International Phenomenological Society

Noema and Meaning in Husserl Author(s): Dagfinn Fllesdal Reviewed work(s): Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 50, Supplement (Autumn, 1990), pp. 263-271 Published by: International Phenomenological Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2108043 . Accessed: 11/02/2012 16:38
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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Vol. L, Supplement, Fall i990

Noema and Meaning in Husserl*

DAGFINN F0LLESDAL

University of Oslo StanfordUniversity

The first issue of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research carried an editorial statement that began as follows:
Whilethephilosophy of Edmund Husserl is thepointof departure forthepublication, it representsno specialschool or sect.

The journal has indeed not been sectarian. It has attracted a wide range of notable contributions to philosophy, including Tarski's "The Semantic Conception of Truth" (I944), several papers by Carnap, starting with his "The Two Concepts of Probability" (I945), White's "On the ChurchFrege Solution of the Paradox of Analysis" (I948), and many others. However, even within the pages of the journal there was in the early years little interaction between the phenomenologists and other contributors. During the last twenty years this has gradually changed, reflecting a growing interest in Husserl's phenomenology among philosophers coming from other traditions. This increased attention to Husserl is, I think, mainly due to two factors. First a heightened concern for intentionality among so-called "analyticphilosophers. " This interest arose as a systematic interest in various interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and perception, and it developed into an appreciation of Husserl when it was discovered that he had made highly interesting observations on these issues. The second factor is the recognition that Husserl had indeed something to say on these issues, that in a different terminology and from a different point of view he was addressing the same concerns that were now worrying "analytic" philosophers. In particular, the key notion in Husserl's theory of intentionality, his notion of the noema, turns out to be closely related to the notion of meaning which is central to much "analytic philosophy." According to Husserl, a proper understanding of the distinctions connected with the noema
* This article springs from a project on Husserl's phenomenology on which I was working as a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, in i989-90. I gratefully acknowledge this support.

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"is of the greatest importance for phenomenology, and decisive for giving it a right foundation" (Ideen I, zzz.z8-30)' In presenting Husserl to philosophers with a background in "analytic" philosophy I have found it particularly useful to stress this and other parallels between Husserl and "analytic" philosophy. I have done so in courses and writings on Husserl from i96i on, and many of my students and several others working on Husserl have done the same.' I used this approach to Husserl in an article in Norwegian in i96z, and in i969 I wrote a paper on the noema where I formulated twelve theses on the noema that in my view gave as precise a formulation of Husserl's view as Husserl's texts and manuscripts permitted. Although the paper was short (8 pages), it has brought forth a large number of critical papers, largely protesting my Husserl interpretation. In i983 Ethel M. Kersey of Indiana University published a bibliography listing I04 English language items, old and new, pertaining to this discussion,4 and more have been coming in the years after that. It would require a whole book to respond to all these critics. This would not be a very interesting book, since the critics adduce no textual evidence against my way of interpreting Husserl. Many of the critics quote passages from Husserl that they interpret in favor of the traditional interpretation. According to the traditional interpretation of the noema of an act is the object of the act modified in a certain way, in particular considered without taking a stand concerning whether it exists or not. However, all the passages my critics quote were discussed in my paper, where I have given both systematic and textual arguments for reading them the way 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 Husserliana edition (The Hague: Nijhoff, I95off.). In the case of the Ideas, where there is an early Husserliana edition (I950) and a new Husserliana edition in two volumes, edited by Karl Schuhmann (I976), the page references are to the new edition. ' See several articles and books by Hubert Dreyfus, David Smith, Ronald McIntyre, John Lad, 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 of Mind, 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 are also numerous books and articles by other Husserl scholars who read Husserl in a similar way, 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 of English Language Sources," Philosophy Research Archives 9 (i983), Microfiche supplement, pp. 6z-90, published March, I984.

