”
The preceding chapter introduced Husserl's conception of the new science of phenomenology and outlined some of the main results in his analysis of the structure of consciousness. This chapter explores, in closer detail, the basic theory and methodology developed in Husserl's system of phenomenology. By practicing a special method of reflection on our experience, “bracketing” the question of the existence of the world we experience, Husserl explicates the structure of intentionality, wherein consciousness intends or represents an object in a certain way: through a given meaning or “noema,” which takes its place in a “horizon” of meaning, in which the object is “constituted” in consciousness as having various possible properties. At the same time, Husserl uses that model of intentionality to explicate his method of reflection on the meaningful content of experience. Husserl's theory of intentionality – featuring structures of noema and horizon – distinguishes phenomenology, in his view, from empirical psychology. For Husserl, phenomenology is part “phenomena” and part “logic,” and their integration is carried out in the details of his theory of intentionality. Our task now is to explain Husserl's revolutionary notions – intentionality, noema, horizon, constitution – in as simple a way as possible while laying out the key terms and their use in his articulation of phenomenology.
The conventional wisdom about Husserl's philosophical development sees a radical shift as Husserl moves from the Logical Investigations (1900–1) to Ideas I (1913), from his early period to his middle period and beyond. In the Investigations Husserl rejected 19th-century psychologism, which would reduce logic and mathematics, and other forms of knowledge, to contingent forms of human activity. Rather, Husserl held, philosophy should begin with a logic that studies ideal meanings, analyzing the relations of entailment among propositions and the semantic correlations of meanings with objects in the world, whereby propositions represent states of affairs in the world. Objective knowledge then supports propositions with appropriate evidence. And within these structures of meaning and knowledge, Husserl held, we find intentionality and thus phenomenology. In Ideas I, the conventional reading says, Husserl then took a radical “transcendental” turn. Phenomenology is no longer a step along the road from pure logic to objectivity of knowledge. Rather, phenomenology becomes the foundation of both logic and theory of knowledge, and of ontology as well. What we mean (logic), what we know (epistemology), and even what there is (ontology) are all defined within the structure of consciousness called intentionality. In the Kantian “transcendental” idiom, intentionality is the condition of the possibility of logic, epistemology, and ontology. For all meaning resides in consciousness, and the task of phenomenology is precisely to analyze the structures of meaning that we find in our conscious experiences of seeing, thinking, and willing. In this way, so the story goes, transcendental phenomenology provides a foundation for all of philosophy and indeed for all forms of understanding in philosophy, in the sciences, and in the arts.
What is missed in this conventional reading of Husserl, however, is the unity of Husserl's philosophy. This unity, explored in Chapter 2 of this volume, is laid out in the long course of argument in the Logical Investigations. Virtually all of that story remains in place in Ideas I. In the narrative line of Ideas I, Part One recapitulates and reorganizes basic principles of ontology largely charted in the Investigations, recast as the theory of fact and essence. These ontological principles are part of Husserl's conception of logic and its cognate ontology (detailed in the Investigations, reorganized here in launching Ideas I). Part Two then develops Husserl's mature account of the aims and methods of phenomenology, featuring the technique of “bracketing” the world in order to study “pure” consciousness. Part Three follows with Husserl's core distinctions among consciousness, sensation, intentionality, and the technical notions of “noesis” and “noema” (concrete experience and ideal meaning content). Finally, Part Four focuses on reason, evidence (“intuition”), and the objectivity of knowledge. This course of argument in Ideas I is broadly the same as that in the Investigations. Accordingly, the unity of Husserl's overall philosophical system remains in place – and continues to frame his work after Ideas I as well.
In Ideas I, important details of Husserl's system are either tacitly assumed or greatly compressed, including the lengthy accounts of logic itself, of how language expresses intentional content (philosophy of language), and of parts or “moments” (ontology). There are important revisions in the account of intentional content reconceived as noema (which we study in detail later in this chapter). As Ideas I unfolds, the focus is on Husserl's full account of phenomenology, its methods, and its core notion of noema. What is new is not a radical reduction of all the world to our ideas (patterns of noemata), but rather a very close account of how reflection on our experience explicates the intentionality of consciousness, revealing the contents of experiences and their role in directing consciousness toward objects in the world around us. This mature account of phenomenology presupposes principles of ontology and a broadly logical analysis of how meaning directs experience toward objects in the world.
We may hear strains of metaphysical idealism in Ideas I (§49), sung with the Kantian idiom of “transcendental idealism.” Yet these idealist notes do not resonate with the rest of Husserl's philosophical system, wherein our thoughts are directed by objective meanings toward objective states of affairs in the world. Husserl often sought to incorporate into his own system major themes from other philosophers, including Brentano, Bolzano, Leibniz, Descartes, and Hume. Teaching in Germany in a period when neo-Kantian philosophy was prominent, Husserl wove into Ideas I Kantian themes of transcendental idealism. Yet Husserl's system differs from Kant's on important fundamentals of epistemology and ontology. We note these differences in passing, but here keep the focus on Husserl's “pure” phenomenology.
Our strategy in exploring Husserl's mature conception of phenomenology will be to trace the development of Husserl's account of method, his practice of that method, and his basic results in the unfolding theory of intentionality. In this path we shall follow Husserl through the highlights of Ideas I.
As an initial gloss, we may say that phenomenology studies the way we experience various forms of consciousness, characterizing “what it is like” to experience these states of consciousness. Some philosophers today think phenomenology addresses only what it is like to have sensory experiences, thereby describing the qualitative characters or sensory “qualia” of seeing red and the like. But Husserl's conception of phenomenology is far richer, and he was much exercised to develop a proper methodology for the new science of phenomenology.
The task of phenomenology, in Husserl's view, is to abstract the structure and content of an experience from the flow of consciousness, so that we may reflect on various forms of consciousness and their significance. In Logical Investigations (1900–1) Husserl developed the theoretical framework within which phenomenology was defined, featuring the intentionality of consciousness. Abstraction was a prominent theme in the Investigations, as Husserl addressed ideal meaning abstracted from uses of language, ideal species abstracted from concrete individuals, “moments” (dependent or “abstract” parts) abstracted from concrete wholes of which they are parts, and finally ideal intentional contents abstracted from “real” acts of consciousness. Subsequently, in Ideas I (1913), Husserl laid out an explicit methodology for phenomenology. The main technique he called “bracketing” or “parenthesizing” (Einklammerung). He sometimes declared this method his greatest achievement. Yet he felt the method was widely misunderstood by friend and foe alike.
Today, with the benefit of philosophical hindsight, we can define Husserl's methodology fairly simply, by using what we know about Husserl's theory of intentionality and related features of language appraised in Logical Investigations. In this recounting, Husserl's phenomenological method “brackets” the object of consciousness – and the surrounding world in general – in order to shift our focus on to the sense or meaning through which the object is experienced. Husserl then displays the sense by a “quotation” of the sense – much as linguistic quotation shifts our attention from what we are talking about to the words we are using to talk about it. In this way, we abstract meaningful content, or sense (Sinn), from our passing acts of consciousness. (This interpretation of Husserl's method, based on his theory of intentionality, is developed in Dreyfus 1982 and Smith and McIntyre 1982.)
Husserl's revolutionary technique of bracketing consists in a transformation (in the first person) from (1) my consciousness of that object to (2) my consciousness of that object. Husserl the mathematician would see this transformation as a mapping from the object of my experience to the experience itself: as it were,
B(E(o)) = E
where E is an experience that aims me toward o (glossed as a function E that assigns to me the object o if such exists), and B is a function that assigns to E(o) the function E.
Of course, Husserl does not “mathematize” the transformation in this way, for that gloss would miss the important experiential aspect of the transformation. (In this spirit, Thomasson 2005 characterizes bracketing as a “cognitive transformation.”)
Indeed, Husserl characterizes the technique of bracketing as a shift in attitude. In the “natural” attitude I see that tree across the way. Now I “bracket” the question of its existence. Thereby I focus on the way the object is presented in my seeing it, the sense it has for me in my visual experience, regardless of whether it exists. By this shift in attitude, I turn toward my consciousness-of-the-object through a modification of my intention of that object. Rather than peering “inward” to see what is transpiring in my mind, as classical introspectionist psychology may have seemed to suggest, I proceed, as it were, through the object of my experience to my experience of the object. That is, I turn toward a consciousness that I experience as consciousness-of-objects-in-the-world. (A characterization of phenomenological method as rooted in “outer observation” is developed in Thomasson 2005. A somewhat different take on the attitude shift is developed in Sokolowski 2000.)
In the “natural attitude,” Husserl observes, we take for granted the existence of the world around us: that is, “I and my surrounding world [Umwelt]” (Ideas I, §27). As Husserl writes, “I am conscious of a world, endlessly spread out in space, endlessly becoming and having become in time…. Through seeing, touching, hearing, etc.,… corporeal things in their respective spatial distribution are for me simply there…” (§27, my translation). The assumption that there is such a world, “out there” surrounding me, Husserl calls “the general thesis of the natural attitude.” Suppose I place this thesis in brackets or parentheses (§§30–2). I do not deny the thesis, indeed I continue to accept it, but I do not make any use of it. Then as I look around me, I attend not to the presumably existing things of which I am conscious, but to my consciousness of them. I shift my attention from the objects of my consciousness to my consciousness of those objects. In this modified attitude, the phenomenological attitude, I practice phenomenology in a dedicated way: thus, I reflect on my consciousness of such-and-such things, regardless of whether such things exist in the world around me. Our goal in the practice of bracketing, Husserl declares (§33), is “the winning of… a new region of being [Seinsregion],” the region of “pure experiences,” “pure consciousness,” its pure “correlates of consciousness” (namely, meanings), and its “pure I.”
Husserl's phenomenological method of bracketing can be elaborated as follows, in the first-person singular:
1 The general thesis of the natural attitude is the implicit thesis that there exists a world around me, in which I and my activities occur.
2 In order to shift my attention away from things in the world around me, I bracket, and so make no use of, the general thesis of the natural attitude.
3 I then attend to my consciousness of things in the world.
4 In this modified attitude toward the world, I give phenomenological descriptions of various types of experience just as I experience them.
Husserl also called this method epoché (§32), meaning that I abstain from positing the existence of the world I experience. (Epoché is a Greek word meaning to abstain, a word used by the ancient Greek skeptics.) Further, Husserl called the method “phenomenological reduction,” speaking of “reductions” in the plural (§§56ff.), wherein I suspend specific theses about the existence of the world, including theses from the natural sciences, theology, even logic. Thus, in a pure description of my experience, I suspend what I know about physics, what I know about God, even what I know about logical inference.
Husserl insisted that in the attitude of epoché “I do not then negate this ‘world’, as though I were a sophist, I do not doubt its existence (Dasein), as though I were a skeptic” (§32, my translation). So phenomenological reduction is not ontological reduction, where the material world is reduced to ideas in the mind, as Berkeley had proposed. Nor is epoché a kind of epistemological reduction or retraction, where knowledge of the external world is reduced or withdrawn into knowledge of consciousness, as a Cartesian skeptic might have held. Yet it is not without reason that Husserl's readers heard echoes of Cartesian skepticism and Berkeleyan idealism in this talk of “bracketing” the world. At one place Husserl even spoke of a methodological “nullification” (Vernichtung) of the world (§49). Husserl had not chosen the best tactic for trying to explicate his phenomenological method. He might better have introduced his method by drawing on the foundations of phenomenology laid in the Logical Investigations, where phenomenology is to study the structure of consciousness, including the intentional contents or meanings that distinguish various types of experience.
We can recast the account of phenomenological method in terms of the theory of intentionality:
1 My consciousness is usually a consciousness of something.
2 In order to shift my attention away from objects in the world around me, I bracket the thesis of the existence of the world including those objects.
3 I then attend to my consciousness of objects in the world.
4 In this modified attitude toward the world, I give phenomenological descriptions of various types of experience just as I experience them, where these descriptions characterize the contents or meanings of such experiences, presenting objects as experienced, regardless of whether the objects represented by these meanings exist.
In this account of phenomenological method we make use of Husserl's basic (ontological) theory of intentionality: an act of consciousness is intentionally directed via a meaning toward an object. Phenomenology studies the experience and its content or meaning, not the object represented by the meaning. Thus we ascend from our first-order experience of things in the world to our higher-order reflection on our ordinary experience and its meaning (somewhat as W. V. Quine spoke of a “semantic ascent” from language to talk about language).
This intentionality-based perspective on method does not, however, follow the pedagogical course of Ideas I. As Husserl began his account of method early in Ideas I (§§27ff.), he did not yet – in the course of argument in that book – have any theory of intentionality to use in characterizing method. This theory itself was to be developed through the practice of phenomenology, as the discipline would unfold in Ideas I. Thus, as he begins to practice phenomenology, Husserl is attending to consciousness as experienced (§33). And the basic character of consciousness, of each conscious experience, is to be a consciousness of something, to be intentional – here is the basic form of consciousness (§§33–6, 84). As his analysis of the structure of intentionality unfolds (§§84–5, 88–90, 128–31), Husserl appraises the way in which consciousness presents its object: in the first person, I see or imagine or think of or desire an object as thus-and-so. To characterize an experience phenomenologically, Husserl shows, we appraise the content or meaning of the experience and its role in presenting the object of consciousness as thus-and-so. Here we find Husserl practicing phenomenological method, and his ultimate characterization of what he is doing is telling: he is analyzing the meaning in an experience, as opposed to the corresponding object of the experience (§§88–90). Indeed, he is doing so by using a variation on a familiar logical device: quotation.
Suppose I am in my garden regarding a tree in springtime. I construct a phenomenological description of my act of perception:
I see this blossoming Japanese plum tree.
If in phenomenological reflection I attend to my visual experience, practicing the method of phenomenological reduction, here is how I might characterize the results of my reflection – in Husserl's prose:
“In” the reduced perception (in the phenomenologically pure experience [Erlebnis]) we find, as belonging inextricably to its essence, the perceived as such, to be expressed as “material thing,” “plant,” “tree,” “blossoming,” and so forth. The quotation marks [Anführungszeichen] are obviously significant; they express that change in sign, the corresponding radical modification of the meaning of the words. The tree simpliciter [schlechthin], the thing in nature, is anything but [ist nichts weniger als] this perceived tree as such, which as perceptual sense [Wahrnehmungssinn] belongs inseparably to the perception. The tree simpliciter can burn up, be resolved into its chemical elements, etc. But the sense [Sinn] – the sense of this perception, something belonging necessarily to its essence – cannot burn up; it has no chemical elements, no forces, no real properties.
(Ideas I, §89, my translation)
So what I find in my experience through phenomenological reflection, Husserl says, is not the physical tree, but the sense “this blossoming Japanese plum tree”: the content of my experience, carrying the way the tree is perceived, as opposed to the physical tree itself.
What is Husserl saying in this dense but revealing passage? Normally, in the natural attitude, I take it that in seeing a tree I am related to the tree in space and time: my visual experience is directed toward and, in my mind, partly caused by the tree spatiotemporally before me on the occasion of my experience. However, in the phenomenological attitude, I “reduce” the experience by bracketing the thesis of the existence of the world around me, including the actual physical tree before me. This is what Husserl means by “phenomenological reduction.” What do I find in my experience through phenomenological analysis? Part of the essence of my “lived experience” (Erlebnis) is what Husserl calls the perceived tree as such, the tree as perceived, which Husserl says is the perceptual sense (Sinn) in the experience. Where the object of my perception, the tree itself, is a physical object that can burn up, the sense in my perception is something entirely different, something that cannot burn up and is not a physical object at all. Yet this sense of the object as perceived belongs “inseparably” to the perception, the perceptual experience. What my phenomenological description of my experience characterizes, then, is the sense in the experience, not the object of the experience. That is the point of bracketing: put in parentheses the presumed existence of the object, the tree that is presumably before me and affecting my eyes; attend instead to the meaning or sense through which that tree is represented in my experience. In this way I appreciate the intentionality of my perceptual experience.
In the passage previously quoted we should notice a very simple device that forms the heart of Husserl's method of bracketing: the device of quotation!
