book reviews

Husserl Studies 2: 291-31 I (1985). 01985 Martinus Nilhoff Publishers, Dordrecht. Printed in the Netheriands.

Book Reviews

Izchak Miller, Husserl, Perception, and Temporal Awareness. Cam- bridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1984. 205 pages. $22.50.

This book considers Husserl’s theory of perception from the point of view of the answer it offers to the question of whether our perceptual experience can provide rational justification for our empirical beliefs. Izchak Miller finds Husserl’s affirmative answer to rest on the thesis that perception provides us with an immediate awareness of physical entities and that this awareness supplies prima facie rational grounds for our beliefs about the objects we perceive.

The book has two main parts. In the first part, comprising Chapters One through Four, an interpretation of Husserl’s theory of perception is developed in order to explain how Husserl conceived of the imme- diacy of perception and to provide an account of his theory of perceptual evidence. This part also serves another purpose. Miller finds that Husserl’s account of temporal awareness, i.e. our perceptual awareness of processes and events, has not received systematic study and he takes it as his task in the second part of the book (Chapters Five through Eight) to provide this (there is also a final chapter entitled “The Phe- nomenological Reduction”). But since Husserl’s writings on temporal awareness span different periods of‘his philosophical development, and as a result change, Miller adopts the strategy of culling from these writings an account which he claims is compatible with the theory of perception that is discussed in the first part of the book. Thus his account of the theory of perception provides an interpretive framework for composing a coherent theory of temporal awareness.

The account of Husserl’s theory of perception which Miller offers is

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based on the work of Dagfinn Fbllesdal, mainly on F$llesdal’s interpretation of Husserl’s concept of the noema. In this interpretation, according to Miller, the nature and role of the noema in Husserl’s theory of the intentionality of consciousness is similar to the nature and role of “sense” (Sinn) in Frege’s semantic theory. This comparison yields two points that are especially important for Miller, the second of which is said to express the “full significance” (p. 24) of the first: (1) the noema of an act of consciousness determines the object of that act, but does not guarantee the actual existence of that object; (2) the noema of an act is in principle distinct from and should never be identified with the object or any feature or part of the object of that act. The second point, according to Miller, marks the central difference between F$llesdal’s (and Miller’s own) interpretation and what he calls the “traditional interpretation,” the origin of which he attributes to the work of Aron Gurwitsch. It also determines much of the method and substance of Miller’s interpretation.

But Miller does not intend to resolve this controversy. He states in his “Introduction” that it is not his purpose “to engage in polemic with other phenomenologists regarding their various different interpretations of Husserl’s views” (p. 5). Indeed, he tells us very little about the controversy.’ His task, rather, seems to be to develop one side of a controversy in the absence of the other side. This is an unfortunate strategy. Not only does it breach scholarly etiquette by ignoring de- cades of Husserl scholarship, as the book does quite generally, but more importantly it causes the book to fail to engage some of the funda- mental issues concerning the very subject matter it treats and, in my opinion, causes it to miss the “full significance” of Husserl’s work. For however well Miller supports his views with references to Husserl’s texts, the other views also have their textual citations and in many cases these extend considerably beyond the narrow range that Miller cites. There are many passages in Husserl, especially, although not only, in works that Miller does not cite at all which seem to pose serious problems for important aspects of his interpretation. I will discuss one case of this shortly.

The two points mentioned above are linked by another idea which Miller expressed by quoting F$llesdal: “The noema is an intensional [with an “~“1 entity, a generalization of the notion of meaning to the realm of all acts” (p. 18). Drawing out the “full significance” of this idea, Miller asserts that a component of the noema of a perceptual act,

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the noematic Sinn, determines the object of that act, and the “noematic Sinne of our perceptual acts are concepts of ordinary physical entities, and not anything else” (p. 48). These Sinne, Miller claims, are “singular meanings” or “individual concepts” (p. 48), i.e. meanings which prescribe an individual entity.

Since noematic Sinne are concepts of physical entities, the relation which a perceptual act has to its object is that of reference. On this basis Miller carefully works out an interpretation of Husserl’s theory of perception using a semantic model derived from the theory of reference that Frege developed for linguistic expressions. On this model, the intentionality of perception is understood to be accomplished in a way similar to the way a linguistic act relates to its referent. Just as referring, in Frege’s theory, is accomplished through something intrinsic to a linguistic act, its meaning, so in Husserl’s theory is the perceptual consciousness of a particular object achieved through the noematic Sinn intrinsic to that act.

According to Miller this interpretation allows us to understand how perception can be direct awareness of an object, for “reference is not a species of inference or judgement” (p. 48), two modes of consciousness which theories of Indirect and Representative Realism have claimed operate in perception to relate us to the physicalworld. However, there is a feature of Frege’s theory and of the major semantic theories that have been derived from it which limits its usefulness for explaining how perception can be direct awareness of an object. Reference has been thought to be achieved through the descriptive or what Miller (after Donnellan) calls the “attributive” content of meanings. In the case of perception this content would be the components of the noematic Sinn that determine the properties we attribute to an object in a particular perception of it. Miller convincingly shows through an analysis of the phenomena of illusion and misperception that this will not suffice to determine a unique object as being the object of an act, and especially not to determine a numerically identical object as the object of different acts having (sometimes radically) different attributive content.

