Natanson devoted most of his aesthetic writings to linking phenomenology with literature. He distinguishes the philosophy of literature from philosophy in literature. The former explores literature’s categories in relationship to the being of the artwork, and addresses such issues as the ontological status of a literary microcosm, the truth of art works; and the strata of meaning and their interaction—as did roman ingarden in the formal aesthetics of The Literary Work of Art (1973). Philosophy in literature, by contrast, makes explicit the philosophical achievement of an already realized literary work. Self-admittedly inclined to this task, Natanson the existentialist turned to literary experience to reconstruct it, not thereby diluting “real” philosophy, but extending it (Natanson 1962: 87, 98–99, 123; 1996: 8–9).

In pursuit of this project, Natanson conceives phenomenology and literature as mutually illuminating. For instance, literature, like phenomenology, presupposes a world taken for granted, so taken for granted that one is not aware of even taking something for granted until rhetoric “draws us up to face what hitherto in seeing we have always ignored” and authors, by inviting us to learn all over again how to see, “return us to ourselves” (Natanson 1962: 97, 129, 139–142, 186). In addition, upon entering the fictive world, readers engage in an analogue of phenomenological reduction by “suspending”—not denying, but attending more carefully to—their ordinary believing in the world (Ibid.: 96–97), and thereby encountering the “miracle of the ordinary, a theme more brilliantly developed in literature than in philosophy” (Natanson 1969: 109). As is the case with phenomenology, fiction does not so much reflect the world as reveal its experiential foundation by engaging in a directional activity of consciousness (Natanson 1962: 97), just as art explores the familiar by exhibiting its structure in forms that disclose the taken-for-granted in a unique moment of aesthetic contemplation (Ibid.: 112, 186). However, one ought not to underestimate the risk of self and its achievements, when, through phenomenological reduction or reading literature, one strives to appreciate the reality of transcendences such as birth, sociality, and death in mundane experience. Hence Natanson (1970: 122) takes the irruption of literary art in everyday life to upset readers’ bad-faith subterfuges and to invite them to appropriate their own world by eliciting from them a “perpetual willingness to agree to undertake the having of a world.” The phenomenological recovery of intentionality thereby converges with existential self-appropriation (Natanson 1962: 32–33).

In developing literature as a phenomenological analogue, Natanson (1962: 64, 107; 1974: 19; 1984: 258–59; 1996: 21) manifests his own understanding of phenomenological reduction, which involves no flight from this world to another, but rather a more careful seeing of that in which one had previously been unreflectively immersed. To avoid viewing literature as merely derivative from phenomenology, however, he argues that the models of the theorist and those of the imagination each contain enclaves within which literature and philosophy irradiate each other (Natanson 1986: 136). Furthermore, one who reduces literary style to mere ornamentation for philosophical concepts would be likely to believe that “despair is a neurological frailty and Gregor Samsa someone with a periodontal problem” (Ibid.: 138).

In The Erotic Bird, Natanson masterfully models the project suggested by the book’s subtitle, Phenomenology in Literature, by exploring philosophical themes in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Though spatial constraints prohibit discussion of these rich analyses, omitting such details might mislead one into reducing literature to a dispensable adornment for philosophical ideas. But it is precisely Natanson’s view of phenomenology that corrects such excessive rationalism. For phenomenology, “every fact can be thought of merely as exemplifying a pure possibility” (Natanson 1996: 130) that results not from theoretical definition based on negative qualifiers, but on an intentional seeing that reveals the impulse of what is given. Thus Hans Castorp, who earlier dismissed form as “folderol,” comes to see it as the fundamental adventure of his life insofar as the running off of time is comprehensible only within the immutable form of temporality itself (Ibid.: 104). Likewise, Gregor Samsa, suspended as an insect from the ceiling and thereby viewing the world through a novel, inverted perspective, discovers that everyday life, sociality, and familiarity are essentially unstable and conceal an essential and inescapable solitude (Ibid.: 118, 121–22, 126).

In sum, one can discern essences precisely through that combination of nearness to everyday experience and reflective distance that literature affords. For this reason, phenomenology was always closer to Plato, the erotic bird, which takes flight by deeper penetration within the eros that might at first seem prohibitive of flight itself (Ibid.: 126). The literary symbol mediates between concrete typifications and forms of transcendence, between the existentially concrete and the phenomenologically essential, such that the universal becomes the “lucidity of the particular” (Natanson 1970: 107, 114–19).

Though concentrating on philosophy in literature, Natanson also addresses formal problems of the philosophy of literature by examining the object of art, which requires of the philosophical aesthetician an attitude distinctively different from that of an art critic (Natanson 1962: 80). To explore the epistemological grounding of the aesthetic object, whether from the viewpoint of its artist or audience, one first undertakes a particular kind of reduction, separating by self-conscious attention the art work from the rest of experience, recognizing, for example, the stage cordoning off the play Hamlet (Natanson 1962: 80–83). The artwork also depends upon “reconstruction,” that is, the intentional acts of synthesis by which the artist unifies the work and its underlying constitutive activities, whether such synthesis is achieved through critical self-consciousness or with minimal cognitive direction. Just as the audience participates in the reduction, so it must reconstruct the meaning-complex of the art work, which presents a world not necessarily coincident with the artist’s and which would be stillborn without the potential infinity of interpretations it generates (Ibid.: 83–85, 90, 110; 1970: 111–12).

