Husserl’s Early Conception of the Triadic Structure of the Intentional Act
Quentin Smith
Published in: Philosophy Today, 1981, pp. 81-91.
Our aim in this paper is to discuss the fundamentals of Husserl’s early theory of the nature of the intentional act. Our principle subject is his conception of the triadic structure of intentionality in the Logical Investigations.[1] This early conception will be related to Husserl’s later theory in the Ideas,[2] and to the ideas that influenced it in the theories of Franz Brentano.
This essay has four sections, corresponding to Husserl’s theory of the three moments of the intentional act, and of the manner in which they are related to each other. The sections are 1) The First Act-Moment: Matter, 2) The Second Act-Moment: Interpretative Form. 3) The Third Act-Moment: Quality, and 4) The Interrelation of Act-Moments: Presentations and the Acts Founded on Presentations.
THE FIRST ACT-MOMENT: MATTER
In Investigations Five and Six of the Logical Investigations, Husserl distinguishes three moments that belong to every act of consciousness. These are the moments of matter, interpretative form and quality. The first of the three moments Husserl distinguishes is the matter. The matter is the component of the intentional act that supplies its reference to an object:
The matter, therefore, must be that element in an act which first gives it reference to an object, and reference so wholly definite that it not merely fixes the object meant in a general way but also the precise way in which it is meant.[3]
There is a distinction in the intentional object which can also be made in the matter that refers to this object. In the intentional object this is the distinction between “the object as it is intended, and the object (period) which is intended.”[4] There can be several acts directed to the same object, and each of these acts can mean the object in a different way, i.e., each can be directed to different properties, relations or categorial forms of the object. As Husserl phrases this,
the matter --- to carry clearness a little further --- is that[5] peculiar side of an act’s phenomenological content that not only determines that it grasps the object but also as what it grasps it, the properties, relations, categorial forms, that it itself attributes to it.
The various phenomena to which the matter is directed, including both the objects and their properties, relations and categorial forms, can be divided into two basic classes. The first is the class of categorial forms and the second is the class of sensuous phenomena.
Categorial forms consist of forms of combination and universals. The categorial forms of combination are the forms of states of affairs, those of total and partial relations[6] of identity ...of simple external relations [and] Collectiva and Disjunctiva.
The categorial universals consist of both formal universals, such as the Idea Something, and material universals, such as “the Idea Red.”[7]
The class of sensuous phenomena is the other basic class of intentional objectivities. As Husserl writes, there is a fundamental “distinction between sensuous stuff and categorial form throughout the whole realm of objectifying acts."[8] Sensuous phenomena divide into two sub-classes, that of outer sense and that of inner sense. The phenomena of outer sense are “external things and connective forms of things (together with their immediate qualities).”[9]
The connective forms are the real relations that subsist between things or the various parts of things, and the immediate qualities are the different properties of things, such as their colors or sounds. The phenomena of inner sense encompass the “sphere of ‘inner objects,’ the ego and its internal experiences.”[10] The internal experiences are the properties of the ego, which include acts and hyle. The acts can be divided into matter, interpretative form, and quality, and the hyle can be divided into sensations, feeling-sensations, phantasms, signs, and categorial representatives.[11]
These divisions of the phenomena to which the matter is directed are rep. resented in the following diagram in terms of divisions of the matter itself.
The concept of a matter of intentional acts is retained in the Ideas under the name “noetic nucleus.”[12] Thus Husserl writes that although the concept of matter had been formulated from a “noetic orientation” (i.e., as a noetic phase) , it remains possible to “interpret the concepts noematically thus: ...the ‘matter’ (as so interpreted) corresponds to the ‘noematic nucleus’.”[13] The major influence in Husserl’s formulation of the concept of an act-matter lies in Brentano’s theory of the act of presentation. Husserl’s conception of matter as the moment of an act which supplies its reference to an object is paralleled by Brentano’s conception of presentation:
We speak of a presentation whenever something appears to[14] us. When we see something, a color is presented; when we hear something, a sound; when we imagine something, a fantasy image.
Husserl’s division of matter into categorial acts and sensuous acts was prefigured by Brentano’s similar division of presentations:
[The class of presentations ] includes the concrete intuitive[15] presentations that are given to us through the senses along with those concepts that are not properly called sensible.
