American Influence
I have already referred to my year in New York, in which one important influence came through the younger men surrounding Thomas Hunt Morgan. This year in New York was possible because at that time the Rockefeller Foundation extended research fellowships to European students under the title of the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Fellowships. I was one of the first recipients, so far as I know the first from Austria, and I had this fellowship for three years. The first year I spent in New York at Columbia University. In the second year I went for one semester to Harvard and the second semester to Wisconsin. The third year I spent in Paris.
These two years in America brought the great break in my intellectual development. My interests, though far-ranging, were still provincial, inasmuch as the location in Central Europe was not favorable to an understanding of the larger world beyond Continental Europe. At Columbia University I took courses with Franklin Henry Giddings the sociologist, John Dewey, Irwin Edman, John Wesley the economist, and Arthur Whittier Macmahon in public administration, and I was overwhelmed by a new world of which hitherto I had hardly suspected the existence. The most important influence came from the library. During the year in New York, I started working through the history of English philosophy and its expansion into American thought. My studies were strongly motivated and helped by Dewey and Edman. I discovered English and American common sense philosophy. More immediately, the impact came through Dewey’s recent book, Human Nature and Conduct, which was based on the English common sense tradition. From there, I worked back to Thomas Reid and Sir William Hamilton. This English and Scottish conception of common sense as a human attitude that incorporates a philosopher’s attitude toward life without the philosopher’s technical apparatus, and inversely the understanding of Classic and Stoic philosophy as the technical, analytical elaboration of the common sense attitude, has remained a lasting influence in my understanding both of common sense and Classic philosophy. It was during this time that I got the first inkling of what the continued tradition of Classic philosophy on the common-sense level, without necessarily the technical apparatus of an Aristotle, could mean for the intellectual climate and the cohesion of a society.
Precisely this tradition of common sense I now recognized to be the factor that was signally absent from the German social scene and not so well developed in France as it was in England and America. In retrospect, I would say that the absence of political institutions rooted in an intact common sense tradition is a fundamental defect of the German political structure that still has not been overcome. When I look at the contemporary German scene, with its frenetic debate between positivists, neo-Marxists, and neo-Hegelians, it is the same scene that I observed when I was a student in the 1920s in the Weimar Republic; the intellectual level, however, has become abnormally mediocre. The great figures engaged pro and con in the analysis of philosophical problems in the 1920s—men like Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Weber, Karl Mannheim—have disappeared from the scene and have not been replaced by men of comparable stature and competence. During my year in New York, I began to sense that American society had a philosophical background far superior in range and existential substance, though not always in articulation, to anything that I found represented in the methodological environment in which I had grown up.
During the year at Columbia, when I took the courses of Giddings and Dewey and read their work, I became aware of the categories of social substance in the English-speaking world. John Dewey’s category was likemindedness, which I found was the term used by the King James Bible to translate the New Testament term homonoia. That was the first time I became aware of the problem of homonoia, about which I knew extremely little at the time, because my knowledge of Classic philosophy was still quite insufficient and my knowledge of Christian problems practically nonexistent. Only later, when I had learned Greek and was able to read the texts in the original, did I become aware of the fundamental function of such categories for determining what the substance of society really is. Giddings’s term was the consciousness of kind. Although I did not know very much about the background of these problems, I remember becoming aware that Giddings was intending the same problem as John Dewey but preferred a terminology that would not make visible the connection of the problem with Classic and Christian traditions. It was his attempt to transform the homonoia, in the sense of a community of the spirit, into something innocuous like a community of kind in a biological sense.
