The Phenomenology of War by Wilhelm Schapp

One of Husserl’s students, the German thinker Wilhelm Schapp (1884-1965), offered his own perspective on the phenomenology of war. In a number of his works devoted to the phenomenology of history, he made a digression in favor of the unconditional factual subject of comprehension - war. Gradually, an independent research approach is revealed in his works, which is partly consistent with the conceptual provisions common to phenomenology, but also has its own original touches. Schapp analyzes war in a system of well-known categories and concepts of phenomenology - transcendence, transcendence and others. But at the same time, he focuses on the deployment of war as one of the substantial foundations of existence, presents this phenomenon as a world of things subject to transcendence, as an essential phenomenon. It is noteworthy that Schapp does not give any specific definition of war, probably avoiding the historicity, eventfulness and facticity characteristic of describing wars in a generalized or concretized form. Nevertheless, there is a clear pattern in the provisions formulated by him, which makes it possible to judge the conceptual design of his approach. The following provisions are meant: (1) overcoming the prevailing ethical format of the reception of war; (2) identification of war as an essential phenomenon - an integral part of being; (3) the deployment of war as the world of things, realized through the act of transcendence. In his approach to the phenomenology of war, Schapp managed to integrate eventfulness, the subject/subjective principle of being, experience as a way of evaluating being, and the experience of being. The article shows that Schapp consistently and accentuated the place of war in a number of other foundations of existence, such as space, nature, the universe and others. The thinker paid special attention to the experience of being as the basis for understanding the war.