An Examination of Husserl’s Theory of Content

Abstract

This chapter is an attempt to analyze the main ideas presented and developed by Blaustein in his early work, Husserlowska nauka o akcie, treści i przedmiocie przedstawienia [Husserl’s Theory of Act, Content and Object of Presentation], which was originally published in 1928. The book is a revised version of Blaustein’s doctoral thesis and is important for several reasons. First, it seems that the arguments and at least some of the theoretical solutions put forward in it provided the basis for Blaustein’s later reflections. This can be illustrated with two clear examples. One has to do with Blaustein’s use of the tripartite structure of content (which can be understood as quality, matter and presenting content) that he developed in discussion with Husserl and that laid the ground for his original classification of presentations. Another example is his 1930s study on the structure of perception in cinemagoers, in which he reflected on whether a cinemagoer’s experiences are the objects presented on the screen or rather sensations. In direct reference to the results of his previous work, Blaustein eventually opted for the latter. Thus, the book is an important step on the way to understanding how the concepts he used evolved. It is also worth mentioning that, in the global literature, it was perhaps the first extensive monograph devoted to Husserl’s theory of content, a conception which is well known to be very complex. In his interpretation, Blaustein advanced an interesting thesis whereby the conceptions from Logische Untersuchungen and the idea of the matter of an act presented therein are best understood within the framework of a tradition that can be traced back to Bolzano’s and Brentano’s philosophies. This tradition related the issue of content to the understanding of psychic phenomena or, more precisely, to the problem of their structure and the objects to which they refer: what is the relationship between the intentional object and the content of lived experience? Could it be that the object of psychic phenomena is just content? Additionally, how should the content of lived experience be understood here? According to Blaustein, when grappling with these questions, Husserl formulated an original conception of content. However, saying that the main intention of Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…] is to ground phenomenology in the tradition of Brentano would not do full justice to the complexity of the arguments developed in the book. Therefore, what was the novelty of its approach?

This chapter is an attempt to analyze the main ideas presented and developed by Blaustein in his early work, Husserlowska nauka o akcie, treści i przedmiocie przedstawienia [Husserl’s Theory of Act, Content and Object of Presentation], which was originally published in 1928. The book is a revised version of Blaustein’s doctoral thesis and is important for several reasons. First, it seems that the arguments and at least some of the theoretical solutions put forward in it provided the basis for Blaustein’s later reflections. This can be illustrated with two clear examples. One has to do with Blaustein’s use of the tripartite structure of content (which can be understood as quality, matter and presenting content) that he developed in discussion with Husserl and that laid the ground for his original classification of presentations.¹ Another example is his 1930s study on the structure of perception in cinemagoers, in which he reflected on whether a cinemagoer’s experiences are the objects presented on the screen or rather sensations.² In direct reference to the results of his previous work, Blaustein eventually opted for the latter. Thus, the book is an important step on the way to understanding how the concepts he used evolved. It is also worth mentioning that, in the global literature, it was perhaps the first extensive monograph devoted to Husserl’s theory of content, a conception which is well known to be very complex.³ In his interpretation, Blaustein advanced an interesting thesis whereby the conceptions from Logische Untersuchungen and the idea of the matter of an act presented therein are best understood within the framework of a tradition that can be traced back to Bolzano’s and Brentano’s philosophies. This tradition related the issue of content to the understanding of psychic phenomena or, more precisely, to the problem of their structure and the objects to which they refer: what is the relationship between the intentional object and the content of lived experience?⁴ Could it be that the object of psychic phenomena is just content? Additionally, how should the content of lived experience be understood here? According to Blaustein, when grappling with these questions, Husserl formulated an original conception of content. However, saying that the main intention of Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…] is to ground phenomenology in the tradition of Brentano would not do full justice to the complexity of the arguments developed in the book. Therefore, what was the novelty of its approach?

By Blaustein’s admission, his analysis was limited to Husserl’s two works: Ideen I and the second edition (1913) of Untersuchungen.⁵ In the opinion of Marek Pokropski, Blaustein’s interpretation was “[…] original and interesting,”⁶ although, as he added, “[…] the weakest parts of it are superficial and insufficient analyses of Ideen.”⁷ To a certain extent, the limitation noted by Pokropski stemmed from the framework that Blaustein adopted. As I have observed, Blaustein placed Husserl in the tradition of Brentano, but this tradition is less present, if at all, in Ideen I. What is crucial is that Blaustein’s point of reference was not so much Brentano but rather Kazimierz Twardowski’s interpretation of Brentano’s theory, as formulated in Twardowski’s habilitation thesis on the object and content of presentations.⁸ In this early work, Twardowski juxtaposed some elements of the theory developed by Brentano, his teacher from Vienna, against the theory of Bolzano, a philosopher who was somewhat forgotten and little discussed at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Blaustein,⁹ when Husserl learned about Twardowski’s proposal, he formulated his own conception of the act as a combination of quality and matter in the form of a critical reinterpretation of Brentano in the spirit of Twardowski and taking into account Bolzano’s distinction between subjective and objective presentations.¹⁰ In other words, Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…] discussed the hypothesis that to understand Husserl’s position, it must be interpreted in the context of the philosophies of Bolzano and Brentano and of the latter’s students, including Twardowski. This approach anticipated contemporary interpretative efforts, preceding them by several decades,¹¹ hence the need for discussion concerning the value of this early interpretation. One of the objectives of the present chapter is to address this question.

Given these interdependencies, in this chapter, I want to pursue several aims that correspond to three consecutive parts of Blaustein’s work: historical, reconstructive, and critical. The first part aims to outline the historical context of Husserl’s theory of content. The second part is primarily a reconstruction of Husserl’s position, while the last part contains a summary and critique of it. Referring to this division, I first want to ask, like Blaustein, about the sources of Husserl’s theory of content in the traditions of Brentano and Bolzano. Next, I offer an analysis of Blaustein’s reconstruction of Husserl’s theory of content, reading his book in light of relevant fragments from Untersuchungen and Ideen I. My aim is to approach the work of both philosophers critically to identify potential limitations of Blaustein’s critique.

6.1 The Brentanian Context of Husserl’s Theory of Content

6.1.1 Blaustein Reads (Twardowski’s) Bolzano

Blaustein started his interpretation of Husserl by adopting the thesis that phenomenology was founded on Bolzano’s theory, as he noted in Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…].¹² Widely discussed and largely accepted in the current literature on Untersuchungen,¹³ this thesis was put forward by Blaustein in the late 1920s, thus anticipating later analyses. Therefore, what are the aspects of Wissenschaftslehre that he highlighted and that would later determine the development of phenomenology? To understand Blaustein’s account of Bolzano, it is worth examining the paper he presented on March 5, 1938, during the 336th meeting of the Polish Philosophical Society. This meeting took place under extraordinary circumstances. February 11—barely a month before the meeting—saw the death of Twardowski, who founded the Society in 1904 and acted as its president, and after his retirement, he became an honorary fellow in 1929. The proceedings were intended to commemorate him. Blaustein presented a paper entitled “Rola Kazimierza Twardowskiego w filozofii niemieckiej na przełomie XIX i XX wieku” [“The Role of Kazimierz Twardowski in German Philosophy at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century”], claiming that Twardowski was the first student of Brentano who combined his teacher’s philosophy with Bolzano’s theory. Blaustein wrote expressly about Bolzano being “discovered” by Twardowski.¹⁴ This made it possible for Twardowski to differentiate between the content and the object of presentation, and this division subsequently influenced Husserl when he worked on his theory of content. Importantly, Blaustein understood Bolzano as mediated by Twardowski’s interpretation.

Regardless of Blaustein’s main thesis, i.e., regardless of whether, historically speaking, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen [On the Content and Object of Presentations] was indeed the first synthesis of Brentano’s and Bolzano’s theories, there is no doubt that, for Twardowski, the clues on how to discriminate between content and objects are to be found precisely in the conception from Wissenschaftslehre. As he underlined in § 4 of Zur Lehre…, “Bolzano used to emphasize this difference [between the content and the object of presentations] and clung steadfastly to it.”¹⁵ However, the terminology used by Bolzano was different as, in the words of Twardowski, “[i]nstead of the expression ‘content of a presentation,’ Bolzano uses the term ‘objective presentation,’ ‘presentation as such,’ and he distinguishes from it the object on the one hand and on the other the ‘experienced’ or ‘subjective’ presentation by which he means the mental act of presentation.”¹⁶ Hence, for Twardowski, the “content” of presentation equates to “objective presentation” (in the sense of Bolzano), which is distinguished both from the object of presentation and the act itself, i.e., “subjective presentation” (in the sense of Bolzano).

