Husserl: German Perspectives

By John J. Drummond, Otfried Höffe, Rudolf Bernet and 15 more

Edmund Husserl, generally regarded as the founding figure of phenomenology, exerted an enormous influence on the course of twentieth and twenty-first century philosophy. This volume collects and translates essays written by important German-speaking commentators on Husserl, ranging from his contemporaries to scholars of today, to make available in English some of the best commentary on Husserl and the phenomenological project. The essays focus on three problematics within phenomenology: the nature and method of phenomenology; intentionality, with its attendant issues of temporality and subjectivity; and intersubjectivity and culture. Several essays also deal with Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology, although in a manner that reveals not only Heidegger’s differences with Husserl but also his reliance on and indebtedness to Husserl’s phenomenology.

Taken together, the book shows the continuing influence of Husserl’s thought, demonstrating how such subsequent developments as existentialism, hermeneutics, and deconstruction were defined in part by how they assimilated and departed from Husserlian insights. The course of what has come to be called continental philosophy cannot be described without reference to this assimilation and departure, and among the many successor approaches phenomenology remains a viable avenue for contemporary thought. In addition, problems addressed by Husserl—most notably, intentionality, consciousness, the emotions, and ethics—are of central concern in contemporary non-phenomenological philosophy, and many contemporary thinkers have turned to Husserl for guidance. The essays demonstrate how significant Husserl remains to contemporary philosophy across several traditions and several generations.

Includes essays by Rudolf Bernet, Klaus Held, Ludwig Landgrebe, Dieter Lohmar, Verena Mayer and Christopher Erhard, Ullrich Melle, Karl Mertens, Ernst Wolfgang Orth, Jan Patočka, Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, Karl Schuhmann, and Elisabeth Ströker.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9780823284474

Rudolf Bernet

Rudolf Bernet is professor emeritus of philosophy and the former director of the Husserl Archives at the University of Leuven. He is the author of several books, including La vie du sujet: recherches sur l’interpretation de Husserl dans la phénoménologie (1994) and Force—pulsion— désir: une autre philosophie de la psychoanalyse (2013), as well as numerous articles.

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Introduction

John J. Drummond and Otfried Höffe

Edmund Husserl, generally regarded as the founding figure of the philosophical movement of phenomenology—or, more precisely, transcendental phenomenology—exerted an enormous influence on the course of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy. This influence was both positive and negative. The subsequent developments of, for example, existentialism, hermeneutics, and deconstruction were defined in part by how they both assimilated and departed from Husserlian views. The course of what has come to be called continental philosophy cannot be described without reference to this assimilation and departure and, among the many successor approaches, phenomenology remains a viable alternative. In addition, problems addressed by Husserl—most notably, intentionality, consciousness, the emotions, and ethics—are of central concern in so-called analytic philosophy. So, Husserl’s views remain central to many contemporary philosophical discussions.

The aim of this volume is to collect and to translate previously untranslated articles written by important German-speaking commentators on Husserl; hence, these German perspectives detail not only Husserl’s phenomenology but point toward his confrontation with other significant figures in the history of German-language philosophy, both ancestors and heirs. In selecting articles to translate, we have focused our attention on three problematics within phenomenology: the nature and method of phenomenology; intentionality (the main theme of phenomenology¹) along with its attendant problems of temporality and subjectivity; and intersubjectivity and culture. Finally, we have selected commentators from a time span that encompasses both Husserl’s contemporaries and our own.

Phenomenology for Husserl is a descriptive science of the essential structures of experiences and of their objects just as experienced. Husserl rejects both empirical naturalism and neo-Kantian idealism. Against both, he insists that philosophical reflection return, as he put it, zu den Sachen selbst—to the things themselves, the matters at hand, exactly as they are given to us in experience. The experiences and their objects are to be described free of both epistemological presuppositions and metaphysical constructions about how things are. These descriptions address the issue of how objective knowledge arises in and for the experiencing subject. They are in the service of an account of reason, understood by Husserl as a striving for evidence, that is, for experiences in which the subject directly, distinctly, and clearly intuits the things themselves. These evidential experiences take different forms in knowing and the theoretical sciences, in valuing and the axiological sciences, and in willing and the practical sciences. In all three domains, however, experiential life is aimed at living a life of reason, of having evidence for one’s judgments and beliefs, and of taking responsibility for those judgments and beliefs.

While studying mathematics in Vienna from 1881 to 1882 and again from 1884 to 1886, Husserl attended the philosophy lectures of Franz Brentano which profoundly influenced his philosophical development. Husserl then studied with Brentano’s former student Carl Stumpf at Halle and in 1887 submitted his Habilitationsschrift titled Über den Begriff der Zahl: Psychologische Analysen (On the Concept of Number: Psychological Analyses). In this work Husserl turned to the philosophical analysis of the methods and foundations of mathematics. Husserl would later extend this kind of analysis to logic and, ultimately, to all experience.

