One thing, more than one appearance

What you will work out

• Distinguish an object from its present appearance.
• Distinguish an act of experience from its intentional correlate: what is experienced, as it is experienced.
• Explain why intentionality requires neither an inner picture nor an infallible report about what exists.

The back of the box

Imagine a small wooden box on a desk. From your chair you can see the lid and two sides, but not the back. Someone turns the box, and a repaired hinge comes into view. You had assumed the box had never been repaired; now you know better.

Two changes have taken place here, and they are worth separating. A different side has become visible, and a belief about the box has been corrected. Neither change requires a second box: you are encountering the same thing while learning something you had missed.

How is that possible? A mere list of visible surfaces would not tell us whether they were views of one thing or of several. Yet the repair appears as a repair to the box that was already there. The new view belongs with the earlier one, and the hidden back belonged to what you were looking at before it came into view.

The back’s details could surprise you precisely because you had not seen them. What was already at work was a more general expectation: this thing has further sides that might come into view. The back was neither visible nor simply missing from what the experience meant; it belonged to the box as something still to be explored. An object is present through an appearance that does not exhaust it.

Husserl makes this relationship a subject of inquiry. Phenomenology examines how things are given in experience: what we encounter, how we encounter it and the connections that make an experience an experience of something. In his inaugural lecture he describes changing views that belong to one continuous awareness of the same object; merely listing the views would leave their unity unexplained.[1]

Seeing, remembering, imagining

Later you remember the box. You can remember it as the box with the repaired hinge, though it is no longer in front of you. Or you can imagine the same box painted blue, without believing that anyone has painted it.

The box can remain the object of attention while the mode of experience, the way it is given, changes. Perception presents it as there before you; remembering presents it as encountered before. Freely imagining it painted blue does not, by itself, present blue paint as a fact about its past or present. Husserl distinguishes such modes in §91 of Ideas I.[2]

A memory does not turn into present sight by becoming more vivid, and remembering the box as encountered before does not guarantee an accurate account of that encounter. The distinction concerns the kind of claim implicit in each experience, not merely the strength of an image or the confidence of a report.

The same caution applies to perception. Seeing the box from one side did not warrant the belief that it had never been repaired. How an object is presented is one question; how much that presentation entitles us to say about it is another.

An experience is of something

Each of these experiences is directed toward something, and Husserl’s term for this directedness is intentionality. Seeing the box, remembering it and imagining it painted blue are all intentional in this sense. No deliberate plan is required: an unexpected glimpse can be as much about something as a careful inspection.

Two questions now help. Is someone perceiving, remembering, imagining or judging? And what is experienced, precisely as it is experienced? Husserl distinguishes the act from its intentional correlate. “Act” here means a process of experiencing, including one that happens without any decision. The correlate is what is perceived as perceived, remembered as remembered or judged as judged: this box as seen from here, or that box as remembered later.[3]

If we describe only the box’s measurements, we leave out whether anyone is seeing it or remembering it. If we say only that a mental event occurred, we leave out what makes it a memory of this box rather than of something else. An adequate account needs both sides. They belong together without being interchangeable: turning the box changes what is visible, while remembering it later changes how it is given.

“Object” and “correlate” therefore answer different questions. We can identify the box that the experiences concern, then ask how it is presented in each; the box can stay the same while these descriptions differ. Husserl’s own terms noesis and noema belong to this analysis of the experiencing and its correlate. They are worth recognizing, but as labels, not as further concepts the present lesson needs.[3]

Why add an inner picture?

The hidden back can make a simple explanation attractive. You do not see the whole box, so perhaps what you really see is an inner picture, from which you infer an external box behind it.

Husserl objects to this account. In the experience described, what is seen is the box; no second box or picture is being inspected inside the experience. A photograph of a box would be a different case: a picture is encountered as depicting something. To treat all perception as picture-viewing is to import that further relation without explaining it.[4]

The explanation also reproduces the problem it was meant to solve. A picture does not explain experience merely by being there: it has to be experienced as a picture of something, so the account has called on another intentional relation after all. If every such relation needs a further picture, the explanation never gets started. If it can be understood without one, then directedness does not require the inner picture proposed at the outset.

This does not abolish research into how perception occurs; light, eyes and nervous systems can still be investigated. The point is narrower. An unseen side does not oblige us to replace the experienced object with a little replica watched from within, and a causal account must not be confused with an account of what is experienced.

