Ullrich Melle
Determining the difference and the relationship between objectifying and nonobjectifying acts is of fundamental significance for Husserl’s attempt to establish a middle way between two theories of reason: intellectualism on the one hand and emotionalism on the other. Intellectualism knows only of logical-cognitive reason, and for it, the spheres of emotional and practical acts are only particular areas for the application of logical reason, whereas in the emotionalism of a Windelband or Rickert, logical reason is reinterpreted as an emotive-evaluative reason.1 To these monistic theories of reason Husserl opposes a pluralistic theory of reason, which he grounds in a parallelism between types of reason.
The number of types of reason depends upon the classification of types of acts. There are as many basic types of reason as there are basic types of acts; to each basic type of act, according to Husserl, belongs a specific type of justification [Rechtsausweisung] and rational validity. Husserl holds strictly to the Kantian classification of act-types, that is, intellective acts, evaluative feeling acts, and volitional acts. Correspondingly there are three types of reason: logical-cognitive, axiological, and practical reason.
Insight into the phenomenological a priori of correlation [Korrelationsapriori] is bound up with the performance of the phenomenological reduction. According to this correlational a priori, rational validity and objective existence are inseparable correlates, and consequently, there are as many basic types of rational consciousness as there are basic types of objectivities [Gegenständlichkeiten]. The question concerning the classification of act- and reason-types is therefore essentially tied to the question concerning the division of regions of objects; a pluralistic theory of reason must have a corresponding pluralistic theory of objects.
A phenomenological theory of reason possesses a two-tiered structure. The adjudication [Rechtsprechung] of reason in the relevant spheres of acts does not occur arbitrarily but according to principles. The corresponding sciences of principles establish the superstructure of the theory of reason. These sciences of principles are then grounded in a rational critique [vernunftkritisch zu begründen] by means of a phenomenological description of the kinds and connections of acts—with their noematic correlates—that fall within the scope of the principles and, above all, a description of the teleological connections of fulfilment that exist in these connections of acts.
To this two-tiered structure of the phenomenological theory of reason there corresponds a two-tiered justification of the pluralism and parallelism among the types of reason. The first—still provisional—level of justification [Begründungsstufe] shows that corresponding to the supposed number of types of reason there is a number of parallel theories of principles; at the second and ultimately valid level of justification, this parallelism of the types of reason, which is suggested by the parallelism of the theories of principles, is identified through comprehensive phenomenological descriptions of the corresponding spheres of acts. With respect to the first level of justification, Husserl attempted to show, primarily in his ethical-axiological lectures of 1908/09, 1911, and 1914, that there are formal-axiological and formal-practical principles analogous to formal-logical principles such that, in addition to formal logic, there exist parallel and analogous disciplines of formal axiology and praxis [Praktik]. With respect to the second, phenomenological, rational-critical [phänomenologisch-vernunftkritischen] level of justification, which alone actually justifies the pluralism and parallelism of the types of reason, we find only the first approaches in these ethical-axiological lectures. As Husserl states in his 1911 lecture, one gets entangled here in a “veritable jungle of difficulties,” a jungle with “lurking monsters.”2
For Husserl, objectifying acts are logical-cognitive, intellective acts; to the nonobjectifying acts belong acts of feeling and willing. Taking up the image of the “lurking monsters,” one could describe objectifying acts or objectifying reason as such a monster: objectifying reason, the reason of the understanding, threatens to engulf the nonobjectifying types of reason.3 The nonobjectifying acts are in fact dependent upon objectifications in a twofold manner: on the one hand, they are founded in objectifying acts; on the other hand, without the underlying objectifications, they are “so to speak, mute and in a certain way blind,” as Husserl puts it in his 1914 lecture on ethics.4 The objectifying understanding must first “provide the eye of the intellect” to axiological and practical acts.5 Logical reason, as Husserl states in the abovementioned lecture, exerts an undeniable and complete authority. Even within the sphere of willing and valuing we orient ourselves by knowing and thinking logically; we judge the values of objects and ascribe practical determinations to them, and, what is more, axiological and practical principles can, of course, only be judgments. How, then, is it possible—in the face of logical-cognitive reason’s superiority, its omnipotence—to still speak of parallel types of valuing and willing reason?