Husserl served as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887 to 1901. During that period, he wrote the Philosophie der Arithmetik (Philosophy of Arithmetic),² the first four chapters of which are a slight revision of his Habilitationsschrift. In this work Husserl also seeks to clarify the relations between mathematics and logic and to consider the possibility that a philosophical account of mathematics and logic could serve as the foundation for all other theoretical sciences insofar as it could serve as a theory of science. He aims to offer an account of those experiences that are sufficiently secure to provide evidence for more complex experiences, including mathematical experiences. To carry out this project, Husserl utilized Brentano’s descriptive psychology, but by the time of the work’s publication, Husserl was already dissatisfied with parts of it—in particular, the account of the inauthentic presentation of the higher cardinal numbers—on account of their psychologism. Husserl came to recognize that these analyses reduced the ideality of numbers and their relations to the reality of psychological acts and their relations; put differently, they reduced the transcendence of the logical content of the experiences to the immanence of their psychological contents.

Husserl’s sustained and definitive critique of psychologism in logic appeared in 1900 in the prolegomena to Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations),³ and the critique is generalizable to any empiricist philosophy that reduces the ideality and objectivity of meaning to subjective, psychological or mental contents. Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl’s contribution to this volume is a detailed discussion of the nature of psychologism and the efficacy of Husserl’s critique. Rinofner-Kreidl notes that the underlying—and more important—problem concerns the question of what a philosophical science should look like, the problem she calls the problem of scientificity. She argues, first, that the critique of logical psychologism reveals that the problem raised by psychologism is fundamentally a problem of determining the proper philosophical standpoint and, second, that this critique consequently played a central and decisive role in the development of Husserl’s phenomenology. This proper standpoint incorporated a commitment to the presuppositionless description of essential structures of experience, and from this perspective, Husserl was able to see that his initial response to psychologism was inadequate insofar as it focused on the consequences of psychologism rather than its presuppositions.

The rejection of psychologism requires an account of the relation of the objective or transcendent content of experience to the mind. Husserl’s task in the second volume of Logical Investigations,⁴ then, is to provide an account of how ideal meanings are related both to a subject’s experiences and to the objects, whether existent or not, of such experiences. Central to this account is the notion of intentionality, which in Husserl’s view encompasses all of phenomenology. Brentano had revived this notion, and under his influence and because meaning and objects are inseparable from psychological experiences, Husserl first adopts Brentano’s method of descriptive psychology. Husserl soon recognized, however, that the name descriptive psychology misleads both because it invites misunderstanding as referring to an empirical science and, more importantly, because it focuses attention solely on the subjective conditions of objective knowledge. More specifically, descriptive psychology restricts the proper object of description to what is really inherent to psychological experience. So, whereas Husserl in the first edition of the Investigations identifies phenomenological contents with the really inherent, psychological contents and distinguishes these phenomenological contents from intentional contents, by the time of the second edition in 1913, he recognizes that an account of intentionality cannot focus exclusively on the subjective conditions of objective knowledge and defines phenomenological contents as inclusive of both really inherent and intentional contents. On the basis of this insight, he develops the notion of intentionality in radically new directions in the first volume of a planned three-volume work titled Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy), also published in 1913.⁵

What had intervened between the first and second editions to motivate this change? First, by focusing on the subjective aspects of experience without any appeal to the intended object itself, Husserl came suspiciously close to a psychologism that transforms ideal meanings into aspects of the experience. Husserl tried to avoid such a conclusion by claiming that the subjective aspects of the experience accounting for the significance of the object were an instantiation of an ideal essence. This was thought to preserve the ideality of objective meaning. But it did so at the cost of incorporating a notion of ideal essences that, precisely because it is prior to experience, could not be justified on phenomenological grounds.

Second, Husserl’s distinction between empty and full intentions cannot be adequately articulated apart from references to the significance belonging to the object itself. Empty intentions make present (vergegenwärtigen) to the mind an object that is, in actuality, absent (expressive, linguistic experience is the exemplar), whereas full intentions intuitively present (gegenwärtigen) an existent object to the mind (here perception is the exemplar). When the full intention presents the object as it was emptily intended, the full intention is a fulfilling intention. Since fulfilling acts intuitively present the objects emptily intended, the sense of the fulfilling act, if it is to be truly fulfilling, must be rooted, at least in part, in the object itself rather than in an ideal meaning-species. It is the sense of the object, the significance it has for us in its actual presence, that fulfills or disappoints what was emptily intended. Only then can we speak of the veridicality or truth of experience. The implication of this is that we must bring the object just as it appears in an experience within the scope of a phenomenological description of that experience.