In what is the most original contribution of the book Miller argues that Husserl’s theory overcomes this limitation by providing an “indexical” or “demonstrative” feature within the noematic Sinn, which he identifies as what Husserl called the “determinable-X.” This feature, he claims, is a “‘purely referring’ element of meaning, something like a meaning of an indexical, probably (at least part of) the meaning of the

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word ‘this”’ (p. 71).2 This interpretation, expanded by applying it to explicate Husserl’s concepts of “horizon” and “congruence” (Deckung), and reinforced by interpretations of Husserl’s notions of “hyle” and sensory “filling,” leads to Miller’s main interpretative thesis: “. . . that the object of an act of perception is . . . ‘demonstratively’ determined is precisely what Husserl means by saying that the act is ‘direct’ with respect to its object” (p. 127).

This interpretation of the “determinable-X” is very well developed and seems quite plausible, given the assumptions which lead to it. And it is certainly a virtue of this book to have made the problem of the unique directedness of perceptual acts acutely felt. But I believe there is something wrong with one of Miller’s assumptions, I do not think it can be maintained that the noematic Sinn is in no way identical to the object of a perceptual act. When the transcendental phenomenological reduction is carried out our reflective glance is directed, in noematic reflection, towards the obiect of our perception, now called the Sinn of our act, and not toward any concept.3 It is from an intuition of the object, as it presents itself in the act, that we derive our description of the structure and content of the Sinn. What Miller may have in mind when he writes of concepts being involved in acts of perception, especially when he considers them to determine what we “take” an object to be, is not what Husserl called the noematic Sinn, but the “apprehension” (Auffasmng) which ‘animates” the hyletic data of the act and which lies on the noetic side of the act (see Hua III, Sections 85 and 97). In- deed, it seems to me that Miller is mostly involved with noetic and not noematic phenomenology.

Besides making salient the “claim” to actuality with which objects usually present themselves, one of the things which the phenomenological reduction achieves is to make us aware of a discrepancy between what we “know” of an object in a particular perception of it and what we could know of it if we could explore it exhaustively. We become aware that objects present themselves as being in themsehes fully determined in spite of the indeterminacy with which they are for US in any particular experience of them. This “object as fully detested” is thus also a component of the noematic Sinn, a component which Husserl identifies in Analysen zur pa&en Synthesis as the very X which Miller discusses. There, Husserl introduces a broad concept of noematic sense within which he distinguishes a “flowing sense” from an “identical sense.” The context of his discussion is an analysis of the

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process of “taking cognizance” where one perceptually explores an object. He writes:

Here we can observe that in the sense of a harmonious and syn- thetically progressing perception we can always distinguish the ceaselessly changing sense from the thouroughly identical sense. Each phase of the perception has its sense in so far as it has the object both in the manner in which it has been determined through the originally presentative moments and those of the horizon. This sense is flowing, it is new in every phase. But through this flowing sense, through all the modes “object in the How of determination”, the unity of the substrate X, of the object itself, is maintained in the continual overlapping as it becomes more and more extensively determined. This substrate, this object, consists of all that which the process of perception determines it to be and which all further possible perceptual processes would determine it to be. Thus an Idea, lying in infinity, belongs to every outer perception, the Idea of a completely determined object, of an object which would be completely determined and known (Hua XI, p. 20)!

These considerations indicate a very different interpretation of Husserl’s theory of perception than Miller offers. It puts the object of a perceptual act within the noematic Sinn which itself is a “percept” rather that a concept. Miller’s text seems to read more like a work of phenomenological psychology in the sense of being an analysis which presupposes the being and being-so of the world and then seeks to disclose how we “pick out,” to use a phrase of his, or attain “reference to” objects which are otherwise simply there. It seems like phenomenology done in the natural attitude where the issue of that “being simply there,” which I take to mark the profundity of Husserl’s work, is never raised. Indeed it is a sign of this that Miller does not discuss the phenomenological reduction and epoch6 until the last chapter, as a kind of appendix. Nevertheless there are some very good special expositions in this part of the book. To mention two, there is a very clear and insightful discussion of the distinction between “filling” and “fulfilling” and of their relationship to one another, especially from the point of view of evidence; and there is a good account of the perception of a spatial object from the same point of view (pp. 130 ff.).

In the second part of the book Miller gives a thourough exposition of the retention/protention/primal-impression structure of time-conscious-

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ness, primarily as it functions to yield awareness of physical processes. Many important details and issues are covered, and often in illuminating ways (e.g. the explanation of Husserl’s diagram of time-consciousness). But the main threads sometimes get lost amongst these special expositions, and the thread which seems to bear the overall concern of Miller’s account ends disappointing the reader’s progressively reinforced expec- tation that a clear and insightful result will emerge.

This overall concern is to show how, according to Husserl, our experience of temporal objects can provide rational grounds for our beliefs about physical processes. Miller lays out the main problems concerning this in a discussion of Husser’s critique of Brentano. They are (1) how can there be consciousness of the past phases of a process in a present consciousness, and (2) how can there be consciousness of the process character of a process, i.e. of the temporal “movement” of its phases. The discussion of Husserl’s solution to these problems concen- trates mostly on retention and primal-impression, as does Husserl’s own account in Zur Phdnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (Hua X), although Miller tries to extend Husser’s analysis there of protention and gives a good account of the epistemic difference between protention and retention.

