The overlap of psychology and philosophy was not foreign to
Husserlian phenomenology. Indeed, one of the founding traumas in
Husserl’s philosophical development was a scathing review of his early
The Philosophy of Arithmetic( 1891 ) by the logician Gottlob Frege, who
criticized its argument for being “psychologistic” in nature; that is, for
confusing psychological causes for logical reasons, fact with essence.^24
From that moment on, Husserl became the relentless critic of psycholo-
gism, and yet his “descriptive method” flirted with this temptation in
one form or another for the next decade.
Sartre seems not to have read any of Husserl’s works published after
his fellowship year in Berlin. Specifically, he is known to have read only
theLogical Investigations, the 1905 Lectures on Inner Time Consciousness,
Ideas I,Experience and Judgmentand theCartesian Meditations, which are
lectures given by Husserl at the Sorbonne in 1929 and originally pub-
lished in French. Though Sartre did not attend those lectures himself, it
is likely that he would have heard of their content from Merleau-Ponty,
who did attend. If this is correct, then it counts as another source of
second-hand information on Husserl’s thought provided to Sartre prior
to his Berlin adventure.^25 Aron’s claim about a concrete philosophy may
written first, even thoughTranscendence of the Egowas published in 1936 – 1937 and the24 intentionality article did not appear until^1939. SeeSFP^27 –^29.
“Psychologism” carries a number or meanings but in the dispute between logic and
mathematics, to which Frege refers, it reduces mathematical reasoning to psychological
phenomena, the a priori to the empirical; in other words, it denies the “autonomy” of
mathematical reasoning. As the chastened Husserl would later say, it reduces “essence” to
empirical “fact.” J. S. Mill is recognized as having defended such a reductionist view of
mathematics in his influentialSystems of Logic( 2 vols., 8 th edn., London, 1872 ). Ironically,
despite Husserl’s apparent volte-face in view of this critique, if Frege was correct, Husserl
had abandoned a basic tenet of his Viennese professor, Bernard Bolzano (see below,note 30 ).
Indeed, perhaps this thought motivated Husserl’s immediate and chastened reaction.
(^25) De Coorebyter cites yet another source, Georges Gurvitch,Les Tendences actuelles de la
philosophie allemande(E. Husserl,M. Scheler,E. Lask,N. Hartmann,M. Heidegger), with a
preface by Le ́on Brunschvicg, published by Vrain in 1930 and probably read by Sartre. In his
avant-propos, Gurvitch remarks: “The title of the present work is justified by the completely
preponderant role that the phenomenological movement plays in contemporary German
philosophy” ( 9 ). Indeed, he devotes the opening chapter of fifty-five pages to “the founder of
phenomenological philosophy,” leaving just half that amount to “the new orientation given to
phenomenological philosophy by Martin Heidegger: the descriptive analytic of existence”
( 207 ). The recently deceased Scheler receives the lion’s share of the consideration, eighty-
five pages, while Lask and Hartmann are discussed in the same chapter. Clearly, Husserl and
Scheler, who is treated as a follower of Husserl despite the fact that they never met, are the
60 Teaching in the lyce ́e, 1931–1939