Abstract
There are not many facts about the noema, and the portrait that emerges from them is far from clear. Thus a “phenomenology of the noema” that would follow Husserl’s instructions on how to do phenomenology begins with difficulties that may well be responsible for the variety of incompatible descriptions in the phenomenological community and on so many pages of commentary. This lack of consensus about a central feature of Husserlian phenomenology presents a challenge (at best) and a confusion (at worst) to readers new to Husserlian scholarship. But in the context of a symposium devoted not to using noematic analysis for phenomenological investigations of other topics, but to developing a “phenomenology of the noema,” we can appreciate and even savor Husserl’s injunction: Be a perpetual beginner; question, radically, the very subject-matter at issue.1 Very well: our subject-matter is the noema. We want then to consider what it is, why Husserl introduced it, and how it functions in phenomenological practice. In other words, we want to consider the noema’s character, value, and purpose.
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This is a revised version of my contribution to the Research Symposium on the Phenomenology of the Noema, sponsored by the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology at Florida Atlantic University, 12–14 April 1991.
Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are from Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie and phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, ed. Walter Biemel. (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950 ). Although I have consulted the Kersten and Boyce Gibson translations, I have returned to the German text in order to propose alternative, but defensible, translations of key terms that can be given a more or less processual and active cast as they are rendered in English. Both extant translations (but especially the latter) opt for less processual renderings. Thus they suggest a substantivizing that lends itself to understanding the noema as a substitution for, rather than analysis of, the terminus of intentional activity.
The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), §§3–4 (6–7). Emphasis in the first sentence is mine; in the last sentence, the author’s. Hereafter cited as Crisis.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 264. (Wahrheit und Methode,II.II.ld, 284).
Logische Untersuchungen VI, Beilage, §4; hereafter cited as LU. As in quotations from Ideen,I have used the German text with my own translations in order to avoid substantivizing interpretations—in this case, those chosen by Findlay.
Author’s Preface to the English Edition,“ in Ideas,trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 16; hereafter cited as ”Preface.“
I would argue, against Richard Bernstein’s position in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), that this general theory of experience as noetic-noematic performance offers an understanding of reason which is unburdened by both “objectivism” and “relativism.”
For extensive discussion of these notions of sedimentation and performance in communicative experience, see Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986 ).
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Langsdorf, L. (1992). Noetic Insight and Noematic Recalcitrance. In: Drummond, J.J., Embree, L. (eds) The Phenomenology of the Noema. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3425-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3425-7_6
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