This class also includes the presenting acts of inner sense, i.e., “the observation of earlier mental states in memory.”[16]
However there are certain differences between Husserl’s concept of matter and Brentano’s concept of presentation, Perhaps the most important is that Brentano did not postulate a hyletic datum that the act “objectifies” into the intentional object. For various reasons, Husserl’s distinction between the hyletic datum and the intentional object enabled him to conceive of something that Brentano was not able to, viz., that the physical objects of perception had a being beyond their being as “merely intended contents.”[17] Another important difference between Husserl and Brentano is that Husserl ascribed an atemporal ideal being to the objects of categorial acts, whereas Brentano maintained that they had a merely intentional being.[18] The other differences primarily lie in how Brentano and Husserl divided up the different moments of the categorial and sensuous acts.
THE ACT-MOMENT OF INTERPRETATIVE FORM
Every intentional act not only possesses a matter, but an interpretative form as well. An interpretative form is the act-moment that determines whether the intentional object is to appear in a perceptual fashion, an imaginary fashion, or in a signitive fashion. That is, it does not determine what the intentional object is, but how the intentional object is to be given. Husserl defines interpretative form as follows:
Interpretative form, i.e., whether the object is presented in[19] purely signitive, or intuitive, or mixed fashion. Here also belongs the differences between a perceptual and an imaginary presentation.
The basic difference in interpretative form is between signitive acts and intuitive acts, the latter which divide into perceptual acts and imaginative acts. Signitive acts are characterized by being empty of their objects, and intuitive acts are characterized by being full of their objects:
Signitive intentions are in themselves “empty,” and...[20] they “are in need of fulness”...A signitive intention merely points to its object, an intuitive intention gives it “presence,” in the pregnant sense of the word, it imports something of the fulness of the object itself.
Signitive acts are acts where I am merely “thinking of” an object, or “having it in mind,” without perceiving or imagining it. Husserl maintained that this distinction held for categorial forms as well as for sensuous phenomena. For example, I am merely signifying a categorial universal when I am reading or talking about it, but I perceive it when I directly behold it on the basis of a concrete exemplification.[21]
An intuitive act is “full” of the object in the sense that it refers to its object “in person,” it refers to the object itself. “In fulfillment our experience is represented by the words: ‘This is the thing itself’.”[22] If the intuitive act is imaginative, then it refers to the thing itself by means of a likeness or analogue of it. If the intuitive act is perceptual, then it refers to the object directly, regarding what it is aware of, not as an analogue of the object, but “'as a self-revelation of the object”[23] itself.
The different characters of the interpretative form are represented in the following table.
In the Ideas Husserl informally describes these types of interpretative form as “types of presentations,”[24] which have as their noematic correlates “the differences in the mode of givenness”[25] of the intentional object. In the place of the imaginative acts of the Logical Investigations Husserl now substitutes the further differentiation between the acts of free fancy and the acts of memory.
Husserl’s concept of interpretative form is the one that was least influenced by Brentano’s theory of consciousness. There is no act-moment in Brentano’s theory that clearly corresponds to Husserl’s interpretative form. However, the different characters of the interpretative form are latent in Brentano’s conception of the presentative act. For the presentation not only determines the reference to the object of the act, but also the mode in which the object is given. Thus Brentano writes that by presentation he means, on a perceptual level, “hearing a sound, seeing a colored object, feeling warm or cold, as well as similar states of imagination...I also mean by [presentation] the thinking of a general concept,”[26] which for Brentano would be an example of signitive thought, as he does not admit the possibility of an intuition of general categories.
THE ACT-MOMENT OF QUALITY
Husserl originally introduced the concept of an act-quality as a correlary to his concept of an act-matter. He correlated them by saying that while the matter determines what object the act intends, the quality determines the way in which the act intends the object. Husserl defines the act-qualities by saying that they are the “different ways of being intentional.”[27] A series of acts can have the same matter with only the qualities of the acts changing. For example, I can doubt, believe, wish or be fearful that there are “intelligent beings on Mars;”[28] all these acts have one and the same matter --- the “intelligent beings on Mars” --- but they all have different qualities, the doubting, fearing, wishing and believing.