Blaustein followed in the footsteps of Twardowski, focusing in his book on Bolzano’s theory of presentations, expounded primarily in § 48 and § 49 of Wissenschaftslehre, which—as he claimed—answered the problems raised by objectless presentations:¹⁷ how is it even possible to present nothing or $\sqrt{-1}$ to oneself (Bolzano’s examples repeated by Blaustein¹⁸)? In other words, how can there be presentations with no object? To solve this paradox, Bolzano suggested distinguishing between two meanings of the term “idea”: subjective presentation and objective presentation. In the first sense, an “idea”—also referred to as a thought or “what is thought” (gedacht)—assumes the existence of a subject and is thus described as “something real” (etwas Wirkliches),¹⁹ i.e., an object with real existence at the time it came into being or was thought. This is in contrast to objective presentation or presentation as such (Vorstellung an sich). Such a presentation does not truly exist and constitutes the “direct and immediate material of the subjective idea” (unmittelbaren Stoff der subjektiven Vorstellung). Next, Bolzano made a clear distinction between an objective presentation or material and the object of presentation. He defined it in the following way: “[b]y the object of an idea I understand that (sometimes existent, sometimes non-existent) something we are accustomed to saying the idea represents or is an idea of.”²⁰ Blaustein concluded that Bolzano assumed a tripartite structure of presentation where in addition to subjective and objective presentation, there was also the object of presentation (both objective and subjective).

The popularity of Bolzano’s thought in Poland should come as no surprise. Twardowski was educated at Theresianum in Vienna, where Robert Zimmermann’s Philosophische Propädeutik was used as a textbook.²¹ First published in 1853, this book summarized Bolzano’s conception in its section on logic, but the terminology used there was different. For instance, Zimmermann assumed that logical concepts (logische Begriffe) (objective presentations in Bolzano) are ideal in nature and are the object of psychic presentations (psychische Vorstellung) (subjective presentations in Bolzano), whereas content (Inhalt) is what is meant by a concept such as This-here (Dieses). Zimmermann eventually claimed that what a concept is directed toward is its object (Gegenstand).²² Thus, strictly speaking, Zimmermann distinguished between the content and object of concepts but did not introduce a more general division into the act, content and object of presentation. In this context, Blaustein accused Zimmermann of being vague and overly general. He wrote: “Zimmermann’s definition of content is so broad that almost all authors of later conceptions of presentation content, however different, may claim him as their predecessor.”²³ This is why, as Blaustein underlined, the value of Zimmermann’s work rested not so much on his definitions of basic terms as on sensitizing Twardowski to Bolzano’s conception.²⁴ Whatever the case may be, the fact that Bolzano remained one of the fundamental points of reference for Blaustein when the latter interpreted Husserl’s theory of content validates the thesis that the scope of the impact of Wissenschaftslehre on Polish philosophers extended beyond the domain of logic. This was mentioned by Wolfgang Künne, who wrote about Bolzano’s influence not only on Twardowski but also on Jan Łukasiewicz, Maria Franklówna, and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (and thus, indirectly, on Quine).²⁵ Similarly, Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre also contributed to Polish descriptive psychology, not to mention the reception of phenomenology.

6.1.2 Struggles with Brentano’s, Höfler’s, and Twardowski’s Concepts of Content

Although Bolzano’s theory provided grounds for assuming a tripartite structure of presentations, it lacked a clear definition of the relationship between content and objects. In light of Blaustein’s work, this definition was partly attributable to Brentano and his Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt [Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint]. Admittedly, Wissenschaftslehre did mention that presentations present something,²⁶ but it was only Brentano who called this relationship intentional. Blaustein claimed that in Brentano’s philosophy, the relationship is not so much between content and object as between an act and its object.²⁷ This is because Brentano, as emphasized by Twardowski, identified objects with content.²⁸ In any case, the object is defined as “immanent,” and it is assumed that it does not need to exist in reality. In the reconstruction presented by Blaustein, who did not seem to go beyond Twardowski’s exposition in this respect, Brentano defined psychic phenomena through the quality of intentionality and differentiated them from natural phenomena. Blaustein claimed that accounting for the object of an act as something “immanent” has consequences that are primarily methodological. The aim is to separate the immanent object from the transcendent object and thus make the point that the nature of immanent objects is not metaphysical. This issue was taken up by Alois Höfler in his Logik—written together with Alexius Meinong—and then, later, by Twardowski.

In his analyses, Höfler referred to the content of both presentations and judgments, claiming that content exists within the object. In Höfler, the expressions “object” (Gegestand) and “item” (Objekt) were fraught with ambiguity, as they can mean both something that exists in reality, a “thing in itself” (Ding an sich), and something that exists “within” us. The latter may be considered an “image” (Bild) of what is real or as a quasi-image or sign.²⁹ Blaustein considered these definitions of content and object to be “unclear,” saying that we do not truly know what an intentional object is.³⁰ More importantly, Höfler spelled out the consequences of Brentano’s conception, as he equated an intentional (immanent) object with content and a transcendent object with what is not psychic. However, such consequences are absurd because—as Blaustein argued—Höfler reduced things such as colors, smells, or landscapes to the psyche of the subject. Another problem has to do with the “image” theory of content, which, it should be mentioned, was subsequently criticized by Husserl. Hence, in both Brentano and Höfler, it is impossible to make a sharp distinction between objects and content.

The above remarks show that Bolzano lacked a clear definition of the relationship between content and object, while Brentano and Höfler—wanting to ensure the metaphysical neutrality of philosophy—blurred the boundary between the two elements because they effectively reduced objects to content. Blaustein suggested that Twardowski’s theory of content should be interpreted precisely in this context. Hence, referring to Bolzano, Twardowski assumed that each presentation has its own object. This, however, requires a more precise definition of the relationship between content and object, which, following Brentano and Höfler, should be done without metaphysical and reductionist implications. To that end, Twardowski moved away from the account of objects as things in themselves, talking about phenomena (Phänomene or Erscheinungen) as the proper objects of intentional reference.³¹ In turn, justifying the distinction between object and content, in Zur Lehre… Blaustein identified three fundamental arguments in favor of such a distinction:

1) Whenever we make a negative-true proposition, the content of presentation exists, while the object does not. 2) An object has properties that content cannot have. (The object of the presentation of a golden mountain is extensive, golden, as well as higher or lower than other mountains). Obviously, these properties and relations do not apply to the content of the presentation of a golden mountain. 3) One object may be presented by many types of content.³²

In his theory, Twardowski described the relationship between object and content, and he did make a clear distinction between them; in Blaustein’s view, however, Twardowski did not define the relationship between content and act. This has to do with the ambiguity with which the problems of content were analyzed in Zur Lehre…. In his work, Blaustein discussed three main interpretations:³³ (1) in line with Höfler’s position, which was a point of departure for the analyses in Zur Lehre…, according to which content may be understood as an image; (2) content means the appearance of the given object; and (3) the Bolzanian interpretation in Twardowski (that content is presentation in itself³⁴) was borrowed from Paul Ferdinand Linke, a student of Theodor Lipps and Wilhelm Wundt. Each of these interpretations was problematic. (1) “Content” is indeed defined in § 1 of Zur Lehre… with reference to Höfler,³⁵ but, as Blaustein observed, Twardowski later modified that account and eventually abandoned it. (2) Interpreting content as appearance was equally problematic, as Twardowski did not attribute to content qualities that are characteristic of appearance, e.g., extension or colorfulness.³⁶ Moreover, such an interpretation did not allow for non-intuitive presentations, e.g., concepts, which contradicted the findings from Zur Lehre…. (3) It seems that Linke’s interpretation was the most accurate, as Twardowski himself wrote about the links with Bolzano’s theory. According to Blaustein, however, this interpretation did not hold up. While Linke justified his position with the thesis from Zur Lehre…, whereby content is not real,³⁷ Blaustein pointed out the ambiguous nature of “reality” in Twardowski. According to Blaustein, Linke suggested that content does not exist (like a lack of something, absence or possibility), whereas in Zur Lehre… content does exist but not in the same way as an act does. Things became complicated when Twardowski accounted for content as an inseparable part of an act, i.e., as something “[…] that cannot exist without an act, combining with the latter to create one psychic reality.”³⁸ Hence, Linke’s interpretation was wrong.

