Abstract
A study of Schutz as viewed by Natanson, his most devoted and distinguished student, but also quintessentially Schutzian. According to Natanson, Schutz’s main contribution is the erection of an indestructible “architectonic” of the quotidian lifeworld as social reality, with anonymity as the central philosophical concept. My pondering of inter-corporeality and ethics should be read as a continuation.
Acting is the hermeneutics of the soul.
— Maurice Natanson
Philosophy is not a certain kind of knowledge; it is the vigilance which does not permit us to forget the source of all knowledge.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Disenchantment is the existential condition for transcendence.
— Maurice Natanson
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
For Schutz’s intellectual biographies in relation to Natanson, see Steven Galt Crowell, “A Conversation with Maurice Natanson,” in The Prism of the Self ed. Steven Galt Crowell. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996, 289–334, and Rodman B. Webb, “The Life and Work of Alfred Schutz: A Conversation with Maurice Natanson,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 5 (1992): 283–94.
Several collected volumes edited by Natanson were dedicated to Schutz. See Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. Maurice Natanson. New York: Random House, 1963; Essays in Phenomenology, ed. Maurice Natanson. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966; Phenomenology and Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970; and Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, 2 vols., ed. Maurice Natanson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. I was introduced to the writings of Schutz by Natanson at the suggestion of John Wild in the early 60s. When Natanson accepted my manuscript on a phenomenological critique of political behavioralism for his two-volume collection of essays on phenomenology and the social sciences, I wanted to dedicate it to Wild. Natanson, however, informed me that I could not do so because the entire collection had already been dedicated to “someone else” who turned out to be Schutz. For the author’s article, see “A Critique of the Behavioral Persuasion in Politics: A Phenomenological View,” in Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, ed. Maurice Natanson, vol. 2. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, 133–73.
It appears that Schutz found in Mead the kindred spirit of a thinker who found comfortably his professional career that intersects philosophy and sociology. Natanson relates that when Schutz began to teach at the New School, its president—Alvin Johnson—gave friendly advice to Schutz not to teach its American students phenomenology because they would not take it. So “Schutz presented his [phenomenological] ideas in the context of the writings of James, Dewey, Whitehead, Mead, Cooley, and Thomas” (“Foreword,” in The Theory of Social Action, ed. Richard Grathoff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978, xiv). In his landmark essay on “multiple realities” in 1945, Schutz calls for a critical study of Mead (see Collected Papers, I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962, 216). Natanson studied Mead with care from a critical perspective of phenomenology in The Social Dynamics of George H. Mead. Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1956. Later, he was still of the opinion that Mead is “the most neglected figure of the great pragmatic tradition in the United States” (see Anonymity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, 140). Hans Joas writes that “Alfred Schutz who, while differing from him on many points, had repeatedly called attention to Mead’s importance, gave the direct impetus to Maurice Natanson, whose book The Social Dynamics of G.H. Mead [sic] was to influence decisively many sociologists’ and philosophers’ image of Mead” (see G.H. Mead, trans. Raymond Meyer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985, 7).
See Maurice Natanson, Phenomenology, Role,and Reason. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1974, 205. See Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967.
Natanson calls himself an “existential phenomenologist” (see The Erotic Bird. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, 9–10). He was also interested in both literature and psychiatry from his student days before he met Schutz. Natanson’s last posthomously published work The Erotic Bird is an exploration of the phenomenological in literature or an aesthetic phenomenology with a focus on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting tor Godot, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Interestingly, he ends up with talking about “Action” in the concluding chapter.
The idea of “application” does not mean something secondary, added, or supplementary. Rather, “phenomenology applied” is an integral part of phenomenology as philosophy. Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer who speaks of “application” (subtilitas applicandi) as integral part—not an addendum of hermeneutics (see Truth and Method, trans. rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad, 1991, 307f0.
nd ed. Wien: Springer-Verlag, 1960.
Trans. George Walsh and Fredrick Lehnert. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967.
Almost two centuries ago, Edmund Burke elegantly put this genealogical continuity of humanity and its social world as “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” (Reflections on the Revolution in France. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955, 110).
The Erotic Bird, 134. Cf. Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World, trans. Richard M. Zaner and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973 and The Structures of the Life-World, vol. 2, trans. Richard M. Zaner and David J. Parent. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989.
