Axiomathes (2012) 22:53–74

DOI 10.1007/s10516-011-9159-7

INVITED PAPER

Phenomenology and Phenomenalism: Ernst Mach

and the Genesis of Husserl’s phenomenology

Denis Fisette

Received: 25 August 2010 / Accepted: 11 May 2011 / Published online: 19 June 2011
 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract How do we reconcile Husserl’s repeated criticism of Mach’s phenome-

nalism almost everywhere in his work with the leading role that Husserl seems to
attribute to Mach in the genesis of his own phenomenology? To answer this question,
we shall examine, first, the narrow relation that Husserl establishes between his
phenomenological method and Mach’s descriptivism. Second, we shall examine two
aspects of Husserl’s criticism of Mach: the first concerns phenomenalism and Mach’s
doctrine of elements, while the second concerns the principle of economy of thought,
which Husserl closely associates with a form of psychologism in his Logical
Investigations. Our working hypothesis is that the apparent contradictory comments
of Husserl regarding Mach’s positivism can be partially explained by the double
status he confers to his own phenomenology—as a philosophical program radically
opposed to positivism, and as a method akin to Mach’s descriptivism.

Keywords Husserl
Mach
Phenomenology
Phenomenalism

At the very beginning of his Amsterdam lectures of 1928, Husserl argues that his
phenomenology can be understood as ‘‘a certain radicalizing of an already existing
phenomenological method which individual natural scientists and psychologists had
previously demanded and practiced.’’1 He then refers to Naturforscher and
1
Husserl, Hua IX, p. 302 (Amsterdam Lectures, p. 213).

Two different versions of this paper have been read, one at L’École normale supérieure in Paris and the
other at the University of Liege. A longer version was published in Portuguese under the title
‘‘Fenomenologia e fenomenismo em Husserl e Mach’’ in Studia Scientiae (São Paulo, v. 7, n. 4, 2009,
pp. 535–576). My thanks to J. Benoist, R. Brisart, G. R. Haddock and M. Sacrini, and to the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its financial support.

D. Fisette (&)
Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Canada
e-mail: fisette.denis@uqam.ca

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philosophers who used this method before him, namely, Ernst Mach, his colleague
Ewald Hering in Prague, and Franz Brentano. Husserl’s debt to the latter and to
descriptive psychology in general is relatively well known, whereas his relation to
Hering and more specifically to Mach, who is usually associated with philosophical
naturalism rather than with the phenomenological tradition, remains problematic.
However, several passages in Husserl’s work corroborate his remarks in the
Amsterdam lectures, in particular, a passage in his lectures of 1910 published under
the title The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, in which he points out that the first
seeds of the phenomenological reduction is to be found in J. S. Mill and ‘‘in the
sensation-monism of Mach, who likewise substitutes connecting groups of sensation
for the thing.’’2 Prima facie, these two remarks establish a close relationship
between phenomenology and Mach’s descriptivism, which beyond its strictly
methodological sense, is based on a form of phenomenalism that reduces mental
states and physical objects to aggregates or complexes of sensations. Yet, Husserl
has always struggled against phenomenalism and the empiricist tradition in general,
and we know that Mill and Mach are two of the main targets of Husserl’s criticism
of psychologism in his Logical Investigations. The question is therefore how to
reconcile Husserl’s repeated criticism of Mach’s phenomenalism almost everywhere
in his work with the leading role that Husserl seems to attribute to Mach in the
genesis of his own phenomenology.
This question raises the whole problem of the relationship of Husserl’s
phenomenology with Mach’s positivism. Despite the importance of that issue in
Husserl’s work and in phenomenology, understood broadly enough to include the
contribution of Brentano and his pupils, it has generated little interest up until now.3
I believe that a better understanding of the historical context that gave birth to
Husserl’s phenomenology makes it possible to more fully appreciate the scattered
observations of Husserl regarding Mach, including those concerning the origin of
the phenomenological method by which Husserl related his phenomenology to a
leading movement that was well known to all philosophers and scientists of the
time. This movement is what has since been called the ‘‘descriptive view,’’ having
its origins in the work of the physicist Kirchhoff Lectures on Mechanics4 and having
as its main advocates during the second half of the nineteenth century E. Mach,

2
Husserl, Hua XIII, p. 180 (Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 76). These two passages are not the
only ones in which Husserl establishes a link between the phenomenological method and Mach’s
descriptivism, as we will see below. In the winter semester of 1903–1904, Husserl gave a lecture on the
new writings in natural science, and Mach’s book, The Analysis of Sensations, was on the program (see
Schuhmann 1977, p. 76). Mach’s book was also an important topic in Husserl’s lectures entitled
‘‘Philosophische Übungen mit einigem Anschluß an E. Machs Analyse der Empfindungen’’ in the summer
semester of 1911 (cf. Husserl’s letter to Vaihinger dated May 24, 1911, in Husserl, Briefwechsel, Bd 5,
pp 211–212).
3
Worth mentioning here is Lübbe’s (1960) pioneering paper, ‘‘Positivismus und Phänomenologie:
Husserl und Mach,’’ pp 161–184. According to Lübbe, Mach belongs more to the phenomenological
tradition than to logical positivism, in that, well before Husserl, Mach ‘‘reached the level of
phenomenological inquiry’’ (p. 181). Another important contribution to that topic is Sommer’s (1985)
book, Husserl und der frühe Positivismus (Frankfurt a. Main, Klostermann), in which he develops
Husserl’s relation to Avenarius’s conception of the natural world more specifically.
4
Kirchhoff (1877).

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Axiomathes (2012) 22:53–74 55

R. Avenarius, and H. Cornelius. Brentano and his students were not very far from
this approach, to the extent that their psychology, which represents the main axis of
Brentano’s philosophical program, used a descriptive method in order to analyze
mental phenomena. Most of these philosophers adopted a critical attitude toward the
speculations of post-Kantian idealism and opted for a rapprochement with the
empirical sciences in order to recover philosophy’s status as rigorous science. The
battleground of this debate was the new psychology and the philosophical questions
raised by the growing interest in physiological and experimental psychology to
which philosophers and scientists such as H. Lotze, E. Hering. E. Mach, W. von
Helmholtz, and W. Wundt contributed significantly. Thanks to his mentor Stumpf,
the first student of Brentano in Würzburg, Husserl was well-informed of the ins and
outs of these debates, as testified by his research during the Halle period. Husserl’s
position vis-à-vis this issue in his Logical Investigations stands out clearly from his
criticism to logical psychologism and from his effort to reconcile the desiderata of
his theory of science and pure logic with his phenomenology, which he defines in
the first edition of this work as descriptive psychology. And it is in this context that
the whole discussion of Mach’s positivism takes on its true significance: while
recognizing the important contribution of Mach’s doctrine of elements to
phenomenology, Husserl accuses Mach of having subordinated it to a form of
phenomenalism which does not stand up to the objection of psychologism.
The main goal of our study is to explain the apparent tension in Husserl’s work
between his critique of positivism and the importance he granted to Mach’s
descriptivism in the genesis of his own phenomenology. We shall first examine the
passages in which Husserl establishes a close relationship between the phenomeno-
logical method and the descriptivism of Mach and Hering. We will then examine two
aspects of Husserl’s criticism of Mach’s positivism; the first concerns phenomenal-
ism and Mach’s conception of sensations, while the second is the principle of
economy of thought, which Husserl associated with a form of psychologism in his
Prolegomena. We claim that Husserl’s apparent contradictory remarks regarding
Mach’s positivism can partly be explained by the double status that Husserl confers to
his own phenomenology, i.e. as a philosophical program that indeed opposes any
form of naturalism, and as a method based on descriptive psychology akin to the
descriptive method. Only the latter presents some kinship with Mach’s work.

