PART II
Karl Schuhmann
If intentionality is the heading for the problem that—according to Husserl’s words in Ideas I—“encompasses the whole of phenomenology,”1 then it must be maintained that Husserl was definitely not a phenomenologist from the start.2 In his first published book, the Philosophy of Arithmetic of 1891, the concept of intentionality plays no role,3 and the same is true of the manuscripts for the book on space he planned in 1893.4 In the following year, Husserl published “Psychological Studies in the Elements of Logic,”5 which Husserl had already completed by the end of 1893 following his efforts dealing with the problem of space. In these studies, and the accompanying manuscripts on intuition and representation,6 the concept of “intention” turns up for the first time with any elaboration. With it, Husserl identifies an interest proper to representational presentations (and only to them),7 specifically their interest in fulfilling what is meant by means of them in an intuition that gives the intended thing itself. What is intuited is as such always the content of an intuiting act.8 By contrast, in the case of representation, the intended object, because it is not itself “there,” is no immanent content that is itself present in consciousness.9 Rather, consciousness directs itself beyond the given content to this nongiven object.
The “Psychological Studies” remained a fragment. As Husserl would later testify, it was owing to the conception of intention as interest developed in these studies that they were not published.10 In the end, with “interest” one usually designates the singling-out of given objective contents. But can this determination simply be applied to the intending character of presenting acts without further ado? Until 1893, Husserl, following Brentano, accepted at face value the view that “intentionality” means having contents. However, there then appeared in 1894 the book On the Content and Object of Presentations by Kazimierz Twardowski,11 who, like Husserl, was a student of Brentano’s. This work forced Husserl to turn to the previously neglected problem of intentionality (and with it the question concerning the relationship of consciousness to its contents) and, in pursuit of the problems introduced by Twardowski, to draft his own doctrine of intentionality.
Considering this situation, a two-fold thesis will be advanced here. On the one hand, a historical thesis: Husserl’s early concept of intentionality is due to his confrontation with Twardowski.12 Further, a substantive thesis: this concept presents a satisfactory solution to the problem introduced by Twardowski. (In what follows, this problem will be designated as the Brentano-Bolzano problem.) Each of these two theses has a polemical flipside. The flipside of the historical thesis: contrary to a widespread conception, Husserl’s concept of intentionality is not the direct further development of the corresponding conceptions of his teacher Brentano. And the flipside of the substantive thesis: Husserl’s later theory of noesis and noema is not a further internal development of his original concept of intentionality but is the result of other problems and influences.
To support these theses, I rely (even if to a lesser extent) on the fifth logical investigation from 1901 and a review of the above-mentioned work of Twardowski that Husserl penned in December 1896.13 Above all, however, I draw on the fragment “Intentional Objects” from the summer of 1894.14 Neither of the last two works, incidentally, was to appear during Husserl’s lifetime. They were first published in 1979 from his estate.
The Bolzano-Brentano problem had been discovered by Twardowski, who then confronted Husserl with it. The most obvious way to present it is in the version Husserl himself gave it in a letter from July 7, 1901, to Anton Marty,15 who was also a student of Brentano’s and was, as such, also interested in this question. Husserl says there that every presentation has an object (for it presents something)—[and yet,] not every presentation has an object (for there is not something corresponding to every presentation in actuality).16 The latter conception of the existence of “objectless presentations” had been defended by Bolzano,17 against which Brentano had identified universal relatedness to an object as a hallmark of all psychic phenomena. According to Brentano, psychic phenomena are characterized by “reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity.”18 It is obvious that there are no real things to be found in psychic phenomena (nor in presentations, or acts built up on them—judging, or feeling and desiring). In the seeing of a house, there is no house. However, it was less clear how one could nonetheless identify the content of an act with its object in such a way as to be able to speak of an immanent objectivity of the act. Unlike Husserl in “Psychological Studies,” Twardowski at least saw a problem here.
Before going into that, we should mention two specific Brentanian doctrines that are of significance for our discussion. First, the doctrine of the reducibility of all statements to existential propositions. According to Brentano, judgment is not simply the connection of two presentations. (The connection of the simple presentations “tree” and “green” does not, according to him, result in the judgment “the tree is green,” but merely in the composite presentation “green tree.”) The proper logical form of the judgment “the tree is (not) green” would then be “the green tree is (not),” or “there is (not) the green tree.” Second, in this context Brentano states a distinction between attributive (or enriching) and modifying predicates of propositions. Propositions that explicitly assert the nonexistence of their subject (e.g., the proposition “This man is dead”) seem to resist Brentano’s thesis concerning the reduction of all propositions to existential propositions. Brentano concedes that in order to be true, this proposition does not exactly presuppose the existence of a man. By contrast, he maintains, its truth requires the existence of a dead man. The illusion that propositions of this kind do not permit reduction arises from the fact that one conceives of these propositions according to the model of ordinary propositions. In most cases, it is the predicate of a proposition specifically (as in the proposition “this man is educated”) that enriches the subject with an attribute. In the above case, by contrast, the subject is completely modified or changed by the addition of the predicate. An educated man is a man, whereas a dead man, by contrast, is not; a big house is a house, but a phantasized house, by contrast, is not. And a lot of money is money, but counterfeit money is not money.19
Now to Twardowski. Like Brentano, he is convinced that every act has some content, that is, an intentional or immanent object. For him, too, this is not the object independent of thought, but rather, as he expresses it, its psychic image in the presentation.20 Anton Marty had shown that three functions are assigned to every name (roughly speaking, to every substantive).21 A name makes it known that whoever uses it currently presents something, possesses a determinate content (i.e., has a meaning), and denominates a determinate object. Likewise, according to Twardowski, the three elements act, content, and relation to an object are assigned to every presentation (that can be designated with a name).
