Noema (phenomenology)

This article has been registered in the quality assurance philosophy . Articles that turn out to be not relevant enough or that do not reach a sufficiently acceptable level in the medium term can ultimately also be proposed for deletion. Please help to remedy the shortcomings in this article and please take part in the discussion ! Please do not remove this notice without consultation!

The noema ( Greek νόημα, noêma , the thought, knowledge or thought content, from nous ) is, according to Husserl, the content of thinking , seeing, fantasizing, meaning, for example the thought tree, the fantasized Minotaur , the seen person, but also the imagined content of an act of judgment (the 'judgment' in the sense of the person judged, today mostly called 'proposition').

Concept history

The expression first appears in the history of philosophy with Plato , namely to describe the mere thoughts ( Greek νοήματα, noêmata) of the ideas themselves, which, according to Plato, we can only grasp thinking (the thinkable Greek νοητά, noêta), but the are independent of our thinking . In Aristotle the term is used expressly for the concepts (the conceptual elements of the propositions).

According to Husserl, human acts of consciousness are directed towards objects. Husserl calls such "symbolic" acts of consciousness noesis . A noema , on the other hand, is the meaning of an act. Thus, Husserl makes a rigid distinction between the act (for example, seeing a tree) and the object intentionally intended "in" this act (ie the tree seen). Husserl often describes this noema as being different from the actually existing object, whereby an object in the sense of a thing-in-itself , as Immanuel Kant understands it, is not meant here. For Husserl, this noema is therefore only part of the stream of consciousness as an ideal correlate, whereas the noesis is its real component. The concept of the noema is a “generalization of the idea of meaning to the entire field of consciousness acts”.

Impact history

The pair of terms Noesis and Noema is not mentioned by Edmund Husserl in the "Logical Investigations", but only in the "Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy I", in short "Ideas I". In the Logical Investigations, however, the concept of “intentional act in specie” can be seen as a kind of predecessor of the noema. The phenomenologists Martin Heidegger , Jean-Paul Sartre , and Maurice Merleau-Ponty , influenced by Husserl, do not elaborate on these terms; other phenomenologists such as Aron Gurwitsch , but also phenomenologically influenced theorists of analytical philosophy such as Dagfinn Føllesdal have the term central to theirs Considerations granted. The pair of terms also plays an important role in the derivation of Levina's so-called extreme humanism .

literature

Edmund Husserl: Ideas for a pure phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy I. 1977, ISBN 90-247-1914-3
Rudolf Bernet et al. a. (Ed.): Edmund Husserl , Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, 5 Vols., New York: Routledge 2005, ISBN 978-0-415-28956-6 , Part 8: The Theory of the Noema, Vol. 4, 134– 302 Collection of important research articles on the topic
Hubert Dreyfus : The Perceptual Noema: Gurwitsch's Crucial Contribution , in: LE Embree (ed.): Life-World and Consciousness (FS Gurwitsch), Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1972
John J. Drummond: Art. Noema , in: Lester Embree u. a. (Eds): Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN

0-7923-2956-2

John J. Drummond: Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism: Noema and Object , Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1990
Dagfinn Føllesdal : Husserl's Notion of Noema , Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969), 680-87
Dagfinn Føllesdal : Noema and Meaning in Husserl , Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 50 / Suppl. (1990).
Guido Küng: The world as noema and as referent , Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 3 (1972), 15-26.
Guido Küng: Noema and Subject , in: R. Haller (ed.): Jenseits von sein und nicht sein, Graz: Akademische Druck- and Verlagsanstalt 1972.
Ronald T. McIntyre: Husserl and Referentiality: The Role of the Noema as an Intensional Entity , Stanford University: Diss. 1970
Ronald T. McIntyre, D. Woodruff Smith: Husserl's Identification of Meaning and Noema , Monist 1975 (54), 115-32.
Karl Schuhmann: Husserl's concept of the noema: A Daubertian critique , Topoi 8/1 (1989), 53-61
Barry Smith : Frege and Husserl: The Ontology of Reference. In: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. No. 9/2, 1978 ( PDF - Word document )
Barry Smith & David W. Smith (Eds.): The Cambridge Companion to Husserl , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1995.
Alfons Süßbauer: Intentionality, facts, Noema , Freiburg / Br .: Alber 1995.

Web links

Christian Beyer: Edmund Husserl. In: Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
Mano Daniel: Bibliography of the Noema , Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc.
Paul Livingston: Husserl Lecture Notes ( MS Word ; 39 kB) on the topic

Footnotes

↑ Edmund Husserl: Ideas for a pure phenomenology ..., Vol. I (Husserliana III, 1), § 94.
↑ Cf. Plato, Parmenides 132 b 3 ff.
↑ Cf. Aristoteles, De interpretatione 16 a; De anima 432a11 f.
↑ Edmund Husserl: Ideas ..., Vol. III (Hua) V p. 89.
↑ See e.g. B. Edmund Husserl: Logical investigations, vol. II, 1 (Husserliana XIX / 1), p. 105 f.
↑ See Bernhard HF Taureck 1997: Emmanuel Lévinas for an introduction. Hamburg: Junius Verlag, p. 46 f.

[1] Edmund Husserl: Ideas for a pure phenomenology ..., Vol. I (Husserliana III, 1), § 94.

[2] Cf. Plato, Parmenides 132 b 3 ff.

[3] Cf. Aristoteles, De interpretatione 16 a; De anima 432a11 f.

[4] Edmund Husserl: Ideas ..., Vol. III (Hua) V p. 89.

[5] See e.g. B. Edmund Husserl: Logical investigations, vol. II, 1 (Husserliana XIX / 1), p. 105 f.

[6] See Bernhard HF Taureck 1997: Emmanuel Lévinas for an introduction. Hamburg: Junius Verlag, p. 46 f.