Those writing in the phenomenological tradition would not be the slowest to remark that, in its operation, the ideal of economy can often issue in theses that are inadequate to and reductive of lived experience. Such a warning finds an earlier voice in the author of the critical philosophy. Kant contends that rationalism falls prey to dogmatism in claiming to proceed in knowledge from concepts alone, taking experience as a lower form of thinking. For its part, empiricism is dogmatic in taking understanding as a higher form of experience, treating its concepts as nothing but empirical products. Only through the form of sensibility—which already goes beyond mere sensation—are objects given to us, and only through the understanding are they thought. Anything that we can represent to ourselves as combined associatively, he contends, has already been combined in thought (Kant 1933, pp. 32, 65, 125, 151, 429).

Whilst Edmund Husserl criticises the “little clarified” Kantian distinction between sensibility and understanding in the Sixth Logical Investigation, he does not abandon it there or elsewhere. Unlike Kant, he extends the concepts of perception and intuition, positing intuitions that are categorical in character. It is these, he maintains, that “intellectualise” sensuous intuitions. And besides positing these two types of intuition, Husserl distinguishes between intuitive givenness and signification. Of whatever kind it might be, intuition must be opposed to thinking in the sense of signitive reference. This grounds his distinction between adequate and inadequate givenness, that is, between the complete or partial fulfilment by perception of empty signitive intending. And all this is the backdrop to his explications of concepts as the universal meanings of words, concepts as species of universal presentations, and concepts as the intentional correlates of such presentations (Hua XIX/2, pp. 731–732; 2001b, p. 318).

Throughout Logical Investigations, Husserl works with a distinction between meaning as conceptual or logical signification (Bedeutung) and as non-conceptual interpreting sense or apprehending sense (Sinn or Auffassungssinn). He only takes Bedeutung as synonymous with Sinn in treating of linguistic expressions (Hua XIX/1, p. 58; 2001a, p. 201). On top of this, meaning as Meinung signifies the act of intending and what is meant in the act. Now it is not always clear whether the conceptual and non-conceptual have to come together in perception—Husserl’s rich descriptions of phenomena in this early work frequently run without telling us. As with Kant’s first Critique, however, his Investigations have undergone explicitly conceptualist and non-conceptualist readings. He is regarded by Richard Cobb-Stevens as extending understanding—recast as intuitional as well as rational–into the domain of sensuous intuition, to the extent that no simple perceptions are actually separated from such formal, higher-level understanding. On an alternative construal by Kevin Mulligan, Husserl distinguishes nominal and propositional seeing from the simple or straightforward—and yet interpretative—seeing of particulars. To see simply is not to exercise an individual meaning or a general concept.

These interpretations are of interest, not just because they are argued at length and resolutely opposed, but also because they can in my view be reconciled under modifications in Husserl’s subsequent work. In this essay I endeavour to show that the story of perceptual consciousness in his later period is one of growing beyond the situation portrayed by Mulligan and into the one explicated by Cobb-Stevens. Following my opening and expository section, I try to bring out in Sects. II and III how Logical Investigations provides evidence for the conceptualist and non-conceptualist views respectively, such that simple seeing does not definitively constitute the finished perception of things. In his transcendental period Husserl also allows for simple seeing, now shown to be subtended by a structured multiplicity of associative, pre-egoic performances. In Sects. IV–V, I hope to show that this working downwards runs with a much clearer commitment to conceptualism. Though they remain notionally separable, pre-conceptual syntheses at the passive level are inevitably interwoven with conceptual and categorial articulations in a developed awareness. Simple or straightforward seeing can only be enjoyed by an infant consciousness, though its achievements are carried into the intellectual stratum that will affect it in its turn. In this way Husserl surmounts naïve seeing without collapsing sensibility into understanding.

1  

In the First Logical Investigation, Husserl’s claim that sensuous intuition is intrinsically interpretative is preceded by the elaboration of “essential distinctions” that ensue from his examination of signs in general and language in particular. Though every sign is a sign for something, not every sign has a meaning. Put another way, every sign functions indicatively, but does not always express anything. This is why indications cannot be confined to marks that have been deliberately fashioned to stand for something (such as a brand on the forehead for a slave or a flag for a nation). They include natural signs, like the smoke that points to a forest fire or the puddle to a shower of rain. The smoke and the puddle may indicate these events, but they do not thereby mean them. An associatively motivated connection can function perfectly without the expression or understanding of a meaning (Hua XIX/1, pp. 30–31; 2001a, pp. 183–184).Footnote 1

By contrast with indications, expressions have an inherent significance. These marks or sounds always express meanings, or to put it in Husserl’s peculiar terms in Logical Investigations, are animated by them. An expression does not merely say something, but says it of something, and this latter function is a condition of its being used significantly. Through its meaning or semantic content, an expression has to direct itself to some objective correlate, that is, to some particular thing or state of affairs (Hua XIX/1, pp. 45–52; 2001a, pp. 192–197). The act of meaning, for its part, “is the determinate manner in which we refer to our object of the moment” (Hua XIX/1, pp. 54–55; 2001a, p. 198). The meaning-content and its object only pertain to an expression because of the conscious acts that give it sense. What is needed for an expression is the act that is interwoven with it (Hua XIX/1, pp. 52, 421; 2001a, p. 197, 2001b, p. 117).

A speaker utilises expressions to point out something to a hearer. For Husserl, simple expressions pick out single objects like the inkpot, and complex expressions or propositions pick out objects as states of affairs, e.g. the inkpot is missing from the table (Hua XIX/1, pp. 52–54, 2001a, pp. 197–198). To the extent that an expression’s referent is not given experientially to the auditor or speaker, its determinate meaning function is indicative, constituting a certain form of signification. In so far as expressions indicate, they are empty. An expression does not need sensuous intuition or givenness to function, but it does require givenness to fulfil it, to convert signitive emptiness into partial perceptual presence, with complete fulfilment being the ideal of an object given so completely or adequately that nothing would be left over to be indicated. When the object is presented in the manner in which the expression means it, there is an appropriate if inadequate unity of coincidence between the expression and the relevant intuitions. The meaning is confirmed intuitionally in a “synthesis of identification” with the given (Hua XIX/1, p. 56; 2001a, p. 199/Hua XIX/2, pp. 585, 589; 2001b, pp. 218, 220).

The manner in which an expression functions effectively is regarded by Husserl as akin to the interpretative “apprehending sense” (Auffassungssinn) that, together with sensations, gives us the sensuous intuition or perceptual presentation of a worldly object. If we imagine a consciousness prior to all experience, he states, it might very well have the sensations that we have, but it will intuit no things and no events, “no trees and no houses, no flight of birds nor any barking of dogs.” We are promptly tempted to say, he continues, “that its sensations mean (bedeuten) nothing to such a consciousness, that they do not count as signs of the properties of an object, that their combination does not count as a sign of the object itself” (Hua XIX/1, p. 80; 2001a, p. 214). This situation might well remind us of a camera or a mobile phone that records an event on a film reel or digitally, and does so quite blithely and uncomprehendingly. The sensations seem to be just lived through without an objectivating interpretation that is derived from experience. But in this place Husserl adds a careful qualification:

Here, therefore, we talk of signs and meanings just as we do in the case of expressions and cognate signs. To simplify comparison by restricting ourselves to the case of perception, the above talk should not be misread as implying that consciousness first looks at its sensations, then turns them into perceptual objects, and then bases an interpretation upon them, which is what really happens when we are objectively conscious of physical objects, e.g. sounded words, which function as signs in the strict sense. Sensations plainly only become presented objects in psychological reflection: in naïve, intuitive presentations they may be components of our presentative experience, part of its descriptive content, but are not at all its objects. The perceptual presentation arises in so far as an experienced complex of sensations gets informed by a certain act-character, one of apprehending or meaning. To the extent that this happens, the perceived object appears, while the sensational complex is as little perceived as is the act in which the perceived object is as such constituted (Hua XIX/1, p. 80; 2001a, p. 214).Footnote 2

This is elaborated upon in other places, most notably in the Second and Fifth Investigations. Animated by interpretations, sensations present objective determinations of things, but are not themselves these determinations. Perceived objects “are meant unities (gemeinte Einheiten), not ‘ideas’ or complexes of ideas in the Lockean sense” (Hua XIX/1, pp. 134–135; 2001a, pp. 252–253).Footnote 3 We have sensations in first order perception, but we do not see them, for they are not intentional or object directed—what perceptual consciousness aims at are the objects that are presented in and through them. In ordinary perception, furthermore, the acts that interpret the sensations are no more perceived than the latter. What we call the presentation of an object is also its interpretation (Hua XIX/1, pp. 399–400; 2001b, p. 105). The moot point, however, is that interpretation itself “can never be reduced to an influx of new sensations; it is an act-character, a mode of consciousness, of ‘mindedness’” (Hua XIX/1, pp. 395–396; 2001b, p. 103).

