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Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20

Piaget and Gurwitsch

Osborne Wiggins Jnr.

To cite this article: Osborne Wiggins Jnr. (1981) Piaget and Gurwitsch, Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology, 12:2, 140-150, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.1981.11007534

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.1981.11007534

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Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 12 No.2, May 1981

Piaget and Gurwitsch

OSBORNE WIGGINS. Jnr.


Jean Piaget has himself written approvingly of Aron Gurwitsch's
appropriation of his work. The approving reference, in Insights and
Illusions of Philosophy, ( 1971, 131) appears within the following context.
Piaget is sharply criticizing "the ambitions of a philosophical psy-
chology", and phenomenology, because of its current prominence in this
area, is his main target. The phenomenological notions upon which
Piaget focuses are those of "intentionality" and "meaning". Piaget argues
that scientific, experimental psychology has no quarrel with philosophical
psychology regarding the reality of intentionality and meaning. The
quarrel concerns rather the manners in which we can acquire reliable
knowledge ofthem. Philosophical psychologists of the phenomenological
variety believe such realities to be accessible through the privileged act of
an introspective "intuition of essences" while scientific psychologists rely
upon controlled experiments without appealing to introspection. Yet in
order to demonstrate the agreements available to the phenomenologist
who wishes to understand intentionality and meaning and the findings of
a scientific genetic psychology, Piaget refers to Gurwitsch's use of his
ideas. In this passage Piaget has just claimed that the psychologist can
very well shed light on intentionality even when he employs another
terminology. Then he writes,
If I can quote myself as an example, all the data I have tried to analyze in terms of
a sensori-motor schematism and of assimilatory schemes have an intentional
character. It is because of this that the phenomenological philosopher Aron
Gurwitsch of New York, much more in touch with psychology than his French-
speaking colleagues, uses my concept of assimilation to justify his arguments.