Husserl applies the method of analogy to provide axiological and practical reason their own legitimacy over against the validity of logical reason. From the standpoint of a science of principles and rational-critical justification, the theory of objectifying reason is, as a matter of fact, much further developed than the theory of nonobjectifying types of reason. According to Husserl, the entire history of ethics has never marked a clear distinction between material [materialen] and formal principles nor any analogous development of an ethical analytic corresponding to the logical analytic. As Husserl explains in his 1914 lectures, with the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle did not become the father of ethics in the way he became the father of logic.6 Since the sphere of objectifying reason is in fact more precisely researched and better known, according to Husserl in the 1911 lecture, “what is emphasized and known in the sphere of objectifying reason [should] offer us an analogical guide for the exploration of parallels in the other spheres.”7
The following considerations do not seek to be anything more than an introduction to the range of problems that can be found in Husserl’s phenomenology of the nonobjectifying rationality of feeling and willing. In essence, I will limit myself to showing that, in Husserl’s description of feeling- and willing-intentionality, two analogies [Analogizierungen] either vie with one another or stand side by side, although they must actually be inwardly bound together, namely, the analogy with perception on the one hand and the analogy with positing judgment on the other. First, I will examine Husserl’s initial determination of the distinction between objectifying and nonobjectifying acts in the Logical Investigations. Then, I will go into more detail regarding Husserl’s lecture on ethics of 1908/09, in which Husserl poses questions concerning an axiological knowledge founded in the intuition of values [Wertanschauung]. In connection with this, I will turn to a discussion of Husserl’s theory of value-perception [Wertnehmung] as analogous to external perception [Wahrnehmung]. In closing, I will examine Husserl’s analogy, prevalent in Ideas I and also in his 1914 lecture on ethics, between feeling- and willing-acts and acts positing being.
Husserl first developed the distinction between objectifying and nonobjectifying acts in the fifth logical investigation in connection with a profound critique and revision of the basic theory of Brentano’s descriptive psychology, namely, that presentation [Vorstellung] is the foundation for all acts of consciousness. This distinction also plays an important role in the sixth logical investigation: the starting and end point of the sixth investigation is the problem of whether nonobjectifying acts can, like objectifying acts, be brought to expression, a problem that Husserl designated in Ideas I as “one of the oldest and most difficult problems in the theory of meaning.”8 Setting out from this problem and on the way toward its solution, Husserl developed in the sixth investigation the fundamentals of his theory of knowledge, such as the theory of syntheses of fulfillment and of categorial intuition. The sixth investigation provides a more detailed determination of objectifying intentionality through the painstaking description of the relation between intention and fulfillment in the objectifying acts of perception and thinking.
The starting point and core of Husserl’s analyses of acts is the distinction between an act’s quality and its matter [Materie] in §20 of the fifth investigation. For Husserl, quality and matter are two mutually dependent, abstract moments of a concrete act that together form the intentional essence of an act. The matter is the act-moment that gives the act its objective [gegenständlich] relation and its full determination with respect to content. The matter fixes not only which objectivity the act means but also “the properties, relations, categorial forms that it itself attributes to it.”9 The act-moment “quality” then determines in which way the act relates to the given objectivity through the matter in the “how” of its determinations. “Quality only determines whether what is already presented in definite fashion is intentionally present as wished, asked, posited in judgment etc.”10
In the sixth investigation, the act-components that give or present the object are determined through the more comprehensive concept of representation [Repräsentation]. The matter is a moment of the representation; it is the sense of the apprehension. Along with this, the sensation-contents and the form of the apprehension belong to the presentation, and they determine “whether the object is presented as purely signitive or intuitive or in a mixed fashion. Here too belong the differences between a perceptual and an imaginative presentation, etc.”11 Instead of matter and quality Husserl will later speak of apprehension, apperception, and sense-giving on the one hand, and positing, thesis, and position-taking on the other hand. The appearing [das Erscheinen] of an object transcendent to consciousness, the being-directed-to-it, constitutes itself for Husserl at the very lowest level of the apprehension, the apperception of nonintentional, experienced, sensuous [stofflich] content that is immanent to conscious. This is the well-known, oft-discussed and criticized “content-apprehension schema.” The paradigmatic case of applying this schema is the perception of a spatio-temporal thing with respect to its sensuous determinations: immanently experienced [erlebte] color-sensations are apprehended or interpreted as adumbrations of the color-determinations of an object transcendent to consciousness.