This year at Columbia was supplemented by the second year in which the strongest impression at Harvard was the newly arrived Alfred North Whitehead. Of course, I could understand only a very small portion of what Whitehead said in his lectures, and I had to work myself into the cultural and historical background of his book that came out at the time, The Adventures of Ideas. But it brought to my attention that there was such a background into which I had to work myself more intensely if I wanted to understand Anglo-Saxon civilization. The occasion for expanding my knowledge offered itself in the second semester of the year 1925–26, when I went to Wisconsin. I had become aware of the work of John R. Commons at Columbia, because during that year his Human Nature and Property was published. Thomas Reed Powell, who at that time was still at Columbia (the next year he went to Harvard), had commented upon Commons’s work. In Wisconsin I got into what I considered at the time, with my still limited knowledge, to be the real, authentic America. It was represented by John R. Commons, who took on for me the shape of a Lincolnesque figure, strongly connected with economic and political problems both on the state and national level, and with particular accent on the labor problem. In that environment in Wisconsin, with a man like Selig Perlman as the historian of labor and the young people who worked with Commons and Perlman as fellow students, I acquired my first enlarged knowledge of the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court and its opinions as the source of political culture in America. This experience of Wisconsin became a strong factor in my later career. When I came permanently to America in 1938, I wanted to go into the teaching of American government as the core for understanding American political culture; and since as a newly arrived foreigner I would not be admitted to teach American government at an Eastern university, I went to the South, where reservations in this respect were somewhat less strong.
This account of my American experience would be incomplete without mentioning the strong influence of George Santayana. I never met him, but I got acquainted with his work in New York, partly through the suggestion of Irwin Edman. I studied his work with care and still have in my library the books that I bought that year in New York. To me, Santayana was a revelation concerning philosophy, comparable to the revelation I received at the same time through common sense philosophy. Here was a man with a vast background of philosophical knowledge, sensitive to the problems of the spirit without accepting a dogma, and not interested at all in neo-Kantian methodology. Gradually I found out about Lucretian materialism as a motivating experience in his thought, and this was of considerable importance for my understanding later, in Paris, the French poet Paul Valéry and his Lucretian motivation. Santayana and Valéry have remained for me the two great representatives of an almost mystical skepticism that in fact is not materialism at all. The emotional impact of this discovery was so strong and lasting that in the 1960s, when I had an opportunity to travel in southern France, I went to see the Cimetière Marin in Cette where Valéry is buried overlooking the Mediterranean.
The results of these two years in America precipitated my book Über die Form des amerikanischen Geistes.1 The various chapters correspond to the several areas of literature and history that I had worked through. The chapter on “Time and Existence” reflects my studies in the English philosophy of consciousness and its comparison with the German theory of consciousness represented by Edmund Husserl. The chapter on George Santayana gives my summary of the work and philosophical personality of Santayana as I understood it at the time. A further chapter on “Puritan Mysticism” is the result of my studies on Jonathan Edwards—even in retrospect I must say it is a good essay. The next chapter on “Anglo-American Analytical Theory of Law,” about fifty pages, reflects my study of this area that in English and American civilization is the counterpart to the “norm logic” of Kelsen in the Continental European theory of law. And the last chapter on “John R. Commons” reflects my understanding of the work and personality of John R. Commons as well as the fervent admiration that I had for him.
This literary work in which I assembled the results of the two American years does not, however, give a full understanding of the importance these years had in my life. The great event was the fact of being thrown into a world for which the great neo-Kantian methodological debates, which I considered the most important things intellectually, were of no importance. Instead, there was the background of the great political foundation of 1776 and 1789, and of the unfolding of this founding act through a political and legal culture primarily represented by the lawyers’ guild and the Supreme Court. There was the strong background of Christianity and Classical culture that was so signally fading out, if not missing, in the methodological debates in which I had grown up as a student. In brief, there was a world in which this other world in which I had grown up was intellectually, morally, and spiritually irrelevant. That there should be such a plurality of worlds had a devastating effect on me. The experience broke for good (at least I hope it did) my Central European or generally European provincialism without letting me fall into an American provincialism. I gained an understanding in these years of the plurality of human possibilities realized in various civilizations, as an immediate experience, an expérience vécue, which hitherto had been accessible to me only through the comparative study of civilizations as I found them in Max Weber, in Spengler, and later in Toynbee. The immediate effect was that upon my return to Europe certain phenomena that were of the greatest importance in the intellectual and ideological context of Central Europe, for instance the work of Martin Heidegger, whose famous Sein und Zeit I read in 1928, no longer had any effect on me. It just ran off, because I had been immunized against this whole context of philosophizing through my time in America and especially in Wisconsin. The priorities and relations of importance between various theories had been fundamentally changed—and, so far as I can see, changed for the better.
1. English translation in CW, vol. 1.