References
- I would like to thank Dr. Bradley O Bassler for inspiring this paper, and Rene Jagnow for his insightful comments throughout its composition. In addition, Eric Helleloid, Joseph P. Carter, AJ Tiarsmith, and Jason Carter deserve thanks for many fruitful discussions of these matters and their helpful comments.
- For example, see Rotenstreich, Nathan. Synthesis and Intentional Objectivity. On Kant and Husserl. Dordrecht, Netherlands. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998. For literature in German on Husserl's relation to Kant see Kern, Iso. Husserl and Kant. Eine Untersuchung ueber Husserl's Verhaeltnis zu Kant und zum Neukantianismus. Den Haag. Martinus Nijhoff. 1964. Both provide a thorough account of Husserl's accusation of Kant's psychologism. In addition, see Anderson, Lanier R., “Neo-Kantianism and the Roots of Anti-Psychologism”. British Journal for the History of Philosophy. Vol.13. Issue 2. 2005. 287–323, in which Anderson distinguishes types of criticisms against psychologism: one is grounded in the objectivity of logic, the other in its normativity. As we shall see, Husserl's criticism opts for the former.
- Concerning the secondary literature on Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic, I have found the following most helpful in understanding the content and method of this work: Bachelard, Suzanne. A Study of Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic. Trans. Lester E. Embree. Northwestern UP. 1990.
- I will mainly focus on Husserl, Edmund, Formal and Transcendental Logic. Trans. Dorion Cairns. Hague, Netherlands. Martinus Hijhoff. 1969 and in particular pages 255–266, in which he critiques Kant at length. For the remainder of this paper, I shall cite the Formal and Transcendental Logic as FTL.
- For Kant, logic is formal and not transcendental if the concepts do not have content. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Trans. and Ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. NY. Cambridge UP. 1998. A51–A62, B75–86. 193–199.
- For Husserl, ‘formal logic’ generally has a different signification. For him, logic signifies the general theory of science, whereas formal logic signifies an apriori theory of deductive multiplicities. Note the difference between Husserl's Leibnizian influenced sense of formal logic from Aristotle's logic, which has a necessary non-formal content, upon which Kant's view is heavily reliant. Husserl's ‘formal logic’ contains the principles of logical compatibility and rules of inference, e.g. principles of non-contradiction and modus ponens, and the results that follow from their application.
- Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 148. B96; A71, pp. 156. A80; B106. The forms of judgment divide into four categories: Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Modality.
- The hidden, but perhaps obvious, assumption generating this inference is that what makes an object possible cannot itself be an object of experience.
- By ‘immanent’ I mean the temporal flux of the contents of consciousness.
- ‘Apophantic’ is a term Husserl employs often throughout the Formal and Transcendental Logic, meaning ‘judgment or science of judgment.’ ‘Formal apophanitcs’, another of Husserl's terms, denotes the study of judgments which hare merely formal in character, i.e. the form of any possible judgment. The forms of any possible judgment are not necessarily connected to any particular content. The study of formal apophantics can be distinguished from a study of judgments which are not indifferent to their content.
- Manifold’ is a translation of the German ‘Mannigfaltigkeit’, which means ‘many-folded-ness.’ The indefinite manifold is the content of intuition that is synthesized by the categories into an object of experience.
- Of course, in the schematism, a'pure image’, each category corresponds to a time-determination. But the assumption is that qua concepts they are not so given.
- In Husserl, Edmund, The Shorter Logical Investigations. Trans. J.N. Findlay. Ed. Dermot Moran, Routledge UP: NY. 2001, Husserl claims that psychologism is a kind of relativism, whether it is transcendental or empirical: “Every doctrine is ipso facto relativistic, a case of specific relativism, if, with the empiricists, it treats the pure laws of logic as empirical, psychological laws. It is likewise relativistic, if, with the apriorists, it deduces these laws, in more or less mythic fashion, from certain ‘original forms’ or ‘modes of functioning’ of the human understanding.” Husserl, Prolegomena to Pure Logic, Shorter Logical Investigations, Paragraph 38, 52.
- Note that the individuals in the ideal objectivity are universals. They may be merely formal, in the sense that they represent the mere form of any conceptual content whatever, or they may be necessarily connected to a particular content. This term denotes a region of ideal objects which the transcendental phenomenologist investigates.
- Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Hamburg. Felix Meiner Velag. 1998. 130, B76; A52. “Die Logik kann nun wiederum in zwiefacher Absicht unternommen werden, entweder als Logik des allgemeinen, oder des besonderen Verstandesgebrauchs. Die erste enthaelt die schlechthin notwendigen Regeln des Denkens […]” Here formal logic is defined as the ‘rules of thinking’, i.e. Regeln des Denkens.
- Clearly, Kant did not view himself as guilty of psycholgoism, since his own view of logic is that logic is the study of how one ought to think, not how one actually does think.
- See Husserl, Edmund, Ideas. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson. NY. Collier Macmillian. 1975, Part 2, Chapter 6, 166. Also see Husserl, Edmund, The Shorter Logical Investigations. Trans. J.N. Findlay. Ed. Dermot Moran. Routledge UP: NY. 2001, Prolegomena to Pure Logic, paragraph 38, 51–55.
- Whether there are formal objects is a question which shall be considered in the next section.
- Husserl is inquiring into the sense or meaning of a genuine science. Since Husserl understands logic as a theory of science, he is investigating the sense of logic. This clarification of the idea of genuine science mirrors Kant's inquiry into the possibility of knowledge, only Husserl's project is not an inquiry into the possibility of natural science but into the sense of any genuine science whatever. In this sense, both philosophers are aiming at developing the conditions for the proper application of reason.
- In Section III Husserl's argument for ideal objectivity is explicated.
- She writes: “But now that we have come to the end of Husserl's reflection, we are in a position to understand that the problem of the ideality of the judgment has been a guiding problem for Formal and Transcendental Logic.” Bachelard, Suzanne. A Study of Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic, 201.
- Here I wish to comment on some terms which may be helpful to some readers. In Husserl, ‘ideal’ and formal objects are conventionally referred to as ‘irreal’ objects, while material objects are referred to as ‘real’ objects. These terms denote the ontological primacy of material, non-formal objects to the formal objects. Nonetheless, one ought to tread lightly here, for although the non-formal is a condition for the formal, the formal permeates every having of the non-formal, as we shall discuss at greater length in what follows. This distinction I mention here ought not be confused with the distinction between reell contents and irreell, or the intentional content of an experience.
- Note here the connection that I am drawing between inference and metaphysics. It appears that when we attempt to develop a metaphysics by assuming the forms of judgment and laws of inference, we have either not yet illuminated the ontological status of the formal, which underpins our ontology, or we have already illuminated its metaphysical structures. In Kant, because the epistemological critique provides us with a body of metaphysics, Husserl's critique of Kant's epistemology engenders a critique of that body of metaphysics.
- Proper phenomenological description, in contrast to mere empirical description, will be discussed in section III. See the discussion of the constitution of logical objects.
- In sections III and IV I provide a fuller account of what this ‘evidence’ is.
- Although Husserl critiques Kant, he thinks that the synthesis of recognition in the deduction of the categories in the first edition of the critique of pure reason comes very close to discovering phenomenology. Nathan Rotenstreich recognizes this, in Synthesis and Intentionality, 142. See Husserl, Ideas, part 2, pp.166. I speculate that this is the case since Husserl's account of the distinction between the immanent and the transcendent in the Ideas relies on seeing the self-same identical thing as adumbrations of the various temporal variations of the object, and the synthesis of recognition in Kant is a recognition of the selfsame object in virtue of running through temporal and spatial variations of the object.
- In section VII explicate further how categorial intuition works.
- On pg. 45 of FTL Husserl writes: “One must not shun the indispensable broadening of the object concept to cover not only the real but also the irreal (‘ideal’) objects; to it there corresponds the broadening of the concept of experience, which, with this amplification, retains precisely the essential property: seizing upon something itself (having of something itself, giving of something itself).”
- Husserl discusses three different forms of consciousness in his Logical Investigations. For a discussion of consciousness as the stream of psychological contents in internal time, self-awareness, and intentionality, see Shorter Logical Investigations, Logical Investigation V, ch.1–2, especially 201–223.
- I should note that the Logical Investigations provides an in-depth analysis of intentionality which is assumed in FTL. It is a term in the nomenclature of Husserl's phenomenology, and does not have the usual meaning of ‘intention’ in English, as in the sentence, ‘I intend to sit down’. It does not mean ‘purpose’, but something closer to pointing. Consciousness points to objects, and exhibits a vector toward objects. Although Husserl does not use ‘vorhaben’, a translation of ‘intend’ into German, to discuss intentionality, the German ‘vorhaben’, ‘having before’, is closer to this meaning in its literal translation.
