If an angel were ever to tell us something about his philosophy, I reckon we would hear many sentences like
′2+2=13′
Lichtenberg
Philosophy, Metaphysics and Science
Since Descartes′ time a contradiction has come to the fore in the relations between philosophy and the sciences, though it was already implicit in Aristotle. Philosophy seeks to think the unconditioned, to transcend positivity and the accepted existence of sciences – arbitrarily dedicated to separate objects, and which starkly isolate matter and method – and to contrast the scientific domain with the unfettered truth. Yet philosophy takes science as its model. Scientific labour overlaps the realm of inherited metaphysics. As long as there has been cosmological speculation, science has constantly robbed metaphysics of what it thought to be its own. At the same time it outlined an ideal of doubt-free certainty compared to which metaphysics appeared vain and dogmatic, so long as it did not practise scientific discipline.
The possibility of metaphysics as a science is a transcription not merely of the themes of the Kantian critique of reason as epistemology. It also points up the impulse behind modern philosophy as a whole. From the outset, however, that impulse does not merely aim at some ′problem′ to be solved in peaceful progress, such as purifying philosophy from its pre-scientific concepts through reflection on itself. The transformation of philosophy into science, even into the first science which would ground the individual sciences, or the highest science, the queen of the sciences – which is the upshot of numerous apologies and excuses – is not fortunate maturation in which thought divests itself of its childish rudiments and subjective wishes and projections. Rather, it also undermines the concept of philosophy itself. As long as philosophy is no more than the cult of what ′is the case′, in Wittgenstein′s formula, it enters into competition with the sciences to which in delusion it assimilates itself – and loses. If it dissociates itself from the sciences, however, and in refreshed merriment thinks itself free of them, it becomes a powerless reserve, the shadow of shadowy Sunday religion. So not limited factual science, but rather objective compulsion bears the blame for philosophy falling into disrepute with the sciences.
Contradiction in Scientificization
One can read off the movement of philosophical thought itself what befalls it with the inalienable progress of its scientific control and self-control. By becoming truer, it renounces truth. Whoever freely reflects about objects confiscated from organized science, may often escape taedium scientiae. But he is not only rewarded for that with the ignominious praise of the stimulating and the intuitive, but must in addition put up with the proof, of either deficient knowledge of the subject matter or the staleness of what is instantly twisted into hypothesis and ground between the millstones of ′Where is the proof?′ and ′Where is the novelty?′
But if, to escape from that danger, philosophy withdraws into itself, then it falls into a conceptual game which is either empty or non-binding and scholastic. Pathetic neologisms, which, as De Maistre says, the greatest writers fear, cannot conceal this.1 Thoughts which grope to conceive it – though over conceiving itself lies the taboo of the unscientific – find everything already occupied. They are not only wholesomely cautioned against the amateurish, that complement of the expert. They are also paralyzed and rendered unable to acquiesce to such things as the manufacture of the spiritual link (whose absence Faust lamented) between all that has been ascertained. For the ′synthesis′ which puts up with ever available scientific findings remains outside the spontaneous relation of thought to object. It also contributes to that organization which it presumes to countermand.
The conservative ideal of science, which once helped to free philosophy from the chains of theology, has itself meanwhile become a shackle which forbids thought from thinking. That is, however, as little due to simply faulty development as its fellow-traveller in that society where philosophy dwells. Thus it will not be arbitrarily corrected through insight and resolve. It submits the scientificization of thought to the division of labour. Either it proceeds according to the pre-established schemata, which economize on superfluous exertion, of the established separate disciplines, or it establishes itself as a supplementary separate discipline which holds its own on the market through its difference from other disciplines. When thought shuts itself off from the division of labour, it falls behind the development of forces and behaves ′archaically′. If as a science, however, it integrates itself into the sciences, then it renounces its proper impulse at the very point where it most needs it. It remains reified, a mere imitation modelled on societal categories and ultimately relations of production. This is so even when it credits itself with making scientific judgements about so-called issues of principle, such as the subject–object relation. Science reifies whenever it defines coagulated spiritual labour, knowledge unconscious of its societal mediations, as straightforward knowledge. Its demands and prohibtions express that completely.
Hence every thematic is laid out on the scientific map beforehand. Somewhat as mathematics customarily dismisses the question of what a number is as extra-mathematical, philosophy also is not supposed to deal with anything except the structure and conditions of the universally valid. But since the themes are already prepared and furnished ready-made from the societal workshop, scientific thought does not fit with what these themes want from themselves. It rather submits them to procedures demanded or inculcated by society.
The primacy of method has today already gone so far that only those research tasks can be undertaken which can be discharged by means of available devices. The primacy of method is the primacy of organization. The availability of knowledge through logical and classificatory ordering has become its own criterion. What does not fit in appears on the periphery as ′data′, that waits in its place; and if no place can be found, it is cast off. Like citizens of a tightly organized commonwealth, all laws of continuity must fit in with all the others. The ′unconnected′ or non-integrable becomes mortal sin. Thoughts are drastically and fully brought under control by societal organization. For every scientific assertion is on principle tested by every approved scientist of the discipline, irrespective of his mental (geistig) constitution. And all spiritual activity should be repeatable afterwards by any other arbitrary individual. Understanding must practically present its staff ID, if it wishes to be tolerated. It is ′evidence′ sought not for its intrinsic merit or content, but rather as a print-out of directions for future data.
Thus cognition does not linger over its object for the sake of elucidating it. It does not really refer to (meinen) its object at all, but rather degrades it to a mere function of the schema under which it is haughtily subsumed. The more objectively cognition poses and the more purified from all delusion and supplement from the observer, the more subjective it becomes in the totality of its procedure. The form of organization which is immanent to science and which philosophy absorbs gets in the way of the goal which is visible to philosophy.
If, however, the relation of philosophy to science is antagonistic in itself – i.e. if as science it enters into opposition with its own raison d′être, and yet whenever it gives a cold shoulder to science literally loses its reason – then its attempt to regard itself as science must lead to contradiction. The Hegelian principle of dialectic, understood through the tension between speculation and science, is the positive expression of such negativity. Hegel seeks to recast it as the organon of truth. What all philosophy works at – philosophy which expects to be ′raised to the status of a science′ with the Phenomenology of Spirit, the conceptual movement which strives for lordship over contradictoriness by settling it – becomes equated with the essence of philosophy. One more step and the metaphysician of absolute spirit, for whom the world is always right, could be called the consistent positivist.
Concept of Intuition
Bergson sought to cut through the Gordian knot, and his intuitionism bears ready comparison to Husserl′s essential insight. For he postulated an immediate-intuitive awareness of the living against conceptual-classificatory thought. His critique of scientism was unique in denouncing the triumph of the reified conventional copy over the authentic. With his dualism of two sorts of cognition and ′worlds′, however, he turned philosophy into a reserve and thus paradoxically re-incorporated it right back into reified life, such as contributes to the sense of the entirety of late bourgeois irrationalism, which Bergson otherwise so thoroughly transcends in depth of experience and proximity to the phenomenon, just as impressionism towers over neo-Romantic ideologies.
In the mechanism of reification of thought, ordering conceptuality – which Bergson blames for all the mischief, though it is itself merely a derivative of mercantile society – just constitutes a moment.2 On the other hand, living knowledge, whose salvation is Bergson′s concern, certainly does not dispose in itself of a ′foreign′ faculty of knowledge. Such an assumption, rather, reflects the split between method and matter which belongs to the realm Bergson detests. Bergson shares with bourgeois thought the belief in isolable and true method. He just assigns to it precisely those attributes which since Descartes have been denied it. He never realized that, whenever a well-defined method has been made independent of its changing objects, then rigidity has already been sanctioned which the magic glance of intuition is supposed to dissolve. Experience in the emphatic sense – the net of ungarbled cognition, such as may serve as a model for philosophy – differs from science not through a higher principle or apparatus, but rather through the use which it makes of its materials, especially the conceptual (which as such match those of science), and through its position towards objectivity. What Bergson calls intuition cannot be denied in such experience, but neither can it be hypostatized. The intuitions which intertwine with concepts and ordering forms achieve more legality with the expansion and hardening of socialized and organized existence. But those acts do not constitute an absolute source of knowledge, cut off from discursive thought by an ontological abyss. They certainly seem precipitate and occasionally involuntary (though artists know that they can also be commanded). And they break open the closed structure of deductive procedures. But this does not mean that they have tumbled from heaven. Only the positivists thought of them in that way, though Bergson′s roots, like Husserl′s, are not far from positivism. Rather, they make succeed what with better knowledge escapes the conversion in which anti-intellectualism and science come to an understanding.
The suddenness of intuition competes in its resistance to social control, which wants to scare thoughts out of their hiding place. So-called inspirations are neither as irrational, nor as rhapsodical, as both Bergson and scientism claim. Unconscious knowledge not entirely subject to mechanisms of control explodes in inspiration and bursts through the wall of conventionalized judgements ′fitting reality′. Since they do not participate in the manipulative activity of ego-regulated cognition, but rather passively and spontaneously recall what organizational thought calls sheer scandal in things, they are in fact ′ego-alien′. But whatever is at work in rational cognition also enters into inspirations – sedimented and newly remembered – in order to turn for an instant against all the devices over whose shadow thought by itself cannot leap. Discontinuity in intuition does honour to continuity falsified by organization. Only lightning bolts of knowledge are saturated with memory and prescience. Official and ′obligatory′ knowledge, as Bergson indeed saw, fall as such directly out of time and memory. The cognizer is overwhelmed at the moment of intuition and delivered out of subsumption alone and from the current present of past judgements, conclusions and especially relations whose unification brings to light what in the object is more than a placeholder in the systematic. In intuitions ratio recollects what it forgot. In this sense, which he certainly hardly intended, Freud was right when he attributed its own sort of rationality to the unconscious.
Intuition is not a simple antithesis to logic. Intuition belongs to logic, and reminds it of the moment of its untruth. As the blind spots in the process of cognition – from which they still cannot escape – intuitions prevent reason from reflecting upon itself as a mere form of reflection of arbitrariness, in order to prepare an end for arbitrariness. In non-arbitrary memory, arbitrary thought seeks, however hopelessly, something to cure it from what it must nevertheless perpetrate. Bergson did not realize that. By passing intuitions off as the immediate voice of that life which nevertheless continues to live only as mediated, he diluted them to an abstract principle that quickly allies itself with the abstract world against which it had been devised. The construction of pure immediacy, the negation of everything rigid, leads him in the text on laughter to say:
Every temperament is comic, as long as we understand by temperament what is finished about our personality, the set mechanism about us, which can function automatically.3
But he sees temperament as nothing more than ′obduracy against social life′.4 That is, that resistance which is the truth of intuition. The absolutization of intuitive cognizing corresponds practically to a mode of procedure of absolute adaptation. Whoever neglects to ′remain attentive to what surrounds him′ and elects to ′shut himself up in his temperament as in an ivory tower′,5 is rejected.
