Jean Cavaillès: On the Logic and Theory of Science

On the Logic and Theory of Science Book Cover On the Logic and Theory of Science
Jean Cavaillès. Introductory notice by Georges Canguilhem and Charles Ehresmann. Introduction by Knox Peden. Translated by Translated by Knox Peden and Robin Mackay
Urbanomic/Sequence Press
2021
Paperback $18.95
128

Reviewed by: Ties van Gemert (Tilburg University)

Why read Jean Cavaillès’ work today? This is the foremost question that we need to address. The history of philosophy pullulates with untimely ideas, obscured innovators, and forgotten precursors: the fact that Cavaillès anticipated decisive developments within French philosophy cannot suffice to revisit his short but dense treatise. Historiographical significance may direct historians to his work, but we need positive, philosophical reasons to convince phenomenologists, philosophers of science, and epistemologists to work their way through a book of which each page demands to be read closely, carefully, and rigorously. To be able to demonstrate the value of Cavaillès’ philosophical pathway, one needs to show how our time calls again for his imagination.

If there ever has been a moment for this untimely treatise. Written while incarcerated by the German authorities in Montpellier and Limoges, Cavaillès did not live to experience its publication, he was executed for his leading role in the French resistance in early April 1944 – just shortly after completing the manuscript. When his friends Georges Canguilhem and Charles Ehresmann published Sur la logique et la théorie de la science in 1947, the moment when one could presuppose acquaintance with Neo-Kantian philosophy, Carnap’s logical syntax, Husserl’s phenomenology, and the debates concerning the foundations of mathematics, had already passed.

The intellectual situation in which the book was conceived had also disintegrated: Cavaillès’ doctoral advisor, the rationalist philosopher Léon Brunschvicg, had died in exile in Southern France; his friend, the philosopher of mathematics Albert Lautman, had been killed for his resistance work; the historian of science Hélène Metzger had become a victim of the Shoah; and the philosopher Gaston Bachelard by then was moving away from philosophy of science to aesthetics. The philosophical positions to which Cavaillès was indebted and the technical debates to which he was responding were reforming: the French epistemology of the 1920’s and 1930’s had lost its compelling force, the fierce disputes regarding the sovereignty of intuitionism, logicism, and formalism in mathematics were tempered, and Kantian, rationalist philosophy had become the target of powerful critiques.

In the 1950’s, the French intellectual scenery underwent profound changes: existentialism came to be fashionable, Marxism became the dominant political ideology, and phenomenology emerged as the dominant philosophical method for studying everything from nausea to wonder. Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger were the names on the lips and the books of the desks of the agrégés.

Notwithstanding the rather unfortunate circumstances of the book’s publication, Cavaillès’ work still exercised a decisive but ephemeral influence on the young Derrida, the early work of Foucault, and the philosophy of science of Louis Althusser. More lasting was his sway over the work of Suzanne Bachelard, Gilles-Gaston Granger, and Jules Vuillemin, but these philosophers, whose labor was decisive in introducing analytic philosophy in France, never had the same impact on the intellectual scenery as the generation of May ‘68. At the time, there was a particular bias amongst French intellectuals concerning analytic philosophy that leaned too much towards logical positivism: the works associated with the Vienna Circle were considered one-dimensional, politically suspect, and to be lacking in terms of style. In the eyes of philosophers such as Althusser, Cavaillès had adequately portrayed the defects of logical positivism with his critique of Carnap. Consequently, the convergences between the works of the Vienna Circle and that of Cavaillès were overlooked in a climate hostile to scientific philosophy.

Under these conditions, the treatise has come to take up an uncanny place within the history of philosophy. Although Cavaillès’ work is canonized in the French epistemological tradition and now recognized as a critical influence upon the (post-)structuralist generation, the fact that he was ‘thoroughly immersed in the new logical culture’ is often deemphasized or simply ignored (27). The affiliations, conjunctions, and divergences between his work and that of Frege, Hilbert, Brouwer, Carnap, and Reichenbach remain underdeveloped and sometimes even unexplored. While it would be philosophically, but also historically, naive to plead for a restorative rereading of Cavaillès’ work within its autochthonic context, the relevancy of On the Logic and the Theory of Science for this other tradition of doing philosophy certainly deserves further scrutiny.

Indeed, it is precisely the uneasy position of Cavaillès’ work in the history of philosophy that makes rereading the treatise so compelling today. His critique of logical positivism, his elaboration of intuitionism, his conceptualization of Neo-Kantianism, and his divergent reflections on epistemological questions enclose a rich reserve for developing alternatives genealogies of twentieth-century philosophy. At a moment when French philosophers are finally beginning to reconsider Carnap’s contributions to philosophy, analytic epistemologists are exploring the resources of French philosophy for interventions in present-day discussions, and a new generation of French philosophers is reinstalling the fundamental relation between philosophy and mathematics: maybe, the time is finally there to begin to read Cavaillès as a contemporary. Now, more than ever, is his anomalous philosophical trajectory able to generate a conceptual space to assemble estranged thinkers and construct new philosophical itineraries.

To demonstrate this, let us discuss three examples that disclose how Cavaillès’ philosophical imagination may illuminate our current discourse. Together these examples show how his work can, once again, be utilized by philosophers, how his concepts can be put to work, once more, and why we should begin to reconsider and rethink the significance of On Logic and the Theory of Science. In other words, we will use these three examples to re-assess the purport of the treatise.

The first example relates to the role Cavaillès could play in the reconsiderations of Carnap’s work in French philosophy. In his book Carnap et la question transcendentale (2021), Jean-Baptiste Fournier engages extensively with a problem central to French philosophy: the status of the transcendental. Throughout the book, he attempts to reread Carnap’s early work as an exercise in transcendental philosophy – focusing mainly on Der Raum (1922) and Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (1928). In doing so, Fournier not only broadens the breadth of the discussion of Carnap’s relation to Husserl’s phenomenology, Helmholtz’ epistemology, and Neo-Kantianism, but also – implicitly – integrates Carnap’s philosophy in contemporary discussions of the transcendental in French philosophy.

According to Fournier, the early Carnap was fundamentally concerned with the question of ‘how logic could play a transcendental role’ within philosophy (18). He argues that in Carnap’s work the question of the possibility of objective knowledge is transcendental to the extent that it puts at stake the very conceptualization of the world. In what Fournier designates as Carnap’s transcendental analyses, the world has a double meaning: it is both ‘the horizon and correlate of consciousness’ (298). The world ‘thus functions as a Kantian transcendental object’ (298). The crucial difference with Kant’s conceptualization of the transcendental, however, is that in the work of the German philosopher, there is still the possibility of a complete transcendental deduction. In Carnap’s philosophy, the transcendental question ‘does not arise once and for all but must always be revived for each concept and each science’ (301).

