Post on 19-Jan-2023
To appear in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Volume
18, Special Issue: Gian-Carlo Rota and The End of Objectivity, 2019. Edited by Burt Hopkins
and John Drummond. Routledge. Forthcoming in September 21, 2021. Please, cite the published
version.
7 Holism, contextuality, and compositionality:
Lotze’s influence on Husserl1
Mirja Hartimo
Abstract
The paper examines the Lotzean background of Husserl’s logic with respect to the so-called
Frege’s principles, the context principle (“the word has a meaning only in the context of a
sentence”), the priority thesis (the judgment is prior to the concepts in it), and the principle of
compositionality (the sense of a complex expression is compounded out of the senses of its
constituents). While some commentators hold that for Frege, the context principle, inherited
from Lotze, is an expression of his epistemological view of logic, Husserl’s indebtedness to
Lotze is diametrically opposite: he owes to Lotze a kind of ontological holism, which is
independent of the context principle.
Keywords:
Frege’s Principles; Context Principle; Compositionality; Lotze, Husserl
Apart from rather common general pronouncements that “Lotze was important for Husserl,” the
more precise nature of Husserl’s Lotzean background has not been much examined, while, for
example, Frege’s Lotzean background has been a subject to many studies since the 1980s. The
relatively few contributions on Husserl’s Lotzean background focus either on Lotze’s influence
1 Thanks are due to Leila Haaparanta for many interesting discussions related to the themes of this chapter.
on Husserl’s turning away from psychologism,2 or on Lotze’s view of abstraction and validity.3
The present paper complements these works by assessing Lotze’s importance on Husserl’s
conception of Mannigfaltigkeitslehre discussed in Prolegomena. It will be argued that in addition
to the features mentioned above, Husserl inherits a kind of holism from Lotze.
In the secondary debates on Frege, Lotze’s holism has been related to the so-called “context
principle” (“the word has a meaning only in the context of a sentence”), which Frege, so the
story goes, owes to Lotze. The context principle has also been related to the so-called “priority
thesis” (the judgment is prior to the concepts in it), but it appears incompatible with yet another
Fregean principle, the “principle of compositionality” (the sense of a complex expression is
compounded out of the senses of its constituents). The end of the paper is devoted to examining
Husserl’s views in the Logical Investigations in relation to these Fregean principles. Husserl’s
analysis shows how to solve the potential tension between compositionality and contextuality.
However, the “ontological” holism (or, better, structuralism) Husserl inherits from Lotze does
not follow from “grammatical” holism associated with the context principle. Furthermore,
contrary to Frege, Husserl does not seem to agree with the priority thesis. All this highlights the
2 K. Hauser, “Lotze and Husserl,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 85 (2003), 152–178; W. Huemer, “Husserl’s Critique of
Psychologism and His Relation to the Brentano School,” in Phenomenology and Analysis: Essays on Central European Philosophy,
eds. Arkadiusz Chrudzimski and Wolfgang Huemer (Frankfurt: Ontos, 2004), 199–214.
3 C. Beyer, Von Bolzano zu Husserl (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996); K. Hauser “Lotze and Husserl”; R. D.
Rollinger, “Hermann Lotze on Abstraction and Platonic Ideas,” in Idealization XI: Historical Studies on Abstraction and
Idealization, eds. Francesco Coniglione, Roberto Poli, and Robin Rollinger (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2004), 147–161.
way in which Husserl appropriates Lotze’s Platonism and how his version of transcendental
philosophy differs from the epistemological readings of Frege.
7.1 Background: Lotze, Frege, and the principles
Gottlob’s Frege’s Lotzean background has been a focus of several studies since Hans Sluga’s
ground-breaking work in the early 1980s. For example, Gottfried Gabriel has suggested that the
origin of Frege’s context principle (“the word has a meaning only in the context of a sentence”)
is in Lotze’s ontological holism.4 However, some commentators claim that instead of the context
principle, central to Frege’s views (and the development of analytic philosophy since then) is the
principle of compositionality (the sense of a complex expression is compounded out of the
senses of its constituents), which at the outset appears incompatible with the context principle.
