Abstract
This paper explicates Husserl’s usage of what he calls “radical Besinnung” in Formale und transzendentale Logik (1929). Husserl introduces radical Besinnung as his method in the introduction to FTL. Radical Besinnung aims at criticizing the practice of formal sciences by means of transcendental phenomenological clarification of its aims and presuppositions. By showing how Husserl applies this method to the history of formal sciences down to mathematicians’ work in his time, the paper explains in detail the relationship between historical critical Besinnung and transcendental phenomenology. Ultimately the paper suggests that radical Besinnung should be viewed as a general methodological framework within which transcendental phenomenological descriptions are used to criticize historically given goal-directed practices.
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Notes
This paper has been greatly improved thanks to the detailed criticisms and useful and generous suggestions of George Heffernan. I am particularly thankful to him for drawing my attention to FTL §§102–105, where Husserl discusses transcendental Selbst-Besinnung. Thanks are also due to Sara Heinämaa and her project “Marginalization and Experience: Phenomenolological Analyses of Normality and Abormality” (MEPA) financed by Academy of Finland.
The term is mentioned already in Logical Investigations (e.g., Hua19/1, p. 25). The number of references to it increases dramatically in Husserl’s texts in 1922, starting with his London Lectures 1922, Introduction to Philosophy Lectures 1922/1923 (both found in Husserliana 35), and the Kaizo articles from 1922–24 (Husserliana 27). Husserl also continues to expand on the notion in the 1930s and applies it in the practical sphere (e.g. Hua 42, where Husserl’s emphasis is on “universal practical Besinnung”). So neither the scope nor the significance of Besinnung is restricted to FTL. I am here indebted to George Heffernan’s hitherto unpublished “Concordance to Husserl’s Use of the Term Besinnung”.
According to Schuhmann, Husserl related this to Grimme in a letter dated to May 31, 1937 (not included in the Briefwechsel). The original reads: “Ich muβte sie regelrecht studieren, ich fand sie schwer, aber war im Ganzen sehr zufrieden. Es ist doch mein reifstes Werk, nur zu sehr konzentriert” (Schuhmann 1977, pp. 484–485).
The accounts that discuss Besinnung see it as a kind of existential self-meditation (esp., Dodd 2004, p. 30; Moran 2012, p. 49. See also Carr 1991 and Steinbock 1995). The present paper argues for it as a (third-personal) method, which aims at critical understanding of the aims and goals of communities and cultures. When applied to one’s own culture, it may arguably yield the kind of existential significance emphasized by the previous commentators. Its existential significance is here regarded as following from the heightened understanding of the purposes of activities and institutions—which is the primary aim of Besinnung. Thus, even though the present paper does not address the existential significance of Besinnung, it is perfectly compatible with such emphases.
Transcendental logic refers to transcendental philosophical investigations of formal logic. In FTL Husserl does not explicitly use the phenomenological reduction as a way to transcendental phenomenology but rather employs “the way through ontology” to transcendental phenomenology, as discussed by Iso Kern (1976, p. 141). This path is more piecemeal: In pursuit of “radicality,” i.e., “uprooting all prejudices,” it starts with the examination of the presuppositions of logic and ultimately leads to full-fledged transcendental Selbstbesinnung understood as transcendental phenomenology (Hua 17, §§104–105).
Note that Besinnung can be exercised in both natural and transcendental attitudes. Besinnung of the formal sciences in the first part of FTL is carried out in the natural attitude. Husserl discusses transcendental Besinnung in FTL only in the few fascinating passages towards the end (Hua 17, §§103–105).
Husserl describes the task of FTL to be “the clear theoretical explicating of the genuine sense of all science as such.” In German: “den echten Sinn von Wissenschaft überhaupt klarzulegen und in der Klarheit theoretisch zu explizieren” (Hua 17, p. 14/9; my emphasis). In paragraph §104 Husserl accordingly refers to systematic Besinnungen concerning the world. Recall that in Ideas II Husserl characterizes the theoretical attitude of the natural sciences (omnipresent in FTL) as having an active focus on what is objective (Ideas II, esp. §3. Cf. also The Crisis §36). I propose that Besinnung is a “human scientific” analogue to the natural theoretical attitude in that it involves an active attempt to understand people’s intentions correctly.
Husserl moved from Göttingen to Freiburg in 1916 (Schuhmann 1977, p. 200).
