Understanding and Simple Seeing in Husserl

Timothy Mooney

Published online: 19 September 2009

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract Husserl’s Logical Investigations has undergone explicitly conceptualist

and non-conceptualist interpretations. For Richard Cobb-Stevens, he has extended

understanding into the domain of sensuous intuition, leaving no simple perceptions

that are actually separated from higher-level understanding. According to Kevin

Mulligan, Husserl does in fact sunder nominal and propositional seeing from the

simple or straightforward—and yet interpretative—seeing of particulars. To see

simply is not to exercise an individual meaning or a general concept. Arguing that

Logical Investigations provides evidence for both views, I endeavour to show that

the account of perceptual consciousness in Husserl’s subsequent work is far more

clear and consistent. It is one of growing beyond the situation portrayed by Mulligan

and into the one explicated by Cobb-Stevens. Though they are notionally separable,

pre-conceptual syntheses at the passive and noematic levels are inevitably inter-

woven with conceptual and categorial articulations in a developed consciousness.

Those writing in the phenomenological tradition would not be the slowest to remark

that, in its operation, the ideal of economy can often issue in theses that are

inadequate to and reductive of lived experience. Such a warning finds an earlier

voice in the author of the critical philosophy. Kant contends that rationalism falls

prey to dogmatism in claiming to proceed in knowledge from concepts alone, taking

experience as a lower form of thinking. For its part, empiricism is dogmatic in

taking understanding as a higher form of experience, treating its concepts as nothing

but empirical products. Only through the form of sensibility—which already goes

beyond mere sensation—are objects given to us, and only through the understanding

are they thought. Anything that we can represent to ourselves as combined

T. Mooney (&)

School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

e-mail: tim.mooney@ucd.ie

123

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DOI 10.1007/s10743-009-9063-9

associatively, he contends, has already been combined in thought (Kant 1933, pp.

32, 65, 125, 151, 429).

Whilst Edmund Husserl criticises the “little clarified” Kantian distinction

between sensibility and understanding in the Sixth Logical Investigation, he does

not abandon it there or elsewhere. Unlike Kant, he extends the concepts of

perception and intuition, positing intuitions that are categorical in character. It is

these, he maintains, that “intellectualise” sensuous intuitions. And besides positing

these two types of intuition, Husserl distinguishes between intuitive givenness and

signification. Of whatever kind it might be, intuition must be opposed to thinking in

the sense of signitive reference. This grounds his distinction between adequate and

inadequate givenness, that is, between the complete or partial fulfilment by

perception of empty signitive intending. And all this is the backdrop to his

explications of concepts as the universal meanings of words, concepts as species of

universal presentations, and concepts as the intentional correlates of such

presentations (Hua XIX/2, pp. 731–732; 2001b, p. 318).

Throughout Logical Investigations, Husserl works with a distinction between

meaning as conceptual or logical signification (Bedeutung) and as non-conceptual

interpreting sense or apprehending sense (Sinn or Auffassungssinn). He only takes

Bedeutung as synonymous with Sinn in treating of linguistic expressions (Hua XIX/

1, p. 58; 2001a, p. 201). On top of this, meaning as Meinung signifies the act of

intending and what is meant in the act. Now it is not always clear whether the

conceptual and non-conceptual have to come together in perception—Husserl’s rich

descriptions of phenomena in this early work frequently run without telling us. As

with Kant’s first Critique, however, his Investigations have undergone explicitly

conceptualist and non-conceptualist readings. He is regarded by Richard Cobb-

Stevens as extending understanding—recast as intuitional as well as rational–into

the domain of sensuous intuition, to the extent that no simple perceptions are

actually separated from such formal, higher-level understanding. On an alternative

construal by Kevin Mulligan, Husserl distinguishes nominal and propositional

seeing from the simple or straightforward—and yet interpretative—seeing of

particulars. To see simply is not to exercise an individual meaning or a general

concept.

These interpretations are of interest, not just because they are argued at length

and resolutely opposed, but also because they can in my view be reconciled under

modifications in Husserl’s subsequent work. In this essay I endeavour to show that

the story of perceptual consciousness in his later period is one of growing beyond

the situation portrayed by Mulligan and into the one explicated by Cobb-Stevens.

Following my opening and expository section, I try to bring out in Sects. II and III

how Logical Investigations provides evidence for the conceptualist and non-

conceptualist views respectively, such that simple seeing does not definitively

constitute the finished perception of things. In his transcendental period Husserl also

allows for simple seeing, now shown to be subtended by a structured multiplicity of

associative, pre-egoic performances. In Sects. IV–V, I hope to show that this

working downwards runs with a much clearer commitment to conceptualism.

Though they remain notionally separable, pre-conceptual syntheses at the passive

level are inevitably interwoven with conceptual and categorial articulations in a

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developed awareness. Simple or straightforward seeing can only be enjoyed by an

infant consciousness, though its achievements are carried into the intellectual

stratum that will affect it in its turn. In this way Husserl surmounts naıve seeing

without collapsing sensibility into understanding.

1

In the First Logical Investigation, Husserl’s claim that sensuous intuition is

intrinsically interpretative is preceded by the elaboration of “essential distinctions”

that ensue from his examination of signs in general and language in particular.

Though every sign is a sign for something, not every sign has a meaning. Put

another way, every sign functions indicatively, but does not always express

anything. This is why indications cannot be confined to marks that have been

deliberately fashioned to stand for something (such as a brand on the forehead for a

slave or a flag for a nation). They include natural signs, like the smoke that points to

a forest fire or the puddle to a shower of rain. The smoke and the puddle may

indicate these events, but they do not thereby mean them. An associatively

motivated connection can function perfectly without the expression or understand-

ing of a meaning (Hua XIX/1, pp. 30–31; 2001a, pp. 183–184).1

By contrast with indications, expressions have an inherent significance. These

marks or sounds always express meanings, or to put it in Husserl’s peculiar terms in

Logical Investigations, are animated by them. An expression does not merely say

something, but says it of something, and this latter function is a condition of its

being used significantly. Through its meaning or semantic content, an expression

has to direct itself to some objective correlate, that is, to some particular thing or

state of affairs (Hua XIX/1, pp. 45–52; 2001a, pp. 192–197). The act of meaning,

for its part, “is the determinate manner in which we refer to our object of the

moment” (Hua XIX/1, pp. 54–55; 2001a, p. 198). The meaning-content and its

object only pertain to an expression because of the conscious acts that give it sense.

What is needed for an expression is the act that is interwoven with it (Hua XIX/1,

pp. 52, 421; 2001a, p. 197, 2001b, p. 117).

A speaker utilises expressions to point out something to a hearer. For Husserl,

simple expressions pick out single objects like the inkpot, and complex expressions

or propositions pick out objects as states of affairs, e.g. the inkpot is missing from the

table (Hua XIX/1, pp. 52–54, 2001a, pp. 197–198). To the extent that an expression’s

1 Indications do not involve the grasping of necessary connections, even if they serve to convey these

connections without their being grasped properly, this, through rational insight. Thus when I chance upon

the first line of an arithmetical proof, it may indicate the conclusion to me by way of memory, without my

currently having the knowledge of how that conclusion was demonstrated rationally. In the case of natural

indications, demonstration in this sense is always lacking, so that if my conclusion happens to be correct,

there is no relationship of necessary entailment that obtains for me to reactivate in my awareness. Our

smoke may in fact have come from a chimney rather than from a forest fire, and our puddle of water from a

stream that has burst its banks. Accordingly, Husserl draws a firm distinction between “demonstration” as

confirming an indicative linkage (Hinweis) and as the rational comprehension of a proof involving ideal

and necessary relationships (Beweis), stressing the lack of insight in indications. Hua XIX/1, pp. 32–34;

2001a, pp. 184–185.

Husserl Stud (2010) 26:19–48 21

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referent is not given experientially to the auditor or speaker, its determinate meaning

function is indicative, constituting a certain form of signification. In so far as

expressions indicate, they are empty. An expression does not need sensuous intuition

or givenness to function, but it does require givenness to fulfil it, to convert signitive

emptiness into partial perceptual presence, with complete fulfilment being the ideal

of an object given so completely or adequately that nothing would be left over to be

indicated. When the object is presented in the manner in which the expression means

it, there is an appropriate if inadequate unity of coincidence between the expression

and the relevant intuitions. The meaning is confirmed intuitionally in a “synthesis of

identification” with the given (Hua XIX/1, p. 56; 2001a, p. 199/Hua XIX/2, pp. 585,

589; 2001b, pp. 218, 220).

The manner in which an expression functions effectively is regarded by Husserl

as akin to the interpretative “apprehending sense” (Auffassungssinn) that, togetherwith sensations, gives us the sensuous intuition or perceptual presentation of a

worldly object. If we imagine a consciousness prior to all experience, he states, it

might very well have the sensations that we have, but it will intuit no things and no

events, “no trees and no houses, no flight of birds nor any barking of dogs.” We are

promptly tempted to say, he continues, “that its sensations mean (bedeuten) nothingto such a consciousness, that they do not count as signs of the properties of an

object, that their combination does not count as a sign of the object itself” (Hua

XIX/1, p. 80; 2001a, p. 214). This situation might well remind us of a camera or a

mobile phone that records an event on a film reel or digitally, and does so quite

blithely and uncomprehendingly. The sensations seem to be just lived through

without an objectivating interpretation that is derived from experience. But in this

place Husserl adds a careful qualification:

Here, therefore, we talk of signs and meanings just as we do in the case of

expressions and cognate signs. To simplify comparison by restricting

ourselves to the case of perception, the above talk should not be misread as

implying that consciousness first looks at its sensations, then turns them into

perceptual objects, and then bases an interpretation upon them, which is what

really happens when we are objectively conscious of physical objects, e.g.

sounded words, which function as signs in the strict sense. Sensations plainly

only become presented objects in psychological reflection: in naıve, intuitive

presentations they may be components of our presentative experience, part of

its descriptive content, but are not at all its objects. The perceptual

presentation arises in so far as an experienced complex of sensations gets

informed by a certain act-character, one of apprehending or meaning. To the

extent that this happens, the perceived object appears, while the sensational

complex is as little perceived as is the act in which the perceived object is as

such constituted (Hua XIX/1, p. 80; 2001a, p. 214).2

This is elaborated upon in other places, most notably in the Second and Fifth

Investigations. Animated by interpretations, sensations present objective determi-

nations of things, but are not themselves these determinations. Perceived objects

2 Translation slightly emended.

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“are meant unities (gemeinte Einheiten), not ‘ideas’ or complexes of ideas in the

Lockean sense” (Hua XIX/1, pp. 134–135; 2001a, pp. 252–253).3 We have

sensations in first order perception, but we do not see them, for they are not

intentional or object directed—what perceptual consciousness aims at are the

objects that are presented in and through them. In ordinary perception, furthermore,

the acts that interpret the sensations are no more perceived than the latter. What we

call the presentation of an object is also its interpretation (Hua XIX/1, pp. 399–400;

2001b, p. 105). The moot point, however, is that interpretation itself “can never be

reduced to an influx of new sensations; it is an act-character, a mode of

consciousness, of ‘mindedness’” (Hua XIX/1, pp. 395–396; 2001b, p. 103).