Miller brings out the uniqueness of the problem of the consciousness of a process by setting it into the interpretave framework he developed to discuss the perception of endurant objects in the first part of the book. The notions of noematic Sinn and determinable-X (now called “determinable-E”) seem at first to be suitable to account for the intentionality of time-consciousness, especially the individuation (“singling out”) of distinct parts of a temporal whole, for example the notes of a melody. But Miller shows that these concepts cannot fully account for the peculiar intentionality of retentions, protentions and primal- impressions, not even if they are supplemented by Husserl’s concept of “partial intentions.” This is because partial intentions are act-components which single out parts of a temporal object but the phases of a simple temporal object (like a note of a melody), which as a whole is individuated, are not themselves singled out. Consequently, the intentionality of retentions, protentions and primal impressions cannot be fully accounted for by referring to particular meaning components within a noematic Sinn.

This conclusion is consistent with some other Husserl scholarship which has maintained that Husserl abandoned the “matter-form”

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schema to account for time-consciousness.’ But Miller makes no reference to this literature. This is unfortunate because it presents as Husserl’s new approach something different from what Miller goes on to offer: first an analysis in terms of our awareness of the temporality of immanent temporal objects (chiefly hyletic or sensory data), and then to what Husserl called “Absolute consciousness” or the “absolute time-constituting fl~w.“~ Miller perhaps missed these developments in Husserl’s thought because he chose the strategy mentioned earlier. His own account relies on the concept of “phase intentions” (e.g. “tone- phase intentions,” p. 141). These are components of the awareness of a temporal object which form a continuous manifold and which are directed to the instantaneous phases of temporal objects. They work in a certain interconnected way to bring about an individuating experience of the object as a whole, “constituting” it phase-by-phase, although not individuating or perceiving it phase-by-phase (p. 142). In the case of a tone, the effect of this is described as being to “locate or ‘spread’ the tone, qua intended, throughout a given interval of time” (p. 141).

Part of the burden of Miller’s account here rests on the substitution of the word “constitute” for “individuate” or “perceive,” a move which is not helpful since the meaning of “constitute” remains quite vague. But the last quoted passage reveals a more serious problem. It leaves the impression that there is a ready-made interval of time which can be conceived of as empty throughout which a content can be “spread.” This seems to beg the question twice, as it assumes there is beforehand an awareness of the temporal interval and that this “spreading” can be a temporal (rather than a spatial) spreading, whereas both of these would seem to require the very process which Miller is trying to account for. Here also the account would have benefited by a consideration of Husserl’s Analysen zur pussiven Synthesis where Husserl specifically discusses at some length the relationship of temporal form and content, the individuation of temporal objects, and what Miller terms “spread” (Hua XI, 117-19 1). But Husserl’s discussion, as it is in most of Zur Phiinomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, is of hyletic data, which is the way he typically discussed temporal objects whether transcendent or immanent. His method for discussing physical processes is usually to abstract from certain “transcendent” apprehensions such as materiality and spatiality in order to descend to a level of a purely temporal and immanent object. Miller’s account does not seem to recognize this method, perhaps because here too he might want to insist

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that there can be no identity at all between a physical object (a process) and a component of an experience, whereas Husserl’s procedure would seem to require some sort of identification between, for example, a violin tone and a hyletic “tone-datum.”

Miller’s discussion of how Husserl accounts for the process character of a process is in terms of “our sense of the passage of events” (p. 145). Through a detailed analysis of retention and protention he argues that this is produced by an awareness of our changing temporal perspective on experienced events. He claims that “it is our awareness of our own changing temporal-perspective of experienced events which produces the sense of temporal passage, and not an awareness of a variation in the temporal location of events” (p. 161). This analysis is the most original and interesting aspect of the second part of the book. It is perhaps a good contribution to a psychological phenomenological analysis of time-consciousness in the sense of “psychological” mentioned earlier. But the analysis does not seem to do justice to the depth of Husserl’s reflections, nor does the second part of the book as a whole. Like the first part, it reads like an account of how we become aware of something, in this case a process, which is somehow already there with its process sense, ready for us to become aware of it. It seems, for example, as though Miller has Husserl asking “How can there be genuine awareness of the past phases of a process in the present?” assuming that the sense and reference of the word “past” is already clear to us. Whereas I take Husserl to be attempting to provide insight into these very things by disclosing the experience in which pastness itself is something for us. Husserl’s theory of perception is not so much designed to answer the question of whether perceptual experiences can provide rational justification for our beliefs about the world as it is to explain how we have a world in the first place.

William McKenna Miami University (Ohio)

NOTES

1. Although Miller says it is not his purpose to engage in polemics, he does make numerous critical remarks against the opposing view, which view he hardly ever explains. On two of these occasions he portrays Gurwitsch’s position as claiming that wordly objects are “logical constructions out of noemata” (pp. 176, 195). This is a surprising distortion.

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2. David Woodruff Smith has also published an article on this point. See “Husserl on Demon- strative Reference and Perception,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus, ed., Husserl, Intentionolity and Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982) pp. 193-213.

3. For an elaboration of this point, see my Husserl’s ‘Introductions to Phenomenology’ (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), pp. 148-158.

4. See also ibid., pp. 160-164 and Hua III, Section 143. 5. See Robert Sokolowski, The For-motion of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution (The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), pp. 104-105, and his Husserlian Meditations (Evanston: North- western University Press, 1974), pp. 145153.

