RICHARD M. ZANER
Richard M. Zaner
The terrain through which this tribute must ineluctably pass, while memorially dim and hazy, is nonetheless marked by several memorable events that, despite that murkiness, remain vividly present to this day—as clear and distinct as any would-be Cartesian idea.
The first one was the time I first met Maurice Natanson. Not long after he earned his second doctorate, with Alfred Schutz at the New School, he had come to the University of Houston. This was shortly before I had enrolled in the spring of 1954 and just after I had been discharged from the Air Force.1 Although I enjoyed the benefits of the G. I. Bill, I still had to work until I was able to win the full fellowship that supported me until I graduated in December, 1956. Before that, I found a job at the university’s bookstore, and it was there I first met Natanson—already well-known among students as a “walking encyclopedia,” he was clearly already a major scholar and an intimidating force on campus. Spying him as he browsed through the shelves, I went up to him, coughing to get his attention. But when he turned around and nailed me with a glare, a menacing glint of light reflecting off his eyeglasses, I almost fled. He stopped me, though, and asked what I wanted. I mentioned my possible interest in philosophy—I knew absolutely nothing of what this meant or might entail. Instead of chatting, he told me to get a piece of paper and, when I did, listed some fifteen or twenty books I needed to study carefully before I made any such decision. Mind you, he was not in the least rude, nor was his demeanor at all menacing; like Schutz, he was a gentle man but, I am sure, somewhat put off by such apparently casual expressions of interest. In any event, I plugged away at as many of these tomes as I could.
Accepted at Rice University, I discovered that their policy prohibited midyear enrollments, so I went to the University of Houston with the idea of moving to Rice the next fall. In the meantime, I met Professor Natanson, made some good friends, and decided to continue at Houston, despite Rice’s fine reputation. I eventually saw him in his office, took several courses, and wound up taking everything offered by him and others in the department. Tough and demanding, impatient with idle chit-chat, he was a great teacher and, some years later, became a good friend.
A second event was the time I first met Aron Gurwitsch: I was but a junior majoring in philosophy under Natanson, who had invited him for a lecture to Houston. That Natanson was even there could be described only as a stunning accident of history—as was my chancing to meet him one day in the university bookstore. That a scholar of Gurwitsch’s stature would venture to this academic outpost—which at the time evoked the old West more than the old World—was equally amazing, even if invited by Natanson.
Yet, Gurwitsch’s performance, if I may so call it, was dazzling. When he had finished, I diffidently raised what must have seemed an impudent question about why he had himself pursued the discipline of phenomenology. Gurwitsch peered out at me, glasses aglitter with reflected light—he looked, for all the world, very much like Natanson had that day I met him in the bookstore. Although unnerved, I heard him ask for my name, which I hesitantly gave. He smiled and then gave his response, which I cannot now recall. But, still crystal clear to me, he then pounded on the table with a fist as he vigorously announced, “In the end, to be CLEAR, Herr Tszaner, to be CLEAR! You see?” Which, though I did not then “see,” I do recall; it was one key to my later decision to apply to the New School’s Graduate Faculty, a decision warmly encouraged by Natanson.
A third unforgettable event took place the following summer. The G. I. Bill and the Parry Fellowship for my undergraduate years had enabled me to save enough for the New York visit I had promised myself after hearing Gurwitsch. I made that long trek in early June, and I stayed in a tiny niche on West 10th Street until late August. To support my summer, I worked in the garment center pushing hand trucks loaded with wedding veils. I recall going to the manager’s office and being transfixed by the sign over his desk: “Scheme” was written in broad red strokes right through the word “Think.” The contrast with what the New School promised was not lost on me.
In any event, it was summer and, I learned, most of the faculty at the New School’s Graduate Faculty were gone—Alfred Schutz was in Germany; Dorion Cairns was off somewhere; and Werner Marx, then only part-time, was likely in Germany. I saw only Hans Jonas, whom I met quite by accident one day when I settled down for lunch in the 12th Street building’s wonderful dining room with its Orozco mural.
