and fundamental type of cognition” (ILI, § 8, 47; italics in original). That is, Husserl is concerned with the formal laws that underpin our knowledge of “reality.” Hence, in LI, his focus is to clarify the idea of analytic, formal reasoning, which is the domain of logic. In what does pure logic—that is, the formal basis of all our judgments—consist? What is the dividing line “between truths of reason and truths of fact” (ILI, § 6, 36)? In other words, what is the difference between formal and empirical knowledge?
Husserl suggests that Theodor Lipps’s claim can illuminate the relationship between formal and psychological laws, which Husserl terms the problem of psychologism. For Lipps, either “logic is a physics of thinking or it is nothing at all.”46 In a certain way, Husserl’s comment on Lipps’s thesis could be seen to delineate the shift in Husserl’s thinking between LI and his final work, Crisis. This shift can be summed up by Husserl’s admission, in LI, that he was always concerned with “the relationship [. . .] between the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the content known” (2). In other words, Husserl attempts to clarify further and further answers to questions that are apparently puzzling. What kind of ground is there for reason to claim any justification for the truth of our beliefs—our subjective thinking? How can our subjective thinking correspond to the objective world, or, rather, to the world of objects? How is it that each of us can think formally; that is to say, think independently from our own subjective way of thinking? Why is it that “a physics of thinking”—that is, our subjective thinking—cannot account for our ability to think and judge according to formal rules? Why is it that apophantic logic, the formal system of predicative statements/judgments, is an instance of the “correct” way of thinking; yet, once instantiated, is independent of our thinking? How is it that we can think of the idea of truth even though ideal truth can never be in the world?
Answering such questions cannot be achieved from within the empirical domain, because the formal rules that underpin such questions transcend our finite thinking. Those rules, or formal laws as Husserl sometimes calls them, are valid for everyone who is familiar with the formal system, irrespective of time and place. For Husserl, to reflect on these questions is to realize that Lipps is mistaken, and that “a physics of thinking” must be based on something other than our psychological experience.
As already noted, Husserl traces the problematic relationship between logic and psychology to Mill, who claimed that logic was a subcategory of psychology (LI, § 13, 29). Likewise for Lipps, “logic is a psychological discipline just as surely as knowing only arises in the mind, and as thinking which terminates in knowledge is a mental happening.”47 However, if logic, taken as Husserl argues, is the domain of formal knowledge on a par with arithmetic, then it cannot be reduced to our mental states, which are happenings in the world, and therefore changeable. To reduce logic thus would be to deprive formal laws of their apodictic status and to think of them as “probable” instead of certain; this reduction would equate them with natural laws. This is what occurs with the metabasis mentioned earlier. For Husserl, formal laws and natural laws are different in character; they belong to different categories. By conflating them, psychologism eliminates the apodictic, timeless truth of formal laws. Formal laws are reduced to empirical, causal laws explainable by changeable time and space and the current state of empirical knowledge. The foundation from which our judgments about the world proceed becomes void of reason, so to speak. We lose the rational basis that is atemporal, and, instead, we take temporal judgments as our “guide,” forgetting that these judgments are contingent on the situation we are in. In order to be “apodictic,” formal rules must be based on something other than “a physics of thinking”; they must be prior to our experience, prior to our acts of judging. Formal rules are analytic, established by insight alone. In other words, in order to provide a frame of reference for the accuracy of our judgments, these formal rules must be independent of our changeable experience; ensuring, ideally, that everybody can understand everybody else. To reflect on such atemporal rules, one must inquire into the possibility of foundational science.
Foundational science must be separate from scientific investigations and from the empirical domain, which is, by definition, the domain of changeable truths. These empirical truths must be based on something that is unchanging, something that only such a formal, foundational science can provide. As Husserl notes, “A rich imagination, a comprehensive memory, a capacity for close attention etc., are fine things, but they have intellectual meaning only in the case of a thinking being, whose validation falls under laws and forms” (LI, § 8, 22; italics in original); and this validation cannot be explained by our mental processes alone. To put it another way: no empirical science can serve as the realm of formal truth on which empirical science itself is based. To accept that “the essential theoretical foundations of logic lie in psychology” (LI, § 17, 40) is to propose that logic is relative to our experience. It is to deny that the idea of truth can be understood consistently by any and all thinking beings, because, in this formulation, truth in itself does not depend on any particular thinking being. Following Husserl, we can say that truth is the property of a proposition—apophansis—and is universal: in other words, truth is the general idea that guides our thinking. It is atemporal. It can be accessed all the time and everywhere as long as the formal structure of judgments is understood. Thus, the idea of the universality/generality of truth means nothing other than that regardless of time or space, there is the possibility of the repeatability of formal, timeless judgments that are the domain of truth in itself. This is the system of formal knowledge, and it is this system that is passed on throughout the ages.48
DOXA AND EPISTĒMĒ IN LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS
If man loses this faith [in reason], it means nothing less than the loss of faith “in himself,” in his own true being. This true being is not something he always already has, with the self-evidence of the “I am,” but something he only has and can have in the form of the struggle for his truth, the struggle to make himself true. True being is everywhere an ideal goal, a task of epistēmē or “reason,” as opposed to being which through doxa is merely thought to be, unquestioned and “obvious.” (Crisis, § 5, 13; italics in original)
The issue Husserl tackles is that of where the system of formal knowledge, or “pure logic,” comes from if it is not, as psychologism decrees, an outcome of our singular mental processes, our individual thinking. Is the system of formal logic based on our mental processes; in other words, on the empirical foundation? Is logic a formal system, a normative science, or a technology?49 In short, is the art (technē) of thinking the same as logic, which is the domain of the formal rules that are at the basis of our finite thinking?
For Husserl, every finite judgment must have some basis: something that transcends the particular act of judging. There must be something other that can validate our experience, so that we can arrive at knowledge that others can understand, too. As Husserl explains, we must distinguish between someone judging that 2 × 2 = 4 and “the true judgement, as the correct judgement in accordance with truth” (LI, § 36, 80). In other words, we must draw a distinction between the true content of judgment and the act of judging. So, if I assert that 2 × 2 = 4, this is clearly determined causally because my assertion is caused by the actual question asked, say, in a mathematical class. It is my subjective judgment that I offer to others on a certain occasion. But if my judgment was not based on something that transcends my particular mental process (subjectivity), there would be no way to account for it. There would be no principle according to which my teacher could mark my judgment as correct. Hence there is a difference between my judgment that 2 × 2 = 4 and the content of my judgment, which expresses “the truth, 2 × 2 = 4” (LI, § 36, 80). This is the puzzle that Husserl notes at the beginning of LI: the relationship between our acts of judgment, or, in other words, the subjectivity of thinking; and the objectivity of the content of judgment. Our acts of judgment are events in the world; they are causally determined and subjective. We can always be wrong. Yet their content is objective, guaranteed by the formal laws that are independent
