The Origin of Judgment :: Judgment Edmund Husserl Essays

The Origin of Judgment Introduction The guiding thesis of Experience and Judgment is that logic demands a foundational theory of experience, which at the lowest level is described as prepredicative or prelinguistic.1 Edmund Husserl pursues within that text a phenomenological elucidation of the origin of judgment in order that he might clarify the essence of the predicative judgment. He does so in the belief that an investigation into the form of prepredicative experience will show it to be the ground of the structure of predicative thought, and thus the origin of general, conceptual thought. From the beginning, Husserl takes the problematic of logic as being two-fold: on the one hand there is the question of the constitution of forms of judgment and their laws; and on the other, that of the subjective conditions of the attainment of self-evidence.2 He gives his investigation into this problematic in Experience and Judgment a tripartite structure, with each part corresponding to a different level of experience. This paper will loosely mirror Husserl’s own division, beginning with an articulation of what Husserl means by the prepredicative domain of experience. This will be followed by an examination of the origins of judgment in the prepredicative realm. Finally it will address simple predicative judgment and give a cursory treatment of the manner in which Husserl sees such judgment as progressing toward knowledge and universal judgment. All of this will be preceded, however, by a brief introduction to the arguments of Experience and Judgment. In Part I of Experience and Judgment, Husserl proceeds with an analysis of the â€Å"passive† data of experience. It is here that Husserl hopes to exhibit what he refers to as the â€Å"prepredicative† conditions of predication as such. These prepredicative conditions underlie every act of objective experience, such that these structures ultimately found the distinct forms of judgment that one would encounter on the level of formal logic. Part II concerns the structure of predicative thought as such; that is, it is concerned with the origin of predicative forms of judgment in prepredicative experience. Husserl argues that on the level of predicative thought, "objectivities of understanding† are realized in acts of categorical judgment, which form the logical structures necessary to the founding of a formal logic. The origin of general, conceptual thought is treated in Part III. The process of isolating the forms of judgment from the data of pregiven subjective exp erience, begun in Part II, is here continued.