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vide an interesting illustration to the old hermeneutic point that a piece of text can usually be interpreted in different ways, depending upon the way one reads the whole text. In some cases the text as a whole can be read in both ways, there are no passages that go against either interpretation. In the case of Husserl, however, we have a lot of texts. He published thousands of pages and left 40,000 pages unpublished. And while I know of no passages in this large body of texts that go against my interpretation, there are a large number of passages in these texts that go against the traditional interpretation and say exactly what they should say according to my interpretation. I quoted and referred to a number of such passages in my article. These latter passages 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 concentrate on three of the theses that have been particularly popular targets of attack, viz., theses number I, 4, and 8. Discussing these may help highlight some of the points in Husserl's view on intentionality where he comes very close to Frege's and others' views on language.
I.

The noema is an intensional entity (intensional with an 's'), a generalization of the notion of meaning. The noema of an act is not the object of the act (i.e., not the object toward which the act is directed). Noemata are abstract entities. Thesis 1: The noema as a generalization of meaning

4. 8.

The first thesis, that the noema is a generalization of the notion of meaning, is my main thesis in that article, from which the other eleven theses flow as natural consequences. That first thesis is also an important part of my attempts to bridge the gap between phenomenology and analytic philosophy, notably Frege. Note, however, that neither in this paper nor anywhere else do I say that Husserl took over his notion of meaning from Frege. He studied Frege's writings carefully and corresponded with Frege concerning his distinction between sense and reference. However, he was familiar with similar distinctions long before he read Frege, particularly from Bolzano, but also from Mill and many others. (One idea, however, is new in Frege: none of these earlier authors has a systematic discussion of the notion of indirect reference, where an expression refers to what is normally its Sinn.) I also point out in my paper that there are many and important differences between Husserl's notion of noema and Frege's

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notion of Sinn. (Thirty years ago, in a small book on Husserl and Frege,5I argued that Husserl was influenced by Frege on another point, viz., in his conversion from psychologism. That claim has also been contested. However, 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 textual. The main systematic reason for regarding the noema as a generalization of the notion of meaning is that it makes it very easy to see what Husserl is up to in his phenomenology. He was very impressed by his teacher, Brentano's ideas concerning intentionality, in particular his view that intentionality consists in a certain kind of directedness of our consciousness upon an object. However, Husserl saw two main flaws in Brentano's notion of directedness. First, many acts have no object, for example, hallucinations and many acts of thinking, as when somebody thinks of Pegasus or of the largest prime number. In the philosophy of language a parallel problem is resolved by distinguishing between an expression's sense and its reference. An expression has a sense which is grasped by everyone who masters the language. In virtue of this sense, the expression refers to its reference, if it has one. However,some expressions, like 'the largest prime number', have no reference although they have a sense and can be used in meaningful discourse. Similarly, I argued, Husserl held that every act has a noema in virtue of which it is directed towards an object, if it has an object; some acts, for example an act of thinking of the largest prime number, have no object, although they have a noema. The second weakness Husserl found in Brentano was a certain emptiness 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 could define the noema as all those features of the act in virtue of which it has the object it has. To be precise, this gives us only part of the noema, the part that Husserl calls the "object-meaning" ("gegenstdndlicher Sinn"). In addition the full noema contains a second component, which Husserl calls the "thetic" component, and which differentiates acts of different kinds, for example, acts of perception, of remembering, of imagining, etc. (This is stated in my thesis z, which I shall not discuss here.) Husserl's notion of the noema can be illustrated by Jastrow's duck/rabbit example, made famous by Wittgenstein. To make the example more applicable to Husserl, let us consider a situation where I do not see a draw5

Husserl und Frege: Ein Beitrag zur Beleuchtung der Entstehung der phdnomenologischen Philosophie (Avhandlinger utgitt av Det Norske Videnskapsakademi i Oslo. Hist.-Filos. Kiasse. II. I958. No. 2) (Oslo: Aschehoug, I958). DAGFINN F0LLESDAL

