K.H. Wolff - Böcker

This work further develops the concepts first presented in "Surrender and Catch" (1976) and applied to sociology and its history in "Survival and Sociology" (1991) and autobiography in "O Loma" (1989). This idea is based on the recognition of the unprecedented nature of the present time in the history of humankind and the planet, a time when we ourselves, rather than Nature or the Deity, can annihilate both ourselves and our planet. "Surrender" is nonlinguistic (or prelinguistic), "prepredicative", "prephenomenal", and involves suspending or "bracketing" the world, calling it into question. In this book, the author explores how his hypothesis of Surrender (-and-Catch) bears on aspects of autobiography (emigre status, field work), sociology of knowledge, poetry, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory and on attitudes to our time.

This issue of Human Studies is dedicated to Alfred Schutz on the twen- ty-fifth anniversary of his death. It also is meant as a fond and admiring salute to one of Schutz's most outstanding students and his intellectual biographer, Helmut R. Wagner, on the occasion ofhis eightieth birthday. The first paper, by Wagner himself, is the first of three that were presented at the session in honor of Alfred Schutz, which was chaired by George Psathas, at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society on March 9, 1984 in Boston. It is based on Wagner's intel- lectual biography of Schutz, reviewed in this issue by David M. Ras- mussen, and shows how Wagner found the main conceptual tools of this biography in Schutz's own theoretical work. The second paper, by Jonathan B. Imber, presents a fresh and far-reaching interpretation of Schutz's "The Well-Informed Citizen," and the third, by David M. Rasmussen, compares Schutz with Habermas, especially Habermas's most recent major work, Theory of Communicative Action.The dis- cussion of these three papers by the present author tries to show that they all touch, despite differences in focus and perspec,tive, on a prob- lem in Schutz's conception of phenomenology and social science. In Ingeborg Katharina Helling's essay, the relationship between Al- fred Schutz and Felix Kaufmann, and thus the interplay between phenomenology and the positivism of the Vienna Circle, is analyzed.

Su"ender and catch: give so you can receive, where the giving is your whole self, in a total experience. This is scarcely new on the American scene, and it is ancient knowledge, East and West. The fears of total surrender, the fears of self-revelation and of total abandon, although genuine, are likewise not new. Yet Kurt H. Wolff does attempt something new here, an epistemologi­ cal essay with the help of this old idea: his subtitle is 'experience and inquiry today'. He tries to formulate an integrated view which incorporates in the theory of total experience not only the accepted component- esthetics, religion, the recent American experience - but also a metaphysics, a phenomenology, a theory of perception, a social philosophy and a methodology of the social sciences, even a philosophy of history and psychopathology. Phenomenology (especially Alfred Schutz), the critical Frankfurt school (especially Adorno and Marcuse), sociology (especially Georg Simmel), and existentialism (especially Camus) are tied in together. It all looks topsy-turvy at first. We have here scraps of a diary, fragments of correspondence, a stray adolescent love letter, notes on notes on field work, and notes and comments on tutorial seminars plus long excerpts from students' essays, a stray paper in a learned journal summarizing the core of the book, comments piled on comments and a web of self-references, literary criticisms, and pieces of poetry, plus a rich scholarly apparatus.