Moreover, the context principle has been related to the so-called priority thesis, which is the
Kantian view that the judgment is prior to the concepts in it. Whether Frege held these principles
(and when, many believe that Frege gave up the context principle in his later philosophy), and
whether they are contradictory to each other, has been debated much in the secondary literature,5
and depending on the author’s take on the issue, Frege’s philosophical outlook ranges from neo-
4 G. Gabriel, “Frege, Lotze, and the Continental Roots of Early Analytic Philosophy,” in From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives
on Early Analytic Philosophy, ed. Erich H. Reck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 39–51, here 49.
5 See, for example, L. Haaparanta, Frege’s Doctrine of Being. Acta Philosophical Fennica, vol 39 (Helsinki: Philosophical Society
of Finland, 1985), and F. J. Pelletier, “Did Frege Believe Frege’s Principle?” Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 10,
2001, 87–114 for surveys on the secondary literature.
Kantian transcendental idealism (e.g. Sluga) to realism (Dummett), and a variety of views
between these. Here are the principles in question in detail:
1. The context principle found in Frege’s Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884):
Nach der Bedeutung der Wörter muss im Satzzusammenhange, nicht in ihtere Vereinzelugn
gefragt werden.
Never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation but only in the context of a proposition.6
2. The priority thesis, formulated by Frege in his Über den Zweck der Begriffsschrift (1883):
In der That, es ist einer der bedeutendsten Unterschiede meiner Auffassungsweise von der
booleschen und ich kann whol hinzufügen von der aristotelishen, dass ich nicht von den
Begriffen, sondern von den Urtheilen ausgehe.
In fact, it is one of the most important differences between my way of thinking and the
Boolean way – and indeed I can add the Aristotelian way – that I do not proceed from
concepts but from judgments.7
3. The principle of compositionality has two versions, one concerning senses and one references:
3.1. The sense of a complex expression is compounded out of the senses of its constituents.
3.2. The reference of a complex expression is determined by the references of its
components.8
The aim of this paper is not to decide how Frege should be read regarding these principles, but
examine them vis-à-vis Husserl’s relationship to Lotze. Here, the neo-Kantian epistemological
readings of Frege are particularly interesting. For example, Leila Haaparanta has argued that
Frege’s context principle is “an expression of the very idea that objects cannot be considered
6 G. Frege, Grundlagen der Arithmetik, x, Vorwort, cited from Leila Haaparanta, “Compositionality, Contextuality and the
Philosophical Method,” in Truth and Games, eds. Tuomo Aho and Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen. Acta Philosophical Fennica 78
(Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland, 1986), 289–301, here 290.
7 L. Haaparanta, “Compositionality,” 290–291.
8 L. Haaparanta, “Compositionality,” 290.
independently of our conceptual systems.”9 Her argument is (roughly) that the context principle
follows from the priority thesis that judgments are prior to concepts. Furthermore, since we get
to know objects only through concepts, this means that we get to know the objects only through
their sentential context.10 Thus in her view, Frege’s logic is a kind of transcendental logic that
provides us a conceptual scheme with which to understand the world.11 Against this background,
it is interesting to consider Husserl’s Lotzean influences that appear almost diametrically
opposite. I will argue that Husserl is primarily inspired by Lotze’s Platonism, which makes him
an ontological holist. In Husserl’s assessment, the context principle is not an epistemological but
a grammatical principle which is not obviously connected to Lotzean ontological holism. This
then shows the order of priority to be different for Husserl and the epistemological readings of
Frege. Moreover, while both are greatly influenced by Lotze, they are impacted by different
Lotzean doctrines. While for the epistemologists, Lotze’s context principle connected to the
Kantian priority principle is the crucial Lotzean element, for Husserl, the Lotzean ontological
holism is more fundamental. Accordingly, Husserl’s transcendental logic is drastically different
from Kantian view of it, as it aims to examine the conditions of possibility of us having