Throughout his earlier and later periods, Husserl is adamant that sensuous perception reaches the thing itself, not a mere sign or picture of it. But this does not mean, and indeed it never means, that a worldly object is presented fully or adequately to our view. As noted above, complete fulfilment is an ideal, but also one that is unrealisable. An object is only ever given inadequately in one perspective, say from the front, and though it may present two or more sides from another and better perspective, we cannot be given all of its sides at once. In straightforward sensuous perception we nonetheless intend the object as a whole—this is how we aim at it (Hua XIX/2, pp. 589–590; 2001b, pp. 220–221). Where part of the currently presented aspect or profile of an object is hidden, say the patterned carpet by a table and chairs, this too is intended as a complete aspect within the greater whole that includes its underside. Thus the carpet is taken as continuing beneath these things that are partially occluding it (Hua XIX/2, p. 573; 2001b, p. 211).

Foreshadowing his theory of the horizons of perception, a horizon being the empty predelineation of the perceptual content of future experiences of something, Husserl contends that intention, in this regard at least, is not expectancy. I do not expect that any of the hidden aspects will be there if I change my position, for they are grasped as already being there. What I do expect is that they will be seen if I move in the appropriate directions. In his later terminology, they are apperceived, that is to say, “co-intended” or “co-meant” (Mitgemeinte) as accompanying the presented aspect without being directly given. But here already in the Sixth Investigation, Husserl contends that every perceptual intention is interwoven with its own signitive intentions pointing to what is there to be perceived. Such significations may run with meanings and concepts, but they have a non-conceptual and non-expressive character. They are significations peculiar to the interpreted appearances themselves, whereby the latter indicate potential appearances that may be actualised in further perceptual acts (Hua XIX/2, pp. 573, 594; 2001b, pp. 211, 224).Footnote 4

The meanings and concepts fulfilled by sensuous intuitions are sharply distinguished from these primitive significations. Individual meanings in simple expressions, according to Husserl, point to unarticulated wholes. They are the intentional correlates of the fulfilling presentations of particular empirical objects to which they refer in “single-rayed” acts of simple, straightforward or “nominal” intending. But meanings are also general concepts, in the sense of being intentional correlates of universal objects to which they can refer, the latter being called “species.” Individual meanings pertain to objects, and species meanings to the concepts in which we think of them (Hua XIX/1, pp. 108, 502; 2001a, pp. 231–232, 2001b, p. 161). This leads Husserl to enquire whether there are parts and forms of perception corresponding to all the parts and forms of meaning that provide a parallelism between such individual and general significations and their fulfilments (Hua XIX/2, p. 658; 2001b, p. 272).

With regard to sensuous perception or intuition, the answer is in the negative, as can be seen from perceptual reports or judgements. I do not just name or speak nominally of a piece of paper or a blackbird, but say that this is white and has been written on, or that the other is flying across the garden and chattering noisily, as blackbirds are won’t to do. In these “many-rayed” acts of complex or propositional intending, my apprehension of extant and complex states of affairs involves a “surplus of meaning.” This surplus is expressed by formal terms like “and,” “this,” “the,” and “is,” articulating amongst other conjunctions the relationship of part and whole, and beyond this again of the being of the situation. I perceive white paper sensuously, but not its whiteness, not the “belonging” as Cobb-Stevens puts it, of the predicated feature to the object, of the part to its whole (Hua XIX/2, pp. 658–674; 2001b, pp. 272–282).Footnote 5

To retain the objectivity of these states of affairs in their internal relatedness, that is, to avoid reducing them to the products of subjective associations or syntheses via judgements, Husserl posits another form of intuition that is categorial rather than sensuous. In “categorial intuition,” I am given ideal and universal objects intellectually, as the fulfilling correlates of the general concepts that refer to them as species. To grasp some state of affairs is to grasp at the same time the ideal, categorial structure that is “instantiated” by that state of affairs in the sense of being true of it, though not given in the sensuous presentations. Yet the everyday perception of a state of affairs does not yet thematise its ideal structure, for in terms of attentiveness, the former is my overall object. Put otherwise, the intellectual givenness of a categorial structure is not ordinarily distinguished from the state of affairs whose recognition it enables. It blends in with the sensuous phenomenon that it transcends (Hua XIX/2, pp. 671–682; 2001b, pp. 280–287).Footnote 6

Comprehending things as involving and as being involved in states of affairs, categorial intuitions do not glue or tie parts or relations together in the experienced object, forming it as a potter would form clay. The same object is given with the same actual properties, but is comprehended in a different manner. Otherwise the original presentative sensations would be changed, so that there would be “a falsifying transformation into something else” (Hua XIX/2, p. 715; 2001b, p. 308). This higher level of intuition certainly involves the judgement that something is or is not such and such, or that it is involved with something else in some way, but the contention is that the judgment has the character of recognition rather than creation or unification ex nihilo. The concept of a state of affairs is not founded upon the fulfilments of judgements, according to Husserl, but found within the fulfilments of the judgements themselves (Hua XIX/2, pp. 669–670; 2001b, p. 279).

Categorial intuitions are always revelatory acts that are founded or built on the simple founding acts of sensuous intuition, though in their intentionality as well as in their fulfilment, these propositional and many-rayed acts that aim at states of affairs can themselves be blended quite seamlessly with what they contain, namely, the simple and single-rayed acts aiming at particular objects (Hua XIX/2, pp. 681–682; 2001b, p. 287). Husserl is at pains to stress that we can never have purely categorial givens divorced from simple, straightforward perceptions. Without exception, all of them rest ultimately on the simpler and founding acts of sensuous intuition. An intuition cut off from sensibility in this last sense, he says “is a piece of nonsense.” In this respect at the very least, he evinces sympathy with Kant’s original critique of intellectual intuition (Hua XIX/2, pp. 711–712; 2001b, p. 306).Footnote 7

2  

On the effectively conceptualist interpretation of this account set out by Richard Cobb-Stevens, Husserl effectively refuses to oppose intuition to intellection, or sensibility to understanding (Cobb-Stevens 1990, p. 147). Now it might be possible to retain this opposition even if one accepts that categorial understanding is itself intuitional in character, since uninformed intuitions could still be located at the sensuous level—here at least we might arrive at sensibility without understanding. Such an alternative is excluded, however, if we want to affirm the theses that sensations are already interpreted at the founding level—where we are furnished with perceptual objects—and that meanings are also operative within such interpretation (where they are individual in their references). But it is questionable whether meanings in this individual sense can be sundered completely from concepts, from species meanings. It is Cobb-Stevens’ contention that sensuous intuitions are always already caught up in categorial acts, to the extent that they are interdependent with the latter.

For Husserl, our acts of simple or straightforward perception already fuse subordinate perspectival views presenting different profiles or aspects into the continuous presentation of a unitary object. Husserl adds that such a unity of perception is an immediate fusion of part-intentions, without the addition of new act intentions founded on them (Hua XIX/2, pp. 590, 677; 2001b, pp. 221, 284). Sensations taken as profiles or aspects of things through this apprehending sense include perceptually independent “pieces” like the head of a horse in its box that is seen without its body, and dependent “moments” like colour and extension (Hua XIX/1, pp. 231–235; 2001b, pp. 5–7). Husserl is also attentive to the fact that, in straightforward perception, a certain profile can be more prominent than others. So indeed can a property within one or more of the fused profiles. It is, so to speak, a part of a part (Hua XIX/1, pp. 246–247; 2001b, p. 14, Hua XIX/2, p. 677; 2001b, p. 284).Footnote 8

Cobb-Stevens’ position is that categorial intuition presents explicitly the identity of profile and object, rendering objective the aforementioned “belonging” of the profiled feature to the object. In its synthetic unity, the categorial act of predication integrates the founding straightforward intuition of a whole containing potential features and the founded articulation of object and feature. Though we here enter the propositional and judgemental sphere, he claims that “there is a continuity between the pre-linguistic awareness of object and feature, and the syntaxed awareness of the object’s having the feature” (Cobb-Stevens 1990, p. 152). Husserl’s following remarks from the Sixth Investigation show grounds for this interpretation:

In straightforward perception, we say that the whole object is explicitly given, while each of its parts (in the widest sense of “parts”) is implicitly given … the apprehension of a moment and of a part generally as a part of the whole in question, and in particular, the apprehension of a sensuous feature as a feature, or of a sensuous form as a form, point to acts which are all founded: these acts are in our case of a relational kind. This means that the sphere of “sensibility” has been left and that of “understanding” entered … [with a sensible object] acts of articulation can put its parts “into relief,” relational acts bring the relieved parts into relation, whether to one another or to the whole. Only through such new modes of interpretation will the connected and related members assume the character of “parts” (or of “wholes”). The articulating acts and, taken in retrospect, the act we call “straightforward,” are not merely experienced one after the other: overreaching unities of act are rather always present, in which, as new objects, the relationship of the parts become constituted … perception purports to grasp the object itself: its “grasping” must therefore reach to all its constituents in and with the whole object. (Naturally, we are here only concerned with what constitutes the object as it appears in perception, and as what it appears in perception, and not with such constituents as may pertain to it in “objective reality,” and which only later experience, knowledge and science will bring out) (Hua XIX/2, pp. 680–682; 2001b, pp. 286–287).

