Noetic Insight and Noematic Recalcitrance

Abstract

There are not many facts about the noema, and the portrait that emerges from them is far from clear. Thus a “phenomenology of the noema” that would follow Husserl’s instructions on how to do phenomenology begins with difficulties that may well be responsible for the variety of incompatible descriptions in the phenomenological community and on so many pages of commentary. This lack of consensus about a central feature of Husserlian phenomenology presents a challenge (at best) and a confusion (at worst) to readers new to Husserlian scholarship. But in the context of a symposium devoted not to using noematic analysis for phenomenological investigations of other topics, but to developing a “phenomenology of the noema,” we can appreciate and even savor Husserl’s injunction: Be a perpetual beginner; question, radically, the very subject-matter at issue.¹ Very well: our subject-matter is the noema. We want then to consider what it is, why Husserl introduced it, and how it functions in phenomenological practice. In other words, we want to consider the noema’s character, value, and purpose.