Whoever wishes to change petrified relations stamped out by mechanistic concepts needs just that. No concept of the living can be thought unless it includes a moment of the identically persisting. The abstract negation of mediation, the cult of pure contemporaneity, which opposes this, thereby falls right into conventions and conformism. While Bergson expunges the societal callouses from spirit, he surrenders it to social reality which causes them.
Husserl′s Scientism
Husserl′s attempt to break the spell of reification through philosophical meditations and ′to come to grips′ with ′the things themselves′ in ′originary dator intuition′, as phenomenologists liked to say, remains, by its proper intention and in contrast to Bergson, in harmony with science. He, of course, submits science to the verdict of philosophy, but at the same time acknowledges it as the ideal of philosophy. Thus he seems incomparably more academic than Bergson. In spite of the expression, ′To the things themselves!′, his texts are still, in their most fruitful sections, generally formal and full of terminological distinctions. He also speaks of the ′stream′ of consciousness, but his conception of truth is traditional, i.e. static and timeless. He seeks to surpass science in sobriety. His considerable capacity for verbal presentation stays hermetically non-artificial (kunstfremd). His thought is non-radical and contemplative and burdened beforehand with everything against which it remonstrates.
But since he does not deny his antagonistic relationship in itself to science, but rather lets it work itself out, he avoids the fraud of irrationalism that abstract negation has power over reification. He ingeniously scorns the powerless fate of an approach which ignores its opponent, instead of appropriating his power. The less reconciled contradictions appear in his philosophy, the more evident their necessity, which intuitionism blithely ignores. And the closer their un-self-conscious development comes to that of truth. Husserl accepts thinking in its reified shape, but he follows it so incorruptibly that it eventually surpasses itself. His programme thinks philosophy as a ′rigorous science′6 involving the ′suspension of all sciences… natural and moral, as sciences, with all the knowledge they have accumulated …′7. And indeed this includes not only, as he wishes, the specialized sciences ′which require the natural attitude′,8 but even ′pure logic as mathesis universalis ′,9 without which the very concept of a rigorous science would be meaningless, though Husserl so qualifies phenomenology. Thought and consciousness as ′spheres of being of absolute origins′10 are dealt with under the primacy of the scientific ideal as a pure research subject, purified from all prejudice and theoretical supplement.
But consciousness thus congeals into what, by essence and possibility, should just arise out of it. Thought ′observed′ by thought reduces to an objective existent and an element which passively registers such objectivity. The form of phenomenological description borrowed from the sciences, which is supposed to add nothing to thought, does change it in itself. Thought is driven out of thought. Despite the reduction of the natural world, that is the strict fact of the case with reification. Even the doctrine of ′logical absolutism′ is prototypical of that. Husserl was not just the first to work intensively with it. He also developed it into the theory of the ideal state-of-affairs, resulting in the construction of essential insight (Wesensschau), the point at which the extremes of Husserl and Bergson meet. Irrationalism clings inalienably to European rationalism.
Dialectic in Spite of Itself
Nothing could be further from Husserl than the assessment of such interactions. The concept of science, on which his conception of philosophy rests, clings to the sense of the late nineteenth century for the triumph of solid research work over dialectical and speculative delusion. Any dialectic in his philosophy occurs in spite of itself, and can be extracted from it only with the force of its own consistency. Along with most of his contemporaries in Germany, Husserl took the appearance of sophistry in the dialectic at face value. Never does he speak of Hegel otherwise than scornfully, even though the name ′phenomenology′ may have been chosen in recollection of the one of spirit. He speaks the language of scientific rancour against a reason which does not capitulate before common sense.
In the factical thought of normal persons the actual denial of a law of thought does not usually occur, but it can scarcely be said that it cannot thus occur, since great philosophers like Epicurus and Hegel have denied the law of non-contradiction. Perhaps genius and madness are in this respect allied, perhaps there are also lunatic rejectors of the laws of thought: these will certainly also have to count as men.11
Even when Husserl regarded his own task to be a ′critique of logical reason′, he still protected himself against the suspicion that his concern was a ′merely frivolous inquiry of a dialectic that argues back and forth between sceptical negativism and relativism and logical absolutism′.12 The Cartesian Meditations are similarly obdurate.
This idealism [that of Husserl′s later transcendental philosophy] is not a product of sportive argumentations, a prize to be won in the dialectical contest with ′realism′.13
The inflexibility of such dogmatic positivity, which cannot imagine the ′contest′ or conceptual movement otherwise than as shadow boxing, is all the more surprising – protesting resistance to the pull of his own thought – since the mature Husserl rejected the positivity of the sciences in an almost orthodox Hegelian fashion.
For such a grounding is now the incessant demand; everywhere it is what makes a scientific purpose specifically philosophic; everywhere it makes the difference between genuine science, which is nothing other than philosophy, and science in naive positivity (which can be accepted only as a stage preliminary to genuine science and not as genuine science itself).14
Before Husserl followed scientific usage and warned philosophy against concept constructions. Now he rejects as naive the idea of science that strutted forth in such a warning. Hence the phenomenologist must let himself reproach another philosopher who confronts no contradictions, namely Wilhelm Wundt, to the effect that
he himself in the second volume of his work falls to a logicism such as disappeared from history since the days of scholastic conceptual and verbal dialectic.15
A Head-Start for Science
Yet Husserl′s philosophy was motivated scientifically as a ′philosophical clarification′16 of pure mathematics and logic which is supposed to rely upon the success of the sciences.
Whether a science is truly a science, or a method a method, depends on whether it accords with the aims that it strives for. Logic seeks to search into what pertains to genuine, valid science as such, what constitutes the idea of science, so as to be able to use the latter to measure the empirically given sciences as to their agreement with their idea, the degree to which they approach it, and where they offend against it. In this logic shows itself to be a normative science, and separates itself off from the comparative mode of treatment which tries to conceive of the sciences, according to their typical communities and peculiarities, as concrete cultural products of their era, and to explain them through the relationships which obtain in their time.17
Sentences of this sort appear at the outset of far-reaching theoretical discussions as plausible and even indifferently self-evident. But they hide what remains to be proved. Husserl′s concept of logic presupposes the success of the sciences as its supreme court. It also assigns its field to the system of the sciences. Scientificity is measured by the purposiveness of the means – the method – versus the ′goal′ which is not even considered. This is quite similar to Max Weber′s theory of purposive rationality. The stringency of its own foundational structure serves as a criterion for scientificity, and not a relation to things of whatever sort.
But then even logic is tacitly detached from thought. It is not supposed to be the form of thought so much as that of current science. Since research assumes the existence of science, the thread between logic and history is snapped, before the reasoning leading to it even gets off the ground. The analysis of the formal constituents of science is supposed to show what logic is. History, however, is concerned with the sciences only as ′concrete cultural products of a time′, and not as such with the thought functions which have sedimented in the sciences. How these functions have been formed in the operation between subjective and objective moments, and what the precipitate of their analysis may be, all remains outside the cautious line of demarcation of scientific ′regions′.
That is how the spiritual division of labour affects the immanent shapes of questions which arise as if they were pre-ordained before any subject matter. Husserl′s logical absolutism mirrors in its own foundation the fetishization of the sciences, which mistake themselves and their hierarchy as an entity in itself. In fact, Husserl says in the passage of the ′Prolegomena to Pure Logic′ which outlines the relationship between philosophy and mathematics (for Husserl throughout the equivalent of pure logic): ′The nature of the matter really demands a thoroughgoing division of labour here.′18 Then the interdisciplinary quarrel is arbitrated in the sense of the hierarchical priority of the deductive sciences.
It is not the mathematician, but the philosopher, who oversteps his legal bounds when he attacks ′mathematicizing′ theories of logic, and refuses to hand over his temporary foster-children to their natural parents.19
The only worry which bothers him is ′If the development of all true theories falls in the domain of mathematics, what is left over for philosophers?′20 Even if the left-over were the formal characteristica of thought, positive science lays claim to precedence over its self-reflection. Science declares it is a ′domain′ by right of possession. But the more abstract and isolated the scientific ′area′, the greater the temptation and readiness to hypostatize it. The drive to disconnection as the possibility of science itself knows no bounds, for the bound-setting procedure of science is raised to a metaphysical principle.
Meanwhile we cannot suspend transcendents without limit. Transcendental purification cannot mean the suspension of all transcendents, for that might leave behind a pure consciousness, but no possibility of a science of pure consciousness.21
The critical, idealistic reference of every sort of objecthood – even that of science – back to the immanence of consciousness must not touch the prerogative of science. The analysis, which precedes all science, of what is encountered in pure consciousness must treat even that as a scientific object.
This paradox is the key to all phenomenology. Scientific reification is entrusted to the foundation of objecthood and science. Husserl, the transcendental philosopher, who approves of the entire positivistic critique of post-Kantian Idealism, does not venture with Fichte to equate science to the absolute. But he will concede none of its primacy. Thus the idealistic hunt for the transcendental must first be called off and the bracketing of the transcendent interrupted. The transcendental is replaced by an ideal of knowledge which, despite all ′reductions′, is derived from the empirically available sciences. This is Husserl′s deepest resemblance to Kantian resignation. The question becomes not whether but how science is possible, and any other is branded as groundless speculation. None of Husserl′s intellectual operations, however radically they may behave, ever give credence to the thought of the vanity of the sciences such as was harboured by Agrippa von Nettelsheim in the early period of bourgeois humanism.
In the Cartesian Meditations, the ideal of philosophy and that of science – ′universal science′ – remain the same. Philosophy is described faithfully to the schema of Cartesian rationalism as a hierarchy of scientific cognitions.22 Though, in comparison with the unrefined Descartes, the project of doubt appears to be extended to the sciences, Husserl means no more than that the unreflective ′purported′ sciences, including formal logic, should also justify themselves before a more rigorous concept of science, that of the seamless stratification of layers of evidence. Husserl does not worry about whether science is true, but rather whether the sciences are scientific enough. Turning established scientific methodology back to the legitimization of science itself in critique is as little an issue for Husserl as for any of his positivist opponents.
This explains why even for the later Husserl truth remains a reified advance, to be grasped ′descriptively′. Even the idealistic motifs of creation and origin petrify before the scientific glance into ascertainable states-of-affairs. His philosophy never gives credence to spontaneous participation in the process of creation, and thus also never to intervention into reality. Throughout the phenomenologist fancies himself as a ′researcher′ who discovers and maps out ′areas′. He takes literally the Kantian metaphor of a ′land of truth′ (′enchanting name′).23 The very term ′ontology′ and later the attacks on scientific systematics could be motivated by Husserl′s wish to raise the system of the sciences to an absolute.
