Dasein - Monoskop

HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGY AND LANGUAGE AS CALCULUS 39
intentional object". This result is avoided by Husserl, however, who
now limits objects of presentations to those objects that exist in the
absolute sense ("an existing, true, real, genuine object" 121 ). Husserl
remarks that this analysis of truth coincides with the classical correspondence
theory. The difference between Husserl's version and the
classical one is supposed to lie merely in the fact that he calls the
presentation "true" whereas the classical, traditional version speaks
of the relation between presentation and object as true, "a case of
this most general equivocation by transference that can hardly be
avoided and which in any case does no harm". 122
To see what precisely is meant here by correspondence and coincidence
(" Übereinstimmung^), Husserl tells us that we have to turn
to cases of "self-evidence" (Evidenz), in which truth is immediately
experienced. It is important for a proper understanding, not only
of the passage at hand, but of Husserl's whole later phenomenology
to appreciate his claim that self-evidence is not a criterion of truth,
or some feeling of regarding something as true, but the experience
of truth. This can best be understood by means of a mathematical
example that perhaps was the model for the entire treatment of
truth and evidence in Husserl. One of Husserl's examples suggests
that he would call x 2 = 4 a presentation to which 2 corresponds as
the true-making object. 123 2 2 = 4 is the truth that is experienced in
self-evidence. Yet what is experienced here, is not something empirical
but rather an ideal relation between an ideal meaning and an
ideal object: x 2 = 4 and 2 are so related to each other that their correspondence
is self-evident as something that holds independently
of anything that pertains to the thinking subject as an empirical
entity. What is experienced here is therefore the ideal relation between
a meaning type and an object type, not between two tokens.
This is so because one's ability to come back over and over again
to this self-same truth is part of the experienced self-evidence. It
is the ideality of the relation between the relata and the ideality of
both relata themselves that rules out the possibility of l 2 = 4 being
self-evident. To judge that 1 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 cannot be regarded as
the perception or experience of a truth simply because it is false.
Someone might, of course, think that the false equation is true, but
that does not give one any reason for saying that he has perceived a