The distinction between matter and quality, apperception and positing or position-taking, implies an essential differentiation in the concept of intentionality: the intentionality of apperception and the intentionality of position-taking are fundamentally different. In Brentano, the intentionality of matter or apperception is reserved for a basic class of psychical phenomena, presentations [Vorstellungen]. Brentano famously distinguished between three basic classes of psychical phenomena: presentations, judgments, and the class of feeling- and willing-acts. Overlaying this tripartite division then is the bifurcation of psychical phenomena into acts that give an object and those that involve reactively taking a position [reaktivstellungnehmenden]. The psychic phenomena of the second and third classes take a positive or negative position with respect to the object given through presentations: judgment is an acceptance or rejection of a presented object with respect to its being; emotive and willing acts relate to the presented object as loved or hated, liked or disliked. The question of truth and reason may be addressed only to position-taking acts; only here does the difference between insight, evidence, and blindness exist.
Husserl revises the fundamental determinations of Brentanian psychology on two essential points: first, he simultaneously rejects Brentano’s conception of judgment and ascribes an object-giving accomplishment to acts of judgment. Whereas presentations have a single-rayed nominal matter, judgments possess a multirayed propositional matter. The object that comes to givenness through the material of a judgment is a state of affairs. As is generally known, in the sixth investigation Husserl even sought to detect a representation within categorial acts and to bring his content-apprehension schema to bear upon them.12 Second, for Husserl presenting objects is not so much the achievement of an independent act as it is that of a nonindependent act-component. The matter or representation or apperception (regardless of whether it is single-rayed or multirayed) necessarily requires completion through an act-quality.
This act-quality that supplements the act-material must, according to Husserl, be an objectifying act-quality. Only objectifying act-qualities or positings (or position-takings) can immediately combine with some material to form an independent act. Only in such a combination with an objectifying act-quality in the formation of an independent objectifying act can the matter also serve to provide an object for a nonobjectifying act. For this reason, Husserl also speaks in Logical Investigations of primary and secondary intentions in connection with objectifying and nonobjectifying acts.13 The nonobjectifying acts consequently are a founded complex [Fundierungskomplex] comprising a full objectifying act and a nonobjectifying act-quality. For Husserl, in Logical Investigations, objectifying act-qualities are only those act-qualities involving belief,14 those that “mean” existence [Seinsmeinung] and posit being [Seinssetzung], and their counterparts in the form of mere presentation, of leaving open-ended, of abstaining-from-positing-existence. It is noteworthy that for Husserl in Logical Investigations not only do emotive and volitional acts belong to the category of nonobjectifying acts but also intellective acts such as questioning and supposing [Vermutungen]; hence, in Logical Investigations, the distinction between objectifying and nonobjectifying acts is not coextensive with the distinction between intellective acts or acts of the understanding on the one hand and emotive and volitional acts on the other.15
In the sixth investigation, Husserl shows that valid relations to objects, namely, in the sense of knowing an objectively existing object, establish themselves in identificatory [identifikatorischen] syntheses of fulfillment, in the transition from emptily meaning an object to a fulfilling intuition of the object itself, just as it was meant. Accordingly, Husserl also defines objectifying acts in the sixth investigation as those acts “whose synthesis of fulfillment has the character of identification and whose synthesis of disappointment has the character of differentiation.”16
In the transition to the fulfilling, self-giving [selbstgebend] intuition, the thesis, the positing, is tested and verified [bewährt und bewahrheitet].17 The questions pertaining to correctness [Recht] and reason are directed to the positings, the position-takings. The rationality of a positing, its insightfulness, its evidence, is not, “a merely postulated and entirely incomprehensible character, which has the miraculous [wunderbare] property of bestowing on the judgment, upon which it depends, the character of correctness,” as it is for Brentano according to Husserl.18 Rather, it is the unity of the positing with the fulfilling, self-giving intuition.