Now, in any presenting act we only ever present one thing, the presented. We do not present two different things, a content and an object. In order to do justice to this fact, Twardowski draws on Brentano’s distinction between attributive (or, as he prefers to say, determining) and modifying predicates. Further, since he understands presenting as a depicting, he compares the relationship between the content and the object of the presentation to the relationship between an image and what it depicts. We call the content of a presentation “presented” in the determining sense (for with this determination we distinguish it from a content that is not presented), just as we call an image “painted” in the determining sense as opposed to, for example, an image that is etched or stitched. The object, by contrast, can be called “presented” in two senses. On the one hand, in a modifying sense. Here it is not a question of the actual object, the thing out there in the world, but only of the object as presented. Only intentional existence is ascribed to this object; that is, it is nothing other than the content of the relevant presentation directed to it. In the same modifying sense, a “painted” landscape, too, is certainly no true landscape but only the image of a landscape. On the other hand, the object can also be called “presented” in a determining sense. Here it is a question of an actual object, and in this case the attribute “presented” means that in addition to many other relations [Relationen] in which the object stands to other objects, it stands in a relation [Beziehung] to a presenting being. Even the predicate painted can be asserted of an actual landscape in a determining sense. In such a case, this landscape is distinguished from other landscapes in that it has been painted, while other landscapes have not prompted a painter to paint them. Now, when looking at an image we are generally supposed to be directed to the subject presented (the thing depicted) and not to the image as a real object (we are supposed to say “the image is a success” and not “the image is bad”). In the same way, the object [Gegenstand] is for the most part the primary object [Objekt] of presenting, while the content is only the secondary object [Objekt]. “What is presented in a presentation is its content; what is presented through a presentation is its object.”22
It is from this standpoint, then, that Twardowski solves the Bolzano problem of presentations to which, either de facto (like the golden mountain) or according to their essence (like the round square), no object corresponds. These presentations, too, have some content (an intentional object), but the objects corresponding to them do not actually exist. Thus, these presentations are not objectless in every respect; their objects are only presented and are not also actual. All objects, Twardowski concludes, have intentional (phenomenal) existence, but only the objects of an acknowledging judgment also exist in actuality.23
By way of summary, we can say that Twardowski solves the Brentano-Bolzano problem in principle in favor of Brentano by adhering to the view that all presentations have objects. He responds to Bolzano’s concern about objectless presentations with the distinction between the intentional and the actual object. While Brentano’s proposition has absolute validity for intentional objects, Bolzano is right, according to Twardowski, when it comes to actual objects. In any event, with this distinction between two species of objects, Twardowski’s solution to the Brentano-Bolzano problem begins on the side of the object.
It is precisely this approach that Husserl contests in his manuscript from 1894 on the intentional object. As Husserl himself later confirmed, this manuscript presents a “reaction against Twardowski.”24 The published text of the manuscript consists of two parts: a critique of Twardowski’s solution and the development of Husserl’s own proposal.25 Let us first consider Husserl’s critique.
Husserl initially casts doubt on Twardowski’s determination of the content of a presentation as a depiction by means of which presentations are supposed to be related to their objects. In order to bring forth depictions of highly complicated constructs such as art, science, or differential calculus, a “veritable cyclone of phantasms” would have to play out in consciousness. Nor do absurd presentations depict anything.26 Further, Husserl rejects Twardowski’s identification of the meaning of a name with the content of a presentation. Such contents tend to vary drastically in different acts and in different individuals (upon hearing the word “tree” one person might present a fir tree, while another might present the written letters “t-r-e-e”).27 Meanings, by contrast, are strictly identical (in all of the cases mentioned, precisely the same thing—the “tree”—is meant). In general, all act contents, as parts of these acts, are just as individual and psychically real as the respective acts themselves. Meanings, by contrast, are idealities.28
Husserl’s principle objection, however, pertains to Twardowski’s doubling of image and thing depicted, thus his doubling of the merely intentionally existing object and the true object (i.e., the object acknowledged in an affirmative existential judgment). Twardowski had sought to distinguish these as the secondary and primary objects of presentation. But in no way does a presentation offer us two objects, not even in the diminished form of a primary and a secondary object. Regardless of whether or not the presented object exists, the presentation always presents only a single object. “The same Berlin that I present exists.… The same centaur that I present does not exist.”29 As stated in Logical Investigations, this means that “the intentional object of a presentation is the same as its actual object … and that it is absurd to distinguish between them.”30 If there is no round square, then it exists neither outside of the presentation nor within the presentation. Otherwise, the proposition asserting its nonexistence would “no longer be strictly universally valid.”31 It would have validity only for what exists outside of the presentation and not for what can be found within it.32
This means that, according to Husserl, the distinction between two species of objects does not allow one to come to grips with the Bolzano problem. Where there is no real object, there can also be no “merely” intentional object. And, conversely, where such an object exists, one will not find a duplicate in the form of a (secondary) intentional object; it would be of no use, anyway.
But what, then, is supposed to be classified with talk of actually and merely intentionally existing objects, if not objects? Here, Husserl turns in the direction of the presenting subject, as was typical for him as an emerging phenomenologist. Specifically, he does this with the help of a pair of concepts,33 taken over from Brentano, that had already played a fundamental role in Philosophy of Arithmetic: the distinction between authentic and inauthentic presentations, or modes of expression.34 Talk of true, real, or existing objects is doubtless an authentic mode of speech that designates precisely what it means and how it means it. Talk of intentionally existing objects (i.e., of contents of presentations as immanent objects) is, by contrast, of an inauthentic nature. The acts themselves contain no objects whatsoever, neither immanent nor real ones (the former do not exist at all, whereas the latter do not exist in the acts that present them but in the world). To speak of intentional objects means authentically to speak of our presentations (of them). Thus, in the authentic sense, the distinction between intentional and true objects only classifies our presentations (in accordance with their objective content) into those that correspond to objects and those for which this is not the case.
