Action of structures, structure of actions

Abstract

Around 1920, Edmund Husserl sketched a fascinating project: to run over again the phenomenoiogical genesis of logical form, starting from ordinary experience of objects and our interaction with them. It was not an empiricist program and even less a logical-empiricist one. According to Husserl, logic prescribes the conditions for the possibility of any theory, therefore the content ground in which logical operations plunge their roots of sense has also the r61e of providing generators for any graspable concept (starting from the very concept of 'object') and for any theoretical construction pretending some objectivity (ideally, if not in fact). This project could only mean that, in the most elementary forms and processes of perception and action within the natural environment, there is an imprinting of so much structure to be sufficient, suitably decomposed and recombined, for conferring meaning (Sinngebung) to any possibile judgment, however complex and abstract. Epistemically, a major difference from Kant was that the synthesis of empirical data is conceived by Husserl as 'passive'. This theme has received detailed study by Gestalt psychologists, who even deepened such difference while making passive synthesis experimentally testable. If the above generating structure inheres the modalities of visual perception, kinesthesis, etc., and, as the later Husserl emphasized in Erfahrung und Urteil, it has an ante-predicative status, then it is something that imposes itself (I can't see a ball as a stick, and so on) and at the same time it is something presupposed by whatever Iogico-linguistic organization. Although mainly descriptive, the projected investigation of the genesis of all operations coded in the very syntax of language can well be considered transcendental, since the intended goal of such careful reconstructive analysis was * This paper was thought of as a form of silent dialogue with my friend Michael Wright. As such, it has the merits, if any, and the defects of a flowing course of thoughts that enters in medias res with less feignings than in standard philosophical literature.