I introduced myself and told him where I was from and that I was interested in philosophy, and phenomenology in particular. Jonas was clearly taken aback, for he did an actual back step and stared at me—no glinting glasses, I had the presence to note. Wonder, if not disbelief, marked his face when he asked again where I was from. “Well, right now, I’m at the University of Houston, in Texas,” I said, “but I’m really from Arizona.” He interrupted, incredulity clearly winning out over initial surprise: “Ah-ri-tzona?” he exclaimed. “Please to tell me, Herr Tzaner, what is a young man from Texas und Ahri-tzona doing here, wishing to study phenomenology?” To which I had no ready response, being as startled by his question as he apparently was over how, as he said, a “Westerner”—he probably meant “cowboy”—could have known about philosophy, much less phenomenology. My mention of Maurice Natanson resolved the matter enough to permit a very pleasant conversation.
I returned to Houston that fall for my last semester and graduated in January. I had applied both to the Graduate Faculty and to Rice University in Houston. I was accepted by both, but Rice awarded a lucrative fellowship. I was tempted, but when I learned that I was to be their first and only graduate student in philosophy, and that the Graduate Faculty had no scholarships to offer, I had second thoughts—and even more when the Graduate Faculty told me that I could apply for a loan. And yet, where else could I go to study phenomenology? I eventually realized that I had to study at the Graduate Faculty. Gurwitsch’s and Natanson’s words still rang in my ears, and Jonas’s unintended but clear challenge was irresistible: could a “cowboy” from the boondocks of Ah-ri-tzona and Texas actually do that? Plus, there were those years studying with Natanson, when I was part of a tiny coterie of students that also included Bob Jordan. The courses with Natanson were tough, demanding, and opened up utterly unexpected horizons. Some sociologist once noted that at one time it was the local junior high school teacher who served for many as the prime link to the rich traditions of Western civilization. For me, that connection emerged only when I met and studied with Natanson, heard Gurwitsch lecture, and then faced off with Jonas in the dining room with its astounding Orozco mural.2
I had found an intellectual home.
I did not see Gurwitsch again until several years later, when he replaced Alfred Schutz, who had finally succumbed to congestive heart failure in the spring of 1959, the end of my second year. Schutz, in fact, was supposed to have been my major mentor, for both my master’s (written at his insistence) and my doctorate.
As events happened, he did neither, although one memorable afternoon he did tell me in no uncertain terms what topic I had to address in my master’s. I had met with him in the spring of 1958, after my first semester, at a restaurant on 8th Street. I was already there when he arrived. He promptly sat down, fiddling with his vest and smiling. He continued to smile, nodding while I talked on and on. Then, after fiddling again with his vest, he began to talk. I was taken aback. He had been so quiet before but now was so talkative. Then, as someone squirted a coin into the music box and noise once again filled the air, Schutz fiddled with his vest and grew quiet again. When the song had finished, and seeing my puzzled look, he explained that he could not stand popular music and had to turn off his hearing aide each time a song played. It was not, then, that I was so interesting; it was only that he could not tolerate the jukebox noise.
In the event, when he talked, it was to probe my intellectual concerns, gently but most thoroughly. I chanced to mention how I one time bought a lot of books while working at the University of Houston Bookstore—a sale of books at ten cents per pound. I made a steal of Marcel’s books, and especially of Kierkegaard’s: four hardbacks for a total of sixty cents! I mentioned in passing how I found Marcel’s writing seriously opaque. He pounced on my words as forcefully as Gurwitsch had beat on that table at his University of Houston lecture: “ach, gut, Herr Tzaner, then you vill write on Marcel. Gut!” Schutz, sad to say, died before he could actually direct that thesis, and Hans Jonas kindly agreed to take over—and he stayed with it even though it turned out to be a very lengthy 250 pages! “Herr Tzaner,” Jonas gloomily announced when I was finished, “you write very well, but, ach! too much!”