1 From Prague to Vienna

Moravian of birth like Husserl, Mach held a chair of physics in Prague from 1867 to
1895. During his professorship in Prague, which was then the most important center
of research on the physiology of the senses in Europe, Mach acquired his reputation
as scientist and philosopher and published his most important scientific treatises
among which his well-known The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical
Account of its Development and The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the
Physical to the Psychical.5 Ewald Hering, who was called to the University of

5
Mach (1901).

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Prague in 1870 to replace Purkinje, held this position until the departure of Mach in
1895 and was the other important figure of this center. Mach left Prague in 1895 and
arrived in Vienna the same year that Brentano decided to leave Austria definitively
and move to Italy, where he remained for the next 20 years. In September of 1894,
Mach was invited to the conference of the Association of German Naturalists and
Physicists, held in Vienna, at which he gave a talk entitled ‘‘The Principle of
Comparison in Physics.’’6 In this talk, Mach argued for Gustav Kirchhoff’s
descriptive conception of mechanics, whose main task is to ‘‘fully describe in the
simplest manner the movements that occur in nature.’’7 Mach extends this definition
to all scientific research and conceives of the task of science as the simplest and
most economical description of the elements in a language of functional relations.
Alois Höfler, a student of Brentano and Meinong, invited Mach to discuss his talk at
a meeting of the Philosophical Society of the University of Vienna, which took
place 3 months later. This discussion, which was attended by several other
philosophers and scientists in Vienna, generated so much interest that two
discussion sessions were held in January and March 1895, this time conducted by
J. C. Kreibig, another student of Brentano. These discussions seem to have
convinced many Philosophical Society and Faculty members of the interest in
Mach’s candidature for the chair of History and Theory of the Inductive Sciences,
which was left vacant since Brentano’s resignation in 1880.8 Mach begins his
professorship in Vienna in 1895, and we know the influence he exerted on the
course of Austrian philosophy, namely, on the members of the Vienna Circle and on
logical empiricism until the late 1930s.9 Unfortunately, Mach occupied this chair
only a few years and was forced to resign in 1901 because of his health.

6
E. Mach, ‘‘Über das Prinzip der Vergleichung in der Physik,’’ already published in 1894 (Leipzig,
Vogel), and reprinted in Mach (1903, p. 266–289).
7
G. R. Kirchhoff, op. cit. p. 1.
8
Carl Stumpf seems to have been approached to occupy Brentano’s chair, but he rather opted for the
prestigious chair in Berlin, which he occupied from 1894 until the end of his career. F. Hillebrand,
another student of Brentano who studied with Marty, Mach, and Hering in Prague between 1886 and
1892, was probably also a candidate for this chair. According to Wieser (1950, pp. 38–39),
R. Zimmermann, who was the only professor of the Faculty to hold a chair, strongly supported Mach’s
candidature; like that of F. Jodl, who succeeded him in 1896 and who made the promise to eradicate all
the so-called Brentanoten.
9
In the correspondence between Mach and Brentano in May 1895 (in Brentano 1988), Brentano
welcomed the announcement of Mach’s appointment in Vienna. We know that Brentano had a keen
interest in Mach’s doctrine of the elements as well as in Mach’s Erkenntnis und Irrtum as evidenced by
his notes dictated in Florence during the winter of 1905–1906. On Brentano’s remarks on Mach’s doctrine
of elements, cf. Brentano’s paper (1979, pp. 93–103) ‘‘Von der Analyse der psychologischen
Tonqualitäten in ihre eigentlich ersten Elemente,’’ which he prepared for the Fifth International Congress
of Psychology in Rome in 1905 and in which he discusses the doctrines of Stumpf and Mach. Note also
that in 1896, one year after his arrival in Vienna, Mach was invited to attend the 3rd International
Congress of Psychology held at Munich and presided by Stumpf and T. Lipps. He refused the invitation
because of his health, and Brentano (1897, pp. 110–133) replaced him and addressed the theme of
sensations. Stumpf pronounced the opening discourse entitled ‘‘Leib und Seele,’’ in which he sharply
criticizes Mach’s phenomenalism. Mach (2001, pp. 118–126) responded to Stumpf’s objections in a paper
entitled ‘‘Sensory Elements and Scientific Concepts,’’). Finally, it is worth mentioning the dissertation of
Stumpf’s student Musil published in 1908 under the title Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs.

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Mach’s succession in Vienna was very coveted, and we know that Husserl never
hid his interest for that chair. Indeed, he met Mach on this subject during the Easter
holidays of 1901, a meeting that he describes to his friend Albrecht in a letter dated
from the month of August of the same year.10 We learn from this letter that Alois
Riehl, a colleague of Husserl in Halle, seems to have been one of the serious
candidates for the succession of Mach in Vienna, but since Riehl was not interested
in this position, he strongly recommended Husserl’s candidature to Mach.11
According to Husserl, Mach reacted positively to Riehl’s recommendation and
expressed his preference for Husserl’s candidature for the chair.12 However,
following numerous negotiations within the Faculty, the Commission took this
occasion to repatriate the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann in Vienna by offering him
Mach’s chair.13 Husserl’s disappointment is palpable in a letter from Göttingen to
his compatriot Thomas Masaryk, in which he admits having lost hope of ever
obtaining a professorship in Austria:
From the old native country I now remain probably permanently separated,
and I have long given up the cherished hope in early years of being once
appointed to Austria—though I heard with pleasure only last year that
E. Mach, when he retired, mentioned my name beside Riehl’s as his desired
successor for the position in Vienna.14

2 The Principles of Comparison in Physics and Mach’s Doctrine of Elements

Mach’s talk ‘‘The Principle of Comparison in Physics’’ is also of significant interest

for our study because Husserl wrote a positive review of the published version of
this talk in 189715 and because Mach uses therein the term ‘‘phenomenology’’ to
designate the descriptive method of research in natural science and psychology.
This ‘‘general physical phenomenology, extending to all fields’’16 is actually an
extension of Kirchhoff’s principle mentioned earlier, according to which, in Mach’s
formulation, science has to describe, as economically as possible, the phenomena or
elements. Mach’s phenomenology presents several similarities with that introduced
by Husserl a few years later in his Logical Investigations. Indeed, Husserl defines
phenomenology as descriptive psychology and assigned it the task of analyzing and
describing the immediate data of consciousness or experience understood in a broad
sense. This is indeed one of the important ideas that he retains from Mach’s paper.17

10
Husserl and Schuhmann (1994, pp. 23–24).
11
Riehl, letter to Mach from May 26, 1901 published in J. Thiel (ed.), op. cit., p. 292.
12
Mach wrote: ‘‘Unter den von Ihnen Genannten möchte ich mir von Husserl das meiste versprechen,’’
quoted in Husserl, Briefwechsel, Bd. IX, p. 24.
13
On Boltzmann’s close relationship to Brentano, cf. Blackmore (1995).
14
Husserl, Briefwechsel, Bd. I, p. 107.
15
Husserl, Review of Mach’s (1897, pp. 241–244).
16
Ibid., p. 243.
17
Husserl (1897, p. 242).