knowledge of the ideal and objective structures.12
9 L. Haaparanta, Frege’s Doctrine, 92.
10 L. Haaparanta, Frege’s Doctrine, esp. 83–84.
11 L. Haaparanta, “Compositionality,” esp. 294.
12 This is discussed in detail in Mirja Hartimo “Husserl on Kant and Critical View of Logic,” Inquiry, 2019..
7.2 Husserl and Lotze
Husserl knew Lotze’s work well. When Husserl was a student of mathematics in Berlin,
Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) was one the most influential philosophers in Germany. Husserl,
too, bought Lotze’s popular Mikrokosmos in 1880.13 The same year, Lotze was invited to Berlin,
where he arrived in April 1881, only to die on July 1, 1881.14 Husserl probably did not see Lotze
since he graduated from the University of Berlin in March 1881, after which he left to study in
Vienna (Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik, 9). Husserl’s next confirmed encounter with Lotze’s
thought took place when he arrived to Halle to work with Carl Stumpf. Husserl’s oral
examination for the nostrification of his doctorate in Halle (in 1887) included questions on
Lotze’s Lokalzeichentheorie that was Lotze’s physiologico-psychological account of our
perception of space. In 1895–1897, Husserl wrote a critical study on Mikrokosmos, which was
meant to be published in the Logical Investigations, but eventually was not, due to lack of
space.15 In 1912, and again in 1922, Husserl gave a seminar on Lotze’s Logik, Book III.16
Moreover, many of Husserl’s students worked on Lotze.
13 K. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik. Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, , 1977), here 8.
14 R. Pester. “Einleitung,” in R. H. Lotze, Kleine Schriften zur Psychologie (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo,
Hong Kong: Springer-Verlag, 1989), here 20, 36.
15 K. Hauser, “Husserl and Lotze,” 164; K. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik, 59–60.
16 K. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik, 169, 259.
Husserl also explicitly said that Lotze influenced his work. In a 1905 letter to Brentano, Husserl
claimed that already the Prolegomena had been influenced by Lotze’s interpretation of Plato.17
In his attempt to rewrite the introduction to the 1913 edition of the Logische Untersuchungen,
Husserl again emphasized the importance of Lotze’s discussion of Plato, calling Lotze’s
interpretation genial:
The fully conscious and radical turn and the related “Platonism” I owe to the study of Lotze’s
Logik. As little as Lotze himself could overcome contradictions and psychologism, as much
his genial interpretation of Platonic ideas helped me and my further studies. Lotze’s discussion
of truths in themselves suggested to me the thought to place everything mathematical and a
good part of traditional logic into the realm of ideality.18
Lotze’s impact on Husserl appears to have been rather lasting: when in 1933 Husserl was asked
about his indebtedness to Plato, he still referred to Lotze’s Logik:
What role of my “Platonism”, my energetical entering for a universal ontology, hence for the
work on the essential intuition (for the genuine a priori) in all fields of knowledge, had for my
development and which new meaning it acquired in the ripening transcendental
phenomenology, can you best explain by Formal and Transcendental Logic, and especially
its second part, although there only the formal ontology is in question. I owe this Platonism to
17 E. Husserl, Briefwechsel I: Die Brentanoschule, ed. Karl Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Springer, 1994), 39, henceforth cited as
Briefwechsel I.
18 E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen Ergänzungsband. Erster Teil, ed. Ulrich Melle, Husserliana XX/I (Dordrecht, The Hague,
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 297. Henceforth cited as Hua XX/I.
the well-known chapter of Lotze’s Logik, as much as his theory of knowledge and metaphysics
always puts me off.19
Similar views are also expressed in Ideen III, §10. Thus, on the basis of Husserl’s own words, it
can be concluded that Lotze’s interpretation of Plato in Lotze’s Logik is what inspired Husserl
the most.
