Intentionality: Reality, Logos, and Open-Endedness

Abstract

One of the few certitudes of everyday life lies in the fact that the individual is very much surrounded by real objects independent of himself, objects which are “out there” and visible to anybody, and which could in no way be identified as states of one person’s consciousness. In this we may clearly observe the exogenous nature of the real: it is something given which invalidates every form of thinking not adaptable to it, and not amenable to the conclusion that the real is “out there.” Philosophy, certainly, does not increase our knowledge of nature (does not allow us to foresee more nor to more adequately describe new experience) when it confines itself to investigating what it means to say that we know what nature is or, in a more general way, that we are in possession of a certain experience. The exogenous character of the real may be something which scarcely needs to be proven, i.e., deduced, but we surely need to have some way of describing it, especially in view of the undeniable fact that the real is external to every individual, something which he therefore witnesses and distinguishes from his own interior processes. The fact that the real is something given does not imply that all the categories used to verbalize it need be accepted as a point of departure: the reference “the real” is not that given in person, and it is not sufficient to say that “the real” refers to what we have in front of us, when it is not clear what is the meaning of “refer to” or “refer to the real,” in view of the circumstance that since what I have before me is outside me, all categories are endogenous.