Upon a first reading, it might appear that there is no room for reading such a concept of the transcendental in Cavaillès’ philosophy. His remarks on the transcendental are often dismissive (22-24, 120). Kant’s transcendental philosophy is said to obscure any attempt to account for the normativity of logic since it is ‘fundamentally dependent upon the notions of actions and faculty, which are meaningful only in reference to a concrete consciousness’ (20). In a similar vein, Cavaillès’ ambition to found an absolute logic of science leads him to reject the transcendental logic of Husserl. In his view, Husserl’s elaboration of phenomenology is parasitic upon the acts of consciousness and, therefore, lacks the autonomy needed for logic to ground itself.

While Cavaillès critiques the role given to transcendental subjectivity in Kant and Husserl’s philosophy, he does leave open the possibility of a transcendental analysis without a constitutive role of the subject. Sometimes, it seems that this is precisely what Cavaillès is concerned with: ‘[h]ere lies the role of transcendental analysis: to recognise authentic diversities and to establish the relations between them’ (49). Just like Carnap’s transcendental analyses, the analyses that Cavaillès conducts concern the structure of scientific theories and their conditions. But even though Cavaillès commences with a reflection on scientific theories, in his analyses, there is never any given that is presupposed or left unexamined. Each level of analysis is incorporated and related to a subsequent or antecedent one: in this way, his vision resembles that of Carnap’s Aufbau.

The question Cavaillès continually asks himself is also similar to that of Fournier’s Carnap: what are the conditions under which objective or scientific knowledge is possible? For Cavaillès, this question cannot be answered at one moment in time, it must continually be asked in relation to specific scientific discoveries, and it must always be compared with and integrated in previous analyses or theories. Within his philosophy, the transcendental, therefore, undergoes constant transformation: it is no longer possible to deduce all the conditions and ramifications of a single concept in one place and time. If there is a concept of the transcendental in Cavaillès’ philosophy, it is thus thoroughly dynamic – maybe even plastic.

The second example concerns Cavaillès’ anomalous position within the history of French philosophy and how it may be of use in connecting the work of antagonized thinkers. Catarina Dutilh Novaes, in a recent paper titled “Carnap Meets Foucault: conceptual engineering and genealogical investigations” (2020), discloses the similarities between Carnap and Foucault and argues for a reengagement with their work in current discussions on conceptual engineering. Although she tries to reconstruct the historical relations between these two thinkers, she does not discuss or even mention Cavaillès, when in fact, the philosopher is one of the missing links: Foucault probably first encountered Carnap’s work in On Logic and the Theory of Science. More importantly, his philosophy could have brought the concerns and considerations of these two philosophers together – since Cavaillès’ philosophy harbors a plane common to both: a more extensive conceptual space, where the dialectics of history and the complexities of (formal) epistemology come together, a central place to revisit the ramifications of what it means to tinker and ameliorate concepts.

In Cavaillès’ work, there are extensive genealogical analyses of concepts and a methodology of explication. Concepts are contemplated regarding their history and are clarified by rendering explicit the inferences that they imply. Furthermore, the French philosopher does not shy away from ameliorating concepts in order to enlarge their function. Yet throughout these efforts, there is never any reference to an essential constituent of a concept. As in Dutilh Novaes’ account of marriage as well the political aspects of Carnap’s concept of explication, pragmatics plays a crucial role, the function of a concept co-determines its value. At the same time, Cavaillès would never go so far to argue that the value of a concept lies in its use – a danger that seems apparent in Dutilh Novaes’ alliance of Foucault and Carnap. In his philosophy, truth remains the last measure when determining the function of a concept.

The last example bears on the philosophical project of two thinkers: Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux. Both reclaim a Platonic theory of truth, bring renewed attention to the discourse of science in French philosophy, and place mathematics, once more, at the heart of philosophy. Taken together, their work reinvigorates a hybrid of rationalism and materialism in French philosophy. To further delineate and deepen their itinerary, one needs conceptual spaces to perceive the limits of and think through the problems particular to their philosophical project. For this, encounters with precursors such as Cavaillès, who have dealt extensively with questions concerning the nature of mathematics and the dialectics of history, are indispensable.

First, something about Badiou. Even though in his book Figures of Post-War French Philosophy (2009), Badiou discusses the relation between Cavaillès’ philosophy and his life as a resistance fighter, he has never engaged extensively with On the Logic and the Theory of Science. In the third chapter of the book, “Georges Canguilhem (1904—1995) Jean Cavaillès (1903-1944)”, Badiou gives us only a brief summary of Cavaillès’ position, which regardless of its fragmentary nature still reveals a concurrence between their projects: ‘the philosophy of mathematics must rid itself of all reference to a constituent mathematical subject, and should examine the internal necessity of mathematical notions’ (10). The absence of engagement with Cavaillès’ philosophy in Badiou’s work is rather surprising, given the importance that both ascribe to set-theory, their collective embracement of ruptures, and their communal passion for a revised Platonic concept of mathematics.

Needless to say, there are also critical differences between their conceptualization of these three points. While it is only in a complicated encounter between their thought that one could be able to explicate the ramifications of this divergence, a brief and somewhat cursory sketch may already reveal the contours of the paths taken and the advancements that can be obtained from such an analysis.

In their work, Badiou and Cavaillès utilize Cantor’s set-theoretical discoveries to conceptualize an ontology that is open, an ontology that resists totality. For them, set theory represents a break within thought, an event that ruptures the intelligible. Yet whereas both affirm the irreducibility of time within the generative movement of thought, Cavaillès is the only one who has thoroughly studied the fundamental historicity of the scientific event: this constituent of Cantor’s discovery is left entirely unexplored by Badiou. This singular difference characterizes their divergent notion of events: while Badiou’s concept of events leaves little room for describing the origination and construction of a scientific theory, Cavaillès aims to rationally reconstruct the very movement of science. As he puts it in the second part of On Logic and the Theory of Science: ‘by defining a structure of science that is nothing but science manifesting to itself what it is, we specify and justify the preceding characteristics’ (30).

In Badiou’s philosophy, there is no such rational reconstruction of scientific discoveries, there is no effort to define the determinate conditions of scientific progress, as there is no account of the labor involved in the progress in mathematics or science in general. His perspective on the history of science is shaped by the great moments of science, he views science through the eyes and work of aristocratic revolutionaries – not the communal work involved in thinking through theorems, experiments, and demonstrations. For Badiou, it seems that events take place within a vacuum; they are indeterminate, contingent, and original. In this regard, Badiou aligns himself with a century old tradition of French philosophy: the importance he attaches to contingency has been present in French thought ever since Émile Boutroux’s De la Contingence des Lois de la Nature (1874).