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The second idea consists in Mach’s opposition to causal explanation: to make

phenomena intelligible is not to consider them as specific instances of a causal law,
as in classical mechanics, but to describe them in simple or familiar terms. Hence,
the question raised by Mach at the very beginning of his paper is what happens to
the explanation and the causal connections between things, and to what extent can
description be dispensed of explanation altogether?18 Part of Mach’s answer is well
known, and it consists simply in dismissing the ‘‘fetish’’ concept of causality.19
The third important idea that Husserl emphasizes in his review concerns the
relations of dependence, which Mach conceives of in The Analysis of Sensations as
functional relations.20 In Mach’s doctrine of elements, the relations of dependence,
through which elements form sensory configurations or gestalts, are functional
relations of different kinds. The essential difference between these classes of
relations, and namely, between the relation to a physical object and the relation to a
mental state, for example, depends on whether the elements overlap the sensory
surfaces or the periphery of our senses. To be more precise, the boundary that
delimits what belongs to the physical and to the mental depends on ‘‘a spatial
delimitation U of our own body’’ or what he calls, in The Analysis of Sensations, a
‘‘Körperhaut’’ or flesh, the body being understood as the boundary delineating the
mental from the physical. For, since the sensory world belongs simultaneously to
the physical and to the psychical world, the difference between physics and
physiology of senses, for instance, depends primarily on the fact that the latter only
takes into account our own body (=our nervous system).
The function U, which designates the spatial delineation of our own body, makes
it possible both to expose the functional relations between the elements very simply
and to distinguish the physical from the psychological in a non-substantialist way.
The three more important classes of relation structuring the elements are the
following:
1a. The relations of physical dependence: relation between items A, B, C, etc.
outside of U;
1b. The neurophysiological relation of dependence: relation between the elements
K, L, M, etc. inside U;
2. The psychophysiological relation: relation between elements inside and outside
of U, i.e., relation between 1a and 1b;
3. The relation of psychological dependence: relation between elements a, b, c,
etc. to which correspond mental states such as representation, feeling,
judgment, etc.
Each variable takes its value only when it takes place in a physical or psycho-
physiological relation. For instance, the elements A, B, and C refer to physical
objects, physical properties, psychological objects, or sensations only insofar as they
take place in a relation of physical dependence (1a and 1b), psycho-physiological
dependence (2), or psychological dependence (3).
18
Mach, Vorlesungen, p. 269.
19
Ibid., p. 269.
20
Mach, The Analysis of Sensations, p. 369.

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Axiomathes (2012) 22:53–74 59

To quote Mach again:

A color is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for
instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colors, upon temperatures,
upon spaces, and so forth. When we consider, however, its dependence upon
the retina (the elements K, L, M, etc.), it is a psychological object, a sensation.
Not the subject-matter, but the direction of our investigation, is different in the
two domains.21
This holds a fortiori for the I understood by Mach as a complex of functional
relations of a certain kind. It follows that the subject matter of all these sciences is
the same, i.e. the elements and functional relations between them, whereas the
differences between these resides in the attitude or stance toward them and in the
interests and orientation of the research. In other words, this form of neutral monism
claims the ontological identity of the physical and the psychological (=ontological
monism), and epistemological dualism, i.e. a functional difference between the
physical and the psychological.

3 The Phenomenological Method from Hering to Husserl

As mentioned earlier, the names of Mach, Hering, and Brentano are closely
associated in Husserl’s Amsterdam lectures on the origin of phenomenology. In an
appendix to the first section of his lectures on phenomenological psychology of
1925, Husserl is more explicit about the historical origin of this part of
phenomenology that he calls ‘‘phenomenological psychology,’’ and he again
confers to Mach22 the merit of having discovered the phenomenological method, to
the extent that Mach’s approach to psychology differs from that of the traditional
natural sciences by its descriptive character. Alluding to the Helmholtz-Hering
debate, also known as the empiricism-nativism debate, Husserl wrote about the
meaning of the method in Mach and Hering:
The sense of this method in men like Mach and Hering lay in a reaction
against the threatening groundlessness of theorizing in the exact natural
sciences. It was a reaction against a mode of theorizing in mathematical
speculations and concept-forming which is distant from intuition, a theorizing
which accomplished neither clarity with insight, in any legitimate sense, nor
the production of theories.23
However, as Husserl points out in several passages in Volume IX of the
Husserliana, it is precisely in virtue of its descriptive character that this method
differs from that of Wundt or Helmholtz, whose point of departure are the natural
sciences. The phenomenological method of Hering, for example, takes its point of
departure in the descriptum, i.e., in the immediate and intuitive givenness or what he
21
Mach, The Analysis of Sensations, pp. 17–18.
22
Husserl, Hua IX, p. 350.
23
Husserl, Amsterdam Lectures, p. 211.

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also calls Sehdinge, which are the immediate data of perceptual experience as they
are actually given in their own being. However, Husserl clearly indicates that this
rapprochement with Mach and Hering applies only to that part of his phenome-
nology, which in the mid-1920s he calls intentional psychology and not to
transcendental phenomenology, which deals with more general philosophical issues.
That is why Husserl proposes, at the very beginning of his Amsterdam lectures, to
leave aside ‘‘the philosophical interests’’ and to concentrate only on what is
psychological ‘‘in the same way as a physicist is interested in physics.’’
The importance of Mach’s descriptivism in the genesis of Husserl’s phenom-
enology is again confirmed by a passage in Husserl’s 1910 lectures, Basic Problems
of Phenomenology, which we have already quoted and in which Husserl claims that
the first seeds of the phenomenological reduction are already present in J. S. Mill
and Mach’s doctrine of elements. Here again, Husserl warns against the possible
confusion between the methodological aspect of the work of Mill and Mach, their
phenomenalism (with which he disagrees), and their position in the domain of
epistemology and metaphysics. However, the starting point in the description of the
sensory data and their intrinsic connections apart from all metaphysical consider-
ations is close to what Husserl is seeking in the phenomenological reduction.24
Husserl describes it as a bracketing of the existence of what is posited in the natural
attitude or common sense as ‘‘an existing real thing, a real constellation, a real
alteration, namely, in the present, past, or future.’’25 This bracketing aims at giving
access to the field of study of phenomenology and to phenomenological data, which
we shall not analyze here.26
Most of these indications concerning the origins of phenomenology point
towards the famous discussion between Helmholtz and Hering on space perception
and color theory.27 The young Husserl was well informed of this controversy and of
the discussions on the origin of space perception and geometry, and we know that
these issues were supposed to constitute an important part of the second volume of
Philosophy of arithmetic, which has never been published. Other indications
demonstrate the knowledge and interest of the young Husserl toward these issues.
First, in his first year in Halle, Husserl submitted to an examination of
‘‘nostrification’’ for recognition of his Austrian diploma. On the jury sat the great
mathematician Cantor and, ex officio, Stumpf, who examined Husserl, among other
things, on Lotze’s theory of local signs, the history of the theories of space
perception, and the relationship between logic and mathematics.28 It was also during
this period that Husserl systematically annotated the Raumbuch of his mentor,
Stumpf. But the most valuable information on these issues is to be found in

24
Notice what he wrote about Avenarius, which applies to phenomenalism in general: ‘‘The beginning
[in description] in Avenarius is good, but he got stuck,’’ Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 111.
25
Ibid., p. 191.
26
On the origin of the phenomenological method in Mach and Hering, cf. Stumpf (1917), Bühler (1927)
and many of Husserl’s students during the period of Göttingen such as Hofmann (1913), Jaensch (1927),
Katz (1911), and Linke (1929).
27
Cf. Turner, R. S. In the Eye’s Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz-Hering Controversy.
28
Cf. Gerlach and Sepp (1994, p. 184).

