Noema and Meaning in Husser

8/12/2019 Noema and Meaning in Husser

1/10

International Phenomenological Society

Noema and Meaning in HusserlAuthor(s): Dagfinn FllesdalReviewed work(s):Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 50, Supplement (Autumn, 1990), pp.263-271Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2108043.

Accessed: 11/02/2012 16:38

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at.http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

International Phenomenological Societyis collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ipshttp://www.jstor.org/stable/2108043?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/2108043?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ips


2/10

Philosophy and Phenomenological ResearchVol. L, Supplement, all i990

Noema and Meaning in Husserl*DAGFINN F0LLESDALUniversity f OsloStanfordUniversity

The first issue of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research carried aneditorial statement that began as follows:While hephilosophy fEdmundHusserl s thepointof departureor thepublication,trep-resentsno specialschool or sect.

The journalhas indeed not been sectarian. It has attracted a wide rangeof notable contributions to philosophy, including Tarski's The SemanticConception of Truth (I944), severalpapers by Carnap, starting with his

The Two Concepts of Probability (I945), White's On the Church-Frege Solution of the Paradox of Analysis (I948), and many others.However, even within the pages of the journal there was in the early yearslittle interaction between the phenomenologists and other contributors.During the last twenty years this has gradually changed, reflecting a grow-ing interest in Husserl's phenomenology among philosophers comingfrom other traditions.

This increased attention to Husserl is, I think, mainly due to two fac-tors. First a heightened concern for intentionality among so-called

analyticphilosophers. This interest arose as a systematic interest in var-ious interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of languageand perception, and it developed into an appreciation of Husserl when itwas discovered that he had made highly interesting observations on theseissues. The second factor is the recognition that Husserl had indeed some-thing to say on these issues, that in a differentterminology and from a dif-ferent point of view he was addressing the same concerns that were nowworrying analytic philosophers.

In particular, the key notion in Husserl's theory of intentionality, hisnotion of the noema, turns out to be closely related to the notion of mean-ing which is central to much analytic philosophy. According to Hus-serl, a proper understandingof the distinctions connected with the noema

* This articlespringsfrom a project on Husserl's phenomenology on which Iwas workingas a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, in i989-90. I gratefully acknowledge thissupport.

NOEMA AND MEANING IN HUSSERL 263


3/10

is ofthe greatest importance for phenomenology, and decisive for givingit a right foundation (Ideen I, zzz.z8-30)'

In presentingHusserl to philosophers with a background in analyticphilosophy I have found it particularly useful to stress this and other par-allels between Husserl and analytic philosophy. I have done so incourses and writings on Husserl from i96i on, and many of my studentsand several others working on Husserl have done the same.' I used thisapproach to Husserl in an article in Norwegian in i96z, and in i969 Iwrote a paper on the noema where I formulated twelve theses on thenoema that in my view gave as precise a formulation of Husserl's view asHusserl's texts and manuscripts permitted. Although the paper wasshort (8 pages), it has brought forth a large number of critical papers,largely protesting my Husserl interpretation. In i983 Ethel M. Kersey ofIndiana University published a bibliography listing I04 English languageitems, old and new, pertaining to this discussion,4 and more have beencoming in the years after that.

It would require a whole book to respond to all these critics. Thiswould not be a very interesting book, since the critics adduce no textualevidence against my way of interpreting Husserl. Many of the criticsquote passages from Husserl that they interpretin favor of the traditionalinterpretation. According to the traditional interpretation of the noema ofan act is the object of the act modified in a certain way, in particular con-sidered without taking a stand concerning whether it exists or not. How-ever, all the passages my critics quote were discussed in my paper, where Ihave given both systematic and textual arguments for reading them theway I read them. These few passages, which can be read both ways, pro-

Here and in the following, references to Husserl's works are by page and line in the Hus-serliana edition (The Hague: Nijhoff, I95off.). In the case of the Ideas, where there is anearly Husserliana edition (I950) and a new Husserliana edition in two volumes, editedby Karl Schuhmann (I976), the page references are to the new edition.' See several articles and books by Hubert Dreyfus, David Smith, Ronald McIntyre, JohnLad, Izchak Miller and Elling Schwabe-Hansen, in particular Dreyfus, ed., Husserl,Intentionality, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Bradford Books/M.I.T. Press, i98z); Smith and McIntyre, Husserl and Intentionality: A Study ofMind, Meaning, and Language (Dordrecht: Reidel, i98z); Miller, Husserl, Perception,and Temporal Awareness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Bradford Books/M.I.T. Press,i984); and Smith The Circle of Acquaintance (Dordrecht: Kluwer, i989). There arealso numerous books and articles by other Husserl scholars who read Husserl in a similarway, too many to list here.

