The Logical Investigations: Paving the Way to a Transcendental Logic

Abstract

This epigraph from Formal and Transcendental Logic echoes Husserl’s complaint in the foreword to the second part of volume two of the Logical Investigations about the “often heard, but to my mind grotesque reproach, that I may have rejected psychologism sharply in the first volume of my work, but that I fell back into psychologism in the second.”² The epigraph, however, also suggests that the Investigations do not go far enough in overcoming psychologism. Only a transcendental phenomenology, it is said, suffices to overcome psychologistic prejudices. On this view, then, the “phenomenological” investigations found in the second volume of the Investigations have merely “paved the way” to the transcendental critique of all cognition found in Husserl’s mature phenomenology. This paper poses two questions: (1) Why, given the rejection of psychologism, is there need for a phenomenology? and (2) Why is there a need for a transcendental phenomenology?

Soon after the publication of the Logische Untersuchungen the reproach was cast that the phenomenological investigations demanded there under the name of the “clarification” of the fundamental concepts of pure logic, investigations which the second volume attempted to block out in broad outline, signified a relapse into psychologism.... The obscurity still generally prevalent today concerning the problem of a universal epistemological psychologism... is something that, at the time, I myself had not entirely overcome; though precisely the “phenomenological” investigations in the second volume, so far as they paved the way to a transcendental phenomenology, opened up at the same time the necessary avenues to the setting and the radical overcoming of the problem of transcendental psychologism.¹