Leopold Blaustein (1905–1942 [?]) was a Polish-Jewish philosopher, aesthetician, psychologist, schoolteacher, and educationalist whose thought was shaped on the border between the main intellectual trends in Poland and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like a lens, his eclectic but original philosophy focused on new readings in the legacy of descriptive psychology, phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology. Certainly, he was well trained in these divergent yet intertwined traditions. After all, Blaustein was educated in Lvov (Lwów, now Lviv in Ukraine), where his teachers were, among others, Kazimierz Twardowski—a disciple of Franz Brentano in Vienna—who supervised his doctoral dissertation, and Roman Ingarden, who was working at that time on the basics of his phenomenological aesthetics, presented later in 1931 in Das literarische Kunstwerk [The Literary Work of Art]. Importantly, while working on his thesis in 1925, Blaustein studied for a few weeks in Freiburg im Breisgau under Edmund Husserl, who was lecturing then on phenomenological psychology. In addition, in 1927/28, he spent a few months in Berlin, where he had occasion to attend lectures given by Carl Stumpf or Max Wertheimer, not to mention his visits to the Berlin Psychological Institute. After his return to Poland in 1928, Blaustein published his first monograph in Polish, Husserlowska nauka o akcie, treści i przedmiocie przedstawienia [Husserl’s Theory of Act, Content and Object of Presentation], which was devoted solely to Husserl’s philosophy.Footnote 1 This book is arguably the very first scholarly work which reads Husserl’s idea of intentionality in the context of Brentano and Bernard Bolzano. Later, Blaustein worked out an original methodological device which allowed him to study phenomena such as experiencing a theater play, a movie, or a radio drama. He also explored new ideas in humanistic psychology and the latest attempts to implement phenomenological tools in psychiatry. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise which scholars often emphasize the novelty of Blaustein’s approach.

First, in an encyclopedia entry on philosophy in Poland, Jan Czerkawski, Antoni B. Stępień and Stanisław Wielgus identified Blaustein as “a pioneer in psychology pertaining to film and radio.”Footnote 2 Zofia RosińskaFootnote 3 and Joanna PlutaFootnote 4 also described him as a “pioneer” in studies on media reception. Although Małgorzata CzapigaFootnote 5 and Janusz ŁastowieckiFootnote 6 assessed some of Blaustein’s analyses of radio experience as outdated, they see a way to use these analyses in light of studies on today’s technologies. In Eusebio Ciccotti’s view, Blaustein undertook “[…] one of the first organic reflections on the status of the radio play.”Footnote 7 In this vein, Jagna Brudzińska associated Blaustein with, as she put it, the “[…] first phenomenological theory of media.”Footnote 8 Wioletta Miskiewicz saw in Blaustein’s theory an anticipation of Richard Wollheim’s idea of “seeing-in,” or Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.”Footnote 9 Last but not least, Józef Nawrocki claimed that Blaustein’s project of humanistic psychology was the very source of the tradition of humanistic psychology in Poland, which, interestingly, anticipated the 1960s projects of Abraham Maslov and Carl Rogers.Footnote 10 Thus, one can agree with Ingarden, who once called Blaustein “the most distinguished” fellow of the last group of Twardowski’s students.Footnote 11 In his text on Blaustein, Ingarden added that Blaustein’s original, pioneering and thought-provoking contribution should not be forgotten. However, paradoxically, Blaustein remained unknown to English scholarly literature. In this regard, Rosińska wrote that “[…] Blaustein had no students or biographers and no tributes were made to him. All that remains is a couple of recollections of friends and teachers, some basic information, and a few critical analyses of his philosophical work.”Footnote 12 The present book addresses this gap by providing in-depth study on Blaustein’s philosophy. The main ambition of this work is to rediscover his thought by discussing the details of his project and by examining the background which shaped his original ideas in complex polemics. Why, however, should one study Blaustein today? A few remarks are necessary here.

First, this study of Blaustein’s philosophy provides unique insight into a less-known chapter of the development of the history of philosophy before the outbreak of World War II. From this perspective, one is able to track how the philosophical heritage of Brentano developed and was reexamined in Central and Eastern Europe or how the phenomenological movement resonated outside Germany. After all, as already noted, Blaustein’s philosophy is an interesting borderline example of an original fusion and a reinterpretation of different philosophical traditions. Thus, Blaustein’s writings provide an opportunity to follow how the legacy of Brentano was confronted with, among other traditions, early phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, the heritage of Wilhelm Dilthey, or classical German aesthetics. In particular, this study deepens our knowledge of the history of the Lvov–Warsaw School, one of the most important intellectual formations in Poland (and in Europe) in the twentieth century. Against this background, we see that Blaustein’s philosophy can be regarded as a nodal point of the complex processes of intellectual life in the early decades of that century before they were brutally interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Blaustein—because of his Jewish roots—shared the fate of many Polish-Jewish philosophers and died in the Lvov ghetto in 1942 or 1944.Footnote 13 The exact date of his death remains unknown.