Throughout his earlier and later periods, Husserl is adamant that sensuous

perception reaches the thing itself, not a mere sign or picture of it. But this does not

mean, and indeed it never means, that a worldly object is presented fully or

adequately to our view. As noted above, complete fulfilment is an ideal, but also one

that is unrealisable. An object is only ever given inadequately in one perspective,

say from the front, and though it may present two or more sides from another and

better perspective, we cannot be given all of its sides at once. In straightforward

sensuous perception we nonetheless intend the object as a whole—this is how we

aim at it (Hua XIX/2, pp. 589–590; 2001b, pp. 220–221). Where part of the

currently presented aspect or profile of an object is hidden, say the patterned carpet

by a table and chairs, this too is intended as a complete aspect within the greater

whole that includes its underside. Thus the carpet is taken as continuing beneath

these things that are partially occluding it (Hua XIX/2, p. 573; 2001b, p. 211).

Foreshadowing his theory of the horizons of perception, a horizon being the

empty predelineation of the perceptual content of future experiences of something,

Husserl contends that intention, in this regard at least, is not expectancy. I do not

expect that any of the hidden aspects will be there if I change my position, for they

are grasped as already being there. What I do expect is that they will be seen if I

move in the appropriate directions. In his later terminology, they are apperceived,

that is to say, “co-intended” or “co-meant” (Mitgemeinte) as accompanying the

presented aspect without being directly given. But here already in the Sixth

Investigation, Husserl contends that every perceptual intention is interwoven with

its own signitive intentions pointing to what is there to be perceived. Such

significations may run with meanings and concepts, but they have a non-conceptual

and non-expressive character. They are significations peculiar to the interpreted

appearances themselves, whereby the latter indicate potential appearances that may

be actualised in further perceptual acts (Hua XIX/2, pp. 573, 594; 2001b, pp. 211,

224).4

The meanings and concepts fulfilled by sensuous intuitions are sharply

distinguished from these primitive significations. Individual meanings in simple

expressions, according to Husserl, point to unarticulated wholes. They are the

intentional correlates of the fulfilling presentations of particular empirical objects to

which they refer in “single-rayed” acts of simple, straightforward or “nominal”

3 See also Locke (1975, pp. 298–301).4 See also Hua XI, pp. 5–6; 2001c, pp. 42–43.

Husserl Stud (2010) 26:19–48 23

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intending. But meanings are also general concepts, in the sense of being intentional

correlates of universal objects to which they can refer, the latter being called

“species.” Individual meanings pertain to objects, and species meanings to the

concepts in which we think of them (Hua XIX/1, pp. 108, 502; 2001a, pp. 231–232,

2001b, p. 161). This leads Husserl to enquire whether there are parts and forms of

perception corresponding to all the parts and forms of meaning that provide a

parallelism between such individual and general significations and their fulfilments

(Hua XIX/2, p. 658; 2001b, p. 272).

With regard to sensuous perception or intuition, the answer is in the negative, as

can be seen from perceptual reports or judgements. I do not just name or speak

nominally of a piece of paper or a blackbird, but say that this is white and has been

written on, or that the other is flying across the garden and chattering noisily, as

blackbirds are won’t to do. In these “many-rayed” acts of complex or propositional

intending, my apprehension of extant and complex states of affairs involves a

“surplus of meaning.” This surplus is expressed by formal terms like “and,” “this,”

“the,” and “is,” articulating amongst other conjunctions the relationship of part and

whole, and beyond this again of the being of the situation. I perceive white paper

sensuously, but not its whiteness, not the “belonging” as Cobb-Stevens puts it, of the

predicated feature to the object, of the part to its whole (Hua XIX/2, pp. 658–674;

2001b, pp. 272–282).5

To retain the objectivity of these states of affairs in their internal relatedness, that

is, to avoid reducing them to the products of subjective associations or syntheses via

judgements, Husserl posits another form of intuition that is categorial rather than

sensuous. In “categorial intuition,” I am given ideal and universal objects

intellectually, as the fulfilling correlates of the general concepts that refer to them

as species. To grasp some state of affairs is to grasp at the same time the ideal,

categorial structure that is “instantiated” by that state of affairs in the sense of being

true of it, though not given in the sensuous presentations. Yet the everyday

perception of a state of affairs does not yet thematise its ideal structure, for in terms

of attentiveness, the former is my overall object. Put otherwise, the intellectual

givenness of a categorial structure is not ordinarily distinguished from the state of

affairs whose recognition it enables. It blends in with the sensuous phenomenon that

it transcends (Hua XIX/2, pp. 671–682; 2001b, pp. 280–287).6

Comprehending things as involving and as being involved in states of affairs,

categorial intuitions do not glue or tie parts or relations together in the experienced

object, forming it as a potter would form clay. The same object is given with the

same actual properties, but is comprehended in a different manner. Otherwise the

5 Cobb-Stevens (1990, p. 149). Categorial intuition is not confined to fulfilment in predicative being.

Husserl claims here that the statement that the paper is white means that the white paper is, that I amreferring to an objectively actual fulfilling situation without making being itself into a real predicate.6 I employ and grasp categorial forms in my ordinary perceptual life, but without having to know that I

am doing so. The thematisation of categorial form as such is the function of a subsequent act of reflective

abstraction. See Hua XIX/2, pp. 690–693; 2001b, pp. 292–294. Husserl describes this derivative intuition

of a form as a “universal seeing,” and in his transcendental phase will describe it a particular mode of

eidetic or essential intuition (Wesenschau). It is true, however, that in this earlier work he fails “to stress

clearly enough the difference between the oblique intuition of a categorial surplus, and the thematic

intuition of a universal that is named as the subject of a predication.” Cobb-Stevens (1990, p. 153).

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original presentative sensations would be changed, so that there would be “a

falsifying transformation into something else” (Hua XIX/2, p. 715; 2001b, p. 308).

This higher level of intuition certainly involves the judgement that something is or

is not such and such, or that it is involved with something else in some way, but the

contention is that the judgment has the character of recognition rather than creation

or unification ex nihilo. The concept of a state of affairs is not founded upon the

fulfilments of judgements, according to Husserl, but found within the fulfilments of

the judgements themselves (Hua XIX/2, pp. 669–670; 2001b, p. 279).

Categorial intuitions are always revelatory acts that are founded or built on the

simple founding acts of sensuous intuition, though in their intentionality as well as in

their fulfilment, these propositional and many-rayed acts that aim at states of affairs

can themselves be blended quite seamlessly with what they contain, namely, the

simple and single-rayed acts aiming at particular objects (Hua XIX/2, pp. 681–682;

2001b, p. 287). Husserl is at pains to stress that we can never have purely categorial

givens divorced from simple, straightforward perceptions. Without exception, all of

them rest ultimately on the simpler and founding acts of sensuous intuition. An

intuition cut off from sensibility in this last sense, he says “is a piece of nonsense.” In

this respect at the very least, he evinces sympathy with Kant’s original critique of

intellectual intuition (Hua XIX/2, pp. 711–712; 2001b, p. 306).7

2

On the effectively conceptualist interpretation of this account set out by Richard

Cobb-Stevens, Husserl effectively refuses to oppose intuition to intellection, or

sensibility to understanding (Cobb-Stevens 1990, p. 147). Now it might be possible

to retain this opposition even if one accepts that categorial understanding is itself

intuitional in character, since uninformed intuitions could still be located at the

sensuous level—here at least we might arrive at sensibility without understanding.

Such an alternative is excluded, however, if we want to affirm the theses that

sensations are already interpreted at the founding level—where we are furnished

with perceptual objects—and that meanings are also operative within such

interpretation (where they are individual in their references). But it is questionable

whether meanings in this individual sense can be sundered completely from

concepts, from species meanings. It is Cobb-Stevens’ contention that sensuous

intuitions are always already caught up in categorial acts, to the extent that they are

interdependent with the latter.

For Husserl, our acts of simple or straightforward perception already fuse

subordinate perspectival views presenting different profiles or aspects into the

continuous presentation of a unitary object. Husserl adds that such a unity of

perception is an immediate fusion of part-intentions, without the addition of new act

intentions founded on them (Hua XIX/2, pp. 590, 677; 2001b, pp. 221, 284).

Sensations taken as profiles or aspects of things through this apprehending sense

include perceptually independent “pieces” like the head of a horse in its box that is

7 See also Kant (1933, pp. 268–275).

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seen without its body, and dependent “moments” like colour and extension (Hua

XIX/1, pp. 231–235; 2001b, pp. 5–7). Husserl is also attentive to the fact that, in

straightforward perception, a certain profile can be more prominent than others. So

indeed can a property within one or more of the fused profiles. It is, so to speak, a

part of a part (Hua XIX/1, pp. 246–247; 2001b, p. 14, Hua XIX/2, p. 677; 2001b,

p. 284).8

Cobb-Stevens’ position is that categorial intuition presents explicitly the identityof profile and object, rendering objective the aforementioned “belonging” of the

profiled feature to the object. In its synthetic unity, the categorial act of predication

integrates the founding straightforward intuition of a whole containing potential

features and the founded articulation of object and feature. Though we here enter the

propositional and judgemental sphere, he claims that “there is a continuity between

the pre-linguistic awareness of object and feature, and the syntaxed awareness of the

object’s having the feature” (Cobb-Stevens 1990, p. 152). Husserl’s following

remarks from the Sixth Investigation show grounds for this interpretation:

In straightforward perception, we say that the whole object is explicitly given,

while each of its parts (in the widest sense of “parts”) is implicitly given … the

apprehension of a moment and of a part generally as a part of the whole in

question, and in particular, the apprehension of a sensuous feature as a feature,or of a sensuous form as a form, point to acts which are all founded: these acts

are in our case of a relational kind. This means that the sphere of “sensibility”

has been left and that of “understanding” entered … [with a sensible object]

acts of articulation can put its parts “into relief,” relational acts bring the

relieved parts into relation, whether to one another or to the whole. Only

through such new modes of interpretation will the connected and related

members assume the character of “parts” (or of “wholes”). The articulating

acts and, taken in retrospect, the act we call “straightforward,” are not merely

experienced one after the other: overreaching unities of act are rather always

present, in which, as new objects, the relationship of the parts become

constituted … perception purports to grasp the object itself: its “grasping”

must therefore reach to all its constituents in and with the whole object.

