Kurt H. Wolff

Surrender and Community Study: The Study of Loma

I was in ‘Loma’ in 1940, 1942, 1944, 1948, and 1960. Loma is a Community in northern New Mexico: a group of people whose lives are significantly bounded by that habitat (by the same walls, moenia). For a long time my question has been: what does this mean? More particularly, following my longest and most important stay in Loma, my questions have come to be: what did it mean to study these people? What was the nature of my research, my contact with Loma? What did it mean to collect ‘field notes’? What was their meaning? Who was I to have gone to Loma, what had I done there, what was I to have done? What had I inquired into? How had I gone about it, how was I to have gone about it?

Surrender-and-catch and phenomenology

One of the characterisitics of ‘surrender’ is the suspension of received notions (Wolff, 1976, p. 23). This suggests a close connection with phenomenology: ‘bracketing’ (‘reduction,’ ‘epoche’), which is common to both. But there is an important difference in the meaning of suspension in surrender and phenomenology. I begin with its meaning in phenomenology.

Surrender and the Body

I went outside and lay down in the yard, in the cooling breeze. I looked up. On my left, from down up, a rising tree. I moved my eyes to the right: there was the dusk—blue sky, then the edge of the house, which defined all. I thought somebody would perceive such a blend but might doubt that I could: I was too coarse: I don’t see rigidity and life, straight, undulating House and tree, manmade and not, hard, soft, How they are laundered by the moon.

A Methodological Note on the Empirical Establishment of Culture Patterns

ions; (5) those who were least decisive in their opinions (the percentages undecided on given issues), tended to have lower incomes on the average, followed the less skilled or unskilled occupations, and had slightly fewer years of school education, than those with more decided opinions; (6) three different groups of leaders, a specially selected group, an emergent group, and a group of labor leaders, showed some sharp differences of opinion on the administration of rationing rules by local enforcement officers; (7) these three groups of leaders also showed differences among themselves in the degree and extent of their community activities; (8) the selected leaders and the emergent leaders were clearly differentiated from the masses by higher average income, more years of school education, and intense activity in community groups; (g) union members tended to follow the trend of opinion -of labor leaders except for the issue of administration of rationing by local officers, on which they disagreed; (io) ration board members believed that their experience on ration boards had positive values for them as individuals; (ii) they felt, however, that there were personal complications in such service which affected health, fatigue, time for recreation and business relationships; (I2) ration board members believed that common sense statements of war time rationing rules would have been better than legal terminology; and (I3) occupational shifts among gainfully employed persons in Red Wing were found between the I940 Census and this I943 sample, which reflected the impact of the war time economy.

The Sociology of Knowledge and Surrender-and-Catch

From the beginning of its career in the 1920s, the term “sociology of knowledge” has been a misnomer. In the first place, “sociology of knowledge” is a bad translation of the German “Wissenssoziologie,” the dictionary to the contrary notwithstanding: both terms are narrower in English than in German. “Sociology,” at least at the time the term “Wissenssoziologie” was coined, was less far removed from philosophy than it is in the Anglo-Saxon world and has since become to some extent in German sociology as well; it is, or was, not so sharply distinguished from social philosophy. But more important, and also more clearcut, is the difference between “knowledge” and “Wissen.” For “knowledge” refers predominantly if not exclusively to positive or scientific knowledge, whereas the German term also covers such kinds of knowledge as philosophical, metaphysical, theological, artistic, or religious. The term “sociology of knowledge” thus means or connotes something other than its original.

Sociology, Phenomenology, and Surrender—and—Catch

My thanks to Jaakko Hintikka for having invited me to write a paper for the special issue of Synthese which is ‘devoted to the methodological Situation in sociology.’ My thanks, because it was in thinking about my contribution that the linkage of the three phenomena to which the terms in the title point occurred to me. Nor is this expression of my gratitude an intrusion of privacy. It is intrinsic to my investigation.

