what is truly present, what is unclearly enough called "substance" in traditional language.
When Hegel explains in the Preface (ed. Hoffmeister, p. 19), "The true (in philosophy) is to be understood and expressed not a5 substance, but just as much as subject," then this means: The Being of beings, the presence of what is present, is only manifest and thus complete presence when it becomes present as such for itself in the absolute Idea. But since Descartes, idea means: perceptio. Being's coming to itself occurs in speculative dialectic. Only the movement of die idea, the method, is the matter itself. The call "to the thing itself" requires a philosophical method appropriate in it.
However, what the matter of philosophy should be is presumed to be decided from the outset. The matter of philosophy as metaphysics is the Being of beings, their presence in the form of substantiality and subjectivity.
A hundred years later, the call"to the thing itself" again is uttered in Husserl's treatise Philosophy as Exact Science. It was published in the first volume of the journal Logos in 1910-11 (pp. 289 ff.). Again, the call has at first the sense of a rejection. But here it aims in another direction than Hegel's. It concerns naturalistic psychology which claims to be the genuine scientific method of investigating consciousness. For this method blocks access to the phenomena of intentional consciousness from the very b~ginning. But the call "to the thing itself' is at the same time directed against historicism which gets lost in treatises about the standpoints of philosophy and in the ordering of types of philosophical Weltanschauungen. About this Husserl says in italics (ibid., p. 340 ): "The stimulus for investigation must start not with philosophies, but with issues and problems."
And what is at stake in philosophical investigation? In accordance with the same tradition, it is for Husserl as for Hegel the subjectivity of consciousness. For Husserl, the Cartesian Meditations were not only the topic of the Parisian lectures in February, 1920. Rather, since the time following the Logical Investigations, their spirit accompanied the impassioned course of his philosophical investigations to the end. In its negative and also in its positive sense, the call "to the