finally press to the fore here, one that can certainly be very dangerous once we glimpse it and expound it as something fundamental? Therefore we could say that although this critique of psychologism is from the outset utterly clear on the guiding distinction between empirical and ideal being, nonetheless the positive questions that now press forward from this distinction are quite difficult. These are questions that did not surface first of all in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, but that already engaged Greek philosophy, especially Plato. This distinction is the same as the Platonic one between sensible being, the αἰσθητόν, and the being that is accessible through reason or νοῦς: the νοητόν. The inquiry today takes up again the question of the μέθεξις, the participation of the real in the ideal, and it is up for grabs whether or not we can get clear on the phenomenon of thinking, of the thought, and more broadly of truth, by stating the problem in these terms.27
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I have already indicated that psychologism as a theory has not restricted itself to logic but has also played a role in ethics and aesthetics, insofar as people attempted to apprehend and understand the problems of ethics and aesthetics from psychology. Husserl’s criticism was directed essentially to psychologism in logic, although his criticism occasionally touched in passing on basic questions in ethics. In that context, Husserl shows that every ethics claims to be a science of norms, a science of correct acting, analogous to logic as the science of the norms of correct thinking. But therefore it presupposes a theoretical discipline as the foundational discipline for a normative science of norms—and that science cannot be psychology. Rather, [53] just as logic deals with the pure content of propositions, so analogously ethics must deal with the pure content of norms, that is, with values. In other words, Husserl’s critique of psychologism also opened the path to a critique of values. Scheler has taken up this question, and in the field of ethics or practical philosophy he has constructed an ethics of value.
We may say, then, that the essence of psychologism consists in a confusion of empirical mental being with the ideal being of laws. When I say “confusion,” please do not take that in a superficial sense, as if psychologism somehow mixed up two available things, like red and blue. Obviously the theory did not begin that way. But I would say that the confusion is based on the fact that at that time philosophy was largely blocked off from various regions of being. It was blind to them, cut off from them and locked up in one specific area of being, that of
27. [Here (Moser, p. 112) Heidegger ends his lecture of Monday, 16 November 1925, to be followed by that of Tuesday, November 17, which opened with a brief 50-word summary that is omitted in GA 21.]