Suppose I say: “That is a plum tree.”You ask: “What did you say?” I answer, quoting my own words: “I said: ‘That is a plum tree.’” When I first said, “That is a plum tree,” I was asserting that a certain plant is a plum tree. But when I quoted my assertion, reporting what I said, I was not asserting this fact: instead, I was reporting my words, and therewith the meaning of my words, that is, what I said. Quotation thus shifts my attention away from the tree, whose existence I assume, to my statement, to my words and so to the meaning of my sentence, the sense of my assertion. The shift to the phenomenological attitude, through the technique Husserl called bracketing, is similar to this shift. And, as we saw, Husserl uses precisely the device of quotation to effect the phenomenological shift away from the object of my consciousness to my sense of that object.
When I see that Japanese plum tree, my perception posits the tree with a certain arboreal type. That is, my experience is intentionally directed through the perceptual sense “that Japanese plum tree” toward a particular arboreal being, and my experience carries the attitude of positing the existence of what is represented through that sense, assuming the existence of the world around me. Now I shift my attention from the tree itself to my perceptual consciousness of the tree. In phenomenological description I report: “I see ‘that Japanese plum tree’.” In the phenomenological attitude I am not concerned with the existence of such a tree as I see, with the tree itself; I am concerned with my experience of seeing the tree. In my report I quote (as it were) the content or sense of my visual experience: “that Japanese plum tree.” This phenomenological quotation (to give it a name) thus shifts my attention from the tree I am seeing to my visual experience of the tree, and specifically to the sense in my perception, the sense that presents or represents the tree itself in a certain way, the sense expressed by my words in quotation marks. I am thus reporting what I see, just as I see it: “that Japanese plum tree.” In effect, I quote that content, my perceptual sense: my shifting regard moves from the object itself toward that content or meaning, moving straightway through the words to the sense they draw from my experience.
Normally, we quote words, whose sense we immediately grasp if the words are familiar. When we specify the words a person used, we are normally trying to specify, as exactly as his words allow, what he said, that is, the content or sense of his statement. Here, in the practice of phenomenology, I use the quoted words “that Japanese plum tree” to focus directly on sense, the noematic sense in my experience. In phenomenological or noematic quotation, then, we focus on the sense these words draw out from my experience. Noematic quotation thus moves straightway through words to the sense in the experience on which I am reflecting. If we use angle brackets in addition to the usual quotation marks, we can say the sense <that Japanese plum tree> is the noematic sense in my perceptual experience, the sense expressed (within the limits of language) by the words “that Japanese plum tree,” words I so use in noematic quotation.
Husserl might have been wise to lay more emphasis on this technique of “phenomenological quotation,” since “phenomeno-logical reduction” can sound like ontological reduction. He could then have stressed the connection to language, relying on his own prior account of the relation between language and experience. In the Logical Investigations Husserl had developed an extensive account of language, holding that the meaning (Bedeutung) of a sentence is the expressed sense (Sinn) of an appropriate underlying act of judgment. When we quote a sentence in a familiar language, we thus rely on the extant semantics of that language, which assigns it a certain meaning, which is a sense that may serve as the intentional content of an appropriate type of experience. We use two grammatical devices, then, which are familiar from everyday language: parentheses (for bracketing the object) and quotation marks (for quoting the content). Still, Husserl's focus is rightly on consciousness, on the shift from object to content of thought, rather than on the conventional signs that express these contents or senses. Indeed, much of what we see outruns our language.
In Chapter 3 we explored Husserl's outline of a logic or semantics, which defines correlations between expressions in a language, the meaning (Bedeutung) assigned them in the language, the corresponding sense (Sinn) in the underlying thought or experience intimated by the expression, and the object designated by the expression, which is also the object intended in the underlying act of thought or consciousness. Husserl assumes that the content or sense in an experience is expressible in language – that is, in principle and within certain limitations. These logical and linguistic doctrines afford a deeper account of how phenomenological quotation is related to the familiar form of verbal quotation wherein we quote a speaker's words and therewith bring out the meaning of those words. At present we rely, as above, on a tacit familiarity with these procedures, as Husserl unfolds his own special use of quotation in articulating the noema or noematic sense of a form of consciousness.
Husserl's method of bracketing was designed to effect a shift in attitude, from the ordinary, “natural” attitude to the phenomenological, “transcendental” attitude. Within the phenomenological attitude I am to describe my experience just as I experience it, and in that project of description or analysis I produce a noematic quotation that invokes or expresses the sense (Sinn) that is the content of the experience on which I am reflecting. Of course, I am using a piece of language to invoke that content (we do phenomenology in language), and I am using the linguistic device of quotation to “quote” that content. Now, the technique of bracketing is a negative trick: I do not make any use of the thesis of the existence of the world around me. But the technique of quotation is a positive trick: I focus on the content of the given experience and formulate (within the limits of language) an expression of that content. Clearly, Husserl's aim is the positive one of focusing on experience and its content. Bracketing is a preparation for this positive account of the content of an experience. And so, in phenomenological reflection, I turn my attention to the content of my experience, where my interest is not in what the content represents, or reaches in the world, but in how the content represents. (On the role of quotation in Husserl's phenomenological methodology, see Thomasson 2005; Smith and McIntyre 1982, the latter drawing on D. W. Smith 1970. A different take on quotation is developed in Sokolowski 2000 and Drummond 1990.)
Despite Husserl's protestations, the method of bracketing has been misunderstood as a kind of denial of the world, of a piece with classical skepticism or idealism. We can now see how to correct that misconception. For the world is not lost or rejected in phenomenology, either in method or in ontology. Rather, the world enters “brackets” – phenomenological “quotation marks” – in order that we attend in reflection to our consciousness-of-the-world.
Consider the force of linguistic quotation. Read the following sentences in quotation (if you can):
“There's a squirrel in that plum tree.”
“Da ist ein Eichhörnchen auf dem Pflaumenbaum.”
“”
If you are fluent in English, you see the quoted English sentence already infused with meaning, that is, you immediately grasp what it says (with reference to the context of utterance), perhaps without noticing the words per se. Phenomenologically it is as if you see through the words to what they mean: you see what is said, what is intended, the purported state of affairs that there's a squirrel in that plum tree. However, if you do not read German or Chinese, then you see, in the second and third quotations, only the German or Chinese symbols above, you do not see what is said with the symbols.
Now consider the force of phenomenological quotation. You consciously think that there is a squirrel in that plum tree. Now you turn your attention to your experience of so thinking:
I think [as I now quote]: “There's a squirrel in that plum tree.”
Reflecting on your experience, you see (comprehend) what you think, that is, you “quote” the content of your thought and straightway comprehend the intended state of affairs that there's a squirrel in that plum tree. Alternatively, in phenomenological reflection you form a phenomenological description of your act of thinking (including the thetic character of thinking):
“I think that there's a squirrel in that plum tree.”
If we use angle quotation marks – angle brackets – to specify phenomenological quotation, where it is not the words but the indicated experiential content that is “quoted,” then we have this phenomenological quotation of the full content of your experience:
<I think that there's a squirrel in that plum tree>.
The intended rodent appears thus within phenomenological brackets (literally, in our graphic scheme). The rodent does not leave the tree or the world; it merely recedes behind the now-foregrounded content. Nor does the cogitative experience leave the world; rather, that “psychological” process in the world is itself bracketed and so recedes behind its own now-foregrounded “transcendental” noematic content.
When I enter into phenomenological reflection in this way, turning to the structure of my acts of consciousness as I experience them, I do not lose the world as it enters the brackets (<…>). Rather, in phenomenological reflection, I am turned toward the way the world is experienced in a given act of consciousness. I am turned thus toward the content or meaning in my experience. But this meaning is so familiar a part of my everyday experience of things in the world (trees, plums, squirrels) that I am turned in reflection toward the meaning of such mundane things (<there's a squirrel in that plum tree>).
So, for Husserl: Consciousness is a consciousness of things in the world around us. As we turn in reflection to the structure of consciousness as we experience it, we do not lose touch with the world of which we are conscious. Rather, we focus on the content through which we experience things in the world. And in phenomenological quotation, where the world appears to us in brackets (<…>), we attend to meanings that we immediately understand as presenting putatively such things in the world, a world we do not thereby renounce.
There is something perhaps confusing about the perspective achieved in bracketing. We speak of the first-person perspective in experience, and we say phenomenology is to describe consciousness as it is experienced from the first-person point of view. When I see the plum tree, I intend that object in a certain way from my first-person perspective: I see it thus. Now, when in phenomenological reflection I turn toward the structure of my own experience, I describe its first-person structure: <I see that blossoming Japanese plum tree>, or, again, <I think that there's a squirrel in that plum tree>. But then I have stepped out of the original experience of seeing or thinking, and into a further experience directed upon the first. Is this new, “transcendental” perspective a third-person perspective? Well, it is the same subject – I – who has the original experience and who now reflects on that experience. In reflecting on the structure of the original experience as it is experienced by its subject (myself), I understand what I experience in that experience. More precisely, I abstract from that concrete experience its sharable noematic content: <I see that… tree>. Understanding such content, with its intentional force, is the aim of phenomenology. I understand what it would be (= what it would be like) to have an experience with that content, that is, as I would experience it from that first-person perspective. Indeed, that is precisely the force of noematic quotation: I report what I would experience in an act of consciousness with the content <I see that blossoming Japanese plum tree>. As I form or read that description, I understand what it would be to experience such an act of consciousness.
It has been commonly thought that phenomenology proceeds by introspection. The gloss is tolerable if we understand introspection as an appropriate form of reflection on one's own (“inner”) conscious experience: we begin with a familiar type of experience, whence reflection leads to phenomenological description and on to analysis of the content of the experience, including the way the content of consciousness prescribes a certain object. However, the term “introspection” may suggest an “inner” inspection of the contents of experience, which is certainly misleading. We should not think phenomenological reflection proceeds by a kind of mental periscope: put up the introspective periscope – a “phenomenoscope” – and peer around inside your mind. Critics of the Cartesian “theater” of the mind often seem to have such a metaphor in mind. But Husserl did not think that way. Indeed, Husserl was very much concerned to distinguish phenomenology from the sort of intro-spectionist psychology that was current in his era.
In the late 19th century psychology was being developed as an empirical scientific discipline. The method of introspection had been used by Wundt and others to study the course of sensory experience. Brentano, however, sought to put psychology on the foundation of objective empirical investigation, by using something like Aristotle's definition of essence, seeking to analyze the properties that define the essence of each type of psychic state: perception, judgment, emotion, and so on. In the Logical Investigations, we saw, Husserl sought to bring to the study of consciousness a kind of objectivity he found in logic. But how could we describe subjective experience in an objective manner?
Throughout his lifetime Husserl returned to this problem of method. His most famous methodology was the technique of bracketing presented in Ideas I. As we have seen, bracketing properly leads us to intentional content, through meaning quotation. But we do not simply peer at ideal meanings. Rather, we reflect upon their significance, their intentional force, their “semantic” power, as we reflect on the way they present objects in our own experience. Phenomenological analysis, then, leads from an appropriate description of a familiar type of experience to a focus on the content or noema of such an experience and then into an analysis of the intentional force of that content.
Reflection on meaning in language can serve as a reminder of just how complicated “reflection” can be. We begin with a familiar piece of language, then reflection on its meaning leads into semantical analysis. We understand the meaning, but analysis requires work. This work is not a matter of turning one's eyes inward to “see” the meaning. And phenomenological analysis, as we have seen, is similarly complex. Husserl likes to talk of “seeing” the way things are, in mathematics, in everyday life, and in phenomenology. His epistemology makes use of this extended notion of “seeing,” as we find in Chapter 7. But we should already see (note the verb) that phenomenological reflection is not a matter of a different set of eyeballs, or of looking through a special “phenomeno-scope.” (See Thomasson 2005 on the contrast between phenomenological analysis and introspection conceived as peering inward.)
In Husserl's idiom phenomenology is an “eidetic” science since it studies the essence of consciousness. (Husserl is drawing on Plato's term “eidos,” meaning the form of something.) As we saw, it is part of the essence of an experience to have a certain meaning as its content. But we must bear in mind that meaning and essence are not the same thing.
Husserl clearly distinguished meaning from essence, though his critics have often lost sight of the distinction. The essence (Wesen, Eidos) of an entity (of whatever type) comprises the properties that make it “what” it is, that is, its species, qualities, and relations. The content of an experience comprises the meanings or sense that form “what” is experienced or intended in the act. But the essence of an object is part of the object, whereas the meaning in an experience of an object is part of the experience. If I see a tree, the content of my experience includes the sense (the concept or percept) “tree.” The tree itself has the essence or species Tree, but that essence is not the same thing as the sense “tree.”The species is instantiated in the tree (regardless of whether anyone is conscious of the object); the sense is entertained in my experience (regardless of whether there exists an object answering to the sense).
These distinctions between essence and sense belong to Husserl's ontology. According to Husserl's epistemology, however, we may have experiences and knowledge of both essences and meanings, but our comprehension of these entities is very different. The method of bracketing turns our regard from, say, a particular tree to a sense “tree.” Essences such as the tree's essence are bracketed along with the natural objects that have these essences. Husserl holds that we can have “intuition” of essences as well as “intuition” of natural objects (as we consider in Chapter 7). But seeing a concrete tree (perceptual “intuition”) is one type of experience, and “seeing” the essence Tree (“eidetic intuition” or insight) is quite a different type of experience. We grasp the essence Tree when we put together our knowledge of what a tree is like, what species, properties, and relations are typical of a tree. This is ultimately a matter of abstraction from observational knowledge we or others have acquired. But this type of cognition of essences is quite distinct from phenomenological reflection on a form of consciousness, effected by turning our attention from objects themselves to our consciousness of such objects. Thus, when Moritz Schlick, founder of the Vienna Circle of logical positivism, attacked Husserl's notion of eidetic intuition, it was a mistake to think this attack pulled the rug from under phenomenology. To this day, many are under the impression that phenomenology is a matter of “seeing essences.” Let us clear away this confusion.
Phenomenology studies the essence of consciousness, and especially the essence of intentionality, the essence of consciousness-of-something (Ideas I, §34). In fancier terms, Husserl declares phenomenology “a descriptive eidetic theory of pure experience” (§75). It is often remarked, following Husserl, that phenomenology is an “eidetic” science. What does this mean?
Like biology or physics, phenomenology studies the “eidos” or essence – the characteristic properties and relations – of things in its domain of study. Botany studies individual trees only in order to develop laws about trees in general. The biologist's concern, while studying a given tree, is not that particular tree across the street, but the typical features of members of that species, the form of DNA of trees in that species, the species' place in evolutionary history, and so on. The arborist who is trimming that tree is interested in its particular form, but the biologist is interested in forms it shares with other trees. Similarly, phenomenology studies individual experiences only in order to develop laws about consciousness in general. The phenomenologist's interest is not in my experience just now as I see “that eucalyptus tree across the street,” but rather in the structure of consciousness typical of visual perception – and more general forms of experience such as intentionality. In that spirit Husserl defined phenomenology as the science of the essence of consciousness. And, accordingly, phenomenological method involves an “eidetic” analysis of various forms and types of experience.
Husserl developed a detailed ontology of essences (Wesen) – ideal species, qualities, and relations – and a detailed epistemology of our knowledge or “intuition” of essences. Husserl's doctrine of intuition we take up in Chapter 7. At this point, however, we note the role of “essential insight” in Husserl's account of phenomenological method, not least because phenomenological reflection has sometimes been confused with “seeing essences.”
When I see “that eucalyptus tree,” the content or noematic sense of my experience is the perceptual sense “that eucalyptus tree.” In phenomenological reflection I analyze the way in which that sense presents an object: the content “that …” (like the demonstrative pronoun used to express it) points out a certain object at a certain place now before me, and the conceptual content “eucalyptus tree” characterizes it as a certain kind of object. The way this perceptual sense works is typical of a simple form of visual experience. A phenomenological analysis of this type of experience characterizes the essence of such a visual experience, and that essence involves carrying the meaning found in this type of experience. Part of the task of phenomenology is then to analyze the intentional or semantic force of such meanings, that is, what and how they represent.
