Percept, Concept and the Stratification of Ideality

PHILIP BLOSSER , THOMAS NENON, LUIS ROMÁN RABANAQUE

Advancing Phenomenology: Essays and Documents in Honor of Lester Embree

SPRINGER

Lugar: Dordrecht; Año: 2010; p. 71 - 86

Husserl’s notion of the noema has been traditionally understood either on the basis of the percept’s inner organization, as Gurwitsch does, or as a generalization of meaning to all acts of consciouness, as in Føllesdal’s interpretation. Both points of view depend largely on Husserl’s early work, mainly on the First Book of the Ideas. This paper aims, in the first section, to point out a tension pervading the early development of both intentionality and the noema, which may throw light on the traditional dispute. The second section is devoted to sketch a view on the noema not in terms of an opposition between percept and concept, but rather as a complex whole whose parts are arranged in certain eidetic patterns that can be best described in terms of ‘stratifications’. Taking a natural thing as an example, at least three levels (Stufen) and strata (Schichten) within the levels can be disclosed in its constitution. On this basis, the last section addresses the issue of the graduality of the noema’s ideality by suggesting a relation of continuity and intertwining between the perceptual and linguistic correlates.