Cognitive-System Phenomenology — A Critique of Husserl (Part Fifteen)

Earlier we discussed an object’s content-meaning, size-meaning, color-meaning, shape-meaning, and even aesthetic-meaning. All of these meanings are obtained through the intuition of the eyes. Husserl holds that intuition is the only way to know things, because in his view only intuition can bring us clarity. Of course, besides this sensory intuition, he also discusses eidetic intuition, which he believes can disclose the essences of things. For now, let us still focus on sensory intuition. We can see that such intuition directly depends on our sensory organ—the eyes—and the meanings derived from it belong to what we called in the previous section “sensory meanings.” Sensory meanings belong to the sphere of super-existential meanings; therefore we may also call them “sensory super-existential meanings.” A very natural question then arises: beyond content-meaning, size-meaning, and other such super-existential meanings obtained through visual intuition, what other super-existential meanings can be derived? Here we attempt to exhaust all the kinds of super-existential meaning that can be given by visual intuition. In this section we will discuss another type of super-existential meaning derived from intuition: scene-meaning. The corresponding form of intuition is scene-intuition. We find that the process of scene-intuition is extremely similar to Husserl’s categorial object. We will discuss this in detail later.