Husserl's Immanence and the Ghost of Frege's Third Realm — Epoche C2
Husserl's noema — introduced in Ideen I (1913) as the objective correlate of an act of consciousness, the perceived tree precisely as perceived rather than the tree standing in the orchard — is regularly credited with securing mental content inside consciousness, and so with sidestepping the difficulties about reference that beset externalist accounts of content. The credit is not earned. On the reading that makes it intelligible in the first place, the noema occupies exactly the position Frege assigned to thoughts in what he called a third realm, neither the outer world of things nor the inner world of ideas. Two qualifications have to be entered at once, because the compressed version of this argument omitted both. First, the reading in question is not neutral: it is the interpretation Dagfinn Føllesdal set out in 1969, and it is rejected by phenomenologists who deny that the noema is any entity distinct from the object intended. Second, "third realm" is not a phrase from "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" (1892), where Frege introduces sense; it comes from "Der Gedanke" (1918), and what Frege argues there is more specific, and more useful here, than the slogan suggests. What the reduction leaves standing, and in which sense Everything in the argument turns on a distinction Husserl draws in Ideen I , so it has to be in place before anything else. The epochē suspends judgement on the existence of the world without denying it; the residue is the stream of mental processes together with their directedness. Within that residue Husserl separates what is reell — really inherent — in a mental process from what belongs to it only intentionally. The really inherent components are the sensory material and the animating moments that interpret it: these are literally parts of the stream, running through the same immanent time as the act. The noema is not a part of the stream at all. It is the act's intentional correlate, and Husserl insists on the difference in the sharpest terms available to him. His illustration in §89 is the decisive text. The tree in the orchard can burn, and can be resolved into its chemical constituents; the perceptual sense — the perceived-tree-as-such, which belongs inseparably to the perception — cannot burn, has no chemical constituents, no forces, and no real properties. That sentence is not a slip. Husserl is stating in his own voice that the sense is not a real item and does not stand in causal relations. So the charge that he inadvertently manufactured a category of objective yet non-actual entities is misdirected; he manufactured it deliberately, as the price of an account on which the same sense can inform many acts. The live question is not whether he noticed, but whether the category is coherent, and whether the phenomenological method earns anything by it that Frege's does not. Husserl's own two senses of immanence: the first correction The compressed version of this argument accused Husserl of blurring an "empirical immanence" of mental states with a "transcendental immanence" of ideal meanings. As stated the accusation cannot be sustained, because Husserl had already drawn the distinction himself, and drew it before Ideen I . In the five lectures of 1907 published as Die Idee der Phänomenologie he separates two pairs of concepts that ordinary usage runs together. The first pair is real inherence and its absence: whether an item is contained as a genuine part of the cognitive act. The second is absolute self-givenness and its absence: whether an item constitutes itself in the seeing with the fullest evidence, or is merely meant beyond what is given. Husserl says explicitly that the first pair is the naive one and that phenomenology needs the second, since the whole point of the reduction is to secure a field of what is self-given rather than a field of what is inside the head. Once the two pairs are separated, an item can be really transcendent — no part of the act — and yet immanent in the second sense, absolutely given. That is exactly the slot the noema occupies. So the difficulty is not that Husserl confused two immanences. It is that the noema falls under neither of the familiar categories he was disambiguating: it is not a real component of the stream, and it is not a worldly object. It is a third thing, and a third thing has no obvious address in an ontology of acts and their objects. Stated this way the objection is harder to answer than the charge of carelessness was, because it cannot be met by producing the distinction Husserl had already made. Frege's third realm, as Frege stated it: the second correction Since the parallel is to be argued rather than asserted, Frege's actual criteria are needed, not the label. His argument in "Der Gedanke" is a partition by elimination. A thought — the sense of a declarative sentence, that for which the question of truth can arise — is not a thing of the outer world, because it cannot be perceived by the senses. Neither is it an idea in the sense of a Vorstellung , because an idea requires a bearer, belongs to exactly one bearer, and cannot be had by two people, whereas the Pythagorean theorem is grasped by many without being thereby multiplied into many theorems. Being neither, thoughts require a third realm, whose members share imperceptibility with ideas and independence of a bearer with things. Frege adds a qualification usually dropped in summary: thoughts are not actual in the sense of acting on things, yet a thought does act, in the only way open to it, by being grasped and taken to be true, and the grasping has consequences in the world. The gain and the cost are both worth naming, because the essay's thesis depends on which of them transfers. The gain is objectivity without psychologism: one and the same thought is available to everyone, so logic does not reduce to a description of how people happen to think. The cost is that Frege has no account of grasping. The relation between a mind and an item in the third rea