The Shorter Logical Investigations

Edmund Husserl, Dermot Moran, J.N. Findlay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134548415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Edmund Husserl is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. One of the founders of phenomenology, the Logical Investigations is his most famous work. Published in two volumes in 1 900 and 1901, it had a decisive impact on the direction of twentieth-century philosophy. It is one of the few works to have influenced philosophers as far apart as Frege and Heidegger and had a crucial impact on the development of both continental and analytical philosophy. This abridged edition of J.N. Findlay's translation makes the key sections of this classic work available in one volume for the first time. It has been specially edited and includes corrections to the Findlay translation and a new introduction by Dermot Moran, placing the Logical Investigations in historical context and bringing out its importance for contemporary philosophy.

Introduction

The Shorter Logical Investigations

The Shorter Logical Investigations is a selection of the key sections of Edmund Husserl’s two-volume Logical Investigations, intended to complement the longer work, now available in a paperback edition for the first time. The current revival of interest in Husserl both in connection with the project to discover the origins of analytic philosophy and also in order to understand the origins of the century-old movement known as phenomenology has drawn attention to the Investigations. The aim of this abridged edition is to provide an accessible introduction for professional philosophers, students and general readers alike, to a work which, although recognised as the most important foundational text of the whole phenomenological movement and as a rich source of original ideas in the philosophy of logic and in semantics, has a not undeserved reputation as a difficult, dense, impenetrable and confusing text. In fact, Husserl intended his Investigations to be an exhibition of his own thinking in progress, as he wrestled with difficult issues concerning logic, meaning and truth, and was always conscious that the work lacked both form and literary grace. He made several efforts to edit the book to accommodate his developing views, and even planned to replace it with something written more deliberately as an introductory text. As a result the Logical Investigations was progressively eclipsed by the appearance of Ideas I, the Cartesian Meditations and by the Crisis of European Sciences, as a basic introduction to Husserl’s thought. Yet, Husserl always regarded the Investigations as his ‘breakthrough work’ and indeed his later positions are almost unintelligible unless understood in relation to his original formulations in the Investigations. A more compact, user-friendly version of the text, then, has long been needed. I hope this Shorter Logical Investigations will answer this need, and provide a convenient entry to Husserl’s thought. In the long run, I can hope no better than that it will also serve as a stimulus to read the Investigations in the full form.

In selecting the texts, I have had to face difficult choices as Husserl’s mode of writing (like Aristotle’s) involves the complex dissection of prob- lems, the consideration of the prevailing views, and then the presentation of his own position, almost as a set of asides within the exposition of the problem at hand. Nevertheless, I have attempted, within the confines of the space available, to provide as comprehensive and representative selection as could be made, while still preserving the overall structure of the work. In selecting passages, I have attempted to preserve the integrity of the individual sections Husserl himself marked out, in order not to interfere with Husserl’s reasoning. I have also sought advice from Husserl scholars (my thanks to David Carr, Kevin Mulligan, Harry Reeder, Donn Welton, among many others) as to the essential passages to include. For the fuller picture, readers are urged to consult the reprint of Findlay’s translation of the whole two-volume Investigations.

The Logical Investigations (1900/1901)

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) published his Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) in two volumes in 1900 and 1901.¹ The first volume, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik (Prolegomena to Pure Logic) appeared from the publisher Max Niemeyer in July 1900.² The second volume, subtitled Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis (‘Investigations in Phenomenology and the Theory of Knowledge’), containing six long treatises or ‘Investigations’, appeared in two parts in 1901. This gargantuan work – which Husserl insisted was not a ‘systematic exposition of logic’ (eine systematische Darstellung der Logik, LI III, Findlay II: 3; Hua XIX/1: 228),³ but an effort at epistemological clarification and critique of the basic concepts of logical knowledge – consisted of a series of analytical inquiries (analytische Untersuchungen) into fundamental issues in epistemology and the philosophy of logic, and also extensive, intricate philosophical discussions of issues in semiotics, semantics, mereology (the study of wholes and parts), formal grammar (the a priori study of the parts of any language whatsoever in regard to their coherent combination into meaningful unities), and the nature of conscious acts, especially presentations and judgements. In fact it was these latter detailed descriptive psychological analyses of the essential structures of consciousness, in terms of intentional acts, their contents, objects and truth-grasping character, especially in the last two Investigations, which set the agenda for the emerging discipline Husserl fostered under the name phenomenology.

The Prolegomena⁴ appeared as a free-standing treatise dedicated to securing the true meaning of logic as a pure, a priori, science of ideal meanings and of the formal laws regulating them, entirely distinct from all psychological acts, contents and procedures. The Prolegomena offered the strongest possible refutation to the then dominant psychologistic interpretation of logic, propounded by John Stuart Mill and others, which Husserl viewed as leading to a sceptical relativism that threatened the very possibility of objec-

tive knowledge. Turning instead to an older tradition of logic stemming from Leibniz, Kant, Bolzano and Lotze, Husserl defends a vision of logic as a pure theory of science – in fact, the ‘science of science’, in the course of which he carefully elaborates the different senses in which this pure logic can be transformed into a normative science or developed into a practical discipline or ‘technology’ (Kunstlehre).

The second volume of the Investigations (1901) was published in two parts: Part One contained the first Five Investigations and Part Two the long and dense Sixth Investigation, the writing of which had considerably delayed the appearance of the work as Husserl began to realise the depth of the phenomenological project he had uncovered. Whereas the Prolegomena was particularly influential in turning the tide against psychologism (Frege’s efforts in the same direction being in relative obscurity at the time), it was the second volume of the Investigations in particular that had a major impact on philosophers interested in concrete analyses of problems of consciousness and meaning, leading to the development of phenomenology.

