Abstract
In 1956 Alfred Schutz was invited to present “Mozart and the Philosophers” at the renowned Peabody Conservatory, Baltimore. In the run-up to this lecture, a Baltimore newspaper published a short article that contains perhaps the most concise précis of Alfred Schutz’s self-defined intentions: “His principal fields of endeavour are philosophical interpretations of the social world through language and the arts, especially music.” A reconstruction of Alfred Schutz’s way into sociology through music has to follow two analytical directions: The exploration of correlations between Schutz’s own musical practice and his theoretical positions, complemented by tracing back the influences, the controversy between Nietzsche and Wagner and the debate between Bergson and Einstein have left in Schutz’s thought. Thus, the analysis unveils sources and backgrounds of what may be called the cantus firmus present throughout the work of Alfred Schutz: the nexus of time, action and the plurality of rationality.
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Notes
- 1.
Newspaper clipping [1956]. Alfred Schutz Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale. Series I/ Box 14/ Folder 271, p. 13019. Probably the article was published in the daily newspaper The Baltimore Sun. Even though “Mozart and the Philosophers” has received much less attention than “Making Music Together”, the author seems not to exaggerate when characterizing Alfred Schutz as a “Mozart authority”: Schutz’s Mozart essay is listed in the catalogue of the world’s most comprehensive library on Mozart, the Bibliotheca Mozartiana at Mozarteum in Salzburg, under the section “Philosophical Reflections”.
- 2.
The Ralph Waldo Emerson lectures “On Imagination and Poetry” 1872 and the “Igor Strawinsky Lectures” 1946 pertain to the eminent contributions to the “Peabody Lectures”. – Alfred Schutz’s invited lecture probably resulted from his presentation of “Mozart and the Philosophers” at a meeting of the Musicological Association in New York in 1956. The first public presentation of the paper had taken place in spring 1956 in the General Seminar of the New School in New York. The philosopher Hans Jonas and the musicologist and initiator of musical iconography, Emanuel Winternitz were among the participants in the discussion that followed the presentation.
- 3.
See “Discussion avec Einstein” (Bergson 1972). Jimena Canales’ article “Einstein, Bergson, and the Experiment That Failed: Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations” (Canales 2005) provides an outstanding historical reconstruction along with an evaluation of the Bergson-Einstein debate as an important milestone in the history of science. “Einstein claimed that no overlap existed between psychological conceptions and physical conceptions of time. He, therefore, did not see a role for philosophy in matters of time. Bergson gladly granted that psychological conceptions of time differed from physical ones. Knowledge of this, he bemoaned, was hardly new. Henri Pieron, an experimental psychologist, joined the debate by reminding listeners of the problem of the personal equation that arose in astronomical determinations of time: ‘For a long time now, astronomers have known that it is impossible to base precise determinations of physical simultaneity on psychological simultaneity…’ This example clearly illustrated the difference between psychological and physical conceptions of time. If the enormous speed of light had caused this realization to arrive slowly for physicists, the slow speed of nerve transmission had made it evident a long time ago for physiologists, psychologists, and astronomers. They had long known that perceptions of simultaneity differed from physical simultaneity. Legend had it that most scientists had learned this lesson as early as 1795. Relativity, in this respect, had only rediscovered what had already been known” (ibid.: 1176).
- 4.
The collection of Schutz’s personal library and transcriptions of Schutz’s annotations is held at Social Science Archive Konstanz and at Alfred Schutz Archive, Waseda University.
- 5.
Alfred Schutz Papers. Beinecke Library, Yale. Series I/ Box 6/ Folder 106, p. 3090.
- 6.
See John Durie’s introductory remarks in (Bergson 1999: vii).
- 7.
Alfred Schutz Papers: Op. cit. I/14/271, p. 13021.
- 8.
In the context of Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of subjectivity, the notion “I can” attains focal relevance. As Alfred Schutz has pointed out in his review of “Edmund Husserl’s Ideas, Volume II”: “The I as a unity is a system of faculties of the form ‘I can’” (Schutz 1966: 32).
- 9.
Mozart. Chamber Works. Gidon Kremer (vin); Kim Kashkashian (via); Valery Afanassiev (pno). Deutsche Grammophon, DG digital, (October 25, 1990). Quick access to this recording is possible via Apple’s iTunes music platform.
- 10.
- 11.
Alfred Schutz quotes his own English translation of the referenced passage on page 66 of his copy of Durée et Simultanéité. As far as the archived holdings of his personal library reveal, Schutz did not possess a copy of Leon Jacobson’s English translation first published in 1922 and reprinted as part of the edition prepared by Robin Durie (1999), which is referenced in the present paper.
- 12.
Alfred Schutz Papers: Op. cit. I/6/106, p. 3090.
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Stascheit, A.G. (2014). The Musical Foundations of Alfred Schutz’s Hermeneutics of the Social World. In: Staudigl, M., Berguno, G. (eds) Schutzian Phenomenology and Hermeneutic Traditions. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 68. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6034-9_8
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