Amazingly, when I turned back to Marcel’s works—it had been more than two years since I last picked one up—it was a totally different story. And there, I soon discovered, was the theme for my master’s thesis: Marcel’s philosophical understanding of human life. That understanding contained also what would become the focus for my dissertation, namely, the beginnings of a phenomenology of embodiment, or what Merleau-Ponty, having learned from Marcel what I was soon to be learning, was later to call le corps propre.
In any case, I had completed a good deal of my graduate studies before I ever saw Gurwitsch again—that came the semester after I had finished my master’s degree and returned in the fall to begin my doctoral program. Schutz had prepared me well for Gurwitsch, as Natanson had prepared me so well for Schutz and, of course, Dorion Cairns, with whom I continued to study for the full four years of my graduate work.
GRADUATE STUDIES
I started at the Graduate Faculty in the fall of 1957, earned my master’s degree in the spring of 1959, and received my PhD in the spring of 1961. My master’s thesis was a critical explication of Marcel’s conception of human life; as mentioned, Schutz was supposed to have been my mentor for this, but with his continuing poor health during my first two years, I had to turn to Jonas, who kindly agreed to direct my work. My doctoral dissertation was on the problem of embodiment, a theme I had discovered while studying Marcel’s writings. I found the problem of embodiment to be a major theme also in Sartre and in Merleau-Ponty.3 I had also, of course, become familiar with Husserl’s writings and discovered Max Scheler’s remarkable ideas on the human body, and Henri Bergson’s early writings as well. Bergson, indeed, seems to have been the first philosopher to come across this phenomenon, but he was nowhere near as focused as Scheler and, later, Husserl and the others. I had decided to take up Sartre and Merleau-Ponty largely because, from what I could tell, both had owed something to Marcel’s work, especially his early writings. However that may be, I was thoroughly taken with these explorations, and soon after my thesis realized I had to explore the phenomenon as much and as far as I could.
Although my courses and seminars were obviously great preparations for what had become my central thematic, I must make it clear that this theme was not a topic in any of them.
I must also confess that it was only much later in my career that I learned of Gurwitsch’s serious interests in this phenomenon. As is known, it is found as a theme in much of his writing, including The Field of Consciousness4 and what was later published posthumously as Marginal Consciousness.5 In retrospect, it is clear that Gurwitsch’s early work in Gestalt psychology (as well as his work with Carl Stumpf and with Adhemar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein on brain-injured persons, as I note in my talk about Gurwitsch at the New School) prepared him very well for further explorations into the phenomenon of embodiment, as did his early interest in Goldstein’s biology.6 Yet, it is also clear that what he took from the gestaltists was far more in the service of his dominating concerns with the ideas of “field” and “contexture,” and with his prevailing interests in the nature of abstraction—precisely these formed his native air and his greatest originality. I have been less impressed with his thoughts about embodiment: thinking of it as falling with the sphere of the marginal, it seems to me he missed the central import.
However that may be, embodiment was surely among my earliest concerns, although it did not by any means exhaust them, for since my studies with Natanson, my central thematic focus has been with human life more broadly, as I tried to make plain in my book, The Context of Self.7 This work, as I emphasize in my lecture on Gurwitsch earlier in this conference, owed much to his highly original and insightful work on the idea of context, as it does to Schutz’s splendid work both in his lectures and his many articles and books.
It was Dorion Cairns, however, who had the greatest influence on my studies and, later, my understanding of Husserl, as well as my efforts actually to practice phenomenological reflection. Not only his wonderful four-semester seminar on Husserl’s Theory of Intentionality—justly famous among students—but also his lectures on epistemology, early British philosophy, and value theory, among others. For me, Husserl’s judgment of Cairns—that Cairns was his finest student—was surely correct. But not only did he bring Husserl vividly before us students, he also made lucid as never before much of modern philosophy and its central issues. Along with Fred Kersten and several others, I was, to put it as bluntly as I can, the most fortunate of students anywhere: I was able to study, in great depth and literally in person, with some of the greatest philosophers of our times: Cairns, Schutz, Gurwitsch, but also Werner Marx and Hans Jonas. I must also say, though, that my later move into the world of medicine—first made in 1971 when I accepted a position as director of the Division of Social Sciences and Humanities in Medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where I was also able to teach in the Department of Philosophy (newly set up as a great place for the serious study of phenomenology)—was not received with much enthusiasm by any except Jonas. Schutz, of course, had died well before that prospect ever came up; what he might have thought about it, I will never know. I do know, though, that Gurwitsch was very opposed to it; Cairns was, to say the least, dubious; Marx was silent but, I thought, not favorably disposed; and Natanson had already turned down an offer by Stony Brook.