Act-qualities are of two kinds: objectifying and non-objectifying. Objectifying act-qualities divide into existentially positing acts and existentially non-positing acts. Existentially positing acts are acts which believe in the existence of an object; they “refer to it as existent.”[29] The existentially non-positing acts, on the other hand, “leave the existence of their object unsettled: the object may, objectively considered, exist, but it is not referred to as existent.”[30]
The act-qualities that are non-objectifying are entirely different ways of referring to an object. The “non- objectifying acts [are acts] such as joys, wishes, volitions.”[31] We may call these acts feeling-acts, which include pleasures and pains, valuations, desires and volitions.[32] These acts refer to an object in the way of being pleased or pained by it, valuing it, desiring it, or willing it.
The different objectifying and non-objectifying act-qualities are represented in the following diagram.
Husserl’s concept of act-quality appeared in the Ideas as the “positing” or “thetic” phase of the noesis. He writes that the concept of quality, like that of matter, was a noetic concept, but is nevertheless susceptible of a noematic interpretation:
We can interpret the concepts noematically thus: “quality”[33] (judgement-quality, wish-quality, and so forth) is nothing other than what we have hitherto treated as “positing” character, “thetic” character in the widest sense.
The objectifying act-quality of the existentially positing kind becomes the “doxic positing,” which has as its noematic correlate the modalities of being, such as certain being, probable being, possible being, and questionable being. The objectifying act-quality which is of the existentially non-positing kind becomes the “neutrality modification.” However this existential non-positing is no longer classified as a quality “beside other qualities, but as a modification which ‘mirrors’ all qualities.”[34] The non-objectifying qualities, the feeling-acts, are now designated as the “secondary types of ‘positing’.”[35]
Husserl’s concept of an act-quality is adopted with almost no changes from certain ideas in Brentano’s theory of consciousness. Husserl’s objectifying act-qualities of the existentially positing kind are virtually identical with what Brentano calls “judgements.” By “judgement” Brentano does not mean a proposition, i.e., a combination or separation of attributes, but an act which “affirms...[or] denies the existence”[36] of an object. Brentano did not distinguish a special act that corresponds to Husserl’s existentially non-positing acts, but rather conceived of the non-positing of existence as the absence of an act of judgement, as an act of “mere presentation.”[37]
Husserl’s concept of non-objectifying qualities is the same as Brentano’s concept of the acts of love and hate. This
...class consists of the emotions in the widest sense of[38] this term. These include...inclination and disinclination [and] joy and sorrow...as well as the highly complicated phenomena that are involved in ends and means.
With this delineation of the nature and source of Husserl’s concept of quality, we have completed our analysis of Husserl’s theory of the three moments of the iIntentional act.[39] We have seen that “consciousness” in the sense of an intentional experience consists of a matter, an interpretative form, and a quality. It remains for us to understand how these three moments are related to one another within the intentional act as a whole.
THE INTERRELATION OF ACT-MOMENTS: THE FOUNDATION OF FEELINGS ON PRESENTATIONS
Husserl formulated his theory of the interrelation of act-moments in terms of a proposition about the priority of acts of presentation. Although he borrowed this proposition from Brentano, his aim was to give it a sense of its own. The exact form of the proposition runs as follows: “Each intentional experience --- is either a presentation or based upon underlying presentations.”[40] Husserl explains at length the meaning of this proposition:
This remarkable proposition means that in each act the intentional[41] object is presented in an act of presentation, and that, whenever we have no case of “mere” presentation, we have a case of presentation so peculiarly and intimately inwoven with one or more further acts or rather act-characters that the presented objects become the objects [intended by these further act-characters]. Such plurality of intentional reference is not achieved in a linked concommitance or sequence of acts, in each of which the object has a novel, i.e., a recurrent, intentional presence, but in a single strictly unitary act, in which a single object is only once apparent, but is in this single appearance the target of a complex intention. We can, in other words, interpret our proposition as saying that an intentional experience only gains objective reference by incorporating an experienced act of presentation in itself, through which the object is presented to it.
