We have studied Husserl's views in the core philosophical fields of logic, ontology, phenomenology, epistemology, and ethics, tracing their interconnections within Husserl's system of philosophy. In this chapter we look at Husserl's place in the history of philosophy and assess how certain Husserlian theories fare today. First, we survey Husserl's role in 20th-century philosophy, in the two traditions called “continental” philosophy and “analytic” philosophy.Then we turn to 21st-century concerns about consciousness, its place in nature and in culture, and the ontology of ideal contents of consciousness.Accordingly,we appraise Husserl's theory of meaning (Sinn) – thus his crucial notion of noema – amid contemporary issues concerning the nature of human experience and its place in the world.
Husserl developed a tightly knit system of philosophy, weaving together theories about phenomena in the domains of logic, ontology, phenomenology, epistemology, and value theory, with a central role for the new science of phenomenology. In Husserl's system we find an integrated philosophy of objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity.
In his grand narrative – explored in the preceding chapters – Husserl moves from the ideal of objectivity in pure logic and mathematics into the study of objective structures of the world. Then he moves into phenomenology, the science of the essence of consciousness, with its own objective methods for understanding subjective experience from the first-person perspective. From there he moves into the ideals of reason and intuition as grounding objective knowledge, achieved in experiences of perception and judgment about the world. He then moves into the role of intersubjective experience in the Lebenswelt, framing the background of all the preceding ranges of theory or knowledge. And from the life-world he moves into social and ethical theory. On Husserl's detailed analyses, then, the grounds of objectivity – in science, in everyday knowledge, in ethics, and in culture generally – lie in basic structures of subjectivity and correlative intersubjectivity.
Central to those structures – throughout Husserl's system and throughout Husserl's corpus – is a multifaceted theory of meaning (Sinn). Meaning is variously manifest in logical content (of propositions in theories), in phenomenological content (of different forms of consciousness), and in historical content (of culturally generated concepts). Indeed, in this Husserlian scheme, meaning itself is something objective (in logical structures), subjective (in phenomenological structures), and intersubjective (in cultural structures). Accordingly, in light of Husserl's detailed philosophical system, we should come to see meaning as a type of ideal structure that deserves a category of its own. Thus, recall (from Chapter 4) Husserl's supercategories of Fact, Essence, Meaning.
In his transcendental turn Husserl would seem to put forth his phenomenological theory of meaning as the ultimate foundation of his system – wherewith all the world is “constituted” in consciousness through systems of meaning, in the form of “phenomena” or noemata. However, I see Husserl's theory of meaning not as the sole foundation of his system, but as a crux of the system, a crucial node in the interconnections of phenomenology, ontology, logic, epistemology, ethics, and so on, in the system.That holistic structure in the system is mapped out in the chapters above.
Here, after a look at Husserl's historical influences, I propose to wrestle with the conceptual problem of formulating a coordinated theory of meaning that casts everyday meanings (forms of Sinn) as ideal and experiential and historical entities.We'll be drawing on the very different facets of meaning that Husserl characterized in the long and winding course of his evolving philosophy. Since these facets seem to lead in widely divergent directions, the problem is how to integrate the logical, the phenomenological, and the historical into a unified theory of meaning. Our critique thus takes the form of a stress test for this core part of Husserl's philosophy.
The history of Husserl's role in recent philosophy is still evolving. The common account is that Husserl was the founder of phenomenology, and phenomenology gave rise to a variety of movements in “continental” philosophy, including the works of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Aron Gurwitsch, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and more.The diverse continental thinkers can be seen as taking phenomenology in different directions, from transcendental to existential to structuralist or historicist and so on. Or some of these continentals can be seen as reacting against Husserlian phenomenology, even rejecting Husserl's project, usually on grounds of its lapsing into idealism or simply into psychology.
Yet Husserl also played a less-familiar role in the early development of “analytic” philosophy, which began with emphasis on the new logical theory from Frege into Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead and on. In his day Husserl interacted with the founders of mathematical logic, from Georg Cantor to David Hilbert to Rudolf Carnap, and decades later was admired by Kurt Gödel. Only in the second half of the 20th century was Husserl perceived as ensconced in the continental tradition, often set in opposition to the analytic tradition.
Meanwhile, as philosophy of mind and language evolved into the 21st century, phenomenological ideas have taken root in the analytic tradition, occasionally drawing ideas from Brentano, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty into contemporary debates. Our reflections on Husserl's legacy consider Husserl's roles in the continental and analytic traditions. With that historical perspective in place, we then turn to contemporary philosophical theory that draws on Husserlian ideas.
Husserl played a prominent and seminal role in the “continental” tradition of European philosophy throughout the 20th century. Husserl was the founder of phenomenology, which in turn was the progenitor of later movements in the continental tradition.A leading concern of this tradition has been the meaning of things human, and Husserl laid out this theme in great detail within his own system of philosophy.
The Logical Investigations appeared in three volumes in 1900–1, and soon launched a vigorous philosophical movement centered on phenomenology. In 1901 Husserl moved from Halle to Göttingen and his first regular professorship. By 1903 philosophers in Munich formed an informal group to discuss and develop issues raised in the Investigations, emphasizing ontology along with a “realist” approach to the new discipline of phenomenology. In this group Adolf Reinach developed an ontology of states of affairs, including their role in law. This notion took shape in Husserl and other Viennese philosophers, and would be central in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921/1961) as the analytic tradition diverged from the continental. In 1907 a group in Göttingen formed a society for the development of phenomenology. In this group were Roman Ingarden and Edith Stein. Joining in an active Polish school of philosophy, Ingarden developed a phenomenology and ontology of works of art, defining an influential approach to aesthetic theory. Stein would later work with Husserl directly. Husserl's lectures and seminars continued to stir interest in ensuing years, and Husserl emerged as the leading philosopher in Germany. By 1913, with the publication of Ideas I, Husserl had absorbed the language of Kantian “transcendental” philosophy, prominent in various neo-Kantian “schools” of the academy in Germany. In 1916 Husserl took the primary Chair in philosophy in Freiburg, where he taught until his retirement in 1928. During these years a number of significant philosophers attended Husserl's lectures, studied with him, or worked as his assistant (a position in the German universities where a young scholar works with and for the “master” scholar).And so Husserl migrated from his origins in mathematics and the Brentano school of Viennese philosophy into the center of German philosophy and indeed of continental European philosophy. As the century progressed, phenomenology, Husserl's brainchild, formed the intellectual center of continental philosophy in one form or another. (Spiegelberg 1965 constructs a two-volume history of the phenomenological movement and its several “schools.”)
Notable philosophers found their way to Husserl's door. Among his assistants at Freiburg were Edith Stein and later Martin Heidegger. Stein wrote a dissertation under Husserl on empathy (Stein 1916/1960), an astute analysis of the phenomenon and a paradigmatic study in the new phenomenology. Stein assisted Husserl in transforming the initial penciled version of Ideas II (prepared in 1912) into a manuscript in 1916, though Husserl still did not publish it. Also, Stein assisted Husserl in preparing his manuscripts on time-consciousness, later published under Heidegger's editorship. Stein's journey led from her early work in phenomenology to writing about cultural and theological themes and women's issues, before she died at Auschwitz in 1942; Pope John Paul II, formerly a Polish student of phenomenology (born Karol Wojtyla), declared her a saint in 1998. When Husserl arrived at Freiburg in 1916, Heidegger had completed his doctorate and was lecturing as a Privatdozent (private instructor). Heidegger collaborated closely with Husserl and served as Husserl's assistant before Heidegger left Freiburg in 1923 to teach at Marburg.When Husserl retired in 1928, Heidegger returned to Freiburg to assume the Chair vacated by Husserl. Though closely associated with Husserl, Heidegger sought to take phenomenology in a new direction in his Being and Time (1927/1962). On one level, Heidegger continued the practice of phenomenology inaugurated by Husserl. On another level, Heidegger sought to replace Husserl in the German academy and, philosophically, to move phenomenology away from a purportedly “Cartesian” emphasis on consciousness, practiced by “bracketing” the world beyond consciousness, and toward a new form of phenomenology, stressing our “being-in-the-world,” our “beingwith- others,” and what Heidegger called “fundamental ontology.” Scholars have sometimes called Heidegger's approach to phenomenology “existential” as opposed to “transcendental.” Interpreters are still arguing about the extent to which Heidegger either continued Husserlian phenomenology with different emphases or undercut the fundamentals dear to Husserl's heart. (Dreyfus 1991 stresses the discontinuities, emphasizing the practical and social dimension of Heidegger's approach, while Crowell 2001 emphasizes the continuities, stressing the “space of meaning” and Heidegger's debts to Husserl.)
What is beyond dispute is the historical progression from Husserl's work to Heidegger's and on to subsequent “continental” thinkers whose work would not have been possible without Husserl's. Indeed, beneath the disputes over method and emphasis, all “continental” philosophers from Husserl forward work in a broadly phenomenological tradition as they interpret structures of meaning (differently conceived) in various ranges of human activity, from perception to political engagement. (The Introduction to Embree et al. 1997, by Embree and Mohanty, assesses the commonalities of the many figures and views that fall within the phenomenological tradition broadly conceived. Moran 2000 offers a current study of the main works of several classical phenomenologists and the progression of phenomenologically inspired thinkers, starting with Husserl.)
In 1929 the Parisian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas visited Freiburg, studying the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. When he returned to Paris, Levinas wrote on Husserl's theory of intuition and subsequently developed a novel phenomenology of “the face” of the other, leading into a religious sensibility informed by phenomenology. In 1933–4 two more Parisian philosophers, whose fame awaited, went to Germany to study phenomenology. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir studied Husserlian phenomenology in Berlin, partly with Aron Gurwitsch, who subsequently taught phenomenology in Paris in the 1940s. Sartre became the archetypal writer-philosopher-activist of French existentialism. Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943/1956) is subtitled “An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology”; in that framework, a variant on Husserlian phenomenology, Sartre developed his famous themes of French existentialism, stressing our ultimate freedom of choice, our creation of values, and the ideal of acting in “good faith,” a kind of existential honesty. Meanwhile, Beauvoir, lifelong friend (and sometime lover) of Sartre developed an existential ethics and wrote one of the major works of feminist theory, The Second Sex (1949/1952), in which she characterized the male-dominant cultural perspective as presenting woman as “the other.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty worked with Sartre and Beauvoir through the Second World War, producing yet another seminal work in Phenomenology of Perception (1945/2003). Admiring the unpublished text of Husserl's Ideas II, Merleau-Ponty developed a rich analysis of the ways our experience is centered on consciousness of the body. His themes are actively pursued today in cognitive science and in cultural studies. In these works, French phenomenology expanded on the ideas developed in Austro-German phenomenology from Brentano to Husserl and beyond.
In Heidegger and then Sartre, phenomenology begat the movement of existentialism, which has had a broad popular appeal and contributed to a more public intellectual scene in France, as well as an existential style of psychoanalysis. In the second half of the 20th century, continental philosophy moved through subsequent movements, from classical phenomenology to existentialism to structuralism (the mind is structured like a language), poststructuralism (culture is structured in historical motifs), deconstruction (an indefinable practice of unearthing hidden, often contradictory cultural meanings), and cultural theory including feminist interpretation.
In the continental tradition, the great thinker needs to “kill off the father” in order to proceed with his own creativity. Heidegger had to separate his conception of phenomenology as fundamental ontology from Husserl's transcendental conception of phenomenology (though Heidegger also talks often of the “conditions of the possibility” of experience, the hallmark of Kantian transcendental philosophy). Sartre had to separate his “phenomenological ontology,” the foundation of his “existentialism,” from Husserl and Heidegger. Foucault and Derrida had to separate themselves from Sartre and from the “structuralism” that came after Sartrean existentialism in Parisian intellectual life. And so on.There is something to this Oedipal impulse in the trajectory of continental philosophy. Perhaps this sensibility reflects Nietzsche's emphasis on the constancy of change and the singularity of historical moments and figures. On the other hand, there are important continuities in the continental tradition, as each successive thinker seeks meaning in what remains a broadly phenomenological approach, as distinct from the “scientistic” approach of the analytic tradition. In Husserl's own case, though he distinguishes his views from traditional theories (of Platonic forms, Cartesian dualism, the Kantian thing-initself, Mill's psychologism), nonetheless his training in mathematics looked to the development of philosophical ideas on the model of mathematical theories built on prior theories. In a cultural vein, continental philosophy remains both a dynamic shifting from one movement to its successor and an evolving phylogeny of phenomenology writ large.
