The Sociology of Philosophies

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limit of a half dozen effective factions and its structural pressures for oppositions
and regroupings; whereas the social and political worlds do not operate by this
kind of struggle over attention space, and do not have the same numbers of factions
and oppositions. Bourdieu posits a further homology between the factions within
philosophy and the structure of relations within the intermediate level constitut-
ing the academic field of the universities in general. Nevertheless, the overcrowd-
ing of candidates for faculty positions after 1900, and a huge influx of students in
the 1920s (Bourdieu, [1975] 1991: 123, citing Ringer, 1969), are not phenomena
unique in the history of modern education, and do not account for the range of
opposing positions in philosophy of this time. Similar overcrowding occurred in
the 1830s and 1840s, but the result was not anti-modernist conservatism but
the radicalism of the Young Hegelians (Toews, 1980: 213–216, 1993: 389–392;
McClelland, 1980). The external resonances of Heidegger’s philosophy were not
specific to (or even primarily with) the Nazis; its greatest popularity was among
Protestant and Catholic theologians, and among the French existentialists of the
anti-Nazi underground, and it received its widest fame in France in the years
immediately after the liberation. The attempts to discredit Heidegger by means of
his Nazi phase are part of the intellectual maneuvers of a later period.


  1. Husserl followed Kant in taking time as the basic form of experience, since all
    experience is temporal but not spatial. For Kant, all categories are configurations
    of time: substance is permanence through time; causality is lawful succession in
    time; and so on. But in this Kantian approach, being itself is not temporal. Husserl
    kept changing his mind as to whether time flows from the pre-temporal transcen-
    dental ego or vice versa, or indeed whether subjectivity and temporality are
    identical (Dostal, 1993: 147–149).

  2. There is an additional reason why Heidegger reverses Husserl’s position. Husserl
    identified being with the naturalistic level, distinguishing being from the essences
    revealed by bracketing. Heidegger’s being is univocal across all levels; therefore he
    eliminates bracketing.

  3. The intermediary between Schutz and Husserl was Felix Kaufmann, a Viennese
    whose interests in mathematics, physics, and economics were fostered in the
    periphery of the Vienna Circle. Kaufmann had visited Husserl from 1922 on, and
    introduced Schutz to him in 1932. Schutz, an economist, took up the pheno-
    menological method in order to clarify debates over the foundations of social
    science, and especially Max Weber’s categories of verstehen and rational action.
    Schutz’s followers, like the later phenomenologists in general, became known as
    violent antagonists of the logical positivists. Not uncharacteristically in the growth
    of intellectual movements, opposing movements tend to split off from a common
    center: in the network, Schutz is only two links away from Schlick, Carnap, and
    von Mises. Harold Garfinkel, a pupil of Schutz at the New School for Social
    Research in New York during the early 1950s, went on to develop the sociologi-
    cal research program of ethnomethodology, inventing methods for breaching the
    taken-for-grantedness of everyday life which are something like experimental
    equivalents of the phenomenological epochê. Garfinkel’s movement in U.S. sociol-
    ogy during the 1960s and 1970s resurrected some qualities of Heidegger’s preach-


1020 •^ Notes to Page 749

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