Su"ender and catch: give so you can receive, where the giving is your whole self, in a total experience. This is scarcely new on the American scene, and it is ancient knowledge, East and West. The fears of total surrender, the fears of self-revelation and of total abandon, although genuine, are likewise not new. Yet Kurt H. Wolff does attempt something new here, an epistemologi­ cal essay with the help of this old idea: his subtitle is 'experience and inquiry today'. He tries to formulate an integrated view which incorporates in the theory of total experience not only the accepted component- esthetics, religion, the recent American experience - but also a metaphysics, a phenomenology, a theory of perception, a social philosophy and a methodology of the social sciences, even a philosophy of history and psychopathology. Phenomenology (especially Alfred Schutz), the critical Frankfurt school (especially Adorno and Marcuse), sociology (especially Georg Simmel), and existentialism (especially Camus) are tied in together. It all looks topsy-turvy at first. We have here scraps of a diary, fragments of correspondence, a stray adolescent love letter, notes on notes on field work, and notes and comments on tutorial seminars plus long excerpts from students' essays, a stray paper in a learned journal summarizing the core of the book, comments piled on comments and a web of self-references, literary criticisms, and pieces of poetry, plus a rich scholarly apparatus.

Inhalt

One. Surrender.- 1. There Is a Beginning.- 1. There Is a Beginning.- An Introduction to Surrender-and-Catch.- 2. Surrender and Catch.- 3. Too Literal, Not Literal Enough.- 4. 'Surrender' and 'Catch'.- 5..- 6. Surrender as a Response to Our Crisis.- 7..- 8. Surrender and Religion.- 9..- 10. (This Book).- I. Surrenders-To.- 11. Surrender and Rebellion.- 12..- 13. Surrender and Community Study: The Study of Loma.- 14..- 15. Surrender and Aesthetic Experience.- 16..- II. From Surrender-To to Surrender.- 17. Prefatory Note.- 18. Beginning: In Hegel and Today.- 19..- 20. On the Cunning of Reason in Our Time.- 21..- 22. Sociology, Phenomenology, and Surrender-and-Catch.- 23..- 24. Surrender and the Body.- Two. Trying with others.- 25. Recovery: Trying with others.- 26. 1951.- 27. 1961-2.- 28..- 29. 1962-63.- 30. 1964-65.- 31. Publishing Papers by Students and Identifying Their Authors.- 32. 1964-65, Concluded.- 33..- 34. 1965-66.- 35. 1971.- 36. And a Letter.- 37. 'Dear Phantasy'.- 38. 1971, Concluded.- 39. And there is an End.- Sources and Acknowledgments.- Index of Names.- Index of Topics.