ABSTRACT
How does Derrida’s Husserl fare with all this? It is an essential part of phenomenology that, despite the reduction of the ‘real’, there remains a distance between intention and intended. The immanence of the intended sphere must always accommodate some kind of transcendence. Hence it is crucial for Husserl to retain a distinction parallel to that of Frege’s one between the realms of sense and of reference.1 Husserl explains this precisely by attending to the above-mentioned inherent playfulness of undetermined language. Here, for example, is a famous paragraph that reflects this spirit:
I see a thing, e.g. this box, but I do not see my sensations. I always see one and the same box, however it may be turned and tilted. I always have the same . . . perceived object. But each turn yields a new ‘content of consciousness’. Very different contents are therefore experienced, though the same object is perceived. . . . In the flux of experienced content we imagine ourselves to be in touch with one and the same object; and this itself belongs to the sphere of what we experience. For we experience a ‘consciousness of identity’, i.e. a claim to apprehend identity. On what does this consciousness depend? [We must] reply that the different sensational contents are given, but that we apperceive or ‘take’ them ‘in the same sense’, and that to take them in this sense is an experienced character through which the ‘being of the object for me’ is first constituted.