6. See John B. Brough, “The Emergence of an Absolute Consciousness in Husserl’s Early Writings on Time-Consciousness, ” in Frederick A. Elliston and Peter McCormick, eds., Husserl: Expositions and Approisols (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977) pp. 83-100.

Joseph Claude Evans, Jr., The Metaphysics of Transcendental Subjectiv- ity: Descartes, Kant, and W. Sellars (Bochumer Studien zur Philosophie, Band 5). Amsterdam: Verlag B.R. Gruener, 1984. xi+138 pages. $24.00.

Attempts to synthesize central theses of Anglo-American philosophy with Continental positions have customarily led to debates concerning the role of language in experience. Joseph Claude Evans’ book, despite its restricted length, is one of the most subtly and carefully reasoned contributions to these debates. Evans succeeds in addressing the main philosophical themes while also illuminating some of the more difficult problems in historical scholarship. What I found most gratifying in his work was his ability to delve into perennial problems of interpretation in Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant with repeated and well-informed references to Husserl’s point of view. I highly recommend Evans’ book to students of Husserl who wish to consider the phenomenology of language in the critical light of Kant’s theory of judgment and a Kant- ian-based analytic philosophy. Comprehending Evans’ arguments remains no easy affair, however. His book is very succinctly and densely reasoned - too succinctly and densely so for my taste, I would have preferred the clarity that can come only from a more elaborate and thorough exposition.

After briefly outlining the body of Evans’ text, I shall address some parts of his critical appraisal of Husserl and Gurwitsch in the Appendix, “Notes on Phenomenological Theories of Judgment and Science’ (pp. 107-l 14).

Evans admits that he is examining Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant from the perspective of the “linguistic turn” of contemporary analytic

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philosophy (p. 2). He wishes to determine whether the "linguistic model" he finds in W. SeUars can also be applied to their views. Evans first portrays this linguistic model in a "metaphor" he derives from Plato. This is Plato's suggestion that "thought is similar to discourse, that thought is a dialogue which the soul carries on with itself" (pp. 1- 2). Now the question of whether this linguistic model is adopted by a philosopher seems to Evans to hinge ultimately on the conception of the cogito that each develops. Hence Evans moves from a close scrutiny of Descartes' "cogito" to Leibniz's "apperception" to Kant's "transcendental apperception" or "I think." The reader must constantly keep in mind this connection between the cogito and the linguistic model, or else he/she may be led to wonder why Evans selects the particular topics he does from the systems he examines. Evans' treatments of these seminal figures, while subtle, are far from comprehensive. And because I am still unconvinced that the philosophical relations between the cogito and the linguistic model are as close as Evans contends, his choice of topics, in my mind, never lost its faint aura of randomness.

Regarding Descartes, Evans concludes that, because of Descartes' ception of ideas, the linguistic model does not apply. But an "internal critique" of Descartes leads toward this model. Evans' focus on ideas in Descartes prompts him to spend much of his space probing the implicit self-awareness contained in ideas. I found this bit of exegesis especially keen and insightful.

Evans' discussion of Leibniz seems fragmented to me. Yet Leibniz, for Evans' purposes, remains simply a transitional figure on the way to Kant.

I was fascinated by Evans' interpretation of Kant's "apperception" as leading to an "autonomy of the sphere of judgment" (p. 113). The close connections he finds between Husserl's formal ontology and Kant's transcendental logic are persuasive. Kant is seen by Evans as the Modem philosopher who, with some residual problems, best develops the linguistic model of transcendental experience.

Evans' exposmon of W. Sellars' views embodies the culmination of his defense of the linguistic model and of a "metaphysics of the think- ing subject which is broadly Kantian" (p. 104).

I would now like to focus on some parts of Evans' criticisms of Husserl. These criticisms receive their most complete expression within the Appendix. They become intelligible, however, only in the light of what Evans thinks he has established in the body of the text. Evans'

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basic disagreement with Husserl, it seems to me, is contained in what Evans calls Husserl's "dilemma" (pp. 91-92). Formulated in my own terms, this dilemma is the following. (1) If an object is to be pregiven in a way that it can become the object of a judgment, it must be conceptually apprehended. (2) For Husserl, an object can be conceptually apprehended only if it is intended in secondary passivity, i.e., only if the intending arises out of sedimentations of conceptual sense accrued through earlier active judgings. (3) But objects which are given prepredicatively cannot be conceptually intended. That is to say, objects which are given prepredicatively cannot be intended in secondary passivity. For if they were so intended, they would not be intended prepredicatively. (4) Therefore, an object which is given in such a way that it can become the object of a judgment cannot be given prepre- dicately. The fallacy of this argument lies in premise (1). An object can be pregiven such that it can become the object of a judgment without being conceptually apprehended. There are several steps involved in moving from prepredicatively intending an object to conceptually ap- prehending it. But let us first notice why Evans might wish to think otherwise.

Evans seems convinced as a result of his reading of Kant that, for predication to be possible at all, (some) concepts must exist a priori. As Evans writes, " . . . the notion of the formation of a first concept (or concepts) becomes paradoxical" (p. 82). Acts of predication cannot generate concepts; such acts always presuppose concepts. Thus Evans contends,

A concept can function as a predicate only under the condition that other concepts have already found predicative application: predication presupposes a sedimented horizon of predication ... . When carried through to its logical conclusion, this leads to a theory of concepts as relational structures, a concept being such only within a system of concepts, a conceptual framework. The predicative deployment of a concept would thus imply ... the whole system... (p. 75).