The marginalia in his personal copies show that Husserl read carefully Hilbert’s “Neubegründung der Mathematik” (1922) and Weyl’s ”Die heutige Erkenntnislage in der Mathematik” (1925), as well as Weyl’s subsequent book Philosophie der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaft (1926) (See Hartimo 2018). The letters exchanged between Mahnke and Husserl are involved and often concern mathematics. However, the letters also suggest that Mahnke got his inspiration from Husserl rather than the other way around. Becker was Husserl’s assistant from 1923 until 1931 and presumably the most important figure in informing Husserl about mathematical matters in the 1920s. Oskar Becker was the most knowledgeable in mathematics among the phenomenologists around Husserl (cf. Mancosu 2010, p. 281). Ernst Zermelo, the set theorist, was also in Freiburg in the 1920s and 1930s, but there are no documents about the relationship between him and Husserl (except the oral report that Zermelo’s late wife, Gertrude, has told Akihiro Kanamori that the two used to play chess together).
This distinguishes Besinnung from Selbstbestimmung, crucial to Husserl’s lectures on ethics in the 1920s (cf. Hua 37, esp. pp. 161–167, where Selbstbestimmung is discussed in connection with “Selbstbestimmung des moralischen ich”). Selbstbestimmung should not be confused with Selbstbesinnung, which is a species of Besinnung such that the scope of the others includes also the investigator. Thus it is an examination of our intentional senses. Besinnung should also be distinguished from the (second-personal) understanding of other’s motivations as elaborated especially in Ideen II.
In The Crisis Husserl does not discuss the various significations of the word logos to establish a preliminary starting point. Instead he holds that his method is necessarily circular: “Thus we find ourselves in a sort of circle. The understanding of the beginnings is to be gained fully only by starting with science as given in its present-day form, looking back at its development. But in the absence of an understanding of the beginnings the development is mute as a development of meaning. Thus we have no other choice than to proceed forward and backward in a zigzag pattern; the one must help the other in an interplay. Relative clarification on one side brings some elucidation on the other, which in turn casts light back on the former”; “Wir stehen also in einer Art Zirkel. Das Verständnis der Anfänge ist voll nur zu gewinnen von der gegebenen Wissenschaft in ihrer heutigen Gestalt aus, in der Rückschau auf ihre Entwicklung. Aber ohne ein Verständnis der Anfänge ist diese Entwicklung als Sinnesentwicklung stumm. Es bleibt uns nichts anderes übrig: wir müssen im ‘Zickzack’ vor- und zurückgehen; im Wechselspiel muβ eins dem andern helfen. Relative Klärung auf der einen Seite bringt einige Erhellung auf der anderen, die nun ihrerseits auf die Gegenseite zurückstrahlt” (Hua 6, p. 59/58). In other words, instead of deriving his starting point from the various significations of the word logos (as he does in FTL), he now thinks that the necessary starting point is in the present-day form of the sciences which then guides the historical investigation, which in turn helps toward understanding the present-day situation.
In German, “in gewissen Weisen geformtes, geordnetes, verknüpftes, und zwar nach Zweckideen der Vernunft” (Hua 17, p. 30/26).
Husserl’s discussion of logic may sound odd to a contemporary reader. The reason for this is that for Husserl it is usually about structures and only derivatively about correct reasoning or proving. Accordingly, Husserl discusses it by way of the normative ideals (truth, consistency) aimed at. Referring to Scheler’s distinction between normatives Sollen and ideales Sollen, Von Wright distinguishes between norms of what we ought to do or may or must not be done, and things that ought to or what may or must not be (1963, pp. 13–14). Using von Wright’s distinction, one may say that Husserl’s account of the normativity of logic emphasizes the latter, i.e., how things ought to be. In contrast, the normativity of contemporary logic is typically understood to be about reasoning, and hence it is viewed in deontological terms, and it falls into von Wright’s former category. Normativity in Husserl’s logic requires a closer treatment than is possible in the present paper. Suffice it to say that it is yet another aspect of Husserl’s approach to logic that cannot be understood without a proper grasp of Besinnung as Husserl’s method.
“Sie [die Logik] normiert aus den Prinzipien der reinen Vernunft selbst und normiert die Vernünftigkeit als solche. An ihren formalen Erkenntnissen ist zu messen, inwieweit prätendierte Wissenschaft der Idee der echten Wissenschaft gemäβ ist […]” (Hua 17, p. 35/31).
What exactly Husserl means by the notion of “definite manifold” has been intensely debated in the secondary literature (see Hartimo 2016). In my view Husserl intends to capture with it categorical and syntactically complete theories (which, in light of the subsequent development of mathematical logic, is usually not possible, even if desirable). Categoricity is a property of a theory, all of whose realizations (in Husserl’s case, for example, systems of vectors, natural numbers, etc.) are isomorphic to each other (i.e., there is a one-to-one correlation between the individuals and relations of one domain and the individuals and relations of another domain) so that the theory defines a unique formal model “up to isomorphism.” A syntactically complete theory is a theory in which every sentence or its negation in the language of the theory can be deduced from the axioms of the theory.