Building on the work of Robert Sokolowski and Jacques Taminiaux, Cobb-Stevens maintains that we do not merely have a thing and its feature presented to us, but also the presentation of the thing in its feature. This is what corresponds to the word “is” when we state about something sensuously present that it is such and such (Cobb-Stevens 1990, p. 152).Footnote 9 And we do not merely have categorial intuitions founded on sensuous ones, for the fulfilling intuitions of any expression describing a particular—like “white” or “white paper”—involve a categorial surplus of meaning. Everything points to the conclusion, according to Cobb-Stevens, “that categorial intuition of the formal surplus is a condition for the straightforward perception of the particular feature or object” (Cobb-Stevens 1990, p. 152).Footnote 10 There is no seeing of particulars except as having certain looks, and there is no seeing of looks except as shared by particulars, so the founding-founded relationship between categorial and simple intuitions is reciprocal: “[t]he peculiar relationship of ‘belonging’ that is expressed by the predicative interplay of identification and description arises out of the inter-dependent and complementary moments of seeing this and seeing as” (Cobb-Stevens 1990, p. 154).

Such a view develops on Husserl’s account of the basic “objectivating acts” of recognising perceptually what one can also express in language. To talk about recognising an object or fulfilling a meaning intention, he says, is to express the same fact from different standpoints, one pertaining to the object meant and the other to the synthesis of identification of intending and fulfilling. He holds that I find this in “static fulfilment,” when something comes into my perceptual awareness without being adverted to beforehand, like the inkpot on the desk or a rabbit which I spot and can name as such after I come around the corner of a country lane. These particular experiences show a “being coincident” of intention and intuition. Cases of disjoined “dynamic fulfilment,” by contrast, involve a “coming into coincidence,” as when I exclaim “keys,” rummage in my pockets, retrace my steps to where I started, and only then see them flashing in the sunlight across the hall (Hua XIX/2, pp. 558, 566–568; 2001b, pp. 201, 206–207).

Husserl maintains that in the field of expressions, the concepts of truth or rightness are not confined to judgments and propositions, or to their objective correlates in states of affairs. It is the nature of the case, on his view, that the first two concepts extend over the whole sphere of objectivating acts, including those of simple or single-rayed intending that are found in acts of naming. In its most fundamental form, truth is to be found in the pre-predicative identification of the meant and the given (Hua XIX/2, pp. 654–655; 2001b, p. 265). Cobb-Stevens observes that when a judgement achieves truth, it is in a comparable manner. It is not attained by reason of its propositional structure but instead by reason of a parallel intuitive fulfilment of its emptily intended object. Truth is now being described as the completion of emptiness by fullness, not in terms of a correspondence that would involve correlating or comparing putative immanence with transcendence. To seek a fit between intra-mental thoughts and extra-mental objects is to forget that objects are also reached intentionally by means of significations (Cobb-Stevens 1990, p. 147).

As this suggests, Cobb-Stevens accepts that truth occurs at the level of sensuous fulfilment, and hence that it can be distinguished from its categorial occurrence, where a whole with potential features has been integrated into the articulation of object and feature (Cobb-Stevens 1990, pp. 151–152). We can differentiate between the simple and propositional fulfilments of the one complex and interdependent act. But it is not immediately obvious how we can hold on to the notions of “founding” and “founded” acts in a hard and fast fashion. Cobb-Stevens seems to be much more consistent when he refers to interdependent moments, and could go so far as to affirm that they are logically “equiprimordial” in their internal relationship, so that all talk of levels might be abandoned too.Footnote 11 One question that arises is whether this can accord with the variety of perceptual experiences that Husserl discerns. When we examine static as well as dynamic fulfilment, we find cases of unanticipated articulations of objects, and Cobb-Stevens’ account needs to be capable of accommodating them in their distinctiveness.

Let us assume that, on coming round the corner, I see and recognise the rabbit in straightforward intending before spotting that it is stock-still, dozing in the sun. Categorial intuition is operative in the first experience if it is granted that identification presupposes description. A further categorial form has not supervened on this “seeing as” in its role of articulating the state of affairs of the rabbit’s being asleep.Footnote 12 Following Cobb-Stevens’ thesis that the initial experience is informed categorially, the categorial intending of being asleep is not waiting in the wings to articulate a feature implicit in the perceptual situation, for the stillness is not yet prominent sensuously. In the original experience, the single-rayed—though not autonomous—intending and coincident fulfilment of the perceived whole tells its own story in type-recognitional terms. It is founding in relation to the subsequent experience, even if not in isolation. With the rabbit, of course, the crash of a falling tree behind me could prevent the initial (explicitly straightforward and latently propositional) experience of the rabbit being continued and articulated further in a succeeding act of categorial intuition.

Yet Husserl states—as we shall see below in more detail—that some straightforward acts do not found anything else and are not at all categorial. They can become elements in categorial acts, but do not have to be taken up in this way. Thus he does not abandon his sharp distinction of founding and founded acts, taking the perceptual object of the first to be finished in the straightforward sense before becoming the term of a relation (Hua XIX/2, pp. 674, 686; 2001b, pp. 282, 290). Furthermore, he asserts unambiguously that individual meanings without their corresponding fulfilments can operate quite independently, that is, without any other meanings, something that he takes to be already evident in the functioning of simple expressions. In this respect, the Husserl of the Fourth Investigation takes the proper name of someone known such as “Schultz” as a better example of independence than a common name. It manifests clearly a “proper meaning” that names an object in a single, “intrinsically uniform” ray. Such a simple expression and indication is independent in comprising the entire meaning of a nominal act of intending that may come to receive its straightforward fulfilment in sensuous intuition (Hua XIX/1, pp. 304, 306, 320; 2001b, pp. 50, 51, 59).

As was noted in the first section above, the act of meaning in every expression involves saying something of something, being “the determinate manner in which we refer to our object of the moment” (Hua XIX/1, pp. 54–55; 2001a, p. 198). Husserl is careful to elaborate on his distinction between acts of meaning and meaning itself. To use the proper name Schultz significantly, we must have the direct or imaginative presence of that person as endowed with some definite perceptual content. Our ordinary consciousness of the meaning, not being distinguished from its referent, involves possibilities of fulfilment and coincidence “within certain ranges of intuition and no others.” For Husserl, the complexity of this wider intentional background does not entail the complexity of the proper meaning, which remains simple in isolation (Hua XIX/1, pp. 306–308; 2001b, pp. 51–52).Footnote 13

When one directly perceives Schultz, a predelineated range of expectations is fulfilled. But if the name is being used as a meaning, and not just associatively, Cobb-Stevens could retort that intending as well as perceiving is implicated in some species meanings, for it is questionable whether such fulfilment bears no relation whatsoever to cognitively grasped and reportable qualities, e.g. that Schultz is a person rather than a car, and an adult rather than a baby. To use a proper name significantly, on this view, is to pick out a being known under recognisable determinations, one already brought under certain concepts. In fulfilment, it is not unreasonable to posit a relationship of interdependence between the individual proper meaning and the tacit yet describable knowledge of the kind of being that is taken to be fulfilling it (in an experience of frustration, moreover, such a type-understanding would be foregrounded as an implicitly meant element of the intending act that has suffered disappointment). This is not to affirm that a proper name is nothing but an abbreviated description, or that there is no single-rayed intending, but it is to question the view that such a name can function cognitively without mediation by description as expressible understanding, and hence that a single ray of meaning can function autonomously.Footnote 14