The highest universals of each and every scientific subject realm are supposed, according to Husserl′s conception, to match propositions of the highest formal type which cannot be further reduced. Their content is called ontology, and this is perhaps more in the spirit of Aristotle and Thomas, just as the newer ontologies held the floor in the beginning. Husserl′s model at all stages is mathematics, in spite of the objection in Ideas that it not be confused with philosophy.24 If in the ′Prolegomena′ a value distinction is drawn within knowledge according to the standard of law-likeness,25 then such mathematicism in form dominates all of Husserl′s thought, up to the end, even where he was no longer content with the ′clarification of logic′, but rather aimed at the critique of logical reason. Even though the Husserl of the phenomenological reductions may have ′bracketed out′ the natural thing world, his own philosophizing had never qualified itself in any other way than by the form of sublimated apprehension of the reified, as it is sketched in the relation of consciousness to insight into mathematical ′states-of-affairs′.
′Realism′ in Logic
That Husserl reverts to the beginnings of bourgeois philosophy, remains untroubled by Hegel′s critique in the Science of Logic, and attributes primacy to mathematics, all occur because of mathematical ′purity′. The mathematician ′never asks about the possible actuality of manifolds …′.26 The analytic character of mathematics protects it from any intrusion by unforeseen experience. Thus unconditioned certainty and security matches its a priority.
Husserl divulges the price. ′This purity in restricting the theme to objective senses in their own essentialness – to ″judgements″ in the amplified sense – can also be exercised as it were unconsciously.′27 The term ′unconsciously′ indicates that the accomplishment of mathematical acts is independent not only from ′questions of possible actuality′, but also from reflection on their own detachment. It is indeed possible that as a science, mathematics requires such an unconsciousness of execution. Objectively, however, this ultimately undermines the very concept of truth. Blank manipulating is the bewitched form in which draining praxis, cut off from both theory and the quality of its objects, returns to theory. The question of any sort of meaning is replaced under the primacy of mathematics by a sort of faded, technical thought activity which perplexes whoever is concerned with meaning, while the mathematician smells sabotage to the machinery in any question of meaning and thus forbids it.
The mathematician′s resolute unconsciousness testifies to the connection between division of labour and ′purity′. The mathematician is concerned with ideal objects like the paleontologist is with fossils. The blind acknowledgement of an externally posited thematic (as Husserl′s manner of speaking throughout expects of philosophy also) releases the mathematician, according to Husserl, from the obligation to execute those acts which could reveal his ′subject area′ (Sachgebiet) as a moment of the whole and the actual. Philosophy repeats what is substantially proven enough times and consecrates ignorance as the legal source for security. But the more hermetically the unconsciousness of the mathematician seals his propositions against any inkling of involvements, the more perfectly pure forms of thought, from which memory is expunged in abstraction, come to appear as the sole ′reality′. Its reification is the equivalent for the fact that it was broken loose from that objecthood without which the issue of ′form′ would not even arise. Unconscious objecthood returns as the false consciousness of pure forms. It produces a naive realism of logic. All of Husserl′s realistic motifs emulate it and that realism motivates his attempt to break out of the epistemological theory of immanence.
The Logical In-Itself
Husserl′s talk of a ′pure logic ″dogmatically″ treated′28 expresses the fact that, in his transcendental philosophy phase, he also finally lost his patience with naive realism in logic. For this reason, he wished in his old age to explain logical reason by means of pure consciousness.
He already ran into that problem, however, in his original formulation of logical absolutism. For among the ′ ″conditions of the possibility″ of any theory whatever′,29 he includes the subjective.
The theory which validates knowledge is itself a piece of knowledge: its possibility depends on certain conditions, rooted, in purely conceptual fashion, in knowledge and its relation to the knowing subject. It is, e.g. part of the notion of knowledge, in the strict sense, that it is a judgement that does not merely claim to state truth but is also certain of this claim′s justification, and actually possesses the justification in question. If the judging person were never in a position to have direct personal experience and apprehension of his judgement′s self-justifying character, if all his judgements lacked that inner evidence which distinguishes them from blind prejudices, and yields him luminous certainties, it would be impossible to provide a rational account and a foundation for knowledge, or to discourse on theory and science.30
All this is already inferred in a transcendental philosophical manner from the consistency of reflection. It must not be allied to ′logical absolutism′. For the validity of logical propositions ′in themselves′ is supported by – and restricted to – the demand for possible evidence in human consciousness. As a result all the epistemological worries, which logical absolutism had sought to ban, creep in once again. Husserl′s rational impulse not only grappled with the dogmatic foundation of logic in psychology, but also logical dogmatism. It induced that turn which exposed him to the cheap reproach that he only eliminated psychologism to later smuggle it back in. The claim to a logical in-itself dissolves. The knowledge of the conditions of the possibility of logic itself is just divested of any movement of spontaneity and subordinated to the positivistic ideal of the sheer acceptance (Hinnehmens) of irreducible facts, i.e. ′givens′. That occurs through the concept of evidence. The central role of that concept in all of Husserl′s thought is explained by the fact that evidence promises to cover the contradictory demands of foundation through recourse to the subjective and of observation of irreducible ′absolute′ states-of-affairs.
A theory, therefore, violates the subjective conditions of its possibility as a theory, when, following our example, it in no way prefers an inwardly evident judgement to a blind one. It thereby destroys the very thing that distinguishes it from an arbitrary, unwarranted assertion.31
Hence the positivistic ideal of sense–certainty is already rudimentarily expanded and turned to its critical function. The demand for immediate givenness is transferred to the mental realm. The construction of categorial intuition comes close to making logical states-of-affairs in-themselves, absolute and yet in need of rational foundations. The later doctrine of such construction is nothing more than the incantation of evidence. But without such an auxiliary concept, in which the being-in-itself of the spiritual and its subjective justification converge, Husserl could not manage. If there are ′subjective conditions of the possibility of a theory′, which arise in a structure of judgements, one cannot assert that logical theory is an in-itself. And yet Husserl must insist precisely on that from the outset. The same postulate of the ′independence from experience′, that amounts to the ′realistic′ construction of the logical in-itself and deals with logic and mathematics as if they were just there, demands both the ideality of logic and mathematics and their purity from the factual. Reification and idealization become correlates of this philosophy – and not at this point alone. If logical propositions were legitimized by the analysis of the ′how′ of their ′appearance′ – i.e. in consciousness, experiencing them – then the question of constitution would be broached and some existent would not be far behind. Logical propositions can only be ′experienced′ at all as related to some sort of entity. Only thus is there motivation for their eventual execution. Otherwise their conception is empty – which is attributed to logical rigour, though the thought of logic does not gain insight into rigour.
Thus the naive realism of logic paradoxically merges with the assertion of the ideality of propositions in themselves over against entities. Thoughts must suspend themselves so that the privilege of self-sustaining absoluteness may be maintained for spirit alienated as logical automatism in which thought does not recognize itself. If science, however, is projected as a systematic, continuous immanent unity of ′propositions in themselves′, such as permeates Husserl, then it slips into the character of fetish. ′Consider, for example, Husserl′s phenomenological method where, in the final analysis, the whole realm of logic is transformed into a higher-order ″facticity″.′32 But to expressly posit the narrow-mindedness of a method measured into ′domains′33 and to see through such a method are by and large the same thing. By owning up to the reification of mathematics – and pure logic – Husserl reaches a second-level critique of positivism:
Here we must note that the mathematician is not really the pure theoretician, but only the ingenious technician, the constructor, as it were, who, looking merely to formal interconnections, builds up his theory like a technical work of art. As the practical mechanic constructs machines without needing to have ultimate insight into the essence of nature and its laws, so the mathematician constructs theories of numbers, quantities, syllogisms, manifolds, without ultimate insight into the essence of theory in general, and that of the concepts and laws which are its conditions.34
Presupposition of Logical Abolutism
The fetishistic aspect of such a thought, which breaks off unconcerned with moving by itself to consistency, is nowhere clearer than in Husserl′s discussion of F.A. Lange′s Logische Studien.
Only sheer ignoring of the plain meaning-content of the logical law could permit us to ignore the further fact that this content is not at all relevant, directly or indirectly, to the actual elimination of contradiction in thought. This actual elimination plainly only concerns the judgement experienced by one and the same individual in one and the same time and act: it does not concern affirmation if divided among different individuals and in different times and acts. For the factual element here relevant such distinctions are essential, but they do not affect the logical law at all. For this says nothing concerning the conflict among contradictory judgements, among real, dated acts of this or that character; it only speaks of the law-based incompatibility of the timeless ideal unities we call contradictory propositions. The truth that the members of such a pair of propositions are not both true, contains no shadow of an empirical assertion about any consciousness and its acts of judgement.35
Husserl criticizes the customary psychological grounding of logic to the effect that contradictory sentences cannot be unified in a single consciousness. Since the same judgement could be affirmed or denied by different individuals at different times, the argument does not suffice. But his reasoning is possible only because he isolates monadologically the consciousness of different individuals at different times. Collective unity in the execution of acts of consciousness, the social moment of the synthesis of thought, never enters his mind.
Since he does not concede that, but must acknowledge a validity of logical propositions reaching beyond the single individual, he finds himself forced to award an unmediated being in-itself to these propositions. If he were to conceive the subject of logical validity as social and in motion rather than as isolated and ′individual′, then he would not need to drive an ontological cleft between thought and its own laws. If thought in fact belonged just to monads, then it would be a miracle that all monads would think according to the same laws, and theory would have no way out other than to appropriate this miracle through Platonic realism of logic. Yet thought is pre-arranged through language and signs for every single individual. The individual′s intention to think ′for himself′ retains, in the utmost opposition to the universal, a moment of illusion. The part of his thoughts which belongs to the individual thinker is negligible both in form and in content. That is true of the doctrine of the transcendental subject, which has priority over the empirical.
But Husserl is blinded by individualism, and the only consciousness he knows belongs to monads. Thus, since he perceives that the validity of logical propositions is not exhausted in the abstraction from the monad, he has to hypostatize that validity. The emancipation of the pure law of thought from thinking reverts to that standpoint, whose critique has been the content of philosophy since Aristotle. By obstinately seeing that principle through, science itself is sentenced to the very mythology which it had sought to annul.
Essence and Development (Entfaltung)
The paradoxical origin of the reification of logic in the abstraction from all facticity, is evident when the early Husserl concerns himself with the motivation of his work as the ′philosophical clarification′ of pure logic and mathematics.
