ABSTRACT
Husserl is perhaps the most radical and formidable proponent of the ‘rationalistic’ solution to the problem of meaning. His work, which revolutionized the twentieth century’s approach to the task of hermeneutics, spans the highest claims ever made in the name of truth-seeking reason, and the revelation of limits which the pursuit of apodictic interpretation can never surpass. The method of phenomenological reduction, which was Husserl’s answer to the historical relativity of understanding, required (in Paul Ricoeur’s description) that consciousness cuts itself off from its historical and social entanglements, and constitutes itself as an absolute; when consciousness becomes the sole world left at the end of reduction, all beings will become meanings for consciousness; they will have no predicates but those which are relative to consciousness. Then-and then only-consciousness liberated from the world will be capable of grasping the true meaning; not the contingent meaning, meaning as it happens to be seen-but meaning in its true, necessary essence.
