Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Ullrich Melle
katholieke universiteit leuven
already occupied herself with the drafts. It was probably she who arranged
the fragmentary texts into the unified text as it is found in the typescript.
The division into paragraphs and the titles of the paragraphs in the pub-
lished text are certainly from Fink, since the text of the typescript is not yet
subdivided into paragraphs.
The typescript of Landgrebe that has recently been discovered in the
Bell papers contains a number of handwritten insertions and other tex-
tual revisions with pencil and ink by Husserl. The text published by Fink
in 1939, however, does not take into account these revisions. Since it is
unlikely that he just ignored them, he must have based his publication on
another unrevised copy.3
Unfortunately, no sources have yet been found that tell us precisely
when, how, and to what purpose Winthrop Bell received the annotated type-
script. It seems likely that Husserl himself sent the typescript to Bell shortly
after Landgrebe had produced it in 1924. A long letter by Husserl to Bell
from November 1925, though, does not mention the sending of the type-
script. If Husserl himself sent the typescript to Bell, to what purpose? Did
he ask Bell for his comments on the text?
The major task Husserl assigned to his research assistants was the
preparation of his stenographic manuscripts for publication. This involved
not only the transcription of the manuscripts but also their arrangement
into a coherent and unified text. The fact that Husserl had Landgrebe pro-
duce a typescript of the drafts that Stein had probably already unified, and
that he then revised, would seem to indicate that he still intended to pub-
lish the text in 1924. Certain features of the text, however, make this some-
what doubtful. First, the text of the typescript still expresses the original
purpose of the drafts to compose a preface to the second edition of the
Logical Investigations. But that second edition had been published with the
exception of Logical Investigation VI in 1913, with the second edition of
investigation VI finally having been published in 1921. Second, the text
also preserves the rather disdainful remarks on Meinong and his theory of
objects (Gegenstandstheorie), as well as the sarcastic polemics with Wundt
where Husserl expresses his frustration and anger about the denial of the
originality of his insights and about the crude misinterpretation of his work
in the original reception of the Logical Investigations. It is hard to imagine
that Husserl in 1924 would still feel the need to denounce Meinong and
ridicule Wundt in such an aggressive tone.
Let us now turn to the two original drafts from late summer 1913. First,
it has to be noted that it is likely that the first draft in longhand is already
a more or less revised copy by Husserl himself of an earlier stenographic
manuscript. The second fragment in shorthand starts with a reference to
what has previously been indicated. This at first suggests that the second
fragment could simply be the continuation of the stenographic manuscript
underlying the longhand text. But the existing overlap between parts of the
first and the second fragment make this unlikely. It rather seems that the
two texts present two alternative conceptions of an introductory preface.
The first clears up prominent misunderstandings concerning Husserls
conception of logic, the relation of logic to psychology, the method used,
and the idealism defended in the Logical Investigations. The second at first
gives an account of the genesis of the Logical Investigations by sketching the
development of Husserls thought and then rejects the association made
between his idea of ontology and Meinongs theory of objects. It next gives
credit to Lotzes and Bolzanos inspiration while at the same time stressing
the radical limitations of these thinkers, then addresses two misinterpreta-
tions of phenomenology, and finally turns to Wundt and his completely
unfounded interpretation and critique of the Logical Investigations. The pre-
cise relationship between the two fragmentary drafts, therefore, remains
an open question.
However, both drafts contain equally important expositions and clari-
fications concerning the project of the Logical Investigations, the intuitive
method, Husserls notions of the formal and material a priori as well as the
conception of logic and of ontology related to these notions, and also his
conception of phenomenology as an ontology of intentional consciousness.
The many succinct formulations in both drafts show Husserl at the height
of his philosophical and expressive powers. These texts offer a remarkably
Husserl acknowledges that the use of the term descriptive psychology for
his descriptions of intentional acts was misleading. He therefore replaced
this term shortly after the publication of the Logical Investigations with the
term phenomenology. But a perceptive reader of the Logical Investigations
would recognize that the descriptive psychology of intentional acts is not an
empirical psychological study but an eidetic analysis, that its descriptions
of different kinds of intentional acts and of the structure of consciousness
claim to have an a priori character, and that they are based on the intuitive
givenness of the essences of such intentional acts. Pure logic is not to be
founded on empirical facts of consciousness but, rather, on the essences of
the intentional acts that achieve knowledge and truth.