The incomplete state of all sciences depends on this fact. We do not here mean the mere incompleteness with which the truths in a field have been charted, but the lack of inner clarity and rationality, which is a need independently of the expansion of science.36
Something in no way self-evident is again imputed self-evidence, viz. the dualism between the actual development of a science and its ′essence′ which is supposed to characterize it formally – the idealistic dualism of form and content. The factual progress of knowledge in the sciences is supposed to have nothing to do with what they are in themselves. If the clarification of logic is undertaken strictly according to that postulate, however, then the theory commits a petitio principii. Objectivity and ideality in logic – its reified being in-itself – which is supposed to be proved by philosophical critique, is already presupposed by a method which attributes to logic a rationality and clarity independent of the state of its development and is thus satisfied with substantiating it descriptively.
Hence more is at issue than the ′self-referentiality′ of logic which Husserl discussed later. It is certainly legitimate to apply logical propositions to logic. Otherwise no rational judgement could be made about it. But it is something else to question the essence of logic, which can only meaningfully be done if the answer is not prejudiced. Yet that occurs in Husserl′s assumption of a fact-free formal a priori which is, as a result, indifferent to the historical fact of scientific development. Arising only in a much advanced logic, whose constituents can be isolated, clarity and rationality are by their own essence laden with history. The fact that they first appear as results and are crystallized in the split between matter and method is not extrinsic to them, however obstinately they may resist that memory. Indifference to such a memory confers on the ′Prolegomena′ a unique impotence, despite its great merit over psychologism which is in fact the mere correlate of reified logic. The argument constantly assumes implicit premises which it would like to exhibit as explicit results. The shadow of what Husserl has excluded falls necessarily over the protected zone of purity – and the fundamental operation of his philosophy is one of exclusion; it is defensive through and through.
Thus Husserl did not deny that ′practice and association′ furnish essential and not simply accidental moments of every logical accomplishment. Thus, all the less can logic be cut off from thinking. Husserl sought to derive practice and association from the ′imprinted′ law-likeness of logical form.37 But he did not even raise the question, which was later so emphasized: how there can be pure logical cause of a psychic fact. Moreover, he is oddly undisturbed by the fact that those thought practices obviously belong to the factual performance of acts and not to pure form.
Calculators, Logic and Mechanics
Not only the presupposition of the argument for logical absolutism is controversial, however, but also the core of that argumentation itself. The passage in the first volume of the Logical Investigations, which contains the most compelling critique of psychologism, viz. the polemic against the belief that the laws of thought are ′supposed laws of nature which operate in isolation as causes of rational thought′38 is also the victim of reification. Husserl argues39 that it would be senseless to look upon logical laws as causal-psychological causes of the course of human thought. Calculators are constituted by ′natural laws′ in such a way that numbers come up as mathematical propositions require. Yet no one would cite arithmetical instead of mechanical laws to explain the functioning of the machine. The same applies to man. He of course also has ′insight′ into the correctness of what is thought through an ′other′ law-governed thinking, perhaps another machine. His thought apparatus as such, however, functions no differently from that of the calculator.
In fact, Husserl showed strikingly by means of his example that the psychological cannot be derived from logical propositions and that the latter are not to be identified with laws of nature. Of course, without the ideal ′validity′ of arithmetical propositions, the machine would have just as little chance of functioning as if it had not been organized according to the laws of mechanics. Even in the example, the split between spheres cannot succeed without a painful residue. But simile (which is not inconsequentially mechanical) cannot be applied to the living performance of insight at all. The impossibility of deducing factical thought performances from logical laws does not mean that there is a χωϱισμός between the two. Hence, the comparison with machines is deceptive. The fact that in machines the mathematical correctness of the results and the causal-mechanical conditions of their functioning seem to have nothing to do with each other is due solely to a disregard for the construction of the machine. That construction demands some sort of connection between arithmetical propositions and the physical possibility of operating according to them. Without such a connection the machine would not produce correct answers, though that is the point of constructing it. The synthesis of the two is brought about not by the machine but certainly by the consciousness of the constructor. The machine becomes a ′thing′ through the definitive establishment of the relation between logic and mechanics. But that relation disappears in individual operations. The work of the constructor is hardened in the machine. The subject, which synchronized causal-mechanical procedure with states-of-affairs, abstracts itself from the machine like the God of the Deists from his creation.
The unmediated dualism of reality and mathematics came about historically through a forgetting, viz. the withdrawal of the subject. That happened not only with machines, but also to man himself whenever his thought broke down into logical and psychological moments. The subject transmits to ontology his own cleavage into a disciplined mental functionary and an apparently isolated existent. Alienated from the subject, logical moments represent his encroaching. As thinker and actor, he is more than just himself. He becomes the bearer of social performance and also competes with the reality whose order precedes the divided being for-itself of his subjectivity. As psychological person, he does not feel alienated. But for his referral back to sheer self-identity, he must pay the price that the content of his consciousness is binding. Nor does he escape the fate from which the psychological person would like to be saved. Devoid of any relation to the universal, he shrivels up into a fact, succumbs to an external determination and yet also becomes a subjectless thing, a sort of solid unity of hardened subjectivity, like the law that governs him. The separate element lets as little come together from free and arbitrary thoughts in men as in machines. It is the social process which decides about separation and unification. Yet consciousness also remains the unity of separates. If self-alienation were radical, it would be death. Since it was caused by man, it also is an illusion.
This blinds the Husserl who is the unconscious but faithful historiographer of the self-alienation of thought. He projects self-alienation onto truth. Of course, he sees the limits of the machine analogy. But he hastily dismisses the objection.
The machine is no thought-machine, it understands neither itself nor the meaning of its performances. But our own thought-machine might very well function similarly, except that the real course of one kind of thought would always have to be recognized as correct by the insight brought forward in another.40
Yet even the hypothetical ′might′ at a central point in the argument must have puzzled the phenomenologist, who promised to abide purely by ′the things themselves′. But above all, the subject of the argumentation does not subsist out of several ′thinkings′ – the linguistic impossibility of a plural for ′thinking′ indicates a factual impossibility. Furthermore, the distinction between reflective and directly performed acts would not establish an absolute dualism outside the unity of self-consciousness. The very possibility of reflection presupposes the identity of the reflecting spirit with the subject of the acts which it reflects upon. But how could one assert a complete divergence between the cognitive legitimization of logical propositions and the factical performance of logical operations, if the two permeate each other in one and the same consciousness? The unity of thinking which becomes aware of the sense of its own operations when operating logically, can be ignored only for a thema probandum which shifts a distinction among scientific disciplines to the ground of being. Without that unity one could not even imagine the consistency of logic itself whose defence dragged Husserl into absolutism. The fact that judgements can be made at all about objecthood following logical laws would become a miracle if the thinking which performs such judgements did not both obey and comprehend logic. Husserl′s theory of a breach can itself be breached.
Reification of Logic
Husserl′s discussion of the ′goals of thought economy′ – the concept of which he appropriated from the positivist critique of knowledge of the end of the nineteenth century, particularly Mach and Avenarius – needs to be pushed just a bit further to reveal all. But he calls the mechanism of reification by name only to capitulate before it.
It is, e.g., a most serious problem how mathematical disciplines are possible disciplines not conducted in terms of relatively simple thoughts, but in which veritable thought-towers, and thought combinations intertwined in a thousand ways, are moved about with the most sovereign freedom, and are spawned in ever increasing intricacy by our researches. All this is due to art and method. They overcome the defects of our mental constitution, and permit an indirect achievement by way of symbolic processes from which intuitability, as well as all genuine understanding and evidence are rejected, but which are rendered secure because a general proof of the performance potential of the method has been once and for all guaranteed.41
The contradiction could not be characterized better than as a rejection of intuitability, understanding and evidence. That mathematical work could only be performed through reification and by abandoning the actualization of whatever is meant, contradicts the fact that it presupposes the performance of what it taboos as contamination, taking that to be the legal basis for its own validity.
By describing, but not resolving the facts of the case, Husserl already sanctioned the fetishism which would put forward its illusory aspect sixty years later in fascination with the wonderful improvement of calculators and the corresponding concern with the science of cybernetics. He uses a good simile when he speaks of mathematical ′thought-towers′, which are possible only because mathematical calculations are not performed in every operation by the mathematician, but rather take place between symbols. Accordingly the objectivity of mathematical procedure appears independent of subjective thought. Those ′towers′ are artefacts which present themselves as if they are natural. Thus – to continue the image – an old bit of masonry is perceived as an element of the landscape, for its social origin and purpose has been forgotten. But the tower is not a crag, even though it was constructed from the stone which colours the landscape. In a move characteristic of his whole method, Husserl diagnoses the reification of logic in order to ′assume′ it, and intentionally forgets again what logic had forgotten before.
The analogy is inevitable with vulgar economic thought which attributes value to goods in themselves and does not determine it through social relations. The mathematical method is ′artificial′ only in that it does not provide thought with self-awareness. But such ′artificiality′ directly transforms logic by magic into a second nature and lends it the aura of ideal being. For its sake Husserl retains mathematics within his philosophy as a sort of pre-philosophical model. He sees no scandal in the paradoxicality of ′thought machinery′.42 The sworn anti-positivist paradoxically encounters the logisticians also when he defines the products of the machinery which have been voided of living execution, viz. the universal arithmetical symbols for number concepts, as ′pure operational signs′,
i.e. as signs whose meaning is wholly determined by external types of operation, each sign counting as a mere something-or-other to which this or that definite thing can be done on paper.43
Husserl′s theory of language remains bound to the logicistic concept of the betting chip. For him words are simply ′sense signs′ and thus interchangeable.44 Logical absolutism sublates itself. Since Husserl dispenses concepts from their ′intelligibility′ (Einsichtigkeit), they necessarily become ′external forms of operation′, while their absolute validity for things becomes contingent. Rendering the formal self-evident and eternal and thus sparing it the confrontation with its own sense, also bisects the connection of what has been propounded as absolutely true with the idea of truth.
The Logical ′Object′
The first volume of the Logical Investigations propounds the thesis that logical propositions are valid for any and all possible judgements. Since they apply to any thinking at all of any object at all, they attain truth ′in itself′. Their validity has nothing to do with an object, simply because it concerns all objects. As in themselves, logical propositions are also supposed to be independent of acts which proceed logically or induce a logic reflected upon.
The talk of ′every object′, however, is ambiguous. The fact that every single object may be ignored, since formal logic applies to all, does signify that in the highest universality of the category ′object in general′, specific differences disappear altogether. What does not disappear, however, is the relationship of the propositions of logic to an ′object in general′. They hold only ′for′ objects. Logic can apply only to propositions; only propositions can be true or false. The law of non-contradiction, for example, could not be expressed without reference to the concept of contradictorily opposing propositions. But the concept of such propositions necessarily involves some content, not only because of the facticity of their proper execution, i.e. factual subjective judging, but also because of the material elements which underlie even the most abstract proposition, however mediated it may be, if it is going to mean anything at all, i.e. be a proposition.