Thus, with respect to objects, this classification is only an inauthentic, or “quasi-classification,” comparable to the classification of determinate and indeterminate objects. Ultimately, one can predicate something of a determinate lion running about somewhere just as well as one can of “the lion” in general (where it remains undetermined which lion). “But how,” Husserl asks, “are we to have, besides the determinate lions, also indeterminate ones running around in the world?” His answer cannot be misunderstood: “The classification of lions into determinate and indeterminate is no classification of lions—as, say, that into African and Asiatic—but is rather a classification of presentations” of lions, specifically a classification “into those where the reference to objects is determinate and those where it is indeterminate.”35 In the same measure, classifications of possible and impossible, or of existing and nonexisting objects, are also inauthentic classifications of objects—that is, they are authentically classifications of our presentations of objects. In each of these cases, the given presentation belongs to one of the two classes of the relevant disjunction, depending on whether or not its objective content—that is, its meaning—can be integrated into judgments of a determinate form. For example, the proposition “the object of a determinate presentation does not exist” means that the meaning of this presentation can occur only in valid existential propositions of the form “A does not exist.” Twardowski’s assertion that the objects of some presentations have only intentional existence can thus be reconstructed to say the meaning of some presentations deploys its function only in certain judgment-complexes of the form “There is no A.”36
Husserl thus interprets Brentano’s thesis that all presentations are related to content or an object to mean that, in any given case, presentations exist that possess a certain intentionality and the characteristic of “meaning” [meinen] something through their meaning [Bedeutung]. The circumstance that objects of some presentations exist while those of others do not (the Bolzano problem) thus amounts to the circumstance that meanings in which objects are meant can only be classified without contradiction (i.e., in harmony with other judgments) partly into valid judgments of the form “A exists” and partly into those of the form “A does not exist.”
On first blush, such a solution might awaken the suspicion that the burden of proof for whether or not certain objects exist has simply been relocated—from the given judgment (concerning the given content of the presentation) to judgment-complexes—and has thus been handed over to other judgments. It thus seems that the decision concerning the existence of the content of the presentation has effectively been evaded. The logically consistent judgment-complex is supposed to guarantee the validity and soundness of the given judgment—but what guarantees that this judgment-complex is sound on the whole?
At this point Husserl introduces a concept that not only is designed to solve this problem but also explains how inauthentic speech comes into being in general. It explains, that is, why we—as happened to Twardowski—do not always and infallibly see through inauthentic modes of speech as such but instead first require a reflection on speech in order to notice its inauthenticity. This concept is that of assumption. It is assumptions that, according to Husserl, govern individual judgments as well as whole judgment-complexes. It can be counted among the strengths of Husserl’s position that he does not leave off with the analysis of isolated judgments; instead he keeps in view the circumstance that in our ordinary thinking and speaking, we always execute series of interconnecting judgments. Their unity is brought about by a common assumption that is sustained in the sequentially ordered judgments and controls them all. Here, too, it is once again typical for Husserl the phenomenologist that he recognizes a subjective moment in this process as what is responsible for its unity, to wit, a kind of assumption which the subject (more strongly, which, most commonly, a community of subjects) makes and under which presupposition then thinks and judges. Assumptions (one can compare them, to some extent, to Kuhnian “paradigms”) are themselves for the most part not at all thematic in our presenting and judging. They are “as a rule not actually thought” but remain dispositional,37 although they form the unreflective presuppositions that we take for granted and under which we present and judge. They are the key to the correct or authentic understanding of judgment. They are, as it were, elliptical, insofar as, for obvious reasons pertaining to the economy of thought, their implications are not made conceptual and do not need to be. In short, they are the indispensable means for the understanding of inauthentic judgments. One could compare them to clefs in music, to the extent that these establish as which tones the notes on the staves are to be read without the key itself becoming a constituting part of the piece of music that is to be performed. Assumptions (or, as Husserl also calls them, hypotheses, or presenting positings) are operative wherever presentations or judgments are objectless in the strict sense. But this determination presents not only Husserl’s solution to the Bolzano problem; it reaches considerably further. For Husserl, in the sense of the Brentanian theory of judgment, object-containing presentations and judgments are only those in which existence is asserted. However, according to Husserl (who here to some extent anticipates the “reism” of the late Brentano), it is in the first instance the objects of our experienced world that have existence: “as a matter of fact the expressions ‘an object’ and ‘an existing, true, actual, authentic object’ are fully equivalent.”38 “Something and something existent are equivalent concepts.”39 For Husserl, in keeping with this most economical ontology with its absolute concept of existence, it is not only (as in Bolzano) those presentations that factically intend something nonexistent or impossible that count as inauthentic presentations (i.e., presentations that are objectless in the strict sense). Rather, to the extent that in them something nonreal is presented or judged, all presentations, as well as the judgments that operate with them (i.e., with the meanings presented in them), are inauthentic. In this context, Husserl mentions mythical judgments (“Zeus is the highest of the Olympian gods”), religious judgments (concerning God), poetic judgments (concerning Red Riding Hood), and judgments of phantasy (concerning a lindworm), as well as scientific judgments of arithmetic and geometry, insofar as, indeed, neither numbers nor geometrical figures are part of the real world of experience. Yet these various provinces may differ from one another and however little they may have in common with one another, they all deal with objects that, in the absolute sense, do not exist. Accordingly, judgments about them are “judgments which seem to be about the presented objects.”40 In truth and in the authentic sense, however, these are judgments about our objectifications of them, precisely to the extent that determinate assumptions are operative in these objectifications.