Husserl's Notion of Noema, The Journal of Philosophy 66 (i969): 680-87.Ethel M. Kersey, The Noema, Husserlian and Beyond: An Annotated Bibliography ofEnglish LanguageSources, Philosophy ResearchArchives 9 (i983), Microfiche supple-ment, pp. 6z-90, published March, I984.

264 DAGFINN F0LLESDAL


4/10

vide an interestingillustration to the old hermeneutic point that a piece oftext can usually be interpretedin different ways, depending upon the wayone reads the whole text.

In some cases the text as a whole can be read in both ways, there arenopassages that go against either interpretation. In the case of Husserl, how-ever, we have a lot of texts. He published thousands of pages and left40,000 pages unpublished. And while I know of no passages in this largebody of texts that go against my interpretation, there are a large numberof passages in these texts that go against the traditional interpretationandsay exactly what they should say according to my interpretation. I quotedand referredto a number of such passages in my article. These latter pas-sages are not discussed by my critics, and not even mentioned by them.

Instead of picking out some of the critics and answer them, I will con-centrateon three of the theses that have been particularlypopular targetsof attack, viz., theses number I, 4, and 8. Discussing these may help high-light some of the points in Husserl's view on intentionality where hecomes very close to Frege's and others' views on language.

I. The noema is an intensional entity (intensional with an 's'), ageneralization of the notion of meaning.

4. The noema of an act is not the object of the act (i.e., not theobject toward which the act is directed).

8. Noemata are abstract entities.Thesis 1: The noema as a generalization of meaning

The first thesis, that the noema is a generalization of the notion of mean-ing, is my main thesis in that article, from which the other eleven thesesflow as natural consequences. That first thesis is also an important part ofmy attempts to bridge the gap between phenomenology and analytic phi-losophy, notably Frege.Note, however, that neither in this paper nor any-where else do I say that Husserl took over his notion of meaning fromFrege.He studied Frege'swritings carefully and corresponded with Fregeconcerninghis distinction between sense and reference. However, he wasfamiliar with similar distinctions long before he read Frege, particularlyfromBolzano, but also from Mill and many others. (One idea, however, isnew in Frege:none of these earlierauthors has a systematic discussion ofthe notion of indirectreference,where an expression refersto what is nor-mally its Sinn.) I also point out in my paper that there are many andimportant differences between Husserl's notion of noema and Frege's



5/10

notion of Sinn. (Thirtyyears ago, in a small book on Husserl and Frege,5Iargued that Husserl was influencedby Fregeon another point, viz., in hisconversion from psychologism. That claim has also been contested. How-ever, there is neither space nor occasion to go into that point here.)Systematic arguments for thesis I.I give two kinds of arguments for each of my theses: systematic and tex-tual. The main systematic reason for regardingthe noema as a generaliza-tion of the notion of meaning is that it makes it very easy to see what Hus-serl is up to in his phenomenology. He was very impressed by his teacher,Brentano's ideas concerning intentionality, in particular his view thatintentionality consists in a certain kind of directedness of our conscious-ness upon an object. However, Husserl saw two main flaws in Brentano'snotion of directedness. First, many acts have no object, for example, hal-lucinations and many acts of thinking, as when somebody thinks of Pega-sus or of the largest prime number. In the philosophy of language a paral-lel problem is resolved by distinguishing between an expression's senseand its reference.An expression has a sense which is grasped by everyonewho masters the language. In virtue of this sense, the expression referstoits reference, if it has one. However,some expressions, like 'the largestprime number', have no referencealthough they have a sense and can beused in meaningful discourse. Similarly, I argued, Husserl held that everyact has a noema in virtueof which it is directedtowards an object, if it hasan object; some acts, for example an act of thinking of the largest primenumber, have no object, although they have a noema.

The second weakness Husserl found in Brentano was a certain empti-ness in his analysis of the directedness of acts. To say, as Brentano did,that each act has an object, is not only false, it is also not very informative.We want to understand how it is that acts are directed towards objects.Husserl's notion of the noema is supposed to do this. Indeed, we coulddefinethe noema as all those features of the act in virtue of which it has theobject it has. To be precise, this gives us only part of the noema, the partthat Husserl calls the object-meaning ( gegenstdndlicher Sinn ). Inaddition the full noema contains a second component, which Husserl callsthe thetic component, and which differentiates acts of different kinds,for example, acts of perception, of remembering,of imagining, etc. (Thisis stated in my thesis z, which I shall not discuss here.)