Cavaillès, with his commitment to studying the history of science and grounding the necessity of scientific progress, takes a radically different route. From the very beginning of his career, he is concerned with mapping the developments that lead to Cantor’s discoveries and examining the role of other scientists, who assisted in clarifying the ramifications of Cantor’s work. In this way, the event is contextualized, its constituents explained, and its conditions determined. For Cavaillès, this labor is critical. In his view, demonstration is at the heart of science, his aim is always to explicate the progress of science, to apprehend the event: ‘in its generative movement … to recover this structure not via description but apodictically as it unfolds and demonstrates itself’ (31). Ultimately, Cavaillès wants to incorporate the event within science, he aims to ground the development of science within science: ‘a science of science, and hence a part of itself’ (30).

By contrast, Badiou has not shown the least interest in science as a communal enterprise, as a self-illuminating development, or as an ‘Riemannian volume, closed and yet without any exterior’, his view of science is restricted to mysterious breaks within the movement of science that simply shock thought (30). This becomes poignantly clear when he speaks about the difference between truth and knowledge or when he reveals his disdain for normal science. In general, he attaches no importance to the observation, experimentation, and theorizing of scientists working in a settled paradigm. The realm of truth in Badiou’s work is thus restricted to ineffable instants in science, politics, aesthetics, and love. Although these events must be incorporated and related to a world, this work remains one of fidelity to the event – not one of a continuous critical examination of the consequences and limits of a theorem, conviction, style, or commitment.

Crudely put, for Badiou, when the event comes to you, you are immediately enlightened about its significance. For Cavaillès, truths are irreducibly genetic, they inherently involve the labor of explicating its inferences. This labor is, at least, twofold: there is paradigmization, where the demonstration is ‘longitudinal, coextensive with the demonstrative sequence’ and there is thematization, where one inaugurates ‘a new system of interconnection on the basis of the old one, understood no longer as a particular phase within a larger movement, but as an object of reflection in its current configuration’ (71). In Badiou’s philosophy, there is no such distinction, he does not seem to recognize the constructive, laborious activities of scientific communities – only the grandiose seems to deserve being subsumed under the idea. Yet with this gesture, Badiou risks splitting science into the profane and the profound, instead of safeguarding the significance of incorporating events within more expansive webs of knowledge.

Now, something about Meillassoux. In his book After Finitude (2006), Meillassoux aims to reconstruct philosophy through a philosopheme called correlationism: ‘the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’ (5). For Meillassoux, the modern line of thought that dissolved Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities has obscured the possibility of thinking the thing-in-itself. His aim is to reactivate this distinction by arguing that ‘all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself’ (3).

In On Logic and the Theory of Science, Cavaillès takes on a similar task: from the very beginning of his book, he is concerned with critiquing the philosophy of consciousness, his worry being that philosophers, such as Kant and Husserl, make science and mathematics dependent upon the acts of consciousness. In his view, science progresses, not consciousness, it might drag consciousness along or happen within consciousness, but certainly does not depend upon it for progress. By distinguishing radically between subject and object, he wants to reinstate mathematics’ autonomy and necessity. As Hourya Benis Sinaceur remarks in her paper “From Kant to Hilbert: French philosophy of concepts in the beginning of the XXth century” (2006): by ‘determining the objective structures of objectivity’, Cavaillès brings about ‘[a] truly Ptolemaic revolution’ (330). It is no longer a question of explicating the constitutive role of transcendental subjectivity, but of explicating the role of conceptual development within the objectivity of mathematics.

For Meillassoux, mathematics plays an equally important role in regaining access to the absolute, but this absolute is one of this world, it is attained through a reflection on the time before or after the existence of human beings. It is at this point that Meillassoux and Cavaillès part ways: Meillassoux wants to make use of the rigorousness of mathematics to say something about the world independent of the correlation between thinking and being and, consequently, about the thing-in-itself, while Cavaillès wants to dissociate subjectivity and objectivity, right now, by founding an absolute logic and science of science, he is determined to never subordinate the autonomy and necessity of mathematics to the ways of the world. For Cavaillès, ‘[t]o know the world, to understand the world – this is a programme that already represents the abandonment of complete creative autonomy, the renunciation of a necessity beholden to nothing other than itself’ (28).

According to Cavaillès, mathematics is never a mere tool for measuring or a medium that helps us access the worldly thing-in-itself, it cannot be subordinated to physics. Although the relation between physics and mathematics remains underdeveloped in Cavaillès’ work, he makes a few profound remarks on the problem of the relation between mathematics and physics. In his view, ‘the concatenation of physics has no absolute beginning, any more than that of mathematics does … experience itself as a system of acts is internally organised in such a way that it is impossible to interrupt its continual unfolding’ (88). It is at the singular intersection of the two sequences that theoretical physics is born. Yet this intersection itself can never be formalized, the correspondence can never be presupposed, and the one can never be incorporated in or reduced to the other. Mathematical physics is hence the name of a problem – not a state of science that we can simply presuppose.

Even if both thinkers endorse a particularly strong concept of logic and mathematics, Cavaillès is the only one who tries to account for this. Throughout Meillassoux’ undertaking, much is put up for grasp: the necessity of the laws of nature, the primacy of consciousness, and the very idea of the transcendental. Nevertheless, the validity of the logic that he uses to construct his philosophy is never questioned, conceptualized, or grounded. Like Badiou, Meillassoux rarely reflects upon the role of logic in his undertaking; he never seems to wonder whether other conceptualizations of logic or the relation between mathematics and the world are possible. Consequently, Meillassoux’ account of the relation of the a priori of logic and the a posteriori of the empirical within science remains somewhat obscure. Crucially, there seems to be no possibility that an event might change the logic he uses to construct his philosophy and thus transform his own conclusive propositions. In other words, Meillassoux’ logic is thoroughly static – whereas Cavaillès’ rendering is thoroughly dynamic.

