Abstract
One of the permanent factors driving philosophy is the puzzle presented by our embodiment. Our consciousness is embodied. We are its embodiment; we are that curious amalgam that we try to describe in terms of mind and body. Philosophy has sought again and again to describe their relation. Yet each time it attempts this from one of these aspects, the other hides itself. From the perspective of mind, everything appears as a content of consciousness. Yet, from the perspective of the body, there are no conscious contents. There are only neural pathways and chemical processes. As thinkers as early as Locke and Leibniz realized, we may search the brain as thoroughly as we wish; within its material structure, we will never find a conscious content1. Both perspectives are obviously one-sided. We are both mind and body; we are determined by our conscious contents and our physical makeup. Husserl’s Logical Investigations takes account of this fact in speaking of the real and ideal determination of the subject. As embodied beings, we are subjected to real causal laws. Such laws, insofar as they relate to our mental contents, take these as determined by the contents temporally preceding them1. As engaged in mind, we are also subject to the ideal laws of “authentic thought.” These are nontemporal, logical laws governing “the compatibility or incompatibility of mentally realizable contents.” In the Investigations, the problem of the mind’s relation to the body comes to a head in these two determinations. How can the same set of mental acts be subject to both causal and logical laws? How can a causally determined subject grasp an apodictically certain set of logical relations ? As Theodor DeBoer puts this question: “on the one hand, these acts are empirically necessary and determined; on the other hand, an idea realizes itself in them through which they claim apodictic validity. How can both these views be combined ?”2
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Locke’s formulation is: “We are so far from knowing what figure, size or motion of parts produce a yellow color, a sweet taste, or a sharp sound, that we can by no means conceive how any size, figure, or motion of any particles, can possibly produce in us the idea of any color, taste, or sound whatsoever: there is no conceivable connection between the one and other” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1995, p. 445). Leibniz makes the same point in his analogy of the mill. “Perceptions,” he writes “… are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is to say, by figures and motions. Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain perception” (“Monadology,” Basic Writings, trans. George Montgomery, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1962, p. 254 ).
A good example of such a law would be the psychological law of association. The experience of one set of contents brings about the presence of a second, associated set of contents. The first edition of the Investigations contains the clearest exposition of Husserl position on real causality. Husserl there takes real being as being temporally determinate. Real causality is, correspondingly, understood as a temporal determination in which the conditions of the past necessity those of the present. If we express these conditions as a series of variables, then these variables — when associated with a particular time point — are considered to be both determined and determinative (See Logische Untersuchungen, 1st ed., 2 vols., Halle/S., 19001901., II., 249–50 — cited as LU, 1st ed.). The unity founded through such a series of determinations is a unity existing through time. It is a “thing-like” unity, its character being determined by relations of dependencies between succeeding contents (ibid., II, 248, 250–51). Applying this definition to the ego, Husserl writes: “Just as the outer thing is not the momentary individual complex of characteristics, but rather constitutes itself as a unity persisting in change in first passing through a multitude of actual and possible changes, so the ego first — constitutes itself as a subsisting object in the unity that spans all actual and possible changes of the complex of experiences. And this unity is no longer a phenomenological unity; it has its basis in causal lawfulness (ibid., II, 332 ).
Zusammenfassung,“ in De Ontwikkelingsgang in Het Denken van Husserl,Assen, 1966, p. 589.
For an account of this see my Question of Being in Husserl’s Logical Investigations,The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 3–6. The claim that Husserl’s own “motivated path” starts from the problem of the possibility of objective knowledge“ is made in his ”Nachwort,“ Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie and phänomenologischen Philosophie,Drittes Buch, ed. M. Biemel, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971, p. 150.
Thus, as J.N. Mohanty observes, Husserl never really abandons the ontology of ideal and real being. In Mohanty’s words, “Husserl… did carry along, throughout his long philosophical career, an ontology…. He had a certain picture of the total domain of entities, the world, according to which there are two kinds of being, the real and the ideal. The former is characterized by temporality, it is individuated by its spatial location and/or temporal occurrence. The 1 atter is not spatio-temporally individuated.” If “Husserl… became more and more concerned with the enterprise of clarifying the constitution of meanings, this should not be construed as entailing that he ever abandoned his belief that there are essences” (“Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology and Essentialism,” The Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985, p. 192.
All citations from the Second Edition of the Logical Investigations,cited as LI, are taken from Logical Investigations,trans. J. N. Findlay, New York: Humanities Press, 1970.
Nietzsche draws a parallel conclusion when he asserts: “The utility of preservation — not some abstract-theoretical need not to be deceived — stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge — they develop in such a way that their observations suffice for our preservation” (The Will to Power,§480, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1968, pp. 266–7). If this is so, then a change in the conditions of preservation does not just change “utility.” It changes what counts as knowledge as well.
Husserl, thus, writes: “This ideal impossibility of a negative proposition does not clash with the real possibility of a negative act of judgment.” In other words, we are free to say, “…the proposition is absurd, but the act of judgment is not causally ruled out” (LI, p. 158).
Husserl’s Thesis of the Ideality of Meanings,“ Readings on Husserl’s Logical Investigations,ed. J. N. Mohanty, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1977, p. 77, hereafter cited as Mohanty 1977.
Thomas Nenon distinguishes two models of foundation in the Investigations. The first is the ontological model that treats of “independent and dependent objects” (“Two models of Foundation in the Logical Investigations,” in Husserl in Contemporary Context,ed. B. Hopkins, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997, p. 99). As exemplified in the Third Investigation’s theory of parts and wholes, its concern is to see which objects require others to exist and which can exist on their own. The second, which appears in the Sixth Investigation,is the epistemological model that treats of independent and dependent acts. Here, “the question is not `in’ which thing another kind of thing finds its existence, but rather on what basis a higher level act can be constructed…” (p. 106). When we assert that meanings are not objects but rather mediums of reference, we are, in fact, asserting that their foundation is epistemological. It concerns the acts that must be undertaken in order that the ideality of their referring function be established.
Experience and Judgment,ed. L. Landgrebe, tr. J.S. Churchill and K. Ameriks, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, cited as EJ, p. 262.
In Husserl’s words, “the proposition itself is, for all these acts and act-modalities, identical as the correlate of an identification and not general as the correlate of a comparative coincidence” (EJ, p. 263).
Mohanty puts this in terms of an analogy with the constitution of the sense of a physical object: “If the sense of the predicate `physical object’ is constituted in perceptual experiences of various sorts interrelated in certain more or less determinate manners, similarly the sense of ‘meaning’ is constituted in acts of understanding and certain correlations between `understanding’ use of expressions by speakers and ‘understanding grasp’ by auditors” (“Husserl’s Thesis,” p. 81).
All citations from this text, cited as OG, are taken from “The Origin of Geometry,” The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,trans. David Can, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 170.
See Berkeley’s Of the Principles of Human Knowledge,“Introduction,” §10 and Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature,Bk. I, Part I, sec. 7.
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Mensch, J. (2003). Real and Ideal Determination in Husserl’s Sixth Logical Investigation . In: Husserl’s Logical Investigations Reconsidered. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0207-2_13
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