Pure logic and its objects in their ideality cannot be completely unre-
lated to consciousness. They are after all accessible and known in their
truth by acts of thinking, and they are the ideal laws of thinking coher-
ently and truthfully. The refutation of psychologism in the Prolegomena
only demonstrates that it cannot be empirical consciousness or empirical
generalization about factual consciousness that founds these ideal laws.
The ideality of these laws requires an ideal foundation, a foundation in the
ideas, the essences of the acts of meaning, of judging and theorizing. Only
by such a foundation can pure logic become a philosophically grounded
and justified logic.
Fundamental for Husserls epistemology and philosophy is the
intuitive-descriptive method. The philosopher, Husserl says in the draft,
has to pledge allegiance to the principle of all principles: to not construct
from above but to lead all knowledge back to its ultimate source, the see-
ing (280). One must on all accounts give credit to that which is clearly
seen. This is the original, that which precedes all theory; it is the ultimate
source for the norm of truth. The ultimate ground of all philosophical theo-
rizing is the unprejudiced and not already theory-laden seeing of the prob-
lematic phenomena, in our case of thinking and knowing, and the careful
and precise description of what is seen. It sounds rather naive and simple
to just look at thinking, bring it to a clear intuition, and then describe what
we see, but this turns out to be not easy at all. It requires a rigorous meth-
odological discipline and great effort to bring the phenomena at issue to
intuition. The intuitive-descriptive method also implies a particular ethos
of philosophical work, an ethos that is characterized by diligence, patience,
modesty, honesty, and unrelenting effort: a philosophy of laborious and
detailed work of analysis and description of concretephenomena in their
essential characteristics, structures, foundational layers, and relationships.
The ontological difference between real and ideal objects is not the
result of a theoretical argument but, rather, is given in a pretheoretical intu-
ition. It can be seen directly in looking at exemplifications of real and
ideal objects, for example, a tree and the meaning of a sentence, that these
are two radically different kinds of objects, real ones and ideal onesboth
of them being subjects of valid judgments, the first of empirical judgments,
the second of a priori and apodictic judgments. The charge of metaphysical
Platonism against the essentialism of the Logical Investigations is therefore,
according to Husserl, completely unjustified and is a misunderstanding
caused by historical prejudices. The ideal essences Husserl describes are
not metaphysical or epistemological substructions, hypotheses, or stipu-
lations; they are, rather, originally and evidently given, that is, intuited
objects. It is, Husserl says, mere prejudice not to accept as validly and truly
existing what one clearly sees, what one clearly has before ones minds
eye, even if it is nothing real. The difficult philosophical task, however, is
to describe the specific kinds of intuitive givenness of the real and of the
ideal. But what precedes this task is that which no theory can remove. The
evidence of the seen is the ultimate measure of all theory and philosophy.
The final part of the first draft is devoted to misunderstandings con-
cerning Husserls idea of pure logic. In the final part of the Prolegomena,
Husserl had shown that pure logic in its full extent comprised all purely
formal disciplines. It was mathesis universalis, of which propositional-
syllogistic logic was only a certain stratum. Arithmetic, the theory of num-
bers, algebra, the theory of theory-forms, and correlatively the theory of
manifolds were all part of pure logic as mathesis universalis, the a priori
science of the whole analytic or formal sphere.
This delineation of pure logic as well as the distinction between its
different levels can be achieved and made evident without recourse to phi-
losophy in a naive and technical fashion. This straightforward, unreflective
logic is transformed into a philosophically grounded and pure logic by the
phenomenological investigations of the correlation between intentional
consciousness and that which is given in its acts, that is, the different kinds
of objects.
While pure logic as mathesis universalis comprises the formal disci-
plines, there are also material ontologies of the material regions of being.
One could call such a material ontology also a logic, for example, the logic
of nature. This logic of nature would comprise all a priori determinations
and laws of nature, which together would explicate the essence of nature.
Again, this logic of nature can be developed in an unreflective attitude
The second fragmentary draft of a preface to the second edition of the Logi-
cal Investigations from late summer 1913 first traces the development of
Husserls thought leading to the breakthrough of phenomenology in the
Logical Investigations. Then, Husserl again elaborates his idea of ontology as
a priori eidetic science, rejecting even more sharply than in the first draft its
suggested closeness to Meinongs theory of objects. In the following part of
the draft he gives credit to Lotze and Bolzano for their inspiration while also
pointing out their shortcomings and limitations. Next, he briefly discusses
and corrects the often-heard charge that phenomenology is merely an anal-
ysis of the meanings of words. The discussion then follows the above-men-
tioned acknowledgment that the term descriptive psychology used in the first
edition of Logical Investigations for the eidetic descriptions of intentional
consciousness was misleading. The last part of the draft, making up more
than a third of the manuscript, is devoted to a biting and sarcastic critique
of Wilhelm Wundts discussion of the Logical Investigations. Husserl vehe-
mently rejects the way Wundt presses the Logical Investigations into precon-
ceived schemata of a constructed historical dialectic and distorts Husserls
terms so that they become utterly nonsensical. In the course of his polemic
with Wundt, Husserl characterizes and elucidates the intuitive-descriptive
method of phenomenology.
