Abstract
The place to which the idea of surrender-and-catch is meant to speak is here, and the time out of which it comes and which it seeks to address is now. In a first approximation here is this Earth, the home of all human beings, and now is this time in human history. At this time in human history, the place in which all of us human beings live has shrunk as never before, and in more than one sense. Two senses at least are most pressing.
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.
Notes
In “The Disciplining of Reason’s Cunning: Kurt Wolff’s Surrender and Catch,” Human Studies, 4 (1981): 365–389, esp. 377–378, Richard M. Zaner argues, convincingly to me, why “surrender and catch” should be hyphenated, and I have so spelled it ever since (while not yet in the title of my 1976 book).
For presentations of the idea of surrender-and-catch, see Chap. II, Secs. 5–6, above, SC, esp. pp. 20–27, and, most recently and comprehensively, “`Surrender-andCatch’ and Sociology,” in Henry Etzkowitz and Roland M. Glassman, eds., The Renascence of Sociological Theory (Itasca, IL: F.E. Peacock, 1991), pp. 201–244, esp. 201–209.
Cornelius Osgood, Winter (New York: Norton, 1953); Colin H. Turnbull, The Forest People (London: Methuen, 1961); Elenore Smith Bowen, Return to Laughter (1954; Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Press, 1964); Claude L¨¦vi-Strauss, World on the Wane (Tristes Tropiques), trans. John Russell (London: Hutchinson, 1961); Gregory Bateson, Naven (1936; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958); Oscar Lewis, Five Families (1959; New York: Science Editions, 1962), and The Children of Sanchez (New York: Basic Books, 1961); James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960). A few other candidates for illuminating analysis are Ronald Blythe, Akenfield (New York: Pantheon, 1969); Robert R. Jay, Javanese Village (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969); Jean Briggs, Never in Anger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
For a fuller treatment of the relation between surrender and community study and of the monographs mentioned, see SC, Chap. 13.
Cf. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963). To mention two of the most serious responses out of the vast discussion of this work, see Bruno Bettelheim, “Eichmann, the System; the Victims,” New Republic, 143, no. 24 (June 15, 1963): 23–33; Gershom Scholem, “On Eichmann,” trans. Miriam Bernstein-Benschlomo, in Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York: Schocken, 1976): pp. 298–300, and “Letter to Hannah Arendt,” trans. John Mander, ibid.,pp. 300–306.
Cf. SC, pp. 339–340.
Georg Simmel, Lebensanschauung: Vier metaphysische Kapitel (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1918), p. 7 (italics added). Cf. Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. and introd. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 358. For a slightly different translation, see SC,p. 298, n. 21.
Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (1959; New York: Fawcett Premier Books, n.d.), p. 68, quoted in SC, p. 186.
For a fuller treatment of surrender and the body, see SC, Chap. 24.
Ibid., Chap. 15, “Surrender and Aesthetic Experience,” pp. 96–108.
Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (1951), trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), p. 260.
SC, p. 64. This precedes a comparison between surrender-to and historical rebellion regarding total involvement, suspension of received notions, pertinence of everything, identification, and the risk of being hurt. Ibid., p. 64–67.
Ibid., pp. 62–63.
For a fuller discussion of surrender and rebellion, see SC, Chap. 11.
Quoted ibid., p. 267.
Herbert Marcuse, “Preface: A Note on Dialectic,” in Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941; Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p. xiv.
Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities” (1945), in Schutz, Collected Papers, I, The Problem of Social Reality, ed. and introd. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), pp. 207–259, esp. p. 230.
Cf. SC, pp. 163–165.
Marghanita Laski, Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences (London: Cresset Press, 1961). This collection is based both on responses to a questionnaire and on religious writings. Also see Laski, Everyday Ecstasy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980).
Georg Simmel, “The Problem of Historical Time” (1916), in Simmel, Essays on Interpretation in Social Science, trans. and ed. Guy Oakes (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), pp. 127–144.
Ibid., p. 131.
SC, p. 188 (from a student’s paper).
Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, trans. R.F.C. Hull, introd. D.T. Suzuki (New York: Pantheon, 1953).
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (1948), trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1959); Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon, 1949).
Quoted in SC, p. 292.
Cf. ibid., pp. 28, 35, 44, 51, 89, 94,193–199. But cf. Seungsook Moon, “Eurocentric Elements in the Idea of `Surrender-and-Catch,”’ Human Studies, 16, 3 (July 1993): 305–317.
SC, p. 293.
For an earlier, but more detailed treatment of this radical intersubjectivity, see SC, Chap. 18, “Beginning: In Hegel and Today,” V, 3, “The Possibility of Intersubjective Existential Truth,” pp. 128–132.
Cf. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
Cf. SC, Chap. 22, esp. p. 172.
See especially Chap. III, Secs. 8 and 9, above.
See Chap. XI below.
Cf. Looking Forward and Backward (2).
See Alfred Schutz, “One Multiple Realities,” p. 255, and many other places; also Survival and Sociology, fifth entry.
Some of this section is based on an unpublished paper “A proposito del soggetto umano in sociologia oggi” (1991); the last paragraph draws on Survival and Sociology, p. 29.
Kurt H. Wolff, “`Surrender-and-Catch’ and Sociology,” in Etzkowitz and Glassman, eds., The Renascence of Sociological Theory (cf. Chap. VI, n. 2, above), pp. 201–224.
Chap. VI, toward end of Sec. 5.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wolff, K.H. (1995). Surrender-and-Catch and Sociology. In: Transformation in the Writing. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 166. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8412-8_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8412-8_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4478-5
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8412-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive