direction forward is applied to the mental so as to help it point outward into the external world. No—the mental is first and only this very self-directedness, and as such it is “real.”

The project, then, was to understand thinking within the horizon of this structure of the mind and, along with that, to understand what-is-thought in its thoughtness. But out of this project grew another one: not just to point out and preserve intentionality by concretely pursuing and investigating specifically logical behaviors—naming, designating, presenting, meaning, intuiting, judging—but also, and for the first time, to properly understand the meaning of intentionality and thereby to secure the field of mind in its basic constitution. With this phenomenological project, Brentano was really striving to secure the ground on which logic, as phenomenological, could make some actual progress in research by taking its directives from the issues themselves.

The project was to antecedently determine the structure of the field of the subject matter, and it first of all had to be adequately dealt with if psychologism’s basic goal was to be possible. Thus, a critique of psychologism has to be a critique of psychology. But as we now see, this critique of psychology is not about correcting its results or improving its methods by inventing new instruments or broadening the arena and the field of investigation by, e.g., making use of child psychology.—Yes, child psychology is of the greatest importance. Perhaps at a later date the psychology of the elderly will also be of great import. All of these are possible and legitimate projects, but they are not the arena in which the real work of research is to be played out.

No matter how much psychological knowledge we accumulate, it will never help us clarify fundamental principles unless we pose the question of those principles right from the start. The accumulation [97] of such knowledge can go on ad infinitum, but it will never get an answer to the question of what the mind is, and yet this question is the concrete, essential question of the science itself. Of course, the path of science—of any science—mostly proceeds by first taking a naïve running jump into a seemingly limitless field, in which it establishes some fixed points of relative value. But then it requires some basic philosophical investigation and clarification of that field it wants to investigate. Only then is the science really put on its path—but it stays on that path only by always understanding how to make the philosophical move, i.e., to continually question its field and revise its basic concepts. People have completely misunderstood the critique of psychologism—and Husserl’s in particular—when they have read out of it an animosity toward experimental psychology. Those kinds of investigations have their own legitimacy and projects, but they have nothing to do with philosophy—any more than physics does. So what is needed is a fundamental reflection on the thematic field of psychology.