ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with determined non-technicality and awareness of the shimmering mirages of the question, with the old issue of what Descartes and Spinoza called ‘objective being’, and what Brentano and the Schoolmen he derived from called ‘intentional inexistence’, and what might less perplexingly simply be called ‘being for thought’. Intentional species, representative ideas, adjusted behaviour, intentional acts themselves, perhaps all these represent such spurious devices, which generate more difficulty than they remove. Intentionality is the truth, to copy a somewhat different phrase of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s, that such exclusive individuality, whether of minds or objects, in relation to the others or among themselves, has no truth. But the lie must be asserted, must almost become the truth, in order that it may be conclusively denied. If logical truths, with their exclusion of impossibilities, are allowed a place in discourse, it is only because impossibilities have already preempted a similar place.