Husserl's notion of the noema can be illustrated by Jastrow's duck/rab-bit example, made famous by Wittgenstein. To make the example moreapplicable to Husserl, let us consider a situation where Ido not see a draw-

5 Husserl und Frege: Ein Beitrag zur Beleuchtung der Entstehung der phdnomenolo-gischen Philosophie (Avhandlinger utgitt av Det Norske Videnskapsakademi i Oslo.Hist.-Filos. Kiasse. II. I958. No. 2) (Oslo: Aschehoug, I958).



6/10

ing, but actually see a silhouette against the horizon and am not surewhether it is a duck or a rabbit. The light waves that reach my retina arethe same all the time, and yet I may vacillate back and forth between see-ing a rabbit and seeing a duck. The difference is due to my structuringwhat I see differentlyin the two cases; my anticipations of furtherexperi-ences are different when I see a duck and when I see a rabbit. In the firstcase I anticipate feathers, in the second, fur. Also my anticipations of howthe object will appear if it moves or if I move around it, are different.The noema corresponds to the set of all the various determinations weattributeto the object and the way in which we see it: the various proper-ties of the object, the relation it bearsto other things and to our own body,the orientation of the object relative to us, the clarity with which its vari-ous features are experienced by us, and on the thetic side, the determina-tions that concern the way in which the object is experienced, whether it isperceived, remembered, imagined, etc. According to Husserl, the noemais a complex of such determinations which makes a multitude of visual,tactile and other data be appearancesof one object. I have put the term'data' between quotation marks to indicate that Husserl here uses it in avery special, noema-dependent sense, which I shall now explain verybriefly.

In the duck/rabbit silhouette example Husserl would not talk of seeingsomething as something or of our taking something one way or another.There is nothing there that is merely given, no raw data that can be takenone way or the other. We undergo certain kinds of experiences when oursensory organs are affected. These experiences Husserl calls hyle. But thehyle arenot objects of experience, they arenot data that we see, hear, feel,smell, or taste (although they become data thanks to the noema whichmakes the hyle be appearances of the object). The hyle are what I like tocall boundary conditions on the noema, in that they put restrictionsonwhat noemata we can have when we areperceiving in a given situation. Ifwe merely imagine something, only our fantasy puts a limit on the noe-mata we can have. However, when we perceive something, only somenoemata are possible, the others are eliminated because they are incom-patible with our hyle. Husserl in his books and manuscriptsdevotes muchattention to the various forms such incompatibility may take. There willalways be more than one candidate left, the irritations of our sensory sur-faces never suffice to narrow down the number of possible noemata toone. This is a point of contact between Husserl and Quine, in Husserl wefind a plurality of noemata, i.e., under-determination,where in Quine wefind indeterminacyof translation. Note, however, also the important dif-ference:for Quine thereis indeterminacy,thereis nothing thereto be right

NOEMA AND MEANING IN HUSSERL z67


7/10

or wrong about, for Husserl there is mere under-determinateness: thephysical irritations do not suffice to uniquely determine a noema, butthere is one.Textual evidence for thesis i.The view that the noema is a generalization of the notion of meaning to allacts gives coherence and intelligibility to Husserl's enterprise, and makesit easier to see how his views and those of various analytic philosophersrelate to one another. This way of reading Husserl is also well supportedby the texts. In my i969 paper I quoted some passages. Most explicit ofthese is the following one from the third, unfinished, volume of Husserl'sIdeas, where Husserl says:The noema is nothing but a generalization of the notion of meaning [Bedeutung] to the fieldof all acts. (Ideen III, 89, 2-4.)

What better evidence could one want for thesis i? Husserl uses theword 'Bedeutung'here, and those who hold that the noema is the object asmodified in a certain way might point out that Frege used the word'Bedeutung'for the object referredto. Husserl, however, is quite explicitthat he does not use the word 'Bedeutung' for the object referredto. In theLogical Investigations (Untersuchung I, ? I5) he criticizes Frege for hisunfortunate terminology and proposes to use 'Bedeutung' for Frege's'Sinn' and 'Gegenstand' for Frege's 'Bedeutung'. (The latter proposalwould, of course, be unacceptable for Frege, who held that general termsrefer to concepts and functions, which he distinguished from 'Gegen-stdnde'. However, we will not go into this here.)