In post-Second World War Europe Husserlian phenomenology has been studied, modified, and critiqued by a wide variety of “continental” philosophers writing in the wake of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Husserlian phenomenology crossed the Atlantic in the 1940s, as Aron Gurwitsch left Paris for the United States, ultimately teaching for many years at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where Dorion Cairns also settled after returning to the States from extensive studies with Husserl in Freiburg. Gurwitsch presented phenomenology in his own terms, merging broadly Husserlian theory with Gestalt psychology (as did Merleau-Ponty, who had heard Gurwitsch lecture in Paris). Gradually, the study of Husserl and phenomenology spread throughout universities in the United States, particularly in the East, but also in the Midwest, notably at Northwestern University. American philosophers, pursuing studies of Husserl and other classical phenomenologists, formed scholarly organizations including the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the Husserl Circle, and the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. “Continental” philosophy, rooted in Husserlian phenomenology, was cultivated thus in the new soil of North American university campuses. (Many pertinent studies of Husserl and Husserlian phenomenology – indicating Husserl's continuing legacy growing out of the “continental” tradition – are cited in the previous chapters, especially Chapters 5 and 6.)
Running parallel to the phenomenological movement and its progeny in 20th-century “continental” philosophy was the tradition of “analytic” philosophy, which focused originally on logical theory. Husserl's role in 20th-century analytic philosophy is less well known than his role in the continental tradition. Much of the contemporary philosophical culture has “forgotten” Husserl's role in early analytic philosophy – in exactly the sense in which Heidegger said we moderns have “forgotten” things known to the early Greeks at the inception of Western philosophy. Alternatively, Husserl's role was “repressed,” in a Freudian sense, by philosophers who came of age in the second half of the 20th century. By the 1950s, the traditions of continental and analytic philosophy had sharply separated, each viewing the other with suspicion. Continental philosophy lacked logical rigor, said the analytic philosophers; analytic philosophy lacked human relevance, charged the continental philosophers. And so Husserl's relations to the founders of the analytic tradition came to be largely forgotten or repressed.
In Husserl's day, however, there was no schism between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy. Nor were these terms used until several decades later. Indeed, Husserl moved naturally among those thinkers who are now seen as the founding figures of the analytic tradition. As we noted in Chapters 2 and 3, from the 1880s through the 1920s Husserl interacted with major players in logic, mathematics, and set theory. During his years in Halle, 1886–1900, Husserl worked with Georg Cantor, a founding father of set theory, even as Husserl developed his own philosophy of mathematics that appeared in Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891/2003). Husserl communicated with Gottlob Frege, chief architect of the new logic of quantifiers and relational predicates, and the effects of the Husserl–Frege correspondence have been duly studied (recounted in Chapter 2). During his years in Göttingen, 1900–16, Husserl worked with David Hilbert, who was not only a leading mathematician (consulted by Albert Einstein), but also a seminal voice in the formalist view of mathematics as purely formal axiomatic systems.
As we stressed, Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900–1) traversed much of the same philosophical terrain as the chief logical works of those formative years, before Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell produced Principia Mathematica (1910–13). Especially striking are conceptual connections between Husserl's Investigations and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921/1961) – even though Wittgenstein's historical links to Husserl are unclear beyond their common ancestry in Vienna. Suffice it to say that Wittgenstein's account of how propositions “picture” facts (existing states of affairs in the world) by virtue of “logical form” resembles key parts of Husserl's account of how ideal meanings represent objects in the world, and how propositions represent states of affairs (see D.W. Smith 2002). In 1924–5 Rudolf Carnap attended Husserl's lectures, and Carnap's Aufbau (Der logische Aufbau der Welt, i.e. The Logical Structure of the World, 1928/2003) draws significantly and explicitly on ideas in Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, even as Carnap builds a “logical empiricism” or “logical positivism” focused on ideal forms of language rather than ideal forms of experience. Pressing the modern empiricist program, Moritz Schlick, founder of the Vienna Circle where logical positivism thrived in the 1930s, took Husserl seriously as Schlick set his own epistemology in opposition to Husserl's doctrine of intuition of essences or Wesenserschauung (as Livingston 2004 stresses).Where the positivists looked to empirical science, Albert Einstein, in formulating relativity theory, consulted mathematicians including David Hilbert and Hermann Weyl, both of whom were conversant with Husserl. Hilbert, as noted, was a colleague of Husserl's at Göttingen, and Weyl explicitly looked to Husserl's transcendental phenomenology as Weyl sought a mathematical formulation of relativity theory (see Ryckman 2005). Alfred Tarski cites Husserl's Logical Investigations in Tarski's 1933 groundbreaking mathematical theory of truth for certain formal languages. And Kurt Gödel in his later years looked to Husserlian phenomenology to support his own Platonistic views in logical theory (see Tieszen 2011).
To be sure, Husserl pressed his case for grounding logical theory in a phenomenological theory of intentionality, rather than an autonomous realm of linguistic signs, as seems assumed by early analytic philosophers. Nonetheless, Husserl's case takes its place in the vigorous debate of his day concerning philosophy of logic and language. (Husserl's role in what is now called analytic philosophy is studied in a number of works: Dreyfus 1982; Mohanty 1982; Smith and McIntyre 1982; Cobb-Stevens 1990; Coffa 1991; Dummett 1993; Richardson 1998; Friedman 1999; Hill and Rosado Haddock 2000; Fisette 2003; Livingston 2004; Ryckman 2005, 2006;Tieszen 2011.)
In Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993), Oxford philosopher of logic Michael Dummett held that what defined early analytic philosophy, beginning with Frege's work, was the thesis of the primacy of language. Bertrand Russell explicitly argued for grounding philosophy in logical analysis, and the new logic was built around a specific formal language.As the tools of this logical language were put to use, notably by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus and by Carnap in the Aufbau and later works, the focus on logic itself shifted to the nature of language. By mid-century, however, a new paradigm joined the older formal models: in philosophy we are to analyze the “logic” or “grammar” of ordinary language, so that classical epistemology, for instance, gives way to an analysis of how we ordinarily talk about sensations, beliefs, emotions, and other mental states.Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953/2001) set the agenda, following on years of discussions with philosophers in Cambridge and Oxford. Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949) appraised a variety of mental concepts as expressed in our everyday idioms of “believe,” “see,” etc. J. L.Austin furthered the new methodology of mid-century analytic philosophy. Now, it happens that Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin each called his own approach a kind of “phenomenology,” albeit moving through analysis of language (rather than reflection on forms of consciousness per se). Here was Husserl's influence, perhaps at some distance, though Ryle explicitly wrote on Husserl. Meanwhile, in the United States, Wilfrid Sellars, familiar with both Husserl's Logical Investigations and the emerging Oxbridge sensibility, developed his own approach to mind through language, in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956/2000), a work that has received renewed interest in recent years.
Analytic philosophy was influenced by Wittgenstein's early work in the Tractatus (1921/1961) and again by his later work in the Philosophical Investigations (1953/2001) and On Certainty (1949/1972). It is not clear whether Husserl ever read Wittgenstein or whether Wittgenstein ever read Husserl.Yet there are important conceptual links between their views, and both philosophers shared a common background in Viennese philosophy and in the logical theory developing in their time. Indeed, models of representation, in language and/or thought, were a focal concern during their times. In the 1930s, moreover, in notebooks gathered as The Big Typescript (1933/2005),Wittgenstein explicitly wrote of “phenomenology” as “grammar,” reflecting on visual space, color, pain, memory-time, “here” and “now,” and the sense of self. Clearly, concepts from Husserlian phenomenology, and its antecedents in Viennese philosophy from Brentano to Mach, were in the air Wittgenstein was breathing. To be sure,Wittgenstein may have privileged language over thought or consciousness, while Husserl grounded language in the intentionality of consciousness. Nonetheless, there are structural similarities (amid differences) between Husserl's theory of intentionality and Wittgenstein's Tractarian theory of linguistic representation (“picturing”). Both focused on the fine structure of our experience and language concerning sensation, time, space, self, etc. And there are conceptual ties between Husserl's account of the lifeworld's role in knowledge formation and the later Wittgenstein's account of the background practices that ground our everyday knowledge. Both philosophers spoke of mathematical “manifolds,” Mannigfaltigkeiten, in mapping the representational power of a system of representation (see D.W. Smith 2002 on intentionality vis-à-vis linguistic “picturing”; 2004: ch. 5, on background ideas and practices; and 2005, on the role of manifolds in a model of representation that extends Husserlian and Wittgensteinian models).
In short, Husserl was in direct contact with early logical and mathematical thinkers now perceived as the founders of modern logical theory and so of the tradition of analytic philosophy. Husserl and Frege critiqued their respective views on sense and reference. Some of Husserl's views were explicitly taken up and modified by Carnap, and are recognizable in early Wittgenstein. Some of Husserl's ideas are cited by Tarski. Moreover, as we observed in Chapters 2 and 3, Husserl's vision of “pure logic” as the theory of theories, outlined in the Logical Investigations, is a philosophical vision of logic and metalogic as they would be developed in technical detail in the works of Hilbert, Tarski, and Carnap. It is as if these logicians were working out the mathematical details of the philosophical vision framed by Husserl at the turn of the 20th century. Meanwhile, Husserl was working out the philosophical details of the vision, in his system of logic, ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology, first mapped out in the Logical Investigations in 1900–1. Husserl's philosophy of logic was distinctive, however, in seeking to ground logical theory in a phenomenological theory of intentionality. Moreover, even though Husserl developed his vision in a work whose title was “Logical…,” his vision is much wider than what many philosophers consider “logical.” Contrary to a certain conception of “analytic” philosophy, Husserl did not seek to reduce philosophy to logic in anything like the usual sense. Rather, logic takes its place in Husserl's system along with ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology, in interdependence with these areas. (Many pertinent studies of relations between Husserl and his contemporaries who worked in logical theory are cited in previous chapters, especially Chapter 3.)
We have surveyed, albeit briefly, Husserl's roles in the often-divergent traditions of continental and analytic philosophy. I have tried to approach Husserl's philosophy however with the attitude, “What split?”between continental and analytic philosophy. Before we turn to a contemporary critical perspective on Husserlian thought, I should like to outline the background within which I have been appraising Husserl's work, an approach sometimes called “analytic” phenomenology. (Some readers may wish to browse through this account of historical context and move on to the critical discussion ahead.)
In the latter half of the 20th century, as philosophical logic developed new semantic models, Husserlian ideas on intentionality were reconnected with themes from logical theory, and Husserlian phenomenology there took an “analytic” turn.