In view of the blistering criticisms Piaget lodges against Gurwitsch's


"French-speaking colleagues" (primarily Sartre and Merleau-Ponty),
this positive remark is high praise indeed.
Piaget is correct, I think, in seeing in Gurwitsch's references to and
uses of his psychological investigations an attempt to justify his own
phenomenological aims. What I wish to emphasize in this essay, how-
ever, is that most of the phenomenological theses for which Gurwitsch
sought support were clearly defined and accepted by him before he
acquired much knowledge of Piaget's work (Embree, 1972, xvii- xxv).
140
The buttressing which Gurwitsch's position subsequently gained from
Piaget's researches were all the more important because with many of his
theses Gurwitsch had placed himself in opposition to the dominant philo-
sophical tradition, a tradition which in certain respects even included
Husserl. I suggest that we can best appreciate Gurwitsch's interest in
Piaget, then, by noting first some of the fundamental tenets of his phil-
osophy which, while developed independently, later found weighty cor-
roboration in Piaget's empirical studies. The affinity between Gurwitsch
and Piaget resides in the novel theses they jointly defended and in the
traditional ones they both opposed- despite the significant differences
in the two thinkers' vocabularies and philosophico-scientific orientations.
Yet the support which his position could receive from Piaget's was
less important to Gurwitsch than the promise of new insights for
phenomenology in genetic psychology. Gurwitsch hoped that Piaget's
work could aid the advancement of phenomenology. Gurwitsch himself
only delineated the possibilities and directions of such aid, however. The
detailed, systematic, and critical confrontation between phenomenology
and genetic psychology, as Gurwitsch well knew, remains to be written
(Gurwitsch, 1966, xxiii).
I shall begin by briefly sketching some of the central ideas which
Gurwitsch developed in a work he wrote prior to any careful study of
Piaget, Human Encounters in the Social World (1979). I shall then indi-
cate the connections ofthese ideas with certain aspects of Piaget's genetic
psychology. Following this path I shall also be able to mark some of the
similarities which Gurwitsch saw between Piagetian principles and Gestalt
psychology, on the one hand, and between Piaget's conception of abs-
traction and Husserl's, on the other.
As the title suggests, the book Human Encounters in the Social
World aims primarily at describing the ways in which we experience other
people in the world of everyday life. Yet this primary aim can be reached,
Gurwitsch argues, only if our philosophical interpretation of the concept
of the world - and, more specifically, the concept of the world of
everyday life - is adequate. And this concept Gurwitsch believes to be
fundamental/]" misconstrued in the tradition ot~\<Jodem philosophy from
Descartes through Husserl. The inadequacy of the world-concept is
correlated with insufficient understanding of the mental processes
through which this world is presented to us. The objects of the world are
traditionally interpreted as composed of material properties such as size,
shape, color, and texture. Mundane objects are thus objects of nature.
And, correlatively, the mental processes in which these objects are given
to us are cognitive acts. Objects are presented to the subject as other
than him, as distinct and alien from him. The cognizing subject thus
"stands over against" objects, mentally grasping them from a distance.
From this Modem perspective - whose basis Gurwitsch examines in
Cartesianism- human existence in the world assumes the form of
141
"world-cognizing" (1979, 35- 50). We might even say that it assumes
the form of "nature-cognizing".
Since the "in-itself" of any mundane object consists exclusively in its
physical attributes, all cultural and evaluative features must be extrane-
ously superimposed by human consciousness on this autonomous natural
substratum. The "natural thing" is thus the "founding" stratum, and
values and use-properties constitute higher strata "founded" upon this
more basic one. We can even claim that the world is fundamentally and in
itself "pure nature", with the qualification "pure" designating a nature
existing prior to and independently of all cultural and instrumental deter-
minations (1979, 39-47).
Not until Heidegger, Gurwitsch maintains, do we overcome this
modem interpretation of the world and of the human subject living in the
world (1979, 66 -73). Heidegger distinguishes between those mundane
entities which are "at hand" and those which are "on hand", and he
ascribes a primordiality to the former for "being-in-the-world". What is
"at hand" is a utensil. Utensils are objects for practical use or manipula-
tion. Indeed, any utensil in its very being as a mundane entity is always
inserted into a "referential tissue of connectedness" which includes the
work to be done and even the human being as the one who is to use the
tool and who is to accomplish the work. The human individual is so
thoroughly inserted into and defined by this overarching nexus of actional
references that he can claim to possess no concrete being independently
of it. While using the hammer to nail boards together, I am the ham-
merer. As Gurwitsch writes,
The sense of being given over to the situation of the surrounding world of utensils
by gearing into it consists, therefore, of the fact that to some measure one can
concretely ex!st only in and by virtue of it. ( 1979, 77)
In such a situation, then, mundane things are always determined as tools
of a certain sort and as referring meaningfully to one another, i.e., as
composing a "utensil-totality"; and I myself am defined by the work to be
done and by my use of the utensils at hand.
Yet even when I gear into such a pragmatic situation and am deter-