7.3 Die Ideenwelt
The chapter Ideenwelt of Lotze’s Logik starts with a consideration of the extent of the Heraclitian
flux. In the Theatetus, Plato construed the Heraclitus’ flux to extend, not only to the realm of
sensuous objects, but also to the determinations of thought. Lotze doubts that Heraclitus really
meant to extend the flux this far since that would render all inquiry impossible. Nevertheless,
Heraclitus’ doctrine, as Plato saw it, produced pernicious results especially in ethics. Against it,
Socrates defended the view that the concepts of good, bad, just, and unjust are fixed and
unchanging. Plato then expanded the view into his own doctrine of ideas, which according to
Lotze is “a first and most characteristic attempt to turn to account the truth which belongs to the
world of our ideas in itself, without regard to its agreement with an assumed reality of things
outside its borders.”20 This passage shows Lotze to be a coherentist about truth and that he
attributes a similar view to Plato, too.
19 E. Husserl, Briefwechsel VI, Philosophenbriefe, ed. Karl Schuhmann (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 1994), 460.
Henceforth cited as Briefwechsel VI.
20 R. H. Lotze, Logik, Drei Bücher vom Denken, vom Untersuchen und vom Erkennen. Zweite Auflage. Verlag von Feliz Meiner.
Leipzig. English translation by Bernard Bosanquet (Clarendon Press, 1884), §313, 434.
According to Plato, there are ideas of everything that can be thought in a universal form, apart
from the particular perceptions in which it is presented. An idea can be distinguished as content
with a meaning of its own, as opposed to a mere affection we experience. Lotze likens his own
view of concept formation to Plato’s. Hence, I will here briefly digress to describe Lotze’s
discussion of concept formation in Book I of Logik:
To Lotze, impressions are first converted into ideas and in making the ideas objective, they are
given a logical form that is derived from grammar (most importantly, substantival, adjectival,
and verbal form). However, language does not fully cover the work of thought, according to
Lotze, and that is why, the linguistic forms have to be supplemented and some ignored (e.g. the
gender is not logical but “aesthetic” fancy).21 This objectification of impressions and the
simultaneous formation according to the parts of speech, is according to Lotze, “the most
indispensable, and in that sense the first, of all operations of thought.”22 But in addition, every
language presupposes employment of judgments and syllogisms, and even systematic scientific
investigation. This, according to Lotze, has given rise to the view that in logic the theory of
judgment must precede the treatment of concepts. However, Lotze considers this to be a
misconception:
for if those judgments, out of which the concept is said to result, are to be really judgments,
they themselves can consist of nothing but combinations of ideas which are no longer mere
impressions; every such idea must have undergone at least the simple formation mentioned
21 R. H., Lotze, Logik, 15.
22 R. H. Lotze, Logik, §8, 17.
above; the greater part of them, as experiment would show, will already practically possess
that higher logical form to which the very theory in question gives the name of concept.23
Lotze thus explicitly opposes the priority thesis. Lotze further explains that
in order to frame complex and manifold concepts, more especially in order to fix the limits
within which it is worth while and justifiable to treat them as wholes and distinguish them
from others, a great deal of preparatory intellectual work is necessary; but that this preparatory
work itself may be possible, it must have been preceded by the conformation of simpler
concepts out of which its own subsidiary judgments are framed.24
I will discuss the context principle later, but note that in this passage, Lotze appears to oppose it
and seems to endorse some sort of compositionality.
The second operation of thought, practically inseparable from the first, according to Lotze, is to
give position to the content in respect to other contents.25 Yet, we can distinguish red from blue
only on the basis of our understanding of what they are in themselves. The comparison may
occasion drawing attention to something that might have been overlooked, but even in this case
the immediate impression is prior to comparison (§11). It is not the case that the thought orders
the impressions, but thought “can make no difference where it finds none already in the matter of
the impressions.”26
23 R. H. Lotze, Logik, §8, 17–18.
24 R. H. Lotze, Logik, §8, 18.
25 R. H. Lotze, Logik, §10, 19.
26 R. H. Lotze, Logik, §19, 27.
The third operation of thought is universalization by which we abstract from varying impressions
their common content. Lotze distinguishes the first universal from the “other universal.” The first
universal involves an immediate experience of the common element as opposed to defining or
explaining, say, the universal concept of an animal or a geometrical figure. “This first universal,
therefore, is no product of thought, but something which thought finds already in existence.”27
On the basis of the first universals, we then produce “the second universal” by logical effort,
which is the fourth activity of thought. Christian Beyer has argued, convincingly, that this
process of abstraction is tantamount to the early phase of Husserl’s essential intuition.28 In
addition, one could argue that Lotze’s emphasis of the role of logical grammar resembles
Husserl’s later view of the logical grammar.