This difference is also inherent to the conception of their own philosophical projects. In Meillassoux’ work, there is no account of the movement of thought itself. This feature is clearly visible in his philosophical style, which distances itself in the writing from the writing, it considers arguments without considering the dialectics of deliberation. Cavaillès’, on the other hand, never distances himself from the theories or concepts that he is discussing, he constantly closes the gap between his own thought and the thought of the philosopher, logician, or scientist that is discussing. There is a decisive need within his philosophy to give an account of the movement of thought itself. Naturally, this raises the question whether his philosophical project does not end in an infinite regression. His critique of Husserl’s logic using Gödel’s incompleteness theorems as well as his reflections on Spinoza’s idea of the idea suggest that Cavaillès was aware of this problem within his philosophy. Still, the question remains unresolved. A biographical fact may illuminate the two possible pathways that Cavaillès envisioned. In his final days, Cavaillès asked a priest for two books: a copy of the New Testament and a copy of Hegel’s Science of Logic.

Let us end with a few remarks on the new translation. Robin MacKay has, once more, proved to be a great translator. His exceptional ability to render unusually difficult and heterogenous French philosophical texts into stylistically gratifying and elegant English prose has been a more than welcome gift to those unable to read the original texts. His translations of the philosophy and literature of Gilles Châtelet, François J. Bonnet, and Gabriel Catren, not to mention a few short texts by Cavaillès, all have an unprecedented quality. The publishing house, Urbanomic, which MacKay founded in 2006, has been an invaluable source for those trying to renegotiate the limits of philosophical creativity. The series of books published together with Sequence Press is the perfect place for Cavaillès’ treatise to re-appear, his work resonates in a strange but enrapturing harmony with that of Land, Laruelle and Zalameo.

The other translator, Knox Peden, has done much to make Cavaillès’ known in the Anglo-Saxon world. His work Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (2014) is an excellent introduction not only to Cavaillès’ work, but also to the French rationalist tradition of which Cavaillès is part. He convincingly argues how we should not only read figures, such as Jean-Toussiant Desanti and Althusser, for historiographical reasons, but for philosophical reasons as well: their philosophical attitude – regardless of its conspicuous shortcomings – remains persuasive. Peden’s introduction adequately narrates Cavaillès’ biography while demonstrating the importance of the concept of necessity in Cavaillès’ work and elaborating upon his position vis-à-vis phenomenology.

Naturally, this is not a perfect translation, and there are choices made by the two translators that are questionable. For example, Peden and MacKay have chosen concatenation as a translation of enchaînement. They choose this word to stress the conceptual continuity between Cavaillès’ philosophy and that of Spinoza and Descartes, but Cavaillès probably picked up this word from Brouwer’s work on the concept of rijen, which is usually translated into English by the word sequences. Footnotes clarifying the obscure references would also have been helpful – especially given the exceptional difficulty and sometimes even obscurity of Cavaillès’ thought.

Still, this new translation is a great opportunity to re-engage with Cavaillès’ treatise. It opens up the possibility of creating a moment that adheres to his vision. A philosopher, whose work breathed cosmopolitanism, and who already at the age of 26 argued in a review of The Second Davos University Conference (2021) that ‘any limitation involves a privation: like those fulgurations with which Leibniz’s God engendered the monads, it is the same spiritual universe that is expressed by French rationalist reflection and German phenomenology’ is one that deserves to be read outside of a small circle of specialists in French epistemology (10). Cavaillès always thought that ‘rapprochement’ between particularisms within philosophy is part of the road to progress (9). For him, it was ‘obvious that they will benefit from coming out of their splendid isolation (like two inland seas), to open up between them channels of communication that will procure for both of them greater movement and fecundity’ (10).

Alexander Schnell: Was ist Phänomenologie?

Was ist Phänomenologie? Book Cover Was ist Phänomenologie?
Rote Reihe 111
Alexander Schnell
Klostermann
2019
Paperback 24,80 €
182

Reviewed by: Daniel Sobota (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences)

Phenomenology as Transcendental Speculative Idealism

 

The book by Alexander Schnell, a professor of theoretical philosophy at University of Wuppertal, bearing the title Was ist Phänomenologie? (What is Phenomenology?), is his third book written in German. The book presents the conception of phenomenology understood as speculative transcendental idealism. To a large extent it refers to Schnell’s prior investigations, such as in his first German-edited book Hinaus. Entwürfe zu einer phänomenologischen Metaphysik und Anthropologie (Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, Orbis Phaenomenologicus (Studien), Nr. 24, 2011, 160).  This book which will be reviewed here consists of a Preface and three parts, each of which is subdivided into two chapters. The length of this book—relative to its gravity and the complexity of the question included in its title—suggests that Schnell’s new book (in a similar vein to his Hinaus) is a systematic presentation of an idea; a well-thought project rather than a complete system of phenomenological philosophy.

Schnell’s project is intended to answer two fundamental questions: 1) How do we understood phenomenological cognition in its most radical form? and 2) How do we reconcile a turn to transcendental subjectivity—being so characteristic of phenomenology as such—with the grounding of the “robust” (that is, “tactile,” “concrete,” “hard,” etc.) concept of being with respect to reality? What is at stake here is the possibility of reconciling an epistemological question about legitimizing cognition with the ontological character of phenomenology. In other words, Schnell’s agenda aims at reconciling the goals and methods of phenomenology pursued by Husserl and Heidegger, respectively. To reach this goal, Schnell delivers an argument which combines three distinct “ways” out of a possible four: 1) it presents the idiosyncrasies of the phenomenological method; 2) it points to the heritage of German idealism and English empiricism as the philosophico-historical origins of phenomenology; 3) it polemizes with Quentin Meillassoux’ speculative realism and puts forward a phenomenological-transcendental grounding of the concept of reality. The fourth way, which would consider specific investigations of phenomenological problems, not counting the issue of correlationism (Korrelationismus) and sense-formation (Sinnbildung), lies outside the author’s interest.

The book is intended not to be a historical or systematic introduction to phenomenology, but rather an outline of the task which we can label, quoting Eugen Fink, as a “phenomenological idea of grounding.” When asked about the possibility of uniformizing such distinct standpoints as Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, Merleau-Ponty’s, Fink’s, Levinas’s, and Richir’s into a common phenomenological “school” Schnell replies that phenomenology from its very beginning was a project which has been (despite many differences in the methods of its realization) characterized by a common philosophical horizon and direction of thinking. In his view, this common denominator is transcendental philosophy.

Phenomenology is a philosophical project emerging from a critical diagnosis of western culture in the 20th century. Opposing the general cultural tendency to reduce the dimensions of sense and being to pure facts, the point of departure for phenomenology is to note that whatever appears to us is given to our consciousness and that the appearance of things presupposes the idea of correlation. The only object of phenomenology is intentionality or original phenomenological correlation, which is the transcendental field for constituting any sense, including the sense of the real world.