mined in my concreteness by it, this situation and its referential tissue of
connectedness does not of itself constitute the "world" for me (1979, 72).
Even while I am geared into the situation and am absorbed by it, I
experience references to entities beyond and outside this present situa-
tion, references to other utensil-totalities. Other mundane things are
"co-included" in the present situation in the sense that I can always
advance beyond this situation and come to deal directly with these other
things. In short, the present situation is always experienced within a
larger "horizon" of mundane reality, and paths into this horizon are
already sketched. While the present situation and its utensil-totality thus
point beyond themselves to other utensils which I could come to gear into
and employ, the "world" in the primordial sense remains this overall
horizon of activities and objects at hand for use.
142
If, consequently, mundane things in their most primordial being and
sense are such utensils which compose the utensil-totality into which the
individual is pragmatically geared, then certain value- and functional
properties belong to these things in a primordial way. These properties
are not superadded to the things' purely material or natural features. On
the contrary, the mundane object as a purely natural thing, a thing with
exclusively physical determinations, can be encountered by someone
only as the result of a modification of the object's more fundamental
character. Distancing oneself from the object so that one can assume a
purely cognitive stance toward it becomes now a "withdrawing" from
situations of practical activity in which the object is a utensil immediately
at hand. Cognition, in short, is a derivative form of being-in-the-world: it
presupposes the more basic form of living and acting in a practical
situation. Accordingly, a problem arises for philosophy which is just the
opposite of the traditionally defined one. The traditional problem had
consisted in explaining how a purely material thing could have evaluative,
instrumental, and cultural properties superimposed upon it. But if mun-
dane things always already exhibit such properties in their most primor-
dial aspect, as Gurwitsch claims, then the problem consists in showing
how things can lose their evaluative and instrumental properties and be
viewed as "merely" physical objects. In approaching this problem
Gurwitsch disagrees with Heidegger's contention that cognizing is a
mode of being-in-the-world which is "essentially deficient" or privative.
Gurwitsch rather asserts that cognition carries its own form of self-suffici-
ency and must be phenomenologically described in its positive aspects
(1979, 80-81).
Having mapped out at least a part of his philosophical problematic in
this way, Gurwitsch subsequently found a kindred intellect in Piaget
(Piaget, 1954 and 1963). Piaget supports Gurwitsch's thesis that practical
activity is the most "primordial" mode of human existence by finding
such activity to be genetically prior in the life of each individual. Such
genetic firstness, however, is not simply a chronological or biographical
fact. It is also a necessity in the sense that the mental capabilities which
arise later- be they cognitive, social, linguistic, or whatever- presup-
pose practical, bodily action as their necessary condition. Without pro-
gressively structuring the surrounding world through directly acting on its
objects, the child would never attain the mental structures which alone
make possible higher mental processes like speaking and rational think-
ing. In an appropriately broad sense, thought- even logical and scientific
thought- is the genetic extension of action.
For Piaget, action is so basic in the genetic constitution of reality
that, at the outset of life, the child experiences neither himself as a
separate and autonomous subject nor mundane objects as things set over
against him with their own "being in themselves". Action is rather an
undifferentiated unity in which the self is involved without knowing itself
143
and in which the properties of objects are not distinguished from the
sensations and movements of the subject. The distinction between sub-
ject and object, between self and world, is a progressive achievement of
action (1972b, 19-20).
From a genetic point of view, then, the immersion of the subject in
the practical situation is at first absolute. The tissue of references which
binds together things, actions, and the acting self is so tightly interwoven
that few distinctions among them exist. Differentiations among the
several relata of a situation are genetic accomplishments. It is only
.gradually that a human self emerges to distinguish itself from its own
individual activities and the instruments it employs.
In the beginning, therfore, is an all-inclusive functioning. But this
functioning is structured (Piaget, 1963, 1 - 20). It is not a pure groping
which comes to be gradually structured through the positive reinforce-
ment of successful accidents. All activity is rather guided from the outset
by a pre-structured schema. And it is precisely through such structured
acting on things that the activity encounters the inherent properties of the
things and gradually accommodates itself to them. Yet such accommoda-
tion is simply the restructuring of the activity; it is the constitution of a
novel structure which will henceforth direct future actions. Thus all
functioning presupposes a structure. But it is through such functioning
that the initial structure is modified so that a new one is formed. And this
genetic cycle begins again.
This prominence of structure in Piaget's psychology allies him with
the Gestaltist position which Gurwitsch defends: the field of conscious-
ness is autochthonously or immanently organized (Gurwitsch, 1964).
Piaget, however, renders intelligible the relation between structure and
genesis. Piaget, like the Gestaltists and Gurwitsch, rejects associationis-