Thus the talk of logic as in-itself is strictly not permissible. Its very possibility depends on existents, the propositions, with all that this existence involves, just as conversely the propositions depend on logic which they must satisfy in order to be true. Formal logic is functional and not ideal being. But if the ′Whereupon in general′ of phenomenologists is recognized as its constitutive condition, then the conditions of the possibility of such a ′Whereupon in general′ would also be those of formal logic. The ′Whereupon in general′ and the propositions which are subjected to logic, as syntheses, necessarily demand thinking, even when what is compelling in synthesis conceals the moment of spontaneity, and makes synthesis appear analogously to sense perception as the sheer passive registering of something purely objective. As a result, however, logical propositions also refer to a subject matter which does not just arise in the thinking that acts upon it.
By suppressing the subjective moment, thinking, as the condition of logic, Husserl also conjures away the objective, the subject matter of thought which is inscrutable in thought. Its place is taken by unilluminated thought which is thus extended to objectivity directly. Without suspecting it, logical absolutism is from the beginning absolute idealism. Only the equivocality of the term ′object in general′ permits Husserl to interpret the propositions of formal logic as objects without an object element.
In this way the mechanism of forgetting becomes that of reification. The appeal to Hegel′s Logic, for which abstract being comes to nothing, just as in Husserl′s ′object in general′ all objecthood can be eliminated, is useless. Hegel′s ′Being, pure being – without any further determination′45 cannot be confused with the highest Husserlian substratum category, ′object in general′. Mainly Husserl feels no doubt about the law of identity. Concepts remain what they are. Husserl′s ′nothingness′, the elimination of facticity in the interpretation of logical states-of-affairs, demands absolute validity as an isolating judgement. Hence his terms have to relate to his own pet method, critical analysis of meaning.
Autosemantic and Synsemantic Expressions
Such an analysis is cleverly implemented in Oskar Kraus′ Introduction to Brentano′s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint :
It is of utmost importance that we should be clear about the term ′object′ (Gegenstand, Objekt). When it is used to mean the same as ′the case′ (Sache), thing, or real entity (Reales), then it is an expression having a meaning of its own – it is autosemantic. In this case it refers simply to what we comprehend by the most universal concept that we can obtain by abstraction from perceptual data; and Brentano treats it as equivalent to the expressions ′entity′ (Wesen), ′the case′ (Sache) and real thing (Reales). But when ′object′ is used in constructions such as ′to have something as an object′, it has no meaning of its own, but rather a relative meaning, since this construction can be completely conveyed by the expression ′to have something in mind′ – it is synsemantic. We can illustrate the ambiguity and occasional synsemantic meaning of the word ′object′ by pointing out the equivalence of the two sentences ′I have something, i.e. a thing, a real entity as an object′ and ′I have something, i.e. an object, as an object′. In the latter sentence, the first occurrence of ′object′ stands for thing or real entity. It exemplifies the autosemantic use of the term, the second occurrence the synsemantic and means nothing in itself. Taken as a whole, the sentence is equivalent in meaning to ′I am thinking of a thing′, ′A thing appears to me′, ′A thing is a phenomenon of mine′, ′A thing is objectual to me or ″given″ or ″phenomenal″ or ″immanent″ ′, ′I have something objectually′.46*
Kraus′ demonstration of how a synsemantic concept may replace an autosemantic one characterizes meaning theoretically the result of reification, but, of course, does not develop it from its origin. Husserl′s neglect, even in his theory of logic, of its ′object in general′, i.e. its relation to objecthood which is implicit to the sense of logical propositions, and Kraus′ turning logic itself into an object, while working out the error, are just two different aspects of the same thing. Since no thinking can break out of the subject–object polarity, nor ever even establish it and determine either distinct moment independently of the other, the object which had been ejected in the hypostatization of pure logic returns within it. Logic becomes the object about which it had forgotten.
Logic necessarily misunderstands itself in its naiveté about its relation to objecthood. As pure form, logic takes credit for the stringency which is clearly gained in judgements about objects, and, as ontology, falsely appropriates it. But that affects not only the question of its ′foundations′, but also its internal architecture. The much discussed inflexibility of Aristotelian logic, which only Russell and Whitehead rendered supple again, could have been produced by the reification of logic. For it shut itself off from its own object sense all the more completely the more it was improved as an individual science.
Logical Laws and Laws of Thought
The reification of logic as the self-alienation of thought is equivalent to and modelled on the reification of what thinking relates to, namely the unity of objects which are coagulated into the thought at work in them, and so to identity. Hence, neglecting their changing content, the sheer form of their unity can be established. Such an abstraction remains the obvious presupposition of all logic. It takes its cue from the form of commodities whose identity consists in the ′equivalence′ of exchange values. By the same token, however, it also looks to a societal relation unperceptive about itself, false consciousness, the subject. Logical absolutism is two things. It is reflection in the subject of the reification which is performed by the subject, which itself ultimately becomes a thing. It is also the attempt to break the spell of universal subjectivization and intercept, by means of something straightforwardly irreducible, a subject which for all its power suspects itself of arbitrariness if not impotence. The most radical subjectivism becomes a fantasm of its own overcoming.
That is already Husserl′s schema in the ′Prolegomena to Pure Logic′. His mode of procedure is already, as in the later epistemology, a ′crossing out′ or ′bracketing out′. The reason is that residual concept of truth which, with the exception of Hegel and Nietzsche, is common to the whole of bourgeois philosophy. To this thought, truth appears as what ′remains left′ after one deducts its production costs, the wages of the labour, as it were, in short what in the vulgar language of science enslaved to positivism is ultimately called ′subjective factors′. A consciousness in possession of the unalterable and inscrutable and thus of the surrogate for experience, which it breaks down into classificatory categories, is indifferent as to whether this does not lead to the amputation of what is substantial in knowledge, the fullness and movement of its object. The instrument which dissolves all absolutes proclaims itself the absolute. Just as Faust could only hold on to Helen′s garments, ever-striving science consoles itself with the empty form of thought. Husserl calls himself a ′logical absolutist′47 not without letting on to a slight unease in the appeasing formula, ′sit venia verbo′. He means the ′laws of pure logic, independent of the peculiarities of the human mind′,48 whose concept is also introduced with the hesitant parenthesis, ′if there are such things′.
Accordingly logical absolutism far surpasses the critique of the psychological interpretation of logic as the derivation of its validity from the dynamics of the ′life of the soul′. It far surpasses the excellent proof that logical laws are not merely a bit of intrahuman soul. Husserl′s theory is absolutist rather because it denies any dependence of logical laws on entities at all as the condition of its possible sense. His theory expresses no relation between consciousness and object. Rather, a sort of being sui generis is passed off on to it.
We for our part would say: Universal likeness of content, and constant functional laws of nature which regulate the production of such content do not constitute a genuine universal validity.49
For him such ideality agrees with absoluteness.
If all creatures of a genus are constitutionally compelled to judge alike, they are in empirical agreement, but, in the ideal sense demanded by a supra-empirical logic, there might as well have been disagreement as agreement. To define truth in terms of a community of nature is to abandon its concept. If truth were essentially related to thinking intelligences, their mental functions and modes of change, it would arise and perish with them, with the species at least, if not with the individual. With the genuine objectivity of truth, the objectivity of being, even the objectivity of subjective being or the being of the subject, would be gone. What if, e.g., no thinking creature were capable of postulating its own being as truly existing? Then they would both be and not be. Truth and being are ′categories′ in the same sense, and plainly correlative: truth cannot be relativized, while the objectivity of being is maintained. The relativization of truth presupposes the objective being of the point to which things are relative: this is the contradiction in relativism.50
However conclusive that sounds, it nevertheless remains vulnerable to attack in detail. By cutting off the ′constraint′ of like judgements from the judging subject and foisting it on ideal logic, the moment of compulsion in such a constraint, which follows from the things, is also neglected. This moment holds true only in the synthesis of judgement performed by the subject. Without constitutive mediation through thought, ostensible ideal laws could in no sense be applied to reality. Ideal being would not even have to do with real being as its ′form′. What Husserl takes as highest objectivity, ′logic elevated above everything empirical′, would in such elevation be condemned to sheer subjectivity. Its relation to the real would obtain by chance.
Even the plausible and perhaps convincing thesis in relation to empiricism that the concept of truth would be abandoned, if it is determined by the ′community of nature′, proves to be abstract negation and too crude. The thought of truth is exhausted neither in the subject, even the transcendental subject, nor in pure ideal lawfulness. Rather, it demands the relation of the. subject to states-of-affairs. And this relation – and thus the objectivity of truth – likewise comprises thinking subjects, which, by fulfilling the synthesis, are brought to synthesis by things. Synthesis and constraint, meanwhile, cannot be isolated from each other. The objectivity of truth really demands the subject. Once cut off from the subject, it becomes the victim of sheer subjectivity. Husserl sees only the rigid alternative between the empirical, contingent subject – and the absolutely necessary ideal law purified of all facticity. This is not to say, however, that truth arises in neither of those. Rather it is a constellation of moments which cannot be reckoned a ′residuum′ of either the subjective or of the objective side.
In seeking a reductio ad absurdum of ′subjectivistic′ logic, Husserl insinuates that the same thinking creatures (Wesen) ′would both be and not be′, if their disposition were to forbid them ′to posit their own being as truly existing (seiend)′. The absurdity is supposed to consist in the fact that such creatures, in spite of their defects, would indeed ′be′. But without the possibility of thinking, to which the concept of the subject is immanent, logical absolutism itself would be senseless. The apparently striking absurdity occurs only because Husserl in one instance assumes contingent psychophysical persons and in another logical laws. Persons certainly have no immediate power over such laws. Yet they are mediated by a concept of subjectivity which surpasses psychophysical individuals without simply eliminating them. Rather it preserves them as a moment of its own foundation.
Truth is as little identified by an ideality which is constituted only in virtue of a blindness to the factical implicates of ideality, as it is by the sheer facticity of subjective organization. Both the empiricist and the idealistic theory fall short of truth because they pin it down as an entity – Husserl calls it ′being′. Truth is, rather, a field of force. Certainly ′truth cannot be relativized while the objectivity of being is maintained′. But in place of such objectivity Husserl himself inserts its copy, pure form. For he cannot conceive of objectivity otherwise than as static and reified.