- In section IV I show how categorial intuition implies a commitment to intentionality because intentional structures ground the intuition of categories.
- Although I lack the space for a proper discussion of the topic here, I would like to suggest that one could also show that the presupposition-less aspect of the transcendental subject in Husserl follows from Husserl's rejection of formal logic as a condition of transcendental logic.
- Husserl, Ideas, Part 2, Ch. 3, Paragraphs 27–30.
- Note that the natural attitude is not necessarily an immediate consciousness of external objects in time and space, but includes an immersion in one's own mental contents. By immersion I mean a non-critical, or unmediated relation to the content of one's experience. For example, one could have an immediate relation to an external object, e.g. a tree, just as much as one can have an immediate relation to a memory or image in one's imagination. This is important to recognize, since phenomenology is not identical to psychological introspection.
- Husserl, Ideas, Part 2, Ch. 3, Paragraphs 31–32.
- Husserl, Ideas, Part 2, Ch.4, Paragraph 33.
- For a good introduction to Husserl, see Moran, Dermot. Edmund Husserl. Founder of Phenomenology. Cambridge, UK. Polity Press, 2005 or Zahivi, Dan. Husserl's Phenomenology. Stanford UP. 2003.
- Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, makes a similar point about accidental categories when he argues that when one studies numbers as numbers, one treats them as though they are independent, even though, for him, they are not, properly speaking, independent things, such as planets and people.
- For those more familiar with the analytic tradition, Moore's ‘argument’ for external things is analogous to Husserl's argument for formal objects. Of course, Moore is not a phenomenologist, but the analogy may be useful anyway. The way that one treats such objects indicates one's primordial attitude towards them such that even if one explicitly denies their objectivity one's actions indicates otherwise. In a certain mode of cognition, the hand shows itself as something independent of consciousness, as the logical objects shows itself as independent in a certain mode of cognition.
- In the Introduction to the Formal and Transcendental Logic, 10–12, Husserl presents his own investigation into the phenomenology of logic as an investigation into the practice of logic.
- Kant provides his Critique of Idealism by arguing that there is an external world. Husserl, on the other hand, need only point out that I am always already committed to external objects, for they are always already intended as ‘transcendent’ in consciousness. In the clarification of genuine science, many epistemological problems that Kantian transcendental philosophy sought to solve, e.g. the problem of the external world, the transcendental the phenomenology resolves.
- Instead of assuming that there is a realm of objects about which one can ask transcendental questions, as Kant does in his inquiry into the possibility of natural science, Husserl provides a phenomenological ground for believing that there is a realm of formal objects about which one can ask transcendental questions.
- Nathan Rotenstreich notes that Kant's account of mind is one situated within a world, whereas Husserl's method brackets those external conditions. This renders the latter without external constraints, whereas Kant's critique is conditioned by nouminal constraints. Synthesis and Intentional Objectivity, 7.
- Kant is often referred to as a ‘logician’ since he is explicating what is necessarily entailed in the notion of experience. For examples, see Sellars, Wilfred, “Toward a Theory of the Categories.” Essays in Philosophy and its History. Philosophical Studies Series. Vol.2. Dortrecht, Holland. Reidel Pub. 1974. Husserl's critique of Kant is a critique of his uncritical attitude toward logic and the practice of logic.
- For a comparison of Husserl's account of ideal objects and the account of other phenomenologists, especially Merleau Ponty, see Besner, Kirk M. Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology: The Problem of Ideal Objects. NY. Continuum International Publishing Group. 2007.
- Acts of predication are described as a certain kind of ‘quality’ of intentional acts in the Logical Investigations. A quality is a way of intending an object which does not individuate what is intended. For example, one may judge ‘that Napoleon is French’ or judge ‘that Bach is a composer’, but the ‘judging’ in these cases does not distinguish the individual whom is judged. ‘French’ and ‘composer’ perform this function. ‘Matter’ is that which individuates the object of an intention, while quality is a way of intending that object. So for Husserl, matter and quality are transcendental constituents of the having of any object whatever. Other examples of ‘qualities’ of judgments are perception, memory, imagination, assertion, signification, etc. So although concepts do not denote individuals, Husserl takes the position that the subject by itself does not give us the marks by which the subject is identified; for this, one needs a ‘sense’ or intentional matter.