This “analytic” development of phenomenology took root in California during the 1960s, after a brief sojourn at Harvard. Dagfinn Føllesdal first studied mathematics at Oslo and Göttingen, and then wrote a master's thesis at Oslo in 1958 on Husserl and Frege, addressing Husserl's anti-psychologism. After completing a dissertation at Harvard in 1961, on reference and modal logic, under the direction of the logician-philosopher W. V. Quine, Føllesdal subsequently taught a course on Husserl at Harvard in 1962, 1963, and 1964, in which he drew parallels between Husserl's model of intentionality and Frege's model of reference (along the lines indicated in Chapter 6 above). Hubert Dreyfus, already working on phenomenology at Harvard since 1957, attended Føllesdal's Husserl lectures, completing his dissertation in 1964. In 1966 Føllesdal began teaching at Stanford as well as Oslo, and in 1968 Dreyfus began teaching at Berkeley, after teaching at MIT for several years. Meanwhile, Jaakko Hintikka, a pioneer in semantics for modal logics, spent 1956–9 at Harvard as a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows. During that time, when Føllesdal also arrived at Harvard, Hintikka developed a form of possible-worlds semantics for sentences of the form “a knows that p” or “a believes that p” (Hintikka 1962), followed in later years by further philosophical models of the logic of perception and intentionality as expressed in “a sees that p” (Hintikka 1969, 1975). In 1965 Hintikka began teaching at Stanford, while continuing also at Helsinki. In 1970 Ronald McIntyre and David Woodruff Smith (the present author) completed dissertations at Stanford,working with Føllesdal, Hintikka, and John Goheen, an astute reader of the history of philosophy. Those dissertations reconstructed Husserl's theory of intentionality, drawing on parallels with both the Fregean model of reference via sense and the Hintikkian “possible-worlds” model of intentional attitudes. (Smith and McIntyre 1982 extends results of those dissertations on the concepts of noematic sense and horizon, and Chapter 6 above pursues those issues further, while addressing alternative interpretations of Husserl.) From 1968 until the present day, “California” phenomenology has evolved through recurrent discussion groups in Northern and Southern California. Early discussants included Føllesdal, Hintikka, McIntyre,Woodruff Smith, Dreyfus, Izchak Miller, John Haugeland, Richard Tieszen, and John Searle (whose views on intentionality were evolving along lines somewhat parallel to Husserl's). While Dreyfus and Haugeland have pursued ideas in Heideggerian phenomenology, Føllesdal and others have developed themes in Husserlian phenomenology. It is interesting to note that most of these philosophers studied mathematics or physics before they studied phenomenology, as Husserl himself did. Since 1991, this style of phenomenology has been addressed in regular symposia at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, under the auspices of the Society for Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy (so named since 2004, formerly the Society for the Study of Husserl's Philosophy). The perennial informal discussion format continues under the California Phenomenology Circle.
As “California” phenomenology evolved, “analytic” aspects of phenomenology also took root on the East Coast of North America in the 1950s and 1960s, with impetus from another direction, as J. N. (Jitendranath) Mohanty divided his time between Sanskrit studies and phenomenology. Mohanty studied Sanskrit philosophy in Calcutta.Then he studied mathematics and philosophy in Göttingen in 1952–4, where he met the quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg, and where he read widely in German-language philosophy and wrote a dissertation on Platonism, looking to Husserl. Returning to Calcutta, he continued work in both Sanskrit philosophy and European phenomenology. In 1964 Mohanty published a book on Husserl's theory of meaning (Mohanty 1964), which was reviewed by Føllesdal, and in 1969 he published a book on the Husserlian model of intentionality (Mohanty 1972). In 1970 Mohanty moved from Calcutta to Oklahoma and later to the New School in New York and on to Temple and Emory Universities, maintaining an active presence in phenomenology on the East Coast. But Mohanty looked beyond the continental European tradition to the analytic tradition, writing on Husserl and Frege (Mohanty 1982) and developing an explicitly “analytic account” of transcendental phenomenology in reflecting on classical Husserlian views (Mohanty 1989). Mohanty has also written extensively on relations between phenomenology and classical Indian philosophy. Thus, Mohanty's work forms a bridge between philosophy East and West – and between East Coast phenomenology and West Coast phenomenology (Mohanty's 50 years of Husserl interpretation led into his two magisterial volumes: Mohanty 2008 and 2011).
In the 1970s another wave of “analytic” philosophy drew on Husserl's Logical Investigations. Three doctoral students in Manchester, England, worked on problems of ontology drawn from the early Husserl, which involved intentionality along with ontology and logical theory, reaching back to Bolzano and Brentano and philosophers influenced by those 19th-century Austrian thinkers. Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith fanned out to teach and write in Salzburg, Geneva, and Germany. They organized numerous conferences and helped organize the European Society for Analytic Philosophy, where Husserlian ontology and phenomenology play a welcome role. Currently, Mulligan teaches at Geneva, Simons at Trinity College Dublin, and Smith at Buffalo, New York. All three were visiting professors at the University of California, Irvine, between 1989 and 1992. (Smith and Smith 1995 includes essays that reflect interactions between the “California” school of phenomenology and this Anglo-European school of post-Brentanian philosophers.)
More recent developments of “analytic” themes in Husserlian phenomenology are informed by philosophy of mind shaped by cognitive science. Among recent philosophers working along these lines are Jean Petitot, Jean-Michel Roy, Bernard Pachoud, and the late Francisco Varela, working in Paris. Dan Zahavi, working in Copenhagen, joins classical Husserlian transcendental phenomenology with perspectives of cognitive science, as does Shaun Galagher, working in Memphis. Christian Beyer, in Göttingen, combines Husserl interpretation with contemporary issues of mind and content, noting Husserl's “twin world” thought experiment, 70 years before Hilary Putnam's “twin Earth” scenario, and arguing for an external aspect of intentionality within Husserlian theory. Gianfranco Soldati, in Freiburg, works on phenomenology in an analytic spirit and, with Fabian Dorsch, started a journal titled Analytic Phenomenology. And the list goes on, as Husserlian phenomenology is being developed, extended, and modified in relation to themes from analytic philosophy of mind and language.
We turn next to contemporary philosophy of mind.
(Basic writings in the “analytic” style of phenomenology are found in Dreyfus 1982; Smith and McIntyre 1982; Smith and Smith 1995. Mohanty 1989 and Cobb-Stevens 1990 address analytic themes in Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. Petitot e al.1999 includes essays on Husserlian phenomenology in relation to recent cognitive science, from a 1996 conference in Bordeaux. Smith and Thomasson 2005 features essays that integrate Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology with contemporary philosophy of mind. Reicher and Marek 2005 gathers essays on the interactions between phenomenology and analytic philosophy, from presentations at the 27th Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium held in Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria, in August 2004. Kriegel and Williford 2006 offers essays on consciousness, some drawing on Husserlian ideas. Bayne and Montague 2011 presents a debate on cognitive phenomenology, where Husserlian themes sometimes appear.)
What should we make of Husserl's complex philosophical system today? Apart from historical influences, and apart from ideological battles in or between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy, how do Husserlian ideas fare in the context of 21st-century theories of mind, brain, consciousness, intentionality, sociality, etc.?
The most difficult philosophical issues of our time concern how we fit into the larger world: how (a) our conscious experience, unfolding in our everyday life-world, ties into (b) the natural world of biological processes and ultimately relativistic-quantum-mechanical dynamics, and into (c) the social historical-cultural-political world founded on consciousness founded on the biologicalphysical- natural world.Well, this perplexing structure – of our lived consciousness, subjective and intersubjective, founded on the natural and on the cultural – exactly reflects Husserl's “material” ontology of Nature + Consciousness + Culture. For Husserl, that “material” structure is itself delimited in his “formal” ontology of Individual + Property/Relation + Part + Dependence, etc. (recall Chapter 4). Within a broadly Husserlian ontology, then, how do ideal structures of meaning and of the essence of consciousness fit into the concrete world around us, our historical-social-biological-physical Umwelt?
Husserl began his intellectual journey as a mathematician. Although he responded to key figures from Plato to his contemporaries, Husserl's corpus reads rather like that of mathematical theory where the theorists are arguing toward new results based on prior results.This critical response to other thinkers is quite different from that of the “debates”we often hear about, where philosophy is more like a gladiator ring than a growing and evolving body of theory. Here I should like to critique Husserl in the spirit of growing theory. In the background are contemporary debates about Husserl interpretation, about the goals and limits of phenomenology, about specific theories of consciousness and content, about theories of being and dependence.Yet here I should like to write not about those interesting debates and the partisans of opposing positions. I should like to write about the problems Husserl wrestled with, looking with our eyes today at “the things themselves.”
Drawing on Husserl's philosophical system, how might we today put together a theory of consciousness bearing ideal meaning that is realized in neurobiological systems in the natural world and differently realized in historical-cultural systems in the life-world? I shall try to sketch such a picture, drawn with an eye to the close detail we find in Husserl's complex system. (The surrounding debates far outrun the scope of this study, but I shall at least cite a sample of relevant references along the way.)
A persistent criticism of Husserl's mature philosophy holds that Husserl developed a radical idealism, where the world is “annihilated” in epoché and drawn into “pure” consciousness as a world of mere “phenomena” or things-as-intended (compare Kantian thingsas- they-appear). The portrait of Husserl's philosophical system developed in this book finds a very different attitude toward realismversus- idealism. As I understand the Husserlian model, acts of consciousness and things in nature and institutions in culture are by essence connected through intentional relations, without any reduction of nature or culture to consciousness, or vice versa.
Here let us put aside issues of idealism (addressed in Chapter 4), as well as issues of phenomenological methodology (addressed in Chapters 5 and 6). And let us put aside the ideological issues of Husserl's day, including how Husserl squares off with either continental or analytic philosophers in 20th-century debates (briefed above). Let us focus directly on the role of meaning (Sinn) in consciousness and the place of consciousness cum meaning in the world. Let us assume a realism that finds us and our experiences in a world where our consciousness is dependent in various ways on physical and biological reality and in other ways on historical and cultural reality.
I should like to address four aspects of consciousness, considering how we might analyze them in a context framed by today's perspective. Those aspects are:
(a) the subjective phenomenal character of consciousness,
(b) the neurobiological ground of consciousness,
(c) the ideal content of familiar acts of consciousness,
(d) the historical genesis of ideal concepts (among contents in consciousness).
How can a broadly Husserlian philosophy today analyze those features of consciousness, in light of the contours of contemporary science? After all, Husserl – former mathematician with eyes for the new physics taking shape around him informed by new mathematics – conceived of phenomenology itself as new science. What I propose to do here is to explore the ontology of phenomenology, drawing on specifics in Husserl's system while considering challenges looming in contemporary philosophy. Accordingly, we start from four basic assumptions about the four cited features of consciousness.
1 Consciousness takes its place in the world (it's “for real”). We experience acts of consciousness with a bona fide subjective, phenomenal, first-personal character: a transcendental character, in Husserlian idiom. What is the phenomenological structure of that character? And what is the ontology of that character?
2 The neurobiology of consciousness is fundamental. My lived conscious experience is grounded in processes in my nervous system within my human organism within my natural environment. In Husserlian idiom, my consciousness is founded, ontologically dependent, on my neurobiology. What is the ontology of that complex system within which consciousness arises replete with phenomenality yet founded in neurobiological processes?
3 Ideal contents are realized in consciousness, that is, as ideal meaning entities entertained in real-time acts of consciousness. In a typical experience I am presented something through a shareable intentional content: in Husserlian idiom, an ideal meaning structure called a noema or noematic sense (Sinn). What is the ontology of sense, whereby such an ideal entity is drawn into a concrete experience?
4 Most of our familiar concepts, which frame the contents of our everyday experiences, have a long history of genesis in our cultural milieu. What is the ontology of ideal contents formed by historical genesis?
With these principles in mind, we thus consider contemporary challenges to a broadly phenomenological theory of mind. How can phenomenal consciousness be realized in brain processes? Conversely, how can neurophysiological processes yield the experiential character of consciousness? Is the mind or brain executing a form of self-monitoring, or what? How can ideal meanings enter into our concrete world, where consciousness is realized through neural processing of information flowing from our environment? Further, how can timeless ideal meanings or concepts be developed in temporal historical-cultural processes?
These challenges have been laid out for the theory of mind and consciousness in countless books over the years, though rarely directed specifically at Husserl. In any case, if the shoe fits, Husserlian theory must wear it. And that means we must assess how well Husserlian theory can meet these challenges on today's horizon. I see these issues as fundamentally ontological, seeking a framework of ontology that accommodates fundamental phenomenological features of consciousness, even as the “horizon” of our contemporary experience opens to these ontological issues.