Error leaves something to describe

Discovering the hinge corrects a belief about the box without erasing the earlier encounter. The correction makes sense because the earlier view and the later discovery concern the same thing. An account of the error has to keep hold of what the error was about.

But a mistake about a feature should be kept apart from a question about existence itself. Someone can imagine a box that has never existed, and Husserl also considers apparent perception with no actual object corresponding to it. Such an experience can still be described as being of something in a particular way, but the description is no certificate that the thing exists.[3][4]

Suppose that, for the purpose of description, we leave a claim about existence undecided. The differences between perceiving, remembering and imagining remain. We can describe an object as experienced as present without using its existence as a premise ourselves: we have suspended the use of a claim, not proved its opposite. That distinction matters to Husserl’s method, though his proposal to suspend the ordinary acceptance of the world reaches much further than checking whether one object is there. Its scope and justification belong to the next lesson.[4]

This modest distinction hides no complete theory of illusion. Saying that an experience has an intentional correlate does not establish when an apparent perception should be trusted. What the distinction does is give that problem a clearer form: what was presented, in what manner and with what claim to reality?

But description already has concepts

An objection has been waiting since the first sentence. We called the thing a box, which is a learned concept, and we assumed that turning it gives another view of the same thing. How can a description claim to start without assumptions when understanding of this kind is already at work?

The objection has force. Listing what seems obvious does not remove the concepts through which it seems obvious, and Husserl himself warns that familiar words can bring misleading interpretations with them and that descriptions can need correction.[4][5]

For the present example, a more modest reply is available. Using a learned concept does not make every description equally good. “I saw the repaired hinge” misdescribes the first encounter; “I saw a box whose back was hidden” keeps the difference between what was visible and what could still surprise the viewer. The second description uses concepts too, but it is more faithful to the case. An account improves when we make such distinctions explicit and test them against a competing description.

The example gives us a continuous encounter with one box; it cannot prove that every identification of an object is correct. Where an identification is disputed, we can distinguish someone’s taking two appearances to belong to the same thing from establishing that they do, and so describe the claim without settling it in advance.

What we have, then, is a revisable description. It has not shown that we can set aside every assumption on which our understanding depends. The objection limits what the example establishes without making the example pointless.

Husserl intends to go further. He seeks to discover which structures any possible experience of a given kind must have, and to make that knowledge a rigorous foundation for philosophy. In the inaugural lecture he compares this ambition with mathematics, where an argument is meant to establish more than a pattern noticed in a few cases; he offers the comparison as an analogy, and the difficult work of inquiry is still required.[1] In §87 of Ideas I, his confidence in a disciplined method comes with an acknowledgment that descriptions can be wrong.[5]

We should keep both parts of that ambition in view. Husserl is seeking necessities, and an attractive description is not enough to establish one. Whether his method can warrant that further step is the question we take into the next lesson.

Try the distinction

Imagine that Odile sees an opaque jar on a kitchen shelf. From one side she can read the label “Coffee.” She takes the jar to contain coffee but does not open it. Later, away from the kitchen, she remembers the jar and thinks of making coffee. On her next visit, its owner explains that it contains rice: an old label was left on it. The owner replaces the label with one reading “Rice.” Assume that this correction is true and that no one changed the contents in between.

What survives the correction? Distinguish the jar, its contents, the modes in which Odile experiences it and what replacing the label changes. Does the error show that she first encountered an inner picture, or that her earlier experience was about nothing? Must seeing a jar as a coffee jar be described in exactly the same way as seeing a jar and then judging that it contains coffee? Give reasons for your interpretation. Writing an answer is optional, and the case asks for no personal disclosure.

A possible response

A good deal survives the correction: the jar, Odile’s earlier encounter with it and her memory of it. What changes is her judgment about what the jar contains, along with the label on its side.

At first Odile perceives the jar through a partial view. She sees the word “Coffee”; she does not see coffee through the opaque sides. The visible label gives her a reason to expect particular contents, but it neither makes those contents visible nor guarantees what they are. The jar, its label and what it contains are distinct things to keep track of.

Away from the kitchen, she remembers the jar as something encountered before. This is a new act concerning the earlier object, not a fresh view of its present condition. Thinking of making coffee could also involve imagining a future use, though the story does not say whether it does; we can identify the mode of remembering without inventing further details of Odile’s experience.

