Abstract
I wish to take this opportunity to offer a few of my reflections on what has always seemed to me to be one of the late Professor Gurwitsch’s most fundamental philosophical insights. In many of his writings he has emphasised what he has called the ambiguous nature of consciousness,1 by which he meant that consciousness lends itself to both causal-explanatory account in terms of functional dependencies on natural phenomena and phenomenological-descriptive account. The ambiguity consists in this very possibility of different points of view.2 At the same time, for Aron Gurwitsch, consciousness as “the medium of access to whatever exists and is valid” constitutes “a unique realm of absolute priority.”3 It is on these two theses that I propose to reflect, taking into account the concept of the life-world developed in continuation of Hus-serl’s later writings.
Read in a memorial symposium for Aron Gurwitsch held at the New School for Social Research, New York, in 1974. Subsequently appeared in Social Research (Spring 1975), pp. 147–166. Reprinted with permission.
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Notes
A. Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), pp. 100–101.
A. Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964), p. 166.
Field of Consciousness, p. 166.
Cf. E. Husserl: “Auch in der eidetisch phänomenologischen Forschung behält das Psychische den Seinssinn von weltlich Vorhandenem — nur bezogen auf mögliche (erdenkliche) reale Welten” (Hua IX, p. 335).
Cf. E. Husserl: “Für ihn ist die und jede mögliche Welt blosses Phänomen” (Hua IX, p. 341).
For the meaning of “purity,” see Hua IX, pp. 308–311.
Husserl calls it the “wesensmässige Doppeldeutigkeit der (phänomenologisch reinen) Bewusstseinssubjektivität” (Hua IX, p. 344).
Hua IX, p. 342.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 343.
Edmund Husserl, “Phenomenology,” in: R.M. Chisholm (Ed.), Realism and the Background of Phenomenology (New York: Free Press, 1960), p. 126.
Hua IX, p. 344.
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, p. 205.
A. Gurwitsch, “Problems of the Life-World,” in: M. Natanson (Ed.), Phenomenology and Social Reality: Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), pp. 35–61, esp. p. 49.
Also compare E. Tugendhat: “Und weil die Lebenswelt, da die Stufenfolge der Konstitution nicht durchbrochen werden darf, in ihren Fundamenten ebenfalls als rein materielle, als ‘Natur’ verstanden werden muss, erhält sie ‘die gleichen Strukturen’ wie die objektive Natur. Was heisst das aber anderes als dass die Analyse der Lebenswelt in Wirklichkeit weiterhin am Leitfaden der Naturwissenschaft vollzieht.” Der Wahrheits begriffbei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), p. 275.
Cf. K.C. Bhattacharyya, “The Subject as Freedom,” in: Studies in Philosophy (Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, 1958), II, pp. 19–92.
Contrast Heidegger’s draft for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
G. Funke, Phänomenologie — Metaphysik oder Methode (Bonn: Bouvier, 1966), esp. pp. 140, 154, 189.
Cf. e.g., H. Wagner, “Husserl’s Ambiguous Philosophy of Science,” in the Husserl number of the Southwestern Journal of Philosophy (September, 1974).
Cf. M. Brelage, Studien zur Tranzendentalphilosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965).
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Mohanty, J.N. (1985). Consciousness and Life-World. In: The Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy. Phaenomenologica, vol 98. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5049-8_10
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