(Naturally, we are here only concerned with what constitutes the object as itappears in perception, and as what it appears in perception, and not with such

constituents as may pertain to it in “objective reality,” and which only later

experience, knowledge and science will bring out) (Hua XIX/2, pp. 680–682;

2001b, pp. 286–287).

8 It should be added here that an object does not have to be a particular thing aspect or part within this.

One can simply intend a plurality, though Husserl states that at this sensuous level we cannot intend it as

such: “[w]e must guard against confusing the straightforward percepts of sensuously unified manifolds,series, swarms etc., with the conjunctive percepts in which alone the consciousness of plurality is itself

properly constituted … the sensuously unifying characters … serve as points d’appui for the signitively

mediated cognition of plurality as such, and of plurality of the kind in question—which cognition now has

no need of an articulated grasp and knowledge of individual items, but does not therefore as yet possess

the character of an authentic intuition of the collection as such.” Hua XIX/2, pp. 689–690; 2001b, pp.

291–292.

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Building on the work of Robert Sokolowski and Jacques Taminiaux, Cobb-Stevens

maintains that we do not merely have a thing and its feature presented to us, but also

the presentation of the thing in its feature. This is what corresponds to the word

“is” when we state about something sensuously present that it is such and such

(Cobb-Stevens 1990, p. 152).9 And we do not merely have categorial intuitions

founded on sensuous ones, for the fulfilling intuitions of any expression describing a

particular—like “white” or “white paper”—involve a categorial surplus of meaning.

Everything points to the conclusion, according to Cobb-Stevens, “that categorial

intuition of the formal surplus is a condition for the straightforward perception of

the particular feature or object” (Cobb-Stevens 1990, p. 152).10 There is no seeing

of particulars except as having certain looks, and there is no seeing of looks except

as shared by particulars, so the founding-founded relationship between categorial

and simple intuitions is reciprocal: “[t]he peculiar relationship of ‘belonging’ that is

expressed by the predicative interplay of identification and description arises out of

the inter-dependent and complementary moments of seeing this and seeing as”(Cobb-Stevens 1990, p. 154).

Such a view develops on Husserl’s account of the basic “objectivating acts” of

recognising perceptually what one can also express in language. To talk about

recognising an object or fulfilling a meaning intention, he says, is to express the

same fact from different standpoints, one pertaining to the object meant and the

other to the synthesis of identification of intending and fulfilling. He holds that I find

this in “static fulfilment,” when something comes into my perceptual awareness

without being adverted to beforehand, like the inkpot on the desk or a rabbit which I

spot and can name as such after I come around the corner of a country lane. These

particular experiences show a “being coincident” of intention and intuition. Cases of

disjoined “dynamic fulfilment,” by contrast, involve a “coming into coincidence,”

as when I exclaim “keys,” rummage in my pockets, retrace my steps to where I

started, and only then see them flashing in the sunlight across the hall (Hua XIX/2,

pp. 558, 566–568; 2001b, pp. 201, 206–207).

Husserl maintains that in the field of expressions, the concepts of truth or

rightness are not confined to judgments and propositions, or to their objective

correlates in states of affairs. It is the nature of the case, on his view, that the first

two concepts extend over the whole sphere of objectivating acts, including those of

simple or single-rayed intending that are found in acts of naming. In its most

fundamental form, truth is to be found in the pre-predicative identification of the

meant and the given (Hua XIX/2, pp. 654–655; 2001b, p. 265). Cobb-Stevens

observes that when a judgement achieves truth, it is in a comparable manner. It is

not attained by reason of its propositional structure but instead by reason of a

parallel intuitive fulfilment of its emptily intended object. Truth is now being

described as the completion of emptiness by fullness, not in terms of a

correspondence that would involve correlating or comparing putative immanence

with transcendence. To seek a fit between intra-mental thoughts and extra-mental

9 See also Sokolowski (1981, p. 129).10 On the same page, he cites Taminiaux on “this strange parallelism, in which the founded is in turn

founder and excessive with respect to that upon which it is founded.” Taminiaux (1985, p. 102).

Husserl Stud (2010) 26:19–48 27

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objects is to forget that objects are also reached intentionally by means of

significations (Cobb-Stevens 1990, p. 147).

As this suggests, Cobb-Stevens accepts that truth occurs at the level of sensuous

fulfilment, and hence that it can be distinguished from its categorial occurrence,

where a whole with potential features has been integrated into the articulation of

object and feature (Cobb-Stevens 1990, pp. 151–152). We can differentiate between

the simple and propositional fulfilments of the one complex and interdependent act.

But it is not immediately obvious how we can hold on to the notions of “founding”

and “founded” acts in a hard and fast fashion. Cobb-Stevens seems to be much more

consistent when he refers to interdependent moments, and could go so far as to

affirm that they are logically “equiprimordial” in their internal relationship, so that

all talk of levels might be abandoned too.11 One question that arises is whether this

can accord with the variety of perceptual experiences that Husserl discerns. When

we examine static as well as dynamic fulfilment, we find cases of unanticipated

articulations of objects, and Cobb-Stevens’ account needs to be capable of

accommodating them in their distinctiveness.

Let us assume that, on coming round the corner, I see and recognise the rabbit in

straightforward intending before spotting that it is stock-still, dozing in the sun.

Categorial intuition is operative in the first experience if it is granted that

identification presupposes description. A further categorial form has not supervened

on this “seeing as” in its role of articulating the state of affairs of the rabbit’s being

asleep.12 Following Cobb-Stevens’ thesis that the initial experience is informed

categorially, the categorial intending of being asleep is not waiting in the wings to

articulate a feature implicit in the perceptual situation, for the stillness is not yet

prominent sensuously. In the original experience, the single-rayed—though not

autonomous—intending and coincident fulfilment of the perceived whole tells its

own story in type-recognitional terms. It is founding in relation to the subsequent

experience, even if not in isolation. With the rabbit, of course, the crash of a falling

tree behind me could prevent the initial (explicitly straightforward and latently

propositional) experience of the rabbit being continued and articulated further in a

succeeding act of categorial intuition.

Yet Husserl states—as we shall see below in more detail—that some

straightforward acts do not found anything else and are not at all categorial. They

can become elements in categorial acts, but do not have to be taken up in this way.

Thus he does not abandon his sharp distinction of founding and founded acts, taking

the perceptual object of the first to be finished in the straightforward sense before

becoming the term of a relation (Hua XIX/2, pp. 674, 686; 2001b, pp. 282, 290).

Furthermore, he asserts unambiguously that individual meanings without their

11 This term is borrowed from Heidegger (1957, p. 130; 1962, p. 170).12 David Woodruff Smith states that when I see “this dog,” the sense of my experience is a perceptual

individual content, whereas when I see that “this dog is a bearded collie” the sense of my experience is a

perceptual propositional content. A propositional act is one whose sense involves predication, whereas a

pre-predicative act is one whose sense is attributive. The latter is seeing “this bouncing dog” rather than

that “this dog is bouncing.” Smith (2007, p. 265). It can be noted that Cobb-Stevens is happy to accept

these different senses and their relevant fulfilments, but not their independence. He might add that

Smith’s use of the phrase “this dog” is revealing if it is perceived as a dog.

28 Husserl Stud (2010) 26:19–48

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corresponding fulfilments can operate quite independently, that is, without any other

meanings, something that he takes to be already evident in the functioning of simple

expressions. In this respect, the Husserl of the Fourth Investigation takes the proper

name of someone known such as “Schultz” as a better example of independence

than a common name. It manifests clearly a “proper meaning” that names an object

in a single, “intrinsically uniform” ray. Such a simple expression and indication is

independent in comprising the entire meaning of a nominal act of intending that

may come to receive its straightforward fulfilment in sensuous intuition (Hua XIX/

1, pp. 304, 306, 320; 2001b, pp. 50, 51, 59).

As was noted in the first section above, the act of meaning in every expression

involves saying something of something, being “the determinate manner in which

we refer to our object of the moment” (Hua XIX/1, pp. 54–55; 2001a, p. 198).

Husserl is careful to elaborate on his distinction between acts of meaning and

meaning itself. To use the proper name Schultz significantly, we must have the

direct or imaginative presence of that person as endowed with some definite

perceptual content. Our ordinary consciousness of the meaning, not being

distinguished from its referent, involves possibilities of fulfilment and coincidence

“within certain ranges of intuition and no others.” For Husserl, the complexity of

this wider intentional background does not entail the complexity of the proper

meaning, which remains simple in isolation (Hua XIX/1, pp. 306–308; 2001b, pp.

51–52).13

When one directly perceives Schultz, a predelineated range of expectations is

fulfilled. But if the name is being used as a meaning, and not just associatively,

Cobb-Stevens could retort that intending as well as perceiving is implicated in some

species meanings, for it is questionable whether such fulfilment bears no relation

whatsoever to cognitively grasped and reportable qualities, e.g. that Schultz is a

person rather than a car, and an adult rather than a baby. To use a proper name

significantly, on this view, is to pick out a being known under recognisable

determinations, one already brought under certain concepts. In fulfilment, it is not

unreasonable to posit a relationship of interdependence between the individual

proper meaning and the tacit yet describable knowledge of the kind of being that is

taken to be fulfilling it (in an experience of frustration, moreover, such a type-

understanding would be foregrounded as an implicitly meant element of the

intending act that has suffered disappointment). This is not to affirm that a proper

name is nothing but an abbreviated description, or that there is no single-rayed

intending, but it is to question the view that such a name can function cognitively

without mediation by description as expressible understanding, and hence that a

single ray of meaning can function autonomously.14

13 See also Hua XIX/2, p. 676; 2001b, p. 283.14 We assume, according to Husserl, that the proper name is of a known person, and hence functioning

normally. It is not functioning in the indirect sense of a certain person called Schultz, which is complex.

Hua XIX/1, p. 309; 2001b, p. 53. But if the word is tacitly understood as the name of this person, its

meaning is already mediated by conceptual grasping. And once it is granted that there is a limited range of

what will count to us as satisfying it, the name cannot amount to an absolutely rigid designator in

awareness.