- On pg. 14 of FTL, Husserl writes: “When we add to this the fact that Kant's transcendental investigation of cognition took effect afterwards in a manner that remained far removed from any actually and concretely explicative analysis of cognition, the result is the immense defect in modern theory of Objective science: It has not been able even to make understandable, even as a problem, the deepest clarification and establishment of the possibility of genuine sciences.”
- I note that what is intended is never fully determined in the sense that the performance is infinitely re-iterable and I can never acquire a complete view on each and every view of any particular empirical object or all objects of consciousness.
- I do not mean for this to exclude the possibility of a non-conceptual passive synthesis. For example, in Husserl's phenomenology internal time consciousness is a synthesis of intuition but is not conceptual.
- ‘Intensional’ here is opposed to ‘extensional’ where the members of a class are defined not by the extension of the class, but by some meaning or standard which is determined by the categorial intuition.
- Shorter Logical Investigations, 375
- It is important to note that for Husserl there is already a unification of meaning and intuition in perceptual awareness prior to language. I use language here only as a means of illustrating via a simple concrete example, how phenomenological evidence works.
- That the intuition of the category gives the intuition of the individual is based on Husserl's assumption that the object is individuated by meaning, or the matter of the intentional act.
- Kant's method, as Husserl notes, overlooks these components:cxx “How strongly we tend to let these oppositions shade into one another would be shown by a criticism of Kant's theory of knowledge, which throughout bears the impress of the failure to draw any clear distinction among these oppositions. In Kant's thought categorial (logical) functions play a great role, but he fails to achieve our fundamental extension of the concepts of perception and intuition over the categorial realm, and this because he fails to appreciate the deep difference between intuition and signification, their possible separation and usual commixture. And so he does not complete his analysis of differentiating between inadequate and adequate adaptation of meaning to intuition. He therefore also fails to distinguish between concepts, as universal meanings of words and concepts as universal objects, as the intentional correlates of universal presentations.” Husserl, Shorter Logical Investigations, 374–375
- This account is very cursory. For a fascinating and detailed account of how this works, see Shorter Logical Investigations, Logical Investigation VI, Second Section. Unlike in Kant, the conceptual unity in the intuition is passive, since the object is not produced in an act of a priori predication, but is simply given in the awareness of the unity of acts. Still, the production of the categorial object, as a result of an intellectualization of intuition, is active, and not simply given in intuition, since the phenomenologist must focus on the correlation of subjective acts and not simply on the object intended in order to achieve an insight into categorial structures.
- On pg. 218 of FTL, Husserl states this coherence of the determinate evidential base must be respected when filling in the content of judgments: “In respect of its content, every original judging and every judging that proceeds coherently, has coherence by virtue of the coherence of the matters in the synthetic unity of the experience, which is the basis on which the judging stands.”
- Truth logic is not indifferent to its own content. Unlike formal logic it is not an inquiry into the form of thinking as such, but it inquires into the proper relations between particular concepts as is dictated by the content of the concepts themselves. The contents of judgments in truth logic are derived from the evidential base. In such a logic, for example, one could not define any concept as one wished by simply changing the extension denoted; concepts have certain necessary entailments culled from intuition, and these must be respected when using the concepts in judgments. For this reason, it would be better to think of truth logic as an intensional logic whose meaning is culled from the evidential base.
- Also, it seems that this determinate having is the condition for any vague having of an object.
- For Husserl, the object is primordially a synthetic unity of intentional consciousness, although it is not identical to any mode of synthetic unity. This pre-predicative judgment seems to correspond to Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic, except in Husserl's case, the Aesthetic is the transcendental condition for the possibility of the Analytic, since the object is prior to the predicative judgment. Because immediate intentional having is characteristic of scientific and pre-scientific experience, Husserl seems to have developed a Transcendental Aesthetic that shows the possibility not only of scientific experience, as Kant intended, but to any experience whatever. We can inquire into the possibility of scientific experience only once the intentional-directedness is established.
- FTL 157; Unlike Kant, Husserl cannot, via deduction, infer that intentionality is the a priori structure of consciousness which no longer requires another confirmation. He is unable to make this inference because the argument for such structures depends on a description of modes of consciousness accessed in phenomenological consciousness. It seems that the a priori truth of the intentionality of consciousness, which functions as the basis of evidence, must always be re-affirmed in the experience of each intentional having. In this sense, phenomenology is never finished, for it can only maintain that intentionality is an a priori structure via an infinite re-confirmation of the basic structures of consciousness. The a priori is possessed by the theorizer in its infinite re-applicability, which the theorizer cannot ever fully perform, but performs in each confirmation of the intentional having.