tic, empiricistic, and stimulus-response approaches because such
approaches view organization in experience as superimposed upon data
or stimuli which are initially or inherently chaotic. But Piaget also spurns
views of structures as innate, a priori, or emergent. Thus Piaget renders
intelligible the relation between organized forms and genesis by demon-
strating the interdependence of function and structure. In Piaget,
Gurwitsch has found a theory of mental genesis which is compatible with
his Gestaltist convictions while it also endorses the centrality of action.
Such are the broad outlines. But this general problematic grows
complex when worked out. For if things first acquire their utility character
precisely through the actual activities in which the child manipulates
them, how can they come to retain their functional aspects even when
they are not actually being used? The constitution of utensils through
action, in other words, would seem to make the instrumental character of
things dependent wholly upon ongoing use. Thus the Gurwitschian thesis
requires an explanation of the permanence of functional properties, of the
primordial presence of instrumental properties even when things are not
actually being manipulated (Gurwitsch, 1964, 36-41).
144
This issue, however, is not separate from the more general one of
objectivation through genesis (Gurwitsch, 1964, 39- 40). The problem
of objectivation consists in explaining why objects are experienced as
possessing in themselves relatively permanent, stable, or regular fea-
tures. In other words, it consists in accounting for those mental processes
in virtue of which mundane things are experienced as possessing a being
independent of the subject.
Now for Piaget, such objectivation occurs through genetic "con-
struction" of the entire world (Piaget, 1954). That is, it occurs through the
progressive elaboration of spatial, temporal, and causal networks within
which objects exist as permanent or as undergoing regular changes and
within which the human subject exists as one object among others. Only
when an entity is experienced as spatio-temporally related to others and
as causally dependent upon them for its being and properties, i.e., only
when an object is given within an ordered "world" of other objects, does
it possess a being "in itself''. What I must emphasize is that this kind of
objectivation, the acquisition of an "objective" being in themselves by
mundane things, is not identical with the "self-sufficient" mode of the
"in-itself" which Gurwitsch finds in the purely material objects given to a
purely cognitive subject (Gurwitsch, 1979,43- 44). This latter kind of
"in-itself" Gurwitsch characterizes as "self-sufficient" because it exhibits
no references to a human subject. The objectivation of functional proper-
ties, properties of usefulness and value, on the contrary, will consist
precisely in the acquisition of permanent and abiding references to typical
sorts of activities by a human subject. An entity is a utensil, Gurwitsch has
claimed following Heidegger, only within a utensil-totality, i.e., only
within that referential tissue of connectedness which includes references
to types of human manipulation. The objectivation of instrumental
properties, then, will lie in the objectivation of precisely those references
to other utensils, to the work to be done, and to the appropriate activity.
Yet, as I have already indicated, this objectivation of functional features
will only form a part of that overall objectivation whereby things become
lasting and regular constituents of the world's spatial, temporal, and
causal order. For only in this way will the functional aspects of things
constitute part and parcel of their very mundaneity.
Piaget maintains that this objectivation of things, this genetic
construction of mundaneity, occurs through the gradual coordination of
the actions through which the child manipulates things (Piaget, 1954). At
the outset of mental life data are not properties of an object because the
action through which the child manipulates the object is isolated from
other possible activities and thus unconnected with other aspects of
things. It is when data are related to one another because the same entity
becomes the target of different but coordinated actions that objects begin
to acquire a being apart from the presently ongoing activity. For example,
when the same thing becomes something to be seen, shaken, and heard,
145
that thing begins to acquire multiple properties which are assumed to
pertain to it even when they are not directly given. The child, seeing bells
hanging from his bassinet, reaches for the string in order to shake them
while he anticipates hearing their ringing. The bells, then, in addition to
their directly given visual aspect, possess purely potential features which
are not now actually presented: the bells are shakeable even when not
shaken, they are bearable even when not actually heard. The bells are
beginning to take on an "in-itself", i.e., a being transcendent to the
ongoing action although this being still refers to the actions of shaking and
listening. And as the various ways in which objects can be used become
coordinated and integrated with one another and the various perspectives
from which objects can be given acquire more complex relationships with
one another, the properties of the objects become more numerous and
interdependent: the objects come to possess properties which are not
now actually experienced but are potentially experienceable, which are
assumed to exist even when not presently given to consciousness, whose
being, therefore, does not depend on actually being perceived. As a part
of this process functional properties become abiding aspects of things. An
object appears to the child as usable in certain typical ways even when he
is not using it and is in fact engaged in some other activity. The very being