I thought that move, however, was both terribly exciting intellectually and, even if regarded as professionally risky by most philosophers with whom I talked, natural. To put it in a nutshell, how best to pose questions of human life, selfhood, embodiment, and intersubjectivity except, say, in instances of coma, severe injury, extreme pain, old age, or even fetal life? At least, as I came to appreciate very quickly, there are few more demanding and challenging ways of posing these and numerous other philosophical issues than within the world of clinical and research medicine. My move into medicine was not in the least for reasons having to do with ethics, though that sphere of human life is surely most significant. My interest was rather spurred by the way human life is principally at issue in the highly concrete, preeminently practical ways that unique individuals come within the purview of physicians and other health professionals.
In short, Edmund Pellegrino’s fundamental challenge to contemporary philosophers won me over. His idea was that what was achieved in ancient Greek times could become a reality in ours. He thought a “new Paideia,” developed by way of multiple and mutual interactions, could at once breathe new life into the field of medicine, which was going quickly haywire with its burgeoning technologies and bureaucratic modes of organization, and regenerate a philosophy gone sterile with its increased remoteness from actual human life. I still find that notion remarkably enriching and challenging, not to say profoundly exigent, for confronting the awesome tests of life in our times. And it has seemed to me a most natural move for someone like myself, deeply entranced by the complexities of human embodiment—complexities that are surely as manifest as clinicians and researchers have found in the anatomy, physiology, and especially neurology of the human body. It is not without real irony, moreover, that these two—the phenomenon of embodiment and what I may for convenience term “the medical body”—have yet to find a common nor comfortable place in either medicine or philosophy. The harshest challenge of modern times—Descartes and his so-called dualism8—lies precisely there, I believe, in a mutual relationship from which both profit to the very degree to which they also engage.
Thus, you will understand, I trust, when I tell that how I imagine myself talking now with Schutz, reminding him of his own sociological studies, not to mention his long-standing concerns for both economics and even business. I imagine myself talking, too, with Cairns, and reminding him of his own work with Max Wertheimer, but especially of his very favorable response to my emphasis on that classic section 60 of Husserl’s Ideas I, where Husserl emphasizes that, to be a serious philosopher, one must “fertilize” one’s fancy by serious studies and work within poetry and history—and I can now emphasize any region of human endeavor, for instance, medicine. Fiction, as Husserl comments, is indeed the “source of all eternal truths.”9 I imagine myself talking, too, with Gurwitsch, and noting along the way his work with Gelb and Goldstein, his early gestaltist studies, his work with the famous brain-injured patient, Schneider, whom some call the hero of Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception and who serves as a remarkable instance of what I came to term “presence through absence.” I mean thereby that a phenomenon can be made to become quite as salient by means of its striking absence as it can by its presence. Indeed, it was precisely the absence of what Goldstein called the “abstract” ability that gave it such prominence when trying to help persons with brain injuries. The method here, moreover, has long seemed to me a clear instance of Husserl’s “free-variational” method and, for many phenomena, a far more effective one for reflective apprehension than otherwise.
THAT’S IT, FOR NOW
However all that may be, I need to conclude this rumination. I have wanted very much to make that set of themes that has been the substance of my professional life as prominent and attractive as I could.