Such considerations led Husserl to undertake a thoroughgoing epistemological critique of experience that eventually resulted in his mature transcendental phenomenology. From a methodological point of view, Husserl was led to develop his notion of the phenomenological or transcendental reduction as the proper means to focus his research on intentionality and the correlation of subject and object. The phenomenological reduction is a methodological device that is, first of all, a change in attitude. Husserl notes that our ordinary experience takes for granted the existence of a world of objects. In the change to the phenomenological attitude, we suspend our participation in that natural, naïve belief in the existence of the world and its objects so as to consider objects exclusively as they present themselves in experience.

This is different from Cartesian doubt whose distinguishing characteristic is its negation—that is, its methodological counting as false—of the positing of an object’s existence or the validity of a judgment. What is distinctive about the phenomenological reduction is not the negation of the general positing characteristic of ordinary experience but its withholding affirmation of that positing. The content is not negated; the acceptance of the naïve belief in the existence of the world is suspended in order to hold those experiences reflectively before ourselves as experiences whose structures and validity are to be examined. The objectivities given in experience are not lost to reflection but are instead considered only as presumed existents. They remain available for reflection just insofar as they are experienced, although the existential index attaching to them has been neutralized. Their status as objects of experience has been modified such that they are now viewed exclusively in their being as objects of the experience in which they are experienced.

There are three implications to this change of attitude: (1) our attention is turned to the intentional correlation between experience and objects just as experienced; (2) our attention is turned from objects as having significance for us to the significance objects have for us (i.e., as meaningful for subjects in determinate ways); and (3) our attention is turned to the subject of experience and to the first-personal perspective that inescapably belongs to experience. Having adopted this phenomenological attitude, we are no longer focused on experiences as real entities or events in the world, as was the psychology of the time. Instead, the phenomenologist seeks to discover the essential (intentional) structures of any possible experience and of objects as experienced. Hence, the phenomenological reduction has a transcendental character, revealing the first-personal perspective of any possible experience and revealing the subject as a source (in part) of the meaning of things insofar as the subject brings an experiential history, interests, concerns, and commitments to its encounter with things such that certain features of things become salient for the subject.

Husserl refined and expanded his understanding of phenomenological methodology over his career, and it was further refined by subsequent phenomenologists. The essays by Ludwig Landgrebe, Jan Patočka, and Dieter Lohmar address this methodology. Landgrebe explores the continuity in Husserl’s thought—both methodological and substantive—throughout his career, but also the reasons why subsequent thinkers differed and deviated from Husserl’s views. Two motifs, according to Landgrebe, characterized Husserl’s early philosophy: an eidetic-psychological one concerned to disclose essential structures of experience, and an ontological one that sought to preserve the objectivity and ideality of meaning. For Husserl, these two motifs were inseparable, but his first followers tended to focus on one or the other of them. The philosopher who best understood the unity of these motifs in Husserl’s thought was Martin Heidegger, who reinterpreted Husserl’s phenomenology in a way that, according to Landgrebe, was an attempt to express the proper intention of phenomenology in a more precise form. Landgrebe explores this Heideggerian reinterpretation in its relation to Husserl’s original motivations.

Patočka also considers the relation between Husserl and Heidegger, but his discussion is rooted in Husserl’s later discussions of intersubjectivity in Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis.⁶ His aim is not primarily to disclose the differences between Husserl and Heidegger—although he does do that—but to find the point of unity between them so that their philosophies can both be called phenomenology. Patočka finds this unity in phenomenology’s radical reflection on the crisis of humanity by way of a methodology that in its consideration of the human strives for an impartiality that annuls the presuppositions of the positive sciences.

Lohmar takes up another leg of phenomenology’s methodology: eidetic intuition achieved through imaginative variations of both experiences and entities. This methodology, when applied to the essential structures of consciousness, opposes an empirical psychology that must rest on empirical generalizations. Lohmar clarifies the sense in which eidetic or imaginative intuition is a form of cognition and how it yields knowledge of a priori structures in Husserl’s sense, that is, necessary and universal structures, without falling into a kind of Platonism that hypostasizes what is essential to a type. He also explores the intimate connection between free phantasy or imaginative variation and the resultant eidetic intuition. In concluding, Lohmar discusses a series of potential difficulties with the notions of eidetic variation and intuition.