Aporia of Logical Absolutism
The idolization of logic as pure being demands an unconditioned split between genesis and validity. Otherwise the logical absolute would be compounded with entities and – accepting the standard of the χωϱισμός – with the contingent and the relative. Husserl developed the split polemically against empiricism. According to him, psychologism, when dealing with logical theory, ′tends always to confuse the psychological origin of certain universal judgements in experience, on account of some supposed ″naturalness″, with a justification of the same judgements′.51
This elucidation of the terms does not really come to terms with the things themselves. It in no way follows from the fact that the generation and justification of judgements should not be ′confused′, but rather that validity is something quite different from genesis, that the explication of the sense of validation features does not refer back to genetic moments as their necessary condition. Husserl, by the way, tacitly conceded this in his later transcendental philosophy, without expressly emending the thesis of logical absolutism. Insofar as the relation of logical validity to genesis is necessary, this relation itself belongs to logical sense which must be explained or ′awakened′. Husserl presented forcibly and with much authority the antinomies into which logical psychologism falls. But the unmediated opposing position of absolutism involves itself in no less harmful antinomies.
Two interpretations are possible of a logic whose validity is absolute and independent of all genesis and thus ultimately of all entities. Consciousness confronts logic and its ′ideal laws′. If consciousness wishes to substantiate the claim of logic as founded and not crudely assume it, then logical laws must be reasonable to thought. In that case, however, thinking must recognize them as its own laws, its proper essence. For thinking is the content of logical acts. Pure logic and pure thought could not be detached from each other. The radical dualism between logic and consciousness would be sublated, and the subject of thought would enter along into the foundation of logic….
Instead Husserl renounces, for the sake of the purity of the claim to absoluteness, the foundation of logic as a form which is immanent to thought and transparent to it as its own essence. In that case, however, logic would be given purely ′phenomenally′ (to transfer an epistemological expression to the most formal states-of-affairs) to consciousness and not evident ′in itself′. Consciousness would know logic not as something that merely appears to consciousness to be accepted as heteronomous, but rather as true only if logic itself were the knowledge of consciousness. If it were merely registered and accepted as a higher order ′phenomenon′, the purity of the logical a priori may indeed be saved. Yet logic then also forfeits the character of unconditioned validity which is just as inviolable for logical absolutism as ideal purity. Its laws would then be valid only in the framework of its ′appearing′. They would remain dogmatic, unproven and contingent. Paradoxically they would become rules of experience and absolutism would turn into empiricism. If other logical laws were to ′appear′ to consciousness, then it would have to submit to those just as it does to the laws of current logic. The phenomenologist would find himself precisely in that situation whose possibility Husserl himself denied to an angelic logic.52 As Husserl refuses to concede to Erdmann, it may be ′that other beings might have quite different logical principles …′.53
Both interpretations of the absolutistic claim lead just as much to aporia as the psychologistic counterposition. Logic is not being, but rather a process (Prozeβ) which cannot be reduced purely to either a ′subjectivity′ or an ′objectivity′ pole. The consequence of the self-critique of logic is the dialectic.
Relating Genesis and Validity
Husserl, however, lays the greatest stress on the contrast between genesis and validity.
The question is not how experience, whether naive or scientific, is generated, but what must be its content if it is to have objective validity: we must ask on what ideal elements and laws such objective validity of knowledge of the real is founded – more generally, on what any knowledge is founded – and how the performance involved in knowledge should be properly understood. We are, in other words, not interested in the origins and changes of our world-representation, but in the objective right which the world-representation of science claims against any other world-representation, which leads it to call its world the objectively true one.54
The thesis that what matters is not how experience is generated, but rather what content it would have to have to become objectively valid experience, ignores the fact that the content of experience is itself a ′generating′ in which subjective and objective moments are chemically united, so to speak. Judgements must both express some thingly content and originate it through synthesis. Only if the immanent tension within judgement is misunderstood, can the ′generation′ of content be disregarded.
In fact, Husserl is not even concerned with content, in spite of his comments, but rather solely with the distilled form of the judgement. Thus, he eludes the very dynamic which is at play in the logical ′state-of-affairs′ itself. The dualism of form and content is the schema of reification. Husserl explains that ′we′, viz. future logicians, are interested not in becoming, but rather in the objective justice of the scientific representation of the world. Thus he arrogantly enthrones the ′interest′, which is dictated by the scientific division of labour, as the criterion of the ontological dignity of ostensibly unchanging being as opposed to sheer becoming. The word ′interest′, which points to an arbitrary turning to oneself, betrays, against Husserl′s intention, the fact that such dignity arises not from the logical state-of-affairs in itself, but from the ′attitude′ of a science, which anxiously fences itself off from the structure of science as a whole for the sake of its own putative dignity. The non-interest of the logician in the ′transformation of the representation of the world′, credits only the opalescence of such a concept for the illusion of its evidence.
Logic is right not to worry about the transformation of the representation of the world as mere representation. It is wrong, however, to the extent that this representation is of the transformation of the world. The ′objective right which the world-representation of science claims as against any other′, does not, as Husserl would like, have its God-given ground in the ′idea of science′, but rather finds its measure and limit in the capacity of science to know its object. The division of labour both helps and hinders it from knowledge. Husserl′s rigid objectivism of the logical proves to be a self-deceiving subjectivism also because the idea of science – the schema of order imposed on objects by human consciousness – is handled as if the need indicated in this schema were the order of the objects themselves. Every static ontology naively hypostatizes the subjective-categorial.
Genesis and Psychology
Husserl makes things easy on himself in his polemic against the genetic interpretation of logic, because he confines himself to ′psychologism′. The genetic interpretation of logical laws must supposedly turn to the processes of consciousness in the psychological subject, the single human individual, as its ultimate substratum. That, of course, allows him to present the difference between psychological foundation in individual conscious acts and the objectivity of logical content.
But the implicit genesis of the logical is certainly not psychological motivation. It is a sort of social behaviour. According to Durkheim, logical propositions contain a deposit of social experiences such as the order of generation and property relations which claim priority over the being and consciousness of the individual. Both compelling and alienated from individual interest, these relations constantly confront the psychological subject as something valid and compelling in itself and yet as arbitrary also. This is also the case with Husserl′s ′propositions in themselves′ though much against his will. The power of logical absolutism over the psychological grounding of logic is borrowed from the objectivity of the social process which subjects individuals to compulsion while remaining opaque to them. Husserl′s scientific reflection unreflectively takes the position of the individual within this social situation. He raises logic to an entity in itself just as pre-critical consciousness did to things. As a result, he correctly asserts that the laws of thought of the individual – psychologically speaking, of the ego, whose categories are indeed turned towards reality, and are formed in reciprocal action with reality, and are therefore ′objective′ – do not receive their objectivity from the individual. The judgement that society is organized before the individual prevails in a distorted form.
The priority of the individual, the self-deception of traditional liberalism, is shattered by Husserl′s post-liberal conception. But the ideology, nevertheless, maintains its power over him. The social process which he never understood was just the truth for him. Its objectivity was spiritualized into the ideal being of propositions in themselves.
Thinking and Psychologism
The response of the reference of logic back to thought and thus to entities is too suggestive not to have occurred to Husserl.
It is irrelevant to object that talk of logical laws could never have arisen had we not lived experiences of representations and judgements, and abstracted the relevant, basic logical concepts from them, or that, wherever we understand and assert such laws, the existence of representations and judgements is implied, and can therefore be inferred. We need hardly observe that this does not follow from our law, but from the fact that we understand and assert such a law, and that a like consequence could be inferred from every assertion. One ought not, further, to confuse the psychological presuppositions or components of the assertion of a law, with the logical ′moments′ of its content.55
What one ′need hardly observe′ skates over the central difficulty. For the issue is not a mere subjective ′understanding and assertion′ of a law, independent of the state-of-affairs and arbitrarily performable. Rather, the claim to the law′s absoluteness is equivalent to the claim to its correctness, and this latter cannot be gained otherwise than by current ′representations and judgements′. The ′law′s′ ′understanding and assertion′ cannot be contrasted with it as an irrelevant mode of behaviour on the part of the observer where the law as ′law of thought′ demands that it be thought to be legitimized, and where it can be stated only as a law for thinking – and ′understanding′.
The mistake of logical psychologism is to derive the validity of logical propositions immediately from the psychic-factual, though this validity has become autonomous of factical psychic ′realization′. But the analysis of the sense of logical structure itself demands the reference to thought. No logic without propositions and no propositions without the synthetic function of thought. Husserl has drawn attention to the fact that the psychological presupposition of the assertion of a law may not be confused with its logical validity. But clearly logical laws are only ′meaningful′ (sinnvoll) and can only be known, when they are inherently matched to the acts of thought which discharge them.
The sense of logic itself demands facticity. Otherwise, it could not be grounded rationally. Its ideality is not a pure in-itself, but rather must always also be for another, if it is to be anything at all. Husserl is correct when he contests the immediate identity of insight and state-of-affairs, genesis and validity, for developed scientific consciousness and the irrevocable position of alienation. He is wrong when he hypostatizes the difference.
The Law of Non-Contradiction
Husserl does not stop there. He expands his critique to the logical arch-principles of the law of non-contradiction and the law of identity. He sees Heyman and Sigwart as primarily responsible for the psychologistic misinterpretation of the law of non-contradiction, and he quotes from the latter′s Logik the formulation that ′It is impossible consciously to affirm and deny the same proposition′. Husserl argues further against the grounding of the law of non-contradiction in the impossibility of psychological coexistence as it is presented in Mill′s attack on Hamilton and in the Logik of Höfler and Meinong. The procedure is once again linguistic-critical, the good old Aristotelian analysis of equivocations.
The term ′thought′, which in its wider sense covers all intellectual activities, is in the usage of certain logicians by preference applied to rational, ′logical′ thought, to correct judgement. That in correct judgement, Yes and No exclude one another, is plain, but this is merely an equivalent to the logical law, and not at all a psychological proposition. It tells us that no judgement is correct in which the same state-of-affairs is at once affirmed and denied: it says nothing regarding a possible coexistence of contradictory acts of judgement, whether in one consciousness, or in several.56
Thus the coexistence of contradictory judgements would be impossible only to a thought whose ′correctness′ (Korrektheit) already presupposes that it proceeds according to the law of noncontradiction. But then the law cannot be deduced from the impossibility of that coexistence. Yet the distinction between thought pure and simple and logical thought, which has such strikingly successful results for non-contradictory propositions, does not present itself so unproblematically to reflection on the thought process. Logical principles crystallize not only around the logical pole, under compulsion from logical ′states-of-affairs′. Rather, such states-of-affairs in turn arise through the needs and tendencies of the thinking consciousnesses, which are reflected in the logical order. ′The universality of thoughts as developed by discursive logic, and lordship in the sphere of the concept, arises on the foundation of lordship in reality.′57
The historical development of that universality of thought is indeed that of its logical ′correctness′. Only contemplative arbitrariness could isolate the two. Correctness itself is just something which arises, a consequence of developing thought. If, however, thought and correct thought cannot be semantically distinguished in the way Husserl asserts, then the question of the possible coexistence of the contradictory judgements is not as indifferent for logic as he would like. His task is so easy because he shares with the psychologistic logicians the thesis of the impossibility of that coexistence and only argues against its having anything to do with the validity of the law of non-contradiction. If that thesis is no longer conceded him, i.e. if one inquires after the origin of thought, ′the primal history of logic′, then the possibility of the coexistence of contradictories in factual judgements is no longer irrelevant. The psychological thesis of the impossibility of coexistence naively imitates the law that the same spatial location cannot simultaneously be occupied by two bits of matter. Such a ′point′ in the life of consciousness is fictive, as the critique of the punctual interpretation of pure presence has long since shown. Thought of the contradictory seems to precede individuation.