It was difficult to establish the relationship between content and act because, as Blaustein concluded, “[…] the author [i.e., Twardowski] understood the act—the whole lived experience—[as] the whole presentation (similarly to Brentano), so that content, which was also something psychic, and which was not an intentional act or a physical phenomenon, was in a way suspended in the air.”³⁹ Thus, if Twardowski accepted Brentano’s distinction between intentional psychic acts and non-intentional physical phenomena, he could not categorize content as something intentional because, as a psychic object, content is not an act. Consequently, Blaustein’s book put forward the thesis that, whether discussing late Meinong or—what is more interesting for us here—Husserl, their theories were developed in response to the difficulties inherent in the tradition of Brentano, which pushed Twardowski to rediscover Bolzano’s theory at the end of the nineteenth century. We focus briefly on Meinong’s proposal. In “Über Gegenstande höherer Ordnung und deren Verhältnis zur inneren Wahrnehmung” [“On Objects of Higher Order and Their Relationship to Internal Perception”], which was originally published in 1899 and made extensive use of Twardowski’s reflections,⁴⁰ Meinong refined some theses from Zur Lehre…. He understood presentation to be the moment which defines acts precisely as presentations despite the multitude of possible objects. However, distinct presentations may remain the same when relating to the same object. The moment which differentiates one presentation from another is the content. As Meinong wrote: “[p]resentations of different objects may be congruent concerning the act, but they differ in something else which can be called ‘content of presentations.’ The content exists, is real and present, it is also psychic, naturally, even if the object of which an idea is had by means of the content, does not exist, is not real, not present and not psychic.”⁴¹ Thus, content exists in reality as a moment (an inseparable part) of an act, even though the object does not need to exist.

6.1.3 The Brentanian Legacy Reconsidered: Husserl’s Theory of Content

In his book, Blaustein adopted an interesting point of view, suggesting that Husserl’s theory of content responded to the difficulties inherent in the tradition of Brentano. The difficulties became even more pronounced if—following Bolzano and Twardowski—one adopted a tripartite structure of presentations: what is the relationship between an act (subjective presentation), content (objective presentation), and the object of an act? Blaustein identified both differences and similarities between these thinkers and Husserl, focusing on Brentano in particular.

As already noted in Sect. 3.1.2 above, in his 1874 Psychologie, Brentano accounted for presentations as psychic phenomena that (1) are non-extensive, (2) are intentional, (3) are the object of inner perception, and (4) create unity.⁴² As Blaustein argued,⁴³ Husserl accepted that acts should be defined as intentional, but he understood them differently. In Brentano, what is psychic had a broader scope than Husserlian acts. This is because psychic life encompasses not only acts but also other elements, such as sensations. Following Husserl, Blaustein showed that Brentano used the ambiguous term “phenomenon” (Phänomen) to distinguish between psychic and natural phenomena on the basis of two different criteria. Psychic and physical phenomena are divided into either acts or non-acts or according to whether they belong to consciousness.⁴⁴ Therefore, because of potential equivocations, the term “phenomenon” should be replaced by the term “act.” It is worth adding that Blaustein noticed the difference between Husserl and Brentano in the way they treated inner perception, the former replacing this term with “apperception of experiences.”⁴⁵ The combined effect of all these differences was that Husserl rejected Brentano’s (and Höfler’s) concept of the object as something “immanent.”⁴⁶ In Husserl, what is immanent seems to belong to the domain of acts and consciousness; hence, objects transcend acts.

This last thesis linked Husserl to Bolzano (objects are distinct from presentations). To reiterate, according to Blaustein, phenomenology was founded on Bolzano’s theory.⁴⁷ First and foremost, the discussion with Brentano brought Husserl’s theory closer to Twardowski’s solutions. Thus, Husserl understood the term “object” to mean “[…] everything that a psychic act can turn toward, whether it is real or unreal, possible or impossible, existing or non-existent, and that is designated by a name.”⁴⁸ This broad concept of the object as “something” can also be found in Twardowski.⁴⁹ Although Husserl made use of a different conceptual apparatus and did not expressly adopt the terminology known from Zur Lehre… (e.g., the differentiation between act, content, and presentation), Blaustein believed that he borrowed the general idea that act and content create a “single psychic reality” from that work, i.e., that content is an inseparable part of the act.⁵⁰ Therefore, what are the parallels and references that link Husserl’s account of content to the tradition of Brentano (and Bolzano)?

Husserl did not adopt a narrow understanding of acts either from Bolzano (as subjective presentations) or from Twardowski (as psychic acts). Nor did he write about presentations, instead replacing them with a broader concept of lived experiences (Erlebnisse). Of course, Blaustein did notice that Husserl grappled with the ambiguous nature of the term “presentation” (e.g., as an act and as an object) in his works, and he referred to the commentary from Ideen I that mentioned the need to make the concept of presentation more precise.⁵¹ However, he claimed that this concept was never developed in full. Even so, Husserl had the basic intuition that acts comprise a real element of experience. Thus, in Blaustein’s interpretation, Husserl broadened Bolzano’s and Twardowski’s understanding of acts in the sense that, in phenomenology, acts are made of two inseparable parts: quality and matter. Quality corresponds to Bolzano’s subjective presentation and Twardowski’s act; it relates to the moment of an act which defines it as a presentation, judgment, etc. In turn, matter corresponds to Bolzano’s objective presentation and Twardowski’s content;⁵² it concerns the moment of an act which differentiates it from other acts of a given type. It is matter that determines the specific objective direction. It follows that Husserl’s solution consists in accounting for an act as a combination of two inseparable elements, subjective and objective presentation (in Bolzano), and as a combination of act and content (in Twardowski). As has been said, according to Blaustein, Twardowski highlighted the problem of combining content with the act or with the object: “[…] content, which was also something psychic, and which was not an intentional act or a physical phenomenon, was in a way suspended in the air.”⁵³ Husserl’s theory of content addressed this problem: therein, content is part of the act—it is its matter and, as such, is different from the act’s quality.

Blaustein also noted the continuity between Husserl’s and Twardowski’s theory of meaning. As he wrote, “[a] name expresses […] an act, [it] means content (meaning) and denotes an object. We find a similar theory in Husserl, yet the crucial difference is that content (meaning) is, according to Husserl, something ideal and not psychic.”⁵⁴ Speaking about meaning as something ideal, Husserl seemed closer to Bolzano than to Twardowski. However, for Blaustein, this solution raised serious difficulties: how can something ideal be the moment of an act? However, for now, this problem is not important. More importantly, Blaustein’s studies show Husserl’s affinity with the tradition of Brentano (and Bolzano). In this regard, the idea of accounting for acts as a combination of two inseparable parts seems to represent an attempt to overcome the problems of that tradition, thus making an important contribution to the discussion about the structure of acts of consciousness. Although undoubtedly interesting, Blaustein’s proposal ignored many of the nuances in Husserl’s theory. In pursuit of the mutual references and the continued themes that link phenomenology with the tradition of Brentano (and Bolzano), Blaustein blurred crucial differences or brushed them aside with hasty generalizations. He was aware of this because he believed that showing the interdependencies between the two traditions did not mean that Husserl could be reduced to the tradition of Brentano: Husserl’s theory of content can be understood in its complexity only by taking into account the original conceptual apparatus that enabled a more precise outline of the relationship between a given act, content, and the object of the act. Regarding Blaustein’s interpretation of Husserl’s theory of content, it is therefore necessary to take a closer look at it, basing not so much on the terminology used by Brentano and his students as on his original nomenclature.

6.2 On Husserl’s Structures of Consciousness

In the “Introduction” to his book, at the very beginning of the part where he reconstructed Husserl’s position, Blaustein openly declared that he would solely focus on Untersuchungen and Ideen I.⁵⁵ That being said, references to the latter work were scant, and their purpose was often to show the continuity of reflections on the problems developed in the former. It was Ingarden who, when reviewing the work of Blaustein, his student from Lvov, observed that reducing Ideen I to a mere reiteration of the main themes from Untersuchungen is problematic.⁵⁶ As I want to cover reactions to Blaustein’s publication and the discussions it sparked elsewhere, I will leave Ingarden’s comment aside for now in order to discuss it later in Chap. 7. In any case, the order of analyses in Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…] undoubtedly followed the intuitions and the framework developed by Twardowski, for whom the theory of presentations concerned three elements: act, content, and object. As shown by Blaustein’s research into Husserl’s position and the tradition of Brentano (and Bolzano), the phenomenological theory of content was related to the question of the relationship between the act on the one hand and the object on the other. Thus, to clearly define Husserl’s understanding of content, it was necessary to examine his account of the act and the object. Starting from this observation, in the second part of his book, Blaustein first analyzed how Husserl understood acts and objects, focusing in particular on topics such as consciousness, lived experiences, intentional acts, inner experience, objects, and the intentional relation. He then considered the problem of content by examining, among other things, the concepts of descriptive and intentional content, as well as an act’s quality and matter. He also asked questions about intuition, the theory of adumbration and, finally, the account of content as noematic sense. It is necessary to bear in mind the Brentanian background of these investigations and, not least, their specific methodology: Blaustein was more interested in analyzing the meaning of concepts in Husserl’s philosophy than in carrying out descriptive studies of specific mental phenomena. However, as he testified in his later book from 1931, Przedstawienia schematyczne i symboliczne [Schematic and Symbolic Presentations], his 1928 analysis of Husserl’s position was an attempt to formulate “a general theory of presentations” (ogólna nauka o przedstawieniach).⁵⁷ Indeed, as we will see in the following, in his discussions with Husserl, Blaustein presented an original theory of presentations.

