Abstract
This essay examines how Husserl stretches the bounds of his philosophy of meaning, according to which all propositions are categorical, to account for existential propositions, which seem to lack predicates. I examine Husserl’s counterintuitive conclusion that an existential proposition does possess a predicate and I explore his endeavor to pinpoint what that predicate is. This goal is accomplished in three stages. First, I examine Husserl’s standard theory of predication and categorial intuition from his 1901 Logical Investigations. Second, I show how Husserl imposes those 1901 insights to uncover the predicate of the existential proposition in unpublished manuscripts and lectures. He determines that the existential proposition predicates of the subject, that it corresponds to an actual object. This analysis reveals that Husserl’s descriptions of existential propositions from the late 1890s employed both static and genetic methodologies. In those texts, he carefully untangles and clarifies the co-enmeshed passive and active moments of consciousness and shows that the passive givenness of certain circumstances is the condition of possibility for our active verifying of propositions. Finally, I execute a critical assessment of Husserl’s thought to reveal that, while his insights about existential propositions are largely correct, they are augmented by re-construing them within the context of his mature philosophy. Only by renouncing his metaphysical neutrality and by accounting for intersubjectivity, can Husserl properly clarify existential propositions.
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Notes
While all translations are mine, I provide references to the corresponding English translation where available, following a slash after the German pagination. Quotes from the Logical Investigations always come from the First Edition.
Clarity regarding Husserl’s definitions of propositions, judgments, expressions, and signified states of affairs is necessary from the start. A proposition is, according to Husserl, an ideal meaning. This ideal meaning can be instantiated in a categorial judgment, which is a temporally and psychically executed intention. An expression that is composed by an individual is given its meaning by the categorial judgment. The expression signifies the state of affairs, see Byrne 2017a and 2017b.
Husserl’s insight, that objectifying reason is unbounded in its range means that all objects and states of affairs “must, ideally speaking, permit expression through wholly determinate word-meanings”, which can be recognized as “corresponding truth-in-themselves” (Hua XIX. Husserl 1984, p. 95 /1970, p. 223). See Płotka 2009, pp. 18–26; Soldati 2008, pp. 67–73.
In other words, categorial (kategorial) judgments express categorical (kategorisch) propositions.
For example, because a name does not predicate something of an object, it has no truth value. Husserl even further asserts that names, which do have some descriptive elements, still do not express propositions. For example, Husserl famously concludes that the name, “the postman hurrying by” (der vorübergehende Postbote. Hua XIX. Husserl 1984, p. 485/1970, p. 152) is no proposition, but rather a non-independent (syncategorematic) part of a potentially whole meaning. According to Husserl, when uttering this expression, one is not making any claim about the postman. Only when something is properly and explicitly predicated of the postman, for example, that he is wearing grey clothes, is the meaning then a proposition with a truth value, which could be determined by examining the clothes of that mail carrier.
Even though there is—to my knowledge—no essay that is exclusively dedicated to engaging with Husserl’s theory of existential propositions, there are several works, which do, if only briefly, address that tenet of Husserl’s philosophy. For example, see; Pietersma 1986, p. 32; Rollinger 1999, pp. 226–229 and 2003, p. 209; Staiti 2015, pp. 822–823; Varga 2006; Yun 2007, pp. 138–142. Christian Breyer’s work (Breyer 2004) engages most with this tenet of Husserl’s theory, but also discusses Bolzano’s understanding of existential propositions at length. However, as I demonstrate in note 16 below, Breyer misrepresents Husserl’s theory, where this leads him to an incorrect interpretation of the evolution of Husserl’s philosophy.
In addition to discussing Husserl’s insights from LU about predicative propositions generally, this essay most frequently investigates Husserl’s 1896 Logic Lectures (Mat I) and his 1902/03 Logic Lectures (Mat II. Husserl 2001). While there are important differences between the two lecture courses, Husserl frequently repeats or revises some sections of the former in the latter (See Rollinger 2003, p. 207). To properly substantiate my interpretation, I also draw from four texts from Hua XL. Husserl 2009. Three were written in the latter half of the 1890s (Hua XL. Husserl 2009, pp. 68–81, 166–118, 118–120) and one was composed in the Winter semester of 1983/94 (Hua XL. Husserl 2009, pp. 32–50). Finally, to contextualize my reading within Husserl’s oeuvre, I occasionally discuss passages from Hua I, III-1, XVI, XX-2, XXII, XXIV, and XXX.
