On Lion Chernyak's 'Eternity and Time: an Old Problem Revisited'

Abstract

Lion Chernyak's Eternity and Time is a book on how space and time are related and what their structure is within the system of transcendental philosophy. This is the background against which the author seeks to provide a new justification of thinking as the essence of man. Contemplation, and space and time along with it, come into consideration not as independent characteristics of perception, but rather as images produced by things only at the moment when thinking meets the extra-thinkable: what happens here is not that a thing assumes an image, but rather that the existing thing is allotted an image. This idea was, according to Chernyak, what determined positions taken by both Husserl and Heidegger in approaching the problems of contemplation and reason. This line of argument compels the author to undertake an analysis of the theories put forward by Descartes and Kant, considering the fact that the Cartesian conception of thinking tends to interpreting time as the underlying structure of thinking/contemplation. Chernyak suggests to regard the structure of contemplation/reason/intellect, as it is represented in the first Critique, not as a hierarchy but as a sum of elements in a cyclic order, so that the required workings of the active intellect would consist in elaborating the transcendental schemes which reveal the inner unity of the transcendental structures of space and time and distinction between them. The monograph here reviewed, therefore, achieves a completely new understanding of human cognitive ability, of space and time, and of many traditional categories such as being, reality, relation, the determinant, and so on.