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Husserl allows that meaning can change so that an unarticulated meaning

replaces one that was originally articulated, and in such cases the original

expression “has ceased to be genuinely complex, and tends, in developed speech, to

be telescoped into one word” (Hua XIX/1, p. 314; 2001b, p. 55). If genuine

complexity is taken as that of an explicit and syntaxed meaning, the unarticulated

meaning could have telescoped the complexity of its precursor such that it now

functions in implicit, unexpressed form. Where such cases involve meant perceptual

identification, seeing this and seeing as would be interdependent. Despite this, the

Husserl of the Fourth Investigation does not accept that the terms of an earlier

complex meaning are themselves informed categorially. As syntactical material, he

claims, an individual meaning does not take the place of the syntaxed meaning forms

or structures in which it may come to serve as a simple term. Everything we later

explicate from it “represents new meanings that were not really implicit as under-

emphasised parts in our original meaning” (Hua XIX/1, p. 306; 2001b, p. 51).15

It remains especially difficult to see how an individual meaning can function in a

associative or stand-alone fashion—i.e. without an element of conceptual subsump-

tion—if it is to count as a common name. It was noted above that Husserl regards

species meanings as pertaining to the concepts in which we think of objects, and

individual meanings as pertaining to the objects themselves. He asserts in the First

Investigation, however, that both meanings have an ideal, universal character.

Though their objects are individualia, individual meanings are also generalia or

species qua unities of meaning. The universality of the meanings in which we think

does not have to resolve itself into the universality of that which we think of, for

referring occurs in different ways (Hua XIX/1, p. 108; 2001a, pp. 231–232). But if to

perceive particulars is also to see them as having certain looks, it is left open that the

looks are grasped as shared by the particulars, as Cobb-Stevens claims, since

individual meanings may also function as implicit species in the same overall acts,

accommodating this claimed interdependence of seeing this and seeing as.16 I will

follow him in his contention that the last two must come together, without accepting

his other thesis that Husserl’s straightforward seeing initially amounts to “seeing as.”

15 In the Fifth Investigation, Husserl goes on to state that there are some single-rayed objectifications that

are not primitive in some ultimate sense, being built on earlier categorial syntheses such that they contain

“in a peculiarly modified, indirect sense, implicit articulations and synthetic forms.” Yet these too can be

analysed backwards into primitive terms free of categorial form. Hua XIX/I, p. 502; 2001b, p. 161.16 Husserl certainly sees the employment or expression of a common name in a perceptual situation as an

act of classification. When I say “my inkpot” and see the relevant particular “[t]he relation, as one of

naming, is mediated, not merely by acts of meaning, but by acts of recognition [Erkennen], which are herealso acts of classification. The perceived object is recognised for an inkpot, known as one, and in so far asthe act of meaning is most intimately one with an act of classification, and this latter, as recognition of the

perceived object, is again intimately one with the act of perception, the expression seems to be applied to

the thing and to clothe it like a garment … the recognitive experience of this thing as “my inkpot,” is

nothing but a recognition which, in a definite and direct fashion, fuses an expressive experience, on the

one hand, with the relevant percept, on the other.” Hua XIX/2, pp. 559–560; 2001b, pp. 201–202. He

stresses here that the perceptual object is being classified, not the perception itself. Classification is being

attributed to the acts of recognition, not to the meaning that is itself being employed, which is taken as

fused with the perceptual object in a definite, direct fashion. The question is whether the acts of

recognition can themselves function without involving a typifying species meaning or meanings.

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3

Kevin Mulligan provides an alternative, anti-conceptualist interpretation of Husserl

on straightforward perception. This undercuts any difficulties attendant on holding

on to the autonomy of individual meanings in single-rayed intending, for the claim

is that meanings find no employment whatsoever at the perceptual level. They need

neither be present in complex and dependent nor simple and independent form. To

perceive simply in a single-rayed manner is not to mean or exercise an individual

meaning or a concept. We only exercise meanings in seeing propositionally, or

when our straightforward seeing is bound up with naming. Simple seeing, states

Mulligan, is the straightforward perception of particulars, but it is not just the seeing

of bare things; it is the experience of things with moments and determinations.

Returning to Husserl’s own examples, Mulligan reiterates that we experience things

like trees and houses, flights of birds and barking of dogs in the one blow (Mulligan

1995, p. 173).

Mulligan concurs with Husserl that a world is conceivable in which creatures

would have sensations without interpreting them, being incapable of perception. By

themselves, sensations stand in mere relations of causality and similarity to objects

and their features. These imagined creatures would enjoy at best structured

sensations in fields of appearance. In vision, for example, it would be “as though

they were aware of rich arrays of qualitative discontinuities and coloured expanses,”

without having experiences of things like tables and chairs and songs (Mulligan

1995, pp. 183, 191). To simply or straightforwardly see particulars, therefore, is

already to have interpreted one’s sensations. All that Mulligan disputes is the claim

that the apprehending sense of perception fusing part-intentions has to involve

meanings or concepts. And there is undoubtedly evidence for his view in LogicalInvestigations. Husserl says in one place that the thing that appears straightfor-

wardly “requires no apparatus of founding or founded acts,” which is not to ignore

“the obvious complexity that can be shown to exist in the straightforward perceptual

act, and particularly in its unitary intention” (Hua XIX/2, p. 676; 2001b, p. 283).

We find further evidence for the anti-conceptualist view in Husserl’s story

concerning the interpretative fusing of views into a unitary object. That there is a

unity of identification in the act, according to Husserl, does not mean that identity

itself is presented to awareness. “In our case,” he says, “an identification is

performed, but no identity is meant” (Hua XIX/2, p. 679; 2001b, p. 285). Once we

reach this level of meaning an identity as such, as cited above, “the sphere of

‘sensibility’ has been left and that of ‘understanding’ entered” (Hua XIX/2, p. 680;

2001b, p. 286). But the presence of commas need not entail a departure from the

literal sense of these terms. There is an essential difference, says Husserl also,

between interpretation that is sensuous and interpretation that is cogitative (Hua

XIX/1, p. 176; 2001a, p. 280). For Mulligan, all of this shows that the foundation

relation between partial perceptual acts and a perceived whole in sensuous intuition

is not one between a supervenient intellectual act and a series of underlying

perceptual acts (Mulligan 1995, p. 188). When we read about meaning and

straightforward perception in Sect. V of the Sixth Investigation, we find little

ambiguity on this point:

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Intuition may indeed be allowed to contribute to the meaning (Bedeutung) of aperceptual statement, but only in the sense that the meaning could not acquire

a determinate relation to the object it means without some intuitive aid. But

this does not imply that the intuitive act is itself a carrier of meaning, or that it

really makes contributions to this meaning, contributions discoverable among

the constituents of the completed meaning…. When I say “this,” I do not

merely perceive, but a new act of pointing (of this-meaning) builds itself on myperception, an act directed upon the latter and dependent on it, despite itsdifference. In this pointing reference, and in it alone our meaning resides …perception is an act which determines, but does not embody meaning. Thisview can be confirmed by the fact that essentially occasional expressions like

“this” can often be used and understood without an appropriate intuitive

foundation … our reference to “this” is fulfilled in perception, but is not

perception itself … we must not only draw a general distinction between the

perceptual and the significant element in the statement of perception; we must

also locate no part of the meaning in the percept itself. The percept, whichpresents the object, and the statement which, by way of the judgement (or bythe thought-act interwoven into the unity of the judgement) thinks andexpresses it, must be rigorously kept apart (Hua XIX/2, pp. 553–556; 2001b,

pp. 197–199).

This account seems to extend to all acts of sensuous intuition, which involve beliefs

prior to assertions. If normal perception is essentially marked by “the intuitive

persuasion that a thing or event is before us for our grasping,” says Husserl, “such a

persuasion is possible, and in the main mass of cases actual, without verbalised,

conceptual apprehension” (Hua XIX/1, p. 41; 2001a, p. 190).17 Furthermore, where

a perceiver does encounter an identity between something that is named or simply

meant and a straightforward given, the objectivating act or synthesis of identifi-

cation is not an articulating performance, being pre-predicative. Identity in this

form, says Husserl, “is not first dragged in through comparative, cogitatively

mediated reflection: it is there from the start as experience, as unexpressed,

unconceptualised experience” (Hua XIX/2, pp. 567–568; 2001b, pp. 206–207). The

coherence of this last view, of course, is precisely what Cobb-Stevens has

questioned.

For Mulligan, Husserl’s separation of simple seeing from meaning is an early

articulation of a view made familiar by a number of thinkers, in particular by Fred

Dretske. The latter has developed on the differences between perceptually

articulated and conceptually vehiculed information (Mulligan 1995, p. 173). In

the first and non-epistemic case, a perceiver can be said to see something if this is

differentiated from its environment, visual differentiation being chiefly the way in

which the thing looks in some way to the perceiver. This is not to deny that beliefs

in the conceptually informed sense play a role in how things look to someone, and

that they can even stop something looking a certain way. Dretske’s minimal thesis is

that seeing something simply is compatible with having no conceptualised beliefs

17 See also Hua XIX/1, pp. 483; 2001b, pp. 151, 166.

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about it (Dretske 1969, pp. 20–23, 22–23n1).18 He holds to the de re belief within

simple seeing—affirmed by Husserl—that something is before us, a belief fixed by

what is seen and not by conceptual or descriptive factors (Dretske 2000, p. 105).

This brings us to a neo-Kantian or conceptualist objection noted by Mulligan,

namely, that simple seeing overburdens non-conceptual interpretation. Even when

we factor in non-conceptual performances—as Husserl does increasingly after

Logical Investigations—it remains true that many types of perceptual contents or

presentations can only be enjoyed by creatures that have been able to master certain

concepts. Mulligan states that Husserl goes some way to meeting the conceptualist’s

worries, not merely because certain perceptions combine with conceptual modes,

but also because “continuous aspect perception is often a matter of wordless

subsumption of what is seen under concepts, particularly in cases of recognition”

(Mulligan 1995, pp. 206–207). As Mulligan observes, we find such cases of

recognition described in the Sixth Investigation: we recognise a Roman milestone

and its weathered inscriptions, or a tool as a drill, though the names will not come

back to us. These are fulfilments of meaning-intentions sundered phenomenolog-

ically from the indications usually pertaining to them (Hua XIX/2, pp. 592–593;

2001b, p. 223).