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Husserl’s research manuscripts dating from 1893, which belong to the project of
writing a Raumbuch,29 and which allow us to identify quite precisely Husserl’s
position in the nativism-empiricism debate on space perception.
To this discussion also belongs the so-called Gestalt controversy, which gave rise
to the publication in 1890 of von Ehrenfels’ classical paper, ‘‘On Gestalt
Qualities.’’30 As we know, Husserl studied similar phenomena in Chapter XI of
his Philosophy of Arithmetic in the context of the explanation of indirect
apprehension of multiplicities, and these phenomena are called figural moments
or moments of unity, to use the terminology of the Logical Investigations. But we
should also bear in mind that Husserl had already applied the concept of Gestalt
toward the concept of number in his lectures of 1889–1890 and thus even before von
Ehrenfels.31 In a footnote to Chapter XI of Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl does,
in fact, mention the article of von Ehrenfels, but he claimed he did not read it;
however, like the latter, he acknowledged his debt to Mach’s book The Analysis of
Sensations: ‘‘Since I read this work by the gifted physicist right after its appearance,
it is quite possible that I too was partly influenced in the progress of my thought by
reminiscences from that reading.’’32 The first edition of Mach’s book was published
in 1886, the date of Husserl’s arrival in Halle, and we also know that his mentor,
Stumpf, produced a positive review of this book the same year.33

4 The Critique of Mach’s Phenomenalism

In his article ‘‘Positivism and Phenomenology,’’ H. Lübbe argues that positivism

and phenomenology led the same battle against a form of dogmatism that sought to
eliminate ‘‘the specific data of consciousness’’ in favor of physical and physiolog-
ical, which they took for reality. He argues that it is precisely this interpretation of
‘‘intentional and immanent data of consciousness in terms of the facts of physics and
physiology that Husserl struggled against as the fundamental error of naturalism.’’34
The above considerations regarding the close relationship of phenomenology with
Mach’s descriptivism seem to corroborate this thesis. However, if one takes into
account the reservations expressed by Husserl repeatedly in different contexts,
29
Husserl (1983).
30
C. von Ehrenfels ‘‘On Gestalt Qualities;’’ on Ehrenfels debt to Mach, cf. Mulligan and Smith (1988,
pp. 124–157).
31
In his «Vorlesung über den Begriff der Zahl (WS 1889/90)», Husserl (2004, p. 298) wrote: ‘‘Now, how
does such a symbolic presentation come together? Let us make a random composition of dots on the
blackboard or think a number of dots on a die and the like. What is the primarily given? Well, a certain
configuration of the dots’’. A unitary intuition is present in which we can notice this Gestalt moment that
gives the characteristic impression to the whole phenomenon. This forms the unitary frame for the
apprehending activity: we apprehend one element, then proceed to another, then to another again. The
outer frame now, the Gestalt, the unitariness of the intuition is what spares us the effort to undertake the
real collection and which makes possible a symbolic presentation of a multiplicity that is defined by this
intuition ».
32
Husserl, Philosophy of Arithmetic, p. 211.
33
Stumpf (1886, pp. 947–948).
34
H. Lübbe, op. cit., p. 169.

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in which he discusses methodological issues related to Mach, one can see that the
methodological kinship of phenomenology with Mach’s descriptivism does not
presume anything about Husserl’s position on philosophical issues related to
metaphysics and epistemology. We must then wonder whether Husserl’s phenom-
enology led the same philosophical struggle as did Mach’s positivism. I will address
two aspects of this issue: the first one concerns Mach’s phenomenalism, which
Husserl criticizes in several places in his work, namely, in Section 7 of the first
edition of the fifth Investigation; the second aspect that I shall examine in the next
section deals with Mach’s principle of economy of thought, which Husserl
associates with psychologism (or biologism) in Chapter IX of his Prolegomena to
Pure Logic. I will argue that the so-called ‘‘radicalization’’ of Mach’s method in the
Amsterdam lectures goes hand in hand with a critique of Mach’s positivism.
Although Mach does not claim the status of a philosopher but that of a
Naturforscher, he nonetheless advocates a form of empiricism that conveys
numerous philosophical presuppositions, such as sensationalism, to the extent that
he seeks to base all sciences on sensory phenomena or what he calls elements. On
the ontological level, Mach advocates a form of neutral monism according to which
the world is made neither of matter nor of mind but of a neutral material, which, as
we saw, can be treated as psychological or as physical depending on the context and
interests of research. Mach also advocates an anti-metaphysical position since he
believes that anything beyond the immediate sense data, and hence, any assertion
about the reality and existence of external objects, are metaphysical, and any
science which goes beyond the pure description of elements is dealing, after all,
with pseudo-problems.35 In fact, as shown by his doctrine of elements, discussed
above, the objects of psychology, like those of physics, are in fact ‘‘permanent
possibilities of sensation,’’ and, as such, they are reducible to elements or complexes
of elements. I would like to briefly discuss three aspects of Husserl’s criticism of
Mach’s phenomenalism: first, the conceptual aspect, which concerns the central
distinction, introduced in the fifth Investigation, between sensory content and
phenomenal properties of the external objects; second, the metaphysical aspect, i.e.,
the reduction of the external objects and mental states to sensory elements; and
third, the famous problem of transcendence.
In the general introduction to the second volume of his Logical Investigations,
Husserl defines phenomenology as a descriptive psychology, suggesting that the
field of study of his phenomenology coincides with that of Brentano’s psychology.
Husserl further suggests that the choice of the term phenomenology is merely
terminological in that it aims at avoiding a confusion that could result from the use
of the term psychology to refer both to the field of physiological psychology and to
that of mental phenomena, to which Brentano’s descriptive psychology is limited.
Like Brentano in his lectures in the mid-1880s, Husserl clearly distinguishes
descriptive psychology from genetic or physiological psychology and assigns to the
former the task of analyzing and describing ‘‘the experiences of presentation,
judgment, and knowledge—experiences which receive a scientific probing at the

