Barber Michael D. - The Golden Age of Phenomenology at the New School for Social Research, 1954-1973

The Golden Age of Phenomenology at the New School for Social Research, 19541973

SERIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT

Editorial Board

Ted Toadvine, Chairman, University of Oregon

Michael Barber, Saint Louis University

Elizabeth A. Behnke, Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body

David Carr, Emory University

James Dodd, New School University

Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University

Sara Heinmaa, University of Jyvskyl, University of Helsinki

Jos Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University

Joseph J. Kockelmans, Pennsylvania State University

William R. McKenna, Miami University

Algis Mickunas, Ohio University

J. N. Mohanty, Temple University

Dermot Moran, University College Dublin

Thomas Nenon, University of Memphis

Rosemary Rizo-Patron de Lerner, Pontificia Universidad Catlica del Per, Lima

Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg Universitt, Mainz

Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy

Elizabeth Strker, Universitt Kln

Nicolas de Warren, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University

International Advisory Board

Suzanne Bachelard, Universit de Paris

Rudolf Boehm, Rijksuniversiteit Gent

Albert Borgmann, University of Montana

Amedeo Giorgi, Saybrook Institute

Richard Grathoff, Universitt Bielefeld

Samuel Ijsseling, Husserl-Archief te Leuven

Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University

Werner Marx, Albert-Ludwigs Universitt, Freiburg

David Rasmussen, Boston College

John Sallis, Boston College

John Scanlon, Duquesne University

Hugh J. Silverman, State University of New York, Stony Brook

Carlo Sini, Universit di Milano

Jacques Taminiaux, Louvain-la-Neuve

D. Lawrence Wieder

Dallas Willard, University of Southern California

The Golden Age of Phenomenology at the New School for Social Research, 19541973

EDITED BY LESTER EMBREE AND MICHAEL D. BARBER

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATHENS

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

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2017 by Ohio University Press

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To the memory of Maurice Natanson, New School phenomenology student, this volume is dedicated.

CONTENTS

Lester Embree

PREFACE

This volume is about the teaching and study of phenomenological philosophy in the Department of Philosophy of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Research at the New School for Social Research in New York City from 1954 to 1973. This was the first doctoral program with this emphasis and arguably played a major role in the introduction and defense of phenomenology into North America. Other important teachersfrom Karl Lwith to Rainer Shurmann, and especially Werner Marxwere there as well and influenced the students of this period. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that J. N. Mohanty and Thomas Seebohm were almost able to continue the tradition, this period was chiefly the time when first Alfred Schutz and Dorion Cairns and then, after Schutzs death in 1959, Cairns and Aron Gurwitsch taught how Edmund Husserls philosophy could be continued. I call these phenomenologists the New School Three. But there was also the influence of Maurice Natanson on other students, both before they came to the school and afterward, to such an extent that he almost counts as one of the teachers; for this reason this volume is dedicated to his memory.

What is distinctive about the New School Three is that, in addition to contributing some scholarship in the forms of interpretations and translations of Husserls works, their principal efforts were devoted toin Gurwitschs phraseadvancing the problems, which is to say that they focused on contributing originally to Husserls constitutive phenomenology. In addition, because these three not only shared a common source in the mature Husserl but also interacted with one another, they can be said to have formed a historical tendency. One can seriously ask whether theirs is not the only such tendency of original phenomenologizing in the United States to have developed. Practically all other phenomenologists in the United States are scholars who teach and write about phenomenology on the basis of literature that had been published in Europe. They rarely if ever engage in actual phenomenological investigation.

This project began as a conference of the same title at the Graduate Faculty of the New School in March 2007. A set of living New School students who had remained in contact with one another to various extents was invited to tell of their experiences of coming to and being at the school, and then to describe or provide a sample of their work since then. In addition, Michael Barber, Thomas Nenon, and George Psathas were invited to write on the deceased colleagues Alfred Schutz, Werner Marx, Maurice Natanson, and Helmut Wagner, whom they had as teachers and friends, while several of the New School students also wrote about their teachers.

I thank the original publishers for the following three reprinted texts: Aron Gurwitsch, On the Object of Thought: Methodological and Phenomenological Reflections, in The Phenomenology of the Noema, edited by Lester Embree and John Drummond (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), 927 (reprinted with kind permission of Springer Science+Business Media); Alfred Schutz, Positivistic Philosophy and the Actual Approach of Interpretive Social Science: An Ineditum of Alfred Schutz from Spring 1953, Husserl Studies 14, no. 2 (1998): 12349; and Werner Marx, The Need of PhilosophyAn Historical Reflexion, Universitas: A German Review of the Arts and Sciences 21, no. 4 (1979): 295303.

Furthermore, I thank Professor James Dodd of the New School and the Philosophy Department there for arranging the conference from which this volume has grown. Moreover, I thank my research assistants, Dr. Daniel Marcelle and Mr. Elliot Shaw, for help in ways too many to list. Finally, I thank the living teachers and the students for their efforts at documenting phenomenology at the New School in its golden age and some of its consequences while it can still be done.

Lester Embree

Delray Beach,

July 2014

Nicholas de Warren, Bina Gupta, J. N. Mohanty, Michael Barber, Jorge Garcia Gomez, Sara Garcia Gomez. Back row: James Dodd, Thomas Seebohm, Lester Embree, William McKenna, Osborne Wiggins, Thomas Nenon. Photo by Lester Embree.

INTRODUCTION

Lester Embree

More than two decades have passed since publication of the most recent book about the New School for Social Research. In previous books, the phenomenological philosophy taught in the Department of Philosophy of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science during what can be called its golden age has, for various reasons, not been covered at all well. Most crucially, the longest-contributing teacher of phenomenological investigation there, Dorion Cairns, has hardly been mentioned. Furthermore, the subsequent efforts of the core group of students that developed have not been considered previously. This golden age and its immediate impact should not be forgotten.