In Logical Investigations, we find no mention of a nonobjectifying reason; the question concerning the correctness [Recht] and validity of nonobjectifying acts has not yet been posed. The determination of nonobjectifying acts proves to be ambiguous, and it is in this ambiguity that the remaining challenges for Husserl’s theory of reason emerge. On the one hand, Husserl stresses the intentionality of, for instance, liking and desiring: “These are all intentions, genuine acts in our sense. They all ‘owe’ their intentional relation to certain underlying presentations.”19 On the other hand, these nonobjectifying acts—such is the conclusion of the sixth investigation—can only be expressed as the objects of an objectification reflexively aimed at them. They cannot on their own lend meaning to an expression in the way a perception or other intuitive act immediately receives expression. The reason for this is obvious: nonobjectifying acts have no objective [gegenständlich] relation other than what the underlying objectifying act constitutes. “While, therefore, where acts function meaningfully, and achieve expression in this sense, a ‘signitive’ or intuitive relation to objects is constituted in them, in the other cases the acts are mere objects, and objects, of course, for other acts which here function as the authentic carriers of meaning.”20 One could say, according to the terms of Logical Investigations, that the nonobjectifying acts make no contribution to the constitution of objects. All value- and practical-determinations would therefore be apprehended as mere reflective determinations [Reflexionsbestimmungen]. One cannot then speak of reason in the Husserlian sense with respect to nonobjectifying acts.
In the second part of the 1908/09 lectures, as we see in the margins of the lecture manuscripts, Husserl agonized over the difference between objectifying and nonobjectifying evaluative-acts. In the first part, in a manner analogous to the refutation of logical psychologism and skepticism in Prolegomena,21 Husserl refuted axiological-ethical psychologism and skepticism and established formal-axiological principles which are analogous to formal-logical principles. The starting point of the second part is the objectivity of value (which was secured in the first part) and the related epistemological problem. The problem concerns “how we are supposed to go beyond the fact of a value-estimation [Wertschätzenden] occurring in a feeling to a predicate that makes a claim to objectivity.”22 Obviously, knowledge in the proper sense, thus knowledge of values too, can only be an act of the understanding. But then what role does the evaluating feeling play in axiological knowledge?
Value judgments do not speak to factually occurring feelings but rather, according to Husserl, make a claim to knowledge with respect to objective axiological determinations of objects. These axiological features are founded in thingly [sachlich] determinations. Husserl often also called these axiological features nonessential object-determinations, which means that they do not belong to the “nature” of the object; they belong in “another dimension” than the natural [naturhaft] object-determinations.23 “The axiological objectivities are founded in the nonaxiological ones in such a way that the latter objectivities are and remain finished and complete objectivities, so to speak, even when we cross out, as it were, the axiological predicates which we may ascribe and really accord to them.”24
Here Husserl hits upon a double meaning in the concept of understanding: if we take “understanding” in the widest sense, axiological predicates are also objects of the understanding. As predicates they “are subordinate to the formal laws of predicates in general,”25 and those are formal-logical laws of validity for judgments or the correlative formal-ontological laws. “With this,” Husserl says, “the complete dominion of the formal-ontological understanding is asserted.”26 A narrower conception of the understanding encompasses only value-free objects or object-determinations. If we are speaking of theoretical predicates as opposed to axiological predicates, then this narrower concept of the understanding is in play. Axiological predicates are accordingly founded in theoretical predicates; these remain what they are even if the axiological predicates are crossed out. “Theory does not lead to any values.”27 That something is valuable cannot be discovered through theoretical means; values are originally given only in evaluative emotive-acts [Gemütsakte]. “It seems that emotive-acts must irrefutably be taken as the constituting acts for values.”28 Only after we have discovered value-determinations in value-feelings [wertfühlen] can we observe them in a theoretical, scientific manner. If, however, emotive-acts are supposed to present objective value-determinations [gegenständliche Wertbestimmungen], then must they not be objectifying acts? “We see that evaluating acts are essential for the constitution of values; but reflecting upon how they could function constitutively, we become lost in obscurity. Indeed only objectifying acts can constitute.”29
Concerning factual [sachlicher] object-determinations, justifying predications in judgment ultimately refers back to pre-predicative intuition—in the case of sensible objects, that is external perception. Following the method of analogy, we are led to ask whether axiological knowledge in the form of value-predicates is not also analogously grounded in a type of value-intuition or value-perception. Husserl had in fact attempted, primarily in a number of research manuscripts, to identify and phenomenologically describe a value-perception analogous to external perception. Like external perception, value-perception should be an apperception, the apprehension of sensations.