In Chapter 4 we sketched a Husserlian theory of the relation between mind and body, drawing details from Husserl's complex ontology. In brief: the same individual “I” incorporates different moments (dependent parts) that instantiate fundamentally different types of properties falling under the distinct essences of Consciousness and Nature. Thus, when I see “that blue-black raven,” my visual activity involves two different moments of me that realize respectively the essence of “seeing that blue-black raven” and the essence of a certain pattern of visual-neural-firing – the former essence falling under the region Consciousness and the latter essence under the region Nature. Here is an articulate version of the view that mind and body are distinct aspects of one entity – a form of monism, if you like.
Now let us consider how that Husserlian “moment” theory plays in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind. Husserl's rejection of “naturalism” I take to be a rejection of the identification of the ideal essence of consciousness (involving subjectivity, intentionality, etc. ) with the ideal essence of brain activity (involving electrochemical firings). Clearly, Husserl allows for a form of property dualism, or property pluralism, recognizing fundamentally different types of regional essences called Consciousness and Nature and also Geist – while avoiding a Cartesian dualism of substances called mind and body, since one individual substance “I” incorporates moments realizing these different types of essences. (This Husserlian moment theory of mind-and-body is detailed more closely in D. W. Smith 1995, cast there with an eye to themes then under discussion in philosophy of mind, including “supervenience” and “anomalous monism.” John Searle has argued sharply for distinct types or levels of reality: physical and biological processes; psychological processes of consciousness, with a “first-person ontology” of “inner, qualitative, subjective processes” (Searle 1998: 53); and social reality, with “collective intentionality” building social institutions (Searle 1998: 112–20ff. ). Searle rejects property dualism per se because he posits causal relations among the biological and the psychological (and hence the social), but familiar versions of property dualism, he holds, do not make room for these causal relations (Searle 2004: 31–33). From my perspective, however, Searle offers sharp arguments for a distinction among key properties of biological processes, subjective processes of consciousness, and social institutions: the very things Husserl distinguished under the three essences of Nature, Consciousness, and Culture or Geist. And indeed the structure of dependencies among entities under these three “regions” is precisely the problem we address below in terms of Husserl's moment theory. In another vein, notably, Chalmers 1996 and 2010 develop a detailed theory of consciousness that involves a particular take on property dualism; see Chalmers 2010: 196–9, and many related discussions there of his “two-dimensional” approach to the metaphysics of consciousness.)
In the age of neuroscience we want to know how consciousness is tied into neural activity in the brain. We know today that conscious experiences are dependent on neural processes in very specific parts of the brain – processes that are themselves dependent on many other biological processes in the body and indeed on interactions with the individual's environment. Neuroscientists themselves now speak freely of the “neural correlates of consciousness.” Consciousness is perfectly real, neural processes are real, and conscious experiences are dependent on certain neural processes. Accordingly, we ask how Husserl's moment ontology may be adapted to appraise the dependence of consciousness on brain. (Damasio 2010 recounts a rich biological story of how consciousness arises in the brain in the body in the environment – the biological Umwelt of consciousness itself. Petitot et al. 1999 includes studies of the correlation of consciousness with neural activity in what Francisco Varela dubbed “neurophenomenology.” Yoshimi 2007, 2011, and 2012 look to a mathematical dynamical model that addresses Husserlian phenomenology in a neural purview.)
In contemporary philosophy of mind, the celebrated “hard problem” for the theory of consciousness is how to fit the phenomenal and the physical into a scientific picture of the world, how to square the subjective phenomenal properties of a conscious mental process with the objective physical properties of its underlying neural process. Descartes famously argued that the properties of minds and of bodies are so different that they must belong to distinct types of things or “substances”: minds are thinking beings, while bodies are beings extended in space and time, never the twain to be identified. For decades now philosophers of mind have sought to reduce mental activity to brain activity or, with cognitive neuroscience, to brain function. In that vein, intentionality was modeled on information-processing à la computer science: whence mind is to brain as software is to hardware. But such information-processing may be simply unconscious, and indeed most of our neuro-mental activity is assumed to be unconscious.
Since the 1990s, however, philosophers of a broadly physicalist persuasion have pressed the case for bona fide subjective properties of mental states realized in neural activity. Consciousness proper arrived with the concern that the phenomenal character of an experience – “what it is like” to see red, to see a red rose, or to think about the thorns on a rose – escapes any account of the physical character of neural firings or their computational function. Accordingly, consciousness is treated seriously today by philosophers and scientists who take it for granted that subjective consciousness is indeed realized or produced in brain activity: the “hard problem” lying in wait on the horizon. (This development is apparent, for instance, in Searle 1983; Strawson 1994; Chalmers 1996; Siewert 1998; Janzen 2008; Kriegel 2009. It was Nagel 1974 that brought home the importance of “what it is like” for a subject to experience a mental act; this motif simmered for two decades. Block 2002/1995 distinguishes “phenomenal” consciousness from functional “access” consciousness à la information-processing, a distinction opening to the “hard problem” claim introduced in Chalmers 1996. Chalmers 2002 gathers key writings on recent philosophy of mind. Chalmers 2010 pursues different “dimensions” of the contents of phenomenal consciousness in relation to brain and environment. Looking toward phenomenology in philosophy of mind, see the essays in Smith and Thomasson 2005, and compare the essays on models of consciousness in Kriegel and Williford 2006.)
Husserl's ontology, I believe we should now see, articulates an intricate categorial scheme defining how subjective phenomenal consciousness fits into the surrounding world. The details lie in the moment theory outlined above (assuming complexities of Husserlian ontology studied in prior chapters). Such a categorial ontology, I submit, affords an insightful approach to the hard problem of consciousness.
It's easy for me to imagine my consciousness without my body, even without the world around my body (my Umwelt). Descartes' evil-genius argument, or thought experiment, is precisely the formulation of that logical or conceptual possibility. It's possible, so far as my consciousness ascertains for me, that there is an evil genius who controls my consciousness (my “thinking”) even though there is no world around me, the world I seem to perceive and interact with. A recent neurological variant assumes: it's possible, up to the theoretical constraints of neurobiology, that I am merely a brain in a vat, a brain producing my stream of consciousness while I remain deluded about the existence of all I seem to experience. And the scenario expands in the science-fiction film, The Matrix (1998), the conceit assuming: it's possible for me (were I in the place of the character Neo) to be experiencing my normal stream of consciousness, presenting me with a rich phenomenal Umwelt in which I live and breath and act, even though my subjective consciousness is altogether produced by a cyber-neural system, wherein my brain is under the control of a powerful cybernetic system interacting with my biological body immersed in a vat. There is something right about these philosophical fictions. But what? (D. W. Smith 2004 distinguishes phenomenological, epistemological, ontological, and semantic issues raised by Descartes' cogito-ergo-sum: see essay 2, “The Cogito circa A. D. 2000.” Chalmers 2010 explicates the hard problem in terms of the “Matrix” scenario: see ch. 13, “The Matrix as Metaphysics,” distinguishing epistemic possibility from metaphysical possibility for a conscious subject.)
Husserl's ontology has implications of considerable interest for the hard problem. First, Husserl carefully distinguished the regional essences Consciousness and Nature, sharply distinguishing the essential features of conscious experiences (intentionality, etc.) from the essential features of things in nature (spatiotemporality, etc.). Second, Husserl distinguished the logical category of Meaning (Sinn, noema) from the material categories of Consciousness and Nature. The separation of consciousness from neural process may seem hard to understand, then, for two reasons. First: the essence of consciousness and the essence of neural firing must be understood clearly, so that the phenomenal character of an experience under the region Consciousness is sharply distinguished from the physical character of neural processes under the region Nature. This distinction turns on a well-developed ontology of essences, and their instantiation in moments (dependent parts) of particular acts (of perception, thought, etc., founded on neural processes). Second: moreover, the noematic meanings of our experiences of mind and body must be understood clearly, so that the meaning through which I experience my own act of consciousness (as intentional, etc.) is sharply distinguished from the meaning through which I experience my own physical body (as spatiotemporal, etc.). This second distinction turns on a well-developed phenomenology and ontology of noematic meaning and its role in consciousness. Thus, I think or conceive of my own consciousness and my own body through meanings that may seem to diverge much as Descartes' evil-genius scenario allows: my consciousness is characterized as my “thinking,” whereas my body is characterized as “extended,” and nothing in the noematic meanings of my experience and of my physical-biological body logically entails that my subjective phenomenal experience is grounded in my brain… A fascinating corollary, in Husserl's phenomenology, is the distinction between the meaning of my own body as lived body (Leib) and the very different meaning of my own body as physical body (Körper). (Chalmers 2010 explores at length a “two-dimensional” approach to the structure of the contents of consciousness. Whether or not Husserl's categorial ontology of consciousness can be reconstructed in something like a “two-dimensional” framework remains to be explored another day.)
What is particularly novel in Husserl's ontology is the careful distinction between formal and material categorial structures. The material structures of neural process are detailed through third-person “empirical” biological investigations of what is happening in specific regions of the brain in various forms of neural process. The material structures of lived experience are detailed through first-person “transcendental” phenomenological investigations of what is happening in specific regions of our consciousness in various forms of unfolding experience. The material correlation of forms of experience with forms of neural process is a further type of investigation: neurophenomenology, to give it a name (following Francisco Varela's coinage: compare the Yoshimi articles noted above). As these correlations are mapped, with increasing specificity, we develop an increasingly rich understanding of consciousness in relation to brain process, often moving back and forth between consciousness and neural process. That understanding is achieved by a synthesis of “empirical” methods in neurobiology and “transcendental” methods in phenomenology: that is the point of mapping the correlations. Yet we may still feel the perplexity of the “hard problem”: How could such wildly different things be so linked – phenomenal intentional experience and physical neural process? Well, here I think Husserl's distinction of formal and material ontology offers further clarity.
It's a brute fact of our world (discovered through scientific investigation) that consciousness and neural activity work together – as brute as the fact that gravity and mass work together. That consciousness and neural activity work together is a substantive or material fact of the world in which we live. How is this correlation possible? Well, by the laws of the world in which our conscious experiences and our biological organisms occur: the correlation is, if you will, a material possibility – a psychophysical possibility – writ in the structure of this world. But there is more: there is a formal possibility to address. This type of possibility is one of formal-ontological possibility: “logical” possibility, if you will, in Husserl's conception of the formal structure of the world (represented by corresponding formal structures of language and of thought, on the model reconstructed in Chapter 3 on logic, leading into Chapter 4 on ontology).
Assume the outlines of Husserl's formal ontology of moments (drawing on details in Chapter 4). Then, we now specify, the structure of the correlation between conscious experience and neural process is a point of formal rather than material ontology. A visual act A occurs. Within A there occur two distinct moments, two dependent parts of A: a consciousness moment C and a neural moment N. C instantiates the essence S of “seeing that blue-black raven,” a certain phenomenal character experienced by the perceiver. N instantiates the essence F of a certain pattern of neural firing in the visual system in the perceiver's brain. Moment C is ontologically dependent on moment N: that is, the essences S and F, instantiated respectively by C and N, are such that moment C cannot occur unless moment N occurs, that is, within act A. The formal relations among A, C, N, S, and F define, I would propose, what Husserl called a manifold (Mannigfaltigkeit): a structured whole (rather like what later theorists called a mathematical model). We might say the act-of-consciousness A is itself defined by this complex manifold in which A, C, N, S, and F are linked together in the formal structures characterized above (note the italicized terms!). And here is where the Husserlian category scheme brings clarity. We must recognize the formal categories of Part (and Whole), Dependence, Instantiation, and Essence; and we must recognize the material regions (regional essences) of Consciousness and Nature. Accordingly, we can then recognize the appropriate formal relations among the entities in this manifold: the act A, its consciousness moment C, its neural moment N, the essence S, the essence F – appropriately linked (as above) by the formal relations of part – whole, dependence, and instantiation. (The above model assumes that a particular consciousness moment depends on one type of neural moment in the visual act. A more complex model might assume that a consciousness moment depends on one of a range of appropriate types of neural moment in the visual act – allowing multiple realizability. In Husserlian terms we would then say the act is defined by a more complex manifold, featuring appropriate formal relations.)