Husserl is explicit about this in FTL: “Without being guided by the philosophico-logical considerations that determined my studies, Hilbert arrived at his concept of completeness (naturally quite independently of my still-unpublished investigations); he attempts, in particular, to complete a system of axioms by adding a separate ‘axiom of completeness’. The above-given analyses should make it evident that, even if the inmost motives that guided him mathematically were inexplicit, they tended essentially in the same direction as those that determined the concept of the definite manifold” (Hua 17, §31). In this connection Husserl refers to the work on definiteness that he carried out almost 30 years earlier. He is thus either reinterpreting his own earlier approach or else claiming that he used Besinnung already then, even if only implicitly.
“sie frei zu wandeln, sie mathematisch zu verallgemeinern und die Allgemeinheiten zu besondern; das aber nicht in Bindung an die hier bedeutungslosen Differenzierungen nach Gattung und Art im Sinne der Aristotelischen Tradition, sondern im Sinne der im Gebiet des Formalen sich darbietenden formal-mathematischen ‘Uber- und Unterordnungen’” (Hua 17, p. 97/93).
“die alle möglichen Theorienformen bzw. alle möglichen Mannigfaltigkeitsformen als mathematische Besonderungen also ableitbar, in sich fassen würde” (Hua 17, p. 102/98).
This view of mathematics is further elaborated in Da Silva (2017, pp. 185–215).
This is what the applications in da Silva (2017) refer to. There, Da Silva gives the most profound explanation that I am aware of how Husserl’s view of mathematics becomes applied in physics.
Apophantic analysis resembles Weyl’s predicative and Hilbert’s proof-theoretical attempts to provide mathematics with secure foundations.
In his “Neubegründung der Mathematik” (1922), read and marked by Husserl, Hilbert writes, in a passage marked by Husserl, that as a precondition for the application of logic there must already be given in representation “extra-logical discrete objects, which exist intuitively as immediate experience before all thought. If logical inference is to be certain, then these objects must be capable of being completely surveyed in all their parts” (Hilbert 1922, p. 163/Ewald 1996, p. 1121). For Hilbert, sets of strokes, such as III and IIII, provided such an intuitive foundation. Husserl obviously thinks that the “extra-logical discrete objects” should be objects of ordinary perception, not strokes as Hilbert suggests. This criticism of Hilbert is also put forward by Dietrich Mahnke (1922). All this—i.e., the difference between formal mathematics aiming at distinctness and truth-logic aiming at truth, and the reliance on the perception of individuals—is captured in the following words by Husserl: “For mathesis universalis, as formal mathematics, these ultimates have no particular interest. Quite the contrary for truth-logic: because ultimate substrate-objects are individuals, about which very much can be said in formal truth, and back to which all truth ultimately relates. If one keeps to the formal of pure analytics, if the evidence – the evidence serving this discipline—accordingly relates only to pure judgment-senses as distinct, one cannot establish this last proposition; it is by no means an ‘analytic’ proposition. To have insight into it, one must make ultimate cores intuited, one must draw fullness of adequation, not from evidence of the judgment-senses, but instead from evidence of the ‘matters’ or ‘affairs’ corresponding to them” (Hua 17, p. 211/203). For more on Husserl’s relationship to Hilbert, see Hartimo (2017).
Becker was at the time Husserl’s assistant and had written a part of Appendix III of FTL. Becker explicitly claims that in distinguishing truth from consequence he is indebted to Husserl (1973, p. 4). Becker’s subsequent philosophical consideration of mathematical existence then decides the dispute between formalists and intuitionists in favor of intuitionism and its “contentful” mathematics, “which alone discovers real phenomena that are accessible to originary and adequate intuition and capable of an existential interpretation” (1973, p. 2). Husserl probably would not go as far as Becker in interpreting Hilbert’s mathematics as examining mere consequence, but he presumably would claim that Hilbert does not clearly distinguish between the two goals striven at in formal sciences: truth and non-contradiction.
Nevertheless, surprisingly much can be found in Husserl’s formal writings. See the recent and very thorough explanation of Husserl’s logic by Ansten Klev (2017).
”ein Angelegtsein auf ’Vernunft’ und sogar eine durchgehende Tendenz dahin, also auf Ausweisung der Richtigkeit (und dann zugleich auf habituellen Erwerb derselben) und auf Durchstreichung der Unrichtigkeiten (womit sie aufhören als erworbener Besitz zu gelten)” (Hua 17, p. 169/160).
“Wie bei allem Handeln sind die Handlungsziele, die zu erzeugenden neuen Urteile im voraus in Modi einer leeren, inhaltlich noch unbestimmten und jedenfalls noch unerfüllten Antizipation uns bewußt, als das, worauf wir hinstreben und was zur verwirklichenden Selbstgegebenheit zu bringen, eben das sich schrittweise vollendende Handeln ausmacht.” (Hua 17, p. 176/167).
“Es ist eine offenbare Idealisierung, da de facto niemand immer wieder kann” (Hua 17, p. 196/188).