I submit that this is Evans' best formulation of his "linguistic model." Evans takes it to imply that prepredicative experience cannot be the genetic source of predication because, for predication to arise at all, predicates or concepts are always presupposed.

It seems to me, however, that Husserl has shown in Erfahrung und Urteil precisely how predication arises out of prepredicative inten-

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tionality (Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, Hamburg: Claassen Verlag, 1964, pp. 73-171). Generic senses - of multiple kinds - are passively and associatively constituted before they are egoically apprehended. The generic sense, redness - to use Evans' own example (p. 75) - is associatively synthesized on the basis of intending different red things. And Husserl has then shown how these generic senses are egoically constituted as genuine concepts. Only when they are so apprehended can they then function as predicates. I must thematically appre- hend redness in order to assert of something "this is red." But the generic redness was already passively intended by my consciousness before I thematically apprehended it. Husserl's point about prepredicative experience simply concerns the necessity for there to be individual red somethings in the visual field of my passive consciousness in order for the associative constitution of generic redness to occur. And these individual red somethings - at this level of prepredicative experience - are not conceptually apprehended as red. Prepredicative experience is thus a necessary precondition for predication. And Evans is correct to the extent that he believes that there must be concepts in order for predication to occur.

As a final remark, I would like to quarrel with Evans' characteriza- tion of Husserl views on science as "instrumentalism" (pp. 111-114). This misinterpretation, it appears to me, arises out of Evans' insuffi- cient comprehension of idealization. Idealization is at work in science, not simply in the mathematization and geometrization of nature, but also in such notions as, for example, "true reality" and "the world as it exists in truth." And the idealizations of "true reality" and "the world as it exists in t ruth" are not simply guiding ideas of the mathematizing natural sciences but also of the social sciences and even of such disci- plines as literary criticism and theology. One of the misconceptions Husserl criticizes is the hypostatization of these regulative ideas as underlying realities. This misconception takes "for true being what is actually a method" (p. 111).

Osborne P. Wiggins New School for Social Research

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Hubert L. Dreyfus, Editor, Husserl, lntentionality, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1982. vi+360 pages. $9.95.

The basic purpose of this book may be indicated by an anonymous remark on its front flyleaf: "This new approach to Husserl provides an ideal introduction to phenomenology for analytic philosophers." The volume's editor, Hubert Dreyfus, suggests that it can serve this function by virtue of its inspiration in, and inclusion of, the work of Dagfinn F~bllesdal: "It took an analytic philosopher and logician, Dagfinn F~bllesdal ... to see what Husserl considered to be his greatest achieve- ment .... ,,1

For a suggestion of the volume's method, we can turn again to the front flyleaf. Here we are told that it provides "a sourcebook of important papers linking phenomenology and cognitive science." The con- cluding sentence gives us a further indication of both purpose and method: "It contributes to current research in analytic philosophy and cognitive science by providing concepts, analysis, and ideas for further research."

The "most important results" may well be more difficult to estab- lish. Perhaps a last flyleaf quotation - this time, from a contributor, Jerry Fodor - can help: "Philosophers who, like me, want to know something about the phenomenological tradition but don't want to spend their lives on it will probably find this the indispensable work."

My own attempt to give a "balanced assessment" of this work must begin with noting the editor's dismissal of three generations of Husserl scholarship. Not all of these scholars, I believe, should be conscripted into "an army of Husserl exegetes" who have not "sufficiently understood" Husserl's work, and so have been practicing phenomenology "without a clear explanation in non-Husserlian terms of what the reduction is, what it reveals, and why according to Husserl one must perform it in order to do philosophy. ''2 Moreover, although this volume does serve to bring together a number of related papers - most, if not all, of which have been published elsewhere - I do not find that it thereby provides the analytic philosopher with "concepts, analysis, and ideas" that are recognizably (much less, non-problematically) Husserlian. 3

This is, I suggest, the book's weakness: it purports to tell "something about the phenomenological tradition" in a manner that doesn't waste the analytic philosopher's time. But several of the papers focus, instead, on what some analytic philosophers find reminiscent of their own

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work, when they read phenomenological texts. Several others support this use of Husserl by means of a highly problematic reading of his work. This is accomplished most dramatically in the introductory essay, toward which my negative criticism is thus directed. Specifically, that essay relies upon associations for which no warrant is given in the Husserlian text cited, quotations taken very much out of context (and set into a Heideggerean reading of Husserl), and problematic parallels to contemporary issues in "analytic" philosophy, artificial intelligence research, and cognitive science.* These are, of course, serious criticisms. I will support them with illustrative quotations, after discussing the themes of the fifteen essays which comprise the body of the volume.

The largest group of contributions presents a theory of the noema that originates with Dagfinn F~bllesdal's 1968 address on "Husserl's Notion of Noema," which is reprinted here. Two related papers by F¢llesdal, one by Ronald Mclntyre and David Smith on "Husserl's Identification of Meaning and Noema," and one by Dreyfus on "Hus- serrs Perceptual Noema" bring together a series of papers - represent- ing an approach often referred to as the "west coast school of phenomenology" - which elaborates upon F~llesdal's theory. Perhaps the best- known opposing view - that of Aron Gurwitsch - is represented here by his "Husserl's Theory of the Intentionality of Consciousness."