How, then, can phenomenal experience and neural process be essentially linked? How is that linkage possible? It is formally possible by virtue of the pattern of formal relations in such a manifold: not by aspects of “material” essence alone, features of Consciousness and Nature that happen to be correlated; but by aspects of “formal” essence that structure the correlation, aspects including Instantiation, Part/Whole, Dependence, Moment, Manifold. The mystery of consciousness takes its place alongside the mystery of gravity: a material structure “informed” by formal structures.
Broadly following Leibniz, Husserl conceived formal-ontological structures to be of a kind with formal-mathematical structures. As Husserl stressed in the Crisis, however, the essence of things in Nature must not be simply reduced to, identified with, the “mathematized” formal structures that characterize spatiotemporal things. Gravity itself is not identical with the idealized mathematical structure specified in Newton's law of gravity. Similarly, Husserl might argue today, consciousness itself is not identical with the idealized mathematical structure that informs its underlying patterns of neural firings. For Husserl today, we may say: consciousness itself is not identical with a formal-mathematical (algorithmic) pattern of information-processing: though a particular subjective phenomenal experience is grounded in a formal pattern of neural information-processing, we must carefully parse the moments instantiating essences of consciousness, the moments instantiating essences of neural activity, and the formal relations among these moments and these essences.
Interestingly, in the parlance of contemporary cognitive neuroscience, calling a process “visual” typically assumes that the process is both experiential and neural (the exception being so-called blindsight, where the visual system takes in information but the subject reports no conscious sight). In effect the appellation makes a neurophenomenological claim. What the Husserlian categorial ontology brings out is the formal structure of the complex of phenomenal and neural properties, and of the “moments” instantiating those properties. Given this Husserlian approach, I am proposing, the place of lived conscious experience in a world of neuro-biophenomeno-logical process is defined by the formal ontology of consciousness. What makes the theory of consciousness especially “hard,” then, is the complexity of that formal ontology of consciousness. (A phenomenology-friendly perspective on recent philosophy of mind is found in the Introduction and essays in Smith and Thomasson 2005. Recent accounts of ontological dependence, Husserl-friendly accounts, are Fine 1995a and Koslicki 2012, both of whom have read some Husserl and probe the same structures of dependence that Husserl probed. A prior study of moments of mind and body, reconstructing an ontology of consciousness and brain in a Husserlian manner, is D. W. Smith 1995. My reading of Husserl takes seriously the role of categories in a highly structured ontology; independently of Husserl interpretation, I have studied several systems of ontological categories in D. W. Smith 2004.)
Assume we have found a place in the world for phenomenal consciousness and its realization through neural activity in the brain. What features of an experience make it conscious?The answer may have seemed obvious to Husserl: the “lived” character of intentionality renders an act of perception, thought, or emotion conscious – end of story. However, recent philosophy of mind has dug into the question in ways that invite a closer look at Husserl's phenomenology.
A perennial doctrine holds that a mental act is conscious if and only if the subject is aware of its occurring. Consciousness is by definition self-consciousness, as John Locke had it. In recent years philosophers of mind have toiled at the analysis of this form of awareness. A salient view today holds that what makes a mental act conscious is a “higher-order monitoring” of the act – say, as one part of the brain monitors activity in another part. Some philosophers call this monitoring higher-order perception (inwardly perceiving the occurring mental act), while some call it higher-order thought (thinking about the occurring mental act). Other philosophers argue that the requisite awareness takes the form of a “same-order monitoring,” an awareness that is an intrinsic part of the mental act, not a separate act of a higher order. Still other philosophers (the present author included) hold that this “inner awareness” (as I like to call it) consists in an intrinsically reflexive element in the mental act (“in this very experience I see or think or intend such-and-such”). Others look to the subject's role in the experience, emphasizing “what it is like for me.” (See Chalmers 2002 for several views on higher-order monitoring: key writers including David Armstrong, Ned Block, William Lycan, David Rosenthal, and others. See Kriegel and Williford 2006 for several views on same-order monitoring and on reflexive self-awareness. See D. W. Smith 2004, the essay “Return to Consciousness”; and 2005, on a particular form of reflexive inner awareness of experience. Compare Janzen 2008 and Kriegel 2009.)
Now, these very issues were already taking shape in the early days of phenomenology, in the work of Brentano and Husserl, in the details of their analyses of consciousness. Every conscious experience, it was assumed, has a certain phenomenal or phenomenological character: if you will, how the experience “appears” in consciousness – phenomenally (by definition). But, within the range of phenomenal characters, which specific characters qualify an experience as conscious?
For Husserl, both sensory (“hyletic”) and intentional (“noetic”) aspects of experience are normally conscious, and a typical conscious visual experience is both sensory and intentional. Also, acts of judgment, emotion, volition, etc., are normally conscious. So already within Husserl's detailed account, there is more to consciousness than either pure sensuousness or the form of visual intentionality on which Husserl so often dwelt. A current debate about “cognitive phenomenology” finds some philosophers restricting phenomenal consciousness to sensation, or to sensuous perception bearing representational content, while others hold that “cognitive” activities of thinking, desiring, or willing-in-acting also carry phenomenal consciousness, that is, when these activities are not merely dispositional states like belief, but occurrent acts of consciousness. (On cognitive phenomenology, see the debate in Bayne and Montague 2011.)
As phenomenology entered the scene in Husserl's day, Brentano held that consciousness is directed primarily toward its object and secondarily toward itself. This secondary directedness Brentano called “inner consciousness.” But Brentano distinguished inner consciousness of a mental act from “inner observation” of the act. Inner consciousness is an integral and “incidental” part of the act of consciousness. By contrast, inner observation is a separate act of observing a particular act of consciousness. This form of observation is what late 19th-century “introspective” psychology practiced, and Husserl rejected that practice of empirical introspection in favor of his form of phenomenological reflection (via bracketing). For Husserl, as for Brentano, then, the phenomenal character of an experience, its “appearing” phenomenally in consciousness, is not achieved by a higher-order monitoring of any kind. Rather, awareness-of-experience – self-consciousness or self-awareness – is somehow built into each act of consciousness. The act is “selfgiven”; the act itself is “given” or “constituted” along with the intended object. But what is the form of that phenomenological structure which defines inner awareness of experience? (For Brentano's view, see Brentano 1874/1996.)
Interestingly, inner consciousness seems to disappear in Husserl's detailed phenomenology. The work of inner consciousness seems to resolve into the flow of inner time-consciousness. We might say Husserl moved Brentanian inner consciousness from the whole act into the complex of primal impressions and retentions and protentions “constituting” the temporal flow of consciousness. The whole act is rendered conscious without any intrinsic higher-order monitoring packed into this form of consciousness. As the current act or experience transpires (featuring a primal impression), it is immediately followed, in the next phase of experience, by retention of the just-prior phase of experience. Each retention is in effect a micro-monitoring of the just-passed phase of experience, and a dependent internal part of the whole experience. On Husserl's analysis of time-consciousness, then, there is a pattern – a manifold – comprising impressions and retentions and protentions, and in virtue of that manifold the flowing experience is rendered conscious. Therein lies the subject's awareness of the transpiring experience, with no further “macro” form of intrinsic inner awareness. In virtue of this manifold of impressions and retentions and protentions, the act of consciousness is self-conscious, or self-given, self-intimated, self-illuminating. As Sartre later said, self-consciousness is constitutive of consciousness, in such a way that consciousness is “translucent” yet pre-reflectively conscious-of-itself. (In the French, Sartre wrote “conscience (de) soi,” the parentheses registering the pre-reflective character of this self-awareness.) It is tempting to read Husserl's theory of time-consciousness in this way, so that it is ultimately retention (and protention) that renders the act conscious, where each retention is a dependent part (or moment) of the whole experience that forms the act of consciousness. Then consciousness's self-consciousness, its self-givenness, is achieved precisely in inner time-consciousness through retention (and impression and protention). (John Drummond and Dan Zahavi pursue this line in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind. See their essays in Kriegel and Williford 2006.)
What would consciousness be if time stopped? What we know as consciousness would cease to exist: as William James found, consciousness unfolds in the “stream of consciousness,” and here Husserl simply followed suit. Evidently, for Husserl, awareness of experience is an intrinsic part of the stream of consciousness. As the structure of retentions (and impressions and protentions) defines inner time-consciousness, therein ipso facto lies inner awareness of one's transpiring consciousness.
I am inclined to think that Husserl did not explicitly consider these varied models of inner awareness per se. Following Brentano (following Aristotle), Husserl wanted to avoid any higher-order monitoring (as we now say). On Husserl's analysis, it seems inner time-consciousness simply takes over without comment the job of inner awareness. There is, however, an alternative model. The act of consciousness may include a reflexive form of self-awareness that is built into the act: an intrinsic awareness of “this very experience.” That form of reflexive awareness would be distinct in form from that of temporal awareness (impression + retention + protention), and distinct from the form of a mini-act of monitoring the original act. Arguably, such a reflexive model may well be fit into Husserl's results in ways Husserl himself did not envision. (My own version of the reflexive model is detailed in D. W. Smith 1986, 1989, 2004, 2005.)
Within the noematic content of an experience Husserl distinguished the mode of presentation of the object from the “thetic character” of the experience. The Sinn content of the act's noema characterizes the object as perceived (to stay with the case of perception); by contrast, the thetic content characterizes the act itself as visual (in the case of visual perception). Now, assuming a broadly Husserlian framework, I think the form of inner time-consciousness is part of the thetic content of the experience – not a part of the Sinn content, as the act's character as flowing off in time is normally no part of the object's character as perceived. To my knowledge Husserl did not address this point, though his demarcation of thetic content opens the door. And if we fold in a form of reflexive awareness of “this very experience,” that form of awareness would take its place in what Husserl called the thetic content of the experience (and which I've called the “modal” content or “modality of presentation”).
That said, the form of inner awareness is, I think, quite different from the form of time-consciousness. And yet, inner awareness may well be founded or dependent on time-consciousness. That is my own view. (Here see D. W. Smith 2004, “Return to Consciousness”; 2005, in Smith and Thomasson 2005; and Ford and Smith 2006.)
In Chapters 5 and 6 we explored Husserl's notion of noema – or noematic sense (Sinn) – and several competing interpretations thereof. We focused then on Husserl's account of the “semantic” relation between an act of consciousness, its noematic sense, and its object. Here I should like to explore Husserl's theory of noema in a wider context, including both phenomenology and philosophy of mind.
Suppose we allow that an act of consciousness can include distinct moments (or dependent parts) that instantiate very different essences of Consciousness and Nature (and also Culture). Still, we face a further problem in Husserl's system. Husserl assumed that the contents of conscious experience are themselves ideal, nonspatiotemporal, entities: various types of meaning or sense (Sinn) including ideas, concepts, propositions, percepts, images, etc. Thus, Husserl conceived the “noematic” content of an act of consciousness, its noema, as a generalization of sense. But how can ideal (nontemporal) meanings be realized in real (temporal) acts of consciousness? Conscious experiences are themselves situated in the temporal flow of the stream of consciousness, but ideal meanings are nontemporal. How can nontemporal meanings be “contained” in temporal experiences?
Within Husserl's ontology, meanings are ideal entities of their own type. Meaning seems to be a category of its own, separate from what Husserl called Fact and Essence. As we found in Chapter 4, Husserl assumed three super-categories, if you will: Fact, Essence, and Meaning. Under Fact fall concrete things in time or in space-time, including: particular bodies or events in space-time (a stone, a tree, a wave crashing on the shore) and particular experiences in time (acts of perceiving, thinking, willing, etc.). Under Essence fall types, properties, and relations of concrete individuals or events (“facts”). Under Meaning, however, fall ideas, percepts, concepts, propositions, etc. Essences are ideal (nonspatiotemporal) entities, and so are meanings. But concrete things are related to essences and to meanings in categorially different ways. Thus, we may say, I instantiate the essence Human, but I entertain the idea <human> or the idea <Eucalyptus tree>. How does that relation of entertaining work?
