Formal and Transcendental Logic

One of Edmund Husserl’s works that I had not looked at before is Formal and Transcendental Logic (German ed. 1929). This will be a very shallow first impression.

Although he goes on to argue for the importance of a “transcendental” logic, Husserl is far from denigrating purely formal logic. He explores developments in 19th century mathematics that have some relation to logic, like Riemann’s theory of abstract multiplicities. Formal logic itself comprises both a theory of objects and a theory of forms of judgment; Husserl aims to give a deeper meaning to both. Ultimately, he wants to give a “radical” account of sense, or meaning as distinguished from reference. For Husserl, we get to objects only indirectly, through the long detour of examining sense.

Having previously severely criticized the “psychologistic” account of logic made popular by John Stuart Mill, here he is at some pains to establish the difference between transcendental and psychological views of subjectivity. Husserl often seems overly charitable to Descartes, but here he writes, “At once this Cartesian beginning, with the great but only partial discovery of transcendental subjectivity, is obscured by that most fateful and, up to this day, ineradicable error which has given us the ‘realism’ that finds in the idealisms of a Berkeley and a Hume its equally wrong counterparts. Even for Descartes, an absolute evidence makes sure of the ego (mens sive animus, substantia cogitans [mind or soul, thinking substance]) as a first, indubitably existing, bit of the world…. Even Descartes operates here with a naive apriori heritage…. Thus he misses the proper transcendental sense of the ego he has discovered…. Likewise he misses the properly transcendental sense of the questions that must be asked of experience and of scientific thinking and therefore, with absolute universality, of a logic itself.”

“This unclarity is a heritage latent in the pseudo-clarities that characterize all relapses of epistemology into natural naivete and, accordingly, in the pseudo-clear scientificalness of contemporary realism. It is an epistemology that, in league with a naively isolated logic, serves to prove to the scientist… that therefore he can properly dispense with epistemology, just as he has for centuries been getting along well enough without it anyway.”

“… A realism like that of Descartes, which believes that, in the ego to which transcendental self-examination leads back in the first instance, it has apprehended the real psyche of the human being… misses the actual problem” (pp. 227-228).

“For a radical grounding of logic, is not the whole real world called in question — not to show its actuality, but to bring out its possible and genuine sense and the range of this sense…?” (p. 229).

“The decisive point in this confusion… is the confounding of the ego with the reality of the I as a human psyche” (p. 230).

This last is an argument I have been concerned to make in a Kantian context. However one chooses to pin down the vocabulary (I have been generally using “ego” for the worldly psychological thing, and “I” as actually referring to a nonempirical, transcendental index of certain commitments), the distinction is decisive. Empirical subjectivity in the realm of psychology and transcendental subjectivity in the realm of meaning are extremely different things, even though we live in their interweaving. These days I’m inclined to identify the human expansively with that possible opening onto the transcendental of values — or “Spirit” in a Hegelian sense — rather than contractively with the “merely human” empirical psyche.

Sentience

The talking or potentially rational animal is an ethical distinction, not a biological species in the sense of Linnaeus. The talking animal is one that could potentially join with us in ethical deliberation, but all animals at least are considered sentient, as having some kind of living awareness. Even our word “animal” comes from anima, which the Romans used to translate the Greek psyche or “soul”. The latter had its origins among the poets, and was developed by Aristotle into a key concept of his hermeneutic biology.

Prolonged meditation on what this living awareness really is seems to me to lead in directions more poetic than discursively philosophical. (I mean neither to denigrate poetry in the way commonly attributed to Plato, nor to assert its superiority in the manner of Heidegger’s later works, just to recognize it as something different from what I am mainly doing here.)

Be that as it may, beyond the community of ethical or sapient beings is the larger community of sentient beings, with whom we ought to feel some kinship. This relation between the ethical community and a larger community to which it belongs is something that itself has ethical significance. So even if we can’t really explain what life is or what awareness is, as ethical beings we ought to respect that broader kinship.

Parts of the Soul

For Aristotle, psyche or “soul” is an ordinary empirical concept. First and foremost, it names a set of functional characteristics and abilities that distinguish living from nonliving things. Associations with what we might call specifically mental functions are secondary to this. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good introduction.

When speaking of “parts” of the soul, Aristotle means distinguishable groups of functions. He explicitly leaves open the question whether they are actually separable from one another. Sometimes he seems to distinguish three main parts: one associated with the basic functions of nutrition and reproduction shared by all living things, including plants; one associated with desire and sensorimotor functions, shared by all animals; and one associated with reason and intellect. At other times, he makes finer distinctions.

Perhaps unexpectedly, reason (logos) and intellect (nous) for Aristotle seem to be more sharply distinguished from what we might call mental functions than mental functions are from biological ones. In contrast with, e.g., memory, which he says cannot exist independent of a living body, and in spite of the fact that he thinks thought contents build on sense perception, he explicitly says intellect has no bodily organ and comes from outside. The very closely connected concept of reason is mainly associated with language and the right kind of socialization. I think reason and intellect still get treated as part of the soul mainly because their presence reshapes the whole (See also Reasonableness; Feeling; Second Nature; Intelligence from Outside; Psyche, Subjectivity; Passive Synthesis, Active Sense.)

For animals, including rational animals, Aristotle located the seat of the soul in the heart. In his time, there was as yet no evidence to refute this traditional conception; understanding of the physiological role of the brain and nervous system only developed in later Greek medicine. But recall also that the psyche for Aristotle is at root more vital than mental. Even today, we still distinguish life by a literal heartbeat, and associate emotion figuratively with the heart.