Alfred Schütz, Farber’s Foundation of Early Phenomenology

Alfred Schütz’s 1944 review of Marvin Farber’s The Foundation of Phenomenology assesses both an interpretation of Husserl’s early philosophy and its importance for English-speaking readers. Reprinted in 1996 with editorial apparatus and a title supplied by Helmut Wagner, the review combines a strong endorsement of Farber’s scholarship with a concise reconstruction of the philosophical development his book presents. Its central judgment is that Farber makes Husserl’s early logical investigations accessible without sacrificing their conceptual precision, while raising objections to later transcendental phenomenology that its defenders must answer.

This book is not only by far the best study of Edmund Husserl’s thought available in English, but also a standard work on the development of phenomenological philosophy up to and including the Logical Investigations.

Schütz grounds this unusually emphatic praise in direct textual comparison. He reports having checked Farber’s rendering of the Logical Investigations paragraph by paragraph against the German original. His approval concerns both the translation of difficult terminology and the selection of material: Farber’s freedom of exposition preserves exactness of meaning. The review therefore treats accessibility as a scholarly achievement, not as simplification. Farber supplies readers with a dependable route into a work whose difficulty still demands sustained study.

The book gives foremost place to an account of Husserl’s contribution to logic.

This emphasis has two distinct grounds. Historically, Husserl’s early development centered on separating pure logic from psychology; the analysis of logical problems and the elements of knowledge subsequently helped produce his breakthrough to phenomenology. Evaluatively, Farber regards Husserl’s logical achievements as especially valuable and particularly relevant to English-speaking readers. Schütz distinguishes these grounds rather than making Farber’s preference an uncontested verdict on Husserl’s entire philosophy. He notes that Farber turns away from later transcendental idealism and sharply criticizes features of it presented by Eugen Fink.

The review follows the book’s developmental organization. Farber begins with the German philosophical background and Brentano’s influence, then examines the Philosophy of Arithmetic. Schütz particularly values his identification there of rudimentary forms of later phenomenological analysis. The discussion of Husserl’s early writings on logic and psychology also brings together material dispersed across German periodicals. These chapters establish the emergence of phenomenological problems through concrete philosophical controversies, rather than presenting the mature method as an isolated discovery.

The main exposition concerns the Logical Investigations. Schütz explains its anti-psychologism through the distinction between ideal logical validity and psychological occurrences. The position Husserl opposes confuses the content of judgment with acts of judging and treats logical law through categories of psychological causation. Its associated prejudices make normative knowledge dependent on psychology, understand logical concepts as psychological structures, and identify evidence with a feeling guaranteeing truth. Against these reductions, pure logic concerns ideal laws and categories grounded in meanings common to all sciences, including psychology itself. Psychology consequently cannot supply the ultimate foundations of the logical principles it already employs.

Schütz then indicates how this argument develops across investigations of expression and meaning, universals and abstraction, wholes and parts, pure grammar, intentional experience, and knowledge. Farber’s achievement is to preserve the movement and essential content of these analyses within a condensed presentation. His attention to differences between editions is equally important: revisions to the Logical Investigations register a later stage of Husserl’s thought, associated with Ideas. The earlier work must therefore be read with attention to its development, not treated as a single, historically uniform statement.

Farber deliberately restricts the scope of the present volume to the foundation of phenomenology and reserves a detailed discussion of transcendental phenomenology for later publications.

This limitation explains the selective treatment of later Husserl. Farber’s concluding chapters discuss levels of logical analysis, time-consciousness, the eidetic method, and the constitution of intersubjectivity as examples of a presuppositionless philosophical procedure. Schütz welcomes these discussions while wishing for the promised fuller account. Their presence connects the early logical foundations to subsequent phenomenological problems without claiming to exhaust the later philosophy.

The review culminates in Farber’s criticism of claims to absolute knowledge:

It criticizes frankly the exaggerated claim of the latest expressions of phenomenology to have achieved an absolute knowledge of the world and of the “phenomenological paradoxes” then arising.

Schütz regards this final chapter as especially important for readers already familiar with Husserl. He does not reproduce its arguments in detail or present their success as settled; instead, he insists that phenomenologists must accept or refute objections directed against principal theses articulated by Fink. The review thus addresses two audiences. Specialists encounter a challenge to transcendental phenomenology’s strongest claims, while readers interested chiefly in logic gain access to a major intellectual achievement. Its enduring significance lies in holding these assessments together: fidelity to Husserl’s analyses warrants serious study, but does not exempt the later system from criticism.