The founded intentional characters are dependent act-moments, and the presentations are independent act-moments : The “added intentional characters are plainly not to be regarded as complete and independent acts: they cannot be conceived apart from the act of objectifying presentation, on which they are accordingly based.”[42] On the other hand the act of presentation “is quite capable of independent existence as a concrete intentional experience, as an act of ‘mere’ presentation.”[43]
We have described elsewhere Husserl’s labored and detailed working out of an adequate sense to this proposition in terms of the three act-moments he distinguished.[44] It will suffice for our present purposes if we simply explain the final results that Husserl was able to achieve.
In this light we may note that the most significant feature about the presentation is that it is the act which achieves the objective reference in any complex intentional experience. In terms of the three act-moments, this means that the presentation must include an act-matter. For as Husserl says, “the reference to an object is, in general terms, constituted in an act’s matter.”[45] However a matter is not capable of existing by itself, independent of every other act-moment. It is impossible to achieve a reference to an object without either perceiving, imagining or signifying it. Hence the presentation must also include a moment of interpretative form.[46] But this still does not constitute an independent and self-sufficient act. For an object cannot be intended without being posited in some modality of existence or non-existence, or without having this posited suspended. Thus the moment of objectifying quality, which includes both existentially positing and non-positing acts, must also belong to the presentation. As Husserl states, “no ‘matter’ [and interpretative form] is possible without objectifying quality.”[47]
It turns out that it is only the remaining act-moment, the non-objectifying quality, that does not belong to the presentation. The non-objectifying qualities, the feeling-acts of pleasure, pain, desire, valuation, and volition, are the only acts which are founded on presentations. This is evident from the fact that in a complex act containing all four act-moments the moment of non-objectifying quality can “be eliminated,”[48] and a complete and independent intentional act would still remain. For example, I can have a presentation of the night sky with a feeling-act of wonder founded on the presentation; the feeling-act may diminish and finally no longer be experienced, but the presentation of the night sky can still remain as a concrete and independent intentional experience. In contrast to this, the feeling-acts are not able to exist as independent intentional acts. They can exist only insofar as they are founded on underlying presentations. Husserl explains this as follows:
Feelings. ..have presentations as their foundations.[49] We can only direct ourselves feelingly to objects that are presented to us by inwoven presentations...Pleasure or distaste direct themselves to the presented object, and could not exist without such a direction.
The manner in which feelings are founded on presentations is a peculiar one. They are not founded on the three moments of the presentation in an equally direct fashion. Rather the feeling, as a non-objectifying act-quality, “has its primary foundation in another act-quality [the objectifying one] and is only mediately founded on ‘matter’ [and interpretative form].”[50] The immediate foundation of the non-objectifying qualities on the objectifying qualities can be explained in terms of “primary” and “secondary” intentions:
We must after a fashion distinguish between primary and 8econdary[51] intentions, the latter owing their intentionality to their foundation on the former. Whether primary objectifying acts are of a positing, affirming, believing character, or of a non-positing, merely present-in, neutral character, does not affect this function. Many secondary acts invariably require affirmations, as, e.g., joy and sorrow: for others mere modifications suffice, e.g., for wishes or aesthetic feelings.[52]
Husserl’s complete theory of the interrelation of act-moments can best be summed up by giving an example of a complex intentional act, an intentional act which includes both a presentation and a feeling founded on the presentation. For this example we will choose the joyful perception of a landscape.
We may begin by distinguishing the three moments of the presentative stratum of the act. First of all there is the matter .In this case the matter is a matter of outer sense, a matter which refers to the outer sense object, a landscape. The landscape is the object of this complex intentional act, and it is by means of the matter that this object is made manifest to the other moments of the act.
This matter is accompanied by an interpretative form. This is the interpretative form of perception, which refers to the landscape as self-given.
These two moments are joined by a third moment, the objectifying quality. This objectifying quality is an existentially positing way of referring to the landscape; it refers to the landscape as existent.
These three moments make up the presentation of the landscape. Founded on this presentation is the non-objectifying quality. This non-objectifying quality is a joyful way of referring to the landscape. This joyful reference to the landscape is immediately founded on the existential positing, and mediately founded on the matter and interpretative form.
