Musings on Husserl’s Personal Transcendental Phenomenology
Husserl’s own personal phenomenology was unique in many ways. He wrote, like others, of meaning and consciousness, but added his own individual flavor in giving us the noema, sense data and other concepts, virtually all of which, one could assert, have combined to withstand the test of time.
A key idea of Husserl’s circulates around the concept of meanings. He writes, “Everything that is logical falls under the two correlated categories of meaning and object.” (Welton 47) And what does he mean by this? First is the idea of mental acts or processes as the bearer of meanings (bedeutungen). One meaning can be instantiated or carried by many different mental acts or states. Further, meaning and objects are interrelated. States Husserl, “Meanings constitute … a class of concepts in the sense of ‘universal objects’.” (50) In just what sense did Husserl think such objects exist? Most likely, as objects of consciousness.
Second, is the idea that particular unities exist between mental acts – unities of meaning (somewhere between voicing and perceiving). He sees a perhaps-necessary intention to express meaning (content) in some form. This idea carries three “intentions.” First, is the voicing intention – for example, the production of certain sounds. Second is the meaning intention, in which some state of affairs is meant to be expressed by the sounds in question – content expresses the expressive act. At this point, there is a relation between meaning intention and meaning fulfillment. Third, is perceptual intention, in which sensations must become involved.
However, as Barry Smith notes, “it is important to stress that meanings as thus conceived by Husserl are not the objects of normal acts of language use. Meanings can however become the objects of special types of reflective act.” (20) It is this type of act that forms the basis of Husserl’s logic. Does that imply that Meaning is then Truth? J. N. Mohanty states, “truth, as correspondence of meaning with its object, is to be understood as the coincidence (deckung) of the meaning and its fulfilling intuition.” (50) Truth then lies in the theory of perceptions, of concept-formation, of “truth-in-itself,” as Smith argues (416). Finally, “One can analyze the meaning of … experience, and thereby investigate its intentional content…. It is meaning or sense that provides consciousness with its object-directedness.” (Zahavi, 22-23) Meaning is defined by the logic of truth via a perceptual state or process.
From his concept of meaning, Husserl shifts to the idea of description in building his “science” of phenomenology. Husserl writes,
In a certain way, we can thus distinguish “explanatory” phenomenology as a phenomenology of regulated genesis, and “descriptive” phenomenology as a phenomenology of possible, essential shapes (no matter how they have come to pass) in pure consciousness and their teleological ordering in the realm of possible reason under the headings “object” and “sense.” (318-319)
Having briefly touched on Object, let’s address sense in Husserl’s concept of description. The word “I” applies to the thinker of “this thought”; the description of self applies to oneself. “I” can be so described. What is it exactly to refer to or think about myself as myself? (Or could one perhaps ask which reality is the real reality?) Through sense and the reference of “I” the thing that satisfies description “D” can be viewed in two ways: “I” thoughts refer by way of some description of their reference, and the “I” in I-thoughts is a disguised (abbreviated) “definite description.” I-thoughts are referential. Husserl combines various sorts of references into one single reference in a fusion of separate objects. As Zahavi states, “reference is determined by the sense, that is … reference is effectuated via the sense.” (58) (Husserl often uses the term “sense-data”.) Of sense, Husserl writes,
Like perception, every intensive mental process—just this makes up the fundamental part of intentionality—has its “intentional Object,” i.e., its objective sense. Or, in other words: to have sense or “to intend to” something … is the fundamental characteristic of all consciousness which, therefore, is not just any mental living whatever, but is rather a <mental living> having sense, which is “noetic.” (89-90)
And of the the noetic (or the noema)? Zahavi argues,
It is widely acknowledged that the noema is something that is only discovered through the epoche [bracketing] and the reduction. It is only then that we thematize the intended qua intended, that is, the object exactly as it is meant and given. But does the epoche imply that we parenthesize the transcendent spatio-temporal world in order to account for internal mental representations, or does the epoche rather imply that we continue to explore and describe the transcendent spatio-temporal world, but in a new and different manner? Is the noema, the object-as-it-is-intended, to be identified with an internal mental representation—with an abstract and ideal sense—or rather with the givenness of the intended object itself? (58)
The noema ties in with meaning. Jaakko Hintikka contends “there is a temptation to isolate noemata conceptually from their objects far too rigidly, to assume that we can find out all we need to know about intentional meaning by examining the mediators of this meaning, the noemata.” (79) However Hintikka continues, “no analysis of the structure of the noema, however detailed and accurate, can tell you what its relation is to its object.” (79)
One can make at least three distinctions regarding the noema, perhaps by using a violin tone as a (unique) example. First, there is the tone, which is real and frankly foundational. Second, one should put aside questions of material reality of the tone, creating a tonal, spatial “phantom” (while forgetting about the source). Third, spatial apprehension can then be suspended and it becomes mere sense datum. Peter Simons puts it a different way though: “each noema has a kernel or nucleus which consists of three elements: a substratum, a set of qualitative moments, and modes of fulfillment of these qualities.” (127) The noema circles back to the idea of objects. Whatever the case, it can be agreed there are real objects appearing in various ways (as in physical sounds), the appearance through which real objects appear (such as auditory appearances), and finally, hyletic data (sense contents, or sensations).
