipline,” completed in 1928. In total, Cairns spent two academic years in Freiburg, the first time between 1924 and 1925 and the second between 1931 and 1932. These forerunners were interested in comparing the positions of the classical pragmatists and of the dominant theories in North American university world, with the “European” – specifically German – philosophy. Among these forerunners, only Farber and Cairns can be regarded as the authentic first promoters of Husserlian Phenomenology. When they returned from Freiburg, they sought to extend Husserl’s thought, while the other seven did not devote their work to such a project. Instead, these other forerunners, located principally at Harvard, offered courses on Husserlian Phenomenology and inspired an attraction for it. In the late 1930s, Farber, with the help of Cairns, translated the nascent interest in Husserl’s thought into a concrete project of promoting it among the American universities. The initial group of those scholars who had met with Husserl in Freiburg made a substantial contribution in North America to the teaching of Husserlian Phenomenology. Among this “Freiburg Group,” we must count Dorion Cairns, Felix Kaufmann, Alfred Schutz, and Aron Gurwitsch. xxii Introduction

Kaufmann,14 a former student of Hans Kelsen and a scholar in mathematics and in sociology, was the first of this group of European scholars to escape to the United States. Thanks to his friendship with Alvin Johnson, he taught at the University in Exile – the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, then the New School for Social Research – from 1938 until his death in 1949. Kaufmann rightly suggested that Schutz read Husserl’s texts during the period during which they studied together in Vienna. Thanks to Kaufmann, Schutz was able to find in the New School a position as an adjunct professor starting in 1939 – and Schutz would remain there as the leading expositor of Husserl’s Phenomenology until his death in 1959. Dorion Cairns taught a course as a lecturer at the Graduate Faculty in New York from as early as the Spring Term of 1934. Then, he moved to New York University, to Hunter College, and to Rockford College until 1950, and then in 1950 he was hired at the Graduate Faculty in New York through the inter- vention of Alfred Schutz. Aron Gurwitsch taught at the New School beginning in 1959, by taking over the position vacated because of Alfred Schutz’s death. Gurwitsch had earlier escaped from Germany and emigrated to France where he stayed from 1933 until 1940. In Paris, he met Alfred Schutz for the first time. At the moment of his arrival in the United States, thanks to Schutz’s help, Gurwitsch received a lectureship at the Johns Hopkins University, a position he held from 1940 until 1942. He then became an instructor in physics at Harvard University from 1943 until 1946. Then he moved to Wheaton College as an instructor in mathematics, a post he held from 1948 until 1951. Then, Gurwitsch taught from 1951 until 1958 at Brandeis, and, finally, after a year as a Fulbright professor in Köln, he managed to be selected at the New School for the phenomenological position that Schutz had occupied for many years. Three other phenomenologists, Moritz Geiger, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Herbert Spiegelberg, were able to find academic positions in the United States as refugee scholars. Moritz Geiger fled to the United States in 1933 to teach at Vassar College. Dietrich von Hildebrand arrived in New York in 1940: he taught at Fordham University until his retirement. Herbert Spiegelberg arrived in the United States in 1938, and he taught first at Swarthmore College and then from 1941 on at Lawrence College in Appleton, which later awarded him an honorary doctoral degree and which promoted him in 1953 to full professor. In 1953 and in 1955, he received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation for the preparation of the first edition of his work, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction. In 1963, he

14 It is necessary to point out that the Kaufmann to whom I am referring to is Felix, who was born in Austria in 1895 and died in New York in 1949, former pupil of Hans Kelsen. He shares the surname with another refugee scholar that covered an important role in the history of Phenomenology in North America: Fritz Leopold Kaufmann – who was born in Germany in 1891 and died in Switzerland in 1958 – to whom the analysis elaborated by Dr. Gabriel Ricci in Chap. 19 of this volume is dedicated. Introduction xxiii moved to Washington University in Saint Louis, where he remained until his retirement in 1971 and continued on as Emeritus Professor. In the second part of this volume, “Phenomenology Arrives in North America,” the presence of phenomenology is examined starting from its having been grafted onto the stem of ongoing North America philosophy. Here we can see how the “official” starting points of the history for the spreading of Edmund Husserl’s thought were localized in two academic centers: the New School for Social Research in New York and the University of Buffalo. Marvin Farber played a key role in this phase. Thanks to his efforts, the creation of the “International Phenomenological Society” and of the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research occurred. The New School for Social Research was the center where phenomenology has been taught by its first promoters and as the place where for the first time, a section of the Husserl-Archives was established officially in United States. I decided to entitle the third part of this volume “The Spreading of Phenomenology in North America” to give an account of the steps and the places, the authors, and the societies that made effective the process of the diffusion of Husserlian Phenomenology in North American universities. Here is analyzed the history of the societies and of the journals born within a purely “North American” context, still active but today having adopted an “international” mission. This analysis brings us up-to-date on the present situation of these journal and societies. I confess that it has been difficult for me to create a sort of genealogical tree and, consequently, to create a map of the “generations” of Husserlian scholars active in North America after the first wave of European refugees. The purpose of this survey is to identify the salient features of the reception of phenomenology, to identify those aspects of it that have been critically highlighted by each promoter after arriving in North America. Over time, some attempts have been made to provide some general description of the kind of phenomenology that has taken up its place in the North American philosophical scene. But such attempts expose the limits of seeking to define this extremely complex phenomenon. My decision to publish, at the end of this volume, Don Ihde’s essay, “Phenomenology in America, 1964–1984,”15 was dictated precisely by a desire to recapitulate the effort from the perspective of phenomenology to label the various philosophical currents present in the US academic world. To return to the origins of the study of phenomenology in the United States means to trace backward from the present interest of several US philosophers in Husserlian thought to the birth of phenomenology in this historical context. To undertake this historiographic reconstruction, one must admit the limits of describ- ing the phenomenon that is US phenomenology and explaining its unfolding through time. This phenomenon began with the simple interest that some US scholars in the late 1930s took in Husserlian philosophy, and it evolved with the development of the first critical interpretations that emerged when the first real promoters of phenomenology re-elaborated what it meant for a new context. The European origin of

