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Husserl on Sensation, Perception, and Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Walter Hopp
Walter Hopp*
Affiliation:
Boston University, Boston, MA02215, USA
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Extract

Husserl's theory of perception is remarkable in several respects. For one thing, Husserl rigorously distinguishes the parts and properties of the act of consciousness — its content — from the parts and properties of the object perceived. Second, Husserl's repeated insistence that perceptual consciousness places its subject in touch with the perceived object itself, rather than some representation that does duty for it, vindicates the commonsensical and phenomenologically grounded belief that when a thing appears to us, it is precisely that thing, rather than some other thing (its ‘appearance’), that we perceive. Third, his distinction between empty and intuitive acts, and his descriptions of their complex interplay in perceptual consciousness, provides a way of making sense of the fact that an object can be perceived even when some of its parts and properties are not. Finally, his theory of perceptual acts as constituents of higher-order acts of fulfilment provides one of the few detailed accounts in the philosophical literature of how a perceptual experience can transform a mere thought into knowledge, despite the fact that the relation between perception and belief is not a logical or inferential one.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , June 2008 , pp. 219 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2008

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References

1 Husserl, Edmund Logical Investigations, trans. Findlay, J.N. (New York: Humanities Press 1970),Google Scholar Investigation 5, section 27, 610. I will henceforth refer to this work as ‘LI,’ and cite investigation, section, and page numbers in a shortened format.

2 The elusive noema can safely be bracketed for the purposes of this investigation, which focuses on the noetic side of the perceptual act.

3 LI 5, 20, 586

4 More precisely, both the matter and the quality of an act are particular parts or moments belonging to an act's real content. Its ideal content is related to its real content, according to the account in the Logical Investigations at least, in precisely the same way that universals are related to their instances — and not as an act is related to its object. ‘The manifold singulars for the ideal unity Meaning are naturally the corresponding act-moments of meaning, the meaning-intentions. Meaning is related to varied acts of meaning… just as Redness in specie is to the slips of paper which lie here, and which all ‘have’ the same redness. Each slip has, in addition to other constitutive properties (extension, form, etc.), its own individual redness, i.e. its instance of this colour-species, though this neither exists in the slip nor anywhere else in the whole world, and particularly not ‘in our thought,’ in so far as this latter is part of the domain of real being, the sphere of temporality’ (LI 1, 32, 330).

5 LI 5, 20, 589

6 LI 5, 21, 590

7 LI 5, 20, 589: ‘Identical matters can never yield distinct objective references…’ Un like Frege, however, Husserl does not seem to hold that identity of cognitive value (Erkenntiswerte) is sufficient for identity of sense. See LI 5 20, 588: ‘Two identically qualified acts, e.g. two presentations, may appear directed, and evidently directed, to the same object, without full agreement in intentional essence. The Ideas equilateral triangle and equiangular triangle differ in content, though both are directed, and evidently directed, to the same object…’

8 LI 6, 25, 738. Husserl makes similar points throughout his discussions of fulfilment (Erfüllung). In fulfilment ‘the semantic essence of the signitive (or expressive) act reappears identically in corresponding intuitive acts…’ (LI 6, 28, 744). Husserl also defines a possible or ‘internally consistent’ meaning in terms of there being a possible ‘complete intuition whose matter is identical with its own’ (LI 6, 30, 749). In Ideas I, Husserl claims that the distinction between experiences in which an object acquires ‘primordial givenness’ and those in which it does not does ‘not concern the pure meaning and position, for this is the same for both members of every such pair of examples’ [Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books 1962), section 136, 350-1). ‘Meaning’ and ‘position,’ in this context, correspond to ‘matter’ and ‘quality’ in the terminology of the Investigations.

9 LI 6, 21, 729

10 LI 6, 28, 745

11 I do not mean to suggest that these are the most common, much less the only, characterizations of conceptual content. Nevertheless, both characterizations of conceptual content have been put forth in the literature on content. Peacocke, for instance, claims that ‘ …any content that can be expressed in language by the use of an indicative sentence, including sentences containing indexicals and demonstratives, will be a conceptual content’ [Peacocke, Christopher ‘Does Perception Have a Nonconceptual Content?’ The Journal of Philosophy 98 (2001) 239-64,CrossRefGoogle Scholar 243]. As for the second characterization, McDowell writes: ‘We can ensure that what we have in view is genuinely recognizable as a conceptual capacity if we insist that the very same capacity to embrace a colour in mind can in principle persist beyond the duration of the experience itself’ [McDowell, John Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1994), 57Google Scholar].

