Intentionality and the noesis-noema structure: is the noema an intensional sense in the Fregean manner, or the object itself in its mode of givenness?

Edmund Husserl, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Consciousness is always consciousness of something; this is the formal expression of intentionality. Every act of consciousness has an act-content-object structure: the noesis (the intending act, the conscious living-through), the noema (the intended-as- intended, the object in its mode of givenness), and the object itself.12 The noema is not a mental intermediary between consciousness and the world, not an inner picture, not a private sense in the head; it is the object as intended, with the determinations through which it presents itself.3 The noema is no more an additional entity than is the seen-as-seen additional to the seen.45

Sources

  1. That carries over naturally to every generic and specific formation [of consciousness]. As a consequence of recognizing the essential two-sidedness of intentionality in terms of noesis and noema, a systematic phenomenology may not direct its attention one-sidedly at a real [reelle] analysis ** Fourth Section First Chapter: The Noematic Sense and the Relation to the Object 129 ** experiences and…
    Ideas I, p. 255
  2. Thus, the noema, too, refers to an object and possesses a "content," "by means of" which it refers to the object, whereby the object is the same object as that of the noesis, once again completely confirming the "parallelism." 130 Circumscribing the essence "noematic sense" Let us move closer to these remarkable structures.
    Ideas I, pp. 258–259
  3. One sees at once that the very same thing which, in relation to the intentional object, is called its presentation, i.e. the perceiving, remembering, picturing, symbolizing intention directed towards it, is also called an interpretation, conception, apperceptionin relation to the sensations really present in this act.
    Logical Investigations Vol 2, pp. 176–177
  4. But talk of "intending" [Meinen] is normally restricted to narrower spheres that function, however, at the same time as sublayers of the phenomena of wider spheres. For this reason, the word (and the expressions akin to it) can come into consideration as a term only for these narrower spheres. Our new terms and the accompanying analyses of examples certainly serve us better for the generalities we are considering.
    Ideas I, pp. 192–193
  5. We shall first have to distinguish three concepts of the intentional content: the intentional object of the act, its intentional material (as opposed to its intentional quality) and, lastly its intentional essence. These distinctions will become familiar in the course of the following very general analyses, which are also essential to the more restricted aim of clarifying the essence of knowledge.
    Logical Investigations Vol 2, pp. 188–189

Where the argument is made

  • Logical Investigations Vol 2, Investigation V (On Intentional Experiences and their Contents) §§9-21 on the schema of act, content, object
  • Investigation VI on signitive and intuitive givenness, fulfillment, and categorial intuition
  • Ideas I §§87-96 on noesis and noema
  • Cartesian Meditations §§14-22 on the cogito-cogitatum structure

How the argument was received

The Føllesdal-Smith-McIntyre Fregean reading (the noema as an intensional Fregean sense, analogous to Sinn in 'Über Sinn und Bedeutung') dominated American Husserl scholarship from 1969 through the 1990s and remains live in analytic philosophy of mind. The continental reading (Sokolowski, Drummond, Zahavi, Bernet) reads the noema as the object itself in its mode of givenness, not as an abstract sense-entity. Zahavi's Husserl's Phenomenology (2003) Chapter 1 makes the case for the continental reading on textual grounds. The debate is a structural feature of analytic- continental Husserl scholarship.