Husserl's Logical Investigations
Husserl's Logical Investigations
Husserl's Logical Investigations
200
and has
fa scinated
concerns th e status and prope r
mind
be
must be
not,
What results
in Husserl's first and in some
more pregnant
For the main text of the addition is that
the easy
of
a lso the intrinsic
second
of the
contrasted with
here. But this
editor may have
interests of
indefinite article
n
first edition - evident also in
fall into two main groups.
Husserl's conviction that he had discovered
the
group are those to be
Husser! had ea flier
or substa ntive
of
says, 'occasional' uses of
and his account of
1I1
basis. In a hitherto
the
of a
indexical use of the firs t
use
a proper name,
intuition'
for 'moment'
, 'element',
rando m . Th is state of atTairs is made still worse in the
'moment ' in the
is confused with 'moment' in
This er ror has
concepts ( 12 of
a n extended discussion
is to be
. This discussion
because it
between the theories of necessary
Husserl and
his teacher Brentaof 1887-91 now
In
material world.
even ts and processes of the
to the third
One felic itous verba l
introduction of the term 'forma l
concerned with
Husserl 's clarification
a nd his still valuable account of
and pure and
mathematics are indeed
a nd
contributions
the
of
at a
official
of moment or 'abstract
Thus for
world .
The
of the
ent
Generalisation
via extension to the
. We shall quote from at
both
reader a
of Busserl's 'Aristotelian'
of his treatmen t, and also because it is absent
translation.
out fi rst of all that
concept of concrete or
exist in isola tion from all other
204
objects, does not coincide with the concept thing. For we find concreta in
this sense also, e.g., in the realm of sensations.
To the unity of the thing there belongs more than the individualised concretum ; there
belongs also (ideally speaking) a possible infinite manifold o f tem porally succeedi ng
concreta of one and the same form, passi ng contin uously into each othe r in the sense
of the concepts of change and persevera nce, this manifold being he ld togeth er (either
for itself or togeth er with other associated manifolds of a similar constitution) through
the unity of causalit y. This means that there obtains a lawflllness in relation to these
manifolds which makes the conc reta co-existing at a ny given poin t in time unilaterally
dependent on those concre ta of a n arbitrarily chosen earlier point in time which are
assigned to it in the sense of change or perseverance. (p. 26 1)
The unity of the thing therefore consists in the existence of a con tinuous
series of temporally instantaneous concrete 'conten ts' or 'objects' - Husserl
uses these terms interchangeably - tied together by a ca usal law.
The re follows a brief form alised treatment of the relation between
successive 'va lues' of a thing at successive instants (a relation later called
'genidentity' by Kurt Lewin), which is followed in turn by an account of
trans-temporal dependence that is manifested in the material world:
As a result of callsality the concreta of a given Iflstant are, whether of themselves or m
consort wi th other co-existing concreta, dependent on those of an earlie r instant and thus in a certain se nse non-self-sufficient. It must however be noted. that thl,'
conce pt of dependence used by us so far was defined only as dependence in ,-.0.
existence .. . It is howe ver easy to generalise the concepts of independent and deper.
conten ts so that one would be able to distinguish between cases of co-exisTence ml!Ii
cases of succession. We need only so extend the concept of whole (and the con'
bound up analytically therewith). that one is allowed to speak not only of h
(unities, connections) of co-existe nce bu t also of those of sllccession . Our concepts
then immedi ately applicab le to things, whereby it is ne<'cssa ry only to
peculiar con te nt wh ich the ta lk of existence and co-e xistence take on when one
things . (p. 262)
205
A whole is not the pa rt s tak en together [das Zusammen del' 1l'iieJ . nor is it the parts
together with the form, but the parts all together in this form. (The form is a concept
tha t uIlltes the whole lt1 question with a manifold of possible wholes). (p. 84 1; compare
Traetallis 2.0124-2 .01 41)
206
modern philosophy of the sort of extended, careful argument that has
become the norm - or at least the ideal - in analytic philosophy.
The sixth Investigation was entirely re-written by Husserl and his rewritings are to appear, at some stage in the future, in a separate volume of
Husserliana. Husserl di d not himself bring these revisions to a publishable
fo rm, and therefore a llowed the 2nd edition of this rnvestigation to ap
in 1921 in a version merely 'partially revised'.