Let us go back to Lotze’s discussion of Plato: for Lotze’s Plato, while the world of sense
undergoes constant change, we think about it with immutable determinations.29 These
conceptions constitute an unchangeable system of thought. Lotze concludes
[t]hus we readily understand the significance of Plato’s endeavour to bind together the
predicates which are found in the things of the external world in continual change, into a
determinate and articulated whole, and how he saw in this world of Ideas the true beginnings
of certain knowledge; for the eternal relations which subsist between different Ideas, and
through which some are capable of association with each other and others exclude each other,
27 R. H. Lotze, Logik, §14, 23.
28 C. Beyer, Von Bolzano,136–137n120,
29 R. H. Lotze, Logik, 435–436.
form at all events the limits within which what is to be possible in experience falls; the further
question what is real in it, and how things manage to have Ideas for their predicates, appeared
to Plato not to be the primary, and was for the time reserved.
(§315)
Lotze holds that to Plato ideas do not exist as things exist, but they possess validity, which is
primitive, “a conception of which everyone may know what he means by it, but which cannot be
constructed out of any constituent elements which do not already contain it.”30 Lotze’s concept
of validity is said to have influenced the value theoreticians of the Southwest neo-Kantians
(Windelband, Rickert). I find it is also justified to claim that Husserl’s view of ideality derives
from Lotze’s view of Geltung (cf. especially Husserl’s criticism of hypostatization of the
universal, in his second logical investigation). Indeed, as I have argued more recently elsewhere,
this makes Husserl and Lotze’s views species of structuralism as opposed to the more
traditionally conceived Platonism.31
Lotze holds that Plato was a victim of Greek language, which does not have a word for validity,
but instead the word Being had to be used for the mode of existence of the ideas. To combat the
Heraclitian flux, the ideas had to be described as eternal, without beginning, and imperishable.32
30 R. H. Lotze, Logik, §316, 440.
31 M. Hartimo, “On Husserl’s Combination View: Structuralism, Constructivism, and What Not,” in After Husserl:
Phenomenological Foundations of Mathematics, ed. Iulian Apostolescu. Special Issue of META: Research in Hermeneutics,
Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy, 11(2), 2019, 526–546.
32 R. H. Lotze, Logik, §318, 441.
They are separable or separate from things because they can also be represented after the things
that originally occasioned their appearance vanish. The independent validity of ideas rescued
Plato from the Protagorean relativity. A deficiency in Plato’s view, Lotze points out in the end, is
that Plato considers his ideas individually:
An account of the necessary connexion of two contents of thought must always assume the
logical form of a judgment; it cannot be expressed in the form of a mere notion which does
not in itself contain a proposition at all. Thus we have always employed laws, that is to say
propositions, which express a relation between different elements, as examples to explain the
meaning of Validity in contradistinction to Existence… we can only say of concepts that they
mean something, and they mean something because certain propositions are valid of them…33
The ideas gain their validity from the way they are related to each other. Lotze thus here appears
to endorse something like context principle (as opposed to his view stated earlier in the same
work).
In the end of the chapter, Lotze’s ontological holism (or structuralism) is once again manifested:
“It is true the abstract thought that the Ideas are not only a multitude of individuals but that they
make up all together an organic and articulated whole …”34 Lotze criticizes Plato, not entirely
fairly, for not being structuralist:
instead of making a systematic collection of the flora of the Ideas, he ought to have turned his
thoughts to the general physiological conditions which in each single plant bind limb to limb
33 R. H. Lotze, Logik, §320, 448.
34 R. H. Lotze, Logik, §320, 449.
according to a law of growth. Or, dropping the figure, the existence of a world of Ideas
possessing a definite meaning and an unchangeable validity being once clearly and
emphatically established, the next task was to investigate the universal laws which govern its
structure, through which alone, in an Ideal world as elsewhere, the individual elements can be
bound together into a whole. Thus the question to be dealt with at this point was what are those
first principles of our knowledge under which the manifold world of Ideas has itself to be
arranged. This is the more precisely defined form which the systematic enquiry into Truth and
the source of Truth now assumes for us.35
The last two sentences are what I want to focus on at the moment. Recall how Husserl
emphasized Lotze’s “ingenius” interpretation of Platonism. Husserl held that:
Lotze’s discussion of truths in themselves suggested to me the thought to place everything
mathematical and a good part of traditional logic into the realm of ideality.