35
Mach, The Analysis of Sensations, p. XII.

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Axiomathes (2012) 22:53–74 63

hands of empirical psychology.’’36 The description and phenomenological analysis

is granted a methodological primacy over the psychological explanation, and
Husserl denounces certain blindness on the part of some psychologists who do not
respect this division of labor in seeking to explain some phenomena, which have not
been previously described analytically and therefore in the absence of a reliable
explanandum. Such cases are legion in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is in
this sense that phenomenology can be considered as a propaedeutic to empirical
psychology.37
Now, this discussion about Brentano’s criteria for the distinction between
physical phenomena and mental phenomena, and more generally on the delineation
of the field of psychology from that of the natural sciences, further suggests that the
field of study of phenomenology does not entirely coincide with that of descriptive
psychology. I have in mind here the criticism that Husserl addresses to Brentano in
the fifth Investigation and in the Appendix to the second volume of the Logical
Investigations. This criticism is directed against two central claims in the
psychology of Brentano: the first concerns the issue of whether intentionality can
delineate the field of psychology, while the second concerns the delimitation of the
field of psychology from that of natural sciences, and it presupposes that the criteria
on which Brentano’s classification are based justify the general separation between
psychology understood as ‘‘the science of psychical phenomena’’ and natural
sciences understood as ‘‘sciences of physical phenomena.’’ Yet, that is precisely
what Husserl denies. To Brentano’s classification, Husserl opposes a distinction,
which he introduced in his early work in Halle, between mental states and primary
contents, more precisely, between two classes of experiences, the first correspond-
ing to Brentano’s psychical phenomena and the second designating non-intentional
experiences or the so-called consciousness or phenomenal experiences. Husserl
argues that these primary contents belong to a more original dimension of
experience and that they do not fall under either of the two classes of phenomena in
Brentano’s classification.38 As a matter of fact, sensory contents are closer to
Mach’s elements than they are to Brentano’s physical phenomena.
Before examining the discussion about phenomenalism and the issue of the
delimitation of the field of phenomenology from that of the natural sciences in
Section 7 of the fifth Investigation, let us consider two conditions that purely
descriptive criteria must satisfy. The first condition corresponds to what Husserl
calls in his Investigations the principle of the absence of metaphysical presuppo-
sition, while the second requires that such criteria be based on ‘‘what is truly given
phenomenally.’’ The first principle states phenomenology’s metaphysical neutrality,
that is to say, the bracketing of any presupposition concerning the existence and
nature of the outside world and the physical laws that underlie it. Husserl claims that
we cannot decide a priori on these metaphysical issues because the distinction we
have in mind with the second issue ‘‘is prior to all metaphysics and lies at the very
gates of the theory of knowledge: it presupposes no answers to the questions that
36
Husserl, Hua XIX/1, p. 7 (LI/1, p. 166).
37
Husserl (LI/2, p. 89).
38
Cf. Fisette, ‘‘Descriptive Psychology and Natural Sciences: Husserl’s early Criticism of Brentano.’’.

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this theory must be the first to provide.’’39 The second principle states that the non-
metaphysical criterion for that distinction should be based on the ‘‘descriptive
character of the phenomena as they are experienced,’’ i.e., on this original layer of
the experience of primary contents. By purely descriptive criteria, therefore, Husserl
means criteria that satisfy both principles.
In Section 7 of the fifth Investigation, Husserl claims that phenomenalism
satisfies neither of these criteria. Concerning the first condition, Husserl wrote:
It is the fundamental defect of phenomenalistic theories that they draw no
distinction between appearance [Erscheinung] as intentional experience and
the phenomenal object (the subject of objective predicates) and therefore
identify the experienced complex of sensation with the complex of objective
features.40
Phenomenalism commits an error similar to that attributed to Brentano in this
context, namely, the failure to distinguish conceptually between, on the one hand,
sensory content and intentional content, and on the other hand, between non-
intentional experiences and objects or their properties. This is confirmed by a
passage in Husserl’s lectures of 1904–1905 on attention and perception, in which he
explicitly criticizes Mach for confusing sensory contents with perceived objects or
their properties:
For example, this occurs in Mach, who regards the things as complexes of
sensory contents and defines sensation in terms of the same sensory contents
insofar as they are considered in their dependence to the sensory group, which
we call our body. The relationship of perceiving to the perceived is conflated
with the relation of perceiving with the sensed, i.e., with the totally different
relationship between sensory perception and presentative [präsentierendem]
sensory content of perception.41
What he calls here the ‘‘presentative’’ sensory content is actually the function of the
primary content in an act of perception, which, by definition, is an intentional act.
To put it very schematically, Husserl criticizes Mach for confusing two types of
relation to which he attaches great importance in these lectures as well as in the
Logical Investigations: on the one hand, the intentional relation between an act
(perception), its content, and its object; on the other hand, the relation between
sensory content and non-intentional experiences, which he also calls apperception,
apprehension, or interpretation. The apprehension-apprehended relation is direct
and immediate, while the former relation is characterized by the mediating role of
the intentional content between an act and its object. In confusing sensory content
and phenomenal properties of objects, Mach, as the British empiricists before him,
systematically conflates the parts belonging to either of these two dimensions of
perception understood as a whole. This is confirmed in a short fragment of his

39
Husserl, Hua XIX/1, p. 401 (LI/2, p. 106).
40
Husserl, Hua XIX/1, p. 401 (LI/2, p. 106).
41
Husserl (2004, p. 24).

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Axiomathes (2012) 22:53–74 65

lectures in 1910, in which he wrote that Mach ‘‘sensualized the hyletic, the act’s
characters, and the objects.’’42
Regarding now the second condition that must satisfy a descriptive criterion in
order to adequately delineate the field of phenomenology from that of natural
sciences, one might think that Mach’s phenomenalism satisfies this condition
because of its anti-metaphysical position. However, Husserl claims that despite
Mach’s well-known statements against metaphysics, he conveys several metaphys-
ical presuppositions, the most important of which being the a priori separation
between the fields of psychology and natural science, i.e., the fact that phenom-
enalism ‘‘puts metaphysics in bondage from the outset’’ in ruling a priori on the
metaphysical nature of the physical. There is, therefore, an essential difference
between phenomenology’s metaphysical neutrality in the Logical Investigations and
neutral monism. Metaphysical neutrality is to be understood as strictly methodo-
logical, i.e., as e´poche` or abstention of any judgment concerning the existence or
non-existence of external objects. In this narrow sense, it is similar to the
phenomenological reduction or bracketing that we already discussed in connection
with Mach’s descriptivism. In this regard, the metaphysical presuppositions in Mach
are reflected in his attempt to reduce objects in general and those of natural science
in particular to ‘‘permanent possibilities of sensation’’ or complexes of sensations.
This objection is clearly formulated in Section 62 of Formal and Transcendental
Logic, which deals entirely with Mach:
For this positivism, physical things become reduced to empirically regular
complexes of psychic data (‘‘sensations’’); their identity and therefore their
whole being-sense become sheer fictions. It is not merely a false doctrine,
completely blind to the essential phenomenological facts; it is also counter-
sensical, because of its failure to see that even fictions have their mode of
being, their manner of evidence, their manner of being unities of multiplic-
ities, and therefore carry with them the same problem that was to be theorized
away by means of them.43
One of Husserl’s arguments against Mach is that, in identifying physical objects
with complexes of functional relations between elements or clusters of ideas,
Mach’s monism is unable to account for the transcendence of objects (and the
subject’s relation to objects). It therefore lacks a theory of intentionality, which
alone can account for the distinction between the experienced and the perceived,
between immanent or sensory content and intentional contents, or between contents
and transcendent objects. In other words, the transcendence of a physical object
‘‘actually or possibly makes its appearance in the purely phenomenological sphere
of consciousness,’’ yet this something, pace Mach, is ‘‘no real part or moment of
consciousness, no real psychic Datum.’’44 Lacking such a theory of intentionality,
phenomenalism systematically confuses transcendent objects with sensory contents,
and the latter with intentional contents, especially with the entities, which represent
42
Husserl, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 111.
43
Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 166.
44
Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 166.

