Autobiography and the Impossibility of Evil in Kurt H. Wolff’s Existential Sociology

Abstract

The purpose of this paper has been to augment Kurt H. Wolff’s arguments claiming the impossibility of an evil catch in his methodology of surrender and-catch by contextualizing his explications in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s philosophical system, the Phenomenology of Life and the Human Condition. An auxiliary purpose has been to show the importance of Wolff’s claim for the realm of literature, for his existential sociology converges with the autobiographical form of literature and with its creative moment. Those writers who engage literature in an existential, genuinely creative way are already practitioners of surrender, but whose catch is objectivated in a literary work. Wolff objectivates the catch of his surrenders in terms of sociological insights. However, I have shown that through the autobiographical moment Wolff’s sociology converges with literature, and that literature that is concerned with the crises of our times and that transcends meaning sedimentations, converges with the goal of Wolff’s sociology. The exclusion of evil from the catch of surrender, in the convergence of sociology and literature offers great hope based on the new insights for vision of a better world. Wolff’s vindication of the subject and the subject’s inventive capacity thus takes on a sense of paramount importance. From such a viewpoint, literature gains much significance in meeting our needs to find out what is for humankind. Tymieniecka has grounded this view in her philosophical system, so Wolff’s surrender-and-catch gains by being contextualized in a system and Tymieniecka’s system gains through a radical existential mode of engagement that perfects the relation between creativity and morality, the pinnacle of her system.