Let us be clear about what is, and what is not, analyzed in phenomenology. Phenomenology analyzes the essence of the sample experience, which carries the sense “that eucalyptus tree”; phenomenology does not analyze the essence of the tree. What is the difference between the sense and the essence of the tree? (These entities are sometimes conflated.) The tree belongs to the biological species Eucalyptus globulus. That species – with its defining features including phenotypical characters and phylogenetic descent – is an essence analyzed in biology. By contrast, my experience belongs to the experiential species Seeing-A-Tree or (if only we spoke this way) Perceptio arboretus. That species of experience is analyzed in phenomenology, and part of the phenomenological analysis is specifying the intentional force of the sense “that eucalyptus tree.” But the logical or phenomenological analysis of that meaning is no part of biology.
Following the methodology outlined, a phenomenological analysis or description of my visual experience (in the case at hand) will be something like: “I see that eucalyptus tree across the street.” The noematic sense “that eucalyptus tree” is part of the intentional content of the experience so described. However, that noematic sense is not an essence of the tree: it is not a property instantiated in the tree, but rather a meaning that represents the tree. The predicative sense or concept “eucalyptus tree” semantically prescribes the property of being a eucalyptus tree, or, if you will, the essence Eucalyptus globulus. But the essence is “in” the tree in nature, a complex biological organism, while the sense is “in” my experience, a complex act of consciousness. The sense and essence are thus distinct entities. “Intuition” or “insight” about them is achieved in different ways, and is never, as Husserl's critics wrongly thought, simply “seeing” with special eyes for essence and sense, respectively. It is better, however, to suppress considerations of intuition until we tackle it head on in Chapter 7.
Meaning is the medium of intentionality, the medium in or through which we are conscious of something. Formally, ontologically, the intentional relation of act to object is mediated by a noema or noematic sense, the ideal content of the act of consciousness, which presents or prescribes the intended object in a certain way. But experientially, phenomenologically, our consciousness is propagated through meaning toward the object, so that I am visually conscious of that tree across the street, without being in any way aware of the meaning through which my consciousness is so directed. This is Husserl's basic story of intentionality.
In our pursuit of Husserl's philosophy we repeatedly encounter his basic theory of intentionality. In the Logical Investigations the structure of intentionality – the relation among act, content, and object – emerges in the context of his philosophical system as a whole. In Ideas I, however, the approach is to work from the first-person experience of “pure” consciousness to the structure of intentionality, drawing the necessary distinctions among act, object, noema (content), and ego as they emerge in phenomenological analyses of various elements of consciousness. Following Husserl's progress through Ideas I, applying his new phenomenological method, we can highlight his key results as follows.
When we bracket the thesis of the existence of the natural world around us, Husserl avers, we find ourselves turning in reflection to “pure” or “transcendental” consciousness (§33). Though our experience remains embedded in the surrounding world, we make no use of that relationship, including actual causal relations with things around us. Our concern, we then find, is with the essence of consciousness (§34), consciousness just as we experience it. Consciousness, we find, is almost always a consciousness of something. This property of experiences (Erlebnissen), “to be a consciousness of something,” we call intentionality (Intentionalität) (§84). So we find that intentionality is the main theme of phenomenology, the “pervasive phenomenological structure” of consciousness (§84). Now, consciousness occurs not in isolation, but in a “stream of experience,” or “stream of consciousness,” a temporal structure with a characteristic unity (§84). The experiences in a unified stream of consciousness belong to a single “I” (Ich) or ego. Husserl adapts Descartes' term “cogito” for an occurring experience, while extending Brentano's metaphor of directedness: “In every occurrent cogito a radiating ‘glance’ is directed from the pure I [Ich] toward the ‘object’ of the respective consciousness-correlate [that is, content], toward the thing [Ding], the state of affairs [Sachverhalt], etc.” (§84). Husserl reserves the technical term “act,” or “act of consciousness,” for this form of consciousness that is directed from an ego toward an object. (“Ding” is Husserl's term for material things in space and time. “Sachverhalt” is the term for states of affairs, or objects bearing properties or relations, a term widely used by Austrian philosophers, including Husserl and Wittgenstein.)
Our most ubiquitous forms of consciousness are perceptual experiences of seeing, hearing, touching things within the context of our everyday actions – regardless of whether those things we perceive actually exist, though we normally experience them as existing. Perception, we find, is both a sensuous and an intentional experience. A perceptual experience is a temporally extended mental process with two interdependent parts, “real” (reell) or temporal parts: a sensuous part or “moment,” and an intentional part or “moment” (§85). The sensuous part he calls hyle (the Greek term for matter or stuff), and the intentional part he calls morphe (the Greek term for form). Husserl here adapts Aristotle's doctrine of matter-and-form: a bronze statue, Aristotle held, consists of a fusion of matter (bronze) with form (shape); similarly, Husserl holds that a visual experience consists of a fusion of sensation (matter) and interpretation or conceptualization (form). In Husserl's ontology, “moments” are dependent parts, that is, parts that cannot exist apart from the whole of which they are parts; here, the sensuous and intentional parts of the visual experience cannot exist without each other, and so without the whole they form. Thus, I do not see a spread of blue broken by a bit of white; rather, I see that white sail (on a sailboat) amid the brilliant blue ocean. My sensuous visual experience of blue and white is at the same time an intentional visual experience of a sail on a boat on the ocean. Husserl calls this intentional part of the experience the noetic moment of the experience, or noesis (§85). He characterizes the noesis in an experience as the “‘animating’, sense-giving layer” (“beseelende,” sinngebende … Schicht) of the experience (§85). For an experience to be noetic is, by its essence, to harbor a “sense” (Sinn) on the ground of this sense-giving work (§88). The sense (Sinn) that is “given” to the object of perception is precisely the intentional content of which we have made much above.
In everyday life we are constantly experiencing perceptions of things around us, as we move among and act upon things near us, walking here and there, digging in the garden with a shovel, typing on the keys of a computer as words appear on the screen. But not every experience is a sensuous perceptual experience. When I am thinking “Husserl was influenced by Hume on the unity of consciousness,” my current sensuous barrage of visual, auditory, and tactile experience is no part of my so thinking. My act of thought does not include a sensuous component. Even if I think with images, even images of words such as “Hume” or “unity,” these images are not sensuous episodes. Yet my thinking does include a noetic component: if you will, my thinking is pure noesis. But noesis consists in the “sense-giving” function of consciousness.
With this noetic activity of consciousness Husserl introduces his famous notion of noema. The noematic content (der noematische Gehalt), or noema, of an act of consciousness is the ideal meaning structure correlated with the “real,” or temporal, process of noesis in the act (§88). In Husserl's own words immediately following his introduction of the term “noema”:
Perception, for example, has its noema, at the most basic its perceptual sense, i.e., the perceived as such. Similarly, the respective remembering has its remembered as such, just as its remembered, exactly how it is in its [being the] “meant” [“Gemeintes”], [the] “consciously grasped” [“Bewusstes”]; again, the judging has the judged as such, enjoying the enjoyed as such, and so forth. Generally, the noematic correlate, which here is called “sense” [“Sinn”] (in a very expanded meaning [Bedeutung]), is to be taken exactly as it lies “immanently” in the experience of perceiving, judging, enjoying; and so forth, that is, as it is demanded of us when we inquire purely into this experience itself.
(Ideas I, §88, my translation)
As is implied by Husserl's phrasing, the sense or noema belonging to an experience is the ideal noematic content that presents an object in a certain way, and the same object can be presented in different ways through different structures of sense. To take an example Husserl used elsewhere, suppose I am visiting a wax museum. I see a woman waving at me on the stair. As I approach her, I realize that “she” is a wax figure, a wax sculpture that looks like a woman waving. The object I see is presented in very different ways in my two visual experiences, where I first see “that woman waving to me” and I then see “that wax figure.” The sense in the first perception is different and distinct from the sense in the second perception. As Husserl puts it, they are so different that my initial perception “explodes” and is followed by a very different perception. To take another example Husserl used elsewhere: if I think of “the victor at Jena” and subsequently I think of “the vanquished at Waterloo,” then the same object, Napoleon, is presented through two different noematic senses in these two experiences. Both of these senses prescribe the same object, Napoleon, but they designate Napoleon in different ways (Logical Investigations, Investigation I, §12).
Here, in phenomenological reflection, we begin to appreciate the structure of the relation of intentionality: how an experience is directed toward an object of consciousness through a particular noematic meaning or sense. In consciousness I am aware of an object as it appears to me in that act, that is, as presented through a particular noematic sense. There lies the bottom line of phenomenology: we are conscious of things – we know or “intend” things – only through structures of sense that present or prescribe those things in particular ways. Yet we are not aware of the sense through which we experience an object until we step back from the experience and abstract its content. Only in phenomenological reflection do we thus become aware of the meanings through which we “intend” objects in the world around us.
In a Kantian idiom, we may say that meaning, or noematic sense, is the condition of the possibility of consciousness. It is only through noesis, and thus through a correlated noematic sense, that consciousness can be intentionally directed toward various things in the world around us. Husserl's full conception of this role of sense is explicated in relation to logical theory, according to the outlines of the Logical Investigations. We might say the logical view of meaning is an “outsider's view” of how meanings work, a view of the semantic relation between meanings of various form and the objects they represent – including propositions (meanings expressed in language by declarative sentences) and the states of affairs they represent. However, the phenomenological account of sense or noema in Ideas I gives us an “insider's view” of how meanings work to present the objects of consciousness, a phenomenological view from “inside” consciousness directed through meanings toward the objects as experienced.
The founder of contemporary logical semantic theory, Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), sharply distinguished the sense (Sinn) from the referent (Bedeutung) of an expression (“On Sinn and Bedeutung,” 1892/1997). For example, Frege observed, the two expressions “the morning star” and “the evening star” both refer to the same object, Venus, but they have different meanings or sense and so refer to Venus in different ways. Each expression expresses a particular sense that determines a particular referent, but these two expressions refer to the same object by way of different senses. We may depict this model of reference via sense in Figure 6.1.
Husserl and Frege shared this same basic model of linguistic representation: the relation of an expression to the object it represents is mediated by a sense. Frege laid out the details of how sense mediates reference by developing a systematic semantics correlating forms of expression with forms of object designated through appropriate forms of sense. Husserl sketched some examples of this semantic relationship, but dwelt instead on the details of what a sense is and how it relates to consciousness. (We addressed logical and linguistic matters in Chapter 3; here our concern is phenomenology, but it is wise to bear in mind the parallel structures of linguistic and mental representation.) As regards what kind of entity a sense is, the only thing Frege tells us is that a sense carries a “cognitive value” (Erkenntiswert) or “mode of presentation” (Art des Gegebenseins), that is, literally, a manner of being “given” in thought or experience. Husserl, on the other hand, went to great length to explicate what a sense (Sinn) is, how it is experienced and implicitly used in consciousness, focusing on its relation to an act of consciousness and its role in the intentional relation of act to object of consciousness, drawing distinctions that remain unexplicated in Frege. Husserl's model of the intentional relation we may depict in Figure 6.2, paralleling Figure 6.1.
Thus, when I think of “the morning star,” my experience is directed via the sense <the morning star> toward the object Venus.
The sense, we have seen, presents the object in a certain way, and so Husserl characterizes the sense as “the object as intended.” If I were instead to think of “the evening star,” my experience would be directed toward the same object, Venus, but by way of the sense <the evening star>.
This model of intentionality via sense – via noematic content – is central to the school of phenomenology called “West Coast” or “California” phenomenology (see Dreyfus 1982; Smith and McIntyre 1982). This model has sometimes been dubbed the “Fregean” interpretation of Husserl's theory of intentionality. Just as linguistic reference is mediated by sense on Frege's theory of reference, so intentionality is mediated by sense on Husserl's theory of intentionality: thus the parallel structures just depicted. However, we might equally, or better, speak of the “Husserlian” interpretation of Frege's theory of reference, noting the same parallel structures. For it was Husserl rather than Frege who analyzed the role of sense in the intentional relation of an act of consciousness to its object, where a sense embodies a mode of presentation to consciousness. (Burge [2005] offers a corrective reading of Frege, arguing that for Frege sense is not intrinsically tied to linguistic meaning, which is social, but belongs to the realm of thoughts [Gedanken], which in themselves carry modes of presentation.)
We should recall that Husserl cited Bolzano, not Frege, as his chief inspiration in “pure” logic. Bolzano's distinction between objective and subjective ideas laid the groundwork for Husserl's distinction between noematic sense and noesis, where an act or noesis is intentionally directed via a noematic sense toward an appropriate object. While Frege did not address intentionality per se, Husserl addressed both linguistic reference and intentionality. For Husserl, a linguistic expression refers or “relates” to an object because it “intimates” a conscious experience of the object and so “expresses” the sense that is the content of that experience (see Chapter 3). In this way, Husserl held, linguistic reference via sense is itself founded on an underlying form of intentionality via sense. The key point here is that, for Husserl, content or sense plays a certain role in mediating intentionality, and sense plays a parallel role in mediating linguistic reference (if you will, linguistic intentionality). You might say sense is the medium of intentionality: consciousness propagates through sense toward its object. This mediating role for sense is depicted in Figure 6.2. (There are, however, important respects in which Husserl's theory of intentionality and reference diverges from a strictly Fregean theory. See Smith and McIntyre 1982: chs. 5–8 on demonstrative and individuative intentionality, on horizon and possible-worlds structure, and on details of the form of a noematic sense and its relation to the object intended. And see Beyer 2004 on singularity of intentionality and externalist features of intentionality in Husserl's theory. We should note at this point that there are alternative interpretations of Husserl's theory of intentionality and the role an act's noema plays in the act's intentionality. We will sketch such alternatives later, after exploring the details of Husserl's account of the noema.)
Husserl's model of intentionality via sense, as here reconstructed, prompts three caveats. First, there is no question of a “veil” of ideas or sense that stands between consciousness and its object. Consciousness is a consciousness of its object, not of its sense. Indeed, it is only in phenomenological reflection that I become aware of the sense through which I am conscious of the tree I see. This point is central to Husserl's methodology of bracketing.
Second, the “Fregean” reading of Husserl's model of intentionality should not be taken as “logicizing” phenomenology, that is, reducing the study of consciousness to the study of logical structures, specifically propositions expressible in language by complete sentences. (Welton characterizes the model as assuming “the restriction of noematic content to Fregian-type propositions” [2000: 394].) In Frege's wake, logic-minded philosophers came to speak of what Bertrand Russell called the “propositional attitudes”: believing that p, thinking that p, wishing that p, and so on. Jaakko Hintikka (1962, 1969, 1975) addressed the logic of sentences ascribing belief and perception, treating intentional attitudes themselves as propositional in content: one believes that p, sees that p, and so on. Again, John Searle (1983) held that intentional content is propositional in form, even in perception. However, Husserl did not hold that the noematic sense of every act is a proposition (Satz). Nor does the model of intentionality via sense assume this. When I see “this dog,” the sense of my experience is a perceptual individual content, which prescribes an individual object. By contrast, when I see that “this dog is a bearded collie,” the sense of my experience is a perceptual propositional content, which prescribes a state of affairs in my environment. And when I think that “this bearded collie likes to bounce,” the sense of my act of thinking is a proposition. Ronald McIntyre and I (in Smith and McIntyre 1982) called an act like seeing “this dog” a direct-object act and an act like thinking that p a propositional act. Husserl himself called an experience like seeing “this dog” a pre-predicative experience, whereas seeing that “this dog is a bearded collie” is a predicative perception, and thinking that “this bearded collie likes to bounce” is also a predicative experience. A propositional act is thus one whose sense involves predication, whereas a pre-predicative experience is, for Husserl, attributive (seeing “this bouncing dog”) rather than predicative (seeing that “this dog is bouncing”).
A third caveat regards a chicken-or-egg problem. Where does intentionality enter the world, where does it all begin, in the act or in the sense? That is, which is the fundamental bearer of directedness? If an act is directed toward an object because the act's sense semantically prescribes that object, then it might seem that intentionality lies fundamentally in the sense rather than, as Husserl would seem to hold, in the act. (This problem for the mediator model of intentionality-via-sense is posed, in slightly different terms, in Drummond 1992: 99–100; see also his discussion of abstraction.) There is indeed a tendency in semantic theory to give meaning or sense the reins, and not without reason: it is concepts that represent, propositions that are true, and so on. Nonetheless, for Husserl, logic, and thus (what we today call) semantics, is grounded in intentionality: that is the thrust of the early Logical Investigations (1900–1) and the late Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929). So, for Husserl, it is because meaning resides in consciousness that meaning represents and so contributes its semantic force to acts of consciousness. Strictly speaking, it is only meaning-in-consciousness, or consciousness-with-meaning, that has intentional force – there is no chicken/egg choice.