Already in §15 of the fifth investigation, where Husserl specifically engaged with the intentionality of feelings, he distinguished between intentional feeling-acts and feeling-sensations—sensory pains and pleasures—which are of the same rank as sensory-contents and, like these, are not intentional experiences. Just like sensory-contents, feeling-sensations can be objectifyingly apprehended and thus yield, according to Husserl’s analyses in §15, the pleasure-tinted object, “bathed in a rosy gleam.”30 But this objectifying apprehension of the feeling-sensation is, in Husserl words, “purely presentational”;31 we have an essentially new nonobjectifying mode of intention in liking and being pleased, that is, the intentional feelings that relate to the affectively colored, presented object.
In his later theory of value-perception, a feeling or value-apperception takes the place of a purely presentative apprehension. The empirical apperception constitutes the factual content; the emotive-apperception, the acts of liking and disliking, constitutes the value-content of the object. This value-apperception is founded in the empirical apperception, just as the feeling-sensations are founded in the sensory contents. Here too, according to Husserl, value-perception is analogous to external perception in that it is a continuous, unitary consciousness in which empty components of feeling-apperception suitably pass over into feeling-plenitudes [Gefühlsfülle]. Husserl writes in a research manuscript from 1909/10:
Just as a [perception] is an apprehending and meaning [meinendes] consciousness of a thing, the other is an apprehending and meaning consciousness of a value, and just as to the essence of the former belongs the possibility of unfolding as a synthetically continuous, varying [auseinandergehendes] consciousness, in which a unity is given in a unitary consciousness, the object as something identical unfolding itself and in which there proceeds the play of actual, ever new objective determinations or the transition from empty to full, from less complete to more complete givenness of these moments, and vice-versa, so it is in the case of pleasure. The consciousness of pleasure [Gefallensbewusstsein], which is founded in object-consciousness, is a unitary consciousness and in an analogical sense it unfolds itself, gives itself etc.32
In the same manuscript Husserl also speaks of “hedonic identification” in addition to the presenting-intellective one.33
The different analyses and descriptions that Husserl undertook in research manuscripts concerning value-apperception are in no way unified and they are full of problems, which above all concern the application of the content-apprehension schema and the feeling-character of value-perception as well as its relationship to emotional affects [Gefühlsaffekten], which Husserl called authentic feelings in a manuscript from 1911.34 In spite of these difficulties in the phenomenological account of sentient value-apperception, Husserl held fast to the analogy between the sentient experience of values and perception. Husserl writes in his lectures on ethics from 1920: “Just as sensory data are the material [Material] for the experience that we call the perceptual experience of things with their immanent thing-appearances, so are sensory feelings the material for our value-apperception, for the experiences in which we evaluatively grasp and enjoy, say, a melody or symphony, a poem, etc. in the unity of a synthetic feeling.”35
The theory of value-perception is Husserl’s attempt to demonstrate that in the sphere of the emotions, there is, analogous to perception, an achievement that gives an object. “In certain ways one must say,” writes Husserl in the lecture of 1908/09, “something also appears in value-acts; there appear value-objects and, to be sure, not merely objects having value but values as such. If we like something, then it is not just what is liked that appears, as it would appear if there had not been any liking but still the same founding act of objectification; rather, the liked stands before us as liked, or as the pleasing, the beautiful as beautiful, the good as good. We have appearances of the pleasing, appearances of beauty, appearances of the comfortable, etc.”36
How does the distinction between objectifying and nonobjectifying acts stand, if nonobjectifying acts also have appearances of objectivities that are specific to them? In response to this question, Husserl reverts to the terms of Logical Investigations. “Objectifying acts are,” he writes, “not complications of a consciousness that brings to mind an object and of taking a position [Stellungnahme] toward what is objectively known. The first would already be a full objectifying act. Conversely, the valuing act is just such a complication. An objectifying act is that which presents the object in an evaluative meaning [Meinen] and there the valuing is still present with it.”37 Therefore, paradoxically, it is only the nonobjectifying acts that have in themselves a relation to something objective, to wit, through the objectification that founds them. Although we can speak of an objectification’s relation-to [Beziehung-auf] solely in a teleological-normative sense with respect to a relation of identity with other objectifying acts, the directedness of nonobjectifying acts indicates “something in the act itself enabling the founding of what manifests itself.… Thus, one can say in a more authentic sense that joy is directed to that which is presented, while we cannot actually say anything about an objectification.”38
