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On Husserl’s Theory of Alien Experience in the Logical Investigations

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Abstract

This paper tackles Husserl’s early analysis of alien experience and its relation to the methodological framework of the Logical Investigations (LI). Since intersubjectivity first becomes a central theme for Husserl in his writings of 1905 (Seefeld Blätter), less attention is usually paid to his analysis of our experience of other minds in the LI. In this context, I attempt to highlight both the fundamental insights gained by Husserl in this analysis that will also remain key for his later accounts of empathy, as well as the challenges alien experiences raises for the theoretical framework of LI. I begin by discussing the main relevant traits of the phenomenological project of LI as a preparatory endeavor for the elucidation of logical objectualities, and the radical way in which Husserl defines its domain, i.e., the sphere of immanent content. Then I analyse Husserl’s understanding of alien experience in terms of an indicative unity based on associative motivations. I argue that, in doing this, Husserl accounts for a non-inferential intuitive access to other minds and, at the same time, maintains their essential alienness. Finally, I show that this account rests on what I call an “intentional contamination” of Husserl’s reductive method of LI.

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Notes

  1. LI I (1984: 6 [166]). Where an English translation is available, the original pages are first indicated, followed in square brackets by the pages of the translation.

  2. See Text nr. 1, Individualität von Ich und Icherlebnissen. Der Unterschied der Individuen (Seefeld 1905), in Hua XIII (1973: 1–20). For Husserl’s influences in turning toward this subject and his use of the concept of empathy, see Kern (1973: XXIV–XXXIII; 2019: 11f.), Ferencz-Flatz (2014: 91–95), Zahavi (2014: 125–132).

  3. For this, see Text nr. 6, Aus den Vorlesungen “Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie” Wintersemester 1910/11, as well as Text nr. 5, Vorbereitung zum Kolleg 1910/11, both in Hua XIII (1973: 77–235).

  4. Concerning Husserl’s exclusion of the relevance of intersubjective communication for his theory of significance in LI, see Bernet et al. (1996: 144f.).

  5. Be it inductive, deductive, or abductive.

  6. See LI I (1984: 8ff. [167 ff.]); HuaM III (2001: 61f.) On the task of phenomenology in LI, see also Benoist (2003); Peucker (2002: 160–168).

  7. “[…] eine etwas differenzierte Analyse der Wortbedeutungen,” as cited by Husserl in Zwei Fragmente zum Entwurf einer Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage der Logischen Untersuchungen (September 1913) (Hua XX/1, 2002: 311).

  8. See, in this respect, Brentano’s fourth habilitation thesis according to which the only true method of psychology is the method of natural science (Brentano, 1968: 137).

  9. In the first edition, §6, the third additional note began by saying “Phenomenology is descriptive psychology” (LI I, 1984: 24 [176]). More precisely, this statement was part of a possible argument which Husserl formulates and rejects in the same note, albeit he does not explicitly reject the denomination of “descriptive psychology,” adding only that “[...] it will be good if we rather speak of ‘phenomenology’ than of descriptive psychology”. (LI I, 1984: 24 [177]). Looking back on his endeavor of 1900/01, Husserl states in Zwei Fragmente…, that “[d]e facto waren die Analysen als Wesensanalysen durchgeführt, aber nicht überall in klarem reflektivem Bewusstsein” (Hua XX/1, 2002: 312). Concerning Brentano’s concept of descriptive psychology, see Kamitz (1987), Moran (2020), Tănăsescu (2021: 345–407). On the changes of Husserl’s concept of phenomenology between the first and the second edition of LI, see Peucker (2002: 168–181). Regarding Husserl’s complex critique of Brentanian descriptive psychology, see Bejinariu (2022a), Moran (2000), Rollinger (2004), Fisette (2010), Stepanians (2013), Tănăsescu (2021: 408–425).

  10. The reflexive turning away from worldly objects does not entail something like the negation of their experience. On the contrary, Husserl’s aim is to access the immanent sphere of their constitution which has a fundamentally different character than that of the world, being a sphere of cogitationes (see Hua III/1, 1976: 77ff.). This means that the objects of our reflexive acts are no longer worldly objects but those precise acts in which the worldly objects are themselves constituted. The necessary reflexive shift of the phenomenological gaze from the level of constituted intentional objectivities to the real (reell), the descriptive level is also the source of a significant difficulty of the phenomenological endeavor that Husserl mentions in his Introduction to the second volume of LI as concerning the communication of the analysis’s results: “Completely self-evident truths of essence, established by the most exact analysis, must be expounded by way of expressions whose rich variety does not compensate for the fact that they only fit familiar natural objects, while the experiences in which such objects become constituted for consciousness, can be directly referred to only by way of a few highly ambiguous words such as ‘sensation,’ ‘perception,’ ‘presentation’ etc” (LI I, 1984: 15 [171]). This difficulty aside, reflexion proper cannot maintain more or less tacitly any sort of transcendent orientation, since its source of evidence and precision is an adequate immanent perception in which “[…] perception and perceived form essentially an unmediated unity, that of a single concrete cogitatio. Here the perceiving includes its Object in itself in such a manner that it only can be separated abstractively […]” (Hua III/1, 1976: 78 [79]). This centering of the analysis in the immanent sphere is nothing else than a first formulation of what Husserl will later call the “principle of all principles” (Hua III/1, 1976: 43f. [44 f.]) to which he explicitly connects it in Zwei Fragmente…: “Es gilt für den Philosophen, sich radikal zum ‘Prinzip aller Prinzipien’ zu bekennen, das an ihn, der ja ‘absolute’ Erkenntnis anstrebt […] die Forderung stellt, eben nicht von oben her zu konstruieren, sondern alle Erkenntnis auf die letzte Quelle, auf das ‘Sehen’ zurückzuführen” (Hua XX/1, 2002: 280).