Trans. David Can. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
“Husserl and His Influence on Me,” in Interdisciplinary Phenomenology, ed. Don Ihde and Richard M. Zaner. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977, 124–29.
See Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, 127. John Wild, too, speaks of inverting Plato’s image of the cave world in philosophizing (see Human Freedom and Social Order. Durham: Duke University Press, 1959, 63).
See Natanson, Anonymity, 4.
Collected Papers, I: 53 and cf. Natanson, Anonymity,8.
Maurice Natanson, Literature, Philosophy,and the Social Sciences. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962, 166.
Natanson, The Social Dynamics of George H. Mead,81.
Collected Papers, I: 229 and cf. Natanson, Anonymity,65–66.
See Natanson, Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, 52. Natanson hastens to add the disclaimer that Schutz did not mean to renounce transcendental phenomenology (see Anonymity, 92). Cf. Helmut R. Wagner, “Toward an Anthropology of the Life-World: Alfred Schutz’s Quest for the Ontological Justification of the Phenomenological Undertaking,” Human Studies, 6 (1983): 239–46 and “The Limitations of Phenomenology: Alfred Schutz’s Critical Dialogue with Edmund Husserl,” Husserl Studies, 1 (1984): 179–99.
See Collected Papers, I: 207–59. It is worth noting that Mead defines “sociality” as the human “capacity of being several things at once.” Joas, however, cautions us that it is not “an operation of consciousness.” Rather, the principle of sociality is found throughout the universe whose culmination is “the appearance of mind” (see G.H. Mead,183). Despite similarities between Schutz’s “multiple realities” and Mead’s “sociality,” the latter’s formulation is a metaphysical one. In this respect, Mead’s sociality resembles the Whiteheadian metaphysical conception of reality as social process.
Here the influence of William James in addition to Bergson is apparent. In “On Multiple Realities,” which is one of his most seminal essays, Schutz speaks of “James’ genius” which touches on “one of the most important philosophical questions” by citing the following passage of James: “Each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention” (Collected Papers, I: 207).
See Natanson, Anonymity,18.
Natanson points out that “participation” must be distinguished from “observation” when he writes: “[p]articipation rather than observation is the prime moment of the dialectic of social life. Accordingly, the task of the social scientist is to honor the pre-interpreted order of common-sense experience by discerning and describing its structure and by trying to illuminate its relevance for the total range of man’s historical and cultural reality” (Phenomenology, Role and Reason, 120).
Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, 156. With his strong interest and well-versed knowledge in literature and theatre, Natanson would not hesitate to use the metaphor of theatre in characterizing the life-world as the “theatre” of action. The terms acting and actor refer also to theatrical acts as role-performing and role-performer. Indeed, Natanson’s literary style itself invariably has a theratrical flair, while Schutz’s predominant reference is music as performing art. The personal importance of music as performing art, particularly the music of Mozart, for Schutz is undeniable. The following are remarks which Schutz made to Natanson: “[i]n my twenties, it was me and Mozart. In my thirties, it was Mozart and me. Now in my fifties, it is only Mozart” (Natanson, Anonymity, xiv).
Natanson, Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, 115. 32 Ibid., 172–73.
Collected Papers, III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. I. Schutz. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966, 82 and see Maurice Natanson, “Alfred Schutz Symposium: The Pregivenness of Sociality,” in Interdisciplinary Phenomenology,110.
Collected Papers, II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, 174.
Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996, 31. 40Natanson, Anonymity, 82–84. Natanson has in mind the essential difference between Schutz’s “anonymity” and Heidegger’s “authenticity” when he writes that “[a]nonymity is the antonym of authenticity” (Phenomenology, Role,and Reason, 201). Nonetheless, interestingly, the mood (Stimmung) or “attunement” (Befindlichkeit) of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein is on the same wave-length with Schutz’s “making music together” among consociates. Natanson notes that [a]lthough I disagree with his assertion that Schutz’s concept of the `we-relationship’ owes something to Heidegger, Ricoeur is most insightful when he says: “Schutz did not, in fact, limit himself to reconciling Husserl and Weber. He integrated their concepts of intersubjectivity and social action with a concept of the we-relationship borrowed from Heidegger, without losing the force of the first two thinkers’ analyses, and without limiting himself to a convenient eclecticism combining all these matters” (Anonymity, 14).
Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, 121.