Schnell operationalizes the conceptual core of phenemenology by the following four points: firstly, double (both ontological and gnoseological) presuppositionlessness; secondly, genetic givenness, which, due to the fact that it is just being drawn out, it is not priorly given; thirdly, the above-mentioned correlativity; and finally intelligibilization, which states that instead of exploring Being and justifying or explaining cognition, phenomenology is oriented at investigating sense and “rendering the idea of cognition comprehensible”.

As far the phenomenological method is concerned (chapter 1), with which phenomenology as such happens to be identified, Schnell points to four points of convergence for the shaping of sense: transcendentality, meaningfulness, eidetics and correlativity. The first point reduces to the correlation between thinking and Being (Fichte), with this correlation being enabled by way of “transcendental experience,” or opening the field of sense constitution. That is why the second sense characterizes the phenomenological method as investigations oriented at sense, or as an attempt to make things comprehensible. After Heidegger, we can describe said sense as the “with respect to what” of each comprehension. The third moment, that is eidetics, protects the phenomenological cognition from the threat of collapsing into investigating fact (contra psychologism). Eventually, the fourth moment has already been mentioned in the context of the concept of transcendentality; on the grounds of phenomenology, correlation proceeds in a three-fold manner: 1) It is still a pre-phenomenological correlation between the subject and object of experience; 2) Strictly phenomenological correlation of noetic-noematic nature; 3) Deep pre-phenomenal correlation, understood as pre-immanence, pure anonymity. With these three points mentioned above serving as a point of departure, one can point to four fundamental axes of the phenomenological method 1) Epoché and reduction; the former means suspension of judgement, as characteristic of the natural approach, whereas the latter means a turn to transcendental subjectivity. Additionally there is 2) Eidetic variation, 3) Phenomenological description, and 4) Phenomenological construction. What merits attention is a complex description of the eidetic variation, with the description in question introducing a characteristically phenomenological concept of essence. This very concept appears to be quite different from what traditional philosophy understands by essence (as opposed, on the latter view, to facts and particulars). From the point of view of the well-known opposition of essence and phenomenological fact, Eidos is something third. Across all these constituents of the phenomenological method, Schnell stresses their “creative,” “constructive”, and speculative character. There is a relation of mutual dependence between the objects of phenomenology and the existence of the phenomenological method.

There is another concept related to the above-delineated phenomenological method; namely, the concept of understanding, which makes the Husserlian phenomenology receptive to Heideggerian motifs (chapter II). The concept of understanding operates within a tension between the Self and the Other; that is between the Self and what is other than myself. As an element of the phenomenological method, the previously mentioned concept renders phenomenology capable of addressing the problem of legitimizing (a problem that haunts the humanities) claims for truth and epistemic accomplishments of the sciences. Schnell brings out a methodical outline of understanding in two steps. First, he refers to historical conceptions of understanding in the thought of Heidegger and Fichte. Second, he heeds two aspects of understanding which the afore-mentioned thinkers failed to consider and which are, however, essential to the phenomenological understanding. Just as in the previous considerations related to a method, also at this point, the author emphasizes a ‘creative’ and active character of the phenomenological method, the aspect of which is understanding itself. The said character manifests itself, first and foremost, in the concept of projection (Heidegger); and second – in the self-interpretation of the Self, which understands something; third – in the negative activity of differentiation (Fichte); fourth – in the fixation; that is, in holding of what is to be comprehended, during which within the Self there emerges some distance to itself; fifth, in the “phenomenalization” of what is incomprehensible, which constitutes a sort of base for the comprehensible. The phenomenalization in question, involving the a priori extension of the field of comprehensibility, is achieved by way of “the phenomenological construction”; namely, “genetization.” Generally speaking, phenomenology as a method means an incessant “going back to things in themselves”; or, to put it more accurately, going “beyond things” and towards the open horizon which makes things appear to us in the first place. In this open horizon, there is eventually something irreducible, something given which is not to be identified with any “data” but rather with something “given” in the process of the phenomenological construction. This will be addressed further along.

Chapter III points to another route towards phenomenology. This route goes across philosophico-historical reflection which is supposed to elucidate “what is not thought about” in the phenomenological method. The idea of grounding, constituting a guiding idea of phenomenology itself, derives its motifs from two traditions: classical German philosophy and English empiricism of the 17th century. Resorting to the pronouncements of Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas, Schnell notes that phenomenology is possible only as idealism which combines in itself both a transcendental and ontological dimension. The premises of this reasoning are to be found in classical German philosophy, especially in Fichte, according to whom one legitimizes cognition by virtue of non-sensory intuitive cognition.  The intuitive legitimization of cognition has different modi. First and foremost, it refers to the first level of justifying cognition. That is, it refers to the level of the phenomenological description of immanent data of consciousness. At a second stage, with this stage entering the sphere of pre-immanence, aware (or conscious) experience must be supplemented with the annihilation of occurring closures. The positive side of annihilation is the already-mentioned construction. Its intuitive dimension is instantiated as history, conceived of as genesis; that is habitualizations and sedimentations. These are creative accomplishments of a phenomenologist who constructs whatever is necessary for validating cognition at the deepest level. This is the lesson from Kant. However, Fichte goes even further than Husserl by demonstrating in the double reflection how what enables cognition is possible: how are conditions of possibility possible themselves? On the grounds of phenomenology, a similar scheme of conduct is realized by the Heideggerian existentiell being-towards-death, which, grounding the “entirety” of Dasein, is labelled as “enabling” (Ermöglichung) what constitutes the “possibility of impossibility”, and hence, death. Searching for the possibility of combining an epistemological and ontological aspect of the “idea of grounding”, Schnell evokes a dispute between Fichte and Schelling. According to the latter, in order to legitimize knowledge, it is not sufficient to resort to a form of knowledge as such. One should also take into consideration its content. This strict relations between the constituting and the constituted was recognized within the realm of phenomenology by Levinas, who speaks of “the relations of mutual conditioning.” To rebut an indictment of formalism, which is in turn related to an indictment of solipsism, one should demonstrate what the immanent link between thinking and Being consists in. The explication of this relations proceeds in reference to three categories and dimensions: truth, constitution, and genesis. Regarding truth: On the basis of the analyses of experience, Husserl demonstrates in what way “truth is an a priori form of any reference to the world.” Regarding constitution: On the level of the sphere of immanence, it is proved that every actual consciousness is surrounded by the horizons of potentiality, which opens up the way towards “new ontology” (Levinas), although it must be conceded that thinking constitutes Being. The latter each and every time transcends thinking, thus founding the former’s accomplishments.  On the level of pre-immanence, what is revealed is the sphere of ‘pre-being’, the aspects of which are “subject” and “object”. Therefore, it transpires that “transcendental constitution is an ontological founding” (100). Regarding genesis: At the level of transcendental genesis, what takes place is what Levinas labels as “diachrony” and Fichte – “the reflection on reflection”. Every relation of conditioning presupposes a shift between registers, wherein one asserts either presence or absence – depending on the perspective assumed: be it the conditioning or the conditioned. Then again, what applies at this point is the trope of enabling doubling. Due to the complexity of the issue under scrutiny and its concise presentation in Schnell’s book, what we can say herein is that it is only at the level which Heidegger calls “fundamental happening,” that what is eventually reconciled is the need to make cognition comprehensible and founding everything upon Being itself.

