The peculiar form of phenomenology that emerges in France in the 1930s, this effort to expand reason, creates a melting pot whose ideas exerted a dominant influence over decades in literature, art, and politics. Even what circulated in the 1960s under the term structuralism can largely be understood as a critical transformation of phenomenology. Waldenfels' presentation begins with the reception of German phenomenology, in which numerous German and Eastern European emigrants such as B. Groethuysen, G. Gurvitch, A. Gurwitch, A. Kojève, A. Koyré, and P. L. Landsberg played a role, and which went hand in hand with the discovery of Kierkegaard alongside a renaissance of Hegelianism and Marxism. The self-production that soon begins finds its representative form.