6.2.1 Acts and Their Objects

6.2.1.1 Consciousness as a Unity of Lived Experiences: The Question of Sensations

In his analysis of Husserl’s position, Blaustein focused primarily on the “First” and “Fifth Logical Investigation” from Untersuchungen and some fragments of Ideen I, though he mentioned that consciousness is understood differently in the latter work, i.e., as pure consciousness, which is a result of applying the method of phenomenological reduction (epoché).⁵⁸ As suggested by Pokropski,⁵⁹ Blaustein truly failed to fully distinguish between the two concepts of consciousness—from Untersuchungen and Ideen I. Of course, this misunderstanding stemmed from relating Husserl primarily to the tradition of Brentano. However, the relation was not uncritical. The reflections from Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…] showed Husserl to be a rather critical interpreter of the writings of Brentano. The differences between the two often pertain to terminology, which was not yet sufficiently precise in the 1874 Psychologie. One such fundamental difference concerned the account of consciousness as a set of psychic phenomena. In Blaustein’s interpretation, Husserl suggested that, instead of phenomena, one should talk about lived experiences (Erlebnisse). This is because the term “phenomenon” (Phänomen) is fraught with ambiguity. Blaustein identified three meanings of the term: (1) as a lived experience itself, (2) as an object which appears or manifests, and (3) as real components of a lived experience.⁶⁰ In this context, Blaustein’s aim was to narrow down the concept of consciousness to a unity of lived experiences.

Following Husserl, Blaustein pointed to the “[v]aried ambiguity of the term ‘consciousness’”⁶¹ when he wrote about the three fundamental meanings of the term: (1) as the entire, real (reelle) phenomenological being of the empirical ego, (2) as inner awareness, and (3) as any mental act. According to Blaustein, definitions (1) and (3) assume the concept of a lived experience as an explanans, while definition (2) assumes a specific account of inner awareness. He added that definition (2) is the source of definition (1), which dominates in Untersuchungen. A lived experience, in turn, should be understood as currently experienced content, which Blaustein accounted for as events. He did not mention, however, that Husserl attributed the account of lived experiences as events (Ereignisse) to Wundt and considered the object of phenomenology to be not real events but pure lived experiences, i.e., experiences that are not related to empirically real existence.⁶² This, however, was not crucial in Blaustein’s analysis. More importantly, he devoted a great deal of attention to Husserlian analysis of the sensational moment of outer perception:

The sensational moment of color, e.g., which in outer perception forms a real constituent of my concrete seeing (in the phenomenological sense of a visual perceiving or appearing) is as much “experienced” or “conscious” content, as is the character of perceiving or as the full perceptual appearing of the colored object. As opposed to this, however, this object, though perceived, is not itself experienced nor conscious and the same applies to the coloring perceived in it.⁶³

Blaustein believed that the fragment of Untersuchungen just quoted separate the elements of perception—or, more broadly, consciousness—that are lived from those that are only perceived or experienced.⁶⁴ While the content of consciousness is lived, an object is not. In the example discussed by Husserl, it is sensations that are lived, while objects are only perceived. Hence, what corresponds to the perceived is a real part, e.g., a color sensation (Farbenempfindung). This part is, in turn, interpreted (Auffasung) in perception. Thus, following Blaustein, Husserl distinguished color as a property of an object from color as the content of consciousness, i.e., a lived experience. Husserl justified the divide in the following way:

Here it is enough to point to the readily grasped difference between the red of this ball, objectively seen as uniform and the indubitable, unavoidable projective differences among the subjective color-sensations in our percept, a difference repeated in all sorts of objective properties and the sensational complexes which correspond to them.⁶⁵

Blaustein did not deny that Husserl consistently separated objects from lived experiences. After all, object properties are not identical to the properties of sensations. The importance of the analysis from Untersuchungen cited above lies in its attempt to account for the way in which an object becomes an object in consciousness. It is through the process of “apprehending” a complex of sensations that an object “appears” or “manifests” in consciousness or precisely becomes a “phenomenon.”

Adopting a critical attitude toward Husserl’s proposal, Blaustein underlined that, in line with the arguments advanced in Untersuchungen, sensations are the real parts of lived experiences, but he thought this conclusion was problematic. The point was that Husserl did not consistently distinguish between a lived experience and living an experience.⁶⁶ This objection was also mentioned by Magdalena Gilicka, who discussed the merit of Blaustein’s interpretation.⁶⁷ However, Gilicka did not develop the interpretation further and did not inquire into the background of the differentiation. Interestingly, its origin is not only Brentanian but also strictly phenomenological, at least to the extent discussed in the book. Here, Blaustein referred to Ingarden’s reflections on the intuition of lived experiences.⁶⁸ In his 1921 work “Über die Gefahr einer Petitio Principii in der Erkenntnistheorie” [“On the Danger of Petitio Principii in the Theory of Knowledge”], Ingarden considered the problem of the possibility of direct knowledge of such experiences. If this direct knowledge originates with reflection, which consists in turning toward an act, the very act of reflection is an act which would have to be founded on another. In other words, the objection is that knowledge based on reflection would lead to the petitio principii fallacy. Responding to this difficulty, Ingarden wrote about intuition (Intuition), which is not so much an act (in the proper phenomenological sense of the word) as a way of someone experiencing the act itself. Here, Ingarden distinguished objects of consciousness, which are only experienced (erlebt), from consciousness or intuition living itself or lived through (durchlebt).⁶⁹ Thus, what is experienced are objects, whereas what is lived through is the specifically subjective nature of apprehending what is present in consciousness. Sensations are also experienced as foreign to the experiencing subject or ego (ichfremd),⁷⁰ although, as Ingarden believed, they are experienced through “living” them. In the end, sensations are content rather than acts of consciousness. Ingarden wrote:

[…] sense data […] are contents which in a specific way are different than conscious acts and which are not (in themselves) conscious. This means that they exist by being experienced and not lived. However, the way in which experiencing (Erlebens) sense data exists lies in “living through” (Durchlebens).⁷¹

Interestingly, Ingarden also derived the problematic status of sensations from Brentano. He expressed this most clearly in his later lectures on the meaning of philosophy in Brentano’s thought (delivered originally in Polish in 1936), where he said that Brentano used the ambiguous concept of sensory data. The point was that Brentano inadequately accounted for the difference between what is experienced and experience understood as a mental action in the context of defining physical and psychic phenomena. The former applies to things, while the latter belongs to the domain of lived experience. Blurring this difference may lead to excluding sensations from the scope of consciousness, but it also obscures their essence, i.e., being the necessary definition or correlate of a property of the experienced or perceived thing. As Ingarden stressed, only those sensations that are understood as experienced may be considered to be psychic phenomena.⁷²

In any case, in “Über die Gefahr…” and in many other works,⁷³ Ingarden emphasized that he distinguished between “lived” acts and “experienced” sensations following Hedwig Conrad-Martius. In her “Zur Ontologie und Erscheinungslehre der realen Außenwelt” [“On Ontology and the Theory of Appearing of the Real Outer World”], this student of Husserl’s and Adolf Reinach’s from Göttingen reflected on the problem of how material properties of things appear in consciousness. Conrad-Martius wrote about “experiencing” (Erleben) the presentation of the sensual thing’s property, such as color or tone.⁷⁴ Admittedly, presentation is possible in contact with the ego, but if it is experienced, what is presented in a way “penetrates” the thing itself. The thing itself remains in the domain of “real transcendence” (reale Transzendenz), as it is different from the act itself and stays autonomous in its existence.⁷⁵ Obviously, sensations are given in consciousness, but they are different from the way in which the act appears for the ego. Włodzimierz Galewicz commented on this idea of Conrad-Martius by claiming that she overcame here the classical act–object model of consciousness and operated with a new model instead; more specifically, she suggested that consciousness changed lived experiences by giving them a new property, i.e., the property of being conscious.⁷⁶ Even if Conrad-Martius discussed this new model as a mere possibility, for Ingarden, it seemingly became convincing. Thus, for Conrad-Martius, sensations are alien to the ego (ichfremd), even though they are presented in consciousness. In the ontological perspective, the ego is not the ontic foundation of sensory data. In the phenomenological account, this is visible in the different mode of the data’s presentation given that it appears on the fringe of consciousness. In short, sensations are experienced differently by the ego. Ingarden used Conrad-Martius’s observations to show that sensations cannot be characterized as acts either: the ego does not carry them out, although, as has been mentioned above, sensations exist in consciousness through being “lived,” even if they are not truly experienced.