The "New School phenomenology" associated with, but not con- fined to, Gurwitsch's work is further represented by two papers by J.N. Mohanty, both of which are accompanied by brief, but especially interesting, responses. Mohanty's essay on the relationship between Husserl and Frege contests F¢llesdal's (and others') conclusions on that subject; it is here printed with F~llesdal's response. A very different contrast is explored in Mohanty's paper on "Intentionality and Possible Worlds: Husserl and Hintikka," which is presented here along with a defense, by Hintikka, of his "intentionality as intensionality" thesis. Mohanty's explication of Husserrs work on pure logic and intentionality is especially valuable in the context of this volume, since he is careful to show both the similarity to issues within the analytic tradition, and the divergence from (respectively) Frege's and Hintikka's accounts.

Similarity to and divergence from investigations in contemporary analytic philosophy are also explored in David Smith's essay comparing Husserl's theory of demonstrative reference with that of David Kaplan, as well as in Ronald Mclntyre's paper, which uses the work of Donnel- lan, Kripke, and Putnam (as well as F¢llesdal) to develop a critique of

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Husserl's theory of intentionality, which he understands on the model of Frege's t heo ry of reference. Harrison Hall also draws upon the F611esdal tradition (and especially, the work of Mclntyre and Smith) in asking "Was Husserl a Realist or an Idealist?" He develops a careful portrayal of the limits placed on phenomenological inquiry by Husserl, and the strict division between meaning and fact underlying those limits, in order to show why Husserl must be neutral in regard to both realism and idealism as philosophical positions.

Two other contributors share Hall's close attention to Husserlian texts in order to explicate particular issues within them. Insofar as Izchak Miller relies upon F611esdal's interpretation of the noema in his consideration of "Husserl's Account of Temporal Awareness," he shares that interpretation's placement of noematic sense within an act of consciousness, and so neglects Husserl's specification of the noema as the correlate o f the act, which presents an object to consciousness. Thus, his analysis minimizes (if not, overlooks) the objective correlate's contribution to constituting temporal (or any other) sense.

Douglas Heinson explores "Husserl's Theory of the Pure Ego" by drawing together a variety of textual material in support of his thesis: "the rpure ego is neither more nor less than an intentional object, a meaning, a noema. ''s Unlike other such objects, however, it is "in a certain sense non-constituted," without content, "absolutely simple" and thus permitting a "givenness" that is "already complete. ''~ These features contrast so dramatically with other intentional objects as to raise serious questions about the appropriateness of Heinson's thesis to Husserl's analysis.

The collection closes with two papers by contributors whose theore- tical basis is outside the phenomenological tradition. John Searle's work on intentional states elucidates their nature as analogous to speech acts, without (as he stresses) meaning " to suggest that Intentionality is somehow essentially linguistic"; he argues, rather, that "Language is derived from Intentionality, and not conversely. ''7 Given this collection's domi- nant orientation toward F6llesdal's thesis - that the noematic correlate of an intentional act "is an intensional entity ''s -Sea r l e ' s judgment of that position is of particular interest:

One of the most pervasive confusions in contemporary philosophy is the mistaken belief that there is some close connection, perhaps even an identity, between Intensionality-with-an-s and Intentional- ity-with-a-t. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are not even remotely similar. 9

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A response by Hintikka or F¢llesdal (along the lines used for the Mohanty papers) would have been especially valuable here.

The last paper in the collection presents special difficulties, for its connection with the volume's stated aim seems to depend upon an implicit and debatable interpretation of Husserlian methodology. Jerry Fodor gives us this sketch of his focus in the opening paragraph of "Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cog- nitive Psychology":

The paper considers two doctrines, both of which inform theory construction in much of modern cognitive psychology: the representational theory of mind (according to which propositional attitudes are relations that organisms bear to mental representations) and the computational theory of mind (according to which mental processes have access only to formal non-semantic properties of the mental representations over which they are defined). It is argued that the acceptance of some such formality condition is warranted, a°

Fodor goes on to argue, moreover, for an even "stronger doctrine": the "view that mental states and processes are computational. ''11 This association seems to derive from his reading of Descartes, as well as from his interest in a concept that is central to the Heideggerean phenomenological tradition: Dasein. His attitude toward this concept, as well as the tone of his paper, may be glimpsed in these remarks from the close of his essay:

My point, then, is o f course not that solipsism is true; it's just that truth, reference, and the rest of the semantic notion aren't psychological categories. What they are is: they're modes of Dasein. I don' t know what Dasein is, but I 'm sure that there's lots of it around, and I'm sure that you and I and Cincinnati have all got it. What more do you want? a2

Fodor's conviction that "acceptance of the computational theory of the mind leads to a sort of methodological solipsism as a part of the research strategy of contemporary cognitive psychology ''13 is given something of an historical flavor by his reading of Descartes' reflections on the difficulty of distinguishing wakefulness from sleep. He understands the "well known passage from the first Meditation" as illustrative of Descartes arguing "that there is an important sense in which how the world is makes no difference to one's mental states. ''14

Tile problematic connection of this computational theory of mind,

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to Husserrs theory o f consciousness as intentional, seems to rest upon some unstated assumptions: e.g., that Husserl is a Cartesian; that Cartesians (including Descartes) are "methodological solipsists" (the phrase, as Fodor notes, is Putnam's); that intentionality is primarily (or perhaps totally) a formal relation. These may well be plausible claims. However, to rely upon them as the only support for an association between Fodor's theory and Husserrs suggests that Fodor's project (in contrast to Searle's) is a very distant "recent parallel "as to phenomenology.

