Noema - Interpreting Husserl

Interpreting Husserl

In fact, commentators have been unable to achieve consensus on exactly what a noema is. In a recent survey, David Woodruff Smith distinguished four different schools of thought. On one view, to say that the noema is the intentional object of an act of consciousness is to mean that it quite literally is an object. Husserl’s student Roman Ingarden, for example, held that both ordinary objects, like chairs and trees, and intentional objects, like a chair precisely as it appears to me, or even a fictional tree, actually exist, but have different "modes" of existence.

An alternative view, developed primarily by Aron Gurwitsch, emphasizes the noema of perceptual experience. Most ordinary objects can be perceived in different ways and from different perspectives (consider looking at a tree from several different positions). For Gurwitsch, what is perceived in each such act is a noema, and the object itself – the tree, say – is to be understood as the collection or system of noemata associated with it. This view has similarities with phenomenalism.

Sokolowski, alternatively, holds that a noema is just the actual object of perception or judgment itself, considered phenomenologically. In other words, the noema of the judgment that “this chair is uncomfortable” is neither an entity (the chair considered as uncomfortable) which exists in addition to the chair itself (but with a different mode of existence) – the Ingarden view; but nor is the noema of such a judgment identified with a particular tactile perception of the chair – which along with other perceptions constitutes the chair as such – the Gurwitsch view. For Sokolowski, the noema is not a separate entity at all, but the chair itself as in this instance perceived or judged. This seems consistent with Husserl’s emphasis on the noema as the "perceived as such…remembered as such…judged as such…"

An analytic philosopher, Dagfinn Føllesdal, in an influential 1969 paper, proposed a Fregean interpretation of the noema, which has been developed extensively by Ronald McIntyre and David Woodruff Smith. This school of thought agrees that the noema is not a separate entity, but rather than identifying it with the actual object of the act, phenomenologically understood, this view suggests that it is a mediating component of the act (of perceiving, judging, etc) itself. It is what gives the act the sense it has. Indeed, Føllesdal and his followers suggest that the noema is a generalized version of Frege’s account of linguistic meaning, and in particular of his concept of sense (Sinn). Just as Frege held that a linguistic expression picks out its reference by means of its sense, so Husserl believed that conscious acts generally – not merely acts of meaning but also acts of perception, judgment, etc. – are intentionally directed toward objects by means of their noemata. On this view, the noema is not an object, but an abstract component of certain types of acts.

Sokolowski has continued to reject this approach, arguing that "(t)o equate sense and noema would be to equate propositional and phenomenological reflection. It would take philosophy simply as the critical reflection on our meanings or senses; it would equate philosophy with linguistic analysis." Robert C. Solomon attempted to reconcile the perception-based interpretation of the Gurwitsch school with the Fregean interpretation of noema as sense, suggesting that while "(i)t has now become virtually axiomatic among phenomenologists that the Sinne of experience stand independent of the Bedeutungen of linguistic expressions. It has become all but axiomatic among analytic philosophers that there is no meaning apart from language. It is the concept of the noema that provides the link between them. The noema embodies both the changing phases of experience and the organizing sense of our experience. But these two 'components' are not separable, for all experience requires meaning, not as an after-the-fact luxury in reflective judgements but in order for it to be experience of anything.”