The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity: Toward a Wider Suffrage

Four: Phenomenology as Rigorous Science

Phenomenology as Rigorous Science Constitutional objectivity and intentionality As a student of mathematics at Berlin, Husserl became acquainted with Karl Weierstrass and his project for founding mathematical analysis on the concept of number. Not without finding Weierstrass guilty of a certain naïve empiricism, Husserl himself aimed to further this program in the dissertation On the Concept of Number (1887) which he went on to compose at Halle under the direction of Carl Stumpf, a former student of Brentano, and which became integrated into his Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891).1 In these works Husserl demonstrates that numbers belong to a continuum that presupposes a mental act of collecting. It is not surprising that Frege criticized the Philosophy of Arithmetic for its psychologism. Without fully accepting Frege’s criticism , Husserl henceforth stressed the objectivity of the fundamental concepts of mathematics and logic. The mental act of collecting, for example, was not a subjective operation; it was conducted according to “rigorous laws,” as will be what Husserl will call his “philosophy as rigorous science.” This philosophical science will steer a course between the naïve empiricism he finds in Weierstrass, the naïve Platonism he finds in Bernard Bolzano’s Theory of FOUR PHENOMENOLOGY AS RIGOROUS SCIENCE | 77 Science, and the naïve psychologism he finds in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint and other works of Franz Brentano whose classes he had attended at the University of Vienna. It is nevertheless by the writings of these three heroes that Husserl will be spurred toward the discovery of two of the main ingredients of his rigorous philosophical science: constituted objectivity and intentionality. Crucial to the latter is Brentano’s thesis that what distinguishes mental phenomena from physical ones is the former’s intentionality. All mental phenomena refer to what Scholastic philosophers call “inexistent” objects, objects of consciousness whose reality is “objective” in the sense still maintained by Descartes in opposition to what he and the Scholastics call “formal objectivity,” that is to say, independent reality such as is possessed by things in the natural world, by psychological phenomena or by the ideal entities of mathematics and logic. “In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired, and so on.”2 This directedness of mental states will become a principle of the science of phenomenology that is yet to be born. Although the word Phänomenologie is used already in the eighteenth century by J. H. Lambert and Kant, and in English in William Hamilton’s Lectures on Metaphysics dating from the late 1830s (though not published until 1858), it begins to get the sense it will have for Husserl only when it is used of the “descriptive psychology” discussed in lectures delivered by Brentano in 1888–1889. In Husserl’s conception of phenomenology constituted objectivity and intentionality are inseparable. For by constitution of an object Husserl means not its creation, but its self-manifestation.3 In this sense even an object in space may be constituted. However, before focusing on such objects in lectures of 1907 published under the title Thing and Space, Husserl conducts an intensive and detailed campaign against psychologism in the Prolegomena to Pure Logic which forms the first part of the Logical Investigations (1901). The first of these titles and the term “pure” that occurs in many of the titles and subtitles of the six Investigations inevitably raise the question of the relationship between the philosophical method followed by Husserl here and that followed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. While expressing the highest admiration for the work of Kant and declaring in his lectures on First Philosophy (1923–1924) that it is from him that he borrows the word “transcendental ,” Husserl maintains that transcendental arguments regressing from facts to the conditions of their possibility need to be founded on pure intuition of evidence, Wesenschau. Several of the transcendental arguments developed by Kant take as their starting point certain facts about time. But Kant does not pause to consider whether his or Newton’s or Leibniz’s notions 78 | PHENOMENOLOGY OF LANGUAGE of time are abstractions from a quite different experience of temporality, the “inner” or (better, see below) “intimate” temporality examined in Husserl’s Lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness of 1904–1905, edited (with additions made between 1905 and 1910) by his assistant Martin Heidegger in 1928. These lectures...