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the subject matter of logic and science in general, and it is exposed, as we shall see
in the next section, to the objection of (logical) psychologism.
Once the possible confusion between phenomenology and phenomenalism is
discarded, Husserl proposes his own criterion for the delineation of phenomenology
in relation to the natural sciences, and this criterion is based on the phenomenal
experience:
The distinction between lived experiences, conscious contents, and the non-
experiences presented in such experiences (and perceived in them or judged to
exist) would remain, as before, the foundation for the division of the sciences
as departments of research. It would therefore be the foundation for the sort of
division that alone is in question at the present stage of development of the
sciences. […] The division must rest on purely phenomenological ground, and
I think that, in this respect, our discussions above were well suited to resolve
the much-debated question in a satisfactory manner. They only make use of
the most fundamental phenomenological distinctions, those between the
descriptive content and the intended object of our percepts and of our ‘‘acts’’
in general.45
The boundary that separates the field of phenomenology (or descriptive psychology
in the broad sense) from that of natural science is not, as in Brentano, the
intentionality of mental phenomena, but the descriptive content, or primary content,
which is distinct from both transcendent objects and mental acts. Husserl agrees
with Mach that phenomena represent the starting point and ‘‘the nearest points of
attack for our scientific researches,’’46 but he has no sympathy at all for the idea of a
reduction of the fields of natural science and psychology to that of sensory
phenomena.

5 The Critique of Mach’s Psychologism in the Logical Investigations

Let us now consider the objection to psychologism that Husserl directed toward
Mach in Chapter IX of his Prolegomena, entitled ‘‘The Principle of Economy of
Thought and Logic,’’ in which he denounces any attempt to base logic and the
theory of knowledge on the principle of economy of thought. Mach responded to
Husserl’s criticism in the fourth edition of his The Science of Mechanics: A Critical
and Historical Account of Its Development, in which he claims not to identify
psychological and logical questions. The debate over psychologism led to a brief
correspondence in June 1901, in which Husserl is more explicit about the meaning
of his critique of Mach’s alleged psychologism, and which seems to have satisfied
Mach, as the latter confirms in his response to this letter. To clearly understand the
bearing of this objection to Mach’s philosophy and to empirio-criticism in general,
namely, in what sense it is distinct from the methodological issues discussed above,
some remarks are needed concerning Husserl’s arguments against psychologism.

45
Husserl, Hua XIX/1, p. 370 (LI/2, pp. 90–91).
46
Husserl, LI/2, p. 91.

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Axiomathes (2012) 22:53–74 67

In the Prolegomena, Husserl distinguishes two schools diametrically opposed on

the question of the relation of logic to psychology, namely, normative antipsych-
ologism, to which belong Kant and the Kantian tradition, and logical psychologism,
to which are associated philosophers as different as J. S. Mill, W. Wundt, and
T. Lipps. According to Husserl’s diagnosis, this controversy is largely due to the
fact that both parties conceive of logic in different ways: the psychologicists
consider it only from a methodological point of view, i.e., as a practical discipline
and as a technology; antipsychologicists, on the other hand, conceive of logic as a
theoretical discipline entirely independent from psychology. To this difference
between two conceptions of logic correspond two different conceptions of the laws
of logic, i.e., as they ‘‘serve as norms for our knowledge-activities, and laws which
include normativity in their thought-content, and assert its universal obligatori-
ness.’’47 According to Husserl, the controversy opposing psychologism and
antipsychologism can be partly explained by the fact that, when the former claims
to base logic on psychology, it only considers normative logic, while the latter’s
arguments only consider the theoretical aspect of logic. That is why Husserl can say
that the claims of psychologism to base logic on empirical psychology are
legitimate only insofar as we consider the technological and practical aspect of
logic. In contrast, proponents of anti-psychologism and normative logic ignore the
difference between the specific content of the propositions and principles of logic
and their practical application, i.e., between the use of a proposition for normative
purposes and its content, which in principle is separable from the idea of
normativity. Recognizing the soundness of this difference is to admit that the
genuine anti-psychologistic argument is not that which opposes the normative
nature of logical laws to natural laws of psychology but that which relies on the
ideal character of laws that, in a sense, are clearly explained in the last part of the
Prolegomena.
The Kantians were therefore right to focus on the theoretical content of logic and
to argue against psychologism that the principles of logic are independent of the
‘‘properties of human nature;’’ but they were wrong in conceiving of logic as a
whole in terms of normativity. In the Prolegomena, Husserl argues that the only
valid argument against logical psychologism is not the normativity but the ideality
of the principles of logic and science in general. Indeed, normativity is not a
decisive argument against psychologism: the content of the principles of logic is
distinct from its normative use, and Husserl argues that what confers to logic its
unity is not a norm but its theoretical content.
A second argument against normative anti-psychologism worth mentioning in the
present context is that logic, understood as a normative discipline, requires, in turn,
a psychological foundation. Not that psychology alone provides it with its ultimate
foundation, but Husserl concedes to psychologism that psychology must also
participate in the foundation of logic because the practical-normative aspect of logic
requires, itself, technical norms that are adapted to human nature. For example, in
order to explain the mechanical use of methodological tools such as the abacus or
the telescope, one must take into account the underlying ‘‘mental processes.’’ But

47
Husserl, Prolegomena, LI/1, p. 101.

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68 Axiomathes (2012) 22:53–74