Thus, these judgments are not categorical, in spite of their grammatical form. Rather, they can be reduced to hypothetical judgments. Provided that we make determinate assumptions that can be explicated in antecedent propositions, the relevant judgments apply. For example, “If the Greek myths were true, then Zeus would be the highest of the Olympian gods.” What presents itself in this way as a seemingly categorical judgment is in truth “categorical” only in an inauthentic sense. That is, it is a judgment in the mode of the “as if.” We speak, judge, and operate as if the respective presuppositions applied and possessed validity in actuality. In doing so, the form of the judgments in question is adapted to judgments about existents. “Zeus is a god” is a judgment that formally may not look different from the judgment “this stone is heavy.” This device for economizing thought allows one tacitly to pass over the respective assumptions (in the normal case, whoever hears the relevant judgments will, for her part, tacitly complete them). It can scarcely do any harm, provided one is and remains aware of it. As with any other judgment, existential judgments are naturally also possible in the framework of such assumptions. Mathematical existence (e.g., of the kind “there is a solution to the equation ‘3 + 2=x’ ”), or mythological and poetic existence (“in Greek mythology there are nymphs, while in German folk tales there is a Little Red Riding Hood”41) intend only inauthentic existence, that is, “relative existence” (as opposed to absolute existence). Such existence is relative to the assumptions presupposed in such judgments, which for their part do not at all need to apply. That is to say, in truth they need not correspond to anything.
One can say that Husserl hereby introduces a concept of modified existence.42 As opposed to Twardowski, however, Husserl does not apply this concept ontologically. With it, he does not mean a species of attenuated existence that would obtain alongside actuality. Rather, he designates with it a derivative existence in opposition to the absolute existence of actuality. What is posited as existent in this derivative way is in the end relative to an assumption performed by the one who judges, and this assumption is in turn the only real aspect of this pseudo-existence. Brentano had already tested his thesis of the reducibility of all judgments to existential judgments with the proposition “a centaur is an invention of the poets.” In this sentence, it is clearly not the existence but the nonexistence of the centaur that is asserted. The existence demanded by this sentence, according to Brentano, is certainly not that of centaurs, but much more that of poets and the determinate acts of fiction accomplished by them.43 Quite in the spirit of this analysis, Husserl, too, now explains that the proposition “Zeus is the highest of the Olympian gods” is to be reduced to the existence of certain psychic beings and acts accomplished by them. The proposition is to be understood as saying that “the ancient Greeks believed that there is a god, Zeus, and that this same god is the highest of the Olympian gods assumed by them.”44
As has already been suggested, the unique thing about Husserl’s concept of assumption lies in the fact that it does not necessarily (as has been previously discussed) mean only the implicit antecedent proposition of an individual judgment (i.e., the presupposition under which the judgment stands and is arrived at). Rather, it can be extended to what Husserl calls a “general assumption.”45 Here it is a question of those assumptions mentioned above that govern entire judgment-complexes and that are responsible for the fact that these groups of judgments form a whole and can be treated as though they were genuine existential judgments. In the case of mathematics, for example, the axiomatic groundwork of this science comprises the general assumption through which mathematics is first made possible in general. All propositions validly deduced from this groundwork are thus nothing other than assumptions dependent on more fundamental assumptions, although they have the appearance of existential propositions.46 In this way, “multitiered inauthenticities,”47 can also be found in other domains of inauthentic speech. The identity of “Zeus” and “highest Olympian god” is asserted as though it were not merely an identity of two meanings but an “identity of the object meant,” just like in the case of the identity of Napoleon with the victor at Jena.48 However, with Zeus there is no object given at all. Rather, his identity with the highest Olympian god is asserted under the general assumption that Greek mythology is true; only on the basis of this mythology is judgment pertaining to it “true” (in an inauthentic sense). In this way, there is no need to presuppose any sort of objective existence for the understanding of such judgments (disregarding the existence of those hypothetical judgments themselves in which the relevant assumptions, or the judgments constructed upon them, are performed). As Wolfgang Künne aptly puts it, matters are no different with the intentionality of an objectification than they are with the aiming of a drawn bow toward a target. The bow need not unconditionally be fired toward a factually existing target but can also “be aimed towards a point—and many bows towards one and the same point—even though there is no object there to be shot at.”49 For aiming a bow does not eo ipso imply determining a (fictive) target point. Or, as Husserl says in Logical Investigations, “the object is meant” means nothing other than “to mean it is an experience.” But the object, purely as supposed object, is “nothing in actuality.”50
General assumptions can be deployed even if no one recognizes that this has taken place. Thus, the ancient Greeks took the divine figures of their mythology for real beings. In such a case it is a matter of “critical reflection,”51 and thus fundamentally a matter for philosophy, to expose those presuppositions as such—to demythologize, as it were, the relevant presented worlds. However, general assumptions can also be consciously made, such as in the field of poetic fiction, which concocts determinate heroes and interconnected events. In the first case, the inauthentic judgments are erroneously passed off as authentic ones. We live in them and bank on their objects as though they possessed true existence, whereas there are actually only presenting acts on hand in which certain meanings are embodied. In the second case, by contrast, “effecting the assumption” means at the same time letting it be undecided, and thus abstaining from participation. This is what happens when the modern researcher of antiquity “places himself upon the grounds of the myth, without actually claiming it for himself.”52 On both occasions, a new world—namely, the world of Greek myth—arises before the eyes of the one who judges by means of the general assumption. The only difference is that the ancient Greek mistakenly took this world to be part of actuality, whereas the modern researcher, by contrast, recognizes it to be an intrinsically closed world of semblance.
