Martin Foss

Martin Foss (1889 – 1968) was a German-born American philosopher, professor, and scholar.

Life and Career

Martin Fuchs was born in Berlin, Germany in 1889 and studied philosophy and law at German and French universities. He married Hilde Schindler, a German woman, and they had two children, Oliver Foss, a painter, and the composer Lukas Foss. The Jewish family left Germany in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came into power, and for the next four years Martin Fuchs commuted secretly between Paris and Berlin. With the help of the Quaker community in the United States, the family was able to immigrate to the U.S. in 1937. The Quakers provided shelter for the family and advised Martin to change the family name from Fuchs to Foss. (It is unknown why the name was not changed to Fox, which is what "Fuchs" means.) Martin subsequently became an American citizen. He taught philosophy at Haverford College where he retired as Professor emeritus. He died of a heart attack at the age of 79, while he was running to catch a plane at Heathrow airport.

Martin Foss taught and wrote during a time when phenomenology dominated and influenced many thinkers, such as Martin Heidegger, Ortega y Gasset, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism was also popular, but his view of existence was based more on the views of Medieval thinkers such as Cusanus. Foss was considered to be an Aristotelian philosopher. He was a student of Max Scheler, whose works had a significant influence on his ideas about ethics, value and love.

Martin Foss’s book, Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience, was listed as one of the “Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years” by The American Scholar in 1956.[1] Other writers have cited his works as being "far-reaching," "seminal," and "ahead of its time."[2] In the academic treatise, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850-1950, authors Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott state that Martin Foss may be considered a greater philosopher than Martin Heidegger.[3] Although Martin Heidegger has clearly had far greater recognition and impact, Martin Foss’s work deserves renewed attention.

Philosophy

Martin Foss’s work deals with the “large” issues of life—love, death, and creative rebirth. His writings on art and creative process are particularly noteworthy, offering a missing perspective in that genre. His texts reach far beyond philosophy, and have been used in academic depth psychology, theology, and art programs, as well as philosophy programs.

Foss's perspective on Greek tragedy is important and unprecedented. He views on tragedy as religious drama give new meaning to the word "religion."

Culture, Meaning and Destiny

In his seminal book Symbol and Metaphor In Human Experience, for which he is primarily known, Foss explains the difference between the Self as a maker of things and the creative process of personality. The germ of this distinction is developed as well in another of his books, Death, Sacrifice, and Tragedy, which explores in more detail the meanings of Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. In Foss’s view, the significance of Greek tragedy involves the discovery of the "creative and dynamic personality and man's sacrificial and intercessional nature."

He writes: "life in its core is a perpetual conversion from a lower sphere to a higher one, destroying the lower for the sake of realizing the higher, and this creative destruction, the sacrificial action, conveys to life its essential character, which is sacramental."

The theme of death, sacrifice, and tragedy is the basis for his view of ethics which supplants the modern humanist perspective that is limited to pragmatic man using his environment solely for fulfilling the needs and desires of the body. This use of the environment for practical expediency is a sphere which man and the animal have in common. It is the world of order and the making of things for their various uses. But beyond the physical world, Foss argues that man is a citizen of another world as well, a world that is hidden but disclosed. This world is the sphere of value "where no things, no accomplishments, no possessions as such count, but where works and achievements manifest a loving communion and nothing else." In Foss’s view, the purpose of human life is to serve this spiritual, transcendent world which rises before man as the meaning and destiny of his life. Through sacrifice and the creative process of personality, man is lifted into this world of intensive reality which shapes his destiny.

Foss contrasts this concept of creation with the commonly accepted ethic of utilitarianism that is prevalent in modern societies. He writes that an ethics of utilitarianism enables a "rational organization of a collective ritual of law," and he defines rituals of law as symbolic reductions that are finite and relative (i.e., not the source of absolute ethical values). Stuck in this deficient sphere, man desires a more meaningful life, which involves seeking the higher realm of creation. Foss refers to this choice as "man under destiny." It is not an easy way of living, since one must accept the sacramental nature of life and the communion of Love as the source of one's direction in life.

Martin Foss and Other Philosophers

Foss's work diverges in important ways from that of Carl Jung. Both scholars were writing in parallel (during the same period of time) about similar concepts, although Jung's definition of the symbol is much different than Foss's. In Jung's view, a symbol has great meaning, deriving from the collective unconscious. Contrary to Jung, Foss uses the term "symbol" to refer to that which is man-made and static (Jung uses the term "sign" to denote something static). Foss uses the term "metaphor" to denote the universal creative process that underlies human life and consciousness. In Foss's view, the metaphoric process of life is a continuous, ongoing creative force that is always working to "move beyond" (and destroy) the static state of the symbol. The metaphoric wants to create anew. Perhaps one reason that their work does not seem to be referenced by the other, is because Jung was writing in the field of psychology, while Foss was a philosopher.

His writings can also be compared with the writings of Martin Heidegger and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, both of whom are well-known for their views on process philosophy which describes the universe as a process, rather than a fixed state.

Major Publications

• Essay. Logos, XII
• Essay. Logos, XIII
• The Idea of Perfection in the Western World
• Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience
• Logic and Existence
• Death, Sacrifice and Tragedy

External links

• “Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years”
• Frye, Northrop & Knights, L.C. (1963). Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
• Armour, Leslie & Trott, Elizabeth (1982). The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850-1950. Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press