This recurrent problem of problematic connection to Husserl's analysis occurs in a distinctive way in Dreyfus' introduction. In return- ing now to that contribution, in order to support the criticisms at the start of this discussion, I would stress two factors. First: the difficulties I have are with Dreyfus' presentation of Husserlian phenomenology in general, and with lack of textual warrant for his construal of intentionality and the noema as independent of consciousness and transcendental ego, in particular. This does not imply any criticism of Dreyfus' stimulating work on the intersection of human and artificial intelligence. The second factor concerns my reference to the "distinctive" manner in which Dreyfus makes some problematic connections which are shared by the contributors to this volume who follow the F~llesdal interpretation (except Miller). Briefly stated: he does so explicitly, whereas they do so implicitly. Thus, he is open to an examination of his textual warrant, and I offer a brief version of that examination here. My criticisms refer to a particular way of reading Husserl; a way which, I would argue, minimizes his originality. 16

Dreyfus characterizes the noema as an independent object which functions as a "rule" or "f rame": "The idea is that whatever we experience must be taken by us as something - i.e., it must fit into a noema or frame. ''17 The effect of this reading of Husserl is a separation of the noema from consciousness - i.e., from the noesis that, for Husserl, is always the correlate of any noema. This separation is necessary if Husserl's theory of constitution is to be assimilated to Fodor's "computational theory of mind," and Dreyfus is arguing here for just that assimilation.

In an especially startling passage, however, Dreyfus recognizes difficulties in reconciling that claim with the Husserlian text. Although the passage is long, I quote it here in lieu of several shorter passages that could be cited in support of my claim that we are offered an eccentric reading of Husserl in Dreyfus' essay.

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Husserl calls his method a phenomenological explication of the transcendental ego. The constant reference of all mental operations back to their source in the constitutive activities of the transcendental ego might s e e m to suggest that for him consciousness plays some crucial role in the organization of experience and in the production of intentionality. I f this were indeed the case Husserl's phenomenology would be the extreme opposite of a computational theory of representational contents which treats the rules it postulates as programs that could run on any 'device,' whether it be a mind or a nonconscious computer. But, in fact, for Husserl, like Kant, the notion of mental activity is so broadened that it does not require consciousness at all. Indeed, Kant and Husserl are precursors of cognitivism precisely because their rules operate like programs totally independentally of the awareness of a conscious subject. Is

Now a phenomenology that "does not require consciousness at all" would be one that could not accomplish any phase of the epoche and reduction, and thus could be a phenomenalism, perhaps, but not a phenomenology at all. For the latter requires a turn (the epoche) from the natural attitude (in which phenomena could indeed be subsumed under a "rule," or fit into a "frame"), to a subject's experience as constitutive of phenomena. The reduction's correlation of experience to objects reveals a structure of consciousness, not simply a rule that could be applied by a machine as well as by a human.

Correlatively, ignoring or undervaluing the reduction makes it almost inevitable that consciousness falls out (so to speak) in Dreyfus' account of how "Husserl bravely tries to explain how the job [i.e. intending] gets done. ''19 Rather than a focus upon consciousness' experience, analyzed in terms of noetic and noematic structures, we have here an analysis in terms of "predicate-senses which, like Fregean S i n n e . . .

presumably refer to atomic properties .. . . -20 This questionable correlation of noematic and predicative sense, in turn, supports the imputation of a foundationalism, in Husserl, appropriate to the needs of "the rapid- ly growing discipline Husserl called cognitive science. ''21

The reading o f intentionality as intensionality noted earlier is also supported by this atomistic and linguistic model. Indeed, intentionality (understood as describing consciousness' interactive directedness within its environment) also falls out of Dreyfus' reading, in favor of reference. An example of that changed focus occurs when he quotes Husserl on

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understanding "transcendental" as a "regressive inquiry concerning the ultimate source of all cognitive formation" as justification for his own explication of "transcendental idealist" as one (e.g. Husserl) who "holds that mental activity plays an essential role in making reference possible and in determining the sorts of objects to which we can refer. ''22

Two last quotations must suffice to illustrate my claim that quotations taken out of context contribute to this eccentric reading of Husserl. Both involve quotation fragments which Dreyfus gives in support of his portrayal o f the noema as a rule. We read first that Husserl " thought of a noema as a 'strict rule (feste Regel) for possible syn- theses.'"~3 The passage from which this phrase is abstracted, however, does not ment ion the noema. Rather, it explains constitution as a syn- thesizing accomplishment of the ego:

By phenomenological constitution of an object is meant the view of the ego's universality from the perspective of the identity of this object. This is to say, it is a reflection on the question of the systematic totali ty of real and possible conscious experiences, which - while they refer to an object - are nevertheless antici- pated in my ego and represent to me a strict rule for possible syn- theses. 24