Husserl allows that meaning can change so that an unarticulated meaning replaces one that was originally articulated, and in such cases the original expression “has ceased to be genuinely complex, and tends, in developed speech, to be telescoped into one word” (Hua XIX/1, p. 314; 2001b, p. 55). If genuine complexity is taken as that of an explicit and syntaxed meaning, the unarticulated meaning could have telescoped the complexity of its precursor such that it now functions in implicit, unexpressed form. Where such cases involve meant perceptual identification, seeing this and seeing as would be interdependent. Despite this, the Husserl of the Fourth Investigation does not accept that the terms of an earlier complex meaning are themselves informed categorially. As syntactical material, he claims, an individual meaning does not take the place of the syntaxed meaning forms or structures in which it may come to serve as a simple term. Everything we later explicate from it “represents new meanings that were not really implicit as under-emphasised parts in our original meaning” (Hua XIX/1, p. 306; 2001b, p. 51).Footnote 15

It remains especially difficult to see how an individual meaning can function in a associative or stand-alone fashion—i.e. without an element of conceptual subsumption—if it is to count as a common name. It was noted above that Husserl regards species meanings as pertaining to the concepts in which we think of objects, and individual meanings as pertaining to the objects themselves. He asserts in the First Investigation, however, that both meanings have an ideal, universal character. Though their objects are individualia, individual meanings are also generalia or species qua unities of meaning. The universality of the meanings in which we think does not have to resolve itself into the universality of that which we think of, for referring occurs in different ways (Hua XIX/1, p. 108; 2001a, pp. 231–232). But if to perceive particulars is also to see them as having certain looks, it is left open that the looks are grasped as shared by the particulars, as Cobb-Stevens claims, since individual meanings may also function as implicit species in the same overall acts, accommodating this claimed interdependence of seeing this and seeing as.Footnote 16 I will follow him in his contention that the last two must come together, without accepting his other thesis that Husserl’s straightforward seeing initially amounts to “seeing as.”

3  

Kevin Mulligan provides an alternative, anti-conceptualist interpretation of Husserl on straightforward perception. This undercuts any difficulties attendant on holding on to the autonomy of individual meanings in single-rayed intending, for the claim is that meanings find no employment whatsoever at the perceptual level. They need neither be present in complex and dependent nor simple and independent form. To perceive simply in a single-rayed manner is not to mean or exercise an individual meaning or a concept. We only exercise meanings in seeing propositionally, or when our straightforward seeing is bound up with naming. Simple seeing, states Mulligan, is the straightforward perception of particulars, but it is not just the seeing of bare things; it is the experience of things with moments and determinations. Returning to Husserl’s own examples, Mulligan reiterates that we experience things like trees and houses, flights of birds and barking of dogs in the one blow (Mulligan 1995, p. 173).

Mulligan concurs with Husserl that a world is conceivable in which creatures would have sensations without interpreting them, being incapable of perception. By themselves, sensations stand in mere relations of causality and similarity to objects and their features. These imagined creatures would enjoy at best structured sensations in fields of appearance. In vision, for example, it would be “as though they were aware of rich arrays of qualitative discontinuities and coloured expanses,” without having experiences of things like tables and chairs and songs (Mulligan 1995, pp. 183, 191). To simply or straightforwardly see particulars, therefore, is already to have interpreted one’s sensations. All that Mulligan disputes is the claim that the apprehending sense of perception fusing part-intentions has to involve meanings or concepts. And there is undoubtedly evidence for his view in Logical Investigations. Husserl says in one place that the thing that appears straightforwardly “requires no apparatus of founding or founded acts,” which is not to ignore “the obvious complexity that can be shown to exist in the straightforward perceptual act, and particularly in its unitary intention” (Hua XIX/2, p. 676; 2001b, p. 283).

We find further evidence for the anti-conceptualist view in Husserl’s story concerning the interpretative fusing of views into a unitary object. That there is a unity of identification in the act, according to Husserl, does not mean that identity itself is presented to awareness. “In our case,” he says, “an identification is performed, but no identity is meant” (Hua XIX/2, p. 679; 2001b, p. 285). Once we reach this level of meaning an identity as such, as cited above, “the sphere of ‘sensibility’ has been left and that of ‘understanding’ entered” (Hua XIX/2, p. 680; 2001b, p. 286). But the presence of commas need not entail a departure from the literal sense of these terms. There is an essential difference, says Husserl also, between interpretation that is sensuous and interpretation that is cogitative (Hua XIX/1, p. 176; 2001a, p. 280). For Mulligan, all of this shows that the foundation relation between partial perceptual acts and a perceived whole in sensuous intuition is not one between a supervenient intellectual act and a series of underlying perceptual acts (Mulligan 1995, p. 188). When we read about meaning and straightforward perception in Sect. V of the Sixth Investigation, we find little ambiguity on this point:

Intuition may indeed be allowed to contribute to the meaning (Bedeutung) of a perceptual statement, but only in the sense that the meaning could not acquire a determinate relation to the object it means without some intuitive aid. But this does not imply that the intuitive act is itself a carrier of meaning, or that it really makes contributions to this meaning, contributions discoverable among the constituents of the completed meaning…. When I say “this,” I do not merely perceive, but a new act of pointing (of this-meaning) builds itself on my perception, an act directed upon the latter and dependent on it, despite its difference. In this pointing reference, and in it alone our meaning resides … perception is an act which determines, but does not embody meaning. This view can be confirmed by the fact that essentially occasional expressions like “this” can often be used and understood without an appropriate intuitive foundation … our reference to “this” is fulfilled in perception, but is not perception itself … we must not only draw a general distinction between the perceptual and the significant element in the statement of perception; we must also locate no part of the meaning in the percept itself. The percept, which presents the object, and the statement which, by way of the judgement (or by the thought-act interwoven into the unity of the judgement) thinks and expresses it, must be rigorously kept apart (Hua XIX/2, pp. 553–556; 2001b, pp. 197–199).

This account seems to extend to all acts of sensuous intuition, which involve beliefs prior to assertions. If normal perception is essentially marked by “the intuitive persuasion that a thing or event is before us for our grasping,” says Husserl, “such a persuasion is possible, and in the main mass of cases actual, without verbalised, conceptual apprehension” (Hua XIX/1, p. 41; 2001a, p. 190).Footnote 17 Furthermore, where a perceiver does encounter an identity between something that is named or simply meant and a straightforward given, the objectivating act or synthesis of identification is not an articulating performance, being pre-predicative. Identity in this form, says Husserl, “is not first dragged in through comparative, cogitatively mediated reflection: it is there from the start as experience, as unexpressed, unconceptualised experience” (Hua XIX/2, pp. 567–568; 2001b, pp. 206–207). The coherence of this last view, of course, is precisely what Cobb-Stevens has questioned.

For Mulligan, Husserl’s separation of simple seeing from meaning is an early articulation of a view made familiar by a number of thinkers, in particular by Fred Dretske. The latter has developed on the differences between perceptually articulated and conceptually vehiculed information (Mulligan 1995, p. 173). In the first and non-epistemic case, a perceiver can be said to see something if this is differentiated from its environment, visual differentiation being chiefly the way in which the thing looks in some way to the perceiver. This is not to deny that beliefs in the conceptually informed sense play a role in how things look to someone, and that they can even stop something looking a certain way. Dretske’s minimal thesis is that seeing something simply is compatible with having no conceptualised beliefs about it (Dretske 1969, pp. 20–23, 22–23n1).Footnote 18 He holds to the de re belief within simple seeing—affirmed by Husserl—that something is before us, a belief fixed by what is seen and not by conceptual or descriptive factors (Dretske 2000, p. 105).

This brings us to a neo-Kantian or conceptualist objection noted by Mulligan, namely, that simple seeing overburdens non-conceptual interpretation. Even when we factor in non-conceptual performances—as Husserl does increasingly after Logical Investigations—it remains true that many types of perceptual contents or presentations can only be enjoyed by creatures that have been able to master certain concepts. Mulligan states that Husserl goes some way to meeting the conceptualist’s worries, not merely because certain perceptions combine with conceptual modes, but also because “continuous aspect perception is often a matter of wordless subsumption of what is seen under concepts, particularly in cases of recognition” (Mulligan 1995, pp. 206–207). As Mulligan observes, we find such cases of recognition described in the Sixth Investigation: we recognise a Roman milestone and its weathered inscriptions, or a tool as a drill, though the names will not come back to us. These are fulfilments of meaning-intentions sundered phenomenologically from the indications usually pertaining to them (Hua XIX/2, pp. 592–593; 2001b, p. 223).