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ing, but actually see a silhouette against the horizon and am not sure whether it is a duck or a rabbit. The light waves that reach my retina are the same all the time, and yet I may vacillate back and forth between seeing a rabbit and seeing a duck. The difference is due to my structuring what I see differently in the two cases; my anticipations of further experiences are different when I see a duck and when I see a rabbit. In the first case I anticipate feathers, in the second, fur. Also my anticipations of how the 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 we attribute to the object and the way in which we see it: the various properties of the object, the relation it bears to other things and to our own body, the orientation of the object relative to us, the clarity with which its various features are experienced by us, and on the thetic side, the determinations that concern the way in which the object is experienced, whether it is perceived, remembered, imagined, etc. According to Husserl, the noema is a complex of such determinations which makes a multitude of visual, tactile and other "data" be appearances of one object. I have put the term 'data' between quotation marks to indicate that Husserl here uses it in a very special, noema-dependent sense, which I shall now explain very briefly. In the duck/rabbit silhouette example Husserl would not talk of seeing something 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 taken one way or the other. We undergo certain kinds of experiences when our sensory organs are affected. These experiences Husserl calls hyle. But the hyle are not objects of experience, they are not data that we see, hear, feel, smell, or taste (although they become data thanks to the noema which makes the hyle be appearances of the object). The hyle are what I like to call "boundary conditions" on the noema, in that they put restrictions on what noemata we can have when we are perceiving in a given situation. If we merely imagine something, only our fantasy puts a limit on the noemata we can have. However, when we perceive something, only some noemata are possible, the others are eliminated because they are incompatible with our hyle. Husserl in his books and manuscripts devotes much attention to the various forms such incompatibility may take. There will always be more than one candidate left, the irritations of our sensory surfaces never suffice to narrow down the number of possible noemata to one. This is a point of contact between Husserl and Quine, in Husserl we find a plurality of noemata, i.e., under-determination, where in Quine we find indeterminacy of translation. Note, however, also the important difference: for Quine there is indeterminacy, there is nothing there to be right

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or wrong about, for Husserl there is mere under-determinateness: the physical irritations do not suffice to uniquely determine a noema, but there is one. Textual evidence for thesis
i.

The view that the noema is a generalization of the notion of meaning to all acts gives coherence and intelligibility to Husserl's enterprise, and makes it easier to see how his views and those of various analytic philosophers relate to one another. This way of reading Husserl is also well supported by the texts. In my i969 paper I quoted some passages. Most explicit of these is the following one from the third, unfinished, volume of Husserl's Ideas, where Husserl says:
The noema is nothing but a generalization of the notion of meaning [Bedeutung] to the field of all acts. (Ideen III, 89, 2-4.)

What better evidence could one want for thesis i? Husserl uses the word 'Bedeutung' here, and those who hold that the noema is the object as modified in a certain way might point out that Frege used the word 'Bedeutung' for the object referred to. Husserl, however, is quite explicit that he does not use the word 'Bedeutung' for the object referredto. In the Logical Investigations (Untersuchung I, ? I5) he criticizes Frege for his unfortunate terminology and proposes to use 'Bedeutung' for Frege's 'Sinn' and 'Gegenstand' for Frege's 'Bedeutung'. (The latter proposal would, of course, be unacceptable for Frege, who held that general terms refer to concepts and functions, which he distinguished from 'Gegenstdnde'. However, we will not go into this here.) Note also that Husserl in the Ideas uses the word 'Bedeutung' for the meaning of linguistic acts and, derivatively, of linguistic expressions, and that he prefers the word 'Sinn' for the broader notion of meaning as applied to all acts (Ideen I, z85.20-24). This goes against those of my critics who object that Husserl's noema cannot be regarded as a generalization of the notion of the linguistic notion of meaning; according to some of them, Husserl had something much deeper and more fundamental in mind with the noema than the notion of meaning that is discussed by analytic philosophers. My view is that there is no incompatibility between Husserl's statement that the noema is a generalization of the notion of meaning to all acts and the view that even prelinguistic acts have a noema. For Husserl, the noema comes first and the notion of linguistic meaning is derivative from it. And yet, given all the philosophical discussion of meaning in the linguistic sphere, it may be illuminating and helpful for understanding Husserl to be told that the noema is a generalization of the notion of meaning to the realm of all acts. That A is a generalization of B

