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RECOGNITION

their own proper way. In severing the bond between reason and calculation, Husserl moves beyond a procedural view of reason to what might be called a teleological and intuitive or evidential account of reason. Reason is a striving for evidence . The intuitive, evidential experiences for which reason strives take different forms in cognition and theoretical science, in valuation and axiological science, and in volition and the practical sciences. Nevertheless, common to all the forms of reason is that they involve this striving for experiences in which our emptily intended judgments are confirmed or disconfirmed by intuitive insight into the directly, clearly, and distinctly presented things themselves. Insofar as it is primarily judgments and their combinations whose confirmation is the task of reason, the notion of reason presupposes the idea that the first task of reason is to articulate objects , to introduce syntax or categoriality into things. Husserl devoted most of his energies to discussion of theoretical reason and, unfortunately, did not develop the details of his notions of axiological and practical reason. Nevertheless, he clearly believed that in all three rational domains, the aim of experiential life is the same to live the life of reason, the life of evidential insight. The achievement of evidenced truth is for Husserl the full exercise of reason in its various forms. Husserl believes we are called to this full exercise of reason he calls it authenticity or self-responsibility and it is just this call that provides the moral urgency at the center of his philosophy. T here is a moral imperative that each person rediscover the proper sense of rationality and develop a sense of self-responsibility in which one decides for oneself in the light of evidence about what is true, about the proper evaluative attitudes one ought to have, and about the actions one ought to perform. See also CATEGORIAL ACT; CATEGORIAL FO RM ; CAT EG O RIAL IN T U IT IO N; CATEGORIAL OBJECT; CAT EGORY; EM PT Y INT ENT ION; INT UIT ION; RECOGN IT IO N ; VALUE. RECOGNITION (das Erkennen) . Recognition is the relation of static union that arises when a sense-giving thought, a meaning-intention , bases itself on intuition and is thereby related to its object. The words expressing the meaning-intention overlay, as it were, the object of intuition, and there arises a synthesis of identification between the meaning-intention and the fulfilling intention belonging to the intuitive act . Recognition occurs, for example, when I speak of an object in its presence and while inspecting it. The recognition is not identical to the intuition, but necessarily involves it and is based upon it. I recognize the object as what it is, and accordingly, I name the object as, say, a desk. The synthesis of recognition is