Maurice Natanson (1924-1996).

Butler, Judith

Maurice Alexander Natanson, an accomplished philosopher of existentialism and phenomenology and retired Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, died on Thursday, August 16, 1996 from prostate cancer, in his home at Santa Cruz, California, where he had recently retired.

Professor Natanson was a philosopher of legendary wit and insight, having a prodigious intellect and a commanding presence. He was one of the first American scholars to write a book on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. He also introduced scores of American philosophers and students of philosophy to the work of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, and the social theory of Alfred Schutz.

Natanson offered a systematic account of subjectivity that drew from both phenomenological and existential philosophy. The transcendental field of the subject could, he said, be glimpsed through its eruption in everyday life. The "epoche" engaged a suspension of belief in the everyday as well as an illumination of the irreality of things. Natanson found this movement in literary works and in perceptual experience, and offered a philosophy that sought to reveal the world in its perpetual novelty and strangeness.

Professor Natanson's scholarship included major publications in the fields of philosophy and 1,iterature, philosophy of the social sciences, and philosophy of psychiatry and medicine. He established existential phenomenology as his own philosophical approach, and in his mature work assumed a philosophical style that mixed systematic analysis with disarming anecdotes. In the last decade, he wrote two books that reflected his singular style and clarified his own philosophy of existential phenomenology: Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz, published by Indiana University Press in 1986; and The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature, soon to be published by Princeton University Press.

Maurice Natanson was born in New York in 1924. After receiving a B.A. from Lincoln Memorial University in 1945, he earned an M.A. at New York University and two Ph.D.'s: one in Philosophy from the University of Nebraska in 1950, and a second in Social Science from the New School of Social Research in New York in 1953. He held teaching positions at the University of Houston (1953-7) and the University of North Carolina (1957-65), before becoming a Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1965, where he assumed the Chairmanship of that department for several years. He moved to the Department of Philosophy at Yale University in 1976, where he quickly established himself as a generous, brilliant, and singular presence.

His work spanned the fields of literature, psychiatry, and the social sciences, and he worked with the conviction that phenomenology could help to illuminate and restore a texture and quality to the world that would make it not only more meaningful, but more humane. He was mindful and unafraid of human finitude, believing that it gave life its luster. He sought to find the essential truths of the world in the brief moments of mundanity, and strove to show how a philosophical approach to the "life-world" could illuminate the workings of literature and science alike.

Among his many published works, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks, published by Northwestern University Press, was awarded the National Book Award for Philosophy and Religion in 1974. Several of his publications have altered the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences: The Journeying Self: A Study in Philosophy and Social Role (1970); The Social Dynamics of George N. Mead (1956); Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences (1962); and Phenomenology, Role, and Reason: Essays on the Coherence and Deformation of Social Reality (1974). He also edited the comprehensive volumes of Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, published in 1973, that have had a great effect on sociological theory.

A festschrift in honor of Natanson, The Prism of the Self, edited by Steven Calt Crowell, was published in 1995 by Kluwer Publishing, making clear his enduring influence on a wide range of American philosophers.