The theory of value-perception, value-appearance, and value-apperception, however, now requires a revision of Logical Investigation’s understanding of nonobjectifying acts as act-qualities founded in objectifications. Now the nonobjectifying act of valuing is a founded apperception and no longer just a founded position-taking. The founded apperception, however, unlike the founded position-taking, is not directed to the object of the founding presentation but rather to its own object: “Evaluating acts are not directed to objects but to values. A value is nothing existent [nichts Seiendes]; a value is something related to being or non-being, yet it belongs to another dimension.”39
The directedness of nonobjectifying valuings then no longer seems to be so profoundly distinguished from objectifying perception and is more akin to other founded apprehensions, such as sign- or image-apprehension.
Just as perception on its own is not yet cognitive reason, so a value-perception on its own is not yet evaluative and volitional reason. Cognitive reason is the reason of judgment, and the reason of judgment is existence-positing, doxic reason; it is a supposing that something exists or that something is composed in such and such a way. A value-perception as the analogue of external perception would certainly harmonize with an intellectualistic theory of reason. Specific [spezifische] thinking and knowing would be similarly built on external perception or value-perception: in the former case factual objects would be known, and in the latter value-objects would be known.
The question of correctness [Recht] and of reason is properly directed to the spontaneous positings, the taking of positions by the ego [Ich-Stellungnahmen]. For an intellectualist theory of reason there would only be one type of position-takings that is subordinate to the norms of correctness, namely, the positings of judgment. One can only rightfully speak of a pluralism and parallelism of types of reason if it is possible to distinguish among multiple basic types of position-takings. In addition to the theory of value-perception as an analogue of external perception and axiological determinations as analogues of sensory-factual determinations, we also find in Husserl’s phenomenology and theory of nonobjectifying acts the analogizing of (i) liking and willing with supposing in judgment and (ii) axiological and practical determinations with the modes of being [Seinsmodi]. “To the class of cognitive acts,” Husserl writes in his lectures of 1914, “stands opposed, as an essentially new class, the class of emotive acts, the acts of feeling, desiring, and willing that obviously divide themselves into closely related genera. Here, new basic types of position-takings appear, new types of supposing, of opining [Dafürhaltens].”40 The taking-as-beautiful [Für-schön-halten] and taking-as-good [Für-gut-halten] are analogous to taking-as-being [Für-seiend-halten] and taking-as-being-so in judgment. Thus, Husserl speaks more often of the widest concept of valuing, which encompasses all position-takings, even the doxic. All position-takings are subordinate to conceptions of the “ought” [des Sollens]; in all cases one can pose the question of correctness, “and so, if you will, pose the question of value.”41 Valuing and willing are not knowing, predicating, and existence-positing. However, there is within all judging, preceding it, a valuing and a resoluteness in the sense of a position-taking, a voting [Votierens]. According to Husserl in his lectures of 1914, emotive- and volitional-acts are to be grasped as a type of existence-modalization [Seinsmodalisierung], “albeit in a new dimension.”42
The analogizing of the emotive and volitional acts with doxic theses also has priority in Ideas I. As in Logical Investigations, the analogy consists primarily in the modalizations of the originary form of doxa, that is supposing, doubting, questioning, and so on. The concept of thesis extends over all spheres of acts. Besides the doxic theses, we find theses of liking and willing. With respect to the noema, there corresponds to each positing a noematic character. The “possible” and “questionable,” like the “likeable” and “obligatory” [gesollt] are not predicates of reflection but characters, which we grasp in the object as such. Each thetic act-character—whether it is doxic, evaluative, or volitional—bears within itself a positionality; it is potentially existence-positing. “It is an essential law that every thesis of whatever genus, by virtue of doxic characterizations belonging inalienably to its essence, can be transformed into current, doxic positing. A positional act posits, but in whatever ‘quality’ it posits, it also posits doxically; whatever is posited by it in other modes is also posited as being, only not currently.”43