Husserl appears to end up, therefore, with an affirmation of straightforward

perception that places him in the anti-conceptualist camp whilst meeting some

conceptualist concerns. And yet the reader is frequently faced with remarks that

obstruct this conclusion. We may recall that, in the First Investigation, Husserl

states that a perceptual presentation arises in so far as a complex of sensations has

been informed by an act of apprehending or meaning so as to present this or that

object. A being for whom sensations mean nothing will intuit no houses or barking

of dogs (Hua XIX/1, pp. 80, 135; 2001a, pp. 214, 253). In the Fifth Investigation,

moreover, he remarks that differences of interpretation are descriptive differences,

and that the apperceptive surplus of meaning within experience in its descriptive

content “ensouls” sensations and is to be distinguished from their raw existence. It is

in its essence “such as to make us perceive this or that object, see this tree, e.g., hear

this ringing, smell this scent of flowers.” What is called the presentation of an

intentional object “is also called an apprehension, interpretation, apperception

[Auffassung, Deutung, Apperzeption] in relation to the sensations really present in

this act” (Hua XIX/1, pp. 399–400; 2001b, p. 105).19

These citations may not pose any great problems on their own, even if they

downplay the role of the apprehending and interpreting fusion of different

perspectival views into a continuous perception of the one thing, a fusing that comes

for the non-conceptualist between the brute causal existence of sensations and the

meaningful intending of the thing as a this or a that. In these places Husserl could be

discussing epistemic perception alone. Only in the second edition of the

Investigations will he stipulate that the apprehending sense of an intentional act

does not merely determine that it grasps an object, but also as what it grasps it,

making it count as this object and no other (Hua XIX/1, p. 430; 2001b, pp. 121–

18 See also Dretske (2000, p. 100ff).19 Translation emended.

Husserl Stud (2010) 26:19–48 33

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122).20 Yet this very addition is supported by his contention—already to be found in

the first edition—that all intentional or object-directed experiences are either

objectivating acts or have their basis in objectivating acts, in synthetic identifica-

tions of the meant with the given. These acts “have the unique function of first

providing other acts with presented objects, to which they may then refer in their

novel ways” (Hua XIX/1, pp. 514–515; 2001b, p. 167).

In the Sixth Investigation, Husserl returns to this point, stating that categorial

formations are founded on what is universal in objectivating acts, or have a function

linked essentially with the generic elements in such acts. It is only experiences of

this class that allow for categorial intuitions (Hua XIX/2, p. 704; 2001b, p. 301).21

And in a passage supporting Cobb-Stevens” thesis that he ultimately makes seeing

as and seeing this interdependent, Husserl says that an objectivating act calls on a

meaningful or conceptual matter that “makes the act present just this object in justthis manner, i.e. in just these articulations and forms” (Hua XIX/2, p. 617; 2001b,

p. 240). This conflicts with those statements in which the perceptual object of a

founding act is finished in the straightforward sense before becoming the term of a

relation. It also suggests that without an objectivating act of articulation, there might

be nothing amounting to a finished perceptual object.

It would be difficult to discern a final position, however, on foot of a number of

isolated remarks. The problem we are faced with is that there is no clear-cut account

that merely awaits its distillation from the pages of Logical Investigations. We find

certain remarks that are hostile to the conceptualist interpretation of perception, and

others that go in its favour, and there are no citations that can decide Husserl’s view.

Even if the weight of argument seems to point in the non-conceptualist direction, the

multiplication of citations ends up inconclusively. In an extended footnote that runs

against the resolutely anti-conceptualist interpretation that is advanced in his main

text, Mulligan himself remarks that Husserl often contradicts his thesis that simple

seeing involves no meaning, and he adds that Husserl is not even consistently clear

that seeing is not meaning (Mulligan 1995, p. 226n9).

4

As is well known, the purpose of the epoche and phenomenological reduction in

Husserl’s transcendental period is to uncover the hidden performances of

transcendental subjectivity by means of which objects and world can claim Being,

with their existence senses themselves becoming phenomena for explication. One of

the features of his work on perception in this period, in my view, is its integration of

conceptual and non-conceptualist descriptions into an account that displays a

consistency which is lacking in the preceding investigations. Whilst there must be a

non-conceptual seeing that is already synthetic, it does not furnish a finished

20 This is the only citation that is taken from the second edition of Logical Investigations. It is to be

stressed that all the other citations in this paragraph and in the single paragraphs that precede and succeed

it respectively are common to both editions.21 Translation slightly emended.

34 Husserl Stud (2010) 26:19–48

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something in isolation. To be constituted fully in lived experiences, a perceived

object must count as a conceptualised unity of cognition. This being said, the

transcendental period is distinguished by an archaeological uncovering of non-

conceptual syntheses.

The theory of constitution proper begins with the distinction of noesis and noema

in Ideas I (1913). The first comprises those moments of the intentional act referring

it to its object. Correlated with it is the second, the object as it is attended to by

consciousness, or better, the object in its very being intended. Perception has its

noema, which at the simplest level is its “perceptual sense” (Wahrnehmungssinn)(Hua III.1, pp. 202–206; 1982, pp. 213–217). This purely perceptual sense of the

noema—as distinct from the level of conceptual or logical signification and

objectivation—is the successor to the fusion of part-intentions constituting the

apprehending sense in his earlier work. The logical or conceptual predicates

articulate the determined bearer or subject that makes up the “outer core” of the

noema. Husserl also posits an “innermost moment” of the core, and this is the

skeletal bearer of the properties, the “pure X” or determinable something of all those

possible and actual ones that are determining it. It is not separate from its properties,

but self-identical as their bearer in successive appearances (Hua III.1, pp. 299–302,

320; 1982, pp. 310–313, 332).

As John Drummond has contended, we get to the innermost core of the noema by

way of the perceptual sense, working through the latter to the “X” lying within it. This

core is not an entity behind or beyond the sense. It is “in it” because the intentional

syntheses of consciousness achieve or perform an identification precisely in their

construal of certain appearances as profiles or aspects of a single particular thing, the

very thing that they are determining. Such an achievement comprises the intended

object and the way in which it is intended. In Drummond’s rendering of Husserl,

the former is something “to have in the sense” (Drummond 1990, pp. 118–119,

136–138).22 Drummond goes on to argue that the “X” is irreducible to a demonstrative

pronoun, which as occasional or indexical can refer to any object whatsoever. Nor is it

reducible to a purely formal identity, since there must be a definite continuitymanifest

in the determinations of (and within) aspects if the object is to be grasped as a

materially determinable spatial particular (Drummond 1990, pp. 153–154).23

Already in the 1907 lectures published as Thing and Space, Husserl argues forthe essential contribution of the seeing, moving and touching body with its

“kinaestheses” or felt internal sensations of these activities to the perceptual senses

of particulars and states of affairs. Developed sensuous experiences of still life

actualities are restricted cases of perception harking back to earlier experiences of

seeing things moving, nearing and grasping them, feeling over their expanses and

lifting them (Hua XVI, pp. 66–73, 154–161; 1997, pp. 55–61, 131–136). In this way

Husserl distances himself from a portrait view of perception. He points out that a

“phantom” or colour-filled shape that manifests purely visual characteristics would

22 See also Hua III.1, p. 206; 1982, p. 217, following Drummond’s emendation.23 Drummond points out here that in the static account of Ideas I the pure X, whilst found in the noematic

sense, is nonetheless formal. It is in Husserl’s subsequent genetic phenomenology that the manifest

continuity of the innermost core is emphasised, though the theses in Thing and Space already allow for it.

Husserl Stud (2010) 26:19–48 35

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not amount to an object perceived in space, fascinating though it might be. I can

only construe these or those appearances as aspects of a physical something because

they are founded on the kinaesthetically felt movements of eyes and neck and trunk

and limbs that I am undergoing and have undergone.

Husserl goes on to note that visual experience can yield the same successive

appearances if the object is moving and I am at rest or vice versa. An object can

approach, turn this way and that and then recede, showing itself in exactly the same

way as it would if it were static and I were moving towards it, around it and away

from it. It is the wider kinaesthetic sensations present in the experience or absent

from it that ground the awareness of the object’s rest or movement within a world

that surrounds it. And the noematic sense that there are hidden aspects to worldly

things is founded on the awareness that I can move and have moved to bring such

aspects into view. The potential appearances are correlated with the expectations of

the kinaesthetic sequences that would be peculiar to them (Hua XVI, pp. 175–176,

187–189; 1997, pp. 147–148, 157–159). Together with touch, furthermore,

kinaesthesia founds one’s grasp of a thing’s efficacy. Take the weight and hardness

of a stone, which are experienced sensuously through the resistance and the pressure

that it exerts on one’s body. These characteristics fill the grey oval space and are

required for the “seeing” of a stone shattering a window. The straightforward belief

that a thing is there has to be built on the felt, incarnate experiences of some of its

material determinations (Hua XVI, pp. 343–345; 1997, pp. 299–301).

Ideas I nonetheless retains a provisional form/content schema of sensations as

formless stuffs interpreted by stuffless forms. In perceptual syntheses, noetic

moments bestow and animate sensations with noematic senses (Hua III.1, pp. 192–

194, 227–228; 1982, pp. 203–205, 238–239). When he turns to the genetic

phenomenology of pre-constitution, that is, to the archaeology of the genesis of

perceptual sense taken to lie beneath the purview of noetic and noematic analysis,

Husserl abandons this schema (Hua XI, pp. 338–340; 2001c, pp. 626–629). On the

new account, the sensible level is not composed of raw sensation data. It is always

already organised or structured by receptive consciousness, and the relevant

organisation is a pre-condition of the intentional experience of an object. Husserl

tells us that his broadening of synthesis in the sphere of sensibility is anticipated in

Logical Investigations, with the account of indication making up the nucleus of

genetic phenomenology (Husserl 1954, p. 78; 1973a, pp. 74–75). Prior to meaning

and sense, indication brings in rule-bound relationships of association, in which the

apprehension of something serves to motivate a belief in the reality of something

else (Hua XIX/1, pp. 32, 35; 2001a, pp. 184, 186).24

24 Here Husserl harks back to a facet of traditional empiricism: “[t]he psychical facts in which the notion

of indication has its ‘origin,’ i.e. in which it can be abstractively apprehended, belong to the wider group

of facts which fall under the historical rubric of the ‘association of ideas.’ Under this rubric we do not

merely have those facts which concern the ‘accompaniment’ and ‘reactivation’ of ideas stated in the laws

of association, but the further facts in which association operates creatively, and produces peculiar

descriptive contents and forms of unity. Association does not merely restore contents to consciousness,

and then leave it to them to combine with the contents there present, as the essence or generic nature of

either may necessarily prescribe. … If A summons B into consciousness, we are not merely

simultaneously or successively conscious of both A and B, but we usually feel their connection forcing

itself upon us, a connection in which the one points to the other and seems to belong to it. To turn mere

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What is distinctive about the later genetic account is its concern with a manifold

of appearances in which the intended thing has not yet been constituted. Here there

is neither an object nor an ego directed towards it, which is why the performances

within receptivity are characterised as “passive syntheses.” At the most fundamental

level, these operations constitute the acts and temporal objects of experience (Hua

XI, pp. 76–77; 2001c, pp. 118–119).25 But this does not deal with the content of

spatial perception, most notably in its visual mode, accepting that visual experience

comes to be informed in ways outlined above (Hua XI, p. 128; 2001c, pp. 173–174).

