Charisma and social phenomenology: Gerda Walther, Herman Schmalenbach and Aron Gurwitsch

This paper explores the contribution of early social phenomenologists working in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany to charisma theory. Specifically, I focus on the works of Gerda Walther, Herman Schmalenbach and Aron Gurwitsch, whose work is now being re-appreciated in the field of social philosophy. Living in the interbellum German-speaking space, these authors were keenly interested in the issue of charismatic authority and leadership introduced into the social sciences by Max Weber, with whom they engaged in an indirect intellectual dialogue. I argue that their phenomenological background equipped them well to understand the intricacies of the experiential and emotional dimension of charisma, and that their insights remain valid even a century after they have been first published.

Ethnomethodological Misreading of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field

Editors’ AbstractDuring the 1992–1993 academic year, Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) offered a graduate seminar on Ethnomethodology in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. One topic that was given extensive coverage in the seminar has not been discussed at much length in Garfinkel’s published works to date: Aron Gurwitsch’s treatment of Gestalt theory, and particularly the themes of “phenomenal field” and “praxeological description”. The edited transcript of Garfinkel’s seminar shows why he recommended that “for the serious initiatives of ethnomethodological investigations […] Gurwitsch is a theorist we can’t do without”. Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological “misreading” is not a mistaken reading, but is more a matter of taking Gurwitsch’s phenomenological demonstrations of Gestalt contextures in phenomenal fields and transposing them for making detailed, concrete observations and descriptions of organizationally achieved social phenomena. Where Gurwitsch addresses the organization of perception as an autochthonous achievement, inherent to the stream and field of individual consciousness, Garfinkel extends and elaborates this field into the social world of enacted practices. The April 1993 seminar also is rich with brief asides and digressions in which Garfinkel comments about his use of Alfred Schutz, his attitude toward publishing, his relationship with Erving Goffman, and many other matters.

Introduction to Harold Garfinkel's Ethnomethodological "Misreading" of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field

This article is the editors’ introduction to the transcript of a lecture that Harold Garfinkel delivered to a seminar in 1993. Garfinkel extensively discusses the relevance of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenological treatment of Gestalt theory for ethnomethodology. Garfinkel uses the term “misreading” to signal a respecification of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological investigations, and particularly his conceptions of contextures, functional significations, and phenomenal fields, so that they become compatible with detailed observations and descriptions of social actions and interactions performed in situ. Garfinkel begins with Gurwitsch’s demonstrations with line drawings and other abstract examples, and suggests how they can be used to suggest original procedures for investigating the vicissitudes of embodied practical actions in the lifeworld. This introduction to the lecture aims to provide some background on the scope of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological critique and elaboration of Gestalt theory and Garfinkel’s “misreading” of it in terms of his own conceptions of indexicality and accountability, and ethnomethodological investigations of the production of social order.

On Lester Embree, Aron Gurwitsch, and Some Other Things From the Past

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Strangeness of the Strange

This article reexamines Alfred Schutz’s famous 1944 Stranger essay and the initial criticism of Aron Gurwitsch. I side with Schutz in thinking of the refugee as a special type of stranger. Then to respond to the charge that the essay is not philosophical enough from Gurwitsch, I read Schutz’s notion of the strange with Husserl’s notion of homeworld and Levinas’s notion of fecundity. This allows us to see the philosophical depth of doing a phenomenology of the stranger and strangeness.

A Autoconsciência na Teoria de Aron Gurwitsch: Posição e Crítica

O objetivo do presente trabalho é apresentar e discutir o modo como o filósofo lituano Aron Gurwitsch concebe o papel da autoconsciência (self-awareness) e da autoconsciência corporal (bodily self-awareness) no interior de sua teoria do campo de consciência. Em um primeiro momento, apresentamos as dimensões do campo de consciência realçando os princípios organizacionais que estão em jogo na integração entre as diferentes estruturas da experiência consciente. Esta contextualização permite compreender a posição ocupada pela autoconsciência naquilo que o filósofo denomina de "margem" da consciência, domínio da experiência caracterizado pela "irrelevância" ou indiferença em relação à apresentação temática – do objeto da atenção. Em um segundo momento, concentrar-nos-emos em descrever a autoconsciência da dimensão encarnada da existência, com o propósito de avaliar os critérios que permitem a Gurwitsch qualificar a autoconsciência corporal sob a rubrica do conceito de "irrelevância". Ao final, esboçamos certos questionamentos à posição de Gurwitsch desenhados a partir de críticas contemporâneas da fenomenologia e das ciências cognitivas à abordagem do autor.

Gurwitsch, Aron (1901–73)

Aron Gurwitsch was a phenomenologist who produced important work on the structure of consciousness. He was concerned with how consciousness is organized, especially its invariant, formal structure. His main work, The Field of Consciousness (1964), argues that consciousness is always structured in a three-fold pattern: theme, thematic field and margin. The theme is the focus of attention, the thematic field is the relevant context and the margin contains items merely co-present with the theme and its thematic field. Gurwitsch applied his philosophy of organization to wide-ranging issues, including social encounters, logic, culture and critiques of psychology. Gurwitsch successfully integrated insights from Gestalt psychology and phenomenological philosophy to advance the problem of conscious organization in a way that neither discipline alone could achieve. His insights on attention and consciousness have become increasingly relevant for phenomenology and the cognitive sciences.