12 ‘The perceptual presentation arises in so far as an experienced complex of sensations gets informed by a certain act-character, one of conceiving or meaning’ (LI 1, 23, 310). Husserl also writes that it is ‘analytically true’ that ‘everything that is intuitively present is also meant’ (LI 6, 23, 732). I think these passages, together with Husserl's contention that the matter of an act can survive the obliteration of its intuitive content, seriously compromises the plausibility of Kevin Mulligan's contention that, according to Husserl, ‘to see particulars is not to mean, is not to exercise a concept, neither an individual nor a general concept’ [Kevin Mulligan, ‘Perception,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995) 168-238, 170].

13 Kant, Immanuel Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan 1965),Google Scholar A51/B75.

14 LI 5, 2, 539. See also all of LI 5, 14, as well as LI 6, 6, 688, where he identifies perceiving something (an inkpot, in this case) with undergoing ‘a certain sequence of experiences of the class of sensations, sensuously unified in a peculiar serial pattern, and informed by a certain act-character or ‘interpretation’ (Auffassung), which endows it with an objective sense. This act-character is responsible for the fact than an object, i.e. this inkpot, is perceptually apparent to us.’

15 LI 6, Introduction, 668

16 LI 6, 8, 694

17 LI 6, 8, 694. See also LI VI, 16, 720: ‘What the intention means, but presents only in more or less inauthentic and inadequate manner, the fulfilment — the act attaching itself to an intention, and offering it ‘fullness’ in the synthesis of fulfilment — sets directly before us, or at least more directly than the intention does. In fulfilment our experience is represented by the words: ‘This is the thing itself.’

18 LI 6, 8, 696

19 It is, however, ‘a seamless unity, which only acquires articulation when drawn out in time’ (LI 6, 9, 698).

20 LI 6, 14b, 714

21 Ibid. See also Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, trans. Steinbock, Anthony J. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 2001), 44:CrossRefGoogle Scholar ‘Every momentary phase of perception is in itself a network of partially full and partially empty intentions. For, in every phase we have genuine appearances, that is, a fulfilled intention…’ (My italics).

22 ‘Matter and fullness are, however, by no means unrelated, and, when we range an intuitive act alongside a signitive act to which it brings fullness, the former act does not differ from the latter merely by the joining on a third distinct moment of fullness to the quality and matter common to the two acts. This at least is not the case where we mean by ‘fullness’ the intuitive content of intuition. For intuitive content (Inhalt) itself already includes a complete ‘matter,’ the matter of an act reduced to a pure intuition’ (LI 6, 25, 738).

23 Dreyfus, Hubert L. ‘The Perceptual Noema,’ in Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science,’ ed. Dreyfus, Hubert L. (Cambridge: The MIT Press 1982) 97–123,Google Scholar 105. It is noteworthy that Dreyfus discovers this difficulty for the wrong reasons: he is convinced that the ‘intentionalist thesis’ that ‘all acts always have objects’ (102) is unproblematic in the case of signitive acts, since signitive acts have ideal meanings or Sinne as ‘direct objects’ or ‘correlates,’ and real objects as ‘indirect’ objects (101). Such ‘direct’ objects, Dreyfus thinks, are required to serve as ‘correlates’ in cases where the real or ‘indirect’ object does not exist. In the case of intuitive or fulfilling acts, however, the introduction of such an ‘intermediary object’ as an ideal meaning or Sinn is untenable, since fulfilling acts purport to present the object itself directly. If we treat the intuitive act along the same lines as signitive acts — as having an object-independent Sinn as its ‘correlate’ — then acts entertaining such a Sinn can exist independently of the existence of the real object, in which case we must forfeit the claim that such fulfilling acts constitute a direct relation to an object. In order to establish such a relation, we must appeal to intuition. But this model of intentionality requires us to analyze intuition along the same lines, generating the regress. This objection stems from a radical misunderstanding of Husserl's theory of intentionality. Husserl never asserts, as Frege sometimes seems to, that ideal contents or Sinne are the direct objects of acts, and with good reason. For supplying acts with direct objects such as Sinne, which themselves refer beyond themselves, leaves it unexplained how Sinne themselves can refer to objects that do not exist. If they cannot, then nothing has been solved — we will require such Sinne to refer to still further Sinne. And if they can, then there is no principled reason why acts themselves cannot. (See Willard, Dallas ‘A Crucial Error in Epistemology,’ Mind 76 (1967) 513–523,Google Scholar at 517.) The problem does not stem from Husserl's insistence that acts have existing objects, since that commitment is no part of Husserl's theory of intentionality, but from the thesis that what makes an act intentional is its conceptual content.