In signitive or non-intuitive consciousness, my intention is directed at an object or state of affairs that does not appear in person via perception and is not represented imaginatively. Husserl writes that, “A signitive presentation does not present analogically, it is ‘in reality’ no presentation, in it nothing of the object comes to life” (Hua XIX. Husserl 1984, p. 670/1970, p. 233). See Byrne 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, and 2020e.
Accordingly, for Husserl, categorial intuition is not just predicating or intuiting. It is both. It is so-to-speak predicatively seeing. I am, in executing a categorial intuition, both ascribing a predicate to a subject and seeing that that predicate belongs to the subject. As Cobb-Stevens writes, “Rather than presenting some particular thing, say a red chair, a categorial intuition presents the chair’s being red, the red quality’s belonging to the chair” (Cobb-Stevens 1990, pp. 43–44).
To be noted is that all categorial intentions are founded in and presuppose single-rayed acts. The categorial intention is a new act, which intends a novel categorial object, which was not given in the single-rayed intentions. Husserl writes that a categorial state of affairs, “can only be constituted in founded acts of the sort in question, which can achieve ‘self-givenness to perception’ only in acts built up in this manner” (Hua XIX. Husserl 1984, p. 683/1970, p. 288).
Sensorial contents are substantially present and are part of the stream of consciousness. They are unrepeatable, as they are continually changing and flowing. Moreover, in and of themselves, these contents are not intentional, but are rather experienced or lived through (Hua XIX. Husserl 1984, p. 397/1970, p. 104). Sensorial contents only can become intentionally representative via their apprehension.
To be clear, only the “apprehending matters” of these two perceptions coincide. The apprehending matter, which is one moment of the apprehension, determines which object is represented and the properties of the represented object, such as its color and size (Hua XIX. Husserl 1984, pp. 429–430/1970, p. 121). In what follows, whenever I discuss coinciding intentions, the reader should understand that the coincidence between the apprehending matters of two acts is specifically being addressed. I have talked at length about Husserl’s account of the apprehending matter and the role that it plays in categorial intuition in my Byrne (2020a).
Husserl would adopt this terminology of “position-taking” in his later writings. In LU and his early texts, he primarily calls position-taking, “act-quality”. I opt for the former term over the latter, as I find that it helps one to better understand what Husserl is actually talking about.
For Husserl, the question of whether I can apodictically know, that is, know with absolute surety that my expressed existential proposition is true and that the object does exist depends upon whether my perception is adequate or inadequate. On the one hand, when I adequately perceive an object, I see all of it at one time. According to Husserl, when the object completely appears to me in this way, it is impossible that the object could be otherwise than it appears or that it could surprise me by radically changing in some way (Hua XIX. Husserl 1984, pp. 586–589/1970, pp. 218–220). As such, Husserl concludes that I can apodictically know that any object I adequately perceive does exist and that my expressed existential proposition about that object is true. On the other hand, during an inadequate intuition, some parts of the object are hidden or obscured, such that a new (previously hidden) intuitive appearance of the object could always contravene my conception of the object. I could always be wrong about an inadequately perceived object. Any predication of a predicate to that object, including color, size, shape, and indeed even existence would always remain tentative and in doubt. For example, when looking at this paper, it inadequately appears to me, as only the one side facing me appears “intuitively”, whereas the backside and inside of the sheet of paper do not. There is thus always an ideal possibility that I could turn the paper over once more and see that the backside of the paper is now blue or the paper could simply disappear in my hands, thereby revealing that my perception of the paper was a hallucination the entire time. As the paper is given inadequately, I could never apodictically know that it exists and that my existential proposition is true, as my perception of the paper could always be revealed to be hallucination (Hua XIX. Husserl 1984, p. 647/1970, p. 260).At the same time, in these early lectures, Husserl surprisingly observes that for both the commonplace categorial intuition for the existential proposition, “the perception does not have to be adequate” (Mat II. Husserl 2001, p. 162). Only after “the experience of perceptual illusion, does this [inadequate] verification become insufficient” (Mat II. Husserl 