III
In recent years, particularly as a resu lt of work by F0l1esdal , Mcln! yr~
and Woodruff Sm ith , the so-called noema theory of meaning set out b,
Husserl in Ideas I has received a considerable a mount of attention . Th
attractiveness of this later theory is due in part to the fact that Husser!"
noemata resemble F regean Sinne, and can indeed be seen as a generalisaf
of the latter. Wha t is less often recorded is that Husser! had already, in the
fi rst edition of the present work, p ut forward another, quite differe nt
of meaning, resting on his twin theories of species and dependen
According to this ea rlier theory each mental event which is an act
language use, either for itself or taken together with other associ ated
upon which it is dependen t, instantiates a species of a certain sort. It is t
th is very species which Husser! identifies as the meaning of the lingui
expression in question .
Thi s (, Arist otelia n') theory of mean ing, which is of course in need
considerable refinement , has a number of immediate advantages. In the
place it yields a simple accou nt of the natu re of linguistic communicaf
(mental acts of com municating subjects may instantiate identical mea
species). It yields also an elega nt accoun t of the relation between Ian u
and thought and of the relation between logical necessity and the contin
fl ux of mental events of judging and inferri ng. Moreover, th is ea rlier th
a ppeals in its ontolo gy onl y to th e relativel y fam iliar relations of instan
tion (between instance a nd species) and intentionality (between act
object) . On the la ter theo ry, in contrast, in which noemata fu nction b I
senses and as (mysterious counterparts of) reference, we have to acce
addition to instant iation and the in tentionali ty of act and object also
further sui generis rela tions between the act and its noema and betwc
noema and its referent. Now it is a st ri king fact that , although the vol
under revie w co ntain a num ber of refe rences to the second theory,
various terminologi cal alterations designed to ease t he transition t
latter, one finds no arguments fo r th is second theory, just as no argu
are to be foun d in Husserl's later writ ings for his change of mind.
It is sti ll unfo rt unate ly the case that the first , second, fourth and
207
Investigations are without any sort of detailed exegesis or commentary, in
spite of the fact tha t the problems th ey deal with are one and all the subject
of great contempo rary interest. The first Investigation contains a number of
distinctions that have since become standard within the p hilosophy of
language , though Husser! draws these distinctions in ways that involve
greate r atten tion to cognitive detail than has been us ual among ana lyt ic
philosophers.
The second Investigation argues that the notions of species and generality
cann ot be made sense of independen tly of an understanding of the notion of
necessary or universal law. The fourth dea ls with the notion of syntactic
c~mpleteness and incompleteness ('unsaturatedness') and presents a theory
of syn tactic and semantic dependence which inl1uenced Lesn iewski in his
developmen t of the first 'categorial grammar'. (Thus consider the relation
between a name, a verb and the sen tence they belong to. Husserl 's acco unt
allows him to distingu ish the relation of unilateral dependence of verb on
na me fro m th e relation of bilatera l nece ssary constitue ncy be tween verb a nd
sentence - every sentence necessarily con tains a ve rb and every verb is
necessarily a part of a sentence.) The fift h In vestiga tio n contains not only
one of the most subtle accoun ts of indexical ity in the lit era ture of philosoph y, but also de tailed accounts of the d istin ction betwee n propos itional and
non-propositional attitudes and of the connection between force a nd
con tent (p hrasti cs and neustics) fo r all mental acts and states.
Panzer's edi tion will, it is hoped , prepare the way for a detailed
commentary on the whole of the Investigations of the sort that already exi sts
in plenty for Wittgenstein's TraC La fus. Now that there is a revisal of interest in
a number of qua rters in just that combina tion of themes that the Investigations de velop so masterfully - cognitive and pe rceptual psychology, fo rmal
ontology and formal meaning-theory and the thorny problems posed by any
atte mpt to give these a un ified treat me n t - such a deta iled co mmentary
wou ld be more tha n welcome .
Kevin MULLIGAN
Barry SM ITH
Universite de Geneve
University of Manches ter