HUSSERL'S THEORY OF INTENTIONALITY: THE IDEALITY THESIS, EVIDENCE, AND THE OPEN EXPERIENCE

In the Logical Investigations, Husserl proposed intentionality as the basic mode of objective reference. When the mind's intention is satisfied by the limiting self-givenness of the object, then the subject has evidence for his assertion. The evidence Husserl means is self-evidence, and since self-evidence provides the ideal form of knowledge, it is in self-evidence that the judging subject can experience the certitude which alone constitutes the rational foundation of knowledge. For Husserl, philosophic certainty is a kind of insight.;Husserl's theory of the ideal nature of meaning is the foundation of the notion of intentionality. The ideality thesis should establish that meanings are objective, that they are internally related to the mental life of persons, and that they serve as media of reference. The ideality thesis is meant to preclude the notion of mental privacy and to situate the thinking subject in the communicative world. For this, Husserl needed a criterion of identity that only the ideality thesis can provide.;But the argument of this essay reveals that Husserl's notion of self-evidence is not credible since he cannot relieve the experiential aspect of the having-of-evidence from its contingent character. The argument further shows that the alleged relationship between ideal objects and evidence is circular: he refers to evidence to establish the thesis that there are ideal objects, which he can do only if evidence guarantees truth; but the assertion that evidence guarantees truth is itself established by the proposition that evidence consists in perception of ideal objects.;Accordingly, the essay concludes that the intentional relation does not imply the self-evidence thesis. Husserl's argument for the possibility of indubitable knowledge depends on the complete convergence of the mean and the given. But since we are always given more than we mean, and we always mean more than we are given, the concept of the intentional relation implies, instead, the dialectic, not the coincidence, of the meant and the given. Husserl's theory of the intentional relation and his notion of philosophic certainty are contrary lines of thought. Intentionality implies the openness of experience.