Felix Kaufmann, Die Transzendenz des Erkennens (1924)

Felix Kaufmann’s review essay examines Edith Landmann’s Die Transzendenz des Erkennens (1923), locating its argument within the phenomenological investigation of knowledge and its objects. The essay moves from a historical account of the relation between cognition and being to an exposition of Landmann’s theory, then concludes with a fundamental objection. Kaufmann welcomes her book’s philosophical ambition but rejects its central assumption: that the unity of an object requires a distinctive “total intention” beyond the particular acts through which it is perceived, conceived, or judged.

The opening presents metaphysics as a threefold problem: are mind and world independent, is mind part of the world, or does the world depend upon mind? Ordinary experience appears to establish their separation, yet thereby makes their agreement in knowledge inexplicable. Invoking a supreme being supplies a construction rather than an evident foundation. Skepticism fares no better, because its denial of truth itself claims truth. For Kaufmann, this contradiction motivates the critique of reason: the search for indubitable knowledge in mathematics and the consciousness of one’s own thinking. Phenomenology becomes foundational because such knowledge must be grounded in its manner of givenness, described rather than explained through something external.

This approach changes the question. Instead of beginning with two independently existing entities, cognition and being, it investigates the relation between an act and its intended object. Thinking of one’s mother does not contain her spatially, temporally, or logically; nevertheless, removing that reference destroys the act’s identity.

Der Gegenstand des Denkens ist also unlöslich zu ihm gehörig und ihm gleichwohl transzendent.

English translation: The object of thought thus belongs inseparably to it and is nevertheless transcendent to it.

Kaufmann identifies this relation with Brentano’s intentionality and traces its development through descriptive psychology, object theory, and Husserl’s phenomenology. Transcendence here does not simply mean an inaccessible world outside consciousness: it names the object’s irreducibility to the act that intends it.

Landmann distinguishes transcendence within consciousness from consciousness’s transcendence toward objects. The first concerns the mutual dependence of cognitive functions. Representation refers back to sensation; higher functions presuppose lower ones while also regulating and correcting them. Present contents point beyond themselves toward connections that no single experience exhausts. This internal dependence already involves objective reference, since one function reaches toward another’s object. Fulfilment becomes possible when different acts—such as recollection and sensory presentation—are recognized as directed toward the same object.

The review then reconstructs three features of object-directed cognition: each function has its characteristic object; that object appears through a content different from itself; and its identity persists across changing acts. Concepts intend universals, judgments intend states of affairs, and neither object is reducible to the psychological event through which it is apprehended.

Die Zahlen entstehen und vergehen nicht mit dem Akte des Zählens.

English translation: Numbers do not come into being and pass away with the act of counting.

This example establishes an independence Kaufmann accepts, but it also anticipates his disagreement with Landmann. The distinction between act, content, and object protects the stability of meanings; it does not yet establish that every object must belong to an encompassing concrete existent.

Landmann’s distinctive move begins where this shared phenomenological account ends. Each cognitive function grasps only particular aspects of an object. However many judgments describe what something is like, their accumulation does not reach the living unity of the thing itself. She therefore postulates a “total intention,” relative to which ordinary intentions are partial.

Nur eine Intention, die über alle Teilgegenstände hinaus, die hinter sie alle greift, kann den Gegenstand erfassen, der sie alle in sich begreift.

English translation: Only an intention that goes beyond all partial objects, that reaches behind them all, can apprehend the object that encompasses them all.

Kaufmann follows the consequences while explicitly limiting his account of Landmann’s difficult analyses. Total cognition alone posits existence; essence and determinate characteristics become moments of concrete being, and truth ultimately derives its content from reality. Subsequent analyses of sensation, concept, and judgment consolidate this priority of the whole object.

The book’s conclusion extends that priority into a hierarchy of knowledge. Science seeks increasingly adequate types, through which individual things can be understood as realizing an underlying image or idea. Philosophy intends the absolute whole and consequently stands above the sciences’ partial apprehensions. Grasping a whole is intuitive: metaphysics differs from other holistic knowledge through the magnitude of its object, not through a separate cognitive faculty. Logical justification is therefore not the ultimate source of truth; intuitive vision rests upon an underivable faith, and absolutely valid cognition is finally characterized as grace.

Kaufmann’s objection targets the premise supporting this hierarchy. A separate total intention appears to turn the shared elements of partial intentions into an independent entity, without adequate descriptive warrant. More seriously, it would erase the distinction between formal concepts, such as number and order, and materially determinate concepts, such as colour and hardness. Logical, arithmetic, and set-theoretical truths would then become inexplicably dependent upon actual or possible existential positing.

Muß diese Kardinalthese aber aufgegeben werden, dann fällt mit ihr auch die Hierarchie der Erkenntnisstufen, in der der Mathematik und mathematischen Naturwissenschaft nur eine untergeordnete Stellung zukäme.

English translation: But if this cardinal thesis must be abandoned, then the hierarchy of levels of cognition, in which mathematics and mathematical natural science would occupy only a subordinate position, falls with it.

The essay’s significance lies in this dispute within a broadly shared phenomenological framework: intentional transcendence need not entail the ontological primacy of concrete wholes over formal truths. Kaufmann nevertheless praises Landmann’s originality, subtlety, and lucid presentation, acknowledging both her philosophical interlocutors and her roots in the George circle. His judgment combines substantial admiration with resistance to the conceptual move on which her system depends.