Eugen Fink und die Phänomenologie

This paper focuses on the puzzling question of what motivates the radical epistemological shift necessary for engaging in transcendental phenomenology. Husserl touches on the problem of motivation on many occasions, but it becomes an explicit issue in Fink’s bold reimagining of the transcendental theory of method, as presented in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. In the first section, I briefly introduce the problem as it appears in Husserl. The second section of the paper discusses Fink’s Hegelian dissolution of it. Finally, I point to several historical, practical, and ethical aspects of transcendental phenomenology, and argue that a good account of motivation for phenomenology ought to find a way to address these without hastily bracketing them.

This article deals with the metaphor of dogmatic slumber in Finkian phenomenology. The Husserlian thought experiment with two worlds for one subject functions here as a starting point which helps to thematize the somnambulistic certitude of the taken-for-granted. It leads to conclusion about the pedagogical task of the philosopher: to constantly wake up himself and the others.

Fink’s early thought is characterized by a sort of fragmentation and concealment, since it must be reconstructed by bringing together the few texts that he wrote during his collaboration with Husserl – and mainly for him – with the great number of private notes and drafts that accompanied, quasi subterraneous, his assistant activity. Based on these materials, the present papers intend to bring to light the coherent theoretical framework which underlies Fink’s conception of philosophy as meontic phenomenology and especially as catastrophic thinking (katastrophales Denken). Based on a clarification of the concepts of “world” and “absolute”, Fink’s thought will be investigated in the light of the double movement of )kbasis and kat'basis that he established between the two realms of what is constituted and what is constituting. It will lead, through a radicalization of the reduction as dehumanizing and absolution, to a new phenomenological understanding of philosophy as “katastroph)”, which is based on a definitive breaking of the hermeneutic circle.

The speculative direction that Fink in the ’30s had imprinted on phenomenology finds its development – distant in many ways from its theoretical premises in Husserl’s thought – in the first university lectures of the post-war period, among which Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1947) is of peculiar relevance. Some common threads connect Fink’s early phenomenological reflections with his following attempt to develop a philosophical cosmology and anthropology. In the course of lectures here examined we can see the revival of the theme that considers philosophy – understood as a radical inquiring, open to the world and at the same time to the self of the human being – the primary place of freedom. In connection with this theme Fink theorizes a concept of freedom that does not confine freedom to a subjective polar opposite to nature, but focuses on the exposure of the human being to the world. Fink, indeed, starts a discussion on the question of freedom through a comparison between two opposite patterns of thought, namely the philosophies of Kant and Nietzsche, read with a perspective that puts both these philosophies in contrast to the absolutization of subjectivity in the systems of German idealism.

This paper elucidates Fink’s phenomenology of the world in its basic conception by illustrating his Kant-interpretation. However, some scholars support that his conceptions are not related to Kant’s transcendental dialectic but rather generated from Hegelian speculative one. In contrast to those views in secondary literature, this study demonstrates, on the one hand, the decisive meaning of Kant’s transcendental dialectic, especially the “cosmological antinomy”, for the formation of Fink’s philosophy as a whole and, on the other hand, how Fink elucidates phenomenologically the problem of the pre-givenness of the world by criticizing Kantian so called Copernican turn and transforming his architectonic of the transcendental philosophy.

This paper examines the systematic connections between Fink and Fichte. For this purpose, three points are emphasized. The text that is mainly referred to is the VI. Cartesian Meditation. The first point concerns the notion of “construction”, which ismethodologically central to the genuine mode of knowledge of transcendental idealism; secondly, a consideration will be given to the extent to which “reflection of reflection” provides crucial insights for the basic position of phenomenological transcendental idealism; and third, in a concluding consideration of the status of transcendental idealism, several points will be made which should allow us to grasp “transcendental idealism” in Kant, Fichte, Husserl, and Fink as precisely as possible. These considerations make it their task to contribute to counteract the indeterminacy of this concept within this entire tradition.

According to Fink, self-reference is one of the distinct features of philosophy. This isn’t merely restricted to her referring to herself thematically. Self-reference is also the key feature of philosophy’s principles, inasmuch as any principle has to be a principle for the very philosophical position explicating this principle. Thus, in my article I will look at four ways in which Fink addresses the self-referential structure of philosophy: Firstly, I will recapitulate Fink’s concept of a “meontic” philosophy. Secondly, I will link this “meontic” philosophy with Fink’s reading of Hegel’s concept of theophany, tracing it back to neoplatonic tradition. Thirdly, I will follow Fink’s reading of Hegel as it transforms his former phenomenological approach into a speculative dialectics of a metaphilosophy of philosophical principles. In a fourth and last step, I will try to give a sketch of Fink’s “phenomenology of the absolute” which combinesHusserl, Heidegger, and Hegel into a speculative phenomenology.