In recent years philosophy of mind has struggled mightily with what kind of thing the “content” of a thought or experience is. Is the content of a mental act an abstract entity like a Fregean sense or “thought”? An internalized pattern of speech? A pattern of neural firing in the cerebral cortex, or perhaps in the ventral visual area? A trace of the flow of information from the environment into the brain? An element of experience individuated only by external features of the environment, either causal or cultural? A pattern of purely sensory qualia – or instead a conceptual or cognitive structure? A phenomenal form, featuring what it is like to see or think or desire something? The question of what we should count as the “content” of an experience finds a carefully calibrated answer in Husserl's philosophy.
Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 6, Husserl developed a complex theory of the content of an intentional experience, choosing the term “noema” for that entity. Echoing the ancient Greek: mind = nous, mental activity = noesis, mental content = noema. Within Husserl's system, what exactly is the place of noemata in the world? If we grant that experiences entertain noemata, how shall we understand the ontology of that relation?
John Drummond has argued (in Drummond 2009, addressing the first edition of this book) that, in Husserl's philosophy, the phenomenological practice of epoché does not, as I think, presuppose the ontology of formal and material categories. Rather, Drummond holds, phenomenological reduction entails the reinscription of all ontology within the bracketed “world.” Enlightened by phenom-enological reflection, we now understand the tree itself as the phenomenal or noematic tree-as-seen (it's still the tree), but we also understand the very categories of the world as noematic categories-as-intended (see Drummond's detailed interpretation, drawing on Husserl's late Formal and Transcendental Logic). On this intriguing view, the practice of phenomenology is like the Hellenistic skeptics' view of the world: by epoché (the skeptics' own term) we suspend judgment about the world and live a more tranquil life in consequence. Similarly, the practice of meditation leads the enlightened Buddhist to see the world as a kind of illusion and yet to return to that world with compassion in dealing with others. In this vein the world collapses, as it were, into noematic appearances. Or, as I think Drummond prefers, the noematic appearances recede into the world itself. Eduard Marbach (in Marbach 2009) presses an in some ways kindred view of the noema as the phenomenal aspect of the intended object, if I may put it so – but have we then rejected, or lost sight of, the status of the noema as an ideal meaning?
Well, there is an alternative to this intriguing view of the world as inscribed within our phenomenal intentionality (arguably a variation on neo-Kantian themes familiar in Husserl's day). Enlightened by phenomenological reflection, I experience things in the world (the tree, other people, my embodied self), and I also now understand the intentional relation between my experience and those things I experience. I turn from the world to my experience, I come to understand the intentionality of my own experience cum noema, and I return to the world with the understanding that my experience stands in intentional relations to things in the world. I see the world through noematic spectacles and I know this in light of reflection. This “enlightened” perspective is precisely the semantic conception of intentionality via noema – as I understand this perspective. Jean-Michel Roy (in Roy 2009) joins in this semantic perspective.
With this perspective, I submit, we can have our cake and eat it too. We can directly experience things in the world (the tree itself) and reflectively experience the noematic sense of things in the world (the tree-as-intended). In the light of phenomenological reflection, we can return to the world wherein we experience the things around us and recognize our intentional relations to them. In my object-level consciousness, I visually experience “that Eucalyptus tree over yonder.” In my metalevel consciousness I judge that my visual experience is intentionally related, veridically, to that tree itself through the noematic sense <that tree over yonder>. I return to the world, moving now between object-consciousness and metaconsciousness as the occasion warrants. And I know the difference now between my visual awareness of that Eucalyptus tree itself and my reflective awareness of the sense <that Eucalyptus tree>. By virtue of my practice of phenomenological reflection, I now know how to move between these levels of consciousness. Indeed, at the level of language, this perspective is in effect what the logician Alfred Tarski proposed as the “semantic conception of truth.” For what is truth but veridical intentionality? (Compare Tarski 1944/2001 and D. W. Smith 2005 on Tarski vis-à-vis Husserl. The mathematical Tarski limited himself, however, to a set-theoretic semantics for a well-defined symbolic language.)
What may seem surprising is the doctrine that the ideal meanings or noemata can play a role in consciousness. But recall that Husserl began with a focus on ideal mathematical entities (numbers, sets, manifolds), then moved into a focus on ideal logical entities, and ultimately moved into a focus on ideal intentional contents or noemata.The great 20th-century logician Kurt Gödel in fact admired Husserl's philosophy. In Richard Tieszen's new study of Gödel in relation to Husserl and phenomenology (Tieszen 2011), Tieszen articulates a position called “constituted Platonism.” On that view, numbers and other mathematical entities are both ideal (per Platonism) and “constituted” (à la Husserl).The same status applies to meanings (concepts, propositions, percepts, etc.): meanings are both ideal and “constituted” in consciousness. As I would put the point, ideal meanings are “constituted” in consciousness insofar as they are entertained in various acts of consciousness. And they are further “constituted” when we step back and appraise those meanings in phenomenological reflection. (Recall Chapter 6 on the constitution of an object through a manifold of acts presenting it from different perspectives: here we apply that structure not to a natural object like a bird or a tree, but to an ideal meaning or noema.)
Fresh light on the noema issue can be seen in a current debate about “cognitive phenomenology” (noted earlier). Some philosophers hold that a sensory experience such as seeing red or feeling pain has a phenomenal character, a “qualitative” experiential character of what-it-is-like, whereas a cognitive experience such as thinking has no such “phenomenology.” On that sort of view, my mental act of thinking that “Husserl was born Moravian” has no experiential character whatsoever, unless perhaps it has the character of an auditory image of the words “Husserl was born Moravian.” Other philosophers (including the present author) contend that a conscious experience of so thinking does indeed have a proprietary phenomenal or phenomenological character – so that my consciously thinking that “Husserl was born Moravian” has a different “feel” than my consciously thinking that “the tsunami from Japan will arrive here on the California coast at 8:35 a.m.” (Compare the essays, including my own, in Bayne and Montague 2011, Cognitive Phenomenology. David Pitt has stressed the proprietary character of the content of a conscious cognitive activity of thinking such-and-such.)
How does an appreciation of cognitive phenomenology help us to understand the ontology of noemata?
Well, in the case at hand, the Husserlian theory holds precisely that (a) my experience-of-thinking entertains the noematic sense <Husserl was born Moravian>, a thought or proposition distinct from any other sense, and (b) my experience in so thinking has a particular phenomenal character, a character I directly experience in living through that experience-of-thinking. On Husserl's analysis of time-consciousness, I experience that phenomenal character in the pattern or “manifold” of retentions that defines my temporal awareness of my passing experience of so thinking. But the noe-matic content of that cognitive experience is an ideal (nontemporal) sense “included” in my concrete experience of thinking. On this Husserlian account, then, I experience the sense <Husserl was born Moravian> as I consciously – phenomenally – think that Husserl was Moravian. My consciousness in so thinking is directed toward the state of affairs that Husserl was Moravian, and the noematic content <Husserl was Moravian> I experience in consciously so thinking. That is: within my temporally unfolding act-of-thinking, a given retention retains a prior phase of my thinking, a phase that “includes” an appropriate element of sense. In that way, over the temporal course of my so thinking, I experience the appropriate elements of ideal noematic content.
Thus, my act of thinking, bearing or entertaining that content, is rendered phenomenal – in its own way, self-conscious – in the pattern of retentions as I think: “Husserl”… “was born”… “Moravian,” where the ellipses suggest the flow of time in my thinking and so the flow of my act of thinking. In this way: in my experience-of-thinking, I directly experience the presence of the ideal sense “included” in my real act-of-consciousness. The logical and the phenomenal aspects of the noema are thus joined, arguably resolving the tension between two interpretations of the notion of noema. And if you like, we may fold in a reflexive awareness of “this very phase of experience” (along lines indicated earlier). In either case, by virtue of retention or by virtue of reflexive inner awareness, I experience the presence of meaning in my passing experience.
And yet there is another aspect of the noema to bring into our story, since the contents of our experience are often concepts inherited from our historically shaped culture – a feature of ideal meanings to which we turn shortly below.
Now, this multifaceted model of noema can be explicated in a certain categorial ontological framework. Thus, in Husserl's treatment of the noema we can discern three fundamentally different aspects of an act's noema:
(i) The noema is an ideal meaning entity.
(ii) The noema embodies the mode of presentation of the intended object.
(iii) The noema carries its genesis in historical as well as natural origins.
These three aspects define very different ontological characters of the noema: three categorially distinct characters of that entity, I would propose. It is by no means obvious how these aspects fit together, and different interpretations of the notion of noema seem to diverge accordingly.We revisit the ontology of noema in closer detail below, but here we emphasize these three distinctive aspects of the noema.
Stepping outside Husserl exegesis, I should like to call in a particular categorial scheme that unifies these ontologically diverse aspects of a noema. Elsewhere (in D. W. Smith 2004, first essay) I developed a “three-facet ontology” that distinguishes for a given entity: its form, its appearance, and its substrate.The form of X consists of the properties (cum relations) that define what type of thing it is; the appearance of X consists of the ways it is experienced, how it appears in consciousness; the substrate of X consists of the background conditions on which X depends ontologically. This three-facet ontology factors the properties of any entity into its form, appearance, and substrate: three categories of properties that play fundamentally different roles in the essence of the entity.This three-facet ontology I applied directly to an act of consciousness. If we apply it now to a noema, then we distinguish precisely the three aspects observed above: the noema as a “meaning” entity (with logical properties), the noema as a “phenomenal” entity (with phenomenological properties), and the noema as an “historical” entity (with genealogical properties).The form of a noema specifies it as an ideal meaning, a sense; the appearance of a noema specifies it as a phenomenal entity, defining the object as it appears in consciousness; the substrate of a noema specifies it as carrying its historical background. If we assume this categorial distinction among form, appearance, and substrate, then we can see how these three facets of a noema gain salience in three perspectives on the noema.
Husserl himself nowhere lays out this three-facet ontology per se. But if the shoe fits, Husserl may wear it. And if we step into these shoes, we can see why Husserl characterized the noema in ways that may well seem to pull in very different directions. It is the same entity, the noema, viewed respectively with an eye toward its form, its appearance, or its substrate. (The three-facet ontology is developed and applied to consciousness in D. W. Smith 2004, Mind World, in the opening essay titled “Three Facets of Consciousness.” Here I focus directly on the content of an act of consciousness, which Husserl called noema. On my own view, the full content or noema of an act of consciousness involves a place for the form of inner awareness; as indicated above, that view is presented in Mind World, in the essay “Return to Consciousness.”)
Most of our everyday concepts carry a cultural history, a feature of meanings that is the product of their social evolution over many years or even centuries. Consider such concepts as <spoon>, <bottle>, <table>, <bicycle>, <wheel>, <eyeglasses>, <house>, <road>, <money>, <California>, <cathedral>, <mosque>, and so on. We could not experience things in our familiar life-world without entertaining such concepts, the contents of our thinking, seeing, willing. But these concepts evolved within the history of human life: in practices of eating, drinking, reading, travelling about, cohabiting with family, building houses and roads, and so on. These concepts would not even exist but for those historical formations. Indeed, these concepts came into being with those historical practices.
Yet, given our reflections above, these concepts are ideal intentional contents or meanings entertained in our activities of consciousness in our natural and cultural life-world. Accordingly, these ideal, nonspatiotemporal meaning entities came into being over a period of space-time in human history on the planet Earth. How can ideal meanings have a historical genesis?
Remarkably, in the Crisis (1935–8), Husserl argues pointedly for just such a historical genesis of meanings. Friedrich Nietzsche (1887/1998) had pursued the “genealogy” of our very concepts of “good and bad,” “good and evil”: a long historical development of the very idea of values, evolving – in a Darwinian sense – with the psychology of our species “man.” This sense of historical background, as concerns our original concepts of “good and evil,” was arguably in the air as Husserl wrote the texts gathered posthumously in the Crisis.We need not remind our reader of what was happening around Husserl in 1930s Germany. Husserl's tack on that Zeitgeist took the indirect form of a highly abstract account of precisely how ideals and ideal meanings come into being in history. Husserl chose to focus on very fundamental theoretical concepts.