of the object refers to purely potential actions and manipulations
(Wiggins, 1979).
Piaget thus assigns genetic priority to what Gurwitsch sees as primor-
dial: gearing into a practical situation and using things for certain pur-
poses. But Piaget and Gurwitsch also concur in the thesis that formal and
empirical cognition is a form of experience which is necessarily derived
from this more fundamental form. They agree, in other words, that there
are stages or strata of variously structured experiences which lead contin-
uously from pre-scientific involvement in action to scientific knowledge of
mathematics, logic, and nature. For both thinkers, there is a progressive
"distancing" of the subject from the world which disengages him from
immediate practice and renders possible all the mediations of theory.
According to Piaget, the progressive objectivation of things through
the coordination of actions performed with and on them leads by a
continuous route to logic, mathematics, and physical science (Piaget,
1970, 1 - 19). Certain kinds of actions, when internalized, i.e., when
performed in thought and not in reality, constitute the genetic roots of
logical and mathematical operations and transformations. Piaget has
recognized two, fundamentally different sorts of abstraction (1970, 15-
19). The first is an abstraction from objects. The second is an abstraction
from actions on objects. Piaget contends that our physical knowledge
arises through the first sort of abstraction, as, for instance, when the child
learns through actual experience that big things can weigh more than little
ones but that sometimes little things can weigh more than big ones. Our
knowledge of logic and mathematics, on the other hand, arises from the
146
second kind of abstraction, abstraction from actions. For example, at a
certain stage the child learns that if he lines pebbles up in a row and counts
them from left to right, he gets ten. And then if he counts them from right
to left, he again- at first with some astonishment- arrives at ten. If he
arranges the pebbles in a circle and counts them, ten is once again the
result. If he counts round the circle the other way, still again ten. Without
explicitly realizing it, the child has discovered what in arithmetic is called
commutativity, i.e., the sum is independent of the order. Piaget points
out that this commutativity is not a property of the pebbles. It is rather a
property of the actions that the child performs on the pebbles.
Piaget specifies his position, however, by asserting that both of these
kinds of abstraction are actually based upon actions on objects ( 1970, 18
-19). The abstraction from objects arises simply from individual actions,
such as throwing, pushing, touching, and rubbing. Abstraction from
actions, on the other hand, is based, not on individual actions, but
on coordinated ones. Piaget has uncovered four different ways in which
action can be coordinated: additive coordination, sequential coordina-
tion, correspondence, and intersection. Since these four types of coordin-
ation of actions have parallels in logical structures, Piaget concludes that
it is precisely such coordinations of actions on objects which constitute
the genetic basis for these kinds of logical structure. Piaget formulates his
hypothesis in this manner:
the roots of logical thought are not found in language alone, even though language
coordinations are important, but are to be found more generally in the coordination of
actions. (1970, 18-19)
Gurwitsch has noted the connection between this Piagetian position and
Husserl's distinction between generalizing and formalizing abstraction
(Gurwitsch, 1966, 385 - 387). Through generalizing abstraction we
construct such notions as "red", "color", "triangle", or "spatial form".
Each of these notions has a qualitative and material content by virtue of
which it refers to some material region. Through formalizing abstraction,
on the other hand, we produce concepts like "object", "property",
"relation", "transitive relation", "class", "member of a class",
"number", "whole", "part", and others. These concepts refer to no
particular material regions. Yet precisely for this reason they can be
applied to any and every material region. Hence logical and mathemati-
cal notions exhibit a universal and unrestricted validity and applicability.
These notions are reached by substituting for qualitative and material
contents terms which have no such content and which are defined solely
by their mutual relations. At the higher levels of formalization even the
relations themselves are defined by their formal properties alone.
Gurwitsch realized that Piaget's detailed and penetrating studies could
contribute much to a genetic account of the very processes of abstraction
and conceptualization with which Husser! was so deeply concerned from
The Philosophy of Arithmetic and Logical Investigations to Formal and
Transcendental Logic and The Crisis.
147
Since Piagetian psychology studies, as we have just seen, the move-
ment from pre-scientific forms of action to scientific and logical opera-
tions and concepts, its set of problems is related in a specific way to that of
Husser! in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenom-
enology (Gurwitsch, 1974, 132- 149). The role which Husser! there
assigns to transcendental phenomenology is similar to that which Piaget
attributes to genetic epistemology: the role, namely, of explicating the
strata of mental processes which lead from pre-scientific to scientific
experience. In this sense phenomenology for Husser! and psychology for
Piaget "account for" mathematics, logic, and the physical sciences. And
since both phenomenology and genetic psychology disclose universal
features of the mental operations involved in the elaboration of
mathematical and logical systems and, indeed, in the "construction of the
world" in natural science, they both provide theoretic foundations for