The thesis I defend in this text is that Eugen Fink’s most original contribution to the phenomenological tradition consists in the rehabilitation of speculative thinking as a legitimate and compelling mode of approaching philosophical problems. Furthermore, I claim that this theoretical move is accomplished through a constant while critical dialogue with Hegel. I start by exposing the criticism Fink levelled against the canonical, Husserlian, understanding of phenomenology as a descriptive enterprise. Then, I delineate the interpretative strategy Fink puts in place in his reading of Hegel and bring out its underlying commitments. As I will show, his interpretation of Hegel is determined by the concern of rescuing some deep-seated cosmological insights determining Hegel’s philosophy. I further show that his understanding of Hegel is worked out in reference to, but also in explicit contrast to, Heidegger’s reading of Hegel. Finally, I claim that Fink’s sustained attention toHegel does not amount to an endorsement of his position and examine the reasons he advances for “rejecting Hegel”.

While avoiding taking part in the discussion of whether Fink’s philosophy should or not be considered from two different moments, the intention of the present contribution is to follow the track given by an evident readjustment in the interpretation of Hegel proposed by Fink in two different moments of his intellectual production. The thematic frame concerning his interpretation of Hegel privileges the concepts of absolute and identity, in order to show how they were articulated in two different ways throughout the development of what we here refer to as Fink’s philosophical project.

Hegel’s philosophy had a decisive role in the development of Eugen Fink’s thought, by suggesting the conceptual means to elaborate a third phenomenological paradigm beyond Husserl and Heidegger. In particular, this applies to the cosmological ontology that Fink developed after World War II, aimed at overcoming metaphysics while combining ontology with the rigorous method of phenomenology and a cosmological interpretation of being. In this regard, Hegel appeared to Fink as the first Western philosopher who had conceived the ground of beings without basing on ontic models, that is, as dynamical genesis of the structure of the world and human experience. The aim of the paper is to deepen Fink’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy and to show how (and to what extent) Hegel is not a metaphysical thinker in this perspective. What is Hegel’s conception of being? Fink’s work Sein und Mensch provides responses to this question.

The paper reconstructs the “speculative exposition” of the correlative distinction between being and cognition called for by Fink in Husserl’s intentional analytics on the basis of his discussion of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In this context, for Fink the chapter “Force and the Understanding, Appearance and the Supersensible World” is key in the Phenomenology asa whole. There, not only the transition fromobject-consciousness to self-consciousness is accomplished but also the question of the basic structure of thinghood in general is raised: From where does being as such and as a whole make itself appear? The paper traces Fink’s reading step by step, which is guided by a radicalisation of “ontological experience” – ontology as an “Er-fahrung (ex-perience)”, which sounds out itself in view of its presuppositions. “Radicalisation”, according to Fink, is the “transition from operative use to the subject”: the living, performative reference itself moves to the abysmal centre of an “inverted world”, which at the same time can be read as an introduction to Fink’s own thinking of a “cosmological difference”.

This paper pursues Eugen Fink’s dealing with Hegel’s philosophy. Unlike Heidegger, Fink comes to the conclusion that Hegel’s thought is not merely the achievement of Western metaphysics but contains approaches to overcoming it. In his interpretation, Fink seeks suggestions for a transition to a different way of thinking. He recognises the concept of force as the central concept of the Phenomenology of Spirit, through whichone is brought to Hegel’s highest philosophical principle of the Absolute as an infinitely moving while at the same time resting all life. Despite its self-divisiveness, however, the Absolute in Hegel remains essentially reconciled with itself and unified. Fink contrasts this to his own view, according to which the Absolute remains determined by an irreconcilable dispute. For this, he leans on his own doctrine of the strife between Earth and Heaven as the essence of the post-metaphysically understood world where every trace of metaphysical substantiality has disappeared.

The other Hölderlin, an unheroic, unprophetic, un-German, in a word: a poor Hölderlin, might have played an essential role in the development of Eugen Fink’s experienceable ontology as an/other form of idealism. Understood cosmologically as a “quarrel” or “game” between heaven and earth, it is designed to realize Husserl’s term “Weltbewusstseinsleben” as illustrated by Fink’s remark: “Coexistence in cognition is at the same time a testimony to the heavenly spirit.” Thus, a twofold question arises: If, in cognition, coexistence is at the same time a testimony to the heavenly spirit, what is it outside of cognition, if anything? And how does it come to cognition? Reading Fink and Hölderlin together, I suggest the following answers: 1. In cognition, coexistence is at the same time a testimony to the “heavenly”, that is to say: higher, i.e. communal spirit, precisely because 2. it is nothing outside of cognition–nothing but the cosmological laceration of man, the openness of human beings to the world, about which 3. nothing more can be said than that it has always already been there for us to know, for it is being brought to our cognition time and again: through poetry.