relation of the real to the ideal. Husserl doesn’t deal with this question in itself. It surfaces only now and then. His interests are focused above all on concrete research into the intentional structure itself.
By now it should be clear what the [99] sole authentic meaning of the critique of psychologism is, and why such a critique must necessarily be a critique of psychology.
b) What positive contribution does the phenomenological investigation of psychologism make to the question of the concept and interpretation of the phenomenon of truth?
In the present context, we need not develop what phenomenology is, in what investigations it first emerged, and what essential discoveries we owe to it. Instead, from the start we will limit ourselves to the question: What was established about the phenomenon of truth as a result of this phenomenological inquiry? In what context does the phenomenon of truth now emerge? Answering this question will also make it possible for us to characterize intentionality more precisely.
Up to now, we have met truth as a determination or “property” of statements. A true statement, a statement to which truth accrues, has validity and is a truth. This characteristic belongs to the field of validity and ideal being. But now we ask about the connection of the real and the ideal—or more exactly, we ask about the phenomenon in which such a connection is supposedly possible. In our earlier treatment, truth was geared to the statement, and the statement to λόγος in a specific, narrow sense. From now on we will simply call it “λόγος–truth.” We will not ask what this λόγος–truth is in itself, although in a certain sense we have already determined its location. Instead, we now look into the phenomenon of the statement, within which λόγος–truth supposedly has its proper home.
I now aim the investigation not primarily at the spoken statement and its meaning—that which is thought and known as such—but at the act of thinking-what-is-thought, the act of knowing the thing. I mean this not according to the context or method of Lotze, who proceeds from what is “in consciousness” as something constantly and stably given, and goes on from there to the question of objective validity. Rather, our treatment prescinds entirely from validity and nonvalidity, [100] and aims at determining what knowing is at all.
Knowing, as a phenomenological relation, is intentional. This is part of the definition of its essence. The question is: What does knowing direct itself to, and what property does this self-directing have qua cognitive?
The first question: What does knowing direct itself to? In answering the “to what?” we neither wish to put a limit on the objects that are knowable, nor recount that knowing directs itself to houses,