Phenomenology, in line with a general turn away from idealism then current, was to be a science of ‘concrete’ issues. According to Husserl’s Introduction, phenomenology aimed to avoid speculative constructions in philosophy (exemplified, in his view, by Hegel). The Investigations impressed its early readers as exemplifying a radically new way of doing philosophy, focusing directly on analysis of the things themselves – the matters at issue (die Sachen selbst) – without the usual detour through the history of philosophy, ‘merely criticising traditional philosophemes’ as Husserl put it (LI VI, Intro., Findlay II: 187; Hua XIX/2: 543), or making partisan declarations in favour of some philosophical system (such as empiricism, positivism, rationalism, Hegelianism or Neo-Kantianism).

Within a decade, as Husserl’s ground-breaking efforts came to be recognised, the Investigations had established itself as the foundational text of the nascent ‘phenomenological movement’ (a term Husserl himself regularly invoked) in Germany. The Investigations’ influence subsequently spread throughout Europe, from Russia and Poland to France and Spain, such that eventually, it is no exaggeration to say that this work took on a status in twentieth-century European philosophy analogous to that of another foundational text – this time in psychoanalysis – Die Traumdeutung (Interpretation of Dreams),⁵ published by Husserl’s contemporary Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) in 1899. The Investigations continues to be a necessary starting-point for anyone wanting to understand the development of European philosophy in the twentieth century, from Heidegger and Frege to Levinas, Gadamer, Sartre or Derrida.

Given that the Logical Investigations is such a pivotal text in twentieth-century philosophy, it remains something of a neglected masterpiece, remarkably little read, and where read, poorly understood. For some seventy years it remained untranslated into English. An American philosopher living

in Europe, William B. Pitkin sought Husserl’s permission to translate it into English in 1905, but he abandoned the effort when he could not get a publisher (see Hua XVIII: xxxvii; XIX/1: xxii). Seemingly, the philosopher William James, who was consulted on the project, advised the publisher not to proceed – suggesting that the last thing the world needed was another German textbook on logic, and so the project was abandoned, which grieved Husserl because he had been an admirer of James.⁶ Marvin Farber, an American student of Husserl’s, published a paraphrase of the Investigations in 1943,⁷ but it was not until 1970 that John N. Findlay produced the first and only complete English translation of the Second Edition. With the hundredth anniversary of the Investigations’ publication now upon us, it is important to make Findlay’s translation available once again in an accessible form for the English-speaking reader.

The emergence of phenomenology

In the first edition of 1901, Husserl adopted the existing term ‘phenomenology’ (Phänomenologie) – a term already in currency since Lambert, Kant and Hegel, but given new vigour by Brentano and his students – in a somewhat less than fully systematic way to characterise his new approach to the conditions of the possibility of knowledge in general. Husserl wrote in his Introduction:

Pure phenomenology represents a field of neutral researches, in which several sciences have their roots. It is, on the one hand, an ancillary to psychology conceived as an empirical science. Proceeding in purely intuitive fashion, it analyses and describes in their essential generality – in the specific guise of a phenomenology of thought and knowledge – the experiences of presentation, judgement and knowledge, experiences which, treated as classes of real events in the natural context of zoological reality, receive a scientific probing at the hands of empirical psychology. Phenomenology, on the other hand, lays bare the ‘sources’ from which the basic concepts and ideal laws of pure logic ‘flow’, and back to which they must once more be traced, so as to give them all the ‘clearness and distinctness’ needed for an understanding, and for an epistemological critique, of pure logic.

(LI, Findlay I: 166; Hua XIX/1: 6–7)

The logician is not interested in mental acts as such, but only in objective meanings and their formal regulation, the phenomenologist on the other hand is concerned with the essential structures of cognition and their essential correlation to the things known. When Husserl says in this Introduction, ‘we must go back to the things themselves’ (Wir wollen auf die ‘Sachen selbst’ zurückgehen, LI, Findlay I: 168; Hua XIX/1: 10), he means particularly that the task of phenomenology is to clarify the nature of logical concepts by tracing their origins in intuition:

Our great task is now to bring the Ideas of logic, the logical concepts and laws (die logischen Ideen, Begriffe und Gesetze), to epistemological clarity and definiteness. Here phenomenological analysis must begin.

(LI, Findlay I: 168; Hua XIX/1: 9)

More broadly, Husserl wants to document all matters that present themselves to consciousness in their diverse modes of intuitive givenness (and not restricting the sources of intuition arbitrarily in advance, as empiricism and other theories traditionally had done). Husserl initially characterised phenomenology ambiguously as either a parallel discipline to epistemology, or as a more radical grounding of epistemology, that sought to clarify the essences of acts of cognition in their most general sense. In analysing knowledge, Husserl wanted to do justice both to the necessary ideality (that is: self-identity and independence of space and time) of the truths known in cognition, and at the same time properly recognise the essential contribution of the knowing acts of the subject. Thus, looking back in 1925, Husserl described the aim of the Logical Investigations as follows:

In the year 1900–01 appeared my Logical Investigations which were the results of my ten year long efforts to clarify the Idea of pure Logic by going back to the sense-bestowing or cognitive achievements being effected in the complex of lived experiences of logical thinking.⁸

Husserl’s overall aim is to lay down what he describes as the ‘phenomenological founding of logic’ (die phänomenologische Fundierung der Logik, LI, Findlay I: 175; Hua XIX/1: 22), a clarification of the essential nature of logical knowledge as a preliminary to systematic formal logic and to science in general.⁹ More narrowly, his ‘phenomenology of the logical experiences’ (Phänomenologie der logischen Erlebnisse, LI, Findlay I: 168; Hua XIX/1: 10) aims to give descriptive understanding of the mental states and their ‘indwelling senses’ (ihren einwohnenden Sinnes), with the aim of fixing the meaning...