The Concept of the Noema in TFP

Here is Husserl's concept of the noema, based on Dagfinn Follesdal's understanding of Husserl's ideas and illustrated by the flow diagram in my Transcendental Feedback Phenomenology (TFP) analysis of the purgation or dark night of the soul phase of a religious experience that culminated in mystical union.
(I'll be quoting from the following article: Follesdal D. 1998. "Edmund Husserl," in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol.4:574-588. Routledge: London.)

I am claiming that the flow diagram in TFP's analysis of purgation is an illustration of Husserl's noema:

The flow diagram for purgation is shown at the end of this web page.

On page 574 of Follesdal's article, he says:

"Brentano had characterized intentionality as a special kind of directedness upon an object. This leads to difficulties in cases of hallucination and serious misperception, where there is no object. Also, it leaves open the question of what the directedness of consciousness consists in. Husserl therefore endeavours to give a detailed analysis of those features of consciousness that make it as if an object. The collection of all these features Husserl calls the act's 'noema'. The noema unifies the consciousness we have at a certain time into an act that is seemingly directed towards an object. The noema is hence not the object that the act is directed towards, but is the structure that makes our consciousness be as if of such an object."
Note that the flow diagram, shown at the end of this web page, is a feedback structure. Also the key intentionality of purgation is the bizarre, though sacred, mental image of 'the heart opening against a resistance in the form of a knot in the heart'. Such a mental image would be labeled by Brentano (1874) as having intentional inexistence. The reality of the mental image is its reification in antagonistic heart muscles.

On page 577 of Follesdal's article, he further indicates that the noema is a structure:
"The structure that makes up the directedness of consciousness, Husserl called the 'noema'."
On pages 577-578:
"... the noema has two main components. First, the 'objective meaning' that integrates the various constituents of our experience into experiences of the various features of one object, and second, the 'thetic' component that differentiates acts of different kinds, for example, the act of perceiving an object from the act of remembering it or thinking about it. The thetic component is thereby crucial for the reality-character which we ascribe to the object."
In my flow diagram for purgation some of the object meaning is given by the following variables or noemata:
KnotsInHeart, HeartRigidityFactor, HeartOpenness, HeartUnfoldmentRate, OpeningPressure, NormalOpeningPressure, AdditionalOpeningPressure.

Here are noemata or variables in the flow diagram that are thetic components for purgation:

  1. Remembering: ShortTermMemory and the two LongTermMemories
  2. Perceiving: ShortTermMemory(STM)RetrivalAccuracy, PrimaryInformationProcessingRate, RecodingFactor, Attention.
  3. Thinking: KnotOriginInsight, PrayerTrueness
  4. Praying: PrayerTrueness, PrayerIntensity, PrayerQuality.

An explanation of the flow diagram, below, can be accessed here.


Arlen Wolpert

http://world.std.com/~awolpert/gtr492.html

June 26,2003

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