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does not mean that B comes first and then A. A may exist and be known long 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 be applied to A. Husserl saw this point, which my critics have missed. He therefore 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 important advance, to widen the meaning of these words and modify them appropriately, so that they in 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 Husserl said similar things. No passages to the contrary have been given by any of my critics, and I therefore remain unshaken in my conviction that thesis i is true. Thesis 4: The noema of an act is not the object of the act Let us now quickly turn to the other two theses. Thesis 4, that the noema of an act is not the object toward which the act is directed, is crucial for Husserl's ability to overcome Brentano's problem concerning acts which have no object. It also follows as a natural consequence of thesis i. Indeed, the reasons why acts are not directed towards their noema are similar to the reasons why expressions do not normally refer to their sense. This is only one example of the many parallelisms between the notion of noema and the notion of sense. Thesis 4 goes clearly contrary to the traditional interpretation of Husserl, according to which the noema is the object of the act as modified in a certain way. However, in addition to the systematic difficulties that arise with acts that have no object (for example, what would then happen to the noema of an act that does not have an object) the traditional interpretation 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 particularly 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's use of this phrase for the noema as their most central piece of evidence that Husserl 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 inseparably to the perceiving as the perceptual Sinn. The tree can burn, may be dissolved in its chemical elements, etc. The Sinn, however - the Sinn of this perception, which belongs by necessity to its essence - cannot burn, it has no chemical elements, no forces, no real properties. (Ideen I, 205.22-29.)

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That the noema of an act is not the object of the act is also clear from the following passage from Husserl's unpublished manuscript "Noema und
Sinn": 6
. the reflecting judgment of phenomenology and logic is directed toward the Sinn, and hence not toward that which is the object of the nonreflecting judgment itself. (NuS,
99-I00.)

These and many similar passages are quoted in my article. It has been objected to them that they concern Sinn and not noema. However, note that in the first passage Husserl uses the phrase "the perceived tree as such" for what he later in that passage calls the Sinn. This former phrase is the traditionalists' main evidence for their claim that the noema of an act is its object as modified in a certain way. The traditionalist interpretersof Husserl are hence faced with a dilemma: either they have to give up the view that the noema of an act of perception is "the perceived object as such." Or else they have to admit that the noema of an act is not the object of the act. Hoping to forestall this traditionalist objection, I pointed out in my article that according to Husserl, "all objectual senses and all complete noemata . . . belong to the same species." (Ideen I, 296.I-3). Also, recall that for Husserl, the noema consists of a "Sinn," viz., the "objectual sense" (gegenstdndlicher Sinn), and of a "thetic" component, which is also a kind of "Sinn," as Husserl states in many places, for example in ?go of the Ideas, where he notes that these further components of the noema may also in an extended sense be called 'Sinn' (Ideen I, zo6.3I -3 6.) Similarly, in ? 88 of the Ideas Husserl refers to the noema as "the noematic correlate that here is called 'Sinn' (in a very extended sense)" (Ideen I, Note also that ? 89 of the Ideas, which I quoted a moment 203.18-i9). ago, has the word 'noema' in the title, while the word 'Sinn' is used throughout the whole discussion in that section. Thesis 8: Noemata are abstract entities Finally, my eighth thesis, that noemata are abstract entities. This follows from my first thesis. It is also supported by the same passage I just quoted from ? 89 of the Ideas: "A noema cannot burn, it has no chemical elements, no forces, no real properties" (Ideen I, 205.z2-29). It has been objected that it is unclear what is meant by 'abstract'. The passage I quoted specifies one set of features that abstract objects have in common: they do not enter into chemical or physical processes. The other passages I quote in my article in support of thesis 8 specify some further features:
6

"Noema und Sinn," Manuscript M III 3

IV/I.

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

The way I interpret Husserl, the noema is like a Peircean type, which is instantiated in various individual acts. These acts are characterized by a pattern of determinations whose common structure is the noema. Husserl's noemata, like geometrical shapes, are timeless. Husserl is hence a platonist in his conception of the noemata. However, that does not mean that the noema of my present act existed before I acted and will continue to exist after my act has ended. Temporal predicates are inapplicable to abstract entities. Platonism becomes much more palatable when one keeps in mind that 'timeless' does not mean 'eternal'.

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