A second historico-background for Husserlian phenomenology, next to German classical philosophy and of equally importance, is English empiricism (chapter IV). Husserl dedicated much attention to the Humean achievements particularly towards the end of his life; that is, in the period in which—on the one hand—he recognized Lebenswelt as a primary category of his phenomenology—and on the other hand—he described phenomenology as reflection on history. The latter characterization leads to the conclusion that the crisis of science results from its “objectivism”, which roughly means its underestimation of the life-world. The said objectivism supersedes the world of natural approach with a mathematical substrate, understood as a being in itself. And it is precisely in Hume’s thought that soul constitutes the world out of impression by virtue of fantasy that Husserl finds the motifs which shake the foundations of this objectivism. In his phenomenological considerations Husserl tries to give a positive account of how consciousness, including the acts of imagination, constitutes the world “in itself” and legitimizes the pretense of modern sciences for absolute truth. In Husserl’s view, unlike in Kant’s, the major problem in Hume’s thought is not the problem of induction, but the problem of making comprehensible this “naïve obviousness of the certainty of the world” which ordinary and scientific consciousness feeds on. To solve this problem, Husserl enters transcendental considerations which are supposed to disclose the transcendental life of subjectivity at the very foundations of “the certainty of the world.” For this purpose, he develops the “world-life reduction”, which is supposed to liberate one’s perception from the naïve certainty of the world and to direct it towards a priori, inhering in Lebenswelt. That is, to the hidden correlation of the world and the consciousness thereof; to “spiritual actions” which constitute all the meaningful creations. Only via this route is one able to, on the one hand, show whence sciences derive their claim for universal validity; and on the other, to make comprehensible the naïve obviousness surrounding the life-world. According to Husserl, the validity of sciences has its foundations in the sense of being in the life-world, from the “synthetic wholeness” of its transcendental achievements.

From the above-described perspective of “the science of Lebenswelt,” Husserl conducts a critical reinterpretation of five fundamental motifs of earlier phenomenology: 1) The grounding horizon of the legitimization of cognition, 2) Intuition as the principle of all principles, 3) The most fundamental role of actual perception, 4) Description as a basic method of phenomenology, and 5) Hegemony of the constructing Ego. Regarding the five above-listed motifs in turn: 1) Whereas in his writings dating back to the twenties, Husserl mainly aimed at justifying any cognition, in his notes and lectures from the thirties he describes the task of phenomenology as making comprehensible, which introduces the process of sense-formation and exposes the significance of intersubjectivity, or actually, strictly speaking, intersubjectivity of “anonymous” character. Such intersubjectivitity requires not reduction but “in-duction” (Latin inductio literally means: introduction) into the realm of what is pre-subjective.  2) This anonymous subjectivity calls into question the principle of all principles; or to put it more clearly, the primacy of intuition as far as sense-formation goes.  3) This in turn gives rise to contesting the primacy of actual perception as a legitimizing source of all cognitive references made by consciousness to objects. Instead, contesting the above can count in favour of the modes of actualization realized by imagination. 4) Reaching the transcendental non-intuitive foundation of sense-formation requires that it should be recognized and conceded that philosophy may be a “universal science” only as a non-objective science. There is no “descriptive science on transcendental being and life”, says Husserl. This implies that the process of making comprehensible must avail itself of a different notion of truth from the one traditionally attributed to objective sciences. 5) The last difficulty concerns the relations between the constituted world and the constituting subjectivity. Here we are facing the following dilemma: either we preserve the participation of the subject in the word, which would make the world-constitution non-radical. Or, alternatively, the constitution is radical, and then what would be required is that the subjecthood, as related to the world, is to be rescinded. Therefore, at this point there occurs some tension between the natural approach to the world and the transcendental approach. To elucidate this tension, it takes the introduction—as a “foundation” of the world constitution—of the self-destructive subjecthood. In Husserl, this paradox is solved by projecting it onto the problem of the relations between primordial-Self and intersubjectivity and between primordial self and objectified worldly self.           

This very reference to the lowest layers of the transcendental life and being is reminiscent of the issue of the Absolute. Schnell raises this issue with reference to the dispute having been going on since the critique of phenomenology launched by “speculative realism,” represented by Quentin Meillassoux (chapter V). According to the latter thinker, phenomenology is purportedly the contemporary paradigm case of the philosophical standpoint, labelled as correlationism, wherein there is no possibility of thinking a being in itself without simultaneously relating this very being to thinking itself. Schnell takes the sting out of these indictments in four steps.

The main argument against the phenomenological correlationism is to be the one from ancestrality. The main thrust of the argument is the claim that any version of correlationism faces an insuperable problem posed by the fact of existence of the events prior to the emergence of conscious beings who could have experienced these events. This argument is easy to refute from the perspective of transcendentalism. Neither Kant’s philosophy nor Husserl’s imply that something exists insofar as it is experienced by empirical persons. Instead, what the above philosophies deal with are the conditions of possibility of possible experience. Believing that the transcendental consciousness must be always embodied in a physical person and defining what is possible in terms of the lack of what is actual, Meillassoux misunderstands the transcendental status of phenomenological subjecthood and its function of making comprehensible what is genuinely possible. It is erroneous to conceive of the relation of phenomenology to reality in the same vein and at the same level as one conceives of the relation of natural sciences to reality. For phenomenology, after applying the epoché, reality appears to us as a phenomenon; a phenomenologist does not ask whether the said phenomenon exists or existed; rather, he asks about its sense: how does the past reality which no empirical person could in fact experience appear to us?

Apart from that in the process of a critical analysis speculative realism proves to be correlationism in disguise. According to Schnell, Meilassoux’s indictments derive from the assumption of a false external attitude towards phenomenology.