In his book, Blaustein approved and made use of Ingarden’s (and Conrad-Martius’s) solutions while undermining Husserl’s thesis that lived experiences cover acts and sensations. Moreover, he claimed that this position can also be found in Ideen I.⁷⁷ In § 36 of Ideen I, Husserl considered accounting for lived experience as consciousness of something, and he acknowledged that intentionality belongs to the pure essence of consciousness. He added that a given lived experience is defined “in the broadest sense” as everything that is present in the stream of lived experiences; thus, it encompasses not only intentional experiences but also all real (reell) moments of a lived experience.⁷⁸ An example of such a real non-intentional moment is sensory data or a sensation. In this context, Husserl analyzed the case of perceiving a white sheet of paper:

Within the live experience of perceiving this sheet of white paper, more precisely, within those components of the perceiving which relate to the quality, whiteness, belonging to the sheet of paper, we find, by a suitable turning of regard, the data of sensation, white. This white is something which belongs inseparably to the essence of the concrete perception and belongs to it as a really inherent concrete component. As the content that is “presentive” with respect to the appearing white of the paper, it is the bearer of an intentionality; however, it is not itself a consciousness of something. The very same thing obtains in the case of other really inherent data, for example, the so-called sensuous feelings.⁷⁹

Blaustein interpreted this passage as an attempt at distinguishing between (non-intentional) sensations and (intentional) acts that are founded on sensations, the latter being “carriers” of intentionality. He concluded that “[s]ensations are labeled by Husserl as sensual λη, acts as intentional μορφή.”⁸⁰ It may therefore be said that Blaustein saw a clear relationship between Husserl’s reflections from Untersuchungen and Ideen I. He even claimed that this parallel is supported by methodological arguments: both publications maintain that acts and sensations (i.e., non-intentional moments of lived experiences) are given as adequate and obvious in immanent perception.⁸¹ I will discuss this argument, as well as the idea of excluding sensations from the domain of lived experiences, in Chap. 7.

6.2.1.2 The Object(s) of Consciousness: The Question of Transcendence

In the literature devoted to Husserl’s phenomenology—e.g., in texts by John J. Drummond, George Heffernan, Dermot Moran, Peter Simons or, more recently, Dan Zahavi⁸²—his idea of intentionality was often juxtaposed with Brentano’s proposal to show its unique qualities and the novelty of its approach. It is claimed that Brentano accounted for objects as mentally “in-existent,”⁸³ which suggests that the relationship between consciousness and its object is a real element of the psychic experience. The novelty of Husserl’s theory, according to the researchers mentioned above, consisted in the strict separation of object and consciousness. It is worth noting in this context that some scholars, e.g., Arkadiusz Chrudzimski or Hamid Taieb,⁸⁴ challenged the validity of this sharp opposition between the two theories, arguing that Brentano had an object-oriented theory of intentionality. To see this dispute in a different light, one may ask whether both thinkers—Brentano and Husserl—considered intentionality to be relational and, if so, how one should understand the relata of this relationship. Are objects only mental or are they transcendent in relation to consciousness?

Blaustein believed that intentionality in Husserl’s philosophy is indeed relational—he wrote about an “intentional relation” (stosunek intencjonalny)—and defined the properties of acts as focused on the transcendent object. To explain this, it should be stressed that Blaustein accounted for the theory of consciousness in phenomenology as a theory of lived experiences that ranges over intentional acts as well as non-intentional sensations. Acts themselves should be understood as apprehensions or interpretations of sensations. Blaustein claimed that this description is viable because, in an act of perception, one sees not sensations but the perceived object.⁸⁵ This corresponds to Husserl’s observations. Therefore, the experienced content is not identical to the object: content is composed of the sensations that present the object, while the object itself appears through interpreted content. Therefore, it is by virtue of interpreting sensations (Blaustein also used the German term “Deutung” for “interpretation”)⁸⁶ that an object appears, for instance, as a perceived object. Commenting upon this general theory, Blaustein observed that Husserl’s approach is more complex than Brentano’s. The point is that, in the case of the former, the object is not given in lived experience simpliciter but rather is due to the interpretation of a non-intentional element, i.e., sensations. But how should “interpretation” be understood here?

According to Blaustein, the relationship between consciousness and its object is best described as intended, “going toward something,” or simply “being conscious of something.”⁸⁷ Thus, consciousness intends toward an object through sensations. In this context, “interpretation” should be understood as a kind of “living through” (durchleben) (in the sense described above in Sect. 6.2.1.1) sensations that are not, however, presented in experience as sensations but as a given object. The fact that an act intends toward an object does not mean that, in an experience, one interprets (“lives through”) a complex of impressions that presents an object. Blaustein accused Husserl of obscuring the extension of the term “intentionality” by defining it across problematically distinct frameworks. In Untersuchungen, intentionality was considered not only in relation to consciousness but also in relation to meaning. In this context, Blaustein cited the following fragment from the “First Logical Investigation”: “[t]he word ‘intentional’ is so framed as to permit application both to the meaning and the object of the intentio.”⁸⁸ However, if meaning is the content of lived experience, it cannot be finally established “[…] whether the intention of an act intends content or the object or both.”⁸⁹ The aim of this objection is to show that objects are transcendent in relation to both the act and the content. Even if the object is intended, it should not be reduced to a merely physical object or to a metaphysically understood thing in itself. In his 1928 book, Blaustein wrote:

Writing about the transcendentality of objects in relation to acts, Husserl underlines that the former are not to be treated as transcendent in the sense of physics or metaphysics. He understands the object as something that is as it seems to appear in perception and as something that one has inside one’s mind. The object of a perceptual idea of a sphere is a sphere with all its sides and properties, such as color, shape etc., and not a complex of atoms and electrons or a thing in itself.⁹⁰

Blaustein added that the reason why Husserl stressed the transcendence of the object so strongly⁹¹ was that he wanted to reject any misleading interpretation that would reduce the object to the act, whether as an object that is immanent (as in Brentano) or that is made present by the act (as in Twardowski). Therefore, the transcendence of the object means that it has its own properties (such as color) with their corresponding (but not identically equivalent) sensations (located also on the side of lived experience). However, as was observed earlier, if sensations are interpreted and objects are only intended, Husserl must ultimately accept the two fundamental meanings of “object” that are mentioned in the context of intentionality: (1) the intended object (der Gegenstand, welcher intendiert ist) and (2) the object as it is intended (der Gegenstand, so wie er intendiert ist).⁹² This distinction accounts for the possibility of various presentations of the same object, which also refer to two types of intentionality: de re and de dicto.⁹³

Blaustein went even further, claiming that the intended object may have more properties than the actual presentation. Hence, only some properties may be intended in lived experience, whilst others may be ignored. This does not mean, however, that the object is reduced to nothing more than how it is intended at a given moment. Quite the contrary: Blaustein emphasized that “[a]ll intentional objects exist […] outside presentation.”⁹⁴ That being said, it is worth bearing in mind that, here, “existence” is not understood physically or, more broadly, metaphysically. Rather, it refers to the nature of presentations as directed toward something. The object does not have to exist either in lived experience itself or outside of it. Importantly, directedness toward the object is the necessary element of the act which turns toward the intentional object. Consequently, according to Blaustein, there is no parallel in Husserl between immanent objects (or objects as they are intended), which exist in consciousness as if in a box, and transcendent (or intended) objects, which exist outside of consciousness. Consciousness has only one object, and it is intentional. To prevent misleading interpretations, Blaustein suggested that “[…] the intentional object of a presentation is identical to its real object, if it exists,” because, as he argues, “[a] transcendent object would not be the object of such and such [a] presentation if it were not its intentional object.”⁹⁵ Contrary to what it might suggest, the term “intentional” in the expression “intentional object” does not refer to existence in consciousness (existence that is “only” intentional) but to the existence of the act in which the object is intended.