Indeed, the answer to the chicken-or-egg problem lies in Husserl's account of the ontology of noema and noesis (see Ideas I, §§89, 98, discussed later in this chapter). Although the noema or noematic sense is an ideal entity (it cannot burn up, etc., per §89), Husserl says the noema is “in” the noesis in a unique way (per §98), as a “moment” or dependent part of the act of consciousness. Accordingly, Husserl might say the noematic sense in my perception of “this tree” is directed as it is because it is “in” this act of perception, and by the same token my perception is directed as it is because the noematic sense is “in” the act. In fact, when we turn in detail to how my perception is directed toward this object in my concrete surroundings, we find that the semantic force of the sense “this tree” depends on its occurrence in this particular experience in this particular context – only then does the sense, and by the same token the act, “intend” the object before me on that occasion. (This analysis of perceptual intentionality is developed in detail in D.W. Smith 1989. The analysis is not found in Husserl but is friendly to the spirit of Husserl's theory of intentionality as here reconstructed.)
In Husserl's theory of intentionality, the noematic sense in an act of consciousness does the key work of presenting or prescribing the object intended in that act. How exactly does Husserl characterize the sense in an experience?
Let us revisit a passage quoted earlier:
“In” the reduced perception (in the phenomenologically pure experience [Erlebnis]) we find, as belonging inextricably to its essence, the perceived as such, to be expressed as “material thing,” “plant,” “tree,” “blossoming,” and so forth. The quotation marks [Anführungszeichen] are obviously significant; they express that change in sign, the corresponding radical modification of the meaning of the words. The tree simpliciter [schlechthin], the thing in nature, is anything but [ist nichts weniger als] this perceived tree as such, which as perceptual sense [Wahrnehmungssinn] belongs inseparably to the perception. The tree simpliciter can burn up, be resolved into its chemical elements, etc. But the sense [Sinn] – the sense of this perception, something belonging necessarily to its essence – cannot burn up; it has no chemical elements, no forces, no real properties.
(Ideas I, §89, my translation)
Husserl thus draws a crucial distinction between the object perceived and the object as perceived, also called the perceptual sense. These two entities are categorially distinct: they belong to distinct ontological categories. Specifically, the tree itself (“simpliciter”) is a “thing in nature,” a “real” object existing in space-time, something that “can burn up, be resolved into chemical elements, etc.” By contrast, the sense of the perception “cannot burn up, it has … no real properties”; it is not a thing in nature, a “real” object in space-time. Rather, a sense (Sinn) is an ideal, nonspatiotemporal object, not a real, spatiotemporal object (recall Chapter 4 on categories and real versus ideal objects, and recall Chapter 3 on sense as ideal).
Husserl here updates the notion of sense he developed in the Logical Investigations. Indeed, his terminology explicitly echoes that of the Investigations. Here, in Ideas, he distinguishes “the tree simpliciter” from “this perceived tree as such,” that is, “the tree as perceived.” This distinction is a special case of the distinction he drew in the Logical Investigations between the object which is intended and the object as intended. In Husserl's words:
In relation to the intentional content understood as object of the act [that is, as intentional object], the following are to be distinguished: the object as it is intended, and simpliciter the object which is intended [der Gegenstand, so wie er intendiert ist, und schlechthin der Gegenstand, welcher intendiert ist].
(Logical Investigations, Investigation V, §17, my translation; see p. 113 of 1900/2001, vol. 2)
Note Husserl's use of the verb “to intend” (intendieren, in the German): in an act of consciousness I “intend” the object, or alternatively the act “intends” the object, and the object is “intended” in a certain way (so wie).
The distinction Husserl emphasizes, then, is that between the object intended and the way the object is intended. The way an object is intended in an act is encapsulated in the sense (Sinn) of the object in the experience, and that sense is the core of the noema or intentional content of the act. There are further components of the full noema (§§131–3), but here we focus on the sense that presents the object, which Husserl calls the “nucleus” (Kern) of the noema.
It is remarkable that in the two published English editions of Ideas I we find a pivotal sentence in the above passage translated to opposite effect:
The tree plain and simple, the thing in nature, is as different as it can be from [ist nichts weniger als] this perceived tree as such.
(Ideas I, 1913/1931/1969, translation by W. R. Boyce Gibson)
The tree simpliciter, the physical thing belonging to Nature, is nothing less than [ist nichts weniger als] this perceived tree as perceived.
(Ideas I, 1913/1991, translation by Fred Kersten)
My translation of the contested sentence (for immediate comparison) reads:
The tree simpliciter [schlechthin], the thing in nature, is anything but [ist nichts weniger als] this perceived tree as such.
I translate “ist nichts weniger als” as “anything but” (following The New Cassell's German Dictionary, New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1965). The nuances of the phrase are not easily captured. Yet Husserl's intent is clear. By “thing” (Ding) Husserl means an object in nature, in space-time; by “sense” (Sinn) he means an ideal content of conscious experience, which does not exist in space-time, in nature, but is “in” consciousness in a certain way. These cannot be numerically the same entity, since the tree can burn away but the sense “this tree” cannot burn away and is not even a physical object, a “real” object in nature. Indeed, these two entities belong to distinct ontological categories. The German phrase “ist nichts weniger als” translates literally as “is nothing less than.” This phrase has led some Husserl interpreters to argue that in some manner the tree and the sense are one and the same entity – in direct contradiction to what Husserl writes in the next sentence. How should we understand Husserl's contested phrase?
Suppose a politician says, “A vote for my opponent is nothing less than a vote for nuclear war!”This does not mean that these two votes are one and the same thing; it means that the first type of vote approaches or leads toward the second in some important way. Similarly, in Husserl's German (an older idiom), the claim is not that the tree itself is numerically or ontologically identical with the tree-as-perceived, the sense “this tree”; rather, the claim is that the tree (the thing in nature) approaches or comes close to the sense in a particular way. Or better, we might say that, from the point of view of my experience, the tree-as-perceived is asymptotic to – approaching without touching – the tree itself. Indeed, the task of the sense in my experience is to intentionally approach the tree, without merging with the tree itself. Moreover, in perception – a form of direct cognition or “intuition” (Anschauung) – I experience the tree as “this tree itself” here before me in its “‘bodily’ selfhood” (“leibhaftigen Selbstheit”: Ideas I, §3). Observing the quotation marks, we can specify the close relation between the sense “this tree itself” and the tree itself. Namely, the sense in my visual experience is intentionally or semantically related to the object: the sense presents or prescribes the tree itself and presents it as now here before me. Again, consider Husserl's use of quotation marks: the sense “this tree” semantically prescribes this tree now here before me, if there exists such a tree before me. However, the sense “in” my perceptual experience remains categorially distinct from the tree it prescribes (see D.W. Smith 1989 for a further development of this type of contextual semantic relation in intentionality).
To generalize: the noematic sense or content in an act of consciousness embodies the way the object is intended in the act, its intention “as such-and-such.” The sense is distinct from the object of the act, but the sense presents – semantically prescribes – the object, presenting the object in a certain way. The act is a consciousness of that object which the sense prescribes, if such object exists. And so the intentional relation between act and object is semantically mediated by noematic sense, that is, the structure of the relation is:
act – noematic sense (“the object as intended”) → object
if such object exists.
Husserl's idiom “the object as intended” has encouraged several different models of the noema and its role in intentionality. Husserl's idiom echoes Kant's “phenomena” or “things-as-they-appear,” where natural objects are “phenomenal.” Alternatively, Husserl sometimes speaks of the “intentional object” rather than the “intentional content” of an act. In the Cartesian Meditations (§§15–18) he speaks interchangeably of the “objective sense,” the “intentional object,” and the “cogitatum qua cogitatum” of an experience. These idioms echo traditional Medieval ontologies where objects exist “in intentio,” suggesting that the noema be assimilated to the object itself. In the appendix at this chapter's end, we outline some alternative models of the noema and its role in intentionality. (See Dreyfus 1982 for the “Fregean” logical interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology, including Dagfinn Føllesdal's seminal article, and Mohanty 1982 for more on the Husserl–Frege connection. See Gurwitsch 1964 for the neo-phenomenalist, quasi-Kantian conception of phenomenology. See Drummond 1990 and Sokolowski 2000 for a realist theory of the “object as intended.” See the Introduction to Smith and Smith 1995 for a brief contrast between such readings of Husserl.)
Why does Husserl talk about noematic content in such different terms: as “sense” and as “the object as intended”? Interpretations of Husserl have tended to divide over these idioms, choosing one or the other. The “logical” reading of Husserl focuses on the role of sense in representing objects of consciousness, looking to similarities between Husserl's phenomenological theory of intentionality via sense and the logical theory of linguistic reference via sense, notably in Frege's logical semantics. By contrast, the “phenomenal” reading of Husserl focuses on the experienced “appearance” of objects in consciousness, looking to similarities between Husserl's theory of intentionality and something like Kant's theory of “phenomena.”Yet Husserl adamantly pressed both of these visions and their integration. How can we understand this Husserlian synthesis?
The idiom of sense plays well in the logical theory of representation, while the idiom of objects-as-intended plays well in the epistemic theory of representation. In the Logical Investigations (1900–1), I have urged, Husserl worked to integrate logical theory inspired by Bolzano with psychological theory inspired by Brentano. The idiom of “phenomena” has been common parlance in German-language philosophy since Kant. And indeed, when Husserl began his socalled “transcendental turn” in the 1907 lectures published as The Idea of Phenomenology (1950/1970), he emphasized the “phenomenon” as the focus of phenomenology, just as the term implies. In Kant's idiolect, “phenomena” are defined as “things-as-they-appear,” which are distinct from “things-in-themselves.” Husserl adapted this terminology, but within his own theory of intentionality: we experience phenomena, or objects-as-they-are-intended, objects as perceived, as imagined, as judged, as desired, and so on, which are distinct from the objects which are so intended. Husserl explicitly put these two idioms together: the sense = the “object as intended.”To renounce either idiom is to miss Husserl's synthesis, and our aim here is to show how the two idioms work together in Husserl's system.We quoted Husserl in full where he explicitly assimilates the two idioms, noting his theoretical use of quotation marks in phenomenological “quotation.” This device of sense-quotation is itself adapted from logic, indicating the synthesis of the logical with the experiential.
As noted, Frege himself, chief architect of the new logic, characterized a sense (Sinn) as carrying a “way of being given” (Art des Gegebenseins). That has to mean: given in consciousness. What a sense does is determine or prescribe an object of reference; what a sense is is a form of consciousness of an object, embodying the way an object is known or intended in consciousness. Frege also says a sense includes a “cognitive value” (Erkenntniswert). (Both “Art des Gegebenseins” and “Erkenntniswert” appear in the early pages of “On Sense and Reference” (1892/1997), and he says no more about the connection between sense and cognition or consciousness.) Frege is searching for an account of sense that would be developed only later, in Husserl's work. There is no theoretical opposition, then, between these claims about sense, its representing an object and its embodying the way an object is cognized. The two claims address the same point at different levels of language or experience: the experiential level (I experience an object as thus-and-so), and the metaexperiential level (the sense of my experience prescribes the object of my experience). These two levels are the “object” level of experience (I intend the object as thus-and-so), and the “reflection” level of experience (I reflect on my experience, which presents the object as thus-and-so). This distinction applies in logic and in phenomenology. Quotation is the logical device that moves from referring to an object to referring to an expression; noematic quotation is the phenomenological device that moves from intending an object to reflecting on a noema that presents the object.
When we abstract the noematic sense from an experience and talk about it in our phenomenological theory of intentionality, or alternatively in our logical theory of ideal meaning, we ascend to a higher level of language, focusing on the sense as a certain kind of entity. In a logician's turn of phrase, we practice semantic ascent, moving from our experience to our language about our experience, as we reflect on the content of our experience, “quoting” the noematic content. Similarly, in logic we practice semantic ascent as we ascend from our use of words to our logical or semantic talk about those words, quoting the words and assessing what and how they represent. Remember that in Logical Investigations Husserl worked his way from “pure logic” into “pure phenomenology” over the long course of narrative in that work. In Ideas I, however, Husserl emphasized the methodology of our study of “pure” consciousness. There he wanted us to experience noematic sense, and then to talk about it in phenomenological description. Husserl's method of phenomenological reduction and quotation was designed to shift our attention from the objects we experience to the ways we experience these objects: thus from this tree I see to this tree as I see it – from this tree to “this tree.” When I characterize the sense as “the tree as I see it,” in effect I project myself as if back into the experience upon which I am reflecting. This process is akin to empathizing with my own experience, attending to it in a reflective or “transcendental” attitude. Thus, when I reflect on my own experience, I take two positions with respect to my experience: I am the subject of the experience on which I reflect, and I am the observer or analyst of that same experience. In the first attitude I take an “insider's” position, and in the second attitude I take an “outsider's” position, in full cognizance that I am at once both insider and outsider. Husserl does not describe his method in these terms, but hindsight allows such a view of phenomenological reflection.
A similar methodological situation arises in logic. In the 1930s the great logician Alfred Tarski (1901–83) developed what he called a semantic conception of truth (see Tarski 1944/2001 – by the way, Tarski knew something of Husserl and the theory of intentionality). Tarski's theory of truth entailed, for a simple sentence of English, the canonical form of truth-conditions expressed as follows:
“Snow is white” is true (in English) if and only if snow is white.
As speakers of English, we recognize two occurrences of the same sentence. On the left it appears in quotation marks, where it is used to name a sentence, the very sentence used between the quotation marks. On the right it is used again, this time to specify the conditions under which the named sentence would be true. In Husserlian terms, if I say the above, I take a semantic ascent to quote the sentence and then go on to say it would be true under the conditions I assert as I repeat the sentence without quotation. When I quote the sentence, I focus on the words and at the same time their meaning, the proposition expressed by the sentence. However, when I use the sentence the second time, I “intend” a certain state of affairs, without focusing on the sentence or proposition I am using to represent that very state of affairs. Central to Tarski's logical-semantic theory of truth was his distinction between two levels of language that seem to merge in everyday language: the language I use in the right side of the equivalence just given, and the language I use in the left side. The sentence I quote belongs to the “object” language, whose semantics is at issue; the sentence I use on the right belongs to the “metalanguage” in which I state the semantics or truth-conditions for the sentence on the left. As a speaker of English, I use and understand the same sentence in two occurrences. In a Husserlian framework we might say: as a phenomenologist appraising my use of language, I distinguish two attitudes or positions, namely, my “transcendental” reflection on the sentence (in saying “‘Snow is white’, is true if and only if snow is white”) and my “mundane” attitude toward the state of affairs that snow is white. (For the record, Tarski himself presented a mathematical system modeling truth without ontological commitment to either propositions or states of affairs. By contrast, Husserl's account of intentionality, say, where I think that snow is white, would hold that my thought is true just in case the content of my thought, the proposition expressible by “Snow is white,” successfully represents the state of affairs that snow is white.) (See the essays in Lynch 2001 on theories of truth, including theories of the role of quotation in the Tarski schema.)
To return to Husserl's idiom: The state of affairs itself, that snow is white, is one thing, while the sense or proposition “snow is white” is another thing. The close connection between them is semantic: that proposition represents or semantically prescribes that state of affairs. The state of affairs itself could also be represented in different terms, say, in the proposition “A quantity of H2O below 0 degrees Celsius reflects a full spectrum of sunlight on Earth.” So the way the state of affairs is intended in my saying, “Snow is white,” is reflected in the sense “snow is white,” but not in the sense expressed by the longer sentence quoted before the preceding period. Notice that I have just referred to that sense in two ways: as the sense; and as the state of affairs as intended through that sense. Only the latter way invites me into the quoted sentence, into the way I intend the state of affairs as I say, “Snow is white.”When I reflect on the way I intend the state of affairs in so speaking, I adopt a “metalanguage” attitude toward the experience, as distinct from an “object-language” attitude toward the state of affairs itself.
Exactly what type of entities are noesis and noema, according to Husserl's ontology?
After introducing the distinction in Ideas I, Husserl proceeds to an intricate account of the ontology of noesis and noema, addressing their basic types and their modes of being. In this account Husserl assumes the notion of “moment” that he had developed in the third of the Logical Investigations (Investigation III, §17). A moment is defined as a dependent or “abstract” part of a given whole: the moment is an entity that is a part of the whole but cannot exist apart from the whole. Here Husserl draws on an idea that began with Aristotle. A piece of paper is white, but the paper is a concrete individual, while whiteness itself is an ideal species, or “universal.” So far, we have something like Plato's distinction between a particular and a “form” (eidos) or property it exemplifies. But Aristotle held that this white in this paper is particular to the paper, a particularized quality that could not exist unless the paper existed. Husserl's version of this doctrine holds that this white is an individual that is an instance of the ideal species White but is a moment, or dependent part, of the piece of paper. With this neo-Aristotelian doctrine in hand, we turn to Husserl's account of the ontology of noesis and noema.
An experience, or act of consciousness, is a lived mental process. How this process relates to neural processes in the brain – the classical mind–body problem – is beyond the purview of phenomenology. But within the scope of phenomenology we can say that an experience is a “real” (reell) or temporal process. (Husserl uses the German “reell” to mean occurring in time.) And, of course, we can say it is a mental or “psychic” process, that is, as Brentano emphasized, a process of consciousness, a process the subject lives through with a certain “inner” awareness of the process, a process that is typically intentional (see Logical Investigations, Investigation V, §§1–8).
A perceptual experience, we saw, has two parts: a sensuous moment and a noetic moment (Ideas I, §85). The sensuous moment, comprising sensuous “data” (Data) or sensory “material(s)” (Stoffe), gives the experience its sensuous character; the noetic moment gives the experience its intentional character, “giving” it the noema or noematic sense that presents the object of consciousness. These two parts of the experience, sensation and noesis, do not occur independently: they cannot occur apart from the whole experience, or apart from each other, as, say, I see “this red-leafed Japanese plum tree.” In an experience of pure thinking, we noted, there is no sensuous part, there is only the noesis.
Husserl speaks often of the correlation between noesis and noema, but these are importantly different types of entity. Amplifying the distinction between noesis and noema (Ideas I, §97), Husserl says the sensuous and noetic moments in a perception are “real” (reell) moments of the experience, while the noematic moment is a “non-real” (nichtreell) moment of the experience. Here Husserl introduces a thoroughly novel ontology of content. In Logical Investigations (Investigation V), he had spent a lot of ink in marking out different notions of “content,” or different uses of the term. His own account there distinguished “real” and “ideal” or “intentional” content. In Ideas I we find his fully developed account of this distinction.
The sensation and noesis in an experience are “real,” temporal components of a perceptual experience. Correlated with the noesis in an experience (whether or not the noesis is joined by sensation) is a noema. Staying with the case of perception, we know the noematic sense – the tree as perceived, “this Japanese plum tree” – is not something in nature, in space–time. (This point is explained in the passage we quoted from §89.) Now (§97) we are told the noema is not “real,” not in time, not in the temporal flow of consciousness. This means the noema is an “ideal” entity. Moreover, Husserl calls the noema a moment of the experience. Both noesis and noema are moments, dependent parts, of the experience: contents of the experience, entities that are “in” the experience insofar as they are dependent parts of the experience. But the noesis is a real, temporal part, while the noema is a nonreal, nontemporal part. How can an ideal, nontemporal meaning be a moment of a real, temporal experience?
It is striking that Husserl calls the meaning itself – as opposed to the noesis with which it is correlated – a moment of the experience. For Husserl is said to join Frege and Lotze in Platonizing meanings, taking meanings to be ideal entities set apart from real processes. True, Platonic forms are supposed to be ideal species, and in Logical Investigations (Investigations II and V), Husserl took meanings to be ideal species or types of intentional experiences. By the time of Ideas I, Husserl had concluded that meanings are not a kind of species, but their own kind of ideal entity (§128): sense (Sinn), aligning more with Frege on Sinn than with Plato on eidos. Husserl keeps both species and meanings in his ontology, but treats them as distinct kinds of ideal entity. Indeed, Husserl says, it is part of the essence (= species) of an experience to include in the experience a sense or noema (Ideas I, §88).
The noema is “in” the experience in a unique way. In Husserl's words:
[T]he real experience-unity of hyletic and noetic component pieces [Bestandstücke] is totally different from the unity of noematic component pieces “consciously grasped in” them. … That which is “transcendentally constituted” “through” the noetic functions “on the ground” of the material [sensuous] experiences is indeed a “given” [object] and … an evidently given [object]; but it belongs to the experience even in a wholly different sense than the real and therewith authentic constituents of the experience.
(Ideas I, §97, my translation)
Both noesis and noema, then, are components – and in that sense “contents” – of the experience, but they are contained in it in wholly different ways.
Husserl then expands on the “mode of being” of the noema (§98). If we turn our attention from the real components of an experience to the noema, say, the seen tree as such, we find:
That which is given in this attentive regard is now indeed itself, logically speaking, an object, but a thoroughly dependent [unselbständiger] [object]. Its esse consists exclusively in its “percipi” – except that this proposition applies in nothing like its Berkeleyan sense, here the esse does not contain the percipi as a real component piece.
(Ideas I, §98, my translation)
This provocative passage is meant to clarify the special mode of being of the noema, the tree-as-perceived, as opposed to both the mode of being of the actual tree and the mode of being of the “real” components of the experience of seeing the tree. Husserl's claim is that the noematic sense in the perception is dependent on the experience: the noema is a moment, or dependent part, of the experience. Yet the noema is not a “real” component of the experience. We might think of a “real” entity as a dependent part of an experience, existing in the experience. But how should we think of an ideal, nontemporal entity as a dependent part of an experience? How can a nontemporal entity be any kind of component of a temporal entity?
The answer lies in Husserl's original notion of moment. The ideal form White exists “in” this white paper insofar as this white in this paper instantiates the form White. Similarly, the ideal sense “this Japanese plum tree” exists “in” this perceptual experience insofar as this noesis of seeing “this … tree” is correlated with the sense “this … tree.” So noematic meanings are ideal entities that are realized in temporal experiences in a way parallel to the way ideal species are realized in temporal objects, yet meanings are realized in such a way that they are experienced in temporal experiences. Here is the novelty in Husserl's ontology of meaning.
Berkeley held that a material object exists only insofar as it is perceived; in his famous slogan, to be is to be perceived, or esse est percipi. Husserl echoes Berkeley's quip not for the tree itself, but for the tree-as-perceived, the noematic sense of the tree. And then Husserl adds that the being of the perceived is not, as for Berkeley, a real perceptual component. If “the perceived” is the tree-asperceived, its mode of being is that of the noema, not that of the perceptual experience. And the mode of being of the noema, Husserl holds, is that of an ideal meaning's being a moment or dependent part of the experience. This mode of being is unique to meanings: only meanings exist in precisely this way!
Husserl's doctrine of noema should be seen as his developed explication of the idea behind Brentano's notion of an object's existing “intentionally” “in” consciousness. Brentano had revived the Medieval notion of “intentio,” with his claim that every mental phenomenon includes an object intentionally within it. It has never been clear how to understand Brentano's claim. Does the object exist in the mind as opposed to reality? Is this a version of idealism, like Berkeley's or like Kant's? If not, what ontological status is this mode of being that Brentano calls “existing in mind”? In Husserl's discussion we have an articulate answer to these questions: for an object to exist “in” consciousness is for “the object as intended” – a noematic sense prescribing the object – to be a moment of the experience.
Now, meanings are studied in logic or philosophy of logic, and logician-philosophers like Husserl, Frege, and Bolzano are called “Platonists” when they say that logic is about ideal meanings – propositions and their constituent concepts – taken as objective entities that exist but are not in space–time. Are such meanings not like Plato's “forms” or “ideas” (eidos), residing outside the real world in a Platonic heaven? Interestingly, Husserl explicitly resisted the charges of Platonism that were leveled against his Logical Investigations.
In the opening part of Ideas I, before turning to phenomenology, Husserl addressed the ontology of ideal entities or essences. As “Platonizing realists,” he said, we make statements about ideal entities, treating them formally as objects having properties. But we avoid a false “Platonistic hypostasizing” because we sharply separate “objects” and “real actualities,” that is, things in spatiotemporal actuality (reale Wirklichkeit) (§22).The category Object is a category of formal ontology: anything at all is an object. With this doctrine in mind, after he has presented his account of noematic sense, Husserl says that the noema belonging to an act of consciousness is a unique kind of objective entity (eigenartige Gegenständlichkeit) (§128). For Husserl, then, a noema is a type of ideal entity sui generic. Noemata are not species, numbers, sets, and so on; they are meanings, ideal entities that enter into temporal experiences in a particular way. For Husserl, meanings are objects, all right, as Bolzano and Frege insisted. But that does not imply an existence in a far-away heaven of Platonic ideas. Rather, for Husserl, ideal meanings are “in” temporally real experiences: they are ideal moments of lived experiences. Indeed, phenomenological reflection puts us in touch with ideal meanings: I know a meaning as “the object as intended” in my experience.
In the Logical Investigations (Investigation V, §§20–1), Husserl says the “intentional essence” of an act of consciousness is a union of two aspects called the “quality” and “matter” of the act. The matter is what is intended as intended, and the quality is the attitude taken toward it, namely, perceiving, imagining, or judging, and so on. Every act has both of these aspects. In Ideas I, Husserl holds, further, that the essence of an act involves a certain ideal intentional content called noema. Husserl factors the noema of an act into two components of meaning called “sense” and “thetic” “ways of givenness” (§§130, 132, 133). The sense (Sinn) prescribes the intended object as intended, say, “this blossoming plum tree”; this noema component corresponds to the act's matter. The thetic content specifies the way the object so presented is “posited,” say, in an attitude of seeing as opposed to hearing or imagining or desiring; this noema component corresponds to the act's quality. In Husserl's new terminology, the thetic or positing character of an experience consists of the act's general species, say, seeing, wishing, thinking, judging, valuing, or willing, together with modifying characters such as clarity, attentiveness, intuitiveness or evidentness, probability, and degree of “doxic” commitment (§§99–117). So the noema of any act is a structured meaning formed from a sense and a thetic content that modifies the sense. The act's noesis thus combines moments of quality and matter, which in turn carry noema components of thetic content and sense, respectively.
The full structure of an act's noema is shown quite naturally by example. Consider the types of experience we describe as follows:
I see this blossoming plum tree.
I see the look of perplexity on my student's face.
I hear that cawing crow.
I think that Husserl admired Bolzano.
I judge that a thunderstorm is brewing.
I wish that it would rain.
I imagine that a soft rain is falling on the roof.
I desire some dark chocolate ice cream.
I value loyalty in a friend.
In these simple phenomenological descriptions, the verb reports the thetic character of the act described, while the direct-object phrase reports the noematic sense of the act. As our descriptions indicate, the sense in an experience can be rather complex, formed from concepts that come together in the form of, say, the sense “this blossoming plum tree” or “a soft rain is falling on the roof.” In a fuller description, adverbs may modify the verb, ascribing further structure in the thetic character of an experience. For example:
I hear rather faintly that cawing sound of a crow in the distance.
I wish fervently that it would rain.
I see clearly and attentively the face of that perplexed student.
These adverbial phrases qualify the thetic character of the act described, whereas phrases in the direct-object phrase qualify the object as intended.
Given Husserl's account of noematic meaning and meaning quotation, we can schematize the structure of an act's noema, in such cases, as follows:
NOEMA
“(THETIC CONTENT) + (SENSE CONTENT)”
“(I see clearly) (that speeding sports coupe rounding the bend on the highway ahead).”
“(I judge intuitively) (that those thunderclouds carry hail).”
A systematic analysis of these structures of meaning in a noema, and their semantic correlation with acts and their objects, would define a “pure logic” of consciousness, as foretold in the Prolegomena of the Logical Investigations. Given the theoretical foundations of logic and the theory of intentionality, Husserl unfolds pieces of such a logic of noemata over the course of Ideas I. After introducing consciousness and its intentionality, he distinguishes noesis and noema. When he introduces the noema, he notes that the noematic sense is the nucleus of the noema (§§88–90, 130), indicating there is more to the structure of a noema. By and by, he marks out distinctions of thetic character, extending thetic character from the central example of perception to wishing, judging, liking, valuing, and willing or volition, and elaborating on the degrees of conviction an experience may hold or lack (§§99–117). These distinctions are “logical” distinctions within the form of a noema. Given these distinctions, he focuses on the typical form of the sense in a full noema.
When I approach an object, say, a tree on a hill, I see it from one side. As I walk closer, I see it again from a different viewpoint. As I sit under it awhile, I see it from still another perspective, looking up at its gnarly limbs. Through this extended course of experience, I repeatedly see “the same” object, sometimes continuously as I walk, other times interruptedly as I look here and there, but always my perceptions of the tree intend “the same” object. Similarly, when I think repeatedly of the same individual, say, when I think that Plato studied mathematics, then I think that Plato admired Socrates, then I think that Plato focused his philosophy on ideal forms such as The Good, throughout these varied acts of thinking, my experiences are thoughts about “the same” individual.
In order to capture this structure of experience, wherein we are conscious of “the same” object in different ways in different acts, Husserl analyzed a basic form of noematic sense. In any noema, Husserl held (Ideas I, §131), we distinguish within the noematic sense two basic components: a sense of the “object” intended and a sense of the various “predicates” attributed to that same object. As Husserl writes:
[In] noematic description of the meant [das Vermeinte] as such … the identical intentional “object” is evidently separated from the changing and variable “predicates.” It is separated out as central noematic moment: the “object” [“Gegenstand”], the “object” [“Objekt”], the “identical,” the “determinable subject of its possible predicates” – the pure X in abstraction from all predicates – and it is separated from these predicates, or more exactly, from the predicate-noemas.
(Ideas I, §131, my translation)
That is, in a phenomenological description of an experience we distinguish within the noematic sense (“the meant as such”) two components of sense: the “object” and “its predicates.” Here are two types of meaning within the sense that prescribes the object of consciousness. (There are surely other forms of sense, but Husserl emphasizes this paradigmatic form, so let us stay with this paradigm.)
When I am conscious of an object, then, the noematic sense of my experience divides into two components: the “X” content prescribes the object “simpliciter,” while the accompanying “predicate-senses” prescribe various properties the object is intended as having (Ideas I, §131). In Husserl's idiom, the “determinable X” presents the object itself, which is “determined” or qualified by the properties presented by the predicate-senses. Husserl's paradigm is that of seeing a particular object, which is seen as having a variety of properties and is expected to have still further properties. Consider the experience whose form we have described repeatedly:
I see this blossoming plum tree.
The sense of the act described here factors into two components: “this,” which designates a particular object before me (“X”); and the predicate-senses “tree,” “plum,” and “blossoming” (configured together as “blossoming plum tree”).There is much to say about the way these types of sense work.
Surely this form of noematic sense is only the beginning of a logic, or formal phenomenology, of consciousness. More complex forms follow, implicitly, where Husserl discusses forms of judgment (explicitly the domain of logical theory), evaluation, imagination, time-consciousness, consciousness of other persons in empathy, and so on. We might begin to amplify Husserl's abovementioned analysis by looking to the forms of experience we describe using proper names (“Husserl”), demonstrative pronouns (“this”), and definite descriptions (“the so-and-so”) – forms of language that have been analyzed extensively in philosophy of language, years after Husserl wrote. We cannot fail to notice the variable “X,” used by Husserl the former mathematician familiar with the new Fregean logic of quantifier expressions (“some object x is such that x is a tree”).
Demonstrative pronouns are based in perception, as Husserl explicitly argued (Logical Investigations, Investigation I, §26; Investigation VI, §5). Thus, in our description of seeing a tree, the content ascribed by “this” functions to single out the object itself in the context of vision, without calling upon its properties: this demonstrative sense introduces an X type of sense. Alternatively, consider the experience described as follows:
I think that Husserl appreciated the apple tree in his garden.
