so-being, but it needs to be further generalized, since there are further realms
of so-being which are not quantifiable. Meinong parallels Husserl’s exploration
of realms beyond naturalistic objects, and in several respects he too formulates
something like Husserl’s phenomenology and a generalization of mathematics.
It is not surprising that these two philosophers, originating close together in
the network, should have regarded each other’s ideas with rivalry and distrust
(Lindenfeld, 1980: 244–246). But each combined his own blend of ingredients.
Meinong had links to empirical psychology and to naturalism, from which
Husserl expressly distanced himself. Where Meinong grants logical paradoxes
(the square circle) the quasi-ontological status of subsisting objects, Husserl,
as an ex-mathematician seeking deductive essential truth, finds it absurd to do
so. On the territory of logic, Meinong remained the loyalist of the Brentano
lineage, willing to give priority to the empirical propensities of the mind to
think in terms of noun slots, even if what we put into those slots is not
coherent. Husserl moved in tandem with the mathematical logicists, scuttling
the psychological level as the realm of superficial mistakes. For a few years
Meinong was the more famous of the two; after 1910 Meinong’s solutions
were upstaged while Husserl’s phenomenological movement took off.
As the Frege camp from which Husserl started developed toward the logical
positivism of the Vienna Circle, and as Meinong expanded the realm of objects,
Husserl shifted his alliances and moved toward a non-religious Idealism. The
question arises of the status of the ego in the process of epochê: If conscious-
ness is purely intentional, how can it intend itself, which is not an object but
only an empty unifier or frame? Husserl uncovers successive levels of reduction:
the empirical ego of psychology, the ego of the epochê, and finally an imper-
sonal transcendental ego, which is the ultimate ground of the very possibility
of consciousness. This position, developed around 1913 in Ideas, brought
Husserl closer to the Neo-Kantians; at this time he became friendly with
Rickert, with whom Husserl in 1910 had founded the journal Logos, and who
recommended Husserl as his own successor to the professorship at Freiburg
(Roberts, 1972: 159).
A phenomenological movement now grew up. At first it comprised two
circles (Spiegelberg, 1982). One surrounded Husserl at Göttingen during 1907–
1916; its object-centered phenomenology remained relatively close to Meinong.
Among its members were Heinrich Rickert, Jr., son of the Neo-Kantian leader;
Koyré, a former pupil of Bergson from Paris; Roman Imgarden; Helmuth
Plessner, who later developed philosophical anthropology and was influen-
tial in German sociology; William Ernest Hocking, a Harvard protégé of
Royce; and Jean Hering, an Alsatian who became the leader of a Strasbourg
school of Protestant theologians, influential in introducing phenomenology into
France after that region was ceded from Germany at the end of the First World
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^741