24 Drummond, John J. Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1990), 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 See his ‘Perceptual Intimacy and Conceptual Indequacy: A Husserlian Critique of McDowell's Internalism,’ in Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries, ed. Zahavi, D. Heinämaa, Sara and Ruin, Hans (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 2003) 49–71,CrossRefGoogle Scholar 55-6.

26 Drummond, Intentionality, 81Google Scholar

27 Drummond, Intentionality, 81Google Scholar

28 Willard, Dallas ‘Knowledge,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. Smith, Barry and Woodruff, David Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995) 138-67, 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 LI 6, 8, 697

30 Dreyfus again: ‘If we wish to preserve the notion of fulfilling acts which corresponds to our experience of perceiving objects and thus arrive at the end of this regress … we must introduce an incarnate meaning, a meaning which is not abstractable from the intuitive content which it informs’ (‘The Perceptual Noema,’ 105).

31 ‘Colour-constancy amidst variation of light and shadow is the phenomenon that the colour sensation/colour quality distinction is intended to do justice to’ (Mulligan, ‘Perception,’ 182). Another explanation, perhaps, is that when we perceive colors, we are also conscious of the light and shadow, and make allowances for such things.

32 See Husserl, Edmund Thing and Space, trans. Rojcewicz, Richard (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1997), 39:Google Scholar ‘…[T]he complex of the contents of sensation is quite varied, and yet the corresponding perceptions, by their very essence, pass themselves off as perceptions of the same object. Conversely, it is also (sic) holds that the same complex of contents of sensation can be the basis of diverse perceptions, perceptions of diverse objects, as every mannequin proves…’

33 LI 6, 26, 741. Elsewhere he maintains that sense contents ‘provide, as it were, the analogical building-stuff for the content of the object presented by their means’ (LI I, 23, 310). And in Ideas he writes: ‘To every phase of perception there necessarily belongs, for instance, a definite content in the way of perspective variations of colour, shape, and so forth. They are counted among the “sensory data”…’ (Ideas section 41, 119).

34 LI 5, Appendix to 11 and 20, 594

35 Husserl, Ideas, section 41, 119Google Scholar

36 Husserl, Ideas, section 97, 261Google Scholar

37 Husserl, Ideas, section 81, 216Google Scholar

38 Husserl, Passive and Active Synthesis, 54Google Scholar

39 Sartre, Jean-Paul Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, Hazel E. (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 20Google Scholar

40 Husserl, Edmund Experience and Judgment, ed. Landgrebe, Ludwig trans. Churchill, James S. and Ameriks, Karl (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1973) 83Google Scholar

41 Hacker, P.M.S. Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1987), 218.Google Scholar Austin makes a similar point: ‘I am not disclosing a fact about myself, but about petrol, when I say that petrol looks like water’ [Austin, J.L. Sense and Sensibilia (New York: Oxford University Press 1964), 43Google Scholar].

42 For an explanation of these two senses of the term ‘transcendent,’ see Husserl, Edmund The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Hardy, Lee (Boston: Kluwer 1999), 27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 LI 1, 23, 309

44 Moore, G.E. ‘The Refutation of Idealism,’ in Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1922) 1–30, 27Google Scholar

45 See LI 1, 23.

46 LI 1, 20, 304

47 See LI 6, 28, 744. After characterizing purely signitive acts as lacking moments of intuitive fullness but as having representative content, Husserl says that this latter moment is ‘really not fullness.’ But he continues: ‘Or rather it is fullness, but not fullness of the signitive act, but of the act on which it is founded, the act in which the sign is set up as an intuitive object.’ A signitive act, then, is an act founded on an intuitive act directed towards the sign.

