Felix Kaufmann, “Review: E. Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil” (1941)

Felix Kaufmann’s journal book review presents Husserl’s Erfahrung und Urteil as a major philosophical achievement whose significance had scarcely been recognized beyond phenomenological circles. Rather than attempting a comprehensive account of its analyses, Kaufmann explains the conceptual orientation needed to approach them: logic rests on forms of experience whose constitutive work scientific knowledge ordinarily presupposes. His review moves from the book’s editorial genesis to the foundations of transcendental phenomenology, then identifies its central problem and singles out its treatment of universals for renewed philosophical discussion.

The publication history establishes the close relationship between Erfahrung und Urteil and Formale und transzendentale Logik. Ludwig Landgrebe began organizing Husserl’s manuscripts on transcendental logic in 1928. Husserl’s intended introduction expanded into the latter work, published in 1929, requiring Landgrebe to prepare a new draft with continuous reference to it. Subsequent revision and postponement delayed publication until after Husserl’s death. Kaufmann praises Landgrebe’s introduction and notes that Husserl discussed and approved it, presenting the volume as the outcome of sustained collaboration and revision.

The philosophical exposition begins with the unexamined presuppositions shared by positive science and traditional logic. Kaufmann recognizes Kant’s critique as the greatest systematic attempt to investigate such presuppositions, while distinguishing Husserl’s approach from Kant’s:

While accepting the term "transcendental," by which Kant designates this type of analysis, Husserl proceeds in his transcendental phenomenology not along the lines of Kant's chief work but, rather, closer to that of Descartes.

The decisive method is radical reflection by the thinking ego upon its stream of consciousness, where both prescientific and scientific knowledge originate. This reflection discloses relations among meanings that ordinary philosophical and psychological analysis overlooks. A seemingly simple claim that a physical thing occupies a certain place implies indefinitely many assumptions about possible perceptions, including those of other people. Kaufmann uses this example to explain why phenomenology cannot merely accept the objective world as its starting point:

They regard the objective world as simply "given," and interpret any "subjective" experience in terms of it, whereas phenomenology aims at understanding the meaning of "objectivity" in terms of such experience.

Here the contrast with empiricism concerns explanatory direction. Empiricist accounts acknowledge perceptual implications but stop where phenomenological inquiry begins: with the question of how experience constitutes the meaning of objectivity itself. Kaufmann’s account therefore makes the analysis of consciousness an investigation of the presuppositions of objective knowledge.

The book’s genealogy of logic develops this inquiry by distinguishing strata of experience. Higher levels accept the results of constitutive processes operating at lower ones. Although knowledge in the strict sense is defined through logical canons, those canons themselves refer back to a deeper, receptive level:

It is the process of the formation of logic from receptive experience which is dealt with in this book.

Kaufmann carefully specifies the scope: the analyses concern categorical judgments grounded in sense perception. Within this restriction, however, they illuminate the fundamental relation between passivity and activity, or receptivity and spontaneity. The philosophical importance of the work lies in tracing how judgment develops from experience rather than treating logical form as self-sufficient.

Kaufmann then directs readers to Chapter 2 of the third and final section, on universals and eidetic intuition (Wesensschau), while emphasizing that individual chapters require the context of the whole. This theory had attracted exceptional influence and controversy, although he does not regard it as Husserl’s most significant contribution. The later chapter supplies a deeper analysis than Logische Untersuchungen and, in Kaufmann’s judgment, should become the basis of subsequent discussion.

The review closes by calling Erfahrung und Urteil one of the age’s few great philosophical works. Kaufmann connects its limited reception to its publication in Prague shortly before the conquest of Czechoslovakia and urges English translations of both it and Formale und transzendentale Logik. His recommendation joins philosophical appraisal to a practical concern: a major investigation into the experiential foundations of logic needed wider access and more informed debate.