those disciplines: they show how such disciplines are possible. But there
the similarity ends. For even if we set aside the considerable methodo-
logical differences between phenomenological philosophy and scientific
psychology, we should note that, for Piaget, genetic psychology is not
"foundational" in any absolute sense. As Piaget explicitly says, genetic
psychology itself harbors presuppositions: it conceptually presupposes
biology, which in turn presupposes chemistry and physics, which them-
selves presuppose mathematics and logic (l972a, 116- 120). If some
sciences "found" others, then they do so in only a circular fashion. Psy-
chology may "found" mathematics and physics in the sense of accounting
for the genesis and structure of the mental operations through which
alone the latter are possible. But, on the other hand, mathematics and
physics "found" genetic psychology in the sense of providing the basic
principles and concepts presupposed by psychological theorizing. Notice,
moreover, that this Piagetian circle of the formal and empirical sciences is
a closed one: there is no place or need for philosophy.
If Piaget's circle of the sciences should prove defensible, then one of
the major aims of Husserlian phenomenology would have to be relin-
quished: the search for the absolute foundations of knowledge. And since
it is this search which, to some extent, motivates the "transcendental
turn" in phenomenology, its transcendentalism would lose some of its
support.
The issues embedded here, however, are notoriously complex. Let
me simply mention the skeptical hint regarding the Piagetian circle which
Gurwitsch would offer in some of his lectures. In the Piagetian claims that
physics "presupposes" psychology and that, on the other hand, psy-
chology "presupposes" physics, the word "presupposes" is equivocal
even in Piaget's own framework. As I have indicated, psychology "pre-
supposes" physics in the sense that some ofthe concepts, hypotheses, and
methods of physics form a theoretical fund upon which the psychologist
draws. In other words, this is "presupposition" in the logical sense of the
148
term. Physics "presupposes" psychology, however, in a significantly
different sense. The physicist does not in his scientific work draw upon the
concepts and hypotheses of psychology. His work "presupposes" psy-
chology only in the sense that psychology explicates the structures and
conditions of the mental processes involved in scientific thinking. Strictly
speaking, the physicist does not "presuppose" the scientific discipline of
psychology although the psychologist does "presuppose" the scientific
discipline of physics. The physicist "presupposes" only his own mental
operations; and it is these mental operations, presupposed by the physi-
cist, which may or may not become the subject matter of a scientific
discipline known as psychology. The relationships among the sciences
are, therefore, not circular because they do not "presuppose" one another
in an unequivocal manner. This fact does not, of course, grant immediate
entry to phenomenology. But it does "reopen" the supposedly closed
circle of the sciences and raise "the question of philosophy" once again.
I have thus far tried to indicate some of the more salient theoretical
similarities between Gurwitsch's claims and Piaget's. But apart from any
such shared theoretical positions, there remains a methodological way in
which phenomenology can utilize Piaget's works (Wiggins, 1979). I shall
in conclusion attempt to chart this way very briefly. For, as I have
maintained, Gurwitsch 's interest in Piaget arose primarily from the hope
that a sufficiently critical and systematic phenomenological appropriation
of some aspects of genetic psychology could lead to novel insights in
phenomenology and advance its general project.
Piaget's studies are rich with suggestive and carefully recorded
observations. And, for the phenomenologist, individual examples consti-
tute the starting point for a process of systematic variation which culmin-
ates in the recognition of a limit, the invariant, the essential feature. Thus
the phenomenologist who had Piagefs observations can well go beyond
Piaget's own theoretical interpretations of them. Precisely through con-
sidering exemplary observations of each genetic stage and uncovering
what remains invariant in them, the phenomenologist can describe the
features peculiar to each stage. He can subsequently disclose the laws
which govern the transitions from stage to stage. Thus a genetic
phenomenology can be developed, using purely phenomenological
methods and formulated in exclusively phenomenological terms. In this
manner Piaget's own naturalistic and biologistic presuppositions and
vocabulary can be "bracketed" and rendered ineffectual. Even very
fundamental Piagetian concepts such as equilibrium, adaptation, assimi-
lation, and accommodation can be set aside. Indeed, Piaget's view that his
claims rest only on scientific grounds and not philosophical ones can
become irrelevant. Piaget's observations can then be freely varied in
one's imagination in order to arrive at those features which definitely
resist variation. Moreover, phenomenological notions such as intention-
ality, protending, retending, originary givenness, and horizontality can
149
be employed to lay bare these invariant features. I wish to stress that this
use of phenomenological method and terms need not remain a mere
exercise in the application of the familiar to the new. On the contrary, it is
worthwhile only if it generates new phenomenological discoveries and
leads toward the definition and resolution of new phenomenological
problems. It is precisely this worthwhile role which Gurwitsch envisioned
in his own studies of Piaget and which he hoped that other phenomenolo-
gists would pursue.

Southern Methodist University

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