Here the proper name “Husserl” singles out a particular object, the man himself, to which the predicative content attributes a horticultural sensibility. Proper names refer directly, without calling upon specific properties of the individual named. This linguistic feature has been much explored since Husserl's day, but was noted by Husserl (Logical Investigations, Investigation I, §16, noting John Stuart Mill's view of names as non-connotative). By contrast with names and demonstratives, a definite description singles out its referent by appeal to properties of the referent. Thus consider the experience described so:
I surmise that the burglar entered the house by the back window.
Here the noematic sense “the burglar” does not function like an X-type sense. Rather, it prescribes whatever individual burglarized the house (in the case under investigation). This sense introduces an individual “X” into my deliberations, about whom I continue to speculate, but the sense “the burglar” works differently than a sense “John Q.Thief” or “that man climbing through the window.”
To capture the way in which different acts are directed toward the same object through noemata involving different predicate-senses, we might form a phenomenological description as follows:
There is an object x such that I see that x is a California live oak tree and I see that x is leaning downhill and I see that on this side x has a broken limb and I think that x was struck by lightning and I judge that x is 100 years old and I like the look of the admirable arching boughs on x.
The variable “x” we use here to track the identity of the object as it is intended in a sequence of acts of perception, thought, judgment, and aesthetic evaluation. By contrast, we use the predicates “California live oak,” “leaning,” “was struck by lightning,” “100 years old,” and “admirable” to ascribe different properties of the object as it is intended in the various acts. In this phenomenological description of a complex of co-directed acts, we describe acts whose noemata include the same X but different predicate-senses.
Suffice it to say the several types of noematic sense we have been considering work differently. The important result in Husserl's analysis of sense as “X + predicates” is the way in which our experiences track the same object through different acts of consciousness. For the work of an “X” sense is precisely to prescribe the same object in various acts. As I walk around the tree, turning away from it, returning my gaze to it, I see “the same” object “X,” regarded from different perspectives, with different properties visible from different sides. My varying experiences thus present the same object with different properties, and the X-sense prescribes that particular object, while adjoined predicate-senses prescribe different properties of that identical object.
A vital part of Husserl's phenomenology is his account of the “horizon” of what we experience. When I approach a tree, seeing it from different perspectives, as I gaze upon it at this moment from this one side, there is more to the content of my current experience than a simple percept or visual meaning such as “this tree” (infused with sensory content) or even “this blossoming plum tree” or “this sturdy live oak tree.” Part of our implicit understanding of things in nature is a sense of what Husserl called their “transcendence”: there is always more to come, more to any given thing than what we see in a given experience, certainly more than what I see of this tree from this one side. A fuller form of phenomenological description of my visual experience (ascribing an X in the complex noematic sense) might be:
I see this object x which is such that x is a tree and x is a Japanese plum and x is blossoming now on the side facing me and x will bear plums in another month … and so forth.
As Husserl remarks, “The ‘and so forth’ is an … absolutely indispensable moment in the thing-noema” (Ideas I, §149).This element of meaning, “and so forth,” prescribes what Husserl calls a horizon (Horizont) of the object as intended in the experience, a range of “indeterminacy” about the object, that is, a structure of possibilities for the same object (“x”) that are left open or undetermined by the act's noematic content, including what the perceived object might look like from the back side (compare Ideas I, £44, quoted later).
Seeing the tree at this moment, I expect that if I walk further around the tree I will see more branches of a similar kind, with blossoms on that side too. My expectations about the object constrain what I see in my current perception of the tree. Constrained by my background understanding, my perception leaves open a horizon of possibilities about the same object. This range of possibilities is defined by the noematic sense in my experience together with the content of my implicit – often vague and indefinite – background ideas about such objects, including beliefs, expectations, and practices. Thus we may define the horizon of an act of consciousness as the range of possibilities for the intended object that are left open by the act's noematic sense together with relevant background ideas that are implicit or presupposed in the core sense. These possibilities are possible states of affairs in which the intended object has further properties compatible with what is prescribed by the act's sense constrained by its background presuppositions. We may also speak of the horizon of further possible experiences of the same object, experiences whose noemata prescribe the same object with further properties compatible with what is prescribed by the original act's noematic sense together with its implicit presuppositions. Or we may speak of the horizon of further noemata or senses that prescribe the same object with further properties allowed by the act's noematic sense together with implicit presuppositions (a detailed reconstruction of Husserl's notion of horizon is developed in Smith and McIntyre 1982: ch. 5).
The possibilities left open in an experience must be compatible with the conceptual content of the experience. For example, given my concept of a tree, the object I see, as perceived, will presumably have bark but cannot bark like a dog. Within the range of conceptual possibilities, however, the possibilities left open in my experience must be “motivated,” not “empty,” possibilities. Consider an example Husserl uses (Ideas I, £140). As I walk into an unfamiliar room, I see a desk across the room. I do not count the number of legs on the desk, which are mostly out of view; I merely see “that desk.” How many legs can “that desk” have, the object as intended in my perception? Given my long familiarity with desks, it very likely has four legs. It might have six or even eight legs if it is unusually ornate (like the one in my own office), but it cannot in any likelihood have ten legs: that possibility is not motivated by my prior experience with desks. Motivated possibilities are precisely those to which I would assign a reasonable probability given my past experience (Logical Investigations, Investigation I, ££2–3; Ideas I, £140).
The notion of horizon is introduced quite early in Husserl's road map of phenomenology in Ideas I, as horizon is tied into noematic sense even before the noema is explicated:
A thing [Ding: material thing] is necessarily given in mere “ways of appearing” [that is, from one side], and necessarily there is thereby a nucleus of “what is actually presented” surrounded in apprehension by a horizon [Horizont] of nongenuine [uneigentlich] “cogivenness” and more or less vague indeterminacy.And the sense [Sinn] of this indeterminacy is once again predelineated [vorgezeichnet] through the general sense of the perceived thing in general and as such, respectively, through the general essence of this type of perception that we call thing-perception. The indeterminacy … points forward to possible manifolds of perception [Wahrnehmungsmannigfaltigkeiten] that, continuously merging with one another, close together into a unity of perception in which the continuously enduring thing in ever new series of adumbrations [Abschattungsreihen] shows again and again new “sides” [“Seiten”].
(Ideas I, £44, my translation)
So a material thing can appear from only one side at a time, but we understand that further aspects or “adumbrations” of the same object can appear from different perspectives. This understanding is part of the (noematic) sense of the perception of a thing. Thus, the sense in the experience “predelineates” a horizon of indeterminacy about the object, a range of properties left open for the same object. And this range of possibilities left open for the object “point forward to” a manifold of perceptions in which the same object would be presented from new sides. That which is given inattentively Husserl calls “backgound” (Hintergrund) (Ideas I, £35) or a “horizon of inattentive background” (£83). Modes of attentiveness belong to the “ways of givenness” in an experience (£92), which are reflected in the thetic part of the act's noema (££130–3). “Every perception has… its background of perception,” which entails potential “positings” in further perceptions (£113).
As the structure of the noema is explicated in Ideas I (££128–33), the noematic sense in a perception accordingly predelineates the horizon of the object as perceived. Whence the meaning “and so forth” is an essential component in the noema of a perception of a thing (£149). That component of sense specifically opens up a horizon of possibilities for the object intended. And corresponding to that horizon of possibilities is a manifold of possible perceptions that fill in the properties of the object in ways compatible with the act's noema together with expectations or background ideas about that type of object. This “manifold” of noemata defines “all possible ‘subjective ways of appearing’, in which [the thing perceived] can be noematically constituted as identical” (£135). Thus Husserl writes:
[T]o every thing and ultimately to the whole thing-world with one space and one time [that is, nature] there correspond the manifolds of possible noetic events, the possible experiences of single individuals and of individuals in community that relate to it, experiences that as parallels to the previously treated noematic manifolds have in their essence itself the peculiarity according to sense and proposition [Sinn und Satz] to relate to this thing-world. In them there thus come the relevant manifolds of hyletic data belonging with “apprehensions,” thetic act-characters, etc…. The unity of the thing stands over against an infinite, ideal manifold of noetic experiences of a wholly determined essential content… , all therein united in being consciousness of “the same” thing.
(Ideas I, £135, my translation)
Corresponding to the manifold of possible perceptions associated with a given act of perception, then, is a manifold of noemata, joined with a manifold of possible sensory (“hyletic”) data that would support or “fulfill” noeses with such noemata. And corresponding to that manifold of noemata is a manifold of possibilities prescribed by these noemata in these possible perceptions. A note on terminology: the German term “Satz” is the traditional term for a proposition, that is, what is posited – proposed or asserted – in a declarative sentence or in a judgment. Husserl takes this term from Bolzano but widens it: a Sinn includes the way an object is presented, while a Satz adds a positing character such as judging, perceiving, desiring, and so on. Thus we understand a Satz as a “position” or “proposition” held on an object presented through a Sinn.
Amplifying the notion of horizon in his relatively late work Cartesian Meditations (1931), Husserl writes:
We can ask any horizon what “lies in it,” we can explicate or unfold it, and “uncover” the potentialities of conscious life at a particular time. Precisely thereby we uncover the objective sense [Sinn] implicitly meant, though never with more than a certain degree of foreshadowing, in the actual cogito. This sense, the cogitatum qua cogitatum [the cogitated qua cogitated], is never present [vorstellig: presented] as a finished given [object]; it becomes “clarified” only through explication of the given horizon and the new horizons continuously awakened.
(Cartesian Meditations, £19, my translation)
The emphasis here is on meaning that is implicit rather than explicit in an experience. Interestingly, such meaning is never fully accessible to the subject, never fully “presented” in consciousness. The meaning implicit in an experience we may call background meaning. Though Husserl does not say so, this range of meaning lies in the background of the experience, presupposed by and so implicit in the core of meaning in the act's noematic sense. Indeed, we may argue along Husserlian lines, the manifold of meanings that are implicit in an act's noema are part of the horizon of the object as intended (such a view is developed in the essay “Background Ideas” in my Mind World [D.W. Smith 2004]).
The term “horizon” appears regularly and saliently in Husserl's many works, with varied uses, always highly suggestive. As the passages quoted indicate, Husserl's account of horizon appeals to his notion of “manifold” (Mannigfaltigkeit), adapted from non-Euclidean geometries under development in his day and featured in the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, launching the Logical Investigations.We may think of a manifold as a structured multiplicity. The German term is often translated simply as “multiplicity,” but this translation misses the structure Husserl has in mind: a manifold consists of “many” things “folded” together in a certain way (we explored Husserl's notion of manifold in Chapter 3). If now we reconstruct an ordered account of Husserl's theory of horizon, organizing and extending what we find in such passages as we have quoted, then the story might run as follows.
In Principles of Psychology (1891) William James observed that what we see is surrounded by a “fringe” of things to which we are not attending. Husserl broadens this notion – radically. (The first English translation of Husserl's Ideas I, by W. R. Boyce Gibson, translates “Horizont” as “fringe,” an allusion to James.) Accordingly, the horizon of an object as seen includes background objects, where the object is in the focus of attention and the surrounding objects are in the background of inattention, the periphery or margin of attention. The 1930s Gestalt psychologists (with influence from Husserl) held that perception has a general form of Figure/Ground or Object/ Background (“Gestalt” means form or figure). In our example above, the noema of my perception of a tree prescribes an object, “this tree,” against a background of surrounding objects, where the tree is presented attentively and the surrounding objects are presented inattentively, “dimly” and “indeterminately.” Part of the background of the object as perceived, then, is the spatial distribution of objects nearby. One of those objects is my own body. My left hand appears in my visual field as I shield my eyes from the sun, and that hand is part of the background of the tree I see. What I see, as seen, forms my visual field. But part of the horizon of the tree I see is my body, not merely my hand as I see it framing my view of this tree, but my whole “living” body. I take this tree to have a back side, and I take my hand to belong to my full body, most of which I do not see (and, for the most part, never will). In fact, my body serves as an “origin” of the spatial organization of my surroundings, my “surrounding world” (Umwelt). The Cartesian coordinate system can be seen as an abstraction from this phenomenological structure wherein all objects in my surrounding world, notably those I now see before me, are oriented with respect to my own body: not a single point (a zero point <0, 0, 0> for the three axes), but a structured living body featuring my head and feet (defining “up”/“down”), my hands (defining “left”/“right”), and my face and back (defining “front”/“back”).Another part of the background of what I see is not spatial, but temporal. The temporal flow of events is part of the horizon of this tree as I see it. The limbs are moving slightly in the breeze, moving in time. The tree as perceived is spread out in space and also in time: things in nature are experienced as spatiotemporal things. Furthermore, my memory, short and long term, is tied into my current perception. I see this tree swaying in the breeze, the same tree I saw a moment ago while walking up the hill, the same tree I expect to see a moment hence as I walk further. My seeing “this tree… ” carries my retention of what I just saw and my “protention” of what I shall presumably soon see; what I just saw and what I am about to see of the tree are part of the horizon of this tree in my perception. And further in the background of what I currently see lies what I happen to remember about the tree from a previous encounter. And further in the horizon lies my own stream of consciousness, for my current perception takes its place in a temporal flow of experiences of which I am aware in my consciousness of “internal” time, in the flow of my own experiences. That is, in the horizon of the object as I see it are both the flow of events in the surrounding world and the flow of events in my stream of consciousness as I see the object. Still further in the background of what I see are the significances or meanings, the noematic senses, relevant to “this tree” and further items of sense in the horizon of meaning associated with my perception. Implicit background meanings themselves lie in the horizon of what I see as I so experience it.
A good part of the preceding account of horizon is expounded in modified terminology in the writings of two phenomenologists who were greatly influenced by Husserl: in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945/2003), and in Aron Gurwitsch's The Field of Consciousness (1964) and Marginal Consciousness (1985). Both Merleau-Ponty and Gurwitsch drew explicitly on the work of Gestalt psychologists who conducted experiments in the 1930s.
By the 1960s a cousin to Husserl's notion of horizon developed within modal logic, in Jaakko Hintikka's logic of knowledge, belief, and perception: as it were, a mathematical logic for locutions like “S knows/believes/perceives that p,” that is, a logic for attributions of intentionality. In Hintikka's logical scheme for attributions of perception:
“S perceives that p” is true in the actual world if and only if, for every perceptually possible world compatible with what S perceives in the actual world, in that possible world it is the case that p.
If we transpose this equivalence directly into the Husserlian language of intentionality, we might say:
In the actual world W* S perceives that p if and only if in every perceptually possible world compatible with what S in W* now perceives, in that alternative world it is the case that p.
Corresponding to the given perception, then, there is a manifold of possible worlds – perceptually possible states of affairs or courses of events – compatible with what S perceives in that perception. These possibilities feature the object of perception in further possible situations, with further possible properties and relations, always compatible with what S perceives. This structure of possibilities makes up what Husserl called the horizon of that perception (see Smith and McIntyre 1982 for the full story of how Husserl's model of horizon is reflected in Hintikka's model of possible worlds).
There is a historical development of logical ideas leading from Husserl to Hintikka, with stops at Carnap and Tarski along the way. The outlines of that story are sketched in Chapter 5, where we looked into the conceptual foundations of phenomenology in relation to logic.
Pure phenomenology,we might well assume, appraises structures of consciousness (including noema and horizon) without making use of metaphysical or ontological commitments. “To the facts of experience alone!” might be the mantra, echoing Husserl's prescription “To the things [Sache] themselves!” In this assumption we hear strains of the Kantian doctrine that we can know things only as they appear, and neo-Kantian ideas were in the air as Husserl wrote Ideas I.That is to say, we are to describe and analyze consciousness without any forays into further analyses of the transcendent reality toward which consciousness is as-if directed. In strict Husserlian terms, pure phenomenology is to study consciousness in abstraction from the world of nature and also from the world of culture, addressing the essence of consciousness while bracketing the essence of nature and the essence of culture. The substantive or “material” ontologies of nature and culture are thus to play no role in the results of pure phenomenology – any more than they would in pure mathematics (which might later be applied to systems of nature or culture).