Through passive syntheses of heterogeneity and homogeneity, the field of vision

that is encountered by egoic awareness has already been organised pre-egoically

into elementary configurations or patterns. Let us imagine that an infant apprehends,

amongst other multiplicities, a number of little red squares on a white surface. They

contrast with the whiteness, and in so doing exercise an affectivity or allure on his or

her consciousness, sending out affective rays of force and pulling on it. Once the

allure becomes strong enough, that consciousness is motivated, not only to

distinguish them from their heterogeneous surroundings, but also, and in the same

blow, to group them together in the synthesis of homogeneity (Hua XI, pp. 129–131,

148–149; 2001c, pp. 174–177, 196–197). The relevant multiplicity gets prefigured

or pre-constituted as one of a plurality of prominent patterns or configurations in the

perceptual field, for it would be rare indeed for there to be just one multiplicity with

a blank background.

The little red squares may be there for sight, but what is seen is more than a

causal representation, since they are discrete of themselves. It falls to the affected

passive sphere to put them together, to join them up in a configurational nexus. The

performance is creative as well as reactive, and Husserl contends that extensional

formations according to temporal and local configurations are none other than what

Kant had in mind under the rubric of figurative synthesis, though in Husserl’s

narrative there are as yet no concepts related to a manifold of sensible intuition.

What our infant has apprehended is not yet a perceptual object, but an “object-like”

formation that may become an object (Hua XI, pp. 162, 164; 2001c, pp. 210, 212–

213).26 This is because prominence in the perceptual field is not the achievement of

Footnote 24 continued

coincidence into mutual pertinence, or, more precisely, to build cases of the former into intentional unities

of things which seem mutually pertinent, is the constant result of associative functioning. All unity of

experience, all empirical unity, whether of a thing, an event or of the order and relation of things,

becomes a phenomenal unity through the felt mutual belongingness of the sides and parts that can be

made to stand out as units in the apparent object before us.” Hua XIX/1, pp. 35–36; 2001a, pp. 186–187.25 The temporal objects of experience can be constituted because every living present or current

perceptual phase of consciousness involves the retention or primary memory of the just lapsed moment,

and the protention or primary expectation of the moment about to be with this or that content. Without

this internally synthesised relationship to past and future, the impressional present of perception would be

nothing. Hua X, pp. 39–40, 90–93; 1991, pp. 41–42, 95–98. This recognition of the constituted

temporality of an intentional act, as Drummond reminds us, lets Husserl proceed from a part and whole

analysis to an identity-in-manifolds analysis. It is not just that the successive and adjoining views of an

object are presented, but that the interrelationship of these views can be experienced. Drummond (1990,

p. 151).26 Translation emended.

Husserl Stud (2010) 26:19–48 37

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attentive thematisation. This is arrived at through the pre-constituted configurations

exercising affectivity in their turn. Having been synthesised and therefore detected,

they competed with each other for attention.

When one wins out it reaches the foreground of awareness. The ego has been

roused to turn towards it and constitute a thematic figure against a background with

a noematic sense that will fuse those sides it may present (Hua XI, pp. 149–150,

166–167; 2001c, pp. 197, 214–215). For Husserl the affectivity in, and productivity

of, passive syntheses are filtered preferentially as far as possible, calling on

biological drives and a wider perceptual interest. When a child seeks to apprehend

something and to discriminate more sensuous details by changing orientation, he or

she can be prompted by aesthetic delight and curiosity rather than by a prefiguration

of danger or the satisfaction of a physical need (Hua IV, 1952, pp. 189, 276–277;

1989, pp. 199, 289).27 We can imagine our infant transfixed by the pattern of red

patches. A parent then takes the same out from behind a pantry door with its grille

and brings a red oval shape to a chopping board. In subsequent years the character

of a red pepper and its contribution to a goulash will be communicated to the older

child who has tasted such a dish. Yet the multiplicity may first have indicated (and

hence been prefigured as) a bouncy red ball criss-crossed with white lines that the

parent had always handed over after taking it out of a toy-box.

Could we not accept the reoccurrence of simple or straightforward perception as

found in the early experience? Our little boy or girl, after all, establishes

configurations and comes to pay attention to one of these, constituting a noematic

perceptual sense. In doing so the baby is engaged in Dretske’s perception as simple

seeing, differentiating something from its environment and trusting in its thereness,

a sense to which Mulligan assimilates the early Husserl’s sensuous intuition. The

later Husserl agrees that the infant perceives in this pre-conceptual manner, having

an intentional background that lets him or her predelineate the behaviour of certain

objects. There are certainly expectations that certain appearances will accompany or

follow on from other ones—perhaps in our example what an adult would call the

bouncing of the ball—but not the articulated appreciations of states of affairs.

As we can guess, the intentional background is highly complex. One thing will

have an associative and interested horizon of chiefly olfactory and gustile

expectations, another of visual and aural ones, each correlated with kinaesthetic

and contextual anticipations. But the relevant identifications and corresponding

bodily fulfilments, however complex, are not identifications that are meant. What

the later Husserl does not allow, in my view, is the discrete, unmediated persistence

27 The later Husserl adds the qualification that, at the very earliest stages of life, some configurations—

including olfactory ones—are only apprehended because they are called upon by instinctual biological

drives. A. D. Smith has drawn attention to his specific claim that, in the play of instincts, there is

recognition of a datum as the content of a satisfying enjoyment. It is Husserl’s position that such

configurations are constituted initially as bare interest-formations (Interessengebilde) that are not

habitually accessible or understood as being there for me as valuable physical existents. Cf. Manuscripts

C 13 I, 6, 10b; A VI 34, 35a, 36, cited in Smith (2003, p. 152). The preferential filtering in passive

synthesis depends on the compliance of a manifold. Husserl is well aware that the rousing of the ego need

not involve any prior need or interest, since the sheer intensity of an event can force its way into

awareness, as with a blast of hot air from a vent, the sharp report of a firework or the searing blue flash

from a welder’s torch.

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of such straightforward perceptions. Granting that our infant grows into the space of

logical signification, on this interpretation he or she then loses for good the ability to

perceive in a manner that is epistemically innocent, in the sense of being

unmediated by concepts and unsusceptible in principle to justification. The genetic

and noematic accounts will therefore comprise abstract explications of perceptual

performances that are no longer prior to or separated from conceptually marked

active syntheses.

This view can be argued with diverging ends in mind, or at least from different

directions. In a recent article on Husserl and McDowell on non-conceptual contents,

Michael D. Barber has cited the following passage from Experience and Judgementas evidence that sensibility and conceptualisation are inseparably entwined in the

eyes of Husserl:

When we distinguish two levels of interest and, corresponding to these, two

levels of objectivating operations, viz., that belonging to receptive experience,on the one hand, and that of predicative spontaneity, on the other, this

distinction of levels should not be construed as if the different operations were

somehow separate from each other. On the contrary, things which must be

treated separately for the sake of analysis and which, genetically, are

recognised as belonging to different levels of objectivation are as a ruleactually closely intertwined. That receptivity precedes predicative spontaneity

does not mean that the former is something independent, as if it was always

necessary first to run through a chain of receptive experiences before there

could be any awakening of genuine cognitive interest. On the contrary, from

the first we can already thematise a pre-given object in the interest of

cognition, not only to examine it carefully, but in enduring cognitions “to

confirm how it is.” In this situation, predicative forming and cognising go

immediately hand in hand with receptive apprehension, and what is

distinguished from a genetic point of view as belonging to different levels

is in fact inseparably entwined in the concretion of one consciousness. These

levels are, to be sure, always erected one upon the other; each step of the

predication presupposes a step of receptive experience and explication, for

only that can be originally predicated which has been originally given in an

intuition, apprehended, and explicated (Husserl 1954, pp. 239–240; 1973a,

pp. 203–204).28

As I read it, what can be gleaned here is that we do not have to thematise what is

pre-given in the cognitive interest. It is left open that predicative forming and

receptive apprehension only run together in certain situations. Put another way, the

inseparable entwining may refer to a conjunction that holds in particular cases rather

than to a relationship that has come to assume a certain necessity, as universal as it

is irreversible. That receptivity comes before predicative spontaneity does not entail

that the former is independent in every situation, but it may be independent in some.

Strong as it is, this passage is not completely conclusive. There are remarks that

Husserl makes elsewhere, however, lending cumulative justification to the view that

28 Translation slightly emended. Cited in Barber (2008, p. 86).

Husserl Stud (2010) 26:19–48 39

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sensibility and conceptualisation become inseparably entwined. Whereas Barber is

quite rightly concerned with defending the later Husserl’s commitment to separable

non-conceptual horizon contents, I wish to go in the other direction, to stress that he

should be regarded as being no less committed in his late works to universal and

irreversible conceptualisation within perceptual experience, at least after infancy,

such that a separate, discrete level of objectivating operations can be taken as no

more than an abstraction.

5

The commitment to conceptualism is indicated in The Idea of Phenomenology(1907). A perceived object, says Husserl, is not simply there to be seen, but is

constituted synthetically by conscious lived experiences as a unity of cognition, one

presented as such and such in its phenomenon (Hua II, pp. 11–13; 1964, pp. 9–10).

This thesis is flagged in the Thing and Space lectures to which this work was

composed as an introduction. The proper continuity of a thing must be established at

the intellectual level, even if it is founded on the sensible level, so that it counts as a

unity of judgment as well as a unity of representation. Only a logical synthesis of

identification can produce the evident givenness of the identity of an object in and

through various perceptions, i.e. the production of an identification that is meant

categorially and not just performed (Hua XVI, pp. 152, 153, 155; 1997, pp, 127,

128, 132). But could a thing continue to be perceived as a mere unity of appearance,

remaining finished at a straightforward level if not in the conceptual and predicative

sense?

