Abstract
In this chapter, I introduce the philosophy of Semyon Frank. Specifically, I would like to focus on his work that deals with the life of the soul. In comparison to the earlier and later periods of his work, which examines the objective world and the outside of being, respectively, Frank’s study of the soul falls into the middle period of his philosophical career, when he actively developed what I consider an analogue of phenomenological psychology. His method, inclusive of some basic phenomenological tenets, is not only so unique as to warrant a study of itself but is also highly suitable for the examination of the soul as a phenomenon grounded in experience. As a result of his examination, Frank presents the soul as an immaterial absolute whole. As such, it governs the subject’s ‘ego’ and at the same time is shaped by the subject as an extension of the material world. With this, the living soul is simultaneously constitutive and constituted by the subject, while remaining an independent whole.
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Notes
- 1.
Frank considers two of his earlier works, An Object of Knowledge, The Soul of Man, and one middle-period work, The Imperceptible, as a trilogy. At the same time, he admits that An Object of Knowledge is a preliminary study for The Soul of Man, while, upon inspection, it becomes obvious that his last work is but an expansion of the second book.
- 2.
For more on intuitivism, see Lossky 1991, pp. 236–261.
- 3.
For example, David Carr argues that history is akin to storytelling if we are to replace writing history with narrating it (Carr 2004, p. 147).
- 4.
I should note that Husserl reversed his position on his method later in his career. In The Crisis, his last published work, he is quite explicit about the primacy of the world in a sequentially organized phenomenological examination because “all that is together in the world has a universal immediate or mediate way of belonging together; through this, the world is not merely a totality [Allheit] but an all-encompassing unity, a whole (even though it is infinite)” (Husserl 1970, p. 31; author’s italics).
- 5.
There is a clear understanding on the part of Frank that although Husserl cannot be involved in his study of the soul for the reasons stated above, the potential of Husserl’s phenomenology allows us to approach the soul using all the instruments of classical phenomenology.
- 6.
It is also worthwhile to remember that in The Crisis, Husserl points to psychology as one of the two ways into phenomenology. In this sense, one may say that Frank anticipated Husserl’s appreciation of psychology as a discipline adjacent to phenomenology by its purpose and method. For more on Husserl’s description of psychology as a way into phenomenology, see Husserl 1970, pp. 191–257.
- 7.
For example, a person who needs glasses does not experience their vision as incomplete, but once the person obtains glasses, they come to see what was previously inaccessible to them. See Husserl, Ms. D 13 II, 206b, in Steinbock (1995, pp. 146, 297).
- 8.
For a contemporary interpretation of the soul’s existence in time and space, see Edward Casey (1991, pp. 263–289).
- 9.
Hence the difficulty of considering Frank a Neo-Platonist, as Solywoda (2008).
- 10.
For philosophical views of emotions, see Landweer and Renz (2012).
References
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Frank, Semyon. 2015. The soul of man. Moscow: Terra Publishing House. [in Russian].
Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Landweer, Hilge, and Ursula Renz, eds. 2012. Handbuch Klassische Emotionstheorien: Von Platon bis Wittgenstein. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Lossky, Nikolaj. 1991. Collected works. Moscow: Logos.
Solywoda, Stephanie. 2008. The life and work of Semën L. Frank. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag.
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Kozin, A. (2020). On the Phenomenological Implications of Semyon Frank’s Psychological Philosophy of the Living Soul. In: Płotka, W., Eldridge, P. (eds) Early Phenomenology in Central and Eastern Europe. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 113. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39623-7_5
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