The Göttingen Four and the Exchange of North American and German Phenomenology

Abstract

Georg-August-Universitat (Gottingen, Germany) has long been at the forefront of bilingual English-German scholarship, owing first to its founding by the British King George II (who was also a member of the German nobility), second to the participation of his English speaking offspring in the ruling life of the university, and third because thereafter it nurtured a robust network of exchange programs with English language universities. Likewise, its tradition of English liberalism, combined with its place at the origins of the German Romantic movement, meant that it was often surprisingly resistant to demands of intellectual submission to the sovereign or the theology faculty. Many scholars traveled there to conduct their work in this climate of relative freedom and respect for individual inquiry. This article focuses on four scholars who conducted research at Georg-August-Universitat—listed, in the order of their arrival: Josiah Royce (1876, as a graduate student), Edmund Husserl (1901–1916, as a professor), William Hocking (1902, as a graduate student), and Winthrop Bell (1911– 1914, as a graduate student). The latter two were graduate students at Harvard under Royce and at Gottingen under Husserl, and they did much to interpret ideas between their teachers and between English and German language phenomenology. Considering the relation of these four philosophers, there are strong reasons to look for a robust relationship between early North American phenomenology and German phenomenology, particularly by way of Harvard philosopher Royce, who began writing on what he called the “New Phenomenology” from 1879, and the Gottingen/Freiburg philosopher Husserl, who began writing on phenomenology from the last years of the 19 th century. While the connection between Roycean and Husserlian phenomenology has been largely overlooked in histories of philosophy, a small but enduring community of scholars has noted striking similarities between Royce’s phenomenology and European phenomenology. Not including Royce’s and Husserl’s own work in this regard, we may date the origin of third-party comparisons of their thought to 1902, with Hocking.