Husserl’s methodology is aimed at opening up a field of transcendental research, namely, the subjective achievements in which the object is disclosed in a determinate manner. These achievements have a certain kind of priority over the objects they disclose, and the investigation of them reveals how it is that we come to experience the objects in those determinate manners, how our different experiences are related to one another—and, therefore, how the different kinds and levels of objectivity are related—and, finally, how our experience confirms or disconfirms in fulfilling intentions what was merely emptily intended.

The development of this specifically phenomenological methodology led Husserl to important revisions of his early writings on intentionality. Much of the existing commentary on Husserl’s account of intentionality focuses on the later theory with its controversial notion of the noema. Nevertheless, certain features of his early account are fundamental to understanding aspects of the later views, and the essays by Karl Schuhmann, Verena Mayer and Christopher Erhard, and Ullrich Melle investigate important features of the early theory.

Schuhmann challenges the widely held view that Husserl’s early account of intentionality was a simple and direct development of Brentano’s theory. Husserl’s theory developed, according to Schuhmann, as a response to the account of intentionality in Kazimierz Twardowski’s On the Content and Object of Presentations.⁷ Schuhmann notes that Twardowski and Husserl shared Brentano as a teacher and that Twardowski thought Brentano’s theory inadequate to address Bolzano’s problem of objectless presentations.⁸ He argues that Husserl’s account, which differs from both Brentano’s and Twardowski’s, satisfactorily addressed this problem. Later developments in Husserl’s theory, he concludes, were the result of attempting to address problems other than the Bolzano problem.

Mayer and Erhard’s and Melle’s essays take up Husserl’s notion of objectifying acts. These are experiences that present an object either emptily or intuitively, and they differ from non-objectifying acts. Mayer and Erhard trace in detail Husserl’s reconstruction of the concept of presentation (Vorstellung) and his transformation of Brentano’s thesis that all acts are either presentations or founded on presentations into the thesis that all acts are either objectifying or based on objectifications. This study reveals that, for Husserl, the intentionality-characteristic of any particular experience depends upon objectivating acts. Since all other kinds of experiences beyond the objectifications in perception (of things) and judgments (of states of affairs pertaining to things) depend on these underlying objectifications, the intentionality of these other kinds of experience—their directedness to an object—can be properly understood only in the light of the notion of objectifying acts. Mayer and Eberhard are careful to note, however, that although non-objectifying acts are grounded in objectifications, they cannot be reduced to the objectifying acts.

Whereas Mayer and Erhard take a microscopic look at objectifying acts, Melle takes a macroscopic look at the distinction between objectifying and non-objectifying acts. The latter, in reacting to the objects presented in objectifying acts, reveal further, nonmaterial determinations of objects, most notably, the value of the objects or states of affairs presented. A value, in turn, motivates desire, choice, and action. Melle explores the distinction and relations between the three classes of experience (logical-cognitive or intellective, evaluative, and practical) in order to reveal how Husserl tried to navigate between two theories of reason—a pure intellectualism on the one hand and a pure emotivism on the other—and how these two views of reason affected Husserl’s accounts of the three domains of reason (logical-intellective, axiological, and practical), each with its own form of justification. Husserl envisioned these three domains of reason in a determinate relationship: axiological reason is grounded in and dependent upon logical-cognitive reason and practical reason is grounded in and dependent upon axiological reason.

The discussions of objectifying and non-objectifying acts point in the direction of Husserl’s ontology of possible objects of experience. The study of the intentional correlation, however, is also concerned with the structures of subjectivity, the most important of which for Husserl is the nontemporal structure of the living present that underlies the temporalization of the subject’s experiences (and of objective time). Klaus Held’s essay considers Husserl’s account of the consciousness of inner time in order to provide a critique of Husserl’s discussions of the temporality of the phenomenal field. Focusing on the latter allows Held to articulate more clearly both the structure of time as the dimensional character of the phenomenal field and the manner in which transcendent objects and their temporality are disclosed within the phenomenal field.

Intentionality has an internal telos that is realized in the movement from empty intentions to fulfilling intentions. The recognition of the identity between the object as meant in the empty intention and the object as experienced in the fulfilling intuition is the experience of truth. Rudolf Bernet’s essay indirectly clarifies the notion of truth by examining the concept of true untruth (as opposed to falsity) found in Heidegger. Heidegger’s understanding of truth is rooted in Husserl’s idea that truth is oriented to the conditions, circumstances, and scope of the manifestation of the true essence of beings, but Heidegger’s exploration of untruth pushes him beyond Husserl’s analysis of truth. The guiding idea for the concept of true untruth is Husserl’s discussion of how empty intentions can involve truth as agreement with reality but yet fall short of truth in the sense of an evidenced or fulfilled intention. It is the latter notion that is the fundamental sense of truth. Hence, the empty intention is untrue in the sense that it lacks evidence, although it can be true in the sense of agreement; it is a true untruth as opposed to false. Heidegger in Being and Time presents a similar account, although his account of untruth appeals, by contrast, to a comportment of Dasein that at once discloses and closes off the thing’s uncovering such that the thing appears with a sheen of superficial evidence. Bernet argues further that the later Heidegger shifts the center of the account of true untruth from Dasein’s comportment to the event of unconcealment, the letting things be, and Dasein’s free openness to this event.