By recognizing that the artwork embodies meanings beyond the artist’s cognitive grasp or deliberateness, Natanson shows himself attuned to questions typically raised in Marxist, psychoanalytical, structuralist, and poststructuralist circles. In addition, his awareness of the intersubjective character of art and the need for audience interpretation alerts him to the indispensable creativity of interpreting and reading that is emphasized in deconstructionism (Natanson 1962: 110, 142). Insofar as he emphasizes an infinite number of reconstructions without explaining in depth the notion of the “objective interpretation” of an artwork (Ibid.: 85; 1996: 36; 1974: 281), he risks succumbing to the relativism frequently attributed to jean-paul sartre’s L’être et le néant (1943). However, Natanson does limit the creativity of the reader who must still be responsive to the text (Natanson 1962: 110); and thus, for instance, “Kafka demands that we become responsible for his world, but that world remains his.” Furthermore, the Sartre of Verité et existence (1990) resists relativism, which permits one to escape easily the risks and contingency of responsibility involved in assuming a position and justifying it—possibilities to which Natanson (Ibid.: 110) alludes when citing Sartre on how one assumes responsibility for the book one opens.

This Sartrean basis for objectivity, though, still remains a bit too subjectively oriented and could profit from inclusion within a more fully intersubjective ethics of interpretation, in which interpreters are accountable to artists and other interpreters, with whom they ought to disagree responsibly if necessary. Moreover, the fact that one always interprets from the sociohistorically determined “fore-having” that martin heidegger (1962: 191) has described and that exceeds one’s rational comprehension does not preclude one from arriving at a weakly holistic verdict about a work’s aesthetic merits (Bohman 1991: 124–26). Such a verdict, undertaken in responsibility to many interlocutors, does not seek to determine which interpretation is infallibly correct, but which interpretation is better or worse with reference to other interpretations and to the text.

In later reflections on the art object, Natanson (1970: 110–13) emphasizes how it “requires” the implementation of the aesthetic reduction, setting in abeyance our usual ways of seeing. As a result, the art object appears distinctive in that in its unity of meanings (as opposed to its character as a physical object), it cannot be changed, possessed (although as a physical object it could be owned by someone), or used (as persons cannot either) without being “degraded.” By stressing this “nonfunctional and irreducible independence” of the art object, Natanson draws out parallels between aesthetics and ethics, as did Immanuel Kant in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790).

In addition to studies on philosophy in literature and on the object of art, Natanson (1986: 92, 126–27; 1974: 186–87) also explored phenomenological themes in literature, especially the transcendental ego, which, existentially interpreted, lies at the root of one’s own uniqueness, and which for alfred schutz was “the most profound prime suppressed” or negated when the “anonymous [e.g., role] replaces inwardness.” This ego, or “current of existence”—taken for granted in everyday life, thematized in phenomenology, and reconstructed in transcendental phenomenology (Natanson 1962: 97, 140)—provides “the phenomenological clue to the essence of literature” (Natanson 1996: 20) whose irruptive force confronts readers with their individual birth and final destruction (Natanson 1970: 122). Hence he approvingly cites Sartre that “the literary object has no other substance than the reader’s subjectivity” (Natanson 1962: 110). This ego, though, is not merely an “object” disclosed through literature, but is presupposed as the condition of the possibility of such disclosure, which phenomenology, ever “attending to the circumstances and conditions of its own procedures,” reveals. Thus Natanson describes the ego as both object disclosed and subject disclosing insofar as “the transcendental ego in this sense is the condition of my being able to find out, through the performance of my life, who I am” (Ibid.: 47).

Two distinctive features of Natanson’s aesthetics serve as junctures for praise and further consideration. First, just as he reconciles edmund husserl’s abstract transcendental ego with Sartrean existentialism, so in his nonrationalistic approach to phenomenology, understood not as fleeing this world but as attending more carefully to it, he permits phenomenology’s fruitful collaboration with literature, never conceivable as dispensable ornamentation for philosophical ideas. Occasionally, however, Natanson (1974: 19) falls prey to this rationalism, ever endangering phenomenology, when he suggests that the phenomenologist starts with experience and then mobilizes language to comprehend it, as if language did not frequently and unconsciously structure the intentionality through which experience is given, as maurice merleau-ponty observed. Finally, one does not subtract from the sophisticated phenomenological existentialism that Natanson developed and used to interpret literature when one questions whether he has the whole picture, especially given his endorsement of Sartre’s striking comment that “the literary object has no other substance than the reader’s subjectivity.”

On the contrary, one could imagine taking as an interpretive key to literature the suffering of the other, which Emmanuel Levinas has developed and which would expand the meaning of the transcendence of sociality to which Natanson refers. Then one might read Natanson’s chosen works differently, with Gregor Samsa, for example, representing the quintessential experience of being excluded. Furthermore, one might have selected other works as paradigmatic for exploring the theme of philosophy in art, such as Leo Tolstoy’s Twenty-Three Tales, José Clemente Orozco’s and Diego Rivera’s murals, or Toni Morrison’s Beloved. But insofar as one cannot think the suffering of the other apart from the ego to which it appears and from whom it elicits a freely chosen response, in the end one will never be able to bypass Natanson’s phenomenological existentialism, or the fecund relationship with art he has shown it entails.