- Length
- 900 pagesFindlay, Logical Investigations, 2 vols, Routledge, 2nd ed. 2001
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Logical Investigations
The book in which phenomenology begins, by a mathematician who had written a psychological account of arithmetic and then decided it was wrong. Its slogan - back to the things themselves - became the watchword of a movement, and almost everyone in that movement ended up disagreeing with him.
- Date
- 1900-1901
- Author
- Edmund Husserl
- Region
- Halle and Göttingen
- Language
- German
- 1970 English, J. N. Findlay Revised 2001; the only complete English version, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Phenomenological — Description of experience as it is given
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 27 years
The founding work of phenomenology, and the book its author spent the rest of his life revising and partly disowning as too close to the psychology it attacked.
What the book says
Two volumes that begin by destroying a position their author had held and end by inventing a method. The first volume attacks psychologism - the view that the laws of logic are laws of how people actually think, discoverable by psychology. Husserl's objection is that this makes logic contingent and species-relative: if the principle of non-contradiction is a fact about human minds, then a differently constituted mind might reason otherwise, and truth becomes relative to a species, which he argues is a self-refuting position. The second volume then asks what logic is about if not mental processes, and the answer requires an entirely new kind of investigation. Six long studies examine expression and meaning, universals, wholes and parts, grammar, the nature of presentation, and finally knowledge itself - each proceeding by careful description of what is actually given in experience rather than by causal explanation of it. The central concept is intentionality: consciousness is always consciousness of something, and describing the structures of that directedness is a task neither psychology nor logic had undertaken.
What it argues
That logic is not about mental events and that describing what appears is a discipline in its own right. The anti-psychologistic argument is the more straightforward: laws of logic are normative and necessary, laws of psychology are descriptive and probabilistic, and no derivation of the first from the second is possible without making truth depend on how creatures happen to be built. The constructive half is harder and more consequential. Consciousness is intentional - directed at objects, which need not exist for the directedness to be real - and the phenomenologist's task is to describe the structures of this directedness without asking about causes and without assuming anything about what lies behind appearances. The method requires suspending the ordinary assumption that the world is out there, not to doubt it but to make the describing possible.
What answered it
Heidegger, from inside, and then a whole succession of students who each took the method somewhere Husserl had not intended. Sartre found intentionality in a Paris café through Raymond Aron and wrote the essay that launched French phenomenology; Merleau-Ponty took the descriptions toward the body; Levinas toward the encounter with another person; Derrida began with a critique of Husserl's account of signs. Almost the entire continental tradition of the twentieth century runs through this book, mostly by way of disagreement with it.
How it argues
By description that refuses explanation. Husserl's method is to take a phenomenon - meaning something by a word, seeing a whole rather than a set of parts, recognising a universal - and describe what is involved in it without asking what causes it, on the grounds that the causal question presupposes an answer to the descriptive one. The prose is long, careful, heavily qualified and famously hard, and the second volume runs to nine hundred pages in English. It repays patience and defeats speed.
The moment
Halle and then Göttingen, at the turn of the century, with psychologism the dominant position in German philosophy of logic. Husserl had published a psychological account of arithmetic in 1891 which Frege reviewed severely in 1894; by 1896 he was lecturing against the position. He moved to Freiburg in 1916, was forbidden to use the university library after 1933 under the racial laws, and died in 1938 with his enormous body of unpublished manuscripts smuggled to Belgium by a Franciscan who feared they would be destroyed.
How it travelled
By students, and by an archive rescued from destruction. Husserl's Göttingen and Freiburg seminars trained the next generation directly; his forty thousand pages of shorthand manuscripts were smuggled out of Germany in 1938 and became the Husserl Archives at Leuven, from which volumes have been appearing ever since and which continue to alter the picture of what he thought. The English translation of the Logical Investigations did not appear until 1970, seventy years after publication, which is one reason the anglophone reception was so late.
The strongest objection
Heidegger's, and it is about the starting point rather than the details. Husserl's method requires stepping back from the world to describe how it appears to a consciousness - but the one doing the stepping back is a person with a history, a language and a practical involvement in things, and none of that can be suspended, because it is what makes description possible at all. The bracketing therefore either fails, or succeeds by producing an artificial standpoint that no longer describes anything anyone actually occupies. Husserl's answer was that Heidegger had reverted to a philosophical anthropology and abandoned the rigorous science he was after, and he wrote in the margins of his copy that this was not phenomenology at all.
Why read it
The Prolegomena, which is the first volume and is a self-contained attack on psychologism, readable and forceful. The six investigations are for those who intend to work in the tradition; the first and the fifth, on meaning and on intentionality, are where most people go. It is long and there is no short way in.
- First printed
- 1900
- First in English
- 1970
- Digitised
- No
The 1913 second edition revises the first five investigations substantially in the direction of Husserl's later transcendental position; the sixth was withheld and revised separately. Which edition is cited matters.
Findlay's English of 1970, revised 2001, is the standard and is in copyright.
Where it stands
Live. Phenomenology is a working method in philosophy of mind, cognitive science and qualitative research; intentionality is a central concept in analytic philosophy too, having reached it by a separate route; and Husserl scholarship is a substantial field of its own.
On quoting this book
The German is public domain but the only complete English translation is modern and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Frege's 1894 review caused Husserl's turn against psychologism is a long-running dispute. The account was established by Føllesdal in 1958 and has been called a historiographical myth by later scholars; Mohanty and others argue from the correspondence and from Husserl's own statement that his course was already marked out by the earlier book, and place the change independently of Frege. Whether the transcendental turn of the 1913 revisions is a development or a betrayal of the original method divided Husserl's own students, several of whom preferred the first edition. And how much of his position survives Heidegger's critique is still argued.