On the next visit, the owner’s explanation gives her reason to revise her judgment about the contents. We have been asked to assume that the explanation is true. In an actual dispute, the owner’s statement would be evidence to assess, and this philosophical distinction would not make it infallible. In the stipulated case, Odile encountered an actual jar of rice while taking it to contain coffee. She may still remember it as containing coffee, but that attribution does not reproduce a sight of the contents: she never saw them.

Replacing the label changes a physical feature of how the jar is presented; accepting the explanation changes Odile’s understanding. Neither turns the rice into something else, and neither supplies a new jar. It remains true that she previously read “Coffee.” A more accurate description of that earlier encounter must keep the mistaken attribution, rather than retrospectively putting the word “Rice” on the old label.

The distinction between act and correlate keeps this account exact. Perceiving the jar, remembering it and judging what it contains can each be described together with what is perceived, remembered or judged. The jar-as-remembered can still concern the original jar even though one belief carried with the memory was false. Equally, what was judged, that the jar contains coffee, does not become true merely by being the correlate of a judgment.

Nor does the mistake give any reason to put an inner picture between Odile and the jar. A real object can be misidentified in one respect, and if an inner picture were proposed as the explanation, we would still have to explain how it was experienced as representing this jar. Error does not make that problem go away.

As for the last question, at least two accounts of how the label and the belief were connected are defensible. Odile may have encountered the thing at once as the coffee jar, with its expected use already part of her understanding. Or she may first have noticed a jar and its lettering, then judged separately that the lettering was reliable. The story does not decide between these descriptions. The second separates a perceptual act more sharply from a judgment based on it; the first stresses how an object may already be understood when it is encountered. Neither lets us say that coffee itself was visible.

A good alternative states which relation it is describing and why the evidence allows it; simply deleting Odile’s belief about coffee would evade the stipulated mistake. Both defensible accounts can keep the same jar across perception and memory while correcting what was believed about it. That is a local success for these distinctions, not a proof that every apparent perception or memory identifies an existing thing.

Sources and limits

[1] Edmund Husserl, “Pure Phenomenology, its Method, and its Field of Investigation,” inaugural lecture (1917), translated by Robert Welsh Jordan, in Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney, eds., The Phenomenology Reader (Routledge, 2002), pp. 124–133, for the unity of an object across changing views and for Husserl’s foundational ambition. Page 125 develops one object through changing views; pp. 125–127 distinguish kinds of experience; pp. 131–133 state the ambition to investigate necessary structures. The anthology’s credit line names Husserl: Shorter Works, edited by Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (1981), pp. 10–17. Its translator note distinguishes two German words that are both translated as “object”; in that translation, capitalization carries a distinction that ordinary English usage does not mark.

[2] Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book (1913), translated by F. Kersten (1983), in the same anthology, §91, pp. 140–141, for the modes of experience. The lesson calls this work Ideas I; a section sign (§) marks one of its numbered sections. Here Husserl distinguishes the modes in which something is perceived, remembered or imagined, even when the description of the object has something in common.

[3] Ideas I, §88, pp. 135–137, with notes 1–2 on p. 150, for the distinction between an experience and its correlate. Husserl’s own example there is a blossoming apple tree; the box and the jar are original teaching examples. “Correlate” is used here to introduce the distinction; the disputed nature of the noema is left open.

[4] Ideas I, §90, pp. 138–140, with note 3 on p. 150. This section supplies the argument against a second inner object or picture, distinguishes meaningful experience from a guarantee of existence and explains suspension without denial. The lesson also draws on the lecture, pp. 129–131. Its account does not depend on the doubtful wording of one clause in §89 (p. 137), and it offers no full theory of hallucination.

[5] Ideas I, §87, pp. 134–135, recognizes both the difficulty of phenomenological description and the possibility of error and correction. The objection about learned concepts and the limited reply developed here are ways of assessing our example; they do not replace Husserl’s stronger foundational claims. The lesson rests on the anthology’s §§87–91, ending before §92, and on the complete lecture as displayed there, with its translator note on p. 133. Page 150 contains six notes, of which only 1–3 attach to §§87–91; their references to other works are pointers for further reading, not arguments developed in this lesson. All locators above refer to this anthology and these translations.