Note also that Husserl in the Ideas uses the word 'Bedeutung' for themeaning of linguistic acts and, derivatively, of linguistic expressions, andthat he prefers the word 'Sinn' for the broader notion of meaning asapplied to all acts (Ideen I, z85.20-24). This goes against those of my crit-ics who object that Husserl's noema cannot be regarded as a generaliza-tion of the notion of the linguistic notion of meaning; according to someof them, Husserl had something much deeper and more fundamental inmind with the noema than the notion of meaning that is discussed by ana-lytic philosophers. My view is that there is no incompatibility betweenHusserl's statement that the noema is a generalization of the notion ofmeaning to all acts and the view that even prelinguistic acts have a noema.For Husserl, the noema comes firstand the notion of linguistic meaning isderivativefrom it. And yet, given all the philosophical discussion of mean-ing in the linguistic sphere, it may be illuminating and helpful for under-standing Husserl to be told that the noema is a generalization of thenotion of meaning to the realm of all acts. That A is a generalization of B



8/10

does not mean that B comes first and then A. A may exist and be knownlong before we note a similarity between it and B. When discovering this,we may decide that a term we have previously applied to B may also beapplied to A. Husserl saw this point, which my critics have missed. Hetherefore could also say the following, which I quoted in my article:Originally, these words ('Bedeuten' and 'Bedeutung') related only to the linguistic sphere,that of 'expressing'. It is, however, almost unavoidable and at the same time an importantadvance, to widen the meaning of these words and modify them appropriately, so that theyin a certain way are applicable to the whole noetic-noematic sphere: that is to all acts,whether these are intertwined with expressing acts or not. (Ideen I, 285.II-I7.)

In my article I also referred to a number of other passages where Hus-serl said similar things. No passages to the contrary have been given byany of my critics, and I therefore remain unshaken in my conviction thatthesis i is true.

Thesis 4: The noema of an act is not the object of the actLet us now quickly turn to the other two theses. Thesis 4, that the noemaof an act is not the object toward which the act is directed, is crucial forHusserl's ability to overcome Brentano's problem concerning acts whichhave no object. It also follows as a naturalconsequence of thesis i. Indeed,the reasons why acts are not directed towards their noema are similar tothe reasons why expressions do not normally refer to their sense. This isonly one example of the many parallelisms between the notion of noemaand the notion of sense.

Thesis 4 goes clearly contrary to the traditional interpretation of Hus-serl, according to which the noema is the object of the act as modified in acertainway. However, in addition to the systematic difficulties that arisewith acts that have no object (forexample, what would then happen to thenoema of an act that does not have an object) the traditional interpreta-tion is also at odds with the text, which strongly supports my thesis 4.

I will quote only some very few passages. First a passage which is par-ticularly helpful, since it contains that phrase 'the perceived tree as such',which Husserl usually uses for the noema of an act of perceiving a tree.Proponents of the traditional interpretation of Husserl regard Husserl'suse of thisphrase for the noema as their most centralpiece of evidence thatHusserl identifies the noema with the object as modified in a certain way.However, listen to what Husserl says about this in ? 89 of the Ideas:The tree, the thing in nature, is by no means the perceived tree as such, which belongs insepa-rably to the perceiving as the perceptual Sinn. The tree can burn, may be dissolved in itschemical elements, etc. The Sinn, however - the Sinn of this perception, which belongs bynecessityto its essence - cannot burn, it has no chemical elements, no forces, no realproper-ties. (Ideen I, 205.22-29.)



9/10


10/10

noemata are not spatial, they are not temporal. According to Husserl'smanuscript Noema und Sinn :A Sinn does not have reality, it is related to a temporal interval through the act in which itoccurs, but it does not itself have reality (Dasein), an individual connection with time andduration. (NuS, I I4.)

The way I interpret Husserl, the noema is like a Peircean type, which isinstantiated in various individual acts. These acts are characterized by apattern of determinations whose common structure is the noema. Hus-serl's noemata, like geometrical shapes, are timeless. Husserl is hence aplatonist in his conception of the noemata. However, that does not meanthat the noema of my present act existed before I acted and will continueto exist after my act has ended. Temporal predicates are inapplicable toabstract entities. Platonism becomes much more palatable when onekeeps in mind that 'timeless' does not mean 'eternal'.

NOEMA AND MEANING IN HUSSERL 27I

Documents

Noema and Meaning in Husser