In light of the analyses carried out thus far, Blaustein’s interpretation may be summarized as follows: (1) Husserl used a relational concept of intentionality, where (2) the intentional relation is understood as intending, “being directed toward,” or “turning toward”; (3) intending is carried out in the act through the interpretation of sensations; (4) the thing which is intended is not sensations but the intentional object; and (5) as such, the object is the proper object of the act, i.e., the necessary element of the act if the latter is indeed an act. Put simply, Husserl adopted an object-theory of intentionality, and what made his position different from Brentano’s position was that he stressed the radical transcendence of the object.⁹⁶ As Blaustein emphasized, this theory is characteristic of Untersuchungen and is considerably reformulated in Ideen I, where the intentional relation is mediated by the noema. According to his interpretation,⁹⁷ Husserl understood the noema to be the object of presentation as it is presented (der Gegendstand, so wie er vorgestellt ist). To elucidate this, Blaustein cited an example from Ideen I: when we regard an apple tree with a natural attitude, we apprehend it as existing in the external world, whereas when we approach it with a philosophical attitude, there is “[…] a radical modification of sense”⁹⁸ because the apple tree is apprehended as sense or noema, i.e., an apple tree as it presents itself. Next, Husserl wrote:

The tree simpliciter, the physical thing belonging to Nature, is nothing less than this perceived tree as perceived which, as perceptual sense, inseparably belongs to the perception. The tree simpliciter can burn up, be resolved into its chemical elements etc. But the sense—the sense of this perception, something belonging necessarily to its essence—cannot burn up; it has no chemical elements, no forces, no real properties.⁹⁹

Blaustein saw Ideen I as a radicalization of the position from Untersuchungen. Thus, in addition to two real parts—hyletic data and the noetic moment—lived experience also contains the ideal moment, i.e., the noema. The noema itself is also a complex object and, in addition to content—noematic sense or core (Kern)—it also comprises its own object, i.e., the identical X that guarantees the unity and identity of the noema.¹⁰⁰ If the noema has its own object, which, like the entire noema, is part of a lived experience, then Husserl in fact seemed to opt for the conception of two intentional objects: immanent (noema) and transcendent (the object apprehended with the natural attitude). The former object is ideal and abstract, while the latter is actual and concrete. Blaustein’s interpretation brought Husserl closer to an account of the noema in the spirit of the so-called West Coast interpretation of the noema, where the noema is understood as a generalization of meaning and an intermediary element in an intentional relation.¹⁰¹ One may assume that this interpretation of the noema theory was influenced by Blaustein’s account of the noema as an ideal element of lived experience. It seems, however, that the relational theory from his earlier book may also be applied—with the necessary clarifications and modifications—to the noema. Blaustein closed this avenue of research for himself due to his previously mentioned critical attitude toward the technique of reduction.

6.2.2 Manifold Levels of Content

Analyzing Husserl’s theory of content, Blaustein considered selected fragments of the “First,” “Fifth,” and “Sixth Logical Investigation” from the second volume of Untersuchungen. It is worth noting that the “Fifth Logical Investigation” is the only one to refer directly to the problem of intentional lived experiences and their content in the scope mentioned by Blaustein; on the other hand, the “First Logical Investigation” focuses on the relationship between expressions and meanings, while the “Sixth Logical Investigation” pinpoints the topic of cognitive acts and objectifying acts. By combining these different perspectives, Blaustein wanted to present a complete theory of content in Husserl’s philosophy of mind. In the context of the reception of phenomenology, this may seem problematic because—as argued by, for example, J. N. Mohanty¹⁰²—due to the theory of fulfillment, the research perspective adopted in the “Sixth Logical Investigation” is fundamentally different from that used earlier in that book. However, Blaustein followed not this way but that of Brentano. For him, each of these parts ultimately applied to presentations. This assumption originated with Twardowski. The thesis Blaustein borrowed from Twardowski is that there are two fundamental types of presentations: (1) concrete, thus intuitive (images or imageries), and (2) abstract, thus non-intuitive (concepts).¹⁰³ Accordingly, when in the “First” or “Sixth Investigation” Husserl addressed questions about meaning and signitive acts, Twardowski saw this as a continued analysis of the problem of presentations, albeit ones that are non-intuitive, i.e., concepts. In his interpretation of Husserl’s theory of content, Blaustein attributed intentions to Husserl that were similar to those voiced by Twardowski: the aim of the theory of presentations was to explain both images and concepts. This in turn means that content works in the same way in both types of presentations. With this in mind, we can now ask about the nature of content in Husserl.

As mentioned above, Blaustein claimed that Husserl put forward his theory of content to solve the problem of intentional relations: for him, content is part of the act or, more precisely, its matter; as such, it is separate from the act’s quality.¹⁰⁴ An act comprises two inseparable parts: (1) quality and (2) matter. While the former defines the nature of the act, e.g., presentation as presentation or judgment as judgment, the latter defines the objective direction of the act toward an object. In this respect, Blaustein adhered to Husserl’s intentions and research results.¹⁰⁵ He also seemed faithful to Husserl’s thought when he explained why the German philosopher incorporated matter into acts in the first place. As he emphasized, the identity of the object of reference is not enough to describe the differences between acts that might be directed toward the same object but present it differently.¹⁰⁶ Moreover, as has been shown above, the object is transcendent and thus cannot determine the act’s direction. After all, “going toward” is a quality of acts and not objects.

As regards matter, Blaustein attributed it to the descriptive content of the act, which means that he accounted for it as an effective yet abstract part that can be identified only through description. Matter is the property of the act thanks to which the latter “[…] establishes an object to which the act intends and defines the object as attributed with certain properties and relations.”¹⁰⁷ The fact that matter is an abstract part of the act also means that it cannot be considered in isolation from the other inseparable part, i.e., quality. By formulating this interdependence in the language of ontology, Blaustein held that the two parts of the act are indeed inseparable. On the other hand, Husserl referred to the combination of quality and matter as the intentional essence of presentation. Blaustein commented that this description of quality and matter is supposed to emphasize that their combination is an essential element of the act.¹⁰⁸ Although it follows the text of Untersuchungen to the letter,¹⁰⁹ this explanation does not seem to reflect Husserl’s theory in its entire complexity. For him, talking about “essence” guarantees the specificity of a given act, which, in its “essence,” may be matched with another act that is “the same.” Thus, as has also been observed by Walter Hopp,¹¹⁰ the “signitive essence” in Husserl is individual. In Blaustein, on the other hand, the “intentional essence” seems to be a general entity that, in Ideen I, is supposed to be the object of eidetic investigation.¹¹¹ In Blaustein’s opinion, therefore, Husserl’s struggle to achieve generality was marked by essentiality, i.e., the general and abstract nature of content. However, it seems that Blaustein deviates from Husserl’s thought by making this statement.

According to Blaustein, the subset of the “intentional essence of the act” is the “signitive essence,” i.e., a combination of matter and quality in the case of objectifying acts. Husserl defined the signitive essence as an in concreto experience of the meaning of a word. As such, signitive essence implements meaning in abstracto, i.e., ideal meaning.¹¹² Blaustein offered a short summary of Husserl’s theory of meaning: “[a] name expresses […] an act, [it] means content (meaning) and denotes an object.”¹¹³ He believed that this theory of meaning referred directly to the conception advanced by Twardowski, for whom meaning was realized in concreto in the content of presentations and thus pointed to the object of a given word.¹¹⁴ In Blaustein’s opinion, Husserl’s conception falls into the important problem of the relationship between the signitive essence and the act itself. He asked what it means for ideal content to be found in (einwohnen) a psychic act. In doing so, he assumed that what is ideal is not necessarily psychic and so cannot be part of an act: “Intentional essence or just the act’s matter is then, according to Husserl, a meaning which belongs to the intention of the word. Since intentional essence or matter are psychic and real, this definition raises doubts regarding the ideal character of meanings.”¹¹⁵ This intuition provides the basis for one of Blaustein’s arguments against Husserl’s theory of content.

Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…] devoted a good deal of attention to the problem of the intuitive fullness (Fülle) of acts, which was analyzed by Husserl in the “Sixth Logical Investigation.” Blaustein also argued that Husserl’s analyses introduced a new concept of content. It is worth mentioning that, in Husserl, the problem of intuitive fullness is related to the fact that even if acts have the same quality and matter, they may still be different: one and the same thing can be presented now in the imagination, now in perception or in a judgment. Following Husserl,¹¹⁶ he accounted for intuitive fullness as the “fulfillment” of matter, although—as he expressly emphasized—the moment is separate from matter. To explain this, Husserl wrote in Untersuchungen about signitive acts and the fulfilling intuition.¹¹⁷ Through intuition, the intention of an act adequately presents its object. Accordingly, intuition confers upon acts the status of relation to features of the objects presented in these acts. In other words, it is due to intuitive fullness that acts can adequately relate to the object, present it or, as Husserl wrote, represent it through content.¹¹⁸ Blaustein underlined that “[d]ue to its function of presenting the object and its properties in the act, Husserl refers to intuitive fullness as presenting content or a representative.”¹¹⁹ The relation between presenting content and the object it presents is that of an analogy or imaging. Thus understood, content shows appearance. In the case of perception, such content is sensations (Empfindung), while in the case of fantasies, it is sensory phantasms (sinnliche Phantasmen). Blaustein generalized these comments made by Husserl,¹²⁰ claiming that presenting content should be understood as “[…] the totality of sensations belonging to the act as content that intuitively presents the object and its properties.”¹²¹ This is why, when talking about different types of acts, Husserl only suggested different functions of sensations in specific acts: impressions in perception or reproducing sensations in fantasies.