Surrender and Religion

In this late historical phase, when there is even a sense in which we might be past history, religion may well appear as the mood embraced in an effort to come to terms with two unanswerable questions — it is the phase in our history in which we know that these questions are unanswerable. The first is: ‘What am I doing, any way?’ And its trouble leads to the second: ‘Who am I, anyway?’ In one question: what can I truly believe about my fate?

surrender-and-catch and hermeneutics

If we people have attentively followed the actions of the nobility since time Immemorial, possess records concerning them, have, so to speak, continued them, and believe that we have, among the mnumerable facts, identified certain guidelines which permit conclusions about this or that historical destiny; and if m accord with these carefully sifted and ordered concluslons we have sought to accommodate ourselves somewhat to the present and the future-then all this is uncertain and perhaps only a play of the intellect, for perhaps these laws which we have here tried to guess at don’t exist at all. There is a small party which actually holds this opinion and which tries to prove that if a law exists, It can only read: The law is what the nobility does. This party sees only arbitrary acts of the nobility and rejects the popular tradition which in this party’s opinion brings us only slight incidental advantage but most of the time grave damage because it gives the people a false, Insidious, thoughtlessness-provoking certainty. This damage Is not to be denied, but the overwhelming majority of our people see its cause m the fact that tradition Is by far not yet sufficient, hence, that many more investigations must be undertaken in It, and that mdeed its material, no matter how gigantic It may appear, is still far too little, and that centunes must still pass before It will be enough. What is sad for the present m this view Is brightened by the belief that one day a time will come when tradition and its mvestigation will, breathing, as It were, a sigh of relief, make a period. Everything has become clear, the law belongs to the people alone, and the nobility disappears. [...J A party which, m addition to

Surrender and Aesthetic Experience

Like love, surrender is a State of high tension and concentration, an undifferentiated State in which ‘anything can happen’; and its catch is unforeseeable. The painter, for instance, who surrenders as he paints may find his catch to be a painting; or the insight that he is not really a painter but rather a carpenter; or the production of a scientific paper, and innumerable other things. If we think of the case where the catch is a painting, we realize that the artist is a less unconditional surrenderer than the ordinary man. The reason is that, unlike the ordinary man, he surrenders as a maker, as one who makes a work of art; and making injects an element of differentiation into his surrender; it puts a qualification on its unconditionality, at the very least because he has to work with his media that he cannot suspend.1 We shall recall this at certain points of our discussion of aesthetic experience.

From Nothing to Sociology

Since I typed last, a few days ago, I remembered some essays I had written more than sixty years ago: I remembered the affinity between them and this juncture in this book; and I got both frightened and delighted by this affinity. “Das Unumgangliche” (The Ineluctable) consists of six very short but very “thick” papers, The Poet and Sociology (already then a theme or a problem); a second, untitled essay; On Interpretation (already intrinsic and extrinsic); “Das heutige Ich (made)” (The Self Today [Tired]); “Rede an das kollektiv gedachte unglaubliche Gehirn” (Address to the Incredible Brain Thought of as Collective); and “Distanzierte Unumganglichkeit, Das Unumgangliche” (Distanced Ineluctability, The Ineluctable).1 The themes suggested by these titles are variations in the formulation, or in the effort to find a formulation, of my basic experience, of the basic experience of my time: the questionability, uncertainty, baselessness of everything, the terrible need for finding a ground on which to be able to stand. I quote from one variation: Finally we want to call attention to an essay which... appears to offer insight and a challenge that is similar to ours: Was ist Metaphysik? (What Is Metaphysics?) by Martin Heidegger (Bonn, 1929). We have two points of reference for this opinion [of affinity]. For one, Heidegger claims for science a unique attitude toward life, namely, service to the “Sache selbst” [the thing itself; cf. Husserl’s “To the things” — and Chap. VIII, Sec. 2, above] (p. 9) — the parallel to us might consist in the fact that by this statement Heidegger seems to want to create for himself an ontic anchoring of what he is doing. But much more it is the second symptom that speaks for our view, namely, that this [Heidegger’s] essay tells, with almost poetic immediacy, of his own life, namely, in developing the concept of “nothing,” when Heidegger neither finds nor could accept the possibility of a rational definition but instead reminds us of the feeling in which alone Nothing can be experienced: anxiety. Only out of this ineluctable feeling is the concept of Nothing hypostasized.2 And what does the experience of Nothing, what does Nothing experienced, lead to? To the concept of surrender-and-catch, as it has become obvious to me, over this period of sixty years. And now — which is a different Now — if I surrender to the question of how to justify doing sociology, what catch might I come up with?