The noetic liking-thesis is correlated to the noematic character of “likeable.” If the doxic potentiality of this liking-thesis is transformed into an actual doxic positing, then “likeable” is predicated of the object. In this way, according to Husserl, each thesis “not only constitutes new noematic characters but rather, with their addition, new existent objects are constituted eo ipso for consciousness. Corresponding to the noematic characters are predicable characters in the object possessing a sense, and these are actual and not merely noematically modified predicables.”44 In this sense, the emotive-and volitional acts are “necessary sources of different regions of being and, with this, also sources of the relevant ontologies. For example, evaluative consciousness constitutes, over against the mere world of things, a new kind of ‘axiological’ objectivity [Gegenständlichkeit], a ‘being’ of a new region, insofar as, precisely by means of the essence of the evaluating consciousness in general, actual [aktuelle] doxic theses are prefigured as ideal possibilities that bring into relief objectivities with a new kind of content—values—as ‘meant’ in the evaluating consciousness.”45
Apprehending emotive and volitional acts as theses analogous to existence-theses and correlatively apprehending the axiological and practical determinations as “modalities of being in an extremely extended sense” is, however, just as inadequate as the theory concerning value-perception as the analogue of external perception when it comes to being able to speak of an axiological and practical reason that would be parallel and analogous to cognitive reason.46 The variations of doxic ur-theses—supposing, questioning, doubting, and so on—refer back (with respect to their rational justification) to a determinate ground of justification pertaining to their basic form [Grundform]: for instance, supposing is rational if something speaks in favor of the doxic ur-thesis. The justification of doxic ur-theses in turn lies within intuition, in its sense fulfilled through intuition. In the framework of Husserl’s phenomenological theory of reason, the question concerning how intuition justifies emotive- and volitional-theses cannot be avoided. Constitution in the genuine sense is not a matter of thesis but of apperception. As merely thetic characters, axiological and practical determinations would not be genuine object-determinations. At one point in Ideas I, in §116, Husserl seems to take this into account. Unfortunately, without further phenomenological exposition, Husserl declares in relation to the noematic correlates of the feeling and willing noeses:
On the one hand, there are new characters that are analogous to the modes of belief but at the same time they possess in their new content the possibility of being doxologically posited. On the other hand, new kinds of “construals” are also combined with the new kinds of inherent aspects; a new sense is constituted, one that is founded on that of the underlying noesis, while at the same time encompassing it. The new sense brings a totally new dimension of sense into play here. Constituted with it are no new determining parts of the mere “things,” but instead values of those “things,” values or, better, concrete value-objects, e.g., beauty and ugliness, goodness and badness, the object of use, the artwork, the machine, the book, the action, the deed, and so forth.47
Our everyday environment, the world in which we live, is for us neither solely nor primarily a world of mere things. “In ordinary life we have nothing whatever to do with natural Objects. What we take as things are pictures, statues, gardens, houses, tables, clothes, tools etc. These are all value-objects of various kinds, use-objects, practical-objects. They are not objects that can be found in natural science.”48 We can of course orient ourselves to these value-objects, use-objects, and practical objects in a theoretical-knowing manner; we can turn them into objects placed in the subject-position of a propositional judgment. Yet a purely theoretical-cognitive understanding would lack any axiological and practical objects. Only for a feeling and willing being [Wesen] are there such objects. In feeling and willing a new dimension is constituted as well as ever-new layers of determination, a dimension opposed to that of factual-natural properties.