The final group of papers attends more directly to questions of intersubjectivity, history, and culture raised in Husserl’s late works. Karl Mertens explores Husserl’s phenomenological interpretation and reappropriation of Leibniz’s monadology. Mertens argues that the differences between Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity and Leibniz’s monadology are serious enough to defeat any attempt to construct a phenomenological monadology. According to Mertens, monadological thinking cannot solve the phenomenological problem of intersubjectivity, and phenomenological thinking cannot yield a properly metaphysical monadology, for there can be no phenomenological grounding for the idea of a monad determined by a complete concept. From the phenomenological perspective, a subject’s experience of the world is always limited and incomplete. Mertens argues, furthermore, that Husserl’s attempt at a monadology reveals the weakness in the phenomenological account of intersubjectivity, for by starting with a subject’s limited experience, phenomenology cannot account for the communalization which is presupposed in the recognition that an individual’s experience is limited.

Elisabeth Ströker, in a lecture delivered on the fiftieth anniversary of Husserl’s death, takes up a recurring theme in Husserl’s phenomenology: the crisis of European culture and, more specifically, the crisis of reason that manifests itself in the failure of the positive sciences to understand their origins and their lack of a fully scientific methodology. Husserl’s phenomenology, in Ströker’s view, is an attempt to return to those origins—to things and states of affairs simply as they present themselves to experiencing subjects—and to proceed with a rigorous methodology to examine them and articulate their essential structures. Only in this way are we able to understand higher-order cultural achievements of the sort we find in the positive and formal sciences. These sciences belong to a tradition and, Ströker notes, Husserl extended his analyses to consider the formation and transmission of traditions, including the dangers lurking in tradition when we passively accept its results without actively appropriating their truth. It is that passive acceptance that motivates the crisis in European culture that so concerned Husserl. Husserl’s aim, for Ströker, was to restore the original Greek idea of philosophy as a guide to living well on the basis of rational insight.

Finally, Ernst Wolfgang Orth considers the relations among the philosophy of culture, cultural anthropology, and transcendental phenomenology. Husserl’s concern was to focus on the nature of rational subjectivity, rather than the human as such, in order to ground the sciences and develop a philosophical science. To the extent that humans are rational beings, Husserl’s philosophy thematized humans, but, so the argument goes, it was concerned with humans only as instances of rationality rather than in their existential reality. However, Orth argues that Husserl began his philosophizing with anthropological motives and that Husserl’s later philosophy realizes an expanded philosophical anthropology or, better, anthropological philosophy. This anthropological philosophy integrates philosophy and anthropology in a manner that rises above particular anthropological orientations and clarifies the very notion of orientation itself.

The articles collected in this volume, written by a broad range of commentators from contemporaries of Husserl to contemporary philosophers, manifest a broad range of phenomenological concerns. Taken together, they display the centrality of the issues Husserl addressed in his phenomenology and of the ways his work has been interpreted in the years since his death to the philosophical discourse of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

NOTES

1. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 187 [translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom as Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2014), 161].

2. Edmund Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik, ed. Lothar Eley (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970) [translated by Dallas Willard as Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003)]; for "Über den Begriff der Zahl, see 289–339 [On the Concept of Number," 305–358].

3. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Erster Band, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, ed. Elmar Holenstein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975) [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970)], 1:51–247.

4. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984) [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970)].

5. The second and third volumes were published posthumously as Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952) [translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989)]; and Drittes Buch, Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971) [translated by Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book, Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980)].

6. Respectively, Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973) [translated by Dorion Cairns as Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960)], and Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954) [translated by David Carr as The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970)].

7. Kazimierz Twardowski, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen: Eine psychologische Untersuchung (Vienna: Philosophia Verlag, 1894) [translated by Reinhardt Grossmann as On the Content and Object of Presentations: A Psychological Investigation (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977)].

8. Cf. Bernard Bolzano, Wissenschaftslehre: Versuch einer ausführlichen und großtenteils neuen Darstellung der Logik mit steter Rücksicht auf deren bisherige Bearbeiter (Sulzbach: J. E. v. Seidel, 1837), 1:304.