2001, p. 162). With this insight, Husserl is prefiguring a conclusion he would only arrive at in his 1907 Lectures on Thing and Space (Hua XVI, pp. 128–135/1997, pp. 106–112). In those lectures, Husserl saw that practical interest often provides the norms for the ideal of perception, such that, in many cases, certain perspectival perceptions of the object suffice for my current interest. Maxime Doyon explains, “In everyday experience, perception usually follows a natural or practical direction of interest in lifeworldly things, and in this context a perception is said to be ‘optimal’ when such things fulfill our practical intention, that is to say, when their appearances fully match our practical or pragmatic expectations” (Doyon 2018, p. 172). In the current case, Husserl is asserting that pragmatically or practically only a brief continual perception and a categorial intuition based thereupon would be required for me to know that the object exists. I only have need of further inspection after the existence of the object has been put into doubt for some reason or if some other theoretical or practical interest emerged (See Summa 2014, pp. 212–233)
Before broaching the conclusion of this essay, I note that Husserl’s early theory of existential propositions was largely maintained throughout his philosophical career and that it continued to influence his thinking up until his death. While there are many different ways that these descriptions continued to have an effect on Husserl (See note 15 above), in this footnote, I only address one point. Specifically, I contend that Husserl believed – from these early lectures up until his death – that the existential proposition signifies the state of affairs. For both the early and later Husserl, the existential proposition predicates of the paper itself that it exists. Emphasis on Husserl’s preservation of this conclusion is necessary, because in the only other article that addresses Husserl’s theory of existential propositions in detail, Christian Breyer argues that Husserl concludes that the existential proposition signifies the state of affairs only after his 1908 discovery of the noema and noematic meaning. Breyer asserts that in his early works, Husserl believed that existence, that is, correspondence to truth is not predicated of the signified subject, but rather of the ideal meaning (or as Breyer calls it, the “idea”) of the expression. Breyer writes, “[Husserl] states that in such sentences ‘exists’ functions as a ‘modifying’ predicate, to be applied to the respective idea in itself expressed by the preceding singular term rather than (as surface grammar suggests) to the object (if any) satisfying that idea in itself” (Breyer 2004, p. 74). In contrast to Breyer’s interpretation; however, in his early works, Husserl repeatedly and explicitly denies that the existential proposition predicates existence (correspondence to an actual object) of the meaning or proposition of the expression. He writes that when we judge about existence, “We are not only not judging about the subjective presentation or conviction, but also not about the meaning-content, that is, about the logical presentation or proposition” (Mat II. Husserl 2001, p. 164. See Hua XL. Husserl 2009, p. 75, pp. 116–117). And again, Husserl claims, “The phenomenological analysis shows entirely clearly that, when we state the result of a verification in the form of a proposition about being or obtaining, we are not judging about the act or its meaning-content, but rather about the thing itself” (Mat II. Husserl 2001, p. 164). In sum, Husserl’s conclusion, that existence is predicated of the object and not the ideal meaning is maintained in both his early and later works. Husserl’s discovery of the noema and noematic meaning did not change this insight about the concept of being, but rather seemed to solidify it.
The veracity of Husserl’s conclusions can only be fruitfully assessed from within a Husserlian framework. Any attempt to criticize Husserl’s account of existential propositions ‘from the outside’, that is, from another philosophical perspective, with different grounding assumptions, would be unproductive. If one refused to adopt the idea that philosophy should be carried out as an eidetic non-naturalistic study from a first-person perspective, one could certainly not fruitfully engage with Husserl’s theory of existential propositions, as they would not embrace the foundational tenets or methodology of his study of those propositions. Rather, such an analysis would become concerned with debating the viability of phenomenology as a method. I naturally will not engage in such debates, as this would lead far afield of the goals of this paper.
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Byrne, T. The Meaning of Being: Husserl on Existential Propositions as Predicative Propositions. Axiomathes 32, 123–139 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-020-09512-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-020-09512-9