Transforming Necessity

Abstract

We shall attempt to strike through the crust of the externalized 'historical facts' of philosophical history, interrogating, exhibiting, and testing their inner meaning and hidden teleology. Edmund Husserl, 1936(1) Although Jean Cavailles's critique of transcendental logic, which is found in On Logic and the Theory of Science,2 influenced the development of philosophy in post-World War II France, it seems to have had little impact on one of its principal targets, namely Husserlian phenomenology. From the Husserlian perspective, one might surmise the reasons for the intransigence to Cavailles's criticisms. In the first place, Cavailles's writing is dense even when compared to the bar set by the Husserliana, and the limited number of works comprising his corpus makes it difficult to discern what a Cavilles-inspired alternative would look like. In the second place, two of his main criticisms, namely, that Husserl's reliance upon a notion of mathematical completeness is invalidated by Godel and that one must choose between a transcendental logic and an absolute transcendental subjectivity, have been addressed at some length by Suzanne Bachelard and Jacques Derrida. Finally, with the ongoing release of Husserl's manuscripts, the ways in which contemporary phenomenologists understand their craft, with its emphasis on genetic and, even, generative analyses, differ sufficiently from the portrait presented by Cavailles as to render his critique otiose. In any case, the intransigence is unfortunate because Cavailles's provocation provides an opportunity to reconsider transcendental logic and to ask whether it satisfies the requirements for a science, either in Cavailles or Husserl's sense. Pursuing that question is necessary, not only for exegetical purposes, but also to determine the possible impact of a phenomenological self-criticism within transcendental logic. In short, the question posed by Cavailles allows us to determine whether phenomenology today has a future as a living philosophy, or whether it represents yet another naively accepted historical fact. To consider whether transcendental logic can be conceived as a science in the wake of Cavailles's critique, two main tasks must be pursued. First, it is necessary to demonstrate that Bachelard and Derrida's responses (or any that would fit within their general, shared approach) are not sufficient to forestall the possibility that transcendental logic may fail as a science. second, once we have established that Cavailles's criticism still bears upon transcendental logic, the path is opened to considering what it would mean for any transcendental discipline to be scientific. Because the first task is substantially more difficult given the present state of scholarship, section one, "Cavailles's Critique of Transcendental Logic," is necessarily longer than the second section, "Transcendental Logic as Phenomenological Science," which remains largely suggestive in content. Cavailles's Critique of Transcendental Logic Cavailles's discussion of Husserl's work focuses almost exclusively on Formal and Transcendental Logic and investigates how successful the proposed transcendental logic could be at explaining the development of scientific (or mathematical) knowledge.3 Although Cavailles's work ends abruptly, without presenting a fully expounded theory of science, it is clear that he believes that any such philosophical enterprise must satisfy three requirements. It must explain science's necessity by maintaining the difference between sensuous reality and mathematical reality; it must ground science by accounting for its genesis; and it must explain science's progress.4 According to Cavailles, Husserl's transcendental logic fails to satisfy these criteria on two levels, firstly in its insistence on an outmoded conception of mathematics, whereby novelty in science is precluded, and secondly, through its adherence to what Cavailles calls the "principle of reducibility," which assures that the distinction between sensuous and intelligible reality cannot be maintained. …