(Hua XX/I, 297)
Compare this with the way in which Lotze ends his chapter: the next task is to study the
universal laws which study the structure “through which alone, in an Ideal world as elsewhere,
the individual elements can be bound together into a whole.” This Lotzean holism is also
characteristic of Husserl’s view of logic, which is what I will argue in the next chapter. Indeed,
Lotze’s doctrine of Geltung presupposes some kind of holism (or structuralism), because the
notion validity presupposes the structure in which the ideas can be said to be valid.
35 R. H. Lotze, Logik, §320, 449.
7.4 Husserl’s idea of logic
To Husserl, the ideal structure mentioned above is studied in mathematics and traditional logic as
it becomes clear from the last chapter of the Prolegomena to Pure Logic (henceforth
Prolegomena). The chapter is devoted to Husserl’s idea of logic and thereby Husserl’s aim is to
reveal what makes science science. The answer lies in “a certain objective or ideal
interconnection which gives these acts a unitary objective relevance, and in such unitary
relevance, an ideal validity.”36 In other words, science owes its validity and objectivity to logic.
Logic, that is, the ideal interconnection, comprises an interconnection of the things to which our
thoughts are directed as well as an interconnection of truths, in which the unity of things comes
to count objectively as being what it is. In comparison to Lotze, Husserl thus includes the
interconnection of things into the realm of logic, while Lotze is only interested in the
interconnection of truths. Husserl, in contrast, holds that logic is about the world as well.
Accordingly, he continues to say: “In these truths or interconnections of truths the actual
existence of things and of interconnections of things finds expression” (Hua XVIII, 231/144).
Husserl then proceeds to discuss the unity of science. Science, according to Husserl, has a unity.
Not every putting of truths together constitutes a science. Scientific knowledge is grounded by
means of a theoretical unity (abstract sciences) or the unity of a thing, as is the case with
concrete sciences. The abstract sciences, however, are, according to Husserl, “the genuine
36 E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Erster Teil. Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, ed. Elmar Holenstein. Husserliana XVIII (The
Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975); English translation: Logical Investigations: First Part. Prolegomena to Pure Logic,
trans. John Findlay (London, New York: Routledge), 230/144. Henceforth cited as Hua XVIII, with German/ English page
references, respectively.
sciences, from whose theoretical stock the concrete sciences must derive all that theoretical
element by which they are made sciences” (Hua XVIII, 237/148). Ultimately, the science owes
its unity to its axiomatic structure. Husserl even claims that “When… our purely theoretical
interest sets the tone, the single individual and the empirical connection do not count
intrinsically, or they count only as a methodological point of passage in the construction of a
general theory…” (Hua XVIII, 238/148). Our theoretical understanding of the world means
ascribing the axiomatic structure to it and seeing everything in the context of the theory:
We must, in particular, as thinking beings, be able to see propositions as truths, and to see
truths as consequences of other truths, and again to see laws as such, to see laws as explanatory
grounds, and to see them as ultimate principles etc. but it is also, on the other hand, inwardly
evident that truths are what they are, and that in particular, laws, grounds, principles are what
they are, whether we have insight into them or not.
(Hua XVIII, 240/150)
Having described the preliminary idea of the pure logic emphasizing the idea of logical unity,
Husserl then proceeds to describe the idea of logic in more detail. He assigns three tasks to pure
logic. The first task of logic is to fix the pure categories of meaning (e.g. concept, proposition,
truth), the pure categories of objects, and their law-governed combinations. So here, primitive
concepts, elementary connective forms, objective categories (object, state of affairs, unity,
plurality, number, relation, connection, etc.), i.e. the first task is to fix the needed logical
grammar and the related laws of existence. These laws separate the realm of sense out of
nonsense.
