The disciplining of reason's cunning: Kurt Wolff'sSurrender and Catch

Mildred Bakan, “Wolff'sSurrender and Catch,”Philosophy and Social Criticism 6, 1 (Spring, 1979), p. 101.

Jose Orgega y Gasset, “A Chapter from the History of Ideas,”Concord and Liberty, Helene Weyl (Trans.), New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1946 (p. 136). Earlier, he writes: “No saying says of itself all it wants to say. It says a small fraction, and the rest is implied and taken as a matter of course … What we actually convey is dependent on innumerable things that remain silent.” (p. 98).

“Our questions are new:” I think of this, for instance: the sheer scope, the temporal reach, of certain technologies and the enormous power they give the wielders; the unforseeable consequences on unpredictable persons, communities, places far, far in the future—making ecological (even eschatological) thinking and planning an urgent necessity. But also, as Hans Jonas stresses, all this placing new, harsh demands on our moral cognizance: future generations, “Nature” itself, are now asnever before, fundamental themes for our moral thinking, and nothing in traditional moral views gives the basis for that, as they were responses only to issues within apresent (sometimes past) community. Countless other examples come to mind only too readily, and even traditional issues (freedom/determinism, e.g.) take on frightful new dimension (e.g., in the face of new psychosurgical or behavioral techniques). See Hans Jonas, “The Concept of Responsibility: An Inquiry into the Foundations of an Ethics for Our Age.” In H. T. Engelhardt, Jr. and Daniel Callahan (Eds.),Knowledge, Value, and Belief, Vol. II, The Foundations of Ethics and Its Relationship to Science. Hastings-on-Hudson: The Hastings Center, The Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences, 1977, pp. 169–198.

In the 1964–1965 tutorial, on one of his students' papers, Kurt made another connection: “… I find that I myself used something close to ‘conception’ in the German rendition of ‘catch,’ namely, ‘Begriff,’ that is, ‘concept.’ [The German book is:Hingebung und Begriff, Neuwied und Berlin: Luchterhand, 1968] But I admit the masculine bias in failing to connect ‘concept’ and ‘conception.’ On the other hand, of course, women can ‘conceive’ other than in their wombs. (pp. 276–277)

In myContext of Self: A Phenomenological Inquiry Using Medicine as a Clue, Ohio University Press, 1981, I explore just this phenomenon as a critical moment in being-self.

See Roy Harvey Pearce,The Continuity of American Poetry, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961, P. 130.

Op. cit., pp. 124–125.

Ibid., p. 122

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., pp. 126–127.

Ibid., p. 128.

William Golding,Lord of the Flies, a novel, New York: Capicorn Books, 1955, pp. 180–181.

Ibid., p. 181.

Ibid., p. 188.

Wolff quotes a dictionary: A palimpset is a “written document, typically on vellum or parchment, that has been written upon several times, often with remnants of earlier, imperfectly erased writing still visible …”. Latinpalimpsestus from Greekpalimpsestos, rubbed again:palin, again …psestos, “scraped,” frompsen, to rub, scrape. (p. 217).

See my efforts to unravel some of these dimensions:The Context of Self, op. cit., Chapters 6–8.

And such talk hardly seems vacuous: from “crises” in medicine, the economy, to international problems, and beyond. For instance, in the very sense of the basic terms of morality, see Alasdair MacIntyre's writing on ethics, and Eike Henner-Kluge,The Practices of Death, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975. Also, more fundamentally, beyond the well-known writings of Husserl and Heidegger, see Max Scheler,The Place of Man in the Cosmos, where man's being problematic to himself in our times is taken as the fundamental theme.

See hisThe Structures of the Life-World, Vol. I, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

Schutz distinguished only unilateral and reciprocal orientation; still, as I have suggested elsewhere, there are grounds for developing the third sort as well—grounds in his work, and surely grounds “in the things themselves.” See myContext of Self, op. cit., Chapters 9–11.