In “The Origin of Geometry,” written in 1936 and included as an Appendix in the Crisis volume, Husserl holds that the basic concepts of geometry – <line>, <point>, <circle>, etc. – were developed, created, by geometers in ancient Greece. These concepts, Husserl argues, were mathematical idealizations of shapes of things we deal with in our everyday world. So the meanings through which we experience spatial things have evolved over many centuries, developing from everyday spatial concepts into idealized geometric concepts of spatial properties, our contemporary concepts of space carrying a residue of their historical genesis. In the text of the Crisis Husserl further argues that in modern times, following Galileo's “mathematization” of nature, physicists have replaced our everyday concepts of things in nature with idealized mathematical concepts of the properties of things in nature. So, since the 17th century, physicists have developed increasingly sophisticated “mathe-matizing” concepts of space, time, force, gravity, etc., extending nowadays from relativity theory to quantum mechanics into string theory. Over the centuries, then, our everyday concepts of things in space-time have led into these mathematical concepts of things in space-time: a historical evolution of these very meanings themselves. At every moment I experience things around me in space-time, most often through concepts that come to me bearing a cultural history that includes geometry, concepts that are themselves ideal meanings entertained in my experiences.Thus, as I am driving along: I see the straight yellow line in the center of the road; the concept <line> is entertained in my current visual experience, part of its noematic content; and the concept <line>, currently entertained in my consciousness, was developed by geometers long before I studied geometry in school.
How can we understand the “genetic” aspect of meaning at work here? We must think in terms of ontological categories! Meanings are their own kind of entity.They are not spatiotemporal entities: that is all Husserl means by “ideal.” They are entertained in acts of consciousness and serve to present objects of consciousness: that is their role in intentionality. And they are, in many cases, artifacts of conceptual work by others: typically passed on through language. In terms of the “three-facet” ontology cited above: a meaning is a content that presents an object in consciousness (part of the form of the meaning); a meaning is entertained in an act of consciousness (part of the appearance of the meaning); a meaning typically has a cultural history (part of the substrate of the meaning).Thus, the ideal character of a meaning falls under its form, while the genetic character of a meaning falls under its substrate, and there is no contradiction between these facets of a meaning… Recall: the substrate is that on which something depends ontologically. And here, says the three-facet model, the ideal meaning depends onto-logically on a pattern of historical genesis.
In “The Vienna Lecture,” written and presented in 1935 and included as an Appendix in the Crisis volume, Husserl argues for the origin or genesis of a particularly fundamental concept: the very idea of “ideas, meaning-structures… not like real things in space.”With the concept <idea>, Husserl postulates, there arose with the ancient Greeks the concepts <philosophy>, <science>, <theory>. (See Crisis, pp. 276–7, 280.) Thus, with the new “theoretical attitude” of the Greeks, developed by Thales et al., Husserl declares, “… there appears the distinction between world-representation and actual world, and the new question of truth arises” (p. 286, emphasis added). Obviously, we here see Husserl isolating the historical origin of the very concept of noema: the concept of an ideal meaning that represents a thing in space, yet is distinct in kind from real things in space.
When Husserl seeks the historical origin of geometry or of philosophy/science/theory in the ancient Greeks, he observes that this genetic analysis is not seeking the empirical history of the intellectual endeavors, in the actual thinking of Euclid, Thales, et al. The task is rather to discern the historical developments that make possible subsequent philosophical theories, looking toward phenomenology and toward the theory of consciousness, its content, and its place in the world. This form of analysis is to take its place in the “transcendental” methodology of phenomenology. (A different pattern of genesis of meaning is that which unfolds within an individual subject's stream of consciousness; that pattern is not our present concern, though Husserl also pursued analyses of such intrasubjective genesis of meaning.)
As we follow Husserl's argument in the main text of the Crisis, we are to shift our concern from our pre-theoretic experience of things around us in space and time to our mathematical theory of space-time, and from our mathematical theory of the natural world to our everyday consciousness of spatiotemporal things in the life-world (which is presupposed in our mathematical theorizing), and ultimately to our “pure” consciousness, in which all the above are “constituted.” The larger theme of the Crisis is the emergence of phenomenology in the course of this long historical reflection. And the key idea is that of the development from the early Greek conception of “idea” into the phenomenological conception of “noema” and its role in the intentionality of consciousness. (See Hyder and Rheinberger 2010 for a contemporary perspective on the significance of the Crisis for the philosophy of science, and D. W. Smith 2010 in that volume for a contemporary account of how intentional contents serve as “bound” meanings, taking their place in historical contexts and semantically appealing to those contexts.)
Without some sense (“noematic sense”!) of the distinction between the world and my consciousness of the world, without some sense of the distinction between an object in the world and its presentation in my consciousness, I could not be conscious of that object as something distinct from my consciousness. And what forms the appearance or mode-of-presentation of an object in my experience? Not the object itself, but the object as it appears to me, the object as perceived or otherwise given in my consciousness! In the idiom of Husserl's theory of intentionality, we are talking about noema, sense, meaning – an ideal mode-of-presentation of an object.
It might be argued, furthermore, that without some sense of the difference between objects in the world and my consciousness of them, I could not experience inner awareness, which is arguably an essential feature of consciousness per se. And without inner awareness, we could not practice phenomenological reflection.
Noting these fundamentally different aspects of an act's noema, from ideality to phenomenality to historicality, let us return to Husserl's own results, and their significance for these different aspects of the noema. Let us dig more deeply into the ontology of the noema.
Husserl scholars have long debated how to interpret Husserl's theory of noema (particularly since Føllesdal 1969/1982 focused sharply on the issue). In Chapter 6 we explored some of the key concerns. Now I should like to revisit the noema: here with an eye to Husserl's intricate categorial ontology, as sketched above (on the heels of Chapter 4), and with another eye to contemporary problems of content or meaning, as explored just above. In the one perspective, Husserl's formulation of his notion of noema looks different if we bear in mind the fine details of his ontology: there we face a problem in the interpretation of Husserl's texts. In the other perspective, the philosophical theory of content itself looks different if we bear in mind Husserl's fine-grained ontology of noematic content: there we face a theoretical problem about the nature of contents. So my aim in this closing section is a fusion of philological and philosophical issues, which I find mutually enlightening. (Different aspects of the noema are raised afresh in Drummond 2009; Marbach 2009; and Roy 2009, commenting on the first edition of this book. See the Postscript Note below.)
For centuries now, intentional contents – percepts, concepts, propositions, et al. – have been assigned two fundamentally different roles. In epistemology, and in phenomenology, contents help define how objects are perceived and known. In logic, contents help define relations of entailment among propositions. In Husserl's phenomenology, these roles come together: noematic contents are phenomenal, framing how things appear, how things are perceived, known, presented, intended; and noematic contents are logical, framing how things are logically or semantically represented, so that truth-preserving entailments among propositions are captured. We have pursued these features of contents in different garb throughout the chapters above.
Husserl's categorial ontology, we found, posited two types of ideal entities: essences and meanings. Essences are ideal types, formal and material, including properties and relations as well as species. Meanings, or senses, are ideal contents of experiences. Now, an intentional experience is related – in categorially distinct ways – both to essences and to senses. My experience of seeing that tree – or my thinking that it is a eucalyptus, or my liking its smell – is a “real” entity, occurring in time or (as embodied) in space-time.And, of course, the tree itself is a “real” entity, occurring in space-time. Neither essences nor meanings are “real”; they are non-“real,” or “ideal.” In everyday language we say a thing has properties and a thought has content. To canonize these distinct relations between a “real” experience and respectively its ideal essence or its ideal content, we have adapted two terms. Following Plato and Aristotle and a long tradition, we say a thing instantiates its type, or qualities, or relations. Coining a term of art, we say an experience entertains its content. “Contains” sounds awkward, and a more specific idiom is needed. Accordingly we say: my experience instantiates the type My-Seeing-That-Eucalyptus-Tree, whereas my experience entertains the content <I see that eucalyptus tree>. The essence of my experience qualifies it, just as the essence Eucalyptus qualifies the arboreal entity across the street from me. Now, the content or meaning of my experience does something very different: the content represents or “intends” the object of my consciousness, here the tree over there.The essence of my experience is indeed such that my experience entertains a content, but the content is categorially distinct from the essence, and the relation of my experience to its essence is categorially distinct from the relation of my experience to its content, or noema. (“Entertain” is the verb used in Smith and McIntyre 1982; we need to emphasize that this term does not designate a specific attitude or, in Husserl's idiom, a thetic character such as that of seeing or thinking, as if an experience is intentionally directed toward its content rather than its object.)
Husserl himself drew just this distinction between instantiating an essence and entertaining a meaning, though we may too easily read through his text without sharply distinguishing the ideal entities at stake in his ontology. My aim now is to bring out more sharply the precise ontology of Husserl's theory of content, or noema, elaborating further on the account in Chapter 6 above.
Husserl introduced the terms “sense” (Sinn) and “noema” in §88 of Ideas I, defining the noema of an experience in terms that presuppose a myriad of notions drawn from his complex ontology. Here are Husserl's exact words, in an English translation indicating all the assumed technical terms:
Every intentional experience [Erlebnis] is, thanks to its noetic moment [Moment], precisely noetic; that is to say, it is [of] its essence [Wesen] to include/shelter in itself [in sich zu bergen] something as a “sense” [“Sinn”] and perhaps manifold sense, upon the ground [Grund] of this sense-giving… to become precisely “sense-ful” [“sinnvolle”]… Now, as this series of exemplary [noetic] moments point to real [reelle] components of the experience, so they also point, namely through the title sense [Sinn], to not real [nicht reelle] [components].
There corresponds to the manifold data [Daten] of the real, noetic content [Gehaltes] a manifold [Mannigfaltigkeit] of data [Daten], demonstrable in actually pure intuition [Intuition], in a correlative “noematic content [noematischen Gehalt],” or in short “noema [Noema]” – terms which we shall constantly use from now on.
Perception, for example, has its noema, most basically its perceptual sense [Wahrnehmungssinn], i.e. the perceived as such [Wahrgenommene als solches].
(My translation; Husserl's emphases and scare quotes)
In brief:The essence of an intentional experience is such that there is a noetic moment in the experience thanks to which the experience includes or “shelters” an ideal sense, or noema. Let us unpack the details of ontology assumed in this theory of intentional content termed “noema.”
In §85 Husserl had distinguished two aspects or “moments” in a perceptual experience. These moments, or dependent parts of the experience, he called the matter and form in the experience: the “sensual hyle” and the “intentional morphe” in the experience (these Greek words printed in the Greek alphabet). The sensual moment, called “hyletic data” or “sensory data,” makes the experience sensory. And the noetic moment, or noesis (Noese), makes the experience intentional. The noesis makes the experience “nous [Nus = mind] in the widest sense.”The noesis makes the experience intentional through its “intentional function” of “sense-giving” (sinngebende). Again, Husserl explains, the “noetic moment” serves only as “fundament [Fundament] of ‘sense-giving’ in the precise concept [prägnanten Begriffe] of sense [Sinn].”Well, Husserl does not mince words here: sense (in the precise conception) is what is “given” an experience by the noetic moment or noesis in the experience. And that sense-giving function of the noesis, Husserl specifies in §88, makes the experience intentional by drawing into the experience the corresponding ideal sense, its noematic content (noematischen Gehalt), or noema (Noema) – whence the experience includes or “shelters” within it that ideal sense.
Bearing all that in mind, we dig into the passage quoted above from §88, where Husserl shows great care in defining the noema of an experience.This extended passage is crucial to the long-running debate in interpreting Husserl's notion of noema – and indeed his conception of “sense,” the same term (“Sinn”) used by Frege in his philosophy of logic. My point here is not to argue for the so-called Fregean reading of Husserl's theory of sense or noema (noted in Chapter 6). My point now is to emphasize the pointed details of ontology that Husserl himself crafted into the passage quoted.
