Meaning and Noema

Abstract

Although the concept of the noema was explicitly introduced in the Ideen, it is, in Eugen Fink’s terminology, more an operative concept of Husserlian phenomenology than a thematic concept (Fink, 59f.): it quickly became a working concept which was used rather than thematized for itself. A complicating factor is the fact that the background in Husserl’s thought for the concept of the noema is rather mixed. As Ludwig Landgrebe has noted, although the concept of the noema is introduced “in the context of the analysis of sense perception and perceptual judgments as assertions concerning the results of perception” (Landgrebe, 122), it is perceptual judgment that is the model for the concept. The concepts of the matter and the quality of an act, developed in the Logical Investigations, are now introduced as the sense and thetic character of the noema. Landgrebe even goes so far as to claim that “The legitimate locus of the use of the concepts ‘noema’ and ‘noesis’ is thus the theory of predicative judgments. Noema is the ‘that about which’ of assertion...” (ibid., 123).