Despite the aforementioned merits, the present study also has another important objective. Generally, if one examines a complex theory which was developed at the crossroads of different trends, it is too easy to oversimplify the question of novelty, originality, or, by contrast, the secondary nature of the thought in question. It seems that Blaustein’s philosophy falls into this category. The fact that Blaustein was educated by scholars, e.g., Twardowski, Ingarden, Husserl and Stumpf, all of whom represented different philosophical traditions, may suggest that he was influenced by these traditions and thus linked divergent approaches and used various methods. This suggestion had led some scholars to regard Blaustein as a missing link between these trends. In this regard, Blaustein is often called an “analytic phenomenologist” since he seemed to “connect” or “combine” the analytic tradition of the Lvov–Warsaw School with (Husserl’s) phenomenology. Jan Woleński, for instance, called Blaustein “a forerunner of analytic phenomenology,” which ought to consist, as he put it, “[…] in combining ideas of Husserl and Twardowski.”Footnote 14 However, Woleński’s categorization is at best enigmatic since it reveals neither which particular ideas of these philosophers were combined by Blaustein nor what this “combination” is supposed to mean at all. Thus, if one refers to, in this context, Blaustein’s doctoral dissertation, which discusses the problem of content, which, in turn, is present in both theories—Husserl’s philosophy and Twardowski’s texts (vide his habilitation thesis)—this may suggest that any attempt to interpret Husserl’s theory of content has Twardowskian roots, which is incorrect. After all, the question of content arose with Bolzano’s analysis of objectless presentationsFootnote 15 and was later elaborated by Brentano in his studies on intentionality; at best, Twardowski’s analysis of the mental act’s structure can be regarded as a further elaboration of this line of thought.

In turn, Woleński could reply that by “combining the ideas of Husserl and Twardowski” he meant that in his book Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…] Blaustein used analytical tools to study (Husserl’s) phenomenology. According to this argument, Blaustein seemed to examine the concepts of phenomena and not the phenomena themselves, and he aimed to formulate their definitions and verify them from an increasingly close perspective, which may imply that Blaustein was indeed close to the analytic approach promoted by Twardowski. This line of reasoning, though not formulated by Woleński explicitly, was recently developed by Marek Pokropski, who also classified Blaustein as an “analytic phenomenologist.” As he stated, “[t]he originality of Blaustein’s thinking is because he synthesized to some extent two philosophical traditions: Twardowski’s analytical philosophy (logical and conceptual analysis) and Husserlian phenomenology (description and analysis of acts of consciousness).”Footnote 16 Pokropski developed Woleński’s idea and specified that Blaustein connected the methods (and not topics) used in both traditions, i.e., he seemed to combine logical analysis with phenomenological analysis. The former consists in analyzing concepts, whereas the latter is focused on consciousness.

Although Pokropski’s proposal is more convincing than Woleński’s rough idea, it still seems to be partial. Pokropski clarified that “analytic phenomenology” refers to the fact that Blaustein actually used two methods, but this classification is inadequate because it does not address the novelty of Blaustein’s philosophy. By contrast, it should be noted that logical analysis in Blaustein’s writings is at best marginalFootnote 17: it sometimes serves as a preliminary and meta-philosophical tool with which to summarize philosophical findings or to analyze theoretical position. This is precisely the main idea of Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…]: the book analyzes Husserl’s phenomenology in regard to his theory of intentionality. Importantly, Blaustein was critical of the scope of the analytic approach—as defined by Pokropski—of the Lvov–Warsaw School. This is evident if one refers in this regard to a critical review of Tadeusz Kotarbiński’s Elementy teorii poznania, logiki formalnej i metodologii nauk [The Elements of the Theory of Knowledge, Formal Logic and Methodology of Sciences] published by Blaustein in the journal Przegląd Humanistyczny [Review in Humanities] in 1930.Footnote 18 In his review, Blaustein appreciated Kotarbiński’s attempt to achieve clear language, but he also recognized a number of flaws in his approach, including possible oversimplifications and misinterpretations of analyzed theories. For this reason, Blaustein did not use the same approach in his other writings as in Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…]; this early analytical approach is almost absent in his later texts written in the 1930s. At that time, Blaustein was more interested in object-directed descriptions of concrete psychic phenomena, e.g., cinemagoers’ experiences or listening to the radio. With all of that in mind, it is pointless to call Blaustein an “analytic phenomenologist” on the basis of only one of his early writings.