PART I

Phenomenology and Its Methodology

The Problem of Psychologism and the Idea of a Phenomenological Science

Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl

The so-called psychologism controversy is, in the narrow sense, a controversy concerning whether the task of establishing the validity of the logical laws rests on logic or psychology. In the broader sense, it concerns the delimitation of the boundary between philosophy and psychology. The fact that the dispute concerning the relationship of philosophy to the other sciences at the end of the nineteenth century erupted in a psychologism controversy (or, the fact that this controversy could become the venue for the dispute concerning the relationship of philosophy to the positive sciences) is indicative of a problematic specific to its time. This problematic showed philosophy to be tightly intertwined materially, personally, and institutionally with psychology, which was diversifying rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century in its line of inquiry and method as it was striving to gain independence. The case of psychophysics and experimental psychology makes it clear that this process was greeted by psychologists as one that made their research more scientific because it separated it from philosophy. It was this tendency that ultimately prevailed despite isolated protests raised for the sake of the quality of psychological research (e.g., from Wilhelm Wundt). Viewed externally, the historical end of the psychologism controversy was ushered in with the institutional division of philosophy and psychology. Viewed substantively, it lies in the restriction of the former epistemological or metaphysical logic to formal logic. At the same time, the separation of modern logic from the old philosophical logic, much like the separation of experimental psychology from philosophy, was promoted as a way of making their work scientific. It thus does not seem exaggerated to understand the psychologism controversy as a symptom of philosophy’s struggle for legitimation in the postmetaphysical era. This struggle was conducted internally as a dispute concerning direction and externally as a dispute concerning boundaries. In both cases the delimitation that was called for or rejected rested upon the (implicit) presupposition of a determinate conception of philosophy and science.

If the psychologism controversy is in fact such a symptom, then this strengthens the suspicion that its institutional and definitional termination cannot count as a natural end to the dispute, and that this dispute extends far beyond the primary controversy concerning the foundation of logic. The greater historical meaning of the psychologism controversy is not to be sought in its immediate object, but rather in that of which the controversy is a symptom. The fundamental problem is the problem of scientificity. It is the task of philosophy to clarify where this scientificity of the sciences is grounded and in the process to ground itself as scientific. With an eye toward the justification of claims to knowledge, this way of stating the problem can be developed in various directions and named in different ways: genesis versus validity, empiricism versus apriorism, relativism versus absolutism, and subjectivism versus objectivism, among others. Which terminology is selected and how it is understood is essentially dependent upon one’s view of the matter.¹ Beyond all terminological and polemical disputes, every philosophical approach must take a stance on the problem of scientificity. Historical inspection shows that both psychologistic (e.g., Beneke, Lipps) as well as antipsychologistic conceptions of logic (e.g., Bolzano, Cohen) either were passed off as rescue attempts for a philosophical science or were intended as a scientific substitute for a philosophy that no one was willing to advocate any longer. Proponents and opponents of psychologism as well as the representatives of distinct psychologistic and antipsychologistic approaches disagreed about the concept of a philosophical science. The myriad definitions of psychologism proposed by the various parties also show that a conflict of scientific standpoints was at stake in the psychologism controversy. How psychologism was defined determined which strategies were pursued in combating or defending it. In a conflict of standpoints, it is to be expected neither that the opponents in the dispute will reach an agreement concerning premises nor that there are only material differences and not methodological ones. In this dispute, the exchange of material solutions to problems offers fewer prospects for acquiring knowledge than does reflection concerning the (respective) manners of stating the problem. To the extent that the psychologism controversy is to be understood as a conflict of standpoints (or, to the extent that it was conducted in a way that is representative of a conflict of standpoints), a confrontation between psychologistic and antipsychologistic arguments only promises to advance knowledge if it occurs on the basis of a determinate standpoint.

This essay clarifies the connection between the problem of psychologism and the problem of scientificity in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. First, I will summarize the principal arguments in the critique of logical psychologism from the first volume of Logical Investigations (Prolegomena to Pure Logic, 1900), interrogating the justification of this critique as well as its underlying concept of psychologism. Then I will advance the thesis that the problem of psychologism is a problem of standpoint and as such played a decisive role in the development of phenomenology. Specifically, this is so because the transition from the descriptive psychology of the second volume of Logical Investigations (Investigations in Phenomenology and the Theory of Knowledge, 1901) to transcendental phenomenology can be traced back to Husserl’s insight into the inadequacy of the critique of psychologism in Logical Investigations. The expansion of the line of inquiry that resulted from this insight occurred on the groundwork of a new conception of philosophical science. According to the tenor of the contemporary critique and of the recent reception of Husserl’s work, the critique of psychologism in Logical Investigations is recognized as overcoming an early psychologistic phase of phenomenology and as a refutation of psychologism that is fundamentally compelling. Although the later development of phenomenology is exposed to incomparably stronger criticism, the following considerations are intended to show why—in view of what can be called philosophical progress in questions of foundations—we should maintain an opposite evaluation of this developmental trend, even though it provided no progress with respect to the material arguments against logical psychologism. (The fact that there is progress in the awareness of the problem admittedly does not exclude the possibility that transcendental phenomenology produces new problems [of foundations] in other respects.) The methodological orientation of the question requires that the discussion of the problem of psychologism fade into the background in the context of the doctrines of intentionality and meaning.