The second task is to search for the laws that are concerned with the objective validity of the
formal structures. Theories of inference belong here, as well as, the number theory, the set
theory, etc. The second task is to construe the logic in the pregnant sense, that is “infinitely more
interesting [ungleich näherstehenden] in our cognitive practice” as he says in the fourth logical
investigation.37 Logical laws such as the law of contradiction, double negation, and the modus
ponens belong to this task. These laws guard against absurdity.
In the second level, several definite possible theories or pure “forms” of theories can be
constructed. This gives a rise to a more comprehensive theory, that is, the theory of theories. The
third task is to investigate the connections of these various theories with one another. This is the
highest goal for a theoretical science of theory in general, according to Husserl. It is what
Husserl claims modern mathematics is about, and the achievements of such mathematicians as
Riemann, Helmholtz, Grassmann, Hamilton, Lie, and Cantor are its partial realizations. The third
task manifests Husserl’s Lotzean holism. Inspired by Lotze, Husserl decided “to place all
mathematics and a good part of traditional logic into the realm of ideality” as he says in the
above quote. To him, mathematics of his time and much of traditional logic manifested a
structured and ideal (pure), whole. Formal theories express truths about the pure objectivities that
are ideally defined by structures.
7.5 Husserl and the Frege’s principles
Husserl’s ensuing analyses in the Logical Investigations then discuss the context principle,
compositionality, and the priority thesis. In the first investigation, Husserl works his way toward
37 E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Teil, ed. Ursula Panzer, Husserliana XIX (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1984); English translation: Logical Investigations, trans. John Findlay, (London, New York: Routledge), 342/371.
Henceforth cited as Hua XIX/1 with German and English page references, respectively.
expressions that have an objective meaning. He, for example, distinguishes them from the
occasional expressions that require looking into the actual circumstances of the utterance in order
to be understood. However, this is not what is meant by Frege’s context principle (Never to ask
for the meaning of a word in isolation but only in the context of a proposition). The context in
question is the context of a proposition not the context of the utterance. These issues are
discussed in the fourth logical investigation.
The key to Husserl’s approach is his discussion of parts and wholes in the third logical
investigation. According to it, parts can be non-independent moments of the whole or
independent pieces of the whole. The analysis carries to the next investigation, in which Husserl
discusses logical grammar. The meanings can be likewise either independent or non-independent
(in other words, complete or incomplete, and yet in other words, categorematic or
syncategorematic). Husserl’s approach to the context principle and compositionality are stated in
paragraph five of the fourth logical investigation. First of all, he explains, the parts of the
complex expression have to be meaningful expressions, even if non-independent.
It is of course possible that meaning may so shift that an unarticulated meaning replaces one
that was originally articulated, so that nothing in the meaning of the total expression now
corresponds to its part-expressions. But in this case the expression has ceased to be genuinely
complex, and tends, in developed speech, to be telescoped into one word. We no longer count
its members as syncategorematic expressions, since we do not count them as expressions at
all. We only call significant signs expressions, and we only call expressions complex when
they are compounded out of expressions.
(Hua XIX/1, 314/55)
Thus to Husserl, if the parts of the complex expression do not have meaning, they cease to be its
parts. Hence, the parts have to be meaningful. But, even though the parts of complex expressions
are meaningful, nevertheless they are incomplete, in a need of completion. Husserl explains that
[i]t is part of the notion of a word to express something; the meaning of the word need not,
however, be independent. Just as non-independent meanings may occur only as ‘moments’ of
certain independent ones, so the linguistic expression of non-independent meanings may
function only as formal constituents in expressions of independent meanings: they therefore
become linguistically non-independent, i.e. ‘incomplete’ expressions.