Another concept Husserl emphasizes is the constitution of temporal objects and of time itself. Husserl writes, “Objects of this kind become constituted in a multiplicity of immanent data and apprehensions, which themselves run off as a succession.” (186) Schematic objects equate to appearances and are not located within the stream of consciousness. The highest level of objectivity is the community. Further, there are two judgment contents: the noetic and noematic.
Two idea-thoughts occur: 1) sense impressions are the impressional side of the retentional side; 2) the concept of double intentionality – the intentionality of retention of the past. The consciousness of past consciousness of duration.
Husserl writes at length on these concepts:
Time-constituting phenomena … are evidently objectivities fundamentally different from those constituted in time. They are neither individual objects nor individual processes, and the predicates of such objects or processes cannot be meaningfully ascribed to them. Hence it also can make no sense to say of them … that they exist in the now and did exist previously, that they succeed one another, and so on. But no doubt we can and must say: A certain continuity of appearance—that is, a continuity that is a phase of the time-constituting flow—belongs to a now, namely, to the now that it constitutes; and to a before, namely, as that which is constitutive … of the before. (213)
Is Husserl being overly idealistic in his concept of constitution? Perhaps, but Husserl’s idealism differs from the traditional. As Zahavi illustrates, for Husserl:
Constitution is a process that unfolds itself in the structure subjectivity-world. For that reason, constitution cannot be interpreted as a contingent animation of some meaningless sense data, nor as an attempt to deduce or reduce the world from or to a worldless object. (74)
Husserl wrote on many concepts and ideas. However, it was his own personal phenomenology that set him apart from so many other philosophers, both at that time and on into the future. While his theories surrounding meaning and objects, sense data, noema and the like are addressed in these musings, many more essential Husserlian phenomenological components await discussion, among them time-consciousness, hyle, intersubjectivity, pure logic, lifeworld, transcendental idealism and so on. These and Husserl’s interrelationships, ethics, objectivity insights and impactful real-world views combine to assure Husserl a reliable place in the realm of philosophy, as well as a continuing influence in numerous fields and among many philosophers, thinkers and scholars.
Scott C. Holstad has authored 60+ books with such publishers as HarperCollins, Sterling House, Chiron Review Press, Lummox Press, Texas Review Press, Gothic Press, Longman & Pearson. He has appeared in the Minnesota Review, Exquisite Corpse, Pacific Review, Santa Clara Review, Long Shot, Wormwood Review, Chiron Review, Kerouac Connection, Palo Alto Review, Wisconsin Review, Lullwater Review, Southern Review, Arkansas Review, San Pedro River Review, Gangan Verlag, Sivullinen, Ink Sweat & Tears, Mad Swirl, Misfit, Bristol Noir, The Beatnik Cowboy, PULP, WIREWORM, Synchronized Chaos, Horror Sleaze Trash, Ashville Poetry Review & Poetry Ireland Review.
He holds degrees from the University of Tennessee, California State University Long Beach, UCLA & Queens University of Charlotte. He currently lives near Gettysburg PA.