15 Ihde, Don. 1986. Phenomenology in America, 1964–1984. In Ihde, Don. Consequences of Phenomenology, Albany: State University of New York Press. Here re-published xxiv Introduction some of these promoters – Gurwitsch, Schutz, Kaufmann, and Spiegelberg – and the US origin of others – Farber and Cairns – display two cultural currents that flowed together in the endeavor to graft phenomenology into American intellectual culture.

Holy Apostles College and Seminary Michela Beatrice Ferri CT, USA February 28th, 2018 Contents

Part I Husserl’s Students Between Europe and North America Husserl at Harvard: The Origins of American Phenomenology �� 3 Jonathan Strassfeld Phenomenology’s Inauguration in English and in the North American Curriculum: Winthrop Bell’s 1927 Harvard Course �� 25 Jason Bell The Freiburg Encounter: Aron Gurwitsch and Edmund Husserl on Transformations of Consciousness �� 47 Daniel Marcelle

Part II Establishment at the New School The Place of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research �� 73 Judith Friedlander The Golden Age of Phenomenology: At the New School for Social Research, 1954–1973 �� 99 Lester Embree and Michael Barber The Checkered Legacy of Marvin Farber’s Idiosyncratic Understanding of Phenomenology �� 107 Eric Chelstrom The Role of Dorion Cairns in the Reception of Phenomenology in North America: The First “Born American” Phenomenologist �� 131 Richard Zaner

xxv xxvi Contents

Part III Some Notable Husserlian Phenomenologists in North America Important Twentieth Century American Husserl Scholars �� 145 Thomas Nenon and Michela Beatrice Ferri Herbert Spiegelberg: From Munich to North America �� 151 Carlo Ierna Jitendra Nath Mohanty: A Phenomenological Vedāntin �� 167 Gabriel R. Ricci Philosophy and the Integrity of the Person: The Phenomenology of Robert Sokolowski �� 187 Molly Brigid McGrath A.-T. Tymieniecka: A Phenomenologist in the United States. The Adventures of a Polish-Born American �� 205 Daniela Verducci

Part IV The Spreading of Phenomenology in North America. Societies and Centers The History of the Husserl Archives Established in Memory of Alfred Schutz at the New School for Social Research �� 227 Michela Beatrice Ferri The Impact of North American Phenomenological Organizations: The Chronicle Revisited �� 239 Daniel Marcelle History of the Husserl Circle �� 261 Algis Mickunas and Burt C. Hopkins The Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy �� 267 Anthony J. Steinbock A History of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. �� 283 Thomas Nenon The Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University and Phenomenology in North America �� 293 Jeffrey McCurry and Chelsea R. Binnie

Part V North American Phenomenological Journals Importing Phenomenology: The Early Editorial Life of “Philosophy and Phenomenological Research” �� 317 Gabriel R. Ricci Contents xxvii

Two North American Phenomenological Journals: “Husserl Studies” and “The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy” �� 337 William McKenna and Burt C. Hopkins

Part VI Regional Phenomenological Schools Phenomenology in America (1964–1984) �� 345 Don Ihde California Phenomenology �� 365 Jeffrey Yoshimi, Clinton Tolley, and David Woodruff Smith Dallas Willard: Reviving Realism on the West Coast �� 389 Micah D. Tillman Husserl and the Pittsburgh School �� 409 Nicholas Rescher From Consciousness to Being: Edith Stein’s Philosophy and Its Reception in North America �� 417 Antonio Calcagno

Part VII Husserlian Phenomenology from an Analytical Perspective The Analytic Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in the United States: History, Problems, and Prospects �� 435 Paul M. Livingston

Author Index �� 461

Subject Index �� 471