(Hua XIX/1,134–135/55)
Syncategorematic, i.e. non-independent expressions are nevertheless understood even when they
occur in isolation: “they are felt to carry definite ‘moments’ of meaning content, ‘moments’ that
look forward to a certain completion which, though it may be indeterminate materially, is
formally determined together with the content in question” (Hua XIX/1, 135/56). Normally, a
syncategorematic expression occurs
in the context of an independently complete expression, it has always, as illustration will
testify, a determinate meaning-relation to our total thought; it has as its meaning a certain non-
independent part of this thought, and so makes a definite contribution to the expression as
such.
(Hua XIX/1, 315/56)
Thus with the distinction between non-independent (moments) and independent parts, Husserl is
able to have both the compositionality (in terms of senses) and the contextuality. The logical
grammar discussed above deals with the a priori laws that govern the combinations of meanings
and shows how the non-independent meanings can be combined with one another. Thus, one can
say that Husserl’s grammar shows a way in which both compositionality and the context
principle can be realized at the same time. Grammar, however, only deals with grammatical
structure of the sentences; it does not discuss the validity of the claims. Grammaticality is thus a
necessary, but not sufficient condition for validity. In particular, in Husserl’s view the context
principle is not obviously connected to ontological holism that is a matter of the second and third
levels of logic.
The priority thesis deserves still a few more words. Frege’s formulation of it was that “[i]n fact,
it is one of the most important differences between my way of thinking and the Boolean way -
and indeed I can add the Aristotelian way - that I do not proceed from concepts but from
judgments.” In other words, to Frege judgments are prior to concepts. But, around the time of the
publication of the Logical Investigations, Husserl would not agree with the priority thesis, which
in Husserl’s view might sound psychologistic. According to Husserl, the objectively valid
structure is what it is independently of anybody’s judgment:
Where the sciences unfold systematic theories, when they no longer merely communicate the
progress of personal research and proof, but set forth the objectively unified, ripe fruit of
known truth, there is absolutely no talk of judgements, ideas and other mental acts.
(Hua XIX/1, 98/225)
Instead of judgments, Husserl could talk about the priority of propositions over the concepts that
are parts of the propositions. Indeed, in his 1896 lectures on logic, for the fear of psychologism,
Husserl uses the term “proposition” (Satz) instead of “judgement” (Urteil).
7.6 Conclusion
Thus in conclusion it can be said that Husserl inherits from Lotze a kind of Platonism that shows
in his ontological holism. In Husserl’s analysis, Platonism and the rejection of psychologism lead
to the rejection of the priority thesis (that judgments are prior to the concepts). Moreover, his
analysis of parts and wholes takes care of the dependencies and independencies within this web
of meaning. His view of context principle is considered as a grammatical principle, which is
considered separately from ontological questions. It may be that the context principle follows
from ontological holism, but Husserl is not explicit about any such connection. However, it is
clear that the context principle is not an epistemological principle as viewed by Haaparanta (and
also Sluga). In such readings, the Kantian priority thesis leads to the adoption of the context
principle and then to an epistemological view of logic. Husserl’s view of logic includes all of
modern mathematics which studies abstract structures. Husserl sees these structures as
comprising Lotze’s Platonistic world of ideas. He eventually claims that the ideality of the
formations with which logic is concerned is “the characteristic of a separate, self-contained,
‘world’ of ideal objects.”38 In his later works, Husserl develops transcendental logic,
whichexamines the way in which these ideal structures are constituted (not constructed), that is,
what kinds of presuppositions and evidences condition our knowledge of them. The difference
between the epistemological readings of Frege and Husserl with regard to Lotze is that Husserl
inherits from Lotze this kind of ontological holism. For him, logic is about pure idealities –
whereas the epistemological readings of Frege, likewise inspired by Lotze, render logic as
38 E. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen, Husserliana XVII (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff); English
translation: Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969). 267/261 Henceforth
cited as Hua XVII, with German and English page references, respectively.
something more subjective, as something that conditions our conception of the world. This
difference also explains why Husserl criticizes Kant’s logic for being directed to the subjective
(Hua XVII, 267/260), and then complains that Kant raises no transcendental questions about it
(Hua XVII, 265/258).39
39 M. Hartimo, “Critical View,” for the detailed argument.