Husserl’s incomplete revisions of the Sixth Investigation
In 1913 Husserl intended to revise the Sixth Investigation in a radical fashion, but became bogged down (see his letter of 23 June 1913 to Daubert, quoted in Hua XIX/1: xxv), and eventually withheld it when he sent the revised five Investigations to press. Husserl now recognised that his original account of categorial intuition with its realist commitments did not fit comfortably with his new transcendental idealist framework. He made various attempts at a complete reworking of this Investigation in late 1913 and again in 1914, but lost enthusiasm for these revisions during the war years (1914–18), when exhaustion prevented research ‘on behalf of the phenomenology of logic’ ( für die Phänomenologie des Logischen, Findlay II: 177; Hua XIX/2: 533). As he recounted, he could only ‘bear the war and the ensuing “peace”’ by engaging in more general philosophical reflections, specifically the elaboration of his ‘Idea of a phenomenological philosophy’ (Idee einer phänomenologsiche Philosophie, Findlay II: 177; Hua XIX/2: 533). Meanwhile, he gave the manuscripts to Edith Stein who attempted to order them into two articles for the Jahrbuch, but she could not get Husserl to look over her work and the project stalled.
After the war, Husserl turned again to logic and eventually was prevailed upon to publish a limited revision of the Sixth Investigation in spring 1921. In his Foreword, dated Freiburg, October 1920, Husserl regrets that he was unable to produce the radically revised Sixth Investigation promised in 1913, and acknowledges that it was the pressure of friends (including, presumably, his new assistant, Martin Heidegger) that finally forced him to produce this new edition. In fact, Husserl was never satisfied with his revision and continued to work intermittently on a full revision of this crucial Investigation,leaving some drafts that remained unpublished at his death.50 These drafts attempt a complete rethinking of the nature of signs involving a distinction between signitive and significative intentions in attempting to specify the achievement of abstract symbolic thought.51 Husserl was also gradually coming to recognise the contextual aspect of meaning which would lead eventually to his discovery of ‘genetic’ phenomenology in the early 1920s.
In Husserl, E. The Shorter Logical Investigations (Introduction). Routledge, p. XLIII-XLIV.