Genetically logic presents itself as an attempt at integration and the solid ordering of the originally equivocal – as a decisive step in demythologization.58 The law of non-contradiction is a sort of taboo which hangs over the diffuse. Its absolute authority which Husserl insists upon, directly originates in the imposition of the taboo and in the repression of powerful counter-tendencies. As a ′law of thought′, its content is prohibition: Do not think diffusely. Do not let yourself be diverted by unarticulated nature, but rather hold tight to what you mean like a possession. By virtue of logic, the subject saves itself from falling into the amorphous, the inconstant, and the ambiguous. For it stamps itself on experience, it is the identity of the survivor as form. And the only assertions about nature it lets be valid are those which are captured by the identity of those forms.
Validity and rationality themselves are for such an interpretation of logic no longer irrational and not an inconceivable in-itself simply to be accepted. They are rather the demand, more powerful than all existence, that the subject not fall back into nature, revert to a beast, and leave behind that small advantage whereby humanity, self-perpetuating natural creatures, goes beyond, however powerlessly, nature and self-preservation. But logical validity is also objective by adopting the standard of nature in order to master it. Every logical synthesis is anticipated by its object, but its possibility remains abstract and is actualized only by the subject. They need each other.
The point is correctly made in logical absolutism that validity, the highest instrument for the mastery of nature, is not exhausted in such mastery. What is done and united in human logical synthesis, remains only humanity and not the empty form of its arbitrariness. Rather, in virtue of the shape of the object of synthesis, which would evaporate without synthesis, synthesis extends beyond sheer doing. Judging means ordering and more than mere ordering into one.
The Law of Identity
In accord with the tradition, Husserl deals independently with the law of non-contradiction and the law of identity. With respect to the latter he especially seeks to separate the validity of logical propositions from their normative character.
The normative law is thought to presuppose absolute constancy among our concepts. The law would then only be valid on condition that we always used expressions with the same meaning, and where this condition was not fulfilled, it would not hold. This cannot be what [Sigwart] seriously believes. The empirical application of the law seriously presupposes that the concepts or propositions which function as the meanings of our expressions really are the same, since the law ideally extends to all possible pairs of propositions of opposed quality but identical subject matter. But this of course is no condition of the law′s validity, as if this were merely hypothetical, but is the presupposition of the possible application of the law to previously given instances. Just as it is a supposition for applying a numerical law, that we have, in a given case, numbers actually before us, and numbers of such a character as the law expressly refers to, so it is a presupposition for applying the logical law that propositions are before us; that they are propositions of identical subject matter is expressly stipulated.59
What Husserl calls ′presupposition′, i.e. that expressions are related in identical reference, is nothing other than the content of the law itself. When it is not fulfilled, a law would in fact lose its validity, for it would present the sheer tautology of validity. The law of identity is not indeed a ′hypothesis′ which would be verified or falsified depending on whether the referents of the expressions are seized or not. But without the confrontation of the expression with identical or non-identical ′matter′, the law of identity could not be formulated at all. Husserl avoids the problem by attacking the normative interpretation of the law of identity as its devaluation to a hypothesis.
The question is not, however, whether the law would be relativized by its implicit reference to the propositions which fall under it, but rather whether it decays into senseless affirmation without such a reference.
Thus what I understand by the law of identity is not a ′principle′ which would be acknowledged as true, but a demand to be fulfilled or left unfulfilled as we may wish. Unless it were fulfilled, however, … the opposition between truth and error in our assertions would lose its sense. The ostensible logical principle of identity which is customarily formulated in the allegedly self-evident proposition. ′A is a′, does not at all express a self-evident truth, elevated above every doubt, unprovable and unexplainable, ultimate and mysterious. Rather, the truth of this proposition depends on the fulfilment of the principle of identity in the above sense, i.e. on the fulfilment of the demand to retain the referents of the signs. It follows from the fulfilment of such a demand. If this demand is not fulfilled with respect to the sign ′a′, the proposition ′A is a′ is no longer correct. For if we do not mean the same thing by the second ′a′ in this proposition as by the first, then the first ′a′ is not the second ′a′. That is, the proposition ′A is a′ is no longer valid.60
The law of identity, therefore, is not a state-of-affairs, but rather a rule of how to think which, once detached from the acts for which it was advanced, hangs in the wind. Its meaning includes the relation to those acts.
Husserl obviously means that the identical use of terms belongs to the side of facticity and that the law of identity independently possesses an ideal validity ′in itself′. But this validity would have to be sought in its meaning, and it means nothing unless terms are used factually. Moreover, the ′presupposition for applying the logical law of contradiction, that propositions are before us′, which Husserl does not contest so much as trivialize, would already suffice to debilitate logical absolutism, just as long as all its implications were followed up.
Contingency
Husserl will not follow it through because of a horror intellectualis of the arbitrary. Contingency is as unbearable to him as it was to the early days of the bourgeoisie, whose theoretical impulses ultimately flare up once again in Husserl, sublimated in every reflection. All bourgeois – all first – philosophy has struggled in vain with contingency. For every such philosophy seeks to reconcile a really self-antagonistic whole.
Philosophical consciousness qualifies the antagonism as one of subject and object. Since it cannot sublate the antagonism in itself, it strives to remove it for itself, i.e. through reduction of being to consciousness. Reconciliation demands – equating everything with itself. And that is also the contradiction of reconciliation.
Contingency remains, however, the ′Menetekel′* of lordship. This is always covert, though lordship eventually openly confesses it: totalitarianism. It subsumes as chance whatever is not like it, the slightest non-homonymy. One has no power over what occurs by chance. No matter where contingency arises, it gives the lie to the universal mastery of spirit, its identity with matter. It is the mutilated, abstract shape of the in-itself from which the subject has usurped everything commensurable. The more recklessly the subject insists upon identity and the more purely it strives to establish its mastery, the more threateningly looms the shadow of non-identity. The threat of contingency is simply advanced by the pure a priori which is its enemy and should allay it.
Pure spirit, that wishes to be identical with the entity must, for the sake of the illusion of identity, of indifference between subject and object, ever more completely withdraw into itself, let more and more go. Namely everything factical. ′It is now clear that, in this pregnant sense, any theory is logically absurd (widersinnig), which deduces logical principles from any matters of fact.′61 Prima philosophia as a residual theory of truth which bases itself on what survives of the indubitably certain, is complemented by a contingency it cannot manage, but which it must exclude, so as not to endanger its claim to purity. As the claim to be a priori is interpreted more rigorously, less corresponds to it and more gets stuck in the realm of chance. Hence, the universal lordship of spirit always also includes its own resignation. Nevertheless, the unsolvability of the ′problem of contingency′, the irreducibility of the entity to its conceptual determination, is also deceit. Contingency only extends to where reason shows solidarity with the claim to lordship, and will not endure what it has not captured.
The false point of departure of the philosophy of identity comes to light in the insolubility of contingency. The world cannot be thought as a product of consciousness. Contingency is frightening only in the structure of delusion. If thought were to escape from this structure, contingency would silence and extinguish it. Husserl, however, is compelled to the Sisyphean labour of overcoming contingency as soon as the unity of bourgeois society as a self-producing and reproducing system – as it was envisioned from the Hegelian heights – broke down. For Husserl, ′chance′ plays no role in ′scientific connections of validation′ which constitute the model of his entire philosophy, only ′reason and order, i.e. regulative laws′.62
Nowhere more disastrously than here does he apply the already advanced method of an individual science to the whole. He believes that he can turn scepticism upside down, since it denies the laws that ′essentially constitute the concept of theoretical unity′,63* i.e. the ′definite sense′64 of terms such as theory, truth, object and constitution. Logically, therefore, scepticism sublates itself in that its content is the contesting of laws, ′without which theory as such would have no ″rational″, i.e. definite sense′.65 But it is not settled whether what is certainly not defined beforehand as a mathematical manifold is inwardly solid and satisfies the form of pure freedom from contradiction. Only in the mathematical ideal of connections of validity is the exemption from contingency imposed on philosophy which must conform to it. But really it should first find out whether it does not thereby regress to pre-critical rationalism. This reflection is no longer performed by Husserl. For him the ideas of the real diluted to pure forms are nowhere more the master. They nowhere enter into reality and nowhere reflect it into itself. Humanity itself as a result is, as a bit of reality, contingent to the idea and is expelled from the paradise of prima philosophia, the kingdom of its own reason. If contingency as scepticism has in the history of recent philosophy dragged ideas into its vortex, then Husserl now proceeds literally according to the dictum that if the facts do not obey ideas, all the worse for the facts. They are explained as unamenable to philosophy and ignored. An ironic twilight hangs over the concept of concretion of recent anthropological philosophies, for the theory which inaugurated the ′material′ turn, far surpassed, in the formalism of its idea of truth, the Kantian version, the object of Scheler′s war cry. Material essentialities, towards which description later tendentially but already in Husserl turned, are inaccessible to the very entities to which they claim to return. Hence the ghostliness of all phenomenological concretion. Husserl reinterprets the need for the contingency of the factual in idealism as the virtue of purity in the idea. Ideas remain behind as the caput mortuum of life forsaken by spirit.
Abandoning the Empirical
The individual material sciences are frankly conceived from an empiricist standpoint. ′The realm of psychology is indeed part of the realm of biology.′ The higher the demands to be a priori are raised, the more completely is the empirical conjured away, somewhat like the bourgeois arranges love according to the schema of sacred or profane. As a variation on the Kantian formula, the doctrine of logical absolutism in the Prolegomena could be called empirical relativism. It treats of the intersubjective world in the style of the sociology of knowledge.
