Some years ago, in 1916, in his inaugural lecture as Rickert’s successor at Freiburg, Husserl compared the philosopher’s tasks with those of Galileo in the natural sciences.78 Naturally, the philosophically unwashed understood these reflections simply as Husserl comparing himself with Galileo and presenting himself as someone greater. Now, we intellectuals are certainly conceited—some more than others, and philosophers above all. They often make this impression because they don’t talk about the despair that haunts them. But in that lecture (which, like many others, is not published), it was certainly not Husserl’s intention to compare himself with Galileo. His purpose, rather, was to show that people had already experimented with nature long before Galileo, but that Galileo was the founder of modern natural science only because, as a physicist, he was a philosopher. The discovery that movement is the fundamental determination of nature had already been made by Aristotle, whom Galileo studied assiduously. [98] Long before Galileo, people had employed numerical calculation. What mattered, however, was not that, but the fact that Galileo asked: How must physical processes be defined if adequate scientific knowledge of them is to be possible?
Comparing philosophy to Galileo’s project means: As regards “mind” or “consciousness” (which is indeed the subject of experimental, numerical calculations), we have to ask what makes mind be mind and what kind of determination must mind have if we are to be able to gain an adequate knowledge of it.
Applied to the critique of psychologism, that means: Psychologism is to be rejected not because psychology wants to force its way into a place where it does not belong, but because it is the application of a psychology that does not understand its own subject matter; not because psychologism merely transgresses a boundary, but because it transgresses into what is not psychology, and for that reason is confused.
Because of this insight, and guided essentially by it alone, even Husserl in the beginning titled his phenomenological investigations a “descriptive psychology,” where “descriptive” did not have the sense of a narrative versus experimental psychology, or a psychology without instruments versus one that uses them, or of “desk psychology” versus laboratory psychology. In Husserl, “descriptive” entails leaving all of these [supposed contraries] behind and getting back to exhibiting the issue itself, its field and its structure.
The basic feature of mind is intentionality. This means that the mind in and of itself is (if we may use this formulation just once) a
78. [This is now published as “Husserl’s Inaugural Lecture at Freiburg im Breisgau (1917),” trans. Robert W. Jordan, in Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston, eds., Husserl: Shorter Works (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 9–17.]