Husserl appears to end up, therefore, with an affirmation of straightforward perception that places him in the anti-conceptualist camp whilst meeting some conceptualist concerns. And yet the reader is frequently faced with remarks that obstruct this conclusion. We may recall that, in the First Investigation, Husserl states that a perceptual presentation arises in so far as a complex of sensations has been informed by an act of apprehending or meaning so as to present this or that object. A being for whom sensations mean nothing will intuit no houses or barking of dogs (Hua XIX/1, pp. 80, 135; 2001a, pp. 214, 253). In the Fifth Investigation, moreover, he remarks that differences of interpretation are descriptive differences, and that the apperceptive surplus of meaning within experience in its descriptive content “ensouls” sensations and is to be distinguished from their raw existence. It is in its essence “such as to make us perceive this or that object, see this tree, e.g., hear this ringing, smell this scent of flowers.” What is called the presentation of an intentional object “is also called an apprehension, interpretation, apperception [Auffassung, Deutung, Apperzeption] in relation to the sensations really present in this act” (Hua XIX/1, pp. 399–400; 2001b, p. 105).Footnote 19

These citations may not pose any great problems on their own, even if they downplay the role of the apprehending and interpreting fusion of different perspectival views into a continuous perception of the one thing, a fusing that comes for the non-conceptualist between the brute causal existence of sensations and the meaningful intending of the thing as a this or a that. In these places Husserl could be discussing epistemic perception alone. Only in the second edition of the Investigations will he stipulate that the apprehending sense of an intentional act does not merely determine that it grasps an object, but also as what it grasps it, making it count as this object and no other (Hua XIX/1, p. 430; 2001b, pp. 121–122).Footnote 20 Yet this very addition is supported by his contention—already to be found in the first edition—that all intentional or object-directed experiences are either objectivating acts or have their basis in objectivating acts, in synthetic identifications of the meant with the given. These acts “have the unique function of first providing other acts with presented objects, to which they may then refer in their novel ways” (Hua XIX/1, pp. 514–515; 2001b, p. 167).

In the Sixth Investigation, Husserl returns to this point, stating that categorial formations are founded on what is universal in objectivating acts, or have a function linked essentially with the generic elements in such acts. It is only experiences of this class that allow for categorial intuitions (Hua XIX/2, p. 704; 2001b, p. 301).Footnote 21 And in a passage supporting Cobb-Stevens” thesis that he ultimately makes seeing as and seeing this interdependent, Husserl says that an objectivating act calls on a meaningful or conceptual matter that “makes the act present just this object in just this manner, i.e. in just these articulations and forms” (Hua XIX/2, p. 617; 2001b, p. 240). This conflicts with those statements in which the perceptual object of a founding act is finished in the straightforward sense before becoming the term of a relation. It also suggests that without an objectivating act of articulation, there might be nothing amounting to a finished perceptual object.

It would be difficult to discern a final position, however, on foot of a number of isolated remarks. The problem we are faced with is that there is no clear-cut account that merely awaits its distillation from the pages of Logical Investigations. We find certain remarks that are hostile to the conceptualist interpretation of perception, and others that go in its favour, and there are no citations that can decide Husserl’s view. Even if the weight of argument seems to point in the non-conceptualist direction, the multiplication of citations ends up inconclusively. In an extended footnote that runs against the resolutely anti-conceptualist interpretation that is advanced in his main text, Mulligan himself remarks that Husserl often contradicts his thesis that simple seeing involves no meaning, and he adds that Husserl is not even consistently clear that seeing is not meaning (Mulligan 1995, p. 226n9).

4  

As is well known, the purpose of the epochē and phenomenological reduction in Husserl’s transcendental period is to uncover the hidden performances of transcendental subjectivity by means of which objects and world can claim Being, with their existence senses themselves becoming phenomena for explication. One of the features of his work on perception in this period, in my view, is its integration of conceptual and non-conceptualist descriptions into an account that displays a consistency which is lacking in the preceding investigations. Whilst there must be a non-conceptual seeing that is already synthetic, it does not furnish a finished something in isolation. To be constituted fully in lived experiences, a perceived object must count as a conceptualised unity of cognition. This being said, the transcendental period is distinguished by an archaeological uncovering of non-conceptual syntheses.

The theory of constitution proper begins with the distinction of noesis and noema in Ideas I (1913). The first comprises those moments of the intentional act referring it to its object. Correlated with it is the second, the object as it is attended to by consciousness, or better, the object in its very being intended. Perception has its noema, which at the simplest level is its “perceptual sense” (Wahrnehmungssinn) (Hua III.1, pp. 202–206; 1982, pp. 213–217). This purely perceptual sense of the noema—as distinct from the level of conceptual or logical signification and objectivation—is the successor to the fusion of part-intentions constituting the apprehending sense in his earlier work. The logical or conceptual predicates articulate the determined bearer or subject that makes up the “outer core” of the noema. Husserl also posits an “innermost moment” of the core, and this is the skeletal bearer of the properties, the “pure X” or determinable something of all those possible and actual ones that are determining it. It is not separate from its properties, but self-identical as their bearer in successive appearances (Hua III.1, pp. 299–302, 320; 1982, pp. 310–313, 332).

As John Drummond has contended, we get to the innermost core of the noema by way of the perceptual sense, working through the latter to the “X” lying within it. This core is not an entity behind or beyond the sense. It is “in it” because the intentional syntheses of consciousness achieve or perform an identification precisely in their construal of certain appearances as profiles or aspects of a single particular thing, the very thing that they are determining. Such an achievement comprises the intended object and the way in which it is intended. In Drummond’s rendering of Husserl, the former is something “to have in the sense” (Drummond 1990, pp. 118–119, 136–138).Footnote 22 Drummond goes on to argue that the “X” is irreducible to a demonstrative pronoun, which as occasional or indexical can refer to any object whatsoever. Nor is it reducible to a purely formal identity, since there must be a definite continuity manifest in the determinations of (and within) aspects if the object is to be grasped as a materially determinable spatial particular (Drummond 1990, pp. 153–154).Footnote 23

Already in the 1907 lectures published as Thing and Space, Husserl argues for the essential contribution of the seeing, moving and touching body with its “kinaestheses” or felt internal sensations of these activities to the perceptual senses of particulars and states of affairs. Developed sensuous experiences of still life actualities are restricted cases of perception harking back to earlier experiences of seeing things moving, nearing and grasping them, feeling over their expanses and lifting them (Hua XVI, pp. 66–73, 154–161; 1997, pp. 55–61, 131–136). In this way Husserl distances himself from a portrait view of perception. He points out that a “phantom” or colour-filled shape that manifests purely visual characteristics would not amount to an object perceived in space, fascinating though it might be. I can only construe these or those appearances as aspects of a physical something because they are founded on the kinaesthetically felt movements of eyes and neck and trunk and limbs that I am undergoing and have undergone.

Husserl goes on to note that visual experience can yield the same successive appearances if the object is moving and I am at rest or vice versa. An object can approach, turn this way and that and then recede, showing itself in exactly the same way as it would if it were static and I were moving towards it, around it and away from it. It is the wider kinaesthetic sensations present in the experience or absent from it that ground the awareness of the object’s rest or movement within a world that surrounds it. And the noematic sense that there are hidden aspects to worldly things is founded on the awareness that I can move and have moved to bring such aspects into view. The potential appearances are correlated with the expectations of the kinaesthetic sequences that would be peculiar to them (Hua XVI, pp. 175–176, 187–189; 1997, pp. 147–148, 157–159). Together with touch, furthermore, kinaesthesia founds one’s grasp of a thing’s efficacy. Take the weight and hardness of a stone, which are experienced sensuously through the resistance and the pressure that it exerts on one’s body. These characteristics fill the grey oval space and are required for the “seeing” of a stone shattering a window. The straightforward belief that a thing is there has to be built on the felt, incarnate experiences of some of its material determinations (Hua XVI, pp. 343–345; 1997, pp. 299–301).