I had made the decision—soon after leaving Stony Brook for the warmer climes of Dallas and Southern Methodist University (where Professor Wiggins was teaching as well—a most attractive prospect, I confess)—that I could not continue within the world of medicine unless I actually undertook to work within the contexts of this endeavor: clinical and research work. And I hoped not only to learn from becoming involved but to find out whether a philosopher could actually become clinically involved to the point where such work might actually be therapeutic. That opportunity was presented when I was offered the Stahlman Chair at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 1981. But was a kind of clinical involvement even possible for me as a philosopher?
Vanderbilt was quite remarkable in these terms: I was not only offered that chair but given free rein to do whatever I believed was appropriate for me. Now I could really give Husserl’s charge to “fertilize” my imagination the test I thought was necessary, at least for me. So, within a year, not only was I rounding with various medical teams, but I was being asked to consult with patients—even, at times, with physicians, nurses, other health professionals, and administrators. Within a little more than a decade, I had conducted more than fifteen hundred consults, and I finally began to think I could be responsive to my own initial questions. These responses can be found variously in my later articles and books, especially in my two collections of narratives, and I won’t bore you with them here.
But I do want to tell you a short tale about what I have learned, especially over the last ten years of my clinical and research involvements. One summer in the early 1990s, when I was covering for both my colleagues who were away on vacation, a young girl was brought into our ER from an outlying hospital. Only fourteen, she and a friend had taken her father’s bright new red coupe for a spin out in the country, and she wound up with her head partially submerged in a ditch of mud and water. How many times the car rolled and how it got turned over is unknown. The girl’s friend, although relatively unharmed, was tossed out of the car; she suffered a momentary blackout and did not recall anything. In any case, the girl who was brought in was soon described by a neurologist on call as “done with; her brain has been torn from her spinal column, it looks like a mushroom yanked almost away from its root.”
Eventually, I was asked to talk with her parents, who were understandably having real difficulty accepting the much gentler language of their attending pediatrician. They were having so much difficulty that they seemed to be in what some staff called “denial”—something of a nondescription, of course, for it said little about their difficulty. I will not go into any more of the details, fascinating as they surely are. I mention even this much to let you know that one day, quite without plan or much forethought, I found myself writing this story; I invented a good deal, to be sure (about, for instance, how that car could have turned over, how long the girl lay with her face partially submerged, etc.), and imagined some of the conversations so that I could make sense of those I did hear or participate in, and so on. I found myself doing this; I did not plan it, nor think in any way about doing it; it just happened. I mean that I discovered it going on within me. The German descriptive phrase for this—es denkt in mir—is much more apt than the English. This has intrigued me to no end since that time. In fact, I could not get the thing written at all well, so I quit. But then I found myself writing other stories that, with distance in space and time, I suppose, came out much more readily. Too readily, in fact, and that too puzzled me. These, though, were published as my first book of narratives.10 Eventually, I was able to finish the girl’s story, which came out in my second book of narratives.11
I recall that while I was studying Marcel, many years ago, I read what he persisted in calling his “method:” l’approche concrète. This phrase puzzled me for a long time—until, in fact, I found myself writing those narratives. Then it dawned on me that by “approaching” whatever it might be in a “concrete” manner, what Marcel meant was that he just started out thinking—just as often, writing—and letting go, in James Agee’s famous phrase. Just letting himself wander, following out whatever it may be and in whichever direction things seemed to move. Moreover, the more I actually came to do this, the closer it seemed to what Husserl termed “description,” as he (or any other phenomenologically inclined philosopher) freely varied or let things be whatever they were and from this letting be sought the most accurate and adequate descriptive words for what he reflectively observed. As Husserl carefully emphasized in his Cartesian Meditations, this way of doing things became a key part of his method12 as he actually practiced it.