this is not an isolated case, since all logical concepts such as truth, judgment,
reasoning, etc. have a ‘‘psychological origin’’ and thus refer to psychic experiences.
However, this psychological aspect of any concept of practical logic does not
exhaust their theoretical content, and such is the meaning of Husserl’s critique of
Mach’s psychologism.
To clearly understand the meaning and the limits of this concession made to the
psychologists, let us consider Chapter IX of the Prolegomena, whose main target is
Mach’s principle of economy of thought. Notice first that Husserl’s objections in the
Prolegomena do not directly concern the theories that use the principle of economy
of thought, as confirmed by his correspondence with Mach. On the contrary, Husserl
recognizes the ‘‘extraordinarily fruitful’’ character of the research conducted by
Mach on the biological and psycho-cognitive aspects of science, and the merits of a
‘‘psycho-biological and genetic approach’’ to science.48 These theories are quite
legitimate and fruitful ‘‘in their due limits.’’49 What are these limits? To answer this
question, the distinction made earlier between two conceptions of logic (as a
theoretical science and as a technology) is crucial. For, in confusing the specific
content of the propositions of logic with their practical application, logical
psychologism systematically confuses the use of a proposition for normative
purposes with its theoretical content, and its error consists precisely in the claim that
logic as a whole may be so founded. Only under this condition can an empiricist
such as Mach be qualified as psychologicist. For, anyone who recognizes the
viability of the division within logic between its theoretical and practical aspects is
quite justified in using empirical psychology in order to explain the mechanical use
of methodological rules. In other words, the use of psychology in the theory of
knowledge can only be described as psychologism to the extent that these two
aspects of logic are confused or explicitly identified and that the theory of
knowledge is thus reduced to a Kunstlehre or technology of knowledge.
Our diagnosis is confirmed by Section 55 of the Prolegomena, which focuses
specifically on this kind of empirical foundation of logic that uses the principle of
economy of thought. In its most general form, this principle can be formulated, as
Mach does, in this passage:
This tendency of obtaining a survey of a given province with the least
expenditure of thought, and of representing all its facts by some one single
mental process, may be justly termed an economical one.50
This principle can be interpreted either as a psychological principle, as does
H. Cornelius, or as a biological principle. What Husserl called the Avenarius-Mach
principle is considered in this section as a biological principle associated with that
of the evolution of species, their adaptation to natural conditions of their
environment, and their conservation. In addition to its recognized applications in
the field of biology, the field in which the principle of economy of thought is the
most fruitful, Husserl argues, is precisely the methods of mathematical logic that
48
Husserl, Briefwechsel, Bd. VI, pp. 255–256.
49
Husserl, LI/1 , p. 123.
50
Mach, ‘‘The Economical Nature of Physical Inquiry,’’ pp. 194–195.

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Axiomathes (2012) 22:53–74 69

serve practical needs, such as the system of decimal numbers and, in general, all
mechanical and algorithmic procedures that are commonly used in mathematics.
For, all these technical and mechanical procedures are methodological devices used
primarily to serve the economy of thought, that is to say, they are used to
compensate for ‘‘the defects of our mental constitution’’51 or the severe limitations
of ‘‘men’s intellectual powers.’’52 In fact, all these devices concern the very nature
of our psychical constitution, and they are the result of a natural evolution or
‘‘certain natural processes of thought-economy.’’53
What is meant here by ‘‘the natural development or evolution’’? In a footnote to
this chapter of the Prolegomena on the principle of economy of thought, Husserl
refers to Chapter XII of his Philosophy of Arithmetic for questions regarding the
genesis of the principle of economy of thought. Basically, the position that Husserl
attributes to Mach in this chapter of the Prolegomena is very close to the position
Husserl himself adopted in Philosophy of Arithmetic and in a manuscript dated 1890
and published posthumously under the title ‘‘On the Logic of Signs (Semiotics).’’54
In the latter, Husserl raises the question as to how arithmetic could have developed
by using operations on signs in the absence of a logical or conceptual understanding
of its algorithmic procedures. In ‘‘Semiotics,’’ Husserl defined logic as a technology
of knowledge and assigned it the following task:
A truly fruitful formal logic first constitutes itself as a logic of signs, which,
when it is sufficiently developed, will form one of the most important parts of
logic in general (as a technology of knowledge). The task of logic is the same
here as elsewhere: to master the natural processes of the judging mind, to
examine them and to emphasize their value for knowledge.55
Logic has the task of both developing a general reflection on signs (their
definition, their functions, and their taxonomy) and elucidating the mechanical use
of symbolic representations (mathematical and linguistic). Like the linguistic sign,
the arithmetic symbol is an invention by which we succeed in overcoming the
‘‘essential imperfections of our intellect,’’ and it thus serves the ‘‘Ökonomie of
accomplishing spiritual work, as tools and machines serve the economy of
accomplishing mechanical work.’’56 However, the arithmetic system differs from
natural language both in its function and its origin and is the product of a ‘‘natural
development.’’ Many pages of ‘‘Semiotics’’ are devoted to the question of the origin
of sign systems, which are organized around the task of logic that deals with the
explanation of natural mechanisms and mechanical procedures at work in
algorithmic processes, such as our daily use of language. In Chapter XII of
Philosophy of Arithmetic, which Husserl refers to in the Prolegomena, the question
was: ‘‘How could we ever construct a system of number-designation grounded upon
51
Husserl, LI/1, p. 126.
52
Husserl, LI/1, p. 126.
53
Husserl, LI/1, p. 126.
54
Husserl, ‘‘On the Logic of Signs (Semiotics),’’ in Hua XII, pp. 340–400.
55
Husserl, Hua XII, p. 373.
56
Husserl, Hua XII, p. 350.

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some few basic signs unless a system of concept formation grounded upon certain
basic concepts would correspond to it in rigorous parallelism?’’57 In ‘‘Semiotics’’,
Husserl partly answers this question by referring to this idea of a parallelism
between a ‘‘system of signs’’ and a ‘‘conceptual system;’’ he claims that with the
evolution of the conceptual system, once the conceptual system had reached its
maturity, ‘‘the mental process of concept formation had to retreat before the external
reproductive mechanism of the formation of names.’’58 Although the name of Mach
is not mentioned in ‘‘Semiotics,’’ several issues are associated with Mach’s principle
of economy of thought. Husserl also mentions such principles as ‘‘natural
selection,’’59 ‘‘Darwinian principles’’,60 ‘‘mechanical instinct,’’ and the ‘‘general
wisdom of nature’’61 to explain the natural development of the arithmetic system.
It is clear from Husserl’s remarks in his earlier works that his interest in the
theory of economy of thought in the Prolegomena is not incidental. However,
Husserl argues in the Prolegomena that this theory presents an interest only insofar
as it contributes to the overall program of a theory of science that is Husserl’s
philosophical project in the Logical Investigations. It follows that this is not the
principle targeted in Husserl’s criticism of Mach in this work. As we argued above,
logical psychologism is attributable to Mach insofar as it takes into account only
one aspect of logic (practical and technological) and confines the theory of
knowledge to a role of Kunstlehre or technology of knowledge. According to
Husserl, indeed, Mach’s main error consists in restricting and limiting knowledge
‘‘to the empirical aspect of science,’’ especially to that part of science which deals
with biological phenomena, and Mach therefore does not take into account the true
‘‘epistemological problem of science as ideally unified, objective truth.’’62 For, the
theory of knowledge that Husserl advocates in the Logical Investigations ‘‘wishes to
grasp perspicuously, from an objectively ideal standpoint, in what the possibility of
perspicuous knowledge of the real consists, the possibility of science and of
knowledge in general.’’63 This task is an essential philosophical complement to the
mathesis and the theory of science. In this regard, as a theory of knowledge,64
phenomenology has nothing to expect philosophically from a genetic explanation,

57
Husserl, Philosophy of Arithmetic, pp. 229–230.
58
Husserl, Hua XII, p. 364.
59
Husserl, Hua XII, p. 371.
60
Husserl, Hua XII, p. 359.
61
Husserl, Hua XII, p. 370. Husserl refers to Hume on this ‘‘very interesting metaphysical fact,’’ namely,
that it is ‘‘the general wisdom of nature to ensure an activity of the soul, so essential for the preservation
of mankind, by a mechanical instinct (…) which appears from the beginning of life and thought, and
which is independent of the motivations of reason (…) possible only when the development has reached
its maturity. Moderns may prefer to explain this teleological feature of our nature by Darwinian
principles.’’ Husserl, Hua XII, pp. 358–359.
62
Husserl, LI/1, p. 133.
63
Husserl, LI/1, p. 131.
64
In the introduction to the second Investigation, Husserl clearly indiçates that his theory of knowledge
differs from that of classical empiricism in that it ‘‘recognizes’’ the ’ideal’ as a condition for the
possibility of objective knowledge in general, and does not ‘interpret it away’ in psychologistic fashion.’’
LI/1, p. 238.

