Andrzej Gniazdowski

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the relation between phenomenology and philosophical anthropology by analyzing it in the selected, theoretical as well as historical contexts. The author focuses primarily on the problem of Edmund Husserl’s criticism of anthropologism and analyzes the practical meaning of the rejection by him of anthropology as a true foundation of philosophy. The thesis of the paper is that already by rejecting anthropologism in the logic and theory of knowledge, Husserl presupposed some idea of philosophical anthropology in the “foundational” sense he criticized, and that this implicit idea was pursued by him not only from pure theoretical reason. In reference to Leszek Kołakowski and the methodology of the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas, which he applies in his interpretation of the idea of phenomenology, the author of the article attempts, unlike Kołakowski, to reveal not only the “religious”, but also the specific political meaning of this idea. What is argued here is that the only possible reconciliation between anti-anthropologism on the one hand and the outspoken humanism of transcendental phenomenology on the other lies in the adoption by Husserl of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s ideal of humanity as its practical, worldview framework. The practical, if not directly political, motif of Husserl’s radical criticism of anthropologism is, in author’s interpretation, Husserl’s attempt to answer, in the reference to this ideal, to the main political question of his times as consisting in the rising racist and anti-Semitic tendencies in the German naturalistic anthropology.

L’objet de cet article est constitué par les motifs cartésiens dans la pensée de Leszek Kołakowski, l’un des philosophes polonais les plus connus et influents de la seconde moitié du xx e siècle. On essaiera ici de montrer que ce qui a organisé la pensée de Kołakowski, et ce non seulement dans sa dimension philosophique, mais tout autant politique, était une réflexion critique sur la légitimité et les limites de la quête cartésienne du savoir fondé sur l’évidence et, à la fois, objectif et vrai. Pour l’auteur de cet article Kołakowski – et avec lui, toute une formation intellectuelle, dont il faisait partie, connue sous le nom d’École d’histoire des idées de Varsovie – interprétait le cartésianisme comme un essai de mise en place du radicalisme intégral, tant philosophique que politique. Dans cet article, on défendra également la thèse suivante : pour Kołakowski et pour bon nombre de ses collègues – anciens marxistes –, le cartésianisme était une philosophie radicale non seulement de la vérité, mais aussi de la liberté. La question que Kołakowski adressait aussi bien à Husserl qu’à Descartes, notamment celle de savoir s’il est possible de découvrir les fondements du savoir, inébranlables et absolument incontestables, sera présentée comme un élément de sa stratégie pour surmonter le marxisme envisagé comme une idéologie qui réduit la liberté humaine à un simple épiphénomène.

The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the theoretical background and practical meaning of the so called war writings which emerged within the phenomenological movement during the First World War. The author exemplifies it by researching the works of two German representatives of this movement, Max Scheler and Kurt Stavenhagen. He focuses on their application of the phenomenological method to the analysis of Russian national identity, and historical as well as cultural foundations of Russian state. The paper’s main thesis is that the politicization and militarization of phenomenology consisted in both “personalization” and “sociologization” of the phenomenological approach to the problem of the state. While interpreting Scheler’s personalism as an exemplification of the approach to the state as a problem of social ontology, the author reconstructs the theoretical conditions of analyzing the Russian imperial state in terms of the “world.” The focus of the paper is particularly on the phenomenology of, as Scheler put it, Russian collective personality and Russian national consciousness or “soul” as well as on the question of legitimacy of Ukrainian resistance against Russian imperialism.

The aim of this paper is to compare the approaches of Ernst Cassirer and Aurel Kolnai on the idea of the nation state in its most radical form, which consists of identifying national sovereignty with an unrestricted right of the nation to political, external, and internal self-determination. What the comparison attempted here focuses on, is the criticism on the conditions for the possibility of specific German nationalism, presented by Cassirer in his Myth of the State and by Kolnai in his War Against the West. According to the main thesis of this paper, insofar as both Cassirer and Kolnai recognized the role played in politics by emotions and considered political phenomena as being constituted by not only rational or at least calculable mechanisms, but also affective factors, like beliefs, religion, and myth, they tended to consider nationalism in terms of the politics of “regression,” understood, psychoanalytically, as a reversion of mental life, in some respects, to a former, or less developed, psychological state, characteristic of not only individual mental disorders, but also social psychosis. It will be argued, that Cassirer and Kolnai, not unlike the representatives of the Frankfurt School, considered the contemporary preponderance of mythical thought in political philosophy to be an expression of the dialectic, which consisted in “relapsing” of the Enlightenment into mythology. As a main motive for the comparison of their political philosophies, an assumption will be presented in the paper, that, while taking into account the contemporary tendency to oppose national sovereignty to the sovereignty of international law, the approach to the idea of nation state, as presented by Cassirer and Kolnai, seems to be by no means out of date.

Andrzej Gniazdowski geht von der Fragen aus, ob die „Rückkehr nach Europa“ nicht ein Opium für die polnische Intelligenz sei und wie diese mit der Position Polens als eines in Europa „trojanischen Esels“ Amerikas vereinbar sei. Die Wirksamkeit des Mitteleuropa-Begriffs in Polen in den 1980er-Jahren scheiterte an der westeuropäischen Vision von Europa. Die vielbeschworene „Rückkehr nach Europa“ kann gegenwärtig nicht in der „Wiederaufnahme einer unterbrochenen Tradtion“ liegen, sondern muss „eher als eine Art Konstruktion“ betrachtet werden.