This, then, is the fundamental achievement of general assumptions: through them new worlds arise alongside the real world (the worlds of mathematics, of poetry, and of myth, for example). We can then deal with the objects of this world formally in exactly the same way as we do with those of our world of experience. Of course, it would be fundamentally mistaken to attempt for this reason to draw an ontological parallel between these worlds and the given world. For nothing can change the fact that only the real world is ontologically existent. What is real about the other worlds are the presenting and judging acts that we perform in this real world by means of which we effect those assumptions that are constitutive for the other worlds. The objective content of those acts is thus nothing beyond the “governing meaning” in them.53 Thus Husserl, already in the manuscript from 1894 here under discussion, has “radically executed the reduction of the worlds containing objects that do not authentically exist to existing presentations in the one unique world.”54 Seen ontologically, there is—to repeat again—only this one world; all remaining worlds are pseudo-worlds that we populate with pseudo-objects by dealing with the meaning-content of the relevant acts as though we were dealing with genuine objects.
Husserl most succinctly expressed his conception of intentionality, and of intentional and real objects, as he developed it in confrontation with Twardowski in the following words: “The ‘world’ of the myth, the world of poetry, the world of geometry, the actual world: these are not ‘worlds’ of equal status. There is only one truth and one world, but manifold representations, religious or mythical convictions, hypotheses, fictions.”55
Husserl’s solution to the Brentano-Bolzano problem impresses, all in all, through its intellectual elegance. In ontology, it adheres to Occam’s Razor by only admitting one single species of existence and one single world of existing objects. As one can say in view of the fifth logical investigation of 1901, all thing-like unities—that is, the “psychical and physical things”56—belong to this world. If one conceives—once again in agreement with the fifth investigation—of intentional acts as real occurrences in psychical things (empirical egos), then a “place in life” is thereby guaranteed for everything that reaches beyond perception of the world. The fundamental characteristic of this world of experience is thereby retained. This is already the case simply to the extent that all acts related to other “worlds” through assumptions adjust to the primary acts in which we make judgments about this world (i.e., the former imitate the latter in an inauthentic way). Of course, all secondary “worlds” are ontologically nugatory, that is, they do not stand in a relationship of depiction, analogy, or any other kind to the true world. Nonetheless, by means of assumption, they are capable of developing a brilliant abundance and a diversity that more than compensates for the Franciscan poverty of the early Husserlian ontology. Here, the motto holds: entia sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.57 It is a peculiarity and very nearly a hallmark of psychical things that they are capable of generating such a motley diversity of worlds. Therein lies the essence of intentionality.58 What Husserl once said about the intentionality of representation can be repeated here: its functioning “is an occasion for astonishment.”59
According to Nietzsche, Western metaphysics since Plato’s time has worshiped the delusion that behind the one and only given world, one must posit a world of “ideas” as the allegedly true world. In the process, this world of ours is degraded to a merely apparent world.60 Assuming this diagnosis, one can say that Husserl’s project is immune to suspicions of metaphysics. Husserl had already chided Twardowski precisely for a “false duplication” of objects according to which we are always necessarily directed to intentional objects,61 but only in passing and accidentally sometimes also directed to actual objects. For Husserl, by contrast, “object” means the existing, the true object. The true world—which is at the same time the only world—is the actual world. Only it exists in the absolute sense. “There are no different modes of existence,”62 although there certainly are different (namely, authentic and inauthentic) modes of presenting and talking about it.63
This solution advanced by Husserl to the Brentano-Bolzano problem agrees with Bolzano on the ontological level and, in contrast, with Brentano (in a modified sense) on the epistemological level. If Husserl’s project leaves something to be desired on many points, then this is not so much because of fundamental problems that he whitewashes or covers up but to the project’s immaturity. Many questions are not adequately discussed in the manuscript “Intentional Objects” (partially because of its polemical orientation against Twardowski, but also because of its fragmentary character). This is true, for example, of the point of contact between the spheres of cognition and being, namely, the psychical subject. An analysis of perception in accordance with the principles of Husserl’s project is lacking. Is perception itself intentional or not? Is there perhaps a non-intentional core to perception that is associatively interwoven with presentations and thus with intentionality? What role is ascribed to perception in relation to presentation and judgment?64 Is the world of perception a world of mere things, or is it experienced “with the same immediacy as a world of objects with values, a world of goods, a practical world,” as Husserl puts it in Ideas I.65 How exactly do intuitive and conceptual presentations stand in relation to one another within a presentation? What takes place on the side of the act when people such as Dionysius the Areopagite or Hermes Trismegistus suddenly turn up as fictions? And what do we really perceive in the perception of a star that ceased to exist millions of years ago?66
In general, in this draft Husserl emphasized above all the difference between valid existential judgments and those that are valid only under assumptions. The uniqueness of the different “worlds” of presentation is, however, not worked out here. Even if the world of mathematics and that of literature are equally products of the capacity for presentation, the two will not stand on an equal footing for long, and their respective relationships to real actuality deviate considerably from one another. Still, with all that, one has only outlined secondary tasks that need not present any insurmountable obstacles for Husserl’s project as such.
In closing, let us briefly go into the question of how Husserl’s later transcendental-phenomenological position appears viewed from the perspective of the early Husserl. First of all, one must insist on the following point: the drafted manuscript from 1894 may certainly be called phenomenological just as much as, for example, the philosophy of Ideas I. For the manuscript describes a regress to subjective acts to which certain constitutive achievements are attributed. This is true of all acts that stand under assumptions (hypotheses or positings). However, the late Husserl, by contrast, understands as constitutive not only inauthentic presenting, but all acts, including those of the fundamental sphere of perception. According to him, even the acts in which truly existing objects are given stand under a kind of general assumption, the “general positing of the natural attitude.”67 Just like those [previously discussed] assumptions, it can—and this is the normal case—be implemented in such a way that we naively live in it without perspicuously seeing it as such. However, one can also expressly emphasize it as such in critical reflection, as the transcendental phenomenologist does. This takes place by means of the transcendental reduction. The transcendental reduction thus has for natural consciousness the characteristic of an exclusion. For the transcendental phenomenologist, however, what is excluded is provided “with an index” of being left undecided and it becomes the “principal topic of research.”68 This is quite comparable to the case of myth, an object of research for which the modern researcher is grateful even though, of course, she cannot truly make the myth her own.
