I Will Tell You about Axel Hägerström: His Ontology and Theory of Judgment

Abstract

In this paper I set out to read Hagerstrom through his own eyes, adhering to the terminology he uses in his own original work and attempting to make sense of the variance and uniformity alike that one finds in his linguistic usage. The translations we have of Hagerstrom's works are quite liberal, using the same word in English where the original uses different ones, and, vice versa, using different words in English where the original uses a single one in different contexts. These misleading translations of Hagerstrom have contributed in some measure to Hagerstrom's reputation for obscurity. Further, and most importantly, I will take seriously what Hagerstrom says about his own thought, namely, that it is dependent on that of Kant and independent of the currents of thought contemporary with Hagerstrom. In Section 1, I will briefly take up the problem of consciousness that Hagerstrom proceeds from, and will recall something that Bertrand Russell once said, in 1928, in regard to the revolt staged in the early 20th century in Europe against German idealism. In Sections 2 and 4.1, I will instead take up Kant for the purpose of clarifying Hagerstrom's theory of judgment as treated in Section 3. In Section 4.2, I will illustrate the difference between the notions of nothing, R-reality, and W-reality in Hagerstrom. In Sections 5 and 6, I will examine the analysis that Hagerstrom offers of the principle of contradiction, and will summarize the three types of judgment he singled out, including the type he called impossible judgment (or, in my own words, pseudojudgment). In Section 7, I will consider Hagerstrom views as grounding, in a transcendental way, the presupposition of the primacy of the external spatio-temporal world, a world independent of our representations: I will consider in particular the W-real complexes that are merely represented, as well as the spatio-temporal world as the only W-real complex that is not merely represented. Finally, in Section 8, I will briefly consider some of those who have commented and translated Hagerstrom, this to conclude that R-reality and W-reality are coextensive but not synonymous.