From the Field of Consciousness to the Social Field: Aron Gurwitsch's Theory of Organization

This paper presents Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenological theory of organization, frst presented in the dissertation of 1929, Phenomenology of Thematics and of Pure Ego: Studies of the Relation between Gestalt theory and Phenomenology, and then developed in his major work of 1957, The feld of consciousness. Although I will refer to these two important works, I will focus my attention especially on another book, the habilitation thesis that was completed in 1933 but only posthumously published in 1977 with the title Human Encounters in the social world. In this book, Gurwitsch tries to apply his theory of the feld of consciousness to the domain of intersubjectivity and to the sphere of the social reality, undertaking some important refections on the notions of “familiarity” and “togetherness” which, as I tries to show, can play an important role both in the contemporary philosophical and scientifc debate and in the actual political context.