In Dreyfus' next paragraph, Husserl's consistent contextualization of constitutive rules - i.e., his discussion of them as intrinsic to ego - is again obscured. Dreyfus writes: "Since 'any object whatever ... points to a structure ... that is governed by a rule' one has to investigate the rules governing all mental activity directed at objects. ''2s Husserrs remark (from which the quoted phrase is excerpted), however, repeats his consistent theme of these rules and structures as intrinsic to the syn- thesizing ego:

The fact is that the constituting multiplicities of consciousness - those actually or possibly combined to make the unity of an iden- tifying synthesis - are not accidental, but, as regards the possibil- ity of such a synthesis, belong together for essential reasons. Ac- cordingly they are governed by principles ... any object whatever (even an immanent one) points to a structure within the transcendental ego, that is governed by a rule. ~6

What has been obscured, by means of these and other partial quotations, is Husserl's theory o f constitution as a synthetic accomplishment structured by rules intrinsic to the transcendental ego, and so binding

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upon consciousness. This theory places Husserl in a very different context from that of "artificial intelligence." Dreyfus' neglect of that context is crucial to his claim that, "for Husserl, like Kant, the notion of mental activity is so broadened that it does not require consciousness at all."

It may well be argued that Husserl's notion of consciousness differs substantially from that of literary, psychological, or everyday discourse. However, when Husserl is read as espousing a phenomenology without consciousness, an admirable goal - "providing concepts, analysis, and ideas for further research" from Husserlian phenomenology, for consideration by an audience of "analytic" philosophers and cognitive scientists - is compromised? 7

Lenore Langsdorf The University of Texas at Arlington

NOTES

1. Hubert L. Dreyfus, "Introduction," pp. 1-2. Cited hereafter as "Dreyfus." If not otherwise identified, all citations are to the book under discussion, with individual contributions identified by title and author in the body of this text, and cited here by the author's name.

2. Dreyfus, p. 2. 3. The "most, ff not all" uncertainty is due to the lack of information on that issue in the

volume. The usual practice of noting original and prior publication dates and places is a useful one; hopefully, its abandonment here does not indicate a new fashion in such mat- ters.

4. Since the intended audience - cognitive scientists and philosophers from outside the phenomenological tradition - could not be expected to identify the effect of a Heideggerean reading in Dreyfus's presentation of Husserl, the omission of any mention of the differ- ences between Heidegget and Hussetl, or even of any identification of the author's/editor's orientation, limits the introductory essay's usefulness.

5. Heinson, p. 153. 6. Heinson, pp. 166-167. 7. Searle, p. 260. 8. FCUesdal, p. 74. 9. Searle, p. 269; cf. p. 272: ".. . there is nothing inherently intension-with-an-s about inten-

tionality-with-a-t." 10. Fodor, p. 277. 11. Fodor, p. 279. 12. Fodor, p. 303; emphasis in original. 13. Fodor, p. 284. 14. Fodor, p. 280. 15. This phrase is from the Table of Contents, p. vi.

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16. For some alternate readings, see Robert Sokolowski's recent essay, "Intentional Analysis and the Noema" in Dialectica 38 (1984), 114-129, which gives his own acute analysis and includes (in footnotes 11-14) a convenient listing of previous work by others. My own contribution to the dialogue may be found in "The Noema as Intentional Entity: A Critique of F¢llesdal," The Review o f Metaphysics 37 (1984), 757-784.

17. Dreyfus, p. 24. During the course of the "Introduction," he speaks of the noema as an "abstract structure" (p. 2), "a hierarchy of rules" (p. 8), "a 'strict rule' ... governing the operations which make intentionality possib!e" (pp. 10-11), and "the way intentional content is realized" (p. 12). Also: noemata are "abstract meanings" (p. 21), each of which "contains a rule" or rules (p. 19; cf. p. 26).

18. Dreyfus, pp. l l - 1 2 ; m y emphasis. 19. Dreyfus, p. 7. 20. Dreyfus, p. 7. 21. Dreyfus, p. 3. There is no indication of what German term Dreyfus is translating as "cog-

nitive science," or where Husserl used it. Cf. p. 8, where Dreyfus speaks of "Husserl's decisive step in the direction of cognitivism," and p. 9, where he speaks of Husserl as "an important precursor of cognitive science."

22. Dreyfus, p. 9, quoting Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. J. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 49; my emphases. That text gives "formation" as plural, in keeping with the German: "der letzten Quelle aller Erkenntnisbildungen." (Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. L. Landgrebe (Ham- burg: Meiner, 1972), pp. 48-49).

23. Dreyfus, p. 10. 24. Edmund Husserl, The Paris Lectures, trans. P. Koestenbaum (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967),

p. 124. The German (Hua I, 24) reads: "... und fiir mein ego eine feste Regel m6glicher Synthesen bedeuten." (My emphasis.)

25. Dreyfus, p. 11; Dreyfus' elipses. 26. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), p.

53; my emphases, Unfortunately, the English translation obscures the crucial point here. The closing passage of the original text (Hua I, 90) makes the nature of this "rule" quite clear: it is "eine Regelstruktur des transzendentalen Ego."

27. Although responsibility for these remarks is of course my own, I would like to acknowl- edge indebtedness to several colleagues for discussions of the book, and offer particular thanks to Dabney Townsend for his detailed remarks on the "Introduction."

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