In Ideas I the very idea of levels is problematised. Husserl now remarks that all

lived experiences that are intentional do not just hold their object fast. In their being

intended noematically, the objects undergo performances of explicating and

relating, no matter how differently structured the acts may be. Once we seize on

something perceptually, we articulate its pieces or moments of the thing in relational

acts. Husserl goes so far as to assert that all noetic acts and their noematic correlates

are interwoven (verwoben) with the “logical” stratum of expressive (expressed and

expressible) meanings, nominal and predicative. Having stated initially that

expressive meaning raises the purely perceptual sense to the level of the universal,

stamping this sense conceptually, he then warns that not too much should be

expected from the metaphor of stratification. Expressive signification, whether

accomplished aloud or carried out in silent cognition without verbal signifying, is

not like a covering cloth or a layer of varnish above a pre-expressive stratum of

sense. Rather it is a conscious formation that exercises new intentional functions on

the intentional substratum, and which is subjected in turn to the functions of the

latter (Hua III.1, pp. 202–203, 284–288; 1982, pp. 214, 294–297). The founding and

the founded are now being run together, to the extent of being intermeshed one with

the other, even if it is not yet asserted that the latter comes to permeate the former

through and through.

In this light one can begin to understand a complete noema as the bearer of

certain properties from which it is inseparable, and which cannot be reduced to the

40 Husserl Stud (2010) 26:19–48

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purely perceptual sense fusing aspects in its part-intentions. Taken collectively, the

properties comprise the object in its fixed and changing determinations and relations

at this or that experiential juncture (Hua III.1, pp. 300–303; 1982, pp. 312–315).

Husserl affirms that some of these have to be cognised intellectually in the

perception of an object, with their significations articulating it inferentially. When

expressed predicatively the properties describe to a looser or more refined extent the

determining content of the relevant object, objectivated expressibly as an actual

enduring something and in its “whatness,” either individually or as part of a wider

state of affairs with other things. I hear the rush of something down a pipe or chute,

to provide a familiar example, and I recognise or objectivate it as a heap of coal

destined to produce warmth. This is how the coal is looked upon in its immediacy,

states Husserl, adding that it is a founded object, a unity of sensibility and

understanding (Hua IV, pp. 187–188; 1989, pp. 197–198). The distinction is kept

between single and multi-rayed intending, though one can find a greater warrant in

the later work for construing nominal and propositional fulfilments as differenti-

ations in one complex and interwoven act.

What underpins this claim is the thesis that the transition from phantom to aspect

construal to thing there in the full-blooded sense—present to the perceiver as a

determined and efficacious particular—goes from simple non-conceptual appre-

hension to conceptual understanding, from non-epistemic seeing and believing to

articulated epistemic intuiting. It was noted that the sensuous experiences of

hardness and weight by way of kinaesthetically felt resistance and pressure are

required for the “seeing” of a stone breaking a window. Yet Husserl does not

conclude that these necessary conditions of the experience amount to sufficient

ones. In the overall perception there is the cognisance that some event is taking

place because of certain objective properties that are possessed by this thing. To

apprehend any particular as the substantial bearer of properties—and properties,

moreover, that are also causal powers to accomplish certain results in certain sit-

uations—is to have engaged in an intellectual grasping that transcends

straightforward sensuous intuition. This allows me to see the power of a hammer

when it is not being swung, or the springiness of sheet steel lying flat. That “‘[s]uch

and such appears under these or those circumstances’,” according to Husserl, “is the

basic schema for the entire stock of determinations of a thing” (Hua XVI, p. 345;

1997, p. 301).29

29 In Ideas II this thesis is reaffirmed and set out at greater length: “[r]eality in the proper sense, here called

materiality, does not lie in the mere sensuous schema and could not be attributed to the perceived, if

something like a relation to ‘circumstances’ did not apply to the perceived and had no sense for it; rather, it

lies precisely in this relation and in the corresponding mode of apprehension … [c]orresponding to the

changed apprehension is a changed correlate. That is to say, in the thing-apprehension the schema is not

perceived as an extension filled merely sensuously, but is perceived precisely as primal manifestation or

‘documentation’ (originary manifestation) of a real property and, precisely thereby, as a state of the real

substance at the point in time involved … if the thing is, then it is as the identical real something of its real

properties, and these are, so-to-say, mere rays of its unitary being. It is as such an identity that the thing is

posited, in a motivated way, by every experience, be it ever so imperfect and leaving so much still open …

reality (or what is here the same, substantiality) and causality belong together inseparably. Real propertiesare eo ipso causal ones.” Hua IV, pp. 41, 43, 45; 1989, pp. 44, 46, 48.

Husserl Stud (2010) 26:19–48 41

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This looks consistent with the account of categorial intuition set out in LogicalInvestigations. To the extent that an object can be explicated and related to other

objects, that is, be determined logically, remarks Husserl in Ideas I, it can take on

syntactical forms, with the fulfilling correlates of such determining thinking being

the syntactical categories. The form of whole and part expresses the broadest

concept of that which contains and that which is contained, of which an efficacious

existent with its hardness or heaviness is a particular instantiation in the region of

physical nature. Although a categorial form is non-self-sufficient in that it has to

refer back to the substrate or core whose form it is (characterised as an

undetermined particular), the substrate is non-self-sufficient too, for it is unthinkable

without the form (Hua III.1, pp. 28–29, 31, 34; 1982, pp. 23, 25, 28). Borrowing

from Cobb-Stevens, I would hold that categorial grasping of a formal surplus in

Husserl is a condition for the perception of a substantial thing as well as of its

having a feature. Beyond a unity in aspects, the thing proper cannot be finished

before becoming a term in a relation; to perceive it is to apprehend a term in itsrelation.

Such a developed apprehension of an object runs with the appreciation that

worldly things and events are reportable to others as well as perceptible—it is part

of my horizon of a perception that others can come to have it for themselves so as to

confirm my story, so long as the object has not passed away. It is there for me and

would be there for them if only they were on the scene. Thus the identical thing or

event has the implicit sense of being intersubjectively available when I am alone, for

it is related constitutively to subjects who understand one another—even if not

actually shared, it is a shareable object, one that is nested in a public or

intersubjective world. The world there for all is the correlate of intersubjective

experience mediated by empathy, in that each perceiver is referred to the perceptual

multiplicities of other subjects (Hua III.1, p. 352; 1982, p. 363). The appreciation of

this is of course acute when one is glad that no one else is around, or for that matter

sorry about their being absent.

Though Husserl can allow for simple or straightforward infant perception prior to

the expressive (nominal, categorial and shareable) stage, he does not suppose that

these come to adventitiously mark a simple seeing that would otherwise carry on

regardless. He stresses that consciousness is an incessant, graduated process of

constituting formations of sense through which an immanent teleology prevails

(Hua XI, pp. 218–219; 2001c, p. 270/Hua XXXI, pp. 15–17; 2001c, pp. 288–289).

The perceptual interest in arriving at richer and richer sensuous details of a thing is

itself a forestage of the properly cognitive interest in articulating these details and

putting them into relation (Husserl, 1954, p. 232; 1973a, pp. 197–198). Once it has

been reached, moreover, there is no stage at the active level that becomes inert or a

ne plus ultra:

An object that exercises an affection from the background, but that does not

yet bear any traits that stem from active accomplishments, is actually a limit-

concept for us, an abstraction, but a necessary one … so long as the ego has

not actively formed its world, we cannot expect the firm path of knowledge

given by a teleological relation to guiding ideas, and even the constitution of

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firm unities of identity, which unities, as genuine objectivities, give to the ego

an environing-world and a rule for its further activities. And the ego must

continually intervene with ever-new formations; it must not allow the

objectivities that are already formed to be abandoned in the passive

background and, so to speak, allow decay to rule. The organization of the

realms of being, the realms of truth for the ego, especially of an objective

world, as the environing-world of the ego, is an accomplishment acquired only

through its activity and in higher formations through its fully conscious

positing of goals and goal oriented activity. What concerns us is the

understanding of the levels of this accomplishment, the originally prefigured

system of their typical strides forward, and in this typicality, their necessary

strides forward. … The consciousness of existence … is not only a progressive

conscious-having in general, but a striving onward to a new consciousness.

This striving is founded in an interest in the enrichment of the self [of the

object] … The interest that we have described is the motive of active

objectivation, of “knowledge or cognition,” and is therefore called “cognitive

interest” (Hua XXXI, pp. 15–17; 2001c, pp. 288–290).

On its side, non-conceptual affectivity is not cast off like the spent stages of a rocket

when active synthesis occurs. It goes towards keeping me interested, and as I get

nearer to the recognised thing, new details may emerge that motivate further

objectivations. But it is clear that productivity by way of affectivity is not confined

to the non-conceptual side. As soon as something is thematised in an active and

developed consciousness, some of its properties and relations are foregrounded as

such, and these go towards motivating subsequent objectivations where more

properties again will be carved out. The conceptual performances of articulation

from the first experience may have sunk into post-egoic passivity, but as sedimented

subconsciously, they play a role in future experience, contributing to the horizons of

expectant and attendant significations in which like objects will be perceived (Hua I,

pp. 111–113; 1960, pp. 77–79).30 Not much indeed is expected from the metaphor

of a layer covering over a pre-expressive stratum of sense.

Against this backdrop, it will be of no great surprise to read that the

conceptualisation that takes place in a judgement about perception—e.g. “this is a

red object”—is merely the instituting mode of the categorially informed awareness

of a state of affairs. In the relevant judgement the signification “being-determined-

as-red” establishes a relation to “redness.” Husserl differentiates between predica-

tive forming on the one hand—that is, the judicative formation of generalities—and

the operations of predicative thinking on the other. In these forms of determinative

and relational awareness, the relation to generalities is contained implicitly, no

longer being thematic. Predicative spontaneity only pertains to original judgements,

whose outcomes can then function post-egoically. The outcomes are propositionally

founded convictions predelineating smoothly and unobtrusively in the absence of

experiences that would frustrate them (Husserl 1954, pp. 240–241, 250; Husserl

30 See also Hua XI, p. 172; 2001c, p. 221 and Hua XXXI, pp. 40–41; 2001c, pp. 312–313.

Husserl Stud (2010) 26:19–48 43

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1973a, pp. 204–205, 212).31 And as with empirical universality, so too with all those

type-specific functions that are dependent on the conceptual comprehension of

substantiality and causality. A child must first have learnt to perceive physical

things, to give another of Husserl’s examples, if he or she is to understand for the

first time the final sense of a pair of scissors that are espied in operation. From now

on they are grasped as such, though not, he adds, “in an explicit reproducing,

comparing and inferring” (Hua I, p. 141; 1960, p. 111).32

In the world on hand for the adult subject, according to Husserl, he or she is

always carrying out multi-layered acts, from which there arise ever-new objecti-

vations at ever-higher levels. Hence the coal will come to be grasped as a

commodity as well as in its role of heating material (Hua IV, p. 188; 1989, p. 198).