“Offenbar wiederholt sich hier das Problem der subjektiven konstitutiven Ursprünge als der verborgenen, zu enthüllenden und als Norm neu zu gestaltenden Methode der Konstruktionen, der Methode, in der das ‘und so weiter’ verschiedenen Sinnes und die Unendlichkeiten als neuartige kategoriale Gebilde […] evident werden. Eben diese Evidenz in allen ihren Sondergestalten muß nun aber zum Thema werden” (Hua 17, p. 196/189).
“in jedem leistenden Tun liegt Intention und Verwirklichung; man kann dieses Tun und was darin liegt selbst betrachten, sich der Identität seines Absehens und der es erfüllenden Verwirklichung versichern. Im naiven Absehen und Tun kann sich die Zielung verschieben, und ebenso in der naiven Wiederholung und im sonstigen Rückgang auf das vorher Erstrebte und Erzielte. So auch in der im Zusammenhang der naiven Aktionen des Logikers verlaufenden Thematisierung. In der Reflexion von den geradehin allein gegebenen Themen (den sich evtl. sehr wesentlich verschiebenden) auf die sie in Abzielung und Erfüllung konstituierende Aktivität—die vordem im naiven Tun verborgen, oder wie wir auch sagen können, ‘anonym’ bleibt und erst jetzt zum eigenen Thema wird—befragen wir hinterher die betreffende Aktivität. Das heißt, wir befragen die eben damit aufgeweckte Evidenz nach dem, worauf sie zielt und was sie erworben hat, und in der Evidenz höherer Stufe identifizieren und fixieren wir bzw. verfolgen wir die möglichen Abwandlungen sonst unmerklicher thematischer Schwankungen und unterscheiden wir die zugehörigen Zielungen und Verwirklichungen, mit anderen Worten, die sich verschiebenden logischen Begriffsbildungen” (Hua 17, pp. 184–185/177).
“daß diese Evidenz—daß Evidenz überhaupt—reflektiv zu betrachten, zu analysieren, umzugestalten, zu reinigen und zu bessern ist und daß sie dann evtl. zum Muster, zur Norm genommen werden kann und genommen werden soll” (Hua 17, p. 184/176).
“Alle diese Untersuchungen haben den Charakter von fundamentalen der Enthüllung und Kritik der ursprünglichen logischen Methode, und zwar können wir sie alle auch bezeichnen als Erforschungen der Methode, durch die die ‘Grundbegriffe’ der Analytik ursprünglich erzeugt werden in der jenigen Evidenz, die uns ihres identischen und vor allen Verschiebungen gesicherten Wesens versichert” (Hua 17, p. 188/180).
The whole passage in German is as follows: “Es ist also wirklich nur Selbstbesinnung, aber nicht vorschnell abbrechende und in naïve Positivität umschlagende, sondern in absoluter Konsequenz eben das bleibend, womit sie anfing: Selbstbesinnung. Nur daβ, sie ohne ihren Stil wesentlich zu ändern, im Fortschreiten die Form der transzendental-intersubjektiven annimmt” (Hua 17, p. 282/276).
Hence there is no conflict between historical–critical Besinnung and transcendental phenomenology, since transcendental phenomenology is a separate, well-defined method that is used within Besinnung to make it radical (cf. Carr 1991).
“Die gegenwärtige Lage der europäischen Wissenschaften nötigt zu radikalen Besinnungen. Sie haben im Grunde den großen Glauben an sich selbst, an ihre absolute Bedeutung verloren. Der moderne Mensch von heute sieht nicht wie der ‘moderne’ der Aufklärungsepoche in der Wissenschaft und der durch sie geformten neuen Kultur die Selbstobjektivierung der menschlichen Vernunft oder die universale Funktion, die die Menschheit sich geschaffen hat, um sich ein wahrhaft befriedigendes Leben, ein individuelles und soziales Leben aus praktischer Vernunft zu ermöglichen. Dieser große Glaube, dereinst der Ersatz für den religiösen Glauben, der Glaube, daß Wissenschaft zur Weisheit führe—zu einer wirklich rationalen Selbsterkenntnis, Welt- und Gotterkenntnis, durch sie hindurch zu einem wie immer vollkommener zu gestaltenden, einem wahrhaft lebenswerten Leben in ‘Glück,’ Zufriedenheit, Wohlfahrt usw.—, hat jedenfalls in weiten Kreisen seine Kraft verloren. Man lebt so überhaupt in einer unverständlich gewordenen Welt, in der man vergeblich nach dem Wozu, dem dereinst so zweifellosen, vom Verstand wie vom Willen anerkannten Sinn fragt.” (Hua 17, p. 9/5).
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Hartimo, M. Radical Besinnung in Formale und transzendentale Logik (1929). Husserl Stud 34, 247–266 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-018-9228-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-018-9228-5