Nonetheless, phenomenology makes use of certain kinds of ontological principles. The distinction between concrete objects and their essences is an ontological distinction, and Husserl assumes this distinction when he says phenomenology is to study the essences of concrete acts of consciousness. So, despite talk of bracketing the question of the existence of “the world,” phenomenology is not supposed to eschew all ontology. Indeed, as we noted earlier, Ideas I begins with an outline of fundamental ontology, starting with the distinction between “fact” (concrete object) and essence. As the course of analysis proceeds, Husserl draws the distinction between noesis and noema, which is again an ontological distinction: noemata are ideal meanings, whereas noeses are concrete moments of acts of consciousness. Furthermore, although an act's noema is an ideal entity, Husserl holds that the noema is a moment of the act, an ideal moment with a unique “mode of being”: here again Husserl makes an ontological claim. In the practice of phenomenology, then, Husserl makes use of certain ontological claims concerning objects, essences, meanings, and parts or moments. These claims belong to what Husserl called “formal” ontology as opposed to “material” ontology (or ontologies), as we explained in Chapter 4.And Husserl uses principles of formal ontology as he pursues the material ontology of consciousness through phenomenological analysis. (Briefly, formal ontology applies within various material ontologies; for instance, the object/essence distinction applies within the ontologies of nature, culture, and consciousness – as Husserl parses these disciplines.)
We spoke in Chapter 5 of a minimalist form of phenomenology. It is important to keep this core phenomenology in mind. At the minimal level of analysis in phenomenology, we should remain as neutral as possible about matters of ontology. But Husserl is concerned also to develop a proper philosophy of phenomenology, a metatheory that would appraise, inter alia, how consciousness, with its phenomenological structure, fits into the world, with its ontological structure. As his development of phenomenology proceeds, then, Husserl lays out analyses of various structures of consciousness, including perception, spatiotemporal awareness, self-awareness, other-awareness, and so on, observing relevant forms of intentionality in these types of consciousness. But he also lays out principles of ontology to explicate what consciousness and its intentionality are all about: consciousness of something consists in an intentional relation among subject, act, noema, and object; an act's noema is an ideal meaning correlated with a noesis; the noesis is a concrete moment of the act; the noema in the act prescribes an object in a certain way; the noema predelineates a horizon of open possibilities for the object; and so on. But Husserl also finds within consciousness commitments to various ontological claims, to which we turn now.
As Husserl's analyses of noematic structure proceed, he finds ontological presuppositions within certain structures of sense. Specifically, the phenomenological distinction between the two types of sense, “object” and “property,” corresponds to a presupposed ontological distinction between the two types of entity, Object and Property. According to Husserl's analysis, I experience this difference in what I see: I see “this object with these properties.” In my experience, then, I assume a distinction between the thing I see and the properties I see it as having, and this distinction is manifest in the structure of the noematic sense in my visual experience. The point is not that these technical terms from ontology are wafting through my consciousness; rather, our use of such terms in phenomenological description ascribes appropriate structures to the experience itself.
Specifically, in phenomenological description Husserl factors predicate-senses themselves into different senses that carry presuppositions about the ontology of the intended world around us. Here is how Husserl unpacks some of these presuppositions:
[T]o [an act's] noema there belongs an “objectivity” – in quotation marks – with a certain noematic composition, which becomes explicated in… a description of the “meant [vermeinten] objective just as it is meant”… To it there are applied formalontological expressions such as “object,” “property,” “state of affairs”; material-ontological expressions such as “thing,” “figure,” “cause”; material determinations such as “rough,” “hard,” “colored” – all have their quotation marks, thus the noematically modified sense.
(Ideas I, £130, my translation)
We recall the significance of the quotation marks: we are talking about items of sense, not what they designate in the world.
As we saw in Chapter 4, Husserl distinguishes formal and material ontology. Formal ontological categories include Object, Property, and State of Affairs – these categories apply to objects in any domain, whether physical objects, numerical objects, musical objects, or whatever. By contrast, material or regional ontological categories apply to objects in a specific domain or region, such as Nature, Culture, Consciousness. Thus, a tree is a thing in nature, a thing with spatiotemporal properties. More specifically, it has a certain shape or geometrical figure, and it stands in causal relations (as when the wind blows its branches around). It has particular properties or “determinations,” such as being rough on its bark, hard to a certain degree, and colored with a certain shade in its leaves. These properties fall under its regional essence as part of nature. But the tree is, more abstractly, an object rather than a property. And it has an array of properties (including those just cited). The tree and its properties form states of affairs consisting in the tree having specific properties. Those features of the tree are, in Husserl's terms, formal rather than material. These distinctions among types of properties belong to ontology, but we are currently concerned with phenomenology.
In the passage just quoted, then, Husserl finds that our experience of objects presents objects with such distinguishable features as those just mentioned: properties that fall under formal and material categories. We do not use this technical jargon of ontology in our everyday lives; nor do we explicitly draw these distinctions as we see a tree with blossoms on its boughs. Yet, in phenomenological analysis, Husserl claims, we find such distinctions at work as we see or think about or act upon familiar things in the world around us. To see a tree, Husserl holds, is an experience with a structured noema that can be analyzed as a meaning that presupposes such distinctions. To be sure, the analysis or explication of an act's meaning, its noema together with its horizon of implicit meaning, requires all that goes into phenomenological reflection: as I see “this tree… ,” the full range of meaning in my experience does not stare me in the face (as does the tree). The meaning in an experience requires considered explication, much as meaning in language requires careful interpretation beyond, say, what a sentence wears on its sleeve, as it were. Under phenomenological analysis, Husserl finds, a simple experience such as my perception of a tree reveals implicit commitment to ontological distinctions concerning what I see and its relation to the world around me.
Not least among the implicit, presupposed distinctions concerning things we encounter in everyday life is the elementary distinction between the same object and its varying properties. This phenomenological structure, “object x + properties P, Q,… ,” is the basis of Husserl's rich account of the horizon of an experience. The distinction of object-identity amid property-variation is a distinction of formal ontology, presupposed in the phenomenological structure of horizon. However, as Husserl fleshes out the horizon of a typical perception of an object, he traces out ways in which the noematic sense of a perception draws upon background presuppositions about the material as well as the formal ontology of objects in nature.
Thus, having outlined how the sense of a thing in nature (say, a tree) carries commitment to formal-ontological features such as “object” and “property” (Ideas I, ££130, 148), Husserl then addresses the material ontology presupposed in the sense of a natural thing:
The thing is given in its ideal essence as a res temporalis, in the necessary “form” of time…. The thing is furthermore according to its idea a res extensa; it is e.g. in spatial respect [a thing] of endlessly manifold changes in form…. The thing is finally a res materialis; it is a substantial unity, as such a unity of causalities.
(Ideas I, £149, my translation)
That is, the sense of a thing in nature presents it as a temporal, a spatial, and a causal object. These aspects belong to the material or “regional” ontology of any object in nature. And, Husserl finds, the very idea or sense of a natural object presents it as having properties of these three basic types.
In the preceding ways, we find phenomenology drawing on ontology. The noematic sense of an object in nature, Husserl says, presents the object as having a specific ontological structure: formally, as being an object bearing properties (species, qualities, relations); and materially, as being an object with temporal location, with spatial extension, and with causal relations to other things in nature. All this structure belongs to what Husserl calls the “constitution” of the object in consciousness.
In the closing sections of Ideas I (££150ff.) Husserl gives his most focused account of “constitution.”What is most difficult to understand in this discussion is the relation between phenomenology and ontology. It may sound as if Husserl is advancing from phenomenology (we experience objects as having certain ontological structures) to ontology (objects have certain ontological structures because we so experience them – our experience makes them so). That is, it may sound as if consciousness produces the objects around us, bringing them into existence and giving them their essences, creating and constructing objects in nature (in space and time), other subjects in their streams of consciousness, and other persons in culture. On such a view, my perceptual experience would project “this tree” into being: “Let there be this tree, on a hillside, with a raven perched on a front branch” – and so the tree on the hill with the raven would come to be. In such an ontology “I” would be the deus ex machina who leaps in to sustain the world. This doctrine of constitution would be a radical form of idealism. But that is not what we find in Husserl when we look at the details. Rather, Husserl's conception of the constitution of the world is an extension of what he called pure logic in the Prolegomena in the Logical Investigations. In the Prolegomena, Husserl proposed a systematic correlation between structures of meaning and structures of object represented by appropriate meanings. In Ideas I, Husserl proposes a systematic correlation between structures of noemata and structures of intended objects. In both cases, in logic and in phenomenology, the correlations involve an application of Husserl's early notion of manifold drawn from mathematics.
(In Chapter 4 we considered whether Husserl was a metaphysical idealist of some sort. In Ideas I [£49], he says the being of the world is “relative” to consciousness. And in Cartesian Meditations he struggles to defuse the worry of “transcendental solipsism.” Nonetheless, metaphysical idealism and solipsism do not fit with Husserl's philosophical system.)
Immediately after introducing the notion of intentionality in Ideas I (£84), Husserl declares that the greatest problems of phenomenology are “the functional problems, or those of the ‘constitution [Konstitution] of objectivities of consciousness’” (£86). “Function” in this sense, as opposed to the mathematical sense, Husserl writes, is “grounded in the pure essence of noesis. Consciousness is precisely consciousness ‘of’ something, it is its essence to harbor ‘sense’ [‘Sinn’].” That is, the function of intentionality is precisely that of “constituting” an object through (noematic) sense.
Husserl's theory of constitution is a theory of the structure of intentionality – a complex structure. Simply put: an object is constituted in an act of consciousness insofar as the object is intended as such-and-such, where the structure of the act's noematic sense is correlated systematically with the structure of the intended object and its essence, that is, the structure of “the object as intended.” If you will, the meaning content of the act projects a certain structure in the projected object, and so the object-as-intended is constituted with the projected structure. Briefly, the structural correlation is that mapped in our prior discussion of the structure of intentionality via noema (cum horizon):
act – noematic sense <object X with properties P> → [object X with properties P]
where this intentional relation is conditioned by a horizon of further possible experiences of the same object.
If the act's content is satisfied, then the object exists and is so structured – in the world, at the terminus of the act's “ray” of intentionality. In short, “constitution” is just structured intentionality. The word “constitution” literally means putting things in place together: “co-institution.” Intentionality puts in place a certain object with certain properties; intentionality, if successful, puts an object with properties in its place in relation to the act. (The angle brackets above express noema quotation. The square brackets represent an objective structure in the world; they do not represent Husserlian “brackets,” though the point might be made by reading them in that way.)
More fully stated, in terms of Husserl's full theory of noema and horizon:
An object X is constituted in an act A of consciousness if and only if:
(1) act A intends “object X with properties P,” where A has a noema with sense <object X with properties P>, that sense prescribes object X with properties P in the actual world W, and if the sense is satisfied in W, then object X with properties P is the object intended by act A in the actual world W; and
(2) corresponding to act A is a horizon of possible acts A*…, where A* intends “object X with properties P*,” where A* has a noema with sense <object X with properties P*>, that sense prescribes object X with properties P* in possible world W*,
and if the sense is satisfied in W*, then object X with properties P*
is the object intended by act A* in world W*;
where X's bearing properties P* in W* is compatible with X's bearing properties P in W, that is, the “determinations” of X intended in the horizon act A* are compatible with what is left open and motivated by the noematic sense in act A.
Constitution then consists in this pattern of intentionality, this structure of what is intended in A together with the acts in the horizon of A. The act-horizon of A is a manifold of possible further experiences of the same object. The noema-horizon of A is a manifold of further noemata which prescribe the same object with further possible properties of the object, properties compatible with and motivated by what is prescribed by the noema of A itself. And the object-horizon of A is a manifold of possible states of affairs in which the same object has further properties compatible with those prescribed by the noema of A. This complex structure correlating manifolds of acts, noemata, and possible states of affairs forms the constitution of the intended object in consciousness. This complex structure is displayed in Figure 6.3.
The formal structure of constitution, as so depicted, is detailed in Husserl's theory of noema and horizon. The material structure of constitution for a thing in nature is specified in Husserl's account of the ontological presuppositions carried in an act's noema: presuppositions of formal ontological distinctions, in the concepts of “object” and “property”; and presuppositions of material ontological distinctions, in the concepts of “temporal,” “spatial,” and “causal” aspects of a “thing in nature.”
Here we fold the formal/material distinction back into the structure of constitution, as opposed to the structure of either a noema (“this object that is a tree in nature”) or the intended object itself (this object that is a tree in nature).
In Husserl's doctrine of constitution we may hear echoes of Kant's transcendental idealism. Husserl's explicit analysis of constitution is found in the closing sections of Ideas I: in Part Four, “Reason and Actuality,” comprising chapter 1, “The Noematic Sense and the Relation to the Object,” chapter 2, “Phenomenology of Reason,” and chapter 3, “… Problems of the Theory of Reason.” Here is Husserl's phenomenological critique of reason, echoing while implicitly correcting Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). Kant did not use the term “constitution” (Konstitution), but he did speak of “constitutive” (konstitutiv) principles governing or defining any possible experience of objects, and he spoke directly of the “construction” (Konstruction) of concepts in geometry (p. 633) and so in effect of our perceptual “construction” of objects such as triangles in Euclidean
space. Kant famously argued that space is not an objective structure of things-in-themselves, but rather a “form of intuition” in our perception of things as spatial and so a structure of things-as-they-appear. Husserl's analysis of space and time and perception of spatiotemporal things does not say that we “construct” things in space and time; rather, we implicitly construct the meanings through which we experience things in space-time. Though Husserl in his own way covers many important Kantian themes (sensation and conception, representation, awareness of space and time, and so on), Husserl's driving concerns were different from Kant's (Kant sought to overcome Humean skepticism, avoid metaphysics, and explain how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible in geometry and physics). Moreover, Husserl's milieu was very different. The new form of logic was taking shape around him, and with it the discipline that would become known as semantics in 20th-century logic. Husserl was very much aware of the relevant developments in mathematics and logic, and his account of the structure of intentionality, in the account of constitution, is in effect a logical semantics of consciousness.
Husserl characterized an act's noema as both “sense” and “the object as intended.”This dual characterization has led scholars to interpret, or develop, his theory of noema in divergent ways. Some four interpretations have been prominent, each developing a distinct model of the noema and its role in intentionality. Each can be seen as a further development of core ideas in Husserl. A comparison will be illuminating and will set off our own interpretation by contrast with alternatives.
Husserl sometimes speaks of the “intentional object” correlated with an act of consciousness: as in Cartesian Meditations (1931/1960), where he speaks of the “intentional object” or “cogitatum qua cogitatum” (§§15–16), which is “in” consciousness as “objective sense” (§18). So “intentional object” is another term for the noematic sense or object-as-intended. An intentional object, we may say, is an object that exists in an intentional relation to an act of consciousness. This notion echoes the original Scholastic doctrine, revived by Brentano, where an object is said to exist “in” an intention. But this idea might be developed in various ways. Husserl's Polish student Roman Ingarden elaborated the notion of an “intentional objectivity” as a “purely intentional object” (see Ingarden 1965/1973, §20: 117ff., and note his prior discussion of linguistic meaning, resonant with our earlier discussion). Ingarden puts forth his own conception of intentional objects as a modification or extension of Husserl's conception of noemata (p. 117, footnote 84, citing Ideas I). In Ingarden's ontology, a “purely intentional” object is “created” by an act of consciousness, whereas an “also intentional object,” or extra-intentional object, exists autonomously and happens to be the “target of an intention” – that is, if there is such an object in addition to the purely intentional object. Yet both are “transcendent” of acts of consciousness, that is, they are objects distinct from consciousness and not literally a part of any act of consciousness. For example, when I see that eucalyptus tree over there, my experience produces a purely intentional object “that eucalyptus tree over there [with a certain appearance],” but the tree itself that stands across the street from me (as it were, looking back at me) exists in space-time independently of my seeing it, and so is an also-intentional object. By contrast, the fantastical gnarly-armed tree I am currently imagining (while reading a Dr. Seuss story) does not exist in space-time but is a purely intentional object, and there is no further also-intentional object that my intention reaches. Since Ingarden objected to Husserl's transcendental idealism (Ingarden 1975), pressing a realist ontology himself, we may note that Ingarden's ontology would posit both ordinary objects like trees and purely intentional objects like fictional trees as objects with distinct modes of existence in the world. Fictional objects, for Ingarden, exist in the world, but they are purely intentional objects created, like works of art, by acts of consciousness. The intentional object model differs from the mediating-sense model we have developed in this chapter by pulling “sense,” as it were, out of the ray of intention and pressing it into the existential status of the object intended. (Other theories of intentional objects were elaborated by Husserl's contemporaries Alexius Meinong and Kasimier Twardowski, and indeed Husserl began his explicit work on intentionality with a 1894 essay titled “Intentional Objects” in the collection Husserl 1994: 345–87.)
