Aron Gurwitsch 1

Abstract

Aron Gurwitsch was so overwhelmed by Edmund Husserl’s “uncompromising integrity and radical philosophical responsibility” and his “painstaking analytic work on concrete problems”. Taking perception as the starting point, the problem now becomes how the manifold sides of a perceptual object, its different noemata, are connected to one another in such a way that they constitute a single noematic system. The "part-whole-relation" mentioned in the definition is basic, and thus there is a short path from Gestalt theory to mereology-the theory of parts and wholes in general. However, such a hypothesis violates the parameters of the phenomenological reduction, blocks one from looking upon conscious states as the causal products of the external world. Finally, Gurwitsch’s account of the contents, on which the acts of the non-egological consciousness focus, clearly mirrors the Gestalt paradigm.