In the early Husserlʼs theory of intentionality, he established a sophisticated account for our mental actʼs relation toward its object. Later, some new elements were introduced into the middle Husserlʼs theory of intentionality, such as concepts of “phenomenological reduction”, “noesis-noema correlation”, and so on. His theory is famous for such concepts. But a question remains of what the significance of such changes consists in. To what extent do these two forms of Husserlʼs theory differ? Or,do they differ from each other merely terminologically? In order to answer these questions, the present paper concentrates on the concept of “noema”. More specifically, the central issue is : whether the meaning-object correlation in the early theory corresponds with the noesis-noema correlation in the middle theory.
Husserl himself sometimes characterized the concept of noema as “the intended object as it is intended”. Therefore it is natural to interpret the concept of noema as somewhat modified concept of object, construing that noema is ontologically identical with object itself. Indeed, not a few writers think so, like Dan Zahavi, John Drummond and so on. But Husserl also calls noema “meaning”, hence a question arises. Which is noema, object or meaning? To answer this question correctly, the concept of “determinable X” in neoma is essential. I will argue that this concept is the key to understand the reason why the concept of noema had to be introduced, in addition to (noetic) meanings and objects. An essential point is identification of object, within temporal succession of our experiences.