As this tells us again, the mature interest that we have in articulating and relating

things is not confined to the theoretical confirmation of how they are in enduring

cognitions, also serving the practical goals of everyday adult life and cognising

them in advance in this role. For the developed consciousness in its familiar

lifeworld, in Husserl’s eyes, every object is apprehended or explicated in advance in

extensive particularisations of types. Going from founded experiences to ones where

categorial, expressive understanding is left out of play is not regarded as anything

more than an abstraction, since it precedes objectivation and leaves the existent

determined by nothing but its natural qualities, no longer having the sense of being

available and reportable to all in a world taken as there for all (Husserl 1954, pp. 35,

56–57; 1973a, pp. 38, 56).33

Such a genetic approach anticipates John McDowell’s claims, adverted to by

Barber (2008, p. 90), that conceptual contents are always available, and that such

conceptual capacities are brought into play before one has any choice in the matter.

For McDowell, concepts are already operative in receptivity, structuring sensibility

whilst falling beneath the level of spontaneity (where they are exercised actively in

judgements). We cannot baldly assert that spontaneity must extend all the way out

to the conceptual contents that sit closest to what he calls “the impacts of the world

on our sensibility.” Having said this, he cautions against the view that these contents

are manifested only in operations of receptivity, for they would not be recognisable

as conceptual capacities in the first place unless they could also be exercised in

active thinking. The passive operation of conceptual capacities in sensibility is not

intelligible independently of their active employment (McDowell 1996, pp. 11–13).

31 See also Hua I, pp. 100–101; 1960, pp. 66–67 and Hua XI, pp. 52–53; 2001c, p. 93.32 My italics.33 See also Hua III.1, p. 581; 1982, p. 53. Such is the conceptual and intersubjective character of perceptual

experience for a developed consciousness that the sense of objects in general has to be changed in Husserl’s

notorious reduction to the sphere of ownness in the Fifth CartesianMeditation. Here one abstracts “from all

determinations of the phenomenal world that refer by their sense to ‘others’ as ego-subjects and,

accordingly, presuppose them. For example, all cultural predicates … [f]urthermore, the characteristic ofbelonging to the surrounding world, not merely for others who are also given at the particular time in actual

experience, but also for everyone, the characteristic of being there for and accessible to everyone, of being

capable of mattering or not mattering to each in his living and striving—a characteristic of all Objects

belonging to the phenomenal world and the characteristic wherein their otherness consists—should not be

overlooked, but rather excluded abstractively.” Hua I, p. 127; 1960, pp. 95–96.

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Husserl agrees, and says as much in his explication of passive productivity. As

noted above, the outcomes of original judgements can function post-egoically,

predelineating experience as propositionally founded convictions. But it is only as

such outcomes that they can be operative. He asserts quite unambiguously that

every conceptual or categorial formation operative in passivity harks back to an

active and synthetic accomplishment of the intellect. All the concepts referring back

to the concept of the object in general—including those of “identical sense,”

“modalities of being” and “verification”—attain their genuine character in activity,

in judicative acts. And what was first accomplished in activity is in principle capable

of reactivation. Its validity and its applicability can be established again, as was

done the first time round (Hua XXXI, pp. 3; 40–41; 2001c, pp. 275, 312–313).

What the later Husserl would have difficulty in accepting, if I understand him

correctly, is the contention—made by Mulligan, if I also comprehend him correctly

—that continuous aspect perception can persist without subsumption of the seen

under concepts, wordless or not. It was noted above that for a developed

consciousness in its familiar lifeworld, every object is apprehended or explicated in

advance in extensive particularisations of types. But our lifeworld can stretch

beyond the familiar, and Husserl proceeds to state that something novel can affect

us from the background and be constituted as an object, though it lacks a particular

typification (Husserl 1954, p. 35; 1973a, p. 39).34 Never having been experienced

beforehand, it is surely conceivable that it would be unable to prompt a noematic

sense possessed of a conceptually predelineating horizon of identification, that is to

say, one that is meant as well as performed.

The absence of typification, however, is not the absence of conceptualisation. If

there is to be a belief that something is there, then on the late view it cannot be a

purely de re belief in the sense demanded by Mulligan. Now Husserl never ceases to

affirm the presence in straightforward perception of the belief in the being of the

thing before me, albeit one that must be subtended kinaesthetically. This belief has

the character of original or primordial opinion (Urdoxa). It is the simple unreflective

trust in the “thereness” of the object (and in the abidingness of the background

world) that precedes judicative, determining performances (Husserl 1954, pp. 53,

60; 1973a, pp. 53, 59). With Dretske, the belief is fixed by what is seen and not by

conceptual or descriptive factors, yet it does not as a result remain unmarked by the

latter. For a developed consciousness, it is too late to see something—material thing

or chimera—without the understanding of efficacy and substantiality being in some

way implicated in the experience. The apprehension of a sensible object in general,

maintains Husserl, even if completely indeterminate and unknown, still entails an

element of familiarity or “familiar unfamiliarity,” being experienced from the start

as something that somehow or other is, and that is capable of explication (Husserl

1954, pp. 34–35; 1973a, pp. 38–39).35 And all this before one tries to explore the

34 See also Hua XI, pp. 28–29, 37; 2001c, pp. 66–67, 76.35 Husserl states elsewhere that, once knowledge has been acquired actively “[i]n the initial view of a

later new perception, this view is given to consciousness of course with the empty horizon of acquired

knowledge … The developed consciousness, the consciousness of the subject that has already operated

with respect to all types of objects as explicating consciousness, will hardly be able to have objects given

that are not already apprehended in such a ‘logical structure,’ that is, that are not already apprehended at

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extensive range of attempted judicative typifications that would be immediately

aroused by the wondering perception of a novel something.

Where one might find it more likely to uncover purely non-conceptual contents

would be in the perceptual background, prior to the level of attention. If it seems to

strain a hypothesis to take everything in this field as a causal representation, it might

seem no less strained to take it as implicitly conceptual. Be this as it may, it is the

second view that the Husserlian account already allows for, at least in one’s familiar

lifeworld or homeworld. We may recall that, on his mature view, something

exercising affectivity from the background but not yet bearing traits originating in

active accomplishments is an abstraction, however necessary. Once it is granted that

thematised, noematically interpreted figures are informed conceptually, and that

conceptual accomplishments are also operative at the passive level before one has

any choice in the matter, it is left open that pattern formation as well as pattern

recognition can sustain contributions from such sedimented accomplishments. They

could help to establish a configuration inferentially, and facilitate its getting to the

foreground. This is not to assert that conceptual determinations would be more than

broad and loose in their function, so that perceptual determinations could not run

ahead of them.36

Since a conceptual contribution to the initial configuring in everyday experience

is not affirmed by Husserl himself (so far as I am aware), his account might appear

to have something of a vague and catch-all generality in this regard; here his

position is not developed and defended in a manner that is interesting philosoph-

ically. But this would be to forget that, in his studies of constitution, Husserl’s

emphasis is on the non-conceptual contents of perception. Put starkly, refining a

Footnote 35 continued

least in the empty form of determinability, as the substrates of properties that are prefigured in proten-

tional indeterminacy as chains of properties that can be explicated. Every object now harbours, in

apprehension, an implicit horizon of properties, of familiar and unfamiliar ones. But this implication is

entirely different from that of objects that we must conceive as found in a still undeveloped con-

sciousness, as entering into the first original determinations.” Hua XXXI, pp. 23–24; 2001c, p. 296.36 In the potentiality of the perceptual background, according to Husserl, there will be “in part, well-

known objects that we got to know little by little in previous acts. They have sunken into the background

with their structure constituted in activity, and if we are able to take note of them again, we then

encounter them with the character of familiarity … In part, they will be objects that are strange to us,

objects that nevertheless can have the apperceptive mint of actively constituted objects insofar as the

apperception already followed in the background, so to speak, the model of the previous activity. No

object can be given to developed consciousness without such a prefiguring.” Hua XXXI, p. 15; 2001c, pp.

287–288. But again, perceptual discriminations can run ahead of broad and loose conceptualisations. In

this regard Barber has pointed to Husserl’s view that one can always enquire into the unthematised

meaning of what is in the unexplored and undefined background or outer horizon of a perceptual

experience. Earlier on in the evening, I heard a dog barking. Following McDowell, it could turn out that

remembering other marginal things to which I was not attentive at the time would turn up a whole new

series of conceptualised experiences. Thus I could come to recall that the aural background of the barks

was characterised by the chirping of crickets, the rustling of leaves, and the hum of a passing car. Yet the

entire process of recuperation in memory suggests, according to Barber, that there is always more that can

be conceptualised in the unconceptualised horizon that accompanies any conceptualised experience (as

that from which any singling out occurs). This would be a “surplus content (as opposed to the non-

conceptual content McDowell finds objectionable) on the fringes of conceptual focusing, without which

such focusing would not be possible.” Barber (2008, pp. 94–95).

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commitment to conceptualism in adulthood is not his major concern in his turn to

genetic analyses. His focus is on the non-conceptual contributions to experience in

early life, the contents of which are at least notionally separable from articulation

and explication. For him the core task is to foreground these contributions. Hence a

form/content schema is only deposed in favour of a schema of forms with pre-

formed contents. Beyond bare causes and drives, interested passive syntheses and

noematic senses informed by movements and kinaestheses are prerequisites for the

achievement (and by the same token the referential purchase) of conceptual

understanding (Hua I, pp. 112–113; 1960, pp. 78–80).

As noted above, these founding performances give rise to the de re aspects of

perceptual belief, in that they allow objects to emerge in performative (and naively

credulous) identifications that are prior logically and temporally to the recursive,

idealising character of concepts. For Husserl, the primordial level of trust or belief

or doxa that is founded on straightforward perceptual evidence is not a domain of

lesser rank than that of episteme, of judicative knowledge and its sedimentations.

What is finally inseparable from conceptual cognition is neither reducible to it, nor

inferior to it, and cannot be captured adequately by its idealisations. This is not to

denigrate understanding but simply to recommend that the origin and specific rights

of the lower stages not be forgotten (Husserl 1964, pp. 44–45; 1973a, p. 46). In

Merleau-Ponty’s rendition, the child’s outlook must somehow be vindicated against

that of the adult, and my greatest attempt at impartiality would not assure me of

prevailing over my subjectivity, if I had not, underlying my judgments, the

primordial certainty of being in contact with Being itself (Merleau-Ponty 1945,

p. 408; 1962, p. 355). This is nicely suggestive, even if overwrought with a

distinction unknown in early life. But if the intellectual level of perception is not the

later Husserl’s core concern, it is scarcely wrong-headed to affirm that he does not

conclude with a pre-expressive innocence of simple seeing any more than he

commences with an operative net of concepts going all the way down.

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