48 LI 1, 23, 309-10

49 Husserl, Passive and Active Synthesis, 55

50 Ibid.

51 LI 6, Introduction, 669

52 LI 6, 26, 740

53 LI 6, 26, 742

54 See LI 6, section 47.

55 Gurwitsch, Aron The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1964), 121Google Scholar

56 ‘The ‘horizons’ of perceptions are another name for empty intentions … that are integrally cohesive and that are actualized in the progression of perception in and through different orientations’ (Husserl, Passive and Active Synthesis, 144Google Scholar). The horizon is much like the Network in Searle's account of intentionality, which must be carefully distinguished from the Background, which consists of non-intentional capacities and abilities that make intentional capacities possible. See John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983), 65 and following. Among the better discussions of the horizon in Husserl's work are section 44 of Ideas I, sections 8 and 9 of Experience and Judgment, and section 19 of Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1977). For one of the best expositions in the secondary literature, see David Woodruff Smith and Ronald McIntyre, Husserl and Intentionality (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company 1982), chapters V and VI.

57 Gurwitsch, Consciousness, 118Google Scholar

58 Gurwitsch, Consciousness, 119Google Scholar

59 Gurwitsch, Consciousness, 272Google Scholar

60 LI 6, 9, 699

61 As Gurwitsch puts it, ‘No perceptual appearance of a material thing can be altogether devoid of references to aspects other than that actualized at the moment. To assume that as possible would entail the consequence of a material thing perceptually apprehended through a single perception’ (Consciousness, 237). More precisely, it absurdly entails that a material thing could be adequately apprehended through a single perception.

62 Husserl, Passive and Active Synthesis, 43.Google Scholar Again, the whole of an act of perception ‘is not only determined by what in it is genuinely a perception; rather, it is also determined by the anticipatory intentions that are concordantly harmonizing and also sense-giving’ (137).

63 LI 6, 26, 740

64 There is some evidence that Husserl, in his later writings, moved toward an account along these lines and away from the conceptualism characteristic of his earlier work. His acknowledgement of ‘prepredicative’ experience and passive synthesis might seem to indicate that Husserl abandoned the model criticized here. However, Husserl does not hold that all conceptual content, in the sense used here, is propositional content. The simplest independent meanings are nominal meanings, which can serve as the matters of single-rayed acts with varying degrees of intuitive fullness. That Husserl recognized such meanings in the Logical Investigations means that he recognized prepredicative intentionality at that time. And yet he treated intuitive contents as intrinsically non-intentional, standing in need of apprehension by meaning-instantiating acts. There is no clear evidence that he changed his mind. On the contrary, Husserl still puts forth the doctrine in many later works, maintaining that ‘consciousness’ accomplishment’ consists in bestowing on ‘mere immanent contents’ the ‘function of exhibiting something “transcendent,”’ (Passive and Active Synthesis, 55) and that ‘Individual objects, spatial things, are constituted by “apprehension,” “apperception,” of sense data…’ (Experience and Judgment, 255).

65 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 33

66 There's a toll to pay here, though, for it precludes analyzing all perceptual inadequacy in terms of the presence of empty horizons. A perceptual act might, on this view, be inadequate not because it has sufficiently expansive empty horizons, but because it lacks them.

67 LI 6, 25, 737

68 This expression is due to Wilfrid Sellars. See his Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1997)

69 Campbell, John Reference and Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2002), 71CrossRefGoogle Scholar

70 See Smith, A.D. The Problem of Perception (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2002), 112:Google Scholar ‘For to deny that we can perceive something without classifying it is to deny that a question such as ‘What is that?,’ uttered in a perceptual context, can ultimately have any meaning.’

71 See Soffer, Gail ‘Revisiting the Myth: Husserl and Sellars on the Given,’ Review of Metaphysics 57 (2003) 301–337, 305.Google Scholar