The first volume of Logical Investigations seeks to lay the foundation for a pure logic as a universal doctrine of science. Logic is pure to the extent that it is a theoretical science that establishes its own foundations (fundamental concepts, principles) rather than inheriting them from other sciences. The initial contention of antipsychologism (logical idealism) is that only logic can ground itself. Accordingly, logic is an autonomous fundamental science. It is not dependent on other sciences. On the contrary, all knowledge in the individual sciences, with respect to its formal conditions, is dependent on pure logic. The principal arguments against a psychological interpretation of logic advanced in Prolegomena can be condensed into two groups: arguments against psychologism relating to its presuppositions and arguments against psychologism relating to its consequences.

Arguments against psychologism relating to its presuppositions include:

Psychologism presupposes (explicitly or implicitly) that logic is applied logic or normative logic. This presupposition is unjustified. The sense-content of logical laws contains neither a relation to a thinking subject and the nomological connection of experiences of thinking nor a normative (regulative) claim (If you want to think correctly, you must think in a way prescribed by the logical laws).² Every normative discipline rests upon a purely theoretical discipline whose object is the purely theoretical content, separated from all normative content, of the discipline concerned. The laws of pure logic can, for didactic reasons, be interpreted as normative. However, this interpretation concerns only their practical application, not the content of the propositions themselves.

Psychologism neglects or obscures the difference between the logical connection of the contents of thought and the psychological connection of the experiences of thinking. It presupposes that there is no essential difference between the two domains, so that it would be possible to speak of the one domain (logical laws) in the terminology of the other (experiences of thought). The real [reale] relationship of cause and effect takes the place of the logical relation of ground and consequence. It is a mistake to confuse the two, for doing so contradicts the proper essence of the logical objects. The law of noncontradiction, for example, is not about the inability to think two propositions that contradict one another at one and the same time but the objective incompatibility of the contents of those propositions.

Psychologism disregards the difference between the sciences of idealities and the sciences of realities which is grounded in their respective object domain and the character of their respective laws. The laws of the empirical sciences are laws concerning matters of fact. The propositions of logic pronounce nothing concerning real objects and events. No logical law is a law of matters of fact. In particular, neither in accordance with their justification nor their content do logical laws presuppose anything psychological (factuality of psychic life). In Prolegomena to Pure Logic, the conflict between psychologism and antipsychologism bears the title logical absolutism (logical idealism) versus relativistic (skeptical) psychologism. In this title, the point of departure and the direction of the critique become clear. Its objective is to demonstrate the countersensical consequences of psychologism.

Arguments against psychologism relating to its consequences include:

If the psychologistic interpretation of logic were correct, then logical laws would be psychological laws referring to experiences of thinking, and accordingly they would be laws of matters of fact acquired by means of inductive generalizations. As such, they would have only probable validity. Formal-logical laws, however, have a validity that is exact and necessary in the strict sense (independent of all experience).

Psychologism is, as an individual or specific (anthropological) relativism, a form of skepticism. It cancels itself out by violating the conditions of possibility of any theory whatsoever, specifically (a) the subjective-noetic conditions (e.g., evident judgments are to be distinguished from non-evident judgments) and (b) the objective-logical conditions (e.g., each science is a science on the basis of the unity of the connection to its grounding, which is why sciences presuppose the validity of the rules of deduction).³ Psychologistic approaches confuse the subjective-anthropological unity of cognition (a methodological unity of the specifically human attainment of cognition) with the objective-ideal unity of the content of cognition (the idea of the theoretical unity of truth).

