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Husserl's Psychologism, and Critique of Psychologism, Revisited

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Husserl's Psychologism, and Critique of Psychologism, Revisited Husserl Studies 2006. DOI 10.1007/s10743-006-9008-5 Ó Springer 2006 HusserlÕs Psychologism, and Critique of Psychologism, Revisited BURT C. HOPKINS Department of Philosophy, Seattle University, Seattle, WA, 98122-4460, USA 1. Introduction HusserlÕs mature statement of his views on the nature of psycholo- gism and on the four decade phenomenological ‘‘war’’1 against it identifies three kinds: logical, epistemological, and transcendental psy- chologism. In what follows, I argue that the psychologism of Hus- serlÕs earliest work, The Philosophy of Arithmetic,2 does not correspond to any of these three types identified in Formal and Tran- scendental Logic. I show that this lack of correspondence is signifi- cant, and not only because HusserlÕs final account of how phenomenology overcomes the three kinds of psychologism identified in FTL does not address the kind of psychologism that characterizes the PA. Beyond this, I also show that this accountÕs appeal to the numerical identity of the objects of thought, as the definitive mark of their trans-psychological status, represents an appeal to the very same logical structure that the psychologism in the PA attempted, unsuc- cessfully, to account for. That is, I show that the logical structure of the ‘‘one over many’’ unity belonging to the ‘‘authentic’’ cardinal numbers (Anzahlen) investigated in the PA also characterizes the unity of the ‘‘numerical identity’’ appealed to in HusserlÕs account (in FTL and Experience and Judgment) of phenomenologyÕs victory over psy- chologism. I conclude my remarks with two suggestions: (1) rather than signal the failure of HusserlÕs mature thought to achieve victory in the war against psychologism, its appeal to the numerical identity of the objects of the understanding signals the only way to ensure its tri- umph; (2) the proper context for establishing the phenomenological priority proper to the numerical ‘‘mode of being’’ that Husserl attri- butes to the meaning of the omnitemporality of these objects is the philosophical reconstruction of PlatoÕs unwritten doctrine of ‘‘eidetic numbers’’ (arithmoi eidetikoi). Pinning down the exact nature of the PAÕs psychologism is no simple task, in part because of the workÕs philosophical immaturity, which is exemplified by the maddening fluidity with which its author uses terms such as ‘actÕ, ‘presentationÕ, ‘conceptÕ, ‘contentÕ, and ‘object.Õ Also, it is difficult not to approach this work through the double perspective of the conceptual level belonging to HusserlÕs later works and the ‘‘historical’’ self-interpretation that is inseparable from them. (Viewed within this context, the PAÕs psychologism appears as a mistake that is as principled as it is ephemeral.) Never- theless, the original problem to which the psychologism of PA is the response can be precisely identified, as can HusserlÕs ex post facto characterization of the inadequacy proper to the ‘‘psychological reflection in BrentanoÕs sense’’3 with which his first analyses attempted to solve this problem. 2. The Psychologism of the Philosophy of Arithmatic The problem addressed by the PA concerns the origin of the logical unity of collections, both in the indeterminate sense of the unity of the concept proper to multiplicity (Vielheit)4 and in the determinate sense of the unity of the concepts proper to the determinate amounts, the cardinal numbers (Anzahlen), that answer to the question ‘‘How many?’’ These two unities are closely related for Husserl, as this ques- tion is directed to the items that fall under the concept of multiplicity. In the case of either unity, the Husserl of PA was acutely aware that, as he put it in 1913, ‘‘The collection is not an objective (sachliche) unity grounded in the contents of the collected things.’’5 This is not to say, however, that Husserl thought that the unity of the collection is not objective. The objectivity of its unity is never in question for him. He was, however, profoundly concerned with the problem of how to account for the objectivity proper to the logical unity of the concepts of indeterminate and determinate collections. His training in theoretical mathematics had, no doubt, sensitized him to the fact that it is impossible to ground the unity of a collection in either the things (Sachen) that compose it or in any combination of the qualities and relations belonging to them. In the PAÕs idiom, neither the physical nor ‘‘metaphysical’’ (in BrentanoÕs sense of the unification of wholes out of ‘partsÕ like color, extension, and intensity) combination of the elements composing a collection can account for the whole of the collectionÕs logical unity. HusserlÕs reason in the PA for distinguishing the logical unity of the items belonging to a collection from the logical unity of the collection itself is deceptively simple. Each item that belongs to a collection does so only insofar as it falls under the generically empty concept of ‘‘anything’’ (Etwas) (or, as he will later say, of ‘‘anything whatever’’ [Etwas u¨berhaupt]). Thus, on the one hand, each such item has the logical status of ‘‘one’’ arbitrary thing, that is, of an arbitrary ‘‘unit.’’ On the other hand, however, the logical unity of the collection as a whole is not one in this sense but – precisely as a collection – it somehow encompasses the ones of the units that it functions to unify collectively. Because the logical unity of each of the items composing a collection is inseparable from something that is singular, and be- cause the logical unity of the collection itself is multitudinous, Husserl realized that these two unities are incommensurable. Hence in the PA – and not just there, as we shall see – Husserl recognized the need to appeal to something other than the singular (and therefore individ- ual) qualities of these items in order to account for the logical unity of indeterminate and determinate multitudes. The problem of accounting for the logical status belonging to both of these kinds of collective unity, then, is the problem that Husserl sought to resolve in the PAÕs analyses by appealing to acts of collect- ing and counting and to the psychological ‘‘reflexion’’ (Reflexion) di- rected to the presentation (Vorstellung) of the collective combination yielded by these acts. He held that acts of collection initially produce indeterminate aggregates (Inbegriffe) or multitudes (Mengen) and that acts of counting initially produce determinate aggregates or multi- tudes (in the guise of the authentic cardinal numbers). Psychological reflexion directed toward the acts of collective combination responsi- ble for the production of both these indeterminate and determinate multitudes was held by Husserl to yield (respectively) the logically objective concepts of collection and cardinal numbers. Two points are worth noting here in connection with the question of the character of the PAÕs psychologism. One, HusserlÕs appeal to the psychological reflexion toward acts was an appeal made in the service of account- ing for the logical unity of the objectivity belonging to the concepts of the two kinds of multitudes identified in the PAÕs logical analysis of arithmetic. Such reflexion, therefore, was manifestly not under- stood by him to equate this objectivity with its occurrence in the psy- che. Two, this appeal grew out of HusserlÕs recognition that the peculiar multitudinous unity proper to the logical unity of the collec- tion or cardinal number cannot be accounted for (or otherwise groun- ded) in the singular unities proper to the individual items comprising either. These points are worth noting, because HusserlÕs rejection of the ‘‘psychologism’’ operative in the first point does not in any way en- tail the rejection of the problem to which it was the response. This problem is succinctly characterized as follows: the logical objectivity characteristic of the collective unity of either multitudes or cardinal numbers cannot be derived from (or otherwise reduced to) either the logical objectivity characteristic of singular unity or the individual objects that comprise the abstractive ground of such unity. Indeed, as we shall see, it is precisely HusserlÕs consistent avowal of the logi- cally distinct qualities of collective and singular unity that will raise and decide the question of whether his mature thought on the phe- nomenological resolution of psychologism addresses the initial prob- lem that the PAÕs psychologism attempted to address. This is the case, because from this logical distinction it follows for Husserl that the constituting acts correlated to each type of unity are also distinct. The PAÕs psychologism, then, is inseparable from the ‘‘logical’’ problem of the origin of objectivity proper to the concept of collective unity, a problem that is logical in the sense that the conceptual char- acter of collective ‘‘unity’’ was something that Husserl clearly recog- nized is non-psychological and therefore objective. The puzzling reason why Husserl would appeal to ‘‘psychology’’ to account for a unity that he clearly understood to be objective6 becomes apparent when the peculiar non-singular nature of this unity is considered. Gi- ven HusserlÕs arithmetical focus in PA, the logical irreducibility of a multitudinous unity to a singular unity is something that, arithmeti- cally speaking, is wholly uncontroversial, because ‘‘many’’ and ‘‘one’’ are numerical opposites. Hence, because the physical or metaphysical qualities of the items that compose a collection have to be ruled out, on the basis of their singularity, as being capable of yielding the ori- gin of the collectionÕs logically multitudinous ‘‘unity,’’ accounting for this origin in the ‘‘acts’’ that combine these items into a collection in the first place, seems most reasonable – at least at first glance. The reflexion directed to such acts abstracts – from ‘‘inner experience’’ – the presentation that results from the psycheÕs spontaneous capacity for ‘‘conceiving-as-one’’ (Ineinsbegreifen) the items that compose a collec- tion, and it does so in the cases of either indeterminate collections, aggregates or multitudes, or of determinate collections, the authentic cardinal numbers.
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