There is another problem with Pokropski’s idea: if the phrase “analytic phenomenology” is supposed to refer to phenomenology, which uses conceptual analysis, it is simply confusing. Pokropski referred to the strict meaning of the term “analysis,” which is defined as a logical and conceptual (or linguistic) approach. If one accepts Pokropski’s suggestion, the phrase “analytic phenomenology” falls into the contradictio in adjecto fallacy since it suggests that a philosopher should use a method which is inadequate to analyze phenomena; with analytical tools, as defined by Pokropski, one can only analyze concepts. Therefore, if Pokropski is right and an “analytic phenomenologist” adopts analytic tools, then—precisely because of this—one is unable to analyze phenomena, only concepts; thus, an “analytic phenomenologist” is not a phenomenologist at all. Overall, Pokropski’s reading, which is based on a narrow meaning of “analyticity,” seems to be controversial.

Pokropski noted that the attempt to comprehend Blaustein as an “analytic phenomenologist” comes from Miskiewicz and not from Woleński.Footnote 19 Contrary to Pokropski, however, Miskiewicz did not connect Blaustein with Twardowski’s analytic method, which is understood as logical and conceptual analysis. Miskiewicz sketched a more convincing picture since she placed Blaustein’s philosophy instead in the tradition of early descriptive phenomenology—which she interchangeably called “analytic phenomenology”—which is focused on the question of the source and value of knowledge. The key insight of this tradition, according to Miskiewicz, consisted in an emphasis on intentionality. Phenomenology thus understood analyzes intentionality, accordingly justifying it being referred to as “analytic phenomenology.” For Miskiewicz, his kind of phenomenology is not limited to the legacy of Husserl, but it is deeply rooted in the Brentanian heritage. She wrote:

There are at least two kinds of phenomenology: hermeneutic and descriptive. The latter rests on the idea that what is given in conscious experience is direct, akin to perception—what most phenomenologists would have called “intuition”—and is therefore a genuine source of knowledge. The theories of early analytical phenomenologists were aimed at providing an understanding of the latter. For instance, the well known distinction between the quality, the content, and the object of mental acts elaborated by Twardowski, Husserl and Meinong in the wake of Brentano was meant as a conceptual tool for the purpose of analyzing and describing cognitive processes such as “representation” and “judgment.”Footnote 20

In the present book, I will argue in favor of Miskiewicz’s position. Interestingly, a comparable point of view was formulated by Guido Küng, who, in Herbert Spiegelberg’s The Phenomenological Movement, noticed Blaustein’s interest in Husserl’s philosophy, but he also emphasized his commitments to the legacy of descriptive psychology.Footnote 21 Simply put, it is more appropriate to place Blaustein’s philosophy in the context of the Brentanian tradition and to ask to what extent he changed Brentano’s and Twardowski’s ideas in light of Ingarden’s or Husserl’s. Thus, if the phrase “analytic phenomenology” is useful in regard to Blaustein, it should refer to the tradition of descriptive psychology and other important contexts which determined Blaustein’s philosophy. In other words, the phrase “analytic phenomenology” understood as “combining” analytic philosophy with phenomenology, following Woleński and Pokropski, is misleading and does not fit Blaustein’s original project. Blaustein’s philosophy primarily arose not from the analytical-qua-conceptual line of Twardowski’s school but from the analytical-qua-descriptive-psychological line of this thought. To see this, one has to analyze these different theoretical frameworks (descriptive psychology, phenomenology or Gestalt psychology), and against this background, it should be possible to understand the depth and originality of Blaustein’s position. Otherwise, Blaustein is reduced to a mere epigone of other philosophers, such as Twardowski or Husserl.