Although Blaustein did not mention this, this interpretation from Untersuchungen referred directly to Twardowski’s idea that presentations are based on sensations and that their classification is made possible by the fact that sensations behave differently in different types of presentations.¹²² In any case, the analogy between different types of presenting content (which Blaustein also referred to as representatives [reprezentanci]) consists in the fact that elements of content have their equivalents in the object, and it is for this very reason that they are intuitive. To conclude, Blaustein reiterated Husserl’s¹²³ words that all presentations have a tripartite structure, being comprised of quality, matter, and presenting content. This division is justified by the different functions performed by each element. While the function of matter is identifying (pointing to), presenting content “fulfills” this identification, enabling the act to adequately present its object. To explain the relationship between content and objects, Blaustein also referred to Husserl’s idea of adumbrations (Abschattungen): he claimed that a representative identifies an object as its shades or adumbrations. Obviously, the entire act refers to the intentional object, but individual moments of presenting content refer to the parts and properties of the object.¹²⁴ This idea was also present in Twardowski, for whom an image referred to an entire object with different properties, whilst specific moments of the image referred to these properties.¹²⁵

As I have already observed, Blaustein’s analyses presented in his 1928 book came in the form of conceptual analysis. The aim of his question about content was to identify the different meanings of the term “content,” in particular “intentional content,” based on Husserl’s writings. According to Blaustein,¹²⁶ there are six such meanings: intentional object, act’s matter, intentional essence, signitive, ideal meaning, and fulfilled ideal meaning. In turn, Husserl understood the term “act” in two ways: as a dual structure (quality and matter) or as a tripartite structure (quality, matter, and a representative [presenting content]). Although it might seem exhaustive, Blaustein’s exposition did not give a full account of the complexity of Husserl’s theory. Blaustein was undoubtedly right to attribute the aforementioned meanings of the term “content” to Husserl. However, it is important to observe that, for example, the description of matter as content is different from the description of ideal meaning. Treating these meanings as equivalent would create problems when formulating a holistic theory of content, something that Blaustein did not fail to attack. Bearing this in mind, we may now proceed with a closer examination of the arguments levelled against Husserl in the Third Part of Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…].

6.3 Blaustein’s Assessment of Husserl

This section uses material previously published in Płotka, Leopold Blaustein’s Descriptive Psychology and Aesthetics in Light of His Criticism of Husserl, 169–172. For the purpose of this book, the text was enlarged and rewritten.

Blaustein’s critical reading of Husserl consisted in discussing, one by one, the main theses of his theory of content, as reconstructed in Sec. 6.2. He summarized Husserl’s theory of the act and object of presentations with the following five theses: (1) consciousness is the source of psychic lived experiences as a coherent and continuous stream or flow; (2) lived experiences comprise both intentional acts and non-intentional moments, i.e., sensations; (3) intentional acts are apprehensions or interpretations of sensations; (4) differentiation between a sensation as apprehended as the determination of an object and a sensation as the content of an act is unjustified; and finally, (5) differentiating between sensations and an object’s properties is necessary.¹²⁷ His critique went through each point and took the form of an elaboration of Husserl’s arguments.

According to Blaustein,¹²⁸ the first claim which defines consciousness in terms of “lived experiences” is invalid. He, of course, acknowledged that this claim is only partly adequate since lived experiences are united as conscious.¹²⁹ However, Husserl’s definition falls into a vicious circle since lived experiences are defined as consciousness, but consciousness is defined as (a set of) lived experiences. Immanent perception does not help us to solve this problem since, for Husserl, this notion—following Blaustein¹³⁰—is also based on the notion of lived experience: immanent perception enables one to perceive the lived experiences of the very consciousness which performs the act of perception. It should be noted that Blaustein used the term “immanent (or inner) perception” here more in the Brentanian sense than in the Husserlian sense. For him, as for Brentano¹³¹ and Twardowski,¹³² immanent perception unfolds or manifests mental phenomena, and this unfolding or manifestation is accompanied by self-awareness that this unfolding or manifestation is taking place. Here, immanent perception is characterized—to employ Brentano’s words¹³³—by its immediate, infallible self-evidence (unmittelbare, untrügliche Evidenz). This means that the object of inner perception is evident and exists as the object of perception. In contrast to the Brentanian tradition (and Blaustein’s suggestion), however, Husserl was skeptical about the scope of immanent perception.¹³⁴

In any case, when discussing the second thesis, Blaustein used the general idea that immanent perception presents its objects as evident. In general terms, he held that Husserl was wrong to include sense data among lived experiences since, for him, sensations are non-intentional moments, which cannot be included in the group of intentional acts. He claimed that Husserl’s arguments are not conclusive and that one is able to formulate counterarguments which show the absurd consequences of Husserl’s thesis. According to Blaustein,¹³⁵ lived experiences cannot be comprehended as both intentional acts and sensations, since whereas intentional acts are characterized by their reference to the ego (Husserl characterizes them as “ichlich”),¹³⁶ the latter are alien to the ego (“ichfremd”). In other words, sense data do not belong to the ego; hence, they do not belong to consciousness.¹³⁷ Blaustein even held that Husserl’s thesis was unacceptable because there was no agreement among scholars as to whether sensations are indeed evident. He noted that Husserl’s inclusion of sensations in lived experiences follows certain arguments rather than from evidential descriptions of consciousness.¹³⁸ Sensations are then, as Blaustein put it, outside consciousness. To describe the relationship between sensations and acts, he referred to Ingarden’s (and Conrad-Martius’s) distinction—discussed above in Sect. 6.2.1.1—according to which intentional acts are lived through (durchlebt), while sense data or sensations are just experienced (erlebt).¹³⁹ In Blaustein’s opinion, Husserl did not adopt this distinction; moreover, he identified intentional acts with sensations, and for this very reason, he could not exclude sensations from lived experiences.

The second thesis does not hold even if one—following Husserl—were to argue that intentional acts and sensations fall under the single category of “lived experience” because they both exist in subjective time (he referred to German phrases: “subjectives Strömen,” which is understood as “Stromzeit”). In response, Blaustein stated that the relation between lived experiences and time is questionable: it is not clear whether something is a lived experience because it is in subjective time or whether time is subjective if it comprises lived experiences.¹⁴⁰ In brief, it is impossible to define subjective time without lived experiences. As already claimed, Husserl’s second thesis (as defined above) is also wrong because of possible counterarguments that expose the absurd consequences of this standpoint. According to Blaustein, Husserl ascribed time to lived experiences on the one hand and space to sense data on the other.¹⁴¹ However, if lived experiences are psychic phenomena, they cannot include the non-psychic component of space, i.e., physical phenomena. Otherwise, lived experiences would be spatial, but that conclusion would be absurd.¹⁴² While discussing this argument of Blaustein, Pokropski notices:

One may defend Husserl using his distinction between spatiality understood as extension (Ausdehnung) and spreading out (Ausbreitung) […]. Sensations would have only the latter, whereas the former would be used to describe material objects localised in space. This however, according to Blaustein, would still lead to the absurd consequence that psychic phenomena are spatial, even in the most primitive way.¹⁴³

Blaustein’s point was then that sensations are not parts of lived experiences but also that they are not spatial. To describe the specific status of sensations—non-mental and non-spatial—he later refers to the idea of the phenomenal world.

According to Blaustein, the third thesis is valid but imprecise.¹⁴⁴ Here, intentional acts serve as the interpretation or apprehension of sensations, and in doing so, acts intend the object. Sensations are understood in this context as the presenting content. However, Blaustein argued, one can be directed toward the content itself without aiming at the object, as happens in simple experiences or the perception of color marks. Here, the presenting content is just experienced and not interpreted—as, for instance, in the case of perceiving without consciousness of what one is actually perceiving. In the latter example, sensations are just apprehended. If this is the case, simple apprehension can occur without interpretation. As a result, Blaustein proposed limiting Husserl’s apprehension (Auffassung) to simple experiences, whereas the interpretation (Deutung) of sensations only arises in higher-order acts which aim at an object.¹⁴⁵ By interpretation (Deutung), Blaustein offered to understand only such acts which refer to or intend their object; these acts are held as an interpretation of the presenting content as a set of moments that analogously corresponds with the relevant moment (properties) of the intentional object. This redefinition, however, misses Husserl’s point, for whom Deutung is indeed connected with interpreting sensations that correspond with an object’s properties.¹⁴⁶ Given this, Blaustein’s argument should be read rather as a postulate of a strict differentiation of both meanings; indeed, Husserl used them both interchangeably.¹⁴⁷ Nonetheless, even if one reads Blaustein in this way, his understanding of interpretation (Deutung) as a higher-order act is problematic. I will discuss this issue later in Chap. 7.