A positive side of the discussion is the attempt to engage phenomenology in elucidating the profoundest foundations of the correlation, which should simultaneously ensure the meaningfulness of what is – in both daily and scientific experience understood as reality it itself. Schnell brings up “correlational hypophysics” (Greek hipo – under), which is supposed—in order to fully realize the task of materializing the “idea of the grounding of phenomenology” to life—to elaborate the “transcendental matrix of correlationism” (151). In the course of elaborating this very idea, the three fundamental motifs of correlationism are uncovered. First and foremost, it is to be established what is the foundation and essence of correlation; second, what is the principle of making phenomenological cognition possible and—along with this—of granting sense; third, what phenomenological reflection consists in. Therefore, what makes up the transcendental matrix of correlationism are three motifs: correlation, sense and reflection.

Schnell outlines the said three motifs in the following manner. The essence of correlation is—following Heidegger—“horizon-opening anticipating.”  It is this concept that captures the intuitive sense of what appears to us; namely the very appearing to us itself. On the other hand, reflection does not imply a subject’s turning to itself. Rather, it means the already-mentioned “introduction (induction) into a self-reflective processualness of sense-formation” (153). Phenomenological reflection is reflection over both “borderline structures of phenomenality and what phenomenality enables”. What is thereby meant is a “characteristic performance of a phenomenologically relevant form of reflection” (154). Schnell distinguishes three types of induction, which correspond with three layers of the transcendental matrix of correlation. At the first stage of reflection, there emerges an intentional structure of consciousness, designing sense and making cognition comprehensible. Each of these structures have a dualistic form: intentionality is divided between a subject and object; what designing sense consists in is its creation and the reception thereof; making cognition comprehensible is spread between the original (Urbild) and a copy (Abbild). At the second stage, these dualities get both deepened and dynamized: consciousness becomes self-consciousness, the apparently ultimate truth of fulfilling intentions is getting hermeneutically distanced and the relations between the original and a copy within the principle of cognition becomes malleable in the process of the simultaneous designing and annihilating. Eventually, at the third stage, self-reflection becomes inward (verinnerlichende) self-reflection. First, this self-reflection opens a pre-phenomenal, pre-immanent sphere of phenomenological constitution; second, it deepens the hermeneutic truth and elevates it to the rank of a generative truth.  In place of what is given, a construction emerges. The example of the latter is Husserl’s phenomenological construction of original temporality, included in Bernauer Manuskripten. Third, what is subject to inward reflection is also establishing and destroying – both interwoven with the principle of cognition; at this stage, the reflection becomes the reflecting (Reflektieren), which highlights the workings (laws) of reflection itself (Reflexionsgesetzmäßigkeit). What is at stake here is to make the very act of making possible transparent. What is thereby meant is to enable the enabling, which characterizes the nature of what is transcendental. These workings (laws) of reflection express—next to making understanding possible—enabling being. For, eventually, what we deal with at the lowest level of what is transcendental is not pure reflective asserting. Rather, it is something which anticipates the former and which reduces to the annihilation of the experienced positiveness of conditions and to the creation of these conditions and of being as a “surplus,” with the said surplus being supposed to serve as ontological foundations to the conditions in question. “Being is a reflection on reflection” (159). “It is being that is ‘ground’ of any reality; it is not priorly given or assumed but rather genetically constructed, reflectively geneticized ‘medium of reality’” (159). With reference to the dispute with Meilassoux, Schnell claims that “the fundamental result of phenomenological speculative idealism ‘is a concept of being that can be classified as the’ Absolute”. It does not coincide with reality. It does not denote any entity. Instead, it can be characterized in the following three-fold manner. 1) Being is a prior being, “pre-being”; it denotes a pre-immanent realm of openness, an “ontological status of transcendental a priori” (161); 2) Being is a surplus; 3) Being is identified grounding.

In the last chapter (VI), Schnell returns to the question of reality. He searches for the motives for raising this question in historico-philosophical problematics of modernity, inaugurated by Descartes and then promptly revolutionized by transcendental philosophy. From this perspective, one can clearly see that the question of reality already appeared in the context of epistemological problematics, within which reality is a concept standing in contradistinction to the subjective experiences of imagination, dream or methodically complex intellectual operations. The Kantian attempt to redefine the problem introduces the idea of correlationism.  However, even this idea is originally of purely epistemological character, with which, on the grounds of phenomenology, only Heidegger clearly polemizes.

According to Schnell, one can distinguish four fundamental forms of correlationism. The first of them is to be found in Kant: it is a correlation of judgement and self-consciousness. The second is introduced by Fichte: it is a correlation of Being and thinking. The third one—phenomenological—is inaugurated by Husserl: it is the intentional correlation. The fourth one stems derives from Heidegger: it is the correlation of being-in-the-world. Schnell pauses to consider the third form of correlation, known mainly from late writings and manuscripts by Husserl in which he develops his investigations pertaining to genetic phenomenology. He combines the notion of constitution with the one of genesis. As Husserl says:

“Indem die Phänomenologie der Genesis dem ursprünglichen Werden im Zeitstrom, das selbst ein ursprünglich konstituierendes Werden ist, und den genetisch fungierenden sogenannten „Motivationen” nachgeht, zeigt sie, wie Bewusstsein aus Bewusstsein wird, wie dabei im Werden sich immerfort auch konstitutive Leistung vollzieht(Hua XIV, 41).

The said history of consciousness is given in transcendental experience. The key concept of genetic phenomenology is the category of  “sense-formation” (Sinnbildung). Schnell distinguishes three semantic moments of the process in question: the constituting moment (bildend-erzeugende), the moment of imagination (Einbildung), and the one introduced by Marc Richir: the constituting-schematizing moment (bildend-schematisierende). With reference to Richir, who was searching for the novel grounding of phenomenology, Schnell highlights the third moment and claims that at the very bottom of any act of a cognizing subject referring to Being, there is no perception but fantasy (certainly, as conceived of in the transcendental sense). Referring to the transcendental concept of an image, Schnell attempts—by way of “transcendental induction”—to demonstrate “the pre-phenomenon of sense-formation,” which allows for making both cognition and reality comprehensible. According to Schnell, what is an image is both reality and the said pre-phenomenon. In three steps of reflection, Schnell constructs “the pre-phenomenon of sense-formation.” In the above-mentioned first step of reflection, one constructs an empty concept of reflection (Abbild) which, in the second step of reflection (that is, during self-reflection) is endowed with some content. This in turn means that the former as an empty concept gets annihilated. The construction thus assumes a malleable form. Finally, during the third step of construction, which is an inward reflection, reflection starts manifesting itself as reflection with its lawfulness, which means that “each transcendental relations of conditioning implies its own enabling doubling” (178); namely, the enabling of enabling. The last sections bring an answer to two originally posed questions: 1) How may we understand phenomenological cognition in its most radical form? and 2) How do we reconcile a turn to transcendental subjectivity—being so characteristic of phenomenology as such—with the grounding of the “robust” concept of being with respect to reality? The first question is replied to with “the principle of elucidating phenomenological knowledge-claims”, which is a gradually inward reflection. By revealing its own workings (laws), this reflection leads to an answer to the second question: the possibility of reconciling epistemological and ontological features of phenomenology is to be found in the concept of phenomenality as “durable steadfastness” (ausstehende Inständigkeit) (Heidegger). Reality, as non-theoretically understood, is a “trace” of a mutual relationship of immanence (endogenesis) and transcendence (exogenesis); it is “onto-eis-ec-stasis”. “Reality is not pure being-in-itself, neither only being-for-myself, but rather, a steadfastly (inständig) discovered and geneticized being-outside-of” (181).