The development of Husserls thought had its beginning with the foun-
dational problem in the philosophy of mathematics of the psychological ori-
gin of numbers. Husserl was trained in philosophy by Franz Brentano and
Carl Stumpf, for whom philosophy became scientific through descriptive
psychology. Husserl soon discovered the importance of merely symbolic
thought, that is, nonintuitive representations by signs, in mathematics. His
effort to understand the possibility of such symbolic thought and to find
an answer to the question of how the objectivity of mathematics and logic
can be constituted in subjectivity led him to the Leibnizian conception of a
pure mathesis universalis and the rejection of psychologism as expressed
and argued for in the Prolegomena. To reject psychologism meant to accept
idealism as a kind of Platonism. Husserl acknowledges that he owed the
turn to his own kind of Platonic idealism to his study of Lotzes Logik.4
After his conversion to logical idealism, he suddenly realized that the first
two volumes of Bolzanos Wissenschaftslehre on representations as such and
propositions as such could be read as a pure logic.5 Bolzanos draft of such
a pure logic was incomplete, however. The idea of a purely formal math-
ematics, of a theory of manifolds, was still missing. Bolzano had no idea of
the inner unity of formal logic and arithmetic and, connected to this, of the
correlation between the formal theory of meanings and formal ontology.
However, it took Husserl, as he himself acknowledges, much effort to fully
comprehend the correlation between formal-ontological propositions about
objects as such, states of affairs, relations on the one side, and propositions
about meanings on the other. All of these logical studies were not yet an
epistemology. They simply relied on the evidence in which such ideas as
numbers, meanings, and propositions are given to us. Such ideal objects
are evidentially given to us as substrates of valid predications. We should
not immediately try to deny such a givenness because of certain ontological
or metaphysical preconceptions we might have. The task of epistemology,
then, of course, is to elucidate this evidence and its validity.
Logical Investigations are about with the help of a few schematic concepts,
and he deduces on a priori grounds the impossibility of such analyses.
Wundt is blind to whole worlds of immanent differences, and nowhere in
his work can one find a truly descriptive analysis of phenomena.
Over many years of strenuous effort, Husserl claims, he learned to see
and to keep the seen free from introjections and projections. He can see
phenomenological differences between intentional acts as clearly as he can
see the difference between the color white and the color red. Husserl calls
upon the reader to try to read the descriptions in the Logical Investigations
as one would read zoological or botanical descriptions. The only test of
the description is whether it is true to the phenomenon, and in order to
pass judgment on its correctness or incorrectness one has to clearly see the
relevant phenomenon. Certainly, descriptions can be deficient and wrong
in various directions; they can be imprecise or too general, or they can fail
to discriminate between moments or layers in the phenomenon just like a
geographer can mistake two separate rivers for two parts of the same river.
There is only one way to correct such descriptive errors: to look again and
to look more carefully. This explains and justifies why the whole being and
life of phenomenology is nothing else than the most radical inwardness of
the description of purely intuitive givens (323).
The radicality of the seeing and the purity of the intuition are all-
important. This requires a critical discipline of identifying and excluding
presuppositions and prejudices that can distort the seeing and the seen.
Here Husserl for the first time (and the only time in both drafts) touches
upon the phenomenological reduction. Phenomenology at first is a new
kind of rational psychology, an a priorieidetic science of consciousness. As
such, it is analogous to other a priorieidetic sciences like geometry, except
that phenomenology is not a deductive science. It was several years after
the publication of the Logical Investigations that Husserl realized that this
rational psychology has to be distinguished from transcendental phenom-
enology. It is the phenomenological reduction that reveals transcendental
consciousness and subjectivity as the research field for transcendental phe-
nomenology.
Husserl does not further elaborate the phenomenological reduction
and transcendental phenomenology here, but he returns to the critique of
Wundt and the further characterization of phenomenologys descriptive-
intuitive method. He stresses the difficulties in achieving the reflective
stance, exercising the reflective gaze, and, in particular, keeping in thematic
focus the intentionality of conscious acts in their unique forms of unity and
unification by intentional syntheses and intentional implications. Natural-
ism in modern times was totally blind to this dimension of intentionality.
