Questions of Phenomenology

Language, Alterity, Temporality, Finitude

Françoise Dastur, Robert Vallier

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780823233748, 9780823233731
• eBook ISBN: 9780823275892
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Françoise Dastur is well respected in France and Europe for her mastery of phenomenology as a movement and her clear and cogent explications of phenomenology in movement. These qualities are on display in this remarkable volume. Dastur guides the reader through a series of phenomenological questions—language and logic, self and other, temporality and history, finitude and mortality—that also call phenomenology itself into question, testing its limits and pushing it in new directions. Like Merleau-Ponty, Dastur sees phenomenology not as a doctrine, a catalogue of concepts and catchphrases authored by a single thinker, but as a movement in which several thinkers participate, each inflecting the movement in unique ways. In this regard, Dastur is both one of the clearest guides to phenomenology and one of its ablest practitioners.

PART I

Language and Logic

1

The Logic of “Validity”

Husserl, Heidegger, Lotze

If the name of Lotze is known to us, it is largely because he is mentioned in the Prolegomenon to Pure Logic alongside those great thinkers under whose authority Husserl placed himself—namely, Leibniz, Kant, and Herbart.¹ Husserl even dedicates a paragraph to explaining his connections to Herbart and Lotze, but in fact, with the exception of the last few lines, the paragraph is devoted entirely to Herbart’s merits and errors. Lotze is credited only with the merit of having the great perspicacity to deepen some of Herbart’s suggestions and for developing them in an original manner; but like Herbart, he is criticized for having confused specific ideality and normative ideality and for having seen a morality of thought in logic. This is why Husserl concludes the paragraph with a rather negative judgment: “[Lotze’s] great logical work, however rich it may be in original thoughts … hereby becomes a jarring mixture of psychologism and pure logic.”²

The brevity of this diagnostic is explained in a note in the first edition of the Logical Investigations, specifying that “in the next volume, we will have the opportunity to offer a critical examination of Lotze’s theory of knowledge, and in particular the chapter he dedicates to real and formal meaning in logic.” This note is replaced in the 1913 second edition by the following: “In edition I, I promised to deal with Lotze’s epistemology in an Appendix to volume II of his work. This was not printed, owing to lack of space.”³

We will therefore not find any more complete information about Lotze’s importance for Husserlian thought in the text of the Logical Investigations itself; Husserl merely underlines that the investigations “have been crucially stimulated by the ideas of Bolzano (along with Lotze).”⁴ In a later text, a 1903 review of Melchior Palagyi’s book on The Conflict of the Psychologists and the Formalists in Modern Logic, Husserl defends himself against Palagyi’s accusation (shared, moreover, by other logicians and philosophers, especially Rickert) that he had merely exploited Bolzano in the Logical Investigations without noting his dependence on him; but in this same text, Husserl also underlines Lotze’s importance for his thought. Recalling that in the Prolegomena, he had explicitly designated Bolzano (along with Lotze) as the thinkers who had the most decisive influence on him, Husserl adds:

With specific reference to my concepts of the “ideal” significations, and “ideal” contents of representations and judgments, they originally derive, not from Bolzano at all, but rather—as the term “ideal” alone indicates—from Lotze. In particular, Lotze’s reflections about the interpretation of Plato’s theory of forms had a profound effect on me. Only by thinking out these thoughts from Lotze—and in my opinion he failed to get completely clear on them—did I find the key to the curious conceptions of Bolzano, which in all their phenomenological naïveté were at first unintelligible, and to the treasures of his Wissenschaftslehre.⁵

Against those who accuse him of having used Bolzano without crediting him, Husserl emphasizes the primordial importance of Lotze, who alone allowed him to acquire an understanding of those “curious” Bolzanoian conceptions, especially the idea of “propositions in themselves,” which initially seemed to him (and to Bolzano’s many other readers) as some sort of “mythical entities suspended between being and non-being.”⁶ As we will see, the Lotzian interpretation of the Platonic theory of ideas allows Husserl to understand that propositions in themselves are indeed objects even though they do not have “existence,” because they have “ideal” being or the value of “general objects,” and not the real—that is, temporal—being of things.⁷