Ideas I nonetheless retains a provisional form/content schema of sensations as formless stuffs interpreted by stuffless forms. In perceptual syntheses, noetic moments bestow and animate sensations with noematic senses (Hua III.1, pp. 192–194, 227–228; 1982, pp. 203–205, 238–239). When he turns to the genetic phenomenology of pre-constitution, that is, to the archaeology of the genesis of perceptual sense taken to lie beneath the purview of noetic and noematic analysis, Husserl abandons this schema (Hua XI, pp. 338–340; 2001c, pp. 626–629). On the new account, the sensible level is not composed of raw sensation data. It is always already organised or structured by receptive consciousness, and the relevant organisation is a pre-condition of the intentional experience of an object. Husserl tells us that his broadening of synthesis in the sphere of sensibility is anticipated in Logical Investigations, with the account of indication making up the nucleus of genetic phenomenology (Husserl 1954, p. 78; 1973a, pp. 74–75). Prior to meaning and sense, indication brings in rule-bound relationships of association, in which the apprehension of something serves to motivate a belief in the reality of something else (Hua XIX/1, pp. 32, 35; 2001a, pp. 184, 186).Footnote 24

What is distinctive about the later genetic account is its concern with a manifold of appearances in which the intended thing has not yet been constituted. Here there is neither an object nor an ego directed towards it, which is why the performances within receptivity are characterised as “passive syntheses.” At the most fundamental level, these operations constitute the acts and temporal objects of experience (Hua XI, pp. 76–77; 2001c, pp. 118–119).Footnote 25 But this does not deal with the content of spatial perception, most notably in its visual mode, accepting that visual experience comes to be informed in ways outlined above (Hua XI, p. 128; 2001c, pp. 173–174). Through passive syntheses of heterogeneity and homogeneity, the field of vision that is encountered by egoic awareness has already been organised pre-egoically into elementary configurations or patterns. Let us imagine that an infant apprehends, amongst other multiplicities, a number of little red squares on a white surface. They contrast with the whiteness, and in so doing exercise an affectivity or allure on his or her consciousness, sending out affective rays of force and pulling on it. Once the allure becomes strong enough, that consciousness is motivated, not only to distinguish them from their heterogeneous surroundings, but also, and in the same blow, to group them together in the synthesis of homogeneity (Hua XI, pp. 129–131, 148–149; 2001c, pp. 174–177, 196–197). The relevant multiplicity gets prefigured or pre-constituted as one of a plurality of prominent patterns or configurations in the perceptual field, for it would be rare indeed for there to be just one multiplicity with a blank background.

The little red squares may be there for sight, but what is seen is more than a causal representation, since they are discrete of themselves. It falls to the affected passive sphere to put them together, to join them up in a configurational nexus. The performance is creative as well as reactive, and Husserl contends that extensional formations according to temporal and local configurations are none other than what Kant had in mind under the rubric of figurative synthesis, though in Husserl’s narrative there are as yet no concepts related to a manifold of sensible intuition. What our infant has apprehended is not yet a perceptual object, but an “object-like” formation that may become an object (Hua XI, pp. 162, 164; 2001c, pp. 210, 212–213).Footnote 26 This is because prominence in the perceptual field is not the achievement of attentive thematisation. This is arrived at through the pre-constituted configurations exercising affectivity in their turn. Having been synthesised and therefore detected, they competed with each other for attention.

When one wins out it reaches the foreground of awareness. The ego has been roused to turn towards it and constitute a thematic figure against a background with a noematic sense that will fuse those sides it may present (Hua XI, pp. 149–150, 166–167; 2001c, pp. 197, 214–215). For Husserl the affectivity in, and productivity of, passive syntheses are filtered preferentially as far as possible, calling on biological drives and a wider perceptual interest. When a child seeks to apprehend something and to discriminate more sensuous details by changing orientation, he or she can be prompted by aesthetic delight and curiosity rather than by a prefiguration of danger or the satisfaction of a physical need (Hua IV, 1952, pp. 189, 276–277; 1989, pp. 199, 289).Footnote 27 We can imagine our infant transfixed by the pattern of red patches. A parent then takes the same out from behind a pantry door with its grille and brings a red oval shape to a chopping board. In subsequent years the character of a red pepper and its contribution to a goulash will be communicated to the older child who has tasted such a dish. Yet the multiplicity may first have indicated (and hence been prefigured as) a bouncy red ball criss-crossed with white lines that the parent had always handed over after taking it out of a toy-box.

Could we not accept the reoccurrence of simple or straightforward perception as found in the early experience? Our little boy or girl, after all, establishes configurations and comes to pay attention to one of these, constituting a noematic perceptual sense. In doing so the baby is engaged in Dretske’s perception as simple seeing, differentiating something from its environment and trusting in its thereness, a sense to which Mulligan assimilates the early Husserl’s sensuous intuition. The later Husserl agrees that the infant perceives in this pre-conceptual manner, having an intentional background that lets him or her predelineate the behaviour of certain objects. There are certainly expectations that certain appearances will accompany or follow on from other ones—perhaps in our example what an adult would call the bouncing of the ball—but not the articulated appreciations of states of affairs.

As we can guess, the intentional background is highly complex. One thing will have an associative and interested horizon of chiefly olfactory and gustile expectations, another of visual and aural ones, each correlated with kinaesthetic and contextual anticipations. But the relevant identifications and corresponding bodily fulfilments, however complex, are not identifications that are meant. What the later Husserl does not allow, in my view, is the discrete, unmediated persistence of such straightforward perceptions. Granting that our infant grows into the space of logical signification, on this interpretation he or she then loses for good the ability to perceive in a manner that is epistemically innocent, in the sense of being unmediated by concepts and unsusceptible in principle to justification. The genetic and noematic accounts will therefore comprise abstract explications of perceptual performances that are no longer prior to or separated from conceptually marked active syntheses.

This view can be argued with diverging ends in mind, or at least from different directions. In a recent article on Husserl and McDowell on non-conceptual contents, Michael D. Barber has cited the following passage from Experience and Judgement as evidence that sensibility and conceptualisation are inseparably entwined in the eyes of Husserl:

When we distinguish two levels of interest and, corresponding to these, two levels of objectivating operations, viz., that belonging to receptive experience, on the one hand, and that of predicative spontaneity, on the other, this distinction of levels should not be construed as if the different operations were somehow separate from each other. On the contrary, things which must be treated separately for the sake of analysis and which, genetically, are recognised as belonging to different levels of objectivation are as a rule actually closely intertwined. That receptivity precedes predicative spontaneity does not mean that the former is something independent, as if it was always necessary first to run through a chain of receptive experiences before there could be any awakening of genuine cognitive interest. On the contrary, from the first we can already thematise a pre-given object in the interest of cognition, not only to examine it carefully, but in enduring cognitions “to confirm how it is.” In this situation, predicative forming and cognising go immediately hand in hand with receptive apprehension, and what is distinguished from a genetic point of view as belonging to different levels is in fact inseparably entwined in the concretion of one consciousness. These levels are, to be sure, always erected one upon the other; each step of the predication presupposes a step of receptive experience and explication, for only that can be originally predicated which has been originally given in an intuition, apprehended, and explicated (Husserl 1954, pp. 239–240; 1973a, pp. 203–204).Footnote 28

As I read it, what can be gleaned here is that we do not have to thematise what is pre-given in the cognitive interest. It is left open that predicative forming and receptive apprehension only run together in certain situations. Put another way, the inseparable entwining may refer to a conjunction that holds in particular cases rather than to a relationship that has come to assume a certain necessity, as universal as it is irreversible. That receptivity comes before predicative spontaneity does not entail that the former is independent in every situation, but it may be independent in some. Strong as it is, this passage is not completely conclusive. There are remarks that Husserl makes elsewhere, however, lending cumulative justification to the view that sensibility and conceptualisation become inseparably entwined. Whereas Barber is quite rightly concerned with defending the later Husserl’s commitment to separable non-conceptual horizon contents, I wish to go in the other direction, to stress that he should be regarded as being no less committed in his late works to universal and irreversible conceptualisation within perceptual experience, at least after infancy, such that a separate, discrete level of objectivating operations can be taken as no more than an abstraction.

