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3. Husserl, Lask, and the Idea of Transcendental Logic
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3 Husserl, Lask, and the Idea of Transcendental Logic T he question of a transcendental logic was one of the two great issues to which Husserl devoted himself in the last ten years of his life. Together with the theme of the lifeworld, transcendental logic seemed to provide a way of articulating what he saw as the universal mission of phenomenology: to reanimate the tradition of Western rationality by establishing philosophy in its historically mandated role as foundational science. Of these two issues, inseparable though they were in Husserl’s mind, the problem of the lifeworld continues to enjoy a currency which that of transcendental logic seems to lack. Yet contemporary debates within epistemology and metaphysics, such as that concerning the nature of realism, come increasingly into the orbit of problems Husserl addressed under the heading of transcendental logic: what it is to be an object, the relation between objectivity and evidence, “categorial frameworks,” and the ground of propositional truth. But to appreciate Husserl’s contribution to this debate it is first necessary to become clear about the sense in which they are transcendental problems, and that means to become clear about what a transcendental problem is. In this chapter I hope to contribute something to such clarification by contrasting Husserl’s conception of transcendental logic with that of Emil Lask, whose major writings on the subject were published just prior to the development of Husserl’s transcendental version of phenomenology .1 Lask’s work involves a criticism of Husserl’s pretranscendental approach to the philosophical problems of logic. At the same time, the shortcomings of Lask’s own conception of the transcendental point toward issues which were even then leading Husserl to the phenomenological reduction, his path into transcendental thematics. In specifying certain points of convergence and divergence in their views, we will be tracing a moment in the archaeology of transcendental philosophy.2 56 57 H U S S E R L , L A S K 1. Transcendental Logic as a Theory of Meaning The origin of the contrast between Husserl and Lask is to be found already in Kant’s transcendental analytic, or “logic of truth.” Whereas general logic abstracts from all content and thematizes the purely syntactical rules to which knowledge must adhere lest it contradict itself, the logic of truth has the task of providing an a priori semantics, or rules without which the formal laws of thought can have no content, “without which no object can be thought.”3 Transcendental logic thus deals with categories and principles valid of objects a priori, those that truly refer to objects but whose reference cannot be established empirically. How is such a logic possible? Kant answers with his famous “Copernican revolution”: The categories are valid of objects a priori because they constitute objects. Here transcendental logic faces a twofold task, and subsequent transcendental philosophy inherits a twofold problem. On the one hand, transcendental logic involves the “objective-logical” question of which concepts are “forms of an object in general.” Which concepts have objective validity a priori? On the other hand, it involves the “subjective-logical” question of the “origin” of such nonempirical concepts.4 Under the Copernican hypothesis the two questions are related. Certain nonempirical concepts have objective validity because, as originating in the subject, they first of all make objects possible for the subject. As subjective forms for the synthesis of a space-time manifold, the categories are rules for what it means to be an object at all. But just because the object is seen as a function of subjective synthesis, its transcendental status cannot be that of a metaphysical “in itself,” but only that of an objective representation. In the wake of the Hegelian criticism of Kant and the emergence of positivism, various neo-Kantian philosophers sought to renew the project of transcendental logic. But even those who turned “back to Kant” acknowledged significant limitations in Kant’s original idea. On the objective-logical side, Kant’s deduction of the categories from the table of logical judgments was felt to be both artificial and too restrictive. Not only did the emergence of logistics make the table itself obsolete, the categories seemed to provide a foundation only for the knowledge of nature. If the Kantian project was at all tenable, would there not be categories specific to knowledge in the domain of history and the related cultural sciences as well? On the subjective-logical side, the idea that categories were subjective...