It is because I need to buy in order to eat and survive that the produce department and its apples have the meanings they do. To say that individuality depends on the regional essence, when fully understood, is to say it depends on the horizon. And the horizon of the world is ultimately just another name for the intentionality of an active, meaning-bestowing subject which grasps its objects by intuition. By intuition, Husserl, like Descartes, means the vision of the object present to consciousness without any mediation, in particular without the mediation of signs or language. Just as for Descartes, the clarity and distinctness of the cogito intuition does not depend on Latin, French or English, so for Husserl the findings of phenomenology are given first without language and only later, when we come to describe the results of our investigations to others, do we need to call on language.
Language describes what is already present to consciousness before the advent of any signs.
Indeed, one of the main obstacles to phenomenology is the interference of language, the prejudices about the phenomena we harbour because of the languages of science and of earlier philosophers. For the purposes of this paper, the important thing is that while the individuality of the object may depend on the ego-horizon structure, it does not depend on the contingencies of any historical language. In his last writings, Husserl comes to realize that language has a more fundamental role to play in the givenness of phenomena and comes close to suggesting that it intervenes before objects become present to consciousness. To accept such a position would, of course, undermine the foundational status of intuition and of the presence of the object, which Husserl, even at the end of his life, was unwilling to do. The intentional is merely a subspecies of the functional, and the functional is merely the sort of property whose attribution depends upon a knowledge of context rather than being observable right off the bat.