5  

The commitment to conceptualism is indicated in The Idea of Phenomenology (1907). A perceived object, says Husserl, is not simply there to be seen, but is constituted synthetically by conscious lived experiences as a unity of cognition, one presented as such and such in its phenomenon (Hua II, pp. 11–13; 1964, pp. 9–10). This thesis is flagged in the Thing and Space lectures to which this work was composed as an introduction. The proper continuity of a thing must be established at the intellectual level, even if it is founded on the sensible level, so that it counts as a unity of judgment as well as a unity of representation. Only a logical synthesis of identification can produce the evident givenness of the identity of an object in and through various perceptions, i.e. the production of an identification that is meant categorially and not just performed (Hua XVI, pp. 152, 153, 155; 1997, pp, 127, 128, 132). But could a thing continue to be perceived as a mere unity of appearance, remaining finished at a straightforward level if not in the conceptual and predicative sense?

In Ideas I the very idea of levels is problematised. Husserl now remarks that all lived experiences that are intentional do not just hold their object fast. In their being intended noematically, the objects undergo performances of explicating and relating, no matter how differently structured the acts may be. Once we seize on something perceptually, we articulate its pieces or moments of the thing in relational acts. Husserl goes so far as to assert that all noetic acts and their noematic correlates are interwoven (verwoben) with the “logical” stratum of expressive (expressed and expressible) meanings, nominal and predicative. Having stated initially that expressive meaning raises the purely perceptual sense to the level of the universal, stamping this sense conceptually, he then warns that not too much should be expected from the metaphor of stratification. Expressive signification, whether accomplished aloud or carried out in silent cognition without verbal signifying, is not like a covering cloth or a layer of varnish above a pre-expressive stratum of sense. Rather it is a conscious formation that exercises new intentional functions on the intentional substratum, and which is subjected in turn to the functions of the latter (Hua III.1, pp. 202–203, 284–288; 1982, pp. 214, 294–297). The founding and the founded are now being run together, to the extent of being intermeshed one with the other, even if it is not yet asserted that the latter comes to permeate the former through and through.

In this light one can begin to understand a complete noema as the bearer of certain properties from which it is inseparable, and which cannot be reduced to the purely perceptual sense fusing aspects in its part-intentions. Taken collectively, the properties comprise the object in its fixed and changing determinations and relations at this or that experiential juncture (Hua III.1, pp. 300–303; 1982, pp. 312–315). Husserl affirms that some of these have to be cognised intellectually in the perception of an object, with their significations articulating it inferentially. When expressed predicatively the properties describe to a looser or more refined extent the determining content of the relevant object, objectivated expressibly as an actual enduring something and in its “whatness,” either individually or as part of a wider state of affairs with other things. I hear the rush of something down a pipe or chute, to provide a familiar example, and I recognise or objectivate it as a heap of coal destined to produce warmth. This is how the coal is looked upon in its immediacy, states Husserl, adding that it is a founded object, a unity of sensibility and understanding (Hua IV, pp. 187–188; 1989, pp. 197–198). The distinction is kept between single and multi-rayed intending, though one can find a greater warrant in the later work for construing nominal and propositional fulfilments as differentiations in one complex and interwoven act.

What underpins this claim is the thesis that the transition from phantom to aspect construal to thing there in the full-blooded sense—present to the perceiver as a determined and efficacious particular—goes from simple non-conceptual apprehension to conceptual understanding, from non-epistemic seeing and believing to articulated epistemic intuiting. It was noted that the sensuous experiences of hardness and weight by way of kinaesthetically felt resistance and pressure are required for the “seeing” of a stone breaking a window. Yet Husserl does not conclude that these necessary conditions of the experience amount to sufficient ones. In the overall perception there is the cognisance that some event is taking place because of certain objective properties that are possessed by this thing. To apprehend any particular as the substantial bearer of properties—and properties, moreover, that are also causal powers to accomplish certain results in certain situations—is to have engaged in an intellectual grasping that transcends straightforward sensuous intuition. This allows me to see the power of a hammer when it is not being swung, or the springiness of sheet steel lying flat. That “‘[s]uch and such appears under these or those circumstances’,” according to Husserl, “is the basic schema for the entire stock of determinations of a thing” (Hua XVI, p. 345; 1997, p. 301).Footnote 29

This looks consistent with the account of categorial intuition set out in Logical Investigations. To the extent that an object can be explicated and related to other objects, that is, be determined logically, remarks Husserl in Ideas I, it can take on syntactical forms, with the fulfilling correlates of such determining thinking being the syntactical categories. The form of whole and part expresses the broadest concept of that which contains and that which is contained, of which an efficacious existent with its hardness or heaviness is a particular instantiation in the region of physical nature. Although a categorial form is non-self-sufficient in that it has to refer back to the substrate or core whose form it is (characterised as an undetermined particular), the substrate is non-self-sufficient too, for it is unthinkable without the form (Hua III.1, pp. 28–29, 31, 34; 1982, pp. 23, 25, 28). Borrowing from Cobb-Stevens, I would hold that categorial grasping of a formal surplus in Husserl is a condition for the perception of a substantial thing as well as of its having a feature. Beyond a unity in aspects, the thing proper cannot be finished before becoming a term in a relation; to perceive it is to apprehend a term in its relation.

Such a developed apprehension of an object runs with the appreciation that worldly things and events are reportable to others as well as perceptible—it is part of my horizon of a perception that others can come to have it for themselves so as to confirm my story, so long as the object has not passed away. It is there for me and would be there for them if only they were on the scene. Thus the identical thing or event has the implicit sense of being intersubjectively available when I am alone, for it is related constitutively to subjects who understand one another—even if not actually shared, it is a shareable object, one that is nested in a public or intersubjective world. The world there for all is the correlate of intersubjective experience mediated by empathy, in that each perceiver is referred to the perceptual multiplicities of other subjects (Hua III.1, p. 352; 1982, p. 363). The appreciation of this is of course acute when one is glad that no one else is around, or for that matter sorry about their being absent.

Though Husserl can allow for simple or straightforward infant perception prior to the expressive (nominal, categorial and shareable) stage, he does not suppose that these come to adventitiously mark a simple seeing that would otherwise carry on regardless. He stresses that consciousness is an incessant, graduated process of constituting formations of sense through which an immanent teleology prevails (Hua XI, pp. 218–219; 2001c, p. 270/Hua XXXI, pp. 15–17; 2001c, pp. 288–289). The perceptual interest in arriving at richer and richer sensuous details of a thing is itself a forestage of the properly cognitive interest in articulating these details and putting them into relation (Husserl, 1954, p. 232; 1973a, pp. 197–198). Once it has been reached, moreover, there is no stage at the active level that becomes inert or a ne plus ultra:

An object that exercises an affection from the background, but that does not yet bear any traits that stem from active accomplishments, is actually a limit-concept for us, an abstraction, but a necessary one … so long as the ego has not actively formed its world, we cannot expect the firm path of knowledge given by a teleological relation to guiding ideas, and even the constitution of firm unities of identity, which unities, as genuine objectivities, give to the ego an environing-world and a rule for its further activities. And the ego must continually intervene with ever-new formations; it must not allow the objectivities that are already formed to be abandoned in the passive background and, so to speak, allow decay to rule. The organization of the realms of being, the realms of truth for the ego, especially of an objective world, as the environing-world of the ego, is an accomplishment acquired only through its activity and in higher formations through its fully conscious positing of goals and goal oriented activity. What concerns us is the understanding of the levels of this accomplishment, the originally prefigured system of their typical strides forward, and in this typicality, their necessary strides forward. … The consciousness of existence … is not only a progressive conscious-having in general, but a striving onward to a new consciousness. This striving is founded in an interest in the enrichment of the self [of the object] … The interest that we have described is the motive of active objectivation, of “knowledge or cognition,” and is therefore called “cognitive interest” (Hua XXXI, pp. 15–17; 2001c, pp. 288–290).

On its side, non-conceptual affectivity is not cast off like the spent stages of a rocket when active synthesis occurs. It goes towards keeping me interested, and as I get nearer to the recognised thing, new details may emerge that motivate further objectivations. But it is clear that productivity by way of affectivity is not confined to the non-conceptual side. As soon as something is thematised in an active and developed consciousness, some of its properties and relations are foregrounded as such, and these go towards motivating subsequent objectivations where more properties again will be carved out. The conceptual performances of articulation from the first experience may have sunk into post-egoic passivity, but as sedimented subconsciously, they play a role in future experience, contributing to the horizons of expectant and attendant significations in which like objects will be perceived (Hua I, pp. 111–113; 1960, pp. 77–79).Footnote 30 Not much indeed is expected from the metaphor of a layer covering over a pre-expressive stratum of sense.