In short, I have found in all this several clues for making sense of what I was learning while undergoing my clinical test, my trial-and-error assessment of myself as a clinically involved philosopher. On the one hand, narrative—the relating of one’s own stories or those of others—is fundamental to understanding what issues, moral or otherwise, are actually presented by specific circumstances. Second, narrative strikes me more and more as the language of the unique and singular, and hence as necessary for clinical work, no matter which type: whatever one’s sciences and body of empirical studies may say, one cannot do without a clear and deliberate focus on the unique features that every clinical encounter presents. Third, this all suggests that Marcel’s approche concrète is pretty much what Husserl understood by his own concrete method, deeply informed as it invariably was, by his free-variational work, and perhaps even answers to what Agee meant by his notion that to understand the people he interviewed and observed in writing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, one must let them be just as they are within the very concrete and particular things they gather about themselves, within the words they use and the habits they display in the course of their daily comings and goings.
At least, this is where I find myself all these years after beginning my explorations under the tutelage of Natanson, Schutz, Cairns, Gurwitsch, and others at the New School. Now, I think, I have finally discovered the reasons that drove my decision to forego the offer of a fellowship at Rice and take instead a loan to get me on my way. I take all my own comings and goings as fundamentally phenomenological in both intent and meaning. I hope others will come to see that as well.
NOTES
1. I spent about two years on active duty, most of it in Korea, where I was a gunner on a B-26, which carried either a two- or three-man crew, depending on a plane’s configuration. I was there from February through the end of October 1952, and upon my return—after fifty combat missions, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and four Air Medals—I was stationed at Forbes Air Force Base in Topeka, Kansas. Offered the chance for early release, I eagerly took it and moved to Houston where my mother was living.
2. Later, while I was working as Dean Hans Staudinger’s assistant—how that came about I must leave for another narrative; I also leave to the imagination how it happened that Dean Staudinger conducted so much of the Graduate Faculty business from his well-known cigar box, a filing system I was able to master very quickly—I decided to find out why that mural was partially covered; if you picked up a corner you would find Orozco’s depiction of Lenin, Stalin, and others. Going through the already large collection of papers and minutes of various groups and committees, I learned, to be brief, that the New School was never seriously investigated by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who decided not to pursue the matter. The school thus remained one of only a very few that didn’t have to bear the brunt of his infamous diatribes.
3. I mention in passing that mine was the first dissertation in English to examine the phenomenon of embodiment, and the first to analyze Merleau-Ponty’s ideas.
4. Although he wrote it in English, it was first published in French in a translation by Michel Butor, now a prominent novelist, as Théorie du champ de la conscience (Paris, 1957). It appeared in English later as The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1964).
5. Aron Gurwitsch, Marginal Consciousness, ed. Lester Embree (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984).
6. This fed into Gurwitsch’s early interest in a philosophy of biology. See, for instance his article, “Goldstein’s Conception of Biological Science,” which he dedicated “To the memory of Adhemar Gelb.” This article was among several I translated and is included in Gurwitsch’s Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966). The book consists of eighteen essays from forty years of work. This article on Goldstein was originally published in Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger 129 (Paris, 1940) and is chiefly concerned with Goldstein’s Der Aufbau des Organismus (The Hague: Springer Verlag, 1934). See also Gurwitsch’s “Gelb-Goldstein’s Concept of ‘Concrete’ and ‘Categorial’ Attitude and the Phenomenology of Ideation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 10, no. 2 (1949), 172–96.
7. Richard Zaner, The Context of Self: A Phenomenological Inquiry Using Medicine as a Clue (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981).
8. I have argued against this notion, believing instead that the actual Cartesian view is a triadism—not that this gets rid of the severe paradoxes in his work. See my Ethics and the Clinical Encounter (Lima, OH: Academic Renewal Press, 2004 [from the 1988 edition by Prentice-Hall, Inc.]), especially chapters 4 and 5.
9. See Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, trans. Fred Kersten, vol. 2, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 132 and footnote.
10. Richard Zaner, Troubled Voices: Stories of Ethics and Illness (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1994), now out of print.
11. You find the details of that story in the fifth narrative of Richard Zaner, Conversations on the Edge: Narratives of Ethics and Illness (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004).
12. See, for instance, Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 9–14.