Husserl retained this conception of presentation and of the acts founded on presentations in the Ideas. Although Husserl does not discuss this concept at any length in this work, he nevertheless remains of the opinion that “presentation” is the “common genus”[53] of the noetic nucleus, the types of presentation, the doxic positings, and the neutrality modifications. And the feeling-acts, the “secondary types of positings” are still conceived as being “intentionalities which are grounded in presentations.”[54]
The proposition that every act is either a presentation or is founded on a presentation is one that Husserl borrowed from Brentano.[55] We recall that for Brentano a presentation includes the two moments that Husserl calls matter and interpretative form. We also know that Brentano distinguished two other acts, the act of judgement, which affirms or denies the existence of an object, and the act of feeling, in which an object is loved or hated. In Brentano’s formulation of the proposition concerning the priority of the act of presentation, the act of judgment and the act of feeling are conceived as the acts which are founded on the presentation. Judgements are founded on presentations in that they can only be experienced as acts of affirming or denying the existence of a presented object, and feelings are founded on presentations in that they can only be experienced as acts of loving or hating a presented object. Moreover, in every complex intentional act the feelings are always the uppermost stratum, for they are also founded on the judgements: whether they love, hate, fear, or hope for the presented object depends on the judgement made concerning its existence.[56]
We can understand from this that Husserl made only one decisive change in his own formulation of this proposition. Instead of considering the judgement of existence ( the existentially positing quality) as an act that was founded on the presentation, he considered it as a moment of the presentation itself. Husserl was able to do this because he included the judgement of existence within the wider class of objectifying quality, a quality which, as we have seen, must of necessity belong to any complete act of presentation. As one of the objectifying qualities, the judgement of existence can then be classified as one of the moments of the presentation itself.[57]
Husserl’s inclusion of the judgements of existence within the class of presentations meant that for him there were only two strata of consciousness, instead of three, as there were for Brentano. For Brentano, consciousness was divided into the three strata of presentations, judgements and feelings, whereas for Husserl consciousness was only divided into the two strata of presentations and feelings.
The differences between Brentano’s and Husserl’s theories of the interrelation of the moments of consciousness can be more easily understood if we represent them in a diagram. We will indicate the parallel relations between Brentano’s theory and Husserl’s theory as it was expressed in both the Logical Investigations and the Ideas. Husserl’s existential non-positing act (Logical Investigations) and neutrality modification (Ideas) are not paralleled by any positive act in Brentano’s theory, but by the absence of an act of judgement, so we will indicate this by a blank space, (___) .The arrow signifies a relation of foundation, and the plus sign indicates a relation of accompaniment.
[1] Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, translation by J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970).
[2] Edmund Husserl, Ideas, translation by W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: The Macmillan company, 1931).
[3] Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 589.
[4] Ibid., p. 578.
[5] Ibid., p. 589.
[6] Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 798. See sections 44-51 of the Sixth Investigation for Husserl’s complete theory of the forms of combination. The usage of the phrase, “forms of combination”, to refer to these phenomena is ours, not Husserl’s.
[7] Ibid., p. 801. Husserl outlines these universals in section 52 of the Sixth Investigation, but makes the formal/material distinction in section 11 of the Third Investigation.
[8] Ibid., p. 778.
[9] Ibid., p. 781.
[10] Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 781. By “ego” Husserl means the empirical ego, not the transcendental ego, which he did not conceive until the Ideas. See section 8 of the Fifth Investigation, and Section 57 of the Ideas.
[11] For this division of hyletic data, see section 1 of “A Phenomenological Examination of Husserl’s Theory of Hylectic Data,” Philosophy Today, Winter 1977. We should append to our discussion of matter that Husserl also made a division of matter into nominal acts (one-rayed acts of perception, imagination, categorial intuition, expectation, etc.) and propositional acts (synthetic acts of hypothetical, categorial. conjunctive and disjunctive judgments). As we indicated in Section 2 of “On Husserl’s Theory of Consciousness in the Fifth Logical Investigation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 37, No. 4, June 1977, this division came in the course of Husserl’s attempt to demarcate a class of acts (presentations) that founded every other class of acts. The different moments of this division are included at various places in the division of matter into categorial acts and sensuous acts.
[12] Husserl, Ideas, Section 92, p. 267.
[13] Husserl, Ideas, Section 129, p. 362. We have substituted “matter” for Boyce Gibson’s “material.” Husserl did not distinguish a noema of acts in the Logical Investigations (Cf. the note to section 16 of the Fifth Investigation. and Section 129 of the Ideas).