Against this backdrop, it will be of no great surprise to read that the conceptualisation that takes place in a judgement about perception—e.g. “this is a red object”—is merely the instituting mode of the categorially informed awareness of a state of affairs. In the relevant judgement the signification “being-determined-as-red” establishes a relation to “redness.” Husserl differentiates between predicative forming on the one hand—that is, the judicative formation of generalities—and the operations of predicative thinking on the other. In these forms of determinative and relational awareness, the relation to generalities is contained implicitly, no longer being thematic. Predicative spontaneity only pertains to original judgements, whose outcomes can then function post-egoically. The outcomes are propositionally founded convictions predelineating smoothly and unobtrusively in the absence of experiences that would frustrate them (Husserl 1954, pp. 240–241, 250; Husserl 1973a, pp. 204–205, 212).Footnote 31 And as with empirical universality, so too with all those type-specific functions that are dependent on the conceptual comprehension of substantiality and causality. A child must first have learnt to perceive physical things, to give another of Husserl’s examples, if he or she is to understand for the first time the final sense of a pair of scissors that are espied in operation. From now on they are grasped as such, though not, he adds, “in an explicit reproducing, comparing and inferring” (Hua I, p. 141; 1960, p. 111).Footnote 32

In the world on hand for the adult subject, according to Husserl, he or she is always carrying out multi-layered acts, from which there arise ever-new objectivations at ever-higher levels. Hence the coal will come to be grasped as a commodity as well as in its role of heating material (Hua IV, p. 188; 1989, p. 198). As this tells us again, the mature interest that we have in articulating and relating things is not confined to the theoretical confirmation of how they are in enduring cognitions, also serving the practical goals of everyday adult life and cognising them in advance in this role. For the developed consciousness in its familiar lifeworld, in Husserl’s eyes, every object is apprehended or explicated in advance in extensive particularisations of types. Going from founded experiences to ones where categorial, expressive understanding is left out of play is not regarded as anything more than an abstraction, since it precedes objectivation and leaves the existent determined by nothing but its natural qualities, no longer having the sense of being available and reportable to all in a world taken as there for all (Husserl 1954, pp. 35, 56–57; 1973a, pp. 38, 56).Footnote 33

Such a genetic approach anticipates John McDowell’s claims, adverted to by Barber (2008, p. 90), that conceptual contents are always available, and that such conceptual capacities are brought into play before one has any choice in the matter. For McDowell, concepts are already operative in receptivity, structuring sensibility whilst falling beneath the level of spontaneity (where they are exercised actively in judgements). We cannot baldly assert that spontaneity must extend all the way out to the conceptual contents that sit closest to what he calls “the impacts of the world on our sensibility.” Having said this, he cautions against the view that these contents are manifested only in operations of receptivity, for they would not be recognisable as conceptual capacities in the first place unless they could also be exercised in active thinking. The passive operation of conceptual capacities in sensibility is not intelligible independently of their active employment (McDowell 1996, pp. 11–13).

Husserl agrees, and says as much in his explication of passive productivity. As noted above, the outcomes of original judgements can function post-egoically, predelineating experience as propositionally founded convictions. But it is only as such outcomes that they can be operative. He asserts quite unambiguously that every conceptual or categorial formation operative in passivity harks back to an active and synthetic accomplishment of the intellect. All the concepts referring back to the concept of the object in general—including those of “identical sense,” “modalities of being” and “verification”—attain their genuine character in activity, in judicative acts. And what was first accomplished in activity is in principle capable of reactivation. Its validity and its applicability can be established again, as was done the first time round (Hua XXXI, pp. 3; 40–41; 2001c, pp. 275, 312–313).

What the later Husserl would have difficulty in accepting, if I understand him correctly, is the contention—made by Mulligan, if I also comprehend him correctly—that continuous aspect perception can persist without subsumption of the seen under concepts, wordless or not. It was noted above that for a developed consciousness in its familiar lifeworld, every object is apprehended or explicated in advance in extensive particularisations of types. But our lifeworld can stretch beyond the familiar, and Husserl proceeds to state that something novel can affect us from the background and be constituted as an object, though it lacks a particular typification (Husserl 1954, p. 35; 1973a, p. 39).Footnote 34 Never having been experienced beforehand, it is surely conceivable that it would be unable to prompt a noematic sense possessed of a conceptually predelineating horizon of identification, that is to say, one that is meant as well as performed.

The absence of typification, however, is not the absence of conceptualisation. If there is to be a belief that something is there, then on the late view it cannot be a purely de re belief in the sense demanded by Mulligan. Now Husserl never ceases to affirm the presence in straightforward perception of the belief in the being of the thing before me, albeit one that must be subtended kinaesthetically. This belief has the character of original or primordial opinion (Urdoxa). It is the simple unreflective trust in the “thereness” of the object (and in the abidingness of the background world) that precedes judicative, determining performances (Husserl 1954, pp. 53, 60; 1973a, pp. 53, 59). With Dretske, the belief is fixed by what is seen and not by conceptual or descriptive factors, yet it does not as a result remain unmarked by the latter. For a developed consciousness, it is too late to see something—material thing or chimera—without the understanding of efficacy and substantiality being in some way implicated in the experience. The apprehension of a sensible object in general, maintains Husserl, even if completely indeterminate and unknown, still entails an element of familiarity or “familiar unfamiliarity,” being experienced from the start as something that somehow or other is, and that is capable of explication (Husserl 1954, pp. 34–35; 1973a, pp. 38–39).Footnote 35 And all this before one tries to explore the extensive range of attempted judicative typifications that would be immediately aroused by the wondering perception of a novel something.

Where one might find it more likely to uncover purely non-conceptual contents would be in the perceptual background, prior to the level of attention. If it seems to strain a hypothesis to take everything in this field as a causal representation, it might seem no less strained to take it as implicitly conceptual. Be this as it may, it is the second view that the Husserlian account already allows for, at least in one’s familiar lifeworld or homeworld. We may recall that, on his mature view, something exercising affectivity from the background but not yet bearing traits originating in active accomplishments is an abstraction, however necessary. Once it is granted that thematised, noematically interpreted figures are informed conceptually, and that conceptual accomplishments are also operative at the passive level before one has any choice in the matter, it is left open that pattern formation as well as pattern recognition can sustain contributions from such sedimented accomplishments. They could help to establish a configuration inferentially, and facilitate its getting to the foreground. This is not to assert that conceptual determinations would be more than broad and loose in their function, so that perceptual determinations could not run ahead of them.Footnote 36

Since a conceptual contribution to the initial configuring in everyday experience is not affirmed by Husserl himself (so far as I am aware), his account might appear to have something of a vague and catch-all generality in this regard; here his position is not developed and defended in a manner that is interesting philosophically. But this would be to forget that, in his studies of constitution, Husserl’s emphasis is on the non-conceptual contents of perception. Put starkly, refining a commitment to conceptualism in adulthood is not his major concern in his turn to genetic analyses. His focus is on the non-conceptual contributions to experience in early life, the contents of which are at least notionally separable from articulation and explication. For him the core task is to foreground these contributions. Hence a form/content schema is only deposed in favour of a schema of forms with pre-formed contents. Beyond bare causes and drives, interested passive syntheses and noematic senses informed by movements and kinaestheses are prerequisites for the achievement (and by the same token the referential purchase) of conceptual understanding (Hua I, pp. 112–113; 1960, pp. 78–80).

As noted above, these founding performances give rise to the de re aspects of perceptual belief, in that they allow objects to emerge in performative (and naively credulous) identifications that are prior logically and temporally to the recursive, idealising character of concepts. For Husserl, the primordial level of trust or belief or doxa that is founded on straightforward perceptual evidence is not a domain of lesser rank than that of epistēmē, of judicative knowledge and its sedimentations. What is finally inseparable from conceptual cognition is neither reducible to it, nor inferior to it, and cannot be captured adequately by its idealisations. This is not to denigrate understanding but simply to recommend that the origin and specific rights of the lower stages not be forgotten (Husserl 1964, pp. 44–45; 1973a, p. 46). In Merleau-Ponty’s rendition, the child’s outlook must somehow be vindicated against that of the adult, and my greatest attempt at impartiality would not assure me of prevailing over my subjectivity, if I had not, underlying my judgments, the primordial certainty of being in contact with Being itself (Merleau-Ponty 1945, p. 408; 1962, p. 355). This is nicely suggestive, even if overwrought with a distinction unknown in early life. But if the intellectual level of perception is not the later Husserl’s core concern, it is scarcely wrong-headed to affirm that he does not conclude with a pre-expressive innocence of simple seeing any more than he commences with an operative net of concepts going all the way down.