Blaustein’s critique of the fourth thesis follows from his view of sensations as alien to the ego. For Husserl—at least from Blaustein’s viewpoint—differentiating between a sensation as an element of apprehension and a sensation as content is unjustified because one cannot differentiate living-through (Durchleben) a sensation and experiencing (Erleben) a sensation. For Blaustein, by contrast, sensations are not a part of consciousness; instead, they belong to the phenomenal world.¹⁴⁸ Blaustein developed the latter notion in his discussion of the fifth thesis. Husserl’s distinction between sensations and objects is based on the second thesis that sensations are included in lived experiences; if so, objects are intended via sensations. Blaustein’s counterargument here is complex. He stated that sensations do not belong to lived experiences but to the world understood as the phenomenal world. According to Blaustein, the world is divided into two parts: the phenomenal and the material world.¹⁴⁹ The former is defined as a set of presenting content that is interpreted as a visible part—at a certain moment in time—of the material world, i.e., a set of material things. The phenomenal world, then, is the world of sense-contents, colors, sounds, smells, etc., which are placed in a two-dimensional space. Contents do not remain here in causal relations. One experiences the phenomenal world as complexes of presentational contents which are interpreted as objects and visible phenomenal things (Sehdinge), which, in turn, are distinct from material things since, as Blaustein put it, “[p]henomenal objects exist not in the material world but in the phenomenal world which presents the material world.”¹⁵⁰ Sensations for Blaustein are adumbrations of a material object’s properties, and simultaneously, they are elements of phenomenal objects which represent material objects.¹⁵¹ As Pokropski emphasized, “Blaustein does not elaborate the further metaphysical consequences of this claim and restricts his investigations only to the phenomenological and descriptive level.”¹⁵² One can try to defend Blaustein’s position by stating that his thesis does not concern real existence but rather that he attempted to describe different attitudes toward the world which one adopts. After all, he wrote about changing one’s attitude. I will discuss this line of reasoning later. In any case, if sensations belong to the phenomenal world, Husserl’s last thesis is false.

As stated above, the fact that Blaustein completed his dissertation under Twardowski is important if one is to understand the Brentanian framework of his reading of Husserl. When considering the relationship between the content and the act of presentation, Twardowski drew an analogy between presentations and painting: the content can be understood as both the picture and the depicted object—the subject matter which is put on the canvas. In his habilitation thesis, Twardowski wrote:

In comparing the act of presenting with painting, the content with the picture and the object with the subject matter which is put on canvas—for example, a landscape—we have also more or less approximated the relationship between the act on the one hand and the content and the object of the presentation on the other. For the painter, the picture is the means by which to depict the landscape; he wants to picture, paint, a real or merely imagined landscape and he does so in painting a picture. He paints a landscape in making, painting, a picture of this landscape. The landscape is the “primary” object of his painting activity; the picture is the “secondary” object. Analogously for presentations. A person presents to himself some object, for example, a horse. In doing so, however, he presents to himself a mental content. The content is the copy of the horse in a sense similar to that in which the picture is the copy of the landscape. In presenting to himself an object, a person presents to himself at the same time a content which is related to this object. The presented object, that is, the object at which the presenting activity, the act of presentation, aims, is the primary object of the presenting. The content through which the object is presented is the secondary object of the presenting activity.¹⁵³

Blaustein addressed this idea of Twardowski’s by claiming that his teacher ultimately rejected a pictorial concept of content: he did not attribute properties of spatiality, e.g., extension, color, etc., to content.¹⁵⁴ What is crucial here is that Blaustein adapted the entire intentional structure of the act and the general idea that the content can be understood as if it were a painting,¹⁵⁵ as described by Twardowski. The content, then, is an inseparable part of the psychic phenomenon, by virtue of which the presentation refers to or intends an object, which, in turn, is transcendent in relation to the act of presenting. The content is understood as a mental entity or vehicle that mediates the mind’s directedness toward the object. In Blaustein’s view, Husserl’s concept of content was ambiguous, and as such, it lacked the clarity of Twardowski’s distinctions. Accordingly, a general notion of content includes, following Blaustein, all “lived experiences, i.e., everything that is a real part” of consciousness.¹⁵⁶ According to Blaustein, Husserl operated with three specific notions of “content”: (1) intentional content, (2) presenting content, and (3) descriptive content. However, intentional content has—as shown above in Sect. 6.2.2—six different meanings: (1) intentional object, (2) the act’s matter, (3) intentional essence, (4) meaning essence, (5) ideal meaning and, finally, (6) fulfilled ideal meaning.¹⁵⁷ Blaustein stated that the most important notion of content is intentional content understood as the act’s matter. He disagreed with the view that matter can be identical (identisch, dieselbe) in different acts; at most, one can say that the matter is the same.¹⁵⁸ After all, the act’s matter is a psychical entity, and for this reason, it is particular, not something universal, that could be instantiated in different acts. Otherwise, one would have to comprehend matter as an ideal part of the act, but that would mean that ideal matter cannot be a real part of the psychic phenomenon.

Blaustein held that Husserl’s notion of presenting content obscured the distinction between matter and quality.¹⁵⁹ Understood as presenting content, sensations are supposedly parts of the act, but they are non-intentional at the same time. To avoid this confusion, Blaustein again suggested excluding the notion of sensations from the domain of acts of consciousness. In this context, Blaustein proposed keeping only the distinction between matter and quality because it is sufficient to define the descriptive content of the act. Finally, Blaustein defined the act as a composite of quality and matter (i.e., intentional content) that is associated with the presenting content, which in turn is part not of the act but of the phenomenal world and which refers to the intentional object.¹⁶⁰ Here, the presenting content seems to serve as a mediating entity that gives the mind a directness toward an object. Nonetheless, the concept of the phenomenal world is, as we will see in the next chapter, problematic and requires elaboration.***

To conclude this chapter, the order of analyses from Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…] undoubtedly followed the framework developed by Twardowski, for whom the theory of presentations concerns three elements: act, content, and object. In the first, historical part of his work, Blaustein traced the meaning and context of the theory of content, going back to Bolzano and Brentano. He identified problems related to reducing content to the object and, citing Twardowski’s thought, pointed out the need to further investigate the relationship between content and act. According to Blaustein, the theory of content presented in Untersuchungen responded to these problems by accounting for content as an inseparable part of an act, namely, the act’s matter. Taking such observations as his starting point, in the second reconstructive part of his paper, Blaustein first analyzed how Husserl understood acts and objects, focusing in particular on topics such as consciousness, lived experiences, intentional acts, inner experiences, objects, and the intentional relation. He then considered the problem of content by examining, among other things, the concepts of descriptive and intentional content as well as moments of act’s quality and matter. He also asked questions about intuition, the theory of adumbrations and, finally, the account of content as noematic sense. Finally, in the critical part of his book, Blaustein raised a number of terminological doubts, believing that the theses advanced by Husserl were not sufficiently precise. This critical section is important because it provides the basis for Blaustein’s original proposals of how content and its relation to the act and the object should be understood. As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, it is precisely these results that make Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…] important for understanding the total body of Blaustein’s philosophy, in particular his aesthetics. However, before identifying the themes that resonate with his aesthetic theory, one should first point out certain limitations that stem from the interpretation of Untersuchungen presented above. I will discuss these limitations in Chap. 7.

Finally, it is worth stressing that Blaustein developed complex research tools that he applied for methodical descriptions of experiences and psychic phenomena. However, focused on a critique of Husserl’s theory of act, content, and the object of presentations, Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…] is mainly an analytical work which examines concepts by formulating their definitions and verifying them from an increasingly closer perspective. He also examines the arguments put forward by Husserl, asking about the evidence behind them. His approach is therefore metaphilosophical, meaning that it is focused rather on definitions and arguments. This strategy is understandable in light of the general goal of the dissertation, which is to analyze Husserl’s position. It is worth remembering this, especially when noticing the contrast between the discussed book and the other books and articles by Blaustein, in which he studies specific psychic phenomena. Nonetheless, as already noted, following Blaustein’s self-description, his 1928 book on Husserl’s theory of content is the basis of his “general theory of presentations” (ogólna nauka o przedstawieniach).¹⁶¹ How should one understand this comment? As we will see in Chap. 8, he refers in his aesthetics to the basic idea that the key to understanding aesthetic experiences lies in the way in which the presenting content refers to its object. However, the idea to focus on the presenting content and its functions follows directly from Husserlowska nauka… [Husserl’s Theory…]. Therefore, although the 1928 work seems to contain no object-oriented analysis that studies the concrete structures of consciousness, it can be argued that it contains the basics of his “general theory of presentations.”