ABSTRACT
In an article from 1930 Moritz Geiger, an eyewitness to the period in which Munich phenomenology arose, already pointed out that Johannes Daubert (1877–1947) was the thinker “who did more to make the Logical Investigations known than anyone else.” 1 Daubert carried out his activities as the architect of the phenomenological movement above all in the circle of Theodor Lipps’s students in Munich, to which he himself had belonged as a student since winter semester 1898–99. Because the Lipps students had been in the habit of meeting regularly since 1895 in the so-called “Academic Club for Psychology,” he had a welcome platform for the propagation of Husserlian phenomenology, which he discovered for himself roughly in the spring of 1902 and which had obviously gripped him immediately as the way of philosophizing most congenial to him. That is to say, around that time the two volumes of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, which appeared in 1900 and 1901, must have fallen into his hands. 2 He found the study of the rather substantial work to be a “cleansing bath,” 3 which obviously rid him quickly of the dross of Lipps’s psychology. In August 1899 Daubert had received from Lipps as the topic of his planned dissertation “the consciousness of actuality.” In the sense of Lipps’s psychology, the consciousness of actuality is to be defined as the consciousness of certain demands that objects make on a psychic being. Whereas a fantasied object submits right away to all the changes I impose upon it, an actual object instead requires for its part a definite kind of treatment. One can move a fantasied rock in thought without any effort; a real rock, by contrast, only with the use of force. For Daubert, however, the question of the consciousness of actuality would soon shift to the sphere of judgment, more precisely, to that of existential judgment. Objects are actual that I legitimately and for convincing reasons characterize as existent. In light of this logical interest (with its unmistakable Brentanist background), 4 it is understandable how Husserl’s Logical Investigations, particularly the theory of judgment in the Fifth Investigation, could have been of special interest to him. 5 Furthermore, this work also paid extensive attention to the concept of the state of affairs as the objective correlate of significational and judicative consciousness and thereby accommodated Daubert’s second, more ontologically oriented interest in what ‘actuality’ and ‘actual object’ mean. 6 As is well known, this Daubertian realism represents an important point of common ground within the earliest branch of phenomenology, which goes back to Daubert’s activities in Munich.
