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Le present volume rassemble plusieurs etudes qu' Alfred Schutz
avait consacrees a diverses questions qui gravitent autour d'un
probleme philosophique majeur: celui de la socialite. La plupart de
ces etudes ont Me publiees ailleurs, mais elles etaient dispersees
et d'un acces parfois difficile. Tel quel, l'ouvrage que nous
presentons n' est que la premiere partie d'un ensemble dans
lequell'auteur se proposait de faire reunir par son disciple et ami
Maurice Natanson les nombreux essais qu'il avait ecrits depuis son
arrivee aux Etats-Unis au debut de la demiere guerre. La mort
l'empecha de voir realiser ce projet. 11 nous a semble que la
pUblication successive de cet ensemble, dans la fidelite aux
indications laissees par l'auteur, etait Ie plus bel hommage que
nous pussions rendre a ce penseur qui fut notre ami et meritait
sans nul doute de tenir dans Ie courant phenomenologique une place
de premier plan que faillirent lui refuser les circonstances
dramatiques de sa vie, jointes a sa trop grande modestie per-
sonnelle. II me faudrait ici parler de l'homme, evoquer sa finesse
d'esprit, son ironie penetrante, sa serenite et son courage dans l'
exil, l' event ail tres vaste de ses preoccupations, Ie don de jeu-
nesse et de sympathie grftce auquel il entreprit a quarante ans
d'assimiler avec bonheur une culture nouvelle, pour y exceller
bientOt.
"Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth
to be healed?" -Jeremiah "Existentialism" today refers to faddism,
decadentism, morbidity, the "philosophy of the graveyard"; to words
like fear, dread, anxiety, anguish, suffering, aloneness, death; to
novelists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Dostoievski, Camus, Kafka; to
philosophers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel, Jaspers, and
Sartre-and because it refers to, and is concerned with, all of
these ideas and persons, existentialism has lost any clearer
meaning it may have originally possessed. Because it has so many
definitions, it can no longer be defined. As Sartre writes: "Most
people who use the word existentialism would be em barrased if they
had to explain it, since, now that the word is all the rage, even
the work of a musician or painter is being called existentialist. A
gossip columnist . . . signs himself The Exis tentialist, so that
by this time the word has been so stretched and has taken on so
broad a meaning, that it no longer means anything at all. " 2 This
state of definitional confusion is not an accidental or negligible
matter. An attempt will be made in this introduction to account for
the confustion and to show why any definition of existentialism in
volves us in a tangle. First, however, it is necessary to state in
a tenta tive and very general manner what points of view are here
intended when reference is made to existentialism."
Twelve years after his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin published
his Descent of Man. If the first book brought the gases of
philosophi cal controversy to fever heat, the second exploded them
in fiery roars. The issue was the nature, the condition, and the
destiny of genus humanum. According to the prevailing Genteel
Tradition mankind was a congregation of embodied immortal souls,
each with its fixed identity, rights and duties, living together
with its immortal neigh bors under conditions imposed by "the laws
of nature and of nature's God." Obedience or disobedience of these
laws destined all to eternal bliss or eternal damnation. What had
come to be called "evolution" was assimilated to the Tradition in
diverse interpretations such as John Fiske's, Henry Drummond's and
Charles Pierce's. Their common ten dency was to establish
"evolution" as somehow the method whereby divine providence ordains
the conditions under which man accom plishes his destiny. The most
productive competitor of the Genteel Tradition went by various
names, with positivism, materialism and naturalism the most
telling. Its success as competitor was not due to its theological
or metaphysical import. Its success flowed from its mode of
observing how effects or results, those undesired as well as those
desired, got produced. Unified and generalized, these observations
were taken for notations of causal sequences always and everywhere
the same, thus for laws of "nature" to whose workings "the
providence of God" added nothing productive and could be and was
dispensed with."
Le present volume rassemble plusieurs etudes qu' Alfred Schutz
avait consacrees a diverses questions qui gravitent autour d'un
probleme philosophique majeur: celui de la socialite. La plupart de
ces etudes ont Me publiees ailleurs, mais elles etaient dispersees
et d'un acces parfois difficile. Tel quel, l'ouvrage que nous
presentons n' est que la premiere partie d'un ensemble dans
lequell'auteur se proposait de faire reunir par son disciple et ami
Maurice Natanson les nombreux essais qu'il avait ecrits depuis son
arrivee aux Etats-Unis au debut de la demiere guerre. La mort
l'empecha de voir realiser ce projet. 11 nous a semble que la
pUblication successive de cet ensemble, dans la fidelite aux
indications laissees par l'auteur, etait Ie plus bel hommage que
nous pussions rendre a ce penseur qui fut notre ami et meritait
sans nul doute de tenir dans Ie courant phenomenologique une place
de premier plan que faillirent lui refuser les circonstances
dramatiques de sa vie, jointes a sa trop grande modestie per-
sonnelle. II me faudrait ici parler de l'homme, evoquer sa finesse
d'esprit, son ironie penetrante, sa serenite et son courage dans l'
exil, l' event ail tres vaste de ses preoccupations, Ie don de jeu-
nesse et de sympathie grftce auquel il entreprit a quarante ans
d'assimiler avec bonheur une culture nouvelle, pour y exceller
bientOt.
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