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10 INTRODUCTION

The Years at Gttingen (19011916)

If the years at Halle were marked by the appearance of theLogical Investiga-

tions, the years at Gttingen were marked by the appearance in 1913 of the

first volume of Husserls Ideen zu einer re inen P hnomenologie und

phnomenologischen Philosophie(Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenol-

ogy and to a Phenomenological Philosophy) and the more or less simulta-

neous publication of a second edition of the Logic al Investigations that

included some revisions of theProlegomena and the first five investigations,

but no revisions in the sixth. The Investigations were not radically revised

pro bably because Husserl recognized that the scope of the revisions wouldrequire a new work. Nevertheless, the years from 1901 to 1913 mark for

Husserl a profound rethinking of his philosophy. During this period Husserl

rad ica l ly re thought bo th h is log ica l v iews and h is v iew of what a n

epistemological critique of experience involved. He developed subtle analyses

of consciousness, including our awareness of the temporal flow of experience

and the discovery of what he called absolute consciousness, that is, the14

consciousness that is aware of the inner or subjective or phenomenal

temporality of the flow of experience and its contents. Finally, during these

years he formulated the first explicit statements of his new ph ilosoph ical

method.

There are three lines along which Husserls development in these years

can be traced: the continued analysis o f mean ing (Bedeutung) and sense

(Sinn) ; the notion of epistemological critique; and the analyses of the

consciousness of inner time. If we return first to the question of meaning, we

find that by 1908 Husserl had come to think that exploring the objective or

ontic dimension of meaning led to a more properly phenomenological

account of meaning. Indeed, by the time ofIdeas Ihe comes to view this

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broader notion of objective sense even as underlying the meanings at work

in linguistic expressions. In the years between the first edition of theLogical16

Investigations and Ideas I, in short, Husserl turns to the investigation of the

correlation between the subjective and ontic dimensions of meaning

through the analysis of what he came to call in Ideas I the noetic and

noematic dimensions of the intentional correlation between an act and its

object.

It is, however, difficult to discern what Husserl means by this ontic or

noematic dimension of meaning, for in responding to the problem ofobjectless presentations in the Logical Investigations, Husserl had drawn a

distinction between the object that is intended and the object as it is intended

or meant. The act, he had said, that confers meaning on a sensible sign

emptily intends an object as such-and-such, an intentional object. Intending

an object as such-and-such, that is, an experiences having an intentional