The boldness of some of Schnell’s ideas are inversely proportional to the detailedness of their respective explications; that is why, the last words of the book—since it is devoid of a conclusion proper—is the statement that all the considerations included therein are of preliminary nature and they call for further elaboration.

At the end, let us take the liberty of posing several questions of a polemical-critical nature. Undoubtedly, the content of the book evidences the fact that the author is well-versed in the phenomenological problematics and he freely chooses the issue that he deems necessary to highlight the identity and the peculiarities of phenomenology. However, it raises the following questions: To what extent do Schnell’s decisions related to the selection of problematics stem from what phenomenology as such is? To what extent do those questions stem from the fact that the author desires to validate his vision—rather arbitrarily assumed—of what, in his opinion, phenomenology may be? Furthermore, the next question is this: To what extent is the reconstruction of the motifs selected by Schnell—the motifs being known to the phenomenological movement—an apt interpretation? And to what extent is this interpretation distorted, taking into account the goal motivating the author’s very enterprise? What is the purpose of Schnell’s considerations? It seems that the purpose may be most easily identified in the light of the title of the scrutinized work. In other words, what is at stake is an answer to the question of what phenomenology is. Does the author succeed in reaching his goal?

Certainly, due to its concise and cursory nature, Schnell’s work requires the reader to be significantly acquainted with intricacies of the problematics of phenomenology. In this sense, the book is not, thematically and historically speaking, of introductory character, which, if it were, would make it useful to the adherents of phenomenology barely initiated into the art of philosophizing in this fashion. Quite the contrary, the beginning of Schnell’s considerations require a higher level of prior knowledge on the part of his readers. Certainly, the above does not translate into any sort of indictment. Still, it must be conceded that Husserl’s wrote that a phenomenologist is always a beginner; yet, this dictum should not be construed as related to the amateur’s practice. Husserl’s conviction about the introductory character of phenomenology gives rise to another quite distinct problem. Phenomenology is an introductory science in the five-fold sense: 1) It is a science about origins; 2) It a science designed from scratch; namely, by dint of systematic maneuvers which are supposed to ensure to phenomenology relevant sourceness and presuppositionlessness; 3) It is a point of departure for other sciences; 4) It is located at the beginning of its historical development; and, eventually 5) It is of preliminary nature. Phenomenology is essentially a research work, it is active searching, questioning, also going astray and getting lost. By contrast, Schnell’s work is a systematic presentation of ideas and of the results of phenomenological analyses – genuinely formidable, coherent construction which, albeit sketchily presented, is ex hypothesi a self-confident attempt at a philosophical system. In this sense, the scrutinized work alludes to all those attempts which can be subsumed under the umbrella term of German idealism. It is especially Kant and Fichte, to whom Schnell makes frequent historical references, that used to present their respective philosophies in a rudimentary form which was meant to eventually assume the form of a system. Hence, the title of Schnell’s book—instead of Was ist Phänomenologie?—should rather be: Ein Entwurf der Phänomenologie als spekulativer transzendentaler Idealismus. Counter to the generality of the title given by Schnell—which not only assumes the form of an interrogative but also uses the word Phänomenologie without any article, thus implying that the text shall concern the most general idea of phenomenology taking into account its most extreme thematic and historical instantiations—all the considerations contained herein are from the very beginning dedicated to the presentation of a single form of phenomenology, that is the one which is understood in the light of “the idea of grounding” (E. Fink). It seems that the element most wanting in Schnell’s consideration is the ability “to maintain the state of questionness” (“what is phenomenology?”). After all, the said ability is—as I believe—a distinctive feature of phenomenology as well as its trademark, thus distinguishing it from the other movements in the history of philosophy. The said traits are not only distinctive features marking the realm of phenomenology off against the backdrop of the history of philosophy. They also constitute its philosophical mission, so to speak. Elevating the motif of the question to the rank of a fundamental methodological directive—which entails the altered understanding of cognition and being—it dissociates itself from the question of oblivion, with the oblivion having lasted since the times of Aristotle. To revoke the question is to restore to philosophy its proper dimension of self-realization. And this is what Kant’s “Copernican turn” as well as its misunderstanding on the part of Kant’s German successors essentially consist in. By the same token, this is what the historical importance of phenomenology consists in too. That is why, if one attempts to understand phenomenology through the eyes of historico-philosophical motifs known to the history of philosophy—which, albeit important and educational in itself, threatens to obfuscate the original contribution made by phenomenology—it is precisely in Kant’s ‘Copernican turn’ that one should look for creative affinity.

After all, grasping phenomenology in the light of the question (stated by the title of the reviewed book) shows more than merely the peculiarities of phenomenology against the backdrop of the history of philosophy. By posing the question of what phenomenology is and “remaining in this state of questionness,” one uncovers phenomenology, on the one hand, as a domain or problems; and on the other hand – as an open field of different possibilities of understanding and solving them. Certainly, these are not pure possibilities but possibilities of historical nature. The internal richness of the possibilities of the idea of phenomenology, and which is what we can aptly label as its internal problematicity, somehow a priori resists any attempt to exclusively identify phenomenology with one of these possibilities. This principle applies both to its thematic and historical aspect. The question opens its own historicalness of phenomenology, with this historicalness directing us to philosophico-historical aspect of the phenomenological movement.  One would be ill-advised to reduce this internal problematicity either to a specific set of problems or to only selected attempts at solving them. However, in the context of this problem, Schnell’s work is of regrettably one-sided character. For instance, despite Schnell’s scholarly competence, as indubitably evidenced by his intellectual accomplishments, his book almost entirely skips the discussions on and transformations in the understanding of phenomenology known from, say, the writings by French phenomenologists of the post-war period (the only exception being sporadically mentioned Emannuel Levinas and Marc Richir). Certainly, it would be very bad if any subsequent attempt to raise the question of “what is phenomenology” similarly dismissed Schnell’s work.