  11. LI II (1984: 368 [352, note 6]).

  12. LI II (1984: 413 [354, note 26]).

  13. I follow in this respect Lohmar (2012) who rightfully showed that “Die jetzt gegebenen reellen Bestände bilden in den Logischen Untersuchungen weitgehend das letzte und grundlegende, rechtgebende Erfahrungsfeld” (Lohmar, 2012: 7). However, Lohmar (2012) also offers a reading of this reduction that may come forth as too strong: “Das Resultat bzw. das Residuum der Reduktion ist ein Fluss von reellen Beständen (empiristisch gedeutet: sinnliche Eindrücke und Empfindungen) in allen Sinnesfeldern” (Lohmar, 2012: 10). It is however not clear that, for Husserl, the flux of real constituents is comprised exclusively of sensations or sense-data since, besides the sensible contents of acts, among the real (reell) constituents there are also the acts themselves (LI II, 1984: 356ff. [82 ff.]; HuaM III, 2001: 235f.), act-characters and moments (HuaM III, 2001: 101f., 237), time-sensations (LI II, 1984: 369 [88]), etc.

  14. For a detailed account of the relation between logic objectivities and subjectivity, see Bernet (2002).

  15. On Husserl’s concept of apperception, see Lohmar (1993); Dwyer (2007). For a discussion concerning the content-apperception scheme in the context of Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness, see De Warren (2009: 111–117, 134–180). A critical take on Husserl’s interpretative account of perception and a concurrent understanding of sensations as presentative contents are developed in Hopp (2008).

  16. See LI II (1984: 646ff. [260ff.]) and HuaM III (2001: 129).

  17. For an account of association as the origin of indication in LI, see Brudzińska (2019: 30–34).

  18. Though recently it has been argued that phenomenology makes use of some sort of abductive reasoning or inference to the best explanation in its hypothesis generation and justification practices (see Reynolds 2022), Husserl’s way of conceiving indication in LI excludes all types of inference, not only the deductive or inductive ones that generate necessary or infinitely probable conclusions. To be sure, his claim is that reflection on the indicative connection shows that there are no subjective acts of judgment or inferring that would instantiate objective reasoning patterns. In the case of indication, we are no longer situated, as Husserl holds, under an “ideal jurisdiction,” because we are dealing with connections between convictions. Or, in the case of abductive reasoning or inference to the best explanation, there are, of course, involved acts of judgment that instantiate an “ideal” content, i.e, objective propositions regarding the probability of the explanation. Hence, in Husserl’s words: “one thing is sure, that to talk of an indication is not to presuppose a definite relation to considerations of probability” (LI I, 1984: 35 [186]).

  19. As Brudzinska (2019) argues, “[…] scheinen die Überlegungen Husserls bereits hier das Fundament für die spätere Egologisierung der Assoziation zu legen. Die egologische Möglichkeit zeichnet sich hier ab, indem es zum Aufmerken erster inhaltlicher, passiv fungierender Motivierungsrelationen und habitueller Bedingtheiten des subjektiven Lebens kommt. Die erwähnte Thematisierung der motivierenden Zusammenhänge, die in gestifteten Dispositionen oder Überzeugungen gründen, erlaubt es sogar–wenn auch die subjekt-genetischen Gesetzmäßigkeiten in dieser Phase noch nicht explizit thematisch werden–, von Vorboten einer genetisch-egologischen Perspektive zu sprechen” (Brudzinska, 2019: 33).

  20. For a complex discussion of the different facets of the relation between Husserl’s concept of empathy and intuitivity, see Ferencz-Flatz (2014).

  21. “Apperception is our surplus, which is found in experience itself, in its descriptive content as opposed to the raw existence of sense: it is the act-character which as it were ensouls sense and is in essence such as to make us perceive this or that object, see this tree, e.g., hear this ringing, smell this scent of flowers etc. etc.” (LI II, 1984: 399 [105]).

  22. On Husserl’s conception of objective meaning, see Benoist (2003), Beyer (1996), Soldati (2008).

  23. For a recent version of this argument with a focus on Husserl’s account of occasional expressions, see Ferencz-Flatz (2022).

  24. “Critically it may be remarked here that the concepts of the ‘intentive’ and the ‘cognitional essence’ which were established in the Logische Untersuchungen are indeed correct but are capable of a second interpretation since they can be essentially understood as expressions not only of noetic but also of noematic essences, and that the noematic interpretation, as carried through there one-sidedly in framing the concept of the judgment in pure logic is precisely not the one to be used in framing the judgment-concept of pure logic […]” (Hua III/1, 1976: 217 [228f.]). See also Hua III/1 (1976: 296 [308]) and Lohmar (2012: 13).

  25. To quote Husserl’s famous Panoptikum example in the Fifth Logical Investigation (see LI II, 1984: 458f. [137f.]).

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Aknowledgement

I would like to thank Cristian Ciocan and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article. Funding was provided by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS/CCCDI—UEFISCDI (grant number PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2021-0735).

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS/CCCDI—UEFISCDI (grant number PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2021-0735).

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    Alexandru Bejinariu

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Bejinariu, A. On Husserl’s Theory of Alien Experience in the Logical Investigations. Hum Stud (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09696-0

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