Surprisingly, only now, close to the end of the second draft, is Brentano
given credit for his general descriptive characterization of psychic phenom-
ena by their intentional directedness. But, Husserl writes, Brentano never
really overcame naturalistic prejudices: The idea of a pure phenomenology
was far from him (326).
Husserl takes leave from Wundt by exposing the climax of all of his
misunderstandings: According to Wundt, the decisive deficiency of the
Logical Investigations consists in its passing by the problem of epistemologi-
cal foundation! Compared with the vitriol Husserl poured on Wundt earlier
on in the text, his response to this confounding judgment is relatively mild:
That a man of such reputation as Wundt could say that the Logical Investi-
gations has passed by the epistemological problem, while, in fact, the work
contains the breakthrough of a radical and new kind of epistemology, will
be an interesting anecdote.
The final two paragraphs of the draft are missing in Landgrebes type-
script as published by Fink. Husserl here discusses the problems involved
in a new edition of the Logical Investigations. His main problem is that with
the publication of the Ideas he has moved far beyond the Logical Investiga-
tions, and from this new vantage point he is painfully aware of the deficien-
cies and the incompleteness of the earlier work. This relates in particular
to the final sense of phenomenology in its relation to psychology and to the
a priori sciences that belong to all domains of being. Husserl then shortly
sketches the directions of his research after the publication of the Logical
Investigations as it is documented in his extensive lecture courses. He did
not want to republish the Logical Investigations before he had yet published
the results of his new research. Since it would still take years to bring these
results to publication, he decided with a heavy heart to follow a middle
path for the new edition of the Logical Investigations. The fragmentary draft
ends here. The middle path, we know from other sources, consisted in a
revision of the Logical Investigations that would lead the reader gradually
through the different investigations up to the level of the Ideas.8
notes
1. Ludwig Landgrebes typescript of Edmund Husserls Entwurf zur
Einfhrung der zweiten Bearbeitung der Logischen Untersuchungen
(1924) is archived in the papers of Winthrop Bell as File 20, no. 57.
2. The original manuscripts are published in Edmund Husserl, Logische
Untersuchungen. Ergnzungsband. Erster Teil. Entwrfe zur Umarbeitung der VI.
Untersuchung und zur Vorrede fr die Neuauflage der Logischen Untersuchungen
(Sommer 1913), ed. Ullrich Melle, Husserliana 20, no. 1 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002),
272329; hereafter cited in the text by page number. All translations are mine.
The full bibliographic reference for the publication of the drafts in Tijdschrift
voor Filosofie is Edmund Husserl, Entwurf einer Vorrede zu den Logischen
Untersuchungen (1913), ed. Eugen Fink, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 1, no. 1
(February 1939): 10633; and 1, no. 2 (May 1939): 31939. The text of the Tijdschrift
is translated in Edmund Husserl, Introduction to the Logical Investigations.
ADraft of a Preface to the Logical Investigations (1913), ed. Eugen Fink, trans.
Philip J. Bossert and Curtis H. Peters (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975). Further
information about the history of the texts can be found in Karl Schuhmann,
Forschungsnotizen ber Husserls Entwurf einer Vorrede zu den Logischen
Untersuchungen, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 34, no. 3 (September 1972): 51324.
3. The published text of the typescript contains a number of smaller changes
of and a few larger additions to the text of Husserls original drafts. The changes
and additions in the text of the typescript are certainly made by Husserl himself.
Regarding these changes and additions, see ibid., 52324.
4. H. Lotze, Logik. Drei Bcher vom Denken, vom Untersuchen und vom Erkennen.
Erster Theil, 2 (Leipzig: Auflage, 1880).
5. B. Bolzano, Wissenschaftslehre (Sulzbach, Germany: Dritter Band, 1837).
6. One of the disciples who could not comprehend and embrace Husserls
transcendental turn was Winthrop Bell.
7. The title of Wundts extensive review of the Logical Investigations is
Psychologismus und Logizismus; it is to be found in W. Wundt, Kleine Schriften,
Erster Band (Leipzig, 1910), 511634.
8. Concerning this middle path and Husserls work on the revision of the
Logical Investigations, see Ullrich Melle, Einleitung des Herausgebers, in
Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, XXIVXXVI.
9. Husserl, Entwurf zur Einfhrung der zweiten Bearbeitung der Logischen
Untersuchungen, 32; my translations.