52
Prolegomenon

idea, in equivocal senses, both as non-sensible being and as “idea” in the Platonic sense—and then mixing them together. (This oversight is still operative in his doctrine of meaning.)42

No matter how widely you extend the content of the judgment (the idea), you will never get to the acts of judgment. Husserl’s remarkable oversight was possible only because, fascinated as he was by the ideal and the Platonic idea, he synthesized the two meanings—propositional validity and the subsistence of the universal essence—into one meaning, and then spoke simply of the ideal in contrast to the empirical. This oversight merely illustrates what the critique of psychologism was really aiming at: to establish the ideal over against the empirical.

This very confusion, which is the basis here of the equivocity of “idea,” both as non-sensible being and as [62] the universal, the genus—this confusion is already basically sketched out in the theory from which Husserl, within certain limits, took his essential orientation, namely, Lotze’s doctrine of the world of ideas and his interpretation of Plato’s doctrine of ideas in book 3 of his Logik.43 It was from this context as well, that the term “validity” and the way of interpreting ideal being as validity came. Thanks to Lotze’s logic, the term “validity” and what it refers to has become dominant today. Of course, only after Husserl’s critique of psychologism and his elaboration of ideal being did the concept of validity achieve clarity. It was also subsumed into Windelband’s and Rickert’s value theory, so that in general we can say that logic today is this so-called logic of validity.44


* * *

§9. The roots of these presuppositions


Although our reflections bring us into an historical context, our goal is not to demonstrate how Husserl’s critique depends on such a context. Rather, we are always guided by our specific interest in the issue, as signaled by the question: How is truth understood both in psychologism and in the critique of psychologism?

We now know that truth = true proposition = validity. So we ask: What does “to be valid” mean? What presuppositions let us acquire the concept “validity”? We can’t say the ideal is an entity that has being if we use the word “being” in the narrow sense, with the result that “being” would be reserved for this very special entity. If “being” and


42. [The last sentence draws on the Weiss transcript (p. 34.27–28).] 43. [See «Bibliography,» above, p. 22.] 44. [Here (Moser, p. 130) Heidegger ends his lecture of Tuesday, 17 November 1925, to be followed by that of Thursday, 19 November, which opened with a 650word summary that is omitted in GA 21.]


Martin Heidegger (GA 21) Logic : the question of truth

Page generated by LogicSteller.EXE