THE SPECTER OF PSYCHOLOGISM
Opiates suppress the symptoms; they do not cure the disease. (ILI, § 2, 23)
At the beginning of Logical Investigations, Husserl suggests a parallel between the artist’s and the scientist’s activity. While the artist performs or creates his art, he can only rarely account for the rules by which it is framed. He is simply the master of “technique” acquired through practice, and his judgment is related to his activity as an artist (LI, § 4, 15). If we take art in its broad sense, as the ancient Greeks did, then we are thinking of technē. This assessment, then, also applies, generally speaking, to science. So, while doing research, the scientist does not need to reflect on the rules that are constitutive of science, but follows her knowledge, instinct, and observations, which she has acquired through her training as a scientist: “Even the mathematician, the physicist and the astronomer need not understand the ultimate grounds of their activities in order to carry through even the most important scientific performances” (LI, § 4, 15). There is nothing surprising about the fact that scientists are not expected to perform validations all the time. Yet the danger is that they become “lost in an excessive symbolism” (FTL, § 33, 98). Husserl draws attention to the scientific practice in which, in order to “economize thought,” scientists use “abbreviations and substitutes,” instead of going back to the basic axioms on which scientific knowledge is based (LI, § 9, 23; italics in original). By privileging the so-called need “for greater exactness,” theory is substituted with “its symbolic analogue.” In short, theory is defined “in terms of mere rules of the game” (FTL, § 34, 100). As Husserl sums up, “The incomplete state of all sciences depends on this fact”; that is, on ignorance of the foundational basis from which science has evolved. He insists that sciences stand in need of “inner clarity and rationality” (LI, § 4, 15).
To be sure, this lack of understanding did not slow the growth of science, bringing about “a formerly undreamt of mastery over nature”; however, this kind of science “cannot satisfy us theoretically” (LI, § 4, 16). We need to account for the metaphysics presupposed by the notions that “an external world exists” and “is spread out in space and time”; that space is mathematical and “three-dimensional and Euclidean, and its time [is] a one-dimensional rectilinear manifold; that all process is subject to the causal principle etc” (LI, § 5, 16). These metaphysical notions migrated from Aristotle’s Metaphysics into epistemology. Without any further reflection on the problematic nature of these assumptions, these notions—now taken as belonging to the positive sciences—are understood as “reality” (LI, § 5, 16). The result is a “physicalism” that has forgotten its own metaphysical ground.42
As Husserl elaborates later, to believe in one of the forms of naturalism, physicalism, or positivism is to believe that the world is “the universe of realities in the form of mutual exteriority.” It is to hold that nature is nothing else but “the realm of the pure res extensae” where “every body [stands] under rules of general causality.”43 Moreover, the law of causality is presumed to govern physical as well as psychical processes. This is the metabasis that Husserl is concerned with. Yet a simple reflection reveals that the law of causality cannot be found in the world. It is a formal law, which guides our scientific (that is, empirical) understanding. It is prior to our understanding of nature, and it structures our understanding of nature as “the realm of the pure res extensae.” As Husserl says in Crisis, “The rationality of the exact sciences is of a piece with the rationality of the Egyptian pyramids.”44
In order to understand Husserl’s charge, let us turn our attention to his Logical Investigations. In doing so, we need to keep in mind that, in LI, he presents “a new foundation of pure logic and epistemology”;45 furthermore, according to his later explanation, the LI is not concerned with the “cognition of reality, but rather [. . . with] the possibility of analytic cognition” that Husserl considers “to be the primary 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