The clearest text concerning Husserl’s understanding of his relation to the Lotzian theory of knowledge, however, appears later, in the 1913 “Draft of a Preface to the Logical Investigations,” specifically in section 8, entitled, “Critical Differentiation from Lotze.”⁸ Husserl eventually published a much shorter text as the “Preface,” but Eugen Fink preserved and published this sketch in 1939 as “a historical evidence of a particular self-interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology.” Fink contends, moreover, that this self-interpretation is instructive in that it was developed more than ten years after the publication of the Logical Investigations and thus from a superior perspective on the problematic; as such it is able to elucidate what in 1900 was still only latent—namely, the final direction of the sense of the work.⁹ Our concern is therefore to show that just as Husserl was not limited to exploiting Bolzano, for whom the “idealist meaning that essentially belongs to [the Husserlian] idea of pure logic remained foreign” because his theory of knowledge “rested upon the foundation of an extreme empiricism”¹⁰ (that consequently weakens the interpretation given in 1913 of propositions in themselves as ideal objects),¹¹ so too is Husserl not limited to repeating Lotze because, although he had assimilated Lotze’s theory of validity (Geltung) and theory of ideas, Husserl proposes a theory of knowledge as different from Lotze’s as Aristotle’s is from Plato’s or Kant’s from Lambert’s.¹² Husserl specifies: “only those who confine themselves merely to the first volume and in so doing do not even think it through thoroughly could identify my anti-psychologism, my theory of ideas, and theory of knowledge (insofar as the latter can be judged at all from such minor indications) with Lotze’s, or would even attempt to contrast them according to their general type.”¹³

Readers of the Logical Investigations who limited themselves to a superficial reading of the Prolegomena were numerous, which is why many of them, particularly the neo-Kantians, considered the six investigations of the second volume to be a relapse into psychologism. If between 1886 and 1895 Husserl had been preparing to renounce the psychologism to which he had previously subscribed through a study of Leibniz and the latter’s differentiation of “truths of reason” and “truths of fact,” he owes his radical “conversion” to “logicism” (and the “Platonism” that accompanies it) to the study of Lotze’s Logic. When Husserl mentions his previously held psychologistic point of view, as he does in the preface to the first edition of the Logical Investigations (which ends with a quote from Goethe: “There is nothing we judge more severely than the mistakes we’ve just made”),¹⁴ he is referring less to the study of number as presented in the Philosophy of Arithmetic, which he continues to cite positively in the Formal and Transcendental Logic in 1929,¹⁵ than he is to the conception of logic that he was then developing and that he had inherited from Brentano. Brentano saw logic as an art, a technique, or even “the doctrine of correct judgment.”¹⁶ For Brentano, logic is not a theoretical science whose unity resides in the field that it chooses to investigate, but rather a practical science, similar to medicine or architecture, whose unity resides in the goal it proposes. Logic as a practical science has judgment as its goal—that is, the affirmation or negation of a content of a representation—and it prescribes directives for achieving this goal. Because judgments are psychic acts, logic turns into psychology, from which it nevertheless differs, in that logic treats only correct judgments and disposes of a norm allowing it to recognize correct judgments.

Under Brentano’s influence, Husserl had viewed logic as a part of psychology, and so he had been led to psychologize mathematics, as the subtitle of the Philosophy of Arithmetic indicates: “Psychological and Logical Investigations.” But he did not publish the second volume of these investigations, dedicated to logical investigations (whereas the first volume concerned psychological investigations) because in the interim he had broken with the Brentanoian conception of logic and had come to see logic as a theoretical and a priori science that concerns not the judging mind but rather the kingdom of ideal meanings. Husserl was led to this new conception of logic by his reading of Lotze, as he underlines in the Draft:

Little as Lotze himself had gone beyond pointing out absurd inconsistencies and beyond psychologism, still his brilliant interpretation of Plato’s doctrine of Ideas gave me my first big insight and was a determining factor in all further studies. Lotze spoke already of truths in themselves, and so the idea suggested itself to transfer all of the mathematical and a major part of the traditionally logical world into the realm of the ideal.¹⁷

And although Lotze also battles against a psychological foundation of logic, in the next part of his account he nevertheless abandons the theory of ideas he had established in an apparently pure fashion and falls back into anthropomorphism. Husserl underlines, moreover, that Lotze’s theory of knowledge is proven to be a failure by the very fact that he recognizes a marvelous character in the possibility of knowledge:

Proper epistemology clarifies, and something clarified is both something become understandable and something understood—thus the extreme opposite of “wonderment.” Reference is repeatedly made to both the nature of all minds—actually understood as a fact of reality—and over against this, the nature of real things in themselves. And the completely distorted problem of the real and formal meaning of the logical comes about through the fact that Lotze presupposes a metaphysical world of things that exists in-itself and, over against it—at least according to our usual knowledge-claim—a world of ideas, meant to represent these things, that belongs to minds existing in the metaphysical world, and that he understandably now struggles in vain to explain the basis of the correspondence between these two worlds within knowledge.¹⁸

Husserl refers here exclusively to the third book of Lotze’s Logic, which treats “Of Knowledge” and which includes five chapters. In the second chapter, entitled “The World of Ideas,” Lotze exposits his interpretation of the theory of Platonic ideas, which Husserl qualifies as “great,” whereas the fourth chapter treats of “Real and Formal Significance of Logical Acts,” offering a theory in which Husserl sees only a “mythological metaphysics”¹⁹ and proof that Lotze lacks “this inner power to draw the consequences of what is claimed.”²⁰ But despite this, Husserl concludes that Lotze’s work “is nevertheless one of the most important of the past century for the theory of knowledge” and that “the present investigations owe much to him.”²¹

Our first concern will therefore be to understand the Lotzian interpretation of the theory of ideas so that we can then demonstrate why it had been so decisive for the development of Husserlian phenomenology. But before reading the famous Chapter 2 of Lotze’s Logic Book III in detail, we might first give some succinct biographical indications of this thinker who is today forgotten.

Rudolf Hermann Lotze was born on May 21, 1817, in Bautzen-an-die-Spree, not far from the current German borders with Poland and the Czech Republic. He studied medicine and philosophy in Leipzig and taught both subjects there until 1844, when he succeeded Herbart at Göttingen. He remained there until 1880, leaving for Berlin, where he died of pneumonia some months later, on July 1, 1881. Lotze had been the most famous German philosopher of his time, in both Germany and abroad. He influenced not only phenomenology, but also the neo-Kantianism of the Baden school of value-theory, founded by Rickert and Windelband, and today there are many questions regarding the influence he may have had on Frege, who was his student. Translations of his Logic and his Metaphysics influenced Bradley’s English neo-Hegelianism and James’s and Dewey’s American pragmatism. His most famous works are a study on anthropology entitled Mikrokosmus (published in three volumes between 1856 and 1864) and the two parts of his System of Philosophy, published between 1874 and 1879, consisting of revised versions of his 1843 Logic and his 1841 Metaphysics. The 1843 version of the Logic, significantly rewritten in 1874, includes three books, respectively entitled “Of Thought,” “Applied Logic,” and “Of Knowledge.” The third book has garnered the most interest, but the first book equally allows for an understanding of Lotze’s extensive influence on modern formal logic. This is why the books were republished in 1989 by the Felix Meiner publishing house.

In his youth, Heidegger was very interested in Lotze’s Logic, and in particular his interpretation of the Platonic theory of ideas.²² In his Winter Semester course in 1925–26 on Logic: The Question of Truth, he devotes the long first part to examining the situation of contemporary logic and to the question of psychologism, which leads him to give a detailed exposition of the Lotzian theory of ideas.²³ He also makes an extended allusio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Half Title
• Part I: Language and Logic
• Part II: The Self and the Other
• Part III: Temporality and History
• Part IV: Finitude and Mortality
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Series Page