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Axiomathes (2012) 22:53–74 71

as Husserl emphasized in his discussion of Külpe and Elsenhans on the meaning of

his criticism of logical psychologism.65
In his brief response to Husserl’s critique, Mach admits that his approach to
science is indeed ‘‘a psycho-cognitive [Erkenntnis-psychologische] sketch,’’66 but
he denies having confused ‘‘natural or blind thought and logical thinking’’ and much
less logical and psychological issues. He sees his dispute with Husserl as a
difference of method: Mach’s is inductive, and it proceeds from phenomena to
general laws (bottom-up), while Husserl, with his general theory of science,
proceeds deductively, starting from principles and laws, which he conceived of as
ideals, to particular cases (top-down). However, in his response, Mach does not take
into account the phenomenological investigations of the second volume of the
Logical Investigations, and he seems to ignore that Husserl also advocates a
descriptive approach in psychology that we discussed above. Mach argues that even
a theory of all possible theories cannot do without research in the field of biology:
‘‘Even if the logical analysis of all the sciences were complete, the biologico-
psychological investigation of their development would continue to remain a
necessity [Bedürfnis] to me.’’67
In a letter dated June 18, 1901, Husserl acknowledges receipt of the new edition
of Mach’s book and reminds him that his critique of psychologism does not deny the
legitimacy of a ‘‘genetic-psychological and biological’’ approach of science, but he
opposes, as we have seen, to ‘‘the subordination of the epistemological explanation
of the purely logical in science under the points of view of psychological genesis
and biological adaptation.’’68 He points out that the chapter of the Prolegomena on
the economy of thought is not directed against Mach’s principle of economy of
thought as such but against its psychological use by H. Cornelius, namely, in his
book Psychologie als Erfahrungswissenschaft, in which he claims that his
psychology of experience is ‘‘the only possible foundation of all philosophy, and
particularly of the theory of knowledge.’’69 This statement is clearly confirmed in
several passages of the Logical Investigations, namely, in the Prolegomena, in
which Husserl says that his criticism is directed more specifically against those who,
like Cornelius, use this principle as a psychological principle ‘‘at the basis of
philosophy in general.’’ Cornelius is also considered the psychologicist par
excellence in an appendix to the second Investigation in which Husserl accuses him
of confusing ‘‘matters pertaining to the intentional content of knowledge (to
knowledge’s ideal sense, to what knowledge means and what is therefore
necessarily posited along with it) with matters pertaining to the intentional object
of knowledge and both with matters pertaining to the mere psychological
constitution of the knowledge-experience.’’70 What Husserl specifically criticizes
in Mach is the one-sidedness of his empirical descriptions, i.e., that he does not take
65
Husserl, LI/1, p. 319.
66
Mach, Mechanics, p. 582.
67
Mach, Mechanics, p. 582.
68
Husserl, Briefwechsel, Bd. VI, p. 255.
69
Cornelius (1897, p. 7).
70
Husserl, LI/1, p. 303.

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into account the ideal and purely logical content of science, as if the genetic point of
view were enough for a theory of knowledge.71 Yet, Husserl’s main argument
against logical psychologism in the Prolegomena rests precisely on the ideality of
laws and propositions of logic and science in general. Nevertheless, there is no
contradiction, argues Husserl, between these two approaches, which are mutually
compatible.72 Husserl’s clarification in this letter seems to have dissipated part of
Mach’s concerns, the latter having responded in a brief letter dated June 23, 1901,
that he had nothing to add to Husserl’s explanation and hoped that this dispute was
over.73

5.1 Final Remarks

We may conclude that the set of Husserl’s judgments on Mach, from his early
writings to Formal and Transcendental Logic, constitutes a coherent whole only if
we distinguish, on the one hand, Mach’s descriptivism from his phenomenalism,
and on the other hand, the philosophical program that Husserl pursues with his
phenomenology, which is based on his theory of science in the Prolegomena, from
phenomenology understood as descriptive psychology in the second volume of the
Logical Investigations. This double life of the phenomenology of the Logical
Investigations is reflected in Husserl’s later works, especially in the Amsterdam
lectures, through the difference, within phenomenology, between intentional
psychology, which roughly corresponds to the descriptive psychology of the Halle
period, and transcendental philosophy, which fulfills the traditional role of first
philosophy. As we have pointed out several times in this study, when Husserl relates
his phenomenology to Mach’s descriptivism or to Hering’s phenomenology, he only
has in mind the intentional psychology that, in most of Husserl’s writings in the
mid-1920s, fills an important methodological function in that it serves as
propedeutic to transcendental philosophy. As such, this part of phenomenology is
an obligatory passage of philosophy and natural science, including physiological
psychology. In this sense only is Husserl’s phenomenology on the same track as the
descriptivism of Mach and Hering, as are that of Brentano and some of his students.
However, the philosophical program sketched in the Prolegomena and which
motivates Husserl’s critique of psychologism is entirely foreign to positivism and
philosophical naturalism in general. This is confirmed by Husserl in Section 62 of
Formal and Transcendental Logic, in which he reiterates his opposition to Mach’s
psychologism and criticizes him for having psychologized the Platonician sphere of

71
Husserl, Briefwechsel, Bd. 6, p. 256.
72
‘‘Mit Rücksicht darauf, daß die rein-logische und practisch-logische, daß die erkenntniskritische und
methodologische Betrachtungsweise sich gar nicht stören, darf ich nun mal sagen, daß zwischen unseren
beiderseitigen Untersuchungen im Wesen gar kein Widerstreit besteht’’. Husserl, Briefwechsel, Bd. 6,
p. 257.
73
Mach, in Husserl, Briefwechsel, Bd. 6 p. 258. However, in a letter to Jerusalem from June 8, 1913,
Mach wrote: ‘‘I became acquainted with Husserl through his Logische Untersuchungen. I cannot discover
in it anything other than psychological investigations. Nor can I understand how it could be regarded as
anything else’’ (Blackmore et al. 2001, p. 222); cf. also chapter X (pp. 211–235) on the dispute between
Jerusalem and Husserl.

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Axiomathes (2012) 22:53–74 73

ideality (in the Lotzian sense).74 In Mach’s positivism, Husserl praises the effort to
reclaim the sense of positivity that the speculative systems departed from
considerably. But Mach himself betrays this very sense of positivity by
subordinating his descriptivism to phenomenalism. As Husserl clearly explains in
the famous passage from his first book of Ideas, once we get rid of such prejudices
stemming from phenomenalism and classical empiricism, phenomenology can
indeed claim the status of positivism:
If ‘‘positivism’’ is tantamount to an absolutely unprejudiced grounding of all
sciences on the ‘‘positive,’’ that is to say, on what can be seized upon
originaliter, then we are the genuine positivists.75

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