[14] Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, translation by Rancurello, Terrell and McAlister (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), p. 198.
[15] Franz Brentano, The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, translation, Chisholm and Schneewind (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), p. 15.
[16] Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, p. 34.
[17] Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 869.
[18] Ibid., Prolegomena, Section 39, and Sixth Investigation, Section 46. And Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Appendixes IX, XIV, and XV.
[19] Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 743.
[20] Ibid., p. 728.
[21] Husserl, Logical Investigations, Sixth Investigation, Chapter VI.
[22] Ibid., p. 720.
[23] Ibid., p. 734.
[24] Husserl, Ideas, Section 99, p. 290.
[25] Husserl, Ideas, section 99, p. 290.
[26] Brentano, Psychology from ant Empirical Standpoint, p. 79.
[27] Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 587.
[28] Ibid., pp. 586-587.
[29] Ibid., p. 638.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 651. It will appear from the analyses in the next section that these acts are “non-objectifying” because they do not refer to their own objects, but rather refer to the objects of underlying presentative acts. For the same reason it will appear that the existentially positing and non-positing acts are “objectifying:” they belong to presentative acts and thus refer to their own “presented objects.”
[32] Husserl at one point informally distinguishes feeling-acts (pleasure, pain and valuation) from the “sphere of desire and volition” (p. 575). However since he treats of desire and volition in the section devoted to “the genus Feeling” (Sec. 15 of the Fifth Investigation), and since these acts have an analogous structure to the feeling-acts, it will be convenient if for the present we refer to them as feeling-acts.
On page 839 Husserl says “questions” are non-objectifying acts. However, we believe his contrary classification of them as objectifying qualities in Section 29 of the Fifth Investigation is the correct one. In conjunction with Section 29, see Section 38.
[33] Husserl, Ideas, Section 129, p. 362.
[34] Ibid., Section 133, n. to page 369.
[35] Ibid., Section 116, p. 326. In the Ideas Husserl maintained that these secondary positions included a doxic positing. Cf. Section 117, p. 331. “Every affective experience, every valuation, wish, and will is characterized in itself either as being certain or as being suggested, or as a presumptive or doubtful valuing, wishing or willing.”
[36] Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, p. 209. Husserl himself stated the identity of his existentially positing acts with Brentano’s judgments on page 639 of the Logical Investigations.
[37] Ibid., pp. 221 and 226.
[38] Brentano, Thc Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong. p. 16.
[39] For a critique of Husserl’s theory of non-objectifying qualities, see our “Husserl and the Inner Structure of Feeling-Acts" Research in Phenomenology, Vol. VI, 1976.
[40] Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 598. Husserl, as well as ourselves, often uses the phrase “intentional experience” or “intentional act” to refer to a moment of an act, as well as to the whole intentional act itself.
[41] Ibid., p. 598.
[42] Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 598.
[43] Ibid., p. 599.
[44] In Section 2 of "On Husserl’s Theory of Consciousness in the Fifth Logical Investigation.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, June, 1977.
[45] Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 648.
[46] Husserl, Logical Investigations. See the “Note” on pages 650-651, where Husserl indirectly states that the interpretative form belongs to the presentation. Also see Section 27 of the Sixth Investigation, where this is explicitly stated.
[47] Ibid., p. 651.
[48] Ibid., p. 650.
[49] Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 570.
[50] Ibid., p. 651.
[51] The text reads “secondary and primary,” which is certainly a misprint.
[52] Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 648.
[53] Husserl, Ideas, Section 116, p. 326. This is not directly stated by Husserl, but is implied by the context of his reference to the “common genus” of “presentation.”
[54] Ibid.
[55] Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, p. 85.
[56] However in acts of “mere” presentation, where there is no judgment of existence made, the feelings are immediately founded on the presentation.
[57] This is only a partial explanation of Husserl’s reasons for rejecting Brentano’s formulation of this proposition. We have given a complete account of these reasons in Section 2 of “On Husserl’s Theory of Consciousness in the Fifth Logical Investigation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, June, 1977. Brentano’s formulation of this proposition is the first formulation that Husserl criticizes, although his critique of Brentano is also contained in his criticisms of the second and third formulations.