Dasein - Monoskop

HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGY AND LANGUAGE AS CALCULUS 17
sentences with such a strong psychologistic flavour at all must be
understood against the background of the threat of formalism. For
Husserl it is the accessibility of meaning as the central ingredient
of the calculus conception that has to be defended first and foremost,
and hence it is the meaning-neglecting formalism that has to
be avoided at all costs. For the same reason, it is crucial to demonstrate
to the mathematicians that they cannot avoid questions about
meaning and that they cannot solve the philosophical problems of
their own science by stipulation. Furthermore, it seems that Husserl
thought that formalism and a "formal" logical definition of number
both end up on the same wrong meaning-denying side of the fence:
Frege does not aim for a psychological analysis of the concept of
number at all; he does not expect that such an analysis could
clarify the foundations of arithmetic; ... Founding arithmetic
upon a series of formal [!] definitions from which all theorems of
that science can be purely syllogistically derived, that is Frcgc's
ideal. 23
Husserl's own account of (finite) cardinal numbers thus seeks to show
that numbers have meaning, that we do have number concepts. But
Husserl—unlike Frege—also holds that the concept of number cannot
be defined, since we are dealing here with "ultimate, elementary
concepts", where *[...] all defining comes to an end". 24 The way
to grasp the meanings of these kinds of concepts therefore has to
proceed by laying bare the type of abstraction as whose result these
meanings emerge. 25
In his Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) 26 Frege had made it
clear that any attempt to base the concept of number on psychological
considerations, that is, any attempt to let the concept of number
emerge as an abstraction from concrete configurations of objects,
runs into the problem of having to deal with different numbers in
different ways. On the one hand, 0 and 1 are not multiplicities at
all 27 : on the other hand, large numbers cannot be abstracted from
concrete configurations of objects, since the respective multiplicities
cannot be given as concrete configurations in intuition (Anschauung).
Husserl accepts Frege's analysis but rejects its conclusion.
For Husserl, the fact that a psychological investigation has to treat