Psychological laws determine the emergence, out of our first roughly agreeing mental collocations, of the representation of the single world common to everyone, and of an empirically blind belief in its existence. One should, however, note that this world is not the same for everyone, but only so ′on the whole′; it is the same only to an extent which affords a sufficient practical guarantee for our common representations and actions. It is not the same for the ordinary man and the scientific research worker: for the former it is a system merely approximate in its regularity, and shot through with countless accidents, whereas for the latter it is a nature ruled throughout by absolutely strict law.66
Such relativism is anything but enlightenment. Husserl′s thought of ′absolutely strict law′ takes things much too easily with the ′countless accidents′, which do not in fact exist. For the researcher chance is the painful remainder which is deposited at the bottom of his concepts. For the ′ordinary man′, whose name Husserl utters without hesitation, chance is what befalls him and against which he is defenceless. The researcher imagines that he prescribes laws to the world. The ′ordinary man′ must obey such laws in practice. He can do nothing about it, and it all may correctly seem arbitrary to him. The fact, however, that the world is composed of things such as are surrendered to accidents of that sort, and of other things which, though they may not make the law, can comfort themselves with its existence, is no accident. It is itself the law of real society. No philosophy which discusses the ′representation of the world′ can overlook it.
But the abandonment of the empirical does not grant Husserl undiminished insight into such connections. Rather, he repeats with a shrug of the shoulders the lixiviated prejudice that it is all a matter of point of view. He is not so punctilious with the knowledge of the factual, since that remains afflicted anyway with the mark of the arbitrary. Reality becomes merely the object of what one means. No binding criterion is supposed to cover it. This modesty is as false as its complement, the hubris of the absolute. Husserl overestimates the arbitrariness of the life of consciousness no less than its opposite number, the being in-itself of the laws of thought. Abstract reflection on the fact that anything factual ′could also be different′, cheats about universal determinations, which are based on the fact that things are not different.
Phenomenological and Eidetic Motifs
The abandonment of the world as the content of such contingent facticity already implies the contradiction between the two governing motifs of Husserl′s philosophy, the phenomenological and the eidetic. The exclusion of the worldly leads by the old and familiar Cartesian schema to the ego, the contents of whose consciousness, as immediately certain, are simply to be accepted. But the ego, which constitutes the unity of thought, itself belongs to the world which is supposed to be excluded for the sake of the purity of logical forms of thought. Husserl observes,
There would, therefore, be no world ′in itself′, but only a world for us, or for any other chance species of being. This may suit some, but it becomes dubious once we point out that the ego and its conscious contents also pertain to the world. That I am, and that I am experiencing this or that, might be false if my specific constitution were such as to force me to deny these propositions. And there would be absolutely no world, not merely no world for this or that one, if no actual species of judging beings in the world was so constituted as to have to recognize a world (and itself in that world).67
The absurdity, however, occurs only because one step in the chain of argumentation is isolated and assessed by an already advanced logical absolutism. Of course, logical principles would not be ′false′ if the human race were to die out. They would, nevertheless, lose the concept of a thought for which they were valid; they would be neither true nor false. They would not come into question at all. Thought, however, requires a subject, and a factical substratum of whatever sort cannot be driven from the concept of the subject. The possibility which Husserl derides as a ′pretty game′, i.e. that ′man evolves from the world and the world from man; God creates man and man God′,68 should appear as horrendous only to a rigid, polar, and, in the Hegelian sense, abstract thought. It offers an admittedly crude and naturalistic but in no way meaningless entry into dialectical thought, which does not make out man and world as warring brothers, one of which must at any price claim the right of first born over the other. Rather, it develops them as reciprocally self-producing moments of the whole which come out of each other.
Husserl′s hatred of scepticism, like his hatred of the dialectic with which he confuses it, expresses a state of consciousness in which despair over the loss of the static conception of truth does not reflect upon whether a defect in the traditional concept of truth may not appear in the loss, but rather stigmatizes all theories which bear witness to that loss. For all relativism lives off the consistency of absolutism. If every individual and restricted bit of knowledge is burdened with the necessity of being straightforwardly valid independently of every further qualification, then all knowledge is effortlessly delivered over to its own relativity. Pure subjectivity and pure objectivity are the highest of such isolated and therefore inconsistent qualifications. If knowledge should be exclusively reducible to the subject or the object, then isolability and reduction are raised to a law of truth. The entirely isolated is sheer identity which refers to nothing beyond itself. The complete reduction to subject or object embodies the ideal of such identity. The untruth of relativism is just that it abides by the negative determination – which is correct in itself – of all individuals, instead of going further. In its faithfulness to mere appearance (Schein), it is just as absolutistic as absolutism. If knowledge is not unconditioned, then it should forthwith be untenable.
In a gestus that is not gratuitously suggestive of the two-phased thought of many psychotics, the judgement is two-valued according to the schema of all or nothing. Husserl has come to all too good an understanding with the opponents he chooses. Both are interminably right to call the other ′standpoint philosophers′, by which term Husserl like Hegel rejects his opponents.69 Husserl is right in that he demonstrates to his opponents that their criteria of truth break down truth itself. The opponents are correct in that they remind him that truth which forsakes those criteria is a chimera. But this robs his critique of its power, for that facticity can be other is a sheer possibility, while in the mode of procedure of thought which is constituted in one way and not another, is deposited the necessity of approximating an object and thus a moment of objectivity itself. The concept of objectivity, to which logical absolutism sacrifices the world, cannot renounce the concept from which objectivity draws its very model. This is the concept of an object: the world.
* [′I have something as an object′ is an unavoidable Teutonism whose sense is explained in Kraus′ text. It does not mean ′My purpose or point is …′ Trans.] 46 Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, ed. Oskar Kraus (Felix Meiner, Hamburg, 1955), vol. 1, p. xix; cf. ed. Linda L. McAlister, tr. Anros C. Rancunello, D.B. Turrell and Linda L. McAlister, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Humanities Press, New York, 1973).
* [The writing on the wall from Daniel, chapter 5. Trans.]
* [Quoted by Adorno as ′insight′ (Einsicht) rather than ′unity′ (Einheit). Trans.]
1 Cf. J. De Maistre, Oeuvres (Lyon, 1891), vol. IV, p. 151 (′Les soirées de Saint Petersbourg′).
2 Cf. Max Horkheimer, ′Zu Bergsons Metaphysik der Zeit′, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 3 (1934), pp. 321 ff.
3 Henri Bergson, Le rire, essai sur la signification comique (Alcan, Paris, 1913), pp. 151–2.
4 Ibid. p. 137.
5 Ibid. p. 138.
6 Edmund Husserl, ′Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft′, Logos I (1910–11), pp. 316 ff; cf. tr. Quentin Lauer, ′Philosophy as Rigorous Science′, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (Harper and Row, New York, 1965), pp. 71–147.
7 Ideen [108]; Ideas, p. 155.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid. [111]; ibid. p. 158.
10 Ibid. [107]; ibid. p. 154.
11 LU I, p. 141; cf. Findlay, p. 158.
12 Logik [208]; Cairns <178>.
13 CM, p. 88; Cairns <119–20>.
14 Logik [278]; Cairns <240>.
15 Wilhelm Wundt, Logik, 5th ed. (Stuttgart, 1924), vol. 1, p. 7.
16 LU I, Vorwort, p. v; cf. Findlay, p. 41.
17 Ibid. p. 26; ibid. p. 71.
18 Ibid. p. 252; ibid. p. 244.
19 Ibid. p. 253; ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ideen [111]; cf. Ideas, p. 159.
22 Cf. CM, ’pp. 12–13 and 14; and Cairns <52–3>.
23 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymund Schmidt (Meiner, Hamburg, 1956); tr. Norman Kemp-Smith (St Martin′s Press, New York, 1965), A 235/B 294.
24 Cf. Ideen [133ff], esp. § 74 ([138ff]); and Ideas, pp. 185 ff, esp. § 74 (pp. 190 ff).
25 Cf. LU I, p. 45; and Findlay, p. 86.
26 Logik [145]; cf. Cairns <124>.
27 Ibid.
28 Ideen [306]; cf. Ideas, p. 376.
29 LU I, p. 110; cf. Findlay, p. 135.
30 Ibid. pp. 110 ff; ibid.
31 Ibid. p. 111; ibid. pp. 135 ff.
32 Georg Lukács, Werke, vol. 2, Geschichte und Klassenbewuβtsein (Luchterhand, Neuwied and Berlin, 1968), p. 295 (131); cf. History and Class Consciousness (MIT, Cambridge, 1971) p. 250.
33 LU I, p. 252; cf. Findlay, p. 244.
34 Ibid. p. 253; cf. ibid. pp. 244 ff.
35 Ibid. p. 97; cf. ibid. p. 125.
36 Ibid. p. 10; ibid. p. 58.
37 Cf. ibid. pp. 21 ff; and ibid. pp. 67 ff.
38 Ibid. p. 64; ibid. p. 101.
39 Cf. ibid. pp. 68 ff; and ibid. pp. 103 ff.
40 Ibid. p. 68; ibid.
41 Ibid. p. 198; ibid. p. 201.
42 Ibid.; cf. also LU II, i, p. 403; and Findlay p. 202.
43 Ibid. p. 196; ibid. p. 202.
44 Cf. LU II, i, p. 73; and Findlay, p. 309.
45 G.W.F. Hegel, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hermann Glockner, vol. 4, Wissenschaft der Logik 4th ed., Jubiläumsausgabe (Fromann, Stuttgart – Bad Cannstatt, 1964), p. 87; cf. Hegel′s Science of Logic, tr. A.V. Miller (George Allen and Unwin, London, Humanities Press, New York, 1969), p. 82.
47 LU I, p. 139; cf. Findlay, p. 156.
48 Ibid. p. 31; ibid. p. 75.
49 Ibid. p. 131; ibid. p. 150.
50 Ibid. pp. 131 ff; ibid. pp. 150 ff.
51 Ibid. p. 86; ibid. p. 117.
52 Cf. ibid. pp. 145 ff; and ibid. pp. 161 ff.
53 Ibid. p. 151; ibid. p. 165.
54 Ibid. pp. 205 ff; ibid. p. 207.
55 Ibid. p. 71; ibid. pp. 105–6.
56 Ibid. p. 88; ibid. pp. 118–19.
57 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Querido, Amsterdam, 1947), p. 25; cf. tr. John Cumming, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Herder and Herder, New York, 1972), p. 14.
58 Cf. ibid. passim.
59 LU I pp. 99 ff; and Findlay p. 127.
60 Hans Cornelius, Transzendentale Systematik (Munich, 1916), pp. 159 ff.
61 LU I, p. 123; cf. Findlay, pp. 144 ff.
62 Ibid. p. 18; ibid. p. 64.
63 Ibid. p. 111; ibid. p. 136.
64 Ibid. p. 112; ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid. p. 205; ibid. p. 206.
67 Ibid. p. 121; ibid. p. 143.
68 Ibid.
69 Logik [123]; cf. Cairns <105>.