When I see an object such as a tree, Husserl stressed, I see it as a tree visible from this one side in this morning light, but I can also see the same object from different sides in different lighting. Accordingly, there is a system of noemata that reflect the various ways in which the same object can be perceived: the tree as seen in one act of perception, the tree as seen in a further act of perception as I walk around it and look at its back side, and so on. Husserl's collaborator Aron Gurwitsch proposed to identify the object itself with this corresponding system of noemata. “[W]e may define the appearance of a thing as the thing itself as given in a particular one-sided manner of presentation … ,” where “the thing itself proves to be the all-inclusive systematic grouping of its appearances” (Gurwitsch 1964: 184; details follow on pp. 220ff.). These “appearances,” Gurwitsch holds (p. 185), are what Husserl called noemata, where a noema is an “object as it is intended” as distinguished from the “object itself.” So on Gurwitsch's ontology, a thing like a tree is identified with a system of noemata each of which consists in the tree itself as intended from a different perspective. Gurwitsch's use of the term “appearances” reflects the Kantian notion of phenomena or “things-as-they-appear,” but Gurwitsch is extending Husserl's notion of noemata or “objects-as-intended.” Nineteenth-century phenomenalism identified a material thing with an array of sensory appearances. In effect, Gurwitsch transforms classical phenomenalism into a doctrine that might be called noematic phenomenalism or noematic idealism (see Chapter 4 in this volume). This doctrine offers a neo-phenomenalist ontology of the “intentional object,” where the intended object itself resolves into a system of noemata, whence each noema is a part of the object. This neo-phenomenalist model of noema differs from our mediating-sense model (developed in this chapter) in that the neo-phenomenalist noema is part of the structure of the object rather than the content of the act.
The noema is not something at the terminus of the ray of intention, but rather something internal to the ray of intention: the ideal content of experience; as it were, the medium of intention. The noema is distinct from the object of the act of consciousness, we have stressed. Moreover, the noema is not a part of the object itself (as on the prior two models). Rather, the noema is part of the intention reaching toward the object. Specifically, the noema is the content of the act, that “in” the act which embodies the way the act is directed toward the object, if such object exists. The content is “in” the act, being a “moment” of the act (as we saw in the section titled “Noematic sense: ‘the object as intended’”), and thereby mediates the intentional relation between the act and the object (if such object exists). This structure of the intentional relation we articulate accordingly in our model of mediating sense:
act – noematic sense (“the object as intended”) → object
When Husserl calls the noema a “sense,” this appellation ties into the logical theory of reference via sense. But what is a sense? It is something that plays this role of mediating intentionality because it embodies the way the object is intended. This model of the noema is sometimes called the “California” or “West Coast” view of the noema, and it is key to the so-called “Fregean” model of intentionality. (It is elaborated in Føllesdal 1969/1982; Dreyfus 1982; Smith and McIntyre 1982; and a similar view is developed in Mohanty 1982, writing from a different geography.)
In the natural or mundane attitude, I see a tree across the street. By contrast, Husserl holds, in the phenomenological or transcendental attitude, I see that same tree but I “bracket” the question of its existence. Thereby, in reflection, I become aware of the tree not in itself, but merely as I see it. The noema, the object as it is intended, thus comes into view in reflection, and only in reflection. Accordingly, one might say the noema of my perception is the “bracketed” object, the perceived object itself shorn of its presumed status as existing in the surrounding natural world: the noema is the object “transcendentally viewed.” This conception of the noema – sometimes cast as an “East Coast” alternative to the “West Coast” view of the noema just elaborated – has been developed by Robert Sokolowski and John Drummond (see Sokolowski 2000; Drummond 1990, drawing on earlier writing of Sokolowski). On this conception, the noema of an act of consciousness is not ontologically distinct from the object of an act, but is “somehow identical” with the object. How? The noema is “the object transcendentally considered,” “the objective correlate [of an act] precisely as it is being looked at from the transcendental attitude” (Sokolowski 2000: 59; the point is amplified on pp. 185–97). Thus, “The object, the sense, and the noema are the same differently considered. In the natural attitude, we are turned to the object simpliciter…. Only in the reflective attitude, however, do we focus on the object as a sense” (Drummond 1990: 59). Furthermore, since the same object can be intended in different ways, from different sides or aspects, the object is itself “an identity presented in a manifold of appearances” (Drummond 1990: 151, drawing on Sokolowski's notion of identities in manifolds, as in Sokolowski 2000: 27ff., 59). This manifold of appearances is the horizon structure we have studied.
So what exactly is a noema on this model? At one level, we are told, to talk of an act's noema is to talk of an act's object, albeit “noematic-ally,” “transcendentally,” even “philosophically,” and so the noema is not an entity at all and not an entity that mediates the intentional relation of act to object (Sokolowski 2000: 59–60, 185–97, 222–3, in explicit contrast to the “West Coast” model depicted). However, in Husserl's categorial ontology (see Chapter 4 in this volume), anything is an entity, even an object-as-transcendentally-viewed. So what type of entity is that? We are told that: the noema = the object as intended = the object as transcendentally viewed. There are problems with this equation. What comes into view in transcendental phenomenological reflection is the object-as-intended, but now we seem to have the (object-as-intended)-as-transcendentally-viewed: the original act intends the object X as F, and now the reflective act intends (X-as-F) as T, so the original act's noema is X-as-F and the reflection's noema is (X-as-F)-as-T. That cannot be right, so perhaps the phrase “object as transcendentally viewed” is misleading. The aim of the account is to say that phenomenological reflection remains tied somehow to the object of consciousness, the object itself. Yes, the object itself in relation to the act of consciousness. But here we seem to have lost the declared goal of phenomenology, which is to turn toward consciousness with its noematic content, rather than toward the object itself. Recall Husserl's use of noematic quotation (in the section on “Phenomenological methods” earlier in this chapter). If Kurt says “Plato rules,” and we say “Kurt said, quote, ‘Plato rules,’” the point of our quotation is not to talk about Plato “in the linguistic attitude,” but to turn our regard to the words Kurt used to talk about Plato (and also thereby to their sense). Similarly, the point of a noematic quotation “Plato rules” is to turn our regard from the subject's thinking that Plato rules to the sense “Plato rules,” which embodies the way Plato is intended in that act of thinking. The aim is not to consider Plato noncommittally, bracketing his existence, but to reflect on one's consciousness of Plato and its sense. Thus, we start with an intention of an object via a sense, and then – by noematic quotation – we move (back up the ray of intention) from the object represented through the sense in our experience to the sense that represents that object. (Compare Thomasson 2005, arguing – by drawing on Wilfrid Sellars together with Husserl – that to talk noncommittally of how a red object looks produces a description of one's sensory experience of red, the red-appearance of the object.)
The key point for this model, then, is that the noema is assimilated to the object of consciousness, rather than to a mediating content that embodies the way the object is intended. Turning to ontology, on this model: first, the noema is identified with the bracketed object; second, that object is an “identity in a manifold of appearances.” Now, it is infelicitous to say two things are identical (“somehow”) – phenomenology does not require that we revise number theory so that 2 = 1. So it would be better to say, not that the noema is identical with the object, but that the noema is the object itself restricted to the presented aspect and shorn of its presumed existence. Then, we could say, the bracketed object model holds: where an act A intends an object X as having a feature F1, (1) the object of the act is X, and the noema of the act is X-as-F1, where X may or may not exist and X may or may not really be F1, and (2) X is a pole of identity in the system {X-as-F1, X-as-F2, X-as-F3, …}, where Fi are purported features of X as intended in alternative acts directed toward X from different perspectives. This model, so developed, is a variation on the intentional object approach to intentionality. It is akin to Meinong's “object theory” and to Hector-Neri Castañeda's “guise theory.” For Meinong, an object itself is “beyond” being or nonbeing, an “incomplete” object is an object limited to certain properties, and acts of consciousness are directed toward incomplete objects and only indirectly thereby toward complete objects. Similarly, for Castañeda, an object is composed of “guises,” complexes of properties, and our thoughts are directed toward guises, which are components of objects themselves. (See Smith and McIntyre 1982 on the distinction between object theories and content theories of intentionality. See Meinong 1904/1960 and D. W. Smith 1975 on Meinongian objects vis-à-vis intentionality. See Castañeda's presentation in Tomberlin 1986: 91–137; and D. W. Smith 1986 on Castañeda's guise theory.)
The mediating-sense model of noema places the noema in the intentional “ray” emanating from an act of consciousness toward an object. On this model, the noema or sense of an act is an abstraction of the way the act is directed. By contrast, the other three models of noema place the noema somehow within the object toward which the intentional ray is directed. Husserl's talk of the “intentional object” reflects a traditional Medieval ontology, and his talk of the “object as intended” echoes a Kantian idiom. These ways of talking seem to lead toward some form of “objectual” understanding of the noema of an act. However, Husserl's background in logical and mathematical theory (observed in Chapters 1–3) leads toward the “logical” or “semantic” conception of the noema as an ideal sense that mediates intentionality. That interpretation, which we have just expounded, places Husserl squarely in the context within which he wrote, within what Alberto Coffa has called “the semantic tradition” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see Coffa 1991). Husserl's basic theory of intentionality via ideal content emerges in the texts we have dissected. This theory could be extended consistently to allow that an object of consciousness is an object whose being is merely possible existence (say, in various possible situations or worlds), or merely intentional existence, or even “bracketable” existence. Some of Husserl's language suggests ontological variations along such lines: he speaks, as noted, of “intentional objects,” and he speaks of “possible worlds.” (See Smith and McIntyre 1982 on the role of possible worlds in a Husserlian, or perhaps neo-Husserlian, theory of intentionality.) Even if Husserl's ontology includes intentional or possible entities, it already includes ideal meanings, which direct consciousness toward objects, be they actual or possible or merely intentional. Alas, we shall not be able to pursue such variations on Husserlian themes here.
Husserl's conception of phenomenology emerged, in Logical Investigations (1900–1), with his theory of intentionality as the central structure of consciousness. By the time of Ideas I (1913) he had extended that theory and developed a distinctive method by which phenomenological reflection would proceed. Husserl's mature “transcendental” phenomenology featured the method of “bracketing,” the notions of “noema” and “horizon,” and a complex account of the “constitution” of objects in consciousness. The essence of consciousness is unfolded through this phenomenological analysis.
The new method of phenomenology iscalled “phenomenological reduction” or phenomenological “bracketing.” In the everyday “natural” attitude, we assume the existence of things around us in space and time, in nature. In order to shift into the “transcendental” attitude of “pure” phenomenology, I “bracket” – make no use of – this general thesis of the natural attitude. Thereby I restrict my attention to my experience per se, to the structure of “pure” consciousness. Each act of consciousness, we then see, consists in a “noetic” process or “noesis” (fulfilled with sensory “hyle” in the case of perception); and correlated with this noesis is a “noema.”The noesis is the intentional part (moment) of the act of consciousness, a process that occurs in time. The correlated noema is an ideal content or sense, which does not occur in time, but which presents or prescribes the object of consciousness. The noema is characterized, alternatively, as the object-as-intended: the object of consciousness just as it is experienced or intended in that act. The object intended through this sense may or may not exist and, as in the case of seeing a tree nearby, may or may not actually occur in space-time (as assumed in the natural attitude). Yet the act intends this object even if no such object exists. By describing this object just as it is experienced, then, I describe my consciousness of the object, characterizing its own form of intentionality, featuring the relevant noema. Further reflection reveals a “horizon” of further possibilities regarding the object of the act. These possibilities are “predelineated” by the noematic content of the act, prescribed by a horizon of further noemata presenting the same object with further possible features.
Intentionality, we see in phenomenological reflection, consists in this structure of consciousness, wherein an act is directed toward an object via a noema constrained by a horizon of further possible significances. In Husserl's “transcendental” idiom, an object is said to be “constituted” in consciousness insofar as it is intended as having certain features and as possibly having a variety of further features, that is, insofar as it is so characterized by a given noema and correlated horizon of meaning.
With this enhanced account of intentionality and the constitution of objects in consciousness, Husserl presents his conception of phenomenology as transcendental. The more minimal conception of phenomenology is thereby elaborated within an extended theory of intentionality and a particular conception of transcendental philosophy. Husserl's conception of logical semantics is here put to work in the foundations of phenomenology. By the same token, Husserl's conception of phenomenology is put to work in the foundations of logical semantics. Ideal sense or meaning is now explicated as noematic intentional content, with all its force in the flow of consciousness.
Coffa, J. Alberto. 1991. The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station. Edited by Linda Wessels. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. A study of the historical development of semantics from the 19th century forward, indicating Husserl's place in the tradition.
Dreyfus, Hubert L., ed. 1982. Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science. In collaboration with Harrison Hall. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. A collection of essays addressing the semantic core of Husserl's theory of intentionality and its relation to contemporary cognitive science and the representational theory of mind, including Dagfinn Føllesdal's seminal 1969 article “Husserl's Notion of Noema.”
Drummond, John J. 1990. Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism: Noema and Object. Dordrecht and Boston, Massachusetts: Kluwer Academic Publishers (now New York: Springer). A study of Husserl's theory of intentionality and noema, Smith and McIntyre (1982) defending a partly different interpretation of noema than that in and Dreyfus (1982).
Drummond, John J., and Lester Embree, eds. 1992. The Phenomenology of the Noema. Dordrecht and Boston, Massachusetts: Kluwer Academic Publishers (now New York: Springer). Studies of Husserl's theory of the noema.
Dummett, Michael. 1993. Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. A study of the roles of Frege and Husserl in the development of the tradition of analytic philosophy, addressing issues of intentionality, sense, and reference, and the relative priority of mind and language.
Friedman, Michael. 1999. Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. A study of Carnap's logical empiricism and its historical background, including Husserl's phenomenology and the concept of “constitution.”
Hill, Clair Ortiz, and Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock. 2000. Husserl or Frege? Meaning, Objectivity, and Mathematics. Chicago and LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court. Studies of relations between Husserl, Frege, and others.
Mohanty, J. N. 1982. Husserl and Frege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. A study of the historical and conceptual relations between Husserl's theory of intentionality and Frege's semantical ideas.
Richardson, Alan W. 1998. Carnap's Construction of the World: The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. A study of Carnap's logical empiricism, including his conception of “constitution” and its relation to Husserlian phenomenology.
Ryckman, Thomas. 2005. The Reign of Relativity: Philosophy in Physics 1915–1925. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. A study of general relativity theory, addressing Husserl's transcendental phenomenology in relation to Weyl's mathematical formulation of Einstein's theory.
Smith, David Woodruff. 1995. “Mind and Body.” In B. Smith and D. W. Smith, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. A study of Husserl's ontology, including Husserl's conception of formal and material ontology, relating the theory of intentionality to contemporary philosophy of mind.
Smith, David Woodruff, and Ronald McIntyre. 1982. Husserl and Intentionality: A Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language. Dordrecht and Boston, Massachusetts: D. Reidel Publishing Company (now New York: Springer). A book-length study of Husserl's theory of intentionality, meaning, and horizon, including relations to contemporary logical or semantic theory.
Thomasson, Amie L. 2005. “First-Person Knowledge in Phenomenology.” In David Woodruff Smith and Amie L. Thomasson, eds. Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. A contemporary account of phenomenological method, explicating Husserl's method by contrasting it with inner observation and comparing it instead with uses of quotation.
Tieszen, Richard. 2005. Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Studies of Husserlian phenomenology in relation to philosophy of logic and mathematics.
