Pedro Rosario Barbosa - The Grasped Sense: The Irreal Ingredient of Intentional Acts

Once the epoché has been carried out, we are fully into our transcendental and pure consciousness. As stated before, our sensations do not disappear with this transcendental reduction, it keeps showing to us.

But besides that happening, one thing we notice from our consciousness is that it is constantly paying attention to those sensations, if not to the sensations then to our thoughts, our imaginations, to real objects or to irreal objects, etc. We find ourselves in a flow of cogitations, a flow of intentional acts. Our mind is constantly intending and transcending itself, that is its essence.

These cogitations are what Husserl calls a residuum of the epoché. Since we cannot use our theories about the world, we can't use our theories about empirical psychology, using psychological concepts. Phenomenology proceeds in another way, it proceeds apodictically. It is an a priori science. It is not about facts, phenomenology is about essences. We are before ourselves a horizon of intentional acts and also an infinite horizon of potential living of the world that is presented to us. But what is an intentional act?

An analysis of language can help us understand what is happening. We can identify essentially four layers for communication to be possible in an expression:

(1) The physical sign: the words that are written or heard, or other signs to express certain ideas.

(2) The psychological act of grasping of sense (meaning) of the physical sign. This is purely a subjective act.

(3) The grasped sense (meaning), which is objective and non-psychological. It is the ideal (irreal) ingredient of an expression.

(4) The reference of the word, which is the object itself or state of affairs (real, irreal or imaginary). As we saw before, the sense (or meaning) is not something spacial, nor psychological. A sense is an a-temporal entity which continues to be one, independently of the many times we refer to it. Something like this is what happens to our intentional acts. Our intentional acts constantly refer to objects or states of affairs in person or in imagination (whether they are possible or impossible objects), but they refer always to something. That's the very nature of the intentional act. We have then a twofold side to an intentional act:

(1) The object the intentional act refers to.

(2) The sense in which the act refers to the object. We gave the example of a linguistic expression, because in essence an expression expresses (forgiving the redundancy) an intentional act. Within the stream of the life of consciousness, the intentional acts themselves occur temporally, however, the sense (the objective content of the act) is itself a-temporal, since many intentional acts can have the same sense as a correlate. The inability to make a difference between sensible data, sense and the object has misguided philosophers throughout centuries.

Hume is wrong when he states that consciousness is a series of events in an unidirectional temporal order. He doesn't take into account the a-temporal aspect of intentionality, the grasped sense which is the content of every intentional act. However, there is also a multiplicity of senses that can refer to the same object. For example, when we talk about "the winner at Jena" and "the loser at Waterloo" we have two senses through which we refer to the same object. The same happens with "the equilateral triangle" and "the equiangular triangle", or "the morning star" and "the evening star". So, we can distinguish two kinds of distinctions among multiplicities in intentional acts:

(1) The multiplicity of the stream of intentional acts vs. the identity of the sense.

(2) The multiplicity of senses vs. the identity of the object. The stream of intentional acts and the objects are real ingredients of intentionality, while the grasped senses are ideal or irreal ingredients of intentional acts.

Hyletic Data, Noema and Noesis Just as in an expression, we can identify four layers of an intentional act:

1. Hyletic Data (or "hylé"): which is the data which we perceive through sensible perception or sensible imagination.

2. The Noesis: the intentional act itself.

3. The Noema: the objective sense in which we intend an object, the ideal content of that intentional act.

4. The object of our intentional act. Hence, of these, two layers determine the two-sidedness of intentionality: the noeses and the noema. The two always go together in every intentional act, it doesn't matter if it refers to an object of sensible perception, an object of sensible imagination, a categorial form, an essence, an impossible object, an unimaginable object, etc. There is always a correlation between the act with the sense, a noesis with its noema, the cogito with its cogitatum.

A consciousness of an object is always a consciousness through a noematic multiplicity. Of the three, the noema is the intermediary between the noetic act and its object. Because of our sensible intuition, our consciousness is always before a stream of sensations: it is always before hyletic data. The hylé is the epistemological "raw material" (so-to-speak) that we constantly perceive. I don't perceive objects, all I perceive are sensible data (hyletic data). These data are themselves completely without reference, only our intentional acts can give them sense. Just as words in themselves don't refer to objects, we should provide them with sense (meaning) to be able to refer to an object. In the case of intentional acts we don't refer, however, to hyletic data as such, we refer to objects.

So, the essence of an intentional act is to provide meaning to hyletic data. When I look at the desk, all my eyes perceive are a stream and flow of sensations, a flow of hyletic data. However, we direct our consciousness at it as this hyletic data as an identical object: a desk. And we interpret the stream of sensations as objective presentations (senses) of one and the same object. To every noetic act there should be a noematic content. A noema is the sense that we give to the hylé, while the noetic act is nothing more than a sense-conferring act. In a noetic act, we give sense to hyletic data, it is the act with which we structure the hylé and refer to an object through it. This is what Husserl calls the intentional morphé. (Ideas sec. 81-96). In this way, Husserl solves the overwhelming problem that tormented Psychologists and Empiricists for such a long time. How is it possible to recognize a pattern out of sensible data?

Very simple. All along Psychologists were supposing that sensible data themselves gave us the pattern, when in reality it is we who confer sense (meaning) to sensible data. When we identify something as a melody, what we really hear are sounds themselves. However, our consciousness confers meaning to certain combination of sounds and call it a melody, or words, or gibberish. It is only through sense conferring act that we can identify certain sounds as being as part of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or a scream, or a sentence, or the song of a bird. The same way we can have a certain set of sensations I confer sense or meaning to them and say that it is a chair, a desk, a tree, etc.

(c) Pedro Rosario Barbosa Verbatim copying and distribution are permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice and copyright are preserved Works Cited Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. NY: Colliers, 1962XT