It is clear that without further supplementation, the theory of value-perception cannot be joined to the theory of liking- and willing-theses, as the analogy with the relationship between perception and judgment would have it; nevertheless, Husserl could only abandon the method of analogy at the risk of compromising the unity of the concepts of reason and constitution. In spite of the precarious situation of emotive and volitional intentionality between the objectifications that found them and the objectifications they found in turn, Husserl could not but attempt to bring the distinction between intention and fulfillment regarding intellective acts to bear upon nonobjectifying acts, a distinction that makes the constitution of emotive and volitional objects possible.
Translated by Patrick Eldridge
NOTES
1. See Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, ed. U. Melle (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 62–63.
2. Husserl, 205. [All English translations of Husserl’s works are mine unless otherwise noted.—PE]
3. Husserl, 333.
4. Husserl, 68.
5. Husserl, 68.
6. Husserl, 37.
7. Husserl, 205–206.
8. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. K. Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 291 [translated by D. Dahlstrom as Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2014), 251]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen I.
9. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. U. Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 430 [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, ed. D. Moran, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2001), 2:121–122].
10. Husserl, 429 [2:121].
11. Husserl, 624 [2:245].
12. Husserl, 695 [2:296].
13. Husserl, 515 [2:167].
14. [The word belief appears in English in the original article.—PE]
15. Husserl, 737, 781 [2:325 and Edmund Husserl, “Selbstanzeige,” translated by P. Bossert and C. Peters in Introduction to the Logical Investigations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 6–7].
16. Husserl, 585 [2:218].
17. “Positing has its original ground of legitimacy in originary givenness.” Cf. Ideen I, 316 [272].
18. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, 334.
19. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:404 [2:108].
20. Husserl, 585 [2:218].
21. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Erster Band, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, ed. E. Holenstein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975) [translated by J. N. Findlay as “Prolegomena to Pure Logic,” in Logical Investigations, ed. D. Moran, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2001), 1:51–247].
22. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, 254.
23. Husserl, 262.
24. Husserl, 261.
25. Husserl, 261.
26. Husserl, 261.
27. Husserl, 268.
28. Husserl, 277.
29. Husserl, 277.
30. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:408 [2:110].
31. Husserl, 409 [2:111].
32. Ms. A VI 7, 11a/b.
33. Ms. A VI 7, 10a.
34. “What I have cared to denote as the act of liking in my older and newer manuscripts, is the spontaneous ‘holding for valuable’ [Für-wert-halten] that ‘emanates from the ego,’ value-perception, or value-positing. This is opposed to the ‘being-affected-by-the-object [Durch-das-objekt-Affiziertwerden] emanating from the object,’ the affect of pleasure or joy, the authentic feeling, which is enjoyed or suffered” (Ms. A VI 8 I, 88a).
35. Ms. F I 28, 83b.
36. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, 323.
37. Husserl, 338.
38. Husserl, 336.
39. Husserl, 339–340.
40. Husserl, 59–60.
41. Husserl, 62.
42. Husserl, 105.
43. Husserl, Ideen I, 270 [233].
44. Husserl, 243 [209].
45. Husserl, 272 [234].
46. Husserl, 260 [224].
47. Husserl, 266–267 [229–230].
48. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. M.Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 27 [translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 29].