Given our discussion thus far, whereas Miskiewicz, in her study on Blaustein, explicitly referred to the heritage of Brentano, Woleński and Pokropski contextualized him only in the framework of both Twardowski and phenomenology without inquiring into their common roots. As already noted, however, the story surrounding Blaustein’s philosophy is, as it seems, one with multiple and sometimes obscure contexts which overcomes the contrast between Twardowski and Husserl. Taking this into account, the present book aims to analyze Blaustein’s writings in detail to determine in what sense, if at all, one is justified in calling Blaustein an “analytic phenomenologist.” In the following chapters, I will discuss the hypothesis that he cannot be regarded either as a mere descriptive psychologist or as a mere phenomenologist. His philosophy is rather an original approach which was developed in permanent polemics. Thus, my task is a decomposition of Blaustein’s philosophy into complex discussions, examinations, reinterpretations and (occasionally) misreadings of, among others, Brentano, Twardowski and his students (including Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Tadeusz Witwicki), Husserl, Ingarden, and Stumpf. As a result, I will argue that Blaustein was at once a descriptive psychologist and a phenomenologist, although both classifications should be contextualized in the framework of his original explorations.

To do this, I will proceed as follows. First, I will present Blaustein’s intellectual biography with an emphasis on the Lvov–Warsaw School in Chap. 2. Examination of Blaustein’s academic life enables one to identify the main context that shaped his thought. This is necessary since at least some of these references, e.g., the thought of Irena Filozofówna, who was Władysław Witwicki’s student and formulated an interesting criticism of Blaustein’s theory of presentations, are less known and studied in the scholarly literature. Next, in Chap. 3, I will discuss at length Teresa Rzepa’s thesis, according to which Blaustein should be regarded as a part of the descriptive-psychological division of the Lvov–Warsaw School.Footnote 22 In addition to Rzepa’s juxtaposition with Twardowski, I will juxtapose Blaustein with Brentano, the Gestaltists and Dilthey. Against this background, I will question the idea formulated by Krzysztof Wieczorek, who argues that Blaustein overcame Brentano’s heritage by adapting Husserl’s phenomenology.Footnote 23 It seems that descriptive psychology cannot be excluded from Blaustein’s philosophy in favor of phenomenology. Furthermore, in Chap. 4, I support this thesis by tracking and examining the main concepts of Blaustein’s descriptive psychology, especially in the context of Twardowski’s theory. As we will see, Blaustein’s classification of presentations can be regarded as a development of Twardowski’s taxonomy. In Chap. 5, I will focus on Wieczorek’s idea once again, and I will address the question of the phenomenological dimension of Blaustein’s reading of Husserl’s method. This topic will also provide an opportunity to analyze Blaustein’s critical assessment of Ingarden’s method. In the secondary literature, one finds the suggestion that Blaustein was strongly influenced by Ingarden.Footnote 24 At least in regard to methodological issues, however, Blaustein was skeptical of Ingarden’s approach.

Chapter 6 examines the main ideas presented and developed by Blaustein in Husserlowska nauka o akcie, treści i przedmiocie przedstawienia [Husserl’s Theory of Act, Content and Object of Presentation], his most famous book. I will argue that in this book, Blaustein followed Twardowski. After all, for Twardowski, the theory of presentations concerns three elements: act, content, and object. Blaustein also follows Twardowski by referring to Bolzano and Brentano when discussing Husserl’s theory of intentionality. In Chap. 7, I explore the limits of Blaustein’s account of Husserl. In this regard, I argue that Blaustein misread Husserl’s anti-psychologism. However, I will also defend Blaustein’s position against the charges formulated by Pokropski and Wieczorek, who both hold that Blaustein’s account of Husserl is in fact metaphysical.Footnote 25 By contrast, one can argue in favor of a metaphysically neutral interpretation of his account by showing that Blaustein analyzes the ways in which phenomena can manifest. He fully developed this idea in the field of aesthetics. Thus, in Chap. 8, I will extensively analyze Blaustein’s aesthetics. In this context, it will become clear that he uses the basics of his descriptive psychology, including the theory of presentations (discussed in Chap. 4). In this chapter, I will again discuss the idea that Blaustein was influenced by Ingarden, but this time I will juxtapose their aesthetic theories. My main task in Chap. 8 is to present a model of aesthetic experience in Blaustein’s philosophy. In turn, in Chap. 9, I address specific models of aesthetic experiences, i.e., his analysis of cinemagoers’ experiences or listening to the radio. Since in both fields Blaustein explicitly postulated analyzing subjective ways in which certain objects manifest themselves, I will argue that this late project of Blaustein’s can be regarded as a form of phenomenology, though understood in a broad sense. By examining these divergent frameworks, it will finally be possible to explicate the main elements of Blaustein’s philosophy in Chap. 10 and to look at it from a bird’s eye view.