That is to say, the later Husserl levels off the sharp distinction between truly existing objects and the meanings of presentations to which nothing corresponds in actuality in favor of the latter. All consciousness is now a positing, and even authentic consciousness (thinking, cognizing, speaking) is understood according to the model of inauthentic consciousness. This means that, aside from the consciousness of the transcendental phenomenologist, there is only inauthentic consciousness in different formations. Viewed ontologically, the difference between what Husserl in 1894 called authentic and inauthentic consciousness is no longer the difference between existents and nonexistents but the difference between two degrees, or modes, of inauthentic existence. True and absolute existence lies beyond our world in a transcendental subjectivity. All objects, generally speaking, are the intentional objects of transcendental subjectivity, and they possess a kind of intentional existence that reminds one of Twardowski. Where the early Husserl was concerned to use and understand the term being in its “normal sense,”69 the late Husserl, by contrast, saw himself compelled explicitly to invert and pervert the “sense commonly expressed in speaking of being.”70 The being of the true world threatens to flow together with the being of all irreal worlds (including dream worlds).
It is no wonder that Twardowski’s duplication of the object also returns in the late Husserl. In the framework of transcendental phenomenology, all actualities are “represented” [vertreten] by senses and propositions that correspond to them.71 Husserl’s insertion of the “noema” between consciousness and object belongs in the framework of this theory of representation [Stellvertretungstheorie]. This noema is a hybrid, hardly any different from Twardowski’s object, which was simultaneously the content and object of consciousness. It simultaneously is supposed to “reside” in consciousness,72 and yet it is not supposed to be really inherently [reell] contained in consciousness.
If elements that recall Twardowski’s position return in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology in this way, then it nonetheless should be said that this is not a matter of a (possibly unconscious) adaptation of motifs that Husserl had originally overcome. It is not a question of a belated revenge by Twardowski, so to speak. Rather, here one must reckon with influences that do not arise from the complex of problems that Twardowski’s attempt to solve the Brentano-Bolzano problem had originally prompted Husserl to tackle.
Translated by Hayden Kee
NOTES
1. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 337 [translated by F. Kersten as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 349; trans. modified]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen I.
2. Husserl himself once called his manuscripts from the period prior to 1894 “still prephenomenological;” see Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890–1910), ed. Bernhard Rang (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 475. These manuscripts, as will be shown, constitute the decisive evidence for Husserl’s development of the concept of intentionality.
3. The expression “intentional” occurs, as far as I can tell, only once in this work, specifically with the announcement that according to Brentano not “every relation comprises its terms intentionally;” see Philosophie der Arithmetik, ed. Lothar Eley (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 68 [translated by Dallas Willard as Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 71].
4. Published in part 2 of Edmund Husserl, Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1886–1901), ed. Ingeborg Strohmeyer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983).
5. Edmund Husserl, “Psychologische Studien zur elementaren Logik,” in Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890–1910), 92–123 [translated by Dallas Willard as “Psychological Studies in the Elements of Logic,” in Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 139–170].
6. Edmund Husserl, “Anschauung und Repräsentation, Intention und Erfüllung,” “Intentionale Gegenstände,” and “Appendix IV” [to “Anschauung und Repräsentation,”] in Aufsätze und Rezensionen, 269–302, 303–348, 406–411 [translated by Dallas Willard as “Intuition and Repräsentation, Intention and Fulfillment” and “Intentional Objects” in Early Writings, 313–344, 345–387, 452–458].
7. Husserl, 406; cf. 298 [452; cf. 341].
8. Husserl, “Psychologische Studien,” 104 [151].
9. Husserl, 107 [154].
10. Karl Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik: Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 41.
11. Kazimierz Twardowski, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen: Eine psychologische Untersuchung (Vienna: Philosophia Verlag, 1894) [translated by Reinhardt Grossman as On the Content and Object of Presentations: A Psychological Investigation (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977)].
12. Here I find myself in partial agreement with Bernhard Rang to the extent that he remarks in his “Editor’s Introduction” to Aufsätze und Rezensionen (xxxi) that Husserl “conceived his theory of intentionality as a response to the theory of objectless presentations.” By contrast, Hermann Philipse would like to see only “a second factor” in Twardowski’s book—with the result that he must insert some “tensions” that are not present in Husserl’s theory. See Hermann Philipse, “The Concept of Intentionality: Husserl’s Development from the Brentano Period to the Logical Investigations,” Philosophical Research Archives 12 (1987): 305.
13. Edmund Husserl, “Besprechung von K. Twardowski, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen,” in Aufsätze und Rezensionen, 349–356 [translated by Dallas Willard as “Critical Discussion of K. Twardowski, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen,” in Early Writings, 388–395].
