this knowing passes over into the mode of empty intention, and the empty idea is itself in need of fulfillment. It also has an explicit tendency toward proof, but not in some indeterminate way. Rather, the content of this knowing has an intrinsic directedness toward the field that provides intuitive fulfillment.
Now, what does proof mean? It means that what is intended in the empty idea is brought, just as it is intended, before the very thing that is intended. But why so? We have put all our emphasis on seeing that the empty idea intends the thing itself—yes, but in the mode of emptiness. This mode is modified when confronted with the bodily presence of the thing itself.
The [legitimacy of the] empty idea is proven by the thing itself that is given in intuition and is seen to be identical with what the idea intended. The empty idea proves its legitimacy by way of the thing itself: by identifying what it intended with the thing, and by seeing the thing and the intention as identical. [107] This empty [idea] now sees that what it intended is identical with the thing that is present in intuition.84
In proof, what is emptily intended in the idea and what is intuited are seen as coinciding. But we must understand this figurative way of speaking correctly, i.e., in terms of the structure of the phenomena in question. The coming-to-coincide of the empty idea and the intuited thing is a matter of intentionality. It is not some sort of mental process in which, as it were, (a) two disks—idea and intuition—are superimposed one on top of the other and coincide; and then (b) some later reflection establishes that coincidence has taken place, which is taken as a sign that the empty idea has been proven. No, this proof happens intentionally, as a matter of directedness-toward-something. That is, the empty intentional idea itself, in its tendency to fulfillment, lives in the act of identification, i.e., its nature is to identify itself with something. It is not simply that unreflected proof precedes reflective proof.85 Rather, as intentional, the empty idea that proves itself knows itself as proving itself. In enacting the identification as an intentional act, that very enactment sees the proof and sees that it is the proof of the enactment itself. Proof is not something that gets attached to the empty idea. Rather, it is a mode of the enactment itself.
When I live in the intuition of a thing as a proving intuition, the act of intuiting does not lose itself in the thing and its content. Rather, this content is intuited as bodily present and explicitly as fulfilling, as identifying-itself-with the empty idea. But this implies that knowing lives not only in the thing but also with itself insofar as, in performing the
84. [GA 21 (p. 107.1) mistakes sieht (“it sees”) for sucht (“it seeks”); cf. Moser, p. 224.22.]
85. [Literally, “The proof does not simply go before itself.”]