Frege had precious little to say about the relation of sense (Sinn) to mental activities (Vorstellungen): we “grasp” (fassen) a sense, and in thinking we “grasp” (fassen) a thought (Gedanke) (see “On Sinn and Bedeutung,” p. 153, and “The Thought,” p. 329, in Beaney 1997). But Husserl had a great deal to say about the relation between consciousness and sense! The details are packed densely into the passage quoted above. Indeed, the terms of art I would bring out in that passage are all technical terms in Husserl's intricate ontology: an ontology we have studied at length in prior chapters.
The terms of art Husserl uses above are, in their order of appearance:
1 “experience” (Erlebnis), a discrete act of consciousness, and here explicitly an intentional experience;
2 “noetic,” pertaining to noesis, the intentional moment in an experience;
3 “moment” (Moment), a dependent part;
4 “essence” (Wesen), the ideal type or species of an entity;
5 “include” or “shelter” (bergen), the relation of containing a sense as content;
6 “ground” (Grund), that on which something depends onto-logically;
7 “real” (reelle), being in time or in space-time;
8 “content” (Gehalt), the term familiarly used for what one thinks or experiences;
9 “manifold” (Mannigfaltigkeit), a structured whole;
10 intuition (Intuition), direct evident consciousness of something;
11 noema (Noema), the content or sense in an experience; and
12 “perceived as such,” alternatively, “perceived as perceived” or “as intended.”
Again, every term so used is a technical term in Husserl's ontology. Notice that in the case of perception the sense is a specifically perceptual type of sense, a “perceptual sense.”
Further, as Husserl introduces the term “noema” (“Noema”), he calls the noema itself “noematic content” (noematischen Gehalt), i.e. the mental (nous-like) content of an intentional experience. And of course he holds that the content or component “data”-structure in the “not-real” noema is correlated with the content or data-structure in the “real” noesis.
If we draw explicitly on Husserl's ontology for all the items Husserl here ties together, we can build a detailed account of the relation between consciousness and content and object. Here is the finegrained Husserlian story: In every intentional experience there is a particular moment, or dependent part, a “noetic” moment, or noesis (§85).Thanks to – in virtue of – that noetic moment, the experience is noetic, i.e. intentional (§85). Now, the experience has an essence (Wesen), its ideal species or type. And its essence is such that – essentially, by essence – the experience includes in itself (in sich zu bergen) a noema, or noematic content. Thus, to be noetic or intentional is by essence to include a noema: to contain a sense or noematic content in the relevant way. Notice that the sense that serves as the ideal noematic content of the experience is not identified with the essence of the experience; rather, the essence requires that the experience includes that sense.
Here we see that Husserl assumes two categorially distinct types of ideal entity, and two categorially distinct types of relation at play. For our purposes, we say an object instantiates an essence, whereas an experience entertains a sense or noema.
Essences are what Aristotle and the tradition have long called universals: i.e. types or species (defined by properties and relations). Essences are ideal entities, that is, non-spatiotemporal entities; yet they are instantiated in “real” entities, that is, spatiotemporal entities. Accordingly, an experience has or instantiates an ideal essence, a type. Now, meanings or senses, noematic contents, are also ideal entities, that is, nonspatiotemporal entities, but they are not essences, or types. For a type groups concrete entities (of that type), whereas a meaning represents entities (including concrete entities such as trees). By virtue of its essence, an experience has or “includes” – entertains – its noematic content or sense.
The noetic moment in an experience is a concrete, temporal entity, a proper part of the experience, a part that could not exist apart from the temporally flowing experience. Now, the noetic moment in an experience effects the instantiation of the type or essence in the experience. On Husserl's theory of universals: this red ball includes a moment, this particular red in this ball, which is an instance of the universal essence Red – so the ball is red just insofar as its particular redness is an instance of the universal Red.The essence Red is not located in space-time, but this red is located in the ball in space-time. By the same theory: an experience instantiates its essence insofar as the experience includes a moment (a dependent part) that is an instance of that ideal essence. Whereas the experience's essence is ideal, that “real” moment is located in the experience occurring in time… Of course, the type of essence here at stake is a phenomenological essence falling under the material region Consciousness, not a naturalist essence falling under the region Nature, or for that matter a historicist essence falling under the region Culture (Geist).As we allowed earlier, the same experience may have interdependent moments that tie the experience to essences under those three regions. But it is the noetic moment in an experience that facilitates its instantiation of an intentional or “noetic” essence.
Well, now, the noetic moment in an experience also does something else, ontologically, something different from tying the experience to its essence.The noetic moment draws into the experience a certain noema or sense: the noema “correlated” with that noetic moment in that experience – semantically correlated, much as an ideal meaning is correlated with a concrete utterance in a given language. And thereby the experience includes (“shelters”) that noema, its noematic “content.” In this way the noetic moment effects the inclusion – or entertaining – of the noema in the experience. We have used the term “entertain” for this unique relation of an experience to a noema. However, to be precise, the experience does not include the noema as a part; the corresponding noesis is that part (a dependent part, or moment). Rather, the experience includes – entertains – the noema as a meaning, a sense. And a sense, we noted, is a different type of ideal entity than an essence. For the role of a sense is to present or represent something, to intend or mean something.
On Husserl's ontology, then, an intentional experience has an essence in virtue of which its noetic moment draws in – includes/ entertains – its noema. When I see that blue-black raven in the eucalyptus tree, my concrete experience includes a noetic moment (a dependent part) that draws in a meaning, an ideal sense, and thereby the experience includes or entertains that sense. In this way, according to Husserl's intricate ontology, my concrete visual experience stands in two distinct relations to two distinct ideal entities: My experience in seeing “that blue-black raven” (a) instantiates the essence My-Seeing-That-Blue-Black-Raven and by virtue of that essence (b) includes – entertains – the noematic sense <that blue-black raven>, or (adding thetic content) the full noema <I see that blue-black raven>. By the way, the noetic moment is infused with a sensory or “hyletic” moment, which today is called the visual sensory quality or “quale” (“qualia” in plural) of my seeing the raven.
Thus, in Husserl's moment ontology, the noetic moment in my experience effects the instantiation of the essence in my experience and thereby effects the inclusion or entertaining of the noema in my experience. Here, again, the essence of the experience entails that the experience has the appropriate noema (the structure of a noema, featuring thetic content + sense, is discussed in Chapter 6).
With these details in mind, take a moment to re-experience Husserl's words introducing the noema (as quoted above): “Every intentional experience is, thanks to its noetic moment, precisely noetic; that is to say, it is [of] its essence to include/shelter in itself something as a ‘sense’ …” – namely, a “noematic content,” or “noema,” that “corresponds to … the real, noetic content” in the experience. (By the way, you have just experienced the cognitive phenomenology of understanding those words anew.)
According to Husserl, then, a noema is an ideal sense that is entertained or “included” in an intentional experience. This abstract characterization has seemed at odds with another style of characterization Husserl used. The noema of a perceptual experience Husserl called “the perceived as such,” that is, “the perceived object as perceived.” More generally, the noema of an intentional experience Husserl called “the object as intended,” which he distinguished from the object itself. This characterization has a compelling phenom-enological flavor: when I see that raven in yonder eucalyptus tree, my visual experience has a noematic content that I experience as, well, what it is like to see that raven just as I now here see it! Stepping outside the experience, in phenomenological reflection, I appreciate that the content I so experience is an ideal meaning which might be entertained in other experiences as well. Such is the essence of consciousness. (Recall our discussion in Chapter 6 of competing interpretations of Husserl's account of noema. Smith and McIntyre 1982 adopted the term “entertain” for the relation between an act of consciousness and its content or noema, to give the generic verb “include” a specific technical meaning.)
So how can we understand an intentional content as something I currently live through and also as something ideal: both a phenomenal entity and a logical entity? The answer is the ontology of content we have pieced together, distinguishing essence from meaning and distinguishing the two formal relations of instantiating an essence and entertaining a meaning. The phenomenal aspect of an act's noema is realized in the act insofar as I live through its instantiating an essence featuring a specific phenomenal character, i.e. one of the act's entertaining said noema. And the logical aspect of an act's noema is realized in the act insofar as the act entertains said noema, i.e. a specific noematic meaning (or Sinn modified further by “thetic” content) with logical properties such as representing an appropriate state of affairs.
And still a further aspect of the noema confronts us, as indicated above. How can we understand an intentional content, a noema or Sinn, also as an historical entity – considering Husserl's theory of intersubjectivity in Ideas II and its subsequent amplification in the Crisis? Here is the door to another world, what Husserl called the region Geist, the region of culture or “spirit.” In brief: the noema entertained in a typical everyday experience includes constituent concepts that are ontologically dependent on their historical genesis or development in one's surrounding culture, in one's Umwelt or life-world. In Chapter 4 we considered the role of Geist in Husserl's categorial ontology, and in Chapter 8 we considered implications for the intersubjective constitution of values. Here we must leave the door to Geist ajar, for further forays in the ontology of the noema.
Given the central role of the notion of noema in Husserl's phenomenology, given the difficulties of interpretation this notion has presented Husserl's readers, and given the importance of the very notion of the content of an act of consciousness in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience, is it not fitting that we close this study of Husserl's philosophy with a detailed portrait of Husserl's ontology of the noema?
Issues concerning the phenomenal and the logical aspects of noema, or intentional content, are raised afresh in a 2009 issue of the Quebecois journal Philosophiques, in a “Disputatio” on the first edition of the present book. Key issues regarding the notion of noema are astutely framed there by John Drummond, Eduard Marbach, and Jean-Michel Roy. Roy discusses sympathetically the logical or semantic conception of noema; Marbach urges anew the phenomenal conception of the noema; and Drummond argues that the onto-logical status of an object is “reinscribed” within consciousness through epoché, thus merging object and noema, without a phenomenological anti-realism. Marbach notes that Denis Fisette (editor of the journal) has proposed that we simply acknowledge that Husserl embraced two different and contradictory conceptions of noema. With these fresh interpretive arguments in mind, I sought above a multifaceted approach to the phenomenological ontology of content, an approach that I think can ameliorate the tensions among these perspectives on the status of the noema. In that spirit we revisited Husserl's own account of noema, drawing on the fine-grained details of ontology we have worked through in the pages above. The intricacies of Husserl's ontology may try our patience, but our patience is rewarded with a finely wrought theory of content. And it is interesting to note that Aristotle's original use of the Greek word “noema” may have been inflected (as Alan Code remarked to me) with the same ambiguity that Husserl interpreters confront, between the thing known or in mind and the way the thing is known: in Husserlian terms, between the object that is known and the object as it is known.
Husserl once remarked that phenomenology is “an infinite task,” forever unfinished. So too with Husserl's philosophical system as a whole. We have drawn a picture of the structure of that system: a complex theory with interdependent subtheories that fall under the areas of logic, ontology, phenomenology, epistemology, and ethics. Through our reconstruction of Husserl's system, we have indicated – extrapolating from Husserl's explicit writings – ways in which one part of the system depends on others, drawing on that part which is Husserl's theory of dependence itself. Phenomenology is of central importance in Husserl's system, yet interdependent with other parts of the system. Within Husserl's philosophy, three themes can be seen as guiding his overall vision: objectivity, subjectivity, and inter-subjectivity. Husserl's legacy, drawing on that vision, reaches into both continental and analytic philosophy in the 20th century. And today – as we have considered in this closing chapter – Husserlian theory affords a detailed approach to 21st-century problems of consciousness and content, addressing their dependence in different ways on ideal meaning, on neural-biological process, and on historical-cultural processes. Of paramount importance is the way the objective, subjective, and intersubjective aspects of our world weave together in this Husserlian portrait of consciousness and world. And a crucial element in this interweaving is the special role of meaning, or noema.
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