Psychologism is that position in the dispute about the grounding of the validity of logical laws according to which this validity can ensue only with the help of psychological regularities. These are generalizations of assertions about real acts of thinking. The universal hallmark of psychologism is an objective reductionism that reduces logic’s realm of objects to that of psychology and that results in a methodological and nomological reductionism. If the objects of logic are not ideal meanings but rather real, psychic experiences of meaning or thinking, then it is legitimate and appropriate to investigate these objects with psychological methods and to determine their mutual relations with the help of psychological regularities. Psychologistic conceptions of logic rest upon a mixing of domains that results not merely from a provisional delimitation of a domain too broadly defined but rather one that has a fundamental character.⁴ The view opposing logical psychologism, which can be designated as logical idealism, maintains, on the contrary, that the reductionism of psychologistic logic is untenable because, on the one hand, it is incompatible with the essence of logical objects as ideal objects, and, on the other, it leads to absurd consequences. The concept of validity, which includes no relationship whatsoever to a (real or ideal) subject, cannot be traced back to the fact of validity, that is, to the factual recognition of validity. An act of recognition of this kind presupposes the validity of logical laws.

The central position in Prolegomena’s critique of psychologism is occupied by the refutation of the thesis that logic is nothing other than a technology of (correct) thinking and that it is thus legitimate to carry out a psychological investigation of logic.⁵ According to the opposing view, that of the critic of psychologism, the conception of logic as a normative discipline can only refer to the fact that logical laws provide a norm for correct thinking in their application to real acts of thought. A thinking that is to be correct must accord with logical laws. The norm prescribes which means must be embraced if a determinate goal is to be reached. To the extent that this goal—to think correctly—can be recognized as purposive, logic has the characteristic of a practical discipline. (What Husserl calls normative logic and occasionally methodological logic could less ambiguously be called instrumental or practical logic.⁶) At the same time, there is no normative judgment underlying the goal itself. The advocate of a normative logic does not maintain that it is good to judge correctly. Consequently, she also does not attempt to justify the recognition of norms by way of a philosophy of value or a moral philosophy in which she seeks to prove the validity of certain values. The task of logic as a normative science is merely to formulate the universal conditions of conformity (or nonconformity) to a norm, specifically the norm of scientificity (or theoreticity). As Husserl writes: For it is of the essence of a normative science that it establishes general propositions in which, with an eye to a normative standard, an Idea or highest goal, certain features are mentioned whose possession guarantees conformity to that standard or sets forth an indispensable condition of the latter. A normative science also establishes cognate propositions in which the case of non-conformity is considered or the absence of such states of affairs is pronounced.⁷ Drawing on a distinction made by Max Weber, one could say that normative logic establishes the conditions of fulfillment of a relation to a value without itself performing valuations. In this sense, it is characteristic of normative logic to describe norms, not to posit them.

The critic of psychologism does not reject a normative interpretation of logic as such. The logical (and mathematical) laws have a "natural right to regulate our thought."⁸ In its function as the universal doctrine of science, logic is normative with respect to the formal conditions of scientificity.⁹ If, however, the normative interpretation of logic serves as the basis [Grundlage] for a psychological grounding [Begründung] of logic, then the charge of confusing fields applies to this interpretation. Normative logic belongs to the prejudices of psychologism because it legitimizes the approach of psychologically grounding logic: The idea of normativization produces a relation between the logical object and psychic act, and with that it gives rise to the impression that psychic acts are of pressing relevance with respect to logic. A naturalistic fallacy is on hand if one maintains that the normativity of ought statements (You ought to judge correctly) is to be derived by establishing matters of fact about real processes of thought. The refutation of normative logic in Prolegomena is not to be understood eo ipso as a refutation of a naturalistic fallacy. Whether this objection pertains to a psychological logic in any given case depends on the position that logic takes with respect to the normative character of judgments. A normative interpretation of logic that takes itself to be an application of pure logic and whose laws are elucidated in reference to the logical ideal of consciousness in general does not represent a naturalization of the idea of correct judgment. On the contrary, we have a naturalistic reductionism in a psychological grounding of logic when two conditions are met: (1) One denies that a pure (theoretical) logic constitutes the basis of the normative interpretation (logical normativism). And (2) one does not merely make an assertion concerning acts that recognize logical norms as valid (i.e., an assertion concerning the facticity of validity), nor merely one concerning the factual (non)conformity to the conditions for the fulfillment of norms; rather, one presents statements of fact of this kind as grounding norms (naturalistic normativism). If one holds only (1) but not (2), then we have a psychologistic interpretation of logic. But this interpretation does not rest—at least, not necessarily—on a naturalistic fallacy. Just as it cannot be assumed that every psychologism is characterized by naturalistic normativism, neither can it be assumed that every logical normativism is connected to a psychologistic approach. Only when the latter is taken into account can it be established conversely, with Husserl, that an antipsychologism that operates with a normative logic cannot achieve an adequate critique of psychologism. When Husserl speaks in §41 of Prolegomena, in reference to