board), but with the following difference. In the S = P content- relation, the members of the relation are the thing and the thing’s determination, whereas in Case B, the relation is between the intended as such and the intuited as such. Now [113] if you take this truth-relation of Case B in the very broadest sense, it has the same kind of being as the proposition—ideal being—and so the identity of the intended and the intuited can be understood as ideal being! And so, by a remarkable path, we have come back to where we started.
In the one case, the proposition as one member of the relation is founded on the intuition-truth of identity, whereas in the other case, identity itself as a state of affairs has the same kind of being as a proposition or a propositional state of affairs: ideal being. And in all this, the treatment remains within the bounds of phenomenology. We will want to keep in mind this connection between propositional content and truth-content for when, later on, we take up these connections in more positive analyses.
Now the question comes up: Why is propositional truth connected in a special way with intuitional truth, as a relatum, a member of a relation? And regarding Case B, why does intuitional truth take its truth—insofar as it is understood as identity—back to propositional truth?89 Does there finally exist between the two determinations of truth a more basic connection than the one we showed above, a connection where propositional truth is founded in intuitional truth? In any case, it follows from our demonstration that the truth of intuition has priority; and if a more basic connection does exist between the two, then our inquiry has to reach back behind both of them.
First of all, how is the priority of intuitional truth to be understood? The answer is that truth is so originally a determination of knowledge that we can say that true knowledge is a tautology, because knowledge is knowledge only if it is true knowledge. (False knowledge is like a square circle. If I understand something wrongly, I do not have knowledge of it.) Knowledge was defined as intuition; but not every act of knowledge is an intuition. Nonetheless, true and proper knowledge is intuition, and every other kind of knowledge aims at intuition and has intuition as its “idea,” i.e., its ideal.
Husserl held to this typically broad and principled understanding of intuition as the giving and the having of an entity in its concrete presence. Such an understanding of intuition is not limited to any particular field or any particular faculty, [114] but rather formulates the intentional sense of intuition. With this unique and radical understanding of the concept of intuition, Husserl thought through a great tradition of Western philosophy right to its end.
89.[Following here Moser, p. 238.3–6.]