14. Husserl, 303–348 [345–387]. This manuscript is a fragment in a twofold respect. As Husserl notes on the envelope, it comes from a larger work titled “Presentation and Object,” of which it is the second part (455). This fits with the fact that Husserl paginated it as pages 35 to 65. The first part of this work is presumably lost. Furthermore, the manuscript does not end at page 65. Parts of the sequel (labeled by Husserl as a “paragraph” of the manuscript) are available in bundle K I 62 at the Husserl Archives (not published in Aufsätze und Rezensionen). Part 1 had established “that there is assigned to every presentation a meaning-content” (303 [345]). Part 2 then showed—Husserl calls this “a main result of the reflections of the past section”—that “the meaning alone is the inner and essential determination of a presentation” (336 [376; trans. modified]). According to Husserl’s note on the envelope, the bundle [Konvolut] K I 62 deals with the question “whether a different object corresponds to different parts of a meaning,” and the work was to be continued with the determination of the “varied relation of meanings to objects” (cf. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik, 42). The fundamental topic of this work (a work that, with its intended division of chapters and paragraphs, was clearly planned to be quite comprehensive) is thus the concept of meaning, beginning specifically with the determination of the concept of presentation by its meaning-content [Bedeutungsgehalt]. Insofar as the “Psychological Studies” conclude with the assertion that with the designation of representations as presentations, a well-founded concept of presentation is still yet to be developed (“Psychologische Studien,” 119 [165]), I suspect that the entire work on “Presentation and Object” was conceived as a continuation of the published “Studies.” After this, Husserl saw himself motivated (by the appearance, among other things, of Twardowski’s book—and, incidentally, also by William James’ Psychology) to give up the originally intended sequel. (See “Intuition und Repräsentation, Intention und Erfüllung,” 269–302 [313–344].) Husserl appears to have worked on the complex of topics contained in “Presentation and Object” into the winter of 1894, at which time he then turned to work on the planned second volume of Philosophy of Arithmetic.
15. Cf. Bernhard Rang’s introduction, in Aufsätze und Rezensionen, xxxi.
16. Cf. Edmund Husserl, “Briefentwurf Husserls an Marty vom 7. Juli 1901,” in Aufsätze und Rezensionen, 420 [translated by Dallas Willard as “Draft of a Letter by Husserl to Marty,” in Early Writings, 474].
17. Cf. Bernard Bolzano, Wissenschaftslehre (Sulzbach: Seidelschen Buchhandlung, 1837), 304 [translated by Rolf George as Theory of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 88. Bolzano determines these as presentations “which have no object at all, and hence also no extension” [trans. modified].
18. Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (Leipzig: Dunker und Humblot, 1874), 115 [translated by A. C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and L. L. McAlister as Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, ed. O. Kraus (New York: Routledge, 1995), 68]. Incidentally, in this passage, Brentano himself indicates that these are “not entirely unambiguous expressions” [trans. modified]. As will be shown in the following, this ambiguity sparked a discussion within the Brentano school that led to Husserl’s conception of intentionality and intentional object.
19. Cf. Brentano, Psychologie, 283–289 [165–172].
20. Twardowski, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen, §1.
21. Anton Marty, Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1908), 292–293.
22. Twardowski, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen, 18 [16].
23. Cf. Twardowski, 25 [22–23].
24. Letter to Meinong from April 5, 1902. Reprinted in Alexius Meinong, Philosophenbriefe, ed. R. Kindinger (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1965). [Also reprinted in Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, Band 1, ed. K. Schuhmann (The Hague: Kluwer, 1994), 144.]
25. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 303–311 [345–352] and 311–338 [352–378].
26. Husserl, 305 [347]. Cf. the parallels in Logical Investigations. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 68–69 [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 299–300].
27. Husserl had already formulated a similar thought in 1890: “Words or letters, accompanied by indistinct and unclear phantasms …—when closely examined, these are our thoughts”; see “Zur Logik der Zeichen (Semiotik), in Philosophie der Arithmetik, 352 [translated by Dallas Willard as “On the Logic of Signs (Semiotics),” in Early Writings, 31].
28. “Besprechung von K. Twardowski,” 349–350 [388–389]. Cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:104–106 [329–330], where Husserl determines the identity of meaning more specifically as “identity of species.”
29. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 305–306 [347–348; trans. modified].
30. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:439 [595]. In Logical Investigations, Husserl concludes from this that “it makes no essential difference to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or is fictitious, or is perhaps completely absurd. I think Jupiter as I think of Bismarck” (2:387 [559]).
31. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 310 [352].
32. Accordingly, in the manuscript on phantasy from 1898, Husserl said that objects of phantasy-presentations do not exist in truth. Specifically, they not only do not exist “outside my consciousness,” but rather they do not exist “at all, even in my consciousness.” Edmund Husserl, Phäntasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung: Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwartigungen; Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925), ed. Eduard Marbach (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 110 [translated by J. B. Brough as Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 119]. This is repeated in Logical Investigations: If there is no god Jupiter, then he exists neither mentally (i.e., he is not immanent to the presentation of him) nor extra-mentally, but rather “he does not exist at all” (387 [559]).
33. B. Rang, in his introduction to Aufsätze und Rezensionen (xxxvn1) has already quite rightly alluded to the following remark from Philosophy of Arithmetic: “In his university lectures Franz Brentano always placed the greatest of emphasis upon the distinction between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ or ‘symbolic’ presentations. To him I owe the deeper understanding of the vast significance of inauthentic presenting for our whole psychical life” (193n1 [205n1]). In this work, and also in the “Psychologische Studien” of 1893, the difference between authentic and inauthentic presentations admittedly still coincides with that between intuition and representation (presentation through signs). See also Husserl’s note from February 11, 1894, concerning the fundamental significance “for all of psychology of the classification of presentations into authentic presentations, or intuitions, and representations (inauthentic)” (cited in Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik, 40).
34. According to Husserl, the whole of arithmetic has grown out of the “fact that we are almost totally limited to symbolic concepts of numbers,” that is, from the most extreme restriction of our capacity for authentic numerical intuition (Philosophie der Arithmetik, 7 [7]).
35. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 313 [354–355]. Adolph Reinach, the Munich phenomenologist and student of Husserl, took up this problem anew, clearly with an eye to this passage. (Evidently, this manuscript had been circulated in Munich in 1904. The inscription on its envelope reads “manuscript from Prof. Husserl in Göttingen (Return!).” This clearly pertains to the circulation of the manuscript in Munich and not—as is suggested in Aufsätze und Rezensionen, 456 [in the editorial comments by Rang, the editor of this volume of Husserliana—HK]—to an intended loaning of the manuscript to Meinong.) Reinach distinguishes the individual lion from the general concept “the lion.” However, the proposition “the lion is found in Africa” does not mean “that alongside lions as individual objects, the concept ‘lion’ is also to be found in Africa.” For the subject of the proposition here is not the concept as a general object, but rather the object that falls under the concept. “The fact that things that are lions are to be found in Africa entails by no means any further detrimental consequences.” Adolph Reinach, “Die obersten Regeln der Vernunftschlüsse bei Kant,” Kant-Studien 16 (1911): 224, 227.
36. Cf. Husserl, “Besprechung von K. Twardowski,” 351–352 [391].
37. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 329 [369].
38. Husserl, 312 [356].
39. Husserl, 330 [370].
40. Husserl, 318 [359; trans. modified].
41. Husserl, 328 [369].
42. Cf. the (somewhat imprecise) presentation in Rang’s introduction to Husserl’s Aufsätze und Rezensionen, xlv.
43. Brentano, Psychologie, 286–287 [169–171].
44. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 317 [358].
45. Husserl, 328 [368].
46. For this reason, Husserl says “The geometer does not make conditioned judgments. If at all, only critical reflection on their status leads him to knowledge of the true situation” (329 [369]).
47. Husserl, 326 [366].
48. Husserl, 317 [358].
49. Wolfgang Künne, “Edmund Husserl: Intentionalität,” in Philosophie der Neuzeit, Band 4, ed. J. Speck (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1986), 185.
50. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:386 [558; trans. modified].
51. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 329 [369].
52. Husserl, 317 [358].
53. Husserl, 338 [378].
54. Rang, introduction to Husserl, Aufsätze und Rezensionen, xlii. Admittedly, Rang might see this reduction first performed in the fifth logical investigation of 1901.
55. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 329 [369].
56. Schuhmann here refers to Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:363–364 [541]. However, the quoted material is not found verbatim anywhere in Logische Untersuchungen.—HK
57. “Entities are be multiplied beyond necessity” (pace Occam).—HK.
58. This determination of intentionality is supported by the manuscript “Intentional Objects,” according to which intentionality is indifferent to whether or not its objects exist [Bestehen] and to that extent is to be ascribed to all objectifications. In the “Psychologische Studien,” by contrast, Husserl had granted intentionality only to those representing objectifications [repräsentierenden Vorstellungen] that mean something that is itself not given in the objectification, while presentations [Präsentationen] and intuitions intend nothing that lies beyond them. Whether there actually are two concepts of intentionality here “that have little more in common with one another than the name” must be left an open question (Rang, “Introduction,” xlix). At any rate, both can be conveyed by means of the concept of perception to the extent that this is an intuition (and thus fulfillment of mere intentions) but also the groundwork for grasping existence with respect to all objectifications. Jupiter and Bismark are objectified in the same way, but not perceived in the same way.
59. Husserl, “Psychologische Studien,” 120 [166].
60. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable.”
61. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 308 [350].
62. Husserl, 326 [366]. Of course, one must concede that in this passage Husserl (what was neglected above) views existence in the sense “of there-being [Dasein], of existence within real actuality” as a restricted concept of existence, as opposed to which he also wants to accept “truths, propositions, concepts” as existing objects in the full sense of the word (326 [366–367]). To that extent, Husserl, like Brentano, here remains a “Platonist.” However, it is not easy to see how this is to be reconciled with the assertion that the only true objects are those that “correspond” to presentations (333–334, 335 [373–374, 374–375]), and accordingly that anyone who perceives “is capable of expressing an evident existential judgment” (461).
63. Impressed by Brentano’s late reism, the late Marty, too, came very close to this Husserlian position. For him, too, there is only one single concept of existence, which is why he likewise rejects the idea of immanent objects. “What actually exists is not a peculiarly modified doppelgänger of the actual object residing in us, but rather only the real psychic event” (Untersuchungen, 415–416). “In the subject, there is given only the real event of presenting or a presenting as such” (406). The talk of things that are only to be found “in” consciousness or also “outside” of it is only a form of speech, a façon de parler without any ontological relevance.
64. Presumably, Husserl took on these questions in the (as yet unpublished) manuscript on perception from the year 1898.
65. Husserl, Ideen I, 58 [53].
66. Barry Smith provides an acceptable solution to questions of this kind in the framework of the early Husserl’s theory of intentionality. “Acta cum Fundamentis in Re,” Dialectica 38 (1984): 157–178.
67. Husserl, Ideen I, 60–61 [56–57].
68. Husserl, 159 [171; trans. modified].
69. Husserl, Aufsätze und Rezensionen, 332 [372].
70. Husserl, Ideen I, 106 [112].
71. Husserl, 310 [322].
72. Husserl, 210 [221; trans. modified]. Concerning Twardowski, Husserl had said that he conceived the presented object “as one literally residing in the presentation” (“Intentionale Gegenstände,” 309 [351]). This employment of the term residing [einwohnen] in the early Brentanians goes back to Brentano himself. In his determining psychical phenomena by the intentional inexistence of their objects, he indicated that Aristotle had already “spoken of this psychical residing” (Brentano, Psychologie, 115n3 [The footnote Schuhmann refers to here is not found in the English translation]).