The Journeying Self Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1970, 34.
Natanson, Phenomenology, Role,and Reason, 101.
See Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, IV, ed. Helmut Wagner, George Psathas and Fred Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996, 131–33; Jung, “A Critique of the Behavioral Persuasion in Politics: A Phenomenological View”; Eric Voegelin, “The Origins of Scientism, ”Social Research, 15 (1948): 462–94; Natanson, Edmund Husserl, 105–46 and “Philosophy and Social Science: A Phenomenological Approach,” in Foundation of Political Science, ed. Donald M. Freeman. New York: Free Press, 1977, 517–52.
The 1953 version of this essay is “Positivistic Philosophy and the Actual Approach of Interpretative Social Science: An Ineditum of Alfred Schutz from Spring 1953,” ed. Lester Embree, Husserl Studies, 15 (1998): 1–27.
See Hwa Yol Jung, Rethinking Political Theory. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993, 2541.
Collected Papers, I: 65–66. This passage is not contained in the 1953 version (see n. 54 above). Aron Gurwitsch is more detailed than Schutz in outlining his argument against positivism and extending the relevance of Husserl’s phenomenology of the lifeworld for the unity of the sciences (see Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, ed. Lester Embree. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974, esp. 132–149). Gurwitsch writes: “the cultural or human sciences prove to be all-encompassing, since they also comprise the natural sciences, since nature as conceived of and constructed in modern natural sciences, i.e., mathematized nature, is itself a mental accomplishment, that is, a cultural phenomenon. The converse, however, is not true. The cultural sciences cannot be given a place among the natural sciences, any more than the cultural world can be reached beginning from mathematized nature or, for that matter, from the thing-world, while, as we have seen, by taking one’s departure from the cultural world, one can arrive at the thing-world and the mathematized universe by means of abstraction, idealization, and formalization. In general, then, there is a possible transition from the concrete to the abstract, but not the reverse” (Ibid., 148–149).
See Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness,trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998, 166.
Maurice Natanson, “Foreword,” in Philosophers in Exile,ed. Richard Grathoff and trans. J. Claude Evans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, ix.
Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, 156.
I prefer to speak of the performance of action, which happens to be also a prominent postmodem theme, for several reasons. First, performance is always and necessarily corporeal or embodied. Second, it is the linkage term between Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world and his phenomenological “microsociology” of literature (i.e., drama, poetry, and novel). See Alfred Schutz, “A Construction of Alfred Schutz’s `Sociological Aspect of Literature,”’ in Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspect of Literature,” ed. Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998, 1–71 and Alfred Schutz, Life Forms and Meaning Structure, trans. Helmut R. Wagner. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, 158–207. Third, Schutz often speaks of social relationships as “mutual tune-in” and thus connects them with music as performing art. Ancient Greeks include in mousike four “performing arts”: oral poetry (poetry recitation), drama, music, and dance. Opera, incidentally, is treated by Schutz as an orchestration of the two “performing arts” of drama and music. Even more importantly, for Schutz—for that matter, for Natanson, too—what the actor on stage is to the playwright, the actor on the social scene is for the social scientist. Cf. Stanford M Lyman, “Dramas, Narratives, and the Postmodern Challenge,” in Alfred Schutz ‘s “Sociological Aspects of Literature,” 197–218. Both types of the actor are the “puppets” or “homunculi”: one is the creation of the playwright and the other the construct of the social scientist. Fourth, in addition to being theatrical, linguistic, athletic, psychoanalytical or sexual, performance is a pragmatic and thus moral concept. In other words, it is the elixir or “viagra” of action.
Schutz, Collected Papers, I: 215.
Alfred Schutz, Reflections on the Problem of Relevance, ed. Richard M. Zaner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, 144–45 n. 12.
Ibid., 173 and Natanson, Anonymity,34 and Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, 104ff. Phenomenology, Role,and Reason, 38.
See Hwa Yol Jung, `Phenomenology and Body Politics,“ Body and Society, 2 (1996): 1–22.
Jean-Paul Sartre writes that “[i]n human societies, faces rule” (The Writing of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 2: Selected Prose, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka and trans. Richard McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974, 67). There is a saying that prosopagnosia, that is, not remembering faces, is worse than forgetting names.
“Erwin Straus and Alfred Schutz,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 42 (1982): 336.
Erwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology. New York: Basic Books, 1966, 211. 71See Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place.(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993 and The Fate of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. The logic of corporeal thinking would lead us to see the importance of “habit” in human conduct, in everyday activities in the mundane world. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, writes: “[t]he conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively `regulated’ and `regular’ without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor” (The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990, 53).
The Phenomenology of Moral Experience. Glencoe: Free Press, 1955, 17 and 3 I.
See John Wild, Existence and the World of Freedom. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963, 54 and “Man as a Responsible Agent,” in Conditio Humana, ed. Walter Ritter von Baeyer and Richard M. Griffith. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1966, 319–33. Based on the phenomenology of the life-world, Wild attempts to develop social and political ethics which is meaningful, free, and responsible.
In his recent discussion of Schutz’s phenomenological microsociology of literature, Lester Embree comes to the conclusion that Schutz’s “theory of literature is… very like his theory of action, i.e., value-free” (Alfred Schutz, “A Construction of Alfred Schutz’s `Sociological Aspect of Literature,”’ in Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspect of Literature,” op. cit., 1–71). 75 Collected Papers, II: 178.
I choose only the following two statements of Schutz which contain normative intimations and which show his attitude of restraint and ambivalence toward value judgements. First, in the conclusion he draws from the discussion of the “well-informed citizen” in democracy he writes: “A certain tendency to misinterpret democracy as a political institution in which the opinion of the uninformed man on the street must predominate increases the danger. It is the duty and the privilege, therefore, of the well-informed citizen in a democratic society to make his private opinion prevail over the public opinion of the man on the street” (Collected Papers, II: 134). In drawing his conclusion on responsibility, Schutz who, as a Jew, fled Nazi Germany writes: “It is one thing, if in the Nuremberg trials, the Nazi leaders were held responsible by the Allied Powers, and quite another thing if they were held answerable by the German people” (ibid., 276).
Crowell, “A Conversation with Maurice Natanson,” 301.
Phenomenological Psychology, 137–65.
See Edmund Husserl, 12–19.
Phenomenology, Role, Reason, 330.
Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, 321.
Ibid. Some anti-Marxist philosophers such as Karl Popper cleverly uses Marx’s own Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach to criticize Marxists by accusing them of interpreting Marx rather than changing him. One may even accuse Marx of conceptual footbinding when he criticized his mentor Hegel for having his dialectics stand on its head rather than standing on its feet since it is true that one cannot stand on one’s head, but it is equally true that one cannot think with one’s feet. In his critique of Hegel, Marx emphasized that in humanity’s emancipation, the “head” of philosophy and the “heart” of the proletariat go together hand in hand. The Italian Marxist phenomenologist Enzo Paci may be called the Erich Fromm of phenomenology, if, according to Natanson (see Edmund Husserl, 191), Heidegger is the Carl Jung of phenomenology. Paci holds that Husserl was unaware of the fact that the crisis of the European sciences is the crisis of human existence in capitalist society (The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man, trans. Paul Piccone and James E. Hansen. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972, 323).
See Natanson, Anonymity, 143–144.
See Herbert Spiegelberg, Steppingstones Toward an Ethics of Fellow Existers. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986.
Phenomenology, Role,and Reason, 121 (my italics).
Gibson Winter’s Elements for Social Ethic (New York: Macmillian, 1966) is, as far as I know, is the earliest and perhaps the only attempt to incorporate Schutz’s phenomenology of the soical world into ethics, into what Winter calls “an ethic of the social world” with an accent on “an ethic of responsibility.” Unfortunately, it has been completely ignored and forgotten. Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics as “first philosophy” (see Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969) extends, and goes beyond the limits of, the tradition of Husserlian constitutive phenomenology. Zygmunt Bauman pays the highest compliment to the achievement of Levinas when he calls him “the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century” (Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991, 214). The face is for Levinas an ethical hermeneutic of humanity. It is the first gesture of the social and thus the moral. His is the ethics of responsibility based on the primacy of the Other over the self in human relationships. In the phenomenological movement, Levinas’s philosophy points to the triumph of the moral over the ontological of Heidegger who said that ontology is possible only as phenomenology.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jung, H.Y. (1999). Reading Natanson Reading Schutz. In: Embree, L. (eds) Schutzian Social Science. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 37. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2944-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2944-4_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5334-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-2944-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive