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Ideologies Old and new ways of ideas Order may be conferred upon the following unchronologically arranged reminders of the history of thinking about linguistic representation if they are prefaced by the reminder that the word Gegenstand, so frequently used by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and that word’s Latinate predecessor “object” bring with them the notion of something that is over against or cast in front and so stands in the way. A further complexity arises for us today from the fact that when the Scholastics, followed by Descartes and others, speak of the objective reality of an idea as distinct from its formal reality, objective means throwing before, projective. He says in the Preface added after the first edition of the Meditations that the formal reality of an idea is the idea as a psychological entity or operation “taken materially,” meaning by this taken in abstraction from what the Scholastics, followed by Brentano and Husserl, call its intentionality. In a reply to Caterus, Descartes cites from himself a statement that anticipates a point upon which Husserl will insist and upon the interpretation of which will turn what one thinks about representation in language: “The idea is the thing itself conceived or thought in so far as it is objectively in the understanding.” The star as obONE 10 | PHENOMENOLOGY OF LANGUAGE served by the astronomer through the “objective” lens of his telescope is not in his mind or in his eye or in his mind’s eye in the manner in which it is in the sky. Only with respect to its formal (or “material”) reality is the idea in the mind in the way that the star is in the sky. And as soon as our topic changes from that of the objective to the formal reality of the idea there results a compensating change in the idea of the mind that it occupies. The mind and its contents now become the topic of scientific study as when the astronomer’s own experience of seeing the star gives way to a third-personal treatment of that experience as a case to be investigated by the science of optics. Of course the word “contents” which I have just used repeats the ambiguity of the word “in.” It encourages the thought just expressed that the occupation of the mind by ideas is like the occupation of space by the star, except that instead of occupying the dimensions of space and time, the idea occupies the temporal flow of consciousness. Like the star itself, the idea will still be a thing, but instead of being objectively observable in the modern sense of this adverb it will be observable only by the subject whose idea it is. This is the move that appears to be made by “the way of ideas” followed by classical empiricism . It is in order to counter this move that Husserl, echoing the sentence of which Descartes reminds Caterus, insists that when he says consciousness has the structure of noēsis–noēma or cogito–cogitatum, although the noēma is an Objekt it is not an entity additional to the Gegenstand—not additional to, for example, a spatio-temporal thing. It is nothing other than the thing itself in its appearing as the accusative of consciousness or as phenomenon. The Husserlian “noēma” is not a freestanding psychological content (Inhalt ) associated with other such contents by contiguity, resemblance, or causality . And if it can be called an idea it cannot be called inert, as Berkeley calls ideas of corporeal things. The hyphen Husserl inserts between “noēsis” and “noēma” indicates not a gap but a connection, one that can never be removed. A noēma is always animated (beseelt) by an act of noēsis, and noēsis is never without a noēma. But at least in the early writings, for example in the Logical Investigations, where some of the work done by the terms noēsis and noēma is performed by the terms Sinn and Bedeutung (though without the specific forces these terms are given by Frege), Husserl argues that, even where the topic is that of the meaning of linguistic signs, this animation need not in principle be the animation of the words of an empirical language. Our interest here, however, is not the question of the dependence of meaning on empirical linguistic expression (though some aspects of this question will be treated in chapter 6). Our interest here is the...

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